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Ruth King

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Destructive Environmentalists “Society can’t exist without mines.” by John Stossel

By on November 26th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/destructive-environmentalists/

People eagerly give money to rich environmental groups. The Natural Resources Defense Council has $463 million in assets.

It claims it uses law “to confront the climate crisis.”

What it really does is pay lawyers to torture people who try to do useful things.

Example: America needs minerals like copper and silver to make things. Even President Joe Biden made a speech saying America will need 400-600% more such minerals to make “solar panels, wind turbines and so much more!”

An iPhone alone requires aluminum, iron, lithium, gold, copper …

But when investors dare try to dig up such minerals in America, the NRDC objects and uses political connections to stop them.

Twenty years ago, entrepreneurs tried to open a mine in Alaska. Before they even got the application in, the EPA vetoed it.

Why? Because groups like the NRDC say the mine “would be a catastrophic threat to the wildlife and … fragile ecosystem.”

They get their way because when Democrats run the EPA, they not only support NRDC’s positions, they even hire NRDC employees.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Norway’s Foreign Minister Targets Israel – and Trump Things have gone completely haywire under Espen Barth Eide. by Bruce Bawer

By on November 26th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/norways-foreign-minister-targets-israel-and-trump/

Weird thing about Norway: on the one hand, the people, by Western European standards, are unusually patriotic and fiercely protective of their sovereignty, waving flags every year on Constitution Day (May 17) and voting twice (in 1972 and 1994) to keep their country out of the EU. On the other hand, these same people’s government is, decades in and decades out, more slavishly devoted to international institutions than that of any other country on earth. Hence Norway, a member of the European Economic Area, is quicker to obey EU directives than are actual EU members. This is true when the “bourgeois” or “conservative” (i.e. socialist) parties are in charge, and it’s even truer when the “socialist” (i.e., really, really socialist) parties are in charge. But since the current Labor Party government took power three years ago, and especially since an absurdly self-regarding mediocrity named Espen Barth Eide was named Foreign Minister a year ago, things have gone utterly haywire.

So last Thursday, when the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its former Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, on the premise that they’ve been guilty of genocide in Gaza, Eide’s ministry was quick to announce that if Netanyahu and Gallant set foot in Norway, they’ll be arrested at once. Andreas Kravik, Eide’s #2 man, explained that as a member of the ICC, Norway has no other choice than to take this drastic action. “The ICC plays a crucial role in ensuring accountability for serious crimes,” professed Eide in a fatuous press release. “It is important that the ICC carries out its mandate in a judicious manner. I have confidence that the Court will proceed with the case based on the highest fair trial standards.” Little tyrants! At the same time, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Hamas leader Mohammed Deif. This is not quite equal treatment, given that Deif, having been killed in an airstrike in July, is no longer with us.

That’s not Eide’s only recent outrage. Earlier this month, after Turkey wrote a letter to the UN calling for an arms embargo of Israel, Norway, which is to say Eide, signed on – along with 52 other countries, including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Indonesia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Venezuela, and Lula’s Brazil, plus the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Norway, note well, was the only Western country to lend its support to this reprehensible document.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

MR. SAMMLER’S PRESCIENCE MELANIE PHILLIPS

By on November 26th, 2024

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In 1970 the novelist Saul Bellow, a titan of American letters, published his masterpiece Mr Sammler’s Planet.

Its eponymous hero is a Holocaust survivor who, in a decaying New York City, sees into the heart of things. A calculated attack on a range of liberal pieties, the novel caused intense controversy. Sammler, and thus Bellow himself, was accused of being misanthropic, racist, sexist, and reactionary.

Not surprisingly, liberal literary America was outraged and affronted. Equally unsurprisingly, the book was brandished as proof that Bellow had “moved to the right”. This is, of course, the standard denunciation of irredeemable evil that has sunk countless reputations and careers on the jagged rocks of elite disgust — but is so often instead proof positive of the denounced individual’s clarity of vision and moral purpose.

So it was with Saul Bellow. Sammler is a latter-day prophet, seeing with his one functioning eye straight through liberal hypocrisy to call out civilisational decay.

What now seems all too familiar was all there in the novel — racial prejudice, sexual violence, civil disobedience and a no-holds-barred capacity to give offence, it seemed, to as many hyper-sensitive groups as possible. The premonition of today’s culture wars is striking. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Sebastian Gorka’s welcome return to the White House Ruthie Blum

By on November 26th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/sebastian-gorkas-welcome-return-to-the-white-house/

As soon as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced the nomination of Sebastian Gorka to the post of senior director for counter-terrorism in his new administration, the anti-“Make America Great Again” crowd dusted off an old smear campaign against the former West Wing staffer.

One enduring attack centers on his association with Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian merit organization established in 1920. Critics have sought to tie the group to Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross regime, despite the International Commission on Orders of Chivalry recognizing its modern incarnation.

Gorka has explained that his wearing of the Vitézi Rend medal at Trump’s inauguration in 2017 was a tribute to his father, Paul Gorka, a Hungarian resistance fighter against both fascist and communist regimes.

This controversy underscores the deeper ideological rift between Gorka—a naturalized American, born and raised in Britain, where his parents had fled to escape Communist Hungary—and his detractors. His robust defense of American and Israeli policies has made him a favorite target of those who oppose his unapologetic patriotism and harsh attitude toward Islamization.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Day 2: Dump The Paris Climate Agreement

By on November 26th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/26/day-2-dump-the-paris-climate-agreement/

During Donald Trump’s first successful presidential campaign, he promised to pull the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. He was unable to do so until the day after the 2020 election he lost, and the reprieve lasted only a little more than two months because Joe Biden rejoined the pact the day he was inaugurated. It’s another one of the many of Biden’s messes that Trump has to clean up.

The U.S. should have never been a part of the Paris Agreement. Committing our country to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which means reductions in fossil fuel use, is foolish. Reaching the made-from-thin-air global temperature target: requires government mandates, restrictions and increased spending on politically trendy but expensive and unreliable renewable energy; stunts economic growth; limits our choices, leaving many of them to be made by globalist elites; and is an abdication of our national sovereignty.

It is simultaneously meaningless and dishonest, a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist.

“The Paris Agreement has always been an expensive farce, a symbolic gesture masquerading as a global solution,” writes Charles Rotter in the Watts Up With That? blog. “Its main purpose? To transfer wealth from productive nations to the politically corrupt under the guise of ‘climate justice.’ Of course, China — the world’s largest emitter — sits pretty with vague promises and no actual obligations. Trump’s exit from this scam is as much common sense as it is a necessity.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Why Palestinians Will Not Have New Leaders by Bassam Tawil

By on November 25th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21152/palestinians-new-leaders

For the past three decades, leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas have systematically targeted political activists, journalists, social media users, students, professors and human rights activists as part of an ongoing campaign to silence critics and deter others from speaking out against the lack of democracy and freedom of speech.

Torture included beatings, solitary confinement, feet-whipping, threats and taunts, and forcing detainees into various painful positions for extended periods. [Human Rights Watch] commented that “the habitual, deliberate, widely known use of torture, using similar tactics over years with no action taken by senior officials in either authority to stop these abuses, make these practices systematic.”

This abuse has transformed the PA-controlled areas in the West Bank and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip into Palestinian dictatorships similar to those that have long existed in most Arab countries. In addition, it has resulted in the suppression of the emergence of new leaders capable of leading the Palestinians towards security, stability and prosperity.

Palestinians still remember how political activist and human rights defender Nizar Banat, an outspoken critic of corruption in the Palestinian Authority, was beaten to death by PA security officers in Hebron in 2021. Until today, no one has been punished for the killing of Banat.

The family of the slain political activist was naïve enough to believe that the ICC or any other international agency would serve them justice.

The ICC does not care about crimes committed by Palestinians against their own people. Instead, the court’s antisemitic prosecutor is busy searching for ways to punish Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for daring to fight back in a war that was launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Palestinians have not only been deprived of a large portion of the international financial aid — stolen by corrupt Palestinian leaders — but also of the right to elect new leaders and representatives through free elections.

Those who are hoping that a new (and pragmatic) Palestinian leadership will take over one day are in for a disappointment. Even after 89-year-old PA President Mahmoud Abbas is gone, his cronies and inner circle will continue to run the show. They will not, under any circumstances, share the cake with other Palestinians.

The same applies to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. No Palestinian will agree to play any role in the administration of the Gaza Strip after the current Israel-Hamas war, as long as the Iran-backed terrorist group and its friends are still around. That is why it is necessary to eliminate Hamas completely and make sure that it loses its military, political and civilian capabilities in the Gaza Strip. This could take a few more months or years, but it is far better than ending the war in a way that keeps Hamas in power.

Palestinian leaders have a long history of cracking down on their political rivals and opponents. For the past three decades, leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas have systematically targeted political activists, journalists, social media users, students, professors and human rights activists as part of an ongoing campaign to silence critics and deter others from speaking out against the lack of democracy and freedom of speech.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Things Worth Remembering: ‘We Shall Win the Tomorrows Before Us’ Six days after JFK was assassinated, LBJ brought hope to a broken nation with a powerful Thanksgiving address. Douglas Murray

By on November 25th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/lyndon-johnson-jfk-thanksgiving?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

We are fast approaching Thanksgiving, and many Americans, no doubt, are wondering what they have to be thankful for. 

There’s the skyrocketing cost of pretty much everything. Rising crime. Endless wars. And perhaps worst of all, this fear that we’re falling apart—that Democrats and Republicans can’t work together, that in the middle of the turkey and stuffing a brawl might break out between the “communists” and “fascists.” (There were no communists or fascists on the ballot this year, the partisan smears notwithstanding.)

Over the past year, there has been much talk about America being more divided than ever. It’s easy to forget, in the midst of all the emotion and politicking, that this is an exaggeration—to say the very least. There was the Civil War. And, of course, the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.

In the 1960s, political violence—including assassination—became an unavoidable fact of life in America. The first devastating and consequential assassination of the decade took place on November 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. 

That single act of violence has spawned countless conspiracy theories; fueled suspicion of the “military-industrial complex” (a suspicion that has morphed into antipathy toward the “deep state”); and driven what seems, at times, a permanent wedge between the government and the governed.

But, as always, events throw up remarkable people. And sometimes even people who do not seem all that remarkable become remarkable when history throws them into the fiercest fire.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was such a man. 

The Kennedy clan—aristocratic, with their Harvard pedigree and penchant for playing football at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts—despised him. Johnson—born into a poor family in Texas Hill Country—despised them right back. JFK had tapped Johnson to be his running mate in 1960, because he needed a Protestant and a good old boy to hold the Democratic coalition together. Johnson, a masterful politician first elected to Congress in 1937, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, was mostly cut out of the very insular Kennedy inner circle. The relationship between the two men was purely transactional. 

On the day of the assassination, Johnson was with Kennedy in Dallas—riding two cars behind the president alongside his wife, Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on November 25th, 2024

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

As the ICC equates democratic Israel with Hamas terrorists, Israel’s positive news includes vast numbers of articles to highlight Israel’s indispensability in combating the world’s greatest problems. It is quite incredible to see the contrast. Michael Ordman

Members of the Hague’s Criminal Court should be denied all of Israel’s dazzling life saving and health enhancing technology and medicine. rsk

 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Covid-19 vaccine breakthrough. Tel Aviv University scientists have developed a low-cost vaccine for all Covid-19 variants that is administered as a nasal spray and can be stored at room temperature. The absence of needles means less stress for patients – a previous TAU study showed high stress made vaccines less effective.
https://www.aftau.org/news_item/nasal-covid-19-vaccine-developed-by-tau/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202404159 (Advanced Science article)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/21983844/2024/11/40 (Advanced Science Back cover picture)
https://english.tau.ac.il/stress_vaccines
 
Prostate cancer radiation halved. (TY WIN) Doctors at Israel’s Beilinson Hospital have demonstrated the effectiveness of treating prostate cancer with two doses of high-dose external beam radiation instead of the current five doses. Benefits include less physical and emotional toll, less side effects, and shorter wait times.
https://tps.co.il/articles/israeli-breakthrough-could-halve-radiation-sessions-for-prostate-cancer-patients/  
 
Can you change your DNA? Dr. Idit Maya, Head of the Genomic School at Beilinson Hospital explains how the body need to use different proteins to perform different functions. These proteins can be generated by making changes at the cellular level. In the future, new skills can be taught with the help of biological tools.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/r1gjujof1e
 
US clinics offer Israeli PTSD device. (TY ATS) the Prism electrodes-laden cap from Israel’s GrayMatters Health (see here previously) has been added to the PTSD treatments offered by two major US clinics – Home Base and Fermata. Prism helps patients control PTSD symptoms by displaying brain activity.
https://nocamels.com/2024/08/us-clinics-add-israeli-ptsd-treatment-to-roster/
 
Invisible eye surgery. Israel’s Beyeonics Vision (see here previously) has upgraded its “One” Augmented Reality digital visualization headset, with cutting-edge “invisible” infrared night-vision technology. It means that ophthalmic surgeons can now operate on patients’ eyes without causing discomfort to the patient.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/beyeonics-one-revolutionizes-ophthalmic-surgery-with-invisible-light-technology-302272801.html   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLY5yM0tiwI  (eye surgery video)
 
Smart software for medical imaging. (TY ATS) Israel’s DeepDense has developed Plug-AI – smart tools to enhance the digital images produced by other medical companies. DeepDense has teamed up with US firm Spectrum Dynamics Medical to improve the quality of cardiac and spinal images and reduce scan times.
https://nocamels.com/2024/08/israeli-and-us-medical-imaging-firms-collaborate-on-ai-integration/
https://deepdense.com/  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imxTTebQExI
 
Revolutionizing women’s health. Israel’s OCON Therapeutics (see here previously) develops, manufactures and markets women’s health products based on its patented, non-invasive, intrauterine therapy delivery technology. 85% of OCON’s workforce are women. Pipeline treatments include fibroids & abnormal bleeding.
https://www.israel21c.org/new-drug-delivery-stent-could-revolutionize-womens-health/
 
Medical clowns help children with pneumonia. (TY Yanky & ATS) At last, a positive Israel story from the New Scientist. It is known that medical clown reduce stress and anxiety in hospitalized children. Now Israel’s Carmel Medical Center found that medical clowns shorten the time children with pneumonia spend in hospital.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2446996-clown-visits-may-shorten-the-amount-of-time-children-spend-in-hospital/

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Theodore Dalrymple Britain’s Long, Hot Summer Mass immigration and an alienated working class are a combustible mix, as the nation’s recent riots showed.

By on November 25th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/britains-long-hot-summer

The outbreak of anti-immigrant mob violence in England this summer, in which rioters went as far as to set fire to buildings with immigrants in them—for example, an attack on a Holiday Inn near Rotherham that housed 220 such immigrants, in the course of which a masked attacker entered the building and made a gesture indicating that the residents might have their throats cut—did not surprise me. It broke out after the stabbing to death of three small children, and the injury of ten more, at a dance lesson in Southport, a seaside town north of Liverpool, by the son of Rwandan refugees.

Anyone with eyes to see, ears to hear, or the slightest imagination to exercise should have detected the undercurrent of violence long present in much of English life, a kind of magma waiting to break volcanically through the crust of normal day-to-day existence. But none are so blind as those who will not consider the evidence, because it points to a reality too painful to contemplate: the murders in Southport were the perfect pretext for the expression of semi-organized brutishness, some of the rioters with extensive criminal histories. And understandably, if hypocritically, it appalled those who had long denied that any problem could arise from two deep-seated social maladies: the coarseness of English popular culture; and years of mass immigration and the increasing formation of ghettos.

Even in times of social peace, few sounds are as terrifying to me as that of young English people enjoying themselves in a certain kind of pub. More than one such pub is located near where I live. A kind of deep-throated male baying emanates from them, punctuated by female screams, whether of laughter and amusement or of fear and distress, it is not always easy to tell. Once, in Manchester, I was woken in my hotel at about 1:30 am by what I took to be normal drunken English revelers noisily heading home. The next morning, I discovered, upon stepping out of the hotel, a police cordon around the place below my window, where a young man had been kicked into a coma (whether he ultimately died, I don’t know). The sound of these Englishmen enjoying themselves and that of committing joint murder were basically the same.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Inside Trump’s Second-Term Mission to Dismantle the Administrative State In his second term, Donald Trump, with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, plans to dismantle the administrative state by cutting bureaucracy, enforcing accountability, and slashing costs. By Roger Kimball

By on November 25th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/24/inside-trumps-second-term-mission-to-dismantle-the-administrative-state/

For many years, and in many places, I have been railing against the rise of what people like me have called “the administrative state,” “the deep state,” “the Syndicate.” In an essay called “The Imperative of Freedom” for the June 2017 issue of The New Criterion, I drew upon the work of the political philosopher James Burnham to point out that at least since the 1940s, real legislative power had been increasingly concentrated in what Burnham called “administrative bureaus,” not parliaments or Congress.

“‘Laws’ today in the United States,” Burnham wrote in The Managerial Revolution (1941), “are not being made any longer by Congress, but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management (what a revealing title!), and the other leading ‘executive agencies.’”

And note that Burnham wrote decades before the advent of the EPA, HUD, CFPB, FSOC, the Department of Education, and the rest of the administrative alphabet soup that governs us in the United States today. As the economist Charles Calomiris pointed out in his short but important book Reforming Financial Regulation After Dodd-Frank (2017), we are increasingly governed not by laws but by ad hoc dictats emanating from semi-autonomous and largely unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, many of which meet in secret but whose proclamations have the force of law.

Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress, just as Article III vests all judicial authority in the Court. The administrative state is a mechanism for circumventing both. In The Administrative Threat, the legal scholar Philip Hamburger describes this shadowy Leviathan as “a state within a state,” a sort of parallel legal and political structure populated by unelected bureaucrats. Binding citizens not through Congressionally enacted statutes but through the edicts of the managerial bureaucracy, the administrative state, said Hamburger, is “all about the evasion of governance through law, including an evasion of constitutional processes and procedural rights.” Accordingly, he concludes, the encroaching activity of the administrative state represents “the nation’s preeminent threat to civil liberties.”

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