WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

We must defeat Theresa May’s wretched Brexit deal and go out into the world with hope and imagination David Davis

Posted By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/12/08/must-defeat-theresa-mays-wretched-brexit-deal-go-world-hope/

This week’s meaningful vote on the Prime Minister’s Withdrawal Agreement marks a watershed moment in British politics. Parliament will decide on the UK’s future relationship with the European Union for a generation to come. That’s not hype. This is the decisive moment.

We are being asked to shackle ourselves to a deal which hands over £39 Billion without anything guaranteed in return, which allows the European Court of Justice to continue to interfere in British law and our daily lives, and which breaks the Conservative manifesto promise to leave the customs union. As Margaret Thatcher once said “No, No, No.”

There is an alternative. We can stop grappling and start grasping the global opportunities available to the UK. The real Brexit prize is the opportunity to go out into the world and agree free trade deals with old friends and new allies.

The UK’s biggest export market is the United States, worth over £110 billion a year. That is almost double our next biggest trading partner, Germany. Our trade with the United States, China and Australia far exceeds our trade with Germany, France and the Netherlands. When we traded primarily in bulky goods, such as coal or steel, our closest trading partners were often our biggest. This is no longer the case. Distance is dead.

The world is changing rapidly, and the UK must keep up. We have to look beyond Europe and seize the opportunities Brexit presents for us to be a truly Global Britain. Let’s not restrict ourselves to obsessive discussion of EU internal market or tie ourselves in knots as to how future trade will be conducted within the EU.

Aside from a global trade deal, Brexit brings a host of new opportunities. We have the opportunity to scrap the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, allowing us to better support farmers, fishermen and consumers, and prioritise animal welfare.

We are a world leader in several emerging sectors including artificial intelligence, life sciences and information technology. These are the sectors of the future, and the UK is well poised to take advantage.

But if we remain tied to EU rules and within the EU’s orbit we will not remain a global leader for long. The EU will seek to reign in our competitive advantage with stifling regulations. Imagine being a global power in an emerging industry but having no power to set the rules.

We cannot allow ourselves to be bound by the EU’s stifling bureaucracy. Nobody is calling for a Wild West of deregulation. But we can have smarter, more sensible rules that create a fertile environment for our industries to thrive.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academics’ Mobbing of a Young Scholar Must be Denounced

Posted By on December 8th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/12/07/academics-mobbing-of-a-

The latest victim of an academic mobbing is 28-year-old social scientist Noah Carl who has been awarded a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship at St Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge.

Rarely has the power asymmetry between the academic mob and its victim been so stark. Dr Carl is a young researcher, just starting out in his career, who is being mobbed for being awarded a prestigious research scholarship on the basis of his peer-reviewed research.

While getting a position like this is normally a time for celebration for junior academics, Dr Carl has gone to ground, unable to defend his reputation from libellous attacks, as he has been instructed not to talk to the media.

Three hundred academics from around the world, many of them professors, have signed an open letter denouncing Dr Carl and demanding that the University of Cambridge “immediately conduct an investigation into the appointment process” on the grounds that his work is “ethically suspect” and “methodologically flawed.” The letter states: “we are shocked that a body of work that includes vital errors in data analysis and interpretation appears to have been taken seriously.” Yet the letter contains no evidence of any academic misconduct. It does not include a single reference to any of Dr Carl’s papers, let alone any papers that are “ethically suspect” or “methodologically flawed.”

Drawing on disparate fields of research in psychology, psychometrics and sociology, Dr Carl’s papers have been peer reviewed and published in journals such as Intelligence, Personality & Individual Differences, The American Sociologist, Comparative Sociology, European Union Politics, and The British Journal of Sociology. His papers have been cited 235 times since 2013.

Much of Dr Carl’s research focuses on how intelligence and other psychological characteristics affect beliefs and attitudes. Papers include: Leave and Remain voters’ knowledge of the EU after the referendum of 2016, Cognitive Ability and Political Beliefs in the United States, and his most cited paper, published in Intelligence in 2014, Verbal Intelligence is correlated with socially and economically liberal beliefs.

Which of these, or any of Dr Carl’s other papers, contain “vital errors in data-analysis”? We’re not told. Nevertheless, on the strength of these allegations alone, with no supporting evidence provided, the letter’s authors have invited people to sign the petition—and hundreds have.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pathetic Clintons resort to Groupon trying to get people to show up and fill some seats on their stadium tour By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/pathetic_clintons_resort_to_groupon_trying_to_get_people_to_show_up_and_fill_some_seats_on_their_stadium_tour.html

We now have the first acknowledgment from their side that the Clintons vastly overestimated their personal popularity and the public’s interest in hearing them talk about themselves.

The Clintons and their stadium tour promoter are officially responding to the public’s refusal to show up in sufficient numbers for them to avoid embarrassment (and financial loss) at the level of ticket prices that seemed realistic when the tour was announced only two months ago. The UK Daily Mail noticed this offer on Groupon:

(source)

This is pathetic on a couple of levels. First of all, notice that this is not some last-minute sale, but rather for an event half a year in the future. In other words, they have given up on the price list that seemed realistic to them just a couple of months ago. They are admitting they are not worth (to the public) what they were charging.

Secondly, they are turning to a company, Groupon, that has also discovered that its stock price was too expensive for the public. Check out its stock chart since its IPO:

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

No way out for Clinton, Inc. corruption this time By Ed Timperlake

Posted By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/no_way_out_for_clinton_inc_corruption_this_time.html

The legal dodge used by James Comey to exonerate Hillary Clinton from her prima facie crimes in using an unsecured server for official business won’t be any help to the Clinton Foundation as it faces charges coming from whistleblowers.

Clinton Inc. criminal defense lawyers trying to hide behind the word “intent” won’t work because the Clintons were previously warned early and often about improper compliance:

.. internal legal reviews that the foundation conducted on itself in 2008 and 2011.

Those reviews flagged serious concerns about legal compliance, improper commingling of personal and charity business and “quid pro quo” promises made to donors while Hillary Clinton was secretary of State.

“With a cloth?”

There is a great line in the fun movie, National Treasure, spoken by the accomplished, former Marine, Harvey Keitel, who was playing a very solid FBI Special Agent “Someone has to go to prison Ben.”

Sadly, as both the first Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Public Affairs and then in a reorganization as being in charge of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs for the Veterans Administration, I did experience many scammers and real criminal types that actually did not go to prison but walked away without being charged after running truly horrific veteran charity scams.

The lesson I learned in trying to bring many veteran charity scams to justice was, sadly, that a legal strategy adopted by defendants often worked. Two FBI Special Agents who were investigating a $ 6 million scam out of the $ 7 million collected said DOJ Attorneys prosecuting charity cases have to respect the power of the word “intent”. Thus the cases were often dropped.

But now the FBI/DOJ does not have that excuse to withhold a prosecution going forward.

One of the elements of a crime is that the criminal behavior has to be documented as being undertaken knowingly and purposeful which is exactly what the whistleblower documents prove.

Often, charity scammers walk away clean because the Government cannot prove “intent” because the defendant if taken to court will simply say; look at our good work we are just bad managers.

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Then They Came for Me’ Review: Germany’s Tortured Conscience Pastor Niemöller spoke out against Nazism. In 1937 he was sent to the camps for “misusing the pulpit.” By Doris Bergen

Posted By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/then-they-came-for-me-review-germanys-tortured-conscience-1544223502

In the annals of the Holocaust, Martin Niemöller cuts an awkward figure. A celebrity in his day, the impulsive German pastor is now remembered, if at all, as the tag to the quote that begins, “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist.” Though a political prisoner, he is sometimes called a martyr but did not die at Nazi hands. In fact, Niemöller remained alive for decades after the war, time he used to try to reckon what he had been part of—and frequently to put his foot in his mouth.

Niemöller’s only meeting with Adolf Hitler was a fiasco. It was January 1934, and Hitler had been in power for just under a year. The chancellor, obsessed with his image, was irritated about strife in the German Protestant church and the foreign press coverage it attracted. Disunity made him look weak. To manage the situation, Hitler summoned a dozen prominent clergymen to his presence. Among them was the Lutheran pastor and former submarine captain Martin Niemöller.

Then They Came For Me

By Matthew D. Hockenos
Basic, 322 pages, $30

A junior member of the group, Niemöller stood near the back. When Hermann Göring, head of the newly formed Gestapo, spoke he pulled a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and began to read the transcript of a phone call recorded that very morning. It was a conversation between Niemöller and a friend. Frozen with dread, the churchmen heard how a cocky Niemöller had promised that everything would be fine. Hitler would come to see that the people he considered opponents within the church were in fact loyal Germans. Anyway, President Hindenburg would take their side, Niemöller predicted gleefully, and by the end of the meeting the old man would be “administer[ing] the last rites” to the upstart Hitler.

The meeting thus torpedoed, the future of the outspoken Niemöller quivered in the balance. Would the devout Christian emerge a champion against the moral evil of Nazism? Or would the ardent nationalist, who voted for Hitler in 1924 and again in March 1933, redouble his efforts to prove that he could serve both his country and his faith and in the process become complicit in Nazi crimes? The answer, Matthew Hockenos reveals in a gripping biography, is “yes” and “yes,” or, more precisely, “yes but.” Niemöller was heroic but flawed, and his life and legacy challenge the popular notion of the individual hero as society’s best hope. In its place, “the pastor who defied the Nazis” offers two modest messages for those under threat in our own troubled times: help one another and don’t wait too long.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Violent Protests Spread from Paris to Belgium and Netherlands By Rick Moran

Posted By on December 8th, 2018

At least 700 were arrested in Paris as 5,000 demonstrators faced off against 8,000 police in another violent demonstration by “yellow vest” protesters.

Riots broke out all over France despite the supposed cause of the violence being eliminated earlier in the week by the government of President Emmanuel Macron. The government had been claiming that a fuel tax increase was to blame for the protests, but the government rescinded the increase on Wednesday.

Donald Trump believes it was Macron’s climate change policies:

But the protesters themselves were giving the real reason for the violence — if anyone in Macron’s government was listening.

Fox News:

“We are not here to destroy Paris, we are here to tell Macron we are f–king fed up,” said one protester before the clashes with the police began, adding that the people are protesting ever-increasing taxes on the working class.

[…]

Many protesters slammed the French media for portraying the protests as led by violent agitators and for siding with Macron’s government.

“We are not black bloc [black clad anarchists], we are ordinary people voicing our anger,” said a protester who did not want to be identified.

Meanwhile, the contagion has spread to neighboring Belgium and the Netherlands.

ABCNews:

Belgian police fired tear gas and water cannons at yellow-vested protesters calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Charles Michel after they tried to breach a riot barricade, as the movement that started in France made its mark Saturday in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Protesters in Brussels threw paving stones, road signs, fireworks, flares and other objects at police blocking their entry to an area where Michel’s offices, other government buildings and the parliament are located.

Brussels police spokeswoman Ilse Van de Keere said that around 400 protesters were gathered in the area.

About 100 were detained, many for carrying dangerous objects like fireworks or clothing that could be used as protection in clashes with police.

The reasons for the protests are not entirely clear. Neither Belgium nor the Netherlands has proposed a hike in fuel tax — the catalyst for the massive and destructive demonstrations in France in recent weeks.

Instead, protesters appeared to hail at least in part from a populist movement that is angry at government policy in general and what it sees as the widening gulf between mainstream politicians and the voters who put them in power. Some in Belgium appeared intent only on confronting police.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The missing collusion investigation

Posted By on December 8th, 2018

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/dec/5/editorial-settling-a-score-is-what-robert-mueller-/

Friends don’t let friends go to the clink. The conclusion that the nation is currently running on a dual justice system — a gentler, privileged system for Hillary Clinton and her cronies, and a harsh and unforgiving system for everyone else — is coming evident to everyone.

Robert Mueller’s search for a collusion between President Trump and Vladimir Putin to cook the 2016 presidential election to a Republican recipe has been covered in exhausting but not exhaustive detail by the Democratic media, from Paul Manafort’s choice of designer neckties suitable for wearing to court to whether Michael Cohen told the FBI his work for a Trump construction project ended in January or June of 2016. It’s hard to say exactly on which side of the yellow line separating titillation and tedium the Mueller squad car runs, but it hasn’t yet picked up anyone linking Russian collusion to the president.

Out of public view, U.S. Attorney John Huber has been working with Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz in investigating what Mr. Mueller could not or would not investigate. Did Obama administration officials use falsified intelligence to obtain warrants to spy on Trump associates? Did such authorities give Hillary and Bill Clinton and their associates a pass for corruption in return for contributions to the Clinton Foundation?

There’s ample reason to suspect that none of the old friends of Hillary and Bill at the Justice Department are on the scout for evidence that would lead to measuring Hillary for stripes. The lawyer for one whistleblower told The Daily Caller last week that he has firsthand knowledge of the crusade to defend Hillary at all costs. Michael Socarras says his client, Dennis Nathan Cain, provided information to the Justice Department and House and Senate Intelligence Committees about unsavory deals involving the Clinton Foundation, Uranium One, the company that enabled Russians to get control of a share of the U.S. uranium market, and the Russian nuclear energy company Rosatom.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE CURSE OF ANTISEMANTICS

Posted By on December 8th, 2018

Gender neutral language and pronouns?

What have we come to? Will the classic musical “Guys and Dolls” have to change its title to “Zeys and Shims”????

Will we no longer hear the wonderful “There is Nothing Like a Dame” from South Pacific? Instead “There is Nothing Like a Hir” ????

And what about “I Enjoy Being a Girl”???? It will definitely be banned…buy your Peggy Lee copy now.

I’m a girl and by me that’s only great
I am proud that my silhouette is curvy
that I walk with a sweet and girlish gait
With my hips kind of swivelly and swervey
I’m strictly a female female
And my future I hope will be
In the home of a brave and free male
who’ll enjoy being a guy, having a girl like me.

Oh Puleez!!!!rsk

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The New Norm: Crime, But Not Punishment : Ilana Mercer

Posted By on December 8th, 2018

http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=996
In the title of his magisterial book, Fyodor Dostoevsky paired “Crime and Punishment,”not crime and pardons, or crime and “Civics lessons,” amnesty and asylum.

Punishment must closely follow a crime in order to be both effective as a deterrent, as well as to serve as a public declaration of values and norms.

In explaining Texas justice and its attendant values, stand-up satirist Ron White performed the public service no politician is prepared to perform. “In Texas, we have the death penalty and we use it. If you come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back.”

So, where’s such clarity when you need it?

Something has gotten into the country’s lymphatic system. The infection is becoming more apparent by the day, not least in the way matters of life-and-death are debated (or not).

Again-and-again one hears boilerplate statements that fail to properly fix on the defining issues of our time, much less fix them.

Consider the flippancy over threats against persons and property, from within the country and from without it.

The home of Fox News personality Tucker Carlson is surrounded by a small, if menacing, mob, and his family threatened. Before dinging the man’s front door, the assailants chant out their criminal intentions:

“Tucker Carlson, we will fight. We know where you sleep at night. We know where you sleep.”

To which other talkers, even the wonderful Tucker, respond by vaporizing about rights to speech and protest vs. some or other watered-down peace and security to which private property owners are entitled.

Nobody alludes to the rights of private property or to the fulcrum that is law-and-order.

No demands for arrests are issued or voiced, publicly. No expectation for retribution is set-up. Follow-up is nonexistent in media. Police do not publicize any arrests. If they make them, none are reported by media.

No teachable moments occur.

IMMIGRATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Let’s Mobilize an Army of Stone Throwers on the Border By Ilana Mercer

Posted By on December 8th, 2018

In the United States, even our Customs and Border Protection apologizes for doing its job. Allegedly, CBP “protects the public from dangerous people and materials attempting to cross the border …”

On one of the media networks that wants all people, dangerous or not, to cross the southern border into the United States if they so desire, a CBP officer was bending over backwards to appear like a “global force for good.” (That, believe it or not, was the U.S. Navy’s motto, between 2009 and 2015!)

Tear-gassing rabble-rousing migrants, who were charging his officers and breaching the U.S.-Mexico border, was in the service of protecting … the migrants, especially The Children. Perhaps that’s in the oath of office a CBP officer takes?

Law enforcement officers entrusted with the safety of the American people struggle to articulate pride in executing their mandate. Attached to the expected self-loathing repartee is, invariably, a declaration of loyalties to The World. (Of a piece with this confused loyalty is the typical argument made by the typical TV talker: Illegal immigration must be stopped, so as to … save migrants from the journey’s depredations.)

It’s instructive to contrast the apologies around defending the U.S. border and the American people with the absence of apologies on Israel’s borders.

In May of this year, The Economist reported, “Tens of thousands of Palestinians massed near Gaza’s border fence, threatening to ‘return’ to the lands their forefathers lost when Israel was created in 1948.” They wanted in.

Israeli soldiers responded not with tear gas, but with bullets. They killed over 60 protesters who threatened to breach the border. The number has since risen to 120.