UN Deletes Article Titled ‘The Benefits of World Hunger.’ Was It Real or Satire? thumbnail

UN Deletes Article Titled ‘The Benefits of World Hunger.’ Was It Real or Satire?

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By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The author of the article in question told FEE it was not a parody.

UN Chronicle, the official magazine of the United Nations, recently deleted a 2008 article titled “The Benefits of World Hunger.”

The article, which now leads to an “error page,” was written by George Kent, a now retired University of Hawaii political science professor. In the article, Kent argued that hunger is “fundamental to the working of the world’s economy.”

“Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive,” Kent wrote. “That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.”

UN Chronicle deleted the article after it began to cause a stir on social media. The magazine said Kent’s article should not be taken literally, contending that it was a work of parody.

“This article appeared in the UN Chronicle 14 years ago as an attempt at satire and was never meant to be taken literally. We have been made aware of its failures, even as satire, and have removed it from our site.”

In the face of looming food/energy shortages caused by disastrous climate policies, the UN says “Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour.”

Yeah. Starvation does that.

Don’t worry. It’s good for you.https://t.co/cI7gFchtD8

— The Real Andy Lee Show (@RealAndyLeeShow) July 6, 2022

At first glance, there seems to be little reason to doubt the United Nations. As some writers have noted, previous works written by Kent include Ending World Hunger, The Political Economy of Hunger: The Silent Holocaust, and Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food.

These titles hardly suggest that Kent sees global hunger as a good thing. In light of this, some contended that he was taking an approach not unlike Jonathan Swift, whose famous essay “A Modest Proposal” cheekily argued that Irish families should alleviate their mean condition by selling excess children to the wealthy for food.

After reading the UN’s tweet, Yahoo’s report, and several other pieces of commentary on the subject, I initially agreed that Kent’s article likely was written as satire. However, closer examination and a brief conversation with Kent revealed that is not the case.

First, it’s important to note that Kent himself denies the article was intended as a form of satire.

“I don’t think the UN would have published it if they thought it was satire or advocacy,” Kent told Climate Depot in a recent phone interview.

In the interview, Kent explains he was not advocating global hunger but was intending to be “provocative” by saying certain individuals and institutions benefit from global hunger.

UN journal article explains ‘The Benefits of World Hunger’ – ‘Hunger has great positive value…Hungry people are the most productive people’ –

UN deletes essay after outcry | Climate Depot https://t.co/1XNGHDpHGQ

— Marc Morano (@ClimateDepot) July 7, 2022

“No, it is not satire,” Kent told Marc Morano, founder and editor of Climate Depot. “I don’t see anything funny about it. It is not about advocacy of hunger.”

I reached out to Kent and asked if the quotes were accurate, and he told me they were, adding that he intends to publish a paper this fall that will further detail his views.

“Marc understood me very well,” Kent told me in an email. “I hope my current paper on who benefits from hunger helps to make my position clear to everyone involved in this discussion.”

Additionally, the article’s concluding paragraph supports Kent’s claim that the work was not designed as either satire or advocacy. A careful reading of the text suggests Kent is being quite literal when he writes that some people benefit from global hunger.

“For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields?” Kent wrote. “Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.”

One senses in these words disapproval. The global poor exist because the wealthy require them to exist. Global hunger exists because humans are simply not doing the moral and necessary things to eradicate it.

But what are those things? A glimpse at Kent’s 2011 Ending Hunger Worldwide offers a clue. In the summary of the book, readers are told the keys to tackling global hunger are “building stronger communities” and challenging “dominant market-led solutions.”

In Kent’s view, one gathers, global hunger is not a complex problem that is being addressed by free market capitalism; it’s a moral one that requires empowering intellectuals like Kent to solve it.

It’s also worth noting that reviews of Kent on Rate My Professor—which gives him a rating of 1.9 out of 5—suggest he’s, well, perhaps a bit of an ideologue.

“Avoid this man with your life. Very opinionated and if your opinion differs, you will fail. He’s the worst professor i’ve had,” one reviewer wrote.

“Horrible professor if you are not politically aligned with his values you WILL FAIL,” another contended.

“Very opinionated and unhelpful,” opined another. “Very critical and extremely boring. Unsupportive and irritating.”

Whether Kent is a good professor or not, or whether his article was satire or literal, are questions that ultimately do not matter a whole lot in the larger scheme of things. What does matter are the policies that cause global hunger and the policies that alleviate global hunger.

And on this front, there has been stunning progress in recent decades. As Our World in Data shows, the percentage of undernourished people in developing countries has plummeted in recent years, falling from 35 percent in 1970 to 13 percent in 2015.

How this happened is not a mystery. As economist Bob Murphy noted in FEE.org, the proliferation of free market capitalism has “gone hand-in-hand with rapid and unprecedented increases in human welfare.”

“As the World Bank reports, the global rate of ‘extreme poverty’ (defined as people living on less than $1.90 per day) was cut in half from 1990 to 2010. Back in 1990, 1.85 billion people lived in extreme poverty, but by 2013, the figure had dropped to 767 million—meaning the number of those living on less than $1.90 per day had fallen by more than a billion people.’”

Ironically, no better example of this can be found in recent decades than China, which has achieved nothing short of an economic miracle in recent decades. China saw its percentage of underweight children fall from 19 percent in 1987 to 2.4 percent in 2013. As recently as 1990, 66 percent of Chinese people lived in extreme poverty. By 2015, that figure was less than one percent.

How did China achieve this economic miracle? By pivoting to privatization following the death of Party Chairman Mao Zedong (1893-1976), as I pointed out in 2019.

In 1979, China adopted its “household responsibility system,” giving many farmers ownership of their crop for the first time. This was followed by Communist Party leaders opening China to foreign investment, curbing price controls and protectionism, and implementing mass privatization of its economy.

The “market-led solutions” that Kent has disparaged have worked wonders for hunger alleviation. The same cannot be said for initiatives hatched by the central planners at the United Nations, the organization that published Kent’s controversial article on hunger.

Sri Lanka’s current food crisis stems directly from an effort to shift the country’s agriculture sector to organic farming, which saw the import of fertilizers banned and led the country to become an importer of rice instead of an exporter virtually overnight.

Many writers and thinkers are blaming Sri Lanka’s crisis on the global rise of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), which was started in 2004 under the auspices of—you guessed it—the United Nations to encourage “sustainable development.”

A food, energy, and financial crisis has brought down Sri Lanka’s government. But the underlying cause is the fact that the nation’s political leaders had fallen under the spell of green elites peddling “ESG” and banning modern fertilizers.https://t.co/En6rbDrsYu

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) July 10, 2022

And people are right to blame ESG. Writing for the World Economic Forum in 2016, economist Joseph Stiglitz said “Sri Lanka may be able to move directly into… high-productivity organic farming…”

Sri Lanka did. By doing so, the nation earned an ESG score of 98/100—and caused a food crisis that resulted in one president’s resignation and food insecurity for millions of people.

This is a tragedy. And while George Kent is clearly wrong—there are no benefits to world hunger—one begins to understand why his 15-year-old article published by the United Nations is suddenly sparking so much interest

It’s not just Sri Lanka, after all. The Netherlands, Canada, and other countries are all making headlines with food schemes that are likely to goose their ESG score—but cause serious problems at a time when global hunger is on the rise for the first time in decades.

If our population were the same size as 500 years ago we’d be poorer and more polluted. Humans solve problems. https://t.co/3NnZVBNMgX

— Peter Jacobsen (@PeterPashute) July 19, 2022

In light of current global policies, anti-population rhetoric, and the track record of twentieth century collectivist food schemes—Holodomor, Cambodia, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which saw tens of millions starve to death because of government policies—George Kent’s “The Benefits of World Hunger” article hit too close to home.

(Editor’s Note: We’ve posted George Kent’s 2008 entire article below since the United Nations removed the article from their site so readers can determine for themselves Kent’s purpose in writing the article.)

We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour.

We in developed countries sometimes see poor people by the roadside holding up signs saying “Will Work for Food.” Actually, most people work for food. It is mainly because people need food to survive that they work so hard either in producing food for themselves in subsistence-level production, or by selling their services to others in exchange for money. How many of us would sell our services if it were not for the threat of hunger?

More importantly, how many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger? When we sell our services cheaply, we enrich others, those who own the factories, the machines and the lands, and ultimately own the people who work for them. For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.

The conventional thinking is that hunger is caused by low-paying jobs. For example, an article reports on “Brazil’s ethanol slaves: 200,000 migrant sugar cutters who prop up renewable energy boom”. While it is true that hunger is caused by low-paying jobs, we need to understand that hunger at the same time causes low-paying jobs to be created. Who would have established massive biofuel production operations in Brazil if they did not know there were thousands of hungry people desperate enough to take the awful jobs they would offer? Who would build any sort of factory if they did not know that many people would be available to take the jobs at low-pay rates?

Much of the hunger literature talks about how it is important to assure that people are well fed so that they can be more productive. That is nonsense. No one works harder than hungry people. Yes, people who are well nourished have greater capacity for productive physical activity, but well-nourished people are far less willing to do that work.

The non-governmental organization Free the Slaves defines slaves as people who are not allowed to walk away from their jobs. It estimates that there are about 27 million slaves in the world, including those who are literally locked into workrooms and held as bonded labourers in South Asia. However, they do not include people who might be described as slaves to hunger, that is, those who are free to walk away from their jobs but have nothing better to go to. Maybe most people who work are slaves to hunger?

For those of us at the high end of the social ladder, ending hunger globally would be a disaster. If there were no hunger in the world, who would plow the fields? Who would harvest our vegetables? Who would work in the rendering plants? Who would clean our toilets? We would have to produce our own food and clean our own toilets. No wonder people at the high end are not rushing to solve the hunger problem. For many of us, hunger is not a problem, but an asset.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Americans Need To Wake Up, Quickly thumbnail

Americans Need To Wake Up, Quickly

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By Bud Hancock

Contrary to what many Americans might choose to believe, we are NOT seeing the beginning of the communist plan/agenda to take over our nation and the world; we are now seeing a fast-moving and far advanced stage of that plan, and it is speeding up with each passing day.

Historically, every nation targeted by, and eventually fell victim to, a communist/socialist regime was, over time, first infiltrated by the communists in every segment: government, academia, the media, entertainment, the military, and some level of the financial world. Once control of the government was  accomplished, and knowing that some portion of the population would resist, the only remaining impediment to their evil plan was the disarming of all citizens by the regime. The government takeover is horrific enough since those who assume power at all levels of government tend to quickly begin stripping the people of their God-given freedoms, but the disarming strategy is even more horrific and extremely alarming. It indicates just how close the communists are to beginning the final phase of their devilish agenda.

Even though the communists are cunning, they are not brave enough to face an angry population of 200 million people who see the dangers of a coming communist onslaught, especially when said population is well-armed and well trained in the use of their weapons.  Only when the regime members are of significant numbers and are themselves armed, mostly with the nation’s own regime-controlled military, will they consider facing an armed populace to complete their agenda. Their cowardly preference is to first disarm all those who own firearms for self-defense, hence, they have long desired and planned to remove the weapons of defense from the possession of ALL Americans.

To date, the public expression of the disarmament plan has been largely based on words, likely as a ‘testing of the waters’ to determine what level of resistance they might encounter, but when a serious plot to take away the means of self-defense progresses beyond words, and moves into the action phase, it may be too late to resist the takeover.

Right now, we have a government that bears absolutely NO resemblance to a ‘semi-free democracy’ (there has NEVER been a truly ‘free’ democracy), and is a universe away from a constitutional republic. In essence, the communists have already assumed total control of our government. The action we are now seeing, the move to instill such a fear of the government, has progressed rapidly and, under the smokescreen and distraction of a ‘pandemic’, is now so far advanced that we can only be a short time away from the action phase to remove all weapons from the hands of armed Americans.

Consequences of American Disarmament

Anyone who might wonder what a largescale disarmament of US citizens would accomplish, simply look at Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Venezuela, along with most of Europe, or read the history of Germany prior to WWII when Hitler led that nation to a mass slaughter of humans, successful mostly due to a previous disarmament of the citizens of Germany.

Am I saying that all Christians should have arms, ammo and the training necessary to protect their own lives and the lives of those whom they love? ABSOLUTELY! When Jesus sent His disciples into the world to accomplish their assigned missions, he understood how dangerous the world was becoming, especially for anyone bold enough and willing to publicly speak about the man who was soon the be killed for claiming to be the Messiah, the saviour of the world. So that they would be prepared to defend themselves physically if needed, He instructed them to sell their cloak if need be, and buy a sword. Well, the sword of that day is the 9mm of this day and all who are capable of legally purchasing and using one safely, definitely should. Failure to do so which results in a godly life being cut short will not help in the spreading of the gospel in these evil times.

A fully disarmed American populace will have a resounding effect on the entire world, not just on those living here in the US. There are millions of people throughout the world who, all their lives, have admired the freedoms we have had and desire to live as Americans live: free and with our God-given liberties intact.

If the current communist government succeeds at getting the populace disarmed,  the United States of America will quickly cease to exist. God only knows what will appear in its place, but it will not be a pretty sight. Those around the globe who have looked to the US as a restraint against government tyranny will quickly lose all hope that their own lives could be better.

A Political Solution?

Anyone who still expects ANY politician to ride in to DC on his grand white horse and suddenly take out the Marxist usurpers now controlling every aspect of US government, has been smoking some seriously bad crap and needs to realize that ALL politicians are cut from the same cloth. They are in the ‘Politics Game’ for one reason, and one ONLY: to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpaying citizens and to grab as much control as possible along the way.

The days when elected US representatives truly cared for the thoughts, the concerns, and the future of their constituents/taxpayers ended long ago. G.K. Chesterton, commenting on politicians in America, nailed it when he said:  “The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.” 

In that statement, Mr. Chesterton clearly explained why the political system in the current US has become so corrupted.  Politicians no longer have any respect for those of us who work hard, obey the laws and pay their immense salaries because they no longer fear us.  They have been allowed to get away with so many crimes against not just the American citizenry, but against all humanity that, as a result, they consider themselves beyond the reach of those who would gladly kick their butts from DC every step of the way back to their home states.

As Bonnie Harvey, of Hebrew Nation Radio, once said: “There is no political solution to a spiritual problem”, and the problem in America is absolutely spiritual, led by hordes of demonic spirits, using politics and politicians, in collaboration with the willingly deceived and evil people who have fallen for the Marxist/socialist/communist line, to accomplish a truly evil agenda.

General George S Patton said, “Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth.  Liberal Democrats are the lowest form of politicians.” Truer words have never been spoken; the liberal Democrats/Marxists/Communists have not changed: they are, always have been, and always will be the scum of the earth for whom human life, other than their own, holds little to no value.

Christians and Christianity at Risk

In my lifetime, I have watched the degeneration of many mainline churches as they slipped from their status as godly organisms, from a closeness to God, into bodies that more closely resemble worldly organizations, intent on growing richer, and partially or fully forsaking their mission to spread the gospel to the world.

If any of them believes that they will be spared because they refused to ‘rock the boat’ and stand against the evil being brought upon us, they are sadly mistaken. Satan will gladly use them in any way they allow to further his plan to unseat God from His throne and then discard them like an old rag when he has used them. As deceived as Satan himself is to believe that he has any chance to unseat God, those Christians who fall for his line are equally deceived and in great peril.

There are more than a dozen references to the ‘Body of Christ’ in the KJV Bible translation.  And just as the human body is a living organism made of billions of cells comprising the various organs, even so, the body of Christ is a living organism, made up of millions of individual believers who all have specific tasks assigned to them. Satan knows this and is extremely afraid of the Body of Christ especially when He resists the devil, boldly proclaims the Truth and is unafraid in the face of danger. He, Satan, thus desires to eliminate as many true believers as he can with the short time he has left.

I fully expect to see increasing persecution of believers everywhere as the evil agenda progresses. We must all be aware of the means Satan uses to bring deception, delusion and death. Although he hates all human beings, since they (we) are all made in God’s image, he especially hates those who identify with Christ. My personal opinion on this is because, when he tried desperately to get Jesus to bow down and worship him, Jesus used the written word to defeat him on each occasion of temptation (see Matthew 4 KJV).  And just as Jesus defeated Satan using the written word, so we must also.

We are told many times NOT TO FEAR, and, if we slip up and allow the enemy to get us off faith and into fear, it is imperative that we stop, repent and get back on faith as a means of stopping any attack of Satan. We are truly living in perilous times, but, according to the word of God, we are already victorious through the completed work of Jesus on our behalf.

Conclusion

If any force will ever stop the madness, the uncontrolled corruption, going on in this nation, or if it even CAN be stopped now, it will NOT come from a political source. Politics, which innately embodies the lust for power and control, coupled with the greed for money, is the primary cause of our current predicament. It is literally impossible for any entity to be both the cause and the cure for any problem simultaneously.

The problem in/with America is absolutely spiritual, led by hordes of demonic spirits, using the willingly evil people who have fallen for the Marxist/socialist/communist line.  Therefore, only a well-trained, well-equipped spiritual army can reverse the destruction that now appears to be imminent and unstoppable.

There have been many men and women in positions of power and authority in large ministries, both national and international, who by using their influence with their followers could have been instrumental in holding back the evil agenda. These are the people one would generally expect to take the lead in organizing this spiritual army, but sadly, many of them are captives of the 501c3 factor: “If I say too much against the government, they might threaten to remove my 501c3 status”, and we would have to pay taxes on all that revenue we receive from our ‘followers’.”

I am reminded of the words of Paul to Timothy when he stated: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows” (I Timothy 6:10 KJV).  The writer of the letter to the Hebrews said, “Let your conversation (behavior, manner of life) be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5 KJV).  As can be seen from these passages, the desire for, and love of, money will seriously impede any effort to produce godly fruit.

No, if an army of God is needed to defeat the evil now assaulting our nation, it must be made up of ordinary, everyday Christians who, having no covetousness, no hunger for power or love of money, know how to pray and intercede for God to become involved and stop the madness.

As bad as the human toll will be in the last days, it could be lessened if that long-awaited Christian army would arise and begin to do battle with the enemy using the weapons Paul  details in  Ephesians 6:11-18 KJV and 2 Corinthians 10:3-6 KJV.

None of us knows just how long we have before our Messiah returns in the sky to take the Church, His body, home to heaven, but we know by the signs we are seeing that the event is VERY close.

The United States, from its founding, has been an example of God’s grace and mercy, setting the standard for evangelism of the gospel to the entire world, but those days appear to be long past with more and more Christians caring less and less about evangelism, or even saving our once-great nation. If this does not change, and soon, the formerly great USA will either be destroyed from within as evil forces infiltrate every segment of American society, or the nation will be rendered helpless by a judgment from God.

Even our Founders were concerned about a nation that turned its back on God. Thomas Jefferson once stated: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever”. 

Every American should be trembling right now for that same reason.

Be blessed as you put on your armor and enter the fray. You may not know in this life how much you accomplished by your warfare, but God knows and will reward you accordingly!

Blessings!

budaroo@twc.com

©Bud Hancock. All rights reserved.

Hannah Arendt’s Chilling Thesis on Evil thumbnail

Hannah Arendt’s Chilling Thesis on Evil

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By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Hannah Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise.

Nine months after the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann died at the end of a noose in Israel, a controversial but thoughtful commentary about his trial appeared in The New Yorker. The public reaction stunned its author, the famed political theorist and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). It was February 1963.

Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of Eichmann as “terribly and terrifyingly normal” took the world by surprise. Her phrase, “the banality of evil,” entered the lexicon of social science, probably forever. It was taken for granted that Eichmann, despite his soft-spoken and avuncular demeanor, must be a monster of epic proportions to play such an important role in one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century.

“I was only following orders,” he claimed in the colorless, matter-of-fact fashion of a typical bureaucrat. The world thought his performance a fiendishly deceptive show, but Hannah Arendt concluded that Eichmann was indeed a rather “ordinary” and “unthinking” functionary.

How callous! A betrayal of her own Jewish people! How could any thoughtful person dismiss Eichmann so cavalierly?! Arendt’s critics blasted her with such charges mercilessly, but they had missed the point. She did not condone or excuse Eichmann’s complicity in the Holocaust. She witnessed the horrors of national socialism first-hand herself, having escaped Germany in 1933 after a short stint in a Gestapo jail for “anti-state propaganda.” She did not claim that Eichmann was innocent, only that the crimes for which he was guilty did not require a “monster” to commit them.

How often have you noticed people behaving in anti-social ways because of a hope to blend in, a desire to avoid isolation as a recalcitrant, nonconforming individual? Did you ever see someone doing harm because “everybody else was doing it”? The fact that we all have observed such things, and that any one of the culprits might easily, under the right circumstances, have become an Adolf Eichmann, is a chilling realization.

As Arendt explained, “Going along with the rest and wanting to say ‘we’ were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.”

Eichmann was a “shallow” and “clueless” joiner, someone whose thoughts never ventured any deeper than how to become a cog in the great, historic Nazi machine. In a sense, he was a tool of Evil more than evil himself.

Commenting on Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis, philosopher Thomas White writes, “Eichmann reminds us of the protagonist in Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger (1942), who randomly and casually kills a man, but then afterwards feels no remorse. There was no particular intention or obvious evil motive: the deed just ‘happened.’”

Perhaps Hannah Arendt underestimated Eichmann. He did, after all, attempt to conceal evidence and cover his tracks long before the Israelis nabbed him in Argentina in 1960—facts which suggest he did indeed comprehend the gravity of his offenses. It is undeniable, however, that “ordinary” people are capable of horrific crimes when possessed with power or a desire to obtain it, especially if it helps them “fit in” with the gang that already wields it.

The big lesson of her thesis, I think, is this: If Evil comes calling, do not expect it to be stupid enough to advertise itself as such. It’s far more likely that it will look like your favorite uncle or your sweet grandmother. It just might cloak itself in grandiloquent platitudes like “equality,” “social justice,” and the “common good.” It could even be a prominent member of Parliament or Congress.

Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, I suggested in a recent essay, were peas in the same pod as Eichmann—ordinary people who committed extraordinarily heinous acts.

Hannah Arendt is recognized as one of the leading political thinkers of the Twentieth Century. She was very prolific, and her books are good sellers still, nearly half a century after her death. She remains eminently quotable as well, authoring such pithy lines as “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians,” “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution,” and “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”

Some of Arendt’s friends on the Left swallowed the myth that Hitler and Stalin occupied opposite ends of the political spectrum. She knew better. Both were evil collectivists and enemies of the individual (see list of suggested readings below). “Hitler never intended to defend the West against Bolshevism,” she wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “but always remained ready to join ‘the Reds’ for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.”

To appreciate Hannah Arendt more fully, I offer here a few additional samples of her writings:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

_____

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

_____

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

_____

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied—as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels—that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

_____

Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how. Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it they articulate it, and by articulating it they make the people somehow love it. They were told before, thou shalt not kill; and they didn’t kill. Now they are told, thou shalt kill; and although they think it’s very difficult to kill, they do it because it’s now part of the code of behavior. 

_____

The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible.

Hannah Arendt (movie trailer)

Why Read Hannah Arendt Now? by Richard J. Bernstein

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt

What Did Hannah Arendt Really Mean by the ‘Banality of Evil’? by Thomas White

Two Monsters of the French Revolution Who Were Consumed by Power—And Lost Their Heads on the Same Day by Lawrence W. Reed

What the Nazis Had in Common With Every Other Collectivist Regime of the 20th Century by Lawrence W. Reed

AUTHOR

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is FEE’s President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Cancelled Ahead Of Time

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By SPIDER & THE FLY The False Allure of Communism

It was 1988.

The gallery was located at the former town house where Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn used to live.  The walls had the reverberations of Watergate intrigues.  Now, it was under a new ownership, who converted the historic— or infamous — townhouse into an Art Gallery which was located very closed to Dupont Circle.

The new owner was a dentist who loved the arts. I had met her before at one of my previous art exhibitions.  She had admired my work.  One day, she called and asked me if I wanted to exhibit at her gallery.  I went to see her space.  The exhibits were held in the rooms downstairs. She, her husband, and children lived upstairs. When she showed me her living quarters I was able to see the all-pink bathroom of Sally Quinn!  Even the bidet!  I never thought “Sally” will have such a color in her bathroom!

After a 20-year career exhibiting in Washington, DC with a variety of my collections inspired by Egyptian art, I had been invited on an official visit to Egypt by the Ministry of Higher Education in Cairo in 1978 and given special pass to visit the Cairo Museum all the times I wanted, and an interview with its Director.  Also the government gave me a car and a chauffeur for trips around Cairo.

The first expedition was to the pyramids in Giza. When I was alone in the chamber, I was able to lie down inside the sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid.  Then, I was taken to the Step Pyramid at Saqqara.  Later, they took me to Luxor, Karnak, The Valley of the Kings, Aswan and Abu Simbel and other important archaeological sites.

I had an interview published by the leading Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram.  Also interviews and photos of my art were published in many international publications.  The authorities in Pharonic Egypt had valued my work.

So back in Washington ten years after my trip to Egypt, I decided to have a retrospective of my paintings in my new friend’s gallery.  And I had room for exhibiting 105 pieces.  This exhibit looked very good!

For some reason, unlike in Egypt, and despite my career as an artist with 20 years of exhibitions and regardless of honors from experts as well as very good comments from the public not a single Washington, DC “critic” had been willing to review my work until then.

This time, as usual, once again my exhibit was completely ignored by art critics.What was the reason? Perhaps I was too shy?

This was the time of Boy George and other unusually dressed singers and artists.  I decided that maybe I needed a “gimmick” to at least attract the attention of those subjective individuals who call themselves “critics.”

So I tried my scheme. I dressed outrageously for the first time at an art center in Maryland mansion having a group show.  I went alone, leaving somebody in the car outside in case I had to escape in a hurry.  To my surprise, I was a success and managed to be the center of attention.  Not that I wanted to be, I am the opposite of that!  I was doing that of pure necessity, only to finally get some publicity for my work!  So although it was a success, I left with a sense of relief…that no one had called the police.

Afterwards, I read that People Magazine was having its 10-year anniversary party at a historic mansion in Washington, DC.  What an opportunity for publicity. The problem was that it was by invitation and I didn’t know of anybody who received one!

But necessity does wonders.  I decided to try to repeat my previous success and dressed outrageously.  Because whatever will be will be.  The house was on a hill in Washington. My platform shoes were killing me as I walked. I was concerned that I would fall down before reaching my target.  I went with a friend who was holding me during the climbing of the hill. I was hoping that I didn’t have to make a running escape, because we didn’t had an official invitation.

I had been present at an art exhibit that didn’t require an invitation in that same historical mansion before.  So I had an idea of the floor plan.  I had to walk up to some steps to enter the foyer.  And if allowed, go upstairs via the grand stairway.  Before departing, my friend had asked me whether I had an invitation.  I replied, “Of course.” I lied.  If I had told him the truth he would have refusde to go with me.  But before we entered the mansion I told him, “Follow me—whatever happens and whatever I do.”

I made my entrance.  Disbelieving eyes immediately turned to me.  A man and a woman came running to see who in the hell I was, and if my companion and I were on the guest list.  The man asked for my name, which I gave him.  Of course, he went up and down the invitation list a few times but could not find my name anywhere.

“I received an invitation,” I said calmly.

And I pretended to look in what was not a pocket in my outfi,t and said, “Oh I must have left it at home.”

Turning to my companion I asked him, “Do you have it in your pocket?”

“I do not, you didn’t give it to me.” He nervously said.

“Well,” I said, “I guess it is at home…”

The gatekeeper and the woman with him told me “wait a second” and went away I don’t know where in a big rush.  Not long after they came back and announced, “Welcome.”

And we went upstairs very, very slowly because I was worried that I would have an accident because of my platform shoes and fall down the stairs.  Many curious people in attendance followed me with their eyes, trying to figure out “who was that strange vision who made that entrance.”

In the main room, their eyes were on me again and I didn’t see any familiar faces.  I walked around, pretending to look at the photographs of the front covers of People magazine over the last 10 years.  Some people approached me out of curiosity and smiled like they approved my look.  I smiled back, but didn’t introduce myself, remaining aloof.

After a while, a lady came over to introduce herself.  She told me she owned a castle in England, and invited me to visit.  I let her talk all she wanted to, and replied in simple monosyllables.  Later, while some of the invited guests were leaving, the lady kept talking me excitedly, when two skinny little women walking side-by-side who reminded me of the Godzilla Mothra Twins appeared like magic. Then they came in my direction.  Fortunately they interrupted the woman with the castle in England!

They said they were very interested in me.  They were People Magazine reporters. And they asked all kind of questions, trying to find out more about me.  I finally broke down under their questioning, and mentioned that I was an artist specializing in Egyptian Art of the Pharaonic era. They might have guessed, since I was wearing three necklaces I bought in Luxor in 1978—but they didn’t.

I tried to continue the conversation about Egypt but they keep asking me where I was born.  I didn’t have a typical Spanish accent, because I was had been an actor in my country and in Spain.  So I told them that I had lived in Europe and continued my conversation about Egypt.  But they kept interrupting me, asking, “Are you Italian?’”

I said, “No.”

And tried to continue talking about my artwork.

“Are you French?”

I replied, “I lived in Paris, but I am not French.”

You may wonder why I was so insistent upon the maintaining mystery of my origin. So I will tell you. My friend, the late and well-known writer, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, had advised me to keep mum way back when I lived in Madrid, Spain, as a young man, in 1966. He told me: “The art world, and the publishing world, are dominated by left-wing Marxists and Communists, so if you want to be in the arts do not mention that you are Cuban — because it will close all the doors for you.”

Based on his advice, as soon as I began exhibiting in the United States, I decided to write in my published biographies that I was born on a Caribbean island… but not mention which one.

But these People Magazine Godzilla Mothra little twins were pressing me about my birthplace. They were so curious that I forgot the advice of Cabrera Infante, and began to blab.

I finally said, “On a Caribbean island.”

But they didn’t leave me alone with that, and asked, “Which island?”

I wanted to say “None of your business.”

But I didn’t. I failed because I didn’t want to be rude. After many more questions about which island, asked in many different ways, I finally blabbed the magic name, “Cuba.”

As automatically as two persons at once can be, they did an immediate about-face movement and abandoned me instantly. I felt like a used piece of toilet paper that had suddenly appeared in the middle of the salon.

I decided to leave immediately. My friend had to follow me as I walked extra carefully out the door in my platform shoes.

My friend Cabrera Infante had been right. Obviously, the People Magazine reporters had deserted me in a flash because they saw I was not a lover of the “Cuban Paradise” that Fidel Castro made of my island.

The Marxists and American left think that any Cuban should be in Cuba supporting Castro instead of living in the U.S. as a Cuban-American.

So, there was nothing else I could do in the art world of the country which I had become a citizen.  I was a non-person.  I did not exist as an artist to them, no matter what.  And that was the moment I decided not to bother exhibiting my work here any longer.

For I had found myself completely “canceled” decades before the “Woke” cancellations in America today.  Because I was a Cuban-American who did not like Castro, I had become a non-person who was treated as if he did not exist.  It was pretty much like in the Soviet Union, except for the gulags and firing squads.

At that instant, I knew my career as an artist in America had come to an end.

AUTHOR

Homer Terence

EDITORS NOTE: This Spider & The Fly column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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The World’s Most Dangerous Idea Explained

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

If there is no right and wrong, we sail through perilous waters.

I think that I have nailed the World’s Most Dangerous Idea. It’s Dialetheism.

Never heard of it? You are not alone. Most people haven’t. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t subscribe to it. It’s a kind of sophisticated version of moral relativism.

Here’s an example of dialetheism at work. A recent issue of Scientific American ran a very unscientific opinion piece, “What Quantum Mechanics Can Teach Us about Abortion”. It was written by an abortion doctor in Salt Lake City, Cara C. Heuser, who may know a lot about obstetrics and gynaecology, but about quantum mechanics not so much maybe.

Quantum mechanics is basically pretty easy to understand, as fans of Marvel films know. Many of their heroes’ superpowers and many of their plot lines incorporate gobbledygook about quantum mechanics. Dr. Heuser may have learned a thing or two from Marvel scripts. “Is light a particle or a wave?” she asks. “Quantum mechanics, a discipline within physics, has demonstrated that both are true. Sometimes light acts like a particle, sometimes a wave.”

Similarly, she explains:

“That these two seemingly irreconcilable beliefs could come together gives me hope that similar harmony could be achieved in the discussion of other deeply polarizing topics, including abortion.”

Even though she performs abortions, Dr Heuser believes that she is serving the cause of life by helping women through difficult pregnancies. This leads her to conclude triumphantly:

“Particle and wave, abortion providers and ethical physicians, pro-life and pro-choice.”

Actually, the fact that light considered from one point of view is a wave, and from another point of view is particles does not mean that it is both at the same time and in the same respect. It means that there is something missing in our understanding of light. Waves and particles are complementary, not contradictory, features of light.

Quantum physics can’t solve moral questions because killing an unborn child is not good from one point of view, and bad from another. It’s just bad. Its effects may be both good and bad, but not the act itself.

Dr Heuser’s Marvel-ous insight is a handy illustration of dialetheism – that contradictory statements can both be true. “The Empire State Building is in New York” and “the Empire State Building is in Los Angeles” are both true.

If this were actually the case, all of Western philosophy would tumble down. Ever since Plato and Aristotle there has been nigh-universal acceptance of the Law of Non-Contradiction, that A and not-A cannot both be true.

However, as a defence of abortion, the notion of dialetheism is catching on.

A philosopher at Wofford College, in South Carolina, Katherine Valde, recently published a brief article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, in which she defended her own decision to have an abortion.

She didn’t do this for what might be regarded as compelling reasons:

“My abortion didn’t save my life or allow me to finish school. It just let me live a life I wanted. And, for whatever reason, that isn’t supposed to be enough.”

Why, she asks, does she need to have a reason? Isn’t the fact that she wants it good enough? Rod Stewart provided an anthem for dialetheism in his song: “If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.” Dr Valde dresses up this sentiment in philosophical garb. She writes:

“I’m tired of the defense of abortion that relies on the idea that there are good and bad reasons to get abortions…”

Unsurprisingly, as a professional philosopher, Dr Valde is fascinated by “the possibility of metaphysical dialetheism- that there might be contradiction in the world itself.”

What if dialetheism is true? There can be no difference between good and bad, right and wrong. What can justify jailing the perpetrator of the Buffalo mass shooting? What will happen to morality? No dialetheist will ever seriously defend torturing babies – but it will be hard to explain why it’s evil. And inevitably there will be more people who torture babies. Ideas, you know, have consequences.

There is a maxim in logic, ex absurdo sequitur quodlibet, from a contradiction you can derive whatever you want. Ideas built on contradiction are pure fantasy. That’s why the gobbledygook of the Marvel Universe is so popular. You can get whatever you want from it. But that’s also why it’s not reality!

The emergence of dialetheism is one of the most corrupting consequences of defending legalised abortion. It’s easier to argue that right and wrong don’t exist than to defend a decision to take an innocent life.

AUTHOR

Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. He lives in Sydney, Australia. More by Michael Cook

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Pushback Against Government/Big Tech Collusion Enters a New Phase

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By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Newly obtained government records show the CDC met and corresponded regularly with social media companies to facilitate the removal of information about COVID the agency did not like and to push government narratives on the subject.  This is important because free speech requirements generally do not apply to private tech companies, but do apply if the platforms become state actors doing the government’s bidding.  The records show the CDC asked for the removal of specific tweets and posts as part of efforts to promote COVID vaccines and boosters, discredit natural immunity against COVID, disparage the vaccine injury reporting system (VAERS), and talk up masking.   The government’s phony narratives on all these subjects have come under increasing criticism. The parties also coordinated congressional testimony.  Attempts to pin liability on the social media platforms for government censorship under the state actor theory, including Trump’s case against Twitter, generally have not fared well in court so far, but the newly obtained records might change all that.

One pending lawsuit was brought by the state Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana.  They sued the Biden administration for colluding with Big Tech to censor free speech on the origins of the coronavirus, the results of the 2020 election, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the insecurity of mail-in voting.  A federal judge recently granted permission to proceed with discovery.  Subpoenas have been issued to Tony Fauci, the White House Press Secretary, other Biden officials, and five social media companies.

Efforts and calls to deputize social media companies have been widespread throughout the Biden administration.  Whistleblower documents show DHS has been laying plans to secure tech company cooperation to push the government line on COVID, election fraud, domestic terrorism, and supposed disinformation and rumors.   Calls to enlist the aid of social media have come from the Surgeon General, the White House press secretary, a White House climate advisor, and even Joe Biden himself.  Writer Alex Berenson was suspended from Twitter after questioning the efficacy of COVID vaccines.  He brought suit alleging the government had pressured Twitter into suspending him.  The case was settled and his account was reinstated.

Government collusion with Big Tech to suppress speech and push phony government narratives raises a whole host of problems I’ve mentioned in previous commentaries.  First, we do not want the government deciding what is true and suppressing information it deems to be false.  That’s the quickest way to stop all progress in life if the government becomes the sole arbiter of truth.   Second, what the government proclaims is true one day can easily be debunked the next.  Hunter Biden’s laptop is a perfect example.  At first, it was supposedly ‘Russian disinformation’, but it is now admitted the laptop is genuine.  There’s no longer any serious dispute about that.  What an embarrassment for those former intelligence officials and media types who all ran around saying ‘Russian disinformation, Russian disinformation’ – none of whom have apologized for being so spectacularly wrong or for so mindlessly serving their government masters.  Third, we don’t want to live in fear.  We don’t want to live in a country where we have to whisper the truth to each other on street corners for fear we will be hauled away in the middle of the night and persecuted if we challenge phony government narratives.  Fourth, and finally, the rise of the authoritarian Left is the central challenge of our time.  You put the power of left-wing government together with the awesome reach of left-wing tech companies and you get the kind of concentration of power our Founders warned us about.  Let’s hope the courts start pinning liability on the fascistic tech giants who have colluded with government to control our minds and our lives.

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©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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Founding Father James Madison on the Chopping Block?

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By Jerry Newcombe

Tragically, slavery has been around from the beginning of time. It is still practiced even today in some places where Christianity is not dominant or has not been dominant. But while slavery was a fact of life in the 1700’s—not only in colonial America, but all over the world—it was the system put in place by America’s founding fathers that eventually led to its dissolution.

But that doesn’t matter to the woke mob, which insists that historical figures be held to today’s standards, and which seeks to tear down America’s history and rebuild it on a neo-Marxist foundation.

Thus, the woke crowd goes after any founding father in any way associated with slavery. Most recently comes the attack on James Madison, a key architect of the Constitution.

The New York Post reports on an overhaul of Montpelier, the house of Madison, noting that a $10 million grant from “left-leaning philanthropist” David M. Rubenstein has put slavery and racism center-stage, shoving Madison’s authorship of the United States Constitution off into the wings. “Instead, blindsided tourists are hammered by high-tech exhibits about Madison’s slaves and current racial conflicts.”

Tourists visiting Montpelier may be coming to learn about the Constitution, but they are sorely disappointed. One describes it as, “A one hour Critical Race Theory experience disguised as a tour.”

And so it is that, in James Madison’s own home, our fourth president and a key architect of the Constitution is relentlessly attacked for not living up to today’s standards.

Madison, though a slave-owner, helped create a framework for one day abolishing slavery. By the standards of their contemporary world, America’s founders were deeply progressive in their desire to eliminate slavery—and far out of step with most of the rest of the world.

Much of the freedom we enjoy today gets back to those men and women who settled America for religious liberty and then the founding fathers who implemented Biblical principles to create America. Madison played a key role.

He attended the Presbyterian College of Princeton, New Jersey (now Princeton University) rather than the Anglican College of William and Mary, where sons of Virginia were expected to attend. He learned directly under Rev. John Witherspoon, who also later turned out to be an important founding father.

Perhaps, the most important lesson that James Madison took home from his Princeton education was the firm belief in the Biblical doctrine of man’s sinfulness—and its implications for political science.

John Eidsmoe, author of the landmark book, Christianity and the Constitution, points out: “One thing is certain, the Christian religion, particularly Rev. Witherspoon’s Calvinism, influenced Madison’s view of law and government.”

Madison once wrote, “All men having power ought to be distrusted.”

After the Constitutional Convention, but before the document was ratified, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote letters to the editor of newspapers in the state of New York, using the pseudonym Publius to argue for ratification. These letters were gathered together later and are known as the Federalist Papers and reflect the genius of American political science.

The Federalist Papers don’t quote the Bible directly, but they express a Biblical worldview on man’s nature and the potential corruption of power.

What is the essence of tyranny according to James Madison, author of Federalist #47?  The answer is having all three branches of government in the hands of one or a few.

In Federalist #51, he argues that “if men were angels,” government wouldn’t even be necessary. But since men aren’t angels, government is necessary. Furthermore, we also need protection from the government, since it is run by men, not angels.

In Federalist #42, Madison explains the Constitutional provision that would allow the federal government to abolish the slave trade 20 years after its ratification: “It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy.”

Americans need to learn the true history of our rich past. Yes, America has a checkered past with slavery and segregation. But so does the rest of the entire world—and the principles of founders like Madison were on the forefront of ending these evils. As America’s greatest civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., observed in his outstanding “I Have a Dream” speech, “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

We will not move toward a positive future if we distort our past, as the woke mobs now do. As James Madison himself once said: “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”

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LinkedIn’s ‘Misinformation’ Policies are an Attack on Science

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Citing a scientific study that undermines the government narrative can get your account “restricted!”

It is becoming a drearily familiar experience for me to receive emails from social media platforms informing me that my content has been removed for violating “community guidelines” prohibiting the dissemination of “dangerous or misleading information.” Usually, this is shorthand for any piece of evidence or analysis contradicting an official statement by a public health authority — to be precise, a specific public health authority or cluster of authorities that the platform in question has decided to treat as the Gospel of Science, very often the FDA, the CDC, or the WHO.

My latest run-in with the social media Information Tsars was an email I received on July 17 from Linkedin, notifying me that they had removed one of my posts for violating their policies on “misinformation,” and threatening to restrict my account if I continued to violate their policies. After posting a complaint about LinkedIn’s misinformation policies, I could no longer access my account, as it had been “temporarily restricted.” As I write this, I am still locked out of my LinkedIn account.

Here is the item that was deemed by Linkedin’s information Tsars to constitute “misinformation” of the sort that they cannot tolerate on their platform:

Click here for the Linkedin misinformation graphic.

So what did I say to deserve to have this post taken down by Linkedin, leading shortly thereafter to a “restriction” of my account and a threat to make the restriction permanent?

Actually, nothing more than (i) cite a scientific study being shared by a Harvard epidemiologist, corroborating many other studies that have shown, time and again, that children are at negligible risk of suffering severe disease from Covid-19, and (ii) question the wisdom and ethical propriety of an FDA decision to approve Emergency Use Authorisation for Covid vaccines for children as young as 6 months old.

Emergency Use Authorisation requires a special justification to show that ordinary protocols for approving a drug should be by-passed. The FDA has produced weak and speculative evidence about the potential benefits of the Covid vaccines for children, and no solid evidence to show children face such a serious risk from Covid as to give rise to a public health “emergency.”

This is not a quirky opinion, by the way: it is corroborated by the World Health Organisation, one of those hallowed pillars of wisdom that LinkedIn would have us revere, which affirms on its own webpage that “children and adolescents are generally at low risk of infection, and if they become infected it is likely to be mild.”

Why would someone get in trouble with a social media platform hosting debate and discussion about public affairs for raising doubts about the ethical and scientific propriety of a governmental decision affecting the lives of millions of children? How is it possible that citing a scientific study that cuts against an official government narrative can get your post taken down, or even get your account “restricted”?

The explanation is simple: Anything that puts in question an official statement by a public health authority is considered by LinkedIn to be incriminating material that can spark a corrective intervention by Linkedin’s Philosopher Kings.

In a society that prides itself on being “progressive,” “scientific,” and rational, Linkedin’s “professional community guidelines” give middle managers a license to take down your posts and eventually restrict your account for the sin of contradicting the decisions or judgments of public health authorities.

Here is the exact wording of Linkedin’s policy on “misinformation”:

Do not share content that directly contradicts guidance from leading global health organizations and public health authorities.

What does this actually mean, in practice? It means that some select persons, just because they got nominated to a “public health authority” or a “leading global health organization,” are protected by Linkedin from any robust criticism from the public or from other scientists.

Anyone who tries to post data or evidence suggesting that a recognised public health authority might actually have gotten something wrong, on a matter of public “guidance,” will find their post taken down forthwith by Linkedin, no matter how respectable the rival evidence or authority they bring to the table may be.

Let’s think about the implications of that: public health authorities are treated by LinkedIn as gurus, or “popes” of modern science, whose utterances should be received with unquestioning reverence. LinkedIn has thus formulated policies of content moderation that effectively quash serious debate and give automatic cover to any potential errors or poor judgment calls on the part of public health authorities.

A scientific or medical claim immune from public criticism may be true or false. But we cannot have full confidence in it, unless we know that it can be properly debated and put to the test in the public square.

When rational and scientific debate is artificially constricted, society languishes in ignorance, and public authorities become arrogant and complacent, in the knowledge that their statements are sheltered from public challenge.

Just look at how life-saving information about the early stages of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak was carefully kept under wraps by the Chinese Communist Party, or how Facebook arbitrarily suppressed evidence suggesting the virus escaped from a laboratory, only to later reverse its policy in embarrassment.

Human beings crave for certainty, especially during a crisis. However, we cannot be certain, from our limited historic vantagepoint, which of our scientific beliefs will eventually be vindicated and which disproven. Only candid and open scientific debate, free from intimidation and censorship, can expose the strengths and limitations of each position over time.

Linkedin is killing the possibility of open intellectual, political and scientific debate among its members, and fostering something that comes closer to a beehive than a true human community: astonishingly, one of the conditions for remaining a member in good standing is refraining from contradicting whatever ideas come out of the CDC, FDA, or WHO.

According to correspondence I have received from LinkedIn, “We have these policies in place to help keep LinkedIn a safe, trusted and professional network for everyone” (email from “LinkedIn Member Safety and Recovery Consultant,” received 19 July 2022, excerpted here).

Linkedin is indeed an incredibly safe place – if you are an official at the FDA, CDC, or WHO, or one of their devotees. If, on the other hand, you believe in serious and robust scientific inquiry, or have any genuine intellectual curiosity left in you, you are unlikely to survive the scrutiny of Linkedin’s Information Tsars for long.

This article has been republished from David Thunder’s Substack, The Freedom Blog.

AUTHOR

David Thunder

David Thunder is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Navarra’s Institute for Culture and Society. More by David Thunder.

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Election Integrity Professional Demolishes Guardian Hit Piece

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By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Democrat-friendly media outlets are working overtime to discredit all efforts to achieve free and fair elections and to smear anyone involved in election integrity efforts.  One of many such pathetic articles appeared in The Guardian, the left-wing British publication with a U.S. presence. The article drives the phony narrative that poll-watching and training for election integrity activists amounts to voter intimidation and is to be condemned.

The article specifically names Tim Meisburger, a member of my activist network devoted to achieving free and fair elections. Tim has spent 30 years observing overseas elections, culminating in his appointment as Director of the Center for Democracy Rights and Governance for the federal agency USAID. Tim is currently Director of the America Project’s election integrity program.   The Guardian never asked him for his side of the story, so he wrote a letter to the editor demolishing the article, a letter which the Guardian has yet to publish.  In the letter, Tim wrote:

This article is littered with “scare quotes”; a rhetorical device and cliché whose overuse reflects poorly on the professionalism of the author, and competence of his editor. Although this article is listed under “US news”, it is immediately clear that it is an opinion piece….

Early in the article Peter Stone … plays the “Hitler” card, suggesting our leadership is pushing a “big lie”; a pejorative the left uses to refer to the opinion shared by many (according to recent polls, more than half of all Americans, including 30% of Democrats) that the 2020 election may have been affected by fraud….

As election and democracy professionals know, you cannot judge the legitimacy of an election by looking solely at what happens on election day, as many events can occur well before election day that affect the integrity of the election process….

[U]ndisputed examples of incidents or programs that might give one cause to doubt the democratic legitimacy of the election include:

  • Coordinated suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story before the election
  • Introduction of many new election procedures as a response to COVID 19 that universally weakened the security of the election process
  • Widespread use of insecure mail-in ballots and drop boxes, paid for in many cases by donations from a partisan billionaire.
  • The use of state officials and resources to turn out voters in predominately Democratic areas, again paid for by a partisan billionaire.
  • Ballot mules geo-tracked and videoed collecting ballots from partisan organizations and then stuffing said ballots in drop boxes
  • Observers being prevented (on video) from observing counting processes
  • Poll workers (on video) sending observers home and stuffing ballot boxes in the middle of the night
  • The suspiciously coordinated suspension of counting in battleground states, followed by markedly different results when counting is resumed

These and other incidents may not be enough to sway Peter, but they are certainly enough to create reasonable doubt for many people. For me, as an election professional, the prevention of effective observation alone is enough to declare that the integrity of the election cannot be verified; and if we were overseas monitoring an election in a developing country and saw that, we would condemn the process and call for new elections….

The letter goes on from there and includes the inconvenient fact Meisburger left USAID at the end of President Trump’s term, not under a “cloud” as the article baselessly claimed.

That’s the rebuttal.  Let’s see if the Guardian prints it.  Don’t hold your breath.  Open and honest debate, any more than free and fair elections, is not how the Democrats roll.

Visit The Daily Skirmish  and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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Abortion and the Soul of a Nation

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By Jihad Watch

The founder of Planned Parenthood envisioned a world with no “tradition” or “moral taboos.”

Everyone from Biden to the media seized on the story of a 10-year-old girl’s abortion to defend the practice. They didn’t want to talk about the ugly details. And with good reason.

The girl, actually only 9, had been raped by an illegal alien. And, on camera, her mother defended the rapist. Rather than a story about abortion, it was another familiar case of children being abused by the men who pass through the lives of their mothers. And a commentary on the social dysfunction created by illegal migration and broken multicultural communities.

Despite the eagerness to make the faceless child into the face of the abortion movement, less than 4% of abortions involve underage girls. Most however involve broken families.

“I do not view abortion as a choice and a right,” Biden had said in 2006. “I think it’s always a tragedy. I think it should be rare and safe.”

Biden was echoing Bill Clinton’s statement that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare”. It was a position that most Democrats of a certain age had adopted to bridge the gap between the party’s pro-life and pro-abortion wings. Biden has since adopted the position that abortion is a feminist sacrament in a party that has jettisoned both women and its pro-life wing.

Bill Clinton, Biden and establishment Democrats of another era understood that abortion was a symptom of broken families and poverty. They still know that, they just won’t say it. It’s why Elizabeth Warren and other Senate Democrats are trying to ban the pregnancy centers that offer assistance to poor mothers. Those same pregnancy centers have faced a campaign of domestic terrorism from pro-abortion extremists which Biden’s DOJ continues to ignore.

Why burn pregnancy centers? Because Planned Parenthood’s clients aren’t feminists, just poor. Warren and her domestic terrorist allies are trying to take away any option other than abortion.

Women who seek out abortions are disproportionately poor and members of minority groups. 75% are low income and half are below the poverty line. 85% are unmarried, among those 61% had been shacking up with the baby’s father, and 61% already had one child. Those making over $100,000 a year have the highest rates of support for abortions and the lowest among those who make only $30,000. From Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, on down abortion is how the Elizabeth Warrens manage the social problems of the underclass.

Eugenicists were divided between the more extreme view, that poverty was a symptom of an inheritable genetic defect, and the more liberal view, represented by Sanger, that the poor were a mixture of genetic defects, who needed to be forcibly sterilized, and irresponsible ‘breeders’, especially minorities such as Italians, Jews, and blacks, who were poor because they had too many children. It was this liberal eugenics that is the pragmatic function of Planned Parenthood even as its ideology trumpets abortion as feminist empowerment for upper class women.

There’s little evidence that abortion has fixed social or economic problems. The multigenerational clients of Planned Parenthood continue to be poor minorities.

Sanger’s contempt for religion had misled her about the role of values in social stability. Children were not the cause of poverty. The poverty rate in 1974, a year after Roe v. Wade became law, was 11%. 5 years later, it was up to 15%. In 2020 it was back to 11%. In 1974, there were 24 million poor people in America. In 2020, there are 37 million.

The poverty rate for married couples is under 5%. It’s at 23% for female householders.

Rather than solving any of the social problems that Planned Parenthood claimed to be tackling, the annual mass sacrifice of babies only serves as a disposal chute for its victims. And so when a child is raped by her mother’s boyfriend, the answer is a speedy trip to an abortion clinic followed by assertions that this system is a vital civil right rather than a moral nightmare.

Democrats, including even Joe Biden, once understood that abortion was the fallout of a failed social system and its broken families, but now abortion can only be discussed as if it were a thing in and of itself, detached from any causes or consequences except perhaps the academic jargon about “pregnant bodies” and the “heteronormative patriarchy” that now infuses the Left.

Media outlets claim, with a mostly straight face, that abortion bans hit LGBT people the hardest.

Meanwhile, on the ground level, leftist activists are firebombing the pregnancy centers that offer an alternative to the mostly poor minority women who are the ones who actually have abortions.

“To effect the salvation of the generations of the future—nay, of the generations of to-day—our greatest need… is to cooperate in the formation of a code of sexual ethics based upon a thorough biological and psychological understanding of human nature,” Margaret Sanger wrote in 1922.

A code of “sexual ethics” based on a raw materialistic understanding of human nature has long since developed by the likes of Alfred Kinsey. The code has brought on an unrivaled hostility between the sexes, hookup culture, the #MeToo movement, STDs, pornography, single parent families, date rape, the sexualization of children and widespread misery and loneliness.

Not to mention abortion.

One wonders what Sanger, who died in 1966, would have made of the wonderful generations of the future she had only begun to witness at the height of Haight-Ashbury. The essence of Sanger’s argument was that nothing more could be expected of people than to live out their drives and society had to protect its own future by eliminating children from the equation.

Women, Sanger had claimed, would be empowered by this exciting new code of sexual ethics.

What that empowerment really adds up to is college students waking up after a drunken encounter wondering if it was rape and single mothers desperately holding on to a man even if he abuses their children, and the problem being “solved” at an abortion clinic.

Abortion has so often been reduced to a debate between the right to life and the autonomy of the mother that we ignore the fact that what we are really seeing is a side-effect of a social breakdown. The larger question is not whether murder is sometimes justified or not, but why do we even live? What is the purpose of our existence and do we even have one?

Sanger began her book with a quote from Walt Whitman that women “are the gates of the body” and the “gates of the soul”, before proceeding to reduce women to the body, the “great fundamental instinct of sex”, as she put it, “expressing itself in the ever-growing broods” of the working poor. “Prohibition” and “restraint” were futile, she warned, and would only lead to “insanity, hysteria, neuroses, morbid fears and compulsions”.

“Remove the moral taboos that now bind the human body and spirit, free the individual from the slavery of tradition,” she urged, and “most of the larger evils of society will perish.”

How is society doing without those taboos?

“I was thirty-nine and scared by the idea that I would not be reproducing the kind of heteronormative nuclear family I had grown up in,” Emily Witt wrote. So the New Yorker writer joined a dating app “for ‘open-minded singles and couples who want to explore their sexuality.’”

“Below the photos is a caption that might read, “31, transmasculine, gynesexual, 3 km away.”

After that, Witt turned in a plaintive article about “the only abortion clinic in North Dakota”.

This is Sanger’s world without the moral taboos or any prohibition and restraint. It’s also a world in which Witt admits that, “The older I’ve got, the more I’ve understood how often sexual freedom imposes itself on people who don’t seek it out.” The torrent of “insanity, hysteria, neuroses, morbid fears and compulsions” has only increased in this world with its alphabet soup of genders and sexualities with sky-high suicide and sexual assault rates.

Whitman failed to understand that the “gates of the soul” come before the “gates of the body”, but Sanger could not conceive of the soul as anything except psychological “chemistry”. And there’s Witt, their spiritual descendant, who browses a world of sexual fetishes and exploitation, along with her “unmarried and childless female friends”, “none of us very young” who “had been ‘hooking up’ with people for large swaths of our adult lives.”

Apart from the moral judgements, Sanger’s world is a lonely one filled with broken people, men who fear to be fathers and women who no longer believe they are women living in a digital ‘Nighthawks’. Abortion is in decline, not because of laws and regulations, but because people are less likely to connect to each other on even on the most casual level that would make a pregnancy possible.

Abortions, childbirths, pregnancies, relationships and marriages are all in a state of decline.

And that is the best of it in the upper tiers. At the bottom is the end of families, homes that aren’t broken, but never even existed, whose children either end up in abortion clinics or prisons.

Breaches of morality are also breaches of our humanity.

Changing all of that requires looking beyond the body and to the soul. According to Sanger, the soul was “nothing but a vague unreality except insofar as it is able to manifest itself in the beauty of the concrete.” She envisioned a humanity whose bodies were as perfect as those of “superb ships, motor cars or great buildings”. And yet our truths lie in what to Sanger was a mere “vague unreality” but whose absence has made all of the achievements a hollow tragedy.

Our ships and cars are better than ever. And our society is more broken than ever.

Abortion doesn’t only represent the death of a child, but of a family and a future. It isn’t only babies who die in abortion clinics, but the potential of two people and the soul of a nation.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

RELATED VIDEO: Blue State Reality Check: Freedom = Slavery, Ignorance = Strength

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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The More Biden Tanks In The Polls, The More Insane and Radical He Becomes

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By The Geller Report

Of course. The people don’t matter. The party of misery spreads misery and suffering. ‘Let them eat electric cars.’ If you hate America, you support the Democrats. If you love America, you’re a Republican. How is co-existence sustainable?

By: Daniel Greenfield, July 22, 2022:

The new New York Times poll is bad news for Biden and bad for America.

It’s not just the 33% approval rating that’s truly worrying. Biden has hit a new polling low, but he hits new polling lows every week. 70% of Democrats still claim to approve of Biden, much as they would a diseased cat, the propped up corpse of Osama bin Laden, or small piece of dried spaghetti as long as it was a Democrat. But only a quarter of the party wants Biden to run again.

Biden’s few remaining brain cells aren’t worried about the 2024 election. They’re worried about the Democrat primaries that he barely survived last time around. And isn’t likely to this time.

64% of Democrats want someone, anyone, other than Biden to run in 2024.

As Biden’s poll numbers have slid down the slopes faster than a falling skier, he hasn’t moved to the center, but to the fringes. Like most of his party, the primary threat comes from the Left. And the more unpopular Biden becomes, the harder he pivots leftward to protect his primary options.

Even if they’re mostly imaginary.

That’s why the poor poll numbers are nothing to celebrate. Biden pretended to run from the center, but never governed from the center. And his growing unpopularity has only made his administration more extreme. Biden doesn’t need America and doesn’t have it anyway.

He needs the Left.

Leftists and Americans wanted opposite things from the Biden administration. Americans wanted stability, sensible policies and an end to the chaos. Leftists wanted endless spending on their agendas, identity politics and a perpetual state of crisis. Biden took office in a locked down city with a heavily military presence, appointed an attorney general bitter at having a Supreme Court seat taken from him and tasked with pursuing partisan grievances. Gargantuan spending bills aggravated the already unstable economy and pushed the country to the brink.

Everything else followed from that.

Biden locked his administration into a leftist worldview that alienated most of the country. The more the rest of the country shuns him, the harder he clings to the “one that brought” him.

Barack Obama.

Biden isn’t popular, but he never was. He first got to the White House riding leftist coattails. He certainly wasn’t elected based on his own popularity, but because the Left waged a scorched earth campaign. The only reason someone so corrupt and inept ever ended up in the White House was as a beneficiary of the outpouring of rabid leftist hatred against conservatives.

The 2020 strategy of lying low and letting the Left rage got him in the White House. And Biden knows that his only shot of getting back in is once again letting the Left do its worst.

Biden’s national poll numbers don’t matter because he didn’t win a popularity contest.

It doesn’t matter if he’s at 41% or 33% or 6%. Biden’s gambit will be once again lying low and letting the Left shape the battlefield. Faced with the likelihood of being a one-termer, his staffers are leftists who aren’t in it for the money or the career development, but are true believers in the “cause”. And he needs leftist donors who aren’t invested in personalities, but in ideology.

Much like Xi, Biden understands that the ‘party’ matters and the public doesn’t. And ‘party’ doesn’t mean the official one with a donkey on the box, but the ideological leftist movement that cares about the things he’s vigorously promoting from critical race theory to gender identity to modern monetary theory and all the theories that in their sum add up to Marxist theory.

Joe Biden likely doesn’t believe any of it, but just as Hunter didn’t have to read Mao’s Little Red Book to cut business deals in China, Biden doesn’t have to understand what he’s promoting.

Biden came into office after outsourcing much of his administration’s policy apparatus to the Bernie and Warren people. The “Big Guy” doesn’t care much about policy. Biden has been anti and pro-abortion, pro and anti-terrorism, and pro and anti-racism depending on the moment.

What Biden cares about is having the big job and whatever benefits flow from it. An egomaniac who kept on lying about his college grades while running for president, he accidentally landed in a position commensurate with his inflated self-image. And one that offers plenty of rewards.

Much as Hillary, another compulsive liar, wrecked her own party and then the country while trying to cling to power no one thought she should have, Biden, even in his diminished state, is not going to let go. In that, Biden is no different than the rest of a gerontocratic oligarchy, men and women like Speaker Pelosi and Senator Bernie Sanders, claiming to speak for the youth.

After generations in power, none of them are eager to let go and accept the inevitable. Especially since the inevitable is no longer as inevitable as it once used to be.

It’s inevitable to most that Biden won’t run and won’t win if he does. And in the normal state of things, that would be true. But we are in a post-polling world in which public opinion is no longer just a reaction to events, but can be directly shaped by manufacturing a series of crises.

And if Biden works hard enough for the Left, perhaps the Left will work to keep him in office.

Some race riots, lockdowns, and crises yet to be unleashed can do wonders for changing people’s perspective. It likely won’t work and may not even be tried, but Biden doesn’t have any other cards to play. And he never did. Biden can’t win elections on his own. So he won’t try.

The more unpopular he becomes, the less likely he is to even bother going through the motions.

Biden may sit in the White House (when he’s not vacationing in Delaware), but he doesn’t work for the American people. He works for the Left. And he may not remember much of anything else, but that is the one thing he has never forgotten. It’s the only reason why he’s here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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The Biden Perpetual Emergency Coup

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By Jihad Watch

What does a president do when he can’t get Congress to pass anything?

  1. Sign executive orders
  2. Go on a foreign trip
  3. Give speeches
  4. Declare an emergency

Lefties are pressuring Biden to declare “emergencies” over abortion and the environment. Trying to sideline two of the branches of government with emergency decrees is a hallmark of tyranny. Biden tried to get his policies through both branches and failed. Seizing emergency powers when you fail legislatively is a coup.

So far we’ve got a “National Climate Emergency” and an abortion “National Health Emergency”.

The only emergency here is the one Dems and their media keep pushing, an “attack on democracy” or, more accurately, the Republic.

We have a Constitution and three branches of government with checks and balances. Biden is a particularly poor fit to play Caesar. If the American voters want a legislature that will turn abortion into law or force them to pay twice as much for gas and energy, they can vote one in. And they’ll shortly have the chance to do so.

(And considering how badly some Senate GOP celebrity nominees like Oz, Walker, Vance, are performing and the risk of another Thiel Facebook pick, Blake Masters in Arizona, they may get the chance.)

But the Democrats don’t want to risk elections. They want to seize and wield power through one man. And then everything becomes an emergency.

Want to pass higher taxes, declare an emergency. Want to mandate bike lanes everywhere? Declare a National Bike Emergency.

That’s a coup emergency.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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VIDEOS: The View from Israel

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By Barry Shaw

The View from Israel brings you accurate pro-Israel information.

We explain Israel’s legitimacy that cannot be disputed.

We introduce you to Israelis with seemingly unique stories but, within democratic Israel, they are not rare or unusual – only to outsiders.

Please help us get out the message by clicking the ‘Like’ button and sharing the videos on your social media sites.

This helps increase our recorded viewership and drives more people to our pro-Israel messages.

Thanks! Now sit back and enjoy the videos.

Whose Land?

I talk with film-maker, Hugh Kitson, about his important movie. We have included excerpts and details of how you can watch the full movie. Please note! If you are in Jerusalem on July 27, try to get to the Begin Center at 6.30 pm to meet High Kitson at the premier of Whose Land?

How Minority Israelis Make a Case for Israel

Often the best advocates for Israel are not Israeli Jews but members of Israel’s rich and varied minorities. Meet Jonathan Elkhoury. Listen to our conversation, and his unique story.

©Barry Shaw. All rights reserved.

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Hunter Will Skate

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By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

The investigation of Hunter Biden has reached a critical stage, with prosecutors weighing whether or not to bring charges.  Their focus has narrowed to tax violations and making a false statement to purchase a firearm.  Apparently, the juicy stuff from Hunter Biden’s laptop and business dealings – money laundering, failure to register as a foreign lobbyist, and such and the like – has been left behind.

Which is too bad, because it leaves a lot of questions unanswered – not only about Hunter but, more importantly, about Joe Biden.  Tenacious investigator Peter Schweizer, author of a book documenting how communist China has captured American elites, asserts it is undisputed Hunter Biden received tens of millions of dollars from Chinese businesses having ties to Chinese intelligence when Joe Biden was in the White House as Vice President and the Obama administration’s point man on China policy.  It is believed Joe Biden—the ‘Big Guy’—gets 10 percent from Hunter Biden’s business dealings. This raises a whole host of major questions, like: Was Joe Biden selling his office when he was Vice President?  Was U.S. China policy affected?  Was national security compromised?  Is Joe Biden in the pocket of Red China today?  Unfortunately, it looks like we’re never going to know because prosecutors can only get interested in whether Hunter Biden lied when he bought a gun.  And they want us to believe we don’t have a two-tiered justice system in this country – one for the high and mighty and another for us little people.

But no matter how you slice it, Hunter’s business dealings and kickbacks to Joe Biden still stink to high heaven.  In recent weeks, it’s been conceded Hunter Biden’s laptop is genuine, not Russian disinformation as ridiculously claimed.  Information from the laptop documents the Biden-Burisma connection and a pay-to-play scheme in Ukraine, how Vice President Joe Biden intervened to get a Ukrainian prosecutor off Hunter’s back, and Hunter’s questionable activities in Moscow, China, and Kazakhstan. The laptop also shows Hunter Biden met with Vice President Joe Biden at the White House or the Vice President’s residence at least 30 times, often just after returning from overseas business trips.  A Hunter Biden business associate attended 21 of those meetings.

Emails on the laptop and now available online show a Mexican billionaire received access to the White House because Hunter Biden requested it.

Joe Biden claims to this day he doesn’t know anything about Hunter’s business dealings, a claim which has been thoroughly debunked.  Recovered files from the laptop show, not only did Joe Biden know about Hunter’s business dealings, but Joe Biden offered to help more than once and even referred more business to Hunter Biden.  The White House won’t answer any questions about the laptop (more here).  Gee, I wonder why.

A recovered text message from Hunter Biden raises questions about why he was working with China’s chief of intelligence, and whether China arrested CIA sources in retaliation for the Justice Department arresting Hunter’s Chinese business partner.  Emails show Joe Biden wrote a college recommendation letter for the son of Hunter Biden’s Chinese business partner.  Bank records released by two U.S. Senators show Hunter Biden has financial ties to companies linked to the Chinese Communist Party or government.  One of the companies wired $1 million dollars to a Hunter Biden company the same month the Chinese company’s lobbyist was arrested by U.S. authorities for bribery and money laundering.  He was later convicted.

Most recently, the Biden administration sold China a million barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  This was oil set aside to help Americans but Joe Biden sold it to China, specifically to Sinopec in which Hunter Biden has a financial interest. Our China policy is, what again?

Finally, we’ve been hearing for a long time Hunter would divest himself of a financial stake in a Chinese oil company.  The latest report from two days ago is he still hasn’t done so.

In 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace after a scandal involving a $10,000 bribe. My, how times have changed, and not for the better.



Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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Bennie Thompson Falsely Claims Police ‘Killed’ in January 6 Capitol Chaos

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By Discover The Networks

At the opening of the January 6 Committee hearing on Thursday, Committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) claimed falsely that former President Trump was indifferent to the “beating and killing” of police officers.

“Donald Trump ignored and disregarded the desperate pleas of his own family, including Ivanka and Don Jr.,” Thompson stated. “Even though he was the only person in the world who could call off the mob he sent to the Capitol, he could not be moved to rise from his dining room table and walk a few steps down the White House hallway into the press briefing room, where cameras were anxiously and desperately waiting to carry his message to the armed and violent mob savagely beating and killing law enforcement officers revenging [sic] the Capitol and hunting down the Vice President and various members of Congress. He could not be moved.”

All false. In fact, of the five people who died in connection with the chaos, only one, protester and Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, was killed, shot by a law enforcement officers. Three other protesters died of unrelated causes. One Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick, passed away after January 6 from natural causes.

Thompson also claimed falsely that Trump “sent” a violent mob to the Capitol; in fact, the chaos began even before Trump told the crowd at his “Save America” rally a mile away “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Thompson also claimed falsely that the protesters were “armed.”

To sum up, the Chairman of the January 6 Committee did nothing but lie about his political opponents and the events of that date.

Bennie G. Thompson

Chairman of the January 6 Commission

On July 1, 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Thompson to chair the January 6 Commission, a special congressional panel investigating the causes and ramifications of the January 6, 2021 protest during which several hundred supporters of President Trump had illegally entered the U.S. Capitol building to express their objections to the result of the 2020 presidential election. “January 6 was a devastating black eye on our democracy, and we have to make sure that it never happens again,” said Thompson…

To learn more about Bennie Thompson, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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When Intelligence is Stupid

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

The smartest guy in the room is often not the most trustworthy or competent.

I’ve long engaged a group of close friends in political and theological discussion. As it happens, two of us agree on most topics and ally against the others. Mostly in banter, although not entirely so, we refer to ourselves as “Team Intelligence.” It’s friendly and jocular, even if somewhat ridiculous.

Who could be against intelligence? Who would wish to be dim-witted or slow; or worse, to be thought dim-witted and slow?

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes intelligence or understanding (nous) as the intellectual virtue by which we apprehend first principles. Such principles are known, but as first, they cannot themselves be demonstrated or based on other more fundamental premises. The intellect grasps them as true by an insight that is neither an intuition nor a conclusion. Thus, all other theoretical reasoning depends on intelligence, which provides fundamental principles.

Nonetheless, it is obvious to any person of experience that intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom, morality, or even basic decency. The intelligent person may turn out worse than the dull precisely because he is clever and scheming. Just as one eventually concludes that interesting people are fine but solid and serious people make better friends, perhaps maturity requires moderating our admiration for the intellectuals, the clerks, and the clever types.

Stupidity’s varieties

Best known for his modernist classic, The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1880–1942) gave a lecture in the anxious Vienna of 1937, “On Stupidity,” that is helpful here. The most “general notion of stupidity,” Musil suggests, is something like incapacity or inability. But at a time of “middle-class conventions,” the conception of stupidity is narrowed, confined to the domain of “mental work” and “rational achievements.” Stupidity is thus thought to describe “one who is ‘a little weak in the head.’” While a failure to understand may be the occasion of humor, Musil rightly notes there is nothing dishonorable in slowness. “Honorable stupidity is a little dull of comprehension, . . . is poor in ideas and words,” but also has “more than a little of life’s rosy cheeks” and is “charming.” Sam Gamgee comes to mind, or Bertie Wooster. They might need to count on their fingers, but there’s nothing dishonorable in doing so.

If honorable stupidity is a weakness of understanding, the dishonorable version “is by far the more dangerous.” It is not the absence of intelligence so much as “failure of intelligence.” Intelligence is present but out of balance and “misshapen and erratically active,” diseased in some manner. The “higher stupidity” is a “misculture” causing not dullness of mind but a kind of blindness or refusal to see.

Musil suggests three primary qualities of this kind of intelligent stupidity. First, it claims accomplishment and facility in matters beyond its competence. Second, it gives way to emotions at the expense of reason. Third, it is clever enough to invent rationalizations for its views, no matter how bizarre the view or silly the excuse. As a result, intelligence does not orient toward true knowledge of first principles and reality, as in Aristotle’s vision, but confuses the spirit. It results in a flight from reality, with all the cultural and spiritual pathologies attendant on living in an ersatz reality. Of course, given the unity of the human being, stupidity of this sort affects sensibility, causing taste and emotions to unmoor. Such intelligence becomes a dangerous disease of the mind and “endangers life itself.”

Culture of intelligence

Ours is certainly an age that privileges mental work, the creative class, the pundit, the intellectual, those of word and symbol; in short, ours is a culture of intelligence. The intelligent are valued, admitted, hired, promoted, and praised, and their product governs and directs us. But which sort of intelligence, honorable or dishonorable? Do our bright lights claim competence in what is clearly beyond the ability of policy and state? Are our best and most powerful governed by reason or emotions? Do our elites offer wild rationalizations for what is clearly bizarre? Do the most important institutions of our society harness and direct intelligence in service of reality or of misculture’s revolt?

Just now, the West comes across as dominated by enthusiasm. Our good institutions lack conviction, while the worst are frenzied with enthusiasm threatening our social order. The irrationality of our experts and their responses to COVID have wounded the education and well-being of our children, foisted a mental health crisis on us, fomented nihilistic violence, and destroyed wealth through inflation. An utterly destructive mania for human experimentation continues in the contagion of rapid onset gender dysphoria. We have no idea what puberty blockers will do long term, even as our cultural gatekeepers silence those asking the relevant questions. This is a plague of social disorder and chaos, much of it prompted by wild abstractions of the intelligent.

Roger Scruton suggested that many “grand liberal conceptions” about rights and freedoms are merely enthusiasms leaving “death and destruction in their wake.” For Scruton, conservative as he was, abstractions always have the whiff of higher stupidity about them, untethered from reality and invented as they are. Instead of cleverly constructed (and intelligent in their way) abstractions, Scruton suggested that “we rational beings need customs and institutions that are founded in something other than reason, if we are to use our reason to good effect.” This, he thought, is the “principal contribution that conservatism has made” to an understanding of human life, and an essential truth.

Seeking soundness

Given the confusion, the temptation among some on the right to respond to wrongheaded abstractions with abstract theories, projects, and grand schemes of their own is understandable. However, this mimics the “higher stupidity” responsible for fragmenting the institutions, structures, customs, and habits on which genuine reason depends, as Scruton has argued. Instead, we ought to value soundness far more than we do. We have become so accustomed to praising mental work, in Musil’s phrase, that we scout for smarts, recruiting and promoting and praising the bright kid while overlooking the solid youngster. Surely a person of good judgment, stolid character, and immovable rectitude is every bit as praiseworthy as the inventive and the quick—and in political and social life far more important.

The sound person is invariably a person of custom, of deference to the collected judgment of long experience, including experience of those long dead. They, after all, knew something and still exert judgment in the manners, mores, and habits of a people. The sound youngster possesses a sort of connatural knowledge of what is to be done, and so maintains stability, which is a basic condition for rational self-governance. Revolution and disruption—so cherished by the intelligent with their plans and projects—demand fluidity, liquidity, and suppleness, all skills of the highly intelligent, and all generally destructive of order and decent society. The disruptors of Silicon Valley flourish as San Francisco collapses, for example.

The sound person holds in trust the accomplishments of a civilization. It is no accident that Plato’s vision of education begins not with philosophy and the clever, but with formation of good judgment and taste. Eventually the philosopher ought to rule, he suggests, but the ruler emerges from those already educated in good judgment; that is, the ruler must first be considered sound, a sensible person, so he doesn’t succumb to the novel (but nonsensical) proposal that ruins social order and well-being. He maintains a high regard for the guards of civilizational inheritance, the not utterly brilliant teacher who knows he has been asked to bequeath a cherished tradition to his pupils rather than tear it apart.

For most, having their customary way of life “problematized” results not in insight and clarity but confusion and vertigo. Far too many young people have had the rug yanked out from under them by their intelligent teachers; unsurprisingly, the result is alienation, nihilism, anger, withdrawal, and helplessness. The “failure to launch” bedeviling so many, including fear of “adulting” and the rejection of growing up, marrying, and parenting, is worsened by the cleverest among us. We often rather lamely refer to this as the failure of the elites, but they have not failed so much as destroyed.

We’ve privileged intelligence far too much. Or, better, we’ve privileged an intelligence quite proper to the world of science—with its doubt and skepticism and experiment and theories—but that cannot understand the human things. Our attempts to force a perfectly good tool into another sphere have caused grave damage. Theoretical reason, so necessary and wonderful within its bounds, is worse than merely erroneous in social and political life. It becomes stupid, highly so. Consider the vicious abstractions harming so many of the most vulnerable and dependent among us—gender ideology and political utopianism, for just two examples.

Aristotle knew better. Different orders of reality require different orders of intellect proper to them, and what he terms the well-schooled man—the sound person—knows the difference. The practical wisdom of the sound person is intelligence of the proper sort, an intelligence about acting. The person educated in this way “knows first principles,” and, indeed, the sound person lives in accordance with “intelligence and right order,” in his phrasing.

Soundness is intelligence apprehending the principles governing action. Such principles are universal, governing all human acts. But they are not theoretical, and it is not the clever but the good who most easily apprehend them.

We have great need for sound men and women, and until we value and praise them as we esteem the clever, and until the sound govern and give law to the clever, we will experience no end of our troubles.

This essay has been republished with permission from Public Discourse.

AUTHOR

R.J. Snell

R.J. Snell is Editor-in-Chief of Public Discourse and Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute. Previously, he was for many years Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy… More by R.J. Snell

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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HHS Pays $40k to Study Why Kids ‘Favor Whiteness and Maleness Over Other Identities.’

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By Judicial Watch

In yet another racial equity venture funded by American taxpayers, a private university is getting tens of thousands of dollars from the U.S. government to study the “developmental trajectory of children’s beliefs that white males—more so than black males, white females, or black females—best exemplify a person.” The three-year research project, to be conducted by academics at New York University (NYU), seeks to uncover why kids “favor Whiteness and maleness over other identities,” according to the grant announcement issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency doling out the cash for the study.

The project is part of a broader HHS Equity Action Plan designed to transform how the agency does business in order “to concretely advance equity.” Under the overhaul a Minority Health Social Vulnerability Index was launched to help identify racial and ethnic communities at the greatest risk for disproportionate impact and adverse outcomes due to COVID-19 and a Racial Equity in Postpartum Care Challenge was created to reduce disparities and improve outcomes for postpartum “Black or African American” women enrolled in Medicaid, the government’s insurance program for the poor. HHS has also doled out millions of dollars to “minority-serving institutions” charged with strengthening COVID-19 vaccine confidence among racial and ethnic minority groups as well as underserved communities.

In the agency’s latest racial equity endeavor, researchers at NYU will receive more than $40,000 to study “societal assumptions regarding typical personhood and their effects on reasoning development.” The HHS grant announcement further specifies that the goal is to “uncover the development processes by which children acquire the belief that white males represent the default person—a pattern rooted in ideologies of androcentrism (centering the experiences of men) and ethnocentricism (centering the experiences of white people) prevalent in the United States.” The document goes on to state that “despite national rises in racial and gender diversity, white men remain vastly overrepresented across a host of domains within the U.S., from media, to politics, to clinical research.” That overrepresentation poses severe costs to the rest of society, the nation’s health agency writes, identifying the victims as “women of all races, men of color, and gender-nonconforming individuals.”

The Biden administration is particularly concerned with embedded disparities in health, where clinical trials have historically prioritized the experiences, perspectives, and health outcomes of white men. “To address this issue, we must understand when and how the tendency to view white males as default people develops across childhood, as well as the environmental factors that underlie this phenomenon,” the HHS grant document states. Specifically, the government wants to know the developmental trajectory by which children’s default representations of people begin to favor whiteness and maleness over other identities, the domains across which children activate a white male default to guide social reasoning, and the sociocultural and ecological factors that can prevent the development of those beliefs. “Young children actively construct knowledge to make sense of their social environments,” according to the grant document. “As part of this process, children absorb complex streams of information from the sources around them, including parents, peers, and broader societal institutions (e.g., media).” HHS proceeds to explain that the beliefs children acquire tend to reflect the dominant ideologies embedded in their specific cultural contexts. In the U.S., those ideologies include the previously mentioned “androcentrism and ethnocentrism.”

The taxpayer-funded researchers are expected to clarify the scope of children’s beliefs about who best exemplifies a person by testing the consistency of the belief across domains and uncovering the features of children’s sociocultural and ecological environments that underlie beliefs about who best exemplifies a person. “The diversity afforded by this platform allows us to capture a holistic picture of the phenomenon in question and the mechanisms underlying it, broadening both the empirical rigor and real-world impacts of our findings,” according to HHS. It will only cost American taxpayers $40,391, though the agency could obligate more funding at any time.

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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The Mindless Expansion of Assisted Suicide Laws

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By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

California reported 486 assisted suicide deaths for 2021, a 12 percent increase over initial reports from the year before.  The increase is understandable, given the fact California loosened its assisted suicide law in two important respects.  First, it reduced the 15-day waiting period between two oral requests to two days. Second, it forced doctors who oppose assisted suicide to make referrals anyway against their conscience, just one of the many ways the authoritarian Left is advancing its cause through this issue.

Euthanasia deaths are also up in the Netherlands – 10.5 percent – and in Belgium by about the same percentage.  The authoritarian Left won’t be happy until we’re all eating bugs while we’re alive and the state can tell us when to die.

The authoritarian Left is still on the march, expanding assisted suicide and euthanasia laws wherever it can.  It tried to argue California’s assisted suicide law permitted euthanasia where lethal drugs are administered by others, but was shot down by a court.

In Canada, euthanasia for mental illness alone will go into effect in 2023.  Canada is also the place where a climate activist asked for euthanasia based solely on his anxiety about climate change.  People in Canada are applying for euthanasia based on chronic but not terminal conditions and even poverty.  A good reason, a bad reason – if the authoritarian Left gets its way, it will soon be no reason at all.   Wrong direction.

People in Colorado are being approved for assisted suicide for anorexia.  A doctor there falsely attests anorexia is fatal when obviously it is not.  So much for the original justification assisted suicide is reserved for cases of imminent death.   Small matter to the authoritarian Left. Given that the wish to die is most closely associated with loneliness and depression, we can see where this is headed – no reason for assisted suicide needed, no questions asked.

Which is why euthanasia advocates want to remove psychiatric review from the process.   They also want to let nurses and other non-physicians approve assisted suicide requests and automatically grant applications from anyone in hospice even though hospice residents are often discharged because they are no longer close to death.

There’s been a shift in the rhetoric on this issue – what were once ‘safeguards’ in the law to keep assisted suicide from spinning out of control are now ‘barriers to a good death’. The pretense is gone; the authoritarian Left WANTS assisted suicide to spin out of control. One reason is they want your organs.  Organ harvesting on demand is big business in communist China, so why not bring it to America by having more people kill themselves and sign organ donation cards right before they do. Activists in California are fighting for the free speech rights of death advisors – ‘death doulas’ as they are called – to counsel people their time is up.  One can easily envision a future where death doulas will become mandatory and spew a government line that organ ‘donation’ is really the way to go.

The Left used to be able to pretend assisted suicide would be rare and carefully bounded by safeguards in the law.  Anyone who warned we were on a slippery slope was just crazy.   No longer.  Assisted suicides are up and the safeguards are systematically being dismantled.  The experience of Canada and the Netherlands shows assisted suicide and euthanasia laws expand their reach until no limits are left, the laws trample conscience rights, and they threaten vulnerable populations like the mentally ill who aren’t even considered competent to consent to a car loan.

What are we doing to ourselves?  Not enough people are stopping to ask.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

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Rep. Gonzalez Funded Racist Blog Attacks on GOP Opponent Maya Flores

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By Discover The Networks

A Texas blogger has levied a volley of racist attacks against Rep. Mayra Flores (R-TX) just days after receiving a payment from her general election opponent, far-left Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX), according to NBC News.

Gonzalez’s campaign provided $1,200 to the blog for “advertising services” on June 24, and yet no advertisements from Gonzalez run on the site. But within days, derogatory attacks began flowing, labeling Flores “Miss Frijoles,” “Miss Enchiladas,” “gringa hag,” a “cotton-pickin’ liar,” and other hate-mongering insults.

The posts came under a byline called “brownsville literary review,” a pseudonym for Jerry McHale, who published one of his latest racially-charged attacks against Flores on Monday:

We have gone through a variety of nicknames for a person who has been described as a cotton pickin’ liar. She hasn’t taken kindly to being called ‘Miss Frijoles’ or ‘Miss Menudo’ or ‘Miss Pozole’ or ‘Miss Enchiladas.’ In her opinion we at The McHale Report are blatant racists. She obviously has no concept of satire, particularly in the political arena. She might have an argument if we had called her ‘Miss Spic’ as a part of our campaign against her, but when did frijoles become the equivalent of the ‘N’ word?

Flores shot back in a tweet, asserting that her “far-left opponent, Vincent Gonzalez, hired a local blogger to run hateful & racist ads against me!”

“But, I love frijoles & I grew up eating frijoles. I am not embarrassed of my upbringings & frijoles w/tortillas de harina is simply the best. Here’s to Miss Frijoles 2022,” she added.

“Democrat Congressman Vicente Gonzalez is paying a liberal blogger to attack Congresswoman Mayra Flores,” Republican National Committee Communications Director Danielle Alvarez told Breitbart News. “These attacks are racist, disparage her Hispanic heritage, and target her sexually. Every Democrat must go on record condemning Vicente Gonzalez and his disgusting campaign tactics.”

But they won’t, of course, because Democrats are hypocritical bigots.

Vicente Gonzalez

4 Known Connections

In 2017 Gonzalez voted against HR 3004 (a.k.a. “Kate’s Law”), legislation that: (a) was named after Kate Steinle, a San Francisco woman who had been shot and killed in 2015 by an illegal alien with numerous prior convictions and deportations on his record; and (b) called for more severe penalties for illegal aliens caught re-entering the U.S. after deportation.

Gonzalez supports the right of local government officials in sanctuary cities to refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Thus, in 2017 he voted against HR 3003, the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act, which proposed that federal funds be withheld from localities that practiced sanctuary policies…

To learn more about Vicente Gonzalez, click here.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Why Does the Left Seem More Committed to Death Than to Life?

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By Jerry Newcombe

Did you read in the news about the three mosques in the U.S. that were set on fire just the other weekend?

Did you hear in the mainstream media about the scores of attacks, including some firebombings, of the Planned Parenthood facilities by pro-life extremists?

Did you hear about the harassment of the pro-abortion politicians and judges for their pro-choice stance?

You didn’t? Neither did I, because none of those things happened. But the mainstream media has for the most part ignored the multiple churches and pro-life facilities that have been attacked in one way or another by pro-abortion forces in the last several weeks. Indeed, if they had been mosques or abortion providers, we would hear over and over about all this.

To add insult to injury, the loving services that the crisis pregnancy centers provide is being woefully distorted by many, including Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Senator Warren said last week: “In Massachusetts right now, those crisis pregnancy centers that are there to fool people who are looking for pregnancy termination help outnumber true abortion clinics by three to one. We need to shut them down here in Massachusetts, and we need to shut them down all around the country. You should not be able to torture a pregnant person like that.”

Pregnancy centers “torture” women? How blind can these people be? The crisis pregnancy centers, now in the cross hairs of the left, provide loving alternatives to abortion.

Through no help of the government, they provide millions of dollars of services—at no charge to the mothers they serve.

Micaiah Bilger of lifenews.com reports that “$266 million of free medical services and resources” are provided per year by these pregnancy centers.

The attack against pro-life churches and facilities was highlighted in the Capitol recently by Congressman Jim Jordan who read a litany of the dozens of attacks since the May 2 leak of the draft of the Dobbs decision. Yet a majority in the House of Representatives just voted against a measure to condemn these attacks.

Recently I spoke on a radio segment with Jim Harden, the president of Compass Care, a ministry that helps women with crisis pregnancies. Their center in Buffalo (technically, Amherst), New York, was firebombed on June 7th, and he told me that the perpetrators were “the pro-abortion terrorist group known as Jane’s Revenge. They’ve taken responsibility for scores of attacks on pro-life organizations since the leak of the Dobbs case.”

I asked Harden, isn’t it illegal to firebomb any building—say a candy factory, much less a charity providing loving services to those in need (although the left doesn’t view it as charity)? He answered, “An arson attack is just below murder in the criminal justice system because it carries too much potential damage and threat to life.”

He told our listeners that so far there have been no leads from the police or the FBI as to suspects. He said that friends in nearby offices were able to provide office space so that Compass Care could continue to serve the mothers in need. They did not miss a day serving, despite the firebombing.

In a follow-up call this week, he told me there have now been, all over the nation, “over 100 attacks where prolife people gather, with no arrests to date.”

His organization is dedicated to rebuilding the facility, which had to be gutted, costing $300,000-$400,000.

Crisis pregnancy centers are doing the Lord’s work, but today it is “open season” on them, thanks in part to the Marxist organization, “Jane’s Revenge.”

Meanwhile, there has been an on-going harassment against pro-life justices of the Supreme Court. These were illegal acts when the pro-death party was trying to intimidate them to change their opinion.

Now the left is even going after pro-life individuals at home.

Writer Alicia Powe notes, “An attorney who founded the Thomas More Society, a conservative Catholic law firm, was attacked as abortion activists threw smoke bombs and firecrackers at his house following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. The insurgents surrounded the home of pro-life lawyer Thomas Brejcha, in Evanston, Illinois.”

I’ve interviewed Tom Brejcha through the years. He once said of the pro-life cause in general: “This is a spiritual battle. This is not just a legal battle. And prayer is the ultimate resource. We need divine intervention…This is God’s work to protect the dignity and value of every human being.”

Is this the America the left is bringing to us, where the full force of government is on the side of death? This is indeed a spiritual battle. Our founders said that our first right granted by the Creator is the “right to life.”

But the left seems more committed to death than life.

©Jerry Newcombe, D. Min. All rights reserved.

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