ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

There’s No Such Thing as an ‘Illiberal’ No reasonable purpose is served by lumping together totalitarians, autocrats, conservatives and democratic nationalists. By Yoram Hazony

Posted By on August 5th, 2017

The American and British media have been inundated lately with denunciations of “illiberalism.” That word was once used to describe a private shortcoming such as a person who was narrow-minded or ungenerous. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, “illiberalism” is being treated as a key political concept. In the writings of Fareed Zakaria, David Brooks, James Kirchick, the Economist and the Atlantic, among others, it is now assumed that the line dividing “liberal” from “illiberal” is the most important in politics.

Who are these “illiberals” everyone is talking about? Respected analysts have ascribed illiberalism to the Nazis and the Soviets; to Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un ; to Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdel Fattah Al Sisi ; to the Shiite regime in Iran and the military regime in Myanmar; to the democratic governments of India, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic; to Donald Trump, Theresa May and Brexit; to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Catalonia; to Marine Le Pen, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and the lefty activists demanding political correctness on campus; to Venezuela, Pakistan, Kenya and Thailand.

Not everyone raising the hue and cry about illiberalism has exactly this same list in mind. But the talk follows a consistent pattern: A given commentator will name some violent, repressive regimes (Iran, North Korea, Russia). Then he will explain that their “illiberalism” is reminiscent of various nonviolent, democratically chosen public figures or policies (Mr. Trump, Brexit, Polish immigration rules) that he happens to oppose.

At first glance, it looks like taint by association. If you hate Mr. Trump or Brexit enough, you may be in the market for a way to delegitimize their supporters, 40% or 50% of the voting public. Making it out as though Mr. Trump is a kind of Putin, Erdogan or Kim Jong Un—not Hitler exactly, but at least Hitler lite—may feel like progress.
The catchall label has been applied to Theresa May, Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping

But that isn’t enough of an explanation. A battalion of our best-known journalists and intellectuals are straining to persuade readers that there exists some real-world phenomenon called “illiberalism,” and that it is, moreover, a grave threat. This isn’t routine political partisanship. They really feel as if they are living through a nightmare in which battling “illiberalism” has taken on a staggering significance.

It’s vital to understand this phenomenon, not because “illiberalism” really identifies a coherent idea—it doesn’t—but because the new politics these writers are urging, the politics of liberalism vs. illiberalism, is itself an important, troubling development.

Start with the exaggerated sense of power many Americans and Europeans experienced after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Anything seemed possible, and a remarkable number of normally tough-minded people began telling one another fanciful stories about what would happen next. A series of American presidents giddily described the prosperity and goodwill that were about to arise.

George H.W. Bush declared in 1990 that after 100 generations of searching for peace, a new world order was about to be born, “a world quite different from the one we’ve known, a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.” Utopian political tracts by Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History and the Last Man,” 1992), Thomas Friedman (“The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” 1999), and Shimon Peres (“The New Middle East,” 1993), described the imminent arrival of the universal rule of law, human rights, individual liberties, free markets and open borders. These speeches and books raised expectations into the stratosphere, asserting that decent men and women everywhere would embrace the liberal order, since the alternatives had been discredited.

Even at the height of all this, one caveat was consistently repeated: A rogue’s gallery of holdouts would continue to resist until the mopping-up operations were complete. Mr. Fukuyama referred to these irrationalists, clinging to nationalism, tribalism and religion, as “megalothymic.” It wasn’t a very catchy brand name. The term that stuck instead came from “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” an insightful 1997 essay in Foreign Affairs by Mr. Zakaria, which argued that resistance to the new order was far more widespread than had been recognized.

In this context, “liberalism” was understood as the belief that it was possible and desirable to establish a world-wide regime of law, enforced by American power, to ensure human rights and individual liberties. “Illiberalism” became a catchall term that lumped together anyone opposed to the project—as Marxists used the word “reactionary” to describe anyone opposed to the coming communist world order.

POLITICS Comments turned off

HOPE FOR THE DEMS? THE BLUE DOG COALITION SEE NOTE PLEASE

Posted By on August 5th, 2017

https://bluedogcaucus-costa.house.gov/members

The Blue Dog Coalition is an official caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives comprised of 18 fiscally-responsible Democrats, who are leading the way to find commonsense solutions. They represent the center of the political spectrum, appealing to the mainstream values of the American public. The Blue Dogs are dedicated to pursuing fiscally-responsible policies, ensuring a strong national defense for our country, and transcending party lines to get things done for the American people.
Rep. Adam Schiff California District 28th left the coalition which recommends it immediately….rsk

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Maxine Waters Is Encouraging More People to Leak Confidential Info From the White House!

Posted By on August 5th, 2017

https://pjmedia.com/video/maxine-waters-is-encouraging-more-people-to-leak-confidential-info-from-the-white-house/
On The View, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), one of the leaders of the the impeach-Trump movement, encouraged more confidential leaking from the Trump administration. After a panelist questioned, “We don’t need to hear these conversations, they’re confidential,” Waters said, “I need to hear these conversations.” She simply denied that foreign countries might view these leaks as a sign that the U.S. is a non-secure environment for discussing key matters and that therefore we will lose significance and trust worldwide. She simply denied that part.

While she was denying things, Waters said that, “I am not running for anything except the impeachment of Trump.” Maybe we should be thankful she won’t run for President?

MEDIA Comments turned off

Jim Acosta, Racist Apologist for White Privilege By David P. Goldman

Posted By on August 5th, 2017

White House adviser Stephen Miller made short work of CNN’s Jim Acosta at yesterday’s White House press briefing on immigration. Acosta enjoined, “It sounds like you’re trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country through this policy,” by giving preference to English speakers. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s 1.2 billion English speakers are African or Asian.

Acosta claimed that preferential treatment for English-speaking applicants would benefit people from Great Britain and Australia. Scathingly, Miller replied:

I am shocked at your statement, that you think only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree. This is an amazing moment. That you think only people from Great Britain or Australia would speak English is so insulting to millions of hard-working immigrants who do speak English from all over the world. Jim, have you honestly never met an immigrant from another country who speaks English, outside of Great Britain and Australia? Is that your personal experience?

There are about 1.2 billion English speakers in the world, including 125 million Indians, 90 million Filipinos, 79 million Nigerians, 30 million Bengalis, 28 million Egyptians and 15 million Pakistanis, according to Wikipedia. More than half of all English-speakers are non-European. Barely a tenth of English speakers outside the United States live in Britain, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. Acosta’s gaffe was epically ignorant and racist in the extreme.

Acosta repeatedly interrupted Miller, chanting “Give me your tired, your poor…,” a line from Emma Lazarus’ 1883 sonnet The New Colossus which is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty. If anything, Miller handled the CNN journalist too gently. He might have said: America had no restrictions to immigration in 1883, and millions of white European immigrants poured into the American heartland. To accommodate them we drove out the Native Americans. By 1890 there were only 250,000 Native Americans left in the United States, compared to 2 million or more before European settlers arrived. In other words, we gave privileges to white people and killed or displaced people of color. You can argue the merits of this policy, but we don’t want to return to a situation in which immigration occurs at the expense of people who were here first.”

For the record, I do not believe that the United States should have sacrificed its future to protect hunter-gatherers who require several dozen square miles of land to sustain one inhabitant. That of course does not excuse the crimes committed against Native Americans. Nonetheless, it is in the public interest to short the circuits in the tiny little minds of progressive journalists.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In Abusing NSA Intelligence, Did Obama White House Commit A Crime?

Posted By on August 5th, 2017

Unmasking’ Scandal: Day by day, the scandal of the Obama administration’s abuse of domestic intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency grows. Forget the phony Russia-Trump collusion charges — the Obama White House looks increasingly to have committed a crime by using U.S. intelligence for political purposes.

The NSA’s insatiable gathering of data and conversations on Americans make it a potentially highly dangerous enemy of Americans’ freedoms. Who would want to have a federal government spy shop that knows almost everything you do in public, on the phone, by email, or by computer?

That’s why the super-secret NSA, which is much bigger than the better-known CIA, has always operated under strict guidelines for how its intel could be used. In its reports, Americans who are surveilled without a warrant while speaking to a foreign citizen are routinely “masked” — that is, their identity is kept secret — unless there’s an overwhelming national security interest in that person being “unmasked.”

Unfortunately, like a child with a dangerous new toy, the Obama administration apparently seems to have believed that the NSA could be used for narrow, political purposes.

As a result, a number of administration officials and Obama supporters, including former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and former CIA chief John Brennan, have been subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee to answer some questions.

On Wednesday, the panel announced another subpoena had been issued for a former Obama official, this for former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. Our guess is it won’t be the last.

This mega-scandal, by the way, has been building for months, though you would hardly know by the near-silence it’s been treated with in the media.

But there are exceptions. Back on May 24, the online journal Circa reported that the scandal was far more serious than it first appeared.

“The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community,” wrote Circa investigative reporter Sara A. Carter.

Now, this week, Carter reports that the scandal is much bigger than suspected. A review of government documents found that “government officials conducted 30,355 searches in 2016 seeking information about Americans in NSA intercept meta-data, which include telephone numbers and email addresses,” Carter wrote.

She notes that the election-year searches by Obama’s political aides and other government officials jumped 27.5% from 2015, tripling the “9,500 such searches” in 2013. “In 2016 the administration also scoured the actual contents of NSA intercepted calls and emails for 5,288 Americans, an increase of 13% over the prior year and a massive spike from the 198 names searched in 2013.”

Before the Obama administration, under rules propagated by former President George H.W. Bush, “unmasking” incidental intelligence targets was strictly limited and frowned upon. Even after 9/11, despite increased surveillance of people with potential terrorist ties, the rules stayed in place. The potential for abuse, they knew, was too great.

But that ended in 2011 as Obama, using the pretense of fighting a War on Terror that he never even believed in, loosened the rules. As the Washington Examiner reported earlier this week, in 2013 National Intelligence Director James Clapper formally loosened the rules on “unmasking” the names of congressional staffers, elected officials and others.

That major violations occurred under this program seems clear. Last week, House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes in a letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats noted that “the total requests for Americans’ names by Obama political aides numbered in the hundreds during Obama’s last year in office and often lacked a specific intelligence community justification,” according to The Hill.

In particular, Nunes pointed out that “one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests” in 2016. Speculation is that the official was U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power.

Is this a crime? We do know that the FISA Court, in a closed-door hearing last October, already censured White House officials for their violations of Americans’ email privacy, citing an “institutional lack of candor” that had become a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.” CONTINUE AT SITE

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Campus Declarations of War on Free Speech : Peter Berkowitz

Posted By on August 5th, 2017

The threat to free speech in the United States is by no means restricted to colleges and universities, but they have become breeding grounds, training camps, and launching pads in the campaign to curtail liberty of thought and discussion. It is on our campuses where the battle for free speech will be won or lost.

In this year alone, protesters at Claremont McKenna College disrupted a talk by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald; protesters at Middlebury College intimidated American Enterprise Institute Scholar Charles Murray and assaulted his host, Professor Allison Stanger; and, in the successful effort to prevent journalist and right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, protesters at the University of California, Berkeley set private property aflame in a rampage across campus.

These are the tip of the iceberg. For a 2017 report, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education “surveyed publicly available policies at 345 four-year public institutions and 104 of the nation’s largest and/or most prestigious private institutions.” A disheartening 39.6 percent “maintain severely restrictive, ‘red light’ speech codes that clearly and substantially prohibit constitutionally protected speech.”

Administrators and faculty have conspired to produce an intellectual environment hostile to free speech. The educational authorities teach students to demand trigger warnings for potentially disturbing subject matter; to perceive opinions with which they disagree as forms of “violence” and to scrutinize everyday utterances for actionable microaggressions; to expect the establishment of public “safe spaces” that exclude disfavored opinions; and to disinvite speakers who depart from campus orthodoxies.

Some high-ranking university officials have gone so far as to tout the policing and curtailment of expression as victories for free speech. In April, in a lengthy New York Times op-ed, “What ‘Snowflakes’ Get Right About Free Speech,” Ulrich Baer — vice provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity, and professor of comparative literature at New York University –advanced a supposedly more “sophisticated understanding.”

If “views invalidate the humanity of some people,” he asserted, “they restrict speech as a public good” and so these humanity-invalidating views, he contended, should themselves be restricted to improve free speech. The traditional name for Baer’s policy is censorship.

Commentary magazine’s summer feature “Symposium: Is Free Speech Under Threat?” canvasses a diversity of opinion on the subject, including the academic establishment’s studied obliviousness to the danger. Despite the massive evidence, First Amendment scholar and Columbia University President Lee Bollinger assures in his contribution that the threat is the invention of demagogues. “I do not for a second support the view that this generation has an unhealthy aversion to engaging differences of opinion,” Bollinger writes. “That is a modern trope of polarization, as is the portrayal of universities as hypocritical about academic freedom and political correctness.”

Yet the bulk of the Commentary symposium—which includes 27 distinguished writers, scholars, broadcasters, and university presidents—reveals just the opposite. It illuminates a wide variety of threats to free speech while recognizing—especially in essays by New York University law professor Richard Epstein, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center history professor K.C. Johnson, and Mac Donald—that the struggle on campuses is pivotal.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Jobs Report: Proof of Trump Making America Great Again By Howard J. Warner

Posted By on August 5th, 2017

What the media won’t tell you: Since the election of Donald Trump, most economic news has been positive.

Since the election of Donald Trump, most economic news has been positive despite the lack of media coverage. Prior to November 2016, some financial reporters predicted losses for the stock market and our national economy should Hillary Clinton lose the election. Yet, since the 2016 election, the Dow is up 20.5% and 12% since January, the NASDAQ is up 21% and 18% since January, and the S&P is up 16% and 12% since January. This demonstrates the limitations of following the “experts” who do not disclose their political prejudices.

The July jobs report includes 209,000 new jobs. This brings the total to over 1 million since January. But the new cover of Newsweek carries a caricature of Trump in a lounger with the title “Lazy Boy.” It is insulting, inaccurate (as he puts in hours most people half his age could not manage), and one-sided.

A look at the economic parameters gives one a sense that the doldrums may be ending. During the Obama years, we averaged less than 2% growth and were told that this was the new normal. To the forgotten Americans, this is unacceptable. Under President G.W. Bush, we saw the end of real income growth nationally, which imperils support for our republic. The health of our economy provides a sense of the national mood. Hence, the forgotten supported the election of Donald Trump, who promised to change the situation for dislocated workers and unemployed citizens, long dismissed by their political leaders.

A perusal of the numbers is quite encouraging: the national unemployment rate is now 4.3%, a 16-year low. Now 7 million are unemployed, which is a shrinking number. The labor participation rate has risen to 62.9%. There are still 5.3 million people employed part-time due to economic reasons. Some 1.8 million people are considered long-term unemployed and constitute 25.9% of the total unemployed. But the number of discouraged workers has declined to 536,000. Though there was improvement of the national economy during the Obama years, this acceleration of good news must upset Democrats and liberals who wish to unseat Trump.

The lack of growth in national income is hard to explain, according to the financial media. Economists have claimed for years that full employment is 4% or so. Under their thinking, the pressures for necessary workers should have an upward effect upon incomes. Only among the lowest wage-earners is income rising. This may provide some new voters for Trump’s re-election.

Reporters have missed possible reasons for this situation. Employers calculate total compensation packages for employees. This includes benefits such as Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, unemployment taxes, vacation time, sick leave, health insurance costs, and miscellaneous expenses. The exploding cost of health care insurance premiums due to Obamacare mandates and fewer insurance providers has cut into the available dollars to give raises. The Trump administration must emphasize this as a way to get Republican senators to move on reform of the Affordable Care Act.

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Maxine Waters: ‘When We Finish With Trump, We Have to Go and Get’ Pence by Ian Hanchett

Posted By on August 5th, 2017

On Friday’s broadcast of ABC’s “The View,” Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) stated that after President Donald Trump is impeached, Vice President Mike Pence won’t be a better president than Trump and should be impeached as well.http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/08/04/waters-when-we-finish-with-trump-we-have-to-go-and-get-pence/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=daily&utm_content=links&utm_campaign=20170804

One of the show’s hosts, Joy Behar asked, “Do you think Pence will be better than Trump if he were impeached? ”

Waters answered, “No. And when we finish with Trump, we have to go and get Putin. He’s next.”Behar then asked Waters if she meant Putin or Pence, and Waters clarified that she meant Pence.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Oxford college treasurer and US academic arrested in connection with Chicago murder

Posted By on August 5th, 2017

Andrew Warren, an Oxford University employee has been arrested in connection with the killing of a 26-year old man in Chicago.

Police have also arrested Wyndham Lathem, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology a Northwestern University in Chicago and expert in the bubonic plague.

Mr Warren, 56, and Prof Lathem, 42 were sought by police after a hair stylist, Trenton Cornell-Duranleau, 26, was found stabbed to death in an upmarket high-rise flat in Chicago. . Chicago Police said the two men are believed to be in custody in Oakland California. by the US Marshals Service.

News that the men were being held was announced by Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for Chicago police department on Twitter.

A senior treasury assistant at Somerville College, Oxford, Mr Warren left the home he shared with his sister in Faringdon, Oxfordshire on June 24.

He was reported missing to Thames Valley Police by Mr Warren’s sister, Tracey, and his partner, Martin Grant.

It is believed Mr Warren left the UK the day before, travelling to the United States without telling his boyfriend or family.

Authorities haven’t detailed the relationship between Mr Warren and Prof Lathem, who moved to Chicago from the Grand Rapids, Michigan.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Peter Smith The Burning Intolerance of Green Scolds

Posted By on August 5th, 2017

Rational analysis offers the hope that warmists and sceptics might find common ground were they to focus on cost-benefit analyses of “solutions” to greenhouse emissions. Nah, who am I kidding? Carpetbaggers living off public subsidies now control the agenda, so no hope there

By the accident of mistakenly tuning in to the wrong channel I heard part of a speech on August 2 by Peter Freyberg to the British Australian Chamber of Commerce. Freyberg is the head of Glencore’s coal operations. You would expect that he likes coal and he evidently does. And presumably that would make him persona non grata among environmental types. Which is a pity because he had some sensible things to say.

When it came to the environment and climate change his message came down to the proposition: do you want to feel virtuous or be effective? At one point, he used the example of the most populous state in India which was building coal power stations to provide base-load power to millions upon millions of people now without electricity. He suggested that a lot more could be done too reduce emissions by redirecting subsidies bound for new wind farms towards building the most up-to-date and efficient (and, per force, most expensive) coal power stations in this Indian state. In other words, you would get more bang for your buck in terms of emission reductions per kilowatt hour.

I feel confident that he is right; though, of course, I don’t have the figures. However, right or not, he is whistling into the wind, so to speak. Carpetbaggers living off public subsidies now control the agenda. And behind the carpetbaggers are hordes of green-tinged know-nothings with ‘ban coal’ tee-shirts. Rational thinking doesn’t get a look in.

It is worth reading Return to Reason by Roger James, who applied Karl Popper’s thinking to explore government planning mistakes in the 1970s. What often happens he explains is that solutions morph into objectives. The solution becomes the goal. The goal becomes lost and sometimes is not even clearly formulated from the start. Among other things, this means that the emergence of more effective solutions to the original problem are not brought into consideration; and nor is the problem continually monitored to assess whether it remains in need of a different solution or of a solution at all.

Think of the PM’s Snowy Mountains (mark 2) power plan. Did this come out of a thorough analysis and identification of the problem and of the potential solutions? Not so far as I can tell. It is not hard to see the problem (a shortage of reliable base-load power) and its generic solution (increasing the supply of reliable cost-effective power) morphing into how do we get the new hydro project built.

Assume that anthropogenic CO2 emissions constitute a life-threatening problem, even if you don’t. The solution of reducing emissions has morphed into replacing fossil-fuel power with wind and sun. Now be brave and get into the mind of a greenie, like Al Gore perhaps, and listen to Freyberg.

While I don’t have a transcript of his speech, readers can check the fidelity of my account against the video of Freyberg’s address, thoughtfully posted on Friday at the website of the Australian British Chamber of Commerce. He says that wind and sun cannot provide the solution. He has figures which back his claim that, unless we go back to the Stone Age, wind and sun will not work. They are too expensive, too intermittent and too unreliable to supply base-load power to modern industrial and industrialising countries in quantities that will make a material difference to emissions.

And that Elon Musk mega-battery coming to South Australia? It would keep an aluminium smelter going for less than 8 minutes. Instructively, he further says, each precious public dollar spent on subsidising wind and sun power is a dollar that could have been better spent on increasing the efficiency and reducing the emissions of conventional power.