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December 2017

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Civilization’s ‘Darkest Hour’ Hits the Silver Screen A masterful new film shows how Churchill saved the world from Nazi Germany in May of 1940. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 28th, 2017

The new film Darkest Hour offers the diplomatic side to the recent action movie Dunkirk.

The story unfolds with the drama of British prime minister Winston Churchill’s assuming power during the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. Churchill’s predecessor, the sickly Neville Chamberlain, had lost the confidence of the English people and the British government. His appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the disastrous first nine months of World War II seemed to have all but lost Britain the war.

Churchill was asked to become prime minister on the very day that Hitler invaded France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The armies of all three democracies — together larger than Germany’s invading forces — collapsed within days or a few weeks.

About a third of a million British soldiers stranded in a doomed France were miraculously saved by Churchill’s bold decision to risk evacuating them by sea from Dunkirk, France, where most of what was left of the British Expeditionary Force had retreated.

Churchill’s greatest problem was not just saving the British army but confronting the reality that, with the German conquest of Europe, the British Empire now had no allies.

The Soviet Union had all but joined Hitler’s Germany under their infamous non-aggression pact of August 1939.

The United States was determined at all costs to remain neutral. Just how neutral is emphasized in Darkest Hour by Churchill’s sad phone call with U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR cleverly assures Churchill that in theory he wants to help while in fact he can do nothing.

Within days of Churchill’s taking office, all of what is now the European Union either would be in Hitler’s hands or could be considered pro-Nazi “neutral.”

Darkest Hour gets its title from the understandable depression that had spread throughout the British government. Members of Churchill’s new war cabinet wanted to sue for peace. Chamberlain and senior conservative politician Edward Wood both considered Churchill unhinged for believing Britain could survive.

Both appeasers dreamed that thuggish Italian dictator Benito Mussolini might be persuaded to beg Hitler to call off his planned invasion of Great Britain. They dreamed Mussolini could save a shred of English dignity through an arranged British surrender.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mapping The Swamp, A Study of the Administrative State (FY2016) reveals the size, scope, and power of the federal government.

By on December 28th, 2017

Here are some ‘Key Findings’:

1.97 million civil service employees at a total cash cost of $136 billion. Every minute, the federal government pays its disclosed workforce $1 million. Every eight-hour workday costs more than $500 million.

Over the last six-years, the number of federal employees making $200,000+ increased by 165 percent.

More than 400,000 federal bureaucrats made $100,000+ incomes. Furthermore, nearly 30,000 rank-and-file employees out-earned all 50 state governors receiving more than $190,823.

After just 3-years of employment, federal bureaucrats receive 43 paid days off – that’s 8 1/2 weeks! We estimate this perk costs taxpayers $22.6 billion annually.

A new ‘minimum wage’ for federal employees: at 78 agencies, the average employee made more than $100,000!

Presidio Trust – a small federal agency in San Francisco – paid out three of the four largest bonuses at the federal government, including the largest in FY2016. The biggest bonus ($141,525) went to an HR Manager in charge of payroll!

Download a PDF copy of our report, click here.

We literally ‘Mapped The Swamp’:

Search our interactive map of the 2 million federal bureaucrats by ZIP code, click here. Just click a pin and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart beneath the map.

See a small piece of the federal bureaucracy in your ZIP code or any ZIP code across America.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ambassador David Friedman has reportedly called for the US State Department to change its terminology and drop the word ‘occupied’ when referring to the ‘West Bank.’ By Shimon Bar Lev, United with Israel

By on December 28th, 2017

United with Israel does not use the term ‘occupied’ when referring to areas controlled by Israel since June 1967. US Ambassador David Friedman apparently agrees.

Although many call the territories to the west of the Jordan River captured by Israel in the Six Day War the “West Bank,” United with Israel prefers to use the historically and geographically correct term ‘Judea and Samaria.’

‘Occupied’ is a loaded political phrase that indicates, just by its usage, that Israel is the occupier and not the legal sovereign in territories in the Land of Israel that were captured in the Six Day War in 1967. The ‘territories’ remain in dispute, and they been the subject of a series of peace negotiations and a few partial agreements, including the Oslo Accords signed in 1995 between Israel and the Palestinians.

International legal expert Ambassador Alan Baker told United with Israel that “Friedman is completely correct. The word ‘occupation’ refers to your army taking military control over some other country’s sovereign territory. Israel has a unique historic connection to Judea and Samaria.” According to Baker, “The correct term should be ‘disputed territories.’”
State Department Agrees to Consider Policy Change

The State Department is refusing to adhere to Friedman’s request but has agreed to bring the issue up for consideration in the near future, Israel Radio reported. The development comes only weeks after President Donald Trump shifted decades of US policy by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Even as he made the policy announcement, Trump went on to declare that the US remains committed to a comprehensive peace agreement and has not taken a position relating to the future and permanent recognized borders between Israel and the Palestinians.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamic Oppression of Women: A Hot New Market by Giulio Meotti

By on December 28th, 2017

Unfortunately, for most of women in the Middle East, veils are not an “exciting development”, but an imposition by an obscurantist ideology. After the Islamic State was defeated in Raqqa, Syria, many women took to the streets to take off their veils and were filmed burning them.

“The enemies of freedom are first recruited from the free societies, from some of the enlightened elites who deny the benefit of democratic rights to the rest of humanity, even to their own compatriots, if they have the misfortune to belong to another religion, to another ethnicity.” — Pascal Bruckner, author.

Instead of embracing these veils, a true feminism should defend the rights and freedoms of all women. It should not be ideologically submissive to those who repress women.

We are not talking about the dreary type of Muslim garment of Raqqa or Kabul, but a global market that is a Westernized, colorful, supposedly joyful Islamic enterprise.

First it was a Muslim woman wearing a hijab in Playboy. Then Nike released a “performance hijab” for athletes. Meanwhile, last spring, Aab, one of the world’s leading Islamic clothing retailers, opened its first boutique in London, just in time for the annual London Fashion Week. Vogue Arabia published its first-ever print issue. Last month, Mattel unveiled, so to speak, the world’s first hijab-wearing Barbie doll, who is apparently part of a new series dedicated to women “breaking social barriers”.

A conformist and “inclusive” establishment, eager for profits, has turned the Islamic veil into a purportedly new symbol of freedom and fashion. Islamists have understood this psychology among Western elites, who are terrified to be accused of “Islamophobia”. This is how Islamist misogyny has been turned into a global garment. Take a recent Vogue announcement:

“Dolce & Gabbana is producing a collection of hijabs and abayas [full-length Saudi covering for women] targeted to Muslim customers in the Middle East. To Muslim women with a taste for luxury fashion, this collection is an exciting development”.

Unfortunately, for most of women in the Middle East, veils and abayas are not an “exciting development”, but an imposition by an obscurantist ideology. After the Islamic State was defeated in Raqqa, Syria, many women took to the streets to take off their veils. Last June, similar images were seen after Raqqa was first freed from the Islamist dictatorship. Women were filmed burning their veils.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pakistan: Blasphemy Laws, Human-Rights Abuses Deepen by A. Z. Mohamed

By on December 28th, 2017

The Pakistani parliament is becoming increasingly radicalized — as the results of a local by-election in Lahore in September demonstrated.

In such a political climate, and with a new prime minister who refuses to criticize his country’s blasphemy laws, let alone work to repeal them, Pakistan’s already fragile “democracy” is on a steady slide backwards.

In late September — less than three weeks after newly instated Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi attended the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly in New York — two Christian boys employed as cleaners at a hospital in Pakistan were arrested for violating the country’s blasphemy laws. According to the complaint lodged with police, the boys had swept up and burned strewn pieces of paper on which Quranic verses happened to be written.

At around the same time, a Pakistani court sentenced a Christian man to death for insulting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in a poem he sent to a Muslim friend on the WhatsApp messaging service. This came two months after a young Muslim Pakistani was sentenced to death for “blasphemous” posts on Facebook.

On September 20, after the closing of the General Assembly, Abbasi was invited to give a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the Q&A period — at the end of his “conversation” with David Sanger of the New York Times — he was asked by Human Rights Watch (HRW) director Kenneth Roth whether he would “speak out against [Pakistan’s] blasphemy law, and certainly about [its] harsh application…with death sentences and mob violence and the like.”

Abbasi replied by dodging the question:

“[I]t’s only up to the parliament to amend the laws. The job of the government is to make sure that the laws are not abused and innocent people are not prosecuted or prosecuted.”

At this point, Sanger interjected:

“[C]ertainly it is up to the parliament, but you’re in a position of both great political and moral leadership now in your post as prime minister. And I think the core of the question was whether or not the leaders of Pakistan are willing to go stand up to what seems to be, at least through American and Western eyes at time(s), deat

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ISIS Takes Hold in Pakistan by Kaswar Klasra

By on December 28th, 2017

In February 2016, the director general of the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau warned the government that ISIS was emerging as a threat, with Pakistani terrorists providing a foothold for the group, whose Pakistani branch is called Walayat-e-Khurasan.

ISIS also enlists “partners of convenience” in Afghanistan and “outsources” terror attacks to Pakistani organizations — such as Lashkar-i-Jhangvi and Jamaat-ul-Ahrar — a recent UN Security Council counter-terrorism report revealed. In addition, as many as 100 Pakistanis left the country in 2015 to join ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

The most vulnerable victims of this threat are Christians, who make up a mere 2% of the Sunni Muslim-majority state. ISIS is only the latest terrorist group to have attacked Christians in Pakistan.

Concern over the extent of the presence and power of ISIS in Pakistan resurfaced on December 17, when a suicide-bombing at a church in Quetta left at least nine worshipers dead and more than 50 seriously wounded.

Had Pakistani security forces not responded swiftly to the attack on the Bethel Memorial Methodist Church — where 400 men, women and children were attending Sunday services – the assailants “would have managed to reach the main hall of the building, and the death toll would have been much higher,” Sarfraz Bugti, the provincial home minister of the Baluchistan province, where Quetta is located, told Gatestone Institute.

Responsibility for the attack — in which two terrorists, clad in explosive vests and armed with AK-47 rifles — was later claimed by ISIS, which has an impressive record of honesty in taking credit for attacks, in a statement published by the Amaq News Agency.

This was the sixth ISIS attack in Pakistan in the past year and a half. The first took place on August 8, 2016, when a suicide bomber killed at least 70 people and wounded more than 100 in an attack on a crowd of lawyers and journalists gathered in a government hospital in Quetta — in the province that borders Afghanistan and Iran — to mourn a lawyer who had been murdered earlier in the day. The attack was claimed by a joint ISIS-Taliban faction.

On October 24, 2016, ISIS claimed responsibility for a deadly attack on a police training college in Quetta. The assault, committed by three heavily armed terrorists against sleeping cadets, left more than 60 dead and more than 165 others wounded.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Scientific American is Officially a Joke Daniel Greenfield

By on December 28th, 2017

I’ve written about the descent of the formerly prestigious Scientific American into social justice blogging before. But this jumps the shark. And all the starving polar bears on the ice floes. And Al Gore’s mansion and private jet.

Men Resist Green Behavior as Un-Manly

Please, tell us more.

Our own research suggests an additional possibility: men may shun eco-friendly behavior because of what it conveys about their masculinity.

Like caring more about brand virtue signaling than doing anything useful?

But surely this is based on solid research. After all, research was clearly mentioned.

In one study, we threatened the masculinity of male participants by showing them a pink gift card with a floral design and asking them to imagine using the card to purchase three products (lamp, backpack, and batteries). Compared to men shown a standard gift card, threatened men were more likely to choose the non-green rather than green version of each item. The idea that emasculated men try to reassert their masculinity through non-environmentally-friendly choices suggests that in addition to littering, wasting water, or using too much electricity, one could harm the environment merely by making men feel feminine.

This comes from two associate professors of marketing. Their solution is to put more wolves on eco-friendly products. That will be less threatening.

At the end of the article, there’s this notice. “Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about?”

If you’re a marketing scientist who specializes in putting wolf virtue signaling, please send your peer-reviewed paper to the Scientific American.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Politics of Caesar’s Wife Maintaining high Victorian standards of sexual behavior in a sexually saturated culture. Bruce Thornton

By on December 28th, 2017

In 62 B.C., the tribune Clodius Pulcher was caught sneaking into Julius Caesar’s house during a religious ritual forbidden to men. Clodius was allegedly attempting to seduce Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, who was hosting the ceremony and was rumored to welcome Clodius’ advances. Because the scandal happened at Caesar’s house, he divorced her.

At Clodius’ trial for sacrilege, however, Caesar testified that he knew nothing of the matter, despite the evidence and despite widespread rumors about Pompeia and Clodius. When asked by the prosecutor why then he had divorced his wife, Caesar responded with the now proverbial, “I thought my wife ought not to be under suspicion.” But as Plutarch adds, Caesar’s decision was not about upholding standards of religious purity or virtuous behavior. Caesar had made a political calculation: the accused was a tribune of the people and a favorite of the masses, who were threatening the jurors with violence. As a leader of the populares, the people, Caesar couldn’t afford to alienate his volatile supporters by testifying against their champion.

The recent numerous accusations of sexual misconduct, harassment, or assault by politicians and celebrities, some of which date back forty years, have been accompanied by condemnations of the accused redolent of the “Caesar’s Wife” standard: political leaders “ought not to be under suspicion.” In Caesar’s time as in ours, this rigorous standard of behavior reflects politics as much as a commitment to virtue.

After eight women accused U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) of various forms of sexual harassment, more than 30 senators, including 21 women, five of them Republicans, called for him to step down. Most of the accusations comprised unwanted physical contact and clumsy passes; one, a photograph of Franken pretending to grope a sleeping journalist’s breasts, was clearly a juvenile gag. Franken in his resignation announcement did not apologize or admit his guilt. Instead, he claimed that some of the allegations were “simply untrue,” and others he remembered “differently.” He also decried “the false impression that I was admitting to doing things that, in fact, I haven’t done.” At this point, little corroborating evidence has surfaced that definitively proves Franken’s guilt.

As well as exposing a sexual offender, however, and asserting high standards of personal behavior, the reaction to the charges against Franken to many smacked of political expediency. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) was the first Democrat to call for Franken’s resignation, saying that “any kind of mistreatment of women in our society isn’t acceptable.” A few weeks earlier, after Gillibrand had criticized former President Bill Clinton for not resigning over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, many questioned why it took nearly 20 years for Gillibrand to acknowledge Bill Clinton’s transgressions.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Looking Ahead to Trump’s Year Two A glance at the biggest challenges — and how to surmount them. Bruce Thornton

By on December 28th, 2017

President Trump’s first year ended with the biggest tax reform since 1986, the most consequential of a list of achievements that have made a good start at rolling back Barack Obama’s runaway expansion of the Leviathan state. At the same time, the hysterical “resistance” of the Dems and progressives, abetted by Republican NeverTrumpers, continues its bizarre attacks on the president, feeding off his blunt twitter commentary and obsessing over his brash style rather than focusing on his notable actions.

As year two of the improbable Trump presidency begins, this conflict remains central to our political drama. But what does it portend for Trump’s program and the critical midterm elections?

Lost in the anti-Trump media frenzy has been, according to the White House, 81 significant rollbacks of the progressive assault on the Constitutional order. The most important was the appointment of originalist Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. That win, along with 12 Appeals Court appointments of similarly minded judges, will shape our government for decades, and survive any future swing back to the Dems. Tax reform will also likely survive, since the left almost never repeals tax cuts to the middle class. Cutting the regulations that metastasized under Obama has saved $8 billion so far, and encouraged the economy’s “animal spirits,” leading to three quarters of more than 3% growth in GDP, 1.7 million new jobs, a stock market up 28%, unemployment at its lowest since December 2000, and economic confidence at a 17-year high.

Throw in opening up more than a million acres to oil exploration and drilling, hastening Obamacare’s demise by eliminating the individual mandate, discarding the economically toxic Paris Climate Accords, reining in the job-killing EPA, getting serious about border enforcement, deporting thousands of illegal aliens, paring back our suicidal open-door immigration policies, and challenging political correctness almost daily, and Trump’s record on the domestic front points to a good start on growing the economy and getting the dead hand of big government out of the country’s business.

On foreign policy, Trump has begun to repair the damage to our international prestige wrought by Obama’s subjection of our country to the one-world, naïve internationalism favored by progressives, who want to diminish America’s global clout and reduce the U.S. to a “partner,” as Obama said in Cairo, “mindful of his own imperfections.” He increased sanctions on Iran and refused to recertify Obama’s disastrous agreement with the nuke-hungry mullahs; bombed a Syrian airfield and destroyed a fifth of Assad’s jet fighters; took the gloves off our military and ended ISIS’s “caliphate”; rolled back Obama’s cringing concessions to Cuba; put Russia on notice by recommitting to the Magnitsky Act and increasing sanctions on regime oligarchs; began work on strengthening military readiness and antimissile defence; gave a rousing defense of Western Civilization in Poland; visited world capitals to project America’s renewed confidence and willingness to defend its security and interests; unleashed U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley to scold and scorn the anti-American pygmy states infesting that “cockpit in the Tower of Babel,” to borrow Churchill’s phrase; and announced that the U.S recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and promised to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital. Under Trump, America seems to be getting its international mojo back.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Terror on Russian Shoppers ‘Tis the season for Jihad. December 28, 2017 Matthew Vadum

By on December 28th, 2017

A Christmas season bombing of a supermarket in Russia’s second-largest city suggests that killing in the name of Islam never goes out of season.

In addition to being a time for end-of-the-year reflection, Christmas is also a popular time for Muslim terrorists to kill Christians and Jews, and sometimes, other Muslims, too.

Yuletide terrorist attacks seem to be becoming the new normal in several countries – and the Christmas season isn’t over yet in Russia. Eastern Orthodox Christians in Russia won’t celebrate the birth of Jesus of Nazareth until Sunday, Jan. 7, more than a week from now.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for the Wednesday evening bombing in Saint Petersburg that sent 10 people to the hospital, but Islamists are thought to have figured in a suicide bombing in the city’s subway system that left more than a dozen dead and 50 wounded in April.

The explosion took place at the Perekrestok market. At that time, thousands of people were present in the shopping complex housing the market. The source of the blast was a homemade bomb packed with shrapnel. The bomb had reportedly been concealed in a locker.

The bombing comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Donald Trump earlier in the month to thank him for a CIA tip that helped head off bombings that Islamic State had planned for the city.

On Dec. 21 a 32-year-old Muslim man named Saeed Noori drove his car into a crowd of people in Melbourne, Australia, injuring 19, three of them critically, according to reports. The Australian citizen entered that country in 2004 as a refugee from Afghanistan.

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