Monthly Archives: October 2023
October 31, 2023 — Lloyd Billingsley
“The only way we can solve the climate crisis is to continue our long-standing cooperation with China,” proclaimed Gavin Newsom during his trip to China. For the California governor, collaboration with one of the world’s leading polluters, a one-party Stalinist police state, is the “only way” to solve a “crisis” that is an existential problem. Gov. Newsom allegedly raised human-rights issues but failed to call for China to release David
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October 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Even before the horror of October 7 blew the lid off the anti-Semitic rot on our college campuses, it was starting to look like the “social justice revolution” was starting to come apart. Think of how Ibram X. Kendi’s famous center for anti-racist research at Boston University hit the wall, as was easy to predict when it launched, along with the obvious corruption and self-dealing of Black Lives Matter that
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October 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
In the three weeks that have gone by since the Gazan massacre of October 7, the United Nations Security Council has not been able to adopt a single resolution relating to the massacre or the resulting war: For weeks, the Security Council has been riven by divisions over the war and its impact, rejecting four draft resolutions about the conflict. Some texts were blocked by the United States, a close
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October 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
This morning I noted that the tone and tempo of Lt. Colonel Jonathan Conricus’s update had picked up. This afternoon Conricus returned with a second update, this one on the IDF assault on Jabaliya — “a known Hamas stronghold.” I have found Colonel Conricus and the IDF to be more reliable sources of information than the mainstream media. This update is a report of the successful strike on a legitimate
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October 31, 2023 — Steven Hayward
News out today is that federal government borrowing for the month of October may yet top $600 billion (officially it’s at $517 billion, but that was several days ago), and this year’s deficit will come in around $1.7 trillion. Good thing Joe Biden has been so successful in cutting the deficit! (/sarc) But then there was the robust economic growth report last week, showing the economy growing at a nearly
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October 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday the Foundation for Defense of Democracies posted its link-laden Insight compilation 10 Things to Know About Hamas and Hospitals — and indeed it provides insight into the nature of Hamas that is apparently beyond the ken of the mainstream media. With FDD’s permission, here it is: Hamas has commanded a network of tunnels and terror infrastructure in the Gaza Strip since it took control in 2007. The Iranian-backed Palestinian
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October 31, 2023 — John Hinderaker
This morning, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee on behalf to the Biden administration’s supplementary funding request for Ukraine and Israel. Blinken’s testimony was repeatedly interrupted by pro-genocide protesters. The protesters timed their interruptions so that every couple of minutes the hearing would be suspended: Blinken is a partisan hack, but this outpouring of anti-Semitism was outrageous. It is
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October 31, 2023 — Lloyd Billingsley
For they are burying the little ones/ And they are making the graves deep. They are burying the little ones/ And they make the graves deep. Now they killed all the little ones,/with their eyes open wide There was no one to help them/on the day that they died . . . That was Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, known for songs such as “Morning has Broken,” featured on
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October 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he focuses on Lebanon, Hezbollah, Syria, and the geopolitics of the Levant. Tablet originally published his illuminating column “Eyeless in Gaza” on October 18. FDD has cross-posted it here with Badran’s many links. The column provides an illuminating account of “how the U.S. blinded Israeli intelligence gathering efforts on Hamas and other Palestinian groups inside Lebanon.”
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October 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
IDF Lt. Colonel Jonathan Conricus (reserve) returns this morning with a nine-minute briefing on the status of Israel’s war on Hamas. He begins with news of the rescue of an Israeli hostage yesterday. According to Conricus, that’s one down, 238 to go. He gives us a glimpse of IDF Major General Yaron Finkelman, head of the IDF Southern Command, “leading the troops from the front.” According to the Times of
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October 31, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Saul Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back was published in 1976, but it is still in print and full of observations that bear on Israel’s current war. I quoted one passage from page 15 of the original hard cover edition here yesterday. This is from pages 25-26: Here in Jerusalem, when you shut your apartment door behind you you fall into a gale of conversation – exposition, argument, harangue, analysis, theory,
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October 30, 2023 — John Hinderaker
As much as anyone, Shani Louk became the face of Gaza’s vicious assault on Israel. She was a 23-year-old German-Israeli girl who also had lived in the United States. She attended the music festival (or “rave”) that was held close to the Gaza border and was attacked by terrorist paragliders, who hunted down and murdered more than 200 festival attenders. Louk became famous because of this short video, which showed
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October 30, 2023 — Scott Johnson
The Star Tribune has just posted Maya Rao’s weepy and euphemistic take on Hennepin County’s close encounter of the Biden kind with the flood of illegal immigrants that is washing up in Minneapolis from New York (thanks, Mayor Adams!) and south of the border. After a month in New York’s overcrowded homeless shelters, two Ecuadorian migrants and their baby recently received a free plane ticket to Minneapolis. They took a
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October 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Business Insider has assembled the latest Census data on where Americans are moving from and to, and it appears the exodus from blue states to better-run red states continues to accelerate: More than 8.2 million Americans moved to different states between 2021 and 2022, 100,000 of whom moved from California to Texas. New US Census migration data showed that thousands of Americans are leaving California and New York in favor
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October 30, 2023 — Lloyd Billingsley
Another month has passed without full release of Audrey Hale’s manifesto, which could reveal her motive for the murder of nine-year-olds Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, daughter of Chad Scruggs, senior pastor at the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville. Hale, a woman who thought she was a man, also shot dead schoolmaster Katherine Koonce, 59; substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61; and custodian Mike Hill, 61. On March 29,
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October 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Way back in 1960, Leo Strauss wrote in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences that “Natural law, which was for many centuries the basis of the predominant Western political thought, is rejected in our time by almost all students of society who are not Roman Catholics.” In the decades since then, however, natural law has enjoyed a revival of sorts, and is implicated today in the rise of constitutional originalism
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October 30, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Ever since David Horowitz broke from the radical left back in the 1980s, he has been trying to warn conservatives that they don’t really understand the core principle of the left, and the depths of the left’s power-mad depravity. Conservatives too often think that the Israel-Palestine conflict, or civil rights, crime, income inequality, transgender ideology, climate change, etc, etc., are discrete issues to be argued against the left with reason
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