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August 2018

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

A Strange Kind of Authoritarian If President Trump is a tyrant, as the Left constantly charges, he isn’t doing a very good job at it. Seth Barron

By on August 27th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/html/strange-kind-authoritarian-16129.html

The double whammy of yesterday’s guilty verdict in the case of Paul Manafort and guilty plea in that of Michael Cohen—President Trump’s former campaign manager and personal attorney, respectively—must have stunned the White House, and certainly elated the president’s critics, who are busy filing their teeth in preparation for an impeachment case. But as the nation moves into untrodden constitutional territory, with demands that Trump be indicted for political corruption, it’s worth examining the balance of power in the U.S. today, and the extent to which the president—frequently accused of unprecedented abuse of executive authority—may actually be more respectful of legal procedure and norms than his critics charge.

While the Mueller investigation moves laboriously toward its ostensible focus—Russian meddling in the 2016 election—it has been blazingly fast in racking up convictions and guilty pleas on what appear to be less-than-urgent tax-fraud cases. Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime campaign manager, was indicted, tried, and convicted for crimes pertaining to his political-consultancy business in Ukraine. No link was alleged between these activities and Trump; it was an ancillary case that, as the judge observed early on, was part of an effort to put pressure on the president. Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, pled guilty to a slew of financial-related crimes. He confessed, among other felonies, to having made $30,000 by brokering the sale of an expensive piece of luggage, and failing to report this income. The kicker in Cohen’s confession was the last count, where he appears to implicate Trump in an effort to influence the 2016 election; the president directed him, he claims, to make “an excessive campaign contribution” to buy silence from women with whom Trump had had sexual relationships with in the past. Cohen, facing 65 years in prison, appears responsive to the prosecutorial squeeze play, and is willing to testify to Trump’s involvement in nefarious doings.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

How to Think about Privilege By Graham Hillard

By on August 27th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/whiteness-meaningless-catch-all-progressive-epithet/

‘Whiteness’ is not a helpful shorthand.

Some years ago, a friend of mine who was employed by a state indoctrination center (all right, a public school) was made to participate in a faculty-development exercise whose ideological preoccupations are by now familiar. Facing each other in a circle, the assembled teachers were directed to take a step backward whenever they could claim one of the “advantages” read from an administrator’s list. Born in the United States? Take a step. Raised in a two-parent home? Step again. Fortunate enough to attend college? Step once more. Perhaps because my friend was forced to back nearly out of the building, he intuited quickly enough the activity’s message. His middle-class life was no longer to be understood as a product of his (and his parents’) diligence and sacrifice but as something undeserved, ugly, even oppressive.

My friend, reasonably enough, was horrified. But now I wonder if the era when that exercise took place should be regarded as the good old days.

One of the retrospective charms of the millennium’s first decade is the fact that the various privileges identified by my friend’s principal hadn’t yet cohered (at least outside academic circles) into the rhetorical catch-all of “whiteness.” Conversations about inequality could still be had — indeed, sometimes they were even useful — but the Left remained sweetly unaware of its ability to evoke a whole host of disparities with a mere sneering reference (“white people”) to 60 percent of the population. A single cultural turning point is impossible to mark, but one could do worse than to point to the progressive beatification of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose contributions to public discourse are perhaps best summed up by his absurd remark to Evanston Township High School students that “when you’re white in this country, you’re taught that everything belongs to you.”

That such a claim is unfalsifiable using any tools currently in vogue — any tools, that is, except reason and observation — is only part of its appeal. The remainder derives from its usefulness as intellectual shorthand: It allows the speaker to substitute a threatening abstraction (“Boo! Whiteness!”) for an actual discussion of the hugely complicated inequalities that obtain in American society.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

‘It Is the Era of Trump’: How the President Is Remaking the Republican Party President Trump’s critics are leaving the scene, and his successful primary endorsements are bringing in a new crowd by Janet Hook

By on August 27th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/crusade-and-jihad-review-conquest-and-conquerors-1535311504

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.—For months after Republican Adam Putnam entered the Florida gubernatorial race, he seemed almost unbeatable. He had a record of government experience and political success, a trove of endorsements, robust fundraising and a solid lead in most polls over his principal rival, GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis.

Then Mr. DeSantis, a vocal defender of President Trump, picked up the president’s endorsement in June, touted it in a new ad, and appeared with Mr. Trump at a campaign rally in Tampa. Mr. DeSantis shot to the lead in the polls.

“The fallout from the president’s visit to Florida was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen,” said Mr. Putnam, the state agriculture commissioner, who has worked ever since to catch up in advance of Florida’s Aug. 28 primary election.

After more than two decades of tension within the GOP between a restive base and its traditional establishment, Trumpism, the archetypal grass-roots movement, is winning.

With the 2018 primaries about to end, all but two of the 37 Republicans Mr. Trump has endorsed for House, Senate and governor during their primary campaigns have won. Mr. Trump has abandoned or undercut the party’s traditional commitment to free trade, fiscal conservatism and a hawkish foreign policy.

Mr. Trump’s most vocal GOP critics in elective office have been defeated in primaries, announced their retirement or gone quiet. No critic was more forceful than Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who died Saturday.

House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, once a rising star of the party and free-market conservatism, is retiring. Of the 33 House and Senate Republicans quitting Capitol Hill in 2018—not including those running for higher office—just two supported Mr. Trump in 2016 before he became the presumptive nominee. At least five of them didn’t endorse Mr. Trump after he won the nomination.

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BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Bartle Bull‘Crusade and Jihad’ Review: Conquest and Conquerors Islam created a mighty empire—and historical narratives that assign the Muslim world to the status of perennial victimhood are infantilizing. Bartle Bull reviews “Crusade and Jihad” by William R. Polk.

By on August 27th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/crusade-and-jihad-review-conquest-and-conquerors-1535311504
By
Bartle Bull
Aug. 26, 2018 3:25 p.m. ET

When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, Islam had not expanded beyond the borders of the Arabian peninsula. His Islamic state grew swiftly in the following century, reaching farther than the empires of Alexander and Genghis Khan and sinking deeper roots. Islam was the only world religion to spread almost entirely by the sword, from North Africa to the northern tier of Sub-Saharan Africa, from the Levant to Mesopotamia and Iran, from Central Asia to India and western China. In foreign lands from the Ganges to the Pillars of Hercules, the invaders left an enduring faith. It was a peerless achievement.

By the time Muhammad died, he had conquered an area larger than Western Europe, but his Arabs were still stopped up in their sandy peninsula by the ancient and powerful empires to the north: Persia and Byzantium. Yet the coming imperial expansion was in the DNA of the system he left behind. Offensive jihad—warfare against the Unbeliever—was a primary obligation of his followers. Muhammad’s own daily example had the force of eternal law, and according to the holy traditions he had fought successfully as a military commander, personally killing, or ordering the killing of, numerous foes as he brought Jews, Christians and pagans under his rule.

Islam’s imperial success, then, was a success on the faith’s own terms. A glorious undertaking, in an old-fashioned martial way, it was triumphant for nigh on a millennium, with the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (d. 1566), the Ottoman sultan, the approximate pinnacle. The Islamic world subsequently grew weak and the West strong—to simplify somewhat—and the West soon enough became the imperialist side.

usade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North,” William R. Polk presents things a bit differently. In 1095, Pope Urban II called the First Crusade. Since then, Mr. Polk contends, a pattern of Western aggression has produced the generally illiberal and often violent condition of the Islamic world today.

Many facts in his book likely will be new to some readers. Various details emphasize European cruelty toward Muslim populations: In 1502 Vasco da Gama cut off the “hands, ears and noses of some eight hundred ‘Moorish’ seamen” of Calicut, for example. Other observations point out curious continuities across the years: During the U.S. fight to suppress the Moros (“moors”) of the southern Philippines, the Moros used suicide fighters called fidayin, just like Saddam Hussein’s suicidal fedayeen, as well as “improvised explosive devices.”

Unfortunately, the book is sometimes on factually shaky ground. The Dutch suppression of Java between 1825 and 1830 (Mr. Polk says it happened a decade later) most likely killed somewhat less than 200,000 natives—not, as the author states, 300,000. In Libya, we are told, Mussolini’s repression of the Senussi revolt of 1923-32 “killed about two-thirds of the population.” Again the truth is bad enough: The Italian campaign in eastern Libya (Cyrenaica) led to the death of perhaps a quarter of that region’s people while missing western Libya (with about 70% of the country’s population) more or less entirely.

The conduct in Islamic lands of the English, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, French and others has indeed been frequently appalling. Mr. Polk’s case would be better served, however, if he mentioned that such conduct often occurred in lands Islam itself had conquered first—usually through great violence. The Muslim subjection of Iran took nine years (642-651) of bloody warfare. Tamerlane (d. 1405), the self-appointed “Sword of Islam,” left pyramids of skulls outside the wrecks of great cities. The “great Mughal Empire,” as Mr. Polk repeatedly calls Babur’s admittedly splendid 16th-century creation, likely saw at least two million killed in a single war (the Deccan campaign, in present-day southern India, of the fanatic emperor Aurangzeb). CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Look Who’s Supporting the NRA against Cuomo The ACLU defends ‘core political speech.’ James Freeman

By on August 27th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/look-whos-supporting-the-nra-against-cuomo-1535397103

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has earned a new opponent in his assault on liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Better late than never, the American Civil Liberties Union is standing up against Mr. Cuomo’s abuse of the National Rifle Association. The happy result could be not just expanded liberty in New York but safer financial institutions as well.

All year long, Mr. Cuomo has been doing whatever he thinks he needs to do to ensure that actress Cynthia Nixon doesn’t threaten his lock on the Democratic nomination and his expected November re-election. On Wednesday, Ms. Nixon and Mr. Cuomo will meet in their one and only debate before September’s Democratic primary. The New York Daily News reports: “Sources close to her and other political observers believe she will come in armed with a number of one-liners aimed at the governor in hopes of getting the notoriously prickly Cuomo off his game.”

Mr. Cuomo has been much worse than prickly to gun owners and those who wish to do business with them. Of course the NRA is the perfect foil for a northeastern politician looking to fend off a challenge from the “progressive” left. But Mr. Cuomo’s infringement of fundamental rights threatens all New Yorkers with progressively greater harm. And it could haunt Empire State citizens long after he leaves office.

In May this column described how Mr. Cuomo was using the state’s financial regulatory agency to intimidate insurance companies, banks and other firms into turning down business with the NRA. The gun-rights group sued Mr. Cuomo after he ordered the state’s Department of Financial Services to tell the firms it oversees “to review any relationships they may have with the National Rifle Association and other similar organizations. Upon this review, the companies are encouraged to consider whether such ties harm their corporate reputations and jeopardize public safety.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

William Kininmonth Paris Is No Longer Relevant

By on August 27th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2018/08/paris-longer-relevant/
With The Lodge flushed there is a possibility of post-Turnbullian sanity, with the first priority being to re-evaluate Australia’s commitment to the Paris Agreement. As a nation, we are pauperising ourselves in a cause demonstrably false and easily discerned as such.

National energy policy is failing to satisfy what has been described as the trilemma of objectives: meeting national commitments for emissions reduction under the Paris Agreement; providing affordable energy; and ensuring continuity of supply.

There is potential flexibility for adopting different technologies to provide affordability and continuity of supply, but governments are tightly constrained by the need for national emissions reduction.

Australia is further constrained by policy shackles of its own making. Legislation is in place that rules out the most obvious technology readily satisfying the policy trilemma: nuclear generation. The reluctance to consider nuclear is baffling considering that seventy percent of France’s electricity generation is from nuclear and the global nuclear increase from 2016 to 2017 was a not inconsequential 65 terawatt hours. That is, nuclear provided more than 10 percent of the global increase in electricity generation, the equivalent of 10 new Hazelwoods.

Not surprising, the government’s favoured option of renewable energy, in the forms of wind and solar, is saddled with the burden of intermittency; there is no generation when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. In addition, expansion of the renewable base requires considerable reallocation of public funds from other infrastructure and social needs (schools, hospitals, transport, etc.).

As each day passes it becomes clearer that the federal government is finding the competing objectives of the policy trilemma impossible to resolve. The costs of overcoming intermittency and the subsidies to promote wind and solar expansion are driving electricity prices for consumers through the proverbial roof. In addition, major industries that underpin our national prosperity are threatening to close or relocate overseas.

It is time to re-evaluate our national commitment to the Paris Agreement and its requirement for emissions reduction. As a nation, are we pauperising ourselves in a cause that is now demonstrably false?

The basis of the Paris Agreement is the hypothesis of dangerous anthropogenic global warming. Computer models of the climate system, which few scientists understand, are invoked to project global temperature rise as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration increases. The most recent assessment from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that global temperature is projected to rise between 1.5oC and 4.5oC for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Indiana ISIS Bride Charged With Terror Support By Patrick Poole

By on August 27th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/indiana-isis-bride-charged-with-terror-support/

An Indiana woman who traveled with her husband to live in the Islamic State capital of Raqqa, Syria was charged last week by the Justice Department for material support for terrorism.

The indictment claims Samantha Elhassani acquired tactical gear for known ISIS terrorists and provided other related support for the terror groups.

As I reported here at PJ Media, her 10-year-old son was featured in an ISIS propaganda video that threatened President Donald Trump and warned of domestic terror attacks. The video also showed a young Yazidi boy from Iraq who was held hostage by her family.

Elhassani’s attorney claims she was tricked by her husband to moving to Raqqa in 2014. Her husband, Moussa Elhassani, was reportedly killed in a drone strike last year.

Last Thursday, the Justice Department announced the material terror support charges against Elhassani:

The indictment alleges that from the fall of 2014 through summer of 2015, Elhassani provided material support and resources to ISIS knowing that the organization was a designated terrorist organization, and knowing that the organization has engaged in and was engaging in terrorist activity and terrorism. Elhassani, is also charged with aiding and abetting two individuals in providing themselves as personnel to ISIS.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Schweizer Exposes More Joe Biden Corruption — It’s ‘Going to be a Central Issue’ in 2020 By Tyler O’Neil

By on August 27th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/video/schweizer-exposes-more-joe-biden-corruption-its-going-to-be-a-central-issue-in-2020/

Rumors swirl that former Vice President Joe Biden will be a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. Extremely early polls find strong support for him in his party. But investigative journalist and bestselling author Peter Schweizer has unearthed Biden’s history of corruption, and that will prove a major issue in the upcoming election.

“This is, I think, going to be a central issue” for 2020, Schweizer, best known for uncovering Hillary Clinton’s corruption but also the author of the new book “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends,” told Fox News’ Steve Hilton.

Schweizer’s book came out in March, but since then new evidence of the Biden family corruption has come to light. Schweizer told Hilton about a bank account unearthed in a New York conviction against Devon Hunter, a friend of the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden.

“A bank account that Hunter Biden drew a lot of money from and that a lot of foreign entities put a lot of money into,” the author noted. “Just to give you an idea, over a 14-month period, from 2014 through early 2016, while Joe Biden is vice president of the United States, a Ukrainian company called Burisma — it’s controlled by a very corrupt oligarch — sends three million dollars into this account.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Progressive Twittersphere Turns Against Socialist It-Girl By Stephen Green

By on August 27th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/the-progressive-twittersphere-turns-against-socialist-it-girl/

Occasionally I like to take a dive in the deep end of progressive lunacy. That’s when I click over… not to Slate… not even to Salon… but to Jezebel.

The outrage du jour: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted something nice about John McCain after he died on Saturday.

Can you imagine?

From the headline, you might guess that you’re about to read a fair-minded examination of the unhinged response to Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet. It reads, “These 3,600 Comments Are None Too Pleased With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s John McCain Tweet.”

But of course this is Jezebel, so there’s going to be nothing fair-minded about it at all. Or even simply, uh, minded.

So what did AOC tweet to raise such a stink? Just that “John McCain’s legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service. As an intern, I learned a lot about the power of humanity in government through his deep friendship with Sen. Kennedy. He meant so much, to so many. My prayers are with his family.” It’s the kind of generic condolence sent by any decent human being, and it’s the first sign I’ve seen that the New York socialist might actually be one.

But that’s not good enough for Jezebel or 3,600 Twitter jerks. Although to be fair, the first bit of Whitney Kimball’s Jezebel tract tried really hard to at least appear even-handed. She wrote:

There’s a heaping pile of “wtfs” and trash GIFs in here, but the intermittent critiques mainly pinpoint her choice to praise McCain’s political record rather than offering a simple condolence. “I still support you, and I’m sure most of the people criticizing you also do as well, but it is disappointing for you to lay praise on such an awful man. You could have just sympathized for his family, said nothing etc.,” one follower tweeted. Others accuse her of pandering and drifting from her own hardline principles, while defenders and conservatives jumped in to attack the critics for vitriol.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s Crisis Is Three-Tiered Justice By Ned Ryun

By on August 27th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/27/americas-crisis-i

Last week brought to the fore a serious problem now threatening to undermine the very foundations of America’s constitutional republic: we no longer have equal application of justice under the law. The rule of law has become trifurcated, with a different application of the law depending upon one’s position in the political hierarchy.

First, there’s one application of the law for members of the powerful elite who have the right political connections. Here, the law is more a series of suggestions that might or might not be followed with almost no legal consequences for non-compliance.

Example A, of course, is Hillary Clinton. Many people have gone to jail for doing what she did, including members of our armed forces. Yet she paid no consequences for violating laws on the use of classified information on her unsecured and illegal private server. She played games, likely for personal gain, with our national security. Yet she and her enablers and co-conspirators like her aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin are apparently above the law, even escaping consequences for lying to federal agents.

There is also the case of U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.). Her erstwhile Pakistani IT staff, who also worked for dozens of Democratic members of the House, had a history of highly questionable behavior, with some even suggesting that they potentially were running a spy ring inside of Congress, accessing computers and uploading sensitive information to the cloud to be accessed by foreign powers. Not only did federal prosecutors refuse to pursue anything regarding those allegations, but just this week, as Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are having the book and the kitchen sink thrown at them over bank fraud, one of these staffers, Irwan Awan, got a slap on the wrist for a charge of bank fraud to which he pled guilty, will have no fines, and will serve no jail time. It seems likely that an investigation of these staffers would have turned up too much dirt on Democratic members of Congress.

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