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The Real Insurrection, and the Dirty Politics of Jan. 6 By Frank Miele

Posted By on March 27th, 2023

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/03/27/the_real_insurrection_and_the_dirty_politics_of_jan_6_149032.html

The Democrats say that Jan. 6 was the worst attack on American democracy since the Civil War. They call it an insurrection, but if it was indeed the worst since 1865, no one but a fool would dare claim it even remotely approached the scale of the bloody war between the states.

And if you weren’t a fool, you might conclude that Jan. 6 was nothing like an insurrection. It wasn’t violent in the sense of an armed rebellion. It wasn’t organized. And it didn’t seek to overthrow the government, but to protect the Constitution. In more ways than not, it was a defense of American democracy, not an attack on it.

In every particular, Jan. 6 was a pale shadow compared to the Civil War. To start with, it lasted less than six hours, whereas the Civil War lasted four long years. The war between the North and South cost the lives of 620,000 soldiers and another 50,000 civilians. The Jan. 6 incursion at the U.S. Capitol, on the other hand, claimed the lives of just two women protesters, Ashli Babbitt and Roseanne Boyland. Among the defenders of the Capitol, police officer Brian Sicknick died after suffering two strokes the next day, but without a direct known connection to the riot. Two other protesters died of natural causes during the siege, and four law officers died by suicide in the months following the attack. If you count all of those as legitimate casualties of Jan. 6, then the total comes to nine compared to a minimum of 670,000 in the Civil War.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the stark differences between Jan. 6 and the Civil War.

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The Consequences of Talking About ‘Climate Doom’ for 30 Years By Rick Moran

Posted By on March 27th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/03/25/the-consequences-of-talking-about-climate-doom-for-30-years-n1681447

They’re called “climate doomers” and the Washington Post says that their belief in the unstoppable and inevitable end of human civilization is even more dangerous than climate “deniers.”

In essence, the doomers have given up on humanity’s ability to survive. Some have become preppers but most appear to be satisfied to feed their paranoia by immersing themselves in the end-of-the-world cult online.

“It’s fair to say that recently many of us climate scientists have spent more time arguing with the doomers than with the deniers,” said Zeke Hausfather, a contributing author to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

What else is to be expected after more than 30 years of pronouncements that climate change would destroy civilization unless we stop the engines of industry and outlaw automobiles? The fact that these hysterical predictions of doom haven’t come true doesn’t appear to matter. The doomers simply shrug off the errors and make new, even more hair-raising predictions.

One such “climate scientist” is the University of Arizona’s Guy McPherson who said in 2017, “I can’t imagine that there will be a human left on the Earth in 10 years.”  The video has 328,000 views and more than 2,500 comments. A sample:

“I generally feel very lonely as most people don’t understand the situation we are in, nor do they want to know the truth. I find great comfort in your video’s [sic] and I would like to thank you for your work.”

Finding “great comfort” in videos about the end of mankind is pathological. And that describes the climate doomers perfectly.

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AOC goes viral on TikTok with video against banning app Shawna Chen

Posted By on March 27th, 2023

https://www.axios.com/2023/03/25/aoc-tiktok-ban-viral-video

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) first and only TikTok video has gone viral — and in it, she outlines her case against banning the Chinese-owned social media app as its fate hangs in the balance.

Why it matters: With more than 150 million monthly active users in the U.S., TikTok is one of the most popular smartphone apps in the country. Lawmakers are pressing forward with bipartisan efforts to facilitate a ban in the U.S. amid scrutiny surrounding the firm’s relationship with the Chinese government.

State of play: Critics have highlighted the fact that Chinese law requires China’s companies to share information with the government.

TikTok has repeatedly said it operates independently and works with Oracle to ensure its algorithms and content moderation models aren’t manipulated by Chinese authorities.

What she’s saying: The video begins with Ocasio-Cortez listing concerns about Chinese surveillance. She then says that the discussion “doesn’t really address the core of the issue, which is the fact that major social media companies are allowed to collect troves of people’s personal data.”

Adding that the U.S. is one of the “only developed nations in the world” without data privacy protection laws, she argues that the solution is not to ban an individual company but to “actually protect Americans from this kind of egregious data harvesting that companies can do without your significant ability to say no.”
She also pointed out that the U.S. has never banned a social media company from operating within its borders, and that Congress hasn’t received a classified briefing on potential risks even though that’s protocol when it comes to national security issues.
“This case needs to be made to the public,” she says. “Our first priority should be in protecting your ability to exist without social media companies harvesting and commodifying every single piece of data about you without you and without your consent.”

The big picture: Ocasio-Cortez is one of several progressive members of Congress mounting a defense of the app. Her video garnered over 2.2 million views in 15 hours.

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The Woke Movement Is Assassinating MLK All Over Again

Posted By on March 27th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/03/27/the-woke-movement-is-assassinating-mlk-all-over-again/

A week from Tuesday we will mark the 55th anniversary of the day the murderous James Earl Ray took the life of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader should be allowed to rest in peace, but he is being slain yet again, this time by a mob of mediocre minds with rock-bottom character that seeks to overturn his life’s works.

In what is widely acknowledged as his greatest speech, King dreamed that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

King also damned the “dark and desolate valley” and “manacles” of segregation. He identified us all as “God’s children.”

He couldn’t have been clearer about his vision for a color-blind society. And in the 40 years that followed his death, our country moved in that direction, year by year, heart by heart.

But much has changed. The woke mob, critical race theory, and the DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) movement have reopened a once-gaping, raw wound that had almost closed. Consider just a few of the many instances in which our “leaders” and institutional luminaries not only reject King’s teaching but actively try to return this country to an era of segregation and ugly, unapologetic bigotry. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Can Israel Survive? By David Solway

Posted By on March 27th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/03/25/can-israel-survive-n1681574

It has never been easy for Israel — the understatement of the century — from the moment of its establishment in 1948, when it was invaded by five Arab armies, to the present day, when it is facing multiple threats to its very survival. It suffers a history like no other nation in the world, surrounded by enemies, fighting wars on every front, infiltrated by terrorists, confronting the wetware dreams of genocidal regimes, in particular the prospect of a nuclear Iran sworn to the country’s annihilation, and subject to an international delegitimation campaign carried out via the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, spurious NGOs and “peace” organizations, labor unions, university campuses, and a hostile European Union.

As if this were not enough, there is yet another menace it has to face, deriving from the Cain and Abel paradigm, which has inwardly corroded the Jewish community since the thunderous instant it purportedly received the tablets from Mount Sinai: betrayal from within. The rebellion of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram against Moses and his mission to create a unified and cohesive people set the tone for much of what followed in the history of the Jews. The record is inexhaustible: the backsliding tribes and their idolatrous rulers whom the Prophets railed against, the conflict between the brother states of Israel and Judah, the quarreling Jews Josephus tells us about who were in considerable measure responsible for the Roman victory and massacre in the first century A.D., the apostates, “wicked sons,” and Court Jews who have proliferated through the ages, and those who contracted the wasting disease that Ruth Wisse in Jews and Power called “the veneration of political weakness.”

True, the quietest Jews who took refuge in ritual and scripture instilled an attitude of helplessness and defeatism into the plasm of the Jewish sensibility — precisely what the vigorous and determined Palmach fighters and the Zionist kibbutzniks who settled and farmed the land of Israel intended to counteract. They put the debilitating syndrome to rest, struggled valiantly to survive, and built a strong and proud country. However, the renegades and turncoats did, and continue to do, immeasurable harm. The motive for treachery seems to be immemorial. As Wisse writes, “For every Mordecai and Esther who risked their lives to protect fellow Jews, there were schemers who turned betrayal or conversion to profit.” Indeed, “the ubiquitous informer, or moser” is always with us. In the modern age, they beget like rabbits on aphrodisiacs.

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The Israeli defense minister’s shameful retreat By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 27th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-israeli-defense-ministers-shameful-retreat/

To borrow the favorite epithet of the demonstrators in the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities, “shame” on Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. In an announcement on Saturday night, the Cabinet member charged with the country’s most crucial portfolio called on the government to halt its judicial reform legislation and heal the rifts that have gone so far as to reach the military.
“I hear the voices from the field and I’m worried,” he said, while also urging the opposition to stop the protests to give negotiations a chance. Oh, and to “enable the nation to celebrate Passover and Independence Day together, and to mourn together on Memorial Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day.”

Prominently on display in this speech—which he had planned to deliver on Thursday evening, but refrained from doing so at the request of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—were two traits that make him unfit for his job: cowardice and betrayal.

Let’s begin with the former. Faced with the phenomenon of mainly Air Force and Cyber Division reservists threatening and refusing to turn up for military exercises, on the grounds that they wouldn’t serve in a “dictatorship,” Gallant got frightened.

Rather than nipping the subordination in the bud, he met with the men and women in uniform to let them vent their concerns. The cream of the crop of the Israel Defense Forces said that without an end to the “coup d’état” (the protest movement’s misnomer for judicial reforms), the powers that be in Jerusalem can forget about confronting Iran. You know, since there won’t be any pilots or computer geniuses to carry out the operations.

Instead of demanding that the IDF chief of staff warn them that such blackmail will result in their ouster from the IDF, or at least in a stripping of their ranks, Gallant not only conveyed their complaints to Netanyahu; he began, apparently, to see the merits of their point of view.

In other words, he didn’t make it crystal clear that political positions have no place in the army. Nor did he hit home the very points about judicial reform on which he based his campaign in the Likud Party primary—the very ones that earned him a top spot on the Knesset candidates list and subsequently the ministry he coveted.

He was simply too intimidated by the unprecedented situation to know how to handle it. Such gutlessness hardly inspires confidence about his ability to deal with Tehran and its tentacles in Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian Authority.

Now for the latter attribute Gallant exhibited that makes him unsuitable: extreme disloyalty. Indeed, he took the opportunity of Netanyahu’s trip to London to undermine the arduous efforts of his party and coalition partners in one fell swoop.

That he pulled the stunt a mere 48 hours after the prime minister’s carefully crafted address aimed at calming tensions was particularly egregious. Netanyahu took pains to articulate the purpose of the reforms—to enhance, not harm, Israeli democracy—and assure that all civil and minority rights would be guaranteed in the law.

What the prime minister didn’t do was capitulate. When the opposition responded by stepping up its war, Gallant opted for retreat.

His move was not only dismissive of Netanyahu. It dealt a blow to all the soldiers who shun the mere suggestion of laying down their weapons in protest over policy.

Worse, it sent a disheartening message to the sector of the public that’s been under political, cultural and social assault for electing and continuing to support the Netanyahu-led government. “Shame” doesn’t begin to describe what Gallant should be feeling at the moment.

Ruthie Blum is a Tel Aviv-based columnist and commentator. She writes and lectures on Israeli politics and culture, as well as on U.S.-Israel relations. The winner of the Louis Rappaport award for excellence in commentary, she is the author of the book “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.’ ”

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When Big Business Married Big Government From banking and chips to broadband and pharma, Biden has ushered in a new era of corporate dependency on D.C. By Allysia Finley

Posted By on March 27th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-big-business-married-big-government-biden-handouts-subsidies-chips-banking-svb-bailout-social-policy-59096477?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

When liberals look back on the Biden presidency, they may hail its greatest accomplishment as ushering in a new era of corporate government dependency. Without fail, and no matter the industry, the administration has hooked businesses on Washington handouts while attaching conditions that put taxpayers and consumers on the hook for leftist policy preferences.

The latest example is the banking panic. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act provided an implicit taxpayer guarantee for the country’s largest banks. With Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, midsize banks are now arguing they’re also too big to fail and lobbying the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to guarantee all uninsured deposits for two years to prevent more bank failures. In other words, they want the government to backstop poorly managed banks.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has lent support to the idea but demands that a government guarantee be tied to increased regulation. And don’t think she has only stronger capital and liquidity standards in mind. Like-minded officials will surely demand a ban on stock buybacks and dividends, executive compensation caps and perhaps even growth restrictions.

Government help is never free, as semiconductor companies are learning. Chip makers lobbied Congress for enormous subsidies to build plants in the U.S., which they claimed would shore up supply chains and protect national security. Republicans joined Democrats last year in approving some $39 billion in direct financial aid, plus a 25% investment tax credit.

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INTERMISSION – NO POSTINGS UNTIL SUNDAY MARCH 26

Posted By on March 24th, 2023

NO POSTING UNTIL MONDAY MARCH 26

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Stanford Law Disruptions Were Orchestrated by the National Lawyers Guild by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on March 23rd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19511/national-lawyers-guild-stanford-law

Let us understand what the National Lawyers Guild is.

The Guild, in addition, refused to support Soviet or Cuban dissidents.

The Guild has never abandoned its Marxist-Leninist provenance. It supports Antifa, which also employs violence to disrupt speakers.

The National Lawyers Guild is not a liberal organization. It does not support civil liberties, due process or freedom of speech. It is the epitome of “free speech for me but not for thee.”

Many decent people question whether hateful, offensive and even speech deemed “dangerous” by some, should be protected. The answer resides in history. Whenever governments are empowered to ban such expression, they use that power expansively, to censor speech critical of their leaders or partisans. The appetite of the censor is voracious. What are seen as legitimate opinions by dissenters are deemed by others — especially those in power — as hateful, offensive or dangerous. Freedom of speech for all is anything but free. It can be hurtful and risky. But in the end, it is worth the costs.

It deplores capitalism and the free market: “don’t fund capitalism, fund the groups working to dismantle it.” And it opposes due process for those with whom it disagrees, for instance, declaring of a “Mass Defense Program” that sends out “legal workers, law students, and lawyers providing legal support for protests”: “We will only show up to actions and in support of movements that directly align with our values.”

Since its inception, the National Lawyers Guild has relied on “useful idiots” – well-meaning left-wingers and liberals who have no idea what the Guild really represents. It disguises its most extreme positions when presenting itself to the public, but advertises them to its members. It also hides from the public the fact that despite its name, the membership Guild consists primarily of non-lawyers. When it was truly a lawyers’ organization, it was slightly more centrist. And then in the 1970s, the Guild opened its membership to “jailhouse lawyers” (who are not lawyers), legal workers (who are not lawyers), law students (who are not yet lawyers) and anyone else who works with or for lawyers or law firms.

The Guild has more than 100 chapters in American law schools. Its membership includes many law professors. It apparently plans to organize nationwide disruptions of the kind we have seen at Stanford. The Guild creates the illusion that these disruptions are spontaneous reactions to conservative provocations. They are anything but.

As the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall observed: “The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin.” These disrupters violated both rights.

Thus far disruptions have occurred at Yale, Stanford and Georgetown law schools. But you can be sure that they are coming to a law school near you. The NLG will not be satisfied until no conservative speaker is allowed to speak at any law school. That is its objective, and it may well succeed, because cowardly administrators — especially deans of diversity, in order to avoid the embarrassment of what happened at Stanford, Yale and Georgetown — will try to make sure that conservative speakers are not invited. They understand that it is much harder to object to the less visible non-invitation of conservative speakers than to publicly disrupting them.

We who support freedom of speech for all sides must organize as well. We cannot count on the American Civil Liberties Union anymore: its silence supports the censorship of the National Lawyers Guild. Our voices must be heard against censorship-by-disruption, by non-invitation or by any other improper means.

It turns out that the disruption by several dozen Stanford University law school students of a speech to be given by federal judge Kyle Duncan was not a spontaneous exercise of freedom to protest.

BOOKS Comments turned off

From Slavery in North Korea to Jeff Bezos’s Gulfstream I came to the U.S. prizing its freedoms. But I found that this nation’s most powerful people value something else entirely. By Yeonmi Park

Posted By on March 23rd, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/from-slavery-in-north-korea-to-jeff

Nothing I have ever read about the slave state of North Korea has affected me more than Yeonmi Park’s bestselling book, “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom.” Her account makes it clear that that phrase—slave state—is not hyperbole.

Park grew up believing that Kim Jong-il was so powerful that he could read her mind. (“Even when you think you’re alone,” her mother warned her, “the birds and mice can hear you whisper.”) She survived a famine that killed nearly three million people. (She ate dragonflies to survive). At nine years old, Park witnessed the public execution of her friend’s mother. (The woman was put to death for the crime of watching a Hollywood movie.)

Almost no one escapes the Hermit Kingdom. Yeonmi Park did.

At 13, she fled to China with her mother. The two endured unspeakable things—rape by human traffickers; sexual servitude. Ultimately, they broke free again, crossing the freezing Gobi Desert at night to Mongolia, then onto South Korea and, finally, to America.

Last year, as she wrote in The Free Press, Park became a U.S. citizen.

Now, she has published a new book, “While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America.” In the excerpt we are publishing below Park writes about her experience among America’s most celebrated, wealthy elites—and the moral corruption she found at their conferences and on their Gulfstreams.