NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Maxine Waters Talks Reparations in Selma By Tom Knighton

Posted By on March 7th, 2018

Slavery was the darkest chapter in American history. No reasonable person thinks otherwise. I wish we could undo it so it never existed, but that’s not possible. It happened.

But it’s also been gone for more than 150 years.

So why is Maxine Waters talking about reparations?

“If we want to get to the point where we can get reparations, we’ve got to have the power to do that, number one, by having a supportive president would be wonderful, but taking back the House would be absolutely wonderful,” Waters said at an event in Selma, Alabama, home to one of the most contentious civil rights battles of the 1960s.

No one alive today in the United States has “legally” owned another human being here. Because of that, there’s no one to actually pay reparations. Not a single living person is responsible for the sins of that era. No living person can be forced to pay for the sins of that era without violating his or her rights.

There aren’t any living victims of slavery who are owed reparations. The last living person who lived as a slave in the United States died a long time ago. Sylvester Magee claimed the title of last living former slave, and he died in 1971, though it’s probable that he was lying about his status. CONTINUE AT SITE

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Now There’s a Play Called ‘Kill Climate Deniers,’ Because Why Not By Jim Treacher (Video)

Posted By on March 7th, 2018

Do you know anyone who denies that there’s such a thing as climate? Do you know anybody who hears the word “climate” and says, “Nuh-uh! You can’t fool me, that’s just made up!” I don’t. Yet whenever somebody questions any aspect of the prevailing global warming orthodoxy, he or she is labeled a “climate denier.” It’s a clever little bit of deceptive rhetoric, linking climate change skeptics with deniers of the Holocaust. A Holocaust denier is an awful thing to be, so a “climate denier” must be just as bad.

You don’t want to be one of those deniers, do you? You know how those people are.

That’s why my climatically skeptical ears perked up when I heard that somebody in Australia had written a stage play with the subtlest title ever: Kill Climate Deniers. Here’s a synopsis of the play, courtesy of killclimatedeniers.com:

As a classic rock band take the stage in Parliament House’s main hall, 96 armed eco-terrorists storm the building and take the entire government hostage, threatening to execute everyone unless Australia ends global warming. Tonight.

Now, the embattled Environment Minister has no choice but to pick up a gun and stand up for her ideals, pushing back against the threat which has engulfed her country – one terrorist at a time.

Sounds like a real crowd-pleaser. They even made a trailer of sorts for it:

Oh. Um… Ha ha?

Now, I tend to be a small-l libertarian about these sorts of things. I think you should be able to espouse any ridiculous conspiracy theory you want, even if it involves the belief that people are destroying the planet by leaving their phone chargers plugged in when not in use. That’s fine. You’re entitled to your religious views, no matter how stupid and insane they may be.

And I don’t think anybody will be inspired to actually kill climate skeptics just because they saw a play called Kill Climate Deniers. I don’t believe that movies or video games or novels or comic books or anything else will make anybody do anything. Let alone stage plays.

But just imagine the uproar if somebody produced a play called Kill Tree-Huggers. Or Kill Feminists, or Kill Militant LGBTQ Activists, or Kill [Fill in Some Other Protected Class Here]. Then it would be different. Then it would be time to hit the panic button. The 24/7 news cycle would be filled with solemn warnings about “hate speech” and “toxic rhetoric” and other euphemisms for “We don’t like what you’re saying and we want you to shut up.” CONTINUE AT SITE

MEDIA Comments turned off

Media Fight For Democrats In Washington Leak Wars Reporters are hostile to even the notion of Republican leaks, but remarkably incurious about the actual Democratic deluge of leaks.By Mollie Hemingway

Posted By on March 7th, 2018

The New York Times published a story on March 1, based on anonymous sources, claiming that Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., had met with House Speaker Paul Ryan to blame Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., for leaking texts between Mark Warner and the attorney for a Russian oligarch connected to the author of the salacious and unverified dossier the FBI used to secure a wiretap against a Trump campaign affiliate.

It was a weird story for many reasons. For one, it was the first time the paper had even mentioned these encrypted texts, despite their newsworthiness and the dramatic twist they gave parts of the Russia investigation.

For another, the story was denied publicly by Burr, who told CNN that the account was simply wrong.

For another, it turned out that no members on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence had even seen the texts, according to Nunes and others on the committee.

But the weirdest part about the story is that The New York Times is a frequent recipient of actual leaks from House Democrats on the Intelligence Committee. On Feb. 27, Democrats on the committee leaked Hope Hicks’ testimony directly to The New York Times. In fact, Nicholas Fandos, the very same reporter on the anonymously sourced story about House Republicans supposedly leaking, received a leak from Democrats on the committee, which he immediately published under the headline, “Hope Hicks Acknowledges She Sometimes Tells White Lies for Trump.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Yale and the Puritanism of ‘Social Justice’ Ditching class to protest won’t count against you—at least if the university approves of the cause. By Walter Olson

Posted By on March 7th, 2018

Answering a question about which there could hardly have been much doubt, Yale’s admissions blog said last month the university would not penalize prospective students who are suspended for joining antigun protests in the wake of the Parkland shooting. “Yale will NOT be rescinding anyone’s admission decision for participating in peaceful walkouts for this or other causes.”

So far, so routine. A university like Yale would not ordinarily snatch back an admissions offer just because an accepted senior had skipped a day of class, no matter the reason.

But there’s more. The post’s author, senior assistant director of admissions Hannah Mendlowitz, makes clear that Yale considers participation in such a walkout to be a plus, rather than a subject of indifference.

“For those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice,” Ms. Mendlowitz writes. “I have the pleasure of reading applications from San Francisco, where activism is very much a part of the culture. Essays ring of social justice issues.” Even if applicants from less-fortunate areas of the country cannot be expected to meet the Bay Area standard, the message is clear. The post is titled “In Support of Student Protests.”

This endorsement of activism raises a few questions. Would Yale really turn away a brilliant young flutist, chemist or poet who, while solidly educated in history, religion and government, is not specifically “versed in issues of social justice”? What about students who have pursued courses based on great works of the past? Must they be versed in contemporary views of social justice too? Besides, which causes constitute social justice?

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

North Korea’s Negotiation Play Maybe this means pressure is working, or maybe it’s another con.

Posted By on March 7th, 2018

South Korean officials disclosed Tuesday that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un says he’s ready to talk with the U.S. about giving up his nuclear weapons. That’s news because Kim has long said he’d never negotiate away his weapons. But the world has seen this diplomatic movie before, only to learn that the North was merely buying more time to build more bombs and ballistic missiles.

“I think that their statement, and the statements coming out of South Korea and North Korea have been very positive,” President Trump said Tuesday. “That would be a great thing for the world. A great thing for the world. So we’ll see how it all comes about.”

Realism is warranted. The hopeful case is that the North’s reversal is a response to the Trump Administration’s policy of pressure through tighter sanctions and diplomatic isolation. Building on United Nations sanctions, the Treasury Department has been blacklisting companies, most of them Chinese, for trading with the North.

As the Journal reported last week, trade across the border with China has declined sharply. Despite its official ideology of self-sufficiency, the North depends on imports of energy, food and raw materials to survive. It also needs luxury goods to reward top officials.

The Trump Administration’s threats of military action if sanctions don’t work may also have secured more Chinese cooperation, even if a military strike carries huge risks. Beijing has been forced to consider the possibility of conflict between nuclear states on its doorstep. It’s also notable that the North told South Korean officials that it agreed to the U.S. demand to halt nuclear and missile tests while talks are underway. Perhaps Mr. Trump’s tough line wasn’t as dangerous and destabilizing as his critics claimed.

Yet the U.S. and the world should still be skeptical that Kim will really put his nukes on the negotiating table. Kim’s father and grandfather used talks to stall for time while they continued the nuclear program in secret. They also extracted concessions in return for talking and broke every promise they made.

The new diplomacy offer also follows a familiar Pyongyang pattern. First make nuclear or missile advances that increase its threat to South Korea and the world. Then make a diplomatic bid once a dovish government takes over in Seoul. This time Kim took advantage of the recent Olympic games and the aching, almost palpable, desire of new South Korean President Moon Jae-in for talks.

The South Koreans said North also demanded “security guarantees,” which it may define as the departure of U.S. forces from Korean peninsula. That would be a security and geopolitical disaster as long as the North retains its military threat.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Media and Joe McCarthy By David Solway

Posted By on March 7th, 2018

The mid-20th Century scandal involving Joseph McCarthy’s investigations of communist infiltration into the U.S. government has become an American myth, and “McCarthy” a handy term for a witch-hunter. Like Benedict Arnold,* Joe McCarthy figures, perhaps permanently, in the devil’s hornbook of America’s legendary scoundrels. In the words of the generally staid Encyclopedia Britannica: “The term has since become a byname for defamation of character or reputation by means of widely publicized indiscriminate allegations, especially on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.”

A serious consideration of the evidence, however, strongly suggests that those who use the term may be the ones guilty of “indiscriminate allegations.” It struck me that I had often used the label “McCarthyism” as if it were an eponymous epithet for a despicable historical figure that did not bear examination or defense. It was a simple fact. I was, of course, influenced chiefly by the media. I used to believe when I was younger in the veracity of print, like the character Mopsa in The Winter’s Tale, who crooned: “I love a ballad in print, alife, for then we are sure they are true.” Mopsa today would implicitly trust the big-ticket TV networks. As a former employee of the CBC, I did precisely that.

Contemporary reassessment of McCarthy’s legacy, a much-needed expansion of William Buckley and L. Brent Bozell’s 1954 McCarthy and His Enemies, was launched by M. Stanton Evans, whose 2007 Blacklisted by History is a massively detailed and scrupulously researched attempt to rescue McCarthy’s reputation. Evans writes: “So deeply etched is the malign image of McCarthy that the ‘ism’ linked to his name is now a standard feature of the language.” He concludes, after some 600 meticulous and fact-filled pages: “The real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error … It’s plain that McCarthy was more sinned against than sinning, and that on the central issues he was chiefly right and his opponents chiefly in error.”**

More recently, Diana West took up the cudgels in American Betrayal, and has reaped the whirlwind for her effort to rehabilitate the senator from Wisconsin. West alleges a cover-up, “perjury and grand-jury rigging by, among others, high-ranking Washington officials … eager to prevent a national security scandal from engulfing the Truman White House.” Like Evans, the evidence she provides — revelations from official archives in Washington and Moscow, FBI memos disclosing active espionage operations, reference to 5000 pages of Senate hearings and 24,000 pages of declassified records, names of agents in possession of secret documents, as well as tracing “gaps in the record” and significantly missing documents attesting to security risks, such as the Samuel Klaus 1946 memorandum — cannot be readily discounted.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Punishing Syrian Chemical Weapons Use Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on March 7th, 2018

The primary goals of American foreign policy are to make our citizens, friends and allies secure and to make our adversaries think twice. There are moments in history when well-timed, well-placed military action will have the effect of causing fear — and moments that, if allowed to pass by, ensure the opposite. President Barack Obama’s failure to uphold the international conventions against chemical weapons worked against American interests in what is perhaps the ugliest battlefield of the 21st century. President Donald Trump’s decision to attack the Syria’s Al-Shayrat Military Airbase from which the Assad regime launched chemical attacks in 2017 was a welcome reversal, though with limited results.

The illegitimacy of chemical weapons use is one of the few points of international consensus in war fighting. The first treaty against it is more than 115 years old – the Hague Declaration of 1899, which was followed by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the 1925 Geneva Protocol.

But the Bashar Assad regime in Syria — with the active support of Russia — has again been using chlorine barrel bombs against the 400,000 hostage civilians of Ghouta. Having failed to pass a Security Council resolution to sanction Syria (Russia and China vetoed), the United Nations Security Council succeeded in passing a unanimous resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire. Less than 24 hours later, there were new reports of chemical raids killing hundreds.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Indulging Victimhood Sydney Williams

Posted By on March 7th, 2018

No person chooses their parents, their place of birth, their nationality or their color. We have no say as to whether we will be born to a rich family or a poor one, to an educated or uneducated one. We are not given options as to physical or mental attributes. As Justice Thomas said, we must play the hand we are dealt.

Certainly, some are more privileged, but that has been true throughout history. However, almost all immigrants to America, whether they came in the 17thCentury or the 21st, emigrated because they were poor and persecuted. But early settlers did not consider themselves victims. They couldn’t. They would not have survived. Through belief in themselves, hard work and perseverance, they converted difficult circumstances into opportunities. In Justice Thomas’ words, they played well the hand they were dealt. Some failed, but most succeeded. Had they not, we would not now have the country we have.

Setting aside the role chance plays, success is a function of aspiration, creativity, tenacity, hard work, risk-taking and being opportunistic – a “can-do,” positive spirit. Justice Thomas grew up in the Jim Crow South, with few options open to poor, rural blacks. He never knew his father, and when his mother’s home was destroyed by fire he went to live with his grandparents on their hard-scrabble farm. Every critic of Justice Thomas – and they are legion among progressives – should read his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, so as to understand the obstacles this man overcame. A bust of his grandfather, a dirt-poor Georgian with nine months of education, sits in his office. It is inscribed with his grandfather’s favorite quote: “Old Man Can’t is dead. I helped bury him.” His grandfather was victimized against but was not a victim.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Do Western “Goodists” Really Care about Helping Syrians, Palestinians? by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on March 6th, 2018

ttps://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11946/western-goodists-syrians-palestinians

The West is drowning in a sea of double standards and moral relativism in which murderers and tyrants are allowed to wallow in their crimes, while global indignation is turned only against the sole democracy in the Middle East: Israel.
Israeli hospitals have never stopped treating Palestinians, even during wars in Gaza. In Syria, by comparison, Bashar Al-Assad continues to bomb the country’s hospitals.
Instead of scapegoating Israel, perhaps these “goodists”, if they really care about helping oppressed people, as they claim, will finally promote a freedom flotilla to liberate Gaza from Hamas’s tyranny and Syria from Assad’s butchery?

It all happened around the same time, 200 kilometers apart. In one photo, Israeli schools were involved in a national drill in the event of a missile attack. In the other photo, a real missile attack in Syria caused 200 deaths, many of which were of children. On one side, you have Israel, a democracy forced to protect its children. On the other side, you have Syria, a brutal dictatorship where the civil war has caused more than 400,000 deaths.

Last month, an Israeli plane was shot down by Syrian anti-aircraft fire. If the Syrian regime, backed by Iran and Russia, is willing to kill 200 innocent Syrians, just think what they would do to other countries’ citizens, if they had the means. Yet, going by media reports of the incident, one would think that Israel had been the aggressor.

How many resolutions has the United Nations dedicated against Syria the last year? Two. How many resolutions against Israel? 21. Both accurate reporting and international law have become distorted into serving as the enemies of humanity and civilization.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

US: Muslim Calls for Murder Increasing by Judith Bergman

Posted By on March 6th, 2018

Far from being “isolated” events, calls for jihad against all non-Muslims began in the US several decades ago.

It would be a mistake to view the hate preached against Jews differently from the hate preached against other non-Muslims. Both are sanctioned by the Quran and the hadiths. It is this hate against anyone “other” — and that is still taken to heart by many Muslims — that drives Islamic terrorism against the West.

Muslim supremacists are apparently acceptable; white supremacists are not.

Yes, other religious books are also filled with hate verses, but as the author Bruce Bawer points out, many “Muslims still live by them.”

In December 2017, four imams — at mosques in North Carolina, New Jersey and Texas — called for killing Jews. Two of the imams quoted from a hadith that says:

“The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him”.

Two other imams, respectively, asked Allah “to destroy the Zionists and their allies, and those who assist them” and “to wreak vengeance upon the plundering oppressors”.

Prior to these December calls, in July 2017, two imams in California (Riverside and Davis) also called for killing Jews. One imam quoted the hadith above. He later apologized, claiming that “The last thing that I would do is intentionally hurt anyone, Muslim, Jewish or otherwise. It is not in my heart”.

It may not be in his heart, but it was in his mouth, and it is in the Quran and the hadiths, which are filled[1] with supremacist and violent references not only to Jews, but to all non-Muslims.