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September 2019

A View of the U.S. from Across the Atlantic by Andrew Ash

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14741/us-politics-britain

My friends assured me there were terrible, terrible things that would become apparent in the ensuing months.

Even in the extended echo-chamber of social media, there appeared to be a seemingly pathological fear of anything even remotely resembling a balanced view.

The only thing that has not changed is the Democrats’ make-believe view that President Trump and the Russians were somehow trying to rig the election, when it was, in fact, they themselves who were doing that.

Before the advent of online news, residents of the UK had to rely on the British press to report on the minutiae of the American political system — something that didn’t happen all that often. In politics what went on in the USA, stayed in the USA, most of it at least. Beyond a major political upheaval, or the swearing in of a new president, news reportage was more concerned with the cut and thrust of our own routine domestic politics.

Only the bickering between the Democrats and Republicans rang a familiar note, mirroring as it did, our British Punch and Judy stereotype, with the stuffy old Tories on one side, and the loony-left Labour on the other.

By 2008, along with the advent of social media, and a growing awareness of international affairs, it became increasingly impossible not to notice the apparently out of proportion intensity driving the Democrat-Republican voter divide. Heralded in by the arrival of the US’s first president “of colour”, Barack Obama, and coinciding with the rising usage of Twitter and Facebook, the “Left” seemed to jump at the chance of embracing the one-dimensional limitations of an “echo chamber”. The “echo-chamber” served not only to widen the chasm between left and right, but — even to the outsider — noticeably amplified the animosity between the two sides. Compared to the almost polite political rivalry between voters and parties in Britain, the political division in the US began looking distinctly engineered.

My American friends, in an effort to help me try and understand their conclusions, sent a raft of articles from the US mainstream media, which, in their bias, displayed the same lack of integrity as my friends’. Even in the extended echo-chamber of social media, there appeared to be a seemingly pathological fear of anything even remotely resembling a balanced view.

France Bleeding Yet again, knife-wielding Religion-of-Peace member randomly kills in France. Stephen Brown

ttps://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/france-bleeding-stephen-brown/

It is a new, wonderful French cultural custom – to randomly attack and stab people to death in the street.

And the latest person to partake in this charming form of multicultural enrichment was an unidentified young Afghan who, armed with a knife and a barbecue spit, randomly attacked people at a bus stop in the city of Villeurbanne in the Lyon metropolitan area, killing one and wounding eight.

“There was a lot of blood. It was not a small cut,” said Nina, a witness, to Le Figaro newspaper. “There was a man wounded with three young children. He had blood on his face and on his tee-shirt.”

The person killed was a young, nineteen-year-old Frhenchman, Timothy Bonnet, whose love of music had brought him to Villeurbanne by chance that day to attend a music festival.

A witness said Timothy was among the first who tried to reason with the Afghan. He said the killer “stabbed him and when he fell to the ground, he continued (to stab him)”

Another witness reported Bonnet then “had trouble breathing.”

The killer also wounded a woman who likewise fell to the ground, whom a passerby covered with her body to protect her. And still another witness told Agence France Press that “A man at the 57 (bus) stop started stabbing people left, right and center.”

One can only imagine the terror and horror of those present.

After his attack at the bus stop, the killer ran to a subway station where he wounded still another person. At the subway, four bus drivers and other passersby “isolated” the killer, persuading him to drop his weapons. One was a knife with an 8 cm. blade. Police later found a knife with a 20 cm. blade under a vehicle that also belonged to the killer.

Iran’s Return Handshake An attack on Saudi oil production shows John Bolton was right.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-return-handshake-11568578218

Since President Trump withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Islamic Republic has tested U.S. resolve with military escalation across the Middle East. Likely Iranian involvement in attacks on Saudi oil production over the weekend marks a new phase in this destabilizing campaign, and it’s no coincidence this happened as Mr. Trump is considering a softer approach to Tehran.

Saudi Arabia reduced daily oil production by about 5.7 million barrels after strikes against facilities in the country’s east on Saturday. Iran-backed Houthi rebels claimed credit, though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted that Iran was responsible and there was “no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.” Iran denies this, but it usually uses proxies to avoid a direct confrontation and there are no other plausible culprits.

This is more than a local dispute between two regional powers. The attacks have caused a roughly 5% reduction in global daily oil production. The Saudis have promised to dip into reserves to offset the losses, but oil prices could rise and harm an already fragile global economy if the Kingdom isn’t able to restore production fast enough.

American shale oil production can take up some of the slack but that would take time. Long-term damage to oil supplies would increase the pressure on the U.S. to ease sanctions on Iranian oil exports, which Mr. Trump has been considering.

The attack continues what is already a hot proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, an important U.S. ally. The extent of the damage raises doubts about how well the Saudis can defend against future drone assaults. Saudi intelligence and air defenses don’t seem up to the job. Saudi revenues would be hurt by a reduction in oil output, and uncertainty will complicate an initial public offering of the country’s national oil company, Aramco.

Even if the Houthis didn’t carry out this attack, Iran is backing their war against an Arab coalition in Yemen. The Houthis have become increasingly aggressive in attacking sites in Saudi Arabia and oil tankers in the Red Sea. If the Saudis cede Yemen to the Houthis, Iran will have won another proxy war, this one on the Arabian peninsula. The Saudis are far from ideal allies, but U.S. Senators who want to end U.S. support for Riyadh should consider the alternative of Iranian regional dominance.

Trump’s A Mysogonistic White Supremacist? Then Explain These Results

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/16/trumps-biggest-failure-hes-had-no-success-at-being-a-white-supremacist/

President Donald Trump’s critics have called him many things during his nearly three years in office. “Racist.” “Fascist.” “Misogynist.” “Anti-middle class.” “Anti-poor.” And so on. But if that’s so, he’s failing miserably at all those things they accuse him of.

A spate of recent data and reports, including an update of the income and poverty statistics by the U.S. Census Bureau for 2017 and 2018, show just how bad that failure is.

Take that “racist” charge. The Census report shows that black unemployment, at 5.5% in August, is the lowest it’s been since records started being kept in 1972.

The gap between black unemployment and white unemployment is also the lowest on record.

Typically, the unemployment rate for African Americans is at least two times the white unemployment rate. Today, it’s about 1.6 times the white rate.

It isn’t only African Americans who are doing better. Both Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans now have near-record low unemployment rates.

Just ask the Washington Post. To its credit, it recently analyzed Labor Department data. What it found was shocking: More than 86% of the jobs added since the end of 2016 went to minorities. Out of 5.2 million new jobs, minorities accounted for 4.5 million.

If Trump’s a racist, he’s an abject failure.

Scapegoating a Young Minority Schools are pushing a curriculum that makes the possibility of a unified, post-racial America impossible. Hezekiah Kantor

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/15/scapegoating-a-young-minority/

A new school year is kicking off for millions of young Americans and, with an election year looming, expect heaps of new assignments meant to “explore public issues.” In thousands of schools throughout the United States, this will mean further political indoctrination by their mostly left-leaning teachers.

No doubt they will be taught about the “racial income gap” in the United States. Most teachers will suggest that the right remedy would be to enact progressive liberal reparations for approved “victim” groups at the expense of “oppressors.” But to accomplish this, it will be necessary first to scapegoat. And the ones being scapegoated —unsurprisingly—will be white men and their sons sitting in the classrooms.

Your kids will most likely read “objective” articles like this one from Time, which states matter-of-factly, “Nationally, black women earn 61 cents for every dollar earned by white men . . . one 2017 study shows that over a 40-year career, women overall lose $418,800 as a result of the wage gap, with women of color losing almost $870,000.” 

Lost to whom? Non-Hispanic white men, evidently. Or, if they are teachers like me, they can sit through “professional development” lectures about these “pay gaps” conducted by liberal females, most of whom are white and typically make over $100,000 a year. 

That’s what I got to do for five hours over two days recently, along with hundreds of other teachers from schools throughout my state. I work and teach while my white liberal administrators opine about all the “systems” that hold down our underachieving students. 

Trumped Out? – Victor Davis Hanson

amgreatness.com/2019/09/15/trumped-out/

After nearly four years of ceaseless attacks by Democrats and the press, the strange thing is not that Trump can be occasionally wearisome, but that he is even still breathing.

The new post-Mueller media narrative is “weariness” and “exhaustion” with President Trump’s tweets, his cul de sac Sharpie controversy, his ideas about buying Greenland, his unorthodox art-of-the-deal foreign policy that resulted in a plan to talk to Taliban leaders in the United States, and his firing of arch-conservative John Bolton.

The Drudge Report, once a go-to site for Trumpism, now seems unapologetically anti-Trump, in its often trademark snarky style.

Are Trump supporters then weary?

The August jobs report “unexpectedly” reminds us that never have so many Americans been at work. The 3.7 percent unemployment rate continues to be the lowest peacetime unemployment figure in 50 years. Black and Hispanic unemployment remain at record lows. Workers’ wages continue to rise. Talk of recession is belied by low interest, low inflation, low unemployment, and a strong stock market. The result is that millions of Americans enjoy far better lives than they had in 2016.

When we look to alternatives, all we seem to hear is multi-trillion-dollar hare-brained schemes from radical progressives and socialists masquerading as Democrats at a time of record national debt. The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free healthcare for illegal aliens, reparations, the abolition of $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, and free tuition for all—are the stuff of fantasies and either would have to be repudiated by any of the Democratic nominees who actually was elected, or would destroy an already indebted nation.

So, again, where exactly is the supposed dissension in the Trump ranks, given that in 2020 he will be only the alternative to the above?

Too Many Tweets?

Many seem disappointed that after the implosion of the 22-month Mueller investigation, Trump’s polls have not neared 50 percent—given the final exposure of the entire collusion/obstruction hoax and the possibility of indictments to follow for those who had staged a veritable coup against the executive branch of the United States.

The New York Times Anti-Kavanaugh Bombshell Is Actually a Dud By John McCormack

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/the-new-york-times-anti-kavanaugh-bombshell-is-actually-a-dud/

The authors omit the fact that the alleged victim has no memory of the alleged incident.

If you opened Twitter on Sunday morning, you were likely greeted with the bombshell headline of the top trending news story: “NYT reporters’ book details new sexual assault allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.”

The allegation, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly write in a New York Times story adapted from their forthcoming anti-Kavanaugh book, is this: “We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”

Wait a second. Who did what to whom?

Kavanaugh’s “friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student”?

Can someone explain the logistics of the allegation here? Was Kavanaugh allegedly walking around naked when his friends pushed him into the female student?

Corrupting Medical Education The reaction to Dr. Goldfarb’s op-ed proves his point.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/corrupting-medical-education-11568578153

Stanley Goldfarb knew what he was talking about. Last week the former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania medical school wrote in these pages that climate change, gun control and “other progressive causes only tangentially related to treating illness” were beginning to corrupt medical training. His piece spurred a social-media eruption that immediately proved his point.

Left-wing medical Twitter —yes, there is such a thing—piled on with virtue signaling that distorted Dr. Goldfarb’s argument. He didn’t write that doctors shouldn’t have opinions about political issues. He wrote that those issues shouldn’t interfere with the scientific and clinical training essential to producing doctors who can serve patients.

The most disappointing response came from Penn medical school, which sprinted for political cover. Dean J. Larry Jameson and Senior Vice Dean Suzanne Rose sent a letter to students and faculty that is a case study in progressive correctness:

“Please know that the views expressed by Dr. Goldfarb in this column reflect his personal opinions and do not reflect the values of the Perelman School of Medicine,” the letter said. “We deeply value inclusion and diversity as fundamental to effective health care delivery, creativity, discovery, and life-long learning. We are committed to ensuring a rigorous and comprehensive medical education that includes examination of the many social and cultural issues that influence health, from violence within communities to changes in the environment around us.”

Maybe we should begin to wonder about the quality of the doctors who graduate from Penn. Patients want an accurate diagnosis, not a lecture on social justice or climate change. Thanks to Dr. Goldfarb for having the courage to call out the politicization of medical education that should worry all Americans.

Transgender Surgery Is the Lobotomy of the 21st Century By John Klar

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/transgender_surgery_is_the_lobotomy_of_the_21st_century.html

Psychology is a “science” that studies human behavior but is itself morally bankrupt.  That is, psychology is unable to scientifically define normality.  It can’t.  “Normal” depends on what the society (through “norms”) or the patient views as morally correct.

This limitation of psychological study is apparent when addressing transgenderism, until recently labeled a mental illness (“gender dysphoria”) by psychology.  Modern textbooks on transgender (and other paraphilic) disorders observe that they arise from “adverse childhood experiences” (ACEs): “Any event sufficiently stressful to threaten a fragile ego” (Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing, 8th edition, Mary C. Townsend, 2015, p. 615).  But here we face a conundrum: the textbook relates that such people are “unable to use coping mechanisms effectively” and become either “adaptive” (“urges are suppressed and not acted upon”) or “maladaptive” (“urges or behaviors cause significant distress or interfere with social, occupational or other important areas of functioning”).  But if society alters its mores such that a person is rewarded for his paraphilic condition in self, occupation, or even a run for public office, then this textbook is reversed, and what was viewed as adaptive becomes toxic, and what was termed maladaptive is healthy.

Drug addiction also is linked directly to ACEs.  Is the “cure” for the disease of addiction found in affirmation or in “correction”?  In encouraging more heroin abuse or in helping people into recovery?  We must ask this question of transgenderism with the utmost compassion and introspection.  If the behavior is “normal,” there is no “condition” to address.  America’s Left has imposed the conclusion of normalcy, without critically considering the effect on the patient or others.

Video: Post-9/11 – Helping Saudis Slip Away The highly disturbing facts about an eerie evacuation. VIDEOS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/video-post-911-helping-saud

In this new Glazov Gang episode, Jamie speaks with Clare M. Lopez, the Vice President for Research & Analysis at the Center for Security Policy.

Clare discusses: Post-9/11 – Helping Saudis Slip Away, unveiling the highly disturbing facts about an eerie evacuation.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch our 2-Part-Series with Clare below:

Part I: 9/11 Came From Riyadh & Tehran:

Part 2: Osama Found Safe Haven in Iran Post 9-11:

Follow us on Twitter: @JamieGlazov

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