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Ruth King

Socialism Dies in the Darkness By Richard Fernandez

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/socialism-dies-in-the-darkness/

“A major power outage hit crisis-stricken Venezuela on Thursday, according to Reuters … a problem the government of President Nicolas Maduro quickly blamed on ‘sabotage’ at a hydroelectric dam that provides much of the country’s power.” National life ground to a standstill, telecommunications — including the Internet — stopped working, hospitals were plunged into darkness and cities of millions lay helpless without electricity.

As the outage continued into Friday spreading to every Venezuelan state, it became clear this was going to become the biggest of all blackouts yet and Maduro’s officials increasingly pointed a finger at the United States. But the national electric grid had also been teetering for a long time. “Crumbling infrastructure and lack of investments have hit Venezuela’s power supply for years.” Outages had become a way of life and there was no easy way of proving this wasn’t ‘sabotage’ but only more of the same dysfunction.

The government has blamed the outages on a variety of things — including pesky animals. In an Oct. 20 tweet, Energy Minister Luis Motta Dominguez named “rats, mice, snakes, cats, squirrels” as possible culprits in shorting out lines. He added: “In the list of animals mentioned above, of course iguanas are included.”

Critics, however, say insufficient investment by the government is the cause, following the 2007 nationalization of the electricity sector.

UNHRC Spews Another Modern-Day Blood Libel Irredeemably-biased UN body demonstrates its Jew-hate yet again. Ari Lieberman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273063/unhrc-spews-another-modern-day-blood-libel-ari-lieberman

The United Nations Human Rights Council, the body that sanctioned and peddled the now infamous and thoroughly discredited Goldstone Report (later repudiated by its principle author, Richard Goldstone) is at it again. Late last week, the UNHRC, whose membership includes democracy stalwarts like Cuba, Venezuela, Pakistan and China, released a commission of inquiry (COI)report accusing Israel of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity by deliberately targeting “journalists, health workers, children and persons with disabilities, knowing they were clearly recognizable as such.”

The 22-page report purportedly examined the deaths of 189 Gazans allegedly at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces since March 30, 2018. That date coincides with the beginning of the Hamas–orchestrated and choreographed Palestinian riots along the Gaza border, dubbed by the terror group, “the Great March of Return.”

Israel did not cooperate with the UNHRC’s investigators and for good reason. The UNHRC is an irredeemably flawed organization whose well-documented bias has made it the poster child for antisemitism on the world stage. The body is obsessed with vilifying Israel to the exclusion of all other nations and maintains the infamous Agenda Item 7, which mandates debate on Israeli actions against Palestinians at every council session. No other nation on the planet, including those with abysmal human rights records, is subjected to such outrageous treatment.

Clearly, there can be but one reason for such “special” treatment. Seventy-four years after the Holocaust and the martyrdom of six-million Jews, the United Nations chooses to obsessively focus its negative energies on the world’s only Jewish nation. The same fascist, anti-Semitic ideology that infected Germany then, infects today’s UNHRC and similar UN committees like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. UNESCO is driven by a near-mad obsession with severing the Jewish nexus to the Land of Israel.

The Bravest Man In Africa? Anti-slavery activist runs for president in slave state of Mauritania – after release from prison. Stephen Brown

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273085/bravest-man-africa-stephen-brown

There are few people who announce their candidacy for their country’s presidency only days after being released from prison. But anti-slavery activist and slave descendant Biram Dah Abeid is an exceptional man facing exceptional circumstances.

“I am from the servile community that makes up 50 per cent of the population (of Mauritania),” said Dah Obeid, a lawyer. “Twenty percent of the fifty percent have been born as property of other men. We were inherited by other people.”

Abeid, a prominent and fearless anti-slavery activist who has been jailed and tortured numerous times in his struggle to abolish slavery in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, was released from prison last December 31, having been incarcerated on “an order from above.” Only days later, he again announced his candidacy, having also run for president in Mauritania’s 2014 federal election.

At that time, Dah Abeid, who heads the anti-slavery organization Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA), presented Mauritanians with the extraordinary and ground-shaking sight of a slave descendant (his father was a freed slave while his mother and uncles remained slaves) under sentence of death of a sharia court and imprisoned numerous times standing for president. Nevertheless, he won eight per cent of the vote, coming in second. Abdel Aziz, a former army general, won with 81.94, not unusual for an African dictatorship.

“We are the only ones to have a different ideological position,” Dah Obeid told Le Courier de Sahel during that campaign. “We are fighting against slavery, against racism, against government waste and corruption.”

Jeremy Keenan, a professorial research associate at the School of Africa and Oriental Studies at the University of London stated the reason for Aziz’s overwhelming victory: “Mauritanian elections under President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz are neither free, fair nor transparent.”

As the Democrats Go Socialist, They Go Anti-Semitic Jew-hate and socialism have always gone hand in hand. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273078/democrats-go-socialist-they-go-anti-semitic-daniel-greenfield

“Every government having regard to good morals ought to repress the Jews,” opined Pierre Leroux, the leftist credited with coining the term ‘Socialism’. “When we speak of Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce.”

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money,” Karl Marx ranted.

American socialism traces its ideological ancestry to Charles Fourier, a French socialist bigot who declared that Jews were the embodiment of capitalism, “parasites, merchants, usurers”, and the “incarnation of commerce: parasitical, deceitful, traitorous and unproductive”.

Even the term ‘anti-Semite’ was popularized by Wilhelm Marr, the socialist founder of the League of Antisemites. The inventor of anti-Semitism’s arguments were the same ones put forward by Marx, Fourier, H.G. Wells, Lenin and countless other socialists. The Jews were all about the ‘Benjamins’. They started wars. They were disloyal and manipulated society. They were a dangerous foreign element.

These are the same tropes that were put forward by Rep. Ilhan Omar and defended by her socialist allies in the House Progressive Caucus and across the media. Anti-Semitism is one of the meeting points between socialists and Islamists. The more anti-Semitism she spews, the more Rep. Omar unites the identity politics caucus of minority group racial nationalists and Islamists, with the traditional Left.

Victor Davis Hanson, Best-Selling, Smeared Author By Jack Fowler

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/victor-davis-hanson-best-selling-smeared-author/
Sophistry in the Service of Evil
A review of ‘The Case for Trump’ by Victor Davis Hanson
by Gabriel Schoenfeld

Last night our colleague Victor Davis Hanson, the author of the new bestseller The Case for Trump, was on Fox News Channel’s The Story with Martha MacCullum vigorously attacking anti-Semitism. Today, taking a break from mocking pro-lifers, The Bulwark published an aggressive attack on the book and its author, in which reviewer Gabriel Schoenfeld casts VDH as a modern-day version of a Nazi mouthpiece and sympathizer. Somewhere in some fiery pit, Gore Vidal is smiling in admiration.

Climate Change Theory: What’s Wrong with it? By William Lippincott

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/climate_change_theory_whats_wrong_with_it.html

Dr. William Lippincott is a retired environment scientist. His inferences are based on extensive literature research on the mechanisms of climate variability, a task open to any student of the scientific method.

How climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.
I can’t believe I’m still writing about climate change. I’d have stopped long ago were it not for persistent calls to blow up the U.S. economy in order to save the planet. The cult-like demand for action permeates every part of public life, government, media, academia, even K-12. Rep. Among the draconian policy solutions, Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would have enormous negative impact on our economy.

For the record, climate does vary — think ice ages. And a combination of natural climate variability and measurement problems make the likelihood of singling out a human fingerprint very low. I look here at how climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.

The term ‘science’ properly refers to the scientific method, which is a system of inference designed to weed out incorrect ideas in favor of those supported by experiment and observation. The crux of the scientific method is rejection of theory rather than proof of it. From Bacon to Hopper and Feinman, it has been well understood that scientific theory must be “falsifiable,” that is, subject to test and rejection. Falsifiability depends on narrow and specific conditions imposed by theory. If the conditions fail, the theory is wrong.

Right From Wrong: Sexual-harassment hypocrisy? Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-From-Wrong-Sexual-harassment-hypocrisy-582783
The exception to this rule, it turns out, is a woman whose accusations could cause problems for the only candidate who poses a threat to Netanyahu’s continued premiership.

When Israeli ex-pat Navarone (Nava) Jacobs came forward on February 27 with a Facebook post about having been sexually victimized by Blue and White Party chairman Benny Gantz some 40 years ago, the only person who seemed to respond without stammering was the alleged perpetrator himself.

Indeed, while the Israeli #MeToo movement barely blinked over the allegations – and said that there is “no corroborating evidence” to back up Jacobs’s account – Gantz immediately filed a NIS 500,000 ($142,000) libel suit against her at the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court. The suit claims that Jacobs’s accusations are “false from start to finish,” and that she “acted at the behest of, or with the help of political parties that seek to humiliate and discredit Gantz,” ahead of the April 9 Knesset elections.

In her social-media post, the New York-based Jacobs, who has been living in the United States since 1980, wrote that when she was a 14-year-old freshman at Hakfar Hayarok boarding school in Ramat Hasharon, Gantz — who was 17 or 18 at the time and a senior at the same institution — cornered her in the cowshed and exposed himself.

The Democrats’ Civil War Begins By Sebastian Gorka

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/07/the-

When the American Conservative Union asked if I wanted to address CPAC this year, of course I said yes. Then came several weeks of discussion as to what the subject of my speech should be. This is the biggest event of its kind in the nation, with more than 200 speakers and this year in excess of 10,000 attendees, more than half under the age of 25, so I am not envious of the job Matt Schlapp and Dan Schneider have to do to pull off such a feat. (Especially when your speakers include the president and the vice president and all the security that entails).

The topic we eventually settled on was the threat Russia poses to America, a subject I am always happy to address given my family history. With parents who suffered under a Stalinist dictatorship and a father who escaped from a Communist political prison, providing a reality-check on the menace posed by a Russia still run by a KGB colonel comes easy.

However, on the day, eight minutes into my speech I decided I needed to change tack. Russia is a threat, but it is not the Soviet Union. Instead I felt compelled to talk about the real threat we face as the free-est nation on God’s Earth: the rise of socialism within our borders.

The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy by Diana West

The first investigation into why a ring of senior Washington officials went rogue to derail the election and the presidency of Donald Trump.

There was nothing normal about the 2016 presidential election, not when senior U.S. officials were turning the surveillance powers of the federal government — designed to stop terrorist attacks — against the Republican presidential team. These were the ruthless tactics of a Soviet-style police state, not a democratic republic.

The Red Thread asks the simple question: Why? What is it that motivated these anti-Trump conspirators from inside and around the Obama administration and Clinton networks to depart so drastically from “politics as usual” to participate in a seditious effort to overturn an election?

Finding clues in an array of sources, Diana West uses her trademark investigative skills, honed in her dazzling work, American Betrayal, to construct a fascinating series of ideological profiles of well-known but little understood anti-Trump actors, from James Comey to Christopher Steele to Nellie Ohr, and the rest of the Fusion GPS team; from John Brennan to the numerous Clintonistas still patrolling the Washington Swamp after all these years, and more.

Once, we knew these officials by august titles and reputation; after The Red Thread, readers will recognize their multi-generational and inter-connecting communist and socialist pedigrees, and see them for what they really are: foot-soldiers of the Left, deployed to take down America’s first “America First” and most anti-Communist president.

If we just give it a pull, the “red thread” is very long and very deep.

San Bernardino County Says No to Big Renewables By Robert Bryce

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/renewable-energy-land-use-san-bernardino-county/

The biggest county in America doesn’t want big solar or wind projects.

It may be the largest county in America by land area, but San Bernardino County, Calif., has decided it doesn’t have enough room for big wind or big solar projects. On February 28, the county’s board of supervisors approved a measure that bans large renewable-energy projects on more than 1 million acres of private land.

The move provides yet another example of how the energy sprawl that inevitably comes with large-scale renewable-energy deployment is colliding with the interests of rural landowners and local governments that don’t want “green” projects in their neighborhoods. Of course, there’s no small irony that that collision is happening in California, which passed a law last year that requires utilities to be getting 60 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030.

As Los Angeles Times reporter Sammy Roth drily noted, achieving those renewable-energy goals “will require cooperation from local governments — and big solar and wind farms, like many infrastructure projects, are often unpopular at the local level.” All across the country rural landowners and governments have been rejecting or restricting renewable projects, and they’re doing so at the very same time that left-leaning politicians and some of the country’s biggest environmental groups are claiming that the U.S. must quit using hydrocarbons and nuclear energy, and instead rely solely on renewable energy for our electricity.

In January, some 600 environmental groups, including 350.org, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Working Group, submitted a letter to the U.S. House of Representatives, which said that the U.S. must shift to “100 percent renewable power generation by 2035 or earlier.” It continued, saying any “definition of renewable energy must . . . exclude all combustion-based power generation, nuclear, biomass energy, large-scale hydro, and waste-to-energy technologies.” For good measure, it said this new hypothetical electric grid must have the “ability to incorporate battery storage and distributed energy systems that are democratically governed.”