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December 2019

The Secrets of Jewish Genius It’s not about having higher I.Q.s. Bret Stephens *****

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/jewish-culture-genius-iq.html

An eminent Lithuanian rabbi is annoyed that his yeshiva students devote their lunch breaks to playing soccer instead of discussing Torah. The students, intent on convincing their rav of the game’s beauty, invite him to watch a professional match. At halftime, they ask what he thinks.

“I have solved your problem,” the rabbi says.

“How?”

“Give one ball to each side, and they will have nothing to fight over.”

I have this (apocryphal) anecdote from Norman Lebrecht’s new book, “Genius & Anxiety,” an erudite and delightful study of the intellectual achievements and nerve-wracked lives of Jewish thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs between 1847 and 1947. Sarah Bernhardt and Franz Kafka; Albert Einstein and Rosalind Franklin; Benjamin Disraeli and (sigh) Karl Marx — how is it that a people who never amounted even to one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population contributed so seminally to so many of its most pathbreaking ideas and innovations?

The common answer is that Jews are, or tend to be, smart. When it comes to Ashkenazi Jews, it’s true. “Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average I.Q. of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data,” noted one 2005 paper. “During the 20th century, they made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions.”

But the “Jews are smart” explanation obscures more than it illuminates. Aside from the perennial nature-or-nurture question of why so many Ashkenazi Jews have higher I.Q.s, there is the more difficult question of why that intelligence was so often matched by such bracing originality and high-minded purpose. One can apply a prodigious intellect in the service of prosaic things — formulating a war plan, for instance, or constructing a ship. One can also apply brilliance in the service of a mistake or a crime, like managing a planned economy or robbing a bank.

But as the story of the Lithuanian rabbi suggests, Jewish genius operates differently. It is prone to question the premise and rethink the concept; to ask why (or why not?) as often as how; to see the absurd in the mundane and the sublime in the absurd. Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different.

Where do these habits of mind come from?

The liberal media’s sordid history of Russia-Ukraine fake news Slanted reporting involving Russia and Ukraine has a long pedigree By Robert Knight

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/27/the-liberal-medias-sordid-history-of-russia-ukrain/

It’s not been a good year for major media.

First, they were caught red-handed as shills for the fake Russian collusion narrative that convulsed the nation for nearly three years.

Then, they were exposed as barkers for the fake Ukraine scandal while the real thing — Joe Biden’s pay-for-play scheme and $1 billion “quid pro quo” while he was President Obama’s vice president — still goes largely unexamined.

Truth be told, this kind of slanted reporting involving Russia and Ukraine has a long pedigree.

In 1932, The New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief, Walter Duranty, won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Joseph Stalin’s USSR. Duranty lied repeatedly, issuing reports that all was well, even as Stalin was killing millions, mostly in Ukraine, by starvation and executions.

“There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be,” Duranty wrote for The Times in November 1931. “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” he wrote in August 1933.

More revealingly, he wrote, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” in May 1933. These and more damning excerpts were reported by the Columbia Beacon, a student paper that has called on Columbia University’s Pulitzer Committee to revoke Duranty’s prize.

The Populist Decade by Matthew Continetti

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-populist-decade/

History doesn’t follow a schedule. The events that define an era often happen before or after the onset of a new decade. It’s been said that the Sixties didn’t begin on January 1, 1960, but on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. They didn’t end on January 1, 1970, but on August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned as president.

Keep this in mind as you look at retrospectives of the 2010s. The calendar decade may be drawing to a close, but the tendencies, ideas, movements, sentiments, and personalities associated with the past 10 years may not be quite ready to leave the stage. The underlying causes of national populism have not disappeared. Our times continue to be shaped by immigration, terrorism, and the cultural distance between voters without college degrees and the credentialed elites who govern them. It would be a mistake to follow the advice of the Bloomberg editor who wrote in a recent headline, “Populism Will Probably Just Go Away Soon, So Relax.” On the contrary: The populist epoch may be only beginning.

To say that the ’10s began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, doesn’t tell the whole story. The first shoots of national populism were visible by the time of the Wall Street panic. In 2005, the Dutch and French both voted against a proposed European Constitution in an expression of discontent with the EU. In 2006, massive rallies of immigrants to the United States, some waving the flags of their countries of origin, sparked a backlash against proposed immigration reform. That was also the year that Congress, against the wishes of the Bush administration, blocked a proposal to transfer management of six American ports to a company in Dubai. And on August 29, 2008, John McCain announced that Sarah Palin would be his running mate.

Mayor Pete Wants to Decriminalize ‘Meth, Coke, Ecstasy,’ Not Just Pot By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/mayor-pete-wants-to-decriminalize-meth-coke-ecstasy-not-just-pot/

In an interview on Friday, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-Church of Social Justice) clarified his drug policy, calling for decriminalization of all drugs including methamphetamine, cocaine, and ecstasy.

“Incarceration should not even be a response to drug possession,” Buttigieg told editors at the Des Moines Register.

An editor pressed him, “Is that across the board? So if it’s meth or coke or ecstasy, any drugs, if it’s possession, incarceration isn’t…”

“That’s right,” Mayor Pete said.

“I would not have said even five years ago what I believe now, which is that incarceration should not even be a response to drug possession,” the candidate added. “What I’ve seen is that while there continue to be all kinds of harms associated with drug possession and use, it’s also the case that we have created—in an effort to deal with what amounts to a public health problem—we have created an even bigger problem. A justice problem and its form of a health problem.”

Rand Paul’s Case against Socialism By Phillip W. Magness

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/31/rand-pauls-case-against-socialism/

The Case against Socialism, by Rand Paul (Broadside Books, 368 pp., $28.99)

Just three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialist political activism has undergone a remarkable rehabilitation. Survey data show the label’s growing popularity among college students, while Karl Marx holds the title of the most frequently assigned author from the philosophical canon in American university classrooms. Far from bearing the stigma one might reasonably expect to accompany a movement that killed 100 million people in the 20th century, socialist ideology retains a position of high esteem in elite academic, journalistic, and intellectual circles.

One recurring source of the problem is the intentional cultivation of a definitional fluidity that operates at the convenience of socialism’s adherents. Modern politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez euphemize the term by prefixing it with the label “democratic” (it strains credulity to imagine that fascism, for example, would ever be afforded similar leeway in rebranding itself). Meanwhile, failing socialist experiments such as the Maduro regime in Venezuela — extolled among leftist intellectuals as a modern socialist success story only a few years ago — are brushed aside with the familiar refrain that they never achieved “real socialism.” The practical result of these ubiquitous word games is a political climate in which socialists never quite reckon with their own track record.

Welcome to the Socialist Dominion of Canada Leon Kushner

https://leonupsidedown.blogspot.com/
Here is some news that none of the mainstream media (MSM) feels worthy of news coverage but I certainly feel that it does. Let me know after you read this if you agree or not.

While our national state sponsored broadcaster in Canada, the left winged CBC, has decided that it was of the utmost importance to cut a 10 second cameo appearance of President Trump out of the movie Home Alone 2 (yes folks, that’s why we pay them the big bucks), they failed to report on a high school in Nova Scotia that has for a long time now, posted pictures of some of their heroes (certainly not mine and hopefully not yours): Karl Marx and Che Guevara! 

Thanks to my colleague Jeremy Valentine, who lives out east, we are all now privy to what passes as history in our Canadian schools where opinion replaces fact and feelings trump everything. 

Despite Jeremy’s numerous attempts to notify the school, the department of education and the mayor of the city of Truro where this school (Cobequid Educational Center) is located, of this terrible ‘mistake’, he’s received no replies to my knowledge.  Worse still, the pictures remain prominently displayed so that children can be brainwashed to think that these men are heroes. I urge you all to contact the school (notice I embedded the link to it above) and let them know what you think of this dreadful practice. 

Trump Exposes Nancy Pelosi and Son Paul’s Shady Dealings in Ukraine Jim Hoft

www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/12/wow-crazy-nancy-whats-going-on-boom-trump-exposes-nancy-pelosi-and-son-pauls-shady-dealings-in-ukraine/

“Wow, Crazy Nancy What’s Going On?” – BOOM! 

CLICK HERE TO VIEW VIDEO

[Pay attention to 1:13 on the video, as it has been removed from social media.]

Trump linked to an OAN video of Paul Pelosi’s shady deal with Ukrainian energy companies.

As The Gateway Pundit reported back in November Quid-Pro-Joe and his son Hunter are not the only Democrat family members cashing in on their prominent positions.

Like many Democrats Paul Pelosi Jr. has made a career off of his mother’s political stature. Shortly after his mother became the first woman speaker, Paul Pelosi Jr., was hired by InfoUSA for $180,000 a year as its vice president for Strategic Planning.

Nancy Pelosi’s son Paul is also on the board of an energy company.
Paul Pelosi Jr. also traveled to Ukraine for his work.

AND — Better Yet — Speaker Nancy Pelosi even appears in the company’s video ad!

According to Patrick Howley at National File Speaker Pelosi’s son Paul Jr. was an executive at Viscoil.

And in 2014 one of Paul Jr.’s businesses he co-founded was charged with securities fraud.

As President Trump said, maybe somebody should look into this – huh, Nancy?

AT THE NATIONAL REVIEW AL SHARPTON MAKES THE BEST CASE

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/al-sharpton-warns-democrats-over-impeachment-focus-deal-with-kitchen-table-issues/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third
Al Sharpton Warns Democrats over Impeachment Focus: ‘Deal with Kitchen-Table Issues’By Tobias Hoonhout

Sharpton warned that a hyper-focused Democratic effort to impeach Trump could distract from a vision of “how we move forward.”

KEVIN WILLIAMSON….AN INVETERATE NEVER TRUMPER

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-presidency-democrats-squander-case-against-him/
Trump Isn’t a Nazi. He’s a Failure. By Kevin D. Williamson

But Democrats can’t capitalize on the president’s broken promises.

Why doesn’t Williamson leave the N.R. again? rsk

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-debate-president-meets-four-tests-for-impeachment/?
Trump Meets the Four Tests for Impeachment By Ramesh Ponnuru

He is unwilling to distinguish between the common good that government is supposed to serve and his own narrow interests.

Does anyone with a pulse care what Ponnuru thinks about anything? rsk

Germany: A “Latent Sense of Insecurity” by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15041/germany-insecurity

Fifty-seven percent of Germans say that “increasingly being told what to say and how to behave” is getting on their nerves. — Survey on self-censorship in Germany, (conducted by Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), May 2019.

“We have seen the consequences of this decision [unrestricted migration] in terms of German public opinion and internal security – we experience problems every day. We have criminals, terrorist suspects and people who use multiple identities… While things are tighter today, we still have 300,000 people in Germany of whose identities we cannot be sure. That’s a massive security risk.” — August Hanning, former president of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service.

“Evidently, many people nowadays view Islam more as a political ideology and less as a religion and therefore not deserving of religious tolerance.” — Yasemin El-Menouar, Bertelsmann Stiftung’s expert on religion, July 19, 2019.

“At least since the events at the Cologne cathedral square on New Year’s Eve in 2015 people apparently feel more and more unsafe,” said Oliver Malchow, the chairman of one of Germany’s two largest police unions. He was referring to the mass sexual assaults committed mainly by Arab and North African men at the Cologne cathedral square on New Year’s Eve more than four years ago. Malchow was also referring to new statistics, which show that approximately 640,000 Germans now have licenses for gas pistols — a large increase since 2014, when around 260,000 people had such a license. A gas pistol fires loud blanks or tear gas cartridges and is only potentially lethal at extremely close range.

The new statistics, according to Malchow, showed a “latent sense of insecurity” in the population. The number of real firearms owned privately also reportedly increased in 2018 — by 27,000 over the previous year. In Germany now, 5.4 million firearms are privately owned, most of them rifles.

A recent annual poll, conducted in September, confirms Malchow’s estimate: Every year since 1992, R+V, Germany’s largest insurance firm, has been asking Germans what they fear most. “This year, for the first time,” according to a report in Deutsche Welle, “a majority said they were most afraid that the country would be unable to deal with the aftermath of the migrant influx of 2015”. Fifty-six percent of those polled said they were scared that the country would not be able to deal with the number of migrants. This September marked exactly four years since Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders and allowed in almost a million migrants. However, Ulrich Wagner, professor of social psychology at the University of Marburg told Deutsche Welle:

“It’s really got more to do with the fact that politicians and media discuss this issue a great deal — which triggers fear… For example, in the latest study, fear of terrorism has clearly gone down. We simply don’t discuss this issue as much as we used to, and that means that people feel safer.”

What the professor appears to imply is that you can solve a crucial societal issue, not by debating its ramifications and publicly seeking to find solutions to it, but by not talking about it, thereby lulling the public into a false sense of security by pretending that the problem does not exist.

Libya’s Political Instability Makes Room for ISIS to Regroup by Ahmed Charai

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15348/libya-instability-turkey

Turkey, which signed a military and economic accord with the Libyan government in November, could deprive Greece and the Greek Cypriots of large swaths of their oil and gas exploration areas and force Egypt and Israel to negotiate with Turkey over the construction of natural gas pipelines to Europe.

The threat posed by extremists in Libya and Tunisia is not one that Europeans can ignore, as evidenced by the attack on British tourists in Sousse and the more recent attack by Tunisian Anis Amri in Berlin.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan opened the way on December 26 for direct military intervention in Libya: he announced a parliamentary vote in early January on sending troops to support the UN-backed Tripoli government against General Khalifa Haftar. Instructors, equipment and Turkish special forces are already operating in Libya alongside pro-government militias. Erdogan said that Turkey would also be willing to send aerial and naval assistance if circumstances require it.

Sending Turkish troops will complicate the situation in an already fragile country, torn by internal dissent since the ouster and killing of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The map of foreign intervention in Libya is important: In the east of the country, forces from Saudi Arabia and Egypt support Gen. Haftar, the separatist who heads the Libyan National Army — not the country’s national army. Arrayed against them are Turkey and Qatar, supporting the recognized government headed by Fayez al-Sarraj, but his government is not supported by the legislature. Then there is Russia. It has dispatched militia forces known as the Wagner Group, which have already carried out operations in Syria, are also operating in several African countries — supporting and assisting Haftar’s forces. France has joined the group of countries that support the rebel general, while Italy backs Sarraj’s recognized government.