tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77949542024-03-07T03:47:25.296-05:00carnage and culture"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." - George Washingtonjtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.comBlogger12520125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-32233723231724547442019-09-28T08:04:00.001-05:002019-09-28T08:05:16.833-05:00‘The Irishman’ review: Scorsese, De Niro and Pesci triumph<br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: , sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 12px;">By </span><a class="johnny-oleksinski" href="https://nypost.com/author/johnny-oleksinski/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); background-color: white; box-shadow: rgb(42, 42, 42) 0px 0px 0px 2px, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.247059) 0px 3px 6px; display: inline-block; font-family: proxima-nova, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 12px; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Johnny Oleksinski</a><br />
<a href="https://nypost.com/2019/09/27/the-irishman-review-scorsese-de-niro-and-pesci-triumph/">https://nypost.com/2019/09/27/the-irishman-review-scorsese-de-niro-and-pesci-triumph/</a><br />
September 27, 2019<br />
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Martin Scorsese needs to de-age me now that I’ve seen “The Irishman,” his epic that <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/07/29/martin-scorseses-the-irishman-to-open-new-york-film-festival/" style="color: #cc3333; text-decoration: none;">had its world premiere</a> Friday at the New York Film Festival.</div>
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At 3 ¹/₂ hours, the Frank Sheeran-Jimmy Hoffa biopic is not only the <a href="https://pagesix.com/2018/03/12/the-irishman-could-be-scorseses-most-expensive-film-yet/" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #cc3333; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">longest film of Scorsese’s career</a>, but the longest studio movie of the decade.</div>
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Well, chug a 5-hour Energy, because the terrific “Irishman” deserves your full, un-fatigued attention.</div>
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The buzz around the movie until now has not been about how this is Scorsese’s first collaboration with Al Pacino, or that it’s the director’s grand return to the mafia genre after 1995’s “Casino.” What the people are going crazy over are the digital face-lifts. That’s right — Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Pacino are <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/07/31/the-irishman-trailer-robert-de-niro-al-pacino-star-in-scorsese-film/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #cc3333; text-decoration: none;">given the Joan Rivers treatment</a> with the help of CGI.</div>
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We watch Sheeran (De Niro), a truck-driver-turned-mob-fixer age back-and-forth from his 30s to his 80s and many years in between. The pricey special effect is cool, if occasionally creepy. In the youthful scenes, De Niro looks less 30 and more Gumby, with expressionless eyes and face only a Martian could love. But as the actors move closer to their natural ages, the subtle, computerized wrinkle cream works wonders.</div>
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The first part of the movie is a lot like “Goodfellas.” There’s voiceover narration provided by Sheeran from a retirement home and a nostalgic origin story set to “In the Still of the Night.” He starts off in the 1950s as a union driver and soon winds up doing favors for the Philly-based Bufalino crime family, headed by Russell Bufalino (Pesci).</div>
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Pesci’s iconic turns are so rammed in our minds that it’s easy to forget he retired and hasn’t made a movie in almost a decade. But in this genre, Pesci’s the Most Valuable Paisan. The 76-year-old actor brings all his scrappy idiosyncrasies, but is also more tender and introspective than usual.</div>
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“The Irishman” breaks from the mobster flick formula when Hoffa (Pacino) enters the picture in the 1960s. A pal of the Bufalinos, the powerful union boss needs protection, so they enlist Sheeran. The pair become friends, and the fixer’s questions of loyalty, love and family intensify.</div>
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This has a different tone than your average gangster film. Plenty of marks are shot in the forehead, yes, and a lot of wine is poured in the corner booths of dimly lit Italian restaurants, but it’s also knock-down, drag-out-into-the-river funny. The best line belongs to De Niro: “Usually three people can keep a secret,” he says. “When two of them are dead.” And Pacino is a ham as Hoffa, wildly gesturing like a coked-up cheerleader and bickering with everybody.</div>
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Speaking of Jimmy, the movie is based on the 2004 biography of Sheeran called “<a data-amzn-asin="1586422383" data-ga-event="{"category":"affiliate ecommerce click","action":"amazon","label":"https://www.amazon.com/Heard-You-Paint-Houses-Irishman/dp/1586422383?tag=nypost-20"}" href="https://www.amazon.com/Heard-You-Paint-Houses-Irishman/dp/1586422383?tag=nypost-20" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #cc3333; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">I Heard You Paint Houses</a>,” and so we see his version of what happened to Hoffa, who went missing in 1975 and was never found. I won’t tell you what that story is, but it sure ain’t vague.</div>
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Five decades is a lot of history to hold together, and it could have easily crumbled. <a href="https://nypost.com/2018/06/15/gotti-flick-is-the-worst-mob-movie-of-all-time/" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: #cc3333; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Remember “Gotti”</a>? But Scorsese is at the top of his game here. His film is never boring, and it explores some unexpectedly deep themes for mafiosos. Witness De Niro coming alive as his character crawls toward death: friendless, ailing and with only a priest to talk to.</div>
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The director’s mindset has, thankfully, not been de-aged. When Scorsese was 47, he made a movie in which his main character said he “always wanted to be a gangster.” At 76, Scorsese would rather focus on a guy who just wants his daughter to call back.</div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-69754305658852192762019-09-27T08:30:00.001-05:002019-09-27T08:30:43.302-05:00Understanding the Impeachment Charade<br />
By Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel<br />
<a href="https://townhall.com/columnists/tuckercarlsonandneilpatel/2019/09/27/understanding-the-impeachment-charade-n2553796">https://townhall.com/columnists/tuckercarlsonandneilpatel/2019/09/27/understanding-the-impeachment-charade-n2553796</a><br />
September 27, 2019<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;">Washington scandals are moving at a record pace. It was only a week ago that</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"> </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;">The New York Times</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;">launched its unfair hit piece on Brett Kavanaugh. This is the Trump-era news cycle. Scandals that used to go on for months now seem to end in hours. Nothing illustrates this better than the bizarre Ukraine story we're all living through. A week ago, no one had even heard of it. Then we were on the brink of impeachment because of it, and now it seems it may be over already.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The same angry news anchors who brought you Stormy Daniels and the Russia hoax now want you to know Big Orange's days in the White House are over. Why? Because Donald Trump, they say, threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine did something bad to Joe Biden and his family. Supposedly, Trump was finished.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Once again, the mob turned out to be wrong. The administration released a transcript of the president's phone call with the Ukrainian head of state, and it says none of the things the news anchors claimed it would. Read it for yourself. It's online. Try to find the extortion in there. There isn't any. Trump never even mentions military aid. There's certainly something unseemly about a president asking a foreign government to investigate an American citizen, but it's not illegal, and it's not all that different from three Democratic senators' writing a letter to Ukraine just last year demanding investigations into Trump.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Now that the call turns out to be nothing like what the media told us it would be, some on the left have started a conspiracy theory that the transcript can't be real; it must be doctored. These conspiracies aren't confined to weird corners of the internet. Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff have already questioned the trustworthiness of the transcript, despite the fact that there's no evidence of wrongdoing. Numerous career national security officials -- many not fans of our president -- have access to the original call and would have to be in on any conspiracy.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What's driving all this insanity? Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, has been more honest about it than most. Green admitted it straight up: "I'm concerned that if we don't impeach this president, he will get reelected."</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lots of Democrats, including many of today's party leaders, stood up when Bill Clinton was impeached to give impassioned speeches about the perils of taking away the American people's choice. Here's today's impeachment ringleader, Rep. Jerry Nadler, in 1998:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #ededed; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 33.6px;">"The impeachment of a president is an undoing of a national election. And one of the reasons we all feel so angry about what they are doing is that they are ripping asunder our votes. They are telling us that our votes don't count."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And here's Nancy Pelosi in 1998 on the hatred behind the Clinton impeachment push:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #ededed; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"Today, the Republican majority is not judging the president with fairness but impeaching him with a vengeance ... We are here today because the Republicans in the House are paralyzed with hatred of President Clinton. And until the Republicans free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer."</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sadly, Nadler and Pelosi were right in 1998. Republicans should not have impeached Clinton, and they paid the price. Democrats today hate Trump. It's not about justice or truth. What they care about is winning the 2020 presidential election. Democratic leaders have decided that impeaching Trump is essential if they're going to win next year. So they're staking everything on this bizarre, flimsy scandal that the rest of us can barely understand.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Personal attacks on Trump have proven ineffective. If calling him a racist or a traitor actually worked, Hillary Clinton would be running for reelection right about now. That's not going to work. If you want to beat Trump, make a case on the issues. He won on the issues. So make a countercase. But the geniuses can't figure that out.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the end, the loser in this impeachment nonsense is likely to be Biden, who, you will recall, is the apparent front-runner. He's supposed to be the safe choice, the guy who's going to reenergize the Obama coalition and win back the White House. Yet Democrats have now in effect demanded that we spend the next six months talking about Biden and his son's alleged corruption. That's what's at the core of this Ukraine story.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The issues aren't really complicated. Why in the world would a Ukrainian company pay Hunter Biden $50,000 a month? We still haven't heard an answer. If we're talking about Ukraine and impeachment, we're talking about Biden's alleged corruption. That can't help his campaign for president. In fact, it's likely to tank it. It looks like sabotage, really. They must have gamed this up. Or maybe Democrats have just become so obsessed with destroying Trump that they're accidentally destroying themselves.</span></span><br />
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-18532142897269509522019-09-25T21:27:00.000-05:002019-09-25T21:27:09.878-05:00Book Review: 'That All Shall Be Saved' by David Bentley Hart<br />
By Thomas Talbott, Ph.D.<br />
<a href="https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/09/03/book-review-that-all-shall-be-saved/">https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/09/03/book-review-that-all-shall-be-saved/</a><br />
September 3, 2019<br />
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<b>Part I: Some Introductory Remarks</b></div>
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At a time when a good many books have been written, some by academics and others by non-academics, on the topic of Christian universalism, David Bentley Hart’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300246226/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag%C3%AClectorthod-20&creative%C2%9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN00246226&linkId%C3%9F016bfde2513da9bd359ea81916f2ba" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation</em></a> stands out in several ways. Its author is, first and foremost, an accomplished classicist and expert in the Greek language, one whose previous publications include an important translation of the New Testament. And one of his purposes in this translation was to restore “certain ambiguities” that, so he believes, are “present in the original texts” but have been lost in later translations. He thus writes, “I am firmly convinced that two millennia of dogmatic tradition have created in the minds of most of us a fundamentally misleading picture of the claims made in Christian scripture” (p. 3). He traces much of that misleading picture, most notably the doctrines of limited election and limited atonement, “back to the late Augustine—a towering genius whose inability to read Greek and consequent reliance on defective Latin translations turned out to be the single most consequential case of linguistic incompetence in Christian history” (p. 49). As this quotation already illustrates, Hart pulls few of his punches in this book; and that very fact, whatever else one might think about it, contributes a lot to the book’s rhetorical power.</div>
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Hart relentlessly opposes, secondly, the whole idea of unending punishment and any other conception of a final separation from God; he rejects all such ideas as “manifestly absurd” even when they do not rest upon a morally offensive doctrine of limited election. For even “the gentlest, the most morally delicate, the most judiciously reluctant” conceptions of a final separation from God “all start . . . on the far side of a prior existential decision to accept an obviously ludicrous premise” (p. 202). So just what is this ludicrous premise, according to Hart? It is essentially the premise that divine justice, divine love, and divine goodness are compatible with God’s having created someone whose final fate he always knew would consist of everlasting misery and torment. For how could that even be possible? “If ‘justice’ means anything at all,” Hart protests, “it cannot be that; if ‘love’ means anything at all, it cannot be that; if ‘goodness’ means anything at all, it cannot be that” (p. 203). Hart also notes how glibly some speak of eternal conscious torment without seriously considering what such a destiny would truly mean. “Can we [even] imagine,” he asks, “that someone still in torment after a trillion years, or then a trillion trillion, or then a trillion vigintillion, is in any meaningful sense the same agent who contracted some measurable quantity of personal guilt in that tiny, ever more vanishingly insubstantial gleam of an instant that constituted his or her terrestrial life?” (pp. 203-204).</div>
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A third unique feature of this book is the extent to which its author refuses to apologize for the hard-hitting nature of his personal manifesto against the “infernalist orthodoxy,” as he calls it. He thus writes:</div>
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Custom dictates and prudence advises that here, in closing, I wax gracefully disingenuous and declare that . . . I entirely understand the views of those that take the opposite side of the argument, and that I fully respect contrary opinions on these matters. . . . [But] I believe that I am obeying my conscience with a special rigor in rejecting the majority view that there is a hell of eternal torment, since I am fairly sure that it must be a wicked thing to give one’s intellectual assent to something that one cannot help but find morally repugnant. . . . I make no apologies whatsoever for rejecting the late Augustinian tradition . . . [and] that tradition’s sheer moral wretchedness as a vision of the gospel . . . I have [also] rejected every version of the infernalist orthodoxy, no matter which Christian tradition may have produced it, and no matter how tenderhearted the reasoning that informs it. To have done otherwise would have been dishonest on my part. (pp. 199-200)</div>
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Although he rejects this “infernalist orthodoxy,” sometimes in exceedingly harsh terms, as morally intolerable, biblically untenable, and philosophically confused, Hart nonetheless acknowledges that the book he has written “is at odds with a body of received opinion so invincibly well-established” that he “cannot reasonably expect to persuade anyone of anything,” with the possible exception of persuading some of his own sincerity (p. 4). At the same time, however, he laments having written a book that “ought never have needed to be written in the first place” because “the doctrine of eternal hell is prima facie nonsensical” (p. 202). And herein lies an insight into his rhetorical strategy, which will, I suspect, make this book difficult for evangelicals and other self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy simply to ignore. Hart himself describes his effort as “a logical and rhetorical experiment” and explains this in the following way:</div>
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There is, at the very least, something liberating about knowing that I have probably lost the rhetorical contest before it has even begun. It spares me the effort of feigning tentativeness or moderation or judicious doubt . . . and allows me instead to advance my claims in as unconstrained a manner as possible . . . [I]f nothing else, this book may provide the champions of the dominant view an occasion for honest reflection and scrupulous cerebration and serious analysis (and a whole host of other bracing intellectual virtues of that sort). (p. 4)</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;">But at this point, I fear, Hart may find himself subjected to an</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"> </span><em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ad hominem</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px;">argument of the following kind: the criticism that he just regards himself as morally superior to his infernalist opponents. It is a criticism that sort of goes with the territory. After publishing a scathing critique of the Reformed doctrine of reprobation several decades ago, one in which I labeled it “a respectable blasphemy” against God, I understandably received many harsh criticisms in return. The only criticism that touched my heart, however, was exceedingly gentle. It happened when the wife of my best friend in the Reformed church that my wife and I were then attending—a dear woman with some serious physical challenges—hesitantly expressed the worry that I might be regarding myself as more loving than others in the church. That was startling indeed, because I knew without question that others in the church were far more loving in their personal lives than I tend to be in my own. None of us, after all, are fully consistent in our moral lives. So in the end I found myself saying, or at least thinking to myself, things like, “Virtually all Calvinists I have known are far better than the theology they have embraced, even as I am far worse than the theology I have embraced.” But Hart’s own attempt to forestall similar criticisms may be better than my own. “Really,” he asks concerning the infernalist orthodoxy, “could we truly believe it apart from either profound personal fear or profound personal cruelty? Which is why, again, I do not believe that most Christians truly believe what they believe they believe” (p. 204). Some may find such a view counterintuitive, but I do not. For over the course of my own life, I have observed more than a few instances where people have sincerely thought they believed certain things about God only to have some tragic event—such as a husband dying “in unbelief” or a teenage daughter committing suicide—prove that they did not truly believe what they previously had sincerely thought they believed.</span><br />
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In any case, I have found no major theological claim in this book with which to disagree. It would be truly remarkable, of course, were I to agree with every detail of every argument presented therein. But I am prepared to endorse every major theological claim contained in the book, starting with this one, which I take to be the main thesis of the book: “if Christianity taken as a whole is indeed an entirely coherent and credible system of belief, then the universalist understanding of its message is <em style="background: transparent; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">the only one possible</em>” (p. 3—my emphasis). Not even many of those who sympathize with the universalist message are so bold as to declare that, given the New Testament understanding of God, the very idea of someone being lost forever represents a logical (or metaphysical) impossibility. Most find it sufficient to endorse a so-called “hopeful universalism,” even as they acknowledge that an eternal hell is at least logically possible. But I disagree with that, even as Hart does; and the reason we both reject even the logical possibility of an eternal hell should emerge in subsequent installments of this review.</div>
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(<a href="https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/09/04/tom-talbott-reviews-that-all-shall-be-saved-part-ii/" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Go to Part 2</a>)</div>
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<em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Dr Thomas Talbott is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Willamette University and author of the celebrated book on the greater hope, </em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1625646909/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag%C3%AClectorthod-20&creative%C2%9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN25646909&linkId7d34cd786698105d6a6bc0e0c0f8fe8" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Inescapable Love of God</a><em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">. He is the author of numerous <a href="http://www.willamette.edu/~ttalbott/publications.html" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">philosophical articles</a>, as well as a piece published on this blog: “<a href="https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2018/05/29/how-to-read-the-bible-from-a-universalist-perspective/" style="background: transparent; border: 0px; color: #743399; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">How to Read the Bible from a Universalist Perspective</a>.”</em></div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-73925907143479779062019-09-25T15:06:00.001-05:002019-09-25T15:06:49.350-05:00Is This Bruce Springsteen’s Single Greatest Live Moment?<br />
By Andy Greene<br />
<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bruce-springsteen-greatest-live-moment-prove-it-all-night-889615/">https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bruce-springsteen-greatest-live-moment-prove-it-all-night-889615/</a><br />
September 24, 2019<br />
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<img alt="Image result for springsteen passaic 1978" src="http://www.arlenschumer.com/images/stories/springsteen/TheLightinDarkness-CAPITOL_Page_2-1.jpg" /><br />
<i>The Capitol Theater, Passaic New Jersey (Arlen Schumer)</i><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><a data-tag="bruce-springsteen" href="https://www.rollingstone.com/t/bruce-springsteen/" id="auto-tag_bruce-springsteen" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Graphik Bold Subset', Graphik, Tahoma, Verdana, Segoe, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; position: relative; text-decoration: none;">Bruce Springsteen</a> has played somewhere in the ballpark of 2,600 concerts since signing to Columbia Records in 1972. Many of the ones before <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;">Born to Run</em> came out in 1975 have been lost to history, but the vast majority since have been bootlegged and traded within fan circles. Five years ago, Springsteen’s team made the wise decision to eliminate the need for bootlegs of his current shows by offering fans the chance to download every one them in pristine sound quality.</span></div>
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With all of this in mind, naming his single greatest concert is a very difficult task. And zooming in even further to pick out his best performance of a singular song is just absurd. After all, he’s played “Born to Run” 1,744 times, “Thunder Road” 1,424 times, and “The Promised Land” 1,375 times. Hell, he’s even done the 1984 B side “Shut Out the Light” 35 times, and “Jump” by Van Halen” twice. One time he even did Bon Jovi’s “Bad Medicine,” though nobody is going to pick that one.</div>
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But in honor of the man’s 70th birthday yesterday, we’re going to go ahead and pick our choice for his best live performance anyway. It was “Prove It All Night” at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, on September 19th, 1978. The show was broadcast on the radio and released as the famous <i>Pièce De Résistance</i> bootleg that Springsteen fans have cherished for years. Springsteen finally released it himself earlier this month as an official download. The Capitol Theatre also had a camera running and you can watch the whole thing right here.</div>
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It begins with a four-minute piano and guitar duel between Springsteen and E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan before the vocals kick in. The version of the song that follows makes the “Prove It All Night” on <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;">Darkness on the Edge of Town</em> sound like a limp, lifeless demo by comparison. The group had been touring the album for four months at this point and were in absolute peak form as a live band.</div>
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To be fair, there were 115 shows on the <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;">Darkness on the Edge of Town</em> tour and only a tiny handful survive in crystal-clear audio like this show. Even fewer were caught on film. It’s quite possible that other shows had a “Prove It All Night” even better than 9/19/78. It’s actually quite likely. But based on what we have access to at the moment, we stand by our choice.</div>
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Springsteen kept “Prove It All Night” in his live repertoire after 1978, but the extended version from the <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;">Darkness</em> tour vanished. The fans never gave up on hearing it again, though, and one even managed to ask Springsteen about it during a 2010 appearance on E Street Radio. “You’re one of the ’78 piano intro guys!” Springsteen said. “There are clones of you in various places throughout the United States. … It was just a device that worked nicely at the time. If you’d like to hear it again, that’ll probably never occur, my friend. But it was good while it lasted.”</div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent;">Just two years later, however, he revived it at a show in Barcelona and then did it again a handful of times throughout the tour. The fans were ecstatic, but it never quite reached the highs of 1978 or, more specifically, the high of September 19th, 1978. Feel free to disagree with us, though. And if you pick “Backstreets” from a 1978 show with a long “Sad Eyes” interlude, you might have a decent case to make.</span></div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-81606748083437076642019-09-25T06:47:00.000-05:002019-09-25T06:47:05.650-05:00A Detailed Account of America’s Greatest Political Scandal<br />
By Julie Kelly<br />
<a href="https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/24/a-detailed-account-of-americas-greatest-political-scandal/">https://amgreatness.com/2019/09/24/a-detailed-account-of-americas-greatest-political-scandal/</a><br />
September 24, 2019<br />
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<img alt="Image result for mccarthy ball of collusion" height="458" src="https://nrinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Andrew-McCarthy-Book-Graphic-1024x734.jpg" width="640" /><br />
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In early 2017, as the shocking story of how the Obama Administration weaponized the world’s most powerful agencies against Donald Trump began to unfold, very few journalists were willing to confront that scandal amid the cacophony of Trump-Russia collusion. Andrew McCarthy was one of them.</div>
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From the pages of <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">National Review</i> to the set of Fox News, McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, explained complex legal procedures in layman’s terms. Americans unfamiliar with FBI counterintelligence probes or the workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or Special Counsel rules were educated by McCarthy in a way that made it easy for the non-lawyer to grasp. McCarthy, a humble, humorous, and gracious man by nature, offered his expertise without the self-gratifying puffery ingrained in so many prosecutors. (Think James Comey.)</div>
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His new <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ball-Collusion-Election-Destroy-Presidency/dp/1641770252" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #5596c1; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: color, background-color, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear;">book</a>, <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency</i>, includes and expands on this crucial work. In careful detail, McCarthy deconstructs the Trump-Russia collusion ruse; the wind-up of Crossfire Hurricane, the unprecedented investigation into a U.S. presidential campaign; and the ramifications of one of the biggest political scandals in American history. In addition to his knowledge and insight, McCarthy knows many of the players involved personally, including former FBI Director James Comey, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney.</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: -0.31px; line-height: 1.32;">Further, McCarthy is no fawning booster of the president so his coverage of the scandal was not in the service of protecting Trump, his family, or his presidency. In fact, McCarthy contributed to the infamous “Against Trump” issue published by</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.31px; line-height: 1.32;"> </span><i style="box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: -0.31px; line-height: 1.32;">National Review</i><span style="letter-spacing: -0.31px; line-height: 1.32;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.31px; line-height: 1.32;">in February 2016. “The threat against us has metastasized in our eighth year under a president who quite consciously appeases the enemy,” McCarthy</span><span style="letter-spacing: -0.31px; line-height: 1.32;"> </span><a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2016/02/15/conservatives-against-trump/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #5596c1; letter-spacing: -0.31px; line-height: 1.32; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: color, background-color, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear;">wrote</a><span style="letter-spacing: -0.31px; line-height: 1.32;">. “But the remedy is not a president oblivious of the enemy.”</span></div>
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The ball of collusion, as McCarthy describes at the end of his 456-page book, is “counterintelligence as a pretext for criminal investigation in search of a crime; a criminal investigation as a pretext for impeachment without an impeachable offense; an impeachment inquiry as a pretext for barring Donald Trump from reelection; and all of it designed as a straightjacket around his presidency.” (Don’t let the number of pages scare you out of reading it; the author’s writing takes up about 350 pages.)</div>
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The book’s 18 chapters cover a range of central and corollary subjects. The biggest takeaway is how this entire scandal fused the competing interests of the nation’s biggest egos—some of whom clearly suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. This list includes the president, former president Obama, Comey, Mueller, former CIA director John Brennan, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, and the collective Messiah complex of the Washington bureaucratic establishment and the national news media. McCarthy exposes the “small world” of partisan operatives, sycophants, apparatchiks, and deep pockets that populate the Acela Corridor and fuel the day-to-day turbulence of the American political climate.</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Clinton Connections</span></h3>
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For the last three years, Americans have been tormented by a dangerous power struggle waged by this claque of political actors who will use any means necessary in order to prevail. It is a black mark in history that will fascinate future historians; those historians undoubtedly will draw heavily from McCarthy’s book as a comprehensive account of what happened between 2016 and 2019, when Robert Mueller finally had to admit there was no evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to influence the stunning outcome of the 2016 presidential election. As someone who has covered this scandal closely, I learned important new information from McCarthy about the timeline and the culprits involved.</div>
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McCarthy offers crucial background about the financial and political ties between Russia and the Clintons—yet somehow Hillary Clinton’s troubling past related to Russia did not provoke any FBI investigation. “Candidate Clinton and her husband had disturbing Russia ties, too,” McCarthy explained in the book’s introduction. “The Clinton campaign had not just Russia contacts; it had Bill Clinton meeting with Putin and taking a huge payment while Russia had important business before the State Department run by his wife,” McCarthy outlines in chapter 10. “It had Russian money pouring into the Clinton Foundation; its chairman, John Podesta, sat on the board of . . . a company into which Putin’s venture capital firm invested $35 million.”</div>
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But Carter Page gave a speech in Moscow.</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">A Multi-Pronged Plot</span></h3>
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McCarthy provides an in-depth analysis of Washington’s unsettling relationship with Russia and Ukraine. Chapter four is a must-read: McCarthy explains how the Obama Administration manipulated intelligence for political purposes—yet another egregious example of how the Obama White House got away with bad behavior while their lapdogs in the media either ignored it or covered it up.</div>
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“No administration in American history was more practiced in the dark arts of politicizing intelligence than President Obama’s,” McCarthy writes. “Examples are legion.” This unchecked malfeasance led to the creation of the fabricated collusion ruse and the empowerment of ego-maniacs such as Brennan and Comey.</div>
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The next several chapters delve into the multi-pronged plot to sabotage the Trump campaign and derail Trump’s presidency. McCarthy confirms that—contrary to dubious <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-russia-investigation-began-george-papadopoulos.html" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #5596c1; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: color, background-color, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear;">claims</a> by the <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">New York Times</i> and faithfully regurgitated by Trump foes—the FBI investigation was <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">not</i> initiated by an alleged drunken conversation between Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos and an Australian diplomat in the spring of 2016.</div>
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That ruse—which McCarthy calls an “unlikely story”—was an attempt to camouflage the way the dossier compiled by British political operative Christopher Steele, who was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, supplied the probable cause to launch Crossfire Hurricane, the official name of the counterintelligence probe into four Trump associates, three of whom are named in the dossier. (A document filled with still-unproven accusations.)</div>
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“Steele’s project was not intelligence-gathering,” McCarthy explains. “It was the crafting of a campaign narrative about a traitorous Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy. That’s why Steele and [Fusion GPS chief Glenn] Simpson peddled the information to the media at the same time Steele was feeding it to the FBI and the Justice Department. The Clinton campaign’s Steele dossier was the sheer political spinning of rank rumor.”</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“This Should Never Happen”</span></h3>
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McCarthy profiles the various spies deployed to infiltrate and monitor the Trump campaign, easily debunking another faux media narrative that the Obama Administration didn’t spy on Trump.</div>
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“The indignant anger over questions about the Crossfire Hurricane undercover operations . . . is misplaced,” he writes in Chapter 12.</div>
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The book’s chapter on the FISA warrant against Carter Page offers a crucial primer in advance of the anticipated report by Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department’s Inspector General, on how Comey’s FBI manipulated the secret court to get an order to spy on Page for a year. McCarthy admits his own miscalculation about how FISA might be abused after procedures were loosened following the 9/11 terror attacks.</div>
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“Back then, it seemed ridiculous to believe the FBI and the Justice Department would resort to FISA pretextually,” he concedes. “I was wrong. What I didn’t factor in was the possibility that, for political reasons, the upper ranks of the FBI and the Justice Department might decide to do an investigation by themselves. This should never happen.”</div>
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But in Trump’s case, of course, it did.</div>
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Comey’s “weasel moves” (that he <a href="https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/04/weasel-moves-with-jim-comey.php" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #5596c1; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: color, background-color, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear;">insists</a> he didn’t make but did repeatedly make when it came to Donald Trump) led to his ouster in May 2017. McCarthy is critical of the president’s handling of Comey’s firing, an assessment which is up for dispute. I strongly disagree that Comey was undeserving of his humiliating public dismissal because he “had served the United States well in many capacities over many years.” Comey will be—and should be—remembered for how he defiled the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency to gratify Barack Obama’s contempt for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The inspector general recommended three criminal charges against Comey in his latest report; it’s very likely Comey will be implicated in more abuses as investigations into his conduct continue. But McCarthy does give an otherwise fair description of one of the most bitter president-FBI director relationships of all time.</div>
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The final chapter pores over the stretch of time between Comey’s firing and the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which Comey successfully prompted by leaking one of his memos documenting a private conversation with Trump to the <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">New York Time</i>s.</div>
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“The collusion narrative had served its purpose,” McCarthy concludes. “The collusion narrative, seeded by the Obama administration, tilted by intelligence leaks and tended by constant media care accomplished its objectives. A special counsel . . . was imposed, despite the absence of criminal predicate, to monitor the Trump presidency.”</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Scandal Is Far from Over</span></h3>
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If there is any criticism of McCarthy’s book, it is that he gives short shrift to the insidious role played by the anti-Trump news media. While McCarthy offers some examples of how news organizations such as the <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Times</i>, CNN and the <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Washington Post</i> eagerly reported classified information to fuel the collusion plotline, the destructive conduct of the media—including reporters, columnists, editors, cable news hosts, and various contributors on both sides of the Trump-hating political aisle—warranted more coverage. For example, MSNBC, which served as a nonstop organ of the collusion deception, only received three mentions in the book.</div>
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To his credit, however, McCarthy generously commends other journalists such as <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Federalist</i>’s Mollie Hemingway, <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Tablet Magazine</i>’s Lee Smith, the <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Daily Caller’</i>s Chuck Ross, and the <i style="box-sizing: border-box;">Wall Street Journal’</i>s Kim Strassel for their invaluable reporting on the scandal.</div>
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Even though the Mueller investigation is complete, this scandal is far from over. The public impatiently awaits the results of pending inspector general reports; criminal inquiries into McCabe and former FBI General Counsel James Baker; and an expansive investigation launched by Attorney General William Barr into what the Obama Administration did in 2016 and 2017 to try to destroy Donald Trump.</div>
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My guess is that McCarthy will have a chance to write a follow-up to this exceptional book.</div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-3077768058710591152019-09-24T05:02:00.000-05:002019-09-24T05:06:14.934-05:00How identity politics drove the world mad<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By Roger Scruton</span><br />
<a href="https://unherd.com/2019/09/how-identity-politics-drove-the-world-mad/"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://unherd.com/2019/09/how-identity-politics-drove-the-world-mad/</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">September 2019</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1b1b1b; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 33.6px;">We thrive on disagreement, but only if we do not also feel threatened by it. In every period of history, therefore, there have been opinions and customs that are dangerous to question, since they provide the firm foundations on which our disagreements rest. Whether religious or political, these established ways of thinking and acting have been protected by law, and embedded in the educational curriculum and the daily customs of the people.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But our situation in Western democracies today is a novel one. There is no shared religion, and the old customs have been torn asunder by a culture of repudiation, which encourages people to shape their lives according to an “identity” of their own. Socialisation no longer means joining or obeying, but “becoming who you are”, regardless of the surrounding norms. This novel situation, which advertises itself as a kind of liberation, has instead produced in my lifetime a totally new kind of censorship and intimidation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thirty years ago I naively assumed that, with the collapse of communism, we would no longer see the persecution of dissidents or the imposition of official doctrines, and so I have been as astonished as everyone else by the mass denunciations and targeted character assassinations that enforce prevailing orthodoxies today. They seem as frequent and comprehensive here in Britain as they ever were in the world of totalitarian government.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">True, you don’t go to the Gulag for your opinions; nor are there show-trials of “deviationists”, Zionists or the running dogs of capitalism. Nevertheless, you have to be careful what you say, and the punishments for saying, thinking or implying the wrong thing, even if administered by private enterprise and social media rather than by the state, are real, serious and largely impossible to deflect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The archive of your crimes is stored in cyberspace, and however much you may have confessed to them and sworn to change, they will pursue you for the rest of your life, just as long as someone has an interest in drawing attention to them. And when the mob turns on you, it is with a pitiless intensity that bears no relation to the objective seriousness of your fault. A word out of place, a hasty judgment, a slip of the tongue — whatever the fault might be, it is sufficient, once picked upon, to put you beyond the pale of human sympathy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As Douglas Murray shows in his impressive and lively survey, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-madness-of-crowds-9781635579987/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgba(28, 28, 28, 0.4); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(27, 27, 27) !important; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity</em></a>, the emerging world of censorship is a world without forgiveness, in which people are condemned for what they are rather than what they do, and in which the real virtues and vices that govern our conduct are ignored altogether as irrelevant.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The crimes for which we are judged are <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">existential</em> crimes: through speaking in the wrong way you display one of the phobias or isms that show you to be beyond acceptable humanity. You are a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a white supremacist or a racist, and no argument can refute these accusations once they have been made.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 33.6px;">You might, in your private life, have worked for the integration and acceptance of your local Muslim community, or for a wider understanding of the roots of Islamic philosophy. This will be irrelevant when it comes to rebutting a charge of Islamophobia, just as your record in promoting minorities in the workplace will do nothing to clear you of the charge of racism, once the crucial words are out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For your accusers are not interested in your deeds; they are interested in you, and in the crucial fact about you, which is whether or not you are “one of us”. Your faults cannot be overcome by voluntary action, since they adhere to the kind of thing that you are. And you reveal what you are in the words that define you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These words may be taken out of context, even doctored to mean the opposite of what you said — <a href="https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/20-latest/617-press-statement-from-sir-roger-scruton-in-response-to-the-apology-from-the-new-statesman-8-jul-2019" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgba(28, 28, 28, 0.4); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(27, 27, 27) !important; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">as happened recently to me in an interview given to the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">New Statesman</em></a> — but this will not affect the verdict, since there is no objective trial, no “case for the defence”, no due process. You are accused by the mob, examined by the mob and condemned by the mob, and if you have brought this on yourself, then you have only yourself to blame. For the mob is by nature innocent: it washes its own conscience in a flow of collective indignation, and by joining it you make yourself safe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Such is the situation that the brave Murray confronts in his latest book, the title of which (taken from a previous anatomy of human folly by Charles Mackay) implies that it is crowd hysteria, rather than ignorance, that is largely to blame. But, as Murray goes on to show, that suggestion is also too simple. With admirable attention to detail he explores the ways in which the spirit of the mob has entered not only the language of public debate but also the sources of information and the institutions of decision making.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 33.6px;">Censorship begins in the media themselves, with the silicon valley elite introducing “machine learning fairness” designed to eliminate “hate speech”, and programmed to recognise as “hate” all those expressions of opinion that violate some norm of political correctness. What Orwell so vividly foresaw — the manipulation of language so as to make heresy inexpressible — is now routine practice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The result, however, is not a culture of gentle conformity, in which “niceness” is the norm. On the contrary, the clamour for recognition involves a constant assault on those who are assumed to be preventing it. These purveyors of “hate” are given no leeway on social media, and the practice of mass denunciation on grounds of race, tribe, class or social milieu is now an accepted weapon in the identity wars.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Murray gives riveting examples of the way in which whiteness has become a moral fault in the eyes of identity warriors on the American campus. It is, for example, now legitimate to <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3321190/F-filthy-white-s-Black-Lives-Matter-protesters-scream-epithets-white-students-studying-Dartmouth-library.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom-color: rgba(28, 28, 28, 0.4); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgb(27, 27, 27) !important; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">condemn people for the colour of their skin</a>, leading some to try to apologise for being white.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Various devices facilitate the emergence of the censorship culture. Three in particular come to the surface in Murray’s carefully constructed argument. First, there is the art of taking offence. Whole sections of the university curriculum are devoted to explaining to students that words, arguments, comparisons, even questions, are “offensive”, regardless of the intention with which they are used.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 33.6px;">Invariably, the offence is given by the old majority culture, and is taken on behalf of some privileged minority. Current concerns about Islamophobia are relevant here: it is offensive, for example, to make jokes about the burqa, but not offensive to appear in public with your face entirely covered, even though the face-to-face encounter is at the root of our shared way of life, as important in showing respect as taking off your shoes when entering a mosque.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">More important, from the intellectual point of view, is the attempt to rewrite hardware as software. As Murray shows, identity politics, which insists that everything relevant to our sense of self lies within our power, so that nothing can be imposed on us without our consent, is at odds with the facts of biology. To get round this problem, sex has been re-written as gender, and gender defined as a social construct. In this way, hardware becomes software, and fate becomes choice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And the result is the “trans” lobby, determined to make all those areas where one sex was hitherto privileged (for example, female sports or female bathrooms) available to whoever wishes to appropriate that sex as his own. The hardware/software confusion has now penetrated the culture, and Murray shows the devastating effect that it has had on our understanding of human difference.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally there is the new scourge of “intersectionality”, which encourages people to explore all the ways in which they have lost out in the pursuit of advantage, and to construct their identity accordingly. A kind of reverse hierarchy of privilege emerges, as you come to see that you are disadvantaged as gay man, and then as a black man, and then as a Muslim man, and so on. The result of this scramble for “virtuous disadvantages” occupies Murray over many partly amusing, partly distressing pages.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; line-height: 33.6px;">As he abundantly shows, the attempt to derive a positive philosophy from this assemblage of negatives leads to absurdity and contradiction at every turn. The problem, however, is that contradiction is not regarded by the mob as an obstacle, but merely as further proof of the great conspiracy by which we are surrounded — the conspiracy enshrined in the old majority culture, which told us that we must accept human nature, find our fulfilment within its bounds, and not engage in a futile metaphysical rebellion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Murray’s comprehensive survey of the prevailing madness will not persuade every reader. But it raises the real questions of our times, which are these: can we reject the idea of a benevolent God and still hold on to our inherited morality, founded on respect for the other and the absolute authority of truth? Can we adopt the posture of forgiveness that Murray is so keen to advocate, without turning to the supreme example that was once given to us?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Can we re-learn the habits of polite disagreement, and address each other as rational beings, capable of forming real communities in which differences are respected and decencies honoured? I want to answer yes to those questions. But as someone who has suffered more than most from the prevailing madness I have my doubts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My own solution — which is to ignore social media and to address, in my writings, only the interest in the true and the false, rather than in the permitted and the offensive — confines me within a circle that is considerably narrower than the Twittersphere. But here and there in this circle, there are people who do not merely see the point of truthful discourse, but who are also eager to engage with it. And I cling to the view that that is enough, as it was for the Irish monks who kept the lamp of learning alight during the Dark Ages. They may have thought they were losing, but they won in the end.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 33.6px;">Douglas Murray’s </em><span style="line-height: 33.6px;">The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 33.6px;">is published by Bloomsbury Continuum</em></span></div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 33.6px;"><span style="color: #1b1b1b; font-family: , serif;"><i><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5BhhKxXBP84" width="560"></iframe></i></span></span></div>
jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-81248362345951444542019-09-24T04:34:00.001-05:002019-09-24T04:34:21.318-05:00Save Greta<br />
By Brendan O'Neill<br />
<a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/24/save-greta/">https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/24/save-greta/</a><br />
24 September 2019<br />
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<img alt="Image result for greta un" height="426" src="https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/c57cc66/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1980x1320+0+0/resize/840x560!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fca-times.brightspotcdn.com%2F0e%2Fee%2F84a35d7f46c4b6098b203b4dcb32%2F49ff469c8b4744e7922ad595ee0e9171" width="640" /><br />
<i>(Associated Press)</i><br />
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Any adult who cheered <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/tag/greta-thunberg/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c92121; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition-duration: 0.3s, 0.3s, 0.3s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, color;" target="_blank">Greta Thunberg</a>’s speech to the <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/tag/un/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c92121; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition-duration: 0.3s, 0.3s, 0.3s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, color;" target="_bllank">UN</a> yesterday should be ashamed of themselves. Her emotional rant was a deeply disturbing spectacle. It revealed a young woman, a girl, in essence, who is in the grip of terror, of a morbid, debilitating belief that life as we know it is coming to an end. You could not have asked for firmer proof that the <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/tag/climate-change/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c92121; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition-duration: 0.3s, 0.3s, 0.3s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, color;" target="_blank">green ideology</a> is seriously screwing up the next generation by pumping them with fear and panic and a deranged belief that the end of the world is nigh. It isn’t the planet that needs saving – it’s Greta. She needs to be saved from the death cult of eco-alarmism.</div>
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It was a truly sad sight. Greta, 16, spoke through tears. And her tears were understandable given she believes life on Earth is being suffocated and murdered by greedy, marauding mankind. She berated the gathered heads of state. ‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood… People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">How dare you</em>?’ With each nightmarish word, with each unhinged dystopian prediction of doom, her voice wobbled and her emotions span out of control. It was a public meltdown. And of course the politicians applauded it – perversely, they love nothing more than being told how awful they are by a petrified, disorientated girl.</div>
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Who did this to Greta? Who turned a bright and curious 16-year-old schoolgirl into a prophet of horror, into a young woman who admits to feeling terror and who believes the Earth is on fire? Adults did. The green-infused educational, political and cultural elites did. The people who have been feeding kids a narrative of eco-fear for years did this. Their secular Armageddonism, their wilful exaggeration of every problem mankind faces, their marshalling of the politics of fear to try to force people to change their allegedly wicked, eco-harmful behaviour – all of this has convinced many young people that the future is dark, mankind is doomed, and there is no point even going to school, far less planning one’s life, because we will all be dead soon. They did this to Greta, and to others, and it is unforgivable.</div>
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The extent to which adults have indoctrinated kids with eco-nihilistic fear was made clear in the words of the UN general-secretary Antonio Guterres. Opening the UN Climate Action Summit yesterday, at which Greta made her frazzled, tragic speech, he said: ‘Nature is angry.’ What is this superstition? It is positively pre-modern. This anthropomorphising of nature is central to the eco-alarmist outlook. It presents everything from forest fires to floods as punishment for humankind’s sins, as nature’s payback to the pox that is humanity and our ‘fairytales of eternal economic growth’, as Greta describes it. In Biblical times, freak weather and plagues of locusts were viewed as God’s punishment of human beings’ sinful behaviour; now we hear talk of ‘weather of mass destruction’ and ‘angry’ natural events that are apparently Gaia’s punishment of us for committing the sin of economic growth. The words change, but the backwardness and hysteria are eerily similar.</div>
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<span style="line-height: 38.5px;">Greta Thunberg is admirable in many ways. She is driven and articulate. But it is patently clear now that she is being exploited. She is being pushed to the forefront of the most fearful and superstitious movement of our times. She has been turned into the chief spokesperson for doom, the mouthpiece of eco-misanthropy, a soothsayer of the horrors humankind will allegedly bring upon itself. The aim seems to be to make environmentalism an unquestionable, untouchable ideology. Witness how anyone who raises even a peep of criticism of eco-nonsense will now be asked: ‘How dare you criticise Greta and the other brave climate-striking children?’ These kids are being used as moral shields by adults to protect the increasingly bizarre politics of environmentalism from interrogation and criticism. It is dizzying in its cynicism.</span></div>
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And it is destructive, too. Destructive of public debate, destructive of critical discussion, and destructive of the kids who are being dragged into this terrifying, miserabilist worldview to play the role of a stage army to adult society’s own loss of faith in mankind and in economic growth. Enough. Set Greta free. Stop instructing her in the cult of fear and let her go back to school and to a normal youthful life. If you really must have a child speaking at the UN, how about a teenager from Africa or India who believes economic growth is not a fairytale but absolutely essential to their liberation from poverty? We’ve all heard more than enough from middle-class Westerners who think economic growth is oh-so-horrible. Let’s hear from someone in the teeming billions around the world who profoundly disagree with this downbeat, anti-human, Western-centric crap.</div>
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<strong style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Brendan O’Neill</strong> is editor of <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">spiked</em> and host of the <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">spiked</em> podcast,<a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast/the-brendan-oneill-show/" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c92121; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition-duration: 0.3s, 0.3s, 0.3s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, color;" target="_blank"><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Brendan O’Neill Show</em></a>. Subscribe to the podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-brendan-oneil-show/id1436524071" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c92121; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition-duration: 0.3s, 0.3s, 0.3s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, color;" target="_blank">here</a>. And find Brendan on Instagram: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/burntoakboy/" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; color: #c92121; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition-duration: 0.3s, 0.3s, 0.3s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, color;" target="_blank">@burntoakboy</a></div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-57023503264201153442019-09-24T04:19:00.000-05:002019-09-24T05:03:24.804-05:00‘Rambo: Last Blood’ Review: Sylvester Stallone Tells a Vital Truth the Media Won’t<br />
By John Nolte<br />
<a href="https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/09/20/rambo-last-blood-sylvester-stallone-tells-truth-media-wont/">https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/09/20/rambo-last-blood-sylvester-stallone-tells-truth-media-wont/</a><br />
September 20. 2019<br />
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When history looks back at the abominable behavior of the establishment news media in the first two decades of the 21st century, there will of course be condemnations for the breathtaking lies and a full-blown coup attempt against a sitting president. But let’s not forget the media’s unforgivable sins of omission, especially their ongoing cover up of the ravages that come with our wide-open southern border.</div>
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The media themselves are not harmed by these ravages. Illegal reporters are not flooding the country to take media jobs, and those who control the media live in high-rise apartments and will never feel the effects of the crime spawned by an open border.</div>
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No, the only people who feel these ravages are the people the media most hate: everyday Americans. Yes, the flood of cheap labor depresses their wages and steals their jobs, but it’s the violence — my God, the violence.</div>
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All throughout our country, illegal aliens who should have never gained entry, and many who would have been deported were it not for Democrat-run sanctuary cities, commit the most heinous crimes imaginable, including rape and murder.</div>
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What’s more, our open border is also a haven for Mexican drug cartels to traffic their poison and their sex slaves, almost all of them young girls from Mexico, and…</div>
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Those young Mexican girls are another group the American media do not care about, a story they dare not tell because it interferes with their desire for the open border that will turn Texas blue. The media’s attitude is, <em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Not gunna let some brown sex slaves get in the way of winning an election!</em></div>
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So here we sit in a country with an open border responsible for atrocity after atrocity after atrocity, and a media that enables those atrocities through a conspiracy of silence.</div>
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Enter Sylvester Stallone…</div>
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You can laugh at the fact that <em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Last Blood</em> is an 89-minute genre film, the fifth chapter in a nearly 40-year-old franchise starring a geriatric who just turned 73: <em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Oh, this is dumb. It’s just a movie. A disposable throwaway.</em></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.4px;">Sorry, but that’s not how pop culture works. Movies matter, and</span><span style="line-height: 22.4px;"> </span><em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Last Blood</em><span style="line-height: 22.4px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">matters… Untold million will eventually see this, will see The Truth through the most powerful propaganda tool there is: a story — not a news story, not a cable TV segment — but a story-story told with sound and picture.</span></div>
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And <em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Last Blood</em> is a fantastic story, deceptively simple, beautifully structured, thoroughly engrossing, and ridiculously satisfying.</div>
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Better still it is a truth told in the most effective way there is, through wish-fulfillment. Rambo is finally doing something about an injustice. <em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">It feels good to see something being done, and dammit I want something done!</em></div>
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<span style="line-height: 22.4px;">In the 70s, genre movies like</span><span style="line-height: 22.4px;"> </span><em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Dirty Harry</em><span style="line-height: 22.4px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">and</span><span style="line-height: 22.4px;"> </span><em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Death Wish</em><span style="line-height: 22.4px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">opened our eyes to a criminal justice system that forgot about the victims. On the political flip-side, movies like</span><span style="line-height: 22.4px;"> </span><em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The China Syndrome</em><span style="line-height: 22.4px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">and</span><span style="line-height: 22.4px;"> </span><em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Silkwood </em><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">opened our eyes to the dangers of nuclear power. And now, in 2019, </span><em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Last Blood</em><span style="line-height: 22.4px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 22.4px;">courageously seeks to open our eyes about the dangers of an open border.</span></div>
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And I say “courageous,” because in modern-day America it takes moral courage to tell a truth when the telling means you will be slandered as a racist — something that has<a href="https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/09/19/woke-critics-rip-rambo-last-blood-as-racist/" style="color: #007faf; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">already happened</a> to Stallone.</div>
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But I would never tell anyone to see a movie because the politics are “correct,” just as I would never pan a movie for “incorrect” politics. A good movie is a good movie, and <em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Last Blood</em> is more than worth your time and money.</div>
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When we last met John Rambo a full 11 years ago (man, those 11 years went fast!), he had finally worked through what he needed to work through enough to return home, stateside to the family farm.</div>
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And life was good during those 11 years — what you might call rocking-chair-on-a-porch-good. Rambo still suffers from PTSD, but he “keeps a lid on” with prescription drugs and by fighting a war he hopes will never come. When not training horses, Rambo maintains an endless series of tunnels he dug under his farm, which includes a workshop where he forges — God bless him — weapons of war.</div>
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With the help of his old friend Maria (Adrianna Barraza) he’s also raising 17-year-old Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal), whose good-for-nothing father took off after her mother died of cancer. But now that Gabrielle knows where her dad is, she wants to see him, and it’s just a short drive from the farm in Arizona to Mexico.</div>
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Uncle John tries to explain the facts of life to her, what he knows about the “black hearts of men,” but she’s 17, which means she’s smarter than everyone else, so when no one’s looking, off she goes…</div>
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The scenes involving Gabrielle’s sex slavery are unbelievably harrowing. Director Adrian Grunberg and co-writer Stallone refuse to turn away from this truth. Our nose is rubbed in it, as it should be.</div>
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Naturally, Rambo throws away his pills and goes to war — “Cops can’t cross the border, and down there they don’t do shit.” — and let’s just say that when John J. Rambo says he’s going to blow your head off and rip your heart out, that ain’t no figure of speech.</div>
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Along the way, Rambo receives courageous help from Carmen Delgado (Paz Vega) an “independent journalist,” because <em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Last Blood</em> wants to remind us that establishment journalists want nothing to do with this truth.</div>
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We also get a dispiriting look at our ridiculously inept border fencing, which elicited laughter in the audience, and there’s one brief moment where I thought I caught Rambo smiling — and it was glorious.</div>
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“I want revenge. I want them to know death is coming.” And so it does, wrapped in truth.</div>
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This one’s for the Angel Moms … on both sides of the border.</div>
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P.S. Make sure to sit through the closing montage and then rent Jennifer Garner’s <a href="https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/09/08/jennifer-garners-subversive-peppermint-is-another-rotten-tomatoes-fail/" style="color: #007faf; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Peppermint</em>.</a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: 700; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </em></span></div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-54914677033470326392019-09-23T05:58:00.003-05:002019-09-23T05:58:33.813-05:00Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Prove It All Night (Phoenix, 78) (from Thrill Hill Vault 1976-1978)<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/okrvOAUg-yY" width="560"></iframe>jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-65632061444770917342019-09-23T05:16:00.000-05:002019-09-23T05:16:30.814-05:00Bruce Springsteen birthday: New artistic frontiers at 70<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By Chris Jordan</span><br />
<a href="https://www.app.com/story/entertainment/music/2019/09/22/bruce-springsteen-birthday-new-artistic-frontiers-70/2355234001/"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://www.app.com/story/entertainment/music/2019/09/22/bruce-springsteen-birthday-new-artistic-frontiers-70/2355234001/</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">September 22, 2019</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bruce Springsteen has a story to tell.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That’s one aspect of a young Springsteen that former manager Carl “Tinker” West noticed early on.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“He’s a good storyteller,” said West, who’s also a giant in the surfing world thanks to his founding of Challenger Eastern Surfboards in Ocean Township. “Vini (Lopez of the future E Street Band) brought him over to the shop (in Ocean Township). He was a smart kid, sort of quiet and he wrote songs. I said, 'You just keep writing something, you guys rehearse — work here all day, make surfboards and rock n’ roll.' ”</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That was the plan. It worked.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Springsteen has sold millions of records, plays to stadiums around the world, is enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, all for his rock ‘n’ rolling. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Now as Springsteen turns 70 on Monday, Sept., 23, he’s in an era of new artistic pursuits, new creative formats. The latest is the movie “Western Stars,” a filmed version of his latest album. He co-directed “Western Stars” with frequent collaborator Thom Zimny. The film features a performance of the folk-rock orchestral album, and vignettes starring a solo Springsteen. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The film follows the hit “Springsteen on Broadway,” which featured the Boss baring his life story, set to song and remembrance. “Springsteen on Broadway” ran from October 2017 to December 2018.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The music play was based on his New York Times best-selling memoir “Born to Run,” which was released in September 2016. Springsteen did a nine-city book tour, where he greeted thousands of fans in person for hours at a stretch in a feat of physical and mental stamina.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Boss stood on a platform, under lights, while he met fans. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Cindy Marselis of Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania, was in tears after meeting Springsteen at the Freehold Barnes and Noble signing on Sept. 27, 2016. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“I met the person I always wanted to meet,” said Marselis, at the signing. “I got to kiss him. It was awesome.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Springsteen is still telling stories, and still on stage. But now he’s exploring new formats for the stories, and the stories he’s telling are largely his own these days.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“I think he’s said this before, but he truly envisions himself as an artist and I feel that all of these projects are in service of him wanting to tap into all of the different facets of who he is,” said Caroline Madden, 26, of Toms River.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Madden is set to release a book on Springsteen’s music in films and TV, “Springsteen as Soundtrack: The Sound of the Boss in Film and Television,” from McFarland & Co. “That’s why he’s so unique and has endured as an artist for so long – he doesn’t settle. He's always looking to renew himself or try something new.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">West saw that creative energy up close when Springsteen fronted the band Steel Mill, which West managed and did sound for.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“I liked Springsteen because those guys would go in the back of the shop and they would rehearse,” West said. “Vini Lopez, Danny Federici, they would write lots of music and whenever we’d get a couple of songs together that were pretty good, we'd go and try it out at Pandemonium, right at the bottom of Sunset Avenue.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The club was less than a mile from West’s surfboard factory.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“What changes his music is that he wants to write something different,” West said. “He writes some great stories. Stories to me are what makes great music, especially the early stuff. The first two albums (‘Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.’ and ‘The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle’), people are still asking for those songs. Even so, he’s written a lot of stuff after that’s pretty damn good.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">West and Springsteen’s enduring friendship is explored in the book “Born to Run” and, subsequently in “Springsteen on Broadway.” A highlight of the play is West, Springsteen and West’s dog driving out west in West’s 1950 Chevy flat-bed truck to play a concert and meet music industry contacts.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Springsteen didn’t know how to drive until he drove the Chevy truck with West in the passenger seat. West still owns the truck.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“He knew what he wanted to do, I’m pretty sure,” said West of Springsteen’s artistic drive. “He wanted to wow an audience and he did. He had a great band. Federici was great. Lopez was great. Little Vinnie Roslin was great.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">West used his connections and hustle to get a deal with Paramount Records.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“I finally found a deal that wouldn’t screw him over,” West said. “Then he said 'I don’t want to do Steel Mill anymore.' That’s up to you.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“I introduced him to Mike Appel. He introduced him to John Hammond and the rest is history,” said West of Springsteen’s subsequent manager and the of the famed Columbia Records talent scout. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The stories Springsteen has been telling in recent years are stark, revealing and confessional.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“For a long time, if I loved you or if I felt a deep attachment to you, I would hurt you if I could,” says Springsteen in “Western Stars.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">He talked without censor of his troubled relationship with his father in “Springsteen on Broadway” and has been candid about his struggles with mental illness.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">“I have come close enough to (mental illness) where I know I am not completely well myself,” Springsteen previously told </span><a data-track-label="inline|intext|n/a" href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a25133821/bruce-springsteen-interview-netflix-broadway-2018/" style="line-height: 22px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Esquire</a><span style="line-height: 22px;">. “I’ve had to deal with a lot of it over the years, and I’m on a variety of medications that keep me on an even keel; otherwise I can swing rather dramatically and ... just ... the wheels can come off a little bit. So we have to watch, in our family. I have to watch my kids, and I’ve been lucky there. It ran in my family going way before my dad.”</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Springsteen is married to Patti Scialfa and they have three children, Evan, 29; Jessica, 27; and Sam, 25.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Springsteen’s non-rock ‘n’ roll work of the past few years has also framed the aging process for fans. He's showing the way to baby boomers about what to do, how to do it, and what's important in life when you get to a certain age.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The fans of his generation might have looked to John Lennon for the answers, but he didn’t get to grow old like Springsteen. Lennon would have been 78 if he were still alive.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"Aging is scary but fascinating, and great talent morphs in strange and often enlightening ways,” said Springsteen in "Born to Run."</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">There no official events planned to recognize Springsteen’s 70th birthday, but area venues do have Boss-themed shows, including the Brian Kirk and the Jirk’s-led “Born: Celebrating the Boss’ 70th” at the Count Basie Center in Red Bank on Wednesday, Sept. 25, and Thursday, Sept. 26. Visit</span><span style="line-height: 22px;"> </span><a data-track-label="inline|intext|n/a" href="https://thebasie.org/events/" style="line-height: 22px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">thebasie.org</a><span style="line-height: 22px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 22px;">for more info and tickets. There's also a dance party featuring all Springsteen music Monday at the Saint in Asbury Park. Visit</span><span style="line-height: 22px;"> </span><a data-track-label="inline|intext|n/a" href="https://www.thesaintnj.com/" style="line-height: 22px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">thesaintnj.com</a><span style="line-height: 22px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 22px;">for more info.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Springsteen: His Hometown,” an exhibit presented by the Monmouth County Historical Association and the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music at Monmouth University, opens Sunday, Sept. 29, at the historical association in Freehold.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">T</span><span style="line-height: 22px;">icket information is at</span><span style="line-height: 22px;"> </span><a data-track-label="inline|intext|n/a" href="https://monmouthhistory.org/springsteen/" style="line-height: 22px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">www.SpringsteenHisHometown.com</a><span style="line-height: 22px;">.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 22px;">Preview showings of “Western Stars” are scheduled for Oct. 19 and 23 in area movie theaters. Visit </span><span style="line-height: 22px;"> </span><a data-track-label="inline|intext|n/a" href="https://www.fathomevents.com/events/bruce-springsteen-western-stars" style="line-height: 22px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">www.fathomevents.com</a><span style="line-height: 22px;"> </span><span style="line-height: 22px;">for more info and tickets.</span></span></span><br />
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-66565220764905787252019-09-19T05:56:00.002-05:002019-09-19T05:56:49.836-05:00Western Stars - Official Trailer<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nGqjav-KbDU" width="560"></iframe>jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-7542384042035109662019-09-19T05:52:00.001-05:002019-09-19T05:52:53.525-05:00‘Western Stars’ Is Part Concert Film, Part Visual Album, All Springsteen<div style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 0px 0px 0.9375rem;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, Times New Roman, serif;">By David fear</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 28px;"><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/toronto-2019-bruce-springsteen-western-stars-review-883883/">https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/toronto-2019-bruce-springsteen-western-stars-review-883883/</a></span></span></div>
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September 13, 2019</div>
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Listen to the opening track of <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/review-bruce-springsteen-western-stars-842052/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Graphik Bold Subset', Graphik, Tahoma, Verdana, Segoe, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; position: relative; text-decoration: none;">Bruce Springsteen’s </a><em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/review-bruce-springsteen-western-stars-842052/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Graphik Bold Subset', Graphik, Tahoma, Verdana, Segoe, sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; position: relative; text-decoration: none; transition: color 0.24s cubic-bezier(0.215, 0.61, 0.355, 1);">Western Stars</a>,</em> the album he put out this past May, and you’ll hear someone bragging about “hitch-hikin’ all day long.” He accepts a ride from a man and his pregnant wife; then he grabs a lift from someone else, just a guy free to heed the call of the open road. Two cuts later, on a song called “Tucson Train,” we get a different tale — maybe he’s a new protagonist; maybe he’s the same romantic drifter of “Hitch Hikin'” and a hundred other Springsteen tracks — who had lost his way and lost and his true love. But now he’s settled down, he’s ready to be part of society, he’s watching that 5:15 train bringing his baby to him to show up. (It takes a lot to laugh, etc.)</div>
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There are 11 more tunes, some of which are country-tinged ballads and others that are Seventies SoCal symphony pop. But you could argue that the whole story is there in those two tracks. The dude who was born to run. The man who’s finally ready to earn and embrace the human touch.</div>
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Should you still be unsure at what he’s getting at, Springsteen spells it out as plain as can be in the beginning of <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;">Western Stars,</em> the concert film-cum-visual album he and longtime collaborator/codirector Thom Zimny premiered at the <a data-tag="toronto-film-festival" href="https://www.rollingstone.com/t/toronto-film-festival/" id="auto-tag_toronto-film-festival" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Graphik Bold Subset', Graphik, Tahoma, Verdana, Segoe, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; position: relative; text-decoration: none;">Toronto Film Festival</a> on Thursday night. (It hits theaters October 25th.) His collection of songs about road warriors and B-movie actors, beat-up stuntmen and places where truckers and bikers drink together, is a look at “the two sides of the American character…individual freedom and communal life.” He says this over panoramic shots that turn the record’s cover of a running mustang into a literal motion picture, interspersed with clips of home movies. A close-up details a hand on a pickup’s steering wheel, ready to skeedaddle. The shot is repeated 90 or so mins later, with another hand now resting tenderly on top of the original one. This is the journey Springsteen wants you take here. It’s the same one, he notes, that he’s been taking over the last 35 years.</div>
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After releasing this solo project, the songwriter knew <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bruce-springsteen-calls-into-e-street-radio-promises-western-stars-concert-film-857487/" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Graphik Bold Subset', Graphik, Tahoma, Verdana, Segoe, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; position: relative; text-decoration: none;">he wasn’t going to support the record with a tour</a>. Still, he wanted to do something to, in his words, “get this music live to an audience.” Springsteen came up with the idea of playing the whole thing start to finish, then capture the event on film for posterity. He and Zimny, the filmmaker behind dozens of Bruce-related music videos and making-of-album docs, started to scout locations; they eventually settled on the top floor of the barn on Springsteen’s property. (“We dressed the space up quite a bit,” he admitted in a Q&A after an afternoon press screening.) The notion was to put on an intimate show “for a few friends, and to entertain the horses.” Just a small crowd, a honkytonk-style bar, a scrappy band buffered by an orchestral section, and a singer with a guitar.</div>
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And as a performance film, <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;">Western Stars</em> is a pitch-perfect example of why this music needed to be played and heard live. On record, you can feel Springsteen working his way through some uncharacteristic styles: Jimmy Webb-style C&W lite, Brian Wilson’s baroque pop, Everly Brothers-like crooning, musical arrangements that wouldn’t be out of place on an old Harry Nilsson joint (listen to that gossamer shuffle that opens up “Hello Sunshine” and tell me you don’t expect the first line to be “Everybody’s talkin’ at me…”). Seeing him take on those songs on a stage, however, and you get the sense he owns all of it now — he’s turned all of these influences into a seamless Springsteen sound. A number of the cuts open up like an oxygenated bottle of wine, whether it’s because there’s a gaggle of string players or a single partner in crime — the interplay between him and wife/guitarist Patti Scialfa on “Stones” deepens the cut substantially — bringing something else out of him.</div>
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But what you see in the live versions is the sum of these parts as one cohesive whole. He’s a singer in sync with the musical community surrounding him, a concept as thematically on point with the album as possible. (Thankfully, the soundtrack to the film will also be released, which means you’ll get Springsteen & Co.’s gorgeous cover of Glenn Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” — an impromptu coda that, Zimny says, he didn’t know Bruce was going to do. The fact that a cameraman was nearby and quickly caught it was a stroke of luck.) Those moments share screen time with free-form scenes of Bruce wandering alone through the California desert near Joshua Tree, offering comments on both the songs and his own struggle to reconcile his stoic loner and loving husband/father sides. There are stoic poses galore, as well old clips of scruffy young Springsteen and rare Super 8 films of his honeymoon with Scialfa that Zimny found buried in the archives.</div>
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Sometimes he cracks wise (“Nineteen albums, and I’m <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;">still</em> writing about cars”). Sometimes he goes into saloon-philosopher mode, offering the sort of deep thoughts (“Walk on through the dark, because that’s where the next morning is”) that longtime fans will tell you are part of the ride when you pay for the ticket. All of it seems part of the self-reflective phase Springsteen has been going through over the past few years; he admitted in the Q&A that the movie is the last part of “a story I haven’t really told before” that includes his 2016 memoir <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box;">Born to Run</em> and his 2018 Broadway residency. Introspection suits him, especially if this is the kind of art we’re getting from him now. He’d hoped the film would help people understand a little better what the songs were getting at. Mission accomplished.</div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 28px;">But <i>Western Stars </i>isn't a therapy session. It's a portrait of lightning momentarily bottled, the way all great concert movies are. It’s the pleasure of watching a guy who’s been doing this for 50-plus years find yet another way to make it fresh without abandoning what made it great in the first place. And it’s also a personal look at someone working it out through his music, looking to find a sense of peace in the spotlight and realizing, with a sigh of relief, that he’s actually found it.</span>jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-39252693483412760352019-09-19T05:43:00.000-05:002019-09-19T05:43:02.780-05:00Hating Kavanaugh, Killing Journalism<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The New York Times took its best shot at Justice Kavanaugh -- and destroyed itself.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By Daniel Greenfield</span><br />
<a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/hating-kavanaugh-killing-journalism-daniel-greenfield/"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/hating-kavanaugh-killing-journalism-daniel-greenfield/</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">September 18, 2019</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Robin Pogrebin, a culture reporter for <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The</em> <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">New York Times</em>, and Kate Kelly, a Wall Street reporter for the same paper, got together to write <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Education of Brett Kavanaugh</em> despite being curiously unqualified.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In sharp contrast to Carrie Severino, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and chief counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network, who co-authored <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation</em>, neither Pogrebin nor Kelly are especially familiar with the world they’re writing about.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And it shows.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Why send a business journalist and a culture reporter to write a book about a legal battle in Washington D.C.? There are two answers. <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Education of Brett Kavanaugh </em>is being published by Penguin Random House. Pogrebin is the daughter of leftist feminist author Letty Cottin Pogrebin. Pogrebin’s books, including her last major book <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Deborah, Golda and Me</em> (Pogrebin has turned on Israel, allying with anti-Israel groups and endorsing boycotts of parts of Israel) have tended to be published by Penguin.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That’s the less cynical answer. The more cynical answer is that nobody actually cared.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The only kind of Kavanaugh book that there would be a market for in the environs of the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">New York Times</em> would be a sore loser text providing ammunition for impeaching and removing Kavanaugh. It’s no coincidence that shortly after Pogrebin and Kelly debuted an article promoting their book with another freshman year sexual allegation against Kavanaugh, three 2020 Democrats called for his impeachment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That’s not good timing. It’s a campaign.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Just to drive the point home, Kelly retweeted a reply from a media figure declaring, “He can be impeached by the house.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Pogrebin and Kelly’s <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">New York Times</em> piece neglected to inform readers that the allegation had been brushed away by their supposed victim and that their source, Max Stier, had been Bill Clinton’s lawyer. Kavanaugh <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/new-kavanaugh-allegation-comes-from-clinton-defense-lawyer" style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #801717;">had worked</a> for Ken Starr on impeachment while Stier had worked to defend Clinton against impeachment. Reporting that the accusation isn’t new, that it was not backed up by the victim and that the accuser had once fought on the opposite side of Kavanaugh in one of the country’s biggest legal battles were pieces of information that <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Times </em>thought readers shouldn’t be distracted by.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Click on the link below to read the rest of the article:</i></span></div>
<a href="https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/hating-kavanaugh-killing-journalism-daniel-greenfield/"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/hating-kavanaugh-killing-journalism-daniel-greenfield/</span></a>jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-17390811975256215602019-09-17T05:47:00.001-05:002019-09-17T05:47:37.364-05:00A Bad Case of the Vapors<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By John Tierney</span><br />
<a href="https://www.city-journal.org/war-on-nicotine-vaping"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://www.city-journal.org/war-on-nicotine-vaping</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">September 16, 2019</span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The war on nicotine vaping has reached a new level of absurdity. It was bad enough when public health officials, politicians, and the press reacted to the recent outbreak of respiratory illness among vapers of marijuana by failing to warn the public in a clear manner. Instead of explaining the specific danger from vaping a certain kind of THC-infused oil, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and politicians like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told the public to stop using any kind of electronic cigarette—which is like responding to an outbreak of food poisoning by telling people to stop eating.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">But now officials are using the panic they sowed to justify policies that could shorten the lives of millions of Americans. The governors of New York and Michigan have moved immediately to ban the most popular flavors of nicotine e-cigarettes used by adult smokers to quit, and the Trump administration plans to ban them nationwide. “People are dying from vaping,” Trump said, justifying the Food and Drug Administration’s plan, but there is</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://reason.com/2019/09/04/michigan-governors-reckless-e-cigarette-ban-relies-on-a-breathtakingly-broad-reading-of-her-authority-to-protect-public-health/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">scant evidence that nicotine vaping has contributed</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">to any of the recent deaths or illnesses. The</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1911614" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">evidence so far</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">clearly points to a problem with marijuana vaping, in particular to an oil derived from Vitamin E that has been added to THC in vaping cartridges sold mainly on the black market.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">So why go after nicotine e-cigarettes? It’s true that a small minority of the stricken vapers said they had used nicotine, not THC, but researchers say they may have been loath to admit to illegal activity. Their symptoms don’t seem plausibly related to ordinary nicotine vaping. Nicotine, unlike THC, is water-soluble and </span><a href="https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/09/10/can-chemistry-explain-vaping-lung-14277" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">can be vaped without the additives</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">used to vaporize THC—like the oil blamed for the recent epidemic. It’s conceivable that some people were harmed by dangerous ingredients that were added to nicotine in liquids that were home-made or purchased on the black market, but that’s no reason to ban commercial e-cigarettes like Juul, which have been used by millions of people without causing respiratory problems. In an article published last month in</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17476348.2019.1649146?scroll=top&needAccess=true" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 600; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Expert Review of Respiratory Medicine</em></span></a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">, a team of Italian, Canadian, and American scientists surveyed the clinical research into e-cigarettes and reported that “no studies reported serious adverse events” or “significant changes in pulmonary functions.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">Their findings jibed with the conclusions by British medical authorities that nicotine itself is</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://www.rsph.org.uk/about-us/news/nicotine--no-more-harmful-to-health-than-caffeine-.html" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">no more harmful than caffeine</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">, and that e-cigarettes are</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/projects/outputs/nicotine-without-smoke-tobacco-harm-reduction-0" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">at least 95 percent safer</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">than tobacco cigarettes. While the U.S. public-health establishment has been misleading the public—so that a</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/general_lifestyle/august_2018/most_say_e_cigarettes_no_healthier_than_traditional_ones" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">majority of Americans now mistakenly believe</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">that e-cigarettes are as harmful or even more harmful than cigarettes—the Royal Society for Public Health has been urging smokers to switch to vaping, and British hospitals have been promoting e-cigarettes by allowing vape shops to operate on their premises.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">The FDA is doing just the opposite with its new policies, which it </span><a href="https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/trump-administration-combating-epidemic-youth-e-cigarette-use-plan-clear-market-unauthorized-non" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">tried to justify</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">last week by releasing the latest results of the National Youth Tobacco Survey. The survey showed that 27.5 percent of high school students in 2019 had vaped at least once in the previous month, an increase from the previous year’s figure of 20.8 percent. No one wants teenagers to develop a nicotine habit, but vaping it is far safer than smoking, and in any case much of the increase in vaping has nothing to do with nicotine. Many of the students are vaping non-nicotine liquids, notably THC, which has surged in popularity among teenage vapers,</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/2017_tables/tobacco_use.htm#t66_down" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">especially in states that have legalized marijuana.</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">Meanwhile, the FDA (and most of the press) ignored the most important result from the new survey: the sharpest one-year decline in teenage smoking ever recorded. The fraction of high school students who’d smoked in the previous month declined by 28 percent, from 8.1 percent of students in 2018 to 5.8 percent in 2019—a historic low reached thanks to the availability of cigarette alternatives. Since e-cigarettes first appeared in 2010, smoking rates among teenagers, young adults, and older adults</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://reason.com/2019/08/21/vaping-may-be-driving-down-smoking-says-federal-survey-report/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">have fallen much faster</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">than during the pre-vaping years. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">But this remarkable progress against the leading preventable cause of death is now jeopardized by the FDA’s proposal to ban Juul and other companies from selling anything except tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes. Anti-smoking activists claim that flavors like mango and mint are being used to entice teenagers, but it’s already illegal for teenagers to buy any kind of e-cigarette, and these </span><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6022703/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">non-tobacco flavors are favored by more than three-quarters of the adult smokers who switch to vaping.</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">In fact, one of the benefits of e-cigarettes is that once smokers become accustomed to getting nicotine from something that tastes better than tobacco, they can become repulsed by the taste of regular cigarettes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">What happens if those other flavors get banned? One consequence would be a black market in flavored liquids—and more risk of unsafe ingredients being added. Another consequence would be an increase in smoking, as Laura Pacek of the Duke School of Medicine and colleagues reported this summer in the journal</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10826084.2019.1626435?src=recsys" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 600; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Substance Use & Misuse</em></span></a><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 600; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, </em></span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">based on a study of 240 young adults who use e-cigarettes as well as tobacco cigarettes. When asked how they would respond to a ban on flavored nicotine e-cigarettes, the young adults said that they would smoke more tobacco cigarettes.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">That’s the same conclusion reached by Wall Street, which reacted to the FDA’s new plan by sending</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://www.investors.com/news/tobacco-stocks-trump-e-cigarette-ban/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">tobacco stocks higher</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">. Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health who studies tobacco-control policies,</span><a href="https://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.com/2019/08/boston-pulmonologist-provides.html" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">says</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">that Wall Street’s reaction “may be the best evidence yet that the FDA’s flavored e-cigarette ban will result in a substantial increase in smoking-related morbidity and mortality.” He calls it a “public-health disaster,” and the numbers back him up. By exploiting the panic they created over a few hundred cases of respiratory illness almost certainly unrelated to nicotine e-cigarettes, the federal government is in effect encouraging smokers to maintain a habit that is responsible for the deaths of 1,300 Americans per day. The U.S. public health establishment remains, more than ever,</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://www.city-journal.org/html/corruption-public-health-15323.html" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">a hazard to public health</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 600; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.city-journal.org/contributor/john-tierney_912" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">John Tierney</a></em></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 600; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> is a contributing editor of </em></span><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 600; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">City Journal<em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> and a contributing science columnist for the </em>New York Times.</span></span><br />
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-46445083821234357882019-09-16T17:40:00.000-05:002019-09-16T17:40:29.012-05:00Woke Doctors<br />
By Rod Dreher<br />
<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/woke-doctors/">https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/woke-doctors/</a><br />
September 16, 2019<br />
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You might remember the post here about <a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/moralistic-therapeutic-med-school-erasing-the-white-stain/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #27338d; text-decoration: none;">“Moralistic Therapeutic Med School,”</a> in which medical schools are starting to remove or relocate images of white men affiliated with the school who accomplished great things. This is about something related, but much more serious.</div>
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A reader who is a physician sent me <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/take-two-aspirin-and-call-me-by-my-pronouns-11568325291" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #27338d; text-decoration: none;">this WSJ op-ed column the other day</a>. He said that this is bad news for the medical profession. The author is Stanley Goldfarb, a former administrator at Penn’s medical school. Excerpts:</div>
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A new wave of educational specialists is increasingly influencing medical education. They emphasize “social justice” that relates to health care only tangentially. This approach is the result of a progressive mind-set that abhors hierarchy of any kind and the social elitism associated with the medical profession in particular.</div>
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These educators focus on eliminating health disparities and ensuring that the next generation of physicians is well-equipped to deal with cultural diversity, which are worthwhile goals. But teaching these issues is coming at the expense of rigorous training in medical science. The prospect of this “new,” politicized medical education should worry all Americans.</div>
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More:</div>
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The zeitgeist of sociology and social work have become the driving force in medical education. The goal of today’s educators is to produce legions of primary care physicians who engage in what is termed “population health.”</div>
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This fits perfectly with the current administrator-rich, policy-heavy, form-over-function approach at every level of American education. Theories of learning with virtually no experimental basis for their impact on society and professions now prevail. Students are taught in the tradition of educational theorist Étienne Wenger, who emphasized “communal learning” rather than individual mastery of crucial information.</div>
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Where will all this lead? Medical school bureaucracies have become bloated, as they have in every other sphere of education. Curricula will increasingly focus on climate change, social inequities, gun violence, bias and other progressive causes only tangentially related to treating illness. And so will many of your doctors in coming years.</div>
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<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/take-two-aspirin-and-call-me-by-my-pronouns-11568325291" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #27338d; text-decoration: none;">Read the whole thing.</a> At some point, reality will take its revenge, and the woke will be banished. But how much suffering will innocent people have to endure before it does? And how many people of faith will be deterred from seeking a medical career because the militant left has placed absurd barriers to keep out the politically incorrect.</div>
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This morning, on the drive to the airport (I’m on my way to New York City now), I heard <a href="https://www.marketplace.org/2019/09/16/transgender-health-training-program/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #27338d; text-decoration: none;">a radio piece talking about the need for transgender health care</a>, and how medical educators in Oregon are meeting it. There’s not yet a transcript available for the broadcast, but I can tell you that it begins with the reporter framing transgender surgery in a politically correct way — something like, “the patient had surgery to realign her body with her gender identity.” This, by the way, is an example of how the media re-engineers society by changing language. Later in the piece, a doctor says that in years past, people with gender dysphoria would typically have been referred for mental health treatment. Today, though, they get surgical intervention.</div>
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This is massively important! What if psychiatric treatment, or some adjacent treatment, is what is better for them than gender reassignment? What if that is what would restore them to health?</div>
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Here’s a little personal story that came to mind as I was listening to this piece.</div>
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The transgender person in the story says that he (a biological male presenting as female) always felt uncomfortable in his body. No doubt this is true. I think this accounts for the disproportionate number of autistic people among gender dysphorics. Autism is often accompanied by something called “sensory processing disorder.” Nobody knows why this is, but it is common.</div>
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As I learned about autism and sensory processing disorder in my own family, a number of things about myself became clear. I am confident that I would not meet the threshold for a formal autism spectrum diagnosis, but I am equally confident that I have many of the traits of people who are (and that includes a member of my family). In fact, the sensory stuff is fairly widespread in my family.</div>
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As a child, I had very strong legs. My father recalls me doing 400 deep knee bends when I was nine years old; he stopped me because he thought I would hurt myself. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not strengthen my upper body. I had poor muscle tone, and nothing could fix that. Decades later, I learned that this is something that people on the spectrum sometimes have.</div>
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I have never felt comfortable in my body, though I thought for most of my life this was simply neurosis. No, I have never had the faintest thought of gender dysphoria, but it manifested itself in something feeling … not right. Something hard to define. To be frank, one reason I drank so much in college — aside from the fact that LSU in the 1980s had a massive binge-drinking culture — was to overcome that sense of not-rightness, so I could talk to girls. The point is, when I read about officially-diagnosed autistic young people seeking sex changes because they say they don’t feel right in their bodies, I get that. I can’t pretend to know about that from a <em>sexualized</em> point of view, but that sense that things aren’t right is quite familiar to me. And it never goes away. You just have to learn how to cope with it. For me, it got better as I grew older.</div>
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I can remember in my childhood, how my mom had a big heart (still does), but was not particular physically affectionate. I couldn’t understand that at all, especially when our father was physically demonstrative. Once I started learning about autism and sensory processing a decade or so ago, and began to understand things about myself, and why I could be so prickly about ordinary bodily things, I understood her in a new way. This was almost certainly not an emotional disposition for her, but a neurological-sensory disorder. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but my mom and I are so much alike in so many ways that I think this is what was going on. It’s how it is with me. I can see this trait — sensory processing disorder — manifesting to some degree in most of my mom’s six grandchildren too.</div>
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I bring this up only to say that at least some of these young spectrum people who seek gender dysphoria treatment, including radical, irreversible steps (e.g., mastectomies, hormone treatment that arrests sexual maturity) could surely benefit from ordinary therapies to help them cope with their sensory issues. If I had known as a teenager and a young adult that what I was feeling in and about my body was due not to a character or psychological flaw, but probably due to neurobiology, it would have been much easier to manage it, and to learn how to live with it.</div>
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I’ve come to see, for example, the fact that I have unusual superpowers when it comes to taste and smell to be an advantage. This is why I love food and wine so much: I can experience aromas and flavors more intensely than most people. And I’ve stopped feeling so bad about my inability to tone my upper body, though I am also sure that I will never feel quite at home in my body (I have always been terrible at dancing and athletics; I can be a graceful writer, but in the flesh, am a shambling galoot). Fortunately for me, this is all relatively minor — discomforting, not tormenting. I wouldn’t judge the subjective experiences of spectrum people suffering from gender dysphoria.</div>
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My point here is simply this: for whatever cultural reasons, young people who report a serious disjunction between themselves and their bodies <em>are being encouraged to express and to affirm that disjunction in sexual ways</em> — and now the medical profession is eager to confirm that concept. Often this results in permanent surgical or hormone-driven alteration to the body. Dr. Goldfarb’s column makes me afraid for those young people and their families, being driven by the popular culture and the culture of medicine into asking for life-changing procedures that will not actually cure them of their sense of alienation from their bodies, because it may not really be about gender.</div>
jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-1820117383184397842019-09-15T09:01:00.000-05:002019-09-15T09:01:02.768-05:00It’s Not The NRA Stopping Gun Control, It’s America’s 100 Million Gun Owners<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By Mark Overstreet</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://thefederalist.com/author/markoverstreet/">https://thefederalist.com/author/markoverstreet/</a></span><br />
<a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/13/not-nra-stopping-gun-control-americas-100-million-gun-owners/"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/13/not-nra-stopping-gun-control-americas-100-million-gun-owners/</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">September 13, 2019</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Rally in Denver on May 18th. (Michael Ciaglio/USA Today)</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">During the Reign of Terror, the most bloodthirsty member of France’s revolutionary government, Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, a “vehement, emotional and vulgar man, craving the center of the stage, dramatizing and gesticulating and bellowing when excited” (<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196977.Twelve_Who_Ruled" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ch. 7</a>), called for the executions of “merchants.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For Adolf Hitler and the German national socialist workers party, the enemy was instead “the Jew.” For Joseph Stalin, it was “the capitalists.” For Mao Zedong, “the bourgeoisie,” “the intellectuals,” and “the reactionary classes.” And for Che Guevara, “rich landowners.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">President Lyndon B. Johnson cannot be placed in the same category as those miscreants. Nevertheless, when the Gun Control Act of 1968 didn’t require the registration of all guns and the licensing of all gun owners as he had hoped, LBJ singularly blamed “the gun lobby.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">President Bill Clinton more specifically blamed “the NRA” when, after Congress imposed the firearm background check system and a <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/05/republicans-shouldnt-cave-democrats-guns/" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">nearly make-believe “ban”</a> on “assault weapons,” 62 Democrats, including Speaker of the House Tom Foley, were defeated in the 1994 congressional elections, giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Participants in this year’s Democrat presidential debates have also pointed their accusatory fingers at “the NRA,” along with a laundry list of other groups and individuals, including “corporations,” “big corporations,” “the 1 percent,” “big pharma,” “big insurance companies,” “the rich and powerful,” “those with money,” “the special interests,” “PACs,” “the Koch Brothers,” “Mitch McConnell,” and, of course, “Donald Trump.”</span><strong style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where vagrants reportedly cover the sidewalks with feces, urine, and needles—a condition aspired to for Austin, Texas, by its mayor, Steve Adler, and its like-minded city council—the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution labeling NRA a “terrorist organization.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Throughout history, the left has achieved power by rallying its mob, and rallied its mob by giving it someone to hate. Vladimir Lenin encouraged “language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us,” Saul Alinsky advised radicals to “pick the target . . . and polarize it,” and leftists continue the practice today.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So, a few days ago, left-wing columnist Michael Tomasky wrote that the gun laws Democrats are now pushing can be imposed if “<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-odessa-shooting-and-3-ways-the-nra-loses-in-2020?ref=scroll" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The NRA Can Be Beaten</a>.” Having worked in the NRA’s political division from 1991 to 2016, I might laugh at Tomasky’s notion, if I had a sense of humor about such things. The left’s everyone-on-message vilification of “the NRA” may inspire high-pitched squeals of approval during the Democrats’ presidential debates and campaign rallies, but anyone who thinks that the NRA is all that stands in the way of disarming the people of the United States has another think coming.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Those 62 Democrats who were defeated in the 1994 elections didn’t lose just because of the several hundred of us who worked at NRA headquarters, nor even because of the NRA’s 1 million or so members at the time. There were 60 million other gun owners in America in 1994 and soon thereafter polls showed that more Americans identified with the NRA than with either major political party.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">NRA’s membership roughly doubled to 3 million after Clinton and the Democrats imposed gun control and rose to 5 million after President Barack Obama tried to impose more gun control during his second term. There are now 100 million gun-owning Americans, and gun owners tend to be single-issue voters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Tens of millions of Americans own handguns, which anti-gun activists tried to get banned in the 1970s and 1980s. <a href="https://crimeresearch.org/tag/annual-report-on-number-of-concealed-handgun-permits/" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; color: #ea370b; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Seventeen and a half million</a> Americans have permits to carry handguns for protection away from home. A comparable number own semi-automatic rifles that Democrats in Congress have been trying to ban since 1989.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Since the 1990s, every time Democrats inside the Beltway have acted against the right to keep and bear arms, or threatened to do so, purchases of guns, particularly those that Democrats want most to ban, have soared. For example, in August, the first month of Democrats’ new push against guns, gun purchases increased roughly 16 percent, compared to the number in August 2018.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yet Democrats believe they have reason to hope. Polls show support for some of the gun laws they are demanding, though support for gun control typically falls once the public becomes informed about the details and it has fallen this year. Also, some have recently claimed that there are internal troubles within the NRA, inspiring some of its detractors to speculate that the organization can now be defeated and gun control now be imposed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Speculations about defeating “the NRA” may titillate the mob, but even if NRA disappeared overnight, there are still 100 million gun owners, their family members, and their friends. Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election because he won “swing states” Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida, all of which have large populations of gun owners. If gun control supporters achieve their goals, it will be because gun owners are complacent or don’t understand the details and ramifications of what Democrats are demanding, not because of rumors about the NRA.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Conventional wisdom holds that you shouldn’t predict what the court might do in a specific case. But three of the justices who voted with the majority in <em style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">District of Columbia v. Heller</em> (2008), Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, are still on the court, and most observers think the most recent appointees to the court, Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, have similar respect for the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Heller</em> observed that self-defense is an “inherent right” that is “central to the Second Amendment,” and ruled that the amendment protects “the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation” and “extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms.” One needn’t a crystal ball to conclude that might not bode well for state laws that impose unreasonable restrictions on carrying arms for protection or that ban firearms and ammunition magazines owned for the inherent right the amendment protects.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally, while “Beto” O’Rourke—another “vehement, emotional and vulgar man, craving the center of the stage, dramatizing and gesticulating and bellowing when excited”—says Americans would agree to hand over their semi-automatic rifles, the last time our government tried to confiscate guns from the people, it received a revolution in return.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As Meghan McCain said on “The View” several days ago—courageously taking a stand while Republican members of Congress we elected to protect our rights hide in the shadows—“If you’re talking about taking people’s guns away from them, there’s going to be a lot of violence."</span><strong style="background-color: transparent; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Or, as Alinsky observed, paraphrasing Lenin, the radical left cannot begin murdering its political opponents in the United States, because it’s the rest of us who have the guns.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 28px;">Mark Overstreet is a firearm instructor and author in central Texas. He retired in 2016 as the senior research coordinator of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, after 25 years with the organization. He is also retired from the Army Reserve, after 23 years including duty as a combat cameraman in Iraq. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the NRA or the Department of Defense. He can be reached at </span><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 28px;">Mark@PanoplyTactical.com.</span></span></div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-1415016838107396352019-09-14T20:30:00.002-05:002019-09-14T20:30:40.519-05:00Turning Brexit into a crime<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By Brendan O'Neill</span><br />
<a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/13/turning-brexit-into-a-crime/"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/13/turning-brexit-into-a-crime/</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">13 September 2019</span><br />
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<img alt="Image result for john bercow" height="266" 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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>John Bercow</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This week, the Remainer elite’s war on democracy reached fever pitch. There is now a distinct whiff of autocracy in their campaign to overthrow <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/topic/brexit/" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition-duration: 0.3s, 0.3s, 0.3s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, color;" target="_blank">Brexit</a>. Their aim seems to be to <em style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">criminalise</em> Brexit, to make it an actual offence to walk away from the <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/tag/eu/" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition-duration: 0.3s, 0.3s, 0.3s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, color;" target="_blank">European Union</a>.</span></div>
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Remoaner politicians constantly complain about the rhetoric of Brexiteers. But this week their own rhetoric became genuinely alarming. They now speak openly about imprisoning those who try to bring about a clean-break Brexit (‘No Deal’). They compare politicians who refuse to extend Britain’s membership of the EU to common criminals.</div>
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So John Bercow, the puffed-up Speaker who abused his position in parliament to try to subvert the people’s will, says <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/tag/boris-johnson/" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition-duration: 0.3s, 0.3s, 0.3s; transition-property: background-color, border-color, color;" target="_blank">Boris Johnson</a> will be no better than a ‘bank robber’ if he refuses to delay Brexit and take No Deal off the table.</div>
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<span style="line-height: 38.5px;">Because the Benn Bill voted through by MPs last week outlaws </span><a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/tag/no-deal/" rel="noopener" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 38.5px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: background-color 0.3s, border-color 0.3s, color 0.3s;" target="_blank">No Deal</a><span style="line-height: 38.5px;"> and demands an extension to our membership of the EU, anyone who defies it is just a no-good criminal, Bercow says.</span></div>
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<img alt="Image result for Jolyon Maugham" height="299" src="https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5853df25dd089571208b45be-750-562.png" width="400" /></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.75em;"><i>Jolyon Maughan</i></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.75em;">Meanwhile, anti-democratic lawyers are taking legal action in Scotland to ‘compel Boris Johnson to seek an extension to Article 50’. One of these lawyers – Jolyon Maugham – has said of Boris: ‘he’ll either see the extension or he’ll go to prison.’ That is, keep us in the EU or you will go to jail.</span></div>
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These people have lost it. It is a striking insight into their tyrannical mindsets that they can so casually speak of criminalising and jailing anyone who wants a clean-break Brexit and wants it now.</div>
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They are using the law to make it a crime to pursue the thing that millions of people voted for: leaving the EU. This genuinely feels like a coup, where a tiny but powerful elite uses its power and its connections to make it a crime for politicians to be faithful to the people’s will. They are tearing apart the democratic fabric of this nation.</div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-14355603780118702932019-09-14T19:57:00.000-05:002019-09-14T19:57:23.752-05:00Adventures In Christian Grift<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white;">By </span><span class="author vcard" style="background-color: white; text-transform: uppercase;"><a class="url fn n" href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/author/rod-dreher" style="text-decoration: none;" title="View all posts by Rod Dreher">ROD DREHER</a></span></span><br />
<a href="https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/adventures-in-christian-grift-falwell-bransfield/"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/adventures-in-christian-grift-falwell-bransfield/</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">September 12, 2019</span><br />
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<i>Jerry Falwell Jr. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)</i><br />
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<a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/09/jerry-falwell-liberty-university-loans-227914" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(39, 51, 141); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Did you see Brandon Ambrosino’s deeply reported <em>Politico</em> piece on Jerry Falwell Jr.’s empire at Liberty University? </span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If not, you should. It’s about how Falwell Jr. runs the Christian college as a family fief, a de facto dictatorship, and a vehicle to enrich the family’s coffers, even at the expense of the university’s mission and reputation. The piece once again forces the question: <strong>where on earth is the university’s board of trustees?</strong> They remind me of a colorful phrase of my late father, who was once a farmer: “useless as teats on a boar.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Well, apparently some of them are speaking to Ambrosino. From the piece:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But these new revelations speak to rising discontent with Falwell’s stewardship. The people interviewed for this article include members of Liberty’s board of trustees, senior university officials, and rank-and-file staff members who work closely with Falwell. They are reluctant to speak out—there’s no organized, open dissent to Falwell on campus—but they said they see it as necessary to save Liberty University and the values it once stood for. They said they believe in the Christian tradition and in the conservative politics at the heart of Liberty’s mission.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Most of the long story is about business shenanigans that appear to violate, or come close to violating, the university’s tax-exempt status, and certainly are at odds with the school’s Christian mission. But the juiciest stuff has to do with Jerry Jr.’s life as a player. Ambrosino got his hands on 2014 shots of Jerry Jr., his wife Becki, their son Trey and Trey’s wife partying at a Miami nightclub. Ambrosino writes:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">According to several people with direct knowledge of the situation, Falwell—the president of a conservative Christian college that frowns upon co-ed dancing (Liberty students can receive demerits if seen doing it) and prohibits alcohol use (for which students can be expelled)—was angry that photos of him clubbing made it up online. To remedy the situation, multiple Liberty staffers said Falwell went to John Gauger, whom they characterized as his “IT guy,” and asked him to downgrade the photos’ prominence on Google searches. Gauger did not respond to requests for comment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jerry Jr. denied to Ambrosino that the photos were real, and claimed that his image had been photoshopped. <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/10/jerry-falwell-nightclub-photos-miami-228054" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;">The photographer who snapped them was so incensed by the claim that he released more of them the next day. </a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And there’s this:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In May 2019, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-falwell-exclusive/exclusive-trump-fixer-cohen-says-he-helped-falwell-handle-racy-photos-idUSKCN1SD2JG" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Reuters reported</a> that Cohen helped Falwell contain the fallout from some racy “personal” photos.Later that month, Falwell took to Todd Starnes’ radio talk show to rebut the claims.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“This report is not accurate,” Falwell said. “There are no compromising or embarrassing photos of me.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Members of Falwell’s inner circle took note of the phrasing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“If you read how Jerry is framing his response, you can see he is being very selective,” one of Falwell’s confidants said. Racy photos <i>do</i> exist, but at least some of the photos are of his wife, Becki, <a href="https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article231717833.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">as the <i>Miami Herald </i>confirmed</a> in June.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Longtime Liberty officials close to Falwell told me the university president has shown or texted his male confidants—including at least one employee who worked for him at Liberty—photos of his wife in provocative and sexual poses.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At Liberty, Falwell is “very, very vocal” about his “sex life,” in the words of one Liberty official—a characterization multiple current and former university officials and employees interviewed for this story support. In a car ride about a decade ago with a senior university official who has since left Liberty, “all he wanted to talk about was how he would nail his wife, how she couldn’t handle [his penis size], and stuff of that sort,” this former official recalled. Falwell did not respond to questions about this incident.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">More than simply talking with employees about his wife in a sexual manner, on at least one occasion, Falwell shared a photo of his wife wearing what appeared to be a French maid costume, according to a longtime Liberty employee with firsthand knowledge of the image and the fallout that followed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ewgh. If you think <em>Politico</em> is just making this stuff up, let me assure you that charges like this don’t make it into print unless they’ve been lawyered to death. That doesn’t mean that they’re true, but it does mean that Ambrosino and his editors almost certainly had to prove to the publication’s lawyers that these allegations could withstand a court challenge. If you’ve ever had to deal as a writer with your newspaper or magazine’s lawyers — I have — you know that they are a very conservative (not necessarily in the political sense) bunch who try to rein their clients in to reduce their potential legal exposure. Again, the fact that Politico published these allegations do not make them true, but it does show that the magazine is so confident in their factual accuracy that they are prepared to face down a very wealthy plaintiff in a libel suit, if it comes to that. That’s not nothing.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/09/jerry-falwell-liberty-university-loans-227914" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;">Read the whole thing.</a> The final paragraphs are harsh. You should know, if you don’t already, that unlike his father, Jerry Jr. is not a preacher. But he is the head of an Evangelical Christian university. So, here:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One source pointed to a tweet Jerry Falwell Jr. sent out in June 2019 criticizing David Platt, an evangelical Virginia pastor who apologized for welcoming Trump to his church. “I only want to lead us with God’s Word in a way that transcends political party and position, heals the hurts of racial division and injustice, and honors every man and woman made in the image of God,” <a href="https://www.mcleanbible.org/prayer-president" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Platt said</a>. “Sorry to be crude,” wrote Falwell <a href="https://relevantmagazine.com/current/jerry-falwell-jr-tweeted-a-crude-message-to-david-platt-following-trump-drama/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">in a since-deleted tweet</a>, “but pastors like [David Platt] need to grow a pair.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">After Falwell came under criticism for his tweet about Platt, he responded to critics with a <a href="https://twitter.com/JerryFalwellJr/status/1136046428588040194" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">two-part Twitter thread</a>, which, in the words of one current high-ranking Liberty official, “a lot of people found troubling.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“I have never been a minister,” Falwell tweeted. “UVA-trained lawyer and commercial real estate developer for 20 yrs. Univ president for last 12 years-student body tripled to 100000+/endowment from 0 to $2 billion and $1.6B new construction in those 12 years. The faculty, students and campus pastor @davidnasser of @LibertyU are the ones who keep LU strong spiritually as the best Christian univ in the world. While I am proud to be a conservative Christian, my job is to keep LU successful academically, financially and in athletics.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To those who worked for Liberty under the late Rev. Falwell, the sentiment appeared to signal a serious departure from his father’s legacy. “Bragging about business success and washing his hands of any responsibility for spiritual life at the university—that was frankly a pretty Trumpian line of commentary,” said one former university official with longstanding ties to both Liberty and the Falwell family.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jerry Jr. says he has asked the FBI to investigate whether employees who leaked his e-mails to journalists broke the law. He’s not denying their content, so I guess that’s all he has left — that, and claiming that he’s being targeted from within because he’s a defender of Donald Trump.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Jerry Jr. says he has asked the FBI to investigate whether employees who leaked his e-mails to journalists broke the law. He’s not denying their content, so I guess that’s all he has left — that, and claiming that he’s being targeted from within because he’s a defender of Donald Trump.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-falwell-emails-exclusive-idUSKCN1VX1QJ?fbclid=IwAR3OnPOJYQ_eXMy3QzwVR22ZjJlhlrp8s6buB8D5ioFambyoppzmfjotM1c" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;">Today, Reuters reported on a new leak of Jerry Jr. e-mails to Liberty U. employees.</a>Excerpts:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As he complains of being targeted by critics, Reuters has found that Falwell himself was disparaging Liberty students, staff and parents for years in emails to Liberty administrators.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The several dozen emails reviewed by Reuters span nearly a decade-long period starting in 2008. In the emails, Falwell insults some Liberty students, calling them “social misfits.” In others, he blasts faculty members and senior Liberty staff:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Ronald Sones, then the dean of the engineering school, was “a bag of hot air” who “couldn’t spell the word ‘profit,’” Falwell wrote in 2011. Sones is no longer the dean and could not be reached for comment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Richard Hinkley, the campus police chief, was “a half-wit and easy to manipulate” and shouldn’t be allowed to speak publicly. Hinkley could not be reached for comment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">-Of Kevin Keys, then Liberty’s associate athletics director, Falwell wrote in 2012: “Only get Kevin involved in something if you want it not to work.” Contacted by Reuters, Keys said: “I don’t know anything about that and I would prefer not to comment.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">More:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The selection of emails provides a glimpse of the management style Falwell employs to run the nonprofit Christian university, which reports $2.8 billion in assets. Several of the emails take a derogatory tone toward Liberty parents, students, and other university officials.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In one 2012 email, Falwell dismisses Liberty parents who begged the school not to move their kids from on-campus dorms to off-campus housing in the middle of their freshman year when Liberty sought to raze some dorms to build new ones.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In response to one mother’s letter expressing concern for how the move could affect her daughter, emails show, a top Liberty administrator sent a reassuring letter. Falwell struck a less sympathetic tone. “Tell them, if they keep complaining, we’ll tear them down over Thanksgiving break!” Falwell wrote to Liberty officials.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Who wants their kid to attend a Christian (!) college under the stewardship of a creep like that? How can you be president of a Christian university, but then claim that you have nothing to do with its spiritual quality? Falwell Jr. may not be a pastor, but he is unquestionably a Christian leader. Seems to me that the board of directors ought to be doing more to defend the university than speaking without attribution to reporters, and leaking e-mails.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Meanwhile, in other Religious Leaders Behaving Badly, the <em>Washington Post</em> has a new piece up about the lush life of former Bishop Michael Bransfield of Wheeling, W. Va. It begins like this:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It was billed as a holy journey, a pilgrimage with West Virginia Bishop Michael J. Bransfield to “pray, sing and worship” at the National Shrine in Washington, D.C. Catholics from remote areas of one of the nation’s poorest states paid up to $190 for seats on overnight buses and hotel rooms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Unknown to the worshipers, Bransfield traveled another way. He hired a private jet and, after a 33-minute flight, took a limousine from the airport. The church picked up his $6,769 travel bill.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That trip in September 2017 was emblematic of the secret history of Bransfield’s lavish travel. He spent millions of dollars from his diocese on trips in the United States and abroad, records show, while many of his parishioners struggled to find work, feed their families and educate their children.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b> </b>Pope Francis has said bishops should live modestly. During his 13 years as the leader of the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, Bransfield took nearly 150 trips on private jets and some 200 limousine rides, a Washington Post investigation found. He stayed at exclusive hotels in Washington, Rome, Paris, London and the Caribbean.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Last year, Bransfield stayed a week in the penthouse of a legendary Palm Beach, Fla., hotel, at a cost of $9,336. He hired a chauffeur to drive him around Washington for a day at a cost of $1,383. And he spent $12,386 for a jet to fly him from the Jersey Shore to a meeting with the pope’s ambassador in the nation’s capital.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/a-penthouse-limousines-and-private-jets-inside-the-globe-trotting-life-of-bishop-michael-bransfield/2019/09/12/4a69fe48-ce87-11e9-9031-519885a08a86_story.html" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;">You have to read the whole thing.</a> This Bransfield is extravagantly corrupt — and the diocese’s own investigation (the source of the <em>Post</em>‘s report) documents it with receipts. His reputation from his lengthy tenure at the Basilica in DC was that of a player, and not just in matters of luxury. <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/04/how-cardinal-wuerl-misled-the-papal-foundation" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;">Matthew B. O’Brien’s powerful, detailed <em>First Things</em> piece back in April</a>, detailing the corruption at the Papal Foundation involving then-cardinal Ted McCarrick, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, and Bishop Bransfield, explains how sexual corruption is tied up with financial corruption in the Catholic hierarchy. Along these very same lines, one prominent Catholic layperson who worked at a very high level within the Church (though not with Bransfield) told me earlier this year that they had never imagined that there was such a close connection between sexual and financial corruption until they took a job working closely with the hierarchy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s about the sex and the money. It was like that with Bishop Bransfield, it seems, and in a different way, it might be about that with Jerry Falwell Jr. Though no one has alleged that he has committed adultery, the weird photo thing with his wife (supposedly photos of her in a position unbefitting the wife of a conservative Christian university president), and this allegation that Jerry Jr. brags in the workplace about his sexual prowess, indicates profound moral and spiritual disorder.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">How can the churches, and church institutions, minister to the world when they cannot clean up their own messes, and hold their own leaders accountable? It’s a more than fair question. It’s also a necessary one.</span></div>
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<img alt="The Rev. Ryszard Biernat is by the side of Bishop Richard Malone as Malone celebrates Mass at St. Joseph Cathedral in 2017. (Sharon Cantillon/Buffalo News)" height="405" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/bncore/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/1007218306_ash_wednesday_14-900x570.jpg" width="640" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><strong>UPDATE:</strong> A Catholic reader sends me updates I missed about the unfolding gay sex scandal engulfing the Diocese of Buffalo and its bishop, Richard Malone. <a href="https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2019/09/05/embattled-buffalo-bishop-calls-alleged-love-triangle-convoluted/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;">Here the successor of the apostles in Buffalo meets the press to discuss the disclosure of a love letter between Father Ryszard, his assistant, and a seminarian with whom Father Ryszard was intimate:</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the midst of an ongoing crisis surrounding Bishop Richard Malone’s governance of the Diocese of Buffalo, newly revealed correspondence suggests a romantic relationship between the bishop’s priest secretary and a former diocesan seminarian who resigned last month.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In a press conference on Wednesday, Malone called the content of the letter “a bit concerning” and the entire situation “a very complex, convoluted matter.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yeah — it involves a gay love triangle with two priests and a seminarian. <a href="http://www.themediareport.com/2019/09/11/exclusive-biernat-bojanowski-love-letter-buffalo/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;">You can read the entire 2016 love letter here. </a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.wkbw.com/news/i-team/the-malone-recordings/bishop-malone-this-could-be-the-end-for-me-as-bishop-it-could-force-me-to-resign" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(161, 174, 215); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; text-decoration: none;">Father Ryszard leaked a recording he made secretly in a meeting with the bishop.</a> From that report:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s the morning of Friday, Aug. 2, and Bishop Richard J. Malone hasn’t slept for two nights.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“We are in a true crisis situation,” Malone said. “True crisis. And everyone in the office is convinced this could be the end for me as bishop. It could force me to resign if in fact they make a story…”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Malone is at his sprawling residence on Buffalo’s East Side for a one-on-one meeting with his trusted secretary, Rev. Ryszard Biernat, and the embattled bishop is concerned about a brewing story regarding Christ the King Seminary, allegations of love letters and claims of sexual harassment by a diocesan priest.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“I think we’re gonna blow this story up into something like an atom bomb if we start talking about that. You know?” Malone said to Biernat. “Cause then it sounds like, it sounds like a soap opera. It sounds like a love triangle. And you know what the media can do with that.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Biernat goes on to say that he made the secret recording and released it because the bishop sees these messes, but never acts on them, or acts too late. It turns out that the third member of the alleged love triangle was a Father Nowak, at the seminary, who tried to blackmail Biernat’s apparent lover, seminarian Bojanowski, into having a sexual relationship with him. The blackmail allegedly included going through Bojanowski’s private things, finding the love letter, and photographing it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Get this: even though Malone knew back in January what Nowak was up to, and is on tape worrying that a guy he believed used information gathered in the confessional for sexual blackmail might be dangerous to leave in parish ministry … he left him in parish ministry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The big thing that Bishop Malone is worried about, according to the August 2 recording, is whether or not he will be allowed to keep his own job.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So: three clerical queens are engaged in a knife fight, and the do-nothing bishop is worried that the people will find out what’s really going on, and push him out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Why would anybody want to be priest of that diocese? Why would anybody want their sons to be a priest of that diocese? Why do people still believe that the Catholic Church scandals are only incidentally about gay men having sex behind the veil of holy orders?</span></div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-40976061165792772282019-09-12T20:37:00.000-05:002019-09-24T05:30:54.064-05:00The Eternal Debate over the Nature of Hell<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">By Nicholas Frankovich</span><br />
<a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/09/30/the-eternal-debate-over-the-nature-of-hell/"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/09/30/the-eternal-debate-over-the-nature-of-hell/</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">September 12, 2019</span><br />
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Does hell exist? It depends on what you mean by “hell.” David Bentley Hart answers the question in the affirmative but gives the term a definition different from that assumed by “apologists for the ‘infernalist’ orthodoxies,” as he calls his adversaries in the perennial debate over the nature of hell.</div>
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<em style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">What is hell? Who goes there? Do they ever leave? </em>Hart embraces universalism, also known as universal salvation, universal reconciliation, and apokatastasis (Greek for “restoration,” as of all creation in the age to come) — the doctrine, sometimes regarded as merely heterodox, other times as outright heretical, “that all shall be saved,” to quote the title of his lively new book on this burning topic.</div>
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Saved from what? From death and damnation. Not spared from their clutches, but delivered from them ultimately.</div>
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First, death: Each of us can expect to die and, like Christ, “descend into hell,” in the words of an antiquated but not entirely abandoned translation of the Apostles’ Creed. (In an older sense now all but forgotten, “hell” was a reasonable English equivalent of the original Greek — <em style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">ta katōtata</em>, the parts below, where the dead dwell. To modern ears, of course, to say that Christ went to hell sounds like blasphemy. It causes confusion and illustrates the outsized role that translation decisions have played in the reception — or, as Hart argues throughout, in the corruption — of doctrine down the centuries.) We can also expect, like Christ, to rise from the dead, although our uncertainty about the precise nature of our glorified, spiritual bodies will persist until we receive them at the general resurrection. Only then will we see the promised new reality face to face.</div>
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As for damnation, Hart imagines that most of us, even while on earth, spend too much time in hell, that our subjection to hell’s torments is not confined to kingdom come, that we walk through hell’s gates and then lock ourselves in, and that we are helpless to leave until they’re opened for us from the outside. “I do in fact believe in hell,” he explains,</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><i>though only in the sense of a profound and imprisoning misery that we impose upon ourselves by rejecting the love that alone can set us free. I believe, in fact, that I have on occasion experienced that hell from within its walls; . . . I suspect that most of us, at least past a certain age, have done so. . . . Practically all of us go through life as prisoners of our own egos, which are no more than the shadows cast by our souls, but which are nonetheless quite impossible for us to defeat without assistance and without grace.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 1.8125rem;">That’s a solid meditation at the intersection of psychology and spirituality. The darkness described by Hart is, as he says, familiar to many. He calls it “hell,” but it doesn’t sound much like the lake of fire in the Book of Revelation, does it? If you’re looking for that, or for a live cam on the lake of ice in the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, this is not the book for you. It will leave you cold, unless your rage provoked by the author’s ridicule of your beliefs about the Last Things leaves no room in your heart for such milder emotions as disappointment. Make no mistake: David Bentley Hart is an able rhetorician and polemicist.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , serif; line-height: 1.8125rem;">What a sharp tongue he has:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><i>There are, I admit — unfortunately, I have met some of them — those Christians who are earnestly attached to the idea of an eternal hell not just because they feel they must be, but also because it is what they want to believe. For some of them, in fact, it is practically the best part of the story. It gives them a sense of belonging to a very special club, and they positively relish the prospect of a whole eternity in which to enjoy the impotent envy of all those writhing, resentful souls that have been permanently consigned to an inferior neighborhood outside the gates. That is the sort of prestige that cannot be bought where the common people shop.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Speaking of prestige: By now, in his mid fifties, the itinerant academic and indefatigable essayist (his full curriculum vitae could probably be its own book) has established himself as one of the best theologians writing in English today and as hands down the best writer among contemporary Anglophone theologians. Behold his literary pyrotechnics. I sometimes wonder whether they distract readers from the hard work of sitting down with him and thinking problems through. I suppose that after a point he gets bored with trying to untangle intractable philosophical knots. He’s capable of mischief. If he ends up doodling in the margins, limning the pages with generous applications of sarcasm and color, to relieve the tedium of, say, a necessary excursus on voluntarist theology, do you blame him?</span></div>
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The book has no endnotes. In a section dedicated to “acknowledgments and bibliographic notes,” Hart cites a few major sources, all of them in English. He’s erudite, and it may be that his final product is a symphony composed of the best, and the worst, but in any case the loudest and boldest that has been thought and said about hell, from Jesus himself to Saint Augustine (one of Hart’s bêtes noires) all the way to Thomas Talbott and a whole roster of present-day thinkers on all sides of the universalism controversy, but it’s hard to say. Hart shows his work, so to speak, only in patches. A convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, he’s wont to quote and reference various of the Greek Fathers with enthusiasm. He loves Origen and Gregory of Nyssa especially. When it comes to modern scholars, though, he names names sparingly. Chalk it up to tact, if you like, in recognition of how much of his work is an exercise in intellectual derision and evisceration. The book is published by a university press and is scholarly, but is it scholarship? One thing it’s not is intellectual history.</div>
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Call it an essay. It’s an attempt, from several angles, not to deny hell’s existence but to refute a common assumption about the duration of anyone’s residence there. The duration is finite, Hart maintains, and he pours out a cornucopia of arguments to make his case. He has arguments from reason (philosophy), arguments from faith (scripture and patristics), and arguments that can be understood only as members of both categories at once — any gesture toward philosophical reasoning tends to enjoy a benefit of the doubt from conservative Christians if the author is a Church Father in whom some of the authority of sacred tradition has come to be invested.</div>
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The most common “infernalist” accounts lean on the notion that eternal damnation is a corollary of human free will, which entails risk. We can choose evil over good. When we do, we must suffer the consequences of our moral error as surely as we must suffer those of playing with fire in a dry forest or of swimming too far from shore during a storm. The moral law is as blind and unforgiving as any law of nature.</div>
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Hart rehearses the counterargument that no one is culpable for breaking the moral law if he errs in ignorance or under deception. To someone who chooses evil over good, the evil appears as good or, on the whole, at least better than the alternative. Otherwise he wouldn’t choose the evil. God warned us about the fruit in the garden, but the serpent had a way with words, and we fell under their spell. Our judgment was clouded. We’re mere creatures, after all, limited in our intelligence and willpower. A punishment of infinite duration would be incommensurate with our finite nature and therefore unacceptable to God not only because he’s all-merciful but also because he’s all-just.</div>
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Nice chess move. But so what? God may knock the pieces off the board. He’s been known to do that. His ways are not ours. In Genesis, he commands Abraham to kill Isaac, setting a precedent that instills in the mindful believer a respectful wariness, an attitude of fear and trembling before the inscrutable Almighty.</div>
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Moreover, God desists from preventing outrages that nature inflicts on human persons and that human persons inflict on one another. To the dulcet theory that the fall of creation is ultimately fortunate because the response it elicits from God is his salvation plan, which, when fully realized, leaves the cosmos more blessed than it would have been had we never lapsed — to that, we might respond, with Hart: No, God is infinitely resourceful. He could have arranged it so that we would enjoy the deepest, richest happiness without having to suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune first.</div>
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Why he didn’t is a mystery. It’s at the heart of the theodicy problem, which is the heart of the matter for the universalist. Hart has no patience for the idea that God might be a capricious judge when deciding our eternal destiny, but God is capricious in other matters all the time, at least from our human perspective. An infant notices his mother’s absence but doesn’t know that it’s only momentary. To him it’s the end of the world. He cries out with all his strength, exercising his lungs and vocal cords almost to the breaking point. We smile at him. We call him “dear.” If you bristle at the suggestion that God rightly does the same to us when we wail over our adult afflictions, over massacres or mass shootings or enormities than which none, we feel, could ever be more heinous, fine. Go ahead and bristle.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">No philosophical argument for universalism is unanswerable, as far as I can tell. Hart is at his most cogent and engaging when he leaves philosophy for philology and sifts the Greek of the New Testament and Church Fathers. He may be right that “eternal” is not the obvious best translation of every instance of <em style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">aiōnios</em>, whose primary meaning is something like “age-long.” Hades, the underworld in Greek mythology, and Gehenna, a valley in Jerusalem, are often conflated under the rubric “hell” in translations of the New Testament but perhaps shouldn’t be. The New Testament provides a wealth of vivid images and strong statements, possibly hyperbolic in many cases, that Christians piece together in different configurations to illustrate competing eschatological visions, some of them more layered than others. What has become the default version, in which hell will endure forever as an abscess of unredeemed evil in a cosmos otherwise perfected and glorified, may be flatter than a close reading of the Greek can support.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Granted, belief in the tragedy of eternal damnation is fertile soil. It nourishes much heartfelt Christian devotion. Without it, no <em style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Inferno</em>. No <em style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Doctor Faustus</em>, either. Those are not sound reasons for rejecting universalism, but they’re strong reasons. A better reason would be that we’re less likely to avoid grave sin if we think that the hell we will go to for punishment will not be forever, although a reading of the <em style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Purgatorio</em> might disabuse us of any complacency. Remember that Catholics who appreciate the severity of what is, in effect, hell with a temporal limit offer fervent prayers for the reduction of purgatorial suffering, their own and that of loved ones and even of strangers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The best reason for rejecting universalism would be that it’s untrue. Is it, though? “We are, as it were, doomed to happiness,” according to Hart. If we are, so be it. Neither his opinion nor yours changes the fact. Consequently, no book on the controversy can be worth fearing or loathing. Here’s one worth reading.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-style: oblique; line-height: 1.27273; text-align: center;">This article appears as “Hell, Yes. Forever? Maybe Not.” in the September 30, 2019, print edition of </span><span class="small_caps" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: small-caps; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; vertical-align: baseline;">National Review</span><span style="font-style: oblique; line-height: 1.27273; text-align: center;">.</span></span></div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-72136833647199164132019-09-12T20:14:00.000-05:002019-09-24T05:31:11.728-05:00Will everybody reach heaven? Are fights over hell about to grab some more headlines?<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">By <a class="p-author author entry-byline-link" href="https://www.getreligion.org/?author=53970d0de4b06a6c9b8923ba" id="yui_3_17_2_1_1568336627811_1066" rel="author" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 23.25px; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none; text-transform: capitalize; transition: all 0.25s ease-in-out;">Richard Ostling</a></span><br />
<span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2019/8/14/will-everybody-reach-heaven-is-hell-about-to-grab-some-more-headlines">https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2019/8/14/will-everybody-reach-heaven-is-hell-about-to-grab-some-more-headlines</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">August 15, 2019</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Chances are churches frequented by your readers and listeners rarely if ever offer sermons about hell and damnation these days. And yet this rather unpleasant topic is eternally (so to speak) fascinating, and may be about to grab some headlines. That’s due to Eastern Orthodox lay theologian David Bentley Hart's acerbic Sep. 24 release from Yale University Press “<a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300246223/all-shall-be-saved" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, & Universal Salvation</a>.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; line-height: 31.2px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Sample sentences: “No one, logically speaking, could merit eternal punishment.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Also this: “If Christianity is in any way true, Christians dare not doubt the salvation of all,”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 31.2px;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Yes, Hart is a Hitler-in-heaven sort of guy (see page 38), and your sources will have interesting responses. Lest Hart seem a rank heretic, the Very Rev. John Behr of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary blurbs that this book presents “the promise that, in the end, all will indeed be saved, and exposing the inadequacy — above all moral — of claims to the contrary.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 31.2px;">Heretofore Hart was better known for ridiculing non-belief, as in “Atheist Delusions.” The prolific author has held a succession of university appointments, most recently as a University of Notre Dame fellow. Catholic theologian Paul Griffiths (in the news </span><a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-I-Resigned-From-Duke/240420" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; line-height: 31.2px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">when he resigned over Duke University’s “diversity” policy</a><span style="line-height: 31.2px;">) proclaims Hart “the most eminent” theologian in the English-speaking world.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Terms Hart applies to centuries of traditional orthodox and Orthodox doctrines on hell and damnation include “absurd,” “ludicrous,” “nonsensical,” “incoherent,” “horrid,” “degrading,” “loathsome,” “diseased,” “perverse,” “cruel,” “wicked” and “morally repugnant.” He is mainly offended by the idea that punishment is everlasting, on grounds that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Hart is open to some sort of cleansing to make sorry souls fit for heaven, but doesn’t spell out any version of Western Catholicism’s Purgatory.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; line-height: 31.2px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“All” is a far cry from the sentimental optimism about humanity preached by officially Universalist churches. Hart argues that the Christian God is not truly God if those he brands “infernalists” are correct. The familiar challenge is how everlasting torment of any person meshes with belief that God is loving. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">What about human will and repenatance? Hart adds the less common claim that defiant rejection of God throughout all eternity cannot be “logically possible for any rational being."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The heart of Hart is the contention that the few New Testament verses usually cited on this could refer to “limited term” punishment, while 23 other passages raise hopes that all will be saved. He relies on Bible interpretations by ancient Eastern theologians, especially the 4th Century’s Origen and St. Gregory of Nyassa. He castigates that era’s great Catholic voice, St. Augustine, for “the single most tragically consequential case of linguistic incompetence in Christian history,” based upon the “defective” Latin translation of the Bible. (Speaking of scripture, Yale also published Hart’s recent, idiosyncratic translation of the New Testament, also well worth a sidebar on scholars’ reactions.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Publicity contact for Hart: Robert Pranzatelli: 203–432-0972 and <a href="mailto:robert.pranzatelli@yale.edu" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">robert.pranzatelli@yale.edu</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Meanwhile – religion writers note – there’s a related dustup in the news right now linked to the Christian claims of exclusivity per Jesus’ teaching that “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Last week’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in America assembly approved a significant inter-religions relations policy <a href="https://download.elca.org/ELCA%20Resource%20Repository/Inter-Religious_Policy_Statement.pdf" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;">(.pdf here)</a> after handily defeating a bid to remove a soft section that says <em style="word-wrap: break-word;">e.g</em>. the status of believers in other religions “is beyond our knowledge, and even our calling” so “we do not need answers.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">(The ELCA’s own news release slid past this issue, covered by <a href="http://juicyecumenism.com/" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" target="_blank">juicyecumenism.com</a>, a reminder that reporters always need to consult varied sources.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Even conservative Christians are not cut-and-dried on this. The Catholic Church’s Catechism teaches the “baptism of desire,” so a person ignorant of Christian teaching who “seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it can be saved,” through means known only to God.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Or consider noted speaker and author Josh McDowell, whose evangelical credentials are unassailable. In “A Ready Defense,” he says the God of Scripture does not wish any to perish (2 Peter 3:9) and will be a righteous judge (Acts 17:31), so it’s reasonable that “no one will be condemned for not ever hearing of Jesus Christ,” although (as in Catholicism) we don’t know the particulars.</span></div>
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-36159601557695880452019-09-11T06:46:00.001-05:002019-09-11T06:48:57.059-05:00Tolkien and Lewis: Masters of Myth and Tellers of Truth<br />
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<a href="http://www.ncregister.com/blog/josephpearce" style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Joseph Pearce</span></a></div>
<a href="http://www.ncregister.com/blog/josephpearce/tolkien-and-lewis-masters-of-myth-and-tellers-of-truth"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">http://www.ncregister.com/blog/josephpearce/tolkien-and-lewis-masters-of-myth-and-tellers-of-truth</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">September 9, 2019</span><br />
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<em><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“I have left behind illusion,” I said to myself. “Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions – with the aid of my five senses.”</span></em></div>
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<em><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.</span></em></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Charles Ryder’s thoughts upon leaving Brideshead for what he thought would be the last time, and his own later judgment on those thoughts, convey a great deal about the nature and supernature of the reality to which we are all subject. Like the young and naïve Charles Ryder, materialists insist that the supernatural is merely an illusion; only when we have “left behind illusion” are we able to see all that there is to see, the world of three dimensions – with the aid of our five senses. The problem, as Charles Ryder would come to realise, is that such a world is itself an illusion. There is no such world. The real world, as Hopkins reminds us, “is charged with the grandeur of God.” There is simply no escaping His powerful omnipresence. “For God’s sake,” exclaims Charles Ryder to the Jesuitical Bridey, “why bring God into everything?” Ryder’s question strikes the dauntlessly (theo)logical Bridey as “extremely funny.” Whether Ryder knows it or not, God <em>is</em> in everything and “into everything.” He is inescapable. Unavoidable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is the inescapable and unavoidable presence of God that makes myth such a powerful conveyer of reality. If the essential ingredients of reality, of life, are not physical but metaphysical, it follows that true stories must reflect these metaphysical realities. If goodness, truth, beauty and love are at the heart of all that is truly real, and if these things transcend the three dimensions and the five senses, it follows that stories must convey this essential transcendence in order to be real and true. Any story that fails to convey this mystical transcendence and remains solely within a world of three dimensions and five senses will not only be lacking in reality, it will be dead. Lifeless.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">And so it is that J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis are tellers of truth and masters of myth. The Ainulindalë in <em>The Silmarillion</em> is a hymn of praise to the Great Music of God’s Creation, as is Aslan’s singing of Narnia into Being in <em>The Magician’s Nephew</em>. In their powerful and poetic evocation of the beauty and harmony at the heart of the cosmos, Tolkien and Lewis are singing in creative harmony with Dante’s vision of Paradise and Lorenzo’s reverence for the Music of the Spheres in <em>The Merchant of Venice</em>:</span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Click on the link below to read the rest of the article:</span></i></div>
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<span style="line-height: 23px;"><a href="http://www.ncregister.com/blog/josephpearce/tolkien-and-lewis-masters-of-myth-and-tellers-of-truth"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">http://www.ncregister.com/blog/josephpearce/tolkien-and-lewis-masters-of-myth-and-tellers-of-truth</span></a></span></div>
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<br />jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-45326082061727526802019-09-11T05:44:00.001-05:002019-09-11T05:44:22.049-05:00Target: New York<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="subtitle" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px 0px 10px; max-width: 685px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Eighteen years after the 9/11 attacks, Islamist extremism doesn’t make much news—but it’s not for lack of trying.</span></i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By Judith Miller</span><br />
<a href="https://www.city-journal.org/islamist-terror-threat"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://www.city-journal.org/islamist-terror-threat</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">September 10, 2019</span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Eighteen years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, many Americans believe that the threat of Islamist terror is played out—but that’s only because our counterterrorism efforts have been so successful. Attempted terror attacks no longer make front-page headlines, but the list of foiled plots to kill American citizens is long and chilling. This past summer saw arrests of potential terrorists who would have killed dozens or hundreds of people if successful. On September 3, for example, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, also known as Suleiman Al-Amriki, with providing material support to ISIS. Asainov is accused of having been an ISIS sniper and weapons instructor. A naturalized U.S. citizen (he was born in Kazakhstan) who lived in Brooklyn for nearly 15 years, Asainov traveled in late 2013 to Istanbul, a common entry point to Syria. There, he joined ISIS and rose through the ranks to become an “emir” in charge of weapons training. He tried to recruit other Americans to fight for ISIS in Syria. Asainov messaged a government informant, exclaiming in reference to ISIS, “We are the worst terrorist organization in the world that has ever existed!” He still yearned to die on the battlefield for jihad, Asainov told the informant.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Last month, Awais Chudhary was charged with plotting to stab New Yorkers in Queens. A 19-year-old American citizen born in Pakistan and raised in a middle-class neighborhood, Chudhary planned to attack pedestrians on a bridge over the Grand Central Parkway to the Flushing Bay Promenade or at the World’s Fair Marina, both of which he had visited repeatedly to scout where he could kill the most people. He planned to record his attack to inspire others. He intended to use a knife, he told an agent, unless the agent could show him how to bomb a “mini-bridge over a busy road with many cars.” He was arrested en route to retrieve items he had ordered online for the assault—a tactical knife, a mask, gloves, and a cellphone with a chest and head strap to enable him to record his slaughter hands-free. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Also last month, prosecutors charged two women from Queens with planning to build bombs similar to those used in earlier terrorist attacks. Asia Siddiqui and Noelle Velentzas, both U.S. citizens and Queens residents, pleaded guilty to distributing information about how to make and use explosive devices and weapons of mass destruction. Between 2013 and 2015, the complaint states, they planned to build a bomb themselves, teaching each other chemistry and the electrical skills needed to create and detonate a deadly device. They also explored how to make plastic explosives and assemble a car bomb, bought and stored in their homes materials required for an explosive device—including propane gas tanks, soldering tools, car-bomb instructions, machetes, and several knives—and discussed similar devices used in past terrorist incidents, including the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. They researched potential targets, focusing on law enforcement and military installations. Velentzas favored attacks on government targets. In terrorist attacks, she said, “You go for the head.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">August also saw Azizjon Rakhmatov, a citizen of Uzbekistan and a New Haven resident, plead guilty to conspiring to provide material support to ISIS codefendants Abdurasul Juraboev and Akhror Saidakhmetov, who planned to travel to Syria to fight for the caliphate. Rakhmatov and another codefendant discussed providing their own money and raising more to cover Saidakhmetov’s travel expenses and to buy a weapon for him once he arrived in Syria. The day before Saidakhmetov’s scheduled departure, Rakhmatov transferred $400 into codefendant Akmal Zakirov’s bank account. Saidakhmetov and three accomplices have previously pled guilty to charges of material support for terrorism; all have been sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In July, officials arrested Delowar Mohammed Hossain at JFK Airport in Queens as he tried to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban. The complaint states that Hossain wanted to kill Americans, particularly members of the military stationed overseas. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In June, Mohamed Rafik Naji, having pled guilty in federal court in Brooklyn in February, was sentenced to 20 years in jail for trying to provide material support to ISIS by distributing its propaganda and messages on social media. By late 2014, Naji was a committed ISIS supporter, and in 2015 he traveled from New York to Yemen to join ISIS. After returning to the U.S., he continued praising ISIS and violent jihad. In July 2016, after the ISIS-inspired truck attack in Nice, France that killed scores of civilians, Naji told an informant that it would be easy to carry out a similar attack in Times Square: “[ISIS] want an operation in Times Square,” he said, “If there is a truck, I mean a garbage truck and one drives it there to Times Square and crushes them . . . Times Square day.” </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Also in June, Ashiqul Alam, an assistant teacher in Queens and part-time IT expert at the Queens public library, was charged with “knowingly receiving two firearms with obliterated serial numbers in Brooklyn” as part of a plan to kill cops and civilians in Times Square. According to NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill, Alam discussed guns, suicide vests, and hand grenades, and surveilled potential targets in New York. Between August 2018 and June of this year, he talked about buying firearms and explosives for an attack and conducted “recon” trips to Times Square, recording the area on his phone. He considered killing cops by using a suicide vest and obtaining AR-15 assault rifles. In April 2019, he had Lasik eye surgery so that he no longer needed glasses. “Let’s say we are in an attack, right, say that my glasses fall off,” he told an undercover cop. “What if I accidentally shoot you? You know what I mean. Imagine what the news channel would call me the ‘Looney Tunes Terrorist’ or the ‘Blind Terrorist.’” He later discussed buying grenades, because a grenade could “take out at least eight people.” </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Most of these Islamist plots have received scant public attention, mainly because they were detected and prevented. John Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, says that public concern about terrorism is now focused on the surge in domestic right-wing extremists. “Domestic terror blunts the impact of the [jihadi] plots that didn’t happen,” he told me. Miller is complacent about neither threat. Though New York has not suffered a right-wing-inspired mass shooting, hate crimes are up in the city. So is anti-Semitism. And Miller warns that the pace of jihadi plots is accelerating.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">According to an NYPD intelligence estimate published last October, nine terrorist plots or attacks targeted New York City between 2001 and 2009. Since 2009, a total of 19 attacks were formulated—11 since ISIS declared a caliphate in 2014. The report notes that 13 of the 14 lone-actor terrorist attacks or plots in New York City have involved “Salafi-jihadist violent extremists.” The study predicts “with high confidence” that both trends—an acceleration in the rate of plots and attacks and the increasing dominance of lone actors inspired, but not directed by, foreign and domestic extremist organizations—“will continue over the next four years.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“The reason there hasn’t been another 9/11 is not because of luck,” Miller says. Intensive national and international counterterrorism campaigns across three presidential administrations have degraded these groups’ ability to plan and carry out major attacks. At home, Miller added, the absence of successful attacks owed to what he called the “seamless partnership between the NYPD and the FBI.” </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">While President Trump has taken credit for having “destroyed” ISIS and its caliphate, once the size of Great Britain, and has often expressed a desire to bring most American troops home, terrorism experts warn that a complete military exit from places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria would be unwise. Just as President Obama’s premature withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 permitted ISIS to take hold and expand into the vacuum left there, the withdrawal of most U.S. forces from the region would permit the Taliban, al-Qaida, and ISIS to reconstitute and regain their deadly reach. “The Taliban are far from defeated,” David Petraeus, the former commander of U.S. Central Command and a former CIA director, asserted in a recent</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Wall Street Journal </em><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">op-ed. A premature withdrawal would risk the “re-establishment of a terrorist sanctuary” in which the Taliban and some 20 other foreign terrorist organizations could reconstitute, train recruits, and carry out terrorism abroad.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">“Al Qaeda has seeded a global network that is competing with and complementing ISIS,” said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert based in Singapore. “Though its core has suffered, many of its leaders are alive,” he argues. “It has not disappeared but entered a new phase of expansion” through affiliates in Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East, and South Asia. ISIS, too, the “son of Al Qaeda,” he argues, may have lost territory and endured “command and control infrastructure losses,” but its murderous intent “remains known to its</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">wilayats</em><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">, networks, groups, and cells.” If either of their current leaders is killed, he warns, the two groups would likely unite and pose what he called “an unprecedented threat.” While the Trump administration has embraced containing China as its highest priority, “the real, ongoing threat to American and its allies remains ideological extremist terrorism,” Gunaratna maintains, calling the war against militant Islamic extremism a “generational” struggle.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Mitch Silber, a former NYPD director of intelligence and analysis, fears that Washington’s war fatigue, Trump’s desire to claim victory, and the lack of a long-term strategy for dealing with America’s Middle East wars endangers the U.S. “Al Qaeda and ISIS leaders and supporters have been killed, captured, and tens of thousands put in camps in Iraq,” he said. “But there is no post-hostilities plan to deal with this Islamist netherworld, those people in the camps. AQ and ISIS could easily regenerate in some form there.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 25.2px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Failure to appreciate the nature of the militant Islamist threat puts New York, especially, at growing risk. “There is a temporary drop in their capability,” Silber said of the jihadi movement. “But there is no drop in intention among those who want to strike the U.S. And for them, New York will always remain a key target.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: red; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.city-journal.org/contributor/judith-miller_572" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Judith Miller</a></em><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> is a </em><span style="font-weight: 600; line-height: 1.4em;">City Journal </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">contributing editor and author of </em><a href="https://amzn.to/2WqjFPP" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">The Story: A Reporter’s Journey</a><span style="font-weight: 600; line-height: 1.4em;">.</span></span><br />
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-62427382914488504072019-09-10T08:20:00.001-05:002019-09-10T08:20:08.450-05:00Environmental Playacting<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By Heather Mac Donald</span><br />
<a href="https://www.city-journal.org/todays-youth-climate-change"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://www.city-journal.org/todays-youth-climate-change</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">September 10, 2019</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">Youth will save the planet, according to the elite narrative about global warming. It was young voters who were “asking the tough questions” and holding “Democrats’ feet to the fire” at last week’s Democratic climate-change pontificon, </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2019/democrats-climate-town-hall/highlights-2020-climate-change?searchResultPosition=3" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">the</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">New York Times</em><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">. A high school student challenged Julian Castro about his previous support for fracking and demanded to know why “should we trust you . . . to transition our economy to renewables?” Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar was grilled by a Columbia University student about her possible fealty to the beef and dairy industries. A Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University berated Joe Biden for allowing a natural gas company executive to host a fundraiser for him; fossil-fuel companies are committing “crimes against humanity,” announced this shoo-in for a prestigious professorship.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The claim about youth’s transformative commitment to radical environmental change is—based on informal observation—bunk. The cardinal rule when it comes to environmental virtue-signaling is that people give up what they’re willing to give up. Young people are no different. If being environmentally sound required sacrificing anything that a self-described environmental warrior actually valued, the conversation would quickly change to a different topic. One’s own habits are necessary; it’s everyone else’s that need to change.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">This always-unreached threshold for environmental sacrifice is particularly notable on the part of celebrity Greens, with their fortress-like SUVs, multiple residences, and massive carbon footprints—whether it’s the</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9628260/eco-warriors-private-jets-google-camp/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">cavalcade</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">of yachts and private jets that brought such luminaries as Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Zuckerberg, and Katy Perry to Google’s three-day climate-change summit in Sicily this July; environmental crusaders Prince Harry and Meghan Markle jetting off to Elton John’s French estate; or Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter’s “</span><a href="https://twitchy.com/gregp-3534/2019/08/28/cnn-climate-change-is-an-important-issue-brian-stelter-hold-my-beers/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">quick day trip</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">” to Los Angeles from New York just ahead of the CNN climate-change debate. A police caravan drives New York City mayor Bill de Blasio 11 miles from his mayoral mansion in Manhattan to his favorite gym in Brooklyn. “Everyone in their own life has to change their own habits to start protecting the earth,” he has intoned, but taking the subway is</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/nyregion/bill-de-blasio-climate-cars.html" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">not one of those changes</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">appropriate for</span><span style="line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">him.</em></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">Most young people have not yet reached such a flamboyant level of energy use, but if they could, they undoubtedly would, with as little sense of anachronism as that of Al Gore in his </span><a href="https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/al-gores-climate-change-hypocrisy-is-as-big-as-his-energy-sucking-mansion/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">energy-guzzling mansion</a><span style="line-height: 1.4em;">. These are the consumers who keep football fields of computer servers buzzing round the clock to support their social media habits. If being green meant turning off one’s phone for 22 hours a day or foregoing the latest smartphone upgrade, the reasons why such sacrifices are not required would spout from every Gen Z-er and millennial’s lips. Students from the University of California, Irvine, constantly run their air-conditioners in the apartment complex where I spend summers, regardless of how cool the temperature outside is. They drive with their windows sealed and the car AC on, no matter how fresh the day (this is the new driving norm for almost everyone now). The meteoric rise of food-delivery apps, producing torrents of plastic and paper waste and a constant circulation of cars and electric bikes, has been fueled by young people’s demand for convenience and instant gratification. Cooking is apparently unthinkable. At best, one buys precut and washed food in the inevitable plastic containers. A daily Starbucks habit is deemed consistent with railing against environmentally destructive corporate greed.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">New York’s tap water is among the purest in the world. Yet a young neighbor of mine in New York, like progressives throughout the city, receives towering deliveries of bottled water, entailing huge energy outlays to package and transport, not to mention generating flotillas of discarded plastic. The swim team members in my gym turn on their showers in the locker room, then walk away or do nothing other than chat as water gushes down the drain. Uber drivers in college towns report that students regularly call a car to get to class, rather than walk or ride a bike.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If the younger generations have any nonpolitical interest in nature, they keep it well hidden. Instagram holds more fascination than forest mosses and lichens; like most air travelers today, the young fly with their seat windows down to reduce the glare on their screens, indifferent to the startling revelations below about geology and topology that John Ruskin and Leonardo da Vinci would have killed to observe.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In short, the young rely on galaxies of goodies beyond count, whose production requires resources, nature-altering infrastructure, and dependable energy systems. The latest environmental crusades—whether banning fracking or plastic straws—are as gossamer bubbles atop this rushing torrent of manufactured consumables.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.4em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The children’s crusade for gun control is another alleged example of the purity of spirit of the young. But anti-gun youth crusaders are prepared to give up guns because, in almost all cases, they have none. Similarly, student protesters—whom we are supposed to admire for heroically skipping classes to agitate around their latest grievance—place little value on those classes and suffer no consequences for missing them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 25.2px;">An awareness of one’s own consumption and an attempt to conserve and to eliminate waste are worthy practices. But so is a zeal-tempering humility that should deflate any moral righteousness around such marginal efforts and that recognizes the fantastically </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">un</em><span style="line-height: 25.2px;">-natural prosperity—the product of Western capitalist enterprise and the rule of law—that underwrites environmental playacting.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="https://www.city-journal.org/contributor/heather-mac-donald_122" style="border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Heather Mac Donald</a></em><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the </em><a href="https://www.manhattan-institute.org/expert/heather-mac-donald" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank"><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Manhattan Institute</em></a><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the bestselling books </em><a href="https://www.manhattan-institute.org/diversity-delusion" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture</a><span style="font-weight: 600; line-height: 1.4em;"> </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">and </em><a href="https://www.manhattan-institute.org/waroncops" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">The War on Cops</a><span style="font-weight: 600; line-height: 1.4em;">.</span></span><br />
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jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-2218812927589256702019-09-08T10:08:00.000-05:002019-09-08T10:08:35.288-05:00Robert Mueller helped Saudi Arabia cover up its role in 9/11 attacks: suit<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 12px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 12px;">By </span><a class="paul-sperry" href="https://nypost.com/author/paul-sperry/" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); background-color: white; box-shadow: none; display: inline-block; line-height: 12px; outline: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Paul Sperry</a></span><br />
<a href="https://nypost.com/2019/09/07/robert-mueller-helped-saudi-arabia-cover-up-its-role-in-9-11-attacks-suit/"><span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">https://nypost.com/2019/09/07/robert-mueller-helped-saudi-arabia-cover-up-its-role-in-9-11-attacks-suit/</span></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">September 7, 2019</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">After a lengthy investigation, special counsel Robert Mueller charged Russia made “multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election” and said the incursion “deserves the attention of every American.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But former FBI investigators say their old boss didn’t feel the same concern when they uncovered multiple, systemic efforts by the Saudi government to assist the hijackers in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks — a far more consequential, to say nothing of deadly, foreign influence operation on America.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As the head of the FBI at the time, they say Mueller was not nearly as interested in investigating that espionage conspiracy, which also involved foreign intelligence officers. Far from it, the record shows he covered up evidence pointing back to the Saudi Embassy and Riyadh — and may have even misled Congress about what he knew.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">9/11 victims agree. “He was the master when it came to covering up the kingdom’s role in 9/11,” said survivor Sharon Premoli, who was pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center 18 years ago.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“In October of 2001, Mueller shut down the government’s investigation after only three weeks, and then took part in the Bush [administration’s] campaign to block, obfuscate and generally stop anything about Saudi Arabia from being released,” added Premoli, now a plaintiff in the 9/11 lawsuit against Saudi Arabia.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In fact, Mueller threw up roadblocks in the path of his own investigators working the 9/11 case, while making it easier for Saudi suspects to escape questioning, multiple case agents told me. Then he deep-sixed what evidence his agents did manage to uncover, according to the 9/11 lawsuit against the Saudis.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* Time and again, agents were called off from pursuing leads back to the kingdom’s embassy in Washington, as well as its consulate in Los Angeles, where former FBI Agent Stephen Moore headed a 9/11 task force looking into local contacts made by two of the 15 Saudi hijackers, Moore testified in an affidavit for the 9/11 lawsuit. He concluded that “diplomatic and intelligence personnel of Saudi Arabia knowingly provided material support to the two hijackers and facilitated the 9/11 plot.” Yet he and his team were not allowed to interview them, according to the suit.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* In Washington, former FBI Agent John Guandolo, who worked terror cases out of the bureau’s DC office, said then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar “should have been treated as a terrorist suspect” for giving money to a woman who funded two of the 9/11 hijackers. But he was never questioned either, Guandolo said.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* Instead, Mueller obliged what Guandolo called an “outrageous request” from Bandar within days of the attacks to help evacuate from the country dozens of Saudi officials, including at least one Osama bin Laden relative on the terror watch list. Mueller assured their safe passage to planes, using agents as personal escorts, according to FBI documents obtained by Judicial Watch. Agents who should have been interrogating the Saudis instead acted as their bodyguards.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* In 2002, Mueller prevented agents from arresting the Saudi-sponsored al Qaeda cleric who privately counseled the Saudi hijackers, said Raymond Fournier, an agent with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Diego at the time. “He was responsible for vacating the arrest warrant for Anwar al-Awlaki for passport fraud,” Fournier said. He even ordered agents who detained the fiend at JFK to release him into the custody of a “Saudi representative,” Fournier said. The FBI closed their investigation of Awlaki, who was allowed to leave the US on a Saudi plane. “Shortly thereafter, the Fort Hood shooting occurred and Awlaki’s fingerprints were all over that incident,” said former FBI Agent Michael Biasello, who helped work the Texas terror case.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* At the same time, Mueller removed a veteran agent from investigating a tip that an adviser to the Saudi royal family had met with some of the Saudi hijackers at his home in Sarasota, Fla., effectively killing the case, according to the lawsuit. The home was suddenly abandoned two weeks before 9/11.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* Mueller even tried to shut down a congressional investigation into the Saudi hijackers and their contacts in LA and San Diego, said Bob Graham, who led the joint inquiry as Senate Intelligence Committee chair. “The strongest objections” to his staff investigators visiting FBI offices there came from the FBI director himself, said Graham, in a 2017 interview with Harper’s magazine. Among other things, Mueller refused their demands to question a paid FBI informant who roomed with the hijackers and even moved him to a safe house where they couldn’t find him, Graham said. Mueller, with the White House, redacted 28 pages detailing Saudi-9/11 ties from the congressional report.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* He also gave testimony to Congress that was, at the very least, misleading. In an October 2002 closed-door hearing, Mueller claimed he found out about Saudi-9/11 connections only as a result of the joint inquiry’s investigative work: “[S]ome facts came to light here and to me, frankly, that had not come to light before.” Only, Moore said he gave Mueller “daily” briefings on such connections in 2001. Mueller also testified the hijackers “contacted no known terrorist sympathizers in the United States,” even though the FBI’s own case files showed they had contact with at least 14 terrorist suspects and sympathizers in the US prior to 9/11, including some working for the Saudi government. (In later testimony, he tried to walk this back, insisting he “had no intent to mislead.”)</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Mueller was appointed FBI Chief by George Bush just a week prior to 9/11 (AFP)</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While the Beltway media have portrayed Mueller as a by-the-book former Marine whose integrity is as square as his lantern-shaped jaw — a cop who can’t be compromised — others know better.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“He’s a villain, and an arrogant one to boot,” former FBI Agent Mark Wauck said, adding that his former boss has a long history of acting as a “servant of the deep state,” or the permanent DC ruling class.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A Mueller spokesman declined to comment. But some agents say he was merely following White House orders.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Any letting the Saudis off the hook came from the White House,” former Agent Mark Rossini said. “I can still see that photo of Bandar and Bush enjoying cigars on the balcony of the White House two days after 9/11.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Still, others note the hypocrisy of Mueller going after President Trump for conspiring with a foreign enemy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Bottom line is, Mueller did not do an investigation on people involved in the 9/11 attacks who were connected to the Saudi government,” a former US counterintelligence official asserted. “Maybe if they were Russians, he would be interested. But he was not interested in investigating [Saudi] terrorists who murdered Americans.”</span></div>
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<em><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Paul Sperry is an invest<span style="font-size: 16px;">igative journalist and author of the bestseller “</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Infiltration-Muslim-Subversives-Penetrated-Washington/dp/1595550038/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Infiltration+paul+sperry&qid=1567801127&s=books&sr=1-1&tag=nypost-20" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); font-size: 16px; text-decoration: none;">Infiltration</a><span style="font-size: 16px;">.”</span></span></em></div>
jtfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16759316632096664665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7794954.post-77249606056247595992019-09-08T07:12:00.002-05:002019-09-08T09:53:53.331-05:00J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Beren and Lúthien”<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 28px;">By </span><span class="vcard" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 28px;"><span class="fn" style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://theimaginativeconservative.org/author/brad-birzer" rel="author" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: color, background-color, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear;" title="Posts by Bradley J. Birzer">Bradley J. Birzer</a></span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/08/jrr-tolkien-beren-and-luthien-bradley-birzer.html">https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/08/jrr-tolkien-beren-and-luthien-bradley-birzer.html</a></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">August 2, 2019</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">"The chief of the stories of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Silmarillion</em>, and the one most fully treated is the Story of Beren and Lúthien the Elfmaiden,” Tolkien wrote Milton Waldman of Collins Publishers in 1951.[1] Along with <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The</em> <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Children of Húrin </em>and <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Fall of Gondolin</em>, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Beren and Lúthien</em> formed the three greatest tales of the First Age, each, in some way, deeply tied to the saga of the three silmarils. Tolkien wrote them in 1916 and 1917, beginning with <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Children of Húrin</em>, following it with the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Fall of Gondolin</em>, and completing the main three with <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Beren and </em><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Lúthien</em>.[2] Of the three, Tolkien explained, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Beren and Lúthien </em>most foreshadowed <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Lord of the Rings</em>. “Here we meet, among other things, the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world,’ are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak—owing to the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama.”[3] Equally important for Tolkien’s entire mythology, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Beren and Lúthien </em>tells the tale of the first marriage of Elf (immortal) and man (mortal), so critical to the entire story.[4]</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">As with all of Tolkien’s great tales of the First Age, the story of Beren and Lúthien transformed dramatically over sixty years from its first imagining and version in 1916 and 1917 to its relatively finalized version in 1977’s <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Silmarillion</em>. During those six decades, it appeared as a long tale of the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Lost Tales</em>, as a summary in the 1926 <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Sketch of the Mythology </em>(written for Tolkien’s beloved professor from King Edward’s, R.W. Reynolds), as a radically ambitious poetic lay, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Lay of Leithian </em>(1925-1931), and as an essential story within the various versions, including the final version, of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Silmarillion</em>.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Yet, the essence of the story has remained the same in all of its many versions. Or, as Christopher so wisely put it, “The fluidity should not be exaggerated: there were nonetheless great, essential, permanences.”[5]</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A daughter of an Elf king, Thingol, and a fay (a Maia—the offspring of the angelic powers; roughly of the same power as Gandalf), Lúthien-Tinúviel expressed her joy and love through dance. One day, Beren, a heroic but displaced outlaw, spies her dancing. “Yet now did he see Tinúviel dancing in the twilight, and Tinúviel was in a silver-pearly dress, and her bare white feet were twinkling among the hemlock-stems.”[6] In Tolkien’s <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Lay of Leithian</em>, he describes in terms comparable only to the Blessed Virgin Mary:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">Her starry jewels twinkled bright</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;" /><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">In the risen sun like morning dew;</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;" /><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">The lilies gold on mantle blue</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;" /><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">Gleamed and glistened.[7]</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Enraptured, Beren followed Lúthien to her hidden kingdom, only to be mocked by her father. When Beren expressed his love for Lúthien, her father challenged him to steal one of the three silmarils, lodged and protected in Morgoth’s (the devil; also named Melko and Melkor) iron crown. Accepting the challenge, Beren heads north to Morgoth’s realm and fortress, Angband. Evil dwells throughout the North, Beren quickly finds. “Many poisonous snakes were in those places and wolves roamed about, and more fearsome still were the wandering bands of the goblins and Orcs—foul broodlings of Melko who fared abroad doing his evil work, snaring and capturing beasts, and Men, and Elves, and dragging them to their lord,” Tolkien wrote.[8] Beren becomes a captive in Morgoth’s house, a thrall and house slave. Distraught by her father’s cruel taunts, Lúthien follows Beren north to Morgoth’s realm. <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">En route</em>, she befriends the greatest of dogs, a dog of the angelic powers, Huan. Huan has been given permission to speak to Beren and Lúthien only three times, and, in each, he offers sagacious thought and advice. He also serves as a guardian, even challenging Morgoth’s greatest lieutenant, Sauron, to a fight.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">From shape to shape, from wolf to worm,</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;" /><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">From monster to his own demon form,</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;" /><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">Thû [Sauron] changes, but that desperate grip</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;" /><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">He cannot shake, nor form it slip.</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;" /><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">No wizardry, nor spell, nor dart,</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;" /><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">No fang, nor venom, nor devil’s art</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;" /><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">Could harm that hound that hart and boar</span><br style="box-sizing: border-box; line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;" /><span style="line-height: 30px; text-align: justify;">Had hunted once in Valinor.[9]</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Together, though, Huan and Lúthien formulate a plan, and Lúthien comes before Morgoth. In lust, he watches her dance, but her dance entrances him, putting him and his household to sleep. “Even the Orcs laugh in secret when they remember it,” the tale reveals, “telling how Morgoth fell from his chair and his iron crown rolled upon the floor.”[10] Beren and Lúthien remove one of the silmarils from Morgoth’s crown and escape, only to encounter the fell wolf, Carcharoth, who bites off Beren’s hand, consuming it and the silmaril it held. Unable to bear the goodness of the silmaril, Carcharoth goes mad, running wild into the wilderness. Having seen the folly of his words, Thingol joins Beren in the hunt for Carcharoth. They succeed in killing the wolf and removing the silmaril, but only at the cost of Beren’s life. Lúthien pleads with the god of death, Mandos, for Beren’s life.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The song of Lúthien before Mandos was the song most fair that ever in words was woven, and the song most sorrowful that ever the world shall hear. Unchanged, imperishable, it is sung still in Valinor beyond the hearing of the world, and listening the Valar are grieved. For Lúthien wove two themes of words, of the sorrow of the Eldar and the grief of Men, of the Two Kindreds that were made by Ilúvatar to dwell in Arda, the Kingdom of Earth amid the innumerable stars.[11]</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Mandos, moved by the beauty of the story, agrees, but he demands, in return, that Lúthien give up her immortality as a fay-Elf. She gladly accepts Mandos’s offer, and she and Beren spend his second life in great joy and adventure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The story of Beren and Lúthien matters profoundly in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Lord of the Rings</em>. Not only are Aragorn and Arwen (who chooses mortality to be with Aragorn) the intellectual and spiritual descendants of Beren and Lúthien, but Arwen is, actually, a genetic and familial descendent of Beren and Lúthien. And, just as Beren lost his hand in rescuing the silmaril from Morgoth, so Frodo loses a finger in securing the fate of the ring from Sauron. Equally important, though, Aragorn chants the story of Beren and Lúthien, only moments before the Ringwraiths attack at Weathertop. The story serves as a form of prayer, preparing the Hobbits for their first real and tangible battle with evil. It remains one of the most beautiful parts of Tolkien’s entire mythology.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The story also mattered profoundly in Tolkien’s own life. His own wife, Edith, inspired the scene of Lúthien dancing, she having danced for him in “a small wood with a great undergrowth of ‘hemlock’ (no doubt many other related plants were also there) near Roos in Holderness, where I was for a while on the Humber Garrison,” during the First World War.[12] Then, Tolkien told his son, Christopher, Edith’s “hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">dance</em>.”[13]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Edith Tolkien’s grave reads “Lúthien,” and J.R.R. Tolkien’s reads “Beren.”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: Montserrat, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">[</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">1] JRRT to Milton Waldman, 1951, in <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Letters-J-R-R-Tolkien-J-R/dp/0618056998/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=J.R.R.+Tolkien+Letters&qid=1564773700&s=gateway&sr=8-1" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: color, background-color, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien</em></a>, Letter No. 131.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[2] JRRT to Christopher Bretherton, July 16, 1964, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">JRRT Letters</em>, Letter No. 257.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[3] JRRT to Milton Waldman, 1951, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">JRRT Letters</em>, Letter No. 131.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[4] See also, JRRT to Peter Hastings, September 1954, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">JRRT Letters</em>, Letter No. 153.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[5] Christopher Tolkien, “Preface,” to J.R.R. Tolkien, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Beren-L%C3%BAthien-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/1328791823/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Beren+and+L%C3%BAthien&qid=1564774113&s=gateway&sr=8-2" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: color, background-color, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear;" target="_blank">Beren and Lúthien</a> </em>(Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2017), 14.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[6] Tolkien, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Beren and Lúthien</em>, 42.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[7] Tolkien, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Beren and Lúthien</em>, 148.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[8] Tolkien, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Beren and Lúthien</em>, 47.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[9] Tolkien, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Beren and Lúthien</em>, 162.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[10] Tolkien, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Beren and Lúthien</em>, 137.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[11] JRRT, <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Silmarillion-J-R-R-Tolkien/dp/0345325818/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Silmarillion&qid=1564774186&s=gateway&sr=8-1" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none; transition-duration: 0.2s; transition-property: color, background-color, border-color; transition-timing-function: linear;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Silmarillion</em></a>, 186.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[12] JRRT to Christopher Bretherton, July 16, 1964, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">JRRT Letters</em>, Letter No. 257; and JRRT to Christopher Tolkien, July 11, 1972, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">JRRT Letters</em>, Letter No. 340.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">[13] JRRT to Christopher Tolkien, July 11, 1972, in <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">JRRT Letters</em>, Letter No. 340.</span></div>
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