WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Can China Dislodge Russia in Central Asia? In one former Soviet republic, Beijing’s blandishments get it only so far. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on April 30th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-china-dislodge-russia-in-central-asia-11556577788

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

A trip to the picturesque capital of this mountainous landlocked republic in Central Asia feels a bit like traveling through time. The brutalist architecture and the monumental scale of the avenues and city squares show just how deeply the Soviet Union left its imprint, and the scarcity of Western-style shopping malls and food chains shows how slowly the local economy has grown since the Soviet collapse.

Bishkek also offers a window into the future of Chinese power. The five countries in Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan—stretch from the Tien Shan mountains to the Caspian Sea. They contain majestic mountains, fertile valleys and vast reserves of minerals, oil and gas. They are also central to China’s ambitious attempt to transform international trade so that land routes across Asia replace the sea routes between Europe and Asia.

Many Western observers think China’s rise to primacy in Central Asia, where Russia has traditionally dominated, is inevitable. Russia’s economy is stagnant, while the appeal of China’s vast market, its cheap consumer goods, and its multibillion-dollar commitment to build a rail and road network throughout the region all tend to pull these countries away from Moscow and toward Beijing.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Heroism at the Synagogue The best defense against a killer with a gun is a defender with a gun. ****

Posted By on April 30th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/heroism-at-the-synagogue-11556580251

When a gunman filled with anti-Semitism opened fire Saturday at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., worshipers turned into heroes. Sixty-year-old Lori Kaye was killed after jumping between Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein and the attacker, according to witnesses. Others shielded nearby children or hurried them to safety. Rabbi Goldstein, who was shot in the hands and lost his right index finger, wrapped his bloody wounds in a prayer shawl and rallied his congregation outside.

Two men confronted the attacker. An Army veteran named Oscar Stewart, 51, shouted and charged the gunman, who ran. An off-duty Border Patrol agent at the service, whom the Rabbi identified as Jonathan Morales, also gave chase, firing his own weapon at the getaway car. The assailant was arrested shortly afterward and is charged with murder and attempted murder.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The White Crow – A Review….see note please

Posted By on April 30th, 2019

http://politicalmavens.com/

To see the real Nureyev, a magnificent dancer see the utubes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHD6Ly0oYpA rsk

A film about the greatest male dancer of his generation should convey at the very least the speed and perfection for which he was known. Unfortunately, The White Crow, a biopic of Rudolph Nureyev, is too often a static production with too little depiction of the dancer in an extended ballet sequence and too much mooning at his yearning or irritable face – the default expressions the director has chosen to emphasize . We see short scenes of the dancer’s talented leaps and twirls and too many scenes of his petulant tantrums which become increasingly annoying with each escalation.

The film leads up to and ends with his request for political asylum in Paris and we see little of his great international successes in America and Europe, nor does the script by David Hare take us up to his tragic death from AIDS.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Judge Napolitano, the mendacious magistrate By Russ Vaughn

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/judge_nap__the_mendacious_magistrate.html

“What is even more mystifying is this: whatever made Napolitano think he, an on-air legal “analyst” for Fox News Network, was of sufficient juristic eminence to be appointed to the highest court in the land?”

I’m not a daytime watcher of Fox News, but as an always-on television is within earshot, I do tend to be a bit of a detached daytime listener. As such, I have been mystified by the one-eighty-degree turn of Fox legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano from being an ardent Trump-supporter to a constant critic of the president. It was one of those mysteries we must sometimes wait years for to get an explanation of what led to such a sudden, inexplicable political reversal. But thanks to that titan of tweeting, our nation’s chief executive (Dems would prefer that to be Titanic), we now know what inspired this sudden onset of anti-Trump hostility from Judge Nap.

Following his hugely successful Wisconsin rally Saturday night, Donald Trump tweeted this:

….Ever since Andrew came to my office to ask that I appoint him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and I said NO, he has been very hostile! Also asked for pardon for his friend. A good “pal” of low ratings Shepard Smith.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Segregation by Design on Campus How racial separatism become the norm at elite universities like Yale, Brown and Wesleyan. By Peter W. Wood and Dion J. Pierre

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/segregation-by-design-on-campus-11556564318

Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars. Mr. Pierre is a research associate at the association and primary author of its new report, “Separate But Equal, Again: Neo-Segregation in Higher Education.”

In his inaugural address in January 1963, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama thundered: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” About “tomorrow,” Wallace was right. More than half a century later, racial segregation comes as easy as breathing to many American colleges and universities.

Wallace had in mind the exclusion of blacks from white-only institutions. Today’s racial segregation, by contrast, consists of ethnic groups walling themselves off within institutions. In the past two years the National Association of Scholars surveyed 173 colleges and universities, public and private, in all 50 states. We found 46% of schools segregate student orientation programs, 43% segregate residential arrangements, and 72% segregate graduation ceremonies. Though these arrangements are ostensibly voluntary, students can’t easily opt out. The social pressure to conform is overwhelming.

This kind of racial separatism on campus isn’t new. We pursued case studies of Yale, Wesleyan and Brown universities, where we found that black students began to organize exclusive groups with separatist agendas as early as the 1960s.

MEDIA Comments turned off

A new low, even for The New York Times: Roger Franklin

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/

If readers would indulge a reminiscence, let me relate an incident from decades back, when I was working for Fairfax in New York and happened to be taking a late-night drink at a now-vanished watering hole on West 43rd Street, Gough’s Chophouse. A dark and smoky armpit of a joint, it was directly across the road from what was then the New York Times HQ and frequented, as on that Saturday evening, by “Timesmen” in their preppy weekend uniform of khaki trousers and Lacoste shirts (Timeswomen mostly had the good sense to steer clear).

Fresh from putting the Sunday edition to bed, four of them were in an expansive mood and making a fair fist of four-part harmonies. Then a fifth Timesman arrived and added his voice to the barroom choirThe singing stopped on a dime. One of the quartet’s vocalists directed a withering glance at the latest tenor and said in that peculiar nasal honk which speaks of an Ivy League education, “We are Timesmen and we do things properly. If you can’t sing in tune, don’t sing at all.” His critique dripped with an arrogance verging on contempt. The Times must be a very peculiar place, I concluded.

The Times, these days singing from a different songbook, is still doing things “properly” — if the definition of proper is an astonishing eagerness to embrace and advance anti-Semitism. That’s Exhibit A above, published in the past few days by the paper that bills itself as the source of “all the news that’s fit to print”.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Matt Fridy’s Alabama Campus Free-Speech Act By Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/matt-fridys-alabama-campus-free-speech-act/

Alabama state representative Matt Friday has just introduced HB498, the Alabama Campus Free Speech Act, into the Alabama State House. Fridy is a lawyer who specializes in constitutional law, and is a strong and effective conservative voice in the Alabama State Legislature. His bill draws on model campus free-speech legislation published by Arizona’s Goldwater Institute. (Along with Jim Manley and Jonathan Butcher, I co-authored that model.) This means that in addition to barring restrictive speech codes and so-called free-speech zones, Fridy’s bill also covers discipline for shout-downs and establishes an effective oversight system as well.
Comments

Although it’s sometimes argued that the campus free speech crisis affects only deep-dyed blue states like California and Massachusetts, the problem is national. An Alabama university currently holds the dubious honor of being FIRE’s Speech Code of the Month award winner. And while it was not a full-on shout-down, the recent heckling of CIA director Gina Haspel at Auburn University is a reminder that more serious speaker disruptions could easily occur down the road. It’s only prudent to prepare for that eventuality. There have been other free speech problems at Alabama universities as well, so protection against such abuses is clearly called for.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times’ Inadequate ‘Apology’ for Its Anti-Semitic Cartoon By Wesley J. Smith

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-york-times-inadequate-apology-for-its-anti-semitic-cartoon/

The New York Times International published an obviously anti-Semitic cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — depicted as a dog wearing a Star of David tag — leading a blind Donald Trump, who is wearing a yarmulke.

The paper has issued a mild apology on its Opinion Twitter feed — where it was soon buried by other posts–saying it “included anti-Semitic tropes” (the whole cartoon was one big anti-Semitic trope) that were “offensive,” stating passively that it “was error of judgment to print it,” and that the New York Times News Service and Syndicate has “deleted it.”

But it was in the international edition of the paper. You can’t delete that! So there will be an “editor’s note” published in Monday’s paper.I am sorry, this (sort of) apology is utterly insufficient. If the Times management was as horrified by the international edition’s transgression as they should be, they would engage in the same deep repentance — meaning a sincere and articulated apology combined with a commitment to change — that the paper would demand of other publications (particularly conservative) that committed similar wrongdoing.
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For example, the paper should explain in detail how the cartoon came to be published. It should explain what — if any — disciplinary actions were taken against those that made the decision to print it, and what steps the paper is taking to ensure there are no repeat performances. And they need to promise to be on heightened guard against yielding to the anti-Semitic impulse.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Madame Secretary, “At this point it makes a very big difference.” by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22617/madame-secretary-at-this-point-it-makes-a-very

During a January 23, 2013, Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing Hillary Clinton was questioned about the September 11, 2012 bombing of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The Benghazi anniversary attack occurred while Clinton was Obama’s Secretary of State during the final months of Romney’s presidential bid to unseat Obama and just two months before the November presidential elections.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was conducting a review of the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans including U.S. Ambassador J. Chris Stevens. During questioning by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), Hillary Clinton famously said, “At this point what difference does it make?” Let’s find out.

The transcript of the hearing recorded on C-SPAN shows Sen. Johnson repeatedly asking Clinton about the story coming out of Obama’s White House that the Benghazi attack was a response to protests outside the Consulate and an anti-Islam video posted on YouTube.

Johnson: No, again, we were misled (5:02 on C-SPAN) that there were supposedly protests and that something sprang out of that — an assault sprang out of that — and that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact, and the American people could have known that within days and they didn’t know that.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Unrelenting Nature of Antisemitism by Alex Grobman, PhD

Posted By on April 29th, 2019

https://thejewishvoiceandopinion.com/the-unrelenting-nature-of-antisemitism/

Antisemitism, sometimes called the world’s oldest hatred, has existed in one form or another throughout much of human history. The current increase in antisemitism throughout the world is a warning of the threats ahead if a vigorous response is not mounted.

If reasonable people are to act against the current surge of antisemitism not only on the streets in the United States and Western Europe but also in the halls of Congress and other government institutions, it may be helpful to examine some historical examples of this particular strain of hatred and review the pernicious libels used to incite hatred and violence against the Jewish people.

Some illustrations are well known. In the Biblical Book of Esther, the villainous Haman tells the King of Persia: “There are a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your realm. Their laws are different from those of every other people’s, and they do not observe the king’s laws; therefore it is not befitting the king to tolerate them.”

In the second century CE, Tacitus writes in his Histories Book V: “Among themselves, they [the Jews] are inflexibly honest and ever ready to shew compassion, though they regard the rest of mankind with all the hatred of enemies.”