NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

British Jews Repudiated the Labor Party. Will American Jews Do the Same with the Anti-Semitism in the Democrat Party? By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

Posted By on July 6th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/will_american_jews_follow_their_british_cousins_in_repudiating_jewhatred.html

There was an editorial last week in The Free Beacon positing that due to anti-Semitism within its ranks, the Democrat party will mimic the electoral defeat of England’s Labor Party, which is similarly plagued by anti-Semitism.  The Ilhan Omar–Ocasio-Cortez–Tlaib trio, as well as many members of various Democrat congressional caucuses, are open enemies of Israel’s existence and redolent with anti-Semitic pejoratives.  The Beacon’s theory is that just as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labor Party was shunned by Jews and many in the public, thereby losing the last election to the Tories, so will Democrats lose to Republicans in 2022.  Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate, though themselves not anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, continue to allow this anti-Semitism in their party, and Pelosi goes farther by publicly and proudly embracing the Squad and especially Omar.

The Beacon should have given its supposition a bit more scrutiny, for there is a big difference between the repudiation of the Labor Party in England and the situation here with the Democrat party.  In Britain, virtually every Jew, Jewish organization, and Jewish politician spoke against the anti-Semitism and severe anti-Israelism happening within the Labor Party.  Their disgust was across the board, and many Jewish Laborites spoke of leaving the Labor Party…and did.  The entire Jewish community was alarmed by what was happening and growing within Labor’s ranks and leadership, spotlighted it as the anti-Semitic party, and worked hard for Labor’s defeat.

In contrast, here in America, we do not hear or see the majority of Jews repudiating the Democrat party.  Not at all!  The Democrats have lost basically none of their previous 70% Jewish support.  If one removes the Orthodox support for Republicans, the Jewish Democrat support is as high as 80%.  Nor has any of the Jewish politicians threatened to leave the Democrat party.  In fact, a dozen or so Jewish congressmen have joined and led others to further tighten Joe Biden’s grip over Israel, and many Jewish Democrat politicians continue to defend Ilhan Omar and whitewash everything she says, calling her critics Islamophobes.  And while some Jewish organizations have criticized Omar herself, none of the major establishment organizations has made any condemnation of the Democrat party per se, as was done against Labor by England’s Jewish organizations.  Dismayingly, non-Orthodox American Jews continue to stand solidly behind the Democrat party today, just as they did last Nov. 3 and many years previous.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The great federal-debt Ponzi scheme David Goldman

Posted By on July 6th, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/2021/07/the-great-federal-debt-ponzi-scheme/

It’s like the pump part of a pump-and-dump scheme in the stock market – without the benefit of an exit strategy.

The discrepancy between raging inflation and soggy Treasury bond yields remains a cognitive dissonance in financial markets.

There’s a simple explanation (and “Inflation is transitory” is NOT a full credit answer): The Federal Reserve and the commercial banks that depend on the Fed are virtually the only buyers of US government debt.

As long as the Fed is willing (and the market allows it) to buy arbitrarily large amounts of government debt, the price of US government debt is whatever the Fed says it is. It’s like the pump part of a pump-and-dump scheme in the stock market, except without the benefit of an exit strategy.

This Ponzi game can continue until inflation rises to the point where investors flee the Treasury market, yields soar and the economy falls back into recession. If the Fed and Treasury are willing to stake the credit of the United States of America on this game, it can last for a while. No matter how big a player you are, though, no one will take your marker at the craps table forever.

Without exaggeration, the US federal debt market is the most manipulated market of importance in the world at this writing.

The US banking system is a captive auxiliary of the central bank. The Fed has flooded the banks with reserves and pays them 0.05% (5 basis points) to hold these reserves at the Federal Reserve’s repurchase facility.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

An Ugly War Among Leftist YouTubers Shows Two Common, Toxic Pathologies Plaguing U.S. Politics Baselessly accusing people of being Russian agents and weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct are reputation-destroying cancers at the heart of liberal discourse. Glenn Greenwald

Posted By on July 6th, 2021

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/an-ugly-war-among-leftist-youtubers?token=ey

An incredibly vicious and protracted war is being waged, seemingly with no end in sight, among numerous prominent liberal and left-wing commentators who work primarily on YouTube. The conflict erupted on May 26 when Cenk Uygur — the founder and long-time host of The Young Turks, the largest liberal-left YouTube platform — baselessly and falsely accused independent journalist Aaron Maté of being “paid by the Russians,” while his co-host, Ana Kasparian, spouted innuendo that Maté was “working for” unnamed dictators.

Maté is one of the very few left-wing journalists who reported skeptically on Russiagate and who questioned the U.S. Government’s narrative about the civil war in Syria, including by traveling to war-torn parts of that country to do so. He won the 2019 Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy Award for his work debunking Russiagate. Yet with a one-minute rant from their insulated studio, Uygur baselessly branded Maté as someone who is “paid by the Russians” while Kasparian asserted that he “seemed” to be working for Assad and other dictators — a potentially reputation-destroying smear for a journalist and one that can be quite dangerous for a reporter who, like Maté, works on the ground in war zones.

The conflict engendered by those grotesque fabrications escalated significantly when Kasparian sent a private Twitter message to one of Maté’s defenders, Jimmy Dore, in which she threatened to accuse Dore of #MeToo-type sexual harassment from when they worked together seven years earlier. Kasparian made clear that her intent to publicly vilify Dore as a sexual harasser would serve as punishment for his criticisms of The Young Turks. Dore then revealed Kasparian’s threat on his program, and days later, Kasparian made good on her threat by accusing Dore of sexual harassment back in 2014.

Twitter Direct Message from The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian to Jimmy Dore, Apr. 14, 2016 and June 11, 2021.

While I used my social media platforms to denounce the false accusations voiced by Uygur and Kasparian against Maté, none of this would merit an article or stand-alone commentary if not for the fact that the two weapons they chose — false accusations that someone is a paid Russian agent and exploited sexual harassment accusations — have become extremely commonplace in Democratic Party politics, liberal circles and U.S. politics more broadly. It is long past time — way past time — that these tactics be rejected and scorned by everyone regardless of ideology or personality preferences.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What the ‘Old Man’ thought of Socialism Victor Sharpe

Posted By on July 6th, 2021

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/210703

And who was ‘The Old Man’ you ask? It was the name Winston Churchill was given in his later years by an adoring public, especially following the end of World War 2.

Increasingly Churchill railed against the creeping socializing of Britain particularly after the Socialist Labour government swept to power in the July, 1945 General Election.

The Old Man later warned about the growing threat of Socialism in his House of Commons speech in 1948 when he said: “We are oppressed by a deadly fallacy. Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy. Unless we free our country while time remains from the perverse doctrines of Socialism, there can be no hope for recovery.”

How familiar his stark words must resonate now here in America as a Democrat/Socialist Party turns the Marxist screw ever tighter on our lives. With the insanities of Wokeism, identity politics, critical race theory, ad nauseam tormenting non-Socialist Americans there is an uncanny similarity with what the British Labor government had imposed upon the British people.

In a speech Churchill delivered in Cardiff, Wales, he spoke about what he called “the Socialist jargon to silliness” that the leftwing government wished to enforce upon the public. His tongue in cheek speech went like this:

“I hope you all have mastered the official Socialist jargon which our new masters, as they call themselves, wish us to learn. You must not use the word ”poor”; they are now described as the “lower income group.” When it comes to freezing a workman’s wages the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Secretary of the Treasury in U.S.) now speaks of “arresting increases in personal income” … There is a lovely one about houses and homes. They are in future to be called “Accomodation Unit.”

Here the Old Man launched into one of his most derisory comments on Socialist nonsense by replacing the famous old song, “There’s no place like home,” with “There’s no place like our Accommodation Unit.” He then delivered the coup de grace to the cheers of the Conservative back benchers by adding, “I hope to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their lips.”

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Words Matter—Or Not: The Biden Vocabulary of the Times Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 6th, 2021

https://victorhanson.com/wordpress/words-matter-or-not-the-biden-vocabulary-of-the-times/

Armed insurrection—a motley mob riot with no leaders, no firearms, no plans, and resulting in five fatalities, four from natural causes and one shot while unarmed by an unnamed police officer.

Assault—anything but 120 days of rioting, looting and arson, $2 billion in damage, 25 killed, and 14,000 arrested.

Bipartisan—you are if you hate Trump.

Cages—overcrowded border detention “facilities” created by the Obama administration and useful to the Biden team’s open-borders agenda. Otherwise known as “cages” between January 20, 2017-January 20, 2021.

Challenge—engineered utter chaos on the border.

Circling back—just circling and circling…

Collusion—the projection of the crime of the guilty onto those innocent of it.

Diversity—coerced uniformity of thought and expression.

Equity—the plan where everybody ends up the same except those who oversee it.

Gender—what people with degrees call sex.

Herd immunity—once a canon of epidemiology, then taboo, now an inconvenient truth.

Inclusion—mandatory state alienation of a majority of the population.

Infrastructure—borrowing trillions for anything but roads and bridges.

Latinix—unknown, maybe a gladiatorial character in some long forgotten Roman graphic novel.

Noncitizen—now used as if all legal US residents crossed the Southern border illegally.

Root causes—an abstraction used to evade the concrete evidence in front of you.

Scott Atlas—the Nemesis following Dr. Fauci’s hubris.

Unity—uniting half the country against the other half.

Woke—body snatched.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Erdoğan’s Miscalculation Crippled Turkey’s Aerial Firepower by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on July 5th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17489/erdogan-miscalculation-air-power

Turkey is still blackmailing the U.S. (and NATO allies) that it may opt for a Russian fighter jet, the Su-57, for instance, in case it feels threatened by the lack of a new generation fighter aircraft. This is bluffing.

Turkish Air Force generals know too well that switching from NATO-standard aircraft to Russian ones after 70 years is not like changing your American car in favor of a Japanese one. Building a new operational structure, modifying air bases, new repair, service and maintenance systems will be too costly, time consuming and technologically difficult.

Erdoğan’s top officials are undermining themselves when they try to convince the public that Turkey’s local defense industry is making miracles in fighter jet technology.

In the meantime, fearing further U.S. sanctions, Turkey has suspended plans to activate the S-400 surface-to-air missile system…. This means Ankara paid a good $2.5 billion to Moscow for a system that it probably will never activate.

“This is a sale. We received our money. The Turks can ride the missiles to go to the beach or to carry potatoes with them. It’s not our concern.” — Aleksey Yerhov, Russia’s ambassador to Ankara, mocking Turkey’s reluctance to activate the S-400 surface-to-air missile system, onedio.com, July 6, 2020.

One of the hottest issues in the 50-minute discussion between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and U.S. President Joe Biden during the NATO summit of June 14 was NATO member Turkey’s acquisition of the Russian-made S-400 long-range air defense system and subsequent U.S. sanctions, including expelling Turkey from the U.S.-led multinational consortium that builds the F-35 fifth-generation fighter jet. Unsurprisingly, the meeting ended without a solution. That is bad news for the Turkish Air Force (TuAF).

For more than a decade, Turkey’s military top brass planned future air power capabilities based on the assumption that they would be receiving at least 100 F-35s starting in the 2020s. The TuAF operates squadrons of fourth-generation U.S.-built F-16s and older F-4s in its operations against separatist Kurdish militants in Turkey’s southeast as well as in northern Iraq and Syria. Turkey first began acquiring the F-16s from the U.S. in late 1980s and has locally produced the iconic fighter jet under license, being one of the five countries to locally produce the aircraft. Today, TuAF has a total of 270 F-16C/D aircraft in its inventory, all of them Block 30/40/50 models. Most of those aircraft will have to be phased out within the next 10 to 15 years, depending on their upgrades. Whether Congress will allow the sale of fighter jet parts and servicing for upgrades is another question mark.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Deception Wearing the Mask of Truth By Geoffrey P. Hunt

Posted By on July 5th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/_deception_wearing_the_mask_of_truth.html

For Joe Biden/Kamala Harris devotees, the 2020 ubiquitous election lawn signs in my neighborhood read “Truth Hope Decency.”  While most of these moralizing bromides did not survive the winter, some are still implanted, reminders of how cheap political speech was soon enough self-repudiated.

Exhorting “Decency” was the refrain decrying President Donald Trump’s occasional crude and coarse cloudbursts, usually unfiltered via Twitter. Yet the substance of decency has eluded Joe Biden and his Democrat handlers, ushering instead a new era of grotesque depravities, where at the top Biden/Harris have endorsed, supported, and invited the unrestrained abject horror of drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and human trafficking via a deliberately porous open southern border, resettling unaccompanied children all across America.

Illegal alien sex and child trafficking continue with impunity under Biden’s open borders policy while a surge in overdose deaths from methamphetamine and oxycontin laced with fentanyl — all managed by Mexican cartels given sanctuary by Joe Biden — merits a VP Kamala Harris response that “climate change is the root provocation for the border challenges, and Mexico should plant more trees.”

Decency? No, neither stupidity nor incompetence; instead, an abomination and disinformation by design.

And why is the Biden/Harris regime, obsessed by race and cultural Marxism, aligned with BLM, and the fraudulent 1619 project — where modern-day slavery and indentured servitude, from the Mexican cartels to South Sudan to Communist Chinese subjugation of the Uyghurs, elicits nary a peep?

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tibet Is Still Fighting For Freedom Against Brutal Chinese Oppression Barbara Demick’s book, ‘Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town,’ provides yet more evidence that the Chinese Communist Party is an oppressive evil that must be confronted.By Helen Raleigh

Posted By on July 5th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/02/tibet-is-still-fighting-for-freedom-against-brutal-chinese-oppression/

Ngaba is a small Tibetan town with only 10,000 people and didn’t even have a traffic light until 2013. Yet it is known as the “self-immolation center of the world.” Why did Tibetans from this tiny town choose to die in such a gruesome and horrific way? You will find the answer in Barbara Demick’s well-researched and beautifully written book, Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, a book about the history and people of Ngaba.

Despite all the curiosity about Tibet, most of us know very little about Tibetan history, its rich culture, the Tibetan people, and their complex relationship with Han Chinese. When I was in China, all I knew of Tibet were the things Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda wanted me to believe: Tibet was always part of China since the beginning of time; the Dalai Lama is a traitor and separatist; and before the Chinese army “liberated” Tibet in 1950, the Tibetan ruling class treated ordinary Tibetan people like slaves and subjected them to horrifying punishment for even minor mistakes, such as turning offenders’ skulls into wine cups or using their skin to cover drums.

Since the CCP has prevented Tibetans from publishing literature and history from their perspective, most Han Chinese, including myself, thought the CCP’s propaganda on Tibet had to be true. This is why a book such as “Eat the Buddha,” based on interviews of Tibetans and how their lives intertwined with Tibet’s history spanning from 1930 to the present, is indispensable to set the record straight for Tibet and its people.

‘Liberating’ Tibet

Ngaba is the capital of the Mei kingdom, one of the many smaller kingdoms in Tibet. The king and his people revered the Dalai Lama as their spiritual leader, but they kept their independence from the Dalai Lama and China. Life on the Tibetan plateau is challenging – Ngaba is at 11,000 feet elevation and the harsh weather makes agriculture difficult.

Tibetans, who were either farmers, herdsmen, or monks, were often poorly nourished but rarely went hungry. Unlike the CCP’s propaganda, the Mei kings and queens never drank any wine from cups made out of human skulls. They ruled their small kingdom fairly and capably throughout history and were respected by their people.

Ngaba’s first unfortunate encounter with the CCP took place in 1935. The CCP’s Red Army marched into Ngaba while fleeing from the Nationalist Army’s pursuit. People at Nagba didn’t have enough food to support thousands of newly arrived Chinese soldiers. The hungry Red Army soldiers tried to feed themselves in any way possible, including picking crops from Tibetan fields and stealing and slaughtering Tibetan herdsmen’s sheep and yaks. For the first time in their living memory, Tibetans experienced famine.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Bard College, Funded by Soros, Will Teach Course on Prison Abolition By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on July 5th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/02/bard-college-funded-by-soros-will-teach-course-on-prison-abolition/

A private college in New York, funded by far-left billionaire George Soros, is about to offer a course on how to “sell” the idea of abolishing all prisons to the broader population, Fox News reports.

The controversial course, “Abolishing Prisons and the Police,” will be offered this fall at Bard College, a private liberal arts college that received $500 million from Soros via an endowment earlier this year. The course description explicitly says that its intent is to inform students on how to “sell abolition to the masses and design a multi-media ad campaign to make prison abolition go viral.”

The description continues, saying that the class “explores what’s to be gained, lost, and what we can’t imagine about a world without prisons. Through the figure of abolition (a phenomenon we will explore via movements to end slavery, the death penalty, abortion, gay conversion therapy, and more), we will explore how and why groups of Americans have sought to bring an absolute end to sources of human suffering.”

The class, listed as part of Bard’s broader “Hate Studies Initiative,” then goes on to say that students “will explore a history of the punitive impulse in American social policy and seek to discern means of intervening against it.”

In addition to the radical materials of the course itself, the professor who will be instructing the class has his own history of radicalism. Professor Kwame Holmes wrote an op-ed last July titled “Why Abolish the Police?”, which suggested that neighborhoods should develop their own “pods” designed to “create intentional agreements around safety.” He also tweeted that people should “reach out to five neighbors and create a pact amongst yourselves to call each other before you call the police” in the event that a crime is witnessed.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Authoritarianism in the Air Peter Smith

Posted By on July 5th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/07/authoritarianism-in-the-air/

Up until a few days ago I was sticking with Glady Berejiklian. This current ridiculous lockdown tested my resolve. But then, I thought, let’s look at the unenviable position political leaders have put themselves in.

First, they slavishly followed China in adopting lockdowns. Bear in mind that this is the first time in the history of epidemics that general lockdowns have been applied. And, I understand, none were ever contemplated.

Don’t want to be conspiratorial but those fake pictures from China showing people dropping down in the street had a purpose. People shown being rounded up and locked in their homes had a purpose. A safe assumption: the Chinese communists are not stupid. An equally safe assumption: they calculate what they do and what they show.

My conclusion is that they wanted the Western world to cripple itself. Of course, they had help from Neil Ferguson and his fellow Imperial College (UK) hysterics in mid-March 2020. Mind you, even they, in their report, did not recommend general lockdowns. True, it is mentioned in passing, but it is not part of the “suppression strategy” which they advocated.

Unsurprisingly, California was one of the first to go full monty. Fauci and epidemiologists around the world soon got on board. What power, basking in the limelight with politicians and the media in thrall! A heady brew.

Second, political leaders, to a man and woman, hid behind medical gurus.  Not our fault you are thrown out of work, your business ruined, they claimed. Blame the expert advice. Follow “the science”.

Powerful political leaders, thinking at first that they were calling the shots, quickly became pawns in the game. To use New South Wales as the example, when Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant says jump, it is now clear that Gladys jumps. I could equally have cited many others, including England’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty. Sure, Boris Johnson was recalcitrant at first but after a personal dose of COVID he soon started paying obeisance to the chief.