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March 2024

P.C.-CULTURE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The UN’s insult to women Why has yet another man been appointed to represent British women on the global stage?Julie Burchill

By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/05/the-uns-insult-to-women/

‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’, sang Henry Higgins in the 1964 film, My Fair Lady. If there were to be a remake in 2024, the film might be called My Fair Ladyboy. It would update the story of a professor of phonetics, who turns a cockney girl into the toast of high society, into the tale of a professor of hormonology, who turns a mockney boy into the toast of café society. For today, a sizable minority of trendsetters and lawmakers think men can be just as good – if not better – at being women.

A man in a frock has even been appointed by UN Women to represent British women on the global stage. ‘Katie’ Neeves was on X last week smarming that: ‘I’m happy to announce that I’ve been accepted as a UN Women UK delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, which is the principal global intergovernmental body exclusively dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.’

Neaves’s X handle – @cool2btrans – gives the game away. As does the name of his business, Martin Neeves Photography and Film. Presumably he retained the old name in case potential customers think kooky Katie might be less efficient.

We’ve been here before, of course. The ‘model’ Munroe Bergdorf – born Ian Beaumont to middle-class parents in the picturesque village of Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex – was appointed the first ‘UK champion’ for UN Women towards the end of last year. This understandably caused a right kerfuffle, not least because Bergdorf has shown contempt for the historical struggles for women’s rights. Infamously, he once branded the Suffragettes ‘white supremacists’ – this from an airhead who probably thinks that ‘force-feeding’ means being slipped a few hidden carbs before Marbs by an envious frenemy.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

William Ruger A Conservative Liberal A new biography puts Milton Friedman’s greatness at the center of twentieth-century economic history.

By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-conservative-liberal

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, by Jennifer Burns (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 592 pp., $27.73)

Jennifer Burns’s biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, will be the standard reference for anyone wanting to dive deeply into the life of the great economist and the world in which he flourished. The historical context that Burns provides makes the book almost as much a work of post-1929 economic and intellectual history as a biography of the bespectacled, diminutive professor who so influenced it. Though Burns is not uncritical of her subject, the story she tells will leave most right-leaning readers longing for the days when Friedman was one of their champions.

Before going back to Friedman’s youth in Rahway, New Jersey, and his time at Rutgers University, Burns introduces him at his apex, as economist extraordinaire and public intellectual. She notes that Friedman did more than lead the charge against Keynesianism; he “offered a philosophy of freedom that made a tremendous political impact in a liberty-loving country.” One of Burns’s goals is to “restore the fullness of Friedman’s thought to his public image” and to “approach Friedman as a scholar . . . setting his ideas in context and making his achievements legible for a new generation, either friend or foe.”

She touches all the key points of Friedman’s life, including his time at the University of Chicago as student and professor; the key influences on his thinking; his period away from academia in Washington and New York; his scholarship and leadership of the Chicago School of Economics, especially its “monetarism” and challenge to Keynesian orthodoxy; his work on the consumption function and the permanent income hypothesis, monetary history, the Phillips Curve, and the negative income tax; the controversy over his work in Chile and his relationship with Augusto Pinochet’s regime; his scuffles with mentor Arthur Burns; and the influence of his ideas on the late twentieth century and beyond. Reflecting on Friedman’s long shadow, Burns concludes that by century’s end, “the basics of monetarism had been adopted into conventional wisdom” and that “many of the things he had pressed for throughout his professional life had come to pass.”

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden’s settlement delusions Contrary to the administration’s claims, history proves that the settlements are neither illegal nor an impediment to peace. Eric Levine

By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/bidens-settlement-delusions/

Last week, the Biden administration reversed the “Pompeo Doctrine,” which recognized that Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria are not “per se inconsistent with international law.”

Biden’s record of being wrong on every single important foreign policy issue of the last 50 years remains unblemished. His decision is wrong as a matter of law and fact. It is also bad politics and undermines Israeli and American national security.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken summed up the administration’s position by saying, “It’s been longstanding U.S. policy under Republican and Democratic administrations alike that new settlements are counterproductive to reaching an enduring peace. … They’re also inconsistent with international law. Our administration maintains a firm opposition to settlement expansion. And in our judgment, this only weakens—it doesn’t strengthen—Israel’s security.”

History disproves Blinken’s claim that “settlements are counterproductive to reaching an enduring peace.” In fact, Israel has always been willing to remove settlements to achieve peace.

The 1978 Israel-Egypt peace treaty required that Israel dismantle its settlements in the Sinai. Prime Minister Menachem Begin did so, deploying the IDF to physically remove those settlers who refused to leave. Clearly, the settlements were not a barrier to peace.

In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered the evacuation of all Israelis from Gaza and turned it over to the Palestinians. Like Begin before him, Sharon sent the IDF to remove the settlers who would not leave. There were no Jews in Gaza for 18 years. Only after the Oct. 7 massacre did Israelis return to exercise their legitimate and legal right to self-defense.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Art World’s Enfant Terrible Runs for Senate Stefan Simchowitz is a provocateur. ‘Why am I running as a Republican? Because I’ve seen up close the hypocrisy of the left and it’s unfathomable.’ By Suzy Weiss

By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/stefan-simchowitz-senate

PASADENA, CA — Stefan Simchowitz, 53, is no one’s idea of a viable candidate, including his own. 

“I have no illusion that I can win or that I stand a chance to win, which is also quite liberating, because I’m not running to win a campaign. I have no prayer,” he tells me. 

Simchowitz, who is running for Senate as a Republican in a seat that has been held by a Democrat for 32 years, is perched at the kitchen island in one of his four homes, an updated Victorian farmhouse on an acre in Pasadena that he’s been building into an exhibition space and artist residency for the past year or so. He calls it Red Barns. 

In a tan Altadena Hardware shirt and one of his signature bucket hats, the contemporary art dealer once dubbed “the Art World’s Patron Satan” offers me sparkling water and a bite of his blueberry muffin. Unlike the Democrats vying for Dianne Feinstein’s open seat—Representatives Katie Porter, who has a $12 million war chest and Adam Schiff ($32 million)—and the Republican front-runner, former L.A. Dodger Steve Garvey, Simchowitz doesn’t seem concerned with shaking hands, kissing babies, or winning votes.

“Sometimes if you know you’re going to lose you can only win,” he says. Stefan sees this campaign as a “vehicle to sell his ideas.” In other words: a performance art project of sorts. How else to make sense of this Democrat-turned-Republican, with no political experience, throwing his hat into the ring? 

This outsider approach has served him well as the enfant terrible of the art world, where he’s circumvented the closed-circuit system of MFA programs, critics, museums, galleries, auction houses, and curators that decide whether an artist is marketable, and for how much. Simchowitz came up by finding starving artists—literally on the brink of starvation, he claims—on Facebook and Instagram, then paying for their studios, materials, and sometimes entire bodies of work outright, before flipping them to buyers, or holding them in his extensive private collection. 

His clientele—which historically includes tech founders who exited their companies and started itching for a Josef Albers; newly flush poker players; and A-list entertainers—trust him implicitly. “He sees opportunities and then he puts a spotlight on them,” Brian Butler, a longtime gallerist in L.A., tells me. “He’s got a tenacity about him.” (Butler himself is voting for Katie Porter, but says he’d vote for Simchowitz “if I was a Republican.”) Though Butler calls Simchowitz a “super mensch,” he conceded he has a “gruff exterior.” 

While his bluntness and allergy to pretension has earned him fans, the management class of the art world scorns him with equal passion. Many collectors, dealers, and artists won’t work with Simchowitz, or anyone who does, arguing that he exploits struggling artists by buying up all their work, then artificially pumping and dumping it. Another L.A. gallerist once called him a “sociopath” and compared him to Charles Manson before walking it back. 

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump is still on the ballot. Supreme Court ensures American democracy is the winner. The Supreme Court opinion may be one of the most significant in its history, not because of what it did but what it would not allow to be done. Jonathan Turley

By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/03/05/supreme-court-trump-ballot-unanimous-ruling-election/72843559007/

“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.” Those words from the Supreme Court in its Trump v. Anderson ruling on Monday put an end to the effort of Democratic secretaries of state to engage in ballot cleansing by removing former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election.

The court’s decision was one of the most important and impactful moments in its history.

During the first Trump impeachment in 2019, I cautioned Democrats not to toss aside constitutional standards out of their hatred for the president. I quoted from the play “A Man For All Seasons,” when Sir Thomas More is told by his son-in-law that he would “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” More responded, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”

As More described England, the United States also is “planted thick with laws, from coast to coast.” The nation’s highest court on Monday decided to leave them standing.

After months of activists and experts calling for the court to allow ballot cleansing by individual states, the justices refused. Figures like Harvard professor Laurence Tribe had insisted that the legal theory allowing Trump’s removal from ballots was “unassailable” and rejected opposing positions as “absurd.”

Many news outlets posted the analysis of former federal court Judge J. Michael Luttig, who also called the theory “unassailable” and denounced the arguments against disqualification as “revealing, fatuous, and politically and constitutionally cynical.” He predicted that the court would simply affirm the Colorado Supreme Court.

Democratic members of Congress further pushed the narrative that only judicial activists and MAGA justices would oppose disqualification. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., declared: “This is their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”

Think what you want about Trump.But even liberal justices agree Trump should stay on ballot. Progressives still melted down.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We Are the Victims and Everything We Do is Justified Breaking the “Self-Reinforcing Victim/Villain” cycle. by Daniel Greenfield

By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/we-are-the-victims-and-everything-we-do-is-justified/

At the heart of everything from the debate over the Gaza War to DEI to toxic interpersonal relationships is a disastrous loop known as the “self-reinforcing victim/villain” cycle.

The self-reinforcing victim/villain cycle is a deceptively simple and incredibly destructive paradigm for any kind of relationship, national, communal or personal, in which one party constantly attacks the other while claiming that it is the victim fighting against oppression.

The paradigm is guided by the idea that there is a permanently fixed victim and villain, that the victim is constantly suffering attacks from the villain and that anything the victim does is justified because he or she has no agency except to resist the assaults of the villain.

While some Hamas supporters have lied or tried to cover up the atrocities of Oct 7, Ghazi Hammad, a Hamas official, initially denied them, but then burst out with, “the existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified.”

“We are the victims”, “nobody should blame us” and “everything we do is justified” perfectly capture the cruel workings of the cycle. So many westerners have sided with Hamas because they accept, incorporate and make use of the same cycle in their own politics and lives.

The very same arguments adapted from Marxism and therapy culture play out routinely in “whiteness” and “colonialist” discourse in America, Europe and other free world nations.

The “self-reinforcing victim/villain” cycle dispenses with arguments, evidence or any reasoned assessments of rights. These may occasionally be thrown in when convenient, but make no real difference because the central premise of the cycle is the lack of any objective standard that both sides have to meet. International law, racial tolerance, peace treaties or negotiations are invoked in a purely one-sided fashion. It is understood that the officially designated victim never has to abide by international law, to stop hating or to sincerely agree to stop the violence.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Illusion of a Palestinian ‘Demilitarized’ State by Bassam Tawil

By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20460/demilitarized-palestinian-state

[A]ny commitment to a demilitarized state by the Palestinian leadership would be legally worthless.

“Any treaty is void if, at the time it was entered into, it conflicts with a ‘peremptory’ rule of general international law (jus cogens) – a rule accepted and recognized by the international community of states as one from which ‘no derogation is permitted.’ Because the right of sovereign States to maintain military forces essential to ‘self-defense’ is such a peremptory rule, Palestine, depending upon its particular form of authority, could be entirely within its right to abrogate any pre-independence agreement that had compelled its demilitarization.” [Italics in original.] — Louis René Beres, professor emeritus at Purdue University, and an expert in international law and political science, jurist.org, December 23, 2023.

“Therein lies the jurisprudential core of the Palestinian demilitarization problem: International law would not necessarily require Palestinian compliance with any pre-state agreements concerning the use of armed force. From the standpoint of such authoritative law, enforcing demilitarization upon a sovereign state of Palestine would be sorely problematic.” [Italics in original.] — Louis René Beres, jurist.org, December 23, 2023

“Unhidden, both the Arab world and Iran still have only a ‘One-State Solution’ for the ‘Israel Problem.’ It is a ‘solution’ that eliminates Israel altogether, a physical solution, a ‘Final Solution.’ Even today, official Arab maps of ‘Palestine’ (PNA and Hamas) show the prospective Arab State comprising all of the West Bank (Judea/Samaria), all of Gaza and all of Israel. They knowingly exclude any references to a Jewish population and list ‘holy sites’ of Christians and Muslims only.” — Louis René Beres, jurist.org, December 23, 2023

No one can stop a future Palestinian state from becoming a lawless and militarized state. Such a state on Israel’s doorstep would pose a direct and grave threat to Israel’s existence and actually facilitate the mission of the Iranian regime and its terror proxies to murder more Jews.

As part of its effort to promote the idea of a “two-state solution,” the Biden administration has been talking about the need to establish a “demilitarized” Palestinian state next to Israel.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is reported to have asked the State Department for a “review of what a demilitarized Palestinian state would look like based on other models around the world.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Christopher F. Rufo Giving DEI the Pink Slip Major institutions have started rolling back their diversity bureaucracies.

By on March 5th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/giving-dei-the-pink-slip

Last year, conservatives began taking action against the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracy. The Manhattan Institute released a model policy to abolish DEI, exposed abuses in public universities, and advised political leaders, most notably Florida governor Ron DeSantis, in the crafting of legislation abolishing public-university DEI programs at the state level. To date, three states—Florida, Texas, and Tennessee—have passed laws abolishing or restricting DEI. A total of 17 states have either passed such laws or are considering them.

Our efforts are bearing fruit. Last week, the University of Florida, the flagship state institution, announced that it had dissolved its DEI department and terminated the employment of all DEI officials. UF was spending an astonishing $5 million per year on DEI programs, which university president Ben Sasse wisely redirected toward faculty recruitment. The new budget would presumably include recruitment for UF’s Hamilton Center, a new home for conservative scholars. Sasse also offered a positive alternative to DEI, promising to hold the institution to the much better standard of “universal human dignity.”

Conservatives are rightly celebrating the move as a watershed. DEI is not an inevitability; it is a choice that can be undone.

Corporate America is following suit. Firms including Google, Meta, and Zoom have quietly cut back DEI departments and laid off employees. I have recently spoken with a number of Fortune 500 executives, who explained that, following the summer of George Floyd, companies felt immense pressure to “do something” about racial disparities. But four years later, they have realized that DEI programs undermine productivity, destroy merit-based systems, and poison corporate culture. Because of our successful campaign to expose the true nature of DEI, they now have the political space—in essence, the social permission—to wind down these programs.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

2024 demographic reality sets the record straight Yoram Ettinger

By on March 5th, 2024

http://bit.ly/4c2GegI

Demographic reality contradicts conventional wisdom

*The number of annual Jewish births in Israel surged by 69% from 1995 (80,400) to 2023 (135,639), compared to a 17% increase of annual Arab births in Israel during the same period, as reported by the February 2024 Monthly Bulletin of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS).

*The 2023 Jewish births (135,639) were 76% of total births (178,454), compared to 69% in 1995.

*In 2024 (based on the 2022 data), the Jewish fertility rate (3.03 births per woman) is higher than the Arab fertility rate (2.75), as it has been since 2016. It is higher than the fertility rates in all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Sahara Muslim countries.

*In 1969, Israel’s and Judea and Samaria’s (West Bank’s) Arab fertility rate was 6 births higher than the Jewish fertility rate. In 2015, both fertility rates were at 3.13 births per woman, reflecting the dramatic Westernization of Arab demography in Judea and Samaria and pre-1967 Israel, triggered by Arab modernity, urbanization, the enhanced social status of Arab women, older wedding age (24), expanded participation of Arab women in higher-education and the job market, a shorter reproductive time (25-45 rather than 16-55) and the increased use of contraceptives. 

*In 2023, there were 43,353 Israeli Jewish deaths, compared to 31,575 in 1996, a 37% increase, compared to a 43% increase in 2022 (while the size of the population almost doubled!), which reflects a society growing younger. In 2023, there were 6,108 Israeli Arab deaths, compared to 3,089 in 1996, a 98% increase, which reflects a society growing older.  

*In 2023, the number of Israeli Jewish deaths was 32% of Jewish births, compared to 40% in 1995 – an expression of a society growing younger. In 2023, the number of Israeli Arab deaths was 14.3% of Arab births, compared to 8% in 1995 – a symptom of a society growing older.

*Israel’s robust Jewish fertility rate is attributed to high-level optimism, patriotism, attachment to Jewish roots, frontier mentality, communal solidarity, high regard for raising children, and a declining number of abortions (34% decline since 1990, while the policy on abortion is liberal).

*In 2024, there is a potential wave of Aliyah (Jewish immigration) of some 500,000 Olim (Jewish immigrants) from the Ukraine, Russia, other former Soviet republics, West Europe, Argentina, the USA, etc., awaiting the Israeli government recognition of Aliyah as a top national priority (as it was until 1992), resuming a pro-active Aliyah policy. 

*Contrary to conventional wisdom, Israel’s Jewish emigration has declined since 1990, where there was an addition of 14,200 to the number of Israelis staying outside Israel for over a year. In recent years, the annual addition of emigrants has declined to an average of 7,000, while the overall population of Israel doubled itself from almost 5 million to almost 10 million. Thus, in 2020, there was an unusually high addition of 10,800 (probably due to  COVID-19 related travel restrictions), and in 2021 there was an addition of merely 1,400 (due to COVID-19).

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Demographics is Destiny? Sydney Williams

By on March 5th, 2024

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Apart from Israel, which has a TFR (Total Fertility Rate) of 2.9, no Western nation (including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) has a birthrate above replacement rate, which implies – barring immigration – a West that faces aging and, ultimately, declining populations. (It is only fair to point out that China, Russia, and North Korea also have declining birthrates.

As Mr. Karabell wrote in the review quoted above: “Governments worldwide have evolved to meet the challenge of managing more people, not fewer and older.” Yet the opposite is in the offing. The effect on living standards could be startling. Economic growth depends on many factors: free markets, rule of law, global and fair trade, the right to property ownership, innovation, entrepreneurship, secure borders, but also on an expanding working-age populations.

Or, at least, a growing population has always been a key driver for economic growth. However, in a 2019 review of Paul Morland’s The Human Tide, Jason Willick wrote: “New technology such as cloning, space travel and artificial intelligence could mean the current demographic slowdown is not an endpoint but an interregnum before another era of radical political change sweeps all before it.” That is possible, and it is also possible that artificial intelligence will forego the need for additional white-collar jobs. But there is no way to avoid an aging population, along with ever-higher costs of healthcare for the elderly. Robots and computers do not pay taxes; people do.

The United States is better situated than most Western nations, as it attracts migrants to offset declining birthrates, though our population continues to age. Europe, as well, attracts migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, but at a lesser rate, and with less assimilation. While birthrates have declined in developing countries, many are still positive. Nigeria, for example, with a population of 226 million and a TFR of 5.3, is projected to have a population of 550 million by 2100. According to projections both Pakistan and Nigeria will surpass the United States in terms of population by 2100. China’s population will shrink to about one half that of India, the only country predicted to have a population over one billion in 2100.

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