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September 2017

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Sweden: What You Won’t See in This Book… by Bruce Bawer

By on September 23rd, 2017

What won’t you see in this book? You won’t see a picture of Muslim “morality police” patrolling neighborhoods and controlling women’s conduct. You won’t see Muslim men cutting in front of Swedish women in queues and then calling them “whores” when they protest.

One of Sweden’s former prime ministers, Fredrik Reinfeldt, pronounced with approval in December 2014 that the future of Sweden belonged not to ethnic Swedes but to immigrants.

Speaking at a rally in Melbourne, Florida, on February 18, President Trump mentioned recent terrorist attacks in Nice, Paris, and Brussels, and then said:

“You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this. Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”

Nothing major had happened the night before in Sweden, except that the country has taken in armies of Muslims, and as a result is descending into social and economic disaster.

The Swedish media might have responded to Trump’s comment by addressing their country’s immigrant crisis honestly. Instead, they took it as an opportunity to mock Trump. The Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet ran an article in English headlined: “Here’s what happened in Sweden Friday night, Mr President.” The article included a list of innocuous news items, among them technical problems that had occurred at rehearsals for Swedish Eurovision and the temporary closing of a highway because of lousy weather.

So much for that episode, right? No. Several Swedish photographers decided to drag it out way beyond a single news cycle. The result: a new coffee-table book entitled Last Night in Sweden.

At least one Swedish photography website has applauded this project. This book, the anonymous author wrote, is a “profound and insightful” work that “encapsulates a true and candid Sweden,” shows “the country as it really is, from the inside — in its multiplicity, subtle textures, and political, social and cultural nuance.”

Lee Roden of the free Swedish newspaper The Local agreed, claiming that the pictures in the book “combat the hysteria about the country provoked by people like US President Donald Trump.” The photographer in charge of the project, Jeppe Wikström, told Roden that people smear Sweden out of jealousy: “We manage to combine diversity with success. We do have high taxes, but we also have a very successful business life.” Wilkström admitted that there are some odd things about Swedes: “We take off our shoes before going inside, put money into the right position and make sure it’s not so wrinkly before paying at a cash register.”

The first copy of Last Night in Sweden, published on September 7, was mailed to Donald Trump. Other copies have been, or will be, sent to “all members of the US Congress and European Parliament” as a way of countering “false news.” [This is how they put it] At the end of October, an exhibition of photos from the book will move from Stockholm to the European Parliament in Brussels.

The book contains pictures of an ethnic Swedish man sitting on a snowmobile on a snow-covered icy river; a young guy walking around a gym practicing the tuba; a 94-year old Swedish woman in a retirement home being pushed in her wheelchair by a Somali immigrant; an octogenarian Swedish couple sitting in their home sauna in Lapland; a handicapped Algerian immigrant working out in the gym he founded; a Romani beggar woman kneeling on a city street; an elderly Swedish couple playing in their kitchen with their dog. And so on. In other words, a bunch of images showing immigrants doing things that, in one way or another, enhance life in Sweden, mixed in with a few photos of ethnic Swedes living pretty much the same way they did before the immigration tsunami started.

What won’t you see in this book?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Plame Knew What She Was Tweeting by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on September 23rd, 2017

Valerie Plame had to know what she was tweeting. Plame retweeted a virulently anti-Semitic article by a well-known bigot, which she characterized as “thoughtful.” Now she’s trying to make excuses, but they don’t wash.

The article by Phillip Giraldi itself contains the usual anti-Semitic tropes: Jews are guilty of dual loyalty; they control politicians, the media and entertainment; they want the US to fight wars for the country to which they have real allegiance– Israel; they are dangerous to America. Giraldi has been pushing this garbage for years and Plame is one of his fans.

But this particular article goes much further in its neo-Nazi imagery. It advocates that the

“The media should be required to label [Jews like Bill Kristol] at the bottom of the television screen whenever they pop up … That would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison –translating roughly as ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril.”

In other words, Jewish supporters of Israel, like Kristol and me, should have to wear the modern day equivalent of a yellow star before we are allowed to appear on TV and poison real Americans. Nice stuff that Plame was retweeting and characterizing as thoughtful.

This was not the first time Plame retweeted Giraldi’s garbage. In 2014, she retweeted one of his screeds with the following notation: “Well put.” And after tweeting the current anti-Semitic article she described it as: “Yes, very provocative, but thoughtful. Many neocon hawks ARE Jewish. Ugh.” Nor is this the only time that Plame has re-Tweeted other nonsense from the bigoted platform this piece came from – a platform of which she has pleaded ignorance. According to journalist Yashar Ali, Plame has tweeted at least eight other articles from the same website since 2014. Sounds like she is into some strange websites.

I actually read the Philip Giraldi article before I was aware of the Plame tweet. I read it on a neo-Nazi website, where Giraldi’s articles are frequently featured. That’s where Giraldi’s articles belong – on overtly anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi websites. For Plame, a former CIA operative, to claim that she was unaware of the anti-Semitic content of Giraldi’s article is to blink reality. Plame had to know what she was doing, since she was aware of Giraldi’s bigotry. Her apologies ring hollow. Her true feelings were revealed in what she said before she realized that she would be widely condemned for her original re- Tweet. She must now do more than apologize. She must explain how she came upon the article? Who sent it to her? Does she regularly read bigoted website? Why is she reading and re-Tweeting a known anti-Semite? What are her own personal views regarding the content of the Giraldi’s article.

The Plame incident reflects a broader problem about which I have written [A new tolerance for anti-Semitism, by Alan M. Dershowitz, published by Gatestone Institute, 2017].There is a growing tolerance for anti-Semitism. Even when some people themselves do not harbor these feelings, they are willing to support those who do, as long as the anti-Semites are on their side of the political spectrum. This is an unacceptable approach, especially in the post-Holocaust era. Unfortunately, Valerie Plame is the poster child for this growing tolerance. She must be called out on it, as must others who follow the same path of bigotry.

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The Nazis’ Supernatural Obsession Eric Kurlander provides an exhaustive examination of the supernatural history of the Third Reich. By Andrew Stuttaford

By on September 23rd, 2017

Adolf Hitler once argued that National Socialism represented “a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based on the greatest of scientific knowledge and its spiritual expression.” If there are any people foolish enough still to fall for that, they will not enjoy this book. While the enthusiasm of some Nazi leaders, most notoriously Himmler, for the occult has been a staple of pop culture and the more disreputable corners of historical “investigation” for years, Eric Kurlander’s book, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, shows that many others felt much the same way.

Kurlander depicts a Third Reich in which, despite uneven and often ambiguous efforts to rein them in, seers, magicians, and psychics flourished. Buddha was drafted into the master race, parapsychology “so long as it comported with ‘Nordic-Germanic feeling’” was recognized as legitimate, and the grounds were laid for an “Ario-Germanic” national religion as a syncretic (it wouldn’t all be Wotan) “substitute for Christianity.” Meanwhile, charlatan-historians and charlatan-folklorists hunted for proof that large swathes of Europe were part of an ancestral German homeland, charlatan-archeologists searched for evidence of “the Nordic origins of Asian civilization,” charlatan-doctors worked on monstrous human experiments, and charlatan-scientists struggled to develop weapons designed to draw on mysterious untapped electromagnetic forces. This arsenal was intended to include death rays, sound weapons, and anti-gravity devices — an absurdity and a waste made all the more grotesque by the contrast with the remarkably sophisticated technology successfully deployed by Germany during the war.

If the magical weapons proved harmless, the same cannot be said of the mix of superstition and pseudoscience that ran through the Nazis’ thinking about race, a mix that goes some way to accounting for both the intensity of their anti-Semitism and the meticulousness of the slaughter that followed. “Traditional” anti-Semitism rested on a distrust of difference reinforced by religious and then economic resentment. It generated exclusion, violence, and, as time went by, increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories. But the notion of Jews as perpetual enemies of an advanced “Aryan” race was a fairly new confection, dating back only to the mid 19th century.

Kurlander is an excellent guide to the complex and often conflicting “histories” of the Aryans’ origins, versions of which featured sex with angels, God-men from Tibet, a descent from heaven, moons made of ice crashing into the earth (the weirdly popular “World Ice Theory,” in which Hitler was one of numerous believers), and much more besides. These narratives also incorporated tales of a fall: The original Aryans had been scattered. Their racial integrity had been diluted by intermingling with “lesser breeds.” They had been preyed upon by — whom else? — the Jews, routinely smeared as parasitic and as a disease but also in terms that sometimes appeared to be more than metaphor: Hitler dubbed Jews the children of the devil and believed that forestalling the “Jewish apocalypse was our duty, our God-given mission.”

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Mueller Scorches the Earth His pre-dawn raid was meant to intimidate Manafort, not just to collect evidence. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on September 23rd, 2017

Robert Mueller’s sprawling special-counsel investigation is playing hardball.

It was not enough to get a search warrant to ransack the Virginia home of Paul Manafort, even as the former Trump campaign chairman was cooperating with congressional investigators. Mueller’s bad-asses persuaded a judge to give them permission to pick the door lock. That way, they could break into the premises in the wee hours, while Manafort and his wife were in bed sleeping. They proceeded to secure the premises — of a man they are reportedly investigating for tax and financial crimes, not gang murders and Mafia hits — by drawing their guns on the stunned couple, apparently to check their pajamas for weapons.

Mueller’s probe more resembles an empire, with 17 prosecutors retained on the public dime. So . . . what exactly is the crime of the century that requires five times the number of lawyers the Justice Department customarily assigns to crimes of the century? No one can say. The growing firm is clearly scorching the earth, scrutinizing over a decade of Manafort’s shady business dealings, determined to pluck out some white-collar felony or another that they can use to squeeze him.

You are forgiven if you can recall only vaguely that supposition about Trump-campaign collusion in Russian espionage against the 2016 election was the actual explanation for Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. To the extent there was any explanation, that is. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Trump appointee, did not comply with the regulations requiring a description of the crimes Trump’s Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate, purportedly necessitating a quasi-independent special counsel.

The way it’s supposed to work, the Justice Department learns of a crime, so it assigns a prosecutor. To the contrary, this Justice Department assigned a prosecutor — make that: 17 hyper-aggressive prosecutors — and unleashed them to hunt for whatever crime they could find.

If you sense that this cuts against the presumption of innocence, you’re onto something. Because of that presumption, coupled with such other constitutional rights as the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable police searches, prosecutors are supposed to be measured in the use of their awesome powers, to employ only as much compulsion as seems appropriate under the circumstances. You don’t get a search warrant when a subpoena will do; if you have to get a warrant, you don’t do a covert pre-dawn entry when ringing the bell in the daytime will easily get you in the door.

In various places, our law reflects this common sense. For example, in applying for a wiretap authorization, besides describing the precise crime it suspects, the Justice Department must satisfy the judge that less intrusive techniques for obtaining evidence of similar quality have been attempted, or would be certain to fail if tried. (See section 2518(b) and (c) of the federal penal code.) The point is to instruct investigators that they must exercise restraint. The prosecutorial privilege to act “under color of law” comes with the duty to respect the rights the law guarantees.

Law enforcement is hard and sometimes dangerous work. Thus, there is leeway for officials to make errors in judgment. Without that leeway, they would be too paralyzed to do their jobs, and there would be no rule of law. But when prosecutors and investigators go way overboard just because they can, it is not law enforcement. It is abuse of law-enforcement power in order to intimidate.

There is no other way to interpret the brass-knuckles treatment of Manafort, a subject in a non-violent-crime investigation who is represented by counsel and was cooperating with Congress at the time Mueller’s Gang of 17 chose to break into his home. Did they really think they couldn’t have gotten the stuff they carted out of Manafort’s residence by calling up his well-regarded lawyers and asking for it? After he had already surrendered 300 pages of documents to investigative committees?

Besides scaring the bejesus out of him with the search warrant, prosecutors reportedly also told Manafort that they intend to indict him. Must mean they have a case, right? So, if Manafort is such a threat to obstruct justice that they needed to break into his home and grab the evidence before he could destroy it, then why hasn’t he been arrested yet? I mean, how could Mueller responsibly allow so dangerous a criminal to walk the streets?

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Was Your State’s Election System Hacked by the Russians? DHS Notifies 21 States By Tyler O’Neil

By on September 23rd, 2017

On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notified the election officials of 21 states that hackers targeted their systems last year. DHS had previously told The Associated Press (AP) that more than 20 states were targeted by hackers believed to be Russian agents before the 2016 elections. Many of the states did not know until Friday that their systems were targeted.

“It is completely unacceptable that it has taken DHS over a year to inform our office of Russian scanning of our systems, despite our repeated requests for information,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D) said in a statement. “The practice of withholding critical information from elections officials is a detriment to the security of our elections and our democracy.”

State election offices in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin verified to the AP that they were among those targeted. Among these, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin are considered swing states.

The DHS did not specify the identity of the hackers, but in most cases, the states were told their systems were not breached. In most of the states, the targeting involved preparatory activity, like scanning computer systems. Targets included voter registration systems but not vote tallying software.

Only Illinois reported that hackers had succeeded in breaching its voter systems. Other states reported that their cybersecurity efforts turned back efforts to get to crucial information.

Election officials in three states did tie the attacks to Russia.

The Wisconsin Election Commission said the state’s systems were targeted by “Russian government cyber actors.” Alaska Elections Division Director Josie Bahnke alleged that computers in Russia were scanning election systems.

“There are constant attempts by bad actors to hack our systems,” Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate (R), said in a statement. “But we continue to deflect those attempts.”

A spokesman for the Colorado secretary of state was hesitant to label the cyber attack attempts. “It’s not an attack. I wouldn’t call it a probe. It’s not a breach, it’s not a penetration,” Trevor Timmons said. “It’s really reconnaissance by a bad guy to try and figure out how we would break into your computer.”

DHS admitted that state and local officials should be informed about cybersecurity risks to election systems. “We are working with them to refine our processes for sharing this information while protecting the integrity of investigations and the confidentiality of system owners,” the agency said.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Professor Wants to Destroy ‘Whitestream Intellectual Habits’ By Tom Knighton

By on September 23rd, 2017

By now, we get it. Race-baiting professors are convinced the entire system is rigged against minorities and will use any and all opportunities to argue such. If possible, they’ll publish these arguments in journals so they can pretend their racially charged screeds are somehow legitimate.

The latest example comes from a professor at the University of Texas. James Jupp is a professor of critical white studies who thinks that too much of K-12 education is racist or something.

From Campus Reform:

Such knowledge, Jupp explains, “refers to Whitestream subject area content and related whitened intellectual habits that form the basis of much mainstream learning and teaching in U.S. schools.”

Jupp then cites K-12 history lessons as an example, noting that many K-12 students are taught through the lens of “white privilege,” which creates problems among the future educators in Jupp’s classes, whom he teaches to “resist critical race and whiteness pedagogies.”

In an effort to fight this, Jupp, a proponent of “decolonizing education,” calls upon his fellow professors to commit to “the creative destruction of cherished curriculum knowledge” and replace it with “actionable, teachable, antiracist knowledge for race-visible teaching.”

“Racialized curriculum recoding is important because it begins to outline the ways in which critical race or whiteness pedagogies must actually recode and replace existing cherished knowledge in process-oriented ways,” Jupp argues, saying such a tactic is important because historically aspiring “white teachers [have] denied, evaded, or diminished the salience of race in teaching and learning.”

In other words, math, science, English, and actual history are all racist and stuff.

Look, we have issues in education, but Jupp is out of his mind if he thinks “whiteness” is somehow an infection that has spread throughout the K-12 curriculum in this country. He’s absolutely insane.

Instead, this is race-baiting nonsense that only really impacts him because he teaches courses in this nonsense and students who enter his class see it as such. They see it, resist it, and Jupp doesn’t like that. So he wants them primed for his class by ignoring centuries of scholarship in all the various disciplines just so he can have an easier time.

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Princeton Newspaper Disbands Editorial Board after Right-Leaning Articles Appear By Tom Knighton

By on September 23rd, 2017

The Princeton campus newspaper has a unique editorial structure. While most newspapers — not just student-run ones — have an editorial board that is made up of senior editors, Princeton’s Princetonian has an editorial board that is completely separate from the senior student staff. Instead, it has what has been reported as a fairly broad cross-section of students on the Ivy League campus.

But then the board put forth several right-leaning opinion pieces in a row, which was intolerable for the tolerant leftists in charge at the Princetonian.

From The College Fix:

Earlier this month, however, that independent board was dissolved by the Princetonian’s top editors, who reverted to the more common model of having senior editors pen unsigned editorials.

The decision upset members of the disbanded board, who have gone rogue, launching their own website to continue to publish opinions and combat what they call the Princetonian’s“anti-pluralism.”

In their debut editorial Sept. 14, they also called current leaders of the Princetonian out for bias, noting the “catalyst for the change in the Editorial Board’s structure was a series of editorials that did not align with the personal political convictions of the Editor-in-Chief and other senior editors.”

Sarah Sakha, who is now editor-in-chief of the campus paper and was also a contributor to the Princeton Progressive, defended the action.

Sakha, in an email to The College Fix, defended the decision to disband the group, noting it was made by the Managing Board, which she heads, after consulting with other members of the Princetonian and its Board of Trustees.

“We decided to revise the structure of our Editorial Board, in a return to a more traditional model of an editorial board, for a college newspaper,” Sakha said. “We welcome a diversity of opinion, which is why we have invited all current members of the board to apply to the new board. Alternatively, they can become bylined columnists, without having to apply. We expect their voices will not be lost, but rather amplified, on our Opinion pages by having a byline.”

I’m sorry, but that’s equine excrement.

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Dershowitz: Plame Story Is ‘Much, Much Worse than the Media Has Presented It’ By Debra Heine

By on September 23rd, 2017

Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz slammed the media this morning for playing down the Valerie Plame anti-Semitic tweet story after her disingenuous apology.

The former CIA operative came under intense fire yesterday on Twitter after she tweeted an anti-Semitic article that blames “America’s Jews” for all of our wars. After the backlash, it was said that she had only skimmed the Unz Review article and somehow had missed the blatant anti-Semitism.

During an appearance on Fox and Friends Friday, the professor said that this story is “much, much worse than the media has presented it.” He added that the author of the article, Philip Giraldi, is a “well-known anti-Semite.”

“In this article, he says that Jews like me or Bill Kristol, when we appear on television, should have on the bottom of the screen identification saying we’re Jews,” Dershowitz pointed out. “And he says it’s ‘like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison. Ingest at your own peril.'”

“All you have to do is read the first couple of paragraphs: Jews control the media, Jews control politics,” he exclaimed. “This is just like what was written in Nazi Germany!” He added, “she can’t now say, ‘I didn’t know what was in it.'”

Dershowitz noted that in 2014, Plame tweeted another article by Giraldi and he argued that her retweets expose “her real set of beliefs.”

“The interesting thing about Twitter, is you do it so quickly, it often reflects your real, genuine beliefs. Then you realize what you’ve said and you say, ‘Uh, oh. I’m sorry,'” he explained. “This guy, Giraldi’s articles are constantly put on neo-Nazi websites!”

“Who would imagine that a former CIA operative would retweet that and, I believe, endorse it?” Dershowitz said incredulously.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary Clinton criticizes first lady Melania Trump – here’s what she said by Carlos Garcia

By on September 23rd, 2017

“Is this a fair criticism?While cyber-bullying has not been stamped out in our time, it is a little unfair of the former first lady to criticize the current first lady when it’s just a few months into the first term of President Trump. Some might also point out that Clinton herself is accused of “bullying” attacks on the alleged sexual harassment victims of her husband, former President Bill Clinton.”

Hillary Clinton said that first lady Melania Trump was doing not enough to stop cyber-bullying, and that if she “were serious” about the issue, there’s plenty of allies she could enlist in the struggle.

What did she say exactly?

When asked if the first lady was doing enough to combat cyber-bullying, she responded, “No, no and, look, I don’t think anybody is doing enough on cyberbullying, because it’s real and it has a particularly damaging effect on young people, who are so influenced by and personally affected by what is said about them or is said to them.”

Hillary made her comments to progressive news site MIC, who published her comments on Tuesday.

“I really worry about it as a major issue,” she said, “y’know, as something that I talked about in the campaign and I wanted to do more. I think they’d be a lot of people who would be willing to help her, if she were serious about actually following through.”

“Because we’ve got to try the best we can to make the internet,” she explained, “particularly social media, understand the impact that it can have particularly on vulnerable people, particularly on susceptible young people, and we need more voices that are not just firing nasty shots back, but saying, time out, no. This is not the way you talk about anybody, this is not how you conduct yourself.”

“You would never do it in person. I think it’s a really important issue, and if she were serious and able to follow through on it,” she concluded, “I bet there’d be so many people who’d be willing to try to help her on that.”

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Obamacare insurance rates in IL expected to rise an average of 35% By Rick Moran

By on September 23rd, 2017

The insurance commissioner for the state of Illinois announced that health insurance customers in the state will see premium increases average 35% in 2018.

Washington Free Beacon:

The four insurers serving the individual market in Illinois are Celtic Insurance Company, CIGNA HealthCare of Illinois, Health Alliance Medical Plans (HAMP), and Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC). Humana has announced earlier this year it was leaving the Illinois exchange.

For Obamacare’s lowest silver-plan, the four insurers are requesting a range of 15 to 43 percent in premium hikes, coming to an average of 35 percent.

A 21-year-old nonsmoker on the lowest cost silver-plan with Celtic Insurance can expect to see premiums of $315.33. For those with Cigna coverage, an individual in this category could expect to see a range of premiums of $448.97 to $344.23. Individuals with HAMP coverage can expect their premiums to go up from a range of $423.96 to $446.71. Those covered by HCSC can expect premiums to increase from a range of $358.46 to $520.94.

For those purchasing the second-lowest silver plan, the commissioner says many counties will see increases of more than 40 percent.

In October of last year, the Obama administration announced that premiums for 2017 would rise by double-digits. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, rate increases are a result of the increasing number of insurers experiencing losses on the exchanges.

“Years before the Trump administration came to office, Obamacare’s double-digit rate increases and onerous mandates have been squeezing the pocket books of the American people,” a spokesperson at the Department of Health and Human Services said.

“Americans are once again facing skyrocketing costs and plummeting choices because of Obamacare’s fundamental failures,” the spokesperson said. “Congress should bring relief to American families and end the Obamacare nightmare once and for all.”

Are these rate increases going to be typical nationwide? Those states with more insurance companies selling policies will see smaller increases, while those states where consumers have fewer options will probably see increases higher than an average of 35%. The key, as in any market, is competition. It’s not rocket science.

The Republican bill that Congress may vote on next week does not address the lack of competition in many states. And as the DHS spokesman points out, whatever uncertainty there is among insurance companies because Obamacare reform is up in the air pales in comparison to the fundamental and continuing flaws of Obamacare from the day it was implemented. The reason Obamacare continues to fail is that insurance companies can’t make money selling Obamacare policies.

Until that issue is addressed, we will continue to see skyrocketing premium increases driving more and more people out of the market.

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