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October 2022

Washington’s Double Legal Standards by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18965/washington-double-legal-standards

Our bureaucrats, it seems, have no boundaries when it comes to a former president of the United States. What a precedent to set. Let us compare that to how they treat themselves.

When Hillary Clinton’s emails were found to contain classified information, some marked at the highest levels of classification, the FBI did not raid her home in Chappaqua, New York. They did not overturn her office or closets when classified emails turned up that she had not sent back to the government or when she wiped the data on her personal server with BleachBit, which meant the government would never know the full extent of the documents Clinton kept. Why was she treated differently by the FBI?

Consider the case of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who lied to the Senate when he declared that the intelligence community had no mass surveillance program collecting data on Americans. Not only did he lie in his public testimony before the committee, he also refused to acknowledge his lie and instead tried to explain it away.

[Clapper] also refused to acknowledge his lie and instead tried to explain it away. Because Clapper is a protected bureaucrat, he faced no consequences, and even joined CNN as a paid national security contributor, regularly attacking former President Trump. CNN does not note that he perjured himself before Congress — with evidence — when they put him on the air.

Hayden also stated that the [CIA interrogation] tapes were destroyed, “only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquires.” Again, all evidence points to the contrary, and Hayden is wrong to make these clearly false assertions.

Hayden’s efforts, however, were just another in a long line of efforts to cover up the actions of unaccountable bureaucrats, who not surprisingly, were never held legally accountable.

My candid advice to Biden, Hayden, Clapper, and many other media commentators, is to consider your own records — and be careful what you advocate.

Former CIA Director Mike Hayden, shortly after the FBI raided the home of former President Donald J. Trump, responded to a tweet by Michael Beschloss in a way that, apart from disregarding any presumption of innocence, seemingly endorsed the idea that Trump was a spy who, for allegedly having taken classified documents, should be executed by the government, as the Rosenbergs were in 1953 for having passed US nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. “Sounds about right,” Hayden wrote over of photograph of the Rosenbergs on Twitter.

Campus Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Excludes and Targets Jews In an age of skyrocketing antisemitism, university programs meant to combat prejudice and hate have become the latest Jew-free zone by Armin Rosen

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/campus-diversity-equity-inclusion-dei-excludes-targets-jews

Making the world safe for Jews in an age of skyrocketing antisemitism isn’t something American universities tend to believe they need to stand for. In a review of 24 major college and university diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, the advocacy group Stop Antisemitism found that only two of them had any specific programming or materials related to antisemitism. “DEI departments have not made fighting antisemitism a priority,” the group concludes in its 2022 “report card” of American campuses.

DEI itself is definitely a priority on campuses, though. Among the 65 large universities that comprise the “power-five” athletic conferences there are nearly 3,000 employees dedicated to DEI, according to a July 2021 analysis by the Heritage Foundation. Collectively, these institutions had 1.4 DEI officers for every history professor, and 3.4 DEI officials for every 100 tenured or tenure-track scholars in their employ.

As the report notes, these institutions have no legal obligation whatsoever to hire thousands of diversity bureaucrats—which is not the case, for example, with staff dedicated to providing federally required aid to disabled students. Even so, of the 65 universities surveyed, only Baylor University and the University of Minnesota employed more Americans with Disabilities Act compliance officers than DEI personnel. A pricey, often-invasive DEI regime is something these universities chose to expand in the wake of the nationwide racial justice protests in 2020, at the expense of providing adequate support for adjunct faculty, limiting class size, and other lesser budgetary priorities. Mistaken or not, DEI is an expression of academia’s deepest sense of its mission during a time of rapid social dislocation

The reason that taxpayers should care about how American higher ed chooses to deploy its resources is that we are paying for it. On top of the enormous cost of America’s publicly funded higher education system, President Joe Biden’s executive decree of limited debt relief for certain student loan borrowers will cost the government upwards of an additional $400 billion, according to a late September analysis from the Congressional Budget Office. In practice, this is an eye-watering taxpayer subsidy for a system that has transformed itself over the past three decades into a vast federally funded cartel that has shunted aside traditional academic occupations of teaching and research in favor of bureaucratic thought-policing and ideological indoctrination. It is a mark of the failure of this system to provide the educational goods that taxpayers think they’re paying for that its graduates now require emergency federal assistance years or even decades after graduating.

How and Why Vladimir Putin Survives by Augusto Zimmermann

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/10/how-and-why-vladimir-putin-survives/

The first attempt to realise Karl Marx’s dream of a communist utopia happened in the former Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1991.  According to Stéphane Courtois, co-author of the seminal The Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999), victims of that communist regime have been estimated to range around 20 million.[1]

On January 1, 1992, “the evil Soviet empire”, to borrow a term from a landmark 1983 speech by Ronald Reagan, finally came to an end. It collapsed and was replaced by 15 new nations, the largest and most populous of which was the Russian Federation. The imperial white-blue-red flag introduced by Peter the Great was reinstalled as the national flag in 1993. The Russian Church’s national holidays were restored.

For most Russians, however, the early 1990s was a time of despair, uncertainty and hardship. During that period, real power laid entirely in the hands of local oligarchs. As noted by Orlando Figes, a British historian best known for his outstanding books on Russian history, those oligarchs “behaved as if they were the government”, demanding posts from the then-president Boris Yeltsin, who was barely able to carry out his job due to heart attacks and heavy drinking. “The state was in danger of breaking into fiefdoms controlled by the oligarchs”, Figes says.[2]

By the end of the 1990s the Russians were desperately hoping for someone who could save their nation, someone who would be healthy, patriotic and … sober. It is in this context that a former intelligence officer was manoeuvred into power in the mid-1990s. Vladimir Putin had just returned from Germany to his hometown of St. Petersburg. In due course, he became the city’s deputy mayor, and, in 1996, he moved to Moscow. On 9 August 1999, he was appointed first deputy prime minister and later that year Yeltsin resigned. Then Putin became Russia’s acting president.[3] 

Putin was a candidate in that year’s presidential election. He campaigned with the promise of a “dictatorship of the rule of law”, thus appealing to everyone tired of the lawlessness of the past decade.[4] As a result, Putin duly won in the first round of that election with 53 per cent of the vote.[5]  Ordinary Russians, desperate for an end to their misery, believed they had found in their new president an energetic politician who could lead the nation towards a brighter future. Indeed, the early 2000s were marked by a remarkable recovery of the Russian economy, which allowed ordinary Russians to enjoy unprecedented levels of comfort and security.[6]

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

In the 9th Oct 22 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include:
 

An Israeli breakthrough delivers chemotherapy without side-effects.

An Israeli emergency NGO aided hurricane victims in Puerto Rico and Florida.

Israeli satellite technology is saving global water supplies.

Israel’s electric airplane takes off.

Israel’s Free Trade Agreement with South Korea has been ratified.

Israeli soccer celebrates two major successes.

A hundred babies were born at one Jerusalem hospital during the Jewish New Year.

All the foregoing, and much more is listed by Michael Ordman. Israel’s global reach gives the lie to B.D.S.-the boycott, divest and sanction libels.

Here is true B.D.S. about Israel: Breathtaking Diagnostic Science every single day which reaches Botswana, Denmark, Senegal. rsk

 
 
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Nanotech to deliver precision chemotherapy. Scientists at Israel’s Technion Institute have developed a nano-material that can deliver different toxic cancer therapies directly to tumors, without harming healthy cells. Robot chemistry was used to test different materials. The breakthrough can vastly reduce chemo side effects.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-tech-can-reduce-side-effects-and-increase-range-of-cancer-drugs-scientists/  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0142961222004409?dgcid=author
 
Detecting tumors via fungi. Scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute have discovered that most tumors have fungi growing inside them. They have also documented their types using records from 17,000 cancer patients. DNA from fungi is detectable in the blood and can be used to develop a new cancer screening method.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/fungus-is-telltale-cancer-sign-possibly-screenable-by-blood-test-israel-us-study/
 
Diagnosing CJD. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) was well known during the “mad cow” epidemic. But it can also be caused by an inherited gene mutation. Tel Aviv’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center is one of only a dozen hospitals globally to use a 92% accurate spinal fluid test for early onset CJD.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/cutting-edge-test-for-fatal-brain-disorder-now-available-in-israel/
 
AI startup to assess new treatments. AION Labs – the Israeli innovation lab for startups (see here previously) has itself launched a startup.  OMEC.AI aims to predict if a new treatment will succeed following pre-clinical trials. Its next-generation computational platform will gauge effectiveness and expose safety issues.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-innovation-lab-backed-by-pharmaceutical-biotech-giants-mints-1st-ai-startup/  https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/aion-labs-launches-ai-startup-addressing-drug-trial-improvement-301635181.html
 
AI engine thinks like a doctor. Israel’s Kahun (see here previously) has expanded from merely a Covid-19 diagnosis system to a full “digital medical advisor”. Its XAI engine bases its clinical reasoning decisions on Kahun’s proprietary map of over 30 million evidence-based medical insights.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bkswkgqmo
 
CE Mark for AR ophthalmic exoscope. Israel’s Beyeonics Vision (see here previously) now has European as well as US approval for its Beyeonics One™ ophthalmic exoscope. The augmented reality (AR) surgical headset gives eye doctors vastly enhanced abilities when performing eye surgery (e.g., cataracts).
https://www.prnewswire.com/il/news-releases/beyeonics-vision-has-completed-the-ce-mark-registration-for-its-beyeonics-one-ophthalmic-exoscope-301636525.html
 
Matricelf wins 3rd place in Startup World Cup. Israel’s Matricelf (see here previously) was placed third out of 17,000 contenders for the 2022 Startups World Cup in San Francisco. Matricelf developed the technology for the heart 3D-printed by Tel Aviv University scientists in 2019 (see here).
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/r1vns800fo
 
WHO conference in Tel Aviv. For the first time, the World Health Organization came to Israel to hold its 72nd session of the WHO Regional Committee for Europe. 53 nations attended the conference from Sep 12-14 during which Israel signed bilateral health cooperation deals with Germany, Croatia, Cyprus, and Kazakhstan.
https://www.jns.org/opinion/heart-of-the-middle-east-israel-a-medical-and-ethical-leader/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tvOeu-ETf0  

Maine University Students Demand Prof Be Fired for Contradicting Their Fantasy That There are Multiple Genders By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2022/10/09/maine-university-students-demand-prof-be-fired-for-contradicting-their-fantasy-that-there-are-multiple-genders-n1635693

“A time is coming,” said St. Anthony the Great way back in the fourth century, “when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’” And here we are. Fox News reported Friday that “students at the University of Southern Maine (USM) are demanding that their professor be replaced for saying that only two sexes exist.”

The students, drunk on the Left’s fantasies and propaganda about there being a multiplicity of genders, actually got up and walked out of professor Christy Hammer’s graduate education class en masse, because she dared to state the simple and obvious truth that cuts against the way they wish the world to be: There are only two biological sexes, male and female.

In response, instead of telling the students that they should stop denying the obvious and try to reconcile themselves to reality, university officials acceded to their demand to hold what the Bangor Daily News called a “facilitated restorative justice meeting.” Adamantine in their delusions, the students demanded that Hammer be fired. USM professors who believe that water is wet and that human beings cannot get along without breathing air are trembling; they could be next.

Oddly enough, in today’s carnival academic environment, USM declined to bring the hammer down on Hammer. However, it did bow to the slavering crazies enough to make an “alternative, identical class” available to the students who remain defiant in their insanity. USM spokesperson Gina Marie Guadagnino explained, “We have developed an alternative plan for this class and will be opening a new section of this course for those students who would like to move.” Sane students, however, will still be able to take Hammer’s class: “The original section taught by professor Hammer will continue for any student who wishes to remain in that class.” It will be interesting to see how many students choose each option.

A Victory for Sanity In the Battle Against Mail-In Ballot Madness By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/10/10/the-morning-briefing-a-victory-for-sanity-in-the-battle-against-mail-in-ballot-madness-n1635772

Buried among the torrent of dreck I found a bit of good news in a post written by one of our new writers, Catherine Salgado:

The Delaware Supreme Court ruled on Friday that a state law enacting universal mail-in voting and creating same-day voter registration was in violation of the state constitution.

“The Vote-by-Mail Statute impermissibly expands the categories of absentee voters identified in Article V, Section 4A of the Delaware Constitution. Therefore, the judgment of the Court of Chancery that the Vote-by-Mail Statute violates the Delaware Constitution should be affirmed,” the Delaware Supreme Court decision said.

This accorded with a September opinion ruling against universal mail-in voting, but the new decision reversed its previous approval of same-day registration.

Delaware is a bit bluer than the other states that have been fighting for more election integrity, that’s what makes this news so interesting.

Goodbye Columbus? It is only because of the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that we even have a basis to criticize the actions of our forebears. By Mackubin Owens

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/09/goodbye-columbus/

This Monday is the federal holiday called “Columbus Day” to honor a man who was once lauded as a great mariner and courageous explorer, whose exploits led to the European discovery of the Americas. 

But in recent decades, Columbus has been demonized and accused of all manner of atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

The attacks on Columbus are part of the broader denigration of Western Civilization as racist, exploitative, and imperialistic. A major source of the assault on both Columbus and Western Civilization is a widely used history textbook by the late Howard Zinn, A Peoples’ History of the United States. Zinn was more of a Marxist polemicist than a legitimate scholar, and the book has been panned, even by left-wing historians who express concern about the damage that politicized history could do to their profession.

As Mary Graber has pointed out in her scathing critique of Zinn, his chapter on Columbus was plagiarized from Columbus: His Enterprise: Exploding the Myth, a book for high schoolers, first published in 1976 by Hans Koning. As she and others, including Robert Royal and Armando Simon, observe, contemporary accounts contradict the portrait of Columbus painted by the likes of Koning and Zinn. He, like most men, was imperfect but far from the moral monster described by these modern leftist writers.

Ukraine and the Malevolent Legacy of the Obama-Biden Administration The United States is shackled by a near decade of Russian reset and the aggression it invited on By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/09/ukraine-and-the-malevolent-legacy-of-the-obama-biden-administration/

During the current Ukrainian war, the media has created a mythology that the Left was tough on Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And thus, now it simply continues its hard-nosed efforts in Ukraine. 

But nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from Biden’s original panic of evacuating American diplomatic personnel from Kyiv, offering a ride out of Ukraine for the Zelenskyy government that would have effectively collapsed his nation’s resistance, and hesitation in selling Ukraine offensive weapons, there is also a prior legacy that had done a great deal of harm.

Indeed, many of America’s current difficulties in Ukraine originate from the Obama-Biden Administration’s former disastrous policies toward Russia birthed between 2009-2016. 

Remembering the Reset Disaster

Remember the initial premise of Russian “Reset”—the idea and the term were first used by Vice President Joe Biden (“It’s time to press the reset button”)—was based on the myth that the “cowboy” George W. Bush had been too tough on Putin after the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. To Biden and Obama, Bush had unduly sanctioned Vladimir Putin following his opportunistic absorption of South Ossetia in 2008 and attack on Georgia. And thus, the Russian dictator would easily then be wowed by Obama’s legendary charisma and charm from needless hostility to accommodation.

Accordingly, the reformist hope-and-change Obama Administration would rebuild a friendly relationship with Russia. Thereby they would win strategic help from Russia with Obama’s new ambitious agendas for Iran and Syria in remaking a more “equitable” Middle East. Translated that meant “balancing” the region. Thus, by weakening our former overdog allies in the Gulf and Israel while empowering our former underdog terrorist-sponsoring enemies in Tehran and Damascus, Obama sought to create strategic tension.

Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Stands Against the Canceling of Kanye While progressives seethe. by Christine Williams

https://www.frontpagemag.com/sean-diddy-combs-stands-against-the-canceling-of-kanye/

Kanye West is determined to keep on wearing his “White Lives Matter” t-shirt, which he sported at his Paris Fashion Week show, despite fierce and expected backlash from the Left.

Kanye is clearly — as he said in his interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson — stating “the obvious.” He is also clearly distancing himself from — and countering — the woke hatred of the Marxist, thieving, destructive Black Lives Matter movement, which has only hurt black Americans.

West’s t-shirt also achieves something else: it presents the picture of a successful and wealthy black man in America who rejects victimhood and embraces ALL races — including white people. This is a nightmare for the woke leftists. And while they convulse in rage over West’s fashion statement, along comes another problem for them: entertainment icon Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs has stepped up in support of West having the right to do and say what he wants on this matter.

Although Diddy stated that the t-shirts were “very tone-deaf,” he also affirmed that people “don’t have to condemn Kanye or cancel him.”

Vanity Fair described Diddy as “the artist and mogul” who is “defining his next era,” and goes on:

The man who turned hip-hop culture into a global lifestyle brand in the go-go 1990s has a lot to think about during the cultural upheaval of the 2020s. “I am the happiest I’ve ever been in life, I laugh the most, I smile the most, I breathe the most,” he tells me. In a word, Combs has love on his mind.

It doesn’t please the woke, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, or its political and financial supporters, to see a black man happy in America.

Biden Puts Rogue Regimes Ahead of American Families The outcome will be a disaster. by Erick Erickson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-puts-rogue-regimes-ahead-of-american-families/

President Joe Biden is draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep gas prices low solely because he wants to mitigate voter wrath against the Democrats. This comes as OPEC cuts back production by 2 million barrels a day. That will drive up costs, drive up the repurchase cost for the petroleum reserve and increase our national debt, which has now shot above $31 trillion with interest rates rising and debt service payments rising.

Biden has created this mess in large part because he is subservient to rogue regimes and puts their needs ahead of Americans. The outcome will be an emboldened China and a national security headache for the United States.

One of the reasons OPEC is going to cut production is because the majority of the Arab nations involved in OPEC are furious with Biden trying to cut a deal with Iran. Biden stopped considering the Houthi terrorists, funded by Iran, to be terrorists, and the Houthi then escalated attacks on the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

In advancing Iran’s interests at the peace table, Biden risks further destabilization in the Middle East in large part because no one really believes Iran will stop until it has a nuclear weapon. Iran is no friend of most of its Middle Eastern neighbors and wants to be the dominant power in the Middle East over and against Saudi Arabia. This has alienated him from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others as China and Russia seek to ingratiate themselves with our longtime allies.