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Ruth King

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Word That Can’t Be Questioned by Mark Steyn

By on November 10th, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/8807/the-word-that-cant-be-questioned

EXCERPT

“The more diverse you get, the more stupid you get,” Steyn said. “The more authoritarian you get . . . the more you need people to police diversity and to police cultural sensitivities. And eventually you end up as a totally moronic society.

“Diversity”, as I’ve said for the entirety of this millennium, is morally neutral. You can have half-a-dozen nice middle-aged middle-class NPR-listening ladies, and they’re not in the least bit diverse. So you add Sudan’s leading clitoridectomist. Now you’re more diverse, but not necessarily the better for it.

Do that for long enough, and you wind up irredeemably stupid. A Mark Steyn Club commenter appended this response to yesterday’s Clubland Q&A on the anniversary of 9/11:

This, from Breitbart London and dated 9/11/18, pretty much sums up where the West is at since 9/11: ‘Austria has rejected the asylum claim of an Afghan national who claims to be fleeing persecution for being homosexual after not being able to find any gay pornography on his mobile phone.’ It sounds like the Babylon Bee, but isn’t.

Just so. When historians are poring through the rubble of our civilization, that one sentence will pretty much cover the entirety of the situation in 2018. In fact, denying asylum claims on the grounds of insufficient gay porn on applicants’ telephones may be the best shot Trump has at getting any meaningful immigration policy past the average District Court judge. Although maybe he should add trans porn, too.

Incidentally, for a Pushtun goatherd or whatever he is, the Afghan guy isn’t the least bit stupid: He’s smart enough to know that claiming to be LGBTQWERTY gets you into the express check-in, so why not give gay taqiyyah (tagayyah?) a whirl?

Yet there is also a tragic, suicidal and sacrificial quality to our diversity stupidity:

‘We took him in as if he were a son,’ the girl’s father said, according to the Bild tabloid newspaper. He has lost his only daughter. She was stabbed and killed by her former boyfriend, an unaccompanied refugee from Afghanistan.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ACT FOR CANADA- A WELCOME INITIATIVE

By on November 10th, 2018

https://www.actforcanada.ca/about/
Who we are

We are patriotic citizens who love our country and our Canadian way of life. We are concerned citizens who have dedicated ourselves to speaking out about the clear and present dangers emerging from those who do not embrace Canada’s values along with the threat of homegrown terrorism. We wish to rouse our fellow Canadians to action, bringing pressure to bear on our government to do more to protect and preserve our long-held Canadian values, our hard-won freedoms and a legal system that maintains one law and one law only for all citizens.
Securing Our Borders

Stopping terrorism means stopping terrorists before they reach Canada. In most cases, that means stopping them at the border. Despite clear Parliamentary mandates, the vast majority of the southern border remains unsecured.

Our current Liberal government is actively promoting the invasion of our country of illegal immigrants through border crossings in Manitoba and Quebec. A porous, uncontrolled border is an open invitation for some of those who wish to harm Canadians to enter our country unnoticed, potentially bringing the tools to wreak unimaginable havoc with them.

ACT! For Canada is committed to seeing the border secured to ensure that those who emigrate do so in search of a better way of life. This means embracing Canada’s democratic values; learning at least one of our two official languages; seeking employment; respecting the Judeo-Christian values upon which this country was founded; and understanding that in Canada there is an established Canadian legal and justice system. This system is not compatible with foreign systems such as Islamic Sharia law and justice.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

How the #MeToo Movement Helped Create a Script for False Accusers written by Diana Davison

By on November 10th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/06/how-the-metoo-movement

The complainant, whom I’ll call Chloe, wept as she labored through her testimony. At several points, she was so overcome by emotion that court proceedings had to pause for a break. Throughout that first day of the preliminary hearing, she projected a sense of soft-spoken vulnerability, but also a certain inner strength. In the hallway outside the courtroom, she was surrounded by trained victim-services support workers, who helped her family avoid contact with the accused.

As an observer in court that day back in 2016, I can attest that Chloe appeared highly credible. She seemed intent on answering every question to the best of her ability. On the drive home from the British Columbia courthouse where the proceedings were taking place, a colleague who’d accompanied me concluded, quite simply: “She’s very believable.”

It had been a year since the alleged assault. Still, she was able to summon up details that brought those past events to life. Her speaking style was natural and unaffected. Absent-mindedly pulling the sleeves of a somewhat ill-fitting cardigan sweater down toward her wrists, she recounted tearfully how the accused had acted after the assault, mocking her for not being able to look him in the eyes.

Chloe seemed to remember the words that the accused had used that day as if they were burned into her mind. “You’ll like this, just trust me,” and “You should be thankful I’m doing this to you. I could have any girl.”

I felt sorry for her—even though I suspected that the story she’d just told us was about to fall apart.

* * *

For several years now, I have regularly observed Canadian sexual-assault proceedings, as part of my work with a non-profit organization called the Lighthouse Project. Many of these sexual-assault prosecutions hinge entirely on the credibility of the alleged victim and the alleged assailant. In some cases, journalists will say that there is “no evidence” presented in these cases. But, as lawyers are quick to point out, testimony is evidence.

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

An Israeli Agent on Campus written by Ari Blaff

By on November 10th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/09/an-israeli-agent

“Academia ought to be a forum for the battle of minds and the testing of arguments and ideas. Instead, students such as myself seeking a fair-minded supervisor face a paucity of options as departments congeal around a monolithic interpretation of Middle Eastern politics and history. The result is that a toxic political environment has been allowed to flourish, unrestrained, in specific departments across elite universities. In an environment struggling to balance the broad aims of diversity and inclusivity, many Jewish students remain on the outside looking in.”

In late 2017, having completed a Masters in History and another in Political Science, I was considering the possibility of a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies. The academic path and research-heavy workload were a natural fit and I figured it would buy me some time to reflect on what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. So, at the end of last year, I contacted a handful of professors whose academic interests overlapped with mine to ask their advice. The first two of these were productive and fruitful, and focused mostly on research, career advice, and language skills—par for the course for a graduate student in search of a supervisor. However, my third attempt did not go well at all, and the experience has led me to worry about the effects of ideological homogeneity on university scholarship, particularly in the field of Middle Eastern history and politics.

On December 13, I wrote a short email to Jens Hanssen, an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean History at the University of Toronto. I explained that I was a graduate student at the Munk School of Global Affairs, that I had found his profile on the History Department website, and that I was hoping to ask him some questions about Middle Eastern history and academia. Later that day, Professor Hanssen responded:

Dear Mr. Blaff, You have probably contacted me because you were alerted to an interview I gave last week to the News Section of UofT’s website on President Trump’s declaration to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Now, you may be a graduate student at the Munk School, but you are also a Hasbara fellow. As far as I know, Hasbara fellows are Israeli advocacy activists sent to North American campuses on behalf of the World Union of Jewish Students, now under the auspices of the new Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, which earlier this year has called for a “new offensive against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” activists.

He then informed me that I had received instruction from something called “The Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus”—a text I had never heard of, let alone read—about “how to approach professors, students and administrators and convince them that legitimate, non-violent criticism of the state of Israel amounts to discrimination against Jews everywhere.” Hanssen continued: “In fact you [are] instructed to conflate Judaism and Zionism and are encouraged to give the impression on our campus that such criticism constitutes antisemitism.”

He went on to accuse me of “slandering” a number of people in an article that he claimed (incorrectly) I had written for the student newspaper the previous September (it actually ran on the Hasbara Fellowship’s blog page). He concluded by announcing that, while the Munk School might be indifferent to the “grave threat Hasbara organizations such as yours pose to academic freedom and the intellectual independence of the university,” he most certainly was not. Consequently, for “ethical and academic” reasons, he would avoid any interaction with people such as myself.

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HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

In 1938, a Tory MP’s account of post-Anschluss Vienna

By on November 10th, 2018

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/11/in-1938-tory-mps-account-of-post.html

(Sir) Beverley Baxter (1891-1964) was a Canadian-born journalist who spent most of his career in Britain, where he became a Conservative MP. His account of the persecution of Jews in post-Anschluss Vienna appeared shortly after the Kristallnacht pogrom, the 80th anniversary of which is being marked now.

Appearing in an Australian newspaper (Shepparton Advertiser, 25 November 1938), Baxter’s article was entitled “Jew-Baiting In Vienna: How the pogroms are organised”. Here is what he wrote (I’ve changed his original spelling of Brownshirts as two words):

What is the truth about the persecution of Jews in Germany and Austria? How far are tales of
atrocities figments of the imagination or inventions of propagandists? It was partly to answer these questions that I went recently to Vienna, where the Nazis are now in supreme control, and where purification of the Germanic race is proceeding according to plan.

It is difficult to describe the Nazi movement one way or another. To condemn it out of hand would be foolish and would show a lack of understanding. We who extol democracy must be willing to learn where this political and economic creed has succeeded against difficulties that would discourage the methods of democracy.

There is a tremendous and genuine idealism in the movement. It is written in the faces of the young men who have donned the uniform of the cause. One cannot look upon the clear eyes and fine physique of these boys without admitting that Hitler has accomplished miracles. Out of a defeated and disillusioned nation he has created a magnificent new generation — if we are to judge humanity by the welfare of the body and the purposefulness of the spirit.

Unfortunately, in the launching of this movement of “national regeneration,” and I do not mock the phrase — there were also let loose forces of national degradation which are now out of control. And the most vile of these is the persecution of the Jews.

In what I write here I have purposely refused to credit the stories of atrocities which cannot be proved. They may be in time. I only mention, however, those which I know to be true.

Herr Rudolf Bear was a director of the Vienna Opera. He was sitting in his box one night when three Austrian Brownshirts entered and drove him in a car to the outskirts of Vienna, where they beat him with truncheons.

When the director reached home, a bleeding pulp of a human being, he took poison. His servants discovered it in time, however, and he was rush ed to the hospital, where the best doctors in Vienna fought for his life — and won.

At last he was discharged, a cured man, and warned about his future conduct By the authorities.
That night he shot himself. [Emphasis added here and below.] Search the literature of tragedy if you like and tell me where fiction can outdistance that story of established fact.

One of the pranks of the Austrian Brownshirts that followed the invasion of the German army, was to make Jews scrub the pavements; and the favorite victims of this sadistic exploitation were young Jewesses.

But not always. A Jewish violinist was given a pail of water and told to scrub the pavement outside a Christian shop. To add point to the jest, acid was poured into the water. The violinist performed his task, to find that the acid had burned the skin from his fingers and that he could never again — or so he thought — play his violin. He went home and took poison.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Broward Elections Supervisor Mixed Good and Bad Provisional Ballots By Jack Crowe

By on November 10th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/report-broward-elections-supervisor-mixed-good-and-bad-provisional-ballots/

Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes contaminated some 200 valid provisional ballots by combining them with more than a dozen rejected ballots, the Miami Herald reported late Friday.

The Broward canvassing board discovered the mistake when Snipes conceded to Republican attorneys’ demand that she present the board with 205 provisional ballots for inspection Friday evening.

The 205 contaminated provisional ballots were filled out by voters whose information did not appear in the databases at their respective polling stations, but whose registrations were confirmed when election workers called the Broward elections headquarters. As a result of the discrepancy, the ballots were not added to the final count and were submitted separately Friday evening at the request of attorneys representing governor Rick Scott, the Republican senate candidate.

Broward election officials have not explained how the rejected ballots were first introduced to the pool of valid ballots.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Labour-Party Anti-Semitism — Scotland Yard Launches an Investigation By Julie Lenarz

By on November 10th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/british-labour-party-anti-semitism-scotland-yard-investigation/

It’s the logical consequence of scandals that have rocked Labour since Jeremy Corbyn became leader three years ago.

The last time that I wrote about Jeremy Corbyn, the British Labour leader, was in August 2018, after the decision by the party not to adopt in full the definition of anti-Semitism as enunciated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. On Friday, the Metropolitan Police Service of Greater London announced that Scotland Yard had opened a criminal investigation into alleged anti-Semitic hate crime in the Labour party. The investigation is the logical consequence of the accumulation of anti-Semitism scandals that have rocked the party since Corbyn became leader in the summer of 2015.

The leaked dossier, police sources say, contains over 80 pages of alleged anti-Semitic statements, including Holocaust denial. Among the messages that are alleged to have been written or spoken by Labour-party members are “We shall rid the Jews who are cancer on us all” and “Zionist extremist MP who hates civilised people about to get a good kicking.”

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The climate within Labour is now so hostile that at a party conference in September a Jewish MP, Luciana Berger, required special police protection from violent anti-Semitic Labour members. In a different incident, a Jewish woman was kicked in the face outside a pro-Corbyn event in North London, where she demonstrated against the party’s handling of anti-Semitism charges. John Mann, another Labour MP who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism, charged that he was trolled by Corbyn supporters who said his grandson’s falling ill was “karma” for the elder’s criticizing the Labour leader and standing up to anti-Semitism.

Corbyn, meanwhile, is paying lip service to the need to address anti-Jewish hatred. “Driving antisemitism out of the party for good, and rebuilding that trust, are our priorities,“ he wrote in the Guardian in August 2018. In the same article, however, he lamented “the killing of many unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza,” encouraging the very conflation — between British Jewry and the policies of the Israeli government — that is at the heart of many of Labour’s anti-Semitism scandals. Once you understand that mindset, you understand why anti-Semitism in the Labour party has been nurtured and is now endemic at every level within the institution.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Forget the Sweet Talk — Both Parties Will Go to the Mat By Charles Lipson

By on November 10th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/11/10/forget_the_sweet_talk_–_both_parties_will_go_to_the_mat_138614.html

“We have two years to show we can make things work,” Republican Mike Braun told Indiana voters in his Senate victory speech. He is wildly optimistic. Both parties are already on war footing, and, barring divine intervention, they will remain that way until 2020.

Their only bipartisanship is a shared commitment to push hard positions favored by their activist bases and enraged donors. President Trump’s unprecedented fight with the legacy media deepens the division. He attacks with ferocity; they take the bait, fill the airwaves with unremitting criticism, and crush underfoot the wall between hard-news reporting and opinion.

Calls for compromise ring hollow from the politicians who make them. In the same speech, they often issue a call-to-arms, as Nancy Pelosi did in claiming victory. The House’s minority leader, who is expected to take the speaker’s gavel in January, spoke softly and urged bipartisan legislation — but quickly added that she and fellow Democrats would stand their ground on all major issues. Trump did the same, even as he spoke about possible deals on taxes, infrastructure and immigration. If he seriously pursues those deals, he risks alienating the very voters who carried him to victory.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Keystone Cops: How Democrats Kill American Infrastructure By Kyle Smith

By on November 10th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/democrat-politics-raises-costs-of-infrastructure-projects/

Democrats favor improving infrastructure as long as it takes longer and costs more.

W hy can’t the United States build or repair infrastructure on a par with countries in Europe or Asia? Why can’t we have all the nifty new airports, bridges, and trains that seem to spring up overnight in other parts of the world? The answer, in one word, is Democrats. Two groups that are virtually owned-and-operated subsidiaries of the Democratic party retard infrastructure progress here. One is labor unions, and the other is environmental activists.

The latest example of the absurd reach of the latter is to be found in the U.S. district court of Montana, where Obama-appointed Judge Brian M. Morris halted completion of the Keystone XL pipeline once again, ruling that President Trump’s permit to grant the bid by TransCanada Corp. to finish the pipeline that would transport oil from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska “hadn’t considered all impacts as required by federal law,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

The first “final environmental review” approving construction was released by Hillary Clinton’s State Department seven years ago, concluding the impact on global warming would not be severe. Another “final environmental review,” also approving the project, was released in 2014 by John Kerry’s State Department, which also foresaw little impact on global warming. Floundering for any excuse to block the pipeline, Judge Morris concern-trolled members of the energy industry by wondering whether the project would be profitable enough given fuel prices. That is for oil guys to worry about, not judges. One interested party observed that Keystone would have “very little impact” on U.S. gas prices. That observer was the person who gave Judge Morris his job, Barack Obama.

The problem is larger than the endless delays on Keystone, though. Because of what Robert Kagan dubbed “adversarial legalism,” routine public improvements are tied up like Gulliver by the Lilliputians with a thousand environmental reviews. In a given year, some 350 Environmental Impact statements and 50,000 Environmental Assessments are being produced by the federal government. Meanwhile individual states and municipalities duplicate these requirements by slathering on their own regulations. Let it not be said that the U.S. doesn’t produce anything: We are the masters of paperwork. Progressive columnists keep wondering why we can’t be more like China and get things done; then they go out to brunch with their human-roadblock friends, all those litigators from the NRDC and Greenpeace and all the other economic reactionaries who spend their lives on lawsuits to stop American progress.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Renewable Mandates and Carbon Taxes Lost Big on Tuesday By Robert Bryce

By on November 10th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/renewable-mandates-and-carbon-taxes-lost-big-on-tuesday/

On Tuesday, Democrats won a majority in the U.S. House as well as gubernatorial races in several key state races. But a look at the results from four states — Colorado, Arizona, Florida, and Washington — shows that voters are still skeptical of bans on hydrocarbon production, renewable-energy mandates, and carbon taxes.

In Colorado, a state that has been trending Democratic, voters elected a Democratic governor, Jared Polis, and gave Democrats a majority in the state senate. But Coloradans handily rejected (57 to 43 percent) Proposition 112, which would have prohibited oil and gas drilling activities within 2,500 feet of homes, hospitals, schools and “vulnerable areas.”

The initiative was endorsed by numerous environmental groups including 350.org, Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Had it passed, the initiative would have effectively banned new oil and gas production in Colorado, the fifth-largest natural gas producer in the US. To defeat Proposition 112, the oil and gas industry in Colorado spent some $34 million.

In Arizona, voters overwhelmingly rejected (70 to 30 percent) Proposition 127, a ballot initiative that would have required the state to get 50 percent of its electricity from renewables. Had it passed, the initiative could have forced the closure of the 3,900-megawatt Palo Verde Generating Station, the biggest nuclear power plant in the U.S.

The fight over the proposition was the most expensive ballot initiative in the state’s history, with opponents, led by the state’s largest utility, Arizona Public Service, spending some $30 million. Proponents of the measure spent about $23 million, about $18 million of which came from California billionaire Tom Steyer, who told The New Yorker in October that “We’re on the side of the angels. . . . This is a black-hat, white-hat fight.” Steyer, a leader of the impeach-Trump wing of the Democratic Party, is contemplating a run for president in 2020.

Although Steyer lost the ballot initiative in Arizona, he got a win in Nevada on Question 6, which will require the state’s utilities to get 50 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2030. Steyer was a key backer of Question 6, which passed 59–41 percent. But the mandate won’t become law unless it passes again in 2020.

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