Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
Imitation may indeed be the highest form
of flattery,
reports Hollie McKay from the Syrian town of Kobane,
but one Syrian-Kurdish father here has taken that concept
to a whole new level.
“My son is 'Trump,'” Rezgar Ramadan, 40, a pharmacy
drug representative, proudly told Fox News this week. “He likes his
name so much, everywhere we go people always ask us, ‘How is little
Trump?’”
Ramadan said he thought of renaming the boy, originally
named Mustafa, back in 2016, after Donald Trump won the presidential
election.
… The boy has become a celebrity of sorts in the village
of Kobane, in the nation's north, his dad said. "Everyone knows him now.
I am teaching him about America. He is already so smart, and wants to
lead his brother and sister.”
… The couple are also parents to 8-year-old twins Muhammed and Rula,
and are planning to expand their family in the very near future. The
names are already picked out.
“If it's a boy, it will be 'Rex Tillerson,'” Ramadan declared. “And if it a girl, she will be 'Nikki Haley.'”
“I like Rex Tillerson because I like his character,”
Ramadan said, unfazed by the fact that Tillerson had recently lost his
job as U.S. secretary of state. “And Nikki Haley fights a lot for the
human rights, and speaking out against Russia, who have been committing a
lot of crimes here in Syria.”
Naming children after foreign leaders is no longer so
unusual in parts of the Middle East. Some supporters of the Syrian
regime have named their babies “Putin,” in honor of the Russian
president. And "Bush" became a popular name after the 2003 toppling of
Saddam Hussein in Iraq under the administration of George W. Bush.
Ramadan insisted he hasn’t received any backlash over his decision to name his son after the U.S. president. …
"I tell you all Iraqis hated Saddam's regime. It was only George Bush who
liberated us, without him it wouldn't have happened. If he hadn't done it the
sons of Saddam would have ruled us for years. He saved us from Saddam and that's
why we named our son after him"
Lars talks with ex-pat Erik Svane who emigrated to France, Erik tells us what
conservativism is like in Europe and how some things are the same but
some are very, very different.
John Ioannidis,
now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that
claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by
trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal
articles.
… It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just aren’t
so.
… The
chief cause of irreproducibility may be that scientists, whether
wittingly or not, are fishing fake statistical significance out of noisy
data. If a researcher looks long enough, he can turn any fluke
correlation into a seemingly positive result. But other factors compound
the problem: Scientists can make arbitrary decisions about research
techniques, even changing procedures partway through an experiment. They
are susceptible to groupthink and aren’t as skeptical of results that
fit their biases. Negative results typically go into the file drawer.
Exciting new findings are a route to tenure and fame, and there’s little
reward for replication studies.
… A deeper issue is that the irreproducibility crisis has remained
largely invisible to the general public and policy makers. That’s a
problem given how often the government relies on supposed scientific
findings to inform its decisions. Every year the U.S. adds more laws and
regulations that could be based on nothing more than statistical
manipulations.
All government agencies should review the
scientific justifications for their policies and regulations to ensure
they meet strict reproducibility standards. The economics research that
steers decisions at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department
needs to be rechecked. The social psychology that informs education
policy could be entirely irreproducible. The whole discipline of climate
science is a farrago of unreliable statistics, arbitrary research
techniques and politicized groupthink.
Mr. Wood is president of the National Association of
Scholars. Mr. Randall is the NAS’s director of research and a co-author
of its new report, “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science.”
Samuel Chamberlain of
Fox News has written the obituary of R. Lee Ermey, the former Marine Corps drill instructor known to millions of moviegoers as the sadistic Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket". Among other things we learn of the man who was 74:
"I've had a very fruitful career. I've done over 70
feature films," he said. "I've done over 200 episodes of [Outdoor
Channel series 'GunnyTime']... and then [Hollywood] found out that I'm a
conservative."
Actually, he corrected, "I'm an Independent, but I said
something bad about the president. I had something unsavory to say
about the president's administration, and even though I did vote for him
the first time around, I was blackballed."
Ermey, who was an NRA board member, said at the time
that his association with the organization and his disapproval of
President Obama cost him acting jobs.
"Do you realize I have not done a movie in five to six
years? Why? Because I was totally blackballed by the ... liberals in
Hollywood," he alleged. "They can destroy you. They're hateful people
[who] don't just not like you, they want to take away your livelihood
... that's why I live up in the desert on a dirt road ... I don't have
to put up with their crap."
… sharing my knowledge and love of Paris is second-nature to me
writes an expatriate American corporate trainer who, after a decade in the City of Light, has taken the leap from trainer to tour guide through her Paris Personally company, which personalizes tours to your wishes and desires (see a sample of Tour Ideas). Gina Hunt continues:
… if you've decided to hire someone to help you get the most out of your
trip, then you're not just looking for a cookie-cutter tour. You're
looking to see Paris in a personal way. You're looking to make your
experience of Paris unique and memorable. That's why you're looking for Paris Personally.
… because
I know how to personalize your experience, you'll enjoy Paris in a
unique and memorable way. I'm always professional, always focused on
helping you have a great time, and I speak fluent French, bien sûr!
Contact Ms. Hunt at gina@paris-personally.com or through her contact pageto see a sample itinerary and learn more details of how Paris Personally's small group trips work.
Horrible! A despicable racist named Roger Whittaker engages in Swahili cultural appropriation with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. And the appallingly un-woke members of the audience at the Jubilee Auditorium seem to be enjoying it…
Instapundit's Stephen Green links to Mark Hodge and James Beal's Sun story, which starts out thus:
DONALD Trump has told Russia to "get ready" for American "smart"
missiles heading to Syria while blasting Putin for partnering with "Gas
Killing Animal" Bashar Assad.
I can't help associating Gas with Poison — two largely invisible killers — and wondering whether, in the same breath, the "Republican firebrand" isn't referring to, and condemning, Putin's poisoning of a Russian spy and his daughter in the UK.
So many people, both inside and outside the United States, have reacted with horror at the nomination of John Bolton to the upper echelons of U.S. power that the Armenian who served as his country's permanent representative to the UN during the time of the Bush administration,
Armen Martirosyan, felt the need to write to the Financial Times to set things straight.
Since U.S. president Donald Trump announced John Bolton as his next national security adviser, the prospect of “possibly Washington’s most aggressive hawk”, as he was described by [the Financial Times’s] Simon Kuper (“Don’t get distracted. John Bolton is a huge threat,” April 7), having a central role in the formulation of American foreign policy has become a cause for foreboding apprehension for many.
In 2005, as the then permanent representative of Armenia to the UN, I was a first-hand witness to then U.S. ambassador Bolton’s aggressive campaign for an anti-Iranian resolution at the UN General Assembly. Armenia’s position on the Iran vote did not meet American expectations, so the U.S. mission contacted us with an urgent request for an appointment with Mr. Bolton.
It was abundantly clear that Mr. Bolton was not ready to take no for an answer, and this peculiar situation called for unorthodox solutions. After a brief welcome, to my guest’s utter surprise I unveiled a map of Armenia and rolled it out over my desk.
With this visual aid, I impressed on him the relevant regional complexities facing my country and thus justified our position on the resolution. Before his departure, Mr. Bolton accepted a sip of Winston Churchill’s favourite Armenian brandy, Ararat, as a seal of our new understanding.
My advice to all potential interlocutors is to treat Mr. Bolton as a rational agent who is perfectly capable of engaging in constructive dialogue and adjusting positions based on new-found insights.
Armen Martirosyan
Ambassador of Armenia to India
New Delhi
Be sure to subscribe to the Financial Times. It is worth it, for the daily is full of treasures like this one…
The left used to get very worked up about the CIA’s interference in foreign elections.
The American Spectator's
George Neumayr has penned what is possibly the best single article on the 2016 election scandal (thanks to Instapundit), the alleged Trump Russia collusion and the real wrongdoing that has been (deliberately) hidden by the noise covering that alleged scandal.
Liberals [used to] quote solemnly the work of Philip
Agee, a CIA turncoat who wrote articles and books about the agency’s
manipulation of this or that foreign election. But these days ACLU-style
liberals shrug at the meddling of John Brennan’s CIA in the 2016
American election, mischief that the FBI is still trying to conceal.
It
was reported recently that the FBI refuses to show Congressman Devin
Nunes an unredacted copy of the origination document that triggered the
probe into the Trump campaign. What is the FBI hiding? Paradoxically,
nothing — that is, no classified information showing collusion between
Trump and Russia. The FBI is simply trying to hide the embarrassingly
partisan origins of its spying on the Trump campaign.
Were the
redactions covering material harmful to Trump, that material would have
been leaked by now. So the redactions can only be concealing the
fingerprints of Hillary’s partisans in the Obama administration. The FBI
will eventually have to fess up to the politicization to which it
succumbed — that the most virulent Hillary partisan imaginable, John
Brennan, had put pressure on FBI officials to start the probe, that a
Trump hater, Peter Strzok, formally opened up the probe, that the smears
of a paid opposition researcher for Hillary, Christopher Steele,
contributed to the probe, that scandalous “intelligence-sharing” between
Brennan and foreign intelligence agencies shaped the probe, and that
FBI officials suspected the probe was unfounded but pursued it anyways
at the insistence of Obama officials.
The FBI says it is redacting “sensitive information.” That’s true in
an ironic sense: the FBI is very sensitive about the information, in
that it illuminates the agency’s transformation into an opposition
research shop for the Hillary campaign. Take her partisans out of the
picture and the probe would never have started.
In
an attempt to sanitize the probe, the media has attributed its origin
to a drunken conversation between an Aussie diplomat and a minor Trump
campaign volunteer. But that’s a joke. Maybe the FBI threw that into the
pot at the last minute, but John Brennan had been stirring it for
months before then. As Brennan told Congress, “we were uncovering
information intelligence about interactions and contacts between U.S.
persons and the Russians. And as we came upon that, we would share it
with the bureau.” Notice his use of “we” in that statement. By “we,”
Brennan meant his retinue of Hillary partisans at the CIA who had been
shaking foreign intelligence agencies down for any dirt on Trump.
The
British intelligence, in cahoots with Brennan and Christopher Steele
(who was on Hillary’s payroll), figured largely into this mischief. In
all likelihood it will come out that the “information” British
intelligence shared with Brennan was just recycled Steele material. The
“allies tipped us off to Trump-Russian collusion” storyline is a sham, designed to distract attention from a chain of Hillary partisans who
in the thick of a campaign were circulating smears among themselves and
calling it “intelligence sharing.”
It was the blinding, viscerally
personal hatred of Brennan for Trump, perhaps more than anything else,
that turned all those phony “tips” into a counterintelligence probe. In
the grip of that kind of feverish antipathy, combined with his desire to
continue as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan could convince himself
of any Trump monstrosity and made it his mission to prod the FBI into
harassing him.
… But it wasn’t enough for
Brennan to push the FBI investigation. He also had to publicize it,
which he achieved through another person in Christopher Steele’s orbit,
Senator Harry Reid, whose Super PAC, as the Daily Caller reports,
was run by the very Hillary lawyer who hired Steele’s services. Brennan
briefed Reid on the beginnings of the FBI investigation he instigated,
knowing that Reid would leak the contents of the briefing to the press.
About
this astounding meddling in an election by a CIA director, the Philip
Agees of the left have fallen completely silent. But that makes sense.
After all, how can old radicals inveigh against the CIA as a “wilderness
of mirrors” when it is John Brennan’s reflection in it?
A Hebrew prophet once asked the rhetorical question: “Can a leopard change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin?” Much later, another prophet asked, “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?”
Fay Voshell goes back a couple of thousand of years (thanks to Instapundit) to explain the modern left.
The idea [of the prophets] was that there are certain realities that humans cannot change by a mere exercise of will.
Even the beasts instinctively accept how they are made.
But the prophets’ common-sense observations about the unchanging nature of material realities has in our day been thrown aside in exchange for a fantasy philosophy that is akin to alchemists’ dream that if we only had secret means to do so, we could change lead into gold.
The fantasy philosophy that insists human will combined with spiritual power can defy and change material reality is called Gnosticism. Gnosticism is basically a pessimistic belief, as it tries to repudiate the existence of the whole universe, which is seen as irretrievably corrupt. Devotees of Gnosticism crave being free from the curse of all things material and believe they may be released from the curse of this wretched world by a secret, inner spiritual knowledge accessible only by themselves.
Even Christianity, which celebrates the material world as still good, though fallen, has through syncretic thinking been afflicted with the idea that the human spirit can by a sheer act of will overcome material reality, including the built in limitations of the human body and its sensual desires.
… Eating only the Host [the daily Eucharistic wafer] was seen as an exercise in achieving a pure spirituality that eliminated or at least utterly transcended the fleshly appetites, including sensuality. Spirit over matter was to prevail. By an act of will, one could overcome the reality of the sinful body.
The ancient Gnostic idea that one can by an act of will repudiate material realities has been resurrected time and again, resurfacing to be part of the current liberal political ethos.
Such is the state of affairs in Gnostic leftist political thought that it is believed quite possible to declare one’s self by fiat to be sex opposite to the one you were born as. If you are a man who feels like a woman, all you have to do is to declare yourself to be a woman.
This denial of a reality that is foundational to all civilizations is being made into law in Europe and in America, with the deleterious consequences still to be completely realized.
As George Weigel notes in his recent National Affairs article entitled “Reality and Public Policy,” in 2007, Spain's Zapatero government enacted legislation allowing men to change themselves into women and women into men by simply declaring one’s newly recognized sex, with or without surgical alterations. The new man or woman could then be issued new national identity card reflecting the gender of choice. Weigel concludes, “It is hard to imagine a more explicit expression of personal willfulness overpowering natural givenness.”
In other words, reality be damned. The purely good will and spirit within the individual is to prevail over common sense and human tradition since time immemorial. I may look like a woman and actually be a biological woman, but if I decide I’m a man, who are you to question my inner light? Who are you to resist my truth about myself? As millions of American children are taught every day, “You can be anything you choose to be.”
As Weigel notes:
“[…]within a very short span of time, less than two generations, two aspects of the human condition that had been understood for millennia to be the very quintessence of givenness -- maleness and femaleness -- were no longer taken to be given at all. "Male" and "female" were not The Way Things Are. "Male" and "female" were "cultural constructs," usually manipulated by those in power for purposes of domination (Gnosticism thus adding a soupçon of Marxism to its ideology of plasticity).
“Gnostic anthropology -- the Gnostic view of the human person and the human condition -- is the antithesis of the Biblical view of men and women and their possibilities, which has long been one of the foundation stones of the Western civilizational project.”
Weigel points out that the new Gnosticism engendered by the sexual revolution not only ignores and warps the differences between men and women, but it also warps the rest of politics:
“[…]if people are prepared to insist as a matter of fundamental civil rights) the unreal claim that marriage can encompass two men or two women, why should those same people not believe that America can continue to run trillion-dollar deficits with impunity? Or that the centralization and vast regulatory apparatus to be created by Obamacare will not inevitably lead to the rationing of end-of-life care? Or that the federal budget deficit has primarily to do with the wealthy not paying ‘their fair share’ ”?
Seeing matters through the lens of Gnosticism’s sure inner light gives infinite plasticity to foreign affairs, as the belief one can discern how things really are by means of that inner light means one can deny actuality and proceed according to fantasy. For instance, liberal Gnostics can see behind the spittle-inducing statements of jihadists and know the Islamists are actually protesting poverty rather than really meaning to kill Jews and eliminate the nation of Israel. Because of their secret knowledge about the true conditions of humanity and the remedies for ill, Gnostics can see behind Iranians’ leaders desire to get rid of the “Great Satan” in order to issue in the reign of the 12th imam and see that at heart, radical Muslims truly believe in peace for all mankind.
Liberal Gnostics also can see clearly that the mass murders of American citizens by lone gunmen are really the fault of the NRA’s advocacy of gun ownership. They discern with inner clarity that the solution to violence is not only to disarm the American populace but to ensure none of our kids even so much as point a finger at anyone and say, “Bang; bang. You’re dead.” In brief, if your child doesn’t even think violent thoughts, evil will never happen.
Leftist Gnostics can also discern that anything bad that happens in the Obama administration is not really his fault. The bad seeds now producing bitter fruit were planted during the administration of G.W. Bush. The illogical conclusion: Nothing is ever Obama’s responsibility, much less his fault.
The fact some guy just murdered his wife and should be punished is trumped by Gnostic prophetic musings about the criminal’s past and pleasant dreams about rehabilitating him and his society in the future. The victim whose blood cries out for justice in the here and now is not as important as political augury extending back into the past to discern how things got this way as well as looking forward into the future to determine how things will change for the better. The present moment, the present reality is entirely insignificant. The murder is significant only for what it represents. It is symbolic, not real.
In sum, for the Gnostic Left, the reality of bad or even criminal behavior is trumped by the idea of how things were and how they ought to be, not how they are in the here and now.
But the greatest Gnostic denial of all is the denial of the almost limitless capacity for evil that lies within the human heart. In laying the blame on material reality as being inherently corrupt and in dreaming of fantastical utopias of the future, Gnostics fail to see that their mystical inner word of discernment can be as corrupted as anything actually occurring within the material world. That clear, spiritual inner voice is not necessarily pure as driven snow. It, too, has unpleasant realities and odious capacities. A soul can smell worse than the body.
As Weigel writes,
“Reality may be, and often is, unpleasant. But policies rooted in a failure to grasp reality are dangerous, and too often deadly. […] A culture convinced that everything is malleable and that there are no givens in personal or public life is not a culture likely to sustain serious debates about serious public-policy options.”
… Ultimately, Gnosticism in all its forms, including current liberal political thought, owes its basis to the Devil’s lie to all humans: “You shall be as gods.” The lure of having infallible inner knowledge of how things really are combined with the mystical misconception that the will to power is all that matters, ignores not only material reality, but the reality of the fact that both good and evil speak to the human heart.
In the end, Gnostics’ belief that the still, small voice within can trump reality puts politics, national and international, on the road to perdition.
The Times has an obituary for the
French actress renowned for playing adulterous bourgeois women and winning a Bafta for her role as the cook in Babette's Feast.
Brace yourself for a stampede of public figures all claiming to be King’s greatest admirer
as April 4th marks 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr was murdered in Memphis. Benny Huang,
who has written about MLK before, declares that he will not pretend
to be one of them. Unlike a lot of conservatives I wouldn’t be caught dead trying to co-opt MLK and his undeserved aura of moral superiority.
Not that King didn’t have a lot of nice things to say. I can support
the sentiment behind his “I Have a Dream” speech despite the fact that
it was co-written by King’s Communist Party handler. I firmly believe that we should judge people by the content of their character not the color of their skin.
But King did not. He simply mouthed those vapid words because he was
trying to persuade a majority-white nation to pass the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, an unconstitutional monstrosity that turned out to be even
worse than its critics had predicted. King’s tactical appeal to
colorblindness was destined to be tossed aside the moment he achieved
his short-term policy goals. As the recognized advocate for America’s only substantial racial
minority, MLK vowed to resolve the race issue once and for all in return
for a few small concessions: our property rights, our right to free
association, our free speech rights, and our right not to be subjected
to involuntary servitude.
It would have been a terrible deal even if each side had held up its end of the bargain. But that’s not what happened.
Less than one year after King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech
Congress gave him what he wanted: a sweeping nondiscrimination law that
invaded the private sphere and unleashed the federal government’s
massive authority to police even our thoughts and intentions. It was
supposed to be government-mandated race neutrality which was
something most Americans could get behind because of their inherent
sense of fair play. Personally, I find the race neutrality part
appealing but resent the government mandated part, especially as it
applies to private entities.
The bill was passed by a congressional supermajority and signed into
law by the old racist Lyndon Johnson who was afforded the opportunity to
portray himself as the black man’s best friend which he most certainly was not.
That was the bait. Then came the switch.
About four months later King sat for an interview with the future Rootsplagiarist Alex Haley in which he argued for racial preferences—which he would also soon get.
Said King:
“Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was
enslaved and robbed of any wages–potential accrued wealth which would
have been the legacy of his descendants. All of America’s wealth today
could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of
exploitation and humiliation.”
Translation: It’s payback time. According to King,
everything America has is stolen wealth. White people should feel lucky
that they’re being allowed to get away with merely being discriminated
against for generations to come. They deserve much worse.
For the remaining three and a half years of King’s life he worked
tirelessly toward Marxist revanchism. He supported racial discrimination
(in his own favor), further eroded our constitutional rights with the
Voting Rights Act and Fair Housing Act, and fought for an even more robust welfare state than even Lyndon Johnson had proposed.
In the same Haley interview
King endorsed racial preferences in housing and hiring, as well as a
$50 billion spending package exclusively for blacks—about $400 billion
in today’s inflated currency. Funny how he didn’t mention any of that until after he got the Civil Rights Act.
King’s support for racial preferences stands in stark violation of
the law he championed that same year. The Civil Rights Act of 1964
clearly states that employers may not discriminate on the basis of race.
It does not say that employers may discriminate against whites (or
Asians!) as long as they’re trying to redress historical grievances.
More importantly: If the bill had contained that kind of language it never would have passed.
But alas, employers have been favoring black over white ever since.
Martin Luther King did not oppose that kind of discrimination because he
never actually opposed racial discrimination per se. He just didn’t like being on the wrong end of it—and who does?
The idea that King opposed racial discrimination is just one of several myths that won’t die. Let’s unpack a few others.
MLK was not non-violent. We’ve been taught this lie because he
refused to fight with the policemen and redneck vigilantes who roughed
him up. But he supported the ultra-violent Planned Parenthood and physically beat
at least one of his many adulterous relations so we know he had no
problem picking fights with women and children. That didn’t make him
Gandhi it just made him a coward.
He also winked at urban rioting.
It’s no wonder his followers honored his legacy by burning down more
than one hundred American cities in the days that followed his
assassination.
Nor was King a patriotic American trying to make his country live up to
its founding ideals. He was actually only one degree removed from the
Soviet Union and he almost certainly knew it. Imagine all the worst
accusations that have been lodged against Donald Trump about his
supposed collusion with the Russians to “steal our democracy”—then
imagine that they’re actually true. That was Martin Luther King.
MLK was just starting to become a household name during the 1956
Montgomery Bus Boycott when he met a Communist Party apparatchik named
Stanley Levison. According to King biographer David Garrow, Levison was
King’s closest white friend.
Levison conveniently “quit” the Communist Party in 1957. He was still
very much a small “c” communist though conveniently unburdened by the
party membership card he had carried for ten years. In all likelihood
his departure was a sham.
Levison was always the man behind the curtain. Even Garrow and other sources friendly to King admit
that Levison got King his first book deal, reviewed the book line by
line, wrote whole drafts of King’s speeches, did King’s taxes, and wrote
his fundraising letters.
And yet I suspect that Garrow’s description of the relationship
between these two men soft-pedals the truth: Levison did everything for
King except speak with that booming black preacher’s voice. For that,
the CPUSA needed an honest-to-goodness black man and a purported
Christian.
There’s a word in the intelligence community for guys like Stanley Levison. They’re called “handlers.”
Stanley Levison joined the CPUSA in 1946 just when the wartime
alliance between the US and the Soviet Union was crumbling. (See John
Barron’s Operation Solo: Our Man Inside the Kremlin.
) Unlike party members who joined in the 1930’s, he cannot claim that
he was attracted to the Communist Party only because of its fervent
opposition to Hitler’s Germany. He was, like every other CPUSA member at
the time, a fanatical defender of Stalin and Soviet Communism. If he
hadn’t been he would have been quickly shown the door.
Even before Levison was introduced to King the FBI had already
identified him as a party treasurer. Levison’s duties might explain why
he was so closely involved in the “civil rights movement’s” finances.
Where all that money came from is anybody’s guess but it’s not
outlandish to consider the Kremlin as one possible source.
What we do know is that the CPUSA always did the Soviet Union’s
bidding. Professor Harvey Klehr et al. argue convincingly in their
excellent book The Soviet World of American Communism
that the CPUSA was a willing instrument of Soviet policymakers. Their
assertion is based on extensive review of Soviet archives opened to
scholars in the early 1990s.
They write:
“[A]t every period of the CPUSA’s history, the American
communists looked to their Soviet counterparts for advice on how to
conduct their own party business. But there was more to it than that:
these documents show that the CPUSA was never an independent political
organization. There were moments when it was less strictly controlled by
Moscow than at others, but there was never a time when CPUSA made its
decisions autonomously, without being obliged to answer to or—more
precisely—without wishing to answer to Soviet authority.”
It should come as no surprise then that Levison was observed in 1962
by FBI counterintelligence meeting with the undercover KGB man Viktor
Lesiovsky, who was then working ostensibly as an assistant to UN
Secretary-General U Thant. This was after Levison “quit” CPUSA.
The Soviet Union was the puppet master pulling Levison’s strings
through the CPUSA. Stanley Levison in turn was pulling MLK’s strings. A
single tissue-thin layer separated King from Moscow and both sides knew
it.
Once one understands this basic fact, so much else becomes
clear—King’s insistence on an even more aggressive war on poverty at the
expense of military spending, for example. Geez, why might the Soviets
be interested in that? Consider his constant racial agitation. Might a
divided America be a weaker foe? The Soviets certainly thought so.
Martin Luther King was dishonest, cowardly, and downright seditious.
He was no hero and the world would be a better place if he had never
existed.
A French police officer who offered himself up in a hostage swap Friday after an armed man reportedly yelling “Allahu Akbar” went on a rampage in southern France, has died
Details about the death of the officer, identified as Col. Arnaud Beltrame, were not immediately available.
Interior Minister Gerard Collomb wrote in a tweet early Saturday that Beltrame had "died for his country."
The officer had offered himself up unarmed to the 25-year-old attacker in exchange for a female hostage.
He managed to surreptitiously leave his cellphone on so that police outside could hear what was going on inside the supermarket.
Officials said once they heard shots inside the market they decided to storm it, killing the gunman.
Beltrame was grievously injured, and his death raised the toll from the attack to four.
The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack, the deadliest since Emmanuel Macron became president last May.
Police said the suspect, identified as Redouane Lakdim, 26, carjacked a vehicle, shot at police and barricaded himself inside a Super U supermarket in Trebes before officers stormed in, fatally shooting him.
The mother of a French police officer who was killed after he swapped himself for a hostage during an Islamic extremist attack on a supermarket says that she wasn't surprised by her son's courage.
Col. Arnaud …
Beltrame's mother told RTL radio Friday night before the announcement of his death that
"I'm not surprised. I knew it had to be him. He has always been like that. It's someone, since he was born, who gives everything for his homeland."
Asked if she was proud of him, she said he would have told her "'I'm doing my job mom, that's all.'"
She said to "defend the homeland" was his "reason for living."
Jakob Stegelmann (th) var med som Tintin-ekspert, da kronprins Frederik så udstillingen på Brandts. V til H: Erik Svane, Belgisk ambassadør Leo Peeters, Odense borgmester Peter Rahbæk Juel, Kronprins Frederik, direktør for Brandts Mads Damsbo, Jakob Stegelmann
At the last moment, I was asked to join the inaugural tour of Brandts's Hergé exhibit in Odense for Crown Prince Frederik, since I had met the Belgian artist as a child when one of the Danish Embassy's top honchos (none other than my father) helped get two signed Tintin albums to the Danish princes (the one to Kronprins Frederik being Tintin au Tibet).
Photos by Fyns Stifitstidendes Birgitte Carol Holberg
Kronprins Frederik fik en rundvisning i den nye Hergé-udstilling af flere Tintin-eksperter. Her snakker han med Nick Rodwell, direktør for Musée Hergé, mens borgmester Peter Rahbæk Juel (i midten) og tegneserie-elsker Jakob Stegelmann (th) ser på. V til H: Nick Rodwell, Belgisk ambassadør Leo Peeters (skjult), Kronprins Frederik, Erik Svane, Odense borgmester Peter Rahbæk Juel, ukendt, Jakob Stegelmann. (Michael Farr var også tilstede.)
The Judges’ handbook on the language of equality misses out the despised new underclass: Oxbridge-educated, cis males. Thus writes Giles Coren in the Times of London:
According to a story in Thursday’s Times, a handbook has at last been published offering judges “advice in how to avoid giving offence”.
… Thank heavens. We live in better and more enlightened times. Overt
racism and sexism are not tolerated anywhere, by anyone. Except in the
White House, of course. So what the Judicial College is looking to stamp
out now, as the noose tightens around those who would seek to upset
their fellow humans with outrageous prejudice, are words like
“Afro-Caribbean” (which I didn’t know was actively offensive but is a
mouthful and I’d never say it anyway), “transsexual” (which I assumed
was fine but should apparently be “trans person”), “ethnic minority”
(which I truly thought was just a description of when one ethnic group
is outnumbered by another), and “postman”, which is obviously downright
bloody disgusting fascist language and must be stamped out now, or we
will soon be in a situation like Germany in 1933, with postmen first
being denied marriage licences and council flats, then being hounded
into special “postie” ghettos, then “relocated in the East” and
ultimately marched to their deaths in the gas chambers of Poland — all
of which, the Equal Treatment Bench Book asserts, can be avoided by merely calling them “postal operatives” instead. So a big “phew” for that.
And speaking of gas chambers, they are also looking to stamp
out the word “Jew” on account of its “potentially negative
connotations”. So does that mean I am not one any more? I mean, it’s
great that judges are being told not to chase me down the street
throwing rashers of bacon at me, shouting “Jew! Jew! Jew!”, because
frankly I have had enough of that, but if it’s at the expense of my
using the only word I can think of to describe my racial identity then
maybe I’m not such a big winner after all.
And “Jew” is my racial
identity only, by the way. I do not practise. I am a “Jew” only in the
way that a black person is black. Although with more counting money and
less dancing. Is that racist? Yes. But only because I said “Jew”,
according to the handbook. What I should have said was “Jewish person”.
Because that is MASSIVELY different.
It’s like when Benedict Cumberbatch got hauled up (rightly) for
saying “coloured actors” and we suddenly learnt that “person of colour”
was a thing. So white columnists all started writing “person of colour”
everywhere to show how liberal they were, until Twitter exploded with
pissed-off black people, shouting, “I’m not a person of colour! I am a
black woman!” And damn right. Because euphemism is the worst thing of
all. It compels people to apologise linguistically for being who they
are.
The political correctness movement did a wonderful thing
from the mid-1980s onwards to change the language used about groups who
had suffered years of bigotry. But changing the focus of language did
not reduce the sum total of hate. You can’t do that.
Telling a
blind person — as the handbook recommends — that she is “a person with
sensory impairment” does not give her back her sight.
… In ten years on social media, nobody has ever called me a y**. Or
even a Jewish person. But every time I write something that the
millennials don’t like, they pour forth a stream of personal abuse
centred around such new disentitlements as being “privileged”, “cis
male”, “Oxbridge” and “public school”, all of them accidents of birth
which my abusers believe should disqualify me from work in the media.
When
I write something angry they ask, “U okay hon?” which, in case you
didn’t know, is the modern way of suggesting that a person is
experiencing mental health issues. It is exactly the same as calling
someone with depression a “spastic in the head”. It’s just new words for
an old thing. No less hate.
And when the swarms of millennials who will misread this piece for a
defence of bigotry set about snarling “privileged, public school,
cisgender male!” at me, they will do it — just like the tribal Labour
supporter who yells “Tory scum!” with a venom that passes way beyond the
realm of political dissent — with every ounce as much hatred as any
black-shirted Mosleyite ever shouted “n***er!” or “p*ki!”
So I’m
going to say to the judges: burn your stupid handbooks (although not in a
Nazi way) and just show respect for your fellow humans. And if that
leads to a Holocaust of the postmen, well . . . my bad.
“I want you to know that in this election you are not
electing a member of the House of Representatives. You are electing the
jury for the impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Never forget that over
these next few months.”
When Michael Moore gives Democrats that message (thanks to Stephen Green) — he is actually quoting "a Democrat running in my district in Michigan" — he does not realize how revealing he is of the true nature of the Democrat Party. (Thanks to Ed Driscoll for the Instalink.)
A jury is supposed to be impartial — with lots of vetting from both defense and prosecution before each person is accepted as a bona fide member of said jury.
For leftists like Michael Moore, the courts, like the people in general, are supposed to fulfill the desires of the élites — our betters — and of the (Deep) State, in the same fashion as the kangaroo courts do or did in all authoritarian countries, from Nazi Germany to Sovet Russia.
How strange is that, however, for a man who, 11 years ago, basically admitted to a French newspaper that he was a full-fledged Marxist?
In the States, mainstream media types have called Michael Moore's Sicko his "least political film". But in his interview with Thomas Sotinel, the Le Mondereporter states that this seems to be Michael's coming-out as "a socialist". To which Moore answers (retranslated from the French) that, in a scene in Sicko,
I film myself on Marx's tomb. Nobody mentioned it. In the reviews in
America, they wrote, "it's his least political film." And I say: "Dude, I
am on Marx's Tomb!" Do I need to take out a baseball bat and hit them
on the head [for them to understand]?!
In case you hadn't understood, this says — and this reveals —
almost more about the powers-that-be (both in the U.S. and abroad) than
about Michael Moore:
being on the socialist/marxist-bordering left, for the MSM and
America's Eastern élites (as for Europe's MSM and élites), is
mainstream, is normal, is understandable, is OK, is cool. It is
avant-garde. Beyond being (naturally) avant-garde and therefore
(obviously) a positive and endearing trait, it hardly bares mentioning.
And it is "not political" (that's only a dirty game that America's
hit-below-the-belt Republicans play).
Nicolas Sarkozy was placed in custody … as part of an
investigation that he received millions of euros in illegal campaign
financing from the regime of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi …
No Pasarán has reported on this before — and on something far worse (see below) — and tried to bring it to the attention of American conservatives. Back in 2011, Instapundit quoted Foreign Policy's Joshua Keating as reporting on the Qaddafi régime's response to the French government's recognition of Libya's rebel forces, through Colonel Kaddhafi's son.
Saif al-Islam: “Sarkozy must first give back the money he took from
Libya to finance his electoral campaign. We funded it and we have all
the details and are ready to reveal everything. The first thing we want
this clown to do is to give the money back to the Libyan people.”
But that ain't all.
Far from it!
France ain't alone and Sarkozy's winning 2007 presidential campaign may hardly be the only one.
Is it possible that Obama's reluctance to interfere in the Libyan crisis has something to do with secrets?
Five months before the 2008 election, indeed, in June of that year,
E-nough's Damien reported on a speech (broadcast and translated by Memritv), which was held by none other than the "Brotherly Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya". (We will look away from Gaddafi's birther
credentials, even though from his perspective, calling Obama a Kenyan,
an African, and/or a Muslim is hardly a smear — far from it.) [Here is what Gadhafi said]
There
are elections in America now. Along came a black citizen of Kenyan
African origins, a Muslim, who had studied in an Islamic school in
Indonesia. His name is Obama. All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man. They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency.
Europe is being battered by unusually frigid conditions even as temperatures at the North Pole soar well above normal.
As the month of March 2018 started, Kendra Pierre-Louis reported that Europe was colder than the North Pole. So, naturally, with all the hoopla around global warming for the past few decades, her New York Times article could not only report on the (climate) news, it also had to explain how on Earth (yes, that's also meant literally) this could be the case. [Update: thanks to Ed Driscoll for the Instalink.] In the process, Kendra Pierre-Louis managed to repeat myths such as the one that "human-caused climate change … is agreed upon by 97
percent of climate scientists."
Subfreezing temperatures have spread across much of Europe over the past week, stretching from Poland to Spain. Snow fell in Rome
for the first time in six years. Norway recorded the lowest
temperatures of the cold snap: minus 43 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 42
Celsius) in the southeast part of the country on Thursday [March 1].
And
on Friday [March 2], Britain and Ireland were buffeted by a storm that brought
snow and high winds, along with cold that was expected to linger for
days.
If Europe feels like the Arctic
right now, the Arctic itself is balmy by comparison. The North Pole is
above the freezing mark in the dead of winter; there are no direct
measurements there, but merging satellite data with other temperature data
shows that temperatures soared this week to 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2
degrees Celsius). That is 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, and 78
degrees warmer than in parts of Norway.
The
Arctic warmth and the European cold snap have raised questions over
whether the unusual weather occurrences are linked to each other, and if
they are somehow related to climate change. Here are some answers.
Are the Arctic and European weather patterns connected?
Probably, according to Judah Cohen, a
climatologist who is director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and
Environmental Research, a weather risk assessment firm. Dr. Cohen is the author of a 2017 study that linked a warming Arctic to the intermittent blasts of cold that those of us in the Northern Hemisphere have come to know as the polar vortex.
The
polar vortex is a low-pressure system that, as its name suggests,
ordinarily rests over the North Pole. (There is also a polar vortex over
the Antarctic.)
When it behaves normally, the polar vortex helps trap cold air in the Arctic.
“It’s
locking in that cold air at the high latitudes in the Arctic region,”
Dr. Cohen said, comparing the polar vortex to a dam holding back the
frigid arctic air from the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
But
sometimes that dam bursts as the polar vortex weakens and allows cold
air to escape the Arctic to more temperate climes. This has always
happened from time to time, but a growing body of research suggests that because of climate change the warming Arctic is weakening the polar vortex.
Why is the polar vortex weakening?
Researchers
are still figuring out how the warming Arctic is triggering the polar
vortex’s aberrant behavior. Some of them, including Dr. Cohen, point to
melting sea ice, caused by global warming. Dr. Cohen says the loss of
ice creates patterns of high pressure near the Barents Sea and Kara Sea
off northern Russia. That high pressure blocks the low-pressure system
of the polar vortex, weakening it in the process.
There
is not yet a scientific consensus over the root cause of the weakening
polar vortex; it’s fair to say that it is not as definitive as, say, the
evidence for human-caused climate change, which is agreed upon by 97
percent of climate scientists.
When
the polar vortex weakens it allows cold air to escape and head south.
This is what Dr. Cohen suspects happened in late December and early
January when the Northeast United States endured some of its coldest
temperatures on record. Other researchers who conducted a rapid analysis of the weather event aren’t so sure, though they stress theirs is just a first pass at the data.
… meanwhile, some countries like Spain that are wholly unused to the cold are freezing.
That explains why Europe is freezing, but why is the Arctic so warm right now?
Dr.
Cohen likens the Arctic to the refrigerator in your kitchen. When the
refrigerator door is closed, the fridge stays cold and the kitchen stays
warm, but if you leave the fridge door open all the cold air comes out.
Because air is spilling out of the fridge, it has to be replaced by
surrounding air — air also has to flow into the fridge, or in this case
the Arctic. And since the air outside the Arctic is warmer, it will
necessarily move in.
For the first time in over 30 years, reports Géo, Corsica's capital is covered with snow.
Those explanations are all good'n'well, but as a Prager U video reveals, the New York Times is repeating a myth ("human-caused climate change … is agreed upon by 97
percent of climate scientists") that, according to Alex Epstein, Director of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, has a shady source, is a manipulative scare tactic disguised as scientific claim, and should never be used by anyone with intellectual honesty.
With regards to the "special Congressional election in Pennsylvania’s 18th District that Trump won by 20 points in 2016" and that a Democrat claims to have won, it is instructive to remember that Myra Adams reported from CPAC that the most frequently-asked question at the conservative get-together could be surprising to many:
… outside the ballroom, there was one question repeatedly on the minds
of conservative media people who lined “Broadcast Row.” Surprisingly,
the question discussed both openly and privately had nothing to do with
gun control or the NRA.
What was this question you ask? Drum roll: “Will Republicans keep control of the House in the midterm elections?”
Perhaps Trump heard the question was being raised. In his Friday
speech, in what was uncharacteristically negative talk for Trump, the
president warned that after his 2016 victory he knows Republicans could
be “clobbered” in the midterms due to complacency among GOP voters.
“That’s why you have to get out and you have to fight for 2018. You have
to do it,” he said.
Trump also explained his theory of historic midterm election losses for a new president:
“I’ve finally figured it out. What happens is you fight so hard to
win the presidency, you fight, fight, fight, and now you’ve got to go
and fight again, but you just won.”
