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Rule by Starvation About 3.9 million people, or 13% of Ukraine’s population, died as Stalin pursued collectivization. Anna Reid reviews ‘Red Famine’ by Anne Applebaum.

Posted By on October 7th, 2017

In March 1932, Communist Party officials in Ukraine’s Odessa province heard rumors of hunger in outlying villages and sent a medical team to investigate. The doctors found empty cottages, corpses lying in the lanes, and the surviving inhabitants gnawing on carrion, boiled bones and horsehide. Local apparatchiks, the horrified medics reported, were doing their best “not to notice the incidence of starvation, and . . . not to speak about it.”

The dead were early victims of the “Holodomor”—literally translated as “hunger-extermination”—an artificial famine inflicted on the Ukrainian peasantry by Stalin in the years 1932-34. The best estimate of the death toll is 3.9 million, or 13% of Ukraine’s population. Up to an additional 2.5 million died in famines elsewhere in the Soviet Union at the same time.

Denied by the Soviet authorities almost until communism’s fall, the Holodomor was first documented by the British historian Robert Conquest in his ground-breaking 1986 book, “The Harvest of Sorrow.” Compiling census data and émigré memoirs and interviews, he demonstrated both the scale of the famine and the fact that it was not the result of drought or economic upheaval but of food confiscation, deliberately and violently enforced. Since then, a mass of new evidence has become available, on which Anne Applebaum draws—with generous acknowledgments to Ukrainian historians—for “Red Famine,” a lucid, judicious and powerful book.

The Holodomor was created in three overlapping stages. First, in the winter of 1929-30, came “collectivization.” Teams of activists were dispatched to the countryside to persuade peasants to hand over land and livestock to state-controlled farms, where they would work as day laborers for payment in kind. Villagers remembered how out of place the visitors looked, tiptoeing through the mud in polished shoes. One even mistook a calf for a colt, brushing aside correction with the declaration that “the world proletarian revolution won’t suffer because of that.”

Unsurprisingly, the anticipated wave of volunteerism failed to materialize, and the activists fell back on violence and intimidation, supported by local thugs and the police. Primed by years of indoctrination, even the more idealistic participants had no difficulty rationalizing their methods. “I firmly believed,” remembered one, “that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of the goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to ‘intellectual squeamishness’ and ‘stupid liberalism.’ ”

A few months later, the Kremlin launched a parallel drive to evict and deport “kulaks”—a term that in theory referred to wealthy peasants but in practice meant community leaders and anyone, rich or poor, who resisted collectivization. Targeted were teachers, clerks, store keepers, millers and tanners, as well peasants who owned two cows rather than one or whose huts were roofed with tin rather than thatch. Vicious propaganda, Ms. Applebaum notes, equated peasant farming with treachery and criminality: “Kulak-White-Guard-bandits” were said to be hoarding grain, sabotaging the collectives or plotting with the Poles to overturn the Revolution.

Not everyone submitted quietly. Police files reveal thousands of riots, shootings, raids on food stores and arson attacks on government buildings. One report, covering unrest in 16 Ukrainian districts, records 35 police and activists killed and an additional 314 beaten. Peasants’ most immediate form of protest was to slaughter their animals before they were confiscated. But though widespread, resistance was not organized enough to force the regime to backtrack. Instead, the regime hardened its position, fearing a repeat of the anti-Bolshevik risings of the Civil War. In the Soviet Union as a whole, more than two million peasants were deported between 1930 and 1933, mostly to Central Asia or the far north. Many died during the journey (in closed cattle cars, without food or water) or during their first winter in exile. At least another 100,000 went straight to the Gulag.

On their own, Ms. Applebaum argues, collectivization and “dekulakization” would not have led to outright famine. What tipped Ukraine from hunger into mass death was food requisitioning. Launched in the summer of 1930 in a drive to raise grain exports, it descended over the next two years into a sadistic pogrom, with no economic rationale at all. Tasked with fulfilling impossible quotas, search teams raided homes at night, smashing chests and cupboards and probing cellars and wall spaces with pointed metal rods. Cautiously, Ukrainian Party officials warned Moscow of growing hunger. “We have greatly overdone it,” reported one investigator. Face to face with desperate villagers, he had felt “like a carp squirming on a frying pan.”

But the Kremlin pressed on. In August 1932, food theft was made punishable by death or 10 years’ imprisonment, sweeping thousands more into the Gulag. Requisitioning brigades snatched fruit from trees, seedlings from gardens, soup from cooking pots. They killed dogs and smashed millstones. Children were shot at by mounted guards as they crept into the fields to glean fallen grain.

By New Year’s 1933 there was no food left, and full-scale famine took hold. Firsthand accounts are not as rich as those in Ms. Applebaum’s superb “Gulag: A History” (2003)—peasants were less likely to record their experiences than the middle-class professionals who filled the prison camps. But they are vivid enough: the eating of bark and weeds; children’s bird-like necks and wizened faces; ubiquitous, unremarked corpses; cannibalism. By the time Stalin finally called a halt in 1934, millions lay dead and thousands of villages stood empty.

At the time and for more than 50 years afterward, the Soviet authorities denied that the atrocity had ever happened. Doctors falsified death certificates. Students and soldiers sent to gather what there was of the harvest were told not to speak of what they saw. Not a whisper of it appeared in the press. In the cities—overflowing, despite roadblocks, with emaciated refugees—the dead were buried at night in unmarked mass graves. Notoriously, the Moscow-based Western press corps colluded in the coverup. Ms. Applebaum retells the shameful story of Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent who privately acknowledged the famine but publicly denied it so as to stay in with the regime. The American and British governments knew the truth from their embassies but, given trade requirements and Hitler’s rise, preferred to turn a blind eye.

Though far from complete—a few journalists reported honestly at the time, and eyewitnesses washed up in the West at the close of World War II—the coverup worked, in the sense that it sowed doubt. The Holodomor’s sheer wastefulness (why deport your best farmers and kill the rest?) made the Ukrainian diaspora’s claims “seem at least highly exaggerated, even incredible,” Ms. Applebaum writes. The authors of slightly amateurish émigré publications “were easily dismissed as ‘Cold Warriors,’ telling tales.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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A Hero in Spite of Himself Ulysses S. Grant won the war, won the presidency and won the battle against his own worst tendencies. Geoffrey C. Ward reviews ‘Grant’ by Ron Chernow. see note please

Posted By on October 7th, 2017

Ulysses S. Grant was a modest man, famously magnanimous toward his defeated enemies, but the myth of the Lost Cause irritated him. “The Southern generals were [seen as] models of chivalry and valor,” he once complained, while “our generals were venal, incompetent, coarse. . . . Everything that our opponents did was perfect. [Robert E.] Lee was a demigod, [Stonewall] Jackson was a demigod, while our generals were brutal butchers.”

Grant’s annoyance was understandable—and prescient. In the century that followed, no one’s reputation would suffer more at the hands of historians sympathetic to the defeated South than his. He was caricatured as a callous, plodding, sometimes drunken commander whose victories were due exclusively to Union advantages in men and materiel, a lucky general who became a politically clueless president, blind to corruption and bent on exacting revenge against the white citizens of the former Confederacy.

Over the past 20 years or so, scholars have done a great deal to rehabilitate Grant’s standing. A year ago, Ronald C. White, the author of the widely praised “A. Lincoln: A Biography” (2009), published his “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant,” hailed in these pages by Harold Holzer as “like Grant himself” likely to “have staying power.” It demonstrated that Grant was not only the architect of Union victory but a two-term president with substantive achievements—among them, the virtual destruction of the Ku Klux Klan, restored relations with Great Britain, and soldiers sent south to protect the rights of at least some of the African-Americans he had helped to free. Too often, these have been overshadowed by the scandals that beset his second term.

If Mr. White’s book is Large, at 826 pages, Ron Chernow’s new biography, “Grant,” is Extra Large, at well over 1,000. Not one of those pages is boring. As readers of Mr. Chernow’s best-selling lives of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and others know, he is a compelling storyteller. Much of the story he sets out to tell here may by now seem familiar, but he adds rich detail and brings to vivid life the reticent, unprepossessing but resolute man whom Walt Whitman called “nothing heroic . . . and yet the greatest hero.”

Every biographer has had to deal with the question of Grant’s drinking. Did he really drink too much? If so, did it interfere with his duties as soldier or statesman? Mr. Chernow is unequivocal: “Grant was an alcoholic,” he writes. For him, “alcohol was not a recreation selfishly indulged, but a forbidden impulse against which he struggled for most of his life. . . . The drinking issue . . . so permeated Grant’s career that a thoroughgoing account is needed to settle the matter.” Mr. Chernow does his best to provide one.

There is no question that drinking helped destroy Grant’s early career. Trained at West Point, calm and courageous in combat during the Mexican War, he drank only after the fighting ended, establishing the pattern he would follow for years.

He was a binge drinker. He could go for months without a drink, but as he himself once confessed to a friend who tried to fill his champagne glass: “If I begin to drink I must keep on drinking.” He actually consumed less alcohol than many of his fellow soldiers, but thanks to what one remembered as his “peculiar organization”: “a little did the fatal [work] of a great deal. . . . He had very poor brains for drinking.”

He knew he did and tried to stop, even joining the Sons of Temperance in 1851. But within a year he was drinking again. Three years later, stationed at a remote garrison on the California coast—bored, depressed and longing for his wife, Julia, and the children whom he hadn’t seen in two years—he suddenly resigned from the Army. No contemporaneous document survives to explain his reason, but Mr. Chernow makes a convincing case, based on a wealth of testimony elicited by biographers in later years, that his commanding officer had confronted him with a stark choice: resign or face the humiliation of a trial for drunkenness.

In that era, when excessive drinking was seen as evidence of moral failure rather than chronic disease, once the word “drunkard” was attached to a man’s name it was almost impossible to shake. When Grant rejoined the Army in 1861, whispers about his drinking haunted every step of his astonishing climb from captain of a company of Illinois volunteers to lieutenant general in command of all the Northern armies in just four years.

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Ken Burns’s ‘Vietnam’ Is Fair to the Troops, but Not the Cause The antiwar narrative could have been lifted from PBS’s last effort, which aired in 1983.By Mark Moyar

Posted By on October 7th, 2017

For the past several years, American and South Vietnamese veterans awaited Ken Burns’s “The Vietnam War” series with gnawing fear. Would Mr. Burns use his talent and prestige to rehash the antiwar narrative, which casts veterans as hapless victims of a senseless war? The program’s final episode has aired, and it is safe to say that worries about the portrayal of veterans were somewhat misplaced, while those concerning the war itself proved justified.

Mr. Burns and co-producer Lynn Novick should be commended for giving veterans a central role in the series. In the interviews, American veterans explain they were driven to serve mainly out of patriotism and admiration of veterans in their communities. They denounce the caricature of veterans as deranged baby-killers. Several South Vietnamese veterans are featured as well, a welcome change from earlier productions.

The treatment of the war itself is much less evenhanded. The documentary corrects a few of the mistakes that have been common to popular accounts, for instance acknowledging that Ho Chi Minh was a full-blooded communist, who pulled the strings of the ostensibly independent southern Viet Cong. Yet the show mostly follows the same story line as the last PBS megaseries, “Vietnam: A Television History,” which aired in 1983.

The documentary’s 18 hours highlight the worst military setbacks incurred by the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, while spending little time on the far more numerous battles in which the North Vietnamese suffered decisive defeat. Most of the combat scenes involve one or two Americans speaking somberly over gloomy music while the screen displays images of American troops who are dead, wounded or under fire. The interviewees then explain how the trauma and futility of battle led to their disillusionment with the war. On the few occasions when we hear of the excitement, camaraderie and pride that are as much a part of war as the fear and sorrow, the words usually come from the mouths of North Vietnamese veterans.

Some American troops did become disenchanted, joining the likes of John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and they deserve to be heard. But they do not merit the disproportionate airtime they are given in this series. Even by the most generous estimates, Vietnam Veterans Against the War never represented more than 1% of Vietnam veterans, whereas 90% of Vietnam combat veterans said they were glad to have served, and 69% said they enjoyed their time there, according to a 1980 survey conducted by the Veterans Administration. Yet about one-third of the American military veterans in the show otherwise espoused antiwar views, and few of the other interviewees expressed pride or satisfaction in their service.

Among those surveyed by the Veterans Administration, 92% agreed with the statement that “the trouble in Vietnam was that our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would not let them win.” This subject seldom arises in the on-camera interviews or in the narration, presumably because it doesn’t fit the narrative of an unwinnable war. The audience does not hear of the bitter disputes in Washington over the use of U.S. ground forces in Laos or North Vietnam. Nor does it mention revelations from North Vietnamese officials acknowledging that such measures would have thwarted Hanoi’s strategy.

The documentary disregards most of the positive achievements of America’s South Vietnamese allies. Viewers are told that South Vietnam’s strategic hamlet program—which sought to stem communist influence in the countryside—destroyed itself by alienating the rural population. Never mind that numerous North Vietnamese communists have admitted the program hurt them until it was disbanded after the American-sponsored coup of November 1963. The remarkable improvement of the South Vietnamese armed forces after the Tet Offensive receives less attention from the filmmakers than the Woodstock Festival.

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Cuban Communism, in Fact and Fiction Best-selling suspense novelist Nelson DeMille discusses his writing career and his latest book, which lampoons Yalies touring Havana. By John J. Miller

Posted By on October 7th, 2017

A Yale tour group visits a Havana restaurant in “The Cuban Affair,” the new novel by Nelson DeMille. As the Cuban handler expounds on the blessings of socialism, several of the Yalies nod in thoughtful agreement. “If they spent an hour in a kennel, they’d probably come out barking,” quips Mr. DeMille’s narrator. “So much for an Ivy League education.”

The point is made and the scene moves on—but during a conversation over coffee at Chicago’s Four Seasons Hotel, where Mr. DeMille is staying during a nationwide book tour, the author muses on the root of the problem. His mind turns to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author and dissident, who died in 2008. “Intellectuals said socialism is good if you do it right. Solzhenitsyn said: No, it’s coercive by its nature. There are millions of people in the world and in this country who don’t know that. They can even visit Cuba and not change their thinking one iota,” Mr. DeMille says. “They are intellectually or emotionally tied to some kind of ideal.”

They’re also easy to lampoon—and Mr. DeMille’s wit is on full display in “The Cuban Affair,” his 20th major suspense novel, following the likes of “Plum Island” (1997) and “The General’s Daughter” (1992), the latter adapted as a 1999 movie starring John Travolta. The new book came out Sept. 19 and is on the fiction best-seller lists. Mr. DeMille calls it “an old-fashioned chase-and-escape action adventure.” Its Cold War theme echoes “The Charm School” (1988), perhaps Mr. DeMille’s best-known novel.

Mr. DeMille, 74, was born in Queens and grew up on Long Island, where he still lives. In 1966 he was a student at Hofstra University: “I was kind of bored at school and didn’t sign up for the spring semester.” He received a draft notice, enlisted in the Army, and attended officer candidate school. Then he shipped off to Vietnam, where he saw combat as a platoon leader during the Tet Offensive. After three years in uniform, he returned home, finished his degree, and tried to write what he calls “the Great American war novel.”

A book editor told him nobody wanted to read about Vietnam. So Mr. DeMille switched to police procedurals, pumping out six cheap paperbacks. He didn’t make much money, but he sensed he was in the right place: “If you’re a painter and you’re living in Paris in the 1920s, you’re where you need to be. If you’re a writer, you need to be in New York. I don’t care if anybody else says, ‘Yes, you can do it from your farmhouse in Dubuque.’ Being in New York helped.” Under pen names, he wrote a biography of Barbara Walters (as Ellen Kay ) and a fictionalized book on sharks (as Brad Matthews ). “That’s when ‘Jaws’ was out,” he explains. “It was on-the-job training. I was learning my craft.”

When a talent-spotting publisher advanced him a five-figure check, he began to draft “By the Rivers of Babylon,” the 1978 novel that became his first hardcover book—and also one of the first thrillers to take on Middle Eastern terrorism. Since then, Mr. DeMille has written a novel roughly every other year, selling tens of millions of copies. He’s in talks to turn the tales of one character—a New York police detective called John Corey, the hero of seven books—into a television show.

“I’ve been offered bonuses to write faster,” says Mr. DeMille. Many big-name novelists publish annually, encouraging fans to mark release dates on their calendars as if celebrating a birthday. Not Mr. DeMille. “To do a book a year every year is just incomprehensible to me,” he says. “The quality would suffer. Stephen King can do it. He’s a brilliant storyteller. Other writers aren’t doing their best because they’re rushing it.”

Mr. DeMille likes to tell a joke—I heard it twice, during our afternoon conversation and then during an on-stage interview at an evening event in Arlington Heights, Ill. It involves James Patterson, a friend of Mr. DeMille’s who is famous for his commercial success, aided by co-authors who help him publish at a dizzying clip: “I called James the other day and his wife picked up. She said her husband couldn’t come to the phone because he was working on a book. I said, ‘That’s OK, I’ll hold.’ ”

Contributing to Mr. DeMille’s slow pace is his aversion to technology. He composes his books with a pencil in longhand; assistants decipher his handwriting and type it up for him. He makes revisions by marking on the printed pages. He owns a flip phone and says he doesn’t use the internet much.

For a man so set in his ways, “The Cuban Affair” represents quite a change. After his last book, “Radiant Angel,” came out in 2015, Mr. DeMille thought about calling it quits. “My sales had flattened at a high plateau,” he says. “That’s a reason to stay in the business—and also a reason to get out. I was vacillating.” He changed agents, left his longtime publisher, and signed a three-book deal with Simon & Schuster. “I felt a lot of the old enthusiasm again,” he says.

He also invented a new character, Daniel Graham “Mac” MacCormick, a wisecracking veteran of the war in Afghanistan who runs a charter-boat business in Key West, Fla. “A lot of characters from my past books are approaching Social Security age,” Mr. DeMille says. “The magic number in Hollywood and popular fiction seems to be about 35 years old.” For insights into the mind of a character less than half his age, Mr. DeMille consulted his son, a 37-year-old screenwriter.

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Georgetown University Stumps for the Muslim Brotherhood : Andrew Harrod

Posted By on October 7th, 2017

The Muslim “Brotherhood [MB] is traditionally a reformist, gradualist movement [which] is working on social change,” stated the Egyptian MB member Amr Darrag at a Georgetown University panel last month. With that, Darrag and his fellow speaker, the British-Iraqi MB operative Anas Altikriti, added to Georgetown’s longstanding history of enabling the MB’s deceitful use of liberal language to mask totalitarian goals. Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) hosted the event, which was titled: “Post-Arab Spring Middle East: Political Islam and Democracy.” A pro-Islamist bent was inevitable given that the moderator was ACMCU director Jonathan Brown.

he Muslim “Brotherhood [MB] is traditionally a reformist, gradualist movement [which] is working on social change,” stated the Egyptian MB member Amr Darrag at a Georgetown University panellast month. With that, Darrag and his fellow speaker, the British-Iraqi MB operative Anas Altikriti, added to Georgetown’s longstanding history of enabling the MB’s deceitful use of liberal language to mask totalitarian goals.

Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) hosted the event, which was titled: “Post-Arab Spring Middle East: Political Islam and Democracy.” A pro-Islamist bent was inevitable given that the moderator was ACMCU director Jonathan Brown. This professor has his own professional links to MB groups and is the son-in-law of convicted terrorist Sami Al Arian. In February, Brown was widely criticized after he gave a speech at a MB think tank justifying the practice of slavery within Islam.

Before the event, MB expert Eric Trager warned against Darrag’s visit to America: “The Muslim Brotherhood is an international hate group that seeks” to establish a “global Islamic state or neo-caliphate.” Speaking at the event, Altikriti, whom the Hudson Institute describes as “one of the shrewdest UK-based Brotherhood activists and the son of the leader of Iraq’s Muslim Brotherhood,” dismissed Trager’s article as “hilarious.”

Despite Altikriti’s insistence elsewhere that he has no connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, he describesthe movement as “the most important democratic voice that espouses multiculturalism, human rights and basic freedoms.” He also maintains that, while indeed part of the “spectrum” of “political Islam”, groups such as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State are “abnormal phenomena” and not ideologically related to the Brotherhood. By contrast, Lebanese-American Middle East expert Walid Phares has identified the MB as the “mothership for the jihadi ideologies.”

Notwithstanding Altikriti’s support and apologetics for Hamas, an MB affiliate and the totalitarian ruler of the Gaza Strip, he expressed a desire for “far more political players and actors throughout society than political Islam.” He added that if the “only alternative to authoritarian regimes is political Islam, that’s a choice that I would loathe.”

Altikriti’s suspect celebration of pluralism echoes his previous descriptions of his own organization, the UK-based Cordoba Foundation. Altikriti has told Al Jazeera that his foundation “rehashes positive memories” of an ostensible period of multicultural coexistence in medieval Islamic Spain. Prime Minister David Cameron, however, describes the Cordoba Foundation as a “political front for the Muslim Brotherhood,” while the United Arab Emirates has designated the foundation a terrorist organization.

Darrag, meanwhile, was a former minister in Egypt’s MB-led government under Mohamed Morsi, until its 2013 overthrow. Darrag argued that under Morsi the MB wanted “to go back quickly to stability, to establish institutions, elections, get a parliament, constitution, a president, all the institutions that would be perfectly fit for an established democratic system.” He denied Islamist involvement in the “Arab Spring,” arguing that protestors “didn’t go out to ask for the application of sharia.” Trager has noted in fact that Darrag played a central role in creating under Morsi a new, sharia-focused Egyptian constitution.

Darrag also claimed that the MB rejects violence in its pursuit of political reform. He described the work of his Istanbul-based Egyptian Institute for Political and Strategic Studies (EIPSS) as the promotion of liberal, democratic issues, such as “transitional justice” and “civil-military relations.” Once again, however, Trager has noted that EIPSS “presents itself as a scholarly think tank, but it often promotes violent interpretations of Islamic texts” in Arabic-language articles — yet another example of the MB feigning nonviolence.

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U of Michigan president trash-talked Trump before, after election, emails reveal By Caleb Parke, Fox News

Posted By on October 7th, 2017

The head of the University of Michigan disparaged President Donald Trump and his supporters, both before and after the 2016 election, in numerous emails sent to faculty and staff, court documents show.

The emails were released this week as a result of a lawsuit settlement with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which sued UM for failing to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request surrounding President Mark Schlissel’s Trump-related emails.

The FOIA request was filed a few days after the November election by Mackinac Center’s Derek Draplin, who was looking into the university’s decision to host events for students who were upset about the election. The center noted that the University of Michigan receives over $1 billion in taxpayer funds each year and Schlissel is a public employee.

The earliest of the emails released is from Aug. 12, 2016, and it includes a Washington Post article written by a college president explaining how he will “teach Trump” to his students, “calling out the candidate’s bigotry.”

In the next email, Schlissel explains to a UM colleague why he didn’t go for the “typical light feel good” summer convocation speech, noting that he had a room full of “first-time voters” before him.

“I realize that some may interpret this as anti-Trump although there is nothing explicit in the remarks,” Schlissel wrote. “That’s just the way it will have to be. I would feel awful if Trump won the election and I was too afraid of appearing political to make any effort to encourage our students to thoughtfully participate. I am willing to accept the criticism since I think it’s very important.”

Weeks later, on election night, Schlissel responded to an email from Andrea Fischer Newman, a Republican member of the university’s board of regents, about an article by The College Fix with video of a Michigan professor’s lengthy rant against voting for Trump.

The professor warned students they would lose civil liberties, Roe v Wade would be reversed and said they could kiss goodbye affirmative action and equal pay, among other things, if Trump was elected.

“It’s not inherently wrong for a faculty member to take a position on any issue, including an election,” Schlissel wrote to Newman. “The key is that they are solicitous and tolerant of the views of students that disagree and that those students don’t feel persecuted in any way.”

The University of Michigan president changed his tune after Hillary Clinton lost, speaking at an anti-Trump rally, then writing in an email two days after the election that it’s the public university’s job to aid in “pushing back against the idea that facts don’t matter, that science isn’t relevant to decision making and that people with white skin don’t belong here.”

Schlissel added that he was “torn on recommendations for appointees” since he couldn’t “imagine lending one’s name to a Trump administration.”

In another email following his anti-Trump remarks, Schlissel called it “ironic” that a “minority of Trump supporters” at UM “now feel marginalized and ostracized in our campus milieu and post-election activity.”

The Mackinac Center said the emails were being withheld in violation of the Freedom of Information Act by claiming the email were protected conversation under law when none of those emails met that standard.

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Tillerson Should Go Rex Tillerson seems at sea in his position. By Rich Lowry

Posted By on October 6th, 2017

If Secretary of State Rex Tillerson resigned, how would anyone know?

He has become the nation’s least influential top diplomat in recent memory. His relationship with the president of the United States is strained at best, he has no philosophy or signature initiative, he has barely staffed his own department, and he’s alienated the foreign service. The former CEO of ExxonMobil has taken one of the power positions in the U.S. government and made it an afterthought.

Who knows the truth of the NBC story that he was close to quitting last summer over clashes with President Donald Trump? But Tillerson’s strange press availability swearing his loyalty to the president is not the sort of thing loyalists usually have to do.

The secretary of state dodged questions about whether he had, indeed, as NBC reported, called Trump a “moron” — almost certainly the first time in U.S. history a cabinet official has been asked about personally insulting the president he works for and apparently been unable, in good conscience, to deny it.

Tillerson doesn’t have an easy job. He works for a mercurial and bombastic boss who has a well-developed skill for humiliating his underlings. Even a practiced and slick diplomat — even Henry Kissinger; heck, even Cardinal Richelieu — would find the circumstances trying. But Tillerson is at sea.

He’s an accomplished man who ascended to the leadership of a quasi-state as CEO of ExxonMobil. As such, he had done plenty of work abroad. It was in business, though, not government. Making him secretary of state turns out to have been like selecting the head of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to run a Fortune 500 company.

Usually establishmentarians have the advantage, if nothing else, of a great store of government experience. Brent Scowcroft devoted most of his adult life to public service; Tillerson devoted most of his adult life to ExxonMobil.

Unlike, say, James Mattis advising Trump on defense matters, this is not a professional guiding an amateur; it’s another amateur trying to school an amateur. Is it any wonder that it hasn’t gone well?

Recent Republican secretaries of state provide two models. There’s the Colin Powell approach of attending to the needs of “the building,” i.e., the civil service, and neglecting your relationship with the president. Then there’s the Condi Rice approach of tending to your relationship with the president and ignoring the building. Tillerson has done neither.

In a nationalist administration, he is a man without a country. He doesn’t have a constituency in the foreign-policy establishment, in the media, in Congress, or in the bureaucracy. He and his top aides are a thin layer spread atop the org chart to little effect.

Neither of the opposing dispensations in American foreign policy should feel vested in Tillerson. If you’re a liberal internationalist who wants Trump checked, you’d prefer someone better suited to the task. If you’re a Trumpist who wants Trump empowered to transform American foreign policy, you want someone who is in sympathy with that goal.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

UN Head Misleads on Hurricanes and Climate Change Politicizes US hurricanes to call for strengthening of Paris Agreement.Joseph Klein

Posted By on October 6th, 2017

The United Nations is misusing statistics to try and prove a causal relationship between the reported increase in carbon dioxide concentrations and the purported increase in extreme hurricane events over the last several decades, focusing in particular on the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season. “Over the past 30 years, the number of annual weather-related disasters has nearly tripled, and economic losses have quintupled,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said at a press briefing on Wednesday. To “prove” his point, graphs were distributed to reporters that show carbon dioxide concentration levels and ocean temperatures rising since 1960, together with an increase in the number of meteorological natural disasters. “Scientists are learning more and more about the links between climate change and extreme weather,” the Secretary General added. He then predictably called for “countries to implement the Paris Agreement [on climate change], and with greater ambition.”

The UN is using the familiar logical fallacy of equating statistical correlations with proof of causation. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory issued a report, last revised on August 30, 2017, that demonstrates the crucial difference between mere statistical correlation and proof of causation. The report found that “records of Atlantic hurricane activity show some correlation, on multi-year time-scales, between local tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the Power Dissipation Index (PDI),” which is “an aggregate measure of Atlantic hurricane activity.” However, the report went on to conclude that it is “premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.” Computer models may indeed predict increased storm intensity and destruction by the end of this century based on some measures of historical data showing increases in sea surface temperatures. However, the extent to which this would be due to an increase in 21st century greenhouse warming caused by human activity is indeterminate at the present time.

Moreover, even the statistical correlations may be misleading. The report examined records of past Atlantic tropical storm or hurricane numbers (1878 to present), which it found to be incomplete in terms of reported storms prior to 1965. Reliance on ship-based observations during that period meant that some storms, particularly short-lived ones, were simply overlooked because they had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic. There were no satellites more than five decades ago to observe and measure hurricanes with the same degree of accuracy as can be performed today. Even with the sketchier information we do have regarding hurricanes in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, we know that five of the eight seasons with the most major hurricanes since 1851 occurred prior to 1965. The strongest hurricane on record to hit the U.S. occurred on the Florida Keys on Sept. 2, 1935. And while Hurricane Maria was a tragically devastating hurricane to be sure, Puerto Rico suffered an even worse hurricane in 1928.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Suffocating Academic Free Speech The fascist Left tightens the screws on the American campus. Richard L. Cravatts

Posted By on October 6th, 2017

As the left exhibits paroxysms of moral outrage since the presidential election, the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome are increasingly evident on university campuses.

One such instance of this irrationality was on full display in August at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln when Katie Mullen, president of the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, was verbally harassed by leftist professors after she had set up a promotional table for the organization.

A video recording of the events shows a graduate teaching assistant and PhD student, Courtney Lawton, giving the middle finger to Mullen while carrying a sign saying, “Just say No! to Neo-Fascism!” and shouting “Neo-fascist Becky right here. Wants to destroy public schools, public universities, hates DACA kids,” “fuck Charlie Kirk [founder and executive director of Turning Point USA],” and “TPUSA Nazis,” among other repellent slurs.

Another professor, Amanda Gailey (founder of Nebraskans Against Gun Violence and virulent critic of police and gun owners), taunted Mullen with a sign that stated, “Turning Point: please put me on your watchlist,” and others passing by aggressively accused the conservative student of being a white nationalist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and a fascist.

Even for campuses which normally tolerate any ideological excesses from its leftist faculty and students, this behavior was a bit too much for the Nebraska administration, which quickly removed Lawton from her position as a lecturer and assigned her to non-teaching duties, commenting that her behavior “did not meet the university’s expectations for civility.”

Outraged by the unceremonious firing of one of their colleagues, fellow faculty, students, and union members organized a September rally on the Nebraska-Lincoln City campus sponsored by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—purportedly to discuss issues of academic freedom but actually a protest of what they believed was Lawton’s unjustified termination. Ignoring the fact that Lawton had not engaged in debate or dialogue at all but had actually viciously bullied Mullen with ad hominem attacks and slurs, her supporters side-stepped that inconvenient detail entirely, choosing instead to make Lawton the victim.

It was not Lawton’s outrageously uncivil behavior that was the problem here, but retaliation for daring to question Turning Point USA, a conservative organization. “We find it suspicious and dangerous,” said English professor Fran Kaye, one of the demonstrators, “that [Lawton] is being told that she cannot speak . . . about an organization that she has, in fact, researched because one of the things it shuts down is research on gay rights, lesbian rights.”

There’s an important distinction to be made in this case, however. The lecture was reassigned and relieved of her teaching duties not because of the content of her speech or the views expressed therein, but for the manner in which she expressed them; specifically, her behavior, not her ideas, is what was inappropriate and violated the norms of both the school’s policies on academic free speech and conduct by students and faculty, but also the central idea of reasoned debate and dialogue. In fact, UNL’s own policies on graduate student conduct is very clear on this matter, stating that, “Of particular note in this regard,” the policy stresses, “are behaviors that make the workplace hostile for colleagues, supervisors or subordinates (e.g., undergraduate students) [emphasis added.].”

It is one thing to engage in a discussion from two opposing viewpoints and to marshal facts and opinions to prove one’s point in a debate, even if that discussion is very contentious and highly argumentative. It is another thing, however, to attack someone—and particularly when that someone is a student and the attacker is a lecturer—and not engage them in a reasoned debate, but instead use ad hominem attacks, spurious allegations about political affiliations, and accusations that their views as conservatives render their ideas useless because they are equivalent to fascist or Nazis beliefs. This is an entirely different interaction that the principles of academic freedom and campus free speech were never intended to protect or enable.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Was Las Vegas Shooter “Radicalized”? Jihadist? Antifa? Neo-Nazi? Sheriff drops a bombshell then runs away. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on October 6th, 2017

Las Vegas authorities now acknowledge mass murderer Stephen Paddock may have been “radicalized” before his bloody rampage Sunday at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival but they won’t say what species of radicalism the shooter may have embraced.

The deadliest mass shooting in modern American history has been cravenly transformed into anti-American propaganda by the Left, as Democrat commentators race to ghoulishly disparage white men, gun rights and the NRA, Republicans, and President Trump, blaming them for what otherwise looks like a Muslim terrorist atrocity. Islamic State continues to claim responsibility for the massacre. The terrorist group also claims Paddock converted to Islam six months ago and refers to him by a nom de guerre, Abu Abdul Barr al-Amriki. In Las Vegas Wednesday FBI Special Agent in Charge Aaron Rouse said, “We have found no evidence to this point to indicate terrorism, but this is an ongoing investigation. We’re going to look at all avenues, not close any.”

Paddock may have been “radicalized unbeknownst to us,” Clark County, Nevada, Sheriff Joe Lombardo said at a presser without elaborating. The reporters present for the statement did not bother to follow up. For much of the mainstream media, the fact that Paddock was a white male explained his violent rampage.

So what kind of radicalism could Lombardo have been thinking of?

The word radicalized “is quite often used to refer to Muslims who wage jihad,” Robert Spencer notes. So the sheriff “may be tacitly acknowledging that the Islamic State’s claims to be behind this attack are accurate.”

Muslim terrorists are increasingly targeting concert venues, as Paddock did on the weekend. There was the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, on May 22 that killed 22. On November 13, 2015, Muslim terrorists attacked the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, leaving 89 dead during a performance by Eagles of Death Metal.

Or Sheriff Lombardo may be implying Paddock was supportive of Antifa or the KKK. “In any case, [radicalized is] a strange word to throw out there and leave hanging,” Spencer adds.

It’s possible Paddock was a right-winger, but if so, he had an odd way of showing it. Targeting country music fans, who are largely Republican and conservative, seems like a strange way to advance a right-of-center cause.

Besides, in the United States, political violence is almost the exclusive province of the Left and Islamists.

Trump-hating Bernie Sanders supporter James T. Hodgkinson came close to assassinating House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) at a baseball practice in June. A little before then, Sanders supporter Jeremy Christian stabbed three men on a train in Oregon, killing two of them. Egged on by the Southern Poverty Law Center, left-wing gay rights supporter Floyd Lee Corkins II shot up the headquarters of the conservative Family Research Council in 2012.

For all we know at this point, Paddock may actually have been an angry left-winger lashing out at conservatives and Trump supporters. Some evidence does seem to point in that direction, and in the current atmosphere of visceral left-wing hatred towards anything and death threats being hurled at everything Republican or conservative, left-wing violence is becoming commonplace.