WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Biden and the Masochistic Nail by Amir Taheri

Posted By on July 31st, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18764/biden-iran-masochistic-nail

There is no way that you or anyone else could help the Iranian people return to normalcy as long as the present regime is in place in Tehran. A people that finds itself in the hands of a brutal authoritarian regime that claims a divine mandate and is ready to do whatever it takes to remain in power, no holds barred, is beyond help by any outsider with the best of intentions.

If you help the Islamic Republic improve its economy, the bulk of the proceeds will go to strengthening the apparatus of repression, with the people receiving mere crumbs to keep their mouths shut.

If you make a deal with the supposedly “reasonable” faction within the regime, its rivals will do whatever they can to sabotage the deal. Haven’t you noticed that each time that the faction you consider as reasonable comes close to normalization, other factions start seizing hostages, putting bombs in your cities, or raiding your embassies to derail the process?

President Barack Obama even smuggled $1.7 billion in cash to “help the Iranian people” but the money went to the regime’s repressive machine. Each time, however, that cursed “goodwill” led to the seizing of new hostages and a more virulent campaign of vilification against “the evil foreign powers.”

Whatever helps this foreign power, with the best intentions one could offer, will go to the regime, not to the Iranian people.

Remember how Prince Charles of Great Britain, Queen Rania of Jordan and US President George W Bush helped collect vast sums to help the earthquake-stricken people of Bam in southeast Iran? Well, not a single farthing reached those people while Khomeinist propaganda claimed that “the evil foreigner” was using humanitarian aid as a cover for espionage and the conversion of Iranians to “canceled (manuskh) religions such as Christianity.

[T]he late Shinzo Abe went to Tehran to play peacemaker, he was insulted and told to return home empty-handed. It is interesting that President Joe Biden or whoever is his ventriloquist still thinks they can normalize the quintessentially abnormal.

“How can one help the Iranian people restore their normal life?”

This was the question that a Japanese friend put to me in 2019 in what at the time seemed to be a casual chat in a Persian restaurant in London. Three years later, I have just learned that the question had been something more than a dinner-table note to prolong the conversation. The friend in question had been sounding out a few people about the tactics that then Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should pursue during a visit to Tehran to persuade the ruling mullahs to lead Iran back into “normal life.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump Stays in the Picture  There is a certain anxiety evident in current anti-Trump imprecations, made more understandable when one looks at the polls. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on July 31st, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/30/trump-stays-in-the-picture/

For some time now, Michael Anton has been saying that the Establishment—Democrats tout court, of course, but also large swaths of the testosterone-challenged GOP—are dead set against allowing Donald Trump to run for president again. It’s been obvious from its beginnings that the January 6 committee—an illegally constituted kangaroo court—was interested in one thing and one thing only: eliminating Trump and his followers from the metabolism of American political life. The fact that its public face is Liz Cheney, a soon-to-be cashiered anti-Trump RINO, underscores Anton’s point, or part of it. 

It’s not just the Democrats who cannot countenance Trump. It is the entire certified political class, what Anton calls the bureaucratic “uniparty” that runs the government and maintains the Overton Window that determines what is and what is not acceptable in the political life of the country. Donald Trump is not in the picture frame. 

Another data point: just Friday, the New York Times gleefully reported that Fox News—Fox!—had also cut the former president loose. Apparently, he hasn’t appeared on the network since April. The Times noted that other mouthpieces of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire—the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, for example—had published opinion pieces harshly critical of Trump and pointedly announcing that he was unfit to run for president. 

There is a certain anxiety evident in all these anti-Trump imprecations, a fact that that is made more understandable when one looks at the polls. The unhappy fact—unhappy, anyway, if you are dead set against Donald Trump being president—is that Trump is by far the most vital Republican candidate. The Republican consensus is repeating the mantra “DeSantis, DeSantis, DeSantis.” Nothing wrong with that: Ron DeSantis is a good guy, Trump without the mean tweets and other baggage that CNN dislikes. Were he the GOP candidate, I would support him avidly. 

But will he be? As Newsmax reports, Trump is “crushing all potential opponents in a Republican primary,” including DeSantis. A recent Harvard-Harris poll has Trump hoovering up 56 percent of the vote in a field of seven GOP rivals. DeSantis clocks in with 16 percent. The last time I checked, 56 was a considerably bigger number than 16.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fauci Deserves a Trip to the Moon, Not an Official Portrait Brian T. Allen

Posted By on July 31st, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/fauci-deserves-a-trip-to-the-moon-not-an-official-portrait/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fourth

The National Portrait Gallery in D.C. flubs it in honoring the Covid lockdown’s high priest.

A couple of art-news stories are worth reporting. A few weeks ago, I wrote a pair of pieces about the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. It’s a great place and part of the Smithsonian. I love portraits, so it’s a natural draw for me.

In one piece, I suggested how the NPG, still new as museums go, could up its game. As an example, it displays many portraits whose subjects are laudable but, as quality goes, suck and shouldn’t be displayed. Since then, I learned that the museum has decided to commission a portrait of Dr. Cockroach for its collection. Fauci’s portrait will indeed premiere this fall.

You could resurrect Gainsborough and Reynolds, Rembrandt and Sargent, all laudable, even luminous, artists, but, alas, labor as they might, in Fauci’s case it’s the subject who sucks.

Fauci is the instigator and champion of the most profound case of public malfeasance in our history, more costly, more damaging, more extreme, and more futile than our failed wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He’s despised by half the country. No aspiring young doctor could look at him as a role model.

Fifty million children, most from poor or working-class families, tossed from school and subsequently tormented by a fear campaign, not to mention inferior online learning. Covid doesn’t affect them. Four trillion in new debt. Over 100,000 small businesses destroyed. Today’s dysfunctional economy, shocked and distorted by Fauci’s COVID regime. Soaring child abuse, drug overdose deaths, and suicides because lockdown left millions in isolation.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats and the FBI Collude Again on a Russia Smear against Republicans Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on July 31st, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/democrats-and-the-fbi-collude-again-on-a-russia-smear-against-republicans/

This time, they’ve been able to turn Democratic collusion with foreign powers into an illusion of disinformation.

Not since Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers has a couple gone cheek-to-cheek quite like Democrats and the FBI.

This spring, we watched special counsel John Durham’s first Russiagate trial blow up on him, not because he lacked evidence of a 2016 fraudulent scheme to portray Donald Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin, but because he portrayed one of the two main schemers, the FBI, as if it were a victim. In Durham’s indictment, the Clinton campaign lies to the bureau’s babes in the woods, gulling them into opening a baseless foreign-counterintelligence probe of whether her Republican rival is a Putin puppet. In Durham’s proof at trial, however, top FBI officials turn out to be fully aware that they are colluding with Clinton campaign operatives in exploiting political opposition research to try to nail Trump — and then labor to cover their tracks.

It’s an unfortunate blind spot. Durham has one conviction so far: a guilty plea from FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, whose manipulation of a document caused the FISA court to be deceived into granting a surveillance warrant to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser — again, substantially based on the Clinton campaign’s bogus opposition research. Except the case wasn’t charged as a fraud on the court. It was charged as a false statement to another FBI official. Yes, it seems even when the FBI itself lies, the victim is . . . the FBI.

And now we learn how adaptable the Democrat–FBI Russia two-step is: You can run it in reverse! Not only can the scheme distort actual disinformation into an illusion of Republican collusion with foreign powers. It also can turn actual Democratic collusion with foreign powers into an illusion of disinformation. Now, that’s some choreography, right there.

BOOKS Comments turned off

On Criminal (In)Justice What helps—and doesn’t help—the victims of violent crime. Rafael A. Mangual

Posted By on July 31st, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/rafael-mangual-discusses-new-book-criminal-in-justice

My new book, Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most, is not about me. It’s first and foremost about the far too many victims of the sorts of injustices that inspired the title—injustices like the 2019 murder of a young, unarmed Chicago mother allegedly shot by a parolee with nine prior felony convictions (including for second-degree murder); like the little boy forced to run for his life in that same city this summer, backpack in tow, as he dodged bullets meant for the group of young men he just happened to be walking past at the time; like the young woman who police say was stabbed to death in her Lower East Side apartment earlier this year by a homeless career criminal with not one, not two, but three open cases; and like the incredibly strong young woman robbed of a husband (Detective Jason Rivera) many of us watched her eulogize after he and his partner, Wilbert Mora, were murdered by a repeat offender out on probation. I wrote this book largely because I was tired of reading stories about heinous crimes carried out by offenders who had no business being out on the street—stories the data make clear are not outliers—and I wanted to do something about it.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

EU Appeasement Of Iran Will Only Increase Threat Of Terrorism Struan Stevenson

Posted By on July 31st, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/30/eu-appeasement-of-iran-will-only-increase-the-threat-of-terrorism/

In retaliation for a series of setbacks in the European courts, the fundamentalist Iranian regime has been accused of instigating terrorist threats to attack an annual rally of anti-regime dissidents and their supporters in Albania, leading to the postponement of the event on security grounds.

The rally was scheduled to take place over the weekend of 23 and 24 July in Ashraf 3, headquarters of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran/ Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK). In January 2020 Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama expelled the Iranian ambassador and his first secretary for planning a terrorist bomb attack on the PMOI/MEK.

The Albanian government called for the last-minute postponement of the event on Friday 22 July, due to “terrorist threats and conspiracies.” Ashraf 3, in Durres, is 30 kilometers (19 miles) west of Albania’s capital, Tirana, and is home to over 3,000 members of the main Iranian democratic opposition movement.

The “Free Iran World Summit 2022” was due to be attended by dozens of U.S. Senators, Congressmen, world leaders and distinguished international politicians and personalities.

The theocratic regime in Tehran has been infuriated by the jailing in Sweden on 14 July of Hamid Nouri, a senior Iranian official, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the notorious 1988 massacre of more than 30,000 political prisoners.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Tom Bevan: Media Beclowned Themselves Redefining The Word “Recession” For Biden This Week Posted By Tim Hains

Posted By on July 31st, 2022

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/07/29/tom_bevan_media_beclowned_themselves_redefining_the_word_recession_for_biden.html

RealClearPolitics co-founder Tom Bevan gave his takes on the “winners and losers” of politics for the final week of July 2022 on Friday’s edition of FNC’s “Special Report” panel.

WINNER: “Chuck Schumer, after months of frustration and humiliation, he finally got his guy, Joe Manchin. Let’s see if he can get his girl, Kirsten Sinema, and get this [Inflation Reduction Act] thing passed.

LOSER: “The media, they really beclowned themselves all week long at the New York Times, Associated Press, and Washington Post trying to redefine a 50-year term [recession] in service to this administration, it was just an abomination.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser:The ADL Has Corrupted Its Mission and Betrayed the Jewish Community

Posted By on July 31st, 2022

https://www.newsweek.com/adl-has-corrupted-its-mission-betrayed-jewish-community-opinion-1728500

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, founded in 1913, originally declared, “The immediate object of the League is to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience, and if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people. Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike, and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.”

It was established, that is, to combat Jew-hatred. If and only if the Jewish community is secure, it would then be appropriate to extend organizational resources to helping others in need. Put another way, a Jewish rights organization, founded by Jews, should rightfully focus on the plight of…Jews.

But for several decades at least, what is now called the ADL does not prioritize Jews. Its new mission is “To stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all.” The ADL has elevated efforts to serve what it perceives as marginalized communities to equal or higher priority than the Jewish community, as though it has already eradicated antisemitism.

It has not. Recent FBI statistics show Jews are subject to more hate crimes per capita than any other group of Americans; twice as likely to be targeted as Black Americans, more than twice as likely as Muslims, and 50% more likely than those who are targeted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Pay Attention To The Dutch Farmer Protests Because America Is Next By: John Daniel Davidson

Posted By on July 31st, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/29/pay-attention-to-the-dutch-farmer-protests-because-america-is-next/

The same climate policies that are set to destroy private agriculture in the Netherlands are eventually coming to America.

Americans should start paying closer attention to the ongoing farmer protests in the Netherlands, which this week transformed long swaths of Dutch highways into what looked like a post-apocalyptic warzone: roadside fires raging out of control, manure and farming detritus heaped across highways, traffic stalled for miles, and massive protests across the country in support of the farmers.

Why is the Netherlands, of all places, experiencing such unrest? Americans need to understand what’s happening over there because the ruinous climate policies that triggered these protests are precisely what President Joe Biden and the Democrats have in mind for the United States.

Specifically, Dutch farmers are protesting a government plan to cut fertilizer use and reduce livestock numbers so drastically that it will force many farms out of business. Earlier this month, farmers used tractors and trucks to block highways and entrances to food distribution centers across the country, saying their livelihood and way of life are being targeted by the government.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sino-forming of Global South passes point of no return As Western nations question the benefits of globalization, China has become the world’s leading globalizer David Goldman

Posted By on July 31st, 2022

https://asiatimes.com/2022/07/sino-forming-of-global-south-passes-point-of-no-return/

China’s exports to the largest economies of the Global South have nearly doubled from pre-Covid levels to a seasonally-adjusted US$70 billion in June 2022 from $38 billion in June 2019.

Several factors have impelled the surge in Chinese exports, but the most important impulse comes from China’s strategic investment in digital and physical infrastructure, ranging from broadband networks in Indonesia and Brazil to power plants in Turkey and railways in Southeast Asia.

As Western nations question the benefits of globalization, China has become the world’s leading globalizer.

What I called “China’s plan to Sino-form the world” in a 2020 book has advanced so far that it is beyond the capacity of the United States and its allies to impede. Half a billion people in neighboring countries now depend on Chinese technology for communications, data processing and logistics, providing China with a nearly limitless source of young workers for its industries and an ever-expanding export market.

For China, economic outreach to the Global South is key to breaking through American efforts to contain China’s drive for economic predominance. China, wrote the influential “Observer” columnist Chen Feng on July 28, “has to solve the problem of generating its own independent growth momentum, after breaking through the critical point of the ‘Matthew Effect,’” the economic maxim that rich countries get richer and poor countries get poorer.