[PJ] "It’s only after you study history that you find out just how bad, how horribly [Marxism] actually turned out." Conservative thinker Thomas Sowell went on Mark Levin’s new bi-weekly "Life, Liberty & Levin" show, where he discussed the dangers of Marxism and censorship.
Last week, Levin explained how Marxism gained power in America, particularly through colleges. Levin also asked Sowell about how he had come to understand the truth about Marxism as a young man. "I think there’s a very simple explanation that, as of the time I became a Marxist, I didn’t know as much as I knew," Sowell confessed.
Studying history changed that. "After several years of study and observing things going on and facts carried a lot of weight with me, and when the facts kept going in the wrong way, I realized that this [Marxism] was not going to do what it claimed it was going to do," Sowell said.
[Aljazeera] In August, when a group of Gabonese military officers deposed President Ali Bongo, whose family had ruled the country for nearly six decades, many ordinary citizens came out on the streets to celebrate.
When Bongo put out a call for the international community to "make noise" against the coup, it quickly turned into a meme mocking him, with dancers and content creators ridiculing his desire to stay in power.
Neither the military putsch in Gabon nor the street response to it are unique. Since 2020, there have been nine coups in West Africa, Central Africa and the Sahel region.
Mali opened the floodgates three years ago when the army staged a mutiny and subsequently undertook a coup led by Colonel Assimi Goita — who then followed up with another coup against an interim administration in May 2021.
Four months later, in September, Guinea followed with a military coup against President Alpha Conde. Sudan’s civilian-military transitional government was overthrown in October 2021. Earlier that year, in April, Chad’s army seized power after President Idriss Deby was killed on the battlefield while visiting troops fighting rebels in the north.
Burkina Faso joined this pattern of collapsing governments, with two military coups in 2022. Then, on July 26, 2023, the presidential guard in uranium-rich Niger overthrew democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum, before the Gabon coup a few weeks later. Since the beginning of last year, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Sao Tome and Principe have all witnessed failed coup attempts. Tribal slaughter, it's what they do. It's what they've always done.
#6
Coups are a sign of the inability to 'bribe all the players'. When the US, USSR CIS, EU and China were throwing money to the winds the graft was so much easier to spread around ...now budgets are tight and the squeeze is on.
#7
What if military juntas are the best they can do? Who are we to go around the world telling other people how to run their countries? What are we supposed to do about it? Colonize them all over again?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/22/2023 13:13 Comments ||
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#9
In Europe, from ancient times through to the Middle Ages, tribes evolved into kingdoms as the biggest and baddest tribal chiefs subjugated other tribes and acquired more territory. I think some of our leaders, particularly in the State Department, don't understand that this process is still underway in many parts of the world and not just Africa. It is arrogant and stupid to interfere in matters we don't understand when we have quite enough problems of our own.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/22/2023 13:43 Comments ||
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#10
^Abu, you did notice that some human groups are incapable of shedding tribal mentality?
#11
^ I wouldn't go that far. It's not for me to judge anyway. All I'm saying is that we don't need to stand around wringing our hands and wondering what to do about it. Let them be. Let them sort it for themselves.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/22/2023 14:44 Comments ||
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#12
^No critisism intended. You just touched on a point that's important to me.
#15
Step #1: Erase all of the boundaries drawn on the maps by the European Colonial Powers; and Step #2: let the Africans sort it all out in twenty years or so...
The Diary of a Young Girl by Holocaust victim Anne Frank, the massively popular Harry Potter series, and the Newberry Medal-winning novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry about racial conflict in 1930s Mississippi are some notable examples of books that 10th grader Reina Takata can no longer find in her public high school library in Ontario, Canada. Why not? Because those titles were culled as part of a new “equity-based” weeding process implemented by the Peel District School Board (PDSB) last spring, leaving library shelves as bare as supermarket shelves in Biden’s America.
Miss Takata told CBC Toronto that the shelves at Erindale Secondary School were full of books as recently as May, but gradually began to empty out. When she returned to school in the fall, “I came into my school library and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books.” (Takata herself took the photo above, of the bookshelves in her Mississauga high school’s library.) She estimates that more than half of her school’s library books are gone.
Libraries across Canada and in the United States have long followed standard weeding plans to dispose of damaged or outdated books; this is understandable and reasonable. But Reina Takata and many other students and parents are concerned that this new process emphasizing the leftist buzzwords “equity” and “inclusion” seems to have led some schools to remove thousands of books simply because they were published in 2008 or earlier.
Libraries not Landfills, a group of parents, retired teachers, and community members, says it has no issue with standard weeding but is concerned about both fiction and nonfiction books being removed based solely on their publication date. The group is also concerned about how subjective criteria like “inclusivity” are to be interpreted from school to school.
#1
I used to take one of my kids to the library to do her homework a couple of times a week. She could not focus at home and our internet service is routinely awful (Spectrum.) The only other patron I remember was a schizophrenic and/or homeless dude who routinely disturbed us with his loud conversations with himself. Based on what I saw, libraries are not making much of an impact on our society today. The homeless problem will likely make them more and more unusable. If you must use one, bring two sets of foamy earplugs and use the second set for your nostrils.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
09/22/2023 11:03 Comments ||
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#2
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was not supposed to be a how-to guide.
[American Greatness] ince early 2021 we have witnessed somewhere between 7 and 8 million illegal entries across the now nonexistent U.S. southern border.
The more the border vanished, the more federal immigration law was rendered inert, and the more Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas spun fantasies that the "border is secure." He is now written off as a veritable "Baghdad Bob" propagandist.
But how and why did the Biden administration destroy immigration law as we knew it?
The Trump administration’s initial efforts to close the border had been continually obstructed in the Congress, sabotaged by the administrative state, and stymied in the courts. Nonetheless, it had finally secured the border by early 2020.
Yet almost all its successful initiatives were immediately overturned in 2021.
The wall was abruptly stopped, its projected trajectory cancelled. The Obama-era disastrous "catch-and release" policy of immigration non-enforcement was resurrected.
Prior successful pressure on Mexico’s President Andrés Obrador to stop the deliberate export of his own citizens northward ceased.
Federal border patrol officers were forced to stand down.
New federal subsidies were granted to entice and then support illegal arrivals.
No one in the Democratic Party objected to the destruction of the border or the subversion of immigration law.
However, things changed somewhat once swamped southern border states began to bus or fly a few thousand of their illegal immigrants northward to sanctuary city jurisdictions—especially to New York, Chicago, and even Martha’s Vineyard.
The sanctuary-city "humanists" there who had greenlighted illegal immigration into the southern states suddenly shrieked. They were irate after experiencing the concrete consequences of their own prior abstract border agendas. After all, their nihilism was always supposed to fall upon distant and ridiculed others.
New York mayor Eric Adams went from celebrating a few dozen illegal immigrants bused into Manhattan, to blasting his own party by allowing tens of thousands to swamp his now bankrupt city.
But why did the Biden administration deliberately unleash the largest influx across the southern border in U.S. history?
The ethnic chauvinists and Democratic Party elites needed new constituents, given their increasingly unpopular agendas.
They feared that the more legal Latino immigrants assimilated and integrated into American society, the less happy they became with leftwing radical abortion, racial, transgender, crime, and green fixations.
Democratic grandees had always bragged that illegal immigration would create what they called "The New Democratic Majority" in "Demography is Destiny" fashion. Now they slander critics as "racists" who object to leftwing efforts to use illegal immigration to turn southwestern red states blue.
Mexico now cannot survive as a modern state without some $60 billion in annual remittances sent by its expatriates in America. But many illegal immigrants rely on American state and federal entitlements to free up cash to send home.
Mexico also encourages its own abject poor and often indigenous people from southern Mexico to head north as a safety-valve of sorts. The government sees these mass exoduses northward as preferable to the oppressed marching on Mexico City to address grievances of poverty and racism.
The criminal cartels now de facto run Mexico. An open border allows them to ship fentanyl northward, earn billions in profits—and kill nearly 100,000 Americans a year. Illegal immigrants pay cartels additional billions to facilitate their border crossings.
Do not forget American corporate employers. Record labor nonparticipation followed the Covid lockdown. In reaction to the dearth of American workers, the hospitality, meat packing, social service, health-care, and farming industries were desperate to hire new—and far cheaper—labor.
Human rights activists insist that the borders themselves are nineteenth-century relics. And the global poor and oppressed thus have a human right to enter the affluent West by any means necessary.
Many in the tony suburbs and in universities do not live anywhere near the border. So they pontificate on the assurance that thousands of unaudited illegal immigrants will never enter their own enclaves or campuses.
The result is elite bottled piety—but not firsthand experience with the natural consequences of millions chaotically fleeing one of the poorest countries in the world to pour into the wealthiest. Without background checks, vaccinations and health audits, legality, high-school diplomas, English-facility, skill sets, or capital, the result is an abject catastrophe.
Polls continue to show that the American people support measured, diverse, legal, and meritocratic immigration as much as they oppose mass illegal immigration into their country and the subsequent loss of American sovereignty on the border.
They understand what the Biden administration does not: no nation is history has survived once its borders were destroyed, once its citizenship was rendered no different from mere residence, and once its neighbors with impunity undermined its sovereignty.
Ending illegal immigration now depends solely on the American people overriding the corrupt special interests and leaders who profit from the current chaos and human misery.
#1
Self-Induced... Just vote yourself out of it. No. Stolen manipulated elections have consequences. No one I know wants unsustainable debts, welfare for noncitizens, foreign aid to hostile powers, and open borders. Voting is modern theatre. We have little recourse but to shot the bastards, but that's not really an option as that will land you in jail. Self Induced because we have very few workable options to rectify this timeline.
by Kurt Schlichter
[Townhall] The United States just lost an F-35 as part of its campaign to reduce itself from the greatest superpower in human history to a pitiful punchline. Ah, the magic of leftism – only it can make a great country like America ridiculous. From an inability to find its fighters to an unwillingness to defend its borders or prosecute criminals – with the exception of conservatives framed for the crime of conservativing – our country has become the Three Stooges without the dignity.
The first question that arises from the mystery jet is not what happened – we can safely assume it was some manner of gross incompetence – but what the plane’s pronouns were. We had the spectacle of the Marine Corps high command dragging itself away from one of its drag shows to ask regular folks if they could pretty please give the jarheads a hand finding their wayward fighter. They couldn’t even spin this fiasco effectively and brag about how their not being able to detect the $100 million aircraft just goes to show how darn good our stealth tech is. No, instead it was just exactly what it sounded like. We can’t keep track of our jets. The only ones happy about it had to be the Navy, since this was a welcome respite from the mockery it earned smashing its destroyers into other boats. Our Army – with its colonels running sex kennels – used to recruit with slogans like “Be All You Can Be,” and now it would probably be better off with “We Suck Less Than That Other Service That Lost The Jet.” Read the rest at the link
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
