HISTORY Comments turned off

Western Leaders Pervert History in Recalling World War I By Julia Gorin

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/20/western-leaders-pervert-history

No sooner was President Trump derided for “brightening” upon Vladimir Putin’s arrival at the Armistice Day centenary last month than he canceled his planned meeting with Russia’s president at the recent G20 summit. This left Putin to high-five Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a gesture, no doubt intended to troll the Western hypocrites pretending to not know either.

Pretense and hypocrisy, however, seem to rule the day, and their current mascot is French President Emmanuel Macron. At last month’s Armistice Day observances, which his country hosted, he presumed to lecture the American president on nationalism.

Quite rightly, Trump skipped the peace forum Macron “had arranged with the intention that his fellow leaders ruminate on the murderous follies of the Great War and compare it to the rise of nationalism today,” the Guardian reported. World affairs editor Julian Borger observed an “absence of Western solidarity,” concluding that “Trump showed himself ill at ease with most of his European counterparts and the fleeting encounter with Putin was a reminder of his much greater affinity for autocrats.”

Or perhaps his greater affinity for those who can smell a rat. This is the same “united West” which uniformly snubbed a commemoration that was at least as important: the last major celebration of Victory Day that any veterans may still be alive to celebrate. In May 2015, the 70th anniversary, Washington gave an instruction to world leaders to boycott Russia’s observances. Only the Czech Republic defied it, President Zeman sending the American ambassador packing, and reaffirming that his visit would be a thank-you to Russia “for not having to speak German in this country.”

There were Americans who saw the snub for the insult it was to our own dead from World War II. The following letter from Michael Gardner of Jacksonville, Florida appeared in English-language Pravda:

. . . When I heard our U.S. government was not going to send a delegation to Moscow for the 70th anniversary victory celebrations, I was very angry. It was an insult to the men of all the Allied Forces who fought and died in Europe. Their sacrifice was ignored because of petty politics by the U.S. government . . . I was moved by what I saw in Moscow, and . . . boycott or not, I will be in Moscow in 2020 for the 75th anniversary victory celebration and I will carry a picture of my father, Corporal James P. Gardner, and honor all those who fought in the Great Patriotic War.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Back to Discipline Disparate impact reflects disparate reality. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/disparate-impact-analysis

A federal commission on school safety has repudiated the use of disparate-impact analysis in evaluating whether school discipline is racially biased. The Trump administration should go further, and extirpate such analysis from the entirety of the federal code of regulations, as well as from informal government practice.

Disparate-impact analysis holds that if a facially-neutral policy negatively affects blacks and Hispanics at a higher rate than whites and Asians, it is discriminatory. Noticing the behavioral differences that lead to those disparate effects is forbidden. In the area of school discipline, disparate-impact analysis results in the conclusion that racially neutral rules must nevertheless contain bias, since black students nationally are suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students. In 2014, the Obama administration relied on this methodology to announce that schools that suspended or expelled black students at higher rates than white students were violating anti-discrimination laws.

To understand how counterfactual such an analysis is, consider Duval County, Florida, which has Florida’s highest juvenile homicide rate. Seventy-three children, some as young as 11, have been arrested for murder and manslaughter over the last decade, according to the Florida Times-Union. Black juveniles made up 87.6 percent of those arrests and whites 8 percent. The black population in Duval County—which includes Jacksonville—was 28.9 percent in 2010 and the white population 56.6 percent, making black youngsters 21.6 times more likely to be arrested for homicide than white youngsters. Nationally, black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined; if Hispanics were removed from the equation, the black-white disparity would be much greater.

Beneath those homicide numbers is a larger juvenile crime wave. “The reason so many kids commit murder in Jacksonville is not because they are murderers, but because they are everything else: drug dealers, robbers, thieves, rapists and a bunch of other types of criminals whose crimes of choice has a great likelihood of leading to a murder,” a teen murder convict, Aaron Wright, told the Florida Times-Union. Fifty-nine percent of juvenile murder convicts from Duval County who responded to the paper’s inmate survey reported that they were committing another crime such as robbery or burglary when they or their co-defendant killed their victim. Wright himself was robbing a woman when his fellow robber shot and killed her, making Wright guilty of felony murder.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

France Afire By Anthony Daniels

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/12/31/france-afire/

The ‘Yellow Vests’ torch cars as President Macron decrees happiness

Returning to England from France, I happened to find in an antiquarian bookshop a pamphlet titled “The Great Week in Paris.” It began:

The events which have taken place in Paris have been so extraordinary, that it would require the pen of a Gibbon to give them a suitable colour.

The writer described the situation in France as follows:

There are among the first ranks of society men . . . who sentimentally adhere to those rotten branches of a decayed trunk! some from habit, others from gratitude for past favours, and many from a consciousness of their total unfitness to figure in the new order of things.

Plus ça change: The great week in Paris referred to in the pamphlet, by an eyewitness to it, was in 1830, the week in which the unpopular monarch, Charles X, was overthrown by revolution. A man who sometimes works for me in my house in la France profonde calls President Macron “Napoleon the Fourth,” though perhaps “Charles the Eleventh” would be as apt.

General dissatisfaction is in the air, and it is not because of the levels of carbon dioxide in it. Millions of Frenchmen are far more concerned with their pouvoir d’achat (their purchasing power), which has risen very little in the last ten years and may actually be declining, than with allegedly saving the planet by reducing carbon emissions — unlike the Parisian elite.

The elected monarch’s concerns seem to them exactly the opposite of those of most Frenchmen: First he reduced the speed limit on France’s excellent but mainly empty rural roads from 90 to 80 kilometers per hour, to many people’s intense irritation, and then he increased taxes on fuel, particularly diesel. You have to be rich these days in France to be able to live without a car, and it is not long since the government encouraged the population to buy the diesel vehicles that it now wants to eliminate for supposedly ecological reasons. This strikes much of the population, which is struggling to maintain its standard of living, as let-them-eat-cake-ish in spirit.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Women’s March, Sponsors Silent on Anti-Semitism Allegations By Alexandra DeSanctis

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/womens-march-sponsors-silent-on-anti-semitism-allegations/his is how toxic the far Left has become.

It has been a week and a half since Tablet magazine detailed extensive allegations of anti-Semitism and financial corruption on the part of the Women’s March leadership.

The organization, which since November 2016 has organized grassroots efforts across the country to demonstrate and vote against the Trump administration, has yet to offer a formal statement on the exposé. And so far, not one of the more than 100 partners and sponsors of the Women’s March has raised a fuss over the story — including more than 20 high-profile groups that National Review contacted directly seeking comment.

As of this morning, the Women’s March website still featured a November 20 statement from co-chair Linda Sarsour side-stepping demands from the group’s founder that the current co-chairs resign over their support for anti-Semitic Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan.

The Tablet essay, by Leah McSweeney and Jacob Siegel, from earlier this month added fuel to that fire. Several sources told the magazine that at the leaders’ first meeting in November 2016, Carmen Perez and Tamika Mallory, now co-chairs along with Sarsour, “first asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people — and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade.”

Later, Mallory and Perez allegedly “berated” one of the group’s leaders over the fact that she was Jewish, saying, “Your people this, your people that” and “Your people hold all the wealth.” The co-chairs have also been accused by former group leaders of reshaping the financial structure of the organization for their personal benefit and of employing members of the NOI security team for Women’s March events.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Der Spiegel Reporter Was a Rotten Apple, and CNN Went Bananas for Him By Jim Treacher

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/der-spiegel-reporter-was-a-rotten-apple-and-cnn-went-bananas-for-him/

These are tough times for journalists, at least according to journalists. The president who loved and nurtured them all (except Fox News) has been replaced by a president who hates and battles them all (except Fox News). Journalists came up with the idea of “fake news” to explain why Hillary Clinton lost, then watched helplessly as they themselves were branded “fake news.” Jim Acosta gets shouted down every time he bravely stands up in the White House and asks a question makes a speech. Things are bad out there.

As if all that isn’t enough to make journalists feel sorry for themselves, seven of them were killed in the United States in 2018. Five reporters in Maryland were murdered during a shooting rampage by a lunatic who’d held a longstanding grudge against their newspaper, and two others were killed by a falling tree while reporting on a rainstorm in North Carolina. Somehow, these two incidents mean America is now one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. Somebody keeps a list every year, and now we’re on it. This is welcome news for journalists who need to think of themselves as martyrs. Move over, firefighters, because the real heroes are here!

And now, journalists have to deal with yet another hardship: Being reminded that their industry richly rewards liars.

Have you heard of Claas Relotius, star reporter for Der Spiegel? Me neither, at least until today, but apparently he’s a respected, award-winning journalist. And now, Der Spiegel has some bad news about him:

Claas Relotius, a reporter and editor, falsified his articles on a grand scale and even invented characters, deceiving both readers and his colleagues…

For example, he included individuals in his stories who he had never met or spoken to, telling their stories or quoting them. Instead, he would reveal, he based the depictions on other media or video recordings. By doing so, he created composite characters of people who actually did exist but whose stories Relotius had fabricated. He also made up dialogue and quotes…

Since 2011, just under 60 of his articles were published in DER SPIEGEL magazine or on SPIEGEL ONLINE. By his own admission, there are at least 14 articles in question that are at least in part fabrications.

Which means the number is probably higher.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘They Shall Not Grow Old’: Peter Jackson’s Masterpiece War Memorial By J. Christian Adams

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/they-shall-not-grow-old-peter-jacksons-masterpiece-war-memorial/

Our war memorials are usually made of brass or stone. But Peter Jackson’s astonishing new film They Shall Not Grow Old is a war memorial for the big screen.

Jackson’s film has done the impossible: He has created a time machine. Jackson was given access to the sound and video archives of the Imperial War Museum and tasked with producing a documentary about World War I in time for the centenary commemoration of the armistice on November 11, 2018. (Link to trailer here.)

After playing to sold-out theaters across the United Kingdom in October, the film will show just one more day in the United States – December 27. December 17, the only day the film has shown so far in the United States, saw packed theaters.

Jackson’s film portrays the World War I soldier as you have never seen him: in color, in high definition, and with sound.

They Shall Not Grow Old painstakingly cleans up the old jerky films of the Great War. It removes the blemishes, turns them into clean high definition, and colorizes them with thorough, painstaking accuracy. The film speed is even reset to natural motion, so no more unnatural gaits.

Jackson’s technical wizardry turns the landscapes of France into something vivid, expansive, and apocalyptic.

But it’s the faces of the young soldiers that will haunt you. Instead of the old washed herky-jerky films with their blurry soldiers marching by, Jackson uses modern technology to wipe clean the dust of a century and draw out the real people who endured unendurable trench life.

The faces are so young.

They are the kids down the street. They are the people you see every day in your own life. They gaze at you across the century and change forever the history of the Western Front in your heart.

An officer reads a morale-boosting charge before a company roars into the hell of the Somme in the summer of 1916. Jackson’s filmmakers dug up the original orders from that day and produced a voiceover of an officer using the geographically correct dialect based on the regional unit insignia. Indeed, Jackson employed lip readers and voice actors from the correct regions of the United Kingdom throughout the film to provide dialog anytime onscreen lips move.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum: Hail to Haley Outgoing U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley not only has lived up to the legacies of other great U.N. ambassadors, she has surpassed them.

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.jns.org/opinion/hail-to-haley/

When Nikki Haley was appointed in November 2016 by U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to serve as America’s ambassador to the United Nations, I wrote that there was reason to hope she would live up to the legacies of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick and John Bolton as “shining beacons in the Midtown Manhattan snake pit.”

Although Haley, the governor of South Carolina at the time, was not well-known beyond the confines of her state, her personal and political history appeared to indicate that she possessed what I called the “kind of clarity on controversial issues that is required in an arena filled with people whose key purpose is to cloud the distinction between good and evil.”

Four months later, when Haley emerged from her first encounter with the U.N. Security Council and blasted its anti-Israel bias, I was even more optimistic that she had what it took “to navigate the Orwellian universe in which the U.N. operates, where Western values are on a lower hierarchical rung than Third World culture, and where a mockery is made of the concept of human rights.”

From that moment on, Haley continued to exceed expectations. She not only served as a proud and fierce defender of American interests in the world, but did so in her own dignified and powerful voice. Indeed, she made the office her own. It is an accomplishment whose significance cannot be overstated.

Her announcement on Oct. 9 that she would be leaving her post at the end of the year was thus a shock and a disappointment, particularly for Israelis. Her popularity in the Jewish state was on full display at this year’s Fourth of July celebration in Tel Aviv, where the mere mention of her name during U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman’s speech elicited such screeching cheers that one might have mistaken the event for a rock concert.

The ovation was well-deserved. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted upon learning of her resignation, Haley “‎led the uncompromising struggle against hypocrisy at ‎the U.N., and on behalf of the truth and justice of ‎our country.”

Indeed. But that’s not the only extraordinary thing about her. Unlike most people on their way out of a job, she did not slack off for a second. If anything, she upped her game. Her farewell speech at the monthly meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Dec. 18 was just as memorable, if not more, than her previous addresses. The gist of her words—a preview of Trump’s yet-to-be-revealed Mideast peace plan—was that the Palestinians have been abused by their leaders and misled by members of the international community.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

It Was Always About the Wall . By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/12/20/it_was_always_about_the_wall_138971.html

The reason a secure borer wall has not been — and may not be — built is not apprehension that it would not work, but rather real fear that it would work only too well.

There was likely never going to be “comprehensive immigration reform” or any deal amnestying the DACA recipients in exchange for building the wall. Democrats in the present political landscape will not consent to a wall. For them, a successful border wall is now considered bad politics in almost every manner imaginable.

Yet 12 years ago, Congress, with broad bipartisan support, passed the Security Fence of Act of 2006. The bill was signed into law by then-President George W. Bush to overwhelming public applause. The stopgap legislation led to some 650 miles of a mostly inexpensive steel fence while still leaving about two-thirds of the 1,950-mile border unfenced.

In those days there were not, as now, nearly 50 million foreign-born immigrants living in the United States, perhaps nearly 15 million of them illegally.

Sheer numbers have radically changed electoral politics. Take California. One out of every four residents in California is foreign-born. Not since 2006 has any California Republican been elected to statewide office.

The solidly blue states of the American Southwest, including Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, voted red as recently as 2004 for George W. Bush. Progressives understandably conclude that de facto open borders are good long-term politics.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Alan Dershowitz: Michael Flynn now has three options to stay out of prison

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/alan-dershowitz-michael-flynn-now-has-three-options-to-stay-out-of-prison

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan’s handling of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s sentencing hearing Tuesday on Flynn’s guilty plea to lying to the FBI was anything but exemplary. The judge – who has a well-deserved reputation as both tough and fair – made several fundamental errors right at the outset.

First, Sullivan suggested that Flynn might be guilty of treason. This reflects an abysmal ignorance of the governing case law. Nothing Flynn did comes even close to satisfying the strict definition of treason.

The U.S. Constitution states: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same Overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

Flynn admitted he represented Turkey – America’s NATO ally – before he became a federal employee as President Trump’s national security adviser, but said he failed to register until later under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not charge Flynn for failing to register – let alone with the far more serious crime of treason.

But Sullivan blundered by accusing Flynn of having been an unregistered foreign agent while he was serving in the White House, thereby having “sold your country out.” This was flat out wrong, since Flynn stopped working for any foreign government before he became President Trump’s national security adviser when Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2017.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Barr Memo Is a Commendable Piece of Lawyering By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on December 20th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/the-barr-memo-is-a-commendable-piece-of-lawyering/

Trump’s attorney-general nominee would help Mueller conclude his work within DOJ guidelines.

It is exactly what we need and should want in an attorney general of the United States: the ability to reason through complex legal questions in a rigorously academic way. Not to bloviate from the cheap seats, but to think these issues through the way a properly functioning Justice Department does: considering them against jurisprudence, statutes, rules, regulations, and Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, with a healthy respect for facts that we do not know or about which we could be wrong — facts that could alter the analysis.

That is precisely what Bill Barr did in June, when he penned an unsolicited memorandum to top Justice Department officials on a matter of immense national significance: the obstruction aspect of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Trump.

Barr, whom President Trump has nominated to be the next attorney general, was not prejudging the facts. He was addressing the law and Justice Department policy. With great persuasive force, the 19-page memo posits two contentions. First, based on what is publicly known, the special counsel’s theory of obstruction is legally flawed. Second, if a Justice Department investigation is going to be used to take down a democratically elected president, the social cohesion of our body politic demands that it be over a clear, very serious crime, not a novel and aggressive theory of prosecution.