Displaying posts categorized under

BOOKS

BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

How the 1957 Flu Pandemic Was Stopped Early in Its Path By the time the virus reached the U.S., the country already had a vaccine ready. Becky Little

By on March 2nd, 2021

https://www.history.com/news/1957-flu-pandemic-vaccine-hilleman?li_source=LI&li_medium=m2m-rcw-history

On April 17, 1957, Maurice Hilleman realized a pandemic was on its way to the United States. That day, The New York Times reported on a large influenza outbreak in Hong Kong. One detail in particular caught the doctor’s eye: in the long waiting lines for clinics, the paper said “women carried glassy-eyed children tied to their backs.” He quickly got to work, putting out the word that there was a pandemic coming and pushing to develop a vaccine by the time school started again in the fall.

The first case of the pandemic had appeared in the Guizhou Province of southwestern China in February 1957. By the time Hilleman read about it in April, the Times reported that an estimated 250,000 Hong Kong residents—or 10 percent of the region’s population—were receiving treatment for it.

“We all missed it,” he later recalled for The Vaccine Makers Project. “The military missed it, and the World Health Organization missed it.”

The day after reading the story, he sent a cable to an Army Medical General Laboratory in Zama, Japan, asking the staff to investigate what was going on in Hong Kong. A medical officer identified a member of the U.S. Navy who’d become infected in Hong Kong, and sent the serviceman’s saliva back to Hilleman in the United States so he could study the virus.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ‘World’s Largest Bookstore’ Gets Into the Censorship Business Roger Kimball

By on February 28th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/27/the-worlds-largest-bookstore-gets-into-the-censorship-business/

Amazon’s decision to remove Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally isn’t about a P.C. company removing one book—it is a challenge to the fundamental principles underlying American democracy.

Just a week ago, I received an email from Ryan Anderson, who was recently tapped to lead the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and who wrote When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment for me at Encounter Books back in 2018. A reader who had tried to order his book from Amazon reported he was unable to find the book listed on the site. I looked myself and, yes, that reader was correct. Other books by Anderson are listed, as are various books on the “transgender” phenomenon, including a now out-of-print title that purports to rebut When Harry Became Sally. But the book itself is nowhere to be found. 

How odd. The book was controversial when it was first published—the New York Times devoted not one but two columns to abusing it. But it sold well and, outside the precincts of wokedom, it was regarded as what it is: a thoughtful, compassionate, and well-researched discussion of the devastating psychological costs of embracing the latest fad of sexual exoticism. 

What happened? Was it an accident? A little digging showed that, like the Earl of Strafford, Amazon’s motto was “Thorough.” It was not just that a book that had been listed and sold by Amazon for the last three years was “out of stock” or “unavailable.” It had disappeared without a trace, more or less like Nikolai Yezhov standing next to Josef Stalin in that notorious photo by the Moscow Canal. One day he is seen smiling next to the great leader. The next day he is gone, airbrushed from history.

So it was with When Harry Became Sally. Amazon had pushed it into the oubliette; the book was gone, “canceled” by the wardens of wokeness at Amazon. Further inquiries show that it was also gone from the Kindle store and from Audible, the audiobooks emporium that is owned by Amazon. As of this writing, the book is still available at Barnes and Noble and other emporia, including at the Encounter Books website.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Danger of Unassailable Ideas Treating beliefs as truths makes it impossible for the academy to do its job Ilana Redstone and John Villasenor

By on February 22nd, 2021

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/01/12/the-danger-of-unassailable-ideas/

Open inquiry is supposed to be the foundation of the academic endeavor. And yet today, that endeavor is constrained by a set of unacknowledged beliefs that administrators, faculty and students at colleges and universities increasingly treat as unassailable truths.

As we argue in our new book, Unassailable Ideas, many of these beliefs have in recent decades migrated from the edge of academia to its very center. Three of these beliefs in particular now shape how the academy conceptualizes research, teaching and its administrative role, a phenomenon that restricts how classes are taught, which questions can be asked and how problems are solved.

The first of these beliefs is that any effort that aims to undermine traditional frameworks is automatically viewed as good. In making this claim, our aim is not to mount a defense of conventional discriminatory power structures. However, it should be possible to rightly condemn them and simultaneously point out that not all efforts designed to fight against them are well thought-out. Sometimes the goals of a particular effort will be worthy, but the methods to achieve them won’t be.

The second belief is that discrimination is the cause of all unequal group outcomes. In other words, absent discrimination, all intergroup differences in representation in various aspects of life—from education to family structure to employment—would cease to exist. While discrimination is clearly a force that should be combated, this second belief precludes any consideration of the potential role of preferences, priorities and culture that might also play a contributing role.

The third belief is in the primacy of identity, where identity is defined by attributes such as race, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, etc. We are not suggesting that identity along these lines isn’t important: it is. Rather, we are suggesting that there can also be value in non-identity-centered perspectives.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Lying About Obama A new biography uncovers the facts behind the fake news. Bruce Bawer

By on February 19th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/lying-about-obama-bruce-bawer/

Jack Cashill has written over a dozen books, including two about the mysterious 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800, one about the Trayvon Martin case, and two – now three – about Barack Obama. His new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is a definitive account not only of Obama’s eight years in office but also of the transformation of most mainstream American political journalists, largely during the Obama era, from relatively objective reporters of the facts – emphasis on “relatively” – to dedicated partisans of the left, ready and eager at every turn to cover up unpleasant truths (however important) about Democrats and to promote outrageous lies (however destructive) about Republicans.

Fortunately, in the age of the Internet, the mainstream media have competition. Yes, there are scads of people who purvey nonsense online. But there are also serious writers who are devoted not to the Democratic Party narrative but to the facts. Some of them have worked in the mainstream media only to lose their jobs because of their excessive curiosity about matters that their bosses considered off-limits. Ken Timmerman, a Clinton voter in 1992, was fired by Time when, in 1994, he “followed the facts on the China trade to the doors of the Oval Office.” Sharyl Attkisson’s interest in the Benghazi story forced her out of CBS News. Both kept writing, but for less prestigious – and less lucrative – outlets. Cashill calls these non-mainstream writers “Lilliputians” (for the teeny-weeny people, of course, in Gulliver’s Travels) and describes them as members of the new American samizdat, borrowing the Russian word used in Soviet times to denote, as he puts it, “the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state.”

Continue reading →
BOOKS, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Book Review: America’s Covert Border War Andrew Harrod

By on February 17th, 2021

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/02/inside-americas-counter-jihad-covert-border-war#comment-2319899

Inside America’s Counter-Jihad Covert Border War

Contrary to America’s Leftists, “that jihadists would infiltrate land borders among bedraggled war refugees” is not an “outrageous fantasy of fringe racists, nativist immigration restrictionists, and conspiracy lunatics.” So writes Center for Immigration Studies National Security Fellow Todd Bensman in his revealing new book examining America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration.

Bensman is an experienced observer of his subject. This former Texas journalist became in 2009 a senior intelligence analyst with the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. With federal security clearance, he worked firsthand with federal agents in Texas government “fusion center” on border security issues.

Particularly since Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have worried about terrorist threats breaching America’s southern border, Bensman has documented. With bipartisan backing, officials have “deployed an internationally expansive, ambitious, and somehow almost entirely unreported counterterrorism enterprise at the border and along its Latin American approaches.” Yet this machinery “just became a victim of its own success in preventing jihadist attack” and has gone largely unnoticed.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Bill Gates’s Climate Hysteria By David Harsanyi

By on February 17th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/bill-gatess-climate-hysteria/

In a recent interview, he relies on fearmongering, cherry-picking, and dire predictions to make his climate-change agenda appear more palatable.

T his past Sunday, Bill Gates (net worth, $133 billion) and Anderson Cooper ($110 million) got together on 60 Minutes to discuss the numerous sacrifices Americans will be expected to make to avert an imminent climate catastrophe.

First, we should refrain from referring to these sorts of conversations as “journalism,” since Cooper never challenges any of Gates’s wild predictions nor displays even a hint of professional skepticism regarding the subject matter. Cooper simply cues up the next talking point like a host of an in-house corporate video.

Gates, who has a new book out called “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” told Cooper that he believes that climate change “is the toughest challenge humanity has ever faced,” and wealthy nations — not China or India, one assumes — must get to zero carbon emissions by 2050 or the world is basically kaput. Not 40 percent. Not five. Zero. Elsewhere in the interview, Gates called for a nationalistic “all-out effort, you know, like a world war, but it’s us against greenhouse gases.”

Americans use over 20 million barrels of petroleum products every day — now more abundant and easier to extract than ever before — so, unless some completely new technology emerges, it will take a fascistic technocracy to win this conflict. Now, I don’t use “fascistic” lightly here. Nor am I suggesting that Gates envisions goose-stepping Gestapo agents banging on your door every time you set the air conditioner below 75 degrees. And, anyway, what kind of monster would own an air conditioner with an extinction-level threat hanging over humanity? He does, however, envision the state dictating virtually every decision made by industry that relates to carbon emissions — which is to say the entire economy. If there is a more precise phrase that describes a state-controlled economy that directs both private and public ownership over the means of production during wartime, I will be happy to use it.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, KRD NEWS Comments turned off

The Doublethinkers By Natan Sharansky With Gil Troy *****

By on February 14th, 2021

https://mailchi.mp/af49bac99832/krd-news-natan-sharansky-the-doublethinkers?e=93

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/natan-sharansky-doublethink?fbclid=IwAR3pb4Fso52-ea1gnwGHIaOOPcb0qMPdAOoiP_PxbpnWzzpWP6mYWhz6z-g

In assessing my own liberation, I recall a conformity that feels terrifyingly familiar today.
Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society.

My father, a journalist named Boris Shcharansky, was born in 1904 in Odessa, the cultural and economic center of the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian empire stuck most Jews. He studied in the Jewish Commercial Gymnasium, because most other gymnasiums accepted very few Jews, if any. By the time he was 16, he had already lived through the Czarist Regime with its anti-Semitic restrictions, the “February” Socialist Revolution, the “October” Bolshevik Revolution, and the years of civil war when power in Odessa seesawed back and forth from faction to faction, as hunger, pogroms, and destruction decimated the population.

When the Soviets finally emerged from the chaos, therefore, my father was hopeful. The Communists promised that a new life of full equality was dawning, without Pales of Settlement, without education restrictions, and, most important, with equal opportunities for all. Who wouldn’t want that? One of my father’s brothers discovered Zionism and went off to Palestine. But my father was excited about building a world of social justice and equality closer to his home.

From the time he was a kid, my bookish father loved making up stories. Lucky for him, Odessa was emerging as a center for a new cultural medium—cinema. As silent Charlie Chaplin-type movies started evolving into more scripted sketches, my father put his storytelling talents to work. Imagine his thrill when, as a twenty-something, he saw millions watch a script that he had written come to life.

Of course, to succeed in his career as a screenwriter, he had to follow certain rules. His scripts, like every other work of art, had to follow the script of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, seeing the world through the lens of class struggle and class exploitation. As Karl Marx argued, and the Bolsheviks now decreed, “the history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight.”

Continue reading →
BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

While Europe Slept, 15 Years Later A new preface. Bruce Bawer

By on February 13th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/while-europe-slept-15-years-later-bruce-bawer/

Note: My book While Europe Slept was first published by Doubleday in 2006. Now the Stapis publishing house has put out a Polish edition, translated by Tadeusz Skrzyszowski. Given that the book is fifteen years old, Stapis asked for a new preface. Here it is.

This book, which appeared first in English, has already been translated into several other languages, but it is a special pleasure to see it published in Polish. My father’s parents were both Polish, although they came from municipalities that, in their time, were located in the Austrian Empire and that are now part of Ukraine, not far from the Polish border. My grandfather was a native of the Galician town of Brody; my grandmother was raised in the Galician city of Krystynopol (now Chervonohrad).  He emigrated to America before World War I; she left her childhood home – which was blasted half to bits during exchanges of gunfire between the Central Powers and the Russians – during the war, traveling all alone at the age of fifteen and waiting for several months in Rotterdam until it was determined that the shipping route was safe from German mines.

My grandparents met and married in New York City and spent the rest of their lives there, raising a daughter and a son, my father, to whom they gave the name Tadeusz Kazimierz, after Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski, the two great Polish heroes of the American revolution. My grandfather died in 1958, two years after my birth, but my grandmother lived to be ninety, and was an important part of my childhood and early adulthood. On the wall over her bed there hung for decades a huge photograph of my father as a baby, swaddled in an American flag; on her bedroom dresser stood a framed photograph of Richard M. Nixon, whom she respected for his hatred of the Communism to which the Polish people had been subjected since the end of World War II. While she was a proud American citizen, ever thankful to the United States for taking her in and for giving her freedom, she retained throughout her life a strong attachment to Poland and a strong concern for the fate of her fellow Poles.

Growing up, I was deeply cognizant of these matters. First my grandmother had been driven from her home and family by a brutal war between the Kaiser and the Tsar; later, long after she had departed, the people she left behind had been cruelly subjugated by the Nazis and the Soviets. Largely because of my awareness of my grandmother’s background, I was, even as a small child, profoundly aware of the evils of despotism in all its forms. As a teenager I read everything I could find about Nazi Germany and the USSR. When, in 1998, I relocated to the continent of my grandparents’ birth and encountered a large Islamic subculture in Amsterdam, I immediately recognized the smell of tyranny. That encounter is the starting point for this book.  

When I wrote this book, I used such terms as “radical Islam” and “Muslim extremist.” Indeed, the book’s original English subtitle was How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. I have asked my Polish publishers to remove the word “radical” from the subtitle of this edition. I no longer use such terms in connection with Islam, for I have recognized that Islam itself is radical and extreme; people who call themselves “moderate” or “liberal” Muslims are people who have exchanged key elements of their faith for Western Enlightenment values.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Deep State, Dark Intentions The NSA concentrates on collecting information on ordinary citizens because they are the low hanging fruit, while the real enemies of the U.S. are much harder to catch.  By Lucja Cannon

By on February 13th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/12/deep-state-dark-intentions/

A review of “Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State,”
by Barton Gellman (Penguin, 448 pages, $30)

Barton Gellman’s Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State raises important questions about American society and politics. It deals with power over personal information and its implications for control, secrecy, individual rights, and politics on a global scale.

The author starts with Edward Snowden and his revelations of the existence of a global surveillance leviathan, feeding off the main arteries of global communications networks. Gellman was one of three journalists who first received the secret National Security Agency files from Snowden and wrote a series of articles about them for the Washington Post, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He describes his encounters with Snowden, the information he provided, and his efforts to verify the files and expand on them.

Dark Mirror expands into a search for a deeper understanding of the surveillance state through the author’s interviews with top Bush and Obama Administration intelligence officials, participation in industry conferences, and research. This is parallel with Gellman’s effort to keep his contacts secret to avoid legal jeopardy, connected with his cooperation with Snowden and publicizing classified information.

The picture that emerges from this book will be unfamiliar to most Americans. Surveillance was pervasive until the Church Committee reforms led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which restricted spying on U.S. citizens and residents, requiring individual warrants. Outside of the United States, President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333 created a legal framework for foreign surveillance.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Soldiering on for the Jews and Israel By Ruthie Blum

By on February 9th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/soldiering-on-for-the-jews-and-israel/
A new biography reveals the lifelong battles of Australian-Israeli warrior Isi Leibler.

(February 9, 2021 / JNS) Reading a biography about a friend is a mixed experience. On the one hand, the protagonist is familiar. On the other, he’s a complete stranger, whose story unfolds like that of a fictional character being introduced in a novel.

This is the sense of duality that I had while curled up with Lone Voice: The Wars of Isi Leibler, a tome by renowned Australian-Jewish historian Suzanne D. Rutland.

Before meeting Leibler in person 20 years ago, I knew about the human-rights activist from Australia and his long-standing fight on behalf of Soviet Jewry, his tireless battle against global anti-Semitism and his connection to the World Jewish Congress—an organization from which he subsequently resigned as vice president and whose financial corruption he would launch a campaign to expose.

I was also aware that he possessed one of the world’s largest private libraries of Jewish books, certainly the most extensive in Israel. Visions of a dimly lit room covered floor-to-ceiling in volumes of bibles bound in leather and gold, alongside works of the sages and interpretations of the Talmud, came to mind.
Judging by his aptly named “Candidly Speaking” columns in The Jerusalem Post—all brutally honest and hard-hitting—I imagined the man himself to be a daunting, scholarly figure around whom I would do well to watch my intellectual step.

Continue reading →