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January 2023

US-Israel Kinship: Part 1 and Part 2 The Early Pilgrims as the Modern Day Exodus VIDEO

Part 1 The Early Pilgrims as the Modern Day Exodus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxOmhEYHhUs

Part 2 The Founding Fathers, Moses and the Bible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHssQLeKuVQ&t=2s

Israeli attorney general and legal advisers in judicial reformers’ crosshairs The government’s legal reform package calls for making ministry legal advisers’ opinions non-binding, putting an end to what it calls the “subjugation of the government to an unelected rank.” by David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/attorney-general-and-legal-advisers-in-judicial-reformers-crosshairs/

The Netanyahu government’s plan to enact wide-ranging judicial reform has taken center stage in Israeli politics, causing tens of thousands of opponents to take to the streets. On Monday, the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee will debate a part of the plan dealing with the proper role of ministry legal advisers, chief among them the attorney general (the position’s formal title is “Legal Adviser to the Government”).

The draft legislation heading to committee would allow ministers to choose whether or not to follow legal advisers’ opinions. “Legal advice given to the prime minister and any minister of the government will not bind them,” the bill’s summary states. “The government, the prime minister and any minister of the government may reject the legal advice and act contrary to it.”

Justice Minister Yariv Levin, in unveiling the “first stage” of his judicial reform plan on Jan. 4, stressed that the legal advisers are “advisers, not deciders, who represent the government and not their personal positions.” He called for an end to the “subjugation of the government to an unelected rank.”

They’re bringing legal advisers back down to earth, “making them understand that they’re advisers, that they’re not in control,” Haran Fainstein, a retired Israeli judge who teaches at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Criminology, told JNS.

“There’s no law that says a government representative has to act according to his or her legal advisers’ wishes. It was a decision of the Supreme Court years ago that made it mandatory. It was Shamgar who made the decision,” said Fainstein.

The Garage Papers From Alger Hiss to Sandy Berger, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, it’s all about memory against forgetting. By Lloyd Billingsley

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/17/the-garage-papers/

Classified documents have been turning up everywhere, even the garage where Joe Biden stashes his vintage Corvette. As Josh Hammer notes, the Delaware Democrat might have a problem.

Unauthorized possession of classified materials is a serious crime for obvious reasons. As vice president, Biden had no authority to declassify, conceal, or leak the classified materials now being discovered. This might be a sign that the deep state is going after their useful idiot, perhaps to make way for a different 2024 candidate. 

So far, veterans of the intelligence community are not shouting that the classified documents are only “Russian disinformation.” On the other hand, the sudden discoveries and appointment of a special counsel could be another whitewash. 

Special counsel Robert Hur, as Roger Kimball notes, is an “anti-Trump former Robert Mueller apparatchik and swamp monster of the tier-one level.” Nothing to see here folks, so shut up and shelter in place. Revelations pending, it is fully apparent that Joe Biden is a certified Clinton reenactor. 

Former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton kept reams of sensitive data on an unsecured home-brew server. When some 30,000 Clinton emails sparked interest, she bleached the server clean and smashed up phones and other devices. Clinton’s actions violated several statutes but the FBI never conducted a surprise raid in the style of their action against Donald Trump and his associates.

FBI boss James Comey, a longtime Clinton crony, contended that no reasonable prosecutor would pursue the case against Hillary Clinton. To the surprise of nobody, none did. That doubtless encouraged Biden, who may have recalled the experience of Samuel “Sandy” Berger, a Harvard law alum. 

Demographic Crisis Looms in China With First Drop in Population in Six Decades By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/01/17/demographic-crisis-looms-in-china-with-first-drop-in-population-in-six-decades-n1662449

China’s population fell for the first time in six decades last year as the nation’s population of 1.4 billion declined by about 850,000.

Short term, this is just a blip on the radar. But China also is afflicted with a rapidly aging population, which means that China is very likely to get old before it gets rich.

“China’s demographic and economic outlook is much bleaker than expected. China will have to adjust its social, economic, defense and foreign policies,” said demographer Yi Fuxian.

“Economic growth will have to depend more on productivity growth,” added Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management.

Reuters:

China’s birth rate last year was just 6.77 births per 1,000 people, down from a rate of 7.52 births in 2021 and marking the lowest birth rate on record.

The number of Chinese women of childbearing age, which the government defines as aged 25 to 35, fell by about 4 million, Kang said.

The death rate, the highest since 1974 during the Cultural Revolution, was 7.37 deaths per 1,000 people, which compares with a rate of 7.18 deaths in 2021.

Contrast those numbers with the U.S., where our births per thousand people were 12.01 and deaths per thousand were 6.98. Eventually, with fewer and fewer productive workers to support China’s aging population, a demographic crisis will overwhelm the state’s ability to cope.

Cleaning Out Joe Biden’s Dirty Garage Will the Big Media ever take a real look into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents? by Michael Reagan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/cleaning-out-joe-bidens-dirty-garage/

Big Media will never let Joe Biden get away with illegally taking classified documents from the White House in 2016 and stashing them at his office and in his garage next to his Corvette.

The ace reporters at liberal places like the New York Times, CNN and NBC are already digging deep into the facts of Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.

Soon the Big Media will be telling us exactly what classified documents Biden illegally took home, where he’s been keeping them for more than six years, what he used them for and if it is true that he did not really know he had them.

And it won’t be long until we’ll know the truth about why the batch of unsecured classified documents that was discovered by the White House at the Penn Biden Center think-tank before the midterms were not revealed to the public until this week.

Of course, in the real world, we know none of this good journalism by the Big Media will happen.

Not in 2023 America, anyway, where the liberal mainstream media’s most reliable standard is the double one.

Biden will never get the same rough treatment the liberal media gave ex-President Trump when it was learned Trump had been keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.

The liberal media’s star reporters and pundits still don’t know squat about the Biden case – let’s call it “Garage-gate.”

But already they are trying to say that Biden’s possession of unspecified classified material pertaining to Ukraine, Iran and the UK is not as serious or sleazy or scary as what Trump had.

Wokeness Is Slowly Hollowing Out The Fed EJ Antoni

https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/14/opinion-wokeness-is-slowly-hollowing-out-the-fed-ej-antoni/

Are you wondering why checking out at the grocery store these days feels like making a mortgage payment? This week’s four-decade-high inflation is a direct result of the Federal Reserve taking its eye off the ball over the last two years. Instead of focusing on its mandate of keeping prices stable, it has been more concerned with financing massive federal deficits and kowtowing to liberal ideology.

But now the Fed chair is claiming just the opposite.

Chairman Jerome Powell recently said in Stockholm that the Fed must avoid politics to maintain its independence, which is absolutely true. But it is the opposite of what the Fed has done under President Joe Biden.

Powell and other Fed members have routinely opined about climate change, diversity, equity and other left-wing talking points — all while they called inflation transitory. Powell opened Pandora’s box as soon as he jeopardized the Fed’s independence with these political talking points.

The recent change in tone from Powell would be welcome if it did not have the hollow ring of rhetoric behind it. The Fed chair rightly said, “Without explicit congressional legislation, it would be inappropriate for us to use our monetary policy or supervisory tools to promote a greener economy or to achieve other climate-based goals.” He continued, “We are not, and will not be, a ‘climate policy maker.’”

Climate change talking points By Mark C. Ross

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/climate_change_talking_points.html

For the record, climate change is real — but that’s nothing new.  Just ask a wooly mammoth or a dinosaur.  Atmospheric heat-trapping is also real, or else everything around us would freeze solid every night — just as it does on our airless moon.  And sea level is the best way to tell if the Earth is warming or cooling because it is a truly global indicator, rather than a stew of various local measurements.

It is also important to understand the well known cycles that bring us seasons and weather patterns.  The seasons change from equinox to solstice over and over because the Earth’s rotational axis is tilted relative to its orbital plane.  During winter in the northern hemisphere, the sun appears in the sky farther in the south.  It moves north until it reaches the summer solstice — as the weather warms.  Due to the elliptical nature of our orbit around the sun, the northern summer finds the Earth farther away from its heat source than it is in the winter, which tends to moderate the seasonal temperature change. 

The opposite is true for the southern hemisphere.  Closer to the sun in the summer and farther in the winter would make for more severe weather down there, except for the much greater amount of the southern surface being covered by oceans, which also serve to moderate the weather.

Another axiom of climatology is that the west coasts of the continents have noticeably milder weather than the east coasts.  This is probably due to the rotational direction of the Earth, which is counterclockwise when looking down at the north pole.

Back to sea level and climate change.  Previously at this site, Viv Forbes posted a link to NASA’s website showing a graph of annual sea level measurements going back to 1993.  The overall accumulated increase is 102.5 millimeters.  This site is also sprinkled, nonetheless, with all kinds of dire climate change warnings.  But if you do the math, it comes out to a little under 3.7 millimeters per year.  At this rate, it would take about 82 years for the sea level to be raised by one foot.  Also, the graph forms what is mostly a straight line even if you scroll down to see the same plot going back all the way to 1900.  No “hockey sticks” here…just a steady increase.  This is because we are in an interstitial warm period known as the Holocene — which began about ten to twelve thousand years ago when the last ice age, the Pleistocene, ended.

5 Times Media Ran Cover For Biden In Classified Documents Scandal By: Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/16/5-times-media-ran-cover-for-biden-in-classified-documents-scandal/

A fourth tranche of documents marked classified was found at President Joe Biden’s Delaware residence, the White House revealed Saturday.

The discovery follows that of other documents from Biden’s time as vice president, which were found at a Washington think tank and in his personal garage. A third discovery, this time of a classified document in Biden’s Delaware home, occurred on Thursday. When classified documents were supposedly found at former President Donald Trump’s palace at Mar-a-Lago through an FBI raid, Biden shamed his Republican predecessor as “irresponsible.”

“How that could possibly happen, how one — anyone could be that irresponsible,” Biden said.

From the moment the first records were discovered at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, however, Biden’s allies in the legacy press corps jumped to give cover for the flagrant hypocrisy. And of course, shortly after news of the records surfaced, the narratives collapsed.

1. Washington Post Says Biden Docs Are Different

Just after CBS News dropped its bombshell report on the classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president discovered in a Washington office, The Washington Post sought to dispel comparisons to the FBI raid conducted on Trump’s Palm Beach home.

Is U.S. Headed Toward Socialism? Majority Says ‘Yes’: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/18/is-u-s-headed-toward-socialism-majority-says-yes-ii-tipp-poll/

In recent years, government in the U.S. has never been bigger, in terms of both spending and its power over individuals and the economy. Some have begun to openly wonder: Is the U.S. evolving into a socialist-style economy? And is that what Americans want? The latest I&I/TIPP Poll has answers.

Over the last three years, due to the COVID pandemic, government spending at all levels averaged just over 44% of GDP, the highest since World War II, when much of the economy was essentially socialized in order to boost war spending.

Today, a majority of Americans agree that the sudden, rapid growth from COVID-related spending and burgeoning top-down control over the domestic economy to address climate change have put U.S. on a path toward socialism.

This comes out of the latest I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,356 Americans across the country, taken online from Jan. 4-6. In it, we asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with the following simple statement: “The U.S. is evolving into a big government socialist state.”

The shocking answer: By 51% to 31%, Americans agreed the U.S. is moving toward socialism. Among the remainder, 18% said they were “unsure.” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

Further broken down, of those who agreed, 20% said they did so “strongly,” while 31% said they agreed “somewhat.” For those who disagreed, just 15% disagreed strongly, while 16% said they “somewhat” disagreed.

While usually such politically sensitive questions show wide differences among the different political affiliations, that’s not exactly the case here.

The Islamist Plan to Conquer East Africa: U.S. Missing in Action by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19322/islamists-east-africa

The most potent threat to East African stability remains Al-Shabaab, rooted in Somalia. Al-Qaeda helps to finance Al-Shabaab through its contacts across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen.

Al-Shabaab’s threat to the American homeland should not be discounted: the group has explored possible scenarios of launching a 9/11 style assault on the US. Shabaab is assessed by US intelligence as Al-Qaeda’s wealthiest and largest affiliate.

If Islamists succeed in establishing an Emirate in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s government could be rendered powerless to combat the spread of radical Islam throughout the country. Using Mozambique as a base of operations, jihadists potentially could export terrorist cells to Indian Ocean island countries such as the Comoros Islands, Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles, and ultimately to southern African nations as well.

Jihadist terrorism poses an existential challenge to Africa’s nation-states. While North Africa has been Islamic for a millennium, the Sahel, that part of the continent south of the Sahara, remains under siege by affiliates of the global Islamist networks, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

France, after a ten-year effort, has abandoned its responsibility to safeguard the sovereignty of its former colonies. Consequently, the Sahel’s counterterrorist mission now rests upon the shoulders of a group of regional states called the “G5” : Burkina Faso, Chad. Mali. Mauritania, and Niger.

The most potent threat to East African stability remains Al-Shabaab, rooted in Somalia. Although Al-Shabaab pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2009, it maintains autonomy for its terrorist operations. Al-Qaeda helps to finance Al-Shabaab through its contacts across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen.