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March 2018

MEDIA, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A.O. Scott’s Vision of America By Marilyn Penn

By on March 10th, 2018

In the Times’ film critic’s review of “A Wrinkle in Time,” he states: “It is the first $100 million movie directed by an African-American woman, and the diversity of the cast is both a welcome innovation and the declaration of a new norm. This is how movies should look from now on, which is to say, how they should have looked all along.” (NYT 3/9)
I assume that by this, he means that movies should accurately reflect what America actually looks like today.

Currently, whites still comprise the majority of our population; Hispanics are over 17%, Blacks are 14%, Asians are 6% and Native Americans are 2%. But if Mr. Scott is referring to how this country looks, he should consider that at least 33% of our population is obese, 8% are disabled, 3% are LGBTQ and 3% are anorexic. If we’re insisting that diversity represent an accurate picture of America, then surely the 33% obese demands greater representation in our films than the handful of actors he can name. And surely there should be many more of these people in all walks of life, just as we have insisted on portraying blacks, gays and women.

But if visibility is what’s important, we should also include the 14% of Americans who are tattooed, the 85% of men with thinning hair by the age of 50 and the 40% of women who have visible hair loss by 40. What about the 15% of Americans who still smoke? Or the 2.2% who have psoriasis – way more than are transgender, yet the latter is a topic that has been done to death on stage, in movies, on television and several times a week in the NYT.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Weeding Out Waste and Fraud at Federal Agencies By H. Sterling Burnett

By on March 10th, 2018

Some recent inspector general reports from within various federal agencies show that the Trump administration is attempting to weed out abuse, fraud, and waste in government programs.

Early in his tenure as secretary of the Department of the Interior (DOI), Ryan Zinke asked for a briefing on DOI grant programs and found to his dismay that not a single person could tell him how much DOI disbursed in grants every year or what projects it had funded or was committed to funding. Saying he feared that the grant program was open to fraud and abuse, Zinke order DOI to review its major grants and cooperative agreements.

Zinke’s fears proved prescient. A February 20 DOI inspector general (I.G.)’s report found that Richard Ruggiero, head of the Department of International Conservation (DIC), which is within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), had violated federal ethics laws when Ruggiero took advantage of a federal cooperative agreement providing nearly $325,000 in funding to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The agreement financially benefited a family member who was an independent contractor with IFAW.

The I.G. report says that before Ruggiero took over DIC, the department had signed a cooperative agreement with IFAW to establish a professional training program for conservation leaders overseas, providing the $126,871 to fund the program. Within nine days of Ruggiero becoming DIC chief, the cooperative agreement was modified several times, extending the program for three years and increasing DIC’s grant to $324,108.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Christopher Steele and the Entitled’s Echo Chamber George Neumayr

By on March 10th, 2018

He couldn’t have meddled without its anti-Trump hysteria.https://spectator.org/christopher-steele-and-the-entitleds-echo-chamber/

In the fragmentary profiles of Christopher Steele, even in the glowing ones, he emerges not as a subtle spy but as a bumptious political activist. He has been described as “very left-wing,” a “little creep” who embraced socialism in college, an ambitious debating society president who invited a representative of the PLO to speak at Cambridge University, a “showy” but charmless operator ill-suited to intelligence work, an “idiot” whose mischief-making has made his old colleagues in British intelligence look like Kremlin-manipulated dupes. He is less James Bond than James Carville.

Even in the accounts by his apologists he comes off not as quiet and sober but oddly hyperactive and noisy. He is portrayed as running around with his hair on fire, second-guessing the FBI, disregarding the FBI’s instructions, lying to it, frantically briefing reporters, and so on. The apologists cast that hyperactivity as evidence of his earnestness and reliability. It is not. It is just evidence of his arrogant presumption and anti-Trump hysteria. Steele told the Justice Department official Bruce Ohr that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” Does that sound like an apolitical spy?

According to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Steele grew more frantic after the passage of Brexit, about which he felt “wretched,” she writes. Does that sound like an apolitical spy? No, it makes him sound like a typical member of the liberal international elite — anti-Brexit, anti-Trump, pro-Hillary.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Jobs Boom* *Manufacturers are hiring right and left—or they were before tariffs.

By on March 10th, 2018

Investors are cheering Friday’s report that the economy added 313,000 jobs in February while the labor force gained 806,000 entrants. This is remarkable for a recovery long in the tooth and shows that deregulation and tax reform are flowing into business confidence and hiring.

Payroll numbers were revised up by 54,000 for December and January, bringing the three month total to 727,000. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1%, but labor force participation ticked up three-tenths of a percentage point to 63%. The increase in the labor force was the largest since 1983 excluding months in which temporary census workers were hired.

Employment growth was broad-based with large increases in construction (61,000), retail (50,000) and manufacturing (31,000). Manufacturers have added 224,000 jobs over the last year, including 66,000 in metals. Much of this growth has been in machinery and secondary metals fabrication—e.g., welding and forging—which will be harmed by President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs.

The best news is that the hiring burst may finally be pulling lower-skilled workers off the sidelines. Labor participation last month rose by 0.9 percentage points among blacks, 1.7 points among black teens and two points for workers without a high-school diploma.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Trump-Kim Summit The President is giving recognition before any nuclear concessions. see note please

By on March 10th, 2018

The President issued a stark and dark warning, and Little Kim offered to meet….and the President agreed with no pre-conditions….Why does the WSJ sound like the airheads of CNN? rsk

A diplomatic breakthrough is easy when you offer the other side what it wants. And Donald Trump on Thursday gave North Korea something it has long craved: a summit with a sitting U.S. President. Perhaps this will be the start of a stunning nuclear disarmament, but it could also end up in a strategic defeat for the United States and world order.

Mr. Trump doesn’t do normal diplomacy, and this leap to a face-to-face meeting had his impulsive trademarks: spur of the moment in response to a Kim Jong Un offer relayed through South Korean mediators; no vetting with his senior advisers or as far as we can tell our Japanese allies; and no pre-planning. What could go wrong?

Mr. Trump tweeted Thursday that “sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached,” which is somewhat reassuring. But like his predecessors, he is giving the Kim regime a substantial reward before it takes verifiable steps toward denuclearization. Even a brief meeting will boost North Korea’s claim to be a nuclear power that must be given respect and recognition. In return, Kim appears to have given nothing other than the promise not to test his weapons in the interim. He can resume those tests at any time.

Mr. Trump can claim credit for putting the diplomatic and sanctions screws on North Korea to a greater extent than any previous President. And it’s possible that pressure may have hurt the North Korean economy enough that Kim chose this moment to change tack. (The Trump critics who claimed he was trying to blow up the world but now say he’s leaping too fast to diplomacy are especially amusing to watch. They wouldn’t give him credit if Kim disarmed entirely.)

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Is Greece about to Recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s Capital? by Maria Polizoidou

By on March 9th, 2018

Two distinguished members of Greece’s parliament, whose party has a good chance of defeating the current leadership, are breathing new life into the political system and reinvigorating crucial partnerships with Israel and the United States.

“The positions of the Palestinians are maximalist and dangerous, since they actually propose the Islamization of the city. Palestinian Islamist organizations, like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have repeatedly launched threats against the non-Muslim population of Jerusalem. Islamists visualize a Jerusalem without churches and synagogues. On the other hand, the Israeli Knesset has recognized since 1980 the multi-religious character of Jerusalem and is committed to the unimpeded access of all believers to places of worship…” — MP Makis Voridis, a former minister from the New Democracy party, writing in the Greek daily Kathimerini.

On his return from a recent two-day trip to Israel — where he met with high-level officials — Adonis Georgiadis, the vice president of Greece’s opposition party, New Democracy, declared his support for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

In an interview with Skai Radio on March 7, Georgiadis called it “almost funny to discuss whether Jerusalem is a Jewish city or not.”

“[It] was founded by the Jews… in ancient times. You can read Flavius Josephus or read Diodoros Siceliotis and see the references to the city of Jerusalem, where there was the High Priest of Solomon’s Temple and that it was the city of the Jews. This is the reality.”

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The Girls of Revolution Street, Waving Their Veils By Annika Hernroth-Rothstein

By on March 9th, 2018

Brave Iranian women are risking their lives in the fight for freedom. We owe them our support.

In Iran, women and girls in recent weeks have been removing their veils, waving them in the air like flags of freedom. With this gesture, they’re staging a nonviolent protest against the mullahs’ regime and the law, imposed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, that requires women to wear the hijab.

The campaign started just before the New Year, as part of a larger anti-government protest, after a photo of a young woman, dressed in black and silently waving her white hijab on the end of a stick, went viral. That young woman was Vida Movahed, a 31-year-old mother of one, and the image of her bravery inspired many of Iran’s women to join her in solidarity and protest.

Vida Movahed took off her headscarf on Enghelab Street in Tehran. “Enghelab” is the Farsi word for revolution, so the movement she inspired was soon dubbed “The Girls of Revolution Street.” Day by day, with the help of social media, the movement has grown. There had been seeds of protest before, most notably in the online social movement My Stealthy Freedom, in which Iranian women shared images of themselves without the compulsory hijab. And online activist and exiled Iranian Masih Alinejad had started the hashtag #WhiteWednesdays to protest the forced hijab. But the hijab-waving of Vida Movahed brought that movement from the Internet to the streets, at great personal risk for those who dare to participate.

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Big Tech Backlash By Theodore Kupfer

By on March 9th, 2018

Cultural conservatives and social democrats find a common enemy.

‘Conservatives are zeroing in on a new enemy in the political culture wars: Big Tech.” So say Michael M. Grynbaum and John Herrman in the New York Times, and there is plenty of evidence to support the claim. Grynbaum and Herrman report that the author of Clinton Cash, Peter Schweizer, is making a movie about the left-wing bias of social-media titans. James Damore, the erstwhile author of the Google Memo who was fired for questioning the company creed on diversity, is now a conservative favorite thanks to his naive decision to associate with opportunists such as Stefan Molyneux and CPAC. If three makes a trend, look no further than these pages, where Ben Shapiro argued this past Wednesday that tech companies are engaged in viewpoint discrimination against right-wing journalism.

Conservatives fear that Silicon Valley, where employees and executives are generally liberal, will suppress conservative speech on their platforms. But they aren’t the only ones questioning the once-prevailing wisdom that Silicon Valley, a bastion of free enterprise and creative capitalism, is a positive force. On the other side, some liberals blame Facebook and Twitter for putting Donald Trump in office or otherwise corroding our democracy, and argue that tech companies should be more censorious. Even further to the port side, progressives assail the industry for both being too profitable and epitomizing late-capitalist decadence. It all adds up to a strange-bedfellows backlash against Big Tech, new for an industry accustomed to amiable public relations.

The worry that Facebook and Google will suppress conservative speech might be the latest fixation of resentful, exasperated right-wingers. But it is also a concern about something that has already happened: Facebook was caught suppressing conservative news, and the new fact-checking service on Google seems to have a skew of its own. As Michael Brendan Dougherty has warned, such bias could worsen if c-suite executives in Silicon Valley listen to the stern clarion calls of their fellow elites.

Yet what makes an alliance of strange bedfellows possible is that the progressive critique of Big Tech is striking a chord. The attacks on its business practices point to a potentially real problem, though occasionally go too far. But as the carefully preened reputation among hipster tech tycoons and employees that their business was unlike other industries collapses, left-wing skepticism of the culture of Silicon Valley is becoming more resonant.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The Sliming of Bari Weiss By David French

By on March 9th, 2018

If you follow at all the ideological war that’s erupted around the New York Times editorial page, then you know Bari Weiss. It’s too much to call Bari conservative. A better description might be heterodox. On some issues, particularly social issues and immigration, she’s a woman of the Left. On others — regarding, for example, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, she’s on the right. She’s a also stalwart in the defense of civil liberties and has written powerfully against the excesses of the #MeToo movement, the embrace of the terrorist Assata Shakur by the leaders of the Women’s March, and has most recently decried the shout-downs and intolerance of the “woke” campus Left.

The backlash has been furious. Like most public figures, she’s subject to more than her fair share of online attacks, but in her case it’s been particularly vicious and silly. Recently, she had to endure a multi-day torrent of abuse because she had the audacity to tweet “Immigrants: They get the job done” after the American daughter of Japanese immigrants won an Olympic medal. That was “othering,” the online mobs claimed, and internally at the New York Times, at least one colleague hysterically compared her tweet to Japanese internment. Yes, to Japanese internment.

While it’s never pleasant to face the social-justice mob, serious people paid no mind to attacks on Bari’s tweet, but now there’s a new charge, that she’s committed the last remaining sin in American public life. The charge is hypocrisy, and elements of the online Left, led by Glenn Greenwald, have tried her and found her guilty.

They’re wrong. The claims are absurd. I know. I was there.

I’ll get to my involvement in a moment, but the substance of the charge against Bari is that during her college days at Columbia, she was guilty of the exact kind of campus bullying that she now decries. Her critics claim that she tried to silence and intimidate pro-Palestinian professors at Columbia, that she was a threat to academic freedom. Greenwald claims that she has a “history of trying to ruin the careers of Arab and Muslim scholars for the crime of criticizing Israel.”

He then details her involvement in a controversy I know very, very well. In 2004, an organization called the David Project published Columbia Unbecoming, a short documentary. In the film, 14 current and former Columbia students recounted alleged incidents of anti-Semitism and intimidation in what was then the university’s department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

New Left Thinkers: Pursuing Utopia or Annihilation? A review of Roger Scruton’s “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands.” Bruce Davidson

By on March 9th, 2018

How did we arrive at a world where the New York Times and other prominent mass media extol leaders of the brutal North Korean regime at the Olympics? The answer is that our current mainstream journalists and educational establishment are largely the ideological offspring of the European and American thinkers of the New Left.

Thanks to Roger Scruton’s book Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, I can now better understand my own experiences of contemporary academia. Until fifteen years ago I devoted a lot of effort to promoting critical thinking in higher education in Japan and Asia. Then I came up against widespread resistance among academics to the inculcation of rationality and eventually gave up on many of those efforts, mystified by the current ascendency of relativistic thinking in the university world. Even more puzzling has been the emergence of Marxist thought among evangelical intellectuals like Tim Keller.

A conservative British philosopher and prolific writer, Roger Scruton does a superb job of explaining how this state of affairs came about. He probes the writings of many influential European and American New Left thinkers, such as Sartre, Said, Foucault, Adorno, Derrida, Rorty, and Zizek. Rather than trying to cover his analysis of these writers in detail, this review will bring out some prominent themes of the whole book that impressed me, including some representative quotes.

To begin with, the New Left thinkers clearly revealed their hostility to ordinary people and their traditions. Like the older Marxists before them, they demonized the bourgeoisie, which basically means middle-class people. Only industrial laborers and leftist intellectuals escape this broad condemnation.

That stance helps account for the apathy of these intellectuals toward the atrocities carried out by leftist leaders like Stalin and Pol Pot. For instance, the French Maoist Badiou made light of the damage caused by China’s Cultural Revolution. Scruton comments that Badiou “expresses a kind of dismissive contempt towards the many Chinese people who had the impertinence to cherish their traditional culture at a time when the French intellectuals had, in their ignorance, waved that culture to extinction.” That disdain usually also applied to bourgeois ideas like human rights.

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