Displaying posts published in

September 2019

Poor, Ignorant, Exploited Scoldilocks Michael Galak

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/09/poor-ignorant-exploited-scoldilocks/

It might come as a surprise to some, but Greta Thunberg isn’t the first teenager whose innocence has been tapped to wrap the Left’s agenda in persuasive emotionalism. Few these days recall Samantha Smith, the Maine 10-year-old who wrote in 1983 to USSR supremo Yuri Andropov to plead for world peace and nuke-free happiness. This happened when the Left was telling all and sundry that Ronald Reagan was intent on pushing the button and plunging the world into nuclear winter. Invited to visit Moscow, she was feted with fawning TV interviews, radio broadcasts, newspaper coverage and a trip to the Young Pioneers in Crimea, the best children’s resort in what was then the USSR.

The photogenic youngster was further hailed by international audiences, the meme being that the Soviets should resist responding in kind to the warmonger in the White House. She certainly proved useful to the Kremlin’s masters, this eager innocent advancing the notion, contrary to reality, of the USSR’s pacific nature. All this took place while Soviet troops were despoiling Afghanistan with their customary brutality.

The parallels between Samantha  and Greta are many. Both spoke about the fear and anxiety experienced by young people in the face of looming doom. Both were bathed in the sort of extraordinary, unqualified publicity that amounted to something close to beatification. Both found their fame granted unprecedented access to the rich and powerful. Both insisted that politicians were knowingly sowing the seeds of catastrophe. Both were cute and photogenic, endearing in their vulnerability and eagerness. Both sought to provoke deep-seated feelings of guilt in adults. And both were cynically manipulated by people hostile to the West’s liberal-democratic societies and their fellow travellers.

However, there are differences as well. Samantha was all sweetness and light. Speaking about the possibility of a nuclear war, she stressed a shared humanity rather than differences between potential combatants.

Youth and Ignorance A self-described transgender prof stands against brainwashed, narcissistic students. Walter Williams

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/youth-and-ignorance-walter-williams/

Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where she has been a faculty member since 1984. Paglia describes herself as transgender, but unlike so many other transgender people, she is pro-capitalism and hostile to those who’d restrict free speech. She’s a libertarian. As to modern ideas that include “gender-inclusive pronouns” such as zie, sie and zim, Paglia says it is lunacy. In a 2017 interview, Paglia was especially irritated by the thought police running college campuses today. In defending University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson, who has become a pariah for his refusal to cave in to nonsensical gender-inclusive pronouns, Paglia said that the English language was created by great artists such as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Joyce. She added: “How dare you, you sniveling little maniac, tell us how we’re gonna use pronouns! Go take a hike.”

On feminism, Paglia criticizes what she calls the “antisex and repressively doctrinaire side of feminism.” She calls it “victim feminism” and complains that “everything we’d won in the 1990s has been totally swept away. Now we have this endless privileging of victimhood, with a pathological vulnerability seen as the default human mode.” Everyone must yield to it “in the workplace, in universities, in the demand for safe spaces.” Paglia adds, “What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life.”

Paglia’s bold statements got her in a bit of hot water last April. University of the Arts students demanded that she be fired over public comments she’d made that were not wholly sympathetic to the #MeToo movement, as well as for an interview with the Weekly Standard that they called “transphobic.”

CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/09/developing-author-peter-schweizer-we-are-releasing-documents-today-related-to-hunter-bidens-1-5-billion-china-scandal-video/

Developing: Author Peter Schweizer: We Are Releasing Documents Today Related to Hunter Biden’s $1.5 Billion China Scandal (VIDEO)

Jim Hoft, TheGatewayPundit.com

www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/the_cynical_plot_behind_global_warming_hysteria.html

The Cynical Plot Behind Global Warming Hysteria

John Eidson, AmericanThinker.com/articles

How do you take over the world?  You find a way to terrify the world’s children to believe they will die if they don’t listen to you.

In what amounts to nothing less than intentional child abuse, the Left has sought since the 1980s to terrify the world’s children about global warming.  This cabal of socialist elites have preyed, like hyenas, upon the fragile emotions of easily-frightened — and easily-indoctrinated — young people, the most famous being Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg, who was severely traumatized when she was a little girl by climate hysteria.  And she is still deeply traumatized, as evidenced by the pained look on her face at her emotional speech at the UN.

Impeachment Madness and the Twisted World of NeverTrump Rage against a president who was just doing his job. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/there-you-go-again-nevertrumpers-bruce-thornton/

The latest in a series of “scandals” that supposedly will finally banish President Trump from the White House has provoked the latest in a series of outbursts from NeverTrump obsessives. Allegations that the president, during a phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, abused his power, violated campaign finance laws, or sullied an upcoming American election by inviting foreign interference, precipitated the latest dudgeon-fest. No one seemed to care that the release of the conversation’s transcript, and the exculpatory protestations of Ukraine’s president have already deflated the “scandal” like a stomped soufflé.

We still have to hear homilies from the Church of NeverTrump, once again trying to turn the president’s blunt, take-no-prisoners, what-you-see-is-what-you-get style into a Constitutional crisis. In fact, Trump was elected because enough voters rejected the vision of politics as the purview of technocratic elites who define “democratic norms,” “presidential decorum,” and “political normality” in terms that happen to suit their tastes, interests, and prejudices.

For them, Trump’s discussion with Zelensky with its alleged implied quid-pro-quo was outrageously out of bounds and unprecedented. So let’s see, the Constitution gives the president wide authority to conduct foreign policy, including interactions with other heads of state. It does not specify by what rules of manners and diplomacy he do so. His only job is to see to the national interests and security of the United States, using whatever tools––except for undeclared war––he finds will achieve those aims.

Do They Mean It This Time? By John Hirschauer

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/do-they-mean-it-this-time/

The Democrats have been desperately searching for a pretext for impeachment that won’t get them laughed out of Washington. Is the latest scandal it?

I  don’t envy Nancy Pelosi.

The base of her party has been apoplectic for the better part of three years. Not without help — from the moment that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, elected Democrats have carefully built up a sense of panic and scandal around the Trump administration, a sense that, in fairness, has been unwittingly and clumsily abetted by the behavior of the president and his aides. Escalated by the breathless outrage of the media, a shroud of illegitimacy has enveloped the Trump White House from Day 1, and this shroud has, in turn, allowed the base of the Democratic party to avoid facing democracy’s colder realities, such as: Sometimes you lose. And it’s not necessarily anyone’s fault — not Russia, not racism, not rednecks — but your own.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t try to pretend otherwise.

First came efforts to undo the Trump presidency via the Electoral College by flipping enough electors to reverse the result (watching progressives, I must add, make use of the electoral college’s anti-democratic features was quite a sight to behold). After that failed, a California Democrat launched an “Impeach Trump Leadership” PAC, meant to coopt the impeachment pretexts du jour — emoluments-clause violations, speculative mental ailments, Representative Al Green’s impassioned say-so — and give each of them something like professional sanction. Then, of course, came the Russia probe, with all its unseemly partisan pomp: the trivial “bombshells,” the seething media firestorm, the discursive public hearings, the televised predawn arrest of Roger Stone (helicopters in the air!), and the theatrical build-up and relative inconsequence of the Mueller Report.

Hunter Biden: The Most Comprehensive Timeline By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/hunter-biden-comprehensive-timeline/

From being appointed senior MBNA vice president (two years out of law school), to a gift of a 2.8-carat diamond from a Chinese energy tycoon, to Burisma Holdings . . .

Late Summer 2006: Hunter Biden and his uncle, James Biden, purchase the hedge fund Paradigm Global Advisors. According to an unnamed executive quoted in Politico in August, James Biden declared to employees on his first day, “Don’t worry about investors. We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” At this time, Joe Biden is months away from becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and launching his second bid for president.

The unnamed executive who spoke to Politico charged that the purchase of the fund was designed to work around campaign-finance laws:

According to the executive, James Biden made it clear that he viewed the fund as a way to take money from rich foreigners who could not legally give money to his older brother or his campaign account. “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying.

Both James and Hunter Biden have denied to Politico that James had ever made these comments.

Up until that time, Hunter Biden had been employed as a consultant to the Delaware bank MBNA, with a $100,000-a-year retainer, according to the New York Times. The bank hired him fresh out of law school and in less than two years promoted him to senior vice president. Biden also separately worked as a lobbyist until 2008, founding the firm Oldaker Biden & Belair, where he represented mostly universities and hospitals but also drug companies such as Achaogen Inc. and Pulmatrix Inc., and the music-sharing company Napster and online gambling sites.

John Durham’s Ukrainian Leads What the prosecutor has found may be quite different from what the Democrats are looking for. By Michael B. Mukasey

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-durhams-ukrainian-leads-11569786611

Americans often boast that we are a nation of laws, but for the moment laws appear to play a decidedly secondary role in the drama we are living in and—hopefully—through.

We have some guidance from our foundational law, the Constitution, which tells us how to proceed: the House of Representatives has “the sole power of impeachment,” the Senate has “the sole power to try all impeachments,” and must do so “on oath or affirmation.” The Senate cannot convict “without the concurrence of two-thirds of the members present.” And “when the president of the United States is tried, the chief justice shall preside.”

It looks almost like a real trial. Yet despite the legal trappings, the underlying standard, if applied to a criminal statute, would be vulnerable to attack as void for vagueness: “The president . . . shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Treason and bribery have specific and recognized meanings, but what about “other high crimes and misdemeanors”?

In Federalist No. 66, Alexander Hamilton defended the Senate as the tribunal for trying impeachments in part by saying that impeachable offenses come from “the abuse or violation of some public trust” and “are of a nature which may . . . be denominated political.”

“Impeachment, Instead of Debate Over Capitalism and Sovereignty” Sydney Williams

In the case of the President Trump and impeachment, a verdict has been rendered without a trial. A visceral hatred for Mr. Trump, an outsider who campaigned on cleaning the swamp that was (and is) Washington, D.C., is all that Democrats need as prima facie evidence.

 

Outside this maelstrom of malice, the West faces stark alternatives. But instead of debating issues that will affect us, our children and grandchildren, specifically capitalism and sovereignty, politicians have chosen to throw up red herrings, like climate change, white supremacy, equality, gender identity, immigration, etc. Progressives have tried to undo the will of the people, i.e. to deny Brexit to the people of the UK and to declare fraudulent an election in the U.S. Debate is impossible when personal, venal hatred replaces deliberative and respectful disagreement. An intentional consequence has been unprecedented scrutiny of Mr. Trump and his appointees. With individuals vilified and high legal expenses incurred, lives have been destroyed for some and bankrupted for others. Is it any wonder so many have left the Administration?

This is not meant to trivialize these other issues. The constant effect of an ever-changing climate is something we must monitor and do what we can to alter and/or adapt, but we shouldn’t let emotions substitute for reason, or use children to score political points. No real conservative denies the existence of white oppression and privilege, but we question its ubiquity. Where it exists, it must be confronted and addressed. Equality is tricky and subject to interpretation – are we referring to equality of opportunities or equality of outcomes? Conservatives believe in the former, while progressives desire the latter. Conservatives are mindful that the favored should bear some responsibility for those less fortunate, but they believe that concern should be manifested in the actions of individuals, not diktats of the state, for morality and compassion are characteristics of people, not bureaucracies. Al genders deserve respect. As for immigration, politicians believe this crisis unresolved is better than were it resolved.

HOLIDAY BREAK FOR JEWISH NEW YEAR

Posting will resume tomorrow.

No, the President of Poland Didn’t Say That Jews Cause Anti-Semitism By David P. Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/no-the-president-of-poland-didnt-say-that-jews-cause-anti-semitism/

In late June of 1941, my father’s first cousins Moshe and Dvora fled their house in the tiny town of Kameny Most, about halfway between Slonim and Baranavichy in what is now Belarus. Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa days before, and their home stood almost on the German-Soviet line that had divided Poland in 1939. Now the Germans had marched into town. The boy and girl, then 15 and 16, reached the woods behind their house before the Germans arrived. Their parents and baby brother fled a minute later, but the Germans already were there. They couldn’t reach the woods and hid in the tall grass. A Polish neighbor pointed them out to the Germans, who shot them on the spot. Moshe and Dvora joined the partisan brigade led by the Bielski brothers, made famous in the film Defiance. Not long afterwards they returned at night, barricaded the neighbor in his house, set it afire and burned him alive. By the grace of God the teenagers survived the war and came to the new State of Israel and started large and flourishing families. I had the merit to arrive at Dvora’s deathbed in 2004 just in time to receive her blessing upon the American branch of her family.

I tell this story to make it clear that my family isn’t soft on Polish anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism is a matter of the most profound importance, and Polish anti-Semitism is something I take personally. That is why it is especially irresponsible to accuse Poles of anti-Semitism falsely, as the Jewish Insider website yesterday accused Polish President Andrzej Duda. According to the website, President Duda told a group of Jewish community leaders assembled at the Polish Consulate in New York that hostile remarks by an Israeli cabinet minister about Polish anti-Semitism “were a ‘humiliation’ and were the reason for an increase in antisemitic attacks against Jews in Poland.” It is wrong to cry wolf under any circumstances, and reckless to cry wolf where real wolves might turn up.

President Duda never said it. I know he never said it because I was at the meeting.