https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F57xdV_mIsA
http://www.swstotd.blogspot.com
Free choice, where it does not break the law or infringe on the rights of others, is fundamental to our rights as Americans. We make hundreds of choices every day, some significant, others not so. Next November’s election represents a significant choice. It has been portrayed as critical because, or so we are told, democracy is on the line. Progressives, and their propagandists in mainstream media, would have us believe that the election of Donald Trump would signify the end of democracy. And there is no question he is mean-spirited, has spoken of retribution against those who oppose him, and may go to jail. On the other hand, many of us on the right believe democracy is at risk because current political trends suggest we are, with the degradation of individualism, headed toward group-think, socialism, and central planning. One is reminded of Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”
As for Trump, despite his well-publicized flaws, consider what he faced in his first term: the weaponization of the intelligence services; retribution by his political enemies; along with the pursuit of identity politics, the elevation of the group over the individual, the imposition of DEI into many aspects of our lives, and the inflicting of ESG into our investment and financial organizations – the phony feel-good elements of Wokeism. Keep in mind, threats to democracy can come from the left as well as the right. So what does a thoughtful voter do? Colleen Hoover, a writer of romance stories for young teens, wrote in Hopeless: “Sometimes you have to choose between a bunch of wrong choices and no right ones.” Given what our options for President are likely to be in November, voters may face a similar ineluctable conundrum – a “Sophie’s Choice” between two bad options, the rock shoals of Scylla or the whirlpool of Charybdis. However, there are nine months to go until election day and much could happen, especially with two far-from-ideal elderly candidates.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20356/unrwa-jihad-against-israel
“Hamas is involved in everything. Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers. Hamas manages UNRWA. They are those in charge in the agency. From the day Hamas came to power, they took control of everything. The UNRWA employees are from Hamas. The heads of the departments and the senior staff are Hamas members.” —Palestinian from the Gaza Strip to an Israeli officer in a recorded call, X (Twitter) December 27, 2023.
It is now clear that the UN heads were lying when they said they were unaware of the involvement of their employees with terror groups. In fact, they knew but did their utmost to appease Hamas.
In a moment of rare honesty, in 2021 the UN acknowledged that UNRWA’s school curriculum referred to Israel as “the enemy,” taught children mathematics by counting “martyred terrorists,” and included the phrase “Jihad is one of the doors to paradise” in Arabic grammar lessons.
“Before UNRWA, this terrorist accomplice [Abdallah Mehjez] worked for the BBC…” — Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch.
“Now is the time for reform. Reform for rehabilitation – so that the minds of Palestinian children can no longer be poisoned. So that there can be a shared vision of peace in this land.” — Lt. Col. (res.) Peter Lerner, X (Twitter), January 27, 2024.
Western taxpayers should not be funding terror groups disguised as humanitarian organizations.
UNRWA was established to support the relief and human development of Palestinian refugees, not to support the development of terrorism.
It is time to dismantle UNRWA and end the farce of Palestinian “refugees.” There are no real refugees. There are millions of Palestinians living — often in unspeakable conditions (so that Israel can be blamed) — under the control of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
It is the UN that enables and perpetuates this human rights abuse. These Palestinians live under Palestinian and Arab regimes that should long ago have absorbed them instead of keeping them in “refugee camps” with the cheery “humanitarian” promise that they will one day flood Israel, turn the Jews into a persecuted minority in their own country, then bring about its demise.
https://asiatimes.com/2024/01/when-genosuicide-feels-like-genocide/
An American coalition consisting mainly of Iraqi forces destroyed the city of Mosul in northern Iraq in 2017, with civilian casualties estimated at somewhere between 2,500 and 40,000. The Associated Press count was 11,000 civilians dead but it might have been much higher. ISIS fighters prevented civilians from leaving as the US and its allies bombarded the town, and no one knows to this day how many are buried under the rubble.
No one called this genocide because it didn’t feel like genocide. Muslims killing Muslims is a tragedy but Jews killing Muslims feels like genocide in the mind of the Muslim world and some who sympathize with it. Humiliation equals death in traditional society, and it is not the death count in Gaza but the humiliation of Hamas that elicits the charge of genocide.
When Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said, “We love death like our enemies love life! We love martyrdom, the way in which [Hamas] leaders died,” the world should have taken him at his word. Hamas leaders might experience martyrdom vicariously from hotel suites in Qatar but they are sincere about martyrdom and do not care how many martyrs they make among non-combatants. This is not genocide but rather genosuicide.
The purging of ISIS from Mosul parallels Israel’s efforts to root Hamas out of Gaza after the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis accompanied by unspeakable sexual and other atrocities, and the abduction of another 240 Israeli hostages. 25,000 Gazans are alleged by the Hamas-controlled health ministry to have died, of which almost 10,000 are Hamas fighters by Israel’s count.
The civilian death toll is about the same as Mosul’s. With 2 million residents in 2014, Mosul had roughly the same population as Gaza so the per capita death rate of civilians is roughly the same—assuming that the unverified figures circulated by Hamas and echoed by the United Nations are accurate.
An Internet search for items posted before 2020 shows that the term “genocide” appeared frequently in connection with Mosul but only and exclusively in association with ISIS, which perpetrated genocide against the Yazidi religious minority, according to a UN commission. There is barely a single instance in which the term “genocide” was used to characterize the destruction of Mosul itself, apart perhaps from the heading of a 2017 Arab Center Washington DC think tank report.
Why then accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza for collateral damage among civilians in a similar campaign to extirpate a terrorist army? The charges brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice are absurd on the face of it.
https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/28/our-democracy-a-deep-dive-into-democratic-weaponization-and-the-need-for-decentralization/
Reading Matt Taibbi’s summary how the Democrats weaponized the government against Donald Trump, starting before the election of 2016 and proceeding right up to the present moment, I am reminded once again that the issue is not democracy but “Our Democracy™.”
That is, the Democrats and their deep-state allies in the media and the myriad bureaucracies that actually run the country believe that democracy means “rule by Democrats.” As Taibbi puts it, “To ‘protect democracy,’ democracy is already being canceled. We just haven’t admitted the implications of this to ourselves yet.”
This is true. Hence the plethora of handwringing articles warning that Donald Trump is a “dictator”-in-waiting, a new Hitler, a refurbished Mussolini who, should he be reelected, will mobilize the military to impose his will on a hapless American populace. Taibbi quotes from a December 2023 “strategy memo” in which Biden’s puppeteers describe Trump as “an existential threat to democracy.”
It sounds absurd. It is absurd. But, as I and many others have pointed out, that is the story we are being asked to swallow. This is the logic:
Trump is a “threat to democracy.”
Ergo, we must use “any means necessary” to keep him off the ballot.
Otherwise, people might vote for him, and that would be “bad for democracy.”
The arrogance of this gambit is breathtaking. It assumes, with Liz Cheneyesque smugness, that ordinary people cannot be entrusted with so important a task as electing their leaders. Only anointed saviors like Liz Cheney can do that. But alongside the arrogance of the we-have-to-destroy-democracy-in-order-to-save-it mindset is the chilling revelation of the extremes to which the people in power are willing to go in order to preserve their prerogatives. They will, for example, censor any opinion they do not like as “malinformation,” i.e., an opinion that might be true but is not consistent with The Narrative. It all adds up to what I have called “the Sovietization of America.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/83-million/
Donald Trump in furor stormed out of a New York courtroom for a while, in the defamation suit brought by author and dating/boyfriend/sex-advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
It was just settled against Trump for $83.3 million. The Carroll suit was largely subsidized by Reid Hoffman the billionaire capitalist, and mega-donor to the Democratic Party and leftwing causes.
The subtext of Trump’s rage, aside from the outrageous monetary size of the defamation ruling, is that he was facing—and angered—a leftwing claimant, a quite hostile leftwing judge, and a leftwing New York jury.
The civil suit serves as a mere preview of four additional leftwing criminal prosecutions, leftwing judges, and leftwing juries to come—all on charges that would never had been filed if Trump either had not run for president or been a liberal progressive.
Yet here we are.
The E. Jean Carroll case is the most baffling of all five. She, the alleged victim, did not remember even the year in which the purported sexual assault took place, nearly three decades ago. Observers have pointed out dozens of inconsistencies in her story.
It was never clear what were the preliminaries that supposedly (Trump denies meeting her) led both, allegedly, willingly to retreat together to a department store dressing room, where during normal business hours the alleged violence took place.
Moreover, the sexual assault complaint came forward decades post facto—and only after Trump was running for and then president.
Carroll eventually sued him for battery, but well after the statute of limitations had expired and thus the case seemed defunct.
Her claims of defamation injuries arise from being fired from her advice column job at ELLE magazine.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/iran-backed-terrorists-kills-3-american-soldiers-injure-30/
Drone and rocket attacks by Iran and its Jihadist militias across the region have killed and injured American soldiers, but not this many, and this attack took place not in Iraq, but in Jordan, which is supposed to be safe territory and not a war zone.
The current reports are that three American soldiers were killed and over 30 wounded in an attack on a position known as Tower 22. This was a position that the United States was using to coordinate attacks on ISIS in Syria. (Jordan, with the typical fidelity we can expect of allies in the Muslim world, already declared that it considers the area to be Syria and has nothing to do with it.)
The drone was reportedly launched from an Iranian-backed Jihadist militia in Syria. There’s plenty of those since the Syrian government is effectively non-functional and a puppet of Iran and Russia which bailed it out during the civil war. Hezbollah and every bunch of Shiite Jihadists in the region have a presence in Syria.
The actual attack was labeled as coming from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq which is a name for an umbrella group of Shiite Jihadists which have been used by Iran to attack American targets providing some plausible deniability for the PMUs and Shiite militias linked to the Shiite regime in Baghdad which are actually behind it. But while the militias and Jihadists have previously aimed attacks at Israel, this is the first attack in Jordan. American forces were clearly not expecting an attack in Jordan.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/joe-biden-announces-border-is-broken-after-he/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=joe-biden-announces-border-is-broken-after-he
Joe Biden’s handlers released a statement on Friday night on his plan to fix the open border that he broke when he came into office.
Note: Joe Biden’s very first act as president was to end the construction of the Trump border wall and the Keystone Pipeline. Joe Biden later sold these border wall parts for scrap to some lucky soul for pennies on the dollar.
During President Trump’s time in office you could track the progress of his border wall. Trump was able to build hundreds of miles of border wall despite pushback from then Speaker Paul Ryan, Majority leader Mitch McConnell, and every Democrat in office. Trump also had to regularly fend off the liberal legacy media who attacked his plan to secure the US southern border.
Joe Biden sold the border wall segments worth $300 million for $2 million.
Over ten million illegals have now walked across the open border into the United States since Joe Biden took office.
Joe Biden allowed more illegals to walk across the US border than the population of New Jersey.
In December a record 302,034 walked across the border into the United States. More migrants crossed into the US in one month than the total population of several prominent US cities like Buffalo, St. Louis, and Greensboro, North Carolina – IN ONE MONTH!
Joe Biden released this outrageous statement on the border crisis he created last night. He is asking for the authority to fix the border that he already has.
https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/29/our-nation-of-effete-status-seekers/
Bill Clinton spoke of “the right side of history” almost two dozen times while president. Some say the phrase can be traced to 1984, when race baiter and Democrat Jesse Jackson used it to describe the rise of the Marxist Sandinistas, who were destroying Nicaragua. But the expression was supercharged by Barack Obama. Since, we’ve had a deluge of status seekers eager to align themselves with The One to show they’re on “the right side of history.”
Except they’re not. But they are on the right side of inconsequence.
Americans have advanced far beyond the subsistence lives so many lived a century ago. We have become so prosperous that millions are able to spend hours on social media and taking part in marches hoping to convince as many as possible of their moral goodness.
For instance, in what other nation and at what other time could a meathead such as Rob Reiner have time to tweet a maniacal string of inanities? He’s known to reverentially reference “our democracy,” which is a factually impaired assertion and a dog whistle for progressives who’ve made a mockery of constitutional restraints; has irresponsibly accused Donald Trump of mass murder; claimed with a baseless certitude the country will survive only if “Trump, and the corrupt party he leads, is decisively defeated in 2024”; and huffed over the possibility that Elon Musk was going to reinstate Trump on Twitter, where he would “lie and spread disinformation to try to overthrow the U.S. Government to return and continue his criminal activity.”
His “signature” closing is “That’s it. That’s the tweet,” as if that somehow makes his sophomoric rants even more profound.
https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27515/chapter-3-birdman-and-the-reality-revolution
The ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is an essential survival skill. If a man believes he can fly and jumps off a twenty-story ledge, he falls to his death because gravity is a fact, an objective truth. Birdman’s fantasy, a subjective reality, cannot compete with the objective reality of gravity.
Let’s break down the process of thinking and doing. Thinking is a private matter and human beings are free to think their thoughts at any time in any place. Birdman is free to think he can fly, without consequence to himself or others. It is the moment he steps off the ledge that his subjective reality collides with objective reality.
Adults and children are evaluated differently in society. The fantasies of children are an accepted part of the growth process. In a sane society, adults who are out of touch with reality are deemed insane. In our example, Birdman would be considered insane.
Civil society and the laws that govern it are based on the acceptance of objective reality by its citizens. What would happen if there was a movement that deliberately rejected the teaching of objective reality and taught subjective reality instead? What would be the purpose of driving a society insane?
Remember, the ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is a survival skill, because thought precedes action. Birdman thought he could fly and jumped to his death. Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts in order to form a judgment, and is the foundation of rational thought.
