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Put Zuckerberg Under Subpoena, Argues Judiciary Committee Senator By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on March 28th, 2018

Mark Zuckberberg is expected to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next month about the harvesting of data on 50 million users during campaign season, but one member of the panel said the Facebook CEO and related documents should be under subpoena.

Facebook announced mid-month that it hired a forensic analysis firm to delve into Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm that worked on President Trump’s campaign, after reports that the company held onto user data that had been improperly harvested.

Paul Grewal, VP and deputy general counsel for Facebook, said in a statement posted Friday on the company’s website that Cambridge Analytica had been suspended from Facebook and they were “moving aggressively to determine the accuracy” of claims that the political data firm didn’t delete user info “contrary to the certifications we were given.”

In a detailed interview with the Guardian, Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who conceived the joining of political research and psychological targeting that started Cambridge Analytica (Steve Bannon was on the firm’s board), said Facebook lawyers didn’t reach out to him until August 2016 to demand that “illicitly obtained” data be deleted. “Literally all I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it,” says Wylie. “Facebook made zero effort to get the data back.”

The UK and EU have launched investigations into Cambridge Analytica.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) invited Zuckerberg to testify at an April 10 on data privacy; Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have also been invited. Other committees have also requested a session with Zuckerberg.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who sits on the Judiciary Committee, told CNN today that “there ought to be subpoenas for him in case he changes his mind, for documents that Facebook has and for Cambridge Analytica and Aleksandr Kogan who are key, also, to knowing how this information on 50 million people was harvested and then abused, illegally juiced to mine and manipulate other data.”

Kogan is a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge who gathered users’ data through an app that promised to predict the Facebook user’s personality. Facebook says about 270,000 people downloaded the app and Kogan “violated our platform policies” by passing the collected data over to Cambridge Analytica.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Progressive Groups Shouldn’t Be Exempt from Anti-Discrimination Law By Theodore Kupfer

Posted By on March 28th, 2018

A women-only social club is being investigated by the New York Commission on Human Rights. It’s almost certainly illegal.

The Wing is a women-only social club and workspace in New York and Washington, D.C. One of its founders worked for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and its in-house magazine, No Man’s Land, once featured a trans woman named Hari Nef on the cover. Members say it empowers them, allows them to work without the specter of sexual harassment that lurks around so many corners, and provides them with a valuable social network. It is “not for everybody in the whole world,” one of its members told Jezebel, “but for a specific slice of it” whose members share “certain community values.” Score one for free association.

Except the Wing, precisely because it is a women-only social club and workspace, appears to be in plain violation of New York’s public-accommodations law. Jezebel’s J.K. Trotter has the story. It is illegal in New York, as it is across the country, for businesses that provide public accommodations to “deny” the “full and equal enjoyment” of those accommodations to someone because of his gender (or race, creed, sexuality, etc.). There are exceptions: Groups that have fewer than 400 members and meet certain criteria can qualify as “distinctly private” clubs, which are permitted to discriminate. Meanwhile, larger businesses can apply for exemptions in the “bona fide interests of public policy,” though only three such exemptions have been granted in the last ten years. The Wing has more than 1,500 members, and has not applied for an exemption. Therefore, Trotter reports, it is under investigation by the New York Commission on Human Rights. A civil-rights litigator tells him the group is “likely illegal.”

The possibility that a trendy social club espousing progressive values and contributing to female empowerment is illegal has led to some wishcasting. Law professor Melissa Murray tells Trotter that the investigation is “patently absurd,” and finds the notion that anti-discrimination laws might apply to women’s groups “ludicrous.” Because the mayor of New York is Bill de Blasio, perhaps the Wing will survive: A city spokesman tells New York magazine that the mayor “is fully supportive of the Wing’s mission.” But whether or not New York files suit, it should not be particularly controversial to assert that a business that both furnishes public accommodations and discriminates on the basis of gender might be on the wrong side of an anti-discrimination statute.

MEDIA Comments turned off

More Is Less for the Anti-Trump Media George Neumayr

Posted By on March 28th, 2018

Journalists are still struggling to put him away.

Hillary famously shouted during the throes of the campaign, “Why am I not up by 50 points?” No doubt the media feels similar rage as it pores over Trump’s latest job approval numbers, which have actually gone up since February, according to CNN: “42% approve of Trump, highest in 11 months.” The CNN correspondent, grudgingly reporting these numbers, chalked Trump’s staying power up to the “economy.”

But in a reversal of the Clintonian adage, it is not the economy, stupid, around CNN these days. It is the sex scandal. Womanizing pundits and louche-living hosts profess shock at Trump’s behavior. They act like it is all so incomprehensible to them. Jeffrey Toobin likes to crank up his wind machine about Trump’s lack of integrity, but not so long ago Toobin’s squalid personal life was tabloid fodder. He was cheating on his wife with former CNN correspondent Jeff Greenfield’s daughter, impregnated her, then (unsuccessfully) put pressure on her to get an abortion, according to the New York Daily News in 2010.

“Jeff and Casey [Greenfield] saw each other off and on over the years,” says one source. “She was married to someone else for two years. After her divorce, she started seeing Jeff again. He said he was going to leave his wife for her. But, by then, Casey had begun to distrust him. She suspected he had several other mistresses.”

In 2008, when Greenfield became pregnant, and when she told Toobin the news, he offered her “money if she’d have an abortion,” says a source. He also allegedly offered to pay for her to have another child later via a sperm donor.

“When Casey wouldn’t have an abortion, Jeff told her she was going to regret it, that she shouldn’t expect any help from him,” claims another source.

Greenfield underwent a risky DNA test while pregnant, but Toobin didn’t provide his sample and stopped talking to her, according to sources. On the day she gave birth, Greenfield e-mailed Toobin, inviting him to meet his son, Rory. A source says Toobin didn’t reply.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Samaria residents will not be tried for defending children Case closed against chaperones who fired warning shots when Arab mob attempted to lynch group of 25 children on Bar Mitzvah hike.

Posted By on March 28th, 2018

The Central District Attorney’s Office decided Monday to close the investigation against two residents of Samaria who shot and killed Palestinian Authority resident Mahmoud Odeh during an attempted lynching of a group of Jewish children last year.

The State Attorney’s Office stated that the decision to close the case on the grounds of lack of guilt was made after examination of the evidence and the relevant circumstances in the case.

Odeh, a resident of the village of Qusra, was part of an Arab mob which attacked a group of 25 schoolchildren who were on a Bar Mitzvah hike on November 30. The attackers creamed at the children and threw stones at them.

The group fled to a cave in the nearby hills, where their attackers continued to chase them, grabbing their cell phones and backpacks..

The two adults chaperoning the hike drew their firearms and opened fire, striking two of the attackers, one of whom, Mahmoud Odeh, died of his wounds.

The decision to close the file on grounds of lack of guilt was made after the evidence gathered revealed that the shooting was carried out in self-defense. The investigation revealed that the shooting took place when the attackers stood on a higher elevation than the children and threw stones down at the hikers. In light of this, the two suspects’ testimony of having fired warning shots in the air was found to be consistent with the wounds sustained by the two attackers as they threw stones from above.

Another source of support for the two was found in the testimony of a resident of Qusra who testified that the suspects fired in self-defense only after the stones were thrown at them. Several attackers were indicted by the Military Prosecutor.

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Where Are the Left’s Modern Muckrakers? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 28th, 2018

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an epic fight of so-called muckrakers — journalists and novelists such as Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, along with trust-busting politicians like Teddy Roosevelt — against rail, steel, and oil monopolies. Whatever one thought of their sensationalism and often hard-left socialist agendas, they at least brought public attention to price fixing, product liabilities, monopolies, and the buying of politicians.

No such progressive zealotry exists today in Silicon Valley and its affiliated tech spin-offs. And the result is a Roman gladiatorial spectacle with no laws in the arena.

In the last two elections, Facebook has sold its user data to Democratic and, apparently more controversially, Republican campaign affiliates. Google, Twitter, and Facebook have often been accused of censoring users’ expression according to their own political tastes. Civil libertarians have accused social-media and Internet giants of violating rights of privacy, by monitoring the shopping, travel, eating, and entertainment habits of their customers to the extent that they know where and when Americans travel or communicate with one another.

Apple, Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook are the world’s five largest companies in terms of stock value. Together they have market capitalization of about 3 trillion dollars, about the net worth of the entire country of Switzerland.

Until the rise of high-tech companies in the 1980s, there were, for better or worse, certain understood rules that governed the behavior of large corporations. Services deemed essential for the public — power, sewage, water, railroad, radio, and television — were deemed public utilities and regulated by the state.

Anti-trust laws prohibited corporations from stifling competition: Price cutting and fixing, dumping, and vertically integrating to ensure monopolies were all illegal. The government broke up large “trusts.”

The public looked askance at the power of mega-corporations and their ability to sway public opinion through the monopolistic purchases of media and advertising and their ability to liquidate smaller rival companies. Product liability laws, if often punitively and unfairly, held corporations accountable even for the misuse of their products: Smokers sued the tobacco companies when they suffered from lung cancer and emphysema. Baby cribs that had hard edges were liable for infant injury.

Yet today’s Silicon Valley and related high-tech companies are largely exempt from such traditional regulations. Facebook and Google run veritable monopolies. Facebook alone controls an estimated 40 percent of the world’s social-media market. It has more than 2 billion monthly users. Google controls about 90 percent of the world’s search-engine market. Apple earns $230 billion in annual revenue and is nearing a market value of $900 billion. Microsoft controls about 85 percent of the word-processing personal and business markets. Amazon alone was responsible for about 45 percent of all online sales of any sort last year. It has huge contracts with the Pentagon and owns the Washington Post. When competitors to Big Tech arise, they are offered billions of dollars, cashed out, and absorbed. Facebook has bought more than 50 rival companies. It acquired former competitor WhatsApp, the world’s leader in messaging platforms, for a staggering $19 billion. Alphabet/Google has bought more than 200 companies, YouTube among them.

BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Václav Klaus: “Let´s not give up fighting climate alarmism, it is never late!”

Posted By on March 28th, 2018

Dr. Václav Klaus, first Prime Minister (1993–1998) and second President of the Czech Republic (2003–2013) and an economist who advocates free markets, delivered this speech at the conference of Association des Climato-réalistes, Musée Social, Paris, December 7, 2017. We are grateful for President Klaus’s permission to publish it here, and we commend him and thank God for his courageous, intelligent, and persevering defense of freedom and reason.

Ladies and gentlemen,

many thanks for the invitation and for the possibility to participate in this important gathering. It is great to be in France after many years and to see Paris as it looks in the era of mass migration.

I travel abroad almost permanently, but not to France. I don´t know whether it is my fault or something else. It may be partly caused by my inability to speak French, something I consider a great deficiency of mine, partly by the evident discrepancy between my views and the mainstream French thinking.

Nevertheless, I was in the last couple of years inspired by the works of several French authors, such as Michel Houellebecq, Pascal Bruckner, Pierre Manent, Alain Finkielkraut, not to speak about my old friends such as Pascal Salin. It gave me a new motivation to be in contact with France and its intellectuals.

I must admit that I was not – until very recently – aware of the French Association des Climato-réalistes, of its activities, and of its ability to organize such an important gathering as today´s one. Many thanks for bringing me here and for giving me a chance to address this distinguished audience.

The issue of climate alarmism, of man-made and human society endangering global warming has become one of my main topics as well as worries. I strongly disagree with the global warming doctrine which is an arrogant, human freedom and prosperity of mankind endangering set of beliefs, an ideology, if not a religion. It lives independently of the science of climatology. Its disputes are not about temperature, they are part of the “conflict of ideologies”.

My way of looking at this topic is based

– on a very special experience gained under the communist regime in which I spent two thirds of my life. This experience sharpened our eyes. We became oversensitive to all attempts to violate freedom, rationality and free exchange of views, we became oversensitive to all attempts to impose on us the dogmas of those who consider themselves better than the rest of us. In the communist era, we witnessed an irrational situation when science was at the same time promoted and prohibited, praised and celebrated, manipulated and misused. I have very similar feelings now;

– on my being an economist who has strong views about the role of markets and governments in human society and economy, about the role of visible and invisible hands in controlling our life and shaping our future and who considers the politically based interventions in the economy connected with the ambitions to fight climate absolutely untenable;

– on my being a politician for 25 years of my recent life who has always been fighting all variants of green ideology, and especially its highlight, the global warming doctrine. I have been for many years intensively involved in the world-wide, highly controversial and heavily manipulated debate about global warming and about the role of human beings in it. I was the only head of state who dared to openly express a totally dissident view at the UN General Assembly already 10 years ago[1].

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe All Inclusive: Understanding the Current Migration Crisis by Václav Klaus

Posted By on March 28th, 2018

“Multiculturalism and human-rightism promote the notion that migration is a human right, and that the right to migrate leads to further rights and entitlements including social welfare hand-outs for migrants.” — Former Czech President Václav Klaus and economist Jiří Weigl, writing in their book, Europe All Inclusive.

“Europe is weakened by the leftist utopia of trying to transform a continent that was once proud of its past into an inefficient solidaristic state, turning its inhabitants from citizens into dependent clients.” — Václav Klaus.

“There are plenty of arguments suggesting that the contemporary migration crisis is connected with the post-democratic character of the EU. That it is a by-product of the already long time existing European crisis, of the systemic errors and misconceptions of European policies, of the built-in defects of EU institutional arrangements, and of the ideological confusions and prejudices of European multicultural political elites.” — Václav Klaus.

Europe All Inclusive, a book by former Czech President Václav Klaus, co-authored by the Arab-speaking economist Jiří Weigl, recently published by Hungary’s Századvég School of Politics Foundation, has already been translated into six languages. The Századvég School of Politics Foundation is connected to the think tank Századvég, which, in turn, is close to the FIDESZ party led by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In the book, the authors write:

“What we see today is a similarly fundamental challenge to the future of Europe… and especially its ‘integrated’ part, is riddled with hypocrisy, pseudo-humanism and other dubious concepts. [When] the most dangerous of them are the currently fashionable, and ultimately suicidal, ideologies of multiculturalism and human-rightism…These ideologies promote the notion that migration is a human right, and that the right to migrate leads to further rights and entitlements including social welfare hand-outs for migrants… Europe is weakened by the leftist utopia of trying to transform a continent that was once proud of its past into an inefficient solidaristic state, turning its inhabitants from citizens into dependent clients.”

The following are excerpts of a speech, “Is Our Membership in the EU a Real Blessing?”, delivered by Václav Klaus at the Corvinus University of Budapest on February 22, 2018:

I came to Budapest to participate in the launching of the book about the recent mass migration to Europe. Its formal launching took place yesterday in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Decision That Hurts Your Chances of Getting Into Harvard Dartmouth College expects early-decision admits to make up nearly half its first-year class in the fall By Melissa Korn SEE NOTE

Posted By on March 28th, 2018

The tuition at those schools now averages $75,000.00 per year for the total re-education of students into group think “progressives” incapable of debate or respect for dissenting opinions. rsk

The odds of getting into Harvard and other elite universities are slimmer for students who apply in the regular pool than for those who apply in early rounds.

This harsh reality will be driven home when Harvard, Yale, Penn and other Ivy League institutions release their regular-decision admission notices Wednesday evening: Large proportions of their incoming first-year classes were locked in months ago under early-admittance programs.

High-school seniors desperate for a leg up in the brutal competition for spots at selective colleges have increasingly been applying through binding early-decision or more flexible early-action programs, rather than meeting Jan. 1 application deadlines and waiting until spring for an answer.

The admission rate for early-round candidates, who typically learn their fates in December, is often two or three times that of regular applicants. Harvard last year admitted 14.5% of early-action applicants and about 3.3% of regular-decision applicants. At Yale, those rates were 17.1% and 5%, respectively. Many institutions fill 40% or more of their incoming classes with early applicants.

Dartmouth College expects students admitted through its early-decision process to make up nearly half its first-year class next fall. The school received 2,270 early applications, compared with roughly 20,000 in the regular cycle. Early-decision applicants make up 53% of Northwestern University’s current freshman class, and just over half at Vanderbilt University.
​The Early Bird Gets AcceptedIvy League schools take a much higher shareof applicants during early-admission rounds.Admission rates for class of 2021Source: the schools*Columbia’s admission rate combines early- andregular-round admission figures.
Early admitRegular admitBrownColumbia*CornellDartmouthHarvardPrincetonPennYale0%102030

“It’s staggering,” said Brennan Barnard, director of college counseling at the Derryfield School in Manchester, N.H. This year, 62 of his 65 seniors submitted an application by Dec. 1 and about three-quarters of the class had an acceptance coming out of the early rounds. Many apply early not necessarily because they are attached to one particular school, but because they fear missing out on the chance to get in somewhere, he said.

Students see schools’ single-digit acceptance rates, worry about their chances and apply early, perpetuating the rush for another year, says Stephen Friedfeld, chief operating officer at Newton, Mass.-based admission-consulting firm AcceptU.

Early-round applicants are either accepted, rejected or deferred to be reconsidered in the general pool. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

That Other Large Complex Ike Warned About “We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Posted By on March 28th, 2018

In his review of recent books about the life of former President Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Rhodes (Books, March 17) repeats the now well-known warning made by President Eisenhower in his Jan. 17, 1961 speech about the “military-industrial complex.” It is important also to recall another warning the president made in the same speech about the need for universities in the U.S. to maintain freedom and independence from federal control imposed by the government making federal grants for research and other programs and activities sponsored by the universities. The president said: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Em. Prof. John A. Clark University of Michigan

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Paul Stevens for the NRA The former Justice wants to repeal the Second Amendment.

Posted By on March 28th, 2018

Critics often accuse the National Rifle Association of paranoia for arguing that gun controllers want to eliminate the Second Amendment. Well, being paranoid doesn’t mean the NRA is wrong.

Look no further than former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who is arguing this week that the Parkland, Florida, students and their allies shouldn’t settle for mere restrictions on guns. They should lobby Congress and the states to abolish the Second Amendment.

“Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment,” the 97-year-old former Justice wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times Tuesday, adding, “today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.”

Apparently Justice Stevens is still sore about losing the argument in the 2008 landmark gun-rights case, D.C. v. Heller. He wrote the dissent in that case arguing that the Second Amendment was merely intended to support a militia, not the individual right to bear arms.