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January 2018

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

WHO DIED? JOAN SWIRSKY ****

By on January 14th, 2018

I started watching Miss America and Miss Universe competitions when I was a little girl, mostly because I loved the gowns. To this day, I still tune in, especially toward the end, when all the gowns are on display. A couple of years ago, I saw my all-time favorite! As the expression goes: TDF––to die for!

I also love the Country Music Awards shows because it’s the only time I hear genuinely thrilling voices without the caterwauling and preposterous over-production that camouflages the dearth of talent in the pop-music industry.

But with rare exceptions, I never tune in to the orgies of self-congratulation, self-importance, and self-indulgence known as the Golden Globes, the Emmys, and the Academy Awards, not only because the presenters and winners are so insufferably narcissistic and vapid but because movies and TV shows have devolved to such a point—with notable exceptions, of course—that this past summer, according to The Los Angeles Times, Hollywood suffered its worst-attended summer movie season in 25 years!

Apparently, this is because the moguls who now run Hollywood and TV and the print media are so out of touch with mainstream America—unlike their bête noire, President Trump, who has his finger on the very pulse of America’s wants, needs, and desires—and so obsessed with leftwing politics, and so hysterical that all their efforts to undermine and sabotage and defeat and impeach him have utterly failed, that they’ve done what millions of losers have done in the past, i.e., doubled down on their efforts.

Who are these desperate people? They are not just the moguls, but all the lefties, including the pussy hat women who have now given up that symbol because it’s too pink and not sensitive enough to perhaps darker colors of the female sex organ and not transgender enough to be “fair” to all women. Can’t make this up!

CHOOSING COLORS

When our Founding Fathers chose the colors of the American flag over 240 years ago, they chose white to signify purity and innocence, red to signify hardiness and valor and the blood they spilled in the cause of freedom, and blue to signify vigilance, perseverance and justice.

On Israel’s flag, the blue lines symbolize the stripes on a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and the Star of David is the widely acknowledged symbol of the Jewish people and of Judaism.

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IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

E.R. Drabik The Coalition’s Immigration Challenge

By on January 14th, 2018

Hand-over-fist immigration levels are straining hospitals, roads, public transport, affordable housing, jobs and the nation’s cultural cohesion. If the Prime Minister has any political nous — a dubious proposition, admittedly — he’ll address this issue before his backbenchers do it for him.

Is the long-standing bipartisan consensus in favour of high immigration set to unravel? While led, for now at least, by a ‘Big Australia’ enthusiast, a recent survey suggests that the Liberals might soon have little choice but to abandon their support for mass immigration if they are to avoid electoral wipe-out.

The issue is becoming too pressing to ignore. Australia’s population swelled by a staggering 384,000 in the year to March, 2017, with around 60% of this growth due to immigration. Propelled by the highest per capita immigration intake in the Western world — a migrant arrives on Australian soil every 2 minutes and 21 seconds — the population will surge past 25 million this year. Malcolm Turnbull is routinely lambasted as a do-nothing Prime Minister who has thus far failed to leave a lasting mark, but that is not entirely true: his supercharged immigrant intake is irrevocably transforming Australia in myriad of ways.

Despite a concerted effort by the major parties and the large parts of the media to smother public debate on the topic, Australians are noticing their urban and cultural environments changing rapidly around them. There appears to be a growing worry about the effects of high immigration, as suggested by an Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRI) survey of voters last August. The findings: around three-quarters of voters think Australia does not need more people, with significant majorities seeing such hand-over-fist population growth placing ‘a lot of pressure’ on hospitals, roads, public transport, affordable housing and jobs.

As prominent economist Judith Sloan recently observed, the immigration-fuelled population explosion is squeezing the life out of our major cities, with liveability crashing as the new infrastructure projects necessary to accommodate such rapid growth fall further behind. Another economic commentator, Leith van Onselen, has repeatedly warned that our cities, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, face an “infrastructastophe” due to population crush-loading. Australia, van Onselen has pointed out — not least to Andrew Bolt in the clip below — will need to build the equivalent of a new Melbourne every decade ad infinitum under current immigration levels, a scenario that is “unmanageable, unsustainable and undesirable.” Existing residents are quite rightly asking how Canberra’s plan to add millions more people to our already clogged major cities will do anything other than degrade their quality of life.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey, the Arab World Is Just Not That into You by Burak Bekdil

By on January 14th, 2018

Sunni Arabs do not wish to revisit their Ottoman colonial past. Still, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists.

A poll by Zogby found that 67% of Egyptians, 65% of Saudis, 59% of UAE citizens, and 70% of Iraqis had an unfavorable opinion of Turkey.

For the Sunni Saudis, the Turks were allies only if they could be of use in fighting Shiite Iran or its proxies, such as the Iraqi government or the Syrian regime. Meanwhile, as Turkey, together with Qatar, kept on championing and giving logistical support to Hamas, an Iranian satellite, Saudi Arabia and Egypt distanced themselves from the Palestinian cause and consequently from Turkey.

He runs around in a fake fire extinguisher’s outfit, holding a silly hose in his hands and knocking on neighbors’ doors to put out the fire in their homes. “Go away,” his neighbors keep telling him. “There is no fire here!” I am the person to put out that fire, he insists, as doors keep shutting on his face. That was more or less how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman, pro-ummah (Islamic community), “Big Brother” game has looked in the Middle East.

After years of trial and failure Erdogan does not understand that his services are not wanted in the Muslim neighborhood: The Iranians are too Shiite to trust his Sunni Islamism; the (mostly Sunni) Kurds’ decades-long dispute with the Turks is more ethnic than religious; and Sunni Arabs do not wish to revisit their Ottoman colonial past. Still, Erdogan insists.

Turkish textbooks have taught children how treacherous Arab tribes stabbed their Ottoman ancestors in the back during the First World War, and even how Arabs collaborated with non-Muslim Western powers against Muslim Ottoman Turks. A pro-Western, secular rule in the modern Turkish state in the 20th century coupled with various flavors of Islamism in the Arab world added to an already ingrained anti-Arabism in the Turkish psyche.

Erdogan’s indoctrination, on the other hand, had to break that anti-Arabism if he wanted to revive the Ottoman Turkish rule over a future united ummah. The Turks had to rediscover their “Arab brothers” if Erdogan’s pan-Islamism had to advance into the former Ottoman realms in the Middle East.

It was not a coincidence that the number of imam [religious] school students, under Erdogan’s rule, has risen sharply to 1.3 million from a mere 60,000 when he first came to power in 2002, an increase of more than twenty-fold. Erdogan is happy. “We are grateful to God for that,” he said late in 2017.

Meanwhile, the Turkish Education Ministry added Arabic courses to its curriculum and the state broadcaster, TRT, launched an Arabic television channel.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germans Tackling Exploding Anti-Semitism? by Khadija Khan

By on January 14th, 2018

The teachers always hear from some of the Muslim students that the Jews must have been responsible for the way they were treated in the Holocaust because they had opposed the Nazi regime.

The situation demands an immediate review of policies and laws evidently too feeble to protect all residents equally, not to mention the even greater feebleness of political will to implement those laws.

If not stopped and countered in a timely way, possibly by these new proposals, this nest of hate-mongers carries with it the potential to trigger for Germany another really ugly time.

Finally, it seems, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is proposing legislation that might even include deporting migrants who are anti-Semites, according to Die Welt.

The alarming scale of anti-Semitism in Germany has been escalating with newly arrived refugees, mainly from Muslim lands, and causing the government previously to launch a desperate integration program with a warning that this kind of hatred would not be tolerated in the country.

The German government also decided to introduce extensive discussions about Germany’s Nazi past in the course designed to make newcomers integrate into democratic societies.

The situation seemed to be getting out of control with escalating anti-Semitism among more than a million asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Teachers familiar with the curriculum, however, predict a bleak future for the efforts to convince the Muslim refugees about European history of Nazi Germany: most of them are already drunk with the anti-Semitic propaganda spread across the Muslim world by Nazi-sympathizing Islamists.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: GOP PRIMARY IN COLORADO DISTRICT 5

By on January 14th, 2018

Republican Representative Doug Lamborn, one of the finest Congressman in America is being challenged in the Republican Primary by Darryl Glenn who ran for the Senate in 2016 and lost to incumbent Democrat Senator Michael Bennet.

I am a big cheerleader for Lamborn who is a conservative and a staunch supporter of Israel and has visited the towns in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) in solidarity with the “settlements.”

Darryl Glenn is no slouch. He is black, a staunch conservative, and spent 21 years of combined active duty and reserve in the United States Air force (June 1988-October 2009) retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel.

The primary is on June 28, 2018. I hope Lamborn wins, but Glenn is a candidate who deserves a future in politics.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Of Sellouts, Sepoys and Superheroes by Mark Steyn

By on January 14th, 2018

There was almost too much news these last 24 hours:

~As listeners to yesterday’s Q&A well know, my view is that mass transformative immigration is an existential threat to western civilization. That’s why Trump caught my eye two-and-a-half years ago, and that’s why I re-emphasized the point a week-and-a-half ago: his presidency will stand or fall on immigration. There’s no market for a Trump who suddenly decides, whaddayaknow, Mexico is sending us its best.

Was yesterday the Humpty-Trumpty Falls Off The Wall moment? The soi-disant immigration hardliners at VDare are oddly relaxed about it; Ann Coulter (the “lowest day” of Trump’s presidency) and Tucker Carlson (“What was the point of running for president?”) are not. As an unassimilated foreigner, I’m not sure I’m 100 per cent on top of Tucker’s Chicago Cubs/World Series analogy, but, if I get the gist of it, I think it’s a sportier version of my immigration-is-all point. That said, I spent much of yesterday talking about the subject in a European context, so I’ll save my extended thoughts for later in the week.

Nonetheless, in the scheme of things, President Trump’s ability to crush Steve Bannon like a bug and piss all over a three-day teacup-storm like Michael Wolff is less important than whether or not he still has the determination or inclination to crush like a bug the open-borders loons in both parties and extinguish apparently indestructible bipartisan euphemisms like “comprehensive immigration reform”. That last evasion leads to the Californication of the entire electoral map. In 2016, a Republican year, the supposed GOP bastion of Orange County voted for the Democrat presidential candidate for the first time since 1936. Why do you think such healthy middle-aged Republican congressmen as Darrell Issa are deciding to “retire”?

~No man is a superhero to his valet: The latest sex-fiend swept up in the ongoing Pervnado is Marvel Comics supremo Stan Lee, who, unlike his creations, likes to get out of the long underwear. I met the great man when I was covering the Democrat Convention in 2000, so yes, put another one in the Dem column. For those of us a-wearying of Spider-Man reboots every fortnight (see my closing paragraph here), the question is:

a) Will they simply do as they’ve done to Garrison Keillor on NPR, Charlie Rose on PBS and Jonathan Schwartz on WNYC and vaporize the guy’s entire oeuvre, including all those godawful Reboot-Man vs the Fantastic Franchisers post-origin pre-sequels? In which case, there’ll be nothing at the multiplex except The Emoji Movie, The Lego Movie, The Lego Emoji Movie and The Lego Darkest Hour in 3D.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Do Justice And The FBI Investigate Crimes Or Manufacture Them? Francis Menton

By on January 14th, 2018

The big recent news in the fundamental corruption of the Department of Justice and the FBI is that various Congresspeople have now been allowed to see the FISA application submitted in 2016 seeking authority to surveil the Trump campaign, and multiple sources are now confirming that at least part of the basis for the successful application was the piece of Clinton campaign-financed phony opposition research known as the “Trump Dossier.” However, although the FBI allowed a viewing of the FISA application, it did not allow the making of copies. (Try that gambit next time the FBI subpoenas you for documents!) So we are now all awaiting additional details. My assumption is that there is lots more disgusting information to come about how our “law enforcement” agencies weaponized their powers to support the favored political candidate against the disfavored adversary. But meanwhile, rather than making speculations that may turn out to be wrong about what is to come, let me take this opportunity to educate readers about some of the other fundamental corruption of our exalted law enforcement agencies that gets far less attention.

Just a few weeks ago, in a post titled “The Reputation Of The FBI — And Of The Justice Department — In Tatters,” I advised readers that “you would be out of your mind ever to cooperate in any way with these guys.” Reasons included not only that they regularly misuse their powers for political purposes and prosecute things that are not crimes, but also “they are entirely likely to create an entrapment scheme to manufacture a crime to nail you.”

The word is that in the last few days Special Prosecutor Mueller has been seeking an interview with President Trump. Does my advice to not cooperate apply equally to the President in these circumstances? Sadly, it applies especially to the President. Let’s review the output of the Mueller investigation to date. When you look at it, the effort appears to amount to little more than the manufacturing of crimes that did not previously exist in order to nail disfavored people.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

In Climate Science, Predictions Are Hard, Especially About The Future Francis Menton

By on January 14th, 2018

You probably think that the classical reference in the title is to a saying originating from baseball humorist Yogi Berra. But Quote Investigator traces the origin of the saying back to an unnamed wag in the Danish parliament in the 1930s. Early users of the phrase included Danish atomic physicist Nils Bohr and movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn.

As hard as they may be to get right, predictions about the future are the core of the field that goes by the name of “climate science.” Because of predictions about the future by climate scientists, everybody knows that human burning of fossil fuels will cause world temperatures to increase by multiple degrees over the coming century, leading to a series of calamities ranging from sea level rise to droughts to floods to hurricane and tornadoes. After all, the climate scientists have sophisticated computer models! If you don’t believe the predictions of the models, you must be a “science denier.” The predictions of significantly rising temperatures are so certain that you are to be required by government coercion (unless President Trump can head it off) to dramatically reduce your use of fossil fuels and restrict your lifestyle.

You and I are not going to be around in 2100 to see if any of these predictions about the future have come true. But meanwhile the climate alarm crowd obliges us with shorter term predictions to help us get some handle on how reliable they are. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing a very good job of keeping track of these predictions and seeing how they are turning out. So once again it falls to the Manhattan Contrarian to do some leg work. On this subject, I am assisted today by some very useful work from my friend Benny Peiser and the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK.

For example, there was the prediction that our national weather bureaucracy (NOAA) came out with back in October as to the severity of the upcoming winter. How do they come up with that prediction? Eric Niler at Wired wrote a post on the prediction on October 29 that revealed that the seasonal predictions rely on models using the same theories of “heat trapping” greenhouse gases as they use for the longer-term models:

NOAA climate scientists incorporate heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels when they run the models that produce their seasonal climate predictions.

So what was the prediction?

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BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Conservation, Not Environmentalism By Janet Levy

By on January 14th, 2018

Much of the disagreement over the use of America’s natural resources stems from confusion over the difference between conservation and environmentalism. Conservation, a rational, conservative approach to protecting and preserving the environment, is an ethic of resource utilization. Conservationists view man as a natural, invested partner in the endeavor to preserve the environment to ensure its continued, sustainable use by humans.

Environmentalism began as a sincere conservationist movement but subscribes to a view of man as nature’s enemy. Nature itself is revered and intrinsically embodied with value. Environmentalists seek to limit human access to, rather than allow use of, nature to advance human life, health, and happiness. Environmentalists perceive man as an immoral, destructive interloper who can interact only negatively with his natural surroundings.

In his book, Smoking Them Out: The Theft of the Environment and How to Take It Back (American Tradition Institute, 2013), Greg Walcher focuses on these ideological differences as he examines the environmental movement.

Walcher begins with the history of the environmental movement. He demonstrates how the stewardship of our resources – water, forests, energy sources, other natural resources – has become less about real science and conservation and more about politics and achieving centralized control. This change in focus has created unintended consequences, far removed from the ideals of caring for the environment and, today, bordering on malfeasance.

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