Islam is an appalling religion. By far the worst of the big ones.

It is savagely cruel in both theory and practice.

Now that the fanatical Taliban sect is taking complete power over Afghanistan, advancing daily as the US military withdraws from the country, Afghan women will be slaves, downtrodden, exploited, abused, killed at the whim of men or by Islamic law, which prescribes agonizing methods of execution. They can be easily divorced and abandoned. Their children can be taken from them. They will be denied education and medical treatment. (They may not be treated by male doctors, and will not be allowed to train as doctors.) They may not go to work outside their homes, so if they are divorced or widowed and have no male relations to earn money to keep them, they are sentenced to death by starvation.

Afghan women who have been working with the American army will be put to death.

Consider this story of one brave strong American woman trying to save one Afghan woman.

Phyllis Chesler tells her story at the excellent site of Steven Emerson, The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

I have been on email with this one women in Kabul both day and night.

“After international forces leave Afghanistan,” she wrote, “my life will be in danger so I once more kindly request you to save my life. Their withdrawing will be life threatening for all those women and girls who worked with international organizations and were social activists. I am one of those girls.”

Few single Afghan women will leave with smugglers on their own. And for good reason. Smugglers will probably rape, rob, and abandon a woman. Life in refugee camps is similarly dangerous. The only safe way an Afghan woman can leave at this point—and with her family’s blessing—would be on a military transport with someone waiting to receive her, and a process in place so that she can live and work while she applies for political asylum. This is the only route which does not require the almost impossible-to-obtain special or America-related visa. If one has not worked for an American NGO or the American military directly, one cannot apply for a visa. I’m told that if an Afghan woman wants to apply for a “special” visa, she must travel to a third country and remain there for a year.

There are thousands of Afghan women who have hosted Afghan radio and television programs (as my woman in Kabul has), and who have written for Afghan newspapers. There are physicians, nurses, teachers, police officers, politicians, scientists, athletes, etc. What will become of them under Taliban rule?

Perhaps America and the West stayed “in country” too long. In 20 years, we neither found bin Laden hiding in an Afghan cave nor were we able to extinguish or moderate Taliban warlord values. They are quintessential Islamists who live to fight, kill, and die “for Allah”. 

But, at the same time, the presence of Western military boots on the ground allowed countless Afghan civilians, especially women, to succeed educationally and professionally. They enjoyed a taste of what Western post-Enlightenment civilization has to offer. We are now abandoning them to the Middle Ages. 

What else can we do? We cannot afford to airlift half the Afghan population and settle them in the West.

The moment the last Western military boot leaves Afghanistan, the remaining shelters for battered women and schools for girls will be torched, one by one, as will the women who dared to run these enterprises.

And yes, the Taliban will shelter and train anti-Western terrorists from all over the world.

Does all this mean that the US should keep a military presence in the country forever?

If not that, is there anything Americans should do, at least for the women?

Is there anything Americans could do for them?

(From PowerLine.)

The Supreme Court has no way of enforcing its rulings.

It depends totally on the legislative and executive branches of government to enforce them.

If, as now, a party takes power (“takes”, not “wins”, being the right word for how the Democratic Party has come to have it) over both the legislative and executive branches and chooses not to obey the Supreme Court, there is nothing that can be done about it. Nothing. 

The Framers of the Constitution never imagined it could happen.

Now the Democrats in power know that they need not go to the trouble of packing the Supreme Court, they can simply disobey it. Ignore it. And that’s what they’re doing.

The Court ruled that a moratorium forbidding eviction for non-payment of rent is illegal – but the “Biden” administration went ahead with it.

The  period of the moratorium was due to end about now, but the administration has decided to extend it. Again the Court has declared that it is illegal. Again the administration has imposed it.

Imposed it how? Not even by administrative order of “President Biden”.  A  woman, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who heads the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has issued the order. And the administration gladly enforces the rulings of the CDC.

Landlords may not demand rent from tenants. But they must continue to pay property taxes and maintenance costs.

One of the few journalists who have chosen to tell the public about this is John Daniel Davidson who writes (in part) at The Federalist:

An astonishing thing happened this week in Washington that didn’t get much critical coverage from a media establishment loath to criticize President Biden. At the behest of congressional Democrats, Biden flouted the Constitution and broke his oath of office by issuing a ban on evictions that he and his advisers know to be illegal.

By “ban on evictions” I mean the president issued a blatantly unconstitutional decree that renters all across America don’t have to pay rent. If landlords try to evict tenants for not paying rent, they could face criminal penalties including fines and imprisonment.

The eviction moratorium is one of the most important stories of the COVID-19 lockdowns but also one of the least covered, because the left doesn’t want to draw undue attention to its evisceration of property rights under the guise of public health.

Nationwide nearly half of the landlords are people who own a second house or apartment that they rent out. Many of these people have gone a year without receiving any rent, yet they’re still liable for taxes, upkeep, and mortgage payments. Landlords  are supposed to be able to survive because of a $46.5 billion federal government rental relief fund. The problem is, the money isn’t being used. With trillions of government aide already creating incentives for people not to return to work, the eviction moratorium creates an incentive not to pay rent.

The way all this has gone down illustrates a deeply disturbing reality about the Democrats running the pandemic response in Washington: They’re lawless, and as the pandemic drags on, they’re becoming bolder about it.

The background here is that a nationwide ban on evictions expired on Saturday. Since then, Democrats in Congress have been agitating for an extension of the ban despite a determination by the U.S. Supreme Court in June that the CDC has no legal authority to do that, as anyone with a passing familiarity of the U.S. Constitution could tell you.

The utter contempt for the rule of law shown in all of this is simply staggering.

The notion that a federal agency tasked with the control and prevention of infectious diseases could simply by fiat impose an “eviction moratorium” on the entire country, effectively nationalizing housing, is shocking and outrageous. Biden himself knows this. At a press conference on Tuesday, he said “The bulk of the constitutional scholars say it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster.”

It sure isn’t. But later that same day he did it anyway.

*

What all this means is that America is no longer a democracy, no longer a free republic. It is a dictatorship.

This country is now governed dictatorially. 

The power to dictate is in the hands of an oligarchy.

The oligarchs are the very rich. The richest men who have ever lived. They are technocrats who own the means of mass communication, newspapers, television news media, the “social” media. They own the politicians through whom they will transform the world.

So it is a plutocratic oligarchy.

The plutocrats are almost all men. Their executive consists increasingly of women: women governors, public prosecutors, mayors, police chiefs, member of congress, cabinet members, directors of government agencies. Lifted into office by the oligarchs, one could reasonably call them the dictators’ “temps” – the Grand Temps of the American oligarchy.

And there is nothing that can be done to bring the dictators down.

Vote them out of power? Can we really believe that there will be fair elections ever again? If a (constitutionally required) election is held at all, it will be rigged. On the excuse that there is a dangerous virus threatening the nation so that voters must keep far apart from each other – which,  the CDC will assure them, they must do to survive – elections will be by mail and “drop box” only. Staff under the Grand Temps will collect the ballot sheets, count them in closed offices, and announce the result: a huge majority (why not 100%?) for the re-election of the oligarchs’ chosen executors.

It is more than likely that the position of Oligarch will become hereditary. Then it will be an aristocratic oligarchy. Who knows but there may even be a monarch?

The dictators of the twentieth century – Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Mugabe, Chavez – became rich by becoming dictators.

The new American oligarchic dictators became rich first, then became dictators.

They will not be satisfied with dictatorial power over America. They are “globalists”. They desire global power. Plutocrats from everywhere on earth meet at Davos, and it was there, in the small Swiss town on a mountain, that the decision was taken to “reset” the way human beings will live and how they will be governed.

The world they intend to create is very different from the world we have known.

There will be no nation states. No borders. The impoverished peoples of what was once called the Third World will continue for a time to move in vast numbers into what used to be called the First World. It does not matter to the oligarchs where people settle. The oligarchic power will extend over them all wherever they may be.

Individuals, other than the oligarchs, will own nothing. No house, no money, no clothes, no car … Not even an electric car. Not even a bicycle. Everything will be provided for them by the Global Oligarchy. What they “need” will be decided by their masters.

They will be allowed the temporary use of things – clothes, maybe a bicycle.

They will be housed, each in a tiny apartment in a vast building. (Herding people together is useful for the spreading of disease when population needs to be reduced.) They will be fed communally. There will be no families.  Breeding will be controlled. Children will be raised by staff of the Oligarchy.

Only some children will be taught to read and write and reckon. All will be taught obedience to the authorities.

Adults will be assigned jobs. The product of their labors will be distributed by the authorities.

A permanent aristocracy will rule over a world of slaves.

Nothing new, stupidity in power. More the general rule than the rare exception.

Think of the First World War. A greater blood-letting than the human race had ever achieved before in all our blood-stained history. Death the only victor. Virtually a whole generation of young men wiped out. Why? For what? To gratify the vanity of a bunch of stupid monarchs. Stupid, vain monarchs and the leaders of a couple of stupidly governed republics.

But their stupidity was not deliberate. Not chosen as a preference over wisdom. Never until now have governments decided that stupidity is a chief qualification for high office. 

But now it is, in America.

Now, in America, under a leftist Democrat federal government – the stupidest government the republic has ever had with a doofus gone senile for a president, a cackling fool for a vice president, a childishly vindictive harpy for speaker of the House, all supported by mass media staffed with parrots and toadies – generations are being raised to be ignorant and dumb. Illiteracy and innumeracy will be conditions of honor; ability, talent, mastery, mere proofs of “white privilege” and “white supremacist” ambition.

Joel Kotkin writes at the American Mind on the intentional stupidifying of Americans:

Our educational deficit with other countries, notably China, particularly in the acquisition of practical skills in mathematics, engineering medical technology, and management, has grown, threatening our economic and political pre-eminence. Our competitors … are focused on economic competition and technological supremacy. In math, the OECD’s 2018 Program for International Student Assessment found the United States was outperformed by 36 countries, [including] not only China, but also Russia, Italy, France, Finland, Poland, and Canada.

Only 5 percent of American college students major in engineering, compared with 33 percent in China; as of 2016, China graduated 4.7 million STEM students versus 568,000 in the United States, as well as six times as many students with engineering and computer science bachelor’s degrees.

“In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields,” Apple CEO Tim Cook has observed …

The skills shortage may be even more profound on the factory floor. Due to an aging workforce, as many as 600,000 new manufacturing jobs expected to be generated this decade cannot be filled. The percentage of the skilled manufacturing work force over the age of 55 has doubled in the last 10 years to 20 percent of active workers. And there is no deep bench of talent waiting to replace retirees—50 percent of the active workers are above the age of 45. The current shortage of welders, now 240,000, could grow to 340,000 by 2024. Manufacturing employment is expanding more rapidly than in almost four decades but there are an estimated 500,000 manufacturing jobs unfilled right now.

To maintain our factories, offices, and laboratories, America needs more rigorous training, not less, and greater emphasis on skills and the ethic of work.

But more rigorous training, an emphasis on skills, an ethic of work are not on the schedule of those who make the big decisions. The Democrats in power believe – have always believed since their slave-owning days, their Ku Klux Klan days, their days of Jim Crow laws – that Blacks are intellectually inferior to Whites. In recent decades, still looking down on Blacks but opting to be charitable to them rather than cruel as of old, they have insisted that Blacks must be given special concessions, special advantages, to help them compete with Whites. And now they are going much further in their folly. Blacks can’t compete in exams, they say, so abolish exams. Further still: Whites and Asians must be handicapped so that Blacks can surpass them in academic achievement and governmental power. For Blacks to be elevated, Whites must be brought down. Blacks must be honored as eternal victims; Whites execrated as eternal oppressors.

That lie, that racist lie, is what Democrats insist they must be taught. That false and perilous belief – not literacy, not numeracy, not the acquisition of skills – is, they say, the business of education, from first grade to college.

They call it Critical Race Theory.

Kotkin deplores the effects of it:

Critical Race Theory is re-enforcing, and enhancing, a long-developing pattern of educational failure ever more evident. …

The current educational philosophy has purposely downplayed the acquisition of skills by scrapping such things as exit exams, or clearly comparable measures of achievement. …

Critical Race Theory and its growing chorus of implementers—from the highest reaches  of academia down to the grade school level—have little use for practical skills acquisition and brook little dissent from teachers and researchers who raise objections to the new curriculum of racial grievance. ‘Woke” educators, like San Francisco’s School board member Alison Collins, claim that meritocracy [is an] essentially racist system. Some denounce habits of punctuality, rationality, and hard work as reflective of racism and white privilege.

In a world where brainpower pushes the economy, the denigration of [such] habits of mind can only further weaken our economic future and undermine republican institutions. Even though the vast majority of corporate executives perceive a growing skills gap, they have failed to stop educators from abandoning skills in favor of ever greater emphasis on race and gender. …

The new educational mandarins, increasingly strident and increasingly influential, have little use for our [cultural] inheritance, which they consider little more than a screen for racists and misogynists. The Western classics, no longer celebrated, are at best fodder for deconstruction. Yale English majors no longer have to study Shakespeare or Chaucer, while you can get a classics degree at Princeton without learning Greek or Latin.

For years, humanities have been molded by post-modernist ideology, but now even the sciences are becoming, as in Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China, politicized. One would think the tech oligarchs at least would advocate for a well-educated domestic technical workforce. But secure in their wealth and power, the new hegemons feel little fealty to traditional ideas about competition and merit; some, including Bill Gates, openly support groups that promote the idea that science and math are themselves racist for focusing on grades and performance. A new Canadian math curriculum stresses the way in which [math] works “to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges” …

So now there is not knowledge, a pool of learning common to all humankind, but race-differentiated “knowledges”, all equal in value.

The goal is to “decolonialize” math, which is ironic, to say the least, given the huge role of Indian and Arabs in generating the symbols and concepts critical to the understanding of numbers.

Rather than science based on evidence and argument, we now get something closer to Science as Revealed Religion [most notably] on issues like the pandemic and climate change.

Government and their allies in the oligarchy, the media, and academia … have transformed science into fallacies that turn unsupported assertions into “accepted truths”.

As the concepts of objectivity, debate, and merit decline, even talent is now seen as yet another “social construct” of our “corrupt society”. Asian parents have to fight off attempts to eliminate merit for admission to elite high schools …

The pushback against the war on merit won’t come from the craven masters of Wall Street or Silicon Valley but from the grassroots, operators of small businesses, new and old, and most importantly, from parents. Most American voters—by wide margins—reject the notion of teaching Critical Race Theory in schools, even though the effort is supported by most Democrats, the powerful teachers’ unions … and the White House. 

Without knowledgeable, motivated, and skilled workers, America’s future will be dismal. … Merit has to be restored …

Has to be, yes. But will be? When? How?