ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Idolatry of Environmental Extremism By David Limbaugh

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-idolatry-of-environmental-extremism/

A bizarre incident at Union Theological Seminary illustrates why many Christians believe that internal forces, not external ones, represent the greatest threat to the church.

Students at this seminary prayed to a collection of plants in its chapel, which triggered a raft of criticism on Twitter. The school defiantly defended its action in a series of tweets.

“Today in chapel, we confessed to plants,” the school tweeted. “Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor. What do you confess to the plants in your life?”

Some Twitter respondents observed that the seminary and its students have lost their minds, but I think it’s worse than that. Insanity might mitigate this sacrilege, but deliberately perverting theology is another matter.

Pastor Greg Locke tweeted, “This is utter nonsense. Absolute theological bankruptcy in every way. Your Seminary is a cemetery.” Another Twitter user quipped, “What kind of penance did the plants give after the ‘confession?'”

What possesses this misguided institution to refer to plants as “beings”? What gross theological error leads them to pray to and encourage others to pray to them? Idolatry is no trifling matter, which is underscored by at least two of the Ten Commandments and the entirety of Scripture.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The walls finally may be closing in on Ilhan Omar By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/the_walls_finally_may_be_closing_in_on_ilhan_omar.html

There is ample reason to suspect that Rep. Ilhan Omar has committed multiple frauds.  Scott Johnson of Powerline, a retired attorney, has been covering the freshman House member ever since her run for the Minnesota state Legislature, and has been among the most active investigators of suspicions that she committed immigration fraud by legally marrying her brother in order to get him into the United States.  Yesterday, he wrote about the genesis of his suspicions:

A few days after I started writing about Ilhan Omar on Power Line in August 2016 — after she had won the primary for the DFL state legislative endorsement — I was contacted by a source who agreed to discuss his knowledge of Omar’s family with me. At our meeting he told me that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — Omar’s legal husband, so to speak, as of that date — was Omar’s brother and that she had married him for fraudulent purposes. 

And Omar herself entered the United States under an assumed identity:

My source told me that Omar and another member or two of the Elmi family had entered the United States as fraudulent members of the Omar family. That would go some way to explain why Omar lacks any acknowledged relative with the name Omar.

Now a tweet that she deleted two days ago is providing corroboration for those suspicions.  Shaikh Tawhidi, the Imam of Peace, called attention to the deletion:

Imam Mohamad Tawhidi

✔ @Imamofpeace
Ilhan Omar has just deleted this tweet from 2013 that proves her father is Nur Said, which makes her Ilhan Nur Said (surnames are the fathers names in most Muslim/MENA countries), and that Ahmed Nur Said, who she married, is in fact her brother.  CONTINUE AT SITE

BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

BOOK REVIEW: GETTING THE WORLD TO SIGN OFF A masterful chronicling of the battle for global support for Israeli independence.

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Book-review-Getting-the-world-to-sign-off-602139
BY YISRAEL MEDAD

Continuing his previous trenchant and detailed history of the Palestine Mandate which covered the years 1933-1939 in his 2014 two-volume Palestine in Turmoil: The Struggle for Sovereignty, Monty Penkower – former professor of Jewish History at Rutgers University, Bard College, Touro College and New York University – now allows the reader again to be able to grasp the intertwined elements of the sub-history of that era. We are led along as the British Mandatory ruler, facing a post-Holocaust reality (the Holocaust period was covered in an earlier 1994 volume, The Holocaust and Israel Reborn), a determined and increasingly militant Jewish community in the Jewish Yishuv community and its need to maintain proper relations with the United States as well as balanced ones with the Arab world. Ultimately, it failed to maneuver itself to a successful conclusion of its administration of the territory the international community decided in 1922 would be the reconstituted Jewish national homeland and awarded it rule over Palestine.

Penkower’s trilogy has marshaled the facts from the documents, memos, diaries and newspaper reports of the time as well as providing an up-to-date collection of the historical research that has been published. We are presented with off-the-cuff remarks, protocols, speeches and the more cached away notations at the time.

This volume, as with the others, is tightly framed in a chronological procession. Month by month, week by week and day by day, Penkower has his reader delve into the at times frenetic and at times frustrating attempts by all the major actors to push their policies, most times in a competing and contradictory fashion. Penkower, to his credit, does not allow the reader to lose the greater picture and provides analysis in an objective style of relating history as it happens.

If there are major lessons to be derived for those wondering what is happening today, the book reveals the utter reversal of British policy from the League of Nations intent in that senior British officials not only reformulate their 1922 charge but express horrible anti-Jewish views in complete opposition to the events they were caught up in.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Jeremy Corbyn’s Incoherent Brexit Politics By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/jeremy-corbyns-incoherent-brexit-politics/

The Labour party leader continues to try to stake out the empty middle ground between Remain and Leave, apparently unaware that it’s empty for good reason.

Well, now it is official. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour party, has finally outlined his party’s new position on Brexit in an editorial in the Guardian. Spoiler alert: It is completely daft.

Just a refresher. Three years ago, citizens of the U.K. voted in simple referendum. The choices were “Remain a member of the European Union” and “Leave the European Union.” Leave won by a small percentage. The Leave and Remain causes are more passionately felt than party attachments for many Brits.

Two years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was able to have it both ways on Brexit. He said his party was committed to implementing the referendum’s result. But in fact, Labour benefited from a surge of Remain voters wishing to stick it to Theresa May, who had started to negotiate Brexit and who denounced Remainers as “citizens of nowhere.” That convergence nearly brought May down. At the time I predicted that the tectonic plates of Brexit underneath British politics would begin to grind Corbyn the way they had May. Now it is happening.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

RIGHT FROM WRONG: BELITTLING BIBI’S MASTERY BY CALLING IT ‘MAGIC’

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-Belittling-Bibis-mastery-by-calling

Stunned that this campaign hasn’t been as successful as they’d anticipated, Netanyahu’s naysayers minimize his ability to remain in power by calling him a “magician.”

When Tuesday’s elections for the 22nd Knesset resulted in an a fully expected stalemate between Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party and its key rival, Blue and White, schadenfreude busted out all over.

In an unveiled effort to express their glee, media outlets abroad have been bidding Bibi a cheerful farewell. Never mind that most of these “eulogies” exhibit confusion, if not outright ignorance, about the Israeli electoral process; many analysts at home who understand it perfectly similarly appear to believe that Bibi’s days are numbered – even if those 24-hour units add up to a few years.
It doesn’t take a PhD in political science to realize that the longest-serving prime minister in the country’s history – who turns 70 on October 21, perhaps before the formation of the next government – is closer to the end of his tenure than to the beginning.

Nor is this the first time that the academic anti-Netanyahu choir has attempted to write him off, counting on the hackneyed fact that “even a broken clock is accurate twice a day” to prove their predictions right.

To explain Netanyahu’s uncanny ability to defy the so-called “odds” time and again, his detractors expend a lot of energy delegitimizing him. Accusing him of hedonism, hubris and criminality is one method. Yes – they moan – he enjoys expensive cigars, paid for by rich friends. Tsk tsk.

Oh, and he has a thing for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, funded by our hard-earned tax shekels. Outrageous. 

Worst of all, he wheels and deals to get positive press coverage. Send him to prison.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Invisible Thread by: Diana West

Posted By on September 20th, 2019

I’m posting the link to my May 15, 2019 Red Thread radio interview with Sean Hannity and Gregg Jarrett (with thanks to Vlad Tepes) because I suddenly realized that this 10-plus minute segment from the beginning of the summer makes a nice bookend to a short passage I find in Andy McCarthy’s late-summer release, Ball of Collusion.

As some may recall, my three-way conversation with Hannity and Jarrett demonstrated what I have found to be a perplexing dynamic in Trump-Russia narratives: namely, an ever-present force field against the notion, even the evidence (as laid out in The Red Thread) that the intellectual history of the anti-Trump conspirators, from Comey to Ohr, from Brennan to Steele, and on and on, reveals open affinities for Marxist ideology, clear connections to communist movements and activities, which bind them all together in a skein of “red threads.”  

The preferred consensus — ideology-free — is succinctly expressed in the Hannity interview by Jarrett, who, in answer to the question that guided my research (what motivated these top Washington officials to risk all in their lawless efforts to stop Trump?), stated that their motivation was personal, visceral, job-related. Had I one more soundbyte, I think I would have replied that none of these assuredly plausible motivations cuts the conspirators’ troubling ties with what old Soviet agit prop called “the socialist camp.”

I plan to read the McCarthy book. We are writing about the same events but it seems that we regard them with very different eyes. What I unravel in The Red Thread as an ideologically motivated conspiracy by subverters (if not “occupiers”) of our constiutional republic against a strongly (yea, vsicerally) anti-communist president, Andy McCarthy defines as a more conventional if “scandalous abuse of power” by the Obama administration.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Trump’s Total Culture War By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 19th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/trumps-total-culture-war/

Donald Trump is waging a nonstop, all-encompassing war against progressive culture, in magnitude analogous to what 19th-century Germans once called a Kulturkampf.

As a result, not even former President George W. Bush has incurred the degree of hatred from the left that is now directed at Trump. For most of his time in office, Trump, his family, his friends and his businesses have been investigated, probed, dissected and constantly attacked.

In 2016 and early 2017, Barack Obama appointees in the FBI, CIA and Department of Justice tried to subvert the Trump campaign, interfere with his transition and, ultimately, abort his presidency. Now, congressional Democrats promise impeachment before the 2020 election.

The usual reason for such hatred is said to be Trump’s unorthodox and combative take-no-prisoners style. Critics detest his crude and unfettered assertions, his lack of prior military or political experience, his attacks on the so-called bipartisan administrative state, and his intent to roll back the entire Obama-era effort of “fundamentally transforming” the country leftward.

Certainly, Trump’s agenda of closing the border, using tariffs to overturn a half-century of Chinese mercantilism, and pulling back from optional overseas military interventions variously offends both Democrats and establishment Republicans.

Trump periodically and mercurially fires his top officials. He apparently does not care whether the departed write damning memoirs or join his opposition. He will soon appoint his fourth national security adviser within just three years.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lewandowski’s Contempt for a Contemptible Congress Julie Kelly

Posted By on September 19th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/18/lewandowskis-contempt-for-a-contemptible-congress/

Shortly after being sworn-in in January, freshman U.S. Representative  Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) promised to “impeach the motherfucker” during an inauguration celebration. The “motherfucker” to whom she was referring, of course, was President Donald Trump.

Tlaib’s outburst ushered in the profane, malevolent, and contemptible 115th Congress of the United States.

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is under fire for his defiant performance during the House Judiciary Committee’s first impeachment hearing on Tuesday. Lawmakers and pundits are howling about Lewandowski’s refusal to answer questions and his mockery of the process. (Lewandowksi testified for more than 20 hours before the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and Robert Mueller’s office.)

Yet Jerold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the committee’s chairman, is reportedly considering whether to charge Lewandowski, who never actually worked for the Trump Administration, with contempt of Congress.

It is Nadler and his Democratic colleagues, however, who are defiling the halls of Congress.

Since taking control of the people’s house more than eight months ago, Democrats—individually and collectively—have acted contemptuously toward the president, his associates, his family, and his supporters. After failing to take down the president by means of fabricated Trump-Russia collusion, Democrats are leading dozens more investigations into Trump World.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

Posted By on September 19th, 2019

FBI arrests man in Alabama after he says he’d kill Americans for ISIS

https://www.theblaze.com/news/fbi-arrests-man-in-alabama-after-he-says-hed-kill-americans-for-isis?utm_source=BlazeTV-capitol-hill-brief-

California lawmakers pass resolution calling on all ‘religious groups’ — including Christians — to ’embrace’ LGBTQ worldview

https://www.theblaze.com/news/california-lawmakers-resolution-religious-groups-embrace-lbgt-worldview?utm_source=BlazeTV-capitol-hill-brief-

 Senate Democrats blocked a government spending bill because of the southern border wall.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/461975-senate-democrats-block-government-sp

‘Only plausible candidate’: Never Trump Republicans plotting to back Biden
David M. Drucker, WashingtonExaminer.com

www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/never-trump-republicans-quietly-preparing-to-back-biden

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Bibi in Trouble? Netanyahu may have to master the art of the deal to stay in power. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on September 19th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/bibi-triuble-matthew-vadum/

Unless he convinces Israeli lawmakers from outside his party to join him in a national unity government, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 10-and-a-half-year run in office may soon end following inconclusive results inhis country’s parliamentary elections this week that appeared to deprive him of a governing majority in the Knesset.

President Donald Trump took a hands-off approach when asked about the elections in America’s foremost ally in the Middle East.

“Our relations are with Israel, so we’ll see what happens,” he told reporters while touring California.

In Israel, Netanyahu has leveraged his ideological affinity with Trump as a selling point in his reelection bid. Trump has described Netanyahu as a close friend. Trump won praise from Netanyahu and others for his bold decision to relocate the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and his statement recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Netanyahu encountered various political headwinds as he campaigned to stay in office.

Israel’s attorney general wants to indict him on corruption charges. Critics say he claimed the media and government officials were out to get him. He apparently turned off some segments of the voting public by promising to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank and vowing to go after militants in Gaza.

At 69, “Bibi” Netanyahu is the longest-serving head of government in the Jewish state’s history and the first to be born in Israel after it was created in 1948.