BOOKS Comments turned off

A Forgotten Voice Speaks of the Horrors of Auschwitz By Janet Levy

Posted By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/a_forgotten_voice_speaks_of_the_horrors_of_auschwitz.html

Holocaust denial is gaining traction among young Americans. 

A December 2023 poll by Economist/YouGov found 20% of respondents aged 18-29 years believing that the Nazi massacre of six million Jews is a myth. 

The antidote could be reading Jozsef Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium.  This haunting memoir of a year as an Auschwitz inmate, first published in Hungarian in 1950, was only last year translated to English and 12 other languages, thus reaching the wider world.

Like Primo Levi, a more famous Auschwitz memoirist, Debreczeni was captured in 1944, as the Nazis, in retreat, inched toward defeat.  Otherwise, he may not have survived.  As with Levi, Debreczeni’s training – Levi was a chemist, Debreczeni a reporter, editor, and poet – enabled him to write with detachment about the Nazi atrocities, the horrific conditions in the camps, his suffering and that of others, and the dehumanization of guards and inmates alike. 

Thus, the dark ironies stand out starker.  A kapo, chosen from the prisoners and accorded privileges in exchange for disciplining and brutalizing the rest, is shocked to realize he has been denounced to the commandant by other kapos.  He is calling out in a booming voice the ID numbers of prisoners selected to stand separately.  Everyone is afraid, not knowing their fate.  The hapless fellow comes upon his own number, but must continue reading the list to the end.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

RNC Sues Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson Over ‘Bloated’ Voter Rolls By Debra Heine

Posted By on March 15th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/14/rnc-sues-michigan-secretary-of-state-jocelyn-benson-over-bloated-voter-rolls/

The Republican National Committee has filed a lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) over the state’s inaccurate voter rolls, arguing her office has failed to follow the National Voter Registration Act.

Newly appointed RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said Wednesday that Benson’s noncompliance with the NVRA has left the battleground state “with inflated and inaccurate voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.”

The NVRA, passed in 1993, “requires states to keep voter registration lists accurate and current, such as identifying persons who have become ineligible due to having died or moved outside the jurisdiction.”

According to RNC, 76 of Michigan’s 83 counties have inflated voter rolls, demonstrating Benson’s lack of compliance with the act.

The RNC filed the suit along with two Michigan voters, Jordan Jorritsma, and Emerson Silvernail, over Benson’s failure to “keep their rolls accurate and up-to-date,”  Whatley said in a statement to the Washington Times.

The Complaint states that at least 53 Michigan counties have more active registered voters than adult citizens over the age of 18.

“That number of voters is impossibly high,” the RNC contends in the lawsuit.

An additional 23 counties have active-voter registration rates that exceed 90 percent of adult citizens over the age of 18. That figure far eclipses the national and statewide voter registration rate in recent elections.

“Retaining voter rolls bloated with ineligible voters harms the electoral process, heightens the risk of electoral fraud, and undermines public confidence in
elections,” the plaintiffs said.

MEDIA Comments turned off

AP ‘Fact Focus’ Elastically Redefines Terms to Defend Biden The latest “fact-checkers” ploy. by Tim Graham

Posted By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ap-fact-focus-elastically-redefines-terms-to-defend-biden/

Reading the “fact-checkers” in the press sometimes triggers memories of the comic book hero Plastic Man, who could contort into all sorts of shapes. Take the Associated Press, and immigration reporter Elliot Spagat in San Diego.

The headline was “Fact Focus: Claims Biden administration is secretly flying migrants into the country are unfounded.” Spagat had to redefine all sorts of words like “secretly” to defend President Joe Biden’s fly-over-the-border policies.

The Spagat dispatch began: “In his Super Tuesday victory speech, former President Donald Trump elevated false information that had gone viral on social media, claiming the Biden administration secretly flew hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States.”

AP noted that on Jan. 26, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (if you can call them that) reported “327,000 immigrants were vetted and authorized for travel.” The government flew in more than 67,000 Cubans, 126,000 Haitians, 53,000 Nicaraguans and 81,000 Venezuelans.

Trump said, “Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown — migrants were flown in airplanes, not going through borders … It was unbelievable.”

How was this false? Spagat elastically argued, “But migrants are not being flown into the U.S. randomly.” Trump never said “randomly,” or “secretly.” He said “parts unknown.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Our Cold and Bloody War with China Peter Schweizer reveals why the powerful turn a blind eye while China kills Americans.

Posted By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-cold-and-bloody-war-with-china/

In November, Biden and Chinese Communist President Xi met once again, this time at the mansion used for the exteriors of the TV show, ‘Dynasty’, to talk about the relationship between the two countries. And yet all these months after the three hour meeting, nothing changed.

Biden had met with Xi everywhere from the Bay Area to Bali with no result. Why?

In ‘Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans’, Peter Schweizer, the journalist and investigator behind ‘Clinton Cash’, follows up on his work in ‘Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win’ to expose an entire network of corruption that is not only stealing America’s future, but has also claimed countless lives.

Blood Money is a war story illustrated with the Sun Tzu maxims that drive the larger strategic thinking of the Chinese military apparatus about how to “subdue the enemy without fighting”.

“According to a textbook given to Chinese military officers,” ‘Blood Money’ reveals, Xi is quoted as saying, “Our struggle and contest of power with the West cannot be moderated. It will inevitably be long, complex, and at times extremely sharp.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Joel Zinberg A Solution in Search of a Problem President Biden’s promise to expand drug-price controls will imperil supply and innovation.

Posted By on March 15th, 2024

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2Fdrug-price-controls.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

In his State of the Union address, President Biden touted the drug-price controls in his Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Though the price controls have yet to take effect, Biden proposed expanding these measures, which threaten to destroy pharmaceutical innovation and harm the nation’s health.

The IRA’s drug-price controls are a solution in search of a problem. Two years ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that per capita prescription-drug spending in real terms had fallen as a percentage of total spending on health care since the mid-2000s. Retail prescription drug prices have gone up at a slower rate than have hospital prices and health-care prices generally. According to researchers at the health-care data group IQVIA, U.S. drug spending is lower as a percentage of national health expenditures than the average drug-spending share across 11 developed countries.

While price-control proponents focus on drugs’ high list prices, the average net price of a prescription—the amount that users actually paid after subtracting manufacturers’ discounts and rebates—has been falling, according to CBO. This reflects the increased use of generic drugs, which cost far less than name-brand pharmaceuticals and now account for nine out of ten prescriptions. In fact, U.S. patients use more generics and pay less for them (16 percent less, on average) than do patients in other developed countries.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When and How Did We Get Here?—Gradually, then Suddenly. Part One Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 15th, 2024

https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-one/

Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden—have either been doubling the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse.

So our presidents, in the manner individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat.

It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary.

So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The thirty-two-hour work week: another of Bernie’s bad ideas Let’s raise wages 25 percent magically Charles Lipson

Posted By on March 15th, 2024

https://thespectator.com/topic/thirty-two-hour-work-week-bernie-sanders-bad-ideas/

Bernie Sanders is the bottomless cup of bad ideas. He keeps refilling it. Take his latest venti, a law that says everybody gets to work thirty-two hours for forty hours pay. That’s a magical 25 percent pay increase. His next trick is to pull free steak dinners out of a hat.

What do you think would actually happen if such Bernie’s law were passed, enforced and found constitutional? (None of those would actually happen, of course.) The immediate effects would be another 25 percent price increase for labor-intensive products, a huge burden on low-income consumers and an additional incentive to replace more expensive workers with machines and computers.

The substitution of capital for labor is an on-going process, but Bernie would supercharge the effort and create incentives for innovators to come up with products, machines and computer programs that performed those tasks at lower costs. The more expensive the tasks, the greater incentive to figure out ways to save money on them.

Bernie’s Magic Pay Raise would create a major incentive to hire people off-the-books (for the true market price) or to have them work extra hours that way. It would create new incentives for employers to hire workers as individual subcontractors, rather than wage workers. And, of course, it would lead to tens of thousands of court cases where employees were sued for violating the new wage rules. Since the wages would be above market rates (otherwise there would be no need for a mandate), the yearly increases would lag inflation so that real wages would gradually return to market rates.

IMMIGRATION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Another Democrat Scheme To Establish Absolute Political Power

Posted By on March 15th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/15/another-democratic-scheme-to-establish-absolute-political-power/

Democrats don’t support open borders for humanitarian reasons. They want the lines erased because they see every illegal alien as a likely Democratic voter crucial to their political power grab. But there’s another reason: They want to increase the populations of Democratic states to boost their representation in Congress and the Electoral College.

Apparently it’s not enough for Democrats to have become authoritarians, they have to be corrupt, too.

Of course this is no surprise. Only the corrupt become authoritarians. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek showed in chapter 10 of “The Road to Serfdom” why socialist systems never have decent people in charge.

“Bad men,” Hayek explained in Why the Worst Get on Top, have no inhibitions about running other peoples’ lives. It is “the unscrupulous and uninhibited,” he wrote in 1944, who “are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.”

Put another way, by Dune author Frank Herbert, “​​Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.”

And thus we understand why the Democratic Party is overflowing with the most wretched people imaginable. It’s a party that draws in the worst among us in much the same way communism attracted the Lenins, Stalins, Maos and Castros.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Aramean Christians Train to Fight for Israel For decades, the country classified this community as Arab over its objections By Rebecca Sugar and Michael Freund.

Posted By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/aramean-christians-train-to-fight-for-israel-e284ed6d?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Forty-eight Israelis graduated in February from Kinneret, a premilitary program, or mechina, in Kibbutz Beit-Zera, near the Sea of Galilee. They spent seven months undergoing training, lectures and field exercises to prepare for army service. Unlike the country’s dozens of other mechinot, Kinneret’s founder and half of its students are Aramean Christians.

The Jewish state is home to some 185,000 Christians, including around 15,000 Arameans, whose ancestors lived in the Levant before the Arab conquest and were early followers of Jesus. For decades Israel registered them as Arabs over their objection.

In 2014 Israel recognized the Aramean Christian community. That recognition was an important step toward fuller integration into Israeli society, says Shadi Khaloul, who founded Kinneret in 2017.

Mr. Khaloul, 48, was born in Jish, a mixed Christian-Muslim community in north Galilee, and educated in Haifa. His uncle served in the Israel Defense Forces, and his father was an Israeli policeman. It was no surprise, then, when he joined the army and became a paratrooper at 18. “I was taught that the Jews are our brothers and our allies,” Mr. Khaloul says. “This state is our state. We need to defend it too.”

He laments that young Aramean Christians study in Israel’s Muslim educational system, where they aren’t taught about their own heritage or historical ties with the Jewish people. Students “become anti-Israel under this system,” Mr. Khaloul says. “It’s what they are taught.” He says he filed a complaint two years ago with the Education Ministry after a Muslim teacher in Jish reprimanded an Aramean high-school student for honoring Israel’s fallen soldiers on Memorial Day. “This is not our holiday,” the teacher reportedly told the teenager. Mr. Khaloul says there are many such incidents in the schools.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Chuck Schumer Lectures Israelis on War and Peace Democrats are making Prime Minister Netanyahu a scapegoat to appease the anti-Israel American left.

Posted By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chuck-schumer-israel-benjamin-netanyahu-75bf4d58?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The Israel-Hamas war is melting brains on the Democratic side of the aisle, and the latest evidence is a remarkable speech Thursday by Sen. Charles Schumer calling for new elections to replace Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yes, the Majority Leader is telling Israelis to replace their government—or the U.S. “will have no choice” but to intervene to “change the present course,” whatever that means.

Mr. Netanyahu is the duly elected Prime Minister of an American ally. Israeli voters will have a chance to hold him accountable, if they choose, for whatever policy and security lapses left his country vulnerable to Hamas’s vicious invasion on Oct. 7. He also will have to answer for how effectively he has prosecuted the war, including whether he has struck the right bargains in exchanging temporary cease-fires for the release of Israeli hostages, and whether the ultimate end-state for Gaza leaves Israel safer or otherwise.

But precisely because Israel is a democracy, accountability for Mr. Netanyahu is baked in. The Prime Minister at this moment represents a broad consensus in Israeli society that the country can’t afford to allow Hamas to continue its violent and corrupt control of Gaza after the horrors unleashed on Oct. 7.

Mr. Schumer knows all this and said as much in his speech on the Senate floor. He blamed Hamas for the atrocities of Oct. 7, and he noted that the terror group has “knowingly invited an immense civilian toll during this war” by using Gazans as human shields. The Senator also allowed that Israel “is surrounded by vicious enemies.”

So what does the Democrat from New York want? He hopes a different Israeli Prime Minister would advance a two-state solution of the sort Mr. Netanyahu has resisted. This reflects the political neurosis developing among Democrats, who wish some deus ex machina would allow Israel to “win” the war against Hamas in a way that would minimize the anger of the anti-Israel left in the U.S.