Our Ridiculous Way of Fighting Wars When we decide to send our young off to fight, we owe them more than a thank you and a free concert.  By Mark Rothermel

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/14/our-ridiculous-way-of-fighting-wars/

As we look at the disgraceful coda of the Global War on Terror and the tens of thousands of our countrymen who have been maimed or killed with scant results, it is clear to all but few (sadly, those few seem to occupy a lot of Defense Department jobs and think tank posts), there must be a better way to fight our wars. If we look to history, and even demands from the anti-war Left, we might find a better way forward.

Believe it or not, the anti-war Left does have a strong point. No, their point was not to be found in their human barricading of military posts or yelling in congressional meetings with ridiculous costumes. It was in their demand for the third rail of military intervention everyone dismisses: Timelines. 

We are told we cannot set timelines. We are there until “mission accomplished” (or it loses funding, as we have seen). But what if we looked at our past and realized that when a war goes beyond four or five years of mobilization, beneficial results are difficult to identify? Which “victory” was more decisive: World War II or Vietnam? Are we to believe that timelines are beneficial to every type of work (construction, budgets, school testing, sports), but when it comes to deploying our military efforts that is the one thing that somehow needs zero accountability for how long it takes?

Why can we not have a five-year timeline requirement on each war declaration/force authorization? What would a five-year timeline require? Massive deployment of forces. Massive manufacturing of equipment, mobilization of forces, etc. (think of the old World War II movies of assembly lines, etc.). Few realize we fought Desert Storm with a larger Army deployed than our total Army is now. What if we had a manpower/equipment requirement (two Armies, 600 ships, 4000 planes, etc.) before we fight? Somehow, this idea would be dismissed as ludicrous (despite it being automatic in wars we cared to win), but yet having soldiers deployed in combat for half their careers is not?

Killing Art Art is not just something we “go along with.” By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/14/killing-art/

I recently had occasion to quote Charles Péguy’s observation, from a 1905 essay called “Notre Patrie,” that “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” 

The cowardice in question can be intellectual or moral as well as physical, something that is vividly illustrated by Holland Cotter’s moist, mincing, over-the-shoulder-glancing review for the New York Times of a small but exquisite exhibition of paintings by the great Venetian Renaissance painter we know as Titian (d. 1576). The exhibition, “Titian: Women, Myth & Power,” is ending its three-city run at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The show centers around six large, mythological paintings commissioned by the future Philip II of Spain in the 1550s. 

Based on themes drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the six paintings, reunited in this exhibition for the first time, are among Titian’s most celebrated, and for good reason. Painted between 1551 and the early 1560s, they show Titian at the apex of his powers. Cotter recognizes and affirms the greatness of the paintings but he is nervous, very nervous. You’ll know why when I tell you that pride of place is given to the Gardner’s own, newly restored work, a depiction of the Rape of Europa, a story illustrated by many artists, including Rubens, Guido Reni, and Goya, but not a theme likely to find approbation among contemporary feminists, the audience to which the Times is chiefly concerned to cater. 

The story is a familiar one. Europa, out picnicking with friends, is approached by Zeus in the shape of a bull (this story’s metamorphosis). He charms her, abducts her, and whisks her away to Crete where, as Ovid himself put it in another poem, cetera quis nescit. 

Biden Administration’s Dangerous Immigration Policies Demonstrate Orwellian “Doublethink” By Michael W. Cutler

https://usinc.org/biden-administrations-dangerous-immigration-policies-demonstrate-orwellian-doublethink/

George Orwell defined doublethink as, “The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

Politicians traditionally put a “spin” on what they say, and how they say it. This is why most folks look askance at politicians and the promises that they make.

George Orwell, in point of fact, said, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

For quite some time these linguistic gymnastics were written off as being examples of “political correctness.” I have consistently resisted the use of the term political correctness (PC), because it creates the deceptive appearance that misleading language is used out of a desire to be considerate.

In reality, such misuse of language generally has a far more sinister motivation, to mislead folks by manipulating language to create propaganda and misinformation. Because people think with words, control of language is actually thought control. Consequently the so-called “PC Police” should be properly referred to as the “Thought Police,” another of Orwell’s creations.

This tactic is unacceptable and incongruous for freedom-loving Americans.

New research suggests CRISPR can destroy virus that causes COVID-19 BY JOSEPH MAINA

https://allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2021/07/new-research-suggests-crispr-can-destroy-virus-that-causes-covid-19/

Scientists have discovered a way to stop the COVID-19 virus from replicating in infected human cells, marking major progress towards a definitive treatment for the deadly illness and accentuating the potential of genetic engineering to cure viral diseases.

The study explores the use of CRISPR, a genome editing tool, and builds on research that started at Australia’s Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in 2019, when Dr. Mohamed Fareh and Prof. Joe Trapani showed that CRISPR could be used to eliminate abnormal RNAs that drive children’s cancers.

At the beginning of the pandemic, and in collaboration with Director Prof. Sharon Lewin and Dr. Wei Zhao from the Doherty Institute, the scientists reprogrammed the same CRISPR tool to suppress replication of the RNA virus SARS-CoV-2 — and importantly, its “variants of concern” — in a test tube model. SARS-CoV-2, which is short for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, is the virus that causes COVID-19.

“The CRISPR approach is for a treatment,” lead scientist Lewin told the Alliance for Science. “There are currently no good antiviral drugs available for COVID-19. CRISPR can efficiently destroy the virus.”

At the core of the research is an enzyme (CRISPR-Cas13b) that binds to target RNAs and degrades the part of the virus’ genome needed to replicate inside cells.

The scientists applaud the specificity, efficiency and rapid deployment properties of reprogrammed Cas13b, which provides a blueprint for antiviral drug development to suppress and prevent a wide range of SARS-CoV-2 mutants. The same properties can be readily deployed to fight off other pathogenic viruses.

“The flexibility of CRISPR-Cas13,  which only needs the viral sequence, means we can look to rapidly design antivirals for COVID-19 and any new emerging viruses in less than a week,” Fareh said. There were signs that this approach could also be applied to a host of existing viruses, signalling a game-changer for how they are currently treated, he added.

“Unlike conventional anti-viral drugs, the power of this tool lies in its design-flexibility and adaptability, which make it a suitable drug against a multitude of pathogenic viruses including influenza, Ebola, and possibly HIV,” Fareh said.

The Typical COVID Death Rate for the Fully Vaccinated? ‘Effectively Zero’ By Judson Berger

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/the-typical-covid-death-rate-for-the-fully-vaccinated-effectively-zero/

Back in the spring, we here at NRO ran a piece by Andrew Michta titled, “The Zero-Risk Western Society.” We could re-run this piece every week — in fact, maybe we should; note to self — and it would still be pertinent. Taking the broad view of our COVID-19 response, Andrew noted “we seem to have become a people no longer capable of accepting any level of risk, while we demand an absolute certainty that those we elect to office provide safety, even at great cost.”

Risk is at the heart of everything that’s been wrong with our pandemic response to date — managing it, calculating it, communicating it.

Today, policy-makers have to reckon with those tradeoffs once more as the Delta variant contributes to a surge in infections, and the media’s corona-coverage amplifies incidents of “breakthrough” cases. The trends are alarming and frustrating. But so would be a heavy-handed government revival of lockdowns (the Biden administration has vowed not to take this step, while leaving wiggle room), travel restrictions (Chicago is flirting with them), and other measures thought to be behind us. Thankfully, data from the Kaiser Family Foundation help put this renewed COVID-19 panic in perspective.

A few takeaways: Among those states reporting data on “breakthrough” cases for the fully vaccinated, the case rate is well below 1 percent. The hospitalization rate ranges from “effectively zero” to .06 percent. And there’s this: “The rates of death among fully vaccinated people with COVID-19 were even lower, effectively zero (0.00%) in all but two reporting states, Arkansas and Michigan[,] where they were 0.01%.”

That number again, “Effectively zero.”

Are there caveats? Sure, there are caveats. The information is incomplete and a few weeks old, and some asymptomatic cases and individuals who did not get tested are surely missing. The study also notes that these hospitalizations and deaths “may or may not have been due to COVID-19.” As Caroline Downey from the news team reports, the CDC (with similar caveats) likewise says that as of early August, the agency had received reports of roughly 7,500 vaccinated patients with severe and/or fatal breakthrough infections, or less than .01 percent.

Fiddle with the numbers even a lot, and the reality is the same: The vast majority of cases are those who are not fully vaccinated. Those who are face a vanishingly small risk of deadly infection.

The Imminent, Inevitable Taliban Victory By Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/the-imminent-inevitable-taliban-victory/#slide-1

Twenty years, and we are still where we were on September 10, 2001.

A ccountability for the Capitol rioters is not enough, we’re told. Progressives insist there must be a national reckoning for the January 6 “insurrection” because punishing the rioters is insufficient to defeat the real enemy — white supremacism and its endorsement of terrorism when necessary to achieve its vision for society.

It is a cartoon depiction of reality. No belief system is held in more disdain in the United States than white supremacism. To most of us, it is a perversion of the core conviction that we are all created in God’s image, all equal in human dignity, and must thus all be equal in the eyes of the law. For the Left, though, white supremacism is a convenient abstraction; one that gives opportunists the foundation needed to build a “systemic racism” dystopia, their path to influence and profit.

What is remarkable, then, is the perdurable blindness of progressives to a much more threatening breed of ideologically driven violence in furtherance of a supremacist, incorrigibly discriminatory vision for society. Not white supremacism but sharia supremacism. They’ve never wanted to acknowledge it, much less come to grips with it.

As a result, the inevitable is coming to pass, in all the horror some of us have long warned about. The Taliban are right on schedule in their quest to retake Afghanistan by September 11, the 20-year anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities executed by al-Qaeda — a jihadist network to which the Taliban knowingly and willfully gave sanctuary as it plotted against, and repeatedly attacked, the United States.

I’ve noted that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are poised, by the anniversary date, to be as strong as they were in the three years leading up to 9/11 — during which, with its safe havens assured by the sharia-supremacist regime, the jihadist network bombed U.S. embassies in eastern Africa and nearly sank a U.S. Navy destroyer. Actually, I understated the matter. As they swallow up more provinces by the day, the Taliban are capturing northern regions that they did not rule when last in charge. It is all part of a longstanding plan to take over Afghanistan while U.S. forces are still a retreating presence, thus projecting the image of the Taliban chasing out a humiliated enemy — an image President Biden seems even more anxious to mint than was President Trump.

Inflation Can Crush the Democrats in 2022 By David P. Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/08/13/inflation-can-crush-the-democrats-in-2022-n1469171

It’s the economy, stupid.

Five trillion dollars in helicopter money (not counting Biden’s proposed $3.5 trillion boondoggle) through the underinvested U.S. economy has given us the worst inflation since the dog days of the Jimmy Carter administration, and Americans are worried — as they should be. Ask anyone who tried to buy a car or rent a dwelling in the past six months. The median asking rent jumped 19% between the second quarter of 2020 and the second quarter of 2021, according to the US Census Bureau. According to Zillow, average rents jumped 6% between last December and June, while Apartmentlist.com reports the median rent up by 10% during the same period.

Real wages are falling. Consumer prices jumped 6% during the past year, while the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s wage measure rose just 3%. That’s an across-the-board 3% pay cut for American workers.

The Great Biden Inflation hands out subsidy checks to American families and then claws the money back and more. Low-wage workers suffer the most. Heaven help the family of modest means whose car died in the past year. Used-car prices (according to the standard Manheim Index of car auction prices) jumped by 25% over the past year.

No wonder the University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment fell in July to a level of 70, down from over 100 before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the lowest level since the Great Recession a decade ago.

The biggest news from the University of Michigan pollsters, though, is political: Democrats are still relatively optimistic about the economy (maybe because they expect more Biden handouts) while confidence among Republicans and Independents has collapsed. Republicans are now more pessimistic about the U.S. economy than they were at any time in history, more than in March 2009 at the depth of the Great Recession.

Critical Race Theory Aims To Murder The Souls Of White Children Jason Riley

/https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/13/critical-race-theory-aims-to-murder-the-souls-of-white-children/

CRT aims to annihilate the souls of white people, to morally paralyze them via a protracted process of induced guilt, shame, embarrassment, and extortion.

A friend of mine told me a true apocryphal story. He is an old-fashioned “liberal” and a strong advocate of public education.

The Covid-19 lockdowns left him additional time to inconspicuously sit in on his sixth-grade son’s online classes. One afternoon, he observed an assignment in an English class in which all the white students were required to place their arms beside a brown paper bag.

The teacher, a white woman, asked if they noticed a difference in color between their skin and the brown paper bag. The white students verbally assented. The teacher then asked if the color of the bag looked close to the skin color of some classmates who identify as black.

The teacher then announced: “If your skin color is different from the color of the paper bag, then you are part of an American problem known as ‘systemic racism’ that does irreparable harm to all black and brown people. Further, if you identify as white, you enjoy something called ‘white privilege,’ which means you are practicing racism every day without knowing it.” The teacher then went on to ask the class if they had ever heard the term “reparations.”

Out of some sense of visceral paternal protection, my friend slammed down his son’s computer and told him to go to his room. He told me that he stood there, shaking with incredulity.

This Is Called Murdering Someone’s Soul

BBC: Leading the World Against Israel by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17646/bbc-against-israel

Following accusations of slanted reporting of the second Palestinian intifada, which began in 2000, and the rise in Jew-hatred caused by it, in 2004 the BBC was pressured to open an inquiry into its coverage, by Malcolm Balen, former BBC News editor. For 17 years Balen’s findings have been kept under lock and key by the BBC, which admitted spending $500,000 of public funds in a series of legal battles to prevent its release.

“What is it are they hiding and what are they afraid of?”, Conservative peer Lord Polack asked. Responding, the Minister for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said that in “some instances it [the BBC] has fallen far short” of the required standards.

Three allegations that Bowen breached BBC guidelines on accuracy and impartiality were fully or partially upheld in 2009 by the BBC’s Editorial Standards Committee, which also said that he had failed to acknowledge there were views contrary to his own.

The BBC’s reporting on the Gaza conflict this year typifies its long-term bias against Israel. It constantly drew moral equivalence between Israel, a Western liberal democracy, and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both proscribed terrorist organizations…. There was no acknowledgement that the conflict had been initiated by these groups that openly seek the destruction of Israel or that without their violent actions, no Palestinians in Gaza or civilians in Israel would have died. Instead the BBC maintained the fiction — pushed by the Palestinian side — that Israel’s actions in Jerusalem were the cause. Nor did they mention that Hamas misappropriated millions of dollars of international aid to construct tunnels, rockets and other engines of war to attack Israeli civilians.

This biased journalism was crowned by commentary direct from Jeremy Bowen, whose report from Gaza at the end of the conflict looked more like pro-Hamas propaganda than objective reporting…..

Why so much emphasis on Bowen’s role? Because all BBC reporting on the Israel-Palestinian conflict for more than 15 years has been driven, above all, by his editorial influence.

I do not blame Bowen for the influence he wields, I blame the BBC executives that allow him, with his history, to hold a position that dominates the coverage of the world’s largest broadcast media corporation. Israel. During the 2021 Gaza conflict… the BBC had to issue corrections eight times in their Arabic news coverage alone.

Senior BBC producer Alaa Daraghme recently shared a video on Twitter which he wrote was “An Israeli settler ramming a Palestinian man near the Lions Gate.” In fact the video showed a car being driven onto the sidewalk after an attempt by Palestinians to lynch the driver, who then lost control. There are many other such cases of bias and distortion among BBC staff.

Like many others, the BBC rejects or ignores historical reality in order to portray Israel as an illegal occupier of Arab lands. To underpin its false narrative, for many years it has repeated Palestinian propaganda, ignored violence against their own people, and whitewashed their Jew-hate…. Israel’s contributions to disaster relief and other humanitarian actions around the world are almost always ignored.

There is little likelihood, without firm intervention by the British government, that the BBC will relinquish its leadership of the global anti-Israel movement that has contributed to so much suffering, misery and bloodshed.

Iran and Its Two Damaged Wings by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17645/iran-damaged-wings

As the great Iranian theologian Kazem Assar put it: “Monarchy and Shi’ism are the two wings with which the Iranian eagle can soar to unimaginable heights.”
This time, however, things may turn out to be different as the Khomeinist regime has tried to clip off both wings of which Assar spoke.
Over the years, rather than the clergy taking over the state, it is the state that has tried to take over the clergy.
Under Khomeinism, state-appointed mullahs control vast enterprises that pay no taxes and are answerable to no one.
Isn’t it time to recognize the Khomeinist regime for what it really is: a banal despotism disguised as a clerical regime to confuse both Iranians and foreign Iranologists while trying to destroy not only Iran’s monarchic heritage but also its religious tradition?
More importantly, isn’t it time for the traditional clergy to end its often complicit silence about the damage that Khomeinism has done to Iran’s identity, culture, social cohesion, economy and even religion?

The past four decades in which the Khomeinist ideology has dominated Iranian state structures, a new breed of “Iranologists” has emerged in Western academic and media circles. Most old Iranologists saw Iran as a glorious but long dead civilization distinguished by religious tolerance, ethnic diversity and an abiding love of artistic creativity. Those who focused on Iran’s story after the advent of Islam recognized monarchy and the Shi’ite clerical institution that, while at times in conflict, played complementary roles in Iranian society.

With the seizure of power in 1979 by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a new breed of Iranologists emerged to declare the definite end of monarchy in Iran and the advent of a theocratic regime backed by re-energized clergy.