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Canada’s Treacherous “Faustian Bargain” by Salim Mansur

Posted By on November 26th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13349/canada-government-media

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it seems, adheres to the principle of globalism, according to which the world is borderless, and the idea of sovereign nation-states is both reactionary and obsolete. In this borderless world, the governing body is the unelected, untransparent, unaccountable and deeply corrupt United Nations and its agencies, which possess the authority to legislate international law that is then enforced by member states.

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration is a document detailing the requirements for UN member-states to adopt as policy that amounts to unfettered global migration. Trudeau has bought into this UN agenda and has decided to impose it on the Canadian people without their prior knowledge or consent.

The Global Compact requires the media outlets of member-states to adhere to the objectives and refrain from any critical discussions of these objectives that would be deemed as not “ethical” and against UN norms or standards consistent with the ideology of globalism.

This helps to explain the Trudeau government’s generous handout to the Canadian media. In this light, the $600 million can be viewed as a form of secretive soft control and censorship, ensuring that the Canadian press abides by the requirements of the Global Compact.

The Canadian government’s recent announcement that it will be providing more than CDN $600 million (USD $455 million) over the next five years to bail out the country’s financially strapped media outlets — as part of the fall fiscal update about the federal budget ahead of the 2019 federal election — is not as innocent as it may seem.

In response to the announcement, the heads of Canada’s media organizations promptly popped open the proverbial champagne and raised their glasses to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Unifor, a national union that represents Canadian journalists, was even more jubilant. It felt vindicated that its slogan of “Resistance” — which it touts as Conservative Party opposition leader Andrew Scheer’s “worst nightmare” — had so swiftly resulted in opening the government’s wallet, and handing out taxpayers’ money, to an industry that should actually be fighting to remain steadfastly independent of any form of government backing.

This is what a “free press” is presumably all about, after all; not as in countries with totalitarian regimes, such as the once-Czarist Russia-turned communist Soviet Union-turned Putinist Russia, or Maoist China, or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, or Castroist Cuba and many third-world states in which the press is simply a propaganda tool of the government, subjected to the dictates and whim of its leader.

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Qatar: Time to Shape Up by Debalina Ghoshal

Posted By on November 26th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13345/qatar-time-to-shape-up

We need a united anti-Iran front, and Qatar needs to come closer to its friends on the peninsula, us, the U.S., and Israel on that point. And in the meantime, let’s help Qatar along here. Why doesn’t the United States get on with the business of declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization? And then that gives Qatar the excuse to go ahead and do it too, so we can cut off everyone’s funding for them, whether it’s in Egypt, the United States, or anywhere else in the world.” — Ambassador John R. Bolton, July 12, 2017.

The time is not only ripe for Washington to take this step; it is essential.

Since 2017, when five countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) severed diplomatic and trade ties with Qatar for siding with the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist groups, Doha has been forging new alliances, particularly with Russia and China.

During a military parade in December 2017, Qatar’s armed forces showcased new Chinese guided ballistic-missile systems that have a range — up to 400 km — that encompasses Qatar’s neighboring Gulf States. In September 2018, PetroChina struck a long-term deal with Qatargas to purchase 3.4 million tons per year of liquid natural gas.

Defense and economic ties with Qatar are crucial to China’s plans to extend its influence in the Middle East through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China is aware that for the BRI to be successful, the GCC must be reunited. Given its own cordial relations with the GCC, Beijing sees engagement with Doha as an opportunity to become a key mediator in the Qatar-GCC crisis.

Qatar is also in talks to purchase Russia’s S-400 air-defense system. Despite Saudi Arabia’s reported opposition to the deal, Russia says it is moving forward anyway.

With Russia under U.S. sanctions, and Qatar under a GCC blockade, defense and trade ties between Moscow and Doha are mutually beneficial. In 2016, for example, Qatar purchased a huge stake in Russia’s state-controlled oil company, Rosneft.

This strengthening of ties is taking place in spite of the fact that Moscow and Doha are on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, with Russia backing the Assad regime and Qatar supporting the rebel forces. Qatar is likely seeking Russian mediation to resolve its crisis with the GCC.

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Google, Facebook, and the ‘Creepy Line’ By Kyle Smith

Posted By on November 26th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/documentary-review-the-creepy-line-google-facebook-disturbing/
A new documentary reveals how much deeply personal information Google has on all of us.
O n Google, I just typed in “top races Republican,” and the word “races” got a squiggly underline suggesting I had misspelled the word. Beneath it ran Google’s helpful correction: “top racist Republican.” With “top races Democrat,” no such veering into the gutter. No squiggly line. The word “racist” did not insinuate itself into my field of vision. Oh, and before I completed the phrase, with just “top races Democra,” two lines below ran the following little hint: “best Democratic races to donate to.” Huh? Who said anything about donating? I’ve never donated to a political candidate in my life, and if I did, I wouldn’t donate to Democrats. Again, no parallel on the Republican side. No steering me to fundraisers.

The documentary The Creepy Line takes its name from a shockingly unguarded remark by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He is smiling and relaxed in a conference as he explains that Google has (had?) a nickname for excessive invasiveness. “Google policy on a lot of these things,” Schmidt says, “is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

How is that going so far? The Creepy Line, a terrifying and important 80-minute documentary now streaming on Amazon Prime, is an attempt to answer that question.

The film delves into some of the troubling habits of our two Internet masters, Facebook and especially Google. An early segment of the film, produced and partly narrated by the journalist Peter Schweizer, illustrates how your search history gives Google an enormous, permanent cache of information about you, everything from what things you like to buy to what you like in bed. Naturally Google uses the data mainly to fine-tune ad sales. But what else might they do with it? Who knows?

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The Costs of Presidential Candor By Victor Davis Hanson *****

Posted By on November 26th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/25/the-costs-of-presidential

Predictably, Donald Trump was attacked both by the establishment and the media as “crude,” “unpresidential,” and “gratuitous” for a recent series of blunt and graphic statements on a variety of current policies. Oddly, the implied charge this time around was not that Trump makes up stuff, but that he said things that were factual but should not be spoken.

Trump’s tweets and ex tempore editorials may have been indiscreet and politically unwise, but they were also mostly accurate assessments. That paradox revisits the perennial question that is the hallmark of the Trump presidency of what exactly is presidential crudity and what are the liabilities of presidential candor?

Concerning the catastrophic California Camp Fire (150,000 acres) and the Woolsey conflagration (100,000 acres), which in turn followed prior devastating California fires in spring and summer of 2018 (perhaps charring 1 million acres in all), Trump tweeted: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

Certainly, while flames were devouring homes and lives, it was unwise and crass to talk of withholding federal disaster assistance funding in the future—a realization apparently soon known to Trump himself. In short order, he began signaling his admiration for the rare courage of California response teams and visited the fires promising full federal cooperation with state officials.

No matter. A chorus of critics claimed that Trump was ignoring the human tragedy to score points, whether about reviving the logging industry to salvage dead trees or punishing blue California. Perhaps, but he did not quite serially milk the catastrophe in the manner of California Governor Jerry Brown, who repeatedly warned that the disaster was a result of global warming rather than his own disastrous green agendas that have led to such destruction: “Managing all the forests in everywhere we can does not stop climate change. And tragedies that we’re now witnessing, and will continue to witness in the coming years.”

Both statements—Trump’s and Brown’s—may well have sounded crass in the midst of such lethal disasters, but there were a few differences. The likeliest immediate cause of the 2018 serial fires was the Brown administration’s continual failure on state lands to allow removal of millions of dead trees, lost in mountain and foothill forests during the four-year California drought, and to petition the federal government to do the same in national forests.

Instead, Brown throughout years of increasingly deadly forest fires has stayed wedded to the unyielding green orthodoxy that decaying trees were nearly sacrosanct and essential to the forest ecosystem (true perhaps in the long run, but absolutely a catastrophic short-term policy in a state of 40 million). Moreover, despite Brown’s diagnosis that that the fires rage because of a new normal era of hot and dry weather, 2016 had seen one of the wettest and snowiest years in California history, while 2017 had been a near normal year of temperature and precipitation. The point then was that Trump’s ill-timed admonishment was truthful, while Brown’s own politicking was either irrelevant, misleading—or abjectly dangerous for millions. And yet Trump’s candor was precisely the sort of bluntness that turns off suburban voters.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

California Dem Chair Who Called Kavanaugh, “Lying Predator”, Investigated for Sexual Misconduct Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 26th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/272057/california-dem-chair-who-called-kavanaugh-lying-daniel-greenfield

The media keeps screaming that Republicans have a “problem” with women. But it’s women who have a problem with Democrats. This is the latest example of a national trend in politics and media.

The California Democratic Party has launched an investigation into unspecified allegations of sexual misconduct against Chairman Eric Bauman involving party staff members.

In a statement released Saturday evening, Bauman confirmed an investigation was underway but did not address the allegations against him. He said that independent counsel has been hired to investigate the matter.

“I look forward to putting these allegations behind us and moving forward as unified Democrats,” Bauman said in the statement.

Democrats unified behind sexual harassment. Meanwhile here’s Bauman’s statement on Kavanaugh.

The Republican Party has no shame and no soul. Todays vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh is nothing less than an assault on every woman in America. It shows the Republican Party is utterly devoid of humanity and decency…

The United States Senate has disgraced itself today. Its up to the millions of Americans who are feeling righteous anger including the millions of survivors of sexual violence who have been violated all over again today to rise up and defeat every single Republican who betrayed our Country by voting to confirm this lying predator to the Supreme Court…

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Netanyahu: Still Israel’s Preferred Leader Why none of the other party leaders are fit to be prime minister. Joseph Puder

Posted By on November 26th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272038/netanyahu-still-israels-preferred-leader-joseph-puder

At the Likud party meeting on Monday (November 19, 2018), Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu declared, “We have an entire year until the elections.” He made the statement a day after he called on his coalition partner not to dissolve the government. Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the “Israel Our Home” party, originally a party of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, resigned last week as Defense Minister, and pulled his party out of the coalition government. He was hoping to bring down Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud (party) led government. The pretext for his decision was Netanyahu’s reluctance to engage the Israel Defense Forces in another Gaza war, and his decision to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas. Lieberman denounced the move as “surrender to terror.” Lieberman’s thinking was that his resignation will prompt other coalition partners to leave as well, and thus new elections will be called, since the Netanyahu government would not have the necessary 61 votes to govern. He failed. Now he will sit on the Opposition benches next to Ayman Odeh, of the United Arab List. Lieberman learned two lessons. One, the country and seated Knesset Members are not eager for new elections to take place, and two, Netanyahu is not led by his coalition partners, but rather the opposite.

Naftali Bennett, leader of the “Jewish Home” party and coalition partner was also in a heated disagreement with PM Netanyahu over the response to the massive rocket attacks from Gaza. Like Lieberman, Bennett also sought more aggressive action against Hamas and its terrorist partners in the Gaza Strip. Bennett used Lieberman’s departure as Defense Minister to petition for this job, the second most powerful post in the Israeli government. Bennett’s eight seats in the 120 Knesset seats (Israeli Parliament), three more than Lieberman’s party, posed a veiled threat to Netanyahu. The “Jewish Home” party departure from the coalition would have brought the government down, and new elections would become a certainty. Netanyahu however, decided not give in. He was aided by Jewish Home party constituents, who pressured Bennett to stay put. They simply figured that Bennett’s quest for the Defense portfolio was not worth risking an early election result that might harm the party, and diminish its representation in the Knesset.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who sought early elections at one point, has changed his mind and is determined to go on with his narrow coalition government of 61 seats until its official term expires next year. Polls have consistently predicted that the Likud would end up increasing its representation in the Knesset. And Netanyahu predicted in August of this year that the Likud might possibly garner “35 (mandates), 40 is the goal.” Netanyahu has held the office of Prime Minister for 12 years, and if he manages, as it appears, to hold on until next year, he could surpass Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, as the longest serving prime minister.

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Anybody hearing about just how far left the caravan organizers are? By Monica Showalter

Posted By on November 26th, 2018

The US government must publicly acknowledge a) its role in Honduran Coup in 2009, b) that the Honduran government is a US supported dictatorship, and c) recognize the political and social crises throughout Central America as caused by US foreign policy.

This is nutbag, far-left stuff. That’s not about moms and kids, that’s about the political demands of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. And as you read further in their “demands,” you can read that they also want American officials prosecuted. This is the caravan agenda as it throws hapless women and children in front of the cameras, leaves Tijuana a humanitarian agenda area, and leaves Mexico with the prospect of a completely shut border. As they say: By any means necessarily, and those migrants are their pawns. Now is the scenario clearer?

And are there any questions as to why the caravan migrants are overwhelmingly military-aged unemployed young men, as this Univision screengrab from Mexicali unintentionally shows? (That reporter look uncomfortable).

Meanwhile, pictures from Univision (Spanish only) do expose who the caravan organizers are. The camera shots show that the organizers themselves are far-left activists, quite possibly what remain of the gang-like Chavista shock troops of Latin America who destroyed Venezuela. Smug, smarmy and robotic, they speak a disciplined Marxist party line devoid of individualism. They’re obviously experienced community organizers, which gives you an approximate look at how Chavez destroyed Venezuela. It was guys like these who produced that. And given the caravan thugcraft already seen, look at them how at odds it all is with their peaceable and humanitarian claims.

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Skip the Children’s Instagram Pageant Kids need to know their parents are paying close attention to them, not playing to an audience. By Jennifer L. Taitz

Posted By on November 26th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/skip-the-childrens-instagram-pageant-1543175539

‘How many likes did I get?” When I overheard a friend’s 8-year-old daughter ask how her back-to-school portrait had performed on her mother’s Instagram, my heart fell. No child should grow up believing life is a continuous popularity contest judged on social media.

I have two toddlers myself and people ask why I don’t post their photos. I’ll admit it’s tempting: Who doesn’t get a dopamine rush from a burst of likes or heart emojis? It’s not surprising that the average mom checks Instagram six times a day, according to the platform’s data. Yet I wonder how parents can navigate sharing while relaying the message that life is about more than presenting the perfect image. In weighing the costs and benefits of social media in my life, I realized that signing up for Instagram would only tempt me to be more superficial.

I also worry about the example I’m setting. Since social-media use is associated with disordered eating and body-image issues, do I want my daughter and son to see me documenting my life and then imitate that behavior? When studies link social-media use with depression and anxiety in young adults, and the average teenager spends nine hours a day in front of a screen, it’s worth considering the impact being visibly tethered to our phones may be having on our kids.

In my mind, healthy living requires participating in the moment in a meaningful way. That’s not easy to do while staging and posting photos, then tracking responses. Robin Berman, one of my favorite psychiatrists and author of “Permission to Parent,” prescribes looking at your children with “hearts in your eyes”: truly seeing who they are with warmth. But it’s difficult to appreciate a child’s inner world from the vantage point of an iPhone camera.

Your social-media feed may be full of kids bearing toothy smiles, but will these children be grinning when they reflect back on their meticulously documented childhoods? Since my toddlers have no idea I’ll be broadcasting a photo I’ve taken of them, it doesn’t seem fair for me to do so. If I were a teenager today, I think I’d be furious if my parents had spent my early years urging me to pose for anyone scrolling.

As a psychologist who teaches people how to regulate their emotions, I can imagine the young girl I overheard sitting on my therapy couch a decade from now, describing how her well-meaning mother chronicled her every move for a distant audience rather than paying close attention to her.

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The Favourite – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on November 26th, 2018

http://politicalmavens.com/

There’s a grand guignol atmosphere in “The Favourite,” with 18th century men coiffed in long sheep-like wigs, made up to look like drag queens and Queen Anne herself looking more like a madwoman than a regal character. Though the story of the queen and Sarah and Abigail, the two women who service her in every sense of the word, is loosely based on historical fact, the language is full of contemporary curse words which seem anachronistic. Surprisingly, they turn out to have been in use during that century – especially the two four letter words with a “u” as the only vowel; this is significant because it lends credibility to some of the sexual behavior you might have thought was not in vogue at that time. Certainly there is no historical record to support the movie’s contentions.

Everything about The Favourite is over the top – the incredible paneled palace, the background music which occasionally rises to the foreground, the oversized ambitions of Sarah and Abigail, well-played by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone and the complicated, convoluted character of Anne herself in a tour-de-force performance by Olivia Colman. She is sickly and dependent yet willful and demanding; at times a fool and then surprisingly capable of rising to the exigencies of her rank. She remains a deeply unhappy woman who mourns her miscarriages and stillbirths and the early death of her child. She is supremely eccentric and prone to childish tantrums such as summarily dismissing her various ministers so she can return to her bed. Though she is the fulcrum around whom the plot revolves, the main subjects of interest are the two women who are distant cousins, each vying for Anne’s attention and rewards.

Lady Sarah Churchill is a commanding presence who, as the queen’s main lady in waiting, has taken over most of the decision making for the country. She is clever, informed and the wife of the Duke of Marlborough who was leading the British troops in a war against the French. Historically, Sarah is credited with having been the most powerful woman in France in her day. After noticing that Abigail has been demoted to being a scullery maid, Sarah rescues her, bringing her upstairs where the work is more pleasant and where she subtly manages to insinuate herself into the queen’s affections and bedchamber.

How this happens is told in graphic scenes involving nudity, sex, politics, violence, treachery, romance, disillusionment and some surprises. At a certain point, the movie begins to feel like a pile-on that actually makes you lose interest because there’s just too much to digest. The soundtrack, effective at first in foretelling an ominous development, eventually turns into a headache-producing disturbance. But the movie will make you run to the internet to learn more about this unusual triangle of women – no mean accomplishment for director Yorgos Lanthimos.

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Airbnb’s Anti-Israel Hypocrisy The tech company will operate anywhere and serve anyone—except Jews in the West Bank.

Posted By on November 26th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/airbnbs-anti-israel-hypocrisy-1543175767

Two very different organizations took action last week against Jews owning property in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority sentenced two Palestinians to 15 years hard labor for selling land to Jews. And Airbnb, the tech behemoth and online marketplace for lodging, announced it would no longer serve Jewish communities in the West Bank. The two actions differ in brutality but are based on the same idea: Jews should have no home in the West Bank.

Under Airbnb’s policy, an American Jew with a rental property in the West Bank is barred from listing it for rent on the website. But an American Arab is welcome to list his home a few hundred meters away, even though the Palestinian law forbidding real-estate deals with Jews carries a maximum penalty of death. That openly racist policy doesn’t trigger Airbnb’s delisting policy.

Airbnb admits the West Bank is the site of complicated “historical disputes.” Until 1948, the West Bank was part of the League of Nations’ 1922 British Mandate for Palestine, created to become a “national home” for the Jewish people. In 1947, the U.N. General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution suggesting the territory be divided into Arab and Jewish states, an idea the Arabs immediately shot down. Indeed, when the mandate ended and Israel declared independence in 1948, all its Arab neighbors invaded immediately. Jordan occupied the West Bank and massacred or expelled every Jew in the area, took their homes and destroyed their synagogues. Israel only regained the West Bank after Jordan foolishly attacked again in 1967. Many Jews then returned, including to lands Jews had purchased before Israeli independence.

Since then, the dispute has narrowed. Israel signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian leadership in 1993, leaving all settlements—the new and returning Jewish communities—under complete Israeli control. Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1994. To be sure, the Palestinians still demand the removal of Jews from the entire West Bank. But Airbnb’s policy applies only to the Israeli—primarily Jewish—communities in the disputed territories.