Oslo’s sovereign fund drops Israeli firm for operating in ‘West Bank’ By David Isaac

https://www.jns.org/oslos-sovereign-fund-drops-israeli-firm-for-operating-in-west-bank/

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund with more than $1.7 trillion in assets, announced on Sunday it has sold all its shares in Israel’s Paz Retail and Energy Ltd.

The fund, which invests surplus capital from Norway’s petroleum sector, quit the stock because Paz operates infrastructure for the supply of fuel to Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

“By operating infrastructure for the supply of fuel to the Israeli settlements on the West Bank, Paz is contributing to their perpetuation. The settlements have been established in violation of international law, and their perpetuation constitutes an ongoing violation thereof,” according to a May 11 statement on Norway’s Council on Ethics website.

The Council on Ethics, set up by Norway’s Ministry of Finance, gives recommendations to the Norges Bank Executive Board, which manages Government Pension Fund Global. The board bases its decisions on which companies to exclude from investment based on those recommendations.

This is the second Israeli company barred from the fund. In December 2024, the board excluded Israeli telecommunications group Bezeq, based on a recommendation by the Council of Ethics for the same reason—that it “supplies telecommunications services to businesses and private individuals in Israel and the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.”

Government Pension Fund Global prides itself on operating according to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing principles.

– “The Great Disruptor – Part II” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Creative destruction is a school in economics, popularized by Joseph Schumpeter[2], that explains the process by which innovation obsoletes older processes, equipment and products. While disruptive in the short term, it is the driving force for long term economic growth and progress. In Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction (1973), Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “It is only through disruption and confusion that we grow, jarred by the collision of someone else’s private world with our own.” On November 5, 2011 in an op-ed in London’s The Guardian, Naomi Wolf noted: “Democracy is disruptive…there is no right in a democratic civil society to be free of disruption.”

Disruption is the antidote to complacency, the enemy of innovation, and it is challenging to those of the status quo – those whom we call the “establishment.” However, disruption is not always good. We can think of dozens of instances – a child throwing food at the table; protestors shutting down university classes; strikers blocking the entrance to a grocery store. But throughout history, progress has thrived on disruption. We see the beginnings of such positive disruption in Washington today: addressing the border crisis, eliminating fraud and waste embedded in federal bureaucracies and confronting anti-Semitism on college campuses. On the other hand, we are also witness to negative disruption: the, seemingly random, use of tariffs by President Trump and belittling comments about allies by Vice President Vance.

That President Trump is a disruptive force is a fact universally accepted. The question we and the world face: Is President Trump a disruptive force for good or bad? “There are times,” Karl Zinsmeister, White House chief domestic policy director 2006-2009, wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal, “when some messy political demolition and noisy rebuilding are necessary.” Is this such a time? I believe it is.

Citizenship is a Gift Eileen F. Toplansky

NO URL ORIGINAL ESSAY

As the demonic Democrats demand subservience to the god of Moloch, it is important to ponder the controversy surrounding the courts, illegal immigrants and free speech.

Judge Learned Hand was a political progressive, and an advocate of judicial restraint, who stated he could not “frame any definition that will explain when the Court will assume the role of a third legislative chamber and when it will limit its authority.”

In light of the partisan actions by Judge Boasberg and other judges who have worked overtime to stop Trump from deporting alleged members of Tren deAragua (a Foreign Terrorist organization), Boasberg should be vigorously reminded that “his court does not have jurisdiction over the president’s exercise of powers [.]” Boasberg has also forgotten Judge Hand’s reminder that a judge’s

“…utterances must be greater than any which his personal reputation and character can command, if it is to do the work assigned to it — if it is to stand against the passionate resentments arising out of the interests he must frustrate — for while a judge must discover some composition with the dominant trends of his times, he must preserve his authority by cloaking himself in the majesty of an overshadowing past.”

In fact, in Dennis v. United States, a plurality of Supreme Court Justices adopted Judge Hand’s view that “Eugene Dennis, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA, did not have a First Amendment right to free speech if his goal in organizing Antifa-style protestors was to overthrow the Constitution and set up a government which would not allow free speech.”

Moreover, those who defend the establishment of a sharia-compliant community in Plano, Texas in order to establish a totalitarian Islamic caliphate are embracing the very antithesis of American Constitutional law.

Meir Y. Soloveichik has written “What to do with a Bad Guest” and cogently explains why the arguments coming from the Left are baseless.

“We are hearing from many that [deporting Mahmoud Khalil] amounts to a criminalization of free speech solely for his views regarding Israel. The problem with this description is that it is doubly incorrect.

“First: To deport a radical pro-Hamas activist is to do so in the knowledge that those representing such positions on college quads not only dislike Israel. They also hate America. Indeed, the very organization Khalil represented, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, has openly stated that it seeks ‘the total eradication of Western civilization. The sympathy with Hamas is the symptom; hatred of the West is the disease.”

Moreover, “Khalil—like all others fighting deportation relating to these statutes—has issued many public declamations through his lawyers, but he has never, as part and parcel of their public defense, put forward two simple statements: that he hates Hamas and that he loves America. The refusal to state the former, of course, is linked to his inability to express the latter [.]”

Thus, “[f]or the Secretary of State to cite statutes allowing deportation of those who espouse support for terror, and who pose a threat to America’s foreign policy, is to emphasize the fact that individuals like Khalil seek the end of America itself.”

In addition, “[t]he second mistake—that deportation is a criminalization of speech—follows from the first. Khalil is being detained only because he has been told to leave these shores and he has refused.”

“As the Supreme Court has clarified, ordering a noncitizen to leave your country is not a criminal punishment. This was made clear by Justice Robert Jackson in 1952, in Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, a case about an individual deported on the grounds of being ‘a member of an organization which advocates overthrow of the government by force.’

“Jackson asserted that ‘[i]t is thoroughly established that Congress has [the] power to order the deportation of aliens whose presence in the country it deems hurtful. The determination by facts that might constitute a crime under local law is not a conviction of crime, nor is the deportation a punishment; it is simply a refusal by the government to harbor persons whom it does not want.

Consequently, “[h[ow is it a punishment to order a guest in your country—or a green-card holder like Khalil, who is here because of the graciousness of the United States—to leave a land he hates? Indeed, how is such an order anything other than a country reflecting basic self-respect and self-preservation for its own future?”

In fact, citizenship is a gift and under President Harry S. Truman, “the third Sunday in May each year has been set aside as Citizenship Day. It is a reminder

“WHEREAS our numerous citizens of foreign birth have shown loyalty and fidelity to their new citizenship in the performance of all the tasks which helped to bring the final and complete victory over the enemies of the country which these citizens have made their own by naturalization;

In a nutshell, to become a United States citizen, immigrants have to study and honor the Constitution.

To those politicians, NGOs, judges, lawyers, and activists who shelter illegals, I say “hold your heads in shame”. Despite illegal immigration’s terrifying cost, and the sheer insanity

of illegal immigration, you have forgotten or are simply indifferent to the oath an immigrant must declare.” You reflect the Western spiritual sickness afflicting our nation.

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen;

“that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same;

“that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law;

“that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law;

“and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

Since illegals broke American immigration law, that should suffice for their deportation. That they engage in the most egregious of crimes against Americans, only cements the fact that they need to be ejected from the country. In essence, as Judge Hand asserted

“If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.

Our legislators and judges need to be reminded of Judge Learned Hand’s 1944 speech titled “I Am an American” wherein he wrote

We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedoms from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves [and] in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.

Cosmic rays, not carbon dioxide, cause climate change By Douglas J. Cotton

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/05/cosmic_rays_not_carbon_dioxide_cause_climate_change.html

When a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Dr John Clauser, labels the claims about greenhouse gases warming the Earth as “pseudoscience” and describes them as “a dangerous corruption of science,” I urge you to take notice. He further stated that “the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation,” and remarked that climate science has “metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”

Similarly, Professor Harold (Hal) Lewis, a distinguished physicist, called such claims “the biggest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud” he had encountered in his lifetime. Another German physicist expressed outrage upon discovering that much of what the IPCC and the media presented was “sheer nonsense,” unsupported by scientific facts or measurements. The late Dr Tim Ball, author of Human Caused Global Warming – The Biggest Deception in History, often cited this scientist.

Over a decade ago, Swedish Professor Claes Johnson, a brilliant scientist, authored a 115-page document explaining why radiation from cooler atmospheric molecules cannot transfer heat to a warmer surface, thus debunking the notion that such radiation warms the Earth.

Physics, not climatology, governs radiation and energy transfer. Physicists like those mentioned above, and I, possess a deeper understanding of atmospheric physics than many climatologists, who often rely on flawed interpretations. For example, a textbook written by Raymond Pierrehumbert often promoted a concept of “Radiative Forcing,” misleading generations of students.

Consider this: water vapor, the primary “greenhouse gas,” constitutes an average of 0.25% of the atmosphere, reaching up to 4% in humid regions. Carbon dioxide averages 0.04%, and methane a mere 0.0002%. Together, these gases account for less than 0.3% of the atmosphere.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Tucker Carlson? By T.R. Clancy

http://Why does Tucker Carlson continue favorably showcasing people who say all the same things Israel’s worst enemies do?

In the opening sentence of Douglas Murray’s current bestseller, On Democracies and Death Cults, Murray writes, “Sometimes a flare goes up and you see exactly where everyone is standing.”

In this case, the flare was the October 7, 2023 pogrom in southern Israel perpetrated by Hamas and hordes of “innocent” Gazan civilians.

And that flare starkly illuminated the unmistakable outline of Tucker Carlson.

On the wrong side of the wire.

For years Carlson offered conservative punditry at outlets like the Weekly Standard, CNN, and MSNBC, until he really took off in 2016 as Fox News’s most popular conservative. In 2019, Michael Anton labeled Carlson “the de facto leader of the conservative movement — assuming any such thing can still be said to exist.”

His nightly monologues fearlessly exposed the debacles of the Russia hoax, COVID, “mostly peaceful” BLM riots, the rigged election, and the Biden administration’s Gestapo tactics towards the J6 protesters.

One could imagine that, once the Left had successfully assassinated Trump, the next worst troublemaker who needed shutting up would be Carlson.

Then the most shocking historical crime of this century happened, and Tucker Carlson had nothing to say. As weeks passed after October 7, his silence implied an unhealthy antipathy towards Israel’s cause.

Then, on November 15, 2023, Carlson interviewed Candace Owens, a frequent guest on Fox News, including Carlson’s former show. At the time of the podcast, Owens was in the middle of a flap with her then co-worker at the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro (an issue of its own that’s not the focus here).

When the conversation turned to Israel, Carlson’s thoughts on October 7 weren’t encouraging.

Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, Daniel Di Martino, Tal Fortgang U.S.-China Tariff Agreement: Will It Stick? City Journal Podcast

https://www.city-journal.org/multimedia/us-china-tariff-agreement-will-it-stick

Charles Fain Lehman, Ilya Shapiro, Daniel Di Martino, and Tal Fortgang discuss the deal between the U.S. and China to temporarily lower tariffs, Trump’s executive order on prescription drug prices, and Chicago-isms Pope Leo XIV should bring to the Vatican.

Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today, Ilya Shapiro, constitutional law guy at the Manhattan Institute, Daniel Di Martino, Argentinian policy expert, politics expert at the Manhattan Institute apparently, and Tal Fortgang, legal policy guy at the Manhattan Institute. Tal works for Ilya, so Tal, don’t mess this up. Otherwise, it’ll come back in your review.

Ilya Shapiro: But by works for me, that means he writes a bunch of stuff. I read a third of it and enjoy it. That’s our professional relationship.

Charles Fain Lehman: It’s a good review. Tal, quote that. We have this on record. I want to take us into the big news of the day. Earlier this morning, I think, I was asleep, but China and United States announced a 90-day temporary reduction in the mutual tariffs. So they’re down on the US side from 145 percent to 30 percent. It’s a major de-escalation as we’re recording this, the markets are up like a thousand points, although God knows what will be happening by the time it comes out. So don’t get mad at me listeners if it’s changed. Daniel, where are we on this front? You’re the econ guy on the panel. Is this a good development? Is this a bad development? What do you think?

Daniel Di Martino:  I think the Chinese negotiation team probably knows more about what the U.S. wants than we do. At this point, I don’t know what’s the goal of U.S. policy with the tariffs on China. If the goal was decoupling from China, then you should have wanted to keep the tariffs, not lift them. And if the goal was to get them to lower the tariffs, well, now we have a higher tariffs than we did before. So it seems like, at least by those two very different goals that are exclusionary from each other, we aren’t achieving anything.

Colin Wright A Long Overdue Return to Reality in Pediatric Gender Medicine HHS’s new review is a comprehensive and sober reevaluation of the science and ethics of the “gender-affirming” model.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/hhs-pediatric-gender-medicine-review-wpath

One of President Trump’s first executive orders was the provocatively titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order directed federally funded insurance programs to end coverage of pediatric sex-trait modification and barred hospitals receiving federal funds from performing such interventions. It also instructed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to conduct a review of the evidence and ethical considerations surrounding pediatric gender medicine.

That review, “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” was released earlier this month. It is already being described as America’s Cass Review, the landmark gender-medicine review published last year in the United Kingdom.

This report is long overdue. While European health authorities in countries like Sweden, Finland, Norway, and the U.K. have moved away from the “gender-affirming” model and toward cautious psychological support for gender-dysphoric children, American institutions have only become more entrenched in the model despite growing evidence of the harm and weak benefits.

The HHS report breaks this trend, providing a comprehensive and sober reevaluation of the science, ethics, and clinical practices in pediatric gender medicine. At more than 400 pages, with chapters on history, terminology, evidence, ethics, and clinical realities, it is the most thorough and ambitious document of its kind in the United States.

The report’s central findings are clear and direct: gender-affirming interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are supported only by low- or very low-quality evidence, while the potential for irreversible harm is substantial. Risks include sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone-density and brain development, psychiatric comorbidities, and surgical complications. The report rejects claims that gender transition reduces suicidality, finding no high-quality evidence to support this oft-repeated assertion. In line with international reviews, it concludes that psychotherapy should be the first-line treatment for youth with gender dysphoria.

Murder Ballads Coming soon: a new musical about Luigi Mangione. (No, I’m not kidding.) by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/murder-ballads/

It didn’t start with Che Guevara, but Che, surely, is one of the major milestones along the way. By all accounts, he was a psychopath, delighting in the summary executions of purported ideological enemies, including children. But that one famous photograph of him wiped all the blood away. A picture cannot only speak a thousand words; it can erase a million crimes. For young people all over the West in the 1960s and thereafter, Che was a hero, period. In 2008, the top Hollywood director Stephen Soderbergh made a hagiographic movie about Che that ran just under four and a half hours (it was ultimately released in two parts); the title role was played by Benicio Del Toro, whose research for the part included a trip to Cuba, where, he later said, he met “tons of people who loved this man.” To be sure, it’s one thing to encounter Che fans in Castro’s Cuba, where the people have been propagandized to a fare-thee-well and where dissenting views are punished severely; it’s another thing to see free people strolling down the streets of Western cities in Che t-shirts – presumably ignorant of the true heroes who won them their freedom but enthralled by a man who fought to destroy it.

Six years after Che’s death, an infant was born in a manger – no, not really – in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He later lived in Houston, where he served nine jail terms for crimes involving drugs, trespass, theft, and aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. Still later he moved to Minneapolis, where he was detained for drug possession and suffered a drug overdose. On May 25, 2020, he was stopped by police on suspicion of passing counterfeit money at a grocery store, and died while resisting arrest by a police officer named Derek Chauvin. News of the death of George Floyd spread around the world like wildfire. Mass protests were held everywhere. Countless Floyd murals were created. Riots caused billions of dollars in damage. Leftists used Floyd’s death to spread the lie that hundreds if not thousands of innocent blacks die each year  at the hands of white American cops (the real number is in the double digits). As a result of this lie, the movement to defund the police won widespread support, and in many cities the police actually were defunded. The fact that Floyd had died not because of Chauvin’s actions but because of the drugs in his system didn’t matter to Chauvin’s judge, prosecutor, and jury, who knew that if they didn’t throw the book at Chauvin – who ended up being sentenced to twenty-two and a half years in prison – they’d be torn to bits by the mob. By the end of the summer, like Che, his fellow perpetrator of violence, Floyd had been canonized by the left, venerated as a martyr. Last May it was announced that, inevitably, Floyd would be the subject of a movie. Daddy Changed the World was being developed by Radar Pictures, with Floyd’s daughter as executive producer. I can’t wait.

Epic Narrative Fail: Federal Revenue Surges 9% Despite Predictions Of Decline

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/13/epic-narrative-fail-irs-revenue-surges-9-despite-predictions-of-decline/

Back in March, unnamed “senior tax officials” told the Washington Post that the “rapid demolition of parts of the IRS” was going to result in a 10% plunge in revenues this spring.  

Actual result: Revenues are up 9% compared with the first four months of last year.

We heard repeated horror stories about DOGE’s devastating spending cuts, too.

Actual result: Spending is up 7% over last year.

Are you noticing a trend here?

According to the Washington Post, “Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.”

That story was published on March 22 and was widely covered by the rest of the corporate media.

So … just how accurate were these “three people with knowledge of tax projections”?

The Decivilizing of America From secure borders to functioning cities, America is shedding the hard-won pillars of civilization—by choice, not chance—in a sweeping, top-down descent into disorder. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/12/332875/

Secure borders and stationary populations were considered the mark of emerging civilization by classical historians. In contrast to nomadism and constant strife over disputed territory, peoples who had clearly defined and protected borders ascended to statehood, maintained a distinct culture, and achieved greater prosperity and security.

In contrast, what we suffered from 2021 to 2025 was unprecedented. It was an intentional administration effort to de-civilize the nation by destroying its borders—as if to return to the premodern era, when there were no clearly defined or secure borders, and nomadic peoples migrated as they pleased.

Stranger still, illegal aliens were at times given precedence over citizens—as immigration law was simply discarded.

Without IDs, illegal aliens boarded U.S. flights, while the government ordered citizens to obtain more secure “real” IDs.

Some 8,500 veteran soldiers were drummed out of the military for refusing the experimental mRNA vaccinations. Yet 10 million simply walked across the southern border into America, without a care from the Biden administration whether they were vaccinated, ill, or had criminal records.

Any American citizen pulled over for speeding with an invalid driver’s license, while trafficking eight illegal aliens without identification, would be jailed and charged with felony counts. Not Abrego Garcia—the violent spousal abuser, M-13 gang-member, and previously deported illegal alien. He was neither arrested nor even cited by the officers who pulled him over.

One of the great hallmarks of Roman civilization and subsequent Western civilization was its ability to create large cities by importing clean water, removing waste through sewers, and collecting garbage from the streets. Even in the age before microbiology, ancient and premodern city planners knew the connection between cleanliness and epidemics and how to lessen disease through sanitation.

But in the last two decades, our major cities have been de-civilizing. Citizens are told not to flush non-biodegradable plastics down their toilets, both to preserve the environment and to ensure municipal septic systems work properly. They are reminded to pick up their pets’ excrement on sidewalks and in parks. For purposes of collective health, they are taught not to urinate, spit, or defecate in public areas.