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Ruth King

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Team Sussex has fallen prey to the wretched cult of eco-miserablism Madeline Grant

By on July 31st, 2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/07/31/team-sussexhas-fallen-prey-wretchedcult-eco-miserablism/

How did we manage before virtue-signalling Royals? First came Prince Charles with his homeopathy and sporadic warnings of imminent environmental doom. Then royal sister-in-law Pippa Middleton added greatly to the gaiety of nations with her book on entertaining for special occasions, advancing such indispensable advice as “Flowers are a traditional Valentine’s token, red roses are the classic symbol of romance” or “[Star-gazing] is best in pitch darkness on a very clear night”. 

But these delights pale in comparison with the extraordinary transformation of Prince Harry in recent years from louche spare to what one commentator described as “Harryward the Woke” – a born-again convert to the cause of virtue-signalling. His latest pronouncements, in the Vogue spread guest-edited by his wife, are a dramatic case in point. 

The Duke of Sussex pledged to conservationist Jane Goodall that he and the Duchess will be limiting their family to “two children maximum”, for environmental reasons. “Surely, being as intelligent as we all are, or as evolved as we all are supposed to be,” he said, “we should be able to leave something better behind for the next generation.” He went on implicitly to accuse some of his subjects of quasi thought-crime, holding forth on the subconscious leanings that drive “racism”. 

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Warren, Bernie & Pete Prove They’re As Daft As New Ager Marianne Williamson Thomas McArdle

By on July 31st, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/31

If you dig up the old tweets of self-help author Marianne Williamson, who stood in her now-familiar place way out in left field during Tuesday’s first night of CNN’s Democrat debates, you’ll know her as the candidate representing Xanadu.

Crime policy? “A gray sky is actually a blue sky covered up by gray clouds. A guilty person is actually an innocent soul covered up by mistaken behavior.”

Health care? “God is BIG, swine flu SMALL … Pour God’s love on our immune systems.”

Energy policy? “Visualize the oil spill plugged. Close your eyes for 5 minutes and see angels coming over it, filling it with sane and sacred thoughts.”

And here’s a great nuclear weapons negotiation strategy versus Iran’s mullahs or Kim Jong-un: “In chaotic times, seek peace within. You then become a harmonizer of external forces and a midwife to peace on earth.”

But the other leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination who took part in the first night showed America they’re just as loopy as Marianne.

What Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, as well as Mayor Pete Buttigieg, had to say would make you think there’s no one left in America who remembers the bleak, bereft economy of the Soviet Union, whose Communist Party constitution painted a picture of paradise where citizens of the U.S.S.R. “are guaranteed the right to employment” plus “the elimination of the possibility of economic crises, and the abolition of unemployment.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

LESSONS OF SAUL ALINSKY IN AUSTRALIA BY ROGER FRANKLIN

By on July 31st, 2019

Insights from Quadrant https://quadrant.org.au/

Predictably, but not less galling for being so, an upcoming gathering of conservatives in Sydney, the CPAC conference, has come under attack for — yes, you guessed it! — homophobia, Islamophobia, gynophobia and assorted etceteraphobias, which is the way the Left rolls whenever those with non-progressive perspectives attempt to air their views, even if only among themselves. It works like this: some diligent elf at GetUp! or a piece of human office equipment in a Labor/Greens backroom picks over the listed speakers, googles “name” + “critics”, and quickly finds what others have said by way of denunciation.

This information is then shopped to hack reporters along with the demand that the targeted individual be denied entry to the country. If all the pieces click, the event will be besieged by the feral and violent Left — as has happened to Geert Wilders, Milo Yiannopoulos, Jordan Peterson, Bettina Arndt, the Australian Christian Lobby and any number of others — eager to implement Saul Alinsky’s advice:

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

With the CPAC conference now mere days away, you just knew a dose of Alinsky’s devious medicine was about to be injected into the body politic. Well today it happened, trumpeted with homepage coverage by the ABC, SBS, and Nine newspapers , we read that failed premier, failed federal byelection candidate and camera-ready Sussex Street sweetheart Kristina Keneally has demanded that CPAC speaker Raheem Kassam be denied a visa.

“We should not allow career bigots — a person who spreads hate speech about Muslims, about women, about gay and lesbian people — to enter our country with the express intent of undermining equality,” Senator Keneally said on Tuesday.

Q: What must one do to qualify as a “career bigot”? A: Utter that which is true but must never be said about those high in  the hierarchy of contemporary victimology. Islam, for instance, which Kaseem described to a BBC interviewer as “a fascistic and totalitarian ideology” — an observation which enjoys the distinction of being entirely true.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Inside North Korea: the Land Where Lies Are King Jasper Burgess

By on July 31st, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/07/inside-north-korea-the-land-where-lies-are-king/

My tour guide, Mr Li, asks “Is Australia divided into a North and South as well?”. Resisting the urge to make a joke about the Northern Territory, I tell him that it is not. These were the type of naïve, yet always cordially couched questions about everyday Australian banalities that I fielded during my visit to North Korea, a nation of 23 million prisoners – physically and psychologically. But it is important to separate the regime from the perpetually violated – yet often still jovial, and always inquisitive – people who have the misfortune of living in the last truly rogue state.

Arid land, emaciated husks of livestock (their owners not dissimilar), and a myriad other abject miseries fly past the window of the 17:27 to Pyongyang. Local farmers stare wide-eyed, some wave at perhaps the first foreign person they have ever seen.

“Thirty minutes until arrival”.

The “city of flat soil”, the literal translation of Pyongyang, is by far the most gentrified in the nation, yet the bleak hopelessness which defines rural life doesn’t ebb when you arrive on urban ground; it is simply traded for an existence – perhaps even crueller – among total artificiality, a state of limbo in which one knows they are imprisoned while acquiescing with their captors, lest they be sent to one of the North’s notorious ‘aquariums’. Pyongyang is only for those who are, relatively speaking, in on the joke – those who know that the outside world at least exists; those who know that Kim Jong Il didn’t, in fact, hit eleven holes-in-one the first time he picked up a golf club. These are mostly political elites, families with a history of loyalty to the regime, and polyglot tour guides, Mr. Li included.

Outside residents are prevented from travelling anywhere near the capital by checkpoints littered along the inbound roads. From afar, Pyongyang almost passes as an average city, mutatis mutandis. Pastel-shaded apartment buildings occupy the outskirts of the city, dated — but not offensively so — glass structures cast shadows over downtown, and spotless public squares are plentiful.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Escalating Madness of Leftist Crowds Roger Kimball

By on July 31st, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/07/sometimes-a-coup-is-just-a-coup/

I see that Nigel Farage has sparked yet another political innovation. Dry cleaners of the world are smiling. A few weeks ago, Mr Farage presented what Aristotle might have described as the final cause, that for the sake of which, an agitated onlooker tossed the contents of his plastic cup into the campaigning politician’s face and all over his dark blue suit. It looked like a nice suit, too.

It’s a gesture that is catching on. During President Trump’s recent state visit to the UK, one of the President’s supporters was—language police: what’s the correct participle?—milkshaked? Milkshook? I favour “shook”. Anyway, a chap in Trafalgar Square got doused by an angry anti-Trump protester. (Why are all anti-Trump protesters always so red-in-the-face angry?) What a waste of a good milkshake. Were Thomas Aquinas available, he might analogise the procedure to the sin of Onan, the misuse of a God-given faculty and improper spilling of precious liquid. But the Atlantic, noting the new popularity of (left-wing) people tossing milkshakes at (right-wing) people with whom they disagree, assures us that “Sometimes a Milkshake Is Just a Milkshake”. At least it’s not boiling hot coffee, the author wrote—or acid, or a Molotov cocktail. Be thankful for small mercies.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to note the artificially induced persistence of public insanity on the issue of Donald Trump. Here, the title of Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds says it all. As Noël Coward sang of mad dogs and Englishmen, “They’re obviously, definitely nuts!” There is, however, a looming disturbance in bedlam. There is still plenty of skirling insanity. Jerrold Nadler, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, gives almost daily performances from behind his desk in the US Capitol. But there is a chill wind blowing through those chambers that is making the children shiver and think of heading home. The name of that refreshing breeze is William Barr, Donald Trump’s new Attorney-General.

Mr Barr has been around the political block a few times. He was Attorney-General once before, way back in the last century, under George H.W. Bush. Unlike his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, there is no rabbit about William Barr. When he was first confirmed, there were cries from people in Jerry Nadler’s corner for him to recuse himself from anything that had to do with the Democrats’ campaign to destroy President Trump (this is what we call an “investigation”), but Barr did not even bother to laugh. The man is entirely unflappable. After Robert Mueller delivered his two-volume fantasy fiction manuscript to Barr this spring, Barr and his colleagues dissected the report. They noted that it had determined that there was no collusion or co-ordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin (sadness!).

They also concluded (what Mr Mueller had forborne to conclude) that the President exercising his constitutionally-defined powers did not count as obstruction of justice. The Democrats in Congress and their PR representatives—that is, the press—had been bitterly disappointed to learn that the President of the United States was not in fact a Manchurian candidate who was in Putin’s pocket. (Actually, I could have told them that years ago, but they never asked.) After that bitter disappointment they had pinned everything on obstruction. “Surely we can get Trump for that! It worked against Richard Nixon, didn’t it?”

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Citizenship and American Identity If we extend the designation to everyone in the world, how can we still be a country? Geoffrey M. Vaughan

By on July 31st, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/american-citizenship

Civis Romanus sum: “I am a Roman citizen!” Two thousand years ago, those words protected one throughout the Roman Empire, imposing strict limits on the punishments that public authorities might inflict. Today, we’re seeing a powerful conflict between the national and the foreign in the Western hemisphere. At the United States southern border, a father and daughter lost their lives attempting to cross the Rio Grande. Along the shores of Italy and Spain, meantime, boatloads of migrants risk their lives sailing across the Mediterranean. 

More than 1 billion people would improve their lives by moving to a relatively small number of countries—namely, those of Western Europe and North America. Polls confirm the desire of citizens of poor countries to move to the West. These people do not merely seek material advantage, though that’s certainly a factor. They also want protection from violent elements of their society, from criminals, and even from their own governments. In many parts of the world, declaring one’s citizenship offers no such protection. Chinese citizenship doesn’t save the Uighurs, for example, from the abuses they have suffered. Even Rome’s decaying republic and corrupt empire had better protections for citizens than do some contemporary countries.

Citizenship, like monetary currency, operates on a principle of trust. Currencies are valued highly if one can be assured that others will exchange goods and services for them at face value. Similarly, advanced countries acknowledge one another’s passports virtually as tickets to entry. Citizenship is treasured when one’s rights can be assumed—but worthless when one cannot leave a country or reenter it, when a government doesn’t protect property or individuals, or when one must take desperate measures to escape.

Just as government policies can undermine currencies, so, too, can they degrade citizenship. Cancelling debt is one way to devalue a currency; printing too much money is another. The Democratic presidential hopefuls seem set on similar policies for American citizenship. Most have, in one form or another, suggested decriminalizing illegal entry to the United States. “That is tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders,” said Jeh Johnson, former head of Homeland Security under Barack Obama. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have also endorsed providing illegal immigrants medical insurance, even as millions of American citizens lack coverage. With these measures in place, what would remain of American citizenship?

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

There Is No Epidemic of Racist Police Shootings By Heather Mac Donald

By on July 31st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/white-cops-dont-commit-more-shootings/A new study debunks a common myth.

The Democratic presidential candidates have revived the anti-police rhetoric of the Obama years. Joe Biden’s criminal-justice plan promises that after his policing reforms, black mothers and fathers will no longer have to fear when their children “walk[] the streets of America” — the threat allegedly coming from cops, not gangbangers. President Barack Obama likewise claimed during the memorial for five Dallas police officers killed by a Black Lives Matter–inspired assassin in July 2016 that black parents were right to fear that their child could be killed by a police officer whenever he “walks out the door.” South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has said that police shootings of black men won’t be solved “until we move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O’Rourke claims that the police shoot blacks “solely based on the color of their skin.”

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.

The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Al Sharpton Is Not a Civil-Rights Hero By Kyle Smith

By on July 31st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/al-sharpton-is-not-a-civil-rights-hero/

He’s made a career of inciting violence and vomiting lies. And Democrats have cheered him on.

Imagine David Duke being a regular, esteemed guest and former honored host on Fox News Channel. Imagine every Republican presidential candidate scrambling to praise him whenever he’s in the news. Imagine David Duke being given a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention or President Trump welcoming him to the White House and openly soliciting his support. Imagine Duke appearing on White House visitor logs more than 70 times during Trump’s administration.

Imagine all of this and you’ll have some idea of how the right and even, I think, the center of American political thought reacts to seeing Al Sharpton continue to be cosseted by the Democratic party and its allies in the media. Sharpton should long ago have been ruled out of bounds.

Employing the morally disastrous logic that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, the Democrats have allowed President Trump to troll them into extolling Sharpton. Trump is incorrect about many things, but he fairly described Sharpton as a racist. Sharpton is a “con man, a troublemaker, always looking for a score,” Trump tweeted. “Hates Whites & Cops!” That’s a lot closer to the truth than the framing of Democrats, who bent the knee to Sharpton as though he were some sort of civil-rights hero rather than a huckster.

Kamala Harris
✔ @KamalaHarris .@TheRevAl has spent his life fighting for what’s right and working to improve our nation, even in the face of hate. It’s shameful, yet unsurprising that Trump would continue to attack those who have done so much for our country.
 
Joe Biden✔ @JoeBiden.@TheRevAl is a champion in the fight for civil rights. The fact that President Trump continues to use the power of the presidency to unleash racist attacks on the people he serves is despicable. This hate has no place in our country. It’s beneath the dignity of the office.
 
Elizabeth Warren✔ @ewarren@TheRevAl has dedicated his life to the fight for justice for all. No amount of racist tweets from the man in the White House will erase that—and we must not let them divide us. I stand with my friend Al Sharpton in calling out these ongoing attacks on people of color.

Sharpton holds the position of America’s Senior Spokesman for Civil Rights only because it’s been some time since he’s done anything so egregiously contemptible that it made the front page; the Left simply assumes short memories have sanitized Sharpton’s reputation. I almost wrote “inflammatory reputation,” but that word might be too literal given the arson attack that followed one of his most notorious hate campaigns.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Compared To The Democrats, Donald Trump Is Moderate When it comes to policy, the president makes Democrats look like a gaggle of extremists David Harsanyi

By on July 31st, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/31/donald-trump-the-moderate/

Once you strip away all the hysteria and madness surrounding the Donald Trump presidency, you’re left with a policy agenda of a populist, big-government Republican. Whether or not you have a moral or personal case against Trump himself, the president’s stated policy positions fall well within the contours of traditional right-left politics.

Can the same be said of Democrats? I’m sorry, but across-the-board tax cuts, notwithstanding the panic-stricken reaction, aren’t particularly radical. Every Republican president going back to Warren Harding has passed some kind of rate reduction. Nor is Trump’s stated position on constrained foreign entanglement, which is popular with large factions of both parties. Trump’s anti-Iran and pro-Israel posture are long-standing GOP positions — and before President Barack Obama, bipartisan consensus.

Higher tariffs, which many of us believe are destructive and counterproductive, have been part of our economic debate forever. We shouldn’t forget, either, that while reflexive anti-Trumpism may have transformed a number of Democrats into temporary free marketers, most progressives share Trump’s protectionist instincts. Hillary, for instance, was compelled to change her long-standing position on both NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership during 2016 campaign to appeal to her left flank. Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren’s new trade proposal not only makes Trump look like Milton Friedman, it allows environmental groups and unions to dictate terms.

Debt? Sadly, no one cares.

At CNN’s primary debate in Detroit, presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg cautioned that no matter which policies Democrats embrace, Republicans will still call them “crazy socialists.” Until recently, there was no need for any qualifier, because Democrats feigned outrage at the mere mention of socialism. But now that Democrats are openly arguing for collectivist policies — one of their leading candidates is, in fact, a socialist who could easily have been the party’s nominee for the presidency in 2016 — sane socialism is, apparently, OK.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

“Indispensable Netanyahu” by David Goldman

By on July 31st, 2019

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/07/article/indispensable-netanyahu/

The Israeli prime minister’s diplomatic role has overriding importance for American and world security

After 13 years in office, Benjamin Netanyahu has served long enough to have rankled every Israeli I know. He faces a difficult election on September 17, after failing to form a coalition government following a national election earlier this year. As an American, I avoid taking a view on Israeli politics, but this is a special situation in which Netanyahu’s diplomatic role has overriding importance for American and world security. I have argued since 2009 that the United States has a narrow but important set of common interests with Russia in the Middle East. Thanks in large part to Netanyahu, security cooperation seems effective.

No other world leader could have convened, as Netanyahu did June 25, a meeting of Russia’s national security adviser Nicolai Petrushev and American NSA John Bolton. Speaking in Jerusalem, Petrushev declared, “We pay special attention to ensuring Israel’s security,” calling it “a special interest of ours because here in Israel live a little less than about two million of our countrymen.” He added, “Israel supports us in several channels, including at the UN.”

The Israeli prime minister is the only head of government who has the confidence of President Trump as well as President Putin. Few observers of the region grasp the scope of that accomplishment. Netanyahu did not create a working relationship with Russia by schmoozing its president, but by combining audacious grit and a willingness to compromise. In consequence, it appears possible for the United States and Israel to contain Iran’s imperial ambitions in the Levant without a shooting war. Russia has quietly but firmly discouraged Iran from crossing lines that would provoke actual hostilities, while allowing Israel to conduct hundreds of attacks against Iranian assets in Syria.

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