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Russia Will Build Its Own Internet Directory, Citing US Information WarfareBy Patrick Tucker

Posted By on December 2nd, 2017

The Russian government will build an “independent internet” for use by itself, Brazil, India, China, and South Africa — the so-called BRICS nations — “in the event of global internet malfunctions,” the Russian news site RT reported on Tuesday. More precisely, Moscow intends to create an alternative to the global Domain Name System, or DNS, the directory that helps the browser on your computer or smartphone connect to the website server or other computer that you’re trying to reach. The Russians cited national security concerns, but the real reason may have more to do with Moscow’s own plans for offensive cyber operations.

According to RT, the Russian Security Council discussed the idea during its October meeting, saying that “the increased capabilities of western nations to conduct offensive operations in the informational space as well as the increased readiness to exercise these capabilities pose a serious threat to Russia’s security.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has set a date of August 1, 2018, to complete the alternative DNS.

Why are they doing it? Russia, along with China, has long pushed for national governments to assert more control over the DNS and net governance in general, via the UN International Telecommunication Union, or ITU. Then, as now, the Russian and Chinese arguments were rooted in national security. But were DNS to be turned over to the ITU, dictatorships would be able to much better monitor dissidents, stifle dissent, and control the information environment in their countries. For example, Western tech companies could be forced to keep data and servers physically within those countries, and thus become entangled in vast citizen-monitoring programs.

In 2014, the U.S. cleverly announced it would give control of the DNS database to a non-governmental international body of stakeholders, a process to be run by the California-based Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

“Now, when China stands up and says, ‘We want a seat at the table of internet governance,’ the U.S. can say, ‘No. The internet should be stateless.’ They’re in a much stronger position to make that argument today than they were before,” Matthew Prince, co-founder of the company Cloudflare, told Defense One at the time.

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Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them By Jack Goldsmith and Adrian Vermeule

Posted By on December 2nd, 2017

Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, has been lobbying in Washington against a Republican proposal to tax large university endowments and make other tax and spending changes that might adversely affect universities. Faust says the endowment tax would be a “blow at the strength of American higher education” and that the suite of proposals lacks “policy logic.” Perhaps so, but they have a political logic. We hope that Harvard and other elite universities will reflect on their part in these developments.

The proposed tax and spending policies aimed at universities are surely related to the sharp recent drop in support by conservatives for colleges and universities. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 58 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country, a figure that has grown significantly in the past two years. This development likely reflects four related trends.

First is the obvious progressive tilt in universities, especially elite universities. At Harvard, for example, undergraduate students overwhelmingly identify as progressive or liberal and the faculty overwhelmingly gives to the Democratic Party. Even Harvard Law School, which has a handful of conservative scholars and a new conservative dean, is on the left end of law school faculties, which are themselves more progressive than the legal profession.

Second, the distinctive progressive ideology of elite universities is relentlessly critical of, to the point of being intolerant of, traditions and moral values widely seen as legitimate in the outside world. As a result, elite universities have narrowed the range of acceptable views within their walls.

Third is the rise of anti-conservative “mobs,” “shout-downs” and “illiberal behavior” on campus, as New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes it. [ See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=301&v=8PuxuGamWUM ] Conservative speakers of various stripes are being harassed and excluded with increasing frequency. “Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas,” noted former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg at a Harvard address a few years ago. Harvard is actually somewhat better on these issues than many universities — it hasn’t had anti-conservative mobs, and it has been relatively respectful of conservative speakers. But even at Harvard, the pervasive progressive orthodoxy chills conservatives’ speech in the classroom and hallways.

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What the Flynn Plea Means There’s less to the news than meets the eye. By Andrew C. McCarthy —

Posted By on December 2nd, 2017

Former Trump-administration national-security adviser Michael Flynn is expected to plead guilty today to lying to the FBI regarding his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

Flynn, who is reportedly cooperating with the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, is pleading guilty in federal district court in Washington, D.C., to a one-count criminal information (which is filed by a prosecutor in cases when a defendant waives his right to be indicted by a grand jury).

The false-statement charge, brought under Section 1001 of the federal penal code, stems from Flynn’s conversation on December 29, 2016, with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. At the time, Flynn was slated to become the national-security adviser to President-elect Donald Trump. The conversation occurred on the same day that then-president Barack Obama announced sanctions against Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. It is believed to have been recorded by the FBI because Kislyak, as an agent of a foreign power, was subject to monitoring under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Mueller has charged Flynn with falsely telling FBI agents that he did not ask the ambassador “to refrain from escalating the situation” in response to the sanctions. In being questioned by the agents on January 24, 2017, Flynn also lied when he claimed he could not recall a subsequent conversation with Kislyak, in which the ambassador told Flynn that the Putin regime had “chosen to moderate its response to those sanctions as a result of [Flynn’s] request.”

Furthermore, a week before the sanctions were imposed, Flynn had also spoken to Kislyak, asking the ambassador to delay or defeat a vote on a pending United Nations resolution. The criminal information charges that Flynn lied to the FBI by denying both that he’d made this request and that he’d spoken afterward with Kislyak about Russia’s response to it.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: MEDIA BIAS? NOTHING NEW HERE

Posted By on November 30th, 2017

Many years ago an Arab in Jerusalem stabbed an elderly Orthodox Jew whose companions gave chase, captured the assailant and beat him until the police came. Peter Jennings, who was the anchor of ABC News from 1984 until his death in 2005, described it thus: “Today an Orthodox mob chased and beat a Palestinian Arab.” That was artful bias–reporting an incident factually with no exculpatory explanation.

The other networks were no better. NBC reported outright lies during their coverage of the Lebanon War.

In 1984 Americans for a Safe Israel produced a documentary entitled NBC in Lebanon- A Study in Media Misrepresentation. In The New York Times, the television critic John Corry reviewed it as flawed (naturally) but admitted “[I]t attempts to prove, and to a large extent does prove, that coverage by the NBC Nightly News of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982 was faulty.” He continued “One may argue, of course, that journalism ought not to reflect any viewpoint, and that to accuse NBC of not reflecting the ‘Israeli viewpoint’ is only to accuse it of not taking sides. On the other hand, the documentary, judiciously using NBC’s own film, suggests that NBC was indeed taking sides and pressing the viewpoint of the P.L.O.“

Of Tom Brokaw, the “star” of the AFSI documentary, Dan Rather who ‘resigned’ in disgrace from CBS after he orchestrated a false report on the National Guard Service of then President George Bush, and Peter Jennings, journalist Sarah Pentz had this to say: “Each of these men leaves a shameful legacy on the face of American journalism. They led their networks into a shocking wave of politically biased reporting and did absolutely nothing to rebuke those who indulged in it––because, it was their agenda, too. They knew exactly what they were doing. Each is responsible for the blackening tarnish that covers all journalists today because of their partisan politics.”

These biased network journalists paved the way for the clowns who dominate network as well as print media today. At least those three had credentials as journalists, however badly they misused them. The present lot reports on world events, and especially Israel without a clue. They pretend that the history of Israel started in 1967 when Jews, without provocation or legitimate rights, invaded the peaceful and productive lands of the “West Bank.”

Chris Matthews of MSNBC worries that moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem will “desecrate the Holy City”, defends Palestinian Arab terrorism, and worries, worries, worries full time about the perverse Jewish lobby, Jewish Republicans, Jewish influence–and non Jewish Donald Trump. As Stuart Schwartz summed up in the American Thinkerin 2010: “Matthews has long used his television platform to spotlight the danger to the United States posed by Israel and American Jews who conspire against the country. Call it ‘The Protocols of Chris Matthews,’ or, perhaps, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of MSNBC.’ Rid us of Israel, rid us of Jews, and Pandora will return to its pre-kosher bliss.”

In 2014, in a widely circulated column from The Atlantic “What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel – The news tells us less about Israel than about the people writing the news” former AP reporter Matti Friedman writes: “The uglier aspects of Palestinian society are untouchable because they would disrupt the ‘Israel story,’ which is a story of Jewish moral failure.” He includes this pithy 1946 quote from George Orwell: “The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect that the lies which they condone will get out of the newspapers and into the history books.”

Media reporting on North Korea, China, Iran, Africa, Russia, and anything about the President and domestic policies is devoid of historical context and alternative perspectives. It is “one size fits all” liberal cant.

Celebrities routinely host galas to reward themselves: Emmies, Golden Globes, Oscars. Journalists have their own awards for distinction in reporting–the Peabody, the Pulitzer, the Edward R. Murrow. I would recommend the Apate award for all those who compound ignorance and bias into fake news. In Greek mythology Apate was the goddess of deception, guile and fraud. The statuette could have a Pinocchio nose, although the Disney legend was limited to thirteen lies, and reporters have no limits.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Caroline Glick :The State Department drops the ball By Caroline B. Glick November 27, 2017 21:26 By reversing course on closing the PLO mission, and groveling to the threatening PLO, the State Department made a laughingstock of the US and President Trump.

Posted By on November 30th, 2017

Over the weekend, The New York Times published its latest broadside against US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for what the newspaper referred to as his “culling” of senior State Department officials and his failure to date to either nominate or appoint senior personnel to open positions.

But if the State Department’s extraordinary about face on the PLO’s mission in Washington is an indication of what passes for US diplomacy these days, then perhaps Tillerson should just shut down operations at Foggy Bottom. The US would be better off without representation by its diplomats.

Last week, in accordance with US law, Tillerson notified the PLO’s Washington envoy Husam Zomlot that the PLO’s mission in Washington has to close within 90 days because it has breached the legal terms governing its operations.

Specifically, Tillerson explained, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas breached US law when he called for the International Criminal Court to indict and prosecute Israeli nationals during his speech before the UN General Assembly in September.

Tillerson explained that under US law, the only way to keep the PLO mission in Washington open is if US President Donald Trump certifies in the next 90 days that its representatives are engaged in “direct and meaningful negotiations” with Israel.

The PLO didn’t respond to Tillerson with quiet diplomacy. It didn’t make an attempt to appease Congress or the State Department by for instance agreeing to end its campaign to get Israelis charged with war crimes at the ICC. It didn’t put an abrupt end to its financial support for terrorism and terrorists. It didn’t stop inciting Palestinians to hate Israel and seek its destruction. It didn’t disavow its efforts to form a unity government with Hamas and its terrorist regime in Gaza.

It didn’t join Saudi Arabia and Egypt in their efforts to fight Iranian power and influence in the region. It didn’t end its efforts to have Israeli companies blacklisted by the UN Human Rights Committee or scale back its leadership of the international boycott movement against Israel.

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Sow the Free Love Wind, Reap the Sexual Debasement Whirlwind The bitter fruit of a destructive generation. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on November 30th, 2017

The explosion of sexual harassment and assault claims, some going back forty years, is the inevitable consequence of the sexual revolution. Long before Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual escapades led him to impeachment, our culture had normalized public sexual behavior and mores once hidden away in the private realm, and kept there by laws, morals, and customs. Like many of our social pathologies today, our sexually saturated public culture and the unleashing of sexual predators are the bitter fruit of the free love movement of the Sixties.

Those who didn’t live through that period cannot imagine how quickly and radically our society was transformed. And that change was encouraged by certain species of dubious Pop-Freudian psychological ideas that had been combined with left-wing theories of political revolution. This synthesis was predicated on the delegitimization of the “bourgeois” virtues, morals, and values that had created the “false consciousness” empowering capitalist oppression. “If it feels good, do it” and “Fuck authority” became the most important personal and political imperatives.

Thus sexual liberation became an instrument of political “liberation,” and both revolutions enabled personal liberation, a weird mash-up of radical individualism and communist collectivism. Listen to Herbert Marcuse, denizen of the Frankfurt School and guru of the New Left:

The civilized morality is reversed by harmonizing instinctual freedom and order: liberated from the tyranny of repressive reason, the instincts tend toward free and lasting existential relations––they generate a new reality principle.

So too another popular intellectual of the Sixties, renegade classicist Norman O. Brown:

The life instinct, or sexual instinct, demands activity of a kind that in contrast to our current mode of activity can only be called play. The life instinct also demands a union with others, and with the world around us, based not on anxiety and aggression but on narcissism and erotic exuberance.

One can see this political justification for “free love” in the 1969 Wellesley commencement address of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wrote her senior thesis on the most consequential theorist of modern left-wing activism, Saul Alinsky. “We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living,” Rodham said. Her three sexually charged adjectives reveal the by then preposterous union of the sexual and the political revolution that starts with “questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government,” Rodham continues, and enables “human reconstruction,” a phrase echoing the leftist “new man” necessary for achieving the collectivist utopia of social justice and equality.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

North Korea Ships Chemical Weapons to Syria: Nukes Next? by Debalina Ghoshal

Posted By on November 30th, 2017

Syria could, of course, also acquire nuclear weapons from North Korea. Syria already possesses ballistic missiles; the chemical weapons are already there.

In the past, North Korea has shipped ballistic missiles to Hezbollah and Hamas via Syria; they will probably continue to do so, and to terrorist organizations as well.

North Korea is reported to be shipping chemical weapons to Syria. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has stated that activity has been intercepted during the past six months and that North Korea is also shipping conventional weapons there. Furthermore, a Syrian government entity, the Scientific Studies and Research Centre, has apparently established cooperation with the Korean Mining Development Trading Corporation (KOMID), North Korea’s key arms exporter, and blacklisted by the UN Security Council

Shipping weapons and chemical weapons to Syria brings cash-strapped North Korea hard currency, Meanwhile Syria, thick in a civil war, can only acquire sophisticated weapons and weapons of mass destruction through a black market; so a sanctioned North Korea is ideal.

This news should not come as a surprise. North Korean support for Syria is nothing new. In 1995, a CIA report confirmed that Syria’s Scud B and Scud C missile systems had been acquired from North Korea. By 1997, a State Department report confirmed that North Korea was providing Syria with crucial equipment for its missile development program. Der Spiegel reported in 2015 that Syria was again trying to build nuclear bombs.

A nuclear reactor being built by North Korea in Syria was destroyed by Israel in 2007. In 2012, North Korea was sending Syria artillery components through China while using sophisticated techniques to avoid interception.

In April 2017, Kim Jong-un called a US missile strike on Syria, in response to Syrian use of chemical weapons on its own citizens, an “unforgivable act of aggression.” North Korea’s aid to Syria in developing chemical weapons, however, is also nothing new.

Lately, North Korea has again been providing Syria with chemical weapons as well as assisting its ballistic missile program.

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The Great Palestinian Shakedown: Have the Arabs Had Enough? by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on November 30th, 2017

Many people in the West are not aware that the Palestinians are trying to torpedo any peace initiative in order to blame others.

The Palestinians are crying Wolf, Wolf! — but only a few in the Arab world are listening to them. This, in a way, is encouraging and offers hope for them finally to be released from decades of repressive and corrupt governance.

These are just some of the challenges Saudi Crown Prince is facing. It is important to support him in the face of attacks by some Palestinians and other spoilers.

A young Saudi man has posted videos on social media in which he calls the Palestinians “dogs” and “pigs.” The man says that Saudi Arabia has provided the ungrateful Palestinians with “billions of dollars” during the past few decades. “The Palestinians,” the Saudi man charges, “have been milking us for decades.”

The videos, which have since gone viral, have understandably drawn strong condemnations from Palestinians, who say they would not have been made public without the tacit approval of the Saudi authorities. For the Palestinians, the abusive videos represent yet another sign of increased tensions in their relations with Saudi Arabia.

Further evidence of Saudi disdain for the Palestinians was provided in a video posted by Saudi Arabia featuring a Palestinian gunman as a terrorist.

Last July, the Saudi ambassador to Algeria, Sami Saleh, shocked many Palestinians when he described Hamas as a terror group. Hamas responded by saying that such remarks were “harmful to Saudi Arabia and its record and stances towards the Palestinian cause and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”

The apparent shift in Saudi Arabia’s position towards the Palestinians should not come as a surprise. Like most Arab countries, the Saudis too have finally realized that the Palestinians are ungrateful and untrustworthy. Saudi Arabia and most of the Arab countries are obviously fed up with the recurring attempts by the Palestinians to blackmail them and extort money from them.

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Turkey Rejects “Moderate Islam” by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on November 30th, 2017

“These epithets of ‘moderate Islam’ are very ugly, it is disrespectful and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

In keeping with Erdoğan’s assertions, the Turkish government-funded Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) published in July a detailed 140-page report, which stated that Islam is “superior” to Judaism and Christianity, and that “interfaith dialogue is unacceptable.”

“The word kafir is the worst word in the human language. It is far worse than the n-word, because the n-word is a personal opinion, whereas, kafir is Allah’s decree.” — Dr. Bill Warner, director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam (CSPI).

At a conference on women’s entrepreneurship, held in Ankara on November 9 and hosted by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rejected the concept of “moderate Islam”. Referring to the vow by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — during the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh on Oct. 25 — to turn his country into a bastion of “moderate Islam,” Erdoğan said, “Islam cannot be either ‘moderate’ or ‘not moderate.’ Islam can only be one thing.” He also claimed that the “patent of this concept originated in the West,” which “really want[s] to weaken Islam.”

Erdoğan has consistently communicated his thoughts about the term “moderate Islam” often used in the West to describe his Justice and Development Party (AKP). As early as 2007, he said: “These epithets of ‘moderate Islam’ are very ugly, it is disrespectful and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

ISIS Teases Vegas in Upcoming Sequel to Original Film Threatening America By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on November 30th, 2017

The Islamic State is promoting a forthcoming sequel to its most infamous movie that threatened America at the beginning of the caliphate, with the new trailer showing fire raining down on several U.S. cities before America is engulfed in a fireball.

ISIS’ official al-Hayat Media Foundation didn’t give a release date for “Flames of War II: Until the Final Hour,” but distributed the trailer extensively across many open media platforms including YouTube and Google Drive.

The teaser begins with a rapid-fire montage of fiery battle scenes that appear to be from Iraq or Syria.

The focus then shifts to the United States, with columns of fire raining down on Los Angeles, Florida, New York, Texas and Nevada, labeled on a U.S. map.

ISIS appeared to be referring to the San Bernardino Christmas party attack in 2015, the 2015 attempted attack at a “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas, the 2016 Orlando nightclub attack, this Halloween’s Manhattan bike path attack, and the Las Vegas mass shooting at the beginning of October. The terror group continues to claim gunman Stephen Paddock as their own Abu Abdul Bar al-Amriki, yet have not released evidence to back up the claim; authorities have maintained they have discovered no terrorist links as a motive remains elusive). CONTINUE AT SITE