Displaying posts published in

June 2022

The Liberation of a Continent and the Fall of the Nazi Third Reich by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18593/europe-liberation-d-day

Understanding who we are today as Americans living in a democracy — because of the sacrifices of those we honor on June 6th — is a solemn responsibility for every American. Yet few will acknowledge the date or the solemn obligation.

On that date, June 6, 1944, more than 160,000 Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified French coastline, confronting Nazi troops that had conquered much of Europe. General Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded the invasion, reminding his troops, “We will accept nothing less than full victory.”

More than 5,000 Ships and 13,000 aircraft supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end, the Allies had begun to push the Germans back, but some 10,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded that day.

Pinned down for hours by German fire, brave Allied soldiers recognized what was at stake: literally the liberation of a continent. Confronting unimaginable obstacles, they found the means to push the enemy back, climb the heights overlooking at the beaches, destroy the bunkers that contained heavy cannons and begin the task of defeating the Nazi Third Reich.

THE GENDER VARIANT UNIVERSE : Christopher F. Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/transgender-activists-in-their-own-words
A consortium of publicly funded nonprofits wants to “decolonize gender” and normalize male genitalia as a form of authentic womanhood.

Transgender activism has been making inroads into America’s public institutions. The Biden administration has recently promoted neo-pronouns and gender reassignment surgery for minors, government agencies have celebrated the expansion of identity categories such as “pansexual” and “non-binary,” and public schools across the country have adopted curricula teaching students about transitioning from one gender to another. Trans activists often present their ideological program through a series of euphemisms and tautologies, such as “gender diversity,” “LGBTQ inclusion,” “love is love,” “protect trans kids,” and “comprehensive sexual education.” But these slogans obscure more than they reveal. The deeper nature of trans ideology is much more radical and the public should have a clear-eyed understanding of what trans activists believe, beyond the protective layer of obfuscatory language.

The best way to do this is to listen to activists in their own words. Last year, a consortium of trans organizations in Washington State hosted a presentation series, titled “Decolonizing Gender,” that offers an honest, unfiltered look into the world of trans activism and ideology. The event was hosted by the most prominent gender identity nonprofits in the region—TRACTION, Lavender Rights Project, Black Trans Task Force, Gender Justice League, and UTOPIA Washington—all of which run programs for minors and receive taxpayer support. (TRACTION, the primary organizer of the event, did not return a request for comment.)

The panelists represented a wide range of idiosyncratic identities, expressed in a mixture of New Age and intersectional language—the more obscure and oppressed, the greater the status within the community. The main presenter, trans activist Malcolm Shanks, said he was a descendant of black slaves and Taíno tribesmen and “used to identify as gender fluid,” but has been “identifying more recently as a little bit more gaseous or plasma-like.” Randy Ford, a fundraiser for the Lavender Rights Project and black male-to-female “trans femme,” said she uses “‘she,’ ‘her,’ [and] ‘goddess’ as pronouns.” Mahkyra Gaines, a program coordinator for the Gender Justice League, said she uses “no pronouns” and identifies as “non-binary” and “kind of like a black hole.” Ganesha Gold Buffalo, a male-to-female trans prostitute and activist at the Black Trans Task Force, said she identifies as “Choctaw, Cherokee, and black” and with the “sacred lands.”

More On Energy Fantasy Versus Reality In Woke-Land Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-6-5-more-on-energy-fantasy-versus-reality-in-woke-land

It’s official: the world is committed to rapidly reducing CO2 emissions. Just look at the the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, or President Biden’s April 22, 2021 press release, or California’s SB 100 climate act, or New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or Germany’s Energiewende, or the UK’s Net Zero pledge, or any of many other such pledges.

And essentially all of woke corporate America is on board with the program. Consider the tidal wave of so-called “ESG” investing, focused on re-organizing corporate activities to reduce carbon emissions. Super-woke banking giant JP Morgan is leading the charge. From a recent JP Morgan press release:

JPMorgan Chase aims to finance and facilitate more than $2.5 trillion over 10 years – beginning this year through the end of 2030 – to advance long-term solutions that address climate change and contribute to sustainable development. . . . This long-term target complements the firm’s Paris-aligned financing strategy and will help accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy by encouraging actions that set a path for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.

And yet, somehow it just doesn’t seem to be happening. Australia’s ABC notices the disconnect in a June 3 piece with the headline “Climate scientists warn of increased climate change events as carbon emissions fail to drop.” Key point:

Emissions across the globe continue to rise despite nations committing to cut them.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Today is the anniversary of D-Day- the Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944 which was followed by several battles in Europe, but heralded the end of Germany’s Nazi regime and the genocide that claimed one third of world Jewry.  The following 77 years brought a miracle. Israel gained its sovereignty and, in those decades, became a world player in research and development of technology and innovation which heals and gives hope to billions of people throughout the world.  And in historic irony, when former German Chancellor Angela Merkel retired, her first foreign visit was to Israel where she was warmly received.    rsk

Michael Ordman’s weekly blog details Israel impressive accomplishments in every field of Human endeavor.

Israel is like a powerful magnet, attracting global demand for its innovations and assistance.  The European Union is negotiating for Israeli natural gas. Israel is partnering Greece for innovation and research. Israeli robots are caring for seniors in New York.  Israeli technology is growing crops in Africa and providing water in India. Israel’s economic ties has extended to Arab countries that don’t even have formal diplomatic relations with it. Meanwhile, arrivals at Ben Gurion Airport include young Moroccan leaders, the Governor of Arizona, OECD educators, hundreds of new Ethiopian immigrants and hundreds of thousands of tourists. Finally, yet another international embassy is to open in Jerusalem. Michael Ordman

 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Ketamine as an antidepressant. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute and in Germany, have clarified the molecular cascade triggered by ketamine, that leads to its sustained antidepressant effects. They found that the gene Kcnq2 enables potassium ions to pass through the brain, maintaining the activity and stability of neurons.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-german-study-hopes-to-pave-way-for-use-of-ketamine-as-an-antidepressant/
 
Hi-tech blood cell analysis. Report and fascinating new video showing the features of the X100 Microscope and Decision Support System from Israel’s Scopio Labs (see here previously).
https://nocamels.com/2022/05/scopio-labs-cell-microscope/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT3vF1UT4HM
 
$30 million for digital health. Israel has selected 19 programs for a new digital health initiative. They include test sharing, endoscopy videos for R&D, and making data on mental health and midwifery more accessible. The databases used are anonymized and better access should contribute to more breakthroughs in Israeli health tech.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-approves-19-programs-for-30-million-digital-health-initiative/
 
An amazing life – Michael Sela. Professor Michael Sela, formerly the sixth president of Israel’s Weizmann Institute, has passed away at the age of 98. Prof Sela co-invented Copaxone to treat MS, Erbitux for cancer, and other treatments. He helped create the field of immunology, won numerous awards, and spoke nine languages.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/328454
 
Identical twins give birth on same day. Identical twin sisters, Yael and Avital gave birth at Shaare Zedek Medical Center to their fourth babies (both boys) on the same day. Each already had two girls and a boy. And previously, a set of twins were born at Hadassah Medical Center, at 2:22am on the 22nd of February 2022.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/328464  https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/322774
 

Over 50 Feared Killed in Terror Attack on Nigerian Catholic Church By Athena Thorne

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/06/05/over-50-feared-killed-in-terror-attack-on-nigerian-catholic-church-n1603375

Reports coming out of Nigeria say that dozens of worshippers including women and children were killed in an attack on St. Francis Catholic Church, in the southwestern Nigerian state of Ondo. The attackers targeted parishioners who were celebrating Pentecost Sunday, with terrorists firing weapons into the congregation and detonating explosives. The terrorists also abducted a priest.

“Only fiends from the nether region could have conceived and carried out such dastardly act,” said Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, according to a spokesman. He called the attack “heinous” and promised, “No matter what, this country shall never give in to evil and wicked people, and darkness will never overcome light. Nigeria will eventually win.” Buhari was elected to office on a platform of making Nigeria more secure.

The New York Post reports that “It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack on the church. While much of Nigeria has struggled with security issues, Ondo is widely known as one of Nigeria’s most peaceful states.”

Catholic Church head Pope Francis issued a statement via the Vatican press office: “The pope has learned of the attack on the church in Ondo, Nigeria and the deaths of dozens of worshippers, many children, during the celebration of Pentecost. While the details are being clarified, Pope Francis prays for the victims and the country, painfully affected at a time of celebration, and entrusts them both to the Lord so that he may send his spirit to console them.”

Uvalde Cops and Evil In Action A society is rotten, certifiably mad, when the cries of little kids and women being blown to smithereens do not make grown men drop their poisonous progressive protocol and run to the rescue. By Ilana Mercer

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/05/uvalde-cops-and-evil-in-action/

Last week we learned that a lady from Charleston had the male bits and the moral compass that upwards of 19 police officers, hunkered down at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas—all SWATTED-up and swaddled in Kevlar body armor—were without.

At the same time, the trapped children cried out to 911 as they were being mowed down. These babies screamed for grown men to quit cowering and pondering bureaucratic distinctions—active shooter or barricaded shooter—a distinction without a difference if the barricaded shooter is also holding the kids hostage and picking them off one by one. 

Do not rest in peace, Uvalde Angels. Rage from the heavens.

The Uvalde cops began milling about the school corridor at 11:35 a.m. on May 24, waiting on a key to open a door behind which little children had been dying since 11:33 a.m.

These cops waited for the key until 12:50 p.m., when “a Border Patrol Tactical Unit officer finally breached the room using a janitor’s keys.” And, no. Despite the gushing on Fox News, that Border Patrol Tactical Unit officer is no hero. Doing your job eventually—when that job is defined by the credo “time is of the essence”—is not heroism.

How overpowering is the instinct to worship! Lawrence Jones of Fox News looked to blame 911 for the Uvalde Police’s disgraceful failure to engage an active shooter. However, the protocol is clear. You go to the fight. Law enforcement is obliged to forthwith engage a known active shooter. An assault rifle was being fired feet away from the officers. Surely the sound would’ve hurt their eardrums. There was no communication breakdown; only a categorical refusal to respond to reality on the ground.

Cops had come a cropper, refusing to respond to reality on the ground, deaf to the cries and telephone calls of brave babies.

Absent keys, operating under the license of no-knock warrants—these state operators, whom we pay for protection, have no qualms about deftly deploying tactical entry equipment, such as battering rams, to kick in our doors on the slightest pretext, and without knowing what’s on the other side.

The Sovietization of American Life Behind all our disasters there looms an ideology, a creed that ignores cause and effect in the real world—without a shred of concern for the damage done to those outside the nomenklatura. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/05/the-sovietization-of-american-life/

One day historians will look back at the period beginning with the COVID lockdowns of spring 2020 through the midterm elections of 2022 to understand how America for over two years lost its collective mind and turned into something unrecognizable and antithetical to its founding principles.

“Sovietization” is perhaps the best diagnosis of the pathology. It refers to the subordination of policy, expression, popular culture, and even thought to ideological mandates. Ultimately such regimentation destroys a state since dogma wars with and defeats meritocracy, creativity, and freedom. 

The American Commissariat

Experts become sycophantic. They mortgage their experience and talent to ideology—to the point where society itself regresses. 

The law is no longer blind and disinterested, but adjudicates indictment, prosecution, verdict, and punishment on the ideology of the accused. Eric Holder is held in contempt of Congress and smiles; Peter Navarro is held in contempt of Congress and is hauled off in cuffs and leg-irons. James Clapper and John Brennan lied under oath to Congress—and were rewarded with television contracts; Roger Stone did the same and a SWAT team showed up at his home. Andrew McCabe made false statements to federal investigators and was exempt. A set-up George Papadopoulos went to prison for a similar charge. So goes the new American commissariat.

Examine California and ask a series of simple questions. 

Why does the state that formerly served as a model to the nation regarding transportation now suffer inferior freeways while its multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project remains an utter boondoggle and failure? 

Why was its safe and critically needed last-remaining nuclear power plant scheduled for shutdown (and only recently reversed) as the state faced summer brownouts? 

Why did its forests go up in smoke predictably each summer, as its timber industry and the century-old science of forest management all but disappeared from the state?

Why do the state’s criminals so often evade indictment, and if convicted are often not incarcerated—or are quickly paroled? 

Why are its schools’ test scores dismal, its gasoline the nation’s highest-priced, and the streets of its major cities fetid and dangerous—in a fashion not true 50 years ago or elsewhere today?

In a word, the one-party state is Sovietized. Public policy is no longer empirical but subservient to green, diversity, equity, and inclusion dogmas—and detached from the reality of daily middle-class existence. Decline is ensured once ideology governs problem-solving rather than time-tested and successful policymaking.

Will America Remain Virtuous Enough to Be Free? John Adams and America’s moral and religious foundations. Terrence P. Jeffrey

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/will-america-remain-virtuous-enough-be-free-terrence-p-jeffrey/

“To pass the American tradition of freedom down to future generations we must also pass down the moral and religious foundations needed to sustain it.”

John Adams, who would soon surrender the presidency to Thomas Jefferson, ventured up to Capitol Hill on Nov. 22, 1800, to deliver the first-ever in-person presidential address in the not-yet-finished home of the United States Congress.

It was noon on a Saturday. What message did he deliver?

First, Adams congratulated the American people for building the Capitol itself.

“I congratulate the people of the United States on the assembling of Congress at the permanent seat of their government, and I congratulate you, gentlemen, on the prospect of a residence not to be changed,” he said. “Although there is cause to apprehend that accommodations are not now so complete as might be wished, yet there is great reason to believe that this inconvenience will cease with the present session.”

Then Adams pointed to morality, religion and God.

“It would be unbecoming the representatives of this nation to assemble for the first time in this solemn temple without looking up to the Supreme Ruler of the universe and imploring His blessing,” he said.

“May this territory be the residence of virtue and happiness!” said Adams. “In this city may that piety and virtue, that wisdom and magnanimity, that constancy and self-government, which adorned the great character whose name it bears be forever held in veneration! Here and throughout our country may simple manners, pure morals, and true religion flourish forever!”

This was not a new theme for the nation’s second president or for his contemporaries.

In 1778, while serving the newly independent United States as a commissioner to France, Adams passed by a mansion called Bellevue that King Louis XV had built as a residence for his mistress, Madame de Pompadour.

Adams came to view this estate as a symbol of the depravity of the French monarchy.

Twisting the Truth about Tinseltown At the leftist Times, an absurd whitewash of leftist Hollywood. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/twisting-truth-about-tinseltown-bruce-bawer/

If you happened to take a look at the New York Times website a few days ago – specifically, on June 2 – you’d have found the usual daily mix of predictable left-wing claptrap. One article smeared the Proud Boys as a “violent” gang of “far-right nationalist[s]”; another lamented the verdict in the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial because it afforded the unacceptable spectacle of “a woman brought low,” while yet another asserted that Depp won “[b]ecause he’s a man.” Meanwhile the travel section pretended that Paris (a “City of Light” nowadays only when Muslim gangs are setting cars and churches ablaze) is still the romantic locale of Gigi and Funny Face, and the op-ed page offered an essay headlined “Inflation Should Make Us All Vegetarians” and an argument that the main problem with the “capable, decent men and women” who make up the Biden administration is that they’re insufficiently eager to make nice with China.

But the day’s most ludicrous piece of agitprop was an essay in which Times film critic A. O. Scott actually tried to make the case that Hollywood isn’t left-wing. Yes, he admitted, the film industry is “a hub of Democratic Party fund-raising and activism” – but, hey, there are also plenty of “suspected conservatives” in La La Land (he didn’t pause to ponder why they’re only “suspected”), and in any case, he suggested, it all evens out, because during the era of the “Red Scare” Hollywood conservatives subjected liberals to “blacklisting and betrayal.” Um, no. Here’s the real story: through much of the 1930s and 40s, the writing and acting branches in Hollywood were dominated by ruthless, card-carrying Stalinists like Dalton Trumbo, who sought to use their power to propagandize for Communism; it was they, not conservatives, who aimed to crush the liberals in their midst; and it was they, not liberals, who were later targeted by the HUAC hearings. “Betrayal”? It was these Stalinists, enemies of their country and tools of the Kremlin, who were the traitors.

Remembering the Boys of Pointe du Hoc By Paul Krause

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/06/remembering_the_boys_of_point_du_hoc_.html

“Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.”

Eisenhower’s speech, on the eve of the greatest military campaign for freedom in human history, was matched only by the speech of President Ronald Reagan in 1984 on the fortieth anniversary of that event. “The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next.” D-Day remains one of the greatest manifestations of the American, and human, spirit of liberty and courage ever known.

We are told that America stands at a crossroad. America has always been standing at crossroads. And time and again America has weathered the storm and come back stronger and freer than before. While it is easy to despair, we must remember what propelled the spirit of freedom and progress — true freedom and progress — into the new dawn despite the surrounding darkness.

What Eisenhower and Reagan’s speeches have in common is a thread going back to our Founding Fathers and the very spirit that birthed America.

In his inaugural address, George Washington said, “I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my Country can inspire: since there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage.”