Author Archives: Dana Pico

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October 6, 2023: a day of peace. The next morning in Israel would be a red dawn.

On Friday, October 6, 2023, Israel was not in open warfare with Hamas or Hezbollah. On Friday, October 6, 2023, Israelis were going about their business. At sundown, on Friday, October 6, 2023, observant Jews were beginning their Sabbath celebrations.

On Sunday, October 6, 2024, Catholics around the world were listening to parts of Psalm 128:

5 – The Lord bless you from Zion: may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life;
6 – May you see your children’s children. Peace be upon Israel!

On Saturday, October 7, 2023, terrorists from Hamas broke through the gates between Gaza and Israel proper, and went on a rampage of rape, murder, kidnapping, and mayhem. It was still the Sabbath in Israel.

As a terrorist surprise attack, it was wildly successful. 1,195 Israelis were killed, 815 of whom were civilians, and 251 people were seized as hostages. Many Israelis were wounded, and the ‘Palestinians’ used rape and serial rape as instruments of torture and terror.

Yet, for the ‘Palestinians,’ October 7, 2023, was a massive failure. None of the bordering nations came to Hamas’ aid, though Iran, a thousand miles away, kept sending weapons, and Hezbollah, not a nation but a terrorist group of Iranian puppets, tried to join in. Much of Gaza is in ruins, thousands upon thousands of homes destroyed, dozens of thousands of Gazans have been killed, all due to a war Hamas started but couldn’t finish.

Israel is not done. Gaza is still being pounded, and the Israel Defense Force has now focused on Hezbollah in the north. Almost all of Hezbollah’s leaders have been sent to Jahannam, and many of their fighters killed or wounded. Parts of Hamas leadership have also been sent to their eternal rewards, while Yahya Sinwar, who planned the October 7th attack has been stuck in underground shelters in Gaza.

Hamas Leader Is Holding Out for a Bigger War, U.S. Officials Say

Yahya Sinwar is increasingly fatalistic, has blocked a cease-fire deal and, so far, been frustrated that Hezbollah and Iran have not come to his aid, officials said.

By Julian E. Barnes, Adam Goldman, and Edward Wong | October 4, 2024

The psychopath Yahya Sinwar. You can see the crazy in his eyes.

The leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, has become fatalistic after nearly a year of war in Gaza and is determined to see Israel embroiled in a wider regional conflict, U.S. officials said.Mr. Sinwar has long believed he will not survive the war, a view that has hindered negotiations to secure the release of hostages seized by his group in the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.

His attitude has hardened in recent weeks, U.S. officials say, and American negotiators now believe that Hamas has no intention of reaching a deal with Israel.

What “deal” could be reached? Hamas have only one point of strength, and that is the hostages. If they surrender the remaining hostages, many of whom are already dead, they have no leverage at all.

But Israel has learned from past wars: whenever they grant the Muslims a ceasefire before the terrorist groups, or, in some cases, actual Arab armies, have been fully destroyed, they slowly reconstitute themselves, and a next generation of boys grow into men and want to take up the fight. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows this, and that’s why he is determined to destroy Hamas once are for all.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has also rejected proposals in the negotiations and added positions that have complicated the talks. U.S. officials assess that he is mainly concerned about his political survival and might not think a cease-fire in Gaza is in his interests.

Well, yes, of course The New York Times and the liberals in the State Department are going to try to put the blame on Mr Netanyahu. But, as the Times previously reported:

As an architect of the Oct. 7 attacks, Mr. Sinwar masterminded a strategy that he knew would provoke a ferocious Israeli response. But in Hamas’s calculus, the deaths of many Palestinian civilians — who do not have access to Hamas’s subterranean tunnels — were the necessary cost of upending the status quo with Israel.

American and Israeli intelligence agencies have spent months assessing Mr. Sinwar’s motivations, according to people briefed on the intelligence. Analysts in both the United States and Israel believe that Mr. Sinwar is primarily motivated by a desire to take revenge on Israel and weaken it. The well-being of the Palestinian people or the establishment of a Palestinian state, the intelligence analysts say, appears to be secondary.

The distinguished Mr Sinwar is very much like Adolf Hitler in his Führerbunker, waiting for the last, and refusing to surrender to save Germany from near total destruction.

On 28 April, Hitler learned that Reichsführet-SS Heinrich Himmler was trying to discuss surrender terms with the Western Allies through Count Folke Bernadotte, and Hitler considered this treason.

How is that any different from what the crazy-eyed head of Hamas is doing? He knows that he’s a dead man, and that his dreams of the ‘frontline’ Arab nations attacking Israel are nothing but fantasy, but if he cared anything, anything at all, about the people for whose liberation he is supposedly fighting, he’d not only surrender himself, and Hamas, but should have done that months ago.

This is being published at 6:30 PM EDT in the United States, which is half-past midnight in Israel. At this time a year ago, innocent Israelis were mostly in bed, living in the peace that they had. When the morning sun arose on October 7th, it would be a red dawn.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer conceals a truth that everyone already knows Is the Inky actually perpetuating a stereotype it wishes to avoid?

This site has reported, many times, on how The Philadelphia Inquirer censors the news, at the direction of published Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes. Miss Hughes told us that “racial justice” concerns will be considered in the newspaper’s “crime and criminal justice coverage.”

Teen critically wounded in shooting on SEPTA bus in North Philly

The shooting occurred on Allegheny Avenue near Third Street, police said. Some gunshots hit the engine area and disabled the bus.

by Robert Moran and Earl Hopkins | Friday, October 4, 2024 | 9:47 PM EDT | Updated: Saturday, October 5, 2024 | 2:33 PM EDT

A 17-year-old was critically wounded in a shooting on a SEPTA bus Friday night in North Philadelphia, police said.

The shooting occurred just after 6:15 p.m. on Allegheny Avenue near Third Street, police said. The teen was taken by private vehicle to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in critical but stable condition with several gunshot wounds, including to the face, police said Saturday.

The suspected shooter, described as a male wearing all-black clothing, got off the bus and fled in a silver Kia, which was located and pursued by police until it crashed at Fifth Street and Glenwood Avenue, said Inspector D.F. Pace. One person in the Kia ran from the car and was apprehended, according to video of the chase, but another remained at large, police said.

Based on a preliminary investigation, police said an altercation between several males on the bus likely led to the shooting near Allegheny Avenue and Fifth Street. The bus had several bullet holes, and spent shell casings were found on the highway in the 300 block of West Allegheny Avenue, so investigators are looking into the possibility of some shots fired outside the bus, Pace said.

There’s more at the original.

I noticed as soon as I read it: the “suspected shooter” was “described as a male wearing all-black clothing”. He wasn’t described as a white male, or an Hispanic male, or an Asian male, but just a male. And I was 99.44% certain that meant that the “suspected shooter” is a black male. The victim was described only as a “17-year-old,” but the Inquirer does tell us that he was male, through the use of the masculine pronouns.[1]Since, in English grammar, the masculine subsumes the feminine, the masculine pronouns are used when the sex of the person to which they refer are unknown, so that does not tell us, technically … Continue reading

But the reporters knew: the Philadelphia Police Department released a crime notification to the media, which Fox 29 News reporter Steve Keeley duplicated at 7:18 PM Friday evening, 2½ hours before the newspaper’s original story, which stated that the victim is a black male. And NBC 10 News reported last night that the suspect was a black male.

Let’s tell the truth here: when violent crime is reported in the City of Brotherly Love, people who hear about it automatically assume that the perpetrators are black. And, in the majority of cases, they are.

But not all of the bad guys in Philly are black, and when the Inky deliberately conceals the race of suspects and victims, is the newspaper not contributing to the stereotype that they are all black?

The Inquirer is privately owned, by the Leftist Lenfest Institute for Journalism, and absolutely has the right to print what it wishes, and not publicize what it wants to keep quiet. But it ought to be asked just how much journalist respect we can have for a newspaper that censors the news for political purposes.

References

References
↑1 Since, in English grammar, the masculine subsumes the feminine, the masculine pronouns are used when the sex of the person to which they refer are unknown, so that does not tell us, technically speaking, that the victim is male, but I also know that the newspaper’s reporters are too grammatically illiterate to realize that and use pronouns thus.
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When the Jew haters tell you who they are, believe them! "Students for Justice in Palestine" could have protested at Israeli consulate, but chose to protest at Jewish center

This poor site, along with literally hundreds of others, has covered the pro-‘Palestinian, really pro-Hamas ‘demonstrations’ on our college campuses last spring. I did note, with some pleasure, that at least at my alma mater, the University of Kentucky, the protests were carried out the way the First Amendment, which guarantees to all of us both the freedom of speech and the right of peaceable assembly, contemplated, peaceably.

Sadly, many of the pro-savages demonstrations at other schools were not entirely peaceable. But I did gloat report on those demonstrations fading away when school was out for the summer.

Well, it’s a new school year — though October seems like this article is a bit late — and the Usual Suspects have been up to their old tricks. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Temple suspends pro-Palestinian student group; Muslim advocates call to investigate police over alleged hijab removal during campus protest

CAIR is calling for an investigation after Temple University’s handling of a protest, where they say a Philadelphia police officer allegedly removed a Muslim protester’s hijab.

by Max Marin and Robert Moran | Wednesday, October 2, 2024 | 2:02 PM EDT | Updated: 6:37 PM EDT

Temple University has temporarily banned Students for Justice in Palestine from operating on campus, the latest in a wave of suspensions against pro-Palestinian student groups amid sustained protests against the war in Gaza.

The move comes after police detained four SJP members, including a Temple student, during a demonstration that interrupted an on-campus career fair last week.

So, the “Students for Justice in Palestine” demonstration was not peaceable in nature, but interrupted a meeting to help more sensible students at Temple who were looking to begin their professional careers after graduation. You know, the sensible thing to do after spending a boatload of money for a university education.

Muslim community leaders are calling for an investigation into the university’s handling of that protest after a Philadelphia police officer allegedly removed a Muslim protester’s hijab and detained the woman without access to her religious head covering.

If that happened, and I will never believe claims by “Muslim community leaders” without outside corroboration, it would have been because the woman was resisting arrest.

While Temple did not cite that specific incident, a university spokesperson said in a statement that the interim suspension stemmed from “recent conduct,” and the student activist group is now forbidden from holding on-campus activities, including “meetings, social and philanthropic events.” The suspension was first reported by the Temple News.

The spokesperson pointed to the university’s on-campus demonstration guidelines that are “in place to ensure the safety and well-being of community members while also encouraging and preserving freedom of expression.” . . . .

This is not the group’s first brush with university leaders. Temple president Richard Englert denounced an SJP-led demonstration in August after protesters chanted outside a Jewish student center on campus.

In a statement, Englert threatened disciplinary action against students who participated in the rally, which he described as a form of “intimidation and harassment.” The pro-Palestinian student group pushed back against Englert’s comments, arguing in a post on social media that the president “distorted our message to serve the false narrative that Temple SJP is a threat to Temple.”

No, I suppose that the pro-barbarian students wouldn’t see accosting Jewish students outside of a known Jewish student gathering place as “intimidation and harassment,” but the Jews on campus certainly would have, and did:

Temple University says it is investigating a student pro-Palestinian demonstration held outside a Jewish center on campus

“Targeting a group of individuals because of their Jewish identity is not acceptable and intimidation and harassment tactics like those seen today will not be tolerated,” Temple’s president said.

by Robert Moran | Thursday, August 29, 2024 | 10:40 PM EDT

Temple University said it is investigating for possible disciplinary action a pro-Palestinian march by students and nonstudents who demonstrated outside a Jewish center on campus Thursday.

The protest march began at the Charles Library, said Temple University president Richard Englert in a statement, then some demonstrators went to the Rosen Center, which is the home at Temple of Hillel, an international organization for Jewish students.

“While there, the demonstrators used megaphones to chant directly at the occupants within the building,” Englert said.

Emphasis mine. Using megaphones to chant directly at the people in the Hillel Center, the majority of who could be assumed to be Jewish, would constitute targeted ethnic and religious harassment.

“We are deeply saddened and concerned by these events,” Englert said. “Targeting a group of individuals because of their Jewish identity is not acceptable and intimidation and harassment tactics like those seen today will not be tolerated.”

This was clearly a protest against Jews in general, not just Israeli policy, as the “Students for Justice in Palestine” have conflated the two. Not all Jews are Israelis, and at an American college 5,774 miles away from Israel, it’s virtually certain that most of the Jews on campus at Temple are not from Israel.

There is an Israeli consulate in Philadelphia, at 1880 John F. Kennedy Blvd, which is just 2.6 miles away from the Hillel Center, at 1441 West Norris Street, pretty much of a straight march down Broad Street, though, admittedly, marching that way takes you partly into the Philadelphia Badlands. If the SJP wanted to protest Israeli government policies specifically, they could have been protesting outside the consulate; instead they were harassing people they knew to be Jooooos.

Temple’s actions won’t stop the SJP from existing; all it does is ban them as a student organization and deny them use of Temple’s facilities.

Our First Amendment was written by civilized men, with civilized behavior in mind; they cited “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”. It does not protect some right to harass others, or gather in mobs, or riot.

But the pro-‘Palestinian’ people in this country, and around the world, are not truly civilized men. They might think that they are, but they are supporting the barbarism of Hamas, they are supporting the antithesis of the Western civilization, the benefits of which they enjoy.  The “Students for Justice in Palestine” have a right to exist, and to protest peacefully; it’s only when the break the code of civilization that they become subject to arrest.

The one thing they do not have is any right to the respect of decent people, and for them, I have none. When the anti-Semites tell you who they really are, you should believe them!

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That this has led to fraud is no surprise at all!

My good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, has an article this Friday morning on the Biden Administration prosecuting a major ‘carbon offset’ sales company for fraud:

C-Quest Capital LLC Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Newcombe, who stepped down as CEO in February, was indicted Wednesday in New York on wire fraud and commodities fraud charges. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the most serious charges.

C-Quest develops emission-reduction projects to earn carbon credits that can then be sold to companies or other entities that wish to offset their own emissions. Newcombe, a onetime Goldman Sachs Group Inc. managing director and World Bank official, founded C-Quest in 2008.

You can read the rest on Mr Teach’s fine site.

But this one speaks to me, due to my experience. It was 2003, and carbon offset salesmen came and made a presentation to the concrete company at which I worked. Ready-mixed concrete producers use pozzolans, materials which are not cementitious alone but when mixed with Portland cement during the production of concrete utilize the excess calcium hydroxide liberated to become cementitious. We use them because they are less expensive than cement. The two most frequently used are flyash, which is harvested from the ignition byproducts of burning coal in power plants, and ground granulated blast furnace slag, the material left over from the smelting of iron ore.

The manufacture of Portland cement is a major carbon dioxide (CO2) emitter, so by the partial substitution of flyash, ready-mix companies reduce their carbon footprint. The salesmen told us that we could gain carbon credits every time we used flyash instead of cement, and that we could sell those carbon credits to other companies, to make it look like they were doing something to help fight global warming climate change, but, since it wouldn’t have changed how we did business since we were already using flyash — other than requiring some bookkeeping — it wouldn’t have reduced CO2 emissions at all! It was simply a way to take money, taking it from one CO2 emitter and giving it to a company which emitted less CO2; virtue signaling for the first, without having to actually spend significantly more money to reduce their emissions, and extra money for us, for doing what was already in our own economic interest.

Is anyone really surprised that fraud would be involved? When it comes to global warming climate change, the scammers and fraudsters will always be buzzing around.

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Killadelphia Yes, homicide is significantly down, but still more than thrice that of the rest of the Commonwealth

It was March 16, 2022, when this poor site noted liberal Philadelphia magazine reporter Victor Fiorillo‘s story about how applications for concealed carry permits had skyrocketed. He had expected an increase, following the 562 officially reported murders in the City of Brotherly Love, but “wasn’t exactly ready for just how big this increase has been.”

Mr Fiorillo doesn’t like Fox 29 News reporter Steve Keeley’s reports on crime in the city, just as WHYY reporter Cherri Gregg, who said his reporting “definitely makes me cringe,” while Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jenice Armstrong “wrote on Facebook: ‘His Twitter feed is also disturbing.'”

So, @phillyvictor, Mr Fiorillo’s Twitter handle, gleefully told us that homicides were down in the city, slamming Mr Keeley for not reporting on that:

Philadelphia Homicides on Pace for Historic Low. No, Really!

The news Steve Keeley won’t tell you.

By Victor Fiorillo | Tuesday, September 24, 202 | 3:29 PM EDT

If you’re addicted to local television news or Fox News or if you live your life based on 15-second blips on TikTok or whatever the awful Citizen crime app[1]Hyperlink not in Mr Fiorillo’s original, but added by me. I have assumed that this is the Twitter site to which he referred, but cannot say that I am certain. has to say, you are probably still convinced that Philadelphia is a desolate hellhole, the Wild Wild West of urban living, where anything goes and where crime is rampant and without consequence. The “car meetup” events from Saturday night into Sunday morning, which featured a ring of fire outside City Hall and at least one flamethrower, are probably all you can talk about. You’re living your best Steve Keeley life.

But here’s some news that Steve Keeley and his ilk can’t find the time to tell you: Philadelphia’s homicide count is on pace for a historic low. You read that right, and I’ll say it once again for those in the back: Philadelphia’s homicide count is on pace for a historic low.

Now, this isn’t fake news. This isn’t my opinion. This is real news based on, you know, facts. Data. Statistics.

According to the latest data provided by the Philadelphia Police Department, homicides in Philadelphia are down 40 percent in Philadelphia as of Tuesday morning compared to the same time period last year. If you think I’ve told you similar things in the not-too-distant past, you’re not wrong. Back in April, I cautiously reported that our homicide count was down 34 percent. I say cautiously because, well, anything can happen at any time, sending those numbers in the wrong direction. Also because we hadn’t yet hit summer, and generally speaking, summers are associated with more violent crime.

Well, friends, guess what? Summer is officially over. And we went from a 34 percent decrease in homicides as of April to a 40 percent decrease in homicides as of today. If we stay on that track, that would mean that we’d end the year with 246 homicides. And if we do that, 2024 would tie 2013 for the lowest number of homicides in Philadelphia for the last 56 years. To do better than that, we’d need to end the year with fewer than 234 homicides. That’s how many homicides the city saw in 1967. One can hope!

Perhaps so, but it comes back to the first story of Mr Fiorillo’s that I cited, concerning the surge in applications for concealed carry permits. And then this, from Thursday morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer:

One killed, one injured in gunfight during an attempted robbery that ended in SEPTA bus crash in West Philly

There were nine people — eight passengers and one driver — on the SEPTA bus, a SEPTA spokesperson said. Nobody was injured.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Thursday, October 3, 2024 | 9:44 AM EDT

A 36-year-old man was killed and a 17-year-old was injured when gunfire broke out during an attempted armed robbery in Mantua on Wednesday night, police said. After the teen and his accomplice fled the scene in a getaway car, the car crashed into a SEPTA bus a block away.

The 17-year-old was identified as Sage Black-Rivera.

Police responded to a report of a shooting at a candy store on the 800 block of North 40th Street at 10:11 p.m., police said. When officers arrived, they found the 36-year-old man on the floor of the store with multiple gunshot wounds, police said.

The man, who police did not identify, was pronounced dead at the scene minutes later.

The victim had been in the store when a 17-year-old boy and another male tried to rob him at gunpoint, said Police Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore. The 36-year-old man then took out a gun and fired at the two men, striking the teen.

The teen then shot the 36-year-old manm, said Vanore.

The two assailants then fled the store in what police believe is a Mazda, but only got a block away before the car crashed into a SEPTA bus near 41st and Brown Streets, said Vanore.

Miss Gregg complained that “it is not good reporting to simply repeat police accounts/narratives,” but that’s what Inky reporter Rodrigo Torrejón just did, as shown my Mr Keeley’s tweet with the image file of the police report.

There were nine people on board the Route 31 SEPTA bus, eight passengers and the driver, a SEPTA spokesperson said. No injuries were reported to anyone on the bus.

The two alleged robbers then fled on foot. Police later found the teen on the 700 block of Preston Street with gunshot wounds to his arm and chest. He was taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, where he was placed in stable condition.

Homicide detectives are continuing to investigate. The 17-year-old boy has been arrested, and police are looking for his accomplice.

Mr Fiorillo noted, in the first cited story about concealed carry permits:

Of course, just because you’re denied doesn’t mean you’re not carrying, and carrying without a license is generally a first-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to five years in prison. But that charge can be upgraded to a felony depending on the circumstances.

It seems sadly appropriate that I’m writing about another Philly murder while drinking my coffee from a blood-red mug.

We have not yet been told whether the 36-year-old victim had a license to carry his weapon, but we do know that the unnamed 17-year-old did not have one, because such permits are not issued to minors. I am waiting on someone to whine that the 36-year-old victim would not be dead had he not been carrying a weapon and tried to defend himself, not that anyone can know that, but if he had been unarmed and simply handed over his wallet, both armed juveniles would have gotten away, and would still be out on the streets, waiting to rob at gunpoint someone else. At least now the 17-year-old will spend — hopefully — the rest of his miserable life behind bars, at least he will if the George Soros-sponsored, criminal loving District Attorney, Larry Krasner, charges him as an adult with second-degree murder, Pennsylvania Title 18 §2502(b). Under Pennsylvania Title 18 §1102(1)(c)(1), “A person who at the time of the commission of the offense was 15 years of age or older shall be sentenced to a term of imprisonment the minimum of which shall be at least 30 years to life.”

Yes, homicides are down and crime is down in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, but there is still a culture in the city, and in most of our major cities, that allows crime to continue. Let’s use Mr Fiorillo’s statistics, estimating that Philly will finish with 246 homicides. With an estimated population of 1.55 million in 2023, that would still leave the city with a homicide rate of 15.87 per 100,000 population, significantly higher that the state’s 8.9 homicides per 100,000. Using the 2022 numbers — and the fact that the full 2023 numbers are not yet available is just plain sinful — Philly saw 514 homicides out of the Commonwealth’s total of 1,068, 48.13% of the total, when the city has only 11.96% of the state’s population. The rest of the Commonwealth had a homicide rate of 4.85 per 100,000 population, less than a third of Philly’s.

What will the numbers look like once full figures are available? Well, who knows, but even if they’re better than 2021, that won’t mean that they are good.

So, yes, things aren’t as bad as they once were, but if you live in Philly, you have slightly more than thrice the chance of being murdered than anyplace outside the city. It’s a shame that Mr Fiorillo didn’t mention that part.

References

References
↑1 Hyperlink not in Mr Fiorillo’s original, but added by me. I have assumed that this is the Twitter site to which he referred, but cannot say that I am certain.
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Karma comes to Taylor Lorenz!

The First Street Journal has previously reported on the very lovely Taylor Lorenz, who covers technology and online culture for The Washington Post. Miss Lorenz was most famous for her doxing of Chaya Raichik as the creator and proprietor of the Twitter site Libs of TikTok, along with her continual fretting about people not wearing face masks for all eternity.

But, I used the wrong tense above. Miss Lorenz does not cover anything for the Post, but covered her subjects, as in past tense.

Taylor Lorenz leaves Washington Post following her Biden ‘war criminal’ post controversy

Columnist had gone weeks without anything published by the paper, suggesting she was benched over the Instagram post</h4
By Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News | Tuesday, October 1, 2024 | 12:18 PM EDT

Reporter Taylor Lorenz announced she left The Washington Post on Tuesday after being absent for weeks following a viral controversy involving her calling President Biden a “war criminal.”

Lorenz went viral in August after a screenshot obtained by the New York Post’s Jon Levine appeared to show her calling President Biden a “war criminal” in an Instagram post while attending a White House event. Lorenz initially implied the caption was edited by someone else before admitting that she shared the post herself.

Translation: Miss Lorenz knew that she had f(ornicated) up badly, and lied to try to save her job. She knew that the newspaper was supporting Democrats editorially, and she had just posted something which hurt the Democrats chances in the November election. We don’t know that was the concern of the editors, but the credentialed media cannot go around calling the President of the United States a “war criminal” unless it’s in a specific opinion column, or he’s a Republican.

As part of the launch of her User Magazine Substack, she explained “why I’m leaving legacy media,” saying her type of reporting “has become increasingly difficult to do in corporate media.”

Yup!

Further down:

In the viral image shared by Levine, a masked Lorenz was seen taking a selfie with Biden speaking in the background. Included was a caption that read “War criminal” with a frowny face.

Fox News Digital learned the post was made in an Instagram story specifically using the “close friends” feature as indicated by the green star icon, meaning it was not posted publicly and could only have been seen by a select group of Instagram users of her choosing.

Perhaps Miss Lorenz wasn’t quite as good an “online culture” reporter as she believed. Anyone even a quarter-way internet savvy knows that anything you post on the internet has left your control, and can be ferreted out and used by someone else. That she sent it out only to “close friends” tells us that she knew it could be problematic for her, but wasn’t quite smart enough to not send it in the first place.

Miss Lorenz was trying to get Miss Raichik fired from her previous job with her doxing article. I don’t think she’s still doing real estate, but her net worth is now estimated to be $10 million, so being doxed doesn’t seem to have hurt her.

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Midnight oil blogging There was a tremendous amount of anti-Semitic propaganda on Twitter while my electricity was out

Burning the midnight oil

I suppose it’s my own fault, because I sometimes can’t resist opening up tweets in which the anti-Semites tell us how the Jooooos really rule the world, that I keep getting more of their bovine feces. The United States is controlled by the Jews, the United Kingdom is controlled by the Jews, all of the Western world is controlled by Jews.

With the 3¼ day power outage, I wound up rereading Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War on my Kindle reader. With its internal light, it was about the only thing I could read in a dark house, unless it was by my single oil lamp.

The Winds of War is a historical fiction novel, with Navy Captain Victor “Pug” Henry serving in various roles, at the time of the subsequent page, from Chapter 22, American Naval attaché to Nazi Germany:

“There’s the live nerve,” (Wolf) Stöller said. “And that’s what I’ve found difficult to convey even to the air marshal, who’s usually so hardheaded. Germans who haven’t been across the water are impossibly provincial about America. I’m sorry to say this goes for the Führer himself. I don’t believe he yet truly grasps the vast power of the American Jews. It’s a vital factor in the war picture.”

“Don’t exaggerate that factor,” (Victor) Henry said. “You fellows tend to, and it’s a form of kidding yourselves.”

“My dear Victor, I’ve been in the United States nine times and I lived for a year in San Francisco. Who’s your Minister of the Treasury? The Jew Morgenthau. Who sits on your highest court, wielding the most influence? The Jew Frankfurter.”

He proceeded to reel off a list of Jewish officials in Washington, stale and boring to Pug from endless repetition in Nazi propaganda; and he made the usual assertion that the Jews had American finance, communications, justice, and even the Presidency in their pockets. Stöller delivered all this calmly and pleasantly. He kept repeating “der Jude, der Jude” without a sneer. There was no glare in his eye, such as Pug had now and then observed when Thoda challenged some vocal anti-Semite. The banker presented his statements as though they were the day’s stock market report.

“To begin with,” Pug replied, a bit wearily, “the Treasury post in our country has little power. It’s a minor political reward. Christians hold all the other cabinet posts. Financial power lies with the banks, the insurance companies, the oil, rail, lumber, shipping, steel, and auto industries, and such. They’re wholly in Christian hands. Always have been.

“Lehman is a banker,” said Dr Knopfmann.

“Yes \, he is. The famous exception.” Pug went on eith his stock answers to anti-Semitism: the all but solid Christian ownership of newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses, the Christian composition of Congress, the cabinet, and the executive branch, the eight Christian judges out of nine on the Supreme Court, the paramount White House influence of a Christian, Harry Hopkins, and all the rest. On the faces of his hearers appeared the curious universal smirk of Germans when discussing Jews: condescending, facetious, and cold, with superior awareness of a very private inside joke.

Stöller said in a kindly tone, “That’s always the Jewish line, you know, how unimportant they are.”

That’s a rather long quote, but I think it important. After six years — at the time set in the novel — of Nazi propaganda, overlaid on Europe’s traditional anti-Semitism. Mr Wouk’s characters very believably accepted what they were being told.

And that’s what I’m seeing from today’s anti-Semitic social media postings. Like Alice, they can believe six impossible things before breakfast.

There’s an old trope that somehow, some way, Jews control everything in the world. If you follow that link, you’ll see plenty of sources on that silliness, and, interestingly enough, many of them predate the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who is not Jewish, reported how that myth at least partially motivated an attack on Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas.

My copy of Mein Kampf. I don’t own it because I support it, but because I read it.

Adolf Hitler wrote dictated in Mein Kampf:

To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung[1]The Frankfurter Zeitung was a Jewish-owned newspaper founded in 1856. It survived until 1943, as Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels found it useful, after the Jewish writers, editors, and … Continue reading moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brains these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.[2]Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 307–308.

While even the Nazis did not believe that the Protocols were anything but a fake, they used them extensively in their propaganda.

But now we’ve come full circle. The apologists for Hamas and Hezbollah, and the supporters of the ‘Palestinians’, have once again been spewing the line that the evil Jews control everything, manipulating President Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and pretty much all of the world’s leaders who are not attacking Israel.

How much of this is being swallowed by the pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, pro-‘Palestinian’ supporters? I honestly don’t know, but I see this stuff all the time by accused groomer Richard Medhurst, a Syrian-British pro-Palestinian propagandist, and several Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — accounts, many of which are probably bots — and though some try to differentiate between Zionists and Jews in general, a lot of the protesters just use the word Jew instead.

One final point, paraphrased from The Winds of War, and I cannot remember where in the book I saw it, but it’s in there: while the Nazis and other anti-Semites[3]The Nazis had tremendous help from ordinary Europeans, not just Germans, but the public in all of the lands they conquered, in finding and rounding up the Jews for shipment to the concentration … Continue reading claimed that the Jews secretly ruled the world, when it came to the Holocaust, the Jews didn’t have enough power to even save themselves.

References

References
↑1 The Frankfurter Zeitung was a Jewish-owned newspaper founded in 1856. It survived until 1943, as Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels found it useful, after the Jewish writers, editors, and publisher were forced out.
↑2 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 307–308.
↑3 The Nazis had tremendous help from ordinary Europeans, not just Germans, but the public in all of the lands they conquered, in finding and rounding up the Jews for shipment to the concentration camps. The Nazis could do it al by themselves.
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John Kerry lets us know that the Democrats have not given up on the idea of regulating speech

My daily diary informed me that September 30th is Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, and my immediate thought was: whose truth?

John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee, Secretary of State during the last half of the Obama Administration, and recently President Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, said:

“But, look, if people go to only one source, and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer it out of existence,” Kerry said.

“What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change,” he added, while acknowledging that different people have other visions for change.

It was 2004, and CBS News, certainly one of our traditional media sources, tried to torpedo the younger President Bush’s re-election campaign, and if it weren’t for two blogs, Powerline and Little Green Footballs — the latter of which has gone off the deep end whacko — spotting that the documents used to buttress the story were forged, and were able to publish that on the internet, it is at least possible that Mr Bush would have lost the election.

Thus, you can see why Mr Kerry doesn’t really like Freedom of Speech, at least not the kind of speech which doesn’t support Democrats.

It’s not just the 80-year-old Mr Kerry. President Biden wanted to set up a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, to be run by the highly partisan Nina Jankowicz, but that effort was first paused and then dropped due to the fiery reaction it received. Naturally, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz waxed wroth!

Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing Internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.

Those familiar with the board’s inner workings, including DHS employees and Capitol Hill staffers, along with experts on disinformation, say Jankowicz was set up to fail by an administration that was unsure of its messaging and unprepared to counteract a coordinated online campaign against her.

The lovely Miss Lorenz told us everything we needed to know about how Miss Jankowicz was expected to run her Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board: she expected it to block “far-right influencers” and “the “right-wing Internet apparatus.” The left were aghast when the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, bought Twitter — sorry, I absolutely refuse to call it 𝕏 — because Mr Musk wants it to be a free speech site, not one which censors some — mostly conservative — arguments.

Mr Kerry’s comments at the World Economic Forum, that private jet set gathering of the hoitiest and the toitiest in Davos, Switzerland to talk about Other People not being able to use fossil fuels, tell us one thing: today’s Democrats have not given up on the idea that they can somehow circumvent the First Amendment and regulate people’s speech. They are so invested in telling people what they want them to hear, and not wanting them to hear anything else, that they actually do thing that regulation of speech, to control ‘disinformation,’ of course, is actually the freedom of speech. And if Kamala Harris Emhoff wins in November, we’ll simply see further efforts to regulate speech.

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What would ‘Palestine’ be like if Hamas and Hezbollah won? If they were under the kind of government that Hamas and Hezbollah would set up if they could, 'progressives' would be utterly astonished to find that they'd be the first ones lined up against the wall.

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is, according to his Wikipedia biography:

an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be “the best novel of all winners” on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.

After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by (Ayatollah) Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. In total, 20 countries banned the book. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. In 2022, a man stabbed Rushdie after rushing onto the stage where the novelist was scheduled to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York.

Simply put, Mr Rushdie is personally familiar with Islamist governments, and what they do, but, not to worry, a Swedish PhD candidate, @AcademiskC — she does not give us her real name — thinks that she knows more about the Middle East than Mr Rushdie. She tweeted:

I have not one atom of respect for this guy. Not one atom. I am trying very hard to remain polite. There is simply no intelligentsia left. No one big voice. Nobody. Also a complete indictment of academia.

“AkademiskC”, from her Twitter profile.

Here we have a novelist under a death sentence in absentia, one issued by a hard-line Islamist government, telling us that an Islamic government in ‘Palestine,'[1]I always put ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinians’ in quotation marks, to note that it is not a real place, and they are not a real people separate from the Arabs. … Continue reading should the world be so unfortunate as to see the ‘Palestinians’ succeed in their goal of conquering Israel and driving the Jews — at least the ones they don’t kill — into the sea would not be ‘progressive’ in any sense of the word as Western liberals see it.

The Taliban are, of course, the most extreme of the Islamist governments. They force women into almost completely obscuring burkas, ban girls from being educated, destroyed non-Islamic art in Afghanistan, and basically imposed their version of shari’a, Islamic law, on the country. Homosexual activity can be, and is, punished, sometimes with death. That Iran publicly and routinely hangs homosexuals has been extensively documented and photographed.

At least Da’ish’s method of executing homosexuals seems to kill them more quickly.

The religious leaders in Iran, which has been funding both Hezbollah and Hamas, are only slightly less restrictive in their laws.

Of course, the Taliban and Iranian religious leaders are not Hamas and Hezbollah. The obvious question is: what have Hamas promised? The Wilson Center stated:

Since its creation in December 1987, Hamas has invoked militant interpretations of Islam to spearhead a Sunni extremist movement committed to destroying Israel. Hamas distanced itself from the longstanding Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—an umbrella organization for disparate Palestinian factions that ranged from Marxist to secular nationalists—by propagating resistance in the religious context of jihad, or a holy struggle and martyrdom. “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes,” Hamas said in its first statement in the late 1980s. Predominantly Shiite Iran has armed, trained and funded Hamas since the late 1980s largely due to its opposition to Israel and Islamic ideology.

The United States Department of State noted:

Hamas, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization with de facto control of Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and other extremist groups disseminated anti-Semitic materials and advocated violence through traditional and social media channels, as well as during rallies and other events. Hamas also continued to enforce restrictions on Gaza’s population based on its interpretation of Islam and sharia.

When people tell us who they are, perhaps we ought to believe them!

So, what would an Hamas/Hezbollah government over the Holy Land be like?

Israel is officially Jewish, but in my all-too-short visit to Jerusalem, I was able to visit and attend Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the site where Jesus was crucified and buried. The Church has existed since the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, and the subsequently ordered investigations and excavations of Christian sites. Following Muslim soldiers gaining control of Jerusalem, in 1009, the fanatical Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the church. However, subsequent Islamic rulers, as the city changed hands between the Muslims, then the Crusaders, to the Muslims again, the Islamic leadership allowed the Church in Jerusalem to continue.

Small mosque on the Via Dolorosa. Photo by D R Pico, and may be freely used, with proper attribution.

Today’s Jewish leadership allow and support the existence of Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. While there have been a few, and I stress the word “few,” protests by Jews in Jerusalem concerning Christian sites, the government have supported the freedom of religion.

It isn’t too far down the Via Dolorosa in which my daughter and I visited a small mosque. The Jewish government allowed that to operate as well.

I visited the Church of the Flagellation, supposedly where Jesus was scourged before his crucifixion, the Garden of Gethsemane, the (supposed) birthplace of Mary, and other sites. I had wanted to visit Bethlehem, but my daughter, an Army Reservist, was under orders not to enter the ‘Palestinian’ areas. While this was eleven months before the October 7th massacres, I understood completely.

I have to wonder: if the Islamists conquered the Holy Land, would they continue to allow the existence of Christian sites, or would they go all-out Taliban, and destroy them? When Jews attempted to visit Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, some Muslims attacked them.

On two occasions, Israeli security forces prevented attempts to detonate explosive devices when Jewish worshipers visited the Tomb. In June and October (2019), unknown persons also threw explosive devices at Rachel’s Tomb from the West Bank.

One of the extreme idiocies we have seen in the anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas demonstrations in the United States following the October 7th massacres has been a few demonstrators holding “Queers for Palestine” posters. What would life be like for homosexuals and the ‘transgendered’ in a ‘Palestine’ completely controlled by the Islamists?

I don’t know AkademiskC, and the odds I will ever meet her are vanishingly small. I’ve never been to Sweden, and if we ever do visit Europe again, that country isn’t high on our list of places to go. Sweden produced global warming climate change and pro-Hamas activist Greta Thunberg, so great wisdom seems to be in short supply there.

Still, as a PhD candidate, I have to assume that AkademiskC knows a little bit more than Miss Thunberg. Surely she’s noticed the increased crime in her country due to immigration from Third World countries. Yet she is utterly appalled that someone would dare to suggest that an independent ‘Palestine’ would somehow not be an enlightened and ‘progressive’ place.

Our Swedish doctoral candidate complained, “There is simply no intelligentsia left.” Mirriam-Webster defines “intelligentsia” as “intellectuals who form an artistic, social, or political vanguard or elite,” but I find it difficult to accept the idea that “intellectuals” or “intelligentsia” can accurately define people like AkademiskC, and so many on the left, who cannot see just what and who Hamas and Hezbollah really are. It is as though the “intelligentsia” are completely absorbed by the silliness of “intersectionality“:

Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how individuals’ various social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage.[1] Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, species[2] and physical appearance.[3] These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.[4][5] However, little good-quality quantitative research has been done to support or undermine the theory of intersectionality.[6]

Intersectionality broadens the scope of the first and second waves of feminism, which largely focused on the experiences of women who were white, middle-class and cisgender,[7] to include the different experiences of women of color, poor women, immigrant women, and other groups. Intersectional feminism aims to separate itself from white feminism by acknowledging women’s differing experiences and identities.

This is intellectual vacuity, empty and lacking content or serious ideas. It doesn’t take a doctoral candidate to see that the interests of different groups, even if the left find them to be oppressed in some fashion, are not all the same. The desires of the ‘Palestinians’ and Islamists are not at all like those of homosexuals or ‘progressives’ or feminists, and the Muslims have been perfectly willing to tell everyone this. The ‘progressives’ have simply been unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears.

If they were under the kind of government that Hamas and Hezbollah would set up if they could, ‘progressives’ would be utterly astonished to find that they’d be the first ones lined up against the wall to be shot.

References

References
↑1 I always put ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinians’ in quotation marks, to note that it is not a real place, and they are not a real people separate from the Arabs. ‘Palestinians’ are simply Arabs who live in the areas conquered by Israel in 1967.