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July 2018

Some Good Trade News Europe and the U.S. call a truce and pledge to negotiate ‘zero tariffs.’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-good-trade-news-1532560648

The meeting on trade Wednesday between President Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had all the makings of a potential crackup, but in the event it provided the best economic news in weeks. Financial markets were clearly pleased, as stocks rose across the board before the closing bell on the statements by the two presidents after their White House session. Call it a relief rally.

The two sides essentially declared a tariff truce, pending negotiations on a larger trade deal between the 28-nation European Union and the U.S. Mr. Trump agreed to step back from his threat of 25% tariffs on European car imports, while the two sides pledged to resolve the current U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs and Europe’s retaliatory levies on U.S. goods.

Europe also agreed to buy more soybeans immediately, and much more liquefied natural gas from the U.S. in the future as its import capacity expands. U.S. LNG export capacity is expected to nearly triple by 2020 to 9.6 billion cubic feet a day, as more export terminals come online and the fracking boom continues.

Tony Thomas The Extinction of Honest Science

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/07/extinction-honest-science/

Warmists’ predictions of climate doom haven’t come to pass or anything like it, but give them credit for agility and perseverance in always concocting a fresh scare. The latest meme to keep grants flowing and careers on track: the purported mass die-off of species large and small.

With no significant warming for 20 years, the climate alarmists need better scares. The temperature rise of about 0.8 degC in more than 100 years is not only non-scary, it’s been immensely beneficial for feeding the globe’s burgeoning population. Now the “extreme weather” furphy is at work, with any storm or flood attributed by Al Gore and the Climate Council to fossil fuel emissions. There’s the purported “ocean acidification” but I’m yet to see evidence that it has hurt a solitary crab, let alone a species.

As for sea-level rises, well, check my birthplace, Fremantle, butting the Indian Ocean: its tide gauge shows 12 cms rise in the past 120 years – compare that with 20cm for the length of my hand. To cap it off, the warmists, including the green-colonised CSIRO, have had to recognize that extra CO2 in the 30 years to 2010 has greened the earth to the extent of two and a half Australias in area.[1]

There are two handy scares still slithering around: “The Anthropocene” and “The Sixth Mass Extinction”. Both are fakes. Both are foisted on kids by green/Left educators. Both require as supposed remedies a supra-national enforcement agency run by the Left/liberal crowd, along with a roll-back of capitalist progress.

Here’s an example. I was in Chicago in 2013 and visited its great natural history centre the Field Museum (named after a 19th century $US9m donor Marshall Field). In the “Evolving Planet” gallery for kids, there was a chart, “The Geologic Time Scale” showing the classic geologic ages (Silurian, Devonian etc) with markers for the first five extinctions. At the top it read “Today” with a picture of a metropolis, and an arrow labeled “Sixth Mass Extinction”. A red-neon “Extinction Clock” ticked over each time another species supposedly becomes extinct. In the hour or two since the gallery opened, the counter had added another 22 supposed extinctions. The count was based not on reality but fanciful modeling 30 years ago by Harvard professor and environmental activist Dr E.O Wilson, who claimed that 30,000 species were going extinct per year. The true number of known extinctions per year among the planet’s reputed 10 million-or-so species and averaged over the past 500 years is about two, according to the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Yet climate activists want to compare this alleged“Sixth Extinction” with the end-Permian “great dying” (250 million years ago) and end-Cretaceous dinosaur die-off (66 million years ago).

As for the“Anthropocene”, it refers to the present geological era in which humans supposedly dominate the planetary processes and destroy other life forms. The label was first seriously proposed in 2001 by co-Nobelist Paul Crutzen, of ozone-hole fame. It supposedly succeeds our 11,500 year old Holocene, the brief warm spell that has fostered our agriculture and civilisation. No such era and label as “Anthropocene” has been endorsed by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the global naming authority. An ICS working group (AWG) endorsed the concept in 2016, positing a start date of 1950. Most geologic eras last about three million years, so the ICS is in no hurry to make a ruling.

COMPARED TO WHAT? DIANA WEST

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3768/Compared-to-What.aspx

Good thing I got back from vacation in time for the really important news, the story Drudge, Breitbart, WaPo and NYT are all on the same page about this morning — or, at least, are all putting forth the same Page One about. The Michael Cohen tape. Big Story. Stop the whatever they’re called.
I have a question. It’s the same question I had last week about Trump and Putin in Helsinki. This question is one of the most important ones to ask about any such “news” blasted out by the news media, those special operators of the psychological battlefield, which they drive into every particle of collective American brain with exploding headlines and siren soundbytes. The Michael Cohen tape is the single most important thing for all of us to think about right now …. compared to what?
Compared to nothing, which is the media m.o. Last month was all Stormy Daniels, all the time. (Who?) Last week, it was “treason!” “impeachable offenses!!” “crimes!!!” committed by Trump at his press conference with Putin in Helsinki. Compared to what?
I don’t ask the question lightly. The truly brilliant anti-communist writer Josef Mackiewicz was a biologist by training. (By the way, so is Bukovsky.) “One of my professors,” he wrote in his 1962 book, The Triumph of Provocation, reissued by Yale University Press in 2009, “used to say that only a comparitive science is an exact science; only by comparisons can objective knowledge be gained. All my life I have tried to use this maxim as a guide, since it seems to me to be the only correct method in the assessment of all the truth that is accessible to man.”
We postmoderns feed on a poor diet of “all the news that’s fit to print.” Imagine, instead, assessing all the truth that is accessible to man.

French Judge Protects Muslim Killer of Elderly Woman from “Hostile” Jewish Community Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270848/french-judge-protects-muslim-killer-elderly-woman-daniel-greenfield

Vichy lives.

ONE NIGHT IN APRIL last year, in the largely working-class neighbourhood of Belleville in Paris, a 27-year old man stole into the apartment of a neighbour, Sarah Halimi, the 65-year old retired director of a Jewish kindergarten, an orthodox Jewish widow with three adult children.

Malian-born Kobili Traoré brutally attacked the sleeping woman before throwing her from the window of her third-floor apartment. Witnesses heard him cry, “Allahu akbar” as he pushed her body onto the balcony, and then, “I killed the devil” as she fell.

The police, who had been called earlier by another family in the building, did not attempt to enter the apartment; afraid that this was a terrorist attack they waited outside the building for reinforcements. By the time reinforcements arrived, Halimi was dead. She had been tortured for an hour before she was killed; the living room was covered in blood.

The usual excuse for the Muslim killer was mental illness.

Yes, he hit her screaming ” Allahu akbar ” and suras of the Koran: first with the phone’s handset, then with his fists. Yes, he threw it well over his third floor balcony. But, he assures, he remains unable to explain why he has committed such an act of barbarism. “I do not know, I do not remember,” slips the young man with each question asked on the motive of the murder. He repeats: “I can not describe what was going on in my head.”

Maybe the suras of the Koran can help. Or his attempt to cover up his crime by shouting that the victim had committed suicide.

But don’t worry, the judge will protect the poor killer.

Blood and Terror: Remembering the Romanovs By Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/death-of-the-romanovs-first-victims-of-soviet-ideology/One hundred years on, it’s worth remembering the first victims of the evil Soviet ideology.

‘What? What?” were the last words of Tsar Nicholas II, according to his murderer.

On July 17, 1918, at 2:15 a.m., the recently abdicated tsar; his wife Alexandra; their daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia; their 12-year-old son Alexey; their doctor Evgeniy Botkin; chambermaid Anna Demidova; valet Alexey Trupp; and cook Ivan Kharitonov were roused from their sleep in their tightly guarded house in Ekaterinberg and led by Bolsheviks into the basement.

There, Iakov Iurovskii, under orders from Vladimir Lenin, told the Romanovs that because their relatives continued their offensive against Soviet Russia, the Executive Committee of the Ural Soviet had decided to shoot them. According to Iurovskii’s diary, Nicholas turned to face his family. Then, “as if collecting himself,” he turned around and asked, “Kакие? Какие?”

By 1917, Russia was ripe for revolution. The tsar’s slow-moving parliamentary reform and the 1905 revolution had shattered the unity of “the people.” War and food scarcity compounded the problem. In February 1917, riots broke out in Petrograd; in March the tsar was forced to abdicate. The provisional government was weak and short-lived, and the Bolsheviks came to power via a coup in October.

Who knows what one’s final thoughts are when faced with certain, murderous death. But this former emperor and current husband and father’s pain was surely tempered by his Christian faith. Days before, on July 14th, the Romanovs were paid an unexpected visit by a priest who had noted their astonishing forbearance and composure. Perhaps they had already accepted that their hope was in heaven, not earth.

Exclusive: Obama Administration Knowingly Funded a Designated Al-Qaeda Affiliate By Sam Westrop

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/obama-administration-al-qaeda-affiliate-knowingly-funded/

The group had been on a list of terrorist funders for a decade when a government agency specifically approved funding for it.

The Middle East Forum has discovered that the Obama administration approved a grant of $200,000 of taxpayer money to an al-Qaeda affiliate in Sudan — a decade after the U.S. Treasury designated it as a terrorist-financing organization. More stunningly, government officials specifically authorized the release of at least $115,000 of this grant even after learning that it was a designated terror organization.

The story began in October 2004, when the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Khartoum-based Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA), also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), as a terror-financing organization. It did so because of ISRA’s links to Osama bin Laden and his organization Maktab al-Khidamat (MK), the precursor of al-Qaeda.

According to the U.S. Treasury, in 1997 ISRA established formal cooperation with MK. By 2000, ISRA had raised $5 million for bin Laden’s group. The Treasury Department notes that ISRA officials even sought to help “relocate [bin Laden] to secure safe harbor for him.” It further reports that ISRA raised funds in 2003 in Western Europe specifically earmarked for Hamas suicide bombings.

The 2004 designation included all of ISRA’s branches, including a U.S. office called the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA-USA). Eventually it became known that this American branch had illegally transferred over $1.2 million to Iraqi insurgents and other terror groups, including, reportedly, the Afghan terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In 2010, the executive director of IARA-USA and a board member pled guilty to money-laundering, theft of public funds, conspiracy, and several other charges.

ISRA’s influence also spread to Washington. Former U.S. congressman Mark Siljander (R., Mich.) pled guilty in 2010 to obstruction of justice and acting as an unregistered foreign agent after prosecutors found that IARA-USA had paid him $75,000 — using misappropriated USAID grant money — to lobby the government, in an attempt to remove the charity from the government’s terror list.

Editorial: Colleges must stop coddling Herald Staff

http://www.bostonherald.com/opinion/editorials/2018/07/editorial_colleges_must_stop_coddling

College campus culture should be fair game for criticism. After all, college is very expensive and in many circles considered a compulsory rite of passage for young people.

More and more we hear stories of speakers being shut down by student protesters amid sometimes violent actions. Speakers running the political gamut from Ben Shapiro to Alan Dershowitz have been on the receiving end of angry mobs.

Yesterday’s college radical is today’s “social justice warrior” and their mission is to disrupt free speech whenever it does not conform exactly to their worldview. It happened at UMass Amherst in 2016 when Milo Yiannopoulos, Steven Crowder and Christina Hoff Sommers attempted to speak.

Whether it’s University of California, Berkeley, Middlebury College or Evergreen State University, there always seems to be at least one institution in the news associated with an attempt to thwart free speech.

Earlier this year, at Portland State University, when biologist Heather Heying made the point that women and men are biologically different, protesters in the audience screamed and excoriated her and tried to damage the sound system before they were removed. “We should not listen to fascism. Nazis are not welcome in civil society,” a protester said.

Year after year, our campuses seem to produce a bumper crop of loud and angry social justice warriors.

Yesterday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions took campus culture to task during a speech at Turning Point USA’s High School Leadership Summit in Washington.

Trump announces a ‘new phase’ in US-EU relationship, working toward ‘zero tariffs’ Christina Wilkie &Tucker Higgins

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/trump-we-hope-to-work-something-out-on-a-fair-trade-deal-with-europe.html

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said the United States and the European Union had launched a “new phase” in their relationship, saying that the two major economies would start negotiations immediately on a number of areas including working toward “zero tariffs” on industrial goods and further cooperation on energy issues.

“We agreed today first of all to work together towards zero tariffs, zero nontariff barriers and zero subsides for the non-auto industrial goods,” Trump said Wednesday.

The announcement came during a joint press fconference in the White House Rose Garden with Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Juncker said the two leaders agreed that as long as negotiations were ongoing, “we’ll hold off further tariffs and reassess existing tariffs on steel and aluminum” put in place by the Trump administration. “This was a good, constructive meeting,” he added.

The major averages rallied earlier in the day following a report in The Wall Street Journal stating that Trump had secured a number of concessions from the E.U.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average popped more than half a percent to a session high Wednesday afternoon. The NASDAQ rose about 1 percent. The euro also rose, hitting a session high against the dollar.

European Commission spokesperson Kinga Malinowska said that Juncker had not yet made any concessions.

“All I can say is that the talks are ongoing,” Malinowska said in a statement. “President Juncker is working to avert new tariffs. No concessions made.”

Trump said earlier on Wednesday, during a meeting with Juncker, that he hoped “to work something out on a fair trade deal with Europe.”

Gregg Jarrett: Comey and Strzok — Two key players in the scheme to clear Clinton and frame Trump Gregg Jarrett

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/07/23/gregg-jarrett-comey-and-strzok-two-key-players-in-scheme-to-clear-clinton-and-frame-trump.html

In one of the more stunning revelations contained in the report compiled by the Justice Department’s watchdog, former FBI Director James Comey claimed he doesn’t remember the moment he decided – and put down in writing — that Hillary Clinton had committed crimes.

We know that on or about May 2, 2016, Comey composed a statement summarizing Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents, concluding that she was “grossly negligent.” Those pivotal words have a distinct legal meaning, and are drawn directly from a federal statute, 18 U.S.C. 793(f), which makes it a felony to handle classified documents in a “grossly negligent” manner.

Comey used the exact phrase not once, but twice.

Based on Comey’s finding, Clinton should have faced a multiple-count criminal indictment, since the FBI discovered that she had stored 110 classified emails on her unauthorized, private computer server. Other people had been prosecuted for similar conduct that jeopardized national security in violation of the law. Yet, Comey – despite characterizing Clinton’s actions with the clear language denoting violation of the law – saw to it that no charges were ever brought against Clinton.

Based on Comey’s finding, Clinton should have faced a multiple-count criminal indictment, since the FBI discovered that she had stored 110 classified emails on her unauthorized, private computer server.

Palestinian Authority Silences Students by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12753/palestinian-authority-silences-students

By targeting Palestinian journalists and university students, the Palestinian Authority shows that it has turned the territories under its control into a dictatorship that systematically grinds public freedoms into the ground.

Palestinians are permitted to badmouth Israel and the US — but that is where their “freedom of speech” ends. Let a Palestinian utter a bad word about his leaders — he will find himself (or herself) behind bars. This bodes rather poorly for the future of democracy and free speech in a Palestinian state. In fact, it discloses exactly what a Palestinian state would look like, if and when it is ever established.

Failing to hold the PA leadership accountable for its actions against journalists and university students drives Palestinians into the open arms of Hamas. Yet the international media remains mute in the face of the PA’s flouting of the right to freedom of expression. Why? Because, for the foreign media, a story that does not serve to bash Israel is not “news that’s fit to print.”

A Palestinian electric engineer from the West Bank is facing up to one year in prison and a heavy fine. Ibrahim Al-Masri, who was arrested by the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces on June 19, is the latest victim of the PA’s continued crackdown on its political opponents and dissenters.

Al-Masri’s lawyer said that his client was taken into custody under the PA’s new controversial Cyber Crime Law, which targets Palestinian social media users. His family said they learned about his detention more than 24 hours after he was taken into custody. They pointed out that Al-Masri was arrested for posting comments on Facebook criticizing the PA security forces for beating him during a demonstration in Ramallah last month. The demonstration was organized by Palestinian activists to protest the economic sanctions imposed by the PA government on the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

The Cyber Crime Law, which has drawn sharp criticism from Palestinian human rights and media organizations, states that, “Anyone who creates or manages or an information technology platform that aims to publish news that would endanger the integrity of the Palestinian state, the public order or the internal or external security of the State, shall be punished by imprisonment for a period of at least one year and no more than 5,000 Jordanian dinars (approximately $7,000) or by a combination of both punishments.”

The law effectively authorizes the PA security forces to arrest Palestinians for their activities on social media, especially if their postings are deemed “offensive” to senior Palestinian officials or harmful to the “integrity of the Palestinian state” which, one might note, remains to be established.

Palestinians are now wondering whether the Ramallah-based PA leadership has created a “Facebook Police” to monitor their activities on the giant social media portal.