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February 2018

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Foreseeing Zuma’s Fall South Africa’s corruption was prefigured in a pair of thousand-dollar loafers. Theodore Dalrymple

By on February 26th, 2018

The downfall of Jacob Zuma as president of South Africa suggests that there might be a limit to tolerable corruption even in the most corrupt of polities; or perhaps it is merely the indiscretion of the corruption that makes it intolerable. The rule should be “steal what you like, but do not flaunt it.”

I’m not surprised by the extremity of Zuma’s corruption: it is, rather, what I had expected more than 20 years ago. It was a pair of shoes that gave me a clue to the future.

I had gone to South Africa in 1990, shortly after the unbanning of the African National Congress and the release of Nelson Mandela, to interview Joe Slovo, one of the ANC leaders and a hard-line, pro-Soviet Communist. He had spent much of his life in various states of exile, surveillance, and imprisonment, but he was now free, and I interviewed him in his office in the Shell Building (than which nothing could have been more emblematically capitalist) in Johannesburg.

He was an amiable man, and I could not but feel sympathy for someone whose wife had been murdered by the South African Secret Service by means of parcel bomb sent to Mozambique, where she had taken refuge. He was a true believer in the Soviet route to heaven, but on his many visits to Moscow, he had failed to notice the lack of freedom and of consumer goods there (he admitted this). Either he wasn’t very clever, or he found the absence of freedom and consumer goods attractive. There is nothing like a shortage of sugar or lavatory paper, after all, for increasing the powers of political patronage—which he assumed, not totally erroneously, would shortly be his. It was his reward: he had been in the wilderness long enough.

I was briefly optimistic about South Africa’s future. Until the Soviet Union’s downfall, an event much underestimated in the peaceful evolution of South Africa, I had assumed that political violence there was inevitable; but a few experiences changed my view.

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Athens, Jerusalem, Gettysburg: Leon Kass on Politics as Moral Endeavor By Emina Melonic

By on February 26th, 2018

A review of his searching new collection of essays, Leading a Worthy Life

Our present age has been marked by various forms of collectivism. People follow trends. They rarely think or ask questions. The idea of examining one’s life has become foreign, even old-fashioned, and yet the question of what it means to live a worthy and virtuous life persists, despite social pressures to live this or that “lifestyle,” as opposed to an authentic life. That question, seemingly simple, is what drives Leon Kass in his new book, Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times.

Kass, a philosopher and bioethicist, has devoted his life to asking what it means to be human. In this collection of essays, he explores that question in detail. Most of the essays in the book were previously published in a similar form in various magazines, although they have been updated here.

These are not just simple musings by a philosopher. Kass lives what he philosophizes. I saw that when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago and attended a seminar that he taught on the Book of Exodus. U of C, as we call it, is all about the “life of the mind.” The approach to learning and arguing there is incredibly rigorous. It was there that I learned how to think critically, how to construct an argument, and especially how to take responsibility for that argument.

That was certainly true of Kass’s seminar. But it wasn’t just that. He is a superb teacher who treats every one of his students with the utmost dignity and respect. He challenged us and yet also encouraged us to be independent thinkers, skeptical of superficial and final pronouncements, and, more than anything else, to free ourselves from the shackles of ideology. In the chapter titled “The Aims of Liberal Education,” he writes that “thinking — all thinking — seeks to liberate us from slavish adherence to an unexamined opinion and an unreasonable trust in our own perceptions and experiences.”

Being the true philosopher and teacher that he is, Kass offers no final answers, which are impossible anyway. To be sure, he makes value judgments, and he challenges groupthink. But the book reveals a man with an open mind that lives in concert with an open heart, always learning, seeking wisdom, and striving to be a good human being in every sphere of his life. What binds the essays together is the author’s rightful insistence to remind us of the dignity inherent in every human being. Knowing and recognizing that dignity — in other words, refusing to engage in the dehumanization of another — should always be a starting point for both contemplation and action.

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North Korea’s Cheerleaders Are Forced to Have Sex with Party Leaders By Wesley J. Smith

By on February 26th, 2018

North Korea wins the gold medal for evil regimes. Its people are starved. There is almost no electricity outside the capital. There reportedly are concentration camps. Its leader threatens the world with nuclear weapons.

But who cares? Too many in the media went gaga over Dear Leader’s wicked sister — after all, at least she’s not Pence! — and they cheered on the cult-victim North Korean cheerleaders as if they had something to cheer about.

Now, it turns out, those cheerleaders are forced to have sex with party leaders. From the New York Post story:

Members of the North Korean national cheerleading squad — who have been featured gleefully rooting at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics — are systematically forced to have sex with high-ranking members of Kim Jong Un’s twisted regime, according to a disturbing report.

Behind the scenes, the troupe — dubbed the “Pleasure Squad” by insiders — are forced to perform sex acts on party leaders during their trip to the Olympics, a defector with knowledge of the sexual slavery told Bloomberg News.
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“[The] troupe came here and performed with dances and songs, and it might seem like a fancy show on the outside [but] they also have to go to parties and provide sexual services,” said defector Lee So Yeon, a military musician who fled the country in 2008, during Kim Jong Un’s regime.

“They go to the central Politburo party’s events, and have to sleep with the people there, even if they don’t want it,” said Yeon, 42.

Those poor young women. Imagine the agony and fear they hide behind their rigidly choreographed smiles.

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The Schiff Memo Harms Democrats More Than It Helps Them By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on February 26th, 2018

It confirms that the FBI and the DOJ relied heavily on uncorroborated, third-hand, anonymous sources in their FISA application.

Maybe Adam Schiff has more of a sense of humor than I’d have given him credit for. The House Intelligence Committee’s ranking Democrat begins his long-awaited memo — the minority response to the Nunes memo that was penned by staffers of the committee’s Republican majority — by slamming Chairman Devin Nunes’s unconscionable “risk of public exposure of sensitive sources and methods for no legitimate purpose.” The Schiff memo, which has been delayed for weeks because the FBI objected to its gratuitous effort to publicize highly classified intelligence, including methods and sources, then proceeds to tell its tale through what appear to be scores of blacked-out redactions of information Schiff pushed to expose.

Heavy Reliance on Steele Dossier Confirmed
The FBI and the Justice Department heavily relied on the Steele dossier’s uncorroborated allegations. You know this is true because, notwithstanding the claim that “only narrow use” was made “of information from Steele’s sources,” the Democrats end up acknowledging that “only narrow use” actually means significant use — as in, the dossier was the sine qua non of the warrant application. The memo concedes that the FISA-warrant application relied on allegations by Steele’s anonymous Russian hearsay sources that:

Page met separately while in Russia with Igor Sechin, a close associate of Vladimir Putin and executive chairman of Roseneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, and Igor Divyekin, a senior Kremlin official. Sechin allegedly discussed the prospect of future U.S.-Russia energy cooperation and “an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russia.” Divyekin allegedly disclosed to Page that the Kremlin possessed compromising information on Clinton (“kompromat”) and noted the possibility of its being released to Candidate #1’s [i.e., Donald Trump’s] campaign. . . . This closely tracks what other Russian contacts were informing another Trump foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos.

This passage puts the lie to two of the main Democratic talking points:

1) This was obviously the most critical allegation against Page. The Democrats attempt to make much of Page’s trip to Moscow in July 2016, but the uncorroborated Sechin and Divyekin meetings, which Page credibly denies, are the aspect of the Moscow trip that suggested a nefarious Trump–Russia conspiracy. That’s what the investigation was about. Far from clandestine, the rest of Page’s trip was well publicized and apparently anodyne. And saliently — for reasons we’ll get to in due course — Page was clearly prepared to talk to the FBI about the trip if the Bureau wanted to know what he was up to.

It is the Steele dossier that alleges Page was engaged in arguably criminal activity. The Democrats point to nothing else that does.

Moreover, because Page was an American citizen, FISA law required that the FBI and the DOJ show not only that he was acting as an agent of a foreign power (Russia), but also that his “clandestine” activities on behalf of Russia were a likely violation of federal criminal law. (See FISA, Section 1801(b)(2)(A) through (E), Title 50, U.S. Code.) It is the Steele dossier that alleges Page was engaged in arguably criminal activity. The Democrats point to nothing else that does.

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Deadly Threat from Iran Former IRGC commander threatens to nuke Israel – and why he’s for real. Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on February 26th, 2018

Maj. General Mohsen Rezai founded Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the early days of the revolution, upon the personal orders of Ayatollah Khomeini.

While he relinquished control of the IRGC in 1997, he remains one of the regime’s most influential leaders. A “principalist,” who is considered a revolutionary purist, Rezai has occasionally shown a more pragmatic bent.

He regularly boasts of the Iranian regime’s military power, and issues threats to all who would challenge the regime that seem to get dismissed in the Western media.

Last week, when he vowed to “level Tel Aviv to the ground,” was no exception.

He was speaking in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned at the Munich Security Conference last week that Israel would “act against Iran itself” if Iran continued to invade Israeli air space, as they did when they sent a drone into Israel from an air base in Syria.

And yet, outside of the Israeli media, only the Daily Mail paid much attention to Rezai’s threats.

But make no mistake about it: General Rezai understands the cold calculus of nuclear deterrence, and he was not making an idle threat.

His message was crystal clear: Iran considers itself to be a nuclear weapons-capable state. And he speaks from direct, personal knowledge since he was himself in charge of Iran’s nuclear weapons program for over a decade.

I know this because his son defected to the United States at the age of 23 in 1999, and wound up staying with me for several months, learning English in my basement by watching Jackie Chan movies. Many of the stories he told me about his father I related in a 2005 book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran.

Here is just one of them, which explains why I am confident that General Rezai was not making an idle threat to Israel last week. It involves a January 1993 trip Rezai made to China and North Korea with a 50-man military delegation, as well as his then teenage son.

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How Identity Politics Is Made to Destroy Us By David Horowitz

By on February 26th, 2018

In January, when negotiations over the fate of 800,000 DACA recipients broke down, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) blamed the impasse on the alleged racism of President Trump and his senior advisers.

“Last night the president put forth a plan,” Pelosi told the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “Let me just say what I said last night, that plan is a campaign to make America white again.” This was not only an obvious lie, but a spectacularly brazen one, since Trump’s announced plan would provide a path to citizenship not only for the illegal aliens who had benefited from President Obama’s constitutionally suspect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, all of whom are nonwhite, but for a million additional illegals, mainly from Latin America, who are also mainly nonwhite.

Trump’s general immigration plan seeks to move to a merit-based system, which would give priority to immigrants who can contribute needed skills to the country and would have a reasonable chance of success once they arrived. Giving priority to English speakers would enhance the ability of new arrivals to assimilate and succeed. To oppose such a plan on the grounds Pelosi does, one would have to believe that nonwhite immigrants don’t have skills or don’t speak English. Anti-Trump reporter Jim Acosta made the latter insinuation on CNN. He said Trump wanted only immigrants from majority-white countries like “England and Australia.” In fact, English is the official language in more than 57 countries, including such nonwhite countries as Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Botswana, as well as Caribbean nations like Jamaica and Guyana.

Pelosi’s malicious accusation was even more disconnected from reality, since Trump has never proposed excluding or expelling populations based on race, which would be the only way to “make America white again” (whatever that might mean). Yet this denial of obvious facts in order to gin up a racial indictment of what otherwise would be seen as patriotic policies has become the ever-present theme of the Democrats’ attacks on Trump’s presidency. These attacks began with his first statement on immigration during the opening presidential primary debate. At that time, speaking specifically of people crossing the border illegally, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best . . . . They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with [them]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

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The Labyrinth of Oppressions By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 26th, 2018

When the human experience is simplistically divided into two worlds, then things increasingly do not easily fit.

Specifically, what happens when the number of victims begins to outnumber the pool of oppressors? At that point can the oppressed become victims of the oppressed?

The following news stories illustrate the increasingly incoherent world of the aggrieved and their aggressors:

Item: Nancy Pelosi is on a tour to blast the new tax reform and reduction law, whose savings often will result in $1,000 or more per annum to families. The law already had encouraged private enterprise bonuses to employees due to employer savings. Pelosi habitually scoffs that such savings are “crumbs.” At a recent speech, after she intoned that income inequality would be exacerbated, a woman in the audience shouted out, “How much are you worth, Nancy?”

Fair question. She and her husband, a developer and property investor (with apparently good connections within the bureaucracy of federal construction, land sales, and property acquisitions) are worth over $100 million. They own more than one multimillion-dollar home. And soon the Pelosis are likely to pay tens of thousands of dollars more in California property and income taxes that are no longer fully deductible under the new law that she so energetically despises.

Could that banal fact explain why Pelosi is so heated about a reform that gives the middle class more take-home pay, and will create more jobs and bonuses from the private sector—partly at the expense of blue-state, high-income professionals like herself?

From this teachable moment, we could conclude that progressivism is so often promoted by the very rich. They are best positioned to game the system and seek exemption through virtue-signaling about the poor. The Pelosis of our postmodern world assume that they are not to be subject to the ramification of their ideologies (she dismissed the rude questioning without answering). And they so often exhibit a peculiar contempt for the working middle classes. The latter are clueless, in need of guidance, and supposedly deluded by the promise of “crumbs”—given their lack of education and sophistication, and the absence of the romance accorded to the distant poor. How did we ever get to a point where a progressive politician on the barricades, worth $100 million, lectures the middle class that their extra $200-300 a month are crumbs?

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Peter Smith: The Strange Logic of Gun ‘Control’

By on February 26th, 2018

Whenever a lunatic perpetrates a mass shooting the calls for additional gun control are immediate and the consequences predictable: more restrictions on law-abiding owners, who don’t need them, while homicidal types ignore and defy the law as they always do and will.

One week after the Florida high school killings CNN hosted a “stacked” Town Hall meeting. This is Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, at the meeting, berating Dana Loesch a spokeswoman for the NRA. “You just told this group of people that you are standing up for them. You’re not standing up for them, until you say I want less weapons.” Interruption follows for cheering and loud applause.

Proverbs 26:11 comes to mind: “As a dog returns to his vomit. So a fool [the typical bleeding-heart Democrat in this case] repeats his folly.” Luckily and fortunately, Americans have President Trump, who I will come to.

What the Sheriff didn’t say, because it hadn’t yet leaked out, was that one of his deputies, Scot Peterson, who served as the ‘armed resource officer’, had remained sheltered from harm outside of the school while the shooting was going on. Another three of his deputies who arrived on the scene stayed crouched behind their police vehicle. Peterson was suspended and has since resigned.

Sheriff Israel was also at pains to deflect attention from the FBI’s failure to follow up specific warnings passed on them and his own department’s failure to do anything about Nikolas Cruz despite receiving many complaints. Only one person was to blame he intoned. Really? Then what is the point of him and his fainthearted deputies?

One message from this episode, as if we didn’t know, is that the police cannot be relied upon to protect us or our families.

I was once attacked by a no-good, estranged boyfriend of one of my daughters outside of my house. I tried ineptly, as best as I could, to fight him off and was lucky that an ex-truck driver neighbor intervened to help me out. In the meantime, my wife at the time had called the police. They arrived too late for the main event. He had long since run off threatening to set a gang on me.

For a while I carried a tightly rolled-up newspaper in my briefcase to ward off potential attackers. I don’t exactly recall, but I might have seen this used effectively by James Bond. How effective it would have been in my hands I will leave you to guess.

Most of us are protected because of where we live and the people we mix with. There is another, less safe world on our doorsteps but, to a large extent, the two worlds do not intersect. Watch out if and when they do. Then you will have no protection worth spit.

America is a gun-owning society, as is Switzerland. According to the latest UNODC figures, the homicide rate in America is over seven times that in Switzerland. And, as point of interest, five times that in non-gun-owning Australia. America is a more dangerous place to live – particularly in some places, in some cities. Would you like to have a gun to protect yourself and your family? Or, are you content to rely on the police arriving in the nick of time?

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Dimwit Florida Sheriff Was ‘Once a Proud Member of Team Obama’ By Jack Dunphy

By on February 26th, 2018

When some major police incident occurs, it is most often my practice to withhold comment until I can be sure that most of the facts surrounding it have been revealed. A horrific event like a school shooting like that which occurred in Parkland, Fla., arouses the impulse to weigh in with opinions based on incomplete or even false information. It is best to resist this impulse.

Others, of course, with endless hours of air time to fill, and with agendas to push along, are unable to resist it. There may be more egregious examples of this, but I don’t see how anyone can compete with the CNN’s recent “town hall,” at which Sen. Marco Rubio and Dana Loesch were mocked and browbeaten by what amounted to little more than an angry mob.

Which is not to say the people in attendance didn’t have reason to be angry. The crowd was made up of students, parents, and teachers from Stoneman Douglas High School, where days earlier 31 students and staff members had been shot, 17 of them fatally. From a high school student’s limited perspective and experience, he knows only that something horrific has occurred in his world, something that by all rights should not have. With his nerves still raw and exposed, he sees before him on the stage a conservative senator and a spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, each of whom he perceives, in that limited perspective and experience, to have contributed to the trauma he has experienced.

Fine. One expects as much from young people, but with the understanding that their outrage, however well founded, will have limited influence in the formulation of public policy. What I found most interesting in the CNN broadcast, aside from the graciousness shown by Sen. Rubio and Ms. Loesch, was how Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel came to be a crowd favorite, echoing as he did their loudly expressed passion for stricter gun control, all the while eliding the apparent failures of his own department. Interrupting Ms. Loesch at one point, Sheriff Israel said to her, “You just told this group of people that you are standing up for them. You’re not standing up for them until you say, ‘I want less weapons.’” This statement, though meaningless, was of course intended to be an applause line, and indeed it was greeted with a standing ovation. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Rick Harrison of ‘Pawn Stars’: ‘Kill the Liberals with Logic’ By Nicholas Ballasy

By on February 26th, 2018

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – Reality television personality Rick Harrison of the History Channel’s “Pawn Stars” lamented that too many high school and college students in America believe “capitalism is bad” and that the federal government can afford to “pay for everything.”

“Kids come out of high school today, they think corporations are bad. They think capitalism is bad. The No. 1 thing in the world that has brought people out of poverty is capitalism,” Harrison said at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside D.C. on Friday.

“We have a generation of young people who think the government can just pay for everything and they have no understanding of how government works and … who we are, why we are and why this country has become such a great country,” he added. “You have kids in college who really think this is a bad country – trust me, I’ve been to India, this is a great country.”

Harrison, co-owner of the World Famous Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas, told the audience that he would not have been able to overcome his battle with childhood epilepsy and succeed in any other country.

“I had to drop out of high school because I was so sick and I became very, very wealthy because I tried really hard. I failed a lot of times, but eventually I got it. There’s no other country in the world, I believe, I could have done that in. So this is a great country,” he said. “When they are argue that this country is terrible, ask them: What country do you think is so great then? Because you’re never going to be able to find a country like this. I don’t know how else to put it.”

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