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May 2019

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz ousted in no-confidence vote

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/27/austrian-chancellor-sebastian-kurz-ousted-no-confidence-vote/

Sebastian Kurz was voted out of office as Austrian chancellor on Monday, less than 24 hours after his party won a resounding victory in the European elections.

Mr Kurz’s government lost a confidence vote in the Austrian parliament following the collapse of his coalition with the far-Right Freedom Party (FPÖ).

President Alexander Van der Bellen will now appoint a caretaker government until elections scheduled for September.

Mr Kurz is the first postwar Austrian chancellor to lose a confidence vote, but he is unlikely to be out of power for long.

His Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) will be strong favourites in September, after coming first with a projected 35 per cent in the European elections, more than 10 per cent clear of their closest rivals.

Hailed as the future of European conservatism when he became the world’s youngest leader in 2017 at the age of 31, Mr Kurz was always going to be vulnerable after ending his coalition with the Freedom Party over a corruption scandal just over a week ago.

He attempted to continue at the head of a minority government, but his former coalition partners joined forces with the centre-Left Social Democrats (SPÖ) to vote him out of power.

Mr Kurz accused his opponents of “playing revenge games” ahead of the vote, and warned: “At the end of the day the people will decide”.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

SA’s Marshall Plan for Gender Activism Stuart Lindsay

By on May 27th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/05/sas-marshall-plan-for-gen

“The gender fluidity cult’s foundation is sheer irrationality after all; gender is to be seen, they contend, as a “social construct” and this notwithstanding that they know what we all know: that every cell in every one of our bodies betokens that we are indisputably forever male or forever female from the moment of our conception (save perhaps for the rare, rare, phenomenon of hermaphroditism).  If such people can think themselves out of the basic structure of biological reality perhaps they were able to think their way out of the common sense of propriety involved in staging such an event in the presence of and focussed upon the minds of infant children.”

Steven Marshall is both Premier and Arts Minister of South Australia, so if anyone bears responsibility for the latest manifestation of the Safe Schools attack upon childhood innocence in this Liberal-governed state it is, I am sorry to say, him. We are in the middle of a bi-annual event here in Adelaide called the DreamBIG Children’s Festival, backed the Liberal government. It is jointly funded by the Arts ministry and the Education ministry and used to be called the “Come-Out” festival but that spoke too indiscreetly, I suppose, about the activist purposes of the bureaucrats who organised it.

This year, and specifically marketed to children under the age of eight, the programme included something called Drag Queen Story Time.

Yes, I am telling you the truth. It was staged in the august State Library in the heart of Adelaide. I went along, with intentions I will describe in a moment, and witnessed two of the performances. They involved two middle-aged men dressed as frumpy fairy tale Queens (one with devil’s horns) reading stories — haltingly and without charm or any kind of narrative tension — to pre-school and very young school-age children in the presence of their parents.

At the end of each session an opportunity was provided for the kiddies to meet and pose for photographs with the drag queens. Again, I am sorry to say I am telling you the truth. The photographs I took — one of which is at left — tell you I am. (Apologies, too, for my substandard lensmanship. Below, if you scroll all the way down, you’ll see another example of drag queen story time time, this one from the US. ‘The hips on the queen go swish, swish, swish‘. Why is it we adopt bad ideas and trends so readily from across the Pacific?)

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HISTORY Comments turned off

The American Revolution’s Starving, Barefoot, Heroic Troops By Jay Cost

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/remember-soldiers-american-revolution/

Our young nation was very poor, the war was very expensive, and Congress and the states wanted everyone else to pay.

Memorial Day is a day to remember and appreciate the ultimate sacrifice given by men and women who have served in our armed forces. Far and away, the Civil War was the deadliest conflict in American history. After that is World War II.

Way down the list is the American Revolutionary War, with “only” 4,435 battle deaths, according to Veterans Affairs. Though few in number, these soldiers bore a unique sacrifice — for, unlike other soldiers throughout our history, these heroes had to fight off the would-be British conquerors without sufficient support from their own government.

On an absolute scale, the American Revolution was a relatively modest affair. However, judged in light of the tiny American economy of 1776–83, it was an enormous undertaking. As a percentage of GDP, the Revolutionary War cost the United States about as much as World War I did (and remember that, before the absolutely massive conflict of World War II, World War I was known as “the Great War”).

For such large-scale conflicts, financing usually comes through issuing public debt. It is just too much to pay via taxation on the citizenry. And indeed, if you look through the government propaganda of World Wars I and II, you will see a relentless emphasis on purchasing war bonds. The problem for America in the 1770s and 1780s was that debt financing was largely unavailable. Domestic wealth was tied up in land, which cannot be quickly turned into cash. And while foreign governments did loan some money to us, none of them lent enough to finance the entire conflict.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Is Unpredictable, Weather You Like It or Not! . By Frank Miele

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/27/climate_is_unpredictable_weather_you_like_it_or_not_140411.html

They say all politics is local; so is all weather.

So on behalf of my fellow Westerners, I have to ask: What’s up with all this cold weather? It may not be a crisis yet, but in the two weeks leading up to Memorial Day — the traditional start of summer activities — much of the country has been donning sweaters and turning up the heat.

I know, I know. Weather is not climate, and you can’t generalize from anecdotal evidence of localized weather conditions to a unified theory of thermal dynamics, but isn’t that exactly what the climate alarmists have done, on a larger scale, for the past 25 years?

Haven’t we been brainwashed by political scientists (oops! I mean climate scientists!) to believe that the Earth is on the verge of turning into “Venus: The Sequel.” You know, catastrophic overheating from greenhouse gases, rising oceans, death and mayhem — oh, yeah, and the world ending in 12 years if we don’t ban carbon or something.

But despite the best fake climate data and the scariest computer simulations, Mother Nature doesn’t seem to be cooperating with the global-warming scare scenario. Sure, there is warm weather in other parts of the country, but here in Montana we have been desperately seeking spring. Instead of enjoying our beautiful outdoors, we are stuck in perennial chill mode, shivering under our blankets and wondering if it will snow in late May.

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BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

Noel Malcolm reviews “The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags” by Tim Tzouliadis

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3556836/The-Forsaken-Americans-in-Stalins-gulags.html

Russia in the late 1930s was not a good place to be. People really did sleep in their outdoor clothes, with a ready-packed suitcase at their bedside, waiting for the NKVD (the secret police) to knock on the door.

You could be arrested and killed for a joke, for a factual remark about a food shortage, or for failing to denounce other people, including your immediate family. And you could also be arrested and killed for nothing at all, since the NKVD, like other elements of the Soviet economy, had productivity targets to meet.

Anyone who was different was suspect.

In 1937, 53 members of a deaf-mutes’ association were arrested in Leningrad, and 33 were sentenced to death for conducting ‘conspiracies’ in sign-language. Stamp-collectors, who had shown an unhealthy interest in letters from foreign countries, were hunted down, and so too were people who had learnt Esperanto.

If life was as bad as this for Russians, just think how bad it must have been for people who were trying to live like Russians, but were in fact Americans.

Not tourists, businessmen, or diplomats; no, these were just ordinary working people, who had moved to the Soviet Union. Their total number is unknown, but it must have run to several thousands, and their story – the subject of Tim Tzouliadis’s gripping and important book – has never been fully told before.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

PARDONS FOR MEMORIAL DAY?

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/pardons-for-memorial-day/90707/

So much hogwash has been written about the President’s pardon power that it’s hard to know where to start. One place, though, would be the New York Times’ editorial on President Trump’s use of pardons in military cases. It ran last week under a headline suggesting Mr. Trump’s general approach to pardons “may be lawful, but it is in no way normal.” In other words — blam! — before the Times even gets down to business it runs off the rails.

That’s because there is no “normal” way to pardon. If the Framers had wanted to specify norms for using the pardon, they were perfectly capable of doing so. They did that for, say, treason. They laid down so many restrictions in respect of the use of the treason charge that your average prosecutor won’t go near it. When it comes to the pardon, though, the only restrictions are that it can’t be used in cases of impeachment and is allowed only for federal offenses.

Other than that, the president doesn’t have to check with the Justice Department or the Senate. He doesn’t even have to clear his pardons with the New York Times. He could empty the federal prisons, if he wanted, just to save money. He can pardon members of his family (President Clinton pardoned his own brother). He doesn’t have to say why. He can lay conditions (President Kennedy freed Tomoya Kawakita on the condition he leave forever the country he betrayed).

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Colluders, Obstructionists, Leakers, and Other Projectionists By Victor Davis Hanson

By on May 27th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/26/colluders-obstructionists-leakers-and-other-projectionists/

Before the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the idea that the Russians or anyone else could warp or tamper with our elections in any serious manner was laughed off by President Obama. “There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections,” Obama said in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.

Obama was anxious that the sure-to-be-sore-loser Trump would not blame his defeat on voting impropriety in a fashion that might call into question Clinton’s victory. After Clinton’s stunning defeat, Russian “collusion”—thanks initially to efforts by Obama holdover Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to go after Michael Flynn and the successful attempts of the CIA and FBI to seed the bogus Steele dossier among the government elite—became a club to destroy the incoming Trump Administration.

Colluders, Inc.
How ironic that Russian “collusion” was used as a preemptive charge from those who actually had colluded with Russians for all sorts for financial and careerist advantages.

The entire so-called Uranium One caper had hinged on ex-President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and their Clinton Foundation uniting with Russian or Russian-affiliated oligarchs to ease restrictions on the sale of North American uranium reserves to a Russian company with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Coincidentally what followed were massive donations from concerned Russian parties to the foundation, as well as a $500,000 honorarium to Bill Clinton for a brief Moscow speech. Note that no more money has been forthcoming from Russia to either of the Clintons or their foundation.

Had Donald Trump been caught, as President Obama was in Seoul in March 2012, on a hot mic assuring the Russians that he would be more flexible with Russia after the 2020 election (“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved—but it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space”) he would likely now be facing real impeachment charges.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Erdoğan’s Istanbul Nightmare by Burak Bekdil

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14252/erdogan-istanbul-election

Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Board, consisting of judges apparently under government pressure, cancelled the result of the Istanbul mayoral election on the pretext that some officials serving at the polling stations were not civil servants, as required by the law. “The Board’s decision brings Turkish democracy one big step closer to death,” wrote Kemal Kirişçi, senior fellow at TÜSİAD, Turkey’s biggest business association.
“It appears that losing Istanbul entails too many risks for the AKP for the matter to be left to its own resources. Many are convinced that if the AKP were to lose Istanbul to the opposition, after having held it – with its precursor – for 25 years, a hornet’s nest of vested interests, corruption, and abuse of power would be revealed.” — Semih Idiz, a columnist for Sigma Turkey, an Ankara-based think tank.
Even if Erdoğan wins Istanbul in the re-run, he will have lost the last few remaining crumbs of his international credibility.

During most of his nearly 17-year-long term as Turkey’s leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s self-aggrandizing, assertive foreign policy and his Islamist and nationalist one-man-rule have earned him popularity and votes in a country where average schooling is a mere 6.5 years. Erdoğan believed — and made the average Turk believe — that Turkey is a major world power. He claimed that his rule made miracles in the economy. Therefore, since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, he has not lost a single election. Everything was coming up roses all the time. Not anymore.

“Who wins Istanbul wins Turkey,” has been Erdoğan’s dictum since 1994, when he won mayoral elections in Turkey’s biggest city (home to nearly 15% of Turkey’s 57 million voters and accounting for 31% of its GDP). Twenty-five years later, his candidate for mayor of Istanbul, former prime minister Binali Yıldırım, lost in the local election — the first defeat in Istanbul for Islamists since 1994. Game not yet over, Erdoğan ruled.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Left’s Battle Against ‘Inequality’ The fallback race card. Larry Elder

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273861/lefts-battle-against-inequality-larry-elder

In his book “Discrimination and Disparities,” economist Thomas Sowell notes that a disproportionate percentage of first-born siblings become National Merit scholars compared to siblings born later, presumably because the first-born starts life with no sibling competition for parental attention. This, says Sowell, illustrates the absurdities of expecting equal results when equal results do not even occur within the same family among siblings raised under the same roof with the same parents.

When I was growing up in South Central Los Angeles, one of my closest friends was “Paul.” We met in the second grade and attended the same elementary school, middle school and high school. Not only did we take many of the same courses with the same teachers, our houses were identical.

When I first invited Paul to my home, about a half-mile from his, he was astonished. “Whoever built your house,” he said, “built mine, too.” He was right. When I visited his house, I found that the only difference was that my house had one tiny additional window that his did not. Same schools. Same teacher. Same neighborhood. Same house design.

Paul was a gifted athlete. Name the sport, he excelled. He was a starting pitcher for the baseball team, the starting shooting guard for the basketball team and the starting quarterback for the football team. He picked up a tennis racquet, hit balls against a backboard for a few weeks and then made the tennis team.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Arab-Israelis Today And why they prefer to live in a Jewish democratic state. Joseph Puder

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273825/arab-israelis-today-joseph-puder

British Labor party shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, speaking at the British House of Commons (May 13, 2019), accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of taking steps that pushed Israel “away from democracy, and away from the rule of law while also attacking the freedoms of Israeli Arabs…” It is apparent that Ms. Thornberry’s accusations against Prime Minister Netanyahu have to do with the Jeremy Corbyn led Labor party policies rather than with reality on the ground. This reporter has just traveled throughout Israel and experienced a different reality insofar as Arab-Israeli citizens are concerned. Ms. Thornberry should do likewise and travel throughout Israel before making a judgement about Arab freedoms in Israel.

In the last Israeli parliamentary elections on April 9, 2019, the combined Arab parties, Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am-Balad lost 3 seats (mandates) in the Knesset. Ahmed Tibi and Ayman Odeh decided to run on an independent list and garnered 6 seats while the more radical and Islamist Ra’am-Balad party, led by Mansour Abbas received 4 (it barely passed the threshold of 3.25% of the vote), down from 13 in the previous 2015 elections when the two parties ran on a combined list. These results reflect the disenchantment of younger Arab-Israelis with their Knesset representatives. The Arab Knesset members, in the words of many young Arab voters, care more about the welfare of Palestinian Arabs than about their own constituents, who seek to integrate into Israeli society and partake in Israel’s prosperous economy.

The New York Times, with its anti-Netanyahu bias, reported (by David Halbfinger) on March 20, 2019 that according to a new poll from the University of Maryland suggested that Mr. Netanyahu’s racial provocations may spur turnout among Arab voters motivated to usher him out of office.

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