ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Weird, Creepy, Surreal—and Dangerous—2024 Campaign This warped election violates every prior precedent and is not just creepy but dangerous—even before the campaign was supposed to formally begin. Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 15th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/15/the-weird-creepy-surreal-and-dangerous-2024-campaign/

The already-long 2024 presidential campaign has become the strangest in modern history.

Here are ten unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world:

1. How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now?

2. Would the media prefer to help her win but lose further credibility themselves by failing to ask why she has disowned her last three decades of leftist agendas, or to reclaim some of their reputations and thereby risk her losing?

3. Does the left appreciate the new campaign and election protocols it has now established?

That is to say:

Cancel by fiat their virtual nominee four months before the election when he sinks in the polls?

Nullify the outcome of a year of primaries and the will of 14 million voters?

Threaten a sitting president with removal by the 25th Amendment process unless he steps aside as his party nominee?

Anoint a replacement nominee before the convention and without a single primary—and then prevent any rival candidates from challenging her?

4. After the precedents of 2020 and 2024, is the future orthodox protocol for any Democratic nominee now to avoid all interviews and ex tempore speaking, and stick to teleprompted speeches and scripted responses only?

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘So Unimaginable and So Abhorrent’: Federal Judge Orders UCLA to Stop Aiding Activists Enforcing Jew-Free Zones on Campus By Zach Kessel

Posted By on August 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/so-unimaginable-and-so-abhorrent-federal-judge-orders-ucla-to-stop-aiding-activists-enforcing-jew-free-zones-on-campus/

““Shame on UCLA for letting antisemitic thugs terrorize Jews on campus,” Rienzi said. “Today’s ruling says that UCLA’s policy of helping antisemitic activists target Jews is not just morally wrong but a gross constitutional violation. UCLA should stop fighting the Constitution and start protecting Jews on campus.”

A Los Angeles federal district court ordered the University of California, Los Angeles, to stop allowing and assisting in self-described pro-Palestinian activists’ creation of what amount to Jew-free zones on campus, holding that the university may not offer classes if Jewish students are prohibited from participating in the programming.

Those who occupied encampments on the university’s property disallowed Jews from passing through the quad unless they would disavow Israel and, by extension, their Jewish faith. UCLA’s position had been that the encampments preventing Jewish students from accessing certain areas of campus were not its responsibility.

Despite that contention, the university erected metal barriers around the encampment and directed Jewish students to leave, according to a lawsuit.

“In the year 2024, in the United States of America, in the State of California, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith,” Judge Mark C. Scarsi wrote on Tuesday. “This fact is so unimaginable and so abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of freedom that it bears repeating, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. UCLA does not dispute this. Instead, UCLA claims that it has no responsibility to protect the religious freedom of its Jewish students because the exclusion was engineered by third-party protesters. But under constitutional principles, UCLA may not allow services to some students when UCLA knows that other students are excluded on religious grounds, regardless of who engineered the exclusion.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

DOJ and the Media Are the Real Story in Belated Biden Corruption Revelations Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on August 15th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/08/doj-and-the-media-are-the-real-story-in-belated-biden-corruption-revelations/

Here is what the New York Times doesn’t tell you.

I can’t decide which is my favorite part of the story dribbled out by the media-Democrat complex’s mothership last night.

It’s probably the part, 16 paragraphs down, in which the New York Times explains how it knew the Biden-Harris State Department was stonewalling on the production of documents showing that, while Joe Biden was vice president, his ne’er-do-well son Hunter beseeched the Obama-Biden State Department to lobby the Italian government on behalf of Burisma — the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that was lavishly paying Hunter so it could have access to Vice President Biden and his political influence.

Pray tell, how did the Times know? Well, as reporter Kenneth Vogel relates, because the State Department “had failed to produce responsive records contained in a cache of files connected to a laptop that Mr. Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop” (emphasis added).

Right, the laptop from hell.

That’s the Hunter Biden laptop that the Times, the rest of the media-Democrat complex, and the politicized “community” of current and former national-security officials colluded with the 2020 Biden campaign to convince the public was a Russian disinformation operation. The same laptop over which Hunter and his allies smeared the repair-shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, as a thief . . . even as they implied that the incriminating data might be fake.

Like the FBI, the IRS, and rest of the Biden Justice Department investigators, who had acquired the laptop data months earlier, the Times understood that the laptop was authentic, that the data was not manufactured by a foreign intelligence service. Ergo, as Vogel relates, the Times sued the Biden-Harris State Department when it failed to produce relevant government correspondence, the existence of which the laptop established.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Joel Zinberg Often Wrong, Never in Doubt More than four years since the advent of Covid, public authorities keep pushing health practices contrary to medical and scientific knowledge.

Posted By on August 15th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/covid-public-authorities-pushing-health-practices-contrary-to-medical-and-scientific-knowledge

Times have changed. Two years ago, tennis great Novak Djokovic could not play in the U.S. Open tournament. It was not because he had Covid-19 and posed a danger to fellow athletes and fans. Djokovic could not come into the country because of President Biden’s proclamation banning the entry of unvaccinated noncitizen air travelers into America.

Now, U.S. sporting officials let American sprinter Noah Lyles compete at the Olympics with an active case of Covid-19, putting his fellow athletes at risk of contracting the disease and impairing their performance.

Lyles tested positive on Tuesday. But he was allowed to run the 200-meter semi-final on Wednesday and the final Thursday, despite having a fever. It was hard not to notice Lyles talking with and hugging other athletes, exposing them at a time when he was surely contagious. Yet, Lyles said that he never considered withdrawing from the event. Nor did he notify anyone of his condition outside of the USA Track & Field medical staff that allowed him to compete.

Lyles was not alone. The World Health Organization reported that at least 40 Olympic athletes have tested positive for the virus. Yet the International Olympic Committee has removed all requirements for health measures or notifications. And the Paris Olympics officials have likewise taken a hands-off approach, letting athletes and teams determine for themselves how to respond to infection.

Amid this change, however, one finds a Covid constant: public authorities have consistently promulgated health requirements that have been, and remain, contrary to medical and scientific knowledge. Imposing a vaccination requirement on noncitizen air travelers, but not citizens and other types of travelers, made zero sense. Moreover, it has long been clear that the vaccine’s primary utility is to protect the person vaccinated from severe disease—the guard against infection is limited and short-lived; thus, vaccine mandates could not be justified as protecting the public.

Public authorities also seemed intent on denying the existence of natural immunity resulting from earlier infections. In Djokovic’s case, he had already had Covid twice. It was common medical knowledge that natural immunity is generally as good as or better than vaccine immunity, though, in the case of Covid, the public health authorities tried to ignore this for years. By April 2022, even Anthony Fauci acknowledged that natural immunity was just as protective as vaccinations for Covid.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media Love Trump’s Ideas When They Come From Kamala Harris By: Tristan Justice

Posted By on August 15th, 2024

https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/14/the-media-love-trumps-ideas-when-they-come-from-kamala-harris/

The only policy plank we really know about the glossy “reintroduction of Kamala Harris” is that she now supports one of Donald Trump’s marquee policies.

Last weekend, the incumbent vice president tried to pass off Trump’s plan to eliminate taxes on tips as her own.

“When I am president, we will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage, and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” she said.

The sudden campaign promise follows months of the presumptive presidential nominee avoiding interviews while flipping on nearly every issue on her platform, from bans on fracking to passing “Medicare for All.”

Yet the press has given Harris a free pass less than three months from Election Day and just a month away from the first votes being cast in Pennsylvania as the far-left candidate campaigns without any kind of comprehensive policy platform. When it comes to taxes on tips, however, Harris gave her position, and the episode offered another case study in media bias covering two identical positions from two very different candidates.

When former President Trump declared his crusade to eliminate taxes on tips earlier this summer, the headline from CBS News read, “Trump proposal to exempt tips from taxes could cost $250 billion.”

But when Harris offered her endorsement for the effort, CBS reported, “Vice President Kamala Harris is rolling out a new policy position, saying she’ll fight to end taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Double Effect and Human Rights in War The flawed moral reasoning of the ICC’s panel of legal experts would have approved the arrests of Churchill and Eisenhower. Nigel Biggar

Posted By on August 15th, 2024

https://quillette.com/2024/08/11/double-effect-and-human-rights-in-war-israel-gaza-icc-loac-ethics/

When, in June, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor sought arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister over their conduct in Gaza, the Conservative government objected that the ICC lacks jurisdiction over Israeli citizens. Last week, the new Labour incumbents of No. 10 abandoned that challenge. 

But lack of jurisdiction is only the weakest ground for objection. Had the reasoning of the panel of legal experts invited to justify the prosecutor’s action been applied to the Allies’ invasion of Normandy in June 1944—the eightieth anniversary of which we have just celebrated—it would have approved the arrests of Churchill and Eisenhower. 

According to the experts’ report, there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that the Israeli ministers have committed war crimes in Gaza. This is because they have “intentionally” used the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare against Hamas, by depriving civilians of “objects indispensable for their survival” and so of their “fundamental rights.” They have done this by “deliberately” impeding the delivery of humanitarian relief and by “attacks directed against” facilities that produce food and clean water, civilians attempting to obtain relief supplies, and humanitarian workers and convoys. “Either … the suspects meant these deaths to happen,” write the lawyers, “or … they were aware that deaths would occur in the ordinary course of events as a result of their methods of warfare.” As for the crime of extermination, “the number of deaths resulting from starvation is sufficient on its own to support the charge.”

Objections to the panel’s report could be raised on factual grounds, since responsibility for the failure of aid to reach its intended recipients and the question of whether or not Gaza has in fact been on the brink of starvation at all both remain hotly contested. But I shall let these pass, since my own objection is ethical rather than factual. 

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iranians Rooting For Israel Against Their Monstrous Regime And what will happen if Israel delivers a decisive blow? by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on August 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/iranians-rooting-for-israel-against-their-monstrous-regime/

Some revealing man-in-the-street interviews in Iran, where hatred of the regime has put many people on the side of Israel, and made them receive with pleasure the news of Ismael Haniyeh’s assassination, can be found here: “Iranians side with Israel, even against their own regime,” by Emily Schrader, Ynet News, August 5, 2024:

For 45 years, the Iranian people have been subjected to a dictatorial Islamic government that prioritizes support for terrorism and enables rampant levels of corruption, over the wellbeing of the people, the Iranian economy, and the future of the state itself….

While Iranians endure a cratering economy, with the leaders of the regime have been enriching themselves. Ayatolah Khamenei now controls a “financial empire” worth $95 billion, according to a six-month investigation by Reuters. How much of that he has pocketed for himself and his immediate family is unknown. But he’s likely to have far exceeded even the three greedy leaders of Hamas, whose net worth— four billion dollars for Khaled Meshaal, three billion for Mousa Abu Marzouk, and four billion for the late Ismail Haniyeh — all comes from aid money that foreign donors intended for the people of Gaza, but instead it went to a handful of thieves living in Doha.

How bad is that Iranian economy? Consider only this: in 2015 a dollar was worth 32,500 Iranian riyals. Today, a dollar is worth 650,000 riyals. The riyal has thus depreciated to one-twentieth of what it was valued at less than a decade ago. Many Iranians have seen their life savings evaporate. And they are enraged not just at the corruptions at the top, among the ayatollahs and the IRGC commanders, but also at the spectacle of their government spending billions of dollars to supply their proxies in the Middle East — the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and especially, Hezbollah in Lebanon — with money and expensive weaponry. How much, they wonder, of Iran’s wealth has gone to supplying 200,000 rockets and missiles for the Lebanese terror group?

That is why Iranian protesters shout not the slogans favored by the regime: “Death to Israel” and “Death to America,” but, rather, “Death to Palestine,” “Help us, not Gaza,” and “Leave Syria alone and deal with Iran.”

Ynetnews spoke with Iranians in the aftermath of the historic assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil to see their feelings and reactions regarding a potential war against Israel. As there are currently Iranians on death row for speaking to Israeli media, we cannot publish the names of the Iranians interviewed for their own protection.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The DEI Retreat: Demise Or Disguise? As top U.S. universities show, DEI remains deeply embedded within schools’ admissions and hiring.Ethan Blevins

Posted By on August 15th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/14/the-dei-retreat-demise-or-disguise/

For months, skeptics of DEI mandates have celebrated as Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and even the Ivy League have rolled back DEI programs. The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action appeared to cool Americans’ re-infatuation with treating people differently according to race.

But history should temper our optimism. Some recent policy changes look less like a full-fledged rout and more like a strategic maneuver.

Take, for instance, the universities that have recently abandoned mandatory diversity statements from job applicants. For decades, hiring committees have used such statements as a tool to discriminate against right-of-center viewpoints and white or Asian applicants. 

Now, MIT and the Harvard Department of Arts and Sciences have scrapped diversity statements. Some critics of the practice seem to take this move as a sincere change. The New York Times quoted the former dean of the Harvard Medical School as saying “the large, silent majority of faculty who question . . . these diversity statements — these people are being heard.” Likewise, some observers called MIT’s move a “watershed moment.”

But, as Hamlet warned, “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” The Harvard deans themselves claim they’re ditching the requirement because it doesn’t work, not because these policies are wrong or illegal. They said diversity statements are “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and “confusing” to international candidates.

And the Harvard deans still want to consider candidate “efforts to increase diversity, inclusion, and belonging.” They will now use two statements: a “service statement” about how an applicant has strengthened academic communities and a “teaching and advising statement” about how an applicant has fostered an open learning environment.

MIT’s move appears more genuine, at least on the surface. MIT President Sally Kornbluth issued a statement recognizing that these statements “impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.” The MIT decision is also university-wide and supported by MIT’s general leadership. But even here, we should not let optimism overrun skepticism. President Kornbluth herself confirmed that MIT remains committed to DEI by other means.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Zero Emissions Grid Demonstration Project Follies: No Fraudulent Demonstration Projects Allowed! Francis Menton

Posted By on August 15th, 2024

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=fc702f390e

Even as I regularly repeat my calls for a Zero Emissions Grid Demonstration Project, I’m ready for the next move in the back and forth. Suppose someone claims that a steady zero emissions electricity supply has been achieved? How can we determine and verify whether that is true? The facts can be sufficiently complex, and the incentives sufficiently perverse, that fraudulent claims are to be expected.

Consider the simple case of El Hierro Island. They set out in 2008 with the objective of building a wind/storage electricity system that would provide the island with zero-emissions electricity. To this day, the website of the wind/storage electricity company, Gorona del Viento, proclaims on its opening page “An island 100% renewable energy.” Proceed through the website, and you will find lots of happy talk about tons of carbon emissions saved, and about hours of 100% renewable generation. But if you are persistent, and finally get to the detailed charts of the latest statistics, you find that the percent of electricity from the wind/storage system for the most recent full year (2023) was only 35%. Because El Hierro is an island, it lacks the ability to cheat by sneaking in some electricity from gas or coal from a neighboring state or country and not counting it.

But now consider the case Switch Inc., which is one of the largest (maybe the very largest) companies that specialize in operating data centers. Like its colleagues in Big Tech, Switch is obsessed with the desire to show its virtue by claiming to have “emissions” as low as possible, preferably zero. As I discussed previously in posts here and here, the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Amazon all have the same obsession, and they all put out annual “sustainability” reports that loudly proclaim their virtue in the headlines and introductions; but then, all of them ultimately admit in the fine print that their emissions are actually increasing with the voracious energy demands of data centers and AI.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Democrats’ Nauseating Doublespeak About ‘Freedom’George Orwell Call your Office!

Posted By on August 15th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/15/the-democrats-nauseating-doublespeak-about-freedom/\

“Liberals don’t care what you do, so long as it’s mandatory.” — M. Stanton Evans

This week a coalition of leftist groups released an ad for Kamala Harris that contains what the New York Times describes as the “unified message from the left.” What is the message? The election is all about “our freedom” – by which they mean their freedom, not yours.

As the Times puts it, leftist groups tested its “freedom” messaging in the 2022 midterms to “reclaim the language about freedom and personal liberty,” which they say helped “blunt what had been expected to be a sweeping victory for Republicans.”

As we noted in this space recently, Harris has been talking up the theme of freedom, although she struggled to even name three. (See: “Kamala The Authoritarian Calls Election A ‘Fight For Freedom’.”)

The ad puts it this way: “This election is about two different futures. One where we control our lives. And one where they do.”

The people who made the ad should be charged with false advertising.

Let’s look at the freedom scorecard. It’s leftist Democrats such as Kamala Harris who:
Proposed a constitutional amendment that would shred the First Amendment’s free speech protections.
Worked with Big Tech to censor content they didn’t like, something that Democrats – not Republicans – overwhelming favor.
Pushed a California bill that would criminalize speech questioning the “consensus” on climate change.
Said, as Tim Walz did: “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”