About Boomer Radicalization

 From The Spectator:

Most terrorists are young men. Whether involved in far-right politics or Islamism, they tend to be recruited early. Around 10 per cent of terror arrests last year were of under-18s. Jack Renshaw, who plotted to kill MP Rosie Cooper was just 23 at the time, while a 17-year-old was convicted in 2020 for planning a ‘race war’ against synagogues in Durham. Jihadi John was in his twenties when he joined Daesh, while Shamima Begum was one of several Brits recruited to the Islamic state in their teens. Often they have flirted with non-ideological violence and been in trouble with the police.

The radicalisation of children and young people is perhaps easy to understand. Young people are impulsive and naïve. They often look for a purpose and an influence beyond their family circle, and are susceptible to the roguish charisma and simplicity preached by those at the extremes. Their families may be neglectful or distant, and they spend a lot of time on the internet, where hate and grooming fester. Those who fall into terror groups are not absolved of culpability, but their journeys are recognisable. The radicalisation of the old is a bit less intuitive. It is, however, happening. (Read more.)

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Paterno and an "UnHappy" Legacy

 Thanks to the journalists who have thoroughly researched this story, of which I heard bits and pieces during the years I lived in State College. While I was living there a young teachers was hideously assaulted around the corner from my house. Considering what a small town it is there have been some terribly violent crimes as well as several disappearances, such as the strange case of the vanished district attorney, Ray Gricar. Although I had (and still have) some good friends there, it was also my misfortune to encounter several sociopaths, in that place called "Happy Valley." From ESPN:

The story of Todd Hodne should have been one of those stories—one that prompted change or at the very least one for which people were held accountable. It should have been a story that elicited outrage, but it wasn't, because the story of the Penn State football player who preyed pitilessly on women even as his team and his coach were competing for the national championship was never told. Like Betsy Sailor, who even after she won in court had to find out that the man who victimized her went on to victimize so many others, the women who suffered at Todd Hodne's hands had to suffer in vain, their pain a missed opportunity cloaked in a secrecy and silence that reverberated decades later.

Ten years ago, when the revelations of the secrets kept by Penn State's athletic department resulted in the conviction of Jerry Sandusky on 45 counts of child sexual abuse involving 10 boys and caused the statue of Paterno at Beaver Stadium to come down, Shelley Gottsagen, who in 1975 had participated in the protests against gang rapes at "the football fraternity," read the coverage expecting a reckoning that never happened: "It stunned me. I really thought, I just made that comment so many times when Sandusky's trial was happening ... I can't believe nobody's dug up what happened in the '70s there. The protests and the rapes—it's gone from history. It stunned me. I really thought, 'Why are they not looking?'" When Karen Zelin, who was working alongside Gottsagen in the 1970s, heard about Sandusky, it almost made sense to her: "This is what was happening then. This was common knowledge among us that things were covered up or ignored." Those incidents with women were the prelude of what was to come, says Joanne Tosti-Vasey, the NOW chapter president who called for Paterno to resign in 2006: "That climate of indifference allowed it [Sandusky's crimes] to happen. It took child sexual assault for the public to become outraged."

At the time of the Sandusky revelations—at the time a 2012 report determined that Paterno failed to respond appropriately when made aware of the accusations against his assistant coach—the general public's understanding was that this was the first time this program had been faced with the prospect of a serial sexual predator in its midst. The belief was that the coaching staff and the administration at Penn State had been caught unawares, that something had happened that they never could have imagined or prepared for.

But that was not the case.

Before Jerry Sandusky, there was Todd Hodne. Before the serial sexual predator who ended Paterno's career, there was the serial sexual predator who left his career untouched. (Read more.)

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How Maryland was Named

Charles I and Henrietta Maria

Just as Marie-Antoinette is unjustly blamed for bankrupting France, Queen Henrietta Maria is unfairly accused of bankrupting England, even in an otherwise accurate article.  Both France in the 1780's and England in the 1640's were bankrupted by wars and by decades of mismanagement that had little to do with the spending habits of the queens. Each queen had a limited budget for their household, and although they sometimes had debts, they did not have open access to the royal treasury as some people imagine. From Aleteia:

Being the Catholic wife of an English monarch was officially impossible then (this prohibition was not revoked until 2015). The price she paid was never being crowned as Queen Henrietta Maria, as she would not endure a Protestant coronation service. Nor was she even called by her correct name very often. The English preferred to call her Mary, and it is through this Anglicization that one of America’s earliest colonies was created.

Mary Land, as it was then known, was founded by a charter from King Charles in 1632. His name had already been used so often that he decided to use his wife’s instead. The most prominent tribute to himself is what later became North and South Carolina (from the Latin for Charles). Charleston, West Virginia, honored a different Charles.

Henrietta Maria was at least allowed to keep part of her original name in the Latin version of Maryland: Terra Mariae. The Charter of Mary Land is a useful reminder of the territorial priorities of English monarchs: “Charles by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland” tells us that the king was still claiming the French throne. The New World was a sideshow.

The land was given to Lord Baltimore, as well as the “fish, whales, sturgeons and all other royal fishes.” Immediately after the clause on fishing and mining rights comes the right to “build and found Churches, Chapells and Oratories.” It was this provision that gave most hope to the persecuted Catholics of 17th-century Great Britain and Ireland. Lord Baltimore was a well-known Catholic whose family’s services to two kings had given him room for religious maneuvering. His intentions for Mary Land were more than commercial. He had selected it as a refuge, and it couldn’t have had a better name. Not only did the new province pay indirect tribute to the Mother of God, who was disapproved of in Protestant England, it was also a reference to a very Catholic queen. (Read more.)

 I always find it hilarious the when the Stuart Kings and Queens of England claimed to be sovereigns of "England, Scotland, France, and Ireland" they had the temerity not only to claim France but mention it after Scotland. Too funny.

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FDA Warns of Grave Dangers of Abortion Pill

 From The National Catholic Register:

The FDA representative anonymously told Politico that the abortion pill mifepristone is “not approved for advance provision of a medical abortion,” because if mifepristone “were prescribed before a patient is pregnant, providers wouldn’t be able to properly oversee care to ensure safety and effectiveness.” The spokesman expressed concern that “if patients were to take mifepristone weeks or months after getting a prescription filled, a medical professional may not be able to assess if a pregnancy is intrauterine or ectopic or date pregnancies properly. The drug is only approved through 70-days gestation for abortions.”

Dr. George Delgado, medical director of Culture of Life Family Healthcare in San Diego, told the Register that for any telehealth or “mail-order medical abortions,” where there is no in-person visit with a doctor, the risks “will be the same as if you buy it ahead of time.”

Those risks include “the possibility of an erroneous diagnosis of pregnancy because a woman is just taking it and not confirming her pregnancy with anybody else” or “inaccurate dating of pregnancy.”

The FDA did not respond by press time to the Register’s questions regarding whether the federal health agency believes the concerns over advance prescription of mifepristone also apply to telehealth prescriptions of the drug and receiving it via mail, particularly in the cases of ectopic pregnancy or ensuring the correct dating of a pregnancy. (Read more.)

 

Abortions are decreasing. From Women of Grace:

 A new report by a pro-abortion group named #WeCount found that the number of abortions dropped dramatically since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade.

According to #WeCount, a national reporting effort dedicated to tracking shifts in abortion access by state since the Dobbs decision, the number of abortions in the U.S. has declined by six percent. In April of 2022, the estimated number of abortions provided by a clinician decreased from 85,020 to 79,620 abortions in August. There were 5,270 fewer abortions in July and 5,400 fewer abortions in August for a total of 10,670 fewer babies who were aborted that month.

The breakdown by states found that states with some abortion restrictions in place saw a decline of 32 percent with the numbers dropping from 13,850 abortions in April to 9,390 abortions in August. This amounted to 6,620 few women who had abortions in those states.

The most dramatic declines were found in states that enacted restrictions or total bans on abortions, including Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin. #WeCount estimated that the number of abortions provided by clinicians in these states or those that restrict abortion to six weeks, decreased from 8,500 abortions in April to 460 abortions in August. In states with bans or severe restrictions, there were 7,870 fewer abortions in July and 8,040 fewer abortions in August, for a total of 15,910 fewer women who had abortions in those states. This change represents a decrease of 95 percent in the number of abortions in those states. (Read more.)

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Birth Control Hormones and the Adolescent Brain

 From IFL Science:

Synthetic hormones, such as those found in contraceptive pills, injections, and patches, may affect brain development during adolescence, according to new research. The study, performed in rats, showed an association between hormonal birth control and higher levels of a stress hormone, as well as signaling changes in the prefrontal cortex. The researchers stress that these findings should not be a cause for alarm for adolescents who are currently taking these medications or their caregivers.

“Birth control has had a major positive impact for women’s health and autonomy – so it’s not that we’re suggesting adolescents should not take hormonal contraceptives,” said senior author Benedetta Leuner in a statement.

“What we need is to be informed about what synthetic hormones are doing in the brain so we can make informed decisions – and if there are any risks, then that’s something that needs to be monitored.”

Previous research has suggested that there could be a link between hormonal birth control and depression. In the new study, the team from Ohio State University specifically looked at the potential effects of contraceptives while the brain is developing in adolescence. According to statistics from The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, almost 5 percent of girls and women aged 15-19 years in the US use a long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) method. Most LARC methods, such as injections and implants, contain synthetic hormones.

While there are efforts to develop long-term male contraceptives (some more out-there than others), the lack of options means that the burden of contraceptive planning still rests primarily on women's shoulders. However, it's also important to note that these products can be prescribed for lots of other reasons, not only for birth control. For example, hormonal contraceptives are a common treatment for heavy periods.

Despite their widespread use, there's still a lot that scientists don’t know about how synthetic hormones may affect the brains of teenagers. “Adolescence is a crucially under-investigated period of dramatic brain change and dramatic hormonal change that we really haven’t understood,” said study author Kathryn Lenz.

In the study, a combination of estrogen and progesterone – hormones commonly used in birth control – was given to adolescent female rats for a period of three weeks. The researchers then took blood samples, and were able to show that the rats had elevated levels of another hormone, corticosterone, compared with untreated animals. This is similar to the human hormone cortisol, known to be associated with stress.

When the rats were exposed to environmental stress and given time to recover, their corticosterone levels remained high. Their adrenal glands were also enlarged; adrenaline, or epinephrine, is another key hormone involved in stress. (Read more.)

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A 'Dangerous Lie'

 From Human Events:

In the latest episode of Human Events Daily, Host Jack Posobiec and Post Millennial Editor-in-Chief Libby Emmons discussed the exit polls numbers revealing that nearly 70% of unmarried women are now leaning left. Posobiec noted that these polls show that Republican candidates were "absolutely slaughtered" in a lot of races by single, unmarried, millennial women. 

"We're also seeing in the demographics that Millennial voters are now the largest voting bloc in the country, having actually surpassed baby boomers," said Posobiec."So why are unmarried millennial female voters going for Democrats by as many as 38 points over conservatives?" he asked Emmons.

"I think this is a really fascinating trend," Libby Emmons said about the results, "and I think that it tracks back decades, when women were sold a false promise that if they leapt into career, if they pursued their own self-determination, their own inner passion and followed their bliss, that they would be really happy."

Emmons argues that this is not true, that rather than these women ending up happy, they're going to end up unhappy and bitter. "I think our culture has done women, and young men as well, a total disservice by telling them that there's no reason at all to prioritize love, that we should not prioritize family, that we should not prioritize fulfillment through raising the next generation. It's a dangerous lie, and it's dangerous for our culture." (Read more.)

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St. Augustine and J.R.R. Tolkien

From The Imaginative Conservative:

Like many Englishmen, he feared a world divided in two, in which the smaller peoples would be swallowed. Only fifteen years earlier, in reaction to the Teheran Conference, Tolkien had written: “I heard of that bloodthirsty old murderer Josef Stalin inviting all nations to join a happy family of folks devoted to the abolition of tyranny and intolerance!” One would be blind to miss Tolkien’s disgust. “I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you). The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be one blasted little provincial suburb.” Soon, he feared, America would spread its “sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production” throughout the world.[3] Neither “ism”—corporate consumer capitalism or communism, both radical forms of materialism—seemed particularly attractive to Tolkien, a man who loved England (but not Great Britain!) and who loved monarchy according to medieval conventions, while hating statism in any form.

Indeed, as with St. Augustine as the barbarians tore through Rome’s gate on August 24, 410, at midnight, Tolkien looked out over a ruined world: a world on one side controlled by ideologues, and, consequently, a world of the Gulag, the Holocaust camps, the Killing fields, and total war; on the other: a world of the pleasures of the flesh, Ad-Men, and the democratic conditioners to be found, especially, in bureaucracies and institutions of education. Both east and west had become dogmatically materialist, though in radically different fashions. In almost all ways, the devastation of Tolkien’s twentieth-century world was far greater than that of St. Augustine’s fifth-century world. At least barbarian man believed in something greater than himself. One could confront him as a man, a man who knew who he was and what he believed, however false that belief might be. “I sometimes wonder,” C.S. Lewis once mused, “whether we shall not have to re-convert men to real Paganism as a preliminary to converting them to Christianity.”[4] Twentieth-century man, led by fanatic ideologies, used state-sponsored terror to murder nearly 200 million persons outside of war. War in the same century claimed another 38.5 million persons.[5] Simply put, the blood ran frequently and deeply between 1914 and Tolkien’s death in 1973.

Despite the fifteen centuries separating the lives of the two men, Tolkien’s own world view closely paralleled that of St. Augustine’s, and the attentive reader finds much in common between the City of God and Tolkien’s larger mythology of Middle-earth. Tolkien would have received his understanding of St. Augustine from his boyhood upbringing in the Birmingham Oratory, founded by the most famous nineteenth-century convert to Roman Catholicism, John Henry Newman. After Tolkien’s mother passed away in 1904, Father Francis Morgan, a priest of the Oratory and friend of Newman’s, became Tolkien’s legal guardian.[6] Certainly, St. Augustine had influenced Newman in a number of ways. In his Apologia, for example, Newman admitted that “the main Catholic doctrine of the warfare between the City of God and the powers of darkness had been deeply imposed upon” him. To Newman, nineteenth-century liberalism and philosophic utilitarianism were the harbingers of a secular, modern City of Man, and God would not stay his wrath. “A confederacy of evil, marshalling its hosts from all parts of the world, organizing itself, taking its measures, enclosing the Church of Christ as in a net, [was] preparing the way for a general Apostacy from it,” Newman feared in 1838.[7] Though the Cardinal never lived to see his fears realized, Tolkien did. Tolkien even experienced the horrors of modernity first hand in the trenches at the Somme. (Read more.)

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He's Still the One

Hold firm, patriots! From Compact:

Only Trump defied the deep state empowered by his Republican predecessors. Only Trump has broken from the disastrous foreign policy championed by the conservative movement. Only Trump has taken on the mania for free trade and outsourcing. No other figure of the right has shown the same willingness to break with his own side’s orthodoxies.

Trump’s opponents on the right often describe themselves as “principled” conservatives. But this is no cause for boasting when one’s principles are bankrupt. The policies pursued by GOP elites since the Reagan era had plunged the nation into costly wars while accelerating the decline of the middle class. Trump promised to punish the architects of these failures. His rhetoric evoked the party’s older Eisenhower-Nixon tradition, which made peace with the New Deal and pursued realism and restraint abroad.

Trump resisted the security apparatus, which sought to keep him from office and then to remove him from it. He also disrupted the broad trend toward depoliticization. From immigration to transnational governance, elites in the years before Trump had removed fundamentally political questions from the realm of political contestation. Voters’ voices on these issues mattered far less than the determinations of elites wielding market rationality and supposedly non-political “expertise”—which just happened to serve their own interests. Trump’s rise promised a return of the political as such. So would his second term.

Trump also exposed the carnage caused by the neoliberal turn in American political economy and the neoconservative turn in foreign policy. For starters, there was the disaster of the post-9/11 wars, which most Republicans defended to the hilt—until Trump came around. “Obviously, the war in Iraq is a big, fat mistake,” Trump declared at a primary debate in South Carolina in 2016. “We have destabilized the Middle East.” The right’s foreign-policy experts were aghast. Yet Trump channeled the anger of military families and millions of others wondering what, exactly, the sacrifice had been for.

In 2019, when Iran shot down a US drone over the Strait of Hormuz, several of Trump’s top advisers—including conservative luminaries John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Mike Pence—supported a retaliatory strike. Trump nixed the attack, pointing out that killing an estimated 150 would not be “proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.” In this and other moments, Trump showed more good sense than the supposed experts.

Then there was the Reaganite establishment’s support for free trade, which had weakened labor organizations and hollowed out the nation’s manufacturing capacity. Once-vibrant industrial regions became desiccated wastelands, strewn with the corpses of the opioid-addled, haunted by memories of good union jobs. Trump—to his credit—sounded more like progressive critics of globalization from the 1990s and early 2000s than any conventional Republican.

Once in office, he tapped Robert Lighthizer, a critic of unfair trade practices, as US trade representative. Trump imposed $350 billion in tariffs, pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (prompting Bernie Sanders to say, “I am glad the Trans-Pacific Partnership is dead and gone”), and renegotiated NAFTA in ways favorable to the United States.

Trump also broke from the right on entitlements. Under the Bush-Romney regime, the GOP had sought to privatize Social Security—the perennial fetish of libertarian extremists and Wall Street fee-skimmers. Trump disagreed. Addressing local radio in Wisconsin, the home state of then-House Speaker and arch-libertarian Paul Ryan, Trump said, “I’m not going to cut” Social Security, “and I’m not going to raise ages, and I’m not going to do all of the things that [Republicans] want to do.”

When Republicans had control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, conservatives pushed for entitlement “reform.” But as Ryan later complained, Trump disagreed. “He and I fought about Medicare and entitlement reform all the time,” Ryan said. “It became clear to me there was no way he wanted to embrace that.” Trump boasted of this record in 2020, telling voters, “I will protect your Social Security and Medicare, just as I have for the past three years.” (Read more.)

Don't blame Trump. There was a lot more at play. From Senator-elect J.D. Vance at The American Conservative:

Of course, no man is above criticism. But the quick turn from gobbling up credit to vomiting blame suggests there is very little analysis at work. So let’s try some of that.

Let’s start with an obvious caveat: there is a lot we don’t know. Precinct level data is still outstanding in most states, and exit polls are notoriously finicky. Votes are still being counted out west. We’re still ignorant about a lot. But any effort to blame Trump—or McConnell for that matter—ignores a major structural advantage for Democrats: money. Money is how candidates fund the all-important advertising that reaches swing voters, and it’s how candidates fund turnout operations. And in every marquee national race, Republicans got crushed financially.

The reason is ActBlue. ActBlue is the Democrats’ national fundraising platform, where 21 million individual donors shovel small donations into every marquee national race. ActBlue is why my opponent ran nonstop ads about how much he “agreed with Trump” during the summer. It is why John Fetterman was able to raise $75 million for his election.

Republican small dollar fundraising efforts are paltry by comparison, and Republican fundraising efforts suffer from high consultant and “list building” fees—where Republicans pay a lot to acquire small-dollar donors. This is why incumbents have such massive advantages: much of the small-dollar fundraising my own campaign did went to fundraising and list-building expenses. If and when I run for reelection, almost all of it will go directly to my campaign. Democrats don’t have this problem. They raise more money from more donors, with lower overhead. (Read more.) 

Whoever the GOP nominee is will be demonized by the Left. From Just the News:

"Six out of 10 Republicans wanted President Trump to run again," John McLaughlin said on the John Solomon Reports podcast this week. "If he does run again, they say they support him 77 to18. If he was running against Joe Biden, he was beating Biden 50 to 43. If he was up against Kamala Harris, it would be 52 to 41."

While the polls seem to indicate that Republicans would prefer former President Trump to be the nominee, McLaughlin acknowledged that the GOP is divided on candidate choices roughly two years out from the next presidential election.

"The sad part for the Republicans is they were split," McLaughlin explained. "Going into the election while Democrats got behind people like Fetterman, there was a euphemism among unnamed Republicans in the media, who would say it was the quality of the candidates. They didn't like Trump's antics. So we're still having primaries in effect and we're divided when we're trying to take the house and the Senate."

Trump this week lobbed shots against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin on his TRUTH social network, claiming that both governors only won their elections because of him. (Read more.) 

 

Time to re-board the Trump Train, in spite of all the naysayers. From The National Pulse:

Last night was the first time Trump was able to say those things to major national television audiences since the corporate media stopped carrying his rallies, years ago. It was right that Trump should have used the occasion to not just speak to his base, but to speak to the millions of Americans from whom he has been hidden.

There is now – already – a massive, new, and dirty campaign against Trump. From people who grifted off him, like Ed Rollins and Mike Pence, to people he has brought immense amounts of wealth to, like Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos. That these forces are singing from the Never Trump hymn sheet, in unison, should serve as enough of a warning to ordinary conservatives and independents. They are not your friends. They do not have your best interests at heart.

But more interesting is the hurried response from Team Biden, and his fluffers at The Lincoln Project. They are already deploying major advertising resources into attacking Trump on television and social media. Which tells you everything you need to know. They are not this afraid – in fact they are not afraid at all – of Mike Pompeo, or Nikki Haley, or whoever else inevitably throws their hat into the ring during the upcoming primary season. (Read more.)

And once again, don't blame Trump. From Raheem Kassam:

A flurry of phone calls and texts at 2am taught me that some long-standing MAGA stalwarts are now preparing to ditch Donald Trump because they didn’t get the flood of feel good results last night. This attitude is incorrect, and sober analysis proves it.

The “OMG RED WAVE!!!” brigade are now the most vociferously disappointed. They set expectations so high – all the while carrying water for a Republican National Committee and party leadership led by the deeply unpopular Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell and Ronna Romney McDaniel. Now they’re upset.

Up and down the country, McLeadership candidates and strategies came up short of expectations. Not even all that short, to be fair. But still, deflating enough that people are already playing the blame game. Two can play.

Firstly, DC-based Republicans think its enough to run against something, rather than for something. They also fundamentally underestimated the appeal of Democrat messaging on abortion, student loan forgiveness, and the cringe-inducing “our democracy”. Honestly, we all did. People really are getting dumber and more pliant and there’s no ignoring that anymore, especially when you see how the TikTok generation turned out, and broke for the far-left. Congratulations, by the way, to Communist China for their apparently totally legal and unchallenged election interference, while CNN staffers shriek about how Elon Musk is trying to charge $8 for the very same verification processes they’ve been outwardly demanding for a decade. Argh.

There’s no need either, to sugarcoat Trump’s “bad endorsements”. As if the GOP field offering a choice between Dr. Oz and Dina Powell’s husband was Trump’s fault. Kathy Barnette may have been better, but her star rose too late. Expecting the man the RNC consistently demands to “stay out of it” to simultaneously tread lightly and deploy massive resources to deliver the same McLeadership who worked against him in office is asinine. And imagine what some of these results would have looked like without Trump’s rallies and assistance. Please. (Read more.)

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Climate Activists Throw Oil on Klimt Painting

Even the Soviets respected great art. From Art News:

Climate activists in Vienna took to the Leopold Museum, where they splashed oil on a treasured Gustav Klimt painting. The work itself was not damaged. The gesture is one of a string of recent ones intended to push governments across the world to take quicker action to combat the effects of climate change. Past actions have seen tomato soup hurled at a van Gogh in London, mashed potatoes tossed at a Monet in Germany, and maple syrup spilled on an Emily Carr in Vancouver. The action on Tuesday was done by Letzte Generation, the Germany-based group that also conducted the Monet action. (Read more.)

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