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September 2022

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘These Attacks Have Racist, Religious Motives’: The Persecution of Christians, July 2022 by Raymond Ibrahim

By on September 11th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18854/persecution-of-christians-july

After raping a Christian woman, her Muslim employer told her and her family—both still not over the shock—to get back to work. — Pakistan.

“The scale of killings, displacement and wanton destruction of property by these Fulani jihadist militia only buttresses the now revealed agenda to depopulate Christian communities in Nigeria and take over lands. Tellingly, the government in power in Nigeria at the moment continues to do nothing about these persistent attacks, save to give laughable reasons like ‘climate change’ or that some Muslims too are sometimes killed in attacks by so-called bandits.” — Bishop Wilfred Chikpa Anagbe, Independent Catholic News, July 19, 2022, Nigeria.

On July 4, a Christian mechanic [Ashfaq Masih, 34] who had been imprisoned for the last five years while awaiting trial under a false accusation of allegedly insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad, was sentenced to death by hanging in a Pakistani court. — churchinchains.ie, July 19 2022, Pakistan.

“I told the real story to a police officer but he did not record my version but conducted investigation ex-parte.” — Ashfaq Masih, churchinchains.ie, July 7, 2022, Pakistan.

“The judges are aware that such cases are made to punish and settle personal grudges with the opponents, especially against the Christians…. Masih’s case was very clear—the shop owner wanted him out and Naveed was a business rival who implicated him in a false blasphemy case. He is innocent and has already spent five years in prison for a crime he never committed.” — Nasir Saeed, Director of the Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement, claas.org.uk, July 7, 2022, Pakistan.

The following are among the abuses Muslims inflicted on Christians throughout the month of July 2022:

The Muslim Abuse and Rape of Christian Women in Pakistan

After raping a Christian woman, her Muslim employer told her and her family—both still not over the shock—to get back to work. Rimsha Riaz, 18, and several others of her Christian household worked at a glass crushing company, where they were described as “hard-working loyal employees for Haji Ali Akbar, a successful Muslim businessman.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How the West Built a Russian Enemy by Amir Taheri

By on September 11th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18876/west-russia-enemy

On a broader tableau, Putin started blocking NATO’s plans to gain a presence in Central Asia and Transcaucasia. Moscow helped overthrow the pro-West regime in Kyrgyzstan, acquired military bases in Armenia and Tajikistan, and clinched a $4 billion deal to supply arms to Iraq.

At the same time, Putin armed secessionists in Moldova and eastern Ukraine and, in August 2008, invaded Georgia to annex Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The US reacted by sending a warship on a brief tour of the Black Sea.

In hindsight, it seems that Putin had worked out a careful plan to test the Western powers’ limit of tolerance as he went from one mischief to another.

In 2012 Putin started getting involved in the Syrian civil war on the side of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Tehran. After testing the waters, Putin also cast himself as a big player in Libya in the hope of getting a chunk of it when and if it was broken into pieces.

Each time Putin misbehaved, Western powers reacted with bland statements, the expulsion of a few diplomats, and expressions of sympathy for Alexei Navalny, one of Tsar Vladimir’s more colorful critics. Meanwhile, Putin built a political support base in the West by financing several parties of both left and right.

Putin at first seized control of chunks of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk and, once convinced that no one would stop him, went along and annexed the whole of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. He also obtained a base in Syria, restoring Russia’s military presence in the Mediterranean for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Empire. His next move was to turn the Caspian Sea into a Russian lake, excluding “outsiders”, meaning the Western powers.

It is hard to know what goes on in Putin’s mind. But his favorite “philosopher,” Alexander Dugin, has dismissed the leaders of Western democracies as a bunch of lily-livered pansies interested in nothing but money and show-off.

Western money, technology and, above all, greed helped Putin become, in the words of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, a threat to world peace.

“One would think the Tsar is back!” This is how a colleague covering the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg in July 2006 commented after a visit by President Vladimir Putin to the facilities provided for journalists covering the “historic event.” Historic because this was the first time that Russia, admitted as a full member of the club of “great powers” in 1997, was hosting the summit.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The True Soul of America The threat to the soul of our nation is real and palpable. Its source is not, however, the one Joe Biden identified.  By Bruce Abramson

By on September 11th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/10/the-true-soul-of-america/

“The threat to the soul of our nation is real and palpable. Its source is not, however, the one Biden identified. Therein lies both the deepest of ironies and the enormity of the challenge. We are indeed locked into a battle for the very soul of our nation. Joe Biden and his woke followers are not on the side of the angels.”

Sometimes a speech can reveal important truths contrary to those the speaker hoped to convey. Joe Biden gave the country a perfect example with his “Soul of the Nation” speech on September 1 in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.

Biden provided perhaps the clearest evidence yet of the deep spiritual crisis roiling our nation. We are mired in a struggle between two spiritual traditions: The biblically grounded American spirit of our founding and a contemporary wokeism grounded in utopian socialism.

The White House insisted the speech was not political. In a narrow sense, that denial may have been accurate. Souls are not fit subjects for politics. Nor are they fit subjects for economics or for science. The soul is not an empirically observable quantity. It has no observable existence apart from the body (though the converse is not true; bodies do exist after the soul has departed). The soul is the part of human existence that remains after all observable, testable, measurable components have been labeled and studied. The soul is inherently and quintessentially metaphysical. Discussions of the soul belong exclusively to the realm of spirituality.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

California’s Net-Zero Energy Model Is Already A Disaster — So Why Should The Rest Of The U.S. Copy It?

By on September 11th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/09/californias-net-zero-energy-model-is-already-a-disaster-so-why-would-the-rest-of-the-u-s-copy-it/

When it comes to “net-zero” energy policy, the commentary coming from the Biden administration these days is truly dizzying. Americans are now being told that California’s crazy energy policies would be a good model for the rest of the nation. Have these people seen what’s going on there?

California’s plan to ban all gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035 and replace them with electric vehicles “could be” a model for the rest of the nation, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently said.

She didn’t mean that as a warning, but you should know: It is one.

“I think California really is leaning in. And of course, the federal government has a goal of — the president has announced — by 2030 that half of the vehicles in the U.S., the new ones sold would be electric,” Granholm added.

Get that? She’s saying the federal government, already trying to destroy the auto industry and ruin the oil industry through insane regulations and restrictions that have pushed energy costs to prohibitive levels, hasn’t gone far enough.

Cali’s nuttiness has only just begun under far-left Gov. Gavin Newsom, but already it’s wreaking havoc on the state’s economy. No sooner had California issued its new rules moving the state toward all electrical vehicles than it was slammed with record heat. The state then told EV owners not to charge their cars.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Class Homicide Joel Kotkin

By on September 11th, 2022

https://americanmind.org/salvo/class-homicide/

Massive inequality and the rise of a new feudal system have nearly destroyed the chances of social mobility.

There’s much talk today, from left and right, about threats to democracy, yet little focus on the social dynamic critical to its survival. In this respect, we may see the current, and troubling, escalation of violent political rhetoric, and even political violence, not so much as the cause of polarization but the result of changing class dynamics, most notably the increasingly perilous state of the yeoman middle class.

The United States, and much of the high-income world, is going through a revision of class relations resonant with gilded age, or even feudal models. A recent British parliamentary study projects that by 2030, the top one percent will expand their share to two thirds of the world’s wealth, with the biggest gains overwhelmingly concentrated at the top one percent of the top one percent—the top 0.01 percent.Similarly, in this country, since the mid-1980s, the share of national wealth held by those below the top 10 percent has fallen by 12 percentage points, the same proportion that the top 0.1 percent gained.As one conservative economist put it succinctly in 2018, “The economic legacy of the last decade is excessive corporate consolidation, a mas­sive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent from the middle class.” 

Hierarchy triumphs over merit and even luck

In the process, the aspirational character long essential to American society is being transformed. According to one study, the chances of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the income ladder has declined by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. Data from the Census Bureau show that the share of national income going to the middle 60 percent of households has fallen to a record low.

In the economy, hierarchy is rapidly replacing opportunity. Banking and finance, treated amiably by Washington during the Financial Crisis, have become increasingly concentrated while many smaller regional institutions have either been acquired or driven out of business.  Growing corporate concentration has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy in both the U.S. and Europe. In Silicon Valley now, the renowned garage culture has morphed into a Gargantua of giant firms with market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 to 90 percent of key tech markets.  

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Higher Ed’s New Woke Loyalty Oaths A ballooning number of hiring and tenure decisions require candidates to express written fealty to political doctrines John Sailer

By on September 11th, 2022

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/higher-ed-new-woke-loyalty-oaths-dei

In 2021, the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) School of Medicine—ranked fourth in the country for primary care—released a 24-page “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Strategic Action Plan,” listing dozens of “tactics” for advancing “diversity and racial equity” over the ensuing half-decade. One of those tactics reads: “Include a section in promotion packages where faculty members report on the ways they are contributing to improving DEI, anti-racism and social justice.” The plan promises to “reinforce the importance of these efforts by establishing clear consequences and influences on promotion packages.”

OHSU’s policy represents the latest stage in the institutional entrenchment of DEI programming. Universities have long required diversity statements for faculty hiring—short essays outlining one’s contributions to DEI and future plans for advancing DEI. Since it began almost a decade ago, the policy has been criticized as a thinly veiled ideological litmus test. Whether you see it as one largely depends on whether you think DEI is simply a set of corporate “best practices” like any other, or constitutes a rigid set of political and social views. In any event, the diversity statements and criteria have only expanded, and are now commonly required for promotion, tenure, and faculty evaluation.

A quick search for academic jobs inevitably yields dozens or hundreds of positions that require diversity statements. In November 2021, the American Enterprise Institute conducted a survey of faculty jobs and found that 19% required them, a number that is likely to grow. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, applicants seeking positions in chemical and biomolecular engineering must submit a one-page “Statement describing candidate’s approach to and experience with diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education.” At the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, despite a new law that prohibits requiring job applicants “to endorse a specific ideology or political viewpoint,” applicants for a job in political science must submit a “statement concerning experience with and plans for contributing to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Meanwhile, every open faculty position listed by Ohio State University’s College of Arts and Sciences, including roles in econometrics, freshwater biology, and astronomy, requires some variation of a statement “articulating the applicant’s demonstrated commitments and capacities to contribute to diversity, equity, and inclusion through research, teaching, mentoring, and/or outreach and engagement.”

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