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Ruth King

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hong Kong protesters attack Britain’s response to extradition outcry as pressure from Beijing grows Sophia Yan,

By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/13/hong-kong-protesters-attack-britains-response-erosion-rights/

Hong Kong demonstrators are calling on the UK to voice stronger opposition against the controversial extradition that triggered mass protests and rare scenes of violence.

On the day after hundreds of thousands took to the streets to block parliament from debating the proposed laws, some protesters turned their ire to the city’s former colonial rulers.

“Is Britain going to honour its promise to the Hong Kong people that our way of life will not be threatened after they handed us over to the Chinese?” Jessica Yeung, 50, a university professor on a hunger strike by the city’s main government building, told The Telegraph.

“Britain told us to trust them, so we trusted them,” she said, as rows of riot police watched a few metres away. But the UK “has let us down terribly”.

Protesters surrounded the Hong Kong parliament on Wednesday demanding city leaders scrap a plan to send individuals to face trial in mainland China’s murky legal system, where the ruling Communist Party controls the courts.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Ingraham Angle Promotes Qanta Ahmed’s And Asra Nomani’s Two-Tiered Takiya On Islamic Persecution Of Christians Andrew Bostom

By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/06/ingraham-angle-promotes

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday June 10, 2019 hosted two so-called “reformist” Muslim women, Qanta Ahmed and Asra Nomani for a discussion of Christian persecution under Islam, which is a shameful, murderous pandemic. Neither woman could deal honestly with the Islamic, Sharia-based roots of this persecution, although certainly Ahmed was much more egregious in her dissimulation/ takiya. Hard data make plain “The Concordance of Sharia ‘Thirst’, Rampant Christian Persecution, and Jew-Hatred in Muslim Societies”. This juxtaposition reveals a striking concordance between Christian persecution by Muslims, the excess prevalence of extreme Antisemitic sentiments within Muslim societies, and Muslim attitudes favoring strict application of the Sharia.

Qanta Ahmed made these egregious pronouncements:

“It [Christian persecution] is also anathema to Islam that reveres Jesus [NO; he’s a Muslim prophet who destroys Christianity], that sees the Gospel as a holy book of God [No; deliberately corrupted version of the Koran]…Islam says everyone has a right to a free will, a right to reject Islam, to reject the truth of God [NO; per Koran 4:89, 2:217; 9:5; 9;29 & canonical hadith, “apostates” are to be killed; jihad to be waged to submit Jews & Christians to limited practice under Sharia jurisdiction if they survive]…So these Muslims are acting beyond the bounds”

She then goes on to extol Qatar for its alleged Catholic ecumenism, and the Kurds—chronic, mass murdering persecutors of Christians, past as prologue.

Asra Nomani was better, but her takiya can be almost as corrosive. She claimed mendaciously that Koran 1:7 is only hateful because of a “Wahhabi interpretation”. This verse in fact has a classical-cum-modern overwhelming (90%) interpretation across 13-centuries, Sunni and Shiite alike, I just carefully reviewed, and it curses the Jews for having incurred Allah’s anger [linking this verse to Koran 5:60, Jews as apes and pigs], and the Christians for having gone astray [linking Koran 1:7 to Koran 5:77]

Here is Asra Nomani, verbatim:

“Why is the cross under attack? It is because the Koran that I have here in the first chapter, the last sentence that we have [she means the Fatiha, Koran 1:6 to 1:7] , we say that we have to stay on the straight path [i.e., Islam] but [what] the Saudi interpretation and how governments like Qatar and Turkey have added is we have to stay on the straight path and not depart from it like the Jews and Christians have done They say that thinking of Jesus as a son of God is like polytheism and that is ultimately worse than murder they say. So that is why you have attacks on the symbol”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Hiding behind ‘Islamophobia’ By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/hiding_behind_islamophobia.html

Jihadists are masters at putting people on the defensive and the term “Islamophobia” is a potent weapon constantly used by them.  Essentially, it shuts down any comment about Islam that is not favorable.  Initially it is the back door to censorship.  Ultimately, it is to establish the Islamic takeover of the West because it obfuscates factual evidence of many of the heinous aspects of sharia law and societies under Islamic rule.

It was “[a]t the end of the 1970s, [when] Iranian fundamentalists invented the term ‘Islamophobia [.]’ The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate.” The term, which is “worthy of totalitarian propaganda, is deliberately unspecific about whether it refers to a religion, a belief system or its faithful adherents around the world.”

The lack of specific definition, of course, leaves the door wide open to multiple interpretations, all to the benefit of the jihadists who would use the word to suit their vile purposes.  Thus, “the term ‘Islamophobia’ denies the reality of an Islamic offensive in Europe all the better to justify it [and] it attacks secularism by equating it with fundamentalism.” It silences all those Muslims who question the Koran, who demand equality of the sexes, who claim the right to renounce religion, and who want to practice their faith freely [.]”

Repeatedly, freedom lovers have demonstrated how the term Islamophobia has served its purpose spectacularly well.  It allows Islamic apologists to “silence any criticism of Islam.”  The term has infiltrated Middle East and Islamic Studies and anyone who would monitor mosques for threats to the public order will be denounced. Consequently “child marriages, forced marriages, female seclusion, honor killings, gang rapes of infidel women, or the enslavement and sale of females for sex slavery” cannot be publicized for fear of being accused of racism.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

On The Promise Of “Green Jobs” June 12, 2019/ Francis Menton

By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-6-12-on-the-promise-of-green-jobs

Sometimes it seems like the biggest selling point advanced in favor of “renewable energy” is the promise of what are called “green jobs.” What are those? Proponents are often vague, but I suppose that the green jobs largely consist of the work of building, installing, and maintaining the vast future farms of windmills and solar panels, and related infrastructure like transmission lines. Since most of these jobs involve some combination of strenuous labor in remote areas and/or a high level of skill, of course they will be very high-paying jobs. Millions of them. What’s not to like about that?

President Obama was an early arrival at the “green jobs” party, tossing out a “plan to create 5 million new green jobs” as part of his 2008 presidential campaign. (Politifact in November 2016 struggles to figure out how many of those jobs ever got created, and if so, where they may be.) You won’t be surprised to learn that Obama’s ideas pretty much all consisted of some variety of government subsidies, programs, mandates, tax credits, “investments,” expenditures, and the like, e.g., a new “job training program for clean technologies,” a new federal “renewable portfolio standard” to force utilities to switch to wind and/or solar generation, extension of the “production tax credit” for wind and solar, and so on and on.

More recently “green jobs” promoters have further upped the ante. In January of this year, Francie Diep of Pacific Standard quoted the Center for American Progress as predicting that a federal “investment” of just $800 billion per year (!) toward cutting carbon emissions to zero would create 6.8 million net new jobs. Meanwhile, the International Labor Organization (part of the UN) put out a study in 2018 predicting that implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement would create some 24 million “net” green new jobs worldwide by 2030. It all sounds like a near-infinite bounty of new wealth.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

What’s Wrong with Asking about Citizenship on the Census? By Rich Lowry

By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/whats-wrong-with-asking-about-citizenship-on-the-census/

A donnybrook has broken out over how the administration decided to add a citizenship question to the census. We’ll presumably learn more one way or the other, but it’s worth asking why it is considered such a scandal to ask about citizenship, which is a question on other government surveys and isn’t new on the census. Here is the Census Bureau itself describing what it asks as part of the very important, ongoing American Community Survey and why:

We ask questions about a person’s place of birth, citizenship, and year of entry into the United States to create data about citizens, noncitizens, and the foreign-born population.

 

Agencies and policymakers use our published statistics to set and evaluate immigration policies and laws, understand the experience of different immigrant groups, and enforce laws, policies, and regulations against discrimination based on national origin. These statistics also help tailor services to accommodate cultural differences.

And explaining the origins of these questions:

Citizenship originated with the 1820 Census, place of birth originated with the 1850 Census, and year of entry originated with the 1890 Census. They transferred to the ACS in 2005 when it replaced the decennial census long form.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FLASHBACK: Two Obama-Era Officials Violated Hatch Act But Weren’t Removed from Office By Nicholas Ballasy

By on June 13th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/flashback-2-obama-era-officials-violated-hatch-act-but-werent-removed-from-office/

WASHINGTON — The Office of the Special Counsel has recommended the removal of White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway over violations of the Hatch Act.

The OSC wrote that her “violations, if left unpunished, would send a message to all federal employees that they need not abide by the Hatch Act’s restrictions. Her actions thus erode the principal foundation of our democratic system — the rule of law.”

This isn’t the first time a White House or cabinet official violated the Hatch Act. It happened several times in the Obama administration but the OSC didn’t recommend the removal of the official.

In 2012, the OSC said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius made “extemporaneous partisan remarks” in her official capacity in violation of the Hatch Act. Sebelius acknowledged her remarks were a “mistake” and she was not removed from her position due to the violation.

Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, who is now a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, violated the Hatch Act in 2016 by praising then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in an interview at his HUD office, but President Obama did not remove him from his position.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Thomas Sowell Talks About Discrimination, Race, And Social Justice By David Hogberg

By on June 13th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/13/an-interview-with-thomas-sowell-on-discrimination-race-and-social-justice/

The famed economist and social theorist sat down to talk about race, discrimination, crime rates, and cultural attitude shifts.

A newly updated version of Thomas Sowell’s book, “Discrimination and Disparities,” came out this spring. The author and famed economist sat down with writer David Hogberg to talk about it and his life’s work.

David Hogberg: I want to read to you something that a currently very popular actress by the name of Brie Larson said at a recent awards show. She stated that, “USC Annenberg’s Inclusiveness Initiative released findings that 67 percent of the top critics reviewing the 100 highest grossing movies in 2017 were white males.  Less than a quarter were white women and less than 10 percent were unrepresented men. Only 2.5 percent of those top critics were women of color. Now you’re probably thinking right now that … doesn’t represent the country I live in. And that’s true. This is a huge disconnect from the U.S. population breakdown of 30 percent white men, 30 percent white women, 20 percent men of color, and 20 percent women of color. So, why does that matter? … If you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will be able to see your movie and review your movie … We need to be conscious of our bias and do our part to make sure that everyone is in the room.”

That’s an example of the main fallacy that you expose in your book, correct?

Thomas Sowell:  It’s one of the many fallacies. My God! We could play the same game with basketball and get even greater skewed representation. Blacks are the vast majority of basketball players in the NBA. That quote is downright silly.

What’s become so frustrating to me over the years is people who assume that if people or events are not evenly represented, then that’s some deviation from the norm. But you can read through reams of what scholars have written and find that nowhere is this norm to be found. You can read people like Gradell and others who have studied internationally various cultural events, and they say again and again that nowhere do they find a distribution of people who is representative of the population of the larger society.

So [people like Larson] are taking something that no one can find and making it a norm, the deviations from which should cause the government to intervene to correct this supposedly rare thing.

Hogberg: What is the “Invincible Fallacy”?

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Media Claims Notwithstanding, Trump Is Favored To Be Re-Elected By Mollie Hemingway

By on June 13th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/13/trump-is-favored-to-be-re-elected-media-claims-notwithstanding/

Nothing has turned out the way the Resistance had hoped. Far from their fever dreams of global chaos and economic catastrophe, the Trump agenda is turning out to be surprisingly successful.

At least six Democratic candidates would defeat President Trump if the election were held today and he’s struggling even in Texas, a pollster claims. Sen. Cory Booker, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former vice president Joe Biden would trounce Trump by anywhere from five to 13 percentage points nationwide, the poll says.

Another poll said Biden and Sanders had 12-point leads over Trump in Michigan.

Media outlets such as Axios claim that Trump has a “re-election crisis“:

Everywhere he looks, President Trump can see flashing warnings that his re-election is in serious peril, a week ahead of his official campaign launch next Tuesday in Orlando. …

Trump is betting polls will swing when it’s a choice between him and someone he can lampoon as a dumb socialist.

But, but, but: Even the self-avowed socialists are beating him — Bernie Sanders is up 12 in Michigan.

Nearly a year and a half before the 2020 election, no one knows what will happen. Perhaps Axios’ Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen and their fellow tut-tutting DC journalists are correct that Sanders really could defeat Trump in a historic nine-point landslide win.

In a more reasonable and less histrionic world than the one DC journalists inhabit, however, the truth is that Trump is a favorite to be re-elected. The polls are what the polls are, as they were in 2015 and 2016, when they showed Trump having little to no chance of winning the presidency. (Spoiler alert: he won.)

One major difference from that era is a poll of Wall Street insiders showing that more than 70 percent expect Trump to win re-election. A Goldman Sachs analysis also sees Trump’s re-election as more likely than not. These projections absolutely could be wrong, but firms such as Goldman Sachs are deeply concerned about making money for the corporation and its clients by making accurate predictions about likely future events.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Special Counsel recommends firing Kellyanne Conway over alleged Hatch Act violations Brooke Singman

By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/special-counsel-recommends-firing-kellyanne-conway-over-alleged-hatch-act-violations/ar-AACPSk8

The Office of Special Counsel recommended Thursday that Kellyanne Conway be fired from the federal government for violating the Hatch Act on “numerous occasions.”

The Hatch Act is a federal law that limits certain political activities of federal employees.

The OSC, which is separate from the office with a similar name previously run by Robert Mueller, said in a report released Thursday that White House Counselor Conway violated the Hatch Act by “disparaging Democratic presidential candidates while speaking in her official capacity during television interviews and on social media.”

“Ms. Conway’s violations, if left unpunished, would send a message to all federal employees that they need not abide by the Hatch Act’s restrictions. Her actions thus erode the principal foundation of our democratic system — the rule of law,” the OSC said in a statement Thursday, noting that Conway has been a “repeat offender.”

The law’s purpose is to ensure federal programs are “administered in a nonpartisan fashion, to protect federal employees from political coercion in the workplace, and to ensure that federal employees are advanced based on merit and not based on political affiliation,” according to the OSC. The office is an independent federal agency that monitors compliance with that law and others.

The White House on Thursday blasted the OSC ruling as “unprecedented.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Justice Dept. Seeks to Question C.I.A. Officers in Russia Inquiry Review Julian E. Barnes, Katie Benner, Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt

By on June 13th, 2019

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/justice-dept-seeks-to-question-cia-officers-in-russia-inquiry-review/ar-AACN4gI

WASHINGTON — Justice Department officials intend to interview senior C.I.A. officers as they review the Russia investigation, according to people briefed on the matter, indicating they are focused partly on the intelligence agencies’ most explosive conclusion about the 2016 election: that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia intervened to benefit Donald J. Trump.

The interview plans are the latest sign the Justice Department will take a critical look at the C.I.A.’s work on Russia’s election interference. Investigators want to talk with at least one senior counterintelligence official and a senior C.I.A. analyst, the people said. Both officials were involved in the agency’s work on understanding the Russian campaign to sabotage the election in 2016.

While the Justice Department review is not a criminal inquiry, it has provoked anxiety in the ranks of the C.I.A., according to former officials. Senior agency officials have questioned why the C.I.A.’s analytical work should be subjected to a federal prosecutor’s scrutiny. Attorney General William P. Barr, who is overseeing the review, assigned the United States attorney in Connecticut, John H. Durham, to conduct it.

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