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February 2019

MEDIA Comments turned off

Stop Earning the ‘Enemy of the People’ Label By Steve Cortes

By on February 25th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/02/25/stop_earning_the_enemy_of_the_people_label_139569.html
Media figures regularly shriek in protest whenever President Trump besmirches the press as “the enemy of the people.” The phrase is jarring, no doubt. But here’s an idea: The leaders in the Fourth Estate should quit behaving in ways that lend credence to the president’s caustic complaint. Just this past Friday, three at MSNBC, the Daily Beast, and HBO proved themselves fully deserving of Trump’s denunciation.

First, Michael Steele, a regular MSNBC contributor and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, appeared on that network with host Nicole Wallace, former communications director for George W. Bush. These two erstwhile conservative commentators prove that the cable news lights shine brightly for establishment Republicans willing to devote their professional lives to deranged disparagement of a president with the most conservative record since Ronald Reagan.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Love him or hate him, Trump is right about North Korea Image Joel Mathis

By on February 25th, 2019

https://theweek.com/articles/825598/love-hate-trump-right-about-north-korea

President Trump is doing the right thing in pursuing peace with North Korea.

It feels odd to type those words, and you probably will not hear them repeated by members of America’s foreign policy establishment over the next few days, as Trump meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Vietnam. A lot of smart people — including Trump’s own aides — fear the president will do anything to proclaim the summit a success, even if it means trumpeting an agreement that somehow lets Kim keep his tiny nuclear arsenal largely intact.

They are right: That is a likely outcome — it is what happened, in fact, the first time Trump met Kim. But that’s OK. Because not going to war with North Korea is better than going to war with North Korea. And Trump’s strategy with regards to Kim, whatever its faults, makes war with that country less likely.

For more than a generation, American policy toward North Korea has been aimed mostly at keeping that country from obtaining or keeping a nuclear arsenal. That mission failed in 2006, and American presidents have been scrambling ever since to obtain denuclearization. That goal has never been achieved, and there is no reason to believe it ever will be.

No, it is not good that Kim has nuclear weapons at his disposal: The more such weapons that exist in the world, the more likely it is that one will be used — and that would be a disaster. But it is unlikely the United States can ever convince Kim to give up his weapons because he has one very important incentive to keep them: his personal and political survival. (As if to emphasize the point, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio this weekend posted a picture of a bloodied Muammar Gaddafi to Twitter — a warning to Venezuela’s leaders during that country’s crisis, but no doubt also a reminder to Kim that giving up a nuclear program can make a leader more vulnerable to his rivals, internal or external.)

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: ABOUT THE OSCARS

By on February 25th, 2019

From my favorite Australian Journal- Quadrant

“Hollywood will convene on Monday morning (Australian time) to hand out Oscars, congratulate itself for being so very wonderful and, inevitably, let the world know the extent to which cocaine-snorting, self-absorbed leftoid libertines disapprove of President Donald Trump. Last year, the top award went to a movie, The Shape of Water, that told the story of a young woman who conjugated the horizontal with a bipedal fish, so it’s anyone’s guess what might tickle Tinseltown’s fancy this year.”

My sentiments exactly. So I skipped the event and went to Birdland to hear the Emilio Solla Tango Jazz Band- with piano, bass, reeds, brass,percussion and even an accordion. The joint was jumping. rsk

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Mars Dreaming by Joe Dolce

By on February 25th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/mars-dreaming/

For a dead and apparently lifeless planet, Mars certainly gets more that its share of attention. From HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Ron Howard and, most recently, Sean Penn, the distant red orb has proven irresistible to any and all with more than an ounce of imagination.

Since the publication of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells in 1897, popular imagination has been drawn to the idea of humans travelling to, and colonising, the planet Mars. Every decade new books and films are released exploring scenarios about whether life exists or ever existed on Mars, whether Martians would be benign or hostile, and whether the planet could sustain human life, should we be able to figure out a way to get there and settle. Although we have landed men on the moon, that journey was a mere 384,000 kilometres from Earth, whereas Mars is 54.6 million kilometres away.

The latest Mars dreaming is the eight-episode series created by the British television network Channel 4, and US streaming service Hulu, The First, starring Sean Penn. It was created by Beau Willimon, the writer-producer behind the American adaptation of the BBC’s House of Cards.

The drama in the premiere season of The First takes place in the not-too-distant future and focuses on the astronauts, their families, and the ground crew, rather on the flight or the experiences on Mars. Rob Thomas, of the Capital Times, wrote:

Beau Willimon seems to be atoning for House of Cards with his new Hulu series The First. Whereas Netflix’s first big hit often focused on the worst about humanity—not just evil but ambition, greed and weakness—his new show, The First, reminds us of the best about us.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Yes, ‘This Is America, 2019’ By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 25th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/24/yes

There have been so far about three general reactions to the concocted Jussie Smollett psychodrama.One, and the most common, has been apprehension that Smollett’s lies will discredit future real incidents of hate crimes against gays and minorities. This could be a legitimate concern, given the tensions within a multiracial society.Yet, in fact, there is no evidence in the past that false reports (some lists of such fake hate crimes put the number at around 400) have had such an effect—either on spiking real hate crimes, suppressing reporting, discouraging police investigations, or preventing even more race-crime hoaxes.

As Heather Mac Donald has recently once again noted, the 2017 upswing in reported hate crimes from the prior year may well be largely because an additional 1,000 police agencies were for the first time reporting such crimes. Mac Donald also notes that a “hate crime”—a micro percentage of reported violent crime—is narrowly defined not to include general interracial violent victimization, a category in which African-Americans on average commit 85 percent of such crimes.From Tawana Brawley to the Covington kids, fictive accounts of race-based bias and violence have not stopped purported victims from believing that they, too, could invent such incidents and win credibility—to say nothing of profitable attention. After all, the publicity of the Duke Lacrosse or Covington hoaxes did not suggest to Jussie Smollett that he would not be found credible. In fact, the opposite may be true. The more we hear of fake hate crimes, the more we will likely hear of future fake hate crimes.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The University of Diversity Is Destroying America By Edward Ring

By on February 25th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/25/the-university-of-diversity

America’s educational system is breaking, and the primary culprits are the diversity bureaucracy, now an industrial strength special-interest group that grows more powerful and more expansive every year. For years they have dominated America’s social sciences and humanities, and now they’re launching an assault on the hard sciences. If they are not stopped, they eventually will destroy America as a first-world democracy.They’re well on their way. But it isn’t “racism”—the currency of the diversocrats—that is denying opportunities to “people of color.” It is failures in the social culture of the inner cities, even more than aggregate economic disadvantages, or the lousy, unionized public schools, that result in the chronic academic underachievement of their children.

There’s no money to be made, or votes to be had, however, in telling this tough truth, even though it might do a lot of good if enough people said it or heard it. The commitment to “diversity” in American university enrollment is absolute and all-powerful, despite the incessant barrage of lavishly funded charges to the contrary emanating from the grievance industry. To achieve diversity, university admissions offices strive to achieve proportional representation by race, and to do that, they downgrade the significance of the single most predictive indicator of academic potential, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Militarization of Xi Jinping’s China “Recovering” Areas They Never Have Ruled by Gordon G. Chang

By on February 25th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13794/china-militarization

The People’s Liberation Army is arming fast, and that development is triggering alarm. Beijing has always claimed its military is for defensive purposes only, but no country threatens territory under China’s control. The buildup, therefore, looks like preparation for aggression.

Chinese leaders — not just Xi Jinping — believe their domains should be far larger than they are today. The concern is that, acting on their own rhetoric, they will use shiny new weapons to grab territory and occupy, to the exclusion of others, international water and airspace.

Moreover, in the 1930s the media publicized the idea that Japan was being surrounded by hostile powers that wished to prevent its rise. Eri Hotta in Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy writes that the Japanese “talked themselves into believing that they were victims of circumstances rather than aggressors.” That is exactly what the Chinese are doing at this moment.

Unfortunately, this tragic pattern is evident today in a Beijing where Chinese, wearing stars on their shoulders, look as if they want to repeat one of the worst mistakes of the last century.

“Be ready for battle.” That’s how the South China Morning Post, the Hong Kong newspaper that increasingly reflects the Communist Party line, summarized Xi Jinping’s first order this year to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Xi, in his own words, which were broadcasted nationwide, demanded this: “prepare for a comprehensive military struggle from a new starting point.”

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Is Zimbabwe the Next Venezuela? By John Fund

By on February 25th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/zimbabwe-people-fear-government-military-violent-suppression-protesters/

History teaches that things may get worse in both countries before they get better.

This weekend’s news that protesters were gunned down at Venezuela’s border while pro-regime thugs burned trucks filled with food and medicine demonstrated just how vicious Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship is. But those who wonder how long he can hold on to power while his nation slowly starves might want to visit Zimbabwe, as I did last month, for a sobering lesson.

Robert Mugabe became the president of Zimbabwe in April 1980, back when Jimmy Carter was still president. Within two years he had deployed his infamous North Korea–trained Fifth Brigade against minority tribes in Matabeleland in a campaign of deliberate killing and starvation. The organization Genocide Watch estimated that 20,000 people were ultimately killed.

Mugabe would later launch an insane seizure of white-owned farms. That led to widespread food shortages and a destructive hyperinflation that resulted in almost-worthless 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar notes in circulation.

But henchmen from the ruling party, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), violently tamped down protests, and he ruled until November 2017, when a clique of his own generals worried that his wife would replace him overthrew the 94-year-old dictator in a coup. Since then, former minister of defense and current president Emmerson Mnangagwa has proclaimed that his country is “open for business,” when in reality the regime’s slogan should be “The new boss is just like the old boss.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump’s War against UNRWA Will Benefit the Palestinian ‘Refugees’ By Ted Belman

By on February 25th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/trumps_war_against_unrwa_will_benefit_the_palestinian_refugees_.html

In August 2017, President Trump declared war on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) by rejecting its estimate of over 5 million Palestinian refugees, suggesting that the number was more like 500,000. In effect he was saying that a new definition should be operative. If he were to exclude descendants, there would be fewer than 20,000 people still living who fled in 1948The State Department followed this attack up by announcing that the US would make no further contribution to UNRWA.

The intent wasn’t to save money or shift the financial burden to others, but rather was to begin the process of doing away with UNRWA itself because it served to perpetuate the refugee problem and the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors, rather than to solve it. And President Trump, and his envoys Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, wanted to solve it.Not only that, but UNRWA has been known to assist Hamas in its wars with Israel, and it uses Palestinian Authority textbooks that incite hatred of Jews and promote a non-existing right of return.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The global warming pause By S. Fred Singer

By on February 25th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/the_global_warming_pause.html

CO2 may no longer affect climate.

The non-warming of the climate has become a topic much discussed since about 2005. John Christy has testified to Congress about the “gap” between IPCC climate models, which are based on steadily increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 and observations of atmospheric temperatures, measured by both satellites and radiosondes, 1978-2015. [REF hyperlink; see Christy fig. below]There have been many attempts to explain this discrepancy, ranging from a flat denial that such a gap exists [REF*; Tom Karl, Science, 2015 pp. 1469-1472, doi: 10.1126/science.aaa5632] to attempts to account for the “missing incoming energy.” For example, Kevin Trenberth has proposed that the missing energy instead of warming the atmosphere, “hides” in the deep ocean, to be released later.

Based on all the foregoing discussion, of the log-dependence of CO2 forcing, [REF Myhre et al, GRL, 1998 vol. 25, doi: org/10.1029/98GLO1908] and its possible climate-cooling effect, I have a simpler hypothesis on the ineffectiveness of CO2 in warming the climate. I realize, however, that this explanation is unacceptable to IPCC, and to many climate-warming advocates. However, I believe the “gap,” now 40 years long, according to Christy, has existed throughout the Industrial Revolution — and probably during the whole of the Holocene. In other words, I consider the “pause” may be permanent.

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