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February 2023

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Did Biden’s Trove Of Classified Docs Jeopardize U.S. National Security? I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

By on February 20th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/20/did-bidens-trove-of-classified-docs-jeopardize-u-s-national-security-ii-tipp-poll/

Recent revelations that President Joe Biden kept classified government documents at his two namesake think tanks, his Delaware home and even his garage have largely been treated with a yawn by big media. But average Americans are paying attention and worry that Biden’s careless stewardship of classified documents endangers U.S. national security, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

In our national online I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,358 adults, taken from Feb. 1-3, we asked Americans two questions, the first being: “How closely are you following the story about classified documents from Joe Biden’s time as Vice President found at his former office and home?”

As it turns out, Americans are paying pretty close attention to the story. Among those responding to the I&I/TIPP Poll, which has a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points, 60% said they were “closely” following the developments.

Among those following closely, 26% said they were following “very closely,” versus 34% who said “somewhat closely.”

Meanwhile, just 36% of Americans said they were not following the news closely, with 22% saying they were following it “not very closely” and only 13% saying “not at all closely.”

So it’s definitely a topic in the public eye.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Only God Can Make a Tree’: Brooklyn’s Tribute to Joyce Kilmer by Lawrence Kadish

By on February 20th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19430/joyce-kilmer

Amidst the unrelenting stories of carnage, corruption and incompetence comes a reminder there is good news if you look long enough to find it.

And it should come as no surprise that this reminder comes from Brooklyn.

Generations ago, the New York City Department of Parks took a triangular piece of park property along Kings Highway in Midwood and renamed it “Sgt. Joyce Kilmer Square.” It lies along a historic Indian trail that became a major thoroughfare for European settlers traveling between rural communities called Flatbush, Gravesend, and New Utrecht.

In time, New York City would acquire the parcel as the arrival of the automobile required the realignment of many Brooklyn streets, resulting in this modest triangle. It was dedicated as parkland in 1934, and named “Sergeant Joyce Kilmer Square” in 1935.

Today it is lined with benches shaded by large oak trees, with a flagpole along East 12th Street. It is a respite for local neighbors seeking a moment’s relief from the challenges of the day.

It is a modest tribute to a giant of an American – and he likely would have had it no other way.

Kilmer was born in New Jersey before the start of the 20th Century and educated at Rutgers University and Columbia University, from where he earned his degree. Kilmer married and had four children. After teaching Latin for a year at Morristown High School in New Jersey, Kilmer began his career in 1909 as a dictionary editor with Funk & Wagnall’s Company. In 1912, he served as the Literary Editor of The Churchman, an Anglican newspaper, also contributing freelance articles and poems to several other publications. On the eve of World War I, he joined the staff of the New York Times and subsequently converted to Catholicism.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Newswashing of ISIS Bride Shamima Begum by Uzay Bulut

By on February 20th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19428/shamima-begum

ISIS brides were complicit in ISIS’s genocide and crimes against humanity. Never mind that hostages were hung upside down and then burned alive, or locked in cages then lowered into water to drown, or crucified for hours “like Jesus;” or that children were crucified or sold as sex slaves; or that countless others were tortured, raped or lined up to have their throats slit.

The Free Yezidi Foundation recently wrote of ISIS and Begum: “Not only terror death cult, but mass-rape genocidal organization. The decision to join was hers. Her actions contributed to unspeakable acts of brutality, which she would have continued had ISIS, Daesh not been militarily defeated.”

“Ms. Begum, for example, claimed that she was only a housewife and did not participate in any heinous crimes or violation of human rights as an ISIS member. Some portrayed her as an innocent schoolgirl who was brainwashed, uninformed, and simply wanted to return home to Britain…. evidence now suggests that she was in fact a member of the ISIS ‘morality police, a group of ISIS women which was an integral part of ISIS’ terror and atrocity apparatus, and was armed with an automatic weapon on her patrols. The crimes allegedly committed by the morality police include major human rights offenses, including support to ISIS’ slave trade of Yezidis.” — Free Yezidi Foundation, September 19, 2019.

“‘Why are the BBC giving Shamima Begum more airtime?’: ‘Sickened’ viewers slam broadcaster for airing 90-minute documentary that ‘parades ISIS bride as a celebrity’ just weeks after it launched 10-part podcast ‘retracing her steps’. — The Daily Mail, February 18, 2023.

“What we Yazidis expect from the international community is support and solidarity, not digging into our wounds. ISIS criminals must face justice for what they have done and practiced. We expect the West to hold ISIS accountable in court rather than putting them on the cover of their magazine. Such stories are particularly difficult for us as Yazidis because these ISIS women tortured and abused Yazidi women while they were in ISIS’s captivity.” — Activist for Yazidi rights who lives in Iraq, to Gatestone, February 2023.

The question is: Why are some big Western media corporations obviously siding with a genocidal terror group and not with its innocent victims?

“I think this is a slap in the face of all those who suffered in the hands of terrorism, not just ISIS but other death cults such as Boko Haram. This is a spit in the face of all those whose loved ones were murdered, and I do not mean only Yazidis, Assyrians or Nigerians, but all the innocent Westerners who perished to Islamic terrorism such as in France, the UK, the US and elsewhere. Media has utterly lost its moral values.” — Juliana Taimoorazy, founding president, Iraqi Christian Relief Council, to Gatestone, February 2023.

While around 3,000 Yazidi children and women are still being held captive at the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization, many in the Western media are portraying a former “ISIS bride” not only as a victim but as a celebrity.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The rewriting of Roald Dahl should disturb us all Philistines and vandals have taken over art and culture. Tom Slater

By on February 20th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/19/the-rewriting-of-roald-dahl-should-disturb-us-all/

It’s easy to become inured to the madness of the culture war. Stories of Peter Pan being slapped with trigger warnings or God going gender-neutral are 10 a penny these days. They can sometimes wash over you. Not because they are unimportant – far from it. But because they are so ubiquitous. Every institution from the Wellcome Collection to Splash Mountain has fallen to some flavour of woke regressivism. Language is warped to flatter a few narcissists. Old art works and new are censored at the behest of hysterics. Such cases don’t surprise us anymore, no matter how deranged and illiberal.

But once in a while the authoritarians who make up our cultural elites outdo themselves – and remind us how much is at stake in this thing we call the culture war. The rewriting of the late Roald Dahl’s books is one such story. When the Telegraph revealed yesterday that Puffin, Dahl’s publisher, has made ‘hundreds of changes’ to his beloved children’s books, in line with suggestions from so-called sensitivity readers, the response was one of horror and disbelief. An author beloved by generations of children for his magical, spiky and sometimes sinister work has had his literary edges sanded off. All new copies will feature the newly cleansed text. Dahl’s words and stories will be changed forever, no longer truly his own, all because some weirdo with a red pen thinks they know better. The philistinism, the cultural vandalism, is stunning.

And what is it that so upset them? What is it that made these sensitivity readers conclude that Dahl’s books must be changed, so they ‘can continue to be enjoyed by all today’, in the words of Puffin? The word ‘fat’, for one. That’s gone from every book – sparing the blushes of characters like Augustus Gloop, the fat lad from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The Oompa-Loompas are now no longer ‘titchy’ or ‘tiny’. Just ‘small’. They’ve also gone gender-neutral for good measure, with ‘small men’ swapped for ‘small people’. Perhaps most outrageously of all, whole lines have been rewritten and brand new lines added, seemingly to pre-empt any prejudice that might otherwise curdle in the minds of young readers. In The Witches, a line describing a witch posing as a ‘cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman’ now casts her as an aspirational girlboss, ‘working as a top scientist or running a business’.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

1 in 45,000 That was the (pre-vaccine) Covid death risk for people under 50 – not 30, 50, and including people with severe comorbidities. Aren’t you glad we shut down the world! Alex Berenson

By on February 20th, 2023

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/1-in-45000

We have known almost since the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic that young people face much lower risks from Covid than the elderly.

But Dutch researchers now have offered what should be the last word on the issue, using data from a national registry to show that even people in their thirties and forties have a risk from Covid almost too low to measure.

The researchers compared the results from a nationwide sample of Covid infections in the Netherlands at several points in 2020 and 2021 to nationwide excess death totals. To determine the Covid death rate, they assumed all the excess deaths resulted from Covid infections.

This method likely overstates Covid deaths. Some extra deaths were likely drug overdoses, suicides, or untreated heart attacks and other lockdown-related health problems. In addition, the sampling technique they used may have understated infections.

Put those issues aside, since they don’t change the most important finding. The researchers determined the death rate from Covid infections was about 1 percent overall in the Netherlands during 2020. (Again, that figure almost certainly is high.)

The researchers then did what governments and Covid hysterics have tried not to do for three years. They explicitly stratified deaths by age, from under 10 to over 80.

The results are… enlightening.

The chart below measures infections, hospitalizations, and deaths from the second Covid wave in the Netherlands, in fall 2020. That stretch probably marks the truest measure of Covid’s lethality. It occurred after the ventilator and nursing home catastrophes of the first wave but before the short-lived happy vaccine valley of spring 2021, when the mRNAs sharply reduced infections.

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