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October 2019

What Is Impeachment For? By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/impeachment-process-political-not-legal/

It’s a political process, not a legal one — and the political climate is anything but static.

What is impeachment for? Seems like a simple question. Constitutionally speaking, it also appears to have a simple answer: to cite and remove from power a president guilty of wrongdoing.

Aye, there’s the rub. What sort of wrongdoing warrants removal from power?

I’d wager that the flames of impeachment were stoked more this week by President Trump’s foreign policy than they have been by any purported impeachable offense his opponents have conjured up over the last three years. By redeploying a few dozen American troops in Syria, the president acceded to a Turkish invasion of territory occupied by the Kurds. Ostensibly, that has nothing to do with the impeachment frenzy over Ukraine, whose government Democrats accuse the president of pressuring to dig up dirt on a political rival. But Turkey’s aggression could crack the president’s impeachment firewall.

There is rage over Trump’s decision. It is rage over a policy choice, not over high crimes and misdemeanors. Only the most blindly angry can doubt the lawfulness of the commander-in-chief’s movement of U.S. soldiers, even though it rendered inevitable the Turks’ rout of the Kurds.

CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB (MINNEAPOLIS 3, 2019)

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/somalis_have_changed_minneapolis.html

Somalis have Changed Minneapolis=By Sunny Lohman

Everyone not lying to themselves predicted when the federal government under Bill Clinton – aided and abetted by Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities and World Relief Minnesota — plopped 30,000 Somalis down into the midst of the kind, virtue-signaling, eager-to-help Midwesterners of Minneapolis (of which I am one) that it would lead to some grave consequences for our community.

Now, due to continuing refugee placements as well as chain migration there are an estimated 80,000 Somalis living in the Twin Cities metro area, or more like 79,000 if you subtract those who’ve left the country to join terrorist organizations like ISIS.

Anyhoo, here’s a week Minneapolitans had with their Somali neighbors last month:

On Wednesday, May 15th a couple of University students were attacked on campus at the East Bank Train station by two Somali thugs. It was an attempted robbery that the guys rebuffed sustaining injuries that required a hospital visit.

On Thursday, May 16th two Somalis burned down the pavilion at Lake Calhoun [or Lake Bde Maka Ska if you’re a virtue signaler) an eating and hanging out meeting place in the heart of the city enjoyed by generations of Americans around the prettiest city lake you’ve ever seen. This is in the most expensive neighborhood in Minneapolis.

US should support, but also prod, Ukraine By Lawrence J. Haas

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/465523-us-should-support-but-also-prod-ukraine

President Donald Trump’s controversial interactions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must not distract attention from the important question of U.S. policy toward Russia in connection with its war in Ukraine – especially as Zelensky and key European leaders send disturbing signals that they want to appease Russia’s Vladimir Putin in hopes of ending the war.

Ukraine remains a key issue of East-West contention and, at the moment, the highest profile flashpoint of Putin’s efforts to extend Russia’s influence far beyond its borders. How the United States and its allies respond will go a long way toward either containing Putin or encouraging him to push harder.

Washington should reaffirm that it won’t recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, maintain its sanctions on Moscow, look to add more sanctions in the face of Russia’s further aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere, and seek additional ways to fortify Ukraine beyond the military aid it has already provided.

Washington also should discourage French and German calls to accommodate Putin in hopes of reducing East-West tensions – calls that are causing serious splits in Europe over how best to respond to Putin’s aggressive behavior around the world.

Elizabeth Warren’s Cruel Plan For “Environmental Justice” Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-10-elizabeth-warrens-cruel-plan-for-environmental-justice

Elizabeth Warren wants to be known as the Democratic presidential candidate who has a “Plan” for everything. I count some 50 of these Plans here on her website. They cover everything from “health care is a basic human right,” to “a new farm economy,” to “fighting for an accessible and inclusive America,” to “addressing our maternal mortality epidemic,” to “how we can break up big tech,” to “universal child care,” and on and on and on — and obviously, I was just getting started. Every one of these things is some form of centrally-directed, bureaucrat-run, taxpayer-funded boondoggle of massive government expansion.

Well, now we can make that 51 Plans, because yesterday Warren came out with the latest and greatest of them all, titled “FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE AS WE COMBAT THE CLIMATE CRISIS.”

I know what you are thinking: How could she possibly have missed that one in the first 50? I can’t answer that, but you really need to look at this one if you want to get an appreciation of the levels of utopia that an uber-progressive like Warren thinks can be quickly achieved by government fiat backed by infinite amounts of government money and equally infinite numbers of bureaucrats. And while we’re at it, let’s make it explicit that anyone who opposes any part of this is an evil racist:

From predominantly black neighborhoods in Detroit to Navajo communities in the southwest to Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, industrial pollution has been concentrated in low-income communities for decades – communities that the federal government has tacitly written off as so-called “sacrifice zones.” But it’s not just about poverty, it’s also about race. . . . We didn’t get here by accident. Our crisis of environmental injustice is the result of decades of discrimination and environmental racism compounding in communities that have been overlooked for too long. It is the result of multiple choices that put corporate profits before people, while our government looked the other way.

The European Union Commission’s war against Israel Moshe Dann

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-European-Union-Commissions-war-against-Israel-604470

Moreover, according to EUC spokespeople, the EUC supports “non-military” branches of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria through transfers of funds to those governments.

According to the European Union Commission’s website, during the last decade the EUC has given over two billion euros to Palestinians in the “West Bank” and the Gaza Strip. This does not include extra payments for health, welfare and education, and legal services to assist claims against Israel. Additionally, the EUC is funding illegal Arab building in Area C, which is under Israeli control via the authority of the IDF and its civilian branch, COGAT. This includes assistance to Palestinian Authority residents who infiltrate into Area C and build illegal homes in Arab villages.

The EUC’s stated purpose is to promote an independent sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1949 Armistice lines (the “two-state-solution”) and “end the occupation of Palestinian territory.” Oblivious of the fact that the PLO/PA and Hamas are corrupt, brutal dictatorships which support and engage in terrorism, the question is:  Why does the EUC waste so much money to advance a goal – Palestinian statehood – which threatens the State of Israel? Is the European community using Arab Palestinians as proxies in a renewed attempt to wipe out as many Jews as possible in Israel? Are EUC policies intended to promote eliminating Israel and genocide? 

Moreover, according to EUC spokespeople, the EUC supports “non-military” branches of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria through transfers of funds to those governments. There is, unfortunately, no accountability for how these funds are used.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

The Jewish festival of Sukkot (Tabernacles) celebrates Israel’s fruit harvest. The latest positive Israel newsletter includes many examples of the fruits of Israeli labor. Lives saved by new medical treatments, innovations and humanitarian activities; new vegan foods, successful startups, record numbers of tourists and reviving endangered species.I will publish my next newsletter, hopefully, on Sun 27th Oct.  Wishing a Chag Sukkot Sameach / Happy Tabernacles to all who celebrate it. Michael Ordman

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Positive results in human trial of ALS treatment. As reported (here)previously, the stem cell ALS therapy developed by Israel’s Kadimastem showed promise in the lab. Now, early results from human trials at Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem show that it has significantly slowed down disease progression without major side effects.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/early-clinical-trial-for-als-sufferers-shows-biotech-firm-on-the-right-track/
 
Helping doctors focus on treatment. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel’s Maverick Medical AI has developed software for reading patient notes to analyze chronic conditions and risk factors. US Health Systems (USHS), in partnership with Arizona Complete Health, is to deploy Maverick’s software within its organization.
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/maverick-medical-ai-announces-its-first-commercial-deployment-at-ushs-health-system-to-automatically-detect-medicare-advantage-risk-factors-300910593.html
 
Predicting high-risk cardiac patients. (TY Atid-EDI) As reported (here)previously, the algorithms of Israel’s Medial EarlySign detect disease early. Its latest algorithm identifies cardiac patients with a high risk of complications after hospital discharge following a Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) procedure.
https://earlysign.com/news-and-events/new-study-shows-earlysigns-machine-learning-algorithm-can-predict-which-cardiac-patients-are-at-high-risk-following-discharge/
 
Blocking bone cancer in children. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have had promising results in the lab with experimental treatments for Ewing sarcoma – a bone cancer common in teenagers with a specific defective gene. Mifepristone – a glucocorticoid receptor blocker – stopped the cancer spreading to other organs.
https://www.weizmann-usa.org/news-media/news-releases/a-new-route-to-blocking-children-s-bone-cancer
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(19)31150-7
 
Another early warning of Alzheimer’s. As reported (here) previously, there are at least two signs of the early advance of Alzheimer’s disease. Now doctors at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center have developed Clara – an AI chatbot that questions the patient and compares the answers to a baseline. It is 95% accurate.
https://www.israel21c.org/israeli-chatbot-could-diagnose-early-alzheimers-disease/
https://www.pnas.org/content/112/52/16024.short https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-23212-001

The Ahmadis: A Peaceful Caliphate?

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/10/ahmadiyya-writing-camouflaged-anti-jewish-and-anti-american-propaganda-and-contributes-to-the-spread-of-hatred

“Love for all, hatred for none”?  Think again, as Ahmadi doctrine contains questionable aspects. 

“Islam is going to progress and triumph in the world and the banner of the Holy Prophet shall be raised all over the world,” stated in a February 10, 2006, sermon Hadrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, the currently reigning Ahmadiyya “caliph.” As previously noted, this small, cultish Muslim sect enjoys disproportionate influence among world leaders with Ahmadi claims of Islamic enlightenment, yet such statements about ultimate Ahmadi goals are more disturbing.

Ahmad rejoiced that Islamic Sharia law “can solve problems of all time and era,” but other observers, such as the Social Democratic German academic Johannes Kandel, are far more critical. In a 2006 study of the Ahmadis for Germany’s main Lutheran church, he noted that the Ahmadis have a “pre-democratic, absolutist state understanding.” Thus the “Ahmadiyyas represent in view of human rights and democracy positions, which, measured against critical inner-Muslim discourses on these questions, are ultraorthodox, indeed fundamentalist.”

Pastor Andreas Volkmar of the Independent Evangelical-Lutheran Church (Selbständige Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche) and the late (d. 2010) German scholar of Islam Hiltrud Schröter reached similar conclusions. In a 2017 study, Volkmar observed that the Ahmadis’ “vision is the implementation of the rule of Islam—worldwide—under the leadership of one of their future caliphs.” Schröter, author of a 2002 book on the Ahmadis, concurred that the Ahmadi community “perfectly sets itself in scene as a democratic Islam and veils its true goals: victory of Ahmadiyya Islam over all other religions.”

Crazy and Woke on the Western Front of Progressive Insanity Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/11/crazy-and-woke-on-the-western-front-of-progressive-insanity/

There are alternatives to destroying our cities and suburbs in order to feed profits to investors and power to corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, but they will require a realignment that allows conservatives and liberals to join together to demand quick, decisive, cost-effective action.

The reason progressive extremism persists in America today is because progressives either are making money by embracing progressive policies, or because progressives are not living on the front lines of progressive insanity.

It is hard to imagine a place that would have an electorate any more progressive than Venice Beach. Located on the shores of West Los Angeles in California’s 33rd Congressional District, Venice Beach is represented by Democrat Ted Lieu, who was reelected in 2018 with 70 percent of the vote. But a revolution is brewing in Venice Beach, because Venice Beach is on the front lines of progressive insanity.

Thanks to progressive ideology as expressed in laws and court rulings, in California today you cannot arrest and hold vagrants for petty theft or possession of hard drugs; you cannot move them out of public spaces unless you can provide them with free and “permanent supportive housing;” you cannot commit demonstrably insane people to asylums; and publicly funded shelters must offer food and urgent care without any preconditions whatsoever.

The Streets of Venice Beach Are An Open Sewer

Testimonials from residents of Venice Beach provide ample evidence of what happens when you impose these progressive policies on an urban area bordered on the west by some of the most inviting beaches and agreeable weather in the world. An estimated 1,200 homeless people have set up permanent encampments in this three square mile beach town. They almost never use actual toilets.

According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, the average human produces one pound of feces per day. Simple math therefore tells us that every week, the homeless population deposits more than four tons of feces into the gutters and onto the sidewalks, driveways, and lawns of Venice Beach residents, where they are dutifully hosed into the sewers and eventually make their way into the ocean.

Victims of a Deluded Sanctimony Jack Weatheral ******

This week has seen globally co-ordinated protests by self-absorbed members of the privileged middle class, who have been by gluing themselves to pavements, trains, planes and automobiles when not splashing public buildings with faux blood, dangling from bridges and making general pests of themselves under the banner of Extinction Rebellion and its mendacious claims of imminent planetary doom. That’s the public face of this latest apocalyptic movement, of which over the centuries there have been many. Perhaps more interesting is the underlying inability of the protesters’ rational selves to examine and critique their emotive selves, to see in their collective antics what amounts to a mass escape from the prison of reason. With such a societal pathology now rampant, it is both timely and instructive to revisit one of the pioneers, and the casualties, of the naïve neo-romanticism whose disruptive rejection of modern life, its power sources and convenience, is the flame burning bright in so many preening hearts.

Long before Greta Thunberg denounced growth, modernity and the pursuit of wealth, there was Christopher Johnston McCandless, whose tragedy plumbs a central human struggle as visceral as it is cerebral. Captured in the considerate and compelling account by mountaineer and author Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild (1996) and the extraordinary film adaption of the same name by Sean Penn (2007), McCandless’s short life may be witnessed as an allegory for a quintessential malaise affecting the contemporary Western world. The book is now taught widely across US secondary schools, although his life and demise is likely to be approached through a romanticised prism that echoes Krakauer’s account and McCandless’s own personality.

Briefly, for those unfamiliar with the story, McCandless abandoned his car, burnt his money, rejected society and made his way by hitchhiker’s thumb and boxcar to the wilds of Alaska, where he died slowly and painfully. Encompassed within the sweeping trajectory of McCandless’s twenty-four years is the human story of a young, disaffected Anglo-America and introverted ideologue. It is within this narrative that we encounter him as the unwitting flag-bearer for much of contemporary progressives’ — more accurately regressives — war on the very cradle of their nurtured existence.

DOUGLAS MURRAY ON GRETA THUNBERG VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDk0CAfdALw

The whole construction of the Greta phenomenon is to make her impossible to oppose. Clearly it’s a way to smuggle a particular type of extreme green ideology in most successfully.

It’s something like ‘I dare you’ — I dare you to oppose a 16-year-old autistic girl

What exactly are the rules here?

Let’s say I find a 14-year-old badly disabled Danish boy who loves fossil fuels, does he win?