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February 2024

Democrats keep pushing two-state delusion in Middle East 75% of Palestinians approve of Oct. 7 massacre: Don Feder

https://www.washingtontimes.com/staff/don-feder/

Democrats are driven by delusion: Guns cause crime. Republicans are to blame for the border fiasco. Electric vehicles are the wave of the future. The polar ice caps are melting.

The ultimate fantasy is that a two-state solution will bring peace to the Middle East.

On Jan. 29, 49 Senate Democrats — all except Joe Manchin III and John Fetterman, who abstained on technicalities — co-sponsored an amendment to the Israel aid bill affirming U.S. support for the two-state delusion. All six Democratic senators who are Jewish joined their colleagues. They should return their bar-mitzvah presents forthwith.

Coincidentally, this was the day after Israel buried 24 of its soldiers who died fighting the future leaders of a Palestinian state.

The amendment affirms that the U.S. supports negotiations “resulting in two states with Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace, security, dignity and mutual recognition.” They have no idea how dumb they sound.

For a cold dash of reality, consider a Nov. 14 Arab World for Research and Development poll that showed 75% of Palestinians approved of the Oct. 7 massacre. They approved of the gang rape and genital mutilation of Israeli women, the beheading of babies and the burning of captives alive.

The same percentage said they supported a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.” Kiss Israel goodbye.

Face It: The Energy Transition Ain’t Happening Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-2-4-face-it-the-energy-transition-aint-happening

If you are at all interested in matters of climate and energy, you have probably read hundreds of articles over the past few years about the inevitability of the coming energy transition. A piece of the claimed inevitability is that all good and decent people support this transition as a matter of moral urgency; but it’s not just that. Nor is it just that government backs the transition with all its coercive powers, from subsidies to mandates to regulations. No, most importantly, the transition is said to have become inevitable due to unstoppable economic forces. Wind and solar are now the least expensive ways to generate electricity! Electric vehicles are superior and are taking over the market! And the legacy fossil fuel producers who refuse to change their ways are seeing their huge investments become “stranded assets” that can no longer compete in the new world and must be written off!

Well, look to Manhattan Contrarian as your go-to source for news on how this supposed energy transition is going. The summary is that all the mandates and regulations and trillions of dollars in subsidies in the world can’t make the impossible happen. Here are a few items from the past week:

Shareholder activists demand that BP re-commit to oil and gas.

The last few years have seen many examples of shareholder activists submitting proxy proposals demanding that the major oil and gas companies reduce their carbon emissions and commit to transition out of the oil and gas business. As one significant example, in 2021 an activist investor called Engine #1 demanded that Exxon commit to this transition. In a proxy contest in May 2021, Engine #1 succeeded in electing two directors to the Exxon board over management’s opposition.

I Was Told to Approve All Teen Gender Transitions. I Refused.By Tamara Pietzke

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-refused-to-approve-all-teen-gender-transitions?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

For six years I worked at a hospital that said all teenagers with gender dysphoria must be affirmed. I quit my job to blow the whistle.

I know from firsthand experience what hard times are. Though I had a happy childhood, raised as the middle child by working-class parents in Washington State, my mom died of ovarian cancer when I was 22. 

After that, my family fell apart. I felt lost and alone. 

I decided to become a therapist because I didn’t want anyone to go through what I had, feeling like no one on this planet cares about them. At least they can say their therapist does. 

I earned my master’s in social work from the University of Washington in 2012, and I have worked as a therapist for over a decade in the Puget Sound area. Most recently, I was employed by MultiCare, one of the largest hospital systems in the state. 

For the six years I was there, I worked with hundreds of clients. But in mid-January, I left my job because of what I will go on to describe.

The therapeutic relationship is a special one. We are the original “safe space,” where people are able to explore their darker feelings and painful experiences. The job of the therapist is to guide a patient to self-understanding and sound mental health. This is a process that requires careful assessment and time, not snap judgments and confirmation of a patient’s worldview.

But in the past year I noticed a concerning new trend in my field. I was getting the message from my supervisors that when a young person I was seeing expressed discomfort with their gender—the diagnostic term is gender dysphoria—I should throw out all my training. No matter the patient’s history or other mental health conditions that could be complicating the situation, I was simply to affirm that the patient was transgender, and even approve the start of a medical transition.

I believe this rise of “affirmative care” for young people with gender dysphoria challenges the very fundamentals of what therapy is supposed to provide. 

I am a 36-year-old single mother of three young kids all under the age of six. I am terrified of speaking out, but that fear pales in comparison to my strong belief that we can no longer medicalize youth and cause them potentially irreversible harm. The three patients I describe below explain why I am taking the risk of coming forward.

Last spring, I started seeing a new client, who at 13 years old had one of the most extreme and heartbreaking life stories I’ve ever heard. (For the sake of clarity, I am referring to all patients by their biological sex.)

Indigenous embassy in Jerusalem opens in unconventional ceremony By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/indigenous-embassy-in-jerusalem-opens-in-unconventional-ceremony/

(February 5, 2024) Wearing colorful traditional costumes, native peoples from around the globe made speeches, sang, danced, beat drums and, in one case, sounded a giant ram’s horn on Thursday to celebrate the inauguration of the Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem.

The embassy will serve as a much-needed antidote to the false claims by the Palestinians that there is no evidence of any Jewish life in Israel prior to 1948, when Jews ostensibly arrived as colonialist invaders.

The embassy is in part due to the efforts of the Indigenous Coalition for Israel (ICFI), a New Zealand-based group founded by native Maori to counter the false narrative about the Israel-Palestinian conflict that has “taken hold amongst indigenous peoples” and “has often bled into antisemitism,” its website says.

“We recognize that Jews are the indigenous people of this land, and we stand with you and your struggle,” ICFI co-founder Sheree Trotter told the 200-plus audience, noting that the Land of Israel is the place where the Jewish “nation was forged, its language and sacred literature developed, the beliefs, customs and traditions began. It is the most sacred place in the world to Jews. … This deep connection to a particular land and its ancestors are defining features of indigeneity.”

Trotter expressed her hope that the embassy would become an information hub and welcoming space for indigenous peoples visiting Israel, and act as a center to “galvanize” global indigenous support. The embassy will develop a digital production department to counter misinformation about Israel prevalent on social media and “to tell the story of our indigenous friendship.”

The embassy will also host academic symposia and become a tourist attraction. “We plan in time to have an NGO presence at the United Nations,” she added.

While not an embassy in the ordinary sense—it will not represent governments of the indigenous peoples’ host nations or the indigenous peoples themselves—it has been recognized as an embassy by the State of Israel. The audience cheered when they learned from Gil Haskell, Chief of State Protocol for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, that the Indigenous Embassy was the 100th embassy to be opened in the Jewish state.

“First Out, Next In” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.bolgspot.com

Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward showed the difficulty of getting the future right, especially when idealism co-opts reason. National socialism proved a disaster to Germany and Italy (and the world), and state ownership of industry deep-sixed the Soviet Union. Kierkegaard suggested in the rubric above, life is best lived with an understanding of history. And as George Santayana famously wrote in Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Divisiveness characterizes our age, like the years leading to the Civil War, the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, or the late 1960s when the Country was divided by the Vietnam War. In last Friday’s The Wall Street Journal Lance Morrow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center wrote: “Exaggeration is the traditional style of American politics, but permanent culture wars, the global pandemic, the agitations of social media and the collapse of party discipline – and, not least, the role modeling of Joe Biden and Donald Trump – have left Americans discontent with mere exaggeration.” We have, he added, “gotten addicted to apocalypse…”

Is there a way out? Can reason subsume emotion? Is a middle ground achievable? I think there is, but I don’t believe that either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump will lead the way. The former is in cognizant decline and the latter has become detached from reality. There are big issues that separate the two parties, but democracy is about debate and compromise, not incoherent brawling, which is what our politics have become.

The Who and the What of Behavior_Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is_by Linda Goudsmit

Children are easily controlled because they live in a world of feelings, subjective reality. They have not developed the critical-thinking skills required to survive in the adult world of objective reality.

In a society of ordered liberty, stealing is a crime regardless of who the thief is. Stealing is the WHAT of the crime, the thief is the WHO. Blind justice evaluates behavior according to WHAT is being done, not WHO is doing it, ensuring that no one is above the law. When blindfolds come off and tribal norms of identity politics take over, freedom is the casualty. Blind justice is foundational in a constitutional republic specifically because it evaluates the WHAT of behavior, not the WHO being charged with a crime.

This is an extremely important distinction for two reasons. First, it is a dramatic departure from the binary sociopolitical infrastructure of rulers and ruled. Binary sociopolitical systems support a two-tiered system of justice, one for the rulers and one for the ruled. In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the goal is one system of justice for all.

Second, distinguishing between the WHAT and the WHO separates childish feelings, which focus on the WHO, from adult, rational thinking that focuses on the WHAT. Children view authority figures through the unquestioning, trustful eyes of dependence. 

If a society can be pressured to remain in eternal childhood, its citizens do not psychologically develop past the WHO of behavior. They remain stalled in the emotional world of childhood, accepting what they are told, because they never developed the critical-thinking skills needed to question the WHAT of information. A regressed society is the unaware, compliant population made famous by the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Biden’s ‘Two-State Solution’ To Reward Palestinian Terrorism, Destroy Israel by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20366/biden-two-state-solution

The declared policy… of the US and Britain since the 1993-95 Oslo Accords has been that a two-state solution should come as part of a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

If the Oslo Accords are so cavalierly abrogated, what do any international agreements mean, and why would any country sign one in the future?

The assumption that normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia in return for the establishment of another failed and corrupt Arab state would bring peace, security and stability to the Middle East is a deadly fantasy.

The Americans and British are evidently no longer demanding that the Palestinians halt their homicidal incitement against Israel and Jews or stop paying financial rewards to Palestinian terrorists who murder Jews.

The Americans and the British are also ignoring the fact that most Palestinians are opposed to the idea of a two-state solution because they want a Palestinian state to replace Israel, not have a state next to it.

Those who are promoting the idea of creating a Palestinian terror state next to Israel — again capitulating to terrorists and rewarding terrorism — are paving the way for more October 7-like massacres. They are essentially asking Israel to commit suicide at a time when its soldiers are fighting to eradicate Hamas and ensure that the Gaza Strip will no longer serve Hamas, or its terror master Iran, as a base for murdering Jews, Americans or anyone else in the West.

In the span of two days, both the US administration and the British government came out with similar statements that they are considering recognizing a Palestinian state. The statements send a message to the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group and other Palestinians that the Americans and British want to give them a prize for the October 7 attack on Israel in which 1,200 Israelis were murdered, decapitated, raped, tortured and burned alive.

Be Guided by the Angel on Your Shoulder by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20367/angel-on-your-shoulder

This article was first published by Gatestone on December 8, 2022.

Scientists have long sought to bring order to our universe through the application of formulas.

Einstein created what is probably the most recognized formula with his explanation of energy as “E = mc²”. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras has been given credit for stating the relationship between two legs of a right triangle and its hypotenuse. Calculus, with its many different equations, sits on the shoulders of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz who labored during the 1600s.

But what these formulas will never be able to compute is the function of the human heart, the role of individual conscience, and ability to recognize right from wrong.

For that, each human being on the planet must depend upon the Angel on their shoulder. The values offered by that Angel are not interchangeable. To secure happiness for us, and those around us, it is important for us to be guided by that Angel on our shoulder, for it is only then we can walk tall.

When that Angel is absent so too is morality. Equally lost is empathy. And for those who have forsaken that Angel on their shoulder, the very concept of love is missing.

During this holiday season it is particularly important to pause and insist upon a period of self-reflection for, regardless of one’s faith, that Angel is in search of the person who embraces the humanity within ourselves and the ability to love.

Author Emily Brontë understood this. In her novel, Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw, one of the main characters, was asked how she could love the gypsy stable-boy, Heathcliff. She replied, “Whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same.” That might be as close to love, rapture, happiness as it gets.

Ironically, it may have been Einstein who authored the most cogent explanation of how that Angel on our shoulder allows us to love.

America’s Election Year Phantasmagoria Roger Franklin

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/02/joe-bidens-election-year-phantasmagoria/

EXCERPTS:

Just now, though, as the process of selecting America’s next president leaves the station and gathers speed towards the summer conventions and November, it might well be that only a writer with the eye of Thompson’s better years can do justice to the phantasmagoria unfolding from the southern border to the snowy north, New York’s courtrooms to the mob-looted stores of Oakland, Chicago, St Louis, Los Angeles and, well, just everywhere. There is no need to hit the hallucinogens; wide-eyed reality mocks illicit pharmacology’s fantasies and distortions.

Start with the Middle East, where the remains of three Americans killed over the weekend as they slept in their Jordan barracks will by now be in Germany and the care of Mortuary Affairs Specialists, the Pentagon’s in-house undertakers. The drone that did for them was launched by what the White House’s team of press-office obfuscators prefer to call “militants”, although there are times when reporters’ questions oblige them to preface that description with “Iran-backed”. Thompsonesque weirdness prevails in the Biden administration’s perception of the situation it is attempting with limited success to sell the American public. “We don’t want a war with Iran,” National Security Council flack John Kirby has repeatedly insisted, despite Iran quite clearly being very much at war with America.

Since early October, US bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan have been targeted on a near daily schedule — some 160 times in a campaign which might well serve as the very definition of asymmetrical warfare. The drones Iran makes and supplies its proxies costs peanuts; the missiles that have destroyed all but a handful of those incoming threats cost millions and, worse, are said to have been used so often they are now in short supply. That tally of attacks, just by the way, doesn’t include what the Houthis of Yemen have been throwing at Red Sea shipping and, when the opportunity presents itself, US warships. Joe Biden’s response to all this? So far nothing but a series of ineffective air strikes on Yemen targets and his flacks’ vague promise that more action will be taken somewhere, somehow, to some extent.

“I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East,” Biden said on Tuesday, “that’s not what I’m looking for.” That comment, like all his interactions these days with the White House press corps, was delivered as he prepared to board the presidential helicopter, those words even harder to make out above the chopper’s turbines than the standard incoherence of any typical public appearance. Would he mount direct attacks on Iran, the reporters shouted? America’s commander in chief stumbled, then landed upon a jesuitical distinction. His “problem” , he said, was that Tehran had provided drones and missiles to those pesky “militants”. That Iran also funds and directs them, from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah’s various iterations in Lebanon and elsewhere, was nothing he thought worth mentioning or, just as likely, thought about at all.

Contrast that wait-and-see prevarication with, say, Ronald Reagan, who reacted to just one Iranian provocation, the 1988 mining of a US frigate in international waters, by sinking five of Tehran’s warships and pulverising a pair of former drilling rigs converted to offshore radar stations.

Indoctrination versus education; or a disgraceful school district versus a wise teacher By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/02/indoctrination_versus_education_or_a_disgraceful_school_district_versus_a_wise_teacher.html

A California school district teaches its students LGBTQ+ ideology, racism, and antisemitism, while a teacher helps a smart student learn how to think.

For 250 years, education in America meant reading, writing, and arithmetic, along with peripheral subjects such as the Bible (in early America), history, civics, and science. During those years, with a mostly literate, numerate population, we were a stunningly successful nation. Now, in leftist-controlled school districts across America, reading, writing, and arithmetic have been supplanted entirely by leftist values, such as LGBTQ+ ideology, racism, and antisemitism. It’s Maoism, with ideology supplanting reason. Two items on the internet today highlight the difference.

On the Maoist front, the Daily Mail reports that an elementary school in Hayward, California, part of the San Francisco Bay Area, using federal taxpayer funds, has shifted its entire focus from education to indoctrination. The outcome for the children is tragic:

A Bay Area Elementary School has spent $250,000 on a ‘Woke Kindergarten’ program only to see its student’s literacy and numeracy rates plunge.

The ‘Woke Kindergarten’ program states its mission as an ‘abolitionist early learning ecosystem’ that trains teachers to uproot white supremacy, disrupt racism and oppression which are barriers to learning.

After spending the federal money on the program Glassbrook Elementary in Hayward saw numeracy among its 474 students fall to a new low of just 4 percent and literacy just 12 percent.

The scores, recorded last Spring two years into Woke Kindergarten’s three-year contract, represent a 4 percentage decline in each category.

The school also remains on the state’s lowest-performing level on the Comprehensive School Improvement list and has a lower rate of attendance than before the program was introduced.

If you go to the linked article, you’ll see that the program focused on such hard-left topics as defunding Israel to “rebuild Palestine,” abolishing the police, and supporting so-called transgenderism. In addition, a third-grade teacher has been encouraging kids to “disrupt whiteness” and to imagine America’s and Israel’s annihilation.