The House Subpoena Wars The Jan. 6 committee tries to coerce the testimony of Members.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-house-subpoena-wars-jan-6-committee-congress-kevin-mccarthy-jim-jordan-nancy-pelosi-11652479291?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Partisanship on Capitol Hill is as bitter as we can recall, and it’s about to get worse. The Jan. 6 special committee has unleashed the subpoena power of the House against fellow Members.

The committee on Thursday issued commands to five GOP Members of Congress to testify about events surrounding the Jan 6 Capitol riot. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.)and Reps. Scott Perry (Pa.), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Andy Biggs (Ariz.) and Mo Brooks (Ala.) have refused to answer committee questions, so they’re getting unprecedented subpoena treatment.

House subpoenas to Members are typically reserved for investigations by the Ethics Committee focusing on allegations of corruption. The Ethics Committee has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, and its investigations (if not always its judgments) are traditionally bipartisan.

The Jan. 6 committee has two GOP Members, though they were chosen by Speaker Nancy Pelosi after she rejected two of Mr. McCarthy’s candidates. The Minority Leader then declined to nominate anyone else. Republicans are sure to see the subpoenas as a case of turning the investigative power of the House against the opposition party.

If Democrats think this will be a one-time-only event, they are dreaming. If Republicans retake the House in November, you can guarantee that Mr. Jordan, as likely Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, will find some reason to subpoena Democrats about oh, say, what they knew about the Russian collusion narrative or Democrats who objected to the electoral vote counts in 2000, 2004, or 2016.

My Lawsuit Will Shine a Light on Twitter Censorship I got booted for dissent over the Covid vaccines—after Biden said critics were ‘killing people.’ By Alex Berenson

https://www.wsj.com/articles/my-lawsuit-will-shine-a-light-on-twitter-censorship-soical-media-big-tech-facebook-speech-11652634888?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Do social-media companies collude with the federal government to suppress speech? On April 29, Judge William Alsup issued a ruling in a case I brought against Twitter that could become a watershed in holding social-media companies accountable for censorship.

This problem became acute at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic. On Jan. 29, 2020, Twitter declared: “We’re committed to playing our part to amplify authoritative, official content across the globe.” Facebook essentially forbade discussion that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab. Today debate over the lab-leak theory is allowed, but free discussion of the side effects and efficacy of Covid vaccines isn’t.

Censorship by these vastly powerful companies is antithetical to the advancement of science and basic democratic principles, both of which require open debate. But the companies and government have closely guarded the secrets of how they work together—including whether and how they target dissenters like me.

After March 2020, I became a prominent skeptic of the U.S. coronavirus response, arguing that neither “nonpharmaceutical” interventions like masks nor vaccine mandates were likely to change the course of the epidemic. Much of what I wrote, though controversial at the time, is now conventional wisdom. Twitter—open to the public, available globally, and a crucial platform for journalism—was my primary outlet.

On the Baltic Frontier By Andrew Stuttaford

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/30/on-the-baltic-frontier/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania keep a wary eye on Russia

Estonia and Latvia

Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s president between 2006 and 2016, is not known for mincing his words about Russia. Nevertheless, as we drove towards a restaurant amid the refurbished industrial buildings and new waterfront apartments in a neighborhood that is a monument of sorts to Estonia’s astonishingly successful tech sector, it was evident that, had circumstances allowed, he would rather have been talking about the future that this small, determined nation is making for itself than about the latest poisonous eruption from the past.

As Ilves and I finished dinner, one of Estonia’s high-tech entrepreneurs wandered over. What had brought me to the country? “The neighbors, I’m afraid.” “Ah yes.” The neighbors are, by definition, not going away. Nor are they likely to change for the better. Russia’s ruling class seems disinclined to abandon political, imperial, and military principles that, despite brief interludes, have remained fundamentally unchanged for centuries. In discussions in Latvia and Estonia (sadly, there was no time to visit Lithuania), it was emphasized to me more than once that the war in Ukraine was Russia’s war, not just Putin’s. To the extent it can be believed (somewhat), polling in Russia appears to support that thesis, at least up to now. But this is not inconsistent with the argument made by James Sherr, an analyst at Estonia’s respected International Centre for Defence and Security, that “Putin’s views about Ukraine are widely shared, but without him there might have been no war.” Something similar, I suppose, might be said about Germany and Hitler.

Ilves anticipated “a hard road ahead,” as did Sherr, who warned that “there is no safe path through this.” A defense official in Tallinn forecast mounting escalation and saw little chance of a return to peaceful conditions. But, for all that, neither Tallinn nor the Latvian capital, Riga, felt like a city on a precipice. There were no troops in the streets. Restaurants looked to be doing good business; shops were busy and well stocked.

Yet Another Anti-Conservative Study Was Fake News By Andrew Follett

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/yet-another-anti-conservative-study-was-fake-news/

Virtually all social-science hypotheses that attempt to find dark psychological reasons for conservatism haven’t held up at all under peer review.

Yet another major study claiming conservatism is caused by mental problems has been conclusively proven to be junk science.

The now-debunked study suggested conservatism is associated with conspiratorial thinking and “negativity bias.” But it proved impossible to replicate when tested by other researchers.

“We find no consistent evidence that negativity bias promotes right-wing ideology; promotes ‘closed’ values or personality traits, such as need for closure or (low) openness to experience; or interacts with political engagement,” researchers doing the debunking wrote in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature. “To support these null results, we conduct a series of data quality and robustness checks that suggest our data is comparable in quality to that of previous work and our results do not hinge on particular operationalizations or modeling choices. Indeed, our results are consistent with several recent studies that fail to replicate associations between physiological indicators of threat sensitivity and political ideology.”

Perhaps nothing confirms that the root of the crisis in science is government control as much as watching people with doctorates make mistakes that should be obvious to a freshman. The critical error of endlessly privileging hypotheses that coincide with progressive political preferences has become sadly common.

Wisconsin middle schoolers accused of sexual harassment for using wrong gender pronouns Lawyer argues use of incorrect gender pronouns does not violate Title IX

https://www.foxnews.com/us/middle-schoolers-sexual-harassment-gender-pronouns

Three Wisconsin boys are facing sexual harassment charges from their middle school over accusations that they used incorrect gender pronouns on a fellow student.

“I received a phone call from the principal over at the elementary school, forewarning me; letting me know that I was going to be receiving an email with sexual harassment allegations against my son,” Rosemary Rabidoux, a parent of one of the accused, told Fox 11 News last week. 

“I immediately went into shock. I’m thinking, sexual harassment? That’s rape, that’s inappropriate touching, that’s incest” Rabidoux continued. “What has my son done?”

But none of the concerns Rabidoux had were at issue. Instead, her 13-year-old son, Braden, was accused of using incorrect pronouns to address another student at Kiel Middle School.

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

There is an old saw “actions speak louder than words” and Israel is a classic example.

First Words: There is a tsunami of libels and criticism of Israel from biased media, the groves of academia, and legislators and organizations that barely conceal their predilection for the narratives of terrorists and jihadists.

Second Actions: As Michael Ordman catalogs weekly, Israel recently inducted a Muslim Supreme court Justice; saved lives with new stem cell treatments and two minute biopsies and innovative surgery that benefits all its citizens regardless of race or religion or ethnicity; gave remarkable water technology to refugees in Syria; offers education to all its residents in three of the world’s top universities; hosts Cyberweek – Jun 27 – 30  at Tel Aviv University internationally acclaimed as one of the top cybersecurity events in the world, with 9,000+ attendees from more than 80 countries.

Amazing! rsk

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
How a Covid-19 variant is created. Most research related to Coronavirus mutations looks at the virus and how it infects a vaccinated individual. But researchers at Israel’s Technion have been analyzing how the mutation is formed. This provides a new opportunity for spotting weaknesses in the virus that can be exploited.
https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2022/01/covid19-variant-individual-patient/
 
Curing blood flow blockages. Israel’s BioGenCell (see here previously) has completed Phase 1 clinical trials at Israel’s Laniado Medical Center, of its stem cell therapy to cure chronic limb-threatening ischemia (CLI). Nine patients have had their legs saved from amputation. BioGenCell will now proceed to Phase 2 trials.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sywu8eil5
 
A biopsy in two minutes. Israel’s Imagene AI develops fast AI-based cancer diagnostics to help identify personalized treatment. Using a digitized biopsy image, Imagene delivers real-time precision-based molecular analysis, increased accuracy and reducing the time required for results, from several weeks to just two minutes.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bjduunabc
 
More than just a thermometer. Israel’s OmnySense has upgraded its telemedicine thermometer (see here previously) into a health-tracking device that measures respiratory rate, pulse rate, ECG, and blood oxygen. It is currently undergoing clinical trials with doctors at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, to detect lung conditions.
https://www.israel21c.org/smart-thermometer-also-checks-heart-lungs-blood-oxygen/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgX8C5UzPWM
 
Three mothers saved. Volunteer EMTs from Israel’s United Hatzalah saved three Israelis thanks to their 3-minute response. Firstly, a 105-year-old Haifa woman who choked on her breakfast. Then a kindergarten teacher in Ashdod who collapsed in front of her class. Finally, an 86-year-old grandmother on Mother’s Day.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/326857  https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/326938
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/327194
 
Doctors fix hole in preemie’s heart. A cardiac catheterization, the first of its kind in Israel, was successfully performed at Hadassah Ein Kerem to close the aorta of a 4-week-old baby born 14 weeks premature. The Hadassah team had trained for precisely this kind of operation at several hospitals and conferences worldwide.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/263116
 
Biomed Israel. The 20th annual 3-day Biomed Israel summit has 10 different tracks including infectious diseases, robotics in the medical field, AI and machine learning, precision cancer diagnostics and therapies, and “bio food”. Some 6,000 scientists, healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, and investors will attend.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/bio-food-precision-oncology-to-take-center-stage-at-biomed-summit-in-tel-aviv/
https://www.israel21c.org/biomed-israel-intl-health-tech-confab-opens-may-10/
 
Documentary celebrates Israeli paramedics. A new documentary, Tel Aviv 911, is a firsthand, behind-the-scenes account of Martin Himel’s 22-year experience as a volunteer senior medic with Israel’s elite paramedic organization Magen David Adom (MDA). Tel Aviv 911 debuts on May 16 at 9pm ET on Vision TV in Canada.
https://www.jns.org/spotlight/new-documentary-celebrates-israels-paramedics/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HMp8VR1gOc
 
Praise for Israeli health system. (TY Hazel) UK Member of Parliament and Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting visited Israel as a member of Labour Friends of Israel. He praised Israel’s “remarkable advances in medical technology” and how they could be used to improve NHS care in Britain.
https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/shadow-health-secretary-streeting-praises-israel-medical-advances-on-trip/
 
Israel’s new Russian & Ukrainian doctors. A few months before the start of the war in Ukraine, a group of medical students immigrated to Israel from Eastern Europe. This video shows how the young doctors, now qualified, were able to study together despite the anxiety about the conflict in the lands of their birth.
https://video.i24news.tv/details/_6305551341112

‘2000 Mules’ investigator: Georgia officials intimidating my witnesses Art Moore

https://www.wndnewscenter.org/2000-mules-investigator-georgia-officials-intimidating-my-witnesses/

A lead investigator in the independent probe of alleged 2020 election ballot trafficking featured in the film “2000 Mules” said he and his witnesses have become the target of Georgia state officials instead of the people he believes delivered fraudulent votes to help Joe Biden win the White House.

Gregg Phillips, who teamed with True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht in the probe, said in an interview with reporter Emerald Robinson that days before the release of “2000 Mules,” Georgia election officials issued subpoenas to get him to turn over his sources and witnesses.

He emphasized that the witnesses came forward because they were promised their identity would be protected.

“This is a very, very dangerous escalation in this. I believe that somebody’s going to get killed if they’re not careful,” Phillips said.

“The (Georgia) investigator himself and the people who fashioned this subpoena are going to get someone killed,” he continued. “They don’t understand what they’re dealing with.

“I’m not going to reveal the source. I don’t care what they do,” Phillips said. “They can cuff me.”

How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp: A Uyghur Woman’s Story by Gulbahar Haitiwaji

The first memoir about the “reeducation” camps by a Uyghur woman.
 
“I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.”
— Gulbahar Haitiwaji toParis Match

Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention­—the biggest since the time of Mao.
 
Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the ‘reeducation’ camps. For three years Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell.
 
These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders.
 
The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping.

DANGER: The WHO’s Death Trap for the US Act Fast: They Vote Next Week by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18534/who-death-trap

This is a plan that Congress and the public need to fight vigorously.

The Biden administration, it appears, unless stopped immediately, is tee-ing up America to make it easy for the Chinese Communist Party to defeat it, and other nations, through biological warfare.

“On May 22-28, 2022, ultimate control over America’s healthcare system, and hence its national sovereignty, will be delivered for a vote to the World Health Organization’s governing legislative body, the World Health Assembly (WHA).” — Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, America Out Loud, May 4, 2022.

“This threat is contained in new amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations, proposed by the Biden administration, that are scheduled as ‘Provisional agenda item 16.2’ at the upcoming conference on May 22-28, 2022.” — Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, America Out Loud, May 4, 2022.

“These amendments will empower WHO’s Director-General to declare health emergencies or crises in any nation and to do so unilaterally and against the opposition of the target nation. The Director-General will be able to declare these health crises based merely on his personal opinion or consideration that there is a potential or possible threat to other nations.” — Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, America Out Loud, May 4, 2022.

“The targeted nation is also required to send WHO any relevant genetic sequence data.” — Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, America Out Loud, May 4, 2022.

“Under the new regulations, WHO will not be required to consult with the identified nation beforehand to “verify” the event before taking action.” — Dr. Peter Breggin and Ginger Ross Breggin, America Out Loud, May 4, 2022.

Unfortunately, this “next pandemic” is neither far off nor a hypothetical “conspiracy theory.” According to multiple credible reports from the U.S. Department of State, to the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Peter Jennings, China has been preparing for bio-warfare using pathogens for more than six years.

A WHO with expanded authority is a terrifying concept. Can you envision providing an international organization with the power to dictate how the U.S. should respond to a future pandemic? Perhaps by forcing the U.S. to turn over supplies and equipment to China because of its larger population? How about an international organization that would have the power to mandate whether we should be required to be vaccinated with a particular vaccine, say China’s inferior SINOVAC vaccine? Or imagine a WHO that has the power to impose what mandates or lockdowns a country would be required to impose, say like China’s current lockdown of Shanghai? Unfortunately, the WHO already has proven itself to be a willing organ of China’s Communist leaders. Providing it with international, legal binding authority over global pandemic response must never be allowed to happen.

The Biden administration, it appears, unless stopped immediately, is tee-ing up America to make it easy for the Chinese Communist Party to defeat it, and other nations, through biological warfare.

The World Health Organization (WHO), the organization that has unhesitatingly been doing China’s bidding during the COVID pandemic, is reportedly now planning to orchestrate a massive new power grab to internationally control the response to any future global pandemic. The plan is apparently to make the health of Americans dependent on the whims of China — which is both actively seeking to displace the US as the world’s leading superpower and has for years been working on new means of bio-warfare.

Lebanese Election and the Broken Oar by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18533/lebanese-election

To win that referendum, Tehran last month wrote a $25 million cheque in “extra help” for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

More money was raised through a number of concerts in Iran, where mullahs also invited “the believers” to dig into their pockets to help Hezbollah and its allies in all Lebanese communities secure “a glaring victory” (fath al-mobin). Nasrallah was portrayed as a caricature of Khamenei, who is himself a caricature of the late Khomeini.

In contrast, Najib Mikati, Lebanon’s ephemeral Prime Minister, hopes that the election will persuade the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to sign its promised cheque of $5 billion in “emergency aid”.

Pie-in-the-sky projects such as reviving the Beirut port, building a railway hub, and removing Bank of Lebanon from the life-support machine may never go beyond after-dinner talks.

Lebanon’s problem is fundamentally geopolitical in the sense that those who hold the reins of power regard the country either as a bunker or a glacis where the interest of outside powers trump those of the nation-state.

Worse still, those who exercise power have proved their utter incompetence, not to mention their corruption, for almost two decades.

[R]eal decision-making is centralized in Khamenei’s office in Tehran.

Regardless of the results, likely to be “arranged”, Sunday’s election may yet turn out to be a referendum on resistance: the resistance of the Lebanese people against forces that try to de-Lebanize their country.

A general election in Lebanon is bound to be news if only because it is years overdue.

But what is it for?

Is it a step towards the exit from the maze of misery and terror that the Lebanese have endured for years or a step deeper into it?