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Ruth King

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What Is the Alternative to Trump Derangement? If they weren’t trying to destroy the president, Democrats would have to focus on an agenda most Americans don’t support. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on June 27th, 2017

By 1968, voters had tired of the failed Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. Four year later, the 1972 Nixon reelection re-emphasized that a doubled-down McGovern liberalism was even less of a viable agenda.

In that context, in 1974, obsessing on Watergate and a demonized Nixon were wise liberal alternatives to running on a positive left-wing vision, given the growing conservative backlash of the 1970s.

After Watergate and the Ford pardon, Jimmy Carter squeaked to a close victory and a one-term presidency — before the country tired of his strident liberalism poorly cloaked in conservative clothing. Bill Clinton’s third-way centrism eventually was a winning Democratic alternative to regain the presidency — albeit with help from two Ross Perot third-party candidacies. Given these historical reminders, the current efforts at Trump character assassination may be the best — or only — progressive pathway back to political power.

In the last few days, the Democratic party lost its fourth special House election; most of the four were billed in advance as likely negative referenda on the contentious first six months of the Trump presidency. Post facto, the uniformly unwelcomed results were written off as idiosyncratic outliers of no importance.

Shortly before the Georgia election, a hard-left-wing killer attacked the players at a congressional baseball practice, intent on the assassination of Republican legislators, whom he had targeted on his hit list. The shooter was foiled, but not before seriously wounding Steve Scalise, the current Republican majority whip in the House.

The two events in saner times might have prompted introspection about why the Democrats keep losing elections and why a hard-core progressive supporter would seek to assassinate key Republican leaders. Indeed, for a brief moment, there were calls on both sides of the aisle to scale back inflammatory rhetoric that in theory might push such politicized would-be shooters over the edge. One might have hoped that self-reflective Democrats could begin to grasp why voters distrusted them more than they feared Trump.

Such moments quickly vanished. Progressives saw any remedies to identity politics as worse than the disease of electoral defeat. Elizabeth Warren, with her trademark rancor, was once again talking about Republican “blood money” — as if her opponents in the Congress were legislative assassins rather than the recent targets of such. An increasingly addled Hillary Clinton (she had loudly joined the “Resistance”) accused the GOP of becoming the “death party,” reminding the country why progressive fanatics such as James Hodgkinson might think rifle fire is the only answer to conservatives who traffic in blood.

Meanwhile, another day, another Hollywood celebrity dreaming of, or advocating, the assassination of Donald Trump: This time a disturbed Johnny Depp (playing the role of Kathy Griffin or Snoop Dogg) mused out loud about repeating a John Wilkes Booth–style shooting. Since January, left-wing pundits and celebrities have alluded that Trump might be decapitated, stabbed by a mob, shot, punched, hit with a bat, blown up, strung up, and flipped off. Incineration and drowning are about the last modes of Trump mayhem left unsaid.

Barack Obama, amid the assassination chic and the obscenity of key Democrats such as Kamala Harris, Tom Perez, and Kirsten Gillibrand, recently remonstrated about the evils of inequality and the need for more diversity — at $10,000 a minute to largely white, Wall Street audiences, while wining about the ongoing recalibration of his failed Obamacare project. That is what passes for 21st-century progressive community organizing.

Left unsaid was that Obama had virtually destroyed the Democratic party, which during his tenure lost more than 1,000 state and local elections and both the House and the Senate. Obama left a personal legacy of a party agenda that had no popular support, an incoming Republican presidency, a conservative Supreme Court, a tenure to be systematically overturned, and a one-time progressive electoral paradigm that could work only for himself while imploding almost any other candidate foolish enough to try to replicate it.

And progressives oddly loved him for all that.

It is said that Democrats are in an existential crisis because of their obsessions with Donald Trump — suing over the election, trying to subvert the Electoral College, dreaming of impeachment and the 25th Amendment, filing briefs under the emoluments clause of the Constitution, stalling appointments, relying on deep-state insurrectionary bureaucrats, cherry-picking liberal judges for obstructive passes, and going from one conspiracy theory to the next as collusion begat obstruction that begat witness tampering. More outsider advice is for Democrats to focus instead on their agenda.

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The Supreme Court Order Is Not Much of a Victory for Trump The High Court postponed and may never resolve the most contentious issues related to the so-called travel ban. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on June 27th, 2017

The positive part of this morning’s Supreme Court order, which narrows the stays lower courts have imposed to block President Trump’s so-called travel ban, is the part you don’t see. Implicit in the Court’s unsigned ruling is a rejection of the anti-Trump presumption adopted by the lower courts. Those tribunals (in the Fourth and Ninth Circuits) essentially based their rulings on the novel premise that Trump’s executive orders should not be considered on their face — i.e., on the terms set forth in the four corners of the travel ban. Rather, they must be seen through the prism of anti-Muslim animus said to radiate from the campaign rhetoric of candidate Trump and his surrogates.

As Justice Clarence Thomas points out in his separate opinion (joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch), when the Court reviews a stay, it is essentially assessing whether lower-court rulings will be ultimately reversed on the merits. There would be no reason for the Supreme Court to narrow the lower-court stays of the travel ban if the justices were of a mind to concur in the lower courts’ reasoning.

The short per curiam opinion does not delve into the most controversial aspect of the travel-ban litigation to date, namely: whether there ought to be what I’ve called a new “jurisprudence of Trump,” in which this president’s orders and actions are judged differently than would the same orders and actions if carried out by other presidents. Still, it seems likely after today that a majority of the justices would resolve that issue in the president’s favor. That is worth celebrating.

So why not celebrate?

Well, it seems highly unlikely that the Court’s left-wing bloc (Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) is averse to a jurisprudence of Trump — indeed, Justice Ginsburg was stunningly intemperate and inappropriate in her pre-election remarks about the GOP nominee. So the question is: Why did they go along with today’s ruling?

For the same reason that caused Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch to file a partial dissent: This ruling is unworkable and actually doesn’t much narrow the lower-court stays.

Let’s try to keep it simple here. The lower courts granted standing to challenge the travel ban to American persons and entities that had special relationships with aliens outside the United States. Ostensibly, the lower courts claimed that the rights of these Americans were harmed by the travel ban’s exclusion of aliens — specifically, aliens who a) are close relatives whose exclusion would deny family reunification to an American; or b) are scholars whose exclusion would deprive their contributions to American universities that had extended offers to them. In effect, however, the lower courts were vicariously granting American legal rights to aliens outside the United States, despite the judges’ grudging admission that the aliens technically had no such rights.

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What happens when famous novelists ‘confront the Occupation’ in the West Bank By Matti Friedman ****

By on June 27th, 2017

“What it’s really about is the writers. Most of the essays aren’t journalism but a kind of selfie in which the author poses in front of the symbolic moral issue of the time: Here I am at an Israeli checkpoint! Here I am with a shepherd! That’s why the very first page of the book finds Chabon and Waldman talking not about the occupation, but about Chabon and Waldman. After a while I felt trapped in a wordy kind of Kardashian Instagram feed, without the self-awareness.”

Matti Friedman is a journalist in Jerusalem and the author, most recently, of “Pumpkinflowers.”

Last year, the American novelists Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman and Dave Eggers led a group of writers to “bear witness” to the crisis in Iraq, confronting the fate of that country during and since the American occupation — the hundreds of thousands of dead, the vanished minorities, the chaos spreading across the region. The resulting anthology adds up to a piercing, introspective look at what it means to be American in the 21st century.

I’m kidding! Reporting on Iraq is bothersome, and so is introspection. Instead, they came to “bear witness” to the crisis in the West Bank and Gaza, where thousands of reporters, nongovernmental organization staffers, activists and diplomats hover around a conflict with a death toll last year that was about a third of the homicide number in Baltimore. It’s the kind of Mideast conflagration where writers can sally forth in an air-conditioned bus, safely observe the natives for a few hours and make it back to a nice hotel for drinks.

The resulting anthology, “Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation,” includes essays by American and international authors such as Eggers, Mario Vargas Llosa, Colum McCann and Colm Toibin — an impressive list — with a few locals thrown in. The visitors were shown around by anti-occupation activists and wrote up their experiences. Edited by Chabon and Waldman, the 26 essays here constitute a chorus of condemnation of Israel.

Chabon, for example, interviews a Palestinian American businessman about life in the West Bank — the byzantine permit system, the 1,001 humiliations of undemocratic rule. Another essay looks at a village of impoverished shepherds, Susiya, in the shadow of an Israeli settlement. Geraldine Brooks describes a stabbing in Jerusalem. We meet children detained by troops, people made to wait at checkpoints and others scarred in different ways by the military occupation that began here after the 1967 war.

I’ve seen the West Bank from many angles over more than two decades in Israel, as a soldier at checkpoints and as a reporter passing through them with Palestinians, and I know the injustices of the situation are real and worth attention from knowledgeable observers. What we get here, though, is a peculiar product. The visiting writers aren’t experts — most seem to have been here for only a few days, and some appear quite lost.

Chabon and Waldman tell us on the very first page of a visit to Israel in 1992, which they remember vividly as a time of optimism, when the “Oslo accords were fresh and untested.” But their memory must be playing tricks, because the Oslo accords happened in the fall of 1993. Chabon and Waldman, who live in Berkeley, Calif., are accomplished writers, but the reader needs a few words about what they’re up to here. Do they have special expertise to offer? Israel is probably the biggest international news story over the past 50 years, so is there a reason they decided the world needs to know more about it and not, say, Kandahar, Guantanamo, Congo or Baltimore?

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A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Britain: May 2017 by Soeren Kern

By on June 27th, 2017

“The whole system failed and that is what has been happening for the last 30 years. And it is PC. People are just too, too afraid to, you know, just too, too afraid to speak the truth.” — Mohan Singh, founder of the Sikh Awareness Society.

MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, revealed that it has identified 23,000 jihadist extremists living in the country.

Manchester bomber Salman Abedi used taxpayer-funded student loans and benefits to bankroll the terror plot, according to the Telegraph. Abedi is believed to have received thousands of pounds in state funding in the run-up to the attack even while he was overseas receiving bomb-making training. It also emerged that the chief imam of Abedi’s mosque fought with militants in Libya. The mosque was also reported to have hosted hate preachers who called for British soldiers to be killed and non-believers to be stoned to death.

“It is no secret that Saudi Arabia in particular provides funding to hundreds of mosques in the UK, espousing a very hardline Wahhabist interpretation of Islam. It is often in these institutions that British extremism takes root.” — Tom Brake, Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman.

May 1. Army cadets in Scotland were warned not to wear their uniforms in public because they could be targeted by jihadists.

May 1. Three female teenagers were arrested in East London on terrorism charges. The arrests were in connection with an anti-terror operation in London on April 27 in which a woman wearing a burqa was shot by police. Police said that an active terror plot had been foiled.

May 2. Samata Ullah, a 34-year-old jihadist from Cardiff, was sentenced to eight years in prison for five terror offenses, including membership of the Islamic State, as well being involved in training terrorists and preparing for terrorist acts. Ullah, a British national of Bangladeshi origin, was a key member of a group calling itself the “Cyber Caliphate Army” and gave other members of IS advice on how to communicate using sophisticated encryption techniques.

May 3. Damon Smith, a 20-year-old convert to Islam, was found guilty of making a bomb filled with ball bearings and leaving it on a subway train in London. Jurors at the Old Baily court were told that Smith had downloaded an al-Qaeda article entitled, “Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom,” which contained step-by-step instructions on how to make a homemade bomb. The court also heard that Smith had a keen interest in Islam, guns and explosives, and had collected pictures of extremists, including the alleged mastermind of the 2015 Paris terror attacks. Smith, who suffers from autism, admitted to making the device but claimed he only meant it as a prank.

May 3. The trial began of four Muslim men who gang-raped a 16-year-old girl in Ramsgate, Kent. The girl was attacked when she got lost after a night out and asked for directions at a Kebab shop. Restaurant owner Tamin Rahani, 37, Rafiullah Hamidy, 24, Shershah Muslimyar, 20, and an unnamed teenager are accused of taking turns raping the girl in an apartment above the restaurant.

May 9. Aine Davis, a 33-year-old British convert to Islam, was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison by a court in Turkey for being a member of the Islamic State. The BBC reported that Davis was one of a four-man IS cell nicknamed “The Beatles” responsible for beheading more than two dozen hostages in Syria. Davis, the only one of the group to face a trial, had denied the charges against him. Davis left his home in West London in 2013 to join the Islamic State. His wife, Amal El-Wahabi, after a trial at the Old Bailey court, was jailed in November 2014 for funding his terrorism.

May 11. A mother and daughter, along with another woman, appeared at Westminster magistrates’ court on charges of plotting a jihadist attack near the British Parliament. Mina Dich, 43, her daughter Rizlaine Boular, 21, and Khawla Barghouthi, 20, are accused of plotting a random knife attack. Dich and Boular appeared in court wearing burkas covering their faces. Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot asked them to lift their veils to reveal their eyes when they were identified in the dock. Barghouthi wore a niqab with her face showing. All three are accused of conspiracy to murder.

May 12. Female drivers in Stockport were warned about a gang of young Muslim males who have been attempting to get into cars stopped at intersections. Several women in the area reported that they had been approached by the men while waiting for traffic lights to change.

May 13. A divorce practice that allows Muslim men instantly to terminate an Islamic marriage simply by repeating the word talaq, meaning divorce, three times to his wife, has been described as “really common” among Muslims in Britain, according to the Times. Women cannot use the method, known as “triple talaq.” Under civil law in Britain, Islamic marriages are not acknowledged, leaving women with little power to escape an unhappy or abusive marriage, or to defend their interests in court when a marriage breaks down. Women often face homelessness and a loss of financial support after divorce. Campaigners have called for an update to Marriage Act 1949 to demand the civil registration of all religious marriages. Christian, Jewish or Quaker marriages must be registered under the law, but Muslim, Hindu and Sikh unions do not. Qari Asim, an imam at the Leeds Makkah mosque, suggested that talaq should initially be uttered just once, and only spoken a second and third time after cooling-off periods of at least three months.

May 14. Mohan Singh, founder of the Sikh Awareness Society, said that Muslim grooming gangs have been allowed to prosper in Britain because the authorities are afraid they will be labelled racist if they speak out. In an interview with Katie Hopkins at LCB radio, Singh said that political correctness had allowed the gangs to succeed:

“I think it is due to political correctness, but it is also down to nobody wants to be called a racist…. Nobody really is grabbing the bull by the horns and saying ‘No, abuse is abuse.’ But they do not want to be labeled that we are after one community, we are targeting one community. We can see all the reports coming out Rotherham, the failings of the police, the failings of the local councilors. The whole system failed and that is what has been happening for the last 30 years. And it is PC. People are just too, too afraid to, you know, just too, too afraid to speak the truth.”

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Looking the Wrong Way on Iran by Shoshana Bryen

By on June 27th, 2017

How will Iraq get rid of the Iranians? Or will it? The chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Qassem Soleimani, has been seen several times in Iraq, most recently near the Syrian border, an indication that Iran has bigger plans than the liberation of Mosul.

The Sunni part of Iraq actually is an essential part of the land bridge being built from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. There is a second and equally compelling issue for Iran to the southwest: encircling Saudi Arabia in the water.

If Iran is allowed to solidify its Shiite Crescent and its naval obstructionism, American allies across the Middle East and North Africa will pay a heavy price.

We have been looking in the wrong direction. While the West was hoping temporarily to check Iran’s nuclear aspirations, Iran was making plans to advance on the ground and in the water — and the plans are unfolding nicely. For Iran.

After the U.S. withdrew from Iraq in 2011, large swaths of Iraqi territory were easily brought under Islamic State (ISIS) control, culminating in the proclamation in 2014 of “The Caliphate” with its seat in Mosul. Having denigrated its capabilities as “the JV team,” the Obama administration was desperate to get rid of ISIS, but the Iraqi army (trained and armed at a cost of $26 billion between 2006 and 2015 with another $1.6 billion spent in 2016) was unable to handle the job, even with American air power and Kurdish fighters as allies.

The Iraqi army has since been improved, but in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, Shiite “militias” have become America’s ally in the battle for Mosul. Some militias are Iraqi Arab Shiites and some are sponsored and commanded by Persian Shiite Iran. There is no love between the two, and certainly no love between any of the Shiite militias and the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi military. But the battle has largely gone against ISIS. Militias on one side and Iraqi forces on the other are recapturing territory amid evidence of outrageous human rights abuses against Iraqi civilians by all sides. At some point soon, Iraqis (army and militias), Iranians, Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and Americans will be eyeball-to-eyeball in Mosul. This run-in raises two questions:

Could Sunni Iraqi civilians prefer ISIS to Shiite militias, whether Iraqi or Iranian? If they do, Mosul may be liberated, but ISIS may still find havens from which to conduct a grinding guerrilla war.
How will Iraq get rid of the Iranians? Or will it? Some Iraqi Shiite militias have been loosely but legally incorporated into the Iraqi military; the Iranian ones have not. The chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Qassem Soleimani, has been seen several times in Iraq, most recently near the Syrian border, an indication that Iran has bigger plans than the liberation of Mosul.

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Megyn Kelly’s NBC Show Continues to Tank By Peter Barry Chowka

By on June 27th, 2017

The ratings for the latest episode of Megyn Kelly’s prime time Sunday night NBC program are in, and the bad news continues for the former Fox News channel star. Kelly’s June 25 show, her fourth outing on NBC, was the lowest rated one yet. The program came in third in the ratings, beaten by an ABC rerun of America’s Funniest Home Videos and by CBS’s 60 Minutes. Kelly had only 400,000 viewers in the preferred demographic (viewers 18-49) while ABC and CBS each had 700,000. (On a typical night – June 22, 2016 – when she was on Fox News at 9 PM ET/PT, Kelly had almost that many viewers in the news demo – ages 25-54 – 384,000.) The total viewers of the three top broadcast channels during Kelly’s hour on June 25, 2017, 7-8 PM ET/PT, were CBS 7.2 million, ABC 3.9 million, and NBC 3.4 million.

Megyn Kelly

Kelly’s interview guest on Sunday June 25 was J. D. Vance, the author of the New York Times best-selling nonfiction book (47 weeks and counting on the list), Hillbilly Elegy. The book has put Vance, a native of Appalachia and a graduate of Yale Law School, on the trendy map for his ability to explain the beliefs of Americans in flyover country (a.k.a. Trump supporters) – who have been variously described elsewhere as “deplorables” who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” – to the cognoscenti on the coasts.

J. D. Vance on Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly

A number of mainstream media outlets increasingly appear to be lying in wait for Kelly to fail. An article in Breitbart links to a selection of them.

Kelly’s terrible ratings have led to many questions about her marketability and competence.

A network executive reportedly told CNN that NBC’s “fundamental mistake” was thinking Kelly was a “superstar” while Variety noted that Kelly’s star is ”dimmer than ever.” The Boston Globe eviscerated Kelly for being a “poseur” who lacks the “acumen” and “magnetism” to succeed at NBC News. Variety also pointed out that Kelly has pretty much alienated everyone in just three weeks at NBC.

NBC News has reportedly been “freaking out” over the“ratings disaster” that Kelly is turning out to be. Her ratings have been so terrible a New York radio host said NBC may be looking to unload Kelly and even ask Fox News to take her back.

But a high-ranking Fox News official told Breitbart News last week that there would be “no way” Kelly could crawl back to the network if such a scenario occurred and emphasized that Kelly simply would “not be welcomed back.”

“Come Hither:” Megyn Kelly Interviews Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, Russia June 2017

Kelly’s first NBC show, on June 4 with Vladimir Putin, was her highest-rated program to date, but it lost one million viewers – over 15 percent of its total audience – in its second half hour after the Putin interview ended. That episode came in second to ABC’s broadcast of an NBA Finals basketball game.

Kelly’s third show, on June 18 with Alex Jones, was also a ratings disappointment and a full-blown public relations disaster. Any positive critiques of that episode, according to Newsmax, were accountable more to the efforts of the show’s editors (to make Alex Jones look bad and salvage the show’s reputation among liberal elitists) than to “Kelly’s performance in the interview.”

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CNN deletes, retracts story linking Trump and Russia by Rob Tornoe

By on June 27th, 2017

On Thursday evening, CNN investigative reporter Thomas Frank published a potentially explosive report involving an investigation of a Russian investment fund with potential ties to several associates of President Donald Trump.But by Friday night, the story was removed from CNN’s website and all links were scrubbed from the network’s social media accounts.“That story did not meet CNN’s editorial standards and has been retracted,” CNN said in an editors note posted in place of the story. “Links to the story have been disabled.”

Neither Frank or CNN immediately responded to requests for comment, and a spokesperson for the Senate Intelligence Committee wasn’t available to comment.

Frank, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2012 while at USA Today, had reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee was investigating a “$10-billion Russian investment fund whose chief executive met with a member of President Donald Trump’s transition team four days before Trump’s inauguration.”

In addition to retracting its story, CNN also apologized to Anthony Scaramucci, an adviser to Trump during the presidential campaign and a member of his transition team’s executive committee, who was mentioned in the story as having met Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) that the network said is overseen by Vnesheconombank, a state-run bank that is currently under U.S. sanctions.

According to the report, the meeting between Scarmucci and Dmitriev could have included the issue of sanctions being lifted, but a spokesperson for the RDIF told Sputnik News, a state-run Russian news channel, that the fund is not a part of Vnesheconombank.

“RDIF always operates in full compliance with relevant regulations and legislation and its operations do not violate sanctions,” the spokesperson said.

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NYT op-ed: Trump assassination fantasies ‘a social necessity’ By David Zukerman

By on June 27th, 2017

Howard Jacobson, in his June 24 New York Times op-ed piece, “Why We Must Mock Trump,” began by referring to the anti-Trump production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in New York’s Central Park, as proof “that plays retain the power to shock and enrage.” Do productions of “Julius Caesar,” played straight, generally “shock and enrage”? I don’t think so. And this production is not straight Shakespeare – not with reference to President Trump’s apartment on “Fifth Avenue.”

At the end of his column, Jacobson asserted, “Derision is a social necessity.” Okay. Imagine, say, Kathy Griffin holding what looks like the severed head of…Hillary Clinton. Would Mr. Jacobson write a piece called “Why We Must Mock Hillary Clinton” – or would he denounce this as offensive, beyond the pale, an action to be condemned? And if the severed head resembled Barack Obama, does anyone doubt that a media firestorm would ensue, protesting this inexcusable example of wishful thinking on the part of a vicious racist who should be prosecuted for hate to the fullest extent of the law – and more?

Mr. Jacobson acknowledged the absence of humor in communist regimes. He continued: “The more monocratic the regime, the less it can bear criticism. And of all criticism, satire – with its single ambition of ridiculing vanity and delusion – is the most potent.” But where is the sense of humor among our anti-Trump leftists? Donald Trump makes a sarcastic comment about Russian hacking – suggesting that if they have emails on Democrats, why, let’s have them – and the left rushes to denounce Trump as a Putin agent. Are leftists, in giving us images of a dead Donald Trump offering satire or wishful thinking?

Mark Twain once wrote: “Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.” What personality on the left, political or otherwise, would Mr. Jacobson allow us to be irreverent to? My guess is that we’d be accused of hate speech if we dared be irreverent toward a leftist.

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Germany and Islam By Mike Konrad

By on June 27th, 2017

Germany has a bizarre historical connection with Islam that lies beneath much of the present day crisis in Europe. One could argue that these connections are just the product of historical coincidences, but with Germany the coincidences seem to add up regularly.

When one studies the age of European imperialism, Germany came late to the game, almost as an afterthought. Bismarck, for all his authoritarian faults, felt that imperialism would do Germany no good, and wanted no part of it. He was overridden by public opinion, and Bismarck’s policy was later repudiated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted Germany to take her “Place in the Sun.”

Imperialism would not have destroyed Germany, per se; smaller and weaker nations such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and even backward Spain all had empires.

But what set Germany apart was a concerted love of Arabs and Islam. There was something deeper and darker to this than mere German MachtPolitik. One of his first acts, upon assuming power as Kaiser, was to visit the Ottoman Empire in 1889, He wore a fez. He offered to arm the Turks.

Sultan Mehmet V greets Kaiser Wilhelm upon his arrival in Constantinople

The Kaiser’s Islamic enthusiasm was fired by an 1889 visit to Turkey, which Bismarck opposed on the grounds that it would gratuitously alarm the Russians. Wilhelm met the murderous Sultan Abdul Hamid II and enjoyed the sinuous gyrations of the Circassian dancers in his Constantinople harem. – New York Review of Books

The Turks were astounded. The Ottoman Empire was on a death watch, and the only reason the European powers did not carve Turkey up is because they feared an intra-Christian war over the pieces. Now, the Kaiser was promising to make Islamic Turkey great again. Kaiser Wilhelm had resurrected the Islamic corpse.

It would only get worse. In 1898, during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the Kaiser made the insane insinuation that were he not already Christian, he would be a Muslim.

A later visit to Jerusalem [in 1898], then under the auspices of the same flattering sultan, left the impressionable Kaiser declaring that, had he arrived agnostic, “I certainly would have turned Mahometan!” Soon the Kaiser was styling himself “Hajji Wilhelm”, the Protector of Muslims. – The Express

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Peter Smith: Knavish Stupidy of the First Degree

By on June 27th, 2017

Madness prevails. Cheered on by green zealots, governments have accepted a tenuous theory based on black-box models of no proven worth. As carpetbaggers rejoice with charlatans, those who can least afford it are bled dry for what was, until recently, cheap as chips: electricity.

It’s five o’clock on Sunday afternoon in Sydney in winter. By any reckoning Sydney doesn’t get that cold. But I have been at my computer for a couple of hours, with three layers on top and a beanie, and have been cold the whole of that time. When I was married the heater would have been on. Women sensibly don’t like putting up with cold. Me, I’m the son of my father who was always concerned about power bills.

He had reason to be concerned; big power bills seriously dented the household budget. Mind you, I can’t remember a time when a coal fire was not heating the living room on a cold afternoon. That’s progress for you; from warm to cold in the space of childhood to older age. I’ve finally just switched on my gas heater. Ah! The luxury of warmth will soon envelop the room.

Now, for a moment, imagine (if you have to) that you live in, say, Melbourne or Tasmania or Canberra and it’s a cold winter afternoon. Now imagine you are poor and must account for every dollar. Power bills matter to you.

You sit as a single mother with your young children wrapped in clothes and blankets. You’re old and clutch a hot-water bottle. You’re a coal power station worker thrown on the scrap heap, pacing the room, distraught at no longer being able to afford to keep your family warm.

Weep not at these Dickensian scenes for all is not bleak in each house. The poor find consolation in knowing they’re helping to save the planet by keeping their heaters off. An inspirational picture of Al Gore hangs over their cold mantelpieces. Big Al watches over them from his private gas-guzzling jet.

Meanwhile in Point Piper and Toorak the deeply-green Smug and Swank families are enjoying the warmth supplied by under-floor heating throughout every room. But there are no double standards here. They are renewal-energy junkies to their cores. They have taxpayer-subsidised solar panels fitted across their vast roofs, which often earn them a rebate for supplying power to the grid. True, managing this reverse flow of power increases power bills for others, but that’s not their fault.

Madness prevails. Cheered on by green zealots, governments have accepted as settled a tenuous scientific theory, based almost entirely on black-box model predictions which have been seriously astray. If that is not enough, cheered on by carpetbaggers and snake-oil merchants, intermittent, unreliable, ineffective and cripplingly costly renewal power has been foisted on working-class populations scared into compliance.

On the flimsiest basis, the world has been turned upside down. Power bills have soared. Our governments and politicians have shown themselves to be as susceptible to superstition as those in bygone ages who sought the future in the entrails of animals. And then there are those in the broader community who simply accept any old rope handed down from authority. Give them the Little Red Book and they would have been fodder for Mao.

I need to confess to an evolving mind. I entertained a small possibility that the received wisdom of catastrophic man-made global warming might be right, though the remedies being applied were totally misconceived (to some extent I was in sync with the Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lomborg positions). Now, the more I read, the more I am tending to believe that it is codswallop from start to finish.

Here, I think, is fairly persuasive scientific comment from Richard Lindzen, eminent Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT:

The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science’.
– Thoughts on the Public Discourse over Climate Change

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