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2016

Europe Agonistes A wave of populism is sweeping over the Continent By John O’Sullivan

Europe has gotten tired of being anguished about Donald Trump and has now moved on to being anguished about itself. The question being asked by all the Big Think editorials and news magazine programs runs: “Is Europe going populist too?” It’s especially unavoidable this weekend because of the coincidence of three events:

French president François Hollande, facing the prospect of a humiliating defeat, announced on Thursday that he would not contest next year’s presidential elections, in which, as everyone knew, he would have run a poor third to the populist Right’s Marine Le Pen and the conservative Right’s new favorite, former prime minister François Fillon.

On Sunday there will be a referendum in Italy on constitutional reform that, if rejected, will lead to the resignation of the prime minister and new elections in which an anti-euro party, Beppe Grillo’s Five Star movement, would at least start out as the favorite.

Also on Sunday there will be a rerun of the Austrian presidential election, which – because the first, narrow victory of the establishment candidate was overturned owing to irregularities – could swing a victory for the candidate of the populist “far right” Freedom party.

As if this trifecta were not excitement enough, almost every news broadcast reminds us that next year we will have – in addition to the French presidential elections — a Dutch election in which the populist party of Geert Wilders (who is currently on trial for demanding fewer Moroccan immigrants in Holland) may end up as the largest single group in parliament, and a German election in which Angela Merkel will seek a fourth mandate in a contest in which, for the first time, a populist anti-migrant party, the AFD, may win a serious number of votes and seats and deprive the conservative Christian Democrats of office.

Something big is clearly going on. It fills the imaginations of the more excitable members of mainstream parties of Left and Right with dramatic fantasies of fighting neo-fascism alongside Paul Henreid and Ingrid Berman. Worse, it suggests that Donald Trump may inspire a new populist politics in Europe that will put them out of a job.

Trump’s Narrow Win Is Not a Landslide, It’s an Opportunity He should take to heart a few lessons from Bill Clinton. By Andrew C. McCarthy

We’ve all seen these kinds of games. The team gets pushed around all over the gridiron . . . but it wins anyway. The opposing squad marches up and down the field with apparent ease, piling up yardage, chewing up clock. But each time, something goes wrong at the critical moment: here a fumble near the goal line, there a tipped pass intercepted and returned for a touchdown. At the end of the game, you stare at the stat sheet in disbelief: Your guys have been outgained by a whopping 150 yards, the other team has held the ball almost 40 minutes out of 60. Yet, somehow, you won, 10–3.

Now, let’s be clear. A win is a win. It’s totally legit, and no one can take it away from you. And while not an every-Sunday occurrence, such contests happen often enough that they can’t be thought of as flukes. Could you say the winning team got outplayed? Maybe. It is equally fair, though, to say that at crunch time, when it got down to the game’s handful of decisive plays, the losing team came up small. For long stretches of the contest, it looked like they were in total control. But it was the plodding kind of control: uneasy, uninspiring, and, in the end, unable to get it done. The losers can talk all they want about piling up yardage, but everyone knows the rules — the game is won on points, not yards.

That is the kind of game Donald Trump just won over Hillary Clinton. For Democrats to belittle the outcome as illegitimate is absurd.

For one thing, it is laughably dishonest. Take the Electoral College. As experience teaches, social-justice warriors hale from the heads-we-win-tails-you-lose school. They don’t care how they win, just that they win. It was hardly out of the realm of possibility that Trump would secure a plurality of the 135 million or so votes cast, but that a few hundred thousand Clinton votes would flip a few battleground states, giving her the decisive Electoral College majority. Had that happened, you know as sure as you’re reading this that you’d have been hearing paeans to John Madison from the direct-democracy crowd — notwithstanding that, where the Constitution is concerned, Democrats tend to be strict destructionists.

Plus, Mrs. Clinton didn’t win a majority. Had she managed to prevail in the Electoral College, she would have been a president that most of the country voted against. As her husband can tell her, having won twice without ever capturing 50 percent of the vote, legitimacy does not hinge on raw vote totals. That is why, with just 43 percent of the vote in 1992, Bill Clinton garnered 370 electoral votes, significantly more than Donald Trump’s 306.

Organizations Funded Directly by George Soros and his Open Society Foundations By Discover The Networks

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1237

Organizations that, in recent years, have received direct funding and assistance from George Soros and his Open Society Foundations (OSF) include the following. (Comprehensive profiles of each are available in the “Groups” section of DiscoverTheNetworks.org):

Advancement Project: This organization works to organize “communities of color” into politically cohesive units while disseminating its leftist worldviews and values as broadly as possible by way of a sophisticated communications department.
Air America Radio: Now defunct, this was a self-identified “liberal” radio network.
Al-Haq: This NGO produces highly politicized reports, papers, books, and legal analyses regarding alleged Israeli human-rights abuses committed against Palestinians.
All of Us or None: This organization seeks to change voting laws — which vary from state to state — so as to allow ex-inmates, parolees, and even current inmates to cast their ballots in political elections.
Alliance for Justice: Best known for its activism vis a vis the appointment of federal judges, this group consistently depicts Republican judicial nominees as “extremists.”
America Coming Together: Soros played a major role in creating this group, whose purpose was to coordinate and organize pro-Democrat voter-mobilization programs.
America Votes: Soros also played a major role in creating this group, whose get-out-the-vote campaigns targeted likely Democratic voters.
America’s Voice: This open-borders group seeks to promote “comprehensive” immigration reform that includes a robust agenda in favor of amnesty for illegal aliens.
American Bar Association Commission on Immigration Policy: This organization “opposes laws that require employers and persons providing education, health care, or other social services to verify citizenship or immigration status.”
American Bridge 21st Century: This Super PAC conducts opposition research designed to help Democratic political candidates defeat their Republican foes.
American Civil Liberties Union: This group opposes virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by the U.S. government. It supports open borders, has rushed to the defense of suspected terrorists and their abettors, and appointed former New Left terrorist Bernardine Dohrn to its Advisory Board.
American Constitution Society for Law and Policy: This Washington, DC-based think tank seeks to move American jurisprudence to the left by recruiting, indoctrinating, and mobilizing young law students, helping them acquire positions of power. It also provides leftist Democrats with a bully pulpit from which to denounce their political adversaries.
American Family Voices: This group creates and coordinates media campaigns charging Republicans with wrongdoing.
American Federation of Teachers: After longtime AFT President Albert Shanker died in in 1997, he was succeeded by Sandra Feldman, who slowly “re-branded” the union, allying it with some of the most powerful left-wing elements of the New Labor Movement. When Feldman died in 2004, Edward McElroy took her place, followed by Randi Weingarten in 2008. All of them kept the union on the leftward course it had adopted in its post-Shanker period.

Gitmo Prisoners Asked for Sedatives After Trump Victory

It wasn’t only the mainstream media that freaked out over Donald Trump’s presidential victory. The prisoners at Gitmo “thought it was the end of the world” and “many” detainees asked for tranquilizers because they were so “distraught.”

One of the prisoner’s lawyers shared with CBS correspondent Margaret Brennan his client’s description about election night.

“He said that many detainees thought that it was the end of the world and felt terrible and that many detainees asked for tranquilizers, sleeping pills because they were so distraught.”

Obama has been emptying out the prison during his term as president and now prisoners are afraid they will not be released with the election of Donald Trump.

“Well, the pace of prisoner releases has picked up in recent months,” Brennan said. “But Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to stop this prison from closing has left the fate of many prisoners in limbo.”

Too bad.

Tackling the peddlers of climate change By Anthony Bright-Paul

How often have we heard that ‘climate change’ is the greatest threat to mankind! How often have we heard that Global Warming will lead to an unprecedented rise in sea levels! — when what is the truth?

There is absolutely no truth whatsoever in these assertions, made by a coven of corrupt scientists, who have held the whole world in thrall. Not only is the globe not warming, but we find that the books have been cooked on a truly massive scale. So massive, in fact, that even intelligent members of Parliament with some scientific knowledge have been fooled. The world at large has been fooled, as witness the bizarre antics at COP22. Did you think that that was a Climate Conference? Think again! It was about nothing but money, and who could screw the most out of the supposedly rich nations.

I am indebted to Christopher Booker, who has written in the Daily Telegraph what I would never have dared to write. He has given a cast of those who have been deceiving the world on an unimaginable scale. Here I quote just a few paragraphs, but it is necessary to read the entire article:

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC’s scientific elite, including not just the “Hockey Team”, such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC’s 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore’s ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

…Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

Columbia University’s Climate: A Visit to an Alternate Universe By Norman Rogers

The subway stop at 116th Street in Manhattan is for Columbia University. Is this subway stop a wormhole to an alternate universe, where people look like everyone else but are possessed by strange ideas and incomprehensible ways of thinking?

My journey to 116th Street was to attend a lecture titled “What Would it Mean to Understand Climate Change?” It is hard to understand the title of this lecture, and the official description of the lecture increases the confusion:

Efforts abound to “understand” climate change. But what kind of understanding is needed? Does “understanding” mean the same thing to concerned citizens as it does to scientists, humanities scholars, or policy makers? At this public event climate scientist Isaac Held, philosopher of science Philip Kitcher, and science journalist Jonathan Weiner will compare the work of understanding undertaken by different communities engaged with climate change, and address the question what remains to be understood.

The first speaker, Isaac Held, was the only scientist. Held is deeply involved with the computer climate models that are the foundation for the predictions of climate doom. Apparently, nearly everyone at Columbia University, judging from the speakers and the audience, has accepted the message from the computers as absolute truth.

Held’s talk was meandering and difficult to understand. His thesis is that there are a hierarchy of stories explaining climate change. At the most complicated level are the computer climate models. A simple story could be a prediction – say, that doubling CO2 in the atmosphere will increase global average temperature by X degrees.

Held avoids making any judgments. He never tells us how much confidence we should have in the climate models, even though one would think that as someone deeply involved with climate models, he should be in a good position to make judgments. After all, if the climate models are unreliable, why are Held and hundreds of other scientists spending their time working on climate models? Perhaps because they are being paid to work on climate models.

I asked Held what conclusion he draws from the lack of warming of the Earth during the last 18 years in the face of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. He acknowledged the problem but seemed to suggest that the warming hiatus was created by chaotic variations in the climate. He also became duplicitous when he suggested that the recent El Niño was breaking the warming hiatus. As an expert on climate, he surely knows that El Niño is temporary and not connected to long-term climate change. (El Niño is the name for a disturbance in the tropical Pacific Ocean that causes a temporary variation in global temperature.)

“Nothing to do with Islam”? by Judith Bergman

“Until religious leaders stand up and take responsibility for the actions of those who do things in the name of their religion, we will see no resolution.” — The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

“The Islamic State is a byproduct of Al Azhar’s programs… Al Azhar says there must be a caliphate and that it is an obligation for the Muslim world. Al Azhar teaches the law of apostasy and killing the apostate. Al Azhar is hostile towards religious minorities, and teaches things like not building churches… Al Azhar teaches stoning people. So can Al Azhar denounce itself as un-Islamic?” — Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah Nasr, a scholar of Islamic law and graduate of Egypt’s Al Azhar University.

The jihadists who carry out terrorist attacks in the service of ISIS, for example, are merely following the commands in the Quran, both 9:5, “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them…” and Quran 8:39, “So fight them until there is no more fitna [strife] and all submit to the religion of Allah.”

Archbishop Welby — and Egypt’s extraordinary President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — has finally had the courage to say in public that if one insists on remaining “religiously illiterate,” it is impossible to solve the problem of religiously motivated violence.

For the first time, a European establishment figure from the Church has spoken out against an argument exonerating ISIS and frequently peddled by Western political and cultural elites. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, speaking in France on November 17, said that dealing with the religiously-motivated violence in Europe

“requires a move away from the argument that has become increasingly popular, which is to say that ISIS is ‘nothing to do with Islam’… Until religious leaders stand up and take responsibility for the actions of those who do things in the name of their religion, we will see no resolution.”

Archbishop Welby also said that, “It’s very difficult to understand the things that impel people to some of the dreadful actions that we have seen over the last few years unless you have some sense of religious literacy”.

“Religious literacy” has indeed been in short supply, especially on the European continent. Nevertheless, all over the West, people with little-to-no knowledge of Islam, including political leaders, journalists and opinion makers, have all suddenly become “experts” on Islam and the Quran, assuring everybody that ISIS and other similarly genocidal terrorist groups have nothing to do with the purported “religion of peace,” Islam.

THE BETRAYAL OF LAWFUL IMMIGRANTS BY OPEN BORDERS ANARCHISTS BY MICHAEL CUTLER

The goal of open borders anarchists is to eliminate the distinction between those who enter the country illegally and those who come legally.

Aliens may be admitted into the United States as immigrants or as nonimmigrants, depending on whether they have been granted lawful immigrant status. Lawful immigrants, in entering the U.S., hope to become a part of the magnificent tapestry that is America, to begin their lives anew to build their futures and, consequently, the future of our nation. Their U.S. presence is sanctioned by our immigration laws.

Illegal aliens, on the other hand, are aliens who enter the U.S. without inspection and aliens who enter legally but violate the terms of their admission and are thus subject to removal (deportation) because their presence violates our immigration laws.

There is a clear distinction, and one that must not be blurred, between aliens who are legally present and aliens who are illegally present.

Illegal aliens have become emboldened to demand “their rights” to receive in-state tuition and a host of other costly government-sponsored programs and services, often through raucous and even violent demonstrations. They demand work in the U.S., driver’s licenses and, in general, treatment the same as, or perhaps even better than, true immigrants who entered the country legally.

Many journalists fuel this lunacy. Those who insist that the federal government secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws are labeled by the media as “anti-immigrant,” a pejorative. Those who oppose measures to secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws are “pro-immigrant.”

Trump Spoke With Taiwan President in Break With Decades of U.S. Policy Leaders ‘noted close’ economic, political and security ties, Trump transition team said By Damian Paletta, Carol E. Lee and Andrew Browne

WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump spoke with the president of Taiwan on Friday, a conversation that breaks with decades of U.S. policy and could well infuriate the Chinese government.

The conversation between Mr. Trump and President Tsai Ing-wen runs counter to the longstanding effort by Beijing to block any formal U.S. diplomatic relations with the island off China’s coast. Chinese leaders consider Taiwan a Chinese territory, not a sovereign nation.

The Trump transition team didn’t give many details of the discussion but said Mr. Trump spoke with the Taiwanese leader, “who offered her congratulations.”

It is believed to be the first time a president or president-elect has spoken with the leader of Taiwan since diplomatic ties between Washington and Taipei were cut off in 1979.

Mr. Trump offered an explanation of the call in a Twitter post: “The President of Taiwan CALLED ME today to wish me congratulations on winning the Presidency. Thank you!”

A short time later, he tweeted again: “Interesting how the U.S. sells Taiwan billions of dollars of military equipment but I should not accept a congratulatory call.”

Anton Troianovski: Austrian Anti-Immigrant Party Forges Ties to Trump Donald Trump’s election has energized Austria’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party, which sees years of efforts to establish political ties in the U.S. paying off just as its own candidate stands on the verge of the Austrian presidency.

Vying for Their Own Election Upset, Austrian Populists Forge Ties to Trump Allies
For the anti-immigrant Freedom Party, Donald Trump’s victory represents a new level of acceptance for the populist political movement in the West.

Senior politicians from Austria’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party celebrated the upset victory of Donald Trump at an election-night party in Trump Tower in New York. This Sunday, when their nation goes to the polls, they will be hoping for an improbable presidency of their own.

Mr. Trump’s win has energized populist politicians across Europe who echo his criticism of immigration, free trade and international institutions and calls for improved ties with Russia.

But nowhere, perhaps, is the jubilation as great as in Austria, where the Freedom Party now sees years of quiet efforts to establish ties with conservative Republicans in the U.S. paying off just as its own candidate stands on the verge of the Austrian presidency.

The party’s Norbert Hofer is running neck-and-neck with center-left candidate Alexander Van der Bellen in the polls ahead of Austria’s runoff presidential election on Sunday. Mr. Hofer’s victory would give the Freedom Party—long ostracized for its xenophobic rhetoric and past links to former Nazis—the Austrian presidency for the first time.

Unlike in the U.S., the position is largely ceremonial, but a win would still anoint the first right-wing populist head of state in modern Western Europe, accelerating the sweep of antiestablishment politics across the continent and giving Mr. Trump a new ally abroad.

The links between Mr. Trump’s domestic allies and the populist politicians from the Alpine country of 8 million were on display in November as a Freedom Party delegation toured the East Coast. CONTINUE AT SITE