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September 2019

ISRAEL, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Another anti-Israel movie – from an Israeli. Jack Engelhard

By on September 6th, 2019

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/24412?utm_source=activetrail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Call me sentimental, but I prefer those big fat movies that celebrate the glory of Israel.

Pass the popcorn for epics like Paul Newman in “Exodus,” and Kirk Douglas in “Cast a Giant Shadow.”

I am still surprised to find that the screenplay for Leon Uris’s “Exodus” was written by Dalton Trumbo, a diehard leftist. I guess leftists were different back then. They had a heart. Nor was Trumbo Jewish, and I shudder to think how “Exodus” would have come out in the hands of a Jewish screenwriter. 

Many of these are so busy implanting moral equivalency into their scripts, like Tony Kushner for Spielberg’s “Munich,” that before you know it, the good guys become the bad guys. 

That’s where we seem to be with famed Israeli writer/director, Joseph Cedar. In partnership with another Israeli, and a Palestinian Arab, and through Israel’s Channel 12 Television, we get an HBO seriestitled, “Our Boys,” a real downer, and shown in 10 parts, so that not just once, but 10 times viewers across the world get to watch a Jewish filmmaker lick the dust and blaspheme his own people.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls the production “anti-Semitic,” and apparently that is a justified rebuke and review.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Left-wing Website Think Progress to Shut Down Debra Heine

By on September 6th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/06/left-wing-website-think-progress-to-shut-down/

ThinkProgress, a once influential left-wing news site, is reportedly shutting down after being in operation for nearly 15 years.

The outlet was a “project” of  the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF), a “sister advocacy organization” of the Center for American Progress (CAP).

The Center for American Progress is a 501(c)(3) organization that receives approximately $25 million per year in funding from a variety of sources, including individuals, foundations, and corporations, according to Sourcewatch.

From 2003 to 2007, the center received about $15 million in grants from 58 foundations. Major individual donors include George Soros, Peter Lewis, Steve Bing, and Herbert M. Sandler. The Center receives undisclosed sums from corporate donors.

Wal-Mart is a major funder of the Center for American Progress, having given at least half a million dollars to the organization. Wal-Mart has been a major backer of Pres Obama’s health care legislation, which critics contend would disproportionately drive up costs for Wal-Mart’s smaller competitors.

According to the Daily Beast, ThinkProgress ran on deficits for years and “will stop current operations on Friday and be converted into a site where CAP scholars can post.”

CAP officials had been searching for a buyer to take over website and were reportedly some interested parties, but ultimately, the site was unable to secure a patron.

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HISTORY, MEDIA Comments turned off

No, Jonathan Haidt is Not Like a Slavery Apologist written by Adam Rowe

By on September 6th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/09/04/no-jonathan-haidt-is-not-like-a-sla

Eve Fairbanks, in an essay for the Washington Post, argues that many of the writers on the so-called “reasonable right,” a group that includes such seemingly benign figures as Bari Weiss and Jonathan Haidt, are making many of the same arguments and using much the same language as proslavery advocates in the American South:

The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly the same as the antebellum rhetoric I’d read so much of. The same exact words. The same exact arguments. Rhetoric, to be precise, in support of the slave-owning South.

Fairbanks follows this breathless announcement by acknowledging that she is not accusing anyone of defending slavery, and that includes, weirdly enough, actual antebellum proslavery writers. “Proslavery rhetoricians talked little of slavery itself,” she writes. “Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of ‘reason,’ free speech and ‘civility.’” This is a bit like smearing someone as a Nazi, then qualifying it with the claim that overt anti-Semitism was really quite atypical of Nazism. In her characterization of proslavery thought, Fairbanks has taken a line that not even the most stalwart member of the Daughters of the Confederacy would care to defend. It is, well, an exact inversion of the truth.

In one sense, the argument is too silly to merit a serious response. The fact that defenders of slavery have in the past appealed to reason and civility no more discredits anyone who appeals to those values than the Nazis’ love of calisthenics discredits anyone who exercises. But the essay does raise, in an absurd, wrong-headed way, an interesting question about the fate of civility and free speech in a society that no longer operates on shared moral premises.

Free speech principles were often at stake in the antebellum controversy over slavery.

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HISTORY Comments turned off

The Frankfurt School and the Allure of Submission Published by Matt McManus

By on September 6th, 2019

https://quillette.com/category/politics/

When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.
~Erich Fromm

Since at least the advent of modernity and liberalism, tremendous emphasis has been placed on the importance of human freedom. For classical liberal thinkers like Immanuel Kant, freedom was the fundamental characteristic of human beings; at the center of all our practical moral action. The American and French Revolutionaries both invoked the infringement of liberty to justify the overthrow of existing tyrannical orders. And, today, political culture is saturated with references to the importance of making choices, living life as one see’s fit, and non-coercion by the state. Socialists in the Jacobin and conservatives at the National Review debate what is really necessary to secure freedom, but none disputes its importance.

Each of these positions relies upon the belief that human freedom is either basic to our nature, essential for the realization of our moral potential, or both. But if this is true, then what explains the appeal of totalitarianism? One of the great intellectual efforts undertaken in the aftermath of the Second World War was to try and figure out why so many people would willingly surrender their freedom, and even exult in submission, in order to commit murder on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Countless artists, philosophers, sociologists and economists have provided explanations. One of the deepest accounts come from the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, who had a dark and melancholic interpretation of what happened.

The Human Yearning for Submission

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

ACLU Files Complaint against Congressional Candidate Who Refuses to Host Down Syndrome Drag Show By Jack Crowe

By on September 6th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/aclu-files-complaint-against-congressional-candidate-who-refuses-to-host-down-syndrome-drag-show/

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a formal complaint against a Republican congressional candidate over his refusal to host a drag show featuring mentally disabled performers at a venue he owns in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Peter Meijier, the heir to a Michigan grocery-store empire and a first-time Republican congressional candidate, refused to host a London-based troupe of drag performers who have Down syndrome out of concern that the performers would be unable to give their “full and informed consent” to participate in a sexualized dance routine.

The ACLU filed a complaint on Thursday with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights on the grounds that Meijer is discriminating against the performers on the basis of their disability and their sex.

“If members of the group were to perform an orchestra recital, chances are he wouldn’t have canceled the performance,” Jay Kaplan, a staff attorney for the ACLU of Michigan, told the New York Times.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Competition Over How To Impoverish The American People Continues Among Democratic Candidates Francis Menton

By on September 6th, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-9-4-the-competition-over-how-to

It was back on June 4 that I posed the eternal question, “Will The Democratic Candidates Ever Notice That The Climate Change Thing Is Over?” That post noted that the Democratic candidates for President had begun a kind of bidding war over who could put forth the most extreme proposal to shackle the American economy in the name of climate salvatio n, while at the same time “out in the rest of the world” they were “laugh[ing] at this spectacle.” Among the data points cited in that post were that China was seeking reductions in the price of coal in order to spur consumption of electricity, and that in Australia a national election had just been lost by the party that made a principal issue out of its opposition to a huge new coal mine in Queensland.

In the three months since early June, things have only gotten sillier.

The Statistical Review of World Energy 2019 from the BP oil company came out. A summary of it in Forbes on June 28 noted: “Coal consumption in most of the developing world continues to grow. Asia Pacific increased consumption [in 2018] by the most overall, but its 2.5% growth rate lagged Africa’s (+3.9%) and Central and South America (+3.7%).”

The annual Google billionaires’ climate summit was held in Sicily at the beginning of August. From euronews: “114 private jets flew into the Italian Verdura Resort, according to the Italian press, and many of the elite guest list arrived in multi-million pound yachts. With stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Barack Obama and Prince Harry in attendance, reports Jim Dobson at Forbes, they were hardly going to be hitch-hiking. . . .”

With the Australian election won by pro-development forces, the giant ($16.5 billion) Carmichael/Adani coal mine project in Queensland resumed its march toward final regulatory approval.

In late August former President Barack Obama plunked down just under $15 million for a beachfront mansion in Martha’s Vineyard, maybe 10 feet above mean high tide, revealing just what the ex-Pres really thinks of his own rhetoric about impending climate-induced sea-level rise.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Dystopian Democrats’ Authoritarian Town Hall — by Thomas McArdle

By on September 6th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/06/the-dystopian-democrats-authoritarian-town-hall/

Who would imagine that the Democrats’ hurtling to the far left would actually lead to an attack on one of their sacred precepts: “a woman’s right to choose.”

The right to choose not to have a baby is fine, reducing as it does your carbon footprint, and thus saving the earth. But choosing to have too many babies (on top of being so bourgeois and unseemly) is like selfishly choosing to burn oil instead of harnessing your energy from the sun or wind.

Get it straight: carbon is immoral, whether the polluting carbon you’re expelling into the atmosphere is fossil fuels or children.

At CNN’s “Climate Crisis Town Hall” on Wednesday, working class champion Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked a population control question by a longtime elementary teacher at a Montessori school where the tuition ranges from $11,000 to $27,000, in 96% white, $66,500 median family income Litchfield County in rural western Connecticut, the state’s most sparsely populated county.

“The planet cannot sustain this growth” in population, she contended. “Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?” she asked. Sanders responded in the positive and expressed a willingness to give U.S. “aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions” and provide contraception.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Death of a Dictator Admired on the left, Robert Mugabe led a thriving country to ruin.

By on September 6th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/death-of-a-dictator-11567796547

Africa’s postcolonial era produced many tyrants, but few as destructive as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. The perverse accomplishment of the dictator, who died Friday at age 95, was to make a thriving country impoverished, corrupt and oppressed.

Mugabe was born in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia and studied in South Africa. He became an enthusiastic Marxist and joined his country’s independence movement in the 1960s. The former schoolteacher turned into a guerrilla commander and served more than a decade in prison. After Zimbabwe became an independent state, he was elected Prime Minister in 1980.

Widely reviled at the end of his life for his many abuses of power, he was feted across the globe earlier in his career by politicians and intellectuals who should have known better. He became a champion of anticolonialism on the left and was even knighted by Britain in 1994. By then the military he controlled had killed thousands of political opponents and civilians.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obamas try to muscle little company into handing over its trademark to them By Monica Showalter

By on September 6th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/obamas_try_to_muscle_little_company_into_handing_over_their_trademark_to_them.html

The Obamas have always been big on Chicago-style political muscle, and even in the post-presidency, Barack and Michelle have not changed a bit.

Get a load of this outrageous bid to force a little company to give up its trademark — to him.  According to Fox News:

The legal team representing the Obamas filed a petition to cancel the trademark of an e-book publishing company called Higher Ground Enterprises, much to the chagrin of the publishing company.

“This is really deplorable behavior. I hope that the Obamas realize that these actions are not consistent with the values they preach and that they instruct their attorneys to immediately dismiss the petition,” attorney Larry Zerner told Fox News in a statement that was first given to The Hollywood Reporter.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the Obama team wanted to name their Netflix propaganda venture ‘Higher Ground Productions’ which is kind of a stupid, banal name, but whatevs.  The U.S. trademark office told them “no” because another company, Higher Ground Enterprises, already had the name, and the names were too similar.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

By on September 6th, 2019

Hispanic Unemployment Rate Ties All-Time Low Craig Bannister

www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/09/liberals-in-pittsburgh-announce-boycott-of-local-businesses-for-trump-support-backlash-ensues/

Liberals In Pittsburgh Announce Boycott Of Local Businesses For Trump Support, Backlash Ensues Jim Hoft, 

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/05/climate-change-hysteria-dangerous/

CNN’s Presidential Climate Change Town Hall Was Insane, And the hysteria is getting dangerous.

David Harsanyi

Put it this way: the most benign climate-change plan proposed during CNN’s seven-hour Democratic Party presidential candidate town hall was more authoritarian than anything Donald Trump has ever suggested during his presidency. 

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/09/05/american-airlines-mechanic-charged-with-sabotaging-an-aircraft.html

American Airlines mechanic charged with sabotaging a plane

Leslie Josephs

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