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October 2017

Spain and Catalonia Carefully Weigh Their Next Steps Carles Puigdemont says any declaration of separation from Spain won’t come for at least several days By Jeannette Neumann and Marina Force

BARCELONA—Catalonia’s leader said Monday that any declaration of separation from Spain won’t come for at least several days, putting pressure on the government in Madrid to make the next move in the standoff between the country and the restive region.

The two sides were carefully weighing their next steps the day after Catalan voters appeared to overwhelmingly back independence in a referendum boycotted by opponents and marred by violence, leaving hundreds of civilians injured and raising the political stakes.

Carles Puigdemont said Catalan authorities were still tallying the official results and weren’t likely to send them to regional lawmakers until at least Wednesday. The Catalan parliament, where separatists have a majority, would then have 48 hours under the vote’s enabling legislation to declare Catalonia’s separation from Spain.

The central government in Madrid says the vote was illegal because it violated Spain’s constitution, which upholds the “indissoluble unity” of Spain. Police, acting on court orders, tried to prevent voters from entering polling stations and using voting material.

Mr. Puigdemont’s slight delay throws the ball into the court of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, a conservative who has taken a hard line against Catalan separation. A strong reaction from Mr. Rajoy—for instance preemptively stripping Catalonia of the autonomy it currently has—would likely bolster Mr. Puigdemont’s support among his voters. The pause also allows the Catalan leader to present himself as open to dialogue, and not solely focused on declaring independence.

Many analysts think secession is unlikely to materialize. “There will ultimately be a settlement on regional financial reform and greater autonomy for Catalonia within Spain but this will be a drawn-out process,” Fitch Ratings analysts said in a research report.

Mr. Puigdemont is seeking to muster international attention and backing for his independence push and assess his domestic support by playing down his urgency, analysts said.

“You burn political capital by moving too quickly and unilaterally,” said Antonio Barroso, a political analyst at consulting firm Teneo Intelligence. CONTINUE AT SITE

Palestinian Authority, Hamas Aim to Mend Ties After 10-Year Deadlock Two days of talks are latest attempt at reconciliation between the two sides By Rory Jones See note please

This is a summit of terrorists who have committed mass murder, now posing as peace processors….and the media including the WSJ buys into it calling them “militants.” rsk

GAZA CITY—Palestinian Authority officials arrived here Monday for two days of talks with militant group Hamas, as the two major Palestinian sides work to mend ties after a decade of deadlock.

The talks are the latest attempt at reconciliation between the groups after years of mistrust, and could lead to a united Palestinian national movement that would participate in peace talks with Israel. Their success hangs on whether Hamas agrees to hand over security of the strip to the Authority for the first time in 10 years.

Israel and the U.S. are carefully watching the outcome of the discussions, which will likely continue for a number of weeks after the delegation’s departure. Israel has fought three wars with Hamas in the past decade.

Among the issues under discussion between Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas, is the return of thousands of Authority employees to jobs administering the strip.

Yasser Muhanna is one of thousands of the Authority’s Gazan employees who stopped working with the rise of Hamas and are now eagerly awaiting the talks’ outcome. He walked out of his job in the telecommunications ministry here a decade ago on the orders of the Palestinian Authority, after it ceded control of the enclave to Hamas.
Since then the Authority, which still formally governs the West Bank, has sought to ensure the loyalty of thousands of people like Mr. Muhanna in part by paying them wages though they no longer work. For many, the talks offer a possible way out of that limbo.

“It’s very important,” he said. “We want to keep working.” CONTINUE AT SITE

First, They Came for the Biologists The postmodernist left on campus is intolerant not only of opposing views, but of science itself. By Heather Heying

“Science has sometimes been used to rationalize both atrocity and inaction in its face. But conflating science with its abuse has become a favorite trope of extremists on the left. It’s a cheap rhetorical trick, and not, dare I say, very logical.Science creates space for the free exchange of ideas, for discovery, for progress. What has postmodernism done for you lately?”

Ms. Heying is a former biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

Who would have guessed that when America cleaved, the left would get the National Football League and the right would get uncontested custody of science?

The revolution on college campuses, which seeks to eradicate individuals and ideas that are considered unsavory, constitutes a hostile takeover by fringe elements on the extreme left. Last spring at the Evergreen State College, where I was a professor for 15 years, the revolution was televised—proudly and intentionally—by the radicals. Opinions not fitting with the currently accepted dogma—that all white people are racist, that questioning policy changes aimed at achieving “equity” is itself an act of white supremacy—would not be tolerated, and those who disagreed were shouted down, hunted, assaulted, even battered. Similar eruptions have happened all over the country.

What may not be obvious from outside academia is that this revolution is an attack on Enlightenment values: reason, inquiry and dissent. Extremists on the left are going after science. Why? Because science seeks truth, and truth isn’t always convenient.

The left has long pointed to deniers of climate change and evolution to demonstrate that over here, science is a core value. But increasingly, that’s patently not true.

The battle on our campuses—and ever more, in K-12 schools, in cubicles and in meetings, and on the streets—is being framed as a battle for equity, but that’s a false front. True, there are real grievances. Gaps between populations exist, for historical and modern reasons that are neither honorable nor acceptable, and they must be addressed. But what is going on at institutions across the country is—yes—a culture war between science and postmodernism. The extreme left has embraced a facile fiction.

Postmodernism, and specifically its offspring, critical race theory, have abandoned rigor and replaced it with “lived experience” as the primary source of knowledge. Little credence is given to the idea of objective reality. Science has long understood that observation can never be perfectly objective, but it also provides the ultimate tool kit with which to distinguish signal from noise—and from bias. Scientists generate complete lists of alternative hypotheses, with testable predictions, and we try to falsify our own cherished ideas.

Science is imperfect: It is slow and methodical, and it makes errors. But it does work. We have microchips, airplanes and streetlights to show for it.

In a meeting with administrators at Evergreen last May, protesters called, on camera, for college president George Bridges to target STEM faculty in particular for “antibias” training, on the theory that scientists are particularly prone to racism. That’s obvious to them because scientists persist in using terms like “genetic” and “phenotype” when discussing humans. Mr. Bridges offers: “[What] we are working towards is, bring ’em in, train ’em, and if they don’t get it, sanction them.” CONTINUE AT SITE

‘An Act of Pure Evil’ Amid the Las Vegas horror, don’t forget Steve Scalise’s recovery.

As of now, little is known about what caused Stephen Paddock to murder some 58 innocent people in Las Vegas Sunday evening. It sits before us as what President Trump described in a statement as “an act of pure evil.”

More information may emerge in coming days, such as how Paddock could have smuggled so much weaponry into the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. But currently there is nothing to link this killer to the kinds of causes or illnesses associated with other recent mass murderers. There is no evident connection to Islamic terrorists or any extremist group, no suggestion of disturbed behavior, no criminal record, no fights with neighbors or co-workers. The only oddly noteworthy fact is that his father was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

We always search for reasons when this happens, but no pretext or explanation is sufficient to explain why a person commits mass murders such as this one. Not Omar Mateen’s slaughter of 49 people at an Orlando nightclub last year or Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people in Norway in 2011.

We all live daily lives that involve some degree of disputes, conflicts and animosities. Most remain inside civilizing constraints. Some recesses of the individual human brain, however, can harbor impulses that are simply malign and sometimes produce senseless murder.

Americans have spent more time recently than they would ever care to trying to absorb moments of terrifying, overwhelming destruction. People in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean islands will spend years rebuilding lives and communities torn apart by several hurricanes. It can sometimes seem too much.

Think, though, of the failed attempt at mass murder in June by a lone gunman who sprayed bullets into a Congressional baseball game in suburban Virginia. Last Thursday, Rep. Steve Scalise, severely wounded by the gunman, returned to the House of Representatives and delivered an eloquent tribute to the acts of valor that day by police officers and colleagues.

Amid the carnage of Las Vegas and the hurricanes’ destruction, a great many similar acts of selfless courage occurred to save the wounded or to minimize the loss of life. President Trump called it “the ties of community and the comfort of our common humanity.” Against the evil of a Stephen Paddock, that undefeatable reality is worth remembering.

Russian Election Influence Jan Mel Poller

There are many claims floating around that Russia colluded with Trump/the Trump campaign during the 2016 Presidential election resulting in the victory of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. While there are general claims about collusion, there are no claims of specific actions. This, of course, ties in with Hillary’s book, “What Happened”.

You can’t claim collusion without pointing to actual acts. That the Mueller investigation teamhas not leaked claims of actual acts throws doubt on his whole enterprise.Here is what I think happened.

What Russia didn’t make happen:

Russia didn’t make Hillary refuse to protect the Consulate in Benghazi.

Russia didn’t make Hillary lie to the people about a video causing the Benghazi attack while she told her daughter it was terrorism.

Russia didn’t make Hillary have an unsecured server in her house and in the bathroom of an apartment in Colorado.

Russia didn’t make people send Huma Abedin emails at home to Anthony Weiner’s personal computer. Weiner had no security clearance and his computer was unsecured.

Russia didn’t make Hillary have her lawyers permanently delete 30,000 emails from her private server.

Russia didn’t make Hillary and Bill create the Clinton Foundation.

Russia didn’t make the Clinton’s take huge “speaking” fees from Wall Street while publicly damning Wall Street.

Russia didn’t make Hillary, her aids, and the press push for Trump to win the Republican primary in the belief that he would be easy to beat.

Russia didn’t make Hillary’s pollsters weight the result to show Hillary as unbeatable.

Russia didn’t make Hillary believe those polls.

Russia didn’t make Hillary believe that she had Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin locked-up and that she didn’t have to go there.

Russia did not make Hillary go to West Virginia and announce that she would shut down the coal industry, which affected Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Ohio and Colorado.

Russia didn’t make Donna Brazil give Hillary debate questions in advance if the debate.

Russia didn’t make Hillary proclaim that half the voters were “deplorables”.

Russia didn’t make Hillary issue invitations to her speeches, as she did to me in Virginia, where you had to pay $35 to hear her campaign talk.

Russia didn’t make the Clintons make speeches for large amounts of money to people who wanted favors from the government.

Russia didn’t make the DNC cause violence at Trump events.

What Russia may have done:

Russia may have hacked Hillary’s and others’ unsecured servers and released the information to Wikileaks.

What Russia did do:

Russia bought 20% of America’s uranium mines. $145 million of the proceeds wound up in the coffers of the Clinton Foundation.

Russia is reported to have employed Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and paid him about $35 million.

Conclusion:

Someone, and it may have been Russia, leaked information from John Podesta’s server to the public through Wikileaks. The information was damming to the Democrats. The release of this information doomed Hillary’s campaign. Her supporters said, in effect, if you didn’t know what she did, you would have voted for her and she would have won.

A Tale of Two Revolutions Srdja Trifkovic

A hundred years ago, in the early hours of November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks grabbed power in Petrograd. Within weeks they took advantage of Russia’s collapsing political and social structure to impose control over the country’s heartland. The result of the coup was a tragedy of world-historical proportions. A vibrant, flourishing culture (see “Remembering the Old Russia,” Breaking Glass, September) was destroyed amid a bloodbath 100 times worse than la Terreur.

In the preceding quarter-century Russia had undergone rapid modernization. On the eve of the Great War she was the world’s fourth-largest economy, her annual growth rate comparable to that of China after Deng’s reforms. Her railway network exceeded 50,000 miles, and her gold reserves were second only to Britain’s. Her wheat harvest had doubled in the two decades preceding 1913. That year Russia had the lowest direct taxes in Europe, four times lower than those of France and Germany, one eighth of the British rate. Real incomes had increased sixfold between 1893 and 1913. Workers’ rights, public health, and literacy were improving accordingly. Of some 150,000 new book titles published worldwide in 1914, over one fifth of them were published in Russia—as many as in Britain, France, and the United States combined. Paul Valéry called the late empire one of the wonders of the world, which, despite its modernity and unlike Western Europe, still retained a Christian outlook.

The leaders of Wilhelmine Germany feared that Russia’s growth would turn her into Europe’s hegemon. As Fritz Fischer established in his 1961 Germany’s Aims in the First World War, the Kaiserreich military and political elite engineered the crisis after Sarajevo to wage a “preventive” war and thus preempt Russia’s rapid economic, demographic, and military rise. The same people actively helped Lenin et al. on their sealed train journey from Zurich to Petrograd three years later, thus sealing Europe’s destiny (as well as their own).

The revolution that ended monarchy in March 1917, leading to its Bolshevik sequel eight months later, did not come because the material condition of Russian peasants and workers was unbearable, or because the war was going badly. The weakness of Nicholas II, the role of his unstable wife, the influence of Rasputin—all were on balance peripheral. The revolution came primarily because Russia’s political and intellectual elite had lost its faith, focus, and nerve.

The most significant trait of the Bolshevik terror during the civil war and in the ensuing decades was the promotion of a quasi religious forma mentis based on anti-Christian zeal, and the parallel insistence on the creation of a New Man divorced from his ancestors, his naturally evolving communities, and his culture. As Trotsky wrote in 1924,

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.

Is the Las Vegas Mass-Murderer a Terrorist? The answer appears to be ‘yes’ under Nevada law, and ‘maybe’ under federal law. By Andrew C. McCarthy

In Las Vegas, more than 50 people are dead, and perhaps hundreds of others have been injured, in the deadliest mass-shooting attack in American history. Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old Nevadan believed to be the lone gunman, fired upon attendees of the Route 91 Harvest music festival from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort across the street. He killed himself before police reached him.

As we begin to process what has happened, it is important to remember — as we have learned from too many of these incidents — that initial reports are often wrong. We must wait for investigators and responsible journalists to do their work before we can have a clear picture of what happened.

On that score, news reports this morning are already referring to this atrocity as a “terrorist attack.” And that was even before the Islamic State jihadist organization claimed responsibility for the attack, a claim that has just beenreported by the Washington Examiner. ISIS offered no proof of its assertions that Paddock was a recent convert to Islam and had carried out the massacre on the terror network’s behalf. Again, we cannot assess it until the investigation unfolds.

Clearly, Paddock did terrorize a community, particularly an event attended by 22,000 people, at least hundreds of whom he put in mortal peril.

Does that make him a terrorist? Let’s put the unverified ISIS claims aside. If Paddock was a lone gunman acting independently and not under the influence of any organization or ideology, the answer to the question may depend on which law we apply — the federal penal code or Nevada’s criminal law.

We’ve recently had occasion to consider federal terrorism law in connection with a discussion over whether the violent “Antifa” movement should be legally designated as a terrorist organization. Under the U.S. penal code (section 2331(5) of Title 18), a violent act meets the definition of “domestic terrorism” if the actor was seeking:

(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.

Many (perhaps most) mass killings will meet this test. Plainly, shooting at a crowd is an act of intimidation. But as the word “coerce” (also in that first clause) implies, the federal terrorism statute speaks to intimidation or coercion of a civilian population toward some identifiable objective. This kind of intimidation is easy to make out when the aggressor is a jihadist, whether associated with an outfit such as ISIS or merely “inspired by” sharia-supremacist ideology (which seeks the imposition of sharia law and to force changes in American policy). Establishing such intimidation is also straightforward when a group with a radical political agenda, such as Antifa, is involved. It is more difficult, though, when we are dealing with a lone gunman.

The Case for Kurdish Independence by Alan M. Dershowitz

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan tried to extort Israel to withdraw its support, and threatened to end the process of normalization unless it does so. It is worth noting that Turkey strongly supports statehood for the Palestinians but not for their own Kurdish population. Hypocrisy abounds in the international community, but that should surprise no one.
Iraqi Kurds were a key partner for the U.S. coalition that toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime and has staved off further sectarian tensions in that country. One thing is clear: if the United States continues to neglect its “friends” and allies in the region — those on the front line in the fight against ISIS — the damage to its credibility will only increase.
Nor are there any limits to the hypocrisy of those university students and faculty who demonstrate so loudly for Palestinian statehood, but ignore or oppose the Kurds. When is the last time you read about a demonstration in favor of the Kurds on a university campus? The answer is never.
No one who supports statehood for the Palestinians can morally oppose Kurdish independence. But they do, because it is double-standard hypocrisy, and not morality, that frames the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

More than 90% of Iraq’s Kurdish population have now voted for independence from Iraq. While the referendum is not binding, it reflects the will of a minority group that has a long history of persecution and statelessness.

The independence referendum is an important step toward remedying a historic injustice inflicted on the Kurdish population in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet, while millions took to the streets to celebrate, it is clear that the challenges of moving forward toward establishing an independent Kurdistan are only just beginning. Already, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, has said: “we will impose the rule of Iraq in all of the areas of the KRG, with the strength of the constitution.” Meanwhile, other Iraqi lawmakers have called for the prosecution of Kurdish representatives who organized the referendum — singling out Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Masoud Barzani, specifically.