Middle East and Other Musings: One Of The Most Interesting Memos I Have Posted.

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You decide:

https://rumble.com/v1wac7i-world-premier-died-suddenly.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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Like David Horowitz, Bill Maher seems to have seen the light or fearing loss of his TV program/income decided to become more rational:
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Bill Maher slams woke college campuses: 'There is a rot, and it comes from academia'

Maher said FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was 'raised wrong' by his Stanford University professor parents

By Alexander Hall | Fox News

"Real Time" host Bill Maher scorches liberal academia for spreading woke ideology, noting with his guests how destructive it has been in American life.

"Real Time" host Bill Maher and his guests slammed the "rot" from academia and woke ideology Friday for filtering down to destabilize civilization and democracy itself.

During a conversation about the FTX crypto scandal, Maher noted that Sam Bankman-Fried, known by some as "Millennial Madoff," has two parents who were professors at Stanford and his mother wrote an essay in 2013 titled "Beyond Blame." He ridiculed the premise of the article and suggest being raised around those kinds of academic ideas influenced Bankman-Fried personally.

Maher quoted from the essay, where Bankman-Fried’s mother argued, "The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy, it’s time to move past blame

He scoffed and asked, "Is it really time? Personal responsibility is bad? And blame, that’s a thing of the past? No wonder this guy’s a f***ing crook. You were raised wrong, you were raised wrong, a**hole!"

BILL MAHER CALLS DESANTIS ‘POWERFUL,' RIPS ‘LOSER’ TRUMP: ‘HOW MANY ELECTIONS HAS HE NOW F’ED UP IN GEORGIA?'

Social psychologist Johnathan Haidt, appearing as a guest on the show, observed that research indicates that of the different disciplines, ethics books are the least likely to be faithfully returned to the library. He said, "There’s no sign that thinking and reading and studying ethics makes you more ethical, and one thing it does, is that it makes you very, very good at post-hoc justifications of whatever the hell you want to do."

Bill Maher quipped, "Kinda what religion is also."

Haidt said that the groupthink mindset of polarized groups are destabilizing countries around the world, "the more you hate the other side, the more you can justify anything because ‘they’re an existential threat to the country, and if we have to invade the capital to overturn the country’ or whatever, you see it on both sides." He warned that the more different sides hate each other, the less sustainable "liberal democracy" will become.

"When historians look back on our time, they will not divide us into red and blue and Republican-Democrat. The things that were wrong with us were wrong with both sides in different ways. I do think they manifest in a more dangerous way on the right," Maher said. "But on the left, there is a rot, and it comes from academia, and it filters down. Am I wrong about that? That’s where it’s all coming from."

BILL MAHER MARVELS AT GOP POPULARITY AMONG HISPANIC VOTERS: DEMOCRATS' ‘PANDERING’ HASN'T WORKED

Haidt later observed that many intellectual institutions, such as academia, the medical establishment and the courts, only function properly if there is "viewpoint diversity… if I say something and then people are going to challenge me."

He suggested that "structural stupidity" is a problem among some of the most educated groups of people when they have no viewpoint diversity.

"When everyone’s on the same side, and someone says something crazy like, ‘How about if we stop punishing people?’ and other people are afraid to object because that would seem to put you against a certain sensibility, and when that happens is a thing called ‘structural stupidity,’" Haidt commented.

Maher agreed, "Yes, we see it all the time."

Hait reiterated the point, "You get really smart people, but you put them together, and they can't think straight, and they say stupid things from the left that just play really well on LibsOfTikTok and give the right-wing lots of ammunition."

Maher joked, "And you get Onion headlines as policy."

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My dear friend, Lt.Col (Ret.) Allen West and fellow memo reader speaks out:

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American Constitutional Rights Union

The #MaricopaMulligan

In the aftermath of the 2022 midterm election cycle, something quite telling and perplexing happened. The progressive socialist left is always the first to decry voter suppression when it serves their purposes. How much did we hear this being echoed in Georgia when they sought to rectify issues from the 2020 election cycle? We even saw Joe Biden fly down to the state of my birth and rant about "Jim Crow 2.0." The Democrats should be very familiar with Jim Crow since they introduced 1.0. As a matter of fact, the city of my rearing, Atlanta, lost the Major League Baseball All-Star game due to the rhetoric of voter suppression, which never materialized.

However, in Arizona, there was a clear example of voter suppression, and disenfranchisement, in the largest voter population county, Maricopa.

Immediately on Election Day, it became national news that the voting machines in the county were malfunctioning. The ballots were printed out in error and were not capable of being read by the tabulation machines. There was a catastrophic failure in election day voting and the resolution for many voters was incomprehensible. Some voters were told to go to another voting location, but there was no guarantee that their current log-in was deleted. Other voters were told to leave a ballot for a provisional count, which many did not trust. Other voters left and returned to be told that there were still issues, and eventually, not be allowed to vote.

Please read the rest here...

Steadfast and Loyal,

Allen West

Executive Director, American Constitutional Rights Union

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Some interesting articles from my friend and fellow memo reader.

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Today's Evening Posts:

The issue is how best to contain antisemitism and not, how to protect free speech. -
Mike Pompeo: ‘Anti-Zionist bias runs very deep inside of the Biden administration’—WATCH - JNS
Ukraine is about to be annihilated -
Tiny Qatar casts a giant shadow. - Belman
‘We must remedy what happened’: Defiant Kari Lake still insisting she ‘WILL become governor’ of AZ - REPUBLICAN BRIEF
Russia’s strategic withdrawal from Kherson is Ukraine’s biggest defeat -
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The Same Old, Same Old Deja Vu
Victor Davis Hanson
Attorney General Merrick Garland has just announced the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith.
But Smith’s team will not look into the Biden family quid pro quo syndicate nor its incriminating confessionals on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Instead, it will further investigate Donald Trump’s possession of presidential records that were hauled off from Mar-a-Lago, as well as his purported role in the January 6 “insurrection.”
We know the script that will follow because we suffered through it for 22 months and spent $40 million for it under Robert Mueller’s special counsel team.
First, the Smith investigation will bear no resemblance to special counsel John Durham’s probes. The media ignored Durham. His team did not leak to the press. And neither a Washington, D.C. nor northern Virginia jury was ever likely to convict any perceived enemy of Trump.
Second, upon the announcement of Smith’s legal staffers, the media will grow giddy that their resumes portend another “dream team,” “all-stars,” or “a hunter-killer team.”
Puff pieces will blanket the media. They will attest, just like “good Ol’ Bob Mueller,” that the former Obama Justice Department public integrity unit lawyer Smith is “an old hand,” “tough but fair,” “nonpartisan,” and a “prosecutor’s prosecutor.”
Weeks into the investigation, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC will darkly inform their audiences that “unnamed sources close to the investigation tell us that “a bombshell” is about to go off.
Perhaps the “stunning development” will be similar to the fake “walls are closing in” scoop about the conspiratorial pinging in Trump tower from the Alfa Bank in Russia, or the “game-changer” Christopher Steele-fed, pee-pee, Moscow hotel room fable.
Yet one thing that will be different this time around is that the Biden administration is in power. Garland remains an unapologetic, embittered partisan. He is fresh off siccing a now-weaponized FBI on school kids’ parents and various MAGA enemies of the state.
After two prior failed impeachment trials, a failed special counsel’s investigation, and a failed and biased January 6 committee probe, Washington government lawyers know that their last and only Wile E. Coyote chance of catching the Roadrunner and now presidential candidate Trump is to get at least something into the hands of a Washington, D.C. jury.
We also know the script of the 2024 election from the last two elections. Election Day 2024 will be an afterthought. Election Night will be an introduction to Election Month.
Sudden ballot “drops” will start pouring in during the wee hours. Voters who went to bed watching many Republican candidates with sizable leads will awake to magical Democratic “comebacks.
We will again suffer through early voting, mail-in voting, ranked-choice voting, and majority-only voting. The more who vote, the more we will be warned of “voter suppression” and “election deniers.”
“Get out the vote” left-wing, electronically fueled projects like this year’s “Mind the Gap” involving Sam Bankman-Fried’s family, or Mark Zuckerberg’s 2020 $419 million de facto absorption of balloting collection in key precincts, will merely be replaced by new names.
There will be new, even richer virtue-signaling billionaires. But otherwise, the same old Silicon Valley-Wall Street font will vastly out-raise pathetic Republican efforts.
Unfortunately for Americans, the 2024 economy will likely still be wounded by nearly four years of inflation. High-interest rate correctives will still have choked off the housing market.
Unemployment and stagflation will still be termed “transitory.” Growth will continue to be slow but dubbed “steady.” High gas and energy prices will be near permanent but “coming down.” A wide-open border will still be termed “secure.” Talk of historic crime rates will still be “racist.”
President Joe Biden will still shake imaginary hands, talk of passing legislation through the Congress that he bypassed with executive orders, and still claim gas was $5 a gallon when he entered office. Fact-checkers will ignore all that mythology and still obsess over Republican “lies.”
The left-wing nexus will still warn of back-alley abortions that threaten millions of women, of children still likely to die if “Mega-MAGA” voters win, of yet another January 6 in the wings, and of the dangers of “semi-fascist” Trump.
There will be more pre-election October surprises, such as the spurious narrative that the man who assaulted Paul Pelosi — David DePape — was a captive of right-wingers. Who knew that the hemp-jewelry maker, illegal alien, nudist, and resident of a BLM/Pride-flagged commune was supposedly addled by “un-American” Trumpism?
There will also be more post-election, November surprises — like the mysteriously sudden discovery just days after the voting that Sam Bankman-Fried was a multibillion-dollar con artist and huge Democratic Party donor, and the appointment of special counsel to investigate Trump.
Who would have known that prior to November 8, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago presidential papers proved neither “nuclear secrets” nor designed for his personal sale after all?
Yet the only mystery will be why Republicans will still be shocked by deja vu.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of "The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won," from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
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Is Iran throwing down the gauntlet to BIBI?
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Iran says it has begun enriching uranium to 60% purity at Fordo underground site
Tehran also claims to build new centrifuges, says moves are retaliation for international resolution criticizing its lack of cooperation with UN nuclear agency
By TOI staff and Agencies Today
Iran said Tuesday it had begun enriching uranium to 60 percent purity at its underground Fordo site, a technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90%, saying the move was in response to international criticism.
The enrichment was being carried out using the advanced IR-6 centrifuges at the facility, and was a response to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s resolution last week criticizing Tehran’s lack of cooperation with the nuclear watchdog, according to Iranian state media cited by Reuters.
“In a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran has informed the agency that it has started enriching uranium to 60% purity at Fordo site,” said the semi-official ISNA news agency.
Iran’s Student News Network announced that Tehran would additionally build new sets of centrifuges at the Natanz and Fordo nuclear sites.
Under the terms of the 2015 agreement with world powers, Iran is only permitted to enrich uranium to 3.67% purity. That deal gave Iran sanctions relief in return for curbs on its nuclear program to prevent the production of a weapon.
The deal also called for Fordo to become a research-and-development facility and restricted centrifuges there, used to spin enriched uranium into higher levels of purity, to non-nuclear uses.
In September, Defense Minister Benny Gantz said the enrichment capacity had tripled at Fordo over the past year, months after Iran said it had begun enriching uranium to 20% purity at the plant.
The IAEA reported in July that Iran had 43 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% purity at other sites, enough fissile material for one nuclear weapon if Iran chose to pursue it
However, Iran still would need to design a bomb and a delivery system for it, likely a months-long project.
Iran said that the latest upgrade in enrichment was a retaliatory measure against the IAEA over the resolution submitted by the United States, Britain, France and Germany to the UN nuclear watchdog’s board last week, censuring Iran over its lack of cooperation with the agency.
A truck containing cylinder of uranium hexafluoride gas leaves Ahmadi Roshan uranium enrichment facility in Natanz to Fordo nuclear facility for the purpose of injecting the gas into Fordo centrifuges, November 6, 2019. (Atomic Energy Organization of Iran via AP)
On Sunday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said a response “was realized today in the presence of IAEA inspectors in the Natanz and Fordo enrichment complexes,” without specifying what the measures entailed.
He also hinted at the likelihood that the IAEA delegation’s next visit to Iran would be canceled.
Kanani added that “the Islamic Republic of Iran is always prepared to respond in the appropriate manner to the actions of Western parties when they return to their commitments.”
The resolution came amid an impasse over undeclared uranium particles in Iran, and as talks seeking to revive the nuclear deal have stalled, alongside international condemnation of Tehran’s response to domestic protests.
The deal collapsed after Washington’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018 under then-president Donald Trump.
Israel has long opposed the nuclear accord, saying it delayed rather ended Iran’s nuclear progress and arguing that sanctions relief empowered Tehran’s proxy militias across the region, with expected incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu coming out strongly against the deal.
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CBS ‘confirms’ Hunter Biden laptop is real 769 days after Post broke story
By Steven Nelson
It only took them 769 days.
CBS News said Monday that it confirmed the authenticity of data from Hunter Biden’s former laptop — more than two years after The Post first revealed its contents — as the first son’s lawyer complained he didn’t “consent” to the release.
The laptop links President Biden to his son Hunter and brother Jim Biden’s foreign influence-peddling, but high-ranking former spy agency officials claimed before the 2020 election it was likely Russian disinformation and the story was censored by Twitter and Facebook.
Most news outlets ignored the laptop’s contents until recently. CBS’s report follows belated verification of the laptop in March by the Washington Post and New York Times.
CBS correspondent Catherine Herridge reported that she received a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drive from former Delaware computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac, and that Minnesota computer scientists led by former Secret Service computer crimes expert Mark Lanterman said the files appeared legitimate.
Lanterman’s firm determined that the laptop’s contents accumulated over the course of time, as would be expected, and that there was no evidence that the documents were altered by outsiders
CBS news correspondent Catherine Herridge reported that she was able to confirm the authenticity of data in Hunter Biden’s former laptop.CBS
The CBS News report comes over two years after The Post reported on the contents of Biden’s laptop.
Herridge did not specifically say which documents from the laptop were determined to be authentic. But she said that two sources confirmed to her that Joe Biden was the person identified as the “big guy” in an infamous May 2017 email that described a 10% side-aside as part of a deal with a Chinese government-linked company.
“Two of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, including Tony Bobulinski, who received the email, told CBS News that the 10% ‘held by H for the big guy’ was shorthand for 10% held by Hunter for his father,” Herridge reported. “The author [of the email, James Gilliar] has not responded to CBS News’s questions.”
Mac Isaac says that Hunter Biden brought the laptop to his Delaware shop and never picked it up. He says the FBI took the original laptop in December 2019 after he alerted the bureau to its contents. In October 2020, he provided files from the device to The Post.
“At no time did any individual, including Mr. Mac Isaac, have Mr. Biden’s consent to access his computer data or share it with others,” Hunter Biden’s attorney, Chris Clark, griped to CBS.
Clark also said, without providing any specific examples, “There have been multiple attempts to hack, infect, distort and peddle misinformation regarding Mr. Biden’s devices and data.”
The incoming Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), said Thursday that he will help lead GOP efforts to learn about Joe Biden’s connection to his family’s business endeavors.
“This committee will evaluate whether this president is compromised or swayed by foreign dollars. This is an investigation of Joe Biden,” Comer said.
The first document reported by The Post from Hunter Biden’s laptop described then-Vice President Joe Biden’s attendance at a 2015 dinner at DC’s Cafe Milano to which his son invited an array of associates — including a representative of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, which paid Hunter Biden up to $1 million pear year while his father led the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.
The Post's initial report was denied by intelligence officials and censored on social media.The Post’s initial report was denied by intelligence officials and censored on social media.
Documents on Biden’s laptop revealed information on his international business deals and the involvement of other Biden family members.
Documents on the laptop show Hunter Biden also invited to that dinner a trio of Kazakhstani businessmen and Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, ex-Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov.
Baturina allegedly paid $3.5 million in 2014 to a firm associated with Hunter Biden and remains one of just a handful of Russian billionaires not to face US sanctions in response to this year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Online business records also indicate Hunter still holds a 10% stake in BHR Partners, a Chinese state-backed private equity firm that manages $2.1 billion in assets and takes a prominent role in acquiring overseas assets.
Hunter Biden co-founded BHR Partners in 2013 within weeks of joining then-Vice President Biden aboard Air Force Two on an official trip to Beijing, according to the Wall Street Journal. Hunter introduced his dad to incoming BHR CEO Jonathan Li in a hotel lobby and Joe Biden later wrote college recommendation letters for Li’s children, according to laptop documents.
In the separate Chinese venture that included discussion of the “big guy” getting a cut, Hunter and James Biden earned $4.8 million from CEFC China Energy — an arm of Beijing’s foreign-influence “Belt and Road” initiative — in 2017 and 2018, according to the Washington Post’s review of laptop files.
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