FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Strange Help for Cuba Why aid the struggling anti-American regime in Havana now?

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-strange-help-for-havana-cuba-sanctions-russia-11652909478?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Whatever the humanitarian impulse behind the Biden Administration’s Monday announcement that it will lift some sanctions on Cuba, the timing couldn’t be worse. The dictatorship is under stress, and it remains Russia’s closest ally in the Western Hemisphere. Why would Team Biden take the pressure off Havana now?

Cuba’s regime may be in the most precarious state of its 63 years in power. The economy has collapsed, and hero worship of Fidel Castro is as dead as he is. The July 11 uprising last year, when tens of thousands went to the streets and shouted for freedom, exposed the contempt Cubans have for their government.

Thousands of peaceful protesters were rounded up last summer by paramilitary and secret police, and some 750 are still in jail. This week Havana declared a new law criminalizing basic liberties. Insulting a government official is now punishable with up to five years in prison. A Cuban who engages with an international aid group not authorized by the state is headed for years behind bars.

The Biden Administration’s new policy removes the cap on dollar remittances that Americans may send to Cuba, reopens air travel to cities across the island, and restores travel by so-called educational groups. The practical effect will be to supply the regime, which controls all commerce, with hard currency to keep its repression going.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

My Synagogue’s ‘Anti-Semitism Tax’ More than 5% of our budget goes to security against mass shootings and other violence. By Howard Husock

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-synagogues-anti-semitism-tax-hate-crime-shooter-shooting-attack-bigotry-judaism-security-11652992632?mod=trending_now_opn_2

“Yet when I reviewed the budgets of mainline Protestant churches in my own community, I found no security line items remotely on par with those in my synagogue. Maybe we are more fearful because of our history, but the Jewish community has been the greatest target of religious-based hate crimes in the U.S. since official reporting started more than a quarter-century ago. The numbers have risen in recent years.”

For the most part, serving on my synagogue’s board of trustees hasn’t involved dramatic decisions. Usually we discuss routine matters such as how to pay for repairs on the house we provide our rabbi. During the pandemic, we debated whether to open the preschool or refund parents’ payments. But over the past several years a more worrisome matter has appeared on our agenda. I call it the anti-Semitism tax.

More than 5% of our budget is now devoted to security to protect the congregation. That’s more than $150,000 a year to prevent tragedies like the deadly attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 or the hostage-taking at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, in January. We had long used funds to hire off-duty cops for the High Holidays to direct traffic, but this is much more serious.

Every Jewish congregation is, as they say in accounting, a tub on its own bottom. There’s no diocese or sanhedrin to provide financial support. Membership dues keep the lights on. Security spending comes at the expense of other budget items: building repairs, new books for the library, or lower tuition for preschool parents, a key source of the new members we need to thrive as a community of believers. Ours is a reasonably well-off congregation, but those that aren’t face hard choices.

“Congregations have had to invest both in physical infrastructure and ongoing security personnel and processes,” observes Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, who heads the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. “Synagogues would obviously rather spend on our core functions of study, worship, volunteerism and community building.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Baby Formula Shortage Was Made in Washington The politicians tacitly admit that their policies are responsible.

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/governments-baby-formula-shortage-abbott-mead-johnson-tariffs-wic-fda-perrigo-democrats-11652996346?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

““I think there might be a need for indictment,” Nancy Pelosi said this week. She means business executives, not Members of Congress, alas.”

Politicians are scrambling to pacify mothers angry about the baby formula shortage, but the one thing they won’t do is look in the mirror. Fixing the shortage requires fixing the government policies that helped to create it.

The shortage began after Abbott Laboratories shut down a plant in Michigan after four infants who consumed formula made at the facility fell seriously ill. Abbott controls about 42% of the U.S. market, and the other three large manufacturers (Perrigo, Nestle and Mead Johnson) haven’t been able to increase production fast enough to compensate. Ergo, empty shelves.

Enter President Biden, who on Wednesday invoked the Defense Production Act. The Cold War-era law lets the federal government conscript private businesses to produce goods for national defense and to reorder supply chains, putting some customers ahead of others. Progressives think government is the solution to every problem, which is why the law has become their household remedy to every product shortage.

Mr. Biden says the law will let his Administration prioritize raw ingredients for baby formula. He also plans to send government planes to fly in supply from overseas. But there doesn’t appear to be a shortage of formula ingredients. Nor is there a problem transporting it. The main barriers to increasing supply are regulatory.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

He Was a World-Renowned Cancer Researcher. Now He’s Collecting Unemployment. Suzy WeissBehind the fall of David Sabatini, ‘one of the greatest scientists’ of his generation. Suzy Weiss

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher?s=r

In 2018, David Sabatini was a world-renowned molecular biologist. He was a tenured professor at MIT. He ran a major lab at the Whitehead Institute, overseeing a team of 39 researchers, postdocs and technicians. Their job was to disentangle the mystery of the mTOR signaling pathway, a protein Sabatini had discovered while still in medical school, at Johns Hopkins. The mTOR signaling pathway plays a critical role in tumor development. Figuring out how it works would go a long way toward saving countless lives. 

This was why Sabatini was predicted to win the Nobel Prize. It was how he reeled in between three and four million dollars every year for his lab from the National Institutes of Health, the Pentagon and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among others. It is why his colleagues have described him to me with words like “genius,” “one of the best scientists alive,” and “a pillar.”

“It’s like working for Steve Jobs. He can be brutal,” said one scientist. “But why would you want to work for anyone else?” 

Today, Sabatini is unemployed and unemployable. No one wants to be associated with him. Those who do risk losing their jobs, publishing opportunities, friends, visas, and huge federal grants. “What wormhole did my life take, to billionaires and protests and being called a sexual predator? What quirk in the universe allowed this to happen?” Sabatini asked me.

The entrance to the wormhole can be found in Rockville, Maryland, at a hotel that Sabatini was staying at while attending a conference about lysosomes and cancer sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. There, on the night of April 18, 2018, after an evening of whiskey tasting—Sabatini is a whiskey aficionado—he and Kristin Knouse had sex. Knouse was an incoming cancer researcher at the Whitehead, where she would also head her own lab; hers focused on liver regeneration. He was 50. She was 29. He had split with his wife, and was in the process of getting a divorce. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Blog Weaponizes Sixth Grade Arithmetic Against Climate Change Fanatics The costs of combatting global warming are astronomical. by Rael Jean Isaac

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://spectator.org/blog-weaponizes-sixth-grade-arithmetic-against-climate-change-fanatics/

On May 9, the Wall Street Journal published an article warning that traditional power plants are being retired more quickly “than they can be replaced by renewable energy and battery storage.” The Journal’s belated discovery that the war on fossil fuels threatens a future of rolling blackouts would come as no surprise for those who have read Francis Menton’s brilliant, deceptively simple blog, the Manhattan Contrarian.

Menton says his entire contribution to the global warming debate boils down to being one of the few people willing to do basic arithmetic. Menton dismisses the idea that his background — majoring in math and economics in college and pursuing a career at the major New York law firm Wilkie, Farr & Gallagher — prepared him for taking on the consensus that achieving zero net emissions is a workable target. Menton told The American Spectator: “The impossibility of [an all-renewable future] is really just arithmetic, the kind you learn by sixth grade. Maybe you want a spreadsheet program to help you but in terms of the math, it’s nothing you didn’t learn in elementary school.”

Menton put that math to use when he attended a public hearing May 3 called by the New York Climate Action Council. The hearing, which invited public comment, concerned the “Draft Scoping Plan,” which lays out the state’s plan for achieving the net-zero emissions target established under New York’s 2019 Climate Act.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Now is a bad time for Biden to visit Israel By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-707211

No good can come of a visit to Israel by US President Joe Biden. If he does show up, as reportedly planned, at the end of June or beginning of July, it will only serve to enhance the fantasies of the faltering government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Alternate PM and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid.

What such a sojourn will not accomplish is a strengthening of the sane patriotic majority in both countries. Though the administration in Washington reiterates statements about the important US-Israel bond, many of its members have an unhealthy affinity to enemies of the Jewish state.

The Democratic Party from which Team Biden hails includes among its ranks politicians who talk about the need for Israelis and Palestinians to “return to the negotiating table” for the purpose of achieving a “two-state solution.” They suffer from peace-process-related amnesia.

This is a condition whose key symptom is forgetting or ignoring repeated Israeli concessions, all of which were both preceded and followed by an uptick in Palestinian jihadist operations. People suffering from this disorder point to Israel’s “occupation of Palestine” after the 1967 Six-Day War. They continue to harbor the ridiculous notion that the conflict is rooted in real estate, and cling to the failed “land for peace” formula.

BUT THE party favored by American Jews also contains open antisemites. These radicals no longer even bother adding the tired caveat about legitimate criticism of Israel. They go right for the jugular, making no bones about their opposition to the Zionist enterprise.

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib is a prime example. The House rep from Michigan with Palestinian parents accuses Israel of original and perpetual sin.

To vindicate this hatred, she and her cohorts in the so-called “Squad” spew venom by distorting history and current events. Though such is the stuff that Hamas, the PLO, Islamic Jihad and ISIS propaganda is made of, Tlaib is an elected legislator in the US Congress. And she’s milking that for all it’s worth.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Globalist Enemies of the State by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/26222/globalist-enemies-of-the-state

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

An enemy of the state is defined as a person accused of certain crimes against the state, such as treason. Treason is defined as the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government. Treason, however, does not address the highest of all crimes against the state, the attempted dissolution of the state itself. The globalist elite are guilty of the highest crimes.

Globalism is a supremacist replacement ideology that seeks to destroy American sovereignty and make the United States part of a one-world planetary nation, ruled through the United Nations by the globalist elite. Globalism is an enemy of the current world order of 193 sovereign states, and cannot succeed without collapsing the United States into its planned unistate. Globalism is absolute totalitarianism on a planetary scale, deceitfully marketed as global peace, harmony, security, and public health.

The essence of globalism is totalitarian centralization of power into the hands of the supremacist globalist elite, who unapologetically plan to rule the world through the auspices of the United Nations, its international infrastructure of UN institutions, and the globalist business entities that support them. The world is in the final battle of globalism’s war on the nation state, and the globalist elite fully anticipate their planetary coup d état will succeed in 2022 with the support and collaboration of the treasonous Biden regime.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Concerning ‘China’s Master Plan to Destroy America’ by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on May 20th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18544/china-plan-destroy-america

China has been unabashed about making its intentions known. Already in 1999, two colonels in China’s People’s Liberation Army, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiansui, wrote, “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America.” In it, the authors “suggest the significance of alternatives to direct military confrontation, including international policy, economic warfare, attacks on digital infrastructure and networks, and terrorism. Even a relatively insignificant state can incapacitate a far more powerful enemy by applying pressure to their economic and political systems.” Ideally, “one might not even know that one is the target.”

There seem to be so many policy decisions now that would appear to help America’s adversaries such as Russia and especially China, rather than what is best for America, that, on February 2, 2022, the Republican Leader of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy — despite a disagreement with former President Donald Trump and a subsequent “genuflection” by way of apology — after mentioning the current administration’s “self-created crises,” noted that “Almost every page,” of the Biden Administration’s 3000 page America Competes Act “has a provision that helps China but hurts America.” McCarthy cited, among other matters:

On page 1689, it provides a new, unlimited green card program for the Chinese Communist Party to exploit. It also allows research funds to freely flow to colleges and universities that host Confucius Institutes – which are essentially CCP propaganda centers that censor our campuses.

These policies would make our nation more vulnerable to Chinese espionage, which is already widespread.

In fact, the threat of Chinese spying in America is so widespread that the FBI has 2,000 active cases to counter it, and opens a new case every 12 hours. “

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is Biden’s ‘Success’ Our Mess? What Americans see as an abject catastrophe, the Biden Administration cheers on as stunning and planned progress. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 19th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/18/is-bidens-success-our-mess/

If an administration deliberately wished to cause havoc on the border, to ensure fuel was nearly unaffordable, to create a crime wave, to spark 1970s hyperinflation, and to rekindle racial tensions, what would it have done differently than what Joe Biden has done? 

So is Biden malicious, incompetent, or a wannabe left-wing ideologue? 

When pressed about inflation and fuel price hikes, Biden either blames someone or something else, gets mad at the questioner, or claims Donald Trump did it. 

His administration apparently believes things are going well and according to plan. 

When polls disagree, his team either believes the American people are brainwashed or that they themselves have not supplied sufficient propaganda. So they never pivot or compromise, but rededicate themselves to continued failure. 

Why? Apparently, what most in the country see as disasters, Biden envisions as success. 

Take the border—or rather its disappearance. 

Never in U.S. history has an administration simply canceled immigration laws, opened the border, and welcomed in millions of illegal aliens. All arrive illegally, and without audit, or vaccinations and tests in times of a pandemic. 

Cartels now import lethal drugs at will into the United States. We have no idea how many terrorists walk across the border each day. 

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Rewarding and Valorizing Jew Hatred at CUNY Law The anti-Semitic crybully becomes the whining victim. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on May 19th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/rewarding-and-valorizing-jew-hatred-cuny-law-richard-l-cravatts/

As if to further confirm how CUNY Law School has become a cesspool of anti-Israel activism masked as social justice, its most radical and toxic student, Nerdeen Kiswani, was chosen to give one of the school’s commencement addresses on May 13th.

Kiswani is the perfect example of the radical who whines about being victimized for her aggressive activism, what The New Criterion’s Roger Kimball, has defined as a “crybully,” someone “who has weaponized his coveted status as a victim.”  

That behavior was on full display during Kiswani’s activist speech when she began by complaining about “facing a campaign of Zionist harassment by well-funded organizations with ties to the Israeli government and military on the basis of my Palestinian identity and organizing,” apparently oblivious to the fact that these organizations may have had good reason to respond to her unrelenting vitriol against Israel, Zionism, and Jews.

Kiswani, it will be remembered, was featured in a provocative 2020 TikTok video when she was a second-year student at CUNY law school, one of the many examples of her long record of toxic activism.

In the video, Kiswani is seen attempting to light on fire an IDF-emblazoned sweatshirt worn by an individual sitting with her, expressing her hatred for the IDF and the nation it defends—a loathing that apparently animates Ms. Kiswani’s life, since she was fully engaged as the former vice president and president of the virulent student group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Hunter College and at the College of Staten Island (CSI), City of New York University (CUNY). She is also the chairperson of Within Our Lifetime (WOL), an anti-Israel activist group in New York City, where, at one repellant rally, she called on supporters to “globalize the Intifada, from New York to Palestine;” in other words, to murder Jews everywhere in the name of Palestinian self-determination.