Gruszecki Surname, Peerage, List of Noble Families

Gruszecki Surname, Peerage, List of Noble Families

Having been born with a Polish surname like Gruszecki, it has been interesting through the years to hear American English speakers murder the pronunciation.  It’s groo-zek-eee in English, and groo-zshets-eee in Polish or Russian.  Since Polish was the first language that I heard from my mother, who was born there, the Slavic combined consonants that twist American English speakers’ tongues come somewhat naturally to me.

I’ve always looked the name up when I travelled in the past, but I could never find it in the phone books of any large cities like New York City, London, Paris, Rome or various other large western cities.  Until about the 1980’s when suddenly there were Gruszeckis all over this and other countries.  Someone, somewhere, “went and multiplied”.

I joined Ancestry.com several years back, and traced my paternal and maternal lines back as far as I could, which meant as far back as this country (Ellis Island, etc.), would allow.  The trail ended in Europe, at least as far as normal research was concerned.  There was no way without accessing records from Poland without going there, and even then, there were no guarantees, since Nazis and Russians had both occupied that part of Poland, and it was dubious as to what records still existed.

All of the above was several years ago.  A recent dive into Ancestry.com revealed that now, a raft of genealogical records were available in Poland in digital form, online, since the Roman Catholic church had made available their birth, marriage and death records going back for several centuries.  The Gruszecki surname has primarily Catholic, but also some Jewish roots.  I was able to trace the family lines in Poland back to the early 1800’s.

Another thing I recently found was that the Gruszecki name Is rooted in Polish peerage, and derives from the knight Maciej – Chorąży, or flag bearer, of the King of Poland Jogaila.   The King had given him the village Gruszka Duża, in eastern Poland, in favor of knightly merit, in 1411, presumably after the definitive battle of Grunwald, or Tannenberg, which defeated and drove back the Teutonic Knights.

The Gruszecki name appears in lists of both noble Polish and Russian families.  The Gruszecki coat of arms: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruszecki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Polish_noble_families

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Russian_noble_families

Ray Gruszecki

April 28, 2019

Measles in 2019?

Measles in 2019?

Measles? Malaria? Smallpox? Plague? These are diseases that were wiped off the face of the earth by advances in science and medicine and inoculation techniques developed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  And along came Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962, and the ensuing environmental hysteria, and lo and behold, DDT was banned and malaria was back.  Tens of millions died of malaria in Africa and South Asia.

In the 1950’s pseudo-science postulated a perceived and anecdotal link between MMR vaccination of 12-18 month-old toddlers, and the onset of autism.  Basically, “if autism happens when the child is vaccinated, the vaccine must have caused the autism”.  The popular press, fueled by the environmental movement, picked up and spread this idea, creating a marked resistance over the years to vaccinating children.  Hence, the return of measles as a public health concern, right now, in the NY/NJ area.

There are similar other deleterious ramifications of the environmental movement that are based on pseudo-science, rumors, falsehoods and politics, rather than on scientific or medical principles.  For example, addition of GMO’s to crops to increase yields to feed the world is a case in point of such a charged issue, as are politicized discussions around the human role in climate change.

Ray Gruszecki

April 26, 2019

Bernie

Bernie

I watched Bernie Sanders, the old snake oil salesman make his pitch last night for socialism in an hour long Fox News Town Hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  As I’ve said before, this guy is no dummy.  He came out of Brooklyn to Vermont with his Marx, Alinsky, Russell and Debs firmly tucked away in his repertoire. He makes his pitch to the average person so appealing and sugar coated, that I was almost saying “where do I sign?”.

Forgetting the anti-Trump rhetoric, socialism always starts out with dissatisfaction of the status quo, and with idealistic promises for the future.  Everyone is entitled to “free stuff”, particularly those that are deemed to have been culturally denied in the past.  This includes free health care, free abortion, free education and a myriad of other free social services, including a guaranteed job and at least a $15/hr minimum wage.  Additional little fillips are “wealth taxes” on “the rich” and on successful corporations, reparations for minorities and forgiveness of college loan debt.


How are these all to be paid for?  Why, by increased taxation, of course, coupled with a redistribution of wealth from the capitalist “fat cats”.  In other words, socialism proposes to penalize the wealthy innovators to provide “free stuff” to everybody else, including those who are idlers in society.


Obviously this does not come naturally, so other means are necessary.  It is absolutely essential to take the guns away and disarm everyone.  Speech disagreeing with “politically correct” social justice mundanity must be curtailed and termed as fascist or “white supremist”.  Laws against emigration and movement by wealthy people and companies need to be enacted.  Stronger government and erosion/cancellation of individual and civil rights must lead the body politic toward totalitarianism and away from any remnants of democracy.  These drastic measures are necessary because taxation can only go so far.  Confiscation requires a strong, dictatorial government.  Socialism, communism and fascism require a commitment to the use of force.  You cannot decide what to do with the other guy’s money unless you are committed to use force to take that money from him. All socialist programs are mandatory and enforced by the government.  This is the reality of socialism — a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny.


So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why socialism never works in the long term, and always leads to the Maduros, Stalins, Maos, Castros and other dictatorial butchers, and to the deaths of over 120 million of their own people in the 20^th century.  Alternatively, socialism/communism morphs into market-oriented dictatorships like China, Vietnam and Laos.


 And yet socialism is no longer a parlor game for academics but a political alternative taken seriously by millennials and other thinkers, who don’t recognize that much of what they enjoy in life is a result of free market capitalism and would disappear if socialism were to be implemented.  We can maybe excuse some youngsters like AOC’s naiveté because of youth and inexperience.  How do we excuse people like Bernie, Markey, Krugman, Reich and others who should know better?


Ray Gruszecki

April 16, 2019

Why Leftist Hatred

Why Leftist Hatred

We Americans have always had political parties, to reflect our disagreements.  From Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, through Henry Clay’s Whigs and Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, and on, to Lincoln’s Republicans and a continuation of the Jackson Democrats, finally nuanced by history to our current Republicans and Democrats.

Most times, and ideally, we were able to debate and settle our differences at the ballot box, and within the framework of our government, but not always.  In the mid nineteenth century, we had a debilitating war costing nearly a quarter million American lives over our differences.  Sometimes, as in the mid twentieth century, riots in the streets and burning cities related to civil rights and the Vietnam war punctuated our disagreements.

So, by those precedents, the current rift and rancor in our politics may seem mild by comparison. 

Well, it doesn’t feel mild.  One has to ask the question, why does the secular, “woke” left hate republicans and particularly conservatives and libertarians, with such an unreasoned, burning hatred, which is now exacerbated and magnified by that big target, Donald Trump?  This irrational hatred is not reciprocated by most of the opposing right, who certainly disagree with the other side on issues, but are normally willing to debate these issues in a rational and civilized fashion. The left will not debate.  They cling to their world-changing belief with a religious fervor.  They “unfriend” people.  They punctuate their radicalism by denying free speech at our universities, by violence in our streets and by continuing lies in the mainstream media.  Any efforts to counter their hardly camouflaged groupthink movement is termed by the shopworn epithet, “racist”.

It almost seems as if this continuing hatred of the right is rooted in an inability by the leftists to accept the results of the 2016 election.  They refuse to acknowledge that Trump won the election, and that in spite of his outsize personality and personal foibles, he is the true and bona-fide president of the United States.  He is not here because of “Russian collusion”.  He is not a Russian spy committing “treason”.  He is the republican President of the United States.  Since he or his campaign did nothing illegal during the 2016 election campaign, he was rightfully angry at the injustice of a special counsel investigating his activities.  His railing, cursing and tweeting against the investigation, while called “unpresidential” by some, reportedly did not constitute “obstruction of justice”.

A striking characteristic of the left is how mercurial and hypocritical they are.  A recent example of this is how they almost deified Robert Mueller while they thought that his investigation would find Trump guilty of all sorts of crimes, and how they quickly turned him into a villain when his report found Trump not guilty of any illegality.  Other examples relate to a dual system of justice for democrats and republicans.  Hillary Clinton obstructed justice in too many ways to count – permanently deleting emails, smashing Blackberries and hard drives, and on and on.  No charges were brought against her – yet.  Trump got pissed off at the Mueller investigation and Nadler wants to impeach him for it.

I’m willing to debate nearly all of the points of contention between democrats and republicans – socialism, healthcare, immigration, sanctuary cities, gender issues, metoo, “your truth”, guilt and innocence, etc.  I will not debate abortion, which kills more human beings than any other cause, and that’s a personal issue with me.

Other than debating differences, what gets me angry and sends me more toward Trump than I would normally be, are the blatant lies, hypocrisy and this duality of justice between right and left.  This is exacerbated by 90% of the mainstream media propagandizing on behalf of the left, and refusing to acknowledge when they have been so obviously wrong, as in the Mueller affair.

Ray Gruszecki

April 22, 2019

No Collusion, No Criminal Obstruction, No Further Indictments

No Collusion, No Criminal Obstruction, No Further Indictments

No Collusion, no criminal obstruction, no further indictments of anyone.  What a betrayal by the saintly Robert Mueller and his band of lawyerly democrats!

But Trump thought bad thoughts.  He said nasty things. He cursed and swore at the enemies massed against him.  He almost used his Article II powers to fire more than just Comey.

In this bizarre “1984” or “Fahrenheit 451” or “Animal Farm” or “Brave New World” scenario, this latter is not allowed, and the groupthink police as represented by the democrats like Nadler and Schiff, backed by Pelosi and Hoyer, will attempt to punish Trump and his minions based on the cultural principles of leftist group identity politics and “social justice”.  It’s not enough that Mueller wasted two years and 25 million dollars to prove nothing, the leftists in the House need to provide fodder for the mainstream media propaganda mills by spending additional time and money re-litigating the Mueller investigation. 

Americans, other than the inveterate and unshakable Trump haters, might say “enough already”, and continue to stray away from the leftist propaganda-laden CNN and MSNBC to Fox News, the only cable outlet that has told the truth about what has been happening with Trump, Mueller and the whole process, for the last two years.  Some might stay with CNN and MSNBC, for the sheer entertainment value of seeing eight to twelve talking heads bobbing up and down in agreement in their blind hatred of Trump, with not one word of dissenting argument allowed, unlike Fox with their Juan Williams, Jessica Tarlov, Marie Harf, Donna Brazile and many other dissenting leftist voices.

President Trump could hold the key to eternal world peace in one hand, and the cure for cancer and other major diseases in the other hand, and the democrats, or socialists, or what they call themselves today, would be convening a hearing on whether Trump helped Jared Kushner to get a security clearance.

The pure hatred of Trump by the leftists and their mainstream media cohorts is so great, that you simply cannot find an honest, balanced view of Trump and his doings anywhere but in a very few middle of the road or right-leaning media outlets.  Just turn on CNN or MSNBC any time of the day or night, for a propaganda-laden litany of anti-Trump rhetoric, with no opposing views.  Thank goodness for AP, Reuters, USA Today, WSJ, Fox News, National Review, because without these we would be completely inundated and indoctrinated by the preponderance of the leftist mainstream media. 

Why this unbalanced and irrational hatred that some call “Trump derangement syndrome”?  It would be easy to simplify and say “because he won the election”, or because he expresses conservative values.  But it’s more than that.  Trump flies in the face of the leftist cultural warriors and relishes it.  He does not give lip service to the leftist inspired erosion of inalienable rights and associated moral values.  He opposes the leftist attacks on our American way of life, and loudly exposes and fights the associated hypocrisy.  All to the cries and wails, and now the HR committee actions by the obstructionist left.

Not that Trump has always been some crusading angel.  It’s obvious to anyone who has been around a while, and has some street smarts, that he has cut whatever corners he could legally get away with to attain and retain his wealth. Its “water under the dam”, but the majority HR leftists would sure like to open all past indiscretions to embarrass him.  So far he has stayed one step ahead of them, in spite of harassment not endured by a president since Lincoln’s days.

Trump is a showman.  He is flamboyant.  He embellishes.  He lies.  He does not neatly fit into a political slot.  Leftists call him a “racist”, based on some of his campaign verbiage.  His actions belie that fact.  Although he has not been given credit, he has done much more for minorities than the “philosopher king”, Obama.  

In spite of overwhelming opposition, business and the stock market and the GDP are booming, employment is at record highs (including minorities), wages and take-home are higher, ISIS is defeated, NOKO is dormant, trade is being re-balanced to our benefit – and on and on.

Ray Gruszecki

March/April, 2019

Attacks on Fox News

Attacks on Fox News

This Washington Post article is an unbalanced and one-sided attack on Fox News, and is in keeping with the leftist editorial policy of this publication.   The New Yorker Magazine “investigation” referenced in the WaPo article is a similarly long and dreary harangue against Fox News and President Trump. 

If these two publications were rational, balanced news media, one might be more attendant to some of the points and claims made in these articles.  It is clear to any discerning consumer of the media, however, that both the Washington Post and the New Yorker Magazine are more “in the tank” of the socialist-democrat left, than they claim Fox News to be in the conservative and/or Trump camp.

I’ve never been fond of the term “fake news”, but it has to be evident even from mild exposure to most of the mainstream media, like the NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC ABC, CBS, NBC, that all of these are biased against republicans, conservatives and President Trump.  If it were not for Fox News, National Review, WSJ, and a few other media outlets, everyone in the country would be thoroughly brainwashed to the leftist socialist-democrat point of view.  As pointed out in these two anti-Fox and anti-Trump articles, why is viewership of Fox News so much greater than other channels?  Could it be that people are finding more truth and resonance at Fox?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/lifestyle/style/its-time--high-time--to-take-fox-newss-destructive-role-in-america-seriously/2019/03/07/aeb83282-40cc-11e9-922c-64d6b7840b82_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3jq4Sza9PTSINTHsCHpa_aUfS3dpq_ZxPTSlLCgdk7veuWo-d1iu2h4_g

Ray Gruszecki

March 20, 2019

Pre Mueller Report

Pre Mueller Report

I’m writing this before the full Mueller report is released to the public tomorrow, and I predict that it will be another big “nothingburger”.  Attorney General William Barr, who is not only the top law enforcement officer in the country, but also a former Attorney General and a lawyer’s lawyer with an impeccable credentials, has already given us the bottom lines.  No collusion.  No obstruction of justice rising to a criminal offense. No further indictments.

Leftist democrats like Nadler and Schiff will not be satisfied with the legally redacted report, and will strive to obtain the unredacted report and the million or so pages of background, so that they can continue what amounts to their harassment of Trump and the executive.  And surely there is derogatory material about Trump in the massive amount of material that Mueller and his band of largely democrat lawyers produced in two years for 25 million dollars.  There just are no crimes, so Messrs. Nadler, Schiff, Pelosi and the angry democrats are just whistling in the wind.

As has been proven so far in this farcical investigation, go to the mainstream media like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, NYT, WaPo Time, et al for continued entertainment on the “collusion delusion”.  Go to Fox News, WSJ, National Review for honest (but right oriented), news.  It certainly has been proven so far that these latter sources told the true story as the Mueller investigation unfolded.  The mainstream media forged a fiction and breathlessly reported it as news for two years.  Talk about rank hypocrisy!  And it’s been reflected by their drop in ratings when the public realized how badly they were being lied to and misled.

What should be way more interesting than beating the dead horse of collusion, obstruction, etc.  by the Trump campaign, are the IG report by Horowtiz, Bill Barr’s investigation of democrat spying on the Trump campaign, and Devan Nunez’ efforts to “investigate the investigators”, and to see how far up the democrat chain the conspiracy to prevent Trump’s election, and to depose him when elected, reached.  How about the misuse of the FISA process?  Did Obama know? Certainly, some of this material is in that million pages or so of backup material?

Ray Gruszecki

April 18, 2019