RUTHFULLY YOURS

The devil is in the details, as they say, and the map (above) illustrating the claim — reverently reported by the Fairfax press, of course — that June, 2015, was the hottest month ever recorded on Planet Earth makes the point. According to the “news” organisation’s Peter Hannam, SMH environment editor, “land and sea-surface temperatures last month and for the first half of 2015 were the warmest in 136 years of records, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said on Monday.”

Now Quadrant Online cannot speak for sweaty sorts in Brazil and we are in no position to agree or differ about what the mercury has been doing in Malawi. But we do know about Melbourne, which has been enduring one of the harshest winters in decades.

How cold? Well, it has been a snap to get the cling wrap off your delivered morning newspaper because near-freezing overnight temperatures make the plastic brittle and easy to unfurl. There has been snow in places that seldom see it. Little kids being dropped off at school by their mums are so rugged-up and padded they make the Michelin Man seem svelte.

Gallup published in late July a poll that showed that Republicans strongly disapprove of the Supreme Court, in stark contrast with Democrats. This ought to be a rallying cry for Republicans going into the 2016 election.

No institution in American government has been as destructive and arrogant as the Supreme Court. Until we unwind the anti-constitutional arrogance of power this court has seized for itself, the problems of our political system cannot be solved.

Last week, when four unarmed U.S. Marines and a Navy petty officer were murdered by a 23-year-old fanatic named Mohammed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the President of the United States was in the process of hyping our national surrender to Iran’s drive for nukes.

The White House also gave its annual Eid el Fitr dinner for Muslims, at a time when they celebrate the end of Ramadan by butchering sheep and goats in the backyard, using the same throat-slitting method the 9/11 hijackers used to murder American and United Airlines personnel, fourteen years ago.

ISIS videos show the same throat-slitting style, to promote the religion of peace. Throat cutting follows Mohammed’s command to “strike at the neck” of Islam’s enemies.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/san-francisco-one-sick-sanctuary-city/?print=1

The horrific — but likely preventable — death of Kate Steinle at the hands of five-time deported illegal alien and seven-time released felon Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez should remind us all of the dangerous wages of ignoring the law.

In the upcoming months, the trial of her killer (on parole from Texas authorities and a user of aliases) may well prove a circus of sorts. We will likely hear all sorts of contextualization to explain why either Lopez-Sanchez was not culpable for the shooting, or hardly can be seen as the inevitable result of a quite unhinged policy. Or we will hear that he was just aiming at sea lions and simply missed with one of his three shots. Indeed, already the ubiquitous and often shameless Rep. Gutierrez has scoffed (on Telemundo no less) that the death of Kate Steinle was “a little thing” [1] (una cosa pequeña).

The latest kerfuffle – actually it’s more than that — in the Republican presidential shootout is between Jeb Bush and Scott Walker and it’s over the all-important Iran deal. Stephen Hayes writes in The Weekly Standard:

Speaking to reporters here Saturday after an appearance at the Family Leadership Summit, Walker said the next president will need to be prepared to take aggressive action against Iran, “very possibly” including military strikes, on the day he or she is inaugurated, and said he would not be comfortable with a commander in chief who is unwilling to act aggressively on day one of a new presidency. In his announcement speech at the beginning of the week, Walker had promised to ‘terminate’ the Iran deal on day one of his presidency, and Bush, at a town hall four days later, said ending the deal on the first day of a new administration was unrealistic and suggested that promises to do so, while politically appealing, reflected a lack of seriousness

By this time what has come to be called the Tim Hunt affair has pretty well become common knowledge, having gone “viral” in the pejorative sense of the term. A malignant virus has become a virtual epidemic, precipitated by the hordes of ideological do-gooders who clutter the social media and infest the roiling bowels of academia.

To recapitulate for those who may still be in the dark: Hunt, a Nobelized physiologist, made an innocuous, self-deflating comment at a scientific conference in South Korea, poking fun both at himself and his female students. As The National Post [1] reports, citing the transcript of Hunt’s pre-luncheon toast to a group of female journalists hosted by a trade association representing Women’s Science and Technology Associations, he said:

“It’s strange that a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry. … Now seriously … Science needs women and you should do science despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.”

The murder of Kathryn Steinle, allegedly by an illegal alien who had been arrested five times and convicted of seven previous felonies, called attention to cities with a policy of shielding illegal aliens from detection by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known euphemistically as “sanctuary cities.”

Obviously failure of the administration to secure our border with Mexico enabled this thug, Francisco Sanchez, to easily gain repeated access to the United States. However, once past the border, the sanctuary policies of California enabled him to remain in the United States with impunity. In point of fact, when asked by news reporters why he kept returning to San Francisco, he said it was because he knew that he would not face deportation in that city.

The killing of five unarmed military servicemen at two military recruiting centers is an omen and a warning: The “war on terror” has come home.

Thanks to Obama’s retreat from Iraq and the Middle East, the jihad waged by Islamic terrorists is now being fought on American soil, instead of on a battlefront in Fallujah and Anbar. Thanks to the borders Obama has destroyed and the tens of thousands of legal immigrants the White House has decided to import from terrorist regions, the enemy is among us. Thanks to Obama’s denial that we are at war at all, the Islamic jihad is now being waged in Chattanooga and Fort Hood, the fly over country that liberals and progressives have always despised.

But one measure would have.

Critics of President Obama’s recent deal with Iran have rejected the president’s assertion that the only alternative to his deal is war. They think that more aggressive sanctions could have changed Iran’s behavior, given the economic costs the current sanction regime has inflicted. A corollary to this argument assumes that the majority of Iranians are pro-American and sick of the puritanical and corrupt mullahcracy and its willful isolation of the country from the global order. Increase the pressure of sanctions, and this mass of discontent could ripen into regime change or at least a moderation of its behavior.

On the sanctions issue the defenders of the deal have a point. Support for the sanctions has been weakening for a long time, for the simple reason that the member countries of the P5+1 who negotiated the deal are salivating at the chance to profit from the end of sanctions and to access 77 million Iranian customers. Russia wants to sell Iran weapons, China wants to buy its oil, and European countries are already negotiating business deals with Iran. These negotiating “partners”–– except for Germany, all veto-bearing members of the U.N. Security Council responsible for the sanctions––are loath to maintain, let alone increase them. Nor would unilateral sanctions have much effect. For decades we’ve had restrictions on U.S. citizens and corporations doing business with Iran, a ban that did little or nothing to change Iran’s behavior. Going it alone is unlikely to be any more successful.

President Obama thinks he has the U.S. Congress right where he wants it as the Members consider his nuclear deal with Iran. Not only do opponents need a two-thirds majority in both houses to stop it, the President has maneuvered to box them in by having the United Nations approve it first.

That’s the meaning of Monday’s unanimous vote by the U.N. Security Council approving the deal less than a week after negotiations were completed. The various ambassadors blessed the agreement with much self-congratulation but no debate on the substance. The only discouraging word came from Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor, who doesn’t sit on the council but pointed out that the deal had achieved the impossible of uniting Israel and the Arab world in opposition.