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Ruth King

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times Embraces Fake Science, Fake Engineering, and Fake Economics By Norman Rogers

By on October 18th, 2017

The Oct. 16, 2017 New York Times devotes most of a full page to an editorial promoting “5 Climate Truths Mr. Trump Doesn’t Get.” They even have graphs to supposedly illustrate their five truths. As someone who has studied climate change and renewable energy I immediately understood that their editorial was very simplistic and does not engage with economic or engineering realities.

The Times’ view is that it is important to reduce CO2 emissions and that wind and solar energy are the way to do that. They also imagine that batteries storing power are the solution for the erratic nature of wind and solar generation. They particularly dislike coal because it emits more CO2 when burned compared to natural gas.

I have to assume the editors of the New York Times are not stupid. Probably they have a very weak grasp of science and engineering and probably ideology blinds them, preventing objective study of the issues.

Global warming is now called climate change because the globe has not warmed for two decades. The “science” behind predictions of global warming due to emissions of CO2 has clearly collapsed. The promoters of the catastrophe are most charitably described as bad scientists and less charitably as snake oil salesmen. The predictions are based on computer models that don’t agree with each other and that have failed miserably in predicting the actual global temperature. There is no shortage of distinguished scientists screaming that global warming is a fraud.

Even if you believe the junk science of climate change, the CO2 emissions are concentrated in Asia. Reducing CO2 emissions in the U.S. at great cost makes no sense because the supposed problem is in Asia. The way to really reduce CO2 emissions is to replace fossil fuel electricity generation with nuclear generation. Nuclear power does not emit CO2 and it works at night when the sun is not shining and it works when the wind is not blowing. Further, there are great prospects for improving the cost and safety of nuclear power. The Times and the promoters of wind and solar ignore or demonize nuclear power.

The globe is not warming in the face of rapidly increasing CO2 levels, giving lie to the theory that CO2 will create a catastrophe, or create any problem at all. It is beyond question that increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere enhances agricultural productivity and greens deserts. Plants are hungry for CO2 and don’t need as much water if they have more CO2.

The Times makes the point that natural gas emits less CO2 than coal and is cheaper than coal. There is some truth in this but there are other issues that should be taken into account. Natural gas is a premium fuel of many uses. It burns cleanly, it is easily transported by pipeline, and due to fracking it has become very cheap. It is feasible to power automobiles with compressed natural gas, the main problem being a lack of refueling stations. Coal, on the other hand, is mainly useful for generating electricity. Modern coal plants are non-polluting because they have elaborate pollution controls. Our reserves of coal are vast, enough for many centuries, and are much greater than the reserves of natural gas. Natural gas is cheap, often nearly as cheap as coal per unit of energy. But the low price may be temporary because we will become an exporter of liquefied natural gas to lucrative markets in Asia and Europe. Natural gas now is used sparingly in transportation, but may be used more in the future due to its cost and clean burning advantages. The price of natural gas may increase substantially as supply and demand equalize.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Where the Russian uranium scandal might lead By Lowell Ponte

By on October 18th, 2017

Before the Obama administration approved Russia’s acquisition of more than 20 percent of America’s uranium supply, the Federal Bureau of Investigation found Russian racketeering involved.

This shocking news is in a must-read investigation by reporters John Solomon and Alison Spann in The Hill on October 17.

“Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow,” sources told Solomon and Spann.

But acting FBI investigators at the time – including then-U.S. attorney Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller, the man Rosenstein would later choose to investigate possible Russian collusion that helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election – apparently did not share this information about Russia with key members of Congress.

Solomon, Spann, and The Hill might win a Pulitzer Prize for their excellent investigative reporting…if it incriminated Republicans. But since it instead found potential wrongdoing by Democrats, the mainstream media will either ignore or find fault with it.

This investigation points to important issues it does not spell out, so we shall use it as a stepping stone to touch on three of them:

1. The new investigation clearly indicates that Mueller and Rosenstein knew of Russian millions paid to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s foundation. This foundation served as a slush fund that paid for some of her political activities and subsidized her campaign staff before 2016.

This is a priori evidence of Russian influence in American politics – in the form of more than $145 million funneled by Russia to the Clintons. Ms. Clinton ran for president in 2008 and was clearly positioning herself to run again in 2016.

Yet Mueller persists in not investigating Ms. Clinton as a suspect in his fishing expedition that seeks some crime of “election collusion by Russia,” yet to be found, committed only by President Trump. Can Mueller continue stonewalling after this new evidence?

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Free Kurdistan Now By Brandon J. Weichert

By on October 18th, 2017

The Kurds are the largest stateless people in the world. Their population exists in a contiguous territory spanning across present-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Historically, the Kurds have been an oppressed people. Iran, Iraq, Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, and what’s left of ISIS in Syria and Iraq are all deeply and viscerally opposed to the idea of a Kurdish state. An independent Kurdistan would remove large swathes of territory from each of those countries.

For the most part, the Kurds—particularly those living in northern Iraq—are stridently pro-American. The fear among the other regional powers is that if Kurdish Iraq were to become an independent state, other Kurdish populations would demand independence, and would seek to be folded into that Kurdish state.

Further, the Iraqi Kurds,with their fearsome Peshmerga forces, as well as the Kurds in Syria and southern Turkey, are all well-trained and heavily armed. In fact, the recent fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has compelled the armed Kurdish factions to sally forth and take territories, such as the Iraqi city of Kirkuk (which the Peshmerga recently liberated from ISIS). Of course, the Iraqi government wants Kirkuk back, and are warring with the Kurds in order to regain control of that strategic city.

The tragedy in all of this is, aside from the Israelis, the Kurds have been America’s most steadfast ally in the region. Throughout history, the Kurds—notoriously and gruesomely—have been oppressed by the region’s powers. They were the constant targets of Saddam’s tyranny in Iraq; they waged a brutal war for their freedom in Turkey; in Syria they are the targets of ISIS and other Syrian “rebels” as well.

During Desert Storm, they answered former President George H.W. Bush’s calls to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Then, the elder Bush undercut their uprising by signing an armistice with Iraq, and abandoning the Kurds to their fate. They were slaughtered. And yet the Kurds never once blamed Bush for abandoning them.

During President Bill Clinton’s administration, the United States led a multinational force to maintain a no-fly zone that prevented Hussein from committing any further acts of genocide against the Iraqi Kurdish population. As a result, the Kurds established something like a quasi-independent state.

When George W. Bush in 2003 led the United States into a quixotic campaign to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein, the Kurds joined the cause even though they understood the grave risks. After Saddam was out of power and the U.S.-led occupation struggled to prevent Iraq from splitting into three states——one for the Sunnis, one for the Shiites, and the other for the Kurds—it was the Kurds who respected Iraq’s national integrity.

What did they get for their troubles?

An Iranian-dominated government in Baghdad that took out its frustration on the Kurds!

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Ibn Warraq :The Islam in Islamic Terrorism: The Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology Reviewed by Nidra Poller

By on October 18th, 2017

Ibn Warraq, The Islam in Islamic Terrorism; the Importance of Beliefs, Ideas, and Ideology, New English Review Press, Nashville, TN, 2017

Book review by Nidra Poller

It has nothing to do with Islam… Mentally deranged, fragile personalities are hijacking a sublime religion… More people die in highway accidents… All religions preach violence and spawn fundamentalists…

Seventeen years since the start of the jihad-intifada, sixteen years after 9/11, Western societies are challenged to understand the connection between antisemitism, antizionism, and 21st century jihad conquest. These two studies address two major misconceptions about the source and nature of the sporadic violence that erupts in a range of intensity from the fatal stabbing of one or a few people in the streets of a European city to the mass murder of 3,000 in Manhattan.

Our societies are like an army with abundant ammunition… and no guns

Law enforcement, intelligence and security services, government leaders, judges, academics, commentators, journalists, and simple citizens are on the battlefield, fighting a rearguard operation, losing ground day by day, self-defeating, and briefed…by the enemy. This intellectual reversal, which is an essential weapon in the war against the West, goes unexamined because those that should be warning against it have in fact succumbed to the lethal narrative strategy of jihad conquest. They do not think rationally, they react Islamically to assaults of all varieties, on all levels, from hijab fashion that they glorify to atrocious murders that they cover with flowers, candles and denial. The intellectual ravages are concealed behind a curtain of consensus.

Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin rips away, with her Jihadi Dictionary, the misleading separation between Islam and the mental illness frequently advanced to explain jihad murder. Yes, these enraged killers are mentally disturbed. But their insanity is specifically Islamic. They are not lost souls that arbitrarily wandered into an Islamic network and committed crimes that are then falsely attributed to Islam. Kobrin, an accomplished linguist, psychoanalyst, and counterterrorism expert, exposes from A to Z the psychological mechanisms by which the sons of devalued, terrorized mothers turn their own terror into annihilationist violence against the Other. Specialists may debate certain points and references to a given school or analyst, but the lay reader is impressed by the clarity brought to the issue by the rigors of a highly developed discipline as compared to the media chatter that reports on this ongoing assault on our lives and freedom. The dictionary format brings sharply focused definition to details that distinguish jihad violence from others forms of criminality that, however morbid, do not further a collective project of conquest.

Precisely. Ibn Warraq outlines the framework in which this culturally induced madness furthers a universal open-ended project of world conquest. The “beliefs, ideas, and ideology” of the subtitle of The Islam in Islamic Terrorism, are enshrined in the Koran, extended in the hadith and sunna, clarified and confirmed by certified Islamic scholars, and translated into action from generation to generation, from the time of Islam’s prophet to the present day. The stultifying uniformity of Islamic doctrine is exceeded only by the horrifying savagery of its practices. Erudite, intellectually scrupulous, and totally proficient in both Islamic and Western languages and culture, Ibn Warraq draws on a wealth of textual and historical evidence to sustain his thesis [quote] that the Islamic war currently waged against the West-and including “wayward” Muslims-is not a reaction to any geopolitical situation, not provoked by any outside causes, not misdirected by a minority of hijackers that could twist a peaceful religion into a relentless war machine.

The defenseless newborn, thrust from the womb into a merciless world, bonds with the nurturing mother, overcomes his existential fear, learns to distinguish self and other and, fortified with trust, achieves the separation from the mother which is absolutely essential to the formation of a healthy adult personality. The jihadi cannot bond with a mother that is devalued, excluded, mistreated and most often cast aside by a polygamous husband. Devalued as a girl child, dominated and terrorized by her brothers, subject to sexual abuse and at the same time held to preserve the family honor under threat of death, excluded from free and equal social communication, the jihadi’s mother cannot interact in a healthy relationship to her sons. The boy is perversely attached to his mother, detests and reviles her, and transfers his positive feelings onto motherfied objects or persons that he protects with extreme violence. In a hopeless attempt to relieve his unresolved childish terror the jihadi feminizes and terrorizes his victims to a degree that knows no limits.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israeli Arabs’ Growing Israeli Identity Don’t believe the hype. Evelyn Gordon

By on October 18th, 2017

Over last week’s Sukkot holiday, Israeli Arab couple Khalil and Reem Bakly launched their own personal coexistence venture by building a completely kosher sukkah (aided by an Orthodox Jewish employee of Khalil’s dental practice) and inviting any and all Israeli Jews to come visit. That same week, a delegationcomprised entirely of Israeli Arabs—Muslims, Christians, and Druze—made final preparations for a speaking tour defending Israel on American college campuses.https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel/israeli-arabs-growing-israeli-identity/

Both could easily be dismissed as unrepresentative of Israel’s Arab community. After all, that very same week, Arab Knesset member Haneen Zoabi asserted in a speech in Dallas that Jews have no right to self-determination, because “the Jews are not a nationality.” And Zoabi, who is only slightly more inflammatory than her party colleagues, was elected on a joint ticket that receives the overwhelming majority of Israeli Arab votes.

But as a recent poll of Israeli Arabs proves, the community is changing—and not in Zoabi’s favor.

Perhaps most striking was the fact that a decisive majority of respondents identified primarily as Israeli rather than Palestinian, which is something that wasn’t true even a few years ago. In 2012, for instance, just 32.5 percent of Israeli Arabs defined themselves as “Israeli” rather than Palestinian. But the figure has risen fairly steadily, and this year, asked “which term best describes you,” 54 percent of respondents chose some variant of “Israeli” (the most popular choice was “Israeli Arab,” followed by “Arab citizen of Israel,” “Israeli,” and “Israeli Muslim”). That’s more than double the 24 percent who chose some variant of “Palestinian” (15 percent chose simply “Palestinian.” The others chose “Palestinian in Israel,” “Palestinian citizen in Israel,” or “Israeli Palestinian”).

Moreover, 63 percent deemed Israel a “positive” place to live, compared to 34 percent who said the opposite. 60 percent had a favorable view of Israel, compared to 37 percent whose view was unfavorable. These are smaller majorities than either question would receive among Israeli Jews, but they are still decisive. Even among Muslims, the most ambivalent group, the favorable-to-unfavorable ratio was a statistical tie (49:48). Among Christians, it was 61:33, and among Druze, 94:6.

One of Zoabi’s colleagues, MK Yousef Jabareen, hastened to assure the Jerusalem Post that Israeli Arabs must view Israel more negatively than the poll indicates, because “when I meet with people from my community, I always hear concerns about increasing discrimination and racism,” as well as “socioeconomic status, an absence of jobs and housing.” Nor is he wrong about his community’s concerns: Fully 47 percent of respondents felt that, as Arabs, they are “generally treated unequally.” Many were also worried about economic issues and their community’s high crime rate.

But what Jabareen evidently hasn’t grasped is that having an overall favorable view of one’s country in no way contradicts having a long list of complaints about it. After all, Israeli Jews complain constantly about their country’s shortcomings while still believing that its merits outweigh its demerits. Why shouldn’t Israeli Arabs do the same?

The comparison with Israel’s neighbors has obviously grown starker following the implosion of several Arab countries since 2011, and it’s undoubtedly a major factor in Israeli Arabs’ growing appreciation for Israel. But government efforts to improve their socioeconomic situation have also contributed.

For instance, a joint initiative between the government and the country’s biggest private-sector employers produced a sharp increase in the number of Israeli Arabs working at these companies, which typically offer better pay, benefits and promotion opportunities than smaller firms. At several participating companies, Arabs now comprise 14 percent of payroll—less than their share of the population, but roughly equivalent to their share of the workforce.

The government has also invested more money in Arab schools, which—together with a new emphasis on education within the Arab community—has helped booststudents’ performance. The proportion of students taking the matriculation exams is now roughly the same for Arabs and Jews, and while more Jews still pass, the gap has narrowed. Indeed, two Arab high schools now rank first and second in the country for academic achievement.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Other Russia Scandal One woman wrecking ball. Noah Rothman

By on October 18th, 2017

In her latest reinvention, Hillary Clinton has emerged from the woods transformed into a self-styled Cassandra. She travels from sound stage to sound stage, reminding the public that her 2016 loss was not her fault and the Russians who undid her once-promising political career are coming again. This newest reboot is remarkable if only for its extraordinary immodesty. Few have done so much to undermine the fortunes of their ostensible allies, but Hillary Clinton is not done yet. Her vendetta has now led her to sabotage the so-called “Resistance’s” last, best hope for cutting the legs out from under the Trump administration: Robert Mueller’s probe into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.

Nearly ten months into his presidency, Donald Trump has not stoppedcampaigning against Hillary Clinton—a fact the Clinton surely appreciates if only for the otherwise undeserved relevance it bestows upon her. When asked about the Mueller probe and the charge that his campaign “colluded” with Moscow generally, Trump is fond of deflecting to the Clinton family’s dealings with Russian entities in both a private and governmental capacity. That distraction tends to inspire yawns and rolls of the eyes, but not today. On Tuesday, The Hillrevealed that FBI and court documents allege that the Clintons, the Clinton Foundation, and the Clinton-led State Department under Barack Obama do not have clean hands when it comes to dealings with Moscow.

The Hill reporters John Solomon and Alison Spann’s inquiry found that the FBI began investigating an effort by the Russian government to infiltrate the American nuclear materials industry as early as 2009. “Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States,” they reported.

These reporters were privy to documents revealing the scope of the FBI’s operation, which was extensive and supported the allegation that Moscow had “compromised” a Uranium trucking firm. All of this took place before the Russian energy firm Rosatom secured its first 17 percent stake in the American nuclear materials extraction company Uranium One in 2009. A year later, Rosatom won a majority stake in that company—a deal that had to be approved at the highest levels of the American government and which alarmed observers who fretted the national security implications of that kind of concession to Moscow.

Meanwhile, between 2009 and 2013, the Clinton Foundation was the recipient of four suspicious tranches of donations totaling $2.35 million from Russian-linked sources including Uranium One’s chairman. Former President Bill Clinton personally received half a million dollars for one speech in Moscow from a Russian government-linked investment bank that was promoting Uranium One stock. While the Uranium One deal was under consideration by the Treasury Department, that bank’s analysts were talking up the value of that firm’s stock.

None of these donations were previously disclosed, despite the Clinton Foundation’s written pledge to disclose all donations it received while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State. If The Hill’s reporting is accurate, this is dirty money. Their report alleges that eyewitness and written accounts obtained by the FBI confirm that Russian officials were responsible for this influx of cash to the Clintons.

What’s odd about this account, though, is how sluggish the FBI investigation was.The Hill noted that, despite the evidence they had obtained by 2010, the bureau continued its investigation for another four years. In the interim, the Uranium One deal among others benefiting Moscow was approved and implemented by the Obama administration. Bizarrely, the relevant members of Congress were apparently not briefed about the extent of this probe.

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Prosecutorial Impunity An appeals court winks at false evidence that destroyed a hedge fund.

By on October 18th, 2017

Federal appeals judge Alex Kozinski has noted that abusive behavior by prosecutors is reaching “epidemic proportions.” That epidemic will get worse after Tuesday’s ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals absolving prosecutors for using false information to put David Ganek’s hedge fund out of business.

A three-judge panel, led by prosecutorial soft-touch Reena Raggi, overturned a lower court ruling and found that prosecutors and FBI investigators have immunity from Mr. Ganek’s suit seeking damages. The court ruled that immunity applies even though prosecutors falsely claimed Mr. Ganek had traded shares based on what he was told was inside information.

An FBI informant in fact testified that he had never told Mr. Ganek the information had been illegally obtained, and an FBI agent corroborated that testimony. Yet the FBI and prosecutors included the false claim in an affidavit to obtain a warrant for a highly publicized raid on Mr. Ganek’s firm. Mr. Ganek was never charged, but the negative publicity forced him to roll up his Level Global fund in 2011.

Prosecutors deserve some measure of immunity lest they be sued every time they lose a close case. But immunity should not be impunity, and Judge Raggi’s opinion all but provides it by refusing to let Mr. Ganek’s suit proceed to gather evidence about whether prosecutors knew the information was false.

Her opinion says this doesn’t matter because the search warrant against Mr. Ganek’s firm would have been justified even without the false information. Yet the trial judge looked at the same facts and concluded the opposite. Judge Raggi’s ruling means in practice that there is no mechanism for an innocent person like Mr. Ganek to seek redress if a claim is a lie, and no legal remedy.

This is incentive for prosecutors to think they can get away with lying as long as they have other evidence to dress up a warrant. Never mind that in this case the warrant was used to justify a raid on an innocent party and destroy his business.

The Ganek raid and smear were typical of former federal prosecutor Preet Bharara’s method in his assault on Wall Street. The smearing continued even during the oral argument at the Second Circuit. Sarah Normand, an assistant U.S. Attorney, accused Mr. Ganek of participating in “a scheme with regard to many, many pieces of inside information from many public companies.”

This was long after her office had decided not to charge Mr. Ganek. But instead of remorse or an apology, Ms. Normand doubled down on prosecutorial innuendo.

Mr. Ganek could appeal, but the Supreme Court is unlikely to take a case that hangs on such a factual dispute. The Justice Department could discipline the prosecutors for spreading false information, and it ought to investigate whether it was a lie, but Justice is an insider’s club. The only real check on prosecutorial abuse are judges willing to enforce standards of honesty. Judge Raggi has set a standard that will encourage more dishonesty.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Europe’s New Nationalists Love Israel By David P. Goldman

By on October 18th, 2017

“If ponies rode men and grass ate cows,” goes the text of “The World Turned Upside Down,” the tune piped by the Continental Army band at Cornwallis’ surrender of Yorktown. Europeans might consider adopting it as their anthem to replace the present European Community hymn, the overused Ode to Joy. The resurgent nationalists who made the Alternative fuer Deutschland into Germany’s third-largest party and the Austrian Freedom Party into that country’s second-largest (and a likely member of a new governing coalition) have an extreme-right reputation, but they are now the most pro-Israel parties in Europe. The world has indeed turned upside-down, and we might as well sing about it.

Most remarkable is the success of the Austrian Freedom Party (German initials FPŐ) in last Sunday’s Austrian elections. It came in second with 26% of the vote, ahead of the governing Social Democrats. Its chairman, Heinz-Christian Strache, rubbed shoulders with neo-Nazis during his early political career, and four years ago posted an anti-Semitic cartoon on his Facebook page, “showing a banker with a large hooked nose and Star of David cuff links profiting from Europe’s financial crisis,” as the Times of Israel reported. Since then Strache has undergone a Damascus road conversion from Saul to Paul (or perhaps the other way round). He has visited Israel several times, defended Israeli settlers in Judea and Samaria, and demanded that Austria move its embassy to Jerusalem.

Strache brings to mind the canonical definition of a philo-Semite, that is, an anti-Semite who likes Jews. It is widely alleged that he is looking for respectability after emerging from the extreme right swamp into the mainstream of Austrian politics, and hoping to burnish his credentials through gestures of reconciliation with the Jewish State. It is also widely believed that the FPŐ as well as the AfD support Israel as the enemy of their enemy, that is, the flood of Muslim migrants that provoked the surge in their support among voters.

I do not know Herr Strache and have no knowledge of his true motives. But I have had the opportunity to speak at length with a leader of the Alternative for Germany. Both motives–the desire to shed the stigma of neo-Nazi associations and common cause with Israel against radical Islam–are relevant, but something far more interesting is at work.

There are neo-Nazis and other swamp creatures lurking in the new nationalist right. Earlier this year I stated that, deplorably, I would vote for Angela Merkel rather than the AfD in the German elections, in part because the AfD’s Vice-Chairman Alexander Gauland defended a regional AfD leader who proposed to dismantle Holocaust monuments, in part because Gauland is insultingly anti-American, and in part because Gauland is too friendly with the mystical nationalists around Vladimir Putin. But that is not the whole of the AfD, and it is possible that the AfD will go in quite a different direction.

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The Axis Was Outmatched from the Start Hitler and his Axis cohorts couldn’t match their enemies’ resources to begin with. That they learned all the wrong lessons from military history while the Allies learned all the right ones doomed them. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on October 17th, 2017

Editor’s Note: The following is the second in a series of excerpts adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book The Second World Wars. It appears here with permission.

Starting wars is far easier than ending them. Since the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta and their allies, winning — and finishing — a war has been predicated on finding ways to end an enemy’s ability to fight, whether materially or psychologically. The Axis and the Allies had radically different ideas of how the wars of World War II would eventually conclude — with the Allies sharing a far better historical appreciation of the formulas that always put a final end to conflicts.

When World War II broke out in 1939, Germany did not have a serious plan for defeating any of those enemies, present or future, that were positioned well beyond its own borders. Unlike its more distant adversaries, the Third Reich had neither an adequate blue-water navy nor a strategic bombing fleet, anchored by escort fighters and heavy bombers of four engines whose extended ranges and payloads might make vulnerable the homelands of any new enemies on the horizon. Hitler did not seem to grasp that the four most populous countries or territories in the world — China, India, the Soviet Union, and the United States — were either fighting against the Axis or opposed to its agendas. Never before or since had all these peoples (well over 1 billion total) fought at once and on the same side.

Not even Napoleon had declared war in succession on so many great powers without any idea how to destroy their ability to make war, or, worse yet, in delusion that tactical victories would depress stronger enemies into submission. Operation Sea Lion, Germany’s envisioned invasion of Britain, remained a pipe dream — and yet it offered the only plausible way to eliminate Britain from the war that Hitler had started. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, then head of the Kriegsmarine, repeatedly warned Hitler that an amphibious invasion of Britain in 1940 was quite impossible. After explaining why the German navy was unable to transport hundreds of thousands of troops across the Channel, Raeder flatly concluded, “I could not recommend a landing in England.” After the war, Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel agreed that the military was not up to the task and was relieved that Hitler finally conceded as much: “I very much worried. I fully realized that we would have to undertake this invasion with small boats that were not seaworthy. Therefore, at that time I had fully agreed with the decision of the Fuehrer.” The invasion of Russia, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, would prove a rerun of the early successes of blitzkrieg in precisely the one theater where it would be nearly impossible to conduct it effectively — an operation that Raeder in hindsight claimed to have opposed, desperately but vainly advising Hitler that “under no circumstances should we go to war with Russia.”

War’s eternal elements — a balance between powers, deterrence versus appeasement, collective security, preemption and preventive attacks, and peace brought by victory, humiliation, and occupation — still governed the conflict. As was true in most past conflicts, the publics in Axis countries, regardless of the odiousness of Fascist ideology, supported the war when Germany, Italy, and Japan were deemed to be winning. Even the liberal German historian Friedrich Meinecke was caught up in the German euphoria following the sudden collapse of France in 1940: “And to have regained Strasbourg! How could a man’s heart not beat a little faster at this? After all, building up an army of millions in the space of only four years and rendering it capable of such achievements has been an astonishing and arguably the greatest and the most positive accomplishment of the Third Reich.” The classical Greek historian Thucydides, who so often focused on the Athenian public’s wild shifts in reaction to perceived battlefield victories or defeats, could not have captured any better the mercurial exhilaration at the thought of decisive military success.

The pulse of the war also reflected another classical dictum: The winning side is the one that most rapidly learns from its mistakes, makes the necessary corrections, and most swiftly responds to new challenges — in the manner that land-power Sparta finally built a far better navy while the maritime Athenians never fielded an army clearly superior to its enemies, or the land-power Rome’s galleys finally became more effective than were the armies of the sea-power Carthage. The Anglo-Americans, for example, more quickly rectified flaws in their strategic-bombing campaign — by employing longer-range fighter escorts, recalibrating targeting, integrating radar into air-defense networks, developing novel tactics, and producing more and better planes and crews — than did Germany in its bombing against Britain. America would add bombers and crews at a rate unimaginable for Germany. The result was that during six months of the Blitz (September 1940 to February 1941), the Luftwaffe, perhaps the best strategic bombing force in the world in late 1939 through mid-1940, dropped only 30,000 tons of bombs on Britain. In contrast, in the half year between June and November 1944, Allied bombers dropped 20 times that tonnage on Germany.

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Status Quo Blues The public is turning away from the institutions that used to unite Americans — the NFL, mainstream news, late-night TV, movies . . . By Victor Davis Hanson

By on October 17th, 2017

The familiar cultural order of the last half-century is crumbling — partly because of larger forces beyond its control, partly from self-inflicted wounds, and partly because of the chaos following the election of the outsider Donald Trump.

NFL, Go to Hell?

In the early 1950s, the National Football League was small, poor, and not America’s pastime. It may soon become that way again — if it is lucky.

Since Colin Kaepernick opened the lid of the NFL’s Pandora’s box, the demons just keep flying out. The result is decreased viewership and attendance and the tarnishing of a multibillion-dollar brand.

To save their NFL investment, some networks now try to avoid airing the pre-game national anthem altogether. The alternative is to show dozens of confused and pampered multimillionaire athletes kneeling in defiance. The cameras only selectively scan the stadium crowd and detour around empty seats. ESPN talking heads glance sideways at one another in hopes that colleagues will cool their accustomed virtue-signaling social-justice rants that are as hypocritical as they are incoherent — rants that cost them viewers and maybe their own jobs.

The NFL in truth was living on borrowed time — a strangely anachronistic gladiatorial spectacle exempt from the nitpicking of a therapeutic society. Not anymore.

The rich white owners are in no need of antitrust exemptions or public subsidies. But they might require a diversity officer to make the franchises look more like America.

The players claim racism while also assuming that they are excused from the traditional liberal antidotes to disproportionate racial representation. Weirdly, the athletes apparently think that a league in which 75 percent of the players are African-American reflects a time-honored commitment to merit. That might be true, but it is a logic that has never done Asian-American students much good when fighting de facto quotas that limit their merit-based representation at marquee universities.

The NFL is becoming as violent as boxing or martial arts, but with thousands, not hundreds, of athletes suffering head trauma. Participation is falling off in its de facto farm and minor leagues in high schools and colleges, on the theory that a smack in the head might end up later as a tremor in the hand.

The old idea that Americans set aside their Sundays for friendly get-togethers, free of weekly political spats and depressing news, has been ruined by the constant editorializing of the players.

Yet they are unable to articulate a consistent gripe other than confusing the First Amendment rights with workplace rules that all Americans abide by. If the League successfully mandates that its paid employees cannot express their gratitude by wearing a small decal on their helmets to honor the dead of 9/11 or slain policemen, then certainly the NFL can also ask its employees to stand for the national anthem.

In sum, there are so many things wrong with the NFL that far from being a national pariah, Colin Kaepernick is likely to be sainted for convincing the nation that we had plenty of reasons beyond his own self-indulgent narcissism not to watch professional football at all.

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