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Brazil Has Had Enough But have we? By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

The Brazilians may not know how to run an Olympics, but they are just aces at impeachments.

Americans should take note.

After a lengthy period of deliberation, the Brazilian parliament has formally removed from office President Dilma Rousseff, the corrupt left-wing populist who has been trying to do for Brazil what Hugo Chávez and his epigones did for Venezuela.

The entire Brazilian political class has been in bad odor of late, with a wide-ranging corruption scandal at the state-owned oil company reminding the world why sensible people do not think much of state-owned enterprises, petroleum-oriented or not. Brazil was riding high for about five minutes there while commodities prices were unusually strong, but President Rousseff’s anti-business, anti-trade, anti-investor, welfare-statist agenda — which differs from the current Obama-Clinton-Sanders-Trump economic vision mainly in aggressiveness rather than substance — did what it usually does. Unemployment and inflation took off, and public-sector spending increased radically, resulting in an unbalanced fiscal position that caused Brazil’s government debt to be downgraded to junk-bond status.

As with the food riots in Venezuela, the Left in Brazil and internationally has whispered darkly that this represents a “coup” against a populist progressive who angered the world’s corporate bosses and free-market fundamentalists. “Corruption is just the pretext for a wealthy elite who failed to defeat Brazil’s president at the ballot box,” the Guardian sniffed. The truth is that Brazilians are not eager to go back to being the country in the Western hemisphere that people cite to illustrate what India used to be like.

What is of note is that Brazilians have made the connection between corruption and poverty.

Rousseff’s corruption, at least that which has been persuasively documented, is pretty small stuff by Brazilian standards — indeed, by U.S. standards. It is “pedaladas fiscais,” what we might call “creative” public finance. Brazil has state-run but notionally independent banks and pension funds, whose coffers were raided through a series of loans to the Brazilian government in order to hide the fact that the government’s finances were such a complete and total shambles that payments otherwise could not be made to popular programs such as cash handouts to the poor and housing assistance — the stuff that politicians such as Rousseff and her party use to buy loyalty. In the United States, that sort of thing is just standard operating procedure for the federal government when it comes to things like Social Security, and for local government when it comes to public employees’ pensions: magical accounting.

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The More Things Change, the More They Actually Don’t Technology hasn’t changed the core of who we are, and history proves it. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

In today’s technically sophisticated and globally connected world, we assume life has been completely reinvented. In truth, it has not changed all that much.

Facebook and Google may have recalibrated our lifestyles, but human nature, geography, and culture are nearly timeless. Even as ideologies and governments come and go, the same old, same old problems and challenges remain.

Compare what dominated the news in 1966, 50 years ago.

Abroad, Israel was constantly fighting on the West Bank against Palestinian guerrilla groups and in the air over Syria. It is likely that in another 50 years the story will remain about the same.

The Middle East in 1966 was going up in flames, just as it is today — and in many of the same places. The Syrian government was overthrown in a coup. The Saudis, Jordanians, and Egyptians were involved in a civil war in Yemen. The Egyptian government executed Islamists charged with planning a theocratic takeover.

Africa, as today, was wracked by wars or coups in places such as Chad, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan.

American relations with Russia were tense. Moscow clamped down on dissidents and opposed almost all U.S. initiatives abroad.

The Castro government in Cuba was railing against the United States, outlawing free expression and alleging American interference in Cuba’s affairs. The only difference from today was that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro then was a 40-year-old firebrand, not a 90-year-old near-invalid.

Nothing has much changed elsewhere in the world either. Just as Cyprus today remains a bone of contention between Turkey and Greece, 50 years ago Greeks and Turks were meeting to resolve tensions on the divided island. Ditto the ongoing dispute between India and Pakistan, whose leaders met frequently during 1966 following outright war in 1965.

There were also the sorts of rifts within NATO that have become so familiar. Today, the U.S. worries that the alliance is unraveling due to bickering and the unwillingness of European countries to increase their defense budgets. Fifty years ago, the problem was France. In 1966, the French actually quit the alliance, which suddenly had to transfer its headquarters from Paris to Brussels, Belgium.

Nor were things that different at home than they are today.

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Hillary First Broached Saudi Visa Deal During Visit to Huma Abedin’s Mom’s Saudi Madrassa Paul Sperry

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

Earlier this month, CounterJihad.com broke the story that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was instrumental in cutting a special deal with the Saudi government to reverse post-9/11 restrictions on Saudi visas, triggering an unprecedented explosion in Saudi students entering the US. CJ has since learned that the seeds of this major change in immigration policy – one with serious national security implications – were planted during a 2010 visit by Clinton to a Saudi college founded by her top aide’s radical Muslim mother – a college that turns out to have direct ties to terrorists.

Clinton’s then-deputy chief of staff Huma Abedinarranged the trip to the radical Saudi school, overruling concerns by diplomatic security, in what was yet another example of Abedin, a self-described “devout Muslim” whose family has direct ties to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, playing an outsize role in influencing US policy when it comes to the Middle East and Muslim empowerment.

The policy reversal appears to have had its roots in a speech Clinton gave at the Dar al-Hekma girls college in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the behest of Abedin, whose mother, Saleha Abedin, helped found the school and currently serves as its dean. Abedin also runs the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which seeks to boost Muslim immigration rates in the the U.S. and other Western countries, while also propagating Sharia law in those nations.

“You know that after 9/11, the United States closed its borders to students from around the world, and the number of Saudi students studying in our country fell dramatically,” Clinton lamented in her talk before the elder Abedin and her students. “Well, I am very pleased that we are now back to the levels that we had before 9/11.”

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Don’t bee-lieve the latest bee-pocalypse scare by Paul Driessen

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

As stubborn facts ruin their narrative that neonicotinoid pesticides are causing a honeybee-pocalypse, environmental pressure groups are shifting to new scares to justify their demands for “neonic” bans.

Honeybee populations and colony numbers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and elsewhere are growing. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the actual cause of bee die-offs and “colony collapse disorders” is not neonics, but a toxic mix of predatory mites, stomach fungi, other microscopic pests, and assorted chemicals employed by beekeepers trying to control the beehive infestations.

Naturally, anti-pesticide activists have seized on a recent study purporting to show that wild bee deaths in Britain have been correlated with neonic use in oil seed rape fields (canola is a type of OSR). In a saga that has become all too common in the environmental arena, their claims were amplified by news media outlets that share many activist beliefs and biases – and want to sell more subscriptions and advertising.

(Honeybees represent a small number of species that humans have domesticated and keep in hives, to produce honey and pollinate crops. Many are repeatedly trucked long distances, to pollinate almond and other crops as they flower. By contrast, thousands of species of native or wild bees also flourish across the continents, pollinating plants with no human assistance.)

The recent Center for Ecology and Hydrology study examined wild bee population trends over an 18-year period that ended in 2011. It concluded that there was a strong correlation between population and distribution numbers for multiple species of British wild bees and what study authors called their “measure of neonic dose” resulting from the pesticide, which is used as a seed coating for canola crops.

The study is deeply flawed, at every stage – making its analysis and conclusions meaningless. For example, bee data were collected by amateur volunteers, few of whom were likely able to distinguish among some 250 species of UK wild bees. But if even one bee of any species was identified in a 1-by-1 kilometer area during at least two of the study period’s 18 years, the area was included in the CEH study.

This patchy, inconsistent approach means the database that formed the very foundation for the entire study was neither systematic nor reliable, nor scientific. Some species may have dwindled or disappeared in certain areas due to natural causes, or volunteers may simply have missed them. We can never know.

There is no evidence that the CEH authors ever actually measured neonic levels on bees or in pollen collected from OSR fields that the British wild bees could theoretically have visited. Equally relevant, by the time neonics on seeds are absorbed into growing plant tissue, and finally expressed on flecks of pollen, the levels are extremely low: 1.3-3.0 parts per billion, the equivalent of 1-3 seconds in 33 years.

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ISIS call on lone wolves to avenge killing of top lieutenant : Gilad Shiloach

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

ISIS channels on Telegram are spreading a call Wednesday for the “general mobilization” of lone wolf actors across Arab and Western countries, urging them to take revenge for the killing of senior leader Abu Muhammad al-Adnani in an apparent U.S strike in Syria a day earlier.

The terror group made the announcement late Tuesday that its official spokesman and one of its top commanders was killed “while surveying operations to repel the military campaign against Aleppo.” A U.S. defense official told Reuters that the United States targeted Adnani in a strike on a vehicle traveling in the Syrian town of al-Bab near Aleppo, but did not confirm that Adnani was killed in the hit.

Vocativ tracked dozens of Telegram channels used by ISIS supporters and found the call for lone wolves circulating after the news broke of Adnani’s death. “Deliver this message to all the supporters,” the message said, telling them that rather than cry for Adnani’s passing, to “remember his words: commit jihad, even by knife, make it the greatest attack across Crusader and Arab countries. For every believer, now it’s time to fight. Let the Crusaders and apostates see Adnani’s words in your acts. Now it’s time to fight.”

The messages likely refer to Adnani’s most recent speech in May this year, in which he called upon “soldiers and supporters of the Caliphate in Europe and America” to attack civilians in their hometowns. The speech preceded a deadly wave of attacks carried out by ISIS supporters in Orlando, Magnanville, Nice,Wuerzburg, Ansbach and Normandy.

Another message posted on ISIS message forums pressed the urgency to motivate followers into action. “We are in need of motivation. Motivate the lone wolves to start taking revenge. Concentrate on the motivation and postpone the mourning, this is a time of war.”

The messages reflect similar warnings that ISIS supporters posted on Twitter accompanied with the hashtag denoting Adnani’s death saying “just wait for the lone wolves, wait for the response, wait for the revenge.”

Adnani, born Taha Subhi Falaha in Syria’s Idlib Province in 1977, pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was once imprisoned by U.S. forces in Iraq. The New York Times claims he was also in charge of ISIS’ external operations and was responsible for recruiting operatives worldwide and planning terror attacks in cities including Paris, Brussels, and Bangladesh. There was a $5 million reward on his head under the U.S. “Rewards for Justice” program.

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Hillary Emailed Nuke Info Classified Until 2033 After Leaving State Dept Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

In 2033, if we’re all still alive. We’ll find out what Hillary was emailing.

I bet you’re as shocked as I am that our nation’s greatest living national security threat continued living up to her reputation. But that she did.

Hillary Clinton continued sending classified information even after leaving the State Department, The Post has exclusively learned.

On May 28, 2013, months after stepping down as secretary of state, Clinton sent an email to a group of diplomats and top aides about the “123 Deal” with the United Arab Emirates.

But the email, which was obtained by the Republican National Committee through a Freedom of Information Act request, was heavily redacted upon its release by the State Department because it contains classified information.

The markings on the email state it will be declassified on May 28, 2033, and that information in the note is being redacted because it contains “information regarding foreign governors” and because it contains “Foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States, including confidential sources.”

The email from Clinton was sent from the email account — hrod17@clintonemail.com — associated with her private email server.

Which means that the odds are good that the sort of people who shouldn’t have access to it probably already do without waiting until 2033.

The “123 Deal” was a 2009 agreement between the United Arab Emirates and the US on materials and technological sharing for nuclear energy production.

Yes, Hillary was emailing classified nuclear information in between all those yoga classes.

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Why the Origins of the BDS Movement Matter The Jew-hatred and radicalism behind a fake Palestinian-led cause. Alex Joffe

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

Reprinted from the Times of Israel.

A recent film clip showing ex-Israeli academic Ilan Pappé has raised eyebrows. Asked whether it was Palestinians who launched the BDS campaign in 2005 Pappé conceded, “Not really, but yes. OK. For historical records, yes.” Both Israel supporters and Israel haters have been taken aback by this forthright statement, from a leading Israel hater, that Palestinians did not create this now iconic movement.

What are the BDS movement’s origins? The question is, at one level, an historical curiosity. The movement exists, it is forging ever-deeper links with the far left and the ‘progressive’ movement, and is a force to be reckoned with. At another level, however, the history of the BDS movement is emblematic of Palestinian political history, and the recent development global antisemitism, as a whole.

Two trends are immediately evident in the history of BDS, the role of Palestinian political factions and professional Palestinians from the diaspora, which have led Palestinians toward rejectionism.

It is easy to dismiss the movement’s own origins story, the 2005 call from Palestinian ‘civil society’ organizations. The call for boycotting Israel was in explicit opposition to the Palestinian Authority (which, indeed, rejected it) and may well have originated with a rejectionist PLO faction. Indeed, many of the ‘grassroots’ organizations that signed the document cannot be traced. They were likely organs of political factions or just fabrications.

The message was simple: the “representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.”

The call also put forward three demands; “1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall 2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and 3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.” In short, the call demanded dismantling of Israel through the ‘right of return.’ This has not changed: the end of Israel is the core BDS goal.

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The Media’s Dirty Clinton Ties, Buys and Lies The media is scalping its own for Hillary Clinton. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

Where does media bias come from?

Anyone who really wanted to know had that question answered when much of the media took a break from attacking Trump to attack the Associated Press. What does the AP have in common with Trump? Both were hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances to score payoffs from dictators, arms dealers and tycoons with terrorist ties for the next four to eight years.

The Associated Press got in trouble with the rest of the media for digging up dirt on the Clinton Foundation. Instead of just repeating the usual Clinton denials, it actually ran the numbers and noted that more than half the “ordinary folks” who got meetings with her had donated to her Foundation.

Instead of reporting on the AP story, the media went to war on its own. It wasn’t just the usual suspects like Vox and Slate who have a reputation for attacking any actual reporters who stray off the reservation and actually do their jobs. This time all the big boys were on the job.

CNN called in AP’s Kathleen Carroll to barrage her with classic ‘Have you stopped beating your wife’ loaded questions like, “Did you feel the pressure to publish something even though so many critics have said it didn’t amount to much?” A better question might be why CNN didn’t inform viewers that its parent company was a Clinton Foundation donor. But that would be practicing journalism.

Instead CNN offers gems like, “AP’s ‘Big Story’ on Clinton Foundation is big failure”. A high school paper could have come up with a cleverer putdown, but in this brave new world in which media companies donate to front groups for presidential campaigns and then denounce stories exposing their corruption there are no more new ideas, just organized spin sessions.

If you didn’t like the AP headline, try Vox’s “The AP’s big exposé on Hillary meeting with Clinton Foundation donors is a mess.”

Yes, they are all reading from the same script.

The New York Times initially blacklisted the story. Then it came out with a call for Hillary Clinton to cut ties with the Clinton Foundation. That’s like asking Al Capone to cut ties with the mob.

But the Times might have started out by cutting its own ties to the Clinton Foundation.

Carlos Slim, the Mexican-Lebanese billionaire who keeps the lights burning at the New York Times HQ, gave the Clinton Foundation anywhere from 2 to 10 million dollars. Then there’s the six figure sum that Hillary picked up for delivering one of her comatose speeches about something or other in a robotic monotone.

It wouldn’t do for his Manhattan investment property to undermine his Washington D.C. investment property.

The Times tremulously urged Hillary to cut ties with the organization she had used to fuel her political ambitions, worrying that, “If Mrs. Clinton wins, it could prove a target for her political adversaries.”

Could prove? If the New York Times occasionally bothered to report the news, it would have noticed that it already had. But the Times isn’t worried about ethics, legality or national security. Instead it, incredibly, asks Hillary to act to protect her agenda and reputation from her own crimes.

That’s like asking an embezzler to quickly burn his second set of books before the cops catch him.

The New York Times doesn’t give a damn if foreign interests buy the White House. Its only concern is to protect Hillary from Republican attacks. And this overt bias is actually downright moderate.

It’s almost noble compared to the Washington Post, another Clinton Foundation donor, which fired off one attack after another. There was this cheerfully breezy masterpiece which read like North Korean propaganda written by a Portland hipster, “AP chief on patently false Clinton tweet: No regrets!”

The Post’s fact check, which is just the paper’s editorial position plus 5 minutes on Wikipedia, panned the AP story. Or rather it panned the tweet which promoted the story. If you can’t argue the facts, you can always pound the table. Or complain about the wording that the intern used to tweet the table.

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Trump: Immigration Must Serve America’s Interests Donald Trump embraces the long-forgotten idea that immigration is supposed to make America better. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

America’s immigration policies must promote “the well-being of the American people,” not the interests of the open-borders lobby, America-hating Islamists, and those who violate the nation’s laws, Donald Trump declared last night.

America cannot continue to be the dumping ground for all the world’s problems, was what the Republican candidate for president implied in his address in Phoenix, Ariz., last night.

The truth is, the central issue is not the needs of the 11 million illegal immigrants or however many there may be … but whatever the number, that’s never really been the central issue. It will never be a central issue. It doesn’t matter from that standpoint. Anyone who tells you that the core issue is the needs of those living here illegally has simply spent too much time in Washington.

The speech, which was met with loud applause, was a ringing, patriotic affirmation of conservative values, particularly the rule of law which has become all but a dead letter in the Obama era. Instead of backpedaling and watering down his stance on the illegal immigration crisis as pundits had expected, he refined it and put flesh on proposals that had until now been overly abstract. (A full transcript is available here.)

Trump made the case that immigration has to be rational and make America better, not worse, a radical idea in today’s political and cultural climate.

The “fundamental problem” with the immigration status quo “is that it serves the needs of wealthy donors, political activists and powerful, powerful politicians.” The current system “does not serve you, the American people.”

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State Dept. Confirms PJ Media Reporting on American Journalist Arrested in Turkey By Patrick Poole

Posted By on September 1st, 2016

On August 8, I reported here at PJ Media on American journalist Lindsey Snell, who had reportedly escaped from Jabhat al-Nusra/Jabhat Fateh al-Sham custody in Syria only to be arrested when she arrived back in Turkey earlier this month. No other American media outlet reported on this story — until now.

Snell’s biography notes she has worked for MSNBC, VICE News, ABC News, the Discovery Channel, and Amnesty International, among others.

State Department spokesman John Kirby confirmed her arrest during his daily briefing today, stating that she is being held on charges of “violating a military zone”:

QUESTION: Do you have any information about a U.S. citizen who was arrested in Turkey?

MR KIRBY: Who was arrested in Turkey? Yes. I can confirm that U.S. citizen Lindsey Snell was detained in Turkey on the 7th of August, 2016. She is currently being held in a prison facility in Hatay Province. I believe that’s how you say it. Consular officers from the consulate in Adana visited Ms. Snell most recently on the 26th of this month and are providing all possible consular assistance. The embassy and the department are following this case closely. State Department officials have been in contact with Turkish Government officials regarding this case.

QUESTION: Can you spell her name?

MR KIRBY: Lindsey. L-i-n-d-s-e-y. Snell. S-n-e-l-l.

Did you have more?

QUESTION: Yeah. Is – was the arrest at all related to her profession as a journalist or in any case – any way associated with that?

MR KIRBY: What I – what we understand is that she has been charged with violating a military zone, but I can’t speak to her reasons for being in Syria, for traveling there. I can’t speak to that. What I can tell you is that we’ve been informed she was charged with violating a military zone.