ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Israel-Hamas Ceasefire Has Exposed Media’s Moral Vacuum By Mackenzie France

Posted By on February 12th, 2025

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/02/11/israel-hamas_ceasefire_has_exposed_medias_moral_vacuum_152337.html

After mounting domestic pressure and repeated attacks on Israel from the international community, Israel has had no other recourse but to accept a ceasefire deal with Hamas. The terms of this deal reveal that this is not a victory, but a compromise, a necessary evil that the people of Israel accepted to bring their hostages home.

The last few Sundays saw emotive scenes as some of the remaining Israeli hostages were reunited with their families in accordance with the terms of the ceasefire deal. This moment of joyful celebration has been tainted by biased media coverage and obsequious comments from Western leaders who have disregarded the plight of these hostages for months. Indeed, a casual observer – say, someone who catches the news for a few minutes a day – could be forgiven for thinking that the release of the Israeli hostages has been part of some agreed-upon “like-for-like” exchange.

In a statement on Jan. 19, U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer described the release of British-Israeli citizen, Emily Damari, as “long-overdue.” This comes, naturally, after months of totally ignoring the plight of the hostages on the world stage and instructing the U.K. to vote for ceasefire proposals not tied to their release at the UN.

Meanwhile, Western media coverage has done a huge disservice to innocent prisoners like Emily by equating their suffering to the just captivity of violent terrorists in Israeli jails.

Headlines from major outlets like the BBC describe “jubilant scenes” in the West Bank following the release of “Palestinian prisoners”; the Guardian reported how “Freed Palestinians and Israelis reunite[d]with families” after the releases on Jan. 26.

This depiction of the “prisoner exchange” glosses over the reality that Israel is being forced to liberate violent terrorist offenders in order to restore innocent men and women to their families.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Democrats Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks

Posted By on February 12th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/12/the-democrats-doth-protest-too-much-methinks/

The Democrats’ reaction to the Department of Government Efficiency’s necessary mission might seem a bit excessive. But it is understandable. Their taxpayer-funded slush fund has been exposed.

Rather than joining with Elon Musk, who is leading DOGE to root out federal waste and fraud, and improve the transparency of the murky federal leviathan, the Democrats are attacking him. At a rally a week ago outside the Capitol, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley, chanted “Elon Musk must go” along with a rabble that seems eager to do harm to the South African billionaire.

There have been similar protests in other cities in which baying mobs demand that Musk be deported, sexually violated, even launched to Mars.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Progressive Caucus wants the Democrats to find a way to “fire” Musk. New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer has groused on X that “an unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,” surely unaware that he’s implying that the permanent bureaucracy is a separate, unaccountable, untouchable and unconstitutional branch of the government. Harpy pundits swear Musk is carrying out a coup and is a threat to democracy, a frivolous slogan that the political left cannot resist using.

Other complaints against the DOGE operation included grousing that Musk’s team has access to sensitive Treasury data and is holding back important federal programs.

But the real reason the Democrats are so upset is because their racket at the U.S. Agency for International Aid has been exposed, and they fear it’s just the first of many similar duplicitous schemes throughout the government that will be uncovered. They’ve even been able to convince their core voters that Musk and his team, merely doing the job they were asked to do by the duly elected president, are pure evil that must be stopped.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

David Axe China’s mysterious nuclear-battery submarine could hurt the US Navy badly in a Taiwan war Unique hybrid propulsion system offers a key advantage

Posted By on February 12th, 2025

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/12/china-mystery-nuclear-battery-submarine-taiwan-war-us-navy/

China’s new nuclear-battery attack submarine – a unique hybrid boat running on batteries like a conventional sub but which recharges them using a tiny nuclear reactor – could be the ultimate near-shore defence sub, and a big problem for US and allied forces in the western Pacific.

The submarine first appeared in commercial satellite imagery of the Wuchang shipyard in Wuhan, China back in April. Five months later, the Type 041 boat reportedly suffered an accident at its moorings – and apparently sank. 

While observers wait for signs Wuchang is repairing that first Type 041 or building new examples of the class, analysts are scrutinising its potential capabilities. Most notably the type seems to have a unique propulsion system – one that sidesteps longstanding engineering challenges in order to deliver a quiet attack submarine for near-shore operations, one that can stay submerged for long periods of time in order to preserve its stealth. The Type 041 is reportedly the first submarine with a tiny nuclear reactor that, while too small to power the entire boat, is big enough to charge the batteries for submerged operations. 

This is a novel approach to the problem of powering a mostly or entirely non-nuclear submarine while it’s underwater. Conventional diesel-electric submarines recharge their batteries using old-fashioned diesel engines. For that, they have to surface or at the least put up a “snort” air intake mast at periscope depth – potentially exposing them to detection and attack. The main alternative is to use nuclear power for propulsion, which produces a very capable boat but is very expensive.

Some navies mitigate this vulnerability by installing so-called “air-independent propulsion” systems in their smaller submarines. There are many different types of AIP. Some burn liquid oxygen. Others draw power from fuel cells. The Japanese navy builds attack submarines powered by lithium ion batteries, which can hold much more energy than normal batteries but are regarded as too dangerous to use in subs by most designers.

All AIP systems are complex, delicate and – when badly made – dangerous. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Charles Lipson: Democrats loved ‘unelected power’ until Trump turned their own weapons against them The party of FDR and Obama created a powerful executive to ram through ‘progressive’ programmes. Now it’s being used to dismantle them

Posted By on February 12th, 2025

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2025/02/11/democrats-loved-unelected-power-trump-weapons-against-them/

With Democrats in disarray and unable to choose a positive theme, they have settled on the obvious alternative. Unite around their shared hatreds. Near the top of that list is Elon Musk and his Doge project. “Nobody elected Musk.” “He is more powerful than the president.” Time magazine tried to drive home that point by depicting him behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

These attacks are manifestly untrue, but they follow a shrewd piece of political advice, given by the old Leftist organiser, Saul Alinsky. Personalise your political grievances. Let one person stand for much bigger complaints. It’s easier to mobilise around that concrete target and move on to bigger goals by taking him down.

Republicans recognise the risk here. They have responded by pointing out that Musk answers directly to president Trump. There are no middlemen, no bureaucratic protections. Trump can fire Musk as soon as he becomes a political liability. That, of course, is what Democrats hope to make him.

This predictable back-and-forth is part of a broader attack on Trump’s swift, aggressive actions against entrenched Washington power centres. Rolling them back and asserting control is the heart of Trump’s MAGA agenda.

Both sides recognise that basic point, but they have overlooked another, equally important one that illuminates the long arc of America’s changing governance. Democrats created all the tools Trump is using to attack official Washington. Oops. They hoped to centralise power in the presidency and break through the old limitations of the 1787 Constitution. They largely succeeded after decades of effort. 

What the authors of this transformation never expected was a president who would use the great powers they handed him to dismantle their own cherished projects. Yet that is exactly what Trump is doing.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

‘Qatar is Hamas, and Hamas is Qatar’ by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21386/qatar-is-hamas

The Israeli hostages kidnapped by Hamas and other Palestinians on October 7 could have been released a long time ago had the Biden administration exerted pressure on Qatar to use its good relations with the Islamist group to force it to do so.

All Qatar had to do was to summon the Hamas leaders in Doha and give them an ultimatum to release all the hostages immediately or face deportation from the Gulf state. It is hard to see how the Hamas leaders would have been able to say no to their major political and financial patrons and backers….The Qataris were never under the slightest pressure.

“For years, Qatar supported the Taliban, and last year [2021] it helped it in its coup against the democratically elected Afghan government, and 13 American service members were killed in the violence. Today, Qatar is doing everything it can to give the Taliban international legitimacy and aid.” – Yigal Carmon, President and Founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (memri.org), and served as counterterrorism advisor to two Israeli prime ministers; Haaretz, May 10, 2022 and memri.org, October 8, 2024

“Any Arab who hears American officials say that Qatar is America’s ally would burst into laughter…. Ask Egypt, not just the rulers, but the people and journalists. Ask the Emirates, the government and people. Ask Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Jordan. They all know that for decades Qatar has been promoting Islamist and terrorist organizations. There are lawsuits against Qatar in the U.S. and Europe in connection with its support for terrorism.” – Yigal Carmon, President and Founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute (memri.org), and served as counterterrorism advisor to two Israeli prime ministers, memri.org, November 1, 2023

The Trump administration needs to understand what Arabs have known for years: that Qatar’s support for Hamas and other extremist Islamist groups is the main reason thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have died over the past few years.

US President Donald Trump’s recent statements regarding Qatar’s role in reaching the Israel-Hamas ceasefire-hostage deal surprised many, especially those who are familiar with the Gulf state’s longtime support for radical Islamist groups.

“Qatar is absolutely trying to help,” Trump told reporters in Washington. “I know them well, and they’re doing everything they can. Very tough situation, but they’re absolutely trying to help.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

MAGANOMICS: Fusion Energy Needs to be President Trump’s 21st Century Manhattan Project by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21385/maganomics-fusion-energy

America’s next great economic revolution — to be spearheaded by President Donald J. Trump — is currently being studied by the preeminent polling firm, John McLaughlin Associates.

A poll will investigate America’s next great economic and technological frontier: clean, limitless, inexpensive energy through nuclear fusion by a made in America nuclear reactor superior to China’s tokamak.

This new 21st Century Manhattan Project would entail a trailblazing, all-out effort to compete against Communist China, already investing billions into this field.

Just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt headed the original Manhattan Project, when America raced to develop a nuclear weapon before scientists in Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan could unlock its enormous deadly power and use it against the Allies in World War II, Trump could usher in a new Clean Controlled Fusion Energy Revolution.

In that era, Roosevelt recognized the existential threat and directed all necessary resources to win that fateful race. Today, we know China is investing enormous sums into fusion energy research that seeks to create a sustained reaction that would be channeled to create unlimited electricity. America must create technology that is far superior to China’s tokamak fusion reactors.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Green Idiocy’s Inevitable Consequences David King

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/doomed-planet/green-idiocys-inevitable-consequences/

The last chapter of Donald Horne’s 1964 classic The Lucky Country opened with the prophetic statement that “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck”. Much has been written over the last 60 years about what Horne intended to convey with his book title, and the source of the luck, including Horne’s own explanation in his 1976 sequel Death of the Lucky Country; but it is a common theme that Australia’s relative prosperity is and has been despite the quality of its leadership, not because of it.

While there have of course been interludes of reasonable government, at both Federal and State levels, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are now at a low ebb in Canberra (and in Victoria); it is such a low ebb that the Lucky Country is now better described as a Kakistocracy, which is loosely defined as “a state or society governed by its least competent or suitable citizens.” The term derives from the Greek word for “the worst”, kakistos; it is of course tempting to speculate a shared origin with the colloquial English and Dutch (amongst others’) word for excrement!

The atrocities in current government policies are nowhere more evident than in the area of energy policy. Let us look at just a few examples.

Government initiatives to stop the use of gas in households is an excellent example. Gas is currently delivered with very little energy loss into homes, where it is efficiently converted for heating, cooking or whatever. Governments are now saying this same gas has to be delivered to a gas-fired power station, where it is converted into electricity at, at best, 60% efficiency. This electricity is then delivered to homes, after suffering further unavoidable transmission losses, where it is converted into heat energy.

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘If you genuinely think Trump is a fascist, go and have a lie down’ Tom Slater

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/07/if-you-genuinely-think-trump-is-a-fascist-go-and-have-a-lie-down/

This is an edited version of a speech that was delivered at the Cambridge Union on February 6 opposing the motion, ‘This house believes Donald Trump is a 21st-century fascist’.

Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump. Il Duce, der Führer, The Donald. The Roman salute, the Sieg Heil, the YMCA dance. The comparison is so absurd it practically debunks itself.

Anyone who genuinely thinks that Trump’s America – whatever else you might think of the man or his policies – can be mentioned in the same breath as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany needs to get a grip.

Because let’s be clear about what we are talking about here. Fascism, and especially its Nazi incarnation, was an evil the like of which the world had never seen before. Or, thankfully, since.

Totalitarian control. Messianic dictatorship. A cult of racial superiority. Paramilitaries crushing the left at home. A Darwinian military struggle for supremacy abroad. The worship of war and violence. The mechanised attempt to murder all of Europe’s Jews.

If this sounds anything like America in 2025 to you, then I suggest you leave here right now and go and have a nice, long lie down.

Trump is many things. He’s a right-wing populist. He’s a trenchant opponent of illegal and mass migration. He’s a culture warrior. He can also be a thin-skinned, occasionally conspiratorial, blowhard.

But try as I might, I am struggling to find the extermination camps or the goose-stepping gunmen killing with impunity. Perhaps my colleagues on the other side can enlighten me.

I almost feel sorry for the speakers for the proposition. It must be exhausting – petrifying even – to see fascism everywhere. To see everyone who disagrees with you, about immigration or gender or whatever, as literally Hitler. I’m amazed you can sleep at night.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The strange reluctance to see Jews as victims Even the sight of three emaciated hostages was not enough to shake the lie that Jews are oppressors. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/10/the-strange-reluctance-to-see-jews-as-victims/

The words of Vasily Grossman, the great Soviet writer, rang in my ears on Saturday: ‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, [and] I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.’ For as those three weak, skeletal, stolen Jews finally tasted freedom after 16 months of bondage in Gaza, it became clear that Hamas is guilty of the very crime it accuses the Jewish State of committing. Famine. The use of hunger as a weapon of war. The infliction of humiliating malnourishment on those judged a lesser people. The Jews are starving us, Hamas cried, when in truth Hamas was starving Jews.

The scenes were chilling. Surrounded by well-fed and heavily armed Hamas gunmen, Eli Sharabi, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami cut frail, gaunt figures. Their 491 days in the captivity of that neo-fascist militia had clearly been hellish. On its Instagram page, Israel posted images of the men before and after their kidnapping. Three fit, tanned men had become haggard creatures. They’d clearly been deprived of both food and sunlight – the stuff of life – while chained in Hamas’s dank tunnels. The glee of their loved ones gave way to dread. ‘He [looks] like a skeleton’, said Ben Ami’s mother.

Hamas’s inhumanity continued even during the men’s release. There was a profoundly unsettling moment when Eli Sharabi, flanked by Hamas brutes, said into a mic that he was looking forward to seeing his wife and daughters. As Hamas knew very well, his wife and daughters are dead. They were murdered in the 7 October pogrom. They were shot to death by Hamas militants who invaded their home crying, ‘Die Israel!’. Their bodies were found ‘cuddled together’. For Hamas militants to watch as a man they starved expressed his hope of being reunited with his family that they butchered is a testament to their depthless moral depravity.

It is unimaginable cruelty. You would need to wade back decades to find equal acts of wanton savagery against a Jewish family. Sharabi’s wife, Lianne, was a British citizen. She was from Wales. Their daughters, aged just 13 and 16, will have been Welsh-Israeli. The silence of Britain’s ‘progressives’ on Hamas’s slaughter of these British women for nothing more than the fact that they were Jews in Israel is horrifying. Hamas’s calculated cruelty towards Eli Sharabi finds its echo in the pitiless indifference of Lianne Sharabi’s fellow Britons towards the barbarism inflicted on her and her girls on 7 October.

Or Levy, 34, also didn’t know his wife was dead: she was slain alongside 363 others at the Nova music festival. These men were robbed of their liberty for 16 months and then freed into unthinkable grief. Yet the virtuous of the West look the other way.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Vance Is Right About the Limits of Judicial Restraints on Executive Power By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on February 11th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/vance-is-right-about-the-limits-of-judicial-restraints-on-executive-power/

In its awful 2012 ruling in Arizona v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld one aspect (out of four) of Arizona’s contested immigration statute — a provision requiring state police, in certain circumstances, to verify a detained person’s immigration status with the federal government. This was a rejection of the Obama administration, which had argued that this provision was preempted by federal law and that its enforcement would interfere with Obama administration policy.

Hours after the Supreme Court ruled against President Obama on this point, the Obama administration announced that it would cease cooperation with Arizona’s efforts to verify a detainee’s immigration status. That is, after Obama lost in the Supreme Court, he decided he was going to ignore the Supreme Court because, under the Constitution, it was his job, not the justices’ job, to decide immigration enforcement policy.

This is nothing new or unusual from Democratic administrations. When FDR initially didn’t get his way on New Deal programs, he threatened to pack the Court until the justices got their minds right. When Biden didn’t get his way on socializing student load debt onto the rest of us, he bragged to his progressive base — which he was desperately trying to turn out to vote for Democrats against Donald Trump — that he didn’t care what the justices said, he was going to keep figuring out ways to do what they said was illegal.