One of the most irritating characteristics of the conservative establishment (yes, there is one) is its conventional leftist slant on European politics. This became painfully apparent to me in how the New York Post on June 30 reported those gains made by the Rassemblement National (National Rally) in the first round of France’s legislative elections: “A right-wing party could seize power in France for the first time since the Nazis occupied the country in World War Two — with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally making huge gains in the first round of a high-stakes snap election.” Allow me to offer a few obvious points. Marine Le Pen’s RN has nothing to do with the collaborationist Vichy government that Nazi Germany allowed to take limited power over France in July 1940. That came after Hitler’s armies defeated French forces and occupied much of the country. Unlike the Vichy government, which passed anti-Semitic legislation in October and November 1940, the current French right abounds in Jewish voters. Éric Zemmour, the leader of the Reconquête party, which is to the right of the RN, is a Moroccan Jew. American “conservative” journalists often illustrate a tendency that is common to the left, particularly when it comes to describing the European political spectrum. France’s most well-known historian of the Holocaust, Serge Klarsfeld, who has relentlessly (and sometimes quite unfairly) attacked the French people for their alleged assistance in the deportation of Jews under the Nazis, supports the RN. He considers that party to be the one most sympathetic to Jews in France. Klarsfeld’s son, Arno, has expressed the same position. Whenever the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and other conventional center-right opinion source refers to a Western European party situated to the right of the ruling blocs, their preferred term for describing that party is “far right.” Whether we are speaking about the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, the German AfD, the Flemish Vlaams Belang, or the RN in France, our putative conservatives view these parties as thoroughly unsavory. Meanwhile parties on the left receive perfectly respectful treatment from the same news sources, as members in good standing of the free world. The electoral landslide of Labour under Keir Starmer in Great Britain last week received noticeably favorable coverage in the New York Post and on Fox News. Indeed, we were made to believe that Starmer and his left-wing party were entitled to power “after drought” and in view of the “infighting and scandal” associated with the Tories. Never mind that Labour abounds in leftist kooks and that Starmer promises to restart processing the applications of Third World refugee who arrived in Britain illegally. One might have expected our “conservatives” to note this problem associated with the leftist stampede in the British elections. So far, they haven’t. Even more outrageously, the American “conservative” press was so busy going after the allegedly extremist Marine Le Pen and her RN that it refrained from criticism of France’s Nouveau Front Populaire, the motley leftist front that ran against the governing Renaissance Party and the RN. The NFP, which may be the most dangerously radical party in Europe, gained almost 28% of the votes cast in the French elections. Unfortunately, this group will likely be pulled into a new ruling coalition in France, seeing that Macron’s Renaissance only won about 20% of the vote and seeing that like other globalist woke European leaders, the French president will not form a government with any party to the right of what looks like our Democrats. Last week, about 100 presumably mostly Jewish French authors and academics, including the philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff and the historian Pascal Perrineau, took out space in leading French newspapers to warn against the inclusion of the Front in a future French government. In this grab bag of leftist factions, one finds advocates of imposing Sharia law in France, anti-Semites of the left, and supporters of Palestinian terrorists, some of whom have been active in France. The call among the signatories of the statement to “block the ascent of the union of the Left” is an exhortation to Macron’s government to find other coalition partners, which means, given the present choices, Le Pen and the RN. American “conservative” journalists often illustrate a tendency that is common to the left, particularly when it comes to describing the European political spectrum. They seem to be immovably frozen in an interwar European frame of reference, in which the right is always made up of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, while the left and center-left are led by anti-fascists. The European right, it would seem, remains eternally tainted by association with the Nazis or the Vichy government, while European politicians who denounce “right-wing extremism” are supposedly our friends. None of this makes sense, and in fact this polarization became increasingly irrelevant after World War II. This archaic perspective has produced a thoroughly grotesque picture of the long-overdue revolt in some Western European countries against anti-national, anti-Christian, globalist governments that are destroying European civilization, while opening the continent to terrorism and an Islamic takeover. While those who fear terrorists cheer for the Rassemblement National, some of our “conservatives” stupidly identify the same party with World War II Nazi collaborators. Quel dommage!

If you thought the torrent of studies and data showing the COVID shots caused catastrophic levels of excess death would make the Centers for Disease Control reconsider, think again. The CDC just recommended more shots for all age groups and will continue to do so for one simple reason: the money.On June 27, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices unanimously recommended both COVID and flu shots for children over six months old this fall. Despite being ineffective and dangerous for all age groups, the vaccine is now suggested years after the pandemic ended, targeting children who were never at risk. The committee ignored safety and efficacy concerns, focusing solely on the expiration of CDC’s Bridge Access Program, which funds free shots for children.You got to love venture socialism. These guys really know how to play the game.How in the world can the committee be so obtuse about the dangers and ineffectiveness of the shot this late in the game?How is it that nobody expressed concern about a new bombshell study from Germany comparing various German states by mortality and vaccination rate, which found “no beneficial effects” of the COVID shots at the community level and that “the more vaccinations were administered in a federal state, the greater the increase in excess mortality.”How is it that nobody discussed a new Italian study that found “all-cause death risks to be even higher for those vaccinated with one and two doses compared to the unvaccinated and that the booster doses were ineffective”?How is it that a new Korean study, which found a 22.5% increase in Alzheimer’s disease and 238% increase in mild cognitive impairment in those injected compared to the unvaccinated, caused not even a modicum of circumspection through the ranks of these health care gurus?Follow the money.In May, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the appointment of eight new members to ACIP, which doubled the current roster of the group that signs off on vaccine recommendations. The Informed Consent Action Network discovered that all eight new members have a direct financial interest with vaccine manufacturers.For example, Dr. Helen Talbot, the new chairman of the committee, has received more than $425,000 in research funding from Sanofi, which produces some of the main flu vaccines, as well as several key injections on the child vaccination schedule, such as pertussis and meningitis.Dr. Edwin Asturias, an infectious disease doctor at Children's Hospital Colorado, has received several million dollars in research funding from various vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, two of the makers of the dangerous RSV vaccine.Four other members — Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, Dr. Noel Brewer, Dr. Helen Chu, and Dr. Albert Shaw — have received funding from either Pfizer or GSK. Is it really any surprise that these members just voted to green light more boosters for a vaccine that is universally regarded as dangerous and ineffective?Money talks, data and science walk.The entire HHS edifice of vaccine promotion and approval is a viper’s nest populated by the manufacturers themselves — all the while they enjoy indemnity from all liability. An FDA email obtained by the British Medical Journal shows that FDA bosses proactively inform employees that they are free to work for the very manufacturers they just regulated. Here is what BMJ editor Peter Doshi found regarding one of the employees who worked on COVID vaccines and is now headed to Moderna.During his final three years at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration the physician scientist Doran Fink’s work focused on reviewing covid-19 vaccines. But a decade after joining the agency Fink had accepted a job with Moderna, the covid vaccine manufacturer, and was undergoing mandatory FDA exit requirements. As he left for the private sector, the FDA’s ethics programme staff emailed him guidelines on post-employment restrictions, “tailored to your situation.”The email, obtained by The BMJ under a freedom of information request, explained that, although US law prohibits a variety of types of lobbying contact, “they do not prohibit the former employee from other activities, including working ‘behind the scenes.’”Moderna recently received approval for its mRNA vaccine for RSV and a $176 million contract to develop a bird flu vaccine. Does anyone believe Moderna will ever face rejection from these same gatekeepers?This revelation is even more concerning after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last month in Murthy v. Missouri, the government censorship case. The majority opinion made it impossible for citizens to sue HHS officials collaborating with Big Tech companies to censor those expressing concerns about vaccine safety. Now we know these officials are in the back pockets of vaccine makers. We fund the research and marketing of dangerous products, pay government bureaucrats to censor critical information, approve these shots, and mandate them for school attendance!You got to love venture socialism. These guys really know how to play the game. The question is what Republicans in Congress are doing more than three years into the COVID vaccine calamity, even as these same malefactors continue to approve dangerous mRNA shots. They will continue the travesty simply because they can.

With the wild debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump remaining a lively topic of conversation and the U.S. Supreme Court handing down landmark decisions on free speech, the administrative state, and presidential immunity, these are contentious and confusing times. So I decided to hang out with H.L. Mencken and solicit his opinions. Why Mencken? Easy. He was an iconoclast. Funny, perceptive, irreverent, insightful. An experienced journalist during a period that could be deemed the golden age of journalism. An essayist. A cultural critic. Humorous. Caustic. Combative. And an authority on language. Exactly the type of person I enjoy hanging out with, conversing with, and listening to. Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed and are right. Mencken (1880-1956) was also known as the Sage of Baltimore. He was so influential that even Ernest Hemingway made mention of him in “The Sun Also Rises” when the main protagonist, Jake Barnes, says, “So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken." Maybe, after reading Mencken’s answers to my questions, you will too. I suggest reading his “Notes on Democracy” and “The American Language.” Jeffrey Wernick: Mr. Mencken, any comments regarding the presidential debate? H.L. Mencken: On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. JW: And what is your opinion of Joe Biden and Donald Trump? HLM: The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. JW: But do you not think there is a moral difference in the qualities of the two candidates? HLM: People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and, if need be, murdering those who resist? JW: Do you believe that one candidate vis-à-vis the other represents a greater threat to democracy? HLM: Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed and are right. One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. The ideal government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone — one which barely escapes being no government at all. JW: Donald Trump believes that to save America, to make America great again, requires the adoption and implementation of his ideas or America has no future. What do you think? HLM: The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic. A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers. JW: Joe Biden refers to his own decency as an important reason why people should vote for him. Do you agree? HLM: Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. Whenever "A" attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon "B," "A" is most likely a scoundrel. JW: What did you think about the golf challenge each of them made to the other? HLM: If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for any office of trust in the United States. JW: Do you think that speech not moderated by platforms represents an existential threat to democracy? HLM: I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance. JW: After reviewing the Supreme Court’s last batch of opinions, what do you have to say? HLM: Probably the worst thing that has happened in America in my time is the decay of confidence in the courts. No one can be sure any more that in a given case they will uphold the plainest mandate of the Constitution. On the contrary, everyone begins to be more or less convinced in advance that they won't. Judges are chosen not because they know the Constitution and are in favor of it, but precisely because they appear to be against it. A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers. JW: Many people ask who represents the greatest threat to democracy and rule of law. I have a different question: Who represents the greatest threat to the state? HLM: The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out ... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable. JW: Do you think limited government where the objective function of the state is to preserve individual liberty and freedom is possible? HLM: The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. ... It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies. There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson’s day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions. At least 95 Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty. If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner. JW: With respect to taxation, spending, and the role of government in society, its appropriate size, scale, and scope, how would you describe the candidates' positions? HLM: When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before. The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of 10 that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods. JW: What, in your opinion, are the attributes of a successful candidate? HLM: When a candidate for public office faces the voters, he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. ... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre. If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner. JW: Which conspiracy theories do you find most credible? HLM: The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts. JW: Finally — and thank you for the time and conversation and patience with my questions — who do you plan on voting for? HLM: There's really no point to voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.

The self-taught artist is getting her first museum exhibition in New York City, where she nurtured her nascent interest in photography

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The Netflix movie Don’t Look Up received plenty of accolades for its scarily realistic portrayal of a professor from Michigan State University attempting to warn the world about a civilization-ending asteroid impact. In reality, there are plenty of organizations in the US government and beyond whose job it is to find and avoid those impacts. And the best way to train them to do those jobs is to run scenarios and try to determine what actions would need to be taken. That was the idea behind the fifth Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise, held at John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in April. NASA recently released a preliminary report on the results of the exercise, with a fully detailed one to come in August. This is the fifth in a series of exercises that have been ongoing for the last eleven years. Each exercise focuses on a different scenario of a possible strike to determine what actions would need to be taken immediately or over a more extended period. International collaborators contributed to the discussion for the first time in one of these exercises. Over 100 people participated, including representatives of the UN, UK, ESA, and JAXA. Notably absent were two other space powers—Russia and China—who would obviously impact any decision-making in a realistic scenario of an asteroid impact. Finding asteroids before they impact us is one of the main tasks of the planetary defense community, as Fraser explains. In this case, the scenario some participants developed didn’t directly impact China or Russia. However, both could have been affected by a tidal wave if the target asteroid had landed in the Pacific Ocean. The scenario called for an asteroid a few hundred meters across that had a 72% chance of impacting the Earth in about 14 years.  The projected path that the asteroid carved across the Earth went from the Pacific across northern Mexico and the southern US, passing directly over Dallas and Washington DC before crossing over the Atlantic Ocean, passing over Portugal, Spain (including Madrid), and northern Africa. It was probably not lost on participants that this scenario could directly affect the town they were sitting in. Calculations showed that there was a 45% chance the impact wouldn’t affect anybody, a relatively high chance it would impact between 1,000 and 100,000 people, and a .04% chance it would impact more than 10 million people—for example, if it scored a direct hit on the Dallas metropolitan area. That uncertainty and the extended timeline gave the planetary defense officials the most significant trouble for this exercise. Stopping a potentially hazardous asteroid comes with its own challenges, as Fraser discusses in this video. As in Don’t Look Up, political considerations played the forefront in the participant’s minds. Many repeated the sentiment of one anonymous participant reported in the preliminary report: “I know what I would prefer [to do], but Congress will tell us to wait.” The uncertainty about impact, and especially about whether it would affect anyone at all, was a significant consideration. In the scenario, the asteroid passed behind the Sun, so additional observations to clarify those estimates weren’t possible for another seven months.  The availability of resources was again a primary consideration, both to track the potential impactor closely enough and to design and execute a mission to potentially deflect it. Participants didn’t believe there would be enough resources for either task and stated that it was one of their main concerns in the future.  They also agreed that the tabletop exercise was a massive success, with it allowing decision-makers who would be involved in an actual process of determining what to do with a potential real asteroid strike to think through the steps they would have to take and what the likely political and public responses would be. Plans for additional exercises are already in the works, and the final report of the session is due to be released on August 5th, with specific assignable action items to come as part of it. While any expected asteroid impact isn’t foreseen in the coming decades, these sorts of exercises will continue to hone what is arguably one of the most valuable skills of any space agency – how to protect ourselves from one of our biggest threats. Learn More:NASA – Quick-Look Report – Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise 5NASA – NASA Asteroid Experts Create Hypothetical Impact Scenario for ExerciseUT – Another Asteroid Discovered Hours Before it Impacts the EarthUT – If You’re Trying to Prevent an Asteroid Impact, the Technical and Political Challenges are Staggering Lead Image:This artist’s concept depicts an asteroid drifting through space. Many such objects frequency pass Earth. To help prepare for the discovery of one with a chance of impacting our planet, NASA leads regular exercises to figure out how the international community could respond to such a threat.Credit – NASA / JPL-Caltech The post NASA Imagines a Catastrophic Asteroid Impact to Study How to Prevent it appeared first on Universe Today.

Whereas Donald Trump as the 2016 Republican presidential nominee battled the GOP establishment over changing the party's direction and in 2020 faced substantive internal resistance during his reelection bid, he now appears as the 2024 nominee to have won control of a party apparatus willing to embrace his policy platform and earnestly support his efforts. The Republican National Committee on Monday formally adopted Trump's 2024 party platform, which focused heavily on economy and border...

Gaza Division operations and airstrikes in the first hours of October 7 were based on limited information. The first long moments after the Hamas attack was launched were chaotic. Reports were coming in, with their significance not always clear. When their meaning was understood, it was realized that something horrific had taken place. Communication networks could not keep up with the flow of information, as was the case for soldiers sending these reports. However, the message conveyed at 11...

Last September, New York City began enforcing its strict new regulations on short-term rentals. Since then, the number of legal short-term rentals listed on Airbnb and other platforms has plummeted. Less than a year into the city's policy, known as Local Law 18, it's not clear whether the near-ban is achieving one of its central goals: relieving pressure on the city's severe housing shortage. But as summer tourism heats up, the dearth of rentals and rising hotel-room prices mean visitors to...

Former President Trump said it seems like President Biden will stay in the 2024 race despite calls from some members of his own party to step down in the wake of his disastrous debate performance late last month.  Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview Monday that Biden has an "ego" and he "doesn’t want to quit." "It looks to me like he may very well stay, and he's got an ego, and he doesn't want to quit. He doesn't want to do that. It just looks to me like...