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October 2015

Vandals at the Gates of Rome: Pay Attention to History, Obama By Jerry Hendrix

In the third century a.d., external pressures from competing powers along the periphery of the empire, along with growing weakness and incoherence within the imperial government, began to undermine the power of Rome. Externally, the Goths, Franks, and Vandals rose and began to roll back the Roman system of governance and trade. Internally, the Senate became impotent and a series of weak emperors led first to the geographic division of the empire and ultimately its demise. The period of history that followed came to be known as the “Dark Ages” and lasted nearly a thousand years, during which human progress was truncated until the emergence of the Enlightenment.

Today, all along the perimeter of the current global system of governance, the combination of external pressures from authoritarian regimes and a series of questionable internal strategic choices have weakened the defenses of the rule of law, individual liberty, and free trade. These actions have allowed Russia to carve out territorial gains in the Crimea and Ukraine, China to assert sovereignty over a vast area of the ocean through the uncontested creation of artificial islands, Iran to inflate an expanding sphere of influence through acts of terrorism in the Middle East, North Korea to gain nuclear weapons, and Cuba to reemerge as a normal nation within the Western hemisphere despite its long and unapologetic support of Communism and terrorist activities.

Bernie Sanders’s Denmark Comments Show He Doesn’t Even Understand His Own ‘Socialism’ By Kevin D. Williamson —

It had to be Denmark, didn’t it?

If you are the sort of person who has better things to do — which is to say, a fully functioning adult who is not professionally obliged to follow these things — then you probably missed the exchange between Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders at last night’s debate, when she lectured him that the United States isn’t Denmark and he responded with a rousing defense of the Danish model.

Never mind, for the moment, that neither of these batty old geezers has the foggiest idea of what’s going on in Denmark, or in the other Nordic countries. Denmark, like Sweden before it, has been engaged in a long campaign of reforming its famously generous welfare state. The country’s current prime minister is the leader of a center-right party, which, strangely enough, goes by the name “Left,” Venstre. (You might even call it libertarian; its former longtime leader wrote a book bearing the positively Nozickian title “From Social State to Minimal State.” ) Denmark has been marching in the direction exactly opposite socialism for some time. Our friends at the Heritage Foundation rank its economy the eleventh most free in the world, one place ahead of the United States, reflecting Denmark’s strong property rights, relative freedom from corruption, low public debt, freedom of trade and investment, etc.

Don’t tell Senator Sanders, but Denmark’s corporate tax rate is a heck of a lot lower than our own.

Are Sanctuary Cities the New Confederates? By Victor Davis Hanson

There are now 340 sanctuary cities in the United States — and the list is growing. All of them choose to ignore federal immigration law by refusing to report detained undocumented immigrants to federal authorities under most circumstances.

Partly as a result, deportations of those who entered the U.S. illegally are at a 10-year low — even according to the Obama administration’s new rigged redefinition of deportation as also occasionally preventing illegal entry at the border.

Some of the 1,000 undocumented immigrants who go unreported to federal authorities each month and are thereby shielded by sanctuary cities from deportation have been accused of violent crimes. According to a new report by the Center for Immigration Studies, more than 2,000 of the immigrants released have used their freedom to commit crimes.

Last year, San Francisco alone released from its custody 252 undocumented immigrants whom federal authorities had asked the city to hold, according to the report. Most notoriously, the city protected Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez — five times previously deported, seven times previously convicted of felonies — who once free allegedly murdered 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle in front of witnesses.

The Nuclear Deal’s True Purpose Obama selects his fall guys. Caroline Glick

It works out that US President Barack Obama’s signature diplomatic achievement, his nuclear deal with Iran, has nothing to do with preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power or even with placing restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities.

Just weeks after Obama led the international community in concluding the nuclear pact with Iran, the Iranian regime filed a complaint with the UN Security Council accusing the US of committing a material breach of the agreement.

The US action that precipitated the complaint was a statement by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest claiming that if Iran violates the deal, “the military option would remain on the table.”

In making the statement, Earnest was responding to a hypothetical question regarding what the US would do if the Iranians breached the deal.

Earnest explained that not only would the US then consider attacking Iran’s nuclear installations militarily, but that its “military option would be enhanced because we’d been spending the intervening number of years gathering significantly more detail about Iran’s nuclear program.”

Blaming the Victims of the Palestinian Death Cult The international community’s response to unabashed slaughtering of Jews. Joseph Klein

Vicious attacks by Palestinians, using knives, guns and vehicles as weapons of choice against Israeli civilians, are escalating to an alarming degree. In response, the so-called “international community” is siding with the Palestinian killers and blaming the Jewish victims, despite the clear source of the violence. Spurred on by hate-filled social media postings exhorting Palestinians to go out and kill as many Jews as possible, would-be Palestinian martyrs – including women and teenagers — set out to do just that. In two dozen violent incidents since October 1st, at least seven Israelis have been killed and scores more have been wounded.

As just one example of the incitement to violence appearing on social media, the following tweet was posted last week under the hashtag “The Intifada Has Started”: “There is no greater reward in Islam than the one given for jihad, and there is no greater reward than the one given for #Slaughtering_the_Jews… Kill them wherever you find them.” (Source: The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI))

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD & NICHOLAS M. GALLAGHER: THE MIDDLE EAST BREAKDOWN CONTINUES

Unexpectedly, The Middle East Meltdown Continues
It turns out, Iran doesn’t seem to be all that interested in promoting a stable order in the Middle East in cooperation with the United States.

Vladmir Putin isn’t challenging U.S. leadership in the Middle East, President Obama declared in an interview with 60 Minutes filmed on October 6 and broadcast on October 11, “and the fact that [Russia and Iran] had to [send troops to Syria] is not an indication of strength, it’s an indication that their strategy did not work.” In a contentious dialogue that drew repeated, incredulous interjections from interviewer Steve Kroft, the President insisted that those both in the Middle East and Republican Party who questioned his approach wanted to commit “several hundred thousand” U.S. combat troops to “police the region”.

The Commander-in-Chief went on to share that he had always been skeptical of U.S.-backed train-and-equip efforts in Syria. The skepticism seems justified, though the President seems unwilling to acknowledge that many of his critics warned him these efforts were likely to fail. In a truly shambolic series of darkly comic failures, President Obama’s initiative budgeted $500 million and fielded a few dozen fighters, most of whom were quickly captured or neutralized.
Is this a sample of the kind of leadership that poor, bumbling President Putin will never understand? In any case, President Obama cited the Paris climate change accords and the international anti-ISIS coalition as examples of the kind of true leadership that Vlad the Imploder cannot match. “Over time, the community of nations will all get rid of [ISIS]”, the U.S. President intoned, and a “transition”, with buy-in from “key players”, could take care of Syria.

EGYPTIAN HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST DENOUNCES THE DEAL WITH THE ‘IRANIAN DEVIL’ BY ANDREW HARROD

An Egyptian expatriate and human rights activist recently took to a Washington, D.C. podium to vehemently denounce the recent Iran nuclear agreement as “shaking hands with the devil.” Calling the accord an “unholy marriage” between America and Iran, the Rev. Majed El Shafie stressed to the National Press Club that the Iranian people will suffer under this accord, which he said will do nothing to stop Iranian nuclear proliferation and power ambitions.

“The first victim of this Iranian deal will not be American [and] will not be an Israeli, but will be the Iranian people themselves,” said Shafie, the founder and president of the human rights group One Free World International, adding that the agreement’s estimated $150 billion sanctions relief for Iran will simply strengthen an Islamic Republic regime notorious for its human rights abuses. “Things will get worse very quickly for Iranians.”

Shafie presented a recent OFWI report outlining the Islamic Republic’s human rights abuses of Iranians, especially women, who are “constantly subjugated and treated as less than human.” The report detailed the treatment of religious minorities like the Baha’i and reported that Iranians accused of homosexuality or adultery are punished with public stoning executions. In addition, young Iranian girls can legally marry at age 13 or even earlier with a court’s permission, and the government allows female genital mutilation, a practice that is widely observed in Iran’s Sunni regions.

MUSLIM REFUGEE IN EUROPE WARNS ABOUT MUSLIM REFUGEES IN EUROPE — ON THE GLAZOV GANG

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/10/15/muslim-refugee-in-europe-warns-about-muslim-refugees-in-europe-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Dr. Mudar Zahran, a leader of Jordan’s opposition. He came on the show to discuss how he is a Muslim refugee in Europe who sees great danger in Muslim refugees flooding Europe.

He gives a dire warning about The Nation of Islam Coming to Europe.

Don’t miss it!

Andrew Orlowski Interviews Freeman Dyson on Climate Change

Interview The life of physicist Freeman Dyson spans advising bomber command in World War II; working at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, as a contemporary of Einstein; and providing advice to the US government on a wide range of scientific and technical issues.

He is a rare public intellectual who writes prolifically for a wide audience. He has also campaigned against nuclear weapons proliferation.

At America’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Dyson was looking at the climate system before it became a hot political issue, over 25 years ago. He provides a robust foreword to a report written by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cofounder Indur Goklany on CO2 – a report published [PDF] today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

An Obama supporter who describes himself as “100 per cent Democrat,” Dyson says he is disappointed that the President “chose the wrong side.” Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere does more good than harm, he argues, but it is not an insurmountable crisis. Climate change, he tells us, “is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?”

We invited Dyson to talk about climate change and other matters, including a question from your correspondent’s kids – how will we do interstellar travel?

You were being invited to help solve problems in an era when things looked pretty grim, and those problems looked insoluble, during the Cold War, and before Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution. Now we’ve conquered a lot of these, but there seems to be an unquenchable thirst for apocalypse.

[Laughs] Yes. I don’t know why, it’s a mood of the times. I don’t understand that better than anyone else. It is true that there’s a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don’t think that’s the full explanation.

It’s like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I. People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we’d gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all. That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it’s in the air today.

Chance of Precipitating the End of Your Career 97% “A Disgrace to the Profession”: The World’s Scientists – In Their Own Words – On Michael E Mann by Mark Steyn

I forget how many Democrat candidates last night identified “climate change” as the principal global threat – I think it was 97 per cent of them – but for those minded to question the consensus here’s a cautionary tale from France’s top weatherman. Philippe Verdier is a household name thanks to his daily forecasts. Then he wrote a book criticizing Big Climate:

Every night, France’s chief weatherman has told the nation how much wind, sun or rain they can expect the following day.

…but he never saw this coming: As of Monday, M Verbier has been on an involuntary “holiday”.

Fortunately for me and my career and my own venture into this territory, I don’t think there’s anyone left to sack me.

~One of the many distinguished scientists quoted in my book is Freeman Dyson, the remarkable physicist who was given a lifetime appointment at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton by Robert Oppenheimer “for proving me wrong”. Professor Dyson is on good form in this interview with The Register. Here’s his answer to a question about why all the climate doom:

It is true that there’s a large community of people who make their money by scaring the public, so money is certainly involved to some extent, but I don’t think that’s the full explanation.

It’s like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, which in a way, helped cause World War I. People like the poet Rupert Brooke were glorifying war as an escape from the dullness of modern life. [There was] the feeling we’d gone soft and degenerate, and war would be good for us all. That was in the air leading up to World War I, and in some ways it’s in the air today.