Displaying posts published in

June 2020

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian Issue: a Core Cause of Middle East Turbulence? Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on June 9th, 2020

Why is the red carpet, which welcomes Palestinian leaders to Western capitals, exchanged for a shabby rug when they land in most Arab capitals?
In 2020, the widely-disseminated Arabic hashtag, “Palestine is not my cause,” reflects the growing Arab disdain toward Palestinians.

It is consistent with the policy of key Arab leaders, who facilitated the successful conclusion of the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace negotiations, by avoiding the myth of Palestinian centrality.  For example, Morocco’s King Hassan, who provided an essential tailwind to the initial stage of the peace negotiations, proclaimed: “The PLO is a cancer in the Arab body.” It is also compatible with a statement made by Egypt’s former President Sadat, a co-signer of the peace treaty: “Why would I want a Palestinian state?! A Palestinian state would enhance the Soviet standing in the region and would join the radical Arab camp.”  This position was echoed by Mubarak, Sadat’s deputy, who succeeded him as President: “Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are not concerned about the Palestinians, and Jordan does not want a Palestinian state either…nor does Israel” (No More War, E. Ben Elissar, 1995, pp 106, 209, 207).

The tangible Arab walk – rather than the placating Arab talk – on the Palestinian issue reflects Arab contempt of the Palestinian track record, as well as the peripheral role played by the Palestinian issue in shaping Middle East reality.

In 2020, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and all other pro-US Arab regimes are preoccupied with domestic and regional epicenters of subversion, terrorism, conventional, ballistic and nuclear threats, which significantly transcend the Palestinian issue.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Reality Is Gradually Catching Up To Green Energy Francis Menton

By on June 9th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-6-8-reality-is-gradually-catching-up-to-green-energy

If you dutifully read your U.S. mainstream media, you undoubtedly have the impression that “clean” and “green” energy is rapidly sweeping all before it, and soon will supplant fossil fuels in powering our economy. After all, many major states, including California and New York, have mandated some form of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, or in some cases even earlier. That’s only 30 years away. And reports are everywhere that investment in “renewables,” particularly wind and solar energy, continues to soar. For example, from Reuters in January we have “U.S. clean energy investment hits new record despite Trump administration views.” In the New York Times on May 13 it’s “In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S.” The final victory of wind and solar over the evil fossil fuels mushttps://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-6-8-reality-is-gradually-catching-up-to-green-energy

Actually, that’s all a myth. The inherent high cost and unreliability of wind and solar energy mean that they are highly unlikely ever to be more than niche players in the overall energy picture. Politicians claim progressive virtue by commissioning vast farms of wind turbines and solar panels, at taxpayer or ratepayer expense, without anyone ever figuring out — or even addressing — how these things can run a fully functioning electrical grid without complete fossil fuel backup. And the electrical grid is the easy part. How about airplanes? How about steel mills? I’m looking for someone to demonstrate that this “net zero” thing is something more than a ridiculous fantasy, but I can’t find it.

To stay grounded in reality, there is no better source than the multiple-times-weekly email from the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

As the New York Times Goes, So Goes Biden By Stanley Kurtz

By on June 9th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/as-the-new-york-times-goes-so-goes-biden/?utm_source=recirc-

The resignation of the editorial page editor of the New York Times for publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to quell the riots marks the completion of the long, slow transformation of the Democratic Party. Whatever face the Democrats present to the world, their woke left fringe is now in charge. That fringe has not only abandoned core American principles like freedom of speech and due process, it has reimagined American history as a story of “systemic” oppression and demanded radical transformation along identitarian–socialist lines. If the New York Times can’t stand up to Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of its odious and just-plain-false 1619 Project, how will Joe Biden stand up to a woke New York Times?

Past his prime, without a policy compass to speak of, Biden would be long gone if he hadn’t been the Democratic establishment’s last best hope of blocking Bernie Sanders. Biden is supposed to give the party a moderate face that will appeal to centrist voters. Increasingly, however, the bases of the two parties are becoming the real contestants in this election, while the candidates are just along for the ride. True, Trump is larger than life and a constant media obsession. Yet Trump appeals to Republicans — whether they like his style or not — chiefly because he protects them from the illiberalism and cultural overreach people such as Hannah-Jones. Trump’s larger-than-life personality matters less than it seems because he’s all about the base.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Campus War on Free Speech Spreads to U.S. Newsrooms By Mark Hemingway

By on June 9th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/09/campus_war_on_free_speech_spreads_to_us_newsrooms.html

Two weeks ago, if you’d asked what American institution was most intolerant of dissenting opinion, preoccupied with promoting radical ideology, and prone to erupting into disruptive temper tantrums, the answer would have been easy. Now it’s not so clear – the hysteria on college campuses has spread to America’s newsrooms.

Over the weekend, the opinion page editor of the New York Times, James Bennet, resigned under pressure, and another opinion editor, Jim Dao, was reassigned to the newsroom. Their offense was soliciting and publishing an op-ed by GOP Sen. Tom Cotton last week on invoking the Insurrection Act. After recent protests in over 700 cities, polling showed a majority of Americans, including nearly four in 10 African Americans, were amenable to using the military to restore order.

Whatever you think of the need for the Insurrection Act, which was last used during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, Cotton’s op-ed had undeniable news value. That didn’t matter to the more than 1,000 employees of the Times who signed a letter objecting to the Cotton op-ed. “Running this puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger,” was the message that upset Times employees spread across Twitter.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

We Have Entered a Looking-Glass World By David Solway

By on June 9th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/we_have_entered_a_lookingglass_world.html

We live in an age characterized by belief — that is, belief in things that do not exist, belief in complete figments of unanchored imagination, abstractions that have no contact with or bearing on reality. Call it the age of irrealism, of pervasive virtuality, of estrangement from the objective world.

Consider several popular notions or beliefs, memes as they are sometimes called, which operate as delusions erroneously confirmed as fact.

There are more than two sexes, biology notwithstanding. Indeed, there are “57 Varieties” of gender. Also, in contradiction, gender is a “social construct.”
Islam is a “religion of peace.”
The university campus is aswarm with female victims of rape and sexual assault.
The planet is entering a carboniferous period as temperatures rise to unsustainable levels.
There is an organized and historical campaign in the Judeo-Christian West of men against women known as the “Patriarchy.”
There is a vast movement of White Supremacists ruthlessly oppressing those of other races and creeds.
America is bedeviled by institutional racism.
There is no such thing as truth.
Looting, vandalism and physical violence are legitimate forms of civil protest.
The value of people derives from their membership in a group rather than from their status as unique individuals.

We have entered the looking-glass world. None of these beliefs correspond to reality, as every sensible person knows.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Yoel Roth Explains It All For You Unmasking Twitter’s “Head of Site Integrity,” the man who fact-checked President Trump. Lloyd Billingsley

By on June 9th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/yoel-roth-explains-it-all-you-lloyd-billingsley/

President Trump recently tweeted about the dangers of mail-in ballots and voter fraud, particularly in California. Twitter attached an alert claiming the tweets were “potentially misleading” and directed users to allegedly corrective website. The president pushed back, but with a pandemic and insurrection going on, the conflict failed to get the attention it deserved.

Twitter did not reveal who, exactly, was charging the president with potentially misleading information. It soon emerged that the culprit was Twitter’s own “Head of Site Integrity” Yoel Roth, an avid tweeter his own self.

In 2017, for example, Roth referred to Trump staffers as “ACTUAL NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE” and the content cop wasn’t done. When Kellyanne Conway goes on television, Roth tweeted, “we’re speaking with Joseph Goebbels about the first 100 days.” As Eric Idle once quipped, “I hate people who vent their loquacity with extraneous bombastic circumlocution.” On the other hand, the man is a deep thinker.

As Roth reflected in another tweet, “How does a personality-free bag of farts like Mitch McConnell actually win elections?” On that theme Roth does not hesitate to weigh in. Back in 2016, for example, he tweeted, “I’ve never donated to a presidential campaign before, but I just gave $100 to Hillary for America. We can’t f–k around anymore.” As Olson Johnson said  of Gabby Johnson’s speech in Blazing Saddles, “who can argue with that?” And as fellow tweeters might wonder, who is this powerful prose stylist?

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Hillary Without Bill What would her life have been like if she’d gone it alone? Bruce Bawer

By on June 9th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/hillary-without-bill-bruce-bawer/

In his 1976 novel The Alteration, Kingsley Amis imagined a contemporary Britain in which the Protestant Reformation never took place. In The Plot against America (2004), Philip Roth imagined a 1940s America in which Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 election and signs peace treaties with Germany and Japan. In her new novel, Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld imagines an equally portentous alternate world: one in which Hillary Rodham never married Bill Clinton – and ended up being elected president in 2016.

Well, it’s not quite correct to say that Sittenfeld imagines it. There’s not really much in the way of imagination in this stunningly vapid, pedestrian piece of work, which plods from incident to incident without a single vivid detail or snappy exchange of dialogue or hint of wit. It’s so flatfooted, so thoroughly uninspired, that one assumes, in the early pages, that Sittenfeld – who is a woman – banged it out prontissimo, Joyce Carol Oates-style, with the cynical objective of cashing in on all the poor hapless women who were so devastated by Hillary’s loss that they’d presumably be desperate to escape into an alternate universe in which Hillary won. But as one reads on, one acquires the distinct, and horrifying, impression that Sittenfeld’s heart is actually in this leaden, lifeless thing, and that escaping into her own sketchily depicted parallel universe is Sittenfeld’s way of consoling herself.  

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Horror and humiliation in Minneapolis Where black churches nourished the civil rights movement, identity politics has built a culture of rage and rejection David Goldman *****

By on June 9th, 2020

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

Why did the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd in police custody arouse a national wave of revulsion? There are two vectors to this wave: The humiliation of American blacks and the horror of white liberals.

If police are restrained, or even de-funded, as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat of New York) demands, the crime rate will rise sharply, and blacks are far more likely to be crime victims than whites.

Why black Americans should want to undermine the police forces that protect them is a sensitive question that has a simple answer: The price of such police protection is humiliation.

The sort of policing that keeps criminals off the streets through filters such as stopping and frisking large numbers of people and stopping cars with broken tail lights also subjects large numbers of innocent people to humiliating examination and occasional mistreatment.

Most people would rather be dead than humiliated, and black Americans are no exception. 

A black American is a thousand times more likely to be killed by another black American than by a police officer, as the estimable Heather MacDonald explained last week in The Wall Street Journal.

To be precise, American police (white or black) killed exactly nine unarmed black Americans in 2019. Whether these shootings were justified is a different issue. That is about one one-thousandth of the 7,407 blacks murdered in 2018 (last year for which data are available), about 90% of whom were killed by other black Americans. 

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EDUCATION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

UCLA Professor Placed on Leave After Rejecting Special Treatment for Black StudentsBy Gq Pan

By on June 9th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/ucla-professor-placed-on-leave-after-rejecting-specia

A professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) is reportedly on leave after he refused to give black students special treatment in their final exams.

Over the past week, nearly 20,000 members of the UCLA community have called on the university to fire Gordon Klein, an accounting professor at the Anderson School of Management. The petition to remove Klein from his position started shortly after an email was shared on social media, in which he rejected a student’s request of special accommodations for black peers, in light of the protests over the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.

“Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only?” Klein wrote in the email, according to the petition, which deemed his responses “insensitive, dismissive, and woefully racist.”

“Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black-half Asian?” Klein continued. “What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half?”

Asking if any students in the class were from Minneapolis, Klein said he assumed that “they probably are especially devastated as well,” especially if they’re white, because “some might think that they’re racist even if they are not.”

“One last thing strikes me: Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the ‘color of their skin,’” he continued, citing the monumental “I Have a Dream” speech. “Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

US Manufacturing Exodus From China Gets Underway By Emel Akan

By on June 9th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-manufacturing-exodus-from-china-gets-underway

Move is mainly to Vietnam, Burma, the Philippines, and Bangladesh, per supplier inspection data.

WASHINGTON—The CCP virus pandemic has put global supply risks into the limelight, and recent data compiled by a Hong Kong-based supply chain inspection company shows that U.S. firms have already started moving their sourcing away from China.

A manufacturing exodus was already underway due to the uncertainties created by the U.S.–China trade war in 2019. The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, has accelerated that trend and encouraged more companies to reduce their excessive dependence on China as a single supplier.

Much of the manufacturing is moving to Southeast Asia and South Asia, according to a report by Qima, a Hong Kong-based quality control and supply chain inspection company. The Qima report is based on data collected from tens of thousands of supply chain inspections conducted globally for consumer goods brands and retailers. Companies use these inspection reports to make decisions about whether to migrate to a new supplier.

In the first two months of the year, demand for inspections and audits from North American buyers increased by 45 percent year-on-year in Southeast Asia, with Vietnam, Burma (also known as Myanmar), and the Philippines reaping the benefits, the report stated.

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