WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

From Oligarchs to Plutocrats by Amir Taheri

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20003/oligarchs-plutocrats

The disastrous consequences of oligarchs meddling in politics are too well known to need more attention here. But what about the plutocrats’ record? The question merits attention, because right now two American plutocrats are engaged in erratic attempts at solving two of the hottest international problems. Elon Musk, the owner of X (Twitter), Tesla and SpaceX, and reputed to be the richest on the man planet, says he has a plan to end the Russian war in Ukraine. For his part, George Soros, now operating through his son Alexander, is busy campaigning for a deal between Tehran and Washington to give President Joe Biden’s forthcoming election campaign the boost it badly needs.

George Soros has been engaged in his grand plan for bringing the Islamic Republic of Iran into the fold for almost three decades.

The scheme reached the peak of its success when the so-called “New York Boys” seized control of the executive branch of government in Tehran under President Hassan Rouhani, a British-educated junior cleric dreaming of leading the Islamic Republic into the “modern world”.

However, as might have been expected, the Soros scenario ultimately failed because “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has bigger dreams for the Islamic Republic. Khamenei believes that the West is heading south to decline while China, Russia and Iran have emerged as leaders for a “New World Order”. Now, however, we know that Khamenei’s leadership troika exists only in his fantasies. China and Russia treat Iran as an untouchable to be kept at arm’s length.

Will the plutocrat’s peace scenario work? I doubt it. Being anti-American and anti-Israel form the Iranian regime’s core identity.

In the 1920s, the American plutocrat Armand Hammer orchestrated a similar scenario with the newly-born Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin. He persuaded Washington to give the Bolsheviks a chance to learn the beauty of getting rich through capitalism and trade. Hammer won the argument and Lenin won the civil war that without the “Great Satan ” pumping money into his war machine, he would have lost.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Berenson: ‘No question’ gov’t policy was to encourage vax ‘by every means short of force’ By AG Staff

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/30/berenson-no-question-govt-policy-was-to-encourage-vax-by-every-means-short-of-force/

Alex Berenson criticized recent attempts by the Left to make us forget about the vaccine mandates enacted just two years ago.

“We were all around for it,” Berenson told host Dan Proft on the “Counterculture” podcast. “It was not fifty years ago, it was two falls ago.”

“There was tremendous pressure to get vaccinated at tremendous societal cost or lose your job or potentially be excluded from shopping, as happened in some places, or being at university,” Berenson said. “There was no question that the government policy was by every means short of force, to encourage vaccination.”

Berenson is a former NY Times journalist and author of “Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives.”

He and Proft discussed “Covid 1.5” and the recent return of mask mandates and “vaccine” pressure.

This full interview is available on Rumble, YouTube, and Spotify.

Proft launched “Counterculture” — American Greatness’ newest podcast — earlier this month. He also is the co-host of “Chicago’s Morning Answer” weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. on AM 560 Chicago. A former Republican candidate for Illinois Governor, Proft attended Northwestern University and received his J.D. from Loyola University-Chicago.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The American status quo as we edge from summer to fall By Molly Slag

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/the_american_status_quo_as_we_edge_from_summer_to_fall.html

As we segue from the Month of the Autumn Leaf into the Month of the Pumpkin, let us contemplate a brief sketch of the status quo we face, in national defense, internationally, and domestically. And if some of these strike you as far-fetched, remember that, a mere decade ago, all of them would have struck you as far-fetched.

(1) National defense:

(a) We are at war with Russia, using Ukraine as our proxy.

(b) We are at war with China, although it has not yet become kinetic.

(c) China is preparing to invade Taiwan.

(d) China and Russia both have hypersonic missiles. We do not:

These weapons can attack with extreme speed, be launched from great distances, and evade most air defenses. They can carry conventional explosives or nuclear warheads. These weapons combine speed with the ability to fly at low altitudes and maneuver in flight, making them more difficult to spot by radar or satellite. That makes them almost impossible to intercept with current anti-missile systems. In a battle in the South China Sea, Beijing could use hypersonic missiles to more than double its reach, leaving U.S. ships in the region nearly defenseless, and could even strike Guam, home to thousands of U.S. troops and key military installations.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Joel Zinberg Equity vs. Evidence Are new draft recommendations on breast-cancer screening the result of DEI-based political pressure?

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2Fbreast-cancer-screening-DEI-based-political-pressure.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—a volunteer panel of national experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine that makes recommendations for clinical preventive services such as screenings, counseling services, or medications—has generally been considered an honest broker, willing to buck political and popular pressures to give advice consistent with the available evidence. New USPSTF draft recommendations on breast-cancer screening suggest that this may have changed.

When the USPSTF last updated its breast-cancer screening recommendations about eight years ago, it found that, for women under 50 with an average risk of cancer, the harms of screening outweighed the benefits. It recommended routine screening for women 50 or older and advised younger women to consult with their physicians to discuss whether their history and individual risk factors warrant screening.

This recommendation echoed guidelines used around the world. The U.K, France, Denmark, and Germany, for example, screen women 50 and older, but there is no organized screening of women in their forties. Switzerland has no screening program for women of any age.

The USPSTF recently issued a draft recommendation lowering the starting age for mammography screening from 50 to 40 years. This will affect approximately 20 million additional women. It is not clear what prompted the change.

The USPSTF acknowledged that no new randomized trials of screening mammography for women in their forties have been conducted since the previous recommendation was made. Nor have new, follow-up findings emerged from the eight previous randomized trials in this age group, all of which found no significant benefit.

Instead, the task force relied on modeling studies to provide information about the benefits and harms of breast-cancer screening in different age groups. As with any model, the results depend on the assumptions made. The model assumed that screening mammography reduces breast-cancer mortality by 25 percent and concluded that lowering the starting age from 50 to 40 would result in 1.3 fewer deaths over a lifetime for every 1,000 women screened.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s ‘democracy’ protesters destroy their own platform The Tel Aviv mob attack on Yom Kippur has far wider resonance Melanie Phillips

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/israels-democracy-protesters-destroy?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The shocking scenes in Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur not only destroyed the principal claim of Israel’s nine months-old protest movement against the government. They also illuminated a fundamental and disturbing fault-line in the wider Jewish world and the west.

Those who came to pray together in Tel Aviv’s public spaces on the holiest day of the year were shouted at, abused, reduced to tears and forced to disband their prayer services.

This repellent spectacle, on Yom Kippur of all days, was redolent of the forcible attempts to suppress Jewish prayer that have characterised Jew-hatred throughout the ages. Yet sickeningly, the perpetrators were themselves Jews spitting baseless hatred against other Jews.

The immediate cause was that the worshippers had erected a mechitzah, or divider, between men and women. Tel Aviv’s Mayor Ron Huldai had made a ruling forbidding segregated prayers in the city’s public spaces, a ruling that was upheld by the Supreme Court.

The objectors said the Rosh Yehudi movement, which tries to spread Orthodox Judaism in Tel Aviv, deliberately provoked disorder by disobeying Huldai’s ruling.

However, as everyone could see, the mob wasn’t only targeting Rosh Yehudi but also ordinary, religiously observant people who came to pray in those open spaces.

During the Covid emergency, segregated public prayers were regularly held in Tel Aviv and provoked no problem. The flashpoint occurred this week because, for the past nine months, secular people have whipped up hysterical loathing of the haredim and religious-nationalist Jews, whom they accuse of plotting to destroy Israeli democracy and human rights through the government’s judicial reforms.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

“The Second Debate – Where Was Reagan’s Optimism and Humor?” Sydney Williams

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Like most Republicans, I watched Wednesday’s debate hoping for a Reagan-like figure to emerge. The venue was the library of a President who had vision, radiated confidence, optimism, humor, and compassion. Like many, I was disappointed. Haley exhibited confidence and vision but without compassion that endears politicians to voters. DeSantis had the confidence of a governor who has done well but appeared humorless. Scott exuded optimism and compassion, but without vision. 

Like today, in 1980 Americans did not believe in themselves. We were in a funk. A President had been assassinated seventeen years earlier; a second resigned ten years later. The Vietnam War, which bled and divided the country for ten years, ignobly ended in 1975; inflation was rampant, with high interest rates and falling real incomes. Culturally, the country was a mess. The optimism of the post-War years was gone. Early in his presidency, Reagan remarked: “What I’d really like to do is go down as the President who made Americans believe in themselves again.” That he did, and the Country, through three presidents, experienced almost twenty years of economic growth and prosperity.

We are living through another fallow period. The twenty-year War against Islamic Terrorism ended disastrously in Afghanistan two years ago. China is on the rise. Inflation is destroying incomes. Parents are excluded from decisions regarding their school-age children. Borders are non-existent. We are told we are a racist society, that our country was built on the backs of slaves. We are divided into oppressors and victims; and that it is okay, if one is a victim, to rampage through streets and destroy private property. Conservative speakers are not allowed on campuses. Public figures cannot define a woman, yet transwomen are allowed to compete against biological women in sports. In his farewell address to the nation, on January 11, 1989, President Reagan said, “All great change in America begins at the dinner table.” Now, the nuclear family is considered passé by many.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Downfall of Ibram Kendi The left-wing racialist’s research center has collapsed. Christopher Rufo

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-downfall-of-ibram-kendi

During the height of the debate on critical race theory, Ibram X. Kendi, the Boston University professor of “antiracism,” attacked my work on MSNBC and other outlets. In response, I penned an op-ed for the New York Post warning that Kendi was the “false prophet of a dangerous and lucrative faith.”  

Now, a prediction I made—that Kendi’s unpopular ideology and bogus research would fail—has proven true. According to news reports, Kendi accumulated more than $40 million for his Center for Antiracist Research at BU, produced virtually no research, and then laid off nearly half of his employees, who accordingly accused him of mismanaging funds, failing to deliver key projects, and mistreating his team. In the wake of these allegations, Boston University announced an official investigation.

As I explained to John Roberts on Fox News:

This is part of a pattern that we saw in 2020. We saw record donations to groups like Black Lives Matter, to groups like Ibram Kendi’s so-called Anti-Racism Center, and now fast-forward three years and what we have seen is the BLM organization, the leaders looted it and headed to the hills. They decamped to their mansions and left the organization in shambles. And now we have Ibram Kendi’s Antiracism Center, which is the most spectacular academic failure in many years. They hoovered up $40 million and produced almost no research.

This really is at the heart of this movement. It’s empty. It’s nihilistic.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will Hollywood strike back? Writers have been reduced to stoop laborers BY David Mamet

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://unherd.com/2023/09/will-hollywood-strike-back/

In the Fifties, television destroyed radio, many of whose stars were themselves survivors of the death of vaudeville, and persisted through radio and into film: The Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields. And many of the first movie stars had come first from the music halls, such as Chaplin; Will Rogers became a movie star after his pre-eminence in vaudeville.

But the movie stars were contemptuous of the New Form, and hung back until the dam broke. (I recall casting discussions in New York in the Seventies themed: “Do you think he would consider doing a Movie of the Week…?”) Still, television and film rubbed on, misharnessed, until the current amalgamation. In 2013, I wrote and directed an HBO film, Phil Spector. On hearing of it, my young son said: “Dad, you’re doing a Made-For-TV Movie. That’s shameful.”

Now the new technology has, again, upset the applecart. Streaming has forever disrupted the old means of distribution, which, after all, is the determining factor in disseminating information — and, so, in determining content. Industrial production requires and rewards economies of scale and expenditure. The corporation buys in bulk, with neither time nor interest in that which one might call artistic integrity, which a comptroller, looking at numbers alone, could only understand as insubordination. The actually talented — those disposed and able to bring their idiosyncratic vision (art) to manufacturing — are as much of an obstruction as Chinese devotees of Feng Shui would be to the Hyundai production line. (To disrupt a production line is the original meaning of sabotage.)

There is a hopscotch effect in show business — it may be universal, but this is the only racket I know. The entrepreneurs and adventurers jump on the new thing. Some become successful, and the creators, actors, hucksters and thugs may exist in some sort of equilibrium until the tide turns.

With the coming of television, producers searched out the famous, to draw the viewers, but also hired the unknowns to work cheap. Early TV scripts were farmed out, one or several at a time, to individual writers (previously known as “writers”). There was a writers’ room, generally, only in comedy shows. No writers’ rooms were required for horse operas, and Warner Television churned them out on their lot, distinguishable only by their theme-songs. With the success of The Industry, land values increased. The movie lots — belonging to Paramount, Warners, Universal, Fox — cut down or eliminated the backlots where the films were made, turning them into cash. (Century City was the backlot of 20th Century Fox.)

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

F-16s for Ukraine, Just as Soon as Belgium Wakes Up by Drieu Godefridi

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19988/belgian-f16s-ukraine

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, the most advanced Free World circles have been calling for Belgian F-16s to be delivered to Ukraine, and the Ukrainian pilots to be trained as quickly as possible. The fact is that by giving the Russians control of the skies, they are almost automatically guaranteed to keep their troops in the Donbass.

If the overall Western policy is just “not to let Ukraine lose” rather than to defeat an unprovoked attack against a democracy, Russian President Vladimir Putin will be emboldened to continue his aggression, and China will read the weakness as a green light to invade Taiwan… The US cannot afford another display of weakness or surrender. Putin sent his troops to the Ukraine in September of 2021, just a few weeks after the US abandoned Afghanistan. He got the message that “the coast was clear.” Unless there is a clear strategy to defeat Russia, anything short of that will look globally like Afghanistan, the sequel; another example of US fecklessness, and a good reason not to be an ally.

The environmentalists do not want to hear about the delivery of F-16s to Ukraine — first because they are pacifists, in the most ideological, surrendering sense of the word, and second because they know what the European environmental movement owes to Russia. The Russian government has massively financed German environmental foundations, and in addition, the Belgian Energy Minister Tinne Van der Straeten (Groen/Ecolo Party), was a 50% partner in a law firm called BLIXT, one of whose main clients was Gazprom — in other words, the Russian government.

These are just two of many examples of European environmentalists effectively becoming a fifth column in Europe of the Russian Federation….

There is also a technical obstacle: the F-35 fighter jets intended to replace Belgium’s F-16s will be delivered late, and the country cannot do without fighter jets. Its air force is the last sector in which the Belgian military is credible in the eyes of its partners.

According to sources who asked not to be named, the solution Belgium is heading for is the initial delivery of four F-16s to Ukraine, then progressively more when Belgium’s F-16s are replaced by F-35s.

However, a movement has recently emerged within the Belgian military, which considers that the Belgian interest is that on the one hand the Russians do not sweep away the Ukrainians and on the other hand that the Belgians regain the respect of their NATO allies.

Belgium’s reputation with its NATO partners is on the line. There needs to a delivery of at least a limited number of Belgian F-16s to Ukraine, and their Ukrainian pilots trained at once.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Danger to Western Lives Takes Off, Thanks to the Biden Administration by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20000/danger-to-western-lives-takes-off-thanks-to

Even though the current Iranian government is a party to the International Convention against the Taking of Hostages, Tehran has long violated it, as it has other commitments, by taken foreign hostages as pawns to extract economic concessions and achieve geopolitical and financial gains.

We can now expect the ruling mullahs of Iran to attempt to target, detain, capture, arrest, and kidnap more Americans anywhere they can. Collecting hostages is now Big Business. Other hostile governments will most likely be tempted to capture Americans, as well.

Secret attempts by the Biden administration to reach an interim deal with the mullahs have threatened to add not only an estimated $100 billion into the treasury of the Iranian regime’s economy, but also, worse, to catapult an Iranian nuclear menace onto the world.

“This exchange operation is in fact one of the most successful and effective negotiation [efforts] ever to happen to the Islamic Republic of Iran. In essence, we released a few Iranian prisoners in exchange for some prisoners whose sentences were about to end, and, on the other hand, we succeeded in releasing billions of dollars of our blocked resources without committing to anything else.” — Anonymous senior Iranian security source, interview with the Fars news agency, August 12, 2023, reported by MEMRI on September 6, 2023

After Obama transferred this $1.7 billion to the Iranian regime to release five Iranian-American prisoners, the theocratic establishment became more emboldened than ever.

“The Trump administration secured prisoner releases without ransom payments….” — Saeed Ghasseminejad, Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Foxnews.com, September 18, 2023

Increased revenues will also allow the IRGC to crush more easily any domestic protests against the government. Other priorities of Iran’s regime are to “export the revolution,” and military domination. Targeted for this project are Yemen, Syria, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad Latin America, Lebanon and Iraq — and strengthening the regime’s militias and terror groups. America and Israel are presumably being fattened up for eventual extermination.

That is what $6 billion has bought us. And the “Iran Deal” that will enable the Iranian regime to have as many nuclear weapons as it likes, is not even dead.

The Iranian regime has lately been collecting hostages: Topher Richwhite and Bridget Thackwray from New Zealand, detained in July 2022, Johan Floderus, a European diplomat from Sweden detained in April 2022, and Bernard Phelan from France detained in October 2022.

This escalation in hostage-taking of Europeans by Iran’s regime should not come as a surprise: the Belgian government last year proposed and ratified legislation that paved the way to transfer terrorists who have been convicted abroad back to Iran. The so-called treaty between the Belgian government and the Iranian regime was designed to secure the release of Iranian diplomat-terrorist Assadollah Assadi.

Assadi was arrested in 2018 for plotting to bomb a huge rally held outside Paris, organized by an Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Last year, Assadi was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison by a Belgian court for masterminding the terror plot. Had it been successful, it could well have been the worst terrorist incident in modern European history.