The Last Jew in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, 1941

Via Blazing Cat Fur, "Rare historical photos."

Never forget that history has a way of repeating itself: "Anti-Semitism and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions." Today's leftists seek nothing short of total annihilation of the Jewish state.

Anti-Semitism and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

I just had a flashback: My depraved stalker Walter James Casper is a vile anti-Semitic hate-monger, but you knew that.

Click through at the Twitter link.

The Radical Left Is Never Right About Israel http://t.co/Cf9uWjbZTz

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 22, 2014

And from Robert Fulford, at Toronto's National Post, "The BDS Smokescreen":

The people who defame Israel and wish to undermine its status in the world are not anti-Semites — or so they will tell you, every chance they get. Their denial of anti-Semitism is essential to their moral position. In their own view they are good progressives, therefore absolutely innocent of racial or religious discrimination. Their propaganda campaign, which they hope eventually will escalate into economic warfare, is intended merely to reshape Israel’s policies.

What they oppose, they want to assure us, is Israel’s position in the West Bank. Their increasingly loud and self-confident BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) is not, as they tell it, a struggle against the Jews. They simply want to bring Israel into line with enlightened leftist opinion in Europe, the U.S. and Canada.

Scarlett Johansson, the film star, found herself the enemy of BDS in January, when she appeared in advertisements for SodaStream, an Israeli home carbonation device that eliminates cans and bottles. SodaStream’s offence is to have one of its factories in the West Bank, where it employs Palestinians who might otherwise have no work at all.

BDS adherents began denouncing Johansson as “the new face of apartheid.” They love applying that South African term to Israel, no matter how unjustified it is. Oxfam, for which Johansson had served as an ambassador in past years, decided to accept her resignation. Oxfam opposes all trade with Israeli settlements and has no place for dissenters among its associates. Johansson said she and Oxfam “have a fundamental difference of opinion in regards to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.” Oxfam likes BDS. She doesn’t. She says she researched SodaStream and found it an ethical operation.

Like the great majority of Americans in the film industry, Johansson is a liberal Democrat. She took part in the last three presidential elections and raised money for Barack Obama. Unlike many who fall into that category, she also thinks for herself.

The May issue of Vanity Fair carries a cover story about Johansson. The author of the piece, Lili Anolik, asked her how she explains why she has been viciously criticized for the SodaStream ads. Johansson answered, “There’s a lot of anti-Semitism out there.” ...

My own belief is that the BDS people and their fellow travellers, whatever their background, are anti-Semites. They do all they can to stigmatize the Jewish state and reduce its ability to defend itself. They know that Israel is surrounded by neighbours who will never recognize its existence, much less sign a treaty developed in a “peace process” quarterbacked by Washington. The Palestinians and the Arab states who claim to support them are not hoping for a more generous Israel or a BDS-approved Israel or an Israel willing to hand over the West Bank. They are working for a day when Israel will be gone forever.

In order to satisfy this generation’s anti-Semites, Israel must meet standards that no other country in the world has ever met or ever will. At the United Nations Israel is condemned more often than all other countries combined.

It is, of course, an imperfect democracy, like Canada and all other free countries, and its human rights record could certainly be improved. But its treatment of Palestinians has never been even remotely comparable to China’s oppression of Tibetans or Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women, two among many outrageous practices that apparently never trouble the students who direct their anger at Israel.

In devising their purposes the BDS campaigners have never shown even the beginning of a sense of proportion. It’s remarkable that the world needs a 29-year-old movie star to point this out.

Israel is held to standards no other country is required to meet. It's disparate treatment, specifically against against the Jews. And it's derived from nothing but hatred of the Jews. It's racism straight up. It's also what my deranged hateful stalker Walter James Casper III is all about.

William Jacobson on the Mark Levin Show

Awesome!

At Legal Insurrection, "On The Mark Levin Show talking Israel and the boycotters."

California's Meb Keflezighi Wins Boston Marathon

The guy's from San Diego, it turns out.

At the Union-Tribune, "San Diegan wins Boston Marathon."

Wow: Marathon winner @RunMeb ran with names of those killed in the bombing on his bib pic.twitter.com/wkB8DXFFpz ht @SteveSaleeba
— Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) April 21, 2014

Also at the Boston Globe, "With 2014 Boston Marathon, Boston moves forward."

And at NBC Sports, "Meb Keflezighi stuns to win Boston Marathon (video)."

Ukraine Photos Link Russia to 'Green Men' in the East

Pretty interesting, at the New York Times, "Photos Link Masked Men in East Ukraine to Russia":

KIEV, Ukraine — For two weeks, the mysteriously well-armed, professional gunmen known as “green men” have seized Ukrainian government sites in town after town, igniting a brush fire of separatist unrest across eastern Ukraine. Strenuous denials from the Kremlin have closely followed each accusation by Ukrainian officials that the world was witnessing a stealthy invasion by Russian forces.

Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces — equipped in the same fashion as Russian special operations troops involved in annexing the Crimea region in February. Some of the men photographed in Ukraine have been identified in other photos clearly taken among Russian troops in other settings...

More, "Ukraine Provides Evidence of Russian Military in Civil Unrest."

And see the latest at the Wall Street Journal, "Russia, U.S. Trade Charges of Violating Ukraine Deal: Vice President Biden Arrives in Kiev Amid Threats of New Sanctions on Moscow."

Plus, at the Independent UK, "Ukraine crisis: Interview with Irma Krat - the journalist and activist being held in Slovyansk: 'I came over here to give voice to people who have not been heard'."

And at the New Republic, "Which Former Soviet State Could Be the Next Ukraine?"

PREVIOUSLY: "Putin's Westward March."

NBC News Conducted Psychological Assessment of 'Meet the Press' Host David Gregory

Now this is something else, at WaPo, "As ‘Meet the Press’ struggles in the ratings, plenty of questions for host David Gregory." (At Memeorandum.)

I'm sure William Jacobson will get a load out of this, heh.

Amid slide in MTP ratings, NBC has commissioned a psychological profile of host @davidgregory, @farhip reports. http://t.co/G1PE3XScEx
— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) April 21, 2014

More at Althouse, "What is NBC going to do about the post-Russert crashing ratings of 'Meet the Press'?"

Sharyl Attkisson: 'I didn't sense any resistance to doing stories that were perceived to be negative to the Bush administration...'

Of course not.

But hey, any criticism of the Democrat administration of President Barack Obama is completely out of line!

This is perhaps the most devastating indictment of the mainstream media I've heard throughout the Obama interregnum. Attkisson's says after 2009 there was a dramatic shift in press censorship at CBS News. This is precisely the news programming that's only going to air the accepted narrative, the administration's line. Attkisson was personally attacked by Democrats and left-wing bloggers, some of whom she argues, like Media Matters, were paid to take her down and banish her reporting from the public forum. Fast and Furious and green energy, for example, triggered enormous recriminations. That is, anything that could endanger the Emperor With No Clothes.

More from Ed Morrissey, "Attkisson: CBS News too “ideologically entrenched” to air stories critical of the Obama administration."

Also from Ed Driscoll, "Sharyl Attkisson: CBS Too ‘Ideologically Entrenched’," and "Attkisson: Media Matters ‘Used to Work With Me,’ Turned Once I Reported on Fast and Furious, Green Energy Cronyism":

Former CBS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson revealed that the far-left watchdog “Media Matters for America” turned against her once she reported on stories unflattering to the Obama administration like the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal and green energy cronyism for CBS.

Attkisson made the remarks during a Sunday interview on the CNN media show Reliable Sources.

Media Matters has made a special case of attacking Attkisson, who ruffled many left-wing feathers when she resigned and said that her work for CBS had been stifled by liberals within the network. That is not an old charge, as former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg wrote in the best-selling book Bias, explaining how the truth was often distorted at the network because of political bias.

“Media Matters, by my understanding, is a far-left blog group that I think holds itself out to be sort of an independent media watchdog group,” Attkisson said. “And, yes, they clearly targeted me at some point. They used to work with me on stories, try to help me, you know, produce my stories and at some point–”

“That’s interesting,” said host Brian Stelter.

“Well, don’t they call you? They call journalists and they try to provide material and information,” she replied.

“Right, they are always emailing things, making us try to act outraged about something,” Stelter said.

“And I was certainly friendly with them as anybody,” Attkisson said. “Good information can come from any source. But when I persisted with Fast & Furious and some of the green energy stories that I was doing, I clearly at some point became a target. I don’t know if someone paid them to do it or they just took it on their own.”

More.

And Part II of Attkisson's interview, "Sharyl Attkisson takes on her critics."

Intellectuals Attacking Inequality Silent on the Decline of the Two-Parent Family

In my essay last night on the Marxist renaissance, I argued, "Real reform [of policies on inequality], indeed, must begin not at the level of the nation state but at the level of communities."

And moving down to an even more basic level of organization, consider the family. Leftists don't want to focus on those family and individual level factors, instead arguing that inequality is consequence of "structures" of racism, classism and disadvantage (or whatever else is in vogue these days).

But real success in eliminating inequality must focus on these lower levels of analysis.

From Robert Maranto and Michael Crouch, at the Wall Street Journal, "Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families":

Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can't change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn't some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?

Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. From economist Susan Mayer's 1997 book "What Money Can't Buy" to Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" in 2012, clear-eyed studies of the modern family affirm the conventional wisdom that two parents work better than one.

"Americans have always thought that growing up with only one parent is bad for children," Ms. Mayer wrote. "The rapid spread of single-parent families over the past generation does not seem to have altered this consensus much."

In an essay for the Institute for Family Studies last December, called "Even for Rich Kids, Marriage Matters," University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox reported that children in high-income households who experienced family breakups don't fare as well emotionally, psychologically, educationally or, in the end, economically as their two-parent-family peers.

Abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues of all kinds, such as developmental behavior problems or concentration issues, are less common for children of married couples than for cohabiting or single parents, according to a 2003 Centers for Disease Control study of children's health. The causal pathways are about as clear as those from smoking to cancer.

More than 20% of children in single-parent families live in poverty long-term, compared with 2% of those raised in two-parent families, according to education-policy analyst Mitch Pearlstein's 2011 book "From Family Collapse to America's Decline." The poverty rate would be 25% lower if today's family structure resembled that of 1970, according to the 2009 report "Creating an Opportunity Society" from Brookings Institution analysts Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill. A 2006 article in the journal Demography by Penn State sociologist Molly Martin estimates that 41% of the economic inequality created between 1976-2000 was the result of changed family structure.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty reported that communities with a high percentage of single-parent families are less likely to experience upward mobility. The researchers' report—"Where Is the Land of Opportunity?"—received considerable media attention. Yet mainstream news outlets tended to ignore the study's message about family structure, focusing instead on variables with far less statistical impact, such as residential segregation.

In the past four years, our two academic professional organizations—the American Political Science Association and the American Educational Research Association—have each dedicated annual meetings to inequality, with numerous papers and speeches denouncing free markets, the decline of unions, and "neoliberalism" generally as exacerbating economic inequality. Yet our searches of the groups' conference websites fail to turn up a single paper or panel addressing the effects of family change on inequality.

Why isn't this matter at the center of policy discussions? There are at least three reasons...

Well, those reasons aren't too hard to guess, but do read the rest.

Here's More on Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century

From Steven Erlanger, at the New York Times, "Taking On Adam Smith (and Karl Marx)."

And ICYMI, "The Misguided Resurgence of Marxist Collectivism."

The Misguided Resurgence of Marxist Collectivism

Last October, far-left columnist Michelle Goldberg published a paean to the current Marxist renaissance at the Tablet: "A Generation of Intellectuals Shaped by 2008 Crash Rescues Marx From History’s Dustbin."

I don't think it was the crash of '08 so much as eight years of George W. Bush that gave rise to a new generation of Marxist intellectuals and their shock-troop communist wannabes on the hardline left. And more than anything, the election of Barack Obama in 2008 --- the most radical president in American history --- provided the left with an American leader so steeped in hard-left ideology as to lift the spirits of even the most crestfallen Trotskyite revolutionary.

But that was over five years ago, and the promise of a new emancipatory progressivism --- if not the full realization of a renascent Marxian socio-economic state apparatus ---  appears to be fading amid the self-inflicting overreach of the Democrat Party, not to mention the return to earth of the "lightworker" and the attendant hopes for the Utopian collectivist transformation.

But leftists are nothing if not persistent.

Enter Ross Douthat and his extremely perceptive piece, at the New York Times, "Marx Rises Again" (via Memeorandum). Read it all at the link. Douthat's largely commenting on the lengthy essay at the Nation, from historian Timothy Shenk, "Thomas Piketty and Millennial Marxists on the Scourge of Inequality." (It's probably over 6,000 words long, although I waded through to the end in any case. Shenk's an overly sympathetic correspondent, for he's clearly excited at the prospect of decisive machinations against the evils of inequality, particularly against the reviled capitalists of the ostensibly rapacious and unjust top 1 percent.)

All the hubbub here is over the new book from the French scholar Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It turns out Piketty's currently on a book tour stateside, and the New York Times has a gushing report, "Economist Receives Rock Star Treatment." And here's what's raising the hopes of the next generation of revolutionaries:

At the book’s center is Mr. Piketty’s contention — contrary to the influential theory developed by Simon Kuznets in the 1950s and ’60s — that mature capitalist economies do not inevitably evolve toward greater economic equality. Instead, Mr. Piketty contends, the data reveals a deeper historical tendency for the rate of return on capital to outstrip the overall rate of economic growth, leading to greater and greater concentrations of wealth at the very top.

Despite this inevitable-seeming drift toward “patrimonial capitalism” that his charts seemed to show, Mr. Piketty rejected any economic determinism. “It all depends on what the political system decides,” he said.

Such statements, along with Mr. Piketty’s proposal for a progressive wealth tax and income tax rates up to 80 percent, have aroused strong interest among those eager to recapture the momentum of the Occupy movement. The Nation ran a nearly 10,000-word cover article placing his book within a rising tide of neo-Marxist thought, while National Review Online dismissed it as confirmation of the left’s “dearest ‘Das Kapital’ fantasies.”

Here's the National Review piece, from James Pethokoukis, "The New Marxism, Part Two." (Also, "The New Marxism.")

Needless to say, Piketty's rising star rests on the obvious fact that he's given the badly ailing intellectual left new legs to stand on, so to speak. If the inequality of capitalism is not in fact a temporal phenomenon, but is instead a condition inherent and ineradicable to the long-term development of the capitalist order, then enemies of free markets can rekindle their centuries-long leveling campaign against the despised capitalist ruling classes. It's no surprise that prominent collectivists such as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman have taken to harumphing Piketty's far-left bona fides (see Krugman's review at the New York Review, "Why We’re in a New Gilded Age"). Indeed, the academic radicals at Crooked Timber are positively giddy at the publication of Piketty's tome:

We’re hoping to have a proper book event on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century in due course. That’s hard for those of us who have read it, because the book is so stimulating, so bursting with surprising facts and ideas [!!!], that there’s a lot to talk about.

The obvious problem, of which Douthat only partly addresses, is that as much as Piketty distances himself from orthodox Marxism and the practical program of state collectivism of the Soviet Union under Marxism-Leninism (apparently Piketty rejects the Marxist label, in favor of the more sober sounding title of "political economist"), the left's statist model has been tried many times before. No matter how you slice it, the various iterations of collectivist command economies do not outperform economies organized more toward the free movement of goods, capital, and people. The heavier the state's hand on the economy, the less economic dynamism of the state over time. Indeed, Sweden --- the classic example of the Scandinavian model of heavy taxation in furtherance of a robust, cradle-to-grave social safety net --- has relinquished much state power in favor of free market mechanisms and private-sector solutions. And don't even get me going about France, where Socialist President François Hollande's proposal for a 75 percent tax on the wealthy has Frenchmen "fleeing the country in despair."

But high taxes and wealth confiscation are the exact policy proposals offered in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. No matter. Leftists are persistent, if anything. Who cares if confiscatory policies have been tried even of late and failed? Forward to full communism!

So to summarize, Piketty's book, for all it's purported pathbreaking research and data-aggregation, just recycles tired old tropes of Marxist and socialist collectivism dating back hundreds of years. Frankly, scholars like this, and their eager-beaver acolytes and hangers-on, are the cross the rest of us have to bear. Leftists can invent new names and repackage old ideological paradigms, but the dead hand of Old Man Marx offers little for the real problems of inequality facing the advanced countries today. Real reform, indeed, must begin not at the level of the nation state but at the level of communities. The American welfare state today is shackling generations of the poor and putting out of reach the very economic mobility that has been the central promise of the American dream. Leftists only want to continue to destroy that dream. Piketty's work is just the latest weapon to be raised by the proletarian mobs against the reviled owners and producers of wealth and (inevitably) broadly shared prosperity.

Obama Autocomplete

Seen just now on Facebook, heh.



I think he's an "asshole" too, although maybe that's farther down in the search results.

Blake Lively #Rule5

She's fabulous.

I clicked on one of those link-bait ads with Blake Lively, and come to find no photos of her, and tweeted it. DANEgerus tweets back her Google image cache and I found this one, showing off her lovely legs.



Also, she's been the subject of divorce rumors, although only at really lowbrow gossip sites.

In any case, a sweetie (can click here for the full-size version).

Joan Jett at Harrah's Resort Southern California

Last night my wife and I caught Joan Jett & the Blackhearts, with opening band Night Ranger, at Harrah's Resort Southern California.

I tweeted a shot of our concert tickets.

I don't see a concert review yet, but she's as hot as ever, tight band, lots of energy and looking fabulous.

She was in the news earlier this week for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where she sang "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for Nirvana's introduction. See Hollywood Reporter, "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Nirvana Joined by Joan Jett, Lorde; Dave Grohl and Courtney Love Hug It Out." Also at Rolling Stone, "Nirvana Reunite With Lorde, Joan Jett on Vocals for Rock Hall of Fame," and "The Inside Story of Nirvana's One-Night-Only Reunion."



PHOTO CREDIT: Harrah's Resort on Facebook.

Kate Moss for Harper's Bazaar

Feels like I've been torturing readers overnight with retro homosexuals, so here's some lovely feminine hotness.

At the main page, "Kate Moss on Top."

Also, "SPRING FLING: No one does evening glamour like Kate Moss. Just bead it," and "COVER GIRL: KATE MOSS'S BAZAAR COVERS."

Obama Has No Plan in #Afghanistan and the War Against Al Qaeda

From Sebastian Gorka, at Big Peace.

Well, with no plan I think the rest of us can plan on the Taliban returning to power.

And, you know, that could be harsh.

L.A.'s P-22 Mountain Lion Exposed to Rat Poison

This story is such a downer.

I blogged this beautiful beast last October, "Mountain Lion P-22."

But now at LAT, "Household rat poison linked to death and disease in wildlife":

The mountain lion known as P-22 looked majestic just a few months ago, in a trail-camera photo shot against the backdrop of the Hollywood sign.

But when a remote camera in Griffith Park captured an image of the puma more recently, it showed a thinner and mangy animal. Scientists sedated him and drew blood samples. They found evidence of exposure to rat poisons.

Now, researchers say they suspect a link between the poisons and the mange, a parasitic skin disease that causes crusting and skin lesions and has contributed to the deaths of scores of bobcats and coyotes. A National Park Service biologist applied a topical treatment for mange and injected Vitamin K to offset the effects of poisoning.

The condition of California's famous cougar is likely to intensify the debate over the use of rat poisons in areas of the state where urban living collides with nature.

Keep reading.

And see the graphic on how large predators are poisoned.

Mange leads to death. The animal was captured and treated so he might survive, but it just seems like a bummer for such a majestic cat. But it's gonna happen when wildlife are so close to humans, and we have to control for pests.

More at the National Wildlife Federation, "Los Angeles Mountain Lion Survives Freeways, Now Threatened by Poison Exposure."

Twin Hipster Homosexuals

Kinda rockabilly, heh.

Via Ann Althouse, "How to be as unheterosexual as possible." (And don't miss the comments.)

Mary Jo Kopechne Was Unavailable for Comment

At Twitchy, "Today in the War on Women: OFA slaughters self-awareness in a single email [pic]."

'Don't come here with guns and expect the American people not to fire back...' — #BundyRanch

Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore bitch slaps leftist propaganda pimp Chris Hayes. Seriously. Why does this loser still even have a show? No, why is MSNBC still even an ongoing cable network? They're just a bunch of dirtball losers with low ratings. Pretty pathetic.

I saw Assemblywoman Fiore on Twitter last week.

The truth about the Bundy’s vs. BLM #BundyRanch http://t.co/QE8HRHyNwR

— Michele Fiore (@VoteFiore) April 14, 2014

And check this at Hot Air, "MSNBC host debates Michele Fiore on Bundy ranch. Does not fare well."

The lulz.

Captain Lee Jun-seok Fled Ship While Passengers Died

The South Korean ferry captain rushed to safety ahead of sinking passengers.

At NYT, "In Sad Twist on Proud Tradition, Captains Let Others Go Down With Ship":

Ever since the Titanic sank on its maiden voyage, carrying its captain and many of the passengers with it, the notion that the captain goes down with his ship has been ingrained in popular culture.

But now, for the second time in just over two years, a sea captain — first in Italy and now in South Korea — has been among the first to flee a sinking vessel, placing his own life ahead of those of his terrified passengers.

A much-publicized photo from the latest accident shows the Korean captain being helped off his own ship, the Sewol, stepping off the deck to safety even as scores of his ferry passengers remained below where survivors believe they became trapped by rushing water and debris.

The behavior has earned the captain, Lee Jun-seok, 69, the nickname the “evil of the Sewol” among bloggers in South Korea. It also landed him in jail.

Maritime experts called the abandonment shocking — violating a proud international (and South Korean) tradition of stewardship based at least as much on accepted codes of behavior as by law.

“That guy’s an embarrassment to anybody who’s ever had command at sea,” said John B. Padgett III, a retired United States Navy rear admiral and former submarine captain.

His sentiments were echoed by Capt. William H. Doherty, who has commanded Navy and merchant ships and managed safety operations at a major cruise line. He called Mr. Lee’s decision to leave his 447 passengers “a disgrace,” and likened it to the desertion of the stricken Costa Concordia cruise ship off the Italian coast in 2012. “You can’t take responsibility, or say you do, for nearly 500 souls, and then be the first in the lifeboat,” he said.

Civil courts in the United States have long viewed captains as having an obligation to protect their passengers and ships, but the cases in South Korea and Italy seem likely to test the notion of criminal liability in disasters.

The captain of the Italian ship, Francesco Schettino, is on trial on manslaughter charges after the sinking of his ship left more than 30 people dead.

The death toll in the South Korean accident stood at 36 as of late Saturday, with 266 missing...

More.