HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Chris Robbins: Has socialism been good for the Jews? Since 1918, socialism has been tried in 64 countries. With over a century of experience, evidence, and history it is time to ask: Has any one of these experiments been good for the Jewish people? *****

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/05/17/has-socialism-been-good-for-the-jews/

The Jewish people have been among the greatest champions and the greatest opponents of socialism and Marxism. We have fought on both sides. The battle began with a pen, not a rifle, in the hand of a lapsed Ashkenazi Jew, Karl Marx.

Socialism is enjoying a resurgence in the United States. According to the most recent Gallup poll, 57% of Democrats now view socialism favorably.

Since 1918, socialism has been tried in 64 countries. With over a century of experience, evidence, and history it is time to ask: Has any one of these experiments been good for the Jewish people?

First, a trip back down memory lane. It is just after midnight, July 17, 1918. Russian Czar Nicholas II and his family, now prisoners of the Bolsheviks, are under guard in a secret location east of the Ural Mountains.

Yakov Yurovsky, a 40-year-old yeshiva drop-out, awakens Nicholas. Now regional commissar for justice, Yurovsky tells the czar to stir the rest of the royal family.

An hour later Yurovsky and 10 other revolutionaries are waiting for them. The captors position the Romanovs and their five servants against a wall. The thin, goateed, curly-haired, and mild-mannered Yurovsky announces that he has official orders. He reads them to the czar.

Yurovsky, a failed clockmaker who converted to Christianity 13 years earlier, received his commands from Filipp Goloshchyokin, 42, who is also a lapsed Jew. Goloshchyokin received the orders from 33-year-old Yakov Sverdlov, who is Jewish and a close colleague of Lenin (who is one-quarter Jewish). The orders are to execute the Romanovs.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Political Bias in Big Tech Is a Major Problem By Julio Rivera

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/28/political-bias-in-big-tech-is-a-major-problem/

Suspicions of political bias in big tech companies are nothing new. Many people have suspected tech companies of being more left-leaning. Recent events and studies, however, are slowly turning these suspicions into facts. This political bias is detrimental not only to the companies and their users but also to the country.

A recent study by Northwestern University showed Google’s search engine ranked left-leaning political sites higher on its news feed. According to the survey, 86 percent of Google’s top stories over the course of a month came from 20 left-wing news sites. Out of these 20 sources, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post were leading the pack.

Google is not the only tech company credibly accused of bias. Facebook and Twitter have also been denounced for censoring right-leaning accounts and groups in their respective platforms. The three tech companies were summoned to a congressional hearing last year to explain themselves.

One might think that these cases of political bias are isolated to the big tech companies but nothing could be further from the truth. Silicon Valley, a region known to be at the vanguard of technological development in the United States, is a very left-leaning place located in a deep blue state.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Base Gets Itself a New Elite by Mark Steyn

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.steynonline.com/9417/the-base-gets-itself-a-new-elite

In any normal UK election, it would be inconceivable for either of the two main parties – Conservative and Labour – to attract just 23 per cent of the vote. The fact that that is all they could muster between them is hilarious, and greatly to be enjoyed. As I put it on the radio last week, the departing Theresa May has led the Tories to their worst result in two hundred years. But, really, that’s praising with faint damns. I saw Daniel Hannan on the telly extending Mrs May’s impressive feat back through the pre-Reform Act era and accounting it the Tories’ worst result since 1678. Which is kind of hard to spin. Her forced resignation last Friday morning (by which point her party had made it clear they wouldn’t stick with her past lunch) ensures that she and that election result will be yoked together for all time. And jolly well deserved it is.

When the party of government falls from favor, the beneficiary is usually the principal opposition. Instead, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party saw its vote fall almost as precipitously as the Tories’. Against the Conservatives’ single-digit nine per cent, Labour could muster only fourteen per cent, its own worst result in a century – in fact, since 1910. Which would also be hard to spin, had Theresa May not done Corbyn the favor of pulling off an unbeatable record.

As I’ve been saying for four years in a Trump context, it’s easier for the base to get itself a new elite than for the elite to get itself a new base. Three years ago the Brexit referendum revealed that Parliament and the people had become misaligned: If over half the people support a policy that no “mainstream” party supports, then in what sense are those parties mainstream? Mrs May should have enacted the people’s wishes, exited the EU on WTO terms, left it largely to civil servants to smooth the technical adjustments, and then invited Brussels to take its time and make proposals for such new arrangements as they might wish to entertain. By now, Brexit would be receding in the rear-view mirror, and normal politics – that’s to say, two-party Tory-Labour politics – would have resumed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

All the Ways Google Tracks You—And How to Stop It

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.wired.com/story/google-tracks-you-privacy/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

You’re probably aware that Google keeps tabs on what you’re up to on its devices, apps, and services—but you might not realize just how far its tracking reach extends, into the places you go, the purchases you make, and much more. It’s an extensive set of data, but you can take more control over what Google collects about you and how long the company keeps it. Here’s how.

It’s worth emphasizing first that we’re really dealing with two topics: The amount of data Google collects on you, which is a lot, and what Google then does with it. Google would say its data collection policies improve its services—helping you find a restaurant similar ones you’ve liked previously, say—whereas users might disagree.

A lot of the data we’re going to talk about here is only visible to you, or used in a limited way to make ads more relevant to you. Ultimately, your choice is either to trust Google to use all this data responsibly (you can view the privacy policy here), not use Google services at all, or limit the information it can gather about you. Since the first two are basically binary, we’re going to focus on that third option.

On the Web

The best place to start taking control over Google’s tracking habits is the Activity Controls page in your Google Account on the web. If you’re currently signed into Google in your browser, that link should take you straight to it. The data Google holds on you is split into six sections. You can turn off tracking on any of them using the toggle switches you see on screen.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s the middle of the night. Do you know who your iPhone is talking to? Apple says, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” Our privacy experiment showed 5,400 hidden app trackers guzzled our data — in a single week.By Geoffrey A. Fowler

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/28/its-middle-night-do-you-know-who-your-iphone-is-talking/?utm_source=pocket-newtab&utm_term=.d5e5cc4bdd66

It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?

Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same — and Apple could be doing more to stop it.

On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.

And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address -— once every five minutes.

Our data has a secret life in many of the devices we use every day, from talking Alexa speakers to smart TVs. But we’ve got a giant blind spot when it comes to the data companies probing our phones.

You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” My investigation suggests otherwise.

IPhone apps I discovered tracking me by passing information to third parties — just while I was asleep — include Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit’s Mint, Nike, Spotify, The Washington Post and IBM’s the Weather Channel. One app, the crime-alert service Citizen, shared personally identifiable information in violation of its published privacy policy.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Triumph of a Free Society Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s victory is a tribute to India’s democratic reforms. Guy Sorman

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/narendra-modi-victory

As Western media focus on China’s rise, India remains a geopolitical enigma. While America’s trade wars with Beijing dominate headlines, news outlets relegate India to buried stories of intrigue—a destructive monsoon, a derailed train, a guru in saffron robes with sacred cows.

Why the difference in treatment? Fault may lie with the Jesuits who, beginning in the seventeenth century, evangelized the Chinese instead of the polytheistic Hindus. Modern China also figures prominently in our daily lives. Look at your shoes or your telephone—they probably come from China, not India. India’s economy focuses on its internal market and on exports to poor countries, rather than on trade with the West. Yet India’s population now equals China’s, with its rate of growth projected to surpass the Communist country. And the Indian middle class, with a standard of living comparable with its counterparts in Europe and America, hovers around 200 million people—equivalent in size to the Chinese middle class. India, nonetheless, remains poorer than China, in part because it was late to reform its economy.

In 1979, Chairman Deng Xiaoping renounced collectivism and opened his nation’s economy to market reforms, permitting the Chinese to accumulate personal wealth. It wasn’t until 2004 that India embraced the free market, with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh renouncing the state socialism that dated to the country’s independence in 1949. Under the long reign of India’s Congress Party, which claimed the mantle of Mahatma Gandhi, the country’s economy grew 1 percent annually. Without irony, economists, called this the “Indian rate,” as if it were a cultural sentence.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Diversity Over Quality Mayor de Blasio is fighting to reduce Asian representation in New York City’s elite schools. Dennis Saffran

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/admissions-nyc-specialized-schools

At a state senate forum earlier this month on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to end the admissions test for New York City’s top high schools, an African-American woman went on a harangue about how Asian-Americans come from “a culture that has no problem with cheating.” Waving a sheaf of “documentation,” McCarthy-style, she railed against “some of the newer immigrants who have come here . . . with that cultural milieu of cheating.” She was not interrupted or challenged by any of the legislators.

But when a 12-year-old, Asian-American middle school girl spoke in favor of retaining the test—asking “If I work hard, shouldn’t I have a higher advantage than those who . . . are just being lazy”—the senators were alert to potentially racially insensitive language. “Be very careful how you prepare them for this argument,” Senator Velmanette Mont­gomery of Brooklyn admonished Asian parents in the audience after the girl testified—taking the word “lazy” as a reference to blacks, though the girl had said nothing about race. “It is your responsibility and . . . obligation that . . . those children do not internalize those racist atti­tudes.”

These anecdotes tell you a lot about the progressive war on New York’s selective “specialized high schools” (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, and five others), now dominated by Asian-American students from largely poor and working-class immigrant backgrounds. It’s a war being fought on two fronts, and both involve attacks on Asian-Americans that would be unim­aginable against any other minority group.

The main action is in the state legislature, where the Democratic takeover of the senate last fall gives the Left its best chance to get rid of the 48-year-old state law that requires a competitive exam as the sole criterion for admission to the selective high schools. De Blasio and his schools chancellor Richard Carranza are pushing an alternative scheme that would cut Asian enrollment in half.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Ramadan lesson: Curse Jews and Christians 17-times daily Andrew Bostom

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23948

PART 1 of 2

As reported by the indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), esteemed Islamic scholar, and “Spiritual Guide” to the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi provided a Ramadan Koranic “homily”, of sorts, on May 14, 2019. In essence, Qaradawi merely re-affirmed for Muslims the classical-cum-modern mainstream ramifications of a Koranic verse [Koran 1:7] votaries of Islam recite 17-times per day, during their requisite 5 prayer times, and the subdivisions of those prayer sessions.

Notwithstanding what is a rather anodyne reminder to Muslims, the contents of Qaradawi’s statements will be “shocking” to those who are completely uninformed about Islam, or have chosen to understand the creed exclusively through the prism of Muslim and non-Muslim apologists, alike.

Moreover, despite Qaradawi’s mainstream scholarly and cultural bona fides—vis-à-vis authoritative Islamic teaching across a 13 century continuum, and resultant normative, “Sharia thirsty” Muslim attitudes within contemporary Islamdom—predictable efforts will be made to marginalize Qaradawi and his “homily” because of the prominent theologian’s ties to the allegedly “radical” Muslim Brotherhood.

 Accordingly, this very illuminating teachable moment may well be be squandered. My fervent hope against hope is to avert that outcome by reviewing Qaradawi’s Ramadan Koranic lesson, and placing it squarely within the context of canonical Islam as taught since the advent of the Muslim faith.  

Qaradawi opens his discussion with a query which he immediately answers, invoking Koran 47:17:

“Who does not need Allah’s guidance? The Muslim always needs Allah’s guidance so that the paths will be clear for him and so that he does not become confused… Furthermore, he also needs additional guidance [from Allah, for it is said], ‘And those who are guided – He increases them in guidance and gives them their righteousness.’ (Koran 47:17)…”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Political Correctness Blinds Us To The Causes Of Anti-Semitism By David Harsanyi

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/29/political-correctness-blinds-us-causes-anti-semitism/

“As Evelyn Gordon at Commentary noted not long ago, American Jews might believe that “rightist governments enable anti-Semitism” in Europe, but polls show that Jews feel safer, sometimes by a 20-point margin, in places like Poland, Hungary, and Romania—which, maybe not coincidentally, also have low numbers of Muslim immigrants—than they do in countries like France and Germany, where anti-Jewish violence is spiking.”

The New York Times blames Israel for engendering hatred while downplaying some inconvenient facts.

“Speak up, now, when you glimpse evidence of anti-Semitism, particularly within your own ranks, or risk enabling the spread of this deadly virus,” advises a New York Times editorial that fails to mention the words “Ihan Omar,” “Rashida Tlaib,” “Women’s March,” “Black Congressional Caucus,” or anything about the Democratic Party’s complicity in enabling these people and groups, for that matter.

To be fair, as far as New York Times editorials go, this isn’t the worst. It does, however, engage in the ugly leftist habit of blaming Jews for engendering hatred against themselves while downplaying inconvenient facts about anti-Semitism in Europe.

Earlier this year, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs pointed out that nearly 90 percent of European Jews have suffered some form of anti-Semitic threat, insult, or assault. Of those polled, 30 percent identified the perpetrator as “someone with an extremist Muslim view,” 21 percent as someone with left-wing political views, and 13 percent as someone with right-wing politics.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mueller Just Proved His Entire Operation Was A Political Hit Job That Trampled The Rule Of Law By Sean Davis

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/29/mueller-just-proved-his-entire-operation-was

At a hastily-arranged Wednesday press conference, Special Counsel Robert Mueller proved that he was never interested in justice or the rule of law.

If there were any doubts about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s political intentions, his unprecedented press conference on Wednesday should put them all to rest. As he made abundantly clear during his doddering reading of a prepared statement which repeatedly contradicted itself, Mueller had no interest in the equal application of the rule law. He gave the game, and his nakedly political intentions, away repeatedly throughout his statement.

“It is important that the office’s written work speak for itself,” Mueller said, referring to his office’s 448-page report. Mueller’s report was released to the public by Attorney General William Barr nearly six weeks ago. The entire report, minus limited redactions required by law, has been publicly available, pored through, and dissected. Its contents have been discussed ad nauseum in print and on television. The report has been speaking for itself since April 18, when it was released.

If it’s important for the work to speak for itself, then why did Mueller schedule a press conference in which he would speak for it weeks after it was released? The statement, given the venue in which it was provided, is self-refuting.