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Mitch McConnell’s Grand Guignol performance in the Senate By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/mitch_mcconnells_grand_guignol_performance_in_the_senate.html

The Grand Guignol was a theater in Paris in the first half of the 20th-century that specialized in amoral horror entertainment. On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gave his own version of Grand Guignol when he rained fire and brimstone on the Senate, detailing the horrors Democrats would suffer if they were to do away with the 215-year-old filibuster. He knew, of course, that his speech was meaningless because he already gave the filibuster away in January. Once it’s gone, Republicans will never again have the power to take revenge on the Democrats.

Back in January, I wrote about how Mitch McConnell preemptively gave away the filibuster. He agreed to Chuck Schumer’s demand regarding Senate rules that, in the 50-50 Senate, there would be “power sharing” (hah!) in exchange for Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema promising not to ditch the filibuster, which has been part of the Senate rules of operation since 1806. While Sinema is something of a maverick and might be trustworthy, Joe Manchin, after pretending to stand strong, always sides with the Senate majority.

On Tuesday, McConnell was back again talking a big game on the filibuster. What triggered him was that Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) was caught on a hot mic telling Transportation Secretary Pete (he likes to play with toy trains) Buttigieg that Democrats were planning to pass an infrastructure bill and were going to do it without Republican votes. The presumption is that Cardin said this because he knew that the Democrats were going to move to end the filibuster – that is, he knew that Sinema and Manchin were reneging on their promise to McConnell.

As the New York Sun explains, McConnell got angry. In many ways, he delivered a stellar defense of the filibuster:

Mr. McConnell responded today with a prediction of the kind rarely heard in the upper chamber. “Let me say this very clearly, for all 99 of my colleagues,” the Kentuckian rasped. “Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin — can even begin — to imagine what a completely scorched earth Senate would look like. None of us has even served one minute in a Senate that was completely drained of comity and consent.”

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Biden Needs to Handle the Turkey Dossier with Utmost Care by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17098/biden-turkey-relations

Erdoğan is waiting for an opportunity to “persuade” Biden that his Islamist regime is in fact a staunch ally of the Western civilization.

What Erdoğan diplomatically refers to as “common interests” are in reality a list of Turkish demands: 1) Remove Turkey from the CAATSA list. 2) Allow Turkey to activate its Russian-made air defense architecture. 3) Ignore the Turkish public bank’s role in violating U.S. sanctions on Iran. 4) End the U.S. alliance with Syrian Kurds and allow Turkey to crush them. 5) Praise, do not criticize, Turkey’s democratic record.

An aggressive overt and covert Turkish lobbying campaign in Washington will soon begin. As a first sign, Turkey has hired a Washington-based law firm, Arnold & Porter, to lobby for its readmission to the F-35 program. Under the six-month, $750,000 contract, Arnold & Porter will “advise on a strategy for [the Turkish defense procurement agency] and Turkish contractors to remain within the Joint Strike Fighter Program….

Three U.S. presidential administrations encouraged Erdoğan recklessly to harm Western interests and further destroy whatever pieces of democracy were left in his own country by allowing him to maintain his transactional relationship with the U.S. rather than weakening his regime.

Biden now has a chance to stop and even reverse that unpleasant chapter in modern Turkish history.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s two predecessors, Donald Trump and Barack Obama, made the same mistake, though for different reasons. They both mishandled Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his increasingly Islamization of Turkey’s secular lifestyle, education system, politics and institutions. Obama apparently hoped that Turkey’s post-modern Islamists could be an example to less-democratic Islamic regimes in the Middle East. Trump, on the other hand, seemed not to care if his pro-Erdoğan overtures emboldened Turkey’s Islamist strongman and simultaneously weakened the NATO ally’s ties with the West and Western institutions.

In a 2010 interview with the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, Obama referred to Turkey as a “great Muslim democracy.”

“The U.S. always expressed the opinion that it would be wise to accept Turkey into the European Union,” he said. In a 2012 Time interview, Obama named Erdoğan as one of the five world leaders with whom he had the strongest bonds. In 2011, Tom Donilon, the president’s former national security advisor, said that Obama regarded Erdoğan as “a man of principle, and also a man of action.” When Obama became conscious of his strategic mistake, it was too late. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic’s April 2016 issue:

“Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West—but Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian…”

Despite irrefutable evidence that Iran (through helping it evade sanctions) and Russia (through purchasing its S-400 defense system) mattered more to Turkey than Western interests, Trump took over the Erdoğan enthusiasm from Obama. Amid the stand-off over Turkey’s military incursion into northern Syria in 2019, Trump hailed Erdoğan as a “hell of a leader, a tough man.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Whatever Happened to Reading? By David Solway

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/03/16/whatever-happened-to-reading-n1433000

I’ve been thinking lately about the pervasive decline in reading, a phenomenon I noticed as a college prof over many years of teaching, and which now seems to have become even more prevalent. These reflections were spurred by two films which I’ve recently re-watched, the rather gruesome three-part Hannibal series starring the inimitable Anthony Hopkins, and the ever-delightful six-episode Oliver’s Travels featuring a charming performance from Alan Bates.*

What struck me about the Hannibal trilogy was the surname Lecter, a homonym for the word “lector” from the Latin for “reader,” and which gives us the common word “lecture.” Hannibal the Cannibal is a reader of sorts, a rather voracious one. A forensic psychotherapist by profession, he is deeply educated, can lecture on Renaissance art and history and recite Dante in the original, loves and understands music, knows precisely how to detect life histories from a modicum of cues—and devours people as if they were texts, relishing choice passages.

Oliver, for his part, is an inveterate wordsmith, an anagram maestro, a crossword buff, an incorrigible punster and an excellent scholar who has been “rendered redundant” as a lecturer in Comparative Religion at the University of the Rhondda Valley in Wales, which has revised its curriculum to reflect “market strategy.” What is now important is “accessing information,” whereas “history,” as Oliver quips, “has become a thing of the past.” The university has become a vast computer lab and erudition is now regarded as quaint and obsolete. There is no place any longer for a playful and richly-stocked mind like Oliver’s. One surveys printouts rather than reads Aristotle.

I was intrigued by these productions in part because each in its different way had something to do with the problem of reading, of “ingesting” knowledge, of “devouring” a complex world as if it were a book, of scholarship in a world dedicated to markets, mere information processing and the devaluation of wit (both Hannibal and Oliver evince a lively capacity for witty utterance). It is a world obsessed with droids rather than people, with mediocrity rather than meritocracy, with surfaces rather than depths, and with artificial intelligence rather than real intelligence. The director of the Hannibal films, Ridley Scott, dealt with the concept of artificial intelligence in Blade Runner, whose replicant anti-hero assumes a human quality only at the end with his “tears in the rain” speech. It is no accident that a leading software system is called “Android.” Novelist Alan Plater’s and director Giles Foster’s Oliver’s Travels gestures toward the great satirist Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and to the comic Restoration dramatist George Farquhar, who figures waggishly in the plot.

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In the Name of Ethnic Studies California pushes the worship of cannibalism and human sacrifice on American children. Jason D. Hill

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/name-ethnic-studies-jason-d-hill/

The collapse of the American Republic is now imminent.
California is soon expected to pass a new statewide “ethnic studies” curriculum that has as its goal the total “decolonization” of American society. It elevates the cannibalistic Aztec religious symbolism across 10,000 public schools that serve 6 million students.

The architect behind this movement is R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, cited throughout the curriculum, Cuauhtin argues that the United States is a white supremacist, patriarchal, misogynistic and anthropocentric state founded as a Eurocentric “land grabbing” genocidal state that committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes. In Cuauhtin’s narrative, the U.S. killed these tribes’ gods and replaced them with Christianity. The evil settlers established a regime of “coloniality,” dehumanization and genocide which resulted in the total erasure of holistic indigeneity and humanity.

The antidote to this “theocide,” as can be surmised from a careful reading of Cuauhtin’s propagandistic manifesto, is nothing short of cultural reparations for the lost peoples of America by way of an insidious moral eugenics program inflicted on unassuming and defenseless young children. Cuauhtin’s goal is to totally decolonize America and to establish a new regime of “counter genocide” and counterhegemony which will displace “white culture” and lead to the ‘regeneration of indigenous epistemic cultural futurity.”

And what does all this look like?

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Can You Say ‘Death Panels’? Perverse priorities in Norway. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/can-you-say-death-panels-bruce-bawer/

On paper, the six million citizens of Norway are among the luckiest people in the world. Thanks to profits from North Sea oil, the nation’s sovereign wealth fund is worth over $1 trillion, which comes to about $200,000 a head. Norwegians earn good salaries, on average, and even though they shell out a lot in income taxes – as well as the world’s highest taxes on gasoline and alcohol – they’re supposed to receive a great deal in return, namely free education up through the graduate-school level (if they choose to go that far) and a social-welfare system that promises to serve the needs of the disabled and unemployed as well as to cover the costs of everyone’s medical care from cradle to grave.

But the promises are one thing, the reality another. In recent decades, like other countries in Western Europe, Norway has welcomed massive numbers of immigrants, an alarmingly high percentage of whom seem destined to be lifelong welfare clients. In Norway as elsewhere, this has put a severe strain on the treasury. Priorities have had to be identified, and choices have had to be made. The nature of those priorities and choices is reflected in two recent news items from the land of the fjords.

One of the reports concerns a family of five in Seljord, a small town in the mountains of Telemark. Ghiat Kanaan, the father; Riham Abouaisha, his wife; and their three children, Bana, Ghazal, and Omar, came to Norway from Syria about four years ago, presumably as asylum seekers. It’s not clear from the news story, which was posted on the website of NRK on March 4, whether anyone in the family has a job; all we know is that they can’t afford to buy their own residence. As a rule, such families are placed in rental apartments on the taxpayers’ kroner, in addition to being supplied with furniture, a car, and regular bank transfers to guarantee them a decent standard of living. 

Now, however, under “From Renting to Owning,” a new program initiated by the Seljord municipal government in order to ensure that “people like the Kanaans” stay in the area (why this should be a desideratum is also unclear), the Kanaan family have their own “dream house.” They picked it out themselves; the municipality of Seljord bought it for them to live in, while retaining the title; eventually, they will become its owners. The Kanaans were one of the first two families in Seljord to benefit from this program, which plunked down a total of about $500,000 for the two houses. The report on the Kanaans’ new house was treated in the media as a feel-good story.

An op-ed that appeared at the end of February in the newspaper Bergensavisen was the opposite of a feel-good story. Under the headline “The Right to Breathe,” 21-year-old David Instebø Vang, a native of Bergen, explained that he was born with cystic fibrosis (CF) and that he is expected to live to be somewhere between 40 and 50. “The question is really what will give way first – the intestines, the pancreas, or the lungs? I would bet on the lungs, because it already feels as if they’re running on empty. Breathing isn’t easy, and talking is usually followed by coughs and hacking. Breathing, for me, is like breathing through a straw while running at full speed up and down the stairs.” And this is just one of several very unpleasant symptoms that make living with CF a painful daily struggle.

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‘Soft’ Science Has No Place in Government Policymaking Henry I. Miller and Andrew I. Fillat

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/16/soft-science-has-no-place-in-government-policymaking/

‘Science, at its core, is a social phenomenon.” This observation, from Alondra Nelson, the newly appointed deputy director of President Joe Biden’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), certainly qualifies for a prominent place in the Pantheon of Inane Statements. The core of science is, in fact, the scientific method – posing and testing hypotheses; carefully gathering, examining, and generating experimental evidence; and finally, synthesizing all the available information into logical conclusions.

Nelson’s assertion is inauspicious, but perhaps we should not be too surprised by a “squishy” statement from someone whose undergraduate degree was in sociology, and her doctorate, in “American Studies.” What, we wonder, qualifies her to be deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy? And how does it comport with Biden’s commitment always to rely on “science and truth.” We suspect it is an example of how lip-service to science has invaded the domain of real science.

“Hard” sciences are a framework for understanding physical, chemical, sub-atomic, biological, and other natural or even manmade phenomena. The disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and especially mathematics, have nothing to do with society as such, because the phenomena they characterize exist independently of humans. Mathematics is typically the language of this framework, whether it is arcane calculus, probability theory, combinatorics, topology, or some other branch well understood by only a very select group.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats Are Forever Slaves To Wretched Ideas

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/17/democrats-are-forever-slaves-to-wretched-ideas/

A White House aide wants the president “to start acting now” on reparations without congressional approval. But not even the consent of the House and Senate would legitimize reparations. It’s a policy so divisive, and so impossible to implement, that the idea, which is an ugly societal wedge of its own, needs to be dropped and never brought up again.

While decent Americans have moved past racial politics and are starving for genuine unity, senior adviser Cedric Richmond “sees first-term progress on reparations,” reports Axios, which recently interviewed the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

“We have to start breaking down systemic racism and barriers that have held people of color back and especially African Americans,” Richmond said. “We have to do stuff now.”

The U.S. House is considering a bill with 169 cosponsors that “establishes the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.” The panel would “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.” A companion bill has also been introduced in the Senate.

Biden, according to his press secretary, “certainly would support a study of reparations,” and Vice President Kamala Harris has publicly endorsed a committee that would explore reparations. Neither of which is a surprise. Just as they can never let a crisis go to waste, Democrats are unable to resist virtue-signaling, and in some cases outright punitive measures against their countrymen, whether warranted or not.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kim Jong Un’s Sister Warns U.S. Not to Cause a Stink With North Korea Kim Yo Jong takes again to state media to vent anger over computer-simulated U.S.-South Korea military exercises by Timothy Martin

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kim-jong-uns-sister-warns-u-s-not-to-cause-a-stink-with-north-korea-11615901802

SEOUL— Kim Jong Un’s sister warned that the U.S. should avoid causing a stink with North Korea if the two countries are to enjoy a peaceful relationship, as a pair of top Biden administration officials traveled to the region.

In a Tuesday state-media report, Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of the North Korean dictator, railed against combined military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea that began last week. The trainings have for years been scaled-down affairs, having moved to computer simulations. But the Kim Jong Un regime has long been irked by the exercises, choosing to view them as U.S. hostilities.

Ms. Kim mostly levied insults at the Seoul government and didn’t mention President Biden by name. But she singled out the new U.S. administration, which she said has been “trying hard to give off [a] powder smell in our land,” according to the English language version of the report.

“If it wants to sleep in peace for [the] coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step,” said Ms. Kim, deputy director of the North’s propaganda and agitation department.

Ms. Kim has taken on a more elevated role in recent years, serving as Pyongyang’s mouthpiece for relations with the U.S. and South Korea. She hadn’t issued a statement since December, when she attacked South Korea’s then-foreign minister for casting doubts about the legitimacy of North Korea’s claims of having zero Covid-19 cases.

The North Korean state-media missive, a hallmark of the regime’s foreign affairs, came as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were in Japan, with plans to next travel together to South Korea. The visits represent the first foreign trip for each. North Korea’s denuclearization is a key focus for the stops in Tokyo and Seoul.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Is Something Dying in Darkness at the Washington Post? The newspaper corrects its story on a famous Trump phone call. James Freeman

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-something-dying-in-darkness-at-the-washington-post-11615926067?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Misleading media coverage about Donald Trump and his supporters has been so common in this era that perhaps it no longer qualifies as news. But it can still do harm to public understanding of national events.

The Washington Post has recently made a significant change to a story it published in January, which now carries the following notice at the top:

Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” …The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.

The Post was forced to amend its story by last week’s publication of a recording of the phone call by the Journal’s Cameron McWhirter.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Hole in Biden’s China Strategy: Central Asia Both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan could help the U.S. combat Beijing and advance human rights. By Kamran Bokhari

Posted By on March 17th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hole-in-bidens-china-strategy-central-asia-11615934414?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The brewing competition between the U.S. and China is the defining conflict of the 21st century. The White House’s recent Interim National Security Strategic Guidance Document, crafted to convey President Biden’s vision for how America will engage with the world, is all about the U.S. vs. China. Yet it fails to mention the region where America has its lightest footprint on the planet: Central Asia.

China is building a land bridge to Europe and the Middle East that runs through Central Asia. The new administration will have to account for the region in its strategic thinking if it hopes to re-engage the world after four years of President Trump’s “America First” policy.

The low priority that Mr. Biden’s team assigns to Central Asia is a legacy of successive administrations dating to the 1991 implosion of the Soviet Union. The U.S. has since engaged Central Asia, but only in a tactical or transactional manner. Take the 2015 establishment of the C5+1. This U.S.-run diplomatic forum has continued to be the channel through which Washington distributes aid to and organizes meetings between the five Central Asian states: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. But it hasn’t brought Washington anywhere close to being able to compete with Beijing and Moscow in the region.

Thirty years since the U.S. gained access to Central Asia, long tucked away in the Kremlin’s shadow, it is time to develop a broader strategy for the region—one that takes into consideration the rapidly evolving geopolitics in Eurasia, as Beijing seeks to fill the vacuum created by Russia’s receding influence.