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May 2017

What Ever Happened to the Civil Rights Movement? Obama & Co. shoved it down the memory hole. Myron Magnet *****

If you’re a Democrat, and your program is wealth redistribution—with a big cut for yourself as a ruling middleman—it turns out that racism is a much better rationale than inequality for robbing selected Peter to pay collective Paul. Inequality, as New York mayor Bill de Blasio ruefully found, is too fuzzy a cause to fire up most people with righteous indignation, since American liberty has always meant that people free to use their different talents and virtues in their own way will arrive at widely varying outcomes. But racism—oh, racism is the original American sin. It is so obviously, wickedly, unjust as to get the blood boiling in blue states and cities across the land.

Trouble is, there isn’t that much racism festering in the nation any more. It was Barack Obama’s political obsession, perhaps bordering on political genius, to convince a majority of Americans that it pervaded everywhere, like phlogiston, seventeenth-century science’s imaginary substance—invisible but supposedly ubiquitous and providing our ancestors with an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon of combustion.

Accomplishing this task, though, required a massive rewrite of the American history of the last half-century. As recently as 15 years ago, there were a lot of people around for whom the civil rights movement had been a formative, firsthand experience. I don’t mean the race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I mean ordinary people who had a deep commitment to ending racial segregation and discrimination and to winning equal opportunity for all Americans, regardless (as the mid-century slogan put it) of race, creed, or color. We had heard the speeches of Martin Luther King and yearned for the day when only the content of your character, not the color of your skin, would count; had known (or even been) Freedom Riders, rumbling south by the busload to help hitherto disenfranchised blacks register to vote; had seen Birmingham police commissioner Bull Connor stand by while the Ku Klux Klan beat those demonstrators and later set his own police dogs and fire hoses on the next peaceful group; had seen Governor George Wallace stand in the schoolhouse door to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama. We saw the moral force of that movement inexorably marginalize the racists, and the legal force of the federal government steamroll them, starting with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and gaining momentum when Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, flanked by federal marshals and national guardsmen, forced Wallace to step aside as the first black students entered his state university in 1963, and when Congress the next year passed the epochal 1964 Civil Rights Act.

My generation lived through decades of what seemed a world-historical liberation. Before our eyes, as we saw it, Jefferson’s dream of an America based on the idea that all men are created equal had solidified into a reality at last. So indelibly etched on our memories were those heady times that on 9/11, when my left-wing baby-boomer neighbors spontaneously assembled at the Firemen’s Monument on Riverside Drive, candles in hand, all they could think of to solemnize the occasion was to sing not “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” but the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” If the Vietnam War was the shadow of our formative years, the civil rights movement’s success was the sunshine.

But like many admirable movements, even this one had its excesses. Equality of opportunity wasn’t enough, some insisted. We needed equality of results. Government and private institutions adopted numerical goals and quotas and tried to reach them through affirmative action—that is, through a supposedly beneficent discrimination by race, seemingly legal, since the Supreme Court, even in Brown v. Board of Education, had never repudiated Plessy v. Ferguson’s odious 1896 acceptance of racial discrimination. We got forced school busing to make student populations of each school mirror the racial composition of the region, and public education’s focus shifted from imparting knowledge to fighting racial disparity—or, as the progressive-ed schools put it, advancing social justice. Needless to say, the education of black kids improved not a whit.

Fixing the Federal IT Mess Before it is Too Late

Paul Ferrillo, Chuck Brooks, Kenneth Holley, George Platsis, George Thomas, Shawn Tuma, and Christophe Veltsos.

Let us take a headcount of recent events: the attack on the Ukraine’s electric grid, a LinkedIn data dump as a result of a 2012 breach, the information warfare campaign surrounding the US Elections, a peculiar “Google Docs” app involved in a massive spear-phishing campaign, and most recently, another information warfare campaign aimed at the French Elections. Do not forget our ”good ole friends” – North Korea, Iran, and Syria, just to mention a few – are well into the cyber game and ready to pounce on the next database which has been left unguarded, unencrypted, and unprepared to thwart an attack.

As the disc jockey says, “and the hits keep on playing!”

Despite increased “cybersecurity talk” since the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) breach, great strides in Federal IT security improvement are not apparent.

Despite loads of Congressional attention, there is only one piece of credible legislation to show for, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA).

And despite the billions spent on cyber defense measures, we seem to wake up every morning to news of some type of new breach, making it feel like Groundhog Day.

With each new breach, some nation state, cybercriminal, or terrorist group has gotten their hands on our personal information (and that of our spouses, kids, and parents) all in an effort to exploit us further, whether it is a wire transfer scam or an attempted run at the crown jewels of whoever employs us. Coupled with publicly available information that we – and our family, friends, and co-workers, and businesses, services, and not-for-profits – post online, and that which is available through workplace and government listings, seemingly tiny and unrelated pieces of information, once collated, become a powerful weapon for the adversary.

The adversary will not hesitate for one moment to use this information against us should it meet their interests.

We cannot overemphasize this issue enough: spear-phishing and pretexting tactics work and they work extremely well. And government employees are by no means exempt or necessarily protected from these social engineering attacks. Once that email makes it past the firewalls, the spam filters, the anti-virus and the artificial intelligence onto your device (which it can and does), you – and you alone – are the last line of defense.

So why have we been so completely unsuccessful in defending our data? There are enough reasons to numb you:

Silo mentalities of various agencies, groups, and companies;

Unsubstantiated hype of vendor strategies designed to work together, but in practice are disjointed;
Never-ending shortage of skilled cyber professionals;
Perpetual lack of money, time, and attention the issue truly needs;
Basic naivety of the user; and
A fundamental misunderstanding of issues and terms.

Do people really understand the intricacies and complexities the cybersecurity challenge presents? How much do the US House and Senate really care to understand these intricacies and complexities?

We do not need to spend another year, or election cycle, or decade debating across party lines or through political filters when there are actionable steps that support a unified American interest, regardless of party or ideology.

They Want to Kill You By Herbert London

Herbert London is Presidentof London Center for Policy Research http://www.londoncenter.org/

In the relentless rush to undermine the Trump administration the Left has adopted the view that the bellicose stance of the president towards North Korea, Iran, and yes, Russia is designed as a distraction. Presumably if one accepts this perverse logic, this hostile rhetoric, missile deployment and movement of military assets are a mere show of force to keep Americans from recognizing the destructive policies being introduced by the newly installed government.

What the president’s foes willfully underestimate is that there are national leaders who want to kill us. North Korea is not simply a police state and a moral outrage, it is an enemy intent on destroying the West. The attempt to develop an ICBM with range sufficient to reach California is an obsessive goal. Recently military forces redirected a North Korean satellite to take a north-south orbit rather than an east-west orbit so that it remains over North America for a longer period. The object is a possible EMP attack on the U.S. thereby paralyzing the nation. Kim Jong Un may be erratic, but he is not completely irrational.

Iran realizes that the United States led by by an assertive national security team is a counter weight to its desire for a Shia empire across the Levant, a reclamation of the Persian empire. After eight years of an Obama led foreign policy that tilted heavily to Iran, a new chapter is emerging in the Middle East that will not serve Iran’s interest. “Death to the Great Devil” is not an empty expression. While the Iranians do not have the capability of attacking the U.S. at the moment, they have been able to obtain North Korean nuclear technology and a deal from President Obama that virtually guarantees nuclear weapons possession some time in the future.

Russian strategy against the U.S. may be more subtle than North Korea and Iran, but it is not less dangerous. The Russians want to encircle American interests by creating a sphere of influence in East Europe and the Middle East. In order to accomplish its goal, it must force the U.S. to retreat from its present positions.

President Trump has his hands full. This is not a distraction, but a reality. The incremental withdrawal of American forces worldwide combined with a naïve belief that nations would rally to create global stabilization, has left foreign policy in tatters.

Universities have caved in to dogma and thuggery : Melanie Philipps

Three months ago, riots broke out at the University of California at Berkeley over a planned talk by the provocative journalist Milo Yiannopoulos. Last month the outspoken polemicist Ann Coulter cancelled her planned talk on that campus after the university said it couldn’t guarantee her safety. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/universities-have-caved-in-to-dogma-and-thuggery-ndcvfw57h

I was invited to Berkeley last week to talk about the Arab-Israel conflict at its Hillel centre for Jewish students. In the light of the uproar over controversial speakers, however, Hillel decided it was too dangerous for me to speak there. So I was disinvited.

I ended up speaking with no advertising or publicity in a “safe house” to which students were invited individually. In effect, they had to be coaxed to venture out. This is because reaction against pro-Israel speakers on campus is now so violent that many Jewish students at Berkeley are too frightened to attend any such presentations.

I’m in America on a speaking tour, talking to a variety of groups about the assorted political convulsions taking place throughout both the West and the Middle East.

In the US, one campus after another is now being dragged into a spiral of violence, intimidation and censorship. When Heather Mac Donald, a distinguished academic and critic of Black Lives Matter, tried to speak at Claremont McKenna College in California last month students ringed the building chanting abuse and banging on the windows. She eventually fled through the kitchen into an unarmed police van outside. At Middlebury College in Vermont in March a professor was hospitalised after being attacked when she tried to shield the social scientist Charles Murray, the author of a study on racial differences in intelligence, who was being driven out of a lecture hall by a violent mob.

According to a survey by Spiked magazine, more than nine out of ten British universities restrict free speech in some way, clamping down on ideas, literature or guest speakers that fall foul of one shibboleth or another. The Wall Street Journal reported that in a survey of 800 US college students, 51 per cent supported speech codes. Dozens of people invited to speak on campus have had their invitations withdrawn or their presentations disrupted, while university staff have been harassed with accusations of racism, micro-aggression or cultural insensitivity.

Overall responsibility for this anarchy rests with faculty members and university authorities. Many universities have stopped being crucibles of reason and knowledge and turned instead into ideological battlegrounds on which protected groups promoting the demonisation of white society or other presumed “oppressors” suppress any challenge to their dogma.

University authorities have actively assisted the culture of zero tolerance for opposing views. Lecturers have been disciplined for teaching ideas that fall foul of prevailing orthodoxies. Universities have cravenly given in to violence and intimidation. On many US campuses students are limited to small “free speech zones” in which to exercise the right to express their views. Failure to observe the limits of such zones can result in disciplinary action and even arrest.

MELANIE PHILLIPS AT BERKELEY

This week I spoke on the Berkeley campus. A transcript of my remarks follows below the video.

I’m on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, where conservative speakers are being systematically censored by violent protests designed to prevent them from speaking. I am on Sproul plaza in the centre of the campus, where free speech was supposedly enshrined back in the sixties but where it is now appallingly being suppressed.

This is the campus where conservative views are called fascism and shouted down. As you can see from these posters on this campus noticeboard.

This is where Jewish students in particular are being intimidated by threatening pro-Palestinian demonstrators. I was originally asked to speak at Berkeley Hillel, the Jewish student centre here. But remarkably, even that was considered too dangerous for me.

So I spoke instead to Jewish students at another, more discreet centre. These students had to be personally coaxed to attend my meeting – because Jewish students at Berkeley are now too frightened for their own safety to attend pro-Israel presentations. That is the truly shocking state of affairs in this prestigious seat of learning today.

I was invited to speak to Jewish students here in order to provide facts about the Arab-Israel dispute that even many pro-Israel people may not know. So this is what I told the students.

Should we support a two-state solution? If the Palestinians were to accept a state of Palestine living in peace alongside the State of Israel, whose existence as a Jewish state they would accept, I would certainly accept that and I guess most Israelis would accept it too. But when you look at certain facts, which most people either deliberately ignore or suppress or don’t even know, you realise the question itself is a tremendous red herring.

First fact. The two-state solution is actually part of the problem. It is not a modern solution at all. It dates from before the State of Israel even came into being.

In 1922 the British accepted a Mandate to administer Palestine and to settle the Jews throughout that land. When they found themselves up against sustained Arab terrorism against both themselves and the returning Jews, the British offered the Arabs in 1937 a slice of Palestine, to create an Arab state alongside the Jewish homeland.

The Arabs refused, as they have refused every such subsequent offer of a state alongside Israel — offers made in 1947, 2000 and 2008. While the Jews have accepted every such proposal for a two-state solution, the Arab response has been instead to wage yet more war or terrorism against the Jews.

But the point is that the two-state solution was always from the start an attempt to appease terrorism. The British response to the Arabs’ murder campaign was in effect to reward them for it — by offering them part of the Jews’ own legal entitlement to the land, and thus breaking the terms of the Mandate.

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present by Michael B. Oren (Feb 17, 2008)

EXCERPT:It’s death by a thousand cuts, or inch-by-inch as some refer to it, and most Americans have no idea that this battle is being waged every day across America . By not fighting back, by allowing groups to obfuscate what is really happening, and not insisting that the Islamists adapt to our own culture, the United States is cutting its own throat with a politically correct knife, and helping to further the Islamists agenda.
Sadly, it appears that today America’s leaders would rather be politically correct than victorious.

by Michael B. Oren
When Thomas Jefferson saw there was no negotiating with Muslims, he formed what is the now the Marines (sea going soldiers). These Marines were attached to U. S. Merchant vessels. When the Muslims attacked U.S. merchant vessels, they were repulsed by armed soldiers, but there is more.The Marines followed the Muslims back to their villages and killed every man, woman, and child in the village. It didn’t take long for the Muslims to leave U.S. Merchant vessels alone. English and French merchant vessels started running up our flag when entering the Mediterranean to secure safe travel.

Why the Marine Hymn Contains the Verse “… to the shores of Tripoli .” This is very interesting and a must read piece of our history. It points out where we may be heading. Most Americans are unaware of the fact that over two hundred years ago,the United States had declared war on Islam and Thomas Jefferson led the charge!

At the height of the 18th century, Muslim pirates (the “Barbary Pirates”) were the terror of the Mediterranean and a large area of the North Atlantic . They attacked every ship in sight and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms. Those taken hostage were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote heart-breaking letters home, begging their government and family members to pay whatever their Mohammedan captors demanded.

These extortionists of the high seas represented the North African Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco and Algiers – collectively referred to as the Barbary Coast – and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American Republic.

Before the Revolutionary War, U.S. merchant ships had been under the protection of Great Britain. When the U.S. declared its independence and entered into war, the ships of the United States were protected by France. However, once the war was won, America had to protect its own fleets.