An Indomitable Spirit Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/an-indomitable-spirit/

Donald Trump never blinks.

There’s nothing that’s happened to Donald Trump since his rise to political prominence that has made him blink, and now we can add to the list an assassination attempt.

Trump displayed remarkable sangfroid in the immediate aftermath of an effort to murder him? Yes, of course, he did. He insisted on not leaving the stage before he’d made a gesture of strength and resilience? Well, what would you expect? He took a nightmarish attack against him and turned it into an iconic image that will cement his status as a populist legend? Are you surprised?

Trump’s extraordinary reaction in Butler, Pa., was entirely in character.

This is a man with an indomitable spirit that has seen him through business reverses, tabloid scandals, and innumerable battles with all comers over the decades. Like most anything else, this quality has its downsides — it can lead him to persist in error, or insist on his own reality — but he wouldn’t be on the cusp of the presidency again without it.

If Trump has never shown any sign of cracking under pressure, it’s because he simply doesn’t feel pressure like a normal person. A fatalism combined with a faith that he’ll find a way out of any fix means that he doesn’t lose sleep over anything.

Although there were any number of controversies during his presidency that would have cracked or worn down a more conventional politician, he carried on as usual. Over the last two years, his partisan opponents have thrown criminal charges at him that carry the risk of him spending the rest of his life in prison; sure, he’s fought the charges like a caged animal, yet he’s never seemed down or frazzled. And now this.

After spending so much time displaying coolness under metaphorical fire, he displayed coolness under actual fire.

A cliché in sports about particularly assured players is that they “slow the game down.” Trump, at his best, does the same thing, and we saw it on the stage in Butler. Whereas he could be forgiven for being confused and in shock after the shooting, he didn’t lose sight of the need to show that he was unbowed, to reassure his supporters, and to project strength.

Assassination Porn and the Sickness on the Left When you send out the message that a mass murderer is about to take power, unless . . . by Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/assassination-porn-and-the-sickness-on-the-left/

If we were leftists and we were to use leftist tropes to editorialize the recent attempt on Trump’s life, then we would frame the assassination attempt in the following way:

We have witnessed for years blatant exceptions to the once common custom that we don’t normalize the imagined killing of any president or presidential candidate and thus lower the bar of violence.

But the Left constantly makes Trump an exception. Now, it as if the imagined killing of Trump had been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of other presidents.

(Do we remember the rodeo clown who merely wore an Obama mask during a bull riding contest and was punished by being permanently banned by the Missouri State Fair authorities?)

So since at least 2016 there has been a parlor game among Leftist celebrities and entertainers joking (one hopes), dreaming, imagining, and just talking about the various and graphic ways they would like to assassinate or seriously injure Trump:

By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting ( Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O’Donnell), just by generic “killing” him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean), or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”).

N.Y. Times Columnist Wants Trump Dead — Seriously Martin Kaufmann

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/07/13/n-y-times-columnist-wants-trump-dead-seriously-2/

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published on I&I on July 3. It has been excerpted with permission from the author. To read the entire article, click here.

John McWhorter, the prominent academic, author and New York Times columnist, wants everyone to know that he’s sorry that he recently suggested it would be a good thing if someone were to assassinate former President Donald Trump.

Except he’s not, really. But at least he owns it.

“I have taken a great deal of heat for saying, for implying, that I wish somebody would kill Donald Trump,” McWhorter said on the new episode of “The Glenn Show” with Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury. “That is exactly what I was implying. It was irresponsible of me to say that in a public space. I really shouldn’t have said it here.”

But then McWhorter acknowledges that it wasn’t a one-off. “I have said it often,” he admitted. (The podcast can be found here; the conversation on Trump starts at 4:04, and McWhorter’s non-apology apology begins at 17:49.)

Iran’s “Moderate” President Is a Just Another Hardliner-in-Disguise to Glide in Its Nuclear Weapons Programme by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20784/iran-president-moderate-hardliner

[Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN-sponsored body that is responsible for monitoring the mullahs’ nuclear programme] also warned that it could take Iran just a month or so for the Iranians to assemble a nuclear warhead, given the progress they have made in recent months in their enrichment programme.

The acknowledgement by an internationally respected body such as the IAEA that Iran has now acquired sufficient material to build several nuclear warheads, which could be assembled within the space of a month, is a devastating indictment of the Biden administration’s policy of appeasement towards Iran since US President Joe Biden took office.

Biden’s refusal to hold Iran accountable for its actions has resulted in the Iranian regime receiving billions of dollars in added revenue because of Washington’s decision not to enforce oil sanctions against Iran. As a result, the extra funds received by Iran have been used to fund the regime’s terrorist networks across the globe, including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

As a senior official with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps admitted to The Telegraph, in the wake of the election, that Pezeshkian had only been allowed to compete in the election to “legitimise the vote”.

It is vital, therefore, that the Biden administration fully understands the cynicism shown by Iran’s hardliners in seeking to legitimise their brutal regime before making any further overtures to the country’s so-called moderate president.

In the uncompromising world of Iran’s autocratic Islamic republic, there is no such thing as a moderate Iranian president — a fact that Iran’s long-suffering people know only too well.

Before the Biden administration gets too carried away celebrating the election of Iran’s so-called moderate president, it should understand that Masoud Pezeshkian’s victory is nothing more than a ploy to distract world attention away from Iran’s nuclear weapons programme.

POSITIVE NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

 

Even during a war, Israelis deliver innovations and perform activities that are bearing fruit for the rest of humanity.  In this week’s newsletter, note the positive impact Israeli startups have made on tackling international criminal activity and the misery of human trafficking. See the effects of Israeli medical innovations detecting urgent problems; preventing adverse medicine interactions; and saving limbs from amputation.  Meanwhile, many Israeli war wounded are reaping the benefits of Israeli rehabilitation therapy. Michael Ordman

What makes Israel special even beyond its outsize contributions is the fact that inside the researchers, the technicians, the accountants, the plumbers, the landscapers, the lawyers, the actors, and citizens on the beaches, cafes, and theaters, there is a soldier prepared to mobilize at a moment’s notice to defend the only Jewish state in the world. That citizen army guarantees the continuity and survival of the Jewish people. rsk

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
Wounded paramedic has a strong spirit. Tal, an IDF paramedic was wounded when he went to the aid of a soldier shot by Hezbollah, who subsequently fired an anti-tank missile at him. He is in rehabilitation but has returned to manage the Golani distillery that he and his family own. He is literally keeping up everyone’s spirit!
https://davebender.substack.com/p/heroic-idf-medics-dad-shares-emotional
https://www.golanispirit.com/collections
 
Miracle survivor leaves hospital after 9 months. Nova victim Sa’ar Ben Sela was almost dead before a Hamas terrorist aimed his gun to finish him off.  But the gun jammed and Sa’ar was eventually brought to Ichilov hospital. After surgery and nine months of recovery, Sa’ar was discharged and walked out of hospital.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-miraculous-israeli-wounded-at-nova-festival-released-after-9-month-recovery/
 
A healing trip to Mexico. A group of 30 orphaned Israelis recently returned from a 13-day healing retreat in Mexico. The trip, arranged by Israeli NGO OneFamily and the Jewish community of Mexico City, brought orphans who lost both parents to terrorism (including on Oct 7) along with their adopted families.
https://www.jns.org/30-israeli-orphans-including-oct-7-victims-heal-in-mexico/
 
Scholarships for Gaza border students. The Russian Jewish Congress and the Center for Jewish Impact have awarded scholarships totaling NIS 430,000 to students at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University residing within 7 km of the Gaza border fence. Many of the students were directly affected by the Oct 7 events.
https://www.bgu.ac.il/en/news-and-articles/scholarships-for-gaza-border-bgu-students/
 
Global support for Gaza border towns. The Jewish Agency for Israel has launched Communities2Gether, to pair 25 Israeli communities with those around the world. The pairings aim to help rebuild infrastructure, mend social bonds and foster long-lasting connections. The priority is to help everyone to return to their homes.
https://www.jns.org/jewish-agency-project-to-strengthen-gaza-border-towns/
 
Released hostage passes IDF training with honors. Noga Weiss, who was released from Hamas captivity in November, has just completed an IDF training course with honors.  She said, “Today I have finished the course and I feel that I have won. I am excited for the future, to feel that I am able to help other soldiers.”
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/392824
 
The search for Stevie. (TY Yanky) When Rebecca travelled from Tel Aviv to London, she left her dog Stevie with friends in a village 7km from Gaza. On Oct 7, Stevie ran off and went missing for 41 days.  Thanks to two animal charities and posters, Stevie was found and now has a new job comforting human victims of Oct 7.
https://people.com/missing-dog-israel-hamas-war-found-8410773
 
Israel lives. (TY Joan) Kathleen Hayes writes in the Jewish Journal about her first trip to the Jewish State. In her opening sentence she states, “there’s something almost biblical about the Israeli people. Ever-emerging stories about October 7 continue to awe and humble me.” And afterwards, “they are getting on with living”.
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/372616/israel-lives/ 
 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Preventing loss of limbs. Israel’s BioGenCell (see here previously) is conducting Phase 2 trials of its Tissue Regenerative Activated Cell (TRACT) Therapy. It is preventing amputations at Netanya’s Laniado Medical Center, the US (Yale and Johns Hopkins), Belgium, and Georgia. It is now raising funds for Phase 3 trials.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hki11xl2wa
 
Preventing clash of medications. A study by Israel’s FeelBetter (see here previously) at Boston’s Mass General Brigham, of its medicine interaction algorithm shows it could reduce hospitalizations by 24%. It has now signed with New Jersey’s Atlantic Health System, which administers to over half a million Americans.
https://nocamels.com/2024/07/patient-care-platform-makes-taking-multiple-medications-safer/
 
Saving lives in Ohio. (TY Atid-EDI) Cleveland based University Hospitals is deploying the aiOS diagnosis platform from Israel’s Aidoc (see here previously) across 13 of its hospitals and many outpatient locations. All patients undergoing CT scans for injury or pain will be analyzed by aiOS for expected and unusual conditions.
https://news.uhhospitals.org/news-releases/articles/2024/06/uh-transforms-patient-care-with-aidocs-ai-enabled-solutions-across-its-entire-health-system
 
Sealing wounds after heart surgery. EndoRon Medical provides abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) patients undergoing endovascular aneurysm repair with a long-lasting sealing and fixation solution for their endograft.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/h1wabb6w0   https://endoronmedical.com/
 
American Jewish medical professionals see this. (TY Yanky) The American Jewish Medical Association (AJMA) is a non-profit, national organization representing health professionals (doctors, dentists, nurses, and others) who stand strongly with Israel, and promote Jewish values and ethics in medicine. Please join them.
https://www.theajma.org/
 
First Aliyah event for South American medics. The inaugural South American MedEx event took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Over 60 doctors came from all over Argentina and neighboring Uruguay to be assisted with their Aliyah planning and licensing. (see here for previous MedEx events in Europe and USA).
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/392745

CHAPTER 27: Pronouns and Pantheism Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is (forthcoming release August 2024) by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27902/chapter-27-pronouns-and-pantheism

The weaponization of language is not a new phenomenon. The politics of pronouns has dimensions in both form and content. Gender-neutral plural pronouns, the grammatical form for linguistic deconstruction, were introduced in America almost fifty years ago. The pro-pedophile advocacy group Child Sexuality Circle advocated passage of a Child’s Sexual Bill of Rights that included use of “the new unisexual pronoun…co for he/she/him/her and cos for his/hers” in January 1977.

Gender-neutral language that blurs male/female identity with plural pronouns derives its ideological content from the unifying sexual ideal of androgyny. The new sexuality that deconstructs traditional Judeo-Christian sexuality and replaces it with total sexual liberation and freedom from all sexual boundaries is an ideological return to ancient pantheism—the belief that God and the universe are one and the same.

Pantheism predates monotheistic Abrahamic religions by thousands of years, but the word pantheism was not used until the early 18th century. The word is derived from Greek (pan = everything, theos = God), and means “All is God, and God is all.” There is no distinction between the two; all things are connected and are ultimately of one substance. Pantheism is a belief system rather than a religion, comparable to the terms monotheism (belief in a single God) and polytheism (belief in multiple gods).

Pantheism revered the androgyne as the archetype of human beings before the Judeo-Christian recognition of man and woman as two sexes. The globalist wrecking ball is attempting to shatter Judeo-Christian religions with the narrative that they are not “true” religions, that before Judaism and Christianity, the true religions were monistic (the doctrine of oneness that denies duality between man and God, or matter and mind) and revered androgyny.

In France, It’s Left vs. Left By Gary Gindler

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/07/in_france_it_s_left_vs_left.html

The right-leaning media and pundits are excited: Marine Le Pen’s party gained twice as many seats in recent French elections.  The left-leaning media and commentariat are thrilled, too: Le Pen’s right-wing party won the popular vote but landed only third place in the French National Assembly.  If both sides of the political spectrum are so enthusiastic, it could mean only one thing: something is missing here.

The answer lies most likely in conflating two different political spectra: absolute and relative.  Since Stalin proposed the modern relative political spectrum, it garnered popularity, and members of the Frankfurt School of socialism brought it to American soil.

As it is known, in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin altered the game’s rules: he decided to utilize the pre-existing left-right conceptual dichotomy (in a pretty narrow setting) to crush any opposition to his dictatorial rule.  Any aberration from the orthodox communist party line — no matter how small — had to be labeled.  Thus, the “Right-deviationists” and “Left-deviationists” were born.

The “Left-deviationists” were deemed “too orthodox,” “too revolutionary,” as strange as it may seem, for the taste of bloodthirsty revolutionary Bolsheviks.  In contrast, the “Right-deviationists” were considered traitors to the idea of the planet-wide socialist revolution because they dared to consider building a workers’ paradise by cleverly exploiting the mechanisms of state capitalism.  Unquestionably, the word “capitalism” was anathema to communists.  The “Left-deviationists” were to the left of Stalin, and the “Right-deviationists” were to his right.

The untold story of the Human Genome Project: How one man’s DNA became a pillar of genetics By Ashley Smart —

https://www.statnews.com/2024/07/09/human-genome-project-untold-story-how-single-volunteer-became-genetics-foundation/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

STAT is co-publishing this investigation by Undark.

They numbered 20 in all — 10 men and 10 women who came to a sprawling medical campus in downtown Buffalo, N.Y., to volunteer for what a news report had billed as “the world’s biggest science project.”

It was the spring of 1997, and the Human Genome Project, an ambitious attempt to read and map a human genetic code in its entirety, was building momentum. The project’s scientists had refined techniques to read out the chemical sequences — the series of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs — that encode the building blocks of life. Now, the researchers just needed suitable human DNA to work with. More exactly, they needed DNA from ordinary people willing to have their genetic information published for the world to see. The volunteers who showed up at Buffalo’s Roswell Park Cancer Institute had come to answer the call.

To take part in the study was to assume risks that were hard to calculate or predict. If the volunteers were publicly outed, project scientists told them, they might be contacted by the media or by critics of genetic research — of whom there were many. If the published sequences revealed a worrisome genetic condition that could be tied back to the volunteers, they might face discrimination from potential employers or insurers. And it was impossible to know how future scientists might use or abuse genetic information. No one’s genome had ever been sequenced before.

But the volunteers were also informed that measures had been put in place to protect them: They would remain anonymous, and to minimize the chances that any one of them could be identified based on their unique genetic sequence, the published genome would be a patchwork, derived not from one person but stitched together from the DNA of a large number of volunteers. “If we use the blood you donate” to prepare DNA samples, the consent form read, “we expect that no more than 10% of the eventual DNA sequence will have been obtained from your DNA.”

Soon, however, those assurances began to wither. When a much-celebrated working draft of the human genome was published in 2001, the vast majority of it — nearly 75 percent — came from just one Roswell Park volunteer, an anonymous male donor known as RP11.

A New Offensive: Trump, the GOP, and the Battle for America’s Future Like the German army as the end loomed, the Democrats have been driven to desperate expedients. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/14/a-new-offensive-trump-the-gop-and-the-battle-for-americas-future/

Having just spent a week padding about battle sites around Verdun and the Somme,  I could not help but register the historical vibration of certain dates. Was it entirely coincidental that on July 18, 1918, Ferdinand Foch, the Allied Supreme Commander, launched a major counteroffensive against the Germans in the Second Battle of the Marne? That operation  was the beginning of the end for the Boche.  They sued for peace in November after American General John Pershing crushed the German forces near Montfaucon, northwest of Verdun.

This Thursday, July 18, 2024, Donald Trump will deliver his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. I like to think that Trump’s address will mark the beginning of a potent counteroffensive against the soul-blighting, woke forces of the Democratic juggernaut.

Like the German army in the summer of 1918, the Democrats are in rabid disarray.  On paper, they still command impressive force.  They continue to jail their political  opponents and shower Donald Trump with potentially lethal legal shrapnel. [UPDATE: I wrote this column  before the assassination attempt on Donald  Trump at his rally in Pennsylvania yesterday.  I will have more to say about that in due course.]

But though their guns may continue their periodic eructations, morale among the troops teeters on despair. Their leaders are panicking.

Of the Kaiser, Winston Churchill once remarked that “in every crisis he crumbled.  In defeat, he fled; in revolution, he abdicated; in exile, he remarried.” What would Churchill say about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris? Addressing NATO a few days ago, the leader of the free world introduced the President of Ukraine as “President Putin.” Asked whether he really thought Kamala Harris was up to the top job, Biden said, “I would not have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president if I did not think she is qualified to be president. Let’s start there.”

Shall we start there? Harris, the half-Indian, half-Jamaican scion of slave owners,  may be a certified “person of color.” But she is also living proof that senility is not the only form of cognitive-rhetorical incapacity.

Like the Germans in the summer of 1918, the Democrats and their media poodles are full of sound and fury.  The New York Times, for example, is regularly on the battlements, delivering anguished rhetorical air-raid sirens. They understand that “Biden’s Path to Re-election Has All But Vanished.” Hence, the Times, along with other besieged media battalions, are engaged in a desperate pantomime to diffuse the biggest threat to their franchise. Donald Trump is “unfit to lead,” they skirl; Republicans will rue the day Trump is reelected, they insist. He’s a dictator in waiting, a bully, and a man of bad character who tramples upon the rule of law.

This signal-jamming wall of static is impervious to fact—including the fact that almost every item of the Democrats’ bill of indictment is a morsel in the giant feast of projection that Trump’s opponents have laid on.

Our Brezhnev, Our Pravda, Our Soviet Union. . . Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/our-brezhnev-our-pravda-our-soviet-union/

Leonid Brezhnev led the former Soviet Union as General Secretary of the Communist Party until 1982. But like most Russian apparatchiks who excessively smoked, drank, and gained weight, he aged prematurely. Also like them, his disabilities never led to his abdication.

By Brezhnev’s late sixties and early seventies, he was too ill to travel abroad or make public appearances. Indeed, his debility left the Soviet Union without a real leader for the final six or seven years of his tenure.

Brezhnev got away with it because the Soviet state-controlled media doctored photos and videos to attest to his supposedly vigorous health and constant hands-on involvement.

“Journalists” sent out false communiques. They spun narratives that Brezhnev was robust, hale, and working long hours on behalf of the Russian people. Any dissenting journalists who sought to report the true, sad state of affairs were in danger of losing their jobs, freedom—or even their lives.

Instead, the “reporters” of Pravda (“Truth”), the official print megaphone of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, wrote lies about Brezhnev’s busy workdays. Pravda’s handlers spun fables about the respect (and fear) the rest of the world held for such a dynamic leader—even as Brezhnev became an ill virtual recluse.

The cynical Russian people shrugged because they had long been accustomed to their lying media and the falsehoods they peddled. And besides, Brezhnev was a doctrinaire Stalinist communist. So his job was not to rock the boat or upset the Russian communist hierarchy.

Instead, he reigned over the penultimate Soviet “era of stagnation,” while an ossified communism increasingly destroyed all incentives and hope, leaving the Russian people poor, cynical, and helpless.

Something similar has happened to a calcified America under President Joe Biden. Like the late-stage Leonid Brezhnev, Biden is now a president in name only. He has outsourced his administration to a vestigial hard-left apparat from the Obama years.