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2016

Literary Repression in a Liberal Culture By David Solway

I often find myself reflecting on Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals and Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, volumes which yield a sober conclusion: intellectuals as a class, including the literati, with only a few resonant exceptions, are a deeply corrupt breed. “The cult of success,” writes Benda, has led to the polluting of their vocation, as “politics mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers.”

This is broadly true of the literary community in the West, and certainly in my own country. Canada is a big little country, the extent of its land mass in inverse proportion to the reach of its mindscape. In my own chosen discipline, we have an extraordinary number of people publishing poetry, but almost no poets to speak of.

In our day it is the reign of political correctness and ovarian sentimentality that has helped to produce the debilitating infection we are witnessing. Our poets — test cases for intellectual and literary decay — can be relied upon to espouse the cultural orthodoxies and therapeutic causes that have descended upon us like the mothership from Independence Day. Their willing compliance may be owing to a deficiency of native intelligence, the inability to arrive at convictions independently, a lack of courage, or the temptation to reap the rewards, monetary or status-related, that sinuous complicity assures.

Making sure to keep in good standing with the progressivist consensus, such poets are given to parroting the bromides of the time, showing themselves as socially conscious, profoundly sensitive, right-thinking caryatids of the Temple of Social Justice. Put another way, they are for the most part fellow travelers, trimming their sails to the prevailing zephyrs of the mawkishly virtuous.

And this is one salient reason why their work is so dismally bad.

We note the nebbish attitude they affect in the maunderings of influential Carcanet publisher Michael Schmidt, who in a recent interview mourns the “unexpected and traumatic” Brexit vote as a “Trumpish decision.” Liberating the nation from the dead hand of the Brussels commissariat and enabling it to reclaim its independence of action are, apparently, bad for poetry, erecting a wall “between us and our dear friends.” Schmidt ludicrously refers to himself and his associates as “we Mexicans [who] will get over the wall.” Let’s hope his Spanish is up to scratch. His petulant salvo, I suspect, has more to do with dividends, gratuities, and reputation than with poetry. We are obviously meant to understand poets as dedicated insurgents speaking for the disinherited of the earth, engaged in a heroic struggle for “social justice.” That their melic efforts are chiefly mediocre is surely a form of poetic justice.

How Trump will and won’t transform the Supreme Court Betsy McCaughey …..see note please

I would like to persuade Betsy McCaughey to run for office. Would she not make a great NYC ‘s first woman mayor?????rsk
The battle lines are forming over Donald Trump’s anticipated Supreme Court nominee. A conservative advocacy group is running TV ads urging Trump to appoint a justice in the mold of the late Antonin Scalia. New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer fires back that Democrats will try to block any nominee who isn’t “mainstream.”

Trouble is, anybody who disputes the Democrats’ left-wing definition of the Constitution as a malleable “living” document is outside their mainstream.

Meanwhile, pro-choice groups are panicked about losing abortion “rights.” For now, it’s much ado about nothing. No matter whom Trump appoints this time, there are already five pro-choice justices on the court, counting Justice Anthony Kennedy. It would take a second Trump appointment to tilt the court the other way.

During the campaign, Trump pledged to appoint justices who would uphold “the Constitution as it was meant to be.” Trump’s victory suggests the public agrees.

Even so, Schumer and fellow Democrats are spoiling for a fight. In part, it’s revenge for the Republicans’ refusal to consider even holding hearings on Obama’s last high-court nominee, Merrick Garland. Will the Democrats’ tough talk lead to anything? Unlikely. Ten Senate Democrats in states Trump won are facing tough re-election races in 2018. Count on some of them to help push Trump’s pick over the 60-vote threshold to defeat Democratic obstruction attempts.

Trump’s first addition to the court will have a major impact on labor-union issues, voting procedures, the death penalty, executive power and religious freedom.

On the separation of church and state, stay tuned for Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley. The justices delayed the case while Scalia’s seat was vacant to avoid a likely 4-4 tie.

The case: Missouri awards grants to help schools make their playgrounds safer with soft, rubber paving. But Missouri nixed a grant to a Lutheran-affiliated preschool. The school sued, saying its children deserve the same safety enhancements as children in secular schools.

Trump’s new justice will shift the court to allow religious institutions and the faithful to be treated equally with everyone else. Yes, the Constitution bars favoring a particular religion, but that shouldn’t require government to discriminate against religion.

THE COMEDIAN- A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

One of the consequences of lowering the bar on scatology and extreme vulgarity on cable tv and the intenet is its seepage into mainstream entertainment. Exhibit A could be “The Comedian,” directed by Taylor Hackford with an all-star cast headed by Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Danny De Vito, Leslie Mann, Edie Falco, Patty Lupone – with cameos by Cloris Leachman, Charles Grodin, Richard Belzer and Billy Crystal. The plot is a very thin excuse for a series of shticks by an aging Jewish comic named Jackie Burke (ne Yakov Bernstein) played by De Niro, who at one time was a huge tv star (think Jackie Gleason, Kevin Hart or a slew of others) but now has fallen on hard times, made harder by a jail sentence for smashing a heckler with his microphone. For his stand-up comedy, think Andrew Dice Clay – someone who is no longer appealing to a much younger generation but is trying to make a comeback. Jackie is hardly a sympathetic character, he mooches off his brother and antagonizes just about everyone who is part of his life, yet he strikes up an unbelievable relationship with a beautiful, much younger woman he meets at the soup kitchen he’s assigned to as part of his community service sentence. That she turns out to be the daughter of a wealthy nursing home owner and real estate mogul in Florida is just another rung in a series of unlikely – never would happen circumstances that pepper the plot.

All the usual subjects are casualties of Jackie’s lacerating humor – women, gays, oldsters, non-lookers, parents, chilldren, sexuality, marriage – a fraction of it on target and funny – most of it simply prurient without benefit of cleverness. You will be guaranteed to feel as Jackie does after an unpleasant encounter with a comedian who steals his material – that you yourself need a power wash. The relationship between Jackie and Harmony (the soup kitchen lady) is stretched beyond credulity (much worse than unbelievable) as is its eventual consequence. The epilogue which takes place 8 years later is embarrassing to everyone concerned – actors and audience. If you feel the need to get down and dirty, just go to Cable TV. If you feel the need to see otherwise talented people sink to squeamish levels of acceptability on the big screen, here’s your opportunity. You won’t feel good about yourself after………….

ISIS-affiliated media post shocking graphic on conducting proper knife attacks by Lisa Daftari

A pro-Islamic State media group posted to its Telegram channel a graphic advising followers on the proper knives to use and areas to stab when conducting a knife attack.

The Yaqeen media group advises jihadis:

• Do not use a short knife

• Do not use a long knife

• Choose a good middle sized knife that does not fold

• You can stab it or cut it open or both

The graphic then advises, “These 3 places are lethal areas in the arm that can be cut,” with arrows pointing to the armpit, elbow and wrist.

A second set of arrows point to the stomach: “Soft area that can be easily cut and torn.”

This comes after Monday’s Ohio State University knife attack in which 18-year-old Abdul Razak Ali Artan rammed his car into a group then subsequently exited his vehicle and stabbed individuals with a butcher knife leaving 11 injured. Artan was then shot dead by a nearby police officer.

ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack Tuesday on its social media channels.

UK: Another Massive Charity Commission Whitewash by Samuel Westrop

In its report, the Charity Commission makes note of the iERA’s promotion of hate preachers, but treats the charity as a victim of such extremism, rather than an instigator.

According to the Commission, bureaucracy is the solution — the iERA’s extremism will be solved by more “adequate procedures… to prevent abuse of the charity, its status, facilities or assets.”

Those more familiar with the iERA will know that asking this Salafist charity to produce and follow its own counter-extremism plan is akin to demanding that the Ku Klux Klan introduce affirmative action hiring processes.

Extremist charities are not private institutions: charitable status affords extraordinary legal and financial benefits, including the opportunity for radical Islamist organisations to claim government subsidies. But no government should allow extremist networks to exploit charitable status. Shut these charities down, and ban those Islamist activists from ever again becoming trustees of a charitable organisation.

On November 4, the British charity regulator, the Charity Commission, published a report of its inquiry into the Islamic Education and Research Academy (iERA), a British Salafist group and religious training organisation. The inquiry was initially welcomed by moderate Muslim groups and counter-extremism analysts, but many will be disappointed with the Charity Commission’s recommendations.

More than a dozen pieces have been written for the Gatestone Institute examining the iERA’s links to extremism, as well as the failure of government, media and even Jewish organisations to tackle this fast-growing Salafist group. In 2014, one of these articles exclusively revealed that the “Portsmouth Five,” a notorious group of ISIS recruits from southern England, were all members of an iERA youth group.

Will Mahmoud Abbas Pay Salaries to the Arsonists? by Itamar Marcus

While Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas was accepting praise for sending Palestinian firefighters to help put out fires in Israel, the PA Finance Ministry was busy doing the paper work to start paying salaries to the Palestinian arsonists who were arrested for setting many of those same fires. So far Israel has arrested 23 suspected arsonists connected to the hundreds of fires that raged across Israel in the last week of November, burning more than 500 homes and 32,000 acres of forests and national parks. According to Palestinian law documented by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), anyone imprisoned for “resisting the occupation” receives a high monthly salary. Therefore, all of those convicted and imprisoned for arson will receive PA salaries “from the day of arrest until the day of release.”

A fire rages in central Haifa, November 24, 2015. (Image source: Haaretz video screenshot)

Of course, it is not only arson-terrorists who receive a PA salary. All Palestinian, Israeli Arab and Arab terrorists from any country who are imprisoned are rewarded with high salaries from the PA. (See PMW Special Report) According to PA law and practice, “resisting the occupation” includes any Arab imprisoned for attacking Israelis by any means, including throwing a stone at a car, driving a car into people at bus stops, building bombs for suicide bombers to blow up at cafes, or shooting and stabbing civilians to death in their sleep. Since the PA automatically includes anyone who attacked Israelis or their possessions as “fighters” who are “resisting the occupation,” there is no justification under Palestinian law and practice not to include last week’s arsonists among the Palestinian “heroes” who receive monthly salaries.

Significantly, these salaries for terrorists rise the longer terrorists are in jail. Terrorists convicted of murder and serving life sentences will reach a high salary of NIS 12,000 a month – more than four times the average Palestinian salary.

Angela Merkel: False Prophet of Europe by Vijeta Uniyal

With his initiative for tighter gun laws, to prevent weapons getting into “the wrong hands,” Justice Minister Maas does not mean to target the Islamists who pose an existential threat to Germany, but an obscure German group called the “Reichsbürger.”

As the German newspaper Bild describes the law proposed by Maas, “a 13-year-old child bride would have to testify against her husband, saying that her well-being as a child is under threat. If neither the child nor the Child Welfare Service lodges a complaint, for all practical purposes the marriage would be declared legitimate.” This law clearly does not take into account the possibility of private coercion against a child, let alone the blinding likelihood of outright threats.

Justice Minister Maas evidently cares more about “gender image” than he cares about truly oppressed women and vulnerable children. In a recently drafted new law by his ministry, Mass refused to ban child marriage.

With both France and Germany going to polls next year, there is the possibility of a democratic, peaceful “European Spring.”

In her first message to President-elect Donald Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel lectured him on gender, racial and religious equality. As the New York Times put it, Merkel “named a price” for Germany’s cooperation with the Trump-led administration, namely the “respect for human dignity and for minorities from a man who has mocked both.”

If this was anything more than political posturing, and Chancellor Merkel truly cared about “human dignity” or the rights of those most vulnerable, she might have started closer at home.

After a year-long investigation into the mass-sexual attacks in Cologne, where an estimated 2,000 migrant men — mostly from Arab and Muslim countries — molested at least 1200 women, almost all the men have managed to walk free.

Europeans Increasingly Skeptical of the EU by Srdja Trifkovic

Excerpts from Srdja Trifkovic’s latest Sputnik Radio interview, in which he comments on the findings of a new poll which indicates that an increasing number of Europeans want their countries to leave the European Union. More than half (53%) of the respondents in Italy said they would like their government to hold a referendum on EU membership. Similar sentiments are felt in France, Germany, Spain and Poland. [Audio]
[…] We are witnessing an overall public backlash against the European Union. It is increasingly perceived not as an institution geared to facilitating the flow of goods, services and people, but as a means of political and ideological control by an elite that is alienated from ordinary people… In Italy’s case it is clear that the level of dissatisfaction with the political establishment is very high. If someone like Beppe Grillo, a comedian who has never conducted a serious campaign, gets as many votes as he did [25.5% in 2013], we are looking at a discredited establishment, where politics is seen as part joke and part tragedy.

In Poland the disenchantment is to a large extent due to the attempt by Brussels to impose immigration quotas on former Soviet bloc countries. They rebelled together, the Visegrad Group, starting with Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, but including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland’s [prime minister] Beata Szydlo. They simply do not want to submit a key element of their sovereignty—the decision on who will reside inside their frontiers—to the unelected Eurocrats in Brussels…

JAMIE GLAZOV MOMENT: SOLEDAD O’BRIEN’S DISGRACE ON CASTRO

In this new Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie discusses Soledad O’Brien’s Disgrace on Castro, unveiling the shame of arguing how there are Cubans who “like” a mass murderer. Don’t miss it! And make sure to watch Jamie focus on Steve Bannon, Keith Ellison and the Left’s Ugly Record on Anti-Semitism, revealing the slander of a noble […]

CNN apologizes for producer’s joke about Trump’s plane crashing

http://www.aol.com/article/news/2016/12/02/cnn-apologizes-for-producer-s-joke-about-trump-s-plane-crashing/21619540/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl13%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D1732122350_htmlws-main-bb

CNN has issued an apology after a tape was leaked where one of its producers can be heard joking about President-elect Donald Trump’s plane crashing.

Business Insider reports that the incident occurred on Thursday as national correspondent Suzanne Malveaux was getting ready to broadcast live from the Carrier plant in Indiana.

A video posted to YouTube by FTVLive’s Scott Jones shows Malveaux on screen and an off-camera voice telling her that Trump is expected to be “landing any minute.”

The unidentified woman then indicates signals she plans to use to communicate his progress and jokes at one point, “That means his plane’s crashed.”

But she quickly states, “No, I’m kidding.”

Malveaux can be seen responding with a shocked look before smiling.