Crow's Nest

#ThomasSowell Enough said!

Until COVID, I thought that free speech was a protected fundamental right guaranteed to all citizens of the United States of America by the Bill of Rights. Having been assigned core texts like 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, and The Trial and Death of Socrates in fourth and fifth grade as a “gifted and talented” student in the California school system of the time, I believed there was no way anything like what was written in those books could happen here in the USA during the 21st century. #RobertWMalone Lies My Gov't Told Me 📖 ©2022 #Covid #FreeSpeech #Liberty

In 2020, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a “racial reckoning” swept the United States, kindling fiery riots across the nation, abrupt moves by municipalities to defund police departments, and the near wholesale capitulation of public institutions—from universities to government agencies to major corporations—to a culturally revolutionary ideology of identitarian grievance and racial separatism. To some, this came as a shock. To the Ford Foundation, it marked the fulfillment of decades of effort... What the Ford Foundation has always most abhorred is the democratic will of the common man. As early as 1949, the authors of a key report setting the foundation's core priorities were openly disdainful of democratic self-government, dismissing the “grotesque” “myth” that “any citizen of reasonable character” was qualified to make important decisions. Instead, they insisted that “at every level of government,” leadership must be placed “in the hands of those best fitted to serve.” Only “sensitive and intellectually gifted men and women” were fit to make decisions as the “competent technicians and administrators” of the country and ensure “the welfare of the general public.” The thirst to exercise enlightened elite control over the public and circumvent the need for legislative democracy has taken many forms in the foundations work. Witness its pouring of millions into remaking American law schools and funding legal professorships, fellowships, and nonprofits, thus inventing an entirely new field—public interest law—engaged in the lobbying of federal courts to impose big social changes by fiat. When the Ford Foundation used India as a test for its Malthusian theories of international development, flooded of the country with “population control” experts, backed Indira Gandhi's seizure of dictatorial power in the 1970s, and supported the Indian Brahmin elite’s compulsory sterilization of more than 10 million lower-caste Indians, this, too, was in line with its technocratic disdain for the masses. When the Ford Foundation today supports efforts to sublimate American National sovereignty to supranational global institutions like the United Nations and World Health Organization, and it echoes on its website, word for word, the Chinese regimes preferred propaganda about the need for “greater equality and fairness in international debates about global governance systems,” its inclination for top-down control is again on display. The Ford Foundation may today use the trendy language of the “woke” progressive revolution and back all the latest causes in the name of social justice, but its nature hasn't much changed from the 1960s. Its decades spent shredding the American way of life merely show what happens when a gang of self-regarding “experts” are handed an almost unlimited pile of other people's money to spend, an indefinite mission to change the world, and no accountability whatsoever. “I made a lot of mistakes,” Henry Ford II told an interviewer in 1973, “but the biggest mistake I ever made was to give up control of the Ford foundation.” The foundation, he said, had “been a fiasco from my point of view from day one. And it got out of control.” “You know,” he mused, “we [the Ford Motor Co.] only exist because we're smart enough to sell something for a profit and we can get thrown out or we can go broke; but those people, they've got nobody to answer to.” #NSLyons “The Foundation of American Folly” City Journal @CityJournal 📃 Spring 2024 #FordFoundation #Left #DefundthePolice

Anthony Fauci—appropriately designated “America's high priest of scientism” by Everett Piper—has been dishonest with the American people throughout the COVIDcrisis and has repeatedly substituted opinion for science-based factual information, directly contributing to one of the greatest losses of life, freedom, and livelihood in the history of mankind. This is an embodiment of the true essence and nature of scientism. But Dr. Fauci is not the only one who has crossed the line between science and scientism. The lockdowns, masking, and social distancing policies were all based not on science, but on the opinions of the people at the top of the administration—policies not to be questioned by scientists or lay people. #RobertWMalone Lies My Gov't Told Me 📘 ©2022 #Fauci #COVID #Science

From 1914 onward there arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism one teacher after another who led, not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hard-working laborer and idealist youth into the National Socialist fold. It was only thereafter that the tide of nationalist socialism attained major importance and rapidly grew into the Hitlerian doctrine. The war hysteria of 1914, which, just because of the German defeat, was never fully cured, is the beginning of the modern development which produced National Socialism, and it was largely with the assistance of old school socialists that it arose during this period. #FAHayek The Road to Serfdom 📗 ©1944 #Socialism #Hitler #Marxism (F.A. Hayek)

The doctrines of National Socialism are the culmination of a long evolution of thought, a process in which thinkers who have had great influence far beyond the confines of Germany have taken part. Whatever one may think of the premises from which they started, it cannot be denied that the men who produced the new doctrines were powerful writers who left the impress of their ideas on the whole of European thought. Their system was developed with ruthless consistency. Once one accepts the premises from which it starts, there is no escape from its logic. It is simply collectivism freed from all the traces of an individualist tradition which might hamper its realization. #FAHayek The Road to Serfdom 📗 ©1944 #Socialism #Nazis #History

Today's pitchers are biomechanical engineers in cleats. Their deliveries are studied frame by frame. Their grips are optimized. Their arsenals are built to tunnel, spin, fade, rise, and vanish. The mound is no longer just a battlefield—it is a laboratory. Kids now train to throw like scientists. They may dream about being the next Nolan Ryan. But they're studying Rapsodo charts, analyzing iPhone video, tweaking finger pressure to vary spin efficiency. They are searching for any edge they can find. The tools are everywhere. Edgertronic cameras capture video at over one thousand frames per second. Motion capture rigs track the body down to the millimeter. Pitching machines replicate the exact release point and movement of Big League arms. A pitcher today has access to more information about one throw that an old school Hall of Famer had in a lifetime. #RobFriedman Unhittable 📖 © #Pitching #Baseball #FantasyBaseball

“Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms.... The right of the citizen to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible.” ~Hubert H. Humphrey~ #WalterEWilliams #2A #2ndAmendment #Liberty

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.” ~Adolf Hitler~ #WalterEWilliams American Contempt for Liberty 📙 ©2015 #2A #2ndAmendment #Liberty

[N]otice that the people who support gun control are the very people who want to control and dictate our lives. #WalterEWilliams American Contempt for Liberty 📙 ©2015 #2A #2ndAmendment #Guns

Know what you own, and know why you own it. #PeterLynch One Up On Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market 📘 ©1989 #Investing #Wealth #StockMarket

According to federal data, the number of homeless in America is no greater today than in 2007, the year before the [2008 stock market] crash that stifled housing production. In much of America, homelessness has fallen since then. Only a handful of states—notably, California, New York, Oregon, and Washington have seen substantial increases in the homeless population. Much of that is a function not of high housing costs but of rising social disorder, fueled by bad government policy—the decriminalization of drug use, federal court rulings and local laws that make it hard to dismantle outdoor encampments, and “harm reduction” strategies that allow drug users to maintain their habits under government supervision in “safe injection sites.” Coexistent with this has been the rise of “housing first” policies, which advocate for curing homelessness by getting people into government subsidized housing without addressing the mental health and addiction problems that typically made them homeless in the first place. The result of these misguided measures has been an increase of nearly 43,000 homeless in California and almost 41,000 in New York since 2007, even as the number of people without housing in places like Florida, Texas, and Georgia have shrunk over that period. Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass lamented the slow pace of government-backed affordable-housing construction in her city. “How on earth could we expect to house 40,000 [homeless] people if we continue to do business as usual?” That Bass ever supposed government could create 40,000 units of housing for the homeless, or that she thinks housing so many troubled people in massive government projects would be a good idea, show us how out of touch some officials can be in housing policy. Without a major shift in thinking, the result will be billions more dollars squandered—and a housing crisis still unsolved. #StevenMalanga “Gimne (Government) Shelter” City Journal 📃 Spring 2024 @CityJournal #HousingCrises #Homelessness #AffordableHousing

There is no real freedom of thought in our society, so it is said, because the opinions and tastes of the masses are shaped by propaganda, by advertising, by the example of the upper classes, and by other environmental factors which inevitably force thinking of the people into well-worn grooves. From this it is concluded that if the ideals and tastes of the great majority are always fashioned by circumstances which we can control, we ought to use this power deliberately to turn the thoughts of the people in what we think is a desirable direction. Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe. #FAHayek The Road to Serfdom 📘 ©1944 #Propaganda #Truth #Freedom

The word “truth” itself ceases to have its old meaning. It describes no longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it. The general intellectual climate which this produces, the spirit of complete cynicism as regards truth which it engenders, the loss of the sense of even the meaning of truth, the disappearance of the spirit of independent inquiry and of the belief in the power of rational conviction, the way in which differences of opinion in every branch of knowledge become political issues to be decided by authority, are all things which one must personally experience—no short description can convey their extent. Perhaps the most alarming fact is that contempt for intellectual liberty is not a thing which arises only once the totalitarian system is established but one which can be found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith and who are acclaimed as intellectual leaders even in countries still under a liberal regime. Not only is even the worst oppression condoned if it is committed in the name of socialism, and the creation of a totalitarian system openly advocated by people who pretend to speak for the scientists of liberal countries; intolerance, too, is openly extolled. Have we not recently seen a British scientific writer defend even Inquisition because in his opinion it is “beneficial to science when it protects a rising class?” This view is, of course, practically indistinguishable from the views which led the Nazis to persecution of men of science, the burning of scientific books, and the systematic eradication of the intelligentsia of the subjected people. #FAHayek The Road to Serfdom 📘 ©1944 #Socialism #Truth #Nazis

The whole apparatus for spreading knowledge—the schools and the press, radio and motion picture—will be used exclusively to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cast doubt or hesitation will be withheld. The probable effect on the people's loyalty to the system becomes the only criterion for deciding whether a particular piece of information is to be published or suppressed. The situation in a totalitarian state is permanently and in all fields the same that it is elsewhere in some fields in wartime. Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people. The basis of unfavorable comparisons with conditions elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions—all will be suppressed. There is consequently no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced. #FAHayek The Road to Serfdom 📘 ©1944 #Socialism #Marxism #Totalitarianism

“In that day the Branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth will be the pride and the adornment of the survivors of Israel. It will come about that he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy—everyone who is recorded for life in Jerusalem. When the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and purged the bloodshed of Jerusalem from her midst, by the spirit of judgment in the spirit of burning” (Isaiah 4:2-4). The reason that a divine character is called for in Isaiah 4:2 is clear from the context. The prophet has declared that Israel must be cleansed from her sin and have the stains of that guilt washed away (Isaiah 2:5-4:1; 4:3-4). But who can forgive sin but God alone? Thus, even though the Messiah may be the Son of David, he must be the Son of God if he is to deliver humanity from the bondage of sin. Therefore, it is important to note that the genitival relationship expressed by the word 'of' denotes source or origin: He is the Branch that came 'from' Yahweh. #WalterKaiserJr The Messiah in the Old Testament 📖 ©1995 #Messiah #Prophecy #Yahweh

Isaiah is one of the most prolific announcers of the Messiah and his times among the old Testament prophets. Probably for this reason he has sometimes been called “the fifth Evangelist,” along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. According to some counts, the New Testament has over four illusions to this book, in parts of forty-seven chapters of Isaiah's sixty-six are either directly quoted or alluded to in the New Testament. This means that Isaiah is second only to the book of Psalms as a favorite Old Testament book from which the early church drew its predictions of what happened to Christ. #WalterKaiserJr The Messiah in the Old Testament 📖 ©1995 #Messiah #Scripture #Isaiah

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values that they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they, or at least the best among them, have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning. Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed. #FAHayek The Road to Serfdom 📙 ©1944 #Language #Equity #Socialism

As the world gets better—as people become richer, better educated, and longer lived—we find new things to worry about and have more disposable income and free time to spend curing humanities woes, real or imagined. Our instinct to save others is noble, but it risks being corrupted. “As society grows wealthier,” the economist David Bourdeaux observes, “the need to be saved by others from earthly misfortunes grows steadily less frequent and less dire while the itch to save others from earthly misfortunes grows steadily more frequent and more intense.” This explains why journalists and the public keep falling for hoaxers like the actor Jussie Smollett: the demand for racism vastly exceeds the supply. It's not easy to meet the growing demand from saviors, given a shrinking supply of victims, but the potential rewards have inspired remarkable creativity—and there's every reason to expect more in the future. #JohnTierney “The March of Dimes Syndrome” City Journal @CityJournal 📃 © Spring 2024 #Racism #Activism #ProtestFatigue

Black parents have long been enthusiastic supporters of education vouchers and charter schools, but the NAACP has remained resolutely opposed. School choice has been called today's most important civil rights issue—and for good reason, given the reams of evidence that minority students are the chief beneficiaries. But betraying these students enables the NAACP to keep collecting funds from teachers unions and the rest of the Democratic establishment. #JohnTierney “The March of Dimes Syndrome” City Journal @CityJournal 📃 © Spring 2024 #Education #SchoolChoice #NAACP

As the civil rights movement searched for new causes, no group shifted as adroitly as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group launched in the 1970s to offer legal representation to individual victims of discrimination but then switch to filing lawsuits against chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1986, the SPLC's entire legal team resigned in protest—they'd signed up to help poor people, not sue an organization whose national membership barely eclipsed 10,000. But the Klan made an ideal villain for fundraising appeals to northern liberals, and the SPLC prospered from the publicity about lawsuits that bankrupted chapters of the Klan. By the 1990s, virtually nothing was left of the Klan to sue, so the SPLC pivoted again. They changed the name of its “Klanwatch” project to the “Hatewatch,” and begin issuing reports listing a growing number of “hate groups” and “extremists” across America. Scholars, journalists, and nonprofits have repeatedly denounced SPLC's blacklists, noting that its tallies include many “hate groups” that don't exist, or are harmless, or are mainstream conservative and Christian organizations that simply oppose progressive policies. The SPLC's lists of dangerous “extremists” have included respected conservatives such as Charles Murray, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson. As Tyler O'Neill observed in 'Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center', the SPLC could itself be called a hate group, given how its irresponsible tactics have smeared political opponents and inflamed partisan rancor. But the organization's scaremongering, however damaging to public debate in America, has been remarkably lucrative. The SPLC's appeals to combat a “rising tide of hate” have brought in so much donor money that its endowment has soared above $600 million. #JohnTierney “The March of Dimes Syndrome” City Journal @CityJournal 📃 © Spring 2024 #SPLC #Activism #HateGroups