ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Taxpayer and Donor-Funded Systemic Anti-Semitism at Berkeley Jewish donors gave UC Berkeley over $450M in one year. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/taxpayer-and-donor-funded-systemic-anti-semitism-at-berkeley/

Berkeley’s $3 billion budget comes from taxpayers through tuition paid for by government scholarships, state, local and federal grants, state funding and tax deductible contributions. While the University of California school insists that “the state provides just 14 percent of the university’s revenue”, taxpayers actually fund or underwrite much of its operation.

And that operation is systemically antisemitic.

When nine campus groups at the UC Berkeley School of Law announced that they wouldn’t host the vast majority of Jewish speakers (as Dean Erwin Chemerinksy admitted that it “would exclude about, I don’t know, 90 percent or more of our Jewish students”), it made headlines around the world. It was also in violation of federal and state not-discrimination laws.

The University of California is a 501(c)(3) and the UC Berkeley Foundation is the college’s own nonprofit. And UC Berkeley Law is eager to accept everything from gifts of stocks to cryptocurrency. Taxpayers subsidize this system even though the UC Berkeley Foundation which has assets approaching $3 billion. That money helps fund its systemic antisemitism.

Systemic antisemitism at the UC Berkeley School of Law is not just a private policy. The creation of “Jewish-Free Zones” at the law school are being subsidized by taxpayers.

And by Jewish donors.

In ’21, Scott Shenker, a computer scientist, wrote UC Berkeley a $25 million check. That same year the Wertheim Family Foundation pledged $100 million to UC Berkeley Optometry. A year earlier, Bob Haas injected yet another $24 million into UC Berkeley. And they are not alone.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Should Convicts Have to Earn Their Keep in Prison? Why doing time shouldn’t absolve you of your fiscal responsibility. by Jason D. Hill

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/should-convicts-have-to-earn-their-keep-in-prison/

“Let’s clean up the language of the 13th Amendment if such a feat is required. Agreed. And then let us remind criminals entering the penal system: There are no free lunches. You will pay as you go.”

The recent Red Scare by the Left in declaring that slavery is still legal in five of the United States needs some cautious reflection and analysis on at least one question it raises. Allegedly, the landmark 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified on December 16, 1865, saw the official abolishment of slavery. It is said, however, that it was allowed to continue as a punishment in prison against convicted felons.

Semantic interpretations of the 13th Amendment aside, and of how it has been and will continue to be applied, there is one moral question that frames the issue and gives it moral heft, so to speak: whether convicted felons ought to be paid for their labor while in prison. These felons include, but are not limited to, wider groups of individuals. They are rapists, murderers, armed robbers, pedophiles, carjackers, child-sex traffickers, and terrorists.

In being incarcerated, such individuals are not simply being punished for their crimes; they are also removed from society as they often pose incalculable harm to individuals and to public safety. They have violated the individual rights of others and have, in some respects, ejected themselves from the ambit of certain rights.

Society pays for their physical, psychological, and medical upkeep through taxation. Taxpayers pay a lot for private prisons. Various reports claim that in the 2018 fiscal year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spent over $800 million of taxpayer money on privately-owned or -operated detention facilities.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Holocaust Is Not Your Metaphor “A production of Romeo and Juliet for non-binary performers” by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-holocaust-is-not-your-metaphor/

This is what happens when the Holocaust becomes universalized, a free-floating metaphor and finally woke kitsch.

A production of Romeo and Juliet for non-binary performers, with Juliet reimagined as a persecuted Jew and Romeo as a member of the Hitler Youth, has become embroiled in a row over its failure to include Jewish people in a casting call.

The London-based Icarus Theatre Collective is staging a version of Shakespeare’s play set in Nazi Germany. The company advertised for “non-binary artists, and/or those of global majority, black or Asian heritage” to join the cast.

The call did not include any request for Jewish performers to join the cast of the production, set in the Third Reich, and the company has publicly apologised for the omission.

Yes, that’s the problem there.

This production, which has now been canceled, comes on the heels of things like the various Anne Frank revisions, including the Latino/ICE one. The underlying problem though is the use of the Holocaust and Hitler as a metaphor for everything bad.

The Holocaust is not a lens. It’s certainly not a lens for whatever woke nonsense is trying to appropriate Jewish history to make claims about the “rise of fascism” today.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Tale of Two Islamic States One is liberalizing, the other is massacring its people. Can you guess which one Biden is aiding – and the one he’s pushing away? by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-tale-of-two-islamic-states/

Biden and the woke Democrats have enthralled themselves in a bizarre love affair with the Mullahs in Iran, while repelling energy and capital giant Saudi Arabia.

The strategic imbecility of this position amounts to geopolitical malpractice. It has emboldened the Iranian regime to murder Americans around the world, including threatened attacks against our former president and members of his administration, and to ruthlessly suppress dissent at home.

It also has driven the Saudis into the arms of Russia and Communist China, a consequence so avoidable to be simply idiotic.

Scratch your head all you wish: you will not find a rational explanation for such a policy because there is none.

Such is the World According to Joe.

Where are the feminists and the Woke Left when Iranian women and girls throw off their head-scarves and taunt the Islamo-fascist storm troopers linking elbows in the streets? Where are Joy Reid, Kamala Harris, or Sandy “AOC” Cortez? Instead of supporting the Iranian Revolution of 2022, they are shrieking at “Mega Maga Republicans” as the enemies of –uh– people-kind.

But the Woke Left doesn’t just tacitly support the murdering mullahs of Tehran. Before Elon Musk walked into Twitter headquarters last Thursday with his kitchen sink, the faceless brown-shirted “moderators” at Twitter suspended the account of an Iranian hactivist group called “Black Reward,” while maintaining the anti-Semitic hate-America rants of the Supreme Turban, phony ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It Isn’t Just Congress: A ‘Red Wave’ Is Hitting Social Media, Too

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/02/its-not-just-congress-a-red-wave-is-hitting-social-media-too/

With the 2022 midterm elections less than a week away, it’s easy to be obsessed with the outcome of the vote. If recent polls are correct, this will be a “red wave” election in which Congress is returned to GOP control. But there’s another “red wave”: The one that’s washing over the Big Media and Social Media.

In recent days, the mainstream media have been in a tizzy following Tesla and Space-X founder Elon Musk’s dramatic $42 billion takeover of Twitter. Along with jokingly calling himself the “Chief Twit,” he promises major changes at the popular social-messaging site, with a total of 1.3 billion accounts and more than 200 million daily posts.

What’s left unsaid is what it will do for free speech and the return of centrist and conservative voices to social media. Musk, regardless of his politics, which range from left to right to everything in between depending on the issue, has been a robust defender of speech rights.

After taking over, Musk fired a whole suite of executives who had created and executed Twitter’s insidious plan to “de-platform” conservative voices from Twitter. The whole enabling apparatus seems set to go: Of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, some 50% to 75% are expected to get the axe as soon as this week.

With the likely restoration of hundreds if not thousands of suspended accounts, America’s thriving online opinion community is about to have part of its political and free speech ecosystem restored.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Energy Policy for Dummies Biden goes from bad to worse with a windfall profits tax on oil.

Posted By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-policy-for-dummies-windfall-tax-oil-companies-joe-biden-11667339340

President Biden has the worst energy policy since Jimmy Carter, so it was probably inevitable that he would disinter one of Mr. Carter’s worst ideas—a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies. Doesn’t he know that when you tax something, you get less of it?

Sorry, rhetorical question. “Their profits are a windfall of war—the windfall from the brutal conflict that’s ravaging Ukraine and hurting tens of millions of people around the globe,” Mr. Biden said Monday of oil companies reporting strong earnings this year.

The reality is that their profits owe more to his Administration’s war on fossil fuels than Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion. Oil prices surged at the start of the war amid uncertainty about the impact of Western sanctions on Russian supply. But prices have moderated as China and India have continued to buy Russian crude at a discount, while markets have downgraded global economic forecasts amid central-bank tightening and Chinese lockdowns.

But gasoline prices remain relatively elevated because production, especially in the U.S., isn’t keeping up with demand. Recent refinery shutdowns in the U.S. and Europe have created a supply bottleneck, boosting refiners’ normally narrow margins. It’s no small irony that government policies and investor pressure to reduce production have inflated Big Oil’s profits.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

In Iran, stonings and beatings create a necropolis for the living By Nicole Sadighi

Posted By on November 1st, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/in_iran_stonings_and_beatings_create_a_necropolis_for_the_living.html

In 2007, a very disturbing video was smuggled out of the Islamic Republic in Iran, recording the stoning of a number of Iranians.

Watching the video is extremely upsetting.

The disturbing video begins with a lashing of one person. After that, Hojjatoleslam Ali Razini, who was the head of Tehran’s judiciary at the time, announced the verdict for the accused men on the amplifier. They were brought to the center of an arena like lambs to the slaughter, surrounded by a baying crowd of fanatics, who had scavenged rocks to use as weapons, and drooled like bloodthirsty wolves for their first kill. The condemned men were covered in white shrouds, as men with spades dug and filled their death pits around them.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

John Murawski: ‘Zero Emissions’ From Electric Vehicles? Here’s Why That Claim Has Zero Basis

Posted By on November 1st, 2022

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/authors/john_murawski/

As California, New York, and other states move to phase out the sale of gasoline-powered cars, public officials routinely echo the Biden administration’s claim that electric vehicles are a “zero emissions” solution that can significantly mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Car and energy experts, however, say there is no such thing as a zero-emissions vehicle: For now and the foreseeable future, the energy required to manufacture and power electric cars will leave a sizable carbon footprint. In some cases hybrids can be cleaner alternatives in states that depend on coal to generate electricity, and some suggest that it may be too rash to write off all internal combustion vehicles just yet. 

Ashley Nunes, Harvard Law researcher: Buy a Tesla? “If you care about the environment, keep the Kia,” he says.
ashley-nunes.com

“I have a friend who drives a Kia he’s had for about 15 years,” said Ashley Nunes, a research fellow at Harvard Law School. “He called me and said, ‘Hey, I’m thinking of buying a Tesla. What do you think?’” 

“I said, ‘If you care about the environment, keep the Kia,’” Nunes said. 

Nunes’ advice points to the subtle complexities and numerous variables that challenge the reassuringly simple yet overstated promise of electric vehicles. Few dispute that the complete transition to EVs powered by cleaner electricity from renewable energy sources will have a less dire environmental impact than today’s gas-powered automotive fleet. But that low-carbon landscape exists on a distant horizon that’s booby-trapped with obstacles and popular misconceptions. 

BOOKS Comments turned off

The General and Mrs. Hemingway (Martha Gellhorn) An Adaptation from “Taking Berlin: The Bloody Race to Defeat the Third Reich”

Posted By on November 1st, 2022

https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2022/11/01/the_general_and_mrs_hemingway_862199.html

The following is an adapted excerpt from “Taking Berlin: The Bloody Race to Defeat the Third Reich” by Martin Dugard.

General James Gavin was a dangerous man.

Tall, powerful, charismatic. Abandoned by his parents at age two and adopted by a coal miner. Dropped out of school in eighth grade, enlisted in the army at seventeen, went on to graduate West Point and rise through the ranks, becoming a two-star general at just thirty-seven. Paratrooper with four combat jumps to his credit, including the Normandy D-Day invasion. The “Jumping General” was always in the lead C-47 and first man leaping out the door: thirteen-inch Randall knife strapped to his rig, .45 holstered on the right hip, and M-1 carbine wedged into his parachute harness.  He used each of these weapons with deadly precision.

But on October 15, 1944, General James Gavin met his match.

The last year of World War II saw combat on an epic scale, from D-Day in June, Market Garden in September, and the grizzly winter fighting of Hurtgen Forest and Battle of the Bulge. To the east, the Soviet Union’s massive and now often overlooked Operation Bagration decimated Nazi Germany. Every day of fighting was focused around the eventual capture of the Nazi German capital of Berlin and bringing the war to a close.

Gavin and the unicorn who would become his unlikely lover and confidante could lay claim to playing vital roles in these pivotal months – for better and worse.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How The Surveillance State And Big Tech Colluded To Make Twitter ‘Disinformation’ The New Terrorism By: John Daniel Davidson

Posted By on November 1st, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/01/how-the-surveillance-state-and-big-tech-colluded-to-make-twitter-disinformation-the-new-terrorism/

Federal law enforcement agencies originally created to protect us from terrorists are now being used to protect us from ourselves.

The late, great Angelo Codevilla maintained that America’s response to 9/11 was fundamentally flawed because it adopted a law enforcement approach to what is essentially a foreign policy problem. He argued that the law enforcement approach — the idea that we could detect and disrupt terrorist plots before they come to fruition, and arrest those responsible — required the construction of a vast state security and surveillance apparatus that would eventually, when the terrorist threat subsided, be turned on American citizens.

As in so much else, Codevilla was prophetic.

Earlier this week, a deeply reported piece by Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of The Intercept revealed an “expansive effort” by the Department of Homeland Security to curb speech it considers dangerous by pressuring tech platforms to engage in online censorship. Although DHS’s widely ridiculed “Disinformation Governance Board” was scaled back and then shut down earlier this year amid well-deserved criticism, “other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.”