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Liz Peek: Biden mute as protests demand freedom around the world

Posted By on December 1st, 2022

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-mute-protests-demand-freedom-world

What does the United States stand for? With Joe Biden in the White House, absolutely nothing.

Apparently, we don’t stand for freedom. As brave citizens in China desperately protest that country’s heinous lockdowns and censorship, a spokesman for the Biden administration says that the White House is “going to watch this closely.”  

We don’t stand against human rights abusers. As crippling energy prices threaten the president’s approval ratings, Biden’s emissaries travel to Venezuela, allowing an easing of sanctions and resumed oil exports from a murderous regime that happens to have the world’s largest oil reserves. 

Amnesty International has called out the Maduro government for “extrajudicial executions, excessive use of force, arbitrary detentions and torture and other ill-treatment against those perceived as critical of the government” but the Biden government needs oil. 

We don’t stand for peace in the Middle East. Too small-minded to accept the extraordinary success of the Abraham Accords achieved under President Trump, which created new alliances in the region and ring-fenced Iran, the Biden team continues its pursuit of a new nuclear deal with Tehran. The Biden White House resolutely ignores Iran’s past history of cheating on its nuclear commitments; astonishingly, it allows Russia to act as an intermediary.

We also seemingly don’t stand with women’s rights. Violent and widespread protests in Iran over the killing of a young woman arrested for not wearing a hijab have reportedly resulted in hundreds of deaths and the blinding of hundreds more by rubber bullets and metal pellets fired by security forces. 

The White House, other than issuing the usual supportive pablum, has been largely AWOL. Biden inadvertently boasted on the campaign trail that “We’re going to free Iran” but his team soon walked back the comment, saying that we merely “stood in solidarity” with the protesters. 

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Leftwing Hysteria and the Art of the Psychodrama. Part One Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 1st, 2022

https://victorhanson.com/leftwing-hysteria-and-the-art-of-the-psychodrama-part-one/

What follows is an extended analysis of how the Left obtains power without agendas that win popular support, and how such aggrandizement inflames social relations and national unity.

The progressive media—which constitute the majority of print newspapers, network news, public radio and TV, Google/Apple/Yahoo news, and the best-funded online venues—have fused with the hard-left Democratic Party. Most in the media, like most Democrats, accept the reality that the progressive, and increasingly neo-socialist, agenda does not and will never win majority support.

Americans want a closed border, a crackdown on crime, fossil-fuel independence, control of inflation and drunken spending, and an end to the woke cancel culture.

So how does the fusion media/political Left obtain power? Usually by the politics of distraction and feigned crises—perhaps better defined as the art of the psychodrama.

Daily the Left scans the news. It ceaselessly ferrets out any story that can be sensationalized and distorted to frighten, to anger, or to confuse the public into thinking America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, and downright awful place run by an elite, rich cadre of prejudicial, white-male Christian nationalists.

And then, presto, social media fuels the agreed-on lie. Television news accelerates it. And print journalism distorts it—all part of an agenda to justify radical changes (“fundamental transformations”) in America otherwise impossible.

ISRAEL, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Shimon Peres: Dreams of peace became Israel’s nightmare – opinion Moshe Dann

Posted By on December 1st, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-723757

Shimon Peres, an iconic Israeli leader until his death in 2016 at the age of 93, was the subject of a recent documentary sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. A prominent figure in the Labor Party, Peres held the positions of prime minister, foreign minister and president of Israel. He was best known for his role in developing Israel’s nuclear facility, as well as what was known as “the peace process” that became the basis for the Oslo Accords, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.

The film and plans to name the International Convention Center in Jerusalem in his memory, however, have stirred controversy and criticism for what many believe to be a publicity campaign that ignores Peres’s true legacy: the Oslo Accords, and his failure to understand the PLO’s agenda to destroy Israel.

Shimon Peres’s legacy

In 1985, as prime minister, Peres arranged the release of over 1,000 convicted terrorists in what was called the “Ahmed Jabril deal,” named after the terrorist leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP). Less than three years later in December 1987, many of the terrorists led a surge of violence, known as the First Intifada, and others joined terrorist organizations.

Before the 1992 elections, Peres’s deputy Yossi Beilin concluded secret deals with the PLO in which the Israeli leaders pledged to grant it self-rule and quasi-state status. This became the basis of the Oslo Accords. The secret content of these negotiations has never been revealed.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Protestors Call for End to CCP Rule by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on November 29th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19173/china-protestors-communist-rule

The CCP, as the Chinese Communist Party is informally known, has now lost hearts across the country.

China throughout the Communist period has witnessed demonstrations, but most of them are, as Burton noted, “highly localized” and “directed at malfeasance, corruption, and incompetence of lower level Communist functionaries.”

Now, however, the anger is directed at the Party itself. In short, as evident from the spontaneous demonstrations of the weekend, the Chinese people have had enough of Xi Jinping and CCP rule. They recognize the fundamental fact that the Party’s system does not work.

The Chinese people are not only angry over Xi Jinping’s “dynamic Zero-COVID policy;” they are also troubled by a crumbling economy and the collapse of the all-important property sector. New-home prices in 70 cities, for instance, fell in October for the 14h-straight month. There have been abnormally few sales in recent months as the market is “frozen,” with big spreads between what sellers demand and what buyers are willing to pay. These drops in prices and sales are of great concern because some 70% of Chinese household wealth is tied up in property. China’s people, as a result, were not happy even before Thursday’s fatal blaze.

Fomenting hatred of America, to save the Communist Party from popular unrest, would not be a big step for Xi.

Extraordinary protests quickly spread across China over the weekend, including major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, since a fire Thursday claimed a reported 10 lives in an apartment block in Urumqi, in the northwestern part of the country.

China’s people were enraged by the regime’s COVID controls, which had prevented firefighters from reaching the scene of the tragedy in time. “This is people past their breaking point,” tweeted CNN’s Selina Wang on Sunday.

Also on Sunday, the Telegraph’s Simina Mistreanu reported on Twitter that a crowd numbering at least 100 began marching toward Tiananmen Square, in the heart of the Chinese capital. Police, however, stopped demonstrators after only a few blocks, at the Liangma River. “The fact that they intended to protest at Tiananmen,” she wrote, “is wild.”

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Trans Psychologist Files Brief Against School District Hiding Students’ Gender Transitions From Parents Madeline Leesman

Posted By on November 29th, 2022

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2022/11/28/trans-psychologist-slams-school-for-transitioning-students-without-parental-consent-n2616447

A transgender clinical psychologist joined a lawsuit against a Maryland school district over a policy that allows educators to hide students’ gender transitions from their parents. 

Last week, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty filed an amicus brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to reverse a ruling from a District Court judge in August that dismissed a complaint from parents against the Montgomery County Board of Education over the policy. 

According to The Washington Post, three parents argued that the policy hinders their ability to “direct the care, custody, education, and control of their minor children” under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The psychologist, Dr. Erica Anderson, reportedly joined the lawsuit because the school district’s policies to keep parents out of their children’s lives will “rip families apart” and “teach children that deceiving one’s parents is acceptable.”

“As a psychologist who works with these kids and families, I have seen instances of family rupture when children don’t advise their parents of what’s going on with them, and then they proceed down a path that sometimes is interrupted only when parents are surprised to learn some of these things,” Anderson said in an interview with Fox News Digital.

“So on all accounts, I am opposed to schools depriving parents of the knowledge of what’s going on with their children,” Anderson added.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Everybody Hates Liz Cheney Pimped by Democrats, used by the news media, abandoned by Republicans, and disliked by the public, Cheney, like her father, might have managed to tick off almost everyone on her way out the door. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on November 29th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/28/everybody-hates-liz-cheney/

It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

After successfully winning the affection and approval of political enemies who, not so long ago, considered her father a war criminal, Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will leave Congress in about 30 days to much greener, so to speak, pastures. (Ironically—or not—Cheney’s effort to indict Trump related to the events of January 6 will continue under Special Counsel Jack Smith, fresh off the heels of prosecuting Kosovo government officials at The Hague, the very place many of Cheney’s new admirers wanted former Vice President Dick Cheney to face trial.)

Democrats, however, may not give the doyenne of NeverTrump Republicans the grateful send-off she undoubtedly believes she earned during her brief tenure in Congress. Cheney, according to news reports, is as popular with the staff of the January 6 select committee as she is with Republicans in Wyoming, who voted her out of office by a nearly 2-1 margin in August. 

Her obsessive fixation with Donald Trump—a personal vendetta in retaliation for Trump’s denunciation of the Iraq War and her father’s lies about weapons of mass destruction—is backfiring as the committee’s work concludes. And like all things Cheney, the end is fraught with internal drama, delusions of grandeur, personal score-settling, private bullying, and growing disaffection among those who trusted her to act in good faith.

The release of the official report has been delayed four times; it’s now scheduled for December 20, just two weeks before Republicans take control of the House with no time to pass any legislation to prevent a future “insurrection,” a major selling point to the public. Cheney, apparently, is to blame. “[Less] than six weeks before the conclusion of the committee’s work, Cheney’s influence over the committee’s final report has rankled many current and former committee staff,” the Washington Post reported last week. “They are angered and disillusioned by Cheney’s push to focus the report primarily on former president Donald Trump, and have bristled at the committee morphing into what they have come to view as the vehicle for the outgoing Wyoming lawmaker’s political future.”

More than a dozen former and current committee investigators spoke anonymously to the Post; some have quit in protest of Cheney’s focus on Trump. “[It’s] long been clear that Cheney deprioritized findings that didn’t fit a specific narrative about Trump’s efforts to foment the insurrection,” the Post revealed. One former staffer complained that the committee had morphed into a “Cheney 2024 campaign.”

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‘Pup play,’ ‘genderfluid’ nuclear bureaucrat accused of felony luggage theft By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on November 29th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/pup_play_genderfluid_nuclear_bureaucrat_accused_of_felony_luggage_theft.html

It made the headlines when the Obama administration hired Sam Brinton as the deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the U.S. Department of Energy. In other words, a fairly high-level nuclear guy. On paper, Sam Brinton, an MIT-credentialed nuclear engineer, looked good. In real life, he’s a way out there “genderfluid” man who believes in pretending to be a puppy for sexual reasons. Now, he’s alleged to have stolen a woman’s suitcase at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport (“MSP airport”).

It’s hard to express just how strange Sam Brinton is. He shaves his head and swans around in women’s clothes:

He’s also a proud “pup handler,” an identity (because leftists always have “identities,” the more, the better) that sees him and his sex buddies dress up like puppies and their owners for fun. It’s unclear if real dogs are involved.  

Brinton is so passionate about his self-acknowledged “kink” that he’s lectured on the “Physics of Kink” at the University of Wisconsin. He’s also a member of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an old-time 501(c)3 drag group that mocks Catholicism, where he rejoices in the name of “Sister Ray Dee O’Active.”

Now, to that list of outré behaviors, we can add “accused luggage thief.” AlphaNews, a Minnesota-based online news outlet, reports that Brinton was charged with felony theft after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at the MSP airport.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Lament for a Nation, or Bye-Bye Miss Canadian Pie By David Solway

Posted By on November 29th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/11/28/a-lament-for-a-nation-or-bye-bye-miss-canadian-pie-n1649327

It is very hard to maintain one’s composure when speaking to ordinary Canadians about the disaster in the making that is Canada today. I have engaged personally and via email over the last two years with literally hundreds of my fellow countrymen from all walks of life on the subjects of the national debt, the deficit, the sunsetting of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the draconian and illegal Covid and vaccine mandates and the turbo maladies that flow from them, the various repressive bills sieving through Parliament, the vicious and lying government and media campaign against the Trucker Freedom Convoy, and the unconscionable behavior of the most vindictive, incompetent and unpatriotic prime minister in the history of Confederation.

With precious few exceptions—“precious” is a key word here—I have come away in a state of profound depression. Some readers of my writings as well as everyday interlocutors have accused me of pessimism, which may be true. I recall a remark of Leonard Cohen’s: “A pessimist is somebody who is waiting for the rain. Me, I’m already wet.” Sometimes I feel completely drenched.

I’ve found the great majority of my correspondents do not know the difference between the debt and the deficit. They draw a blank when I mention the Charter or the Nuremberg Code, let alone Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, and the Great Reset. None have researched the deception or willful ignorance among our politicians regarding the Covid mandates and not one has examined the harmful and even lethal nature of the vaccines and booster shots. None I’ve spoken to have even heard of SADS—Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, which emerged post-vaccine. Bills like C-4, C-11, C-12 and C-18, which are dictatorial measures designed to muzzle and censor the average citizen, are little more than arcana unworthy of consideration. Most people are indifferent to, or approving of, the push for legislated mask mandates, “a result of a compliant populace,” Cory Morgan writes, “willing to shrug their shoulders and give up personal liberties with little complaint.” The government and medical profession’s targeting of parents who resist the sickness of transgenderitis in order to provide a normal life for their children does not appear to move many Canadians.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Hysterical Spoof of a College English Course Description? Oh, Wait! By George Harbison

Posted By on November 29th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/george-harbison/2022/11/27/the-babylon-bee-publishes-a-hysterical-spoof-of-a-college-english-course-description-oh-wait-n1648938

The Babylon Bee is far and away the leading source of conservative satirical content on the internet.  Its writers brilliantly skewer the entire spectrum of woke and PC nonsense on a daily basis.  Its pieces are shared widely in social media by clear thinkers seeking comedic relief in the face of the avalanche of increasingly crazy and dangerous ideas, positions, and rhetoric emanating by the American left.

If the Babylon Bee’s most creative satirists conjured up a parody of a woke college course description, it would probably read something like this:

Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5

How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.

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The Sophistry of Disinformation When you can’t handle the truth, call it disinformation. by Loyd Pettegrew

Posted By on November 29th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-sophistry-of-disinformation/

Misinformation differs from disinformation only in regard to intent. The former is simply inaccurate information without the intent of being so. Disinformation is intentionally crafted by the sender and sent by him/her.

Those on the Left dismiss out of hand ideas they don’t like through name-calling. Information that goes against what the Left consider gospel, like the possible dangers of Covid vaccines or treatments such as Ivermectin, is dismissed out of hand as disinformation (or misinformation) depending on who is using the term. A Google search of the term disinformation yields 100 million results!

Robert Malone (the physician censored for presenting information counter to the CDC’s Covid gospel) and Whitney Webb argue that journalism is in existential crisis through their war on dissent: “Whereas journalism continues to be defined as ’writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation’—in practice, it has become a battlefield where the most powerful social media outlets (Facebook, Instagram, TIKTOK, Snapchat, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc.)—that is, those closest to the centers of power—deliberately manipulate or omit facts to craft narratives that expressly benefit the powerful while also colluding to censor their more truthful competition.”

Dominick Sansone terms this America’s “information war” with political power and financial fortunes at stake. In the underbelly of this war is the promulgation of disinformation—the Left’s coin of the realm against anything expressed by the Right, no matter how valid.

Although the term “disinformation” reemerged as the popular parlance of federal bureaucrats during the Trump presidency, the term traces back to an 1876 newspaper article published in the Newport Mercury (Newport, RI). Disinformation is a literal translation of the Russian word dezinformatsiya, which means “misinformation,” a term the KGB used in the 1950s to signify a department created to dispense Communist propaganda.