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December 2018

MARK STEYN ON THE NATIONAL SCENE

The big news from their respective sides of the Atlantic was the sentencing of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and the confidence vote in UK PM Theresa May. Neither party merited the final score.

I would find the standard operating procedure of US federal justice – squeeze till you squeal – utterly repugnant even if it were not so selectively applied. Me on October 19th 2016:

Comey’s FBI is hopelessly corrupted – and certainly more corrupt than J Edgar Hoover’s FBI…

That was months, and in some cases years, before the revelations about Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page et al. Michael Cohen is a sleazy shyster even by the standards of his grim trade, but the issue is the ability of the feds to get you on something once they decide it’s in their interest to do so. Which is not the hallmark of any real justice system.

~In that respect, the more interesting federal prosecution in the news yesterday was an under-reported story out of New Jersey. Per The North Jersey Record:

Feds: NJ woman forced Sri Lankan woman to marry her, enslaved her for 9 years

Mattis and Syria: Get a Grip on the Hysteria! By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mattis-and-syria-get-a-grip-on-the-hysteria/

Three, earlier this year Mattis was the subject of a lot of curious stories quoting appraisals of him as “bulletproof,” given that despite his numerous disagreements with Trump (reportedly on getting out of the Paris climate accord, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, quitting the Iran deal, transgender soldiers, etc. ), he still was seen as invaluable to the president, who had given him, according to Washington conventional wisdom, unusual latitude and exemption to focus on rebuilding the military and reestablishing deterrent policies.
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Four, earlier this year Trump had promised to put troops into Syria to finish up destroying ISIS for “six months.” So his deadline was not really much of a surprise, although most had thought, given the success of the mission, that a continued presence would be in the country’s and the administration’s interests. And now we will see what happens, and pray that the Kurds and free Syrians can survive, while Russians, the Assad regime, the Turks, ISIS remnants, and the Iranians and their terrorist surrogates all fight over the carcass of Syria.

Fifth, on matters of entering or leaving the Middle East, U.S. strategists in the cases of Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and Iraq must develop a more coherent rationale to justify long-term occupations — to convince Americans that these increasingly numerous and optional interventions (whether six months or 18 years) enhance U.S. strategic advantages, and in cost/benefit analyses are worth the human and material costs of maintaining them. So far, we rarely receive any real information on what the actual ends are, and whether the means to obtain them are sufficient or justifiable, at a time of $21 trillion in national debt and a seeming absence of gratitude from those we seek to help.

Four, earlier this year Trump had promised to put troops into Syria to finish up destroying ISIS for “six months.” So his deadline was not really much of a surprise, although most had thought, given the success of the mission, that a continued presence would be in the country’s and the administration’s interests. And now we will see what happens, and pray that the Kurds and free Syrians can survive, while Russians, the Assad regime, the Turks, ISIS remnants, and the Iranians and their terrorist surrogates all fight over the carcass of Syria.

Caroline Glick: Pros and Cons on US Pullout From Syria

http://carolineglick.com/pros-and-cons-of-the-us-pullout-from-syria/

President Donald Trump’s sudden announcement Wednesday that he is removing U.S. forces from Syria shocked many. But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, because the move is consistent with key aspects of Trump’s military and foreign policy.

Trump promised to bring the 2,000 U.S. Special Forces home from Syria in April. When his announcement sparked opposition from the Pentagon and from key allies, Trump said that he would give the Pentagon six months to complete its mission to defeat so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) forces in Syria.

Seven months later, he announced the troops will be coming home.

Trump’s decision will have negative consequences. But it will also have positive consequences. Only time will tell if the positive implications of the move will outweigh the negative ones. But it is important to set out both to consider the wisdom of his decision.

On the negative side, the most immediate casualties of Trump’s decision are the Kurdish-dominated People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia. The YPG has been America’s partner and its ground force in the U.S.-led campaign against IS in Syria. YPG forces are the only forces on the ground in Syria that are loyal to the U.S.

At the same time, the U.S. partnership with the YPG has raised the prospect of a war between the U.S. and Turkey. Turkish dictator Recip Erdogan. Erdogan threatened last week to launch an offensive against the YPG forces. He spoke to Trump on Monday. Trump reportedly decided to announce the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria on Tuesday.

Also during the course of their discussion, Erdogan reportedly agreed to cancel his order of the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system and to purchase a package of U.S. Patriot missile systems valued at $3.5 billion instead.

David Singer: UN Hit List Can Bypass Congress and Fund Trump Border Wall

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/12/david-singer-un-hit-list-can-bypass_20.html

21 Nations that received almost $14 billion in US foreign aid in 2017 could become the key to unlocking the White House confrontation between President Trump and Democrat leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer over their refusal to commit the Democrats to authorizing Congress to commit $5 billion immediately towards the construction of Trump’s border wall to prevent illegal immigration into America.

Trump’s threatened Government shutdown by 21 December has been withdrawn as he seeks alternative sources of funding.

The following UN hit list offers a ready solution:

Country, and US Aid 2017
Bangladesh $261 million
Congo $494 million
Egypt $1475 million
Indonesia $277 million
Iraq $3712 million
Jordan $1489 million
Lebanon $505 million
Mali $230 million
Morocco $490 million
Mozambique $580 million
Niger $173 million
Nigeria $852 million
Pakistan $837 million
Russia $168 million
Senegal $197 million
South Africa $511 million
Turkey $153 million
Vietnam $150 million
Yemen $595 million
Zambia $419 million
Zimbabwe $194 million
TOTAL $13762 Million

These 21 states were major players in humiliating Trump — when an American-sponsored resolution in the United Nations General Assembly seeking to condemn Hamas and other militant groups for indiscriminately targeting Israel’s predominantly Jewish civilian population since 2007 failed to secure the required two-third’s majority earlier determined as necessary for its passage.

Trump has warned on many occasions that those who receive money from America — yet do not support America diplomatically — stand to lose financially as a result.

Trump has already well and truly practised what he preached:

– Defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency of $360 million annually

– Withdrawing from UNESCO leaving it to fund the 22% of its budget lost as a result

– Calling on NATO countries to meet their agreed share of the NATO budget

– Cutting more than $200 million in funding the Palestine Liberation Organisation

Trump has already ominously warned those countries that humiliated him on the Hamas Resolution that they could be in the firing line for reductions in their annual foreign aid as a result of not voting with America.

This threat becomes increasingly more likely as the Democrats dig in their heels and refuse to give the President the $5 billion he needs to build the border wall — one of the president’s cardinal promises made in the 2016 election campaign that has been frustrated by the Democrats from the day Trump became president.

Trump should be readily able to determine how $5 billion of this $14 billion funding to these recalcitrant states can be redirected to building the border wall.

Rod Liddle: ‘My journey into the darkest depths of British antisemitism’ Journalist and broadcaster Rod Liddle has spent more time than he cares to defending Israel to a rabid antisemitic crowd on social media and attacking Labour on TV. *****

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/opinion-rod-liddles-journey-im-woke-to-the-new-antisemitism/
Roderick E. Liddle is an English journalist and an associate editor of The Spectator.

Call it a ‘personal journey’, if you like. That’s what the dimbo TV documentary producers like to call it. Rod has been on a personal journey, and now he is woke, praise the Lord. Oh, I’m woke all right. Woke to the new antisemitism – which isn’t, when you poke and pry at it a little – terribly different from the old antisemitism.

I remember 15 years back a report coming out which showed that there had been a steep rise in antisemitic attacks and graffiti in London. The weird thing was, I thought at the time, the producers of the report (it was somehow attached to the Greater London Council) played this headline down. Usually anti-racist organisations scream blue murder at any rise in racism.

One bloke, involved in the report, was insistent that the antisemitic thing was not really important. That was a man called Lee Jasper. I knew of him as being part of the truly mentalist Labour far left. But still, why would he play down the shocking findings from his own organisation? More importantly, why do others on the far left play it down now?

Yes, I was slow to realise – you guys were on to this long before me.

This new rise in antisemitism, which I had thought long dead, was not shaven-headed white imbeciles from the far right. It was Muslims, a large chunk of it. The giveaway was the graffiti the report didn’t show: “Allah U Akbar!” The National Front rarely paint that on walls.

Suddenly I grasped that the British far left didn’t want people to know about antisemitism because it pointed the finger at people they really, really liked. From that moment on, it all fell into place.

Fast forward 13 years and I was kicked out of the Labour Party, of which I’d been a member for 40 years, for having attempted to explain the party’s strange affection for antisemitism.

It was the consequence, I reckoned, of the growing number of Muslim activists and councillors within Labour (four had just been suspended for making antisemitic statements) and the infantile supposedly liberal far left whose unconditional support for “Palestine” (to the exclusion of every other supposedly persecuted minority in the world) was an even more potent symbol of their status than shopping at Waitrose and eating quinoa. These groups loathe Israel as much as they loathe the capitalism which has given them their comfortable existences.

Suddenly I grasped that the British far left didn’t want people to know about antisemitism because it pointed the finger at people they really, really liked.

Every Schoolchild Should Read This Book written by Richard Haier

https://quillette.com/2018/12/20/every-schoolchild-should-read

A review of Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are by Kevin J. Mitchell. Princeton University Press (October 16, 2018) 304 pages.

Kevin Mitchell’s Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are is a book for high school students. And I mean that as a compliment. Profound misunderstandings about the genetic nature of human beings lie at the heart of the social justice movement, as well as some education reforms, attitudes toward mental disorders, aspects of the self-help industry, and social policies including but not limited to immigration, welfare, racism, and sex/gender issues. What a person understands or misunderstands about genetics is a foundation for evaluating new ideas encountered in college, forming political opinions, dealing with difficult co-workers, tackling issues of parenthood and family, and generally living day-to-day life.

If read early enough, Innate might provide some inoculation against bad or naïve information about human nature and the indisputable role played by genes. That is why it belongs on high school reading lists, not just in science classes. Think general liberal education.

Kevin Mitchell is a neurogeneticist who has a knack for explaining things like a good science writer. His book does not break much new ground, but it explains what we know at this time about genetics and human differences with a clarity that presumes no technical background or previous study of genetics. It is a good read for anyone at any age interested in how we get to be who we are, or more accurately why we are different from everyone else. That is, this book is all about human variation. According to Mitchell, the key to individual differences is a combination of a unique genetic recipe for a soup of proteins specified in our DNA (the “innate” of the book’s title) and how that recipe comes to fruition during brain development when the recipe is subject to unique random errors with cascading effects from protein formation to neural circuits.

A Tale of Two Cities: The Modern Soothsayers written by Neema Parvini

https://quillette.com/2018/12/22/a-tale-of-two-cities

Five weeks on from the #GiletsJaunes, managerial elites in London conspire to chain the United Kingdom to ever closer union with the fate of Europe. There is something profoundly emblematic about the sight of Emmanuel Macron facing down the people of his once great nation.

Condescending, Napoleonic, and completely without self-awareness, he is the living embodiment of the vision of the anointed. As French citizens riot because of increases in their fuel taxes, he has been utterly indifferent in telling them to take their thin gruel because the predictive models of his shaman class say so. It is an almost perfect encapsulation of the Rousseauian top-down state versus the people that it subjugates.

Meanwhile, across the channel in London—where, despite their civic and intellectual history, the ruling class have long sought to mimic their Gallic counterparts— the Bank of England’s Mark Carney has been playing a similar game. He has been issuing regular doomsday forecasts based on predictive models by alleged experts. I wonder how much longer people are going to listen to these modern soothsayers. At this point, they are naked lobbyists for entrenched special interests. When reality fails to meet their expectations for the umpteenth time, how long will it take for the prophets to lose their authority in the eyes of the public and their self-appointed gatekeepers in the chattering class?

It has struck me recently just how much of our current political discourse is based on “forecasts.” In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel prize for his work on behavioral economics, partly for his career-long demolition of how “experts” convey statistical information:

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained. As Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult to accept the limits of our forecasting ability.…The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future. (Thinking Fast and Slow, p. 218).

Rand Paul issues ‘Festivus Edition’ of The Waste Report By Rick Moran

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/rand_paul_issues_festivus_edition_of_the_waste_report.html

“The stupid, inane, shocking, maddening, and depressing examples of how our federal government spends your tax dollars.”

Read it and weep, taxpayers.

Every Christmas since he took office, Senator Rand Paul has issued a “Waste Report” on government spending. This year, Senator Paul has outdone himself in finding the stupid, inane, shocking, maddening, and depressing examples of how our federal government spends the hard-earned tax dollars of citizens.

So here we are, another year past, another year to forget. A government shutdown resolved by hiking spending; nuked budget caps; a debt over $21 trillion; and Congress okayed $1.3 trillion in new spending – all in the first three months! An October 2018 report from the Congressional Budget Office showed net interest payments on the debt for fiscal year 2018 at $371 billion, $62 billion more than payments for fiscal year 2017. Given such largesse, it may seem like a few million dollars is a drop in the bucket. But to borrow from a line credited to former Senator Everett Dirksen(R-IL): “a million dollars here and there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

This year, The Waste Report is highlighting $114,514,631 of wasted money. We feature an old favorite due for an update and some instant classics, like a study of daydreaming. Exactly where taxes should go, right? No matter how much federal agencies waste, politicians think they’ve never got enough. But if there’s money to waste, there’s too much already. So, before the Feats of Strength can begin, there must be an Airing of (spending) Grievance.

Darkness Falls in Windsor, Ontario Habibullah Ahmadi now charged with murder of Anne Widholm.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272307/darkness-falls-windsor-ontario-lloyd-billingsley

“Sara Anne Widholm, 76, died at Windsor Regional Hospital on Saturday, Dec. 15,” the Windsor Star reports, but this was not a mere obituary. On October 8, 2017, while out for a walk on the Ganatchio Trail in Windsor, Widholm was the victim of a “vicious” and “unprovoked” attack by Habibullah Ahmadi, 21.

He was originally charged with assault, later upgraded to attempted murder and now second-degree murder with the death of his victim. Little has emerged about Habibullah Ahmadi and his motive in the attack, which was “not just another assault,” according to neurosurgeon Dr. Balraj Jhawar.

“The worst skull fractures I’ve seen in my 12 years here in Windsor,” Jhawar told reporters. “This is among the most brutal things I’ve seen in my career.” The victim’s multiple brain hemorrhages and fractured skull and vertebrae required eight hours of surgery. Hospital officials did not indicate whether Widholm emerged from a coma before she finally passed away.

Attacker Habibullah Ahmadi was 21, a full adult, but police never released his booking photo. News reports described him as a “Windsor man,” who goes by the name “Daniel.” Local and national news stories contained no statements from Habibullah Ahmadi, nor any indication that he had declined an interview. Likewise, news reports contained no quotes from Habibullah Ahmadi’s family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, or fellow students in Windsor.

Habibullah Ahmadi, a male of 21, attacked a defenseless woman, 75, but local and national feminists did not cite the attack as an example of violence against women or toxic masculinity. Likewise, no statement against violence emerged after the attack finally claimed Widholm’s life.

Ex-Obama adviser worries of war with Iran over Mattis departure, brutally reminded of those ‘pallets of cash’ Samantha Chang

https://www.bizpacreview.com/author/samantha-chang

Iran increased its defense budget 145% using the cash infusion from Obama’s disastrous Iran Nuclear Deal.

Former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes — one of the architects of the disastrous Iran Nuclear Deal — now says he’s worried about a possible US war with Iran after Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned, citing policy differences with President Trump.

Twitter torched Rhodes over his ironic observation, which spotlighted his comically shocking lack of self-awareness.

“No Ben, the $1.5 billion you and your overlord, Obama, gave to Iran makes war more likely.”

“No more so than the ‘deal’ you and your former boss made with them, not to mention the Pallets Of Cash you sent them.”

The US is now indirectly a leading sponsor of Islamic terrorism — thanks to the disastrous Iran Nuclear Deal signed under former President Barack Hussein Obama.

Under the Iran Nuclear Deal, Iran — the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world — promised never to acquire nuclear weapons.

In the lopsided agreement, Obama lifted economic sanctions that had crippled Iran’s hostile regime financially for decades, unfroze $150 billion in assets, and gave Iran $400 million in cash in the dark of night.

Shortly afterward, Iran increased its defense budget 145% and is using the billions of dollars that were unfrozen under the Iran Nuclear Deal to build up its weapons stockpile and foment terror worldwide.