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September 2018

POLITICS Comments turned off

Menendez in Jeopardy as Senate Challenger Makes Push By Adele Malpass

By on September 21st, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/09/21/menendez_in_jeopardy_as_senate_challenger_makes_push_138139.html

The New Jersey Senate race was supposed to be a done deal with incumbent Bob Menendez easily cruising to re-election. It’s rated solid or likely to remain Democratic by most election watchers, and the Democrats were certainly putting it in their win column as they mapped out plans to retake the Senate.

But someone forgot to tell New Jersey voters that this race was uncompetitive. The polls show it to be tight — Menendez simply has not shaken Republican challenger Bob Hugin in a state Hillary Clinton carried by 14 points over Donald Trump two years ago.

Part of the reason seems to be that despite his acquittal in court on federal corruption charges, Menendez has not escaped the taint that came with his 2015 trial. Another is that Hugin, the wealthy former CEO of a biopharmaceutical company, had already spent nearly $16 million in the race. Throw into this mix a state with the worst affordability index in the country and an expected increase in the gasoline tax on Oct. 1 — on top of significant increases in state taxes enacted this spring. It seems a combustible mix in which an attractive and well-funded outsider with a sterling resume can give the political establishment heartburn.

Meanwhile, Menendez has a lot of baggage to defend. In 2015, he was indicted on federal corruption charges pursued by his fellow Democrats — the first U.S. senator to be indicted by the administration of his own party in 30 years. He was accused of doing favors for Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen, who is now serving 17 years in prison for Medicare fraud. Prosecutors presented evidence of 19 free private plane trips and campaign donations, which they asserted came in exchange for political favors. According to prosecutors, one such trip to the Dominican Republic supposedly involved underage prostitutes. Menendez strongly denied those allegations, but in the #MeToo era, any lingering suspicion is unhelpful for a politician. And though he was not found guilty by the jury, Menendez was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee.

While he may have survived his legal battles, New Jersey voters have apparently not forgotten. In a June primary, an unknown Democratic opponent who raised less than $5,000 got 38 percent of the vote against Menendez. That challenger, Lisa McCormick, didn’t have enough money to run ads reminding the electorate of Menendez’s legal troubles. But Bob Hugin did. Hugin’s campaign began running hard-hitting television spots against the incumbent in February. Menendez was pounded by ads titled “Guilty,” “Screwed” and “Dead Last.” By July, Menendez was leading Hugin by two percentage points, and in an August poll he was up by only six.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Unprincipled Boycott of Israel The demands of the politicized life. Jonathan Marks

By on September 21st, 2018

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/i

John Cheney-Lippold, an associate professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, has been the subject of withering criticism of late, but I’m grateful to him. Yes, he shouldn’t have refused to write a recommendation for a student merely because the semester abroad program she was applying to was in Israel. But at least he exposed what the boycott movement is about, aspects of which I suspect some of its blither endorsers are unaware.

We are routinely told, as we were by the American Studies Association, that boycott actions against Israel are “limited to institutions and their official representatives.” But Cheney-Lippold reminds us that the boycott, even if read in this narrow way, obligates professors to refuse to assist their own students when those students seek to participate in study abroad programs in Israel. Dan Avnon, an Israeli academic, learned years ago that the same goes for Israel faculty members seeking to participate in exchange programs sponsored by Israeli universities. They, too, must be turned away regardless of their position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

When the American Studies Association boycott of Israel was announced, over two hundred college presidents or provosts properly and publicly rejected it. But even they might not have imagined that the boycott was more than a symbolic gesture. Thanks to Professor Cheney-Lippold, they now know that it involves actions that disserve their students. Yes, Cheney-Lippold now says he was mistaken when he wrote that “many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel.” But he is hardly a lone wolf in hyper-politicized disciplines like American Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Women’s Studies, whose professional associations have taken stands in favor of boycotting Israel. Administrators looking at bids to expand such programs should take note of their admirably open opposition to the exchange of ideas.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Oslo Accords and the Failures of Idealistic Internationalism A reflection on a wish-fulfilling folly. Bruce Thornton

By on September 21st, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271359/oslo-accords-and-failures-idealistic-bruce-thornton

Twenty-five years ago, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat stood in front of Bill Clinton in the White House Rose Garden and shook hands to mark their signing of the Oslo Accords. This pact included handing part of Judea and Samaria to the control of Palestinian Arabs. A year later the Palestinian Authority was created as the controlling authority that still governs part of the so-called West Bank. These changes were celebrated as a major step toward furthering the “peace process” whose aim was to create national “self-determination” for the Palestinian Arabs, and eventually the fabled “two nations living side-by-side in peace.”

A quarter of a century later, the peace process is dead, and peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is farther away than ever. The Oslo Accord became the Oslo War, as Middle East historian Efraim Karsh calls it. Rather than peace, the lasting legacy of the Oslo Accords will be another reminder of the serial failures of idealistic internationalism.

That Oslo was a wish-fulfilling folly became obvious soon after the photogenic handshake in the Rose Garden. Terror attacks between 1994-1999 totaled 215, roughly equal to the pre-Oslo number in the early 90s. Terrorism continued to escalate in subsequent years. In 2000––a mere month after Arafat turned down Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer of everything the Palestinian Arabs claimed they wanted except for the suicidal “right of return” –– Arafat launched the so-called Second Intifada, which in five years murdered over a thousand Israelis. The killing didn’t start to abate until Israel walled off Judea and Samaria from Israeli territory.

Still unschooled in the dangers of relying on “parchment barriers” like Oslo, and facing intense international opprobrium and pressure to cede “land for peace,” in 2005 Israel evacuated 8,500 Jews from the Gaza Strip. The territory fell into the hands of Hamas, a terrorist gang whose genocidal intent is still encoded in its founding charter. What followed was not peace, but a continuing series of terrorist attacks, kidnappings, incursions, and nearly 20,000 rockets and mortars fired into Israeli territory. Hamas today has made no more progress than has the PA toward creating the political and economic infrastructure necessary for a viable, independent nation.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Ravages of Leftist Thought Control The “Newspeak” of Orwell’s 1984 is here. Michael Cutler

By on September 21st, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271375/ravages-leftist-thought-control-michael-cutler

On September 12, 2018 the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) posted an article in its official website, Twitter Ads Rejects Tweets for “Hateful Content.”

The CIS article noted:

Yesterday Twitter rejected four Center for Immigration Studies tweets for use in the Center’s Twitter Ads campaign, alleging hateful content. (Several others were approved.) All four tweets use the statutory phrases “illegal alien” or “criminal alien,” and all of the tweets referenced law enforcement, either at the border or in the interior. One of the tweets contained a powerful Daily Caller video showing illegal aliens in camouflage carrying large backpacks across the border unimpeded.

Two days later, on September 14th The Daily Caller posted a report updating the situation: Twitter Allows Center For Immigration Studies To Promote Tweets About Illegal Aliens That Were Previously Rejected.

Twitter apparently reversed its decision when Mark Krikorian, the Director of CIS, appeared on Fox News to discuss the issue.

Here is an excerpt from The Daily Caller article:

The four tweets that could not get promoted, but are still on Twitter, contained the terms “alien,” “illegal alien” or “criminal alien” along with reference to law enforcement, according to a statement from CIS Wednesday.

A promoted tweet is a normal tweet bought by advertisers that can have a greater outreach on people, according to Twitter’s website.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Kavanaugh, DeSantis and the Human Cost of Fake News The media’s lies have a price. Daniel Greenfield

By on September 21st, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271388/kavanaugh-desantis-and-human-cost-fake-news-daniel-greenfield

“Its fake news techniques rely on hearsay, implication, rumor, gossip, and innuendo. These techniques are rarely subject to the media’s fact checking. They don’t make definitive statements. Instead they misleadingly connect the dots into a blizzard of conspiracy theories that can never be pinned down. There’s no way to stop them, except by calling them what they are. Fake news.”

Politico, the media outlet of choice for flacks and hacks, has declared that Ron DeSantis, the conservative Republican running for Governor of Florida, against the media’s favorite new socialist, suffered his “fifth race-related” controversy.

That fifth “controversy” is about something that somebody who isn’t DeSantis tweeted. The fourth controversy also involved a DeSantis donor. The third controversy falsely smeared the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend attended by DeSantis (and Medal of Honor winner Clinton Romesha). The second involved a GOP official who also isn’t DeSantis. And the first was that DeSantis had been added without his knowledge to a Facebook group where other people said racist things.

And the media actually dares to get offended when people call it, ‘Fake News’.

What the five “race-related” scandals have in common is that none of them involve DeSantis. They’re all guilt by association. Even by the loosest possible association, a donor, a GOP official, someone on the same Facebook page or someone in Florida.

These fake news scandals aren’t being generated because there’s any basis to the racism smear. It’s a strategic campaign decision made because DeSantis’ opponent, Andrew Gillum, is African-American. Since Gillum is black, the Democrats decided to accuse DeSantis of racism. (If DeSantis were running against a woman, he would be accused of sexism.) And the media decided to advance the smear by inventing “race-related” scandals based on the flimsiest of premises to help the Democrats win.

The fake news template is to find somebody in Florida who said something controversial, then to demand that the DeSantis campaign disavow it. And presto, there’s another “race-related” controversy.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Unforgiven Those who argue that what Brett Kavanaugh allegedly did is disqualifying ​need to consider the precedent they’re setting. Kay S. Hymowitz

By on September 21st, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/brett-kavanaugh-christine-blasey-ford-16176.html

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman. According to the accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, during a party Kavanaugh and a friend, both heavily intoxicated, pulled her into a bedroom, closed the door, and pushed her onto a bed. Kavanaugh got on top of her, and, placing a hand over her mouth to muffle her screams, groped her and tried to remove her clothing. Terrified, she was able to escape and hide in a bathroom before fleeing the house.

This happened 36 years ago, Ford says. Kavanaugh was 17 years old at the time and Ford, 15. Kavanaugh firmly denies the story.

These last facts should make all those determined to use the charge as the poison pill to kill the judge’s nomination nervous. They’re on the verge of setting a dangerous precedent that will inevitably come back to bite them.

For one thing, they are setting the stage for condemning to reputation-death not just a Roe v. Wade-threatening Supreme Court nominee but any person, man or woman, Bible-thumper or Democratic socialist, by accusation alone. Ford’s story is almost impossible to investigate, much less to corroborate. It happened either in 1982 or 1983; it was either in June or August; it was a house, but she doesn’t know whose; she can’t recall how she got home.

Despite the hazy details, many find Ford’s story is credible, and for good reason: there’s nothing extraordinary about the events she describes, unfortunately, and over the years she told two therapists about them, though it’s not clear that she ever named Kavanaugh. Still, those who caution that human memory is unreliable, especially after more than three decades, are indisputably right. Is she certain that it was Brett Kavanaugh who was on top of her during those dreadful minutes? She had reason to fear that he was going to rape her, but do we know that that’s what he was intending, and does that make a difference? Kavanaugh himself might not know the answer. Multiply 35 years by large quantities of alcohol—Ford described Kavanaugh and his buddy as “stumbling drunk”—and you’ve got a terrible formula for truth-seeking.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Truth About Polygraph Tests They’re junk science, inadmissible in court, and about as reliable as a pack of Tarot cards. Claire Berlinski

By on September 21st, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/truth-about-polygraph-tests-16180.html

News organizations would render a valuable service if, whenever they report that someone has taken or proposes to take a polygraph, they reminded readers (or explained to them) that polygraphs are voodoo. Junk science. They are no more reliable than a pack of Tarot cards. Polygraph evidence is inadmissible in court. There is a good reason for that. To check Brett Kavanaugh’s qualifications for the Supreme Court, Congress would do well to ask him whether he believes Frye v. United States and United States v. Scheffer were correctly decided. This would be far more illuminating (and meaningful) to anyone trying to discern his qualifications for the Court than asking him whether he assaulted Christine Blasey Ford.

Journalists who report that Mike Pence has offered to take a polygraph (to prove that he was not the author of the anonymous New York Times op-ed), or that Ford has taken one, without explaining that polygraphs cannot discern truth from falsehood are wasting an opportunity to educate their readers. If you promulgate the idea that there’s a machine that can tell when someone is lying, you shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself living in a culture so hostile to science that kids go unvaccinated and measles break out in the First World.

A polygraph measures your heart rate, breathing, and galvanic skin response. There is no evidence that any pattern of physiological responses is unique to deception. Polygraphs are useful to investigators trying to elicit a confession, however: if you convince suggestible people that these measurements are associated with lying, they are more likely spontaneously to confess when you tell them, “The machine says you’re lying.”

It works as follows:

I say, “We’ve got your endotrygliceride levels from the doorknob you’re touching. We’ll match those up against the steering wheel and that’ll tell us the whole story right there. Son, why on earth wouldn’t you want us to match up those endotrygliceride levels if you’re not involved in this? If you’re afraid of what those endotrygliceride levels will tell me, you should sit right back down. If the truth comes out later and you’ve been wasting my time, I won’t be able to help you.”

I was right. It was the moment. The endotrygliceride levels never lie. Then I tell the suspect he is guilty. Full stop. He is guilty and I know he is guilty. I tell him all the evidence we have against him, piling it up later after layer until he feels entombed by his misdeeds, until the suspect is well-nigh positive he cannot escape.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Killing Free Speech by Judith Bergman

By on September 21st, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12975/killing-free-speech

The OIC’s media strategy encourages “accurate and factual portrayal of Islam. Emphasis should be directed at avoidance of any link or association of Islam with terrorism or the use of Islamophobic rhetoric… such as labeling criminal terrorists as ‘Islamic’ fascists, ‘Islamic’ extremists.”

That part of the strategy has already had much success across the Western world, where authorities and media do not want to label Muslim terrorists as Islamic, but routinely describe them as “mentally ill.”

The OICs highly ambitious plans to do away with freedom of speech go severely underreported in the West. Mainstream journalists do not appear to find it dangerous that their freedom of speech should be supervised by the OIC, while Western governments, far from offering any resistance, appear, perhaps for votes, to be cozily going along with everything.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is trying to curb your freedom of speech — yet again[1].

In June, the first “I 1st Islamic-European Forum for examining ways of cooperation to curb hate speech in the media,” initiated by the OIC, ironically but sadly took place at the Press Club Brussels Europe.

The director of the information department of the OIC, Maha Mustafa Aqeel, explained that the forum is part of the OIC’s media strategy[2] to counter “Islamophobia”:

“Our strategy focuses on interacting with the media, academics, and experts on various relevant topics, in addition to engaging with Western governments to raise awareness, support the efforts of Muslim civil society bodies in the West, and engage the latter in developing plans and programs to counter Islamophobia.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

After Kavanaugh, A Way to Take the Spectacle Out of Confirmations By Roger Kimball

By on September 21st, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/20/after-kavanaugh

Is there a silver lining in the malignant circus now playing at the Capitol and beamed to computer and television screens across the fruited plain? Depending on when you happen to read this, you might ask: “Which circus? Who’s playing this week?”

Politics is by nature a performance art. The rhetor declaiming in the Agora or the orator fulminating in the Forum may not have been Cory Booker or Kamala Harris—and certainly wasn’t Dianne Feinstein—but we can see the same habits of exaggeration, grandstanding, calumny, and economy with the truth at work, to say nothing of Machiavellian calculation and preening self-regard.

Politics, in short, may be a high calling—the proper ordering of the state, after all, is a big deal—but it is assuredly a grubby business full of loathsome characters, backstabbing, and power-hungry melodrama. So what else is new?

Everyone’s personal metanoia proceeds at its own pace and is sparked by different contingencies. For me, this week’s performance, starring Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, was a minor Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment. I have long known, and often written, that the process by which we confirm candidates for the Supreme Court has become deeply corrupt. (I was going to say “politicized,” but that is not quite right: it’s by nature a political process, but one that has been perverted.)

As many commentators have noted, the definitive twist came with Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. That televised circus, unprecedented in its tawdriness, captivated the nation’s prurient attention and marked a brutal new low, unsurpassed even by the battalions of lies that surrounded Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings. This wasn’t “advice and consent” but naked power politics, shocking partly for its breathtaking mendacity and bad faith but mostly alarming because of what it betokened about the place of “the least dangerous branch” in the metabolism of out political life.

Yes, judges were men, and men were interested parties, but here—one had thought—was a part of our political process that was set slightly to one side of the usual rough and tumble “I-want-this-so-you-cannot-have-that” partisan squabbling. The still-novel idea, back then, was that we were a country of laws, not men, and we therefore required people of intelligence and good will who were sufficiently impartial to don the black robe signifying not that they had no personal interests but that they could be sufficiently dispassionate to bracket those interests in order to adjudicate a dispute on the basis of the settled law of the land in light of precedent and the Constitution. Once upon a time, that was the idea.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Schweizer: Stalin, Hitler, Mao ‘Would Dream About’ Google’s Power Over Our Thoughts By Tyler O’Neil

By on September 20th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/schweizer-stalin-hitler-mao-would-dream-about-googles-power-over-our-thoughts/

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Google and Facebook have tremendous power to influence billions of people, without them even knowing it. An upcoming film documents how they can make companies rich, they can suppress information, and they can sway an election. They can even suggest thoughts and sway culture. This is the kind of power kings, emperors, and even dictators of yesteryear would envy, if they knew it existed.

“Throughout human history, tragically, leaders, ideologies, and belief systems have arisen that want to have total control over our lives, they want to remake human nature,” Peter Schweizer, New York Times bestselling author and writer for the upcoming film “The Creepy Line,” told PJ Media. He mentioned Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

“They all had police forces, they killed millions of people — tens of millions of people, in some cases,” Schweizer noted. “I’m not suggesting companies like Facebook and Google do that, but these companies do have control or influence over us that those dictators and leaders would dream about.”

“All the crude propaganda that they engaged in, the radio broadcasts, the leaflets, the sort of hypnotic speeches that they would give, pale in comparison with the ability for Google to nudge and to steer us in directions they want us to go and we don’t necessarily want to go,” the author explained.

Facebook and Google “do that by sifting our information, determining what we see and what we don’t see, they also do that by censoring information, and they nudge us in directions that they want us to go.”

“This is enormous power,” Schweizer said. “It’s the sort of power of Big Brother in ‘1984,’ and it’s the sort of power that these totalitarians from the last century would have loved and dreamed of having. They have power over the news and information that we get and the thoughts that we start to form.”
DOJ Invites 24 State AGs to Jeff Sessions Meeting About Breaking Up Google, Facebook

“The film is called ‘The Creepy Line’ because we believe that Facebook and Google are doing things that are out of bounds with what we expect from companies,” Schweizer explained. The phrase comes from a speech in which Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, said his company likes to “get right up to the creepy line, but not cross it.”

“They never define what the creepy line is, but our view and attitude is that they cross the creepy line all the time,” he told PJ Media. “They have the ability to sway and influence people, and they admit this. They brag about it. It gives them a power over the control of information, it gives them the power of suggestion, and it gives them the power to have a dramatic effect on elections.”

M.A. Taylor, director of “The Creepy Line,” told PJ Media how this power works. He explained that Robert Epstein — a psychologist who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard — has extensively researched the search engine manipulation effect (SEME), discovering that Google’s search engine “can actually sway your opinion.”

“If I type a character in the search bar and suggestions come up, if they’re all positive, they’ll lead to positive web pages which will lead to a positive effect. If you have a negative in there, that negative is likely to get ten to fifteen times more clicks, bringing up negative pages,” Taylor told PJ Media.

Google gives users ten search results on the first page, and it delivers them in ranks from one to ten, with the top result regarded the most reliable. This involves two biases, Taylor explained. First, it has to sift through results to give the top ten, then it has to choose the most reliable result for number 1. Users want this ranking for the most reliable basic information for searches like, “What is the capital of France?”

“This becomes problematic when you talk about things like candidates or issues, because that algorithm has to make that decision about who’s the best candidate or who should you vote for and things like that,” Taylor said. “That’s where it becomes problematic, because we don’t really know what the algorithm is doing to give us these results.”

Robert Epstein ran an experiment, using a search engine to measure the impact of bias on Americans who had no knowledge of a particular issue — like Australia’s 2010 election, for example. “He thought it would be, we put all positive searches for one candidate, they’ll shift two or three percent,” the director said. “It actually shifted 48 percent.”

Epstein first thought this huge result was a mistake, but he ran the study again, and the shift got bigger, 63 percent! He even figured out how to mask the bias by adding one positive search result for the other candidate into a list of results favoring his opponent.

The psychologist has run this experiment in India and with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He found evidence of bias, and conservatives would not be surprised to find that the bias favored Hillary Clinton. CONTINUE AT SITE

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