MEDIA Comments turned off

New York Times Blames Israel For Stalin’s Antisemitism by Ira Stoll

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

The New York Times art critic last seen complaining that a Jewish museum exhibit was insufficiently sympathetic to the Nazi Adolf Eichmann is at it again.https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/03/08/new-york-times-blames-israel-for-stalins-antisemitism/#

The latest piece from the critic, Jason Farago, is a review of an exhibit at the Jewish Museum Vienna. The exhibit explores Jewish involvement in Communism.

Farago’s inaccuracy is on display from the start of his story, which appears under the headline “The Jews Who Dreamed of Utopia.” He writes:

Step into the Jewish Museum Vienna, just off the main shopping drag of this imperial city, and you will be greeted by a bust of Karl Marx, the descendant of rabbis who would call religion the “opiate of the masses.” Dour, wild-haired Karl presides over the first gallery of an ambitious, searching show on religion and revolution, uniting paintings, posters, propaganda, film clips, and a fair amount of Soviet kitsch. Its romantic title — “Comrade. Jew. We Only Wanted Paradise on Earth” — sets the tone for an extensive overview of the dreams and nightmares of communism and international socialism, as seen through the lives and work of Jewish politicians, philosophers and artists: not just Marx, but also Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, El Lissitzky, and many others.

Farago calls Marx “Jewish” and “the descendant of rabbis” without telling Times readers that Marx’s parents had both converted to Christianity. Marx himself was formally converted to Christianity at age six and confirmed as a Christian at age 15, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Hedy Lamarr – the 1940s ‘bombshell’ who helped invent wifi Pamela Hutchinson

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

The actor, who depicted film’s first female orgasm, was well known for her scandalous love life and sultry beauty. Now, a new documentary explores how her scientific talents were vastly overlooked.

Hedy Lamarr, the star MGM called “the most beautiful woman in the world”, had two of the worst-kept secrets in Hollywood. One of them, she could never escape until long after her career was over. The other, the press took little interest in at the time – but since her death in 2000, this is the story that has come to define her. A new documentary about Lamarr’s life, released this weekend, encapsulates both stories – one about sex and the other about science – in the innuendo of its title: Bombshell. Lamarr’s story is one of a brilliant woman who was consistently underestimated. It also gives us the clearest possible illustration of why on-screen representation matters – of all the parts that Lamarr was given to play, none of them was as fantastic, or inspirational, as her real life.

The actor, who was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1914, was given her new surname by Louis B Mayer when she signed for MGM in 1937. He named her after the studio’s silent-era vamp Barbara La Marr – intending that her dark, heavy-lidded beauty should remind people of MGM’s sizzling back catalogue, not her own. Back in Europe she had made a film that was too hot for MGM’s family-values ethos. Gustav Machaty’s Ecstasy (1933) starred a teenage Hedy as a frustrated bride who finds fulfilment in an affair with a young man: she appears completely nude and performs what is probably the first on-screen female orgasm. Lamarr herself said that her movements in the love scene were prompted by the director shouting instructions and sticking her with a safety pin, but the effect, in this atmospheric, heavily symbolic and near-silent drama, is remarkably intense. The film was banned in the US, but screened illicitly there for years, and no matter how many hits she had at MGM, and despite the studio’s efforts, Lamarr was frequently referred to as the “Ecstasy girl”.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Anthony Daniels Free Speech’s Emboldened Enemies

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

At a recent literary festival it was not enough for those who disagreed with a fellow speaker merely to protest her words and sentiments. Rather, they assaulted patrons and filled the air with threats and menaces while the police, as usual, did nothing. Free speech, it seems, is now a public nuisance

It is difficult to estimate the strength of the tide against free speech in the Western world: in other words to navigate safely between the Scylla of panic and the Charybdis of complacency. But recently I have had two experiences that suggest to me that our attachment to freedom of speech is by no means so strong as to be unbreakable, and that those who wish to restrict it are a good deal more active and passionate, though not necessarily more numerous, than are those who want to defend it. In a world of monomaniacs, the reasonably balanced man, the man who sees the world as “so various, so beautiful, so new”, is at a perpetual disadvantage, engaged as he is on asymmetric (and boring) warfare against the fanatics of the latest mad orthodoxy.

Our current monomania is that of transsexualism which, as with all modern monomanias, is like the dawn that comes up like thunder outer Berkeley ’crost the Bay. Yesterday, for example, I read in the Times that the National Association of Head Teachers in Britain has issued “guidance” (the kind that communist dictators used to issue when they visited locomotive repair workshops or sausage factories, their words of wisdom on every subject being taken down by scribes), to the effect that there should be books in all schools for children under the age of eleven about “transgender” parents, and that “trans people, their issues and experiences”, should be “celebrated across the school”. This raises the interesting question of how exactly one celebrates transsexualism: dancing round a maypole hung with packets of oestrogen or testosterone, perhaps?

MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

Jill Abramson, Voodoo Priestess By Michael Walsh

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

The first, and so far, last, female editor of the New York Times has found a second career as a spokeswoman for the lunatic Left, writing in the pages of Britain’s Guardian. Still preaching to the Upper West Side, however, Ms. Abramson has saved the money graf for last in her latest column:

It’s easy to look at what’s happening in Washington DC and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this strange, but you have to take comfort where you can find it in Donald Trump’s America.

Some people… but on to the main story, in which Abramson is among the last to the party, hopefully speculating that a “blue wave” will demolish president Trump and the GOP this fall. Why, just look at Texas! And all those strong women!

With new Democratic voters racing to the polls in big numbers in Tuesday’s primaries, Texas is looking purple rather than Republican red. That’s big news, especially on the heels of Democrats winning recently in Alabama, where Doug Jones beat Roy Moore, and Virginia, where Democrat Ralph Northam was elected governor.

Though their optimism may be premature, national Democrats think Ted Cruz can be defeated in November by a well-funded liberal House member from El Paso with the name of Beto O’Rourke, who just won his state’s Democratic Senate nomination.
Republican gloom in Washington DC is palpable, with White House chaos, Donald Trump’s sinking approval ratings and incumbent retirements piling up. This week brought news that Mississippi’s long-serving Thad Cochran is leaving the Senate. That has left the Republican party searching for a replacement strong enough to defeat a Roy Moore-like rightwinger in an upcoming primary from which Cochran has decided to withdraw. And a special House election in Pennsylvania next week looks dicey.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION, POLITICS Comments turned off

At the Box Office and Voting Booth, Leftist Fantasies Bomb By Andrew Klavan

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

Early on in a life spent studying the art of storytelling, I came upon an interesting example of narrative power. In his encyclopedic study of mythology, The Masks of God, Joseph Campbell quotes an essay by German ethnologist Leo Frobenius. Frobenius tells of a little girl who plays with three matchsticks, pretending they are Hansel, Gretel and the witch. After a time, she lets out a shriek of terror. When her father asks her what’s the matter, she replies, “Daddy! Daddy! Take the witch away!” In her imagination, the matchstick has become the witch she pretended it was.

Something similar has happened to the Democratic Party and its communications arm, by which I mean so-called journalists and Hollywood entertainers. They have convinced themselves that their duty to defeat the demonic evil of Donald Trump overrides their obligations to do their various jobs. Instead of governing, informing and entertaining us, they have spun out a fairy tale of heroic resistance against authoritarian wickedness, conspiracy and corruption. And now, like the little girl in the anecdote, they are shrieking in terror because they believe Donald Trump is what they pretended he is instead of what he is in fact.

What is the president, in fact? Well, without dabbling in psychology or mind-reading — that is, judging only by what we know of his presidential record so far — he seems to be a run-of-the mill conservative Republican who is getting quite a lot done. Oh, and he has an obstreperous personality and a big mouth.

Because most people live in something vaguely resembling the real world, the disparity between the left’s hysteria — their imaginings of Russian conspiracy, of Gestapo governance, of abusive power — and the facts of Trump’s actual presidency — tax cuts, regulation rollbacks, Constitutional judges and the occasional unruly tweet — makes the self-serious emergency activism of the “resistance” seem like a child’s game, a silly fantasy.

And so, instead of the hero’s welcome the left always seems to be expecting, the people keep giving them the bum’s rush.

Weepy former man Jimmy Kimmel acknowledged as much in his opening monologue at the Oscars, “Of the nine best picture nominees only two of them made more than a hundred million dollars. But that’s not the point. We don’t make films like Call me By Your Name for money. We make them to upset Mike Pence.” CONTINUE AT SITE

MEDIA, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A.O. Scott’s Vision of America By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

In the Times’ film critic’s review of “A Wrinkle in Time,” he states: “It is the first $100 million movie directed by an African-American woman, and the diversity of the cast is both a welcome innovation and the declaration of a new norm. This is how movies should look from now on, which is to say, how they should have looked all along.” (NYT 3/9)
I assume that by this, he means that movies should accurately reflect what America actually looks like today.

Currently, whites still comprise the majority of our population; Hispanics are over 17%, Blacks are 14%, Asians are 6% and Native Americans are 2%. But if Mr. Scott is referring to how this country looks, he should consider that at least 33% of our population is obese, 8% are disabled, 3% are LGBTQ and 3% are anorexic. If we’re insisting that diversity represent an accurate picture of America, then surely the 33% obese demands greater representation in our films than the handful of actors he can name. And surely there should be many more of these people in all walks of life, just as we have insisted on portraying blacks, gays and women.

But if visibility is what’s important, we should also include the 14% of Americans who are tattooed, the 85% of men with thinning hair by the age of 50 and the 40% of women who have visible hair loss by 40. What about the 15% of Americans who still smoke? Or the 2.2% who have psoriasis – way more than are transgender, yet the latter is a topic that has been done to death on stage, in movies, on television and several times a week in the NYT.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Weeding Out Waste and Fraud at Federal Agencies By H. Sterling Burnett

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

Some recent inspector general reports from within various federal agencies show that the Trump administration is attempting to weed out abuse, fraud, and waste in government programs.

Early in his tenure as secretary of the Department of the Interior (DOI), Ryan Zinke asked for a briefing on DOI grant programs and found to his dismay that not a single person could tell him how much DOI disbursed in grants every year or what projects it had funded or was committed to funding. Saying he feared that the grant program was open to fraud and abuse, Zinke order DOI to review its major grants and cooperative agreements.

Zinke’s fears proved prescient. A February 20 DOI inspector general (I.G.)’s report found that Richard Ruggiero, head of the Department of International Conservation (DIC), which is within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), had violated federal ethics laws when Ruggiero took advantage of a federal cooperative agreement providing nearly $325,000 in funding to the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The agreement financially benefited a family member who was an independent contractor with IFAW.

The I.G. report says that before Ruggiero took over DIC, the department had signed a cooperative agreement with IFAW to establish a professional training program for conservation leaders overseas, providing the $126,871 to fund the program. Within nine days of Ruggiero becoming DIC chief, the cooperative agreement was modified several times, extending the program for three years and increasing DIC’s grant to $324,108.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Christopher Steele and the Entitled’s Echo Chamber George Neumayr

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

He couldn’t have meddled without its anti-Trump hysteria.https://spectator.org/christopher-steele-and-the-entitleds-echo-chamber/

In the fragmentary profiles of Christopher Steele, even in the glowing ones, he emerges not as a subtle spy but as a bumptious political activist. He has been described as “very left-wing,” a “little creep” who embraced socialism in college, an ambitious debating society president who invited a representative of the PLO to speak at Cambridge University, a “showy” but charmless operator ill-suited to intelligence work, an “idiot” whose mischief-making has made his old colleagues in British intelligence look like Kremlin-manipulated dupes. He is less James Bond than James Carville.

Even in the accounts by his apologists he comes off not as quiet and sober but oddly hyperactive and noisy. He is portrayed as running around with his hair on fire, second-guessing the FBI, disregarding the FBI’s instructions, lying to it, frantically briefing reporters, and so on. The apologists cast that hyperactivity as evidence of his earnestness and reliability. It is not. It is just evidence of his arrogant presumption and anti-Trump hysteria. Steele told the Justice Department official Bruce Ohr that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” Does that sound like an apolitical spy?

According to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Steele grew more frantic after the passage of Brexit, about which he felt “wretched,” she writes. Does that sound like an apolitical spy? No, it makes him sound like a typical member of the liberal international elite — anti-Brexit, anti-Trump, pro-Hillary.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Jobs Boom* *Manufacturers are hiring right and left—or they were before tariffs.

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

Investors are cheering Friday’s report that the economy added 313,000 jobs in February while the labor force gained 806,000 entrants. This is remarkable for a recovery long in the tooth and shows that deregulation and tax reform are flowing into business confidence and hiring.

Payroll numbers were revised up by 54,000 for December and January, bringing the three month total to 727,000. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1%, but labor force participation ticked up three-tenths of a percentage point to 63%. The increase in the labor force was the largest since 1983 excluding months in which temporary census workers were hired.

Employment growth was broad-based with large increases in construction (61,000), retail (50,000) and manufacturing (31,000). Manufacturers have added 224,000 jobs over the last year, including 66,000 in metals. Much of this growth has been in machinery and secondary metals fabrication—e.g., welding and forging—which will be harmed by President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs.

The best news is that the hiring burst may finally be pulling lower-skilled workers off the sidelines. Labor participation last month rose by 0.9 percentage points among blacks, 1.7 points among black teens and two points for workers without a high-school diploma.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Trump-Kim Summit The President is giving recognition before any nuclear concessions. see note please

Posted By on March 10th, 2018

The President issued a stark and dark warning, and Little Kim offered to meet….and the President agreed with no pre-conditions….Why does the WSJ sound like the airheads of CNN? rsk

A diplomatic breakthrough is easy when you offer the other side what it wants. And Donald Trump on Thursday gave North Korea something it has long craved: a summit with a sitting U.S. President. Perhaps this will be the start of a stunning nuclear disarmament, but it could also end up in a strategic defeat for the United States and world order.

Mr. Trump doesn’t do normal diplomacy, and this leap to a face-to-face meeting had his impulsive trademarks: spur of the moment in response to a Kim Jong Un offer relayed through South Korean mediators; no vetting with his senior advisers or as far as we can tell our Japanese allies; and no pre-planning. What could go wrong?

Mr. Trump tweeted Thursday that “sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached,” which is somewhat reassuring. But like his predecessors, he is giving the Kim regime a substantial reward before it takes verifiable steps toward denuclearization. Even a brief meeting will boost North Korea’s claim to be a nuclear power that must be given respect and recognition. In return, Kim appears to have given nothing other than the promise not to test his weapons in the interim. He can resume those tests at any time.

Mr. Trump can claim credit for putting the diplomatic and sanctions screws on North Korea to a greater extent than any previous President. And it’s possible that pressure may have hurt the North Korean economy enough that Kim chose this moment to change tack. (The Trump critics who claimed he was trying to blow up the world but now say he’s leaping too fast to diplomacy are especially amusing to watch. They wouldn’t give him credit if Kim disarmed entirely.)