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February 2017

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Shock Poll: In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Party Smashes Rivals By Michael van der Galien

By on February 7th, 2017

Some thirty parties will compete with each other for the favor of Dutch voters on March 15. Because there are only 150 seats in the Dutch Parliament, the largest party will not be able to get much more than 35 to 40 seats. The favorite right now to become the largest party in parliament is Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV).

A shocking new poll has been released in the Netherlands. According to Kantar Public, PVV has opened a large lead over the second largest party in the polls, the VVD, which is currently part of the governing coalition. This makes Wilders the absolute favorite to succeed current Prime Minister Mark Rutte as the political leader of the country.

According to the Kantar Public poll, the PVV would get 35 seats in the 150-seat Dutch Parliament if elections were held today. By Dutch standards, that’s an impressive result. This is especially true because of the significant gap between PVV and the VVD. The party led by current Prime Minister Mark Rutte wold have to settle for a mere 22 seats, 19 fewer seats than they currently occupy.

Wilders is profiting from a general feeling of unease about the direction in which the country is heading and public outrage at the refugee crisis. The Dutch government has allowed the borders to remain open, thereby allowing tens of thousands of “refugees” to come to the Netherlands every single year. This while there already were significant problems caused by (mostly) Islamic immigrants who refuse to assimilate into Dutch culture and society.

Voters’ explanations make clear that the ruling VVD party has a very serious problem. Says one voter:

Enough. Enough with everything!

Another angry voter adds:

The VVD has become the party for the rich and they never deliver on their promises.

That voter refers to Rutte’s promise during the campaign of 2012 that he would give every working Dutchman a taxbreak of 1.000 euros. Once he put together a coalition with the social democrats of the PvdA, however, he actually raised taxes. Additionally, Rutte promises to halt mass immigration. As is clear, he has done no such thing.

A third voter explains his current support for the PVV by referring to Wilders’ eurosceptic attitude:

Wilders is the only one willing to address the major problems caused by Europa and mass immigration.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Italy Appears On Course to Leave the EU By Michael van der Galien

By on February 7th, 2017

Is Italeave fast approaching? From the looks of it, it could be!

The future is looking increasingly bright for those of us who are rooting for the downfall of the European Union and, especially, the grand Europroject, which has caused more human suffering in Europe than almost every other megalomaniac project in history. British Prime Minister Theresa May wants to lead her country out of the EU as soon as she can and already has the backing of Parliament. That’s wonderful enough, but it gets even better: according to the latest polls, eurosceptic parties could very well win the elections in Italy.

An analysis of the political setup in Italy shows eurosceptics are on the verge of taking control of the country.

The only missing ingredient is an early election. And early elections are now the odds-on favorite.

In normal circumstances, new elections would be held in 2018. However, former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi — who leads the Italian Democrat Party (PD) — is calling for early elections. His thinking is obvious and purely Machiavellian: because he was forced to resign last year after he lost the referendum on a proposed change to the Italian constitution, he fears he’ll be replaced as leader of the PD if he gives his internal enemies more time. Additionally, the leader of the populist Five Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, is also calling for early elections because he believes that he’ll win them. Recent polls indicate he could very well be right:

As the Zero Hedge website explains, most pollsters have a reputation for overestimating the Democrats and underestimating Grillo’s Five Star Movement (M5). Considering the marginal difference between the two parties in most polls, that’s an important disclaimer. But there’s more to this story. According to Italian observers and Zero Hedge, the PD could very well break apart into a pro-Renzi faction and a faction that opposes him. The latter believe they can draw away almost half of Renzi’s voters if they create their own left-wing party, which is what they threaten to do if Renzi goes ahead and agrees to early elections.

In short, it’s increasingly likely that Italy will soon get an anti-euro government.

Add that development to the rise of eurosceptic populists in the Netherlands and it’s clear that the European house of cards is on the verge of collapsing. If that isn’t good news for those of us who support national sovereignty, I don’t know what is.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Report: ISIS Chops Off Kids’ Hands for Refusing to Kill By Bridget Johnson

By on February 7th, 2017

An Iraqi satellite network has reported that the Islamic State cut off the hands of two boys in western Mosul for refusing to kill in the name of ISIS.

Iraqi forces have liberated eastern Mosul; the fight west of the Tigris is shaping up to be more difficult and a more painstaking advance because of the dense neighborhoods there.

“The coalition has liberated about 60 percent of ISIL-held territory in Iraq. ISIL remains on the back foot in Mosul,” Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman Col. John Dorrian told Pentagon reporters via video link from Baghdad last week. “Its leaders are accusing citizens of spying, and tragically, they are executing people who don’t cooperate with them in some cases. They’ve also lost trust in some of their fighters and they’ve even done executions against their own fighters.”

Iraq’s Alsumaria News said Thursday that sources reported two boys had their hands amputated by ISIS fighters tasked with training youths for jihad, according to Iraqi News.

“The Islamic State’s leaders issued orders to train a group of children on fighting in the group’s camps in Nables neighborhood, in the western side of Nineveh,” the source reportedly told the network. “Meanwhile, members of the Islamic State terrorist group amputated the hands of two children, for refusing to carry out the execution sentence on two civilians in front of their families.”

The boys were estimated to be around 10 to 12 years old.

ISIS has long places emphasis on its “cubs” program to indoctrinate kids into jihad, and the group has released videos lately showing younger and younger jihadists.

In one video out of Raqqa, kids were sent on a live-fire exercise through an abandoned building with some dummy targets in the rooms and a handful of live targets: prisoners with their hands zip-tied behind their backs, trying to elude the child jihadists in the multi-story, debris-strewn building.

A video released last month out of ISIS’ Khayr province in Syria was a more gory follow-up, showing children as young as preschool age murdering prisoners tied to broken carnival rides.

The Syrian Democratic Forces, which are conducting an offensive to retake Raqqa from ISIS, recently released a video showing three young teen boys, who had reportedly been kidnapped from their families, on the front lines as ordered by the Islamic State. The boys surrendered to the Kurdish-Arab-Christian coalition and were reunited with their relatives.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Berkeley Republican Describes Night of Terror, Says Agitators Were Trying to ‘Burn Us Alive’ By Debra Heine

By on February 7th, 2017

In an interview with The College Fix, a Berkeley College Republican said that he and his compatriots feared for their lives during the violent riot last week and some of them continue to face threats from the “anti-fascist” (Antifa) terrorists on campus.

Naweed Tahmas, who helped organize the Milo Yiannopoulos speaking event, said he was “pushed and shoved” by agitators as he headed to help prep for the speech. As the demonstration devolved into a riot, he and his peers sheltered in place as left-wing goons threw firebombs at the building.

And now Tahmas said he’s been told to watch his back because he may get jumped, and an Antifa affiliate has also threatened to publish the names and contact information of those sympathetic to Milo’s visit, called “doxing.”

Undaunted by the harassment and threats, he told The College Fix he is proud to stand for free speech.

Tahmas told The Fix that the crowd was violent and menacing from the start.

By the time he got to the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union to begin prepping for the event at 5:30 p.m., a throng of students and other demonstrators flanked the building. As he walked through the crowd, protesters surrounded him and closed in on him, pushing and shoving him from all sides.

“We know who you are, you can’t hide from us,” Tahmas recalls them saying as he pushed through the crowd.

“It was so violent at that point,” he said. “They were surrounding me. They were assaulting me.”

Rattled but essentially unharmed, he made it into the building. There he met up with Yiannopolous and other Berkeley Republicans. But it was not long before someone pulled the fire alarm. Then protesters began shooting M-80 firecrackers at the building, with several narrowly missing the group and the police officers attempting to guard them.

Tahmas said one of Milo’s security guards, a former Navy Seal, even commented: “I haven’t seen protests like this since Afghanistan.”

As the protesters began to light fires around the building, Tahmas recalls thinking that “they [were trying] to burn the building with us in it.”

“I don’t think they would have had any regrets burning us alive,” Tahmas told The Fix. “We were basically like cattle. The protesters shouted, ‘We’re going to burn and shut your shit down.’”

When the event was canceled, they tried exiting from the back of the building, but still had to pass through a gauntlet of rioters yelling, “F-ck the Berkeley College Republicans!” Milo, in the meantime, made his way out separately to an underground parking garage.

Tahmas told The Fix that he ended up sleeping at a friend’s house that night for his own safety because someone had posted his personal information on Facebook and Twitter. He said he continues to face threats for his role in organizing the event. “One individual mentioned they were ‘going to catch me in the shadows’ when I was on campus,” he said.

Tahmas disagreed with the notion propagated by some on the left that the troublemakers only came from outside groups.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Government whistle-blower accuses NOAA of manipulating climate data By Rick Moran

By on February 7th, 2017

John Bates, former principal scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lab at the National Climatic Data Center, is accusing the agency of cooking the books to disprove the theory that there has been a “pause” in global warming and alleging that the motive for manipulating the data was to buttress the Obama administration’s EPA carbon rules and build support for the Paris Climate Treaty.

To absolutely no one’s surprise.

Washington Times:

In an article on the Climate Etc. blog, John Bates, who retired last year as principal scientist of the National Climatic Data Center, accused the lead author of the 2015 NOAA “pausebuster” report of trying to “discredit” the hiatus through “flagrant manipulation of scientific integrity guidelines and scientific publication standards.”

In addition, Mr. Bates told the Daily [U.K.] Mail that the report’s author, former NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information director Thomas Karl, did so by “insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximized warming and minimized documentation.”

“Gradually, in the months after [the report] came out, the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale’ — in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets — in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy,” Mr. Bates said Saturday on Climate Etc.

The June 2015 report, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus,” which updated the ocean temperature record, was published six months before the U.N.’s Paris summit.

The accusations sparked a fierce back-and-forth Sunday between so-called climate warmists and skeptics over the validity and implications of Mr. Bates’ claim, which he defended on the Climate Etc. blog run by former Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry.

Zeke Hausfather, Berkeley Earth climate scientist, said in a Sunday “factcheck” on the CarbonBrief blog that the Karl paper’s conclusions “have been validated by independent data from satellites, buoys and Argo floats and many other independent groups.”

“While NOAA’s data management procedures may well need improvement, their results have been independently validated and agree with separate global temperature records created by other groups,” Mr. Hausfather said, citing Berkeley Earth and the U.K.’s Met Office Hadley Centre.

He said the record “strongly suggests that NOAA got it right and that we have been underestimating ocean warming in recent years.”

Independent analysis in 2015 when the report came out showed this same NOAA conclusion to be a question of giving more weight to sources that showed a rise in temperature as well as fiddling with past data to show a larger rise than was evident in the temperature record. This is exactly what Bates is alleging.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Just What Is the Israel-Palestine Two-State Solution? By Jack Winnick

By on February 7th, 2017

The so-called “Two-State Solution” has been touted for years as the only way to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians. But time has shown it’s just a land-grab by Israel’s enemies.

The so-called “Two-State Solution” has been touted for many years by Israel’s enemies as the only way to achieve peace. The fundamentals of this “solution” consist of the creation of two new countries. One would comprise the “West Bank,” historically known as Judea and Samaria, and be populated and governed solely by Arabs. As in other Arab countries, Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims would be unwelcome.

The other “country” would comprise the area now known as Israel, but would be open to the return of millions of Arabs as citizens. These “returnees” would include all Arabs who could show any relation to those living in the ill-defined region known as “Palestine” prior to the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948.

This, in effect, would mean Israel would have to open its borders to all Arabs in the Levant. The idea of a Jewish homeland would disappear. A nation populated and governed by Arabs would take its place.

The nation of Israel came into existence after a protracted 30-year struggle, beginning with Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, guaranteeing a Jewish homeland within its protectorate. It culminated with a decisive vote in the United Nations in 1947, the same year Pakistan was created as a home for Indian Muslims (the size of the new Jewish State decreased over the intervening years to about 20 percent of that originally proposed in 1918.)

In the 70 years following that vote, Israel has been subjected to three major conflicts, all instigated by its Arab neighbors. The first, the War of Independence, began right after its birth on May 15, 1948 with a coordinated attack by forces from Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. Few people at that time gave the tiny Jewish nation any chance for survival. Yet thanks to financial and military aid, but not troops, from the United States, it did survive and prosper, miraculously turning a patch of desert with virtually no natural resources into a thriving, productive democracy, home not only to Jews but to Arabs and Christians as well.

The second major conflict was the so-called “Six-Day War,” brought on by troops from Egypt and Syria massed on Israel’s border in early June, 1967. Thanks to a brilliant preemptive strike, Israel was able to survive. Further, because of Jordan’s poorly thought-out attack on West Jerusalem, attempting to wrest control of the Jewish sector, Israel was able to gain control over the whole city and its environs. It also captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria, giving it some measure of protection from future attacks.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Myth of the Trigger-Happy Cop Contrary to public perception, fatal shootings by police officers are relatively rare and have gone down dramatically in places such as New York City By Charles Campisi

By on February 7th, 2017

The seeming surge in fatal shootings by police officers has become one of America’s most divisive issues in recent years. From Ferguson to Baton Rouge, from North Charleston to Minneapolis, from Charlotte to Chicago, communities have been rocked by protests and demonstrations after local police officers shot and killed people, many of them minorities, some completely unarmed. Images of some of the most egregious cases have shocked the national conscience.

As the former chief of internal affairs for the New York Police Department for almost two decades, I was personally involved in the investigation of hundreds of these incidents, including such controversial cases as the 1999 shooting of the unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo and the 2006 shooting of Sean Bell. Perhaps no one knows better than I do that some cops, when using their weapons, make mistakes, disregard their training, succumb to panic or even act with outright malice.

But I also know that, despite the impression often created by TV news and social media, not all but many law-enforcement agencies have dramatically reduced the number of officer-involved shooting incidents.

The NYPD is a case in point. Consider the numbers. In 1971, the first year that the department began compiling detailed data on police shootings, officers shot 314 people, 93 of them fatally. Two decades later, in 1991, the number of NYPD shootings had decreased to 108, with 27 fatalities—a significant reduction but still a disturbingly high number. By 2015 (the last year for which complete official statistics are available), the number of people intentionally shot by NYPD cops had plummeted to 23, with eight resulting in a fatality—a reduction of more than 90% over the previous 4½ decades.

Let me put that in context. In a city of 8.2 million people—and in a police department of more than 35,000 armed officers who in 2015 responded to more than 66,000 calls involving weapons—NYPD cops shot and killed eight criminal suspects. All of these individuals had prior arrest histories, five were carrying a gun or pellet gun, one was stabbing an officer with a knife, and two were violently struggling with cops to avoid arrest.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Netanyahu Presses for More Sanctions Against Iran The Israeli leader says in London that ‘responsible’ countries should follow U.S. lead in countering alleged Iranian aggression By Nicholas Winning and Jason Douglas

By on February 7th, 2017

LONDON—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday urged Western leaders to follow U.S. President Donald Trump in imposing fresh sanctions against Iran.

Speaking in London, where he met with his U.K. counterpart, Theresa May, Mr. Netanyahu said responsible countries should follow the U.S.’s lead to counter alleged Iranian aggression.

“Iran seeks to annihilate Israel. It says so openly. It seeks to conquer the Middle East, it threatens Europe, it threatens the West, it threatens the world. And it offers provocation after provocation,” Mr. Netanyahu said.

“That’s why I welcome President Trump’s insistence of new sanctions against Iran. I think other nations should follow soon, certainly responsible nations.”

Tehran recently test-launched a ballistic missile, drawing condemnation from the new administration in Washington, which imposed a raft of new sanctions against dozens of Iranian-linked entities on Friday.

Iran was also listed among the seven countries whose citizens have been denied access to the U.S. under Mr. Trump’s controversial travel ban.

Senior U.S. officials said the sanctions marked the beginning of an escalating campaign to confront Tehran in the Middle East and restrain its military capabilities.

Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to visit the White House on Feb. 15 for talks with Mr. Trump.

Speaking alongside Mr. Netanyahu on Monday ahead of their formal discussions, Mrs. May said she was willing to discuss Iran but didn’t say whether the U.K. would support a tougher stance against Tehran.

A spokeswoman for Mrs. May said after the two leaders met that the British prime minister “was clear that the nuclear deal is vital and must be properly enforced and policed, while recognizing concerns about Iran’s pattern of destabilizing activity in the region.”

The U.K. is one of the parties to the 2015 deal under which Iran agreed to limit its nuclear program in exchange for an easing of international sanctions. Mr. Trump has criticized that accord and threatened to renegotiate it. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israel Approves Legislation Retroactively Legalizing Settlements No immediate reaction from Trump administration, which initially indicated it wouldn’t pressure Israel to cease settlement expansion By Nancy Shekter-Porat

By on February 7th, 2017

TEL AVIV—Israel’s parliament on Monday approved legislation that retroactively legalizes thousands of Jewish settler homes in the occupied West Bank, a step likely to spark legal challenges and draw international condemnation.

The passage of the bill by a vote of 60-52 in Israel’s 120-seat parliament follows a string of pro-settler steps taken by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since Donald Trump took office as U.S. president.

While Israeli critics of the legislation vowed to go to court, Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the ruling coalition’s Jewish Home Party who co-wrote the bill, hailed the vote as a milestone in the country’s history.

“On this day, the State of Israel decided that developing and advancing settlements in Judea and Samaria is in Israel’s interest,” he said, using the biblical names for the West Bank. “Now we will continue to apply sovereignty and continue to build and develop settlements in all parts of the country.”

Mr. Netanyahu wasn’t present in parliament for the vote: He was returning to Israel from London, where he met U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May earlier in the day for talks on alleged threats posed by Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and bilateral trade.

There was no immediate reaction from the Trump administration, which initially indicated it wouldn’t pressure Israel to cease settlement expansion, reversing the position of its predecessor. In a statement on Friday, however, the White House said Israel’s settlement construction “may not be helpful.”

Mr. Netanyahu is scheduled to visit the White House Feb. 15 for talks with President Trump.

Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Defense, Eli Ben-Dahan (front) and other Israeli lawmakers gesture as they attend a vote on a bill at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem Monday. Photo: ammar awad/Reuters

Under the legislation approved late Monday, Israeli authorities are allowed to declare as government property the private Palestinian land upon which the formerly illegal enclaves were built. The measure calls for the Palestinian owners of the land to be compensated with money or alternative plots of land. CONTINUE AT SITE

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BOOKS Comments turned off

George Eliot Knew a Thing or Two About 21st-Century Politics She wrote ‘Middlemarch’ in 1872 and set it in the 1830s. It’s eerily familiar.By Allysia Finley

By on February 7th, 2017

What can a Victorian-era novel depicting provincial English society teach us about modern politics? For starters, the more politics change, the more they stay the same.
George Eliot’s opus “Middlemarch” (1872), set in a small English town in the early 1830s, isn’t on most high school or college core reading lists. It should be. The novel’s vexing political questions foreshadow the debates taking place today.

“Middlemarch” unfolds against the backdrop of rapid industrialization and a rising middle class. At the time, only the landed aristocracy could vote. Due to urban migration—there was no redistricting to account for population shifts—cities were underrepresented. Meanwhile, the gentry controlled sparsely populated “rotten” boroughs whose voters were under their thumb.

In the novel, political agitators recruit the wealthy landlord Arthur Brooke to run for Parliament on a program of democratic reform. Eliot portrays Mr. Brooke as a frontman for the populist movement and observes that “the very men who profess to be for him would bring another member out of the bag at the right moment.”

Democratic activists choose him because he’s an empty vessel: “Mr. Brooke’s mind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again.” He’s flawed in other ways: Mr. Brooke’s opponents disparage him as “a damned bad landlord” who is “currying favor with a low set.” They make hay out of his poor treatment of tenants.

Mr. Brooke buys a newspaper, the Pioneer, and installs Will Ladislaw, a political activist, as editor to promote his campaign. Eliot describes the Pioneer as a “valuable property which did not pay.” Newspaper readership in those days was also segregated politically: “It’s no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw: they only pick the more holes in his coat in the [competing rag] ‘Trumpet,’ ” Tertius Lydgate tells his friend. Mr. Ladislaw retorts: “No matter; those who read the ‘Pioneer’ don’t read the ‘Trumpet’ . . . Do you suppose the public reads with a view to its own conversion?”

Dr. Lydgate is a young physician who aims to revolutionize the practice of medicine, which “chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs.” Doctors made their money by writing prescriptions, especially for opiates. Dr. Lydgate favors a holistic treatment-and-payment model over physicians “making out long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.”

However, the doctor doubts whether laws promulgated by self-interested politicians will accomplish anything in the way of reform. “That is the way with you political writers,” Dr. Lydgate tells his friend, “crying up a measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part of the very disease that wants curing. . . . You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”

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