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Ruth King

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When the Dust Settles By Mark Steyn

By on April 17th, 2024

https://jewishworldreview.com/0424/steyn041524.php

The conventional wisdom of the media and think-tanks agreed its line around the time the two-hundredth drone was shot down: Iran’s assault on Israel was a flop.

A record number of drones, cruise and ballistic missiles were launched by the mullahs against the Zionist Entity: For the flight from Persia, a drone takes nine hours, a cruise two hours, and a ballistic missile about twelve minutes. Not a single drone or cruise missile made it to Israeli soil. A few of the ballistics penetrated the country’s air space, lighting up the sky over the Temple Mount yet killing not a single Jew. An unlucky seven-year-old girl in a Bedouin encampment in the desert was injured by shrapnel, but for Tehran that’s one lousy return on investment. For purposes of comparison, the usual West Bank bloodletting racked up a higher body count: a fourteen-year-old Israeli shepherd was found shot in the head yesterday.

Meanwhile, after six months in geopolitical Coventry, Israel is once again flush with allies:

(April 14, 2024 / JNS) The United States, United Kingdom and Jordan downed many of the over 300 projectiles launched at Israel by Iran overnight Sunday, while France also played a role in defending the Jewish state against the unprecedented attack.

The Jordanians were mostly concerned to protect their own territory from carelessly targeted incoming, the French are said to have confined their efforts to patrolling the airspace and giving a friendly head’s up, and the British dispatched jets from the RAF base at Akrotiri to take out Iranian drones over Syria and Iraq. Whether any of these efforts were militarily necessary to Israel’s defence, they’re not likely to be politically popular on their respective home fronts. Yet all were eager to be perceived as in on the operation, and their participation is being hailed as the emergence of a new Israeli-Sunni-western regional security force:

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Our ‘Woke’ Rackets We know who will pay the bill. by Bruce Thornton

By on April 17th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-woke-rackets/

The “longshoreman philosopher”  Eric Hoffer once observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” This course of corruption has been ubiquitous in U.S. history, but especially characterized the postwar period. In contemporary times, the post-Cold War period, it is accelerating and now reaching terminal velocity.

One of the great causes in our history was the Civil Rights Movement begun in 1954. The people who comprised it made a dignified moral and historical argument against segregation, onederived from Christian ethics and the Prologue to the Declaration of Independence, and eschewing the parochial identarianism and violence of leftist activists. The results were the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

It didn’t take long, however, for that noble cause to become a business, then degenerate into a racket that exploited discriminatory government polices like affirmative action, all predicated on a made-up “compelling state interest” called “diversity”––an Orwellian term that relied on crude racialist, superficial group characteristics, while ignoring the true diversity of individual hearts and minds.

The Civil Rights Movement then became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party and government agencies backed by federal law and enforced by hordes of bureaucrats. Consultants, trial lawyers, administrators, educrats, and diversity “trainers” waxed fat on political power and redistributed taxpayer loot.

Today’s diversity 2.0 DEI cartel has expanded the reach and power of Diversity INC to corporate C-Suites and Boards of Directors, magnifying the corruption. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote recently, “Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.” 

This corruption of our constitutional order and foundational principles–– the assaults on the integrity of the First Amendment rights to free speech and religion, or the 14th amendment’s guarantee of “due process,” the “equal protection of the laws,”and the accountability of power to the people ––is a dire threat to our ordered freedom and political equality, for such debasement relentlessly subjects our republic to regulatory tyranny.

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The Failed Experiment with Ending Standardized Testing

By on April 17th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/the-failed-experiment-with-ending-standardized-testing/

When Columbia University announced in March of 2023 that it would become the latest Ivy League school to no longer require applicants to submit SAT/ACT scores for admission, the editors of National Review criticized a move that not only seemed designed explicitly to skirt the Supreme Court’s anticipated decisions banning racial discrimination in college admissions, but threatened the academic quality of the institution as well.

We have been emphatically confirmed in our position by the subsequent course of events. Harvard University announced last Thursday that it would be reversing its “standardized testing-optional” policy for applicants to the Class of 2029. This change in course — Harvard dropped the SAT/ACT requirement for applicants four years ago — comes on the heels of announcements by fellow Ivy League schools Dartmouth and Yale in February that they would be doing the same. We hail Harvard’s decision as one long overdue, and note that — given their influence on elite academic trends as a whole — it represents a setback for the continuing effort by left-wing academics to redirect higher education away from the pursuit of excellence and toward the pursuit of an ideological agenda.

The trend is unmistakable and the timing extremely telling: Unlike Columbia — which only acted last year — Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth all dropped their testing requirements in June of 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 crisis. For each school, the proffered logic was identical, and facially plausible: The chaos and national variation in Covid-19 lockdown protocols made it incredibly difficult (and in certain lockdown-happy states functionally impossible) for high-school students to sit for these tests. The problem was that the testing-optional policy remained in place long after Covid had faded away, which suggested that the pandemic was a pretextual excuse, and ideological considerations rather than epidemiological ones had driven it all along. (The fact that Columbia jumped onto this bandwagon years later and without any Covid rationale underlines the point rather demonstratively.)

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Heather Mac Donald Kidneys Don’t See Color Meritocratic medicine scores another triumph with a genetically modified pig kidney—but the STEM diversity crusade threatens to replace discovery with identity-driven mediocrity. Heather MacDonald

By on April 17th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/kidneys-dont-see-color

On March 16, 2024, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital transplanted a genetically modified pig kidney into a 62-year-old man suffering from end-stage kidney disease. The groundbreaking operation was, among much else, a refutation of the STEM diversity crusade, which threatens the medical progress that lay behind the landmark procedure.

Transplant recipient Richard Slayman had endured the usual debilitating effects of kidney failure for years. Healthy kidneys filter toxins and excess fluids from blood and excrete those waste products as urine. When kidneys fail, if no donated human kidney is available to replace them, patients spend hours a week hooked up to a dialysis machine that filters their blood mechanically. Slayman had already spent seven years on dialysis before receiving a human kidney in 2018. That transplanted kidney itself faltered, however, and by 2023, Slayman was back on dialysis. This time, though, he required biweekly visits to the hospital to keep his blood vessels open. He developed congestive heart failure. And he rejoined the more than 100,000 Americans waiting, often futilely and fatally, for a human kidney.

If Slayman’s new pig kidney continues to function, the capacity to transplant animal organs successfully into humans (a process known as xenotransplantation) will be as significant as curing cancer, says nephrologist Stanley Goldfarb. Getting to this point required 125 years of scientific creativity and an ever more complex understanding of molecular biology. None of that development had anything to do with racial identity.

Slayman’s genetically modified pig kidney represents a return of sorts to the origins of transplant science. When surgeons started contemplating organ transplants in the early twentieth century, they initially focused on organs from other mammals, since harvesting human organs was considered problematic at best. The French surgeon Alexis Carrel began a series of transplant experiments on dogs after discovering how to connect arteries to arteries and how to widen narrowed vessels—prerequisites to organ transplantation. For the next several decades, surgeons in France, Germany, Russia, and the U.S. transplanted goat, sheep, and monkey kidneys into dying human patients, but the organs (and patients) quickly failed. It would take the evolution of another branch of medical science—immunology—to understand why.

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In True Journalistic Fashion, NPR Can’t Take What It Dishes Out

By on April 17th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/17/in-true-journalistic-fashion-npr-cant-take-what-it-dishes-out/

Has there ever been a more hypocritically thin-skinned occupation than journalism?

Day after day these relatively uneducated writers piously dish out opprobrium on those they don’t like and then respond like whiny spoiled brats when anyone dares to criticize them.

The latest example of this involves Uri Berliner, a senior editor at National Public Radio who we learned on Tuesday was suspended without pay for having the temerity to complain that this taxpayer-supported enterprise had become hopelessly agenda-driven.

Berliner has worked at NPR for a quarter century and describes himself as a Sarah Lawrence College-educated child of a “lesbian peace activist mother” whose Spotify “listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley.”

In other words, he’s a solid liberal. So, it’s worth listening to what he has to say.

“It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent,” he writes, “but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed.”

That culture no longer exists, he says, a transformation that started in earnest in 2016.

“What began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency,” he writes. He goes on to describe how the network’s ideological blinders caused it to swallow the Russia-hoax story whole, mishandle the COVID-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop stories, and how woke dogma infects everything NPR covers.

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CHAPTER 14: Changing Hearts and Minds Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is [forthcoming release May 2024] Linda Goudsmit

By on April 17th, 2024

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27717/chapter-14-changing-hearts-and-minds

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

On October 30, 2008, in Columbia, Missouri, candidate Barack Hussein Obama declared to an unsuspecting public, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America.” It was the promise of a radical leftist to change the culture of America and move the nation from constitutional republic to socialism. John Dewey’s destruction of American minds through progressive education had a partner in Obama and the Culture War president Obama unleashed on America.

To move our constitutional republic to socialism and beyond, globalism’s leftist progressive movement adopted the binary victim/oppressor social structure of cultural Marxism. Classical Marxism identifies the oppressors as the bourgeoisie (owners of production) who exploit the proletariat (workers). The metric of classical Marxism is economics. Cultural Marxism re-labels the participants and defines culture, not economics, as the metric of exploitation. It is one species of the genus Marxism as described by James Lindsay in Chapter 11. In cultural Marxism, white males are the identified oppressors and everyone else is their victim.

Both classical and cultural Marxism seek to replace the existing order with collectivism, each selling its own idealized form of a secular heaven on Earth. Today’s social justice warriors who sign onto this leftist lunacy are ignorant of history, arrogant, and too childish to examine the objective reality of the offer. Leftist ideologues actually believe the fantasy of a Marxist Utopia, and don’t realize that the paradise they advocate is the powerless state of infantile dependence, the opposite of individual freedom. When infantile dependence is advanced into adulthood, it awards the state total control.

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Iran’s attack was a cassus belli, not a ‘retaliation’ Ruthie Blum

By on April 17th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/irans-attack-was-a-casus-belli-not-a-retaliation/

Following the April 1 strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, threats of retaliation against Israel—widely assumed to have been behind the attack—promptly emerged from Tehran. Seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed in the bombing that reportedly destroyed the building that housed them next to the embassy compound.

Among the dead were Mohammad Reza Zahedi, and his deputy, Mohammad Haj Rahimi. Zahedi was a top commander in the IRGC’s Quds Force, designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organization, who oversaw all terrorist operations against Israel from Syria, Lebanon and Palestinian-run territories.

Dubbing their headquarters in Syria a “diplomatic mission,” therefore, is like calling Shifa in Gaza a hospital. Indeed, according to international law: “Any object that serves a military purpose, even if used for both military and civilian activities, is a legitimate target.”

Despite this, or because of it, most analysts were skeptical about the likelihood of a counter-offensive from the soil of the foremost state sponsor of terrorism. After all, the ayatollah-led regime has spent decades cultivating proxies to do its dirty work around the world.

And at this very moment, some of those surrogates are actively engaged in their sponsor’s aim to wipe the Jewish state off the map, while others are sporadically contributing to the effort.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are fighting Israeli troops and holding hostage 133 mostly Israeli civilians in Gaza, while targeting Israel with rockets; Hamas and PIJ are fighting soldiers and civilians in Judea and Samaria; Hezbollah missiles have caused the evacuation of citizens in northern Israel; and the Yemen-based Houthis occasionally join in the multi-front assault through UAVs launched at Eilat.

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The Rise of the Civil Rights Constitution By Jesse Merriam, Tom Klingenstein

By on April 17th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-rise-of-the-civil-rights-constitution/

Editor’s Note: We cannot forget that the group quota regime is just that: not merely an ideology but a proper regime, a civilizational and constitutional rival to the American regime. It has its own legal and organizing principles, which directly challenge those of our own Constitution. These operating principles of the group quota regime have long been taking hold in our society and in our governing institutions.

Jesse Merriam, a legal and political philosopher, recently joined Tom Klingenstein to discuss that quiet revolution: its roots, its current state, and the possibility for reform. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

TK: Welcome Jesse Merriam. Jesse is an associate professor of government at Patrick Henry College and a research fellow at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. Jesse holds a J.D. from George Washington University Law School and a Ph.D. in judicial politics and legal philosophy from Johns Hopkins University.

JM: It’s good to be with you.

TK: Jesse, you are a man of controversy. Among your controversial opinions are: 

The legal conservative movement has been much less successful than most conservatives believe.
Diversity and anti-discrimination are the twin pillars of today’s Constitution which makes it fair to say that today America operates under the Civil Rights Constitution. 
We should revive, to a degree, freedom of association, which you believe to be a right necessary for self-governance. 
The Federalist Society, despite notable successes, has not provided what the legal conservative movement needs to be successful.
Originalism has not, as intended, advanced a distinctly conservative agenda.
The recent Supreme Court affirmative action decisions are not likely to reduce affirmative action by very much. 
Harvard and Affirmative Action

TK: Let’s take the last claim first. My impression is that most analysts think that the recent UNC and Harvard affirmative action decisions will have a much greater impact than you do. Why are you so skeptical?

JM: My skepticism boils down to three reasons. One reason has to do with the unique status of affirmative action. We can understand this uniqueness in terms of both law and policy. Affirmative action law is unique in the sense that, since the civil rights revolution, affirmative action is the only type of governmental discrimination based on race that the Supreme Court has permitted. Affirmative action is also unique in American policy in that it is the only public program in all of American history—to my knowledge at least—that has expanded in breadth and strengthened in force in the face of growing resistance from the American people, state legislatures, and federal courts. 

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Israel Has No Choice but to Strike Back Against Iran Those urging restraint after Tehran’s attack are following the same failed strategy that produced catastrophe on Oct. 7.Elliot Kaufman

By on April 17th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-has-no-choice-but-to-strike-iran-restraint-strategy-failed-on-oct-7-b8159f29?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

What if the Oct. 7 invasion had been “intercepted”? Imagine the same Hamas attack but better Israeli defense, with more than 90% of the terrorists stopped before the border or shortly thereafter, and only minor Israeli casualties. President Biden would probably have done then what he is doing now, in the aftermath of Iran’s intercepted attack: urge Israel not to respond in any serious way. Let Hamas live to try it again.

To learn the lessons of Oct. 7 is to reject that advice after the long night of April 13. Israel will respond to Iran, it announced Monday. It has learned the hard way that air defenses don’t relieve you of the duty to subdue a determined attacker. Hamas’s intent to slaughter Israelis was hardly a secret, but Israel allowed it to survive and grow stronger because its rockets could be intercepted.

It was no harm, no foul. Israel agreed to “take the win” against Hamas—as Mr. Biden now advises with regard to Iran—all the way to catastrophe.

Rocket fire from an Iranian proxy became normal, not worth a response in most cases, until it was too late. It’s the same story with Hezbollah, whose expanding arsenal and occasional rocket fire became facts of life in northern Israel. Another war would have been costly, and what damage were the rockets really doing in the meantime? As the smart set says about Iran today, Hezbollah’s attacks were merely “symbolic.”

Israel never stopped the trickle, so it became a flood. Hezbollah has fired on Israel more than 3,000 times since Oct. 7, depopulating the country’s north. Yet this, too, has become normal. “Man is a creature who can get used to anything,” writes Dostoevsky, and all the more so if it’s the other guy who has to live with the consequences. Biden administration officials now regularly implore Israel not to “escalate” with Hezbollah—that, they say, would cause a war.

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Law-School Rot Hits Berkeley Dean Close to Home — Literally Tal Fortgang

By on April 16th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/law-school-rot-hits-berkeley-dean-close-to-home-literally/

When students turned a party into a protest, Erwin Chemerinsky learned the hard way that coddling activists won’t save you when they become the mob.

The moral and behavioral rot at our elite law schools has hit close to home — literally — for the dean of Berkeley Law, Erwin Chemerinsky. On April 9, about 60 third-year students gathered in the dean’s backyard for a pre-graduation dinner. A few of the students co-opted the occasion to rant about their school’s supposed support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and Chemerinsky’s avowed Zionism. Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, repeatedly pleaded with these students to leave. When Fisk tried to wrest a microphone from the student leading the demonstration, the student accused Fisk of assault and refused to move, insisting that she had a First Amendment right to continue.

In the days before the dinner, posters had gone up around campus that depicted the dean wielding a bloody knife and fork, with the message, “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.”

In his short official statement following the unsettling evening at his home, Chemerinsky used the words “sad” or “sadness” four times. He was “sad to hear” that students wanted him to cancel the dinner, as proclaimed on the posters, and that if he did not acquiesce, they would protest. And he was “enormously sad” that students would be “so rude” as to “use the social occasion for their political agenda.”

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