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June 2023

The WHO Welcomes North Korea Kim Jong Un gets a seat on the executive board. Trump approves.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/world-health-organization-north-korea-kim-jong-un-world-health-assembly-donald-trump-9fb7d02b?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The World Health Organization had a bad pandemic, bowing far too much to Chinese influence and making it harder to discover the origin of Covid-19. The WHO added to that embarrassment recently when the World Health Assembly voted to allow North Korea to serve on the WHO executive board.

Yes, that’s the government in Pyongyang known for its network of camps where political prisoners starve to death. On the executive board, Pyongyang will have a say in setting and enforcing international norms about global health—which it will no doubt flout if WHO ever dared apply them to North Korea.

The farce continued when Donald Trump congratulated North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un on his social media platform, Truth Social. “Congratulations to Kim Jung Un!” [sic] wrote the former President. Keep in mind Mr. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the WHO after its Covid blunders, only to have President Biden rejoin.

Mr. Trump’s comments didn’t sit well with his rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination. “No one should be praising the dictator in North Korea or praising the leader of Russia who has launched an unprovoked war of aggression in Ukraine,” former Vice President Mike Pence told Fox News. Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, said “you don’t congratulate a thug.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said “we need to be getting out of WHO” rather than “congratulating” Kim for being involved in the WHO.

Meanwhile, WHO denied Taiwan even observer status to the World Health Assembly, and singled out Israel for condemnation over claims it violated the health rights of its Palestinian and Druze populations. Kim Jong Un will fit right in.

China’s Space Program: Designed to Defeat the United States by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19701/china-space-program-defeat

Far more significant than scoring space spectaculars, however, is the question of which nation will achieve military dominance in the domain of near-earth space. Chinese international media deceitfully stresses the peaceful, cooperative, and scientific nature of its national space program. However, the ambitious nature of China’s space program indicates that Beijing’s primary objective is to dominate near earth space.

China’s PLA is openly preparing for war, particularly in areas where Beijing’s territorial and maritime claims are illegal and hegemonic.

The aggressive nature of China’s space program is particularly obvious in its anti-satellite projects.

The proximity of these Chinese anti-satellite vehicles clearly reveals the mission to degrade and/or blind collection and transmission of intelligence data by US systems. Another Chinese anti-satellite project features a satellite with a grappling hook, designed to capture US satellites as an immediate prelude to war.

Beijing is planning to win a war in space as part of its reported overall objective of replacing the US as the dominant power on earth. One assessment estimates that fully 84% of China’s space launches are military in nature — indicating that the CCP may well be determined to emerge as the only remaining superpower.

It will also most likely be in the dimension of space, as well as biowarfare, that mankind will get a tip-off that a major armed conflict is about to breakout between China and the United States. China at present not only has “killer satellites,” but also reportedly: “Beijing also has rapidly developed an array of space warfare capabilities, including several types of ground-launched anti-satellite missiles capable of hitting satellites in different orbits; ground-based lasers that can blind or damage orbiting satellites; and small robotic satellites capable of maneuvering and grabbing orbiting satellites.”

China will most likely attempt to shut down US intelligence collection, “eyes and ears in the sky,” prior to combat operations on earth. The United States, if an impending military clash seems unavoidable, may be forced to “preemptively retaliate” by disabling China’s intelligence collection and data transmission space-based assets – if it can.

“[I]f the U.S. military doesn’t change course… we’re going to lose fast” — Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote, the deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, americanmilitarynews.com, March 11, 2021.

It seems high time that the US increased its defense budget instead of cutting it, prepositioned arms in Taiwan for deterrence, and got serious about acknowledging the Chinese Communist Party, led by President Xi Jinping, not as a “competitor,” but as an adversary, and an intractable one at that.

The US-China “Space Race” is but one dimension of the ongoing Cold War between the two superpowers. The national space programs of both countries are comprehensive in scope, running across the entire scientific spectrum. Both America and China are focused on scoring space spectaculars to influence the world as to which superpower will inherit the future. Each rival is seeking to be the first to land a human on Mars.

Two Christian Teenagers Charged with Blasphemy and Sent to Jail in Pakistan by CLAAS-UK

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19699/pakistan-christian-teenagers-blasphemy

[Police constable Zahid Sohail] alleged that the boys were making fun of each other and were calling a puppy “Muhammad Ali.”

The families of both boys said they have no puppy.

“‘Muhammad Ali’ is the brand name of the Naswar [tobacco] he takes. While both boys were talking about the brand, at the same time Zahid Sohail, a policeman, was passing by and heard them. Without knowing the facts, he started beating the children, saying they were committing blasphemy.” — Samina Nadeem, the mother of Simon.

[B]oth boys have been sent to jail, and nobody knows their fate.

On May 19, a judicial magistrate in Lahore, Pakistan sent two Christian teenagers, Simon Nadeem, 12, and Adil Baber, 18, to jail on judicial remand, after they were charged under Penal Code section 295-C (the blasphemy law).

Both boys were arrested by the police and charged on May 18 after a complaint was made against them by police constable Zahid Sohail.

Corporate Media Trips Over Itself Trying To Downplay Biden’s Faceplant By: Evita Duffy-Alfonso

https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/05/corporate-media-trips-over-itself-trying-to-downplay-bidens-faceplant/

Americans know the corporate media launders disinformation on behalf of the Democratic Party.

After President Joe Biden faceplanted during the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation ceremony last week, the corporate media immediately began running PR for the president, waving away legitimate concerns surrounding his mental and physical fitness.

“Biden ‘fine’ after fall onstage at Air Force Academy graduation,” reads an NBC headline, framing their story around the totally impartial word of a White House aide. Politico ran a similar story titled, “Biden falls on stage at Air Force graduation but is ‘fine,’ according to spokesperson.” Reuters’ headline read, “Biden trips and falls during graduation ceremony, recovers quickly,” and Newsweek had the creative angle of blaming the whole thing on the Secret Service.

But the most shameless piece of media manipulation after Biden’s tumble comes from The New York Times, which ran a piece titled “Inside the Complicated Reality of Being America’s Oldest President.” You have to hand it to the Times. It takes some truly dedicated propagandists to spin a story about Biden falling before the world on national television into an opportunity to praise the president for his “sharp[ness],” “fit[ness],” and “striking stamina.”

“The two Joe Bidens coexist in the same octogenarian president: Sharp and wise at critical moments, the product of decades of seasoning, able to rise to the occasion even in the dead of night to confront a dangerous world,” read the Times article. “Yet a little slower, a little softer, a little harder of hearing, a little more tentative in his walk, a little more prone to occasional lapses of memory in ways that feel familiar to anyone who has reached their ninth decade or has a parent who has.”

Our Descent into Clown World By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/our_descent_into_clown_world.html

Before the Woke Wars began in earnest, I once naïvely thought that men’s professional sports would remain a small redoubt from the insipid idiocy of “political correctness.”  Stadiums where rowdy fans cheer on strong men engaging in physical acts of confrontation — and sometimes bloody violence — seemed like sturdy cultural ramparts capable of keeping leftist indoctrination at bay.  Alas, owner-imposed ideology across leagues and organized intimidation campaigns against individual players have combined with enough force to crash through the gates.  

Now grown men who have spent their lives training for battle meekly embrace ever-changing Marxist planks before millions of spectators, who likewise are allowed to watch only if they implicitly accept the State’s woke dogma.  Will players and fans be forced to kneel during the National Anthem this week?  To reject their religious faith as an expression of “hate”?  To applaud child-grooming and predation?  To cheer the World Health Organization’s dictatorial control over their lives?  Stay tuned.  The sports leagues will let you know what to believe just as soon as the Marxist brigades lay down new marching orders.  Even men with a surplus of testosterone will be expected to comply.

Just as the beer companies, fake conservative news networks, and so many iconic American companies before them, the sports leagues have turned their backs on generations of loyal fans in a display of repugnant pusillanimity.  I wonder whether the Judases will one day regret it.  I know that the ESG- and DIE-pushing communists are castrating corporate holdouts that resist the Woke Borg, but by bending to the Borg’s will, these companies have destroyed any goodwill with lifelong allies.  When the Marxists come for another pound of flesh from their corporate vassals — and another after that — those in charge will eventually be forced to fight back or surrender.  By that time, though, nobody will be willing to come to their defense.

This has always been the shortsighted corporate gamble of the Woke Wars — there’s never been a communist revolution that did not devour itself.

Culture War Offensive The attack on traditional America intensifies. by Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/culture-war-offensive/

Back in the mid and late 1960s, college students rebelled against authority and American traditions. Social mores, government policies, corporate America, schools, and the media were targeted mostly by urban youth eager for radical change. But now, almost 60 years later, we have done a 180. The government, big business, schools, the media, etc., aka “the establishment,” are now the radicals demanding change.

Even the military has not been spared the ravages of the woke insurgence. The armed forces now proudly support “diversity and inclusion.” The military, whose traditional raison d’être has been defending the country by killing people and blowing up things, now concerns itself with such matters as “reviewing hairstyle and grooming policies for racial bias.”

Big business is no better. Bud Light showed its woke bona fides when it partnered with “trans influencer” Dylan Mulvaney to sell its beer. It didn’t work quite as planned, however, and the company lost billions of dollars. The media, of course, blamed right-wingers for objecting to the marketing campaign.

A while back, retail giant Target began to promote “Pride Month,” but now has upped their game by partnering with a British transexual satanist to push his agenda in their stores. One of the items for sale from Abprallen is a messenger bag that reads “Too Queer for Here.” Additionally, one of the label’s sweatshirts states, “Cure transphobia, not trans people.”

Education is clearly a major target in the culture wars. Most recently, the federal Department of Education concluded an investigation into a Georgia school district, arguing that the removal of several books containing pornographic material “created a hostile environment” for LGBTQ and nonwhite authors and readers. In fact, the books contain sexual depictions, including boys performing oral sex on each other. In a video, Joe Biden called out “MAGA extremists” for banning certain books from the classroom, even though they contained pornographic material.

Law schools are no less woke. Georgetown University Law School is demanding that students consider whether the law should any longer be “considered and enforced neutrally.” A professor at Boston College of Law suggests that it’s time to consider scrapping the Constitution.

The New ‘Treason of the Clerks’ Is the world’s “last best hope” for freedom lost? by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-new-treason-of-the-clerks/

When French writer Julien Benda published The Treason of the Clerks in 1926, Europe still lay in the shadow of the Great War and a failure of civilizational nerve. The old verities of faith were eroding, and new political religions like communism, ethnonationalism, and fascism were battling for ascendancy in people’s hearts and in the streets.

For Benda, this cultural malaise was the consequence of intellectuals––the “clerks” whose vocation is the life of the mind and the search for truth––having betrayed that calling to honor humane ideals and moral integrity, and instead pursued “practical advantages” in order to fulfill the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action,” and promote the idea that “politics decides morality.” He particularly focused on the ideologies “owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions.”

In short, a betrayal of the true vocation of the intellectual to “urge their fellow beings to other religions than to the religion of the material.”

Today, the disease Benda analyzed has metastasized throughout our body politic. This new “betrayal of the clerks” touches on every dimension of our culture, not just the universities, the natural habitat of today’s intellectuals, or its adjuncts in high-brow culture, but in K-12 education, popular culture, many churches, government agencies, sports, media, and entertainments.

This abandonment of truth and moral clarity, and in its place the adoption of a philistine, relativistic utilitarianism, has deep roots. The most heinous betrayal by intellectuals supposedly committed to truth and humane principle is the Holocaust. The seed of this atrocity was “scientific racism,” the application of Darwinian evolution to political and social policy.

From CUNY to the Pandemic, Systemic Anti-Semitism is the Real Problem And the Biden administration is complicit in it. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/from-cuny-to-the-pandemic-systemic-antisemitism-is-the-real-problem/

In May, the Biden administration released its National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism which promoted a definition of antisemitism written by an anti-Israel activist who had defended Islamic terrorism against Jews. The administration partnered with CAIR, refused to acknowledge Islamic antisemitism, or address the worst cases of campus antisemitism at the government’s public universities like the University of California and City University of New York.

Earlier that month, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Students for Justice in Palestine activist, took the podium as the commencement speaker at CUNY Law’s graduation ceremony. Mohammed had previously tweeted, “i pray upon the death of the USA on a public platform” and delivered speeches celebrating violence against Jews. The anti-Israel activist had advocated segregating Jewish professors and students, urging, “”Demand that Zionist professors are not welcomed on your campus! Demand that Zionist students are not in spaces where Palestinian students are.“

Had any such remarks been directed at black or Latino students, Mohammed would never have been allowed to serve as commencement speaker and likely would have been expelled.

At the commencement address, Mohammed celebrated the “rage that fills this auditorium” and expressed hope that it would “fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism around the world” and hailed those “who brought the ferocity of the violence” who will “carry the revolution”.

She praised CUNY Law’s support for BDS and described the Hamas fundraisers of HLF as “political prisoners”. That would presumably include Abdulrahman Odeh who had celebrated a bus stop suicide bombing as a “beautiful operation”.

OSSIFIED AMERICANA PART 4 VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

https://victorhanson.com/ossified-americana-part-four/

The FBI

How, then, do we alter the FBI to save it from itself?

1. Choice One: Move the entire headquarters to Kansas City or Laramie or Oklahoma City. There would be far less incestuous media/political/bureaucratic marriages, lobbying, and consulting, and far less opportunity for cocktail-hour networking, plotting, profiting, and cajoling. And, of course, a different sort of FBI agent would prefer to live far from DC.

2. Choice Two: Farm out the agency’s divisions among the cabinencies. The Departments of the Treasury, Homeland Security, Justice, and Interior could inherit various orphaned FBI sects from counterterrorism to counterfeiting to drugs. A division head would not have the power of a Comey or Wray and be a bit humbler and more reasonable under congressional testimony.

3. Choice Three: Reform the FBI. Put a 5-year limit on the Directorship. Create a permanent oversight committee in Congress. Require special permission to conduct swat-style arrest raids. Advise all FBI personnel that lying to Congress or to federal investigators results in automatic dismissal and loss of pensions, with criminal proceedings to follow.

The Pentagon

The U.S. military’s last draw in a major war was some 70 years ago in South Korea. We won the First Gulf War of 1991, but lost the brief peace by insanely allowing Saddam Hussein, in defeat and humiliation, to slaughter the Kurds and Shias. A decade of no-fly-zones and Iraq 2.0 followed.

The Iraq War (2003-2010) was finally won in 2008. But then Obama yanked out U.S. troops, ISIS absorbed much of the country, and Trump really did have to “bomb the sh*t out of ISIS” to restore the country to whatever it is now.

Our Clinton/Rice/Power Libyan bombing misadventure ruined that country.

The Strange Pandemic of ‘White’ Disparagement All of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/04/the-strange-pandemic-of-white-disparagement/

One of the tenets of the early civil rights movement some 65 years ago was ending racial stereotyping.

When Martin Luther King, Jr. called for emphasizing the “content of our character” over “the color of our skin,” the subtext was “stop judging people as a faceless collective on the basis of their superficial appearance and instead look to them as individuals with unique characters.”

It is tragic that King’s plea for an integrated, assimilated society, in which race became incidental, not essential to our personas, has mostly been abandoned by the Left in favor of racial stereotyping, collective guilting, and scapegoating by race and gender.

Indeed, many of the old Confederate pathologies—fixation on racial essence, obsession with genealogy, nullification of federal laws, states’ rights, and segregated spaces and ceremonies—are now rehabilitated by woke activists.

In that larger landscape, the collective adjective and noun “white” now has also been redefined and mainstreamed as a pejorative to the point of banality.

“White” followed by a string of subsequent oppressive nouns—“rage,” “supremacy,” “privilege”—has become a twitch on campus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion deans and provosts cannot write a memo, issue a communique, or sign a directive without a reference to “white” something or other.

Like the mysterious omnipresence of transgenderism in popular culture, all of a sudden, the obsession with whites as a Satanic collective has become a national fad—a pet-rock or hula-hoop-like collective madness.

Yet such an addiction remains bizarre in a variety of ways. Millions in the present are now to be libeled as oppressors by the contemporary self-described oppressed—supposedly for what some whites who are mostly now dead once did to now mostly dead others.

Yet what does “white” really mean anymore? Is it an adjective or noun indicating color? Culture? Race? Ethnicity? Is white defined as three-quarters, one-half, or one-quarter paleness? Is it an overarching state of mind that encompasses both “Duck Dynasty” and “The West Wing”?