FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

PALESTINIAN LIES, AMERICAN DELUSIONS By RUTHIE BLUM

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/palestinian-lies-american-delusions-on-solving-the-conflict-opinion-660258

The capacity of peace-process addicts to delude themselves about the Palestinian war against Israel is as bottomless as it is peculiar. It is they, after all, whose repeated attempts at solving the conflict have failed.

The only real shift in perception and action on this issue came from former president Donald Trump. 

As a businessman with no political or diplomatic background, he refused to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors in many areas, key among them the Middle East.

His approach, based on rewarding America’s allies and rejecting the appeasement of enemies, was working. His replacement in November by US President Joe Biden signaled a backslide to the tired, old, false paradigms relating to the Middle East.

Palestinian Authority leaders heaved a sigh of relief. For them, dealing with Democrats in the White House, State Department and Capitol Hill is as second nature as manipulating the European Union and United Nations.

Their satisfaction at the outcome of the US presidential election only increased with Biden’s appointment of Hady Amr – a foreign-policy wonk with a history of hostility to Israel and sympathy for Hamas – as deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli and Palestinian affairs. Due to his role in the new administration in Washington, Amr was handed an official letter sent to the White House last Saturday by the PA.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Math: The Latest Battleground in the War Against Truth By Janet Levy

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/math_the_latest_battleground_in_the_war_against_truth.html

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, set in the superstate of Oceania, the government propagates the absurd equation 2 + 2 = 5. Through steady indoctrination, and under the ever-watchful Thought Police, the citizens accept it as an unquestionable truth. The equation symbolizes the extinction of free thought in repressive totalitarian societies: facts, truths and objective reality are subordinated to political will and twisted to serve the authoritarian goals of the Party and its leader, Big Brother.

Something similar is happening in many American schools. An eerie Orwellian shadow is being cast over math instruction. The focus is insidiously shifting from arithmetic, geometry, and algebra to critical race theory, ethnic studies, and intersectionality. Ridiculous as it may sound, an objective field of knowledge is being thrust into the realm of social experimentation. Students are being taught not how to think but what to think. Instead of developing critical thinking skills, today’s math classes stipulate that students hold particular views about the world and instruct them on how they must extinguish what is posited as “wrongthink.”

Across America, math teaching practices that were considered essential are suddenly being condemned as racist, requiring students to display the steps in solving a problem is now deemed white supremacist; teachers’ corrections, and even the concept of a correct answer, are considered suspect or undesirable; polite interaction, raising hands before commenting or asking questions, and maintaining order in the classroom are viewed as reinforcing paternalism and condemned as “power hoarding.”

This idiocy has swept, among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the fruit of the worst practices of monopolistic capitalism but now quick to align itself with left-liberal, pseudo-egalitarian causes. The foundation is providing more than $140 million to ‘A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction,’ an organization of 25 educational institutions that contend that math is synonymous with white supremacy and upholds “capitalist, imperialistic and racist” views. Pathway offers a five-part toolkit and videoconferences to make educators “reflect on their own biases” and commit to advance math “equity” by understanding that students of color use math differently than do white students.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump In The Looking Glass Edward R. Zuckerbrod

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

EXCERPT from bottom half of this excellent commentary. Read top part at link. 

The bedsheets are tied snugly together and on Sunday, February 28, Trump will dodge the searchlights and descend the compound wall. Loyalists are waiting outside to whisk him to Orlando, where he’ll address the annual CPAC Conference. The audience will be suitably adoring; readily receptive to the menu of ideas Mr. Trump decides to place before them. He’s too good a natural leader not to grasp that this appearance is one of the most important, if not the most important, of his political life. The ground he chooses to stand upon, and the general attitude he strikes, will have a profound effect on not just himself, but on American politics, and even his successor’s future endeavors for the next few years.

Who will stand at the podium Sunday night? Will it be Trump the reputed solipsist; viewing every occurrence we’ve lived through during this unsettling time primarily through the lens of its effects upon him? Will he dwell upon the unfairness and hypocrisy with which he was surely treated in the aftermath of his unexpected election? Will he rail against the Deep State, and how he proved that it truly did exist, and how much wider and more insidious it turned out to be?  And how much time will he devote to the much-derided STOLEN ELECTION meme that grew out of the highly suspicious events of the preceding contest? (And this is asked by someone who firmly believes the election may well indeed have been stolen.) 

If this is the guy who shows up at CPAC, merely playing to the resentments of a crowd filled with justifiable anger at how its leader was so shabbily treated, and how its beliefs are constantly mocked and mischaracterized, he’ll be confirming his bitterest opponents’ assessment of him, and will in fact, be doing their work in marginalizing conservatism. He’ll hand them a victory more resounding than Biden’s November win.

But if he speaks in the voice of the leader of a movement that’s bigger than everyone in the room, including himself, then he’ll ensure that this vital fight will continue in the proper terms and in its legitimate context: on the issues, as a patriotic struggle for the principles upon which this nation should stand. Not as a vindication of one man, however much he’s been genuinely wronged.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We Are Not Safer At Home While making only a limited impact on Covid-19, lockdowns are taking a severe toll on physical and mental health. James Piereson Naomi Schaefer Riley

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/lockdowns-impact-on-mental-and-physical-health

At the start of the pandemic last year, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti chose “safer at home” as the motto for his lockdown policies. If the past year has shown us anything, it’s how misguided that notion is. Lockdowns have created not just economic devastation for America’s small businesses, restaurants, museums, and zoos. They have also taken a significant toll on the mental and physical health of everyone from small children to the elderly (while doing little to contain the virus itself). To get a sense of this, compare two states that took opposite approaches: New York and Florida.

Despite the hysteria about how bad things were in Florida and the Biden administration’s recent threat to restrict travel to the state, statistics suggest that you’re better off in the Sunshine State. Currently, Florida has 224 people per 1 million in hospitals for Covid-19; New York State has 338 per million, or 50 percent more. In New York, blacks are 2.3 times more likely than whites to die of Covid; in Florida, blacks are equally as likely as whites to die. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous policies have resulted in much higher mortality rates in New York’s nursing homes than in Florida’s.

The lockdowns themselves have also been deeply destructive. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Florida saw a 4.6 percent drop in employment from December 2019 to December 2020. New York’s drop was more than twice that, at 10.4 percent. To judge by recent news coverage of businesses fleeing New York for Florida, it’s possible that a number of those jobs simply went from one state to the other.

The pandemic’s toll on physical and mental health has also been severe, no doubt related to these economic losses but also caused by the severe isolation people experience under lockdown. At the beginning of the pandemic, Florida entered a brief lockdown phase in the same way that New York did. As a result, both states saw a severe decline in the number of cases reported to state child-abuse hotlines.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Biden: It’s Okay to Finance China’s Military by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17099/finance-china-military

Wall Street wants to finance the enemy, and the Biden administration is opening the door wide…. Beijing views the U.S. financial community as its channel to influence the highest levels of the American political system.

“It would be a tragic mistake for the new administration to postpone, dilute, or otherwise eviscerate implementation of the key provisions of Executive Order 13959. Doing so would only serve to enrich Wall Street and Beijing at the expense of American security, fundamental values, and investor protection.” — Roger Robinson, chairman of the Prague Securities Studies Institute, interview with Gatestone.

The People’s Republic of China is a unified state, so the investment ban should apply not only to companies the Trump administration designated but also to all state-owned enterprises. State enterprises are by no means separate businesses. The divisions among them are artificial, and all are tightly controlled by the Communist Party. Each one of these entities, therefore, is military-linked and Party-controlled.

China’s Military-Civil Fusion means the People’s Liberation Army “has the right to raid any non-military Chinese company for any technology it decides could advance its military strength.” — Richard Fisher, of the International Assessment and Strategy Center, interview with Gatestone

The Biden administration is allowing Wall Street to use the cash of “scores of millions, up to 160 million Americans” to “fund ICBMs targeting their families, to fund concentration camps in Xinjiang.” Most Americans will have no idea their retirement and other savings are being used to finance their own destruction…. financing China’s war on America.

Wall Street wants to finance the enemy, and the Biden administration is opening the door wide.

How can this be?

On January 26, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued General License No. 1A, which permits Americans to continue acquiring shares in certain companies associated with “Communist Chinese Military Companies,” known as CCMCs, until May 27. The previous deadline, set by the Trump administration, was January 28.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Muslim Life in 2021, as Predicted in 1921 by Daniel Pipes

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17096/lothrop-stoddard-muslim-life

The Muslim world “sunk to the lowest depth of its decrepitude” in the eighteenth century; “the life had apparently gone out of Islam, leaving naught but a dry husk of soulless ritual and degrading superstition behind.” Meanwhile, Europe discovered ocean routes, established economic hegemony, and exploited its power as “mistress of the world” to indulge in “recklessly imperialistic policies.” Its conquests of Muslim-majority lands prompted a massive “flood of mingled despair and rage” against the West.

The “great Mohammedan Revival” began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a “profound ferment” and a “stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.” This process was well underway by 1921: “The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.”

The “great Mohammedan Revival” began with the Wahhabis in eighteenth-century Arabia and entailed a “profound ferment” and a “stirring to new ideas, new impulses, new aspirations. A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind.” This process was well underway by 1921: “The world of Islam, mentally and spiritually quiescent for almost a thousand years, is once more astir, once more on the march.”

Do not try to reduce causation to interests. Beliefs and passions count at least as much.

When Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) is still recalled, it is as a prominent racist who had a major but malign influence on the budding field of international relations, who acted as theoretician for the Ku Klux Klan, and who contributed the concept of Untermensch (sub-human) to the Nazis.

Stoddard, however enjoyed a high and favorable profile during the 1920s. He had earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and traveled widely. President Warren Harding praised him, and F. Scott Fitzgerald obliquely referenced him in The Great Gatsby.

Stoddard also wrote a prescient 1921 study, The New World of Islam, a survey of 250 million Muslims “from Morocco to China and from Turkestan to the Congo.” Despite his consuming racism, Stoddard impressively recognized trends underway in Islam. As Ian Frazier observed in the New Yorker, “Whatever his philosophy and methods, his guesses sometimes proved out.”

His book had a substantial impact on public opinion, including on such notable figures as the German strategist Karl Haushofer, the Lebanese pan-Islamist Chekib Arslan, the Indian scholar S. Khuda Bukhsh, and Indonesia’s President Soekarno. So, despite Stoddard’s well-deserved ignominy, his New World of Islam is well worthy of scrutiny on its centenary.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Losing An American Genius We are mourning for Rush, but also for ourselves, who are going to miss—and need—him more, not less, each day that he is now silent. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/24/losing-an-american-genius/

Rush Limbaugh created modern national talk radio as we now know it—from nothing. For over three decades he kept at rapt attention weekdays—live from noon to three—the largest conservative audience in broadcast history. Over 15 million tuned in each week. 

Last week—32 years, and over 23,000 hours of on-air commentary after Rush went national in August 1988—he is gone, at 70 years young. 

By the 1990s he had become the voice—literally and iconically—of the conservative movement and its hot/cold liaisons with the Republican Party. Rush was hated by the Left because he was deadly effective in fighting them, and feared at times by the Republican establishment—because he could also be deadly effective in fighting them. 

Limbaugh had an uncanny sense of what conservative populism could do—such as abruptly end Barack Obama’s control of Congress after just two years, in the sweeping Tea Party midterm election of 2010.  And he also instinctively sensed what it should not do: endorse Ross Perot’s Quixotic third-party surge of 1992 that eventually would split the conservative vote and ensure Bill Clinton the presidency with just 43 percent of the popular vote. 

Rush was a master comedian. His pauses, intonations, and mock tones were far funnier than those of our contemporary regulars on late-night television comedy. He was a gifted mimic, an impersonator, with as wide a repertoire and as skilled at impressions as the masters of the past like Vaughn Meader, David Frye, and Rich Little. Yet Rush worked mostly behind the mike, without the aid of an on-stage presence. 

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why did the Biden administration approve a pipeline for Russia to Germany but not from Canada to the US? By Jack Hellner

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/why_did_the_biden_administration_approve_a_pipeline_for_russia_to_germany_but_not_from_canada_to_the_us.html

President Biden blocked the Keystone pipeline from Canada to the U.S., ostensibly due to environmental concerns and claims about global warming, even though the long planned project had cleared all environmental hurdles.

Yet the Biden State department just effectively approved an energy pipeline from Russia to Germany.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

The State Department in a report to Congress didn’t name new companies as targets for sanctions related to an $11 billion pipeline designed to transmit Russian natural gas to Germany, allowing work on the pipeline to continue unabated for now.

Some Republican lawmakers criticized the State Department over the Nord Stream 2 report, which was required by Congress, and both Republicans and a key Democrat requested an explanation of the administration’s position.

Count that as a win for pipelines — for others, just not us.  The rest of the press is focusing on Biden making his “decisions,” but with this news, the direction of this administration is clear.

It is clear that jobs in Europe and Russia are more important to Biden than jobs in the United States.  Energy from fossil fuels is also OK in Europe, just not here.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brexit Diary: As BoJo Waffles, Tory ‘Dinosaurs’ Turn on His Fiancée By Stephen MacLean

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/brexit-diary-as-bojo-waffles-on-policy-critics/91429/

Not since the days of Benjamin Disraeli has a prime minister’s wife been cause for such conversation as has Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s fiancée. “Is Carry Symonds really a Downing Street manipulator — or a shrewd supportive partner?” asks the headline in the Times, though the Mirror suggests merely that she has become the prime ministerial hair-dresser who finally tamed the PM’s unruly mop.

I offer the comparison to Mary Anne Disraeli because Dizzy’s wife was quite the story in her day. In her case it was more bemusement — as with, say, Denis Thatcher, husband to Margaret — than hostility. Dizzy declared of his own wife, “She is an excellent creature,” with one of his few complaints being that “she never can remember which came first, the Greeks or the Romans.”

Mrs. Disraeli, accompanying her husband to Westminster on the eve of a great debate, managed to get her finger caught in the carriage door and, though the pain was great, “went on chatting and laughing as if nothing had happened, lest his concern for her should prevent him from doing his best.” Assessed Dizzy at another point: “We have been married thirty-three years, and she has never given me a dull moment.”

The current controversy concerning BoJo’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds, is far less comical — or dull. One leading Tory think tank, the Bow Group, is calling for a “judicial review and inquiry” to look into the influence wielded by Ms. Symonds in affairs at Downing Street. “Symonds is unelected, unappointed, and unaccountable,” the Group asserted in a statement, and “has no constitutional powers to hold any role in governing the UK.”

Among the issues raised by the Bow Group, according to Breitbart London, is Ms. Symonds’ role in hirings and firings of officials and in forming Government policy. “The public take a very dim view of cronyism,” Bow’s chairman, Ben Harris-Quinney, contends; “democracy in Britain is and must always be sacred, and no one should be involved in running our country without accountability to the people.”

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pompeo: China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on February 25th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pompeo-chinas-reckless-labs-put-the-world-at-risk/

In today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, along with Miles Yu, his top China policy adviser write that “China’s Reckless Labs Put the World at Risk,” and come right up to the line of outright declaring that the coronavirus pandemic is the result of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Pompeo and Yu don’t point to any new or smoking-gun evidence, but they do point to a few pieces of circumstantial evidence that haven’t gotten much attention. Perhaps most notably, the op-ed column declares, “in January 2021, the State Department confirmed that people had fallen mysteriously ill at WIV in fall 2019, and that WIV conducts secret bioweapons research with the PLA.”

This echoes the fact sheet issued by the department that began with the cautionary note that the U.S government did not know how the virus first jumped into humans, but then continued, “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

This past Sunday, President Trump’s former deputy national-security adviser, Matt Pottinger, said on CBS News’ Face the Nation:

We have very strong reason to believe that the Chinese military was doing secret classified animal experiments in that same laboratory, going all the way back to at least 2017. We have good reason to believe that there was an outbreak of flu-like illness among researchers working in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the fall of 2019, but right — immediately before the first documented cases came to light.

China signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1984, which outlaws the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological weapons.

China claims that it is in complete compliance with the BWC; the U.S. government disagrees. In 2019, the U.S. State Department’s updated report on compliance with arms-control agreements concluded,

the People’s Republic of China engaged during the reporting period in biological activities with potential dual-use applications, which raises concerns regarding its compliance with the BWC. In addition, the United States does not have sufficient information to determine whether China eliminated its assessed biological warfare program, as required under Article II of the Convention.