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January 2018

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Collusion 3.0: Russia and the NRA Speculation about Russian funding of the organization’s backing of Trump By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on January 21st, 2018

Is there a “three strikes and you’re out” law for political narratives?

Democrats and their media allies were back at the Collusion Reclamation Project this week. The new and improved version is: The NRA did it.

As we have recently recounted, the first breathless attempt to suggest a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to subvert the 2016 presidential election centered on Carter Page. A tangential foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, Page featured prominently in the Steele dossier. Anonymous Russian sources reporting to former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele placed him at the core of an espionage enterprise that entailed hacking Democratic-party emails and negotiating a corrupt quid pro quo arrangement with Putin operatives to give Russia sanctions relief.

That storyline appears to have gone by the boards with the revelation that the dossier — already in disrepute as salacious, unverified, and convincingly refuted in key particulars — was actually an opposition-research project funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Facing libel lawsuits, Steele himself has taken the position that his third- and fourth-hand hearsay information was “raw” and “unverified,” passed along to American law enforcement because he thought it should be investigated, not because he was vouching for its truthfulness. His collaborator, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, has similarly offered nothing meaningful in the way of corroboration in testimony before Senate and House investigators. At the moment, the more pressing question about the dossier involves not the contents of its sensational allegations but whether they were used by the Obama Justice Department and FBI in obtaining a FISA-court warrant to spy on Page and the Trump campaign.

The collapse of the dossier led the media to cobble together a new foundation for their rickety collusion tale. We were treated to gin-mill chatter between an even more obscure Trump-campaign figure, twentysomething climber George Papadopoulos, and an Australian diplomat. Papadopoulos told his companion that he’d heard from Kremlin-connected sources that Russia had emails that could be damaging to the Clinton campaign. Australian intelligence thought so little of the exchange that they waited months to alert their American counterparts, and the FBI thought so little of it that they waited for months — i.e., until after the election — to interview Papadopoulos.

Similarly, Special Counsel Robert Mueller thought so little of it that he let Papadopoulos plead out to a process crime of lying to FBI agents. It is no wonder: While his story is titillating for the media and Democrats because it feeds the Trump-Russia banter, it is a body blow to a prosecutor trying to establish a Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy (which you may vaguely remember as the original “collusion” claim). At best, Papadopoulos’s version of events means the Trump campaign had nothing to do with Russia’s acquisition of Clinton emails. More likely, Papadopoulos’s contacts were bluffing — neither he nor the Trump campaign got emails from Russia and there is, to date, no proof that the Kremlin had them in the first place. There being no actionable collusion evidence, Mueller was in no position to induce Papadopoulos into a collusion-based guilty plea.

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BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Tony Thomas We Will Make You Green A Review of Rupert Darall’s book “Green Tyranny”

By on January 21st, 2018

The “climate industrial complex” is necessarily led by the state, with its power to engorge the renewables rent-seekers via tax, regulations, laws and administration. As Rupert Darwall notes in his new book, if warmists were sincere they would be backing nuclear power, not fighting it.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Encounter Books, 2017, 352 pages, US$25.99
____________________________________

Anyone remember the “acid rain and forest death” scare of the 1970s and 1980s? Rupert Darwall, in Green Tyranny, provides a reminder of this and much more while “exposing the totalitarian roots of the climate industrial complex”.

Acid rain caused by sulphur emissions from coal-fuelled power stations was supposedly poisoning Scandinavian and northern American soil, lakes, fishes and forests. Scandalously, the national science academies of the US, Canada, UK, Sweden and Norway said so loudly. But it was bunk, and put to rest by a 1990 report by the US government’s National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, a decade-long US$500 million study.

Darwall is not a scientist or an academic but an investment banking and public policy wonk, with an after-hours specialty in the history of ideas. His previous book was The Age of Global Warming: A History (2013). In this new volume, his forensic rigour again puts muscle into every page.

The book gains novelty and heft by focusing on how Sweden and Germany generated the global—or rather, the West’s—renewables transformation. The Swedes (population 8 million) have been extraordinarily influential, due largely to their supposed integrity and independence from power blocs. Above all, the Swedes were father to the IPCC. Darwall busts the stereotype with detail, such as Sweden’s refusal to accept Jews fleeing from the Nazis, and its alliance with NATO in the Cold War that was kept secret from the Swedish and world public (Sweden was not neutral at all). In a hall-of-mirrors exercise, Sweden was also used by the Soviets as a drop-box and credible source for their misinformation campaigns. These included the “nuclear winter” phoney scare, designed to undermine the US nuclear armament drive that, ultimately, led to communism’s defeat. In the twenty-first century Swedish bureaucrats continue to enforce conformity to the state line, including suppression of wayward journalism.

The “climate industrial complex” is necessarily led by the state, with its power to engorge the renewables industry rent-seekers through tax, regulations, laws and administration. “Dense networks connect state bureaucracies and regulatory bodies to universities, think-tanks, NGOs, the media, special interest groups, financiers and their lobbyists, and religious institutions,” Darwall says.

Their aim is to overwhelm business opposition, control advice to government and suppress the sensible objections to draconian renewables targets. Thus is occurring “the largest misallocation of resources in history”. As one example, Angela Merkel coerced the EU in 2007 into a legally-binding 20 per cent renewables target by 2020. This was in the absence of any technical knowhow about the grid integration, let alone the cost (which in Germany’s case alone is heading towards 1.1 trillion euros, about the same as its renovation costs for East Germany). As Darwall puts it, “Government support for wind and solar was less about assuring the survival of the unfittest than guaranteeing the triumph of the unfittest.”

That the climate-saving rationale is a sham is proven by the same environmentalists’ successful attacks on nuclear power and strivings against the dazzlingly emissions-effective fracked gas.

The climate cabal’s own-goals would be hilarious if the issues were not so world-changing. Before 2010, the environmental NGOs attacked Volkswagen as a polluter, but greased by Volkswagen million-euro donations, changed tune and lauded the company in 2012 as the world’s ecologically-nicest car-maker. Then in 2015 the sensational Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal came to light.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

SNOWFLAKE FEMINISM BY BRUCE THORNTON

By on January 21st, 2018

The anonymous attack on comedian Aziz Ansari, essentially for being a lousy date and inconsiderate sex partner, has led some to think that the spate of attacks on men for sexual harassment and assault might be slowing down. Although the account by “Grace,” the pseudonymous accuser, has been defended by many, others who have supported the outing of sexual assaulters have drawn the line at lumping bad dates in with more serious sexual malfeasance. Still others hope that the absurdity of Grace’s charges will force a rollback of the ever-escalating demonization of men guilty of nothing more than failing to fulfill a woman’s subjective expectations even when not made explicit.

Don’t count on it. Modern feminism for years has institutionalized a fundamental incoherence. Women are the equals of men and should have the same autonomy and agency, particularly over their sexual choices. At the same time, they need protection from men, who are empowered by a persistent “patriarchy” that encodes in women’s psyches a deference to that power. This internal contradiction has given us the snowflake feminists.

Feminist Contradictions
This incoherence, moreover, is nothing new. It has been obvious since the mid-1990s, when Rene Denfeld inThe New Victorians and Camille Paglia in “No Law in the Arena” analyzed how feminist ideology infantilizes women, making them out to be the helpless victims of “patriarchy.” Yet those exposés of feminist contradictions did not slow down, in subsequent decades, the diminishment of women’s sexual agency. In fact, the development on university campuses of restrictive policies regarding student social life and classroom behavior, and the unconstitutional campus investigations and punishments of men accused of sexual harassment and assault has spilled over into the larger culture. The #MeToo movement, which confuses prosecutable sexual assault with unsubstantiated accusations of boorish behavior, is the culmination of this decades-old process.

The contradictions of feminism, however, reflect a much larger problem, one endemic to any identity politics predicated on grievance and victimhood. Equity feminism, the demand for equal legal status, was a movement to sweep away the unjust laws and social mores that limited women’s lives. It assumed not that women were the same as men, but that they were capable of running their lives beyond the home, and did not need the tutelage of males. Voting, attending university, joining the workforce were all expressions of the personal autonomy that underlay their innate right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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Feminists in Wonderland By Michele Bregande

By on January 21st, 2018

Twinkle, twinkle, pussyhat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea tray in the sky.
(With apologies to Lewis Carroll)

The Women’s March and the Pussyhat Project—its sea of pink pussy hats tipped to Donald Trump—has reached its first birthday! But wait . . . instead of wearing party hats to a celebration, this weekend’s events were more like the Mad Hatter’s un-birthday: the Feminist Wonderland has begun to unravel.

After only one year, pussyhats are old hat. Along with the founders of the Pussyhat Project, the organizers of the Women’s March are peddling new wares and new reasons for women to come together in “support and solidarity for women’s rights and political resistance.”

What happened to the pussyhats? The question reminds me of when the Mad Hatter riddles “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” and then we, like the March Hare and Alice, are swallowed whole into the confusion that ensues, with no way to rationally answer a nonsensical question.

The riddle we might ask the Pussy Hatters is “Why are the pussyhats ‘all hat and no cattle?’” It’s difficult to imagine how this weekend’s march in Washington, D.C. could have been anything near last year’s spectacle. Besides, how could it possibly be as inclusive if the women aren’t all wearing their matchy-matchy vulva headgear?

Pussy Hatters must have gotten a real bee in their bonnets when they began to contemplate some of last year’s ridicule: As I said a year ago, “it seems they forgot the lesson of the infamously retired ‘flesh’-colored crayon.” And now, though they still assert that their choice of Barbie-pink represents femininity, their skewed sensibilities tell them the color is not very inclusive of female anatomical diversity.

The Women’s March chapter in Pensacola, Florida posted to its Facebook page that “the Pink Pussy Hat is white-focused and Eurocentric in that it assumes that all vaginas are pink.” Madly enough, not only do they worry that their hats might be mistaken to represent only white women’s vulvas, they state that since “not all women have pussies,” they don’t want to appear they are promoting “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism”: you know, the feminist crime of excluding men who identify as women.

Now hold onto your own hats here, because then they literally instruct that women tuck in those vulvic corners, and wear any kind of hat that doesn’t look like a pussy!

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Columbia Students and Professors Boycott Bookstore for Supporting Israel by Mike LaChance

By on January 21st, 2018

It all started with a book called “P is For Palestine”

The left wing mob at Columbia is targeting a nearby business for believing Israel has the right to exist. How progressive.

Campus Reform reports:

Students, profs boycott bookstore for supporting Israel

More than 170 members of the Columbia University community have signed onto a petition calling for a boycott of a local bookstore for affirming Israel’s right to exist.

The petition takes aim at Book Culture, a locally-owned independent bookstore that also sells textbooks. In response to backlash from a local synagogue after the store began selling P is For Palestine, a book that praises “intifada,” the owners of Book Culture released a statement acknowledging the violence perpetrated against Israeli civilians during the Palestinian uprisings known as the first and second intifadas.

“We regret that we did not fully appreciate the political or communal ramifications of the children’s book, P is for Palestine, by Dr. Golbarg Bashi, nor did we anticipate the pain and distress it has caused in our community,” the statement began.

The owners of Book Culture also sought to dispel any misconceptions that they may support terrorism against Israelis, and further noted that they “support Israel’s right to exist” and “do not endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.”

This statement angered members of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, who subsequently launched a petition to boycott Book Culture, urging the owners to retract their statement of support for Israel and reaffirm support for “marginalized voices in literature.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

215,000,000 Christians Persecuted, Mostly by Muslims by Raymond Ibrahim

By on January 21st, 2018

In short, the overwhelming majority of persecution that these 215 million Christians experience around the world — especially the worst forms, such as rape and murder — occurs at the hands of Muslims.

If time is on the side of Christians living under Communist regimes, it is not on the side of Christians living under Islam. The center of the great Christian Byzantine Empire is now an increasingly intolerant, rapidly Islamizing Turkey. Carthage, once a bastion of Christianity — where one of Christendom’s greatest theologians, St. Augustine, was born and where the New Testament canon was confirmed in 397 — is today 99% Muslim-majority Tunisia.

As what began in the seventh century comes closer to fruition and the entire world becomes more Islamic and “infidel” free, as in Iraq, confronting these uncomfortable facts is at least a welcome first step in countering the problem.

“215 million Christians experience high levels of persecution” around the world, according to Open Doors, a human rights organization. On its recently released World Watch List 2018, which ranks the world’s 50 worst nations wherein to be Christian, 3,066 Christians were killed, 1,252 abducted, and 1,020 raped or sexually harassed on account of their faith; and 793 churches were attacked or destroyed.

The Islamic world had the lion’s share of this persecution; 38 of the 50 worst nations are Muslim-majority. The report further cites “Islamic oppression” behind the “extreme persecution” that prevails in eight of the 10 worst nations. In short, the overwhelming majority of persecution that these 215 million Christians experience around the world — especially the worst forms, such as rape and murder — occurs at the hands of Muslims.

These Muslims come from all walks of life and reflect a variety of races, nationalities, languages, socio-economic and political circumstances. They include Muslims from among America’s closest allies (Saudi Arabia #12 worst persecutor) and Muslims from its opponents (Iran #10); Muslims from rich nations (Qatar #27 and Kuwait #34) and Muslims from poor nations (Afghanistan #2, Somalia #3, and Yemen #9); Muslims from widely recognized “radical” nations (Pakistan #5), and Muslims from “moderate” nations (Malaysia #23 and Indonesia #38).

But if the World Watch List ranks North Korea — non-Islamic, communist — as the number one worst persecutor of Christians, why belabor the religious identity of Muslims? Surely North Korea’s top spot suggests that Christian persecution is not intrinsic to the Islamic world but is rather a byproduct of repressive regimes and other socio-economic factors that proliferate throughout the Muslim world?

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Restoring Persecuted Middle East Christians’ Faith in America by Johny Messo

By on January 21st, 2018

Christians, members of the largest religion in the world, have become the most persecuted faith group but lack a political voice.

The White House urgently needs to develop a clear vision of how to help Christianity survive — let alone thrive — in its homeland. At the moment, there seems to be no foreign policy based on this vision.

Without urgent action on the part of the United States, Christianity in biblically historic lands, such as Iraq, Syria and Turkey, will be clinically dead before the year 2030. The current administration in Washington has expressed, in words, that this situation cannot be tolerated. It is time now for deeds, as well, to reverse the previous administrations’ virtual abandonment of Christians in the Middle East to the fate of persecution at the hands of Islamists.

In September 2007, then-Senator Obama wrote a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, expressing “concern for Iraq’s Christian and other non-Muslim religious minorities, including Catholic Chaldeans, Syriac Orthodox, Assyrian, Armenian and Protestant Christians, as well as smaller Yazidi and Sabean Mandaean communities.”

Obama warned:

“These communities appear to be targeted by Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish militants… And according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, ‘violence against members of Iraq’s Christian community occurs throughout the country’… Such violence bespeaks a humanitarian crisis of grave proportions. The severe violations of religious freedom faced by members of these indigenous communities, and their potential extinction from their ancient homeland, is deeply alarming… and demand an urgent response from our government.”

In spite of Senator Obama’s having addressed the growing threat to Christians and other ethno-religious minorities in Iraq, their situation would only deteriorate during the eight years of his presidency. While President George W. Bush may have opened the gates of hell for Iraq’s Christians, President Obama not only widened them, but unleashed the demons on Syria. The following give some idea of this downward spiral:

Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, after earlier underreported exoduses of Christians from the country, there were 1.4 million Christians in Iraq, making up 5.4% of its overall population of 26 million. Today, 15 years later, Iraq’s Christian population stands at less than 250,000, a drop of 82%, and a mere 0.65% of Iraq’s general and much larger population of 38 million.

In 2011, there were 1.8 – 2 million Christians in Syria, who made up 8% of the country’s total population of 23 million. Today, less than seven years later, no more than 500,000 Christians, out of a total population of 18.2 million can be found in their war-torn homeland — a drop of more than 72%.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

“Don’t Tell Your Mother” by Linda Goudsmit

By on January 21st, 2018

“Don’t tell your mother.” Parents teach their children to recognize these words to warn them of stranger danger. Exposure is the predator’s enemy. “Don’t tell your mother” is the victimizer’s watchword used to silence his/her victims. So it is in politics.

The leftist Democrat party has weaponized secrecy for political purposes. Exposure is their enemy. The Mueller “Russian collusion” probe, launched by a falsified dossier financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to destroy candidate Trump, handed to the FBI by Republican political adversary John McCain, was deceitfully used by the Obama team to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump team.

The Mueller investigation designed to destroy President Trump has boomeranged on Obama by exposing the serious criminal actions taken by his administration to destroy candidate Trump and elect Obama’s legacy candidate Hillary Clinton. Mueller’s probe found no evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump and the only Russian collusion exposed by the investigation belongs to Hillary/Obama who sold Russia 20% of our uranium. Yet the probe continues.

Mueller’s campaign to destroy President Trump has exposed the staggering abuse of power by Obama’s administration in deliberately using the salacious dossier to secure FISA warrants to spy on Trump. Watergate was five bungling burglars – Obamagate involves his FBI, CIA, DOJ and the colluding mainstream media for censoring and manipulating factual coverage of this massive abuse of power. Yet the probe continues.

On 1.18.18 members of the House said they viewed a “shocking” classified memo allegedly detailing abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by senior Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigations officials in relation to the investigation of the Trump campaign and called for it to be declassified and available to the public immediately.

The Democrats responded with “Don’t tell your mother.”

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In New York, the Tormented, Triumphant Life of Tennessee Williams At the Morgan Library & Museum, photos, posters, letters and even the playwright’s own paintings By Brenda Cronin

By on January 21st, 2018

Playwright Tennessee Williams said that he found “no refuge but writing” and couldn’t resist gilding even his paintings with words. On one self-portrait, the author scrawled “very flattering”; on another, he signed the canvas on the white undershirt he is wearing.

The pictures—one is from 1939, the other isn’t dated—capture Williams’s face and his bare shoulders, in a simple representational style, against a vivid blue background. They are part of a wide-ranging exhibition on the writer of plays such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” opening Feb. 2 at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Williams started painting as a young man and made it a lifelong hobby. The exhibit also includes an undated oil portrait by Williams of Pancho Rodriguez, his lover at the time he was working on “Streetcar.”

The poems of Hart Crane entranced Williams, but in 1936, a performance of Henrik Ibsen’s dark drama, “Ghosts,” literally propelled the would-be-poet from his seat and into pacing back and forth. The drama “took the top of his brain off,” said Carolyn Vega, an associate curator in the department of literary and historical manuscripts at the Morgan, who organized the exhibition.

The Morgan exhibit focuses on six plays Williams created between 1939 and 1957, from the threshold of fame to the height of his powers. He left behind a prodigious trail of journals, letters, poems, short stories, one-acts and full-length plays. The exhibit also includes first editions, posters, programs and photographs from his plays—including a 1947 image of a then-little-known Marlon Brando and his co-stars on the first day of rehearsals for “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which made Brando’s name. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Turkey Launches Airstrikes on Kurdish Targets in Syria Strikes follow days of threats from Ankara to crack down on Kurdish forces allied with the U.S.By Sune Engel Rasmussen in Beirut and Yeliz Candemir in Istanbul

By on January 21st, 2018

Turkish jets began airstrikes on a Syrian Kurdish force allied with the U.S. in the fight against Islamic State, opening a new front in the seven-year Syrian war.

The assault on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in northern Syria follows weeklong threats from the Turkish government to crack down on the main Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG.

The militia has proven to be the most effective partner on the ground in Syria to the U.S.-led coalition battling Islamic State. But Turkey, a U.S. NATO ally, is troubled that the Kurds have gained strength, land and a greater degree of autonomy in a region along the Turkish border through their role in battles against Islamic State.

Turkey has fought the separatist Kurdish movement PKK at home for decades and views the YPG as an extension of the PKK, branding both terrorist organizations. While the YPG has been a strong American ally, the U.S. says it doesn’t directly support the Kurds in Afrin. Nevertheless, U.S. officials warned over the past week that a Turkish incursion into the area risked escalating tensions in northern Syria.

The top U.S. military commander in the region said Saturday he feared that the Turkish action could distract from efforts to counter Islamic State and urged a quick resolution and end to the hostilities.

“The fight against ISIS continues in Syria,” said Army Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command. “We’re still involved in day-to-day fighting with our partners against ISIS, trying to liberate the remaining parts of the terrain that they control.”

Gen. Votel said he spoke earlier Saturday with Turkey’s deputy defense chief, though he offered no details. “We would urge the parties to try to resolve this quickly and avoid escalation on it and try to get back to our common threat, which is ISIS,” he said.

Earlier Saturday, before the strikes began, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said a military operation had “de facto” begun. He pledged to expand it to Manbij, another semi autonomous Kurdish area in northern Syria.

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