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Ruth King

POLITICS Comments turned off

Wake up and smell Mr Schultz’s coffee, Democrats – America’s never going to going to elect a loony lefty as President, even against Donald Trump: Piers Morgan

By on January 31st, 2019

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-

Who’s going to stop Donald Trump being re-elected in 2020?That is the big question looming large over America’s political landscape as the clock ticks ever louder on the next election.

Maybe it will be Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose much-awaited report into alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign team and Russia is expected in the near future?

Should Mueller produce real hard evidence directly implicating President Trump, it would be game over for The Donald. But I very much doubt that’s going to happen.

If he had found any, we’d surely know about it faster than a greyhound flies out of a trap.

Maybe it will be old age or ill health?

But I very much doubt that will happen either.

Trump, who will be 74 by the time he faces the voters again, shows no sign of slowing down or losing a single ounce of his combative energy.

Maybe it will be Hillary Clinton, who has spent the past two years seething with indignant fury that she lost and is apparently ‘seriously considering’ running again?

But I am 100% confident that won’t happen. Mainly because Trump would think Thanksgiving had come early.

So who CAN stop Trump?

The pool of Democrat candidates who have so far indicated they will run is distinctly underwhelming.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Land Grabs in Hong Kong as Beijing Challenges the Freedoms of Former British Colony: By Sophia Yan

By on January 31st, 2019

https://premium.telegraph.co.uk/newsletter/article1/land-grabs-in-hong-kong-as-beijing-challenges-the-freedoms-of-former-british-colony/?

Late on a recent morning, a woman slowly rode a bicycle beneath the trees along the sun-dappled shores of Sha Tau Kok, a small village on the Hong Kong-China border.

It was a rare moment of tranquility amid modern China’s bustling urban sprawl. But now this crescent of greenery is at the centre of increasingly fraught tensions between the former British Colony and president Xi Jinping’s Communist government in Beijing.

Six years ago, mainland authorities occupied a small parcel of land in the village – reportedly for military use – after diverting the course of a river.

Carrie Lam, chief executive of Hong Kong, initially said her administration was unaware of any such land occupation.

But the apparent cross-border land-grab angered local residents, who have in turn criticised hamstrung city officials for failing to stand up to Beijing.

“How could the government not be aware?” Mr Yau, a local landowner, told local media when the border breach emerged last November. Mr Yau, who did not give his first name, said he feared losing the land his family grew rice on for generations.
The waterfront near Sha Tau Kok, a village at the heart of a land dispute between Hong Kong and mainland China
The waterfront near Sha Tau Kok, a village at the heart of a land dispute between Hong Kong and mainland ChinaCredit: Sophia Yan/Telegraph

The Hong Kong government said in a statement that it was looking into the issue and that mainland personnel had agreed to refrain from using the land “until a consensus is reached on the boundary issue”.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Slow Death of Western Civilization Amil Imani

By on January 31st, 2019

https://www.amilimani.com/index.php/archives/show?show=262&start=10

Persia was the greatest empire on the planet and the most civilized nation until she was infected with Islam and suffered a slow death. A Muslim is required to abide by and live under the laws of Sharia and not the Constitution of the United States of America or any other laws. Because it is mandatory for a Muslim to adhere to Islamic laws and not to a man-made law like the US Constitution, a Muslim can never be a both Muslim and an American at the same time. They are incompatible with the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and our Judo-Christion values.

Like a virus, Islam is an invader. I am no longer worried about Persians because Persians by the millions have either left Islam or are on their way out. I am concerned about Western Civilization which is on the verge of death with the help of Islam apologists, Islam enablers and their collaborators: the liberal media, Hollywood celebrities, the liberal University professors, and both Democrats and many Republican politicians.

When our so-called educated leaders, call Islam a “religion of peace,” they are appeasing, if not lying outright. We, the people, elect our leaders and we hold them accountable to be honorable to their oath. When they use their voice to call the deadliest threat to everything we cherish, they not only legitimize Islam but also, they confuse the rest of the uninformed population with a false belief.Therefore, those politicians will become the agents of death, using political correctness to advance their own lofty agenda.

Ignoring the smoldering fire and relying on a few local “firefighters” to keep the fires from spreading is either naive or outright criminal, and it is certainly the easiest thing to do.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

SYDNEY WILLIAMS: JANUARY 2019 THE MONTH THAT WAS

By on January 31st, 2019

swtotd.blogspot.com

Mainstream media has gone from a trusted source of unbiased news to proselytizing for the political Left or Right, but mostly the Left. Opinions, which were once relegated to the editorial page, have migrated to the front page and became “news”. The reader is left unsure as to what is fact, what is fake and what is opinion. It is a trend that has accelerated as social media has gone mainstream. We have become two camps, divided by a hatred that grows ever bitter. Like the Biblical Joshua, we warily approach those we don’t know: “Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?”

Compounding the problem has been an abundance of data. In 1982, Buckminster Fuller introduced the Knowledge Doubling Curve. He noted that knowledge doubled every hundred years until 1900, when a linear growth in knowledge transitioned to exponential growth. By 1945 knowledge was doubling every twenty-five years. Today, estimates are that it doubles every twelve months. The curve will steepen. But wisdom does not stay pace with knowledge. We no longer question assumptions or listen to contrary opinions. We read and hear what supports our views. Thus, we grow apart. Political correctness and identity politics have hardened positions. A tsunami of information is not all that inundates our lives. As we grow older, we are encouraged to stay active, to fill every hour – play tennis, golf, learn to paint, travel abroad, attend an aerobics class, and check Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for ephemeral messages. We are told health and longevity depend on it. But that leaves too little time to think, to read, or to take a solitary walk and quietly ponder issues that have perplexed man for centuries. Idleness need not be idle.

The above serves as a prelude to a month that did not take time to smell the roses – except for those furloughed by a shut-down government. It was that, with all its consequences – intended and unintended – which monopolized domestic news, while a hesitant and bumbled Brexit dominated international news. The vagaries, inefficiencies and pitfalls of democracies served to delight schadenfreude-infected autocracies, like Russia and China? But what person who has ever tasted the sweetness of liberty would not prefer the imperfections of a Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi or Theresa May to the efficient but brutal Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping? Would those in Turkestan, Somalia or Guatemala prefer to live in socialist Russia, China and Venezuela, or in capitalist Japan, Switzerland and the United States? When we complain and demonstrate against our democratic institutions, we should be reminded of Martin Luther King, whose January 15th birth we celebrated on the 21st. He was a man who battled oppression and fought for love and understanding. In 1967, a year before he was assassinated, King spoke: “Let us be dissatisfied, until that day when nobody will shout ‘White Power!’ – when nobody will shout ‘Black Power!’ – but everyone will talk about God’s power and human power.” His wish of fifty years ago remains just that, a wish.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Sinister Creep of Gender-Identity Ideology By Madeleine Kearns

By on January 31st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/gender-identity-ideology-honest-inquiry-demonized/Honest inquiry into the causes of gender dysphoria is being demonized.

With debate over the Equality Act looming, two groups held events in Washington D.C. last weekend. The first, “Women Stand Up,” was organized by members of Standing for Women, along with other bipartisan women’s- and lesbian-rights groups across Britain and North America. The second, “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns from the Left,” was put on by the Heritage Foundation and featured an all-liberal panel.

Jennifer Chavez, a liberal lawyer on the Heritage panel, pointed out an irony:

One of the significant differences between here and the U.K. is that there are journalists in the U.K. speaking out about [the issue]. And here there are journalists speaking out but not with the sort of national reach and name recognition that the journalists who are speaking in the U.K. have had and I think that has made a humongous difference. So, we need journalists to speaking about this and covering both sides of the story at least.

Ironically, Chavez was later misquoted (and a correction was issued) by Tim Fitzsimons of NBC News. Fitzsimons’s piece focused on the conservative politics of the Heritage Foundation and ignored the progressive parents’ testimony.

This is particularly striking, since the host at the Heritage Foundation, Ryan T. Anderson, explained that the event had only come about once a progressive mother, whose autistic daughter has identified as a boy for the past four years, contacted him saying she’d been ignored by liberal organizations and media.

“As a lifelong Democrat I am outraged by my former party and find it ironic that only conservative news outlets have reported my story without bias or censorship,” the mother, who wished to remain anonymous to protect her daughter’s privacy but is known to National Review, wrote.

Anderson introduced the event by acknowledging that while he and the panel and audience likely disagreed on a range of issues from abortion to taxes, “If ‘gender identity’ becomes a protected class in federal civil-rights law, there will be serious negative consequences. That’s where we agree. And that’s where we can work together.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Compared with What? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 31st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-compared-with-what/

Trump, as most presidents, of course, will point to achievements next Tuesday. And despite the 90-percent-negative media coverage and the shutdown, he can brag about continued robust economic growth, low unemployment, record oil and gas production, tax reform and reduction, and a generally positive economic picture.

Manufacturing jobs show marked increases. Minority unemployment is at record lows. Deregulation, not more regulation, is now the new gospel.

Abroad, for all the herky-jerky presidential rhetoric and musical-chairs key appointments, there is emerging a reification of the NSC’s 2017 strategic assessment emphasizing principled realism. China’s trajectory to global supremacy is no longer shrugged off in the West as inevitable — and it will likely renegotiate downwards its mercantile trade surpluses.

We have been quite harder on Vladimir Putin than at any time under the previous administration. NATO is coughing up millions more in defense investments. There is new attention to missile defense.

ISIS’s land hegemony is almost gone. The verdict is out on North Korea and Iran as well as planned redeployment out of Afghanistan and Syria, but the consensus is also that U.S. foreign policy prior to 2017, reifying the status quo with Pyongyang and Tehran, and paralysis vis-à-vis the Taliban and ISIS, was failing. For all the melodramas about the “wall,” at least there is an effort to secure the border to reduce illegal immigration, and the Democrats at some point will have to explain why they now utterly reject their long-held past agreements to fortify parts of the border with a wall.

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Much Has Changed for the Better Since 2016—Not That Trump Will Get Credit By Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 31st, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/30/much-has-changed

The news obsesses over the recent government shutdown, the latest Robert Mueller arrest and, of course, fake news—from the BuzzFeed Michael Cohen non-story to the smears of the Covington Catholic High School students.

But aside from the weekly hysterias, the world has dramatically changed since 2016 in ways we scarcely have appreciated.

The idea that China systematically rigged trade laws and engaged in technological espionage to run up huge deficits is no longer a Trump, or even a partisan, issue.

In the last two years, a mainstream consensus has grown that China poses a commercial and mercantile threat to world trade, to its neighbors and to the very security of the United States—and requires a strong response, including temporary tariffs.

The world did not fall apart after the U.S. pulled out of the flawed Iran nuclear deal. Most yawned when the U.S. left the symbolic but empty Paris Climate Accord. Ditto when the U.S. moved its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

In retrospect, most Americans accept that such once controversial decisions were not ever all that controversial.

There is also a growing, though little reported, consensus about what created the current economic renaissance: tax cuts, massive deregulation, recalibration of trade policy, tax incentives to bring back offshore capital, and dramatic rises in oil and natural gas production.

Although partisan bickering continues over the extent of the upswing, most appreciate that millions of Americans are now back again working—especially minority youth—in a manner not seen in over a decade.

The Supreme Court and federal judges will be far more conservative for a generation—as Trump’s judicial nominations are uniformly conservative, mostly young and well qualified.

For all the acrimony about illegal immigration, the government shutdown over the wall and the question of amnesties, most Americans also finally favor some sort of grand bargain compromise.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Republicans’ Preemptive Cringe Stop validating the Left’s self-serving standards. Bruce Thornton

By on January 31st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272696/republicans-preemptive-cringe-bruce-thornton

Recently two events occurred that illustrate the Republican bad habit of ceding to progressives a whole set of questionable assumptions. Whether out of sincere but misguided belief or fear of political cost, this anxious and cringing validation of progressive ideas and the double-standards that follow empowers the Democrats and weakens the GOP.

The most egregious example was the speed at which many nominal conservatives chastised the Kentucky parochial school students who were attacked by an illiberal and racist outfit called the Black Hebrew Israelites, and by an American Indian “activist,” “tribal elder,” and “Vietnam vet” (the last a patent lie and a case of stolen valor). The anti-Trump media, as expected, without waiting for more information savaged the kids for embodying the worst traits of “white supremacism,” “toxic masculinity,” and “racial privilege.” One CNN Minister of Propaganda delighted in pointed out one kid’s “punchable face.” This was the same young man who stoically endured a deranged grown-up banging a drum in his face while the Black Hebrews rained down vile epithets on him.

The left’s reaction should surprise no one familiar with its disregard for fact and equal justice, and its penchant for bullying the weak. More disgusting were the equally precipitate and bullying comments from some on the right. The NeverTrumpers at National Review beclowned themselves with their usual moral preening and preemptive cringing. One editorial subaltern tweeted of the students, “they might as well have just spit on the cross and got it over with.” At least the putative conservatives had the decency to be embarrassed, apologizing and removing their tweets and articles.

Those gestures, however, don’t explain the initial impulse to attack, before all the facts were in, sixteen-year-old Catholic kids attending the March for Life rally against abortion, a cohort likely to become readers of National Review. Given that the bell of the attackers’ calumny cannot be unrung, it smacks of opportunism to apologize now, when the pundits never should have hastened to condemn the kids on such scant and subjective evidence in the first place.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

This May Be the Worst Regulation Ever A USDA rule about labels on ‘bioengineered’ food costs hundreds of millions and has no benefits. By Henry I. Miller and Drew L. Kershen

By on January 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-may-be-the-worst-regulation-ever-11548890635

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has created what may be the most bewildering, least cost-effective regulation ever. In July 2016, Congress passed a law mandating that all food containing genetic material that has been modified with recombinant DNA or “gene-splicing” techniques bear labels clearly identifying it as “bioengineered.” The statute acknowledged that bioengineered food is neither more nor less safe than other food, but the new rule—the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard, or NBFDS—won’t help consumers understand that. It will only leave them confused.

Under the NBFDS, two identical bottles of corn oil on a supermarket shelf could be labeled differently—one as bioengineered, one not—even though both were derived from the same field and are identical in processing and quality. Both labels would comply with the regulation because the new rule doesn’t require a label “if the food does not contain detectable genetically modified material.” The NBFDS allows manufacturers to make voluntary disclosures on such products, but not that they “may contain” bioengineered ingredients.

The word “detectable” poses its own problems. Technologies will evolve and become ever more sensitive, so that a single molecule of “genetically modified material” would make a food bioengineered. This is an invitation to meritless litigation over what is “detectable.”

Under the 2016 statute, labels are mandatory only if the food must also bear labels administered by FDA or USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service. Complying with the rule will require such detailed knowledge of the existing universe of food regulations that food lawyers will end up cross-eyed or wealthy—or both. Consider this gem: “Seafood, except Siluriformes (catfishes), and meats such as venison and rabbit are subject to the [Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act] (but not the Federal Meat Inspection Act). Thus, a multi-ingredient food product that contains one of these as the first ingredient would be subject to the NBFDS. A multi-ingredient product that contained one of these as the second most predominant ingredient or lower, could also require disclosure, unless the product is otherwise exempt (for example, due to the predominance of another ingredient such as chicken or beef).”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Who’s Afraid of Howard Schultz? Democrats seem to be afraid he might give them a policy debate.

By on January 31st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whos-afraid-of-howard-schultz-11548893911

The way progressives are denouncing Howard Schultz, you’d think he is Donald Trump’s first cousin. The former Starbucks CEO said Sunday he might run for President as an independent in 2020, and Democrats have since been shrieking like teenagers at a horror movie. They seem to fear a policy debate, which is exactly why a Schultz candidacy could be good for the country, including Democrats.

Senator Elizabeth Warren wasted no time on Twitter deriding “billionaires who think they can buy the presidency to keep the system rigged for themselves while opportunity slips away for everyone else.” The Democratic pundit class, which means nearly every pundit, rushed to say Mr. Schultz should stick to grande cappucinos and leave politics to the professionals who . . . lost to Mr. Trump.

They’re trying to bully Mr. Schultz out of running, but along the way they’re making the case for why he should. Take economics, where Ms. Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris and other Democrats wants Americans to shut up and jump on their bullet train to Bernie Sanders’ utopia. On policy Mr. Schultz is closer to a John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton Democrat.

He grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, worked in sales at Xerox and built his global coffee company from next to nothing. “I thought that was the American dream, the aspiration of America,” he said this week. “You’re going to criticize me for being successful when in my company over the last 30 years, the only company in America that gave comprehensive health insurance, equity in the form of stock options, and free college tuition?”

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