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July 2018

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Patriotism: The Secret of Trump’s Success By Karin McQuillan

By on July 31st, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/patriotism_the_secret_of_trumps_success.html

The driving force behind Trump’s winning for America is his powerful patriotism. Patriotism is a virtue that our politicians talk about a lot, in utterly empty ways. Many Democrats think it is a vice. The left wing of the Democratic Party mistakes it for white nationalism. Trump lives American patriotism. It is the reason he ran for president and the reason he won. He knows we are a great country.

Trump recognizes and is comfortable with power – his personal power, America’s power. He does not think power is toxic. He thinks American and presidential power is wonderful and meant to be used for our common, national good.

Our president loves to build. He used to build big apartment and hotel towers with his name on them. Now he is building up America, because he loves America. President Trump’s patriotism has these two equal parts: a strong economy and a strong military. His eye is always on the prize of jobs and security.

Patriotism overflows in his speech on achieving a quarter of 4.1% growth for the economy and the return of fallen heroes’ remains from North Korea.

In everything we do, in every action we take, we are fighting for loyal, hardworking, patriotic citizens of our blessed nation. We’re making our country great again. We’re respected again all over the world. Our military will soon be stronger than it’s ever been, by far.

Unlike his political rivals, President Trump wants to use our full power. We do not need to be intimidated by anybody – not China, not the E.U., not Russia, not Iran, not terrorists. We are the powerhouse. Trump seeks to create win-win situations, but he will not compromise on American interests. If someone is going to lose, it is going to be the other side, not we.

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Pastor Brunson, Trump’s America, and Ankara’s Hypocrisy… by Gerald A. Honigman

By on July 31st, 2018

http://q4j-middle-east.com

The headline for the Bizpac Review mailing for July 30th read, “Turkish President Erdogan Warns Trump…”

Before going any further, I’ve valued the American and NATO relationship with the Turks too…the Turkish Straits, the Russian bogeyman, and so forth. But, at what price?

The current dispute is over the demand that Washington issued that Ankara release American Pastor Andrew Brunson, imprisoned since 2016, who had a small church in Turkey that Turks accuse of supporting “terrorists–i.e. especially Kurds, who’ve done most of America’s fighting against ISIS and other Jihadis. They refuse to accept that they’re really just “Mountain Turks,” as Ankara renamed them after also outlawing their language and culture, and have forcibly reacted against their bloody subjugators.

Now, if this doesn’t sound familiar, think about what happened to some two million or more Christian Armenians and Assyrians, and others who, like those (Muslim) Kurds above (some 22 million just in Turkey alone, 20 to 25 % of the population), dared to suggest that they too had their own pre-Turkish (and pre-Arab) invasion identities, let alone rights and aspirations in the age of nationalism as well.

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Communism Is as Socialism Does (and Vice Versa) by: Diana West

By on July 31st, 2018

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3769/Communism-Is-as-Socialism-Does-and-Vice-Versa.aspx

They argue and split hairs, they fight and break heads, they work together and destroy liberty because they all travel to the same soul-crushing destination. As far as liberty-loving anti-communists are concerned, communists and socialists — and “democractic socialists,” Fabians, progressives, Alinskyites (not to mention most Democrats and an awful lot of Republicans), etc. — believe in the same centrally planned, varyingly totalitarian vision for America that the founding fathers would have had to declare independence from all over again.

To that point of ideological convergence, a couple of quotations

The first is from Rene Wormser, a renowned lawyer specializing in estate planning and taxation who served admirably as the general counsel of the Reece committee, the second of two 1950s congressional committees investigating the Marxist/socialist/communist/progressive/etc./etc./etc. subversion of the great American foundations, which, of course, undergirded the subversion of our educational institutions.

Reflecting on both committees’ work, Wormser wrote the following on pp. 177-178 of his extremely important book, Foundations:

Socialist Penetration

The two recent Congressional investigations were largely concerned with “subversion.” The Cox Committee interpreted this term to include only international communism of the Stalinist brand and organized fascism. The Reece Committee, in the course of its work, came to give the term broader or deeper meaning. Neither investigation established sharply, however, the characteristics of Communist activity which would be clearly held to be subversive. In the public mind, the term “subversion” is generally confined to Moscow-directed Communist activity, or that of domestic Communists allied in an international conspiracy. The emphasis on a search for organized Communist penetration of foundations absorbed much of the energy of the investigators and detracted somewhat from the efficacy of their general inquiry into “subversion.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Peter O’Brien Snake Oil in a 26% Solution

By on July 30th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/07/whitewashing-pain-ahead-26-solution/

For argument’s sake, accept that global warming is more than fanciful algorithms and careerism. Now wonder how Australia will ever make its 2030 targets, given the energy sector represents only about a quarter of our emissions. Conclusion: there’s far more ruinous stupidity yet to be revealed.

As Australia’s contribution to the Paris Agreement’s aim of limiting global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels, the Turnbull government has gallantly committed to reducing our CO2 emissions by 26%-to-28% of 2005 levels by 2030. It is important to note that we are already at 0.8C warming so we, the world that is, has only got 1.2C to play with. We claim that we only contribute 1.3% of global emissions so, logically, our aim should presumably be to chip in at least 0.016C of cooling.

So somewhere in our great bureaucracy there must be a calculation that shows that reducing our total emissions by 26% (or 155MtCO2e) will achieve this aim. Or so you would hope.

Let me digress slightly but bear with me. Recently, The Australian editorialized (www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/take-the-politicking-out-of-infrastructure-projects/news-story/41e1b27bda05b884949a5e2bd8de4ca9) on the topic of the politicization of infrastructure development. That editorial quoted Philip Davies, outgoing head of Infrastructure Australia:

Too often we see commitments being made to projects before a business case has been prepared, a full set of options has been considered and rigorous analysis of a potential project’s benefits and costs has been undertaken.

Too right! The Australian editorial used the NBN as the most flagrant example of this malaise. But it occurs to me that, while not strictly an infrastructure project per se, our Paris Agreement commitment puts the NBN in the shade in this respect.

Nowhere in all of the Turnbull/Frydenberg propaganda – in speeches, press releases, fact sheets or any publicly available documentation on government web site – is the figure of 0.016C mentioned, or any other temperature goal. There is a total disconnect between the stated aim of the Paris Agreement and our CO2 emissions reduction target. In fact, politically, it could not be otherwise because that would drag the naked emperor into full, pitiless sunlight. However, I am not concerned with politics but good governance, something which is conspicuously missing in this debacle.

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Darryl Budge: Politically Correct Medicine

By on July 30th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/07/politically-correct-medicine/

The Medical Board of Australia is pushing a draft code that would oblige physicians to accept and thereby endorse ‘cultural practices’ antithetical to both good medicine and civilised conduct. Female genital mutilation, payback spearings — apparently these demand ‘respect’…..

A proposed Code of Conduct, which is open for public submissions until August 3, could force doctors to accept ‘cultural beliefs and practises’ that are opposed to good medical practise, according to a group of doctors.

The Medical Board of Australia draft code of conduct that will apply to all Australian doctors requires doctors to be “culturally safe” and comply with a patients’ beliefs about gender identity and sexuality, with no provision given for a doctor to differ in their professional judgements. A doctors’ group convened by Dr Lachlan Dunjey of Perth, has expressed concern for the future of medicine in Australia in light of the changes.

“We are concerned with the possible interpretation of ‘culturally safe’, that it should not impact on good health outcomes and good medical practice”, the group has stated. “We are concerned that ‘respectful practice’ is significantly different to ‘respectful of the beliefs and cultures of others’ and that this change also could impact on good health outcomes.

“Respect for a patient does not equal respecting ‘cultural beliefs and practices’ that may be antithetical to good medical practice.”

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Pakistan’s Deep State Seeks a New Patron Forget elections. The military’s ties to Beijing will shape the country’s future. Walter Russel Mead

By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pakistans-deep-state-seeks-a-new-patron-1532989532

Another meaningless Pakistani election has attracted another burst of world media attention. Last week, voters gave the party of former cricket player Imran Khan a plurality in Parliament, making him the likely next prime minister. The press is full of accounts of what Mr. Khan’s victory means for the troubled country. But the real decisions in Pakistan are made by unelected military officers—and the media’s dutiful coverage of the nation’s all but ceremonial electoral process is a major propaganda victory for the permanent ruling establishment.

Pakistan matters, even if its elections don’t. It is the world’s only nuclear state with deep ties to terror groups. And its national-security elite believes it is locked in an existential competition with India, its much larger, richer and more technologically advanced southern neighbor. Yet Pakistan simply does not have the economic capacity to keep up this security competition. That has been true since the partition in 1947, and it became more pronounced when India helped East Pakistan emerge as independent Bangladesh in 1971.

Pakistan’s security disadvantage has always had a profound impact on its politics. The imbalance has driven Pakistan’s concentration of power in the hands of the military, its quest for nuclear weapons to counteract India’s edge in conventional warfare, its dependence on patrons and paymasters to bridge the resource gap, and its deepening reliance on Islam as a legitimating force.

There is little room for actual democracy under these circumstances, or so Pakistan’s rulers believe. But they have come to understand the advantages of a democratic charade. The blame for problems with public services like sewers, roads and schools—often exacerbated by the resource constraints imposed by the military’s security fixation—can be shifted onto politicians. When political parties become enmeshed in corruption scandals, the military presents itself as the clean and patriotic alternative, siding with the people against a crooked elite. The political pageantry currently being indulged by the press diverts attention from the hard fact of military rule without endangering the national-security establishment’s position at the heart of the state. Even controversies over the fairness of the election process contribute to the effectiveness of the dictatorship’s disguise.

Not that electoral competition in Pakistan is entirely without consequences. Politicians who win elections don’t gain power over the strategic direction of the state, but they do win government jobs and lucrative contracts for family and friends, along with other rewards and emoluments of office. The rival clans and ethnic groups who back Pakistan’s political parties sincerely want their side to win. Favored access to the governmental piggy bank is no small thing, and collaborating in a sham process that keeps the military in power is a small price to pay.

The most important story in Pakistan today is not the elevation of Mr. Khan, the military’s preferred candidate. It is that the U.S., Pakistan’s principal ally during both the Cold War and the war on terror, is no longer interested in subsidizing a partner it needs and trusts less and less. Pakistan’s military rulers are therefore seeking a new patron, and China is eager to fill the void. CONTINUE AT SITE

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump, Putin and the Montenegro Question NATO’s newest member vexes Russia and occasions unsettling comments from the U.S. president. By Michael B. Mukasey

By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-putin-and-the-montenegro-question-1532989476

Two weeks have passed since the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, but there is still no public account of what the two leaders said—other than their own self-congratulatory remarks. But the recent actions of the U.S. and Russian presidents suggest they may have discussed the role and ambitions of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, taking steps toward a rebalancing of power that should worry Europeans and Americans alike.

President Trump provided one clue in his statements about Montenegro, a tiny Eastern European country and the newest NATO member. During a July 18 conversation with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, he suggested that “aggressive” Montenegrins might start a global conflict. To be fair, Mr. Trump didn’t raise the subject; it was Mr. Carlson who suggested that honoring NATO’s mutual-defense obligation might entangle the U.S. in a fight Americans would rather sit out. But once the subject was raised, Mr. Trump pounced—conjuring the specter of Montenegro dragging the U.S. into World War III.

Where did that come from? There’s no evidence that Mr. Trump had any earlier concern about Montenegro, or even that he knew where it was. Though Montenegro joined NATO shortly after he took office, Mr. Trump’s only direct interaction with the country on record came during a photo session at last year’s NATO summit, when he shoved aside Montenegrin President Dusko Markovic to get a spot in the front row.

There is plenty of evidence, however, that Russia is worried about Montenegro’s accession to NATO. The Kremlin promised unspecified retaliation against NATO in 2015 when the alliance first formally offered membership to Montenegro. Senior Russian officials claim that, in adding the Balkan country to the alliance, NATO members violated their promise not to expand the alliance eastward—an assurance they had given Russia during the presidency of George H.W. Bush.

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Fantasyland: Why I left Berkeley By Alexander Nazaryan

By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/08/13/berkeley-free-speech-why-liberal-gave-up-college/

A liberal explains why he gave up on Berkeley

There were seven men climbing the hillside, through thickets of sagebrush and lupine, through groves of oak and pine. Finally they came to an outcropping of rock, which they scaled. From there, they could see the bay, rippling in the afternoon light. Two ships were out there, heading for the open waters of the Pacific. The glorious moment called for recognition; Frederick Billings, a Vermonter who’d come west during the Gold Rush, supplied the grace note, in the form of a verse from George Berkeley, the 18th-century English philosopher: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” That was how Berkeley, Calif., got its name.

I wasn’t there, obviously, but my imagination pulled me like a tide to that moment during the three years I spent in Berkeley with my wife and two children. I am a terribly plodding runner, but nevertheless an avid one. Daily I huffed up those very same hills, and looked at that very same bay, and filled with the very same wonder of those men 152 years ago. This was especially so when fog obscured the skyscrapers of San Francisco, effacing the human element, leaving only you and water, the tops of hills, the milky, cloud-covered sky.

But this was fantasy. Below, the frontier settlement of 1866 was no longer. Descending back to town always left me coated in a thin film of dread. I was sinfully sour with my wife and children, perfectly graceless with the in-laws who had wholly funded our move from New York to California. By the time I realized that I hated the place, it was with tremendous relief, as when a spouse realizes that a marriage has run its course even as her counterpart cluelessly makes vacation plans. But it would take a rather long while to figure out why, and what that irreducible antipathy had to do with liberalism — Berkeley’s and my own.

Bishop Berkeley would prove a prescient namesake for this Northern California city that has made its sibling across the bay, San Francisco, seem staid by comparison. Berkeley was a subjective idealist who argued that there was no world apart from the world each one of us experienced. “To be is to be perceived,” he famously postulated. Today’s popular injunction to “live your truth” is the simpleton cousin of Berkeley’s insight that there wasn’t any other truth to be lived.

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BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Savagery of ISIS By Douglas Murray

By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/isis-brutality-nazi-like-cruelty-yazidis/

“They took us to pits on the farm that were supposed to be our graves . . . They threw us down there in shifts. Every fifteen minutes they would lower down about a dozen men . . . and open fire on them. They arranged us into rows, telling us to line up next to each other so it would be easier for them to shoot us. My brother was in the first shift. My other brother was in the second shift. I was in the third. I knew everyone down there with me; they were my neighbours and friends.”

Up to this point, I imagine most readers will assume that the above passage is a quotation from a survivor of the Nazi atrocities. Only the end of this passage identifies that it is a more recent testimony that we are hearing.

“After they shouted Allahu Akbar, the sound of gunfire rang out, and once they had finished shooting us one by one, I was swimming in a pool of blood. They shot at us again, then a third time. I shut my eyes and prepared to die, as one must.”

“How long did you stay like that?”

“I was bleeding there for almost five hours.”

“Where were you shot?”

“In three different places. Once in my foot and twice in my hand.”

“And did everyone else die?”

“All except for one other man, Idrees, a childhood friend of mine. His feet were injured. I tried to drag him out of the pit with me but I couldn’t because half my body — the left side — was bleeding. I couldn’t lift him with just one hand. Idrees, I said to him, climb up on my bank, get on. But he couldn’t move. He was still alive but I wasn’t able to save him. I struggled to get out of the pit and walked away from the school. As I crossed the farm road, I heard the nonstop rattle of gunfire, and I dropped down onto the ground, which is where I stayed, hidden under the wheat and barley until the sun went down.”

The above is the account of a man called Khalid, a resident of the Nineveh plains who like many thousands of others tried to flee ISIS in August 2014 but was captured by them. His testimony is one of many collected in a remarkable new book by the poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail titled “The Beekeeper of Sinjar.”

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The Unserious Face of an Unserious Movement By Charles C. W. Cooke

By on July 30th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-socialist-face-unserious-movement/

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the Great Young Hope progressives deserve.

When, last Thursday, she was asked an elementary question about spending, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez struck her best Cobra Kai pose. “I sat down with a Nobel Prize economist last week,” she exclaimed, contorting her face into Jack Nicholson’s and attempting to shoot webs from her fingers. “I can’t believe I can say that,” she added. “It’s really weird!”

Alas, nothing from this brush with greatness appears to have worn off on her. Mere seconds elapsed between the boast and the disaster that followed. Speaking to a friendly Trevor Noah, Ocasio-Cortez revealed that she does not know the difference between a one-year and a ten-year budget; confused the recent increase in defense spending with the entire annual cost of the military; implied that the population of the United States was around 800 million strong; and, having been asked to defend her coveted $15 minimum wage, launched into a rambling and inscrutable diatribe about “private equity” firms that would have been a touch too harsh as a parody on South Park. If anything, she was worse this time than she had been during her appearance on Firing Line a few days earlier, on which newly revamped show she demonstrated her obliviousness to the fact that the United States economy exploded during the 1990s, to the manner in which unemployment numbers are calculated, and to even the most obvious facets of the Israel–Palestine question about which she has assured her supporters she is so passionate.

“It’s really weird!”

It is, yes. Especially given that, before her two interviews aired, Ocasio-Cortez had taken to exhibiting that jealous penchant for credentialism that so stains the world’s wannabe socialists, and to boasting about her intellectual prowess. At the beginning of July, she tweeted with self-satisfaction — and a noticeably premature use of the word “other” — that she was “Wondering how many other House Democrats have a degree in Economics like I do?” Two days later, she upgraded that claim: “If you think the GOP is terrified of my politics now,” she threatened on Twitter, “just wait until they find out about public libraries.” Just wait, indeed! From a BA from BU to the embodiment of all human knowledge in just 48 hours! At this rate it can’t be long before she gives it all up and becomes an honorary Krassenstein Brother: “We are the way, the truth, and the light. Retweet if you love Love and hate Trump!”

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