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Ruth King

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on the Notre Dame Cathedral fire…brilliantly By Peter Barry Chowka

By on April 18th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/victor_davis_hanson_weighs_in_on_the_notre_dame_cathedral_fire_brilliantly.html

Victor Davis Hanson is a well known conservative historian, academic, and author. He contributes commentaries prolifically on the current political scene to a variety of publications. He is a frequent guest commentator on the Fox News Channel. When Dr. Hanson speaks, I listen.

On Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle on Tuesday, April 16, Hanson appeared live from his home in California for a three-minute Q and A on the burning of Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. When a transcript of the program appeared online on Wednesday, I read his comments, which were as impressive as when I first heard them.

His comments totaled 362 words. I can’t think of anyone who can fit more substance and meaning into so few words.

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS CHANNEL HOST: Hundreds marched through the streets of Paris today to ask for the intercession of Notre Dame, Our Lady. The cathedral named in her honor was heavily damaged by fire yesterday, but it is structurally sound. French President Macron vows it will be rebuilt as donations pour in from around the world. And amid the tragedy at Notre Dame, there is a lesson to be learned.

Joining me now is Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Victor, you say there’s an irony in the history here in the aftermath of this architectural tragedy, tragedy in terms of what we’ve lost in church history. What is the irony?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, HOOVER INSTITUTION: After 800 years, we were the steward of this iconic representation of western civilization, Catholicism, Christendom. And of all the years, 2019, at the height of our sophistication and technology, I’m not blaming the French or anybody, but we were found wanting and we didn’t protect this icon. And we don’t build them anymore.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Soho Forum Global Warming Debate, And The Impact Of Scientific Arguments Francis Menton

By on April 18th, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-16-the-soho-forum-global-warming-debate-and-the-impact-of-scientific-arguments

As you may have noticed from the announcement that appeared for the past week or so on my sidebar, the Soho Forum held a debate Monday night on the issue of Global Warming. The official resolution for the debate was Resolved: There is little or no rigorous evidence that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming and threatening life on the planet. The debaters were Craig Idso for the affirmative, and Jeffrey Bennett for the negative.

For those who haven’t heard of it, the Soho Forum sponsors debates, roughly monthly, on current policy issues. The venue is usually the Subculture Theater, at 45 Bleecker Street in Manhattan. The Forum’s Director is long-time Barron’s senior editor Gene Epstein; and the Chief Operating Officer is my daughter Jane. Other recent Soho Forum debate topics have included things like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the causes of the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Holding a debate on the issue of global warming or “climate change” — and particularly one focused on the scientific question of whether empirical evidence supports or refutes the hypothesis of potential dangerous warming — is often difficult. Contrary to what you might think, the problem is not that it is hard to find scientifically-literate advocates for the skeptic position. Actually, there are plenty of those. Rather, the problem generally is that adherents to the alarmist cause refuse to debate anyone who disagrees with their position, often denigrating their adversaries as “climate deniers.” So Gene Epstein deserves credit for locating Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Bennett also deserves credit for being willing to put his position to the test.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

A College President Stands Up for Academic Freedom written by Claire Lehmann

By on April 18th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/04/16/a-college-president-makes-a-stand-for-academic-freedom/

At Quillette we hope David Yager’s moral leadership becomes a turning point in the defence of free thought. We raise our glasses to him and to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.

What happens when university students call on authority figures to censor students or staff at institutions of higher education? At Yale such students have been awarded prizes, at the University of Missouri they’ve been successful in forcing administrators to resign, at Claremont they were able to force their president to implement a long list of demands, and at Evergreen State College a throng of students were allowed to take control of the campus while harassed faculty sought refuge off-campus. At other colleges around America, and even on campuses in the U.K., Canada and Australia, university administrators have met illiberal student mobs with a parade of mealy-mouthed platitudes and prostrations. This pattern of weakness has been dismaying for all people who value academic freedom and open inquiry. This week, however, a line has been drawn by David Yager, President of Philadelphia’s University of Arts (UArts). In response to students calling for the censorship of Camille Paglia—one of the most admired humanities scholars in the world—he articulated a full-throated defence of intellectual freedom, showing administrators of supposedly superior universities what real leadership looks like.

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Why Are Women Under-Represented in Physics? written by Alessandro Strumia

By on April 18th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/04/16/why-are-women-under-represented-in-physics/

Six months ago CERN hosted a workshop on “High Energy Theory and Gender.” Nearly all the contributors to this and previous workshops on the same topic endorsed the view that gender imbalances in physics, particularly in the higher echelons, are predominantly due to sexual discrimination. The following phrases appeared in the presentations: “men mobilize their masculinity supporting…men in ways that advance careers,” “evaluators tend to favor men,” “scientific quality is a gender social construction,” “practically all women share the same kind of sad and unfair experiences since the beginning of their scientific career,” and physics is an “oppressive ambient.” One attendee claimed that only the military has a higher rate of sexual harassment, although she didn’t say which country’s armed forces she was thinking of.

In an attempt to go beyond mere anecdotes and measure the amount of discrimination, I did a bibliometric analysis using a public database of publications, references, authors and hiring decisions in fundamental physics world-wide over the past 50 years. CERN maintains this database, but nobody had used it for this purpose before. Certainly, none of the hosts of the “High Energy Theory and Gender” workshop had used it to test their claims.

The results that came out of this study did not fit the discrimination narrative.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Keep Digging Dems! You’ll Find that Pony Somewhere in the Manure Pile Known as the Mueller Report By Rick Moran

By on April 18th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/keep-digging-dems-youll-find-that-pony-somewhere-in-the-manure-pile-known-as-the-mueller-report/

Somewhere buried deep in the Mueller report is incontrovertible evidence that the president of the United States is a Russian spy. I know it. I just know it. It has to be there.

And I just know that Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice. How can he not be? He’s guilty of so much that the obstruction is, I’m sure, just the tip of the iceberg.

How do I know? Ask any Democrat.

I can’t decide whether it’s amusing or pathetic, this desperate desire by Democrats to will the Mueller report to say something it isn’t saying. An appropriate cultural reference might be that Democrats are searching for Captain Queeg’s missing strawberries even after they know the fruit has been eaten and the culprit found.

Classical? How about Democrat’s tearing the castle apart to find the emperor’s new clothes?

All of those “flipped” witnesses who Democrats believed would turn on their boss and dish the “real” dirt apparently had little to say. Kind of makes you wonder what Mueller got from these cooperating witnesses. Like Bullwinkle pulling a rabbit out of a hat: “Nothin’ up my sleeve…Presto!” (Wrong hat).

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Airbnb’s Anti-West Bank Policy Shows Why Laws Against BDS Matter In another year, finding 21 Democrats willing to support pro-Israel legislation should have been a cakewalk. However, 2019 is not any old year. By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

By on April 18th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/18/airbnbs-anti-west-bank-policy-shows-laws-bds-matter/

Want to fight The Man? If you’re too young to have fought for civil rights, you’ve got the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS).

BDSers wrap themselves in the cloak of justice, but their high-minded rhetoric quickly devolves into hate, because at bottom, stigmatizing democratic Israel isn’t hopeful. BDS is a high-stakes game of pressure that affects individual students, performing artists, and corporations, as the movement pursues a long game of destroying Israel. As Airbnb learned when they sided with the BDS bullies last year, it’s not necessarily a wise business decision.
Airbnb’s Politicized Decision about West Bank

Last November, Airbnb made headlines when they announced that, after consulting with various experts, they would de-list approximately 200 properties in Jewish communities within Israel’s Judea and Samaria regions, better known stateside as the West Bank. The company’s rationale was that these locations “are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

On its face, this was an odd move for a business. An American for-profit corporation that serves private, paying customers went out of its way to take sides in one of the world’s most sensitive and emotional political disputes. In response, lawsuits were filed on behalf of affected hosts, would-be hosts, and travelers.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘No Evidence’ Trump Was Aware of Don Jr.’s Meeting With Russian Lawyer By Jack Crowe

By on April 18th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/no-evidence-trump-was-aware-of-don-jr-s-meeting-with-russian-lawyer/

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation failed to produce evidence that then-candidate Trump was aware that his son, Donald Trump Jr., and other high-ranking campaign officials met with a Russian lawyer offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton in June 2016, according to the special counsel’s report released Thursday.

Donald Trump Jr., campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and at least five other people met with Kremlin-linked attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in Manhattan in order to obtain damaging information on Hillary Clinton from Veselnitskaya.

After news of the meeting broke in July 2017, Trump dictated a statement to be released on Trump Jr.’s behalf in which he falsely claimed the meeting was held to discuss sanctions that restricted the U.S. adoption of Russian children.

“The president then dictated a statement to Hicks that said the meeting was about Russian adoption (which the president had twice been told was discussed at the meeting). The statement dictated by the president did not mention the offer of derogatory information about Clinton,” the report reads.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Barr Press Conference: No Obstruction on the Facts of the Case By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on April 18th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/william-barr-press-conference-no-obstruction-on-the-facts-of-the-case/

The most interesting new disclosure to come out of Attorney General William Barr’s press conference on the Mueller report was about obstruction of justice.

As I pointed out in a Fox News column this morning, the obstruction issue was one of the main reasons why the media-Democrat complex’s caterwauling about Barr’s unremarkable decision to hold a press conference was ludicrous. Special Counsel Mueller declined to render a prosecutorial judgment on whether obstruction charges should be brought against the president. Since it is the attorney general who made the judgment, for that reason alone it was worth hearing from him this morning.

The attorney general stated that the special counsel evaluated ten incidents with an eye toward whether they amounted to an obstruction offense. Barr elaborated that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disagreed with Mueller on whether these incidents even could have amounted to obstruction as a matter of law.

It is important to grasp what that means, and what it doesn’t, because I’ve heard some inaccurate commentary. Barr was not saying that Mueller found one or more of these incidents to constitute obstruction; Mueller was saying that the incidents involved actions that could theoretically have amounted to obstruction.

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MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

Adam Schiff: The Media’s Pin-Up Doll By Julie Kelly

By on April 18th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/17/adam-schiff-the-medias-pin-up-doll/

There are times that even The Onion—the popular satirical newspaper—can’t compete with the outlandish coverage produced by allegedly legitimate news publications. Newsweek magazine’s front-cover swoon over Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) this week is one such example.

The interview portrays Schiff as a warrior-martyr, fighting the evil Trump regime for the good of the country. He blasts Attorney General Bill Barr; regurgitates long-disproven allegations of Trump-Russia collusion; and again insists many of his Republican colleagues have private misgivings about President Trump but refuse to air those grievances in public for fear of retribution.

For anyone even remotely aware of Schiff’s congenital dishonesty and malfeasance, the Newsweek profile is as comical and ironic as any Onion parody could dream to be. Except one can assume the author and editors want the article to be taken seriously by its unserious readership.

Newsweek’s cover photo appears tweaked to bulk up his thin neck, which the president and some of Schiff’s Republican colleagues in the House have mocked with glee. (Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida last week introduced a bill entitled the PENCIL Act that demands Schiff be removed as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. President Trump recently called the California congressman, “little pencil-necked Adam Schiff.”) In an attempt to transform the geeky gadfly into a bad-ass, Newsweek accompanied the photo with a Schiff quote: “No one escapes the law.” Scary.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Red Joan Joins a Rogues’ Gallery of Resisters By Armond White

By on April 18th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/red-joan-joins-a-rogues-gallery-of-resisters/

Judi Dench in a guess-the-genre political sob story

Red Joan is a love story, a political thriller, a woman’s coming-of-age sexual memoir, and a history of British espionage just before and after World War II. It is also a crock. Based on real-life KGB spy Melita Norwood, Red Joan’s sentimental exoneration of one woman’s treason and sedition fits with how today’s media pay tribute to the kaffeeklatsch of political resisters.

Judi Dench plays title character Joan Stanley as a kindly widow suddenly exposed by the British government for her activities, 60 years earlier, relaying wartime bomb secrets to Russia. Crone Joan’s mummified on-trial look (Dench’s facial wattles, a padded, thick rump, and flabby legs with an ankle monitor) dissolves into flashbacks played by pouty Sophie Cookson, who beams a girlish complexion and period hairdos as a student at Cambridge University. Cookson never locates her character’s sexual-political tension, which was the key to every characterization in the film version of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, because that complexity isn’t part of this film’s reverential concept.

Young Joan is seduced by a pair of sexy Jewish radicals, Sonya (Tereza Srbova), who teaches her espionage tricks, and firebrand Leo (Tom Hughes), who talks of religion when he has politics in mind. Their exoticism, flaunting past political persecution, is meant to excuse WASP Joan’s uncritical fascination.

Asked, “Who politicized you then?” Old Joan’s response, “That’s a strange way to put it,” epitomizes the disingenuousness of red-diaper-baby filmmaking that dodges political intent and refuses to admit its Communist sympathies. This is where Red Joan stops being entertainment and becomes romanticized indoctrination. Leftist attitudes are dramatized as the norm.

Joan defends her romantic intrigues and professional deceptions that include blackmailing her Cambridge colleagues. She prevaricates: “I have also been accused of deceiving my country. I am not a spy. I’m not a traitor. I wanted everyone to share the same knowledge. Because only that way could the horror of another world war be averted and I think if you look back at history, you’ll see I was right.”

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