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December 2023

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Number of Chinese Nationals Spikes at the Border Lincoln Brown

By on December 26th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/lincolnbrown/2023/12/26/number-of-chinese-nationals-spikes-at-the-border-n4925030

December is not quite over, and as Catherine noted earlier today, 250,000 illegal aliens have crossed the border this month — more than the number of people who stormed the beaches on D-Day. She also raised a point that has been stated again and again: there is no way of telling who these people are and, for that matter, why they are here. There is no doubt that a number of those entering the country are fleeing poverty and crime or who want their shot at the American Dream. (Incidentally, good luck to them. Most Americans are not even sure they can get a shot at the American Dream.) 

Others are cartel members, drug and human traffickers, and possibly members of potential sleeper-cell terrorists from enemy nations. I interviewed border experts and members of law enforcement who were saying those things almost 15 years ago. When waves upon waves of people arrive at the pace at which they are currently entering the country, it is impossible to tell who is who. And the current administration seems to have no real interest in doing so. In fact, it shows a vested interest in refusing to enforce immigration laws of any kind.

Ordinarily, when one hears the words “illegal immigrant,” one thinks of people from Central and South America. But as has been reported elsewhere, immigrants are coming from all points of the globe, including China. The Daily Caller reports that the number of illegal immigrants from China continues to hit record highs. In November, the Border Patrol had 4,767 encounters with Chinese illegals. 

In a November article in The New York Times, Eileen Sullivan writes that in the past year, CBP apprehended over 24,000 Chinese nationals entering the U.S. from Mexico.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Underground People David Solway

By on December 26th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/david-solway-2/2023/12/26/the-underground-people-n4925025

My wife and I have been considering buying a property on the Hawaiian island of Kauai to escape the chill, rainy Vancouver winters. One can imagine our distress when we learned that someone I regard as among the most contemptible people on the planet, Mark Zuckerberg, is building a 1,500-acre compound on this most beautiful island in the Hawaiian archipelago.

Citing various sources, Stephen Green at PJ Media reports that “a 5,000-square-foot underground lair featuring its own energy and food supplies is under construction.” According to Housing.com, also cited by Green, Zuckerberg’s $270 million Koolau Ranch project “is designed to function as a self-sufficient space, ready to withstand global catastrophes…It is packed with security measures, encompassing keypad locks, soundproofing and concealed doors, while an extensive camera network ensures surveillance.”

The Guardian informs us that Zuckerberg’s lawyers “filed suit against hundreds of local Hawaiians who may own an interest in small pockets within his estates boundaries… [which is] surrounded by a 6ft stone wall blocking easy access to Pila’a Beach.” A local resident described this legal action as “the face of neocolonialism.” Zuckerberg eventually backed down, and the disputed parcels of land were sold at auction. How that changed anything is beyond me.

Apparently, “a smaller-scale ‘bunker’ is being built on nearby Maui by none other than Oprah Winfrey.” Mr. Portfolio himself, Bill Gates, who owns at least seven multi-million dollar homes, extensive farmland, hotel chains, and a private island in Belize, is rumored to have bunkers at all his properties. 

Billionaire bunkers are in, it seems, to protect the world’s oligarchs from an impending apocalypse that they have conspired to bring about. “A number of companies around the world are meeting a growing demand for structures that protect from any risk, whether it’s a global pandemic, an asteroid, or World War III – while also delivering luxurious amenities,” says CEO Robert Vicino of Vivos, an underground shelter company.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Wretched of the University Daniel J. Mahoney

By on December 26th, 2023

https://americanmind.org/salvo/wretched-of-the-university/

Postcolonialism rivals Jacobinism and Bolshevism in its systematic destruction of civil society.

In the summer of 2020, decent Americans found themselves overcome by a torrent of propaganda besmirching the United States as a nation racist to its core, with “white privilege” making life intolerable for anyone but its immediate beneficiaries. A fanatical moralism demanded that all right-thinking people sign on to an anti-racist catechism that was as simplistic as it was absurd. And plead “guilty” untold numbers of people did, with a whiff of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the air.

Civic courage was hardly to be found, and accommodation to ready-made lies provided a momentary reprieve for those, especially on the Left, afraid of being “cancelled” by their censorious peers utilizing social media as the weapon most ready-at-hand. The ritualistic self-loathing that had long been present, even institutionalized, on college campuses became the norm in journalism, the entertainment business, corporate culture, professional sports, and in many churches and synagogues, too. As Andrew Sullivan has strikingly observed on more than one occasion, we are all living on college campuses now.

Naïve liberals and suburban housewives joined the hardened Marxists and Maoists (and grifters, too) of Black Lives Matter in demanding the radical revolutionary transformation of a country still largely free, decent, and self-critical. The police became targets of angry mobs (and Antifa terrorists), and pressure grew to withdraw police protection from the weak, aged, and vulnerable, especially in minority communities.

The revolution was driven in large part by white progressives, trust fund babies, and the like who marched as they bandied about tired and stale revolutionary slogans. In the name of “anti-racism,” whole groups of people were stigmatized for belonging to the wrong race or “gender,” an ugly word that has become meaningless as it has been weaponized. Everything was racialized, and it became verboten to judge people by “the content of their character.” Those blacks, not a few in number, who wanted to think for themselves, who refused to define themselves as helpless victims and nothing else, were subject to endless vituperation. The loud, the angry, the uncivil, and the massively uninformed were lauded for their so-called courage and social consciousness. For months, the most “privileged” Americans playacted at revolution, as if any ideological revolution can ever end well.

For all intents and purposes, America had gone mad. Grown-ups took their bearings from 18-year-olds repeating mindless and extremist slogans (and finding “systematic” violence and mass killings against black Americans where they didn’t exist). In their “socially constructed” world, an ideological Second Reality took the place of the common world where citizens debate and deliberate, sometimes contentiously but never violently, about matters of public import.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hamas rejects Egyptian proposal to end war with Israel, refuses free elections in Gaza By Ronny Reyes

By on December 26th, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/12/25/news/gaza-terrorists-reject-giving-up-power-as-part-of-any-peace-plan-sources/

Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror groups operating in Gaza have rejected an Egyptian-led truce proposal with Israel that would see the militants relinquish power in return for an end to the war, sources say.

The terrorists, who conducted the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel, have refused to take part in one of the biggest conditions laid out by negotiators in Cairo on Sunday: an end to Hamas’ reign in Gaza by forming a Palestinian parliament and holding free elections, according to two Egyptian security sources.

The terrorist organizations instead reiterated that the only thing they’re ready to discuss is a prisoner swap that would see more than 100 Israeli hostages released in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners being held in Israel’s jails.

But a Hamas official who was in Cairo during the negotiations added that even a new prisoner swap would only take place once Israel has withdrawn from war-torn Gaza.

“Hamas seeks to end the Israeli aggression against our people, the massacres and genocide, and we discussed with our Egyptian brothers the ways to do that,” the official told Reuters.

“We also said that the aid for our people must keep going and must increase, and it must reach all the population in the north and the south,” the Hamas official added. “After the aggression is stopped and the aid increased, we are ready to discuss prisoner swaps.”

A senior Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, later told Al Jazeera, “No one accepts negotiating under fire – not Hamas, not anyone else.”

In terms of who would govern the Palestinian region after the war, Hamdan added, “Who will lead the Palestinians is an internal Palestinian issue. 

“The people must elect their own leadership. No one has a right to dictate, not the Americans, Israelis or any one else,” he said.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Christmas Is Canceled’: Pro-Palestinian Protesters Riot in New York, Block O’Hare in Chicago Joel B. Pollak

By on December 26th, 2023

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/12/25/christmas-is-canceled-pro-palestinian-protesters-riot-in-new-york-block-ohare-in-chicago/

Pro-Palestinian protesters spent the weekend rioting, disrupting holiday travel, and targeting Christmas in general in an attempt to force Americans to listen to their concerns by causing them inconveniences, disturbing their holiday plans, and irritating them.

In New York City on Monday, several hundred demonstrators carried a bloodied Nativity scene to Rockefeller Center. Some carried Islamic symbols.

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES – DECEMBER 25: Pro-Palestinian protesters rally in front of the News Corporation building and near the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, and march on 42nd Street, 5th and Park avenues on Monday, December 25, 2023, in New York City. They chant ‘Christmas is canceled’ while carrying blood-red mock Nativity scene through New York City streets. The police arrest several protesters and use force while detaining. (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

They attempted to disrupt festivities and later clashed with police.

One man was heard on video evidently shouting “Jew!” at police.

Update: Video emerged of pro-Palestinian activists vandalizing the Union Square Christmas market with anti-Israel graffiti, and even anti-police graffiti familiar from the Black Lives Matter movement:

The New York Post reported:

Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters converged on Midtown Monday, lugging a blood-red mock Nativity scene and chanting “Christmas is canceled here.”

“Long live the intifada,” the crowd of about 500 demonstrators yelled, using the Arabic word for “rebellion” or “uprising,” as they mobbed the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree where revelers were enjoying the holiday.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Voluntary population transfer floated as option for Gaza residents By David Isaac

By on December 26th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/voluntary-population-transfer-floated-as-option-for-gaza-residents/

(December 26, 2023 / JNS) South American and African countries have already expressed interest in taking in Palestinian Arab refugees from the Gaza Strip in return for monetary compensation, Likud Knesset member Danny Danon said on Monday.

Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations, who has floated the idea of the transfer of Gazans as part of his five-point plan for the post-war period, told Israeli broadcaster Kan Reshet Bet that Israel should “make it easier” on those Palestinians who wish to leave the Strip for other countries.

Danon noted that Canada said last week that it would expand immigration for Gazans, referring to Canadian Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Marc Miller’s Dec. 21 announcement that he would enact measures to allow extended families of Gazans with Canadian citizenship to enter the country.

“Migration happens in every war, look at what happened in Syria,” said Danon. (More than 5 million Syrian refugees are registered with the U.N.’s refugee agency. This does not include those who went to Europe.)

The interviewer questioned the feasibility of the plan as both Egypt and Jordan have cautioned that if Israel considers directing Gazans into their territories, it would mean war. Danon replied, “Look what happened during the Syrian civil war. Jordan made the identical statement. Now there are one-and-a-half million Syrian refugees in Jordan.”

The Arab countries, he continued, “have an obligation to help the Palestinians. Let them help instead of giving inflammatory speeches.”

He emphasized that the plan doesn’t involve large numbers.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How UNWRA Grooms Terrorists by Bassam Tawil

By on December 26th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20258/unwra-grooms-terrorists

By providing the residents of the Gaza Strip with various services, UNRWA exempted Hamas from its responsibilities as the governing body, such as creating a working economy that would pay for education and healthcare, and allowed it, instead, to invest resources in building tunnels and manufacturing weapons.

“They [UNRWA] teach us that the Al-Aqsa Mosque belongs to us [Muslims], that Palestine belongs to us,” said Atif Sharha, a student at an UNRWA school.

“Yes, they teach us that the Zionists are our enemy,” said Nur Taha, a third-year student from Kalandia. “We should carry out an [terror] operation against them [Zionists].”

“The Palestinian matriculation exams [at UNRWA] have become a finishing school in extremism. It is as if the Palestinian Authority is cramming as much hate into the tests as possible, to ensure the twelve previous years of indoctrination stay with them into adulthood.” — Marcus Sheff, CEO at the Institute for Cultural Peace and Tolerance in School Education, i24news.tv, July 23, 2023.

Despite years of considerable condemnation of the textbooks, newly produced editions, approved by UNRWA, are exponentially worse….

Whatever hopes that anyone may have held for the trustworthiness of UNRWA have long expired, and were arguably misplaced at the outset. UNRWA, in its current state, has proven itself irremediably defective, unworkable and yet another massive stain on the already scandalously stained UN.

It is high time for the international community and those who actually want a better future for the Palestinians to liquidate UNRWA and take actions that truly help the Palestinians move forward to a golden life.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will The Guardians of The Narrative Win? We watch the unfolding of an unedifying spectacle By Roger Kimball

By on December 26th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/24/will-the-guardians-of-the-narrative-win/

Much that is happening in the spectacle of America’s legal-political  life today reminds me of some pages in Johan Huizinga’s great book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938). In a chapter on “Play and Law,” Huizinga distinguishes the unfolding of legal proceedings in advanced cultures, where strict adherence to process and abstract notions of right and wrong prevail, from the situation in more primitive cultures, where the ultimate criterion is victory. “Turning our eyes from the administration of justice and highly developed civilizations,” Huizinga writes, “to that which obtains in less advanced phases of culture, we see that the idea of right and wrong, the ethical-juridical conception, comes to be overshadowed by the idea of winning and losing, that is, the purely agonistic conception. It is not so much the abstract question of right and wrong that occupies the archaic mind as the very concrete question of winning or losing.”

In this sense, I submit, Special Counsel Jack Smith, District Judge Tanya Chutkan, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the rest of the anti-Trump legal confraternity perfectly epitomize the atavistic persistence of archaic impulses in the law. People like me are always going on about “the rebarbarization of civilization.” The peculiar legal assault against Donald Trump is one instance (among many) of that phenomenon.

It’s been going on for quite a while. The 2020 election, for example, took place during the period of eagerly embraced Covid hysteria. That hysteria provided a justification or, more accurately, an alibi for the numerous violations of the law in the conduct of the election. The Constitution of the United States stipulates that state legislatures are in charge of determining voting procedures. But various governors and secretaries of state, from blue states mostly, swept that Constitutional provision aside in their eagerness to assure the appearance of a Biden victory. Such anomalies were noted and commented on at the time but somehow never got traction. Why? Because the media, that great tool of The Narrative, determined that it oughtn’t to get traction.

In subsequent months, the public has been treated to an efflorescence of similar and even more extreme anomalies as Donald Trump can barely turn his head without being indicted for something or other. I do not think that the public at large grasps how bizarre the quartet of indictments, proceeding in tandem in four separate jurisdictions, really is. It is unprecedented, yes, but it is also surreal. It is also a travesty of the legal process. The aim is not justice but the grubby partisan goal of removing a popular political rival from the field. The Attorney General of New York, Letitia James actually campaigned on the promise that she would “get Trump.” How is that OK? What has happened is that the law—or, more precisely, the paraphernalia and accoutrements of the law—is simply the weapon of choice, all else having failed. Those who point out that the effort to transform a political rival into a pariah is tantamount to banana republic tactics are right. But to say that is not yet to do justice the breathtaking situation in which a former president who happens to be, by a wide margin, his party’s favorite for the presidential nomination is treated worse than a common criminal. Common criminals, as a rule, are not subject to gag orders for trying to defend themselves.  “Shut up, or you might convince people you are being unfairly persecuted!” What a blow against “Our Democracy™” that would be.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Artificial Intelligence—Learning Panacea or Progressive Trojan Horse? “In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.” by Loyd Pettegrew

By on December 26th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/artificial-intelligence-learning-panacea-or-progressive-trojan-horse/

Barak Obama’s Administration first reported on the future of Artificial Intelligence in an October 12, 2016 summary. A new battle is being enacted against our conservative way of being. At the center of this battle is the widespread support for and increased use of artificial Intelligence (AI). Its intrinsic values are myriad but nonetheless secreted. James Giodano, Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program and Scholar-in-Residence in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University cautions that “The brain is the battlefield of the future.” He believes that neuros are weapons that can be used “against humans in directional ways that can be harnessed for what’s called dual use medical purposes, the ethics of those individuals who may be competitive if not combative to us, so in other words, this can also be weaponized against others and this is where we get into the idea of novel neural weapons.”

For example, after the Arab massacre of Israelis on October 7th, there has been a concerted effort to polarize through AI’s visual propaganda functions targeting especially the younger generation using photorealistic, generative artificial intelligence. Such visual propaganda, on its surface, appears authentic but was created by a machine to use against Israel and its supporters. This effort is based on the belief that AI learning is the suasory equivalent of a second educational coming. In fact, Gruetzemacher and Whittlestone argue that AI is presently having a genuinely “transformative” effect on society at large, but in clandestine and unobvious ways.

The Foundation of AI

Stanford University’s Hoover Institution provides a succinct and useful definition of AI: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a computer’s ability to perform some of the functions associated with the human brain, including perceiving, reasoning, learning, interacting, problem solving, and even exercising creativity. In the last year, the main AI-related headline was the rise of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 (Generative Pretrained Transformers), on which the chatbot ChatGPT developed by OpenAI, and its most recent derivatives [the soon to be released GPT-5] are based.” The same article cautions that even the most advanced AI today has many failure modes that can prove to be unpredictable, not widely acknowledged nor easily fixed; inexplainable, but capable of leading to harmful unintended consequences.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

The U.S. Military is Not Woke, But the Woke Threat is Real The potential Achilles’ heel of our military. by Jesse Petrilla

By on December 26th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-u-s-military-is-not-woke-but-the-woke-threat-is-real/

I remember the day vividly, standing in formation in the hot Kentucky sun at Ft. Knox. “Look to your left and to your right,” the sergeant said. “You are all wearing the same uniform, you all bleed the same color blood. There is no color here other than green.” But by the end of my career, there were directives coming down from Washington D.C. telling us that some of our service members were somehow different, as was the case when we were told we should counsel some of our soldiers letting them know they can change the gender on their ID cards. I wasn’t about to single out a soldier, and I doubt very many did in any branch of the services.

But aside from causing a few eyerolls, woke policies in the military are more of a distraction at this point than anything else and are thankfully being largely ignored other than service members being ordered to sit through the regularly occurring death by PowerPoint. However, that in no way diminishes the very real threat it poses.

The United States military remains the most effective fighting force on the planet, and although wokeness has not yet significantly infected the military, the woke cancer continues to grow, threatening the cohesion of America’s fighting forces. Every hour that a service member wastes sitting through unnecessary woke briefings, is an hour lost that should have been spent on warfighter training, leaving us less prepared for the next war.

Woke policies, unnecessary political correctness at the expense of readiness or the success of a mission, have been and continue to be pushed at the behest of politicians inside the beltway. But the problem with their efforts to change the way our military operates is that it doesn’t need changing. The military is one place where true diversity has already been achieved.

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