https://jamieglazov.com/2019/11/21/malkin-video-deadly-diversity-lottery-visas/
https://greekcitytimes.com/2019/11/18/turkey-greek-chora-church-to-be-converted-into-a-mosque-is-hagia-sophia-the-next/
The Turkish Council of State recently approved a decision on the “Kariye Museum.” Originally a Byzantine Greek church in Constantinople (Istanbul), it was converted into a mosque by the Ottoman Turks. According to the new ruling, the former church is to be converted into a mosque again.
This decision could also pave the way for the conversion of Hagia Sophia, built as a basilica and now a museum, into a mosque, according to a report published on November 5 by the pro-government Turkish newspaper, Yeni Safak.
“Through a decision by the Council of Ministers on August 29, 1945, many mosques and masjids, including the Kariye Mosque, were allocated to the Ministry of National Education as museums and museum depots whose maintenance and repair expenses were to be paid from the state budget,” said the newspaper.
However, to overturn the change-of-status of Kariye Museum, the Association of Permanent Foundations and Service to Historical Artifacts and the Environment filed a lawsuit in 2005, requesting the cancellation of the decision.
According to Yeni Safak, the final verdict of the Council of State noted that;
“The Kariye mosque… is one of the public immovables belonging to the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Foundation.
“Immovables are public property established for direct charitable services such as places of worship, hospitals, and soup kitchens, and the provisions of private property cannot be applied to them. These charitable public immovables cannot be allocated to be used for a purpose other than the use specified by the [Fatih sultan Mehmet] Foundation.”
The Kariye Museum, however, was originally an Orthodox Church, namely the Chora Church. According to the official website of Princeton University:
“Described by Osterhaut as ‘second in renown only to Hagia Sophia among the Byzantine churches of Istanbul’, Kariye Camii [Mosque] attracts much attention because of its rich mosaics and frescoes. The original structure was built by the Holy Theodus in 534 in the reign of Justinian. In the 11th and 12th centuries, it was rebuilt by the Comnenus family and dedicated to Christ (thus the name, Christ in Chora). The structure suffered the great earthquake of 1296 and was later converted into a mosque in 1511 after the Turks conquered Istanbul. Since 1948, the building has been the Kariye Museum, a popular tourist attraction.”
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/machiavelli-calumny-and-free-speech-on-campus/
“Opposing same-sex marriage, challenging the assertion of rape culture on campus, and failing to put what is deemed an acceptable number of female authors on a literature course is enough to see you accused, convicted and condemned. This is not education or anything like it.”
I join those who are criticising schools and universities for failing to educate young members of Western societies in their own traditions of moral and political thought. But this criticism often takes the form of vague moralising which is short on examples that show how we can benefit from studying those traditions. And because it is deficient in this way, this criticism often has a small claim upon the attention of people in the business of education, and the society at large. I’d like to try to improve the situation by providing an example of how reading and thinking about works from the past can be of value in dealing with important moral and political issues, such as freedom of expression, education, and civil liberty in general. I also aim to identify a serious problem with our universities and propose a solution for it.
Let’s remember one of the great works of the Italian Renaissance, Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy (Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio). Machiavelli wrote this work after he had completed The Prince, probably between 1514 and 1519, but it was not published until 1531, four years after his death. This work is now commonly referred to as the Discourses, and it is a commentary on the first ten books of the monumental history of ancient Rome—From the Founding of the City (Ab Urbe Condite)—that was written by the ancient Roman historian we now refer to as Livy. Despite Machiavelli’s rather sinister reputation, the Discourses is now widely seen as one of the most powerful and influential analyses of civil liberty and republics in the Western tradition of political thought.
In the first book of the Discourses, Machiavelli comments on an incident involving two of the great military and political figures of the early Roman republic, Furius Camillus and Manlius Capitolinus. Both men had displayed outstanding virtue in serving Rome: after the Gauls had sacked the city in 390 BC, Manlius Capitolinus remained with a garrison on the Capitol (the summit of the Capitoline hill on which the temple of Jupiter stood). Alerted by the sacred geese to an attack by the Gauls, he and his men repelled them and saved the Capitol (hence his cognomen, Capitolinus); Furius Camillus led the Roman military to several victories over its enemies, including the Gauls, and he oversaw the reconstruction of the city once the Gauls had been defeated under his command.
Though both men were regarded at the time as heroes of the republic, the Romans granted a pre-eminence to Camillus, which did not sit well with Capitolinus, who felt he was every bit as good. Machiavelli observes that “so fraught was he with envy that he could not remain tranquil while Camillus had such glory, but, realising that he could not sow discord among the patricians, he turned to the plebs and disseminated among them diverse sinister rumours” (I cite the Walker/Richardson translation). Among other things, Capitolinus accused Camillus and other Roman patricians of embezzling and withholding public funds, an accusation that inflamed the plebeians against the patricians and, for a while, made them think Capitolinus was on their side. The Senate appointed an official (a “dictator”) in order to deal with this standoff between Camillus and the patricians in the Senate, and Capitolinus and the plebeians. This official commanded Capitolinus to appear in public, and asked him to provide evidence for his accusations and to identify those who held the funds he claimed had been embezzled and withheld. Capitolinus provided no details, so the dictator sent him to prison. Eventually united in the view that he was a danger to the republic, the patricians and the populace ordered that he be thrown to his death (as depicted above) “from the Capitol which he had once saved with such renown”. And he was.
Machiavelli approves of the Romans’ treatment of Capitolinus. Indeed, he claims the incident “shows how perfect the city then was and how good the material of which it was composed”. On Machiavelli’s view, the Romans rightly saw Capitolinus as a “calumniator”. A calumniator is a person who makes serious accusations against other citizens without providing sufficient evidence or witnesses to support those accusations. Calumniators make these accusations unofficially, in private, and promote their circulation “in the squares and the arcades”. And, on Machiavelli’s account, the Romans also rightly saw that calumny is a potent means of achieving political power and objectives:
calumnies … are among the various things of which citizens have availed themselves in order to acquire greatness, and are very effective when employed against powerful citizens who stand in the way of one’s plans, because by playing up to the populace and confirming the poor view it takes of such men one can make it one’s friend.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/sheep-during-reset-lions-now/
I have written frequently about the dangers Vladimir Putin poses to U.S. interests. Yet when we prune all the rhetoric away, we are still left with two antithetical Obama–Trump administration policies.
The Obama reset, in reaction to the Bush pushback against Putin’s aggression in South Ossetia, inaugurated a bewildering policy of appeasement — summed up in a 2012 debate by Obama’s weird attack on Mitt Romney who warned of Russian threats (“the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years”).
The list of Obama’s Russian appeasement is long: watering down sanctions, not arming the Ukrainians, inviting Putin into the Middle East after a near 40-year hiatus, defense cuts, dismantling plans to cooperate with Eastern Europeans to install missile defense, the Obama/Medvedev hot mic incident, whose terms (reelection “space” for Obama in a exchange for “flexibility” on Eastern European missile defense) were carried out, high-level U.S. intelligence and FBI operatives trafficking in a “dossier” drawing on purchased Russian disinformation sources, anemic responses to the Russian absorption of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and wet-noodle reactions to Russian cyber interference in the U.S. (“cut it out”, Vladimir?).
All of this naivete was based on the mythical assumptions that Russia was in transition to a civil society and should no longer be alienated as it had been in the last years of the derided Bush administration, and that Putin would interpret such restraint as magnanimity to be reciprocated rather than as timidity to be exploited.
Trump’s rhetoric was certainly not as eloquent on questions of Russian human-rights abuses as we heard in the twilight of the Obama administration in 2016, when the reset was in ruins.
But Trump’s 2017–19 record stands in stark contrast to all of the above: Pulling out of an asymmetrical anti-missile deal, arming the Ukrainians with lethal aid, defeating and killing Russian mercenaries in Syria, beefing up U.S. defense, jawboning NATO to rearm, opposing energy deals between Germany and Russia, and pushing for more U.S. gas and oil production and exports that stabilized or lowered global export prices. Are these witnesses going to criticize Trump’s “unfair” dismantling of Obama’s Russian reset on grounds that he knew Putin had tried to sabotage his campaign via having Russian operatives seeding Christopher Steele’s phony dossier?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/what-if-the-democrats-hadnt
Sondland’s testimony provided their daily ‘this changes everything’ fix.
The excitable team of Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy is especially excitable in Stelter’s a.m. newsletter today. Darcy, filling in today for Stelter, thinks everything has changed. “Historic day” is the headline of his newsletter. Isn’t every day? Approvingly, he quotes CNN colleague Jeffrey Toobin: “I think you can divide the Trump presidency into two periods, before November 20th, 2019, and after, because now we know. I mean, now we know that every fantasy about how corrupt this administration was is actually true. That this was a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning.”
I won’t bore you by listing all the other times Team Excitable has solemnly declared that Suddenly Everything Has Changed, the Other Shoe Finally Dropped, and it’s The Beginning of the End. Just to give a quick recap, Trump was going to be dragged out of the Oval Office because he colluded with the Russians during his campaign; because he fired James Comey, which was obstruction of justice; because he paid off Stormy Daniels; because he interfered with the Mueller investigation, which was obstruction of justice; and because he violated the Emoluments Clause by continuing to be a hotelier. This last was deemed the “number one” reason to impeach Trump by the Democratic party’s shaman-healer-id, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as recently as April.
Toobin’s statement is self-contradicting; Gordon Sondland’s testimony didn’t demonstrate that this administration “was a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning.” That Toobinism is the Democrats’ problem; the fact that they’ve been calling this administration a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning negates the idea that Sondland’s Testimony has Changed Everything. Darcy enthusiastically quotes pundits who called yesterday a “John Dean moment.” I think not. People who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s were about four standard deviations less cynical about politics than everyone is today.
Brian Stelter’s newsletter would have us believe that yesterday was like the moment when Krusty the Clown’s switch was flipped from Good to Evil. He and Darcy never expressed the slightest objection to anything in TrumpWorld until now, when it becomes their reluctant duty to call foul. That Darcy would suggest this simply indicates that his memory works about as well as that of the unfortunate hero of Memento. A more useful metaphor is that the Trump administration is like a tub of clear water into which beef-bouillon cubes of accusation have been thrown since before he even took office. The water turned dark brown a long time ago. Sondland’s testimony merely made the leather-colored water a bit more leathery-looking.
https://www.city-journal.org/europe-and-its-enemies
n 1989, as the Soviet empire was imploding, Alexander Arbatov, a diplomatic advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, addressed a brilliant remark to Westerners: “We are going to do something terrible to you. You will no longer have an enemy.” The disappearance of Communism indeed plunged Europe and the United States into a disorienting euphoria; for the “free world,” it was a symbolic catastrophe. There was something terrible and yet reassuring in the Soviet Union’s hostility: the East/West divide separated good from evil with razor-sharp clarity.
An enemy represents a guarantee for the future, a certainty of solidarity; it mobilizes individuals who would otherwise be ready to go their own way; and it overcomes the apathy that inheres in prosperous societies. The Cold War provided a polemical ordering of memory and of knowledge—a pedagogy for the problems of the present. The obligation to follow and check the adversary’s movements made us attentive to the slightest guerrilla actions and to the most local of conflicts; humanity remained a common concern. The threat that loomed over our social life restored an unprecedented clarity to our institutions, rights, and well-being. Democracy was once again fragile and precious, like a treasure that could be stolen at any moment.
Three decades later, the Old World, which meantime has been overcome with skepticism, seems to have provoked in its uncertainty the encroachments of two enemies: radical Islamism, in the double form of terrorism and Salafism; and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Both view the West with resentment, considering it, in the first case, guilty of hostility toward the religion of the prophet and, in the second, of having brought about the fall of the Soviet Union. There, though, the resemblance ends.
Vladimir Putin sees himself as a hyperbolic Westerner, despising European decadence in the name of the true European values that he claims to incarnate. “The liberal idea,” Putin told the Financial Times in June 2019, “has become obsolete.” All the ills that Russia suffers supposedly come not from Russians themselves but from Europe’s corruption, America’s malfeasance, and a satanic NATO. What the Kremlin’s master dreads above all is democratic contagion, an importation of the spirit of Maidan—Kiev’s Independence Plaza—into Russia itself.
https://www.city-journal.org/ny-mental-health-court-system
Today’s jails hold a disproportionate number of offenders with mental illnesses. As Stephen Eide has noted, these individuals often stay in jail far longer than typical inmates, which increases the likelihood of violent incidents or even solitary confinement. If they receive any treatment, it’s provided in a punitive rather than therapeutic environment.
Working to change this grim reality is the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, which last week celebrated a milestone: 1,000 successful graduates from its criminal-justice-system diversion program. Mental health courts provide low-level offenders with community-based treatment as an alternative to trial and potential incarceration—if both the prosecution and defense agree to it. Participants must appear in court regularly to report on their progress. If they complete their program (which often lasts 12 months or more), their charges are dropped. Thanks to the court’s approach, New York has 1,000 fewer instances of jailed mentally ill persons.
The Brooklyn Mental Health Court works in similar fashion to Kendra’s Law, the New York statute that empowers judges to order people with serious mental illness to receive mandated and monitored treatment while they live in the community. Both programs catalyze treatment and can reduce recidivism by holding systems accountable for providing services to those who require care. As the city prepares to close Rikers Island, mental health courts and Kendra’s Law are more important than ever.
Judge Matthew D’Emic has presided over the program since its creation in 2002. Today, 29 other mental health courts operate in New York State, including in Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. They have handled over 11,000 cases. According to an evaluation of the mental health courts in the Bronx and Brooklyn prepared for the National Institute of Justice, participation reduces the likelihood of re-arrest by 46 percent. By diverting defendants with serious mental illness from the criminal-justice system into community-based treatment, mental health courts improve public safety and limit unnecessary incarceration. This common-sense solution ultimately increases coordination between systems responsible for the mentally ill—a shortcoming since the 1960s.
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-tragedy-of-the-trans-child/
In Texas, the case of James Younger points to a disturbing trend in the treatment of gender-confused youth
His mother pulling him by one arm, his father pulling him by the other, seven-year-old James Younger, dressed in a skirt, looks distressed and confused. His mom, Anne Georgulas, wins the struggle and rests him on her hip. His dad, Jeffrey Younger, calls 911. “Why?” asks James. “She was supposed to give me custody,” his father replies. A video recording of this incident, which occurred on March 8, 2018, at James’s elementary-school open house, was played before a jury in Texas last month. It is a larger symbol of how children such as James Younger have become pawns in the transgender debate.
The Younger case has gained much media attention, in the U.S. and beyond. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC all seem to cast the father as the villain, in particular for his refusal to agree that his child is transgender. Rolling Stone opines that the Younger story has become a “terrifying right-wing talking point.” Vox is worried about Republican state legislators’ trying to introduce bills prohibiting chemical and surgical interference with the sexual development of children who say they’re transgender, and “what [this] could mean for families nationwide” when “legislators want to have a say in whether Luna Younger should be allowed to socially transition.” For the Left, the Younger story is a tale of backwards attitudes victimizing a child.
In truth, it’s progressive attitudes that are victimizing the child, and James Younger is not an outlier. There are many more just like him, and some in even more dire straits. For years, the medical and legal establishments have been ignoring evidence and bending their standards to please transgender activists, some of whom are clinicians. There are three clinical approaches to helping children who exhibit symptoms of gender confusion. One involves a range of talk therapies and psychotherapies to address suspected underlying causes. A second, called “watchful waiting,” allows the child’s development to unfold as it will, which may mean that he chooses to transition later or not at all.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/pelosis-projection-lloyd-billingsley/
In Adam Schiff’s “impeachment palooza,” as one Republican called it, not a single witness has flagged an impeachable offence on the part of President Trump. As the smears, hearsay and lies surge onward, an offstage player has provided the key to all mysteries of the 2016 election and beyond.
After former ambassador Marie Yvanovitch failed to signal any bribery or crime on the part of the president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promptly targeted President Trump. “I think part of it is his own insecurity as an imposter,” Pelosi told CBS. “I think he knows full well that he’s in that office way over his head. And so he has to diminish everyone else.”
Nancy’s keyword was “imposter,” a person posing as someone he is not. That profile hardly fits the current president of the United States.
Donald Trump has been a public figure for decades, putting up buildings, staging boxing matches, and appearing on television. Nobody has suggested that Donald J. Trump ever posed as somebody else, and nobody can point to mysteries in his ancestry. All that, and more, does apply to his predecessor in the White House.
The junior senator from Illinois, a virtual unknown, claimed that his father was a Kenyan goatherd who went to school in a tin-roof shack. That story came from the 1995 Dreams from My Father, which official biographer David Garrow proclaimed a novel and the author a “composite character.” That was apparent to the most casual reader of the Dreams book, which claims the Kenyan “bequeathed his name” to the Hawaiian-born American, and called him a “prop” in someone else’s narrative.
In all his writing from 1958-1964, the Kenyan Barack H. Obama makes no mention of an American wife and son. Barry, as his mother named him, was adopted by Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian student his mother Ann Dunham married, and raised in Indonesia.
https://spectator.org/author/rael-jean-isaac/
It comes in waves, and it’s impossible to predict what will happen after the current wave of increasingly unhinged climate change activism breaks.
Global warming has been characterized by its critics (and occasionally by followers like Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono) as a religious movement. While this is correct, it is a religious movement of a special kind, that is, an apocalyptic movement. And although it is widely known that apocalyptic movements foretell an end of days, demand huge sacrifices by followers, and demonize dissent, what is less known is that these movements follow predictable patterns. The general “laws” that an apocalyptic movement follows over time explain both its short-term strength and, fortunately, its longer-term vulnerability.
In Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (2011), Richard Landes chronicles recurring apocalyptic eruptions over the last 3,000 years. Typically there is belief in an imminent cataclysmic destruction that can only be averted by a total transformation of society. Precisely because the stakes are so high, a successful apocalyptic movement has extraordinary initial power. Believers are committed, zealous, and passionate, the urgent need for prompt action putting them at a high pitch of emotional intensity.
Landes describes the four-part life cycle of such movements. First comes the waxing wave, as those whom Landes calls the “roosters” (they crow the exciting new message) gain adherents and spread their stirring news. Second is the breaking wave, when the message reaches its peak of power, provokes the greatest turmoil, and roosters briefly dominate public life. Third is the churning wave, when roosters have lost a major element of their credibility, must confront the failure of their expectations, and mutate to survive. Last is the receding wave, as the “owls” — those who have all along warned against the roosters’ prophecies — regain ascendancy.
While Landes does not apply his apocalyptic model to global warming, the fit is obvious. In the 1980s and ’90s, a series of UN conferences on climate launched the waxing wave. This was followed at the beginning of this century by the breaking wave. In 2006, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (which later became a classroom staple) persuaded a broad public that man-made global warming threatened doomsday. That same year Sir Nicholas Stern, appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair to lead a team of economists to study climate change, prophesied it would bring “extended world war” and the need to move “hundreds of millions, probably billions of people.” In 2009, then–UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon told the Global Economic Forum, “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.”
