ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Will New York Come Back? Will New Yorkers? The likely next mayor says he’ll lobby all those exiles in Florida to come back, and explains how he’ll reduce crime while restoring trust in police. By Tunku Varadarajan

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-come-back-eric-adams-mayor-covid-recovery-florida-crime-charters-police-11630677464?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Like many New Yorkers, Eric Adams plans to head for a warmer climate this winter. But for him it’s a business trip. “On Jan. 2, 2022,” he says, “I’m taking a flight to Florida, and I’m telling all those New Yorkers that live in Florida—I’m telling them, ‘Bring your butt back to New York.’ ”

Long a cold-weather bolt-hole for affluent New Yorkers, Florida became even more attractive last year as it quickly ended its pandemic restrictions. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles estimated this July that 33,500 New Yorkers—many able to work anywhere with an internet connection—had made the move in the preceding 10 months. A real-estate firm’s analysis of postal change-of-address forms counted some 26,000 moves from metro New York to the Miami area in 2020.

Mr. Adams, the Democratic nominee for New York mayor, expects to be sworn in on Jan. 1. He has good reason for wanting to win back erstwhile New Yorkers who’ve voted with their feet. Speaking by phone from the back seat of his car somewhere in his home borough of Brooklyn, he says he believes many of those who moved were “among the 65,000 New Yorkers who pay 51% of our income tax.” That is entirely plausible, given that New York City residents pay state and local income taxes at rates of up to 14.776%, while Florida has no income tax.

“I don’t blame them for leaving,” Mr. Adams says. “New York has become too violent, too bureaucratic, too expensive to do business.” He appreciates their financial contribution to the city: “We have cops on our streets, teachers in our schools and all of the other things because of those high-income-tax earners.” (He’s quick to acknowledge the contribution made, “also, by middle-income earners and even the low-income earners.”)

The election for mayor isn’t until Nov. 2, but Mr. Adams appears to be a shoo-in. Democrats outnumber Republicans 6 to 1 on the city’s voter rolls. Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg won a combined five terms as Republican nominees between 1993 and 2009, but they didn’t leave an effective party behind. Joe Lhota, a former Giuliani aide who was the GOP mayoral nominee in 2013, received less than a quarter of the vote as he lost to leftist Democrat Bill de Blasio. The current GOP nominee, radio host Curtis Sliwa, founded the Guardian Angels anticrime group in the late 1970s.

On the Democratic side, Mr. Adams prevailed as a centrist in a crowded field. He outpolled all rivals in every borough save Manhattan and did especially well in minority neighborhoods. (Mr. Adams, who is black, is serving his second term as Brooklyn borough president.) After 22 years in the New York City Police Department, rising to captain, he positioned himself as the mayoral candidate best equipped to tackle crime—a problem that seemed well under control in the Bloomberg years but has grown worse under Mr. de Blasio.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Hurricane Ida Isn’t the Whole Story on Climate The number of landfall hurricanes isn’t rising and the world is getting better at mitigating their destruction. By Bjorn Lomborg

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hurricane-ida-henri-climate-change-united-nations-un-galsgow-conference-natural-disaster-infrastructure-carbon-emissions-11630704844?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Editor’s note: As November’s global climate conference in Glasgow draws near, important facts about climate change don’t always make it into the dominant media coverage. We’re here to help. Each week contributor Bjorn Lomborg will provide some important background so readers can have a better understanding of the true effects of climate change and the real costs of climate policy.

Hurricane season has arrived in the Atlantic Ocean. Already this summer Hurricanes Henri and Ida have caused headline-generating damage and flooding in the Gulf states, the Southeast and the Middle Atlantic states. Yet despite what you may have heard, Atlantic hurricanes are not becoming more frequent. In fact, the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the continental U.S. has declined slightly since 1900.

Airplanes and satellites have dramatically increased the number of storms that scientists can spot at sea today, making the frequency of landfall hurricanes—which were reliably documented even in 1900—a better statistic than the total number of Atlantic hurricanes.

And there aren’t more powerful hurricanes either. The frequency Category 3 and above hurricanes making landfall since 1900 is also trending slightly down. A July Nature paper finds that the increases in strong hurricanes you’ve heard so much about are “not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Media Can’t Handle the Climate Truth If, after four decades, scientists see less warming and lower emissions, isn’t that good news? By Holman Jenkins Jr.

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-climate-change-truth-degrees-warming-disaster-hurricanes-flooding-adaptation-infrastructure-united-nations-11630703058?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s

If “news” is about how today differs from yesterday, the press missed a lot of news in the long-awaited new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was issued a few weeks ago.

After 41 years of promoting a fuzzy and unsatisfying estimate of how much warming might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2, the world’s climate science arbiter has finally offered the first real improvement in the history of modern climate science.

Through five previous U.N. assessment plus their predecessor, the 1979 Charney Report, the likely worst-case was a rise of 4.5 degrees Celsius. This came from averaging the result of inconsistent computer climate simulations about which the IPCC knew only one thing: They couldn’t all be right and perhaps none were.

Using real-world data, the new report now says the worst case is a 4-degree rise. More important, with much greater confidence than before, disastrous outcomes above 5 degrees are now found to be very unlikely.

In another departure, the U.N. panel now says the dire emissions scenario it promoted for two decades should be regarded as highly unlikely, with more plausible projections at least a third lower.

The report also notes, as the press never does, the full impact of these emissions won’t be manifested until decades, even a century, later. The ultimate likely worst-case effect of a doubling of CO2 might be 4 degrees, but the best estimate of the “transient climate response” this century is about 2.7 degrees, or 1.6 degrees on top of the warming experienced since the start of the industrial age.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Why we are reclaiming history from the distortions of Critical Race Theory By David Abulafia

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://capx.co/why-we-are-reclaiming-history-from-the-distortions-of-critical-race-theory/

Writing history is about critical assessment, not the imposition of a political agenda
Critical Race Theory is a dangerously simplistic way of explaining both the past and the present 
CRT is lightweight, imprecise and totally unconcerned with an authoritative account of the past

In 1984 George Orwell wrote, ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’  The idea of controlling the past can be traced back long before the emergence of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. It is the backdrop to boastful inscriptions on the walls of ancient Egyptian temples at Luxor.

Today this idea has taken a new form. A way of reading the past is being imposed in universities, schools and wider society that is justified not by its historical accuracy but by its political message. The adherents of so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT) have no sense that the task of the historian is to expound the evidence, rather than to indulge in moralising jargon. They have no sense that it is important to engage in argument, rather than to impose one’s views. They have no sense that the dogma they are spreading is not taken seriously by very many historians. Or rather, it does need to be taken seriously by its opponents, for it is a dangerously simplistic way of explaining both the past and the present.

History Reclaimed is a new website that challenges the increasingly dominant dogma of the Theorists, and demands proper debate about the distorted view of history that lies at the heart of the new thinking. History Reclaimed supports the art of writing history as it has been written ever since the time of Herodotus in ancient Greece: collecting the evidence and assessing it before spinning any general theories about the nature of human development.

Interestingly, Karl Marx understood perfectly well the need to accumulate large amounts of data before moulding the arguments of Das Kapital. The days he spent in the imposing Reading Room of the British Museum were given over to serious study, as even those of us who reject his conclusions have to concede. By comparison, CRT is lightweight, imprecise in its use of terms such as ‘capitalism’, ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’, and much more concerned with righting supposed wrongs in the past than in writing authoritatively about the experience of our ancestors.

At the core of the ideas that we are challenging is the notion that history has been moulded by the racism of white people towards black people. Racism is seen as an invention of white people in western Europe who sought to create worldwide empires through the brutal exploitation of the labour of black Africans. These Africans were transported in vast numbers across the Atlantic from the early sixteenth century right up to the nineteenth century, and no one can deny that their treatment was at best callous and at worst murderous. It is possible that as many as 12.5 million slaves were imported to the Americas, the largest number towards the sugar plantations of Brazil, others towards similar plantations producing sugar, cotton and tobacco in the Caribbean islands and in what became the United States.

In this interpretation, the oppression of African slaves was not merely based on pseudo-scientific ideas that different races possess different levels of intelligence. It is also argued that the Industrial Revolution that took off in 18th-century Britain was funded by the profits of the sugar industry, which depended on slave labour. The fact that there were more significant sources of capital in the agricultural transformations taking place in Britain is conveniently ignored. So too is the fact that the main source of slaves was African kingdoms that willingly sold their war captives.

HISTORY Comments turned off

ROSH-HA-SHANA: THE JEWISH NEW YEAR EXPLAINED BY YORAM ETTINGER

Posted By on September 3rd, 2021

No one tells it better than Ambassador (Retired) Yoram Ettinger…..rsk

The evening of September 6, 2021 will launch the 5782th Jewish New Year.

1.  Annual reminder.  The Hebrew word Rosh (ראש) means first/head/beginning and Hashanah (השנה) means the year. The root of the Hebrew word Shanah is both “repeat” and “change.” Rosh Hashanah constitutes an annual reminder of the need to enhance one’s behavior through a systematic study of moral values, learning from experience and avoiding past errors.  Rosh Hashanah ushers-in the Ten Days of Repentance, which are concluded on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).

The New Jewish (lunar) Year is the only Jewish holiday, which is celebrated upon the (monthly) appearance of a new moon, proceeding from relative-darkness to a fully-illuminated moon in the middle of the month.

2.  Humility.  Rosh Hashanah is celebrated on the 6th day of Creation, when the first human-being, Adam, was created.  Adam is the Hebrew word for a human-being (אדמ), which is the root of the Hebrew word for “soil” (אדמה). Moreover, the Hebrew letter  הis an abbreviation of God, the Creator.  Thus, the date of the Jewish New Year highlights the centrality of the soil – a metaphor for humility – in human life.

3.  Genesis.  The Hebrew letters of Rosh (ראש) constitute the root of the Hebrew word for Genesis (בראשית), which is the first word in the Book of Genesis. Rosh Hashanah is celebrated on the first day of the Jewish month of Tishrei – “the month of the Strong Ones” (Book of Kings A, 8:2) – when the three Jewish Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) and the Prophet Samuel were born. Tishrei means beginning/Genesis in ancient Acadian. The Hebrew letters of Tishrei (תשרי) are included in the spelling of Genesis (בראשית). Furthermore, the Hebrew spelling of Genesis (בראשית) includes the first two letters in the Hebrew alphabet (אב), a middle letter (י) and the last three letters (רשת) – representing the totality of the Creation.

4.  The Shofar (a ritual ram’s horn).  Rosh Hashanah is announced and celebrated in a humble and determined manner, by the blowing of the (bent-humble) Shofar. The sound of the Shofar used to alert people to physical challenges (e.g., military assaults). On Rosh Hashanah, it alarms people to spiritual challenges, while paving the potential road to salvation. It serves as a wakeup call to the necessity of cleansing one’s behavior.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Competence Question The national government of the United States is incompetent. It’s time to consider what can lawfully replace it. By Jay Whig

Posted By on September 3rd, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/02/the-competence-question/

The lesson we can learn from Afghanistan is not that Joe Biden lost what Donald Trump could have won. Nor is it that Trump, and his deplorable supporters, are to blame. After all, withdrawal was their plan. Nor is it—God forbid—that the United States should stay in Afghanistan forever. 

The lesson is a hard one. The national government of the United States is incompetent. 

The United States has been defeated in Afghanistan. The United States set incompetent, unachievable war aims, spent as much as $2 trillion over 20 years in the attempt, and achieved none of them. None. The Taliban are stronger, better financed, better equipped, more likely to remain in power, more able to harbor terrorists, more sophisticated, and more popular than they were in 2001. Women in Afghanistan will return to their former abject condition. China will be the Taliban’s partner for the extraction of Afghanistan’s natural resources, and for the promotion of the heroin trade.

The United States famously employs 16 intelligence agencies, a massive State Department, and a fabulously equipped Department of Defense. None of these institutions had the foresight to predict their failure. To say they were blind is unfair to the blind. They either willfully did not look or were consciously deceiving their country. Yet, the heads of these institutions have suffered no loss of prestige. There have been no dismissals, no reckonings, no resignations. The brass, the top bananas at the State Department and the intelligence agencies are, in fact, proud of the role they played. They are incompetent even to address their incompetence.

The incompetence in Afghanistan is not a specific, one-off, incompetence. The incompetence of the national government of the United States is general.

The national government of the United States is a gerontocracy. The president is nearly 79, the speaker of the House is 81, the Senate minority leader is 79, and Senate president pro tempore is 81. The Senate majority leader is the youngest of the senior elected officeholders at 70. The chain of succession for the presidency under the Constitution is president, vice president (who is incompetent, despite her youth), speaker, president pro tempore. Interrupted only by a cackle, it is liver spots all the way down. A gerontocracy requires the cooperation of the middle-aged and young, who cannot conceive of themselves wielding power and so defer to the old. Many place their hopes in Donald Trump, who will be 78 in 2024. This is a deep, broad incompetence.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden completely makes up a visit to Pittsburgh synagogue victimized by mass shooting in speech to Jewish leaders By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on September 3rd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/biden_completely_makes_up_a_visit_to_pittsburgh_synagogue_victimized_by_mass_shooting_in_speech_to_jewish_leaders.html

The President of the United States has completely lost touch with reality. This is Twenty-fifth Amendment territory, my friends. “No joke,” as the addled executive would say. Like some Walter Mitty of compassion, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. substituted himself for President Donald J Trump, as the person who visited the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh after a deranged gunman attacked the house of worship in 2018. This is not acient history, but a mere three years ago. Here is the fantasy claim:

Steve Nelson of The New York Post fact-checked the claim:

Barb Feige, executive director of the Tree of Life, said that Biden did not visit the synagogue in the nearly three years since the anti-Semitic attack.

In a phone interview, Feige, executive director since July 2019, said firmly that “no” Biden didn’t visit, even before taking office when he had a lower public profile as a former vice president and then-Democratic presidential candidate.

BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam By Janet Levy

Posted By on September 3rd, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/emwoke_inc_inside_corporate_americas_social_justice_scamem.html

In 2020, at the World Economic Forum, David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, proclaimed that the investment firm wouldn’t take corporations public unless they had at least one “diverse” member on their board. The ostensible logic: a diverse leadership performs better by avoiding groupthink. But the proclamation came too late. Six months before, the last S&P 500 company with an all-male board had inducted a woman. Goldman was actually virtue-signaling to divert attention from its role in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal, described in 2016 as the “largest kleptocracy case to date.” Goldman had paid $1 billion in bribes to win work raising money for 1MBD, a slush fund linked to then Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak and corrupt officials. Fined $5 billion for its machinations, Goldman was embracing “woke” to burnish its credentials.

It’s not just Goldman. Corporate America has learnt to invoke buzzwords like ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and ‘social justice’ to boost their profile, cache and profits. In Woke, Inc.:  Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy lays bare this duplicitous con. He writes in the introduction, “Here’s how it works: pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of each.” Worryingly, this deception is subverting democracy.

Like most American capitalists, Ramaswamy believes that the job of business is to provide products, maximize profit, and deliver value to shareholders. It’s not the realm of business to impose one particular vision of “social responsibility” on society. Corporate law limits boards’ focus to the financial interests of shareholders. This protects democracy from corporate overreach, for with financial power, businesses can easily crowd out dissent, whether from employees or from ordinary Americans.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is the U.S. Intelligence Community Putting the World at Risk? by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on September 3rd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17710/intelligence-report-china-covid

The Intelligence Community’s COVID Summary is dangerous; infinitely more dangerous than it appears.

How can the IC seriously believe that China’s active stonewalling of the international community’s attempts to get to the bottom of what happened and thus learn better how to combat the virus can be reduced to its “uncertainty about where an investigation might lead” or its “frustration” about outside political pressure? If… this wishful thinking really reflects what our IC believes, the world is in deep trouble.

In sum, we can assess with a high degree of confidence that while the origins and initial awareness of the virus by the Chinese government cannot be clearly ascertained, the Chinese government has been intimately involved in most everything since then. It has used the pandemic to further its global economic and political agenda. Its behavior has been ruthless and malicious.

[T]he U.S. intelligence community’s whitewashing of China’s culpability puts us all at risk…. Every word is weighed and considered. The implication that China is essentially innocent of any ill will is in the report only because some senior official wanted to include it.

God help us if this signals the beginning of a Biden administration appeasement strategy. Judging from everything we have experienced over the last ten to twenty years, the attempt to placate China by writing off its malicious behavior as lightly as this report does… shows weakness. It rewards an aggressive China, and only invites more of the same.

The recent release of an unclassified summary by the Intelligence Community (IC) of its investigation into China’s role in the COVID pandemic leaves one feeling that there is nothing there. Like Sergeant Schultz in the old TV series “Hogan’s Heroes,” the IC seems to be protesting “I know nothing! Nothing!” The report provided no real substantive insights into the origins of the pandemic. Yet the Intelligence Community’s COVID Summary is dangerous; infinitely more dangerous than it appears. Without saying so directly, it encourages us to discount China’s significant culpability in this disaster, downplaying its responsibility for the pandemic unleashed on its territory and its role in the deadly spread of COVID around the world.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The United Church of Christ’s Biased Resolution on ‘Palestine’ and Israel Historical facts are immaterial to the UCC. Joseph Puder

Posted By on September 3rd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/united-church-christs-biased-resolution-palestine-joseph-puder/

The United Church of Christ (UCC), in what has become typical among the mainline Protestant churches, issued a resolution (July 18, 2021) stating that Israel’s continued oppression of the Palestinian people is a “sin.” The resolution calls on the General Synod to adopt a declaration of requirements for a just peace between Palestine and Israel. The UCC’s most recent resolution was adopted by 83% of its delegates voting on line. The UCC has a membership of 800,000.

The UCC, with its progressive-leftist interpretation of the Bible, its lack of regard for history and Middle East realities, particularly as it applies to Palestinian Islamist terrorism and intimidation, is guilty of the sin of bias. The current UCC resolution, like previous ones, shows a clear anti-Israel bias that is largely influenced by the dhimmified Arab-Palestinian Christians. In order to survive in the increasingly jihadist-Muslim Middle East, including the Islamist Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon (all three funded and supported by Iran), and Fatah in the West Bank, Palestinian Christians must show greater anti-Israel vigilance than their fellow Muslims. The above points are evidenced by the massive exodus of Christians from the Middle East to Europe, and the Americas. The Christians are escaping Arab-Palestinian oppression…not Israeli oppression. In fact, this writer interviewed Bethlehem’s Mayor, Elias Freij, in 1991, and asked him where are the Christians of Bethlehem? He replied, “In Santiago de Chile.” Today Bethlehem’s Christian population is around 7%, in the West Bank as a whole, the Christian population is down to about 2%, and in Hamas ruled Gaza, less than 1%.

Using as supportive “evidence” the following groups; Arab-Palestinian dhimmified Kairos declaration, the World Council of Churches, the anti-Semitic and terrorist dominated United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNWRA), and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel alone, or bringing forth discredited Israeli NGO’s who are funded by European government agencies with the purpose of weakening Israel, only serves to reinforce the one-sided, biased sources employed by the UCC resolution.