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Ruth King

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Was the Pre-Trump World Normal or Abnormal? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 21st, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/trump-disrupted-american-transformation-into-lead-from-behind-nation/

The ‘unpresidential’ outsider disrupted America’s transformation into a ‘lead from behind’ nation.

Much of the controversy that surrounds the policies of Donald Trump can be explained as a reaction to the past. He was either clumsily disrupting the sacrosanct or trying to resurrect what was lost.

In other words, what you feel about Trump is inseparable from what you think of the world before Trump.

Was the status quo, especially in the years between 2009 and 2017, normal or abnormal — at least compared with the prior half century?

Take the challenge of China. We are now locked in a veritable trade war with the Chinese. Each side escalates with a threatened new round of tariffs. The subtexts of the conflict range from Chinese military ascendency to patronage of nuclear North Korea.

Is Trump creating unnecessary conflicts ex nihilo, or trying to address what was an abnormal, one-sided assault at which most prior presidents had shrugged their shoulders?

Certainly, China is a proven systematic trade cheater. Given its size and clout, traditional international means of rectifying such massive violations had proven impotent.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Police Investigating ‘Unlawful and Dangerous’ Toppling of ‘Silent Sam’ Confederate Statue at UNC By Tyler O’Neil

By on August 21st, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/police-investigating-unlawful-and-dangerous-toppling-of-silent-sam-confederate-statue-at-unc/

On Monday night, a group of roughly 250 violent protesters toppled a Confederate monument from its plinth at the University of North Carolina (UNC)-Chapel Hill. “Silent Sam” commemorated the UNC students who had gone off to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Protesters had scheduled a rally entitled “Until They All Fall,” for 7 p.m.

According to the flyer, the event would be “a demonstration against institutional white supremacy at UNC, in solidarity with Maya Little on the day of her trial for marking Silent Sam with her own blood.”

In May, UNC Ph.D. student Maya Little — who is black — mixed her own blood with red paint and dashed it on the “Silent Sam” statue. She was arrested for defacing a public monument, and her trial started Monday. “That statue is not a historical object,” Little told The News & Observer. “It’s missing its history. What I did was give it some context.”

UNC’s independent student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, shared pictures and video of the protest.

Demonstrators chanted “tear it down!”

The crowd went crazy when Silent Sam fell.

Ph.D. student Samee Siddiqui shared an image of the fallen Silent Sam, where protesters proceeded to bury its head in the dirt. CONTINUE AT SITE

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Move Over Vagina, Make Room for the Trans-Inclusive ‘Front Hole’ By Megan Fox

By on August 21st, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/move-over-vagina-make-room-for-trans-inclusive-front-hole/

In the “not enough mind bleach in the world to blot out what I just read” category of the week, Healthline has decided that the word “vagina” is too triggering for trans people and so they will now use the term “front hole” in their sex education materials. No, really. Please keep in mind that these are the same people who for years have told us that toddlers need anatomically correct vocabularies in order to be properly aware of body parts, lest they become victims of sexual abuse.

But now, we are going to stop calling a vagina a vagina and call it a “front hole.” One wonders how the “Front Hole Monologue” ticket sales will go. Costume manufacturers everywhere are updating their protest gear to “Front Hole Costumes” and “Front Hole Hats,” and woke bakers everywhere are working on new “Front Hole Cupcakes” to sell at the next #Resist extravaganza.

In case you were wondering, Healthline went into great, confusing detail about why such a LGBTQWTF-sensitive sex education guide is needed. The enlightened staff at Healthline say that the scientifically accurate old sex ed guides “unnecessarily gender body parts as being ‘male parts’ and ‘female parts’ and refer to ‘sex with women’ or ‘sex with men,’ excluding those who identify as nonbinary.” Don’t ask me what “nonbinary” is. I still can’t tell you even after studying these people for the last several years. But they’re not finished yet!

And as a result, the notion that a penis is exclusively a male body part and a vulva is exclusively a female body part is inaccurate. By using the word “parts” to talk about genitals and using medical terms for anatomy without attaching a gender to it, we become much more able to effectively discuss safe sex in a way that’s clear and inclusive.

Clear? CLEAR? BAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Austin Texas Residents and Tourists Oppose Renaming City By Nicholas Ballasy

By on August 21st, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stupid-bullsht-austin-texas-residents-and-tourists-oppose-renaming-city/

AUSTIN, Texas – Residents and tourists in Austin told PJM that they oppose the idea of renaming the state capital due to Stephen F. Austin’s support for slavery.

Austin, known as the “Father of Texas,” owned “a few slaves” in his lifetime and opposed efforts in Mexico to end slavery, according to author and historian Gregg Cantrell. In 1824, Austin defended the economic benefits of slavery, specifically for cotton. The city of Austin’s Equity Office published a report recommending street names to change since they honor figures who had ties to slavery, in addition to renaming the city itself.

The city’s report noted that Austin is “not directly tied to the Confederacy and/or the Civil War” but argued that the existing name is “within the spirit of the resolution representing slavery, segregation, and/or racism.”

Austin residents and tourists disagreed with changing the name.

“F**king no, stay Austin, I think the name is good. Just keep it this way; this is part of history, let’s keep it that way. You do not want to erase history right now. What’s the point?” said Leon, who was visiting Austin from Oklahoma.

“This is the stupidest bullsh*t I’ve ever heard. Why do they want to erase history? Can they change that by changing the name? No. Leave it alone, that’s my take. Some might think I’m crazy but, hey, I’m just like, don’t change it – don’t fix it, there’s nothing wrong, OK?” he added.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

UChicago Must Defend Professor Against Social Justice Slander By David Randall

By on August 21st, 2018

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2018/08/21/uchicago_must_defend_professor_against_social_justice_slander.html

David Randall is the Director of Research at the National Association of Scholars.

Rachel Fulton Brown has been calumnied and no one will stand up to defend her good name.

Brown is a professor of history at the University of Chicago, but this isn’t just an academic dispute. What’s happened to her is what happens to anyone who speaks up against social justice warriors.

It all started because Brown got tired of medievalist social justice warriors saying that the middle ages were essentially about white supremacy, and that if medievalists didn’t spend all their time teaching the middle ages as a story about racism, they were complicit in modern-day racism and white supremacy — or even outright advocates for the same. In 2015 she wrote a blog post arguing against the social justice warriors — “Three Cheers for White Men.”

The result, of course, was that Brown got called a racist and a white supremacist herself — and accused of “inciting violence” against her most vitriolic interlocutor, Dorothy Kim of Vassar College, because she’d posted screenshots on her own blog of Kim’s defamatory writings against her. More than 1,400 of her colleagues wrote an open letter to condemn her — an open letter that endorsed these defamatory accusations.

All of this is doubleplustrue because Brown likes Milo Yiannopoulos and writes nice things about him. Brown is guilty by association.

Except that she is guilty of nothing. Ask Professor Daniel Franke of Richard Bland College, who has explained the accusations of racism and white supremacy: “Fulton Brown’s conservative beliefs in the value of ‘Western civilization’ have been publicly attacked since 2016 as ‘white supremacist’ by Dorothy Kim of Vassar.” Professor Brown’s “incitement to violence”? Professor Franke properly concluded that “Fulton Brown’s response to Kim hardly qualifies as ‘persecution.’”

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Sobering Reports from the School-Reform Wars Two new books offer revealing synopses of a half-century’s worth of efforts. Ray Domanico

By on August 21st, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/html/sobering-reports-school-reform-wars-16116.html

How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success from One of the Nation’s Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education, by Arne Duncan (Simon and Schuster, 256 pp., $26.99)

Changing the Course of Failure: How Schools and Parents Can Help Low-Achieving Students, by Sandra Stotsky (Rowman and Littlefield, 130 pp., $25)

Taken together, new books from former education secretary Arne Duncan and scholar Sandra Stotsky offer a good synopsis of the changes in American schooling since the 1960s. Duncan, who served in the Obama administration from 2009 through 2015, offers an account of what appear to be the final years of national school reform as practiced by both political parties. Stotsky, a professor of education and former Massachusetts state education official, describes national efforts in the 1950s and 1960s on her way to critiquing much of what the U.S. has tried to accomplish, both before and during Duncan’s tenure.

For Stotsky, national education policy was on the right track in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the nation’s response to Sputnik and other challenges sparked a vast effort to upgrade teacher training, curriculum, and textbooks. In Stotsky’s telling, content-based education held the promise of sweeping away the worst theories of the education schools, which favored a “whole-child” approach over strong academics.

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MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Latin American Conservative Blogger: Facebook Suspended and Doxed Me By Debra Heine

By on August 21st, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/latin-american-conservative-blogger-facebook-suspended-and-doxed-me/

A conservative Latin American blogger has been suspended from Facebook for 30 days for “violating community standards,” although she doesn’t think she did anything wrong. Worse, she says the social media giant “doxed her” by putting her private family photos in a public setting.

“I am 100 percent sure of it,” the blogger, who wishes to remain anonymous because she fears the communists in South America, told PJ Media. “I’m panicked … I’m very terrified,” she said.

The blogger — I’ll call her Maria — has made a huge impact in the Latin American community in recent years, especially in 2016, when she helped then-candidate Donald Trump win 29 percent of the Hispanic vote despite a never-ending torrent of negative press painting him as an anti-Hispanic bigot.

The suspension comes as Latin American conservatives rally for Brazil’s right-wing candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, who holds a solid lead in the race for October’s presidential election in a recent poll — one that excludes jailed leftist candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. When the corrupt former president is included in the poll, 37 percent of voters said they backed him, putting him in the lead by 5 percentage points despite him being in the slammer.

“The Amerian Left is financing Lula, as always, and they go to the poorest regions and neighborhoods to buy votes,” Maria explained.

Maria posts at several very popular conservative Latin American Facebook pages — including Resistencia Capitalista, Red Alternativa Capitalista de Informacion, and Resistencia Anti-Communista — where she shares stories from The Daily Caller, Breitbart, PJ Media, Townhall, and more. Her Twitter handle is @LatAmFr.

Being a Hispanic Trump-supporter, Maria has — not surprisingly — been the target of much online harassment.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russia’s War on the West by Stephen Blank and Peter Huessy

By on August 21st, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12849/russia-war-west

If one examines Russia’s proposals, there is a shell game going on. Russia wants the United States to abide by treaties that they themselves are breaking. Russia, for instance, has been breaking the INF Treaty since the 1990s, a fact essentially admitted by the Russian press in 2007.

The real Moscow build-up of nuclear warheads and associated missiles and bombers are tailored for short, intermediate, and long-range missile strikes. These systems, along with Russian published doctrine and testing, reveals a Russian military preparing to use nuclear weapons (as well as chemical and biological weapons) for war-fighting purposes and to threaten not only military targets but population centers as well.

Russia’s proposals also aim to block American conventional global strike programs and capabilities and to seek guarantees that American and allied missile defenses, especially those in Europe, will either not be built or will be strictly limited.

Russia’s public displays of the new programs is no doubt designed both to intimidate the West into not responding to Russian provocations, and to force the U.S. into one-sided arms control deals in their favor, out of fear of emerging Russian nuclear arms.

After the Helsinki Summit was over, the Russian government, the Russian and American media, and many Russian experts in the West have been calling for the United States and Russia to agree quickly to either an extension of the 2010 New Start Treaty, or a new follow-on arms control agreement; the New Start Treaty between the two countries is scheduled to expire in 2021.

Many of these calls for new negotiations and a new treaty are primarily driven by alarm at the bad state of East-West relations, the belief in the inherent benefits of arms control in general, and that arms control remains the area where it is easiest to secure Russo-American dialogue.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Abbas’s Responsibility for Gaza Crisis by Bassam Tawil

By on August 21st, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12898/gaza-crisis-mahmoud-abbas

In a letter to the UN Secretary-General, Mahmoud Abbas’s Foreign Ministry accused Israel of committing “crimes” against Palestinians civilians, especially in the Gaza Strip, and renewed the call for providing “international protection” for the Palestinians.

This is the same Abbas whose sanctions have triggered the recent violence along the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. If anyone needs “international protection,” it is those protesters who are being targeted by Abbas’s security forces in the West Bank.

Abbas is especially worried that the international community will be funding economic and humanitarian projects in the Gaza Strip behind his back. He wants the money to be spent through his government. He wants to control every penny the international community earmarks for the welfare of his people.

What exactly does Abbas want? He wants the people of the Gaza Strip to continue protesting so that he will be able to continue to demonize Israel.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is continuing to pursue a policy of double-dealing regarding the Gaza Strip.

On the one hand, President Mahmoud Abbas and the PA leadership continue inciting against Israel by holding it solely responsible for the humanitarian and economic crisis in the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, Abbas and his Ramallah-based government continue to impose strict economic sanctions on the Gaza Strip.

Now, Abbas is bending over backwards to foil a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas and the other Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip. Abbas says he is worried that such a deal would pave the way for the implementation of US President Donald Trump’s yet-to-be-announced plan for peace in the Middle East.

Although they have never seen the Trump plan, Abbas and the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah claim that it envisages the establishment of a separate Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip. They also argue that the Trump plan seeks to transform the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from a political and national conflict into one that is related only to humanitarian and economic issues. Abbas says he fears that the humanitarian and economic aid that the international community is promising to the Gaza Strip, as part of a cease-fire deal, is aimed at extracting concessions from the Palestinians, especially on issues related to Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

From One Psychodrama to Another By Victor Davis Hanson *****

By on August 21st, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/20/from-one-psychodrama

Michael Wolff and his media-hyped blockbuster—that supposedly game-changing landmark of a book Fire and Fury—are now ancient history.

Fading similarly is Karen McDougal, Playboy‘s 1998 Playmate of the Year, and her National Enquirer grifter lawsuit that was also supposed to destroy the Trump presidency.

We are by now mostly tired with Stormy Daniels and her unhinged lawyer Michael Avenatti, who at least proved more entertaining than his porn-star client.

Consiglieri Michael Cohen, the Trump attorney who secretly taped his own client and apparently has been flipped to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s side in his veritable war against Trump, is also sliding into the netherworld of no-news coverage and a legal morass.

Cohen now competes with the narcissist Omarosa Manigault, entering from stage left with her trunkful of tapes and gossip to demand her own proverbial 15 minutes of fame. She promises to release never before told, shocking, unprecedented, flabbergasting dirt on Donald Trump that will ensure his impeachment, indictment, and jail time—or reify the dreams of celebrities who have variously voiced desires to hang, dismember, smash, blow up, stab, shoot, and ignite the president.

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