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February 2023

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Season for Swamp Draining The new House seeks to restrain federal bureaucrats. Do we dare to dream? James Freeman

By on February 28th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-season-for-swamp-draining-21cf59f5?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Two weeks ago this column shared the cheery news that the 118th Congress had so far managed to avoid doing anything of consequence to us. The lucky streak continues and this welcome respite from the misguided frenzy of Biden lawmaking could be just the start. Now some taxpayers are beginning to dream that Beltway lawmakers might be able to achieve even less than nothing—an actual reduction in the burdens Washington imposes on the citizenry.

Lisa Rein and Jacqueline Alemany report for the Washington Post:

At a House hearing this month on fraud and waste in pandemic aid, some Republicans zeroed in on one group in particular for criticism: the federal employees overseeing the money.
“Fire people if they don’t do things they’re supposed to do,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said. “That is our biggest problem in the federal government. Nobody can be held accountable.”
That sentiment is animating a newly empowered GOP House majority eager to ramp up scrutiny of the army of civil servants who run the government’s day-to-day operations. The effort includes seeking testimony from middle- and lower-level workers who are part of what Republicans have long derided as the “deep state,” while some lawmakers are drafting bills that have little chance of passing the Democrat-led Senate but give Republicans a chance to argue for reining in the federal bureaucracy of 2.1 million employees.

Why not take the chance, especially given the surging cost of maintaining this vast unproductive enterprise? The Post report continues:

…House Republican leaders have told almost all of their committees to come up with plans by March to slash spending and beef up oversight of federal agencies in their jurisdiction.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The ‘Not a Consensus’ Wuhan Covid Dodge The White House tries to downplay the news of ‘new’ virus information.

By on February 28th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-energy-department-covid-lab-china-national-security-john-kirby-299ee360?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

White House spokespersons played the press corps like a Stradivarius on Monday as they ducked questions about Sunday’s report that the Energy Department has concluded the Covid virus probably originated in a Chinese laboratory.

“There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how Covid started,” said John Kirby, the White House national-security spokesman. “There is just not an intelligence community consensus.”

So what? When was the last time there was an intelligence community consensus on anything? No reporter asked Mr. Kirby that question, but we don’t mind doing so.

By its very nature, intelligence is usually murky and open to different interpretations. That’s why agencies attach terms like “low confidence” or “moderate confidence” to their judgments. A difference in agency views can be useful because it means there is less chance of groupthink influencing policy choices.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Holocaust is a myth, say a quarter of young Dutch Bruno Waterfield

By on February 28th, 2023

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/db56e1a8-9c9e-11ed-8201-2ed91f44d1e8?shareToken=5f00e026edb6acc3ffce3b840d61b95a

Almost one in four Dutch people born after 1980 think the Holocaust is “a myth” or that the number of Jewish people killed by the Nazis is “greatly exaggerated”.

Research by the US-based Claims Conference, an organisation representing Jews in negotiations with Germany for compensation and restitution, has found “shocking and disturbing” ignorance among millennials and Generation Z in the Netherlands, which ranked the worst for Holocaust denial from a selection of Western countries surveyed.

Almost a third (32 per cent) of Dutch millennials do not know that Anne Frank, whose diary written while hiding under Nazi occupation is a worldwide bestseller, died in a concentration camp.

A total of 2,000 Dutch people were polled last December following similar surveys in the United States, Britain, France, Austria and Canada.

More than half of those surveyed in the Netherlands, and up to three out of five younger people, do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, while 23 per cent said the crimes of Nazi Germany were untrue or exaggerated.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

SOCIAL JUSTICE SHRINKS: SALLY SATEL

By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/social-justice-shrinks-how-identity-politics-infected-therapy/

In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.”

“We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology.

Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.’” White women, one professor told a class, were “basic bitches,” “Beckys” and “nothing special.”

If the client were black, Elliott was told to ask how it felt to sit with her, a white counselor. If the client felt at ease, “my job — regardless of what brought him to therapy — was to make him more aware of how being black compounded, or perhaps caused, his problems.

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the three-year program intensified its emphasis on race and oppression, making clear that counselors were to be foot soldiers in the culture wars. “Incredible as it sounds,” says Elliott, “we were encouraged to see ourselves as activists and remake ourselves as social change agents.”

“Critical social-justice therapists” is what Aaron Kindsvatter and others call this new breed of mental health professional graduating from programs across the country. Last year, Kindsvatter le his tenured position at the University of Vermont to pursue private practice in Burlington, where he has treated a handful of clients who were, in his words, “victims of indoctrination attempts” by their “authoritarian” therapists. To be clear, Elliott and Kindsvatter are not talking about a mismatch in sociopolitical views wherein, say, a client is conservative and the therapist is liberal or progressive. To be sure, such a
discrepancy can — though by no means inevitably does — create tension. Studies have shown, in fact, that therapeutic relationships were stronger when clients felt comfortable disclosing their political views to the therapist and when the therapist was accepting of those views.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Realism on China by Pete Hoekstra

By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19439/realism-on-china

What is clear is that, intentionally or not, China has shown America’s need to get serious about the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its expansionist global aims.

As the latest provocation by the CCP plays out, it gets more disturbing. The media, and even US President Joe Biden, describe the CCP as a “competitor” and downplay any possible conflict. When the CCP flies spy balloons across the continent, opens police stations in our cities, infiltrates our universities, poisons more than 100,000 Americans with hard drugs each year, and announces its plans to replace the United States, it is hard to argue we are in anything but a “Cold War” with the CCP.

It is time for the U.S. government and our allies to definitively outline the clear challenge and danger the CCP poses to the West. The behavior demonstrated by the CCP spy balloon is not an aberration; it is part of a dangerous pattern. This includes the CCP’s longtime intellectual property theft; breaches of cybersecurity; its increasing global military presence; expanding and modernizing its military, and its purchases of farmland near US military sites. Given that this is the reality, the Biden Administration must act more forcefully in response to the CCP’s aggressive behavior or, through passivity, it will invite an even greater challenge from China.

Given the CCP’s clear efforts against America, why does there continue to be such a muted response from the Biden Administration? While they haven’t explicitly said it, one reason might be climate change.

Other reports, however, strongly contradict the Annual Threat Assessment. These assert 1) that “apocalyptic claims about climate change are wrong” and that climate change is “a fraud”; 2) that China has less than no interest in cutting emissions; 3) that green energy actually consists of a huge transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich to “destroy capitalism” and punish the West for having “pulled millions out of poverty and shaped the modern world”; 4) that cutting back on fossil fuels hurts the poor , it hits them worst ; and 5) that climate change is basically caused by sun flares and there is not a blessed thing you can do about them. Vested interests can offer grants for “scientific papers” to promote their businesses; sun-flares cannot offer grants.

No matter where one falls on climate change, the CCP’s brazen spy balloon flight has left little doubt about the threat the Chinese Communist regime poses. It is past time for all Americans to recognize and respond to this threat.

It was impossible to miss — a giant white balloon with a massive solar array and a yet-to-be-publicly-disclosed sensor package flying over some of America’s most sensitive military sites. In the time since China’s spy balloon traversed Alaska, Canada and the continental United States, details surrounding the surveillance overflight are murky at best as the Biden Administration has provided confused, conflicted and muddled statements to Americans and even Congress.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Solution to Ballot Fraud By Jay Valentine

By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/the_solution_to_ballot_fraud.html

The irresistible force is mail-in ballots, nonexistent signature verification, phantom voter rolls, a feckless Republican Party, Republican governors donating tax money to a George Soros–funded entity to clean voter rolls — election commissions changing ZIP codes so mail-in ballots stack up — courts refusing to remove dead people from voter rolls unless they miss two consecutive elections, and a Republican presidential candidate who thinks he can win with ballot-harvesting.

What could go wrong in 2024?

In 2000, the national realization was that election fraud is industrial-scale, committed by election commissions or with their acquiescence.  It is a sovereign crime.

The 2020 realization is that voter integrity teams cannot remove phantoms from voter rolls — even with death certificates.

This irresistible force will not dissipate.

Wisconsin advanced the state-of-the-scam to further flood voter rolls with anyone claiming existence. 

Forty years of Republican acquiescence and temerity brought us here — the end of free and fair elections.  Election fraud is baked into every state’s voter rolls — protected by government.

This week, we demonstrated a solution.

We sent an open letter to ERIC, the organization, ostensibly founded with help from George Soros, managing voter rolls for almost 30 states — many Republican.  We sent George a copy.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Auschwitz Studies The difference between knowledge and ignorance, between truth and lies, is the difference between life and death. By Lloyd Billingsley

By on February 27th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/26/auschwitz-studies/

A review of The Escape Artist: the Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World,
by Jonathan Freedland, (HarperCollins, 400 pages, $28.99).

The murder of Jews began on December 8, 1941, one day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The German National Socialists herded victims into vans, locked the doors, then fed in the deadly exhaust fumes. In four months, the Nazis killed 50,000 Jews that way, but as author Jonathan Freedland explains, the killers didn’t want gas chambers on wheels.

They built “fixed purpose-built camps,” such as Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz, a former Polish army barracks near the village of Oswiecim in Upper Silesia. The remote location and proximity to railway lines made it ideal for “the method of murder by gas.” Walter Rosenberg, also known as Rudi Vrba, was the first Jew to break out of the place. The Escape Artist: the Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World is based on his account.

Walter hailed from Slovakia, where “the state religion of the infant republic was Nazism, albeit in a Slovak denomination.” Since Walter met the legal definition of a Jew, his high-school education was terminated. To prevent Jews from studying at home, they were ordered to hand in all textbooks.

The regime of Father Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, also banned Jews from government jobs, restricted them from the professions and later banned Jews from owning cars, radios, and even sports equipment. Walter landed on a list for deportation and “resettlement” which took him to Majdanek and then Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

There he became “a witness to and target of a program of industrialized continent-wide murder” that “aimed both to eradicate an entire people and turn a profit for the murderers.” 

Among the camp’s living dead, known as Muselmanner, Walter spots engineers and managers of the site’s proprietor, the German industrial conglomerate I.G. Farben. 

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Victor Davis Hanson :Refighting the Vietnam War Triumph Retaken shows that America’s war in Vietnam could have been won earlier at far less cost, and in fact almost was, even belatedly by 1968.

By on February 27th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/26/refighting-the-vietnam-war/

Military historian and Hillsdale College professor Mark Moyar has just published Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968, which is the second in what will become a massive three-volume revision of the entire Vietnam War. It is a book that should be widely read, much discussed, and reviewed in depth regardless of one’s view of that sad chapter in American diplomacy and conflict in Vietnam. 

The first book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 appeared in 2006. It gained considerable attention for its heterodox analysis of the postwar origins of communist aggression against the South, beginning with the disastrous French colonial experience and its transference to the Americans. Moyar described the Byzantine intrigue through which the Kennedy Administration inserted American ground troops into Vietnam, and why and how his successor Lyndon B. Johnson rapidly escalated the American presence.  

Moyar’s controversial argument in volume one centered on the disastrous decisions of these two administrations that ensured Americans would be sent into an uninviting distant theater of operations in the dangerous neighborhood of both communist China and Russia. Worse, they would be asked to fight under self-imposed limitations of the nuclear age in which their leaders could not achieve victory or perhaps even define it.  

Still, Moyar argued that there was nevertheless a chance to achieve a South-Korean-like solution at much less cost, one that was thrown away through a series of American blunders. Most grievous was the American support for the 1963 coup that removed South-Vietnamese strongman president Ngo Dinh Diem and led to his almost immediate assassination‚ even as he was evolving into a viable wartime leader.  

Moyar additionally deplored the biased and lockstep reporting of anti-war media, including its icons David “The Best and the Brightest” Halberstam and Neil “A Bright, Shining Lie” Sheehan, who operated on ideological premises far different from reportage in World War II and Korea. Both characteristically exaggerated American shortcomings consistent with their theme that Vietnam was an anti-colonialist war of liberation rather than a Cold War proxy fight over unilateral communist aggression. 

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

UPenn Law’s Race Inquisitors Seek to Silence Amy Wax The tenured law professor fights back. by Richard L. Cravatts

By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/upenn-laws-race-inquisitors-seek-to-silence-amy-wax/

When he wryly observed that “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,” Orwell may well have had academia in mind, where challenging prevailing ideology can have a calamitous effect on one’s reputation and career—something especially true of faculty.

One ubiquitous ideology in academia now is an obsession with race, manifested in the relentless pursuit of recruiting and retaining minority students as part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion, (DEI) campaign. The campaign for diversity is based on an assumed, but unproven, assumption that diverse student populations are automatically superior to non-diverse ones, and that diversity not only benefits minority students but all students and the university as a whole. This belief is accepted by woke virtue-signaling administrators and diversocrats as a given, but it is certainly still a topic that can be questioned, critiqued, and challenged, and a faculty member has the right to not accept it as settled doctrine.

DEI bureaucracies have also had another unintended, negative side-effect, namely, that minority students are counseled to see themselves as victims of systemic racism—both in their own universities and in the country as a whole. Students have quickly realized that once they are designated as victims and given a bucket of accommodations and benefits not enjoyed by their white and Asian peers, they have become emboldened to demand further concessions—one significant one being the “right” not to be challenged or offended by the views of others that question the prevailing dogma on liberal campuses.

Actual racism—from faculty, students, and administrators—is so rare and benign that in order to identify cases where racism reveals itself, university diversocrats and the student victims they serve must assiduously ferret out examples of racist thought and behavior—including accusations of systemic racism, invisible racism, triggers, microaggressions, white privilege, and, recently, instances when faculty or students have defended law enforcement or criticized the motives and tactics of Black Lives Matter. Any challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy of these victim students and their administrative enablers are stamped down, attacked, and deemed racist and indicative of white supremacy. And when it is faculty members who dare to question affirmative action, diversity, systemic racism, and white supremacy, the wrath of the woke mob is immediate and unrelenting.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Ukraine and Our Confused Foreign Policy When idealistic goals exceed political will and materiel grasp. by Bruce Thornton

By on February 27th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ukraine-and-our-confused-foreign-policy/

“It’s time to accept that our vacation from history was over 20 years ago, and we need to get back to work strengthening our country’s security.”

The first anniversary of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine has come and gone, and the uncertainty about how that conflict will be resolved remains, despite the West’s cheerleading and photo-ops with Zelensky, and billions in cash and materiel sent to Ukraine. Meanwhile, China is  “strongly considering” supporting Russia with arms and ammo, Iran keeps sending Russia drones, and American support for aid to Ukraine is starting to dwindle.

The way out of this stalemate, moreover, requires choices none of which are politically palatable or possible. So here we are again, with our idealistic foreign policy reach exceeding our political will and materiel grasp.

The origins of this predicament in part lie in the still uncertain justifications for spending billions of dollars and depleting our own stockpiles of materiel. The Asia Times’s David Goldman recently posed the still unanswered questions about our reasons and intentions:

“In furtherance of what strategic interests has the United States acted in Ukraine? Is Ukraine’s NATO membership an American raison d’état? Did American strategists really believe that sanctions would shut down Russia’s economy? Did they imagine that the trading patterns of the Asian continent would shift to flow around the sanctions? Did they consider the materiel requirements of a long war that is exhausting American stockpiles? Did they consider what tripwires might elicit the use of nuclear weapons? Or did they sleepwalk into the conflict, as the European powers did in 1914?”

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