ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Threatens Netanyahu’s Drive to Destroy Hamas by Con Coughlin

Posted By on January 22nd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20323/biden-threatens-netanyahu-drive

The Israeli premier has also reiterated his long-standing opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state, which he insists would become a launching pad for attacks on Israel.

Israel’s efforts to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas, though, are at serious risk of being undermined by the Biden administration’s growing hostility towards Netanyahu’s government.

There are credible indications, moreover, that the Biden administration’s hostility towards Netanyahu has led it to work with senior figures within Israel’s security establishment, which is known to have a difficult relationship with the Israeli premier, to remove his government from power.

[T]he Palestinian leadership has always been just as deeply and outspokenly committed to the destruction of Israel as Hamas is.

Instead of trying to overthrow the Netanyahu government, the Biden administration would be better advised to grasp the vital strategic consideration that defeating Hamas is as much in the interests of the US as it is for Israel.

The deepening antipathy of the Biden administration toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening to derail Israel’s military offensive to destroy Hamas.

With every day that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) maintain their military effort to end the threat to Israeli security posed by Hamas’s presence in Gaza, more details emerge of the staggering underground terrorist infrastructure the Iranian-backed group has constructed in Gaza.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Inflated Grades, Increasing Graduation Rates, and Deflated Test Scores Those who are obsessed with equity are doing great damage to American education. by Larry Sand

Posted By on January 22nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/inflated-grades-increasing-graduation-rates-and-deflated-test-scores/

“But when you are obsessed with equity, quality is an afterthought. We may be raising a nation of illiterates and innumerates, but they will all be equally brainless.At this time, the American Medical Association is embracing equity, and perhaps exams to enter the medical profession will soon cease to exist.God help us.”

Grade inflation is rampant and has been so for many years. Back in 2011, an in-depth study by three Ivy League economists looked at how the quality of individual teachers affects their students over the long term. The paper, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years, and, using a value added approach, found that teachers who help students raise their standardized test scores have a lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates, greater college matriculation, and higher adult earnings. The authors of the study define “value added” as the average test-score gain for a teacher’s students “…adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics such as prior scores.”

But to those who believe in equity über alles, quality is an afterthought, and many states are ditching any objective criteria for entry into the teaching field. In California, teachers traditionally have had to pass the ridiculously easy California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) to gain entry into the profession, but the test is now under fire.

Is it because the test is a snap and needs to become more rigorous? Hardly.

Christopher Davis, a member of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, claims that standardized testing causes “disproportionate harm to people of color.” In an equity-driven statement, John Affeldt, managing attorney at Public Advocates, agrees, saying, “CBEST is a barrier for educators of color,” and thinks the test should be eliminated.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas’ Howl in Amsterdam It can happen here. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on January 22nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-howl-in-amsterdam/

For a while there it looked as though my semi-annual long weekend in Amsterdam would come to naught. Several days of massive snowfall made travel impossible in our part of Norway and closed down Oslo Airport for most of a day. Thanks to the snow, the usually reliable bus to Oslo pulled into the station a couple of hours behind schedule; and the airport express trains, which are never so much as a minute late, were delayed by an hour or so.

There was one surprise on the express train. In every car, they have these big video screens on which they give you a couple of the latest headlines, current temperatures in major European cities, stock market news, and flight departure times. Somewhere in there, there’s always an ad – invariably innocuous, instantly forgettable. Not this time. The ad – big blood-red letters on black backgrounds – was placed by Doctors without Borders, and it demanded an end to the “genocide” in Gaza.

Having allowed plenty of time because of the chaos, I got to the airport several hours early. I killed part of the time watching a couple of new YouTube videos in which the U.K. podcaster Konstantin Kisin interviewed participants in a pro-Palestinian rally in London. It wasn’t a particularly dense crowd, and it consisted mostly of young English people. They carried signs, distributed by the Socialist Workers Party, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and demanding that Palestine be free “from the river to the sea.”

A brief, polite questioning by Kisin established that they didn’t know what that meant, and that none of them really knew much of anything, for that matter, about Islam or Israel or the history of the Middle East. They’d spent four years learning that white is bad, darker shades good. They had yet to discover that there was more in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in the lyrics to “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Dementia And Double Standards

Posted By on January 22nd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/22/dementia-and-double-standards/

Every once in a while media bias is so flagrant, it’s worth pointing out.

At an event in North Carolina last Thursday, President Joe Biden called out for a congresswoman with whom he claimed he’d just been photographed. She was, at the time, in Washington, D.C.

At an event in New Hampshire the next day, presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared to mix up Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley when talking about Jan. 6.

Guess which mental lapse was ignored while the other was covered by the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, ABC News, The Hill, PBS, and countless other news outlets.

About a minute into his speech about the taxpayer money he’s dumping into high-speed rail, Biden veered off his teleprompter and apparently forgot where he was, or what day it was.

“Where’s Deborah?” he asks, referring to Rep. Deborah Ross, who was in Washington. “Did she — I just had my picture taken with her. That’s probably why she left. (Laughter.) No, all kidding aside — but, anyway — you — oh, she couldn’t be here, actually. That’s not true. I got it mixed up.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Traumatic Brain Injuries’ Iranian-backed militias mount another missile attack on U.S. forces.

Posted By on January 22nd, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/traumatic-brain-injuries-iran-militias-ad061562?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Iranian-backed militias launched another missile and rocket barrage at U.S. forces in Iraq on Saturday, and several Americans may have been injured. Will Iran pay any price for this latest assault?

U.S. Central Command said in a statement that “most of the missiles were intercepted by the [al-Assad Airbase] air defense systems while others impacted on the base. Damage assessments are ongoing.” It added that “a number of U.S. personnel are undergoing evaluation for traumatic brain injuries. At least one Iraqi service member was wounded.”

This appears to be one of the largest of the 140 or so attacks by Iranian-backed militias since Oct. 7 against the U.S. in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. has responded a few times against the militias inside Iraq and Syria, as it has against the Houthi militia targeting commercial ships and U.S. naval assets in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The attempt to restore deterrence hasn’t worked.

That may be because the instigator of all this is Iran. None of these militias would stage these attacks without knowing they have the support of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. If Iran thinks the U.S. won’t put Tehran’s military or commercial assets at risk, it has no incentive to stop the militias from attacking American targets.

The U.S. Commander in Chief is supposed to protect U.S. troops from having to risk “traumatic brain injuries” from enemy assault. Where is President Biden?

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

They’re Coming After Us by John Podhoretz

Posted By on January 21st, 2024

https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-podhoretz/antisemites-coming-after-jews/?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=290858331&_

‘IHAVE NEVER FELT LIKE THIS BEFORE’

I have lost count of the number of times the phrase “I have never felt like this before” has been spoken in my ear, texted to me, or sent to me in an email, in the three months since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

When I talked with Israelis on a trip in November, the phrase described a gut emotion few under the age of 50 said they had ever experienced—the sense that they were personally vulnerable to outside attack in a manner more like an extended military invasion than a terrorist blow. They had lived through years of ineffectual rocket fire that was all but magically extinguished by the Iron Dome and Arrow anti-missile systems. Those interceptions had provided a feeling of near-divine protection. No longer. Israelis feel raw now, and such vulnerability is never momentary or transitory; one might say the opposite. Once it seizes you, it might take years before you wake up one morning and notice suddenly it’s no longer there.

I experienced that blissful moment once in my life, in New York City in 1998, when I was walking alone late at night across Central Park and realized I was doing something I simply would never have done before in my 37 years as a native Manhattanite. The feeling in the gut of every New Yorker of my age—the need to protect oneself from some sudden onslaught, in part because everyone we knew had been attacked in one way or another—was just no longer there, and I had never felt it disappearing. Because of the crime drop, because of increased police visibility, because of the presence of others like me in exactly the same place at exactly the same time, this new sense of freedom was now my new reality.

I am not saying Israelis ever felt secure in quite that way before October 7. They had, of course, lived through 60 years of terrorist attacks (the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964 as a violence-worshipping gang designed to attack civilians on the model of the anti-colonialists in Algeria) and several short wars over the past half century. But through the 2010s and early 2020s, the sense of immediate danger for Israelis had split in two—and might therefore have seemed, oddly enough, twice as weak.

The threat had either become too geopolitically large to affect their quotidian existences (like the existential risk posed by Iran’s nuclear program) or could have only come so suddenly and unexpectedly that it would have been absurd to disrupt your daily life taking personal countermeasures (Palestinians engaged in a bus-stabbing spree at one point; how do you defend against that?).

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

DeSantis Drops Out of Presidential Race, Endorses Trump

Posted By on January 21st, 2024

Ron DeSantis dropped out of the presidential race Sunday afternoon and endorsed former president Donald Trump, announcing the suspension of an embattled campaign that began with a bungled launch on Twitter Spaces with a video posted to the same platform just two days before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.

DeSantis acknowledged in the video announcement Sunday afternoon that he no longer had a “clear path to victory” in 2024, but emphasized that his political career is just beginning. “While this campaign has ended, the mission continues. Down here in Florida, we will continue to show the country how to lead,” the governor said. Coinciding with the video announcement, DeSantis canceled a meet-and-greet event with voters originally scheduled for 5 P.M. in Manchester, New Hampshire.

DeSantis’s departure comes after his allies had spent days making calls to top donors asking whether the candidate should drop out ahead of the New Hampshire primary, as first reported by National Review. The bundler page on the campaign’s finance website was no longer working earlier that day, which signaled the campaign, NR reported earlier Sunday, which signaled that a drop-out announcement was imminent.

DeSantis had put all his eggs in the Iowa basket, which won him some key endorsements from Governor Kim Reynolds and influential evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. But given that DeSantis and his allied PACs invested heavily in Iowa to the exclusion of New Hampshire, Trump’s roughly 30-point defeat proved a fatal blow to a campaign that was already on life support.

While DeSantis initially publicly claimed he punched his ticket out of Iowa and was staying in the race, the pro-DeSantis PAC Never Back Down was hit by layoffs last week and the campaign had canceled scheduled media appearances in recent days.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Ramaswamy Defies New York Times Narrative: Suspends Campaign, Backs Trump The New York Times doesn’t get it. That’s one more reason why it is an increasingly parochial publication that speaks only to a shrinking coterie of pampered, irrelevant dittoheads. Roger Kimball

Posted By on January 21st, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/21/ramaswamy-defies-new-york-times-narrative-suspends-campaign-backs-trump/

No one was surprised that Vivek Ramaswamy decided to suspend his campaign for the presidency after his poor showing in Iowa. Although he was by far the most rhetorically nimble of the GOP candidates, it had long been clear that this was not his moment. His showing in the Iowa Caucus—he came in a distant fourth with about 7 percent—quantified that truth.

Not that Vivek is going anywhere. He will not be the GOP presidential candidate in 2024.  But by immediately suspending his campaign and enthusiastically endorsing Donald Trump after Trump’s stunning, blow-out victory in Iowa, Vivek guaranteed that he would have an important role to play in Trump’s campaign and, should Trump be reelected, in the second Trump administration.

The New York Times did not like that Vivek endorsed Trump. Veteran readers of our former paper of record can already tell from the headline and subhead of the story that reported the news. “Vivek Ramaswamy, Wealthy Political Novice Who Aligned With Trump, Quits Campaign.” “Wealthy,”  eh? “Quits,” you say? Beginning rhetoricians should be set the task of rewriting that headline for some progressive plutocrat.  Then they should try their hand at rewriting the subhead: “A self-funding entrepreneur, Mr. Ramaswamy peaked in late August but deflated under attack from his rivals. He dropped out after the Iowa caucuses and endorsed Donald J. Trump.”

I think it was a writer for Time magazine who, back in the day, illustrated the point by noting the difference in tone between “Truman slunk from the room to huddle with his cronies” and “Ike strode from the chamber to confer with his advisors.” Truman and Ike were doing the same thing, but the description of their activities cast them in very different rhetorical spaces.  The Times obviously had Vivek slated for a Truman-like role.

Consider the first sentence of the story: “Vivek Ramaswamy, the 38-year-old entrepreneur and political newcomer who briefly made a splash with brash policy proposals and an outsize sense of confidence, dropped out of the race for the Republican White House nomination after a disappointing fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.” “Newcomer,” “briefly,” “brash,” “outsize,” “disappointing.” You see where this is going.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fani Willis’s romance keeps the ‘Get Trump’ efforts entertaining She hired her boyfriend, Nathan Wade, as chief prosecutor to go after Trump Roger Kimball

Posted By on January 21st, 2024

https://thespectator.com/topic/fani-willis-romance-keeps-get-trump-nathan-wade/

Some enterprising entrepreneur ought to find a way of collecting a cover charge for the entertainments that the Get Trump concession is currently offering the public free and for nothing.

At the moment, the first of my two favorite forays into the twilight zone are the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll against Trump. Carroll claims that sometime, she cannot remember exactly when, but it was about thirty years ago, Trump sexually assaulted her in a fitting room at the swank department store Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan. A New York jury found Trump guilty of defamation and sexual abuse (but not rape) and ordered him to pay Carroll $5 million of the crispest. Now she is back asking for more. Who knows whether she will get it. Stand by and pass the popcorn. 

Then down in Georgia, site of one of the four major lawfare assaults to damage Trump and make him radioactive to the electorate, Fani Willis, the district attorney, is after the former president because — it is alleged — he tried to overturn the 2020 election. How did he do this? By telling the secretary of state Brad Raffensperger that “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” The conversation was taped and the New York Times went to town with it, claiming that Trump “pressured” Raffensperger to manufacture the votes. 

Vocabulary quiz: what is the difference between the words “find” and “manufacture?” Use each in a sentence. 

That’s not the sort of test the Times is likely to pass. Remember back during the 2016 presidential election campaign when Trump said, referring to Hillary Clinton’s “lost” emails, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.” The Times instantly accused him of “essentially urging a foreign adversary to conduct cyberespionage against a former secretary of state.” It reminded me of the passage in The Pickwick Papers when Pickwick’s landlady, Mrs Bardell, brings suit for breach of promise because of a couple of letters like this: “Dear Mrs. B. — Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.” “Gentlemen,” said the lawyer for the plantiff Bardell, “what does this mean? Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick! Chops! Gracious heavens! and tomato sauce! Gentlemen, is the happiness of a sensitive and confiding female to be trifled away, by such shallow artifices as these?” Ha, ha, ha. 

The anti-Trump legal fraternity needs lawyers like that chap.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Green Rolling Blackouts Crushed Canada during a Winter Storm By Andrew Follett

Posted By on January 21st, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/green-rolling-blackouts-crushed-canada-during-a-winter-storm/?utm_source=

When Albertans most needed their energy, wind and solar ensured there wasn’t enough to go around.

Centrally planned “green” solar and wind power are simply not reliable when they’re needed the most. A recent wave of blackouts and brownouts in the Canadian province of Alberta proves it.

“With temperatures near minus 45 [Celsius, minus 49 Fahrenheit] over the weekend even colder in some parts of Alberta and virtually no wind or solar showing up on the grid, Alberta issued an electricity advisory asking its residents to conserve electricity to avoid brownouts,” Ontario energy minister Todd Smith said in a Facebook video. Smith happened to be in Edmonton, Alberta, to announce a deal between the provinces to construct a small modular nuclear reactor.

The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO), which manages the province’s grid, began a series of declared states of emergency last Friday. The grid fluctuated throughout the crisis until this past Monday. Energy supply repeatedly collapsed and residents were repeatedly asked to conserve electricity by shutting off essential services.

The province has massively invested in green energy. Three quarters of Canada’s new wind and solar generation is based there. But fewer than 1 percent of both Alberta’s 4,481 potential megawatts of wind power and 1,650 of solar power could operate when the province most needed electricity. Essentially all of the province’s solar- and wind-power plants were offline. Greatly increased energy demand for electric heat pumps, cars, and even phone batteries, which work far less efficiently in cold weather, ensured disaster.