RUTHFULLY YOURS

Socialism depends on three all-too-human factors: ignorance, naiveté and duplicity. The first is common if not disastrously ubiquitous, affecting large strata of any given population. The latter two pertain, in extreme measure and without the tendency to conscious self-correction, to the various ranges of the leftist elite, whom Yugoslavian dissident Milovan Djilas in his must-read The New Class called “the managerial class” — the caste that dominates and exploits the political landscape under the pretense of far-sighted and compassionate stewardship. Obviously, no one is exempt from these character defects, but here it is a question of degree, of intensity and persistence. Let us consider these three factors in turn.

Ignorance

A few years ago students in my home province of Quebec went on strike and closed down the colleges and universities on the assumption that they were owed free tuition, free textbooks, free transportation and in many cases free meal chits and dormitory lodging. I met with a representative group and inquired where the money would come from. The response was: “le gouvernement.” When I suggested that nothing is free and that someone has to pay for someone else’s “free stuff,” the fact simply did not register.

What I found startling was the consummate ignorance of the students and, indeed, of many people who believe “the government” actually produces wealth rather than merely administers it. Government does control the mint, but cranking out dollar bills does not create wealth; currency is only a means of facilitating exchange. The students I spoke with had no idea of so palpable a distinction. They had never heard of hyperinflation. They did not understand that money means nothing unless it is based on a sound economic foundation. Money is more likely to come from trees — and it often does, to wit, Quebec’s maple syrup and logging companies — than from bureaucratic shuffling and administrative directives.

Such public sycophancy as the students demonstrated springs from conceiving of government in loco parentis, a father figure that magically provides for offspring needs and demands nothing in return but love and loyalty. Anyone with a functioning cortex should know that government produces nothing tangible. The revenue it needs to operate must come from somewhere else. And that somewhere else has three major addresses: industry, commerce and taxation, in other words, from the pockets of working people. Ignorance of how a prosperous society actually works, the refusal to study the dismal history of the socialist experiment in political paternalism, is a sine qua non of the socialist hallucination. That the province’s student cohort voted as a bloc for the socialist/secessionist Parti Québécois was no accident. A sovereign Quebec would lead to a socialist utopia where the necessities of life would be available to all and everyone would be equal — except, as Orwell pointed out, those who weren’t.

“Militants????” what happened to the word “terrorists” ?????? RSK

Two militants dressed as doctors raided a hospital in Kandahar supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday, killing at least one emergency room patient in an hourlong firefight, Afghan officials said.

The men, armed with pistols and suicide vests, wounded two other people before being shot dead by Afghan security forces, the officials said. The firefight took place in wards among patients, they said.

The first militant was quickly shot by an intelligence agent, while the second escaped further into the hospital before being killed by security forces about an hour later, said a spokesman for the Kandahar governor. Angry families outside protested to be allowed into the compound to rescue trapped relatives as the gunfire rang out across Afghanistan’s second largest city.

An Afghan intelligence officer and a policeman were also killed in the attack, a foreign official in the country said. Afghan authorities didn’t confirm their deaths.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Iran’s pistachio farms are dying of thirst.

That may not, in itself, seem like major news. But it has a greater significance.

After crude oil, pistachio nuts are Iran’s biggest export, with only the United States producing more. Yet a drought lasting years, along with uncontrolled pumping of water by farmers, has created a situation where the pistachio crop is drying up.

AFP reports that:

In Kerman province in southern Iran, cities have grown rich from pistachios, but time is running out for the industry.
Some 300,000 of Iran’s 750,000 water pumps are illegal—a big reason why the United Nations says Iran is officially transitioning from a state of “water stress” to “water scarcity.”
In 2013, Iran’s chamber of commerce carried out a survey showing that Kerman province was losing about 20,000 hectares (49,400 acres) of pistachio farms every year to desertification.

Overall, Iran’s water crisis is so severe that it could lead to mass internal migration and emigration. Even in the water-scarce Middle East, Iran is one of the most imperiled countries. Drought conditions were one of the factors that led to Syria’s civil war with its horrendous consequences.

The above-linked AFP report notes that some Iranian pistachio farmers have “taken matters into their own hands” and installed drip-irrigation systems—which save their crops, allowing them to flourish again while using up to 70 percent less water.

The systems, however, are expensive, and only farmers with “cash and connections in Tehran” can obtain them.

What the report doesn’t mention is that modern drip irrigation is a technology that was invented and developed in Israel. From Israel, drip irrigation has spread throughout the world and was a key factor in the Green Revolution in Asia and Africa.

North Korea is reported to have conducted its fifth and largest underground nuclear test on September 9th. According to South Korean officials, monitors had picked up unusual seismic activity near a North Korean nuclear test site. For its part, North Korea did not deny that it had conducted a test. To the contrary, North Korea’s state media claimed that the test would enable North Korea to produce “a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power.”

The explosive power of North Korea’s latest test is estimated, subject to further verification, to be approximately double the size of North Korea’s last test conducted in January 2016 and five times the explosive power of its test conducted during the first year of President Obama’s presidency in 2009. Four of the five nuclear tests that North Korea has conducted occurred under Obama’s watch. According to experts, North Korea is likely by 2020 to be able to build a workable intercontinental missile fitted with a nuclear warhead, with enough nuclear material accumulated to build up to 100 such warheads. The New York Times has quoted one expert, who has traveled to North Korea and formerly directed the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico, as saying that North Korea has made a strategic shift from regarding its nuclear weapons as mere bargaining chips to “deciding they need a nuclear weapons fighting force.” In any case, bargaining chip or not, North Korea has continually breached the previous promises it has made to freeze its nuclear activities in return for economic aid.

Moreover, North Korea’s most current provocation is once again in violation of a succession of United Nations Security Council resolutions, including one passed in March that contained a range of new punitive sanctions and embargoes imposed on the rogue regime. They have not worked. In fact, it seems that North Korea’s missile launchings and nuclear tests combined are outpacing the ineffective measures the Security Council has been taking to try and deter them. In just the last month alone, North Korea has conducted four missile tests. Just three days before North Korea’s latest nuclear test, the Security Council had pulled together a press statement condemning the previous missile tests and alluding to the possibility of even more punitive actions if North Korea persisted in its violations. The press statement said in part: “The members of the Security Council reiterated that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea shall refrain from further actions, including nuclear tests, in violation of the relevant Security Council resolutions and comply fully with its obligations under these resolutions…The members of the Security Council agreed that the Security Council would continue to closely monitor the situation and take further significant measures in line with the Council’s previously expressed determination.”

Weeks before Islamic State militant Abdelhamid Abaaoud led the Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris, French authorities thought he was holed up in northern Syria. Western Intelligence agencies pursuing Abaaoud had tracked him there using cell-phone location data and other electronic footprints.

The Paris attacks, which killed 130 people, showed how badly they were fooled. Abaaoud had slipped past the dragnet and entered the city unnoticed.

Drawing from a growing bag of tricks, Islamic State accomplices located in Syria likely used phones and WhatsApp accounts belonging to Abaaoud and other attackers to mask the group’s travel to Europe, said a Western security official: “We relied too much on technology. And we lost track.”

Terror attacks in Europe, which have killed more than 200 people in the past 20 months, reflect new operational discipline and technical savvy by the Islamic State terrorists who carried them out, security officials said.
The extremist group’s communications, once commonly conducted on phones and social media accounts easily tracked by authorities, have evolved into a mix of encrypted chat-app messages over WhatsApp and Telegram, face-to-face meetings, written notes, stretches of silence and misdirection.

These techniques helped protect attackers from Western intelligence agencies by leaving few electronic clues in a sea of intercepted data.

In recent months, Europe has been convulsed by a string of simple yet lethal attacks. Some were committed by people who appear to have received little direct training from Islamic State. The suspects in a failed plot in France last week were “remotely controlled” from Syria by the group, prosecutors said Friday. Officials worry such attacks could be a way to distract intelligence services while militants prepare more complex plots.

Three women have been killed after they attacked a police station in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa, a police official said Sunday.

One of the women threw a petrol bomb at officers while another pulled out a knife, Mombasa police chief Parterson Maelo said, adding two policemen were wounded in the attack.

The women, who were dressed in niqabs, were then shot by police.

Mr. Maelo said the women arrived at the central police station at about 10:30 a.m. to report a stolen telephone.

“While the officers were questioning them about the particulars of the stolen phone one of them drew a knife and another threw a petrol bomb at the officers of the report office,” he said.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Kenya faces a constant danger of being attacked by adherents of the Somali militant group al-Shabaab, which has vowed retribution for Kenya’s deployment of troops to Somalia in 2011.

al-Shabaab is al Qaeda’s affiliate in the region. It has recruited hundreds of Kenyans and used them in numerous attacks on the country, including the April 2015 attack at Garissa University which killed more than 148 people.

Recently, al-Shabaab attacks in Kenya have been limited to the border towns of Mandera and Liboi near Somalia.

However, Kenya is also struggling to battle Islamic State’s recruitment of some of the country’s youths. At least 20 young Kenyans have traveled to Libya to join the extremist group, according to police.

The World Economic Forum in 2015 had a prophetic vision that unless the world mends its wicked ways “global warming will become catastrophic and irreversible”.

In July 2016 the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, claimed that global warming was as dangerous to the world as Islamic terrorism.

At the recent G20 summit in China, the world leader of the Global Warming Religion, Ban Ki-moon, canonised two new cardinals — Cardinal Obama (who seeks political sainthood in his afterlife), and Cardinal Xi Jinping (who seeks to crucify western industry on the climate cross). Both signed the Paris Pledge.

Then at the ASEAN Economic Forum, ordained Minister Turnbull of Australia joined worshippers to pray for a saviour from Global Warming.

Global warming to hit Asia hardest — “Hundreds of millions of people are likely to lose their homes as flooding, famine and rising sea levels sweep the region.”

Finally, at the Pacific Island Forum in Vanuatu last week, the Global Warming service commenced with a rousing rendition of the hymn “Repent and Pay, or the Seas will Devour Us”.

As a sign of his devotion, Australia’s Global Warming Minister Turnbull dropped a cool $80M into the Global Warming Collection Plate. Islanders who truly believe will now receive total donations of A$300M from the pious Australian government.

John Kerry was right — this new Global Warming religion is spreading faster than radical Islam. It is the new Cargo Cult.

SYDNEY—Australian police have charged a man with committing a terrorist act and attempted murder after he allegedly stabbed a man multiple times in Sydney on Saturday.

Australia’s New South Wales state police on Sunday said the 22-year-old man was arrested following the stabbing of a 59-year-old man in the Sydney suburb of Minto.

The attack was allegedly inspired by Middle East-based militant group Islamic State, but the man isn’t known to be connected to any terror outfit, said New South Wales state police Deputy Commissioner Catherine Burn.

Police said the 22-year-old man and the victim were not known to each other. The victim is in the hospital in serious condition, said Ms. Burn.

The incident on Saturday came days after Islamic State urged followers to stab, shoot, poison and run over Australians at iconic locations, including the Sydney Opera House, according to the Associated Press.

President Obama says the $400 million he paid Iran in January for the release of four hostages was leverage, not ransom. If so, the mullahs have apparently developed a taste for it. Witness the five-year prison sentence handed to their latest Western hostage, which came to light Friday.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual citizen, had traveled to the Islamic Republic to visit relatives. She and her 2-year-old daughter, Gabriella, were detained in April at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport as they were about to fly home to London.

The exact charges haven’t been disclosed, but Iran’s Revolutionary Guards accuse her of plotting revolution. Ms. Zaghari-Ratcliffe works at the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the company that owns the Reuters news agency. She wasn’t involved in coverage of Iran.

One purpose of the harsh sentence is to remind Iranians in the diaspora tempted to return home in the wake of the nuclear deal that the regime sees them as traitors. It’s also no accident that the sentence came shortly after the U.K. upgraded its diplomatic relations back to ambassador level.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson cheered the new opening to Tehran last Monday, only to receive a rude awakening days later. Now the regime has a new political and financial bargaining chip, and Mr. Obama has created a cash-for-hostages incentive system with his earlier ransom. Let’s hope the British government is wiser than to stuff briefcases with unmarked bills.

“They hold such events to establish hegemony over society, to scare and terrorize people — mainly Alevis, secularists, Christians, and even Muslims who do not agree with their policies. They aim to silence, repress, and standardize the people.” — Kemal Bulbul, Alevi author and community leader.

“Laïcité [secularism] should not be in the new constitution in Turkey.” — Ismail Kahraman, the speaker of Turkey’s parliament, and an MP of the ruling AKP.

Countless churches in Anatolia have been destroyed, left to decay or, used for sacrilegious purposes, such as stables and storehouses.

Islamic supremacists do not aim to establish a system where different communities can meaningfully and peacefully coexist. Instead, they aim for political and social domination in which non-Muslims will be second class citizens — or dhimmis — who will always remain under threat.

At least a thousand Muslims worshipped in the mosque of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s presidential palace in Ankara on August 6. They performed a ceremony known as dhikr (“remembrance” in Arabic).

This event was heavily criticized by the country’s many secularists on the social media.