ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Fake Crowds, Fake Ads, Real Ridicule: A Week of Failures for Harris-Walz What we are witnessing is the panicked flailing of a campaign that is desperately attempting to recoup its lost initiative. The result is partly embarrassing, partly hilarious. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 13th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/13/fake-crowds-fake-ads-real-ridicule-a-week-of-failures-for-harris-walz/

If I may start with an understatement:  It has not been a good week for team Kamala Harris.  First, there was the scandal of her interview on the CBS program 60 Minutes.  Asked about US influence on Israel, Harris delivered one of her signature, zero-calorie word salads. We know this because the network released a preview of the interview on social media, where it was promptly pounced upon and mocked.  But when the entire interview aired, the interview was edited so that Harris’s original answer was replaced by a brief answer lifted from another part of the interview.

That bit of techno-fraud was instantly pilloried and deposited a lot of unsightly egg on the corporate face of CBS. I have not seen anything resembling an apology or even an acknowledgment from the network.  As of this writing, calls for an unedited transcript of the whole interview to be released have gone unanswered. As the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway wrote, CBS’s refusal is “a huge scandal” that, among other things, “suggests that much of the entire finished product was manipulative and deceitful, and not just the one horrible example that was discovered.”

Bad though the episode is for CBS, it is also humiliating for Harris. As Macbeth noted in another context, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.”  The 60 Minutes débâcle was only the advance guard assaulting team Harris last week. Then there was a disastrous “town hall” meeting in which, again, multiple humiliations were assembled. First, some attentive scribe noticed that Harris was reading her replies off a teleprompter. Remember that was supposed to be an open forum in which Harris could connect with voters personally.  But here she was, repeating scripted replies to pre-formulated questions.

And that was not the worst of it.  A little digging revealed that the audience, too, was scripted.  As one commentator noted, “Kamala Harris’s disastrous Univision town hall featured a ‘fake’ audience. 50% of the attendees were handpicked from across the country and flown to the town hall and were allowed to ask questions. The other 50% of the attendees were hired by an ‘audience-for-hire’ company and weren’t allowed to ask questions. The event was completely stage-directed and fake.”

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Why Therapy Is Broken Eleanor Cummins Everyone is telling one another to “get help,” but few acknowledge that the practice is often flawed.(Published September 26, 2022)

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-therapy-is-broken?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

An hour a week in a shrink’s office is increasingly treated as a prerequisite for a healthy, happy life. There, we imagine, friends learn new coping skills and enemies realize the errors of their ways. Everyone is “healed.” Therapy has been marketed as a panacea for all kinds of issues, from fixing a bad personality to ending racism. Refusing to seek treatment becomes a red flag, while fluency in “therapy-speak” is all but mandatory. Professional help has even infiltrated our leisure hours: Reality TV shows like Couples Therapy, podcasts from This Is Dating to Where Should We Begin?, and “therapy in a box” card games, some actually designed by psychoanalysts, abound.

Unfortunately, as anyone who’s actually tried it can tell you, therapy often sucks.

Anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of people who go to therapy report some benefit—but at least 5 percent of clients get worse as a result of treatment. (For people from marginalized groups, harmful outcomes may be even more common.) The remainder report no clear benefit at all. Plenty of would-be clients go once and, feeling alienated, never return. Others keep trying, even as it becomes clear they aren’t really getting what they need, whatever that is.

But the American mental health care system has hardly acknowledged the existence of bad therapy, let alone taken steps to fix the problem. Instead, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which sent the demand for therapy soaring, the American Psychological Association and other organizations seemed to prioritize the quantity of available appointments over the quality of any resulting therapy. The rise of app-based mental health care, like BetterHelp and Talkspace, has only made this landscape harder to navigate.

The result is that everyone is telling everyone else to go to therapy, but “nobody really creates space to have dialog about, ‘OK, if it doesn’t work, let’s talk about why,’” says psychotherapist Ben Fineman, cohost of the Very Bad Therapy podcast with Carrie Wiita. That’s partly out of fear of uncertainty, which therapists dislike as much as anyone, and partly because reforming mental health care is complicated. But ignoring these shortcomings is only perpetuating the suffering therapy promises to heal.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier-Reality Is Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

CHAPTER 40: The Art of Using Technologies to Alter Human Cognition: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28110/chapter-40-the-art-of-using-technologies-to-alter

CHAPTER 41: Your Brain Is the Battlespace: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28111/chapter-41-your-brain-is-the-battlespace 

CHAPTER 42: Quantum Computing Empowers Technocracy, Transhumanism, and the Managerial Unistate: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28112/chapter-42-quantum-computing-empowers-technocracy

CHAPTER 43: Ideological Subversion, Communitarianism, and the 15-Minute City: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28113/chapter-43-ideological-subversion

CHAPTER 44: The American Reformation: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28114/chapter-44-the-american-reformation

CHAPTER 45: Every Conspiracy Begins with a Theory: https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28115/chapter-45-every-conspiracy-begins-with-a-theory

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Betraying the Free World? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21008/betraying-the-free-world

The only country in the Middle East consistently pressured to make concessions “to avoid escalation” was the victim of October 7, Israel.

The rapacity of Iran’s regime, which apparently feels free to launch attacks on U.S. troops at will — especially after enjoying massive amounts of US generosity — is breathtaking.

The Biden-Harris administration also infused the regime with “closer to $60 billion” — which most likely funded its militias; its terrorist proxy organizations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis; its expansionist agenda as far away as Venezuela, and its oppressive domestic policies, to which, for decade, the U.S. has turned a blind eye. When widespread protests take place in Iran, citizens bravely rise up against the regime, only to be brutally crushed — without so much as a glance from the U.S.

Iran, taking its cue from the Biden-Harris administration’s road-siding of Israel, proceeded, not surprisingly, to escalate its campaign against it. If there are no serious consequences, why stop?

Israel now finds itself fighting for its survival on multiple fronts. Thanks to the seeming lack of support from the Biden administration, Israel alone must fend off Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the UN, much of Europe, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, professionally whipped-up Western university campuses and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The dangerous reality that unfolds when a once-reliable ally is abandoned, is that enemies can become increasingly aggressive so long as no one stops them.

The message being sent is that allies will be left to fend for themselves, and enemies of freedom and democracy can go ahead and demolish them with impunity.

The Free World, once a beacon of security, is left vulnerable, isolated and under siege.

An ally, a true friend, is someone upon whom you can depend in times of crisis, especially when under attack. Throughout history, alliances have been formed on the basis of mutual support and protection. Yet, one could strongly argue that no administration in the history of the United States has left its allies in such a vulnerable position as the Biden-Harris administration.

Iran, no longer content to merely act through its proxies, has taken direct and aggressive action against America’s long-term ally, Israel, by attacking not only Israel but, through its proxies and militias, U.S. troops in the region more than 160 times just since October 2023 — whenever it deems fit. Iran-backed Hamas terrorists murdered 43 Americans in their October 7, 2023 invasion of Israel.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Cold Comfort from Norway Rachael Kohn

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/the-middle-east/cold-comfort-from-norway/
Norway’s pride in its democracy has been tainted by the May recognition of Palestine

Norway, the home of the Oslo Accords and the Nobel Peace Prize, is proud of its democracy. Every May 17, as the country emerges from its long dark winter, the capital is alive with marching bands and colourful parades of young and old dressed in their elaborate national costumes, to mark the day in 1814 when the country’s constitution was passed. It also signalled the end of 434 years of Danish rule, which by all accounts was so benign that most Norwegians did not seek independence. (Even then, Norway was given as a prize to Sweden, which attacked and defeated Denmark for backing Napoleon, but that’s another story that lasted until 1905.) Ten years ago the bicentenary of the 1814 constitution was a huge affair.

Not to let Norway’s political pride fade, in May 2024 an even greater celebration was mounted to commemorate 750 years of the country’s democratic origins. How it jumped from 1814 back to 1274 is a story briefly told on a series of billboards that stand in front of the Parliament (Storting) in Oslo. In this version, the Landslov, Norway’s first nationwide code of law, issued by King Magnus VI between 1274 and 1276, established a centralised authority for the first time over a population of perhaps 500,000, scattered across a land divided by high mountains, deep rivers and long dark winters. Consisting of four regional law books and covering marriage, property and inheritance, as well as the rules of royal succession and Christian laws, the Landslov attempted to exert control over the isolated farms and impoverished hamlets which were still vulnerable to the remnants of Viking overlords whose rule had formally ended in 1066.

How the Landslov is construed as the origin of Norwegian democracy comes down to the notion that everyone was effectively under the same law, which emphasised the qualities of “justice, truth, peace and grace, as opposed to fear, monetary gifts, hostility or alliances”. What is excluded from the narrative erected in front of the Parliament is that the Landslov attributed these virtues to the Christian laws it promulgated, which contained a prologue that emphasised the Christian faith and reflected the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Fourth Lateran Council. The Landslov would be administered through what had been local assemblies that were then turned into courts of law enforcing the new law code.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tal Fortgang Lying by Omission Ta-Nehisi Coates declined to provide critical context about Israel and Palestine in a CBS News interview.

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/lying-by-omission

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent appearance on CBS News has ignited yet another round of controversy. This time, the firestorm surrounded the network’s Tony Dokoupil, who dared to ask Coates challenging, if obvious, questions. Those who treat Coates as a modern-day prophet claimed that the anchor’s behavior crossed the line into insensitivity, and even racism.

What followed was ritual humiliation. CBS subjected Dokoupil to what can only be described as a struggle session, bringing in DEI consultants to “educate” him on the acceptable bounds of discourse and the proper body language to maintain when talking to an exalted minority guest. This is the state of modern journalism: the slightest challenge to the progressive narrative results in swift reeducation efforts.

A review of the substance of the underlying exchange, and the baffling explanation Coates offered in defense of his unfairness toward Israel, illuminates why there has been such a rush to reframe his CBS appearance as a hostile confrontation.

Dokoupil’s first comments and question challenged the broadside against Israel contained in Coates’s new book, The Message. “The content of that section” on Israel, noted Dokoupil, “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” “Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates . . . a very talented, smart guy, leave out so much?” Dokoupil asked. In a book largely about Israel’s security practices and their supposed excesses, the anchor pressed, “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it?” These are crucial questions that Coates must have anticipated receiving from even a friendly interlocutor. Dokoupil offers one more natural follow-up for the author, who cannot find the slightest justification for Israel’s security measures: “Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?”

Coates’s response was puzzling, but revelatory:

I would say the perspective that you just outlined—there is no shortage of that perspective in American media. . . . I am most concerned, always, with those who don’t have a voice, with those who don’t have the ability to talk. I have asked repeatedly, in my interviews, whether there is a single network [or] mainstream organization in America with a Palestinian-American bureau chief or correspondent who actually has a voice to articulate their part of the world. . . . The reporters of those who believe more sympathetically about Israel and its right to exist don’t have a problem getting their voice out. But what I saw in Palestine . . . those were the stories that I have not heard.

In these few lines, Coates channels rhetoric that he has employed throughout his career—a nebulous invocation of marginalized peoples (here, Palestinians) and a claim that their members are denied a platform in the American public sphere.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel at war: democracy in action The common cause uniting citizens with the armed forces has been key to Israel’s military success. Mike Hume

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/08/israel-at-war-democracy-in-action/

How does Israel do it? When the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) assassinated the head terrorist of Hezbollah two weeks ago, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the world that ‘We are winning’. And he was right.

A year after the darkness of 7 October, the message from Israel is: let there be light! The IDF has crushed Hamas in Gaza, delivered hammer blows to Hezbollah in Lebanon and shaken the terrorists’ sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to its tyrannical roots.

So how has Israel – a small state of fewer than 10million people, surrounded, as Daniel Ben-Ami analysed on spiked, by genocidal Islamist enemies and isolated on the international stage as never before – had such military success?

No doubt superior military technology, both imported and homemade, has played its part, alongside the sort of intelligence and chutzpah required to blow up personal pagers in terrorists’ pockets.

The most important factor, however, is surely the active commitment of a large part of the Israeli population to the war effort. It is a people’s war, supported by millions who identify with and have a stake in the Jewish State, and view its existential struggle against the Islamists as a fight for their own heritage and future.

Anybody who supports democracy and freedom should be unequivocally on Israel’s side. As the sole democracy in the Middle East, and the sworn enemy of Islamist terrorists, Israel is on the frontline of the global struggle between civilisation and barbarism.

Even more than that, Israel is an example to us all of what can be achieved if you fight for what you believe in and take the people with you. The support of the Israeli demos – the people – means that Israel is not only fighting for democracy. Its war effort is real democracy in action.

This idea might come as a surprise to those who get their news about the Middle East solely from the mainstream media. The only Israelis who ever appear on the TV news here, in between the constant coverage of suffering Palestinians, are those protesting against the Israeli government and demanding an end to the war.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Doug Emhoff Dismisses Domestic-Violence Allegations as ‘Distraction,’ Doesn’t Deny Report By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/doug-emhoff-dismisses-domestic-violence-allegations-as-distraction-doesnt-deny-report/

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff says claims that he “forcefully” slapped his then-girlfriend in 2012 are a “distraction” – but did not deny the allegations in a new interview that aired Friday.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough gave Emhoff an opportunity to respond to several “tabloid stories about your personal life.” Reporting from the Daily Mail has claimed Emhoff slapped his then-girlfriend during the Cannes Film Festival more than ten years ago, with sources telling the outlet he hit the unnamed woman so hard that she “spun around.” The story, which is based on claims from several of the unnamed women’s friends as she declined to speak with the outlet, suggested he may have hit her in a moment of jealousy after he believed she had been flirting with a valet.

Other reporting from the outlet indicated he was “inappropriate” and “misogynistic” during his time working at a Los Angeles law firm.

“We don’t have time to be pissed off,” Emhoff told Scarborough. “We don’t have time to focus on it. It’s all a distraction. It’s designed to try to get us off our game.”

While Emhoff did not deny the allegations, a spokesperson for Emhoff previously told Semafor that the report was “untrue.” “Any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false,” the spokesperson said.

Vice President Kamala Harris began dating Emhoff in 2013 and the pair wed in August 2014.

Emhoff in August publicly admitted to having an affair during his first marriage after the Daily Mail reported that he cheated on his first wife and got their nanny pregnant.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Urban Violent Crime Surged 40 Percent Beginning in 2019 Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/urban-violent-crime-surged-40-percent-beginning-in-2019/

The further removed we are from the presidential debate, the clearer it is that ABC’s David Muir’s “fact-checking” of former President Trump’s remarks on surging crime was outrageous.

In insisting that “the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country,” Muir relied on FBI statistics that, at best, showed a marginal one-year drop — down 3 percent nationwide from 2022 to 2023. Even if the bureau’s numbers were arguably reliable, such a reduction would be negligible. In reality, though, the FBI’s numbers are not reliable. And most significantly, Muir ignored the trajectory of the past five years, which tells a dramatically different story in major American cities — almost uniformly run by Democrats.

There, violent crime has, indeed, surged.

Jeffrey Anderson led the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) during Trump’s administration. Unlike Muir, he is a reliable source, both on overall trends and the flaws of FBI crime-statistic reporting — beginning with the rudimentary fact that the bureau is an investigative agency, not a statistical agency.

Writing in the City Journal, Anderson explains that if we start with 2019 — right before the radical Left’s George Floyd riots and the toxic combination of the defund-the-police movement and the Progressive Prosecutor Project of non-enforcement policies — and then run the numbers through 2023, there was “a whopping 40 percent surge in urban violent crime” (emphasis added). During the same timeframe, urban property crime increased by 26 percent.

Anderson is relying on the BJS’s National Crime Victim Survey. The NCVS is a Nixon-era crime measuring tool. It is the gold standard because it grapples with the fact that most crime — probably about 55 percent — goes unreported. By searching for victims, rather than recording only crimes that are reported to the police, it provides a more accurate depiction.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The China Crisis? For years, investors profited from China despite its corruption, but they are now acknowledging the increasing risks as the country moves away from capitalism. By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on October 12th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/10/12/the-china-crisis/

It is largely axiomatic in the investment world that “to be early is to be wrong.” It doesn’t matter what you know, in other words, or how right you may be in understanding conditions or a developing situation. If the rest of the world isn’t ready to accept your case, if it isn’t “there” yet, then you won’t make any money. Indeed, you may lose quite a bit as you wait for everyone else to catch up to you.

Under this specific investment-driven definition, then, I have been wrong about China for the last 25 years or so—repeatedly and spectacularly wrong.

My boss and I once got ourselves into scalding hot water with our employer at a large financial services firm for questioning the sanity and propriety of the hottest investment deal on Wall Street, the initial public offering of PetroChina, the listed arm of the Chinese National Petroleum Company. I once left a job—at a different large financial service firm—in part because the firm’s investment bankers were censoring what we could and could not say about the Chinese government. For some reason, they found it difficult to cut deals with the Butchers of Beijing when their own firm’s analysts were back stateside, calling their partners “the Butchers of Beijing.” Funny how that works.

In a real, fundamental, political, and moral sense, I was right about China. I was right that the CCP cannot be trusted, that it is a brutal, neo-fascist regime. I was right that the defenders of the “global order” had it backward, that allowing China to play in the free world’s sandbox would not make its government freer and more amenable to classical economics and politics. All it would do would befoul the sandbox, make it grotesque and largely unusable. I was right that the CCP would lie, cheat, and steal to advance its agenda and achieve its goals. In short, I was right about everything—everything that is, except the short-term investment possibilities.