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February 2018

Mueller indicts 13 Russians for interfering in US election

Special counsel Robert Mueller has brought charges against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups for interfering with the 2016 U.S. elections.

The explosive new charges allege that the Russians created false U.S. personas and stole the identities of real U.S. people in order to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, an assessment previously reached by U.S. intelligence agencies.

“This indictment serves as a reminder that people are not always who they appear to be on the Internet,” Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein said at a press briefing announcing the indictments.

“The indictment alleges that the Russian conspirators want to promote discord in the United States and undermine public confidence in democracy.”

President Trump, who has repeatedly cast doubt on whether Russia interfered with the election, has been briefed on the indictments, the White House said.

The efforts, which began in 2014, were connected to the so-called Internet Research Agency, a shadowy Russian operation based in St. Petersburg that leveraged Facebook and other social media platforms to spread divisive messages leading up to the 2016 election.

Elizabeth Warren Went Native Daniel J. Flynn

Elizabeth Warren looks like the love-child of Tilda Swinton and Edgar Winter. She talks like Ward Churchill, Iron Eyes Cody, and so many others who hail from the Cigar Store Indian Tribe.

“I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes — and only by tribes,” fake Indian Warren told a conference of real Indians on Wednesday. “I never used my family tree to get a break or get ahead. I never used it to advance my career.”

Only she did.

The blue-eyed blonde listed herself as a minority in academic directories prior to obtaining employment by Harvard Law. After gaining tenure, her minority designation disappeared.

Warren now may downplay her invented ancestry’s role in obtaining employment but Harvard then boasted about it.

“Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the law school faculty includes no minority women, [then Harvard Law spokesman Mike] Chmura said professor of law Elizabeth Warren is Native American,” reported the Harvard Crimson 22 years ago.

No tribe recognizes her as one of their own and genealogy records show no evidence of even great-grandparents hailing from Native American ancestry. The record does show Warren attending a good law school, albeit the type that does not typically send on graduates to Ivy League schools to teach and does not ever send them to Harvard.

Warren graduated from Rutgers Law, which currently comes in at 62 — above Georgia State but below the University of Tennessee — in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. When I examined faculty at Harvard Law five years ago, I discovered that more than half of Harvard Law’s professors and assistant professors received their degrees from Harvard Law. Outside of specialists who obtained degrees outside of the field of law, every professor and assistant professor at the school graduated from a top-ten law school and just five graduated from a law-school in the bottom half of the top ten. Nobody from Rutgers Law besides Warren has ever received tenure from Harvard Law.

The incestuous culture of Harvard that imagines that elite minds only attend elite schools exhibits problems of its own. But clearly practice dictates that they exclusively grant tenure to those from the best of the best schools. Elizabeth Warren strikes as the sole counterexample.

Though the senior senator from Massachusetts depicts those mocking her as mocking Native Americans, she clearly mocked them in falsely portraying herself as a member of their historically-underrepresented group to obtain a job for which she did not possess the requisite qualifications. In doing so, she made a farce of affirmative action in a manner similar to the forgettable but amusing 1986 comedy, Soul Man.

Historically Yours- La Guardia, The Jews And Hitler

In 1922, Republican New York Congressman Fiorello La Guardia ran for
reelection and was opposed by a Tammany-backed Jewish candidate.
Sensing the opportunity to drive a wedge between La Guardia and his
Jewish supporters, the opposition circulated a flier in the Jewish
tenements calling La Guardia “a pronounced Jew hater.”

La Guardia fought back in a most unusual manner. He imposed one condition,
namely, that the entire debate be spoken exclusively in Yiddish.
Completely stunned, his opponent could not accept the proposal.

La Guardia, nicknamed the Little Flower (he was 5’2”) won reelection. La
Guardia was born in 1882 in Greenwich Village to his parents of
different religions. His Catholic father was Achille Luigi Carlo La
Guardia and his observant Jewish mother was Irene Lazzato Coen. To
maintain their heritage within the home, Achille spoke Italian to
Fiorello while Irene spoke to him in Yiddish. La Guardia became fluent
in both languages. Fiorello had earned a great reputation as a young
attorney among the Lower East Side’s immigrant Jewish garment workers
by representing many of them in court without charge. He also became
an early advocate for Jewish rights.

MONSTERS AND MADNESS BY EDWARD CLINE

Pamela Geller said she will never surrender.

“They lost the election, and then lost their minds.”

I promised some movie reviews. These reviews reflect the abandonment of cause and effect, logical plots, reason, and endings that make sense.I discuss some Netflix movie fare: Just note the ubiquity of the epistemological disintegration in movies. I’m not making it up or exaggerating.

The Batman comics and films have spawned a Netflix TV series. First of all is Dr. Hugo Strange (http://de-beta.imdb.com/list/ls077979301/) director of a Gotham insane asylum. He’s Chinese. He lets free as certifiably “sane” Oswald Cobblepot to advance an unspoken conspiracy of his own. He keeps frozen bodies in the basement of the asylum. He’s “reanimated” the body of the original “Mr. Freeze” and black crime queen Fish Mooney and other deceased criminals, and kept them in preserved until he reanimates them to unleash vengeance and chaos in Gotham. “Mr. Freeze,” committed suicide after his wife dies of some unidentified disease he was trying to save her from. He froze himself to death.

Another stinker: “The Cloverfield Paradox.” Time: the near future. If you remember or ever saw “Cloverfield” a few years ago (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1060277/), it was a black-and-white (and now a color) Hollywood product about some mysterious, and possibly undersea creature or alien, raiding Manhattan. The Head of the Statue of Liberty is knocked off and sent to land on Fifth Avenue. No explanation was given what it was. Film ends with the creature trapping a surviving couple in Central Park, their fate unknown. Actions in the whole film visually recorded on some character’s camera phone as he and his friends try to outrun the creature.

“The Cloverfield Paradox” is supposed to be a follow-up. And apparently there is a series and a fan base. (http://im.bia2moviez.com/title/tt2548396) It is mostly set on a space station whose purpose is to test some device to supply the earth with free energy (man is running out of energy supplies, war may break out). The crew tries over and over again to get the device to work. Then it works and the earth disappears and the station is in unknown space. The explanation is that man has introduced an alternate universe. Strange things begin to happen. One of the crew painlessly loses his right arm; he’s left with only a stump, which is volitional and can write messages.

MY SAY: GUNS AND HYPERBOLE

I have been around guns my entire adult life. My father, my brother and my husband- gentle, kind and peaceful gentlemen- all owned guns. I spent many evenings before a fireplace in Connecticut cleaning, oiling and polishing handguns.

Each tragedy begets screeching about guns from both sides in the debate. A dear and scholarly friend- a physician, master carpenter and conservative sent me the following note which is a fair appraisal:

“Another awful day of carnage at the hands of an unstable young man wielding an automatic rifle. I’m all for protecting the Constitution, but when the writers penned the Second Amendment, fire arms were muzzle loaders that required three stages of ramming home powder, then wadding, and then the ball. No one envisioned even an all in one bullet comprising all three that could go directly into the breach of the weapon, much less automatic rapid-firing weapons with 30 round clips. AR-15s are military weapons used for killing humans in battle.

There is no reason for such weapons to be available for purchase by consumers other than the armed forces and law enforcement. With all due respect to the rights of hunters, why should such a weapon be used for hunting? Is the hunter fearful that the deer might shoot back if the first shot misses its mark and therefore needs to get off multiple rounds quickly to be certain the animal is dispatched? Background checks on buyers are certainly necessary but do not come into play on the secondary market where people with clean records purchasing guns make a profit when re-selling to folks who might not qualify as a gun buyer.

The issue can be dealt with while preserving the Second Amendment rights as envisioned by the founding fathers. I do not hunt, but my friends that do would give up the sport if their prowess was so bad as to require an automatic, big clip weapon.” M.M.M.D.

Islamic Anti-Semitism in France: Toward Ethnic Cleansing by Guy Millière

Graffiti on Jewish-owned homes warn the owners to “flee immediately” if they want to live. Anonymous letters with live bullets are dropped into mailboxes of Jews.

Laws meant to punish anti-Semitic threats are now used to punish those who denounce the threats. A new edition of a public school history textbook for the eighth grade states that in France it is forbidden to criticize Islam.

Those French Jews who can leave the country, leave. Most departures are hasty; many Jewish families sell their homes well below the market price. Jewish districts that once were thriving are now on the verge of extinction.

“The problem is that anti-Semitism today in France comes less from the far right than from individuals of Muslim faith or culture”. — Former Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

Friday, January 12, 2018. Sarcelles. A city in the northern suburbs of Paris. A 15-year-old girl returns from high school. She wears a necklace with a star of David and a Jewish school uniform. A man attacks her with a knife, slashes her face, and runs away. She will be disfigured the rest of her life.

January 29, again in Sarcelles, an 8-year-old boy wearing a Jewish skullcap is kicked and punched by two teenagers.

What’s Oozing Out of Campuses Is Polluting Society We should be trying to understand others of all backgrounds and situations, not pushing them away. By Michael Barone

In a 1989 article in The New Republic, Andrew Sullivan made what he called “a (conservative) case for gay marriage.” Today same-sex marriage is legal everywhere in America, supported by majorities of voters and accepted as a part of American life.

Now Sullivan has cast his gaze on what he regards as a disturbing aspect of American life — the extension of speech suppression and “identity politics” from colleges and universities into the larger society. The hothouse plants of campus mores have become invasive species undermining and crowding out the beneficent flora of the larger free democratic society.

Sullivan can be seen as a kind of undercover spy on campuses, to which he is invited often to speak — because of his bona fides as a cultural reformer — by those probably ignorant of the parenthetical “conservative” in his 1989 article. As Jonathan Rauch did in his 2004 book, “Gay Marriage,” Sullivan argued that same-sex marriage, by including those previously excluded, would strengthen rather than undermine family values and bourgeois domesticity. That now seems to be happening.

The spread of campus values to the larger society would — and is intended to — have the opposite effect.

Take the proliferation of campus speech codes. Americans of a certain age have trouble believing that colleges and universities have rules banning supposedly hurtful speech. They can remember when campuses were the part of America most open to dissent. Now students are disciplined for handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution outside a tiny isolated “free speech zone.”

The Progressives’ Legacy: Debt, Deficit, and Entitlements The high cost of rejecting human nature and simple mathematics. Bruce Thornton

Last week Senator Rand Paul briefly shut the government down in protest of the $500 billion spending bill recently signed by the president. This latest binge will by 2027 increase to $800 billion the already $300 billion we currently spend on servicing the $20 trillion national debt. And that projected increase assumes interest rates at 3.5%. The debt-driving deficits are again approaching $1 trillion a year, meaning the debt will continue to expand beyond 100% of GDP, reaching $30 trillion in a decade.

But like Troy’s Cassandra, who for ten years accurately predicted the city’s destruction, Senator Paul was no more successful at alerting people to the coming calamity. Nor are any of the other fiscal hawks likely to do so either. The majority of citizens and politicians have no interest in our looming fiscal disaster, for they have become used to thinking that entitlements are “rights.”

The fiscal problem is one of simple mathematics. We spend much more than we take in from tax-paying citizens, which leads to more and more borrowing to make up the shortfall. And we have made promises to the people––Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid––that we have not funded adequately, and that now account for nearly two-thirds of the annual budget. Social Security alone has unfunded liabilities of about $34 trillion, and that’s not as bad as Medicare’s $49 trillion. Worse yet, every day 10,000 Baby Boomers retire, meaning the beneficiaries will continue to expand. And right behind the Boomers are the 66 million Millennials. We’re looking at decades and decades of relentlessly increasing expenditures and the borrowing required to pay for them.

Most of the “solutions” to this problem are preposterous, functioning mainly as a political narcotic to numb the voters’ minds. The left thinks that raising taxes on the “rich” will generate enough money to fund these programs, even though confiscating all the wealth of America’s billionaires couldn’t fund the whole government for one year. The right thinks cutting taxes will create economic growth that will generate enough funds to put us in the black. But we can’t tax or grow our way out of this problem. Half the voters don’t pay federal taxes, nor do payroll deductions cover the whole bill for the average retiree, who will take more in benefits from Social Security and Medicaid than he paid for. Economic growth indeed increases revenues, but we typically spend the extra money instead of saving it so we can pay future bills or reduce the debt.

“Terrorsploitation”? How leftist critics consistently slam the films that portray our enemies truthfully.

Scrolling the other day through Netflix’s mostly unimpressive offerings, I noticed something entitled London Has Fallen, a thriller about a terrorist attack on the British capital. I hadn’t heard of it before. I looked it up on Wikipedia. Released in early March 2016, it’s a sequel to Olympus Has Fallen (2013), which is about an assault on the White House.

The A.V. Club, according to Wikipedia, picked London Has Fallen as its “worst movie of the year.” Variety called it “terrorsploitation” and “reactionary fear-mongering.” I had the sneaking feeling that it would be just my cup of tea.

I was right. It proved to be a rousing specimen of the genre, complete with terrorists armed to the teeth (machine guns, flamethrowers, hand grenades); shootouts and car chases; helicopters dodging missiles in the sky over London; and much else. Most important, the bad guys were the people who should be the bad guys, and the good guys were the people who should be the good guys. The picture even ended with Morgan Freeman, as the vice president, saying “God bless the United States of America.”

Hokey? Okay, if you say so. But also exciting and inspiring – precisely the kind of movie it takes to focus alpha males on the threat that jihadist Islam represents to all that they hold dear. Seen through a cynical postmodern lens, Mrs. Miniver was hokey, too. But it also, as Churchill noted, turned millions of Americans into fervent supporters of the British war effort.

Lying About Gun Violence With Statistics Fake numbers for fake news. Daniel Greenfield

Every time a Muslim terrorist shoots, stabs, bombs or runs over Americans, the default response is, “Let’s not jump to any conclusions”. That’s swiftly followed by media spin pieces claiming that the majority of terrorist attacks are really committed by white male Republicans and the Amish based on math so bad that even the world’s crookedest bookie wouldn’t go near it. And anyone who argues that the pattern of Islamic terror attacks is a call for common sense migration reform is regarded as a racist and a coward who wants to destroy the Constitution by blowing a handful of attacks out of proportion.

(And do you know how many people are hit by lightning or stung by killer bees every year.)

And whenever a suburban shooting happens, especially in a school, it becomes a clarion call to dismantle the 2nd Amendment. And that’s also backed by some of the world’s worst statistics.

The worst gun violence statistics trolls work for Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety. Bloomberg had bought Gracie Mansion out of the pocket change in his sofa cushion. But buying the office of mayor of New York City was a lot easier than his plans to buy the White House. Everytown was supposed to be a match for the NRA. But while the NRA represents gun owners, Everytown represents a lefty billionaire. And Bloomberg’s gun control trolls spent years dressing in drag to hide that simple fact.

There was Mayors Against Illegal Guns, but the group quickly began falling apart. Some members had to leave when they were caught misusing guns. Like Mayor James Schiliro who was arrested for waving guns around and demanding sexual favors from a young man. Then there was Ma Bloomberg’s Moms Demand Action. None of it worked. And Everytown for Gun Safety isn’t working either.

What does a fake group like Everytown do? It spreads fake statistics.

Everytown jumped on the Parkland, Florida school shooting to claim that there were “18 shootings at schools in the first 45 days of 2018.” If that sounds like a lot, you’re right.

But Everytown was being literally true, and false in every other way. There were 18 shootings at schools: counting suicides, accidental firearms discharges and shootings in the general vicinity of a school even when the building is completely empty. In around half of the shootings, no one was injured.