Displaying posts published in

April 2023

What Happens To A Country That Loses Its Mind?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/11/what-happens-to-a-country-that-loses-its-mind/

To see biological males win “woman of the year” awards and others compete against women in sports, and at least one paid to promote sports bras, it’s obvious the American mind has slipped a few gears. But our current troubles are about more than celebrating what is clearly a mental illness that needs to be treated. We have lost our way almost entirely across the board.

The locus of our insanity, one could argue, is Washington, D.C. The federal government developed a habit long ago of spending beyond its means. But the foolishness has reached new levels.

The federal debt is heading to $31.7 trillion like a freight train at full throttle with no brakes. Spending is outpacing revenue by more than $1.5 trillion. Social Security is headed for collapse sooner than its appointed guardians had expected, but the collective vision among our “leaders” on the Potomac doesn’t go beyond the next election. So nothing is done.

Despite the obvious problems, the Democrats want to tax higher and spend more. The supply of vacuity seems endless.

Washington is also at the axis of weaponized government. Free speech is being crushed, dissent from the left’s political agenda is considered an imprisonable offense, and court rulings are to be ignored if they offend progressive sensibilities (yes, we know, two words that don’t belong together). The Democrats see the IRS not as just a revenue collector but also as a truncheon with which to discipline those who refuse to live under their boots. Parents who grouse at school board meetings? They are of course terrorists who must be watched.

It’s no coincidence that we’re living in riotous times. The damage seems to build with every news cycle. But to listen to the Democrats and their communications department, also known as the mainstream media, the only riot in U.S. history was on Jan. 6, 2021. In their twisted minds, rampaging, killing, burning and looting in the name of George Floyd, or some imagined resistance to fascism, are just benign elements of mostly peaceful protests. Democrats have even contributed money to bail out the “protesters.”

Wartime Intelligence Leaks Can Sink Allies If Ukraine’s air defenses are now at risk, the U.S. bears some of the blame.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/classified-document-leak-russia-ukraine-war-offensive-u-s-intelligence-dfda36c9?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The leak of classified U.S. documents related to the Ukraine war looks like a debacle at many levels—undermining the confidence of allies in the U.S., revealing how much the U.S. knows about Russia’s military deliberations, and above all betraying the weakness of Ukrainian air defenses.

The source of the leak isn’t known, which is disconcerting on its own. The documents first appeared on social media, and the press hasn’t been able to verify their authenticity. But the obvious alarm among U.S. officials suggests that much of the leaked intelligence is accurate. The Justice Department and Pentagon began a criminal investigation last week, for what that is worth.

The leaks are especially damaging because they disclose secret U.S. judgments about the progress of the war. It’s not the same as betraying the location of troop movements, but it’s close. The disclosure of how much the U.S. knows about Russian military plans could be a death sentence for sources in Russia.

The most troubling leak is that Ukraine’s air defenses could be defeated by May, which would give Russia air superiority and a huge tactical advantage. The Kremlin hoped air dominance would help it achieve an early victory, but Ukrainian air defenses held up well against the initial assaults.

Federal investigation into classified docs leak heats up as U.S., allies race to contain fallout Revelations could pose diplomatic headaches with close allies: Ben Wolfgang

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/10/federal-probe-classified-docs-leak-heats-us-allies/

The Pentagon, Justice Department and agencies across the federal government scrambled Monday to track down the source of a major classified documents leak and to limit the widening fallout in allied capitals from Jerusalem to Seoul, South Korea, where the revelations threatened to stoke domestic turmoil and friction with Washington.

The collateral damage from the leak, one of the most serious disclosures of sensitive information in years, has quickly spread far beyond American shores. Biden administration officials said they are in contact with allies because of signs that the individuals behind the leak are trying to sow discord between the U.S. and its closest partners.

At the Pentagon, officials called the leak a “very serious” risk to national security. They were careful to avoid confirming specific revelations in any of the materials, including apparent assessments of the Russia-Ukraine war and what appear to be internal political conversations in South Korea. The Defense Department has started an internal review, and the Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation.

“This team is really working to get our arms around everything that has to do with this distribution,” Pentagon spokesman Chris Meagher told reporters. “It’s a comprehensive effort. The department is trying to wrap its arms around what may have happened and the way ahead in terms of our response.”

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said President Biden has been getting regular briefings about the leak.

He said the administration isn’t sure whether more disclosures are on the horizon.

When Democrats attack democracy by Byron York

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/when-democrats-attack-democracy

The United States Constitution and all the state constitutions establish legislatures and give those legislatures the authority to set their own rules. The constitutions also give lawmakers the authority to punish members for violating those rules.

Rules make a legislature run, which is why party leaders always stack their rules committees with lawmakers sure to side with their party on any heated dispute. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), for example, was widely regarded as a master of using the rules to further her party’s ends. To see how she did it, look to January 2021, at the beginning of her last term as speaker, when Pelosi introduced a series of rules “reforms” that severely limited the rights of the minority, Republicans, to offer amendments to bills. “The rules all but eliminate what is called the motion to recommit,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page noted at the time. “This legislative tool has existed since the first Congress, and for nearly 90 years it has allowed the minority party to offer the last amendment to legislation. The motions typically fail, but they are a way for the minority to highlight and provoke a debate on controversial questions.”

Pelosi, working with a very small Democratic majority, shut down the minority’s ability to focus on issues important to them. Her basic guideline was very simple: The majority rules. For this, Pelosi received lavish praise in the media as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, speakers in history.

So Pelosi showed that rules matter. But she also showed that rules did not matter when they stood in the way of something she wanted to do. In June 2016, Democrats, then in the minority in the House, wanted to force votes on gun control measures in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting. Majority Republicans did not. The problem was Democrats had only 188 members, while Republicans had 247. On their own, Democrats couldn’t force the House to do much of anything. The majority rules.

ADL: Criticizing George Soros Is ‘Anti-Semitic’ By Ben Bartee

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/04/10/adl-criticizing-george-soros-is-anti-semitic-n1685984

The Anti-Defamation League – one of the premier censorship agencies of the corporate state — has unironically adopted the Hamas human shield tactic of hiding behind Holocaust victims to deflect incoming flak for George Soros, globalist puppeteer extraordinaire.

Via ADL:

Hungarian Jewish billionaire, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros is widely recognized for funding progressive political and social causes, usually through grants made by his Open Society Foundations. As a result, Soros has become a lightning rod for conservative and right-wing groups who object to his funding of liberal causes.
In far-right circles worldwide, Soros’ philanthropy often is recast as fodder for outsized conspiracy theories, including claims that he masterminds specific global plots or manipulates particular events to further his goals. Many of those conspiracy theories employ longstanding antisemitic myths, particularly the notion that rich and powerful Jews work behind the scenes, plotting to control countries and manipulate global events.

Get it, bigot? Criticizing a foreign billionaire money changer (Soros literally built his fortune trading currencies and wrecking multiple national economies in the process) who uses his ill-gotten fortune to meddle in American politics isn’t about a sincere desire for national sovereignty and local, true political representation.

An unspeakable atrocity The pain is made so much worse by the pusillanimity of the west Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/an-unspeakable-atrocity?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The heart breaks. The pain currently being felt by Rabbi Leo Dee and his family is unimaginable. 

On Friday, as the rabbi drove towards Tiberias in northern Israel for a Passover break with his family, the car following him carrying his wife Lucy (Leah) and two of his daughters, Maia and Rina, was ambushed by Palestinian Arab gunmen and crashed into the barrier. The gunmen then approached the car and shot Lucy and her daughters at point blank range with 20 bullets from a Kalashnikov rifle. Maia and Rina were killed on the spot. Lucy was left fighting for her life. Yesterday, Rabbi Dee buried his daughters. “How will I explain to Lucy what has happened to our two precious gifts?” he wept. Today, Lucy died.

This unspeakable atrocity has united Israel in horror. Once again, Israeli Jews have been murdered for nothing other than the fact that they are Jews living in their ancestral homeland. Once again, a quiet, wholesome, blameless family has been shattered for ever by the forces of evil bent upon exterminating Jews. 

Hours after the attack on the Dee family, an Italian tourist, Alessandro Parini, was murdered and several people injured in a car-ramming terror attack in Tel Aviv.

Since September 2000, Palestinian Arabs have murdered at least 1420 Israelis. Over the past year, at least 30 Israelis have been murdered in such attacks. For months, there have been multiple attempted attacks against Israeli citizens almost every day. 

Trans ideology is destroying the university Gender-critical academics have become the enemy within.Lauren Smith

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/04/09/trans-ideology-is-destroying-the-university/

Academia is now hostile to free thought – especially when it comes to the trans debate. Few cases demonstrate this as clearly as that of London-based sociologist Dr Laura Favaro.

Last week, Favaro started a crowdfunding campaign to help her take her employer – City, University of London – to an employment tribunal. Favaro claims she was ostracised and ultimately dismissed by her university after writing about some of her research findings, which showed that gender-critical academics are terrified of openly expressing their views.

In 2020, Favaro joined City as a postdoctoral research fellow, where her main topic of study was the debate surrounding sex and gender. As part of her research, Favaro conducted interviews with 50 gender-studies academics on both sides of the trans debate, across multiple disciplines and universities. The gender-critical feminists she interviewed told her they face unrelenting harassment and intimidation. Some even claimed that their career progression had been blocked because of their views. Last year, Favaro wrote up some of these findings in Times Higher Education. Her research left her ‘in no doubt that a culture of discrimination, silencing and fear has taken hold across universities in England and many countries beyond’.

Favaro was warned by her interviewees that her research could get her into serious trouble. It was not uncommon, Favaro said, for participants to tell her that ‘everybody is going to hate you’ for talking openly about the culture of silence around sex and gender in universities. After her THE piece was published, those warnings quickly came true.

Favaro claims on her crowdfunding page that City was bombarded with vexatious complaints, which branded her research ‘unethical’. An investigation by City found these claims to be baseless. Nevertheless, she says she was ostracised and frozen out by her department. She claims she faced bullying and harassment from a senior colleague. She also alleges there were attempts to persuade her to destroy interview transcripts. Eventually, she was dismissed, despite being on a fixed-term contract. City is then alleged to have prevented her from accessing the data she collected, and to have locked the email account she had used to communicate with participants in her study. In short, Favaro allegedly faced exactly the kind of hostile treatment that her research was trying to draw attention to.

There is now a long line of academics who have been attacked and censored for speaking out against trans orthodoxy. Philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, was infamously hounded out of her role at the University of Sussex in 2021, after students waged a relentless campaign against her. In 2018, Rosa Freedman at the University of Reading found her door covered in urine after she spoke out against gender self-identification. Selina Todd, a professor of modern history at Oxford University, revealed in 2020 that she needs bodyguards to accompany her to lectures. The list goes on.

Stanford and Yale Are Elite No More Until the scion admits that he’s come to be defined by his own humiliations and no longer by his father’s success, he cannot hope to be elite again. By Sean Ross Callaghan

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/09/stanford-and-yale-are-elite-no-more/

Once among the West’s most prestigious institutions, Stanford and Yale are now beset with addicts of ideology who bring them to shame. Recent crises there are vivid episodes in the decline of Western institutions, which now face a choice: Will they, like libertine scions, insist every hungover morning that their namesakes hide their spreading notoriety? Or will they sober up?

At Stanford Law School last month, Judge Kyle Duncan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit came to speak on the rather academic topic of inter-court dialectic. A federal judge of any stripe used to be welcomed on a law-school campus like a legal celebrity. Federal judges have reached the pinnacle of their careers, and learning how they think should be the keen interest of would-be lawyers everywhere because persuading federal judges is how top lawyers get paid top dollar.

But at Stanford, supposedly a top training ground for future lawyers, Judge Duncan was greeted like a nun in a crack house by the school’s Woke cartel.

Students heckled him. “We hope your daughters get raped,” one shouted. Another screamed, “you scumbag!” One stood up and said, “I f— men. I can find the prostate. Why can’t you find the cl–?” Judge Duncan was unable even to begin his remarks before federal marshals had to whisk him off campus.

Before a few years ago, law students almost never acted this way. If they did, they regretted it. At the University of Chicago Law School, one student led the heckling of a speaking event, and he got expelled. But now, at law schools that are supposed to be our nation’s best, heckling is common—while consequences are scarce.

At Yale Law School last year, hundreds of students heckled a panel of Supreme Court lawyers. They raised their middle fingers. They stomped their feet and banged on the walls. One even screamed “b–ch!” None faced discipline.

These are students who have hit rock bottom, and the mark of their rock bottom is the mark of any addict’s, whether of substance or of ideology. It’s angry self-abasement. Their public vulgarity is their point because it’s a revenge they exact at the expense of their own dignity. By covering themselves in muck, they can say to their targets, “welcome to the pig sty: this is where you belong.”

Could the partition of India and Pakistan repeat itself in U.K. and Scotland? By Rajan Laad

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/could_the_partition_of_india_and_pakistan_repeat_itself_in_uk_and_scotland.html

When India was liberated from British rule more than 75 years ago, the territory was divided, or partitioned, into India and the new state of Pakistan; East Pakistan later became Bangladesh.

The British oversaw the partition along with the newly appointed Indian and Pakistani leaders in their respective newly formed nations.

British civil servant Sir Cyril Radcliffe drew up the borders between India and Pakistan, in 1947, dividing the sub-continent very roughly into:

a central and southern part, where Hindus had the majority
two parts in the north-west and north-east that mostly  Muslim population

But Hindus and Muslims were scattered throughout British India.

Hence, after the declaration of the partition, more than 15 million people traveled, often hundreds of miles, to cross the new frontiers to their respective nations. It has been called the largest exodus in human history.

Almost 75 years later, history may be repeating itself.

Last October, the United Kingdom swore in Rishi Sunak as their new prime minister. Sunak’s parents are Indian Hindus who migrated to the U.K. from East Africa. Sunak was born in Southampton in 1980. His father was a doctor, his mother was a pharmacist. He went to the boarding school Winchester College, then studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford, and business at Stanford University in the U.S.

Baseball Home Runs Blamed on Global Warming It’s basic physics. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/baseball-home-runs-blamed-on-global-warming/

Americans, at least liberal ones, lost the right to make fun of Lysenkoism, phrenology and every bit of stupid pseudoscience some years back. Ever since, “the science” has become someone’s idea of an absurd routine, part Peter Sellers and part South Park, in which the goal is to say completely absurd things with a straight face.

At the current rate of descent into absurdity, it takes the occasional new low to even get any attention.

Climate change is making major league sluggers into even hotter hitters, sending an extra 50 or so home runs a year over the fences, a new study found.

It’s basic physics.

When air heats up, molecules move faster and away from each other, making the air less dense. Baseballs launched off a bat go farther through thinner air because there’s less resistance to slow the ball.

That also probably explains the four-minute mile. We think it’s a lesson about self-confidence, but actually the only reason Roger Bannister was able to do it and so many after him was because of global warming. He was able to run faster because the air was thinner due to global warming. It’s basic physics.

Also, Alex Ovechkin’s NHL record is probably best explained by global warming. As the ice melts due to global warming, goals become easier to score. It’s basic physics.

The latest research also shows that Michael Jordan’s entire career was due to global warming. It’s just basic physics. As the global warming particles penetrate the basketball, it becomes lighter. So do basketball shoes. The event horizon around the hoop is then hyperaccelerated through the 12th dimension every time someone uses a disposable plastic plate.

The good news is that all sorts of records can now be broken as long as we just keep driving gas cars and feeding environmental consultants to packs of hungry wolves.

It’s basic physics.