RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://carolineglick.com/john-bolton-warns-u-s-wants-hezbollah-out-of-syria/

U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that the Trump administration insists “Hezbollah forces in Syria have to go back to Lebanon.”

In a wide-ranging conversation following several days of meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense officials, Amb. Bolton discussed the U.S. position on Iranian and Hezbollah operations in Syria and the threat they pose to Israel and to U.S. interests in the region.

Syria and Iranian deployment in Syria, he said, dominated President Donald Trump’s discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last month. That came after Netanyahu had previously expressed grave concern regarding the threat Iran’s entrenchment in Syria poses to Israel.

In Bolton’s words: “Syria was the main topic of discussion during President Trump’s meeting with President Putin in Helsinki. This was the case both during their meeting with their advisors and during their one-on-one meeting. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s discussion of the issue during his phone call with the president earlier that week and during his visit with Putin during the FIFA [World Cup] tournament [on July 12] contributed to making Syria such an important issue.”

During his press conference with President Trump, Putin prompted concerns from critics about his intentions regarding the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12909/macron-partition-france

The first legislative rider abolished the obligation of religious associations to declare themselves as lobbying groups — a measure that clearly opens the way for entities such as Muslim Brotherhood to lobby Members of Parliament without leaving a trace.

Is it, however, the business of the secular State of France to organize Muslims and train “republican” imams?

The tradition in France ever since the 1905 secularism law — one accepted by all religions except Islam — is that religion may not to impose its rules on secular society. Now it is France that must adapt to Islam.

The big question is: Who will be heading and managing this new framework? Will it be the Muslim Brotherhood, the most powerful organization, which controls more than 2,000 mosques in France? Or a young guard of Muslim technocrats close to the president but with no ties to mosques, imams and the organized Muslim community in general?

In a confessional book, “A President Shouldn’t Say That…”, published in 2016, a few months before the 2017 French presidential election, France’s then President François Hollande admitted that France has “a problem with Islam. No one doubts it,” he wrote. He wrote as well that France has a problem with veiled women in public and with mass immigration. Then he added: “How can one avoid a partition? Because that is still what is happening: a partition”.

The “partition” about which Hollande was talking was the partition of France — one part for Muslims and another for non-Muslims.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-upheaval-down-under-1535151472

Australia’s ruling Liberal Party deposed another Prime Minister on Friday, its second internal coup in three years, and with an election approaching the hope is that new PM Scott Morrison is the charm. Malcolm Turnbull had led a coup against the admirable if rough-edged Tony Abbott in 2015, but Mr. Turnbull’s poll numbers have sagged even as he clashed with the party’s conservatives.

A former investment banker from the Sydney suburbs, Mr. Turnbull deserves credit for slowing the growth of spending and cutting individual income taxes. He had help from Mr. Morrison, a 50-year-old former tourism executive, who has been Treasurer in the Turnbull cabinet, the equivalent of U.S. Treasury Secretary.

But Mr. Turnbull contradicted his tax-cutting message with a large levy on banks. And he had the bad luck to contend with a record drought, a constitutional crisis over whether dual citizens could serve as legislators, and a scandal over Chinese political donations to Australian parliamentarians.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/australias_prime_minister_malcolm_turnbull_out_of_office_over_foisting_expensive_green_power_on_his_nation.html

Devotion to the global warming fraud has driven from office the head of government of a major democracy. Facing a no confidence vote from the Liberal Party (which is actually what passes for a conservative party in Australia – the Labor Party is the leftist party Down Under), Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull resigned.

Turnbull had lost 40 to 45 what the Aussies call a “spill motion” to short-circuit a leadership ballot in the party. The party then chose Scott Morrison as new party leader and therefore prime minister in their coalition with the National Party, which holds 16 seats and represents rural areas.

John McMahon comments from Australia:

Scott Morrison was the treasurer under Turnbull. With Morrison as prime minister, the leftist policies of Turnbull will doubtlessly continue. The vote was close, being 45-40, meaning that Peter Dutton was only three votes away from being P.M.

Thus, the “war” between the true moderates, called the right by the leftists, and the so-called “moderates,” who are in effect leftist liberals, will continue. There is the very real probability that in the very near future, possibly after the next federal election, that there will be a formal split in the Liberal Party.

Josh Frydenberg has been elected as deputy leader of the Liberals (remember: the position of deputy prime minister is reserved for the leader of the National Party in terms of the Coalition Agreement).

Josh Frydenberg’s mother, Erika Strausz, was a Hungarian Jew born in 1943 who arrived in Australia in 1950 as a stateless child from a refugee camp after escaping from the Holocaust.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/art-laffers-chinese-curve-ball/

God bless Arthur B. Laffer, the author of the eponymous curve. If statesmen are hedgehogs (with one big idea) or foxes (with many little ideas), Art is the mayor of Hedgehog City. His big idea is that lower taxes give you more economic growth. Along with my former business partner Jude Wanniski, Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, and a handful of other economists and publicists, Art sold the idea of dramatic tax cuts to Ronald Reagan and thus stood midwife to the greatest U.S. economic boom of the past century. All of them were the intellectual children of the great Robert Mundell, but that’s another story. Years ago I had the honor to write the occasional paper for Art’s consulting service. He’s an American treasure.

Art had one magnificent idea. I took his economic service when I ran research groups at Credit Suisse and Bank of America, and he stopped by once a year for a talk. In 2001 he stopped by at Credit Suisse. American manufacturing jobs were disappearing and America’s trade deficit was exploding, but Art wasn’t fazed. Americans shouldn’t manufacture anything, Art averred: We would do the design, like Apple, and foreigners would dirty their hands making the actual goods.

In 2007 he was still bullish on U.S. stocks. I told him that the financial system was about to crash (at the time I was working in the bowels of the hedge fund world, manufacturing some of the toxic waste that would blow up in 2008). He thought I was mad; after all, taxes were low and the Republicans were in office. How could anything go wrong? On July 18, 2007, I appeared on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC show and warned of a “trillion-dollar AAA asset bubble” that would bring down the banking system. Larry didn’t believe me, either.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/09/10/chinas-technology-war-with-america/Nothing less than global dominance is at stake

‘Self-determination and innovation is the unavoidable path . . . to climb to the world’s top as a leading player in technology. We [should] hold innovative development tightly in our own hands. . . . The situation is pressing. The challenges are pressing. The mission upon us is pressing.”

With those words, spoken at the opening of the joint annual conference of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering in May, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party declared war on the United States. Not an actual war, of course, or even a cold war like the one we fought against the Soviet Union. No, this is a war for control of key sectors of the global economy, as laid out in Xi’s “Made in China 2025” initiative at the 19th Party Congress last October: a struggle for high-tech supremacy over everything from robotics and advanced telecommunications to artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and the quantum computers of the future.

The stakes of this conflict are in many ways as serious as those of the race for nuclear supremacy during the Cold War. It isn’t being fought over military hardware such as Minuteman missiles or even today’s stealth fighters and nuclear submarines — although the ultimate utility of such weapons will depend on who finally wins this high-tech race. The technologies in question are ostensibly civilian: cell phones, microchips, supercomputers, and the coming Internet of Things, as well as basic research and development in areas such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Yet these are precisely the technologies that will power and network the world’s most advanced weapons systems — and, especially in the case of quantum technology, become weapons systems themselves.