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Is Eric Holder really qualified to scold Jeff Sessions? By Greg Pisarevsky

Posted By on March 22nd, 2018

Former attorney general Eric Holder scolded Jeff Sessions for the “rushed” firing of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe under pressure from the White House. Holder said Sessions needs “to have the guts” to stand up to President Donald Trump.

This is the same Eric Holder who on June 28, 2012 became the first U.S. attorney general in history to be held in both criminal and civil contempt by the House of Representatives in a 255-67 vote, with 17 Democrats voting for the measure (the rest of the Democrats walked out of the House, refusing to vote).

Peculiarly enough, in the first part of his claim, Mr. Holder may be not too far from the truth. Jeff Sessions really does “need to have the guts”…to consider starting a DOJ investigation of Holder’s activity in 2009-2015, when he “served” our country as the U.S. attorney general. And Sessions knows it as well as anyone. It was Republican Senator Jeff Sessions who gave a well deserved objurgation to Mr. Holder on June 17, 2009, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Back at that time, Sessions was of the opinion that after spending only five months on the job, Holder put into question the integrity and independence of the Department of Justice.

According to then-senator Jeff Sessions, in just a few months, A.G. Eric Holder, among other things, ignored recommendations of the Office of Legal Counsel on the constitutionality of a D.C. voting bill, refused a request from law enforcement officials to keep interrogation methods confidential, and released dangerous detainees from American prisons.

The list of Holder’s “achievements” as A.G. could be continued to eternity. On February 18, 2009, during Black History Month. Eric Holder called USA a “nation of cowards” on racial issues, stirring much controversy and even a statement from President Obama mentioning that he “would use different language” talking about the same issue. Mr. Holder refused to prosecute the famous case of voters intimidation by the Black Panthers in Philadelphia and called only black Americans “my people” while supposedly representing the whole American nation.

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Amy Wax and Free Speech at Penn By Gamaliel Isaac

Posted By on March 22nd, 2018

In August 2017, Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Larry Alexander, a law professor at the University of San Diego, wrote an article arguing that we are paying the price for the loss of values that we had up to the mid-60s. They listed those values as:

“Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”

They argued that these values are superior to what we have today such as “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks and the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

One could hardly imagine a more innocuous article, yet the blowback has been escalating ever since and Black Lives Matter plans to sow chaos on Penn’s campus if Dr. Wax is not fired.

Note that while single parenthood is a bigger problem in the black community than in the white community, Amy Wax and Larry Alexander went out of their way to describe it as a characteristic of the white community, because they wanted to stress that people from all segments of our society have lost the values of the past. Wax emphasized that “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” and that “bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead” in an interview about her article with the Daily Pennsylvanian.

The efforts of Wax and Alexander to be evenhanded didn’t protect them from false accusations of racism and white supremacism from organizations at Penn. It didn’t stop 33 Penn Law faculty members from publishing a letter in the Daily Pennsylvanian condemning Amy Wax.

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As Biden and Kerry Went Soft on China, Sons Made Nuclear, Military Business Deals with Chinese Gov’t By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on March 22nd, 2018

In 2013 and 2014, China embarked on an aggressive air and island campaign to dominate the South China Sea, much to the dismay of Japan and other countries in the region. When Vice President Joe Biden visited the country in 2013, he emphasized trade between the U.S. and China and did not focus on the South China Sea. Secretary of State John Kerry did the same in 2014.

Meanwhile, Biden’s son Hunter and Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz carried out massive business deals with Chinese officials and the state-owned Bank of China. Worse, Hunter Biden and Chris Heinz even invested in a Chinese nuclear company under FBI investigation.

“During a critical eighteen-month period of diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Beijing, the Biden and Kerry families and friends pocketed major cash from companies connected to the Chinese government,” Peter Schweizer writes in his new book “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends.”

Schweizer’s book delves into the ways in which “American Princelings” profit at home and abroad from the economic and diplomatic policies of high-ranking U.S. officials. With former Vice President Biden rumored to be considering a 2020 presidential run, the scandals surrounding how his diplomatic efforts enriched his son take on renewed importance. His role in abetting China’s aggression for family gain seems particularly damning.

When Biden became the vice president in 2009, his son Hunter Biden “became a social fixture in Washington,” Schweizer explains. In the summer of 2009, the VP’s son joined forces with Chris Heinz, a wealthy heir to the late Senator John Heinz, whose wife Teresa married Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.). The two formed Rosemont Capital, an alternative investment firm “positioned to strike profitable deals overseas with foreign governments and officials with whom the U.S. government was negotiating.”

Devon Archer, Chris Heinz’s roommate at Yale and star fundraiser for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential run, joined the American Princelings at Rosemont. Federal agents would later arrest Archer in May 2016 for defrauding a Native American tribe in an effort to enrich a branch of Rosemont Capital, Rosemont Seneca Bohai.

The American Princelings set up Rosemont Capital as an alternative investment fund of the Heinz Family Office, and attached several branches to it, including Rosemont Seneca Partners and Rosemont Realty.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

John Stossel: Pompeo, Trump and the Paris climate agreement

Posted By on March 22nd, 2018

President Trump’s pick to be the new secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is not a fan of the Paris climate agreement, the treaty that claims it will slow global warning by reducing the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Politicians from most of the world’s nations signed the deal, and President Obama said “we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”

That’s dubious.

Trump wisely said he will pull America out of the deal. He called it a “massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.”

Unfortunately, Trump often reverses himself.

The climate change lobby has been trying to change Trump’s mind. Al Gore called his stance “reckless and indefensible.” Most of the media agree. So do most of my neighbors in New York.

That’s why it’s good that Pompeo opposes the Paris deal. Such treaties are State Department responsibilities. Pompeo is more likely to hold Trump to his word than his soon-to-be predecessor Rex Tillerson, who liked the agreement.

The Paris accord is a bad deal because even if greenhouse gases really are a huge threat, this treaty wouldn’t do much about them.

I’ll bet Al Gore and most of the media don’t even know what’s in the accord. I didn’t until I researched it for this week’s YouTube video.

Manhattan Institute senior fellow Oren Cass is the rare person who actually read the Paris accord.

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Trump is right: The special counsel should never have been appointed Alan Dershowitz

Posted By on March 22nd, 2018

President Trump is right in saying that a special counsel should never have been appointed to investigate the so-called Russian connection. There was no evidence of any crime committed by the Trump administration. But there was plenty of evidence that Russian operatives had tried to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, and perhaps other elections, in the hope of destabilizing democracy. Yet, appointing a special counsel to look for crimes, behind the closed doors of a grand jury, was precisely the wrong way to address this ongoing challenge to our democracy.

The right way would have been (and still is) to appoint a nonpartisan investigative commission, such as the one appointed following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to conduct a broad and open investigation of the Russian involvement in our elections. This is what other democracies, such as Great Britain and Israel, do in response to systemic problems. The virtue of such a commission is precisely the nonpartisan credibility of its objective experts, who have no political stake in the outcome.
Such a commission could have informed the American public of what Russia did and how to prevent it from doing it again. It would not seek partisan benefit from its findings, the way congressional committees invariably do. Nor would it be searching for crimes in an effort to criminalize political sins, the way special counsels do to justify their existence and budget. Its only job would be to gather information and make recommendations.

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Facebook, Uber and the end of the Great American Tech Delusion Tech Bubble Part II has arrived in America but China will probably navigate around it thanks to a culture of innovation David Goldman

Posted By on March 22nd, 2018

We’ve been there before, in the crash of the dot-com bubble of 2000, when we believed that downloading pop music and porn would drive the economy of the future. We’ve done it again: We made another tech bubble on the premise that Americans would write the apps and Asians would make the hardware, and the miracle of connectivity would bring the world together in Mark Zuckerberg’s utopian vision. Internet community and Artificial Intelligence were the two blasts of hot air that inflated the bubble. Social media as a substitute for actual human interaction and computation as a substitute for human thought were going to waft us into the future.

Yesterday’s double crash of these delusions was the sort of irony that makes one intimate the hand of God in human history.

The crown jewel of Artificial Intelligence shattered when Uber’s autonomous SUV ran over Ms. Elaine Herzberg at the corner of Curry and Mill Street in Tempe, Arizona. And the concept of Internet community vaporized when news reports alleged that Cambridge Analytica improperly retained Facebook profiles of 50 million users. Facebook promptly lost 7% of its stock market value in yesterday’s trading, and other big tech names fell by 3% to 4%.

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John Brennan’s Thwarted Coup George Neumayr

Posted By on March 22nd, 2018

As his plot to destroy Trump backfires, his squeals grow louder.It was the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky who coined the phrase the “dustbin of history.” To his political opponents, he sputtered, “You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!”

It is no coincidence that John Brennan, who supported the Soviet-controlled American Communist Party in the 1970s (he has acknowledged that he thought his vote for its presidential candidate Gus Hall threatened his prospects at the CIA; unfortunately, it didn’t), would borrow from Trotsky’s rhetoric in his fulminations against Donald Trump. His tweet last week, shortly after the firing of Andrew McCabe, reeked of Trotskyite revolutionary schlock: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.”

America will triumph over a president it elected? That’s the raw language of coup, and of course it is not the first time Brennan has indulged it. In 2017, he was calling for members of the executive branch to defy the chief executive. They should “refuse to carry out” his lawful directives if they don’t agree with them, he said.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

David Archibald Climate Sooks Can Stop Whimpering

Posted By on March 21st, 2018

“Everything is pointing to belief in global warming as being a reliable indicator that a person is a mindless fool, a witless idiot. If they can’t get global warming right and persist in believing in something for which there is not a scintilla of evidence, then how can they trusted to make the right decision in any instance? ”

This time it is bushfires, the next it will be floods, or drought, or gender-fluid frogs or somesuch. No matter what Gaia comes up with, some or other spigot of snappy sound bytes will point at climate change with one hand while reaching for fresh grants with the other. Well, they need fret no more.

According to an article in The Australian, the Greens have blamed bushfires and cyclones on the government’s inaction on climate change. Well the good news for the Greens is that they are wrong and therefore they can worry about something else instead. Australia’s climate hasn’t changed one whit, so a deranged climate can’t be the cause for bushfires and cyclones. Exhibit A is Australia’s lower tropospheric temperature anomaly as measured by satellites with the data available from Dr Roy Spencers’ group at the University of Alabama in Huntsville:

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Paul Collits: Ideology Stomps on Truth

Posted By on March 21st, 2018

The Left’s rules: The personal is political. Belief trumps argument and evidence. Don’t change your mind when the facts change, simply summon a Twitter posse of the abusively like-minded. ‘Shut up’ is a valid argument. There can be no debate with racists/misogynists/climate deniers…

The increasing inability to reach a “sensible center” consensus on important political and cultural issues – what the late Christopher Pearson called “club sensible” – has been much noted across Western countries. The capacity to “reach across the aisle” in the USA, for example, is all but a distant memory. Ideological and partisan opponents have dug into entrenched positions on most issues and refuse to budge. More and more, we find that ad hominem attacks substitute for reasoned, solutions-oriented, respectful conversations among antagonists. There are a number of reasons why this has occurred.

One is the pervasive influence of relativism – the belief that there is no truth, not in relation to anything. Another is the coming of social media, which encourages all sorts of people with all sorts of views to vent them boldly to audiences they may not know personally and will ikely never meet face to face. A third reason is the general shallowness and incoherence of the age in which we live. A fourth is the decline of critical thinking skills that were, in former times, routinely developed in the many classics, humanities and liberal arts programs that now more or less no longer exist. Critical skills that supported reasoned arguments, and therefore reasonable positions on topics of the day. A fifth, I believe, is that now it is just about universally (and erroneously) accepted across most political and cultural institutions that “everything is political”, and that “the personal is political”. Again, this is post-modernism 101. A sixth is the close contemporary alignment of the political with one’s group “identity”, guaranteeing a deeply personal and entirely subjective stake in one’s political positions. This applies specifically to those of the left, who so often are allowed to set the agendas for political and cultural debate.

But there is something else at work. This is an age of ideology, of group identity, of culture wars and warriors. Of in-built, reflexively and tightly held positions on issues. There is much intransigence, often viciously expressed. And the stakes are high. If you are religious, for example, it matters deeply when supporters of gay rights press on beyond the acquisition of agreed, sensible respect for all persons and their dignity, towards dictating whom Christian schools can employ. We see all around the attacks on freedom of speech and of belief, their enemies gussied-up with awards and accolades despite representing the antithesis of that which they are purported to champion. The stakes are indeed high. People can lose their jobs, their careers even, when they express the “wrong” views (especially in public) on a contested subject where there are ideologically entrenched positions in play.

There seems very little desire abroad to say, “Well, you have a point, you know. Let’s sit down and discuss this over a coffee. We might both be right, or at least we might both hit upon parts of the truth.” Yeah, right.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Officials Confirm Russian Hackers Can Shut Down U.S. Power Plants At Will By Jack Crowe

Posted By on March 21st, 2018

State-sponsored Russian hackers currently possess the ability to shut down U.S. power plants should they so choose.

The hackers gained access to critical control systems at numerous unspecified power plants beginning in the spring of 2017, allowing them to disrupt the facilities’ operations at will, according to a Department of Homeland Security report released Thursday.

Moscow continues to enjoy access to the machines controlling the power plants and could theoretically disrupt their operations given the requisite level of Russo–American hostilities, multiple government officials and private security professionals confirmed to the New York Times Friday.

“We now have evidence they’re sitting on the machines, connected to industrial control infrastructure, that allow them to effectively turn the power off or effect sabotage,” said Eric Chien, a security technology director at Symantec, a digital security firm. “From what we can see, they were there. They have the ability to shut the power off. All that’s missing is some political motivation.”

DHS and the FBI first warned utilities companies of the emerging threat in June, roughly a year and a half after intelligence agencies first became aware that Russia had redoubled their efforts to infiltrate critical U.S. infrastructure.