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August 2019

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Aiding and Comforting the West’s Enemies Michael Galak

By on August 25th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/08/aiding-and-comforting-the-wests-enemies/

Had I been born in Australia, the content of Paul Monk’s well-argued article (“Chinese Spies and Our National Interest”) would’ve shocked and amazed me. However, since I was born in the USSR, it came as a bit of an anti-climax.  ‘Someone is surprised that the Soviets and the Chinese spy on Australia? Really? Surprised? You’re kidding, right?’ Of course they spy on us.

But first, a little trip down memory lane: the David Combe affair. This ALP functionary was befriended by the well-known Russian intelligence agent Valeriy Ivanov and, socially lubricated, tutored the KGB man about the ALP, the workings of the Australian government and his own political ambitions. Needless to say, Ivanov was all ears. Unsurprisingly, the conversation was taped by ASIO, which had bugged the Russian’s residence. Surprisingly, their exchange was broadcast on national TV some time later. The consequences for our David were to be kicked sideways and more than somewhat down, appointed Australia’s chief salesman of wine to Canada. Mighty powerful slap on the wrist, if you ask me. Kevin must’ve winced at least a couple of times, I bet.

In this sense, I appreciate and share Paul Monk’s frustration, and his politely restrained fury (“Treason Will Go Unpunished“), that those betraying the nation’s interests seem to suffer no stern and genuine consequences. Achievements of the Soviet and the Chinese intelligence services are many, varied and impressive. Monk picked up on the subtle differences which distinguish these predators. The Soviets, for starters, were quite angry with the Russian-speaking diaspora, considering them traitors to the cause. By contrast, the pragmatic China regards its expat populations as inexhaustible sources of intelligence. However, and this is the crucial point, both relied on similar principles. The fundamental, shared principle was and remains the use of liberal democracies’ resources, law, openness and freedoms against these very same democracies. The second common principle is the collaboration of democratic societies in the transfer of technology, know-how and expertise.

One has only to look to the history of Soviet industrialisation, which was promoted with the blessing of US government by the industrial architect Albert Kahn, whose firm kick-started the construction of  Soviet industrial enterprises. The long list includes steel mills that produced howitzers, locomotives factories that churned out T-34 tanks, hydroelectric power stations to supply energy for the aluminum production for planes — the list of the dual-purpose and readily switchable projects goes on and on. Many of those factories were built by prisoners. Foreign specialists knew all about it. How did the impoverished Soviets pay for all this expertise and equipment, you might ask? That is where the socialist principle of communal property came in — the peasants were herded into kolkhozes (collective farms), their grain was seized and, despite the resulting famine, sold overseas. Moscow-sanctioned starvation killed millions in the Ukraine alone.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Crazies Now Want You To Feel Guilty About Your Vacation By Stephen Kruiser

By on August 25th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/climate-crazies-now-want-you-to-feel-guilty-about-your-vacation/

The scolds who buy into the notion that we’re all killing dear old Mother Earth have a seemingly endless list of joys they want to remove from our lives, and have now set their sights on one of the greatest: your annual vacation.

The New York Times has an opinion piece this weekend titled “How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation?” The article was written by a travel writer named Seth Kugel.

In a halfhearted attempt to seek absolution, Kugel immediately dons his journalistic hair shirt:

I’ve often wondered how it would feel to work in an industry blamed for its outsize impact on global warming — say, oil drilling or cattle ranching. But it recently struck me that the question is not hypothetical. I’m a travel writer.

Yes, I’ve long known that jet fuel emits a ghastly amount of greenhouse gases, but I pinned that on the fossil fuel and aviation industries. Now the flight shaming movement, which emerged recently in Sweden and spread into Europe, has attempted to shift blame onto travelers.

The “flight shaming movement” mentioned has been championed by that teenage brat who got a week’s worth of publicity by refusing to meet with President Trump, even though no such meeting was ever discussed.

Those of us not members of the climate hysteria cult have long marveled at the disconnect exhibited by those who are as they wag their fingers at us from private jets and commercial airliners. It’s nice to see that they are at least beginning to realize that they are full of it.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Smearing Steven Menashi CNN and MSNBC distort another judicial nominee’s views. By The Editorial Board

By on August 25th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/smearing-steven-menashi-11566761235

The Trump Administration is nominating more federal judges, and right behind comes the character assassination. The latest target is Steven Menashi, a highly regarded appellate lawyer who was acting general counsel in Betsy DeVos ’ Department of Education and now works in the White House counsel’s office. He was tapped this month for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Progressive groups have been orchestrating a smear campaign in coordination with their media allies. Rachel Maddow opened the assault this month with a MSNBC monologue suggesting Mr. Menashi is a white nationalist. Her evidence? A 2010 article Mr. Menashi wrote for a University of Pennsylvania international-law journal that defended Israel as a liberal democracy and Jewish state.

Some on the left argue that Israel’s “right of return” immigration law for Jews is illegitimate because it excludes other groups. Mr. Menashi disputed this by describing comparable laws in Germany, Greece and Finland, which have welcomed back displaced nationals. He noted countries like India and Ireland take a special interest in their ethnic diasporas, and that this doesn’t diminish their democracies.

Ms. Maddow said this amounts to a “high-brow argument for racial purity.” After all, Mr. Menashi drew on that noted herrenvolk theorist Hannah Arendt, the Jewish chronicler of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, who once wrote that human rights “has been achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national rights.”

Nation states often have an ethnic, linguistic and cultural basis. But Ms. Maddow said Mr. Menashi is on the “fringe of racial thinking.” If Senators take her seriously, they will confirm how far they have drifted to the anti-Israel fringe.

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HISTORY Comments turned off

The Weaponization of History Ignorantly invoking slavery or the Holocaust is an affront to those who seriously study the past. By Wilfred M. McClay

By on August 25th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-weaponization-of-history-11566755226

History is the most humbling and humanizing of subjects. It opens reality to us in all its gorgeous variety, from the earthbound lives of ordinary peasants and servants to the rarefied universe of the mighty and wealthy, and the astonishing range of human experience in between. It seeks to provide a balanced and honest record of humanity’s achievements and enormities alike, generous enough to acknowledge the mixture of motives that every one of us flawed humans bring to life’s tasks.

That, at any rate, is how it ought to be. But instead of expanding our minds and hearts, history is increasingly used to narrow them. Instead of helping us to deepen ourselves and take a mature and complex view of the past, history is increasingly employed as a simple bludgeon, which picks its targets mechanically—often based on little more than a popular cliché—and strikes.

The best example may be the evergreen argumentum ad Hitlerum, in which every evil from bigotry and militarism to vegetarianism and appreciation of Wagner’s operas is referred to the transcendentally evil standard of Nazism. The detention centers on America’s southern border should be called “concentration camps,” according to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When questioned, the young, irrepressible Democrat advised Americans: “This is an opportunity for us to talk about how we learn from our history.” But that history isn’t ours. By invoking such an emotionally laden term, she was playing on a potent theme, but in a way that underscored the limited range of her historical reference, as well as the public’s.

A more disturbing example is the pell-mell rush to pass judgment against heroes of the past and tear down or rename the monuments to them—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson. Are we really so faint of heart that we can no longer bear to allow the honoring of great men of the past who fail in some respects to meet our current specifications?

It’s true that all three men held either slaves or racist beliefs. Does that exhaust everything we need to know about them? Ought it to outweigh the value of everything else they did? For those who say yes, the transformation of history into a weapon depends upon a brutal simplification of the historical record. Such is the approach of the New York Times’s audacious “1619 Project,” which argues “that nearly everything that has made America exceptional grew out of slavery.”

A genuinely historical approach would acknowledge, even insist on recognizing, that Washington owned slaves. It would go on to consider that fact from the larger perspective of a long, important and consequential life. It would weigh Washington’s beliefs and actions carefully in the context of their time, and would take into account his decision to free his slaves at the time of his death.

That kind of respectful detail and complexity seems to be leaving with yesterday’s fashions. Instead, we get patent idiocy. The San Francisco School Board voted in June to spend up to $600,000 to paint over a high school’s mural depicting the life of Washington. Two weeks ago it voted to cover up the artwork instead—a compromise. The 1,600-square-foot mural was painted in 1935 by a communist who sought to include Washington’s ownership of slaves as part of a complex portrait of him. But the school board decided that complexity was too disturbing to teenagers, and that the mural was racist and degrading in its depiction of black and Native American people. Better to have plain white walls—or morality tales depicting “the heroism of people of color in America,” as is the new plan—than to tell a complicated story about an American hero.

The weaponizing of history corresponds invariably with a remarkable hostility to history. Its practitioners are content to slice a single fact out of a web of details, then repeat that fact with the stubbornness of protesters who have memorized a chant.

This aggressive historical simplification is at the core of the cult of intersectionality, which now rules American college campuses. The language of unchallengeable collective grievance relies on history for its authority. Notice how concepts such as “historically underrepresented” and “historically marginalized” are used to certify groups that deserve to be favored automatically in the present. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, POLITICS Comments turned off

Bernie’s Green Leap Forward Cost: $16 trillion. Fracking: banned. Oil CEOs: in jail.

By on August 25th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernies-green-leap-forward-11566761328

Bernie Sanders published his version of the Green New Deal last week, and it’s written with all the realism voters have come to expect. Start with its price: “an historic $16.3 trillion.” That’s 10 times Joe Biden ’s climate plan, which is wild already. For the record, America’s annual economy is about $21 trillion.

Mr. Sanders says climate change “shares similarities with the crisis faced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940s,” when the U.S. “within three short years restructured the entire economy.” Oh, the good old days of coffee and meat rationing. Maybe that isn’t what Mr. Sanders has in mind, but he pledges to declare a national emergency and push through “a wholesale transformation of our society.”

To start, he’d switch electricity and transportation to 100% renewables by 2030. He would ban fracking; ban drilling offshore and on federal lands; ban “imports and exports of fossil fuels”; cancel oil pipelines already being built; and halt permitting of “new fossil fuel extraction, transportation, and refining infrastructure.”

Nuclear power would be phased out. He calls it a “false solution,” along with geoengineering and carbon capture. And don’t worry about rising costs. “We do not expect energy prices to spike,” he says, “because the federal government is going to weatherize homes, electrify heating, and keep electricity prices stable.” Thanks to the public provision of renewables, “after 2035 electricity will be virtually free, aside from operations and maintenance costs.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The great failure of the climate models by Patrick Michaels and Caleb Stewart Rossiter |

By on August 25th, 2019

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/the-great-failure-of-the-climate-models

Computer models of the climate are at the heart of calls to ban the cheap, reliable energy that powers our thriving economy and promotes healthier, longer lives. For decades, these models have projected dramatic warming from small, fossil-fueled increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, with catastrophic consequences.

Yet, the real-world data aren’t cooperating. They show only slight warming, mostly at night and in winter. According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there has been no systematic increase in the frequency of extreme weather events, and the ongoing rise in sea level that began with the end of the ice age continues with no great increase in magnitude. The constancy of land-based records is obvious in data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Should we trust these computer models of doom? Let’s find out by comparing the actual temperatures since 1979 with what the 32 families of climate models used in the latest U.N. report on climate science predicted they would be.

Atmospheric scientist John Christy developed a global temperature record of the lower atmosphere using highly accurate satellite soundings. NASA honored him for this achievement, and he was an author for a previous edition of the U.N. report. He told a House Science Committee hearing in March 2017 that the U.N. climate models have failed badly.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Recession? Headlines in Search of a Story Refusing to take the economy’s soundness for an answer. by J.T. Young

By on August 25th, 2019

https://spectator.org/recession-headlines-in-search-of-a-story/

Recent breathless headlines of impending recession exposed the “experts” more than the economy. In attempting to see over the economic horizon, they appeared more to be seeking to see past this administration. The economy remains sound, even as attempts to discredit become less so.

On August 19, the Washington Post’s first sentence summed up their one-dimensional angle on the National Association for Business Economics’ August survey: “Most economists believe the United States will tip into recession by 2021, a new survey shows, despite White House insistence the economy is sound.” So it went, with most establishment news outlets bent on finding the gray cloud around today’s current sterling economy.

Negative news sells. Perhaps it has always been thus, though it certainly seems most prevalent when it is adverse to this administration.

Interestingly, the latest NABE survey showed something else — an improvement over the previous survey — if the time had been taken to read it. As the survey stated in its section on the economy: “Compared with results in the February 2019 survey, respondents, on balance, expect the next U.S. recession to occur later.” In other words: The survey shows an improved outlook regarding recession.

Respondents predicting a recession this year dropped from ten percent to two percent. Those anticipating one next year also dropped, from 42 percent to 38 percent. Presuming these more optimistic respondents must put their predictions somewhere, they moved them to 2021, causing this later estimation to rise from 25 percent to 34 percent. Finally, those predicting the next recession would be even later moved up from 11 percent to 14 percent.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

College Creates AI to Identify Hate on Campus — Discover Minority Students are the Worst Abusers Jim Hoft by Jim Hoft

By on August 25th, 2019

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/08/college-creates-ai-to-identify-hate-on-campus-discover-minority-students-are-the-worst-abusers/

Radical far left students at the University of California, Berkley held a protest and formed a human chain to prevent white students from going to class in a 2016 demonstration.

A new study by Cornell Univesity using artificial intelligence found that minority students were much more likely to spread abusive racist language on twitter.

Campus Reform reported:

A new study out of Cornell reveals that the machine learning practices behind AI, which are designed to flag offensive online content, may actually “discriminate against the groups who are often the targets of the abuse we are trying to detect,” according to the study abstract.

The study involved researchers training a system to flag tweets containing “hate speech,” in much the same way that other universities are developing systems for eventual online use, by using several databases of tweets, some of which had been flagged by human evaluators for offensive content.

“The results show evidence of systematic racial bias in all datasets, as classifiers trained on them tend to predict that tweets written in African-American English are abusive at substantially higher rates.If these abusive language detection systems are used in the field they will, therefore, have a disproportionate negative impact on African-American social media users,” the abstract continues.

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KRD NEWS Comments turned off

CENSURING ISRAEL: COMMON SENSE ON LIFE SUPPORT By Meir Jolovitz *****

By on August 25th, 2019

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24343?fbclid=IwAR3xs0eN1rb-piy8YGK8mGIYZXWtqItEAG9m-1O1egcHzJV3hEmykgKLM3k

Congressman Steve King, a Republican from the 4th District in Iowa, is perceived to be racist. Rightly, or wrongly. King made a few comments – opining about several political issues – which all liberal voices, and not a small number of Republicans, deemed to be racist, even if only marginally so.

With a ruptured reputation now solidly in hand, the consequences that would follow seemed almost axiomatic. Condemnation. Rebuke. Censure. And to be sure, the expectation that he might be banned from circles where he was certain to find himself excoriated and unwelcomed.

So, are we all good with this so far?

Let’s play it out.

With his damaged political stature well established, if Steve King, the democratically elected Congressman, wanted to visit South Africa, and that nation said “no” – what would the Democratic Party’s position be? That’s a rhetorical question, of course, because we all know the answer. Uniformly.

What would Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and the litany of progressive candidates for the most important and most powerful job in the world say? What would the self-professed experts, those political pundits from CNN, MSNBC, or the New York Times say, as they competed to outdo each other in flaying the congressman?

Hell, what would J Street or the Anti-Defamation League say? And, what would AIPAC say?

We know the answer. They would issue a press release that would each echo the other. You made your bed, Congressman King. Now sleep in it.

What unmitigated hypocrites. All of them. All except the Zionist Organization of America, the National Council of Young Israel, Coalition forJewish Values,  Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI), and the Republican Jewish Coalition (and perhaps one or two others whose press releases went unnoticed).

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Ending ‘Catch and Release’ by Rachel Bovard

By on August 25th, 2019

amgreatness.com/2019/08/24/ending-catch-and-release/

As Congress persists in serially ignoring anything having to do with the border crisis, the Trump Administration continues to release regulations aimed at fixing the problem of illegal immigration.

The administration on Friday released its latest rule to address a longstanding “pull” factor: that illegal migrants who arrive with children immediately are released into the interior of the country.

This process, often called “catch and release,” has bedeviled multiple administrations for years. It has its roots in a 1997 legal agreement known as the Flores settlement. Though originally having to do with detention conditions, judges have expanded and interpreted the settlement to mean that children cannot be detained for more than 20 days.

The practical effect leaves the government with two choices: separate families when they get here, detaining the parents and placing their children with foster families, or release families to await processing together.

The latter has been the approach of most presidents. The Trump Administration, however, enacted a strict application of the law in 2018 when it began separating families to detain the adults and then reversed itself after public outcry.

The consequences of a “catch and release” policy are self-evident. U.S. Border Patrol wastes time and resources arresting crossers who are then immediately released. Illegal crossers are incentivized to cross, knowing they’ll be released instead of being detained. Many of them do not show up for their designated court dates, remaining in the country illegally and without documentation, creating a permanent underclass.

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