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November 2023

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Why Governments Have Replaced God with Global Warming By J.B. Shurk

By on November 20th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/why_governments_have_replaced_god_with_global_warming.html

For millennia, monarchs ruled by some form of divine right.  If not asserting god-like powers, they claimed to be acting as God’s emissaries here on Earth.  You can imagine the effect this had on devout peoples of any faith.  How could the great unwashed masses dare question any royal’s divinely inspired orders?  This paradigm kept government authorities towering over those they ruled.

The Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution crashed through the walls of absolute monarchies and reoriented political systems on the foundations of natural law, religious toleration, constitutional government, and individual liberty.  Twentieth-century postmodernism later led to a rise in religious agnosticism and a growing uncertainty about even the existence of God.  First, philosophers stole monarchs’ divine right to rule; then they convinced new generations to question God altogether.  

Unsurprisingly, both of these intellectual revolutions weakened the innate authority upon which governments relied.  Stripped of any divine pretense for exerting power over their subjects, governments have been attempting to justify their existence ever since.

From this perspective, it is easy to see why those with power today have gone all-in on “global warming” fearmongering.  By replacing God with the apocalyptic threat of “climate change,” governments have effectively created a “higher power” that they exclusively control.  Instead of beseeching citizens to follow God’s will here on Earth, governments beseech them to “follow the science.”  The “science,” for its part, is treated as some kind of infallible religious scripture that can never be questioned.  It doesn’t matter that climate models have been wildly incorrect, that research has been fabricated, that sea levels are not rising, or that the proposed “solutions” for manipulating naturally dynamic climates will accomplish nothing.  Governments have decreed, “The science is settled,” and once the “science” has spoken, no lowly heretic may disagree.

In truth, the “global warming” con is about three things: gods, money, and control.  

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

IT’S ALL ABOUT HATING THE JEWS; ISRAEL IS JUST THE EXCUSE ERIC LEVINE

By on November 20th, 2023

NO URL: Eric Levine is a lawyer/writer.

At a recent pro-Hamas rally in New York City, a mob of advocates for destroying Israel tried to occupy News Corp.’s Manhattan headquarters. Addressing the mob, actress Susan Sarandon told us what we have known all along about these types of protesters: They are about nothing other than hating and destroying Jews. For folks like Sarandon, it does not matter whether the Jews live in Israel or on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. According to those folks, every day should be October 7.

As she so eloquently put it:

“There are a lot of people that are afraid, that are afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country…[.] It’s important to have facts…you don’t have to go through the entire history of that region, you just have to show the babies that are dying in incubators.”

Let that sink in for a moment.

For Sarandon and her fellow antisemites, the ONLY fact that matters is that Palestinian babies have died in incubators in hospitals that are being used by Hamas as bases for their terrorist operations.

There appears to be no concern for the Jewish babies who were decapitated, cooked alive in ovens, or cut out of their mother’s bellies and then murdered in front of their screaming mothers by Hamas terrorists on October 7. For Sarandon, those dead babies simply do not matter.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

At The New York Krazy Klimate Konference Francis Menton

By on November 20th, 2023

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-11-18-at-the-new-york-krazy-klimate-konference

On Thursday (November 16) a publication called City & State (specializing in covering New York state and local government) put on a conference they called the “2023 Clean Energy in New York Summit: New York’s Path to Sustainability.” Let’s call this the New York Krazy Klimate Konference. I showed up to observe and report on the festivities, along with another prominent skeptic, Roger Caiazza of the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York blog.

The Krazy Klimate Konference featured a gaggle of high-ranking New York bureaucrats and legislators, there to report on New York’s exciting progress toward Net Zero nirvana; plus an even larger gaggle of grifters and parasites looking to cash in on the big piles of government loot sure to get passed out along the way. The co-Chair of New York’s Climate Action Council — Doreen Harris — gave the Keynote address. Other presenters included several members of the State Assembly, as well as bureaucrats in charge of the so-called “energy transition” on the Governor’s staff, at the State Energy Research & Development Agency (NYSERDA), at the City Department of Environmental Protection, at the City Department of Buildings, and so forth. Wind and solar energy grifters were also prominently featured.

As readers here likely know, the first big step in New York’s transition to carbon-free energy is supposed to be the construction of some 9000 MW nameplate capacity of off-shore wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island. Contracts for about half of that have been issued after a competitive bidding process. Unfortunately, between July and October, nearly all of the contractors for the off-shore wind announced that they were walking away from the deals, absent massive price increases. The Public Service Commission thereupon rejected the price increases, but as of the time of the Konference nobody had figured out the next step. Thus, as we listened to the speakers, New York’s headline initiative to move toward carbon-free energy was literally dead in the water.

You might think that the focus of a Konference like this would be addressing the very serious obstacles that stand in the way of the hoped-for energy transition.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Plight of Jews on College Campuses By Robert Weissberg

By on November 20th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_plight_of_jews_on_college_campuses.html

This is not the best of times for many — perhaps most — Jews on college campuses.  Pro-Hamas, anti-Israel demonstrations and occasional vandalism have become commonplace, with more than a few explicitly calling for the extermination of Jews.  Harvard’s graduate student union, backed by a majority of its members, issued a statement that demanded “the end of “occupation and colonization of all Arab lands.”  A group of MIT students, the Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA), meanwhile, physically blocked Jewish students from attending class.  The CAA “support[s] the liberation of all peoples, with a focus on the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”  Faculty similarly celebrate Islamic terrorism while condemning Israel for genocide and war crimes.  This is not just from a nutty fringe.  According to one study, one in five college students sympathizes with Hamas.

Jewish students can do little to turn the tide.  Jewish billionaires can threaten to cease donations unless the school administration “does something,” but the campus apparatchiks are powerless.  Ditto for firing professors who glorify Hamas brutality, nor can schools pull the plug on campus groups falsely condemning Israel for war crimes.  Also forget about the federal government defunding of higher education unless universities crack down on hate speech.

What Jewish students and their sympathizers fail to grasp is that this antisemitic outpouring is not an aberration triggered by recent events in Gaza.  Rather, it reflects the long and nearly invisible transformation of the academy, beginning in the late 1960s with the anti–Vietnam war protests and reaching maturity when the black civil right movement successfully advanced its racial justice agenda.  Campus antisemitism is just the latest installment of a long story and will not be vanquished when the university’s president offers up a limp pro-Israel speech or Washington taxing school endowments.

Fundamental is how physical violence or its threat has become an integral part of campus life.  

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Equity, Equality and Hamas How we got to college students supporting Hamas. by Daniel Greenfield

By on November 20th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/equity-equality-and-hamas/

How did we end up with Hamas rallies on college campuses across America? Start with ‘equity’.

America started out with the idea of ‘equality’ that all people should be treated equally so that regardless of where they started out, everyone had the same rights and their lives had the same value. Advocates for ‘equity’ argue that this was unjust because different people were starting out in different places. What they really needed was a level playing field by imposing ‘equity’.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion disposed of equality. Its equity agenda dismissed the idea that people would be treated equally. The only way to achieve equality was through an indefinite period of inequality: raising up some people and pushing down others. Organizations, from the White House to Corporate America, vowed to ”embed equity” into everything that they did.

The moral DNA of society was completely rewritten so that everything from freedom of expression to the value of human life had to be weighed in terms of identity politics. Even the most basic moral questions came down to the paradigms of oppressor and oppressed. Right and wrong were determined purely in terms of ‘punching up’ or ‘punching down’.

“Is it wrong to murder, rape and kidnap people?” was a question to which the answer was no longer “yes”, but “were the victims or the killers members of an oppressed group?”

What matters is not so much that Hamas raped, killed and kidnapped kids, but that it appears to be the weaker party in the conflict, the one with backing from leftist figures in good standing, and the one that has the revolutionary vibe that bourgeois radicals love so much.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

A Flood of Retirements in Congress Threatens to Upend the 2024 Election Rick Moran

By on November 20th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2023/11/18/a-flood-of-retirements-in-congress-threatens-to-upend-the-2024-election-n4924046

Less than a year before election day 2024, the number of retirements in the House and the Senate may break a record for this cycle.

Thirty-four members of Congress have already announced they were not seeking re-election, including Senator Joe Manchin whose West Virginia Senate seat has moved from “Leans Republican” to “Safe Republican” in the Sabato Crystal Ball ratings.

Few retirements in Congress will lead to that kind of a decisive difference. Since most Congressmen are already in non-competitive districts, a retirement won’t matter in many districts.

But there’s still the known commodity vs. the unknown candidate. The known commodity is a proven fundraiser and vote-getter. So even with a high partisan lean in a district carried by Joe Biden, there’s no guarantee a Democratic candidate will prevail.

According to Politico, out of the last 15 elections, the party with the fewest retirements has won 10 of them. Even with a partisan lean of 10, a district with a retired incumbent is still considered “in play” by the opposing party.

(FiveThirtyEight’ defines partisan lean “as the average margin difference2 between how a state or district votes and how the country votes overall. For example, if a state has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+5, that means it is 5 percentage points more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole.”)

Currently, there are 27 Democrats not running for re-election while only 9 Republicans are declining to run. Some of those candidates are running for another office such as governor and senator. But why those 34 retirements are significant is because the cycle hasn’t hit its historic peak of announced retirements yet.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Manchin attacks Biden, vows to ‘mobilize the radical middle’ Manchin said that Biden is “not the person we thought was gonna bring the country together.”By Madeleine Hubbard

By on November 20th, 2023

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/manchin-attacks-biden-vows-mobilize-radical-middle

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin on Sunday attacked President Joe Biden for being too far to the left, and he vowed to “mobilize the radical middle.”

“Joe Biden has been pulled so far to the left, the extreme left, as far as liberal,” Manchin, told radio host John Catsimatidis in an interview Sunday on “The Cats Roundtable” show. “Makes no sense at all. It’s not the person we thought was gonna bring the country together.”

Manchin, who is not seeking reelection in 2024, said that Washington, D.C., wants “America to be divided because it’s a better business model,” and he “came to the conclusion” after 13 years in the Senate that he is “not going to change it from within.” 

After realizing that he could not change Washington as a politician, Manchin said, “I’ve decide[d] to go around and see if I can mobilize the radical middle.”

Meanwhile, last week Manchin alluded to a potential 2024 White House bid. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Watershed for America’s Jews? by Rael Jean Isaac (2015)

By on November 20th, 2023

https://www.algemeiner.com/2015/10/18/a-watershed-for-americas-jews/

Are the years when the United States was a supremely comfortable place for American Jews coming to an end? Thanks to President Obama’s polices, the answer may be yes, although most American Jews are not only blind to the dangers, but actively promoting those very policies.

Challenged by what U.S. Secretary of State Kerry calls Germany’s “example to the world” in opening its borders to 800,000 (overwhelmingly Muslim) migrants this year, the Obama administration now proposes to boost the number of refugees it accepts to 100,000 annually, including 10,000 Syrians.

In practice, this means a huge increase in Muslim immigrants, much larger than even that number suggests. Breitbart reported that in 2013 there were 280,276 immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. Of these, just under 40,000 were refugees. The rest were divided almost equally into those given permanent resident status and those coming as temporary (in theory) migrants, including students and foreign workers. With Obama more than doubling the number of those admitted as refugees, there is little doubt there will be a substantial rise in the other categories. Don’t forget, family unification is a major source of legal immigrants.

There is no doubt that the American Jewish community is the one most threatened by this immigration. Unlike in Germany, a million more Muslim immigrants will not upend the religious demographics of the United States with its population of almost 319 million. But the radical growth in the Muslim population will have a dramatic effect on the small U.S. Jewish population. There are estimated to be five and a half million Jews in the United States. Even before the current Obama escalation, the Pew Research Center forecast the Muslim population would more than double by 2030 to 6.2 million, over-matching the number of Jews.

One cultural trait Muslims infallibly bring with them is hatred of Israel — and contempt for Jews –  inculcated in them from a very early age. When a reporter for The Times of Israel interviewed migrants at a reception center in Milan, a 21-year-old Syrian refugee named Adman told her, “In Syria we have all races and religions living together. We are all brothers but Israel, Israel is the ultimate enemy.” Rima, a Syrian who has lived in Italy for years and now registers migrants, explained “For Syrians, Israel is Palestinian territory.” When the reporter suggested a two-state solution, Rima replied “I don’t think Jews should have a state. They are a religion, not a people.” The reporter encountered no contrary views among the refugees.

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ELECTIONS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

This is how the Republican Party became so strongly pro-Israel

By on November 20th, 2023

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206481356/republicans-israel-gop-middle-east-evangelicals-end-times-rapture-christians

Since the Hamas attack on Israel, Republican presidential candidates have been sniping at each other. The goal: to prove to Republican voters that they support Israel more strongly than their rivals.

Former Vice President Mike Pence declared on CNN, “this is what happens when we have leading voices like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis signaling retreat from America’s role as leader of the free world.”

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott likewise slammed Ramaswamy for, at one point, saying he hoped the U.S. could eventually reduce aid to Israel.

Former President Trump, meanwhile, took aim at Democrats at a recent campaign rally, drawing a direct line between protecting Israel, being an evangelical Christian and voting Republican.

“I can’t imagine how anybody who’s Jewish or anybody who loves Israel — and frankly, the evangelicals just love Israel — I can’t imagine anybody voting Democrat,” he said bluntly.

To be clear, people of both parties widely expressed horror at Hamas’s attack on Israel. But there is a divide on public opinion toward the ongoing conflict and the history behind it, with Republicans being particularly pro-Israel.

That divide didn’t always exist; in the late 1990s, the Pew Research Center found that just over half of Republicans said they sympathize with Israel more than the Palestinians. By 2018, 8 in 10 Republicans said Israel. (Pew has since stopped asking that exact question, but more recent polling still shows a wide partisan gap in attitudes.)

And as Trump said, evangelicals are a big part of that shift.

The biblical connection to Israel

Conservative news sources can offer a glimpse of the biblical link between Israel and evangelical Christians. Baptist preacher and Fox News contributor Robert Jeffress recently told the network about what he sees as connections between current war and biblical descriptions of the end times.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Young Voters Flee Biden, Who Turns 81 Monday Eric Mack

By on November 20th, 2023

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/joe-biden-age-young/2023/11/19/id/1142871/

President Joe Biden is already the oldest president ever elected or ever to hold the office, but he turns 81 on Monday and Democrats backing him want to stress former President Donald Trump’s age is equally advanced.

“I think everyone knows it’s an issue, and we have to address it,” former Biden administration White House chief of staff Ron Klain told Politico, wanting to “emphasize it gives him more wisdom and experience, how he’s navigated this difficult problem in Ukraine.”

“He’ll keep on doing the job, campaigning with vigor and demonstrating to the American people his energy level, which is quite robust.”

A Democrat donor and Biden bundler, Alan Kessler told Politico age should not be important in the 2024 presidential rematch between Biden and Trump because of the age of both leading candidates.

“Neither are going to get any younger on their next birthdays, but yet Biden seems to get, on a continuing basis, knocked for his age while Trump does not,” Kessler lamented to Politico. “No one brings up the age thing with [Trump]. That double standard is troubling.”

But it remains a disparate issue for Biden among young voters than Trump voters, according to the latest NBC News poll released Sunday. 

Among young voters (18-34 years old) — just 20% of whom view Biden favorably on Israel’s war on Hamas — Biden (42%) trails Trump (46%) by 4 points, which is outside the poll’s margin of error.

“This could be a massive sea change,” according to NBC News poll analyst Steve Kornacki, who noted Biden was plus-26 points on younger voters in 2020.

Unable to change the reality of an 81-year-old incumbent who will be 82 if he were to win next November, Democrats want to focus on the narrative of “wisdom.

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