ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Greta Thunberg and the Greatest of all Heresies By Stephen Soukup

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/11/greta-thunberg-and-the-greatest-of-all-heresies/

The other day, as environmental hero/prophetess Greta Thunberg donned a keffiyeh and joined the pro-Hamas protests in Malmo, Sweden, social media blew up with its usual mix of angry condemnation and fierce support. “How could she?” countless posters tetchily demanded, only to be met, in response, with the equally peevish “How could you?” With a few notable exceptions, most observers missed the obvious point that of course the erstwhile environmental activist was protesting the Jewish “oppressors” and supporting their poor, Palestinian victims; of course she took to the streets with neo-Marxist identitarians to demand “justice” and an end to “colonialism;” of course she has and will continue to embrace every subversive left-wing liberationist cause. How could do otherwise? After all, these causes are all interconnected, if not wholly identical.

Interestingly, some otherwise keen political observers are only now coming to the conclusion that Marxism is not economic in nature but religious and that it does not stand on its own as a unique and discrete phenomenon but is interconnected with all of the other anti-realist, quasi-religious utopian endeavors that have accompanied its rise over the last nearly two centuries. Marxism, for all its destructive murderousness, is but one component—albeit the dominant component—of the enduring effort to update and replace the moral system that was undermined and largely abandoned in the West with the Enlightenment.

Perhaps the greatest and least appreciated analysis of what we would broadly call “the left” is that which appears in Chapter 6 (or 7, depending on the edition) of Hilaire Belloc’s 1938 classic The Great Heresies. It is “The Modern Phase.”

Belloc is careful in his presentation of this heresy to clarify that it is not merely Communism or “Bolshevism” that constitutes this perversion of Catholicism but the broader “Modern Attack.”  Nevertheless, it is clear that he has in mind what we know today as “the left.”  Moreover, it is clear that he sees this “religion of man” and its ill-defined “spiritualism” as both an obvious Catholic heresy and the greatest and deadliest of them all.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Hysterics for Hamas Why have young women been so prominent in the recent campus chaos? Heather MacDonald

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/hysterics-for-hamas

The female voices rose high-pitched and shrill above the crowd:

“Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terrorist state.”

“We don’t want no Zionists here, say it loud, say it clear.”

“Resistance is justified when people are occupied.”

The voices that answered them were also overwhelmingly female, emanating from hundreds of students chanting and marching around tents pitched in front of Columbia University’s neoclassical Butler Library, part of an effort in late April to prevent the university from uprooting the encampment.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gem from the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Gaza and not the Uighurs? The long march through the institutions has reached a familiar target: the Jews Charles Lipson

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://thespectator.com/topic/gaza-not-uighurs-china-college/

The Babylon Bee, “the newspaper of record” for anyone with a sense of humor, posed a more interesting thought about the campus demonstrations than anything you can find in the New York Times or Washington Post. The Bee’s headline proclaimed, “Uighur Slaves Struggling to Keep Up with Demand for Palestinian Headscarves.”

Dark humor indeed. The headscarves, like the masks, serve one obvious function: they hide the faces of demonstrators. That’s why bank robbers wear masks, too. Students know they are breaking the rules and professional agitators know they are breaking the law, so it’s smart to hide their faces.

But the scarves have one additional advantage that bank robbers’ masks don’t: the keffiyeh is a visible symbol of Palestinian identity. “Pardon me,” they say, “my virtue is showing.”

The Babylon Bee also picked up another interesting point the legacy media missed. The keffiyehs worn on campus today come from China, like so much clothing. Ah, globalization. Palestinians used to produce the scarves themselves but cheaper Chinese production squeezed them out of the market. The protesters’ attire is a hidden mark of the international trade they loath.

Another symbol of that global commerce is the vast number of international students involved in the protests and often leading them. Have you seen objections to that aspect of globalization? No. But then no one ever accused the mob of intellectual coherence.

What is it about Gaza that excites such large, ferocious and often violent demonstrations? Why are there no massive demonstrations about other human-rights atrocities around the world? Why is the campus silent about Hong Kong and the prisons in Siberia? Why such intense focus on Israel, which often bleeds into open antisemitism?

A few reasons top the list. The first is the nature of the hard-left coalition on campus. It centers on two groups, both of which position themselves as righteous victims. The number one domestic victims are African Americans. The number one international victims are Palestinians, plus Muslims more generally. Other victims run the gamut, Native Americans, queers, transgenders and others. White students and increasingly Asian Americans are labeled as the oppressors or victimizers. Their only chance at salvation from their “sin” is to make common cause with the putatively oppressed and follow their lead. Hispanics are rarely part of this coalition, even though their professors are.

The word “sin” is important here. The ideology has the intensity of a religion and the hatred of apostates.

The coalition would crumble if it emphasized positive issues, such as “gay rights in Gaza.” So they focus on common hatreds. Those are what hold the coalition together.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Emerson College head tries to appease anti-Israel students By David Isaac

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/emerson-college-head-tries-to-appease-anti-israel-students/

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu on Tuesday defended the police against charges by student protesters at Emerson College that officers had engaged in extreme brutality while removing their anti-Israel tent encampment, which had commandeered a city street.

The mayor said a city review found no protesters had been hospitalized. They “wanted to get arrested,” she added.

She noted that the school had offered the protesters rooms to use 24 hours a day but the response of the student organizers was to “keep the tents up to get arrested.”

The mayor’s no-nonsense response contrasted sharply with that of Emerson College president Jay Bernhardt, who has assured the protesters he “could feel the pain.”

His approach has won him little love among the student population, judging from recent meetings.

Many students called on the president to resign at a town hall meeting held on April 29, which centered around events leading up to the April 25 arrest of 118 students by the Boston Police Department. Police acted after protesters at the “Popular University Encampment” at 2 Boylston Place Alley refused to vacate the public street.

Student calls for the president’s resignation echoed a Student Government Association general assembly meeting on April 26, when students unanimously voted no-confidence in Bernhardt, who is Jewish, demanding he resign.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

I witnessed Israel choosing life as it fights against a ‘death cult’ By Douglas Murray

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/05/08/opinion/i-witnessed-israel-choosing-life-as-it-fights-against-a-death-cult/

Adapted from Douglas Murray‘s speech Monday as The Post columnist accepted the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Award.

“I want to dedicate my acceptance of this award to the people of Israel who in the face of death, choose life.”

I’ve never seen as much of the best and the worst of humankind as I have in the past six months in Israel and Gaza.

I was here in New York on the 7th of October, and on the 8th, I went down to Times Square.

And there were these men and women, waving signs, celebrating the massacre.

They were holding these signs in Times Square, “by any means necessary.”

At a time when we already knew what those means included.

I thought I had to get to Israel as soon as I could, that we were going to see a kind of Holocaust denialism in real time, and therefore I should see with my own eyes everything that had happened.

In Israel, I joined the pathologists in the morgues of Tel Aviv as they were trying to identify the dead.

An unbelievable task, which they do with extraordinary delicacy and religiosity.

I had the great opportunity to witness firsthand Israel’s response, because unlike some countries today, Israel doesn’t just sit back with equanimity when it’s attacked.

Some of the world would like it to do so.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Wars for Survival-Sydney Williams

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Israel and Ukraine are fighting wars for survival. Neither wants more land or to impose their values on their neighbors. They are fighting to maintain their independence and to keep their way of life. Iran and its proxies have said they want to annihilate Israel, not shrink its borders. Putin has not gone that far with Ukraine, but the analogy of a camel getting its nose under the tent applies. To the extent that Israel and Ukraine are our allies we have a duty to support them in their existential wars.

Israel is not a colonialist power. Over three quarters of a century it has created a thriving democracy on land from which their ancestors came. Today they combat forces that want to drive them from their land. Former Iranian president Rafsanjani called Israel “a one-bomb state,” that one nuclear weapon could erase Jewish civilization. Palestinians speak of the “River to the Sea,” effectively extinguishing the state of Israel. Israelis fight for their survival. If Rafah is not taken Hamas, a political party elected by Palestinians to govern Gaza, will survive, and threats to Israel will persist.

Ukraine was once part of the Russian empire and later part of the Soviet Union. In 1991 the nation drafted a declaration of independence, which received overwhelming support in a public referendum, and it was recognized as an independent state that year. It now fights to keep its independence. Yet Putin has said that Ukraine is an “aberration that doesn’t really exist.” He considers it a province of Russia and a country whose language should be obliterated. Should we help them? If we do not, does anyone think Putin will stop with Ukraine?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is This Biden’s ‘Supermarket Scanner’ Moment?

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/10/is-this-bidens-supermarket-scanner-moment/

“They have the money to spend.” — President Joe Biden

Those of us who’ve been around a while remember when the press made an epic deal out of President George H.W. Bush’s apparent amazement at an ordinary grocery store checkout scanner. It turns out the story was a complete media fabrication, but it fed the narrative that Bush was hopelessly out of touch, and it helped cost him his reelection.

This week, Joe Biden actually did do something that shows he is perhaps the most clueless president in American history.

In a softball interview this week, CNN’s Erin Burnett let Biden carry on — uninterrupted — with his usual litany of lies.

That he created 15 million jobs (there’ve been less than 6 million net new jobs under Biden – about equal to Trump’s over the same period).
That Trump told people to inject bleach (a claim repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers).
That a million people died from COVID on Trump’s watch (fewer than 470,000 had died when Biden took office; more than 720,000 have died since).
That “we have got 1,000 billionaires in America. You know what their average federal tax is? Eight-point-three percent” (a completely made-up number that we wrote about here).
That “when I started this administration, people were saying there’s going to be a collapse of the economy” (nobody but Biden was saying that).

But then Burnett, to her credit, asked about inflation.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

What You Aren’t Hearing About Marijuana’s Health Effects Bertha Madras, a leading expert on weed, outlines the science linking it to psychiatric disorders, permanent brain damage, and other serious harms.y Allysia Finley

Posted By on May 11th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-you-arent-reading-about-marijuana-permanent-brain-damage-biden-schedule-iii-9660395e?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Young people who smoked marijuana in the 1960s were seen as part of the counterculture. Now the cannabis culture is mainstream. A 2022 survey sponsored by the National Institutes of Health found that 28.8% of Americans age 19 to 30 had used marijuana in the preceding 30 days—more than three times as many as smoked cigarettes. Among those 35 to 50, 17.3% had used weed in the previous month, versus 12.2% for cigarettes.

While marijuana use remains a federal crime, 24 states have legalized it and another 14 permit it for medical purposes. Last week media outlets reported that the Biden administration is moving to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous Schedule III drug—on par with anabolic steroids and Tylenol with codeine—which would provide tax benefits and a financial boon to the pot industry.

Bertha Madras thinks this would be a colossal mistake. Ms. Madras, 81, is a psychobiology professor at Harvard Medical School and one of the foremost experts on marijuana. “It’s a political decision, not a scientific one,” she says. “And it’s a tragic one.” In 2024, that is a countercultural view.

Ms. Madras has spent 60 years studying drugs, starting with LSD when she was a graduate student at Allan Memorial Institute of Psychiatry, an affiliate of Montreal’s McGill University, in the 1960s. “I was interested in psychoactive drugs because I thought they could not only give us some insight into how the brain works, but also on how the brain undergoes dysfunction and disease states,” she says.

In 2015 the World Health Organization asked her to do a detailed review of cannabis and its medical uses. The 41-page report documented scant evidence of marijuana’s medicinal benefits and reams of research on its harms, from cognitive impairment and psychosis to car accidents.

She continued to study marijuana, including at the addiction neurobiology lab she directs at Mass General Brigham McLean Hospital. In a phone interview this week, she walked me through the scientific literature on marijuana, which runs counter to much of what Americans hear in the media.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Defending Freedom: A Tribute to the Warriors of Israel by Nils A. Haug

Posted By on May 10th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20625/warriors-of-israel-defending-freedom

These assaults are not only aimed at Israel and its inhabitants but, ultimately, at the West.

Adversaries of the West — whether religious fundamentalists or authoritarian states such as China, Russia, and Iran and its allies — appear intent upon imposing a new totalitarian world order. To do so, they seek destruction of the two main countries standing in their way: United States of America and Israel, the global champions of democracy, freedom, Western values, and human rights.

Regrettably, with freedom often comes the need to protect it, at times by force, from those who would take it away. Sometimes, this requires measures open to criticism by those who may have a different goal….

“Therefore, having judged that to be happy means to be free, and to be free means to be brave, we do not shy away from the risks of war.” — Pericles, funeral oration, 432 BCE.

Israel… is fighting for the values of civilization opposing terrorist barbarism so that the rest of us in the West will not have to. We should be sending whatever they need to end the terrorism, not withholding precision-guided weapons — especially, as we sanctimoniously claim, if we do not want to harm civilians.

“I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land.” – Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1986.

As people of peace, the warriors and all citizens of Israel long for such a time with all their hearts, but first there are battles to be won.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Real Reason Hamas and Egypt Oppose Israel’s Control of Rafah, the Only Border Out of Gaza by Bassam Tawil *****

Posted By on May 9th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20624/israel-gaza-egypt-border-rafah

Hamas and Egypt were quick to issue statements denouncing the capture of the Rafah border crossing, claiming that the move would “threaten” the lives of the Palestinians and hinder the entry of humanitarian and relief aid into the Gaza Strip.

The Egyptians and Hamas have good reason to be angry with the presence of the IDF at the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing. For several years, Palestinians who wanted to exit the Gaza Strip via the terminal have alleged that they had to bribe Hamas and officials. Hamas and Egypt are now afraid of losing the Palestinian milk-cow.

“It is our right to travel without bribes and without corruption. We are living under a [Hamas] dictatorship.” Abu Amr was later arrested by Hamas security officers, who confiscated her mobile phone and ordered her to delete the Facebook post. — Noha Abu Amr, Palestinian journalist, 24.ae, January 24, 2024

[A] Palestinian man in the US [said] he paid $9,000 to get his wife and children on the list. On the day of travel, he was told his children’s names were not listed and he would have to pay an extra $3,000. He said the brokers were “trying to trade in the blood of Gazans”.

[T]he company [Hala Consulting and Tourism Services] owned by an influential Egyptian businessman and ally of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi] is estimated to have made a minimum of $118 million from desperate Palestinians trying to leave the Gaza Strip. “By the end of this year, if the April average continues, the company may earn well over half a billion dollars from the so-called VIP list of people Hala is transferring across the Gaza-Egypt border. ” — Middle East Eye, May 1, 2024.

An international charity [that does not want to be named] with extensive experience in providing emergency aid in wars…is also being forced to pay $5,000 per truck to a company linked to Egypt’s General Intelligence Service (GIS) to get aid into the Gaza Strip. — Middle East Eye, January 30, 2024.

The Palestinians actually owe Israel a huge debt of gratitude for finally driving Hamas out of the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing.

Egypt and Hamas are, it seems, indifferent to the pain endured by the Palestinians they are effectively imprisoning. All that matters to them is making more money off anyone desperate to leave the Gaza Strip.

On May 6, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) captured the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, drawing condemnations from the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group and Egypt.

The IDF said it had “intelligence that terrorists were using the border crossing for terror purposes.” A day earlier, Hamas terrorists fired rockets from near the Rafah terminal toward the Kerem Shalom area (near the Israel-Gaza border), killing four Israeli soldiers and wounding several others.

In response to the Israeli military operation, Hamas and Egypt were quick to issue statements denouncing the capture of the Rafah border crossing, claiming that the move would “threaten” the lives of the Palestinians and hinder the entry of humanitarian and relief aid into the Gaza Strip.

“Egypt condemns in the strongest terms the Israeli military operations in the Palestinian city of Rafah, and the resulting Israeli control over the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing,” read a statement by the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.