WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

First Round to Putin, What Next? by Amir Taheri

Posted By on February 27th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18274/first-round-to-putin

Initially, aware that he [Russian President Vladimir Putin] must cast himself as victim in order to win sympathy in Western public opinion that warms up to figures like Saddam Hussein or George Floyd, he presented Russia as a victim of NATO “expansion” and his saber rattling as an act of self-defense.

Never mind that NATO is a defensive pact and not allowed to attack anyone unless one of its own members is first attacked. Even then, Article V under which military action is allowed is not automatically applicable and hasn’t been applied since the alliance was created. In contrast, led by the now defunct Soviet Union, the rival Warsaw Pact was used for military interventions in Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia to crush popular uprisings against Russian domination.

[U]nder NATO rules, a country that has unsettled irredentist disputes with its neighbors cannot be admitted as a member. That rule applies to both Ukraine and Georgia, another country invaded by Putin, both of which are barred from NATO membership because of their territorial disputes caused by Russian aggression.

Thus, Putin was making a song and dance about something that couldn’t happen under NATO’s own rules.

[Putin] can no longer play wolf disguised as sheep. Even his apologists, not to say mercenaries among Western politicians and journalists, are able to defend his latest move let alone presenting him as a victim of “Imperialism”.

Putin would be wrong to think that with the passage of time the rest of the world will endorse his “conquest”, just as no one ever recognized the annexation of the Baltic republics by Stalin.

The spectacle of ancient Russian tanks and armored vehicles creeping into Donbass showed how antiquarian Putin’s arsenal is.

At first glance, the latest twists and turns in the Ukraine poker game might present Russian President Vladimir Putin as the winner.

After all, he is reaping what he sowed eight years ago, when he incited ethnic Russian secessionists to set up breakaway “people’s republics” in parts of Ukrainian territory, in Donetsk and Lugansk. By stationing troops in the two enclaves, Putin makes official an occupation that he had indirectly exercised through Wagner mercenaries and local militias. Imposing two “cooperation treaties” on the breakaway “republics,” he also shows their annexation in all but name by Russia.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine renews Pennsylvania lawmakers’ Keystone Pipeline calls Three state Senators seeking cosponsors for resolution urging President Biden to reopen Keystone XL Pipeline to restore U.S. energy independence.

Posted By on February 27th, 2022

https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/russias-invasion-ukraine-renews-pennsylvania-lawmakers-keystone

Three Pennsylvania senators are soliciting cosponsors for legislation to urge the Biden administration to rethink its opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Sens. Wayne Langerholc, R-Johnstown; Joe Pittman, R-Indiana; and Gene Yaw, R-Williamsport, posted a cosponsorship memorandum, outlining plans to introduce a resolution urging President Joe Biden to reopen the Keystone XL Pipeline.

“This week oil prices have soared over $100 per barrel and currently, the United States is importing over 800,000 barrels of oil per day from Russia,” they wrote. “These barrels are either going to become more expensive or completely unavailable as the conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues to escalate.

“The United States cannot continue to rely so heavily on foreign oil when we have the resources to fuel our vehicles and heat our homes,” the memo read. “It was expected that the Keystone XL Pipeline would transport 830,000 barrels of oil per day, which would help offset the current supply received daily from Russia.

“Re-opening the Keystone XL Pipeline will start to ease the burden that Pennsylvanians are feeling every day and protect our national energy security going forward.”

The senators wrote they plan to introduce the resolution “in the near future.”

Biden issued an executive order Jan. 20, 2021, to revoke the permit granted to TC Energy Corporation for the final phase of the Keystone Pipeline, known as Keystone XL, which runs from Alberta, Canada, through Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Growing Threat of a World Run by Dictators By Michael Abramowitz & Sarah Repucci

Posted By on February 27th, 2022

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/26/the_growing_threat_of_a_world_run_by_dictators_147250.html

Early Thursday, an authoritarian ruler deployed troops into an embattled democracy in clear defiance not only of that country’s sovereignty, but of condemnation and threats from the rest of the democratic world. The Putin regime’s incursion into Ukraine is just the latest symptom of a much larger pattern of antidemocratic aggression.

In 2021, for the 16th consecutive year, Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report found that respect for political rights and civil liberties declined globally. Military coups proliferated, and authoritarian regimes staged utterly uncompetitive elections in Hong Kong, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, and elsewhere. An astonishing 8 out of 10 people in the world now live in countries rated by Freedom House as Not Free or Partly Free.

Fueling the spread of authoritarian practices has been a new kind of mutual aid society for dictators – less formalized than the Communist International (Comintern) of the Cold War era, but perhaps more effective. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the global dominance of democratic states meant that all nations needed to move or – appear to move – toward democratic standards of governance in order to gain credibility, access international trade and financing, and receive development or military aid. Over the last decade and a half, however, wealthy and powerful authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and the Middle East have made it possible for an increasing number of despots to openly pursue antidemocratic systems, safe in the knowledge that any repercussions from the world’s democracies will be offset by assistance from their autocratic friends.

Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad have long been propped up by other authoritarian regimes: Havana, Moscow, and Beijing in the former case and Tehran and Moscow in the latter. More recently the practice has benefited Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus and the leaders of military coups in Myanmar and Sudan.

When tens of thousands of Belarusian citizens turned out to protest the fraudulent presidential election of August 2020, Russia’s Vladimir Putin came to Lukashenka’s aid – not only with words of support, but also with a $1.5 billion loan. The Kremlin sent propagandists to “report” on the election when real journalists in Belarus went on strike, provided security forces to backstop the regime’s brutal crackdown, and dispatched election observers to validate the farcical results.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble By tying itself to a reckless and dangerous America, the Ukrainians made a blunder that client states will study for years to come Lee Smith

Posted By on February 27th, 2022

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraines-deadly-gamble

Russian President Vladimir Putin chose this war, Joe Biden said in his Thursday afternoon speech to America regarding the conflict in Ukraine. That is true, but U.S. elites also had something to do with Putin’s ugly and destructive choice—a role that Democrats and Republicans are eager to paper over with noble-sounding rhetoric about the bravery of Ukraine’s badly outgunned military. Yes, the Ukrainian soldiers standing up to Putin are very brave, but it was Americans that put them in harm’s way by using their country as a weapon, first against Russia and then against each other, with little consideration for the Ukrainian people who are now paying the price for America’s folly.

It is not an expression of support for Putin’s grotesque actions to try to understand why it seemed worthwhile for him to risk hundreds of billions of dollars, the lives of thousands of servicemen, and the possible stability of his own regime in order to invade his neighbor. After all, Putin’s reputation until this moment has always been as a shrewd ex-KGB man who eschewed high-risk gambles in favor of sure things backed by the United States, like entering Syria and then escalating forces there. So why has he adopted exactly the opposite strategy here, and chosen the road of open high-risk confrontation with the American superpower?

Yes, Putin wants to prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s border. But the larger answer is that he finds the U.S. government’s relationship with Ukraine genuinely threatening. That’s because for nearly two decades, the U.S. national security establishment under both Democratic and Republican administrations has used Ukraine as an instrument to destabilize Russia, and specifically to target Putin.

While the timing of Putin’s attack on Ukraine is no doubt connected to a variety of factors, including the Russian dictator’s read on U.S. domestic politics and the preferences of his own superpower sponsor in Beijing, the sense that Ukraine poses a meaningful threat to Russia is not a product of Putin’s paranoia—or of a sudden desire to restore the power and prestige of the Soviet Union, however much Putin might wish for that to happen. Rather, it is a geopolitical threat that has grown steadily more pressing and been employed with greater recklessness by Americans and Ukrainians alike over the past decade.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The Experts, Science, Medicine––All Amazing, All Fallible By Joan Swirsky

Posted By on February 27th, 2022

https://www.thepostemail.com/2022/02/26/the-experts-science-medicine-all-amazing-all-fallible/

For thousands of years, going back to the Bible, women have wept and grieved and pleaded to God over their miscarriages. Indeed, it took all these millennia for modern-day pharmaceutical companies to develop solutions to this ongoing nightmare.

In the 1940s, they were happy to offer doctors the ability to prescribe diethylstilbestrol (DES) to prevent miscarriage. “You can tell them you would give it to your wife,” the marketing mavens from Big Pharma suggested to physicians.

And with good reason. This “miracle drug” worked! Women who had experienced no trouble conceiving but were plagued by constant miscarriages were now able to carry their babies to term and deliver quite “perfect” bundles of joy!

But then disaster hit with unspeakable horror. After one or two years of watching their beautiful babies smile and roll over and teethe and then walk and speak and thrive, the little girls began developing hideous vaginal cancers, and those who survived to adulthood experienced higher-than-normal premature births, miscarriages, and ectopic pregnancies.

The little boys, too, had horrible anomalies in their urogenital tracts and are still being watched for higher-than-average cases of testicular and prostate cancers.

In 1971, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took DES off the market.

So much for the science!

ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORMAN

Posted By on February 27th, 2022

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com 

 

The news affecting the United States is grim….war in the Ukraine, threats and taunts from China, North Korea, and Iran. Michael Ordman compiles a a ray of sunshine and hope from our most dependable ally. Israel’s daily innovations in science, technology, medicine, agriculture, and social institutions continue to flourish and enrich the entire world including the human termites whose libels and baseless enmity are designed  to bring down the walls of the Jewish state. rsk

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
 
Innovative heart treatment. After 68 years, Yair’s complex congenital heart defect finally caught up with him. Luckily, the years also brought new advances and, for the first time in Israel, instead of open-heart surgery, his irregular pulse could be resolved at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center using cardiac catheterization.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-698121
 
Portable lung tests. Israel’s PulmOne (see here previously) has developed the MiniBox+, a revolutionary lung function device about the size of a desktop computer. It has the potential to help diagnose many of the half a billion people around the world who suffer from lung disease.  The MiniBox+ is FDA approved.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/spotlight/portable-lung-tests-help-patients-breathe-easier/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvUadvOJb3U   https://www.pulm-one.com/
 
Hyperbaric oxygen relieves PTSD. Israeli scientists are the first to have used hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. The pressurized pure oxygen treatment successfully relieved IDF veterans with treatment-resistant PTSD that had lasted for at least four years.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/world-first-israeli-study-shows-oxygen-therapy-can-dramatically-reduce-ptsd-symptoms/  https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-698327
 
Electric pulses to fight cancer. Technion Professor Yoram Palti has been awarded the Israel Prize in the Field of Entrepreneurship and Technological Innovation. Prof Palti founded Israel’s Novocure (see here previously) that developed a groundbreaking cancer treatment (especially brain cancer) using electric pulses.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/yoram-palti-awarded-israel-prize-for-groundbreaking-cancer-treatment/
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-novocure-uses-electrodes-to-treat-brain-tumors-1001120662
 
Using nanotech to create the impossible. (TY WIN) Great feature by VeryGoodNewsIsrael subscriber Diana Bletter about Technion Professor Hossam Haick (see here previously). His expertise in nanotechnology has led to 42 patents and the inventions of the cancer SniffPhone, NaNose, molecular sutures, skin sensors and more.
https://www.israel21c.org/the-scientist-using-nanotech-to-create-the-impossible/
 
Robots to help rehabilitation. Ben Gurion University’s 46th Webinar Wednesday featured BGU Professor Shelly Levy-Tzedek, who discussed how robots can help in the process of rehabilitation. This includes physical assistance (e.g., post-stroke, Parkinson’s, or aging) and social assistance. The video also stars Pepper the robot.  https://americansforbgu.org/video/future-of-rehabilitation/#  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms6wFLmnqNg  https://shelly453.wixsite.com/levy-tzedek-lab
 
Relaxation to boost radiation benefits. (TY UWI) Neuroscientist Amir Amedi from Israel’s Reichman University, has invented multisensory devices to relax patients awaiting cancer radiation therapy at Israeli hospitals. These include 3D VR glasses, smart tables and chairs, breathing sensors, and in-ear recordings.
https://www.israel21c.org/futuristic-tech-brings-healing-relaxation-to-radiotherapy/
 
Siblings of special needs children may be more empathic. Researchers at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University studied 1,657 families of twins born in 2004/5. In 63 cases, one of the twins had a development delay or disability. The other twin was found to have a higher cognitive empathy than those with a normal twin.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/article-698420
https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.13740

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

KENDALL QUALLS- REPUBLICAN FOR GOVERNOR OF MINNESOTA

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

Why I’m Running
There are three reasons I’m running for Governor…
The entire country should care about my first reason.

Minnesota was GROUND ZERO where the riots, looting and “Defund the Police” ALL started and then spread across the country.

In the center of it all was Keith Ellison, Ilhan Omar, and our weak Governor Tim Walz pushing anti-American woke agenda. Shoving CRT down the throats of parents and allowing our kids to fall behind in school.

At the same time allowing record murders, car jackings and all crime metrics go unchecked. That changes Day One when I’m in office.
Minnesotans have been leaving the state in record numbers.

My opponent enforces one of the heaviest tax burdens in the country on the business community, private citizens, and retirees by taxing social security benefits.

This is not the time to nominate a career politician. We need a leader from the private sector with private sector solutions.
Lastly, Americans are tired of being bullied by the left and exhausted by constant accusations of systemic racism.

In fact, this is the least racist period in our country’s history. My parents and grandparents would have loved to have grown up in the America I grew up in.

We are NOT going to be the generation that lost America.

We are going to be the generation that saved it, restored it and passed it on to the next generation.
That is why I’m running and that’s why we are going to win.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

On the Eve of the Show Trials The first trial of a January 6 defendant is set to begin next week. But jury trials should expose the government’s weak case against most of them. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/24/on-the-eve-of-the-show-trials/

Guy Reffitt has been in jail since he was arrested by the FBI nearly 14 months ago.

Reffitt, like dozens of Americans who protested the unlawful election of Joe Biden, isn’t in jail because he was convicted of a crime. Neither is Reffitt in jail because he has a criminal record—he does not—or a history of threatening his Bonham, Texas neighbors or community.

Instead, Reffitt has languished behind bars for more than a year because Joe Biden’s Justice Department asked a federal judge to keep him detained awaiting trial for his participation in the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021. Since then, more than 100 Americans, including several accused of no violent crimes, have been incarcerated under pre-trial detention orders sought by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Constitutional rights such as the presumption of innocence, due process, the right to a speedy trial, and protection from cruel and unusual punishment have been stripped from January 6 defendants based on the Biden regime’s false premise that they are all “domestic terrorists” and “insurrectionists.” (None of the January 6 defendants has been charged with terrorism or insurrection.)

Now that the first trials are finally getting underway, the public can assess whether the government prosecutors and federal judges who created America’s first class of political prisoners were justified in doing so, or were shamefully complicit in Joe Biden’s vengeful prosecution of Donald Trump supporters.

Guy Reffitt is one of hundreds of protesters not charged with committing a violent crime on January 6. According to his initial indictment, Reffitt did not assault police officers—to the contrary, he was attacked by law enforcement with rubber bullets and mace—or vandalize any public property. In fact, he never even entered the Capitol building.

But based on the government’s mostly hearsay evidence, a D.C. federal magistrate last year denied Reffitt’s release—and it had little to do with his alleged criminal behavior on January 6. 

“[The] gravity of the offense is not captured by the offenses because it was an attack upon the democracy and the lawful administration of that democracy as there was a transition of power,” Judge Zia Faruqui said during an April detention hearing. “My concern is that he still harbors the belief even after the election results were certified, the Electoral College was processed, that he continued to harbor the belief, the false belief that something untoward was happening with the democratic process.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Chinese Censorship on American Soil by Peter Schweizer

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18268/chinese-censorship-american-soil

Americans are now familiar with the sad spectacle of their own countrymen bowing to Chinese pressure publicly. We see it done by captains of industry, Wall Street’s largest firms, the most elite universities, sports heroes, cultural figures, and politicians alike. It has become so common that it is news when someone instead resists the pressure from Chinese communist regime and suffers financially because of it.

The latest example of that is professional basketball player Enes Kanter Freedom, who was recently traded by the Boston Celtics to the Houston Rockets, which then promptly waived him. The Rockets have offered no reason for this move, but it is no secret that the team has a devoted following in and makes a lot of money from China.

“People’s willingness to speak out about these issues tends to be related to how much business they have in China…. Everyone understands that the quid pro quo of taking Chinese cash is that you never criticize them.” — David Sacks, The Megyn Kelly Show, February 8, 2022.

My latest book, Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, traces these themes…. It is surprising how little attention those chapters have received in mainstream news outlets….

Highlighted are detailed actions and pro-Beijing statements of financial giants such as Larry Fink and Ray Dalio, who run BlackRock and Bridgewater Associates, respectively. An entire chapter catalogs similar kowtowing from Big Tech by Silicon Valley’s wealthiest CEOs, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cooke, and Bill Gates. From political dynasties in the US and Canada to philanthropists and Harvard professors, from sports stars to movie actors, the Chinese money talks so loudly it drowns out every other sound.

“News conglomerates do not want to cover bad news about China. But it’s not because of a grand conspiracy theory. It’s simply because they make so much money.” — Alex Marlow, editor-in-chief of Breitbart News and author of the book, Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

Even smaller media outlets such as The Atlantic Monthly and Axios aren’t immune, [Marlow] notes in his book. Both are owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow, whose fortune came from Apple and Disney, two companies that owe a lot of their wealth to their business activities in China.

“Bloomberg News has to extend its contract every two years, so [Michael Bloomberg] goes over there to kiss the ring.” — Alex Marlow, The Drill Down, February 10, 2022

How much longer will our large media outlets ignore the growing threat Chinese influence poses to their core principles of presenting the truth without fear or favor?

As Albert Camus, wrote, “The Welfare of the people… has always been the alibi of tyrants… giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.”

Billionaire tech investor David Sacks recently summed up the present state of Communist Chinese intimidation of American business, sports leagues like the NBA, and anyone else with commercial interests in China. He sees it getting worse, not better.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The School Shutdowns and Lost Literacy New evidence that children have fallen far behind in reading.

Posted By on February 25th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-school-shutdowns-and-lost-literacy-covid-pandemic-amplify-education-reading-11645653340?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Governments made many mistakes in the pandemic, and shutting down schools was arguably the worst. We’re now discovering the damage as studies calculate the learning loss.

Amplify, the curriculum and assessment provider, examined its test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states. It found a spike in students not reading at grade level, with the literacy losses “disproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades (K-2).”

Before the pandemic, 55% of kindergartners were on track in reading skills. That fell to 37% in 2020–2021 and 47% this school year. The year before the pandemic, only 29% of kindergartners were deemed “far behind” in early literacy skills. That rose to 47% and 37% the first and second year of the pandemic.

Amplify sees some progress this year in reading as the classrooms have reopened. But the troubles persist for this year’s second graders, whose schooling has been dominated by shutdowns and disruptions. Among this Covid cohort, Amplify finds that “the number of students at greatest risk of not learning to read is slightly higher than it was a year ago.” Some 35% of second graders are in literacy crisis this year, up from 26% before the shutdowns.

Like other recent studies, Amplify reports that minority children suffered disproportionate learning loss. During the last normal school year, only 34% of black and 29% of Hispanic second graders needed intensive intervention to help catch up. This school year 47% of black and 39% of Hispanic second graders have fallen this far behind on literacy, compared to 26% of white peers.