Robert Mueller, Agent of Willful Ignorance

It has come to light that as director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, who is currently the special counsel looking for any dirt he can find on Donald Trump, presided over the 2012 removal of all counterterror training materials of any mention of Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism. Since then, our law enforcement and intelligence officials have been blundering along in self-imposed darkness about the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat. This, it turns out, was Mueller’s doing.
In February 2012, the Obama Administration purged more than one thousand documents and presentations from counter-terror training material for the FBI and other agencies. This material was discarded at the demand of Muslim groups, which had deemed it inaccurate or offensive to Muslims.
This purge was several years in the making, and I was – inadvertently – the one who touched it off. In August 2010, when I gave a talk on Islam and jihad to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force — one of many such talks I gave to government agencies and military groups in those years. While some had counseled me to keep these talks quiet so as to avoid attracting the ire of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the possibility of that pressure seemed to me to make it all the more important to announce my appearances publicly, so as to show that the U.S. government was not going to take dictation from a group linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Those who had urged silence were proven correct, however, for the Obama administration was indeed disposed to take dictation from CAIR. CAIR sent a series of letters to Mueller and others demanding that I be dropped as a counter-terror trainer; the organization even started a “coalition” echoing this demand, and Jesse Jackson and other Leftist luminaries joined it.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/268542/robert-mueller-agent-willful-ignorance-robert-spencer 

Repealing Obama's Net Neutrality a Blow for Freedom

The FCC is expected to vote and approve on December 14 Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal to end the so-called “net neutrality” rules imposed by President Obama’s FCC in 2015. This has provoked howls from liberals and tech giants that this is a blow for Internet freedom and another boon for big business. It is exactly the opposite. It is in fact a boon for economic and political freedom as are all the other Obama-era regulations rescinded by the Trump administration that have promoted economic growth and lessened our dependency on big government. As the Washington Examiner notes:

Sometimes you have to wonder how sincere people are when they gnash their teeth and pull out their hair over President Trump blocking or reversing an Obama-era regulation.
The latest cries of distress about anarchy and market apocalypse can be heard about an announcement by the Federal Communications Commission that it will roll back “net neutrality.”
Net neutrality’s dubious value is made obvious by the misleading way Democrats and many news outlets reported the decision. “F.C.C. plans net neutrality repeal in a victory for telecoms,” wrote the New York Times. Missing from the headline or lede was that the decision was a loss for Netflix, Amazon, Google, and other corporate giants that provide content.

Liberals oppose the free flow of information they can’t control and in the name of providing equal access to all they sought to regulate the access of everybody. They., in effect, sought to put toll booths and speed bumps on the information superhighway. As the Daily Signal reported:

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/11/repealing_obamas_net_neutrality_a_blow_for_freedom.html#ixzz4zjZ2WdAS

Will House Ethics Comm. Let Conyers’ Sex Scandal Slide Like His Past Corrupt Acts?

The prominent Michigan congressman who illegally forced congressional staffers to be personal servants and work on state and local campaigns is embroiled in a major sex scandal. Various media outlets report that John Conyers, the longest serving House member and ranking Democrat of the powerful Judiciary Committee, secretly settled a sexual harassment claim by an employee with taxpayer funds from his office budget. Additionally, multiple former staff members accuse the 88-year-old lawmaker of repeatedly making sexual advances toward female staff. Democratic colleagues have already called for a House Ethics Committee probe, but there’s little hope Conyers will be punished since the notoriously remiss panel let him off the hook the last time it investigated his corrupt acts, determining that he had “accepted responsibility” for the violations. A former staffer said the legislator, a civil rights icon and founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, is untouchable.

If you recall, Conyers’ wife, disgraced Detroit City Councilwoman Monica Conyers, served three years in prison for bribery. Now it’s hubby’s turn to be in the scandal limelight. Affidavits filed by four former employees and scrutinized by reputable news outlets, show an alarming pattern of sexual misconduct by Conyers. In the documents the workers say they saw the congressman repeatedly making sexual advances to women on his staff, including touching them inappropriately with leg and back rubs and requesting sexual favors. The woman who received the secret settlement filed a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2014, claiming she was fired for rebuffing the congressman’s repeated sexual advances. In 2015 she was paid $27,000 from Conyers’ taxpayer-funded office budget in exchange for silence. “His office would ‘rehire’ the woman as a ‘temporary employee’ despite her being directed not to come into the office or do any actual work,” according to the document cited in the news report that broke the scandal this week. A law clerk representing the woman described it as a “designed cover-up.”

https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/11/will-house-ethics-comm-let-conyers-sex-scandal-slide-like-past-corrupt-acts/ 

'Washington cannot lead the country' in addressing sexual harassment

Anita Hill on Sunday said she doesn't believe officials in Washington, D.C., will lead the country on addressing sexual harassment, adding that she believes the recent spate of accusations against politicians and celebrities are "the tip of the iceberg."

“We have made progress, but unfortunately 26 years ago, Washington wasn’t ready to lead on this issue, and I’m afraid even today Washington cannot lead the country on this issue,” Hill said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“There seems to be too many conflicted feelings and understandings about what needs to happen when sexual misconduct occurs,” she continued.

Hill, an attorney, in 1991 accused her then-boss, Clarence Thomas, of sexual harassment after he was nominated to the Supreme Court. Her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee became a national sensation.

http://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/361848-anita-hill-washington-cannot-lead-the-country-in-addressing-sexual 

FCC Head Ajit Pai: Killing Net Neutrality Will Set the Internet Free

In an exclusive interview today just hours after announcing his plan to repeal "Net Neutrality" rules governing the actions of Internet-service providers (ISPs) and mobile carriers, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai has an in-your-face prediction for his critics: "Over the coming years, we're going to see an explosion in the kinds of connectivity and the depth of that connectivity," he said this afternoon. "Ultimately that means that the human capital in the United States that's currently on the shelf—the people who don't have digital opportunity—will become participants in the digital economy."

Pai stressed that regulating the Internet under a Title II framework originally created in the 1930s had led to less investment in infrastructure and a slower rate of innovation. "Since the dawn of the commercial internet, ISPs have been investing as much as they can in networks in order to upgrade their facilities and to compete with each other," he says. "Outside of a recession we've never seen that sort of investment go down year over year. But we did in 2015, after these regulations were adopted." In a Wall Street Journal column published today, Pai says Title II was responsible for a nearly 6 percent decline in broadband network investment as ISPs saw compliance costs rise and the regulatory atmosphere become uncertain. In his interview with Reason, Pai stressed that the real losers under Net Neutrality were people living in rural areas and low-income Americans who were stuck on the bad end of "the digital divide."

Proponents of Net Neutrality maintain that rules that went into effect in 2015 are the only thing standing between rapacious businesses such as Comcast, Verizon (where Pai once worked), and Spectrum and an Internet choking on throttled traffic, expensive "fast lanes," and completely blocked sites that displease whatever corporate entity controls the last mile of fiber into your home or business. Pai says that is bunk and noted that today's proposed changes, which are expected to pass full FCC review in mid-December, return the Internet to the light-touch regulatory regime that governed it from the mid-1990s until 2015.

http://reason.com/blog/2017/11/21/ajit-pai-net-neutrality-podcast 

The Rise of the Beta Male Sexual Harasser

The winds of what the New York Post calls Pervnado continue to gather strength, carving a hole through the beta male worlds of NPR, PBS, Hollywood, the New Republic, Vox, the New York Times, and MSNBC, among others. What emerges from this storm of scandal is a clearer picture of a culture that trained men not to respect women but to respect feminism. In many ways, the Beta Male sexual harasser is the squalid offspring of the unhappy marriage between feminism and the sexual revolution, from whose chaotic household he learned virtue-signaling without virtue.

The growing pile of confession notes — which combine ostensible empathy and promises of sensitivity and submission with strategically placed, lawyerly denials — testifies to the grimly comic dishonesty of the Beta Male sexual harasser. He thought that he could continue to indulge his appetites as long as he adjusted his attitudes, a view that all of the prattle about “systemic change” confirms him in, insofar as it treats his misbehavior as an ideological problem rather than a moral one. Implied in many of the confession notes from the harassers is the ludicrous suggestion that with a little more “education,” with a few more training seminars, with a little more consciousness-raising, they would have behaved virtuously. This pose allows them to escape moral responsibility and painlessly join the “solution.” The sexual revolution’s massive crisis of unchastity is thus turned into a “problem of power” that can be remedied by the hiring of more female executives, the expansion of HR departments, and “better” education.

For sheer pomposity, perhaps nothing beats Richard Dreyfuss’s non-apology apology, chalking up his misbehavior to the “performative masculine man my father had modeled for me to be.” But, no worries, he is enlightened now: “I have had to redefine what it means to be a man, and an ethical man. I think every man on Earth has or will have to grapple with this question. But I am not an assaulter.”

https://spectator.org/the-rise-of-the-beta-male-sexual-harasser/ 

Morality, Not Civility, Is the Basis of the Social Order

I would like to propose a hypothesis: "If a society loses its belief in God and Judeo-Christian morality, it will go down the drain faster than you can flush a wad of toilet paper."  We shall test this hypothesis in a laboratory.

We shall have two teams of rats in cages.  In each cage, there will be four rats and two pieces of cheese.  In cage A, the rats will be allowed to fight over the cheese. In cage B, the rats are allowed to fight over the cheese but are required to say "please" before grabbing the cheese.  If our hypothesis is correct, the rats in cage A will kill each other for the cheese faster than the rats in cage B.

America is now more like cage B.  There is a minimal form of civility attempting to pass as morality.  Thus, we remain intact somewhat longer than other societies.  But the civility we mistakenly call morality is still such a futile exercise and devoid of spiritual power and enlightenment that mutual destruction is assured even if delayed.

This belief that common courtesy is the equivalent of morality is supplemented by a belief that the law – our written statutes and legal system – defines social order when civility fails, such as when there are rape-murders or, in civil cases, when construction companies are paid but do not do the job they were contracted to do.  The adjudications that arise in these and a myriad of other criminal and civil conflicts restore the fairness or equilibrium that is otherwise lacking.  Egregious harm to others, while sometimes called "evil," is evil not in some religious or dogmatic sense, but in that it is far from a norm of civility that has replaced Judeo-Christian morality.

Although "evil" appears as an absolute term, it is now used in a relative sense. It is only relatively absolute.  From a logical point of view, of course "relatively absolute" makes no more sense than saying "truthful lie," but in our fluid and bereft consciousness, this seems to be where we are.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/11/morality_not_civility_is_the_basis_of_the_social_order.html#ixzz4zYQdSI2o