ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Howard Husock Local Option How to drill, baby, drill—even in New York State.

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/local-option

The 2024 election was a referendum on a wide range of issues, but there’s no doubt that increasing domestic fossil-fuel production—“energy dominance,” as Donald Trump now calls it—was on the ballot and won. Kamala Harris backed away from her past calls to ban fracking but nonetheless lost Pennsylvania, where voters seemed to doubt her sudden change of heart.

The pro-Trump vote in most counties outside Gotham suggests that pro-fracking sentiment played a role in the election in New York State. Trump won by overwhelming margins in the counties located above portions of the Marcellus Shale formation, which feeds natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Many of these counties are economically distressed and have lost population. The time has come to give them a voice when it comes to permitting natural gas fracking, currently banned statewide.

At least 22 upstate New York counties sit atop Marcellus Shale deposits. These counties typically lag the state’s median household income level. Median income in Broome County, which is located on the Pennsylvania border and which nearly flipped from Biden to Trump (as of current data), is $63,000 compared with the statewide figure of $81,000. The county has lost 2 percent of its population since 2010, and 19 percent of residents live at or below the official poverty line. In western New York, Cattaraugus County, which also borders Pennsylvania, has a similar profile, with a median income of just $56,000. It has lost 5,000 of the 80,000 residents it had in 2010, and 16 percent live in poverty. It, too, voted for Trump in 2024. Indeed, outside of cities like Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo, the entire 2024 upstate county vote map is red.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Seriously, Is Biden Trying To Start WWIII To Get Even With Trump?

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/22/seriously-is-biden-trying-to-start-wwiii-to-get-even-with-trump/

A mentally-challenged President Joe Biden turned 82 years old this week, a much-diminished man from his hey-day as a Democratic Party Senate stalwart in the last century. But one part of his character is undimmed by the passage of the years: His legendary spite and gleeful willingness to betray his political foes.

Knowing this, is he now about to set off a third world war to settle an election score with newly re-elected President Donald Trump, who Biden still calls an “existential threat” to America?

We’re talking of course of Biden’s inexplicably dangerous decision to encourage Ukraine to use long-range U.S. missiles against Russian territory, which has already prompted a response from Russia in the form of a missile barrage against Ukraine.

Biden’s also approving antipersonnel mines for use against Russian forces, along with sending yet another $237 million in military aid and forgiving $5 billion in loans.

It makes no sense at all, unless you see it as a way of showing he still has the reins of government firmly in hand, and wants to hand newly re-elected President Donald Trump a nasty, dangerous mess as he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Regime-Change: Prerequisite for Iran’s Policy-Change Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

http://bit.ly/40Xe8QQ

According to the State Department’s annual human rights report on Iran: “Iran’s restrictions on human rights worsened in a number of areas during the year….[For instance], transnational repression against individuals, femicide, forced sterilization, early and forced marriage, trafficking in persons, recruitment of child soldiers, worst forms of child labor, violence targeting ethnic minorities [e.g., Shiite Arabs, Sunni and Shiite Kurds and Sunni Balochis], severe restrictions on freedom of expression and religion [e.g., Sunnis, Baha’is, Jews], criminalizing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons, enforced disappearance, torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government….”

The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights adds: ”Human rights violations by Iran… amounting to crimes against humanity…. Women and girls subjected to rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including gang rape, rape with an object, electrocution of genitalia, forced nudity and groping…. State authorities at the highest levels encouraged, sanctioned and endorsed human rights violations through statements justifying the acts and conduct of the security forces….”

*Since its February 1979 violent rise to power, the Ayatollahs’ regime has been intensely committed to its 1,400-year-old fanatical vision, as documented by its Constitution, school curriculum, mosque sermons and the daily enforcement of its Islamic Revolution, domestically and globally.  The Ayatollahs’ vision – which transcends financial and diplomatic considerations – has transformed Iran from “The American Policeman of the Gulf” to the leading global epicenter of anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the proliferation of advanced military systems.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden sanctions Israeli farmers while dropping sanctions on Palestinian terrorists Victor Sharpe

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

Here in the United States, journalism ruined itself and by extension harmed the nation. The leftwing legacy media, filled as it is with anti-Trump, anti-Republican, and increasingly anti-Israel hacks, exposed its relentless malignancy during this last election with its inexorable bias. However, vast numbers of U.S voters finally saw the malign legacy media for what it is and has become. They voted in favor of Trump and against the dangerous Democrat Biden-Harris policies that were pushed by the media.

The number of votes in favor of President Trump may have even exceeded that of the votes cast for Barack Hussein Obama in 2008. America may yet become great again.

There is little the Trump Administration may be able to do about the current malevolence which erodes ABC and CBS News, as long as those two media outlets don’t violate their license. But NPR and PBS violated the public trust with extreme and biased coverage during the election. For so many years they have been subsidized by the American taxpayers through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and it is now high time to end those subsidies. After all, that will help defeat their wokeism.

With support for the new President and his Administration, the hope is that the appalling measures that Biden, Harris and Blinken enacted since coming to power – and especially during these last two months of their term of office – will be toppled by President Trump. Biden immorally is ramping up yet more sanctions on Israeli farmers but is dropping those on Palestinian terrorists.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why they refuse to see Jews as victims The left’s pitiless cynicism about the pogrom in Amsterdam confirms how morally lost they are. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on November 21st, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/20/why-they-refuse-to-see-jews-as-victims/

It was the speed with which the racism fearmongers became racism deniers that was most unnerving. Virtually overnight, as men whose only crime was their Jewishness were still being patched up in Amsterdam hospitals, the preening racism denouncers of what passes for the Euro-left were saying this wasn’t racism. The very people who see racism everywhere could not see it here, in the broken teeth, black eyes and bloodied faces of Israelis who became the prey of a self-described Jew hunt earlier this month in Amsterdam. Confronted with beaten, bruised Jews, they said, for the first time I can remember, ‘Maybe it wasn’t a hate crime. Maybe it was something else.’

It has been extraordinary. The people who wring their hands over the racial microaggression of asking a woman in African garb ‘Where are you from?’ were positively blasé about the racial macroaggression of a mob smashing in a man’s face because he ‘helped a Jew’. The people who cry ‘Islamophobia!’ when a schoolkid lightly scuffs a page of the Koran struggled to see the Judeaophobia in a gang of self-styled Jew-hunters accosting men and asking them: ‘Are you Yehudi? Are you Jewish?’ The people who madly insist that every tabloid piss-take of Meghan Markle is an act of unforgivable ‘racist bullying’ refused to accept that ‘Jew hunters’ on mopeds who fired fireworks at Israelis might have been racist bullies.

The zeal of the downplayers felt alarming. There are prominent British and American leftists who for a whole week devoted every waking hour to disproving the claim that Israeli Jews were the victims of a mass, coordinated racist attack. The moral energy they normally reserve for proving that the West is institutionally racist they now expended on proving that a pogrom did not take place in Amsterdam. That was their main beef: the use of that p-word by Dutch and Israeli politicians, Jewish groups and sections of the media. ‘There were no “anti-Semitic pogroms” in Amsterdam’, they cried, as noisily as they normally cry that racism is the disease our societies will never shake off.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Unfulfilled Promise Pope Francis and the Israel-Hamas War Adam Gregerman

Posted By on November 21st, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/unfulfilled-promise-pope-francis-israel

Pope Francis has called for an investigation to determine if Israel’s operation in Gaza constitutes genocide, according to a new book published for the Catholic Church’s jubilee year. “According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” the pope said in excerpts published Sunday by the Italian daily La Stampa.

What makes the inflammatory statements in the pope’s book especially disturbing is that they follow on remarks by the pope that appear to demonize Jews even more broadly and which are contrary to teachings of the Church. Pope Francis’ prior Letter to Catholics of the Middle East on the first anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel from Gaza provoked widespread confusion and consternation among Jews and Catholics. While he has spoken regularly about the attack and the fighting that erupted in its wake, his inclusion in the letter of a citation of John 8:44 to denounce the evils of war was to many inexplicable.

The verse chosen by the pontiff, a vitriolic accusation that the Jews “are from [their] father, the devil,” has for centuries provoked and been used to justify Church hostility to Jews. Yet such terrible imagery of Jewish malfeasance is thoroughly out of place in a modern Catholic document. Regrettably, the pope nonetheless chose to use this notorious verse at a time when global antisemitism has reached disturbingly high levels. Such a statement threatens the intellectual work of his Catholic predecessors going back to the 1960s.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Sending Them Home ‘Mass deportation’ starts with the removal of illegal aliens who break the law inside our borders, whether on the streets or on campuses by Mark Krikorian

Posted By on November 21st, 2024

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mass-deportation-criminal-aliens

Who said the following?

Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.

Donald Trump? Stephen Miller? Incoming “border czar” Tom Homan?

No—civil rights icon Barbara Jordan in 1995.

Jordan, the first Black congresswoman from the South and a star of the Watergate hearings, was named by President Clinton to head an immigration commission some 30 years ago. It is precisely because her recommendations were ignored that we are where we are today. The lack of credibility that Jordan bemoaned is how you get a man like Trump.

The bottom line is that a large-scale program to make illegal aliens leave doesn’t require soldiers breaking down doors, cattle cars, or concentration camps. This is law enforcement, not war. And it is imperative in light not just of the past four years of immigration mismanagement, but the past four decades of dishonesty.

Decades of unwillingness to enforce immigration laws were driven by the desire of some for cheap, controllable labor, and of others for a new client class that would shift political power to the Democratic Party. The culmination of that process under Biden became entwined with the identity of the party and its ideological activists who sincerely believe that national borders are an expression of racism and that turning away foreigners who want to move here illegally is immoral. The belief in unlimited, lawless immigration has become a litmus-test issue for the activist left, like hostility to the existence of law enforcement itself.

And because most voters naturally consider that insane, we now see broad public support, including among first-generation migrants, for “mass deportation” and an electoral mandate for what the president-elect has promised will be the “largest deportation effort in American history.”

Restoring credibility after decades of deceit will take time, cost money, get tied up in courts, and inevitably involve an unfortunate measure of human suffering, the images of which will be ruthlessly exploited for political purposes by the media and the interests they serve. But it’s neither the Manhattan Project nor the D-Day landings—it’s simply a matter of enforcing existing law consistently and without apology, which is the legal and popular mandate the American people have given the incoming administration.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Puts Trump, Trade, and Foreign Business in the Crosshairs by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on November 21st, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21135/china-trump-trade

AstraZeneca confirmed this month that Chinese investigators had detained Leon Wang, president of the company’s China business.

[I]t is highly unlikely that AstraZeneca is the only pharmaceutical company guilty of shenanigans. Selective prosecution of foreigners is a Communist Party specialty.

Xi Jinping… hits foreign companies whenever he can. He took down the U.S.-based Mintz Group in March of last year and has not let up since.

[F]oreign pharmaceutical businesses are at special risk because they occupy a sector that Xi Jinping is determined to control. He is, infamously, the driving force behind Made in China 2025, the predatory ten-year plan to achieve dominance in ten key technology areas. One of those ten sectors is medicine and medical devices.

He [Xi Jinping] does not really believe in free trade, however: He really wants China to have unfettered access to other markets while denying others access to China’s.

So Trump, despite his tariff promises, is not the one attacking the rules-based trading order.

The real culprit is Xi Jinping.

“The attempt to block economic cooperation under all sorts of pretexts and break up the interdependence of the world is nothing but backpedaling,” declared China’s President Xi Jinping at the just concluded APEC summit in Peru.

“Stand up to protectionism and unilateralism,” said Ren Hongbin, a former Commerce Ministry official and now chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, also at APEC. “There is the rhetoric of the decoupling and derisking,” he warned. “The artificial severance of the global supply chain is detrimental for everyone”

Beijing’s campaign against the next president of the United States has just begun. China is trying to position itself as the defender of free trade and tar Donald Trump as the global disruptor.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Trumpian Rebuke to the World Economic Forum By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on November 21st, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/a_trumpian_rebuke_to_the_world_economic_forum.html

In the background of everything I write is a recurring message: human freedom is invaluable, and we must fight for it daily.  We are not “biological programs” or “redundant machines,” as the techno-fascists at the World Economic Forum would describe us.  We are not “useless eaters” whose mere presence threatens the planet.  We are unique individuals made in the image of God.  We are meant to make choices, learn valuable lessons, struggle through hardship, overcome adversity, and persevere.  We are meant to live, have children, protect our families, and pass what wisdom we gain to the next generation.  

What I describe above is ancient knowledge.  Yet many of today’s “leaders” would deny these essential truths.  They speak of “saving the planet” with great fervor but are silent when it comes to saving human life.  In fact, their message is just the opposite: don’t get married, don’t have kids, celebrate abortion, and embrace euthanasia.  To most leaders in the West, life is a burden.  Or rather, your life is a burden.  While they enjoy the perks and privileges of wealth and power, they see everyone beneath their social stratum as just another mouth to feed.  How lowly and unimportant are we in the minds of those who wish to rule over us?  Men such as Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Al Gore, and John Kerry tell us bluntly that we should own nothing, obey our “betters,” and subsist on a diet of bugs.  According to their dark worldview, this is the bleak future that we deserve.

No doubt Schwab, Gates, Gore, Kerry, and other WEF enthusiasts see themselves as “visionaries.”  The editorial boards of many influential newspapers and the boardrooms of many influential corporations certainly hail them as such.  Don’t forget that prominent American and European businessmen once hailed Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler as “visionaries,” too.  There is no shortage of opinion pieces from the snappiest writers of the first half of the twentieth century extolling the “virtues” of the very leaders we now almost universally denounce as monstrously “totalitarian.”  When the World Economic Forum repackages the tenets of totalitarianism as a “humanitarian” form of global governance necessary for fighting “climate change,” “disinformation,” or COVID, the ideological descendants of last century’s totalitarians manage to make this century’s totalitarianism sound like philanthropy.  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Trump Counterrevolution Is a Return to Sanity The Trump counterrevolution challenges entrenched elites, bureaucracies, and progressive ideologies in favor of restoring traditional values, government accountability, and national identity. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 21st, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/21/the-trump-counterrevolution-is-a-return-to-sa

We are witnessing a historic counterrevolution after Trump’s victory, far different from his first election in 2016.

The orthodox and the supposed scripted future are now suspect. And they are likely to be dethroned—from the trivial to the existential.

Critics claim Trump has no mandate to stage such a counterrevolution. They argue that he did not win 51 percent of the popular vote or achieve a Reaganesque landslide in the Electoral College.

Yet all the initiatives he advanced and won on polled landslide public approval.

Despite being the target of Democrat lawfare for years, a defiant Trump promised to end an open border, massive illegal immigration, rising crime, and soaring prices. He pledged to slash government and its administrative state, terminate racial and gender identity politics, and restore deterrence abroad.

The people overwhelmingly wanted those messages but were waiting for an unorthodox messenger who would actually deliver them.

The Trump messenger reassured weary citizens that they were not crazy.

Instead, they had good cause to be sick of being talked down to by a media, academic, bureaucratic, and political elite that never earned nor deserved such self-appointed status.

The FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ, not the massive crowds at rallies, were the ones truly out of control.