9/08/2022
9/07/2022
The Medlock Post Ep. 48: The Story of a Family Escaping Communist Hungary
The Medlock Post Ep. 48: The Story of a Family Escaping Communist Hungary
Any time people are able to escape a Communist country, there are many lessons to learn. Listen to the story and learn.
UC Berkeley Law dean slams ‘scourge’ of ‘originalist’ reading of Constitution in LA Times op-ed
Chemerinsky called the 'originalist philosophy' of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork 'nonsensical and dangerous'
In an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, Erwin Chemerinsky, described the "originalist" interpretation of the U.S. Constitution by Supreme Court justices as a "scourge" which is in "ascendency" in the judicial branch.
Chemerinsky attributed the rise in this "scourge" to the conservative justices on the court who have a "cramped reading of history" and as such have done away with abortion rights, protected gun rights, etc.
The Berkeley Law dean opened his piece with an anecdote about a better time in American history when the "Senate resoundingly rejected the nomination of Judge Robert Bork for the Supreme Court because it found his originalist views unacceptable." Chemerinsky described Bork’s views, writing, "As a law professor, Bork argued that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it is adopted and can be changed only by amendment."
Here's the Left's latest Trump-manufactured psychodrama: Victor Davis Hanson
Here's the Left's latest Trump-manufactured psychodrama: Victor Davis Hanson
Hanson details how the Left creates diversion and division
The Secret Curriculum
The Secret Curriculum
School is starting, but don’t count on getting answers about what your child is being taught. School administrators commonly lie or give parents the runaround.
That explains the fireworks over Jeremy Boland, a Greenwich, Connecticut, elementary school assistant principal, bragging about how the school pushes kids to think in a “progressive” way that he hopes will make them Democratic voters.
The school’s hiring process, he explains in a video, is geared to accomplish indoctrination. Prospective teachers who are Catholics or over 30 are disqualified. They’re too set in their ways, he says. Catholics are unlikely to “acknowledge a child’s gender preferences” or go against parents. He says, “You don’t hire them.”
The Work of Virtue
The Work of Virtue
A free republic depends on citizens who can take their prosperity into their own hands.
Mark T. Mitchell has written a book that addresses the specter haunting our decayed and decaying American republic. The title of the book gives that specter an apt name: “plutocratic socialism.” This two-headed creature combines the worst of an imperious oligarchy with the illusions of a socialism that is at once paternalistic, woke, and despotic. The principles of our republic remain admirable and choice-worthy, to be sure, but their presence in our common life has become attenuated with each passing day. The soul of our great republic has become hollowed out, because we have lost touch with the virtues that animate responsible citizenship in a free society.
More fundamentally, we have lost an appreciation of self-government in the most capacious sense of the term. The plentiful rights guaranteed by our constitutional order (and by “Nature and Nature’s God”) too often degenerate into excuses for self-destructive hedonism, veering inconsistently between impulsive self-assertion and debilitating passivity. As Mitchell persuasively argues, rights must be accompanied by the self-limitation that makes political liberty—what Aristotle called “ruling and being ruled”—possible and sustainable. There can be no self-government in the political sense without the governance of the self, and some self-conscious effort to put order in the human soul. Here the classics, Christians, and the American founders have more in common than we sometimes realize. Despite their elevation of rights as the central political category, the founders never broke with the Great Tradition’s understanding that “statecraft is inescapably soulcraft,” to cite the old locution of a more conservative George F. Will.
The Great Regression
The Great Regression
All hail our globalist overlords.
A word of caution is needed about the pretentious and supposedly benign signature title of the Great Reset project. Assume the worst when the adjective “great” appears in connection with envisioned fundamental, government-driven, or global political changes. What was similar between Lyndon Johnson’s massively expensive but failed “Great Society” and Mao’s genocidal “Great Leap Forward” was the idea of a top-down, centrally planned schema, cooked up by elites without any firsthand knowledge, or even worry, how it would affect the middle classes and poor. So often, the adjective “great” is a code word of supposed enlightened planners for radical attempts at reconstruction of a society that must be either misled or forced to accept a complete overhaul.
The Democrats’ Attack On Free Speech
The Democrats’ Attack On Free Speech
Generally, when Democrats disagree, they call people names instead of debating policy. This robs us of the opportunity to debate and come up with a reasonable conclusion. And perhaps we can even learn from each other. That is what American politics is supposed to be.
In recent years the venom from the Democrats has gotten worse. Their insults have gotten more vitriolic; they use less logic and push the idea that all Republicans, Conservatives, and/or Trump supporters are haters who think alike.
Families are facing inflation at record levels. Many economists predict a major food crisis coming in 2023. Agricultural production will cause food shortages as production will be way below expectations all over the planet in 2022, and there will be far less food to go around in 2023. The shortages will create higher inflation on food products. Instead of anticipating or fixing the problems, the Democrats are slandering their opponents, hoping they will back down into submission.
My Colleague Faye Higbee wrote at Conservative Firing Line:
High school students have a strong shot at success with career technical education: 'A win-win'
As the back-to-school season gets underway, one challenge that many parents and educators face each school year is keeping students of all kinds engaged in classroom learning.
One pathway to student engagement at the high school level is career technical education (CTE). It's what many people still think of as "vo-tech" or vocational-technical education. Today, CTE offers a whole world of opportunity, combining the ever-changing demands of today's top industries with the knowledge gained from classroom and on-the-ground training.
Tara Troester, a CTE content lead in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, works with both teachers and industries to create the substance of career tech programs in her area.
Why This East Coast State Is Becoming a Hub of Education Entrepreneurship
Why This East Coast State Is Becoming a Hub of Education Entrepreneurship
When Ben Ashfield and Tammy Tiranasar couldn’t find their preferred educational environment for their two younger children, they decided to build it. Ben works in advertising and Tammy is an artist, but first and foremost they are entrepreneurial parents who want the best for their children. Last fall, the couple took over a vacated classroom space in Mountainside, New Jersey, and created The Village Electric as a full-day, colearning center for local children ages two to twelve, open five days a week. They launched with 45 kids and several teachers.
This year, their program continues to thrive, but Ben and Tammy aren’t content with creating just one alternative learning model that satisfies their family’s needs. They want their space to become an incubator for many other entrepreneurial parents and teachers who wish to build microschools and colearning communities of their own.
Unserious Leadership in A Serious Time
We live in a deeply serious time with deeply unserious leaders.
Historian Niall Ferguson has written that the “extreme violence of the twentieth century” was precipitated by three preconditions: “ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and empires in decline.” It is difficult not to see such preconditions repeating themselves in this century. The West is currently tearing itself apart over concerns about birthrate, immigration and multiculturalism. Economic volatility is raging: After a decades-long reshifting of manufacturing away from the West and a reorientation toward finance and service, the hollowing out of the Western energy sector in pursuit of utopian environmentalism — all punctuated by the Great Recession, the COVID-19 mini-depression and now sky-high rates of inflation — the global economy sits on a razor’s edge.
And then there is the problem of empires in decline.
9/06/2022
By 2080, climate change will make US cities shift to climates seen today hundreds of miles to the south
Down south
“Under current high emissions the average urban dweller is going to have to drive more than 500 miles to the south to find a climate like that expected in their home city by 2080,” said study author Matt Fitzpatrick of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
“Not only is climate changing, but climates that don’t presently exist in North America will be prevalent in a lot of urban areas.”
Read Full Article and please try to control your laughter
Wealth, if managed well, can be a positive good, not just a necessary evil.
Wealth, if managed well, can be a positive good, not just a necessary evil.
9/05/2022
'Socialism in sheep's clothing': Pro-market leaders combat ESG, liberal capture of corporate America
September 5, 2022
'Socialism in sheep's clothing': Pro-market leaders combat ESG, liberal capture of corporate America
ESG investment strategies, increasingly prevalent among large asset management firms, seek to leverage passive investors' assets to steer corporate decision-making to promote progressive social and environmental priorities. ESG has often been compared to the "social credit" system used by China's ruling communist elite to enforce political conformity on its population.
Every region of Chile rejects Communist-drafted constitution promoted by unpopular president
September 5, 2022
Every region of Chile rejects Communist-drafted constitution promoted by unpopular president
Chileans were not impressed by the far-left constitution promoted by President Gabriel Boric, whose disapproval has shot past 50% since he took office in March with only 20% disapproval.
The Economist reports that all 16 regions of Chile voted against the proposal, whose 388 articles would have guaranteed Chileans more than 100 rights from "nutritionally complete and culturally relevant food" to abortion, universal healthcare and the freedom to develop their "personality, identity and life projects."
The constitution, opposed by 62% of voters, would have also imposed a 50% minimum quota for women on elected bodies and created separate governing and justice systems for indigenous Chileans. The drafting convention members were appointed by a leftist coalition that included the Communist Party.
A pro-constitution event a week before the vote featured a drag queen who "had the national flag pulled out of his rectum while his bandmates encouraged the audience to 'abort Chile,'" the Economist reported.
A Massive Economic Storm Is Already Overhead And Nobody Seems To Notice
September 5, 2022
A Massive Economic Storm Is Already Overhead And Nobody Seems To Notice
When ominously dark clouds roll in on a hot afternoon driven by a stiff wind, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to know a storm is coming. Yet the economic equivalent is already overhead, and no one seems to notice.
Many people are worried about the economy, and rightly so. Investors looking to the stock market have no sense of direction as major indices and commodity prices fluctuate violently. Potential homebuyers and existing homeowners alike are seeing the housing market in freefall. Workers can find jobs, but it is difficult to find work where the pay keeps up with inflation.
While all the above are troubling, they are not the scariest harbinger today for a worsening recession.
Control and Ignorance Are the Goals of Public Education … and Parents Are Catching On
A recent viral video from the YouTube channel Fleccas Talks showed several man-on-the-street interviews testing young people in New York City on their knowledge of basic facts. Some of the questions focused on American history and civics, while others were simple, numerical-based ones. The results were depressing, as the following samples demonstrate:
Q: “When was America Founded?” A: “Probably like … 1901?”
Q: “Do you know the capital of the United States?” A: “There’s a capital?”
Q: “How many are in one dozen?” A: “Ten?”
Q: “What’s 3 x 3 x 3?” A: “Nine?”
Democratic Socialist Lawyers
Why Only Christianity Can Save the West… Again
Why Only Christianity Can Save the West… Again
Hellenistic thought experienced its “golden age” during the the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. This period witnessed the lives of some of history’s greatest philosophers, teachers, authors, and playwrights, and culminated with the spreading of Hellenism by Alexander the Great.
But by the end of the 1st century B.C., Hellenistic thought had been exhausted. Its creative energies had dried up; its ideas had lost their life.
As Harvard professor Georges Florovsky noted in 1957:
“The ‘ancient’ Hellenism, in fact, completed its course, and its internal limitations were spectacularly exposed. In all areas of human existence, the ‘ancient Hellenism’ found itself in a desperate impasse.”
An Appeal to Christians for Home Education
An Appeal to Christians for Home Education
I’m sorry to say this, but we live in a nation that seeks to devour children.
You probably already knew that, especially in consideration of the wickedness that has become more prevalent in recent years and taken hold of every facet of our society. There is nothing slowing down the widespread state of evil within our government, our cities, our schools, and even in some of our churches. However, over the last two years, the evil has taken a darker turn as the attacks on our children have escalated.
Consider the following realities in our country now (and please be warned: some of the links here are graphic and disturbing): Activists are now attempting to normalize sex between adults and minors. Doctors have no problem performing medical experiments on kids, and hospitals are performing hysterectomies, double mastectomies, and phalloplastys (where skin on the forearm or thigh is removed to create a non-functioning penis), on young girls.