Displaying the most recent of 92148 posts written by

Ruth King

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: Why Hamas Will Not Disarm by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on March 26th, 2018

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas wants to extend his authority to the Gaza Strip, while Hamas is seeking to take over the West Bank.

Abbas is fortunate to have Israel sitting with him in the West Bank. Otherwise, Hamas would have succeeded in its effort to topple his regime and “transfer” its weapons to the West Bank.

Meanwhile, Abbas will continue to dream of returning to the Gaza Strip, while Hamas will continue to prepare for war against Israel and removing the Palestinian Authority from power.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is living in an illusion if he thinks that his rivals in Hamas would ever agree to lay down their weapons or cede control over the Gaza Strip.

Hamas has no intention of dismantling its military and security apparatus. It also does not have any intention of allowing Abbas’s security forces to be stationed in the Gaza Strip. This refusal is why the “reconciliation” deal that Abbas signed with Hamas in Cairo in October 2017 will never be translated into facts on the ground.

Hamas is prepared to give Abbas anything he wants in the Gaza Strip except for security control. Hamas has no problem allowing Abbas and his government to function as a “civil administration” in the Gaza Strip by providing funds and various services to government institutions there.

If Abbas wants to pay salaries to civil servants in the Gaza Strip, that is fine with Hamas. If he wants to pay for fuel, water and electricity supplies to the Gaza Strip, that is also fine with Hamas.

Security control, however, is the last thing Hamas wants from Abbas. For Hamas, security is a red line not to be crossed.

What is behind Hamas’s fierce opposition to relinquishing security control over the Gaza Strip?

Hamas wants to retain its weapons and security control of the Gaza Strip for two reasons: first, it wants the weapons so that it can continue the “armed struggle” against Israel; second, Hamas knows that the moment it hands over security control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority (PA), many of its leaders and members will either be killed or imprisoned by Abbas’s security forces.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

David Martin Jones Utopian Ambitions Meet Big Data

By on March 26th, 2018

Social media deliberately exploits human psychology, not least with its parade of endless distractions. As well as making us stupid and inattentive, political democracy also is undermined via the mining of big data, as the ongoing revelations of Facebook’s privacy violations attest.

The European Renaissance formed much of what became the West’s vocabulary concerning individual freedom, humanism, political order and the idea of scientific inquiry freed from religious supervision or customary oversight. It gave rise, amongst other things, to speculation about the possibility of perfection. Neo-Platonists, like Pico della Mirandola, considered what man’s release from a determinist chain of being might mean. “What a great miracle is man,” Pico wrote in 1487, “the intermediary between creatures … familiar with the gods above him, as he is lord of the creatures beneath him.”

In this optimistic spirit, later humanists, like Thomas More, imagined utopia, “no place”, where “there’s never any excuse for idleness”. More’s society of perfect happiness was also one of complete surveillance where “everyone has his eye on you”. In a similar vein, Francis Bacon conceived a New Atlantis where Salomon’s house, or the scientific College of the Six Days Work, would find out “the true nature of all things (whereby God might have the more glory in the workmanship of them, and men the more fruit in the use of them)”.

The scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment only reinforced this quest. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein captured the dream of science which also came to address the growing irrelevance of God. By the late nineteenth century both Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hardy speculated on the meaning of God’s death. As Hardy wondered:

And who or what shall fill His place?
Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes
For some fixed star to stimulate their pace
Towards the goal of their enterprise? …

In Silicon Valley, Big Tech offers the latest apocalyptic answer to Hardy’s question concerning “the goal of their enterprise”.

Continue reading →
MEDIA Comments turned off

Facebook denies it collects call and SMS data from phones without permission Catherine Shu

By on March 26th, 2018

After an Ars Technica report that Facebook surreptitiously scrapes call and text message data from Android phones and has done so for years, the scandal-burdened company has responded that it only collects that information from users who have given permission.

Facebook’s public statement, posted on its press site, comes a couple of days after it took out full page newspaper ads to apologize for the misuse of data by third-party apps as it copes with fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal (follow the story as it develops here). In the ad, founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg wrote “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”

The company’s response to the Ars Technica story, however, struck a different tone, with Facebook titling the post “Fact Check: Your Call and SMS History.” It said “You may have seen some recent reports that Facebook has been logging people’s call and SMS (text) history without their permission. This is not the case,” before going on to explain that call and text history logging is included with an opt-in feature on Messenger or Facebook Lite for Android that “people have to expressly agree to use” and that they can turn off at any time, which would also delete any call and text data shared with that app.

Ars Technica has already amended its original post with a response to Facebook’s statement, saying it contradicts several of its findings, including the experience of users who shared their data with the publication.

“In my case, a review of my Google Play data confirms that Messenger was never installed on the Android devices I used,” wrote Ars Technica IT and national security editor Sean Gallagher in the amendment to his post. “Facebook was installed on a Nexus tablet I used and on the Blackphone 2 in 2015, and there was never an explicit message requesting access to phone call and SMS data. Yet there is call data from the end of 2015 until late 2016, when I reinstalled the operating system on the Blackphone 2 and wiped all applications.”

In its statement, Facebook said “Contact importers are fairly common among social apps and services as a way to more easily find the people you want to connect with. This was first introduced in Messenger in 2015, and later offered as an option in Facebook Lite, a lightweight version of Facebook for Android .”

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Standing Up in France One hundred French intellectuals make a public declaration against Islamist totalitarianism. Ibn Warraq

By on March 26th, 2018

On Friday, March 23, while he screamed “Allahu Akbar,” Redouan Lakdim killed three people in a supermarket in Southwestern France, where he had just taken hostages. First known to the police as a drug dealer, more recently Lakdim became known as a jihadi, an Islamic militant who proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS. He had demanded the release of Salah Abdeslam, the prime surviving suspect in the Islamic State attacks that killed 130 people in Paris in 2015. Yet he was allowed to circulate freely. Why?

All too often, the first reaction to such acts of Islamic terrorism is not horror at the barbaric acts and compassion for the victims, but an obsessive fear that “Islamophobia” will increase. In France, editorials in liberal outlets will once again warn against “conflation” (in French, the expression is “pas d’amalgam”), by which is meant that there should be no automatic identification of acts of terrorism with Islam. Islam is a religion of peace, we are instructed, and terrorists know nothing about true Islam. Liberal publications deny the evidence of the Koranic texts, Islamic principles, and the 1,400- year history of jihadi terrorism, which began with the Prophet Muhammad himself. They also ignore the writings of “modern” jihadists such as Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, which provide ample justification for holding Islam itself responsible for acts of terror.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Never Again’? Omnibus Bill Is a Product of the Swamp By Roger Kimball

By on March 26th, 2018

Thinking about the $1.3 trillion—that’s “trillion” with a “t” for “terrifying”—omnibus spending bill that President Trump signed on Friday, I wonder who is most unhappy about that incontinent, 2,232-page monument to congressional irresponsibility. (A small token of its irresponsibility—and its contempt for the public—was that the bill had to be signed a mere 17 hours after being passed by the Senate. “Otherwise”—cue the scary voice and Halloween music—“the government will shut down!” Is that a threat or a promise?)

There have been all sorts of lists of winners and losers. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that “We Democrats are really happy” with the bill, which will stuff enough cash into the bloated congressional gizzard to keep the government wheezing along through September. Many, nay most, on the other side of the D.C. gastrointestinal tract are not happy. “With Omnibus Signing,” as one representative headline put it, “Trump Formally Surrenders To The Swamp.”

I had myself, like other fiscally responsible Americans, hoped that President Trump would veto that bill, as he suggested he might as late as Friday morning. Still, it is well to keep in mind a fundamental truth that some canny tweeter put with pithy conciseness: “Regardless of how you feel about the #omnibus, it’s still a good day when you wake up and realize Hillary Clinton is not our president.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Worst Law in America Congress can limit the damage of New York’s unjust Martin Act.

By on March 26th, 2018

The competition is fierce for the worst law in America, but our pick goes to New York State’s notorious Martin Act. Now an effort is building in Congress that could curb its worst excesses and help the innocent.

Passed in 1921 to stop “boiler-room” stock-sale operations, the Martin Act lets prosecutors call almost anything fraud, and there’s no requirement to prove evil intent in civil cases. Yet proving scienter, or the intent or knowledge of wrongdoing, has been a staple requirement of British and American law for centuries lest innocent mistakes be prosecuted as intentional frauds. The Martin Act thus gives prosecutors a huge legal advantage against defendants, though for decades it was used sparingly.

That changed in the early 2000s when then New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer wielded the Martin Act to bludgeon settlements out of big Wall Street firms without going to court. The law does particular damage because New York is America’s financial capital and nearly every company sooner or later does business there. Note how Mr. Spitzer’s equally unconstrained successor, Eric Schneiderman, is leveraging the Martin Act to investigate Exxon for purportedly misleading the public about climate change.

Prosecutors don’t want to give up this immense power, and legislators in New York have been loath to challenge them. But Congress has the power to act under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Legislation introduced last month by Rep. Tom MacArthur (R., N.J.) would address the problem by pre-empting state enforcement of civil securities fraud.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The U.N. Hates Israel Why does the U.S. still belong to Turtle Bay’s Human Rights Council?

By on March 26th, 2018

Syria bombs civilians with chlorine gas, China tortures dissidents, Venezuela restricts access to food and Burma is engaged in ethnic cleaning of a Muslim minority. So naturally the United Nations Human Rights Council trains the bulk of its outrage on . . . Israel.

On Friday the council approved five resolutions condemning Israel, as it has done every year since its creation in 2006. The 47-member council includes such paragons of political freedom as China and Cuba. The resolutions characterize Israel as an “occupying power” in Palestinian-claimed territories, including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and denounce the Middle Eastern democracy as an abuser of human rights.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and her team, at the urging of the British and the Dutch, spent months trying to convince other European countries not to single out Israel. But when the votes were tallied Friday, only the U.S. and Australia voted against all of the anti-Israel resolutions. The council passed only one resolution apiece condemning North Korean, Iranian and Syrian abuses.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Are we suffering global cooling? By Martin Marcus

By on March 26th, 2018

The east coast of the United States just endured a rare spring snowstorm. How could this happen when NASA is constantly announcing that we have record high temperatures?

Advocates of the global warming theory have been predicting rising temperatures since around 1983. Available data indicated no such trend, so these advocates found reasons to adjust past temperatures downward. People who remembered the 1930s as being the hottest decade of their lifetimes were ignored. If people witness spring snowstorms, should they be ignored, too?

Recent scientific work predicts that the sun’s output will diminish in our lifetimes. Valentina Zharkova et al, here and here, estimate that we will have an ice age from about 2020 to 2053.

The theory about ice ages is simple. Do you remember when your science teacher would rap two tuning forks against a table? They would make two tones plus a periodic lull, which your teacher called a beat. Zharkova believes that the sun has two resonances and they sometimes cause a beat. The last beat that we observed, the Maunder Minimum, was from 1645 to 1715. It accompanied a climatic episode known as the “Little Ice Age” (LIA).

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The press howls about trade wars, but fails to look at Chinese tariffs on us By Jack Hellner

By on March 26th, 2018

Boy, I hope President Trump doesn’t charge tariffs on Chinese products to the U.S. That may cause China to retaliate. They may start charging tariffs on U.S. goods. That seems to be the story line we are getting, not everywhere, but in most of the press overall. It’s as if China isn’t already charging tariffs on a wide range of products.

The way the media reports Trump’s trade policy is to suggest that he is stupid and is going to destroy the economy if he imposes mirror tariffs on Chinese goods. Yet at the same time, many suggest that existing polices are great.

It would be helpful if news organizations listed some existing tariffs on U.S products being exported to China.

I looked up cars, car parts, computers and grains, and they all have significant tariffs or taxes already. (Nothing I looked up did not have a tariff or tax.)

Here is what I found.

Manufactured in Toledo, Ohio, the Wrangler is a descendant of the jeeps that were used by American forces in World War II. Equipped with a 3.6-liter engine and a five-speed automatic transmission, the Rubicon edition of the Wrangler has a suggested retail price of $40,530 in the United States.

But in China, the same vehicle would set a buyer back by a hefty $71,000, mostly because of taxes that Beijing charges on every car, minivan and sport utility vehicle that is made in another country and brought to China’s shores.
Chinese rules on taxes for the import of auto parts impose 15% charge (on top of the 10% customs duty) on imported car parts when they are destined to a
model that fulfils the “characteristics of a whole vehicle.”

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Stop Diminishing the Men By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on March 26th, 2018

There is a “gender crisis” in America today, and it has nothing to do with the alleged 63 varieties of genders espoused by leftists. Nor does it have to do with women’s marches. Quite simply it deals with the “expendable male,” where, “in the space of just a few decades[,] American women have managed to demote men from respected providers and protectors to being unnecessary, irrelevant, and expendable ” (Venker & Schlafly, The Flipside of Feminism).

It is apparent by attitudes from well known women – e.g., Pamela Paul, who authored Are Fathers Necessary and wrote, “The bad news for Dad is that despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution.” Then there is actress Jennifer Aniston, who once stated, “Women are realizing they don’t have to settle with a man just to have a child.”

Naomi Schaefer Riley at the Washington Post writes that “while our culture often celebrates the single life as empowering, this empowerment rarely trickles down to children. We can cheer the mother who dragged her son away from rioting in Baltimore after Freddie Gray was killed, and we can find it sweet that the former star of ’16 & Pregnant’ is taking her young son on ‘dinner dates’ to teach him how to treat women, but there is something sad about the fact that these boys do not have a father to offer these lessons in a more effective way.”

It is commonplace in the college composition classroom to read where single mothers assert that they do not need men since their own single mothers told them never to depend on anyone else. “Don’t need men since they are childish and immature” is a frequent refrain.

Continue reading →