TV’s Stone-Cold Harridans Against Roger Stone

Criminal Injustice, Donald Trump, Gender, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media

Continued post impeachment is the non-stop huffing coming from “TV’s empaneled witches and their housebroken, domesticated boys. These people are guided more by the spirit of Madame Defarge than by Lady Justice.” (See “The TV Tarts’ Reign of Terror“)

(Madame Defarge is the bloodthirsty commoner who sat knitting as she watched the en masse public beheadings of aristocrats, 17,000 of them, in Paris, during the Reign of Terror, aka the French Revolution…)

America’s modern-day Madam Defarges are the harridans who shriek in vengeance on TV when anyone suggests mercy—or just justice—for the likes of Roger Stone or Paul Manafort, who were caught up in the derangement against all things Trump.

Susan Hennessey is one CNN ghoul who cannot tolerate mercy—or just plain justice—for Roger Stone, even though John Dean of Watergate fame indicated that the 9-year sentence imposed on Stone is brutally harsh. Dean, by the way, has nothing good to say about Stone; he was just being fair-minded or legally minded.

Not the ladies. (CNN activist/anchor Brooke Baldwin just kept up the breathless mutterings: “stunning. stunning.”)

READ: “The TV Tarts’ Reign of Terror”

* Image courtesy of Politico

UPDATED (7/11/020): Education: UK & US Much More Radically Egalitarian Than Europe

America, Britain, Conservatism, Education, Egalitarianism, Europe, Intelligence

The two Anglo-American countries, as I have surprisingly come to realize, are fundamentally more radical on many fronts than the Europeans.

Take education. Germany has a “The three-tiered German education system—which sorts children on the basis of ability at the age of ten into either university-preparatory schools or vocational ones.” It “has always been criticized for fostering social segregation.” (The Economist: “The dignity of all the talents: A battle over gifted education is brewing in America.”)

The impetus to “to eliminate separatism in secondary education” began in … you guessed it, England and America, where the very idea that some individuals are more intelligent than others is anathema, apparently.

“The debate over whether education of gifted children segregates them on the basis of pre-existing privilege rather than cognitive ability is neither new nor uniquely American. The number of selective, state-run grammar schools in Britain reached its zenith in 1965, before the Labour government of Harold Wilson embarked on a largely successful effort “to eliminate separatism in secondary education”.

In New York City, Bill de Blasio, the city’s left-wing mayor, wants to eliminate what he deems unjust programmes and school screening for gifted and talented students. … “Mr de Blasio floated the idea of scrapping the entrance test and admitting the top 7% of students from each middle school (roughly, for pupils aged 11 to 14) to specialised schools. … One problem is that at some middle schools this would include students who had not passed the state maths exam. This infuriated many Asian parents, who do not see why their children should be punished for studying hard.” Or, for being more intelligent.

An astonishing 40% of high schools in the city do not teach chemistry, physics or upper-level algebra, notes Clara Hemphill, the founding editor of InsideSchools, an education-policy website. “The problem is not learning linear algebra in schools, but not knowing arithmetic.” …
… Only 6% of high-school pupils attend one of the eight sought-after specialised high schools. Because admissions are based on high-stakes tests …

“Some advocates yearn for an egalitarian model like Finland’s—where comprehensive schools and a focus on special education (or disabilities) rather than giftedness coincide with high rankings on international measures such as PISA scores.”

I suspect Finland is so much more homogeneous a society, down to its education system, than the US.

“But even in Finland, more than 10% of upper-secondary schools (those before university) are specialised. Other attributes, such as high education spending and extreme selectivity of applicants to become teachers (only 10% make it), are probably also critical to the education system’s success. Removing programmes for the gifted will not suddenly turn New York into Finland.”

* Image courtesy Stuyvesant High School, for the gifted, 345 Chambers Street, New York (Photo By: Susan Watts/NY Daily News via Getty Images)

MORE: “The dignity of all the talents: A battle over gifted education is brewing in America.”

UPDATE (7/11/020):

 

UPDATED (2/10): NEW COLUMN: What Americans Can Learn From F. W. de Klerk’s Great Betrayal Of South Africa

Africa, Democracy, Federalism, History, Iraq, Racism, Secession, South-Africa

NEW COLUMN IS “What Americans Can Learn From F. W. de Klerk’s Great Betrayal Of South Africa.” It’s on American Greatness NOW. The column also appeared on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

Excerpt:

In what should serve as a lesson for Americans today, recall that 30 years ago, on February 2, 1990, F. W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last white president, turned the screws on his constituents, betraying the confidence we had placed in him.

I say “we,” because, prior to becoming president in 1989, Mr. de Klerk was my representative, in the greater Vereeniging region of Southern Transvaal, where I resided. (Our family subsequently moved to Cape Town.)

A constellation of circumstances had aligned to catapult de Klerk to a position of great power. A severe stroke forced the “The Crocodile,” President P. W. Botha, from power in 1989. Nothing in the background of his successor, President, F. W. de Klerk, indicated the revolutionary policies he would pursue.

To a 1992 referendum asking white voters if they favored de Klerk’s proposed reforms, we returned a resounding “yes.” Sixty-eight percent of respondents said “yes” to the proposed reforms of a man who sold his constituents out for a chance to frolic on the world stage with Nelson Mandela.

For it was in surrendering South Africa to the ANC that de Klerk shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela.

Why was de Klerk trusted to negotiate on behalf of a vulnerable racial minority? For good reason: De Klerk had made his views abundantly clear to constituents. “Negotiations would only be about power-sharing,” he promised. At the time, referendum respondents generally trusted de Klerk, who had specifically condemned crude majority rule. Such elections, in Africa, have traditionally amounted to one man, one vote, one time. Typically, elections across Africa have followed a familiar pattern: Radical black nationalist movements take power everywhere, then elections cease. Or, if they take place, they’re rigged.

Among much else, de Klerk’s loyal constituents agreed to his scrapping of the ban on the Communist-sympathizing ANC. Freeing Nelson Mandela from incarceration was also viewed as long overdue as was acceding to Namibia’s independence, and junking nuclear weapons. Botha, before de Klerk, had, by and large, already dismantled the most egregious aspects of apartheid.

What de Klerk’s constituents were not prepared for was to be legislated into a permanent position of political subordination. President de Klerk, the man entrusted to stand up for crucial structural liberties, went along with the great centralizers. He caved to ANC demands, forgoing all checks and balances for South Africa’s Boer, British and Zulu minorities.

By the time the average “yes” voter discerned the fact that de Klerk had no intention of maintaining this opposition when push came to shove, it was too late.

… READ THE REST. “What Americans Can Learn From F. W. de Klerk’s Great Betrayal Of South Africa” is on American Greatness NOW. The column also appeared on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

* Image is of President F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela (Photo by © Louise Gubb/CORBIS SABA/Corbis via Getty Images)

UPDATE (2/10):  Nevertheless, we are honored to have a response from Jeffrey Sachs. It generated quite the thread.

My book is not “an attack on the end of apartheid,” @JeffDSachs. That’s a distortion. A principled critique of dominant-party rule in South Africa doesn’t amount to an approval of apartheid, of which the book offers a detailed critique, too.

Heck, I came out FOR Quebec’s secession (2000), @GerardHarbison & @JeffreyASachs . That’s the libertarian position. Political divorce is completely kosher, so long as individual rights are preserved.

 

 

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NEW COLUMN: D’oh! Looks Like Democracy Dies In Diversity

America, Democracy, IMMIGRATION, Multiculturalism, Nationalism, Nationhood, Racism

NEW COLUMN, “D’oh! Looks Like Democracy Dies In Diversity,” is now on WND.COM and The Unz Review.  Fans of American Greatness, whose editor maintains extraordinary standards, can catch “Democracy Dies In Diverse Societies” there, too.

An excerpt:

“Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years,” say researchers at the University of Cambridge. “The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent.”

No wonder. Certainly, America is a severely divided country. “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule,” argues Donald L. Horowitz, a scholar of democracy, at Duke University.

Having studied “constitutional engineering” in divided societies like South Africa, Horowitz has concluded that, “In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. An ethnic party with a majority of votes and seats can dominate minority groups, seemingly in perpetuity.” (Journal of Democracy, April 2014.)

The Democratic Party has morphed into such a political organ. It’s responding to the fact that minorities in the U.S. will soon form a majority. This rising majority, as polling trends indicate, will speak in one political voice, for most immigrants to the United States are not from Europe and Canada, but from Latin America and Asia, south and east. And this cohort of immigrants is reliably progressive: It votes Democratic.

Likewise, the poor and the unskilled are well-represented among our country’s immigrant intake. It’s the way we roll. Poor immigrants favor the rearranging of the income curve in their new home.

The policy establishment preaches well-meaning pieties. All these energetically imported, fractious minorities, claims our ruling Idiocracy, will relinquish race and tribe as unifying principles, and adopt our U.S. constitutional design and “our values.”

Democrats know better. Oh, the founding population, they expect, will naively hitch its existential survival to a political dispensation called liberal democracy.

The duped, historic majority of the U.S. will willingly cede political and institutional dominance in return for the constitutional safeguards—for the abstractions—offered by democracy. This, Democrats know only too well.

Moreover, being pushover-passive on matters domestic, Caucasian America is generally pro-immigration, the more exotic and culturally incongruent, the better. It makes for a warm and fuzzy feeling about The Self. But while Americans don’t see race; the people they’re importing see nothing but race.

Take Indian Americans. They’re a relatively new addition to the United States’ top-down, state-planned, multicultural mess of pottage. Most Indian-Americans have “arrived in America over the past two decades.” But they are highly aggressive politically and reliably Democrat.

By the Economist’s telling, “Capitol Hill, for example, is crammed with staff and interns of Indian-American heritage. They also appear to be ‘over-represented’ in academia, the media and other influential posts.” And, it is their indisputable habit to deploy and grow “informal networks, as well-connected Indian-Americans find jobs for each other’s offspring.”

Caste and ethnicity: It’s what the scrupulously candid English magazine is here hinting at, ever so genteelly.  …

…  READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “D’oh! Looks Like Democracy Dies In Diversity,” is now on WND.COM and The Unz Review, and on American Greatness .