A Fine and Dangerous Madness By Michael Walsh

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/20/a-fine-and

To make sense of the recent spate of hysteria on the Left, it helps to understand how their minds work—or, as they like say, connect the dots. The shortest route between an isolated instance (Jussie Smollett, John Wayne) and a knee-jerk cry of racism, sexism or some other pet -ism is from one neuron to the one directly adjacent to it in a progressive’s brain. Every event, even ones faked or misleadingly reported, must have both a political cause and a coercive resolution: the Narrative demands it. Amplified by social media, it’s driving us all mad.

Any random weather event can trigger cries of the apocalypse from the likes of Al Gore or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A putative but wholly implausible attack during the sub-zero arctic chill of a Chicago late night instantly is seized upon as proof of America’s incorrigible (and thus de-legitimizing) racial prejudice. A wrongly interpreted word, or gesture, or smile, even the use of a personal pronoun, is cause for alarm, insults, or legal action. J’accuse! has become the national motto as the Twitter tumbrels roll. Heads dutifully roll into the baskets as the Madame Defarges of the media click their knitting needles and fashion the next installment of the Narrative tapestry.

A Citizen Suing the Department of Justice Needs More than Just a Winning Legal Argument By Sharyl Attkisson

How the deck is stacked against citizens who think the government derives its power from us.

As I fight on with my computer intrusion lawsuit against the U.S. government, it seems to intersect more clearly with current events every day. And it points to an even larger story.

How widespread is improper government surveillance of journalists, politicians and other U.S. citizens in the name of the fight against terrorism? A few of us found out we were targeted only because we were lucky enough to be alerted by inside sources or other unique ways. How many others were targeted, monitored and watched by government officials but still have no idea it happened?

Who is behind the move to use government surveillance tools against innocent Americans? Do some of these officials still work inside the government? Were some of them the very same officials now implicated in alleged surveillance abuses during Campaign 2016?

The Case

In late January, an appeals court heard oral arguments in my federal lawsuit, now entering its fourth year. A panel of three judges will determine what happens next. Here are several possible outcomes:

Fighting in the Trenches of This Culture War For a Canadian “Festival of Literary Diversity,” some cultures are more equal than others. Howard Rotberg

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272914/fighting-trenches-culture-war-howard-rotberg

For over 15 years, I have been operating a small publishing house, which is Canada’s sole conservative and pro-Israel publishing house. We publish some of the greatest Canadian, American and international authors who support fundamental freedoms, liberty, justice and individual rights as opposed to group rights. Our authors generally oppose cultural and moral relativism, and for that reason they are generally shunned by leftist publishing houses who naively believe that all cultures are equal.

I am the son of a Holocaust survivor who lost his parents and then eight-year-old sister in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. When someone tells me that all cultures are equal, I ask if the person believes that the culture of Nazi Germany or of ISIS is equal to the culture of Canada or the United States. The person usually walks away at that point.

Recently, as part of my publishing duties and the need to see if there are any upcoming opportunities for our authors to speak, I came across an event near Toronto called the Festival of Literary Diversity. Looking at the photographs of the 20 or so authors speaking or appearing, I could see that almost all were brown or black and they were mostly women.

Mantua Books also publishes brown women (Farzana Hassan, The Case Against Jihad), brown men (Professor Salim Mansur, Delectable Lie: a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism and Islamism and the Qur’an Problem), as well as white Jewish women, aged Christian men, gay Jewish men, all what we might term “conservative” thinkers, but who are actually “classically liberal” as much as conservative.

What Taxing the Rich Did to Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s States They wrecked Massachusetts and New York, now they want to wreck America. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272867/what-taxing-rich-did-elizabeth-warren-and-daniel-greenfield

Tax time is usually an unhappy time for taxpayers, but a joyous time for government employees and the welfare class that gets more in “refunds” than it ever pays in taxes.

But this year, tax time is a depressing time for the taxmasters in the big blue states.

Blue states use high taxes to finance their frivolous spending. But this year, the money just isn’t there even as House and Senate lefties from big blue states tout new plans to soak the rich.

Senator Elizabeth Warren made headlines by building her 2020 campaign around a “wealth tax”.

Warren called it, “the ‘Ultra-Millionaire Tax” and claimed that it only “applies to that tippy top 0.1% – those with a net worth of over $50 million”. That’s convenient because the millionaire class warrior’s own estimated net worth tops out at around $10 million. When millionaires like Elizabeth Warren talk about taxing wealth, they mean the wealth of the millionaires who are wealthier than they are.

But over in Warren’s Taxachusetts, soaking the rich isn’t keeping the blue state model afloat.

Massachusetts experienced a January tax revenue shortfall of $195 million. That’s down 6% from 2018. And January is the cold, snowy month that is meant to account for 10% of the revenues for the year.

December was none too cheerful either.

To the Moon! SpaceX to Launch Israeli Lunar Lander (and More) on Thursday By Elizabeth Howell

https://www.space.com/spacex-to-launch-israeli-moon-lander.html?utm_source=notification

SpaceX will launch an Israeli robotic lunar lander during the company’s Falcon 9 rocket launch tomorrow (Feb. 21). If the lander succeeds, this will be the first privately funded moonshot to reach the lunar surface.

The lander, called “Beresheet” (in the beginning), will launch at 8:45 p.m. EST (0145 GMT, Feb. 22) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. You can watch the launch live on Space.com courtesy of SpaceX or directly through SpaceX’s webcast page or on Facebook via the lander’s creators.

The Beresheet lander is a joint venture between Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL — one of the participants in the Google Lunar X Prize, which challenged companies to land spacecraft on the moon — and Israel Aerospace Industries, the country’s largest aerospace and defense company. [Israel’s 1st Moon Lander: SpaceIL’s Beresheet Lunar Mission in Pictures]

While the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize challenge ended with no winner in 2018, several participating companies said they are continuing work on their concepts. The SpaceIL project will be the first of those designs to launch, and Israel now has a shot at becoming the fourth country to land a robotic probe on the moon — after the former Soviet Union, the United States and China.

Taiwan’s president says military threat from China is growing ‘every day’ By Chris Mills Rodrigo

https://thehill.com/policy/international/china/430732-taiwans-president-says-military-threat-from-china-is-growing-every

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen says in a new interview that the threat of military intervention from China is growing “every day.”

Tsai warned in an interview with CNN released Wednesday that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s increasingly assertive foreign policy is a risk for all Asian nations.

“If it’s Taiwan today, people should ask who’s next?” she said. “Any country in the region, if it no longer wants to submit to the will of China, they would face similar military threats.”

Taiwan, which sees itself as a sovereign state with its own democratic government, is considered by China to be a breakaway province.

The Chinese Communist Party has long pushed for reunification, but Tsai and her pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party continue to push back on reunification under Beijing’s terms.

Tsai said earlier this year that Taiwan would not accept a “one country, two systems” solution to the dispute.

“I want to reiterate that Taiwan will never accept ‘one country, two systems.’ The vast majority of Taiwanese public opinion also resolutely opposes ‘one country, two systems,’ and this is also the ‘Taiwan consensus,’ ” she said in a New Year’s address.

Life-saving gene therapies are here — we need to get them to patients By Liam Sigaud

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/430737-life-saving-gene-therapies-are-here-we-need-to-get-them-to-patients

For decades, scientists around the world have dreamed of medical interventions to repair or replace defective genes in a targeted way. Today, that vision is becoming reality for an ever-growing number of debilitating and deadly diseases thanks to breakthroughs in gene therapy technology. But if millions of Americans are to benefit from these advances, our health care system needs to adapt.

Up to 4,000 diseases (including certain types of cancer, cystic fibrosis, and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s) are rooted in genetic mutations that prevent cells from working properly. About 25-30 million Americans live with a rare medical condition, the majority of which are thought to be related to a genetic defect. By fixing the underlying causes of genetic disorders, gene therapies have the potential to deliver cures for these patients.

Progress has been swift. In 2017, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first three gene therapies for use in the U.S., and dozens more are completing the review process. Last month, FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb predicted that by 2025, “the FDA will be approving 10 to 20 cell and gene therapy products a year based on an assessment of the current pipeline and the clinical success rates of these products.”

Radically Transforming the Nation: Our Politicized Schools of Education by Jay Schalin

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/02/radically

If somebody wanted to fundamentally transform a society to its roots, where would he or she start?

The most logical starting point would be education. And if there were one part of the educational system that would produce this transformation most broadly, effectively, and efficiently, it would most likely be at our schools of education that train teachers for the K-12 classroom. That’s where ideas from the rest of academia are inserted into the curriculum for elementary and high school students, and where politically unsophisticated young people are turned into classroom teachers. Control the schools of education, and the education system will eventually be yours to forward your political agenda.

Remarkably, that is just what has happened in this country. Over 100 years ago, when our education schools were just starting up or growing from two-year normal schools to university status, Progressive educators set out to transform the nation into one that was based on social science theories, collectivism, and central planning.

How successful were they? Several years ago, I started an investigation into how politicized education schools have become. Today, the Martin Center is releasing the results of that investigation in a new report, titled “The Politicization of University Schools of Education.”

The report’s main conclusion? That schools of education may very well be radicalized beyond anything imagined by the early Progressives.

Our Woefully Politicized Education Schools By George Leef

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/our-woefully-politicized-education-schools/

A book that happened to catch my attention long before I was working in the field of higher-ed policy was Rita Kramer’s 1991 Ed School Follies. In it, she showed how many of America’s schools of education — the training grounds for future teachers — had been overrun with leftist ideology. And how do things stand 28 years later?

No better and probably worse is the answer.

The Martin Center’s Jay Schalin has just written a study on the politicization of ed schools and he discusses it in today’s article.

Pompeo Denies ‘ISIS Bride’ Request to Return to U.S. By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pompeo-denies-isis-bride-request-to-return-to-u-s/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that an Alabama woman who fled to Syria to join ISIS in 2014 is not a U.S. citizen and, as a result, is not entitled to return to the U.S. with her 18-month-old son, as she had hoped to do.

“Ms. Hoda Muthana is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States,” Pompeo said in a statement. “She does not have any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States. We continue to strongly advise all U.S. citizens not to travel to Syria.”

Muthana, 24, was taken to a refugee camp in northeast Syria by Kurdish forces after escaping ISIS territory.

An attorney representing Muthana’s parents claims she is a U.S. citizen despite the fact that her father was serving as a Yemeni diplomat when she was born in New Jersey, which, according to the State Department, means she is not entitled to birthright citizenship.

Muthana’s son was fathered by one of the three ISIS fighters she was married to during her time in the caliphate. In a 2015 tweet, she urged Americans to carry out domestic terror attacks.