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April 2017

Trump vs. Obama: A Study in Contrasts By Roger Kimball

A full recitation of the differences between Barack Obama and Donald Trump would fill a book.

Since this is a blog, not a book, I won’t assay that gargantuan task. But I wanted to say a word about two of the things that have repeatedly struck me about the differences between the two men.

I am going to leave to one side what might be the largest difference: that Obama was above all a man of lofty-sounding rhetoric, at once pragmatic in tone and utopian in aspiration, while Trump is a man of demotic and sometimes involuted rhetoric but decisive, almost impatient action.

An example on everyone’s mind is Syria. Obama had his red line, rendered inert (Whew!) by the as-it-turns-out-false assurance that “100 percent” of Syrias’s chemical weapons had been removed. Trump saw footage of the results of Assad’s early April sarin gas attack and responded a couple of days later with with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against the air base from which the attack originated.

Red line and inaction vs. infraction and response.

Many more examples of that sort could be adduced, but I wanted to call attention to two things that are more modest.

One concerns the character of their more personal interventions. Again, I am going to leave one large category out of consideration: everything that has to do with race. Instead, I would simply ask you to think about some of Obama’s signal actions with respect to race: his support of Eric Holder, the most patently racialist attorney general in history, his intervention while president into local controversies like the Skip-Gates-Cambrdige-Policeman episode or the “If-I-Had-A-Son-He–Would-Look-Like-Trayvon-Martin” wheeze. Such things, I believe, tell us a lot about Obama’s unspoken Weltanschauung: the value-laden background of assumptions out of which his immaculately accoutered pronouncements were uttered.

There is not, so far as I have been able to determine, anything similar in Donald Trump’s makeup. His approach to problems, to events generally, is less ideological than pragmatic. “What’s the right thing to do in this particular case?” That seems to be his cynosure. You might not like the answers he gives, but it is easy to see that they come not from a previously adopted program or ideology but from an ad hoc response to the case at hand. Critics call that “confusion” or “inconsistency” or “contradiction.” I’m not sure those categories have much purchase in this context.

In any event, this difference between Obama and Trump results in some striking contrasts between the two men. In 2014, Obama made headlines when he traded five senior Taliban leaders held captive in Guantanamo Bay for the release of Bowe Robert Bergdahl, the Army solider who deserted his post while on guard duty in June 2009 after announcing his loathing for America and hatred of the Army. “I am ashamed to be an American,” he wrote in an email to his parents. “And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. . . . The horror that is America is disgusting.” Who can forget the spectacle of Bergdahl’s parents, who came to the White House and praised Allah for the release of their son?

Donald Trump, through diplomatic intervention with Egyptian President al-Sisi when he visited Washington earlier this month, quietly secured the release of the Egyptian-American charity worker Aya Hijazi, her Egyptian husband, and four other humanitarian workers who had been held for three years by Egyptian authorities. Trump sent a government plane to pick up the entoruage and welcome Hijazi to the White House for a photo-op. CONTINUE AT SITE

Bill Maher Says College Anti-Free Speech Warriors Are the Liberals’ Version of Book Burning VIDEO

https://pjmedia.com/video/bill-maher-says-college-anti-free-speech-warriors-are-the-liberals-version-of-book-burning/

Bill Maher is a liberal, but even he doesn’t like the fact that liberals have silenced conservative speakers on college campuses. The latest victim of the social justice warriors’ attack on our civil rights is Ann Coulter, who was set to give a speech at UC Berkeley. Maher said that the anti-debate and anti-education nonsense at our college campuses is the liberals’ version of book burning. Let’s put aside the fact that most of the historic book burnings have been perpetrated by liberals, and focus on the one liberal, Bill Maher, actually standing up for our civil liberties.

Tony Thomas: Warmists Fight Their Own Nuclear War

Forget North Korea’s threat to make Australia a lake of irradiated glass because such an attack would be as nothing in comparison with the civil war amongst tax-supported catastropharians. What set them off? One side’s footnoted paper that renewables can’t hold an organic candle to atomic power.
Fights within the climate-alarm community are vibrant entertainment for sceptics. There’s the fun factor as rival climate alarmists kick shins and yank each others’ hair. And they deride each other’s extreme and foolish arguments, which saves sceptics some work. Moreover, the unedifying fights reduce the credibility of so-called climate “science” in the eyes of important onlookers like politicians.

A splendid fight-in-the-family broke out this month with the publication of a paper by four advocates of the nuclear-power route to emissions reduction. Their paper, “Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems,” is published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, (edited by Lawrence Kazmerski, who visited Australia in 2010 and played a small, proud part in forcing up electricity prices to their current obscene levels).

The study mercilessly exposes the nonsense of the wind and solar advocates, who imagine a world of 100% electricity from renewables by 2050. These fantasists have induced Australian state and federal governments to set unrealistic renewable energy targets, much as mad dogs infect bystanders with rabies. (The Victorian government, for example, last February passed its Climate Change Act with a net zero emissions target by 2050).

There is the added piquancy that all four authors exposing the technical impossibility of wind/solar regimes established their academic profiles in South Australia, where blackouts have made the state a global cautionary tale against moving to 50% renewables (let alone any higher percent).

The lead author is Ben Heard, PhD candidate at Adelaide University, the co-authors being Professors Barry Brook (U.Tas), Tom Wigley of National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colorado, and Corey Bradshaw (Flinders U.) All are nuclear-power advocates, which enrages their wind/solar-loving peers.

Here’s the gist of the Heard paper:

“Our sobering results show that 100% renewable electricity supply would, at the very least, demand a reinvention of the entire electricity supply-and-demand system to enable renewable supplies to approach the reliability of current systems. This would move humanity away from known, understood and operationally successful systems into uncertain futures with many dependencies for success and unanswered challenges in basic feasibility.”

They reviewed 24 scenario studies supporting 100% renewables as the way ahead and found not one passed the technical-feasibility test – let alone any commercial tests. On the Heard scale for technical feasibility, with a top score of 7 , they found only one study that even achieved a score of 4.

Four studies scored zero – these included, of course, the propaganda screeds presented as practial plans by WWF and Greenpeace. Another seven studies scraped up scores of just 1. Among those scoring a mere one out of seven was a scenario co-authored by the Climateworks (Monash University/Myer Foundation) crowd, headed by Labor’s John Thwaites, who was once Victoria’s deputy-premier. The Australian Academy of Science relied on that half-baked Climateworks exercise in its 2015 submission to the federal government endorsing the magic zero emissions solution to global warming by 2050.

Incidents of Piracy on Upswing Off Somalia, Prompting Concern After five-year hiatus, U.S. military’s Africa Command said there have been as many as six incidents in past two months By Gordon Lubold

CAMP LEMONNIER, Djibouti—Piracy has made a worrisome return to the waters off Somalia after a five-year hiatus, U.S. defense officials said, prompting commercial shippers, the military and others to revisit the issue.

In the past two months, there have been as many as six incidents of piracy, according to Gen. Tom Waldhauser, head of the U.S. military’s Africa Command, speaking to reporters here Sunday. They are the first incidents since about 2012, Gen. Waldhauser said. Pirates seized food, oil and other commodities from smaller-size boats, he said.

Gen. Waldhauser appeared with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who is winding up a trip through the Middle East and North Africa. Mr. Mattis stopped in Djibouti on Sunday to meet with Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh. He also met with French troops stationed here and received briefings about U.S. operations at Camp Lemonnier, a sprawling U.S. naval base here with more than 4,000 U.S. personnel.

The base provides support for a number of U.S. activities, including training and advising forces in Somalia and in nearby Yemen, and is home to numerous logistical and tactical aircraft and drones. The senior command, Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, is also based here, the only permanent U.S. base on the African continent.

Gen. Waldhauser attributed the return of piracy part to famine and drought in Somalia, adding private security measures should be kept in place to defend against pirates. CONTINUE AT SITE

North Korea’s Latest American Hostage The Kim regime detains a teacher, its third American captive.

As global events go, one of the safest predictions is that North Korea would take another American hostage amid growing tensions over its nuclear program. Sure enough, the Kim Jong Un regime on Saturday arrested an American teacher as he waited to board a flight out of the country.

South Korean media identified the new hostage as Kim Sang-duk, who was teaching a class in international finance and management at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. The mere thought of such a class is puzzling since North Korea’s “international finance” is smuggling. But Mr. Kim had taught at a sister school in China near the border with North Korea, and perhaps he thought he could spread some goodwill. Bad mistake.

In addition to Kim Sang-duk, the North is known to hold two other Americans. Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who was on a tour of North Korea, was detained last year for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda poster. He was convicted of subversion and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. He hasn’t been seen since March 2016. American businessman Kim Dong-chul was charged with spying last year and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Hostage politics is a hardy Korean perennial, perhaps because it always seems to yield some political or diplomatic benefit. Pyongyang recently detained Malaysian citizens and traded them to Kuala Lumpur in return for the North Koreans suspected of conspiring to assassinate Kim Jong Un’s brother. The North has also traded Americans over the years for visits by high-ranking U.S. officials, even former Presidents, who offer the regime some legitimacy and sometimes more tangible benefits.

That’s the best reason for the Trump Administration not to engage in hostage negotiations. The U.S. warns Americans not to travel to North Korea, yet some still tempt fate by doing so. The U.S. can ask China to intercede for the imprisoned Americans on humanitarian grounds, but the U.S. also needs China’s help against North Korea’s nuclear missiles.

North Korea is a terrorist government that obeys none of the norms of international behavior. The only solution is regime change. But in the meantime, the U.S. should make clear that Americans who travel to North Korea do so at their own risk.

France’s Stark Choice Macron vs. Le Pen reveals the French nationalist divide. see note please

This sentence “And Ms. Le Pen’s vigorous defense of French civilization against threats real (terrorism) and imagined (Muslim immigrants in general) resonates. Mr. Macron will need credible answers to the terrorist threat—witness Thursday’s attack on the Champs-Élysées—and a growing disconnect between French society and the impoverished immigrant (often Muslim) communities in the banlieues.” The threats of terrorism from Muslim immigrants is not “imagined”…but real indeed! rsk

Sharply divided French voters on Sunday gave themselves Emmanuel Macron as a mainstream alternative to far-right Marine Le Pen in next month’s second round of presidential voting. The French will now decide between two very different visions of French nationalism.

Incomplete tallies as we went to press suggested that the independent former Socialist Mr. Macron would finish first in a crowded field, with about 23% of the vote. Ms. Le Pen of the National Front was close behind. Free-market conservative François Fillon and far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon each won a little under 20%. French voters remain deeply divided about how to jolt their country out of its malaise. But they seem willing, for now and only barely, to give the center another chance.

The most stunning result is the repudiation of the two mainstream parties that have ruled France for decades. Voters rejected the ruling Socialists but also Mr. Fillon of the center-right Republicans. Mr. Fillon might have fared better if not for his personal scandals, but voters also remember the promise and failure of the last Republican President, Nicolas Sarkozy, six years ago.

Socialist President François Hollande started his term in 2012 promising a return to doctrinaire socialism before attempting a shift toward economic reform that never materialized. Unemployment has remained mostly stuck above 10%, with youth unemployment near 25%. Economic growth barely scrapes above 1% in a good year, and France’s educated young flee to London, New York, Hong Kong and other global centers.

Benoît Hamon, representing the ruling Socialist Party, notched a distant fifth place with less than 7%. The other left-wing loser Sunday was Mr. Mélenchon. Though he is personally popular for his authenticity, voters rejected this French Bernie Sanders, rightly doubting that tripling down on statism is the way to revive France’s fortunes.

The French will now have a choice between two very different political “outsiders.” Mr. Macron’s case in next month’s runoff is that to regain its former vitality France must reform and compete better with the world.

Why can’t the Clintons just go away? By Maureen Callahan

Since losing the most winnable presidential election in modern American history, Hillary Clinton has, among other things: given a series of high-profile speeches, joined Gov. Cuomo at his public unveiling of tuition-free college, refused to rule out a run for mayor of New York and issued an online video message exhorting fellow Democrats to fight on in her name.

“The challenges we face,” she said, “as a country and a party, are real.”

Clearly, Hillary still sees herself as the leader of the Democratic Party. And why shouldn’t she? Democrats have been locked in an abusive relationship with the Clintons for decades, enabling, explaining, convincing themselves that next time will be different. Party faithful hew to Hillary’s excuses for losing to Donald Trump: It’s James Comey’s fault, plus the Russians, white supremacists, misogynists, the deplorables and immobilized millennials, among other things.

Her losses in 2008 and 2016 have been framed as things that happened to Hillary — not one, but two Black Swan events that stymied her historic destiny.

How is it that Democrats have fealty here, let alone sympathy? How is it that Hillary routinely walks into standing ovations at Broadway theaters? Where is the realization that Hillary is to blame or the rational rejection of a two-time loser?

Any debate about what happened last November ends with Tuesday’s publication of “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.” Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes spent the past two years talking to Hillary’s most trusted advisers, and what emerges is damning.

Every mistake made in her 2008 run was compounded in 2016: the paranoia, the staff infighting, the underestimation of the intra-party wild card, the self-righteousness, the failure to connect with average voters, the belief that because it was her turn the presidency would be hers. It’s “Groundhog Day” with global consequences.

Clinton’s Towering Fiasco

The September 2016 article in Politico championing Hillary Clinton’s use of “data analytics” now looks—how shall we put it?—rather premature.

Politico swooned that computer algorithms “underlie nearly all of the Clinton campaign’s most important strategic decisions.” Computer guru Elan Kriegel had crunched the numbers for campaign manager Robby Mook, allowing Team Clinton to precisely target her potential voters and thus not waste one dime on appealing to the deplorables.

“Clintonites saw it as their secret weapon in building an insurmountable delegate lead over Bernie Sanders,” Politico reported. And come the general election the Clintonistas were downright giddy about the edge Big Data was giving them. With the hopelessly old-school Trump team “investing virtually nothing in data analytics during the primary and little since, Kriegel’s work isn’t just powering Clinton’s campaign, it is providing her a crucial tactical advantage.” Ah, hubris.

We were reminded of that Politico article in reading the first of what promises to be a sizable library of books autopsying the Clinton campaign, Shattered, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. The consensus among the Clintonites interviewed is that Mook and Kriegel and all their overhyped whizbang hooey are to blame. Fair enough: That’s what they get for taking their victory lap too soon.

But don’t put all the blame on the geek squad: The reason Hillary Clinton lost, first and foremost, is that Hillary Clinton was the dismalest, dreadfulest of candidates. That said, the emphasis on data analytics was of a piece with Hillary’s overall awfulness. Understanding the data approach, Politicowrote before the election, “is to understand how Clinton has run her campaign—precise and efficient, meticulous and effective, and, yes, at times more mathematical than inspirational.” The reporter was more right than he knew.

Still, the Clinton team’s overconfidence in data analytics was a typical error made with new technologies. It isn’t just overconfidence in what the technology can achieve, it is that the people using the technologies are ever tempted to push out to the edge of what the technologies can do as a way of proving not only the power of the new machines and methods and materials, but the prowess of the technologists themselves.

The Moral Obscenity of Kim’s North Korea By Claudia Rosett

North Korea’s menace has been all over the news, including its missiles tests, visible preparations for a sixth nuclear test and its threats to attack a U.S. aircraft carrier and to reduce the U.S. to ashes with a “super-mighty preemptive strike.” Assorted experts, debating how to handle the rogue regime of Kim Jong Un, have been weighing the pros and cons of trying yet more sanctions, new negotiations, tough talk, pressure on China, displays of military might, actual use of military force to take out North Korean missiles or even nuclear facilities, or assorted permutations of all these options and then some.

Amid all the strategizing — much of which envisions somehow continuing to “manage” the North Korea problem — it’s easy to sideline a basic and profoundly important element of the Pyongyang regime, a quality we should take into account quite thoroughly, front and center, before considering any course that might leave the Kim regime in power. The feature I’m talking about is the raw moral obscenity of Kim’s North Korea.

That obscenity might seem so entirely self-evident that it needs no repeated mention. We know that Kim is a tyrant, ruling a country that doubles as a prison for its 25 million people. We know that Kim keeps power by doing horrible things to those who fail to please him, including members of his own family. It was all over the news in 2012 when he swept aside his uncle and purported mentor, Jang Song Thaek, who was abruptly denounced and executed. Kim’s regime appears to have been behind the horrific assassination with VX nerve agent of Kim’s half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, just two months ago, in a Malaysian airport.

We know that Kim runs a state which last year year sentenced a visiting American student, Otto Warmbier, to 15 years at hard labor for the prank of taking down a political propaganda poster from a hotel wall in Pyongyang — thus turning Warmbier into a likely bargaining chip in North Korea’s long-running hostage games (this weekend comes news that North Korea has added another visiting American to its current haul). We also know, as reports over the past dozen years have richly documented, that a native North Korean showing disregard for the totalitarian propaganda of Kim’s regime would risk being executed outright, or possibly exiled incommunicado, along with three generations of his or her family, to the brutal labor camps in which the regime currently holds an estimated 80,000-120,000 political prisoners.

But that scarcely begins to sum up the systematic depravities with which the totalitarian Kim regime has held onto power for three generations, from founder Kim Il Sung, to his son Kong Jong Il, to the current Kim Jong Un (who inherited power upon the death of his father, more than five years ago). For decades, reports of the Kim-family regime’s atrocities have been seeping out of North Korea, including a landmark report in 2003 from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea on North Korea’s prison camps (“The Hidden Gulag”), and another groundbreaking report in 2012 on what amounts to North Korea’s system of political apartheid (“Marked for Life: Songbun, North Korea’s Political Classification System”).

French Presidential Campaign: Part 5 by Nidra Poller

10:44 AM: I feel like my country, the country I’ve lived in for over 44 years, is a patient in intensive care. Tubes and catheters, control panels, IT graphs, pulsing images, flashing lights. We’re waiting with sinking hearts for the specialist to come in and interpret the lab results. Something ineluctable is about to be revealed. But what?

I’m going to the outdoor market. When I get back, maybe I’ll run the vacuum cleaner. To keep my mind fresh. Plans for my visit to Israel in May are shaping up. Then 2 weeks in June in the US. A week in the South of France after that. Life goes on. I’ll walk around and take a look at the polling places. All the candidate posters have been defaced by anarchists and other heavy metal destroy protestors.

3 PM : The hawk is out, a merciless cold wind is slamming our hopes for springtime. The sun is hot and bright. It’s not enough. Anarchists and other looking-for-a-fight protesters at yesterday’s Social 1st Round left their filthy messages all up and down boulevard Beaumarchais. Last night they threw bottles and other hard edged objects at the police. Their graffiti looks like blood, talk about broad brush, they obscure whatever they touch. WAR ON THE RICH here POLICE ASSASSINS there. Can’t someone get them out of our face, out of our hair, out of the national conversation? Their causes are rotten. They grab at anything as an excuse for slopping signs and breaking windows, attacking the police and whatever else they get their hands on.

I’m on edge. Up to now, everything was possible, you grasped it with your rational mind. Now it is happening. People are voting. The verdict will soon fall.

I’m sharply impatient and here they come again with Marine Le Pen. A friend tells me about an article in the Jerusalem Post, CNN is in her stomping grounds at Bénin-Haumont and President Trump thinks she’s the best on frontiers and all that sovereignty, and the only one that’s dealing with that pesky problem. C’mon guys, either find out what’s really happening here or comment on another poker game. You want Marine le Pen for president? Help yourself. But leave us out of it

Oh they’re so sure she’ll get to the 2nd round. I just hope they’re wrong. I’m so tired of her misrepresentation.