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Easing German-Israeli Tensions New German foreign minister vows to fight anti-Semitism.Joseph Puder

Posted By on April 4th, 2018

Angela Merkel’s Germany has a new coalition government and a new Social Democrat Party (SPD) Foreign Minister, 51-year old Heiko Maas, who replaced his controversial predecessor, Ingmar Gabriel. Last week was Maas’ first official trip to Israel, which began at Yad V’shem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. In the visitors book Maas wrote “Germany bears the responsibility for the most barbarous crime in the history of humanity.” He also vowed that Germany would continue to fight against anti-Semitism and racism “everywhere and every day.” On this, his preliminary foreign trip, Maas arrived in Jerusalem following visits to Paris, Warsaw, and Rome. On his two day trip he was visiting Ramallah for talks with Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and he met with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin.

In recent months, the relationship between Germany and Israel has been pretty frosty, and the new foreign minister seeks to change that. In his inaugural speech in Berlin, Maas announced that he would travel to Israel to mark Israel’s 70th anniversary of independence, and pointed out that, “Personally, the German-Israeli history is not just one of historical responsibility, but it also represents a deep motivation in my political decision-making.” He added, “I didn’t go into politics out of respect for Willy Brandt or the peace movement, I went into politics because of Auschwitz.”

Maas’ statement about his motivation to enter politics is certainly commendable, considering that 42-years ago (1976), an Air France airplane from Israel bound for Paris was diverted it to Entebbe by German hijackers. Once there, the Germans initiated a Nazi-like selection, which separated Jews and Israelis from the rest of the passengers. German soil saw the murder of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics. Earlier in the 1960’s, German scientists helped Egypt’s Dictator Abdul Nasser develop missiles aimed to destroy the Jewish state. Given (Nazi) Germany’s murder of Six-Million European Jews, Germany’s moral responsibility to the Holocaust survivors in the Jewish state was not upheld. Blood money was indeed paid by the West German government, but at the same time, its scientists sought to finish Hitler’s work against the Jewish state.

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The Campaign To Destroy Laura Ingraham David Hogg’s totalitarian tactics aim to frighten a TV host’s advertisers away. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on April 4th, 2018

The left-wing lynch mob that has been trying to destroy conservative commentator Laura Ingraham for her gentle mockery last week of David Hogg has already succeeded in frightening advertisers away from the host’s Fox News Channel show.

Since launching his career in big-money leftist televangelism weeks ago, Hogg has been spewing hatred and venomous lies about anyone who doesn’t toe the party line. His belligerent in-your-face activism has also been driving up sales of firearms and ammunition and boosting the membership rolls of groups like the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America.

Hogg has been especially focused on accusing his enemies of wanting children to die. “It just makes me think: What sick f**kers are out there that want to sell more guns, murder more children, and, honestly, just get reelected?” Hogg told The Outline. “What type of person are you, when you want to see more f**king money than children’s lives? What type of shitty person does that?”

Hogg has also called the NRA “child murderers,” NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch “disgusting,” and Republicans “sick f**kers.”

Hogg is a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Broward County, Fla., where former student Nikolas Cruz massacred 14 students and three school employees on Valentine’s Day.

Ingraham has blamed “mental illness” and “broken or damaged families” for the massacre, which is consistent with the evidence, given that Cruz has serious psychiatric problems and had a difficult upbringing, losing his sole remaining parent in the months before the attack. Others have pointed out the multiple failures at every level of government that kept Cruz out of the criminal justice system, as well as the left-wing Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (JDAI) that helped to make the young man the mass murderer he is today.

Ingraham said a March 14 student walkout for gun control was not an “organic outpouring of youthful rage.” It was “nothing but a left-wing, anti-Trump diatribe.” This comment angered a lot of left-wingers.

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Yale Panel Condemns ‘White Saviorism’ in ‘Nonprofit Industrial Complex’ By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on April 4th, 2018

Last week, a student panel at Yale University suggested that white supremacy is central to nonprofit charities. According to Yale students, the “white savior” mentality turns charities into a racist and oppressive “nonprofit industrial complex” keeping people of color down.

“The nonprofit industrial complex is very real and very alive in New Haven and needs to be dismantled just like any other oppressive system,” Kerry Ellington, organizer for People Against Police Brutality, argued. “White folks are centering themselves in these spaces and don’t know how to listen to the communities they serve.”

The U.S. Health Justice Collaborative, an initiative started by students in Yale’s health professional schools, organized and hosted the event. The panelists included a journalist, nonprofit directors, and several organizers. Each of them discussed how their careers in nonprofits involved “white saviorism.”

Over 1,300 people said they were “interested” in the event on Facebook, and many attendees were turned away at the door, organizer Robert Rock, a senior with the class of 2018, told the Yale Daily News. Those turned away could watch the event livestreamed on Facebook.

Barbara Tinney, executive director of the New Haven Family Alliance and a member of the panel, described her initial shock at the “audacity” of the event’s title: “Paved With Good Intentions: White Saviorism and the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.” Even so, Tinney said the panel echoed themes she had previously discussed with her colleagues over her long career in the New Haven nonprofit scene.

Tinney suggested there is a conflict between the work nonprofits do and “many of the oppressive power dynamics they can help maintain.”

Panelists lamented the predominance of white people at the head of nonprofits, and launched into a discussion of “white fragility,” a term referring to the alleged widespread avoidance of difficult racial discussions in order to prevent “white discomfort.”

“When my white allies use their claws, they could get pushback,” Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change, said on the panel. “When I hiss, I could get shot.” Even so, she suggested that discomfort should not stop “white allies from showing up to support people of color,” the Daily News reported.

Journalist Jordan Flaherty half-jokingly referred to Batman as a “white savior,” the Daily News reported, “because he is a rich white man who dedicates his money to gadgetry and vigilante justice, rather than investing in his community.”

The “white savior” panelists suggested that many nonprofits, led by white people, misunderstand the needy communities they aim to serve, entrenching poverty rather than alleviating it. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Hungary and the Strongman Voters will have to defend their democracy since Brussels can’t.

Posted By on April 4th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hungary-and-the-strongman-1522795619

A mayoral loss for Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party in an urban stronghold in February was a warning that voters are growing disenchanted with his rule. Mr. Orban’s rhetoric about a George Soros -led conspiracy to inundate Hungary with migrants seems to be turning off many undecided voters. Corruption allegations against Fidesz politicians and supporters, which they deny, also weigh on support.

If Hungarian voters deal Mr. Orban a blow, they’ll have to do it without much help from the country’s opposition parties. The electoral system makes Fidesz beatable if voters choose the single most viable alternative candidate in each district. But many parties are reluctant to stand down their candidates for fear that they may win too few seats to make it back into parliament. The two most prominent opposition parties are also at opposite ends of the political spectrum—the Greens, and Jobbik, a formerly far-right party that claims to have remade itself as a center-right group. That leaves voters to figure out how to vote tactically in each district.

The stakes are high for Hungarians and their European and NATO partners. Mr. Orban has eroded freedom of the press by withholding government advertising from unfriendly media and encouraging his friends to buy newspapers and TV stations, and new laws target funding for civil-society groups that challenge his actions. Mr. Orban is a close friend of Vladimir Putin within the EU and NATO, where Hungary enjoys the same veto as other members. A supermajority would allow him to further entrench his power.

An embarrassment is that the EU hasn’t been more effective at blocking Mr. Orban’s authoritarian moves. Mr. Orban has been shrewd in befriending political groups in Brussels, and the EU doesn’t have much authority to punish countries determined to stray from democracy. That leaves Hungarian voters to defend their democracy as best they can, while they can.

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The Divine Frenzy of Feminism By David Solway

Posted By on April 4th, 2018

If the spirit of the classical Greek playwright Euripides could be summoned from the grave and observe our feminist age, he would not be surprised. In The Bacchae (premiered circa 405 B.C.), he told the story of Pentheus, the unfortunate ruler of Thebes, who resisted the ritual incursion of Dionysus, the androgynous god of wine, ecstasy, passionate delirium, and the oracular Mysteries.

In the play, Dionysus returns to Thebes, the city of his birth, accompanied by a retinue of bacchants, or drunken revellers. Finding himself mocked, he infects the women of the royal household with an access of divine frenzy, whereupon they flee into the forest to perform paroxysms of fevered worship. Pentheus wishes to preserve the functioning of the state and recognizes that the upsurge of visionary dementia and phobic irrationality exemplified by the maenads or “raving ones” — the RadFem hordes of the day — would lead to the disruption of the political order and the destabilization of civil society.

Pentheus intends to put an end to the insanity but, influenced by Dionysus, falls prey to curiosity and is persuaded to disguise himself in women’s clothing, enter the forest and witness the maenadic revels from a perch in a tall fir tree. He is spotted by the tribe of hysterics, brought to the ground and ripped to shreds, the mordancy of the scene enhanced by the fact that it is his own mother, Agave, who tears off his head and carries the trophy back to Thebes.

Of course, the play is far more complex than this short synopsis would indicate. Euripides treats the perennial conflict between the Olympian gods and the maternal Furies, between man and woman, between social order and individual enthusiasm, between Apollo, the god of reason and light, and Dionysus representing the darker forces of emotion and rapture — or as we would say today, of libido.

This theme was famously addressed by Euripides’ great predecessor Aeschylus in the Oresteian Trilogy, where the female goddesses the Eumenides (or Furies) are pitted against the male Olympians. Both forces, Aeschylus felt, the visceral and the rational, were necessary to the proper conduct of the state and in the life of the individual, but must be contained in a condition of approximate balance to avoid a descent into anarchy. The message of The Bacchae, however, is ambiguous insofar as the conclusion of the play suggests the desired victory of the Dionysian infatuation, yet the disintegration of public order and Apollonian statecraft would have been obvious to Euripides’ audience. We recall that Plato’s Republic, in which music, art, and trance-like phenomena were to be the prohibited by law, appeared circa 380 B.C., only 25 years after the initial performance of The Bacchae. Both sides of the dynamic had their dedicated votaries.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

When the EPA Was Really Corrupt By Julie Kelly

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

Who said this? “The EPA is one of the most toxic places in the federal government to work. If you don’t get rid of the toxicity of the employees at the EPA, we are doing a great disservice to this country. I have serious questions about [the EPA administrator’s] ability to actually administrate.”

No, those remarks aren’t from one of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s many critics on the Left. They’re the words of former House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who held several congressional hearings in 2016 to investigate egregious cases of misconduct and mismanagement under the leadership of Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s last EPA chief.

Since official Washington is consumed with Pruitt’s every move, perhaps it’s time to take a little trip down pre-Trump Memory Lane—when all was right in the world, according to incurious elite media—and jolt the faulty memories of these hyperventilating talking heads and editorial boards who insist Pruitt should be fired for spending 50 bucks a night to rent a D.C. condo.

Gina McCarthy should share a place of ignominy in the Obama Hall of Shame, right alongside IRS commissioner John Koskinen, FBI Director James Comey, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Despite extensive evidence of wrongdoing and subsequent attempts to cover up one scandal after another, McCarthy mostly avoided harsh news coverage during her tenure from July 2013 to January 2017. (She barely won Senate confirmation following questions about her integrity and environmental activism.)

Chaffetz led a series of hearings in 2015 and 2016 detailing outrageous—and occasionally unlawful—behavior by EPA bureaucrats, and McCarthy’s failure to reprimand wayward employees. McCarthy was a masterful blame-shifter who skillfully conned a gullible media into buying her excuses, an approach that started before Obama promoted her to EPA chief. (After a top official embezzled nearly $1 million in bogus pay and bonuses while working for an EPA department McCarthy supervised, she blamed a colleague for her failure to act in a timely manner—a delay that permitted the plundering to continue for more two years.)

She was at the helm of the EPA during two major environmental crises, the Gold King Mine spill and the Flint Water crisis. McCarthy helped push one of the greatest bureaucratic overreaches of all time—the Clean Power Plan—which was so excessive that the Supreme Court stayed the rule in an unprecedented move by the court. She spent nearly $750,000 on international travel in three years.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

New York Times Melts Down Over EPA’s Secret Science Ban By Steve Milloy

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

The New York Times is spittin’ mad at Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt. In just the past week, the paper has attacked Pruitt four times—from the front-page to the editorial page—following his announcement that the agency would not longer be permitted to rely on so-called “secret science” as a basis for taking regulatory action. And at no point in this onslaught has the Times allowed the truth to get in the way of its narrative.

Since 1994, the EPA and university researchers it funds have been hiding scientific data from Congress and the public. The agency has used the data and studies in question since 1997 as the basis for issuing unnecessary and draconian air-quality regulations. During the Obama years, EPA relied on these studies to issue regulations that wiped out 94 percent of the market value of the U.S. coal industry. The largest companies were forced into bankruptcy, eliminating thousands of miner jobs, and wreaking havoc on communities that depended on those jobs.

In 1994, an EPA external science advisory board known as the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee asked EPA for its air pollution data, but the agency ignored the request. In 1997, Congress requested the same data and was refused. In 1998, Congress passed a law requiring that scientific data used by the agency must be made available to the public. But a federal appellate court held the law unenforceable.

In 2011, Congress again began politely asking the EPA for its data. No luck. So in 2013, Congress issued its first subpoena in 30 years to force EPA to produce the data. Again, no luck. The House then began passing bills—three of them in successive sessions of Congress—to bar EPA from relying on secret data to issue regulations. But all three got stuck in the Senate, including the current bill known as the HONEST Act. (The secret science saga is told in full in my book, Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA and summarized in my March 27 Wall Street Journal op-ed).

Since Congress can’t or won’t act, Pruitt has taken the initiative and recently announced that the agency will no longer rely on studies with secret data.

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Elizabeth Warren’s Sad Sick Joke By Ronald L. Rubin

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

Mick Mulvaney lets the senator’s attacks convince Democrats to restructure the CFPB.

If Elizabeth Warren’s Wall Street Journal piece “Republicans Remain Silent as Mulvaney’s CFPB Ducks Oversight” had run three days later, readers would have thought it was an April Fools’ Day joke about the famously two-headed government agency.

Most Americans had not heard of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last Thanksgiving when its first director, Richard Cordray, resigned and proclaimed Warren acolyte Leandra English acting director, prompting President Trump to appoint cabinet member Mick Mulvaney to the same post. Senator Warren has not laughed much in the four months since a judge backed the president’s choice.

It was no wonder the public tuned out the CFPB narrative that Democrats have repeated since they controlled Congress and the White House and passed the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which created the bureau. The plot never changes — before Cordray’s resignation, Republicans opposed the bureau because it kept the financial industry honest; now they restrain the CFPB so businesses can cheat consumers.

Facts never get in the way of the banal narrative. In February, Patrick Rucker of Reuters reported that, according to unnamed sources, after Equifax disclosed its historic data breach on September 7, 2017, Cordray “authorized an investigation that month” and that acting director Mulvaney had “not ordered “subpoenas against Equifax or sought sworn testimony from executives, routine steps when launching a full-scale probe.” The “exclusive” was hardly news. The Dodd-Frank Act forbids the Federal Trade Commission and the CFPB from conducting independent inquiries into the same matter. Cordray may have authorized an investigation of the Equifax data breach, but the FTC ended up conducting the full-scale probe.

Cordray and Warren, who helped draft the law, surely recognized Rucker’s sleight-of-hand. Nevertheless, the senator tweeted, “Another middle finger from @MickMulvaneyOMB to consumers: he’s killed the @CFPB’s probe into the #EquifaxBreach.” Cordray, while campaigning for Ohio governor, wrote in the Washington Post that “the administration has . . . halted the investigation of Equifax,” with a link to the Reuters article as proof there had been something for Mulvaney to halt.

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The New Last Refuge of Scoundrels By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

Samuel Johnson famously used that line in an attack on William Pitt for supposedly advancing his agenda under warped pretenses. During the McCarthy era and the 1960s anti-war movement against Vietnam, when leftists were called unpatriotic, they offered Johnson’s line as a riposte, quoting it ad nauseam, not as a serious counter-argument but as an accusation that the conservative establishment was smearing them.

When Harvey Weinstein was caught coercing female subordinates, assaulting actresses, and offering quid pro quo perks for quickie sex, he thought, in medieval fashion, that he could preserve his fortune and power by making politically correct offsets. Weinstein pompously announced that despite the charges of sexual assault, he should be given a pass because he was buying politically correct indulgences:

I am going to need a place to channel that anger so I’ve decided that I’m going to give the NRA my full attention. I hope Wayne LaPierre will enjoy his retirement party. I’m going to do it at the same place I had my Bar Mitzvah. I’m making a movie about our President, perhaps we can make it a joint retirement party.

Weinstein crammed a lot of firewalls into his apologia: His crimes were merely a matter of “anger” management. He was religiously devout. The ironic upside of assaulting women was that now he could be turned loose to devote his “full attention” to battling NRA. And he now would have time to use his cinematic talents to trash Trump. Why would liberal women hound someone promising a twofer destruction of the NRA and Trump?

Late-night host Steven Colbert tried a similar me con. He used obscene and homophobic imagery to smear Trump, in words that would have gotten a conservative fired: “In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster.” The Left did not care that he had smeared the president of the United States, but Colbert potentially had committed a mortal sin in suggesting that a homosexual act was tawdry or embarrassing.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Saudi Crown Prince Acknowledges Israel’s Right To Exist By Tom Knighton See note please

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

Okay the Prince is trying, but how ridiculous is the statement “acknowledges Israel’s right to exist”as if that was a big concession. Israel is a democracy with the most advanced scientific, technical, medical and social institutions that has contributed 100 times more than all the OPEC nations to the well being of the entire world….And, it is the only post colonial nation asked to accept recognition of its right to exist as an example of “moderation.” rsk

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of the oil-rich kingdom, has been rapidly instituting big changes to one of the world’s most repressive countries. He’s still acting dictatorially, but change that could affect the whole region is occurring.

He just said this to The Atlantic in an interview: “I believe that each people, anywhere, has a right to live in their peaceful nation. I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land.”

The Atlantic noted the significance: “According to former U.S. peace negotiator Dennis Ross, moderate Arab leaders have spoken of the reality of Israel’s existence, but acknowledgment of any sort of ‘right’ to Jewish ancestral land has been a red line no leader has crossed until now.”

Needless to say, I expect social justice jihadis to protest bin Salman at every opportunity. After all, they’ve protested Gal Gadot for simply being a Israeli who landed a big movie role.

While the Palestinians have shown no interest in living side by side with the Jewish State, and the prince believes the Palestinians are a distinct people and deserving of autonomy, his acknowledge that Israel has a right to exist will have ripple effects.

Who knows what form those will take.

Bin Salman has enlarged the target on his back, but other Islamic nations will weigh their interests vis a vis Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United States, and act accordingly.