The decline in free speech continues

 From Jonathan Turley.

It's about Ireland, but is just as true of the United States

This is far more serious than January sixth.

It's too bad that so many US voters fail to appreciate freedom and are working to diminish it.

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The Irish Government Moves to Crackdown on Free Speech After Anti-Immigration Riot

We have previously discussed the growing anti-free speech movement in Ireland. As discussed in The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in the Age of Rage, these crackdowns on free speech tend to come with periods of public panic or anger. Anti-free speech advocates use such periods as opportunities to get the public to surrender this core right to government censors or prosecutors. Right on schedule, Ireland is now pushing one of the most chilling crackdowns to date.

The excuse for the latest rollback of free speech was a riot in Dublin leading to the arrest of 34 people and extensive property damage in anti-immigration protests. The protests have challenged the government policies on handling undocumented migrants.

The bill criminalizes any “preparing or possessing material likely to incite violence or hatred against persons on account of their protected characteristics.” That includes any material concerning national or ethnic origin, as well as protected characteristics including “transgender and a gender other than those of male and female.”

The bill includes crimes relating to “xenophobia” and can be committed merely by the”public dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures or other material.”

Elon Musk has flagged the law as have other free speech advocates.

Irish Prime Minister (Taoiseach) Leo Varadkar has rushed to ride the political wave after the recent Dublin riot to announce that he would fight hatred by taking away rights. He declared his intent to “modernize laws against hatred” by criminalizing speech that his government decides is “incitement.” He insisted that the existing legislation is “not up to date for the social media age” and needs to have a broad reach of criminalized speech. He wants to crackdown not just on violence but on those who say things that might “stir up” others.

What was particularly chilling was a speech by the Irish Green Party Sen. Pauline O’Reilly who admitted that “We are restricting freedom, but we’re doing it for the common good.”

That is all it takes to get citizens to surrender core rights, a declaration that fewer rights is better for the common good. It has become a Siren Call on the left not just abroad but in the United States.

I have previously written columns about the rising generation of censors in our country. After years of being told that free speech is harmful and dangerous, many young people are virtual speech phobics — demanding that opposing views be silenced as “triggering” or even forms of violence. A recent Pew poll showed just how much ground we have lost, including the emergence of the Democratic Party as a virulent anti-free speech party. Pew found that “Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are much more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to support the U.S. government taking steps to restrict false information online (70% vs. 39%).”

Ireland shows how public disorder can play into the hands of government officials in further limiting the right of free speech. As O’Reilly explained, free speech is simply too dangerous and denying the right is now viewed as a public good.

Of course, some have more direct measures. Dublin Councilman Abul Kalam Azad Talukder has reportedly called for protesters to be “shot in the head or bring the public in and beat them until they die.”

Political prisoner dilemma

 From John Cochrane.

On target.

If JC is right, things will only get worse. Freedom is declining now and will continue to decline., Relatively free markets, less regulation, and a host of other things that once provided a better standard of living than elsewhere will continue to be attacked and lose ground. More and more political power will be used in a way that reduces efficiency and moves us further away from a Pareto optimum.

So, what is the solution? Or, more relevant, what is a feasible solution?

Perhaps the reason why history contains no example of a society that retained a large amount of freedom and economic efficiency for very long is that there is no feasible solution.

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This is a draft oped. It didn't make it as events in Israel are now consuming attention. But sooner or later we need to elect a president and live with the results. I went light on the economics, but you can see the basic game theory of the analysis. It amplifies some comments I made on Goodfellows.

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If, as it appears, the election will come down to Trump vs. Biden, the US is headed for a constitutional crisis, and the social, and political chaos that implies. Like prisoners of the economists’ dilemma, there seems no easy way out.

Whichever wins, the others’ partisans will pronounce the president to be fundamentally illegitimate. In turn, Illegitimacy justifies and emboldens scorched-earth tactics, more norm-busting and institution-destruction.

If Biden wins, Trump supporters will see an official Washington, especially its justice system, enmeshed in presidential politics. They remember Hilary Clinton’s laptop, the Russia collusion hoax, and endless investigations. Now they see sprawling indictments for process and paperwork crimes, that nobody else would be charged for. They see a Washington-media-intelligence cabal censoring news, from censorship of Covid policy dissenters — who turned out to be largely right — to the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the last election. See the scathing Missouri V. Biden. And they see the Family Business. Sure, Biden, like so many in public office who somehow end up with millions in family wealth, likely has enough lawyers and shell companies to avoid provable illegality. But illegality is not the issue. Trump supporters will see the stench of the swamp, secret email accounts, the reins of power covering up the embarrassing facts.

If Trump wins, Democrats will go ballistic. Democrats have refined de-legitimization for decades. Trump’s denialism was almost comical in its incompetent emulation. Recall Bush derangement syndrome, continuing claims that the 2000 election was stolen or decided by a corrupt court; Stacey Abrams, the #resistance, #not my president. But it’s all worse now. Though Democrats express themselves in legalisms, in the end they feel that Trump’s actions after the last election amount to a nearly treasonous violation of his oath of office to defend the Constitution.

(Before you start yelling your side's spin, take a breath. Yes, you see things differently, but how will they see things, no matter you loud you yell? How will they act? That's what matters.)

Our next election is likely to be chaos, enhancing the voices claiming illegitimacy. The election will be close. There will surely be a nationwide legal battle. Every questionable vote, every smudged postmark, every local decision to stretch a ballot deadline, every change in procedures will end up in court. Losing Democrats will cry “racist voter suppression.” Losing Republicans have gotten good at even more fanciful stolen election claims.

If the election is decided by courts, heaven help us. The Democrat’s efforts to de-legitimize the Supreme Court are already well under way. Media now routinely refer to every federal judge by the president that appointed him or her, not, say, by the school they went to or their most famous decisions. Large swaths of the population will tell themselves that the election was stolen.

With No Labels and Kennedy in the fray, it is possible that the election will come down to many ballots in the electoral college. Having tried to de-legitimize Trump for losing the popular vote in 2016, will democrats accept an electoral college result if the popular vote is 40-30-30? Will Republicans? It is possible that the electoral college fails, and the Presidency is decided by the House of Representatives, itself chaotic and under a razor-thin majority. Our Constitution brilliantly prescribes fail-safe procedures to produce a decision. But it only works only if people accept that decision. With so many already opining that the electoral college is an illegitimate anachronism, and with the House in such chaos and low esteem, will losers calmly accept the results of the Constitutional mechanism?

Widely believed, and more widely spun illegitimacy justifies horrendous behavior. You can tell the Jan 6 rioters were play-acting by how unserious they were. People who really believe an election was stolen bring tanks. Widespread violent protests are easy to foresee.

Widely perceived illegitimacy leads to constitutional crisis and chaos. People will simply disregard presidential actions, action by his appointees, and court orders. They will violently resist attempts to enforce government actions.

How do we avoid this mess? There is a lot of hope that one or the other party will blink, and choose a vaguely sensible candidate who will then sweep the general election. But candidates are chosen by primaries, a “democratic” reform we may wish to rethink. (Old men in smoke filled rooms, desiring to win a general election, would never have picked these two.) It’s not so easy.

And even a reasonable candidate will only postpone the deeper question: Why is attacking the legitimacy of elections, institutions, and the courts gaining in strength? It is a scorched earth policy — ruin the institution to gain temporary advantage.

The answer seems clear: The rewards of winning and the costs of losing are now too great. Narrowly, each of Trump and Biden could well end up in jail if he loses, a situation familiar in, say, Pakistan, but so far undreamt of in the US. Avoiding that is worth a lot of scorched earth. More broadly, winning an election now confers the power to rule by executive order. It confers power over administrative fiat, the power to shower billions on supporters, control of the regulatory machine that lines up corporate support, the power to censor the internet, and the power to hound your opponents and their supporters through the intelligence and judicial system. Losing graciously is a less and less viable option.

Democracy isn’t so much about who wins elections. Democracy requires the ability to lose elections, admit the legitimacy of the loss, but live on to regroup and win another day. Only when the power of the winners to impose immense changes with narrow majorities is constrained can losers do that.

A bad recipe for science

 Judith Curry is on target.

Science - particularly climate science, has been compromised by politics and agenda.

Just goes to show that scientists can be just as dopey as everyone else.

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Politically-motivated manufacture of scientific consensus corrupts the scientific process and leads to poor policy decisions

An essay with excerpts from my new book Climate Uncertainty and Risk.

In the 21st century, humankind is facing a myriad of complex societal problems that are characterized by deep uncertainties, systemic risks and disagreements about values. Climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic are prominent examples of such wicked problems. For such problems, the relevant science has become increasingly like litigation, where truth seeking has become secondary to politics and advocacy on behalf of a preferred policy solution.

How does politics influence the scientific process for societally relevant issues? Political bias influences research funding priorities, the scientific questions that are asked, how the findings are interpreted, what is cited, and what gets canonized. Factual statements are filtered in assessment reports and by the media with an eye to downstream political use.

How does politics influence the behavior of scientists? There is pressure on scientists to support consensus positions, moral objectives and the relevant policies. This pressure comes from universities and professional societies, scientists themselves who are activists, journalists and from federal funding agencies in terms of research funding priorities. Because evaluations by one’s colleagues are so central to success in academia, it is easy to induce fear of social sanctions for expressing the ideas that, though not necessarily shown to be factually or scientifically wrong, are widely unpopular.

Activist scientists use their privileged position to advance moral and political agendas. This political activism extends to the professional societies that publish journals and organize conferences. This activism has a gatekeeping effect on what gets published, who gets heard at conferences, and who receives professional recognition. Virtually all professional societies whose membership has any link to climate research have issued policy statements on climate change, urging action to eliminate fossil fuel emissions.

The most pernicious manifestation of the politicization of science is when politicians, advocacy groups, journalists, and activist scientists intimidate or otherwise attempt to silence scientists whose research is judged to interfere with their moral and political agendas.

Speaking consensus to power

A critical strategy in the politicization of science is the manufacture of a scientific consensus on politically important topics, such as climate change and Covid-19. The UN climate consensus is used as an appeal to authority in the representation of scientific results as the basis for urgent policy making. In effect, the UN has adopted a “speaking consensus to power” approach that sees uncertainty and dissent as problematic and attempts to mediate these into a consensus. The consensus-to-power strategy reflects a specific vision of how politics deals with scientific uncertainties.

There is a key difference between a “scientific consensus” and a “consensus of scientists.” When there is true scientific certainty, such as the earth orbiting the sun, we don’t need to talk about consensus. By contrast, a “consensus of scientists” represents a deliberate expression of collective judgment by a group of scientists, often at the official request of a government.

Institutionalized consensus building promotes groupthink, acting to confirm the consensus in a self-reinforcing way. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has worked for the past 40 years to establish a scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. As such, the IPCC consensus is a “manufactured consensus” arising from an intentional consensus building process. The IPCC consensus has become canonized socially through a political process, bypassing the long and complex scientific validation process as to whether the conclusions are actually true.

The flip side of a manufactured consensus is “denial.” Questioning the climate change narrative has become the ultimate form of heresy in the 21st century. Virtually all academic climate scientists are within the so-called 97 percent consensus regarding the existence of a human impact on warming of the Earth’s climate. Which scientists are ostracized and labeled as deniers? Independent thinkers, who are not supportive of the IPCC consensus, are suspect. Any criticism of the IPCC can lead to ostracism. Failure to advocate for CO2 mitigation policies leads to suspicion. Even a preference for nuclear power over wind and solar power will get you called a denier. The most reliable way to get labeled as a denier is to associate in any way with so-called enemies of the climate consensus and their preferred policies—petroleum companies, conservative think tanks, or even the “wrong” political party.

Covid-19 provides a very interesting example of a manufactured consensus. The consensus that COVID-19 had an entirely natural origin was established by two op-eds in early 2020—The Lancet in February and Nature Medicine in March. The Lancet op-ed stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The pronouncements in these op-eds effectively shut down inquiry into a possible origin as a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan. Articles in the mainstream press repeatedly stated that a consensus of experts had ruled lab escape to be out of the question or extremely unlikely.

The enormous gap between the actual state of knowledge in early 2020 and the confidence displayed in the two op-eds should have been obvious to anyone in the field of virology, or for that matter anyone with critical faculties. There were scientists from adjacent fields who said as much. The consensus wasn’t overturned until May 2021 with the publication of a lengthy article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that identified conflict of interests in the scientists writing the Lancet letter in hiding any links with the Wuhan lab. This article triggered a cascade of defections from scientists – the fake consensus was no longer enforceable.

What is concerning about this episode is not so much that a consensus was overturned, but that a fake consensus was so easily enforced for more than a year. A few scientists spoke up, but they were aggressively cancelled from social media. The vast majority of scientists who understood that there was a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the origins of the virus did not speak up. It was becoming increasingly clear that any virologist who challenged the community’s declared views risked being labeled as a heretic, being canceled on social media, and having their next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency. The ugly politics behind this fake consensus are only now being revealed.

Political and moral biases in a manufactured consensus can lead to widely accepted claims that reflect the scientific community’s blind spots more than they reflect justified scientific conclusions. A manufactured consensus hampers scientific progress because of the questions that do not get asked and the investigations that are not undertaken. Further, consensus enforcement interferes with the self-correcting nature of science via skepticism, which is a foundation of the scientific process.

Broken contract between science and policy makers

Speaking consensus to power acts to conceal uncertainties, ambiguities, dissent, and ignorance behind a scientific consensus. Greater openness about scientific uncertainties and ignorance, plus more transparency about dissent and disagreement, is needed provide policymakers with a more complete picture of policy-relevant science and its limitations.

A manufactured consensus arises from oversimplification of the problem, which leads to restricting the policy solution space and mistaken ideas that the problem can be controlled.

A manufactured consensus on a complex, wicked problem such as climate change or Covid-19 leads to the naivete of thinking that these are simple risks, and the hubris of thinking that we can control the risk. Even beyond the technical issues, greater realism is needed about the uncertainties and politics underpinning the pursuit of control for wicked societal problems.

The pandemic illustrates that our tools for acting on a complex global problem—experts, precise scientific metrics, computer models, enforced restrictions— have resulted in much less than the desired quality of control. The global energy transition and worldwide transformations to sustainability are far more challenging than the global COVID-19 pandemic. The modernist paradigm of mastery, planning, and optimization is not appropriate for the wicked problems of the twenty-first century.

As a consequence of the exaggerated sense of knowledge and control surrounding climate and Covid-19 policies, some highly uncertain issues that should remain open for political debate are ignored in policy making. Premature foreclosure of scientific uncertainties and failure to consider ambiguities associated with wicked problems such as climate change and pandemics results in an invisible form of oppression that forecloses possible futures.

With regards to climate change, what is going on represents more than politically motivated consensus enforcement and cancel culture. Climate change has become a secular religion, rife with dogma, heretics and moral-tribal communities. The secular religion of climate change raises concerns that are far more fundamental than the risks of bad policy. At risk is the fundamental virtues of the Scientific Revolution and the freedom to question authority.

The road ahead requires moving away from the consensus-enforcing and cancel culture approach of restricting dialogue surrounding complex societal issues such as climate change. We need to open up space for dissent and disagreement. By acknowledging scientific uncertainties in the context of better risk management and decision- making frameworks, in combination with techno-optimism, there is a broad path forward for humanity to thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond.

John Christy critiques climate models -tuning is not physics

 Here is a link to John Christy's talk "Climate Change for Policy - A Bridge Too Far".

JC does a great job putting climate models in perspective for the layperson.

Watch the video and learn the sad truth.

An old saying: Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

Another old saying: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

The coming blackouts

Here is a link to

"Net-Zero Targets: Sustainable Future or CO2 Obsession Driven Dead-end?"

by Balázs M. Fekete

The Green Agenda is is not realizable. A move away from fossil fuels requires nuclear power.

Here are some excerpts.

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For over three decades, the reduction of CO2 emission was the primary motivation for promoting the transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. Concerns about the inevitable exhaustion of fossil fuels were considered particularly during energy crises, but these concerns died out quickly as discoveries of new fossil fuel reserves such as the shale revolution in the US that appeared to secure energy supplies.

An under-appreciated paper by Murphy et al. (1) offers very strong arguments that the energy transition is a must that has to happen in a short time. Anyone looking at Figure 1 from this paper should be more concerned about running out of fossil fuels than climate change. It is almost certain that the spike on Figure 1 will only last for a few centuries irrespective of the exact location of the star, and the fossil fuel era will be only a fraction of the history of human civilizations. This period will not last long enough to deserve the proposed anthropocene[1] designation. The industrial era might rightfully be called a geological event that triggers post-anthropocene, but by no means will it last long enough to qualify as geological age or epoch.

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The primary challenge in relying on renewable energy sources is aligning consumption with the availability of intermittent energy fluxes. The distinction between stock vs. flux limited resources was first proposed with respect to water resources (2), but it is applicable to other resources including energy. Relying on flux limited resources consumed within the flux limits are clearly the pathways to sustainability defined as “a form of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (3), but stock limited resources serve both as a source and storage.

Fossil fuels formed over hundreds of million years offer the inherent flexibility of allowing consumption as needed, Flux limited resources necessitates the alignment of the consumption with their availability unless supplemental storage is available. Surprisingly few scientific papers have attempted to address this alignment that is so critical for relying on intermittent energy sources such as solar or wind that are envisioned as the primary energy sources in a sustainable future.

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A recently published paper by Fekete et al. (4) addresses the storage requirement for relying on solar or wind power only. This paper considered the seasonal and inter-annual variability of solar and wind by analyzing solar radiation and wind speed data averaged over the conterminous United States (Figure 3) vs. twelve selected states on the East Coast. A frequently repeated argument for neglecting the intermittency of renewables is that even if the Sun is not shining or the wind not blowing at a particular location and moment, the Sun is shining or the wind is blowing elsewhere so it is only a matter of establishing the necessary connectivity.

Firstly, if the Sun was always shining and the wind was always blowing somewhere, then spatially averaged solar radiation and wind speed (Figure 3) would balance out to a relatively constant value over time for large enough regions. The conterminous United States is clearly not large enough, because solar radiation and wind speed vary substantially both seasonally and inter-annually (Figure 3). Solar radiation in particular has strong seasonality that should surprise-nobody living at higher latitudes. Without going into details discussed in Fekete et al. (4), the seasonality of solar and wind in the selected states are not very different from the CONUS-wide average. Therefore, the expansion of the electric grid (“Upgrade our power infrastructure to deliver clean, reliable energy across the country and deploy cutting-edge energy technology to achieve a zero-emissions future”) — that is one of the key objectives listed in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law[5] — will have little or no impact on addressing intermittency.

An “entertaining” element of the green agenda is the obvious contradictions in the advocated solutions. Green activists often view renewable energy as a means to reduce dependency on large-scale engineered infrastructures like the electric grid and suggest that renewables will allow communities to become more resilient and independent by disconnecting from the electric grid and live on “smart grids”. One has to ask, if autonomous “smart grids” were so “resilient”, then what is the purpose of the multi-billion dollar investment in long-distance grid connectivity?

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The storage capacity needed to align power generation from solar or wind is around 25% of the annual energy consumption, which is significantly higher than the few hourly or no energy storage factored in into typical life-cycle analysis comparing renewable and non-renewable energy sources (12, 13). In the absence of energy storage technology that can store several months worth of energy, one has to conclude that all studies suggesting that solar or wind are price competitive with other forms of energy should be retracted, since without storage neither could replace any other forms of energy that can deliver power on demand that the energy industry calls dispatchable.

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Intermittent energy sources such as solar and wind will not be able to replace the firm (dispatchable) power generation from fossil fuels without massive energy storage on the order of several months worth of energy consumption. In the absence of such energy storage technology, one has to conclude that renewables are not viable alternative to fossil fuels. Only nuclear energy is a viable “stock limited” resource where the stocks are much larger than the jack pot from fossil fuels.

Squeezing the world’s vulnerable peoples

 Victor Davis Hanson at the Jewish World Review

VDH is on target.

In some quarters, humans are lauded as the only intelligent species on Earth. Given evolution, that means we are the first form of intelligence to evolve. Put another way, perhaps we are the lowest possible form of intelligence. That might explain why our cultures are so screwed up.

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The population of Israel is about 10 million. This represents about half of the world's Jewish people.

The founding idea of modern Israel was to offer a sanctuary for Jews in their biblical home in the Middle East, in the aftermath of Nazi Germany's mass murder of 6 million Jews.

Yet currently, 78 years after the Holocaust, anti-Israel protestors throughout the Middle East, the great cities of the Western world, and iconic American universities chant death threats and "Palestine will be free from the river to the sea." Their signature slogan is shorthand for the erasure of the Jewish state and everyone in it.

There would currently be zero chance that Jews could live peaceably under any current Middle Eastern government. In the postwar era, nearly a million Jews were persecuted, ethnically cleansed, and forcibly expelled from all the major Arab countries — Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen — despite hundreds of years of residence.

Anti-Israel hatred still remains a staple in most of the nearly 500-million-person Arab world, and indeed is commonplace among the world's 1.6 billion Muslims and their countries at the United Nations.

And Israel is only one of a number of small, vulnerable states. Most of them are in the volatile Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. All are surrounded by hostile neighbors. The others have also suffered a long history of persecution and periodic genocide — catastrophes that are not necessarily permanently relegated to their ancient pasts.

Bitter proxy fighting between Armenian- and Azerbaijan-allied forces in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh corridor recently ended with the defeat of Armenian supported forces. As a result, shortly before the Hamas massacre of Jews on October 7, some 120,000 Christian ethnic Armenians were expelled from the region by Muslim and Turkish-speaking Azerbaijan.

This current ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh comes a little more than a century after the Turkish genocide of Armenians that led to more than 1 million people being driven out of their ancestral homes and slaughtered.

Christian Armenia, with only 3 million inhabitants, is even smaller than Israel. And it is nearly surrounded by hostile Muslim states. As in the case of Israel, the world mostly either ignores the old, familiar brutal scenario, now recurring with the same aggressive players — or does not care.

Christian Greece — a NATO and European Union member — also is similar to Israel in being relatively small, with a population of 10.5 million. For more than 400 years, Greece was occupied by Ottoman Turkey. Roughly a century ago, Turkish forces ethnically cleansed Greeks from ancient Ionia and its capital of Smyrna – a homeland of Greek peoples for millennia.

Like Armenia, it shares a border with its historical aggressor Turkey. Greek islands off the coast of Asia minor are currently subject to constant overflights by Turkish military jets. To Greece's north are the historically volatile Balkans. Across the Mediterranean lie a number of often violent and unstable North African nations, the frequent source of massive, destabilizing illegal immigration into Greece.

Tiny Cyprus is another equally vulnerable nation. Cypriot history is one of constant invasion and occupation. Most recently, Cyprus was forcibly divided into Greek and Turkish states in 1974, after Turkey invaded and expelled some 200,000 Greeks from their centuries-old homes in the north of the island.

And all these small nations' vulnerabilities are neither abstract theory, nor ancient history. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for example, has recently weighed in on the tensions currently buffeting them all.

With apprehensions rising over Turkish violations of Greek air space in the Aegean, Erdogan has threatened to send a shower of missiles into Athens: "We can come down suddenly one night when the time comes."

Erdogan also recently bullied Israel with nearly the same warning of a preemptive nocturnal Turkish missile attack, bragging that Turkey could "come at any night unexpectedly." He also has ominously weighed in on the October 7 massacres and the Israeli response to it in Gaza: "We will tell the whole world that Israel is a war criminal. We are making preparations for this."

Of the recent expulsion of the Armenians and the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, Erdogan also boasted, "We will continue to fulfill this mission which our grandfathers have carried out for centuries in the Caucasus region." Apparently, Erdogan was referring both to the Ottoman conquest of Armenia and to the later Turkish efforts in the early 20th century to ethnically cleanse Armenia of Armenians.

In all these cases, small and vulnerable countries hold transparent elections and ensure individual rights — in stark contrast to their larger and more aggressive neighbors. Their very continued existences hinge on Western alliances and support – from the European Union, from NATO, and especially from the United States.

In the past, they all suffered catastrophes because they differed from their neighbors in ethnicity, religion, and history — and were seen as either expendable or irrelevant to their supposed allies and patrons in the West.

If we are not careful, what supposedly cannot happen again, most surely will.

Just whose side is America really on?

Melanie Phillips at jewishworldreview.com.

MP is on target.

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Soon after the Hamas pogrom on Oct. 7, the United States sent two aircraft carriers, additional land-based warplanes, and eventually, a guided-missile submarine to the region. This was said to be a "clear message of deterrence" to Hezbollah and its patron Iran, warning them not to escalate the ensuing war between Israel and Hamas by attacking Israel from southern Lebanon.

With 150,000 precision-guided missiles embedded in Lebanon's civilian population and able to target the whole of Israel, Hezbollah poses a vastly greater threat to Israel than Hamas.

But Hezbollah is already at war with Israel. Since the Hamas atrocities, Hezbollah has regularly been firing volleys of missiles into northern Israel, causing the evacuation of Israeli communities closest to the border and sending thousands of Israelis into their shelters.

Iran is also waging war against America itself. During the past month, Iranian proxies in the region have mounted drone and rocket attacks against U.S. air bases in Iraq and Syria at least 40 times. Dozens of American personnel have been injured and one American contractor died of cardiac arrest.

Yet the U.S. response has been feeble. It's been limited to shooting down the drones and mounting a couple of airstrikes in eastern Syria against buildings categorized as "Iranian Revolutionary Guards-affiliated" weapons storage facilities, but otherwise doing nothing at all.

The Iranian and Hezbollah attacks keep coming. So, what exactly would it take to establish deterrence? At what point does the Biden administration decide that the war in the north has indeed escalated and requires a decisive response?

What's the point of the mighty apparatus of war that America has sent into the region if it's not going to use it? And if we're all asking that question, how does the U.S. think the Iranian regime will answer it?

America's passivity is going hand-in-hand with a notable cooling of its original support for Israel. Immediately after the Hamas atrocities, U.S. President Joe Biden visited Jerusalem, pledged that the U.S. would stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel in the total destruction of Hamas and undertook weapons supply programs costing millions of dollars.

Now, however, there's been an ominous change in the rhetoric. With Israel having trapped Hamas in the nerve center of its terrorist operations in Gaza City and poised to deliver a decisive blow, Biden had called for a three-day "pause" in Israel's ground operation. Any such ceasefire would stop the IDF's momentum, throw a lifeline to Hamas and make the terror group more likely to survive. Israel has now agreed to daily “pauses” of four hours to allow for aid and evacuation.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a Senate hearing that, after Israel succeeded in ousting Hamas, "what would make the most sense would be for an effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority to have governance and ultimately security responsibility for Gaza."

Seriously? That's the same Palestinian Authority that incites jihadi holy war against Israel, pays rewards to terrorists and their families, teaches Palestinian Arab children to murder Jews and steal their land, and is presiding over a huge increase in murderous attacks on Israelis in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.

Not only is Blinken's proposal a recipe for further Israeli bloodshed, it also ignores the elephant in the room. Israel isn’t just fighting Hamas and Hezbollah. It is fighting Iran.

Tehran funds and arms Hamas and, as Hamas has acknowledged, was behind the Oct. 7 pogrom. Iran funds and arms Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Syrian militias, the Iraqi Shi'ites and the Palestinian Arabs in the disputed territories.

Israel is thus surrounded by a regime and its proxies whose aim is the annihilation of the Jewish state. If Iran isn't stopped, Israel will before long face the ultimate nightmare of a genocidal enemy armed with nuclear weapons.

Even if Hamas is utterly destroyed, Hezbollah and Iran will still need to be dealt with. America needs to strike the head of the snake.

But the Biden administration studiously avoids identifying Iran as the real enemy. For the terrible truth is that Iran has been empowered by America.

The Obama administration's 2015 nuclear deal would not only have enabled a nuclear-weaponized Iran after only a few years’ delay. It also funneled billions into Tehran's coffers, which it used to accelerate its regional power grab and terrorist activities.

This strategy of empowering Iran has been continued by the Biden administration. It has groveled to Tehran in an attempt to restore the nuclear deal, relaxed sanctions once again and retaliated on only four occasions to the 90 attacks by Iranian proxies over the past three years on U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.

Even now, the Biden administration still wants to bring Iran on its side. Even now, it is still banging the drum for a Palestinian state despite the murderous terrorism against Jews incited by the people America wants to run it.

As a result, far from having Israel's back, the Biden administration is aiming its knives at it.

The IDF is going to great lengths to protect Gaza's civilians as much as possible in the middle of a war. It is warning them to evacuate targeted buildings through leaflets, phone calls and "knock on the roof" missiles. It set up a humanitarian corridor to the south, along which it has been guarding evacuees against attacks by Hamas.

Yet despite the fact that the United States took no such steps to protect Iraqi civilians when it flattened Mosul in its fight with ISIS, Washington is increasingly harassing Israel to do more to protect Gaza's civilians.

This is clearly paving the way for Washington to abandon Israel in the event of a genuinely high civilian death toll in Gaza.

This malignant appeasement of Iran and harassment of Israel goes back to former President Barack Obama. In his recent remarks about the Hamas pogrom and the Gaza war, Obama equated Hamas's "horrific" atrocities with Israel's "unbearable" occupation and war.

But Israel hasn't "occupied" Gaza since 2005. If Obama was referring to the disputed territories, what's "unbearable" there is the daily and unremitting campaign of murderous attacks on Israeli Jews.

Obama's attempt to shift the blame for the depraved onslaught against Israeli Jews onto Israel itself was despicable and morally degenerate. Worse, the Biden administration is stuffed with Obama retreads and acolytes. There's worse still.

In September, the news platform Semafor and the London-based émigré opposition outlet Iran International reported sensationally on a large leak of Iranian government correspondence and emails.

These revealed that, in 2014, senior Iranian Foreign Ministry officials initiated a quiet effort to bolster Tehran's image over its nuclear program through a network of influential overseas academics and researchers.

This involved Iranian infiltration of the Obama administration. At least two of the people on the Iranian network list were, or became, top aides to envoy Robert Malley. He was the point man on Iran under both the Obama and Biden administrations until he was placed on leave in June following the suspension of his security clearance.

The leaked materials showed that, in 2021, Malley helped infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai, who was associated with the Iranian network, into the State Department to assist him in his negotiations with Iran.

Tabatabai then moved to the Pentagon, where she still serves as chief of staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Christopher Maier in an office that oversees hostage recovery—including presumably the U.S. citizens now being held hostage by Hamas.

No one will say why Malley was suspended other than it was over a "mishandling of classified material." The tight secrecy suggests that what he did was devastating to national security.

Meanwhile, as Lee Smith writes in Tablet: "Pro-Hamas and pro-Iran influencers inside the Pentagon are briefing that Israel is manipulating the U.S. into a war with Iran."

Just whose side is America really on?

 

Teaching the causes of the Great Depression to college students – do the histori-ans get it wrong?

At the Journal of Economics and Finance Education.

Teaching the Causes of Great Depression to College Students: Evidence from History, Economics, and Economic History Textbooks, by Jeremy Horpedahl, Phillip Magness, and Marcus Witcher.

Here is the link.

The message is that historians get it wrong compared to economists and economic historians. Worse, the former focus, you guessed it, on failures of Capitalism.

Here are some excerpts.

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ABSTRACT

We survey the treatment of the Depression in college-level textbooks for courses in US history and economics. History textbooks emphasis on inequality, the stock market crash, and underconsumption as the primary causes does not reflect the consensus of economic historians. Introductory economics textbooks use the Great Depression as an example to illustrate macroeconomic concepts in ways aligned with the research consensus, which emphasizes declining aggregate demand and issues related to monetary policy and the financial system. History textbooks could be improved by focusing more on bank failures, the actions of the Federal Reserve, monetary deflation, and declines in autonomous spending.

Free speech in freefall

 Freedom in the US has been in decline for awhile. There is no sign that the decline will stop.

The problem is too many voters who do not value freedom and are intolerant. We can thank educators for much of this.

Here is Jonathan Turley - on target again.

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The Censorship “Switchboard”: A New Layer to the Biden Administration’s “Orwellian Ministry of Truth”

Free speech is in a free fall as millions embrace censorship as a political cause, including some now running for federal office on a pledge to silence others. One of the most alarming aspects of this period has been the emergence of a type of triumvirate of censorship, an alliance of government, academic, and media corporations. Together they have established the most comprehensive censorship system in the history of this country.

That system is being forced out into the public by the investigation of House committees. This week the House Judiciary Committee released a 103-page staff report on the academic prong of the triumvirate. What is most chilling about this report is that it adds yet another layer of government-supported speech controls. It also reflects a conscious and coordinated effort to carry out censorship through allies in a labyrinth of academic and public interest groups.

Earlier this year, I testified at the first hearing by the special committee investigating the censorship system. I warned that there was ample evidence of a system based on “censorship by surrogate” where government agencies used academic and media allies to silence those with opposing views.

The latest report reveals details of the critical role played by government officials in “switchboarding” the censorship system by channeling demands for removal or bans from state and local officials. In addition to the direct targeting of individuals by federal agencies, switchboarding allowed the agencies to operate as a control tower in this sprawling system.

This switchboarding system was confirmed by Brian Scully of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security. CISA has emerged as one of the critical control centers in this system.

CISA head Jen Easterly declared that her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure would be extended to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes not just “disinformation” and “misinformation,”
but combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

Despite the determined opposition by Democratic members and the Biden Administration, the investigation has revealed a wide array of grants to academic and third party organizations to create blacklists or to pressure advertisers to withdraw support for conservative sites. The subjects for censorship ranged from election fraud to social justice to climate change.

The Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) was created in partnership with Stanford University “at the request of DHS/CISA.” It is described as a “consortium of ‘disinformation’ academics led by Stanford University’s Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO).

EIP supplied a “centralized reporting system” to process what were known as “Jira tickets” targeting unacceptable views. It would include not only politicians but commentators and pundits as well as the satirical site The Babylon Bee.

Some of us have previously criticized Stanford for its effort to systematize and expand censorship. Stanford’s Virality Project pushed to censor even true facts since “true stories … could fuel hesitancy” over taking the vaccine or other measures.

In newly released emails, the secret coordination with federal agencies was made public, including a July 31, 2020 email from the director at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, an EIP partner.

Graham Brookie, the lab’s senior director, confirmed that her group “just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA and are in weekly comms to debrief about disinfo.”

During this time many of us in the free speech community were raising the alarm over the evidence of a government-supported censorship system, including the use of surrogates in academia. As noted in emails in May 2020, government officials were privately saying that they need to avoid any move that would “openly endorse” censorship while funding these groups and switchboarding the system.

As officials served as the conduit, it continued to attach a standard disclaimer that CISA “neither has nor seeks the ability to remove what information is made available on social media platforms.”

Notably, EIP worked not only with CISA, but with the Global Engagement Center, a multi-agency entity housed within the State Department. It was the Global Engagement Center that contracted with the Atlantic Council, which sent suggested blacklists to Twitter. It got to be so reckless that Yoel Roth, then Twitter’s head of trust and safety, responded “omg” and “what a total crock.”

This system rests on grants coming from Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the State Department, and other agencies. That system included scoring groups through a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to the British-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI). The index targeted ten conservative and libertarian sites as the most dangerous sources of disinformation, including sites like Reason which publishes conservative legal analysis. Conversely, some of the most liberal sites were ranked as the most trustworthy for advertisers.

The report on switchboarding is most chilling when placed within this larger context. The Biden Administration has funded a global effort to score, target, and ban opposing views through an ever-increasing array of allied groups in academia and corporations. A federal court recently enjoined aspects of that system after finding that it is an unprecedented censorship system that effectively created a type of “Orwellian Ministry of Truth.”

The solution is as obvious as the danger itself. Congress must bar any funding — directly or indirectly — for censorship systems. Calling opposing views “disinformation” does not alter the fact that there is a comprehensive censorship system using groups allied with the government. Federal agencies are always able to respond to claims that they deem are untrue about their own policies and programs. However, we need to get the government out of the business of speech controls, including shutting down the censorship switchboard.

The anti-freedom wave continues

 Jonathan Turley is on target again.

The Salem Witch hunt gathers momentum.

It's not just the politicians - it's those who elect them. Too many voters have no conception of where their voting is leading.

History is clear: a free country is the exception, not the rule. Theorem: Freedom is not a stable equilibrium.

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Running on Censorship: A California Candidate Seeks to Ride the Anti-Free Speech Wave

It is not easy to unseat an incumbent in Congress, but Will Rollins believes that he has hit on a guaranteed winner to galvanize Democratic support in California’s 41st congressional district. He is pledging to push for greater censorship to stop those “profiting by spreading division based on lies.” Of course, the former assistant U.S. Attorney suggests that he will know who is lying and who should be allowed to speak freely.

Rollins is also running on his role “prosecuting insurrectionists” from January 6. While most of us condemned the riot on that day and supported the prosecution of those who broke into the Capitol, polls shows that most Americans do not view what occurred as an actual insurrection or rebellion.

That, however, is a legitimate matter of debate and people of good faith can differ in how they view the crimes committed that day. What is far more serious is the embrace of censorship as a political cause.

Rollins pledged to stop people saying things that “erode our democracy.” His policy platform promises “accountability” for tech platforms that “spread conspiracy theories” and do not yield to demands for censorship. It appears to be a pitch to restore censorship systems on sites like X but also pledges to go after “media outlets.”

He is not alone in such efforts. Democratic members caused a firestorm previously by writing to cable carriers like AT&T to ask why they are still allowing people to watch FOX News. Rollins promises to crackdown on “propaganda networks to protect the public’s right to be informed.” He does not identify which networks would be targeted but the assumption is that it is not MSNBC. (For full disclosure, I am a legal analyst on Fox News). However, he wants ramped up penalties for anything that he considers “harmful lies and conspiracy theories.”

Of course, one person’s “conspiracy theory” is another person’s news. It is again unlikely that Rollins will be pursuing the Washington Post which recently reaffirmed that it is standing by past false claims made about Lafayette Park, the Hunter Biden laptop, and Russian collusion. It is not likely the false conspiracy theories funded by the Clinton campaign like the Alfa Bank allegations.

As someone who was raised in a liberal, politically active Democratic family in Chicago, Democrats once championed free speech as a touchstone of the party. Now it is often treated as an existential threat to democracy.

In recent hearings on the government’s censorship programs, Democratic members and pundits attacked witnesses “Putin lovers” or supporters of “insurrectionists” in opposing censorship.

President Joe Biden is now the most anti-free speech administration since John Adams. His administration is unabashedly and unrepentantly pursuing the silencing of those with opposing views. Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, extended her agency’s mandate over critical infrastructure to include “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes combating “malinformation” – described as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

Democratic members have warned social media companies that they will not tolerate any backsliding after Elon Musk dismantled the massive censorship system at Twitter.

In one hearing, tech CEOs appeared before the Senate, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) pushed back on statements from the witnesses suggesting an effort to protect free speech and reminded them that “the pandemic and misinformation about COVID-19, manipulated media also cause harm” as well as “climate change misinformation policy” and “climate denialism.”

It did not matter that many censored over their views on the efficacy of masks or the necessity of shutting down schools have been vindicated. Even raising the lab theory on the origin of Covid 19 was denounced as a conspiracy theory. Even after the theory was embraced by government agencies as possible or the most likely explanation, science and health reporter for the New York Times, Apoorva Mandavilli, continued to denounce the theory as “racist.”

The concerning aspect of Rollins’ campaign is that censorship was largely used as a political tactic in Washington to silence critics and opposing views. It is now an actual political campaign. It shows how speech regulation has become popular with the rank-and-file in the party. It now defines the party.

Campaigning for censorship should be a warning sign of the breakdown of democratic values. Limiting free speech is akin to cutting off oxygen to the body politic. It produces atrophy in a system, the breakdown of our political tissues. That is also reflected in a recent poll that shows that 52% of Biden supporters say Republicans are now a threat to American life while 47% of Trump supporters say the same about Democrats. Roughly 40% of both parties believe violence is now justified and roughly a quarter of both parties now question our system of government.

Politicians fuel that anger by running on silencing their opponents in the name of disinformation or malinformation. It is of course popular. Rage is often popular. Indeed, it can be addictive. Yet, what remains is release from reason in the blind pursuit of those with opposing views.

Will Rollins is right that this is a popular pitch for an age of rage. However, it is the political version of the Dead Sea Fruits that were irresistible to pick but would turn to ashes in one’s mouth. Silencing others creates an insatiable appetite for combating an ever widening circle of “lies.” Until, that is, when you find yourself encircled by your own truth police.

Why they rip down the “Kidnapped from Israel” fliers

 Jeff Jacoby at the Jewish World Review.

JJ is on target.

The asymmetry is remarkable.

What we are seeing is the product of our "educational system": schools, cultural contexts, and yes, parents.

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A cat from my neighborhood has gone missing. Her owner has distributed fliers around the area, asking residents to keep an eye out for her. "LOST CAT," it says in big letters beneath a photo of Coco, a beautiful animal with fluffy white fur and blue eyes.

Whether the fliers will lead to Coco's recovery I don't know. But of one thing I am certain: No one walking through the neighborhood will be grabbing all the posters and stuffing them in the trash. Even people who dislike cats wouldn't be that callous and mean.

But ever since fliers calling attention to something far more terrible than a missing cat — the plight of the more than 200 hostages abducted from Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7 — began going up on telephone poles, subway walls, utility boxes, and worksite fences in cities around the world, a startling number of people have been eager to tear them down. Individuals have been filmed destroying or defacing the posters in Boston, London, Miami, New York, Melbourne, Philadelphia, Richmond, Ann Arbor, and Los Angeles.

There is no possible justification for such heartlessness. The whole purpose of the fliers is to heighten awareness of the Israeli (and other) civilians kidnapped by the Hamas terror squads — to put names and faces to the hostages, all with one goal: to bring them back home. How can a project so heartfelt and humane trigger such a poisonous response?

The posters were the brainchild of two Israeli artists, Nitzan Mintz and Dede Bandaid, who were visiting New York when Hamas carried out its bloodbath. Aching to help in some way, they drew on their art backgrounds to design the eye-catching fliers. Each is topped with the word "KIDNAPPED" in large white letters on an orange background; below that heading is the name, age, nationality, and photo of one of the hostages, who range in age from 3 months to 85 years.

The posters went viral overnight. Within days they were appearing everywhere, a powerful symbol of Israel's anguish and of the desperate yearning for the captives' safe return. Then came the backlash. "Within minutes or hours of going up," reported the New York Jewish Week, "many of them had been partially ripped off the subway station's walls, tears obscuring the victims' faces or details about their lives, while others were defaced with marker or surrounded by messages such as "Free Palestine." On a poster of two of the youngest hostages, 3-year-old twins Emma and Yuli Cunio, Hitler mustaches were drawn on the girls' faces. On other posters, the words "Lies" or "Actors" were scrawled.

Those ripping down or damaging the signs are by no means abashed about doing so. Some have filmed themselves attacking the fliers and posted the video online. Others, when asked why they were trashing the pictures of civilian hostages, have yelled about "genocide," declared their support for "Palestinian civilians," claimed the fliers contained "inaccurate information," or simply cursed out the person filming them.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intensely controversial and generates great emotion on both sides. But these assaults on the "Kidnapped" posters have nothing to do with the merits of the dispute. The sole purpose of the fliers is to emphasize the humanity of the innocent hostages seized by Hamas (many of whom, as it happens, were peace activists deeply committed to Arab-Israeli coexistence). What drives the people ripping down the posters or adding Hitler mustaches to the pictures is a pathological need to deny the humanity of those kidnapped Jews.

A core principle of antisemites in all times and places is that Jews are not fully human and are never innocent. A thousand years ago, Jews were slaughtered by Crusaders for being satanic Christ-killers who consumed the blood of children; a century ago Hitler preached that they were subhumans who polluted the racial purity of Aryan Europe. Today the Jewish state is accused of committing the demonic crimes of genocide and apartheid. The poison never changes, only the vial it comes in.

The "Kidnapped" fliers are intolerable to the haters because they so urgently challenge the antisemitic paradigm. They make it vividly clear that in the war between barbarism and civilization, between oppressor and oppressed, it is Jews who are under attack. That infuriates those whose worldview revolves around the certainty that Israel and its supporters are the victimizers. The outpouring of sympathy for Jews kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — and the moral force of that sympathy — is anathema to them.

That explains as well why the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 immediately triggered so many vehement public demonstrations in support of the Palestinians. Precisely because the massacre and abductions had been so unspeakably horrific, it was necessary to reinforce the narrative of Jewish villainy. At times, denunciations of Israel gave way to naked antisemitsm. At a pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney, a chorus of voices chanted "Gas the Jews! F*** the Jews!" Others expressed their hatred by rejoicing in the slaughter of Israelis. A professor at Cornell, for example, told a crowd he was "exhilarated" by what Hamas had done.

In the wake of terrible mass shootings like the one that took at least 18 lives and convulsed Lewiston, Maine, on Wednesday, grieving family and friends often display pictures of their loved ones. It is a way of reinforcing the humanity of the victims and of evoking compassion from passersby. Who, seeing such a display, would destroy or vandalize it? Some norms are so ingrained as to be all but inviolable. When someone puts up an image of a missing or murdered child, no decent person rips it down.

But antisemitism has the power to override every norm and decent impulse.

On Reddit last week, a commenter explained that coming across a "Kidnapped" flier made him feel not empathy with the hostage, but "the exact opposite." It filled him with "white hot rage," he wrote, and he decided that "ripping it down and tearing it to shreds is the only thing I can do."

The ripped-up fliers are one more indication of the rising tide of antisemitism in America and the West. A "white hot rage" is building. I, for one, cannot shake the conviction that Jews are at graver risk than they have been in decades, and not only in southern Israel.

Perspective on Gaza – and more

 Victor Davis Hanson is on target.

It is remarkable that:

• Otherwise civilized people can be so uncivilized.
• How naive othewise smart people can be.
• How stupid some geniuses can be.

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There is something surreal, even sick about the current Gazan war.

Throughout European and American cities and campuses, tens of thousands of Middle East immigrants and students, and radical leftists chant nonstop "Free Palestine from the River to the Sea."

More recently, they are also yelling, "Israel, you can’t hide, we caught you in genocide."

Consider the hypocrisy of that dual messaging.

Hamas and its supporters are openly and eagerly calling for the genocidal end of Israel by wiping it out from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Yet at the same time they also claim it is Israel that is committing genocide — the very current self-described agenda of Hamas and its expatriate community of devotees!

The war has become crazier still.

Hamas and its megaphones abroad also blast Israel daily for retaliating for the October 7 butchery of some 1,400 Israeli infants, children, women, and the elderly.

They further demand Israel must be selective in its airborne targeting of the Hamas killers, who burrow beneath hospitals and mosques while using civilians as shields.

Hamas takes for granted that a supposedly heartless Israel nevertheless will be reluctant to strike the Hamas terrorists when and if they are surrounded by civilians.

Indeed, Gazans are put in more danger by Hamas than they would otherwise be by the Israel Defense Forces.

Yet the world accepts that Israel itself would never employ such a ruse of using civilians to shield its cities from indiscriminately fired Hamas missiles.

The world further knows that if Israel ever employed such a barbaric tactic, Israeli civilian shields would attract — not deter — Hamas rockets.

Hamas’s apologists insist that Israel warn in advance civilians to keep clear of Israeli bombs.

Yet at the same time, daily Hamas launches rockets into Israel. And no one in the international community lectures Hamas first to drop leaflets or text Israeli civilians that Hamas rockets are on their way into their vicinity.

Instead, the only purpose of Hamas rockets is to indiscriminately strike and kill Israeli civilians.

So the real issue is not about the principle of civilian deaths — given Israel is damned when it tries to avoid noncombatants and Hamas is cheered on when it deliberately targets them.

Instead, the asymmetry is explained by the efficacy of the Israeli response and impotence of Hamas rocketry.

In other words, Hamas cannot stop the IDF from hitting its targets, while Israel can knock down far more Hamas rockets.

And so Israel is being blamed for being too effective — or "disproportionate" — in its bombing, and Hamas is rewarded for being too ineffective in its rocketing.

There are other sick paradoxes in this war.

Hamas started the conflict by sending death squads of 2,000 killers into Israel at a time of peace to surprise murder more than 1,000 Israeli civilians.

There was no precivilizational, unspeakable atrocity that the butchers did not commit — torture, beheading, rape, mutilation, and necrophilia.

The terrorists were followed into Israel by a multitude of opportunistic Gaza civilians, who in turn joined in the violence and looting.

Back in Gaza crowds reviled and tried to harm Israeli captives bound as hostages to trade for jailed terrorists in Israel.

In sum, the population that once elected Hamas into power, and cheered on its bloodletting — as long as there was yet no Israeli response — now claims to have no connection at all with Hamas. Yet the world assumes correctly that the people of Israel are inseparable from its military.

The surreal paradoxes of this war still do not end there.

In its mass murdering spree of October 7, Hamas butchered more than 30 American citizens, and perhaps another 13 still are unaccounted for — and are likely hostages inside the tunnels of Hamas in Gaza.

Yet the Biden administration has not forced Hamas to return kidnapped Americans, much less responded to its killing of U.S. citizens.

Why then despite all the rhetoric of solidarity, is the United States constantly pressuring Israel to be measured in its retaliation against the Hamas terrorists in Gaza, pressure that will only make things easier on Hamas?

Why are we seeking to restrain those who are trying to destroy the killers of Americans, and indirectly aiding those who murdered them?

And why is the global elite community siding with the murderous aggressors and not those seeking justice for the murdered?

Lots of reasons.

There are 500 million Arabs in the world, and nearly 2 billion Muslims — but only 9 or so million Israelis.

Nearly 50 percent of the world’s oil reserves are found in the Muslim Middle East.

Westerners, like tiny Israel, are considered too rich and powerful, while non-Westerners are romanticized as blameless, victimized underdogs.

But the best way of understanding this sick war is that Israelis are Jews and the ancient plague of antisemitism is again sweeping the globe.

This is shooting

 This is shooting.

Here is the link.

SR-71 Video

 Here is the link.

Israeli Arrow 3 defeats long-range missile attack

 From Steve Trimble at  Aviation Week's Aerospace Digest

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Arrow 3 Makes Combat Debut, Thwarting Long-Range Missile Attack

The Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) Arrow 3 made its combat debut on Oct. 31 by successfully shooting down a long-range ballistic missile over the Red Sea, Israeli government and industry officials said.

Israeli officials did not confirm the source of the ballistic missile attack, but the location and direction suggest it may have come from Houthi-controlled Yemen.

In September, Houthi forces displayed a long-range missile reminiscent of Iran’s Ghadr and North Korea’s Nodong missiles.

The Arrow 3 “demonstrated today that Israel possesses the most advanced technology for defense against ballistic missiles at various ranges,” said IAI CEO Boaz Levy, who led development of the ballistic missile interceptor.

Israel Defense Forces deployed the Arrow 3 for the first time in 2017 to defend Israel against long-range missile strikes by Iran or its proxies.

The lower-altitude Arrow 2 interceptor had been fielded a decade earlier but shot down a Syrian surface-to-air missile in its combat debut in 2017.

The Israeli government has agreed to export the Arrow 3 system to Germany.

The Israeli Air Force also shot down “aerial objects” in the Red Sea region on Oct. 31, the Israeli Ministry of Defense said.

The intercepts come a week after the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Patrick Carney shot down three more cruise missiles over the Red Sea that were believed to be headed toward Israel from a Houthi-controlled area of Yemen.