NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Some Good Jobs News The black jobless rate falls to its lowest ever in the Labor statistics.

Posted By on January 6th, 2018

Friday’s Labor Department report on the December jobs market was mostly ho-hum, with the economy creating 148,000 net new jobs and the unemployment rate staying flat at a low 4.1%. But one more hopeful figure leapt out at us and a few others: The unemployment rate for black Americans fell to its lowest rate ever at 6.8%.

That’s right. The jobless rate for African-Americans hasn’t been lower since 1972, the earliest date we could find in the Bureau of Labor Statistics data tables. The jobless rate for blacks has always been substantially higher than for whites, and it tends to fall faster later in the economic cycle as growth picks up steam. The black jobless rate fell into the 7%-8% range in 1999-2000, before the dot-com bubble burst, and briefly in 2007 before the financial panic. But it climbed back to as high as 16.8% in 2010 before a long, slow decline as the economy recovered.

The rate has fallen especially fast the last couple of years, and in December fell another 0.4 percentage points. That big a fall might be a statistical anomaly that bounces back up in future months, but the downward trend is as clear as the political and economic message: Get the economy growing faster, and everyone will benefit.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Haley Thanks UN Ambassadors for Standing With US on Jerusalem

Posted By on January 6th, 2018

JNS.org – Two weeks after the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution criticizing the American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley hosted a reception on Wednesday for the 64 other countries that refused to back the measure.

The “Friends of the US” reception was held for the ambassadors of the eight countries (including Israel) that voted against the resolution in addition to the US, the 35 countries that abstained, and the 21 whose envoys did not show up for the vote.

“It’s easy for friends to be with you in the good times, but it’s the friends who are with you during the challenging times that will never be forgotten. Thank you to the 64,” Haley said at the reception, before reading the list of countries.

The event also included a video message from President Donald Trump.

“Rest assured that your actions on Thursday, December 21, will go down as a very important date, [and] were noted and greatly appreciated,” Trump said. “The United States remains committed to achieving lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. There’s no reason that peace should not be entered into. We will continue to work with the partners like you to ensure a peaceful and prosperous future for the region, for the people, for the world.”

Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon posted on Facebook, “I was honored to take part in a reception hosted by Ambassador Nikki Haley for the countries that stood by the US during the UN vote on Jerusalem. The leadership shown by the US unveiled the hypocrisy of the Palestinians, who speak of peace while doing all they can to avoid negotiations….We thank Ambassador Haley and the American people for their strong stance on behalf of truth and historical justice.”

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

US Freezes $125 Million Funds for Palestinian Refugees: Report

Posted By on January 6th, 2018

The United States has frozen $125 million in funding for a UN agency that provides aid to Palestinian refugees, Axios news site reported on Friday, citing three unidentified Western diplomats.https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/01/05/us-freezes-125-million-funds-for-palestinian-refugees-report/

The diplomats said funding, a third of the annual US donation to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, was supposed to be delivered by Jan. 1 but was frozen until the administration of US President Donald Trump finishes its review of US aid to the Palestinian Authority, Axios reported.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Legal Battle Heats Up Over Fordham University Decision to Ban ‘Students for Justice in Palestine by Shiri Moshe

Posted By on January 6th, 2018

Fordham University in New York on Wednesday called on a judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed over its refusal to recognize a chapter of the anti-Zionist group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/01/05/legal-battle-continues-over-fordham-university-decision-to-ban-students-for-justice-in-palestine/

Four current and former students filed the motion accusing Fordham of practicing viewpoint discrimination by barring the formation of an SJP affiliate, and demanded that the university sanction the club while the case is in litigation. The private Jesuit school has argued, in turn, that SJP’s reported behavior on campuses nationwide indicate that the establishment of a local branch could be “polarizing” and pose a safety concern to students and faculty.

Justice Nancy Bannon of the New York County State Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling at a later date.

Keith Eldredge, dean of students at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, announced in a December 2016 email that he would deny SJP club status, even though the school’s United Student Government voted to grant the group recognition. Under university policy, the dean has the final authority to approve or deny student clubs.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sexual Harassment East and West by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on January 5th, 2018

“I say that when a girl walks about like that, it is a patriotic duty to sexually harass her and a national duty to rape her.” — Nabih Wahsh, Islamist lawyer, on Egypt’s al-Assema TV, October 19, 2017.

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 sparked off increasingly revolutionary movements across the Islamic world, and in the process saw women in many countries denied the freedoms they had started to acquire under earlier regimes. The veil returned widely, notably in Turkey, following the growing power of authoritarian and fundamentalist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with women’s rights being increasingly denied.

We urgently need to drop our unwillingness to contrast Western and Islamic values — whether regarding violence, treatment of religious minorities, anti-Semitism, or treatment of women. There are also growing numbers of Muslims, as we are seeing today in Iran, who find wider Islamic attitudes abhorrent and work hard, mostly against the odds, to bring their faith closer to modern values.

For a time, one could not open a newspaper or visit an online news site without finding yet another scandal about sexual harassment. Lawyers are presumably going to have a field day for years to come. In the UK, a further wave of accusations has shaken an already shaky parliament and the Government, whose Cabinet is increasingly in disarray. In the US Congress, Hollywood and elsewhere, similar claims are still being made, with #MeToo stories being shared by women, while there is an unknown number of accusations in US statehouses.

Sex scandals in the West are far from new.[1] The irony is that this brings us face to face with attitudes to the same problem in the Islamic world.

For many years in the West, it was common practice for sexual harassment and rape among celebrities and public figures to be hushed up. To secure silence, abusers often used bribes or threats. Young women feared the loss of their careers or reputations; in many instances, the police would reject claims of abuse. This happened more than once in the UK, when young victims of “Asian” grooming gangs were not believed by social workers and police; in Europe authorities tried — and still try (see here, here and here) — to cover up harassment and rape committed by Muslim migrants. There will be a lot of work to do to protect women and children from the excesses of so many men.

Just watch and marvel at this short clip from a debate on Egypt’s al-Assema TV, aired on October 19, 2017, or read an English transcript. The Director-General of al-Assema is Brigadier-General Muhammad Samir, a former spokesman for the Egyptian armed forces. His appointment has been criticized on the grounds that it is “a miserable attempt by the military regime authorities to nationalize the media, unify its message, and block any opposing voices against the government”. In that sense, al-Assema represents a semi-official voice.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Macron Criticizes U.S. & Israel For Siding With Iranian Protesters France demonstrates yet again why it is — and will always be — a third-rate power. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on January 5th, 2018

On Thursday, French president Emmanuel Macron criticized the United States and Israel for encouraging anti-regime protests in Iran claiming, inter alia, that such talk would lead the world closer to war. “The official line pursued by the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia, who are our allies in many ways, is almost one that would lead us to war,” Macron told reporters.

Unlike his predecessor, who capitulated to the whims and dictates of the mullahs, President Donald Trump voiced strong support for the protesters and leveled harsh criticism against the oppressive theocratic regime. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized Europe’s tepid reaction to the rapidly unfolding events throughout Iran and issued encouragement to the protesters, referring to them as “heroic” and “brave.”

With his pusillanimous comments, Macron demonstrates yet again why France is, and will always be a third rate power. Few nations in the world today pose more of a threat to world peace than the Islamic Republic of Iran. But France, steeped in the craven mindset of 1938 Munich is either unwilling or unable to recognize the clear and present danger posed by this malevolent regime.

Iran has planned and carried out dozens of acts of terror across five continents. The regime currently provides financial and military support to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad, groups listed as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) by the State Department and designated as terrorist organizations by the European Union as well as several Arab nations. Iran enabled Assad to perpetrate genocide against his own people, enabled Hezbollah to swallow Lebanon whole, has spread misery in Yemen and provided deadly Explosively Formed Projectiles (EFP) to Jihadists battling American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Trump Collusion Conspiracy Theory Falls Apart Here’s what you get for 7 months and $7 million. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 5th, 2018

Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate Russian collusion back in May. A new year is upon us.

The warm May temperatures have been replaced by a deep freeze and snow is falling in Tallahassee. But after blowing through around $7 million and putting on an exciting show of surprise raids, gag orders, leaks and the varying pleas and indictments; Mueller still hasn’t produced a single collusion indictment.

It’s much easier to pick Manafort’s lock than to prove Hillary Clinton’s conspiracy theory.

What Mueller did was harass a bunch of already shady characters into pleading guilty on minor charges, some, like lying to the FBI, created by his own investigation. All he had to do was get his team of Obama and Clinton supporters in front of Obama and Clinton judges who would rubber stamp anything.

And the grand jury allegedly looked like a “Bernie Sanders” or “Black Lives Matter” rally with some participants wearing left-wing shirts. There wasn’t a single white male among the 20 jurors. That’s a convenient way to screen out likely Trump supporters and bring in likely Trump opponents.

Blatantly rigging it to a low bar is an admission by Mueller and his team that their case is too weak for prime time. Even now Manafort is suing the DOJ. His lawsuit may go nowhere, but the odds are good that Mueller’s tactics and evidence won’t stand up to serious scrutiny. That’s what happened with key Mueller team member Andrew Weissmann’s assault on Arthur Andersen. It’s also been happening to Preet Bharara’s more recent takedowns of top New York political figures. This is how political prosecutors score fast headlines and fame. It’s not how they win enduring victories in a court of law.

And so Mueller is talking about indicting Manafort again. It’s been done already. And even the media can only pay so much attention when like an aging rocker, Mueller lip syncs to his greatest hits.

Despite all the media cheerleading, Mueller can’t get too close to Trump without his rigged investigation being subjected to serious scrutiny that it can’t withstand. Getting lefty judges and a lefty grand jury to give you whatever you want may fly with the vulnerable and isolated targets he’s been going after.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Fractal Wrongness of Leftist Ideology by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on January 5th, 2018

What is fractal wrongness? Let’s begin with a fractal. A fractal is a geometric pattern that repeats itself at every level of magnification. Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot introduced fractal geometry in 1975 and defined a fractal as “a geometric shape that can be separated into parts, each of which is a reduced-scale version of the whole.” This means that a fractal is a self-similar never-ending pattern that repeats itself at different scales.

The famous Menger sponge is a fractal in math. Fractals in nature are trees, rivers, lightning bolts, and crystals. Russian nesting dolls are fractals. In computer science fractals are images that are the same at any level of scale which means that it is impossible to determine how much the image is zoomed by simply looking at it.

Fractal wrongness is the state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution – the person’s entire worldview is wrong. The political Left has decided that anyone who disagrees with their platform of political correctness, moral relativism, and historical revisionism is fractally wrong. Fractal wrongness explains why the Left views the entire worldview of conservatives as wrong, deplorable, and contemptible.

Leftism, like any orthodoxy, has embraced its tenets with religious zealotry and a tyrannical demand for conformity that ignores obvious contradictions in its own narrative. Leftists, who pride themselves on being tolerant, are hypocritically intolerant of anyone who embraces a world view that differs from their own. Leftist faux tolerance only tolerates those who look different – it does not tolerate those who think differently. This presents a philosophical inconsistency that Leftism solves with Leftist Newspeak, the official language of the Left.

Newspeak is the language of George Orwell’s dystopian city Oceania described in his classic novel 1984. Newspeak is the language of official propaganda in Oceania that was created to replace Oldspeak – standard English. Newspeak replaces the meaning of a familiar word with its unfamiliar opposite. The key to translating Newspeak is thinking in opposites.

Leftist Newspeak is the language of opposites that imitates taqiyyah – deliberately lying or obfuscating to further Islam. The Islamic world understands the word peace to mean when all the world is Islamic. The Western world understands the word peace to mean pluralism, tolerance, and the absence of conflict. Leftist Newspeak interprets peace as manifest when all the Western world embraces Leftism. Taqiyyah and Leftist Newspeak share an intentional replacement of one set of meanings for another. Leftist Newspeak is the language of contronyms.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Left’s Siege of Our Universities David Horowitz’s latest book chronicles the Left’s transformation of academic institutions into doctrinal training centers. Barbara Kay

Posted By on January 5th, 2018

In November, an incident regarding freedom of speech on campus took place at Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University that galvanized the attention of Canadians and of those with an interest in this subject beyond our borders.

A graduate student in the field of Communications, Lindsay Shepherd, used a short segment in class from a debate on TVOntario’s nightly issues show, The Agenda, to illustrate to her students how linguistic terminology can become contested terrain in the realm of ideas. The presenting issue was freedom of speech; the vehicle for debate was the use of transgender pronouns. The segment Shepherd showed – without either approval or condemnation – included forceful pushback against “compelled speech” by Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto professor whose publicly avowed refusal to use constructed gender pronouns has in the past 18 months rocketed him, via a tsunami of vlogs and public appearances, from virtual obscurity outside the academy to continental celebrity.

In short order Shepherd was summoned to a meeting with her supervisor, her department head and the director of WLU’s Gendered and Sexual Violence and Support program. What happened at that meeting – more like a Star Chamber interrogation – would have fallen into the historical oubliette, except for the fact that Shepherd recorded it and shared it with the media.

Ordinary Canadians who listened to this recording were stupefied at the overt intimidation and condemnation Shepherd was subjected to, including accusations of “transphobia,” a comparison of Peterson to Hitler and for good measure a sprinkling of demonizing “racism” and “ “white supremacist” to ensure the message took hold. All because she adopted a perspective of neutrality in presenting conflicting opinions to her class so that they could freely discuss the issue without her influence. This was an intolerable stance for her left-wing superiors.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Ella Whelan : The celebrity fund for poor women reveals how patronising #MeToo is.

Posted By on January 5th, 2018

Anyone hoping that the #MeToo panic would be left in 2017 will have been disappointed this week, when Hollywood A-listers launched their new campaign: Time’s Up.

Spurred on by the momentum of the so-called ‘silence breakers’ and the flurry of exposés, allegations and sackings related to sexual harassment last year, celebrity women have given their cash to fund legal aid for poor women who are apparently being abused in the workplace.

The launch letter, published in the New York Times, begins with ‘Dear sisters’. It reads like a charity pledge – and this is exactly what it is. ‘We particularly want to lift up the voices, power, and strength of women working in low-wage industries where the lack of financial stability makes them vulnerable to high rates of gender-based violence and exploitation’, it says. Apparently Emma Stone, Sarah Jessica Parker and hundreds of other female celebrities think their money will give poor women a voice. How Dickensian. And what about the suggestion that there are high rates of ‘gender-based violence’ in low-wage industries? Where’s the proof?

This sense of paternalism runs through the letter. ‘We see you’, it tells the members of the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas (a female farmworkers’ union) which wrote in support of #MeToo last year. Yes, those hitherto invisible female farmworkers should now be overjoyed after having been ‘seen’ by the cultural elites of New York and LA. The wealthy feminists of the #MeToo movement are now posing as the saviours of helpless, stupid, poor women:

‘To every woman employed in agriculture who has had to fend off unwanted sexual advances from her boss, every housekeeper who has tried to escape an assaultive guest, every janitor trapped nightly in a building with a predatory supervisor, every waitress grabbed by a customer and expected to take it with a smile, every garment and factory worker forced to trade sexual acts for more shifts, every domestic worker or home health aide forcibly touched by a client, every immigrant woman silenced by the threat of her undocumented status being reported in retaliation for speaking up, and to women in every industry who are subjected to indignities and offensive behaviour that they are expected to tolerate in order to make a living: We stand with you. We support you.’

The worst thing about Time’s Up is the hollowness of its support for workers.