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2016

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For Cubans, the Long Wait Is Over With Fidel Castro dead, will the island nation finally begin to live again?By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

By on November 27th, 2016

On a trip to Cuba in the late 1990s I met a young man who was trying to earn hard currency as a tour guide in Old Havana. It was obvious he wasn’t trained for the job. But I didn’t care. I wanted to hear from locals and, as I discovered, he wanted to be heard.

Over the course of several days we walked around the crumbling city while I peppered him with questions about daily life on the island. I got an earful about the absurdity of revolutionary Cuba, the privation, the frustration, the alienation.

He was angry. But when it came to talking about the hypocrisy of Fidel Castro, who everyone knew lived lavishly while his subjects struggled to get by, my guide was more careful. One evening over dinner he whispered, “Maria, don’t put what I say in your newspaper or Fidel will . . .” and he put his hands around his throat in a gesture of strangulation. He was afraid.

I heard the news around 2 a.m. Saturday that the 90-year-old despot had finally departed. I thought of that young man. And of the many other aspiring 20-somethings I met on my trip who wanted me to know of their longing for freedom.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Recount Hail Mary The left may get an unexpected lesson in electoral federalism.

By on November 27th, 2016

Remember when Democrats and the left scored Donald Trump for worrying that the election might be “rigged”? Well, now that he’s won, the same crowd is demanding recounts in three battleground states on grounds that the Russians rigged the results.

On Saturday what’s left of the Clinton campaign said it will join the recount effort demanded by Green Party candidate Jill Stein in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The conspiracy theory for which they have no evidence is that Russian hackers rigged voting machines to manipulate the results. The Obama Administration has said it detected no such hacking and that the elections were “free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.”

But reality doesn’t matter in the fake-news world of the far left any more than it does on the far right. The recount may be a progressive gambit to raise money from the gullible, or perhaps to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election. The ultimate Hail Mary would be to raise enough smoke about irregularities that individual electors would deny Mr. Trump the 270 votes he needs in the Electoral College.

Mr. Trump leads in 30 states with 306 electoral votes, and he would have to lose all three contested states to lose the election. He leads by some 71,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a little more than 20,000 in Wisconsin, and by nearly 11,000 in Michigan. If you think U.S. politics is polarized now, try handing the White House to Hillary Clinton now.

The silver lining may be to teach a lesson in electoral federalism. It’s all but impossible for hackers to rig U.S. elections because they are run locally and voting machines aren’t connected to a national internet network, as Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund explained on these pages in September. Progressives, not conservatives, want to nationalize election laws. So go ahead and do the recounts and then accept that Mr. Trump won fair and square.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama, on Way Out, Looks to Further Strengthen Iran By P. David Hornik

By on November 27th, 2016

The House Rules Committee has voted 7-2 to stop the sale or leasing of a few score commercial Boeing planes to Iran. But President Obama has promised to veto the bill, saying it would “undermine the ability of the United States to meet our JCPOA commitments.”

Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling disputed this:

[Hensarling] reminded the committee that the Treasury Department sanctioned Iran Air in 2011 for using its planes to transport military-related equipment on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Treasury Department removed the sanctions as part of the Iran nuclear deal, but Hensarling says Iran’s behavior “remains unchanged.” Iran Air has continued to use its aircraft to fly weapons and resupply routes to Syria, he said.

“Also last month, Iran conducted military drills using Boeing planes that have been a part of its air force fleet for many years,” he said. “This is not surprising as Boeing itself has posted that its commercial jetliners ‘make an ideal platform for a variety of military derivative aircraft.’”

Denny Heck (D-WA) claimed that the Treasury Department has “minimize[d] [the] risk” that Iran would use the new Boeings for military purposes, and said that if the U.S. doesn’t sell Iran the planes, “a non-U.S. company like Airbus” (a European consortium) may do so instead.

By Heck’s logic, the U.S. should always sell militarily usable items to America-hating, terror-supporting, expansionist regimes, since someone else will anyway.

Iran, of course, does not lack suitors when it comes to selling it military items. Russia’s RT News blares: “Russia, Iran plan $10 bn arms sale to Tehran.” And that deal would occur “following the successful delivery of Russia’s S-300 air defense missile systems to the country in October.”

Under strong pressure from Israel, Putin refrained for years from selling Iran the S-300s, which will be deployed to protect its nuclear sites. But in July 2015, just after the signing of the JCPOA agreement — which, we were told, would usher in an era of peace — Putin approved the sale.

Now, a Russian official says “all the S-300s that had been shipped to Iran will be put into operation by year’s end.”

As for the new $10 billion sale, the same official says it will include “T-90 tanks, artillery systems, and various aircraft” for Tehran.

Because of UN Security Council restrictions, the sale might have to wait — but only until October 2020, when those restrictions will be lifted.

The negative developments since the nuke deal was signed, among others, not only include Russia’s arms sales to Iran, but also the emergence of Russian-Iranian military cooperation in the region. Considering this reality, President Obama’s insistence on the Boeing sale, and on treating Iran as a responsible party in general, can at best be understood as a case of severe strategic irrationality.

And the Boeing sale is not all. The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama is also seeking to bolster the deal before leaving office by helping more American businesses enter the Iranian market and removing additional U.S. sanctions. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Roger Franklin: Everyone I Don’t Like is Hitler

By on November 27th, 2016

Ah, journalism as she is taught! Thanks to The Conversation and Queensland University of Technology’s Professor Brian McNair readers appalled by the partisanship, bias and emotional illogicality of the modern press can gain some insight into how it got that way.
Recently at Quadrant Online, Tony Thomas took a long, hard look at The Conversation, where academics pad the ledgers of their published thoughts with what is, in all too many cases, unmitigated piffle. It is a pity Tony did not wait a few more weeks because, had he done so, his argument would have been rendered iron-tight by the latest contribution to the taxpayer-supported vanity press of Brian McNair, professor of journalism, media and communication at the Queensland University of Technology. McNair’s insight – achieved, one suspects, by squatting over a mirror and seeing nothing but the familiar — casts Donald Trump as Hitler2.0 while imagining the Western world accelerating down the scree slope of a “slide into fascism.”

Know first that, while McNair shapes the young minds of those who aspire to newsroom careers, he is not a journalist by training. Rather, he is a sociologist (’nuff said?) who deconstructs journalism. If you have ever noticed the inane punctuation, asinine logic, misleading headlines and abuse of language that litter the pages of diseased and dying newspapers, the disinclination of those atop the ivory tower to teach basic craft skills might just have something to do with it. In this regard, if no other, McNair’s column is a treasure, well worth a close examination.

Below, his lump-sized dollops of his extrusion in italics, each paragraph followed by commentary of the sort a dyspeptic subeditor might have given a first-year cadet.

As the results of the 2016 election came in, the mainstream media in America and around the world demonstrated their inability to cope with the challenge of a president Trump within the conventional paradigms of journalistic objectivity, balance and fairness. Or, rather, to cope without normalising the most conspicuously overt racism, sexism, and proto-fascism ever seen in a serious candidate for president.

“As the results” … make that singular; there is only one result. There were many “returns” from the various states and territories, but only one result – in this case, Mr Trump.

“conventional paradigms” … use this vile jargon again and you’ll be fetching Chinese food for the back bench all next year. Meanwhile, read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.

“the most conspicuously overt” … look up “tautology” in the dictionary. “Overt” means “conspicuous”.

“sexism, and proto-fascism ever seen in a serious candidate for president” … allowing that your description of Trump’s views is accurate, which it isn’t, you must never have heard of the Know Nothing Party?

As street protests broke out in Portland, Oregon in the days after the election, for example, BBC World noted the police definition of the events as a “riot”, in response to what it coyly described as “some racist remarks” made by Donald Trump during his campaign.

You need a comma after “Oregon”. You most definitely do not need a comma after “a riot”.

And about that “riot”, which you intimate should not be describe thus, presumably because you agree with the rioters. So what should it have been called — a disturbance? an upswelling of genuine grievance? politics by other means? Incidentally, I’ve found two BBC reports on the fracas, neither of which makes mention of “some racist remarks”. If you have a source for those words, please nominate it.

And since you’re citing the BBC, why have you neglected to mention that the Portland protesters, per the local police department’s description, were “carrying bats and arming themselves with stones. Objects were thrown at the police, who responded with pepper spray and rubber baton rounds”?

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

“LION” A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

By on November 27th, 2016

The main reason to see “Lion,” the latest release by the Weinstein Boys, is Sunny Pawar, an 8 year old actor whose tiny teeth make him look far younger and more precocious. I dare you not to smile when Saroo (his character) pronounces the English words for salt and pepper and I double-dare you not to weep at his predicament – having jumped onto a train that took him 1,000 miles from home and Mum, the only name he knows for his mother. His native smarts enable him to escape all sorts of entrapment by unsavory predators until he is finally adopted by an honorable Australian couple who adore him and raise him with love and advantages he would never have known in his poverty-stricken village. This segment of the film is poignant and appropriately touching until Saroo becomes a young adult played by Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel.

For the next 40 minutes or so, the film loses focus, becoming strident and repetitive as Saroo realizes that he must reclaim his past and find his birth family, with few facts to go on. The action takes on the semblance of “filler,” with little dialogue but lots of weltschmerz as Saroo bemoans his fate to his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) and secretly tries to find his village by calculating the distance the train traveled from there to Calcutta over the course of 3 days. Fortunately, Saroo has Google-Map and colorful pegs to help him solve the mystery, along with the support of Rooney whose empathy derives from the premature loss of her own dear mother. Tolstoy knew that every family has its own share of tsuris – even those living in first-world conditions.

I won’t reveal the ending except to say that as with too many other movies lately, this one is based on a true story so the real people appear in the coda and reveal how skillful the casting director was in making Nicole Kidman play your average Tasmanian housewife who might adopt not one, but two Indian orphans. Though this is all very heartwarming, it’s tediously slow watching Patel’s hair get longer and messier – a sign of his inner distress – and really boring seeing the same clips we’ve seen before revived too many times. This movie desperately needs a ruthless editor to eliminate whole segments – such as the disturbed second adopted child whose story goes nowhere – and cut at least 1/2 hour from Saroo’s staring at the Google-Map and thinking. Best of all would be a grand finale with the real parent and the screen actors doing a Bollywood dance that would have us all leaving the theater joyfully instead of checking our watches and heaving a sigh of relief that this attenuated film finally reached The End.

p.s. you have to stay to the end to find out what the title Lion has to do with any of the above – or just ask someone who has already seen the movie and have a savory Indian dinner instead.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Tom Quirk: It’s all Greek to a Warmist

By on November 27th, 2016

Climate catastropharians’ effusive confidence in their cause demonstrates yet again that an unexamined belief is not worth holding. Pose a few simple questions, as Socrates might have done, and it won’t be long before someone is calling for the hemlock
Socrates sought truth by asking questions. He might have employed the following line of questioning to explore the subject of global warming.

Socrates Nice to meet you Mr Smith. I hear you are very concerned about dangerous global warming.

Smith Yes, we are facing the alarming prospect of a global-warming catastrophe.

Socrates What gives you such concern?

Mr Smith Emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuels.

Socrates How were these fossil fuels formed?

Mr Smith Plants grew, died and formed fossil fuels during the Carboniferous Period.

Socrates Was there dangerous global warming prior to the Carboniferous Period?

Mr Smith No. It was a very good time for life on earth.

Socrates So where did the carbon in fossil fuels originate?

Mr Smith Plants absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere prior to the formation of fossil fuels.

Socrates So the CO2 absorbed by plants at that time is now being released from burning fossil fuels.

Mr Smith It must be so.

Socrates You have observed there was no dangerous global warming prior to CO2 being absorbed to form fossil fuels, so how could the same CO2 now being released cause dangerous global warming?

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Adios Dirtbag!!!! by Morgan Chalfant ******

By on November 27th, 2016

The death of Cuba’s former dictator Fidel Castro late Friday was met with both celebration and regret, with a number of American politicians spotlighting the violent oppression of his regime while some world leaders mourned his loss.

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump labeled Castro a “brutal dictator” and described his legacy as one of “firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.” Trump said his administration will work to help the Cuban people move away from oppression.

“While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve,” Trump said Saturday. “Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty.”

President Obama, who has cultivated warmer relations with Cuba, offered condolences to Castro’s family and acknowledged the “powerful emotions” that the event will foster in the Cuban people. Obama did not relay any direct criticism of Castro for his leadership.

“We know that this moment fills Cubans—in Cuba and in the United States—with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him,” Obama said.

Cuban President Raul Castro announced the death of his brother late Friday in a televised address. Fidel Castro, who was 90 years old, ruled over Cuba for almost five decades before passing the power to his younger brother in 2008. A polarizing figure, Castro has been widely criticized for cracking down on political and economic freedoms, while some have praised him as a revolutionary.

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Fidel Castro’s Communist Example He turned a developing Cuba into an impoverished prison.

By on November 27th, 2016

Fidel Castro’s legacy of 57 years in power is best understood by the fates of two groups of his countrymen—those who remained in Cuba and suffered impoverishment and dictatorship, and those who were lucky or brave enough to flee to America to make their way in freedom. No progressive nostalgia after his death Friday at age 90 should disguise this murderous and tragic record.

Castro took power on New Year’s Day in 1959 serenaded by the Western media for toppling dictator Fulgencio Batista and promising democracy. He soon revealed that his goal was to impose Communist rule. He exiled clergy, took over Catholic schools and expropriated businesses. Firing squads and dungeons eliminated rivals and dissenters.

The terror produced a mass exodus. An April 1961 attempt by the CIA and a small force of expatriate Cubans to overthrow Castro was crushed at the Bay of Pigs in a fiasco for the Kennedy Administration. Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union, and their 1962 attempt to establish a Soviet missile base on Cuba nearly led to nuclear war. The crisis was averted after Kennedy sent warships to intercept the missiles, but the Soviets extracted a U.S. promise not to invade Cuba again.

The Cuba that Castro inherited was developing but relatively prosperous. It ranked third in Latin America in per-capita daily calorie consumption, doctors and dentists. Its infant mortality rate was the lowest in the region and the 13th lowest in the world. Cubans were among the most literate Latins and had a vibrant civic life with private professional, commercial, religious and charitable organizations.

Castro destroyed all that. He ruined agriculture by imposing collective farms, making Cuba dependent first on the Soviets and later on oil from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. In the last half century Cuba’s export growth has been less than Haiti’s, and now even doctors are scarce because so many are sent abroad to earn foreign currency. Hospitals lack sheets and aspirin. The average monthly income is $20 and government food rations are inadequate.

All the while Fidel and his brother Raúl sought to spread their Communist revolution throughout the world, especially in Latin America. They backed the FARC in Colombia, the Shining Path in Peru and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Their propaganda about peasant egalitarian movements beguiled thousands of Westerners, from celebrities like Sean Penn and Danny Glover to Secretary of State John Kerry, who on a visit to Havana called the U.S. and Cuba “prisoners of history.” The prisoners are in Cuban jails.

On this score, President Obama’s morally antiseptic statement Saturday on Castro is an insult to his victims. “We know that this moment fills Cubans—in Cuba and in the United States—with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation,” Mr. Obama said. “History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.” Donald Trump, by contrast, called Castro a “dictator” and expressed hope for a “free Cuba.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

PRESIDENT ELECT DONALD TRUMP ON THE DEATH OF CASTRO…..

By on November 27th, 2016

President-elect Donald Trump took to Twitter on Saturday morning after the longtime former Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, died Friday at the age of 90.

“Fidel Castro is dead!” Trump tweeted.

In an official statement released later Saturday morning, Trump referred to Castro as a “brutal dictator” who “oppressed his own people” for decades.

“Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights,” Trump said in the statement.

He added: “While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.”

Castro, whose health had been failing for years, was pronounced dead at 10:29 p.m. local time, his brother and current Cuban leader Raul Castro announced on state-run television.

“At 10:29 in the night, the chief commander of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, died,” Raul Castro said in the televised address. “Ever onward, to victory.”

President Barack Obama has made efforts to normalize relations with Cuba over the past few years. He became the first sitting president to visit the Communist-ruled island since Calvin Coolidge in March. Obama’s statement on Castro’s deathtook a markedly different tone than the president-elect.

Trump frequently criticized Obama’s Cuba policy on the campaign trail, but it’s unclear how the president-elect will continue relations with the island country.

“Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty,” Trump said Saturday.

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BOOKS, ISRAEL Comments turned off

It Had to Be the Promised Land Review: Gur Alroey, ‘Zionism Without Zion: The Jewish Territorial Organization and Its Conflict with the Zionist Organization’ by David Isaac

By on November 27th, 2016

“The Ugandists and the Territorialists are jumping up on chairs, shouting furiously at the President; their faces are distorted … the electric lights in the hall are turned off … The noise and tumult continue for a long time in the dark hall,” wrote Russian Zionist leader Leib Jaffe, describing the scene at the Seventh Zionist Congress on July 28, 1905.

Zionist founder Theodor Herzl had died a year earlier, but as Haifa University Professor Gur Alroey observes in his pioneering study of the Territorialist movement, the chaotic scene described above was his immediate legacy. Herzl had loosed what Alroey calls “the big bang” at the previous Zionist Congress when he brought forward the so-called Uganda Proposal, a tentative offer by the British colonial secretary of a Jewish national home in an area in present-day Kenya. As Herzl saw it, the Jewish need for a refuge had grown desperate following the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, while the path to Palestine seemed closed for the foreseeable future. After a fiery debate at the Sixth Congress, Herzl secured a vote to explore the matter further. Now, at the Seventh Congress, the Uganda Proposal was not only killed off, but a resolution was passed rejecting all future attempts at settlement activity outside of Palestine.

In response, the defeated faction hurriedly formed a new group, the Jewish Territorial Organization, or ITO, as it was popularly known. Zionism Without Zion tells the ITO’s fascinating story. The book is a serious contribution to Zionist scholarship for, as Alroey writes, “there isn’t a single book about the Jewish Territorial Organization.” It is as good an example as any of Churchill’s axiom that history is written by the victors.

The Territorialists chose as their leader Israel Zangwill, who had argued eloquently, if vainly, in favor of the Uganda proposal at the congress. Though known today chiefly for his translations of Jewish liturgical hymns that have been incorporated in the standard English Festival Prayer Book, Zangwill was a greatly admired British novelist and journalist and one of Herzl’s most highly prized intellectual “conquests.” To give an idea of his stature, historian Benzion Netanyahu, father of the current prime minister, chose Zangwill as one of five founders of Zionism.

Territorialism, which is based on the idea that a Jewish state need not be in the Land of Israel, was baked into modern Zionism from the start. In his 1882 book Auto-Emancipation, Leon Pinsker, the Russian-Jewish doctor who helped organize the Lovers of Zion movement, a forerunner to Herzl’s World Zionist Organization, wrote: “The goal of our present endeavors must be not the Holy Land, but a land of our own.” Herzl himself, in his 1896 The Jewish State, left the issue of its location open.

Thus, the Territorialists saw no contradiction between Territorialism and Zionism. They treated Pinsker as a spiritual mentor and hung Herzl’s picture at their conferences. Alroey quotes a prominent member, Max Mandelstamm: “Although Palestine is a territory, our dearest and most desirable territory, and although we are bound to it with thousands of memories and traditions, it is not free…”

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