EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestine, Pedagogy and Protesting Kevin Donnelly

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2023/12/palestine-pedagogy-and-protesting/

The plea published in The Age and the SMH by Melbourne-based teacher Farah Khairat arguing teachers have every right to advocate on behalf of the Palestinians in the Gaza war illustrates how teachers, instead of being balanced and impartial, are intent on indoctrinating students with radical, cultural-left ideology.

Khairat argues she is entitled to present a one-sided, highly emotional account of the war in Gaza to her students — an account where the Palestinians are the victims and Israelis the criminals and there is no mention of Hamas’s evil and barbaric attack killing Jewish women and children. Ignored are the Israeli women raped and abducted, the babies killed and mutilated.  Instead, Khairat writes of “one Palestinian child killed every 10 minutes”, “dozens of teachers and school staff killed” and “children’s bodies covered in dirt, rubble and blood”. She also argues teachers should be allowed to politicise the classroom by “expressing solidarity with the Palestinian cause” and students allowed to wear a Palestinian scarf (keffiyeh) while at school.

In response to departmental directives not to discuss the Gaza war in the classroom, Khairat argues “As an educator, I question the appropriateness of feigning ignorance on such critical matters.  How could I pretend not to be knowledgeable on this topic”. Confusing her personal opinion of Israel and her primary duty to educate students in a balanced and objective way, she writes “I refuse to stay silent because trying to sweep this under the rug is just another form of oppression. To be silent is to be complicit”.

Given Khairat is a member of the Teachers and School Staff for Palestine Victoria group, it’s understandable she has such a jaundiced and one-sided view of the Gaza war.  What is inexcusable is that like-minded teachers have abrogated their responsibility as their students’ guardians. Rather than indoctrinating students with their personal political views and enforcing cultural-left mind control and groupthink, the role of the teacher is to educate students to be knowledgeable and able to evaluate arguments is a rational and balanced way.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Regime Soon to Have Nuclear Bombs; Hezbollah Is Next by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20191/iran-nuclear-bombs

The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran must not be underestimated. Iran’s regime has frequently threatened to wipe a whole country — Israel — off the map, and is also increasing military cooperation with Venezuela and Cuba to threaten the US. Europe, too, remains a rich target for nuclear blackmail. Iran would not even have to use its nuclear bombs; the threat would be enough.

It is high time for the Biden administration and the European Union at least to stop Iran from selling its oil. If not, much of the planet will soon see itself either in World War III or a surrender.

It would have been so much less costly in life and treasure to stop Hitler before he sent the German army across the Rhine in 1936. Perhaps US President Joe Biden is trying to bribe the mullahs not to create any more mayhem before next year’s US presidential election – but the only result of such timidity is that the price goes up – with a worse war to follow. Biden would not have won WWII.

The Iranian regime, through its proxies, has already attacked US forces in Iraq and Syria at least 74 times since October 17. US retaliation – against the proxies, not Iran – apparently could not impress Iran’s regime less. Someone else takes the bullet: that is why Iran has proxies in the first place… The Biden administration is not only allowing to Iran’s mullahs to create a war cost-free, it is paying them to do it.
The threat of a nuclear-armed Iran must not be underestimated. Once Iran obtains nuclear weapons, it will most likely provide some of them to its proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. (Image source: iStock)

Iran is closer than ever before to obtaining nuclear bombs; meanwhile, the Biden administration’s only policy toward the ruling mullahs of Iran is to keep “rewarding” them with billions of dollars.

After the Iran-backed Hamas terror group launched its genocidal war against Israel and Jews, the Iranian regime ratcheted up its enrichment of uranium. The regime claims it now has enough enriched uranium to make three nuclear bombs, according to one of the two confidential reports by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and seen by Reuters.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

No Amount Of Subsidies Will Ever Make A Wind/Solar Electricity System Economically Feasible: Francis Menton

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=a3f66ecf7b

The COP 28 climate confab opened today in Dubai. Some 70,000 true believers in the energy transition are said to be gathering. And not one of them appears to be either willing or able to do the simple arithmetic that shows that this can’t possibly work.

So far, no country that has made a commitment to “net zero” has officially backed off. (Argentina may soon become the first.). Things proceed as if all that is needed is to build sufficient wind and solar generation facilities, until eventually you have enough of them to meet demand. But that’s not how this works. The absurdity becomes more obvious every day. Can somebody please tell the poor people making fools of themselves in Dubai?

Let’s consider the latest from Germany. According to Statista here, Germany consumed 511.59 TWh of electricity in 2021 (latest year given, although the numbers have recently changed very little from year to year). Divide by 8760 (number of hours in a year) and you learn that Germany’s average usage of electricity is 58.3 GW. So, can you just build 58.3 GW of wind and solar generators to supply Germany with electricity?

Absolutely not. In fact, Germany already has way more wind and solar electricity generation capacity than the 58.3 GW, but can’t come anywhere near getting all its electricity from those sources. As of June 2023 Germany had 59.3 GW of generation capacity from wind turbines alone, and (as of end 2022) another 67.4 GW of generation capacity from solar panels. The total of the two is 126.7 GW — which would supply more than double Germany’s usage at noon on a sunny and breezy June 21. But, according to Clean Energy Wire here, through the first three quarters of 2023, the percent of its electricity that Germany got from wind and solar was only 52%. Capacity seemingly sufficient to supply double the usage in fact only supplies half. That’s because the supply does not come at the same time as the demand, and the wind/solar generation system provides no mechanism to shift the supply to a time to meet the demand.

And why doesn’t Germany just double the amount of its wind/solar generation, so that those sources would go from supplying 52% of usage to 100%. Because it doesn’t work that way. If they double the wind and solar generation, then on the sunny/breezy June 21 mid-day they will now have over 250 GW of electricity generation — more than 4 times what they need — so they will have to discard or give away the rest. But on a calm night in January, they will still have nothing and need full backup from some other source. Multiplying the wind/solar generation capacity by 10 or even 100 (referred to as “overbuilding”) will increase the costs of the system exponentially, but will never be enough to keep the lights on all the time. Or you can try energy storage to save up the surpluses to cover the deficits, but that also multiplies the costs of the system exponentially. For more than you will ever want to know about energy storage and its costs, read my December 2022 energy storage report, “The Energy Storage Conundrum.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Top takeaways, real winner of DeSantis, Newsom debate

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/top-takeaways-real-winner-of-desantis-newsom-debate

Against all expectations, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis absolutely destroyed California’s Gavin Newsom in Thursday night’s Red State-Blue State debate moderated by Sean Hannity on Fox News.

Yes, the governor of Florida had a stronger hand – his state has seen a massive inflow of residents attracted to the better quality of life offered by the Sunshine State, while people have been fleeing California. On issue after issue raised by Hannity, DeSantis could roll out statistics that prove the success of the conservative common-sense policies he has implemented in Florida. 

But the surprise was in his strong and persuasive presentation. DeSantis is generally perceived to be a wooden speaker and campaigner; maybe his run for president has made him more effective. Newsom, on the other hand, is reputed to be the Democrat’s smooth-talking, politically clever president-in-waiting, the likely successor to Joe Biden should the president drop out of the 2024 race.  

The California governor was glib, to be sure, but he turned out to be all fluff — unable to answer questions that he surely saw coming, like why people are fleeing his state or why gasoline prices are $4.85 a gallon compared to $3.17 in Florida and $3.25 nationwide.   

Newsom embarrassed himself by disputing indisputable facts presented by debate moderator Hannity; he had no answers. The California governor could not explain why 750,000 people left his state in the past two years, while 454,000 people moved into Florida, why violent crime is almost twice as high in California as it is in Florida, why taxes are so much loftier, or why homelessness is over three times greater than in Florida. (He actually tried to suggest that the homeless issue had begun under Ronald Reagan’s governorship.). 

Asked about these issues, Newsom mostly skirted the questions, denied the facts or pivoted to talking up President Joe Biden’s record. For instance, he resorted to White House talking points on the large number of jobs added nationally under the Biden administration rather than explain why unemployment is so much higher in California than it is in Florida. On our open border, Newsom blamed Republicans for not backing Biden’s plan for comprehensive immigration reform, rather than admit that the millions of people pouring into our country illegally pose a security threat.

Sometimes, Newsom made up completely non-credible statistics of his own. He claimed, for instance, that more people had moved from Florida to California in the past two years than the other way around. People watching immediately debunked that idea, posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, actual numbers that disproved the governor’s claim.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

“To Whom, or to What, Do We Owe the Phenomenon that is Donald Trump?” Sydney Williams

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Donald Trump is like a battery-operated Hyper Pet Critter Dog that runs helter-skelter around the floor. As long as its battery is charged it will annoy most everyone except its owner. Trump’s battery life appears inexhaustible, but is it, and who or what is responsible?

Since January 6, 2021, it has become common for Democrats to claim democracy is under attack, with Donald Trump as prima facie evidence. In a speech on November 2, 2022, shortly before the midterms, President Biden said: “In our bones, we know democracy is at risk.” Just over two months ago, and citing the January 6 attack, he repeated the warning: “We know how damaged our institutions of democracy – our judiciary, the legislature, the executive – have become in the eyes of the American people, even the world, from attacks within, the past few years.” It is a message that resonated with voters in 2022. Will it succeed again in 2024? In that same 2023 speech, he warned that democracies “can die when people are silent – when they fail to stand up or condemn threats to democracy.” While he did not refer to him by name, he was speaking of Donald Trump.

The impetus for his remarks was January 6, and the “attack” on the Capital by Trump supporters. But in both remarks Biden failed to mention that democracy did survive – that the only fatality was that of Ashli Babbitt who was shot dead by a Capital policemen and that Vice President Michael Pence certified the election results, which made Joe Biden President. Nor did he acknowledge that the people were not silent – that the “attack” was condemned by Democrats and Independents – and by many Republicans – and all of mainstream media. More than 1,100 rioters have been charged with close to 300 having been given prison sentences, ranging from six months to eighteen years. The people have not been silent about January 6.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Road to Victory Starts, Ends with Israel E.J. Kimball

Posted By on December 2nd, 2023

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/hamas-hezbollah-iranian/2023/11/30/id/1144266/

To this day, Hezbollah remains a powerful force in Lebanon and a dire threat to Israel, especially those living in the north.

At some point, the war between Hamas and Israel will come to an end.

A looming but important question: what’s next?

What comes next after an Iranian-funded terrorist organization manages to kill over 1,200 Israelis and take 240 of its citizens hostage into Gaza?

The future of the region must be addressed, and whatever resolution is generated must include increased security measures in volatile areas like Gaza, the West Bank, and the northern border with Lebanon.

Additionally, the U.S., and more broadly, the U.N., must give the Jewish State full autonomy and support in dealing with this dangerous conflict.

We are now aware that the Biden administration is putting pressure on the Jewish State to restrain its operations against Hamas by conditioning aid to Israel.

Not only is this giving Hamas exactly what it wants, it continues this long cycle of Israel listening to western influence and ultimately causing more harm to Israel and the Jewish people.

In a recent interview with the BBC, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett remarked that Israel’s biggest flub over the past 20 years was listening to the advice of Western nations rather than doing the job at hand.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Three Israelis Dead, 13 Injured in Jerusalem Shooting after Cease-Fire Extended Another Day By David Zimmermann

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/three-israelis-dead-13-injured-in-jerusalem-shooting-after-cease-fire-extended-another-day/

Just after Israel and Hamas agreed to extend the existing cease-fire by another day, two Hamas terrorists opened fire at a bus stop near Jerusalem, leaving at least three Israelis dead and 13 injured.

Israeli police received reports of the shooting around 7:40 a.m. local time Thursday when two individuals pulled up in a car armed with weapons and shot several civilians standing by a busy bus station. The gunmen were killed by Israeli security forces at the scene, according to authorities.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack later Thursday, saying it was carried out in response to Israeli soldiers killing two Palestinian children in the West Bank the day prior.

“As we mourn our martyrs, we confirm that this operation came as a natural response to the unprecedented occupation crimes” of Israel, the terrorist organization said in a statement, identifying brothers Murad and Ibrahim al-Nimr as the deceased perpetrators.

The mass shooting came shortly after the cease-fire in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war was extended by another 24 hours ahead of the 7 a.m. deadline, allowing Hamas to release more hostages in exchange for Israel freeing its Palestinian prisoners and providing humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Unless another cease-fire extension is agreed upon, both warring sides will resume fighting by Friday.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Globalism Is a Disease That Deprives Life of Meaning By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/globalism_is_a_disease_that_deprives_life_of_meaning.html

Two recent statistical surveys keep bouncing around in my head.  One study concludes that one out of every four young people in the world feels lonely today.  The other study finds that 72% of Americans have no interest in defending the United States in a major war.  In other words, a quarter of the planet’s emerging leaders are clinically depressed, and nearly three-quarters of the voters in the world’s wealthiest, most powerful nation have no interest in fighting to preserve the “American dream.”  People, it seems, are so disappointed in the present that they have no appetite for the future.  

Signs of such debilitating malaise should be a smack across the face to those who insist on ruling planet Earth from privileged perches secured behind steel gates at private social clubs such as the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations.  Across the globe and in poor and rich countries, alike, the human race is suffering.  Real leaders would recognize this phenomenon for what it is: a worldwide cry for help.

Does it seem as if the post-WWI eruption of think tanks, international associations, economic clubs, and foreign policy institutes has had a net-positive effect on human happiness?  Has the Council on Foreign Relations successfully steered the planet toward sustained peace?  Have the privately controlled central banks that are empowered to manipulate national currencies at whim safeguarded middle class families from regular economic disaster?  Has the League of Nations’ successor, the UN, prevailed in its self-appointed mission to build a better world?  Or, after a solid century of international busybodies obsessively micromanaging the world’s affairs, is it perhaps time to conclude that a glut of governmental and non-governmental organizations with a penchant for starting wars and triggering economic calamity has, quite demonstrably, done more harm than good?

With so many global institutions dominating private life, is it any wonder why so many people now behave as if they should be committed to institutions?  True meaning — the kind formed through personal struggle, adventure, hard work, religion, community, and family — has been replaced with the incremental oppression of international rule-making.  The sanctity of the family home has been bulldozed, so that a global cabal of atheists — whose only real mission is to severely reduce the human population — can poison the natural bonds nurtured between parents and children.  The blessings of marriage have been paved over with such vulgar elevation of sin as to condemn human beings, who would otherwise have been made whole through matrimonial commitment, to lonely lives — bereft of hope and adrift in promiscuous isolation.  

Culture, marriage, children, and a devotion to God are the bricks that build communities, which in turn fortify nations against the evils propagated by those who lead drab, meaningless lives drenched in self-loathing and hatred for humanity’s existence.  The UN and its sister organizations do one thing well: they vanquish cultural bonds and, by doing so, demolish civilizations.  And with the wreckage that they reap, they extinguish human happiness.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Floor is Falling Out From Under Biden’s Ukraine Policy A year of Russian gains could force major U.S. policy changes in 2024 By Fred Fleitz

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/01/the-floor-is-falling-out-from-under-bidens-ukraine-policy/

Just two weeks ago, President Biden again likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to Hamas. In a November 18 Washington Post op-ed titled “The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas,” he made this comparison and said America will stand against these aggressors to prevent them from wiping neighboring democracies off the map.

I have major concerns about how committed Biden is to Israel in its war against Hamas after its barbaric October 7 terrorist attack, given his lecturing to the Israeli government on how it should conduct the war and increasing anti-Israel pressure against Biden from his progressive supporters. I expressed my concerns about Biden going wobbly on his support for Israel in an October 27 American Greatness article. Unfortunately, this problem is now getting worse.

But let’s talk about Ukraine, a conflict that has been pushed off the front page by the Israel-Hamas War. You know that President Biden’s Ukraine policy is in trouble when MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show hosts panels, like one held on November 21, to discuss why the war is unwinnable, explain why Ukraine needs to change its strategy to protect the 80% of the country it controls, and encourage Ukraine to pursue a cease-fire with Russia.

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough and his guests also reluctantly admitted what many members of Congress have long realized: the Biden strategy to arm Ukraine “for as long as it takes” but not send the weapons it needs to win is not a strategy.

Although Scarborough and others in the mainstream media won’t admit it, they now recognize something else about the Ukraine War: that the highly vaunted 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive that was supposed to turn the tide of the war failed to reclaim a significant amount of territory and may have lost ground to Russia.

As a result, many experts on the right and left have concluded that this conflict has become a stalemate and a war of attrition that Ukraine will eventually lose because Russian forces are dug in and Ukraine is running out of soldiers.

The New York Times reported in August 2023 that Ukraine’s war casualties were estimated at up to 70,000 killed and 120,000 injured. Russia’s estimated casualties of up to 120,000 killed and 180,000 injured were significantly higher, but Russia can more easily absorb these losses since its population is three times larger.

Resistance to the Biden Administration’s Ukraine policy is especially strong in the House of Representatives, where many members have demanded the Biden Administration provide a clear strategy for ending the conflict and reaching a cease-fire instead of just sending weapons to Ukraine. Many House members are also concerned that the Ukraine conflict is consuming advanced weapons that the U.S. cannot quickly replace that may be needed elsewhere, such as to defend Taiwan.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Black Progress and Black Rage A new biopic about Bayard Rustin and the New York Met’s opera about the life of Malcolm X celebrate very different notions of black struggle. Joshua Muravchik

Posted By on December 1st, 2023

https://quillette.com/2023/11/30/black-progress-and-black-rage/

Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X, two enormously important figures in black history, were each the subject of a major cultural event in November. The biopic Rustin, produced by Michelle and Barack Obama, opened in movie theaters and was released on Netflix. Meanwhile, New York’s Metropolitan Opera raised the curtain on X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, a decades-old production that has at last reached opera’s biggest stage. 

The simultaneity is a coincidence, but the contrast between the two men brings into unusually sharp relief a fundamental divide in the struggle of black people for equality. Aside from Martin Luther King, almost no one contributed more to the victory of civil rights in America than Rustin. The only other figure who deserves to be placed ahead of him is A. Philip Randolph, who organized the first predominantly black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—a substantial base that enabled him to play the role of patriarch to the movement. 

Randolph was also something of a father figure to Rustin, who was born to a young single mother and raised among Pennsylvania Quakers by his grandparents. The two men first collaborated in 1941, when Rustin, then in his late twenties, assisted Randolph in organizing a march to demand an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industries. President Roosevelt yielded, and the march was called off. At the war’s end, Randolph and Rustin reprised that scenario, securing an order from President Truman to integrate the armed forces. 

Then, in 1947, Rustin and a few other pacificists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation undertook the first “freedom ride,” which aimed to secure enforcement of a ruling against discrimination in interstate transport. In North Carolina, he was beaten by police, arrested, and sentenced to work on a chain gang. From his cell he sent dispatches to the New York Post, generating such an outcry that North Carolina abolished chain gangs. 

In 1956, the Montgomery bus boycott propelled King into national prominence. Rustin had traveled to India to study Gandhi’s techniques and he mentored King in the strategy of nonviolent protest. Then, together with Randolph and a few others, Rustin organized the first civil-rights mass marches, the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom and the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools. The movement gained momentum with the lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960 and the “freedom rides” of 1961, reenacting the 1947 effort of Rustin and his pacifist colleagues but this time into the murderous deep south. The gathering momentum led to the movement’s culmination in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the most important protest in US history.

The 1963 march was orchestrated by Rustin, who bore the misleading title Deputy Director (the other civil-rights leaders were afraid that his homosexuality and brief youthful membership in the Young Communist League made him too controversial to be called the Director), and it provided the venue for King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Even more importantly, it decisively tilted Washington’s political scales in favor of civil rights. There followed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in public accommodations, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. This trifecta of legislation put paid to a century of overt racial discrimination.