https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20217/biden-helping-putin-win
• The Biden administration’s persistent failure to provide Ukraine with the military supplies it requires poses a serious danger of gifting victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
• [T]he Ukrainians… remain desperately short of key ammunition.
• [A]ny form of Russian success in Ukraine would not only spell disaster for Kyiv, but for the wider Western alliance.
• Putin has made no secret of his desire to extend Russian military aggression beyond Ukraine to include other regions of eastern Europe,
• [I]t is vital that the Biden administration not only renews its support for Zelensky during his visit to Washington this week, but also ensures Ukrainian forces receive the equipment they desperately need to defeat Russia.
• Only by making certain that Putin suffers a humiliating defeat in Ukraine will the West succeed in deterring autocratic regimes such as Russia, China and Iran from committing further acts of aggression.
The Biden administration’s persistent failure to provide Ukraine with the military supplies it requires poses a serious danger of gifting victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
From Abrams tanks to F-16 fighters, US President Joe Biden has constantly dithered over providing Ukraine with the equipment upgrades its forces desperately need if they are to succeed in defending themselves against Russian aggression.
The failure, moreover, to ensure that Ukraine achieves victory in its battle against Moscow’s unprovoked invasion has been a key factor in the failure of Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive to achieve a decisive breakthrough of Russia’s heavily-fortified defences in Ukraine.
Even though it is a year since President Volodymyr Zelensky first made his request to the US and other Western allies to be equipped with superior heavy armour and warplanes, the equipment is only starting to become available on the battlefield now, just as the bitter Ukrainian winter takes hold, thereby severely diminishing its effectiveness.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/climate_and_covid__making_it_up_as_they_go_along.html
During COVID, we were all told to “follow the science.” The COVID poster boy, Dr. Anthony Fauci, went so far as to self-proclaim, “I am the science.”
What science was the “COVID experts” following? Masks were previously deemed ineffective during viral respiratory infection outbreaks until COVID when Dr. Fauci and Surgeon General Jerome Adams suddenly did an about face and proclaimed masks effective and necessary.
Were they making up mask science? It seems so. What changed? Not viral particle sizes. The British Medical Journal recently published a systematic review concluding,
Real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or infection has not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence. The current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID-19.
A Norwegian paper reported a 33-40% higher incidence of self-reported COVID in those wearing masks often or always, respectively.
COVID “science” said mask up when the actual science said no benefit or even harm from masking.
Then there was “safe and effective” vaccine science.
A BMJ study found, “A gradual increase in the risk of COVID-19 infection from 90 days after receiving a second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.” Wait! The science said less COVID after getting vaccinated, not more.
A confirming Cleveland Clinic study discovered a higher incidence of COVID infection among their employees correlating with more vaccine doses.
Were COVID public health recommendations on masks, vaccines, and distancing about the medical science or the political science?
Now pivot to climate change, formerly known as global warming.
No scientist will argue that the climate is not changing. The planet has gone through numerous ice ages, large and small, obvious evidence of a changing climate. The disagreement is over what is causing that change.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/subverting_medical_science_for_a_racebased_political_agenda.html
The story of the change in testing standards for chronic kidney disease is a warning about the politicized degradation of American medical care.
For almost two years, everyone has ignored an important “health equity” story affecting 87% of Americans. It concerns the medical definition of chronic kidney disease (CKD), which is an impairment of the kidney’s ability to filter waste, toxins, and excess fluids from the blood. Affecting approximately 37 million US adults, the disease can lead to dialysis, kidney replacement, and death.
Physicians and health care providers rely on laboratory measurements of glomerular filtration rate (GFR) to diagnose CKD and to qualify patients for treatment, Medicare-paid education, referrals to a nephrologist (kidney specialist), and kidney transplants. GFR is usually estimated from a chemical in the blood called “creatinine.” High creatinine levels signify that the kidneys are not functioning well. Nearly 250 million creatinine measurements are made each year in the US.
On average, blacks have higher creatinine levels than non-blacks with the same kidney function. Their higher creatinine levels may arise because blacks in America have greater average muscle mass than non-blacks.
For over two decades, the formulas used to estimate GFR have included a correction for the higher creatinine concentrations in blacks in order to obtain the very best estimate of their directly measured GFR (the gold standard of kidney function.) This correction factor increased black GFR between 16% and 21%.
One might assume that CKD and GFR would be defined with scientific impartiality. However, one consequence of the race adjustment is that, at the same blood creatinine level, a black patient might not receive the same kidney treatment as a non-black patient. Thus, whites with lower creatinine numbers will receive medical intervention, while blacks will not.
This has led medical students and physicians-turned-activists to cry discrimination. Activists collected petitions at major hospitals calling to remove the race correction. Medical journals published no fewer than fifty commentaries, editorials, and articles calling for its abolition. Print and internet news articles dutifully reported that the formulas were racist.
There was little published opposition once the race correction was framed as a civil rights issue. Scientists’ reticence to speak out was not unexpected, given that research funding requires nearly unanimous endorsement from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and no scientist can risk alienating even one grant reviewer.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/right-deed-wrong-reason
Liz Magill was forced to resign Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania—by all indications because, at a congressional hearing, she could not bring herself to declare that calls for the genocide of Jews are punishable speech. She would more justly have lost her job for being a bald-faced hypocrite when it comes to campus free expression. The future of higher education depends on which of these motives governs such decisions in the future.
Magill was part of a triumvirate of college presidents who testified before a House committee last week. Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth had been called to discuss the anti-Israel hatred embroiling their universities since the October 7 terror attacks on Israel. To call their performance robotic would insult robots. When asked a repeated question after their first evasion did not satisfy the questioner, these intellectual role models repeated their first evasion verbatim, maybe adding a cryptic non sequitur.
Congressman Jim Banks (R., Indiana) grilled Magill, for example, about a conference on Palestinian culture that the University of Pennsylvania had hosted two weeks before the Hamas terror attacks. Critics had demanded that Penn cancel the conference, due to the presence of alleged anti-Semites among its speakers. Penn allowed the gathering to continue, however, citing academic freedom.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-covid-catastrophe
The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind, by Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean (Portfolio/Penguin, 448 pp., $32)
The American response to the Covid pandemic was an unprecedented disaster— surely the costliest public-policy mistake ever made in peacetime—but most of the politicians, public-health officials, scientists, and journalists responsible still refuse to acknowledge the damage they caused. Many still pretend that the lockdowns and mandates were effective. Others argue that they did the best they could under the circumstances and dismiss critics as partisans trying to score political points. It’s time, they plead, for all of us to move on.
Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean have not moved on, and their new book, The Big Fail, is especially valuable for two reasons. First, it provides an insider’s view of how mistakes were made during the pandemic and how public-health officials and scientists blatantly violated basic principles of their professions. Second, these veteran journalists can’t be dismissed as conservative partisans. Nocera, who now writes for the Free Press, was a long-time op-ed columnist at the New York Times; McLean is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. Their book attacks Republicans, especially Donald Trump, along with other targets that left-leaning readers love to hate, such as the business executives who run hospital chains and have made America dependent on factories in foreign countries for masks and other medical supplies.
But The Big Fail also shows Democrats how much needless harm their leaders caused, and its subtitle is a dagger aimed at a liberal’s bleeding heart: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind. Democrats in blue states reveled in moral superiority during the pandemic, denigrating the selfishness and stupidity of red staters who refused to lock down, close schools, and wear masks. They mocked #FloridaMorons on Twitter and proclaimed their devotion to “the common good.” The Right lambasted those Democrats for their virtue signaling (as in the Babylon Bee headline, “Inspiring: Celebrities Spell Out ‘We’re All In This Together’ With Their Yachts”). The Big Fail chronicles why they deserved it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/oct-7-attack-made-israel-stronger-hamas-palestinians-jewish-state-herzl-4b628804?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
Tel Aviv
The Jewish state, and the Zionist movement that sustains it, is emerging from this crisis stronger than before. That’s my conclusion after a week in Israel, traveling to the combat zones in the north and south, touring the Gaza-area kibbutzim that were occupied by Hamas, and meeting with Israelis ranging from senior government officials to survivors of the Oct. 7 attacks struggling to put their lives back together. Israel is more united, its citizens are more determined to fight for their state, and Jews around the world have renewed their commitment to the Zionist cause.
I spoke to Israelis across the political spectrum. From leaders of the pre-Oct. 7 protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to senior officials in the war cabinet, I heard only commitment to supporting the government through the war. Politics isn’t dead in Israel. Protests demanding Mr. Netanyahu’s resignation have resumed, and profound disagreements bubble below the surface. But none of this affects the country’s determination to prosecute the war. Israelis from all political camps are determined to put national security first when the war ends.
Israeli military experts, including critics of the government, think the war is going reasonably well. Casualties are significant, and there is hard slogging ahead, but Israel is on course to inflict defeat on the deranged and misguided Hamas movement. It also is headed toward deeper integration into the Middle East. Arab leaders, who are moving the Arab and Islamic worlds into a brighter future than the fanatics can imagine, appreciate as never before the value of a strong Israel to their own security and prosperity.
Much can still go awry. Iran and its proxies have a vote in what happens next. America’s Middle East policy remains muddled, and the global struggle of revisionist powers against the American-led world system can intersect explosively with Middle East politics. But for now, Israel has rallied from the shock of Oct. 7 and is on track to re-establish deterrence.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/arab-enslavement-black-africans
The Oct. 7 massacre which killed at least 1,200 Jews in Israel is being compared to the mass murders of the Holocaust. But, unlike the Nazis, who hid their crimes and perfected impersonal and mechanized slaughter, Hamas jihadists affixed GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could broadcast themselves exulting in their gory murder of Jewish families, some of whom they decapitated and burned alive.
For those in the Christian world who know about the decades long mass slaughter and enslavement of Black Christians in Sudan, which they call the “hidden Holocaust,” the scenes out of Israel were shockingly familiar. As part of a self-declared jihad which lasted from 1983 to 2005, northern Sudanese Arabs sought to subjugate and enslave the Black Sudanese of the mostly Christian south. The onslaught cost the lives of perhaps 2.5 million Black Sudanese, and the freedom of an estimated 200,000 more. The Arab Muslim government’s jihad utilized kidnapping as its terror weapon of choice, not to mention casual gang rape and mutilation.
One little known but highly detailed report of an Arab Muslim pogrom against Black tribesmen and Christians in Africa during that period shows how eerily similar the anti-Black African jihad raids are to Hamas’ pogrom against Jews. According to the report, just after dawn on March 28, 1987, Arabs from the Rizeigat tribe set upon their Black neighbors in the town of El-Daein, storming their village with axes, gasoline, guns, knives, spears, sticks, and swords, looking to murder people who sought whatever shelter they could. The night before, the raiders had attacked Black members of the Dinka tribe at the local church. Many of the hunted took refuge near the local police station.
Why are these horrors of real-world slavery, with women raped and men kept in chains, based on the color of their skin or their religion, not better understood and publicized in the West?
https://www.newsweek.com/merry-christmas-hanukkah-canceled-opinion-1850487
Anyone still clinging to the belief that there is a difference between hating Jews and wanting Israel to disappear now needs to explain away another inconvenient truth. Scheduled Hanukkah celebrations across the United States, Canada, and elsewhere have been scrapped. The reason cited over and over is that hosting such holiday events would imply support for Israel in its war against the Gaza-based Hamas terrorist organization.
A Hanukkah candle lighting that was due to take place at a music and arts festival in Williamsburg, Virginia, was canceled by the festival’s founder because the lighting of a menorah ‘seemed very inappropriate’ given current events in Israel and Gaza.
Let us conduct a quick thought experiment. Even supposing that holding Jewish people everywhere accountable for Israel’s actions since the Oct. 7 massacre was somehow valid, at what point did a country’s right—obligation—to defend itself against a group that invaded its territory, murdered 1,200 people, kidnapped over 200 men, women, and children, and drove over 200,000 citizens from their homes become ‘inappropriate’?
Moreover, this fear of being seen as siding with Israel over Hamas has not extended to Muslim-themed events and ceremonies in the United States and Canada, which continue to be held. When it comes to Muslim communities residing in these countries, there is a clear line being drawn between Hamas in Gaza and law-abiding citizens in Los Angeles, New York, Virginia, and Toronto exercising their right to worship and assemble as they see fit.
Despite this discrepancy between how two minority groups are being treated, Washington has repeatedly equated the plight of American Jews to that of Muslims living in the United States. Responding to a question about soaring rates of antisemitism and the wave of cancelled Hanukkah celebrations, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre said this week, “We have seen an uptick in hate, just more broadly, in different communities—obviously, also in the Muslim community. And so, we will do everything that we can to make sure that these communities feel safe.”
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/12/leftist-lunacy-fuels-hamas-atrocity/
Israel’s descent into tragedy at the hands of Hamas reveals America’s descent into idiocy at the hands of the Left. Every anti-Semitic outrage, all the Hamas apologists, each excuse for terrorism — together they reveal that we are not confronting just terrorism alone but an absolutist ideology. The left has prepared the ground in which Hamas and its supporters have sown their hate, and America is witnessing its flowering.
As the aftermath of October 7th continues unfolding, we see mounting examples of leftist arguments defending it. The latest lunacy occurred on Nov. 23 when Sky News’ Kay Burley interviewed Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy about the exchange of 150 Hamas prisoners for 50 Israeli hostages. Burley stated: “I was speaking to a hostage negotiator this morning…. and he made the comparison between the numbers and the fact that does Israel not think Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives?”
Shocked temporarily speechless, Levy recovered: “It is outrageous to suggest that the fact that we are willing to release prisoners who are convicted of terrorism offenses, more of them than we are getting our own innocent children back, somehow suggests that we don’t care about Palestinian lives? Really, that’s a disgusting accusation.”
Assuredly “disgusting,” the accusation is also disturbing in its revelation of the shallowness to which the left has spiraled this discussion’s descent. Deconstructing the accusation shows that there is no debate — and cannot be one — with the left.
First, it was Hamas that created this vile market for the exchanging of human beings. Hamas abducted 240 innocent Israeli civilians and did so for the clear purpose of doing what it is doing now: obtaining the release of its captured terrorists. And without captured terrorists, there would be no one to exchange Hamas’ hostages for. So, Hamas created both sides of this transaction.
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/12/biden-puts-us-on-a-fast-train-to-nowhere/
At long last, we’re building the first high-speed rail project in our nation’s history. And it’s starting here.”
That was President Joe Biden announcing last week that us taxpayers will be ponying up $3 billion to help a private company build a bullet train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas so gambleholics can start losing money more quickly.
The L.A. to Vegas train will supposedly be finished in time for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 2028 — just four and half years from now.
Well, anything is possible. A private company is planning to build the thing and claims to have the route and rights-of-way all figured out. But when you consider that Biden put up $7.5 billion to get private companies to put EV chargers all over the country and two years later not a single one has been built, constructing more than four miles of complex high-speed electrified rail each and every month seems a bit optimistic. (It took eight years to build an 11-mile extension to the Washington, D.C., Metro Silver Line.
But let’s say this private company can build it that fast, and that it will be a huge win for travelers, as Biden claims. Then why on Earth are taxpayers on the hook for a third of its construction costs?
What’s more, Biden’s claim that this is the “first high-speed rail project” in the country is a flat-out lie. Or did he forget about the high-speed rail project from Los Angeles to San Francisco that California has been working on since 2008 — the one that he and President Barack Obama threw $3 billion at 13 years ago?
Actually, Biden did eventually bring it up in his remarks last week (as transcribed by the White House):
Another high-speed rail project we’re announcing today is in California. Ultimately, it’s going to take folks from Los Angeles, through the Central Valley, all the way to San Francisco, b- — in less than three hours. But today, the journey can take eight hours by bus or car. Think of how this train will transform California’s Central Valley with new businesses, new residents, visitors, economic opportunities, or what it will mean to folks who live in inland towns and commute to work in Californian coastal cities. It’s a game changer.
Biden announced that he is dumping another $3.1 billion of taxpayer money into what has so far proved to be nothing more than a monument to wishful thinking and government waste.
