Kamala Harris took her campaign to Arizona on Friday for a 20-minute stop at the border, which was reinforced with razor wire — something the Biden-Harris administration took Texas to court for. We're…

"You've got to do it now." The post Why was Terry Reid rock and metal’s most sought-after vocalist? first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

China’s constitution contains a list of conventional rights as impressive as anything in the West. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are there, as they typically are in Communist constitutions after Stalin’s. [S]he does not hold herself accountable to anyone save for the power she means to attain. It also has a clause that follows that listing of rights that says the following: “When exercising their freedoms and rights, citizens of the People’s Republic of China shall not undermine the interests of the state, society, or collectives, or infringe upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.” (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: We the People Can Break the Culture of Lies) In practice, it is the CCP that decides when this clause is sprung, and the constitution’s protections disappear. In practice, those protections matter little, as scholars Ling Li and Wenzhang Zhou wrote in China Law and Society Review: The constitution appeals to the Chinese Communist Party because it does not provide solutions to fundamental issues of governance. Instead, such issues are kept out of the constitution so that they can be addressed by the Party through other regulatory mechanisms outside of the constitutional realm.  As anyone who is bothered by the Deep State knows, this is not a phenomenon unique to China. The complaint of Deep State critics is that, more and more, the real decisions of governance are made by unelected officials largely immune to popular pressure. The complaint surfacing in this election is that even the nation’s highest elected post may be occupied by someone who: never received in a single primary vote for her party’s nomination; was crowned the nominee by an opaque closed-door process; evades public critical engagement on policy issues;  evades all discussion of principles unless couched in language vague enough to allow denial of any commitment; and  seeks to evade all responsibility for the policies which she advocated and was empowered to implement on the highest of levels. The emptiness of substance and principle, the addiction to rehearsed responses, the tricks of expressing a verisimilitude of sincere emotion, together signal that she does not hold herself accountable to anyone save for the power she means to attain by checking the right boxes for those who support this massive effort of the machine. The key to our freedom, such as we have enjoyed it, stems from the high awareness of Founders and Framers that we are all accountable, and that true power, the highest power, creates and governs by stepping back and honoring the liberty and relying on the affection of those subject to its power. That is why the Constitution tells us from the start, that we, the people, are the sovereigns, and that, as the Bill of Rights concludes, the federal government has only the power we delegate to it. But delegate we do — having the power, we step back and make a compact to be ruled by the laws the government creates and to be adjudicated by the courts it empowers. It is, like the divine covenant, empowered by the love of those who partake in it for each other and what they jointly create through it. All of this stems from something absent from Athens, the lack of which doomed its democracy to an early demise and to be a laughingstock of rulers for centuries. That thing that was not present was the Biblical understanding that there is a unified reality underlying this world that calls us into being and steps back to give us the room to attain meaning of the highest sort by allowing us to be moral agents — even if it means that we may sin and hurt that reality temporarily. The Jewish mystics spoke of God’s contraction of Self; the rabbis of old, following Genesis’ principle that humanity is created in the image of God, applied this idea to humans: “Who is the mighty person?” one sage asked, and then answered his own question: “The one who conquers his own chaotic inclinations.” This is the power of a parent who loves a child by not caving in to his or her every whim. It is the power of a teacher who corrects a student, knowing that at present, the student will not like the correction and may even feel it hateful. The parent and the teacher exert power over the chaos, channeling it so that it might yield only creative goodness and not mere indifferent — or noxious — novelty. Illegitimate power runs in the opposite direction — it amplifies the chaos to appeal to those whom it terrifies. You will find the agents of chaos disguising themselves as psychopaths do — emulating the phrases and echoing the words meant to convey proper convictions, to play and game those whom they despise for being so manipulable. They do not wish to be seen as chaos agents, and so they must pose as those who will rescue us from it.  They hope to so empower themselves that they no will longer have to play the chaos game. The one thing they want is sure power. But even having gained power, and using it amply to suppress any opposition, they still will not stop lying even then. As Solzhenitsyn wrote of the fully metastasized Stalinist state: They lie, we know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, and they go on lying still. In Kamala’s California, in Labor’s Britain, that’s where we are already. Political memes and satires will be subject to government oversight and will be banned and authors criminalized if they offend the gentle sensibilities of the state. The UK, even under the so-called Conservatives, had already created an atmosphere in which a Jew wearing an item of traditional dress was forbidden by police to stand in public places where crowds were crying for the destruction of the only Jewish nation in the world because he would be “provocative.” (The Jim Crow South said the same thing about those who “got uppity.” It all stems from the same evil and its desire to control.) The name of the party doesn’t matter, as we see by the Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., and Elon Musk going towards the freedom and some others who had stood as constitutional conservatives showing other priorities. We need to focus on what constitutes good and its opposite in the political sphere, on the principles of the matter.  When we address that question, we see that the political question is nested in something deeper. Our deepest values are not set by politics but inform our politics. Do we seek political power on our own terms, content to take it away from others to get the result we want? That is the world of the Caesars of every age. (READ MORE: Kamala’s Words Mean Nothing Against Hamas) Or do we seek it on God’s terms, using the power given in trust for the sake of those who gave it — God in the first place, and in the second, His creatures, who heard us, deliberated deeply, and freely exercised their choice? When we take that step back from catastrophic falseness and honestly place our case before our fellow citizens, we must know that that is true power on the highest model. It deserves our trust, for we saw how the deep trust of freedom broke down the Soviet walls we thought would last for centuries.  It is our strength now as well. It speaks to every heart and though we cannot say exactly how or perhaps even when, we trust they will listen and our Republic will live. The post Grant Power Only to the Accountable appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

If you have never attended a scholarly lecture by the late Prof. Irwin Corey, please begin by viewing this 82-second link. He died at 102. He has been reincarnated in Kamala Harris. “Well, we need a holistic approach because a holistic policy will result in a holistic solution that will afford everyone holistic results.” I taught law school for twenty years. During those two decades, I had the opportunity to educate and touch the lives of more than 2,000 students. I tried to know them all by face and name from day one, and I became a life mentor to several of them. Some, even non-Jews, asked me, a rabbi, to conduct their marriages. Today, after hearing Kamala Harris’s “holistic” TV interview on MSNBC, I remember one of them in particular. Harris’s Strategy We who closely follow this stuff have long known that Harris is a phony, a three-dollar bill not even worth the inflated paper on which it is printed. She is unworthy to be even a candidate for president, and if she is elected, G-d forbid, the Creator of the Universe will repay and punish those who elected her with a Divinely exquisite measure for measure: they will have her for their president over the next quadrennium. We know by now that she is not going to do many, if any, press conferences, and the few interviews for which she will sit will be only with hand-picked Democrat ringers. Even then, she may require Walz to be seated alongside her throughout the interview like a court-appointed guardian assigned to accompany a child for a rarely approved visitation with an abusive parent under a restraining order. Her handlers keep her restrained. The strategy works. Let’s say all you eat all day is a quart of Haagen-Dazs or McConnell’s ice cream (rightly boycotting Ben & Jerry’s) followed by a box of 32 Godiva or See’s chocolates, flushed down by a six-pack of any beer except for Bud Lite. OK? That’s your daily diet, seven days weekly through the past ten years. Meanwhile, your blood lab draws come back with numbers reflecting perfect hemoglobin, creatinine, A1C, cholesterol (all three: HDL, LDL, and Triglycerides), and all else perfect, even the molars. OK? Then, although your doctors and dentist will be scratching their heads, why stop? Indeed, just the opposite: Don’t dare stop! It tastes great, and it’s working! That’s the Harris campaign strategy. They all know that if she opens her mouth unscripted she will get politically crushed. So they rightly advise her to keep it up. Just shut up and cackle. Meantime, it works. Rarely, she takes a risk and agrees to be interviewed by a ringer such as Oprah or her mother or some leftist hack at MSNBC. Recently, she did one of those, and whiffed at several softball tosses. She sounded OK to the unsophisticated, seemed to the gullible, and to know what she was talking about. But it was like Walter Mondale sitting alongside Gary Hart and asking “Where’s the Beef?”(READ MORE from Dov Fischer: Why We Inherently Despise Kamala Harris) For example, when asked about what she would do about high mortgage rates (i) preventing a generation of young people from buying their first home and experiencing the American Dream, and also (ii) restricting older homeowners from selling their low-interest-mortgage homes  to downscale or upscale because of insanely higher borrowing rates, Harris said this without having a script, thus having to think: [I]t’s going to be different in different places, depending on the needs of that community, the needs of that local government, that municipality, but working in consultation and coordination and also around incentives that we can create. For example, some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars, and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing for working people. (Emphases added.) Sophisticated viewers and readers grasp that she said nothing. As it happens, the incompetence of Harris and Biden has caused the price of my home to rise … uh, holistically? So I have no business complaining. I have no plans or desire to move anywhere else in America. So I’m good. And my kids all went to private Ivy League schools before Jews started getting beaten up there by Arab Muslim foreign exchange students, so they bought their own homes before Harris-Biden destroyed their American Dream. But, still, the fool said nothing, instead dressing her word salad with “holistically,” an adverb most Americans do not use. Harris Is Like a Student I Once Had That reminded me of a particular law student I had several years ago. This guy impressed the heck out of me. Whereas most students came to class wearing jeans or shorts and everyday t-shirts, even undershirts, he always came to class wearing a suit and tie. A true anomaly. I knew that I never did that in law school. I was a jeans and button-down guy myself. He spoke elegantly, just beautifully. He could have been a radio host on NPR. He spoke with elevated diction, excellent grammar, and impressed beyond words. Whenever he spoke up in class, he perorated with a self-confidence and ease that extended way beyond what a law student typically would articulate. I still remember him. I told my wife, Ellen of blessed memory, that she had to accompany me to class one day to experience this guy in action. I would not tell her in advance which student I meant and would leave it to her to guess. And yes — she guessed. So impressive. But there was this kinda weird thing. The way most of us law professors teach is by assigning students in advance to read 2-4 published judicial appellate opinions regarding litigated cases that came their way. Then, in class, the professor leads a discussion, focusing not only on the facts of the assigned cases and the applicable law that governed those facts, and the appellate panels’ holdings but, equally important, focusing on the “How” and “Why”: How did the appellate court apply that law to those facts, and why did they come out as they did? In other words, the students were expected to arrive in class knowing the assigned facts and law, and they were being invited to think like (fair) judges about what they had read and to evolve a process of legal thinking by internalizing how and why real-life (fair) judges ruled as they did. Sometimes that process may seem obvious, but in the more complex cases the reasoning is more subtle. (The cases were not of the political sort where Obama Judges and other partisans abandon all fairness and objectivity, fabricating their own law, ruling based on their own personal preferences.) (READ MORE: The Debate Was Fixed) Our immaculate student, when he volunteered to discuss an assigned case or when I called on him to engage him in the wider class discussion, always began by exquisitely detailing the cases’ facts and law and then describing the court’s holding. Then, when I would ask him some questions, like hypothetical scenarios that were similar but differed in important ways, he never could answer me. He could memorize, but he could not think. He lacked reasoning power. He transmogrified from a confident English-speaking Winston Churchill to a dolt. I could not figure it out. In law schools, final exams like mine require students to read somewhat convoluted hypothetical fact patterns that we make up — what we professors call a “parade of horribles” — and to apply to those facts the laws they have learned throughout the term in order to reach their own “judicial” conclusions. We grade those exams by anonymous Student Identification Numbers (S.I.N.) so that we have no idea whose paper we are grading. That helps ensure that, in grading essays, professors are not being influenced inadvertently by knowing whose paper is on the grading desk. After all exams are graded, we send in the final scores by their anonymous SIN, and we later may request from the Registrar a list revealing which students scored which grades. When I got my list back that term, sure enough, the incredibly impressive student with impeccable comportment and diction had failed miserably with one of the lowest scores I ever gave. I could not believe it, but in time I could. Retrospectively, the pieces clicked. The Harris Bluff That is Kamala Harris. Her handlers dress her properly. She knows words and grammar, has learned to project self-confidence, and knows several “smart-sounding words.” But it is all bluff — smoke and mirrors but no beef. She is kind of smart, but she is not intelligent, thoughtful, insightful, knowledgeable, or wise. As with all handicapped people, she has learned the tricks to disguise her challenges. For example, I live with a lung transplant. Sometimes I have a day when I have a lung-related but not virus-related cough. If I am scheduled that day to deliver a speech for my $1,000 honorarium, I take a spoon of 5 milileters of codeine cough syrup an hour before the speech. That way I do not cough; I thereby cover up my handicap. Kamala Harris has a handicap. She cannot think. But she can memorize phrases. Therefore, because of her handicap — an inability to think — she avoids press conferences or impromptu interviews with people who are not Democrat ringers. When she is asked a question she did not expect, or — worse for her — when she is asked a follow-up question, even if it is a softball and she had a memorized response to the opening question, she panics and covers it up. Sometimes she buys five seconds by cackling, even if the subject is severe. Over time, with training and practice, she has evolved her equivalent to my codeine cough syrup. To push through the challenge, she starts motioning her hands like a professor, cackling, and talking gibberish like Prof. Irwin Corey. As she perceives she has not filled an adequate amount of time with her answer or has not remotely answered with specificity, she defaults to a word salad, lost as a deer in headlights, searching for something — anything — to say. Some people fill dead space by saying “Uh …. Uh … Uh.” Others use “Y’know … It’s, uh, like, well, y’know — uh, what was the question again?” For Kamala Harris it is a word salad, preferably spiced with a dressing that sounds profound. What can be, unburdened what has been done. (Look self-assured to convey that, if the listener is lost, it is his or her problem.) The economy? The border? Inflation? “Well, I grew up in a middle-class home, and I always loved yellow school buses and Venn diagrams. Don’t you?” (Cackle) High mortgage rates? “Well, we need a holistic approach because a holistic policy will result in a holistic solution that will afford everyone holistic results.” (Look profound) It worked for that law student for several months, but it caught up with him at final exams. It will catch up with Harris, too. Half of America already has graded her final exam with an F-. The other half will catch up in time, hopefully not when they are given a pink slip at work, denied a mortgage at the bank, getting raped or murdered by an illegal immigrant with a gang tattoo on his chest, or getting bombed by an Iranian or North Korean hypersonic bomb. Subscribe to Rav Fischer’s YouTube channel here at bit.ly/3REFTbk  and follow him on X (Twitter) at @DovFischerRabbi to find his latest classes, interviews, speeches, and observations. To be invited to attend his three weekly Zoom classes, send a request to rabbi@yioc.org Rav Fischer’s latest 10-minute messages: (i) “There is No Palestine” (here) and (ii) “Jewish Campus Students Need to Stop Whining” (here) The post Kamala Harris, Prof. Corey, and a Law Student appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Over 400,000 Germans left the Catholic Church last year. In 2022, over a half a million left. Of those who remain, less than 7 percent attend Mass with any regularity. LGBT activists within the ranks of the clergy are at risk of going to war against the Vatican. Catholic moral teaching is diluted and dismissed with prejudice and impunity, in favor of sexual degeneracy. And what are Germany’s bishops — those shepherds and princes of the Church tasked with leading souls to Heaven — doing to address these multifaceted crises? Criticizing the “far-right,” of course. The Left … supports all manner of moral degeneracies which the Church has condemned since the first century. Germany’s bishops published a document last week giving guidelines for firing members of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party from jobs with parishes or dioceses. Although not binding, the guidance followed a spate of AfD members being fired from positions with various parishes. One man was even told that he could not be an altar server because of his involvement with the conservative political organization. (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Can A Catholic Support Kamala Harris? No.) While some political parties in Germany — such as Die Heimat or Der III. Weg — align themselves with actual Nazi ideology, AfD does not. Instead, it simply opposes the mass immigration program imposed on Germany by its own political elites and the European Union, opposes the Islamization of Germany, and supports traditional marriage and the nuclear family. Yet AfD is condemned by name 56 times by the German bishops, while Nazi-influenced groups like Die Heimat or Der III. Weg only warranted a peripheral nod. What’s so bad about AfD, according to the German bishops? The political party is labeled “extremist,” with the bishops writing: These fundamental principles of the Catholic Church are not compatible with extremist positions or a racial [völkisch]-national ethos that aims at an unchanging cultural identity and a homogeneous community of descent and, as a result, systematically and regularly excludes people.… Members and representatives of the AfD often publicly advocate right-wing extremist positions that disregard human dignity and are diametrically opposed to the Christian view of humanity, the commandment to love one’s neighbor, and Catholic social doctrine, at least without sufficient distancing by official bodies of this party becoming known to the outside world, so that there is a contradiction to the Church’s order of values.… In the AfD … there are clear indications that a dominant part of the party aims to discriminate against people with a migrant background based on an “ethnocultural” concept of ethnicity that is incompatible with human dignity. This concept of ethnicity is based on the idea of a culturally homogeneous population consisting exclusively of autochthonous Germans. It is characterized by the idea that peoples are distinguished from one another by an unchanging cultural identity and as a homogeneous community of descent. Ironic, isn’t it, that the German bishops deride AfD members for being too “exclusive” in the very document that they’ve drafted with guidelines on excluding AfD members? Catholic principles are not, in fact, in opposition to the preservation of a national heritage and identity. Pope Pius XII, himself an ardent enemy of Nazism, once wrote, “It is quite legitimate for nations to treat their differences a sacred inheritance and guard them at all costs.” One cannot help but wonder if Germany’s bishops would feel quite so comfortable condemning, say, a Hindu nationalist party in India, or telling Israelis to abandon any “racial [völkisch]-national ethos” and stop trying to preserve “an unchanging cultural identity and a homogeneous community of descent…” One imagines that the German bishops would crawl on their hands and knees to avoid being associated with any such statement. Yet their own countrymen are subject to such derision. As I wrote earlier this month, immigration controls and the protection of one’s national heritage are not contradictory to Catholic teaching, but are actually upheld by it. And the condemnation of a völkisch-national ethos may be addressed by the Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas himself, who wrote that “friendship among blood relations is based upon their connection by natural origin, the friendship of fellow-citizens on their civic fellowship, and the friendship of those who are fighting side by side on the comradeship of battle.” He concluded, “Wherefore in matters pertaining to nature we should love our kindred most, in matters concerning relations between citizens, we should prefer our fellow-citizens, and on the battlefield our fellow-soldiers.” However, the German bishops added, “While individual positions of other parties without an extremist stance may diverge from the Church’s teachings, their basic orientation does not contradict the Church’s values.” The Social Democratic Party is explicitly Marxist and socialist, ideologies which have been condemned time and time again by the Catholic Church, from the time of Pope Pius XI to that of the late Pope Benedict XVI. The Left is also a socialist organization and supports all manner of moral degeneracies which the Church has condemned since the first century. The current Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, worked with a coalition of varying parties to decriminalize advertising abortions — considered among the gravest of sins by the Catholic Church, punishable by automatic excommunication — in 2022. Yet we are to believe that these parties and politicians do not “contradict the Church’s values?” It may come as little surprise, given their LGBT adoration over the past several years, that the German bishops are again attempting to rewrite the Church’s moral teachings, declaring immigration control and social conservatism a sin worthy of excommunication — at least excommunication from the sinner’s job — while Marxism, abortion activism, and the destruction of the nation via mass migration all get a free pass. (READ MORE: Immigration Control Is Smart, Not Un-Christian)  Many of the political problems being faced in Germany — immigration chief among them — are currently being faced in the U.S. American Catholics must be careful to know what the Catholic Church teaches. The leftist ideology has found its way into the seminaries and episcopal chairs of the American clergy, too, and American Catholics must be prepared to confront it when the time comes. The post German Bishops Firing Conservative Voters appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Only in the Movies In the box office hit You Only Live Twice, a SPECTRE ninja assassin unrolls a length of thread through the bedroom skylight until the end of the thread is just above James Bond’s lips. The ninja drips a viscus fluid down the thread, but at the last-minute Bond’s “cover” wife, Aki, rolls over and gets the poison instead. The film industry revels in exotic murder and mayhem, particularly when they can drape it around convoluted Machiavellian plots of revenge  —  patiently planned and meticulously executed. Even better when the intended victims’ own hubris or avarice are essential to “success.” Just this last Friday, September 27, Israeli jets took out Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, along with his main headquarters. Countless remakes and re-imaginings of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians insidious subplots relentlessly kill bewildered pawns on schedule with poison, chandeliers, clubs, knives, axes, guns, phones, and nooses  —  all ticking along like clockwork towards an unpredictable and inexorable end. In the cross-genre thriller Law Abiding Citizen, Clarence Darby (Gerard Butler) swears to “tear the system down” after an ambitious attorney cuts a plea deal with the scumbag who raped and murdered Darby’s wife and child before his very eyes. Darby turns out to have a black ops background with special skills: weaving a carbon fiber ratchet into a necktie which all-but cuts the target’s head off, killing the judge who accepted the plea deal with an explosive projectile implanted in the judge’s cell phone, and modifying a bomb disposal robot with an EMP device and .50 caliber machine gun to wipe out the prosecutor at a mass funeral for victims that Butler had blown up with remote-control car bombs. (READ MORE from Michael Howard: ‘Martians Wanted’ for NASA Simulation: White Males Need Not Apply) In The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Phibes (Vincent Price) choreographs spectacular deaths through fanciful takes on the ten plagues from Exodus: blood, frogs, gnats, flies, beasts, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of first-born sons. While the genre doesn’t always demand murder and mayhem, it does demand audacious planning and patient execution. In the British farce The Spy with a Cold Nose, British agents implant a radio transmitter in the Russian president’s pet bulldog to access top-secret conversations in an otherwise impenetrable ultra-secure room. Where do they dream this stuff up? Well, they don’t really have to look far for fodder. Stranger Than Fiction Truth is as strange as fiction. In 1978, a Bulgarian Darzhavna sigurnost (State Security) assassin reportedly stabbed accused defector and BBC broadcaster Georgi Marhov with an umbrella to implant a deadly ricin pellet. On the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, the CIA cast a wide net, and getting word that he was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan, worked with a local doctor to organize a fake vaccination program. Working door to door, the team gained access to Bin Laden’s compound and the DNA of his extended family. On May 1, 2011 President Obama sent two-dozen mission-built Black Hawk helicopters, carrying U.S. SEAL Team 6 members, 79 operators, and one K-9 dog  —  and shot Osama Bin Laden to death. A less imaginative but just as bizarre assassination attributed to North Korean despot Kim Jong Un was carried out in February of 2017 at the Kuala Lumpur airport. Two women jumped Un’s older half-brother Kim-Jong-nam and sprayed VX nerve agent in his face. In August 2020, Russian SRV Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki (previously KGB) agents sneaked into a hotel room and painted Novichok nerve agent on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s underpants. Navalny survived, only to be subsequently arrested and die “mysteriously” in the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service on 16 February 2024. Israel and It’s Enemies As wild as these few examples appear at first glance, they pale in comparison with this last month’s Mossad strike on the Hezbollah terrorist leadership. On October 7, 2023 over 6,000 Hamas terrorists and a ragtag assortment of supporters and sympathizers stormed across the length of the Israel-Gaza border, pouring through sewer-like tunnels, bashing through checkpoints, and tearing through fences. Outlandish Mad Max styled marauders on motorcycles, battered pickup trucks, jeeps, and even paramotors (those flimsy go-carts slung under parasails) wreaked havoc on  a music festival, farmsteads, villages, schools, and border-control checkpoints. They murdered, tortured, and raped civilians. They hurled grenades into bomb shelters, recording their atrocities on go-pros and cell phones  —  smiling while taking “selfies” with their dead and dying victims. The next day, with social media lit up with visuals of bloodied, wounded, and terror-stricken hostages being motored away into Gaza, Hezbollah terrorists further north in Lebanon began firing hundreds of missiles indiscriminately into Israeli territory. Other than taking out most Hezbollah rockets with their “Iron Dome” air defense systems, there was an ominous silence from the Israeli High Command and their Mossad action groups. Days turned into weeks and the Hezbollah rockets continue to rain down  —  mostly ineffectually, with sporadic but devastatingly accurate Israeli counter fire. Then  —  on October 27, 2023, Israel launched its ground campaign counter offensive on Gaza. Today  —  twelve months after the psychotic Hamas raids into Israel, Gaza is largely rubble. A few Hamas terrorists remain cowering in tunnels  —  uncounted innocent Western hostages suffer in darkness. But what about Hezbollah and Lebanon? Israel’s Plan In January of this year, Mossad began putting the Dairy Queen curl on their plans to deal with Hezbollah aggression. They didn’t want to risk a two-front war with Hamas. Not with Hezbollah up north, Houthis in the rear, and Iran pulling the strings. What to do? Whatever they did would be under intense global criticism. And precision targeting of the Hezbollah leadership was difficult  —  they’d stopped using cellphones for internal communications and were resorting to “untraceable pagers” and handheld “walkie talkie” styled two-way radios. The light bulb went on. Mossad infiltrated Hezbollah logistics, identified the manufacturers of preferred pagers and radios, and designed retrofits that included triggering devices and a few ounces of explosives. They placed the modified devices into Hezbollah supply channels — and waited. (READ MORE: Three’s the Charm for Elon Musk’s Starship Launch) Five months later, on Tuesday, September 17, 2024, just after 3:30 p.m., the pagers began buzzing, chirping, and chiming, alerting Hezbollah operatives to an important communique from high command. Some had time to hold their pagers to their faces to read the screen. Some were still fumbling at their belt holsters or digging in the pockets when the bombs detonated. Talk about targeting. Surprisingly few “innocent” bystanders, women or children were harmed. The Hezbollah leadership, now eschewing pagers, were left with their walkie talkies as relatively secure communicators. Not so much. On Wednesday, September 18, 2024 at 5:00 p.m. hundreds of walkie talkies  —  these carrying much larger packets of explosives  —  blew, some tearing out the sides of Hezbollah office buildings. Phew. More fodder for Hollywood’s gristmill. High tech, Machiavellian plots, prescient plotting, technicolor visuals, deadly outcomes. It’s not over. Just this last Friday, September 27, Israeli jets took out Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, along with his main headquarters hidden beneath a residential condo in the Haret Hreik Dahiyeh stronghold of the Lebanese capital. In so doing they reduced four adjacent buildings to smoking rubble. Still  —  a precision strike, all things considered. Hussein Fadlallah, head of Hezbollah in Beirut, vowed not to give in, no matter how many commanders Israel kills. “We will never abandon the support of Palestine, Jerusalem, and oppressed Gaza,” Fadlallah said. “Never” is a long time, and the Israeli ground assault hasn’t even started. But Hollywood is taking notes. The post Israel Forced to Live Beyond Hollywood’s Imagination appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Long ago and far away, when I was a student at Columbia, we boys wore Oxford cloth shirts, silk ties, and we shaved, washed our hair, and showed up in class with our teeth brushed and our breath fresh and clean. The ONLY place I see decent clothes now is on the bodies of the young, hip, and black. We looked like mensches. Now, students look like homeless. They are an embarrassment to the school and to themselves. In 1967, when I started at Yale Law School, we were neatly dressed, and looked as if we were ready to go into court versus Hamilton Berger ready for blood. In 1970, when we were getting ready to go out to earn the staggering sum of $300 per week to work a sixty-hour week, we dressed in J. Press neckties and Peal & Company tan bench-made loafers. I look around the law offices I occasionally see now in glorious Los Angeles. The boys and girls look as if they are on a crime show as fugitives from justice. When I see lawyers that I know are “earning” six-figure annual salaries, they look as if they should be hiding up in family hunting lodges far from a paved road. Why? Why have the appearances of the young lawyers collapsed? And this is not just about men. Women lawyers look like servers at nail salons, too. Why have the appearances of us male and female lawyers changed so negatively? Why has it become the fashion to look like bums and/or street hustlers? It’s a scary thing to see our professional men and women look like slobs. Does it make us look as if we are so rich and so powerful that we don’t really care what anyone thinks of us? Do we show up for “dates” dressed like rapists and sex traffickers? Where did the idea come from that the slobbier we look, the smarter and more competent we are? I don’t know where it came from but I well know where it should go — and soon. Is this “wokeism”? Is it anti-racist? Far from it. The ONLY place I see decent clothes now is on the bodies of the young, hip, and black. Let’s pull ourselves together. It’s not too late. READ MORE from Ben Stein: A Letter to My Favorite Grocer Inflation, Houses, and You The post We Need to Tell Them ‘Clothes Make the Man’ appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Writing in the New York Times, retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal has endorsed Kamala Harris for president over Donald Trump. This should surprise no one. Gen. McChrystal, one of the leading commanders in our ill-fated 20-year war in Afghanistan, supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. Trump is the greatest threat to the military-industrial complex since President Dwight Eisenhower. Ironically, McChrystal was fired by President Obama in 2010 after publicly insulting some top administration officials, including then-Vice President Biden. McChrystal is simply the latest graduate of the military-industrial complex to endorse Harris. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney, one of the principal architects of two failed wars under President George W. Bush, also recently endorsed Harris.  (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: None Dare Call It a Hostage Crisis) After his firing by Obama, McChrystal released a statement saying, “I strongly support the President’s strategy in Afghanistan and am deeply committed to our coalition forces, our partner nations, and the Afghan people.” McChrystal had previously urged Obama to provide him with more troops to finish the job in Afghanistan, reminiscent of some of the commanders during the Vietnam War who promised to win the war if Washington would just send them more troops to fight and die. Obama later criticized McChrystal in his book A Promised Land, for acting with “the same air of impunity that seemed to have taken hold among some of the military’s top ranks during the Bush years: a sense that once the war began, those who fought it shouldn’t be questioned, that politicians should just give them what they asked for and get out of the way.”  Trump Disapproved of Their Wars This is a trend that began in 2016, when Donald Trump criticized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then, Tom Ridge (Homeland Security), Michael Chertoff (Homeland Security), Robert Zoellick (State Department, World Bank), Michael Hayden (CIA, NSA), John Negroponte (DNI) and other “deep state” veterans came out against Trump. Trump called them and Hillary Clinton “the owners of the disastrous decisions to invade Iraq, allow Americans to die in Benghazi, and they are the ones who allowed the rise of ISIS.” McChrystal noted in his New York Times piece the importance of continuing to support the war in Ukraine. That was also a key reason why a group of 700 “National Security Leaders 4 America,” that included Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Victoria Nuland, Michael McFaul and Leon Panetta, and numerous retired military officers, endorsed Harris for president. They praised Harris’ “relentless diplomacy with allies around the globe [that] preserved a united front in support of Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression.” “The message coming from Washington’s foreign policy elite, many of them directly responsible for the counterproductive and failed U.S. wars and interventions of the last 40 years, is loud and clear,” writes James Carden in Responsible Statecraft. “They do not like, trust, and indeed, perhaps even fear, the return of Trump to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” That is because, as John Feehery, a veteran of Capitol Hill politics has noted, Trump is the greatest threat to the military-industrial complex since President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against its growing, undue influence in our councils of government. It is not as if Trump while he was president starved the Defense Department of money and weapons. He advocated and supported Defense increases, but like our greatest presidents — Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan — he sought to use our military strength to back diplomacy. He did not, to quote John Quincy Adams, go “abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The Dick Cheneys and Stanley McChrystals did, and they seem convinced that Kamala Harris will, too. Trump, at least in the last two years of his presidency, focused on the real threat to U.S. national security — China.  More War? In the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Far East, separate conflicts threaten to spark World War III. As Victor Davis Hanson has noted, World War II started out as separate conflicts in Europe and Asia that evolved and coalesced into the most destructive war in human history. (READ MORE: Hillary Clinton Stokes the Fires of Anti-Trump Demagoguery) For more than two decades many of the civilian and military leaders who are now backing Kamala Harris were responsible for waging futile, costly, and long wars and interventions that have made America less secure while fueling the engines and filling the coffers of the military-industrial complex. Why should anyone listen to them?     The post Endless War Champions Back Harris for President appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Back in 2020, I began to receive requests from the Biden campaign on one of my email accounts asking for donations . However the messages were addressed to “Stephanie.” I’m not sure who Stephanie really is, but I assume that she mistyped  or otherwise mangled her email address when she signed up as a Democrat. The emails stopped when the election was over. However, Stephanie recently began receiving requests from the Harris/Walz campaign for donations. Kamala and Tim are now Stephanie’s new best friends forever, or at least until the election. They are even offering friendship bracelets. Stephanie wrote back saying that, although she would love to help, she had all her money tied up in bail for her grand theft auto charge. I thought that she would be dropped from their list. I was wrong. They sold her address to another group and she began getting solicitations from law firms offering to represent her, and she continued to get requests for donations, She wrote back saying that, although Harris was a personal role model, her funds were tied up fighting a restraining order keeping her away from elementary schools. That did not deter them. A message saying that she was saving up money for her sex change operation had no effect either. Finally, Stephanie’s mother wrote on her account that she was deceased having been shot in a drug deal gone bad. The pleas for donations continue. I had foolishly forgotten that being dead does not necessarily disqualify Democratic voters. The fact that Stephanie is a felon, a pervert, and quite possibly dead says a lot about the kind of supporters that the Democrats are looking for; it apparently has pitched a big tent. This is a party that regularly portrays Trump supporters as knuckle dragging, violence prone fascists despite the fact that the assassination attempts against Trump as well as the attack on the Republican congressional baseball team that injured Representative Steve Scalise were carried out by professed leftists. The reality is likely that the campaign probably ignores incoming emails that don’t contain credit card numbers. Groucho Marks famously observed that he would not want to be part of any organization that would have him as a member. Independents and undecided voters should ask themselves if they want to be lined up with a party that would have Stephanie as a member. READ MORE from Gary Anderson: Trump Is an Extraordinary Manager of Client Nations Tim Walz, Unreformed Summer Soldier Gary Anderson is a seventy- six year old professed male conservative  and an occasional contributor to The American Spectator. The post Kamala and Tim, Stephanie’s New Best Friends appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

On August 1, 2020, Julie McCarthy sent an email to the Department of Public Safety to express her dismay about a recent visit to Sager’s Liquor in Hugo, Minnesota, where she observed numerous people violating the law.  Few people are genuinely evil; systems, however, often are, especially bureaucracy. “Employees were not consistently wearing masks during the 10 minutes my husband spent in the store,” she wrote. “six of eight people present in the store did not wear a mask in the short time he was in the store.”  Like many state leaders across the country in the spring of 2020, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz passed an executive order placing restrictions on the everyday movements of Americans. But Walz went further. His administration set up a hotline and encouraged Minnesotans to report on those in violation of the governor’s Covid mandates. Though the policy was met with controversy, Walz refused to back down.  “It’s for their own good,” Walz told local media in March 2020. Walz, who in August was tapped by Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris as her running mate, did not mention the fines up to $1,000 or 90 days behind bars for violators.  McCarthy’s email is just one of hundreds of “snitch” documents now available online following a public records request. The documents, which have received little attention to date, shed light on a terrifying phenomenon: Americans reporting one another to authorities for the crime of going about their lives.   ‘I Have Attached Photos’  In October 2020, seven months into the Covid pandemic, rumors began to circulate that First Apostolic Lutheran Church was going to hold a church service in contravention of state law. Though Minnesota had eased its Covid emergency order in May to allow “non-essential” businesses to reopen and retailers to operate at 50 percent capacity, churches, synagogues, and mosques were restricted to no more than 10 worshippers. A woman who identified herself as Amy Keranen emailed the Department of Public Safety to inform the agency of Apostolic Lutheran Church’s alleged plan. “I am aware that the apostlic [sic] Lutheran church at 2300 Cox Trail medina MN is planning to hold church services,” she wrote to the hotline. “And they will be serving meals in the church dining hall. I don’t believe this fits with legal requirements.”  It’s unclear if the state took any action against Apostolic Lutheran Church, or if church services were even held. But the email shows the zeal with which some Americans reported on one another in response to Walz’s invitation.   Reporting on one another isn’t exactly new in America.  It’s associated with some of the darkest chapters in American history.  The Salem Witch trials of 1692 saw no fewer than 144 people (including children) accused of witchcraft by their colonial communities. Nineteen were executed — after trials, of course. Christopher Nolan’s recent movie Oppenheimer explored another notorious chapter in America’s accusatory history: the McCarthy Era, a period that saw a “Red Scare” sweep across the country over fears of communism. As Nolan’s movie shows,  communists did exist in America. But it was McCarthy’s calculated and sometimes unsubstantiated accusations against his countrymen that created a climate of fear and political persecution. Minnesota’s Covid snitch line doesn’t exactly mirror these famous historical examples. Citizens in 2020 weren’t being accused of  witchcraft or Soviet spying; they were accused of much more mundane “crimes.”   “A bunch of teens gather in the skateboard park nearby,” reported one unidentified man. “There is definitely not social distancing between them. It’s in Plymouth. Plymouth Creek Park.” An astonishing number of emails show Minnesotans reporting on fellow citizens simply because they were enjoying recreation outdoors in contravention of Walz’s six feet social distancing order. In other cases, informants seem upset that businesses were trying to make a profit to survive.  “There is a bar/grill in Scanlon, MN that refuses to do what has been instructed of us, simply because the owner can not afford the loss in revenue and will continue to keep his bar open despite what the Governor has said or ordered us to do,” wrote a man who identified himself as Jeremy Johnson. “I have attached a few of the photos.”  ‘Ms. Schneider is traveling on Wednesday’ Unlike previous accusatory fevers in American history, the targets were not labeled devil worshippers (the Salem Witch trials) nor treasonous commies (the Red Scare). They were accused of breaking bureaucratic rules and dogmas. (That these were not rooted in rigid science is something architects of America’s Covid response concede today.)  In this sense, Covid snitching is more reminiscent of the reporting network that emerged near the end of the Cold War in East Germany. Many Americans are familiar with the Stasi (abbreviation for Staatssicherheit), the secret police founded in 1950 in the German Democratic Republic. The infamous GDR security unit has received abundant academic and cinematic attention, as has the Stasi’s use of “informal employees” (informants known as “IMs”) to report on their friends, family, and colleagues. But the feared Stasi were just one part of a much larger network of spies that emerged in the 1980s before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a 2015 Der Spiegel article, author and documentary filmmaker Peter Wensierski helped expose evidence that snitching in the GDR went far beyond the Stasi and included “almost every area of East German society.”  “Government agencies, political parties, associations, companies, universities, cultural institutions: Everywhere, people reported incriminating information about those around them,” wrote Wensierski. “They were totally normal citizens of East Germany who betrayed others: neighbors reporting on neighbors, schoolchildren informing on classmates, university students passing along information on other students, managers spying on employees and Communist bosses denouncing party members.” These were not IMs, Wensierski points out, and they were not snitching exclusively to the Stasi (though reports could certainly end up there). Much like Walz’s snitch line, German citizens reported on neighbors for behavior that hardly seems criminal. A bit of humor directed in the wrong direction could be enough to generate a report, and perhaps land a jokester in prison. Or perhaps holding the wrong political views, or taking an unauthorized trip.  Wensierski recounted a man’s phone call to a police headquarters in Döbeln September, 1987.  “Ms. Marianne Schneider is traveling on Wednesday, Sept. 14, to West Berlin for a visit. She doesn’t intend to return.”  “And who are you?”  Silence.  “You would like to remain anonymous?”  “Yes.” How to Judge Walz’s Snitch Line Defenders of Walz’s Covid hotline might argue Minnesotans’ pandemic  snitching was different. Informants in Minnesota were simply trying to keep fellow citizens safe. But snitchers in Germany could similarly argue they were simply making the world better by protecting the German state and advancing socialism. (READ MORE from Jonathan Miltimore: The Horrors of the Holodomor Must Not Be Forgotten) Judging the human heart is never an easy matter, of course. No doubt many people believed (or convinced themselves) that informing on their fellow citizens served a greater cause. But informants are often driven by motives other than altruism, and the hotline documents show this. In some emails, people seem primarily concerned that others are having fun while they’re following the rules and staying indoors.  “Every night, and during the daytime now too — we have large groups of teenagers and young adults clumped in groups in the park,” one unidentified man reported. “Playing sports games. Playing on all the park equipment.” Others complained that businesses deemed “non-essential” by the state (unlike liquor stores, which were never ordered closed) appeared to be open. “I wanted to report the Harley Davidson in Elk River off 169 appears to continued (sic) to be open,” a woman who identified herself as Meghan Ferguson reported. “I don’t see how this is an essential service.”  Some informant emailers sound genuinely afraid of the virus (an immuno-compromised man reported his neighbors for receiving a group of visitors), others seem less concerned with safety and more concerned with reporting rule breakers, such as one man who was greeted by a staffer at a Chick-fil-A. “I asked her if she thought it was dangerous to be within six feet of a car with no mask or gloves to protect herself,” he wrote on April 1. “She immediately stepped back onto the curb and was still within three feet of my vehicle.” The individual, who identified himself as David Palmer, said he proceeded to the window to receive his food, where he was met by a female manager with whom he shared his dismay. “I was handed my food and told to have a nice day,” he wrote. This doesn’t sound like a person terrified by a deadly virus, nor altruistically concerned for the public welfare. It sounds more like someone who feels powerless, but is trying to exert a measure of control over the behavior of others.   In a way, such a reaction makes sense. In these centrally planned environments, both East Germans and Minnesotans had been largely stripped of their own freedom, and humans who’ve lost their own personal agency often are more tempted to unjustly exert control over others. “The moment we undertake to direct the lives of others,” observed author Leonard Read in his 1964 book Anything Peaceful, “we lose our own moral compass, for we assume a power we do not possess.” Tim Walz and the Banality of Evil In 1961, the philosopher Hannah Arendt flew to Jerusalem to observe the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Watching the trial, Arendt realized Eichmann was no Iago or Macbeth or Richard III. He was a bland man, not distinguishable in any way except, perhaps, his “diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.” Observing Eichmann, Arendt coined a phrase: “the banality of evil.”  The words come to mind while reading the reports to Walz’s snitch line. Reports of “a large group of adults playing pickleball at Washington Park in Richfield” are nothing if not banal; yet, they are also sinister, which is no doubt what prompted one writer to quip that “totalitarianism consists in reams of paper.” Arendt reminded us that the face of evil is often not what we expect. Like Solzhenitsyn, she understood that the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart. Few people are genuinely evil; systems, however, often are, especially bureaucracy. The dehumanizing nature of bureaucracy is a theme that has been explored by countless thinkers, from Franz Kafka to the Nobel Prize-winning poet Günter Grass to Arendt, who described it as the root of collective evil.   “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them,” she wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Essay on the Banality of Evil. What made Walz’s snitch line so evil was that it combined the madness of crowds with the bureaucratic power of the state. His policy did nothing to stop the virus and was quietly rescinded in November 2020, much like policies in a dozen or so other states. But fear, paranoia, and tribalism were fruits of the policy, which encouraged people of the Bread and Butter state to snitch on one another much like East Germans during the Cold War.   Astonishingly, Walz, who has been campaigning across the Midwest, is now lecturing others about the importance of minding one’s own Ps and Qs. “In Minnesota, just like in Wisconsin, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make,” he said, “even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves. We know there’s a golden rule. Mind your own damn business!” The “mind your own business” theme is playing well to audiences. So well, that Walz included the phrase in his remarks at the Democratic National Convention, drawing massive applause.  (READ MORE from Jonathan Miltimore: Nancy Pelosi’s Other Legacy: A Mountain of Debt for Our Children) Minding one’s own business is good advice and a tenet of classical liberalism. Unfortunately, as someone who has lived in Minnesota the last 15 years, I can assure you that Tim Walz is not interested in minding his own businesses. Nor does he respect the personal choices or individual rights of Americans.  Walz may not be evil, but his snitch line was—and Americans should not forget it. The post In Minnesota, Tim Walz Had a Covid Snitch Line appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.