WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

FIFA has scored a spectacular own goal Everybody in the world knows why the World Cup is taking place in Qatar: Douglas Murray

Posted By on November 27th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/life/fifa-scored-spectacular-own-goal/
“Everybody in the world knows why the World Cup is taking place in Qatar. It is because the Qataris are very rich and bribed FIFA officials to have the competition in their inappropriately climated statelet. Many people have lamented this, but I think the whole thing has paid off. Rather than covering over the lamentable aspects of Qatari society, the World Cup has highlighted them — as it has also highlighted a range of people who are willing to say almost anything so long as they get to trouser a lot of cash.”

Unlike some fair-weather fans I maintain a fairly constant interest in the workings of FIFA. Not because I especially care for association football, but because I consider myself something of a connoisseur of corruption. I do not spend all my time studying the matter, but I do take an interest in corrupt people and entities. They form a sort of hall of fame in part of my head.

Top of my list is probably Abdalá Bucaram. For anyone who failed to follow Ecuadorian politics in the 1990s, that is the period when Bucaram was elected to office in his country. Known as “El Loco” (“The madman”), the president had a colorful period in power. Among other things, he released a pop single trying to adopt his nickname in a positive light (“The madman who loves”). But he was best known for his fantastical corruption. So corrupt was Bucaram that when the Ecuadorian parliament voted to impeach him, he was caught trying to bribe officials to vote that he wasn’t corrupt. Shortly afterwards he was seen clambering on to a private jet to Panama with what one witness described as baskets full of cash.

Outside South America, you really have to go to international sporting organizations for corruption of this calibre. So it is that very near to Bucaram in my personal pantheon sits Chuck Blazer. You may remember him from a few years back as one of the FIFA officials who was proved to have received bribes to arrange for the World Cup to go to any country that could line his voluminous pockets. For Mr. Blazer was a big man. Indeed so morbidly obese was he that he had to move around in a mobility scooter. He had two apartments in Trump Tower, one of which was set aside for his cats. When the Feds came knocking, Mr. Blazer was on the way to his favorite restaurant on his mobility scooter. And so the Feds caught the FIFA official fairly easily on Fifth Avenue in perhaps the lowest-speed chase in NYPD history.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Western humbug over murdered Israelis Through Palestinian propaganda, what was once confined to Nazi Germany has now poisoned much of the free world Melanie Phillips

Posted By on November 27th, 2022

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/western-humbug-over-murdered-israelis?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=77655&post_id=86654580&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

It’s been another epic week for western hypocrisy. And it’s been another epic week for indifference or worse towards Israel. The two are, of course, intimately connected.

On Wednesday, 16-year-old Aryeh Schupak was murdered and over a dozen others injured, at least one of them critically, when a bomb packed with nails and ball-bearings exploded at a bus stop in Jerusalem. Another remote-controlled bomb went off shortly afterwards at another bus stop in the city.

The Biden administration rushed to condemn the bombings. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that America “stands resolutely with Israel in the face of the terrorist attacks this morning in Jerusalem” and reiterated that “our commitment to Israel’s security is iron-clad”.

This is nauseating humbug. These attacks, like the rest of the terrorist wave against Israelis in recent months, are in large measure the product of relentless Palestinian Authority incitement in its schools and media, as well as its “pay for slay” rewards to terrorists and their families.

Nor are Israeli Jews the only targets of Palestinian terror. On the same day as the bombings, a 17-year-old Israeli Druze, Tiran Fero, who was critically injured in a car crash in Jenin, was abducted from hospital by a mob of Palestinian Arab gunmen, reportedly because they mistakenly thought he was an Israeli soldier.

According to Fero’s family, the terrorists stormed the hospital, disconnected him from his respirator while he was still alive and threw him into a car. His body was retrieved by Israeli and PA security forces and returned to his family the following day.

Given its role in inciting and financing such terror, the Palestinian leadership would be treated as pariahs in any civilised universe. Instead, the Biden administration continues to fund it and treat it as worthy of a state.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump special counsel Jack Smith was involved in Lois Lerner IRS scandal by Jerry Dunleavy,

Posted By on November 27th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/trump-special-counsel-jack-smith-involved-lois-lerner-irs-scandal

Newly appointed special counsel Jack Smith was instrumental in the Justice Department’s public integrity unit inserting itself into the Lois Lerner IRS scandal targeting conservative nonprofit groups.

Smith, picked by Attorney General Merrick Garland to helm the DOJ’s investigations of former President Donald Trump, led the Public Integrity Section from 2010 until early 2015.

Lerner, director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Unit, led an IRS effort targeting Tea Party groups and similar conservative nonprofit organizations. Smith’s push for DOJ officials to contact Lerner and the IRS in order to get the DOJ involved seemed to be the impetus behind the IRS sending the FBI reams of nonprofit tax records.

An IRS watchdog and the DOJ later admitted the IRS committed wrongdoing, although not of the criminal variety. Lerner would apologize.

Republicans unsuccessfully sought a special counsel to investigate the IRS scandal at the time, with Smith’s actions cited as one reason.

“Jack Smith was looking for ways to prosecute the innocent Americans that Lois Lerner targeted during the IRS scandal,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), expected to lead the House Judiciary Committee next year, told the Washington Examiner.

Jordan and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who led House Oversight, sought Smith’s testimony in May 2014, saying, “It is apparent that the Department’s leadership, including Public Integrity Section Chief Jack Smith, was closely involved in engaging with the IRS.”

Smith testified that month that he spoke with the FBI about these nonprofit groups.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

NYC convictions plummet, downgraded charges surge under Manhattan DA Bragg By Melissa Klein

Posted By on November 27th, 2022

https://nypost.com/2022/11/26/convictions-plummet-downgraded-charges-surge-under-manhattan-da-bragg/

Soft-on-crime Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has downgraded more than half his felony cases to misdemeanors — while also managing to lose half of the felony cases that do reach court.

Since taking office on Jan. 1, Bragg has downgraded 52% of felony cases to misdemeanors — compared to 39% in all of 2019. Between 2013 and 2020, under District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., the percentage of cases the office downgraded had never exceeded 40%, according to data made public by the DA’s office.

When serious felony charges are brought, Bragg’s office wins a conviction just 51% of the time — down from 68% in 2019, the last year before the pandemic disrupted the court system.He has declined to prosecute 35 percent more felony cases this year than in 2019, with 1,119 so far in 2022 compared to 828 three years ago.

The DA’s office requested bail in only 49% of felony cases this year compared to 69% in 2019. State bail reform measures mean almost no non-violent felonies are eligible for bail now although they were in 2019.

Misdemeanor convictions have also spiraled downward — to 29% so far this year, from 68% in 2019.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Is the Biden Administration Colluding with Russia to Allow Iran to Go Nuclear? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on November 26th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19155/biden-russia-iran-nuclear

The mullahs are freely expanding their nuclear weapons program, now enriching uranium to nearly weapons-grade level. Iran is also seeking assistance from its ally, Russia, to bolster its nuclear program, according to the US intelligence officials.

Iran has been providing attack drones to Russia that are being used in Ukraine and is preparing also to deliver ballistic missiles. As a result, it should not come as a surprise that the Islamic Republic is going to seek something in return from Russia for these weapons deliveries.

The regime continues to keep the IAEA’s cameras at Iran’s nuclear facilities turned off. By doing so, it is effectively preventing the IAEA from monitoring its nuclear activities, including uranium enrichment.

Iran’s regime also refuses to answer the IAEA’s questions about uranium particles found at three of its undeclared nuclear sites.

To what lengths will the Biden administration go to protect Iran’s mullahs, allow them to crush anti-regime protestors, and collude with Russia to help Iran acquire nuclear weapons capability?

It has been nearly a year since nuclear negotiations with Iran stalled; since then, the Biden administration appears to be sitting idly by watching the ruling mullahs advance their nuclear weapons program.

The mullahs are freely expanding it, now enriching uranium to nearly weapons-grade level. Iran is also seeking assistance from its ally, Russia, to bolster its nuclear program, according to the US intelligence officials.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Plug the Next Lab Leak The case for a pandemic early-warning system Willy Chertman

Posted By on November 26th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/the-case-for-a-pandemic-early-warning-system

The lab-leak hypothesis for Covid-19’s origin, once a forbidden topic in the press and on social media, is now the subject of fierce debate among scientists and journalists. But the very possibility of a lab leak should be alarming, and not just retrospectively. A recent report based on documents from the National Institutes of Health reveals wide variation in how institutions respond to lab accidents involving dangerous pathogens. Regardless of whether the U.S.-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology released Covid-19, policymakers should change their attitudes toward this kind of research in the future.

What form should this rethink take? Some have called for a crackdown on “gain-of-function” research, in which an existing organism is modified to enhance a given feature. Others have advocated stricter safety standards for research funding or better training in labs that handle pathogens. Still others want independent oversight of especially high-risk research. All these proposals are worth serious consideration—but an under-discussed possibility would be to acquire better, earlier data on lab leaks. The current approach to detecting lab leaks is insufficiently proactive: if an incident happens, the world will know only if scientists and lab techs self-report it or if enough people develop symptoms. An early-warning system that uses large-scale genetic sequencing would strengthen security against lab leaks and other pathogenic threats.

In a way, the world was lucky that Covid-19 wasn’t worse. Though the disease killed perhaps 1 million Americans (and many more globally), its infection fatality ratio was quite low. Smallpox, on the other hand, killed around 10 percent of its victims, while untreated bubonic plague and Ebola kill around 30 percent. And novel pathogens with no known treatment have a non-zero chance of emerging every year. Industrial-scale animal farming, wet markets, and human encroachment onto animal habitats may increase the risk of new pathogens, which rapid intercontinental travel can spread around the world.

Of course, natural threats don’t tell the whole story. Pathogens engineered to be more dangerous—whether for benign or nefarious purposes—present another threat. In the 1980s, using biotechnology that would today be considered primitive, a Soviet bioweapons program developed antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax and other diseases, estimating death counts in the hundreds of thousands with merely one successful city attack. In the future, technological development will make creating lethal diseases even easier: gene editing through CRISPR and its successors will improve; more predictive computer simulations will make lab work more efficient; and the proliferation of DNA-synthesis companies will reduce barriers to entry.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Highways to Utopia Humanity is at the crossroads of an awesome moral divide.  By Roger Kimball

Posted By on November 26th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/25/highways-to-utopia/

EXCERPTS:

At some point, the West really will decline. Is it finally happening? And what is this “West” that is “declining,” “closing,” facing a momentous crossroads? An incomplete but not inaccurate shorthand is “Christendom.” I know that the term strikes an antique note in America circa 2022. When is the last time you heard someone utter it without invisible scare quotes? (When was the last time you heard someone utter it at all?) But a decaying moral vocabulary—consider the recent career of words like “virtue,” “manliness,” “womanly,” or “respectable”—is part of the ominous cargo we are called upon to bear. As for “Christendom,” it names a dispensation in which the individual possesses intrinsic moral worth, defined not only by the Christian tradition itself but buoyed also by those traditions, predominantly classical and Judaic, which flowed into and helped nurture and define that baggy creation we call “the West.” 

One bleak route on the crossroads we face involves the willful throttling of those mighty currents. Angry at the Gyndes River for sweeping away and drowning one of his sacred white horses, Cyrus decided to punish the river by having his slaves cut 360 channels into it, stanching its flow to a trickle. This we have done to ourselves, applying mental tourniquets to the arteries that fed us from the past in order that we might gambol undisturbed in distracted present-tense ignorance. An illustrative case in point is the Princeton classics department, where woke educationists panting for relevance recently jettisoned the requirement that its students learn Latin or Greek, never mind both. At the same time, they publicly celebrate the 57 varieties of racial-trans-wonderfulness that have become the focus of academic obsession. It is a situation that is as absurd as it is malignant. In The Present Age (1846), Kierkegaard described the jaded spirit that “leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.” That is where we are today: occupying a husk of decadence assiduously emptied of vitality. Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and the rest of the querulous educational establishment are sodden with money but spiritually and intellectually bankrupt. They continue to look like educational institutions: leafy walks, imposing libraries, impressive buildings. But most of the activities they sponsor are inimical to real education, inciting thousands of puny Cyruses to divert and stymie the waters of tradition in order to polish the mirror of their narcissism. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Supply-Side Inflation And Its Cures David P. Goldman

Posted By on November 26th, 2022

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/disputed_questions/how-can-we-fix-inflation.html#supply-side-inflation-and-its-cures

The Federal Reserve failed to anticipate the worst inflation since the 1970s and is now administering medicine that will sicken rather than cure the patient. As Fed Chair Jerome Powell said recently: “Restoring price stability will take some time and requires using our tools forcefully to bring demand and supply into better balance. Reducing inflation is likely to require a sustained period of below-trend growth. Moreover, there will very likely be some softening of labor market conditions.”

This is entirely misguided: unlike the 1970s, today’s inflation is the result of too little labor and too little capital investment – in manufacturing as well as energy. To a great extent, it is a supply-side problem. Discouraging employment and investment by raising interest rates will only make things worse. What the United States requires, rather, is incentives for investment and employment in manufacturing and construction.

The impulse from inflation came from a fiscal shock in the form of federal transfer payments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With a lag of zero to six quarters, transfer payments show a high correlation with year-on-year changes in the Consumer Price Index, as in the cross-correlogram above. A predictive equation that relates year-on-year changes in CPI with lagged values of transfer payments explains most of the change in CPI.

BOOKS Comments turned off

How China’s Covert Operations Fooled the World By Janet Levy

Posted By on November 26th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/how_chinas_covert_operations_fooled_the_world.html

The biggest deception China has successfully perpetuated in the West is that it would rise peacefully, gradually liberalize and present enormous business opportunities. Behind that veneer of reform, Beijing has played a masterful influence game, ensnaring governments, academia, think tanks, cultural groups, and businesses in the West to further its goal of global preeminence.

Analyst Alex Joske’s revealing book, Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World, explains how China’s intelligence apparatus, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), revamped espionage from cloak-and-dagger ops alone to a sophisticated collection of innocent-seeming front groups. He shows how these groups, speaking the language of transparency, globalism, and cultural, academic, and business exchanges, influenced key persons in every sphere of endeavor in the West, masking China’s quest for world dominance, its military build-up, its stealing of technology, its human rights violations, and its territorial expansionism. Appearing eager for cultural and business reciprocity, China presented intelligence operatives as journalists, scholars, and trade and tourism representatives. The U.S. – and other western governments – engaged with China, mistaking it for a useful partner, and often acting under pressure from businesses that sought lucrative deals with Beijing.

According to the book, billionaire George Soros, who is still in quixotic and dangerous pursuit of his flawed notion of an ‘open society,’ was one of China’s earliest dupes. Chinese intelligence and its numerous fronts used Soros and his funds as an entrée to the West, creating what has grown into a omnipresent cloud of influence, ubiquitous yet impossible to pinpoint and hence combat or dislodge. But more on Soros later.

The focus of MSS’s elite influence operations is on inveigling targets into promoting narratives of China’s choice, often making them believe they are being welcomed into the inner sanctum of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – a route to proprietary access and mutually beneficial networks. In this the MSS draws on the party’s united front work tradition, which harks to the revolution. At that time, the party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) sought to gain influence beyond party members, using networks to suppress dissent, indoctrinate those sympathetic to the cause, find and train leaders, and so on. Later, the same methods were deployed abroad, providing networks, covers, and institutions for furthering the party’s purposes.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Law Schools Without LSATs The American Bar Association’s move to discard objective tests won’t enhance diversity.

Posted By on November 26th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawyers-without-lsats-american-bar-association-11669157733?mod=opinion_trending_now_opn_pos3

The flight from merit continues across America, and it’s spreading fast in the legal profession. An arm of the American Bar Association (ABA), which accredits law schools, voted on Nov. 18 to end the requirement that prospective law students take the Law School Admission Test. And here we thought torturing prospective lawyers was a widely accepted public good.

The vote is pending approval from the ABA House of Delegates in February. If adopted, it would make standardized testing optional in preparation for a career that demands a lot of standardized knowledge.

The LSAT has long been a target of diversity advocates who argue that the use of the test has limited minority enrollment in law schools because the test questions are allegedly biased in favor of white test takers. Detractors also object to the LSAT because affluent students often pay thousands of dollars to prepare for the test that is supposed to predict their first-year law school performance.

The ABA decision is best understood as an attempt to get ahead of a possible Supreme Court decision against the use of racial preferences in school admissions. By making the LSAT optional, schools will be able to admit the students they want without lowering the average LSAT score that is one measure of elite status. But the schools need the ABA to move first.