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A Bigger Russian Threat: Disrupting U.S. Innovation By Henry I. Miller

By on October 6th, 2017

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/05/a-bigger-russian-threat-disrupting-u-s-innovation/

Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, is experienced at employing surrogates and agents of various stripes and talents to further its agendas. The most recent example was a “trending topic” story on Facebook about the Las Vegas shooting published by Sputnik, a news agency controlled by the Russian government; the item claimed, inaccurately, that the FBI had found a connection between the shooter and Daesh, also known as ISIS.

An ongoing example is TV “news channel” station RT (formerly Russia Today), the Kremlin’s English-language propaganda arm, the mouthpiece for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agenda. Fake news is its stock in trade, as illustrated by its blatant disinformation attacks on the reporting of news by respected media outlets like the BBC.
In a report from the Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, implicated RT in Russian hacking during last year’s presidential election. The report found that the network uses the internet and social media to conduct “strategic messaging for the Russian government” and that its programming is “aimed at undermining viewers’ trust of U.S. democratic procedures.”

Russia’s targets are not limited to politics. Dr. Alex Berezow of the American Council on Science and Health has describes how RT subtly undermines the technology and economic growth of the United States. One example:

The report released by the Director of National Intelligence on Russia’s interference in the U.S. election concluded that RT is spouting anti-fracking propaganda as a way to undermine the natural gas industry in the United States. Why? Because fracking lowers the prices of fossil fuels, which severely harms Russia’s economy.

To underscore how seriously this is being taken by congressional leaders, on July 10 the House Science Committee sent this statement from Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) to the Wall Street Journal’s “Best of the Web” column:

If you connect the dots, it is clear that Russia is funding U.S. environmental groups in an effort to suppress our domestic oil and gas industry, specifically hydraulic fracking. They have established an elaborate scheme that funnels money through shell companies in Bermuda. This scheme may violate federal law and certainly distorts the U.S. energy market.

In addition, there is what a New York Times news article called “a particularly murky aspect of Russia’s influence strategy: freelance activists who promote its agenda abroad, but get their backing from Russian tycoons and others close to the Kremlin, not the Russian state itself.”

Russia’s targets are not limited to politics. Dr. Alex Berezow of the American Council on Science and Health has describes how RT subtly undermines the technology and economic growth of the United States.

Genetic engineering in agriculture is another sector that holds intense interest for the Russians. Harkening back to the Lysenkoism catastrophe for Soviet agriculture in the Soviet Union, their research and development expertise in that area is virtually nil, and the government has a long-standing ban on genetically engineered organisms from abroad from entering the country, so the Russians have adopted a strategy of trying to inhibit its development elsewhere.

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Trump’s Katrina? Try the Media’s Waterloo By Mike Sabo

By on October 4th, 2017

President Trump took on the Left’s politicization of the NFL last week. This week, he is taking on their appropriation of natural disasters and human caused horrors for political gain.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/03/trumps-katrina-try-the-medias-waterloo/

The Left and its accomplices in the press couldn’t pin the blame on Trump for the administration’s responses to the hurricanes that struck the Gulf Coast states and U.S. territories early last month. But in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which hit the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico especially hard, they thought they finally got their story.

Instead of focusing on the myriad logistical challenges of reaching an island more than 900 miles away from the U.S. mainland, or on how FEMA has worked with the Puerto Rican central government and most municipalities, or the ins-and-outs of federal disaster management, the media pounced on Trump.

They couldn’t wait to allege that Trump’s response was akin to George W. Bush’s Hurricane Katrina performance. CNN ran an article with the headline, “‘Trump’s Katrina?’ No, it’s much worse.” A piece at The Daily Beast authored by noted Trump-hater Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC was titled, “Puerto Rico is Trump’s Katrina.” The Leftist fever swamp Salon ran an article, “‘We are doing a great job’: Is this Trump’s Katrina moment?”

From the media’s lips to God’s ears.
The most transparent response came from the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz. Earlier last week, Cruz described FEMA as “wonderful” and doing an all-around “great job.” She noted further that federal officials “have been here since last week—helping us and setting up logistics.”

But at a morning press conference on Saturday, Cruz completely changed her tune. As she stood in front of pallets of water bottles and other supplies, she shouted, “We are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency, and the bureaucracy!” Cruz claimed if Trump didn’t do something quickly, “we are going to see something close to a genocide.” The irony of this scene, of course, was completely lost on the press.

Trump, understanding exactly what was taking place, fired back:
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.

Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They….
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

…want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

Trump’s refusal to serve as a Republican punching bag for Cruz, a rabid Hillary Clinton supporter, and other Democrats sent shock waves through the media. In marked contrast with previous Republican presidents, Trump understands the Democratic-Media complex’s playbook when it comes to natural disasters when Republicans are in office: shame them into submission for their errors—real or imagined. And for the coup de grace, hint in not so subtle language that race was the deciding factor in how the disaster was handled.

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Peter Smith Kneel Before Your ‘Progressive’ Masters *****

By on October 2nd, 2017

The US media’s arrogance has once again blinded it to the genius of Donald Trump, whose denunciation of gridiron players ‘taking a knee’ has set the commentariat to another fit of frothing. How out of touch must the pundits be to back myths and spoiled millionaires above patriotism and good manners?

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired! He’s fired!”

Down come the Trump haters from great heights of sanctimony. Trump is a racist and white supremacist, charge the Democrats and their cheerleaders; to wit, the hopelessly-corrupted fake-news media. No other conclusion could be drawn, they intone over and over again.

Repetition of lies makes factoids. Leftists know that and are well practised in mythmaking. ‘The stolen generations’ is an exemplar in Australia. Talk to almost anyone you like and that myth has become a ‘truth’.

As most of the highly paid NFL players are black – they must have some physiological edge but we are probably not allowed to say that –Trump must be a racist. And he is dog whistling to white supremacists. His use of the word ‘bitch’ proves that to those who are prepared to go through any tendentious contortions to arrive at the answer they want.

The never-Trump Republicans get on board, if in a less colourful way. Karl Rove disproves of Trump’s language and his impugning of the parenthood of the NFL players. I was reminded of NSW Premier Robert Askin vocalising his thought “run over the bastards” to Lydon Johnson when anti-Vietnam War protesters were attempting to block his motorcade. Askin was criticised for this in some quarters, but I don’t seem to recall part of that criticism being related to the archaic literal meaning of ‘bastards’.

Memo to leftists and Karl Rove and company: Trump was using a common or garden expression, as was Askin. Moreover, in using the expression “he’s fired” he was parodying himself. The humour of the children’s literature character Amelia Bedelia, who took everything literally, would be entirely lost on today’s adult wallies. We are clearly living through a dumb age in which common sense has become a much rarer commodity.

Mark Steyn says that common sense presupposes a common understanding of the world, which is now absent. He’s right which is why Q&A panels and audiences, for example, appear to me to be mostly populated by aliens; and particularly dumb and nasty ones. Witness, as another example, an elementary school librarian, Liz Phipps Soeiro, who has just scolded Melania Trump for gifting her library “racist” Dr Seuss books. This lady can spot racist undertones in The Cat in the Hat. Imagine how young children will turn out under this dumb leftist tutelage. It is a growing curse on our children and on mankind.

Back to taking a knee for the flag and anthem. Though it has taken on an anti-Trump complexion, the initial protest by Colin Kaepernick was against (imagined) police brutality towards black men. Disconcertingly, even those who oppose the form of the protest; nevertheless, implicitly accept its premise, if only by their silence about it. The premise being that black men are disproportionately targeted and shot by cops. Quite simply, this is not supported by the evidence.

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Westerners: Guilty of Reading the News by Douglas Murray

By on September 27th, 2017

If the public are asked whether Arabs should be profiled for security reasons, why should it be surprising if a very slight majority of the public think they should be? A large number of terrorist incidents have occurred in the Arab and Western world in recent years.

If, at some point, large numbers of, say, Czechs, Poles and Hungarians had started to export terrorism across the planet, a majority of the public in a country such as Britain might be relied on to call for increased security checks on people of Eastern European origin. In the meantime, the public would appear to be guilty of nothing other than reading the news.

Few newspaper commentaries bothered to wonder whether the people who had decapitated a soldier on the streets of London might not be responsible for the negative sentiments that followed. For Arab News, any such explanation would be an impossibility.

In August, the polling company YouGov conducted an opinion survey among 2,000 members of the British public. The poll, carried out in partnership with Arab News, the Saudi paper owned by a member of the Saudi royal family, was published September 25.

As might be expected from such a publication, the questions asked of the British public, and the answers received, suited a particular line of argument: the survey evidently sought to find evidence of “Islamophobic” attitudes. It duly found that 41% of the British public polled said that Arab immigrants and refugees had not added anything to society and 55% agreed in principle with the profiling of Arabs for security reasons. The Arab News/YouGov poll also found that 72% of the British public think that “Islamophobia” is getting worse in the UK.

Alongside this report came the surprising finding that a similar number of British people (7 in 10) believe that “the rise in Islamophobic comments by politicians and others are fuelling hate crime.”

All of this presents a fascinating as well as slightly confused picture. Why should the same percentage of the public believe that “Islamophobia” is getting worse but that politicians in Britain are fuelling it? Let alone that politicians are fuelling an alleged rise in “hate crime” — the upsurge in which is constantly promised yet mercifully never occurs? It is clearly the aim of Arab News — as with many other media companies from the same region — to present Britain as a bigoted and unenlightened place — a country filled with primitive and medieval views of “the other”. As opposed to, say, an enlightened and welcoming family fiefdom like that of Saudi Arabia, where attitudes towards foreigners and incomers are renowned the world over for their tolerance and good humour.

If it was possible to have genuinely free and fair polling in Saudi Arabia, carried out by a foreign newspaper and without any government interference, then doubtless the world would learn only of the amount that outsiders had brought into the country, and the extent to which security checks on any people coming to the country from outside Saudi should be entirely absent.

The idea, of course, is ridiculous. What is more ridiculous still is the idea — consistent from a range of opinion polls over recent years — that the British people, like those across Europe and America, are in the grip of some profoundly irrational mania. If the public are asked whether Arabs should be profiled for security reasons, why should it be surprising if a very slight majority of the public think they should be? A large number of terrorist incidents have occurred in the Arab and Western world in recent years, and despite the considerable diversity of the perpetrators of Islamist attacks across the globe, a larger number of terrorists in recent years have emerged from the Arab world than, say, Eastern Europe. If, at some point, large numbers of Czechs, Poles and Hungarians had started to export terrorism across the planet, a majority of the public in a country such as Britain might be relied on to call for increased security checks on people of Eastern European origin. In the meantime, the public would appear to be guilty of nothing other reading the news. The central conceit of a poll such as this, however, is, of course, to present the whole issue of terrorism as a misunderstanding by the general public.

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The Lampoon Times By Thomas Lifson

By on September 27th, 2017

When did the New York Times get taken over by the National Lampoon? It happened so slowly I didn’t even notice.

As has been widely noticed, the Times has been running a series of articles related to the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, and it is obvious that the Times is still sad that the whole show came to an ignominious end in the early 1990s. (After all, there was one wall that the Times actually liked—at least their Pulitzer prize winning “reporter” Walter Duranty.) The series has produced gems such as this:

Hubba, hubba, comrade.

Monday the Times outdid itself:

Memo to the Times: I suspect the “big dreams” of Chinese women was an end to Communist tyranny, which wasn’t just a “flaw,” but its essence.

Imagine a headline that started, “For all of its flaws, slavery. . .”

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National Review editors fall back on lazy assumptions to criticize Trump on NFL By Thomas Lifson

By on September 26th, 2017

The editors of the National Review are back on their high horse again, recalling the days of their “Against Trump” issue devoted to foiling his quest for the GOP nomination. This editorial in National Review, calling for a “time out” on the NFL for Trump (like some naughty preschooler) and calling for better “judgment” (in other words, their judgment) from the president:

The president has conducted himself here in an unseemly fashion, to say the least, and has exhibited his remarkable knack for making everything he touches about him, which the NFL protests weren’t until he stuck his nose in. (snip)

This is not a question of rights but a question of judgment, which was, unhappily, in short supply over the weekend.

But along the way, the offer supporting context that makes it seem like the writers on the editorial board never read Heather MacDonald.

We do not believe that simmering white malice is the reason for it, but black Americans are arrested and incarcerated in numbers far disproportionate to their share of the population.

Huh? MacDonald has repeatedly shown that incarceration is not disproportionate to criminality.

Blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants in America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, 57 percent of all murder defendants and 45 percent of all assault defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks comprise only 15 percent of the population in those counties.

In New York City, where blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population, blacks commit three-quarters of all shootings and 70 percent of all robberies, according to victims and witnesses in their reports to the New York Police Department. Whites, by contrast, commit less than 2 percent of all shootings and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are nearly 34 percent of the city’s population.

In Chicago, 80 percent of all known murder suspects were black in 2015, as were 80 percent of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are a little less than a third of the population. Whites made up 0.9 percent of known murder suspects in Chicago in 2015 and 1.4 percent of known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are about a third of the city’s residents.

Such racially skewed crime ratios are repeated in virtually all American metropolises. They mean that when officers are called to the scene of a drive-by shooting or an armed robbery, they will overwhelmingly be summoned to minority neighborhoods, looking for minority suspects in the aid of minority victims.

This means that observers have a duty to be realistic in assessing what ought to be of concern. As Mac Donald writes:

Trump’s concern about rising crime is therefore not a concern about white victims and the loss of white life. Rather, it is a concern about black lives. As Trump said: “[Y]oung Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson . . . have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child America.” Hint to the media: He was referring to black children in those cities, such as the ten children under the age of ten killed in Baltimore last year; the nine-year-old girl fatally shot while doing homework on her mother’s bed in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2015; and the nine-year-old boy in Chicago lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies in November 2015.

And yet the media is twisting itself into knots trying to downplay and trivialize the crime increase. Isn’t it white Republicans (and, of course, the cops) who are supposed to be indifferent to black lives?

Indeed, on their own pages, where Ms. Mac Donald is a contributor, a review of her latest book published by the very same National Review tells us:

You would never know it from the activists, but police shootings are responsible for a lower percentage of black homicide deaths than white and Hispanic homicide deaths. Twelve percent of all whites and Hispanics who die of homicide are killed by police officers, compared to 4 percent of black homicide victims.

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Bret Stephens’s New Math By Richard Baehr

By on September 24th, 2017

Bret Stephens seems to work hard at finding new things about which to complain about President Trump. In his latest column, it is our relationship with Australia.

In his column on September 23, Stephens says Australia has suffered 100,000 casualties in the last century in America’s wars — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

“A visit to the Australian War Memorial is a moving reminder that Australians have fought alongside Americans in nearly all of our wars over the past century: in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and — to this day — Afghanistan. More than 100,000 Aussies perished in these efforts, a staggering sacrifice for a country with less than 8 percent of America’s population.”

Australian War Memorial

In fact, the number of Australians who died in these four wars is fewer than 1,000:

340 in Korea;

521 in Vietnam;

2 in Iraq; and

42 in Afghanistan

905 in total.

Australia suffered heavy casualty counts in World War 1: 61,532, and in World War 2: 39,652, and even if one were generous enough to assume Stephens meant to include these wars, Australia’s relationship with Great Britain had a lot more to do with their involvement in these wars than anything to do with the United States. Most of Australia’s World War 1 casualties were absorbed before the United States even entered the war., and not in the last century in any case.

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Dershowitz: Plame Story Is ‘Much, Much Worse than the Media Has Presented It’ By Debra Heine

By on September 23rd, 2017

Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz slammed the media this morning for playing down the Valerie Plame anti-Semitic tweet story after her disingenuous apology.

The former CIA operative came under intense fire yesterday on Twitter after she tweeted an anti-Semitic article that blames “America’s Jews” for all of our wars. After the backlash, it was said that she had only skimmed the Unz Review article and somehow had missed the blatant anti-Semitism.

During an appearance on Fox and Friends Friday, the professor said that this story is “much, much worse than the media has presented it.” He added that the author of the article, Philip Giraldi, is a “well-known anti-Semite.”

“In this article, he says that Jews like me or Bill Kristol, when we appear on television, should have on the bottom of the screen identification saying we’re Jews,” Dershowitz pointed out. “And he says it’s ‘like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison. Ingest at your own peril.'”

“All you have to do is read the first couple of paragraphs: Jews control the media, Jews control politics,” he exclaimed. “This is just like what was written in Nazi Germany!” He added, “she can’t now say, ‘I didn’t know what was in it.'”

Dershowitz noted that in 2014, Plame tweeted another article by Giraldi and he argued that her retweets expose “her real set of beliefs.”

“The interesting thing about Twitter, is you do it so quickly, it often reflects your real, genuine beliefs. Then you realize what you’ve said and you say, ‘Uh, oh. I’m sorry,'” he explained. “This guy, Giraldi’s articles are constantly put on neo-Nazi websites!”

“Who would imagine that a former CIA operative would retweet that and, I believe, endorse it?” Dershowitz said incredulously.

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New York Times Faces Backlash After Publishing an Inaccurate Book Review Vanity Fair digs into the controversy. By Rebecca Gibian

By on September 23rd, 2017

The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review became embroiled in controversy last week when one author published an inaccurate review, Vanity Fair reports.

Michelle Goldberg reviewed Vanessa Grigoriadis’s new book, Blurred Lines, which examines the debate about consensual sex on college campuses. Goldberg offers a few pieces of praise, Vanity Fair writes, before giving a harsh critique of the book, even saying that “occasionally (Grigoriadis) makes baffling errors that threaten to undermine her entire book,” according to Vanity Fair.

But Grigoriadis defended herself and her book on her Facebook page, saying that Goldberg performed “some of her own (incompetent) journalism here.”

By the time the issue went public, a large correction had been added to Goldberg’s piece, writes Vanity Fair.

The journalism and media circles began buzzing. Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple published an account of what happened on his blog, and Vanity Fair reports that various women’s organizations chimed in as well. Goldberg took to Twitter to say that she would “give a kidney and five years of my life back” to take back the assertions, writes Vanity Fair, and expressed frustration with how the whole thing played out.

Vanity Fair says that the controversy set off “drama within the halls of the Times,” because it is a significant error. One source told Vanity Fair that it was “humiliating.” One interesting fact is that both women are part of the Times masthead. Grigoriadis is a contributing writer. Goldberg was just hired as a columnist for the Times Op-Ed desk, appointed by James Bennet, the editorial page editor who some think might someday succeed executive editor Dean Baquet. “The fact that they’re both affiliated with the Times is what makes it unusual,” a Times staffer told Vanity Fair.

Vanity Fair also writes that now people question how this will affect Bennet, since he has faced some major issues in his short year and a half at the job — such as a defamation lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin, that was later dismissed.

One further question Vanity Fair brings up is would the mistake have happened if there was a free-standing, centralized copy desk. The copy desk was eliminated from the Times this summer. But Vanity Fair writes that some people at the Times disagreed with this thought, saying it seems unlikely “even the most assiduous copy editor” would have questioned Goldberg on some of her fundamental points.

Vanity Fair writes that at the end of the day, this is just an example of the rockiness the Times is currently going through as it makes “important and necessary changes.”

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Anthony Bourdain “Jokes” About Poisoning President Trump The oppressive Cuban dictatorship is more to his liking. Humberto Fontova

By on September 20th, 2017

“Anthony Bourdain, host of ‘Parts Unknown’ on liberal CNN, said last week that he would poison Donald Trump if the celebrity chef was asked to cater a peace summit between the President and Kim Jong Un….’Hemlock,’ Bourdain simply replied when asked by TMZ what he would serve Trump and the North Korean dictator.”

OK, so Bourdain was joking. Har–Har! But here’s Bourdain from interview right after Trump’s election:

“I will never eat in his (Donald Trump’s) restaurant. I have utter contempt for him, utter and complete contempt… I’m not going. I’m not going.” (Anthony Bourdain, Eater.)

Bourdain sure seems sniffish about patronizing (much less publicizing) restaurants belonging to deviants from his political worldview. OK, fine. That’s his privilege.

But what does this say about the “principled” celebrity chef’s sniveling propagandizing for restaurants owned by the racist, mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring Castro-Family-and- Military-Crony Crime-Syndicate (habitually and grotesquely mislabeled as “Cuba” by Bourdain’s employers at The Travel Channel and CNN)?

“Yes, Go to Cuba!” gushed Bourdain at the end of a show he did from Cuba in 2011. So let’s hand it to this shameless and sniveling hypocrite, to this celebrity who wears his political principles and social-conscience on his shirtsleeve. He’s simply a corporate shill—but for one of the most profitable and unscrupulous corporations in modern history: the Castro Family.

In fact Anthony Bourdain– this “hipster” chef—has headlined several propaganda junkets (his shows from Cuba) to help secure the financial lifeline for a Stalinist regime that jailed and tortured the longest suffering black, female and gay political prisoners in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere.

Bourdain’s bootlicking services for the financial welfare of the terror-sponsors who craved to nuke his nation also included –not only a tourism commercial for the Castro family!—but also an official “Tony Bourdain’s Guide to Cuba.” Along with a handy-dandy link from Bourdain’s page to the Castro-regime-owned Hotel Nacional– for quick and easy reservations! But let some celebrity chef plug a U.S. restaurant and Bourdain turns up his nose and sneers at such a “sell-out.”

In case you hadn’t heard, amigos: As Venezuela’s oil subsidies dry up, Castro’s Stalinist regime is increasingly living off tourism. And Cuba’s Intelligence and Military sector owns 80 per cent of the tourism industry, as documented in Congressional testimony by retired Defense Intelligence Agency Cuba analyst, Lieut. Col. Chris Simmons.

Those charming, smiling hosts who escorted Bourdain around Castro’s fiefdom were all regime apparatchiks. Immediately upon applying for his Cuban visa, well before Bourdain even set foot in Cuba, Castro’s intelligence had Bourdain completely sussed and his future escorts completely briefed. The procedure started the day he applied for Cuban visa, as also explained by Lieut. Col. Christopher Simmons. That your official “guides” while officially visiting a Communist nation were regime apparatchiks was common knowledge even to proto-imbeciles all during the Cold War. Bourdain was born in 1956.

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