Displaying posts published in

March 2016

Restroom Follies : Edward Cline

The object of the boycott is not so much to protest the North Carolina law, as to punish anyone who does not conform to the “settled science” of à la carte gender identity.

The traditional source of the law of non-contradiction is Aristotle’s Metaphysics where he gives three different versions.

ontological: “It is impossible that the same thing belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect.” (1005b19-20)
psychological: “No one can believe that the same thing can (at the same time) be and not be.” (1005b23-24)
logical: “The most certain of all basic principles is that contradictory propositions are not true simultaneously.” (1011b13-14)

In short, A is A; A cannot be A and non-A (or B) at one and the same time.

Aristotle did not deal in traditions. Traditions are not a fundamental basis for establishing facts, politics, art, or even gender. Traditions are “time-honored” actions or beliefs, which may or may not be worthy of observation. But they are not philosophy.

In today’s culture, a culture that has more or less repudiated Aristotle in its government, in its culture, and even in “gender identification,” it is possible for transgenders, gays, and other identity-deficient individuals to believe that they can be one gender and not what they don’t want to be. This phenomenon is possible only in a culture of philosophical disintegration.

This writer was banned and all records of his past columns “archived” out of public sight on http://capitalismmagazine.com/ over an article he wrote and posted in June of 2015, “The Prancing Unicorn of Bruce Jenner.” The article criticized Bruce Jenner, who decided he was Caitlyn Jenner, a woman. He claims he is no longer a man. But when he undergoes the emasculating surgery that will enable him (and all his fans) to pretend he is a woman, in fact, he will still be a man, but now a eunuch. Neither the blog host nor many of the site’s readers, cared for that logic. As a consequence, I no longer post columns on the site, and no longer read it.

Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. Ayn Rand, the novelist/philosopher wrote succinctly and eloquently on the subject:

All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identify it as a solid object; he learns to identify the object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists.

What Palestinians Think about the Knife Intifada Six months after the current wave of violence began, some observers think it might be running out of steam. But what next? Daniel Polisar

Is the “knife intifada” beginning to run out of steam? Some observers say so. Yet this Friday, April 1, marks an impressive half-year since the launch of the current wave of Palestinian violence. Characterized largely by stabbings carried out by youngsters, generally acting alone or in pairs, this round of attacks has already claimed the lives of 29 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean asylum seeker, and a Palestinian bystander, and caused more than 400 injuries.

During this time, according to official Israeli sources, there have been over 200 stabbings or attempted stabbings at an average pace greater than one per day, as well as 40 car-ramming assaults and 80 shootings. Though perpetrated almost exclusively by Palestinians living in Jerusalem and the West Bank, and focused largely on these areas, the attacks have also reached Israel’s coastal cities, most notably Tel Aviv. And though not yet nearly so long-running as the first (1987-1991) or second (2000-2004) intifadas, the current wave, given that it appears to be driven by individual initiative rather than by organized militant groups like Hamas or Fatah, has shown remarkable staying power.

What explains its endurance? One reason may be that the perpetrators both reflect and are largely motivated by Palestinian public opinion—a subject to which I devoted a comprehensive essayin Mosaic last November. Here I want to explore what has changed over the last six months in how Palestinians see their conflict with Israel, and especially the desirability and efficacy of resorting to violence. In doing so, I’ll rely principally on polls conducted during this period by three of the leading Palestinian polling institutes whose published results reliably indicate what Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza think.

The New Dark Ages on Campus How protestors, professors, and administrators are consciously working to destroy free thought and free expression at America’s universities

K.C.JOHNSONhttps://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/new-dark-ages-campus/

As last fall’s wave of student protests arrived in Durham, North Carolina, a self-described “group of unaffiliated and concerned students” presented the “Demands of Black Voices.” The Duke University activists wanted “bias and diversity training” for many segments of the Duke community, a new university policy “concerning hate speech” toward “students of color,” a new administrator to address the complaints of students of color only, and permission for students of color to miss classes by citing “mental health trauma” from “racial incidents on campus.”

One demand stood out. “Professors,” the students wrote, “will be in danger of losing their jobs, and non-tenure track [sic] faculty will lose tenure status if they perpetuate hate speech that threatens the safety of students of color. They will also be liable if the discriminatory attitudes behind the speech could potentially harm the academic achievements of students of color.”

A university that dismisses professors whose “attitudes” could “potentially harm” the exam performance of preferred undergraduates has abandoned all pretense of academic freedom. Given how zealously professors normally defend the concept, one might have expected that Duke faculty members would have unanimously condemned the proposal. Instead, the only public reaction came via a statement signed by 23 Duke professors that hailed the students for “forcing us all to learn out loud.” The protesters’ incivility had overcome the “muting of sharply articulated criticism of white supremacy.” And the professors had a message for the students who recommended the dismissal of an unspecified number of their colleagues: “Thank you.”

Little in the professional experiences of the faculty signatories suggested a culture of “white supremacy” at Duke (or, for that matter, at any other contemporary college campus). The faculty statement was hosted on the website of Professor Mark Anthony Neal—who, in a fawning 2006 interview in the university’s official magazine, described his “intellectual alter ego” as “thugniggaintellectual,” who “comes into intellectual spaces like a thug, who literally is fearful and menacing,” producing “some real kind of ‘gangster’ scholarship…hard-core intellectual thuggery.” Signatures for the statement were solicited by Professor Wahneema Lubiano—who came to Duke, with a lifetime position, more than 15 years ago, touting two allegedly “forthcoming” books. To date, neither of these books, nor any other Lubiano manuscript, has appeared in print.

As it turns out, the students could have stayed home. In the name of promoting appropriate thinking on matters related to “diversity,” Duke had effectively implemented the protesters’ plan. Dean Valerie Ashby announced at a November 2015 forum that department chairs would be held “accountable” for inculcating the administration’s “values” among faculty in their departments. And “at every stage of their evaluation,” Ashby revealed, untenured professors learned “how we feel” on questions of race and gender. The message these faculty members received: “You can’t be a great scholar and be intolerant. You have to go.”

Stanford Activists Demand Its Next President Be Nonwhite and Female or Transgender Because a transgender white person would just not be “diverse” enough. By Katherine Timpf

An activist group at Stanford University is demanding that white people — as well as men of any race who are not transgender — be forbidden from being appointed as the school’s next president or provost.

“We demand that the next appointment to the position of president and provost of the University break both the legacy of white leadership and cisgender male leadership,” states a document that the group, called the “Who’s Teaching Us Coalition,” released on Tuesday.

Note that the students are demanding that “both” of these leadership legacies be dismantled — which means that neither a cis, black gay man nor a transgender white person would technically be “diverse” enough to qualify.

Among the other demands? “The development of recurring and comprehensive identity and cultural humility training to be instated as a requirement for all faculty in all departments by September 21st, 2017,” a “dedicated, responsive platform for reporting and tracking microaggressions from faculty” and “the hiring of at least 10 additional tenure-track ethnic studies professors and a commitment to the retention of these professors, prioritizing underrepresented groups within the ethnic studies programs.”

Oh, and of course, “adequate staffing and funding to achieve all of the aforementioned demands.”

According to an article in Campus Reform, the group released its demands after a draft of them was leaked by The Stanford Review, the school’s conservative newspaper.

In any case, it’s certainly a good thing that WTU released them sooner rather than later, because the document also demands “that the Administration immediately accept the aforementioned demands and that a statement of acceptance, a timetable of implementation of each demand, and an administrative point person for each demand, be presented to WTU at 3 pm on Friday April, 8th in open forum at the Native American Cultural Center.”

That’s next week, folks!

Welp. I guess they’d better get crackin!

Why Westerners Make Inviting Targets for Terrorists By Victor Davis Hanson

China has a long record of persecuting its Muslim minorities. Russia has brutally suppressed the separatist movement of the predominantly Muslim Chechens with bombing and shelling. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered airstrikes against Syrian Muslims without much worry over collateral damage. India has zero tolerance for Islamic radicalism and hits back hard any time Muslim terrorists attack.

Given such severe backlash elsewhere, why do radical Islamists prefer to strike Europeans and Americans — from Paris and Brussels to Boston and San Bernardino?

No place has been more open to Muslim refugees than the United States and the European Union. Together they have accepted several million emigrants from the Middle East since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The EU and the U.S. lavish foreign-aid money on the Palestinians. America has offered a half-century of support to Jordan and Egypt. It is much easier to be a Muslim in Europe than a Christian in the Middle East.

Barack Obama started his presidency eager to win over the Muslim world. In a 2009 interview with Dubai-based TV news channel Al Arabiya, he emphasized that he has Muslim family members. Obama’s NASA director redefined the space agency’s “foremost” mission as Muslim outreach.

Obama has sought a closer relationship with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan despite Erdogan’s Islamization of Turkey’s shaky democracy. In contrast, Obama alienated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the most steadfast friend America has in the Middle East.

Obama has publicly deferred to Muslim interests while abroad. He apologized to the Turkish parliament for a host of supposed past American sins — “some of our own darker periods in our history.” In symbolic fashion, Obama bowed to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The president’s Cairo speech mythologized Islamic contributions throughout history and downplayed Western achievement.

Susan Sarandon Says Trump Would Be Better for America Than Hillary By Tyler O’Neil (Twisted logic?????)

Liberal actress Susan Sarandon is an outspoken Bernie Sanders supporter, but that doesn’t mean she’s wedded to the Democratic Party. In fact, she recently suggested that it would be better for Sanders’ cause of “revolution” if Donald Trump were to win the presidential election in November.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday night, Sarandon made an odd kind of endorsement for Trump. Hayes asked if Sarandon would “really” consider voting for Trump over Hillary.

“Really,” Sarandon said, adding that “some people feel that Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in, things will really explode.” Asked if she thinks that’s “dangerous,” she replied, “It’s dangerous to think that we can continue the way we are with the militarized police force, with privatized prisons, with the death penalty, with the low minimum wage, threats to women’s rights and think you can’t do something huge to turn that around.”

“I think, in certain quarters, there’s growing concern that the folks that are into Bernie Sanders have come to despise Hillary Clinton or reject Hillary Clinton and that should she be the nominee, which is as yet undetermined, they will walk away,” Hayes noted.

“That’s a legitimate concern,” Sarandon replied, adding that Sanders supporters would be unwilling to back Clinton in November “because they’re very passionate and principled.”

She insisted that Clinton does not believe in the things Sanders stands for. “What would make you think that when she gets in, she’s going to suddenly go against the people that have given her millions and millions of dollars?” Clinton “accepted money for all of those people. She doesn’t even want to fight for a $15 minimum wage. So these are people that have not come out before. So why would we think they’re going to come out now for her, you know?”

Jihad Hopping from One Islamist Group to Another Ghazala Salam trades CAIR for Emerge. Joe Kaufman

Ghazala Salam has left her job with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). But rather than having made this decision in order to repudiate radical Islam and her work on behalf of an organization associated with the terrorist group Hamas, she instead, joined the staff of another Islamist group, Emerge USA, whose unwritten mission is to promote Muslim infiltration of the American political system to undermine government institutions.

CAIR was established in June 1994 as part of a terrorist umbrella group headed by then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. In 2007 and 2008, CAIR was named by the US Justice Department a co-conspirator for two federal trials dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. Since its founding, a number of CAIR representatives have served jail time and/or have been deported from the United States for terrorist-related crimes. In November 2014, CAIR itself was designated a terrorist group by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government.

CAIR-Florida has fully reflected the extremism of its parent organization. Its Executive Director Hassan Shibly, who has previously denied that Hezbollah is a terrorist group, wrote in August 2014, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of G-d…” In July 2014, CAIR-Florida co-sponsored a pro-Hamas rally in Downtown Miami, where rally goers repeatedly shouted, “We are Hamas” and “Let’s go Hamas.” Following the rally, the event organizer, Sofian Zakkout, wrote, “Thank God, every day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!”

Last month, CAIR-Florida featured Ghazala Salam on the ‘About’ page of its website, along with her title as Community & Government Relations Director and accompanied by her bio. Today, that information is gone, deleted from the site.

Salam has now moved on to Emerge USA as the group’s new Florida Executive Director.

ISIS’ European Matrix How the terror commandos spin their web of death. Emerson Vermaat

“ISIS have 400 trained fighters in Europe who are poised to unleash more terror attacks with orders to wait for the right time to cause maximum carnage,” the British Daily Mail reported on March 23, 2016. ISIS terror commandos already struck in Paris on November 13, 2015, and in Brussels on March 22, 2016.

Abdel Hamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of the terror attacks in Paris who operated from Belgium, said that around 90 jihadists had traveled from Syria to France and that “they were spread out around the Paris region: Syrians, Iraqis, British, French and Germans.”

ISIS jihadists receive their training in special training camps in Syria and Iraq. The focus of their training is on how to plot and carry out terror attacks in Europe. Last January, the European police organization Europol claimed in an alarming report that such training camps not only are in existence in Syria and Iraq, but also in the European Union and the Balkan countries. Terror attacks on soft targets are also being planned in Europe itself, the report warns. This finding proved to be right: Both terror attacks in Paris and Brussels were partially planned and prepared from Brussels.

On Saturday March 26, 2016, the Italian anti-terror police arrested Jamal Eddine Ouali, a 40-year-old Algerian who forged lots of identity papers for illegal immigrants and terrorists linked to the ISIS attacks in Paris and Brussels. Ouali was arrested near the southern city of Salerno. He had provided forged identity papers to Mohammed Belkaid, Salah Abdeslam and Najim Lachraaoui, all of whom were members of the ISIS terror commandos that struck in Paris and Brussels.

Terrorism, Enclaves and Sanctuary Cities How sanctuary cities facilitate the growth of terror enclaves in America. Michael Cutler

In the wake of the terror attacks in Belgium, news reports once again focused on how so-called “No Go Zones” in Europe create neighborhoods where communities develop that, although are geographically located within major cities, insulate themselves from their surroundings, fostering the mindset that cooperating with law enforcement is dangerous and even traitorous.

The residents eye law enforcement officers with great suspicion if not outright animosity. The situation is exacerbated because while they fear law enforcement, they may well also fear their neighbors who may take revenge against them for cooperating with law enforcement.

These neighborhoods become “cultural islands” that eschew the cultures and values of the cities and countries in which they grow — a virtual malignancy that ultimately comes to threaten its host city and country because within this cocoon radical Islamists are shielded from law enforcement, find shelter and support and an ample supply of potential terror recruits.

These communities are inhabited by many Muslim refugees who cannot be effectively screened.

This makes assimilation by the residents of these isolated communities unlikely if not impossible and creates breeding grounds for crime and, in this era and under these circumstances- breeding grounds for terrorism.

While there are no actual “No Go Zones” in the United States, there are neighborhoods scattered around the United States, where the concentration of ethnic immigrant minorities is so great that police find themselves unable to make the sort of inroads that they should be able to make in order to effectively police these communities. Adding to the high density of these aliens in these communities is the issue of foreign languages often being the prevalent language in such “ghettos.” This gives new meaning to the term “Language Barrier.”

Back when I was an INS agent, we had an expression- “Big cases- big problems; Little cases- little problems; No cases- no problems!” That phrase applies to all law enforcement officers.

When police or other law enforcement officers are put into a classic “no win” situation, their commonsense solution is to make their own survival and well-being their priority by minimizing their contacts with such enclaves and taking the fewest actions possible within those communities.

Arrest George Soros Use existing criminal and civil laws to shut down his anti-American juggernaut. Matthew Vadum

It is time to hold radical ringleader George Soros to account for the growing civil unrest that he has helped to foment in this presidential election cycle and his efforts to shut down Donald Trump rallies using physical force and intimidation.

Soros, the billionaire speculator, is the preeminent funder of the activist Left in America, which means he is the Number One funder of the domestic terrorism that is part and parcel of the Left.

Soros makes no secret of his contempt for leading GOP candidate Trump. In January he said “Donald Trump is doing the work of ISIS.” Ideas like banning entry to the U.S. by Muslims might “convince the Muslim community that there is no alternative but terrorism.”

Soros favors the decline of the U.S. and spends lavishly on activism to bring that collapse about. He has spent an estimated $7 billion or more on giving left-wing groups the resources to screw up the country.

He has used his vast fortune to topple governments in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. He “broke” the British pound, was accused of wreaking havoc on the Malaysian ringgit, and was called an “economic war criminal” in Thailand. A French court convicted him of insider trading.

America is his current target.