Category Archives: Cultural

Miracle on ice – Canadian edition

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Not much of a video but the best I can do. And if there has been any other news today, I haven’t seen it. This was for the Women’s Hockey (sur glace) Olympic final.

Down 0-2 with 3:26 left in the game, Canada scores one, to make it 1-2, they pull their goalie for an extra attacker and the USA shoots the puck down the ice and hits the post. Canada then takes the puck up the ice and scores to make it 2-2. And so into sudden-death overtime and at 8:53 into the ten minute overtime Canada scores to win the game.

And meanwhile, in the men’s. Russia knocked out by Finland 3-1, and Canada only just gets past Croatia (do they have ice?) 2-1 or maybe it was Latvia.

Men’s semi – Canada and USA again. And after the Women’s final, this one will be even more for real.

UPDATE: A year later I have added the whole game below.

The Radosh-Horowitz riddle

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Suppose Diana West had written the worst book ever on Roosevelt, Stalin and the Cold War. She hasn’t – she’s crafted one of the best books on this issue ever written – but suppose she had written one of the worst. Suppose the facts didn’t stack up. Suppose there were large gaps in her logic and in the analysis. Suppose it was a pot boiler badly crafted and convincing to no one. Suppose she had done that.

Well so what if she had. Throw it out there for others to deal with. Let it be refuted by those on the left if they have the nerve and the knowledge to do it. Let them unpick her errors and mistakes. Let them take the time and the trouble. If she can establish a case, even on really flimsy grounds, that Roosevelt’s White House was riddled with Soviet agents and that America’s strategy during World War II was shaped in major ways to suit the Soviet Union and Stalin, well, where’s the problem with that? It is an idea worth pursuing and even if the evidence had been thin, it’s not for people on our side to knock it over. There is nothing to be gained by doing the left’s work for them. Put it out and let it be debated.

And the fact is that there is no value whatsoever on the conservative side of politics for anyone on the right to attack West’s book, whether it is good, bad or mediocre. This is politics at its most dangerous, not some useless academic tearoom debate. This really matters if we are to understand the world we live in. Who cares whether there are some obscure errors in what she wrote that no one can see unless they have spent thirty years in an archive. How moronic and politically stupid do you have to be to challenge such a book, even if it is badly done. Whose interests are being served, and exactly why are they being served by seeking some pristine purity and perfection that no one else has ever achieved or could be expected to.

If people are such idiots that they actually think that the interests of the conservative side of politics are served by ridiculously high standards of scholarship that no one can meet, then they should get out of the political arena and sit in their archive and stay in the tearoom because they are useless to any kind of political debate.

The only interests that are served in attacking Diana West’s book are the interests of the left. No other. If that is not 100% obvious then these people are political fools of the highest order. And if they do understand that, who are they really and where are we then?

Occasionally you win one but the trends are still bad

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This is from Andrew Bolt, under the heading, No discount for the Jew from Israel:

It is increasingly hard to tell the difference between the Greens-backed Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement and old-fashioned anti-Semitism.

Australian company Cinematic Strings advertises a product:

Cinematic Strings 2 is a completely redesigned and updated version of the original orchestral strings sample library. Whilst retaining the warm luscious tones produced in the world class Verbrugghen Hall of the Sydney Conservatorium, the new version features a sleek new interface and even smoother legato.

It offers a discount to students:

Supporting Students and Institutions Worldwide

We believe that the latest technology should be readily available to the education sector to facilitate learning and to keep training up-to-date and relevant to industry requirements. For this reason we offer a range of individual educational discounts to both teachers and students; we also have tailored packages available for universities and colleges that seek to incorporate a professional-level string library into their program.

And then it sends this reply to a Jewish student placing an order:

Hi Yossela,

I am very, very sorry but I will not be able to provide you with a student discount. We support the BDS movement worldwide and the cultural boycott against Israel until Israel ceases its illegal settlement activities in the West Bank and ceases its discrimination against the Palestinian people. Please see this website for further information http://www.bdsmovement.net/activecamps/cultural-boycott.

Please understand that this is not in any way directed at you personally and we have heard from many Israeli students who have been very sympathetic towards the Palestinian people. However we are fairly powerless here in Australia to act on behalf of the victims of oppression and so the BDS is the only way we can have a voice.

We wish you all the best in your future musical endeavours.

Kindest regards,

Alex and the CS team.

For the company to say this decision “is not in any way directed at you personally” is to actually explain one of the offensive things about it. Yossela is not being judged as an individual but as an Israeli, and specifically a Jewish Israeli. (Would the ban apply to him were he an Israeli Arab?) This is the tribalism of the Left – a tribalism that strips us all of our individuality and our individual worth.

Moreover, when that tribalism is then put into the service of a movement aimed at only one side in a conflict involving at least two parties, the other of which uses terrorism and preaches a religious hatred of its enemy, we must ask what truly lies behind this BDS movement. It smells like something very old and putrid.

But good news: it didn’t take long after this issue hit the Internet for Cinematic Strings to think again:

While we stand by our reasons, we can see now that this action itself may be construed as discriminatory, and therefore we will make discounts available to all students regardless of location. If Yossela would like to contact us again we will make the discount available to him

.

And here is the full story of why they thought again:

For any who think we can’t fight BDS: here’s a result. Within hours of the original blog post kicking off a Facebook viral avalanche from our readers, the company behind Cinematic Strings has, at least technically, backed down.

As I was writing a follow up post, the owners of Cinematic Strings posted the following in various places on Facebook and in emails (my emphasis). They appear to have backed down on refusing a discount to an Israeli.

We have seen it reported in the past few hours that we do not sell our product in Israel or to Jewish people and it is simply not true. We have always allowed anyone anywhere in the world to purchase CS2; we have sold many copies to Jewish composers both within and outside Israel.

However we have historically allotted discounts case by case, at our discretion. We did withhold a discount in support of an academic and cultural boycott; we did this in order to promote dialogue aimed at ending state-sanctioned discrimination against the Palestinian people. While we stand by our reasons, we can see now that this action itself may be construed as discriminatory, and therefore we will make discounts available to all students regardless of location. If Yossela would like to contact us again we will make the discount available to him.

Thank you to those who have contacted us personally and with whom we have had polite and constructive discussions. I hope this outcome will be satisfactory to all concerned.

Kind regards,

Alex Wallbank

Answering the first paragraph: we certainly never claimed they wouldn’t sell to Jews or Israelis: only that they wouldn’t give a discount that was available to any other nationality.

After posting earlier about the company in Australia that makes the software “Cinematic Strings 2” and who wouldn’t give an educational discount to an Israel, I fired off an email to a friend of mine. He just happens to be a top Hollywood music producer. I specifically asked him for alternatives. This is the answer I received (reproduced with permission):

I am horrified.

I am about to start a new movie and have been sourcing new library.

Cinematic Brass was on my shopping list. It is now OFF.

I will do everything in my power to alert other composers to this abomination. Divestment cuts both ways and Hollywood is a place where many well known Jewish composers reside.

Your email and its unlikely subject matter arrive on the cusp of my purchase decision, and was beshert.

As far as strings are concerned, I have invested in the product of a German company – Orchestral Tools – who make a brilliant library named Berlin Strings. They also have a woodwind library called, not too surprisingly, Berlin Winds. Now, I have no way of knowing whether OT are involved in BDS or not, but would suggest applying the same approach as was used with the Ozzie mumsers.

If anything of a similar nature occurs, let me know.

With fond regards,

So there you have it. One sharp email back to an Israeli asking for a perfectly reasonable student discount which would be offered to any other nationality in the world and repercussions can start.

I just want to say this to the owners of Cinematic Strings. This is not personal, it’s business. I have a theory, expanded here, that boycotting Israel (in this case unfairly refusing an academic discount purely on national origin) will harm the boycotter more than Israel. In his speech the other night Netanyahu very clearly laid out why boycotting Israel and Israelis is so evil:

“In the past, anti-Semites boycotted Jewish businesses and today they call for the boycott of the Jewish state. And by the way, only the Jewish state. Now, don’t take my word for it. The founders of the BDS movement make their goals perfectly clear. They want to see the end of the Jewish state. They’re quite explicit about it. And I think it’s important that the boycotters must be exposed for what they are. They’re classical anti-Semites in modern garb. And I think we have to fight them. It’s time to delegitimize the delegitimises.”

I’m very pleased Cinematic Strings have understood how their actions looked discriminatory but concerned about “we stand by our reasons”. I still feel slightly sorry for “Alex and the CS team”. They’ve been deceived into hating Israel by many years of brilliantly executed propaganda financed by an enormous amount of money. You’ve bought into lies that say we oppress people for fun, steal their land and build big walls to ensnare them. I’m sorry about those lies and that so many believe them, and I’m sorry the far less exciting truth hasn’t been explained properly.

As a business owner myself, I’d be upset if my Arab customers chose to boycott me. Fortunately the Arabs (including many in the disputed territories) have no trouble trading with my Israeli company to our mutual benefit.

Perhaps, through this process of us highlighting their BDS against Israelis (and only Israelis) they’ll come to see that we’re not evil, we don’t kill or steal for sport and we dearly would like to lay down our arms and tear down our walls. We’d do all that in an instant providing we can remain a Jewish nation and sanctuary for Jewish people while accepting any willing to live peacefully alongside us. Just like the Israeli Arabs I ate my lunch with today. We’d love to pull out our troops (they’re our children!) as soon as we know we won’t be blown up on buses and in pizza parlours. But right now, they’re trying to do this almost every day and they’re trying to fire rockets almost every day.

So the walls and the security devices stay in place and, at least on our side, we still yearn for a realistic peace and security.

And I’d like to see BDS against Israelis become just as unacceptable in polite society as antisemitism, which really should be called Jew hatred, used to be.

Opinions on the cheap

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Left and right is more than just opinion about what ought to be done. There is something else about being on the left, which is the emotional rush it seems to give. In an article at Quadrant Online I list the odd reality that, so far as I can tell, even though the temperatures have not risen for fifteen years, there are no warmists who have become sceptics, and even with the disastrous outcomes of the Keynesian stimulus, there have been no economists I know of who have given up their Keynesian faith.

But that was the lead into what I thought was an interesting post from a Canadian blogger about the nature of those on the left, the kinds of people they are and the way they wish to experience the world through their emotions in ways that reason cannot touch.

The majority of people are weak-minded. They are also lazy. However, they are also egotistical . . . and so their mind reaches for something that will not only allow them to claim some kind of intellectual “superiority” or “achievement,” but also allow them to do so with no work.

Going green. Protesting. Claiming they’re a caring liberal. Joining a religion. Going vegan. Becoming a professor, etc.

This not only results in them living in a delusional, non-real world, but also makes them emotionally and egotistically invested in keeping up their ideological facade. Thus, when you make passionate, logical, stoic arguments of fact, math, and statistics you (consciously or not) pierce their ego, expose their charade, and therefore trigger a visceral, emotional, and often hate-laden response.

It’s the notion of having an opinion on the cheap that must be so pleasant, specially when you can use that opinion to go around blaming others for the woes of the world without actually having to do any work in finding out what’s going on. Left wing ranting is a species unto itself. His entire post was I thought quite insightful look at the nature of political argument.

You have to be strong while there is still a chance to do something

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Do we really need Mark Steyn to point out the obvious about anti-semitism. Can’t Jews see things for themselves? We live in terrifying times. Mark’s article is titled, Hath Not a Jew Eyes?.

Is it really possible in 2014 even for the capo di tutti capi of official Jews to be so blind? Foxman is either the most wicked dissembler or, to be more charitable, he reflects merely the blinkered parochialism of America’s liberal Jewish elites. Unlike the head of the ADL, I have no special interest in or responsibility for the welfare of the Jewish people, but I have been to Toulouse, Antwerp, Malmö and the old Jewish East End of London, and I know what I have seen there.

I would like Foxman to go to Toulouse, a city the size of Jacksonville, Florida, where in recent years one synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a third burgled and “Dirty Jews” scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, where a kosher butcher’s was strafed with gunfire, and a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails, and three Jewish children murdered outside their grade school, I would like Foxman to go to Toulouse and tell any Jew he finds there (they are advised by their rabbis not to wear identifying marks of their faith) that it’s all the work of “anti-government people”.

I would like him to go to Malmö – once the first Christian city in Norway and soon to be the first Muslim city in Sweden – and tell such Jews as he can find (they are abandoning the city) that the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and the ugly reinforced steel doors at the Jewish kindergarten and the rocket-proof glass in the windows of the synagogue are all the fault of “neo-Nazis”. Sweden is renowned for its neo-Nazis, isn’t it? Doubtless they were the reason why a year or two back at the Davis Cup the Israeli tennis players had to play their match behind closed doors, in a Baltiska Hallen stadium without a single spectator. For had they opened the doors, the seats would have filled up with Swedish “nationalists” and Swedish “neo-fascists” and all hell would have broken loose.

I would like Abe Foxman to go to Tower Hamlets in London’s East End, where on Holocaust Memorial Day a couple of years ago a visiting New Yorker had to be taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel after a Jewish tour group was pelted with stones by a group jeering “If you go any further, you’ll die.” I would like Foxman to tell those Jews that their attackers were an “anti-immigration” group.

I would like him to go to Villiers-le-Bel, where a Jewish girl was brutally attacked by a gang shouting “Jews must die!”, or to Odense, where the headmaster says his school can no longer take Jewish pupils for security reasons, and tell them it’s the fault of Danish “nationalists” and French “neo-Nazis”.

As good an explanation as any and better than most

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From Breitbart News. Definitely plausible since it fits the facts and nothing else seems to:

Democratic pollster Pat Caddell thinks so, and radio host Rush Limbaugh said it’s plausible. One historian even told Breitbart News the modern GOP resembles a “crime family.”

“The establishment Republicans want the IRS to go after the Tea Parties,” Caddell told Fox News on Sunday.

“When you have 71 percent who want an investigation, 64 percent who believe that it is a sign of corruption including nearly a majority of Democrats,” Caddell said, “the reason is the establishment Republicans want the IRS to go after the Tea Parties. Got it?”

Caddell said the GOP establishment is happy to have the IRS take the Tea Party down a notch.

“Because the Tea Parties are an outside threat to their power hold and I’m telling you the lobbying consulting class of the Republican party and Republican leadership who have been attacking the Tea Parties, and alienating them, they want the IRS to do this,” he said.

On Monday, Rush Limbaugh addressed Caddell’s charges against establishment Republicans in his nationally syndicated program.

“That is a serious charge,” Limbaugh said. “That is a very, very serious charge, that the Republican establishment is aligned with Obama and is okay with Obama using the IRS to investigate the Tea Party. But it’s believable, because we know the Republican establishment, the political class in Washington, is spreading the word that they are not gonna criticize Hillary, it isn’t gonna happen, and we shouldn’t, either. It shouldn’t happen.”

Reagan biographer Craig Shirley told Breitbart News on Monday that he agrees with Limbaugh that Caddell’s charges are credible.”The Washington Republican party is no longer a political party in the way we understand political parties,” Shirley said. “It more resembles a crime family than a movement of ideas.”

A review of Hannah Arendt

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This is a quote from Norman Podhoretz’s 1963 review of Eichmann in Jerusalem. It is found in an excellent review of the film, Hannah Arendt by Ed Driscoll.

This habit of judging the Jews by one standard and everyone else by another is a habit Miss Arendt shares with many of her fellow-Jews, emphatically including those who think that the main defect of her version of the story is her failure to dwell on all the heroism and all the virtue that the six million displayed among them. But the truth is—must be—that the Jews under Hitler acted as men will act when they are set upon by murderers, no better and no worse: the Final Solution reveals nothing about the victims except that they were mortal beings and hopelessly vulnerable in their powerlessness. And as with the victims, so with those who were lucky enough to survive the holocaust. There is no special virtue in sheer survival, whatever Bruno Bettelheim may say, and there is no martyrdom in sheer victimization, whatever certain sentimentalists among us may think.

It is getting harder to be brave but the courage must be found

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From endofyourarm.com by Laura Rosen Cohen.

HERE’S WHY JEWS ARE OUR OWN WORST ENEMY: ABE FOXMAN BLIND TO THE REAL “NEO-NAZIS” OF EUROPE

Blind, myopic Jews like Abe Foxman, as far as I am concerned are complicit in antisemitism and I will tell you why.

If you read this article (hat tip: Blazing Cat Fur), you will not that this gutless Jew cannot muster the moral courage to identify the worst perpetrators of European antisemitism: Muslims.

These leftist extremist liberal Jews can only identify Judenhaas when it comes from the white, political right.

They are absolutely blind to the dangers of jihad, even though they are cognitively aware that there was no “last time” a synagogue in Europe was attacked by a white, Christian “neo-Nazi”.

When Jews, and Jewish children are slaughtered in cold blood in France, they know it was a jihadist perpetrator but they are blind to it. They will not articulate the motivation behind those attacks.

When Turkey simmers with Jew hatred motivated by religion, they will still blame the European white, Christian right.

When Malmo, Sweden becomes inhabitable for Jews, they blame the white, Christian right. It is the rape capital of Europe not because of white, Christian right-wingers-but the facts are irrelevant.

Shame on you, Abraham Foxman. Shame on you.

These Jews are a danger to the Jewish people.

Their denial is so thick and so amoral that it is difficult sometimes to find the words to express my utter disgust and contempt.

By fighting the last war against the German Nazis over and over in their heads, they endanger living Jews. But they will never learn.

It’s so cozy to be a professional Jew, fighting the ghosts of WW2 over and over and never facing the real threats to the Jewish people.

How fortunate for them, how convenient for their denial that there is an Israel now and an IDF to fight the real battles on behalf of the Jews.

For them, the “science’ of antisemtism is “settled”. Case closed!

See no jihad, hear no jihad, speak no jihad!

This disgraceful denial is, not coincidentally, coupled with abject sucking-up to, and fawning over President Obama, who is inarguably the worst and most hostile President in American history toward the Jews and Israel.

The disgusting denial gives them the ability to prance around like intoxicated Jewish fan boys on American television and at various dinners and tributes and lectures talking about the fairy tale, ghost culprits.

For shame.

These complicit moral cretins refuse to admit that the real neo-Nazis of Europe are the murderous, Jew-hating immigrant jihadists who are motivated religiously to slaughter the Jew-and do it with glee.

The only thing I “enjoyed” in the video clip was that Mr. Foxman rightly notes that he is replaceable.

You are replaceable, Mr. Foxman, indeed.

G-d willing the Jewish world will wean off such pathetic, morally obtuse losers who are sinfully complicit in the current war against the Jews.

I pray to the G-d of Israel that He will save us from Jews like Mr. Foxman and his posse of pathetic, terrified followers who are deaf, blind and mute to the existential threat to the Jewish people of Islamic jihad on a small (yet painful, deadly and bloody) scale in Europe and on a scale the size of the Holocaust, in the form of Iranian nuclear arms.

Picked up at Five Feet of Fury.

Well that is certainly interesting

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The story where this comes from is about safety concerns over drugs sourced in India. But way down inside the story was this:

The crucial ingredients for nearly all antibiotics, steroids and many other lifesaving drugs are now made exclusively in China.

This sentence is in fact the very last sentence in a very long article but the whole article turns out to be quite fascinating in its own way.

From Instapundit