ELECTIONS Comments turned off

“To Whom, or to What, Do We Owe the Phenomenon that is Donald Trump?” Sydney Williams

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Donald Trump is like a battery-operated Hyper Pet Critter Dog that runs helter-skelter around the floor. As long as its battery is charged it will annoy most everyone except its owner. Trump’s battery life appears inexhaustible, but is it, and who or what is responsible?

Since January 6, 2021, it has become common for Democrats to claim democracy is under attack, with Donald Trump as prima facie evidence. In a speech on November 2, 2022, shortly before the midterms, President Biden said: “In our bones, we know democracy is at risk.” Just over two months ago, and citing the January 6 attack, he repeated the warning: “We know how damaged our institutions of democracy – our judiciary, the legislature, the executive – have become in the eyes of the American people, even the world, from attacks within, the past few years.” It is a message that resonated with voters in 2022. Will it succeed again in 2024? In that same 2023 speech, he warned that democracies “can die when people are silent – when they fail to stand up or condemn threats to democracy.” While he did not refer to him by name, he was speaking of Donald Trump.

The impetus for his remarks was January 6, and the “attack” on the Capital by Trump supporters. But in both remarks Biden failed to mention that democracy did survive – that the only fatality was that of Ashli Babbitt who was shot dead by a Capital policemen and that Vice President Michael Pence certified the election results, which made Joe Biden President. Nor did he acknowledge that the people were not silent – that the “attack” was condemned by Democrats and Independents – and by many Republicans – and all of mainstream media. More than 1,100 rioters have been charged with close to 300 having been given prison sentences, ranging from six months to eighteen years. The people have not been silent about January 6.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Road to Victory Starts, Ends with Israel E.J. Kimball

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/hamas-hezbollah-iranian/2023/11/30/id/1144266/

To this day, Hezbollah remains a powerful force in Lebanon and a dire threat to Israel, especially those living in the north.

At some point, the war between Hamas and Israel will come to an end.

A looming but important question: what’s next?

What comes next after an Iranian-funded terrorist organization manages to kill over 1,200 Israelis and take 240 of its citizens hostage into Gaza?

The future of the region must be addressed, and whatever resolution is generated must include increased security measures in volatile areas like Gaza, the West Bank, and the northern border with Lebanon.

Additionally, the U.S., and more broadly, the U.N., must give the Jewish State full autonomy and support in dealing with this dangerous conflict.

We are now aware that the Biden administration is putting pressure on the Jewish State to restrain its operations against Hamas by conditioning aid to Israel.

Not only is this giving Hamas exactly what it wants, it continues this long cycle of Israel listening to western influence and ultimately causing more harm to Israel and the Jewish people.

In a recent interview with the BBC, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett remarked that Israel’s biggest flub over the past 20 years was listening to the advice of Western nations rather than doing the job at hand.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Three Israelis Dead, 13 Injured in Jerusalem Shooting after Cease-Fire Extended Another Day By David Zimmermann

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/three-israelis-dead-13-injured-in-jerusalem-shooting-after-cease-fire-extended-another-day/

Just after Israel and Hamas agreed to extend the existing cease-fire by another day, two Hamas terrorists opened fire at a bus stop near Jerusalem, leaving at least three Israelis dead and 13 injured.

Israeli police received reports of the shooting around 7:40 a.m. local time Thursday when two individuals pulled up in a car armed with weapons and shot several civilians standing by a busy bus station. The gunmen were killed by Israeli security forces at the scene, according to authorities.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack later Thursday, saying it was carried out in response to Israeli soldiers killing two Palestinian children in the West Bank the day prior.

“As we mourn our martyrs, we confirm that this operation came as a natural response to the unprecedented occupation crimes” of Israel, the terrorist organization said in a statement, identifying brothers Murad and Ibrahim al-Nimr as the deceased perpetrators.

The mass shooting came shortly after the cease-fire in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war was extended by another 24 hours ahead of the 7 a.m. deadline, allowing Hamas to release more hostages in exchange for Israel freeing its Palestinian prisoners and providing humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Unless another cease-fire extension is agreed upon, both warring sides will resume fighting by Friday.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Globalism Is a Disease That Deprives Life of Meaning By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/globalism_is_a_disease_that_deprives_life_of_meaning.html

Two recent statistical surveys keep bouncing around in my head.  One study concludes that one out of every four young people in the world feels lonely today.  The other study finds that 72% of Americans have no interest in defending the United States in a major war.  In other words, a quarter of the planet’s emerging leaders are clinically depressed, and nearly three-quarters of the voters in the world’s wealthiest, most powerful nation have no interest in fighting to preserve the “American dream.”  People, it seems, are so disappointed in the present that they have no appetite for the future.  

Signs of such debilitating malaise should be a smack across the face to those who insist on ruling planet Earth from privileged perches secured behind steel gates at private social clubs such as the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations.  Across the globe and in poor and rich countries, alike, the human race is suffering.  Real leaders would recognize this phenomenon for what it is: a worldwide cry for help.

Does it seem as if the post-WWI eruption of think tanks, international associations, economic clubs, and foreign policy institutes has had a net-positive effect on human happiness?  Has the Council on Foreign Relations successfully steered the planet toward sustained peace?  Have the privately controlled central banks that are empowered to manipulate national currencies at whim safeguarded middle class families from regular economic disaster?  Has the League of Nations’ successor, the UN, prevailed in its self-appointed mission to build a better world?  Or, after a solid century of international busybodies obsessively micromanaging the world’s affairs, is it perhaps time to conclude that a glut of governmental and non-governmental organizations with a penchant for starting wars and triggering economic calamity has, quite demonstrably, done more harm than good?

With so many global institutions dominating private life, is it any wonder why so many people now behave as if they should be committed to institutions?  True meaning — the kind formed through personal struggle, adventure, hard work, religion, community, and family — has been replaced with the incremental oppression of international rule-making.  The sanctity of the family home has been bulldozed, so that a global cabal of atheists — whose only real mission is to severely reduce the human population — can poison the natural bonds nurtured between parents and children.  The blessings of marriage have been paved over with such vulgar elevation of sin as to condemn human beings, who would otherwise have been made whole through matrimonial commitment, to lonely lives — bereft of hope and adrift in promiscuous isolation.  

Culture, marriage, children, and a devotion to God are the bricks that build communities, which in turn fortify nations against the evils propagated by those who lead drab, meaningless lives drenched in self-loathing and hatred for humanity’s existence.  The UN and its sister organizations do one thing well: they vanquish cultural bonds and, by doing so, demolish civilizations.  And with the wreckage that they reap, they extinguish human happiness.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Floor is Falling Out From Under Biden’s Ukraine Policy A year of Russian gains could force major U.S. policy changes in 2024 By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/01/the-floor-is-falling-out-from-under-bidens-ukraine-policy/

Just two weeks ago, President Biden again likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hamas. In a November 18 Washington Post op-ed titled “The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas,” he made this comparison and said America will stand against these aggressors to prevent them from wiping neighboring democracies off the map.

I have major concerns about how committed Biden is to Israel in its war against Hamas after its barbaric October 7 terrorist attack, given his lecturing to the Israeli government on how it should conduct the war and increasing anti-Israel pressure against Biden from his progressive supporters. I expressed my concerns about Biden going wobbly on his support for Israel in an October 27 American Greatness article. Unfortunately, this problem is now getting worse.

But let’s talk about Ukraine, a conflict that has been pushed off the front page by the Israel-Hamas War. You know that President Biden’s Ukraine policy is in trouble when MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show hosts panels, like one held on November 21, to discuss why the war is unwinnable, explain why Ukraine needs to change its strategy to protect the 80% of the country it controls, and encourage Ukraine to pursue a cease-fire with Russia.

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough and his guests also reluctantly admitted what many members of Congress have long realized: the Biden strategy to arm Ukraine “for as long as it takes” but not send the weapons it needs to win is not a strategy.

Although Scarborough and others in the mainstream media won’t admit it, they now recognize something else about the Ukraine War: that the highly vaunted 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive that was supposed to turn the tide of the war failed to reclaim a significant amount of territory and may have lost ground to Russia.

As a result, many experts on the right and left have concluded that this conflict has become a stalemate and a war of attrition that Ukraine will eventually lose because Russian forces are dug in and Ukraine is running out of soldiers.

The New York Times reported in August 2023 that Ukraine’s war casualties were estimated at up to 70,000 killed and 120,000 injured. Russia’s estimated casualties of up to 120,000 killed and 180,000 injured were significantly higher, but Russia can more easily absorb these losses since its population is three times larger.

Resistance to the Biden Administration’s Ukraine policy is especially strong in the House of Representatives, where many members have demanded the Biden Administration provide a clear strategy for ending the conflict and reaching a cease-fire instead of just sending weapons to Ukraine. Many House members are also concerned that the Ukraine conflict is consuming advanced weapons that the U.S. cannot quickly replace that may be needed elsewhere, such as to defend Taiwan.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Black Progress and Black Rage A new biopic about Bayard Rustin and the New York Met’s opera about the life of Malcolm X celebrate very different notions of black struggle. Joshua Muravchik

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/11/30/black-progress-and-black-rage/

Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X, two enormously important figures in black history, were each the subject of a major cultural event in November. The biopic Rustin, produced by Michelle and Barack Obama, opened in movie theaters and was released on Netflix. Meanwhile, New York’s Metropolitan Opera raised the curtain on X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, a decades-old production that has at last reached opera’s biggest stage. 

The simultaneity is a coincidence, but the contrast between the two men brings into unusually sharp relief a fundamental divide in the struggle of black people for equality. Aside from Martin Luther King, almost no one contributed more to the victory of civil rights in America than Rustin. The only other figure who deserves to be placed ahead of him is A. Philip Randolph, who organized the first predominantly black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—a substantial base that enabled him to play the role of patriarch to the movement. 

Randolph was also something of a father figure to Rustin, who was born to a young single mother and raised among Pennsylvania Quakers by his grandparents. The two men first collaborated in 1941, when Rustin, then in his late twenties, assisted Randolph in organizing a march to demand an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industries. President Roosevelt yielded, and the march was called off. At the war’s end, Randolph and Rustin reprised that scenario, securing an order from President Truman to integrate the armed forces. 

Then, in 1947, Rustin and a few other pacificists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation undertook the first “freedom ride,” which aimed to secure enforcement of a ruling against discrimination in interstate transport. In North Carolina, he was beaten by police, arrested, and sentenced to work on a chain gang. From his cell he sent dispatches to the New York Post, generating such an outcry that North Carolina abolished chain gangs. 

In 1956, the Montgomery bus boycott propelled King into national prominence. Rustin had traveled to India to study Gandhi’s techniques and he mentored King in the strategy of nonviolent protest. Then, together with Randolph and a few others, Rustin organized the first civil-rights mass marches, the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools. The movement gained momentum with the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960 and the “freedom rides” of 1961, reenacting the 1947 effort of Rustin and his pacifist colleagues but this time into the murderous deep south. The gathering momentum led to the movement’s culmination in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the most important protest in US history.

The 1963 march was orchestrated by Rustin, who bore the misleading title Deputy Director (the other civil-rights leaders were afraid that his homosexuality and brief youthful membership in the Young Communist League made him too controversial to be called the Director), and it provided the venue for King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Even more importantly, it decisively tilted Washington’s political scales in favor of civil rights. There followed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in public accommodations, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. This trifecta of legislation put paid to a century of overt racial discrimination.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Pro-Hamas Nazi Students at Harvard Give President Claudine Gay a Deadline Emboldened more than ever. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pro-hamas-nazi-students-at-harvard-give-president-claudine-gay-a-deadline/

In the annals of campus presumption, this latest news takes some kind of cake. Various student groups at Harvard who are united in their hatred of Israel, and in their solidarity with those who wish to destroy the Jewish state and replace it with a twenty-third Arab state, have just issued an ultimatum to President Claudine Gay. She has until Monday, November 27 to respond. More on this absurdity can be found here: “‘Your Move’: Anti-Israel Harvard University Students Issue Demands to School President, Give Monday Deadline,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, November 24, 2023:

Dozens of anti-Israel student groups at Harvard University, along with several allied campus groups across the US, have issued a set of demands to Harvard President Claudine Gay and given her until Monday to respond, adding further fuel to what’s become an explosive situation at one of the world’s most elite universities over the Israel-Hamas war.

Earlier this week, students protested on campus and issued the list of demands, which included the reinstatement of a student proctor who three weeks ago participated in mobbing a Jewish student and screaming “Shame!” into his ears.

That proctor was part of a group that ganged up on a Jewish student, surrounding him and screaming “Shame! Shame!” — while he tried to get away. You can see the disturbing scene here.

According to The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper, the university had suspended indefinitely Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a second year student at the Harvard Divinity School, from his role as a proctor over his involvement in the incident, video of which went viral earlier this month. Tettey-Tamaklo reportedly has been ordered to vacate free housing he received as compensation for holding the position, which gives graduates the opportunity to mentor freshmen.

What kind of a “mentor” to freshmen can this Elom Tettey-Tamaklo possibly be, if he thinks ganging up on a lone Jewish student, surrounding him and preventing him from leaving is an acceptable way to behave? And he’s a student the Divinity School? His spirituality takes strange forms.

This week, the students also demanded that Gay commit to pursue no disciplinary or punitive actions against “pro-Palestinian students and workers engaging in non-violent protest.” The letter came as, according to The Harvard Crimson, eight undergraduate students had been summoned to hearings as part of disciplinary proceedings against students who last week occupied University Hall on campus for 24-hours.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

‘Net Zero’ Fails the Cost-Benefit Test As COP28 opens, two new studies show that extravagant climate promises are far more wasteful than useful. By Bjorn Lomborg

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/net-zero-fails-the-cost-benefit-test-paris-climate-accord-cop28-748ae52d?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

World leaders are gathering in Dubai for another climate conference, which will no doubt yield heady promises along the lines of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to keep the global temperature’s rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degrees. But they’d be wiser not to. New research shows how extravagant climate promises are far more wasteful than useful.

A new special issue of the journal Climate Change Economics contains two ground-breaking economic analyses of policies to hold global temperatures to 1.5 degrees and its practical political interpretation, mandates to reach net zero, usually by 2050. Though more than 130 countries, including most of the globe’s big emitters, have passed or are considering laws mandating net-zero carbon emissions, there’s been no comprehensive cost-benefit evaluation of that policy—until now.

One of the Climate Change Economics papers is authored by Richard Tol, one of the world’s most-cited climate economists. He calculates the benefits of climate policy using a meta-analysis of 39 papers with 61 published estimates of total climate change damage in economic terms. Across all this, Mr. Tol finds that if the world meets its 1.5 degree promise, it would prevent a less than 0.5% loss in annual global domestic product by 2050 and a 3.1% loss by 2100.

If that sounds underwhelming, blame one-sided reporting on climate issues. While headlines tend to focus on stories of violent climate catastrophes and modeled worst case scenarios, the data reveal a far less frightening picture. Despite a drumbeat of stories this summer about rising heat deaths, higher temperatures also prevent cold deaths, and so far in much greater number. Globally, the result has been fewer overall temperature-related fatalities. Writ large, the damage the world experiences each year from climate-related disasters is shrinking, both as expressed in fraction of GDP and lives lost.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

DeSantis DOMINATES in Red State-Blue State Debate With Newsom Paula Bolyard With videos

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/paula-bolyard/2023/11/30/desantis-dominates-in-red-state-vs-blue-state-debate-with-newsom-n4924384#google_vignette

I was not among those who said a debate between the governors of Florida and California—Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom, respectively—was a bad idea. I’d actually like to see more debates—more good debates, that is, not the bread-and-circus shows we’ve seen on network and cable television in recent years. If it were up to me, we’d switch to a Lincoln-Douglas debate format. Back then, there weren’t TV executives rigging the debates to ensure maximum eyeballs, profits, and mud-slinging. They’re designed to make money, not reveal what the candidates would do if they were elected.

This brings us to tonight’s Red State/Blue State debate in Alpharetta, Ga., moderated by Sean Hannity on Fox News. 

Hannity promised at the beginning of the debate that he would not tip the scales in favor of one candidate, but the questions he asked and the graphics he displayed definitely favored DeSantis. He debated Newsom several times, which I wish he hadn’t done. DeSantis proved more than capable of handling Newsom on his own. In fact, he wiped the floor with Newsom, who wouldn’t know a truthful statement if it hit him in the head. Over and over again, the Florida governor used facts to back up his claims and called out Newsom for saying things that were not true. 

The first question was about net migration from California to Florida. DeSantis explained why people are leaving and coming to Florida. “You almost have to try to mess California up,” he quipped. 

When it was Newsom’s turn to answer, he completely ignored the question and rambled about all the great things California has, like Silicon Valley (which no doubt carts a truckload of cash over to Newsom’s campaign every other month). 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Osama bin Laden, Big Man on Campus His 2002 ‘Letter to America’ is consistent with what students have been taught. By Christopher Nadon

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-osama-bin-laden-became-the-big-man-on-campus-bff1c53b?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

College students haven’t always been persuaded by Osama bin Laden’s prose. Yet when his 2002 “Letter to America” went viral among young Americans earlier this month, I wasn’t surprised. I had assigned the document for a course on religion and politics when it first appeared. Students found it compelling as a clear and concise statement of al Qaeda’s motives, intentions and understanding of world and Middle Eastern history. They were horrified, as were most faculty.

Yet a year earlier, only a few days after Sept. 11, 2001, a cultural Marxist professor lectured a staff meeting on the need to understand and sympathize with the 19 unfortunate men who had been driven to their martyrdom by Western colonial oppression. Those in the towers, he intoned, had it coming. On that day, my colleagues reacted to this claim with derision and contempt. But the virus had arrived. It would soon spread.

I began to teach the course again in 2017, after a 12-year hiatus. By then the class was filled with students whose education took place entirely within the post-9/11 world. Again we read bin Laden’s letter, and again the students were horrified—this time, not at bin Laden but at me for having assigned it. The students had been trained to consider anyone who might suggest a connection between al Qaeda and religion as racist. The ground had been prepared to insulate so-called non-Western discourse from critical discussion. They denounced me as “Islamophobic” and walked out of class. But at least at that stage they hadn’t yet taken bin Laden as a model.

Today his letter appears prescient to the young because the views it espouses resonate with what their professors have taught for years. Opposition is rarely heard. At the Claremont Colleges, where I teach, 186 faculty members signed onto a letter blaming “Israeli settler colonialism” for the Oct. 7 massacre and supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Students erected a shrine “to the insurgents who have died for the liberation of Palestine.”