ISRAEL Comments turned off

How Now, Brown Cow: Israel’s Bovine Spies In the annals of animal absurdity, the Palestinians are determined to leave their mark. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on January 10th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-now-brown-cow-israels-bovine-spies/

In the annals of animal absurdity, the Palestinians are determined to leave their mark. Recently they were alarmed that Israel was setting loose wild boars that had somehow been trained to uproot Palestinian crops but leave Israeli crops alone. Never mind that the increase in the wild boar population is even worse in Israel proper than in the West Bank, the result of more garbage being available because of the residential spread. And now they have charged that Israeli cows have been spying on Palestinian villagers. A preliminary Jihad Watch report is here, and more on this craziness can be found here: “Palestinians accuse Israel of training spy cows – report,” Jerusalem Post, January 6, 2023:

A Palestinian villager encountered Israeli cattle and fabricated a story about how Israel has been secretly training the cattle to spy on Palestinians, according to Palestinian Media Watch, citing the official Palestinian Authority daily news outlet Al-Hayat Al-Jadida.

These are recruited and trained cattle, Palestinian villager Rushd Morrar reportedly told the daily. “On the neck of each cow, they hang a medallion with an eavesdropping and recording device on it and sometimes cameras, in order to monitor every detail in Khirbet Yanun large and small.”

On the neck of each cow, they hang a medallion with an eavesdropping and recording device on it and sometimes cameras, in order to monitor every detail in Khirbet Yanun large and small.”

He also reportedly claimed that “the settlers release herds of wild boars” as a way to destroy any and all Palestinian crops. “The settlers’ crimes are diversifying and becoming sophisticated and the means they employ in their war are unlimited,” he alleged. “Starting with direct acts of murder and ending with incidents of car ramming on the roads; starting with burning agricultural crops, uprooting trees and stripping lands and ending with releasing boars towards the farmer’s lands.”

The only “acts of murder” involving “settlers” are those committed by Palestinian terrorists; the settlers are victims, not perpetrators, of murder. Not a single car-ramming incident has been caused by Israelis; they have been the victims of such attacks, which take place especially at checkpoints, where Palestinian drivers suddenly swerve to hit the IDF soldiers on duty.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Soviet Union: A Primer Michael Malice’s new book is the perfect gift for anyone who thinks Communism is cool. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on January 10th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-soviet-union-a-primer/

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by the Soviet Union. For most of my life, it was the other superpower, the villain to our hero, the anti-matter to our matter. We had freedom and prosperity; they had neither. It loomed large in our imaginations but was, as Churchill famously put it, a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” We held their lives in our hands, and they held ours in theirs. During my teens, I read everything about the place that I could get my hands on.

In 1976, paperback editions were issued of both Russia: The People and the Power by Robert G. Kaiser, who’d been the Washington Post’s correspondent in Moscow, and The Russians by Hedrick Smith, who’d held the same position at the New York Times. I read both books avidly. At around the same time, probably on the 19-cent used-book tables at the legendary Barnes & Noble annex at 5th Avenue and 18th Street, I came across a paperback entitled The Soviet Union: The First Fifty Years, edited by Harrison E. Salisbury. Published in 1967, it contained twenty-odd essays by New York Times staffers on different aspects of contemporary Soviet life and culture.

I still have my copies of these books. I paged through them just now. In all three, what stands out most is the authors’ readiness to normalize life under totalitarianism – to emphasize the good, to minimize the bad, to make Soviet life relatable to Americans by portraying it as something that, just like our own life, has its pluses and minuses. Smith warns in his foreword that readers shouldn’t “misinterpret my criticisms of certain features of the Russian way of life as constituting approval of corresponding aspects of Western society.” Similarly, Kaiser, in his introduction, writes that “when I criticize some aspect of Soviet life, implicitly or explicitly, I hope it is clear that I am not simultaneously trying to endorse the corresponding feature of Western life.” I only just now noticed the striking similarity between those two sentences. Remarkable, no?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Let’s Find Out What The Democrats Have Been Up To

Posted By on January 10th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/10/lets-find-out-what-the-democrats-have-been-up-to/

The 15-round vote to finally elect a speaker of the House was, we were told by the political left, an embarrassment and evidence that the Republicans are untrustworthy. It was in reality our system in action and it produced at least two important outcomes, both of which will cause discomfort for the Democrats and their communications wing known as the mainstream media.

Over the weekend, we learned that in order for Rep. Kevin McCarthy to earn their votes, the 20 holdout GOP lawmakers got a promise from the California moderate that two special investigative panels would be created. One would look into “the origins of the COVID-19 virus,” the other at the “weaponization” of federal law enforcement agencies, such as the Justice Department and FBI, Just The News reported. The panels will be select subcommittees, one in the House Judiciary Committee, the other in the House Oversight Committee.

As important as both of those subcommittees will be, there is great need for more probes. There are decades of Democratic corruption and malfeasance that need to be exposed to the public, untangled and then removed.

Look at the IRS again, this time at the agency’s targeted harassment of the poorest taxpayers who cannot defend themselves from the leviathan, and do it in light of the 87,000 new IRS employees that will be hired through the Democrats’ ​​Inflation Reduction Act passed in August.

Dig not just into the origin of COVID-19 but also the lockdowns, and vaccine and mask mandates. Such egregious violations of liberty should never happen again in this country. But they will, the next time likely in an effort to protect the climate, if the Republicans don’t start making a hard stand against government encroachment, and hold the lockdown-mask-up maniacs accountable.

MEDIA Comments turned off

NPR Promotes Pornography for Kids By Matt Margolis

Posted By on January 9th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/culture/matt-margolis/2023/01/09/npr-promotes-pornography-for-kids-n1659974

Conservatives have been calling for the defunding of National Public Radio (NPR) for years now because of its blatant political bias, but now they have a new reason to deprive the news outlet of its federal funding.

This week, NPR published a misleading and disturbing essay by Maia Kobabe, the author of Gender Queer, a controversial graphic memoir documenting Kobabe’s journey to coming out as “nonbinary.” In addition to being “nonbinary,” Kobabe has nonsensical “preferred pronouns.”

Kobabe laments in her NPR essay that Gender Queer has become the most challenged book in public school libraries. “Several conservative politicians made book banning a major talking point of their campaigns,” she wrote. “There were so many challenges in such quick succession before the end of the year that I literally could not keep track of them all.”

Related: NPR Releases Hardcore Abortion Porn Audio to Savor on Your Morning Commute

By Kobabe’s telling, the book is challenged because of discrimination. “I was obviously already aware that queer, trans, and nonbinary narratives often receive pushback.” But this is incredibly misleading. In fact, Gender Queer is most often challenged because it contains graphic depictions of minors participating in sex acts — a detail Kobabe conveniently omits in her essay.

She was, however, questioned about the graphic nature of some of the illustrations in an interview with NPR. “Let me ask you this. Some of the criticism is about how explicit the book is. There are some graphic panels where you’re describing some of your sexual encounters. Did you consider doing less graphic versions of those scenes?” NPR’s Claire Murashima asked.

“You know, I really didn’t,” Kobabe said. “I drew as much as I felt like I needed to tell the story that I was trying to tell and get the points across that I was trying to make.”

Kobabe insists that her book could have been even more explicit. Opponents of the book say it is pornographic — and having seen screenshots of the illustrations, I can say this characterization is correct — which means it has no business in public libraries or school libraries. That NPR is promoting this book and giving a platform to the author, who is clearly a groomer, is disturbing. So, yes, NPR is promoting pornography aimed at grooming young children.

Last year, NPR also broadcasted a segment about “queer” sex education, which, among other things, denounced the “terrible lie” that STDs make one “dirty.”

It’s long overdue for NPR to lose its federal funding. Promoting pornography that targets kids should be the last straw.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Wokeism Goes Global: Biden’s Foreign Policy John O’Sullivan

Posted By on January 9th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/wokeism-goes-global-bidens-foreign-policy/

There are broadly two ways of conducting a foreign policy. The first is responding intelligently to events abroad as they occur, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brexit, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or as Harold Macmillan once said: “Events, dear boy, events.”

The second way, sometimes called a Grand Strategy, prescribes the general direction in which you want your country to go and the policies needed to get there. Thus, Brexit was intended to transform Britain from “a country at the heart of Europe” (John Major’s formulation) into Global Britain.

But since the policies needed to achieve Global Britain were never pursued or even devised because they were opposed by people in government and major British institutions, that grand strategy was stillborn. A successful grand strategy requires the government to know roughly how it wants each crisis to turn out without having to work out its responses from scratch.

President Biden has so far had a mixed record on responding to events: he did badly in Afghanistan but well over Ukraine, where his policy has rallied the Western alliance and frustrated Putin’s Russia. What explains his success in one case and failure in the other?

The answer lies in part in the unusual reality that US progressive Left—which currently dominates the Biden administration—sees America as a racist, sexist, homophobic and white supremacist country. That makes it ambivalent about America’s national interest. Even if it sees the necessity for some purposeful action in a crisis, it can’t want the outcome to benefit the US. At the very least that mindset must weaken and confuse the US even when it follows a prudent course.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The New McCarthyism Expect the changes to the people’s business-as-usual to be mostly cosmetic under Kevin McCarthy’s reign as speaker of the House. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on January 9th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/07/the-new-mccarthyism/

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” That seems to be Kevin McCarthy’s favorite mantra. Friday night, on the 15th vote for speaker of the House, he finally got his moist little palm around Nancy Pelosi’s still-warm gavel. Welcome to the new Republican-ish speaker of the House!

The contest was brutal, occasionally absurd, and the occasion of hilarity and consternation among the punditocracy on both the Right and the Left. The Left clucked their tongues about the “chaos” on view on the other side of the aisle. Some among the GOP agreed and wondered why “their side” could not govern as effectively as the Democrats. Would Nancy Pelosi have put up with this level of dissension among the Democratic rank and file? Others said, no, no, the 20 freedom caucus members (and others) holding up the inevitable were just giving the world a reality show, live-action look at how “democracy” (if not quite Our Democracy™) works and should work.

I am of two minds about that. My own take is that McCarthy is an unreliable ally for those on the Right. He was only too happy to shovel billions of your and your children’s money to Ukraine while doing little to secure our southern border. McCarthy is from California, so, naturally, he likes to spend money. He even got behind such improvident and mendacious schemes as raiding Medicare to pay for the U.S. Postal Service. He was happy to fund the January 6 kangaroo court, grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, and support mandates for the useless—indeed, dangerous—COVID vaccine for the military. In plain terms, his voting record is only intermittently conservative.

Kevin McCarthy, in short, is a swamp creature masquerading as a swamp critic. The Swamp loves its own, and so it was no surprise that McCarthy eventually prevailed, just barely. He did so at considerable cost to the power of the speaker’s office but also considerable benefit to people who care about accountability.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

How DEI Is Supplanting Truth as the Mission of American Universities An obsession with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion threatens students, professors, and the very credibility of higher education in the U.S. By John Sailer

Posted By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/how-dei-is-supplanting-truth-as-the

One of the things The Free Press has been doing since its inception is documenting and exposing how many of our most important institutions—medicine, the media, the law—are increasingly being captured by an ideology that is hollowing out their core functions.

Today, John Sailer, a fellow at the National Association of Scholars, tells the story of how that’s happening at American universities across the country.

You don’t have to have ever stepped foot on a college campus to care about the revelations in today’s piece. Because as we’ve seen again and again, what happens on campus doesn’t stay there. It’s just a preview of what’s coming for the rest of us. — BW

In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a longtime accounting lecturer at UCLA, made the news after a student emailed him asking him to grade black students more leniently in the wake of the “unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.”

Klein’s response was blunt. It stated in part:

Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota. Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only? Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black-half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? 

He went on:

Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the “color of their skin.” Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?

Thanks, G. Klein

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Where are the Intellectually Curious Doctors? By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.

Posted By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/where_are_the_intellectually_curious_doctors.html

Good medicine is asking questions and forming a differential diagnosis, ruling out possibilities based on science, not on politics.

Medicine, like most sciences, entails thinking and hypothesis creation to explain the myriad complexities of the healthy and diseased human body.

Hypotheses are tested and refined, with new information or insights nudging or abruptly shifting current knowledge in a new direction.

For examples, bloodletting with leeches is no longer standard medical practice for most ailments as it was up until the late 19th century. More recently, Vioxx was considered a safer painkiller, until it was found to cause heart attacks and strokes, similar to another “safe and effective” product introduced about two years ago. Oxycontin was marketed as a nonaddictive pain killer until it devasted hundreds of thousands of lives and families and was shown to be otherwise.

YouTube screen grab

Physicians, upon medical school graduation, recite the Hippocratic Oath. Quoting from the revised version (simply because the language is easier to understand), physicians swear, “I will not be ashamed to say, ‘I know not’” and “Above all, I must not play at God.”

Saying “I don’t know” is what drives the pursuit of new or alternate hypotheses. Physicians of a few hundred years ago saw their bloodletting patients die and didn’t know why, so they devised better treatments by asking questions and not playing God.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Uniparty Sure Hates Democracy! By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/

Watching the political Establishment freak out over twenty Republican members of Congress voting their own consciences in the election for House speaker has been hilarious.  Karl Rove, Dan Crenshaw, Sean Hannity, and just about anyone else whose sinecure and preeminence depend upon religious devotion to Washington’s status quo sounded like little Greta Thunberg whining, “How dare they!”  Oh, my goodness, some congressional representatives took it upon themselves to vote as they believe their district constituents would desire and not as the Uniparty nobles who insist on ruling the nation from their petty thrones demand.  Whatever shall we do if this lowly democratic spirit sweeps the land?

This is what’s wrong with the People’s House, where it is still occasionally possible to elect an iconoclast unbeholden to the Leviathan’s palace guard despite mail-in ballot fraud and outside money operations distorting local races: sometimes a freethinking heretic shows up in the nation’s capital with the beastly notion that a vote is more than ornamental pageantry garnishing a foregone conclusion.  Weren’t these Republican holdouts properly instructed that Kevin McCarthy is the Uniparty’s man?  An empty vessel of mediocre intellect and flaccid beliefs, Kevin is surely the only Republican who can lead the House!  We must bring McCarthyism back to Washington, or D.C. will become home to the right-wing nuts!

What a spectacle this whole affair has been.  Pretend President Biden and Senate Republicans agree: forcing the world to watch American legislators partake in repeated democratic votes without devolving into bloodshed (despite the anger management issues of Mike Rogers) is so embarrassing.  It is much more elegant when ballots can be printed, signatures forged, and elections certified according to the wishes of the ruling elites.  The appearance of democracy in the absence of it is ideal.  The practice of actual democracy would bring the whole government’s house of cards crashing down!

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The European Union’s War on Israel by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19293/european-union-war-israel

A confidential leaked document, composed by the EU mission in east Jerusalem, shows that the Europeans are actively working with, and on behalf of, the Palestinian Authority to take over Area C of the West Bank — although the area was clearly agreed on, by both Israel and the Palestinians, until further negotiations, to be under Israeli control.

“[T]he EU… insists that its positions are based on meticulous compliance with international law, EU law and charter, and also the Oslo Accord. This claim is surely defied by the leaked document in which we can see an activist EU striving to help the Palestinians take over Area C, the very area that is designated to Israel’s control per the Oslo Accord which the EU claims to uphold.” — Jenny Aharon, Jerusalem Post, December 28, 2022.

Aharon noted that while the EU was insisting that Israel abide by the Oslo Accords and that a Palestinian state should be established within the framework of a comprehensive peace agreement, the EU, at the same time, is trying to strip Israel of its rights according to that same agreement, which gave Israel responsibility over security, public order and all issues related to territory, including planning and zoning, in Area C.

The EU, in short, is encouraging the Palestinians not to return to the negotiating table with Israel. Instead, the EU is telling the Palestinians that the EU will help them steal land as an alternative to reaching a peaceful settlement with Israel through negotiations.

“The EU’s reported clandestine activity to undermine Israeli control in Area C and to advance illegal Palestinian development in those areas constitutes a clear and present threat to the security of the State of Israel, and is an act of blatant hostility and aggression.” — Letter from the Israel Defense and Security Forum, consisting of 16,000 former military, security and police officers; i24 News, December 21, 2022.

“As this document confirms, Europe’s use of labels like support for ‘civil society’ and ‘human rights’ were designed to hide the millions of euros given every year to selected allied NGOs, particularly in Area C, to create facts on the ground.” — Dr. Gerald Steinberg, quoted by JNS, January 5, 2023.

These revelations show that no one should be surprised when the E.U. condemns the new government for trying to save land in Yehuda and Shomron [the West Bank] — they [the EU and Palestinians] are the ones responsible for stealing it. – Dr. Eugene Kontorovich, quoted by JNS, January 5, 2023.

In 2022, illegal Palestinian construction in Area C increased by 80%. The report documents 5,535 new illegal structures built in 2022, compared to 3,076 structures in the same period in 2021. — Regavim, October 11, 2022.

The EU support for the Palestinian efforts to take over Area C is actually undermining the prospects of reaching a peaceful settlement between the Palestinians and Israel. The EU has not only damaged any chance for a negotiated settlement, but has duplicitously endorsed the Palestinians’ ongoing attempt to impose a solution on Israel rather than — as both parties involved agreed — to reach one through negotiations.

It is time to tell the EU to mind its own business and stop its anti-democratic meddling in other countries’ affairs.