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Ruth King

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Don’t tell me your pronouns — I can guess! By E.M. Cadwaladr

By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/dont_tell_me_your_pronouns__i_can_guess.html

“There are now sixtyish new pronoun sets, just as we are told there are sixtyish new genders. ”

A leftist shtick that been going on for some time in universities, government offices, and other haunts of the chronically offended is the idea of choosing one’s own personal pronouns — and expecting the world to actually use them.  Under this scheme, it would be politically correct for me to self-identify as:

e.m. cadwaladr
he/him/his

The main point of this bold new level of wokeness is that a man who wants to entertain an essentially psychotic delusion that he’s a woman may now style himself:

Higgly-Piggly Doe
she/her/hers

If someone does not go along with such a man’s mentally aberrant state and address him according to his delusional identity, the offending person can be prosecuted in some localities.  Nor is this game limited to mere conventional gender dysphoria sufferers.  There are now sixtyish new pronoun sets, just as we are told there are sixtyish new genders.  I do not know what genders “zie/zim/zir” or “ey/em/eir” denote.  These words sound vaguely Yiddish to me — though they lack the Yiddish language’s quirky charm.  The new pronouns are always uttered with a certain peevish militancy that precludes them having charm of any kind.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

35 Obama Gaffes To Make Joe Biden Feel Better About Himself By Matt Margolis

By on August 31st, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/35-obama-gaffes-to-make-joe-biden-feel-better-about-himself/

Lately, it seems we can’t go a day without a new gaffe from Joe Biden. When you have to tell your supporters “I’m not going nuts,” it’s clear things aren’t exactly going well for you. So, to make Joe Biden feel better I thought it would be nice to compile the top thirty-five gaffes from Barack Obama, the man whose coattails Joe Biden is so desperately trying to ride.

35. Obama doesn’t know what committee he’s on.

While speaking in Israel during his first presidential campaign, Obama claimed to be on a committee that he was not on. “Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee — which is my committee — a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”

34. Plagiarizing his campaign speech

We all know that Biden’s first presidential campaign was thwarted by revelations of plagiarism. Obama was also discovered to have plagiarized a campaign speech. Perhaps that’s really why he picked Biden as his running mate, they had that in common.

In 2006, former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick said the following in a campaign speech:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’-just words. Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’-just words. ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’-just words. ‘I have a dream’-just words,”

In 2008, Obama said these words in his own campaign speech:

“Don’t tell me words don’t matter! ‘I have a dream.’ Just words. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Just words. ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself.’ Just words, just speeches,”

Obama obviously survived the scandal, unlike Joe Biden.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Feminist Capitalist Professor Under Fire The students who demand her firing, Camille Paglia argues, take prosperity for granted, are socially undeveloped, and know little about Western history. Who’s Moses? By Tunku Varadarajan

By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-feminist-capitalist-professor-under-fire-11567201511

When Camille Paglia was an “obnoxious adolescent” of 15, she had what she describes as “this huge fight with a nun” in upstate New York. Ms. Paglia, 72, remembers the incident with a clarity that suggests a lifetime of unresolved umbrage.

“We were released from school for religious instruction on Thursday afternoons,” and teen Camille posed a question: “If God is infinitely forgiving, I asked the nun, is it possible that at some point in the future he’ll forgive Satan?” The nun—a doctrinaire Irish Catholic without any of the “pagan residue” of Ms. Paglia’s Italian culture—“turned beet red. She was so enraged that she condemned me in front of everybody for even asking that question.”

That was the day Ms. Paglia left the Catholic Church. It was not the last time she asked an awkward, even incendiary, question. Such provocations are the stock-in-trade of this most free-spirited of America’s public intellectuals.

Ms. Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has been a tenured—and occasionally embattled—faculty member since 1984. This April, mutinous students demanded her firing over public comments she’d made that were not wholly sympathetic to the #MeToo movement, as well as for an interview with the Weekly Standard that they called “transphobic.” That denunciation, with its indignant dogmatism, is particularly slapstick, since Ms. Paglia describes herself as “transgender.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

A Famine of Fact at U.N. Climate Panel The IPCC sounds an alarm about food production, but another U.N. agency’s data show it’s a false one. By James Taylo

By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-famine-of-fact-at-u-n-climate-panel-11567201352

Global crop production sets new records virtually every year. That didn’t stop the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from publishing an alarmist report Aug. 8 that suggests global warming has devastated crop production and threatens food shortages.

“Climate change . . . has adversely impacted food security and terrestrial ecosystems as well as contributed to desertification and land degradation in many regions,” the report asserts. “Warming compounded by drying has caused yield declines in parts of Southern Europe. Based on indigenous and local knowledge, climate change is affecting food security in drylands, particularly those in Africa, and high mountain regions of Asia and South America.”

At the same time, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reports that new records were set for global corn, wheat and rice production five years running through 2017, the most recent year for which data are available. How is that possible?

The IPCC report parses words and engages in semantic tricks to give readers a false impression of declining global crop production. Note the reference to declining yields in “parts” of Southern Europe. The report doesn’t mention that yields are increasing in Southern Europe as a whole. What sense does it make to blame declining yields in a small portion of the world on global warming without crediting global warming for global gains?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tehran Threatens a Think Tank The regime targets a U.S. group for opposing the 2015 nuclear deal.

By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tehran-threatens-a-think-tank-11567205715

As Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif negotiates with Europe to keep the 2015 nuclear deal alive, he sells the Islamic Republic as a normal government wronged by a rogue Trump Administration. This is a sham, and Tehran has proved it again by targeting an American think tank for retribution.

Last week the Iranian Foreign Ministry accused the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and CEO Mark Dubowitz of “economic terrorism” and “actively trying to harm the Iranian people’s security and vital interests.” Tehran claimed that the independent think tank “is in fact the designing and executing arm of the U.S. administration.”

As Mr. Dubowitz wrote Friday on these pages, “according to the law cited against us, Mr. Zarif has already coordinated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] and Iran’s Intelligence Ministry in developing sanctions against FDD.”

The regime’s apologists draw a false equivalence between these sanctions and U.S. restrictions placed against Iranian officials and the IRGC. But producing research, lobbying lawmakers and educating the public is not the same as spreading terrorism around the Middle East. FDD has been an important critic of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but the group’s only influence is with ideas.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

24 Hours of Media Malpractice . By Mark Hemingway

By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/08/30/24_hours_of_media_malpractice.html

In the Trump era, it increasingly appears that journalistic standards are on life support. Consider, if you will, what a day in the life of contemporary journalism now looks like.

Late Tuesday afternoon, some conservatives on Twitter started grumbling about an article the Washington Post published that morning. The op-ed in question accused best-selling conservative author J.D. Vance of being racist, and otherwise tried dubiously to connect the dots between mainstream pro-life advocates and white supremacists. At a speech in July, Vance said the following: “Our people aren’t having enough children to replace themselves. That should bother us.” Washington Post contributor Marissa Brostoff characterized the remark by saying, “Vance did not spell out exactly who was included in the word ‘our.’ He didn’t need to.” Her clear implication was that Vance was referring to the fact he only wanted to have white children. This would be news to Vance, since he’s married to a woman of color, and his best-selling “Hillbilly Elegy” ­– a movie version, directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard, is in post-production – is a very critical look at the mores of poor white Americans.

And Vance did, in fact, spell out exactly what his pronoun referred to. A couple of sentences earlier in his remarks, which Brostoff didn’t bother to read closely, he makes it clear he’s referring to all Americans. Low birth rates are a serious concern in Western countries for many reasons, including the need to sustain liberal welfare policies, which have nothing to do with racism.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Dangerous Stalinism of the “Woke” Hard-Left by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14794/the-dangerous-stalinism-of-the-woke-hard-left

People on the “woke” hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them apparently see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel “unsafe.” They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be
expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.

The other dangerous similarity between the Stalinists and the “wokers” is that both disdain due process for those they deem guilty of political incorrectness or other crimes and sins. They reject any presumption of innocence or requirement that the accuser bear the burden of proof.

For Stalinist and “wokers,” there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged.

That is why I make the controversial claim that today, the “woke” hard-left is more dangerous to civil liberties than the right. To be sure there are hard right extremists who would use — and have used — violence to silence those with whom they disagree. They are indeed dangerous. But they have far less influence on our future leaders than their counterparts on the hard-left. They are not teaching our college age children and grandchildren. They are marginalized academically, politically and in the media. The opposite is true of hard-left Stalinists. Many have no idea who Stalin even was, but they are emulating his disdain for free speech and due process in the interests of achieving the unrealizable utopia they both sought. They also have in common the attitude that noble ends justify ignoble means.

We must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny.

Civil liberties are in greater danger today from the intolerant hard-left than from the bigoted hard-right. This may seem counterintuitive: There has been far more violence — mass shootings in malls, synagogues and other soft targets — from extremists who identify more with the hard-right than with the hard-left. But the influence of the hard-left on our future leaders is far more pervasive, insidious and dangerous than the influence of the hard-right.

People on the “woke” hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel “unsafe.” They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Boomer Revolution and Its Consequences Matthew Boose

By on August 31st, 2019

amgreatness.com/2019/08/30/the-boomer-revolution-and-its-consequences/

The Wall Street Journal this week published the results of a survey that found Americans’ values are shifting drastically, and not in a good way.

The poll, conducted with NBC News, found that Americans care less about patriotism, family, and faith than they did 20 years ago. The percentage of Americans who regard family as very important dropped 16 points, to a mere 43 percent. The importance of religion dropped 12 points, to 48 percent; and patriotism fell 9 points, to 61 percent.

The trend was most pronounced among Millennials and older members of  Gen Z—or Zoomers, as they are sometimes known, who consistently rated these values lower than older Americans: 79 percent of Americans 55 and older valued patriotism, compared with 42 percent of younger Americans; nearly two-thirds of older Americans say they value religion highly, compared with less than one-third of younger Americans.

Taken together, the statistics tell a neat story of moral decline. So young people really are a bunch of godless egoists who think brunch and having pets instead of children is the summum bonum! It’s not quite wrong, but it isn’t quite fair, either.

Young people get a lot of grief from Boomers, but their confusion wasn’t formed in a vacuum. Sure, university, mass culture, and public schooling all have played a role in bringing about these changes, but Millennials are the products of the Boomers, the first true “Me Generation” in American history.

The shifts in core values reflect the ascendance of a culture of selfishness and mindless consumption, but that culture didn’t come from the Millennials or the Zoomers. Before today’s “Me Generation” came into being, there were the hedonist faux-ascetics of the 1960s who melted their brains with hallucinogens while dabbling in Eastern religions of self-denial to stick it to their uptight suburban parents.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Dreyfus affair: The story behind Polanski’s film An Officer and a Spy See note please

By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-dreyfus-affair-the-story-behind-polanskis-film/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2019-08-30&utm_medium=email
Mark Twain also attended the trial and wrote of it….rsk

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org › mark-twain-and-the-jews
Jewish French army captain convicted — and later exonerated — of spying for the Germans in late 19th century; case famously exposed anti-Semitism in France at the time.

The Dreyfus affair, subject of the new Roman Polanski film which is premiering at the Venice Film Festival, triggered a national crisis over anti-Semitism in France in the late 19th century.

Here is an account of the scandal, which had wide international repercussions.

Alfred Dreyfus was a 36-year-old Jewish French army captain, from the Alsace region of eastern France which was at the time occupied by Germany.

He was accused in October 1894 of passing secret information on new artillery equipment to the German military attache.

The accusation was based on a comparison of handwriting on a document found in the German’s waste paper basket in Paris.

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KRD NEWS Comments turned off

PUNCTURING THE LIE OF PALESTINIAN IDENTITY By Melanie Phillips

By on August 31st, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/08/30/puncturing-the-lie-of-palestinian-identity/?utm_content=opinion1&utm_medium=daily_email&utm_campaign=email&utm_source=internal/

Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), recently claimed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the Canaanites. “This land is for its people, its residents and the Canaanites who were here 5,000 years ago — and we are the Canaanites!” he declared, vowing that every Israeli stone and house “built on our land” would end up “in the garbage dump of history.”

Any Western Palestinian supporter might have been left somewhat perplexed. After all, it’s an article of faith among those hostile to Israel that the indigenous inhabitants of the land are Palestinian Arabs who have been supplanted by Jewish occupiers.

Since Canaanites were said to have been conquered by the Jews, Abbas is laying claim to Canaanite ancestry to give the Palestinians a prior right to the Land of Israel. But if they were actually Canaanites, then they can’t be Arabs, who many centuries later came, as the name implies, from the Arabian Peninsula, just as the Philistines, from whom in other moods the Palestinians also claim to have descended, came from Crete.

Abbas’ argument is, of course, ludicrous. The fact is that the Jews were the only people for whom the Land of Israel was ever their national kingdom, several centuries before the creation of Islam. The Jews are the only extant indigenous people of the land. Palestinian identity was invented in the 1960s in order to destroy the Jews’ claim to Israel, and airbrush them out of their own history.

From time to time, this inconvenient historical truth has been blurted out by Arabs themselves. In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: “There is no such country as Palestine! ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented!”

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