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Ruth King

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Dinosaurs, Snow Drifts and Mrs Simpson James Allan

By on December 15th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/travel-qed/2019/12/dinosaurs-snow-drifts-and-mrs-simpson/

“Greetings from snowbound Utah, where our trans-America trek has been stalled by a blizzard. Like the bleak and parched Dinosaur Monument Park, it’s another reminder that climate change was at work long before SUVs and modern life so upset a certain teenage Swedish truant.”

As my time in Coronado, San Diego, came to an end, my wife and I looked out at our next-door neighbour, the magnificent Hotel del Coronado, and decided we really needed to take the upmarket tour of the place.  This hotel is the second-biggest all-wood structure in the United States.  It was built in 1888 by two entrepreneurs from back east who bought up the land on the isthmus of Coronado (which has such a long and slender neck that most people just think of it as an island).  They sold enough to start building the grand hotel they had always envisaged in the Queen Anne style, with money seemingly no object as it was being built.  Today the hotel is in the midst of a $200 million-plus facelift, about half of which has been completed.    Near on a dozen US presidents have stayed there.  You have to see this place, and if you’ve ever watched Some Like It Hot, you already have. While the movie pretends the last half takes place in Florida, the reality is that those scenes were shot at the Coronado.

The Coronado also played host to all sorts of celebrity types.  Edward VIII, pre-ascent and abdication, was a guest.  The hotel had a huge banquet in his honour.  Our tour guide reported that early in the night the Prince of Wales sneaked away to gamble in Tijuana. It rings true.  And Mrs Simpson has quite a connection with Coronado as well, having lived there for a number of years and whose extended stay is commemorated by The Windsor Cottage, named for the abdicator and his divorcee wife. Her first husband (Edward was number three) was a US admiral in charge of the US Navy’s nearby air base.  This is where naval aviation was born; it’s where Charles Lindbergh learned his craft (meaning flying, not idiotic political views) and from where he started out in the Spirit of St Louis to make his way east before becoming the first man to fly the Atlantic from New York to Paris.

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Boris Triumphant The British election was a thunderous rejection of the Labour Left. Oliver Wiseman

By on December 15th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/boris-johnson-victory

All elections matter, but some matter more than others. Yesterday’s British general election will be remembered as one of the most consequential in decades. The immediate effects are beyond doubt. Boris Johnson’s 80-seat victory—the biggest Conservative win since Margaret Thatcher—means that Brexit will happen next month. Britain will leave the European Union by the end of January. The emphatic defeat for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn—the worst defeat for the party since the 1930s—means that, for the foreseeable future, socialism in Britain remains something to be debated in the abstract, rather than tested on the country.

Finishing Brexit and finishing off Corbyn are huge achievements. But they are only part of a bigger shift. Last night, British politics didn’t just escape a three-and-a-half-year doom loop of squabbling over the 2016 referendum; it changed in fundamental ways. As the results trickled in, it soon became clear that the realignment many had forecast ahead of polling day was really happening, and on a remarkable scale. Voters in Brexit-supporting seats in the North and Midlands that have always returned a Labour MP to Parliament abandoned the party in droves. While the Conservatives demolished Labour’s red wall, it was a different story in London and the South East, where things trended in the other direction, even if the Conservatives held onto all but a few of the seats they were defending in and around the capital.

The upshot is that Britain’s two major parties now answer to very different sets of voters than before. The Conservative base has become more working-class, older, and whiter. The Labour Party’s constituency is getting wealthier, younger, more metropolitan, and more ethnically diverse.

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Present at the Demolition By Matthew Continetti

By on December 15th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/post-wwii-order-ending-and-nothing-has-replaced-it/

The post-WWII order is ending — and nothing has replaced it.

Economists at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund must feel pretty lucky these days. They work for just about the only institutions set up in the aftermath of World War II that aren’t in the middle of an identity crisis. From Turtle Bay to Brussels, from Washington to Vienna, the decay of the economic and security infrastructure of the postwar world has accelerated in recent weeks. The bad news: As the legacy of the 20th century recedes into the past, the only 21st-century alternatives are offered from an authoritarian surveillance state.

The pressure is both external and internal. Revisionist powers such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea undermine the foundations of global governance and hijack institutions to the detriment of the liberal international order. The institutions themselves lack the self-confidence necessary to further the cause of human freedom. Meanwhile, the most powerful nation in the world has turned inward. Its foreign policy is haphazard and improvisational, contradictory and equivocal. The confusion and zigzagging contribute to the erosion of legitimacy. It delays the emergence of new forms of international organization.

The breakdown was visible at last week’s NATO summit in London. Remarkably, the source of the immediate ruckus wasn’t President Trump. It was French president Emmanuel Macron, who doubled down on his criticism of the Atlantic alliance that he’d expressed in a recent interview with The Economist. Trump disagreed with Macron’s description of NATO as “brain dead.” He and other allies didn’t back Macron’s call for rapprochement with Russia and China and renewed focus on terrorism.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Business of Climate Change By Rupert Darwall

By on December 15th, 2019

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2019/12/12/the_business_of_climate_change.html

MADRID

Saving the planet takes money, and lots of it. Money is both the theme and the subtext of the latest round of UN climate talks being held here—a vast river of cash flows through the UN climate process. Formally, the meeting is about nailing down one of the more obscure provisions of the Paris Agreement: Article 6, which provides for market-based instruments so that countries can trade their way out of their decarbonization commitments. Billions of cross-border dollars and transaction fees hang on the outcome.

With the negotiations concerning mind-paralyzing definitions of interest only to the most intrepid climate geeks, business and finance leaders could wind up taking center stage. When they first started coming to climate conferences, it was to observe and advise. Now it’s to show-and-tell their green virtue. “Momentum is there,” declared Paul Polman, the former Uniliver CEO. “Climate change is the biggest business opportunity of all time.” We’re close to several policy tipping points, he suggested.

The EU is about to approve a massive Green New Deal. Michael Bloomberg’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TFCD) encourages companies to make voluntary climate-related risk disclosures. Draft EU regulations, meantime, could pave the way for mandatory climate disclosures that would force investment managers to justify their investments against climate and environmental benchmarks. Businesses are transitioning to “net zero,” Polman claims—meaning zero carbon emissions. They’re so far advanced that at this point, it’s only governments holding them back.

Peeling away the hype reveals a very different picture. Companies promising to cut their carbon emissions rely on offsetting—that is, paying for their consumption of hydrocarbon energy by supporting projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, such as renewable energy. If companies were genuine in their commitment to tackle climate change, though, they would develop zero-carbon baselines for their own activities.

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GRETA THUNBERG, PUPPET OF PROGRESSIVES, MALICE IN BLUNDERLAND

By on December 15th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/malice_in_blunderland.html#.XfUlW9CVq2M.twitter

Malice in Blunderland Doris O’Brien,

As if the stresses of the holiday season weren’t enough, harried Americans find themselves tumbling deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole of political insanity.

Originally orchestrated by Mad Hatter Adam Schiff, the plot of the impeachment hearings has been every bit as preposterous as that of the Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, written over a century and a half ago.  And the current cast of characters is eerily reminiscent of those in that childhood classic — if not even more bizarre.

You may recall that the original tale was about a young girl who nods off to sleep and dreams that she runs after an agitated white rabbit and unexpectedly falls into a warren of  strange misadventures from which she finally awakens — just in the nick of time to avoid the evil Red Queen’s edict, “Off with her head!”

Thus far, however, Americans have unfortunately not awakened from the nightmare of the contemporary “Malice in Blunderland,” the congressional impeachment hearings whose shifting Schiff-controlled narrative has been advanced by Trump-hating  Democrats and likeminded loathers brought into the proceedings to validate their biased claims. With its bungled series of changing charges, the presidential impeachment scenario can aptly be described as “curioser and curioser.”

If any “fun” is to be found in all of this nonsense, it might come from comparing the current wild-eyed crop of impeachment pushers to the hodgepodge of  fantastical characters Alice encounters in Wonderland.  The scampering white rabbit, for example, could well be white pants-suited Nancy Pelosi, nervously flitting here and there, eager to retain her  personal power by acquiescing to the demands  to impeach Trump, and then acknowledging — as she scurries off  to join her colleagues — “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.”

But the current impeachment hearings have been anything but a tea party. Mad Hatter Schiff and Dormouse Nadler – who snoozed at his own hearings! — have  played their  parallel roles looking  much like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumber.  Meanwhile, at the prospect of finally impeaching her nemesis in the White House, perennial Congressional rabble-rouser Maxine Waters has been grinning like the Cheshire Cat .

https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/greta-thunberg-isnt-a-hero-shes-a-victim-of-the-leftist-progressive-cult

Greta Thunberg isn’t a hero. She’s a victim of the leftist progressive cult.
TheBlaze.com

For the 16-year-old climate catastrophe prophetess turned Time Person of the Year has “How dare you’d” her way into our cultural folly, because her life has been entirely forsaken to a cause clearly not of her own choosing. From the perspective of the progressive cult, she is no less a worthy human sacrifice now than she would have been had she been aborted. Either way, all of her individuality has been subsumed by the cause.

The degree to which the poor girl is afflicted with Asperger’s, which adversely impacts socialization and communication skills, is clearly how she was able to be groomed into such a useful zealot’s frenzy of one-note rage at such a young age. Even though progressives will tell you they are about individuality and diversity — a scam I have exposed on my show many times before — what they really want is the sort of rigid, doctrinaire conformity that allows them to maximize their zeal for power and control over us all.

Greta was the perfect vessel for what other people, young and old, often try in the name of various progressive shibboleths, but can’t quite pull off because the lure of autonomy in their lives is just too strong. But the girl who just admitted she hardly spent any time talking to people before this year of pagan jubilee was programmed by her parents to live in such fear of a climate Armageddon that one neurosis was simply traded for another. Yes, that’s right. Her parents manipulated her curse of perpetual discomfort and weaponized it to suit the ends of the inglorious group think.

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Trapped by the Ghosts of Corrupt Administrations Past The Left is lying not to beat Republicans so much as beat the rap. Thaddeus G. McCotter

By on December 14th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/13/trapped-by-the-ghosts-of-corrupt-administrations-past/

It’s little wonder sane people have taken the Left’s messaging strategy regarding impeachment and the Justice Department inspector general’s new report as mere political inanity and mendacity. Government officials, past and present, who fear potential indictment for abuse of power for personal and partisan gain, their legal “experts” at Lawfare, their collusion media cohorts, and social media’s rabid pack of regressive mouth-breathers who do little more than parrot them are not advancing a typical political argument. They are proffering a preemptive legal defense.

For the Left, preparing briefs for a prospective court of law rather than making good faith arguments in the court of public opinion is a necessary gambit, due to U.S. Attorney John Durham’s probe into the Russia-gate lie. Think of it this way:  These Obama administration officials, both in and out of government, are out on karaoke night croaking out their mashup of Warren Zevon’s classic, “send Lawfare, guns, and money!”

Specifically, the Left is pursuing a legal strategy common in criminal trials: In order to distract from and/or prejudice the trier of fact against the evidence of the accused’s guilt, the defense endeavors to put the government on trial. (In the case of the House Democrats’ sham impeachment, it is doing this quite literally.)

It’s understandable the Left’s ulterior motive might be missed as one merely aimed at gaining votes and, though they do hope that will be a collateral benefit, that’s not all that’s going on here. Still, they are using their shopworn bag of despicable “politricks”: baseless personal attacks; veiled threats to intimidate; and, of course, accusing others of what the Left is doing.

This is routine by now, so it’s easy to miss what’s actually going on.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sweden: Confronting Reality by Judith Bergman

By on December 14th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15248/sweden-confronting-reality

One problem is that the Swedish state itself contributes indirectly to the spread of extremism. The Swedish Security Service (Säpo) has found that a “relatively large” number of organizations with links to violent extremism have been using Sweden’s state and municipal grant systems, which Säpo says could “contribute to radicalization and thus growth in extremist environments in Sweden.”

According to Säpo, individuals from Islamist groups are using public-funded schools, cultural associations and foundations as platforms to spread extremist ideology within Sweden.

“Of course, the segregation, exclusion and long-standing uncontrolled immigration that is now driving serious crime did not suddenly arise. Responsibility for years of ill-conceived policies — and the inability to address the problems — is shared by many…. [I]t is quite clear that gang criminality, shootings and executions are strongly linked to excessive immigration and to bad integration. How can you even pretend anything else?” — Ulf Kristersson, leader of the Moderate Party, Facebook, November 17, 2019

The question now is how the Moderate Party will transform Kristersson’s apology into “concrete political action” that can stop Swedish reality from deteriorating even further.

Back in February and March 2017 BBC News ran a number of articles about Trump’s much vilified remarks about Sweden, including one with the headline, “Trump’s wrong, it’s ‘quiet and safe’ in Malmo.” One article in particular, “All eyes on Malmo but not because of Trump” painted an idyllic picture of the lives of expats in Malmö. It spoke, among others, about a young American woman working in Malmö, Susanna Lewis, in the following way:

“As a woman, she is also used to being prepared and watchful as she walks alone in other places, yet she does not feel afraid in Malmö city centre or its outer suburbs”.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Just politics by James Bowman On the narcissism of small differences. *****

By on December 14th, 2019

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/12/just-politics?mod=article_inline

“We have reached a period of political partisanship where people are so willing to suspend reality in order to pursue an agenda that they view real-life events almost entirely through the prism of their own bias. Like football fans watching the video replay of a penalty—one set of people are able to scream that one thing is “clearly” the case, even as the other shouts that it is “blatantly” the opposite. The same footage, the same evidence, through almost identical sets of eyes, is capable of spinning wildly contrasting views. . . . We have reached the stage where manipulation of the facts by spin doctors or government departments is no longer necessary—people take the raw evidence before them and mould it themselves in real time. But what is every bit as chilling is just how effective it is at drowning out reasoned debate on serious subjects.”

In what now seems a distant epoch of pre-history, President Bill Clinton came before a joint session of Congress in 1996 to deliver the State of the Union Address and announced that “the era of big government is over.” Even in 1996, no one thought that the era of big government was actually over, least of all Bill Clinton. But it must have seemed like the right thing to say at the time, in order to show that one was in tune with the popular mood—in fact, leading it rather than following it—by putting into a pithy sentence what people were beginning to think, or thought they were thinking, before they had quite thought it. This happened, you may remember, just after the newly elected Republican Congress, the first in forty years, was forced to knuckle under to Mr. Clinton after shutting down the government in a vain attempt to limit big government–style spending. Thus the President, as it might have seemed, was being magnanimous in victory—making a gesture in the direction of the ostensibly small-government philosophy of his opponents before adding: “But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”

Needless to say, the reference to “the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves” was as empty of real political content as the claim that the era of big government was over. No one was proposing, as no one would have dared propose, to abolish the social safety net. The President was merely juggling partisan clichés, but in an original enough fashion that the media were inclined to regard it as a political masterstroke, part of his campaign of “triangulation” in which progressive desiderata were introduced cautiously or with an alloy of conservatism (or, failing that, conservative rhetoric) in order to make them more palatable to the centrists in both parties. We disgruntled conservatives used to speak of this as “the triumph of style over substance,” but in retrospect the joke was on us. Bill Clinton saw sooner than we did that, in the post–Cold War 1990s, style was substance—or as much substance as most people wanted to bother themselves about.

Politics, in other words, had become a fashion statement rather than a serious program for governing. The real business of government was already in the process of being turned over to judges and what is now being called “the deep state,” leaving politicians free to posture and virtue-signal without consequence. With the departure of seriousness and responsibility from the political culture, what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences” took over, and the rancorousness and hatred which are now the salient features of our political life have been increasing ever since. Way back in the ’90s I tried coining the name—I’m sure I wasn’t the first to think of it—“post-modern politics” to describe this new, style-centered political culture based on moral preening, but it didn’t catch on. Of course, we had no need for the name once all politics became post-modern politics. It was just politics.

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The Real Dangers to Jews Twitter-fueled partisan insanity is preventing society from keeping Jews safe—at exactly the moment it’s most needed Liel Leibovitz

By on December 14th, 2019

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/295616/the-real-danger-to-jews

“Jews make up about 2% of the American population, yet were the victims of a whopping 57.8% of all religious bias crimes last year, according to the FBI. Rather than vocally and unequivocally demanding that their Jewish constituents be protected, the politicians representing those targeted—from de Blasio to New York Sen. Chuck Schumer—have been largely silent on this issue, while at the same time loudly and vigorously accusing the right of racism.”

The past 24 hours provided a clear and painful picture of the momentous challenges American Jews face these days.

The day began with news that President Trump had issued an executive order designed, the White House said, to fight anti-Semitism. Reporting on the order, The New York Times stressed that it will “effectively interpret Judaism as a race or nationality, not just a religion,” and that it “could be used to stifle free speech and legitimate opposition to Israel’s policies toward Palestinians in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.” Leftist NGOs echoed the same talking point, and a phalanx of pundits took to Twitter to decry the order as anti-Semitic because, allegedly, it somehow paved the road to defining Jews as something less than fully American. From the Hollywood actress who thundered,“You, stupid crook president do not get to decide this so your white nationalist pals get to stick me in a concentration camp,” to the law professor who blasted the order for deeming Jews to be “some nationality other than Americans,” our bien-pensants were whipping everyone into a wild frenzy, portraying the president as an unhinged anti-Semite and a clear and present danger to the Jews.

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California’s Accounting System Cost Taxpayers $1.1 Billion And Still Can’t Produce A State Checkbook Adam Andrzejewski

By on December 14th, 2019

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/12/12/californias-accounting-s

California State Controller Betty Yee admits to paying 49 million bills last year. Yet, she won’t produce a single transaction subject to our public records request for line-by-line state spending.

Out of the 50 states, California is the only one that refuses to produce its state checkbook to our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com. Even though it’s home to Silicon Valley, the state government isn’t letting tech drive transparency when it comes to its own records.

It shouldn’t take subpoenas and litigation to force open the books.

Last year, Yee paid 49 million bills for about $320 billion in payments. If you can make the payment, then you can track the payment. The state controller’s office – whose job it is to stop waste, fraud, corruption, and taxpayer abuse – may be in violation of transparency laws.

In 2013, then-California State Controller John Chang rejected our public records request for the state checkbook telling us: stop asking because the records can’t be located. Today, six-years later – Yee is still parroting the same answer.

So, how is the controller even doing her job without access to the records she helped create? We reached out to Yee for comment, and will update the piece if she responds.

She’s charged with tracking “every dollar spent by the state.” Her duties includepaying the bills and all state accounting, bookkeeping, payroll, and auditing– including financial and compliance audits and attestations.

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