NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

THREATS TO AMERICA: SYDNEY WILLIAMS

Posted By on October 22nd, 2024

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

“The extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that this oozy, bulging

wealth of the English upper and upper-middle classes would last forever, and was part of the order of things.”

                                                                                                                                George Orwell (1903-1950)

                                                                                                  

The differences between today and the years preceding World War I are far greater than any similarities. Nevertheless, I worry that the collapse of the Soviet Union 1991, and the concomitant elevation of the United States to global hegemon, has caused complacency toward persistent external threats – a complacency not unlike that which existed in Europe in the first decade and a half of the 20th Century, before the Great War provided reality in its horr

The West has enemies, those to whom liberal democracies represent a threat. The autocrats in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are fearful of what free speech would do to their positions of power. Democracy is an anathema to ideological authoritarians, be they on the Left or the Right, which is why the United States is portrayed as the “Great Satan” by the zealot Ali Khamenei and his followers, and why it is challenged by all four authoritarian states. Nothing is more fearful to a tyrant than freedom.

Yet other threats consume the media, particularly so-called “threats to democracy,” by which Progressives mean the re-election of Donald Trump to serve a second term; the flood of undocumented immigrants; abortion; and the threat of climate change. Largely ignored, as well as enemies abroad, is the imminent threat of financial default because of unending federal budget deficits that have grown our debt, as a percent of GDP, from 33% in 2000 to 121% in 2023. It is a trend that was aggravated by the long period of extraordinary low interest rates following the 2008 credit crisis. Nevertheless, all threats should be taken seriously. Democracy is fragile. It can fall to enemies from within or without. Allowing possible terrorists into our country, along with known criminals has consequences for our citizens. Abortion, in my opinion, was best described by President Clinton – it should be “safe, legal, and rare.” As for climate, Earth and the solar system are not eternal. At some point they will cease to exist. Will man be the cause? I don’t know, but I suspect not. The best way to improve the environment is to promote economic growth. And reckless government spending will negatively impact our standards of living.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Despite designated a terror group, Hamas funding thrives in Europe By David Isaac

Posted By on October 22nd, 2024

https://www.jns.org/despite-designated-a-terror-group-hamas-funding-thrives-in-europe/

The Hamas terror organization has managed to increase its fundraising efforts in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom since its terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, according to four reports that the European Leadership Network released this month.

The reports from ELNET, which convenes leaders to foster close relations between Europe and Israel, focus on the activities of Hamas-affiliated fundraising groups in the five countries.

“In all four reports, we have seen increasing levels of operations since Oct. 7,” Daniel Shadmy, an ELNET spokesman, told JNS.

The reports identify some 30 organizations, which operate under “civil fronts,” including nonprofits and lobbying groups, and people affiliated with Hamas who work in Europe.

Hamas’s funding operations are more deeply rooted in the United Kingdom and Germany than in the other countries upon which the report focuses. That makes them “harder to dismantle” in the two countries, according to Shadmy.

Hamas-affiliated groups operate relatively unscathed in Europe, despite European governments and the European Union designating Hamas a terror organization.

One way the groups stay ahead of authorities is by shifting operations to newer organizations, per the ELNET reports.

“One of the key findings of the report is that the Hamas-affiliated network has shut down three older, pan-European organizations, possibly in response to formal designations, and moved their operations to three newer organizations,” Shadmy told JNS.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

14 Reasons Bosses Are Quickly Firing Gen Z Hires by Liane Starr

Posted By on October 22nd, 2024

https://www.aol.com/finance/14-reasons-bosses-quickly-firing-130000679.html

What’s to Become of Gen Z?

Bad news for recent college grads — your bosses aren’t fans. A survey found that 6 in 10 bosses gave Gen Z employees the boot this year — and 1 in 6 companies are now hesitant to hire Gen Z employees. Why are bosses so unimpressed with the latest generation to join the workforce? As you might expect, it’s complicated.

They Lack Initiative

As you might expect from a generation that grew up during a pandemic, many employers are finding that some Zoomers aren’t prioritizing work. While previous generations assumed they’d have to shine (and spend plenty of time) in the office to impress the boss, Gen Z has had a crash course in learning that life is short. But that lack of motivation or initiative is referenced as a problem by 50% of the employers surveyed.

Lack of Professionalism

Considering that many Gen Z employees had internships over Zoom and may lack extensive real-life office experience, this may not come as a surprise. Not surprisingly, colleges like Michigan State University are offering students classes on how to behave and even write a work-appropriate e-mail.

Poor Organizational Skills

Roughly 45% of bosses say organization is a problem for Gen Z hires, likely because so much of their time is spent on phones —  a remarkable 7.2 hours per day.

Poor Communication Skills

Even Gen Z workers admit they have a hard time drumming up conversation with coworkers. A full 65% of them admit they aren’t great at communication, according to a recent Harris poll.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Are Dems Out Of Options To Stop Trump?

Posted By on October 22nd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/10/22/are-dems-out-of-options-to-stop-trump/

Two impeachments, 88 felony counts (with guilty verdicts on 34 of them), a massive fine, two assassination attempts, unrelentingly hostile media coverage, a last-minute candidate switcheroo, and Donald Trump is still showing signs that he will win the election in two weeks.

So, what do Democrats still have up their sleeve to stop Trump? They must have something.

Back in May, we asked what the Democrats’ Plan B was if their lawfare campaign against Trump failed, and offered five options – four of which have come to pass. Here is what we said then.

Dump Biden … We’ve long suspected that swapping Biden out at the last minute has been the Democrats’ plan for some time, especially since mainstream reporters started parroting Democratic talking points about how Biden was 100% guaranteed to be the nominee.

Well, we were right about that one.

Reassemble the election rigging team … Evidence is currently emerging that the Biden administration has been using taxpayer money on a government-wide effort to selectively register voters most likely to vote for the Democrat – i.e., rig the election.

Big Tech is also doing its share. Podcaster Joe Rogan complained recently that “You can’t find a negative story about Kamala Harris on Google if you tried.” Meta’s chatbot refused to answer questions about the Trump assassination attempt. Amazon’s Alexa gave starkly different answers when asked the same question about Trump and Harris. The companies, of course, deny tilting their algorithms. Google blamed “bugs,” Meta denied AI chatbot bias, and Amazon blamed an “error” that was “quickly fixed.” Funny how these “errors” always go in one direction.

Cheat … Even if election fraud is widespread and obvious, the same institutions that rallied to ‘save’ the 2020 election will deny it all and accuse anyone who claims otherwise of being an insurrectionist.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Hollow Warnings to China Are Leading to War by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on October 21st, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21036/biden-hollow-warnings-to-china

The world’s two most dangerous states, Xi Jinping’s People’s Republic of China and Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation, have been growing closer in part, it seems, because they see there is no cost to ignoring the warnings of the Biden administration.

“Mr. Biden can either enforce his red line through sanctions or other means, or he can signal a collapse of American resolve by applying merely symbolic penalties. Beijing and its strategic partners in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, and Caracas would surely interpret half-hearted enforcement as a green light to deepen their campaign of global chaos. Mr. Xi sees a historic opportunity here to undermine the West.” – Matt Pottinger, wsj.com, April 30, 2024

Since then, the Biden administration has done little but impose meaningless sanctions on Chinese parties, such as the ones announced on October 17 on two companies.

The American inaction today brings to mind President Obama’s infamous red-line failure in Syria in 2013. We should not be surprised: Biden, then vice president, was Obama’s foreign policy advisor.

Britain and France [last century] issued a series of threatening words to Berlin. German leaders, from the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 to the eve of the invasion of Poland in late summer 1939, ignored them.

“Warnings were crafted in such a way so they could not be enforced and understood as not intended to be enforced.” — Arthur Waldron, retired Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, to Gatestone Institute, October 17, 2024.

China’s aggressive leader apparently believes he can with impunity do just about anything.

Hollow warnings lead to war.

“These are not dual-use capabilities,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told reporters in Brussels on September 10, describing China’s aid to Russia for use against Ukraine. “These are component pieces of a very substantial effort on the part of China to help sustain, build, and diversify various elements of the Russian war machine.”

The Beijing-Moscow cooperation, Campbell argued, is “not a tactical alliance.” It is, instead, “a fundamental alignment.” The Chinese-Russian hook-up was “orchestrated at the highest levels” in the two capitals, he said.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Advocates of Woke Medicine Play Victim While Still Pushing Their Agenda

Posted By on October 21st, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/advocates-of-woke-medicine-play-victim-while-still-pushing-their-agenda/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

It’s pretty brazen to pretend to be on the defensive when your effort is having real-world consequences for doctors and patients.

The forces driving the politicization of medicine have a complaint: People are starting to notice what they’re doing.

Their effort to view health care through a DEI lens, which has proceeded almost unabated for years, has only recently begun to have genuine opposition. And this is supposedly threatening their cause’s very existence. “It’s very taxing,” Chandra L. Ford, a professor at Emory University and founding director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health, recently lamented to the Washington Post. “This anti-DEI movement creates a climate of fear.”

Sheldon Rubenfeld would be surprised to learn that Ford and those like her are on the defensive. Rubenfeld had been clinical professor of general medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. But this past summer, the medical school officially ended its relationship with him. It’s just the latest chapter in a story that demonstrates both the extent of the problem and the need to confront it.

Rubenfeld’s service at Baylor went back decades. It encountered a major stumbling block last year, however. The medical school abruptly canceled Healing by Killing: Medicine during the Third Reich, an elective course he had been teaching for 20 years. Rubenfeld, also the author of Medicine after the Holocaust: From the Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond, believes the course was an effective way to warn aspiring doctors against letting their prejudices influence how they treat their patients. Doing so ultimately “leads to all sorts of nastiness,” he says, “and Jews are always the first ones to experience it.”

One student, however, thought the course itself was a source of nastiness and filed an “anonymous grievance” after a lecture in which Rubenfeld pressed his students about their own potential biases. As he wrote in National Review earlier this year, all he learned about the nature of the complaint is that the student objected to his use of the word “Palestinian” — somehow now a charged term after the campus convulsions surrounding Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s response. Despite the filing of no further anonymous grievances, Baylor canceled the course.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

James Lynch: ‘Very Concerning’: Mike Johnson Reacts to Leak of U.S. Intel on Israel’s Plans to Strike Iran

Posted By on October 21st, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/very-concerning-mike-johnson-reacts-to-leak-of-u-s-intel-on-israels-plans-to-strike-iran/

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) is alarmed about the leak of highly classified U.S. intelligence documents on Israel’s plans to strike against Iran.

“The leak is very concerning. There’s some serious allegations being made there, an investigation underway, and I’ll get a briefing on that in a couple of hours,” Johnson said Sunday during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.

Johnson is currently undertaking a swing-state tour to help Republicans fight to preserve the party’s extremely narrow House majority. He will receive a classified briefing on the intelligence leak Sunday and spoke with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I talked to my friend Bibi Prime Minister Netanyahu, yesterday to encourage him,” Johnson said, while reaffirming U.S. support for Israel’s multi-front war in the Middle East.

“If he had taken Joe Biden’s advice, I think they’d be in a much weaker position right now. I think the United States needs to stand unequivocally with our ally there right now,” Johnson added. He called for a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran and criticized the Biden administration for trying to micromanage Israel’s military strategy.

The leaked U.S. intelligence documents started circulating online Friday when a pro-Iran account posted them on Telegram and claimed to have received them from a source inside the intel community, according to multiple reports. The top-secret documents were only meant to be seen by “Five Eyes” U.S. allies: Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

One of the documents appears to be an intelligence report created by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and contains details on munitions transfers. Another document appears to be attributed to the National Security Agency and shows Israeli air force exercises.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Russia Evades Western Sanctions Shady trade routes and oil tankers keep the Russian economy ticking over. Sonny Loughran

Posted By on October 21st, 2024

https://quillette.com/2024/10/15/how-russia-beats-western-sanctions/

Russia currently exists in a state of economic purgatory. Since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Western powers seeking to limit his nation’s warmaking capacity have instituted one of the harshest sanction regimes the world has ever seen. Imports of Russian oil, above a certain price, have been outlawed, as have exports of sensitive materials, such as semiconductors, engine parts, and communications equipment,that might find their way into Russian weaponry. The country’s banks have been cut off from SWIFT—the main system banks use to coordinate international payments. And some $280 billion worth of Russian assets remain frozen in European banks. 

Despite this, Russia’s war continues. The Russian economy grew at a rate of around 4 percent in the second quarter of 2024, down from a first quarter high of 5.4 percent. And despite predictions that the Russian military would suffer crippling shortages, Putin’s war machine has proved surprisingly efficient at rearming itself. In fact, the Russian arms industry is booming. The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK defence think tank, estimates that Russia’s domestic production of Kh-101 cruise missiles has increased eightfold over the last year. And Russian military spokespeople have boasted of supply lines that deliver tanks, drones, and artillery shells in their thousands.  

Though the Russian boasts are surely hyperbole, Russia’s military resilience continues to embarrass the world’s economists. Shortly after Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine, the International Monetary Fund predicted that the sanctions would cause Russian GDP to shrink by more than a tenth by the end of 2023. The Economist speculated about the possibility of a coup. Analysts at Reuters opined that Russia would probably collapse under such financial pressures. How then, has the Russian war machine kept on rolling?

The answer is that trade flows of restricted goods have shifted in response to the global sanctions.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Hamas Loyalist Professor: Samer Alatout at UW-Madison Championing Hamas at an illegal campus encampment. by Sara Dogan

Posted By on October 21st, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-loyalist-professor-samer-alatout-at-uw-madison/

#6: Samer Alatout, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Samer Alatout is a Palestinian associate professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at UW-Madison who has long been noted for his record of Jew hatred and his whitewashing of Hamas’s terrorist violence. In recent months, his promotion of Hamas has become even more explicit, praising the organizers of the barbaric October 7th attacks on Israeli civilians and participating in—and getting arrested—during an illegal anti-Israel demonstration on campus.

Just days after Hamas’s massacre of Israeli innocents, Alatout made his support for the terrorist organization clear, tweeting, that “Hamas fighters r precisely the kids & grandkids of those who were displaced from Palestine in 1948. They r the Palestinians if one comes to think of it. In refugee camps, they live legacies of that war and hold tight to the right of return (enshrined in international law).” While most leftist critics of Israel were attempting to draw a moral distinction between Hamas and the larger mass of Palestinian people, Alatout was doing precisely the opposite—and justifying the actions of Hamas.

In another tweet on October 13, 2023, Alatout attempted to absolve Hamas and blame Israel for the barbaric massacre of 1200 innocents and the kidnapping and maiming of many more. “…[I]t is not about Hamas, not about Gaza, and not about the recent attack by Hamas. Israel has been targeting Palestinians within Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and in the Diaspora. The demand: Die silently, without a whimper,” he wrote.

Professor Alatout has repeatedly invoked the Holocaust in condemning Israel’s actions to defend itself from Hamas, a classic form of anti-Semitism. On November 15, 2023, Alatout tweeted, “#Israeli use of #Goebbels’s (the Nazi propaganda guy) approach of ‘lie, lie, and keep lying until people believe you,’ will not work in 2023.” Two days later, he compared Israelis to Holocaust deniers, tweeting, “Deniers of the ongoing #Genocide_of_Palestinians should be ashamed. They are made of the same moral depravity of which Holocaust deniers are made of.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Steven Malanga No, You’re Not Imagining a Migrant Crime Spree Four years of open borders and sanctuary policies have brought criminal drug networks, human trafficking, and an epidemic of sexual assault.

Posted By on October 21st, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-youre-not-imagining-a-migrant-crime-spree

The arrest of an illegal immigrant for the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley a few weeks before President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address ignited a political firestorm. “Laken’s death is the direct result of policies on the federal level and an unwillingness by this White House to secure the southern border,” Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp charged, after reports emerged that the border patrol had grabbed Venezuelan Jose Ibarra back in 2022, but that he was quickly paroled and released into the United States. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, reacting to the controversy, warned of an illegal-alien crime wave; at the State of the Union itself, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted Biden, calling out for the president to “say her name”—a reference to Riley. When Biden did mention her name, he acknowledged that she died at the hands of an illegal migrant; further controversy ensued when he later apologized for using the term “illegal,” and not the politically correct “undocumented.”

The elite press rode to Biden’s defense. The idea of a migrant crime wave was a myth, media outlets proclaimed, noting studies of Texas incarceration data from years ago, which seemed to suggest that illegals commit crimes at low rates. This ignored other surveys, based on federal multistate data, which show a far more troubling reality. And after years of a migrant border “surge”—with countless asylum-seekers inadequately vetted and then allowed to enter the U.S.—state law-enforcement agencies now warn that immigrant gangs have seized control of many drug- and human-trafficking networks and have unleashed robbery sprees across the nation. With polls showing Americans alarmed about illegal immigration—a majority even backing mass deportations—Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin reflected public anger when he charged that “every state” is now “a border state.”

Underlying the escalating controversy is the sheer number of migrants entering America during the Biden administration. In a 2020 debate with Trump, Biden seemed to encourage an immigration surge, and it followed soon after his election, with about 8 million people, on some estimates, flocking to the U.S. border without applying first for legal entry. The administration has released up to 3.3 million of them into the U.S. to await immigration hearings, many of which won’t occur for years. At the same time, the number of immigrants who enter by avoiding border security and remain fraudulently in America has also skyrocketed, to an estimated 1.6 million to 1.7 million since Biden’s election, compared with about 1.4 million over the entire previous decade.