EDUCATION Comments turned off

Have You Looked Inside Any of These Books? Page through a few of the titles removed from Florida schools—some outright pornographic—and ask yourself if kids should be reading them.Dave Seminara

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/have-you-looked-inside-any-of-these-books

President Joe Biden and the Democrats think that they’ve found a potent campaign issue in “book banning.” Indeed, a recent piece in Politico asserts that the Biden campaign has “made the issue of book banning a surprisingly central element of his campaign’s opening salvos.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been the most prominent Republican leader supporting the removal of inappropriate books from schools. I live in Florida, and I checked out five of these “banned” books to see why they were removed from school libraries.

All five books were easy to find at my local library. They are categorized as “young adult,” i.e., titles intended for children ages 12 to 18, according to the American Library Association. After reviewing them, I’m convinced that the overwhelming majority of the public wouldn’t find their removal controversial, if they knew what was contained in these provocative, and in some cases pornographic, titles.

Politico quotes a Democratic pollster who claimed that “book banning tests off the charts,” with Americans overwhelmingly opposing it. “They associate it with really authoritarian regimes, Nazi Germany,” said Celinda Lake. This is likely because the media and Democrats have misled the public in several ways. First, in using the word “ban,” they’ve created the impression that books removed from schools are also being removed from public libraries and bookstores. They’re not.

Second, prominent figures on the left have not told the truth about the content of the “banned” books and which ones have been removed from schools. For example, many progressives promoted a false claim that Duval County, Florida banned books about Robert Clemente, Hank Aaron, and Rosa Parks. Duval County schools wrote a post on February 17 correcting the misinformation, but that didn’t stop Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from blaming the GOP for allegedly prohibiting a book about Parks in Duval County more than a month later in a speech on the floor of Congress. “The Life of Rosa Parks— this apparently is too woke for the Republican Party,” she said.

The first book I looked at, This Book is Gay, written by transgender author Juno Dawson, is marketed as a “bestselling exploration of sexuality and gender for young adults.” Dawson writes in one chapter that “perhaps the most important skill you will master as a gay or bi man is the timeless classic, the handjob.” She continues, “Something they don’t teach you in school, is that in order to be able to cum at all, you or your partner may need to finish off with a handy.” The book also offers graphic descriptions of oral and anal sex, among other adult topics. “Being on bottom makes a dude no less manly than his top partner,” Dawson writes of anal sex. “He is literally taking it like a man.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Past Week Proves It — Democrats Are The Brainless Party

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/19/the-past-week-proves-it-democrats-are-the-brainless-party/

If Republicans are the stupid party – and you will get no argument from us here about that – perhaps the correct label for today’s Democratic party is “brainless.” Witness what it did in just the past few days:

President Joe Biden showed up at the pro-abortion EMILY’s List gala, where he said “I also want to thank my buddy Kamala who I work for up in the White House for leading on this issue.”

This is not the first time Biden has mistaken Harris as president. The fact that she could be president is worse, since there are few in public office as dimwitted as she. Recently, Harris offered this pearl of wisdom at an event honoring National Small Business Week: “Some of our younger small business owners actually self-identify as entrepreneurs. They’re small business owners also.”

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, the darling of the left, had this to say to a witness during a Senate Banking Committee hearing this week:

“Is it a staggering responsive … responsibility … that the the head of a bank could literally could literally crash our economy. Astonishing. That’s like if you have, I mean like … and, and they also realize is that-that-that now they have, it’s in the guaranteed a guaranteed way to be saved, by again by no matter no matter how, you know. So, it’s, it’s, you know, isn’t it appropriate that the those kinds of this kind of control should be more stricter to prevent this kind of thing from going? Or should we just go on and start bailing and sailing whoever bank, regardless of how however there’s their conduct is?”

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Marvel, and the ‘Scandal,’ of Jerusalem Anti-Semitism is rooted in envy of the Jewish people’s eternal endurance. By Meir Soloveichik

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-marvel-and-the-scandal-of-jerusalem-day-anti-semitism-missiles-gaza-b01f4eda?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Thousands of religious Israelis are celebrating Jerusalem Day, which began Thursday at sundown. On Friday morning at the Western Wall, they will recite psalms of thanksgiving commemorating the moment in the Six Day War of 1967 that Israeli soldiers conquered the ancient city of Jerusalem, making it the heart of Israel’s capital. Those assembled won’t merely mark a military achievement 56 years ago. Their minds will travel back to the earliest origins of the sacred city, to its conquest by King David and to the empires that have destroyed it, only to have it rise again from the ashes. They will ponder how Jewish Jerusalem reflects the miracle of Jewish existence: one that allows us to understand why, for better or worse, the world’s attention remains riveted on Israel.

No city in the world has a history like Jerusalem, and no other people has a relationship to a location like the Jews do to it. To study Jerusalem is to study the story of the world: from Egyptian pharaohs to Mesopotamian kings, from Greek and Roman emperors to kaisers and sultans. They, and others, sought to end Jewish presence in the ancient city permanently. Yet Jerusalem is a Jewish city restored, while other ancient cities of biblical past—Babel, Pi-Rameses, Nineveh—are in ruin.

As Norman Podhoretz once put it, Jerusalem reflects “the scandal of Jewish particularity”: The uniqueness of one city in world history testifies to the enduring nature of one people on this earth. Established as Israel’s capital when now-extinct empires bestrode the world, it was toward Jerusalem that the Jews prayed in exile, binding themselves to it as empire after empire became the Ozymandias of its age. Jews celebrate the anniversary of the Jewish return to ancient Jerusalem not only because it is central to their spiritual lives but also because it is a reminder of God’s providence in the history of their people and of the world.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The EPA Threatens to Turn Out the Lights Its proposed power-plant emission rule would destabilize the energy grid and end reliable electricity. By William S. Scherman

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-epa-threatens-to-turn-out-the-lights-electricity-generation-energy-grid-natural-gas-coal-co2-a5ca4d77?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Imagine flipping a light switch and not knowing if the lights will come on. Normally unthinkable. But the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed power-plant rules would destabilize the energy grid, resulting in less-reliable electric service.

The EPA’s aggressive standards require all coal-fired power plants to use a new and still-tricky technology called carbon capture and storage, or CCS, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 90% by 2035, or begin co-firing with natural gas. In addition, natural-gas-fired plants must capture 90% of emissions by 2035 using CCS or switch almost entirely to hydrogen by 2038. The only other option for both: shut down.

These nascent technologies simply won’t get the job done in the next few years. CCS is used at only one commercial power plant in North America. The only U.S. coal plant to implement CCS successfully closed in 2020 for economic reasons.

CCS holds great promise, but there are significant operational and economic hurdles to its widespread deployment. The Biden administration recently acknowledged that building and using CCS faces many of the same permitting and regulatory problems plaguing other energy infrastructure

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: THE LEFT DESTROYS EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/institutions-breaking-bad/

As a general rule, the Left eventually destroys everything it touches.

It sees all institutions as ideological fodder, to be warped and twisted, as a necessary means to serve higher political ends. Think of an institution that started out in theory as at least neutral, apolitical, and benign, and then ponder how utterly corrupt it has become.

Public Broadcasting. The public was delighted over a half-century ago with the novel idea that it could enjoy drama, documentaries, and in-depth news—without soap and car commercials (as if something can ever be “free” without consequences). Who did not enjoy the importation of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation or the multi-episode version of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius?

Remember the first decade of the MacNeil/Lehrer Report? It was a mostly honest liberal version of the news, delivered by two professional journalists, both superior to a Dan Rather or Peter Jennings.

But by the new millennium, the non-political programming began to become overtly ideological. “Nature” documentaries began plugging manmade, disastrous “global warming” to “climate change” to “climate chaos” themes. The PBS NewsHour house “conservatives” were more liberal than most Democrats of the age.

The quirky Garrison Keillor’s liberal, but interesting radio show, A Prairie Home Companion was finally Trotskyized by #MeToo, along with the blotted-out name of Keillor himself.

Many originally thought that NPR might resemble a more lavishly funded form of a mostly nonpartisan C-SPAN, as envisioned, say, by the talented, fair-minded, and astute Brian Lamb of Booknotes. But listen to NPR now and one would conclude that transgenderism is the new normal, that about four people voted for Donald Trump, that BLM/Antifa are similar to the Elks or Rotary, and the dossier is still “Russian collusion,” and Hunter’s laptop remains “disinformation.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Dithering Biden is Seriously Harming Ukraine’s Victory Prospects by Con Coughlin

Posted By on May 18th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19646/biden-harming-ukraine-victory-prospects

While U.S. President Joe Biden has constantly pledged his support for Kyiv, his rhetoric has invariably failed to result in providing the Ukrainians with the military support they require. Even when, as happened earlier this year, the White House reluctantly agreed to provide Ukraine with Abrams tanks – a move that was only approved after Washington came under intense pressure from allies such as Poland – the slow delivery timetable has made Ukrainian commanders despair that the equipment will ever actually arrive.

As for the promised Abrams tanks, U.S. officials readily admit that the Abrams are months away from arriving as the Pentagon looks at its stocks to see what it can send.

In a recent interview with Foreign Policy magazine, Sasha Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker, confirmed the U.S. military had delivered far less than what Valeriy Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top general, had asked for from the Pentagon. U.S. military aid is only arriving piecemeal as the Biden administration warns it is nearing the end of its ability to provide weapons that can be pulled off of the Pentagon’s shelves to give to the Ukrainians.

Ustinova said that Ukraine hoped to begin the offensive in April, but the lack of weapons has pushed the launch date back indefinitely.

Certainly, any delay in the Ukrainians launching their offensive will only help to convince the Kremlin that, despite all the setbacks it has suffered over the course of the past year, it may still end up winning the war.

The Biden administration’s constant dithering over supplying weapons to Ukraine is proving to be a decisive factor in the Ukrainian military’s decision to delay its long-awaited spring counter-offensive against Russian forces.

Since the end of last year, when the Ukrainians inflicted a series of humiliating defeats against their Russian foes, Kyiv has been warning that it is in urgent need of fresh supplies of military equipment from its Western allies if it is to continue its campaign to liberate Ukrainian territory from Russian occupation.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

New York Mayor Eric Adams praises yeshivah learning “We need to be duplicating what you are achieving,” he said.

Posted By on May 18th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/new-york-mayor-eric-adams-praises-yeshivah-learning/?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%2005-17-2023&utm_medium=email

(May 17, 2023 / JNS) New York City Mayor Eric Adams called for public schools in the five boroughs to learn from the success of some of their non-public counterparts.

Adams said at the annual 2023 Teach NYS dinner on May 10 that “instead of us focusing on how we can duplicate the success of improving our children, we attack the yeshivahs that are providing a quality education that is embracing our children.” Teach NYS is partnered with the Orthodox Union.

The mayor also noted that yeshivahs “have turned around the question mark of ‘how are our children.’ You are making an exclamation point that’s saying, ‘Our children are fine.’ ”

Referencing the recent criticisms and investigations into New York’s Jewish schools, Adams said that “people are asking questions … about what is happening in our yeshivahs across the city and state, while at the same time, 65% of black and brown children never reach proficiency in the public-school system, but we’re asking, ‘What are you doing in your schools?’ ”

He urged: “Let’s reach across our ethnic, cultural and religious philosophies … and appreciate the religious philosophies that are part of the educational opportunity.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden, the Habitual Racialist Demagogue His racist commentary and demagoguery is an old story, deployed as needed and in the direction most likely to suit the moment. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 18th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/17/joe-biden-the-habitual-racialist-demagogue/

The most recent liberal ABC News/Washington Post poll showed Joe Biden’s approval rating at 36 percent—the lowest in history for a president at this point in his first term.

Biden’s low popularity is no mystery. 

He inherited energy independence, affordable gas prices, historically low interest rates, low inflation, calm overseas, a low crime rate, and a largely closed border with legal-only immigration. 

And then Biden destroyed that inheritance. 

He has begged illiberal foreign governments to pump oil he refuses to drill domestically. 

He spiked inflation at the highest rate in over 40 years. 

Home interest rates have skyrocketed from less than 3 percent to 7 percent. 

He nearly doubled the price of gasoline. 

His hare-brained retreat from Afghanistan marked the greatest humiliation of the American military in the last half-century. 

Kabul is now selling billions of dollars’ worth of abandoned American equipment to terrorists and anti-American regimes.

After that fiasco, Biden foolhardily played down a possible “minor” Russia invasion of Ukraine. He implored Russia to exempt some American institutions from its cyber-attack target list. 

No wonder an empowered Putin went into Ukraine. 

Biden’s family is corrupt from top to bottom. 

Its influence peddling schemes increasingly are targets of congressional investigations. Biden himself is explicitly mentioned by his son Hunter as the recipient of a 10 percent commission on monies the family syndicate leveraged from foreign interests. 

Biden promised “unity.” Instead, he habitually smears half the country as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” extremists. 

Biden is cognitively challenged and often incoherent. And he is now losing support in the polls from African Americans, once his most loyal constituency.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The ‘Nakba’ and How it Grew A narrative of deceit dating back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on May 18th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-nakba-and-how-it-grew/

Along with “apartheid” used as an adjective – as in “Israel is an apartheid state” – haters of Israel have taken to referring to the “Nakba,” the Arabic word for “catastrophe.” The “Nakba” is the word the Arabs now use to describe the failure in the 1948 war of five Arab armies to destroy the Jews of Israel, by expelling or killing every last one. That, of course, is not how the Arabs put it to the Western world: they claim the “Nakba” refers to the defeat of the Arabs who had intervened only to help their Palestinian brothers hold onto the land that had been theirs for centuries, land that the “Zionist entity” was stealing for itself. More on the history of the “Nakba” can be found here: “The Nakba Narrative: A History of Deception,” by Chaim Lax, Honest Reporting, May 8, 2023:

“The Nakba” is repeatedly invoked in the media, academic literature, politics, and popular culture surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its appearance is so ubiquitous at this point, that it seems like it has always been part of the general lexicon.

However, that is not the case.

Here, we’ll look at the significance of the term “Nakba,” the history of the term from 1948 until the present, how this Arabic term gained popularity around the world, and the new adoption of the term to refer to anti-Jewish persecution by the Arab and Muslim worlds.

In Arabic, the term “al-Nakba” means “the catastrophe.” In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the catastrophe that the “Nakba” is referring to is the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, and the disintegration of Palestinian Arab life in Israel.

For those who adopt this narrative, the Zionist movement and Israel are solely responsible for the displacement of Palestinian Arabs between 1947 and 1949, while the Arabs themselves are the exclusive victims of the conflict.

By failing to take into account the Palestinian and Arab refusal to accept a two-state solution in 1947 and the subsequent military attempt to destroy the Jewish state, the Nakba narrative advances the claim of perpetual Palestinian victimhood and serves as a historical basis for the Palestinian “right of return.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Daniel Cameron Runs Away With Kentucky GOP Gubernatorial Primary By Chris Queen

Posted By on May 18th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/chris-queen/2023/05/17/daniel-cameron-runs-away-with-kentucky-gop-gubernatorial-primary-n1696091

If the Republican Party is full of racists and white supremacists, as some Democrats are fond of saying, somebody may want to tell Daniel Cameron. On Tuesday night, Cameron, the state’s current attorney general, ran away with the Republican primary for governor, emerging triumphant from a crowded field.

Cameron just so happens to be black, which goes to prove Democrats wrong again. He’s also the state’s first black gubernatorial nominee from either party.

The attorney general won with 48% of the vote, which means that, since Kentucky’s primary system awards the win to the candidate who gets the most votes with or without a majority, Cameron proceeds to the general election without a runoff.

The Associated Press reports that Cameron pointed out in his victory speech how historic his win is, stating that his campaign goal is to “embody the promise of America, that if you work hard and if you stand on principle, anything is possible.”

Cameron’s win was so decisive that counting the votes was quick and easy, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.