Utopia, you are standing in it!

On the afternoon of May 4^th – some five and a half hours after terrorists in the Gaza Strip had begun launching an intense barrage of rocket attacks against Israeli civilians – the BBC News website published an article headlined “Hostilities flare up as rockets hit Israel from Gaza” and tagged “Gaza border clashes” on its ‘Middle East’ page.

In the hours that followed the article was updated sixteen times. The final version – which will remain on the BBC News website as ‘historical records’ – includes some notable points.

The immediate background to the story was portrayed by the BBC as follows:

“Four Palestinians, including two Hamas militants, were killed on Friday after an attack injured two Israeli soldiers.”

Under the sub-heading “What triggered the latest unrest?” readers were told that:

“The violence began during weekly Friday protests in Gaza against the tight blockade…

Bored Panda has a heartwarming story of a Scottish man who, cycling around the world, came upon a stray tabby (click on screenshot). The rest is history.

This three-minute video, embedded in a tweet, tells the tale:

Some photos and text from the article:

In September 2018, Dean Nicholson had one goal – to cycle across the globe solo – and he began his long journey riding from his hometown Dunbar, Scotland. The 31-year-old Scottish traveler was tired from his nine-to-five job as a welder so he wanted to change his lifestyle and see the world from a bicycle seat.

The trip went great as he traveled south, passing through eight different countries and sharing his wild adventures online. But when he was crossing the Bosnian border into Montenegro, his plans…

In his latest weekly “Interesting Times” column in New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan lays out why he thinks Joe Biden might be the best candidate to beat Trump in November, 2020.  I think I agree with him, though it’s certainly early days. Some Leftists, though, are saying we need a woman candidate or a minority candidate. Even Pete Buttigieg, who’s openly gay and married to another man, has been dissed by some Leftists for being “just another white male.”

My own view is that it’s far more important to get rid of Trump than to run a candidate who isn’t the strongest one we have (that could, of course, be a member of a minority who isn’t gay).  Right now Biden is the strongest candidate, at least according to the polls, and his numbers run far above those of the other contenders. And I don’t see him as “too…

Donald Trump is an incoherent mix of good policies and bad policies.

Some of his potential 2020 opponents, by contrast, are coherent but crazy.

And economic craziness exists in other nations as well.

In a column for the New York Times, Jochen Bittner writes about how a rising star of Germany’s Social Democrat Party wants the type of socialism that made the former East Germany an economic failure.

Socialism, the idea that workers’ needs are best met by the collectivization of the means of production… A system in which factories, banks and even housing were nationalized required a planned economy, as a substitute for capitalist competition. Central planning, however, proved unable to meet people’s individual demands… Eventually, the entire system collapsed; as it did everywhere else, socialism in Germany failed. Which is why it is strange, in 2019, to see socialism coming back into German mainstream politics.

TheGuardian today published a review by anti-Israelwriter Ben Ehrenreich of a book called Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel‘ by Andrew Ross.

Ehrenreich’s review – which naturally avoids any semblance of balance or nuance and toes the desired Guardian narrative of Zionist original sin – includes the following claim:

[Jews] constructed a brand new modernist city distinct – and segregated – from its ancient neighbour, Palestinian Jaffa, which was built of weathered stone. In 1948, Jaffa would be cleansed of 97% of its Arab population

The word “cleansed” of course would suggest to most readers that 97% of Palestinians were expelled or in some way forced out by Israeli forces that year – a claim totally at odds with the historical record.  As CAMERA, and commentator Dr. Petra Marquardt-Bigman, recently demonstrated in response to a NY Times article, the overwhelming majority of Jaffa’s Arab…

Climate change is an urgent topic of discussion among politicians, journalists and celebrities. But what do scientists say about climate change? Does the data validate those who say humans are causing the earth to catastrophically warm? In this PragerU video, MIT atmospheric physicist and one of the world’s leading climatologists, Richard Lindzen, summarizes the science behind climate change.

Not long ago I wrote about how both a group of students and the student newspaper at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts are pushing to get “affinity housing” for students (a euphemism for segregated housing). The activist students, grouped together under the rubric of CARENow, have an Instagram site with many of their thoughts and demands. On that site, as well as at this link, appears a list of demands from CARENow addressed to the Trustees of the College (there is also a letter to the President of Williams, Maud Mandel, demanding her response by tomorrow at 5 p.m.)

One of the demands is for segregated housing: housing segregated not just by race, but by sexuality and other “minority characteristics”:

3. Improve community spaces and establish affinity housing for Black, queer, and all other minoritized students.

“Minoritized” is a new word that was coined to emphasize deliberate oppression rather…

Liberals like President Obama want to shoot for an equality of outcome. That system does not work. In fact, our free society allows for the closest gap between the wealthy and the poor. Unlike other countries where free enterprise and other freedoms are not present.  This is a seven part series.

Created Equal [6/7]. Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980)

(Laughter)

PIVEN: If you look at the leadership of the black __

(Applause)

FRIEDMAN: But I want to go back to the __

MCKENZIE: Yeah.

FRIEDMAN: __ I want to carry it back to an earlier point. Number one, there’s no question but what equality of results, if it comes about through a framework of freedom, is a desirable result. Number two, I argue in the film I’ve argued here that in point of fact you get greater equality of actual results by a system under which people are free to achieve unequal…