*19 'We are all marked men and women today.'
Catholic Bishop Matthew Kukah of Sokoto, Nigeria, at the funeral Mass of recently murdered seminarian Michael Nnadi. Kuka lashed out at Resident Muhahhadu Buhari for failing to protect Christians from Islamist terror, saying the Muslim-majority north has become 'one large graveyard, a valley of dry bone, the nastiest and the most brutish part of our dear country'.
*38 While Washington fiddles (ukraine's Donbass region faces life-and-death fallout over impeachment.
A column of Russian trucks rolled to the border with Ukraine on Feb, 5 as US senators in Washington prepared to vote on whether to remove from office president Donald Trump. the Russian convoy carried ammunition, weapons, and military equipment - all to reinforce Russian-backed rebels and Russian units that in 2014 took control of eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian Defense Ministry officials report the trucks crossed into the Eastern European nation, which gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, near the village of Diakove in Luhansk. Much of Luhansk and Donetsk, a region known as Donvbass, essentially has become Russian territory with Ukraine's military forced to hold a 280-mile front line for six years.
Moscow has tested some of its latest weaponry in Donbass, while Ukraine's army relies on Soviet-era aircraft and outdated weapons. A January video clip showed one Ukranian unit using the M1910 maxim machine gun, a one-revolutionary weapon used in Imperial Russia before World War I.
That disparity is the forgotten centerpiece of Trump's controversial decision last year to withhold $400 million in military aid from Ukraine, T's willingness to condition that aid to Ukraine investigating his domestic political opponents threatened Ukraine's security. Democrats, by leaping to open an unbounded campaign to remove Trump. also showed their willingness to risk Ukraine's future.
Noone looking seriously at the Russian threat can cheer the Democrats' hapless conduct of impeachment proceedings. Nor can anyone applaud Trump's victory lap once the Senate acquitted him on Feb 5 - within hours of fresh Russian armaments rolling into Ukraine.
Ukraine lost much during the five-month Washington debacle. The Russian convoy signals that momentum toward a bilateral pullout from Donbass -spearheaded by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zenlensky - has ended. republicans and Democrats' bipartisan effort to maintain sanctions and diplomatic pressure on Russian may also be finished. Zelensky emerges from the impeachment melodrama a weaker leader, even though he was elected in a landslide last year. Trump and his lawyers have seen to that, touting Ukraine as a bad actor who let the United States down.
This emboldens Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose expansionist aims extend into other former Soviet states. Putin is likely to redouble efforts to control Ukraine and extend the Kremlin's reach into Europe.
Ukrainians already have paid a high price for Russian occupation in Donbass. More than 14,000 have died in the conflict. The region's economy has never recovered. To cash a monthly check, elderly pensioners take buses to cities outside the zone, as no banks have reopened since 2014. Authorities have outlawed non-orthodox religious groups, forcibly closing churches ,sizing property and making many religious activities illegal. 'You cannot serve a soup kitchen. you cnnot spread o receive humanitarian aid. There is no place to complain. There is no one to stand for them', sid mission Eurasia President Sergey Rakhuba.
1990 and 2020 (Examining how public opinion on abortion has changed in the last 30 years by Marvin Olasky)
*48 The printed signs they carried:
'Life is Winning'.
'Pro-Life is Pro-Woman'.
'Love them both'
'Choose love, choose Life'.
'We are the pro-Life generation'.
'Pro Life'.
'We are the pro-Life Generation'.
'Pro-freedom, Pro-life'.
'Babies lives matter'.
'I regret My Abortion'.
The handwritten signs they waved:
'She can have her baby and her dreams too'.
'I am a lifeguard: I believe in guarding all life'.
'Pregnancy is not a health problem'.
'human rights begin in the womb'.
'I was 16 scared and pregnant, but her life mattered too'.
'Doctor Said Abort. Parents Said No. I Love My Life'.
The crowd at the 47th annual march for Life on Jan. 24 was huge -100,000 was a reasonable estimate - and young. Thousands of students from Christian schools came wearing coats and beanies of many colors: blue, orange, black, and checkerboard. The march i attended in 1990 was smaller and older.
That year president George H.W. Bush phoned the march and offered abstract niceties. This year Donald Trump became the first president to speak in person at a march. he gave a passionate speech emphasizing his administration's pro-life successes, including the confirmation of '187 federal judges who apply the Constitution as written, including two phenomenal Supreme Court justices'.
Trump concluded with an'i love you all', and many in the crowd yelled, 'We love you back' or 'We love you, Donald'. it was a long way from his 1999 statement, 'I am pro-choice in every respect'. for the pro-life movement, 2020 is a long way from 1990, when abortions in the United States peaked at 1.6 million per year, and from 1995, when 56% of Americans called themselves 'pro-choice' (and only 33% said they were pro-life.) The number of abortions has fallen by almost half during the past 3 decades. The viewpoint split now, according to Gallup polling, is 46% 'pro choice (and 49 % pro-life. A May 2019 poll showed 38% of Americans favoring legal abortion in all or most circumstances, and 60% wanting it illegal in all or almost all circumstances.
*51 ...meanwhile, many ardent abortion advocates are no longer chasing the middle ground with the 'safe, legal, and rare' mantra of the 1990s. with increasing shamelessness they are ordering women to 'shout your abortion!'
and last month President Trump didn't stay in the oval office, at a safe mile away from the march for Life. He not only said all the right words and listed his baby-saving executive orders, but recognized the compassion that characterizes most of the pro-life movement:
'You stand for each and every day.
you provide housing, education, jobs, and medical care to the women you serve.
You find loving families for children in need of forever home.
You host baby showers for expecting moms.
you make - you just make it your life's mission to help spread God's grace.'
*70 NOT-SO-GREAT MOMENTS IN HISTORY The New Jersey schools turn to LGBTQ promotion instead of teaching important lessons about the past.
Starting in September, New jersey public schools will be teaching children in grades 5,6,8,10 and 12 about the great historical contributions of LGBTQ people to united States history.
What are these great historical contributions, you ask? Well, for example. that Barbra 'Babs' Siperstein was the first transgender person to serve on the Democratic national Committee. yes, it's true! you may have lived your whole life in deplorable ignorance, but your children will never again be deprived of this knowledge.
Nor that Siperstein's name is on legislation allowing trans people to change their birth certificates. (Which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like changing the past, a thing we once took a dim view of when Stalin air-brushed Leon Trotsky and Lev Damenev from photos of Lenin's speech at Sverdlov Square.)
Don't look for much detail about Lenin or Stalin in the new new jersey school curricula - or perhaps even about Washington crossing the Delaware. I mean, something will have to be sacrificed from the syllabus to make room for 'Babs'. Children's textbooks can only be so big.
The Garden State joins Illinois, California and Colorado in mandating that our pedagogical institutions henceforth teach the social, political, and economic contributions of men who like to have sex with me, women who like to have sex with women, folks who like to swing both ways, and those who have breasts and penises surgically removed or installed.
For myself, i struggle to see the relevance of what individuals do in their bedrooms to their accomplishments in the fields of management, finance, real estate, marketing, and civil engineering. Is the invention of a light bulb any more to be celebrated because it is made my someone who checks'gender-queer' on government forms.
Well, if that's how it is, then i say we go all the way and pass laws ensuring that let-handed people get their due acknowledgment.also, what are the great achievements of freemasons? Or freckled citizens? or redheads? Or tobacconists? or aficionadoes of fly fishing? Or makers of reflective orange street cones?
and when the pendulum has swung its furthest from priggish morality toward sexual 'liberation', let us update new jersey's educational materials to include the category of pedophile, that last of all civil rights victims. We'll rehabilitate tarnished British author Oscar Wilde, who pleaded heroically at his 1895 trial on charges of 'gross indecency':
The love that dare not spake its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. it is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art. ...it is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as 'the love that dare not speak its name', and on account of it I am place where I am now.
Beautiful sentiments, eh? so your children will be made to think, especially if they hear it in the fifth grade, then are told again in sixth grade, and are reinforced in the opinion in the eighth grade, 10th, 12th.. in vain you console yourself that only 'History will be infected; Teachers of math, music and science will be tutored by curriculum coaches to make their own disciplines more 'inclusive'.
Oscar Wilde is wrong about David and Jonathan, of course. and Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias says that before his untimely death, Wilde asked a friend and fellow pederast, (def- sex with a minor) says that before his untimely death, Wilde asked a friend and fellow pederast, 'In loving one of those boys, did you ever love any one of them for themselves? the friend replied, 'No, I never did'. Wilde said, 'Neither did I'.
I dare say you won't find that in a textbook in a high school in New Jersey.
*72 Misplaced blame - using 1619 for propaganda in 2020
As black history month concludes let's not forget the biggest historical gambit of the past year, the '1619 project' of The new York Times. Princeton historian Allen Guelzo's use of semicolons that he's an academic who normally doesn't scream.
Guelzo and many other scholars are complaining about the 1619 project, named after the tragic year slaves from Africa first arrived in Virginia. The project teaches that American's 18th -century founders fought a revolution 'to ensure that slavery would continue'. the project, in its own words, shows slavery was part of the brutality of American capitalism...low-road capitalism...winner-take-all capitalism...racist capitalism'.
as if there's not only enough hate-America teaching in public schools, some educators are jumping on this crooked-wheel bandwagon. Chicago public Schools announced that each of its high schools will receive 200-400 copies of the Times' glossy 1619 project publication, whereby students will learn that america relishes not only modernity and democracy but also 'barbarism...cruelty...totalitarianism'.
some backstory on the use of such loaded terms in a newspaper that once used understated prose: The Times has figured out a way to have both the appearance of moral principle and the accretion
( def - gradual external addition) of financial principal. while its editors and writers rage, rage against the Trump machine, the newspaper's decisive move further to the political left has won it many new readers and millions of dollars. the Times had already lost most of its conservative subscribers, so it alienated few as it picked up numerous Trump-haters.
last month prominent historians James McPherson, Gordon wood, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes charged that the 1619 Project reflects'a displacement of historical understanding by ideology'. (def - the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class or large group.) the NYT turned down their request for corrections. these and other liberal or moderate historians recognize the evil of slavery but stand against attempts to minimize not only its horror but its continuing effects.
Allen Guelzo's 2012 book Fateful Lightning: a New History of the Civil War &Reconstruction is a thoughtful account of the war and is aftermath, so i value his judgment: 'The 1619 project is not history: it is polemic,
(def - a controversial argument, as one against some opinion, doctrine, etc. ; a person who argues in opposition to another ; controversialist )
born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery.
Guelzo said the NYT effort views 'slavery not as a blemish that the Founders grudgingly tolerated with the understanding that it must soon evaporate, but as the prize that the Constitution went out of its way to secure and protect. The times presents slavery not as a regrettable chapter in the distant past, but as the living, breathing pattern upon which all american social life is based, world without end'.
That's no exaggeration. The 1619 project is a case study in how, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail: 'Why doesn't the united States have universal health care? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War. ...Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. both still define our prison system. ...The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the 'white gold' that fueled slavery. ...What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite alot'.
So, given the many reasons we are disunited concerning health insurance, is the biggest one white fear that 'fee and healthy African-Americans would upend the racial hierarchy'? yes, we need criminal justice reform , but is the main problem that 'a presumption of danger and criminality still follows black people everywhere'?
Since my own Ph.D. is in american studies and I've written half a dozen american history books, i feel able to weigh in on this. seems to me we're seeing at NYT attempt to squeegee not only the present but the past as well, and drip what remains down the captive throats of teenagers forced to study a bigoted high-school curriculum.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment