“We did this repeatedly, at the highest levels and I want to make things clear — we did this behind closed doors. We received various explanations, but the basic situation has not changed. Certain shipments trickled in, but the bulk of the munitions was left behind,” he said.

“After months during which the situation was static, I decided to make it public,” Netanyahu said. “I did this based on years of experience and knowing this step was essential to release the bottleneck. I anticipated it would involve personal attacks against me both from within and without,” Netanyahu said. “I’m willing to endure personal attacks for the sake of Israel’s security,” he added.

 There are things we take for granted until, one day, we are made to realize how unique they are. For atheist and historian Tom Holland, a trip to the war-torn Iraqui town of Sinjar gave him a different perspective on one of the most commonly accepted symbols of our culture: the Christian cross. //

If we take a deeper look at the fundamentals like Holland did, there can be no comparison. Holland was working on a book about the impact of Christianity on history when he was invited to visit Sinjar, a town that had been held captive by the Islamic State for two years. When he arrived with the film team, they encountered destruction beyond belief.

https://youtu.be/cDa4vpkNKeQ?si=_osxjy2uBmD4_tVz&t=1353

 The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a part of President Trump's 2017 'Tax Cuts and Jobs Act' that levied a tax on capital appreciation is constitutional. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

The court ruled 7-2 that the mandatory repatriation tax, or MRT, is constitutional under the taxation regimes defined in Article I and the 16th Amendment. In short, the MRT imposed a one-time requirement for US citizens and companies to repatriate money held overseas. //

The Moores had earned $0 from their investment, but the value of their investment had increased because the business they invested in was successful. Because their investment was successful, that unrealized gain, which could totally disappear in a few months if things went pear-shaped, was taxed.

Why is this important?

The lodestar of the far left is "income inequality." They want everyone to be poor but them. Where their policies are defeated is by frugality and investment. //

The wealth tax's strategy is to prevent the accumulation of intergenerational wealth and penalize those who work hard, save, and invest in favor of those who consume. Every time your stock portfolio or home increases in value, a wealth tax would make that gain taxable, even if you didn't cash out. //

FreeWilledThinker
an hour ago
I just read the opinion and, even though I am a Constitutionalist and favor strict construction, I would have voted with the majority on this one. The reason why is due to the pass-through nature of the company. Every LLC in the U.S. works this way, where you get a K-1 and get taxed, even where not a cent has come into your bank account.

I think the muddy water comes from the ownership mechanism. As a shareholder, the Moore's wish to treat the pass-through as though it is not taxable on the owned company's income, but it would be were it based in the U.S. and did not pay any tax on the base income. //

Buckeye kamief
18 minutes ago
But that interest would be taxable if NOT in an IRA -- which is the crux of this. These folks were catching gains on a foreign corporation NOT in an IRA, yet because of reinvestment, they weren't paying any taxes. Compare to US tax code in existence -- if you have a stock and it's in a dividend re-investment program, which is effectively exactly what they were doing, you DO PAY TAXES on those dividends, even though you chose to re-invest. That's another reason I agree with the USSC on this one. Their Indian corporation was making money, but not calling it a "dividend", and they kept putting it back in....sorry that's basically tax evasion by US code.

I've written a third edition of Security Engineering. The e-book version is available now for $44 from Wiley and Amazon; paper copies are available from Amazon here for delivery in the USA and here for the UK.

Here are the chapters, with links to the seven sample chapters as I last put them online for review: //

Here are fifteen teaching videos we made based on the book for a security engineering class at Edinburgh, taught to masters students and fourth-year undergrads: //

The Second Edition (2008)

Download for free here:

 I deeply appreciate the support we were given by President Biden and the United States administration for our war effort from the beginning. President Biden came here, he sent two carrier groups, and he gave us valuable assistance and ammunition and weapons from the beginning of the war. I appreciate that. And I remain appreciative.

We began to see that we had some significant problems emerging a few months ago. And in fact, we tried, in many, many quiet conversations between our officials and American officials, and between me and the president to try to iron out this diminution of supply.

And we haven’t been able to solve it. //

What we learn from Netanyahu's confession of spending months behind the scenes trying to get Biden to do what he says publicly he is doing, is that Biden is playing us all. He says one thing publicly to appease one group, then secretly does another thing to appease a different group. This game of charades has one goal - for Biden to never be held accountable because he maintains the facade that he is giving everyone what they want, while in reality giving them nothing.

Sometimes, when teaching theology at a Southern Baptist seminary, I would quote Pressler warning about what he called the “Dalmatian theory of inspiration.”

“Once you say that the Bible could contain error, you make yourself the judge of what portions of the Bible are true and which portions are error,” Pressler said in an interview at the height of the Southern Baptist controversy over biblical inerrancy. “It is a presumptuous thing for an individual to edit God. Somebody has called it the spot theory of inspiration. The Bible was inspired in spots, and we are inspired to spot the spots.”

Even before the court actions and subsequent revelations, though, those of us in the conservative wing of Baptist life should have recognized the low view of biblical authority even in the actions Pressler did in full public view. Instead, we were told, and believed, that the stakes were too high—the orthodoxy of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination—to worry that the warlords leading the charge were not like Jesus. Many of us learned to tolerate the idea that one can do evil that good may result—a contradiction of the inerrant Word of God (Rom. 3:8).

The implicit idea is that, if the stakes are high enough, the usual norms of Christian morality—on truth-telling and kindness, gentleness, love, joy, self-control, etc.—can be ignored, at least long enough to fix the problem and return to normal.

This is not an unusual temptation: Let’s violate human rights in order to save human rights. Let’s terminate the Constitution to save the Constitution. Let’s elect sexual abusers to protect the family. Let’s disobey the Bible to save the Bible. Pressler warned (about other people in other situations) that what is tolerated is ultimately celebrated. That’s not always true, of course, but it certainly was in the case of conviction defined as quarrelsomeness.

Before one knows it, one ends up with a partisan definition of truth, all the more ironic for defenders of biblical inerrancy and—with a situational definition of ethics—for warriors against moral relativism. When this happens, the criterion by which the confession of faith is interpreted is through whatever controversy enlivens the crowd. Biblical passages that seem to be violated by one’s “enemies” are then emphasized, while those applying to one’s own “side” are minimized. To do this well, one needs some authoritative, if not authoritarian, leaders to spot the spots that are to be underlined and to skip over those to be ignored.

What difference does it make if one’s liberalism is characterized by ignoring Paul but quoting the Sermon on the Mount, or by ignoring the Sermon on the Mount but quoting Paul? How is one a liberal who explains away the Exodus but takes literally the Prophets, while that’s not true for the one who explains away the Prophets but takes literally the Exodus?

If the Bible is breathed out by God, then all of it is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16, ESV throughout). A high view of biblical authority does not, by itself, guarantee orthodoxy.

Last month, the Secretary of the Air Force put on a flight suit and sat in the front seat of an F-16.

His F-16 spent an hour in the air, dogfighting with another Air Force fighter. His jet was piloted by AI. //

I was reminded of the scene from "2001: A Space Odyssey." Machines deciding what is right and wrong. //

jumper
16 minutes ago edited
Between a president that keeps threatening to use F-15's against us and a woke military that will absolutely fire on their own people we may as well take our chances with the computers.

But the reality is quite different. This isn't "AI" in the sense that it's sentient and self-determinant. It's adaptive software that eliminates the problems of the human in the aircraft. There would be hard-wired kill switches and all sorts of other safety measures that sci-fi tries to pretend is easily bypassed. Put it this way: the Chinese and the Russians will be designing their own UCAV's. We would be foolish to fall behind in this.

 Since the beginning of the Rise of Trump, I've maintained that Trump is not a cause, but a symptom. His initial seeking of political office was a reaction to what many Americans see as the rise of a political elite in the United States; politicians serve as though they were the Roman Senate, appointed for life, and many of them grow monstrously rich while in office. There are those on the left now who are comparing Trump to Caesar, but that's a canard; Trump has no military background, and he has not sought to make himself a dictator no matter what pearl-clutching claims are made by his opponents. In his first term, Trump worked within the Constitution. There is no reason to think that he would not do the same in a second term.

Trump may well be our Gracchi. The Gracchi were among the first voices calling out the corruption of the wealthy and powerful in the late Roman Republic. They called for populist reforms, and they worked to put themselves in a position to implement those reforms and, if you will allow the term, Make Rome Great Again - and the establishment of the time, those same wealthy and powerful men, destroyed them for it. (Sound familiar?) But it was that reaction to the Gracchi that led to the Sulla/Marius conflict and then to the rise of Caesar.

Whether Trump wins a second term or not, the die has been cast. The wealthy and powerful have been called out. Trump may be leading the populist movement, but he is not the populist movement, and that movement is not going away. Trump himself has proven to be notoriously resistant to any attempts to brush him aside. Will history continue to rhyme? Will there, in another generation or two, be another American civil war? An American Caesar? There may well be - but that's a story for another column. //

RSB
10 hours ago
This is where you have to be a bit more nuanced. Yes Rome lost its Republic and a LOT of that went back to corruption and a degradation of society to where the first loyalty of the troops was to their generals not the state. And yes the moral rot of Rome itself was a causal factor in this because people turned to the strong generals to give them some actual peace and security.

In one respect Rome got lucky. Caesar was not some tyrannical monster and Octavian (in one of the big surprises of history) was possibly the greatest statesman in history. He built the Empire on the notion of lowered taxes, respect for individual rights and security for trade, commerce and everyday life within that framework. And the result was the Pax Romana. True the moral issues remained (albeit lessened due the laws against theft, murder et al being enforced), it fell to later rulers such as Vespasian who threw a lot of the decadent people out of the Senate and government and promoted Italians who were more closely tied to the common folk and had more rural morals - then Roman morals improved.

So. Is America on the road to having its "Caesar"? Probably. Will we get lucky like Rome did? No way to know.

No seriously. He said this.

 Carey J
4 hours ago
“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn //

cupera1 Hold the Fort
3 hours ago
"We're in a situation where we have put together, and you guys did it for our ... for President Obama's administration before this...." Biden said. "We have put together, I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics" Joe Biden

https://rumble.com/vatuxx-biden-says-hes-created-the-most-extensive-inclusive-fraud-organization...-i.html

If you follow family-run businesses over multiple generations, a common theme will emerge that is so statistically significant that even Dave Ramsey warns families about it.

When the first generation starts a business, it is often passed down to the second generation who directly witnessed the blood, sweat, and tears that both of their parents invested to make it sustainable. This second generation generally feels an obligation to the investments made by their parents and generally runs the business well. But the third generation has no historical appreciation for the business. They were not alive when the business was born and can’t comprehend a world without it. If the business was passed from the first to the second generation, of course, it will be passed to the third which causes a sense of entitlement. This entitlement and lack of perspective are at the core of why a disproportionate number of third-generation business owners fail.

The United States is now in its third generation of bureaucracy following World War 2. The first generation was directly a part of the pain and sacrifice made around the world to defeat an axis of evil. The second generation of bureaucracy grew up in the shadows of World War 2 and even got a taste of it during the Cold War. But the third generation of bureaucrats and technocrats embedded in unelected offices earning mid-six-figure salaries have none of this. Their version of a threat to democracy is the prospect of a democratic reelection of Donald Trump.

Just like a family business, this third-generation bureaucrat is running this country into the ground and is stirring a populist revolt that I don’t think they understand. Let me explain.

It is about 3,000 light-years from Earth, but it can be witnessed with the naked eye. //

NASA predicts a nova will occur sometime this summer, about 3,000 light-years from Earth, but it can be witnessed with the naked eye.

The nova reoccurs once every 80 years. //

The nova should happen in a dark spot among the seven stars of Corona Borealis, known as the Northern Crown.

The dark spot contains “two stars that are bound to and in orbit around each other,” known as T Coronae Borealis or T CrB. NASA nicknamed it the Blaze Star:

"They're the largest satellite operator in the world." //

We discussed Starlink's rapid road to profitability—it took just five years from the first launch of operational satellites—and the future of the technology.

One of the keys to Starlink's success is its vertical integration as a core business at SpaceX, which operates the world's only reusable rocket, the Falcon 9. This has allowed the company not just to launch a constellation of 6,000 satellites—but to do so at relatively low cost.

"At one point, SpaceX had publicly said that it was $28 million," Henry said of the company's target for a Falcon 9 launch cost. "We believe today that they are below $20 million per launch and actually lower than that... I would put it in the mid teens for how much it costs them internally. And that's going down as they increase the reuse of the vehicle. Recently, they've launched their 20th, maybe 21st, use of a first-stage rocket. And as they can amortize the cost of the booster over a greater number of missions, that only helps them with their business case." //

SpaceX was founded as a launch company in 2002, first with the Falcon 1 and then the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. But it is clear today that a significant portion of the company's revenue, if not a majority, comes from its Starlink satellite internet business. So is it still primarily a rocket company?

"I think today they're a satellite communications company," Henry said of SpaceX. "I think it's interesting that Stéphane Israël from Arianespace—in the early days, like 2015, 2016 when Starlink was just announced—would try to court customers and say, 'Do you want to fund your competitor?' And no one really took him seriously. Now people are taking him very seriously. [SpaceX is] the largest satellite operator in the world. They have literally more than doubled the number of consumer subscribers for satellite internet in the world.. This is a humongous, nearly unrivaled impact that they've had on the industry."

A new bill would encourage treating the underlying health conditions that result in fertility problems, before pushing women into trying IVF. //

In vitro fertilization (IVF) does not treat infertility.

The procedure has been in the news a lot lately. Democrats are trying to turn IVF into a campaign issue, which has Republicans panicking (as usual). Meanwhile, Southern Baptists have concluded that the IVF industry’s standard practices — creating “extra” human embryos, eugenically screening them, and indefinitely storing or outright destroying the leftover embryos — are wrong, and that Christians ought to reflect seriously on the ethics of IVF in itself.

Yet overlooked in all of this is that IVF is a workaround for infertility, rather than a real treatment for it. Sometimes IVF works. But despite the current hype, it also has a high failure rate, is expensive, has risks and potential complications, and, of course, comes with a bevy of ethical issues. Nonetheless, there is a tendency to quickly push women into trying IVF without treating the underlying health conditions that result in fertility problems.

This level of national obesity is new. In 1960, rates were about 10 percent for men and 15 percent for women. They drifted up a little for the next few years, then in the late 1970s inflected upward in a steady rise to their current levels. //

So what caused this national epidemic of obesity?

The most persuasive answer is that in the late 1970s, the U.S. government, acting under pressure from such senators as former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, launched a nutrition campaign that resulted in the 1980 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and, a decade later, the “Food Pyramid.” Bread, cereal, rice, and pasta were the base of the pyramid. Then in order upward were vegetables; fruits; milk, yogurt, and cheese; meat, poultry, fish, dry beans, eggs, and nuts; with fats, oils, and sweets in the small apex.

The guidelines are reviewed periodically, but the latest version (2015) continues the anti-fat, anti-meat, pro-carbohydrate basic philosophy. //

Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, asked McGovern in 1977, “What right has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?”

But the skeptics were drowned out and left stranded without research money or institutional support, and clinicians who tried a different approach, such as Dr. Robert Atkins, were traduced viciously. A huge body of respectable clinical observations that contradicted the guidelines — see, for example, “Treating Overweight Patients” from a premier medical journal in 1957 — went down the memory hole. Also unnoticed was the similarity between the guidelines and the recommendations in a 1930 Oregon pamphlet on “Fattening Pigs for Market.” //

The failure of the guidelines to improve public health was not bad news for everyone. The more the weight-challenged fail, the higher the rates of Type II diabetes, which is accompanied by a rise in blood sugar and consequent insulin prescriptions, and the more the money that can be made from substituting cheap vegetable oils for natural fats, from weight loss programs, and from drastic surgical remedies. Good times for Big Farm, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, and assorted other major players. //

In 2001, investigative journalist Gary Taubes published “The Soft Science of Dietary Fat” in the peer-reviewed and prestigious journal Science. The article, and his subsequent book “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” argued that the food pyramid was almost totally wrong.

Taubes cited both solid metabolic research, which was being ignored, and extensive medical history, which had been amnesia-ized, to the effect that overconsumption of carbohydrates eventually leads to insulin resistance, which skews appetite regulators and turns off the ability to burn fat. The eventual result is a cascade in which the body is taking in excessive amounts of food and storing it as fat, but cannot access the fat for energy. The lack of available energy then reduces metabolic rates, which makes losing weight still more difficult. The solution is to cut carbs to decrease insulin, and add fat. //

The rebels agree with the conventional wisdom on one crucial point: The refined-sugary fast foods that permeate the current American diet are terrible. Otherwise they conclude weight loss can be achieved by inverting the food pyramid, creating a diet of 70 percent healthy fats (not vegetable oil or saturated fats), 25 percent protein, and 5 percent or less carbohydrates, an approach abbreviated as “low-carb” or “ketogenic,” a term based on the fact that burning fat produces substances called “ketones.” Red meat is favored, the fattier the better.

The rebellion is reinforced by numerous clinicians who struggled with personal weight issues as well as with frustration over an inability to help patients. //

The moving force behind EAT-Lancet is a vegan Norwegian billionaire, but it is also a darling of the corporate world. Among its sponsors are 20 Big Food companies, 7 Big Pharma, and 14 Big Chemical. All of these have their own interests, which do not necessarily include our health. As Teicholz says about Big Food:

The vast majority of packaged foods sold on the inner aisles of supermarkets — cookies, crackers, chips (crisps), candy, cereals — are made up of the same basic ingredients: soy, corn, grains, sugars, and salt. This is vegan.

Americans eat more chicken and less beef than they used to. They drink less milk – especially whole milk – and eat less ice cream, but they consume way more cheese. Their diets include less sugar than in prior decades but a lot more corn-derived sweeteners. And while the average American eats the equivalent of 1.2 gallons of yogurt a year, he or she also consumes 36 pounds of cooking oils – more than three times as much as in the early 1970s. //

Broadly speaking, we eat a lot more than we used to: The average American consumed 2,481 calories a day in 2010, about 23% more than in 1970. That’s more than most adults need to maintain their current weight, according to the Mayo Clinic’s calorie calculator. (A 40-year-old man of average height and weight who’s moderately active, for instance, needs 2,400 calories; a 40-year-old woman with corresponding characteristics needs 1,850 calories.)

Nearly half of those calories come from just two food groups: flours and grains (581 calories, or 23.4%) and fats and oils (575, or 23.2%), up from a combined 37.3% in 1970. Meats, dairy and sweeteners provide smaller shares of our daily caloric intake than they did four decades ago; then again, so do fruits and vegetables (7.9% in 2010 versus 9.2% in 1970).

Nearly 60 years after tobacco companies were first required to print warning labels on cigarettes to reduce smoking, statists salivate at the opportunity to pull the lever for labels on any other behavior they wish to deter, such as eating meat.

Last fall, a coalition of scientists proposed cigarette-style caution labels be placed on meat products for alleged hazards to the climate and human health. A study examining 1,000 meat-eating adults found labels espousing hazards to climate, health, and pandemics were enough to convince participants to opt for a non-meat meal. Given the success of warning labels at reducing cigarette use, researchers expressed optimism at the potential for similar warnings for deter meat consumption.

A dramatic drop in meat at the center of the American diet, however, offers far worse implications for public health than appreciated by the statist class of academics determined to manipulate behavior. The federal government’s recommendations to embrace a low-fat diet, for example, planted the roots for the twin epidemics of obesity and chronic disease overwhelming the health care system today after three generations dutifully followed the dietary guidelines. Americans increased consumption of grains and processed oils at the behest of the “experts” and now live in a nation where nearly 42 percent of adults 20 and older are obese and 6 in 10 suffer from at least one chronic illness.

 JSobieski
3 hours ago edited
This is nothing new and it is nothing bad.

Scalia and Thomas, while they voted more similarly than any other two justices during their shared tenure, actually had a BIG philosophical difference in how they approached the job. Barrett is kind of taking of making the Scalia-esque point, but because people see things almost exclusively through a political lens, they miss the bigger picture and context for the disagreement.

Justice Thomas is someone who subscribes to the concept of "natural law". A snarky liberal might call this concept the right-wing version of substantive due process, although natural law has a pedigree older than the US. https://www.thepublicdiscou...

Justice Scalia in contrast was a strict textualist. This approach is often referred to as "legal positivism". Scalia is famous for ignoring things like legislative history for example. https://www.cmc.edu/salvato... .

These two men agreed on the outcome the vast majority of the time, but their approaches to that outcome were actually quite different. Thomas was called Scalia's lapdog by people who looked at things through a political lens, but philosophically, they were in some ways very very different.

Barrett is apparently Scalia's intellectual heir... at least in this particular dispute.

Tolly JSobieski
2 hours ago
'Justice Scalia in contrast was a strict textualist.'

Agreed. Where some go sideways, I believe, is that some believe "textualism" equates to "originalist". There are distinctions. Those distinctions are many times found whenever the text of an Act are at issue, in the first instance, and when the provisions of the Constitution are in question, in the second.

etba_ss JSobieski
2 hours ago
Well said.

And Thomas' philosophy is superior.

JSobieski etba_ss
2 hours ago
Maybe. It depends on how much your prioritize self government.

There is some validity to the argument that "natural law" is just the right-wing version of "substantive due process", i.e. a doctrine that is sufficiently malleable to reach whatever outcome is desired.

When I was in law school, I agreed with you. But now as a seasoned lawyer and a long time follower of politics, I think strict textualism is the best way to constrain the judiciary. Of course, constraining the judificiary may then in fact enable Congress to overreach---so it is a pick your poison kind of thing.

There is a lot to be said for legal positivism.

Scholar JSobieski
2 hours ago
The question is the preference whether constraining judiciary or the legislature. The Founders preferred the latter as they are the representatives of the people. If Common Law was not so outdated we didn't have to have this dillema.

Tolly JSobieski
2 hours ago
Don't you mean constraining the legislators? If legislation was enacted that respected what the judiciary has already achieved by substantive due process, what then is the need for any other argument than precedent?; or "pedigree rather than principle", as Justice Barrett argues?

JSobieski Tolly
an hour ago
I mean constraining the legislature---the collective action of legislators. I guess you could call taht constraining legislation, but it is more common to think of constraining people. Separation of powers is typically said to constrain the branches of government, not the outputs created by the three branches of government. Same with respect to the constraining impact of federalism (prior to the income tax and New Deal expansion of the Commerce Clause).

Proponents argue that it’s better for our health and the environment. Science suggests otherwise

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