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January 2019

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Donald Trump might be just the man to topple President Maduro and save Venezuela Fraser Nelson

By on January 24th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/01/24/donald-trump-might-just-man-topple-president-maduro-save-venezuela/

The collapse of Venezuela is one of the greatest human tragedies of our time, all the worse because every part of it was avoidable. Gang violence is now such that, by some estimates, a child is killed there every eight hours. Add the adults, and it’s a violent death every 25 minutes. Mothers sit on rubbish heaps scavenging for food, prices double every month, thousands flee every day. Not so long ago, this was the wealthiest country in Latin America. Most Venezuelans now live on standards comparable to those of Bangladesh or Congo. The rest of the world can only look on in horror.

Donald Trump may not be the most obvious solution to all this, but his actions on Venezuela this week have been decisive, subtle and effective. The problem is Nicolas Maduro, who has taken the radical socialist policies of his mentor, Hugo Chavez, to their destructive conclusion. The nationalisations (at the time hailed as a model by Jeremy Corbyn) led to economic chaos and hyperinflation. Maduro has now rigged elections and violated the constitution, but for the first time he now faces a united and energetic opposition led by Juan Guaidó, whom Trump has just recognised as the “interim” president of Venezuela.

Within an hour of Trump’s announcement, Guaidó was also recognised by Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala, Paraguay and Peru. In Caracas, thousands of protesters gathered to cheer Guaidó on during a mock swearing-in ceremony. A democratic movement to displace Maduro is now underway, with backing across Latin America and Trump offering co-ordination and support. His strategy is to do what he can to bolster Juan Guaidó, the 35-year-old leader of the Venezuela National Assembly, and encourage change to come from within.

Trump started off with sanctions against Venezuela, but has realised that they won’t achieve much – with Maduro using them to blame America for everything that’s going wrong. Intensifying sanctions would only serve to deepen the agony of people who are already dying for want of basic medicines. Asking a third country to mediate (as Norway once did in Colombia) won’t work either. The Vatican tried to play honest broker in Caracas, but gave up once everyone realised that Maduro was playing for time.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

A Note on Climate Change and Bushfires Roger Underwood

By on January 24th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/01/a-note-on-climate-change-and-bushfires/

Fixing the climate so as to fix the bushfire crisis is particularly popular with the authorities. Being able to blame the climate for unstoppable bushfires is, politically speaking, a beautiful strategy: it absolves governments and agencies of accountability. Plus, what empire-building bureaucrat doesn’t want a budget boost to buy water bombers in bulk lots?

A recent article in the Sunday Telegraph paints a despondent picture: horrible bushfires are “the new normal” because of climate change. The fire season, we learn, now extends to nearly 10 months of the year, and bushfires have become so intense that they cannot be stopped before immense damage is done. According to recently retired NSW fire commissioner Greg Mullins (now a member of the Climate Council): “The price of inaction [on climate change] will increasingly be paid in lives lost and communities shattered”.

This echoes comments made in the wake of the bushfire that destroyed the town of Yarloop in Western Australia in 2016. The conditions were described by authorities as “unprecedented”. And following the 2018 Queensland bushfires, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told reporters “If you want to know what caused those conditions, I’ll give you an answer – it’s called climate change”.

Let’s assume for the moment that this is all correct. Put aside the views of most bushfire experts that the basic problem is failure to prepare the potential fire grounds in the expectation of fire. For the sake of argument, let’s accept that, thanks to climate change, the bushfire threat in Australia is now completely out of hand and deteriorating by the day. So what is to be done?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Terror-Linked Muslim Group Pressures Amazon Into Yanking Products, Facilitating Islamic Practices Given its extensive history of terrorist support, it might seem odd that many companies and others targeted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations are quick to capitulate to their pressure campaigns. Patrick Poole

By on January 24th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/24/terror-linked-muslim-group-pressures-amazon-yanking-products-facilitating-islamic-practices/

The online giant Amazon, which is one of the world’s largest retailers, recently capitulated to a demand by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to remove products the terror-tied pressure group deems to be offensive to Muslims.

Earlier this month, CAIR called on their supporters to complain to Amazon about doormats and bath mats sold by third-party vendors on the Amazon website that were inscribed with Quranic verses of blessing and greeting. The group said it organized the effort because the Islamic references would be stepped on or otherwise disrespected.

Days later, CAIR announced that Amazon had agreed to remove the items. That week, CAIR claimed it had found other offensive items sold on the Amazon website, and asked for those too to be banned. Although they might seem a bit silly, CAIR’s bath mat complaints can be viewed as part of a current strategy to exert influence over tech giants and Silicon Valley powerhouses. While Amazon is chiefly known as an online retailer of almost any item imaginable, it is also one of the world’s largest tech companies.

The bathmat complaint came at exactly the same time CAIR is supporting efforts for Somali workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, to force the company for greater religious accommodations and other demands. According to The New York Times, Amazon recruited heavily from the Somali community and already designated spaces at the center for prayer and ritual washings dictated by the Quran. For one of its meetings with Somali workers, the company even brought in from Texas a Muslim manager “who works on accommodating Islamic practices.”
Working Hard Is Against Our Religion

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

TWO VIDEOS-JORDAN PETERSON

By on January 24th, 2019

ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE FATAL FLAW IN AMERICAN POLITICS

1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVUnUnWfHI

2.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBbvehbomrY

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Come All and Receive! By Matthew Continetti

By on January 24th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/02/11/come-all-and-receive/

The Democrats are routinely diluting the significance of citizenship

Gavin Newsom has big plans for California. Among his first acts as governor was to ask the state legislature to expand health coverage for illegal immigrants. California began offering insurance for illegal-immigrant children some years ago; now Newsom wants to raise the age limit for receiving subsidized health care to 26. “We will never waver in our pursuit of guaranteed health care for all Califor­nians,” he said in his inaugural address. That includes individuals residing in the state illegally.

Around the same time, on the other side of the country, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio offered a similar proposal. He wants the city to spend another $100 million on its shambolic public hospital system so that illegal immigrants are treated at clinics before they crowd emergency rooms. “From this moment on in New York City,” de Blasio said, “everyone is guaranteed the right to health care — everyone.”

The Newsom and de Blasio initiatives are more than your standard bleeding-heart social spending. Democratic politicians are beginning to act on the realization that they govern large numbers of people who, under the letter of the law, should not be here. Coastal and metropolitan Democrats increasingly represent individuals who cannot vote, do not pay income taxes, and are ineligible for military service and jury duty. This epiphany has led the progressive movement to begin to elide and subvert the distinction between citizens and noncitizens. Such policies do not simply undermine the rule of law. They erode our sense of national identity, our constitutional structure, and the idea of Ameri­cans as a self-governing people.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Plan to Fund Wall Fails, Two Republican Senators Defect By Jack Crowe

By on January 24th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trumps-plan-to-fund-wall-fails-two-republican-senators-defect/

The Senate on Thursday voted down a Republican-backed spending bill that would have ended the longest-running government shutdown in history and allocated $5.7 billion for the construction of President Trump’s long-promised wall on the southern border.

The bill was defeated 50–47 in a vote that largely broke down along party lines, with Republican Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Tom Cotton of Arkansas the only Republican’s to vote against and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia the only Democrat to vote in favor.

A Democrat-backed stop-gap spending bill that would have funded the government through February 8 without allocating any additional funds for border security also failed to pass the Senate Thursday afternoon.

The competing bills were widely considered test votes, as the White House and leaders of both parties were aware in advance that they lacked the bipartisan support required to clear the 60-vote threshold.

Mindful that Republicans lacked the seven Democratic votes needed to pass their spending bill, the White House reportedly viewed Thursday’s vote as an opportunity to gauge support for President Trump’s shutdown strategy within the Republican caucus. The Trump-backed bill granted a temporary, three-year asylum to immigrants brought to the country illegally as children in exchange for border-wall funding.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Destiny in Retrospect By Tracy Lee Simmons

By on January 24th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/02/11/churchill-walking-with-destiny-book-review/

Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts (Viking, 1,152 pp., $40)

We might ask ourselves which is worse — disdain for Winston Churchill or simple ignorance of this colossal figure and his place in history. Ignorance may be unsurprising in a period when, as a recent poll shows, many young people think Churchill a character from fiction. But the disdain can come only from minds corrupted by propaganda and laced with ingratitude for Western civilization and, just as much, for those who have sacrificed for its defense in those darker days before our own brilliantly flabby, righteous age arrived. The fact that astronaut Scott Kelly can be slapped down for tweeting a quote by Churchill (“In victory, magnanimity”) on grounds that the great man was so clearly a “racist” is regrettable enough. That the ill-schooled Kelly so quickly apologized to trolls tells us much about the desperately low tone of our culture these days.

So perhaps yet another biography of Churchill, one of the most written-up men of the last century — this is the 1,010th biography, Roberts notes — doesn’t need to justify itself after all. This is true most especially when the British historian Andrew Roberts writes it. Churchill’s world and its environs have been so richly and perspicaciously documented by Roberts for decades that the real oddity would be his reaching the end of a fruitful career as a historian of vast events and great men with no such tome to his credit.

And a tome any proper biography of Churchill must be. Little else can do justice to a man whose stupendous political journey lasted over 60 years and who died just past his 90th birthday. With nearly a thousand pages of chiseled prose, Roberts allows himself the room to lay out all the highlights and not a few sidelights of his subject’s long and varied life, following him from a benighted childhood and on to Harrow and Sandhurst, through military and journalistic triumphs and misadventures from Cuba to Sudan, India, and South Africa, and then by the age of 25 to Parliament, from which point the rest would be history. The result is a tour de force of scrupulous selection and astute appraisal, perhaps the best full-scale biography to date in a field where the competition has been crowded and stiff.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Ilhan Omar Endorsed Somalia’s New President. Four Days Later, Omar’s Brother-in-Law Had a Powerful Job in His Administration By David Steinberg

By on January 24th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/davidsteinberg/ilhan-omar-endorsed-somalias-new-president-four-days-later-omars-brother-in-law-had-a-powerful-job-in-his-administration/
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) became the first Somali-American legislator in United States’ history when Minnesota’s House District 60B elected her on November 8, 2016. The distinction won Omar immediate fame and influence in Somalia, which was entering the final stretch of a critical presidential election of its own.

According to prominent federal security clearance defense attorney Sean Bigley (read below), Omar’s documented actions in the weeks that followed would almost certainly prevent any applicant with such a background from obtaining or keeping a U.S. security clearance.

Ilhan Omar is now a U.S. congresswoman, however. Elected federal officials are exempted from the arduous security clearance process; they hold de facto clearances once sworn in to office. Further, Omar will likely be privy to a significant amount of classified national security information this term. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has granted Omar’s request for a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

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“Corruption … affects virtually every aspect of the Somali society: from public officials’ misuse of public goods for private gain and the solicitation of bribes in exchange for basic services to the clan-based patronage networks used to obtain employment and political appointments.” — Transparency International, 2018

The common hyperbole for describing government corruption — “rampant,” or “endemic” — does not help adequately illustrate Somalia’s recent administrations. “As bad as it gets” does the job, literally: Transparency International, the massive NGO dedicated to exposing public-sector corruption, has placed Somalia dead-last among all nations on Earth in its annual “Corruption Perceptions Index” — for 11 consecutive years. Somalia has occasionally managed to tie, though never outrank, North Korea.

Any significant involvement by a U.S. citizen in Somalia’s election process would likely raise eyebrows at America’s intelligence agencies.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinian Arab Leadership Calls “Coexistence” With Israelis Criminal By Lori Lowenthal Marcus

By on January 24th, 2019

A brand new, two-story shopping mall just opened in Atorot, a poor, largely Arab section of northern Jerusalem that will serve both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. It is not being celebrated by everyone and may come with a price.

The mall has drawn the ire of Palestine Arab leadership who say ‘coexistence’ between the groups is criminal and in many ways, it reveals the internal machinations of the deep divide that has made the U.S. peace negotiations so difficult.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week that a U.S. peace push “won’t be [uniquely] a U.S.-driven process” and would require the cooperation of all parties, including allies in the region.

“Ultimately, the Israelis and the Palestinians will have to come to an agreement,” he said.

If anything, the Atorot Mall, is another test of that process. It is just across Israel’s separation barrier from Ramallah, the government seat of the Palestinian Authority. Atorot, known as Al-Ram in Arabic, is a little more than six miles from downtown Jerusalem.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum Is Israel’s inevitable war with Iran already underway?

By on January 24th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/is-israels-inevitable-war-with-iran-underway/

It would be a mistake to dismiss nuclear threats coming out of Tehran as mere saber-rattling, given its stated intention and increasingly overt attempts to annihilate Israel, even at its own potential peril.

Israelis enjoying themselves on the slopes of the Mount Hermon ski resort in the Golan Heights were startled on Sunday afternoon to witness an Iranian missile heading their way. Had it not been intercepted by the Iron Dome missile-defense system, many innocent vacationers, as well as residents in the area, would have been killed.

The surface-to-surface projectile, fired by the Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force in Syria, did not cause the skiers to pack up their gear and run for shelter and hot chocolate, however. After filming the scene on phones and helmet cams, they picked up where they left off. For most Israelis, the rain of enemy rockets is not nearly as novel as mounds of fresh snow.

Disappointment was high, then, when the Israel Defense Forces announced that the popular site, adjacent to the Syrian and Lebanese borders, would be closed on Monday. The IDF was already planning the retaliatory strikes that it carried out late Sunday night against Iranian bases and soldiers stationed near Damascus—a mere 30 miles from Mount Hermon.

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