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Walter Starck: Knowing What You Don’t Know

Posted By on April 1st, 2018

When did we begin to accept mere opinion as unquestionable truth, with no hint of doubt or uncertainty allowed, no need for deeper knowledge, no possibility of error and no place for any change of mind? Such is the arrogance of the loudly uninformed that fervour these days overwhelms mere fact.

There are three levels of ignorance. Simple ignorance is just not knowing and knowing you don’t know. Compound ignorance is thinking you know but knowing so little you can’t recognise your own ignorance. Tertiary malignant ignorance is then not knowing, thinking you do know and that, for their own good, others should be forced to conform to what you believe.

The simple form is the most honest and least harmful. It can even be beneficial in avoiding stupid mistakes as well as prompting one to learn more. Unfortunately, in our culture it seems to be noticeably less popular than the compound and malignant varieties. In the current version of democracy, the idea of one-person one-vote appears to have become equated with the notion that all opinions are of equal value and everyone is not just entitled to an opinion, but should have one on every issue regardless of how ill-informed they may be. Indeed, it appears that the only socially acceptable consideration for a belief is for the fervour and conviction with which it is held. Conviction thus trumps reason, and certainty prevails.

In public opinion polls it is unusual for anyone to say they do not know enough about something to have an opinion, or to be uncertain, to need to know more or even to be open to better knowledge. It seems that opinions are not only necessary but must be expressed as beliefs with no hint of doubt or uncertainty, no need for better knowledge, no possibility of error and no place for any change of mind in the light of better information. When the idea of simply not knowing about something or of making a tentative assumption that may be subject to change become unthinkable, believing a half-dozen impossible things before breakfast becomes the norm.

With such a dynamic prevailing in the public sphere, the future of our current form of democracy looks dubious. This problem is now manifest across a growing number of complex and uncertain issues of critical importance. These include mass immigration from failed societies, premature adoption of technically and economically unviable energy systems, an ongoing unchecked proliferation of government that is stifling essential productive activity, plus ever-increasing commitments for health, education, welfare and defence spending which are simply impossible to sustain. Another major and pervasive problem would also have to be the whole obscene morass of taxation that is now beyond any possibility of effective reform and desperately requires a fundamental rethink.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MICHAEL FINCH: EASTER THOUGHTS AND OF FREEDOM DYING

Posted By on April 1st, 2018

It is Easter weekend and my mind wanders, my thoughts are sad and full of fear for what is overtaking us. Yes, His rising fills me great wonder, gives me reassurance as to what lies ahead. But in this world, the Left marches, ever marches on, every day freedom erodes, the insidious march and relentless, doggedness of their pursuit to destroy America’s liberty, to bind us, reeducate us, to mold a new man in a Utopian vision. For they are God, they are creating a heaven on earth and we are nothing, worse than nothing, an obstacle in their long progressive drive. We stand in their way, they of the angels, we block them; therefore we must be destroyed. Liberty, the very thought of liberty must die.

So, my mind takes me, takes me into the Plains, north of the Platte, crossing the Missouri, fast as the winds could take me, past, into the way back, rushed and with fear at my heels, I pushed forward into hills of time, given over to time, before, long before this time of tragedy. Into the Dakotas and badlands, wheat high, winds strong and true, the breath of free men and liberty still blow through our bodies strong.

Liberty trampled, burned, destroyed and for what? This God’s graceful land, bequeathed by Founders of a vision unseen, unheard, unknown from all time and history. But now being shattered, transformed for a Utopian dream of hell, an equality of man’s God, a rejection of Him, a tyranny built on jealousy, envy and hatred, from the devil himself. How man, so easily fooled and sold into slavery of shattered illusions of self-righteousness and the striving to be their own God, to make heaven here, to want to mold men to break and destroy them.

All for want of peace, justice, equality and security, we so easily pursue a false God. We pursue our own God, to remake us as the Creator and Judge, to rule over all, to destroy all that is good, just and true and free. The enemy of the Illusionary is the free; their enemy is the very essence of liberty. The free must be destroyed, by the millions they have fallen, and how many more? I fear for all of us, the how many more that will suffer from their progressive crusade.

We have paved the way for tyranny, every day, every minute gone, we drift away from that dream, that dream of our Founders and of that timeless dream of a free man and his faith, his liberty to live and think and be as God made him.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bombshell criticism of FBI as jury foreman in the Noor Salman Pulse nightclub trial speaks out By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on April 1st, 2018

The jury that acquitted Noor Salman of aiding and abetting her husband’s slaughter at the Pulse nightclub believed she was aware of what her husband was planning, but based on the detailed jury instructions and the nature of the evidence they were presented, they had no choice but to deliver a “not guilty” verdict. We know this now because the Orlando Sentinel received a statement from the foreman, which is presented in its entirety below. What leaped out at me was a single sentence criticizing the FBI, that comes 294 words into the statement.

I wish that the FBI had recorded their interviews with Ms. Salman as there were several significant inconsistencies with the written summaries of her statements.

Many readers may recall from the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email scandal that no recordings were made of the FBI’s interview with her (or with any other witnesses, for that matter). This is because the only record of subject interviews that the FBI makes is Form 302s, notes prepared by an agent.

Readers may also recall that according to two investigative reporters, Sara Carter and Mike Cernovich, fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe has been accused of asking FBI agents to alter 302 reports. It is not clear if this accusation was part of the inspector general’s report that led to McCabe’s firing, nor is it clear that it actually happened.

What matters to me is the ridiculous policy of not recording the actual interviews, and instead relying on the integrity, skill, and diligence of FBI agents in faithfully recording everything of any relevance that took place during an interview. Sometimes, the pacing and tone of voice of a subject may have great relevance, for example, and written notes cannot possibly fully reflect the reality of the situation.

Relying on Form 302s made sense only in the era when recording an interview was impossible or difficult owing to technology limits. But now that a pocket cell phone can record interviews almost effortlessly, there is no justification of ceding to the FBI the task of writing up what an agent thinks (or wishes) was said.

Civil libertarian icon Harvey Silverglate is scathing about this practice:

Instead of electronically recording its interviews and interrogations, the FBI’s policy is to rely on agents’ typewritten “section 302 reports,” crafted to reflect the supposed substance of the exchange. At such sessions, one agent takes notes by hand while the second agent – in the traditional two-agent FBI interviewing team – conducts the interview/interrogation. Tape recordings are almost never done because such recordation is – believe it or not – against formal written FBI policy. Therefore, the 302 report becomes the sole arbiter of what was, and was not, said; moreover, as we will see below, any interviewee who contests its accuracy risks prosecution. Hence, a potential witness’ script is written – and not necessarily by the witness himself – the moment he opens his mouth in the presence of an agent.

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The New York Times’ Dangerous Missile Defense Delusion By Andrew Harrod

Posted By on April 1st, 2018

“Missile defense needs to be part of the United States’ strategy” against North Korean nuclear threats, conceded even a February 11 New York Times editorial in an incoherent anti-missile defense rant. Yet the Times still derided vital missile defense efforts like Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD), a continuation of the leftist Gray Lady’s longstanding dangerous folly of opposition to protecting America’s homeland from nuclear attack.

The Times probably would have preferred that President Donald Trump had kept his initial Fiscal Year 2018 budget request with the missile defense spending levels of his predecessor, Barack Obama. However, growing North Korean nuclear threats prompted Trump and legislators to add $368 million to missile defense, reflecting a growing missile defense commitment noted on March 7 before Congress by undersecretary of defense John C. Rood. The Alaska- and California-based GMD is central to these missile defense efforts. As the Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) notes, GMD “is currently the only U.S. missile defense system devoted to defending the U.S. homeland from long-range ballistic missile attacks.”

Nonetheless, the Times simply repeated decades-old sophistries about missile defense’s futility, something that “will never provide a foolproof, comprehensive shield against a nuclear adversary.” “After more than 30 years of research and more than $200 billion, the nation’s ballistic missile defense program remains riddled with flaws, even as the threat from North Korean missiles escalates,” the Times wrote. The Times cited a 2016 Pentagon report that supposedly “faulted” missile defenses (it actually describes GMD’s “limited capability to defend the U.S. Homeland”).

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Jews Are Being Murdered in Paris. Again.By Bari Weiss

Posted By on April 1st, 2018

It’s no rare thing for the Israeli prime minister to enrage the Jews of the diaspora. But three years ago, Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech that won him near-universal condemnation.

In the aftermath of several deadly attacks in European cities like Paris and Copenhagen, Mr. Netanyahu called on Jews to leave Europe. “Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country. But we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home,” he said, echoing comments he had made more subtly the month before at Paris’s Grand Synagogue.

Mr. Netanyahu’s suggestion of “mass immigration” was “unacceptable,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the head of the European Jewish Association. Abraham Foxman, then head of the Anti-Defamation League, suggested such a policy would “grant Hitler a posthumous victory.” Denmark’s chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, said he was “disappointed.” Smadar Bar-Akiva, the executive director of JCC Global, said “the calls for French Jews to pack their bags” and move were “disturbing and self-defeating.”

François Hollande, then president, echoing a chorus of European leaders, pushed back hard, appealing to his country’s Jews: “Your place is here, in your home. France is your country.”

Is it?

This is a question worth seriously asking following the barbaric murder last week of Mireille Knoll.

Ms. Knoll, 85, believed Mr. Hollande. France was her place, her home, her country. And Paris was her city.

She believed this despite the fact that it was also the city where, when she was 9 years old, the police rounded up 13,000 of the city’s Jews, 4,000 of them children, and crammed them into Vélodrome d’Hiver, a cycling stadium, before shipping them to their deaths at Auschwitz. Ms. Knoll narrowly escaped this largest French deportation of Jews during the Holocaust and fled to Portugal with her mother.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Reject the Diversity Mandate Whatever his Interior secretary actually said, President Trump should make clear his administration’s commitment to colorblind merit. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on April 1st, 2018

President Donald Trump is facing a revolt from his base for having signed the bloated omnibus spending bill that torpedoes his “drain the swamp” pledges. But the president now has an opportunity to achieve a small measure of redemption: he should offer loud and unequivocal support to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who is being hammered for reportedly having rejected identity politics in favor of meritocracy.

Zinke is facing a storm of media criticism from liberals for allegedly saying that diversity is “not important,” though his office denies that he said this. The same sources that reported Zinke’s comments say that he followed up by stating that what he cared about was excellence—and that by hiring the best people, he would in fact put together the most diverse group anyone has ever had. This second statement is a cowardly concession (as is his denial of his initial diversity observation, assuming that he made that initial statement). Sometimes meritocracy will yield diversity; sometimes it won’t. The point is that it doesn’t matter. Diversity should not be an end in itself; excellence is the goal.

Rejecting the primacy of diversity constitutes a head-on assault on the received wisdom of Washington and elite American culture. Gender and racial quotas have been the order of business for the last three decades. The #MeToo movement has only intensified pressures on public and private organizations to hire based on sex and skin color. The result: wasted resources, the sidelining of merit, and ever more virulent and irrational identity politics. The rule of the diversity regime is that you’re required to be fanatically obsessed with race and gender until you aren’t—because at that unpredictable moment, whenever it comes, noticing race and sex becomes racist and sexist.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Socialized Medicine: A Dose of Reality by Ileana Johnson

Posted By on March 31st, 2018

Although Britons do have affordable access to primary-care doctors, and everyone in the UK is covered through high taxes, they are subjected to extensive waiting periods for specialists, surgeries and hospitalization. The fact is that many patients die waiting for treatment.

Rather than rejecting the basic free-market principles of the US economy — as a 2016 Harvard University survey found that most do — young Americans would do well to ask themselves why it is that so many people from countries with socialized medicine flock to the United States for treatment.

According to a recent Pew poll, support for universal health care, provided and paid for by the federal government, is higher among American millennials than among older generations. Young Americans seem to believe that socialized medicine is a “cure-all” for health-care ills in the United States, as it ostensibly is elsewhere, such as Canada and Britain.

Unfortunately, there are facts that would appear to put this fantasy to rest by the facts — for instance, the tragic and untimely death of a 20-year-old British woman in her dorm room last March. Victoria Hills, a first-year student, died of an ear infection, after “postpon[ing] visiting her campus general practitioner because her student loan had not come through and she couldn’t afford the prescription.”

There seems to be a myth that all medical care, procedures and drugs are free under a socialized system. Although Britons do have affordable access to primary-care doctors, and everyone in the UK is covered through high taxes, they are subjected to extensive waiting periods for specialists, surgeries and hospitalization. The fact is that in the West, as the ability of physicians to provide services becomes stretched, many patients die waiting for treatment.

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5 Reasons To Watch ‘The Prince Of Egypt’ With Your Family This Week This somewhat overlooked telling of the story of Exodus is serious and beautiful for adults and kids.By Mary Katharine Ham

Posted By on March 31st, 2018

It’s Easter weekend. Like any good Southern mom, I have approximately 17 pairs of shoes for my daughters and me, three coordinating but not matchy-matchy Sunday dresses, and some very matchy-matchy polka-dot bunny leggings I picked up at Target in the little girls’ section for good measure. Those were all easy to find.

A little trickier to find are activities that commemorate the actual reason for Easter in a way that young children can understand and enjoy. Obviously, if you’re looking for stories of suffering and sacrifice that end with the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises, start with the Bible.

But may I also suggest the 1998 animated movie, “The Prince of Egypt.” This ambitious production was the first project undertaken by Jeffrey Katzenberg’s DreamWorks and was the top-grossing non-Disney animated film at the time, but it’s a bit of a forgotten gem 20 years later.

Here are five reasons to watch it this weekend with your kids.
1. It’s Epic

I don’t mean epic in the overused modern Internet slang way. I mean the themes are serious and universal, the story timeless, the music moving. Animation allows for the locusts and the blood and the frogs to pour forth in a truly stunning fashion, giving the Exodus story the towering, overwhelming imagery it was meant to have. There is one shot, during the parting of the Red Sea, of a whale silhouetted behind the giant curtain of water as a parade of tiny people walks to freedom in its shadow that is just stunningly beautiful.

As Roger Ebert said in his review, “What it proves above all is that animation frees the imagination from the shackles of gravity and reality, and allows a story to soar as it will.”

A lot of animated films aim to be entertaining for both adults and kids, tossing in sly jokes for the parents in the crowd. Pixar is famous for this. “The Prince of Egypt” feels more like an animated film for adults that children will also enjoy. There’s a bit of comic relief in the form of the Pharoah’s two hapless magicians (Martin Short and Steve Martin), but the movie is dignified and sophisticated. I discovered it as an adult and it holds up 20 years later with my kids.
2. The Cast

“The Prince of Egypt” was lauded for its voice acting, and with good reason. The cast is a bunch of A-listers in their prime in the ‘90s. Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Patrick Stewart, Sandra Bullock, Danny Glover, Helen Mirren, the aforementioned comic superstars as Pharaohs lackeys, and a special treat for any cast, but particularly voice acting — Jeff Goldblum.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Junk science: California calls coffee ‘cancerous’ By Monica Showalter

Posted By on March 31st, 2018

People have been enjoying and drinking coffee for thousands of years and recent health studies suggest it’s rather good for you, but now, all of a sudden, the State of California claims it has “science” to support the notion that coffee causes cancer.

That’s why some numbskull judge ruled that now all coffee must carry warning labels, same as dreaded, dangerous, cigarettes, warning everyone of cancer and attempting to get at least some people to stop. Can you say: ‘judiciary out of control?’

Associated Press reports:

A Los Angeles judge has determined that coffee companies must carry an ominous cancer warning label because of a chemical produced in the roasting process.

Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle said Wednesday that Starbucks and other companies failed to show that benefits from drinking coffee outweighed any risks. He ruled in an earlier phase of trial that companies hadn’t shown the threat from the chemical was insignificant.

The Council for Education and Research on Toxics, a nonprofit group, sued Starbucks and 90 other companies under a state law that requires warnings on a wide range of chemicals that can cause cancer. One is acrylamide, a carcinogen present in coffee.

What this activist suit and consequent judicial overreach represent is a sort of medicalization of food, nanny-state-style, as if food itself were some sort of toxic medicine, full of side effects, instead of a combination of risks and rewards, all ameliorated by moderation of use. And this judicial order to label coffee as cancerous is hideously disproportionate – the same sorts of carcinogens criticized in the coffee roasting process found in minute quantities can also be found in roasted peppers and bacon, too. Now coffee joins the ranks of all the other things that can possibly cause cancer, along with air pollution and BPA water bottles and building materials, many of which also carrry warnings yet change no behavior and improve no one’s quality of life. Now coffee needs to carry the explicit warning label, as if we would all like to buy a product full of as many warnings of side effects as an advertised prescription medicine on television, and as if those labels actually give any useful context or probability of cancer. It’s nonsense, because people who do get cancer rarely ever know what actually causes it. What’s more, as oncologists will tell you, none of these risk factors, not one, have anything like the predictive power of getting cancer as genetics do.

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Another Tenured Professor Fired over Speech By George Leef

Posted By on March 31st, 2018

Tenure used to protect professors against termination for anything short of criminal behavior. In today’s PC climate, however, it’s no match for administrators who want to get rid of someone who’s said things they dislike. Violations of vague “harassment” policies are the weapon they employ.

That’s what Louisiana State professor Teresa Buchanan discovered in 2015 when she was terminated over her tendency to use coarse, blunt language. Even though she was a good teacher (she taught in LSU’s school of education), the administration decided to fire her after some complaints from students and an outsider. Objections from the faculty senate, which opposed Buchanan’s firing, made no difference.

With the assistance of FIRE, Buchanan took her case to court, but lost when the district court judge dismissed her complaint. I write about the case in this Martin Center article.

I have never been a great fan of tenure, but universities that have it should not undermine it with terminations for speaking in ways that offend “progressive” ears. Faculty (tenured or not) shouldn’t have to worry that the next thing they say or write will upset one of those people on campus who are looking for excuses to drop the ax on their perceived ideological enemies.