And now, Scientology and the Nation of Islam are working together even more closely. An independent Scientology news service, @IndieScieNews, first tipped me off to the connection. On October 20, the Church of Scientology honored the Nation of Islam’s Tony Muhammed with its Freedom Award in Inglewood, Calif., in recognition of his “humanitarian” efforts. What, exactly, are those efforts? Muhammed travels the world showing a documentary on vaccines, claiming they cause autism. Just this week, Nation of Islam members held a blessing and naming ceremony for Tony Muhammed at the Scientology Land Base Chapel in Clearwater, Fla.
The individual behind IndieScientologyNews told me:
The extent of the integration of Scientology into the Nation of Islam is demonstrated by the fact that members of the Nation of Islam are not only practicing the religion of Scientology, they are also becoming Ministers and Ministers-in-Training of the Church of Scientology.
The connection between the two groups goes far deeper than just a gala or a naming ceremony. One of the stars of Leah Remini’s docuseries, Aaron Smith-Levin, laid out the financial connection and the incentive for Nation of Islam members to become involved in the Church of Scientology, and vice versa.
My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.
It’s difficult to gain admissions to the schools where I’ve taught – Princeton, Georgetown, and now Notre Dame. Students at these institutions have done what has been demanded of them: they are superb test-takers, they know exactly what is needed to get an A in every class (meaning that they rarely allow themselves to become passionate and invested in any one subject); they build superb resumes. They are respectful and cordial to their elders, though easy-going if crude with their peers. They respect diversity (without having the slightest clue what diversity is) and they are experts in the arts of non-judgmentalism (at least publically). They are the cream of their generation, the masters of the universe, a generation-in-waiting to run America and the world.
But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?
Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?
Some students, due most often to serendipitous class choices or a quirky old-fashioned teacher, might know a few of these answers. But most students have not been educated to know them. At best, they possess accidental knowledge, but otherwise are masters of systematic ignorance. It is not their “fault” for pervasive ignorance of western and American history, civilization, politics, art and literature. They have learned exactly what we have asked of them – to be like mayflies, alive by happenstance in a fleeting present.
The “Morning Joe” hosts played a video montage showing anchors warning viewers about a “deep state” conspiracy they claimed was out to destroy President Donald Trump, and one after another told viewers this was “extremely dangerous to our democracy.”
Scarborough and Brzezinski agreed this was indeed “extremely dangerous to our democracy,” and bashed the right-wing broadcast company for “shoving propaganda down local anchor’s throats.”
“The president has no problem calling the media enemies of the state, has no problem constantly lying about them,” Scarborough said. “He has no problem being angry when they call him out on his own lies. What’s so interesting is, as those news anchors from around the country were saying that this weekend, you know, and they were instructed to recite words that legitimize the president’s agenda, it was Donald Trump who was lying.”
The Journolist — or whatever they’re calling it now — keeps the Left marching in near-perfect lockstep, every day, over the complete spectrum of major news outlets, entertainment, and social media. But they totally lose their cool over a clumsy, one-time effort at messaging by Sinclair Broadcast Group.
On February 1970, Ehrlich’s work finally paid off: He was invited onto NBC’s “Tonight Show.” Johnny Carson, the comedian-host, was leery of serious guests like university professors because he feared they would be pompous, dull and opaque. Ehrlich proved to be affable, witty and blunt. Thousands of letters poured in after his appearance, astonishing the network. The Population Bomb shot up the best-seller lists. Carson invited Ehrlich back in April, just before the first Earth Day. For more than an hour he spoke about population and ecology, about birth control and sterilization, to an audience of tens of millions. After that, Ehrlich returned to the show many times.
* * * * * * * *
“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” he promised in a 1969 magazine article. “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come,” Ehrlich told CBS News a year later. “And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
Such statements contributed to a wave of population alarm then sweeping the world. The International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, the Hugh Moore-backed Association for Voluntary Sterilization and other organizations promoted and funded programs to reduce fertility in poor places. “The results were horrific,” says Betsy Hartmann, author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, a classic 1987 exposé of the anti-population crusade. Some population-control programs pressured women to use only certain officially mandated contraceptives. In Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Korea and Taiwan, health workers’ salaries were, in a system that invited abuse, dictated by the number of IUDs they inserted into women. In the Philippines, birth-control pills were literally pitched out of helicopters hovering over remote villages. Millions of people were sterilized, often coercively, sometimes illegally, frequently in unsafe conditions, in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
In the 1970s and ’80s, India, led by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, embraced policies that in many states required sterilization for men and women to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care and pay raises. Teachers could expel students from school if their parents weren’t sterilized. More than eight million men and women were sterilized in 1975 alone. (“At long last,” World Bank head Robert McNamara remarked, “India is moving to effectively address its population problem.”) For its part, China adopted a “one-child” policy that led to huge numbers—possibly 100 million—of coerced abortions, often in poor conditions contributing to infection, sterility and even death. Millions of forced sterilizations occurred.
Curiously, the name Norman Borlaug doesn’t show up until the comments section. In any case, if you’re old enough to remember the 1970s’ non-stop doomfest, Ehrlich and his media enablers are some of the people you can “thank.”
Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) said on Sunday that he does not support an assault weapons ban and does not believe a gun ban can pass Congress right now.
Asked by “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos whether he would support an assault weapons ban like his colleague Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Jones said it’s not feasible and they should instead focus on policy goals that can be accomplished.
“We’ve got to get done what I think can be done right now. Let’s reach across and within our own party to do those things that we can do, and that to me is where I want to focus,” Jones said. “I really don’t believe that a gun ban is feasible right now.”
“When then?” is the natural followup question, but doesn’t appear to have been asked.
TO ERIC HOLDER, A CITIZENSHIP QUESTION ON THE CENSUS IS VOTER INTIMIDATION, BUT TWO JACK-BOOTED THUGS WITH BILLY CLUBS SHOUTING RACIAL EPITHETS IN FRONT OF A POLLING PLACE AREN’T: If you’ve forgotten how the Holder Dept. of Justice failed to enforce voting rights law when the victims were white (and then denied it), this detailed statement will serve as a reminder. And it wasn’t just the New Black Panther Party case.
Since “knife control” is a subject often rhetorically employed in gun control discussions, many readers pondered whether the article was yet another bit of satire (or clickbaiting fake news).
In fact, the web site for the ‘Save a Life, Surrender Your Knife,’ which urges the public to surrender knives in order to reduce “knife crime” in the UK is still online (although it doesn’t appear to have been updated since February 2015):
As Meads writes, “Considering there is already pretty strict gun control in England in the first place, perhaps somebody should tell him — it is not the weapon that is the problem, but the intention of the person wielding it that matters.”
The entry for “assault rifle,” which was updated March 31, 2018, reads as follows:
noun: any of various intermediate-range, magazine-fed military rifles (such as the AK-47) that can be set for automatic or semiautomatic fire; also : a rifle that resembles a military assault rifle but is designed to allow only semiautomatic fire
After 17 people were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February, activists have been using the tragic events to make the sale of so-called “assault weapons” illegal.
An Internet archive search shows the Merriam-Webster entry for “assault rifle” appears to be different now than it was before the shooting.
Blurring definitions is always intended to blur people’s thinking.
HOW LOW-TRUST SOCIETIES START: “There’s a dentist’s office in Pennsylvania that will report you to Child Protective Services if they think you’re not keeping up with your appointments. I am not making this up.”
Plus: “This trend actually started under Obama, when the regime ‘suggested’ that doctors start asking patients about gun ownership. (If your doctor asks you about gun ownership, I suggest lying.) But it is also a defining characteristic of communist regimes where neighbors are encouraged to spy on neighbors and children are encouraged to spy on parents.”
I’m pretty sure The Lives of Others, the 2006 film on the East German surveillance state was not crafted to be a how-to guide for America in the 21st century.
The people who are the most likely victims of crime are the very ones who benefit the most from being able to defend themselves. While gun control may stop some criminals from getting guns, it is the most law-abiding who obey the law and are disarmed. Taking guns away from drug gangs is about as difficult as stopping them from getting illegal drugs to sell.
Mr. Johnson claims that Australia’s 1996-1997 gun buyback produced supposedly amazing benefits: “gun-related homicides and suicides dropped by 59 percent and 65 percent, respectively.”
If only reducing crime and suicides were so easy.
Australia’s buyback resulted in more than 1 million firearms being handed in and destroyed, reducing gun ownership from 3.2 to 2.2 million guns. But since then there has been a steady increase in the number of privately owned guns. Since 1997, guns ownership grew over 3 times faster than the population (from 2.5 to 5.8 million guns).
Looking at simple before and after averages is extremely misleading. Firearm homicides and suicides were falling from the mid-1980s on, so you could pick any year from the mid-1980s on, not just 1996-97, and the average firearm homicide and suicide rates after the year you picked would always be lower than the average before it. The question is whether the rate of decline changed after the law went into effect.
Unfortunately, the rate of decline in both firearm homicides and suicides actually fell more slowly after the buyback than it was beforehand.
What gun control advocates should have predicted was a sudden drop in firearm homicides and suicides after the buyback and then an increase as the gun ownership rate increased again. But that clearly didn’t happen.
For other crimes, such as armed robbery, the exact opposite of what was predicted happened. The armed robbery rate soared right after the buyback and then gradually declined.
Gun control is a protection racket preying on disarmed civilians, with government officials playing the role of mob enforcers.
What makes the Stevens manifesto especially irresponsible is that it would rupture the social fabric in this country — leading to turmoil, lawlessness and violence. Considering the fervor of many gun-rights advocates, it’s quite possible that not even reversal of Roe v. Wade would incite such rage. And to what end?
Ultimately, it’s all about humiliating the flyover rubes and letting them know who is boss. Everything else is window dressing.
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