FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sleepwalking into War Rebecca Weisser

Posted By on August 30th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/09/sleepwalking-into-war-rebecca-weisser/

Our international editor, John O’Sullivan, has compiled an excellent collection of essays called Sleepwalking into Wokeness, which I heartily recommend to readers. It prompts me to wonder whether the West is now sleepwalking its way into a Third World War, or at least a war engaging great powers on three continents: North America, Europe, the Middle East and the Far East.

After my three-month fellowship at the Danube Institute in Budapest, of which O’Sullivan is the founder and president, the Russian invasion of Ukraine feels far too close for comfort. It’s not just that Hungary shares a land border with Ukraine, and Budapest is located less than 1000 kilometres from the front line. Up to 75,000 ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine, many of whom are fighting the Russian invasion, and more than 60,000 refugees from Ukraine have arrived in Hungary, of whom more than 44,000 have registered for temporary protection.

Meanwhile, Russia and Belarus have weaponised the entry of up to 400 illegal migrants a day into Poland, some of them violent and armed with homemade spears and broken bottles, one, on June 6, stabbing a Polish border guard to death. Finland has closed its border with Russia entirely after it experienced a sharp increase in migrants from Somalia and Iraq who had been aided by Russian security agencies.

The European Union was outraged at Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s audacity in independently promoting peace negotiations by calling on all the key protagonists while Hungary is President of the EU, but he may have helped focus minds on the end game.

One prospect of a speedy end to the conflict rests on the second coming of Donald Trump. Perhaps Orban’s visit to Mar-a-Lago reminded the warring parties of Trump’s bold promise that if he is re-elected he will end the war before he reaches the White House.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The CNN Interview Revealed Only That Kamala Harris Is as Vacuous as Her Campaign By Jeffrey Blehar

Posted By on August 30th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-cnn-interview-revealed-only-that-kamala-harris-is-as-vacuous-as-her-campaign/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

We have been waiting ever since the day Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race for Kamala Harris to sit down in front of a camera and take questions from an interviewer. And if nothing else, we have learned why: In the friendliest possible format — a joint interview with VP nominee and emotional-support midwesterner Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash with the delicacy of an ornithologist gently hand-feeding hatchling chicks — Harris has revealed that her gaseously mindless word-cloud of a campaign is in fact an accurate reflection of her own personal vacuousness.

To be sure, Harris did not memorably self-destruct tonight. Whatever her failings, they are not those of Joe Biden, who couldn’t even articulate his words without slurring by the end. Her inarticulateness tonight was of the sort already known to be a Harris trademark, the endless jumble of nonsensical, comically vapid stock language. When she could fall back on a memorized list of talking points, she presented somewhat normally; the second she was required to respond directly to a question, then she began to spin out otiose nonsense like a pasta chef catering a Sicilian banquet. You could practically see the gears turning inside her head as she cast her eyes downward, stared laser-beams into the floor, and groped for cliches. She was more muted tonight than usual — her aides clearly ordered her never to display mirth under any circumstances, for fear the Kamala Kackle might emerge — and as a result, while she simulated sobriety for the most part, her body language was pronouncedly downbeat.

And all throughout she offered no answers to any policy questions whatsoever, nor any explanation for her various changes of position between 2020 and now. In theory, Bash asked most of the “right questions”; in practice, the way she solicitously asked them — sometimes even helpfully offering in advance a multiple-choice list of acceptable answers for Harris to choose from — turned them into cream puffs that Harris immediately used to serve up word salad.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

How the Department of Defense Went Woke By Will Thibeau

Posted By on August 30th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/how-the-department-of-defense-went-woke/

The transformation of the United States Armed Forces over the last century has been as radical, as sudden, and as thoroughgoing as virtually any experienced by a military body in all of recorded history. Over the course of two world wars, the demands of combat at unprecedented scale sped along the integration of both racial minorities — especially black Americans — and women across every branch of the Armed Forces. 

It took less than a generation, however, for this integration (and the principles of color-blindness that emerged from it) to be overtaken by a new social imperative: proportional representation, enforced by group quotas and later the widespread framework of “DEI.” No longer would it be enough for the military to select the best of the best, regardless of race or other innate factors. Under the new regime, the Armed Forces became a representative institution, one whose political/racial composition — modeled on that of the nation at large — took priority over its warfighting capabilities.

This pivot was accomplished largely by successive commanders-in-chief, starting with Harry Truman and carrying on through the Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. The transformation, however, cannot be blamed entirely on progressive presidents. Civil Rights-era Supreme Court decisions, racial conditions on funding imposed by Congress, initiative by the military bureaucracy, interference by outside activist groups — all these and more were essential to turning the merit-based force that won two world wars into an identity-centric institution that has not seen a major victory since 1991.

Today, the drive for proportional representation colors every action of the military establishment. Recruiting strategies are crafted with racial targets front of mind, and the entire DoD approach to personnel now revolves around identity groups. Each branch now works actively to increase the representation of women and minorities in the most critical roles, including aviation, combat operations, and the highest echelons of command. This identity-based decision-making is mutually exclusive with the singular insistence on merit that undergirds any strong military force.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel is Demonstrating How Deterrence Works in the Middle East Fred Fleitz

Posted By on August 30th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/30/israel-is-demonstrating-how-deterrence-works-in-the-middle-east/

Israel has taken these extreme measures to defend its nation and people against existential threats to its security since last October. It has often acted alone and over the objections of its allies.

As threats to Israel have increased from all sides since the horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack and the United States, under the weak leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris, has become a problematic ally, the Israeli government has done what it had to do to protect its nation—establish Israeli deterrence.

This was dramatically demonstrated in the early morning hours of August 25, when about 100 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fighter jets conducted a preemptive strike in Lebanon to destroy thousands of rocket launchers and a large number of drones that the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah planned to fire a few hours later against Israel.

Hezbollah scaled back its planned attack after the Israeli strike and reportedly did not fire dozens of high-precision missiles because it feared “the Israeli retaliation would be so forceful as to start a far longer and more devastating conflict than the past 10 months have seen,” according to the Times of Israel.

Just as dramatic was an Israeli missile attack on April 19, 2024, that destroyed missile radars deep inside Iranian territory and near a critical facility believed to be engaged in nuclear weapons research. The attack was in retaliation for an April 13 attack on Israel by Iran with a salvo of about 150 missiles and 30 drones. The U.S., U.K., and Jordan assisted Israel in shooting down almost all of these projectiles.  The handful of missiles and drones not shot down did no serious damage.

Although the Israeli attack against Iran did minor damage, it humiliated the Iranian regime because its military forces were unable to detect or intercept the Israeli missiles and drones. The Israeli attack also demonstrated the vulnerability of Iranian military, government, and nuclear sites to Israeli attacks and Iran’s inability to protect them.

BOOKS Comments turned off

How the Anglosphere Eradicated Racism In a definitive book, a distinguished historian demolishes the academic consensus. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on August 30th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-anglosphere-eradicated-racism/

Now 88 years old, John M. Ellis studied German at London University, has taught at a series of universities in Britain, Canada, and the United States, and has written several books that are critical of the corruption of the humanities by ideology. His newest book, A Short History of Relations between Peoples: How the World Began to Move beyond Tribalism, is a fascinating and utterly timely piece of work. Why timely? Because we are living in an era when millions of people in the Anglosphere have been taught that the history of their countries is something to be ashamed of, marred by centuries of racism and white supremacy, and that we therefore should not only look with disdain upon our forebears but should applaud when statues of men and women once considered to be heroes of our civilization are torn down.

It’s all a lie, and Ellis challenges it brilliantly. Rather than judge our most prominent and accomplished ancestors by the moral standards of our own day, he argues, we should recognize that they themselves contributed, generation by generation, to the development of those very standards. Ellis sums up those standards with the Latin term gens una sumus, meaning, as he puts it, “that we human beings are all of one family.” Today this assertion is considered self-evident. But five centuries ago it wasn’t. On the contrary, up until around the year 1500, people living in different parts of the world did not look upon foreigners with a sense of common humanity. Instead, they were possessed – every last one of them – of a strong sense of tribalism.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Kamala’s Stolen Working-Class Valor

Posted By on August 30th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/30/kamalas-stolen-working-class-valor/

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has been found guilty of puffing up his military record to look more manly – also known as stolen valor. Now it looks as though Kamala Harris has committed her own version of stolen valor by claiming a working-class medal that she may never have earned.

Harris and her campaign have been bragging about her modest roots and her supposed connection to working-class folks, exemplified by her having toiled at McDonald’s while in college, a claim she repeatedly makes in her speeches and that came up countless times at the Democratic National Convention.

But, like so many things about Harris and Walz, this story started to fall apart on closer inspection.

Earlier in the month, Harris’ campaign said that “Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college.” An ad produced by a pro-Harris PAC said she’d “worked her way through school at McDonald’s.”  

That’s fishy enough. Even if Harris worked full-time all summer every summer at McDonald’s, she’d have earned only a fraction of Howard University’s tuition and fees. (The line about Harris’ “working mother” is also a stretch. Her mom was an eminent cancer researcher, and her dad was a tenured Stanford economist.)

In any event, Harris couldn’t keep up this particular fabrication, and later in August at a campaign event said only that she’d “worked at McDonald’s to earn spending money.” Still later in the month, the New York Times said she’d worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, California, “for a summer” while going to college in Washington, D.C.

Suddenly, Kamala’s working-class roots don’t look so working-class anymore.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump’s Endorsement by Kennedy and Gabbard Signals a Reform Revolution That Upends the Old Conservative-Liberal Divide We haven’t seen anything like it since President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932. Newt Gingrich

Posted By on August 30th, 2024

https://www.nysun.com/article/trumps-endorsement-by-kennedy-and-gabbard-signals-a-reform-revolution-that-upends-the-old-conservative-liberal-

American politics is undergoing a profound change in its core pattern. We haven’t seen anything like it since President Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932.

For nearly a century, politics has been defined as a choice between liberals, usually Democrats, and conservatives, usually Republicans.

Now, the key dividing line is changing dramatically in politics and government. An increasingly corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest government system is failing to deliver on its promised achievements — and then lying about its failure. The American people are increasingly alienated from their government.

At America’s New Majority Project, our polling shows roughly 70 percent of Americans believe our country is on the wrong track. We are also learning that Americans want real changes that don’t fit the traditional liberal-conservative dialogue.

Given the opportunity to pick the top three changes for our government that are most important for getting America back on track, Americans chose less corruption (45 percent), more accountability (38 percent), and less dishonesty (29 percent).

These are not left-right issues. These are questions of fundamental dysfunction and reform which cut across normal politics. These ideas also profoundly threaten lobbyists, government contractors, entrenched bureaucrats, and the Congress.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The high cost to the hostages of ‘enlightened’ hypocrisy Ruthie Blum

Posted By on August 30th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/the-high-cost-to-the-hostages-of-enlightened-hypocrisy/

The argument over whether there’s such a thing as too high a price to pay for the release of the remaining hostages in Gaza continues to rage in Israel unabated. And “rage” is the right word to describe what is rarely a serious discussion on the part of the “Bring Them All Home Now” advocates.

Those whose family members are still languishing in the Strip can be forgiven for seeing the issue from a prism of personal pain. Still, not all the captives’ loved ones agree with their more vociferous counterparts that the government should cave in to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s demands in order to seal a deal that would put an end to the 11-month nightmare.
The latter group grasps that it’s not so simple. In the first place, Sinwar hasn’t consented to free all the hostages, including if Israel withdraws all troops from Gaza and leaves him in power to repeat the atrocities of Oct. 7 “again and again and again,” as his henchmen have vowed to do.
Second, the hundreds of bereaved families of soldiers who fell in this war to defeat Hamas and rescue the hostages are desperate not to have all that loss be in vain. Ditto for the men and women in uniform risking their lives every day in the same pursuit.
The people who deserve no sympathy are the ones who’ve been exploiting everyone’s devastation to fan the flames of the pre-Oct. 7 protests aimed at ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition. Indeed, their cynical abuse of the hostage crisis to further a political agenda that got upstaged by the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is nothing short of despicable.
Since the bulk of the Hebrew media has been complicit in this effort, it’s often difficult for members of the public to make a distinction between rational debate and “anybody but Bibi” hysteria. Occasionally, though, the disingenuousness gets exposed—and it’s a doozy.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Peter Arcidiacono, Tyler Ransom Elite Universities and the Diversity Game MIT and the media are blaming a 2023 Supreme Court ruling for “reducing diversity,” but the true picture is more complicated.

Posted By on August 29th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elite-universities-and-the-diversity-game

Since the Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Carolina in June 2023 that repealed race-conscious admissions policies, many observers have wondered what would happen to the racial makeup of elite universities. In the past, such schools have proudly advertised the data on the racial makeup of incoming freshmen. So far this year, most have remained strangely silent.

Last week, however, MIT broke the silence by reporting that the percentage of underrepresented minorities enrolling had precipitously dropped. Whereas black and Hispanic students, respectively, made up 15 percent and 16 percent of MIT’s Class of 2027, the Class of 2028 is just 5 percent black and 11 percent Hispanic. Meanwhile, Asian Americans have increased their enrollment from 40 percent to 47 percent, while the white share stayed essentially unchanged at 37 percent. That Asian Americans were the primary beneficiaries of the removal of racial preferences is consistent with the work we have published on the SFFA cases.

Both MIT and the media advertised the changes in the racial makeup of incoming freshmen as reducing diversity. The Chronicle of Higher Education described it as a 36 percent drop in racial diversity. Despite no change in the share of white enrollment, NBC News claimed that “The university’s white and Asian American student populations have increased, while all others have declined—some even down to zero, according to MIT.”

While MIT is to be lauded for actually releasing its numbers, the picture is more complicated than MIT and the media let on: it depends heavily on how one defines “diversity.” As MIT and the media are using it, the term seems to mean “representative of the national population.” Asian Americans are a diverse group, representing many different cultures and ethnicities. But MIT and the media treat them as a monolith. To them, the diversity they bring as individuals of particular cultures and ethnicities is less important than their representativeness of the U.S. Asian-American population as a whole.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Ridiculers Haven’t Learned Their Lesson Noah Rothman

Posted By on August 29th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trumps-ridiculers-havent-learned-their-lesson/

The impulse to mock every word out of Trump’s mouth sometimes exposes his critics as the ignorant ones, as with recent reactions to his space-defense proposal.

Donald Trump has once again said something about space. And according to the former president’s reflexive critics, it is positively hilarious.

“One of my proudest achievements in my first term was to create Space Force, the first new branch of the armed forces in over 70 years; it’s a big deal,” Trump said in a Monday address to the National Guard Association conference in Detroit. With that legacy achievement in his pocket, Trump announced a plan to build on it. “I agree that the time has come to create a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space Force,” he said. In addition, “We’re going to build a great Iron Dome for missile defense around our nation.”

Trump’s skeptics are enjoying a hearty guffaw over the former president’s latest proposal. “Trump’s campaign has earthly problems,” read Politico’s gratuitously impish headline, “but he’s focusing on outer space.” Trump “promises to waste BILLIONS of tax dollars,” the super PAC American Bridge remarked. Indeed, the former president backed the creation of a sixth branch of the armed forces devoted to low-earth orbit only “because he thought it sounded cool,” MSNBC’s Steve Benen posited. And what’s with the Iron Dome talk? “I have a hunch it’s because he likes the words ‘iron’ and ‘dome,’” he speculated.

This fits a pattern, but by now, Trump’s hecklers should have trained themselves out of exhibiting it. It was obvious from the moment it was proposed that a new branch of the armed forces devoted to exo-atmospheric operations was necessary, if only because space had already become a theater of war. Likewise, creating a “a Space National Guard as the primary combat reserve of the U.S. Space Force,” as Trump proposed, is a remedy to an unworkable proposal offered by Joe Biden.