The Monkees celebrate 50th anniversary by teaming with modern pop luminaries for a new album

Randy Lewis

May 20, 2016

http://www.latimes.com/

The Monkees: Davy Jones,left, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith. (Rhino Entertainment)

When the TV series “The Monkees” premiered on Sept. 12, 1966, by all rights it should have been nothing more than a effervescent bubble on the face of pop culture —something to be enjoyed now, because surely it would burst and quickly vanish.

Half a century later, many key players in that strictly-of-the-moment enterprise are as amazed as anyone that the Monkees, once derisively nicknamed “The Pre-Fab Four,” live on in 2016.

On May 27, the first Monkees album with new material in 20 years will be released by Rhino Records. Called “Good Times!,” the album bridges the group’s five-decade lifespan with newly completed tracks from the Monkees’ original heyday along with songs recently written and recorded expressly for the 50th anniversary.

Two of the group’s three surviving members — Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork — launched a still-expanding world tour on Wednesday in Fort Myers, Fla., and the band returns to Los Angeles for a homecoming show Sept. 16 at the Pantages Theatre.

“It’s stunning to be part of a project that 50 years later is having a significant resurgence,” Tork, 74, recently said from his home in Connecticut.

“I don’t know how significant it will turn out to be, but it’s certainly the biggest tour we’ve been on in the last 10 years, including the times Davy [Jones] was still with us.”

Although Jones died in 2012 at age 66 of coronary artery disease, he is represented on the new album in “Love to Love,” a song written by Neil Diamond. Period recordings from 1966 and ’67 were recently updated with “a little color here and there,” Tork said.

In a demonstration of the Monkees’ influence on subsequent generations, the album also includes songs written for them by a number of modern rock favorites, including Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, Oasis’ Noel Gallagher, Death Cab for Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard and the album’s producer, Fountains of Wayne bassist-songwriter Adam Schlesinger.

“Everyone knows at this point that the Monkees had some of the greatest songwriters in the world writing for them,” said Schlesinger, 48, who was born the year the TV show began its second and final season. “Personally, it’s an honor to be on that list.

“We got amazing submissions from a lot of great writers. It was hard to even choose which ones to go with. I think everybody likes the idea of writing for the Monkees. It’s a very freeing assignment in a way, because it’s just about writing something catchy and fun.”

The then-and-now idea for the new album came from conversations between Dolenz and their manager and tour producer of recent years, Andrew Sandoval.

Having looked together through unfinished material in the vaults — “not a few, but literally dozens of tracks,” Sandoval said — they chose several they thought represented the best unreleased songs to finish.

When Schlesinger came aboard to produce, “fortunately he pretty much agreed with the ones we liked.”

For all the fun the participants had working on the new album (“It was a blast,” Schlesinger said, “probably the most fun I’ve ever had making a record”), Dolenz, 71, conceded to being emotionally overwhelmed while working on the title track, which was written by Harry Nilsson, the songwriter whose own career was launched by the Monkees’ decision to record his song “Cuddly Toy.”

Working on a newly created duet that includes the voice of his friend, who died at age 52 in 1994, “I had to stop and take a break a couple of times,” said Dolenz at a West Los Angeles television studio where he’d just taped a morning show appearance. “Hearing his voice in the headphones and singing with him all these years later, it really got to me.”

The new version is built on the original demo recording that Nilsson made in 1967.

Later, he and Dolenz became particularly close, and were notorious Hollywood partygoers. In the 2010 documentary “Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?,” Dolenz recalls Nilsson showing up at his house, inviting him to lunch, “and three days later I’d wake up and we would be in some massage parlor in Phoenix.”

To further commemorate the band’s anniversary, a newly remastered edition of the Monkees’ two-season prime-time run will be released on Blu-ray in June.

For a network situation comedy, “The Monkees” generated a lot of ripples through pop culture.

Show creators Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson also cooked up unconventional techniques for shooting the show’s obligatory musical numbers. They were invigorated with quick cuts, off-kilter camera angles and general absurdity, which proved influential when music videos began to flood the airwaves with the birth of MTV.

Part of the ongoing appeal of the show, from Dolenz’s perspective, is that “We were never an American version of the Beatles,” as the Monkees were often described at the time. “We were four guys who wanted to be the Beatles.”

Rafelson, who went on to direct and produce such counterculture classics as “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces,” bristled over the years at suggestions that “The Monkees” was inspired by the Beatles and “A Hard Day’s Night.”

“This was a show I had written six years before the Beatles existed, and the pilot was based on my own life as an itinerant musician when I was 17 years old,” Rafelson told The Times in 2012, shortly after Jones’ death.

“What the Beatles did was to create a kind of permission for any rock ’n’ roll to be a popular subject for television.”

Likewise, Dolenz pointed out that in 1965, when screen tests were underway to find cast members for the show that would become “The Monkees,” “I shot four pilots that year, all music projects. One was about a folk trio modeled on Peter, Paul and Mary, one was about a surf band like the Beach Boys, the other was about a big folk group like the New Christy Minstrels.”

But when the Beatles arrived, “They just swamped pop culture,” Tork said, and thus the pilot hewing closest to the Beatles blueprint was the one green-lighted for production.

The show — and its songs — were hits almost immediately. The Monkees’ debut single, “Last Train to Clarksville,” shot to No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was quickly followed by another chart-topper, “I’m a Believer.” The group scored seven more top 20 hits over the next 18 months and sold more albums and singles in 1967 than the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.

But the Monkees felt wrath from some quarters of the rock music world that treated the whole enterprise as some sort of con game, a subterfuge that undermined notions of musical integrity.

“Some people are very serious about their rock music,” Dolenz said, adopting an Eastern European accent. “There vill be no joking around!”

Band member Michael Nesmith led a rebellion against music impresario Don Kirshner, who oversaw their early recordings and kept his hand on the pipeline of pop songs flowing to the Monkees from then-little-known writers including Nilsson, Diamond and, most frequently, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart.

Over the years, “the smart Monkee” has emphasized that he wasn’t objecting to either the quality of songs or the level of musical support they got from the studio pros, but to the illusion the show’s creators tried to maintain by crediting only Jones, Dolenz, Tork and himself on the album covers.

His showdown with Kirshner — during which he put his fist through a wall in the office building they were in — led to the quartet’s being granted autonomy, and their third album, “Headquarters,” was the product of just the four Monkees.

It was a virtually unprecedented display of artistic independence, yet one that still hasn’t earned the Monkees sufficient respect, in the eyes of some, to win them a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

And to the members of the group, it seemed a strange, and unnecessarily divisive, subject.

“People would ask us about the band, and I always said, ‘What band?’ It’s a TV show!” Dolenz said. “I was an actor, and I was hired to play a role, and that’s what I did. Now I’m getting ready to play that role again, and I’m delighted to do it — like a revival of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ or ‘Oklahoma!’”

Nesmith, who carved out a successful solo career in the 1970s and ’80s and became a pioneering video producer and entrepreneur, won’t be joining his old bandmates, at least not on a regular basis.

He last toured with them in 2014 but currently iswrapped up writing a book. On his Facebook page, he has wished his on-and-off bandmates well, suggesting he might join them on selected tour stops.

Said Dolenz with a smile, “We’ll see what happens. It’s kind of like waiting on our Neil Young. We’ll have him represented in the show because of all the film footage we use. And that lets us have Davy in it as well.”

And what do the Monkees represent long after they proudly sang “We’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say”?

“I think everybody has a soft spot for the Monkees,” said Schlesinger. “They’re not specific to one generation, which is why this record had a nice aura around it from the beginning. For me, it’s really the music. Not that the show doesn’t hold up, but the music really holds up. It’s a cliché, but it really is a band for all ages.”

randy.lewis@latimes.com

Twitter: @RandyLewis2

Who's the Conservative Heretic?

By Patrick Buchanan
http://townhall.com/
May 20, 2016



In his coquettish refusal to accept the Donald, Paul Ryan says he cannot betray the conservative "principles" of the party of Abraham Lincoln, high among which is a devotion to free trade.

But when did free trade become dogma in the Party of Lincoln?

As early as 1832, young Abe declared, "My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank ... and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles."

Campaigning in 1844, Lincoln declared, "Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth."

Abe's openness to a protective tariff in 1860 enabled him to carry Pennsylvania and the nation. As I wrote in "The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy" in 1998:

"The Great Emancipator was the Great Protectionist."

During his presidency, Congress passed and Abe signed 10 tariff bills. Lincoln inaugurated the Republican Party tradition of economic nationalism.

Vermont's Justin Morrill, who shepherded GOP tariff bills through Congress from 1860 to 1898, declared, "I am for ruling America, for the benefit, first, of Americans, and for the 'rest of mankind' afterwards."

In 1890, Republicans enacted the McKinley Tariff that bore the name of that chairman of ways and means and future president.

"Open competition between high-paid American labor and poorly paid European labor," warned Cong. William McKinley, "will either drive out of existence American industry or lower American wages."

Too few Republicans of McKinley's mindset sat in Congress when NAFTA and MFN for China were being enacted.

In the 1895 "History of the Republican Party," the authors declare, "the Republican Party ... is the party of protection ... that carries the banner of protection proudly."

Under protectionist policies from 1865 to 1900, U.S. debt was cut by two-thirds. Customs duties provided 58 percent of revenue. Save for President Cleveland's 2 percent tax, which was declared unconstitutional, there was no income tax. Commodity prices fell 58 percent. Real wages, despite a doubling of the population, rose 53 percent. Growth in GDP averaged over 4 percent a year. Industrial production rose almost 5 percent a year.

The U.S. began the era with half of Britain's production, and ended it with twice Britain's production.

In McKinley's first term, the economy grew 7 percent a year. After his assassination, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt took over. His reaction to Ryan's free-trade ideology? In a word, disgust.

"Pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fibre," wrote the Rough Rider, "I thank God I am not a free trader."

When the GOP returned to power after President Wilson, they enacted the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922. For the next five years, the economy grew 7 percent a year.

While the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, signed eight months after the Crash of '29, was blamed for the Depression, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman ferreted out the real perp, the Federal Reserve.

Every Republican platform from 1884 to 1944 professed the party's faith in protection. Free trade was introduced by the party of Woodrow Wilson and FDR.

Our modern free-trade era began with the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Among the eight no votes in the Senate were Barry Goldwater and Prescott Bush.

Even in recent crises, Republican presidents have gone back to the economic nationalism of their Grand Old Party. With the Brits coming for our gold and Japanese imports piling up, President Nixon in 1971 closed the gold window and imposed a 10 percent tariff on Japanese goods.

Ronald Reagan slapped a 50 percent tariff on Japanese motorcycles being dumped here to kill HarleyDavidson, then put quotas on Japanese auto imports, and on steel and machine tools.

Reagan was a conservative of the heart. Though a free trader, he always put America first.

What, then, does history teach?

The economic nationalism and protectionism of Hamilton, Madison, Jackson, and Henry Clay, and the Party of Lincoln, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and Coolidge, of all four presidents on Mount Rushmore, made America the greatest and most self-sufficient republic in history.

And the free-trade, one-worldism of Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama enabled Communist China to shoulder us aside us and become the world's No. 1 manufacturing power.

Like Britain, after free-trade was adopted in the mid-19th century, when scribblers like David Ricardo, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, and evangelists like Richard Cobden dazzled political elites with their visions of the future, America has been in a long steady decline.

If we look more and more like the British Empire in its twilight years, it is because we were converted to the same free-trade faith that was dismissed as utopian folly by the men who made America.

Where in the history of great nations -- Britain before 1850, the USA, Bismarck's Germany, postwar Japan and China today -- has nationalism not been the determinant factor in economic policy?

Speaker Ryan should read more history and less Ayn Rand

Pope Francis' Jihad on Christianity

Disturbing pronouncements on the faith from the Vicar of Christ.

Raymond Ibrahim

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

May 20. 2016

Pope Francis performs the foot-washing ritual at the Castelnuovo di Porto refugee center near Rome on Holy Thursday. (Osservatore Romano/AFP via Getty)

The man known as the “Catholic Pope” and the “Vicar of Christ”—but who in light of what follows is probably best referred to by his real name, Jorge Mario Bergoglio—recently gave an interview demonstrating why “so many people think he is the anti-Christ.”

The more salient features follow:

Christ as Warmonger

In classic relativistic fashion, Jorge claims that:

It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam. However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest.

Only someone who is either very ignorant or hostile to Christianity can make such a claim.  To state the obvious: Yes, both Christianity and Islam seek to win converts.  However, Jesus’ call to his disciples to “go forth and make disciples of all nations” in Matthew’s Gospel was understood and practiced peacefully.  Disciples preached, people converted.  No violence, no coercion.  In fact, it was Christians—chief among them disciples and evangelists—who were persecuted and killed simply for preaching Christ, first by the pagan Roman empire, later (and still) by Islam.

Conversely, Muhammad said, “I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped—Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my commandments (The Al Qaeda Reader, p.12).”  The Koran is replete with commands to do violence on those who refuse to submit to Islam—and yes, in ways that far transcend comparison with Old Testament violence.

Unlike the spread of Christianity, Islam spread through the sword.  This is a simple, historic fact, acknowledged bymore sober European leaders: the overwhelming majority of territory that today constitutes the “Muslim world” was seized from non-Muslims by great violence and bloodshed.  Two-thirds of Christendom—the Mideast and North Africa—was to be swallowed up by Islam a century after its founding.  

The making of martyrs is the only similarity that Christianity and Islam share when it comes to how they spread: while Christians were martyred for their faith, Muslims martyred whoever refused their faith.  

Dislike for “Christian Roots” of Europe (or Dislike for Truth)

According to Jorge, “when I hear talk of the Christian roots of Europe, I sometimes dread the tone, which can seem triumphalist or even vengeful. It then takes on colonialist overtones.”

One expects such ahistorical multicultural drivel from a clueless atheist—not the “pope.”  A quick education for Jorge: the “Christian roots of Europe” is a fact.  For centuries, after the aforementioned Islamic conquests of the Middle East, the original heartland of Christianity, Europe became the heart and standard bearer of the Christian faith.  That’s why it was called “Christendom.”  How can the supposed vicar, or representative, of Christ, “dread” this fact, denouncing it as “triumphalist or even vengeful”? 

Christianity as a Welcome Doormat

Apparently for Jorge, Europeans may express their Christian roots and faith—but only by being “welcome” doormats:

Yes, Europe has Christian roots and it is Christianity’s responsibility to water those roots. But this must be done in a spirit of service as in the washing of the feet. Christianity’s duty to Europe is one of service….  Christianity’s contribution to a culture is that of Christ in the washing of the feet.

So according to the head of the Catholic church, the entire purpose and message of Christianity is the “washing of feet”—or, in this context, taking in millions of Muslim migrants, many of whom are openly hostile to Christianity.  

Yes, Christ served and washed his disciples’ feet and preached mercy and compassion—but that was hardily the sole or even primary purpose of his mission.  He offered an entire worldview founded on profound theological assertions.  When people erred by profaning the temple, he didn’t “turn the other cheek” (let alone wash their feet).  He whipped them.  He didn’t preach naivety—open your doors to those who have a long history of and still seek to subjugate you—but to be “wise as serpents.”    He spoke of everlasting hell and torments—indeed, more so than anyone else in the entire Bible.  That’s why all Christian denominations have traditionally held that being Christian far transcends “the washing of feet.”  

But for Jorge, the only aspects of Christianity worth expressing are those that benefit Muslim migrants, some of whom hate and persecute Christians in Europe.

The Muslim World’s Problems: Our Fault and Responsibility

When asked if Europe has the capacity to continue accepting so many migrants, Jorge said: “[T]he deeper question is why there are so many migrants now.”  Like a true apologist for Islam, he went on to cite anything and everything—arms manufacturers, hunger, and, parroting the Obama administration, unemployment—as causes for upheavals in the Middle East, while ignoring the elephant in the room: Islamic culture, which engenders dysfunctional, intolerant, violent, authoritarian, and tribal societies.  Simply look to the birthplace of Islam, where Islamic law is strictly upheld: Saudi Arabia is wealthier than most Western nations and has none of the problems cited by Jorge; yet it too is barbaric, corrupt, and hostile to all who do not profess Islam.  Why?

In the same Gospel of Matthew that Jorge cited to conflate the mission of Jesus’ disciples with the mission of Muhammad’s jihadis, Christ declares “Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them.”

If ever there was a person whom this admonition seems to pertain to—a man who holds the authoritative office of “representative of Christ,” but who empowers the historic (and ongoing) enemy of Christianity, while urging Europeans to suppress their Christian heritage and express their faith exclusively by the “washing of feet,” or, laying down before Muslims—surely Jorge Mario Bergoglio fits the bill.   

 Tags: Christianity, Islam, Pope Francis

The Party of Scientism, Not Science

The gruesome history of left-wing scientific fakery.

Bruce Thornton

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

May 19, 2016

Karl Marx

In a commencement speech at Rutgers, President Obama took an indirect shot at Donald Trump and the Republicans:

Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science: These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy . . . We traditionally have valued those things, but if you’re listening to today’s political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from.

Obama here indulges one of the hoariest progressive clichés: that they are the party of enlightenment, reason, and fact, while conservatives are ignorant obscurantists, “bitter clingers” to the superstitions of religion and tradition. This prejudice is false about both conservatives and progressives. Most of what many progressives think is science is, in fact, scientism: the application of the methods, techniques, and jargon of genuine science to subjects for which they are inappropriate.

Indeed, leftism was born in scientism. Karl Marx believed that his ideas about the historical development, economics, and human nature comprised “scientific socialism,” as true as the laws of natural science. As Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral, “Just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, so did Marx discover the laws of human history.” Of course Marxism is no such thing. It is a reductive view of human nature and action, based on selective evidence, unexamined assumptions, and jargon modeled on real science.

As we now know, Marxism is in fact a political religion based on faith more than reason. It identifies the good (the proletariat and the intellectual left) and the evil (capitalists and petty bourgeois); promises an earthly paradise (a society of equality and justice without private property); and provides a totalizing narrative that explains everything (historical progress driven by the struggle for control of the means of production). And despite its bloody failure, a Marxism dressed up as “democratic socialism” still attracts leftists like Bernie Sanders who fancy themselves thinkers of cool reason and empirical evidence.

Or take eugenics, an expression of progressivist ideology that dominated American social policy from around 1900 until the Second World War. The most prestigious universities and professors in the country preached eugenics and the “scientific racism” on which it was based. Its authority came from Darwinism and its theory that natural selection favored the fit, including humans. As Darwin said in The Descent of Man, “At some future period . . . the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” Calling on Darwinian ideas, Margaret Sanger created Planned Parenthood in part to keep the “less fit” races from overbreeding and hence overwhelming the “more fit” Anglo-Saxon and Nordic races.  For the same reason, state governments passed forced sterilization laws upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1927 decision Buck v. Bell. Of course it was all scientism, fake science based on biased observation, the confusion of culture with nature, and quantitative silliness like measuring skulls.

Yet eugenics was the “settled science” of its time, and as such justified illiberal and cruel policies like forced sterilization, race- and ethnic-based immigration restrictions, and Jim Crow segregation. It took the horrors of the Holocaust to discredit, at least publicly, these ideas. But we still see remnants of the logic of eugenics, like the idea that abortion reduces crime rates. This idea surfaced in 1972 and was popularized by the 2010 best-sellerFreakonomics. We heard its echo in Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s comment that thanks to Roe v. Wade, we can eliminate “populations we don’t want to have too many of.”

Then there’s Freudian psychology, discredited as a science only after real science began discovering the biochemical causes of many neuroses and mental disorders. Sigmund Freud also thought he was a scientist who had discovered the material bases of mental phenomena. The ideas that came from this claim, such as “repression” and the Oedipus Complex, were received as scientific discoveries akin to the heliocentric planetary system and Newton’s law of gravity. That prestige facilitated the incredible influence Freudian thought held, and still holds, over a Western culture that had abandoned traditional religion yet still yearned for a substitute to make sense of people’s lives. But Freud’s “discoveries” are not the fruit of science. They are quasi-mythic ideas made up by Freud and buttressed with his subjective observations of his patients. Freud was a culture critic, not a scientist, promoting an explanatory narrative about human behavior, and liberation from the old religious taboos and superstitions that create our unhappiness.

There are other abuses of science, however, that are just as mischievous. Science that strays beyond the limits of what it has established as scientifically true can resemble pseudo-science. Much of the breathless reporting of popular science about how the mind works basically makes mountains of certainty out of molehills of research that uses fMRI scans to measure blood flow in the brain. More careful scientists call this the “higher phrenology.” The fad of identifying a gene as the determiner of behaviors like drinking, promiscuity, and even shopping only began to fade after further research showed that genes interact in much more complex and intricate combinations.

But there is no greater example of this bad habit than the claims that global warming is caused by human-produced atmospheric CO2. The crude causal link between CO2 and increased warming, a hypothesis over a hundred years old, is too simplistic to account for global climate change unfolding over millions of years. It cannot explain contrary evidence, such as the now two-decades-old pause in warming that has been going on even as people continue to add billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. Gaps in understanding are filled by computer simulations compromised by the self-interested need of researchers to generate the results that confirm their lucrative climate model Yet despite these problems, governments all over the world continue to speak of “settled science” and a “scientific consensus,” two phrases that cut against the skeptical grain of real science.

So what do all these examples have in common? They have been embraced to a greater or lesser degree by most progressives and liberals, the people like Obama who pride themselves on their belief in “facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science,” as he told the cheering audience at Rutgers. Progressives argue they are more fit to rule because they rely on these habits of thinking when they make “policy.” Thus they display the misplaced progressive faith in technocratic elites who armed with knowledge from the new “human sciences,” will avoid the self-interest, superstition, religious dogma, and fossilized traditions that conservatives supposedly base their policies on.

But this faith in “techno-politics” in the end serves un-scientific ideology, self-interest, ambition, and the power to boss other people around and run their lives, all dressed up in the prestige and authority of real science. Nothing exposes this progressive sham more than the current attempt by Democrat Congressmen and state Attorneys General to use government and judicial power to investigate and punish writers and researchers who exercise their freedom to question “scientific” claims about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. That is, these proponents of reason and science want to attack the public skepticism upon which modern science is founded. Such illiberal obscurantism is the hallmark of scientism.

To paraphrase British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, science is to scientism what a gentleman is to a gent. As the gruesome history of communism, eugenics, and other pseudo-scientific ideologies teach, we should never confuse a pretender with the real thing.

 Tags: Left, Marxism, Progressive, science

The Faith of Christopher Hitchens

A touching memoir of Hitch’s last crusade.

David Horowitz

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

May 18, 2016

When he died in 2011, at the age of 62, Christopher Hitchens was the most famous atheist alive. He was also one of the nastiest, having risen to these heights of fame with an international best-seller alternately mocking and excoriating believers under the title: God Is Not Great - How religion poisons everything. (A less venomous, more credible prospectus for a book would have been “How deceitful and corrupt human beings poison religion.”) Christopher Hitchens was also a man of contradictory impulses, and this same polemical malevolence co-existed in him with a graciousness that he could direct – not always but not infrequently - towards ideological enemies, allowing him to form relationships, and even friendships, with the most unlikely bedfellows. (Full disclosure, I am an agnostic and former radical who has also written a memoir of Christopher, a man I knew intermittently for fifty years, and as a friend for the last decade of his life.)

Larry Taunton is the author of a new and deeply appreciative memoir called The Faith of Christopher Hitchens:The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist. Taunton is a well-known evangelical Christian whose Fixed Point Foundation organized some of Christopher’s debates with religious adversaries during the final crusade he undertook to slay the dragons of religion, and to refute defenders of the idea that belief in a divinity can open the door to a redeeming faith.

Did Hitchens himself have a faith, as the title of Taunton’s book suggests? Of course he did. An Oscar Wilde mot that Taunton cites and that Hitchens was exceptionally fond of was that a map of the world without Utopia on it was not worth consulting. Like other romantics, Hitchens was inspired for most of his life by a revolutionary faith in a future transformation of the world as we know it. When his faith in the socialist future waned, he replaced it with a faith that reason could be the foundation of a more rationale and humane world order. Hence the crusade against what he regarded as superstitious, reactionary belief.

Because Taunton’s foundation organized some of Hitchens’ debates, the two spent precious time alone together during the long drives from Hitchens’ home in Washington to the venues in Alabama and Montana where the intellectual contests took place. Because the two men were intensely interested in ideas and in each other, the trips resulted in long and intimate conversations about themselves, atheism and Christian belief. Because Hitchens was a man of catholic interests who kept “double books” – which is the way he described his inner contradictions and paradoxical engagements - he allowed Taunton to lead him in a bible study of the New Testament. The result is a remarkable, closely observed memoir of their intellectual encounters, which anyone who has been enchanted or enraged by Hitchens – or both – will not want to miss.

Taunton is an unusually sensitive man and an unusually honest and diligent writer, points that need emphasis because the God debate has aroused such ideological passions that even this circumspectly observed memoir has been dragged into the maelstrom to its detriment. “Of all that can transpire in a bedroom,” begins the New York Times review of Taunton’s book, “nothing can be as titillating to the religious, or those of us who write about them, as a dying man’s conversion. Oscar Wilde’s deathbed baptism remains a coup for the Roman Catholic Church 116 years later, and an embarrassment for those who cherish his legacy of hedonism….The latest controversy about a late-in-life religious turn involves Christopher Hitchens, one of the world’s most prominent atheists. Unsurprisingly, evangelicals have celebrated the book, while some of Mr. Hitchens’s secular friends have winced.”

One of those secular friends cited by the Times is the Marxist editor and literary agent, Steve Wasserman, who is also an executor of Hitchens’s estate. Wasserman, who had not even read the book when interviewed, described Taunton’s work as “a shabby business” in which “unverifiable conversations” are made to “contradict everything Christopher Hitchens ever said or stood for.” This is shameless invention to grind an ideological ax – nothing could be further from the truth. Along with the Times’s innuendos Wasserman’s statement performs a great disservice not only to this remarkable little book, but to fans of Hitchens who might be discouraged from reading it.

The author of The Faith of Christopher Hitchens never for a moment believed that Hitchens, whom he affectionately refers to as “Christopher,” converted. He wanted Christopher to convert because he loved him as a friend and because as a Christian he believed that if Christopher did not convert he would be lost forever and the two of them could never be reunited. But he never once concludes that Christopher did convert. This is the way Taunton ends his book: “For me, the debates, the late-night discussions, and the Bible studies conducted in the front seat of my car were never about winning or losing an argument. Let the bloggers and the people in online forums fight that out … I didn’t need Christopher’s conversion to feel good about myself or to reinforce a flagging faith in the claims of Jesus Christ. I have never doubted them. No, for me it was always about the struggle for his soul because I believe this verse: ‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.’” 

The rich rewards readers of Taunton’s memoir will reap are an affectionate portrait of a remarkable man at the end of his life, drawn by a religious adversary with an open heart; an informed examination of Christopher’s relationships with his conservative father and liberal mother, and with his atheist-turned-Christian and radical-turned-conservative brother, Peter, along with thoughtful reflections on the way they each influenced Christopher and illuminate his complexities. Finally it is a testament of one man’s religious creed, and his view that grace is the core belief of a Christian faith. Each and all of these elements serve to make Taunton’s book a literary gem, which no honest reader could mistake for an ideological tract.

 Tags: Christopher Hitchens, David Horowitz, Left

Book Review: ‘The Secret War: Spies, Ciphers and Guerrillas’ by Max Hastings

By Joseph C. Goulden

http://www.washingtontimes.com/

May 16, 2016

Writing in the New York Review of Books in March, British historian Max Hastings noted (with an author’s undisguised pleasure) that “seventy years after the conclusion of World War II, works about the conflict enjoy a popularity second only to cookbooks.”

Such is due in large part to writers such as Sir Max, whose hard-eyed objectivity about war is a far cry from the “feel good” books from Stephen Ambrose and others. Mr. Hastings‘ 2011 work “Inferno” dealt with the brutality of war, and it is easily the best one-volume history of the war.

Now I must award Mr. Hastings another “best.” In a quarter-century of reviewing books on intelligence in these pages and elsewhere, “The Secret War” ranks foremost.

His massive overview is a fascinating look at the dark world of espionage and dirty tricks that are a part of warfare, with terse and readable looks at spies, communications intercepts and guerrillas. He postulates some rules that should be heeded by modern masters of the dark arts: report what you find, not what you expect that superiors would like to hear. Further, in the end, intelligence is a sideshow to war — essential, to be sure, but in the end, battles are won by “great armies, fleets, air forces.” In other words, by brave persons who face the enemy directly.

Further, expect political leaders to view intelligence with suspicion. As Joseph Stalin put it, “A spy should be like the devil: no one can trust him, not even himself.”

Thus an anomaly: Although the Soviet Union ran the most extensive espionage network of the 20th century, relying heavily upon fellow-travelers, Moscow frequently ignored their reports — including a forewarning of the German invasion of 1941.

Here Mr. Hastings has a jibe for American leftists who continue to ignore the likes of, say, an Alger Hiss. He feels that espionage writers “dwell obsessively on the treachery of Britain’s Cambridge Five, but relatively few recognize what we might call the Washington and Berkeley five hundred — a small army of American leftists who served as informants for Soviet intelligence.” Although he says Sen. Joseph McCarthy “stigmatized many individuals unjustly,” he was correct in charging that there was a vast number of persons, in government and elsewhere, “whose first loyalty was not to their own flag.”

Signal intelligence, he writes, achieved “an unprecedented importance in operational planning;” nonetheless, it provided no “magic keys to victory on the ground, in the air and at sea. The Germans, Italians and Japanese always had to be fought.” Battlefield victories did not come until Allied forces achieved military superiority.

Mr. Hastings gives the Office of Strategic Services and its British counterpart, the Special Operations Executive, high marks for boosting the morale of persons who resisted German occupation of their countries. But he takes a dim view of the “supposed military achievements of guerrillas,” especially in connection with D-Day. He writes, “the story that the Resistance ‘liberated’ parts of France in August 1944 is a fairy tale — the German army retreated because it had suffered defeat in Normandy.”

Nor, save in rare instances, could signals intelligence reveal enemy intentions. A notable exception was British intercepts of messages sent to Tokyo by Baron Hiroshi Oshima, Japanese ambassador to Germany. Some 2,000 of his cables were decrypted between 1940 and 1945 and distributed in London and Washington. Although he got poor marks for “assessments and predictions,” his conversations with top Nazis proved valuable, as were exchanges between Berlin and Tokyo.

As Mr. Hastings writes, “Never in history had belligerents been empowered to eavesdrop on the conversation of their enemies’ policy-makers, as now they were.” Gen. George C. Marshall, the U.S. chief of staff, commented that Oshima was “our main basis of information concerning Hitler’s intentions in Europe.”

Many historians have treated British intercepts of German signals as a “war-winner” in its own right, but as Mr. Hastings notes, intercepts were “always patchy.” Further, knowing enemy intentions rarely diminished its strength.

Nonetheless, Mr. Hastings credits signal intelligence for a feat that essentially changed the course of war in the Pacific. Naval officer Joseph Rochefort was not star; indeed he barely escaped being cashiered for poor seamanship and was shunted off to code-breaking duties.

But he had a stroke of genius which Mr. Hastings details. Studying Japanese intercepts in June 1942, Rochefort concluded the next attack target would be Midway. He was correct, and carrier fighter planes sank four Japanese carriers. “It was arguably the most influential single intelligence achievement of the global conflict,” Mr. Hastings writes. (Nonetheless, Navy superiors denied him a contemporary decoration; he received a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal in 1985.)

Ten cloaks, 10 daggers.

• Joseph Goulden is the author of 18 nonfiction books.

Today's Tune: The War On Drugs - Down The Rabbit Hole Festival, The Netherlands 2015 (Complete Show)

From 1970s-Era Academic ‘High Theory’ to Transgender Bathrooms on Campus

by HEATHER MAC DONALD

http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 16, 2016

Source: iStock

One take-away from the transgender-bathroom wars is that the public ignores arcane academic theory at its peril. For two decades, a growing constellation of gender-studies, queer-studies, and women’s-studies departments have been beavering away at propositions that would strike many people outside academia as surprising — such as that biological sex and “gender” are mere ideological constructs imposed by a Eurocentric, heteronormative power structure. Even though skeptical journalists have regularly dived into the murky swamp of academic theory and returned bearing nuggets of impenetrable jargon and even stranger ideas, the public and most politicians have shrugged off such academic abominations, if they have taken note at all. 

(Senator Marco Rubio’s deplorable jab at “philosophy majors” during his presidential run demonstrated how clueless your typical politician is about the real problems in academia.)

Now gender theory has leapt from the academy to the real world with the demand by the Obama administration that public schools allow biological boys, bearing their full complement of male genitals, to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms if those boys declare themselves female. 

How did this happen? A pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media. The products of the narcissistic academy graduate and bring their high theory indoctrination with them into the federal and state bureaucracies and into newsrooms. Even the judiciary is affected. The opinion of the federal district court striking down California’s Proposition 8 (declaring that marriage was an institution uniting men and women), for example, was steeped in the women’s-studies notion that marriage originated as a way to impose a subordinate “gender” role on females.

The most notable aspect of this latest public eruption of academic theory is how quickly the new academically driven moral consensus was formed. The current wave of non-academic transgender activism began last summer, when the New York Times ran a full-page editorial declaring that the oppression of the transgendered by the biologically obsessed heteronormative majority was our most pressing civil-rights struggle. TheTimes then followed up with a series of news stories documenting the alleged oppression and plight of the “trans community.” Now, less than a year later, any parent with qualms about having his twelve-year-old daughter share a locker room with a 14-year-old boy is branded as the equivalent of someone advocating a return to whites-only water fountains. An issue that didn’t even exist a year ago is now completely settled in the minds of the cultural elite; anyone who opposes the new regime is simply an atavistic, benighted bigot.

How short are the memories of the politically righteous! In the 1970s, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg pooh-poohed as sheer demagoguery the idea that the Equal Rights Amendment would require co-ed bathrooms, her implicit assumption being that such an arrangement would of course be preposterous. In 1991, the Michigan Women’s Festival expelled a transsexual woman on the ground that she was in biological fact a male. The First International Conference on Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender at California State University, Northridge, in 1995 maintained separate bathroom facilities for males and females, causing a protest by trans activists. Gay-rights activist and historian Martin Duberman stormed out of a gender-theory presentation. Now those early advocates for gay and women’s rights would be lumped into the same category as segregationists.

There are several corollary take-aways to the present moment. First, we have learned that the trans movement trumps feminism, just as Europe’s reaction to the mass Muslim sexual assaults this New Year’s Eve revealed that multiculturalism trumps feminism. Given the constant caterwauling about “rape culture” by campus feminists, one would have thought that feminists would have opposed allowing males’ use of facilities frequented by unclothed or otherwise vulnerable females. But apparently the claim that college campuses are awash in serial “rapists” waxes and wanes in salience depending on context. It now becomes merely another sign of redneck bigotry to suggest that a heterosexual male (i.e., a rapist in waiting) or a sexual pervert may take advantage of the new trans rules. Wellesley and Smith colleges have twisted themselves into knots deciding whether the “trans” category trumps the favored status of females. They concluded that being trans cancels the disability of being male and in fact elevates the trans “female” to the highest rank on the victim totem pole.

Second, we have learned that all academic High Theory bears watching. The conceptual roots of gender theory lie in 1970s-era deconstruction and post-structuralism, with their pretense to having obliterated the traditional categories of Western epistemology and metaphysics. From Jacques Derrida’s purported “deconstruction” of the privileging of the spoken word over the written sign, and of presence over absence, it turned out to be not so big a step to the alleged dismantling of the biological difference between male and female.

Third, we notice that all colleges matter when it comes to the generation of corrosive High Theory — not just the Ivy League. The University of Iowa, for example, jumpstarted the field of queer studies in 1994 with a conference on queerness.

Finally, we see that narcissistic students are now co-equal drivers with their professors when it comes to rapidly evolving victim theory. By one count, there are now some 60 categories of gender identity, many of those developed by students desperate to find some last way to be transgressive in an environment where their every self-involved claim of victimhood is met by fawning attention and apologies from the campus diversity bureaucracy. How those 60 categories will play out for public policy remains to be seen.

The ultimate agenda here, however, is to destroy any last shred of female modesty that might stand in the way of the total normalization of casual promiscuity, in obedience to the sexual-liberation movement of the 1960s. Many girls are embarrassed to be seen naked by other girls. Now, however, they are being told to swallow their inhibitions if a boy is in their bathroom or locker room. This can be achieved only by adopting a stance of utter indifference to the powerful, primal taboos around nakedness and sex — in other words, to adopt the sad sexual crudeness of the stars of Sex and the City or of Lena Dunham. And according to the Obama administration, any parent or school official who disagrees is standing in the way of moral progress. One shrinks to contemplate what the academy is cooking up next.

— Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of the forthcoming The War on Cops (June 2016). 

On 'Clinton Cash', Or, It’s Always Worse Than You Think

BY ROGER KIMBALL MAY 13, 2016

https://pjmedia.com/

In his column for PJ Media, my friend Ron Radosh, the distinguished historian, outlines the case for believing that Hillary Clinton is the “lesser of two evils” compared to Donald Trump. Ron says that he is “fully aware” of Hillary’s liabilities, yet concludes:

On foreign policy, there is more hope that [she] will take a course that asserts American leadership abroad.

Ron is not alone in asserting this. Several prominent conservatives have, with varying degrees of hesitation (not to say repugnance), embraced Hillary Clinton as the less bad alternative to Donald Trump.

A new film, which will debut Monday at Cannes, may force them to reconsider that judgment.

Clinton Cash, the documentary film which I watched in previews yesterday, is based on the best-selling exposé of the same name by Peter Schweizer, the tireless investigative journalist who has devoted himself to confronting political corruption and crony capitalism regardless of the political affiliation of the perpetrators. Produced by Breitbart’s Stephen K. Bannon and directed by M. A. Taylor, Clinton Cash is crisply narrated by Schweizer and provides a relentless and devastating portrait of brazen financial venality in exchange for political favors.

I read through Clinton Cash quickly when it came out last May. This was no right-wing hit job (as the Clinton campaign asserted) but rather a methodical and exhaustively sourced chronicle of how the Clintons parlayed Bill’s celebrity, Hillary’s position as secretary of State, and her possible future tenure as president of the United States into a veritable Niagara of cash.

Eye-popping speaking fees for Bill -- $250,000, $500,000, even $750,000 a pop -- and millions upon millions directed to the Clinton Foundation and its offshoots. Where was the money coming from? Did they actually find his "wisdom" that valuable?

No. The money came from multinational corporations that needed a favor. Shady foreign financiers. Dubious state entities in Africa, Saudi Arabia, Russia, South America, and elsewhere.

Are you worried about “money in politics”? Stop the car, get an extended-stay room, and take a long hard look at the Clintons’ operation for the last sixteen years.

The Associated Press estimated that their net worth when they left the White House in 2000 was zero (really, minus $500K). Now they are worth about $200 million.

How did they do it? By “reading The Wall Street Journal” (classical reference)?

Not quite. The Clintons have perfected pay-to-play political influence peddling on a breathtaking scale. Reading Clinton Cash is a nauseating experience.

At the center of the book is not just a tale of private greed and venality. That is just business as usual in Washington (and elsewhere). No, what is downright scary is way the Clintons have been willing to trade away legitimate environmental concerns and even our national security for the sake of filthy lucre.

Do you doubt the authority of Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution? How about The New York Times, then?

Last year, following up with independent investigative research based on revelations in Clinton Cash, the Times published a long and devastating story about the how the Clintons sold out some twenty percent of American uranium assets to a Russian company controlled by Vladimir Putin. “At the heart of the tale,” the Times reported:

... are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One. 

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Worried yet? It gets worse:

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well. 

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

It gets still worse, much worse. Read the book. But then watch the documentary, coming to a television screen near you much sooner than the announced release date of July 24.

It gives a detailed analysis of how the Clintons hypocritically mouth progressive pieties while selling out those values to multinational corporate interests on the one hand, and some of world’s creepiest political actors on the other.

Clinton Cash should outrage not only conservatives but also supporters of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders. Despite its thriller-like scenarios, this brilliant documentary is not a partisan melodrama. It is a public service.

This should be watched by anyone who cares about restoring basic trust and accountability to our political life. The sad truth is, I conclude, Hillary Clinton is ostentatiously unfit to be President of the United States. We do not, pace my friend Ron Radosh, possess instruments delicate enough to determine that she is the "lesser of two evils."

What we do know, however -- what this documentary demonstrates beyond cavil -- is that Bill and Hillary Clinton are as corrupt as they are hypocritical, lining their pockets by selling out the values they pretend to cherish. It makes for a repellent spectacle.