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December 2019

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Climate Cult’s ‘Grave New World’ Thaddeus McCotter

By on December 2nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/01/the-climate-cults-grave-new-world/

A new and dire manifesto demands population control that would dictate who gets to eat, have heat, and procreate to save the world with “social integrity”—whatever that means, other than nothing good.

As a proud debunker of the apocalyptic climate scam, it’s only natural that the climate cult has a plethora of biodegradable slings and arrows to hurl at my person. Among their most common claims is that I use “straw man” arguments to describe the climate cult’s destructive agenda. Yet, no sooner is this straw man accusation leveled that some new fanaticism unwittingly provides me vindication.

For example: “Earth Needs Fewer People to Beat the Climate Crisis, Scientists Say” by Eric Roston in the “Climate Changed” (get it?) section of Bloomberg News (which I believe was founded by a billionaire former Republican mayor who oddly expects Democratic presidential primary voters to embrace his candidacy rather than confiscate his property).

In an “emergency declaration,” more than 11,000 of the climate cult’s high priests of politicized science pledged your lives, your fortunes, your sacred honor, and your genitalia to impose immediate, radical changes in how human beings acquire energy and food, and reproduce.

After noting that 40 years ago “scientists from 50 nations converged on Geneva to discuss what was then called the ‘CO2-climate problem’” and “predicted global warming would eventually become a major environmental challenge,” (but failing to note the earlier false alarms that the planet was heading into a “another ice age”) apparently “the scientists got to work, building a strategy on how to attack the problem and laying the groundwork for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s preeminent body of climate scientists. Their goal was to get ahead of the problem before it was too late.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

How America’s Students Need to Get ‘Woke’ Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 2nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/01/how-americas-students-need-to-get-woke/

The progressive campus project is a mere veneer. It is a scab of sorts, overlaying a wound beneath of progressive exploitation and class privileges and hierarchies.

Today’s university students want to “wake” the nation to problems that they and their professors have identified as threatening our very existence. And they issue these periodic alarms in hyperbolic terms: we have just 10, 20—fill in the blanks—years to end fossil fuel use or else die from global warming.

They warn us that there is a veritable war waged on American women who have been limited to a mere 800,000 abortions on average per year. Sexism must explain why only 56 percent of college students are women.

The woke university lectures us that ubiquitous racism, white privilege, sexism, homophobia, transgender hatred, Islamophobia, nativism, and xenophobia supposedly make life deadly for people of color, gays, immigrants, the transgendered, and women. Apparently, such endemic hatred explains why the United States is the most tolerant, freest, most leisurely and affluent country in history for racial, religious, and gender minorities.

To address these supposedly existential concerns and agendas, the university has radically reinvented itself over the last 30 years. The relative and absolute number of tenured and tenure-track professors on campus has nosedived. In their places, the legions of noninstructional  employees and part-time lecturers have soared. The former are mostly highly paid race, class, and gender diversity and inclusion provosts, deans, and czars. The latter are low-paid and largely exploited temporary teachers.

Student aid packages have been front loaded with federally-guaranteed debt, as tuition in response has naturally soared over the last few decades above the rate of inflation. All sorts of “studies” majors have blossomed—ethnic studies, peace studies, environmental studies, black studies, Latino studies, Asian studies, feminist studies. The curricula now expand into popular culture, as if comic books, Hollywood movies, hip-hop music, and cartoons need academic study, professional scholarship, and professorial guidance.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Life and Death of the American Song Book William D. Rubinstein

By on December 2nd, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/the-life-and-death-of-the-american-song-book/

Between about 1920 and 1960, American composers transformed the nature of popular music through an unparalleled array of songs which became known throughout the world, publicised by sheet music, musicals, radio, films and by the big bands of the era. Hallmarked by melodies and lyrics which could be sung and were memorable, this world of popular music has become known as “The Great American Song Book”, and was quite unlike the popular music which preceded it or the rock-and-roll which replaced it. It was peculiarly American, and in many respects was the earliest product of American popular culture to become internationally known. Above all, the best of these songs were unforgettable and beautifully written and crafted, and their most famous composers were seemingly able to churn out hit songs at will. “The Great American Song Book” lasted for only forty years or so, and then largely disappeared. It is well worth considering its place in popular culture.

This music emerged from New York, the popular-music capital of the world, and specifically from the sheet music and piano roll publishers centred on West 28th Street in midtown Manhattan, known then and since as “Tin Pan Alley”. Most of those in the industry were immigrant Jews, whose livelihood depended on finding something new and popular. Although there were some well-known popular songs written earlier, the First World War, which shattered so many Victorian conventions, and also turned the United States into the world’s leading superpower, was the primary trigger for a new form of popular music. Almost overnight, many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of talented popular composers appeared, whose output became nationally and internationally known on 78 rpm records, and was played as the background music to silent films, by dance bands and popular orchestras, and above all on radio stations, which began to broadcast in the early 1920s.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamic State Alive and Well in Europe by Soeren Kern

By on December 2nd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15201/islamic-state-europe

“I think that the practice of automatic, early release where you cut a sentence in half and let really serious, violent offenders out early simply isn’t working, and you’ve some very good evidence of how that isn’t working, I am afraid, with this case.” — UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson November 30, 2019, after the ISIS attack on London Bridge a day earlier.

At least 1,200 Islamic State fighters, including many from Western countries, are being held in Turkish prisons. Another 287 jihadis have been captured by Turkish forces since the start of an offensive that began on October 9 against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeastern Syria.

Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu announced that Turkey would begin repatriating captured Islamic State fighters back to their countries of origin — even if their citizenship had been revoked.

“We could soon be facing a second wave of other Islamic State linked or radicalized individuals that you might call Isis 2.0.” — Jürgen Stock, Secretary General, Interpol.

“From my point of view, it is better to know that these people are prosecuted in France rather than leaving them in the wilderness. How can we protect ourselves if we do not have them in custody? The best method is to judge and control them.” — David De Pas, French anti-terrorism judge.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the November 29 jihadi attack at London Bridge, where a Pakistani Islamist stabbed two people to death and injured three others. The suspect, 28-year-old Usman Khan, a convicted terrorist, was subsequently shot dead by police.

Khan, from Stoke-on-Trent, was convicted in February 2012 of plotting — on behalf of al-Qaeda — jihadi attacks against the London Stock Exchange and pubs in Stoke, in addition to setting up a jihadi training camp in Pakistan. He was sentenced to an “indeterminate sentence,” meaning that he could have been kept in prison beyond his original minimum term of eight years due to the danger he posed to national security.

In April 2013, however, the Court of Appeal revised that sentence with a fixed term of eight years. Khan, a student of the Islamist extremist Anjem Choudary, who co-founded the now banned Al-Muhajiroun group, was released from prison in December 2018, before the end of his sentence, after agreeing to wear an electronic tag.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Durham Needs to Bring Indictments by Chris Farrell

By on December 2nd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15219/durham-indictments

The alternative to a purely domestic intelligence operation targeting a major political party’s candidate for the presidency (and later, president) was to manufacture a foreign counterintelligence (FCI) “threat” that could then be “imported” back into the United States.

Plausible deniability, the Holy Grail of covert activities, was in reach for the plotters if they could develop an FCI operation outside the continental United States (OCONUS) involving FBI confidential human sources (Halper, Mifsud, others?) that would act as “lures” (intelligence jargon associated with double agent operations) to ensnare Trump associates.

We have evidence of these machinations from December 2015 when FBI lawyer Lisa Page texts to her boyfriend, the now infamous FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, “You get all our oconus lures approved? ;).”

The coup plot failed, but the chief coup conspirators are free, crisscrossing the country on book tours and appearing as paid contributors to CNN and MSNBC.

There is new evidence that U.S. Attorney John Durham is getting to the root of criminal abuses by senior U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials in their conspiracy to undermine the Trump campaign, transition and presidency. Mr. Durham’s mandate from Attorney General William Barr — to uncover the seditious plot behind the Trump-Russia hoax, if pursued vigorously, will uncover the single greatest threat to the Constitution since the nation’s founding.

Mr. Durham’s apparent interest in FBI source Stefan Halper and the contract vehicles available to the Pentagon think tank, the Office of Net Assessments, for whom Halper worked, is an important clue.

Likewise, Mr. Durham’s travel to Italy for talks with the Italian government and their intelligence service points to another possible clue concerning the mysterious Maltese academic, Joseph Mifsud.

For the purposes of the manufactured Trump-Russia hoax, one need only remember the associations of Halper with Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page — and Joseph Mifsud with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy junior advisor — to the Trump campaign.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

It Is Time for Europe to Take NATO Seriously by Alain Destexhe

By on December 2nd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15239/take-nato-seriously

The second major challenge the NATO summit will face is Turkey. Following the 2016 coup attempt, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan purged his army. As a result, many senior Turkish officers assigned to NATO asked for asylum in Belgium.

Turkey has the second-largest army in NATO, but it is no longer a fully democratic country, nor it is a reliable ally. As long as Erdogan’s Islamist AKP party dominates Turkish politics, the country will remain a significant problem for the Alliance.

It will be illuminating to see what the London Summit brings.

In May 2017, the new $1.23 billion NATO headquarters was inaugurated in Brussels, in the presence of US President Donald Trump. With its state-of-the-art facilities, it was supposed to be “an emblem of a strong, adaptable Alliance… a 21st century headquarters for a 21st century Alliance”, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

In November 2019, in an explosive interview with The Economist, French President Emmanuel Macron declared NATO to be “brain dead”, thereby triggering a flood of angry reactions.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

McGill University Student Government Seeks to Oust Jewish Representative for Accepting Hillel-Sponsored Israel Trip by Karys Rhea

By on December 2nd, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/01/mcgill-university-student-government-seeks-to-oust-representative-for-accepting-hillel-sponsored-israel-trip/

The Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) in Montreal, Canada has attempted to remove a Jewish student from her position on the Legislative Council over her decision to partake in a sponsored trip to Israel and the West Bank.

Second-year science student Jordyn Wright accepted an offer by the Jewish campus organization Hillel to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories, and meet with politicians, journalists and locals offering multiple perspectives. According to Wright, she was hoping to “better understand a very nuanced geopolitical conflict.”

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MEDIA Comments turned off

New York Times Faulted for ‘Irredeemable and Indefensible’ Coverage of British Chief Rabbi avatar by Ira Stoll

By on December 2nd, 2019

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/12/01/new-york-times-faulted-for-irredeemable-and-indefensible-coverage-of-british-chief-rabbi/

The New York Times is drawing criticism for its handling of a warning by British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis about antisemitism in the British Labour Party.

The Times news article reported that “Rabbi Mirvis leads a body of Orthodox congregations not only in Britain but across the Commonwealth; in Britain, those synagogues account for just over half of total synagogue membership, according to a 2010 report.” The Times went on, “Not all British Jews recognize the chief rabbi as the leader of their communities.”

The Times also reported, “some people warned that Rabbi Mirvis had sidestepped a greater threat posed to Jews and other British minority groups by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has himself been accused of making racist and Islamophobic remarks and energizing parts of the far right similar to those responsible for recent attacks on Jews in the United States.” It attributed this view to “an organization called Jews Against Boris.” The Times didn’t say how many members Jews Against Boris has, or what proportion of British Jews it represents.

It’s a classic Times double standard. When an Orthodox rabbi warns against antisemitism on the left, the Times bends over backwards to undercut his authority. Contrast it to how the Times, in three recent news articles, handled a Reform rabbi’s criticism of decisions by the Israeli and American governments or politicians.

Here is the Times reporting in December 2017 about reaction to President Trump’s decision to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem: “‘Jerusalem has always been the most delicate issue in every discussion about peace,’ said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest branch of American Judaism. ‘So we’re very concerned that the announcement will either delay or undermine the very, very important resuming of a serious peace process.’” Nothing from the Times in that article about how many American Jews Rabbi Jacobs does or doesn’t represent or about how not all American Jews recognize his authority.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

At Least 20 Killed in Mexico Gunbattle Near Texas Border Clash adds to doubts over Mexican president’s ability to control organized crime groups By José de Córdoba

By on December 2nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-least-20-killed-in-mexico-gunbattle-near-texas-border-11575252949

MEXICO CITY—Dozens of cartel gunmen engaged in a two-day battle with Mexican security forces that left at least 20 people dead in a small town across the border from Texas, officials said Sunday.

The clash is the latest incident in a surge of violence hitting Mexico, exacerbating doubts about the ability of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to control organized crime groups.

Last week, President Trump said he planned to declare Mexico’s cartels foreign terrorist organizations. In November, gunmen ambushed and killed three mothers and six of their children, all U.S. citizens living in a fundamentalist Mormon community in northern Mexico. Mexico’s attorney general’s office said Sunday it had detained various suspects in the killings.

Mexican officials criticized Mr. Trump’s proposal as opening the door to U.S. interference in its domestic affairs. U.S. Attorney General William Barr is expected to meet with Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard to discuss security issues later this week.

On Saturday, a caravan of gunmen in trucks, many marked with the initials of the Northeast Cartel, drove into the small town of Villa Unión, about 44 miles from the city of Eagle Pass, Texas, according to officials. The gunmen shot up municipal offices and other buildings.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Cuba Imprisons a Humanitarian José Daniel Ferrer threatens the regime because his group serves Cuban needs. By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

By on December 2nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuba-imprisons-a-humanitarian-11575229476?mod=opinion_major_pos7

When Nelva Ortega Tamayo visited her husband José Daniel Ferrer in a Cuban prison in early November, she found him emaciated, hunched over and covered with bruises. He had a laceration on his face.

The Cuban dissident had been in custody for five weeks; the dictatorship had yet to announce charges against him. But his wife, who is a medical doctor, came away convinced that her husband was in grave danger of losing his life. Her concern is justified.

This isn’t Mr. Ferrer’s first time behind bars. He was named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International during a 2003-11 incarceration. Now he is again jailed, and again drawing global attention.

Last week the European Parliament approved a joint resolution condemning the 49-year-old’s “arbitrary detention” and calling for his “immediate release.” The European body further denounced the dictatorship’s use of torture and expressed concern over continuous “attacks against peaceful dissidents, independent journalists, human rights defenders and political opposition.”

The resolution noted that there are an estimated 120 Cuban political prisoners. Three fellow members of the Patriotic Union, which was founded by Mr. Ferrer in 2011, were arrested with him. The whereabouts of two of them—José Pupo and Fernando González—remain unknown.

Dr. Ortega Tamayo had only five minutes with her husband at the Aguadores prison near Santiago de Cuba. But it was long enough to assess his condition.

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