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July 2020

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, POLITICS Comments turned off

Biden’s Green New Deal Is Just As Crazy As AOC’s

By on July 16th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/16/bidens-green-new-deal-is-just-as-crazy-as-aocs/

Joe Biden’s $2 trillion climate change plan, released this week, was described by one liberal outlet as “the Green New Deal, minus the crazy.” We beg to differ. Just look at Biden’s plan to outlaw the internal combustion engines for starters.

Biden says that on his first day in office, he will develop “rigorous new fuel economy standards aimed at ensuring 100% of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be zero emissions.”

Biden hasn’t said exactly when he wants new cars to be all-electric, but House Democrats have already established a timetable. Their new climate change plan calls for mandating 100% “clean” vehicles by 2035.

Keep in mind that as of today, plug-in electrics account for 0.5% of cars on the road, and made up less than 2% of new vehicles sold in 2019. And that’s despite massive taxpayer subsidies that have cost taxpayers $5 billion in credits to — mostly wealthy — EV buyers.

Clearly, consumers are not that interested in plug-ins, which is why Biden and his fellow Democrats want to force electric cars on everyone in the name of climate change.

Aside from fuel economy mandates, Biden also wants to extend and expand the EV tax credit, pump federal money into charging stations, create a new “cash for clunkers” program for those who trade in a gasoline-powered car for a plug-in.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Beinart’s Final Solution: End Israel as Nation-State of the Jewish People by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on July 16th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16242/peter-beinart-final-solution

If Israel were to end its existence as the nation-state of the Jewish people — as Beinart advocates — and become a Jewish “homeland” in a single binational, bi-religious state, a demographic war would become inevitable, in which Jews and Muslims would compete to become a majority. As soon as a Muslim majority materialized, the Jewish “homeland” would become precisely the kind of “Bantustan” that Beinart has railed against in the context of South Africa.

The Jewish minority would be ruled by the Muslim majority, even if it were given some degree of autonomy. Their protection would be largely in the hands of the Muslim majority, many of whom believe there is no place for a Jewish entity anywhere in the region.

A Palestinian majority would not allow persecuted Jews from around the world to seek asylum, as they can today under Israel’s Law of Return. Instead, the Palestinian state would enact its own law of return that would allow millions of exiles to “return” and assure a permanent Muslim supermajority.

Peter Beinart’s New York Times op-ed advocating the end of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people is a study in historical ignorance, willful deception and arrogant rejection of democracy.

Beinart proposed that a single binational, bi-religious state in what is now Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip replace current Israel, whose Jewish population would then be given a “homeland” within the new nation. But Beinart is woefully ignorant of previous attempts to create or maintain binational or bi-religious states.

Beinart ignores the lessons of history surrounding the former Yugoslavia — Tito’s failed effort to create a single artificial nation from different ethnicities and religions — which ended in genocide, tragedy and its breakup into several states now living in relative peace. He omits any mention of Lebanon — a failed experiment in sharing power between Muslims and Christians. He writes as if Hindu India still included Muslim Pakistan, instead of having been divided after considerable bloodshed and divisiveness. He focuses instead on two countries, Northern Ireland and South Africa, which bear little relationship to current-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Northern Ireland is a country whose population is ethnically similar, with only religious differences at a time when religion is playing a far less important role in the life of many secular Northern Irish. South Africa was a country in which a tiny minority of whites dominated a large majority of Blacks, and is now a dominantly Black nation.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Lebanon’s New ‘Great Satan’ by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on July 16th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16241/lebanon-hezbollah-great-satan

Hezbollah’s financial crisis is the result of US sanctions on its patrons in Iran, which had been supporting the terrorist group annually with about $700 million from oil revenues…. — Fahim al-Hamid, Saudi journalist, okaz.com.sa, March 22, 2020.

For several weeks now, a hashtag titled “Nasrallah has ruined the country” has been trending on Twitter, with many Lebanese and Iraqis accusing the Hezbollah leader of destroying their countries.

“Nasrallah has taken Lebanon hostage and accused the US of Lebanon’s economic collapse. Hezbollah is a major partner of the network that looted the Lebanese treasury and banks. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization running an entire country.” — Video clip posted on social media platforms.

“No one has the right to drag us into the place they want, and no one has the right to impose on us a lifestyle that we do not want…. We do not want to live in isolation and be cut off from the West, Arabs and the entire world.” — Sami Gemayel, Lebanese Member of Parliament, Asharq Al-Awsat, June 18, 2020.

Hezbollah (Arabic for “Party of God”) has long been functioning as a state-within-a-state in Lebanon and its leader, Nasrallah, is the de facto ruler of the country. Now that he is having trouble paying salaries to his terrorists, Nasrallah is hoping that the US will step in and rescue Lebanon (and Hezbollah) from collapse.

Has Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah changed his mind about the US, which he always considered a great enemy of the Arabs and Muslims? Not likely. More likely is that he is trying to dupe the Americans into giving Lebanon money to prevent the collapse of his Iranian-backed terrorist group.

Dominated by heavily-armed Hezbollah, Lebanon is currently facing the worst economic crisis in its history. The crisis is seen as the biggest threat to stability since the 1975-90 civil war in Lebanon. The World Bank warned last November that if conditions worsened, the proportion of Lebanese living in poverty could rise to 50%. Since then, the economy has been further hit by the restrictions imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, so the crisis has only deepened.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Communist China Partners With Islamic Iran Intensifying China’s challenge to U.S. ascendancy.

By on July 16th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/communist-china-partners-islamic-iran-joseph-klein/

Communist China is forging a 25-year strategic partnership with the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is an economic and security alliance between two America-hating dictatorships. As a result, China’s footprint in Iran will increase in proportion to its expected $400 billion of investment in Iran’s energy, petrochemical, transport, and manufacturing infrastructure and purchase of oil at a discounted price over the next 25 years. Beijing’s ongoing infrastructure work includes the China National Nuclear Corporation’s redesign of an Iranian heavy water nuclear reactor at Arak.

According to the New York Times, which has had access to the proposed agreement between the two countries, the agreement “calls for joint training and exercises, joint research and weapons development and intelligence sharing.” China would also be helping to construct port facilities, including one just outside of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategically important entrance to the Persian Gulf.

China was already Iran’s largest trading partner and oil client in 2019, although Iran-China trade fell by over 34 percent to $23 billion compared to 2018. The decline was in part the result of the impact of the Trump administration’s crippling sanctions imposed on the Iranian regime and firms doing business with the regime. Nevertheless, while Chinese companies are continuing to keep a wary eye on the impact of U.S. sanctions on their overall business, the Chinese government appears willing to risk a short-term economic hit to its state-run companies in order to reap the geopolitical benefits of gaining greater influence in the Middle East region through an expanded relationship with Iran. This relationship promises to bring Iran more firmly into China’s Belt and Road Initiative orbit. China is delivering yet another message to the United States that China will use its increasing economic power to challenge U.S. ascendancy in defining the rules of international relations and multilateralism.

Alex Vatanka, an Iran analyst at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, was quoted as saying during a Voice of America Persian interview that “Iran is potentially a lucrative market for China, which wants to keep its stranglehold on that market and keep out rivals.” Vatanka added that “China also does not want to see the Islamic republic fall because of American pressure, an outcome the Chinese would read as a net loss for themselves, geopolitically.” 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Nigerian privilege By Sarah Lilly *****

By on July 16th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/nigerian_privilege.html

The war on white privilege is permeating the entire world. As a white person, I am anxiously aggrieved by the obsessive persecution of my fellow whites and I’m feverishly in fear that my white privilege will be looted from me like a loaf of bread taken from a New York deli. How will I survive without the constant assistance that this white supremacist system provides me? Out of pure self-preservation, we need to shift the focus of the mob towards another group that has been stealthily benefitting from their privilege unscathed… the Nigerians.   

Perhaps you are unaware, but Nigerians are one of the most successful demographics in the United States. While the average household income in the United States is $61,937, the median income for households of Nigerian ancestry is $68,658.

In fact, 10% of Nigerian headed households earn over $140,000 annually and 25% earn over $90,000 annually.

Nigerian immigrants rank in the top ten for both the percentage of persons 16 and older that are employed and the percentage with college degrees.

Nigerians are also one of the most educated demographics in the country. Of people over the age of 25, 37% of Nigerians hold a bachelor’s degree and 29% hold an advanced degree, compared to 20% and 11% of the total U.S. population respectively.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Marxo-Capitalism at Work By David Solway

By on July 16th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/marxocapitalism_at_work.html

It may well be that the hoary political distinction between left and right that has embedded itself in the language since the French Revolution of 1788-89, when the radical anti-monarchists and Jacobins sat on the left side of the chamber in the National Assembly and the traditionalists on the right, is no longer pertinent. The political binary that has dominated thought for over two centuries is growing obsolete.

The right is gradually being eroded, its traditional domains in government, church, education, corporate affairs and art, as Andrew Breitbart feared, gradually but inexorably losing their cultural authority and political credibility. With the advent of global financiers intent on remaking the world and the establishment of the giant media platforms and search engines, left and right are merging into a new, corporate, non-Hegelian synthesis. Soon there may be only different shades of left, which in practice means that once the progressivist venture is fully consummated, the term and concept of “left” would no longer apply. There would be little to the right of it.

We might say that the right is spending its way into the left. One of the great enigmas of our day is the fact that the most devoted and powerful socialists among us happen to be capitalist billionaires, corporate patricians laboring to destroy the democratic structures and free-market economies that allowed them to amass their fortunes in the first place. They are the elite members of the fabled one-percent whose policies and initiatives would ideally abolish the fiscal bracket to which they belong. Moreover, they are depriving young people of the social and economic conditions that they themselves enjoyed to blaze a path to opportunity and personal wealth.

They are, in short, cultural paradoxes who appear to suffer from a critical access of cognitive dissonance, Marxo-capitalists whose political loyalties and principles work against their own economic interests — unless, of course, they can successfully transform themselves into a managerial ruling class with a personal grip on the wealth of the nation. Such is clearly their aim. At that point, they need no longer compete in the marketplace but only with one another for the best seats on the Presidium. Company headquarters coalesce into a new Kremlin.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Silencing The Song of the South By Gamaliel Isaac

By on July 16th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/silencing_emthe_song_of_the_southem.html

Splash Mountain was a thrilling log flume ride for children in Disney’s Magic Kingdom.  Children were taken on an exciting ride past animatronic characters singing classic songs from the 1946 Disney movie The Song of the South.  Alas, our woke culture is not happy with Splash Mountain or Song of the South.  Over twenty thousand people signed a petition asking that the characters of Splash Mountain be changed to those of The Princess and the Frog, a 2009 film featuring Disney’s first African-American princess.  Disney caved in.  Long before the petition Disney decided not to release Song of the South in any home video format in the United States and after streaming technology came along Disney decided not to stream the movie. 

Fortunately, Disney released the movie in other countries.  When I read about how racist Song of the South was, a skeptical light bulb went off in my head and I ordered a DVD to see if it was really so bad.  My children loved the movie and I enjoyed it too.  The last thing that movie is, is racist.  So why did Disney cave in to demands to prevent Americans from seeing it?

Song of the South is a musical based on stories that originated in Africa.  So censoring Song of the South censored stories by black people.  The stories were compiled by Joel Chandler Harris who grew up on a plantation and heard them from a slave called Uncle Bob Capers.  In 1880, Harris published his first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings. In the book, he preserved the dialect of Uncle Bob Capers.  The book was an instant success, and Harris went on to publish another ten books of stories from Uncle Remus.  Walt Disney grew up reading those stories and one of his ambitions was to bring them to the silver screen.  His idea was to have both animated characters and people together in the same movie.  Walt Disney in his effort to be faithful to the stories kept the dialect of Uncle Remus although he simplified it somewhat so that it would be more understandable to general audiences. 

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Will Biden’s War on the Suburbs Become a Campaign Issue? By Stanley Kurtz

By on July 16th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/will-bidens-war-on-the-suburbs-become-a-campaign-issue/?utm_

In remarks Tuesday in the White House Rose Garden, President Trump promised to reverse what is arguably the most radical action of the Obama-Biden administration: promulgation of the rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH). Trump went beyond his tweet of a couple of weeks ago, when he said he “may” end the rule. Now he says he will in fact “take out” AFFH. This will need to be by amendment or modification, since the Obama-Biden AFFH is actually a wild over-reading of the phrase “affirmatively further” in current law.

The president said that coming from New York, he’d been following the Westchester County controversy for years. As I explain in Spreading the Wealth, the Obama administration ran a test of what would someday become his AFFH rule in suburban Westchester County, New York. The Obama administration effectively stripped Westchester County of its zoning power, forced it to spend tens of millions of dollars on high-density low-income housing, then ordered it to “affirmatively advertise” that housing to non-residents. In effect, the federal government took over Westchester and forced it to suspend its own laws and spend its tax money on non-residents. All this occurred without evidence, or even allegation, of housing discrimination. Westchester was actually one of the most diverse counties in New York at the time. Such demographic “imbalances” as existed there were a function of economics, not discrimination.

After the Obama-Biden administration intervened, Westchester’s local government flipped from Democratic to Republican. Rob Astorino was elected county executive and fought the Obama administration for years, although his hands were largely tied by a legal agreement signed by the previous Democratic county executive. (Astorino is now running for state senate, by the way, in a hotly contested race.) That gives you a sense of how powerful AFFH can be as a political issue. AFFH flipped the county that Bill and Hillary Clinton call home from blue to red. The question is whether President Trump will make AFFH and Biden’s anti-suburban plans an issue in the presidential election. The answer, I think, is “probably.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Peak Jacobinism? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on July 16th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/peak-jacobinism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Even the woke eventually fear the guillotine. T he Jacobin Left is just now beginning to get edgy.

A few of its appeasers and abettors are becoming embarrassed by some of the outright racists and nihilists of BLM and the Maoists of Antifa — and their wannabe hangers-on who troll the Internet hoping to scalp some minor celebrity.

The woke rich too are worried over talk about substantial wealth, capital-gains, and income taxes, even though they have the resources to navigate around the legislation from their wink-and-nod brethren. Soon, even Hunter Biden and the Clintons could be checking in with their legal teams to see how much it will cost them to get around the Squad’s new tax plan.

The lines are thinning a bit for the guillotine. And the guillotiners are starting to panic as they glimpse faces of a restless mob always starved for something to top last night’s torching. Finally, even looters and arsonists get tired of doing the same old, same old each night. They get bored with the puerile bullhorn chants, the on-spec spray-paint defacement, and the petite fascists among them who hog the megaphones. For the lazy and bored, statue toppling — all of those ropes, those icky pry bars, those heavy sledgehammers, and so much pulling — becomes hard work, especially as the police, camera crews, and fisticuffs thin out on the ground. And the easy bronze and stone prey are now mostly rubble. Now it’s either the big, tough stuff like Mount Rushmore or the crazy targets like Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

There are only so many ways for adult-adolescents to chant monotonously “Eat the Rich! Kill the Pigs! Black Lives Matter!” blah, blah, blah. And there are only so many Road Warrior Antifa ensembles of black hoodies, black masks, black pants, and black padding — before it all it ends up like just another shrill teachers’-union meeting in the school cafeteria or a prolonged adolescent Halloween prankster show.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Funds The Lincoln Project? Exactly Whom You Expect By David Harsanyi

By on July 16th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/who-funds-the-lincoln-project-exactly-whom-you-expect/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

If The Lincoln Project was exclusively campaigning against Donald Trump, one might be tempted to believe it wasn’t merely an arm of the Democratic Party. If one of its co-founders, John Weaver, hadn’t been registered as a foreign agent lobbying for a Russia-owned nuclear-energy company against U.S. sanctions not long ago, one might accept that the group believed the conspiracy theories it spreads. If the group wasn’t working against the moderate Republicans senators for the sin of supporting originalist Supreme Court justices, who will transcend the Trump presidency and help preserve the traditional constitutional order, one might believe that its mission was to preserve the system. If you target moderates like Susan Collins and Cory Gardner — politicians who not only parted with Trump on issues but have quite un-Trumpian dispositions — you’re not working against Trumpism, you’re working against the GOP.

The media can keep calling you “Republicans,” but if you support Democrats, take Democratic Party positions, make voting for Democrats all the way down the ticket a binary choice and moral imperative, and then take most of your money from big Democratic Party donors, you’re a Democrat. That’s fine. You should embrace it.

I’m not really a fan of making a big deal over a group’s funding. Your arguments should stand on their own. I don’t care who pays you. But if you advertise your cause as something it’s not, you’re a fraud. And the biggest funders of The Lincoln Project aren’t distraught Republicans but long-time Democratic Party operatives.

By far the biggest donor has been Stephen Mandel, who gave The Lincoln Project — which, as far as I can tell, produces cheap b-roll-laden ads and takes nearly 90 percent of its budget in “operating expenditures” — a million dollars. His company Lone Pine Capital, it seems, has given the Democratic Party Senate committee $497,000 this year, $248,500 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee, and a bunch of money to other left-wing candidates. During the 2018 cycle, Lone Pine Capital doled out $5,893,300 to Democrats. It gave $1,333,333 to Planned Parenthood.

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