P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

An Outbreak of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria Michael Connor

Posted By on May 28th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/05/an-outbreak-

A book for young adult readers (fourteen-plus) includes a letter to the writer’s amputated breasts:

And I know this is probably hard for you to hear, but I believe I’ll be happier without you. I also think this will be better for you. You need to be free and I’m just going to keep holding you back and pushing you down. It’s time to separate.

Nevo Zisin’s surgery costs were paid for, like earlier testosterone treatments, by internet appeals for cash. Finding Nevo is an autobiography commissioned by Walker Books, “the leading children’s publisher in Australia and New Zealand”. By age twenty, when it was published, the gender celebrity author had been a girl, a lesbian, a man, and non-binary. Presently, the transgender activist is a public speaker who runs “programs and workshops” for schools and workplaces, and advises children and parents in the Jewish community on gender and sexuality.

In December 2016, about the time Finding Nevo was being written and edited, Dr John Whitehall, Professor of Paediatrics at Western Sydney University, published the first in a series of Quadrant articles on childhood gender dysphoria—the conflict experienced by those children who believe they have been born in the wrong gender. The psychological condition has become a politicised media celebration, and a cause in the culture wars. YouTube, Tumblr and Instagram are guides for escaping youthful boredom, bullying and parents by selling the excitement and obsessiveness of gender swapping. For the isolated and friendless, Google will find you gender advice and medical solutions to put things right. It’s a fast-track route that leaves some young twenty-somethings mutilated and drug dependent, alone, and in another body, worrying about adult things like working, passing and how to tell new acquaintances, and remind old ones, of their pronouns. And after the glamour and grooming that led them on their journey, everyone around them now seems to be talking of suicide.

              

Whitehall is on the side of the kids, urging caution and pleading for the saving of young bodies from surgical castration, body disfigurement and lifetimes of prescribed drugs with unknown long-term effects:

While proponents argue for massive intervention, scientific studies prove the vast majority of transgender children will grow out of it through puberty if parents do little more than gently watch and wait.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Promise and Peril of Modi’s Triumph Hindu nationalism made India governable. Can it stay that way? By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on May 28th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-promise-and-peril-of-modis-triumph-11558989753

Narendra Modi’s triumphant re-election as India’s prime minister may not have been a shock—ever since Indian forces retaliated in February against Pakistan-based attacks in Kashmir, the contest had been moving in his direction—but it does represent an important tipping point in Indian history, and therefore in world history.

As Tunku Varadarajan wrote in these pages last week, India is turning decisively away from the Western ideological foundations of its founding fathers. The secularist and liberal beliefs that grounded Indian politics during the long era of Congress Party domination have lost majority support. Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism can do what the Congress vision no longer can: assemble a consensus that makes India governable.

A dedication to secular liberal values imported from abroad is weak tea for holding large political agglomerations together, and the Congress vision of India was dying long before Mr. Modi administered the coup de grâce. Before the new era of majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party governments, India was turning into a country without a majority. Regional- and caste-based parties had eaten away at the Congress consensus. The complicated coalition building necessary to form a majority was frustrating effective governance. Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalism for now offers a collective identity that can mobilize Indians across the subcontinent, defeating both the dying secularism of the Congress Party and the more parochial visions of the regional and caste parties.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

“Israel is a Defensive State” Former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper tells it like it is. VIDEO

Posted By on May 28th, 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXy4NXbuE-k

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump-Russia’s Turning, and the Knives Are Out . By Eric Felten

Posted By on May 28th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/28/trump-russias_turning_and_the_knives_are_out_140430.html

Now that the Russia collusion allegations have evaporated, the long knives are out and President Trump’s antagonists are watching their backs. They have moved from accusing him of treason to pushing revisionist narratives that try to shift the blame for the debunked probe onto others.

This effort is expected to accelerate following Trump’s decision Thursday to empower Attorney General William Barr to declassify CIA, Pentagon, and Director of National Intelligence documents as necessary to access “information or intelligence that relates to the attorney general’s review” of the Russia probe.

In other words, he’s gaining the authority needed to investigate the investigators.

CIA sources immediately objected in the New York Times that assets’ lives would be at risk, stunting Langley’s ability to recruit. Perhaps. But the argument is a bit shopworn, raising the question whether intelligence managers are looking to protect their agents and sources, or aiming to protect themselves.

There are a growing number of indicators that the leading players in the 2016 election drama are turning on one another, making a mad dash for the lifeboats to escape being dragged under with the political Titanic that is Christopher Steele and his dossier. These are many of the same people who had been eager to exploit the dossier, that collection of memos paid for by the Clinton campaign and supposedly sourced from Russia. Once treated like the Rosetta stone of collusion, the Steele documents now seem even to Trump antagonists more like the Howard Hughes diaries.

A “former CIA official” has told Fox News that two of Trump’s most high profile accusers – former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Director of the CIA John Brennan – didn’t want anything to do with Steele’s opus. It was former FBI Director James Comey, the source said, who was pushing to use the dossier in the official Intelligence Community Assessment, issued in the final days of the Obama administration. Having failed at that, thanks to Clapper and Brennan’s diligence (or so the story goes), Comey went rogue and confronted President-elect Trump with the salacious highlights produced by Steele.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ on Obama’s Bad Cops and Spies By Charles Lipson

Posted By on May 28th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/28/a_hard_rains_gonna_fall_on_obamas_bad_cops_and_spies_140429.html

The skies are growing dark and increasingly ominous for dirty officials at the top of Obama-era law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Leading the “I’m really worried” list are James Comey, John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch, and their senior aides, all political appointees. They expected Hillary Clinton to win in 2016 and bury any traces of malfeasance, just as they had buried hers. It didn’t work out that way.

Now they need protection themselves. House Democrats and anonymous leakers are busy providing it. Many are delicately called “current and former senior officials” by the New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media. Gee, I wonder who they are?

These defenders of the old guard are sliming Attorney General Bill Barr, who heads the investigation into their actions. They have good reasons, if not clean hands, for their attack. First, they want to keep as much secret as they can. Exposure can only harm them. Their main argument is that any disclosures will damage U.S. national security. Second, they want to paint the disclosures and forthcoming indictments as President Trump’s revenge, the illegitimate use of powerful agencies that should be nonpartisan. That, of course, is precisely what they are accused of doing.

Barr won’t be deterred. He did not return for a second stint as AG to pad his résumé or protect Donald Trump. He returned to clean out the Augean Stables. He needs to muck out the mess left by his predecessors and find the horses that left it.

Barr is determined to do that. He intends to find out how and why the Department of Justice embarked on an all-consuming, two-year project to investigate Trump’s alleged cooperation with Putin’s Russia to win the presidency. The investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no such cooperation (going well beyond saying he simply could not indict). Now, Barr wants to understand the origins of the probe and whether the tools used to launch it were lies or distortions — and were known to be so by DoJ, FBI, and CIA officials. Barr wants to know if U.S. intelligence agencies were used to spy illegally on Americans, or if they outsourced that to friendly foreign services and then recovered the information from them. He wants to know if the investigations really began in July 2016, as the FBI testified, or earlier, and what evidence was used to begin them.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinian Authority TV Series Features Uncle Teaching Nephew How to Shoot at ‘the Jews’ By Debra Heine

Posted By on May 28th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/palestinian-authority-tv-series-features-uncle-teaching-nephew-how-to-shoot-at-the-jews/

Official Palestinian Authority TV is running an ahistorical and blatantly anti-Semitic series that features an adult man teaching a child how to shoot “the Jews,” and characterizes the Jewish people as “cowards,” rapists, “impure schemers,” and “the enemy.”

This evil propaganda is being broadcast during the month of Ramadan, which is considered the holiest month of the year for Muslims.

The series, called “Children of the Village Chief, portrays Arab life in a “West Bank” village around the time of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 until the 1980s, according to Palestinian Media Watch.

The first episode starts with the so-called Palestinian nakba—the “catastrophe” of the establishment of modern-day Israel—and the series takes the audience up to the 1980s.

In one episode, a cherubic young boy asks his uncle to teach him how to use a rifle so he can shoot at “the Jews” if they come to his village. Happy to oblige, Uncle Ibrahim instructs his nephew to only aim at “the enemy,” who the boy then again identifies as “the Jews.”

In another episode, a woman wonders how the Arab forces were defeated by the Jews since “the Jews are cowards.” The man replies that “the British are a snake in the grass … they gave [the Jews] everything.” (Britain did not arm Jewish forces during Israel’s War of Independence.) CONTINUE AT SITE

ISRAEL Comments turned off

BREAKING THE SILENCE SMEARS ISRAEL IN ‘THE GUARDIAN’ – AGAIN BY EMANUEL MILLER

Posted By on May 28th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Breaking-the-Silence-smears-Israel-in-The-Guardian-again-590654?

With the emergence of the hard Left in the UK in recent years, many British Jews are worried about the rise of antisemitism. 

At the same time as claiming to be anti-racist, papers like The Guardian and The Independent have normalized the language of delegitimization. The constant stream of anti-Israel articles, unparalleled in intensity and level of scrutiny, have done much to create an atmosphere in which any justification of Israel’s right to self-defense is regarded as beyond the pale.
 
The Guardian displays a Pavlovian loathing for Israel. Anything, even something as simple as holding an international music contest, becomes an opportunity to censure Israel while exempting the Palestinians from even a modicum of criticism. 
This is the newspaper selected by Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of the Israeli anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence (BTS), as the most appropriate place to publish an op-ed criticizing the presence of Israeli civilians and the IDF in Hebron, calling it “legal discrimination.”
 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

530 multinationals from 35 countries innovating in Israel Amir Mizroch

Posted By on May 28th, 2019

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startupnationcentral/2019/05/27/530-multinationals-from-35-countries-innovating-in-israel/#c8bbdd33f5d1

Israel is emerging as a leading innovation destination for a growing number of multinational corporations looking to the country’s 6,000 plus startups for new ideas, quick prototyping ability, and infectious entrepreneurial culture, a new report shows.

The PwC report, commissioned by tech NGO Start-Up Nation Central, maps for the first time the activities of some 539 multinational companies (MNCs) representing 35 countries, who are currently active in Israel. It tracks the evolution of their innovation activity, showing that companies tend to increase and diversify their innovation activity with time in market, for example, going from tech-led R&D centers to operating startup accelerators and engaging in joint ventures. Download the full report here.

An unexpected benefit: many of the MNC’s themselves say they’re starting to take on some of the characteristics of the startups they’re working with, including regular pivots to new technology focus areas, faster execution of projects, and a higher tolerance for failure. “The Israeli way of approaching risk and failure, and the importance of giving startups independence and space to innovate – these core characteristics of the Israeli ecosystem allow MNCs to step outside of their comfort zone, re-think their approach to innovation and effectively tap into Israeli innovation,” the report states.

It is no longer just technology companies expanding innovation footprint but MNCs from a wider blend of industries. Deutsche Telekom, for example, regularly host management teams in Israel to absorb startup thinking. Pfizer, Genpact, Flex and Johnson Controls all have senior executives located in Israel who manage their companies’ global scope of technology scouting, product development, or open collaboration activities. Siemens’ Dynamo and Innogy’s Innovation Hub are unique innovation vehicles, not replicated anywhere in those groups’ global innovation portfolios.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

John Bolton Was Right to Meet with Taiwan By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on May 28th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/john-bolton-was-right-to-meet-with-taiwan/

Its existence as a nation independent from China is a fact.

National Security Adviser John Bolton has caused a furor in Beijing by meeting with his counterpart from Taiwan, leading an entire generation of young Americans to ask: “Where?”

Taiwan once loomed large in the American consciousness, and the American Right was particularly solicitous of its well-being. In the political vocabulary of the time, the Republic of China — Taiwan — was a tiny outpost of freedom menaced by Red China — the so-called People’s Republic.

Taiwan is still a thriving republic. China is still a single-party police state, grown perhaps a slightly paler shade of red. But American politics has changed and, to some extent, moved on.

Bolton, a movement conservative of Cold War vintage, apparently has not moved on. Good for Bolton.

The existence of Taiwan as an independent nation is a fact. It is no more a break-away province of the People’s Republic of China than Massachusetts is a rebellious British colony. Its 24 million people constitute the largest nation to be excluded from the United Nations and from full American diplomatic recognition, and its economy of more than $600 billion is the largest of any country to be marginalized by the global economic and diplomatic communities. The Holy See is one of a tiny handful of sovereign states recognizing Taiwan.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s High-Wire Act of Reestablishing Deterrence without War By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 28th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/trump-foreign-policy-challenge-deterrence-without-war/

Trump’s opponents at home and abroad would love to see him get the U.S. into a messy intervention right before the election.

Donald Trump inherited a superficially stable world from Barack Obama that, in fact, was quite volatile. There had been no tense standoffs with North Korea, but also apparent intercontinental ballistic missiles with possible nuclear warheads now pointed at the United States. Obama more or less punted on North Korea, by declaring it a problem — and hoping that Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear testing did not get too out of hand before 2017.

Then there was the “Iran deal.” It was an appeasing agreement that almost surely guaranteed that Iran would soon have nuclear weapons, along with a revived economy liberated from sanctions and empowered with American cash. Iran’s terrorist surrogates were the greatest beneficiaries of U.S. naïveté. At best, Obama assumed that when Iran went nuclear, it would be on someone else’s presidential watch and therefore not his fault. At worst, Obama, in delusional fashion, believed that empowering Iran would balance Sunni states and bring justice to historically oppressed Shiite and Persian minorities who would take their rightful place in the Islamic world.

Everyone knew that China violated almost every aspect of world commerce. Everyone knew that China would never allow the U.S. to trade with China the same way that Beijing traded with America. Everyone knew that 1.3-billion-person China was a neo-imperialist Communist dictatorship that was headed on an announced trajectory of world hegemony. Obama in particular thought that stopping China’s agenda would be medicine that was more painful than the disease.