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December 2024

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Can Elon and Vivek Lead Us to a More Efficient Government? Not with Congress unwilling to give up money and power. By Richard Truesdell and Keith Lehmann

By on December 6th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/06/can-elon-and-vivek-lead-us-to-a-more-efficient-government/

Once Donald Trump is inaugurated as our 47th U.S. president, Tesla, SpaceX, and X/Twitter CEO Elon Musk will likely head a Department of Government Efficiency commission (DOGE). Teaming up with tech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, this dynamic duo will focus on “drastic reforms” targeting “the entire federal government.”

Already there is talk that Musk and Ramaswamy have identified work-at-home policies for federal workers in an effort to trim $2 billion of bloat from the budget. One area they are targeting is waste at the Veterans Administration.

You might not support the movement to “transition” our country to electric vehicles. But you must be impressed with the sheer determination and sense of urgency Elon Musk applied to his vision of building EVs to scale as he did with Tesla. Similarly, Musk brought the U.S. space program back into existence with similar single-mindedness, having achieved 100 successful year-to-date space missions in 2024 with more to come.

A core aspect of his approach to development and production was found in his recent biography, a five-step process that he refers to as “the algorithm.”

Question every requirement. Never accept a requirement that came from a department or committee.

Delete any process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back 10 percent of them, you didn’t delete enough.

Simplify and optimize. This should come right after Step 2. Do not simplify and optimize a process that should not exist.

Accelerate cycle time. Every procedure can be sped up.

Automate. This comes last. Do not automate until all requirements have been questioned, processes have been deleted, everything has been simplified, and procedures have been sped up.

Imagine if these five steps were applied to reforming the U.S. government. It would probably look a lot like what Musk achieved with X/Twitter. Less than two years after Musk acquired the company, it operates today with 80 percent fewer employees and is much more productive, accurate, timely, and ideologically balanced.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Gunman Shot Kindergarteners in California for ‘Palestine’ A “response to America’s involvement with genocide and oppression of Palestinians” by Daniel Greenfield

By on December 6th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/gunman-shot-kindergarteners-in-california-for-palestine/

Two kindergarteners were critically wounded when Glenn Litton, a monster with a long criminal record and apparent delusions, tricked his way into the school and then opened fire in a small California town.

Glenn Litton lied to gain access to the Feather River Seventh-Day Adventists school by claiming to be the grandfather of a prospective student before opening fire on the children.

The gunman wrote in a note that the shootings of children were “carried out countermeasure in necessitated response to America’s involvement with genocide and oppression of Palestinians along with attacks towards Yemen.”

The media emphasizes that Litton was mentally ill and I’m sure his sense of reality was probably none too grounded, but the note also makes it clear that he had been feeding off pro-terrorist propaganda on social media probably supplemented by media coverage.

Even apart from his recent support for Islamic terrorism, Litton was a poster boy for California’s revolving door criminal justice system.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A Real Pain Jesse Eisenberg explores American Jewish identity eighty years after the Holocaust. by Danusha V. Goska

By on December 6th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/a-real-pain/

A Real Pain is a comedy-drama Holocaust-themed film. A Real Pain was written, directed, and co-produced by Jesse Eisenberg. The film depicts the journey of two cousins, David and Benji Kaplan, who travel with a tour group to Poland. The cousins’ late grandmother, Dory, was a survivor. The cousins’ journey is an effort to honor her and better understand their heritage.

Eisenberg, 41, plays David; Kieran Culkin, 42, plays Benji. A Real Pain also features Will Sharpe as James, the tour guide, and other tour members Jennifer Grey as Marcia; Kurt Egyiawan as Eloge; and Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes as Diane and Mark.

David is a happily married husband and father. He lives in an attractive brownstone and makes a good living selling ads. He suffers from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as does Eisenberg himself. David takes prescription medication to suppress his symptoms.

Benji is a “real pain” – as in, “a pain in the ass.” He is disruptive and socially inappropriate. Benji lives in his mother’s house and smokes a lot of marijuana. He has no committed relationships or steady work. He uses the F-word in every sentence.

David’s pain and Benji’s pain are set against the overwhelming pain of the Holocaust. The tour group members are flummoxed in their attempts to assimilate historical reality. They juxtapose their comfortable American lives with what Holocaust victims endured. They cannot craft a coherent narrative about the world or their own lives that encompasses that dichotomy.

RottenTomatoes awards A Real Pain a hefty 96% positive score. Prognosticators predict Academy Award nominations for Eisenberg, Culkin, and the film itself. Moira MacDonald, writing in the Seattle Times, speaks for many. The film “examines Jewish identity, generational trauma, sibling-like rivalry and the strangeness of being in a country you don’t recognize, but that’s nonetheless partly your own.” Other critics use superlatives like “perfect,” “radiant.” “vivid,” “moving,” “funny,” “devastating,” “masterful,” “superb,” “rueful,” “heart-swelling,” and “poignant.” Peter Travers of ABC news promises, “You’ll laugh till it hurts.”

David Fear in Rolling Stone writes, “Culkin” produces “the single greatest, funniest, most cringe-comic and heartbreaking performance.” Richard Roper, in the Chicago Sun Times, says that Culkin takes “a character who could have been a one-dimensional, shtick-reliant jerk and infuses him with vulnerability and empathy.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Amnesty International and Balaam’s Talking Ass by Seth Mandel

By on December 6th, 2024

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/amnesty-international-and-balaams-talking-ass/?vgo_ee=3xxTz8o1O%2F7d9HuBtB3FmsUQj67wDM1s4yaaaNXdMJo9QsM%3D%3AZGXaMR29aKIE%2FybP91c7nT%2BH2%2BYeFvok

It’s hard not to take some enjoyment in the absolute disaster of Amnesty International’s new report on Israel, in which the infamous NGO blew the biggest moment of its nefarious existence. Surely one can appreciate a modern reenactment of the biblical tale of Balaam’s Talking Ass.

In that story, the Moabite king hires the prophet Balaam to curse the Israelites. Along the way, God sends an angel to stand in his way, but only Balaam’s she-donkey can see the angel. The donkey swerves and Balaam beats the animal. On the third attempt, the angel successfully blocks them and the donkey lays down in surrender. Balaam beats the donkey again, but this time she speaks: “What have I done to you that you have beaten me these three times?”

They argue, and God’s angel reveals itself to Balaam, who is embarrassed by the whole ordeal. When Balaam ultimately tries to curse the Israelites, he finds that God has put only words of praise in his mouth.

Balaam, then, is unable to execute the sole purpose of his mission. To add insult to injury, his own donkey observed God’s messenger before he did.

Amnesty International’s leaders came to curse the Jews, failed, and were revealed to be sub-donkey intellects in the process.

Here’s what happened. Amnesty has produced a report accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. It was intended to be the capstone of the organization’s work. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Wai Wah Chin A Conspiracy Against Specialized High Schools? Opponents angle to defund the entrance exam.

By on December 6th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-conspiracy-against-specialized-high-schools

New York City’s racial polarizers are back, targeting academic excellence in public schools. This time, they’re mobilizing to oppose the standardized test that the city’s specialized high schools use to achieve race-blind, meritocratic admissions.

To understand the polarizers’ scheme, take a step back. The Specialized High Schools Admission Test (SHSAT), which determines admissions to eight of the city’s nine specialized high schools, had been provided by Pearson Assessments to the New York City Department of Education under a multiyear contract. That contract expired on October 31, and the decision to renew the deal falls to the city’s Panel for Education Policy (PEP).
 
PEP itself has a history of racial politicking. The panel infamously helped kill the department’s gifted and talented program in 2021, with members claiming that the G&T admissions test was racist. They declined to approve the vendor contract for G&T testing—with Pearson. “A yes vote on this contract would be a continuation of white supremacy,” said one PEP member. Other members suddenly discovered frugality and objected to the test’s cost.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in his final year in office and no friend of G&T, used the panel’s denial of the Pearson contract to terminate the program entirely. Mayor Eric Adams restored it, but without the admissions testing that PEP had rejected, rendering the program far less effective in delivering rigorous K-8 education that, among other things, prepares top students for the SHSAT.

This time, the racial polarizers’ pretext for objecting to the proposed Pearson contract renewal is the proposal to replace paper-and-pencil testing with computerized (“digitized”) testing, which, they claim, “could worsen inequities.” The notion that, in our digital age, the city’s sharpest eighth-graders would be intimidated by computers is ridiculous. Indeed, the SAT, Advanced Placement tests, and New York State’s proficiency tests—the last administered even to grade schoolers—have all been successfully computerized without fuss. The GRE and MCAT have been computerized for decades.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New Poll Shows How Americans Feel About Trump’s Nominees Guy Benson

By on December 6th, 2024

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2024/12/05/new-poll-all-of-trumps-nominees-are-viewed-more-favorably-than-unfavorably-n2648647

With Washington, DC consumed with controversy of a handful of Trump nominees, the American public is looking…pretty comfortable with what they’re seeing from the presidential transition.  We noted strong polling on this front before Thanksgiving, and the trend appears to be continuing.  Donald Trump’s overall favorability has pulled even at 48-48, whereas both his defeated rival and the current incumbent underwater by double digits.  You’ll see that recent Gallup data in the graphic embedded below.  As for the transition, a sizable majority (52/38) approves, with literally every single Trump nominee polling with more support than opposition — both according to Morning Consult:

One of Trump’s most embattled picks, Defense Secretary-designate Pete Hegseth, is above water by single digits, with the public splitting almost into thirds on his nomination: Support, oppose, and don’t know.  Hegseth is facing a series of allegations against him and responded in a Wall Street Journal op/ed yesterday.  An excerpt:

I’ve been through a lot: combat tours, job changes, divorces and family challenges. (Yes, I love my mom very much, and she loves me.) I have always led with honesty, integrity and passion. Tragically, many veterans never find the purpose for their next chapter and succumb to the bottle, depression or, worst of all, suicide. I understand what they are facing—because I’ve lived it. But by the grace of God, I took another path. My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has renewed and restored my life. I am saved by his grace. The press is peddling anonymous story after anonymous story, all meant to smear me and tear me down. It’s a textbook manufactured media takedown.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We Were 100% Right In 2020 — ‘Elect Joe Biden: He’ll Be The Worst President In U.S. History’

By on December 6th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/06/we-were-100-right-elect-joe-biden-hell-be-the-worst-president-in-u-s-history/

Editor’s note: Now that Joe Biden’s disastrous term as president is coming to an inglorious end, we thought it worth reminding readers that we predicted his failed presidency more than four years ago. Even we are surprised by how prescient we were. Every single item on our list came true.  The only thing we missed is that he would end his presidency by betraying his own party and all his sycophants in the media with a get-out-of-jail-free card for his miscreant son. Unfortunately, all the elites and pundits who gaslit the country about Biden will continue to be feted and fattened, while we do the hard and unglamorous work of telling the unvarnished truth. Below is our Oct. 20, 2020, editorial.

Elect Joe Biden: He’ll Be The Worst President In U.S. History

October 20, 2020

Ranking modern presidents, from first to worst, is an entirely subjective matter. That said, we’re quite sure Joe Biden will be, if elected, the most destructive president of our lifetimes if not of all time.

At I&I we tend to look at Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama as being the worst presidents from our lifetimes. Carter saw himself as the caretaker of the country’s inevitable decline rather than someone who would lift it from its malaise. Obama managed the worst economic recovery in our post-war history, allowed ISIS to grow into a terrorist power, and rolled over for Iran’s mullahs. His was the most divisive presidency of modern times. If this nation is on the brink of another civil war, as some suggest we are, it’s because he set the tone for the bitter separation we see today among Americans.

At least Carter led the deregulation of the airline, trucking, and rail industries, and in his 1978 State of the Union address acknowledged “we really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government.”

Biden would neither do nor say any such thing.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Will Racial Quotas Survive SCOTUS? By Garrett Snedeker

By on December 5th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/will-racial-quotas-survive-scotus/

Now that the first slate of undergraduate admissions statistics following the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing race-based affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and its companion case has been released, it is clear that elite colleges are following one of two paths. 

The first path is largely one of prudential compliance with the Court’s ruling. Elite colleges following the first path feature incoming classes of first-year students with higher proportions of Asian and white students than in previous classes while maintaining stellar secondary school class rank and standardized test scores. Call this the path of least resistance, demonstrating prima facie that these colleges’ admissions practices hew toward the race-neutrality the SFFA decision requires. 

The second path is one of greater resistance toward the Court’s ruling. With the composition of incoming classes of first-year students unchanged from previous admissions cycles or even in some cases featuring increased numbers of black and Hispanic students, elite colleges following the second path are taking increased risks of future litigation. Such litigation, even if unwelcome, would demonstrate fidelity to a regime that preserves race-based affirmative action and quotas, in spirit if not in name.     

Affirmative action in college admissions has redounded toward greater percentages of black and Hispanic students, to the detriment of Asian-American and white applicants. The problem at root though is that race-conscious admissions, a group quota regime which Tom Klingenstein has rightly decried on this website and in his public remarks, runs contrary to the first principles of moral and legal judgment. As philosopher Hadley Arkes has observed, “It is the fallacy of assuming that we can draw moral inferences about persons, their goodness or badness, their moral deserts, as though race determined or controlled their conduct and character.” Setting aside the fundamental injustice of using race as a proxy for an individual’s moral standing, racial categories in modern America are imprecise groupings of individuals motivated to further political goals, as the scholar David E. Bernstein demonstrated at length in his 2022 book Classified, on which I worked as a research assistant. Elite colleges signal fidelity to these political goals by reporting racial quotas as a sign of commitment to group diversity rather than individual merit. 

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

‘Antisemitic nightmare at Fontainebleau Miami beach,’ says Rabbi Shmuley

By on December 5th, 2024

https://m.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-832073?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_

“My goal is to ensure the arrest and prosecution of my assailant and hold the Fontainebleau Hotel accountable for its failure to protect me and Jewish visitors,” Shmuley said.

I was viciously attacked at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach while simply working on my laptop, wearing a yarmulke. The attack was extremely dangerous, devastatingly unsettling, terrifying, and entirely unprovoked. It happened solely because I am proudly and unmistakably Jewish. 

The alleged attacker, Faiz Akbar from Lorton, Virginia – later identified by facial recognition by outstanding online Jewish organizations – confronted me in the hotel lobby, repeatedly threatening me with graphic violence. What was most shocking was the hotel’s security response.

One staff member actually and sickeningly fist-bumped and hugged the man who was calling me a baby killer and threatening me with his savagery. The video, posted to social media, has now gone viral around the world and has been watched by millions of people, with hundreds of thousands posting comments of disbelief that something like this can happen, not just in the United States, but especially in South Florida where Jews felt so much more safe and at one of the world’s premier hotels.

The incident has been reported both to local law enforcement and the FBI. My goal is to ensure the arrest and prosecution of my assailant and, given their shocking behavior since the attack, hold the Fontainebleau Hotel accountable for its failure to protect me and Jewish visitors.

Trend of rising antisemitism

This attack is part of a disturbing trend of rising antisemitism that I’ve personally experienced. As a public Jewish figure, I am often targeted, but I want to be clear: I will never hide my Jewish identity. I am proud to be Jewish and will continue to stand up against hate, even in the face of violent or near-lethal incidents.

I grew up in Miami Beach, a city I love deeply. My mother lived and died here. I attended the Hebrew Academy of Greater Miami. One class below me was Ron Dermer who would later become my student president at Oxford University and is today Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s closest aid.

Antisemitism was something almost unknown to us as part of daily experience. Indeed, since the COVID epidemic, a dramatic surge of Jews in general and orthodox Jews in particular have made South Florida their home, seeking safer havens than New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania have proven to be.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Race for Nuclear Fusion Energy, the Clean Fuel of the Future: Will China Eat America’s Lunch? by Lawrence Kadish

By on December 5th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21182/race-for-nuclear-fusion-energy

The clean energy breakthrough everyone has been wishing for finally is here! It may not be quite ready for prime time, but a quiet nuclear-fusion energy race is underway and cannot come soon enough.

The problem is that China seems to be winning it, not the United States or the West.

It is nuclear fusion — making atoms collide, rather than splitting them, or fission — when two atoms are forced to combine into one new atom at extremely hot temperatures. “In order for fusion to occur on the very hot gas — or plasma,” notes euro-fusion.org, “the plasma must be heated to temperatures in excess of 150 million degrees Celsius [320 million degrees F]. ” The sun does it without a container — their combined new weight comes to less than each atom had separately.

This differential becomes a burst of energy that leaves no nuclear residue while functioning as if one had in one’s car a gallon of gas which could run it for 20 years. Fusion energy produced four times the power of fission energy, and when harnessed could be used as fuel for expeditions into outer space. Soon we shall presumably be able to say goodbye to expensive, combustible, warm-weather-only and not-very-far lithium batteries, and instead travel unpollutingly along on tiny bundles of captured energy.

The good news is that nuclear fusion, which is produced through nuclear reactors, tokamaks, leaves absolutely no residue.

The bad news is that — apart from needing further development and affordability — the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems already to be working at warp-speed to develop this new form of energy for commercial and other use. China’s regime has reportedly allocated $1.5 billion annually to this effort, which would appear hardly enough, but is still nearly twice as much as the US is investing.

The CCP, moreover, has also reportedly been able to remove the most major drawback: a troublesome resin that impeded the fusion by lowering the temperature needed in the reactor, an impediment that was possibly overcome last month by changing the fuels and using the magnetic fields inside the tokamak — “the device that uses magnetic fields to confine a plasma” — to divert the plasma into a chamber the shape of a “cored apple.”

In the US, entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk at Tesla and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the parent company of ChatGPT), have also been in this race to harness nuclear-fusion energy. Tesla bought SolarCity in 2006, originally to explore energy storage, but apparently also produce nuclear fusion energy. Altman took a nuclear energy company public for $500 million. One of his companies reportedly “has already secured a permit from the Department of Energy to build its first microreactor at the Idaho National Laboratory.”

Meanwhile, other entrepreneurs have been exploring hydrogen-generated energy. At least for now, however, it seems that the method is carbon-intensive and converting the hydrogen into energy might still require more energy than it can produce.

Meanwhile, China, with at least three tokamak reactors, is speeding along to win the clean nuclear energy race – and its lucrative markets:

“China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion reactor on 28 May achieved another world record by maintaining a plasma temperature at 120 million decrees Celsius for 101 seconds and at 160 million Celsius for 20 seconds, a major step toward the test run of the fusion reactor. EAST is located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Science (ASIPP) in Hefei. It is one of three major domestic tokamaks now in operation in China.”

It is intensely to be hoped that the incoming administration will not allow China to eat America’s lunch.

Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.

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