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February 2020

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

INTERVIEW (Part I): Swedish Author Johan Norberg On The Devastating Impact Of Socialism, And What It Could Cost The U.S.

By on February 16th, 2020

https://www.dailywire.com/news/interview-part-i-swedish-author-johan-norberg-on-the-devastating-impact-of-socialism-and-what-it-could-cost-the-u-s?itm_source=parsely-api?utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email&utm_content=021520-news&utm_campaign=position3

Frank Camp February 14th, 2020
With the success of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and rival Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has come the rise in notoriety and popularity of so-called Democratic socialism in the United States.

According to a 2019 Gallup survey, 43% of Americans said that “some form of socialism [would] be a good thing” for the United States. Regardless of whether or not Americans fully understand what “socialism” means, they appear to support it in some way nonetheless.

Because of this development, I thought it would be vital to speak with Swedish author Johan Norberg, an historian of ideas and CATO Institute fellow, who has written such books as “In Defense of Global Capitalism” and “Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future,” among others.

His documentary film, “Sweden, Lessons for America?” hit the airwaves in 2018, and can be rented or purchased on Amazon and iTunes, and is available for free on YouTube.

In part one of this two-part interview, Norberg discusses socialism as a philosophy, the rise and fall of Sweden due to its experimentation with socialist ideas, the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders and what that means for the United States, and how even voluntary “libertarian” experiments in socialism have failed.

DW: There are a lot of people who cite the so-called “Nordic model” when advocating for socialism or “democratic socialism.” Is Sweden a socialist nation? And if it’s not, why do people seem to think it is?

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HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

A Short History of Palestinian Rejectionism By Dr. Edy Cohen

By on February 16th, 2020

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/palestinian-rejectionism/

The consistent and enduring Palestinian rejection of any and all peace initiatives with Israel, most recently the “Deal of the Century,” calls into question the commitment of the Palestinian leadership not only to peace but to the very welfare and safety of the Palestinian people.

Taking into account all the peace initiatives proposed to end the conflict between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs over the last 83 years, we must consider the possibility that the Palestinians—or at least their leaders—do not want to establish their own state.

Their sight is currently set on the big prize—the entire state of Israel—and they are playing for time. In the meantime, they plan to continue to subsist on monies donated by the Arabs and the Europeans. Many of the Arab states have grown disenchanted with this enterprise, and their assistance, particularly from the Saudis, has been discontinued in recent years.

President Trump has also reduced the flow of US support. Only the Europeans remain committed to the implacable Palestinian narrative.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pelosi Names First Head of House Whistleblower Office By Zachary Stieber

By on February 15th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pelosi-names-first-head-of-house-whistleblower-office_3239173.html

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Saturday announced the first director of a new office, the House of Representatives’ Office of the Whistleblower Ombudsman.

The office was established at the beginning of the current Congress and is charged with developing best practices for whistleblower intake for House offices and providing trainings to House offices on how to safely and confidentially receive information from whistleblowers.

The office is meant to be independent and nonpartisan, according to Pelosi’s office.

Pelosi said the first director of the office is Shanna Devine, who most recently advocated for whistleblower and other occupational rights for Public Citizen, a public interest organization located in Washington. She began her career with the Government Accountability Project.

The director is selected by the speaker of the House with advice from the chairs and ranking members of the House Committees on Administration and Oversight and Reform.

Devine’s “deep policy experience will be vital, as the first-ever Director of the Office of the Whistleblower Ombudsman, as she works to ensure that the House has the support and tools to carry out our legislative oversight responsibilities for the American people,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the House Administration Committee, added in a statement: “The establishment of the House Office of the Whistleblower Ombudsman and the appointment of Shanna Devine to lead this new office is an important step to uphold our end of the bargain by providing offices of the House of Representatives with the resources and trainings necessary to protect and empower those who strive to bring about accountability and transparency for the American people.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

President Trump Keeps Promises to the ‘Forgotten Americans’ Kay C. James

By on February 15th, 2020

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68525-president-trump-keeps-promises-to-the-forgotten-americans-2020-02-12

In his 2016 victory speech, Donald Trump talked about “the forgotten men and women of our country,” declaring that they “will be forgotten no longer.” Today, after months of impeachment proceedings, accusations of wrongdoing and a media that has reported overwhelmingly negative stories about him for three years, his polling numbers are at their highest ever.

Why? Because the president kept his promise to remember the forgotten, and he’s continued to push ahead with policies to help them and every American.

President Trump’s “forgotten men and women” are the farmer, the factory worker, and the middle-class men and women who have been ignored or even sneered at by Washington politicians. They are the people of “flyover country” and “Middle America.” They are the people CNN host Don Lemon and his guests recently made fun of when they called Trump supporters rubes and used mock Southern accents to paint them as uneducated, illiterate and unable to find places like Ukraine on a map.

Mr. Trump’s “forgotten” are the average, patriotic hard-working Americans who pay taxes for government programs many of them will never use. Many are religious. Some are gun owners. A surprising number are Democrats, independents or political agnostics.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Waste No Tears on the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri Tony Thomas

By on February 15th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/02/shed-no-tears-for-rajendra-pachauri/

It’s a worthy saying, “Do not speak ill of the dead”, but I’ll make an exception for Dr Rajendra Pachauri. The chair of the IPCC for 13 years, to 2015, died at 79 last Thursday, January 13, of heart problems. He bugged out of the IPCC abruptly when a 29-year-old woman employed at his TERI think-tank called the cops about his sexual harassment for 15 months since almost the day she arrived there. He then used the labyrinths of the Indian court systems to stall the prosecutors for five years and ruin the life of his courageous young victim. A TERI panel affirmed her complaint, in which she  deposed:

I feel broken and scarred in body and mind due to Dr. Pachauri’s behaviour and actions. I get frequent panic attacks due to the constant harassment and being made to feel like an object of vulgar desire from this man, who is old enough to be my grandfather.

Apart from taking sexual advantage of his top-dog status at TERI and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Pachauri was a perjurer, an habitual liar and fantasist about the IPCC, a hypocrite, corrupt, and a non-scientist prepared to defame real scientists to cover his own and the IPCC’s gross bumbling. All round, he was an exemplar of the carpet-baggers aboard the catastrophic-warming bandwagon, currently on a roll involving $US1.5 trillion global spending a year. This essay documents the above.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Crumbling of Cuba’s Grand Socialist Experiment By John Eidson

By on February 15th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/the_crumbling_of_cubas_grand_socialist_experiment.html

John Alpert is an American photojournalist whose work is featured in the Netflix documentary Cuba and the Cameraman.  He first went to the island nation in 1972, a little more than a decade after the Cuban Revolution.  Over the next 45 years, Alpert returned to Cuba, each time taking pictures of its towns and cities and people.  The images he took are a timeline that chronicle how Castro’s socialist revolution played out for the Cuban people in the years that lay ahead.

A disarmingly polite young photojournalist at the time, Alpert was one of the few Americans granted face-to-face meetings with Castro.  With the U.S. media curious about the grand socialist experiment unfolding in Cuba, Alpert was invited to appear on TV programming to discuss his conversations with Cuba’s communist dictator.  Alpert was quite impressed when Castro said he was taking concrete measures to make life better for the Cuban people, citing as evidence a free health care system, free schools, free higher education, and shiny new and rent-free housing projects. When Alpert first visited Cuba, the shelves of grocery stores and other retail establishments were filled with consumer goods of every description.

To a young photojournalist who was idealistic and somewhat naïve at the time, socialism seemed to portend a bright future for Cuba.  With its people happy and well taken care of by a paternalistic government, things were going well.  But as time moved one, Cuba’s house-of-cards communist system fell apart.  The free goods and services given to the Cuban people were funded not by the country’s top-down collectivist economy, but by a massive infusion of hard cash, gasoline, food, and other provisions from the Soviet Union.  When the Soviets eventually pulled the plug as their own socialist economy was crumbling, the day-to-day lives of the Cuban people fell on hard times, a rude reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s observation the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Bloomberg’s money sowing the seeds of destruction of the Democrat party By Thomas Lifson

By on February 15th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/bloombergs_money_sowing_the_seeds_of_destruction_of_the_democrat_party.html

Right before our eyes, a mega-billionaire is buying the presidential nomination of a political party, and oddly enough, it is the party that decries inequality of wealth and whose leading lights debate taxing billionaires out of existence.

This will not end well for the Democrats.  Bloomberg is luring the party’s elites into visibly betraying the principles most of its rank-and-file hold dear and identifying themselves as sellouts who can be bought by sheer force of lucre. A bitter split will be hard to avoid.

Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal gets right to the point in his headline” “Bloomberg buys the Democratic elite.” It is not the rank and file getting rich off of Bloomberg, but rather the ostensible leadership class, and therein lie the seeds of destruction for the party that purports to be about the common man, woman, and nonbinary individual.

He’s distorting the incentives of activists, officials and campaign fixers who suddenly are thinking less about a presidential victory and more about the Bloomberg gravy train.

Jenkins cites these examples of leaders betraying their people and their principles:

When a recording leaked of Mr. Bloomberg defending stop-and-frisk in New York, Andre Fields of the liberal voting-rights group Fair Fight Action rushed out a tweet hitting him as a “true terrorist” but promptly deleted it. Fair Fight Action had received $5 million in funding from Mr. Bloomberg.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Science Says There Are Only Two Genders, No Gender ‘Spectrum’ By Matt Margolis

By on February 15th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/science-says-there-are-only-two-genders-no-gender-spectrum/

In the increasingly brainwashed world we live in, it is incredibly refreshing when experts are willing to speak the politically incorrect truth. In Thursday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, biologists Colin M. Wright and Emma N. Hilton provide extensive commentary on the transgender fad and the notion of gender fluidity. What does the science say?  In short, it says that are only two genders: male and female.

Sadly, such an obvious conclusion can get you branded as a bigot these days

And what about the gender “spectrum” and gender being a social construct? Wright and Hilton completely destroy the basis of these concepts. “If male and female are merely arbitrary groupings, it follows that everyone, regardless of genetics or anatomy should be free to choose to identify as male or female, or to reject sex entirely in favor of a new bespoke ‘gender identity,'” they write. “To characterize this line of reasoning as having no basis in reality would be an egregious understatement. It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.”

They explain that “In humans, reproductive anatomy is unambiguously male or female at birth more than 99.98% of the time.” Humans, just like most animals and plants, have two distinct biological sexes with the corresponding anatomy for reproduction. “No third type of sex cell exists in humans, and therefore there is no sex ‘spectrum’ or additional sexes beyond male and female. Sex is binary.”

According to Wright and Hilton,  denying the “reality of biological sex” in favor of subjective “gender identity” raises “serious human-rights concerns for vulnerable groups including women, homosexuals and children.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

REMEMBERING DANIEL PEARL by Jeff Benson

By on February 15th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/14/remembering-daniel-pearl/

This Friday, I will be at a minyan for morning prayers. It will be the 19th of Shevat — 18 years since the journalist and musician Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan by Islamic terrorists because he was a Jew. I will remember Danny’s warm, encouraging smile, and I will speak the kaddish in his memory.

Hating Jews is, sadly, an outsized and grotesque part of the human story. But, on that day in 2002, when evil embodied in man stole from us the future of Daniel Pearl, he left us with words that can help us shape and determine our future, yet unrevealed.

After Danny’s murder, his parents, Ruth and Judea Pearl, published a book, I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl. In it, Dr. Pearl recalls Danny’s last words: “Back in the town of Bnei Brak, there is a street named after my great-grandfather, Chayim Pearl, who was one of the founders of the town.”

Elizabeth Warren has run out of steam, danken gott (thank God), her professorial persona full of numbers that she equates with ethics failing…

In 1924, Danny’s great-grandfather knew he had to return to his ancestral home. He left behind the hatred endured in exile, purchased a sandy plot in the land of Israel, and brought his wife and four children to a place where he was free to build a better life for his family, and to help fashion a better future for the world.

Danny’s father, Judea, believes that Danny freely chose to recount the actions of his great-grandfather as a rebuke to those who were about to murder him and steal his life. Danny wanted his murderers to know that — in contrast to their destruction — Jews plant and build and toil to fashion a better world, a better future for all people.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Maduro acknowledges his socialist delusions Lawrence Haas

By on February 15th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/483213-maduro-acknowledges-his-socialist-delusions

Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro’s quiet move to restore elements of free enterprise to his nation’s economy should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone listening to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ siren song of socialism in the Democratic primaries or who is still tempted by promises of socialist bliss.

Maduro’s move represents a desperate attempt to dampen public outrage, and thus maintain his grip on power, in the midst of an astonishing economic collapse that economists view as the world’s worst in decades in the absence of war.

Venezuela’s tale is hardly a unique one. In recent decades, socialist nations across the world have scrapped their doctrinaire visions and incorporated elements of free enterprise to rescue their ailing economies. Perhaps most striking, a post-Mao China opted for a more market-based economy as Deng Xiaoping conceded that his nation could not otherwise compete with the United States.

Maduro’s bow to reality is particularly instructive. It comes a decade after the Great Recession and financial collapse of 2008 and 2009 shook confidence in capitalism and emboldened the proponents of socialism and other alternative models. With that crisis long over, however, capitalism has again proved its mettle by nourishing more prosperity and higher living standards while Venezuela’s economy continues shrinking at an alarming rate.

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