The town Wastewater plant treated an average of 199,450 gallons a day last week, with a high day of 255,300 on September 26. The Wastewater plant treated a total of 6.91 million gallons for the month of September.
The town’s pump station at the Fig Street collection system had issues with Vacuum pits. The problems have been found and fixed and did not cause any problems for customers.
Routine maintenance processes including filter backwashing and softener regenerations were completed at the Water Plant.
Lead and copper sample kits were distributed to residents.
The plant had 142,280 average daily production with a peak of 173,505 on 9/27.
Fall Fest at Pearl Farmer’s Market
Pearl Market Farmers Market will hold a Fall Farmers Markets every Saturday thru October 31. As it gets warmer later in the day, they have extended their hours from9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Local Produce, Seafood, Baked Goods, Breakfast, Coffee, Art, Woodwork, Crafts, and much more.
The market has at least 25 local vendors that rotate every week. Come support your local businesses.
Located at 4198 Latimer Siding Rd off Lankford Hwy (Route 13,), Cape Charles. Just across 13 from the CBBT electronic message board.
Pet of the Week: Meet 20792
Meet 20792! This bashful lady is about 30 pound mixed breed and estimated to be around 2 years old. As you can tell from the video she is very shy but does accept cookies nicely. There is something a little hound-y to her and maybe a little pitty – a classic Eastern Shore mix.
Shelter life isn’t her jam, so she’d love to be adopted by a resident of Northampton or Accomack County or to be transferred to an approved rescue. I think given the opportunity, this girl could become a wonderful addition to your household.
Interested? Contact the Eastern Shore Regional shelter at 757-787-7091 or email sburdge@co.accomack.va.us
Can’t adopt? Sharing is caring and gives her the chance to be seen by potential adopters so please pass this post along.
History Notes this week of Oct 7
3761 BC: The “epoch reference date” for the modern Hebrew calendar. If you ever wondered why Jewish folks gave something of a “meh-“ reaction to the hysteria of Y2K, it is because it was already Y5K plus (!) by then.
1535: Publication of the Coverdale Bible, the first English printing of the complete 66 canonical books plus the Apocrypha. Translator Miles Coverdale used William Tyndales’s New Testament translations, in addition to Tyndale’s translation of the book of Jonah. The rest of the Old Testament he translated himself from German texts and the Latin Vulgate.
1571: Battle of Lepanto– The last exclusive galley-versus-galley naval battle, fought between the navies of the Ottoman Turks and a Christian coalition formed by Don Juan of Austria. The lopsided victory stopped the Ottoman coastal surge in its tracks, and is considered one of the three* great battles that ensured the continued development of a Christian Europe under the spiritual guidance of the Pope, as opposed to a Muslim Europe under the political and spiritual control of the Caliphate of Ottoman Turkey.
1600: The tiny principality of San Marino, a small Tuscan city tucked on the side of a cliff, adopts a written constitution, making it the first republic of the modern age.
1691: Great Britain issues a Royal Charter establishing the Province of Massachusetts, ‘way across the sea in the New World, where the Plymouth Plantation was continuing to prosper.
1763: King George III issues the Royal Proclamation of 1763 stating, among other things, that aboriginal lands north and west of the Appalachians and Alleghenies were closed to white settlement. The edict came on the heels of the Treaty of Paris that ended the 7 Years War (a.k.a. French and Indian War), which ceded to Britain all French claims to the eastern drainage of the Mississippi River. The king and Parliament reasoned that by keeping white settlers out, it would not only stabilize relations with the Indian tribes of the Ohio Valley, but would inhibit the rampant land speculation that was sure to get worse as the new territory was surveyed. British colonists along the seaboard did not see it quite that way, helping set the conditions for further unrest and dissatisfaction with the Crown in the years to come.
1780: At the Battle of Kings Mountain, near Blacksburg, South Carolina, an American Patriot militia, loosely organized as a collection of scores of smaller militias from “over the mountain” regions, and under the nominal command of ten different colonels, decisively defeat a superior force of Loyalist militia under the command of British Major Patrick Ferguson. The Loyalist force was part of Lord Cornwallis’ Southern Strategy, which attempted to exploit Loyalist sentiment in the coastal regions by creating local militias that would take the fight to- and thence out of- their Patriot-leaning neighbors inland, led and supported by British Regulars. The previous months saw repeated vindication of this strategy with the capture of Charleston, the Battle of Camden, the Battle of Waxhaws, and Tarleton’s Massacre. Major Ferguson expected to make a short, violent thrust inland from the Waxhaw area to put down the last of the Patriots. What he didn’t know is that the news of Tarleton’s Massacre inflamed Patriots hundreds of miles away, and the intervening weeks gave the distant militias time to gather and loosely organize a defense. Ferguson finally learned of the gathering force, and took a strong defensive position atop Kings Mountain. When the Patriot attack started, Ferguson rode up & down the line, fully exposed to fire, blowing commands with a silver whistle. The Patriot militias, meanwhile, broke into 20 separate groups and charged screaming up the hill, pausing behind rocks to load their rifles, carefully aiming at and picking off individual Loyalists, and eventually Ferguson himself. It was a terribly lopsided victory, completely unexpected by either side, but it unleashed Patriot momentum throughout all the colonies, and most especially in the Carolinas, where Cornwallis’ Regulars were on the cusp of an even more strategic defeat at Cowpens.
1793: In a continuing effort to ensure the citizens of France believe and behave as rationally as possible, the National Convention formally adopts a legislative program to de-christianize [sic] France. Rather than pursuing the American precedent of separating the offices of Church and State, and thus allowing free exercise of religious conviction, the Convention reasoned that there should be no public acknowledgement or display of religion at all, even in churches. The program opening this day entailed: 1) Confiscation of all church properties, to be held by the State as collateral on its new currency; 2) Removal of all silver, gold, art and any other iconography from places of worship; 3) Removal and destruction of any crosses, bells or other external signs of worship being conducted; 4) Establishment of civic cults, specifically designed to incline the heart toward the virtues of the benevolent State through the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being (more in November); 5) Most importantly, holding all non-jury (i.e., will not vow obedience to the jury of the civil government) priests liable for death. If this sounds a little harsh to you, that’s because it is; and it is also the logical extension of where led the French Revolution’s obsession* with Reason as the arbiter of all things.
1793: Death of the owner of the most famous signature in America, John Hancock.
1795: The young French general (age 26) Napoleon Bonaparte, fresh from suppressing counter-revolutionary insurrection down in Toulon, arrives in Paris to suppress an even more dangerous insurrection that physically threatens the National Convention. He orders several batteries of artillery into position in the streets of the capital to protect the Tuilieries Palace. The cannons are not loaded with normal cannonballs, but with thousands of small pellets, making them the equivalent of giant shotguns. Bonaparte’s artillery mows down over 1,400 royalists, tidily ending the revolt. His actions today quickly became known as the “whiff of grapeshot…” the expression of which you will still hear bandied about today.
1813: Death of the great Indian warrior Tecumseh (b.1768), in the Battle of the Thames, near present-day Chatham, Ontario.
1879: At the Battle of Angamos, the Chilean Navy defeats the Peruvian navy in a crucial action that opened up the Bolivian port of Antofagasta to eventual occupation and annexation by Chile. I count myself among those of us Norte Americanos whose knowledge of South American history ends somewhere in the early 1800s when Simon Bolivar forced Spain to begin breaking up their centuries-old overseas empire. “And what happened then?” we ask. Well, without Spain to enforce colonial borders, the newly independent states resorted to the traditional methods of inter-state war to settle competing claims and boundary disputes. In this case, the issue at hand was the lucrative mining regions of the central Pacific coast, nominally under Bolivian control, but claimed as well by Peru and Chile. The naval battle this day provided a huge strategic advantage to Chile, which was eventually codified in the treaty that ended the 1879-83 War of the Pacific, also known colloquially as “The Saltpeter War” or “The Guano War,” due to the nature of one of the mining products in the region.
1883: First continuous run of the Orient Express, that is, the original Orient Express, which set the standard for intrigue and luxury travel between Paris and Istanbul.
1884: Under the tutelage of Commodore Stephen Luce, the United States Naval War College is established in Newport, Rhode Island. The school nurtured among it first faculty Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of the most brilliant intellects ever to don a Navy uniform, and developer of the seminal theory of naval warfare that holds naval fleets as the key to controlling events ashore. A “Mahanian Navy” is one comprised primarily of capital ships that can duke it out on the high seas with other capital ships, after which they can turn their attention to the land campaign, if necessary.
1888: Birth of Henry Wallace (d.1965). Wallace served as Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President, 1941-45. He was the 1948 nominee for President of the Progressive Party. He was a Socialist through and through, regularly alienating his own Democrats, to say nothing of the rest of the country, with his outspoken admiration for the advances of the Soviet Union.
1889: American inventor Thomas Edison publicly displays his motion picture device for the first time.
1892: Death of British Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson (b.1809).
1902: Birth of Ray Kroc (d.1984), founder of McD’s.
1904: Death of Austrian chemist Carl Bayer (b.1847).
1905: During their Huffman Prairie flying period outside of Dayton, Wilbur Wright sets an airplane endurance record of 26 miles traveled over the ground in 39 minutes.
1908: The government of Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina into their polyglot empire. The two provinces are normally always mentioned in tandem, although those of you who have been over there know that the people who actually live in the places would rather not be connected with each other.
1912: Opening guns of the 1st Balkan War, where the Balkan League (Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria) initiated combat in a bid for independence from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were no match for the multi-front armies of the four allies, who relatively swiftly defeated their Turkish overlords and then settled into their own rounds of territorial squabbling, aided and abetted by the Great Powers of Europe. You are correct to assume that the formal cessation of hostilities only shifted the focus of long-simmering regional anxieties.
1914: Less than 10 years after Wright’s record flight, a French pilot, Louis Quenact, opens fire with a machine gun to shoot down a German pilot interfering with his reconnaissance duties. This is widely regarded as the first day of intentional aerial combat.
1927: Opening night for The Jazz Singer, starring the versatile Al Jolson. The movie was the first commercial presentation of a “talkie” where sound and music were synchronized with the visual images on the screen. It didn’t take long for the silent movies to go away, along with a number of silent movie stars whose voices didn’t quite fit in with their on-screen images.
1940: Publication of a secret memorandum by LCDR Arthur H. McCollum, in which he outlines the depth and breadth of the Japanese Empire’s advance throughout “the Orient,” and offers a prescription for what the United States should do about it, namely, generate enough of a confrontation with Japan that they will attack U.S. interests somewhere. Such an attack would ease the U.S. entry into the burgeoning World War, and free us up to materially and overtly support Britain in her life & death struggle with Germans. The McCollum Memo is often bandied about as a “smoking gun” that proves Roosevelt knew about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance and did nothing to stop it, among other flawed theories. McCollum worked as an analyst at the Office of Naval Intelligence on the desk that monitored the Orient.
1943: Birth of LtCol Oliver North, USMC (ret)., whose work at the NSC during the Reagan Administration gave proof that the staff Action Officers up in Washington really are the guys who make things happen.
1957(a): The Soviet Union successfully launches Sputnik 1 into orbit, creating a little beep heard ‘round the world. You youngsters may find it hard to believe, but that little ball of aluminum turned the United States inside out until we launched a little satellite of our own. Part of the angst was the realization that the Russians had the rocket technology to lob a bomb across the planet at us, and we had nothing in return.
1957(b): Happily for the rest of us, this evening gave us the first broadcast of Leave it to Beaver. The program ran 234 episodes, up through 1963.
1962: Birth of American race car driver Michael Andretti, son of Mario, father of Marco.
1967: The communist warlord Che Guevarra, having worn out his murderous welcome in Cuba, is finally captured in Bolivia by soldiers of the next government to whom he was addressing his ministrations.
1969: This day marks the opening of the “Days of Rage,” a “direct action” protest against, take your pick: the war in Vietnam, the draft, corporations, Wall Street, the “man,” suburban life, capitalism, bicameral legislature… any of the normal processes and institutions of national life. Organized by the Weather Underground, its guiding principle (quoted in the estimable Wikipedia) is quite clear: “The Elections Don’t Mean S**t—Vote Where the Power Is—Our Power Is In The Street!” The names of the people who led this movement are still highly influential in remarkably high circles even today.
1977: The Supreme Soviet adopts the 4th Soviet Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
1981: Death of Anwar Sadat (b.1918), President of Egypt, at the hand of a core of Army officers egged on by an Islamist fatwa issued by Omar Abdel-Rhaman, a.k.a. “The Blind Sheikh” who also was also convicted for the first attack on the World Trade Center. Sadat’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel negated in Islamist’s eyes any gains he made by launching the 1973 Yom Kippur War against the Jewish state. In 2017 Abdel-Rhaman died in a federal prison in NC, finally putting to an end issuing fatwas against the West and any Muslim who would dare to resist the Islamist movement.
1985: The Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro is hijacked by terrorists of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The cretins who captured the ship took wheelchair-bound American tourist Leon Klinghoffer to the upper deck, shot him in the head, and then rolled him and his chair into the cold Mediterranean.
1993: After 103 days of rain, broken levees and farms and towns wiped off the map, the Mississippi River at Saint Louis finally dips below flood stage.
2001: NATO confirms Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty for the first and only time. You remember that Article 5 is the core of the treaty, stating that an attack on one is an attack on all. Although it was designed to counter a Soviet attack on Western Europe, it was actually the United States who invoked it after 9/11. Germany responded right away by deployin g NATO AWACS to U.S. airspace, and the rest of the European allies did their bit by supporting our engagement in Afghanistan.
2001: One month after the attacks of 9/11, the Executive Branch of the US government, with the massive concurrence of both houses of Congress, establishes the Office of Homeland Security, led by former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, and charged with doing for domestic security what DOD does for international security. The late Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), during the debate on transforming this Office into a Department, he labeled the massive bureaucratic reorganization in a Bill 1,500 pages deep, “…this monstrosity.”
Obama, Biden Fully Aware that Hillary Clinton financed and helped to plan the lies about Trump and Russia collusion
Somehow, blockbuster news from earlier this month never quite made it to the mainstream news cycle. That is, news that recently released Russian intelligence reports claim Hillary Clinton financed and helped to plan the lies about Trump and Russia collusion. There is also new evidence that the Obama administration — including Joe Biden, State Department leaders, and others — also knew about the plan to frame Trump from its inception.
On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified and released to Congress handwritten notes from former CIA Director John Brennan as well as a CIA investigative referral to James Comey and Peter Strzok requesting that they investigate Russian knowledge of Hillary Clinton’s anti-Trump collusion smear operation.
National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe on Tuesday declassified documents about a claim Hillary Clinton ordered “a campaign plan to stir up a scandal” by linking President Trump to Russia in 2016 — and that indicate then-President Barack Obama knew about her possible role.
Top U.S. intelligence officials were so concerned heading into the 2016 election that the Russians were aware of and potentially manipulating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s plans to smear Donald Trump as a Russian agent that they personally briefed President Barack Obama on the matter, newly declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents show. CIA officials also requested that the FBI investigate Russian knowledge of the Clinton campaign’s collusion smear operation.
The newly released notes from Brennan, who now is a fiery anti-Trump commentator, indicate that Brennan briefed Obama on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 28 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”
Ratcliffe’s initial disclosure said that, according to Brennan’s notes, Clinton allegedly approved the scheme on July 26. The minor inaccuracy shortens the window of time between Clinton’s alleged approval of the plot and the FBI opening its investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion on July 31, 2016.
According to the declassified notes, Brennan and the U.S. intelligence community knew months prior to the 2016 election that the collusion smear was the result of a campaign operation hatched by the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“We’re getting additional insight into Russian activites from [REDACTED],” Brennan’s handwritten notes state. “Cite alleged approval by Hillary Clinton–on 26 July–of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to villify [sic] Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”
The notes appear to have been prepared by Brennan to memorialize a meeting held at the White House with the president and his top national security advisers. Included in Brennan’s notes are the responses of other participants in the briefing — including those of former White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice, former White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, and former DNI James Clapper, but those responses are redacted.
At one point, Obama asked whether there was any evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia, but any response that may have been recorded in Brennan’s notes is redacted.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies also suspected early on that many of the key claims underpinning the collusion narrative could themselves be the product of deliberate Russian disinformation.
While the Clinton campaign hired Christopher Steele, a foreign agent in the pocket of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, to concoct a dossier of allegations against Trump, the primary source of the most salacious and damning allegations of treasonous collusion came from a suspected Russian spy named Igor Danchenko. Last month, Attorney General William Barr informed Congress that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was so concerned about Danchenko, who had been dubbed the “Primary Sub-Source” used by Clinton campaign sub-contractor Christopher Steele in his thoroughly debunked Steele dossier, that it had previously deemed him a national security threat and investigated him to determine if he was a Russian spy. The bureau called off the investigation once Danchenko left the United States and was no longer within the purview of the FBI’s domestic counterintelligence mission.
The CIA remains convinced that Russian intelligence believed as early as summer of 2016 that the Clinton campaign launched its anti-Trump collusion smear operation to distract from Clinton’s e-mail scandal. In October of 2017, the top lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee finally confessed publicly that he had personally hired the Democrat opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which paid Steele to peddle allegations that Trump was a secret Russian agent working on behalf of Vladimir Putin.
SAT Scores Drop in 2020
Close to 1.1 million students in the class of 2020 took the SAT on a school day, up from almost 1 million in the class of 2019, and 49% of the class of 2020 took the SAT on a school day, compared to 43% of the class of 2019.
2020 SAT results are out and here are the trend lines. Scores for every group fell except for Asians. Interesting that several universities reported this year that they were going to phase out the SATs in admission decisions.
Is the Culture War Lost?
The following is a correspondence between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Sarah Haider on Wokeism and The Culture Wars.
Dear Ayaan,
Let me begin with what I hope is obvious: I’m very excited and honored to have this discussion with you.
I’m even more thrilled that our correspondence will not be centered on the topic people might expect from us—Islam. Instead, we will be focusing on the phenomenon commonly referred to as “wokeism.” However, as many have pointed out, wokeism is not entirely different from religion, so our experiences in addressing the excesses of Islam will be highly useful.
In fact, it was my activism with religion that first drove me to investigate this issue many years ago. When I first began speaking publicly about Islam, I quickly found (as did you), that those whom I anticipated would be on our side viewed me with suspicion. My criticisms of Islam were based on the very principles that those liberals claimed to champion, and yet I was swiftly rejected by them. This behavior left me stunned and confused, so I set out to understand it.
Very quickly, it became evident that the hesitancy to critique Islam actually had nothing to do with Islam. Educating my fellow liberals would not be enough—as ignorance was not the root of the problem.
Over the previous few decades, a new ideology had taken hold throughout liberal and progressive circles: writer and cultural critic Wesley Yang called it “the successor ideology,” but now it’s more usually called wokeism. At its core, this ideology is a delegitimization project—and it targets the very foundations of humanist, Enlightenment values. Wokeism is not the only movement to exploit the same programming that makes us vulnerable to religion. But it has achieved astounding success because it has also managed to neutralize liberals, who might otherwise stand against religious impulses, by hijacking our caring instinct, and by ruthlessly exploiting social dynamics to crush dissent.
Before we dive in too deeply, I would like to elaborate on a point I made in a private conversation prior to this exchange, which seemed to surprise you. I will repeat it here for the benefit of our audience: I believe that what we are witnessing is not the dawn of open war, but its conclusion. The woke have won, and decisively. But all is never truly lost, and this is not a prelude to submission. My approach is one of pragmatic optimism: In order to fight this—and we must fight it—we need to understand what lies ahead of us.
Let me briefly attempt to justify my view.
Wokeism has won because it has captured our cultural and sense-making institutions.
Nearly all our educational, media, and non-profit institutions (including major grant-making organizations) are advancing in one direction. Meanwhile, the hearts and minds of the global elite are almost uniformly supportive of this new secular faith.
To give just one example: Although the guillotines posted on his doorstep might indicate otherwise, the richest man in the world is not the enemy of wokeism. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post not Breitbart, and his former wife has pledged to dedicate nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars to causes relating to social justice.
Let me also make a brief analogy with a subject all too familiar to us. We know that jihadists do not appear in a vacuum. They require a degree of permissiveness within their larger context to exist in significant numbers. We can therefore use the number of jihadis from a particular country as a crude measure of the overall level of liberal tolerance within it.
Pulling this analogy back to the “woke,” it is no anomaly that the New York Times can hire and stand by an employee who speaks of white people as “dogs pissing on fire hydrants,” but cannot publish an op-ed by a sitting US congressman without a major staff insurrection. The conditions required for the extremists to thrive already exist. The door is open; they only need to walk through.
One may object, however, and point out that the majority of Americans are not woke. I believe that this is true. I also believe that it doesn’t matter. When so many of our fundamental institutions are in cult-like consensus, when the richest and most powerful among us routinely display public allegiance to one faith, the preferences of the average American are largely irrelevant.
We must adjust our approach accordingly. To put it rather dramatically: we are not meeting the barbarians at the gate; we are rebelling against the empire.
I’ll end this first letter here. I’m excited to explore this topic with you, and would love to hear your thoughts on how we might tackle this issue.
Dear Sarah,
I am delighted that we are having this conversation. For a while I thought I was the only one who saw the parallels between the Islamists and the woke. I agree wholeheartedly that “wokeism” has quite a number of dogmas, rituals, a dedicated priesthood and a fellowship just like a religion. In that respect, I see what you mean when you say that our experiences in addressing the excesses of Islam are useful in understanding wokeism.
However, I must admit that I was slower than you in connecting the dots of the woke faith. While I found the adherents of purist Islam (and still do, by the way) highly motivated, well resourced, insidious and incredibly dangerous, I thought of the woke at first as just bothersome cowards who wanted to appease the Islamists because they were either scared of them or because they wanted the Muslim vote. Even the term “woke” is still relatively new to me. I may have heard it for the first time as recently as 2018. Certainly not earlier.
I have been cancelled many times. As far back as 2006, a group of Dutch professors and other illuminati wrote a letter as a collective to try stop me from speaking, arguing that I was suffering from phobias. On countless occasions, my attempts with my Dutch and other European colleagues to push for the assimilation of immigrant minorities into their host societies was frustrated by people using language that we would call wokeism today.
In response to my attempts to criminalize female genital mutilation, child marriage, forced marriages and honor violence, some feminists claimed that we must not impose our Eurocentric views on immigrants.
Activists and journalists put forth arguments they said were derived from multicultural principles to compel us to respect the customs, faith and ways of doing things in immigrant communities—even if they trapped female members of those communities in poverty, illiteracy and domestic violence. Government officials set aside longstanding norms and granted the dole to young immigrant men who refused to work on religious grounds.
In those decades so called parallel societies emerged in many European countries.
Yet slowly—painfully slowly—sentiment has changed. Arguments that once got me cancelled are now made openly by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron. German politicians no longer defend multiculturalism; they now actively promote programs of integration for reasons I explore in my forthcoming book Prey.
In the same way, I think, the tide will turn against wokeism. And I believe it will turn more swiftly, because wokeism is a far less substantial thing than Islam, one of the world’s three enduring monotheistic faiths.
As I said, at first, I paid little attention to wokeism. Thanks to people like Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, I now see that it is a distinct and quasi-religious ideology. It is interesting to see the symbiotic relationship there has been between the Islamists and the woke. That may be material for another letter. But for now, I want to respond to your words:
When I first began speaking publicly about Islam, I quickly found … that those whom I anticipated would be on our side viewed me with suspicion. My criticisms of Islam were based on the very principles that those liberals claimed to champion, and yet I was swiftly rejected by them. This behavior left me stunned and confused, so I set out to understand it.
My understanding is that you and I mistook many of the woke for true liberals when in fact they are anything but.
I found and still receive abiding support from true liberals. Some are world famous like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens. You may even recall that Theo van Gogh was murdered for his work to help bring about the emancipation of Muslim women. There are many other true liberals—too many to name here—whom I met over the years in various countries whose views are completely aligned with yours and mine.
I bring up the distinction between the true liberals and the woke because I believe this is the reason you are wrong when you argue that the woke have won—that they are the empire now, and the rest of us are the underdog rebels.
As long as there are true liberals out there, I do not think the woke are anywhere near any kind of victory. The key thing to remember is the resilience of the philosophy of liberalism—the sheer strength of the institutions that evolved based on those principles and the strength of the ideas and ideals of universal human rights, individual freedom, the sanctity of life, the rule of law and property rights, the democratic process, free inquiry, science, and free markets.
Islam has mounted a partly successful resistance to all these ideas for centuries, at the price of impoverishing Muslim-majority societies around the world (aside from the ones that were sitting on oil fields).
But wokeism is a far less compelling ideology. Let me give just one example, a quotation from a professor named Sunny Singh, who teaches a creative writing course at London Metropolitan University:
I get regular invites to debate on various platforms. I always say no. Because debate is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion & oppression.
It seems to me that the more the woke turn their fire against true liberals—for example, the author J.K. Rowling—the more they reveal the fundamental intellectual bankruptcy of their cult, and the more they encourage other true liberals to cease the appeasement of wokeism that has characterized the past decade or so.
In short, I am more optimistic than you because I believe both battles—against the Islamists and against the woke—can be won. And the latter are in fact the much weaker foe.
I look forward to your reply.
Warmest,
Ayaan
Yes, my, my, my Corona is Mutating
Scientists in Houston on Wednesday released a study of more than 5,000 genetic sequences of the coronavirus that reveals the virus’s continual accumulation of mutations, one of which may have made it more contagious.
The new report, however, did not find that these mutations have made the virus deadlier or changed clinical outcomes. All viruses accumulate genetic mutations, and most are insignificant, scientists say.
The new study was posted Wednesday on the preprint server MedRxiv. It appears to be the largest single aggregation of genetic sequences of the virus in the United States thus far. A larger batch of sequences was published earlier this month by scientists in the United Kingdom, and, like the Houston study, concluded that a mutation that changes the structure of the “spike protein” on the surface of the virus may be driving the outsized spread of that particular strain.
We know you don’t want to hear this, but Corona is not going away, and there will never be a cure. A vaccine is at least 6 years away (at least a legit one). We have had a flu vaccine for 70 years, and it comes back every year just like clockwork.
We have to come to the grips with the fact that we have to live with Covid-19, and that everyone will eventually get it, just as everyone gets the flu virus, or even the common cold. As with the flu, we are all affected differently–some will have little or no symptoms, some may die.
It is time to move on from this and get back to living again.
NBA to cut ties with Black Lives Matter Thugs
NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced the decision on ESPN’s NBA Countdown on Tuesday evening prior to Game 4 of the NBA Finals between the Lakers and the Heat. He acknowledged the affirmations of their Black Lives Matter initiatives but recognized also the need to refocus on the action.
”My sense is there’ll be somewhat a return to normalcy, that those messages will largely be left to be delivered off the floor, and I understand those people who are saying ‘I’m on your side, but I want to watch a basketball game.”’
Silver’s remarks came on the heels of reports that this year’s Last Dance drew the lowest TV ratings in the history of the NBA Finals. The first three games only averaged a 3.6 rating and 6.65 million viewers. In comparison, last year’s matchup between the Toronto Raptors and the Golden State Warriors had an average rating of 8.8 and more than 15 million viewers.
The league apparently figured out it’s a business after all. The reality is the majority of sports fans (NBA) are white dudes 18 to 45. Maybe calling the majority of your customer base a bunch of racists is not the best marketing move.
The NBA supported the Black Lives Matter movement and other related causes following the furor over the death of George Floyd, which led to riots across the nation. Superstars like LeBron James, Chris Paul, Donovan Mitchell, and Jaylen Brown became more vocal, using social justice as a collective battle-cry.
Reality: sports fans only care about the integrity of the game. Once you lose that, they turn you off. Sports is where they go to escape this non-sense.
Congresswoman Elaine Luria Cosponsors Bipartisan Flood Resiliency and Taxpayer Savings Act
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congresswoman Elaine Luria announced her support for the Flood Resiliency and Taxpayer Savings Act (H.R. 8462). This bipartisan bill will ensure that federal agencies invest in coastal resiliency measures when working in Hampton Roads and Coastal Virginia.
“By requiring federal agencies to plan for future flood risks, we can strengthen coastal resiliency and protect our community from recurrent flooding,” said Congresswoman Elaine Luria. “In Coastal Virginia, climate change is a problem we face every day that threatens our environment, infrastructure, and national security. This bill is an important step in the right direction for the federal government to take meaningful action to protect coastal communities.”
Specifically, the bill:
Directs federal agencies to consider and plan for future flood risk as they evaluate spending federal dollars, including the entire lifespan of a project.
Requires agency leaders, for projects that are currently or in the future will be in flood-prone areas, to use the best available data about current and future flood risk including FEMA maps, state and local data, hydrologic studies, and other information.
In the absence of concrete data, ensures agencies incorporate appropriate safeguards to shield communities (and federal investment) from future damage and loss—such as structure elevation, hardening, nature-based systems, or other mitigation strategies.
In Congress, Congresswoman Luria worked with colleagues from both parties to protect Coastal Virginian communities from rising sea levels and recurrent flooding. Last December, the Coastal and Great Lakes Communities Enhancement Act passed the House with Congresswoman Luria’s amendment to ensure that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers living shoreline projects that support resiliency at military installations. These projects restore and stabilize shorelines, including marshes, wetlands, and other parts of the shoreline ecosystem by using materials such as plants and oyster shells.
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