ISRAEL Comments turned off

America Is Among the Targets as Israel Issues Warnings on Iran

Posted By on September 12th, 2023

https://www.nysun.com/article/america-is-among-the-targets-as-israel-issues-warnings-on-iran?utm_source=MG&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Evening%20Sun%20%202023-09-11

If Prime Minister Netanayahu and President Biden meet next week — even at this late date, the word “if” must be used — expect some pleasantries but also a lot of behind the scenes disagreements, including on a growing rift over Washington’s Iran policies. 

“The prime minister made clear to all world leaders that if we detect uranium enrichment above 60 percent then Israel will have no choice but to act,” Israel’s national security council chief, Tzachi Hanegbi, said Monday. “I don’t think we gamble on our fate if this seems to be the Iranian policy.”

A day earlier, the Mossad chief, David Barnea, made a lot of headlines by telling a conference at Reichman University at Herzliya that Israel is contemplating new methods to slow down the Islamic Republic’s aggression in the region and beyond.

“The time has come to exact a price from Iran in a different way,” Mr. Barnea said, warning that attacks against Israelis and Jews at home or around the world would be more costly to its perpetrators than was seen with past Israeli methods. “These prices will be exacted with great precision in the depths of Iran, in the heart of Tehran,” he said. 

Iran is reportedly building a new airbase in southern Lebanon from which to conduct drone attacks on Israel. “The land is Lebanese, the control is Iranian, and the target is Israel,” the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told Reichman University Monday, warning of “lethal force” against the base. 

While Israel in the past has often uttered warnings against Iran, the current ones may be directed at more than just Tehran. Mr. Barnea “did not threaten the Iranians. He is a serious enough person to understand that that has no meaning,” a former senior Mossad official, Haim Tomer, told Radio 103FM Monday. “He made a threat to the Americans.” 

Mr. Tomer, who was Mossad’s chief of intelligence and operations, added that Mr. Barnea is “expressing harsh criticism of the current U.S. administration,” and “is telling the Americans that he has freedom of action.” The foreign intelligence agency chief’s comments were cleared by Mr. Netanyahu, and were made on his behalf, Mr. Tomer added.

Washington and Jerusalem increasingly disagree over what to do about the Iranian nuclear program and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ military beef-up and growing aggression. Instead of addressing those issues, Mr. Biden is pressuring Israel over its lack of concessions to the Palestianians.

Washington well knows that Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing government, as it is currently formed, cannot agree on concessions to Ramallah. Such concessions are even less likely in light of the much publicized recent antisemitic comments made by the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas. He denied that Jews are Semites and blamed them for Hitler’s genocide. 

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Biden’s Assault on Liberty Another legal setback for the White House war on free speech. James Freeman

Posted By on September 12th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-assault-on-liberty-1be5bb65?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

This column is as concerned as anyone about the things our president says when he’s left alone with a live microphone. But the actions Joe Biden has taken to prevent other Americans from saying things represent a much greater danger to our country. Democratic primary voters will soon have the opportunity to punish Mr. Biden for his relentless attack on our essential rights to free speech and let’s hope they seize the day. If it’s acceptable for the federal government to systematically trample on the First Amendment, how can any of our liberties be preserved?

Thank goodness many Americans are still determined to preserve them. In July this column noted the wonderful birthday present to America courtesy of U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana, who issued a July 4 injunction barring the White House and a number of federal agencies from communicating with social-media companies for the purpose of censoring speech by users of their platforms. The wise judge acted in a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.

Now the Journal’s Jacob Gershman reports:

A federal appeals court ruled the Biden administration’s policing of social-media content during the pandemic likely violated the First Amendment, a decision that bars White House aides and other officials from pressuring online platforms to suppress protected speech.
In a 74-page opinion released late Friday, the New Orleans-based U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said administration officials coerced social-media platforms to censor disfavored views about Covid-19 health policies, the origins of the pandemic and other divisive topics including election security and Hunter Biden…
The decision in many respects affirmed the conclusions of a federal judge who ruled against the government on July 4 and castigated the Biden administration for establishing what he called an “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’ ”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Government Censored Me and Other Scientists. We Fought Back—and Won. By Jay Bhattacharya

Posted By on September 11th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-fought-government-censorship-and-won

Last week, a federal appeals court confirmed that science cannot function without free speech. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya reflects on a victory for himself—and every American.

When I was four, my mother took her first flight and first trip out of her native India to the U.S. with me and my younger brother in tow. We were going to meet my father, an electrical engineer and rocket scientist by training, who had won the U.S. visa lottery in 1970. He had moved to New York a year earlier. By the time we arrived he was working at McDonald’s because engineering jobs had dried up during a recession.

Both of my parents—children of the violent partition of India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)—had grown up in poverty, my mother in a Calcutta slum. They immigrated to this country because they believed in the American dream. That belief led to the success my father ultimately found as an engineer and my mother found running a family daycare business. 

Our family had indeed won the lottery. But coming to America meant something more profound than financial opportunity. 

I remember in 1975 when a high court found that then-prime minister of India Indira Gandhi had interfered unlawfully in an election. The ruling disqualified her from holding office. In response, she declared a state of emergency, suspended democracy, censored the opposition press and government critics, and threw her political opponents in jail. I remember the shock of these events and our family’s collective relief that we were in the U.S., where it was unimaginable that such things could happen.

When I was 19, I became an American citizen. It was one of the happiest days of my young life. The immigration officer gave me a civics test, including a question about the First Amendment. It was an easy test because I knew it in my heart. The American civic religion has the right to free speech as the core of its liturgy. I never imagined that there would come a time when an American government would think of violating this right, or that I would be its target. 

Unfortunately, during the pandemic, the American government violated my free speech rights and those of my scientist colleagues for questioning the federal government’s pandemic policies. 

My parents had taught me that people here could criticize the government, even over matters of life and death, without worry that the government would censor or suppress us. But over the past three years, I have been robbed of that conviction. American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, have attacked and suppressed my speech and that of my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies—criticism that has been proven prescient. 

On Friday, at long last, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that we were not imagining it—that the Biden administration did indeed strong-arm social media companies into doing its bidding. The court found that the Biden White House, the CDC, the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, and the FBI “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign [on social media outlets] designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints.” 

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Helen Mirren astounds in a fast-paced, moving biopic. by Danusha V. Goska

Posted By on September 11th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/golda/

Golda is a biopic about Golda Meir and the Yom Kippur War. The film was released in the US on August 25, 2023. Golda Meir was Israel’s fourth prime minister, its first and only woman prime minister, and the third woman prime minister in the world. Her tenure was from 1969 to 1974. She resigned after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Golda Meir was not only exceptional because she was a woman and a leader, and not only because she rose to power without being the wife or daughter of a male leader. World leaders typically cultivate as glamorous an image as they can; attractiveness is a form of power. Golda Meir, in her youth, looked like a studious, serious young lady, more interested in books and service than primping in front of a mirror. In her maturity, Meir looked like a grandmother. Pulling back her long, graying, frizzy hair into a bun and keeping it in place with barrettes was her one obvious grooming choice. Her suits were in neutral colors, conservative and unadorned. She wore sensible shoes that came to be known as “Golda shoes.” Eschewing obvious appeals to glamour, Golda Meir, counterintuitively, became an icon.

Meir lived a life on the front lines of historic events that affect us today. She was born in 1898 in Kiev, what is now Ukraine, and what was then part of the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire was not a safe place for Jews for much of the early twentieth century. Anti-Semitic violence was increasing significantly. “Between 1918 and 1921, over 1,000 anti-Jewish riots and military actions … were documented in about 500 different locales throughout what is now Ukraine … a conservative estimate is that 40,000 Jews were killed and another 70,000 subsequently perished from their wounds, or from disease, starvation, and exposure … About two-thirds of all Jewish houses and over half of all Jewish businesses in the region were looted or destroyed,” writes historian Jeffrey Veidlinger.

A photograph of the child Golda Mabovitch is a portrait of sadness. Five of her siblings died in childhood. “I can’t recall anything good or happy. I remember the strife at home, a real … shortage of food. And I remember the fear of pogroms,” Meir would later say. Among this little girl’s earliest memories was one of her father boarding up the house to protect his family from a rumored pogrom.

The Mabovitch family escaped to America. Little Golda watched the store when her mother had to buy supplies. Meir made aliyah to Israel with her husband in 1921, and quickly took on leadership positions. She signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948. She would go on to be the first Israeli prime minister to meet with a pope, and she hosted West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s visit to Israel.

Several feature films and documentaries have covered Meir’s life. Anne Bancroft, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Davis, Tovah Feldshuh, Valerie Harper, and Colleen Dewhurst have all played Meir on either stage or screen. Golda 2023, rather than presenting Meir’s entire life story, focuses on the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Director Guy Nattiv and screenwriter Nicholas Martin dramatize what they call new revelations about that war that will significantly alter received interpretations of Meir’s role, and the role of other key figures. Nattiv is one of two Israeli directors who has won an Academy Award. Nicholas Martin’s previous project was writing the script for the 2016 Meryl Streep – Hugh Grant biopic, Florence Foster Jenkins.

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22 Years Later The freedom that the 9/11 hijackers hated is slipping away from us with terrifying speed. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on September 11th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/22-years-later/

“Only days after 9/11, Norwegian author Gert Nygårdshaug sneered at the idea that there might soon be an attack on ‘Oslo or Rome or Copenhagen.’ He was far from alone in his mockery. Then came Madrid, London, Bali, Beslan, Mumbai….The Western European elite played down, even denied, any connection among these events. Yet year by year the truth has become increasingly clear: though the U.S. was the target on 9/11, the front line of the war with Islamism is Europe.”

Bruce Bawer, “9/11, Five Years Later: A View from Europe,” December 2, 2006

“If we’d had a president who had dared to speak the truth about our enemies and about the ideology (which is to say theology) that motivates them, and had done so eloquently and stirringly and repeatedly, à la Churchill…it might have made a huge difference….But perhaps not. Perhaps the poison of multiculturalism — the fear of acknowledging that our enemies were, in fact, our enemies — was simply too potent….The tragic fact of the matter is that ten years after 9/11, we are more ignorant, and more vulnerable, than ever.”

Bruce Bawer, “9/11 and the Pastness of the Past,” September 11, 2011

“9/11 was a day of heroes and of villains, of stark contrasts between good and evil. Yet how quickly the politicians, journalists, and others in positions of power managed to make a muddle of it all. Instead of witnessing a democratization of the Middle East, we experienced a steady Islamization of the West. Instead of seeing freedom bloom in the Islamic world, we saw a rise in Western censorship and self-censorship on the subject of Islam.”

Bruce Bawer, “9/11: Twelve Years Later,” September 10, 2013

“His enemies call him a fascist. On the contrary, he’s the first U.S. president since 9⁄11 who genuinely seems to grasp that Islam is fascism.”

Bruce Bawer, “Remembering 9/11 in the Age of Trump,” September 11, 2018

“Twenty years on, under the disgraceful Biden, America feels like a damaged and diminished nation – its power weakened, its alliances shaken, its once-unshakable core beliefs largely shattered, not least by the suicidal compulsion to speak well of Islam.”

Bruce Bawer, “Celebrating Our Enemies, Twenty Years after 9/11,” September 10, 2021

“America has been transformed very quickly into a country that’s so dramatically different from the one we lived in on September 10, 2001, that the twenty-first anniversary of that atrocity can feel almost irrelevant to our present concerns and calamities. But let’s remember that it was on 9/11 that the shock was delivered to our system that, responded to in precisely the wrong way, saw us wade deeper and deeper into the current muck of doubt, deception, and division.”

Bruce Bawer, “That Day, Yet Again,” September 10, 2022

Sometimes it feels as if it happened just the day before yesterday, and other times it seems lost in the mists of time.

Time is like that.

At first there was intense shock. Then a sharply focused anger, a flourishing of patriotism, and a potent resolve. And then, over the years, increasing confusion, division, self-doubt.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Woody Cozad :Attention Paid Jack Cashill punctures the standard “white flight” narrative by letting former residents of urban neighborhoods tell their own stories.

Posted By on September 11th, 2023

Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, by Jack Cashill (Post Hill Press, 288 pp., $20)

Our well-intentioned government—named the “Good Intentions Paving Company” by financial analyst James Grant—always seems to find itself scrambling to explain how its latest scheme for a better world has delivered us into an even lower circle of hell. Bureaucrats to the core, they’ve even developed a one-step procedure for dealing with this task: blame it on the people. The term “white flight” is a product of this procedure.

A principal benefit of this system is that the Paving Company doesn’t have to ask people—in this case, the whites who took “flight”—why they fled. It must be because they were fleeing from nonwhite people, and fleeing from nonwhite people is racist. Why would you bother consulting racists about their motives?

Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable, punctures this familiar white flight narrative. Cashill’s subtitle promises the “true story of white ethnic flight from America’s cities.” Cashill has learned a thing or two from his fellow descendant of Irish refugees, Ronald Reagan: damn the statistics, tell the stories. In fact, let people tell their own stories. In this book, they finally get the chance to do so.

Decades on, few have bothered asking white ethnic residents why they left the neighborhoods where they had met and married spouses, raised families, made their livings, drank beer together, cheered the home team, and gone to the movies. They (or their forebears) hadn’t left Ireland, Germany, Italy, or Poland lightly. It took poverty, starvation, tyranny, and decades of suffering, in many cases, to get them to our shores. We’re expected to believe that they dropped the fruits of a lifetime’s effort in America and decamped for the suburbs solely because some black families bought houses a few blocks away.

This certainly isn’t the story the white ethnics tell in the pages of Untenable. Their reasons for leaving boil down to two things: the rise of crime and the collapse of schools.

The book takes its title from one of those stories. Cashill asked a friend, a lifelong Democrat, why he and his mother had left the old neighborhood in the latter years of its long decline. “It became untenable,” came the careful reply. What did he mean by that? “When your mother gets mugged for the second time, that’s untenable. When your home gets broken into for the second time, that’s untenable.”

Cashill posted word of his book project on his grade school’s alumni page; the responses he got from his fellow refugees from the Roseville neighborhood of Newark were numerous and moving. A smattering: “Leaving Roseville was one of the hardest and most emotional parts of my life . . . We had a wonderful life and didn’t know it until we see (sic) the way things changed . . . God, I miss the Roseville Section. Leaving there was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It just wasn’t safe to live there anymore . . . I’ve always envied those that can go home again.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Scientists responds to critiques of new study: ‘Reply to erroneous claims by RealClimate.org on our research into the Sun’s role in climate change’ By Marc Morano

Posted By on September 11th, 2023

https://www.climatedepot.com/2023/09/11/scientists-responds-to-critiques-of-new-study-reply-to-erroneous-claims-by-realclimate-org-on-our-research-into-the-suns-role-in-climate-change/

In the last month, we have co-authored three papers in scientific peer-reviewed journals collectively dealing with the twin problems of (1) urbanization bias and (2) the ongoing debates over Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) datasets:

Soon et al. (2023). Climate. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11090179. (Open access)

Connolly et al. (2023). Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. https://doi.org/10.1088/1674-4527/acf18e. (Still in press, but pre-print available here)

Katata, Connolly and O’Neill (2023). Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. https://doi.org/10.1175/JAMC-D-22-0122.1. (Open access)

All three papers have implications for the scientifically challenging problem of the detection and attribution (D&A) of climate change. Many of our insights were overlooked by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their last three Assessment Reports (AR), i.e., IPCC AR4 (2007), IPCC AR5 (2013) and IPCC AR6 (2021). This means that the IPCC’s highly influential claims in those reports that the long-term global warming since the 19th century was “mostly human-caused” and predominantly due to greenhouse gas emissions were scientifically premature and the scientific community will need to revisit them.

So far, the feedback on these papers has been very encouraging. In particular, Soon et al. (2023) seems to be generating considerable interest, with the article being viewed more than 20,000 times on the journal website in the first 10 days since it was published.

However, some scientists who have been actively promoting the IPCC’s attribution statements over the years appear to be quite upset by the interest in our new scientific papers.

This week (September 6th, 2023), a website called RealClimate.org published a blog post by one of their contributors, Dr. Gavin Schmidt, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS). In this post, Dr. Schmidt is trying to discredit our analysis in Soon et al. (2023), one of our three new papers, using “straw-man” arguments and demonstrably false claims.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Depressed? Don’t worry: Be Happy Diane Bederman

Posted By on September 11th, 2023

https://dianebederman.com/depressed-dont-worry-be-happy/

Seems depression is rising.

So, what is depression?

Here is one definition:

“Depression (major depressive disorder) is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act. Fortunately, it is also treatable. Depression causes feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities you once enjoyed. It can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems and can decrease your ability to function at work and at home.”

I am beginning to wonder if we are misdiagnosing sadness as depression. And for a reason. How does a doctor know that it is depression for which he will happily prescribe medication, all kinds of medication, and not just sadness from life’s events? Seems there is no pill for sadness.

How is it possible that millions of people would not be sad after the years of Covid when “mental illness” in our children went through the roof, and now fear mongering over climate? And those attacks on free speech?   Is there a pill for that sadness, too? What about the damage we are witnessing that is being done to our children by adults who try and confuse them about their “being”?  Who let these people get close to our children to tell them they may be in the wrong body when they never questioned their body in the first place? And now schools taking away parental rights regarding the “identification” of their children? How many of those children will develop “depression”? And what about the removal of healthy genitals by our esteemed medical professionals? Do you suppose reading about that every day and watching videos of men twerking and sexual perversion, in front of children, might lead to sadness?  Is it possible some of us are very sad because we don’t understand why parents expose their children to “exposed” people in Gay Pride Parades or at Drag Queen shows – too often sponsored by our governments in the name of equity or some such BS?

I’ll bet there is a pill for every sadness which will be diagnosed as depression.Think about it. If millions of people are diagnosed with depression and there is a pill for that… a happy pill… wouldn’t the government just love to have millions more on that pill? The ads for it would be – Don’t worry, Be Happy.

And while you are not worrying, your freedoms will be squeezed. Your rights will be taken away.  Your guns will be taken. Those 15 minute cities will grow exponentially. Your choice of food will be taken away from you. But not to worry. You will be happy on your happy pill.

Sounds hilarious, doesn’t it? But not to me, anymore. I know the difference between sadness and depression. Sadness lives in those of us who see the world falling apart, our freedoms shrinking, our rights taken away, our families destroyed and have to watch as friends and family continue to bend the knee to false gods and governments. How can we not be sad? But  NO. It’s depression. No-it’s sadness over fear for the future.

There is no pill to alleviate that sadness/depression. The sadness/depression…righteous anger?… that we feel has been brought to us by the governments we have elected – corrupt elites who care only about themselves and their pocketbooks. We have become so tired just trying to put food on the table, clothes on our backs and a roof over our heads – from the policies of the elites, that we have no energy left to fight back. And that is part of the plan. Along with a  pill for your “depression.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Time to Declare a ‘People’s War’ on the CCP: All of China Is One Military Machine by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on September 11th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19969/china-military-machine

Washington should be trying to end the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is time to declare a “people’s war” against the CCP. We are in an us-or-them fight.

The Party certainly thinks that way. In May 2019, People’s Daily, the CCP’s self-described “mouthpiece”… declared a “people’s war” against the United States.

“A people’s war is a total war, and its strategy and tactics require the overall mobilization of political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, military, and other power resources, the integrated use of multiple forms of struggle and combat methods.” — PLA Daily, an official news website of the Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army, April 1, 2023.

Although it denies doing so, China’s regime is conducting “unrestricted warfare” against America.

Unrestricted warfare means total war. The regime’s deliberate spread of COVID-19 and support for the Chinese fentanyl gangs, for example, should be viewed in that light.

Most Americans have chosen not to see the Chinese regime’s hatred of America.

Why should Americans be concerned?

The Party, with strident anti-Americanism, is establishing a justification to strike America. As James Lilley, the great American ambassador to Beijing, said, the Chinese always telegraph their punches. They are now telegraphing punches.

[US National Security Adviser Jake] Sullivan and others are willing to impose, for instance, technology sanctions on China, but they are largely ineffective.

Xi Jinping has a policy of “military-civilian fusion,” which means that anything a civilian organization possesses can be — and is — pipelined to the Chinese military. In the Communist Party’s top-down system, every individual and entity in China must obey every Party order.

It’s a warning to America….

The U.S. Commerce Department allowed transfers of American technology to SMIC on the condition there would be no transfers to Huawei.

Why would Commerce ever think SMIC would keep that promise? The only realistic solution is to treat all Chinese parties as one and to prevent tech transfers to all of them.

Xi’s regime is mobilizing all of the country’s civilians for war. The Chinese leader never misses an opportunity to talk about it. China’s regime is clearly planning to wage “kinetic” war — the type Americans are used to seeing in the movies — on America.

Obviously, American parties, especially businesses, should not be enabling the Chinese regime to kill Americans. This means they should not be engaging in any transaction that can strengthen any part of China. We should think of all of China as military.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Frightened Left Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 11th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/the-frightened-left/

An impeachment inquiry looms and the shrieks of outrage are beginning.

The Left is now suddenly voicing warnings that those who recently undermined the system could be targeted by their own legacies.

So, for example, now we read why impeachment is suddenly a dangerous gambit.

True, the Founders did not envision impeaching a first-term president the moment he lost his House majority. Nor did they imagine impeaching a president twice. And they certainly did not anticipate trying an ex-president in the Senate as a private citizen.

In modern times, the nation has not rushed to impeach a president without a special counsel investigation to determine whether the chief executive was guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

But thanks to the Democrats, recent impeachments now have destroyed all those guardrails. After all, Trump was impeached the first time on the fumes of an exhaustive but fruitless 22-month, $40 million special counsel investigation—one designed to find him guilty of Russian “collusion” and thus to be removed from office but found no actionable offenses at all.

Instead, dejected Democrats moved immediately for a second try. In September 2019 a few weeks after Trump had announced his 2020 reelection bid, the Democratic House began to impeach the president on the new grounds that he had talked to the President Zelensky of Ukraine and said he might delay offensive arms shipments—unless the Ukrainians could demonstrate that they had ended corruption and, in particular, were no longer influenced by the Biden family quid pro quo shakedowns.