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July 2017

Tony Thomas The Trump Doctrine on Energy

If you go by the mainstream media’s lockstep ‘coverage’ of the US president’s first six months, he is no more nor less than a tweeting buffoon. A comforting narrative for cant-addicted newsroom hacks and groupthinkers, it handily avoids any and all mooting of Australia’s need to follow his lead.

Our federal and state politicians scuttle about looking for innovative new ways to strangle the Australian energy sector. But across the Pacific, America is unleashing a world-changing energy revolution. The world’s energy fundamentals are in transition. Donald Trump is liberating American coal, gas, oil and nuclear industries from eight years of Obama’s harassment and restrictions.

The consequences for us as a player in energy-export markets are dire. In an officially supportive environment, Australian energy could hold its share – intrinsically, it has global competitiveness. But politics here involves ‘renewables’ targets and other sacrifices to please the climate gods, bans such as Victoria’s on normal and fracked gas exploration, official and green lawfare against every new energy project (think Adani), impromptu Turnbull restrictions on LNG exports, Sargasso seas of red tape, and on-going fatwas against nuclear proposals.

Domestically, American industry will enjoy cheap energy inputs, while our own industry’s energy becomes as expensive as anywhere in the world. This disparity will play out in Australian factory closures and capital flight to the US.

A banana republic couldn’t do a better job of destroying its own wealth.

The US is now estimated to have 20% more oil than the Saudis – at USD50 a barrel, a storehouse of USD $13 trillion. The US has been a net energy importer since 1953, but thanks to fracking is now likely to be a net exporter as early as 2020. American LNG could move into net export surplus as early as this year. By 2040, US natural gas exports alone could bring in USD $1.6 trillion, and generate USD $110b in wages. US gas reserves are also enough to meet domestic needs for a century. The American energy revolution – in Trump’s word, “dominance” – seldom makes the mainstream media here, which is fixated on the schoolyard narrative of Trump as a tweeting buffoon.

Want to know what’s really important? Trump on June 29 addressed the Department of Energy’s “Unleashing Energy” conference in Washington.

His policy announcements were so shattering to the green/left ideology – he talked of “clean, beautiful coal” for example – that his message went almost unreported here. Trump said

The golden era of American energy is now underway. When it comes to the future of America’s energy needs, we will find it, we will dream it, and we will build it.

American energy will power our ships, our planes and our cities. American hands will bend the steel and pour the concrete that brings this energy into our homes and that exports this incredible, newfound energy all around the world. And American grit will ensure that what we dream, and what we build, will truly be second to none.

Today, I am proudly announcing six brand-new initiatives to propel this new era of American energy dominance.

First, we will begin to revive and expand our nuclear energy sector which produces clean, renewable and emissions-free energy. A complete review of U.S. nuclear energy policy will help us find new ways to revitalize this crucial energy resource. [US nuclear plants have been shuttering because of cheap gas and low power demand].

Swedish music festival cancelled next year due to sexual assaults By Rick Moran

The largest music festival in Sweden will not go on next year because, for the second year in a row, more than a dozen sexual assaults of young girls marred the event.

Last year, more than 40 young girls reported being sexually assaulted. Men described as being of “foreign origin” were responsible.

Despite increased security this year, the assaults continued.

Breitbart:

Festival safety manager Ulf Bowein was asked why the sex attacks were continuing to happen despite the increase in the number of personnel and tighter security precautions. He said: “That’s a good question—ask those who commit the infractions instead.”

“Unfortunately, it’s like anywhere in the community. We have a number of individuals who commit the crime,” he added.

Bowein noted the number of attacks had gone down in number since last year. Reports claimed that men, largely described as being of “foreign origin”, had sexually molested up to 40 girls at the festival.

The news prompted British band Mumford and Sons, who headlined the event, to announce a boycott for future performances until the situation was brought under control. The band did not feature at all in this year’s event.

Sex attacks became common at Swedish festivals last year, so much so that officials estimate the number of sex attacks at outdoor music festivals increased by 1,000 per cent in 2016.

The targets of the sex attacks are generally young girls, many of them underage. 17-year-old Alexandra Larsson was one of the victims and she described what happened to her: “First, someone touched me on the butt a few times. I turned around and inquired who had done it, but got no answer.”

“This was repeated several times. Finally, someone touched me on the genitals. Then I got angry and turned around and shouted, ‘Whoever it was, you are an idiot!’”

Festivals are not the only locations for sex assaults as various reports have shown that girls in Sweden have been attacked in railway stations, and even in public schools.

It should be noted that authorities have not identified the perpetrators of the assaults this year. Less than a month ago, two “African migrants” were arrested for sexually assaulting numerous women at a railway station.

Rescue at Entebbe — the continuing lesson By Abraham H. Miller

On July 4, 1976, Israeli commandos launched one of the most daring hostage rescue missions of all time, the raid on Entebbe. Its military audacity and tactical details have become a textbook case of the use of special forces and the element of surprise to gain advantage over a superior force. Its success awed military leaders across the globe. ­

On June 27, 1976, an Air France Air Bus took off from Tel Aviv for Paris with a stop in Athens. Among the passengers that boarded the plane in Athens were four hijackers, two members of the loosely organized Revolutionary Cells, a German terrorist group, and two members of a faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Shortly after takeoff, they commandeered the plane and forced it to fly to Benghazi Airport.

From Benghazi, the plane flew to the airport at Entebbe, Uganda, which at the time was under the control of the maniacal psychopath, Idi Amin, who was president for life of Uganda and head of the Organization of African Unity. Four more armed hijackers boarded the plane at Entebbe, with the complicity of the Ugandan dictator. Ugandan military reinforced the hijackers.

At the Entebbe Airport, the terrorists, with the help of Ugandan soldiers, separated the Jews from the rest of the passengers. Of the non-Jews, 148 were released and flown to Paris.

With the unstable Amin in charge and the terrorists refusing to receive diplomatic entreaties, even from Yasser Arafat, the lives of the Jewish hostages hung in a fragile balance.

Following hostage negotiations, the Israelis ran the clock and prepared for an assault on Entebbe. The dramatic and skillful execution of the surprise raid has been well documented elsewhere and the subject of several cinematic productions. Israeli commandos rescued some 100 hostages, losing one of their own, Yonatan Netanyahu, the brother of the current Israeli prime minister, and three hostages. The Israeli Special Forces killed all of the terrorists and more than forty of their Ugandan military accomplices.

The drama did not end there. What followed afterward in Uganda and on the world’s diplomatic stages is as important as the raid itself.

Members of Amin’s security forces, in retaliation, dragged Dora Bloch, an elderly British-Jewish woman, from a hospital bed in Kampala and shot her. They also shot Ugandan medical personnel who tried to intervene to protect her.

Because Kenya permitted the Israeli plane that transported the hostages to refuel in Nairobi, Amin’s troops massacred hundreds of innocent Kenyans who were living in Uganda.

At the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity entered a complaint against Israel for violating Ugandan sovereignty. The Soviets joined in the condemnation. Among many African nations, the principle of sovereignty of a country run by a psychopath and co-conspirator in international piracy was more important than the humanitarian consideration of saving lives — perhaps, because they were Jewish lives.

Will Trump End Campus Kangaroo Courts? Democratic senators, a New Jersey task force and even the ABA mobilize against due process. By KC Johnson

Mr. Johnson is a Brooklyn College historian and co-author, with Stuart Taylor, of “The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities” (Encounter, 2017).

Is the Education Department preparing to dial back the Obama administration’s assault on campus due process? In late June, Candice Jackson, who in April became acting head of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, made her first public remarks about the regulatory regime she inherited. Ms. Jackson said she is examining her predecessors’ work but offered no specifics about when, or if, Obama-era mandates will be changed.

Beginning in 2011, the Obama administration used Title IX—the federal law banning sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funds—to pressure colleges and universities into adopting new procedures for handling sexual-misconduct complaints. At most schools, accused students already faced secret tribunals that lacked basic due-process protections. But the Education Department mandated even more unfairness. It ordered schools to lower the standard of proof to “preponderance of the evidence” instead of the “clear and convincing evidence” standard that some schools had used. It required schools to permit accusers to appeal not-guilty findings and discouraged allowing students under investigation to cross-examine their accusers.

As a result, scores of students have sued their colleges, alleging they were wrongfully accused. They have won more than 50 decisions in state and federal court since 2012, while nearly 40 complaints have been dismissed or decided in the colleges’ favor.

Ms. Jackson has already reversed another Obama-era policy that sought to tip the scales in favor of accusers. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed revealed that her predecessor, Catherine Lhamon, had ordered that whenever someone filed a Title IX complaint against a school with the Education Department, the civil-rights office would investigate every sexual-assault allegation there over several years. The shift sometimes led to reopening cases in which accused students already had been cleared. Ms. Jackson argued last week that this policy—which Ms. Lhamon never announced publicly—treated “every complaint as a fishing expedition through which our field investigators have been told to keep searching until you find a violation rather than go where the evidence takes them.” CONTINUE AT SITE

These first signs of renewed fairness have elicited strong protests. Last week 34 Democratic senators, led by Washington’s Patty Murray, sent a letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos accusing her of endorsing “diminished” enforcement of federal civil-rights laws. The senators did not even make a pretense of caring about due process for the accused. Congressional Republicans have mostly remained silent.

Late last month a task force appointed by Gov. Chris Christie released a report on how New Jersey institutions should respond to sexual assault on campus. The panel, dominated by academic administrators and victim advocates, based most of its work on the assumption that university investigations are meant to validate accusations rather than test them.

U.S. Tells North Korea It Is Prepared to Go to War Pyongyang claims a further breakthrough toward a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach American cities By Jonathan Cheng

SEOUL—The U.S. warned North Korea that it is ready to fight if provoked, as Pyongyang claimed another weapons-development breakthrough following its launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile a day earlier.

The regime, having demonstrated its capacity to reach the U.S. with a missile, on Wednesday touted another achievement of the test launch: It claimed that its missile warhead—the forward section, which carries the explosive—can withstand the extreme heat and pressure of re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.

If true—the claim couldn’t be independently verified—that would clear another hurdle in developing a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach American cities.
As tensions between Washington and Pyongyang rose, Gen. Vincent Brooks, the top American military commander in South Korea, said in a statement Wednesday that the U.S. and South Korea are prepared to go to war with the North if given the order.

“Self restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war,” Gen. Brooks said. “We are able to change our choice when so ordered.…It would be a grave mistake for anyone to believe anything to the contrary.”
North Korea said it successfully test-fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile, a claim that could escalate tensions between Pyongyang and the rest of the world. Image: KRT/AP

Earlier in the day, allied armies conducted a rare live-fire drill, launching tactical surface-to-surface missiles off the east coast of Korea—an action they said was aimed directly at “countering North Korea’s destabilizing and unlawful actions on July 4.”

The drill and tough language appeared meant to reassure Seoul after North Korea’s successful ICBM test, a significant advance.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson described the development as an escalation of the threat to the U.S. It came despite years of sanctions and warnings aimed at preventing Kim Jong Un’s regime from reaching the milestone.

Washington has considered military action against North Korea, but pulling the trigger presents serious risks. Seoul, a city of 10 million, sits just 35 miles from the North Korean border, where Pyongyang has assembled artillery that could inflict devastating damage on the densely populated South Korean capital.

“A single volley could deliver more than 350 metric tons of explosives across the South Korean capital, roughly the same amount of ordnance dropped by 11 B-52 bombers,” said a report published last year by Austin, Texas-based geopolitical consultancy Stratfor.

The North Korean Missile Crisis The nuclear threat to U.S. cities requires an urgent response.

North Korea continued to defy the protests of world leaders on Tuesday by launching what looks to be its first intercontinental ballistic missile. The symbolism of launching on America’s Independence Day was surely no accident, but the technical feat is more consequential. The speed of North Korea’s progress toward threatening the U.S. with a fleet of nuclear-tipped ICBMs requires an urgent response.

Tuesday’s missile, dubbed the Hwasong-14, has an estimated range of 6,700 kilometers, which puts Alaska within range. America’s lower 48 states may still be out of reach, but the test shows the North has overcome most of the obstacles to a long-range missile. The apparent success will provide more data on the remaining problems, such as a warhead capable of withstanding extremes of temperature and vibration.

One crucial question is whether the new missile is based on the Hwasong-12, an intermediate-range missile successfully tested on May 14. As we wrote at the time, that rocket was apparently a single-stage design and thus a good candidate to become the first stage of an ICBM. The regime has heretofore used engines cobbled together from Russian and Chinese missiles for its ICBM program.

The Hwasong-12 was designed from scratch, and its new engine is more sophisticated than anything the regime had produced. If the North has now attached a second stage, the U.S. will have to advance the estimates of when Los Angeles and Chicago could come under direct threat.

The Trump Administration now has some hard decisions to make as it contemplates its Korea options. More sanctions put the Kim regime under pressure and thus are worth doing, but they can’t be relied on to disarm the North in time. Like its allies South Korea and Japan, the U.S. will soon be vulnerable to attack by a regime that has an estimated 20 nuclear warheads as well as chemical and biological weapons. A pre-emptive U.S. military attack can’t be ruled out but risks a nuclear counterstrike on South Korea if even one North Korean missile survives.

China, the dovish new South Korean government and the U.S. left are pressing for more disarmament talks in return for a “freeze” on Pyongyang’s nuclear programs. But three U.S. administrations have tried diplomacy and failed. The freeze would be phony and the North would break out again when it feels its demands for more money and recognition aren’t being met.

The best option is a comprehensive strategy to change the Kim regime, as former Undersecretary of State Robert Joseph has argued. Washington must strengthen deterrence and build out missile defenses, revive the Bush Administration’s antiproliferation dragnet, convince countries in the region to cut their ties with North Korea, consider shooting down future Korean test missiles, and spread news about the regime’s crimes to people in the North.

The U.S. will also have to recognize that Beijing is part of the problem. North Korea’s trade with China grew by 37.4% in the first quarter, contributing to an economic miniboom. Chinese companies are cashing in on the North’s mineral resources and cheap labor while supplying the dual-use materials and technology for its nuclear and missile programs.

JUNE 2017- THE MONTH THAT WAS…SYDNEY WILLIAMS

With June behind us, so is the first half of 2017, a year that seems to have just begun, yet which has brought so much news.

Mainstream media has assumed a Potemkin village-like stance – twisting news to corroborate a prescribed narrative. James Comey’s testimony before the Senate (see my TOTD “The Dystopian World of James Comey,” June 19, 2017) began as an investigation into alleged Russian interference in last year’s election, but then had to adjust, as Comey suggested that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch needed scrutinizing for persuading him to refer to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server as a “matter.” Muddying the waters further, it was disclosed that then President Obama tried to put a lid on probing Russian interference last fall, when it seemed probable that Mrs. Clinton would win the Presidency. In Georgia’s sixth district, Republican Karen Handel overcame a $30 million spending campaign by Democrat Jon Ossoff to keep Tom Price’s seat in Republican hands. DNC Chair Tom Perez blamed the loss on gerrymandering, while mainstream media took succor from the fact that Democrats narrowed the size of the loss; though they skipped over the inconvenient fact that Congressional wins in Georgia and South Carolina were by wider margins than that achieved by the President in November.

The Senate healthcare bill was released by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, but a full vote in the Senate was delayed until after the July 4th recess. Unilateralism, as we saw in the previous Administration, encourages partisanship. In 2009, with 60 Democrat Senators, it took 18 months to pass the Affordable Care Act, and it was passed without a single Republican vote. The insufferable Nancy Pelosi, then House Speaker, said we would have to pass the bill to see what was in it. The American people would like the Party’s to work together, but the media knows that bad news (partisanship and bickering) sells better than good news (reconciliation and concessions). In the meantime, the Affordable Care Act is in trouble. An article in the June 9th The New York Times reported that by next year no insurance companies would be operating in 45 counties in the U.S., and that 1,388 counties will only have one plan. For left-leaning Democrats, the only option to a failing ObamaCare is a single-payer system – socialized medicine. For right-leaning Republicans, the only answer is repeal, and replace later. Neither is good. The best would be for the two Party’s to find a bipartisan path – seek common ground, fix what needs to be fixed, eliminate what’s wrong, work on tort reform and allow insurance companies to compete across state borders. But that is not what Party leaders want, nor is it what the media prefers.

Inflexible Progressivism: The Rise of a New Dogma

By Herbert London President, London Center for Policy Research

As a young man coming from a left-wing pedigree, I embraced a liberal agenda which included most notably, a belief in Israel as a bastion of socialism and democracy. In the 1950’s a good progressive was a good Zionist.

Oh, how the world has changed. Now a progressive has moved 180 degrees to anti-Zionist position. As one wag put it, the Left is now the congenial home of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. One of the leaders of the progressive left recently said, “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.”

Linda Sarsour, the leader of the Woman’s March in Washington and a commencement speaker at the City University of New York clearly embodies the new spirit on the Left. She has praised Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, once anathema to liberals. She has honored Embrased Rasmesh Odeh, a terrorist murderer. She has spoken in favor of Sharia finance.

What is truly remarkable, and to some degree ideologically shattering, is that the New York Times wrote a fawning profile about this woman who challenges all liberal principles. She had the audacity to say that “the vagina of Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be taken away,” the same Ayaan who has worked so hard to promote women’s rights throughout the Muslim world. Yet the ADL defends Sarsour.

For the Left, Zionism has promoted Islamophobia – a false critique from the standpoint of Islamists. As a consequence, anti-Semitism is rendered a virtue, as a way to discourage negative sentiment about Islam. Yet even when the evidence of anti-Semitism is incontrovertible, the Left contends anti-Semitism is a figment of an hysterical, oversensitive imagination. For the most part, Jews are being systematically written out of the progressive agenda, even though they were responsible for that agenda in the first place. But why quibble.

North Korea’s Fireworks By Claudia Rosett

While Americans were celebrating Independence Day, North Korea test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, with a potential range that some experts estimate could reach the United States. As The Wall Street Journal reports, in an editorial headlined “The North Korean Missile Crisis”:

Tuesday’s missile, dubbed the Hwasong-14, has an estimated range of 6,700 kilometers, which puts Alaska within range. America’s lower 48 states may still be out of reach, but the test shows the North has overcome most of the obstacles to a long-range missile.

Enough, already. There is no safe way to end the North Korean menace, but the threats from Kim Jong Un’s regime are amplifying at a clip that suggests it is even more dangerous to allow the Kim regime to carry on. While the world has watched, for years — and while the United Nations Security Council has passed one sanctions resolution after another — North Korea has not only been carrying out ballistic missile and nuclear tests, but enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium to amass ever more bomb fuel. As the Journal editorial also notes, North Korea by now “has an estimated 20 nuclear warheads as well as chemical and biological weapons.”

The threat is not solely that North Korea — well versed in shakedown rackets — could target the U.S. with nuclear-tipped ICBMs, or that North Korea can add nuclear weapons to the massive arsenal with which it has long threatened Seoul.

A further danger is that North Korea could proliferate its advancing nuclear missile technology, or even the weapons themselves, to other rogue states, such as Iran — with which Pyongyang has trafficked and cooperated for decades in missile development, and according to some press accounts (please see my discussion of reporting by Douglas Frantz), in nuclear weapons development as well.

The Pyongyang regime was part of Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network, supplied taboo nuclear-related materials to Qaddafi’s Libya, and has a record of proliferating nuclear technology (the clandestine Al-Kibar reactor built with North Korean help in Syria, destroyed by a 2007 Israeli air strike). It is alarmingly plausible that when Pyongyang brags up its missile and nuclear tests, the global headlines double as North Korean advertising to actors around the globe who might be interested in North Korea’s illicit wares.