90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, July 17, 2022

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #532

How Can Western Civilization Survive with Reviled Institutions?

A Monmouth University poll released on July 5 reveals that 57% of Americans believe that U.S. federal government actions over the last six months have directly hurt their families. In that same poll, Monmouth compiles the 22 most important priorities of the American people. Neither Russia's war in Ukraine nor Congress's January 6 Committee hearings appear anywhere on the list; instead, the top four issues all deal with skyrocketing inflation and economic uncertainty.
A new Gallup poll documents a precipitous drop in Americans' confidence across 16 major institutions, including historic lows for confidence in newspapers, the criminal justice system, big business, police, and all three branches of the federal government. The survey's results represent the lowest overall institutional confidence ever recorded in its decades-long survey history, and not a single institution reflected an increase in confidence over last year's measures. Only 7% of Americans have a "Great deal / Quite a lot" of confidence in Congress, while only 11% feel similarly about television news.
Only adding to Westerners' perception of widespread institutional corruption, an investigation by the British Medical Journal recently documented pervasive conflicts of interest within Western drug and health regulatory agencies whose budgets are funded primarily by monetary gifts from major pharmaceutical companies, the very industry players whose products the government agencies are charged with regulating.
Westerners increasingly do not trust their governments or their major news media to report accurate and reliable information. They increasingly view government actors as perpetuating two standards of justice and economic security — one for those at the very top of society's pyramid of wealth and power and one for everyone else.
Westerners increasingly do not trust their governments or their major news media to report accurate and reliable information. They increasingly view government actors as perpetuating two standards of justice and economic security — one for those at the very top of society's pyramid of wealth and power, and one for everyone else.
Surely Western authorities cannot expect to maintain long-term legitimacy if their populations judge governing institutions as irredeemably marred by corruption and political leaders as indifferent, if not downright hostile, to ordinary citizens' wants and needs.
It has become fashionable for Western politicians to divide up the global chessboard between virtuous "democracies" struggling for world peace and threatening "dictatorships" causing hardship and chaos. Whatever the West's "democracies" are today, however, they are not bastions for representing honestly their peoples' most dire concerns, nor are they above doling out to their citizenries hefty portions of hardship and chaos.
Institutions can be broadly categorized as those that are created and maintained through human cooperation and consent and those that require force and coercion to endure. In a "democratic" society, cooperation and consent are the principal building blocks, as well as tools, for fashioning strong institutions capable of surviving unknown threats and unexpected emergencies.
What happens when consent is replaced by government force and coercion? Laws lose legitimacy. News sources are reduced to pure propaganda. Political disagreement turns to bloodshed and murder. It is as if society's cement has instead been replaced by strongmen trying to squeeze humanity's discrete blocks together with sheer muscle...

Western authorities cannot expect to maintain long-term legitimacy if their populations judge governing institutions as irredeemably marred by corruption and political leaders as indifferent, if not downright hostile, to ordinary citizens' wants and needs.

Across the West, there is a sharp divergence between the needs of normal citizens and the worldview articulated and pushed by their "representatives" in government. Faith in the institutions staffed by those "representatives" is plummeting. Shouldn't this disconnect be setting off alarm bells from...

A China-based company that specializes in sugar substitutes and flavor enhancers has recently purchased hundreds of acres of North Dakota farmland just a hop, skip, and a jump from a sensitive U.S. Air Force base and has more than a few analysts and lawmakers concerned about the potential for espionage.

Fufeng Group purchased for $2.6 million a 300-acre farm near Grand Forks, 90 minutes from the Canadian border and just 12 miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base, the presumed home of some of America’s most sensitive and sophisticated military drone technology, according to a report in the New York Post.

Located a mere 40 miles from the thousands of acres of potato farmland purchased for $13 million by a limited liability company that is believed to belong to billionaire Bill Gates, the Fufeng sale is yet another large swath of American farmland that has been gobbled up by Chinese in recent years.

“Fufeng Group said it is planning to use the land to build a $700 million corn milling plant that would create at least 200 jobs as well as residual opportunities for logistics, trucking, and other services,” The Post reports. “But U.S. military officials are raising the alarm nonetheless.”
“Senior Air Force officers circulated a memo in April warning that the presence of Fufeng Group in Grand Forks, a town of just 60,000 people was a national security...

Visage à trois #364

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #530

Liberal group lands $171M gov't contract that could reach $1B to help illegal immigrants avoid deportation

The Vera Institute of Justice secured the contract amid an escalating border crisis

A left-wing nonprofit working to end mass incarceration landed a $171.7 million taxpayer-funded government contract that could potentially hit $1 billion to help unaccompanied minors avoid deportation, Fox News Digital has discovered.

The Vera Institute of Justice, a New York-based group that supports defunding police and views immigration enforcement agencies as a "threat" to civil liberties, was awarded a Health and Human Services-funded contract in March to provide legal assistance to unaccompanied minors, according to a federal database.

The arrangement lasts until March 2023 but can reach as high as $983 million if renewed until March 2027, the agreement shows. This appears to be the largest federal contract Vera has secured for immigration-related services for any single year dating back to the mid-2000s.

The lofty nine-figure contract came amid an escalating border crisis that saw more than 239,000 migrant encounters in May alone -- a historic high. There were 14,699 encounters of unaccompanied minors in May, an increase from the 12,180 encountered in April and slightly higher than the 14,052 encountered in May 2021.

According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), there was an average of 692 minors in the agency's custody during May. So far, there have been more than 100,000 unaccompanied minor encounters in fiscal year 2022, which started in October, compared to 147,925 for fiscal year 2021 and 33,239 in fiscal year 2020.

Unaccompanied minors are not being removed under the Title 42 public health order -- which has been used to expel a majority of migrants coming across the southern border due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Instead, they are typically transferred into the custody of Health and Human Services -- and moved across the country to parents or sponsors already in the country.

The Biden administration has scrambled to deal with the massive surge of unaccompanied children, as well as adult migrants and family units, coming across the border. Most recently, the Biden administration signed a five-year contract to start leasing a...