Displaying posts published in

April 2018

5 Big, Fat Lies Free Speech Opponents Love Free speech is under sustained attack in our country. Here are five lies the attackers use to undermine our most basic freedom.By David Marcus

The concept of free speech, so central to the American experience, is facing a trial in our society. This is not the first time, and surely won’t be the last, in which competing interests wrestle to define the term.

But it is our time to debate it, and those who would trammel speech in the name of justice, or patriotism, or anything really, are relying on several very flawed premises in their attempts to silence their fellow citizens. It’s time to tackle them, one by one, and establish a positive argument for free speech that recognizes it is a blessing, not a burden.

Much of the confusion regarding the idea of free speech stems from a fundamental misunderstanding that somehow the First Amendment of the Constitution invented and constrains the idea. This is hogwash.

In 399 BC, Socrates was tried, convicted, and executed for violating speech codes. For more than 2,000 years since then, Western culture has played a game of tetherball over speech, sending it this way and that. But the heart of the issue has nothing to do with government. It has to do with whether we, as individuals, value tolerance for perspectives we disagree with.

In the past decade or so, many people — usually but not always those on the Left — have distorted the concept of free speech in an effort to suppress it. Their arguments are not deep; they are not even shallow. It is useful, however, to look at and dismantle them so we are not tempted to snatch from ourselves the rights generations past established for us.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan Isn’t the Sharpest Knife in the Drawer By Jim Treacher

Recently, London’s murder rate caught up with New York City’s. Which is weird, because there shouldn’t be any murders in either city. After all, both NYC and the UK have very strict gun laws. As we’ve learned from our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters on the left, banning guns leads to fewer gun crimes. (That’s why the Secret Service doesn’t carry them!) So how is this happening? How can such a gun-free utopia be so dangerous? The answer will terrify you: scary, evil KNIVES.

Jason Douglas, WSJ:

A series of stabbings has put the number of murders in London this year on a par with New York, with police and lawmakers blaming the surge on drugs and gang-related violence…

Police said Friday there have been 53 murders in the British capital in the year through April 5, 16 more than the number recorded during the first four months of 2017…

A spokeswoman for the U.K. Home Office said the government is taking action to restrict young people’s access to knives and other offensive weapons, such as banning online stores from delivering knives to homes.

This is serious, people. Common-sense gun control has been such a huge success that now it’s time for the next step: common-sense knife control.

This is bad news for Jack the Ripper.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s knife-confiscation effort even has its own website, with a corresponding hashtag:

#Knifefree, eh? Let’s hope Londoners don’t think this means they’re getting bladed weapons without charge.

No offense to Mayor Khan, but I can think of a few good reasons to have a knife. It can come in handy when you need to:

Cut up a piece of food
Open a box
Perform an emergency tracheotomy
Spread some nice cream cheese on a bagel
Live in a crime-infested $#!+hole like London

If knives are outlawed, only outlaws will have knives.

Banning weapons has never made people safer, and it never will. Criminals don’t follow laws in the first place — that’s why they’re called criminals! — and law-abiding people are just rendered defenseless against attackers. If you ban guns, people will use knives. Or clubs. Or jars of acid. Or whatever else they can get their hands on. Hell, now we know that terrorists and white supremacists will even drive cars and trucks into crowds of people, if that’s what it takes. Bad people are always going to find ways to hurt and kill others. And they’re always going to prey on those they believe to be defenseless. CONTINUE AT SITE

Nervous Mark Zuckerberg, Under Heavy Security, Arrives on Capitol Hill By Paula Bolyard

A nervous-looking Mark Zuckerberg, under heavy security, arrived on Capitol Hill Monday ahead of his planned testimony at a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on Tuesday, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday.

The Facebook CEO met with lawmakers, including Democratic Senators Bill Nelson and Dianne Feinstein, on Monday to discuss the company’s recent security breaches and to explain how the company plans to protect users going forward. In his written testimony, released ahead of his appearances before Congress, Zuckerberg took full responsibility for Facebook’s failures and vowed to do better in the future.

“It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy,” Zuckerberg said in the prepared remarks. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here.”

In his remarks, Zuckerberg tallied up the known damages thus far—and the numbers are astounding:

In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who agreed to share some of their Facebook information as well as some information from their friends whose privacy settings allowed it. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access some information about tens of millions of their friends.
Our best estimate is that approximately 126 million people may have been served content from a Facebook Page associated with the [Russia-based] IRA [Internet Research Agency] at some point during that period. On Instagram, where our data on reach is not as complete, we found about 120,000 pieces of content, and estimate that an additional 20 million people were likely served it.
Over the same period, the IRA also spent approximately $100,000 on more than 3,000 ads on Facebook and Instagram, which were seen by an estimated 11 million people.
Echoing what COO Sheryl Sandberg told “Today” last week, Zuckerberg said there may be more breaches discovered in the weeks and months to come as the company continues its investigation. “We’re in the process of investigating every app that had access to a large amount of information before we locked down our platform in 2014,” he wrote. “If we detect suspicious activity, we’ll do a full forensic audit. And if we find that someone is improperly using data, we’ll ban them and tell everyone affected.”CONTINUE AT SITE

The Limits of American Patience By Victor Davis Hanson

Not being willing any longer to be manipulated is not succumbing to isolationism. Wondering whether the United States can afford another liability is not mindless nationalism. Questioning whether America can afford the status quo here and abroad is not heresy. Assuming we can borrow our way out of any inconvenience is largely over.

What helped elect Trump was a collective weariness with demands put on a country $20 trillion in debt. America is currently running a $57 billion a month trade deficit.

The poverty of inner-city Detroit, or rural Central California, or West Virginia does not suggest an endlessly opulent nation, at least as a visitor might conclude from visiting Manhattan, Chevy Chase, or Presidio Heights.

NATO was designed to protect Western Europeans from Soviet expansionism and to allay fears of traditional Russian nationalism. It transmogrified into a vital Western alliance that might use collective deterrence and action to preserve shared democratic values.

But if a distant United States is to continue anchoring such a key defensive league, then surely its front-line member states of a prosperous Europe must meet or exceed their own freely agreed upon levels of defense spending.

Instead, until recently, most did not.

The unspoken premise for such nullification was that the United States needs NATO more than the NATO states in Europe need the United States. Or given that America is so big and powerful a patron, surely it could always afford to subsidize an errant client.

Mexico assumed that a rich neighbor could, in perpetuity, serve as a refuge of last resort for its impoverished citizens, thereby providing a safety valve and precluding any need for its own internal reform.

The United States was supposedly so affluent that it could both offer entitlements to illegal aliens and, given such aid, not care whether many of them sent $60 billion back home (what is a mere $60 billion out of a multi-trillion dollar economy?) to Central American and Mexico.

When occasionally the United States recoiled a bit, Mexico could always accuse an essentially open-border America of being restrictionist and xenophobic. One wonders how exactly would Mexico’s hostility be expressed—by vows not to receive remittances, or to demand repatriation of its lost citizens, or unilaterally to leave NAFTA, or to elect a nationalist president who would build a wall?

A Short, Communist History of “McCarthyism” by: Diana West

It was one thing for the Communist Party organ, the Daily Worker, that pre-Twitter roadmap of every zig and zag of Kremlin directives, to have ramped up the information-war against Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s by turning the name of our greatest anti-communist hero into an epithet mouthed by the Left.

It is quite another for conservatives nearly 70 years later to keep pounding what was, after all, Stalin’s line. It was Stalin’s line not for his health, of course, but for his long war to destroy the USA at home: specifically, to destroy the anti-communist resistance, personified, circa 1950, by the fearless junior senator from Wisconsin. There are many markers attesting to the Kremlin’s mainly unacknowleged ideological victory in this same war, from our own Marxist college campuses, to a numbing list of cultural debasements, to Russian hypersonic missiles, courtesy the seemingly invisible “reset” tech transfer scheme called Skolkovo. To this list of markers I would add the quick-trigger, full-throated conservative chorus against “McCarthyism.”

It seems hard to imagine, but at some point long ago most Americans rejected the Daily Worker and everything it stood for outright — communism, Stalin, subversion, the works. Now, we don’t really know what any of it means (see capture of the US education system, already under communist siege by 1920). Even astute conservative commentators draw a blank on the entire battle that the Daily Worker & ilk very successfully prosecuted against us on our own home front. Manchurian-candidate-style, they go to veritable Marxist slogans for intellectual ammunition, as we see in the selection of best-brightest comments above.

Here’s an idea: How about reconsidering the origins of “McCarthyism” and understanding them for what they are — the very real seeds of our Marxian destruction and collective shambles.

To set the scene, imagine that post-WWII-time when Americans were still trying to assess the depths and toxicity of the original Swamp, which started to come into public view after nearly two decades of unchecked communist infiltration during most of the 1930s and 1940s. Presently, along came 41-year-old Senator McCarthy with that explosive list of federal security cases, which he presented on the floor of the US Senate in February of 1950.

The Humanitarian Hoax of Globalism: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 24 by Linda Goudsmit

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The humanitarian hoax of globalism requires clarification. Globalism is the internationalizing of sovereign nations into a federation of one-world government ruled by the globalist elite themselves. Globalism is internationalized collectivism.

Globalism is NOT to be confused with global trade. Global trade is the import and export of goods and services across international boundaries.

Why is understanding the distinction between globalism and global trade so important? Because the globalist humanitarian hucksters are busy conning the American public with promises of cheaper goods through global trade deals to disguise their sinister underlying motive of collapsing the American economy. Globalism requires a collapsed America to internationalize it into the globalist New World Order that the humanitarian hucksters intend to rule.

The humanitarian hoax of globalism is based on asymmetric information – Joseph Stiglitz’s theory of economics where one party to an economic transaction possesses greater material knowledge than the other party. The globalist humanitarian huckster relies on asymmetric information to sell global collectivism to an unsuspecting public.

Wiki explains the differences between two asymmetric information models. “In adverse selection models, the ignorant party lacks information while negotiating an agreed understanding of or contract to the transaction, whereas in moral hazard [models] the ignorant party lacks information about performance of the agreed-upon transaction or lacks ability to retaliate for a breach of the agreement.”

Globalism exemplifies both the adverse selection model and the moral hazard model. This is how it works.

Collectivism, whether it is called socialism, communism, Islamism, or globalism, denies freedom of speech and the ownership of personal property. Theoretically, collectivism means giving a group priority over the individuals who form the group. In practice collectivism awards all the power and privilege to the ruling elite Equality simply cannot exist in collectivism because there is always a power structure.

A free society requires free speech and the ownership of personal property – both are fundamental to American life and guaranteed by our Constitution. The Culture War against America is an asymmetric information war against both freedom of speech and ownership of personal property. The globalist elite are using asymmetric information as a war weapon to collapse America from within. A free society supports individualism and upward mobility – collectivism does not.

Collectivism, as an economic theory, awards control of the production and distribution to the group. Collectivism as a political reality enslaves the population and establishes a master/slave infrastructure – collectivism is the absence of individual freedom. The ruling elite has absolute power over production and distribution – it has complete centralized social and economic control over the group. The globalist elite know this and they are duping the public with asymmetric information.

Europe’s Civilizational Exhaustion by Giulio Meotti

Islam is filling the cultural vacuum of a society with no children and which believes — wrongly — it has no enemies.

In Sweden, by 2050, almost one in three people will be Muslim.

The European mainstream mindset now seems to believe that “evil” comes only from our own sins: racism, sexism, elitism, xenophobia, homophobia, the guilt of the heterosexual white Western male — and never from non-European cultures. Europe now postulates an infinite idealization of the “other”, above all the migrant.

A tiredness seems to be why these countries do not take meaningful measures to defeat jihadism, such as closing Salafist mosques or expelling radical imams.

Muslim extremists understand this advantage: so long as they avoid another enormous massacre like 9/11, they will be able to continue taking away human lives and undermining the West without awakening it from its inertia.

In a prophetic conference held in Vienna on May 7, 1935, the philosopher Edmund Husserl said, “The greatest danger to Europe is tiredness”. Eighty years later, the same fatigue and passivity still dominate Western European societies.

It is the sort of exhaustion that we see in Europeans’ falling birth rates, the mushrooming public debt, chaos in the streets, and Europe’s refusal to invest resources in its security and military might. Last month, in a Paris suburb, the Basilica of Saint Denis, where France’s Christian kings are buried, was occupied by 80 migrants and pro-illegal-immigration activists. The police had to intervene to free the site.

Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University in London, recently published a report, “Europe’s Young Adults and Religion”:

“Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good – or at least for the next 100 years,” Bullivant said.

According to Bullivant, many young Europeans “will have been baptised and then never darken the door of a church again. Cultural religious identities just aren’t being passed on from parents to children. It just washes straight off them… “And we know the Muslim birthrate is higher than the general population, and they have much higher [religious] retention rates.”

Richard Dawkins, an atheist and the author of The God Delusion, responded to the study’s release by tweeting to his millions of Twitter followers:

Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let’s not forget Hilaire Belloc’s menacing rhyme:
“Always keep a-hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.”

Dawkins is apparently concerned that that after the demise of Christianity in Europe, there will not be an atheistic utopia, but a rising Islam.

Anti-‘Christian Privilege’ Activism in Academia At “Christian” colleges too. Jack Kerwick

A few days ago, I had a conversation with a neighbor who revealed to me that, insofar as she would like to exercise her right to bear arms, she doesn’t consider herself especially “liberal.” For this reason, she would eventually like to leave our painfully blue state of New Jersey.

Yet during the course of our exchange, she also shared that her daughter is away at college. I responded: “I hope that she doesn’t come home hating you.” I was half-joking, of course, but only by half. It was then that I told her that, being an academic dissident, I make it my mission to inform otherwise uninformed parents of what their children can expect to experience during their time in today’s university.

A glance at a couple of recent events from two schools, one secular, the other Catholic, suffices all too easily to leave an indelible impression of the contemporary academy:

At George Washington University, just days after much of the Christian world celebrated Easter, a training session was held for faculty and students. The purpose of this “diversity workshop” is to expound upon the thesis that Christians “receive unmerited perks from institutions and systems all across our country.”

The seminar is titled: “Christian Privilege: But Our Founding Fathers Were All Christian, Right?!” According to the seminar description, Christians have “built-in advantages” over non-Christians.

Upon their completion of the workshop, participants should be able to “describe what is meant by privilege overall and white privilege especially;” “describe the role of denial when it comes to white privilege;” “differentiate between equality and equity;” “list at least three examples of Christian privilege;” and “list at least three ways to be an ally with a non-Christian person.”

Over at Providence College, a Dominican-founded, Roman Catholic institution, the school has succumbed to what Anthony Esolen, one of its former faculty members, characterizes as the “Totalitarian Diversity Cult.” Esolen is a practicing Catholic, a scholar who famously translated Dante’s Divine Comedy, who left Providence nearly a year ago because of what he insists is its abandonment of its Catholic Christian mission.

Fears About Chinese ‘Trade War’ Are Late And Dumb China has been waging economic war against the U.S. for decades. Michael Cutler

President Trump’s political adversaries and globalists, including the media pundits, are frantically yelping about how the President’s proposed tariffs against Chinese imports would spark a “Trade war.”

In point of fact, concerns about a trade war with China are late — very late — and have nothing to do with Trump’s proposed tariffs.

In reality China has, for decades, engaged in a one-sided “trade war” with the United States that doesn’t involve tariffs but wide-spread and wide-scale theft of intellectual property.

One-sided relationships are not relationships!

Foolishly, a succession of previous administrations have facilitated this outrageous situation.

My previous FrontPage Magazine article, Educating America’s Adversaries focused on the lunacy of the United States hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to study STEM (Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines and also providing them with optional practical training at U.S. corporations unwittingly providing them with the opportunity to engage in industrial espionage.

My article today is predicated on an April 4, 2018 Justice Department press release, Chinese Scientist Sentenced to Prison in Theft of Engineered Rice, that reported on the sentencing of a Chinese scientist, Weiqiang Zhang, for his crimes that, although not related to military concerns, are related to intellectual property theft (trade secrets), specifically genetically engineered rice seeds with potentially profound implications.

We’re Not the Thought Police That being said, what are you thinking? Bruce Bawer

To read Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch website regularly is to get an unsettling daily dose of real-life Islam-related horrors. But on April 4, Robert posted a half-hour audio that was even more disturbing than the bulk of his usual offerings. The audio records the visit by a couple of British police officers to the home of a British subject who had apparently been reported to the authorities for posting anti-Islam comments on social media. The householder in question greeted the cops with surprising – perhaps nervous? – cheeriness, and for a half hour he earnestly, willingly, and good-humoredly answered their indefensibly intrusive and insulting questions about his opinions. Among them: What were his political beliefs? What did he think of Islam? Did he hate Muslims? Was he a racist? Was he a Nazi?

It quickly became clear that this man – whose name we never learn, unless I missed something – is anything but a racist or Nazi or hater of any kind. On the contrary, he is a thoughtful citizen who, after considerable study, has come to some sensible conclusions about Islam. He made it clear that, unlike his visitors, he had read the Koran, had acquainted himself with the major specifics of the life of Muhammed, and knew the basics of Islamic theology. He was, it emerged, a strong opponent of Islam for precisely the right reasons, including (as he mentioned) the fact that it commands believers to do harm to infidels, Jews, and gays.

Yet even as he spelled out these indisputable truths about Islam, the police officers responded as if he was imagining it all. They suggested that he might want to sit down for a conversation with an Islamic scholar, who could clear up what they seemed determined to view as his misunderstandings. They insisted, moreover, that they were not the Thought Police – even though there is no other word for police officers who show up at the home of an innocent citizen to interrogate him about his personal opinions.

A couple of reader comments on the Jihad Watch audio suggested it was fake, on the grounds that police officers in a free country would surely never do such a thing. Wrong. For me, the audio brought back vivid memories – for I’ve had my own very similar encounter with European policemen. My experience was slightly different in that instead of being visited at home, I was summoned to a local police station in Norway, where I live. But the encounter itself, which took place in January 2014, was strikingly similar to the one recorded on the Jihad Watch audio. My interrogators even assured me, as their British colleagues assured the fellow in the audio, that they were not the Thought Police. When I heard that statement on the audio, I couldn’t help wondering: are cops around Europe, even in different countries, working off of the same script?

Immediately after returning home from my visit to the police station back in January 2014, I sat down and typed up everything I could remember about the exchange I’d had with my new uniformed friends. The conversation had been in Norwegian, and I wrote it out in Norwegian. I sent copies to a few friends of mine, including Hans Rustad, editor of the vitally important Norwegian website document.no, who, in response, told me that he had heard similar, and equally disturbing, accounts from other people living in Norway. He actually took a copy of my testimony with him to a meeting at the Norwegian Ministry of Justice, where he confronted officials with this example of thoroughly inappropriate police conduct.