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March 2017

Marine Deputy Commandant: Half Our Aircraft Not Ready to Fly By Rick Moran

The deputy commandant for programs and resources of the Marine Corps, Lt. Gen. Gary Thomas, says that budget sequestration has cut into the Corps’ readiness for combat, with less than half of their aircraft ready to fly. General Thomas said that number should be 75 percent, meaning the Marines’ ability to meet challenges is severely restricted.

Washington Examiner:

The service’s goal is to have 75 percent of its aircraft on the flight line ready to go, a number he called “reasonable” since routine maintenance will always take some aircraft out of commission.

But the actual number now is just 45 percent, mostly due to aircraft exceeding their planned service life, Thomas said. The statistic seemed to shock Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Subcommittee.

“I’m sorry, can we go back for a second,” Turner said. “That’s pretty abysmal. To have that be closing the gap, we must have been in dire straits.”

Thomas also said the service has identified a capability gap when it comes to keeping forces safe in vehicles.

“If you look at some of our current vehicles, they no longer are adequate for the types of threats that they face in terms of protecting our Marines,” Thomas said.

Oshkosh Defense is building a new Joint Light Tactical Vehicle for the Marines that Thomas said will help better protect troops from current threats.

Other capability gaps include counting an emerging threat from drones, and coping with a fleet of amphibious vehicles that is 40 years old, Thomas said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Holland: the Canary in the European Coal Mine By Michael Walsh

Holland was the first European country I set foot in as a lad, and it continues to have a special place in my memory. But the country I encountered in the summer of 1970 is all but unrecognizable now. In a fit of cultural enervation, social ennui, and just plain suicidal stupidity, it was among the first Western countries to throw open its doors to the avant-garde of Islam, and is now paying the price. So with the Dutch elections now looming, the question is: can the tide of Muslim social conquest be reversed?

The question is precipitated by the extraordinary sight of riots in Rotterdam this weekend when the Dutch government forbade the Turkish minister of family affairs from landing in Holland in order to openly campaign among Holland’s Turkish “emigrant” community on behalf of Turkish strongman Erdogan’s latest power grab, which is coming up for a vote on April 16. Naturally, she simply snuck across the border from Germany into the Netherlands, but the Dutch somehow managed enough backbone to block her.

Police using water cannon, horses and dogs moved in to disperse the crowds after several hours of demonstrations on Saturday evening. Protesters hit back, throwing rocks at the police, while hundreds of cars jammed the streets blaring their horns.

Tensions tipped over into violence after a day of fast-moving events, triggered when Turkey’s family affairs minister Sayan Kaya was stopped from attending the rally by being expelled from the Netherlands. Ms Kaya could be seen in images on Dutch NOS television appearing to argue with officers about the situation.

Earlier, Dutch authorities also refused permission for foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu to land in the city, saying he was not welcome to campaign for the referendum. In response, Mr Erdogan accused the Dutch, who were once under Nazi occupation, of being “the vestiges of Nazis”.

To which a Dutch official replied: “It is a crazy remark, of course. But I understand they are angry, but this is of course way out of line.” If that’s the best riposte the Dutch government can muster, they’re going to need a lot more riot police.

Peter Smith: The Left Left Leak

Bill Leak, Australia’s eminent political cartoonist was forced to move his home and family to a secret location after being marked for death by Islamic fascists — real fascists, mind you, not the sort the sniveling Left perceives at every word of disagreement. He died of a heart attack.

The left is no longer the left unless names mean nothing. The old left would never, ever kneel before an oppressive medieval culture, nor would they cheer as Star Chamber commissars assault free speech. Bill knew that and it sickened him.
In Bill Leak’s last cartoon in The Australian (below) he has Rob Stokes, the NSW minister for education, in front of Punchbowl Boys High School, severed head in hand, explaining to an interviewer that “boys will be boys.” Getting to the nub of the matter is the cartoonist’s art. Bill Leak was a peerless grandmaster of it.

I was at the CIS function last Wednesday evening for the launch of his book Trigger Warning, which contains his cartoons over the year 2016. Partway through his speech, he was stopped in his tracks by Sir Les Patterson. If you are going to be pushed off stage I can’t think of any more formidable person to do it than Sir Les; though perhaps Dame Edna would come close. In any event, Bill took it in his stride: brilliant cartoonist interrupted by iconic entertainer. Ending is hard but I can’t think of a much better sign-off than a book launch, Sir Les and a final, cutting cartoon.

I met Bill only twice but on both occasions he told me how much he enjoyed reading Quadrant. Like me he was a convert from the dark side. I don’t know, but I tend to have more affinity with those who’ve seen the light than with those who start out that way. Being youthful and conservative doesn’t always sit right somehow. Aren’t the young supposed to be, at the least, a touch radical? Mind you, I think I’m living in the past when being left had more of a respectable and honourable cloth cap about it.

The left is no longer the left unless names mean nothing. The traditional left would not have happily seen miners thrown out of work and power stations and heavy industries closed down in pursuit of a climate chimera. They would not have been happy with strange men visiting their daughters’ bathrooms. They would not have been happy to have gender-fluidity studies shoved down their children’s throats. They would not have been happy to have free speech closed down to appease an alien and oppressive medieval religious culture.

Free speech? Not at my college! By John Meinhold

“You’re not going to let us speak.”

You would expect to hear those words in oppressive Communist regimes, or in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan where unacceptable speech can get you beheaded.

No — this is what was disgracefully heard this month at Middlebury College, an elite private liberal arts college in Vermont. This was what Professor Allison Stanger acknowledged to an unruly crowd of Middlebury students who decided it was “unacceptable” for Dr. Charles Murray, an invited controversial conservative political scientist and author, to speak on their campus. Among chants yelled by the mob was “Shut it down!” and “Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go!”

Stanger, who had agreed to moderate the discussion then pursued plan B — go to a closed location and live stream the discussion. The angry students pursued and banged on the walls and set off fire alarms to try and stop any talk with Murray. Murray was there to discuss his book called Coming Apart, that details the plight of poor working class white Americans and how whites in America live in a stark two class society. Murray has been vilified for a previous book he co-authored called The Bell Curve. This book had some discussion on ethnicity and I.Q. which has led Murray to be called “a racist” and “white supremacist” among many other nasty labels.

No one seemed to know or care that Murray is the father of two biracial children, has degrees from Harvard and MIT, and even has a daughter who is an alumnus from Middlebury.

During the interrupted live stream talk Murray asked simply, “What is it that is so terrible that I cannot speak?” While Murray was trying to leave the campus, Stanger was assaulted and endured a neck injury and was treated at a hospital. Stanger later wrote, “I feared for my life.”

The incident at Middlebury has received national attention and articles have been written in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, and many others. Last month a violent protest also broke out at UC Berkeley to stop Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial conservative writer, from speaking that resulted in $100,000 in property damage. Though the media has portrayed the incidents at Middlebury and Berkeley as a new trend, censorship of conservative speakers on U.S. college campuses has been ongoing. Furthermore, Caroline Glick, writes in the Jerusalem Post, “Jewish speakers and students have been subjected… to campaigns of repressions for nearly 20 years at universities and colleges throughout the US. What is new about the riots against Murray and Yiannopoulos is that they were shouted down despite the fact that they weren’t talking about Israel.”

The Arabs Know that the Moslem Brotherhood are Terrorists By James Lewis

Conservatives see the threat of aggressive Islam, which puts us far ahead of liberals, who merely live in stupefied denial. But conservatives tend to treat Islam as monolithic, which it is not.

Right now the Trump administration is considering whether to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, which sounds to Arab ears like “Is the Pope Catholic?” Do the Saudis play double games?” “Are the mullahs of Iran really genocidal?”

The answer is Yes! Yes! and Yes!

Which is why even Saudi Arabia, Russia, Syria, Bahrain, and the UAE have officially designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror group. One of biggest on the Sunni side of the street.

A new article in Cairo’s Al Ahram this week gives an explanation even the New York Times could understand (if it wanted to). The MBs promote violent Jihad, and carry it on themselves in their civil war against Egypt. They sponsor Hamas terror against Israel. They follow radical doctrines. Most of all (and here comes a new word), the MB’s are taqfiri. (TAHK-fear-ey). They regularly declare other Muslim groups to be infidels, which means they will kill other Muslims unless they submit to the MB version of Islam. From its most basic belief, the Ikhwan is at war with all Muslims who do not follow its militant war doctrine. The doctrine of taqfir is basic, and deviation puts you outside of the circle.

And yes, there are peaceful Muslim sects, like the Ahmadiyya. But they are small minorities in constant trouble from the violence-supporting majority.

There are also rational Muslims like Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who has said in a famous speech:

It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible! …

Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants — that is 7 billion — so that they themselves may live? Impossible!

Those may be the most important words any Muslim leader has said since 9/11/01.

Yet Obama chose to ignore Sisi and supported the Muslim Brotherhood instead. What does that tell you?

Hillary’s closest confidante, Huma Abedin, comes from an MB family, was indoctrinated from childhood onward, and is paid by a family “charity” who are all MBs. Hillary and Bill know all that, of course, but the Moobs bring in huge amounts of money to the Democrats, and that’s what counts for the Clintons. (It should also matter to the rest of us.)

Can America function with fewer than 33 assistant secretaries of state? By Ed Straker

The New York Times is again making hay of the fact that President Trump has not nominated any assistant secretaries of state, and Trump has been giving mixed signals on whether he thinks they are even necessary.

It turns out there are six undersecretaries of state and 22 assistant secretaries of state who report to them. If you factor in those with equivalent ranks, there are actually more like 33 assistant secretaries of state, each making an average of $155,000 a year, plus benefits!

Seven of the assistant secretaries cover different regions of the world, which makes some sense. You can’t have all ambassadors reporting directly to the secretary of state.

Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs

Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs

Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs

Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs

Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs

But after these posts it makes less and less sense. Let’s go over the rest of the list.

Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research

The State Department has an intelligence branch? I have never heard of it. Well, except maybe this guy (paragraph eight).

Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs

Why does a congressional liaison need to have the rank of assistant secretary?

Assistant Secretary of State for Administration

Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs

Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security

The assistant secretary of state for administration deals with administering what? The consulates, I’ll bet! Why then do we need another secretary for consular affairs? And since diplomatic security is so integral to consulates, why can’t this all be wrapped into one job, rather than three?

The Prosecutors’ Prison State Crime rates in the U.S. continue to decrease, yet we have higher incarceration rates than Russia or Cuba. So much for the land of the free. Edward P. Stringham reviews “Locked In” by John F. Pfaff.

Imagine if a business did not have to worry about convincing paying customers to choose its product and could stick non-customers with the bill. Bureaucracies like the Postal Service, Amtrak and the Department of Veteran Affairs have that luxury. But imagine further that the enterprise could force its services on users whether they like it or not. Law enforcement is one of the few American entities that enjoys this privilege. The U.S. now has twice as many prosecutors as it did in the 1970s—and each one now sends more than twice as many people to prison as he or she did in that period.

In the extremely important book, “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform,” John F. Pfaff analyzes why America incarcerates more people than ever even as crime rates continue to fall. State and federal prisons jailed 200,000 Americans in the early 1970s; today they hold more than 1.5 million people. Another 700,000 are locked up in local jails. The U.S. now has higher incarceration rates than Russia or Cuba.

Product Details

Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration—and How to Achieve Real Reform
Feb 7, 2017
by John Pfaff

Mr. Pfaff, a Fordham law professor and economist, argues that the American criminal justice system defines too many offenses as deserving of jail time and that prisons often act as a revolving door. He likens incarceration to radiation treatment: Yes, it targets the disease, but it also causes a tremendous amount of collateral damage.

A 2012 Pew Survey found that 69% of Americans oppose the fact that our government jails nearly 1 out of every 100 citizens—and to read “Locked In” it’s no wonder that number is so high. For starters, although there have long been claims that higher incarceration rates are tied to the decrease in crime, Mr. Pfaff cites multiple studies showing that, at best, the effect is minuscule. Criminals who commit crimes of passion do not really weigh the prospect of having to serve time. Most criminals tend to get less violent with age, so overlong prison sentences have little effect on safety.

Incarceration for what most people consider non-crimes can have unintended consequences. When the U.S. Justice Department investigated the police in Ferguson, Mo., following the shooting death of Michael Brown by an officer in August 2014, they discovered that the city’s cops routinely threatened to jail citizens for charges as insubstantial as having an overgrown lawn. Law enforcement was used as a means of increasing revenue for city coffers through ticketing and forfeitures. The result was a severely strained relationship between the public and the police that was primed to explode. CONTINUE AT SITE

Crime and Immigration The U.S. needs to deport criminals, not create a new bureaucracy.

President Trump has made crime a big part of his immigration enforcement campaign, last month unveiling a new immigration-crime victims unit at the Justice Department. We understand the emotive political appeal, but the federal government doesn’t need a new bureaucracy given the facts about immigrant crime.

Mr. Trump highlighted the murder victims of undocumented immigrants “whose government failed them.” He’s right about that, and it’s exasperating that foreign criminals are released onto the streets only to perpetrate more violence. But there’s no evidence that immigrants commit more crimes than do native-born citizens and some to suggest they commit less.

In a newly published paper, researchers at the University at Buffalo and University of Alabama examined 200 metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2010. They found that murder, robbery, burglary and larceny rates decreased as immigration increased. A recent meta-analysis of 50 studies published between 1994 and 2014 concluded that cities with larger immigrant populations have lower crime rates.

Copious research also indicates that immigrants are less crime-prone than native-born Americans. A 2012 study observed that “foreign-born individuals exhibit remarkably low levels of involvement in crime across their lifetime,” though the second generation “caught up” to their native-born counterparts.

A 2005 analysis of 180 Chicago neighborhoods between 1995 and 2002 found that first-generation immigrants demonstrated significantly lower rates of violence than blacks and whites and that their “odds of violence are almost half those of third-generation immigrants.” At least on crime, immigrant families are assimilating too much.

The Chicago study (and some others) discovered a robust link between “concentrated immigration” and lower crime. So whites and blacks who live in communities with more immigrants are less likely to experience crime. Researchers suggest that immigrants may be less criminal because they have strong family bonds and work ethic, which is underscored by their higher labor participation rate. Immigrants washing dishes probably aren’t committing crimes in their down time.

The anecdotes Mr. Trump cites result mainly from failures in federal and local law enforcement as well as overreaching court rulings. Between 2013 and 2015, about 8,000 convicted criminals were released as a result of the Supreme Court’s Zadvydas v. Davis in 2001 that prohibited Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from indefinitely detaining immigrants.

Federal courts have also ruled that detention orders are not mandatory, and local governments can refuse to enforce them. Municipalities have even been sued for not releasing immigrants on bond. Foreign governments are often uncooperative, and the State Department could stop issuing visas to countries that don’t repatriate their criminals.

Local governments have also resisted cooperation when they believe ICE is indiscriminately rounding up undocumented immigrants. Notably, local cooperation increased when the Obama Administration prioritized removing criminal immigrants. Former ICE director Sarah Saldana told Congress last year that “more than half of previously uncooperative jurisdictions are now cooperating.”

This evidence suggests that the Trump Administration would better protect Americans by focusing on immigrants who commit serious crimes, not anyone here on an illegal document. Trying to round up everyone, or creating a needless bureaucracy, will mean fewer resources for deporting dangerous criminals.

A Doctor to Heal the FDA Scott Gottlieb may be Trump’s most important nominee.

cott Gottlieb may have landed the toughest job in Washington: President Trump has selected the physician and policy expert to run the Food and Drug Administration, where a culture of control strangles innovation. An iron triangle of interest groups, the bureaucracy and the press will resist change, but Dr. Gottlieb could save lives by renovating FDA’s drug-approval processes.

Mr. Trump deserves credit for picking a pragmatist who understands the agency: Dr. Gottlieb served as a deputy commissioner at FDA during the George W. Bush Administration, and he has also worked at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and his many contributions to The Wall Street Journal include insights on doctor autonomy, drug prices, antibiotic development and more.

One of Dr. Gottlieb’s priorities will be moving generic medicines to market, and competition is the best way to reduce the price of treatments like the now infamous EpiPen. About 10% of 1,300 branded drugs “have seen patents expire but still face zero generic competition,” Dr. Gottlieb wrote in the Journal last year. “New regulations have, in many cases, made it no longer economically viable for more than one generic firm to enter the market.” Now he can roll back such arbitrary directives.

Dr. Gottlieb has also suggested that the FDA should explain its reasoning when declining to approve a drug. FDA does not release a rejection notice known as a complete response letter. The rule ostensibly exists to protect manufacturers, but the silence allows the agency and a company to peddle divergent tales about what happened. The public is left with minimal information and FDA can operate without fear of accountability.

The press is overcome with relief that President Trump didn’t pick Jim O’Neill, a Peter Thiel pal who supports making drugs available to patients after testing for safety, though not for efficacy. But that idea is far from crazy, especially for drugs that treat rare diseases when no approved options exist. Why should desperate patients have to take a sugar pill so the FDA can satisfy its demand for 100% certainty that a drug works?

Laws in 2012 and 2016 directed FDA to include patient data in reviewing such orphan drugs, but the agency has refused to modernize or rely on anything but exhaustive placebo trials. Dr. Gottlieb should make the most of this legal flexibility, though he’ll be unfairly accused of lowering standards.

Most important is that Dr. Gottlieb understands that the fundamental problem at FDA is cultural: Staff reviewers think they are the “lone bulwark standing between truth and chaos when it comes to prescribing drugs,” as he put it in a 2012 piece for National Affairs. The agency delays approvals for therapies to search for remote risks, and the cost of this method is human lives lost from excessive delays in approving new medicines.

This culture has meant “that trials continue to get longer, larger, and harder to enroll,” he wrote. The average length of a clinical trial stretched to 780 days in 2005 from 460 in 1999, and median number of procedures (such as X-rays or blood draws) on patients in trials grew to 158 from 96. To speed approvals, Dr. Gottlieb has proposed that such decisions be made by a central committee of the agency’s most senior scientists, not the same reviewers who collect and analyze the data.

Dr. Gottlieb must win Senate confirmation, and some on the left are flogging that he has consulted for pharmaceutical companies and invested in health-care ventures, which they call a fatal conflict of interest. In other words, he’s disqualified because he’s qualified.

Dr. Gottlieb will have to adhere to government ethics rules, and the irony is that if he had never worked with the industry he’d be accused of inexperience. His understanding of entrepreneurship would be a valuable addition to an FDA that has for too long pretended its decisions have no influence on research or private investment.

One last credential: Dr. Gottlieb is a cancer survivor, which means he understands the urgency of helping treatments and cures reach the patients who need them. Dr. Gottlieb can expect relentless political and bureaucratic resistance, but he also has a tremendous opportunity to unleash medical progress in this era of rapid biological discovery.