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Ruth King

ISRAEL Comments turned off

What lies beneath the progressives’ favourite cause Palestinianism has weaponised Israel against the Jewish people Melanie Phillips

By on October 16th, 2021

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/what-lies-beneath-the-progressives?token=

Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States who is now a candidate to head the Jewish Agency, has rightly said that the decline in support for Israel among American Jews has reached a crisis point. The Jewish Agency, he said, “needs to bring young American Jews back from the brink”.

However, the Jewish Agency won’t address this problem by simply tackling American Jews. The roots of this crisis are broader and deeper.

At a conference at the Al Quds University in Ramallah in June, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas delivered a recorded speech with the title, “The Zionist Narrative: Between Reversal and Cancellation”.

In a piece for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser has written that Abbas “proudly noted” in this speech that international public opinion had recently undergone a gradual shift towards accepting the Palestinian narrative.

As Kuperwasser wrote, this “narrative” is a tissue of demonstrable and idiotic lies designed to promulgate the fiction that the Palestinian Arabs are the true inheritors of the land of Israel rather than the Jews.

But as Kuperwasser also observes, the Palestinian position is that the Jews of Israel must return to the places from where they allegedly came — not the land of Israel, their actual original homeland, but Europe, where they were scattered in exile, persecuted and murdered in great number.

“The narrative,” he writes, “also emphasises that the Palestinian struggle is national and Islamic at the same time and ultimately states that, in light of all this, all of Palestine is included, and Israel should not be recognised in any way as the nation-state of the Jewish people — which, at any rate, does not exist. At most, it is possible to temporarily accept the existence of an ‘Israeli people’ which is a new concept referring to Israel as the state of all its citizens”.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Educating Students about the Victims of Communism By Mike Sabo

By on October 16th, 2021

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/15/educating_students_about_the_victims_of_communism_110650.html

Many Americans today assume that the threat of Communism subsided with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But “We continue to see Communist and socialist regimes pop up and spread not only in Latin America – for example, in Venezuela and Nicaragua – but around the world,” says Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, president and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC). “These regimes regularly kill their own citizens and have a devastating effect on human rights and their national economies.” In fact, over 1.5 billion people – including those living in Laos, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and, of course, China – currently live under oppressive Communist and socialist governments.

Founded in 1993 by a bipartisan, unanimous Act of Congress, VOC is “devoted to commemorating the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world and to pursuing the freedom of those still living under totalitarian regimes.”

Before coming to VOC, Bremberg served as the Trump administration’s Representative of the United States to the Office of the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva. During his time there, which he describes as a “profound and life changing experience,” he “became aware of the challenge of China,” which was “far worse” than he had realized. He notes that the U.N. International Human Rights Council made investigating the United States’ record on racism during the summer of 2020 its highest priority – putting it above China’s appalling human rights violations against Uyghurs, among other ethnic groups within its borders.

“Communist countries by far have the worst record on human rights, past and present,” Bremberg argues. “Their brutality is only outdone by their lies and obfuscations.” Seeing this moral imbalance up close convinced him of the “need to educate Americans about the dangers of Communism today.”

American civic education, Bremberg states, entails not only understanding the structure of our form of government but also the world around us. Pointing to the competing claims of the 1619 Project and the 1776 Commission, he notes that while we should be willing to “be self-critical and examine our past,” we also need to view our nation in comparison to others, especially ones existing under Communism’s iron fist.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Lurching Between Crisis and Complacency’: Was This Our Last Covid Surge? Rising immunity and modest changes in behavior may explain why cases are declining, but much remains unknown, scientists say.By Emily Anthes

By on October 16th, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/health/coronavirus-delta-surge.html?referringSource=articleShare

“It’s a combination of immunity, but also people being careful,” said Joshua Salomon, an infectious disease expert and modeler at Stanford University.” “It’s not likely that it will be as deadly as the surge we had last winter, unless we get really unlucky with respect to a new variant,” Dr. Salomon said.”

After a brutal summer surge, driven by the highly contagious Delta variant, the coronavirus is again in retreat.

The United States is recording roughly 90,000 new infections a day, down more than 40 percent since August. Hospitalizations and deaths are falling, too.

The crisis is not over everywhere — the situation in Alaska is particularly dire — but nationally, the trend is clear, and hopes are rising that the worst is finally behind us.

Again.

Over the past two years, the pandemic has crashed over the country in waves, inundating hospitals and then receding, only to return after Americans let their guard down.

It is difficult to tease apart the reasons that the virus ebbs and flows in this way, and harder still to predict the future.

But as winter looms, there are real reasons for optimism. Nearly 70 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, and many children under 12 are likely to be eligible for their shots in a matter of weeks. Federal regulators could soon authorize the first antiviral pill for Covid-19.

“We are definitely, without a doubt, hands-down in a better place this year than we were last year,” said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research at Boston University.

But the pandemic is not over yet, scientists cautioned. Nearly 2,000 Americans are still dying every day, and another winter surge is plausible. Given how many Americans remain unvaccinated, and how much remains unknown, it is too soon to abandon basic precautions, they said.

“We’ve done this again and again, where we let the foot off the pedal too early,” Dr. Bhadelia said. “It behooves us to be a bit more cautious as we’re trying to get to that finish line.”

Crushing the curve

When the first wave of cases hit the United States in early 2020, there was no Covid vaccine, and essentially no one was immune to the virus. The only way to flatten the proverbial curve was to change individual behavior.

That is what the first round of stay-at-home orders, business closures, mask mandates and bans on large gatherings aimed to do. There is still debate over which of these measures were most effective, but numerous studies suggest that, collectively, they made a difference, keeping people at home and curbing the growth of case numbers.

These policies, combined with voluntary social distancing, most likely helped bring the early surges to an end, researchers said.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Durham and the Amazing Disappearing DNC Hack Evidence grows that the alleged Russian hacking of the DNC server in 2016 was an inside job by George Parry

By on October 16th, 2021

https://spectator.org/john-durham-and-the-amazing-disappearing-dnc-hack/

This is the fifth in a series of articles analyzing the 27-page federal grand jury indictment charging lawyer Michael Sussmann with making a false statement to the FBI.

As stated in the fourth article, when the FBI learned of the alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee’s (“DNC”) emails,

it asked to examine the server.  In fact, at the same time as the alleged DNC hack, there were similar reports regarding the

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s (“DCCC”) server as well as DNC Chairman John Podesta’s personal email devices.

In testimony before the Senate, FBI Director James Comey stated the following:

Question (by Senator Burr): Did the FBI request access to those devices [the servers and Podesta’s devices] to perform forensics on?

A: Yes, we did.

Q: And would that access have provided intelligence or information helpful to your investigation in possibly finding … including to the Intelligence Community Assessment?

A: Our forensics folks would always prefer to get access to the original device or server that’s involved. So, it’s the best evidence.

Q: Were you given access to do the forensics on those servers?

A: We were not. We were … a highly respected private company eventually got access and shared with us what they saw there.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden walks naked into a climate conference With Congress stalled, he likely won’t meet his own green commitmentsRupert Darwall

By on October 16th, 2021

Nye Bevan, the British socialist, famously denounced the nuclear unilateralists in his party for sending a future foreign secretary ‘naked into the conference chamber’. Unless Congress passes the stalled budget reconciliation bill, President Biden will fly to the COP26 Glasgow climate conference, which starts in less than three weeks’ time, in a similar state of undress.

Before the Paris agreement in 2015, UN climate change conferences were about hammering out the texts of binding climate treaties and agreeing to emissions reduction targets. All that has changed. Climate change targets are now decided in advance by individual countries in their Nationally Determined Contributions, draining climate conferences of drama and turning them into a giant show-and-tell. Unless, that is, the world’s self-styled climate leader turns up in Glasgow with nothing to show.

The Biden administration’s NDC is long on rhetoric, starting with climate change as an existential threat. Yet when it comes to the ‘bold action’ the threat demands, the cupboard is bare of bankable action. Interviewed in April, Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser, who put together the NDC, was asked what was the one piece of legislation she wanted Congress to pass. ‘To make sure that by 2035 we have a clean energy sector,’ McCarthy answered.

Much of what McCarthy wants is embedded in the gargantuan reconciliation Build Back Better package, including $300 billion of clean tax credits and a Clean Energy Standard to meet Biden’s goal of having a zero-greenhouse gas emitting grid by 2035, items that McCarthy describes as ‘non-negotiables’. There is a reason for this. The White House touts the falling cost of renewables, but its convoluted formulation that clean alternatives ‘may start looking like the cheap alternatives’ suggests cost competitiveness is still years away. Until recently, the rapid transition the White House wants ‘looked anything but cheap’, so it seeks to place the cost of decarbonizing electricity on taxpayers rather than in higher electricity bills. Doing this will require congressional approval.

McCarthy claims the administration has ‘lots of regulatory authority’ should the administration fail to get the reconciliation package through Congress. But she knows as well anyone that regulation is a distant second to legislation. Build Back Better’s Clean Energy Standard is a successor to the Clean Power Plan, which McCarthy oversaw when she was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the second Obama term. Challenged in the courts, the Supreme Court imposed a stay on the EPA implementing the plan. Would the Supreme Court’s decision slow down the transition to a low carbon future? ‘Absolutely not,’ McCarthy responded two weeks later. If so, what was the point of the plan?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Was January 6 Part of the FBI’s ‘Operation Cold Snap’? It’s only a matter of time before we learn how many “Big Dans” or Stephen Robesons were part of January 6. By Julie Kelly

By on October 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/14/was-january-6-part-of-the-fbis-operation-cold-snap/

The tony, bucolic town of Dublin, Ohio would be one of the last places in America expected to host a convention of white supremacist militiamen. Nestled along the Scioto River, the Columbus suburb’s biggest claim to fame is hosting the PGA’s annual Memorial Golf tournament every summer.

But in June 2020, days after the nation was roiled by Black Lives Matter looting and rioting, a man from Wisconsin named Stephen Robeson sponsored a “National Militia Conference” at a Dublin hotel. (Yes, that was the real name of the event.) 

According to BuzzFeed’s exceptional July 2021 investigative report on the FBI-led plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, Robeson “helped organize the national meeting, and he was enthusiastically pushing people he knew to attend.” The purpose of the conference was to recruit people who ultimately would stoke “political violence” against governors who refused to reopen their states after lockdowns supposedly necessitated by COVID.

Some participants said Robeson, known as “Robey,” relentlessly pestered them until they agreed to show up; people came from as far as Maryland and Kansas City, BuzzFeed’s Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison reported. One member of the Three Percenters, an alleged militia group on the FBI’s naughty list, observed people taking photos from discreet locations in the hotel. “The feds are everywhere,” he thought to himself.

Indeed. One of the feds was Robeson himself.

In a motion filed in July by a defense lawyer in the Whitmer kidnapping prosecution, Robeson is described as having a long record “of cooperating with the government in exchange for personal benefits. Basically, this [confidential human source] has a decades-long history of acting as a professional snitch for the government.”

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FOREIGN POLICY, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Biden’s Credibility Plummets over Purchase of Chinese-Made Drones by Con Coughlin

By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17861/biden-china-drones

Critics of DJI’s systems claim they have the potential to be monitored remotely, and a review of the drones conducted by the Pentagon earlier this year concluded that they posed a potential threat to national security.

The Pentagon has been voicing concerns about commercial off-the-shelf drones since 2018, when it implemented a ban. The following year, Congress passed legislation banning the use of drones and components manufactured in China, and the Trump administration blacklisted DJI for national security reasons

“DJI drones are safe and secure for government and enterprise operations.” — spokesman for DJI rejecting claims that its drones posed a security risk, Reuters, July 23, 2021

Given the Chinese Communist Party’s abysmal record for trustworthiness, however – as in prominsing not to militarise the fake islands they built in the South China Sea just before they militarised them, or claiming that their Chinese virus, COVID-19, was not transmissible human-to-human – this assessment is less than reassuring.

Nothing better illustrates the Biden administration’s utter incompetence in safeguarding America’s interests than the revelation that a number of federal agencies are reportedly purchasing surveillance drones from China.

The Pentagon has previously advised against US agencies purchasing Chinese-made drones on the grounds that they could be used to transfer sensitive data to Beijing’s communist rulers.

But now a new report by the Axios website claims that a number of federal law enforcement agencies in the Biden administration have purchased drones from China that have previously been labeled a potential national security threat by the Pentagon.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Campus ‘Diversity’ Menace Comes to Yale The objective of campus leftists is not to “win” the campus wars. They’ve already done that. The objective is to make the other side feel pain. By Josh Hammer

By on October 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/14/the-campus-diversity-menace-comes-to-yale/

It is increasingly obvious that modern Americans universities, which are less institutions of unfettered intellectual pursuit than they are “madrasas of wokeness,” to borrow from the Independent Women’s Forum’s Inez Feltscher Stepman, are unsalvageable in most present manifestations. Though there are notable exceptions, many American universities are actually worse than unsalvageable.

On-campus debauchery spoils matriculants’ lingering senses of virtue and propriety, and woke classroom indoctrination and divisive intersectional poison vitiates the mutually interdependent bonds of citizenry without which no people can cohere. As Arthur Milikh soberly concluded in a 2020 National Affairs essay, “Preventing Suicide by Higher Education”: “Universities that spread poisonous doctrines no longer believe in the purpose of the university.”

Pedagogical and curricular debasement aside, one concrete manifestation of this now decades-long corruption has been the engorgement of on-campus administrative bureaucracies tending to all sorts of “diversity” needs. As Heather Mac Donald’s 2018 book The Diversity Delusion helped demonstrate, the core university mission—ostensibly, to pursue truth and produce citizen-statesmen capable of advancing the national interest—has been steadily undermined by the university’s imbibing of various woke fetishes and “diversity” diktats like mother’s milk. Even hold aside the institutionalized racism of affirmative action, modern “diversitycrat” commissars rove campus for possible Title VI violations, enforce “equitable” faculty hiring quotas, and more generally seek to police and enforce intersectionality’s hierarchy of alleged victimhood.

An eye-opening recent report from the Washington Free Beacon‘s Aaron Sibarium reveals how this cancerous operation can play out in practice. At top-ranked Yale Law School, a second-year student and member of both the Native American Law Students Association and the conservative/libertarian Federalist Society sent an email inviting classmates to an event: “We will be christening our very own (soon to be) world-renowned NALSA Trap House . . . by throwing a Constitution Day Bash in collaboration with FedSoc.” The student added that the event would include “American-themed snacks” such as “Popeye’s chicken” and “apple pie.”

Within minutes of the email’s mass distribution, the student’s wokerati classmates were already signaling intense aggrievement. Some immediately concluded, with all the charity of Ebenezer Scrooge, that “trap house” necessarily connoted a nefarious blackface party. The president of the Black Law Students Association quickly wrote in an online forum available to all second-year Yale Law School students: “I guess celebrating whiteness wasn’t enough. Y’all had to upgrade to cosplay/black face.” We have fallen a long way from the stirring peroration of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (conveniently available online via Yale Law School) about the imperative to maintain “malice toward none” and “charity for all.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Life after Capitalism By George Gilder

By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/11/01/life-after-capitalism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

The information theory of economics

Anyone determined to provide a “new economics” must haul a heavy burden of proof up a steep slope of professional resistance. At the summits of academic prestige, economics presents a Delphic façade of math and marble.

A still higher barrier faces anyone suggesting major modification to the entrenched system of reasonably free markets and economic incentives associated with “capitalism.” Within recent memory, exponents of free markets — myself included — were celebrating a triumphalist “end of history.” Even China’s “Communist Party” and “Middle Kingdom,” self-consciously central in the order of the universe, were thriving as a self-evidently capitalist regime. China’s entrepreneurs were as “free to choose” as any “robber baron” of yore, particularly if their field was sufficiently technical to baffle the bureaucracy and so long as they didn’t under any circumstances compare their rulers to Winnie-the-Pooh.

With the U.S., Europe, and China all essentially organized by markets, dissenters retreated to government-funded universities, cranky leftist redoubts such as Harvard and the New York Times, and green movements thriving on money and lawyers from the disgruntled families of penitent or deceased entrepreneurs.

As autodidact supply-side paragon Jude Wanniski put it in 1980 — with credit to economists Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell — to most observers, capitalism is simply “the way the world works.” And Wanniski was proved right. I long had criticized him for his judgment that Communist regimes were merely capitalist in a disguise of incompetence. But even this view may prove prescient, as today market-oriented regimes are blithely donning the same disguise.

With banks essentially nationalized and stultified by regulators and no longer making loans to entrepreneurial companies; with the nation recently locked down and masked because of COVID at the caprice of germophobic governors; with energy usage regulated, subsidized, priced, and litigated by bureaucrats around the globe out of a demented fear of CO2 emissions; with education run by manipulative ideologues with lifelong tenure and government appointments, funded by $1.5 trillion in guaranteed student loans; with money pumped up and propagated like gilded gas — we live in a new twilight zone beyond capitalism and freedom.

Thomas Sowell is lapidary: “Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters.’”

Still, for all the complaints in the air, let us give tribute to the far from dismal accomplishments of economic science.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

America Enraged An interview with Peter Wood the author of a new book on our culture of political wrath. Mark Tapson

By on October 15th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/america-enraged-mark-tapson/

One thing Americans can presumably all agree on in our current cold civil war is that civility, mutual if grudging respect, and rational if testy debate in our political discourse have all been replaced by a hair-trigger performative outrage, the scorched-earth warfare of cancel culture, and even occasional violence. It’s difficult to remember that there was a time when even acerbic antagonists like William Buckley and Gore Vidal could trade barbs onstage without hurling chairs at each other and inciting nationwide rioting. What has happened to us? How did we come to this point? And is this state of rage destined to be a permanent feature of our cultural and political landscape?

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and author of the essential 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, has addressed these questions incisively in a must-read, brand new book titled Wrath: America Enraged. He agreed to answer some questions about the book.

Mark Tapson: Mr. Wood, what is the “new anger,” and what is the difference between anger and wrath in a political context?

Peter Wood: “New anger” is show-off anger, the display of someone who expects to be admired for the performance or to boast about it afterwards: anger mixed with self-delight.  New anger contrasts to the older ethic of trying to master your anger and not to let it master you.  Through much of American history, giving free vent to anger was regarded as a sign of weakness and immaturity.  We admired the man or woman who, when provoked, found ways to handle the situation without descending into rage.  Of course, that kind of self-control often failed, at which point brawls erupted.  Those who brawled in public or in private, however, were not regarded as good people.  Those who turned to anger too quickly or too often were shamed.

“New anger” became a recognizable force in American life in the 1950s, though it was at first a trend confined to avant garde parts of society:  the beat generation, early adepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, and people reading French existentialist novels. From these seeds grew the counterculture of the sixties, and then the disillusioned anger of the Big Chill 1970s.  I am collapsing a lot of history into a few sentences.  The breakdown of the older ideals of emotional self-control and their replacement by a new ethic of emotional expressiveness didn’t happen overnight or all at once or equally in all sectors of society.  Fifteen years ago I spent a whole book (A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now) to describe the slow progression of new anger into the position it now has of cultural dominance.  I’m mindful that whole generations have grown up for whom there is nothing “new” about “new anger.”  It is all they have ever experienced unless they have been immersed in the world of Turner Classic Movies, where you can glimpse a world ruled by different emotional norms.

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