MEDIA Comments turned off

Don Lemon gets away with a slap on the wrist CNN should have taken this golden opportunity to shed one of its most embarrassing acts Roger Kimball

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/don-lemon-gets-away-with-a-slap-on-the-wrist/?utm_source=

Have you noticed that bullies tend to grovel when threatened? They are cruel when they have the upper hand, but cringe, cower, and whimper whenever confronted with superior force.

A case in point is the smarmy CNN dittohead Don Lemón. Last week, while commenting about flash-in-the-pan presidential candidate Nikki Haley, he suggested that women over forty were no longer in their “prime.”

One might ask how Lemón, who takes every opportunity to advertise his homosexuality (also his race), would know.  But let’s leave that epistemic puzzle to one side. “Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry,” Lemón declared. “A woman is considered to be in their [er, that’s “her,” Don, “her”] prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s. If you Google ‘when is a woman in her prime,’ it’ll say 20s, 30s and 40s.”

Well, the world’s biggest surveillance network said it, so it must be true.

ANTI-SEMITISM, BOOKS Comments turned off

Why the whole world is indeed wrong about Israel The launch of a new book about how lethal lies came to drive a murderous narrative Melanie Phillips

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/why-the-whole-world-is-indeed-wrong?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I was delighted to take part this week in an event in Jerusalem to launch the devastating new book by Professor Richard Landes, Can the Whole World be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and the Global Jihad. I previously wrote about the book here.

Joining me on the panel, in addition to Richard Landes, were Brig.Gen. (Rtd.) Yossi Kuperwasser, senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs and head of the Intelligence Methodology Centre Research Institute at the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Centre; and Adam Levick, co-editor of CAMERA UK (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis).

You can watch the whole event below.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

You cannot run businesses, hospitals, and the military on occasional electricity! By Ronald Stein

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://www.cfact.org/2023/02/22/you-cannot-run-businesses-hospitals-and-the-military-on-occasional-electricity/

Regardless of the intermittency of the weather, the electrical grid is expected to deliver continuous and uninterrupted electricity no matter what the weather.

Power grid blackouts are driven by the rapid retirement of small acreage coal and natural gas power plants.

Wind and solar electricity generation requires vast amounts of pristine acreage, but due to the intermittency and variability of breezes and sunshine being a significant deficiency, wind turbines and solar panels do not work most of the time.

This is illustrative of why a myopic focus on renewables for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions through a deepening dependence on the intermittency of wind and solar electricity must ultimately come to terms with the laws of physics and the high financial and environmental cost of achieving a reliable electrical grid with these technologies.

Future carbon dioxide concentrations in the global atmosphere will be largely determined by developing nations who are digging themselves out of abject poverty through the development of coal and natural gas energy resources.

Politicians have backed utility engineers into a corner as politicians now designing the power grid to their liking. However, politicians are not cognizant enough to know that renewables only generate electricity, and thus have no plans for the replacement of what is now manufactured from fossil fuels, which are supporting the 8 billion on this planet!

Over the last 200 years when the world populated from 1 to 8 billion, we learned that crude oil is virtually useless, unless it’s manufactured (refineries) into oil derivatives that are the basis of more than 6,000 products in our daily lives that did not exist before the 1900’s, and the fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of more than 50,000 jets moving people and products, and more than 50,000 merchant ships for global trade flows, and the military and space program.

Chemical products, such as plastics, solvents, and fertilizers, are essential for supporting modern lifestyles.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Amtrak Joe Couldn’t Be Bothered To Visit A Train Wreck but when Donald Trump Went, the White House ……

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/24/amtrak-joe-couldnt-be-bothered-to-visit-a-train-wreck/

A freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, three weeks ago. Residents were ordered to evacuate and the cargo of toxic chemicals from five tanker cars was eventually released and set on fire. So far, Joe Biden hasn’t visited the scene, as is tradition for presidents when large-scale disasters strike. Instead, Biden officials have blamed Donald Trump, who hasn’t been president in more than two years, for the wreck. But even some media outlets are admitting it wasn’t his fault.

Official word from the White House accuses “congressional Republicans and former Trump administration officials” for selling out “to rail industry lobbyists when they dismantled the Obama-Biden rail safety protections as well as EPA powers to rapidly contain spills.” The administration believes Trump, who beat Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (who is utterly useless) to the site, and GOP lawmakers, owe “East Palestine an apology.” 

“Congressional Republicans laid the groundwork for the Trump administration to tear up requirements for more effective train brakes,” Andrew Bates, a deputy White House press secretary, ranted on Wednesday, “and last year most House Republicans wanted to defund our ability to protect drinking water.”

That last point must really eat at the White House. Bates issued the statement on the same day Trump showed up with 13 pallets of bottled water, nine of which he donated (and delivered by two moving companies based in Red States), for the East Palestine residents who are understandably fearful of their water supply. Seems the former president was doing the work of the federal agency that has “emergency management” in its name but had not arrived in the city until this past weekend.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Summer School Can Remedy Pandemic Learning Loss A philanthropist-funded program in New York showed that students got back on track quickly. By Michael R. Bloomberg

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/summer-school-can-remedy-pandemic-brain-drain-covid-closures-students-charter-public-philanthropy-bloomberg-af4b2278?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The crisis in American public education caused by the pandemic has settled into a dangerous new phase: resignation. The disastrous effects of remote instruction are still with us. Students continue to lag behind where they should be—sometimes by multiple grade levels—and little is being done to help them. The good news is that we know how to overcome learning loss.

Last year, when it became clear that a nationwide expansion of summer school would not be happening, I led a group of philanthropists in creating Summer Boost in New York City. The program focused on math and English and was open to struggling K-8 students in the city’s public charter schools, most of which did not have the resources to run robust summer school programs.

We didn’t know if the program would succeed. But letting struggling students languish was out of the question. The U.S. can’t move on from the pandemic until we address student learning loss.

The response from students and schools was resoundingly positive. More than 16,000 students from 224 schools participated. At the end of the summer, we tested students to assess their progress, and the results were encouraging.

The percentage of students who met grade-level standards in math nearly doubled—and in English, it more than doubled. The share of students scoring below the most basic levels of proficiency fell by nearly half. By the end of the summer session, many students had caught up and were back on track for success. But in much of the country, students didn’t spend any of their summer vacations in classrooms.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Transgender Hormones Increase Heart Attacks and Strokes, but the Left Still Pushes Them on Kids By Kevin Downey Jr.

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2023/02/23/trans-meds-increase-heart-attacks-and-strokes-sevenfold-but-the-left-still-pushes-them-on-kids-n1673171

What happens when men hoover up estrogen and women scarf testosterone? Aww, you know!

Specialists at Pennsylvania’s Mercy Catholic Medical Center are reporting that transgendered people taking hormones face serious risks of heart attack, stroke, and myocarditis.

The study compared transgender people who do and do not take hormones, hormone blockers, or any other medication associated with those looking to “change their gender.”

Those transgendered people — many of them teens — who take the drugs are facing a handful of bad news, including:

They are seven times more likely to have a stroke.
They are six times more likely to have a myocardial infarction.
They have a five-times higher risk of pulmonary embolism, which blocks the arteries in the lungs.

“It’s all about risks and benefits,” Dr. Ibrahim Ahmed, lead author of the study, reported. “Starting transitioning is a big part of a person’s life and helping them feel more themselves, but hormone replacement therapy also has a lot of side effects.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Earthquake Unveils Turkey’s Many Ugly Faces by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19406/turkey-earthquake-ugly-faces

The worst disaster in modern Turkey’s history, the earthquake killed, as of February 15, more than 35,000 people and injured 100,000. The death toll will likely reach 40,000 or more. According to one estimate, the quake will result in $84 billion in economic losses to Turkey, more than 10% of gross domestic product.

It was not the quake that killed tens of thousands, but politics and suicidal profit-maximization behavior on individual level.

[I]n the aftermath of the 1999 quake, Erdoğan said: “What broke here is not the fault line … It is [the state’s] sense of shame. This is [the result of] poor building planning and stealing from construction materials.” Now that he is in power, Erdoğan explains that the loss of life in this month’s earthquake was (God’s) fate.

As part of his election campaign in 2018, Erdoğan granted “amnesty” to 7.4 million applications for unregulated buildings in return for fees, of which his government collected more than $13 billion.

More than 10,000 buildings were destroyed in the latest earthquake.

With the amnesty, contractors were allowed to skip crucial safety regulations, increasing their profits but putting residents at risk. Few buyers and tenants could guess that those permits would be their death certificates.

One of the buildings that collapsed in Hatay, one of the worst-hit provinces, was a government hospital. In 2012, experts wrote a report that the building was not earthquake-resistant. The authorities did not mind. Ironically, a bridge in the same region, built 18 centuries ago during the Roman Empire, survived unscathed.

An Israeli relief team from United Hatzalah, after having rescued 19 people under the rubble, was forced to cut short their work in Turkey and leave the country “in the face of growing security threat to the team.” Yeni Akit claimed that “the Israeli team consisting of intelligence agents disguised as relief workers left Turkey in the face of threats and local people’s cries of ‘go home.'”

At 4:17 am on February 6, an earthquake of 7.8-magnitude hit 10 provinces in Turkey’s east, which account for a sixth of the country’s total population. The worst disaster in modern Turkey’s history, the earthquake killed, as of February 15, more than 35,000 people and injured 100,000. The death toll will likely reach 40,000 or more. According to one estimate, the quake will result in $84 billion in economic losses to Turkey, more than 10% of gross domestic product.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Rehabilitating a War Criminal like Assad is Not an Option by Con Coughlin

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19429/rehabilitating-war-criminal-assad

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s offer to ease border restrictions to allow aid agencies better access to areas of northern Syria that were devastated by the recent earthquake is nothing more than a calculated ploy to have the punitive sanctions regime against Damascus eased.

The same pattern of double-dealing is now evident with the Assad regime’s blatant attempt to exploit the humanitarian disaster caused by the earthquake on the Turkey-Syrian border for its own ends.

Instead of easing sanctions against Assad, the Biden administration should be supporting efforts to establish an international war crimes tribunal that will ensure Assad and his henchmen stand trial for their despicable crimes.

Nor is Syria the only rogue Middle Eastern state seeking to exploit the earthquake.

Reports have also emerged that Iran, Syria’s main regional ally, is similarly seeking to take advantage of the humanitarian disaster to expand its military presence in Syria, a policy that is designed to intensify its efforts to threaten neighbouring Israel.

It is reported that Iran is using the earthquake to smuggle convoys of weapons disguised as humanitarian aid for earthquake victims in Syria.

The Biden Administration should not be encouraging them in their duplicity.

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s offer to ease border restrictions to allow aid agencies better access to areas of northern Syria that were devastated by the recent earthquake is nothing more than a calculated ploy to have the punitive sanctions regime against Damascus eased.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Declaration of Independence is being used as a protest prop By RUTHIE BLUM

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-732582

Explaining his party’s decision to exit from the Knesset plenum on Monday and boycott the proceedings surrounding the first reading of two initial bills relating to judicial overhaul, Yisrael Beytenu chairman MK Avigdor Liberman tweeted: “The very vote, even a ‘nay’ vote, is legitimizing a series of laws that contradict the Declaration of Independence, and since [they do], I call on President [Isaac] Herzog not to sign them.”

Israel’s Declaration of Independence was also highlighted during anti-government rallies the preceding Saturday night. A huge replica of the document was spread out, like a massive carpet, on a street in Tel Aviv.

Elsewhere in the White City, protesters marched around holding a similarly massive one above ground. Others carried long banners with a quote from the Declaration, in Hebrew and English, reading, “The State of Israel will be founded on freedom, justice and peace.”

Two days earlier, Yom Kippur War veterans invoked the document, as well. The now-aging retired IDF soldiers placed a blown-up copy of it on the side of a tank that they stole from a memorial site in the Golan Heights to use as a prop in the protests and signed their names to it. Meanwhile, a separate armored vehicle from the existential 1973 battle was nicked from the area and bore the sign in block-capital English letters: “Defending Israel’s Declaration of Independence.”

It’s no accident that many of the streamers and posters waved in the ongoing demonstrations – held, ostensibly, to decry the ruling coalition’s judicial-reform moves, but actually staged in reaction to the rise of a “full, full, right-wing government” in Jerusalem – are in English. For one thing, foreign NGOs are paying for them, with help from the US State Department. For another, they’re much more photogenic when written in a language that CNN and the BBC can broadcast internationally without subtitles.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Biden needs to answer these 3 questions about Ukraine

Posted By on February 24th, 2023

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/3870017-biden-needs-to-answer-these-3-questions-about-ukraine/

In his recent surprise trip to Kyiv, President Biden took pains to note that assistance to Ukraine has been “bipartisan.” That is true, but it is also true that some Republicans are beginning to question what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called the “blank check” that Biden seems to be offering the war-torn nation.

Republicans and others debating the open spigot of U.S. aid are not pro-Russia or anti-Ukraine, they simply want some answers as the U.S. ships an unprecedented amount of money and arms to the beleaguered country. Last year Congress approved $113 billion in munitions and aid for Ukraine, an amount greater than budgeted for the U.S. Department of Education or the Department of Homeland Security. Imagine that.

Polls show U.S. enthusiasm for helping Ukraine is waning. In a recent survey, 48 percent of U.S. adults approved sending weapons to Ukraine; a year ago, 60 percent were in favor.  

Biden is to blame for this sliding support. On his trip the president spoke about the war to the people of Poland and to those in Kyiv. But when was the last time he spoke to Americans? When did he last hold a press conference about our strategy in Ukraine, perhaps joining with our military leaders? True, he touched on the war in his State of the Union speech but expended a mere 224 words on the conflict in a 9,000-word address. He spent more time denouncing baggage fees than explaining what U.S. ambitions were in Ukraine.