Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Saving higher education

Posted: December 12, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

As I have written several times, higher education is an absolute mess, from its leftist culture to its ambivalence toward educating students about essential subjects.

Having suffered through numerous attacks at three universities for my conservative viewpoints, I have some suggestions on how to correct the problems in higher education.

First, eliminate tenure, which provides lifetime jobs and propagates the leftist culture. After only seven years, faculty members who are usually in their twenties when they arrive on campus don’t have to worry much about what they say or do for the next 40 or so years after tenure. 

Faculty members play an important role in hiring new faculty. It’s a bit like closed union shops where you only get accepted if you share political viewpoints or know someone already on the inside. 

Even CNN’s Fareed Zakaria acknowledged recently that higher education policies “use race, gender, and sexuality as political weapons to enforce intellectual conformity, dictate tenure decisions, and punish dissenters.” I guess a broken clock can be right twice a day!

Second, eliminate nonprofit status for private colleges and universities. Since these institutions have become political petri dishes, make them pay for their antics.

Third, look seriously at the amount of tax dollars that flow to higher education. Institutions of higher education get more than $1 trillion in tax money from various governmental agencies. State and local governments allocated about nine percent of their total budgets—more than the amount paid for highways and roads. About four percent of the federal budget goes to higher education—much of it in loans to students who end up heavily in debt. 

I am heartened that the public is starting to see that the emperors have no clothes. 

Americans’ attitudes about higher education have turned sharply negative in the past decade. In a Gallup poll, the percentage of young adults who said a college degree is important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Another poll found that about a third of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. In another Gallup poll, almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

Partly as a result of these attitudes, the number of college students has dropped dramatically in recent years. In the fall of 2010, more than 18 million undergraduates were enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States. That figure has been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021.

It’s time for individuals, colleges’ boards of trustees, and government entities to take a good, hard look at what higher education has become and make sure that the trends of intolerance and leftist thinking stop now!

The Biden Regime is now using the FBI to target Traditionalist Catholics

Posted: December 7, 2023 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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Joe Biden and his handlers have demonstrated a pathological disdain for traditional American values and traditions, along with a similar disdain for reality.  They despise the concepts of individual liberty, limited government, free market economics, and Judeo-Christian Religious values.  That is because they are radical leftists to the very core of their being.

Projection is one of the cornerstones of leftist ideology, and the Biden Regime epitomizes this.  They completely ignore the violence committed by the left’s shock troops, ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter.  They accuse the peaceful MAGA and Tea Party movements of  being violent threats to our democracy.

The Biden Regime has also demonstrated a pathological disdain for the Constitution of the United States, most particularly the First, Second, Fourth, amd Fifth Ammendments.

The scandal chronicled in this article exemplifies everything despicable about the Biden Regime: FBI Interviewed Priest, Choir Director in Investigation Targeting Catholics (breitbart.com)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) allegedly interviewed a priest and a church choir director as part of its investigation into “radical traditionalist” Catholics, a House Weaponization Committee report obtained by Fox News Digital details.

In February, a now-retracted leaked memo from the FBI Richmond Field Office titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” showed the bureau was targeting Catholics, and had used information from the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to guide the crafting of the memo. As Breitbart News reported, the memo showed the Richmond office had found that violent extremists’ “interest” in “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology was growing and that it therefore presented an opportunity for the FBI to engage with certain churches in an attempt to goad the churches’ leadership into serving as FBI “tripwires,” who would operate like unofficial informants to the FBI.

This loathsome behavior on the part of the FBI violates the Fourth Amendment and the Free Exercise of Religion clause of the First Amendment,

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) revealed in August that multiple FBI field offices were allegedly involved in crafting the memo, which detailed plans to target “radical traditionalist” Catholics, despite FBI Director Christoper Wray’s testimony that it was a “product from a single field office.”

The House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have been investigating the FBI’s investigation of certain Catholics as potential domestic terrorists since the leak. The committee’s new report concludes that there was “no legitimate basis for the memorandum to insert federal law enforcement into Catholic houses of worship,” according to Fox News Digital. 

The report further accuses the FBI of “abus[ing] its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists.”

If it wasn’t for The House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, would this scandal have come to light?

“The Committee and Select Subcommittee discovered that the FBI relied on at least one undercover agent to develop its assessment and the FBI even proposed developing sources among the Catholic clergy and church leadership,” the report states. “Not only did the FBI propose to develop sources, but it already interviewed a priest and choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond, Virginia for the memorandum.”

The committee said, citing whistleblower disclosures, that the FBI interviewed the priest and choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond, Virginia, to “inform on the parishioner under investigation.” The committee added that if the whistleblower had not come forward, the memo targeting Catholics would likely “still be operative in FBI systems, violating the religious liberties of millions of Catholic Americans,” according to the report. 

This despicable investigation is a clear violation of the Free Exercise of Religion clause of the First Amendment and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  These traditional Catholics were targeted because they hold beliefs that are at odds with Progressive Orthodoxy.

The committee’s report points to documents obtained by the committee’s subpoena which allegedly show the agency “singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists.”

“While the FBI claims it ‘does not categorize investigations as domestic terrorism based on the religious beliefs—to include Catholicism—of the subject involved,’ an FBI-wide memorandum originating from the FBI’s Richmond Field Office did just that,” the committee said, according to the report. “Under the guise of tackling the threat of domestic terrorism, the memorandum painted certain ‘radical-traditionalist Catholics’ (RTCs) as violent extremists and proposed opportunities for the FBI to infiltrate Catholic churches as a form of ‘threat mitigation.’”

The college football mess

Posted: December 5, 2023 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

As college football fans look forward to bowl season, it’s time to realize that the sport has become an absolute mess.

I’ll put aside the flap over Florida State being excluded from the playoffs because I can see both sides of the argument. I also never liked FSU, so I admit my bias against the Seminoles. I also don’t understand why FSU has eluded the PC police for its mascot and name. 

But I digress. 

The collegiate model is changing, and revenue streams might need to be improved to fill the growing money pit. It should be noted that the average operating deficit among the 100 major programs stood at $18.8 million in 2019.

“Almost nobody is in good shape, and the few schools in decent shape are experiencing a world that’s much more unstable and uncertain,” Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist professor at Smith College, told 247Sports. “Even if they’re in decent shape now, they still have to worry about it.

For example, the Big 10 started as a Midwestern conference that has grown into 18 universities spanning the country from east to west. That’s primarily because the league has the most lucrative TV contracts worth more than $1 billion annually. As the realignment of various leagues started, the Pac-12 took the biggest hit, falling to a mere two schools—Oregon State and Washington State—as Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington moved to the Big 10. Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado joined the Big 12. Two West Coast teams, UC Berkeley and Stanford, are joining the Atlantic Coast Conference. The Big 12 lost Oklahoma and Texas to the Southeast Conference.

The impetus for conference realignment is rooted in money. That’s why Oklahoma and Texas secretly pursued the SEC in the summer of 2021 and opted to surrender $100 million to leave the Big 12 one year earlier than expected in 2024. UCLA and USC bolted the Pac-12 for the Big 10 in the summer of 2022 and will begin competing in the wealthiest conference in college athletics in 2024.

The salaries for coaches are out of control. According to an ESPN analysis, well-known programs spent more than $533 million in dead money owed to coaches who were fired without cause with time left on their contracts from 2010 to 2021. Now add the buyout of $76 million to Jimbo Fisher of Texas A&M!

The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay reminisced recently about the time Alabama coach Bear Bryant stipulated in his contract that he had to make a dollar less than the university’s president.

Two other changes—the transfer portal and the Name, Image, and Likeness plan—have created even more havoc in college football. According to Higher-ed Ethics Watch, the transfer portal has created “a lack of loyalty to the schools from which they transfer, a lack of loyalty to their teammates, many of whom cannot take advantage of the transfer portal because of their anonymity as a student-athlete, commercialization of college athletics, which once was a fully amateur sport, and outsiders buying the allegiance of student-athletes through promises of being able to financially benefit from their NIL after they transfer.” 

Moreover, the NIL program has benefited only a few players and makes little sense when one looks at the top earners. For example, Shedeur Sanders and Travis Hunter of Colorado earned $4.1 million and $1.8 million, respectively, even though they played on a team that won only four games this year. Arch Manning has an excellent pedigree but has yet to start a game for Texas. Still, he’s estimated to earn nearly $3 million this year. 

Simply put, college football is about making more and more money, but only a few colleges and players benefit from the current system. 

 

The Biden Regime Has Gone Full Dystopian Science Fiction

Posted: November 30, 2023 by Jon Fournier in Uncategorized
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I am a huge fan of dystopian Science Fiction, especially those with a pronounced Libertarian slant.  My favorite authors in the genre are Robert Heinlein, George Orwell, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournell, Aldous Huxley, Ayn Rand, and Suzanne Collins. 

Joe Biden’s handlers have been following the plot lines featured by those authors, all from the point of view from the villains.  They most likely have never read any of these great works.   Their dystopian playbooks are based on the collective works of Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Chairman Mao.  Joe Biden’s Cabal should have read the same works I have read; they would have learned some valuable lessons about the various levels of hell created by collectivist policies.

Robert Heinlein wrote a short story, Free Men, and a novel, Sixth Column, where communist nations launched nuclear strikes on the US, and then invaded.  In both stories, written in the late 1940s, the communist invaders completely curtailed travel to ensure control over the conquered US.  Curtailing the freedom of movement is one of the favorite ploys used by dystopian regimes to exert complete control over a population.   The Biden Regime is using safety and climate change as a justification to curtail the freedom of movement of Americans, as chronicled in the following two articles:

NTSB Recommends All New Cars Be Equipped With Technology to Make Speeding Difficult or Impossible (thefederalistpapers.org)

In a recent development, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has proposed a measure that has sparked considerable debate.

The recommendation is for all new automobiles to be equipped with intelligent speed assistance (ISA) technology, a system designed to make speeding difficult or impossible.

The proposed ISA technology works by utilizing GPS and sign recognition to adapt the vehicle’s speed to the local limit.

Its approach is distinct from traditional speed limiters as it varies the maximum speed based on the location.

‘Dystopian Science Fiction’: Thomas Massie’s Amendment to Stop ‘Kill Switch’ in Vehicles Fails (breitbart.com)

Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) amendment to stop what has been dubbed a “kill switch” in vehicles beginning in 2026 under the guise of “passive drunk driving technology” failed last week — something that largely fell under the radar as all eyes remain on newly-elected House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Congress passing his stopgap funding bill this week.

This battle broke out last week, as Massie presented an amendment, which essentially states that none of the funds made available in the Biden-approved Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed in 2021, may be used to implement Section 24220 of the bill.

George Orwell’s 1984 has long been the playbook for dystopian regimes: Biden Admin ‘Working With’ Social Media to ‘Counter Misinformation’ on Economy – The Political Insider

“The White House official said the administration is working with TikTok creators to tell positive stories of Biden’s economic stewardship while also working with social media platforms to counter misinformation.”

If it seems strange to you that the government would just brazenly admit to making naked propaganda, well, that’s just where we are now.

We’ve witnessed what that entails thanks to the release of the Twitter Files that uncovered that the administration, via the arm of the Department of Justice and various aspects of the Intelligence Community, manipulated and infiltrated social media companies to bury factual news stories and infringe on the First Amendment rights of countless users.

NewsGuard Sells Government-Funded Censorship Tool (thefederalist.com)

The for-profit censorship giant NewsGuard is now selling its “Misinformation Fingerprints” technology to private companies to silence Americans’ speech — technology the federal government helped NewsGuard develop to the tune of nearly $750,000 in taxpayer funding. So while NewsGuard is now making headlines for trying to take down Elon Musk’s X, the bigger story concerns the federal government’s funding of the censorship-industrial complex.

In September 2021, NewsGuard was awarded a grant through the Small Business Innovation and Research program, which funds early-stage companies to develop products and technologies that can be helpful for government,” NewsGuard announced in its 2021 Social Impact Report. “Under the grant,” the report explained, “NewsGuard plans to further develop the Misinformation Fingerprints tool and test the effectiveness of the Fingerprints in detecting state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.”

Federal records show the Department of Defense funded the Small Business Innovation and Research program’s award of nearly $750,000 to NewsGuard for the further development and testing of the Misinformation Fingerprints tool. And according to NewsGuard’s 2021 Social Impact Report, its “Misinformation Fingerprints” catalog traced “762 false narratives,” “providing one-of-a-kind tracking seeds for the AI tools used by defense industry clients.”

This whole transgender craze is right out of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: Even the Census Bureau Is Trying To Promote Radical Gender Ideology | The Heritage Foundation

The Census Bureau is asking Congress for $10 million to figure out how best to promote the fiction that sex is assigned at birth, rather than the scientific fact that it is present at conception. It is part of a new set of questions on sexual orientation and gender identity that the bureau wants to ask residents even as young as 15.

This expansion beyond race and ethnicity represents a new foray into sexual identity—one more step in the bureau’s decadeslong degeneration into an agency completely captured by the identity-mongering industry, and which produces the supposedly “victim” categories that the industry requires.

The Biden Administration Is Scheming To Take Your Kids Away (thefederalist.com)

Democrats have been suggesting taking children away from ‘non-affirming’ parents for years now, but Biden’s HHS is getting the ball rolling…The Biden administration has proposed new rules for foster care, which would treat any parent rejecting LGBT ideology as a child abuser.

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