BOOKS Comments turned off

River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candice Millard

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

Millard’s book is wonderful reading about the Spekes/Burton search for the source of the Nile. Burton is described as a swashbuckling, romantic hero, but he had a vicious side not documented in Millard’s book…..rsk

https://www.haaretz.com/2008-12-11/ty-article/musings-the-other-richard-burton/0000017f-dc0b-df9c-a17f-fe1bf0cd0000

“However, the manuscript with the most inflammatory content, a brand which, as it were, was a brand plucked from the flame, has been preserved to this day. It is entitled “Human Sacrifice among the Sephardine (sic) or Eastern Jews.” In it, Burton, one of the most educated men of his time, had given credence to that most ignorant of medieval prejudices: the blood libel. How he came to this is a story on its own. The Damascus Affair, about which he wrote, occurred in 1840. A Capuchin friar disappeared with his servant, never to be seen again. With the help of the fiercely anti-Semitic French consul, 13 Jews were arrested and confessed under torture to sacrificing the friar for religious purposes. The cause of the Jewish victims was taken up by the great and the good, and they were released and vindicated. By the time Burton wrote his inflammatory pamphlet, the Damascus Affair was history.”

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was one of the most intriguing of all Victorian adventurers. A truly extraordinary character, he was a spy, scholar, linguist, explorer, religious fanatic and pornographer. He was said to have learned 25 languages and 40 dialects. Burton spent much of his life as a soldier in India. With his excellent Hindustani, Persian, Gujarati, Urdu and Arabic, it was natural that he should be an active player in what became known as the “Great Game” – the espionage activity on the northwestern frontier of India popularized by Kipling in his novel “Kim.” To misquote the title of the old BBC adventure serial, he could well be described as “Dick Burton, special agent.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama-Era ‘Sisters’ Circle Trump Will the trio of Susan Rice, Avril Haines, and Lisa Monaco get their target or will their exaggerated sense of self finally catch up with them?  By Julie Kelly

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/30/obama-era-sisters-circle-trump/

Susan Rice describes the trio as family.

In her 2019 memoir, Rice, Barack Obama’s final national security advisor, wrote glowingly of the close bond she shared with two other women in Obama’s tight knit circle of confidants. “In my last two years as NSA, I was extremely fortunate to have the invaluable input, support, and counsel of my sisters, Avril Haines and Lisa Monaco,” Rice explained in her book, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For. “Never before, I am sure, had such small packages wielded such national security punch. Confident in ourselves and each other, we wouldn’t let any outsider perceive, much less exploit, our differences. Woe unto anyone, especially any male counterpart, who tried to play one of us against another.”

Hard eye roll.

Rice’s self-aggrandizing flex notwithstanding, no one tried to “play” the little women off each other; to the contrary, Haines and Monaco—Obama’s deputy national security advisor and homeland security advisor, respectively—and Rice played the American people by helping engineer one of the biggest frauds in U.S. political history: the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax.

Their sisterhood presumably strengthened during secret huddles in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Working off alleged intelligence collected by CIA Director John Brennan, Haines’ former boss, indicating the Kremlin planned to sabotage America’s election, Rice, Monaco, and Haines “convened meetings in the Situation Room to weigh the mounting evidence of Russian interference and generate options for how to respond,” the Washington Post reported in June 2017.

Monaco accompanied then-FBI Director James Comey to Capitol Hill in September 2016 to “warn” top congressional leaders in both parties that Russia was up to no good. After the election, in a brazen attempt to sow doubt about its legitimacy, Monaco announced the intelligence community would conduct an assessment into how Russian “hacking” impacted the results. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Change Forecasts “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Larry Elder

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/climate-change-forecasts-larry-elder/

“‘The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says Paul R. Ehrlich, the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. … We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.'” — The New York Times, 1969.

“No real action has been taken to save the environment, (Ehrlich) maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.” — Redlands Daily Facts, 1970.

“Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century. … If the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States. … By the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.'” — The Boston Globe, 1970

“The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. … ‘In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’ –‘five to 10,’ he estimated — ‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’ — Washington Post, Times Herald, 1971.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Trillion Dollar Bailout for the Idiot Machine College for everyone is making everyone dumber. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/trillion-dollar-bailout-idiot-machine-daniel-greenfield/

Government institutions are in the business of making things worse in order to collect more money to make them better. We declared war on poverty and impoverished ourselves. After promising to fix homelessness, the streets are covered in needles and human waste.

Nowhere is this truer than in education.

Education results are inversely proportional to the amount of money spent on them. New York has the highest per pupil spending at $25,645 and the second lowest literacy rate in the country. Utah has the lowest per pupil spending in the nation and a 90% literacy rate.

Good thing the education market is set to hit almost $2 trillion by 2025. At 10% of GDP, we will spend far more than China (4% of GDP) with much worse outcomes to show for it. But Educrats will claim that if we only spent 25% of our GDP, Johnny would finally be able to read. All that’s  holding him back is that Chicago public school teachers with an MA only make $89,083.

The American Federation of Teachers put out a study claiming that funding levels should cause New York school districts to “perform well above average on national fourth and eighth grade math and reading exams.” They did not. And no matter how much money is wasted, they never will. You can’t buy literacy with subsidies for a broken education system. At any level.

Ever since Bill Clinton told working class people that manufacturing jobs weren’t coming back, so they all better go to college and learn to write lesbian feminist poetry, the number of college enrollees and graduates has shot up. So have their illiteracy rates.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Norway’s Comeuppance After years of official anti-Semitism, Israel reacts. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/norways-comeuppance-bruce-bawer/

“The relationship between Norway and Israel,” wrote Trond Ellingsen the other day at Document, Norway’s leading alternative news website, “is now at a historically low level.” We’ll get around to the reason in a minute, but first let’s just note that that’s saying a lot, given that antisemitism on a very profound level goes back a long way in the exquisite land of the fjords.

The Norwegian Constitution, drafted in 1814, originally contained this sentence: “Jews are still excluded from admission to the kingdom.” Knut Hamsun, probably Norway’s most illustrious novelist, was a Nazi. During World War II, it was the Norwegian police who, obedient to the German occupiers, rounded up Jews to be sent to death camps; in neighboring Denmark, by contrast, the police played a key role in the valiant effort – in which virtually all Danish gentiles took part – to sequester Jews from the Nazis and then help smuggle them to safety in Sweden. As a result, while only thirty-eight of the 773 Norwegian Jews who were shipped to Auschwitz survived the war, most of Denmark’s 7800 or so Jews made it to Sweden; of the 464 who were captured and, in keeping with a special agreement with the Danish authorities, sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt instead of to death camps, 425 returned home alive. 

Yes, Norway was quick to recognize the state of Israel. But hatred for that country, and for Jews generally, has flourished in Norwegian politics ever since.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill Barr – All-In With the Mar-a-Lago Raid The defender of the deep state can be no friend of the people. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/trumps-attorney-general-explains-raid-trumps-lloyd-billingsley/

“Number one is that I think a lot of the attacks on the FBI are over the top because a decision like this is not made by the FBI,” former Attorney General William Barr told the Bari Weiss podcast on August 25.

“In fact, I don’t think the FBI would push a decision that it’s best to go in and search and obtain those documents after being jerked around for a year and a half. The decision would be made at the Department of Justice, by subordinates of the AG, and ultimately signed off on by the AG. The FBI would be told to go and execute it. I think the idea that the FBI is the problem here is misplaced.”

The former AG was more disturbed by “the constant pandering to outrage” on the right, without discussion of whether the outrage had any merit. The FBI seized Trump’s passports, leaving the impression that the former president had committed a crime and was now a flight risk. FBI agents also rummaged through the closets of Melania Trump, an act of pure intimidation. With Trump attorneys forced outside, the FBI could easily have planted or destroyed information. If that is not cause for outrage, it’s hard to imagine what might qualify.

Weiss brought up the “Russiagate” episode, as the host explained, “the idea that Donald Trump was a compromised agent of Moscow. That there were deep connections between Trump’s people and Russian intelligence. That the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians, including by hacking Democratic National Committee emails.” Barr was all over it.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

R.I.P. Gorby, the Man Who Watched Others Tear Down the Iron Curtain By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/r-i-p-gorby-the-man-who-watched-others-tear-down-the-iron-curtain/

Mikhail Gorbachev was born in 1931 and was old enough to remember the suffering of his family during World War II and the great Stalinist purges, in which one of his grandfathers was tortured and another executed. Many obituarists will focus on his tentative reforms of the Soviet Union, and rightly so. He allowed more political freedom in elections, though less than any of us would recognize as legitimate. He reestablished relations with the Vatican, eased up on official state atheism, and conducted successful arms treaties with the United States. He broke the taboos on talking openly about Russian history and the quality of life in the Soviet Union.

But all this was not enough to save Russia from the collapse.

In this space, it is important to state clearly that Gorbachev’s dull optimism and his dull passivity was turned into the end of the Soviet Union by more nimble statesmen like Hungary’s prime minister Miklós Németh, and German chancellor Helmut Kohl, with big assists from forward-seeing activists like Poland’s Lech Walesa and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Németh first and Kohl later would present one fait accompli after another to the cautiously optimistic Americans (Bush and Secretary of State James Baker) and the dithering and overwhelmed Gorbachev. The statesmen and political movements of Central and Eastern Europe wanted to get into Western political structures like NATO and the European Community faster than the White House or Brussels wanted to accept them. Some obituarists will claim that Gorbachev tore down the Iron Curtain. No. The end of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany as a full NATO member was a stampede through a door that Gorbachev was unwilling to bolt shut again. But his optimism and passivity in the face of fast-moving events prevented these days from becoming the bloodbath that history would lead us to expect during a European security realignment. With the exception of Lithuania, most Soviet member states were allowed to escape peacefully. This was a miracle, and Gorbachev can be thanked inasmuch as his awareness of his and Russia’s then limitations allowed the Cold War to end without going hot again.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s Time For Voters To Unleash Their Inner Howard Beale :“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.” — Howard Beale, “Network“

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/31/its-time-for-voters-to-channel-their-inner-howard-beale/

“Voters had better get mad, stay mad until November, and kick the left out of every leadership position it holds. Because Biden and Co. are setting the nation on a road that will lead to disaster. If voters don’t get mad now and force a course correction, they will only have themselves to blame when the inevitable crash comes.”

The mainstream press sees a glimmer of hope in recent polls showing President Joe Biden’s approval rating inching up and Democrats’ prospects looking brighter for the midterm elections. Don’t let yourself, or your friends, family, and neighbors be conned.

Biden’s string of “victories” includes getting a massive growth-killing tax-and-spend bill through Congress and canceling about $1 trillion worth of student loan debt to benefit a small minority of college-educated Americans.

The only thing these recent events have in common is that they are designed specifically to improve Democrats’ chances in November.

These are awfully big price tags for vote buying. And you are paying for it.

So why isn’t the public mad as hell?

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russia’s Mariupol Show Trials The Kremlin subjects prisoners of war to torture and sham trials.

Posted By on August 31st, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-mariupol-show-trials-ukraine-prisoners-of-war-denis-pushilin-vladimir-putin-11661894589?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Ukrainian prisoners of war already face deprivation and torture, and Russia now plans to subject them to a show trial that violates the laws of war and international agreements that Russia has signed.

In May some 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers under siege in Mariupol surrendered to save the lives of severely wounded comrades. Last week Denis Pushilin, the Russia-backed head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said a tribunal in Mariupol would hear some 80 cases of war crimes.

The trials will focus on captured members of the Azov Regiment of Ukraine’s national guard. Formed in 2014, the unit was accused of including anti-Semites. The regiment says it has since dishonorably discharged extremists in its ranks, and its members now include Jewish soldiers. The unit fought alongside Ukrainian marines and other soldiers in Mariupol, and their stand pinned down Russian troops that could have been deployed elsewhere.

But the Kremlin claims it is “de-Nazifying” Ukraine, and it is using the Azov Regiment as propaganda to justify the invasion. In August Russia’s Supreme Court designated the Azov Regiment a terrorist organization, paving the way for lengthy jail sentences for its captured members. Leonid Slutsky, a deputy of the Russian Duma, has said Azov Regiment members “do not deserve to live.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Diversity Over Careers at Duke By Lincoln Brown

Posted By on August 30th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/culture/lincolnbrown/2022/08/30/diversity-over-careers-at-duke-n1625216

The Career Center at Duke University was slated to get some new digs. This is a good thing since its function is to help shepherd students into actual careers, which is ostensibly why people go to college in the first place. The career center’s page states:

“The Career Center, working in partnership with faculty and colleagues, provides career advising to all Duke undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni. Recognizing the unique talents and needs of each individual, the Career Center encourages students to make the most of their Duke experience by accessing relevant campus resources, developing career interests and values, and establishing and maintaining important human relationships with their peers as well as Duke faculty, staff, and alumni. The Career Center works to build and maintain relationships with alumni and employers who can provide internships and learning opportunities, entry-level positions, and opportunities for experienced professionals.”

Presumably, accessing the Career Center can help you get a job so you can make money, eat, rent an apartment, buy a home, contribute to society, and allegedly pay your student loans. Okay, go ahead and laugh.

According to the Duke Chronicle, the Career Center was supposed to take over the space on the first floor of the Bryan Center that had been previously occupied by the Office of Student Affairs. That did not sit well with the student body, which claimed the space had been promised to student groups that had been demanding a place to gather for decades.