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Come to Me, My Mélenchony Baby By David P. Goldman

Posted By on April 22nd, 2017

The surge in support for ultra-leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon to 19% in the French presidential polls — from just 11.4% on March 13 — shows how dangerous the French political situation has become.

Most of Mélenchon’s gain came at the expense of the candidate of the governing Socialist Party, Benoit Hamon, who shows less than 8% support in the latest polls. When the ruling party’s candidate polls in single digits, something nasty is at work.

With 25% undecided before Sunday’s first round elections, the jump in support for a candidate who calls for a 100% tax rate on the rich indicates a nasty polarization in French society. There are two risks. One is that National Front leader Marine Le Pen and Mélenchon win the first round, giving France a choice between an extreme right and extreme left who agree about leaving the European Union. Both also are friendly with Moscow. The other is that Le Pen will face either the traditional conservative Francois Fillon or the synthetic centrist Emmanuel Macron, with the likelihood that the left will support Le Pen rather than — as in the past — obediently align itself with the center in order to defeat the National Front. A Le Pen victory would mean the end of Europe’s institutions as we know them.

The “centrist” candidate, former economics minister Emmanuel Macron, is a 39-year-old technocrat whose principle attraction is the fact that he hasn’t ever run for office and is not tainted by association with the existing parties. The default scenario has Le Pen and Macron winning the first round, and the body politic uniting behind Macron to stop Le Pen in the second round. That could go pear-shaped.

Macron is pure bubble; if the bubble pops, right and left could unite with some elements of the Establishment to put Le Pen in power. She is the only candidate to warn about the danger to French society posed by Muslim migrants. But she also wants to take France out of the European Union, which would mean the end of the EU. The main winner in that case would be Putin. If I were French I would at least consider voting for Le Pen; as an American, I hope she loses as a matter of pure American strategic interest. The best outcome from an American standpoint would be the victory of the conservative Catholic free-marketeer Francois Fillon.

There are two sources of French rage against the country’s complacent and corrupt Establishment. The first is security. As Soeren Kern noted at the Gatestone Institute April 18:

An Ifop poll found that 71% of French people believe the security situation in France has deteriorated during the past five years; 93% believe the terrorist threat remains high; 60% said they do not feel safe anywhere in the country; and 69% believe there are not enough police and gendarmes. The poll also found that 88% support deporting foreigners convicted of serious crimes, and 81% support terminating social assistance to parents of repeat offenders.

A quarter of French teenagers are Muslims, and one-third of them hold fundamentalist views.

The second is economic. Youth unemployment in France stands at 22.4%. Globalization has not been kind to French industry (unlike German industry, which dominates key niches in manufacturing).

MEDIA Comments turned off

Trump Derangement Syndrome sends NYT’s David Brooks off the deep end By David Zukerman

Posted By on April 22nd, 2017

Once upon a time, David Brooks was considered the house conservative at the New York Times. But in his April 21 New York Times column he put President Donald J. Trump on a list of “strong men” that includes Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Mr. Brooks noted that Erdogan has “dismantle[d] democratic institutions and replace[d] them with majoritarian dictatorship.” The Times columnist went on to assert: “While running for office, Donald Trump violated every norm of statesmanship built up over these many centuries….” Mr. Brooks, however, does not elaborate, explain or elucidate the nature of the alleged violations.

But when it comes to discussion of President Trump, Never Trumps like David Brooks feel no need to place their anti-Trump views on a foundation of fact. For Trump-haters, the truth is in the accusation. And so, comparing President Trump to Turkey’s Erdogan, Mr. Brooks does not set forth the democratic institutions dismantled by Mr. Trump, nor does he provide evidence of the “majoritarian dictatorship” that was constructed during the first 100 days of the Trump administration. How could he, there being no such dismantling, no such dictatorship here?

Mr. Brooks recognizes “the collapse of liberal values at home,” citing “fragile thugs who call themselves students [who] shout down and abuse speakers in a weekly basis.” But are these illiberals to be found under the banner of Trumpism — or under the banner of the totalitarianism of left?

Mr. Brooks goes on to cite a study suggesting that only 57 percent of “young Americans” (age range not provided) are committed to democracy, compared to “91 percent in the 1930’s….” What is the source of this declining commitment to democracy: student Republicans, or students influenced by leftist professors? Mr. Brooks does not say. For David Brooks, apparently, critical thinking about political trends does not require precise analysis; anti-Trump innuendo will do.

I challenge David Brooks to point to any instance of political repression attributable, today, to conservatives on college campuses. I challenge David Brooks — or any of the Trump-detesting columnists at The New York Times (and aren’t they all?) — to explain how it is, that if President Trump is the American version of Kim Jong-un, the New York Times is still publishing?

The threat to the American spirit of liberty is not to be found among conservatives, or in the corridors of today’s White House. The threats to democracy, to free speech, to the free flow of information, are to be found on the left side of the political divide, from neo-totalitarians who, like the execrable Howard Dean, would limit free speech to persons who agree with the political biases of leftists — with the encouragement of Never Trumps in the media like David Brooks, who lack the ability to distinguish a duly-elected American president from the brutal dictator of a totalitarian state.

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Mainstream media bungle Russia…again By D.H. Miles

Posted By on April 22nd, 2017

It is predictable, if not horrifying, that leftist-elitist Time magazine would print an article on the dangers of uranium falling into the wrong hands – and nowhere mention Bill and Hillary Clinton’s role in enabling the Russians to lay claim to 20% of American uranium from mines in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Texas.

Did the editors at Time forget that it was Hillary’s State Department who granted approval of the uranium sale to a Canadian firm middleman who then sold it in 2009 to the Russians in Kazakhstan – the world’s second largest holder of uranium?

Was it sheer coincidence that at about the same time the Clinton Foundation received $145 million in donations from the Canadian company, Bill Clinton received a nice speaking fee of $500,000 from Putin and the Russians for enabling the deal?

Finally, the Clinton-enabled transfer of uranium from the U.S. to Kazakhstan (controlled by Putin since 2010) is actually underscored by the article that Putin released to Pravda on January 22, 2013. In open mockery – for it was the month Hillary was leaving the State Department – Putin taunted Hillary (and the Obama administration) before the entire world by announcing that Russia now controlled 46% of the world’s uranium and the U.S. only 3%.

The headline, however, was doctored by the U.S. It did not read, as reported, “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World,” but rather (in the original Russian):

Putin’s Open Mock of Hillary: “Russia Controls Energy Weapons”

Can it be that Time’s interests are not to educate, enlighten, and warn Americans about terrorist dirty bomb threats to our country and to our soldiers abroad – but rather to conceal these threats from Americans? Does P.C. stand for “political censorship” of truth?

Enough said.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Iranian Nuclear Agreement Should Not Be Extended By Sarah N. Stern

Posted By on April 22nd, 2017

As I write these words, the Iranian nuclear agreement that was brokered by the Obama administration is sitting on President Trump’s desk. It requires presidential certification of compliance every 90 days, and the president is deliberating on whether or not to certify.

My answer is an emphatic, unqualified, and resounding “No”.

Firstly, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear regulatory agency, has already certified that Iran has been out of compliance with the deal. The most recent IAEA report specifies that Iran has already exceeded its limit of heavy water under the agreement. Heavy water can use unrefined uranium as a fuel, shortcutting the expensive process of enriching uranium to rapidly produce a nuclear bomb. This is happening, as we speak, in Arak.

Beyond that, since the deal was struck in July of 2015, Iran has conducted as many as 14 missile tests, in brazen defiance of UN Resolution 2231.

Then there is the process of verification, which is inherently flawed. Anything that Iran deems as a “military site” is, according to Iranian leadership, off limits to inspectors. These include those “military sites” which we don’t even know about. That means that the IAEA’s means of obtaining critically important information is via a letter certifying compliance written by the government of Iran. That is akin to releasing murderers and rapists from prison and having them certify in a letter that they are no longer committing murder and rape.

And the Iranians gave their own soil samples from Parchin, where explosive nuclear tests took place. Senator Jim Risch of Idaho compared this to the NFL allowing a football player to mail in his own urine samples as part of a drug test.

Thanks to Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and CIA Director and former Congressman Mike Pompeo, we now know of the existence of multiple secret side deals made with the Iranian regime.

We know that the deal was not even allowed to be voted upon as a treaty because Mr. Obama made an end-run around the U.S. Constitution, as well as around the Congress, by going first to the UN, and then presenting it to Congress as a fait accompli.

We also know that the deal that the Majlis, the Iranian Parliament, voted on, was more than 1000 pages long, while the agreement that we saw in the United States was only 159 pages long.

The reason the agreement is so utterly flawed is that President Obama was hell-bent on securing this deal as his foreign policy legacy. He basically refused to acknowledge the Iranian government for what it is: an apocalyptic, messianic regime that believes that destroying Israel and America will bring about the coming of the 12th Imam, (the Shia Messiah). Equipping this sort of regime with nuclear weapons presents a clear and present danger to the survival of the United States, Israel, and to the Sunni Arab nations, as well as much of Europe.

We recall that President Obama began his first administration on an apology tour to the Muslim world, and had a difficult time articulating a belief in American exceptionalism. And we know that even until his last day in office, Obama vehemently refused to articulate that radical Islamic terrorism exists.

Mr. Obama and his ilk sees all the worlds actors as morally equal. There is no distinction between those who would obliterate entire innocent populations so that their theology or political entity would reign supreme, and those who would never even entertain such a thought. Such a world view makes one incapable of acknowledging that certain nations, such as the United States, Israel, Britain, etc., are morally capable of possessing a nuclear bomb, because they are responsible enough to use it only for morally correct reasons, and other nations, like Iran, are not.

We know that the Obama administration had absolutely no qualms about deceiving the American people about Iran’s intentions. We recall that Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor, Ben Rhodes, in a May 5, 2016 article in the New York Times magazine, openly boasted of manufacturing the belief that Iran’s new leadership was more “moderate,” and thus willing to make, and keep, a nuclear deal with the U.S. and the West.

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Russian Military Planes Crowd the U.S. for a Fourth Day U.S., Canadian fighters intercept long-range bombers By Ben Kesling

Posted By on April 22nd, 2017

WASHINGTON—Russia flew long-range combat aircraft near American airspace for the fourth consecutive day, the Pentagon said Friday, marking the first such string of incursions since 2014, but prompting little concern from the White House.

American and Canadian jet fighters intercepted a pair of Russian “Bear” long-range bombers in international airspace near Alaska on Thursday, said John Cornelio, a spokesman for North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad. The interception was the latest incident between American and Russian aircraft, coming amid tension between the two powers over Syria and other issues.

At a press briefing Friday, White House Spokesman Sean Spicer said the administration is aware of the situation but said it isn’t unusual.

“As long as those are conducted in accordance with international protocols and rules, then that’s obviously — but we monitor everything,” Mr. Spicer said. “Any further comment on that I would refer to the Department of Defense.”

U.S. military officials declined to speculate about Russia’s motives for the flights, which came amid an increase in tension between the two countries following U.S. cruise missile strikes earlier this month targeting Syria’s military aircraft. Syria and Russia are allies.

Asked to comment on the flights, Russia’s U.S. embassy pointed to a Defense Ministry statement carried earlier this week in government-controlled media.

“All flights of the Aerospace Force were carried out and are carried out in strict accordance with the international rules of using the airspace over the neutral waters without violation of borders of other states,” the statement said.

In the latest incident, two U.S. F-22 jets along with two Canadian CF-18 Hornets, scrambled Thursday to meet a pair of Russian Tu-95 bombers which were in international airspace near the coasts of Alaska and Canada, Mr. Cornelio said.

“Those aircraft identified and intercepted two Russian bombers and stayed with them until they departed the identification zones,” he said. “It’s the fourth day in a row that we’ve seen Russian activity in our air defense identification zone.” CONTINUED AT SITE

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Ehsanullah Amiri and Jessica Donati:Taliban Fighters Infiltrate Afghan Army Base, Kill More Than 100 Attack in northern Balkh province came during afternoon prayers See note please

Posted By on April 22nd, 2017

Taliban “fighters”….and “militants” ????? They are terrorists….and barbarians and savages…..rsk
KABUL—Taliban fighters entered the Afghan army’s regional headquarters for the north hidden in military vehicles on Friday and went on a shooting spree that killed more than 100 people, Afghan and U.S. officials said Saturday, in the latest sign of an emboldened insurgency that threatens the central government.

The attack involved at least eight Taliban militants who caught the soldiers off-guard during Friday prayers, when many were unarmed in a mosque on the base or having lunch at a nearby dining facility.

“Attackers blew up a military vehicle full of explosives at first security check post of the compound,” an Afghan military official said. “After that, they got into the compound in a second military vehicle.”

The operation to clear the attackers from the army’s northern headquarters in Balkh province, one of the more peaceful parts of the country, took several hours, as Afghan special forces drove out attackers holed up in buildings on the base.

“The Afghan commandos came and saved the day,” a coalition official said on condition of anonymity, adding that 130 soldiers had been killed in the attack. “Truth has to always be told out of respect to those lost.”

The Afghan army denied figures provided by the coalition, saying fewer than a dozen had been killed, while provincial officials accused the army of trying to coverup the scale of the incident.

Afghan and foreign officials similarly suspect the Afghan army underreported the number of casualties in last month’s deadly military hospital attack, in which at least 50 people were killed when militants stormed the facility disguised as doctors. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Paris Attack and Revelations About Gunman Jolt French Election Candidates in Sunday presidential vote seize on Champs-Élysées shooting and finding that attacker Cheurfi had been investigatedBy Stacy Meichtry, William Horobin and Joshua Robinson

Posted By on April 22nd, 2017

PARIS—Two months before Karim Cheurfi stepped onto the Champs-Élysées with an automatic rifle French investigators questioned him on suspicion he was plotting an attack on police officers, according to law-enforcement officials.

The revelation Friday that authorities missed this opportunity to stop the 39-year-old Frenchman before he fired on police the previous day amplified the impact of the shooting. In killing a police officer, Cheurfi sent shock waves through France’s closely fought presidential election.

“Fundamentally, the target is our democracy, our cohesion,” said Emmanuel Macron, the 39-year-old former investment banker who is in the running as a staunch defender of Europe.

With no clear front-runners in place, candidates scrapped their scheduled public appearances and took to the airwaves Friday, seizing on the Champs-Élysées attack as a moment that could tip the scales of an election with the future of Europe hanging in the balance.

The French will elect a president in two rounds of voting on April 23 and May 7; the result could reshape the European Union. WSJ’s Niki Blasina discusses the top candidates. Photo: Getty Images.

Conservative François Fillon vowed to fight terror with an “iron fist” by hiring more police and prison officers and stripping French terrorists of their citizenship. Marine Le Pen —the far-right National Front candidate who wants to withdraw France from the European Union, its common currency and NATO—called for an immediate lockdown of France’s borders and pledged, if elected, to detain or deport people on the country’s terror watch lists.

“Wars are won only with consistency and coherency. The ruthless war we must wage against Islamism doesn’t escape this principle,” Ms. Le Pen said.

Before the attack, the election was already on a knife’s edge with a crowded field of mainstream and antiestablishment candidates jockeying for position as voters prepared to cast ballots on Sunday. The top two finishers will head to a runoff on May 7, unless any candidate garners more than 50% of Sunday’s vote.

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The Challenge of Our Disruptive Era It is arguably the largest economic transformation in recorded history. Can our politics adapt? Senator (R) Ben Sasse *****

Posted By on April 22nd, 2017

Mr. Sasse, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Nebraska. This is adapted form a speech he delivered to Colorado’s Steamboat Institute. He is a conservative, intellectual star in the GOP rsk

I am a historian, and that usually means I’m a killjoy. When people say we’re at a unique moment in history, the historian’s job is to put things in perspective by pointing out that there is more continuity than discontinuity, that we are not special, that we think our moment is unique because we are narcissists and we’re at this moment. But what we are going through now—the past 20 or 30 years, and the next 20 or 30 years—really is historically unique. It is arguably the largest economic disruption in recorded human history. And our politics are not yet up to the challenge.

There have been four kinds of economies: hunter-gatherers, agriculture (settled agrarian farmers in their villages), industry (mass urbanization and immigration), and whatever we’re entering now. Sometimes we call it the information-technology economy, the knowledge economy, the service economy, the digital economy. Sociologists call it the “postindustrial” economy, which is another way of saying “we don’t have anything to call it.”

What it really means is that jobs are no longer permanent. It used to be that you did whatever your parents and grandparents had done. Hunter-gatherers and farmers never even thought about it. There was no such thing as job choice, only becoming 7 and 10 and 12 years old and taking on more responsibilities to earn your keep.

Industrialization brought a massive disruption. At the end of the Civil War, 86% of Americans still worked on the farm. By the end of World War II, 80 years later, 60% of Americans lived in cities. One of the most disruptive times in American history was the Progressive Era. And what was Progressivism? Not much more than the response of trying to remake society in an era of mass immigration, industrialization and rising cities. But it turned out not to be as disruptive as people feared, because once you got to the city, you got a new job, which you’d probably have until death or retirement. And the social capital that used to be in the village tended to be replicated in urban ethnic neighborhoods.

What’s happening now is wholly different. The rise of suburbia and exurbia, and the hollowing out of mediating institutions, is an echo of the changing nature of work. In the 1970s, it was common for a primary breadwinner to spend his career at one company, but now workers switch jobs and industries at a more rapid pace. We are entering an era in which we’re going to have to create a society of lifelong learners. We’re going to have to create a culture in which people in their 40s and 50s, who see their industry disintermediated and their jobs evaporate, get retrained and have the will and the chutzpah and the tools and the social network to get another job. Right now that doesn’t happen enough.

Think about qualitative survey data—polls that ask, “What are the top three or four things you’re worried about?” Ten years ago, nowhere on the top 10 of that list was anything about prescription drugs. Today opioids are a major concern. People are scared about drug abuse in largely middle-aged populations. That’s a symptom of the economic disruption.

I don’t mean to be exceedingly pessimistic. There are plenty of wonderful opportunities for American families and innovators in this new economy. For one thing, there are fewer middlemen complicating transactions instead of adding value. So we’re going to get a lot more visibility and transparency into product offerings, and consumers are going to get higher-quality and lower-cost stuff.

In other industries, we don’t know how to price for things that turn out to matter quite a lot. Think of the news media. We are going from a world in which we had too much central control by a few large organizations, to one in which everybody, everywhere can deluge us with information. What is likely to happen next is not a lot more higher-quality journalism. We’re going to have higher-volume journalism, and some of it will be good. A free, thriving, and independent press is critical to self-government, so this is a big challenge.

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Those ‘Snowflakes’ Have Chilling Effects Even Beyond the Campus Academic intolerance is the product of ideological aggression, not a psycho By Heather Mac Donaldlogical disorder.

Posted By on April 22nd, 2017

Student thuggery against non-leftist viewpoints is in the news again. Agitators at Claremont McKenna College, Middlebury College, and the University of California’s Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses have used threats, brute force and sometimes criminal violence over the past two months in efforts to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and me from speaking. As commencement season approaches, expect “traumatized” students to try to disinvite any remotely conservative speaker, an effort already under way at Notre Dame with regard to Vice President Mike Pence.

This soft totalitarianism is routinely misdiagnosed as primarily a psychological disorder. Young “snowflakes,” the thinking goes, have been overprotected by helicopter parents, and now are unprepared for the trivial conflicts of ordinary life.

“The Coddling of the American Mind,” a 2015 article in the Atlantic, was the most influential treatment of the psychological explanation. The movement to penalize certain ideas is “largely about emotional well-being,” argued Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and Jonathan Haidt of New York University. The authors took activists’ claims of psychological injury at face value and proposed that freshmen orientations teach students cognitive behavioral therapy so as to preserve their mental health in the face of differing opinions.

But if risk-averse child-rearing is the source of the problem, why aren’t heterosexual white male students demanding “safe spaces”? They had the same kind of parents as the outraged young women who claim to be under lethal assault from the patriarchy. And they are the targets of a pervasive discourse that portrays them as the root of all evil. Unlike any other group on a college campus, they are stigmatized with impunity, blamed for everything from “rape culture” to racial oppression.

Campus intolerance is at root not a psychological phenomenon but an ideological one. At its center is a worldview that sees Western culture as endemically racist and sexist. The overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people within the ever-growing list of official victim classifications to view themselves as existentially oppressed. One outcome of that teaching is the forceful silencing of contrarian speech.

At UC Berkeley, the Division of Equity and Inclusion has hung banners throughout campus reminding students of their place within the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood. One depicts a black woman and a Hispanic man urging fellow students to “create an environment where people other than yourself can exist.” That’s not meant as hyperbole. Students have been led to believe they are at personal risk from circumambient bigotry. After the February riots at Berkeley against Mr. Yiannopoulos, a columnist in the student newspaper justified his participation in the anarchy: “I can only fight tooth and nail for the right to exist.” Another opined that physical attacks against supporters of Mr. Yiannopoulos and President Trump were “not acts of violence. They were acts of self-defense.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum: The North Korean path

Posted By on April 22nd, 2017

Iran is reacting angrily to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s announcement on Tuesday, and to subsequent comments by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis Wednesday, about a review of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed between Tehran and world powers in July 2015.

On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, a chief negotiator of the nuclear deal, tweeted: “Worn-out U.S. accusations can’t mask its admission of Iran’s compliance with JCPOA, obligating U.S. to change course and fulfill its own commitments.”

Zarif was referring to claims by President Donald Trump’s administration that while it was re-evaluating its Iran policy, it would not walk away from the deal in the meantime.

The part that Zarif and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been leaving out of their anti-American rhetoric — and Iranian assertions that the U.S. is the party violating the agreement — is the real reason for Washington’s review of the JCPOA, which in any case merely delays Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

As Tillerson said, it is Iran’s “alarming and ongoing provocations that export terror and violence, destabilizing more than one country at a time” that make it necessary to prevent the regime from traveling “the same path as North Korea.”

Indeed, even while it engaged in talks with representatives of the P5+1 countries (the U.S., the U.K., China, France, Russia and Germany), Iran continued funding and training terrorists across the Middle East, leaving others to do its dirty work.

One of its key proxies is Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Shiite organization that has also been fighting on the ground in Syria on behalf of President Bashar Assad.

Though Iran unveiled missiles inscribed with a Hebrew warning about wiping Israel off the map, it nevertheless has been relying on Hezbollah, situated along Israel’s northern border, to carry out this objective, bit by bit, through battles of attrition that involve both limited terrorist operations and all-out war. Hezbollah’s last major military campaign against the Jewish state took place in the summer of 2006. The 34-day Second Lebanon War, during which rockets blitzed northern Israel and even reached the major city of Haifa, culminated in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which was aimed at preventing Hezbollah from re-arming.