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January 2023

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden Released More Illegals in 3 Months Than Population of Montana Even blue cities have been overloaded by Daniel Greenfield

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-released-more-illegals-in-3-months-than-population-of-montana/

Biden made his ritual visit to an El Paso scrubbed of illegal aliens and a detention center scrubbed of detainees. The entire Potemkin village setup was meant to kick off Biden’s plan to get rid of Title 42 and ram open the border all the way to flood the nation with illegal aliens even more than it already is.

How bad is it now?

“Using even a very conservative estimate of unknown got aways, Biden has released or allowed more illegals into the United States in the last 100 days than the whole population of Montana. An entire storied American state now exceeded by just 3+ months of foreign lawbreakers,” Stephen Miller tweeted.

That’s the massive rate of demographic change underway. And it’s entirely intentional.

Even blue cities have been overloaded and are begging for help. But the bigger plan is to eliminate red states entirely.

The Biden regime claims that they can’t do anything about it. Sure, they can’t.

Biden’s visit was scheduled at a time when border crossings had already dropped drastically in El Paso.

They control the trafficking and they control the border.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

LGBTQ+++™ Propaganda Study: Children Given Irreversible Puberty Blockers Continue Treatment Into Adulthood By Ben Bartee

By on January 9th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/01/08/lgbtq-propaganda-study-children-given-irreversible-puberty-blockers-continue-treatment-into-adulthood-n1659772

A cohort study recently published in The Lancet, the bible of the biomedical establishment, found that children administered puberty blockers (euphemistically termed “gender-affirming hormones”) kept up with “therapy” into adulthood.

Via The Lancet:

720 people were included, of whom 220 (31%) were assigned male at birth and 500 (69%) were assigned female at birth…

Most participants who started gender-affirming hormones in adolescence continued this treatment into adulthood. The continuation of treatment is reassuring considering the worries that people who started treatment in adolescence might discontinue gender-affirming treatment.

Of course, corporate state propaganda outlets and the study’s authors (which demonstrates the bias built into the study) spin these findings as proof that they are necessary. Why, the argument goes, should these irreversible drugs be considered harmful for children when most of the children given to them end up using them in adulthood?

Via NPR:

Marianne van der Loos, a physician at Amsterdam UMC’s Center for Expertise on Gender Dysphoria, is the paper’s lead author.

“I think it’s an important finding because we see that most of these people continue to use gender-affirming hormones,” van der Loos tells NPR.

But really what this study shows is that in-group social pressure and inertia exist, which should already have been obvious.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Governor DeSantis is picking a fight with the academic left, and it’s a shrewd move. By Thomas Lifson

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/governor_desantis_is_picking_a_fight_with_the_academic_left_and_its_a_shrewd_move_.html

I am thrilled that Ron DeSantis is putting in place people who want to reverse the woke academic coup d’état at one state-run institution of higher education. New College of Florida is a rarity: a public liberal arts small college (675 students) that is part of the State University System of Florida, where in-state tuition is under $7000 a year.

Zac Anderson of the Sarasota Herald Tribune writes:

Gov. Ron DeSantis began the process Friday of transforming Sarasota’s New College of Florida into a more conservative institution, appointing six new board members, including conservative activist Christopher Rufo, a dean at conservative Hillsdale College and a senior fellow at The Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank.

“It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the south,” Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz said in a statement.

The shakeup of the 13-member board is certain to create major tensions at New College, an institution that started as a progressive private school before becoming the state’s liberal arts honors college. The small school’s student body and faculty have a reputation for leaning left politically.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s New Border Strategy: Blame Republicans First

By on January 9th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/09/bidens-new-border-strategy-blame-republicans-first/

At a briefing last week, a daring reporter asked President Joe Biden why he decided to visit the border now, after Republicans have been calling for him to do so for nearly two years – during which time an unprecedented 4.4 million people crossed the border illegally.  

Biden’s answer: “Because the Republicans haven’t been serious about this at all. Come on. They haven’t been serious about this at all.”

That answer makes no sense. If Republicans haven’t been serious – which is a bald-faced lie – then wouldn’t that be more of an incentive for Biden to take the reins?

But nothing Biden is saying lately about the border makes sense. It didn’t when he was denying the problem existed. It doesn’t now that he’s trying to shift blame to the GOP.

Remember that from day one, Biden insisted that the border was secure. At least, that’s what he’s had his Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas tell Congress repeatedly. Mayorkas did so as recently as November, a month when border patrol agents “encountered” more than 233,000 – which was 33% more than the previous November, 224% more than November 2021, and 448% higher than November 2020.

For the most part, Biden simply ignored the issue, and with Democrats in charge of Congress, he knew there’d be no accountability. Plus, he could count on the media to ignore the issue.

But now with Republicans in control of the House, suddenly ignoring the border isn’t an option. The GOP won’t let the issue slide.

So, what’s Biden’s recourse? Simple. Blame Republicans.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu: The Unexpected Moderate by Amir Taheri

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19297/netanyahu-moderate

After decades, some genius pretended to have discovered the “two-state solution.” That “solution”, of course, had been offered by the United Nations and accepted by the Jews under the “extremist” David Ben Gurion in 1947, but rejected by neighboring Arab states. Its revival by Western powers, notably the United States, was an exercise in diplomatic wild goose chasing.

The fact is that repeated opinion polls and elections show that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians do not want the “two-state solution…”

[T]he dismantling of all settlements in Gaza never led to the peace expected.

As the theme of the settlements began to appear shopworn, a new version of the “Palestinian problem” was put into circulation: “Israeli Apartheid.” But that, too, was never defined. In South Africa under Apartheid, black and colored citizens were not allowed to vote or get elected. In Israel, non-Jewish citizens can and do. Palestinians in the West Bank do not have those rights because they are not Israeli citizens.

Opinion polls in the West Bank, too, show that bread-and-butter politics and cleaning corruption are the top concerns of Palestinians.

That problem might find a solution only if both Israelis and Palestinians are convinced that solving it is in their own interest. Whichever way one looks at it, that conviction isn’t there yet. And even if, one day, that conviction materializes, there is no guarantee that those who have built whole carriers and national strategies around perpetuating it will allow a solution to be agreed and applied.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Can the Biden Administration Define Anti-Semitism? The federal government should adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, which includes attacks on Jewish identity. By Alvin Rosenfeld and Leslie Lenkowsky

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-administration-define-anti-semitism-attack-violence-synagogues-jewish-identity-11673208133?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The Biden administration announced in mid-December the creation of an interagency working group to develop “a national strategy to combat antisemitism.” This effort, which will span both domestic and foreign policy, is overdue. Anti-Semitism has been on the rise globally since the turn of the century, and the U.S. isn’t immune to the harm it causes. To succeed, however, the working group must first answer a basic question: What is anti-Semitism?

One answer is affirmed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a group of 35 countries (including the U.S.). The IHRA defines the term as “rhetorical and physical manifestations” of hatred toward Jews. Defacing synagogues and cemeteries, harassing people wearing Jewish religious symbols and, at the extreme, assaulting or murdering people because they are Jewish are examples. These kinds of incidents have been rising in the U.S. and elsewhere.

But another expression of anti-Semitism has recently grown more common, especially in higher education and parts of popular culture. It takes forms such as Holocaust denial or minimization, comparing Israeli policies to those of the Nazis, and denying the Jewish people “their right to self-determination” by claiming that Israel is a “racist endeavor.” According to the Amcha Initiative, a nonprofit focusing on campus hostilities, these kinds of attacks on “Jewish identity” occurred during the 2021-22 academic year at 60% of schools with large populations of Jewish students.

The IHRA’s definition, which includes both types of anti-Semitism. is widely endorsed by governments and numerous private organizations. But it isn’t legally binding. Even so, in 2019 the Trump administration issued an executive order aimed at extending the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to cover discrimination “rooted in anti-Semitism.” It called on federal agencies to “consider” using IHRA’s definition while keeping in mind the First Amendment’s protection of speech. The State Department has also been using the IHRA’s definition in reporting on anti-Semitic activities throughout the world.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How the FBI Hacked Twitter The answer begins with Russiagate by Lee Smith

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-the-fbi-hacked-twitter-lee-smith

After journalist Matt Taibbi published the first batch of internal Twitter documents known as the Twitter files, he tweeted that the company’s deputy general counsel, James Baker, was vetting them.

“The news that Baker was reviewing the ‘Twitter files’ surprised everyone involved,” Taibbi wrote. That apparently included even Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, who added that Baker may have deleted some of the files he was supposed to be reviewing.

Baker had been the top lawyer at the FBI when it interfered in the 2016 presidential election. News that he might have been burying evidence of the spy service’s use of a social media company to interfere with the 2020 election, is rightly setting off alarm bells.

In fact, the FBI’s penetration of Twitter constituted just one part of a much larger intelligence operation—one in which the bureau offshored the machinery it used to interfere in the 2016 election and embedded it within the private sector. The resulting behemoth, still being built today, is a public-private consortium made up of U.S. intelligence agencies, Big Tech companies, civil society institutions, and major media organizations that has become the world’s most powerful spy service—one that was powerful enough to disappear the former president of the United States from public life, and that is now powerful enough to do the same or worse to anyone else it chooses. 

Records from the Twitter files show that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million, apparently for actions in connection with the 2020 election and nominally a payout for the platform’s work censoring “dangerous” content that had been flagged as mis- or disinformation. That “dangerous” content notably included material that threatened Joe Biden and implicated U.S. officials who have been curating the Biden family’s foreign corruption for decades.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The shameful silence on the Taliban’s war on women Why Western progressives are so unwilling to criticise Islamic tyranny. Brendan O’Neill

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/08/the-shameful-silence-on-the-talibans-war-on-women/

Two images of men are seared into my mind from the month of December. In the first, brave lads in Afghanistan, about to sit a university exam, get out of their seats, pick up their exam papers, and leave. They were protesting against the Taliban’s obscene ban on women attending university. It was a moving act of solidarity, a courageous display of moral conscience in a nation in which you can be severely punished for doing such a thing. The men jeopardised their education to take a stand against the vile misogyny of their government.

In the second image, a row of men in Holyrood, the Scottish parliament, applaud as Nicola Sturgeon’s gender-ID bill is passed. The men look nothing like our modestly dressed heroes in Afghanistan. Their attire is eccentric. They have long, strangely coloured hair. They don’t even think of themselves as men – they claim to be women. And their gesture was about as far from an act of solidarity with women as it is possible to get. They were cheering the passing of a bill that will make it ridiculously easy for a man to be legally recognised as a woman. Where those valiant Afghans were fighting for the right of women to enter into the sphere of education, the grinning trans activists in Holyrood were fighting for the right of men to enter into women-only spaces. The former want women’s rights expanded; the latter want them shrunk.

Nothing better captures the moral degeneracy of the modern West than the contrast between these two events last month. It was nothing short of despicable that as women were violently cast out of universities in Afghanistan, reduced to second-class citizens in the most brutal fashion, the issue that was occupying the minds of the supposedly virtuous here in the UK was the right of men to say: ‘I’m a woman!’ Valorous men in Afghanistan put their necks on the line for a woman’s right to learn alongside men. Right-on, pronoun-declaring, vegan men in the West put nothing whatsoever on the line for a man’s right to get undressed alongside women.

There’s a last days of Rome feel to all this now. Only a society that had become utterly untethered from sense and reason could devote so much energy to the navel-gazing gender ideology.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America: a nation of giants led by pygmies However dreadful its political class, the US’s fundamentals are overwhelmingly strong. Joel Kotkin

By on January 9th, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/08/america-a-nation-of-giants-led-by-pygmies/

The United States today stands as a living contradiction to the ‘great man theory of history’. For the US is a great country led by small minds. In recent times, it has been ruled by a narcissistic moral reprobate and it is now being run by a cognitively deficient and scandal-plagued politician. There is a growing feeling, particularly among the young, that today’s America is diminished. Yet the US remains the world’s premier power, and its last best hope against a rising authoritarian tide.

So, how does an America led by mediocrities succeed? The secret sauce lies in two great assets – America’s geography and its constitution.

America enjoys an enormous expanse of arable land, the largest in the world, bigger than that of Russia and Ukraine combined, and nearly 100million acres more than China. It is not only by far the largest food exporter in the world, but it also leads all countries, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, in the production of fossil fuels, which are now being consumed more than ever. And not to be overlooked are America’s vast reserves of fresh water, the third largest on the planet.

These assets separate America from its largest rivals. Neither China nor Europe has adequate domestic energy supplies, making both ever reliant, like Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois, on the ‘kindness of strangers’. Shortages and high prices are already hammering Germany’s industrial economy, from its dynamic mid-sized firms to the giants of its chemicals industry, despite the German government spending a massive half-a-trillion dollars on energy subsidies. Europe is now desperately firing up coal plants and reconsidering nuclear energy, but in the near-term its energy salvation will most likely lie in the oil fields of the Permian basin and other hotbeds of US energy production.

These geographic advantages, as well as the growing global suspicion about China, are turning America once again into the world’s primary destination for foreign investment, particularly in energy-intensive sectors like manufacturing. Japan, Germany and Canada are the top investors. German car giant Volkswagen sees the US as its best bet for ‘strategic growth’, especially given the business and political pressure against investment in China.

Yet perhaps even more than nature’s gifts, America’s greatest asset may lie in its centuries-old constitutional order. This is very different to the much ballyhooed, bureaucratic ‘rules-based’ system so attractive to Eurocrats and their American admirers. In Europe, decisions are based on the political fashions of the moment. Only a bureaucracy in thrall to green ideology, for instance, could have ignored all the warning signs of the current energy crisis and placed ever more bets on unreliable wind and solar in the name of stopping climate change – even while China, by far the world’s biggest emitter of CO2, is building more coal plants to power its homes and industries. Today, coal is now being consumed more than at any time in history.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Coming Future Of Electric Vehicles: Something Here Does Not Add Up Francis Menton

By on January 9th, 2023

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=e232eda9a3

Supposedly, we are rapidly on our way toward a zero-carbon, all electric energy future. But has anybody done the arithmetic to see if this adds up?

I’m carving myself out a niche as the guy who does a few simple calculations to check if the grand schemes of our central planners make any sense. So far I’ve taken that approach to the question of energy storage to back up a wind/solar electricity grid, and on that one the schemes of the central planners most definitely do not add up. But the energy storage question, although involving no math beyond basic arithmetic, does have some complexities. How about something somewhat simpler, like: If we convert our entire automobile fleet to all-electric cars, where is the electricity going to come from?

With the big push currently on to get rid of internal combustion vehicles and replace them with electrics, surely someone has done the calculations to be sure that the electricity supply will be ample. Actually, that does not appear to be the case. Once again, the central planners have no idea what they are doing.

A few things in the recent news make this issue highly topical. First, in the days just before Christmas, much of the country experienced a severe cold snap. Severe, that is, but not record-breaking. Almost everywhere that had very cold temperatures during those days had had even colder temperatures in the past, not necessarily every year, but multiple times over the course of decades. Second, several utilities found themselves with insufficient electricity to meet demand, and had to impose rolling blackouts on their customers, even in the face of freezing cold temperatures. Examples of utilities imposing rolling blackouts during the severe cold wave included Duke Energy (covering most of North and South Carolina, and parts of Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky) and TVA (covering all of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Mississippi and Kentucky). Both of those utilities, and many others, have spent the last decade and more shuttering reliable coal power plants, and building lots of wind turbines and solar panels, along with some (but obviously not enough) natural gas plants, as replacements.

As of today, electric vehicles are a tiny fraction of all vehicles (less than 1% in the U.S., says Reuters as of February 2022), particularly in these Midwestern and Southern states. Yet even with only the tiniest level of electricity demand coming from electric vehicles, already major utilities are short of electricity when a not-out-of-the-ordinary cold snap hits.

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