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Ruth King

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Trump Doctrine and the Return of Pax Americana Daryl McCann

By on March 9th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/03/the-trump-doctrine-and-the-return-of-pax-americana/

Any serious reckoning of the Trump Doctrine will see the experts recoiling in horror or simply snickering at the very thought of attaching “doctrine” to the foreign policy initiatives of President Trump. What informs Donald Trump’s decision-making, according to most narratives, is nothing more than an incongruous compendium of braggadocio, narcissism, opportunism and impulsiveness. His America First worldview, in the opinion of the naysayers, cannot be configured as a coherent set of principles. The Obama Doctrine was ascribed to Barack Obama and the Bush Doctrine to George W. Bush, but to talk earnestly of a Trump Doctrine is to suggest a degree of lucidity in Donald Trump’s actions where none exists. As a consequence, the targeted killing on January 3 of Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Forces, foreign legion division of Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, can make no strategic sense in the eyes of the experts, though it could—and still might—trigger general war in the region. Maybe it is the anti-Trump narrative that lacks credibility.

Scepticism about President Trump’s judgment in foreign affairs runs very deep. We now know, thanks to revelations by the former US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, in her book With All Due Respect (2019), that Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s Secretary of State in the period 2017-18, questioned his judgment. In conjunction with John Kelly, Trump’s White House Chief of Staff for a time, Tillerson considered it his duty to impede President Trump’s inexpert ideas to save America and the world from calamity. Secretary Tillerson, astonishingly, attempted to enrol Ambassador Haley in an anti-Trump cabal operating at the very heart of the Trump administration: “Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country.” If even those close to him—or, at least, those who were close to him—have no confidence in President Trump, then why should anybody else make the case for a cogent Trump Doctrine? Haley’s disclosure gives credence to this sentiment, expressed in the aftermath of the Qasem Soleimani killing by the reliably anti-Trump journalist Joel McNally: “The most dangerous day of his presidency is always tomorrow.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians Revive Blood Libels as Israel Saves Their Lives by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15697/palestinians-blood-libels

Earlier, the Israeli authorities announced that they had facilitated 105,495 humanitarian crossings for Palestinians to receive medical treatment in Israel during the last week of February.

Yet, rather than showing gratitude toward the Israeli authorities for their assistance, the Palestinian Authority and its media outlets and officials are continuing their campaign of incitement against Israel.

If, as the Palestinians claim, the Jews have been using wild boars for the past two decades, why has no one snapped even one photo of an Israeli truck carrying the animals into Palestinian villages?

What about the hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the West Bank? How come they too have not been attacked by wild boars? And how are these wild boars able to distinguish between Arabs and Jews?

While this sort of perverse Palestinian payback is nothing new, it nonetheless ought to interest anyone in the international community who is considering contributing to the Palestinian cause.

Israel is making a massive effort to help the Palestinians contain a coronavirus outbreak after several Palestinians in Bethlehem tested positive for the disease. In return, the Palestinians are continuing to spread blood libels against Israel and the Jews.

On March 5, the Israeli Defense Ministry announced that it has been working in the past two weeks to assist the Palestinian Authority in “curbing and preventing a coronavirus outbreak” in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israeli authorities have transferred 250 coronavirus test kits from Israel to the Palestinians. Furthermore, joint training sessions for Israeli and Palestinian medical personnel were organized for the professional study of the virus, the protection of medical personnel, and the testing of patients suspected of being virus carriers.

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EDUCATION, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Here’s Why Now Is the Perfect Time to Cut Education Spending Teresa Mull

By on March 9th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/08/heres-why-now-is-the-perfect-time-to-cut-education-spending/

What government-run schools do, in general, isn’t education. At best, it’s wasting money, energy, and resources. At worst, it’s dangerous indoctrination that threatens to destroy the entire identity of the nation our forefathers fought and died to build.

Leftists love to label those who favor cutting education spending as “anti-children,” “anti-public school,” and basically, “anti-education.” That’s because leftists are the ones benefiting most from the increases in education spending that have, until recently, been mandated like clockwork.

“Each year, President Trump has proposed a new budget with cuts to programs at the Department of Education,” Forbes reports. “This year is no different as his new proposal shows. In addition to cuts to other areas like Medicaid and food stamps, Trump has proposed nearly an 8 percent cut to education …”

Cue the dramatic, “Trump hates kids” chorus, as well as a less-than-flattering photo of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos looking devious and pleased, these sorts of stories suggest, at the announcement of more cuts. House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) called the reductions “destructive and irrational,” a hysterical view Democrats always take when any sort of spending reduction is proposed, but never more so than when cuts affect unions that serve as their campaign cash cows.

Although many of the Trump Administration’s proposed education budget cuts deal with college loans and student aid, now is the perfect time to examine federal education spending in general. For starters, why there’s so much of it; why it’s not only wasteful but damaging to society; and ultimately, how we can do better.

As a nation, U.S. schools are failing to compete with the rest of the world. A 2017 Pew Research report found “U.S. students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries.” How can this be, when we spend approximately $706 billion on education—or $13,847 per public school student?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

California Is a Cruel Medieval State The Golden State has become a cruel and unusual place because callousness and narcissism were redefined as caring and compassion. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 9th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/08/california-is-a-cruel-medieval-state/

One way of understanding California is simply to invert traditional morality. What for centuries would be considered selfish, callous, and greedy is now recalibrated as caring, empathetic, and generous. The current ethos of evaluating someone by his or her superficial appearance—gender or race—has returned to the premodern values of 19th-century California when race and gender calibrated careers. We don’t pay medieval priests for indulgences of our past and ongoing sin, but we do tweet out displays of our goodness as the penance price of acting amoral.

A paradox ensues that Californians both have a high, indeed smug, view of themselves and yet do a lot of damage to their fellow human beings. Their haughtiness is based largely on the reality that Silicon Valley, sandwiched between Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley, became the birthplace of the global computer, internet, social media, and a high-tech revolution. For progressives who deprecate the capitalist lifestyle, having a lot of money still allows one to say one thing and live out the opposite.

The state’s multi-trillion-dollar companies have hired tens of thousands of seven-figure, mid-level executives and computer experts who assume that life in the California coastal corridor is a birthright paradise.

The resulting tax revenue bonanza to the state allows one-party-rule to rid California of the old bothersome Reagan-Deukmejian-Wilson working- and middle-classes by embracing not-in-my-backyard zoning, identity politics, anal-retentive regulations, steep tax rates, utopian green agendas, open borders, and decriminalization of things that used to be felony offenses.

Indeed, the bigger and wealthier California became, the more the rich sought to privatize their lives and to give up on public services, the more the middle classes left the state, the more the poor from Mexico and Latin America crossed the southern border illegally, the more its schools deteriorated, and the more its infrastructure ossified and became decrepit, from century-old power transmission towers to pot-holed and jammed highways.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Virus and the Economy Widespread quarantines and shutdowns of industries have human costs, too. Steve Malanga

By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-and-the-economy

The spread of the coronavirus has led to fears of a worldwide economic slowdown. China, where the virus first leaped into the human population, has quarantined large sections of the country, virtually shutting down economic activity. In South Korea, several companies—including the automaker Hyundai—closed facilities when workers there tested positive for the virus. The Italian government, meantime, has shuttered schools and universities and banned public attendance at sporting events—including the nation’s popular soccer league—for 30 days. Such responses, likely to spread to other countries as the virus itself travels, have led to estimates that containment efforts could cut worldwide economic growth in half this year. Whether that prediction proves accurate, or whether the toll proves even worse, may depend on how the economic impact of the virus plays out in the United States, the world’s largest and most consequential economy.

The U.S. has already taken several basic steps to stem the spread of the virus, including suspending flights from China and quarantining those returning from areas of the world where the infection is most intense. But as the virus spreads, officials contemplate stricter measures. These include banning public gatherings such as concerts, movies, and sports events; advising businesses to keep workers home; or even shutting down firms where the virus is detected.

It might be easy to justify such draconian measures based on the toll that the coronavirus can take on society. But what’s also worth contemplating is the human toll that a potentially sharp decline in economic activity would exact. While the simplest way to measure an economy may be in dollars and cents, economic activity also produces well-being. A decline in the economy sparks deterioration in public welfare. Those are human costs that must be measured against the inevitable cost of the virus itself. Extended school closures, for example, place a burden on employed parents, who must miss long periods of work; on households living paycheck-to-paycheck; and on the self-employed.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Global Warming Alarmists: Not Only Wrong But Vicious J. Frank Bullitt

By on March 9th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/09/global-warming-alarmists-not-only-wrong-but-vicious/

Christiana Figueres, at one time the United Nations’ climate director, says the coronavirus might be good for the climate “because there is less trade, there’s less travel, there’s less commerce.” She didn’t say it, but given her past statements, it’s not hard to imagine she’d be OK with any global or Western crisis that hurt the economy.

After all, Figueres is the woman, the former executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, who admitted some years ago that the “fight” against global warming was a cover to crush capitalism.

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” Figueres, considered “the world’s most important environmentalist,” said in 2015.

Those comments are similar to those of Rajendra Pachauri, a former chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said he was “not going to rest easy until” he had “articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development. That’s the real issue. Climate change is just a part of it.”

For these world “leaders” to militantly crusade against the only economic system — the free market — that has lifted hundreds of millions out of “grinding” poverty is beyond cruel.

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EDUCATION, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Video: High School Teacher Reprimanded for Insulting Islam on Facebook Sharia is here.

By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/video-high-school-teacher-reprimanded-insulting-frontpagemagcom/

Subscribe to the Glazov Gang‘s YouTube Channel and follow us on Twitter: @JamieGlazov.

In this new Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie discusses High School Teacher Reprimanded for Insulting Islam on Facebook, unveiling how Sharia is here.

Don’t miss it!

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

SecState Pompeo Confronts UN Secretary General Guterres on UN Blacklist A solid and legitimate move by the Trump administration. Joseph Klein

By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/secstate-pompeo-confronts-un-secretary-general-joseph-klein/

Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo met on March 6th with United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres at UN headquarters in New York. Secretary Pompeo took the opportunity to condemn the UN’s highly biased pro-Palestinian decision to release its blacklist of companies doing business with Israeli firms operating in disputed areas of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which includes several U.S. companies.

According to the State Department’s readout of the meeting, Secretary Pompeo “reiterated his outrage at the decision by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to publish a database of companies operating in Israeli-controlled territories.” The U.S. statement added that Secretary Pompeo “made clear that the United States will continue to engage UN officials and member states on this matter, will not tolerate the reckless mistreatment of U.S. companies, and will respond to actions harmful to our business community.”

As usual, the UN Secretary General tried to paper over significant objections to the UN’s moral failures with diplomatic niceties. His office’s readout of the same meeting made no mention of the blacklist controversy. “The Secretary-General expressed appreciation for the continued engagement of the United States in the United Nation,” the UN statement said. It ticked off as topics of discussion “a range of situations around the world, including Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, the Sahel and the questions related to the implementation of the host country agreement.” The reference to the host country agreement implementation may have alluded to a dispute over the denial or delay of visas issued by the U.S. to UN diplomats from certain countries, principally Russia and Iran, seeking to attend UN meetings in New York. However, the statement completely sidestepped the substance of the issue. Nothing was even hinted regarding any other differences between the United States and the United Nations.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Elizabeth Warren Lost Because Women are Sexist Only 1 in 4 women voted for Warren. The other 3 out of 4 must be sexist. Daniel Greenfield

By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/elizabeth-warren-lost-because-women-are-sexist-daniel-greenfield/

Senator Elizabeth Warren née Herring only lost the Democrat primaries because of sexism.

Hillary Clinton blamed Warren’s setbacks on “unconscious bias” and “gendered language”. If only the media had referred to Warren as “him” or “xer” while being unconscious, it might be the nominee.

“Sexism Sank Elizabeth Warren,” bleats The Nation. “Gender is at the core of this,” Salon insists.

There’s no such thing as gender when it comes to castrating 7-year-old boys, or in weightlifting competitions, but is a serious problem for the political ambitions of millionaire 70-year-old professors.

Vox even falsely claims that “women are feeling so defeated after Elizabeth Warren’s loss”.

If women are feeling so defeated by Warren’s primary faceplant, why didn’t they vote for her?

In her home state of Massachusetts, 34% of women voted for Joe Biden, 36% for Bernie Sand

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Stigma of Coronavirus? The leader of the World Health Organisation says it’s more dangerous than the virus itself.Katie Hopkins

By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/stigma-corona-virus-katie-hopkins/

Following its latest media briefing, the World Health Organization (WHO) might want to think about changing its name to the Woke Health Organization.

In the face of a possible global pandemic of Coronavirus (so called COVID-19), the head of WHO says the most urgent priority is how we talk about the virus so as not to cause offense.

He is worried about the social impact of Coronavirus and the stigmatizing effect of words. He claims the stigma is more dangerous than the virus itself and he has made every effort to underline this point by repeating it… twice.

Stigma is the most dangerous enemy we face. Stigma is the most dangerous enemy we face.

You know, even with the duplication I am not really getting his point. An unknown killer virus with no known cure that turned a Princess cruise ship into a floating plague hotel and has killed 100 Italians in a week sounds just a bit more dangerous than words right now.

The Director General of WHO is a gentleman named Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, which I think is short for Utter Madman. Rallying around his own rhetoric, he is leading the fight for unity in the media and online, retweeting a tweet from Twitter that says: “Take care of each other.”

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