How It Might End, Act I By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/25/how-it-might-end-act-i/ 

It seems to be that we have alarm bells going off all around us. The oddity is that so few people seem to hear them. 

A couple of years ago, I had the honor of publishing American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by Frank Buckley, a prolific author and law professor at George Mason University. Buckley began by noting the obvious: that we in America are more divided now than at any time since the 1850s. We know how that Disunited States of America worked out, and the horror of the Civil War—what Buckley calls Secession 1.0—has led many of us to conclude that we’d put up with almost anything rather than risk a repeat of that disaster. 

“Almost” anything. 

Buckley does not predict a second American secession, exactly, but he shows, convincingly, I think, how it might come about. “The bitterness” of our life together, “the contempt for opponents, the growing tolerance of violence, all invite us to think that we’d all be happier were we two different countries.” There is something to that. And something to Buckley’s admonitory conclusion: “In all the ways that matter, save for the naked force of the law, we are already divided into two nations, just as much as in 1861.”

I hesitate to spoil the ending, but it is probably worth noting that in the end, despite his warnings and various scenarios of how the divorce might happen, Buckley turns out, again like most (but not all of us) to be a unionist. The United States may be too big and too powerful for its own or anyone else’s good, but might, while it doesn’t make right, does or at least conduce to stability. 

And consider the alternative world orders on offer: Communist China? Islamic fundamentalism? European socialism? 

No thank you. 

At the same time, some current events lead me to suspect that some of the scenarios Buckley imagines have a lot of divisive life left in them. At one point, he observes, “A state that uses every means at its disposal to neuter a federal law might render it unenforceable within its jurisdiction, at least until the Supreme Court is able to rule on the matter. That might be years later, however, and that may be all it takes, if during the interim a new president has been elected and the new administration takes the state’s view of the question.” 

Buried Alive: Persecution of Christians, August 2021by Raymond Ibrahim

tps://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17800/persecution-of-christians-august

After sexually harassing a Christian sanitation worker, a Muslim supervisor threatened to file blasphemy charges — which carry a maximum death penalty — against her unless she withdraws her complaints against him.” — Morning Star News, August 31, 2021, Pakistan.
“Most sanitation workers in Pakistan are Christian…. Christian sanitation workers are routinely called derogatory terms… and face sexual harassment, discrimination, nonpayment of salaries, irregular work contracts and extortion by senior officers….” — Morning Star News, August 31, 2021, Pakistan.
“[T]he Taliban are going door-to-door in Afghanistan, executing Christians on the spot…. Taliban militants are even pulling people off public transport and killing them on the spot if they’re Christians…. The Taliban have spies and informants everywhere.” — Religion News Service, August 17, 2021, Afghanistan.
“Women who disappear and are never recovered must live an unimaginable nightmare. The large majority of these women are never reunited with their families or friends because police response in Egypt is dismissive and corrupt. There are countless families who report that police have either been complicit in the kidnapping or… bribed into silence.” — Coptic Solidarity, 2020, Egypt.
Muslims murdered a man for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity by burying him alive. — Morning Star News, August 26, 2021, Uganda.
“What you have witnessed happening to your husband today is for the disobedience of your husband not heeding the advice given by the family that he should return to Islam, since Islam cannot tolerate infidels.” According to report, “Police have taken no action regarding the killing.” — Morning Star News, August 26, 2021, Uganda.
“Islam is now invading South Sudan. They’re saying South Sudan is a strategic place and… the gate[way] to Africa [so that] Islam can go to all of Africa.” — Local Christian, Vatican News, August 19, 2021, South Sudan.

Editor’s note: The publication of this report marks the tenth anniversary of the “Persecution of Christians” monthly series, which Gatestone began to publish a decade ago, starting with the month of August 2011. Scroll to the bottom of this report to access the previous 119 reports, covering every month between August 2011 and now.

The following are among the abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of August 2021:

NO POSTINGS TODAY

I AM OUT OF TOWN. BACK TOMORROW.

Iran Cements Its Advantage While Biden Sleeps Iran’s leaders recognize the pain that results from sanctions do not pose an existential threat to a regime willing to rule through hard power.By Jason Killmeyer

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/24/iran-cements-its-advantage-while-biden-sleeps/

Six months into President Joe Biden’s term, several sanctions against Iran were lifted and new ones imposed as the administration seeks to cajole Iran back to the negotiating table over their nuclear capacity. While the messaging from Washington, and the signaling from Tehran, was mixed, one thing was clear this past July in the southwestern city of Ahvaz: people were thirsty. On July 15, after weeks of irregular access to water and periods of several hours with no water, a spontaneous protest emerged.

Desperate, angry citizens took to the streets and blocked roads as the growing service shortages plaguing Iran reached a breaking point. Dubbed the Uprising of the Thirsty, within days the protests were province-wide then soon spread around the country and into Tehran. Citizens blamed the government, and widespread corruption, for water and power shortages, and in some instances chanted “Death to the dictator.”

Some reports indicate the regime was taken aback by the speed at which the protests spread, the biggest in the capital since after the mistaken downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane in January 2020. Security forces killed protesters in cities near Ahvaz and the government throttled Internet service to limit organizers’ ability. Given the frequency of unrest in the past several years, the regime by now has a well-worn playbook, much of it dedicated to suppressing demonstrators with deadly force.

So, despite the protests’ organic and widespread nature, there will be no revolution this year. Still, an important evolution has taken place in Iran in 2021. Conventional wisdom has for years suggested that relief from Western sanctions is a drastic and urgent need for the regime. But a more careful read of their actions in 2021 suggests relief as maybe the third or fourth priority of the government.

Biden Isn’t Facing ‘Challenges.’ Biden Is The Challenge By Eddie Scarry

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/24/biden-isnt-facing-challenges-biden-is-the-challenge/

Well-known Washington creature Amy Walters wrote this week on the “challenge” that Joe Biden is facing early in his presidency: “The former senator and vice president looks more like a helpless bystander than an experienced Capitol Hill deal maker…”

That, in a nutshell, is the national media’s preferred framing of the absolute breakdown we’re witnessing under Biden. A collapse that he created and is wholly responsible for.

The media want Biden to look like a “helpless bystander,” a victim of circumstances out of his control. He’s not. He’s the perpetrator of nearly every disaster anyone with eyes can see, from the obscenity at the southern border, to the loss of 13 service members (not fighting, but leaving a war zone), to the stratospheric inflation of household necessities.

We’re led to believe these are simply “challenges” Biden is facing rather than the results of his own deliberate screw-ups.

These are things happening to Biden.

CNN did a remarkable job handicapping Biden’s presidency earlier this week. In a Sept. 20 segment on Jake Tapper’s show, correspondent Phil Mattingly said Biden was “grappl[ing] with one of the most consequential weeks of his first year in office.” The graphic on screen noted that Biden was “faced with foreign policy turmoil…” Mattingly later said Biden was in “a key moment, particularly in the wake of a bumpy last several weeks.”

Let’s take stock of what’s happened during those “bumpy last several weeks”: On Sep. 20, there had been a total of 676,718 COVID-related deaths. Roughly 270,000 of those happened under Biden.

Pretty bumpy!

Also, on Aug. 26, 13 members of the U.S. military were killed during a suicide bombing attack at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, where operations were underway to withdraw from our decades-long effort in that sandpit. Eleven of the brave men and women were under the age of 24.

That feels bumpy, too.

Thanks to Biden Administration, Iran Mullahs and Taliban Empowered by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17785/iran-mullahs-taliban-empowered

Not only did the Biden administration – whose sole purpose in Afghanistan was to prevent another “9/11 attack” – hand the Taliban and the mullahs of Iran a major political and strategic victory, it also rewarded them with sophisticated, state-of-the-art US weapons worth $85 billion – courtesy of American taxpayers — which these terrorists will undoubtedly use to launch an even more deadly “9/11 attack” to kill American taxpayers.

The US withdrawal to the Taliban was so poorly planned that the Biden administration actually delivered seven brand new helicopters to Afghanistan just a month before announcing that it would be withdrawing from the country.

It is mind-boggling that the Biden administration announced its withdrawal from Afghanistan without any plans either to secure billions of dollars of US military equipment, but made not the slightest effort to recover or destroy it.

The Taliban and the Iranian regime now are not only able to unleash US-made weapons against the US and its allies, but Iran, Russia and China can also utilize this military equipment for research, reverse engineering, reproducing and selling it.

The Biden administration’s poorly planned surrender to Afghanistan has been causing tragedy and disaster one after another, all while empowering the Taliban and the mullahs of Iran.

The Iranian leaders have close ties to Taliban; both share a deep hatred towards the United States and Israel. Iran, as well as Pakistan, has also long provided shelter to Taliban leaders.

Iranian leaders have therefore applauded Biden administration’s decision to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan. Former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif characterized the US withdrawal as a positive action, while President Ebrahim Raisi described it as a defeat for Washington’s Middle East policy that “must become an opportunity to restore security in Afghanistan.” The Iranian regime had evidently been preparing for a Taliban takeover and meeting with Taliban leaders. In January 2021, a delegation from the Taliban had already been publicly consulting with senior Iranian officials, including then Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. According to him, both parties held productive talks, and discussed their ties and the future of Afghanistan.

Going Batty Over Climate Change Michael Kile

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/09/going-batty-over-climate-change/

We live in an age where Climate Change™ has replaced God as the explanation for everything. The list of phenomena it allegedly causes grows ever longer. More and more young people seem to be coming down with climate anxiety and ecological distress. In a recent survey led by Bath University, UK, over half of ten thousand respondents between 16 and 25 believe they are doomed and have no future.

The twenty-sixth United Nations annual climate Conference of the Parties (COP) is only weeks away.  After a quarter of a century of concern and another two billion people on the planet, is it too late to save us from a french-fry fate? Given the sombre mood, an attempt to link climate change with the COVID pandemic was inevitable. As if on cue, a “short communication” appeared in May this year in Science of The Total Environment, Volume 767:

“Shifts in global bat diversity suggest a possible role of climate change in the emergence of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2”.

The three authors: Robert M Beyer and Andrea Manica (Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) and Camilo Mora (Department of Geography and Environment, University of Hawai’I, Manoa). Beyer has since taken up a European research fellowship at the alarmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Hysteria Impact Research. They argue that bats are the likely zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. The local number of coronaviruses is said to correlate with “bat species richness”, with climate change shifting the global distribution of bats. This “bat richness” has strongly increased the likelihood of SARS-CoV-1 and 2 outbreaks; hence climate change may have been an important factor in these outbreaks.

Here we show that the southern Chinese Yunnan province and neighbouring regions in Myanmar and Laos form a global hotspot of climate change-driven increase in bat richness. This region coincides with the likely spatial origin of bat-borne ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. Accounting for an estimated increase in the order of 100 bat-borne CoVs across the region, climate change may have played a key role in the evolution or transmission of the two SARS CoVs. (R M Beyer, A Manica and C Mora, 2021)

A simultaneous media release showed how keen the authors are on climate change playing a bigger role in the COVID drama. Surely it too should be addressed “as part of COVID-19 economic recovery programmes.” 

The ‘Science’ of Climate Change By Norman Rogers

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_science_of_climate_change.html

The science surrounding COVID has been hijacked for political purposes. People recovered from the disease are pushed to get vaccinated, even though they have a natural immunity that is stronger than vaccine immunity. People are required to wear masks even though masks are essentially useless for preventing infection. People that die are reported as dying of COVID even though they died of something else. The government demands that children be vaccinated even though they are naturally resistant to the disease and suffer disturbing side effects from the vaccine. Schools are closed for no good reason.

The “science” of climate change is also BS. That should be easier to accept after seeing what the government did to COVID science. Why do politicians want to hype a nonexistent climate crisis? In a word: power. By claiming that there is an urgent climate crisis the politicians can spend billions to fight the imaginary foe. Those billions create political allies and reward friends. H.L. Mencken put it nicely in 1918:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

The parade of imaginary environmental catastrophes during the last 70 years is very long. Here are some books predicting this or that environmental disaster: Our Plundered Planet (1948), Road to Survival (1948), Silent Spring (1962), Famine 1975! (1967), The Population Bomb (1968), The Limits to Growth (1972), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Climate (2014), The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019).

Richard Lindzen, one of the most accomplished climate scientists in the world by virtue of his discoveries, does not have to kowtow to the global warming mob. In an essay he pointed out that scientific data that challenges the global warming hypothesis are simply changed. He cites examples of how environmental extremists have infiltrated scientific organizations.

Iraq Should Join the Abraham Accords Full relations with Israel would help atone for the infamous act of driving out our Jewish population. By Wisam Al-Hardan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iraq-abraham-accords-israel-sunni-shiite-11632495291?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Erbil, Iraq

More than 300 of my fellow Iraqis from Baghdad, Mosul, Al-Anbar, Babel, Salahuddin and Diyala joined me Friday in this northern city, where we issued a public demand for Iraq to enter into relations with Israel and its people through the Abraham Accords.

We are an assembly of Sunnis and Shiites, featuring members of the (Sunni) Sons of Iraq Awakening movement, which I lead, in addition to intellectuals, tribal elders, and youth activists of the 2019-21 protest movement. Some of us have faced down ISIS and al Qaeda on the battlefield. Through blood and tears we have long demonstrated that we oppose all extremists, whether Sunni jihadists or Iran-backed Shiite militias. We have also demonstrated our patriotism: We sacrificed lives for the sake of a unified Iraq, aspiring to realize a federal system of government as stipulated in our nation’s constitution.

Now, in striving to rebuild our country, we commit ourselves to an awakening of peace. Our guiding light is the memory of a more honorable past: a young, modern state with a glorious ancient tradition; a country that, at its finer moments, witnessed a spirit of partnership across ethnic and sectarian lines. Iraq’s subsequent deterioration was marked by the dissipation of tolerance—a casualty of generations of tyranny and fear, imposed first by rulers, then by external actors, as a tool to divide and conquer.

The most infamous act in this tragedy was the mass exodus and dispossession of the majority of our Iraqi Jewish population, a community with 2,600 years of history, in the mid-20th century. Through their forced migration, Iraq effectively cut one of its own principal veins. Yet we draw hope from the knowledge that most Iraqi Jews managed to rebuild their lives, passing their traditions to their children and grandchildren in Israel.

Effort to spread discredited Russia collusion theory welcomed by McCain Senate panel, memos show Armed Services panel secretly fought court battle this summer to quash subpoena seeking records of contacts with ex-FBI official Daniel Jones and liberal-funded The Democracy Integrity Project nonprofit.By John Solomon and Lee Smith

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/effort-spread-discredited-russia-collusion-theory

The efforts to disseminate a now-discredited theory that the Trump campaign had secret computer communications with the Kremlin extended beyond the FBI, CIA, and State Department to the U.S. Senate.

Under the late Sen. John McCain, the Armed Services Committee engaged a former FBI official and his progressive-funded nonprofit to produce a report on the matter, according to court records obtained by Just the News.

The Senate committee, now under Democrats’ control, successfully waged a secret federal court battle this summer to quash a subpoena that would have forced one of its staffers, Thomas Kirk McConnell, to turn over documents and testify about his dealings with former FBI analyst Dan Jones and his nonprofit, The Democracy Integrity Project, the records show.

A spokesman for George Soros confirms the progressive megadonor was one of the financial backers of The Democracy Integrity Project. Tax records show the group raised more than $7 million in donations in 2017 and hired Fusion GPS — the same firm that produced the debunked Steele dossier for Hillary Clinton’s campaign — to pursue allegations of foreign interference in elections.

The episode, recounted in hundreds of pages of federal and D.C. Superior court records, provides extraordinary insight into how current and former government officials in multiple branches of government were able to sustain a Russia collusion theory on artificial life support for years after the FBI first dispelled it.

The legal skirmish with the Senate also provides new context to allegations filed last week by Special Counsel John Durham, who indicted a former DOJ lawyer named Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI during his efforts to peddle the same debunked story about the Trump campaign, a computer server at the Alfa Bank in Moscow and the Kremlin. Sussmann was being paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign when he pitched the allegations to the bureau, court records show. He has pleaded not guilty.