Confirming what all of our self-proclaimed moral superiors already knew, Euractiv.com reported Wednesday that according to a new study that has just been issued by the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP), “the number of far-right terrorist acts has risen by 250% since 2014. When it comes to fatalities, the increase was even more than 700% within five years, with 89 people killed in 2019.” In fact, “there are now more right-wing attacks than at any other time in the past 50 years, with 13 far-right terrorist attacks that had each killed more than 10 people, compared to 24 Islamist attacks, and three linked to other ideologies, the report found.” As Benjamin Disraeli put it, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Assailant in Swiss knife attack was known jihadist, say police
A Swiss woman who knifed a victim in the neck and grabbed another by the throat in a department store in the Swiss city of Lugano on Tuesday was a known jihadist who fell in love with a militant online and tried to meet him in Syria, say police.
Must We Now Hate ‘Hillbilly Elegy’?
Here’s a really punchy interview with Batya Ungar-Sargon, op-ed editor of the liberal-leaning Jewish newspaper The Forward, on the meaning of contemporary liberalism. Ungar-Sargon says that Covid has exposed a class divide:
There’s a huge Covid class divide. The economy has not just bounded back for upper income Americans; it’s given them higher housing values and lower interest rates. Meanwhile, 12 million service industry workers are still out of work. Small businesses are struggling. The affluent see Covid as a health problem, while for the working class it’s about economic survival. And liberals are doing the same thing they did with Trump: Clothing their class privilege as science and facts and morality.
Why I had to leave The Guardian – If you were bullied by 338 colleagues, what would you do?
It is March 2020. For several months now I have been trying to write something — anything — about the so-called “trans debate” in my Guardian column. But if I ever slip a line in about female experience belonging to people with female bodies, and the significance of this, it is always subbed out. It is disappeared. Somehow, this very idea is being blocked, not explicitly, but it certainly isn’t being published. My editors say things like: “It didn’t really add to the argument”, or it is a “distraction” from the argument.
‘In the Trump era, the media abandoned objectivity’
Donald Trump’s time in the White House is coming to an end. One of the most remarkable developments during his term was the transformation of the media into the ‘Resistance’. Many journalists no longer saw their role as to report the world objectively, impartially or even truthfully. Instead, they were possessed by an all-consuming desire to bring down Trump. Stories that could damage Trump were relentlessly pursued, even if there was little to back them up. Meanwhile, major stories, such as the worst rioting in 50 years in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests, were barely explored, seemingly in case they benefitted Trump. How did the media get here? And what does it mean for the future of journalism?
The Return of Obama–Biden Energy Cronyism
Green lobbyists and other Obama favorites are about to enter a new golden age.
After 47 years in government, hundreds of relationships with Washington insiders, and a son who made millions off the family name from foreign regimes, the media is “shocked” that the incoming Biden administration is planning on filling dozens of high-level positions with lobbyists.
From pharmaceutical to Big Tech lobbyists, the Biden administration is placing the “Open for Business” sign at the D.C. trough. Among those most excited to start feasting are the energy industry lobbyists, who made millions during the Obama–Biden years.
“They’re very easy targets”: Old Order Mennonite churches, schools shut by public health
Old Order Mennonites have had their churches and schools forcibly closed following what the local health authority deemed an “outbreak” of COVID-19.
The Stealing of the Presidency, 2020
The left-wing news media didn’t just poison the information environment with their incessantly negative coverage of President Trump going into the 2020 election. They also refused to give airtime to important arguments of the Republican campaign — both pro-Trump and anti-Biden — which meant millions of voters cast their ballots knowing only what the media permitted them to know about the candidates.
WTF?
Salvador, Brazil: Four men attempted to rob a convenience store at the moment a customer was paying for his goods. Forced to lay flat, one of the robbers attempts to check the man. A poor job at best and that cost him and his two idiot friends their lives as they exchange fire with the officer.
Long tumble
Matt Drudge Logs Off
The Drudge Report has become a conformist shadow of its formerly bratty, oppositional self. Why?
It was the kind of story that would once have had Matt Drudge deploying font sizes that newspapers used to reserve for declarations of war. On Oct. 14, Twitter and Facebook blocked users from spreading a New York Post article alleging that Hunter Biden had brokered meetings between his father, then the vice president of the United States, and executives at a Ukrainian energy firm where the younger Biden held an $80,000-a-month sinecure. The Post’s article included photos of what appeared to be an exhausted and intoxicated-looking Biden in various states of undress.
Canada’s climate-change child soldiers: The exploitation of children to front a climate-change lawsuit is ethically troubling
On Nov. 12 an Ontario judge refused to strike out a lawsuit by a group of two minor children and five youths alleging that the Ontario government’s 2018 reduction in its climate-change target by 15 per cent violates their constitutional rights to life, liberty and security of the person. This judgment conflicts with a judgment of the Federal Court two weeks earlier, striking out an almost identical claim. The Ontario court should have followed the Federal Court precedent.
Google Plots to Use the Biden Administration to Avoid Accountability
Biden’s administration will be packed with Big Tech insiders.
Google is crafting plans to convince the incoming Biden administration to allow it to continue its growing monopoly over the internet.
The company, facing an antitrust suit from the Department of Justice and heightened public opposition to its power, will conduct an aggressive campaign on the Biden administration, including deploying an army of lobbyists paid millions of dollars and mobilizing tech insiders within the administration.
Google will find it far easier to influence the Biden administration than the Trump administration.
Bribed: Subverting American Universities
A recent governmental report exposes the “purchased” influence foreign nations have on America’s most prestigious universities and, as a result, on what America’s current and upcoming generations of analysts and policymakers will think and believe.
More than one-third of the nearly $20 billion in foreign donations and contracts made to American universities between just 2014 and 2020 were never disclosed as required by federal law, according to “Institutional Compliance with Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965,” a Department of Education report released on October 20, 2020.
Among those “gifts” were more than $3 billion from the Muslim Brotherhood’s number one state backer, Qatar; more than $1.1 billion from the chief disseminator of “radical” Islamic ideology, Saudi Arabia; and nearly $1.5 billion from China.