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The Impotence of the G7 By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/the-impotence-of-the-g7/

What, at this point, does the high-profile diplomatic summit purport to do?

At this year’s G7 Summit in Biarritz, France, the summit’s host, President Emmanuel Macron, gave each of the other leaders in attendance a watch made of recycled fishing nets and powered by solar energy. The watches, he explained, symbolized the group’s collective commitment to global sustainability and ocean conservation — though actually, they symbolize the summit’s pointlessness.

Was it always so? In 1975, the leaders of the then-G6 — France, West Germany, Japan, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S. — met outside of Paris to tackle that year’s oil-related financial crisis. The next year, they became the G7, as Canada joined under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (the father of the country’s current prime minister, Justin Trudeau). Soon after, the president of the European Commission was invited to attend, as were other countries. In 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, then general secretary of the U.S.S.R.’s Communist party, came to observe the summit in London, where it was hoped he’d learn a thing or two about democracy, liberty, and how to make friends and influence people.

Of course, the summit never had any real political or legal force behind it. But the idea was that — given the overwhelming economic clout of the G7, which originally made up almost 70 percent of the global economy, at least in nominal terms, though that has now fallen to around 50 percent — greater transparency on macroeconomics would better prepare and coordinate international markets.

Perhaps inevitably, the scope of the enterprise was soon extended beyond economics. It became a political power show, a festival of diplomacy, and a field day for journalists and political cartoonists around the world. In 1998, Bill Clinton allowed Russia into the club, where it remained until 2014, when it was booted for annexing the Crimea from Ukraine. The idea behind this was, presumably, to humiliate President Putin into changing his ways, which he evidently still hasn’t.

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‘The Squad’ Co-Sponsors Bill Claiming Israel Tortures Children, And Parrots Other Terrorist Propaganda By Warren Henry

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/26/squad-co-sponsors-bill-claiming-israel-tortures-children-terrorist-propaganda/

The claims made in the bill originate mostly from a group that could be described as the propaganda arm of a terrorist organization.

Many Americans now know that Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar—two members of “the squad” of far-left congresswomen so much in the news—were recently barred from traveling to Israel to agitate for the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Fewer know all four members of “the squad,” including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, have co-sponsored a bill that accuses the Jewish state of torturing children. Fewer still know the claims made in the bill originate mostly from a group that could be described as the propaganda arm of a terrorist organization.

The so-called “Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act“ was re-introduced in the House by Rep. Betty McCollum, whose congressional district neighbors Omar’s in Minnesota. Until recently, McCollum was considered a supporter of Israel, but a critic of its government.

In February, however, she condemned “[t]he right-wing, extremist government of Benjamin Netanyahu and its apartheid-like policies,” adding “there are now members of Congress who are not willing to ignore the Israeli government’s destructive actions because they are afraid of losing an election.”

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Journalists Are Having A Meltdown Over Journalism Being Done To Them By Madeline Osburn

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/26/journalists-meltdown-journalism-done/

After years of doxxing innocent Americans for their political views, mainstream media journalists are now upset that their own racist and antisemitic tweets have been complied by conservative allies of President Trump.

Last week, a New York Times editor, Tom Wright-Piersanti, was demoted after 10-year-old tweets mocking Jews and American Indians resurfaced and were widely covered by conservative outlets. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Wright-Piersanti’s archived social media posts were part of the White House’s “aggressive operation to discredit news organizations.”

The Times report decried this tactic, arguing that targeting individuals is acceptable when journalists do it to other people, but not when other people do it to them.

“But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power,” wrote reporters Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel.

The New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger said in a statement to the paper of record’s staff that such tactics were taking the president’s campaign against a free press to a new level.

“The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”

Sulzberger’s concern over the intimidation of journalists fails to address and even excuses the racist and antisemitic views of his own staff, but also fails to acknowledge the mainstream media’s aggressive history of intimidating private individuals because they support the president or hold conservative political views.

Last February, a CNN crew showed up on an elderly woman’s lawn in Florida to publicly shame her for unknowingly sharing a “Russian-coordinated event” on her Facebook page. Consequently, the woman received waves of violent threats, abuse, and harassment online.

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CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://spectator.org/why-michelle-obama-wont-run-in-2020/

Why Michelle Obama Won’t Run in 2020 David Catron

The Democrats are clearly losing confidence that their declared presidential candidates can beat President Trump in 2020. They tout polls showing that any of their top four candidates would win the general election were it held now, but only the most naïve take such hypothetical matchups seriously. Moreover, they can see that their leading candidate is so fuddled that he frequently forgets his talking points and even where he is on a given day, while his competitors are so far left of the mainstream that Trump would trounce them. This is why so many on the left have turned their desperate eyes to Michelle Obama.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/25/countering-progressive-nihilism/

Countering Progressive Nihilism Edward Ring

America’s homeless epidemic, along with a shocking rise in deaths from drug overdoses, stem from the same root cause: liberal progressive ideology. The seductive power of this ideology, which brims in equal measure with overwrought compassion for the less fortunate alongside fuming resentment towards the “privileged,” has earned it a dominant position in American culture.

Armed with the rhetorical equivalent of nuclear weaponry, but devoid of common sense or acceptance of hard truths, liberal progressive ideology defines the message and the agenda in public K-12 and higher education, entertainment, conventional media, social media, multinational corporations, powerful nonprofit organizations, and establishment politics. But the consequences of liberal progressive ideology are often nihilistic.

http://www.dickmorris.com/wheres-bill-lunch-alert/  VIDEO

WHERE’S BILL? DICK MORRIS

Old Hickory v. New Quackery Jim Goad

Marianne Williamson is easily the most entertaining candidate the Democrats have belched up this go-round, so let us gather to celebrate her campaign before it likely craps out on Wednesday and she gets disqualified from the third debate because she couldn’t even scratch together a measly 2% support in each of four prominent polls.

But Miss Marianne’s little flame flickered as brightly as it could for one brief and hilarious moment on the national stage, and despite the fact that even enough Democrats are sane enough never to vote for her, it cannot be denied that no one ever went further in politics by saying less than Marianne Williamson says.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Emmanuel Macron’s climate change virtue signaling The French president is addicted to the ecstasy of gratuitous self-righteousness Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://spectator.us/emmanuel-macron-climate-change-virtue/

“The outcry over ‘climate change’ (what we used to call ‘global warming,’ until the evidence that the globe was not, in fact, warming became incontrovertible) has very little to do with any genuine concern about the environment and everything to do with 1) the ecstasy of gratuitous self-righteousness that comes from repeating, mantra-like, clichés dear to one’s own tribe and 2) the weaponization of those sentiments in a program of anti-Western economic redistribution.  It’s a tactic that is repellent for its moralizing sanctimoniousness, and evil for its economic implications.”

It is also part of a larger war against Western, and especially American, thriving, but that may be taken as given whenever the subject is the preening exhibitionism of liberal elites.

The French president Emmanuel Macron is as flighty as the movie character he most resembles, Harold Chasen, the eponymous sillyboy boy in Harold and Maude. As the world’s economies shudder under a variety of eco-angst initiatives, uncertainty over Brexit, the disruptions of Trump’s steely tariff initiatives, and the truculence of a surprised China, the blinking boy wonder jettisoned all the careful laid plans for the G7 meeting in Biarritz and announced without warning that the summit should focus on the ’emergency’, the ‘international crisis’ of (as one news report put it) ‘the record number of fires ravaging the Amazon jungle.’ ‘Our house is burning. Literally,’ Macron squeaked in a tweet Thursday, even as he elsewhere accused Bolsonaro of lying to him about Brazil’s effort to combat the great green phantom, ‘Climate Change.’

This took everyone, including Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, who was not present in Biarritz, by surprise. Bolsonaro swiftly fired back an angry, articulate response pointing out that 1) the Amazon was a treasured part of Brazil’s national identity (read: none of your business, Frenchie), 2) Brazil was devoting great resources, including military resources, to battling the fires, and 3) there were fires every year in the Amazon, fewer in wet years, more in drier years, which this was.

President Bolsonaro might have also pointed out that, far from there being a ‘record number’ of fires in the Amazon this year, there were actually far fewer this year than in many recent years as this chart shows.

Being of a more charitable disposition than I am, President Bolsonaro also forbore to point out that the picture Macron featured in his horror story depicted not a fire in 2019 but was in fact snapped by the American photojournalist Loren McIntyre in 1989.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

On climate, Trump says he won’t lose nation’s wealth to ‘dreams and windmills Michael Collins and John Fritze,

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/08/26/donald-trump-nations-wealth-wont-traded-dreams-and-windmills/2118191001/

BIARRITZ, France – President Donald Trump said Monday that his first priority is to maintain the nation’s wealth, not trade away that prosperity for climate initiatives that he described as amounting to “dreams and windmills.”

“It’s tremendous wealth,” Trump told reporters gathered at the G-7 summit in France. “I’m not going to lose that wealth. I’m not going to lose it on dreams and windmills, which, frankly, aren’t working too well.”

Trump’s remarks came after White House aides acknowledged he skipped a session of the G-7 meeting focused on climate, biodiversity and the health of oceans. The White House said the president was taking part in other meetings during that session. 

The president did not answer two specifics questions: Whether he still harbored skepticism about climate change and what he felt the U.S. and other countries should do about it. Before his election, Trump had described climate change a Chinese hoax. 

Trump has reportedly told aides that the meeting of world leaders has focused too intensely on climate and other environmental issues. White House officials have said the president wants the meeting to deal more with economic issues, and Trump pushed for and secured a session on Saturday focused on the global economy. 

“The United States has tremendous wealth,” Trump said, referring to the nation’s preponderance of natural gas. “I’ve made that wealth come alive.

Trump has been at odds with other members of the G-7, especially host France, after he announced in 2017 that the U.S. would formally withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Then-candidate Trump promised to withdraw the U.S. from the accord.

But Trump defended his environmental record on Monday, telling reporters that he was an “environmentalist.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Is America about to adopt the Israeli prime minister’s 20-year-old plan for a durable settlement between Israel and the Palestinians? By Benjamin Netanyahu

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/290029/bibis-peace-plan

Of late, a new “villain” was introduced into political discussions about the future of the Middle East. There are those who said that the responsibility for a thousand years of Middle Eastern obstinacy, radicalism, and fundamentalism has now been compressed into one person—namely, me. My critics contended that if only I had been less “obstructionist” in my policies, the convoluted and tortured conflicts of the Middle East would immediately and permanently have settled themselves.

While it is flattering for any person to be told that he wields so much power and influence, I am afraid that I must forgo the compliment. This is not false modesty. The problem of achieving a durable peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors is complicated enough. Yet it pales in comparison with the problem of achieving an overall peace in the region. Even after the attainment of peace treaties between Israel and its neighbors, any broader peace in the region will remain threatened by the destabilizing effects of Islamic fundamentalism and Iran and Iraq’s fervent ambition to arm themselves with ballistic missiles and atomic weapons. Let me first say categorically: It is possible for Israel to achieve peace with its Arab neighbors. But if this peace is to endure, it must be built on foundations of security, justice, and above all, truth. Truth has been the first casualty of the Arab campaign against Israel, and a peace built upon half-truths and distortions is one that will eventually be eroded and whittled away by the harsh political winds that blow in the Middle East. A real peace must take into account the true nature of this region, with its endemic antipathies, and offer realistic remedies to the fundamental problem between the Arab world and the Jewish state.

Fundamentally, the problem is not a matter of shifting this or that border by so many kilometers, but reaffirming the fact and right of Israel’s existence. The territorial issue is the linchpin of the negotiations that Israel must conduct with the Palestinian Authority, Syria, and Lebanon. Yet a territorial peace is hampered by the continuing concern that once territories are handed over to the Arab side, they will be used for future assaults to destroy the Jewish state. Many in the Arab world have still not had an irreversible change of heart when it comes to Israel’s existence, and if Israel becomes sufficiently weak the conditioned reflex of seeking our destruction would resurface. Ironically, the ceding of strategic territory to the Arabs might trigger this destructive process by convincing the Arab world that Israel has become vulnerable enough to attack.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

May the President Ban Commerce with China . . . by Tweet? By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/president-can-legally-regulate-foreign-commerce-says-congress/

Foreign policy via Twitter is obviously unwise, but Congress has given the president wide latitude to regulate foreign commerce.

Lots of high dudgeon after the president’s manic tweeting on Friday.

As to some of it, rightfully so. It was contemptible for the president to equate the dictator of Communist China to the chairman of the Federal Reserve, a patriotic American who apparently disagrees with Donald Trump on policy — and who is more attuned than the president to the need to avoid the appearance that Fed policy is susceptible to political tantrums.

Still, the righteous blasts by Trump critics in defense of Chairman Jerome Powell turned out to be so much throat-clearing. Soon followed indignant howls over what was framed as the president’s constitutional illiteracy in purporting to “order” American companies “to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing . . . your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” Trump also said he was “ordering all carriers, including Fed Ex, Amazon, UPS and the Post Office, to SEARCH FOR & REFUSE . . . all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!).”

Preliminarily, let’s stipulate that there is uncertainty, to say the least, about exactly what the president may “order” anyone to do via Twitter, even the people who work for him.

After being dazed by the tweets in the first few weeks of the Trump presidency, I’ve come to regard them as political performance art. I imagine most of us have. I tune most of it out. Other times, I chuckle . . . or gasp . . . or envision Trump rubbing his hands together in anticipation of making his critics’ heads explode. Mostly, I wonder if the president is too self-absorbed to grasp how wearying all this is — how he could easily lose a winnable reelection because he is exhausting, or because the tweets help his critics argue that he is unstable, or at least too feral for the office.

Foreign policy via Twitter is obviously unwise, but Congress has given the president wide latitude to regulate foreign commerce.

Lots of high dudgeon after the president’s manic tweeting on Friday.

As to some of it, rightfully so. It was contemptible for the president to equate the dictator of Communist China to the chairman of the Federal Reserve, a patriotic American who apparently disagrees with Donald Trump on policy — and who is more attuned than the president to the need to avoid the appearance that Fed policy is susceptible to political tantrums.

Still, the righteous blasts by Trump critics in defense of Chairman Jerome Powell turned out to be so much throat-clearing. Soon followed indignant howls over what was framed as the president’s constitutional illiteracy in purporting to “order” American companies “to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing . . . your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” Trump also said he was “ordering all carriers, including Fed Ex, Amazon, UPS and the Post Office, to SEARCH FOR & REFUSE . . . all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!).”

Preliminarily, let’s stipulate that there is uncertainty, to say the least, about exactly what the president may “order” anyone to do via Twitter, even the people who work for him.

After being dazed by the tweets in the first few weeks of the Trump presidency, I’ve come to regard them as political performance art. I imagine most of us have. I tune most of it out. Other times, I chuckle . . . or gasp . . . or envision Trump rubbing his hands together in anticipation of making his critics’ heads explode. Mostly, I wonder if the president is too self-absorbed to grasp how wearying all this is — how he could easily lose a winnable reelection because he is exhausting, or because the tweets help his critics argue that he is unstable, or at least too feral for the office.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Cultural Marxist attack on Western society It’s at the root of the Democratic Party’s identity politics and political correctness By James Veltmeyer –

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/22/cultural-marxist-attack-western-society/

Have you ever heard of Antonio Gramsci? How about Herbert Marcuse? Or the Frankfurt School?

These names are probably meaningless to all but a small minority of scholars academics and political theorists throughout the world. Yet, Americans — and indeed all those who treasure the religion, culture and history of Western Civilization — should become acquainted with these names if they are to understand the forces that are currently tearing society apart. 

Marxism appeared on the scene in Europe in the mid-19th century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels posited a thesis that capitalist society was doomed to  demise as the “proletariat” — the working class — rose up to overthrow their oppressors, the “bourgeoisie” — the middle class of property owners. Marx and Engels saw world history through the prism of a perpetual class struggle between these two implacable enemies. Marx predicted that socialist revolutions would spring up throughout the West as the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie and established dictatorships in the name of the “people.” 

Fortunately for us, but unfortunately for Marx, his prediction fell short.  The socialist revolutions largely failed to materialize in Europe or America. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 arrived in Russia — vanguard of the East — and had as much to do with the tragic casualties and deprivations of World War I as anything to do with the wealth of the propertied classes. Subsequent communist revolutions that attempted to replicate what Lenin achieved in Russia — be they in  postwar Hungary under Bela Kun or Germany under Rosa Luxemburg were either  short-lived or failed altogether. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Unsafe Space of the First Day of School by Andrew Ash

Posted By on August 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14561/unsafe-spaces

Incoming innocents, entering into such an unsafe space as the first day of school, are increasingly less likely to encounter any requirement for inner strength as they face, for the first time, the perils of the world without maternal protection.

Yearned-for amendments to the facts of life, previously intended to equip a child against the rough and tumble of the “school of life,” have been replaced by the notion that refusing to hear anything that might offend one is not a choice, but a right. Why argue with creatures who have an opposing view when you can simply shut them down?

The tech giants, big government, the media, and their willing executioners, are trying to push all opposition to the periphery.

Fragile sensibilities and the desperate need to have them catered to now appear the number one priority of the pampered, guilt-ridden offspring of the people who found a way to lower them gently into the best universities.

Incoming innocents, entering into such an unsafe space as the first day of school, are increasingly less likely to encounter any requirement for inner strength as they face, for the first time, the perils of the world without maternal protection.