ISRAEL Comments turned off

UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the Misrule of Law By Ted Belman

Posted By on January 22nd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/un_security_council_resolution_242_and_the_misrule_of_law.html

Israel is the legal owner of all lands west of the Jordan River, as the San Remo Resolution of 1920, The Palestine Mandate of 1922 and Section 80 of the United Nations Charter prove.

After the Six Day War in 1967, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) weighed in with Resolution 242 to set the parameters for the achievement of peace among the Arab states in the area. The Jerusalem Center of Public Affairs published Understanding UN Security Council Resolution 242  which is the most definitive analysis of this resolution anywhere.

In it, the UNSC allowed Israel to remain in occupation of the acquired land until she had agreements with all the Arab states in the area for “secure and recognized boundaries.” But even then, she need not withdraw from all territories. Thus, Israel’s “occupation” cannot be considered as illegal as she has the permission of the Security Council to remain there.

It also called for “a just settlement of the refugee issue,” but did not make mention of a Palestinian people nor require a peace agreement with them, nor call for the creation of a Palestinian state.

Finally, it included one noteworthy recital: “Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.…” 

But there is no such principle in law. To the contrary, in a defensive war, which this undeniably was, the defender gets to keep the lands acquired.  In any event, a recital is not an operative clause.

Recitals are meant as background only.  Normally, one would expect that Israel’s legal rights would have been noted in a recital but they weren’t. Particularly so when this war, which was commenced in 1948, was all about terminating Israel’s existence. Surely, Israel’s legal rights should have been recited.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Overcoming College Getting a Job In Spite of Your Education Robert F. Graboyes

Posted By on January 22nd, 2023

ttps://graboyes.substack.com/p/overcoming-college

If you wish to squander your children’s potential and incinerate any appeal they might hold for employers, America is chock-full of colleges and universities anxious to harness their vast infrastructures to help make them unemployable. These services, refined over many decades, won’t come cheap. But America’s student-loan complex will happily offer tuition money by the wheelbarrow. Decades hence, when you tire of progeny residing in your attic, politicians will squeal at the opportunity to foist their student loan debts onto other Americans who made better decisions.

Mind you, not all colleges and universities—or programs within those institutions—fit this description. And regardless of where and what said progeny intend to study, you and your children have the capacity to make higher education a worthwhile experience. But in general, the task of making college worthwhile cannot be entrusted to colleges. I’ve spent much of my adult life in and around universities and always took great pleasure in helping students to navigate employment markets. Here are five bits of advice from my experience.

Check under the hood before shelling out the money.
Make sure your children understand that their merits are not obvious.
Master at least two things.
Begin the job search no later than the beginning of freshman year.
Reinvent yourself when necessary.

I’ll elaborate below on all five points.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

BREAKING: UNMASKING GOV. AND MRS. GAVIN NEWSOM Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on January 22nd, 2023

https://mailchi.mp/aa0a8501f26f/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-59495?e=f8586430d6

California Governor Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, are the dream team. He’s the governor and she’s the founder of a “gender justice” nonprofit that creates films and curricula for schools.

The Newsoms are going to change the world.

So, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com dug deep. What did we find?

Radical ideologies — funded by taxpayers.

And 2.6 million students in 11,200 classrooms in 5,000 schools across all 50 states have (so far) been subjected to Newsom’s films and curriculum. 

READ OUR INVESTIGATION: NEWSOM TWOSOME: SIEBEL NEWSOM’S FILMS – SHOWN IN MIDDLE SCHOOLS – FEATURE PORN, RADICALGENDER IDEALOGIES, AND HER HUSBAND GAVIN

Already, our report has been covered by FOX News, Yahoo! News, BizPac Review, and more…

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

More New Yorkers moved to Florida in 2022 than any year in history in staggering exodus By Selim Algar

Posted By on January 22nd, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/01/19/more-new-yorkers-moved-to-florida-in-2022-than-any-year-in-history/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=twitter_app

Dazed and abused by high taxes and rising crime, more New Yorkers fled to Florida in 2022 than any year in history, according to new data.

A staggering 64,577 Empire Staters exchanged their driver’s licenses for the Sunshine State version last year, according to figures from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

“They come in every day,” a staffer at a Jacksonville DMV office told The Post this week with a weary laugh. “I hear all the complaints. I feel like a therapist sometimes.”

The worker said the venting refugees harbor a long list of grievances — with taxes and eroding quality of life at the top of the list.

“It’s slowed down a little bit,” she said of the stampede. “But not by a whole lot, I can tell you that.”

There were 64,577 New Yorkers who exchanged their driver’s licenses for the Sunshine State version last year.

Last year’s record-shattering number comfortably eclipsed the prior mark of 61,728 New Yorkers who made the Florida switch in 2021, according to the data.

Fashion designer Alvin Valley, who moved his main residence to Palm Beach, previously told The Post that the demographics of those moving south has expanded in recent years.

“First it was the billionaires,” he said. “Then it was the rich following behind them. Now you have the middle class.”

The license transfer metric is considered a reliable indicator of migration patterns as it suggests a lasting decision to relocate.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Ethiopian-Israeli Republican Jewish mother of seven set to challenge George Santos for congressional seat [Note by Tom Gross]

Posted By on January 22nd, 2023

As calls intensify for the disgraced Republican George Santos to resign from the US Congress, Mazi Melesa Pilip an Ethiopian-Israeli Shabbat-observant 43-year-old Jewish mother of seven, has emerged as a prime candidate to replace him, according to Politico.

Pilip was airlifted to Israel as a child as part of the Operation Solomon rescue of refugee Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

She served in the paratroop division of the Israel Defense Forces (one of her greatest achievements, she says) and then took a first degree at the University of Haifa followed by a degree in diplomacy and security at Tel Aviv University.

She met her husband, an American medical student at the Technion in Haifa, while she was at the University of Haifa. She later accompanied him to finish his medical studies back in New York, where they married.

She says that one of the reasons that motivated her to enter politics was witnessing the antisemitic abuse directed towards her children in the Great Neck Public Schools system, including comments from other kids such as “I wish Hitler would kill you all.”

Santos is being pressed to step down because of the multiple lies he told while running, including untruths about his education, job experience, charitable giving and family background.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Embracing Failure Despite recent crime spikes, decarceration advocates are unrepentant. Rafael A. Mangual

Posted By on January 22nd, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/despite-recent-crime-spikes-decarceration-advocates-are-unrepentant

The 2022 midterm election cycle was the first real test of the police and criminal-justice “reform” movements’ political viability amid resurgent violent crime. The crime issue loomed larger than usual over some of the nation’s most heated political contests. Republicans took up the cause of those who were worried about public safety and open to a tougher approach to crime, while Democrats defended the recent leftward lurch on the criminal-justice policy front. The Democrats’ defensive strategy involved downplaying (if not outright denying) recent crime increases or dismissing any suggestion that such upticks in crime were related to depolicing efforts.

Whether this strategy worked is unclear. Democrats held off what many predicted would be a “red wave” election, but the GOP enjoyed a massive advantage among the 11 percent of voters who told exit pollsters that crime was the biggest issue. Absent any clear political price imposed on the party, at least judging by the midterm results, there remains in office a critical mass of Democrats unwilling to roll back the most misguided reforms passed to date, or to resist newer efforts to go even further.

In November, for example, the Democratic city council in Washington, D.C., voted to move forward with a plan to rewrite the city’s criminal code—all but doing away with mandatory minimum sentences, extending the right to a jury trial to misdemeanor cases, expanding the rights of convicts to petition judges for sentence reductions, and lowering the maximum penalties for various serious offenses such as burglary, robbery, and carjacking (on the rise for some time in the nation’s capital). While the proposed rewrite is not yet a done deal, the public should be disconcerted that things have gone this far.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Secrecy Is for Losers What Biden’s classified document scandal reveals about power in America: Jacob Siegel

Posted By on January 22nd, 2023

http://Secrecy Is for Losers What Biden’s classified document scandal reveals about power in America

Secrecy—the first refuge of incompetents—must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society, for a fully informed public is the basis of self-government.
– From a 1960 report by the Committee on Government Operations, U.S. House of Representatives.

On Wednesday morning, Jamie Lee Curtis was trending on Twitter. Earlier in the week, the actress had posted a photo on Instagram showing off the handsome set of black Pollock chairs that furnish her office. It was not the chairs, however, that landed her on Twitter’s front page, but the photograph on the wall behind them. The Instagram photo has since been deleted, after thousands of amateur investigators online tweeted at Curtis to ask why there was a photo of a naked child stuffed into a suitcase hanging on her office wall.

Here was a clue pointing to Curtis’ involvement in the globalist pedophile ring known to dominate the political and cultural elite of the United States along with who knows how many other Western nations. This particular conspiracy theory, which has branches in Pizzagate and QAnon, has two great strengths. First, it can’t be disproved by contrary evidence. To take one example, the image on Curtis’ wall does not, in fact, show a child’s body crammed into a suitcase. The photo, taken by the artist Betsy Schneider, is of a young girl in a tub of water. Creepy it may be, but bad taste and ritualistic child sacrifice are not necessarily the same.

The conspiracy’s other source of strength is its basis in reality. Jeffrey Epstein really was enticing some of the world’s richest and most powerful people to a private island where he kept a harem that included underage girls trafficked into the sexual service of a global elite. Yet Epstein’s arrest, rather than dragging his horrible crimes out into the light of day, only deepened their mystery. For one thing, his well-timed suicide in a New York prison put an end to the chance that he might spill his secrets. But the secrecy remains as the FBI stonewalls requests to release files related to Epstein’s work as a Bureau source.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Anything Goes, Wearily HBO’s new documentary series, Sex Diaries, reminds us that, for the most part, television still wants to be trash. Jonathan Clarke

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/hbo-sex-diaries-is-a-cynical-misfire

The emergence of the visionary and provocative television of the 1990s and 2000s, the period that gave us The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Larry Sanders Show, owed a great deal to HBO, whose narrowcast distribution model and welcome appetite for risk helped make such programming possible. More recently, the premium network has found distinction with Show Me A Hero, True Detective, and Chernobyl. Sex Diaries, however, HBO’s new series of 30-minute documentaries about the sex lives of Brooklyn hipsters on the make, is a much more cynical enterprise.

Sex Diaries is derived from a popular New York magazine column of the same name, which ran from 2007 to 2013. Anonymous New Yorkers wrote in to describe their sexual activity (or lack of same) in a given week; columnist Rachel Kramer Bussel, a former NYU Law student and the editor of sex-themed anthologies like Big Book of Orgasms, Vol. 2 and Crowded House: Threesome and Group Sex Erotica, curated and edited the submissions. Kramer Bussel aimed to capture a representative sample of New Yorkers, both gay and straight, from the very sexually active to the more solitary, from vanilla to kink. Inevitably, the television series leans more heavily into less mainstream lifestyles, from polyamory to latex fetishism to trans sex. What provided a frisson a mere decade ago now seems tame, even banal.

The show is bad—extraordinarily bad, in fact, both hollow in conception and, unusually for HBO, badly made—but there is always plenty of bad television to go around. What irks is that HBO is trying to pass off this trash as avant garde. Is it brave and provocative in 2023 to show people engaging in threesomes or in leather bondage, or using Tindr or Grindr to find the assignations that will briefly shore up their sense of self? At the leading edge of opinion in a large U.S. city, the really brave thing would be to suggest that we should impose some limits on our desires. Who besides church leaders is willing to come out in favor of sexual continence and fidelity to a partner? Who would dare to suggest that someone who has sex with many nameless partners is putting their soul at risk? Most of us would much rather be derided as libertines than risk looking like a square.

The series’ first subject, “James,” a British-born female bartender, is rarely clothed, and she looks exceptionally good naked. This was a promising start. And yet, by the episode’s seventh minute—I made a note—I was losing interest, because there’s simply nothing else going on. The producers have no interest in letting us know who James is, aside from her being an exhibitionist.

Episode three gives us a very overweight black woman living in Coney Island. She’s engaged in polyamorous relationships with people she meets out of town. She acknowledges that sex is more fraught for her because of her race and her body size. Something interesting is beginning here—she is trying to tell us something about her inner life—and then the camera just moves on.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

No Signs of Light in the West Christopher Akehurst

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/no-signs-of-light-in-the-west/

It is nice to start the new year with some expression of hope. Will this be a better year than last? Well, we can always dream, but all the indications are that it will be worse. The malign forces that are undermining Western society remain in the ascendant and are getting stronger.

Yet life is never without consolations, and it is an unusual privilege to witness the declining days of a dying civilisation. It doesn’t happen often in history. It is happening now, to us. Too pessimistic, you think? Well, consider the evidence.

Take the current pandemic of idiocy. We are in the grip of idiocy; you encounter it everywhere, from the ravings of climate lunatics about the world getting uninhabitably hot to the denials of biological reality by gender cranks, to the manufactured lies that pass as education, to the delusion that the senile President Biden is some sort of leader. No government or individual has the capacity to suffocate this nonsense.

How do we explain the slide from rationality to idiotic fantasy? Could it be that in the intellectual civil wars of the 1960s and after we have marginalised the intelligent elite who once guided our society? Certainly, “elite” has acquired a pejorative meaning, especially in education where it has been replaced with the pursuit of “equality of outcome”, for which, of course, it was necessary that standards be lowered. The dislike of “elitism” showed itself in all sorts of ways. In Australia for instance no longer was it considered necessary to try to speak correct English. “Strine” and “Aussie English” were the new norm, promoted on the ABC and elsewhere with propaganda about one accent being as good as another and not being ashamed of the way we spoke. Simultaneously formality, which takes some effort to maintain, was progressively discarded every­where, from Government House to what you wore to a restaurant. Public institutions and utilities replaced their Latin mottos and coats of arms with infantile logos and meaningless utterances such as “bringing you world-class service”, the excellence boasted of being invariably in inverse proportion to the quality of the product supplied. Across the Western world, the lowest common denominator—the tastes and preferences of “the common man” whose century it was said to be by an American vice-president—dethroned a striving for excellence. Indeed, the concept of excellence was abolished in favour of cultural relativity. There is no evidence that this state of affairs is changing for the better.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The World Economic Forum: Making the World Safe for Autocracy Their great reset is nothing but a regressive autocratic agenda to reinstitute feudalism. Why would free people cede their liberty and prosperity to this self-anointed new nobility? By Thaddeus G. McCotter

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/20/the-world-economic-forum-making-the-world-safe-for-autocracy/

Churning out carbon emissions to fly in on their corporate jets to Davos, Switzerland, for their annual fête to make the world safe for autocracy, the World Economic Forum’s hypocrisy is once again patent:

Greenpeace accused attendees of ‘ecological hypocrisy’ before asking just why the WEF claims it is committed to the global goal of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) when the emissions generated from all the private jets flying in and out of airports serving Davos last year were equivalent to those produced by about 350,000 average cars for a week.

Despite the calumnies by that nest of right-wing loons, Greenpeace, the WEF’s hypocrisy is only exceeded by its elitism. Consider the following from the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change, billionaire John Kerry: “[It is] extraordinary that we select human beings . . . are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet.”

What makes them “select” and gets them into that room is that they are rich and powerful. How they got that way varies from those who inherited it, married into it (like Kerry), or earned it by providing a good and/or service the masses purchased. Like thinking placing a book under your pillow as you sleep will help you cram for an exam, these elitists believe their ability to acquire money (one way or another) mystically translates into expertise in other fields of human endeavor, ones which must be fertilized by their presumed omnipotence—the climate change apocalypse, disinformation, immigration, etc.

So, too, there are invited attendees who are not necessarily wealthy, such as journalists and politicians (though nowadays many of them qualify for the “one percent”), and sundry courtiers. These invitees leap at the opportunity to attend, hoping to parlay the invite into career and monetary advancement; and relishing the sense of vicarious elitism accorded by their economic betters deigning to acknowledge their existence. It is deemed impolitic to note that the attendance of  these lesser lights is only suffered because they are deemed useful idiots.

What these elitists and their useful idiots are after, unadorned by nicety, is seen in this John Kerry quote: “money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money.” 

Money from whom, you might ask? You. Again, Kerry:

We don’t have time, folks, to be cobbling together bespoke deals here, there and everywhere. We have to do it on a massive basis and the key to that one is philanthropy. It’s not the only key, we need governments to put Federal public money into it.

You see, the rich are tired of footing the bill to peddle apocalyptic conspiracy theories that can scare the peons senseless enough to throw away their liberty and prosperity to make the world safe for autocracy.