Tag Archives: University of Pennsylvania

Resisting Communist China

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Author: R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D

Let’s face the facts. The very unwise effort by the U.S. Government over the past 40 years to undermine communism in China by granting them economic privileges and favored nation status has been a disaster. The naïve politicians , who fostered this absurd policy included Democrats and Republicans such as
Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, George Bush (both), Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and worst of all Joe Biden. As a result, communist China is arguably the strongest country on earth economically and militarily. And we funded them!

The question is what do we do now? First, we have to recognize that President  Biden is a compromised president who is being unduly influenced by Communist China. As a result, he does not put America first. Several examples such as the $60 million given to the U. of Pennsylvania where Biden set up an ancillary office after he left the Vice Presidency in 2017 (where classified documents have been found), his son, Hunter, receiving millions of dollars in money from Communist China for his scam “business” deals and passing it on to Joe by paying a reported $50,000. per month for renting one of Joe’s homes.. Money laundering straight out of the Mafia playbook! What do we do about it while we wait the outcome of the 2024 election?

Governor DeSantis of Florida is again leading the way. He recently announced that he will be working with the legislature to pass a law that would ban Communist China (and any phantom corporate entity) from purchasing real estate, especially agricultural land in Florida. North Carolina should follow suit. A couple of years ago, Smithfield Foods was purchased by a Chinese group centered in Hong Kong. Why on earth would we allow a communist adversary to purchase a main component of our food chain? Insanity if you ask me.

Another issue is Communist China supplying the chemicals to the drug cartels to produce fentanyl which is then smuggled into the United States and has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans over the past few years What are we doing about it? Compromised Joe Biden is doing nothing. In fact, his open border policy is facilitating this death drug. The U.S. Government should be imposing the severest of trade sanctions on Communist China until this is stopped. . Try starting with stopping the export of U.S. coal to China. That
would get their attention!

The final thing is Communist China giving grants to higher education institutions in this country and allowing Chinese citizens to work here on research projects that have high technological value. No Communist
Chinese grants should be allowed into in this country. You know they will want a return on their investment that will be detrimental to American safety, security and technological advancement...

These are some things that need to be done immediately. If you agree, contact your appropriate elected officials and demand action before it is too late.

Let’s Watch The Contrast Between How These Cases Are Handled

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On Monday, Townhall posted an article about classified documents belonging to then Vice-President Biden found in a private office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. The documents were found before the mid-term elections, but somehow the public was not told about them.

Townhall notes:

As Americans were lectured about for weeks after the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago, federal officeholders such as Trump and Biden “are required by law to relinquish official documents and classified records when their government service ends.” But, according to CNN’s source, Biden didn’t follow that law any more than Trump did, although fewer documents were found in Biden’s private office than at Mar-a-Lago.

Still, Biden asked how “anyone could be that irresponsible” to have classified / top-secret documents from their time in office in a private facility, despite the fact that Biden had similar documents in his private post-VP office. And while we don’t yet know the subject or content of the classified documents Biden evidently kept after leaving office, the government needs to figure out “what data was in there that may compromise sources and methods?” — to borrow a quote from Biden himself. 

This is a developing story and may be updated.

A friend of mine on Facebook who does amazing research notes:

China Joe left classified information at the Biden Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. The $40,000,000, endowment to set up the Biden Institute came from the Chinese Government. Joe’s $350,000, salary at the Institute during the four years between his vice presidency and presidency was paid indirectly by the CCP. For most of those years, It was what we now call a “Hunter Biden job,” where you get a paycheck but never need to go to the office. The Chinese didn’t want him, just his access to top government information.

No need to wonder why Joe left classified documents there. He was paid to do so by the Chinese.

Here is also a very important distinction between CJ’s treason and the Obama and President Trump holding on to some presidential documents. The latter two were the President of the United States when they did it. The President has the exclusive authority to unilaterally declassify documents. The Vice President, like the Secretary of State, where Hillary did the same thing, does not have that authority.

Both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden committed felonies while they were in office. There is no reason in the world why Joe Biden should not be impeached immediately because of that crime. He and the Democrat party and corrupt news media that support him are setting up the inhalation(sic) of the USA.

I believe he means annihilation, but you get the point. Eventually the lack of equal justice under the law is going to cause serious problems for the Democrats and for the country.

This Is All Very Confusing

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On Sunday, Hot Air reported that Lia Thomas, the transgender swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania swim team, recently lost the 100-meter freestyle race to another transgender swimmer. Okay, fair is fair. That seems logical. However the story gets a little weird after that.

The article quotes an Outkick article:

Penn transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who had been crushing her competition since joining the women’s swim team after three years swimming as a biological male, met her match Saturday in the 100-meter freestyle during a tri-meet with Yale and Dartmouth.

Thomas won the 200-meter and 500-meter races at Penn’s final home meet of the season, but she finished sixth in the 100-meter where Yale’s Iszac Henig, a transgender swimmer who is in the process of transitioning from female to male, crushed Thomas. Henig finished the 100 in 49.57 while Thomas touched the wall in 52.84.

“I wasn’t prepared for that. Everything is messed up. I can’t wrap my head around this. The NCAA needs to do something about this. They need to put science into the decision and discussion,” a Penn swim parent told The Daily Mail.

The article at Hot Air concludes:

Not all of the irony has been removed from the story, however. What this really means is that trans swimmer Thomas was beaten by an actual woman, so how well would Thomas do against the guys? This is a subject we touched on when the story first emerged last month. Thomas may be setting records for the University of Pennsylvania and for these specific meets, but all of the times posted thus far are still slower than the current NCAA women’s division records for those events. And they are laughably far behind the men’s division records. And now, even with the distinct biological advantage that Thomas enjoys, the swimmer has been defeated in multiple events by an actual female.

That doesn’t remove all of the injustice from the situation, of course. There are still plenty of other legitimate female college athletes who are being bumped down the charts. As the linked article indicates, one parent of a female Penn swimmer was once again calling for the NCAA to “put science into the decision and discussion.” We already saw one collegiate swimming official end her career in protest over what’s been going on. Sadly, the NCAA has clearly drunk deeply from the new chalice of wokeness and they aren’t likely to voluntarily embark on a return to sanity any time soon.

This makes my head hurt.

 

 

Sad, But Not Surprising

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The transgender movement is a direct threat to women’s sports. A transgender woman can compete and win in women’s sports. A woman who transitions to a man will generally not do well in men’s sports. This is illustrated in a article posted yesterday at PJ Media.

The article reports:

Will Thomas was a moderately successful swimmer on the University of Pennsylvania’s men’s swim team for three years. But then he took a year off, reemerged as transgender, and started dominating the women’s swim team.

“One of my big concerns for trans people is feeling alone,” he told Penn Today. “Even if you don’t pay attention to the news … [about] states proposing and passing vicious anti-trans legislation, it can feel very lonely and overwhelming.”

“The process of coming out as being trans and continuing to swim was a lot of uncertainty and unknown around an area that’s usually really solid. Realizing I was trans threw that into question. Was I going to keep swimming? What did that look like?”

He added, “Being trans has not affected my ability to do this sport and being able to continue is very rewarding.”

It may not have affected his ability to do his sport, but as a transgender he is competing against women who generally do not have the upper body strength that men do. He is competing in an unequal playing field where he has an unfair advantage. How many women will lose college scholarships in swimming to a transgender women?

Is This Where Our Culture Is?

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Dennis Prager posted an article today in National Review about middle-class values and the attack on those values by the political left.

The article reports:

In August 2017, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax wrote a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer in defense of middle-class values. She and her co-author cited a list of behavioral norms that, as Wax, put it, “was almost universally endorsed between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s.”

They were:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

She later wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “The fact that the ‘bourgeois culture’ these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s largely explains today’s social pathologies — and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies.”

For her left-wing colleagues at Penn Law School, this list was beyond the pale. About half of her fellow professors of law — 33 of them — condemned her in an open letter. And Wax wrote in the Journal, “My law school dean recently asked me to take a leave of absence next year and to cease teaching a mandatory first-year course.”

If you are over the age of 60, chances are these are the values you grew up with. Many young people rebelled against these values in the 1960’s and beyond, but these were the values they grew up with.

The article continues:

The Pennsylvania chapter of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild condemned her for espousing bourgeois values and questioned “whether it is appropriate for her to continue to teach a required first-year course.”

These are now considered bourgeois values by the political left. Let’s look at the consequences of these values.

In March 2013, the Brookings Institute posted a list of three things teenagers living in poverty themselves should do to avoid poverty in their future.

This is the list:

In addition to the thousands of local and national programs that aim to help young people avoid these life-altering problems, we should figure out more ways to convince young people that their decisions will greatly influence whether they avoid poverty and enter the middle class. Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.

I would add avoiding illegal drugs or excessive alcohol to that list. However, note that the ways to avoid poverty are very much in line with the bourgeois values that the political left is denigrating. These bourgeois values are also the building blocks of a strong society. Again, why is the political left denigrating them?

The article concludes:

There surely are mean conservatives — witness some of the vile comments by anonymous conservative commenters on the Internet. And it is a moral scandal that Ford has received death threats. The difference in left-wing meanness is the meanness of known — not anonymous — people on the left. They don’t hide behind anonymity because they do not feel bound by traditional notions of civility, for which they have contempt.

Now you can understand why the Left hates Mike Pence, a man who has, by all accounts, led a thoroughly honorable life. He — and other Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews — tries to live by a code that is higher than him.

That ethic is what Übermenschen seek to destroy.

They are succeeding.

I hope not. That is not the country I want to leave to my children and grandchildren.

Using The Age Of New Media To Control The Story

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The U.K. Daily Mail posted an Associated Press article today about how the Obama Administration is using the new media to avoid scrutiny of their policies. Like previous administrations the Obama Administration has controlled access to the President, but they have gone a step further.

The article reports:

Capitalizing on the possibilities of the digital age, the Obama White House is generating its own content like no president before, and refining its media strategies in the second term in hopes of telling a more compelling story than in the first.

At the same time, it is limiting press access in ways that past administrations wouldn’t have dared, and the president is answering to the public in more controlled settings than his predecessors. It’s raising new questions about what’s lost when the White House tries to make an end run around the media, functioning, in effect, as its own news agency.

These people make Pravda look like amateurs.

The article draws a conclusion about the dangers of a White House news agency:

And while plenty of news organizations cover the president’s State of the Union address, the commentary that accompanies the White House’s ‘enhanced’ version is more one-sided.

When viewers choose the White House as their news source, ‘what people are being exposed to is highly selective,’ says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center.

‘They’re not getting the balance of the alternative points of view. They’re not getting the criticism that asks, “Is this accurate?” It’s not being put in historical context.’

Jamieson says the White House-generated content can be highly seductive, particularly when people feel they’re developing a ‘direct relationship’ with White House officials who send out chatty mass emails and solicit feedback through social media.

Democratic and Republican veterans of the White House alike say it makes sense for the Obama administration to maximize its use of digital advances to communicate directly to the public, but they warn that something is missing when ‘the administration’s feet are not held to the fire’ in certain settings, in the words of Ari Fleischer, who served as White House press secretary under Bush.

Kumar, the Towson professor, warns that the administration can even delude itself if it puts too much emphasis on self-reinforcing content.

‘They start believing what they’re creating,’ she says. ‘They need to hear a lot of voices and they need to hear them early.’

One of the reasons for the success of the new media (outside the White House new media) is that people who want to stay informed are willing to look for the other side of the story. The current administration’s control of the story and the mainstream media’s bias have combined to create ‘the low information voter.’ This voter would not exist if the mainstream media told both sides of the story. Unfortunately, the low information voter votes based on his knowledge of events. That is the reason we are in our second term of President Obama (aka our third term of Jimmy Carter).

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Where Are We A Week After The Newtown Killings ?

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It’s been a week since the horrible tragedy in Connecticut. There are screams for gun control, assault weapons bans, police at the schools, and all sorts of things. But an article in yesterday’s Washington Post sheds some light and common sense on the subject.

Charles Krauthammer was a psychiatrist in Massachusetts during the 1970’s. He has an interesting perspective on what happened last week.

Mr. Krauthammer states that there are three parts to every mass shooting–the killer, the weapon, and the cultural climate.

The article points out:

Random mass killings were three times more common in the 2000s than in the 1980s, when gun laws were actually weaker. Yet a 2011 University of California at Berkeley study found that states with strong civil commitment laws have about a one-third lower homicide rate.

Regarding the weapon, Mr. Krauthammer states:

I have no problem in principle with gun control. Congress enacted (and I supported) an assault weapons ban in 1994. The problem was: It didn’t work. (So concluded a University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the Justice Department.) The reason is simple. Unless you are prepared to confiscate all existing firearms, disarm the citizenry and repeal the Second Amendment, it’s almost impossible to craft a law that will be effective.

The article points out that over the past 30 years, the homicide rate in the United States has dropped 50 percent.

The article reminds us that gun violence is on the decline:

Except for these unfathomable mass murders. But these are infinitely more difficult to prevent. While law deters the rational, it has far less effect on the psychotic. The best we can do is to try to detain them, disarm them and discourage “entertainment” that can intensify already murderous impulses.

But there’s a cost. Gun control impinges upon the Second Amendment; involuntary commitment impinges upon the liberty clause of the Fifth Amendment; curbing “entertainment” violence impinges upon First Amendment free speech.

I tend to think that the fact that the murder rates are lower in states with strong civil commitment laws is significant. An article posted at The Blue Review on December 15th provides insight into what it is like to get appropriate treatment and possible restraint for a troubled child.

It’s time to look at all the elements of the tragedy at Newtown–not just the ones that are politically expedient.

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How Did We Get Here And What Are We Going To Do About It ?

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A website called Twitchy posted a ‘tweet’ today from Anthea Butler, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

The tweet:

Butler @AntheaButler

Good Morning. How soon is Sam Bacile going to be in jail folks? I need him to go now.When Americans die because you are stupid…

12 Sep 12

I realize that I am not the most educated person in the world and maybe I shouldn’t question a college professor, but my first question is, “Did this woman raise any children?” Why is that question relevant? Because when you raise children, you learn some things. You learn that bad behavior is bad behavior and that there is no excuse for it. You learn that if you do not deal with bad behavior, it gets worse.

Sam Bacile (the person who made or is making a movie that made Muslims angry) is not responsible for the violence in Libya or Egypt. It is no coincidence that this violence occurred on September 11th. This is simply more bad behavior from the people who brought us 9/11 in 2001. When are we going to wake up and admit that we have to deal with the continuing Muslim violence or it will escalate? This is the first American Ambassador killed since 1979 (under Jimmy Carter oddly enough).

Yahoo News lists five ambassadors killed by terrorists:

—Adolph Dubs, in Afghanistan, 1979

—Francis E. Meloy Jr., in Lebanon, 1976

—Rodger P. Davies, in Cyprus, 1974

—Cleo A. Noel Jr., in Sudan, 1973

—John Gordon Mein, in Guatemala, 1968

Another lesson learned from motherhood–if there are no consequences to bad behavior, the behavior will continue. Don’t we have any mothers in our government who can figure that out?

The people in our embassy were not killed because Sam Bacile was stupid, they were killed because people in power are unwilling to protect Americans at home or abroad. Was anyone in the American Embassy armed? Did we let people die because we were afraid of the public relations fallout? Get over it. Muslims don’t hate us because of public relations, they hate us because we are free, successful, and generally unwilling to live under Sharia Law. No amount of public relations is going to change that.

Meanwhile, we need to pray for the families of the people lost yesterday.

 

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