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Three Chanukah Cheers for the Maccabees Michael Galak

Posted By on December 21st, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/religion/2022/12/three-chanukah-cheers-for-the-maccabees/

EXCERPT

The history behind this festival is extraordinary. What’s more, far from being important only to the Jewish people only, this festival is relevant to the entire Western civilization. I would even go as far as to say that this festival commemorates a decisive moment for the Western world because the events of more than 2000 years ago celebrated at Chanukah influenced — indeed, determined — the future of we know today as the Western world. If you think this assertion a bit over the top, please read on.

The Hanukkah story

Let me take you back to the time of the Greek-Syrian despot Antiochus III (222 -186 BC) , succeeded by his son Seleucus IV,  and then by his brother of the same name during one of the most dramatic times Israel has endured in all its long and difficult history.  Needing the money to pay off the Romans, who won a war against him, Seleucus decided to foot the bill by confiscating the treasure from the Temple in Jerusalem. At the time, every Jewish adult paid a special tax – ‘half a shekel” – in order to provide for orphans, to provide for the sacred rituals and, of course, to maintain the Temple itself. The decision to confiscate the national treasure was met with outrage but the people were helpless to resist.

Seleucus IV was succeeded in 174BC by his brother, Antiochus IV, more commonly known as Epimanes, the madman.  To root out an intractable Jewish individualism he forbade all Jewish laws to be followed. The Jews rebelled, were crushed and thousands died. Jewish worship was forbidden, the Torah scrolls were siezed and burned, their study declared punishable by execution.  Sabbath rest, circumcision and the observing of dietary laws were prohibited under pain of death, with many more thousands killed for refusing to comply. The spark which ignited the firestorm was lit in the village of Modiin, where an elderly priest, Mattityahu, refused to offer sacrifices as demanded by the gods of the Greeks. The villagers fell upon the Syrian soldiers and killed them. After this, the Jews had no choice but to seek refuge in the surrounding hills of Judea, and that is where the rebellion became a guerrilla war. The Jewish volunteer legions were formed, led by Juda Maccabee. This name, by way of background, was an acronym of the four Hebrew words Mi Kamocha Ba’Eilim Hashem – “Who is like You, oh G-d”.

Despite their overwhelming strength, the Syrian-Greek armies were defeated by the Maccabees, who returned to Jerusalem in triumph and rededicated the Temple, casting out the idols placed there in 139 BCE.

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COVID Communism Has Been Contagious By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on December 21st, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/covid_communism_has_been_contagious.html

Now that we’re approaching the three-year anniversary of COVID-1984’s global demolition (or “Great Reset” in World Economic Forum parlance), reality looks very different from what many people once perceived it to be.  Raise your hand if you thought “free” nations would declare the authority to close millions of small businesses until they went bankrupt and folded.  Or whether never-before-used, experimental cocktails of mRNA “vaccine” would be coercively injected into citizens.  Did you think governments would conspire to cover up “vaccine”-related injuries and deaths?  Did you expect that the Canadian government would take the unprecedented steps of invoking the Emergencies Act and seizing the private bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters in order to intimidate peaceful Canadians and quell dissent?  Did you predict that in the United States and throughout the West, public debate would be targeted and censored if that speech contradicted governments’ official public health “narratives”?  Did you know that COVID communism would end up being more contagious than the virus?

If you still have your hand raised, then you are part of a humble minority who were worried about the West’s accelerating attacks against personal liberty even before the rise of COVID-1984.  If you had your eyes unexpectedly opened during the last three years, though, it is all the better to have you seeing clearly now.  Around the world, the WuFlu pandemic and governments’ coordinated responses to use this health scare as a transparent pretense for ushering in the WEF’s beloved “Great Reset” have awakened hundreds of millions of people who might otherwise still be sleeping.  While our puppet master oligarchs have achieved a great deal in a short time, their in-your-face mobilization efforts to “fundamentally transform” the world have also commanded new, unwanted attention.  A growing share of the population finally understands that we are in an ongoing battle between self-government and global government and that friends of freedom must dig in their heels for the long haul.

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The Takeover Self-righteous professors have spawned self-righteous students and unleashed them into the public square Russell Jacoby

Posted By on December 21st, 2022

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/takeover-russell-jacoby

In 1987 I published The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe which elicited heated responses. Only now do I see I got something wrong—as did my critics. Some had objected to a term I introduced, “public intellectual,” as redundant and misleading. Others rejected the main argument. I proposed a generational account of American intellectuals. For earlier American intellectuals, the university remained peripheral because it was small, underfunded, and distant from cultural life. The Edmund Wilsons and Lewis Mumfords earlier in the 20th century to the Jane Jacobs and Betty Friedans later saw themselves as writers and journalists, not professors. But I missed something, the dawning takeover of the public sphere by campus denizens and lingo.

What I called a transitional generation, the largely Jewish New York intellectuals, ended up later in their careers as professors, but usually they lacked graduate training. When Daniel Bell was appointed to the faculty of Columbia University in 1960, officials discovered that he did not have a Ph.D.—and bestowed it on him for his collection of essays (The End of Ideology). This incident indicates something of the commitment of these men—and they were men; they wrote essays for a public, not monographs or research papers for colleagues. This orientation was as true for a confrere of Bell, like Irving Howe, who also ended up as a professor without graduate training. He observed that like himself Bell did not want to write long-winded treatises; nor did they want to specialize or get pigeonholed. Or as Bell phrased it for all of them, “I specialize in generalizations.”

But the story changes for the next generation—my ’60s generation. In pose we were much more radical than previous American intellectuals.We were the leftists, Maoists, Marxists, Third Worldists, anarchists, and protesters who regularly shut down the university in the name of the war in Vietnam or free speech or racial equality. Yet for all our university bashing, unlike earlier intellectuals, we never exited the campus. We settled in. We became graduate students, assistant professors and finally—a few of us—leading figures in academic disciplines.

To be sure, this was not simply a series of individual choices. The conditions that funneled the transitional generation onto campuses were hard to resist. The life of the freelance intellectual, always precarious, had become virtually impossible.

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The Deep State vs Donald Trump saga is not over Will the J6 Committee backfire as its status as a politicized vendetta becomes unbearably obvious? Roger Kimball

Posted By on December 21st, 2022

https://thespectator.com/topic/deep-state-donald-trump-saga-january-6/

As I have said before, I hope that the new Congress, which begins its session in just a couple of weeks, will continue the work of the January 6 Committee, minus Liz Cheney and the other kangaroos. The New York Times, in its best slant-the-news-while-appearing-magisterial modality, described the Committee’s 100-plus-page “Executive Summary” as a “report into the effort to overturn the 2020 election.” But surely the far greater attempt to impact the 2020 election was the FBI’s infiltration of Twitter and other social media platforms, Mark Zuckerberg’s half a billion dollars distributed like alms to NeverTrump sororities in battleground cities, etc., etc.

All that should be the work of the new Congress. The old Congress wasn’t interested in the truth. They were interested reminding us plebs who is in charge — hint, it is not “We the People” — and, above all, they were committed, as Lonesome Liz Cheney herself put it, to “making sure that Donald Trump never gets near the Oval Office again.”

Someday, when all the smoke clears, future historians will be busy investigating how it was that a flamboyant real estate developer called Donald Trump went from being the most improbable presidential candidate since Andrew Jackson (or, maybe, since the founding of the republic) to being the most investigated and calumniated president in history.

The entire bureaucratic machinery of the state was surreptitiously mobilized against this one individual. It is only gradually that we are learning about this. Remember the Russia Collusion Delusion? The country spent tens of millions of dollars conducting a sham investigation that hobbled Trump during his first term.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Democracy Under Siege? Parsing the New York Times’s obsession with alarmism Lee Siegel

Posted By on December 21st, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/democracy-under-siege

The impending collapse of democracy—that’s not small beer. So imagine the alarm of New York Times subscribers when, on October 3, an essay titled “Democracy Challenged” appeared in the newspaper with the subhead, “Representative government faces its most serious threats in decades.”

If the New York Times wishes to limit gun ownership in America, articles like this can hardly be said to help. Before leaving the house the day the article was published, I opened our front door as slowly as I could, motioned to the family to stay in place until I had peered up both ends of the street, and then instructed everyone to walk behind me as we all moved as noiselessly as possible toward the sidewalk and our several destinations. “Do what you can to save representative democracy in America!” my wife whispered to the kids as they set off for school.

I am joking, of course. The piece, written by Joseph Kahn, the paper’s new executive editor, appeared in what the Times calls “The Morning Newsletter.” Though this morning’s item concerned the country’s worst nightmare, it was only four paragraphs long. And it was hard to fathom. The subhead’s reference to the most serious “threats” to “representative government” “in decades” was perplexing, since any real threat to democracy would be deadly and single, not one among several competing threats. And there was no threat to American democracy decades ago, unless Kahn was referring to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, which were threats of a whole different order than what he went on to claim were the perils faced by American democracy now.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

On To The Great Future Of Offshore Wind Power Francis Menton

Posted By on December 21st, 2022

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/

Today was a big day on the way to New York’s energy future: Our “Climate Action Council” voted to approve the final “Scoping Plan,” telling us all how we are going to achieve, among other goals, 70% of statewide electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030 and a zero-emission electricity system by 2040. The press release has the headline “New York State Climate Action Council Finalizes Scoping Plan to Advance Nation-Leading Climate Law.” Here also is a link to the Scoping Plan itself.

Taking a look at the Scoping Plan and its Executive Summary, I find that the two biggest elements in getting to this zero-emissions electricity system are supposedly going to be offshore wind turbines and energy storage. I’ve covered the energy storage issues extensively in other posts. But how about this offshore wind thing? Surely, to commit New York to transitioning to using offshore wind as the primary source of electricity only seven years from now, they must have a very solid game plan for how it is going to happen.

Actually, as with everything else here, they have no idea. As of today, there isn’t a single functioning offshore wind turbine in New York State, nor is there a single offshore wind turbine under construction. The climate cultists on the Climate Action Council think that they can just order this up, and then it will happen.

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The Founders Would Have Been Appalled at the January 6 Committee Democrats violated the prohibition on attainder to try to force a prosecution of President Trump.

Posted By on December 21st, 2022

https://www.nysun.com/article/the-founders-would-have-been-appalled-at-the-january-6-committee?utm_

Democrats violated the prohibition on attainder to try to force a prosecution of President Trump.

The final act of the January 6 committee, voted on in broad daylight, represents, to us, the final act in a process that the Founders of America had tried to prohibit — a process of attainder, meaning a trial on criminal charges by the legislature. It is prohibited to the Congress in Article I, Section 9. And by our lights, referring President Trump and his colleagues for criminal prosecution is an evasion by the Congress.

We understand that we are the only newspaper banging this drum (not an entirely novel situation for us). Nor are we without illusion in respect of how serious the moment is. It’s decidedly possible that the Justice Department will seek an indictment against Mr. Trump and alleged confederates and try them on charges that could put them away for years. That would be deeply divisive, as the Wall Street Journal argues, though a jury would have the last word.

It might — it’s a long shot — be possible for Mr. Trump to press a constitutional objection, double jeopardy, on one charge on which he was referred, incitement to insurrection. That’s because of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution, which says the “party convicted” in an impeachment trial shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment, trial, judgment and punishment, according to law. It might present a problem in prosecuting Mr. Trump.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

China’s Deal with Saudi Arabia is a Disaster for Biden by Con Coughlin

Posted By on December 20th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19252/china-saudi-arabia-alliance

Nothing better illustrates the utter ineptitude of the Biden administration’s dealings with the Middle East than Saudi Arabia’s decision to forge a strategic alliance with China.

Biden set the tone for his strained relationship with the Saudi royal family during the 2020 presidential election contest when he denounced the kingdom as a “pariah” state over its involvement in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018, although there has never any audible distress from the Biden administration over Iran’s 2007 abduction and presumed death of ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson.

By any standard, the deepening military cooperation between Russia and Iran should serve as a wake-up call to the Biden administration to redouble its efforts to reaffirm its commitment to key allies in the region such as the Saudis, who are committed to resisting any attempt by Tehran to expand its malign influence in the region.

That Riyadh is now moving away from its traditional alliance with the US and strengthening its ties with Beijing is a strategic disaster of epic proportions, and serves as a damning indictment of the Biden administration’s careless treatment of the Saudis, for which the president is personally to blame.

Nothing better illustrates the utter ineptitude of the Biden administration’s dealings with the Middle East than Saudi Arabia’s decision to forge a strategic alliance with China.

This is a time when Washington should be working overtime to strengthen its ties with long-standing allies like the Saudis to combat the mounting threat Iran poses to the region’s security.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Everyone Gets an A By Lincoln Brown

Posted By on December 20th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/culture/lincolnbrown/2022/12/19/everyone-gets-an-a-n1654760

Have you heard of New York City’s New School? Me either. Apparently, it is a very elite private university. According to the website, it is a place that “reimagines the future,” “interrogates justice and equity,” “cultivates new models of creative work,” and “creates more sustainable futures.” As far as the course catalog, it seems fairly straightforward in terms of its School of Design. Its liberal arts program offers classes such as “Outings in Queer Anthropology,” “Women in Post-Socialist Transformation,” and “Activist Anthropology: Toward Antiracism, Decolonization, and Anti-Oppression.” In other words, a school perfectly designed for overindulged, rich kids who are desperate to rid themselves of whatever guilt they have decided everyone has. And what do spoiled, rich kids do when they do not get what they want? They have tantrums, of course.

The New York Post reports that on Dec. 8, the students at The New School began a protest in solidarity with adjunct faculty who were striking for higher wages and a better healthcare package. That issue was resolved by Dec. 10, and yet the protest itself goes on. Somehow, the list of complaints has evolved into demands for better cafeteria food, a tuition freeze, and refunds for time lost during class, and that the president, vice president, and provost resign. They also want the president’s townhouse to be turned over to the student body. The protesters have yet to figure out what they will do with the property. Chief among the list of demands is that all students receive A grades for their fall semester classes and the removal of “incomplete” or “withdrawal” listings on grades. The New School told the Post, “The university supports peaceful free expression by our students, and we are listening closely to all of our students’ concerns. Faculty retain autonomy about how to conduct and grade their courses.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

David French: Yes, The Dispatch Takes Money To Help Leftists Keep The Internet Conservatism-Free By: Jordan Boyd

Posted By on December 20th, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/19/david-french-yes-the-dispatch-takes-money-to-help-leftists-keep-the-internet-conservatism-free/

David French, the “principled conservative” who argued drag queen story hours in libraries are “blessings of liberty,” publicly confirmed last week that he’s personally advised Big Tech platforms on how to suppress the speech of people who disagree with leftists.

“A few years ago I was invited to an off-the-record meeting with senior executives at a major social media company,” reads the Atlantic contributor and Dispatch senior editor’s first sentence. In 2020, The Dispatch became a paid censor to help Facebook suppress conservative ideas using the pretense of “factchecking.”

As a Facebook censor, The Dispatch has helped suppress true information in the service of leftist conversation control. This has included keeping accurate pro-life ads off Facebook in a way that protected the candidacy of Joe Biden and restricted nonviolent political speech. Dispatch CEO Steve Hayes also defended Facebook’s 2020 election interference in the form of throttling a true story about Hunter Biden’s corruption that may financially benefit his father.

Facebook launched its third-party fact-checking program in 2016. By 2020, more than 50 publications including French’s The Dispatch agreed to do Big Tech’s dirty censorship work. Throttlers like The Dispatch are tasked by Facebook “reduce the spread of misinformation and provide more reliable information to users.”

The Dispatch claims to be a center-right media organization. It called for Donald Trump’s impeachment, a position opposed by the vast majority of Republican voters.