NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Beauty contest winners and the death of standards Merit and individual achievement are under attack Don Feder

Posted By on June 25th, 2024

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/don-feder/

Plus-sized beauty queens are another aspect of the war on standards.

Sara Milliken, who has been described as “morbidly obese,” was crowned Miss Alabama 2024 in the National American Miss pageant. The virtue-signaling crowd was ecstatic. “Finally, we have a pageant winner who doesn’t look like Barbie,” they cheered, as if this marked a milestone of tolerance and understanding. Ms. Milliken may have many fine qualities. Getting up from the table isn’t one of them.

Our culture is now dedicated to eradicating standards. 

On June 1, Bailey Anne Kennedy became the first transgender “woman” to win the Miss Maryland USA contest. Why should a contest for women be limited to real women? 

Should academic competitions be open to those with low IQs? What’s wrong with a cooking show including contestants whose idea of fine cuisine is a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli?

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of “the hatred directed against the privileged in body and spirit: the revolt of the ugly and bungled souls against the beautiful, the proud and the cheerful. The weapons used: contempt of beauty, of pride, of happiness.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Where Are the Celebrities After Public Assault on Jews in Los Angeles?by Ronn Torossian

Posted By on June 25th, 2024

https://www.algemeiner.com/2024/06/24/where-are-the-celebrities-after-public-assault-on-jews-in-los-angeles/

On Sunday, we saw pro-Hamas protestors physically attack Jews in front of a Los Angeles synagogue, as they called for genocide and violence.

We have long heard that Jews control Hollywood, but many Jewish celebrities have been completely silent about the growing attacks against Jews, not to mention the situation in Israel.

I wish Jewish celebrities had half the courage to speak out for Jews and Israel as random influencers do, with posts about “All Eyes on Rafah” and other supposed injustices.

Furthermore, when Jews do speak out, they often do so in a half-hearted way, in order to protect their fan base.Ben Stiller recently came out in public saying that all wars should end, and that he wants peace. Stiller continued, “Antisemitism must be condemned whenever it happens and wherever it exists. As should Islamophobia and bigotry of all kinds.”

It seems like Stiller is apologizing for even speaking out. He can’t just oppose hatred against Jews and Israelis, without implying that attacks on Muslims are happening at a similar level (they are not; almost every domestic act of violence about Israel has been Muslims and other people attacking Jews).

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Douglas Murray :All eyes should be on Al Jazeera for being founded, funded — and directed — by terrorists All eyes should be on Al Jazeera for being founded, funded — and directed — by terrorists

Posted By on June 25th, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/06/20/opinion/all-eyes-should-be-on-al-jazeera-for-being-founded-funded-and-directed-by-terrorists/

Considering how much attention the American media get, it’s amazing that one piece of actual, unbelievable subversion keeps going on.That is the Al Jazeera network — founded, funded and directed by the terrorist-supporting state of Qatar.

Last month, The Washington Post reported darkly that the Israeli government had shut down the Al Jazeera network’s operations in Israel because of its coverage from Gaza. WaPo portrayed this as a “dark day” for press freedom.

In fact, there were a lot of good reasons for the Israelis to stop the network from operating inside Israel.

Just one being that a number of Al Jazeera journalists reporting on Israel’s war against terrorists in Gaza were — er — terrorists.

Take Muhammad Washah, whom Al Jazeera presented as a stellar part of the press corps merely reporting the truth.Unfortunately for them, their man is also a senior commander in Hamas.

He used to be in Hamas’ anti-tank missile unit, but since 2022 he has been in charge of research and development for aerial weapons.Known to you and me as “rockets.”

ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What I Saw at a Terrorist Rally Outside a Synagogue “Billions of us will come and kill you.”

Posted By on June 25th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/what-i-saw-at-a-terrorist-rally-outside-a-synagogue/

Thirty minutes after Hamas supporters first set up their operation outside a Los Angeles synagogue, they maced their first Jew. And the Los Angeles police did nothing.

Not until an hour into the terrorist rally outside a synagogue, did the LAPD finally step in, pushing back masked Jihad supporters in keffiyeh terror scarves from the entrance of Congregation Adas Torah (Congregation of the Bible) which they had occupied.

And then the mob, chanting calls for “intifada” and the destruction of Israel, moved outward to target two smaller synagogues attended by Persian Jewish refugees from Islamic terror in Iran.

“Billions of us will come and kill you,” a heavily accented Middle Eastern man in a keffiyeh unprompted rasped at me as I walked up. Only dozens had actually shown up, but they made up for it with bullhorns, robotic chants, and assaults in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood.

The Jewish counterprotesters had come waving American and Israeli flags while the other side was a sea of terrorist flags. A man wore an Antifa cap, another had come in ski goggles during 90-degree heat, while others toted bear spray, metal bottles, and other implements of violence.

The Jewish community members included older men and women, as well as families, while the Hamas contingent was mostly young and many were masked. A pair of rabbis led a melodic song that could hardly be heard over the harsh clatter of the hateful terror chants.

Despite knowing that a terrorist rally was planned outside a synagogue, the LAPD had allowed the terrorist supporters to take over the entire sidewalk leaving only a thin lane for attendees to walk through to get inside. The LAPD did little to interfere with the terrorist supporters, but did block Jewish counterprotesters from reaching their own synagogue. The police also did nothing as clumps of masked Hamas supporters broke away from the synagogue and began confronting, threatening, and attacking Jewish community members on the street.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Google Doesn’t Want You To Know The Truth About Heat Waves And ‘Climate Change’Just as We Predicted

Posted By on June 25th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/25/google-labels-govt-weather-data-unreliable-and-harmful/

Earlier this week, we published an editorial arguing that government data didn’t support various claims about climate change. And we predicted Google would demonetize it. We were right. (See: Heat Wave Sets Off New Round Of ‘Climate Crisis’ Lies.)

Shortly after that article was published, Google’s AdSense informed us that it had “disabled ad serving” on that page because the article contained “unreliable and harmful claims.” (We have one spot on our pages for AdSense ads, mostly to track Google’s efforts to demonetize content. See the list of related editorials below.)

So what was “unreliable” or “harmful” about that editorial? Google doesn’t say. It just says we have to “fix” it if we want their ads to run on that page.

What we can say is that Google has effectively labeled official government data as “unreliable and harmful,” since all the evidence we provided was from official sources.

The editorial pointed out that claims about more frequent heat waves, tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires – claims that get repeated ad nauseam by the mainstream press and by climate activists – are not supported by the official data.

We included charts and cited the sources of the data – sources such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Interagency Fire Center, the government-run GlobalChange.gov, etc.

Here’s how Google defines “unreliable and harmful.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Power is Their Goal Sydney Williams

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

“Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”                                                                                                                    Essay, The New York Times
                                                                                                                                                  Henry Wallace
                                                                                                                                              “The Danger of American Fascism”

                                                                                                                                                          April 9, 1944

While Wallace, then Vice President of the United States, was writing of the dangers of Fascism, his words apply today to extremists on both sides of the political aisle – Progressive/Marxists on the left and Neo-Fascists on the right – those who campaign under the mantle of service but who, in reality, seek power for themselves and the state. Keep in mind, at the time Wallace wrote, the Soviet Union, with its Communist ideology and its totalitarian practices, was our ally in the fight against Germany’s Nazis. Because his socialist leanings were not broadly popular, Wallace was dropped by FDR as his choice for Vice President in favor of Harry Truman in the 1944 election. In 1946, in the early days of the Cold War, Wallace left the Democrat Party over Truman’s hard line with the Soviet Union and joined the Progressive P

Power is an aphrodisiac, whether exercised by an individual, a cabal, or a mob. It has always existed in politics, in varying degrees. In a letter to Anglican bishop Mandell Creighton on April 5, 1887, Lord Acton (1835-1902) wrote: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” High political office carries enormous influence – the ability to financially reward backers (as well as oneself) – that many find irresistible. While there are principled individuals who run for office for the purpose of “giving back,” we live in a time of career politicians, those who have spent their careers either in elected or appointed office. We also live in a time of polarization where slogans substitute for reason and violent protests for debate.

Power and the corruption that often accompanies it are not limited to one party. But single party states and cities, with an absence of competition, are more likely to attract corrupt individuals. A Wikipedia map of the U.S. shows twenty red states, twenty blue states, with seven others either leaning red or blue, and three that are purple. Of the five most populous states, three are blue – California, New York and Pennsylvania – one is red – Texas – and one is purple – Florida. BallotPedia notes that seventeen of the country’s twenty largest cities are Democrat-run. Corporate monopolies are not good for consumers, and government monopolies are not good for citizens.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hamas is the enemy of the Palestinian people This reactionary religious movement has never had any interest in national liberation. James Heartfield

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/06/23/hamas-is-the-enemy-of-the-palestinian-people/

On 7 October last year, Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. Despite this demonstration of anti-Semitic barbarism, many Western anti-Israel activists continue to see Hamas as some sort of ‘resistance’ movement, fighting for Palestinian nationhood.

This view couldn’t be more wrong. As Italian journalist Paola Caridi shows in her largely sympathetic account of the group, Hamas: From Resistance to Government (originally published in 2009 but updated last year), Hamas is not and never has been a national-independence movement. It is above all an intransigent, religious movement set on the destruction of Israel.

The exhaustion of Palestinian nationalism

To get to grips with the nature and development of Hamas, it’s important to understand the broader historical background. The central problem here for Palestinians and Israelis is that their national aspirations are irreconcilable.

Israel was founded in 1948, after Jewish people revolted against Palestine’s British rulers. (With a mandate from the League of Nations, the British took over from the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled Palestine for over four centuries, at the end of the First World War.) During the 1920s and especially the 1930s, Palestine’s indigenous Jewish population was supplemented by refugees from Eastern Europe and later Nazi Germany. This growing and increasingly restive populace rebelled against British occupation, just as neighbouring Iraqis did in the 1920s and 1940s, and Egyptians did in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In doing so, these rebellions laid claim to new nations, which claimed descent from ancient civilisations.

Many Arabs, caught in the crossfire of the often violent Jewish struggle for an Israeli state in the late 1940s, fled to the neighbouring territories of the Egyptian-governed Gaza Strip and the Jordanian West Bank. In 1967, Israel defeated the Arab coalition of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six-Day War. Through this war, Israel conquered the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, complete with their Arab populations. These became the ‘occupied territories’.

As the Six-Day War demonstrated, the Arab world refused to accept Israel’s existence. Arab nations took Israel as an affront to their own independence. Yasser Arafat, born to Palestinian parents in Cairo in 1929, co-founded the paramilitary organisation, Fatah, in the late 1950s. Its object was to fight for a Palestinian state. In 1967, Fatah joined and became the dominant faction in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which was then a national-independence movement. Arafat became PLO leader in 1969.

Israel’s leaders always understood that the national aspirations of Palestinians were irreconcilable with the existence of Israel. Hence, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir insisted in a 1976 New York Times op-ed that there were no ‘Palestinians’, only Arabs, living in Egypt, Jordan and Israel itself.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo How DEI Corrupts America’s Universities The ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not what it purports to be.

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-dei-corrupts-americas-universities

The idea of public universities in the United States originally rested on a compact between the citizen and the republic. The agreement was that the citizen would provide funding for the university in order to train young people to advance the public interest and the common good. In recent years, however, this compact has shattered, and considerable efforts will be needed to rebuild it.

The clearest expression of what has gone wrong is DEI. At first glance, a commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” might seem laudable. But DEI employs a propagandistic language to conceal its real intentions. It is, in fact, the opposite of what it appears to be.

We can review the acronym in parts. First, “diversity.” The initial connotation of the word suggests a variety of people, experiences, and knowledge. But in practice, universities use diversity to justify a policy of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, racial discrimination: a total inversion of the principles of colorblind equality and individual merit.

Second, “inclusion.” In kindergarten, teaching kids to be inclusive means encouraging them to share and be polite to classmates. But in the context of a university, inclusion is used as justification for excluding people and ideas that are seen as a threat to prevailing ideologies and sentiments. 

Finally, “equity.” The immediate association is with the principle of equality. But equity is actually a radically opposed idea. Equality is the principle that every man or woman should be judged as an individual, neither punished nor rewarded based on ancestry. Equity demands the opposite: categorizing individuals into group identities and assigning disparate treatment to members of those groups, seeking to “equalize” what would otherwise be considered unjust outcomes.

What this means in practice is that members of certain groups get favored, others disfavored: in short, inequality justified under the ideology of “equity.”

You see this hiding in plain sight. Universities publish in their own materials prima facie evidence of their commitments to racial discrimination, quotas, and disparate treatment on the basis of identity in hiring, admissions, promotions, and in other programs.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Logic in All the Madness The Biden administration’s agendas may have fundamentally changed the country for decades, if not longer—and will require tough remedies that may be almost as unpopular as the wreckage they wrought. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/24/the-logic-in-all-the-madness/

Most Americans believe it is unhinged to deliberately destroy the border and allow 10 million illegal aliens to enter the country without background audits, means of support, any claims to legal residency, and definable skills. And worse still, why would federal authorities be ordered to release repeat violent felons who have gone on to commit horrendous crimes against American citizens?

Equally perplexing to most Americans is borrowing $1 trillion every 90 days and paying 5-5.5% interest on the near $36 trillion in ballooning national debt. Serving that debt at current interest exceeds the size of the annual defense budget and may soon top $1 trillion in interest costs, or more than 13% of the budget.

Why would the United States suspend military aid to Israel as it tries to destroy the Hamas architects of the October 7 massacres? Why would it lift sanctions on a terrorist Iran? Why would it suppress Israel’s response to Iran’s missile attack on the Jewish homeland? Why would it prevent Israel from stockpiling key munitions as it prepares to deal with the existential threats posed by Hezbollah?

Why would the Biden administration cancel key pipeline projects and put vast swaths of federal lands rich in oil and gas off limits to production, even as it further drains the strategic petroleum reserve? Why not pump rather than drain our own oil from strategic stockpiles?

Why would the Biden White House’s counsel’s office meet with Nathan Wade, the former paramour chief prosecutor in the Fani Willis Fulton County prosecution of Donald Trump? Why would the third-ranking prosecutor in the Biden Justice Department step down to lead Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan prosecution of Donald Trump? Why would the Biden Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland select Jack Smith as a special prosecutor of Donald Trump—given his past failures as a special counsel and known political biases?

Nihilism only explains so much. A better explanation is that the Biden administration and its handlers knew that there was a good chance that most of their policies would prove unpopular and might even jeopardize Biden’s reelection.

But they also were confident the changes were of such magnitude that the United States would either become—in the infamous phrase of Barack Obama—“fundamentally transformed” or force the next Republican administration to adopt such tough medicine that it would prove untenable politically and the malady would still prove mostly impossible to undo.

After all, how would a Trump administration deal with 10 million illegal aliens who entered the US without audit or legality? Where are they? How would they be found and deported? How many court suits in blue-jurisdictions before blue judges would have to be overcome?

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Will Voters Turn the World Upside-Down? By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on June 24th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/06/will_voters_turn_the_world_upside_down.html

So the Great Awakening continues apace.  All over the West, men and women who simply want to be left alone are concluding that their governments will not let them live in peace.  Woe to any Establishment hobgoblins who believe they can sabotage their home nations without paying a price.

After having failed to implement Brexit or curtail mass illegal immigration during their last decade and a half in power, Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives appear destined for extinction-level losses in the U.K.’s July 4 general election.  This regrettably means that Labor’s champagne socialists will seize Parliament’s suicidal reins and drive that once great nation deeper into the ground.  But in the background of Great Britain’s self-immolation is the resurgence of Brexit champion Nigel Farage, who enjoys unprecedented support for his Reform Party.  Because the U.K.’s Deep State has refused to honor the terms of Brexit, the British people are ready to overturn the whole system.  July 4 — what a lovely day for a revolution!

Emmanuel Macron, the Rothschild banker and diminutive king who married his grandmotherly schoolteacher, will likely suffer electoral humiliation of his own in France’s legislative elections over the next two weeks.  The Napoleon wannabe — who speaks snobbishly of European empire and prefers to be photographed while kitted out in the latest boxing fashion — called for snap elections in a stompy-foot hissy fit after the French people handed him heavy losses in the European Parliament vote earlier this month.  Just as Le Petit Fromage seems to believe that he can convey strength by staring menacingly at stationary punching bags, Macron thinks his political hubris can transform almost certain defeat into chance victory.  The French people, on the other hand, are fed up with mass illegal immigration, rising crime, and deteriorating standards of living (common complaints throughout the West) and are not particularly enthused about the growing prospect of a hot war with Russia.  It is difficult to persuade French citizens that they should rally around their tricolor flag and defend Ukraine’s borders when French aristocrats continue to lecture the peasants that national borders are so passé (another common complaint throughout the West).

Of course, the granddaddy of imminent political earthquakes is the (cross your fingers, throw a pinch of salt over your shoulder, turn around three times, and whisper, “MAGA-MAGA-MAGA”) likely return of President Trump to the White House.  Oh, I know the Democrat Deep State will continue to do everything it can to rig the election in November (even if it has to throw the MAGA Man in prison and wake up half the dead people in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Phoenix to “vote”), but political polling in the United States continues to show Iron Trump with substantial leads over Horse-Glue Biden.  If the United States didn’t have a third-world election system devoid of voter identification and rife with mail-in-ballot fraud, the propaganda press would already be grudgingly admitting that Biden’s re-election hopes are as dead as a doornail.  Since Dementia Joe is the president for dead voters, though, and because he managed to “win” fifteen million more votes than the progressive demigod Barack Obama did during his re-election campaign, the Fascist Bureau of Intimidation and the Department of (in)Justice are still telling everyone, “Don’t worry.  We’ve got this.”  As Hans Gruber would say, “You ask for a miracle?  I give you the FBI.”