http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2016/05/it-didnt-start-with-marx.html An extraordinary book came my way, one which alters to some degree my own focus on the current conflict between socialism and conservatism, between secular political collectivism and religious political collectivism in America. This is George Watson’s The Lost Literature of Socialism, originally published in 1998 and reissued in 2001. Then, as now, it […]
http://swtotd.blogspot.com/ If you have concluded that Donald Trump’s gibberish about Muslims, trade wars and the building of a wall along the Mexican border and asinine assurances that he will “make America great again,” render him unfit to be President, as I had, you may want to reconsider your position. First, he is the choice of […]
I am not British. But I wish I were because now and in the foreseeable future Britain has a unique role to play in the world. And if I were British, I would think about Britain’s future in the following way. Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, both the United Kingdom and the […]
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/18883 “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but [in 1936] in Spain for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie…. This kind of thing is […]
Some Further Instruction for Donald Trump Why hasn’t he yet responded to the Ben Rhodes Iran Deal scandal? Every presidential campaign has milestones that tell candidates they have to turn their skills to different tasks. Donald Trump has reached one of them but he isn’t making the course corrections he needs. Trump had political skills […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8050/palestinians-abbas-succession Hamas is convinced that the Palestinian Authority (PA) will never allow elections to take place in the West Bank because of the likelihood that Hamas would win. The PA argues that Hamas will never allow a free election in the Gaza Strip because it does not tolerate any competition. After Arafat died, Arafatism lived […]
Say what you will about newly minted London mayor Sadiq Khan, but the man has chutzpah. When likely Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said that he would make an exception to his hypothetical Muslim travel ban and welcome Khan to the United States, Khan demurred. “Donald Trump and those around him think that Western liberal values are incompatible with mainstream Islam,” the Muslim mayor said. “London has proved him wrong.”
Khan’s assurances about “mainstream” Islam in Britain are undermined by thefindings of an extensive recent survey of British Muslims. The study, conducted in connection with an April 2016 documentary, “What British Muslims Really Think,” shows that hundreds of thousands of Khan’s countrymen hold viewsutterly incompatible with those of free societies on matters of jihadism, politics, and culture. Consider that, of the 1,081 individuals surveyed to represent the views of Britain’s more than 3 million Muslims:
Only 74 percent completely condemn “suicide bombing to fight injustice”;
Only 66 percent completely condemn stoning those who commit adultery;
Only 53 percent completely condemn violence against those who mock Muhammad;
Only 34 percent would contact police if they believed someone close to them was involved with jihadism;
23 percent believe Sharia law should replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations;
52 percent believe homosexuality should be illegal;
31 percent believe polygamy should be legal;
39 percent believe women should always obey their husbands;
35 percent believe Jews have too much power in the UK.
These indicators only confirm how seeds of Islamist supremacism have spread throughout British society; chilling episodes over the last decade have made the dangers clear. Britons remember, of course, the 7/7 jihadist attacks in London in 2005, but much more recently, at least 1,500 British Muslims have emigrated to join ISIS, and outspoken Islamist cleric Anjem Choudary has been charged with supporting the group. In 2014, the Rotherham Borough Council released a report detailing a sexual-abuse scandal in which at least 1,400 children from 1997 to 2013 were “raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated.” Reportedly, those who knew of the crimes remained silent for fear of being called racists, as the perpetrators were Muslim immigrants.
Also in 2014, a government investigation uncovered Operation Trojan Horse, an organized effort to Islamize Birmingham schools. Such episodes would not have come as a surprise to anyone who read British journalist Melanie Phillips’s 2007 book, Londonistan.
As Daniel Johnson writes of Sadiq Khan’s hometown:
Here in London, which is home to about a third of British Muslims (including thousands of migrants who live below the radar of the authorities), we have already seen the assertion of power by political Islam. The takeover of Tower Hamlets by a corrupt Islamist politician, Lutfur Rahman, may be a harbinger of things to come. Last year he was removed from office by special commissioners, but for five years Rahman and his cronies ran a borough of nearly 300,000 people, distributing a budget of more than £1 billion. . . . The Muslim “block vote” is such a formidable electoral force that for Islamists to dominate a city it does not need to have a Muslim majority.
Clinton Cash, the documentary film which I watched in previews yesterday, is based on the best-selling exposé of the same name by Peter Schweizer, the tireless investigative journalist who has devoted himself to confronting political corruption and crony capitalism regardless of the political affiliation of the perpetrators. Produced by Breitbart’s Stephen K. Bannon and directed by M. A. Taylor, Clinton Cash is crisply narrated by Schweizer and provides a relentless and devastating portrait of brazen financial venality in exchange for political favors.On Clinton Cash, Or, It’s Always Worse Than You Think | PJ Media
I read through Clinton Cash quickly when it came out last May. This was no right-wing hit job (as the Clinton campaign asserted) but rather a methodical and exhaustively sourced chronicle of how the Clintons parlayed Bill’s celebrity, Hillary’s position as secretary of State, and her possible future tenure as president of the United States into a veritable Niagara of cash.
Eye-popping speaking fees for Bill — $250,000, $500,000, even $750,000 a pop — and millions upon millions directed to the Clinton Foundation and its offshoots. Where was the money coming from? Did they actually find his “wisdom” that valuable?
No. The money came from multinational corporations that needed a favor. Shady foreign financiers. Dubious state entities in Africa, Saudi Arabia, Russia, South America, and elsewhere.
Are you worried about “money in politics”? Stop the car, get an extended-stay room, and take a long hard look at the Clintons’ operation for the last sixteen years.On Clinton Cash, Or, It’s Always Worse Than You Think | PJ Media
The Associated Press estimated that their net worth when they left the White House in 2000 was zero (really, minus $500K). Now they are worth about $200 million.
How did they do it? By “reading The Wall Street Journal” (classical reference)?
Not quite. The Clintons have perfected pay-to-play political influence peddling on a breathtaking scale. Reading Clinton Cash is a nauseating experience.
At the center of the book is not just a tale of private greed and venality. That is just business as usual in Washington (and elsewhere). No, what is downright scary is way the Clintons have been willing to trade away legitimate environmental concerns and even our national security for the sake of filthy lucre. CONTINUE AT SITE
One take-away from the transgender-bathroom wars is that the public ignores arcane academic theory at its peril. For two decades, a growing constellation of gender-studies, queer-studies, and women’s-studies departments have been beavering away at propositions that would strike many people outside academia as surprising — such as that biological sex and “gender” are mere ideological constructs imposed by a Eurocentric, heteronormative power structure. Even though skeptical journalists have regularly dived into the murky swamp of academic theory and returned bearing nuggets of impenetrable jargon and even stranger ideas, the public and most politicians have shrugged off such academic abominations, if they have taken note at all. (Senator Marco Rubio’s deplorable jab at “philosophy majors” during his presidential run demonstrated how clueless your typical politician is about the real problems in academia.)
Now gender theory has leapt from the academy to the real world with the demand by the Obama administration that public schools allow biological boys, bearing their full complement of male genitals, to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms if those boys declare themselves female. How did this happen? A pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media. The products of the narcissistic academy graduate and bring their high theory indoctrination with them into the federal and state bureaucracies and into newsrooms. Even the judiciary is affected. The opinion of the federal district court striking down California’s Proposition 8 (declaring that marriage was an institution uniting men and women), for example, was steeped in the women’s-studies notion that marriage originated as a way to impose a subordinate “gender” role on females.
The most notable aspect of this latest public eruption of academic theory is how quickly the new academically driven moral consensus was formed. The current wave of non-academic transgender activism began last summer, when the New York Times ran a full-page editorial declaring that the oppression of the transgendered by the biologically obsessed heteronormative majority was our most pressing civil-rights struggle. The Times then followed up with a series of news stories documenting the alleged oppression and plight of the “trans community.” Now, less than a year later, any parent with qualms about having his twelve-year-old daughter share a locker room with a 14-year-old boy is branded as the equivalent of someone advocating a return to whites-only water fountains. An issue that didn’t even exist a year ago is now completely settled in the minds of the cultural elite; anyone who opposes the new regime is simply an atavistic, benighted bigot.
Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew
While millions of Republican primary voters have chosen Donald Trump as the party’s nominee, Bill Kristol and a small but well-heeled group of Washington insiders are preparing a third party effort to block Trump’s path to the White House.
Their plan is to run a candidate who could win three states and enough votes in the electoral college to deny both parties the needed majority. This would throw the election into the House of Representatives, which would then elect a candidate the Kristol group found acceptable. The fact that this would nullify the largest vote ever registered for a Republican primary candidate, the fact that it would jeopardize the Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, and more than likely make Hillary Clinton president, apparently doesn’t faze Kristol and company at all. This is to give elitism a bad name.
One would think that the Trump opponents would have substantial reasons for pursuing such a destructive course. But examination of their expressed reasons shows that one would be wrong. Their chief justification for opposing Trump is that he is not a “constitutional conservative” and in fact is “without principles” and therefore dangerous. The evidence offered is that he has supported Democrats in the past and changed his positions on important issues.
Yet in seeking a candidate to carry their standard, the Kristol group has approached billionaire investor Mark Cuban, a figure uncannily similar to Trump. During the presidential election year 2012, the Hollywood Reporter noted that, “in February, billionaire sports and media mogul Mark Cuban was seen hugging Barack Obama at a $30,000-a-plate fundraiser for the president’s re-election bid.” Cuban was also a visible campaigner for Obama four years earlier. A fan of Obamacare, Cuban wrote a column for Huffington Post just before the 2012 election titled, “I would vote for Gov. Romney if he were a Democrat.”
Now it is true that Mark Cuban eventually had second thoughts about Obama, and perhaps even about Democrats. But what these facts show is that Kristol and his allies are willing to elect anyone but Trump, even if they have even fewer principles than the man they hate.
A second charge against Trump is that his character is so bad (worse than Hillary’s or Bill’s?) that no right-thinking Republican could regard him as White House worthy. “I just don’t think he has the character to be president of the United States,” Kristol declared in a recent interview:
It’s beyond any particular issue I disagree with him on, or who he picks as VP or something. The man in the last five days has embraced Mike Tyson, the endorsement of a convicted rapist in Indiana… He likes toughness, Donald Trump, that’s great, he likes rapists.
This would be fairly damning if the facts were as black and white as Kristol presents them. But as anyone familiar with the sports world would know, Mike Tyson had a dramatic change of heart following his release from prison — rejected the life he had led, repented his past, and committed himself to a course of humility and service to others.
Here is an online news summary of the transformation: “Former boxing champ Mike Tyson has dedicated the rest of his life to caring for others – because he considers himself a ‘pig’ who has ‘wasted’ so many years of his life.”
