Showing posts from April, 2018

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Trump's International Art of the Deal

It’s really not that complicated. But President Trump’s Syria strikes have reopened the debate over what defines his foreign policy. Is he an interventionist or an isolationist? Foreign policy experts claim that he’s making it up as he goes along. But they’re not paying attention. President Trump’s foreign policy has two consistent elements. From threatening Kim Jong-Un on Twitter to moving the embassy to Jerusalem to bombing Syria, he applies pressure and then he disengages. Here’s how that works. First, Trump pressures the most intransigent and hostile side in the conflict. Second, he divests the United States from the conflict leaving the relevant parties to find a way to work it out. North Korea had spent decades using its nuclear program to bully its neighbors and the United States. Previous administrations had given the Communist dictatorship $1.3 billion in aid to keep it from developing its nuclear program. These bribes failed because they incentivized the nuclear p

Fresno State's Hate Problem

2017 was a bad year at Fresno State. 2018 looks to be even worse. In the winter of last year, Lars Maischak had tweeted, "To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance." The next day he inquired, “Has anyone started soliciting money and design drafts for a monument honoring the Trump assassin, yet?” Toward the end of the week, he proposed the mass murder of Republicans, “Justice = The execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant.” Maischak was a history adjunct at Fresno State whose topics had included, “Marx and Hegel for Historians.” President Castro eventually clarified that calls to murder the President of the United States and millions of Republicans, “do not reflect the position of the University.” Castro failed to clearly condemn Maischak’s murderous tweets. Instead Maischak took a voluntary leave “conducting research off campus”. His university faculty page appears to be active. Had an adju

Big Banks Target the Bill of Rights

The American people lent $45 billion to Bank of America during the bailout. That bailout came with a hefty $100 billion guarantee against losses on toxic assets. That money came from American taxpayers. It came from gun owners and non-gun owners. But Bank of America has warned that it will refuse to lend money to manufacturers of “assault-style guns”. It had previously announced it was edging away from the coal business to fight global warming. Citigroup got $476 billion in cash and guarantees: the most of any bank. Now Citibank is repaying the generosity of the American people by requiring its clients to impose their own gun control policies on their stores. Impose gun control on your customers or Citibank will discriminate against you. Next up is Wells Fargo. The stagecoach brand has said that it’s up to the government to impose gun control, but that it is discussing gun safety with its clients. That’s not enough for outraged activists. The American Federation of Teachers, an org

Who Can Count the Dust of Jacob

" Who can count the dust of Jacob or number the seed of Israel ." Numbers 23:10 The sun sets above the hills. The siren cries out and on the busy highways that wend among the hills,  the traffic stops ,  the people stop , and a moment of silence comes to a noisy country. Flags fly at half mast, the torch of remembrance is lit, memorial candles are held in shaking hands and the country's own version of the Flanders Field poppy, the Red Everlasting daisy, dubbed Blood of the Maccabees, adorns lapels. And so begins the Yom Hazikaron, Heroes Remembrance Day, the day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terror-- Israel's Memorial Day. What is a memorial day in a country that has always known war and where remembrance means adding the toll of one year's dead and wounded to the scales of history? A country where war never ends, where the sirens may pause but never stop, where each generation grows up knowing that they will have to fight or flee. To stand

The Media's War on the First Amendment

The media took a brief break from its campaign against the Sinclair Media Group to go after the National Enquirer. The two don’t have anything in common except the perception of being pro-Trump. In the good old days, going after rival media outlets meant writing nasty things about them. But these days the media doesn’t write nasty things for the sake of writing them. It writes nasty things to get someone fired, investigated or imprisoned. And that’s what its Sinclair and Enquirer stories are about. CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times had wasted barrels of ink and pixels, to warn that Trump’s criticism of their media outlets represented a grave threat to the First Amendment. And what better way to protect the First Amendment than by destroying it? In its story about the FBI raid on Trump’s lawyer, the Times managed to suggest that the Enquirer’s support for the President of the United States might strip it of its First Amendment protection. The Times tells its rea

Another Election Conspiracy Theory Bites the Dust

In the middle of March,  The Guardian , a British lefty tabloid, rolled out a fake scandal that has dominated the media. Its original article claimed that Christopher Wylie, a "whistleblower", had revealed how Cambridge Analytica, the company he had worked for, had helped Trump win by illegitimately harvesting large amounts of Facebook data and then exploiting it to target users. The story has since fallen apart in every conceivable way that a story is capable of falling apart. Obama’s people had also harvested data from Facebook friends. "We ingested the entire U.S. social graph," his media analytics guru  had boasted . But so had everyone else. A platform operations manager at Facebook  estimated  that hundreds of thousands of developers had gotten access to friend data. So much for  The Guardian’s  claim that, "information had been harvested on an unprecedented scale". Free online services are part of a data marketplace. That’s the real busines

The Betrayal of the Holocaust

When we talk about the Holocaust, we are talking about the mass murder of millions of Jews. The dead included my grandparents and countless others, shot, starved, gassed, beaten to death and buried in mass graves. And yet the lessons of the Holocaust in its commemorations rarely have anything to do with Jewish lives.  Millions of dollars have been spent building memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, even as Iran is spending its millions on building another kind of memorial to the Holocaust, in the form of nuclear technology. Ben Rhodes, the Obama crony who helped sell the Iranian Big Lie, sits on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Council. The Washington D.C. museum ignores the murder of Jews in Israel, but is very worked up over the deaths of Muslims in Myanmar, in Egypt and around the world. Millions more are spent, by some of the same groups that claim an interest in Holocaust education, on bringing Muslim migrants to America and Europe to carry out the promise o

March For Our Lives Isn't a Youth Movement

A month after the Parkland shootings, a  Quinnipiac poll  showed that voters 18-34 were much less likely to support either an “assault weapons” ban or a ban on the sale of “semi-automatic rifles”. 80% of voters 65 years of age and older supported an “assault weapons ban”, but those 18-34 split over it. A majority of voters 65 and over backed the “semi-automatic rifle” bans, but a majority of 18-34 voters opposed it. The Washington D.C. March for Our Lives rally was billed as a way for the next generation of youth to speak out. But only 10% of the crowd that cheered the bizarre drama club antics on stage was under 18. The  average age of  the adults was 49 years old. That’s young compared to the median age of the CNN primetime viewer:   60 years old . The media hype for the March was a cable news phenomenon. Few millennials even watch cable news. Why would they show up for a media circus whose audience is approaching retirement age? 70% of the March for Our Lives attendees