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Ruth King

Heather Mac Donald :Feminists’ Undue Process Ideologues react hysterically to the Trump administration’s suggested reforms to campus-rape tribunals.

https://www.city-journal.org/devos-title-ix-regulations

The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings gave the public a crash course in campus-rape ideology. It is about to get another. Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released a proposed federal rule that corrects the worst procedural abuses of campus-rape tribunals. It hews closely to judicial precedent and is fair to all parties, yet the feminist establishment has reacted with hysteria, characterizing the draft regulation as an assault on sexual-assault “survivors.” Maintenance of the campus-rape myth, it turns out, is incompatible with due process. Whether feminism itself is compatible with Enlightenment values appears increasingly doubtful.

Opposition to the Kavanaugh nomination was based on the principle that self-professed “survivors” must be believed and that accused males must be condemned, regardless of the paucity of evidence against them. That principle, already ubiquitous on college campuses, got an assist from the federal government in 2011, when the Obama administration released a so-called guidance (an informal federal directive of murky legal status) on college rape proceedings. The guidance strongly discouraged cross-examination of the accuser and required schools to use the lowest possible standard of proof for finding a defendant guilty of sexual assault. It promulgated a broad definition of actionable sexual harassment—“unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”—that ignored relevant Supreme Court precedent and that would extend to an unwanted request for a date. Since 2011, due-process deficiencies in campus-rape proceedings have become ever more widespread. Colleges routinely deny defendants the opportunity to review all the evidence, fail to provide an impartial decision-maker, and ignore the presumption of innocence. The accused is regularly forbidden the assistance of counsel. In 2014, a Title IX officer at Washington and Lee University issued a lugubrious warning to a male student—“a lawyer can’t help you here”—before expelling him for sexual assault.

The proposed Education Department regulation tries to end these abuses. Ironically, in an administration regularly charged with ignoring the law, the DOE has carefully followed the legal framework for promulgating new federal rules. The 2011 Obama guidance was issued as a fait accompli; Donald Trump’s DOE, by contrast, is giving the public the opportunity to comment on the proposed rule before it becomes final.

“Human Sacrifices” in Greece by Maria Polizoidou

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13346/greece-organ-trafficking

Greek diplomats were issuing visas to unaccompanied children in order to facilitate illegal removal of their organs, “but the press did not write about them.” — Nikos Kotzias, Greece’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, in an interview on November 20, 2018.

There are currently 3,050 unaccompanied children in Greece, and 1,272 of them (42%) are either homeless, or they live in a non-permanent residence or in an unknown location, according to the newspaper Kathimerini. They all face the risks of sexual exploitation and illicit organ removal.

“The Trafficking in Persons Protocol states that if the victim is a child, that is a person below the age of 18, consent is irrelevant regardless of whether any improper means (such as deception, force, abuse of a position of vulnerability) have been used.” — United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Greece’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nikos Kotzias, in an interview on November 20, disclosed — for a second time — that he sent to the prosecutor 93 cases that involved Greek diplomats issuing visas to unaccompanied children in order to facilitate illegal removal of their organs. These diplomats are already in jail. “The fact that I saved a few souls will make me sleep quietly when my life is over,” Kotzias said.

The first time Kotzias revealed illegal trafficking of organs from children in Greece was in October 2018, when he said:

“We sent 93 cases to the Prosecutor, highly evaluated ambassadors went to jail, but the press did not write about them. Because the person who gives a visa in Constantinople [Istanbul] to an unaccompanied child is not just a criminal, he is traitor. A visa for a 14-month-old unaccompanied baby and they tried to cover it up for him.”

The Palestinians No One Talks About by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13355/palestinian-victims

The 3,903 Palestinians killed in Syria in the past seven years are of no interest to the Western correspondents and their editors.

The Western media’s obsession with Israel has created the impression that the only Palestinians living on this planet are those who are residing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This impression does injustice to the Palestinians who are facing horrendous conditions, torture, and death in the Arab countries, especially Syria.

Who cares about the suffering of these Palestinians? No one. Every week, scores of foreign journalists travel to the Israel-Gaza border to report on clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian rioters. Have any of these journalists thought of travelling to Syria or Lebanon to report about the atrocities that are being committed against the Palestinians there? Of course not. Why should they do so when the story lacks an anti-Israel angle?

The number of Palestinians killed in Syria will soon reach 4,000. Perhaps then, with that gruesome milestone reached, will Western correspondents in the Middle East wake up to the enormity of the crimes that are really being perpetrated against Palestinians?

Here’s some “good” news: In October, only five Palestinians living in Syria were pronounced dead. The London-based Action Group for Palestinians of Syria reports that in October 2017, 12 Palestinians were killed due to war-related incidents in that country. “The list of victims who died in October 2018 includes four Palestinians who were pronounced dead in Teloul Al-Safa, in Al-Sweida desert, south of Syria, and one Palestinian in Damascus,” the group said.

According to the human rights watchdog that monitors the situation of Palestinians in Syria, the number of Palestinians killed in Syria since the beginning of the civil war there in 2011 now stands at 3,903. Another 1,712 Palestinians in that country have been arrested by the Syrian authorities, and 316 are listed as missing.

The latest victim was identified as Ahmed Abdullah Balbisi who, according to the human rights group, died of torture in a Syrian prison eight years after his incarceration. The group said that Balbisi was arrested then for participating in peaceful demonstrations organized by the Syrian opposition. Balbisi is the latest victim added to the 3,903 Palestinians killed in Syria during the past seven years. His death was reported by the group on November 22.

A day earlier, the human rights group reported that two other Palestinians, Mohammed Khalil al-Kurdi and Wael Abu Hamdeh, died due to lack of proper medical treatment. On November 19, reports surfaced that a third, Mohammed Ahmed Farhat, was killed during an exchange of gunfire between the Syrian army and the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group.

The Latest Manipulative National Climate Assessment Report Outlandish predictions aim to steer public policy changes. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272052/latest-manipulative-national-climate-assessment-joseph-klein

Last Friday, the Trump administration released the latest volume of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment, which was prepared by scientists from 13 government agencies with contributions from outside scientists. The development of this report was well underway during the Obama administration. Nevertheless, the Trump White House did not change the report’s content. When President Trump was asked on Monday whether he had read the report, he replied, “I’ve seen it, I’ve read some of it, and it’s fine.” He remains skeptical, however, regarding the report’s dire predictions of the extent to which climate change will have a supposedly devastating impact on the U.S. economy by the end of this century. “I don’t believe it,” he said, also noting that China and other countries were largely responsible for the problem, not the United States. The president has every reason to be skeptical of the report’s doomsday forecasts for the U.S. economy.

“Climate change is transforming where and how we live and presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life, the economy, and the natural systems that support us,” the report’s authors wrote. At the same time, the authors admitted the difficulties in making predictions as to the “cascading impacts” climate change may have on “the natural, built, and social systems we rely on individually and through their connections to one another.” The authors also acknowledged that “it is hard to quantify and predict all the ways in which climate-related stressors might lead to severe or widespread consequences for natural, built, and social systems.” Nevertheless, after admitting the difficulty of making such predictions, the report’s authors did just that in very specific terms. No wonder President Trump has his doubts.

Indeed, the authors of the just released National Climate Assessment report projected what they believe is likely to happen in the United States by the middle and the end of this century if drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not taken in time. The authors purported to quantify the devastating effects in the United States on health, the environment, agriculture, trade, infrastructure, and the economy if there is continued growth in greenhouse gas emissions at the current rate. The authors predicted between 3,900 and 9300 more deaths per year by the end of the century. They broke down their end-of-century forecast by type of climate change-related harm to the economy. There will be $141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from sea level rise and $32 billion from infrastructure damage, they predicted. Under one of their scenarios, “almost two billion labor hours are projected to be lost annually by 2090 from the impacts of temperature extremes, costing an estimated $160 billion in lost wages.” All told, according to the latest National Climate Consensus report’s authors, “annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century—more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states.”

Trump’s critics are wrong. By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

https://spectator.org/american-nationalism-is-a-good-thing/

Over the last month, President Trump has been assailed by shrieking critics within the U.S. and overseas by French President Macron regarding Mr. Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of the concept of American Nationalism. Many NeverTrumpers and neocons are charging that nationalism in America equals white supremacy, a forerunner to Nazism. Nothing is further from the truth. Their hysterical assertion is extremely misguided or a deliberate attempt to once again besmirch Mr. Trump, in the same way as when they blamed him for anti-Semitism and the massacre at a Pittsburgh synagogue despite the fact that the shooter was anti-Trump and the President has been the most pro-Israel and genuinely Jewish-friendly president we have ever witnessed.

Loving America is a good thing inasmuch as America is a good country. As with any institution, including marriage and family, nothing is perfect; but America was founded on highly moral and workable principles and has consistently provided more fair pay, opportunity, and decency than any country in the history of the world. America is the first choice for those around the world seeking a haven or place to find work and dignity, and deserves to be loved. It is a badge of honor to identify with America as a nation.

Loving this nation and its people is highly proper and commendable inasmuch as the American people themselves are a good people. For over a half century I have traveled across America and, precisely because of my yarmulke, I have been greeted with enthusiasm and warmth by strangers due to their sense of spiritual and civic kinship with a member of the Jewish faith, whose biblical Testament had so much to do with the founding of this country and whose ancestral nation of Israel is so deeply ingrained within their outlook. Contrary to what liberal Northeasterners often accuse, I have been treated with utmost respect and sincere friendship by those in the Deep South. News Flash to NeverTrumpers and neocons: America is not Nazi Germany. Being a super-patriot or putting America first, is what we should do.

Latest Global Warming Lies from US Global Change Research Program By Norman Rogers

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/latest_global_warming_lies_from_us_global_change_research_program.html

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has released its latest doomsday climate report. This organization, part of the federal government, has been in business for a long time, releasing nonsense reports concerning the supposed global warming threat. I attended meetings of the federal advisory committee associated with the program in 2011 and wrote an article about that particular circus. Federal advisory committees are supposed to be committees of experts with a diversity of viewpoints. The committee in 2011 consisted of supposed experts with only one point of view, that we are threatened by doomsday global warming.

The USGCRP suffers from a lack of imagination. Its reports imitate the style and approach of the United Nations International Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). The USGCRP uses the IPCC as a trusted source. The problem is that the IPCC is not to be trusted. One idea broached at the 2011 meeting is present in the 2018 report. In 2011 the activists wrestled with the problem that nobody was paying much attention to their reports. They decided that there should be customized reports for different parts of the U.S. The idea was that people would be more concerned if there were specific doomsday predictions for their neighborhood. The country was divided into regions as shown in the map below. Doomsday forecasts for the regions are taken from climate models, sometimes supplemented by a procedure known as downscaling.

Shattering the Obama Myth: A Wolf in Presidential Clothing by Linda Goudsmit

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/21815/shattering-the-obama-myth-a-wolf-in-presidential
http://goudsmit.pundicity.com
http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Fabian Society, a British think tank founded in London in 1884, is named after the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus whose battle strategy was one of harassment and attrition rather than violent military battles against the Carthaginian army under general Hannibal.

Fabius had much in common with the great Chinese warrior and strategist Sun Tzu who wrote the extraordinary military treatise The Art of War in the 5th century BC. According to Sun Tzu, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. . . the greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

Sun Tzu’s foundational premise was, “All warfare is based on deception.” His advice, “Engage people in what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment – that which they cannot anticipate.”
In 2008 Jerry Bower wrote a brilliant article appearing in Forbes titled, “Barack Obama, Fabian Socialist.”

Raised by a Fabian socialist, Bower defines the ideology, “Fabians believed in gradual nationalization of the economy through manipulation of the democratic process. Breaking away from the violent revolutionary socialists of their day, they thought that the only real way to effect ‘fundamental change’ and ‘social justice’ was through a mass movement of the working classes presided over by intellectual and cultural elites.”

Fabian socialism is Obama’s world. Bower continues, “He’s [Obama] telling the truth when he says that he doesn’t agree with Bill Ayers’ violent bombing tactics, but it’s a tactical disagreement. Why use dynamite when mass media and community organizing work so much better? Who needs Molotov cocktails when you’ve got Saul Alinsky?”

Barack Obama was sincere when he promised to fundamentally transform America. What most Americans did not understand in 2008 was that Obama was promising to bring evolutionary socialism rather than revolutionary socialism to America – the soft sell – revolution without bullets. Obama disguised the radical creed of Fabian socialism in the soft sell of a gifted con man. This is how it works.

Storming the Southern Border Violent migrants will turn Americans against generous asylum policy.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/storming-the-southern-border-1543277802

Migrants on Sunday stormed the U.S. border near San Diego, and from the media coverage you’d think the culprits were the Border Patrol agents who used tear gas to disperse the mob and defend themselves. But the officers were right to repel the crowds, and the tragedy is that such lawlessness will undermine support for legal asylum in the U.S.

Hundreds of migrants overwhelmed Mexican law enforcement and rushed north, and some stormed the car lanes at San Ysidro, the Western Hemisphere’s biggest land-border crossing. Others surged through gaps in the nearby border fence.

The United States can’t tolerate migrants who rush the border or assault officers with rocks. Members of the same caravan defied officers last month to push through the Honduras-Guatemala border and later the Guatemala-Mexico border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection spent weeks preparing for a similar rush, and to its credit no one sustained serious injury on Sunday.

President Trump responded with typical overkill, threatening on Twitter Monday to “close the Border permanently if need be.” That may have been an attempt to get Mexico’s attention, but closing the border would hurt the U.S. too. More than 100,000 people cross north legally each day at San Ysidro, and Customs and Border Protection estimates that 33 such travelers create one American job.

By Monday morning Mexican authorities had already deported around 100 migrants over Sunday’s fracas and said they’ll do the same to others involved. Mexican immigration officials added that, far from helping Central American migrants, such acts “undermine the legal migration framework and could result in a serious incident at the border line.”

That’s also a message for U.S. immigration activists who too often sound as if migration anywhere is a natural right. Sunday’s real victims are Central Americans who have respected U.S. law even as they flee genuine persecution, and who are waiting in Tijuana to seek asylum legally at the U.S. port of entry.

Violence and lawlessness erode public support for a generous asylum policy. Germany is the cautionary tale. Even Hillary Clinton recently acknowledged that Chancellor Angela Merkel erred by admitting a million Middle Eastern migrants in 2015. The result has been a political backlash that has abetted the far right and turned many Europeans against non-passport transfers within Europe.

Mr. Trump is also being vilified for seeking to keep asylum seekers inside Mexico as they wait to have their requests reviewed by U.S. agents. But 69 of the migrants who rushed the border Sunday made it to U.S. soil. They were detained and will be prosecuted, but the Immigration and Nationality Act allows them to apply for asylum now, despite their lawlessness.

Trump’s Saudi Gamble By:Srdja Trifkovic

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/trumps-saudi-gamble

“America First! The world is a very dangerous place!” President Donald J. Trump’s opening of his statement on “Standing with Saudi Arabia” (November 20) was eccentric; the ensuing 600-odd words—indubitably his own—appeared to give Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MbS”) an unqualified and outrageous carte blanche, seven weeks after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. There may be more than meets the eye, however.

A disclaimer first. With my decades long, sometimes passionate, amply documented record of loathing all things Saudi, I do not rejoice at what looks like the President telling a nasty man in charge of a nasty country that he is free to go on acting like a murderous thug that he is. What I sense, however, is that Trump-the-Transactionalist senses an opportunity to grab and hold MbS by his short and curlies, while telling an incredulous world that the Prince is still a good boy intent on reforms like women driving, Saudi Vision 2030, and all that.

The opening of Trump’s statement was replete with visceral Iranophobia:

“The country of Iran . . . is responsible for a bloody proxy war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, trying to destabilize Iraq’s fragile attempt at democracy, supporting the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, propping up dictator Bashar Assad in Syria (who has killed millions of his own citizens), and much more . . . The Iranians have killed many Americans and other innocent people throughout the Middle East. Iran states openly, and with great force, ‘Death to America!’ and ‘Death to Israel!’ Iran is considered the world’s leading sponsor of terror.”

Robert Conquest and the Human Spirit under Communism-Robert Service

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/robert-conquest-human-spirit-c
COMMUNISM AND THE COLD WAR-ON ROBERT CONQUEST- THE BEST HISTORIAN ON THE SUBJECT RSK

Robert Conquest (left) was an extraordinary man in the seamless way he combined his literary with his historical endeavours. He was also a notable public figure in British, European and Western life. I first heard a poem by Robert Conquest when I was thirteen years old and an English master at my school read out the “Excerpt of a Report to the Galactic Council”. So I knew him as a poet many years before I had any idea about the astonishing contribution he made to the analysis of Soviet totalitarianism.

The book that made a worldwide impact for him was The Great Terror, published in 1968. We all now use the term “the Great Terror”. Robert Conquest invented it. It was used only privately in Russia before communism started to collapse. Now it is used generally. Millions of people were killed in 1937 and 1938. Millions of people were also killed, starved or otherwise abused both before and after, but especially in that two-year period of the Great Terror. The euphemism that was applied to it was the period of the cult of the individual. Robert Conquest tore down the veil of preposterous euphemism and called things by their names. His poetry, for all its wonderful refinement, is similar in its determination to use plain words when plain words will do. The basic Conquest interpretation of totalitarianism is one with which I overwhelmingly agree.

That fine book, The Great Terror, was welcomed by people who accepted a fundamental set of ideas. This was that the USSR had invented a one-party, one-ideology terror-based state that poured people into its Gulag labour camps; that it systematically built up propaganda in favour of militant atheism; that it practised legal nihilism—these ideas were fundamental to Robert Conquest’s oeuvre. The remarkable achievement of the book was that it was welcomed by people along the political spectrum from Trotskyists through the middle of Western political life to the further reaches of the political Right.

Robert Conquest was an open-ended writer. You could read him and find out what you wanted for yourself. But when reading him, you could not overlook his essential message that there was something utterly rotten about how the Soviet model had originated and developed in Russia and how it was spread, not just to one or two countries, but to a third of the world in the six decades after the October revolution.

As a public figure, Robert Conquest insisted that something had to be done about removing the communist blight. The result was that whereas he was welcomed for having written The Great Terror, he was shunned and disliked by many who rejected his appeal for action against communism worldwide. He urged that it simply wasn’t right for Western policy to ignore the fate of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the countries to the west of those Baltic States. He declared that a much firmer Western policy was morally and practically desirable. And he pursued this objective throughout his literary and political life, a life which made him a controversial figure.

He is no longer controversial, for the basic reason that most of his ideas now form part of the conventional wisdom. They weren’t greeted in this way at the time when he was first expressing them. He had to stand up for them against a blizzard of criticism.