NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A pro-Israel musician faces challenges to artistic freedom — in the U.S. By Charles Lane

Posted By on March 22nd, 2024

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/19/pro-israel-performer-matisyahu-concerts-canceled/?

There is no one quite like Matisyahu. The international reggae-hip-hop-rock artist burst on the scene 20 years ago, rapping his hit single “King Without a Crown,” while sporting the beard, sidelocks and black coat of Hasidic Judaism. NBC picked “One Day,” his stirring antiwar anthem, as theme music for its 2010 Winter Olympics coverage.

Matisyahu left Hasidism, but his music still reflects his strong Jewish identity, religiosity and affinity for Israel. Since Hamas’s massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, the singer has spoken out against rising antisemitism and in support of Israel. He has draped himself in an Israeli flag at concerts and placed an empty chair onstage to represent Israeli hostages in Gaza. He has called for Hamas to be “destroyed.” He has visited Israeli troops and sent a supportive video message to their families.

For all of that, he is paying a price: When Matisyahu arrived in Chicago earlier this month, he learned his March 8 show at the 1,400-capacity House of Blues — owned by Live Nation — would be canceled. The reason: the potential for unruly protests against him outside the venue.

The U.S. Palestinian Community Network, one of several groups calling for demonstrations against Matisyahu, cried victory: “Through our relentless pressure on [the House of Blues and] Live Nation, the concert of the racist, zionist Matisyahu was canceled!” the group said in a statement on X. “Chicago has made it clear that it stands with Palestine and supporters of the #GazaGenocide are not welcome here!”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Starting To Notice That The Energy Transition Is Not Happening Francis Menton

Posted By on March 22nd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/22/grid-draining-electron-guzzlers-and-the-end-of-driving/

Supposedly, there is a big energy transition going on. Throughout the West, countries have made ambitious pledges to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions by specific percentages and by specific dates. Many such pledges were notably made in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016. Some countries — for example, the U.S. and UK — have even gone beyond the Paris Agreement and made still more ambitious pledges in the years since then. But is any of it real?

No, none of it is real. The failure to make the progress that would be necessary to achieve the alleged pledges and mandates is obvious and easily tracked. But a code of silence has enveloped the progressive media, commanding that no one is allowed to notice.

A small crack in the wall of silence suddenly happened in the New York Times on March 14. The front page article had the headline “A New Surge in Power Use Is Threatening U.S. Climate Goals.” The gist is that various sources of new electricity demand are rapidly emerging, from data centers to EVs to AI. Demand for electricity is starting to rise, but wind and solar generators can’t be added to the grid fast enough to fulfill this demand. And thus utilities are starting to add large numbers of new natural gas plants.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Grid-Draining Electron Guzzlers And The End Of Driving

Posted By on March 22nd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/22/grid-draining-electron-guzzlers-and-the-end-of-driving/

In perfect Democratic Party form, the Biden administration has dropped another government burden on the private sector. Two days ago, the White House rolled out “the toughest-ever” automobile emissions standards. The objective, of course, is to force Americans to buy the cars that the ruling class wants them to drive. There’s a big problem here, though – the grid won’t be up to the task of keeping tens of millions of electric vehicles charged.

The headline from a Bloomberg story last week summed up the plan: “​​Biden Set to Crack Down on Auto Emissions to Accelerate EV Sales.”

Rules decreed by the Environmental Protection Agency are intended to “propel electric vehicle sales well beyond current levels,” says Bloomberg. “The EPA has projected that to meet proposed mandates, electric models would need to make up roughly two-thirds of car and light truck sales in 2032 — up from less than a tenth last year.”

This is no noble effort to prevent a climate catastrophe. Democrats, eco-activists and the thoroughly compromised media continually argue that we have to move to EVs to save the sky, but the federal rules and state mandates they propose and issue are part of a larger plan to drive Americans out of cars and into public transit, which is failing across the country.

There are a number of problems with the march to EV-topia. They’re not zero-emission vehicles, they’re an extravagant purchase, costly to repair, expensive to insure, hazardous to own, and they create a new class of hazmat problems.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

CAN’T ERASE OUR JUDEO-CHRISTIAN PAST Bill Donohue

Posted By on March 22nd, 2024

https://www.catholicleague.org/cant-erase-our-judeo-christian-past/

Militant secularists would like to erase our religious heritage, but they are clearly in over their heads. Our nation’s Capitol abounds with Judeo-Christian iconography, so much so that it overwhelms attempts to cancel it.

The dome of the U.S. Capitol was inspired by the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, as well as St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.
The Supreme Court building is modeled after a Roman temple.
St. Joseph’s church on Capitol Hill was built in 1868.
The Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress features The Court of Neptune Fountain; it resembles a grotto.
The west end of the Mall—from the U.S. Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial—has a statue of Lincoln surrounded by comments he made about his respect for God. At the far end of the Mall, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress, and the Capitol building have inscriptions honoring our Judaic heritage.
Within the Capitol there are statues of Catholic priests and nuns and medallions of Pope Innocent III and Pope Gregory IX.
On the first floor of the Main Reading Room in the Library of Congress there is a statue of St. Paul.
In the Library there is a quote from the Book of Proverbs and a reference to God from Shakespeare.
There is a chapel in the U.S. Capitol. Moreover, prayer meetings for Senators and Congressmen are commonplace throughout.
Crucifixes abound in the Capitol.
On the front doors of the Capitol are pictures of Franciscans with rosaries, symbolizing the history of Columbus.
In the Rotunda, there is a painting of Hernando De Soto and his armies standing on the banks of the river rejoicing, as well as a depiction of priests planting a cross.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Jew Hate By Joan Swirsky

Posted By on March 22nd, 2024

https://newswithviews.com/jew-hate/

There is nothing new about the fanatical hatred of Jews that we see playing out in today’s world––literally a pandemic of anti-Semitism which echoes the fear and loathing that gave rise to the over-4,000-year history of the Inquisition, the Crusades, centuries of pogroms, the expulsion of Jews from country after country, and the Holocaust of the 20th century in which six-million Jews were savagely incinerated in the crematoria of Hitler’s Germany as the entire world––including U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt––looked on and did nothing!

Plus ça change and all that. But it’s not exactly true that things have remained the same. Today, the staggering power of technology makes the spread of Jew Hate all the more rapid, powerful and lethal.

In America, while blacks, Muslims, feminists, single mothers, immigrants, the global-warming fetishists, college graduates in debt for their exorbitant-but-meaningless “educations” and minorities of every stripe all bleat endlessly about being victims of this or that indignity, slight, “unfairness,” historical insult or crime, the Annual Report on Hate Crimes released by the Uniform Crime Reporting Program of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) show that, by far, it is the world’s tiny population of Jews––15 million in a world of nearly eight billion––who experience the most bias, hatred, assaults, blatant racism and hate crimes.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When and How Did We Get Here?—Gradually, then Suddenly. Part Four

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-four/

The final catalyst that led to our collective implosion was the election year 2020 and the accelerating Trump Derangement Syndrome. As the cities burned, unbelievable madness followed in efforts to ensure the incumbent president would not be reelected.

Suddenly, congressional officials, mayors, and governors all refused to keep the peace by requesting federal troops to stop the summer riots. The more the cities went up in flames, the more the blue states blamed Trump. It was almost as if they would fault Trump for the ongoing violence and blame him even more if he sent in the military to quell it.

Had they forgotten the Rodney King LA riots of 1992, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Colin Powell, called up President George H. W. Bush to encourage him to deploy the 5,000 Marines then ready to go into South Central and Watts to quell the violence? And so, Bush did just that and stopped the mass looting and rioting.

No matter. The nation was now a Luche Libre of open anti-Trump craziness. Mark Zuckerberg poured in a historic $419 million to absorb the work of the registrars in key election precincts. Social media suppressed news unfavorable to Biden.

Street riots and protests were modulated to aid the Biden campaign. Liberal Time essayist Molly Ball described the “conspiracy”:

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Pro-Palestinian Group Calls for ‘Intifada’ in NYC, Tells Supporters to ‘Find a Target’ and ‘Flood’ City By Zach Kessel

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pro-palestinian-group-calls-for-intifada-in-nyc-tells-supporters-to-find-a-target-and-flood-city/

The pro-Palestinian activist group Within Our Lifetime (WOL) plans to hold a “Palestine is Everywhere” event in New York City from March 27 to 30, the organization announced, advertised in a flyer calling for “autonomous action” and “global intifada.”

The flyer, which WOL shared on its X page, directs the group’s supporters to “get a group together,” “find a target,” and “take action to defend Palestine.” WOL is urging its followers to “flood all of New York City” by taking “autonomous actions,” which include “de-occupations, assemblies and gatherings, public testimonies, roving shutdowns, sit-ins and slow downs, painting walls, wheatpastings, & other happenings.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s Border Blowup Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://victorhanson.com/bidens-border-blowup/

Some 8 to 10 million illegal aliens from all over the world, as expected, have flooded across the border since Joe Biden took office.

A demagogic candidate Biden, remember, in 2019 invited those massing at the southern border to “surge” into the United States without specifying they first needed legal sanction: “We immediately surge to the border all those seeking asylum.”

In contrast, we know legal immigration is America’s great strength, but it has always depended on a few key prerequisites.

Immigration must be legal and measured.

Why? Because only the host nation can adjudicate how many immigrants it can successfully accept and assimilate. It has no desire to encourage Balkanized tribalism so common in nations abroad torn apart by ethnic conflict.

America must have some knowledge of the background of immigrants, especially whether they have criminal records, belong to gangs, are importing drugs, carry infectious diseases, or can be self-supporting.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Terrorists who perpetrate attacks are not who ‘experts’ say they are – opinion Why do so many “experts,” politicians, and pundits still stubbornly cling to the utterly unscientific idea that poverty causes terrorism? By Moshe Phillips

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-792959

Children, clergymen, and Israeli citizens supposedly are among the Arabs least likely to carry out anti-Jewish terrorism. They don’t fit the profile. And yet all six of the most recent terrorist attacks have been carried out by precisely those individuals.

Supposedly, the “typical” Palestinian Arab terrorist is a young Palestinian Arab man, single, uneducated, and unemployed, who turns to violence because of his difficult personal circumstances.

But the terrorist who was shot dead while throwing firebombs at Israelis near Ramallah on March 4, Mustafa Abu Shalbak, was just 16. 

The next day, a Palestinian Arab terrorist named Muhammad Shehadeh stabbed and seriously wounded an Israeli near Bethlehem. The would-be murderer was 17.

And the day after that, a Palestinian Arab stabbed and wounded an elderly Israeli man standing at a bus stop in Jerusalem’s Neve Yaakov neighborhood.

Not only was the attacker just 14 – presumably too young to fit the profile of the “typical” terrorist – but he was a resident of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem’s Arabs are supposedly more “moderate” than those who live in the Palestinian Authority territories. Well, not much moderation was on display in that attack.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany’s Murder of Europe by Drieu Godefridi

Posted By on March 21st, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20470/germany-murder-of-europe

Climate, of course, is a global issue: if Europe reduces its emissions to zero, while the rest of the world continues to increase them, the effect on the climate will be zero. As a result, the German plan will not save a single euro in terms of the damage caused by global warming and extreme events.

So, the investment needed each year would not be €1.5 trillion invested to save 0.03% of GDP per year. It would be €30 trillion — €1.5 trillion per year for 20 years — invested to change absolutely nothing in the climate of Europe.

There are no serious analysts left who still maintain that the objective of the Paris Agreement will be achieved; the Paris Agreement is obsolete and to pretend otherwise, as the European Commission is doing, is misleading, irresponsible, and not even scientific.

In practical terms, whole swathes of our populations have entered into a pattern that is the ultimate dream of environmentalists: degrowth. In other words, their impoverishment.

Ironically, if the IPCC’s projections are to be believed, global warming may occur, and we will adapt to it through innovation. All the resources that Europe is burning up in a phantasmatic “energy transition”, which has failed and will fail — will just burn through money that we will then not have for innovation. What will Europe do when these misguided ideologies have permanently broken the back of its economy?

In a preparatory impact report, a copy of which has been obtained by the Financial Times before official release, the European Commission estimates that to achieve the target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040 then 100% in 2050 — the main objective of the “European Green Deal” — Europe will need to invest €1.5 trillion a year from 2031 to 2050.

1.5 trillion euros a year. That is equivalent to 10% of the Europe Union’s entire GDP for 2022 — every year! Apart from a war effort, there is no objective of any kind that has ever required the diversion of 10% of a continent’s GDP by political decree.