Displaying posts published in

2016

Syria: Checkered Past, Uncertain Future by Amir Taheri

Because almost every religious and/or ethnic community in Syria is divided, some siding with Assad and others fighting against him, it is difficult to establish clear sectarian demarcation lines. Syria today is a patchwork of emirates.

The Islamic Republic of Iran needed Syria to complete the “Shiite Crescent” which it saw as its glacis and point of access to the Mediterranean. Iran is estimated to have spent something like $12 billion on its Syrian venture. By the time of this writing, Iran had also lost 143 ranking officers, captain and above, in combat in Syrian battlefields.

Turkey’s “soft” Islamic leadership, the main source of support for anti-Assad forces, has always had ties to the global movement of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is likely that Turkey’s leaders see the Syrian imbroglio as an opportunity for them to “solve” the problem of Kurdish-Turkish secessionists based in Syrian territory since the 1980s.

Turkey has become host to more than 2.5 million Syrian refugees, posing a long-term humanitarian and security challenge. Ankara’s decision to goad large numbers of refugees into the European Union was an attempt at forcing the richer nations of the continent to share some of Turkey’s burden.

The country most dramatically, and perhaps permanently, affected by the Syrian conflict is Lebanon. More than 1.8 million Syrian refugees have arrived, altering the country’s delicate demographic balance. If the new arrivals stay permanently, Lebanon would become another Arab Sunni majority state.

Next March will mark the fifth anniversary of what started as another chapter in the so-called “Arab Spring” morphed into a civil war, degenerated into a humanitarian catastrophe and, finally, led to the systemic collapse of Syria as a nation-state.

That sequence of events has had a profound impact on virtually the whole of the region known as the Greater Middle East, affecting many aspects of its component nations ranging from demography, ethno-sectarian composition and security. Since the purpose of this presentation is not to offer an historic account of the events, a brief reminder of some key aspects would suffice.

HILLARY- I AM WOMAN-HEAR ME WHINE

Hillary’s Use of the Gender Card Isn’t Working By Jonah Goldberg —

Hillary Clinton is not a woman, and that’s a triumph for feminism and a problem for Hillary.

Let me clarify.

Yes, technically she is female. But when millions of Americans think of Hillary Clinton, they don’t think of her gender; they think of, well, Hillary Clinton. Some may think of her as a heroic liberal technocrat. Others might think of her as a deeply partisan politician. The list goes on: She’s a supportive (or enabling) wife, a great (or terrible) former secretary of state, a left-wing bully, or a victim of political witch hunts.

What she is not is an icon for a category of humanity called “womanhood.”

This strikes me as a significant victory for feminism, though not for professional feminists and certainly not for Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, who on her best days is a workmanlike (workwomanlike?) politician, desperately wants to borrow some unearned excitement about her gender. And to her great frustration, it’s not happening. In Iowa, Bernie Sanders crushed Clinton among women under 30 years old by 70 percentage points (84-14). He beat her significantly among 30- to 44-year-old women (53-42). Meanwhile, Clinton trounced Sanders among mature and, uh, very mature women. Women over the age of 65 backed Clinton 76 percent to 22 percent.

But in the lead-up to the New Hampshire primary, Sanders had opened an eight-point lead over Clinton among New Hampshire women, according to polls.

While a gaggle of female Democratic politicians and aging feminist writers and actresses have tried to gin up female solidarity, it’s largely backfired.

Gloria Steinem, a fading icon of a bygone era, said that Bernie Sanders is attracting young female supporters because they’re boy-crazy, and “the boys are with Bernie.” She later apologized.

Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright was trotted out to issue her favorite quip: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”

BYE BYE BULLY-

New Hampshire Deals Death Blow to Christie Campaign By Alexis Levinson —

Nashua, N.H. — “Four years ago, people wanted me to run for president. I said no,” Chris Christie told a crowd of employees at DYN, a tech company based in Manchester, 30 hours before polls closed in the state’s primary. “The reason I said no is ‘cause I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to be president. I knew I wasn’t ready. I’d been governor for a year and a half; I wasn’t ready to be President of the United States.”

“But I’m ready now.”

Timing can be everything in politics. And for Christie, the timing was never quite right.

The New Jersey governor’s presidential hopes were vanquished Tuesday night here in New Hampshire, the state on which he’d staked his campaign: He came in sixth place, failing to earn a single delegate, and while he did not officially suspend his campaign, he made clear it was unlikely to continue unless the results changed after all the votes had been counted.

“Mary Pat and I spoke tonight and we decided we’re going to go home to New Jersey tomorrow. And we’re going to take a deep breath, and see what the final results are,” a subdued and evidently saddened Christie told a crowd assembled in the ballroom of the Radisson Hotel. He had been scheduled to fly to South Carolina in the morning.

“We leave New Hampshire tonight without an ounce of regret,” he added.

But Christie’s tale is very much a story of what could have been. When he won overwhelming re-election as the Republican governor of a blue state in 2013, he was heralded as perhaps the top contender for the nomination. The win, wrote the New York Times, “vaulted him to the front ranks of Republican presidential contenders and made him his party’s foremost proponent of pragmatism over ideology.”

Beach Books 2014-2016: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class?

https://www.nas.org/projects/beachbooks

The NAS published Beach Books 2014-2016: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class? on February 9, 2016. The main author is David Randall; Ashley Thorne and Peter Wood are contributors. We invite readers to share responses in the comments section or in article submissions via email to contact@nas.org.

Hundreds of American colleges and universities assign a summer reading to entering freshmen—usually one book, which the students are asked to read outside their courses. For many students, this is the only book they will read in common with their classmates. Colleges rarely assign classic texts: the common reading genre is parochial, contemporary, commercial, optimistic, juvenile, obsessed with suffering, and progressive.

Our study of common readings covers more than 350 colleges and universities for the academic years 2014-2015 and 2015-16.

Beach Books Report: 20-Page Version

Beach Books Report: 2-Page Media Packet

Universities Assign Simplistic, Childish Books as Common Reading for Incoming Freshmen By Peter Wood

Reading a book is like going to a dinner party. You agree not just to spend time with your host, the author, but with all the other invited guests—your fellow readers. If the party goes well, you meet people you like, and you definitely have something to talk about.

Colleges and universities have caught onto this idea. From Princeton University to tiny Hesston College in Kansas (“Start here, go everywhere”), some 350 institutions of higher learning this year assigned a single book that all the freshmen were asked to read. As the colleges see it, these common reading programs “build community.” Between the hors d’oeuvres and the demitasse, the students will discover their mutual admiration of…Homer, Proust, Hemingway? No, not quite.

The host books of these community-building parties definitely aren’t classics. The seven most assigned books this year are:

The Other Wes Moore

16 colleges, including Kansas State University, assigned this 2011 memoir by Rhodes Scholar Wes Moore in which he contrasts his fortunate life with a namesake crack dealer in prison for murder.

Just Mercy

14 colleges, including the University of Wisconsin, Madison, assigned this 2014 account of author Bryan Stevenson’s successful efforts to spring a black man in Alabama wrongfully convicted of murder.

The Circle

6 colleges, including the University of Tennessee, assigned this 2014 novel by Dave Eggers depicting a Google-like corporation’s attempt to take over the world.

Anti-Semitism Raises its Ugly Head in Europe by Herbert London

The winds of change in Europe have circled back to the 1930’s as public attitudes have grown dark and bitter. It was recently reported that more than forty percent of European Union citizens hold anti-Semitic views and agree with the oft repeated claim that Israel is committing genocidal acts against Palestinians. In fact, there is the common refrain that Israelis are the new Nazis.

Reasons for this remarkable condition – as the blood of the Holocaust still soaks the soil of Europe – abound. Obviously radical Islam promotes this calumny even as it engages in violence from Paris to Moscow. Refugees from Syria attribute their plight to Jews, a form of scapegoating that downplays the role of ISIS in population displacement. The BDS movement has a role in using boycott, divestment and sanctions as instruments to delegitimize the state of Israel. When Jewish organizations themselves climb on to BDS, e.g. J Street and the New Israel Fund, it is difficult to refute the claims, albeit claims that should be refuted. And last, is the rise of extremist parties on the right and the left that have often exhibited hostility to Israel. While Jean-Marie Le Pen of the French National Front, Jeremy Corbyn of the British Labor party have deep seated philosophical differences, they are united in their hostility to Israel.

Dutch Intelligence Report Exposes Horrors of Daily Life Under ISIS by Abigail R. Esman

When the leaders of ISIS declared the caliphate of the Islamic State in June 2014, the world already had a strong idea of who they were: a jihadist group so violent, so barbaric, so extreme, that even al-Qaida, with whom they had once been affiliated, wanted nothing more to do with them.

But as the world soon learned, it would get even worse.

The founding of the Islamic State brought some of the most inhumane violence of modern civilization: captives held in cages and burned alive; beheadings captured on video and broadcast on the Internet; mass enslavement and rape of non-Muslim women; and the genocide of Iraq’s Yazidi tribe.

Coupled with this has been a perverse propaganda campaign that makes the Caliphate look like a teenage summer camp, aimed at recruiting Westerners to join the jihad and enjoy life in their idyllic, Allah-blessed commune-on-the-sea. And for thousands of Western Muslims, it has worked, either by inducing them to make the journey, or hijrah, to Syria and Iraq, or by motivating them to carry out terrorist attacks on Western towns and cities.

This is what we know.

What we have not known has been the reality of life in the Islamic State, including the social order, the availability of housing and health care and other basic necessities and the treatment of women and children.

Michael Kile The Climate Monkeys Howl

Really, they have only themselves to blame for the CSIRO’s mass axing of global warming careerists. If only the high priests of the movement had been more persuasive in casting random weather events as specific symptoms of our planet’s death agonies, the gravy train might not have been derailed
Shrinking the CSIRO’s multi-million dollar climate cookie jar in the Year of the Monkey was bound to cause a rumble in the jungle and shrieks of alarm. But the primal screams of self-preservation from near and far were a surprise. Allowing that one has no objection to rubbing salt into wounds, here’s a tweet it would be satisfying to send to those smart folk who swear they can “re-engineer global simulations to make predictions down to catchment and paddock scales”. The message: Don’t be surprised when, one day, a lot more of you are put out to grass.

Hell, however warm, hath no fury like an atmospheric astrologer scorned, as CEO Dr Larry Marshall discovered when he revealed new plans for the agency last week (ABC 7.30 report video here).

In a letter to staff, Marshall noted that

CSIRO pioneered climate research … But we cannot rest on our laurels as that is the path to mediocrity. Our climate models are among the best in the world and our measurements honed those models to prove global climate change. That question has been answered, and the new question is what do we do about it, and how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with?

How, indeed? Just as the ‘underpinning science’ had been overcooked, so was the reaction. The purveyors of ‘settled science’ would have none of it. (See Joanne Nova here.) Professor Matthew England, Deputy Director at the University of NSW’s Climate Change Research Centre, described the letter as ‘jaw-droppingly shocking’. “There seems to be no appreciation of how much this science underpins our nation’s interests,” he said.

The evil of two lessers -Trump and Bernie by Roger Franklin

Most days, there is little reason to feel any sympathy for my son, whose birth date on each of his twin passports, American and Australian, testify that he has the bloom of youth about his twentysomething cheeks, stands to enjoy a long, interesting life and, as our latest Prime Minister would put it, is blessed to have come of age in this, the most exciting time to be alive. Being also agile — a gifted short-stop who can pitch a baseball at 90mph — and innovative to boot, especially in winkling money out of his father’s wallet, the fruit of my loins might very well represent the sort of ideal citizen of whom Mr Turnbull dreams after gliding past the Nolans and Drysdales to place his supremely gifted head upon the Lodge’s lovely new pillows.

Just now, after this morning’s telephone conversation, Junior has the benefit of both my sympathy and advice that he stop at the nearest bar and a order something strong and bracing, preferably in double measure. He lives in New York, you see, where unlike Australia the nanny-staters have not yet banned the stiffer-than-average libation. Given the New Hampshire primaries results, Junior might as well enjoy one of the US’s civilised decencies.

“Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump!” he exclaimed, “a fruitcake socialist and a land shark! That’s the best this country can put up for the White House.” Speaking as an Australian, he continued, “Americans are mad as cut snakes.” I reminded him that his mother, a Brooklyn gal, is reasonably sane most of the time, and that he had to take at least some small measure of blame on his own shoulders. Weren’t you telling me only the other week, I reminded him, that Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop campaign was knocking the Republicans’ moribund leadership for six and that this was a good thing?

Switching to his American persona, he responded that, yes, he had said that, but never expected the property developer “to hit a home run”. Trump would cause a bit of damage — a bit of good, too, if you subscribe to the view that complacency needs to be ruffled from time to time — but then fade away, as tends to be the case with the flash-in-the-pan mavericks of American politics. Ross Perot and John Anderson would be waiting to greet him from atop that pile of ambitious and delusional discards. That was Junior’s theory anyway.

Intelligence Director: Al-Qaeda ‘Positioned to Make Gains in 2016’ By Bridget Johnson

The director of national intelligence warned Congress this morning that “unpredictable instabilities have become the new normal, and this trend will continue for the foreseeable future.”

In a briefing of worldwide threats referred to as his “litany of doom,” James Clapper told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “violent extremists” are “operationally active in about 40 countries.”

“Seven countries are experiencing a collapse of central government authority, 14 others face regime-threatening or violent instability or both. Another 59 countries face a significant risk of instability through 2016,” he said.

Russia and China “continue to have the most sophisticated cyber programs” and China continues cyber espionage against the United States.

“Whether China’s commitment of last September moderates its economic espionage” — a vow touted by President Obama — “remains to be seen,” Clapper noted. “Iran and North Korea continue to conduct cyber espionage as they enhance their attack capabilities.”

ISIS, he said, “displays unprecedented online proficiency”and “at least 38,200 foreign fighters, including at least 6,900 from western countries, have traveled to Syria from at least 120 countries since the beginning of the conflict in 2012.”

From 2014 to 2015, the number of ISIS supporters arrested by the FBI increased fivefold.