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February 2017

Science Journalism is Going Full Leftist By Robert Arvay

We on the right have grown to expect bias in political journalism — but most of us probably thought that science literature would always be objective, and exempt from radical leftist opinion. If so, then our thoughts were mistaken.

Every once in a while, I receive emailed articles from science journals, for example, Scientific American. Most of these are of interest to science junkies like myself — but a disturbing and growing number of them have less to do with science than with left-wing political propaganda. Much of it is unashamedly anti-Trump. It seems (sarcasm here) that by questioning the (questionable) evidence of global warming, President Trump is seeking to inundate the entire world with rising oceans. In reality, thousands of government grants are at risk, billions of dollars of them, unless the scientists receiving the money can prove that global warming is manmade, and that human effort can reverse it.

Of course, the scientists can prove no such thing, which is why their journal articles increasingly give the impression of “hair-on-fire” panic.

More recently, I am beginning to notice an even more sinister trend, one which hints at anti-Semitism. In an article at Space.com, a site oriented toward NASA news, the authors seem to twist and turn through verbal contortions, straining to avoid any mention of the word, “Israel,” even though the science news therein was discovered by studying ancient Jewish records.

The article describes the geography of the featured discovery as being that of “Judah, an ancient kingdom situated around what is now Jerusalem.” This seems like an awful lot of words to substitute for the word, “Israel.”

The article credits Israeli scientist [quote], “Erez Ben-Yosef, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University,” with analyzing much of the information, but yet again, avoids mentioning that he is an Israeli scientist. In other articles, I find no shortage of phrases such as, a French scientist, or a scientist at Britain’s Oxford University, and so forth.

It is perhaps possible that I am being a bit overly sensitive in my appraisal of this one article, but I noticed its omissions largely because the piece fits the mold of many other science articles I have read over the past year, articles which in my view are ever more politically oriented toward leftist opinions.

One State or Two States? By Ted Belman

President Trump told Prime Minister Netanyahu in their joint press conference on Wednesday, he “likes the one both parties like.” He also said on another occasion that he wasn’t going to pressure Israel to make a deal.

The importance of his remarks is that the object of the exercise for the US is to make a deal rather than to create a Palestinian state. The push back on this has been substantial, not only from the EU and the UN but also from some officials in the State Department.

To deflect some of the criticism, the Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, framed it this way, “We absolutely support the two-state solution but we are thinking out of the box as well.”

“The solution to what will bring peace in the Middle East is going to come from the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority,” Haley said. “The United States is just there to support the process.”

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates have been working together with Israel to confront their common enemy, Iran. Both Netanyahu and Trump want to build on this and formalize it. They hope that as part of building this alliance, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates will soften their demands on Israel regarding the solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict or perhaps enter a peace agreement with Israel without reference to the conflict.

DEBKAfile reports: “…these sentiments reflected agreement in principle between Trump and Netanyahu to seek an Israeli peace accord with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates as the lead-in to negotiations for an accord with the Palestinians. Egypt, Jordan and Turkey with whom Israel already has normal relations would jump in later. This deal fits in with the US plan reported more than once on these pages for a regional peace between the Sunni Arab nations and the Jewish State.”

At the press conference, Trump also said,

“This is one more reason why I reject unfair and one-sided actions against Israel at the United Nations — just treated Israel, in my opinion, very, very unfairly — or other international forums, as well as boycotts that target Israel.”

Democracy, Capitalism and Morality A free world isn’t a perfect world, but it’s better than any alternative. By Michael Novak (R.I.P.)

(This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 27, 1994. Michael Novak died Friday at 83.)

Democracy, Winston Churchill once said, is a bad system of government, except when compared to all the others. Much the same might be said of capitalism. It is not a system much celebrated by the poets, the philosophers or the priests. From time to time, it has seemed romantic to the young; but not very often. Capitalism is a system that commends itself best to the middle aged, after they have gained some experience of the way history treats the plans of men.

My own field of inquiry is theology and philosophy. From the perspective of these fields, I would not want it to be thought that any system is the Kingdom of God on Earth. Capitalism isn’t. Democracy isn’t. The two combined are not. The best that can be said for them (and it is quite enough) is that, in combination, capitalism, democracy, and pluralism are more protective of the rights, opportunities, and conscience of ordinary citizens (all citizens) than any known alternative.

Better than the Third World economies, and better than the socialist economies, capitalism makes it possible for the vast majority of the poor to break out of the prison of poverty; to find opportunity; to discover full scope for their own personal economic initiative; and to rise into the middle class and higher.

Sound evidence for this proposition is found in the migration patterns of the poor of the world. From which countries do they emigrate, and to which countries do they go? Overwhelmingly they flee from socialist and Third World countries, and they line up at the doors of the capitalist countries.

A second way of bringing sound evidence to light is to ask virtually any audience, in almost any capitalist country, how many generations back in family history they have to go before they reach poverty. For the vast majority of us in the U.S. we need go back no farther than the generation of our parents or grandparents. In 1900, a very large plurality of Americans lived in poverty, barely above the level of subsistence. Most of our families today are described as affluent. Capitalist systems have raised up the poor in family memory.

The second great argument on behalf of capitalism is that it is a necessary condition for the success of democracy—a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. The instances of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Chile (after Pinochet), South Korea and others allow us to predict that once a capitalist system has generated a sufficiently large and successful middle class, the pressures for turning toward democracy become very strong. This is because successful entrepreneurs speedily recognize that they are smarter and more able than the generals and the commissars. They begin demanding self-government.

As has been recognized since ancient times, the middle class is the seedbed of the republican spirit. Capitalism tends toward democracy as the free economy tends toward the free polity. In both cases, the rule of law is crucial. In both, limited government is crucial. In both, the protection of the rights of individuals and minorities is crucial. While capitalism and democracy do not necessarily go together, particularly in the world of theory, in the actual world of concrete historical events, both their moving dynamism and their instincts for survival lead them toward a mutual embrace.

On this basis, one can predict that as the entrepreneurial spirit grows in China, particularly in its southern provinces, we can expect to see an ever stronger tide in favor of democratic institutions begin to make itself felt. The free economy will unleash forces that propel China toward the free polity.

Three Military Men and a Diplomat: Trump’s National Security Candidates The president interviewed four for the job of national security adviser on Sunday, and may meet more By Felicia Schwartz, Thomas M. Burton and Carol E. Lee

https://www.wsj.com/articles/three-military-men-and-a-diplomat-trumps-national-security-candidates-1487554639

President Donald Trump interviewed four candidates for the job of national security adviser Sunday, and may meet more on Monday, a White House spokeswoman said. The vacancy was created after the president’s first adviser, Mike Flynn, resigned under pressure last week.

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster

A military strategist with extensive battle experience, Gen. McMaster is now director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center at Fort Eustis, Va. Gen. McMaster, 54 years old, is a decorated officer with leadership experience in military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s a 1984 graduate of West Point, where he played rugby.

Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen

Gen. Caslen, 63 years old, spent his entire career in the Army, including key leadership roles in Iraq and Afghanistan. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1975, where he was the football team’s starting center for two years. He returned as school superintendent in July 2013.

John Bolton

The security adviser role isn’t the first vacancy to cause Mr. Trump to look to John Bolton, 68. He was previously considered as a possible secretary of state, and then to be the No. 2 official in the State Department.

Mr. Bolton is a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a frequent commentator on Fox News.

Keith Kellogg

Joseph Keith Kellogg Jr., 72 years old, is a retired three-star general in the U.S. Army, who has this past week been acting national security adviser following Mr. Flynn’s departure.

The acting national security adviser, retired Gen. Keith Kellogg Photo: Reuters

He served in the 101st Airborne in Vietnam, and was later a special forces adviser to the Cambodian Army.

Why Was the FBI Investigating General Flynn? There appears to have been no basis for a criminal or intelligence probe. By Andrew C. McCarthy

National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was dismissed amid a torrent of mainstream-media reporting and disgraceful government leaks (but I repeat myself). Among the most intriguing was a New York Times report the morning after Flynn’s resignation, explaining that the former three-star Army general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was “grilled” by FBI agents “about a phone call he had had with Russia’s ambassador.”

No fewer than seven veteran Times reporters contributed to the story, the Gray Lady having dedicated more resources to undermining the Trump administration than the Republican Congress has to advancing Trump’s agenda. Remarkably, none of the able journalists appears to have asked a screamingly obvious question — a question that would have been driving press coverage had an Obama administration operative been in the Bureau’s hot seat.

On what basis was the FBI investigating General Flynn?
To predicate an investigation under FBI guidelines, there must be good-faith suspicion that (a) a federal crime has been or is being committed, (b) there is a threat to American national security, or (c) there is an opportunity to collect foreign intelligence relevant to a priority established by the executive branch. These categories frequently overlap — e.g., a terrorist will typically commit several crimes in a plot that threatens national security, and when captured he will be a source of foreign intelligence.

Categories (a) and (b) are self-explanatory. It is category (c), intelligence collection, that is most pertinent to our consideration of Flynn.

At first blush, this category seems limitless: unmooring government investigators from the constraints that normally confine their intrusions on our liberty (e.g., snooping, search warrants, interrogations) to situations in which there is real reason to suspect unlawful or dangerous activity. Intelligence collection, after all, is just the gathering of information that can be refined into a reliable basis for decisions by policymakers.

George & the Dragon Slayer By Joan Swirsky

The original story of Saint George and the Dragon dates back to the 7th century, the narrative maintaining that in a fictitious town in Libya there lived a king who chose to appease the evil dragon in the town’s lake that was poisoning the countryside. With the agreement of his subjects, the appeasement involved feeding the dragon two sheep every day. But when there were no more sheep, the King’s subjects started feeding their children to the dragon, chosen by lottery.

When one of the lots fell on the king’s daughter, he told the people they could have all his gold and silver and half his kingdom if his daughter were spared, but the people refused. As his daughter walked to the lake to be fed to the dragon, fate intervened–– Saint George happened to be riding by.

Saint George stabbed the dragon with his lance, then placed a collar around its neck and, with the princess at his side, paraded the wounded monster through the streets of the town. The townspeople were terrified, whereupon Saint George promised to slay the beast if they all converted to Christianity, which they did quite promptly. What a rich parable––with variations of course––on today’s political scene.

THE 2017 VERSION

In my version, the poisonous dragon is radical billionaire George Soros, who has made it his life’s work to poison vibrant democratic systems of government throughout the world in order to actualize his globalist vision of One World Government in which unicorns prance in gorgeous meadows, everyone speaks a polyglot Esperanto, capitalism is destroyed, food and shelter and meaning in life are provided by egomaniacs who know better than everyone else what is good for We the People, and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, as well as Jesus and Buddha, are all dead because only government is the god worthy of being worshipped.

In an interview with The L.A. Times, Soros admitted the following: “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble.” And when asked by Britain’s Independent newspaper to elaborate on that passage, Soros said, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”

In other words, the guy actually believes he is god! That was in 2003, when Mr. Soros was investing a formidable amount of his fortune into defeating President George W. Bush in his run for a second term in office. That effort failed, but the dragon got busy with other things, including making huge investments in organizations that would carry his radical message to new heights: the progressive Media Matters for America with its obsessive pursuit and vilification of conservative media, the Secretary of State Project, focused on electing leftists to that office to oversee the election process, like they did in the 2008 Minnesota Senate race that magically produced absentee ballots which gave the election to Al Franken instead of the popular incumbent Norm Coleman.

Also, as spelled out by journalist Mike Ciandella, the radical National Council of LaRaza, the abortion factory aka Planned Parenthood, the leftist Associated Press, the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation, as described by Dr. Sebastian Gorka, author of the best-selling book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, ACORN known for rampant voter fraud, and the following huge number of leftist groups. And that is not to omit the over-$100 million Mr. Soros has spent on, among other of his fetishes, Obamacare, anti-illegal-immigration groups, and anti-Israel organizations.