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October 2022

BOOKS Comments turned off

Jews Don’t Count: A Times Book of the Year 2021 by David Baddiel

By on October 28th, 2022

Today the Jewish population of the world is about 14.8 million, 0.2% of the 7.95 billion worldwide population and yet in discussing hate crimes and diversity we seem to count for nothing. As a reviewer describes it below, this book is essential reading for those concerned about this concerning fact…..rsk

Jews Don’t Count is a book for people who consider themselves on the right side of history. People fighting the good fight against homophobia, disablism, transphobia and, particularly, racism. People, possibly, like you.

It is the comedian and writer David Baddiel’s contention that one type of racism has been left out of this fight. In his unique combination of close reasoning, polemic, personal experience and jokes, Baddiel argues that those who think of themselves as on the right side of history have often ignored the history of anti-Semitism. He outlines why and how, in a time of intensely heightened awareness of minorities, Jews don’t count as a real minority: and why they should.

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FOREIGN POLICY, HISTORY Comments turned off

In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud Biden, Putin, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Robin Ashenden

By on October 28th, 2022

https://quillette.com/2022/10/25/in-the-shadow-of-the-mushroom-cloud/

The threat of a nuclear war, absent from our headlines for decades, is in the news again. Putin threatens Ukraine with an atomic strike and Biden tells us we’re closer to Armageddon than any time in the last 60 years. Meanwhile, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace flies to the US to discuss the danger of Russia detonating a nuclear bomb over the Black Sea as a show of destructive strength. A bumper crop of articles have appeared in the world press announcing that this time the nuclear threat could be in earnest. British MP Robert Seely, a long-time Russia expert, reminds us of the country’s first-use policy and warns that “saying Putin is bluffing is no longer serious.”

In the Spectator, historian Mark Galeotti tries to calm nerves by walking us through all the complicated steps the Kremlin would have to take in order to release a nuclear device. But in April, Galeotti was writing about Putin’s RS-28 Sarmat missile—a new super-weapon with a range of 11,000 miles and a maximum load-capacity of 50 megatons (over 2,500 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb), which carries 15 nuclear warheads dispersible to multiple locations. Reportedly, it is due to be operational in December. Meanwhile, in the US, bunker sales are soaring, with one company reporting that, following the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine in February, enquiries regarding shelters had risen from less than 100 a month to over 3,000. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, indolently at grass since the end of the Cold War, are apparently cantering over the horizon towards us once again.

Biden’s reference point for nuclear danger was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the comparison was apt. Go back exactly 60 years this week and we find a crisis with at least superficial similarities to the one we are experiencing today—two rival camps stonily contemplating one another, one of which had a smaller, less powerful country in its gunsights; a nation led by a charismatic leader in combat fatigues desperately calling for help from the other side. In 1962, however, the war was cold not hot, and the small country was Cuba, a Caribbean island just 90 miles from the United States.

That Cuba was menaced by the US is not in doubt. Since Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in 1958, it had been near the top of America’s “to do” list. The doomed and disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961—in which 1,400 anti-Castro Cubans were encouraged to storm the island, insufficiently supported by the White House, and duly captured and imprisoned by Castro—was only a temporary setback. It was followed by a US economic blockade and the infamous Operation Mongoose, a series of botched US assassination plots against Castro. A communist takeover on America’s doorstep was anathema to the White House. What if other Latin American nations followed suit?

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Fetterman Debate Disaster Reveals Both Democrat Hypocrisy and Media’s Shame Groupthink is a hell of a drug. By Josh Hammer

By on October 28th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/27/fetterman-debate-disaster-reveals-both-democrat-hypocrisy-and-medias-shame/

It is difficult to describe just how disastrous Tuesday evening’s Pennsylvania Senate debate performance was for Democratic candidate (and current Keystone State Lt. Gov.) John Fetterman. In the course of one incredibly revealing and frankly painful hourlong debate, Fetterman—the victim of a stroke from May 13, just four days before his primary win over U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.)—was exposed as still struggling mightily to regain his full cognitive abilities, and thus wholly unfit to serve Pennsylvanians in what was once considered “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

It should go without saying that, like every decent American, I wish Fetterman the swiftest convalescence possible under his difficult circumstances. But it is also true that Fetterman’s stroke befell him before the primary—just a few days before, but before the primary date nonetheless. Fetterman’s inner circle, including his ambitious social activist wife, thus had a few days to consult trusted—that is, not Democratic Party donor—doctors to soberly gauge his continued candidate viability. While we should all feel bad for Fetterman, then, it must be said that a more altruistic and less cynical political candidate would have likely dropped out after a debilitating stroke such as that which Fetterman suffered. Democrats had a reasonable alternative ready to go, in  Lamb.

But now, the Pennsylvania Senate race, which was already a nail-biter, is Dr. Mehmet Oz’s race to lose. And in addition to Fetterman’s glaring cognitive deficiencies, two other things were also exposed for the whole nation to see in the course of that cringeworthy hour of television Tuesday night: the Democrats’ hypocrisy on how mental and cognitive fitness concerns ought to impact the viability of a U.S. Senate candidacy, and how shameful and loathsome the mainstream media’s monthslong cover-up of Fetterman’s health woes is. In fact, the two aspects of this scandalous story fit together quite neatly.

The Democrats’ stances on the Pennsylvania and Georgia Senate races are impossible to reconcile with each other. In Georgia, Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, a former football star who has a checkered personal past, has been very open about his past struggles with mental illness. In fact, Walker literally wrote a book about it over a decade ago, titled Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder. Walker’s past struggles, about which he has been fully transparent, have often come up during the course of his close race against incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). The Democrats’ basic stance on Walker—which, notably, runs entirely contrary to their general pro-“forgiveness” stance on “criminal justice reform”—is not to forgive, not to show grace and to tarnish him as an irredeemable candidate.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

A few ideas for ending racial discrimination in higher ed By Andrea Widburg

By on October 28th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/a_few_ideas_for_ending_racial_discrimination_in_higher_ed.html

The currently constituted Supreme Court has enough of a conservative majority that it does seem to be returning to an original list standard of review—that is, the justices are respecting what those who wrote the Constitution, and those who passed the amendments, meant when they acted. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson,* for all her chatter, cannot change this. For this reason, it looks as if the court may finally hold that affirmative action in higher education is unconstitutional. However, because we know that ruling will not stop institutions from engaging in affirmative action, one legal thinker has come up with innovative ideas to put the brakes on discrimination in higher education.

At Minding The Campus, Louis K. Bonham, an intellectual property litigator, is optimistic that a return to originalism at the Court will reverse past decisions that paved the way for anti-White and anti-Asian discrimination at America’s colleges and universities, all in the name of “remediating” racism in America. However, he argues (correctly, I believe), that Supreme Court rulings will not stop the academics, who view affirmative action as a religion.

Moreover, suing the institutions won’t help because damages never fall on the people who have made the bad decisions. Bonham, therefore, suggests that, if the Court does end the racist abomination of affirmative action, red states should enact laws very explicitly attacking not just the institutions but also the institutional actors.

The starting point would be laws explicitly making any preferences in academics (both paying jobs and student admissions), whether based on race or victimhood, illegal. Second, Bonham suggests an automatic and severe economic penalty for an institution found to have violated the state law: Students would be entitled to recover 50% of tuition and fees during the period in which the institution was violating the law.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Lunatics Throw Mashed Potatoes on Monet Masterpiece And it’s going to get worse. by Robert Spencer

By on October 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/climate-lunatics-throw-mashed-potatoes-on-monet-masterpiece/

Just nine days after climate doom fanatics threw tomato soup onto Vincent Van Gogh’s famed Sunflowers painting in the National Gallery in London, the apocalyptically named Last Generation group has struck in a similar way, hurling mashed potatoes at Claude Monet’s Haystacks, which recently sold for $110 million, in the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, before they glued their hands to the wall and settled in for a long day of climate hectoring, mythology, propaganda, and sloganeering. It’s an annoying and stupid form of protest, but get used to it: there is going to be a lot more of it, and worse.

According to the Guardian on Sunday, one of the climate clowns explained after throwing the starchy treat at the Monet: “People are starving, people are freezing, people are dying.” Smart move: people are starving, so let’s have a food fight in an art museum. But of course, the climate activists wouldn’t be engaging in stunts of this kind if they were rational thinkers who could critically evaluate what they were told and reject the climate propaganda that has been irresponsibly pounded into them since they were toddlers.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will a Biden Go to Prison Instead of Trump? The biggest threat to the Biden machine is not from Republicans or conservatives. by Douglas MacKinnon

By on October 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/will-a-biden-go-to-prison-instead-of-trump/

Soon after he announced his run for President in June of 2015, the Democrats – along with their obedient lap dogs in the media – went after then New York City businessman Donald J. Trump hammer and tongs.

In collusion with elements of the “Deep State” within our own Federal government, fabricated accusation after fabricated accusation was hurled at then candidate Trump.  Once he was elected President, the left’s smear machine went into overdrive.

Why?

The main reason being that “They” – meaning the Democrats, the entrenched Republican-elites, and the Deep State – could not control him.  Ever.  President Trump was not part of the DC “Club” or “Cabal.”

He didn’t need their fawning approval nor their special interest connections or money.  He was in it to put forth what he believed to be the best policy initiatives designed to benefit the vast majority of the American people.  Most especially the working and middle-class.

As far as President Trump was concerned, it was: “Damn the partisan; special interest; and corrupt-liberal-media torpedoes.  Full speed ahead.”

Except…if you are instituting policies to help protect the vast majority of the American people, you will invariably expose numerous politicians as outright frauds, while identifying countless organizations and individuals greedily feeding from the tax-payer trough at the direct expense of the American people.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

America’s Woke Military Has Never Been This Weak But Biden’s National Security Strategy says diversity is our strength. by Daniel Greenfield

By on October 28th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-woke-military-has-never-been-this-weak/

For the first time the Heritage Foundation’s index of American military strength has ranked us as ‘weak’. The index warns that the Army “remains ‘weak’ in capacity with only 62 percent of the force it should have”. And even the Army has admitted that it has missed its recruiting target by 10,000 personnel which is expected to climb to over 20,000 by the end of the next fiscal year.

As Heritage and the Wall Street Journal note, “From 2005 to 2020, the U.S. fleet grew to 296 warships from 291, while China’s navy grew to 360 from 216.” The Navy however is focused on inclusion and diversity. The situation at the Air Force is much worse with the Heritage report warning that “the munitions stockpile” would probably “not support a peer-level fight that lasted more than a few weeks”. But the Air Force is also focused on diversity and inclusion.

The Navy is rated as very weak in capacity and weak in readiness. The Air Force ranks as very weak due to “problems with pilot production and retention, an extraordinarily small amount of time in the cockpit for pilots, and a fleet of aircraft that continues to age”. The Heritage index warns that “there is little doubt that it would struggle in war with a peer competitor”.

The Space Force is described as weak because “there is little evidence that the USSF has improved its readiness to provide nearly real-time support to operational and tactical levels of force operations or that it is ready in any way to execute defensive and offensive counterspace operations.”

Only the Marine Corps is rated as strong. Even our nuclear capabilities are slipping with “Russia and China are aggressively expanding the types and quantities of nuclear weapons in their inventories. Nearly all components of the nuclear enterprise are at a tipping point with respect to replacement or modernization and have no margin left for delays in schedule.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: A NATO Ally? by Burak Bekdil

By on October 28th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19028/turkey-nato-ally

What do members, future members, dialogue partners and future dialogue partners of this exotic blend of nations [the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, SCO] have in common?

With their growing democratic deficits and authoritarian-to-dictatorship regimes, they are at cold war with the world’s democratic bloc of nations.

“I told Putin… Let us in so we’ll break up with the EU. The Shanghai Five is better [than the EU]. It is much more powerful. [With membership] we’ll have a chance to be together with the countries with which we share common values” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, January 2013.

And finally, in September 2022, Erdoğan became the first head of a NATO state attending an SCO summit, in Uzbekistan…. Erdoğan went to the summit upon Putin’s personal invitation.

This is the natural outcome of West’s deaf ears and blind eyes. When Erdoğan first spoke of SCO membership for Turkey a decade ago, Western capitals reacted with shy laughter and a misdiagnosis: that Erdoğan was just bluffing to win quicker membership accession to the European Union.

Western bigwigs did not even get the message when in 2013 Erdoğan spoke of Eurasian dictatorships as “countries with which we have common values.” He was just speaking what, to him, was the truth.

Funny, Erdoğan became the first NATO head of state attending an SCO summit while pressuring Congress for the delivery of U.S.-made F-16 Block 70 fighter aircraft for his air force. Behind closed doors in Washington, his envoys and back channels will be telling their U.S. audience that “Turkey’s future is in the Western bloc, that the SCO talk is for Turkey’s balancing act between its commitment to the West and its inevitable proximity with Russia.”

Turks are living in a totally different economic realm than the recent past. Turkey’s official annual inflation climbed to a fresh 24-year high of 80% in August — though ENAG, an independent research organization, estimated the true annual inflation rate at 181% for the same period. Worse may be yet to come.

Meanwhile, Turkey’s currency, the lira, has lost more than half of its value against the US dollar since 2021.

The Shanghai Five group, which later became the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), was created on April 26, 1996 with the signing of the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions, in Shanghai by the heads of states of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.

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ISRAEL, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Netanyahu trials horror film puts justice system in focus  By RUTHIE BLUM

By on October 28th, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-720807

A new documentary examining the impetus for and preface to the trial of former prime minister (and current opposition leader) Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu is a must-watch. The 45-minute, Hebrew-language film focuses on Case 4000, which creators Gilad “Gili” Goldschmidt and screenwriter Yoad Ben Yosef identify as the most serious of the three indictments.

Case 1000 involves Netanyahu’s allegedly having been gifted cigars and champagne from Hollywood mogul Arnon Milchan and Australian businessman James Packer, in return for access and clout. Case 2000 is about Yediot Aharonot publisher Noni Mozes offering the prime minister favorable coverage, in exchange for help to curtail the circulation of the Israel Hayom newspaper.

Netanyahu never accepted the proposal. But he didn’t immediately reject it off hand. This, according to the indictment, enabled him to enjoy positive reportage during the time that Mozes believed such a deal was in the works.

You can’t make this stuff up – unless you’re the Israel Police and State Attorney’s Office, that is. Then you charge the “perpetrator” with fraud and breach of trust. And you add a bribery rap to the mix in Case 4000.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Supreme Court and Racial Preferences The Justices can reassert the principle that discriminating by race is illegal.

By on October 28th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-court-and-racial-preferences-harvard-university-of-north-carolina-college-admissions-11666905779?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

A great triumph of 20th-century American government was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It broke the back of Jim Crow and reasserted the principle that no one should be discriminated against for his race. The Supreme Court has a chance to reaffirm that vital American principle on Monday when it hears challenges to the admissions practices at Harvard and the University of North Carolina(Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and SFFA v. University of North Carolina).

The case is an important moment for American law but even more for the country’s social and political future. America is becoming increasingly diverse. Yet rather than assimilate this melting pot with race-neutral principles, many in our political class want to divide America into racial categories, allocating jobs, benefits and even elections based on race.

The Biden Administration is trying to embed this practice across the federal government and impose it on the private economy. This is a destructive trend that will inevitably lead to more racial balkanization and enmity.

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