NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Martin Gurri The New Censorship How the establishment Left embraced government control of digital speech

Posted By on July 18th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-censorship-2

On March 9, in the bowels of the Capitol building, a gathering took place of a type that might be possible only in Washington, D.C. The host was Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, chair of the curiously named House Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government. The guests: Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, semi-famous for revealing, in the “Twitter Files,” the deeply tangled relationship between the social-media platform and the federal government. The subject was freedom of speech in the digital age.

The Republicans had recently won a slim majority in the House and were eager to score points off the Biden administration. Taibbi and Shellenberger had been invited because they had a troubling story to tell about the abuse of power—what Jordan meant by “weaponization.”

According to Taibbi, federal entities, from the White House to the CIA, had developed a “formal system” to convey their demands to the digital platforms regarding what could be said online and who could say it. A gaggle of “quasi-private” organizations, many of them recipients of government funding, acted as force multipliers, repeating the same demands. Rather than question these practices, the news media aped them, becoming “an arm of a state-controlled thought-policing system.” Shellenberger called it the “censorship-industrial complex.”

The substance of the Twitter Files appeared to confirm these allegations. The FBI loomed large in Twitter’s content-moderation decisions. The agency dedicated as many as 80 staffers to hunting transgressors on the platform, overwhelming Twitter executives with requests for action and ultimately paying the company $3.4 million for its troubles. During the controversies surrounding the 2020 presidential campaign, Twitter leaned heavily on the judgment of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Federal intervention in digital speech followed a tendentious pattern. Any opinion that offended establishment sensibilities was a target for suppression. That included left-wing populist views and eccentrics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but most of the heretical voices belonged to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. During the 2020 campaign, Trump was “deamplified” by Twitter—meaning that he was essentially talking to himself. After the January 6 riots in Washington, Twitter booted him off the platform, though it never identified how he had violated its terms of service. FBI personnel took jobs with Twitter in significant numbers, intensifying the partisan tilt. James Baker, who played a leading role in the Trump investigation while at the FBI, became a persistent advocate of expelling Trump after moving to Twitter.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kamala’s Population Bomb

Posted By on July 18th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/18/kamalas-population-bomb/

Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris received a round of applause when she said “​​when we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.” And with that, she pulled back the curtain to expose one of the many horrors that is usually endorsed not quite so openly by the political left.

We acknowledge that Harris might have lost another one of the many battles she and her White House boss have with teleprompters and public speaking in general. The official transcript scrubs “population” and replaces it with “pollution,” as if that was the term the speech called for.

Maybe it is the word she was supposed to use. But we can’t rule out the likelihood she made a Kinsley gaffe, revealing a truth she didn’t intend to, because her side of the aisle has long been aligned with population-reduction cranks.

One Democrat who hasn’t been shy about population limits is Bernie Sanders, the Vermont bedlamite. During a 2019 town hall meeting, Sanders said “yes” when asked if he asked about “the need to curb population growth” in order to “address climate catastrophe.” He spoke for many that day.

Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich was not the first to advocate cutting the planet’s population, but he did blow up the world in 1968 with “The Population Bomb,” in which he shared his conviction that unless humanity was culled, the near future was one of “mass starvation” on “a dying planet.” To get to the beginning we’d have to go back at least as far as the late 18th century, when Englishman ​​Thomas Robert Malthus wanted to “court the return of the plague” and forbid “specific remedies for ravaging diseases” to stop what he thought was the pestilence of overpopulation.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Gender Ideology Isn’t Kids’ Stuff Psychologically and emotionally, most aren’t ready for it. By Erica Komisar

Posted By on July 18th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sexual-ideology-identity-trans-gender-school-dysphoria-puberty-blocker-parent-rights-seattle-new-jersey-florida-nea-777ffa84?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

A campaign is under way to introduce schoolchildren to the latest ideas about sexual orientation and “gender identity.” Pupils in New Jersey are expected to understand the differences between these concepts by fifth grade. An official of the National Education Association, the largest U.S. teachers union, recommends asking preschoolers their “preferred pronouns.” The NEA’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer+ Caucus has a reading list for elementary-school children that includes titles such as “My Princess Boy” and “Jacob’s New Dress.”

It’s important that children learn to accept differences; but indoctrinating them or promoting an agenda is another matter. Parents, many of whom find such ideas objectionable or exotic, are often kept in the dark about what their children are being taught, or told they have no right to opt out if they are informed. Parents around the country have filed lawsuits alleging that school officials withheld vital information about their own children from them.

Children develop at their own pace. Many aren’t psychologically or emotionally ready to discuss or think about their “identity.” I have seen many young adolescents overwhelmed by the need to know “who and what I am” in a heated and socially pressured environment. I have even had teen patients tell me that “identifying as heteronormative”—yes, they’ve been trained to talk that way—is stressful in an environment that idealizes being “queer.”

Preadolescent children are only beginning to discover who they are. All children (adults too) have both masculine and feminine parts of their personalities, which they should be free to explore in play. If a girl doesn’t like wearing dresses and a boy enjoys playing with dolls, it’s cruel and destructive to lead them to believe they’re actually members of the opposite sex.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ramat Gan wine-shop owner battles city over rainbow Pride flags “There’s an aggressive silencing of the Jewish voice in the public sphere,” the merchant’s attorney said. by David Isaac

Posted By on July 18th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/israel-news/lgbtq/23/7/17/302985/

For several years, a Ramat Gan store owner has found himself under fire from the municipality for opposing LGBTQ flags adorning the city’s thoroughfares, including in front of his shop, during the annual Pride Month (June).

Facing thousands of shekels in fines, he and his attorney say he is the target of selective enforcement in a clash echoing a wider cultural war against religion in the Israeli public square.

Amnon Goldis, the owner of a small boutique wine shop, “Kosher Wine Or Ganuz,” felt compelled to act three years ago when gay pride flags appeared along Ramat Gan’s Jerusalem Boulevard, where his store is located. His protest took the form of banners he placed above his storefront. The first was simply the Jewish creed, “Shema Yisrael”: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”

The original Shema Yisrael sign was a temporary vinyl banner above the store in 2020. .

But Ramat Gan, located just east of Tel Aviv, came down hard on Goldis. In 2020, he received a call and a letter from the municipality warning him to remove the sign immediately or face a fine. Goldis refused, telling radio station Kol BaRama at the time: “I made it clear to the municipality that I do not intend to take down the sign. They can issue fines, make committees—I am not taking down this sign.”

Goldis then made the Shema sign permanent, placing it where his store sign had been. Essentially, he changed the name of his store.

Each year a new sign followed. In 2022, there was Zechariah 13:2, “And the spirit of impurity I will cause to pass out of the land.” This year it’s a combination of Ezekiel 9:4 and Ezekiel 8:6, “that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof … even the great abominations that the house of Israel committeth here, that I should go far off from my sanctuary.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Have We Forgotten the Russian Way of War? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 17th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/16/have-we-forgotten-the-russian-way-of-war/

“I think I am not exaggerating when I say that the campaign against Russia has been won in fourteen days.”

General Franz Halder, June, 1941, Chief of Staff, Oberbefehlshaber des Heeres

Masters and commanders of history who have sworn that they have defeated an incompetent, disorganized, and corrupt Russian army are legion. For a time they seemed to have been correct. But there is a pattern to their encounters with the Russian army that is germane to the current Ukrainian offensive.

In 1707, Swedish King Charles XII appeared like he could successfully invade Russia in the manner that he had defeated Russian armies. But by 1709, he had wrecked the Swedish army against a numerically superior enemy that seemed to grow despite losing battles.

Napoleon won more battles than he lost in Russia, took, and burned Moscow—and destroyed his own French army in the process. The famous invasion chart of Charles Joseph Minard graphically demonstrated how his Grand Army shrunk each day it advanced further into Russia.

The 3.5 million-man Wehrmacht expeditionary force consistently crushed the Russian army for nearly two months following its invasion of June 22, 1944—killing nearly 3 million Russians. Such catastrophic losses would have broken any Western army.

But by December 1941, the Germans could no longer win the war in the east.

One might object that it is a truism that invading the vast landscape and enduring the harsh weather of Mother Russia is a prescription for disaster; yet Russian armies do poorly when they invade other countries and fight as aggressors outside of their homeland.

Yes and no.

Certainly, the preemptive Russian attack on Kyiv proved an utter disaster. Who can forget the scenes of last winter when sitting-duck, long columns of stalled Russian vehicles were picked off in shooting-gallery fashion by brave Ukrainian ad hoc units? But note saving Kyiv was the mere beginning not the end of the war.

Resilience and recovery from disasters are the historical trademarks of the Russian army.  From May to September 1939, a Russian army under the soon to be heralded General Zhukov fought a large Japanese force on the Mongolian-Manchurian border. Despite the battle hardened and military ascendant imperial Japanese military, the Russians withstood every Japanese assault, and eventually destroyed 75 percent of Japanese forces.

On September 17, 1939,  a duplicitous Soviet Russia invaded Poland from the west, under the agreements of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939.

The large Russian force hit a Polish army reeling from nearly three weeks of relentless hammering from a German invasion that had attacked from three directions. Although the belated advance of the Russian army was not especially impressive, its victory was foreordained.

The three-and-a-half month Finnish-Russian “Winter War” of 1939-40 is usually referenced as an example of the gritty heroism of the outnumbered Finnish army and the general ineptness of the invading Russian behemoth that outnumbered the heroic Finns by more than two to one. When the tattered Russian army finally ground down the Finns and forced them to negotiate, they had suffered nearly 400,000 casualties, perhaps five times Finnish losses.

The Russian invasion was poorly planned, inadequately supplied, incompetently led, and characterized by low morale. And yet the invasion was eventually mostly successful given the numerical and material advantages of Russia—and Moscow’s seeming indifference to its massive losses. Its trademark war of attrition eventually proved too costly for tiny Finland.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians: Victims of Apartheid in Lebanon by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on July 17th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19807/palestinians-apartheid-lebanon

“The procedures and restrictions imposed on the entry of building materials into the Palestinian camps in Lebanon are in contradiction with the principles of human rights.” — Hassan al-Sayyida, a researcher and human rights activist at the Palestinian Association for Human, palinfo.com, July 10,2023

This is the second case within a year in which a Palestinian has been arrested on charges of a “construction violation.” On July 28, 2022, the Lebanese authorities arrested another Palestinian woman, Amal Mousa, also on the pretext of building a house without a permit. Mousa was released only after she was forced to demolish the foundations of her house.

Israel, too, has demolished illegal houses — but for Arabs and Jews…. Israel is not even doing much about the massive illegal building by Arabs, who have reportedly seized 30% of the land unpoetically called “Area C”: land that by mutual agreement in the Oslo Accords belongs wholly to Israel. One can go to the edge of Jerusalem and see literally countless illegal skyscrapers built by Arabs as well as smaller illegal buildings that extend south for miles. “At present [2022]…there are 81,317 illegal Arab-built structures in this area….” according to the research group Regavim. Moreover, Israel never arrests or keeps anyone in prison because of a construction violation.

[T]here is an urgent need to build new houses for the Palestinians in Lebanon, “especially since the existing houses are not sufficient and do not meet the demographic increase in the population”… [M]any Palestinians, as in the case of Um Wissam, are forced to build houses on top of the roofs of their homes. — The Palestinian Association for Human Rights, refugeesps.net, July 10, 2023

Palestinians in Lebanon “face substantial challenges to the full enjoyment of their human rights. They are socially marginalized, have very limited civil, social, political, and economic rights, including restricted access to the Government of Lebanon’s public health, educational and social services and face significant restrictions on their right to work and right to own property.” — UNRWA, reporting that the Palestinians are still prevented from employment in 39 professions such as medicine, law, and engineering; unrwa.org, updated September, 2020

“Palestinian refugees [in Lebanon] consistently report experiencing discrimination in hiring practices and opportunities for employment. They are faced with informal restrictions on the types of jobs and industries they can be hired for due to additional bureaucracy around contracts and work permits and discrimination.” – UNRWA, reporting that the Palestinians in Lebanon are still prevented from employment in 39 professions such as medicine, law, and engineering; unrwa.org, updated September, 2020

“[I]t is difficult to deny that the Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon have been subjected to systematic discrimination and to the violation of their basic human rights. The Palestinian refugees have been forced into abject poverty by the Lebanese government’s denial of their rights to remunerated employment, social security, public health care, public education and property ownership. The argument that Palestinian integration into Lebanese society would either cause them to lose their right of return or would upset Lebanon’s sectarian balance is just a pretext the Lebanese government uses to discriminate against the Palestinians, whom many Lebanese blame for causing the Lebanese civil war. The Palestinian refugees are not asking for citizenship; they are simply asking to be afforded the rights given to other refugees around the world.” — The Palestine-Israel Journal , 2008

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Chasing a Green Chimera, Biden Has Put America in the Red Dragon’s Grasp By Janet Levy

Posted By on July 17th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/07/chasing_a_green_chimera_biden_has_put_america_in_the_red_dragons_grasp.html

No country would ever depend on an out-and-out rival for something as vital as energy.  Yet the Biden administration, through its zealous, misguided pursuit of “net-zero emissions,” is fast-tracking America’s dependence on Communist China for the minerals and components that back-end green technology.  The administration also is curbing the mining industry, again allowing China to monopolize America and the world in minerals and ores.

This strategic disaster is a complete reversal of what President Donald Trump had achieved.  Under him, the U.S. — long dependent on OPEC for oil — became a net exporter of natural gas and crude oil for the first time in more than 50 years.  Exploration of oil and natural gas boosted the economy, lowered energy prices, and bolstered national security by increasing our energy independence.

Biden, on assuming office, pledged to eliminate the fossil fuel industry and pursue a radical climate agenda to replace carbon energy with renewables.  He has since called for replacing 50% of carbon-fueled automobiles with electric vehicles (E.V.s) by 2030, creating a carbon-free electric grid by 2035, and having a carbon-free economy by 2050.  This push toward unstable solar and wind power will markedly increase dependence on China, which dominates the market in materials required for E.V.s, batteries, and other renewables.

As a report from the Institute for Energy Research (IER) states, “green energy runs through communist China.”  It notes that even if China were a trustworthy trading partner, near-total dependence on one country would still disadvantage America greatly.

While Biden pursues a chimerical goal, increasing energy prices in America despite rich domestic resources of oil, natural gas, and coal, China and India are building coal plants to grow their economies with readily accessible electricity.  The green agenda, for whatever it’s worth, is also defeated by the massive amounts of carbon energy required to manufacture wind turbines and solar panels and the unrecyclable material with which they will clog landfills at the end of their useful lives.  Manufacturing E.V.s requires six times more minerals than gas-powered cars; wind farms require nine times more minerals than gas-fired plants.  Add to that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the import of required materials.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Racial Preferences, Charter Schools, and the Teachers Unions What happens when you compare affirmative action with charter schools? by Larry Sand

Posted By on July 17th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/racial-preferences-charter-schools-and-the-teachers-unions/

On June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a university’s consideration of race in accepting students violates the U.S. Constitution. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, explains that the admissions processes at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The 6-3 decision saw the three liberal justices dissent.

In addition to being unconstitutional, affirmative action has not worked out well in the real world. Only 42% of black students nationally graduate college within six years, which is far below the 66% rate for white students.

As Jason Riley writes in City Journal, racial preferences are counterproductive. “They mismatch students with schools that recruit minorities for window dressing and then fail to graduate them in a timely manner or in the majors they initially wanted to pursue. Many bright black students who could have graduated from Xavier with a degree in engineering were instead lured to Duke, where they struggled academically, perhaps switched to a softer discipline, or simply flunked out. The upshot has been fewer black mathematicians, lawyers, and physicians than we would have had in the absence of race-based admissions.”

It’s worth noting that affirmative action was never meant to last forever. When the policy was first implemented in the 1960s, it was assumed that gaps in educational achievement between black and white Americans would eventually shrink, thereby rendering racial preferences unnecessary. Along these lines, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in 2003: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

Needless to say, the left was delirious and then some over the SCOTUS decision. Leading the wackadoodle parade was union boss Randi Weingarten, who has never been shy about wearing hysteria on her sleeve. “Make no mistake: Today’s draconian ruling by the Supreme Court is a catastrophic decision that will have dire outcomes for millions of Americans for decades to come. This decision ignores the original sin of this country—it’s a throwback to a cruel, racist past that admissions policies like this tried to repair. This decision doesn’t simply end affirmative action, it has huge consequences for public life far beyond higher education. Ignoring the facts before them, the majority pretends that both discrimination and the effects of discrimination simply do not exist and do not need to be tackled.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

While Navy Pushes DEI, 37% of Attack Subs Are Out of Order If only the Navy could repair subs as quickly as its transgender teams castrate sailors. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on July 17th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/while-navy-pushes-dei-37-of-attack-subs-are-out-of-order/

On June 16, 2023, a date which will live in infamy, the Pearl Harbor base featured the story of Lt. Nick Grant, an “out gay cisgender man” who was a co-chair of the Naval Medical Force Pacific Transgender Care Team (NMFP TGCT).

The title of the Pride Month feature was “serving with pride”.

The Navy’s medical service, which can’t seem to do anything about active duty personnel killing themselves, has multiple “transgender care teams” for different regions composed of multiple specialists for different areas to “oversee and, in many cases, provide mental health, hormonal, and surgical interventions as needed to facilitate the gender transition process.”

There are some who say that the Navy ought to be focused on other things. Like getting its submarines to work. In the latest numbers, nearly 40% of attack subs are out of commission.

With only 31 subs operationally ready, the US Navy is more unready than ever to face off against the People’s Liberation Army Submarine Force of Communist China.

In 2017, 28% of submarines were out of commission. By 2022, it was 33%, and now it’s 37%. At the rate that the woke Naval brass are going, most subs will soon be out of order.

Under Biden, the number of operational nuclear powered attack subs has never gone above 33 out of 49. A third of our submarine attack fleet being out of order has become the new normal.

If only the Navy could repair subs as quickly as its transgender care teams castrate sailors.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The Doctor Won’t See You Now Therapists who judge, recoil, or quietly rage at their patients can’t provide effective therapy. By Andrew Hartz

Posted By on July 17th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-doctor-wont-see-you-now-psychology-white-supremacy-politics-9a3c32b5?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A patient came to a clinic where I worked a few years ago. He was looking for help with depression but also told his therapist that he was feeling frustrated after having lost out on a research fellowship. The patient, who was white, felt the reason was affirmative action. The therapist was Arab. A group of psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists discussed the case at a clinic-wide meeting and came to an apparent consensus: Confront the patient and tell him that if he didn’t overcome his biases, he would be transferred elsewhere. They argued that it would be unfair for a clinician of color to have to provide therapy to a “racist” patient.

The same ideologies that have infiltrated education, medicine and the legal profession have also invaded mental healthcare. The American Psychological Association has decried “traditional masculinity.” The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published a paper describing “Whiteness” as a “malignant, parasitic-like condition.” Two years ago, a prominent psychiatrist speaking at Yale shared her fantasies of killing white people. Recently, the president of the APA’s division of psychoanalysis said that therapists should “center Palestine . . . as a central working tenet of any clinical praxis.”

These attitudes are more common than one might imagine. The most recent APA psychoanalysis conference, which has in the past focused on the practice of therapy, was absorbed by identity politics, such as “the white supremacist within” and “psychic colonization,” to quote two panel titles.

Emerging empirical research shows the problem is widespread. One forthcoming study charts a more than 500% increase in politically slanted communiques at the APA from 2000-02 to 2017-19. A 2018 study showed that psychology departments, like most of academia, have extreme bias, with almost 17 registered Democratic professors for every one Republican. The bias is larger at higher ranked schools, and most Republican academics report higher rates of self-censorship.