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Ruth King

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: We Have to Fight Climate Change Like We Fought the Nazis in World War II By Tyler O’Neil

By on October 20th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/video/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-we-have-to-fight-climate-change-like-we-fought-the-nazis-in-world-war-ii/

In remarks captured on video Friday night, Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared the threat of man-made climate change to the threat from Nazi Germany in World War II. She suggested that the U.S. efforts in that war should be seen as a “blueprint” for remaking America’s economy in the environmentalists’ image.

“So when we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II, so we’ve been here before, and we have a blueprint of doing this before,” Ocasio-Cortez began.

“What we had was an existential threat in the context of war,” the candidate added. “And what we did was, we chose to mobilize our entire economy, industrialize our entire economy, and we put hundreds of thousands and millions of people to work on defending our shores and this country.”

Then came the kicker: “We have to do the same thing in order to get us to 100 percent renewable energy.”

According to Ocasio-Cortez, climate change is an existential threat, just like Nazi Germany was. Therefore, America has to rethink its entire economy. The government should nationalize entire industries, directing everything to the goal of “renewable energy.”

In other words, “war socialism” without the war. Ocasio-Cortez later admitted, “It may seem like really big, it may seem very ambitious, it may seem very radical, but we are dealing with a radical truth.”

Earlier this month, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a breathless report. In the words of Washington Post reporters Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, “To avoid racing past warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, that’s 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, over preindustrial levels would require a rapid and far reaching transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before, the group found” (emphasis added).

The difficulty is, politically-charged groups like the IPCC do not acknowledge how limited the current scientific knowledge about human impact on global climate really is. While it stands to reason that burning fossil fuels may have some impact on the climate, the exact impact remains unknown.

Alarmists claim the science is settled, but prediction after prediction has failed to come true, and the Maldives — which were supposed to be under water by now — still remain resolutely above the waves. Meanwhile, National Geographic had to retract an unscientific message in a misleading video. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Crazed Liberal Attacks Mitch McConnell’s Table at Restaurant, Tosses Food Out the Door “Why don’t you leave the entire country?” By Caleb Howe

By on October 20th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/crazed-liberal-attacks-mitch-mcconnells-table-at-restaurant-tosses-food-out-the-door/

Mitch McConnell was assaulted at a restaurant ho-hum. That’s your summary of the headlines you’ll see about this from the MSM. Because they don’t really care about it.

TMZ has the story and the video. It would go without saying if it weren’t important to say, but…
Caleb Howl

✔ @CalebHowe
http://www.tmz.com/2018/10/20/senator-mitch-mcconnell-confronted-restaurant-protesters/ …

“The woman who shot the video tells us, before she started recording, the main aggressor slammed his fists down on McConnell’s table, grabbed his doggie bag and threw the food out the door of the restaurant.”

The Kentucky Senator was eating dinner with his wife at Havana Rumba in Louisville, when 4 men confronted Mitch. The main aggressor screams at McConnell, “Why don’t you get out of here? Why don’t you leave the entire country?”

The woman who shot the video tells us, before she started recording, the main aggressor slammed his fists down on McConnell’s table, grabbed his doggie bag and threw the food out the door of the restaurant.

The woman says the main gripe seemed to be the Senator’s stance on Social Security and health care. McConnell recently said entitlement programs are the main cause of massive debt. The woman says before she started shooting, the main aggressor was screaming that McConnell was killing people with his views. CONTINUE AT SITE

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POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: TENNESSEE, ARIZONA, MISSOURI, TEXAS, NEVADA, FLORIDA, NORTH DAKOTA

By on October 20th, 2018

Tennessee- Marsha Blackburn (R) vs. Phil Bredesen (D)…..Blackburn has a 6 point lead

Arizona- Martha McSally (R) vs. Kirsten Sinema (D)…..McSally has a slim lead

Missouri- Josh Hawley (R) vs. Claire McCaskill (D)…..Hawley ahead by 5 points

Texas- Ted Cruz (R) vs. Beto O’Rourke (D)…..Cruz ahead by 7 points

Nevada-Dean Heller (R) vs. Jacky Rosen (D)….Heller maintains a small lead

Florida- Rick Scott (R) vs. Bill Nelson (D) Too close to call

North Dakota- Kevin Cramer (R) vs. Heidi Heitkamp (D)….Cramer holds a good lead

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ben Weingarten: Why Is Khashoggi Being Made The Defining Issue Of U.S. Foreign Policy? The alleged killing of Jamal Khashoggi reveals far more about the nature of the American press and political establishment than it does foreign policy.

By on October 20th, 2018

https://thefederalist.com/2018/10/19/khashoggi-made-defining-issue-u-s-foreign-policy/

Why has the media and much of the political establishment made the presumed murder of an Islamist Saudi dissident on Turkish soil a defining issue in American foreign policy?

Jamal Khashoggi is not a U.S. citizen, despite his past residence in Virginia, nor is he a lover of liberty, despite his criticism of Saudi Arabia’s despotic regime. He previously served that regime as a mouthpiece for, and adviser to, the alleged al-Qaeda-tied Saudi intelligence leader Turki bin Faisal. Khashoggi mourned the death of Osama bin Laden, whom Khashoggi had been granted unusual levels of access for numerous interviews. Khashoggi was also an ardent proponent of political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Needless to say, one wonders why Khashoggi was permitted to enter the United States and handed a column at The Washington Post given this background, particularly at a time our media claims acute sensitivity to foreign influence. One also wonders why so many in the media are quick to fawn over such a figure given his regressive views.

This is not to dismiss Khashoggi’s alleged gory assassination at the hands of his supposed Saudi captors by characteristically sketchy unnamed Turkish sources. If Mohammad bin Salman’s regime did execute this grisly murder, risking all the capital it had accrued in the West to send a signal to its political opposition, it should have to deal with the consequences.

But surely our media and political establishment are not blind to the brutality and censorship that characterizes the regimes of the Islamic world, whether in Riyadh, Ankara, or Tehran. Nor are they deaf to the proxy war taking place in any of a number of theaters with Iran, intense jockeying for relations with the Trump administration and much else that divides Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab nations like Egypt and the United Arab Emirates on the one hand, and Turkey and Qatar on the other.
3 Reasons Khashoggi Is Suddenly a BFD

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: Anjem Choudary Released from Prison by Soeren Kern

By on October 20th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13145/uk-anjem-choudary-released-from-prison

“I believe we are underestimating the potency and danger of the radicalizers who don’t carry knives, guns and overtly plot terrorist attacks but who pollute the minds of young Muslim men.” — Richard Walton, former head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command

“I asked the guy who spoke to him if the de-radicalization program had worked and he said, ‘No, he’s got worse. He’s hardened. He speaks in the mind-set of the victim. He sees himself as a martyr the state tried to silence.'” — Fiyaz Mughal, head of the anti-extremist group Faith Matters

Choudary is now considering mounting a legal challenge to the strict conditions of his release, according to the Telegraph. It reported that he has applied for legal aid funding, at taxpayer expense, to bring his action against government ministers, and arguing the parole conditions breach his human rights.

The Islamist firebrand preacher Anjem Choudary, described as Britain’s “most dangerous extremist,” has been released from prison after serving only half of the five-and-a-half-year sentence he received in 2016 for pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.

Prison authorities could not prevent his release: under British sentencing guidelines, prisoners — even those who are still a risk to the public — automatically become eligible for release under license (parole) after serving half their terms.

Prime Minister Theresa May has downplayed concerns over Choudary’s release; British counter-terrorism authorities, however, say they are worried that he will re-exert influence on hundreds of followers upon his release. The cost to British taxpayers of keeping Choudary under surveillance is expected to exceed £2 million (€2.25 million; $2.6 million) a year, compared to the £50,000 (€57,000; $65,000) to keep him in prison.

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Britain’s Grooming Gangs: Part 1 by Denis MacEoin

By on October 20th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13075/britain-grooming-gangs

As far back as 2013, Britain’s Attorney General stated in the House of Lords that 27 police forces were then investigating no fewer than 54 alleged gangs involved in child sexual grooming.

Last year, Shahid Javed Burki, a former Pakistani finance minister and vice-president of the World Bank, spoke out about the treatment of women in his country, arguing that the low status given to women has had serious social, demographic, educational, and financial effects.

This problem is, in some measure, reflected in the UK, where Muslim women (mainly of Pakistani origin) face limitations on their participation in the workplace, in higher education, and even knowledge of the English language — matters examined by Dame Louise Casey in her 2016 government review into opportunity and integration.

Bringing Pakistani attitudes into the UK, often within segregated communities, only serves to perpetuate the belief that women are intrinsically the inferiors of men in all respects.

On July 24, 2018, Britain’s Home Secretary, conservative MP Sajid Javid, issued orders for research into the ethnic origins of the country’s many sexual grooming gangs that had involved large numbers of loosely-termed “Asian men”, who, over many years, had taken vulnerable young white British girls to use or pass on for sexual purposes. Most of the men have, Javid has stated been of Pakistani extraction, which makes the Home Secretary’s intervention significant. Javid’s father came, as did many other Pakistani immigrants, from Punjab, and with only £1 to his name. He became a bus driver, then a clothing store owner. Yet his five sons have all become fully integrated Britons, with successful careers in business, politics and the public sector. They are all models of second-generation immigrant achievement, miles away from the men in the gangs. Reporting on the Javid family, The Times wrote:

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MEDIA, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Stick To Fashion Teen Vogue, And Shut Up About Politics By aggressively politicizing fashion, Teen Vogue is furthering one of the most destructive trends in our culture.By Inez Feltscher Stepman

By on October 20th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/19/stick-to-fashion-teen-vogue-and-shut-up-about-politics/

Teen Vogue, publisher of groundbreaking, age-appropriate material like anal sex manuals for both “prostate owners” and “non-prostate owners” alike, has stepped into the political arena once again with an article about the alleged failures of capitalism.

“Can’t #endpoverty without ending capitalism,” the magazine tweeted on Wednesday, with a link to a poorly-written diatribe that reads like a B student’s Marxism 101 paper and gets key historical facts wrong. Absent from writer Kim Kelly’s excoriation of the system that has brought the world out of grinding poverty is the fact that her screed was published in a fashion magazine, which is supposed to fill its pages chronicling the trends of an industry of excess that owes its existence to the tremendous wealth capitalism has created.

Meanwhile, socialist paradise Venezuela is succumbing to what increasingly seems to be an ironclad rule of left-wing economics: they’ve run out of toilet paper. Of course, the leader of the workers’ paradise isn’t going on the same crash diet that caused the people of Venezuela to lose an average of 24 pounds last year (“10 ways to lose 20 lbs: 1. Communism”). President Nicolas Maduro was recently spotted living the Michelin star-studded capitalist life with a Miami celebrity chef known as “Salt Bae.”

While it’s easy (and let’s face it, kind of fun) to tear Teen Vogue’s pop Communism apart on the merits, the relentless politicization of all spaces in public and private life is exhausting and dangerous. When top Democrats refuse to condemn — and sometimes encourage — mob violence against Republicans, calls for civility are falling on deaf ears in a political environment where left and right seem polarized even on the most foundational principles.

With the threat of political violence and civil unrest bubbling in the background, it’s even more critical that people of different political tribes connect with each other as friends, family and fellow citizens. When politics are front and center in every interaction, Americans are deprived of the ability to connect as everyday human beings — as sports fans, Netflix bingers, and yes, fashionistas.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Democrat Strategy of Crying Rape Is Not Over By Karin McQuillan

By on October 20th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/19/the-democrat-strategy

Brett Kavanaugh’s televised trial by ordeal may be over, but Democrats will never let go of the falsehood that Republicans have elevated a would-be or actual rapist to the Supreme Court. Neither have we heard the last rape accusation deployed as political weapon. Think of the Kavanaugh hearings as the trailer for the Democratic horror movie to come.

And don’t be surprised if we haven’t heard the last of sexual misconduct smears against Justice Kavanaugh stemming from his college days at Yale. If the Democrats take the House in the midterms, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) would be chairman of the judiciary committee, and he has vowed to pursue the accusations of sexual assault against the newest Supreme Court Justice.

At first glance this seems self-destructive on the part of Democrats, given how the general public hated the cruel and lawless attack on Kavanaugh. Democrats have a different calculus. Abortion with no limits is threatened. There is a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, so the court itself must be besmirched.

What is becoming more obvious by the day is that the Democrats don’t care about the general electorate. They appear bent on destroying unity wherever they find it. They want to destroy constitutional limits on their power, including the limits brought on by separation of powers or Democrats losing elections.

The newly radicalized Democratic Party has priorities that follow a neo-Marxist identity politics playbook. Their future depends on whipping up emotions of fear and anger and dividing the country into warring factions. Success requires that women become a one-party voting bloc, joining blacks who have long been corralled into a near-permanent voting bloc (now finally cracking) by cries of racism and attacks on dissenters as race traitors if they dare break free.

Democrats need American suburban women—educated, prosperous, assertive, successful American women—to feel like victims. President Obama’s Title IX Office of Civil Rights redefined sexual assault to be any unwanted words or touch. Their directive explicitly states, the action does not need be “objectionably offensive” to an “objectively reasonable person.” Assault is defined in the mind of the accuser.

Since every woman in America has received an unwanted catcall or pat, an obnoxious grope or innuendo, everyone is a “survivor.” No surprise, the villains are “white men,” shorthand for “evil racist, sexist Republicans.”

Putting on the mantle of “survivor” appeals to the drama queens of Hollywood. It is second nature to the feminists of the coastal elites. It plays well in the wealthy enclaves that fund the Democrat party.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: ILLINOIS DISTRICT 6: A House Majority by ‘Any Means Necessary’ A Democratic challenger with a smash-mouth style seeks to flip a suburban Illinois district Hillary Clinton carried in 2016.By Kyle Peterson

By on October 20th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-house-majority-by-any-means-necessary-1539989212

Ask Sean Casten about the sharp tone of his congressional campaign, and he responds by going for the jugular. In a bellwether race as Democrats try to take the House, Mr. Casten has been accused by his opponent, six-term GOP Rep. Peter Roskam, of spraying “rhetorical gasoline” and “parroting Donald Trump.” Nonsense, replies the Democratic challenger.

“If you don’t have a thick skin, I’m not sure why you’re in politics,” Mr. Casten says, after we duck into a quiet corner during an office-park meet-and-greet. “What Roskam is offended by is that I’ve had the temerity to speak truth to power. He’s voted 94% of the time with Trump. He has on his website that he is proud to work at Denny Hastert’s desk. I’m opposed to pedophilia. If that bothers him, that’s between him and his God.”

Say what?

To back up a smidge: Mr. Casten is referring to an old press release, from 2011, on Mr. Roskam’s official website. It explained that Dennis Hastert, who served as House speaker from 1999-2007, was passing down a “historic desk” used by Illinois congressmen since the 1940s. Five years after bequeathing the antique, Mr. Hastert admitted he had sexually abused boys as a high-school wrestling coach in the 1960s and ’70s. And this horrifying crime now reflects on Mr. Roskam . . . how, exactly?

Welcome to Illinois’s Sixth Congressional District, where the political debate this year is peppered with casual references to Nazis, morons and, yes, pedophiles. These Chicagoland suburbs, which went for Hillary Clinton by 7 points in 2016, are a prime pickup opportunity for Democrats. The district, shaped like a cocktail shrimp, arcs between O’Hare Airport and the particle accelerator at Fermilab. Half of adult residents went to college, one-fifth have a graduate degree, and the median household earns $99,000.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Shedding Humanity, Shredding the Humanities Anthony Esolen

By on October 19th, 2018

https://www.nas.org/articles/shedding_humanity_shredding_the_humanities

An incident from my final year teaching at Providence College, now roiled by what has been called “identity politics,” stands for me as an example of how that new monster of man’s morbid imagination has made real education in the humanities and the very notion of a common good nearly inconceivable.

A young freshman from Colombia was among a group of students who took offense at my suggesting, in an article written online for conservative Roman Catholics, that the cult of diversity, defined by a stark political monotone and divorced from interest in actual human cultures, was self-contradictory. I called out the diversitarians for their frankly expressed desire to transform the somewhat Catholic Providence College into a secular place like pretty much every other, and noted that this desire was especially visible in the college’s apparent longing to join those other secular colleges in that land of sexual indifference over the rainbow.

I am not going to argue about that article here. The student did not want to argue about it, either. He and other students went straight to the president’s office to demand that I be fired. Of course that was not going to happen. I had tenure. Peter Singer, the philosopher of ethics at Princeton, does not get fired for recommending the murder of lebensunwerte Leben, a baby here and a baby there. I was not going to get fired for saying that people ought to learn about other cultures before they call themselves “multicultural,” as fearful as such learning might be.

I found out about the student, who was enrolled in my section of the college’s team-taught program in the development of Western Civilization. I wanted to talk to him about what a culture is, why we study them, and what he might be reading with us in the spring if he stayed with the team. We would be taking a good look at the golden age of Spain, and reading, in a bilingual edition, a work by her greatest playwright, Pedro Calderon de la Barca. But he shook his head and muttered, “It’s still European.” And there you have it. Calderon is an artist of the first rank, working at the end of the most glorious period of dramatic flourishing in the history of the world, but because he was European and not Colombian, or just because he was European and not something or anything else, he meant nothing to this young man. It did not matter that Spanish was the student’s mother tongue and not mine. I was passionately interested in reading La Vida es Sueno in the original early modern Spanish, and he was not. That alone did not of course distinguish him from his fellow students, who are not known to be eager to venture forth into lands and times far distant from theirs. But some of them at least might be capable of catching the fire of the venture, whereas politics had cast a cold frost upon his mind and soul.

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