Displaying posts published in

April 2019

The West and Middle East Dictators Sudan and Algeria topple despots, but experience teaches us not to expect much. By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-west-and-middle-east-dictators-11555368174

Another spring, another set of political crises in the Arab world. This time autocratic rulers, long past their “sell by” dates, have fallen in Algeria and Sudan. In both countries, factionalized ruling elites, insulated for decades from political pressures other than backstairs intrigue, now scramble to satisfy angry throngs of protesters without any idea how this can be done.

We can recite the mantras of development theory and democracy promotion: Economic reform and political opening are what the region needs. Such platitudes are as useless as they are true. An inexorable buildup of economic and social pressure, like an upwelling of molten rock from beneath the Earth’s crust, threatens to engulf the dysfunctional postcolonial social orders in states from Pakistan to North Africa, and nobody, in the region or in the West, has the slightest idea what to do about it.

Activists Must Stop Harassing Scientists written by Peggy Sastre

https://quillette.com/2019/04/01/activists-must-stop

Is this the end of the era of factual, scientific inquiry? In today’s labs, the line between affirmative action and ideological harassment is vanishingly thin. But prioritising scientists who have the correct opinions and tick the right identity boxes rather than because of the quality of their research can lead to real persecution.

“At the moment I prefer to stay anonymous,” explains an astrophysicist. “I am not proud of this, but I have to eat, and I am also responsible for the research opportunities of my students and my postdocs.” He hadn’t killed anyone. Rather, he had just chosen to move from Australia, the country where he earned his degrees and spent most of his career, to China. Why? Because, as a researcher, he has more freedom in China. As unbelievable as this may sound, it’s true. Indeed, for more and more scientists, the pressures in universities and other research institutions to be “politically correct” (for lack of a better term) are so great that going into exile in a non-democratic country, where dissidents disappear and religious minorities are sent to re-education camps, has become a stopgap solution for those who want to be left alone to pursue their research interests. “I left Australia because I am fed up with seeing job and grant opportunities dwindle for real astronomers,” he says.

Today, everyone, or almost everyone, agrees: harassment is a scourge to be fought, whether it’s sexual harassment or discrimination based on race or gender. But the consensus is much weaker when the persecuted—to the point of losing their desire to work or live in the West—are scientists who have been ostracized for “incorrect thinking,” regardless of the integrity, seriousness, or quality of their work.

Breathless Reports About ‘Hate Groups’ Aim To Panic Americans Into Speech Controls The questionably sourced report was no doubt a clear enough justification for many people to continue culling speech freedoms online.By Brad Betters

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/15/breathless-reports-hate-groups-aim-panic-americans-speech-controls/

A cluster of events this past week marked a steepening in the upwards trend toward online censorship.

In a New York Times and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report about online extremism, authors claimed the social media sphere enabled a “global network of white extremists” to develop and that this has led to a “surge of white supremacist and xenophobic terrorism in the West.” Although grasping in its conclusions and broadly flawed, the report was no doubt a clear enough justification for many to continue culling speech freedoms online.

In a near-identical report, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said certain social media platforms have become “round-the-clock digital white supremacist rallies.” They also conclude more policing from both industry and government must be done. Both reports coincided with social media executives being called to a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, where lawmakers demanded they do more to “stem white nationalist propaganda and hate speech online.”

The collective push to double down on a free-speech atmosphere already challenged post-Christchurch seems to beg the question: is it a surge in “hate” we’re witnessing, or a surge in “hate panic”?

The Feds Should Tell Every American Exactly What They’re Doing With Our Money Every Year By Kyle Sammin

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/15/feds-tell-every-american-exactly-theyre-money-every-year/

Congress should require that, within six months of Tax Day, the Internal Revenue Service must issue to all taxpayers a rundown of how much they paid, and what programs it went to fund.

Every April 15, Americans think about taxes. For something that grabs such a large part of our income, federal income taxes should be more prominent in our thoughts. Every day, every hour that you work, a piece of what you earn gets taken by the government before it even gets into your hands.

That is by design, and the withholding system not only guarantees the government the steady revenue it needs to function, but also makes sure that average taxpayers do not spend money that they will need to pay on tax day. The system is important—even necessary—to the functioning of a modern government, but it has one significant downside: people often do not realize how much they pay in taxes every year. That was shown to be especially true after the latest tax law changes: most people paid less in total taxes, but because their refunds may have decreased, they didn’t know it.

Candace Owens Has Shown Us the Way By Sebastian Gorka

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/15/candace-owens-has-shown-us-the-way/

How did this happen?

When did it become OK for one of the two major political parties in America to attack a young black woman, who works for an orthodox Jew, as a fascistic fan of Adolf Hitler after she was invited to testify before Congress?

When did it become OK for the representatives of the same party openly to label Israel, our closest friend in the Middle East, an “evil” state which has “hypnotized the West,” then libel their fellow representatives of having “dual loyalties” because they are Jewish, or to intimate that Israel simply shouldn’t exist?

And when did the all the leading names in that party’s list of candidates for president come to see it as obligatory to endorse a Green New Deal for the nation that has as its objective the outlawing of the internal combustion engine and air travel?

How Trump Masterfully Frames the Ilhan Omar Debate By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/15/how-trump-masterfully-frames-the-ilhan-omar-debate/

Donald Trump is the best thing to happen to the American Right in a good long while. The second-best thing to happen to the American Right is Ilhan Omar.

If Omar had been elected to Congress under previous Republican administrations, she would stand as yet another example of how Democrats’ hypocrisy regularly flies under the radar as it is dismissed by the mainstream media and Democratic leadership without a second thought.

But in the age of President Trump, the freshman from Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District has proven just how effective Republicans can be if they hold their rivals’ feet to the fire over their own bigotry—with the added bonus of forcing the media to talk about it.

Pelosi: AOC’s Progressive Faction Is ‘Like Five People’ By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nancy-pelosi-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-progressive-faction-like-five-people/

House speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed the progressive faction of her caucus led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “like five people.”

In a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday, Pelosi was asked whether she could unify the “self-described socialists” and the “moderates” among House Democrats.

“By and large, whatever orientation they came to Congress with, they know that we have to hold the center. That we have to go down the mainstream,” she responded.

“But it doesn’t look like that. It looks as if it’s fractured. You have these wings– AOC, and her group on one side,” interviewer Lesley Stahl continued.

“That’s like five people,” Pelosi replied.

“The progressive group is more than five,” Stahl said.

The European left’s ‘Extinction Rebellion’ is more radical than even the ‘Green New Deal’ By James Stansbury

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/the_european_lefts_extinction_rebellion_is_more_radical_than_even_the_green_new_deal.html

The Dems’ Green New Deal is simply an adaptation of the recent sustainability movement, but another movement with European origins is even more radical. Both use climate activism to disguise its core intentions of socialist indoctrination.

A review of a Finnish-to-English translation from “The Ilmastotiede blog” in “Watts Up With That?,” titled “The New Green Threat: Extinction Rebellion,” exposed the spinoff of the sustainability movement. Wikipedia describes it:

Extinction Rebellion (abbreviated as XR) is a socio-political movement intending to utilise nonviolent resistance in order to avert climate breakdown, halt biodiversity loss, and minimise the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse.

Extinction Rebellion was established in the United Kingdom in May 2018 with about one hundred academics… and launched at the end of October by Roger Hallam, Gail Bradbrook, Simon Bramwell, and other activists from the campaign group Rising Up!… The movement is unusual in that a large number of activists have pledged to be arrested and go to prison…

Participation appears confined to Western democracies (China and Russia are notably absent), and the tactics emulate hardcore leftist organizations such as Occupy. XR is much more aggressive than the Dems’ Green New Deal. Worldwide protests for climate change action are scheduled to start this week (we shall soon see if that happens). Notably, Stuart Basden, another founder, readily admits that XR is not really about climate change.

Valerie Jarrett Accused of Manipulating Book Sales to Get On NYT Bestseller List By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/trending/valerie-jarrett-accused-of-manipulating-book-sales-to-get-on-nyt-bestseller-list/

Did you know that Valerie Jarrett, the former top advisor to Barack Obama, has a new book out? Even though we’ve been bombarded with promotions and news stories about Michelle Obama’s memoir, there hasn’t been a lot of hype about the new memoir published this month by one of Obama’s closest friends and confidants, who had a tremendous impact on his administration.

The hardcover edition currently ranks at #1,346 overall on Amazon. Last year my book, The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama, reach #485 on Amazon on July 25, 2018. Guess which book ended up on the New York Times bestsellers list, and which one didn’t? That’s right, Valerie Jarrett’s book Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward, is a New York Times bestseller, and my book outperformed hers on Amazon. My book, the Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama also hit #624 on Amazon… and it never made the New York Times bestseller list.

For sure, Amazon is only one retailer, but they have a huge share of the book market, and you can get a good sense of how well a book is doing overall by looking at its Amazon rankings. In particular, Amazon is crushing the digital book market. How is the Kindle edition of Jarrett’s book doing? At the time I wrote this, it is at #11,940. How about my book? The Kindle edition of my book is currently at #10,383 on Amazon. So, the Kindle edition of my book appears to be doing better than Jarrett’s right now, too. CONTINUE AT SITE

Five Times The Obama Administration Investigated Itself By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/trending/five-times-the-obama-administration-investigated-itself/

Each time they cleared itself of any wrongdoing.

Last week, Twitter declared that their own study of tweets by Democrats and Republicans last year proved there was no anti-conservative bias on their social media platform. It was amusing to see how the folks at Twitter considered this definitive proof that they don’t hold a bias against conservatives. It reminded me of how so many times the Obama administration attempted to control the narrative of their own scandals by investigating themselves and then clearing themselves of wrongdoing, with the expectation that the matter would be settled. Here are five examples of times the Obama administration investigated itself in the hopes of burying a scandal.

5. The Senate Seat For Sale Scandal

Few people seem to remember that even before Obama took office his presidential transition was under a cloud of scandal. Just over a month before he was to take office, Obama was implicated in a scandal involving his soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich had hoped to get a Cabinet position or ambassadorship in exchange for appointing an Obama-backed individual to replace him in the Senate. Obama’s top choice had been Valerie Jarrett, and offered to appoint Jarrett “in exchange for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services in the President-elect’s cabinet,” but she eventually opted to follow Obama to the White House as his top advisor.