Abolition Fantasyland A new book distills the problem with the Left’s anti-police imaginings. Charles Fain Lehman

https://www.city-journal.org/review-of-a-world-without-police-by-geo-maher

A World Without Police, by Geo Maher (Verso, 288 pp., $27)

It is hard to think of a slogan as dramatically unpopular as “defund the police.” As of March, just 18 percent of Americans supported the movement. Some House Democrats have blamed their party’s flirtation with it for their underperformance in the 2020 congressional election. And while some cities have slashed police budgets, more have resisted the urge; others attempting to make cuts have met with resistance from communities that don’t want violent crime in their backyards.

Geo Maher’s A World Without Police, released 15 months after the “defund” movement began, is thus best read not as a call to arms but as an epitaph. The book is a strangled cry for attention—a demand that we return to the fantasy world a few activists inhabited ever so briefly last summer, before rioting and violence snapped us back to reality.

Why get rid of the police? Much of Maher’s answer is standard-issue babble: policing’s sole purpose is to enforce “white supremacist capitalism” by harassing and murdering anyone who is not white, male, and straight, particularly black people. Maher recapitulates long-debunked claims that policing emerges out of slave patrols, and argues that even majority-black-run criminal-justice systems are obviously white supremacist.

As evidence for this argument, Maher leans heavily on various unpleasant anecdotes about the worst police brutality of the past century. Such arguments are a prime example of “sampling on the dependent variable,” using only outcomes selected on a criterion to prove the universality of that criterion. For example, if I wanted to prove that all leftists were lunatics, I can’t just use as evidence one leftist who was forced to resign his academic job after tweeting “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” Lots of leftists have not written that “when the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed,” and it would be poor reasoning to infer a general principle from this.

Biden Loses 4,890 Migrant Children, And The Left Yawns

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/05/biden-loses-4890-migrant-children-and-the-left-yawns/

Last week, Axios reported that the Department of Health and Human Services has lost contact with more than 4,500 children who’d crossed the border illegally after it had released them into the country. That’s a third of the migrant children it was supposed to be tracking.

“In 2018, the Trump administration was criticized for being unable to account for the whereabouts of around 1,500 children released from HHS shelters during a three-month period,” Axios reports. “There were around 4,500 such minors as of the end of May who had been released under the Biden administration.”

Axios, a small news organization started just four years ago, uncovered this new wrinkle in the Biden-created border crisis by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request.

The reaction from the mainstream press, leftists, celebrities, and the twitterati?

Crickets.

As of Sunday, the New York Times hadn’t mentioned it. Nor had the Washington Post. Nor any other major newspaper. There’s been no mention of the findings on the network news, on CNN, or on MSNBC. The story has been picked up only by some conservative news outlets.

Hans von Spakovsky: Missing Ballots in Three States Exceed Joe Biden’s Victory Margins

https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2021/09/01/hans-von-spakovsky-missing-ballots-three-states-exceed-joe-bidens-victory-margins/

Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, said president Joe Biden’s margins of victory in Arizona, Nevada, and Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election were narrower than the states’ respective totals of unaccounted-for ballots.

Biden’s margin of victory in Wisconsin was approximately 20,000 votes despite the number of ballots “missing or undeliverable” in the state amounting to 83,000, von Spakovsky noted.

“Remember the margin of victory in Wisconsin was only 20,000 votes, and that basically 82,000 ballots were either lost or undeliverable or were rejected,” von Spakovsky said on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. “That’s four times the margin of victory.”

“Those are the numbers that the Wisconsin Election Commission itself reported to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission,” he added.

Von Spakovsky shared details of “unaccounted-for ballots” from a Daily Signal report

“[The Wisconsin Election Commission] said 6,500 absentee ballots they mailed out were sent back by the postal service as ‘undeliverable’ [and] 3,000 ballots that came back were rejected. They don’t say why, but usually [a ballot is rejected] because, for example, the signature doesn’t match, indicating it may have been a fraudulent ballot,” he remarked.

Wisconsin authorities cannot account for 76,000 ballots, von Spakovsky stated. “They don’t know what happened to them,” he said. “In other words, voters requested an absentee ballot, or [Wisconsin officials] simply decided — in some places in Wisconsin — to simply mail out absentee ballots to everybody, and the ballot never came back, so it’s unaccounted for. These are the official numbers of the election commission [in Wisconsin], and we don’t know what happened to them. We don’t know if [the ballots] got lost [or] if they were stolen and somebody didn’t get to vote.”

Protecting America from hostile Afghan refugees By Rachel Ehrenfeld

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/protecting_america_from_hostile_afghan_refugees.html

The Biden administration used military, commercial and charter flights to secretly fly more than 123,000, mostly undocumented and unidentified Afghans out of the country. Reportedly, 50,000 to 100,000 have already been transported to the U.S.

Who are these Afghans?

We know the Biden “airlift” did not­­­ carry most of the Afghans who aided the U.S. forces, translators, and others who already held or were cleared for Special Immigrant Visas (SIV).

We also know the Afghans who were brought here, unlike thousands of SIV holders, were allowed access to the airport by the Taliban. 

So, are these Afghans affiliated with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, ISIS? Are they friends or foes of the U.S.?

How can we find out who these people are? Is there a way to identify these Afghans’ intentions towards the U.S. or their compatibility quickly and reliably?President Trump’s first executive order proclaimed:

“The United States must be vigilant during the visa-issuance process to ensure that those approved for admission do not intend to harm Americans and that they have no ties to terrorism. In order to protect Americans, we must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes towards our country and its founding principles.”

Section 2 of the active order states that the policy of the U.S. is to

“…protect our citizens from foreign nationals who intend to commit terrorist attacks in the United States, and (b) prevent the admission of foreign nationals who intend to exploit United States immigration laws for malevolent purposes” (emphasis added).

Our Afghan Atomic Bomb—Insane Foreign Policy Meets Insane Immigration Policy John Derbyshire

https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/our-afghan-atomic-bomb-insane-foreign-policy-meets-insane-immigration-policy/

We are now out of Afghanistan. This is such a relief after twenty years of futility, Joe Biden has been getting thanks from some surprising people—Ann Coulter and Richard Spencer, for example.

I’m as glad as they are. But I think the appalling mess Biden’s people made of the evacuation cancels out any gratitude due to the president. When the Soviet Union, on its last geriatric legs, made a cleaner, cheaper show of withdrawing from Afghanistan in defeat than we have, heads should roll.

A basic atom bomb depends on a mass of nuclear material going into a spontaneous fission reaction. You put two or more subcritical masses into some device, keeping them apart from each other. Then, when you want an explosion, you bring them together to form a critical mass. Bang!

Similarly, the current mess is the result of two subcritical masses of insanity coming together:

U. S. foreign policy insanity; and
U. S. immigration policy insanity.

Our foreign policy insanity—these dumb missionary wars we keep getting involved with—has been a constant for decades now. It’s possible we have finally learned our lesson; but I seriously doubt it. I look forward to milking that insanity for commentary as long as I can work a keyboard.

So let’s see what this week has shown us about our immigration insanity. The focus of concern: the floods of Afghans we have taken in.

The original idea, which seemed reasonable (at any rate to me) was that we should take in and settle Afghans who had trustingly put their lives on the line to help us advance our foreign policy, as insane as that policy was. That would be a fair and decent thing to do.

As it’s worked out, though, none but a small proportion of the tens of thousands of Afghans we’ve brought in belong to that category. Most are just random Afghans who got to Kabul airport and bribed or elbowed or threatened their way onto a plane. Far from owning Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) papers to show they have at least claimed to have helped us, many have no papers at all.

Meanwhile, Afghans who are SIV applicants but could not make it to Kabul, are being hunted down and killed by the Taliban. Moral of the story: Put no trust in the U.S.A.

Ann Corcoran has noted that most of the incoming Afghans are likely being admitted on parole, not as refugees. What does “on parole” mean? If you follow Ann’s link to the Homeland Security Today website, you get this:

Parole does not confer immigration status and does not provide a path to permanent residency or the ability to obtain lawful immigration status. However, a parolee may be able to obtain lawful status in the United States through other means.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

The Jewish New Year 5782, which starts tomorrow evening is a time of reflection on our tragic history, our survival, and our triumph and pride in Israel which contributes to the health, quality of life, hope and aspirations of people in every continent throughout the world.  Motivated by the mandates and obligations of the Torah Israel maintains scientific, technological and social justice institutions dedicated to a better life for all. Thanks to Michael Ordman we get a weekly update on the foregoing. rsk

http://www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Coronavirus latest. Some 2.3 million Israelis have now had a coronavirus booster. It is 95% effective against infection and available to all Israelis vaccinated over 5 months ago. Serious case numbers have declined and are nearly negligible in those who have been triple-vaccinated. Some 2.5 million children have returned to school.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-30/covid-19-boosters-work-at-curbing-severe-cases-israel-data-show https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/312641
https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general
 
Israeli vaccine Phase 2 trials commence. Israel’s Institute for Biological Research IIBR (see here previously) has stated that it has delivered 1,000 doses of its BriLife coronavirus vaccine to Georgia for starting Phase 2 trials. IIBR’s partner, NRx, will lead the trials, expand patient numbers and prepare for Phase 3.
https://nocamels.com/2021/08/israel-covid-19-vaccine-phase-ii-trial-georgia/
 
Protection against Delta variant. A pre-clinical trial of opaganib from Israel’s Redhill (see here previously) shows that its strong antiviral and anti-inflammatory activities can inhibit any variant of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Opaganib targets SK2 – a key enzyme used by the virus to replicate, irrespective of spike protein mutations.
https://www.redhillbio.com/RedHill/Templates/showpage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=178&FID=4457&PID=0&IID=21354
 
Covid trial of cholesterol treatment. (TY UWI & WIN) Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem successfully trialed TriCor (fenofibrate see here previously) on 15 severely ill Covid patients. 14 were weaned off their ventilators within a week. TriCor targets inflammation-producing lipids produced by the coronavirus.
https://www.ynetnews.com/health_science/article/sjjmdjb11f
 
Better cancer detection. In a study of over 9,000 patients Tel Aviv University researchers used previously ignored “silent mutations” analysis techniques to increase chances of detecting cancer early. They proved that the huge volume of genomic and gene expression data available can help extend survival times and save lives.
https://tau.zimininstitutes.org/projects/automatically-deciphering-silent-cancerous-mutations/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41525-021-00229-1
 
Gastric cancer diagnostics in Israel. Israel’s Ibex Medical (see here previously) has launched its new Galen Gastric system, to detect gastrointestinal cancer, at Israel’s Maccabi HMO (Health Management organization). Maccabi is the world’s only health system to use AI for multi-tissue detection (breast, prostate and gastric).
https://nocamels.com/2021/08/ibex-ai-gastrointestinal-cancer-maccabi/
 
Algae to treat IBD. Israel’s Yemoja (see here previously) and Israel’s MIGAL Galilee Research Institute are leading a 4-year research initiative to find algae-sourced compounds to help Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) sufferers. The 21-member Algae4IBD consortium has received a €7.5 million EU Horizon 2020 award.
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/yemoja-joins-migal-institute-to-pioneer-major-study-of-microalgae-for-inflammatory-bowel-disease-301365044.html
 
Saving women’s lives in the Gulf. Israel’s illumigyn (see here previously) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Dubai-based company DHI 2048 to deploy 2,500 units of its Gynescope cloud platform service. It will boost the availability of imaging and examination to improve women’s healthcare in the region.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3916633,00.html
 
Brain rehab helps wounded IDF soldier. In 2018, 24-year-old Netanel was shot in the head by a terrorist. Minimally conscious for several months, he is now making slow but steady recovery progress, against all odds, at Sheba Medical Center’s Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit.
https://www.jns.org/wounded-idf-soldier-makes-strides-at-sheba-brain-rehab-unit/
 
An affordable US virtual health company. Israel’s Antidote Health is bringing a virtual Kupat Holim (health fund) to the US for the benefit of uninsured and under-insured Americans. Using a digital service and AI, Antidote Health says it can cut the costs of the service to about a tenth of what Americans pay now.
https://www.jpost.com/jpost-tech/israeli-startup-looks-to-disrupt-us-healthcare-with-kupat-holim-model-677574  https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3916071,00.html  https://www.antidotehealth.ai/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ka7pPE2B9E
 
The best birthday gift. United Hatzalah EMT Gal was just in time when he used his own son’s EpiPen to save the life of a 5-year-old boy who suffered an anaphylactic reaction in Netanya. It was the birthday of the boy’s mother and she said that the life of her son was the best birthday present she had ever received.
https://israelrescue.org/blog/the-best-birthday-gift-her-sons-life/
 
 

‘Adults,’ ‘Progress,’ and Disaster Historians will look back at the Great Afghan Fumble of 2021 and say it was there and then that the United States took a large public step towards its own diminishment. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/04/adults-progress-and-disaster/

Is there anything to add to the avalanche of disparaging commentary on the national humiliation that is the Biden Administration’s handling of our departure from Afghanistan? I’m not sure. 

True, the scandals keep coming. As I write, it was only a few days ago that someone leaked and Reuters published the story about Joe Biden’s July call to Ashraf Ghani, then president of Afghanistan, now a multi-multi-millionaire thanks to the $169 million of American taxpayer money which he stuffed into bags before leaving Afghanistan for the United Arab Emirates. During that call, Biden made the president of Afghanistan an offer he couldn’t refuse: military aid in exchange for lies. There is a “perception around the world,” Biden said, that “things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there’s a need, whether it is true or not, . . . to project a different picture” (my emphasis).

Opinions differ about whether this conversation constituted an impeachable offense. Were it Donald Trump making the call, you can bet your burqa-wearing seventh wife that Nancy Pelosi would have articles of impeachment drawn up before the cocktail hour. For Biden, not so fast, though it is an occasion for thought that someone—presumably someone in the Pentagon or the State Department—leaked the audio and transcript of the conversation. That’s a felony, but these days only Republicans get charged for that sort of bad behavior. The question is: what does it portend that someone in the deep state apparat excreted that embarrassing tidbit? Was it a warning shot across the bow of Biden’s sinking skiff? 

It’s also pretty scandalous that the Biden Administration, still reeling from the news that the United States left a zillion dollars worth of prime, made-in-the-USA military hardware behind in bases across Afghanistan in its rush to hightail it out of that god-forsaken country, is now hit with the news that they ordered federal agencies to scrub public records listing the nearly $83 billion worth of military matériel—airplanes, Black Hawk helicopters, armored vehicles of every size and description, some 600,000 assault rifles, various pieces of artillery, and countless rounds of ammunition—proffered as a tasty trifle for the Tally-bahn toffs. 

There are going to be more such news stories, about the fate of the hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghan allies left behind (not “stranded,” according to Jen Psaki, just abandoned), about the behavior of the thousands upon of thousands of fundamentalist Afghans who have been transplanted to the United States, about what the Taliban is doing with all the merchandise of death we kindly gifted them. So the autopsies will keep coming and will furnish ever more detail about this gigantic political failure.

The glaring truth about Biden and his masters By Liam Brooks

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/the_glaring_truth_about_biden_and_his_masters.html

Corrupt.  Incompetent.  Pathological.  Criminal.  Treasonous.

Those are just a few of the (printable) adjectives that aptly describe the illegitimate gang of idiots currently running our country.  Joe Biden, the so-called president, is nothing more than a marionette controlled by a gaggle of career bureaucrats and academics, none of whom has ever contributed anything substantial to our once vibrant society.  Indeed, they are nothing more than destroyers, power-mad ideologues who use a demented old grifter as a mouthpiece while they dismantle, piece by piece, our once great Republic.  Globalism is their ultimate goal, and the nightmare we’re experiencing brings us ever closer to that frightening reality.

Biden is a figurehead for the Marxist madness that’s corrupting our schools, destroying small business, and slowly but surely eliminating our nation’s sovereignty.  The current push to force Americans to “register” their firearms under a United Nations gun-grabbing scheme is just one example of the ongoing attack on our cherished freedoms.  Another glaring example is the fascist collaboration between the ruling elites and Big Tech to silence dissent, a clear violation of the First Amendment. 

If the Marxist drive continues, it will go on and on until the Bill of Rights is little more than a footnote in a long forgotten history.  After all, it’s hard to teach real history when tyrants control the schools and certain “undesirable” books are banned.  Don’t scoff.  On our present course, it’s not only possible, but likely.  And don’t think the internet can save any documented evidence of real history, because the algorithms Big Tech uses and the Thought Police (i.e., “fact-checkers”) they employ can control virtually everything online…including Cloud, or whatever files you use to store data.  Privacy is virtually nonexistent nowadays, and that includes your bank accounts, business sites, photo files, and email accounts, just to name a few.  (Ask Tucker Carlson.)

But as smart as they think they are, progressives are actually pretty dumb.  And arrogant.  The hubris in our ruling elite sometimes opens a door where their stupidity, ineptitude, deceit, and downright hatred of our founding principles are on full display…for anyone who cares to look, anyway.  The ongoing disaster created by their surrender to the Taliban — laughingly referred to by certain talking heads as a “successful withdrawal” — is a prime example.  Even the compliant media, which normally spin or ignore the administration’s boatload of disastrous mistakes, had to scratch their respective heads over this one.  It’s truly one of the worst military debacles in our nation’s history, costing innocent lives, abandoning American citizens, and handing over almost a hundred billion dollars in high-tech equipment and weapons to a murderous gang of cave-dwelling lunatics. 

Belarus Floods EU with Migrants from Middle East by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17715/belarus-eu-illegal-migrants

Thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East are pouring into the European Union from Belarus, a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. The surge in illegal immigration is being orchestrated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is accused of trying to blackmail the EU into reversing the sanctions it imposed over his disputed reelection and a crackdown on dissent.

While the EU — hampered by its ideological commitment to open borders — appears at a loss as to what to do next, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania are being forced to spend millions of euros to build fences along their borders with Belarus. An EU spokesman explained that Brussels “does not finance fences or barriers.”

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis said that Belarus should be a concern not only for the Baltic countries or the EU, but for the “whole democratic world” which, he advised, “needs to wake up.”

“We firmly believe that the protection of European external border is not just the duty of individual Member States but also the common responsibility of the EU. Hence, proper political attention should be paid to it on the EU level and sufficient funding allocated.” — Joint statement issued by the prime ministers of Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

“Only a very clear and unified EU policy on returning irregular migrants can effectively prevent criminal groups and regimes from exploiting illegal migration for their own purposes. Europe’s message must be short and precise — those illegally entering the EU cannot be granted a refugee status and will be returned to their countries of origin.” — Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis.

Thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East are pouring into the European Union from Belarus, a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. The surge in illegal immigration is being orchestrated by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who is accused of trying to blackmail the EU into reversing the sanctions it imposed over his disputed reelection and a crackdown on dissent.

Many of the migrants are being flown to Belarus from the Middle East and then bussed to EU borders by Belarusian authorities. The trips are being organized by Belarus’s state-owned tourism agency, which charges migrants between $1,800 to $12,000.

The number of people illegally entering the EU from Belarus increased sharply after Lukashenko signed a decree on July 1 that allows citizens of more than 70 countries to travel to Belarus without visas and stay for up to five days, ostensibly to get Covid-19 vaccine shots.

The EU’s notoriously fraught relations with Belarus deteriorated in August 2020 after fraudulent presidential elections which Lukashenko claimed he won with 80% of the vote. He subsequently launched a brutal nationwide crackdown against pro-democracy protesters. The EU responded by sanctioning 40 officials suspected of election misconduct — but not Lukashenko himself.

Dealing with Taliban: It’s Urgent to Wait by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17723/taliban-wait

More importantly, perhaps, it may be naïve to demand that Taliban give up terrorism — the very method that has given them some significance for more than a quarter of a century. Terror is the very raison d’etre of this outfit.

The New York Times ran reports glorifying the USSR at a time that the Georgian master of the Kremlin carried out bloody purges. And, for a while at least, President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw Heinrich Himmler as leader of “moderates” in Nazi Germany….

China has not morphed into the “moderate” power that Henry Kissinger, Beijing’s chief lobbyist in the US, claims.

Why should the group listen to Western powers when they have neither a coherent policy nor the hard power needed to back that policy? The Taliban know that they owe their very existence to terror and repression….. They reached the top of the pile because they could cut throats, stone women to death and dot the roads used by foreign troops with home-made bombs.

The Taliban may promise not to threaten Western interests directly…. In the final analysis, however, a regime that treats its own people with utter contempt is unlikely to offer foreigners, especially the “infidel,” a better deal. In most cases, at least in the short and medium terms, a regime’s foreign policy is the continuation of its domestic policies.

There is no need to rush towards any deal with Taliban.

In dealing with nasty regimes, the choice is not limited to full scale invasion or abject surrender.

As the world tries to absorb the shock of Taliban’s return to Kabul, officials in Western democracies are launching a debate on how to deal with the new masters of Afghanistan.

So far the main theme in this debate seems to be a desire to recognize the gun-toting “religious students” as the legitimate government of that long-suffering land. However, to ward off charges of appeasing a terrorist group, Western officials set a number of conditions before the implied recognition is granted. French President Emmanuel Macron, on a visit to Baghdad, has set four conditions while British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has unveiled four conditions of his own.