Water Madness by Tom McCaffrey

The federal government is draining Folsom Lake, one of California’s larger reservoirs-in the midst of a historic drought. We had a good Sierra snowpack this year, so the lake was almost full at the end of May. In the past when the lake was full, we could leave our boat in its berth at the marina until December, when the Bureau of Reclamation drains the lake to make room for the winter rains. But this year the Bureau is already draining the lake-to benefit the salmon in the Sacramento River, so we must pull our boat out in July.

One good snowpack is not enough to make up for four years of bad ones. Last summer faucets ran dry in some communities in the Central Valley, irrigation water to farmers was cut off, and thousands of farm workers were put out of work. You can see dead or dying orchards up and down Interstate 5. This summer the State-imposed restrictions on water use remain in place. Dead lawns and dying trees abound in our neighborhood. But still the feds are draining the lake. And they expect the rest of us dutifully to abide by the restrictions they have imposed on us.

The standard response to this sort of madness, among those able to recognize it as madness, is to blame it on radical environmentalists. But this is not the work of ideologues operating on the fringes of the environmental movement. This is standard-issue, mainstream environmentalism as practiced by the green establishment in Washington and Sacramento. This is not to deny that draining a major reservoir in the midst of a drought is a radical act. The point, rather, is that mainstream environmentalism is itself a radical ideology, and the current water shortage in California is Exhibit A.

From its beginnings in the 1960s, as I argue in my book Radical by Nature, environmentalism has been about preserving natural landscape where it exists, and restoring it where it does not. In California, this has meant, among other things, halting economic growth and development as much as possible. And what better way to halt growth than to restrict the supply of new water?

Former Boston Red Sox Star Kevin Youkilis Tweets Dismay Over ‘Jew Hatred,’ Burning of Israeli Flag Outside Democratic Convention by Shiryn Ghermezian

A former star player for the Boston Red Sox expressed dismay on Wednesday over the burning of Israeli flags outside the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia.

“Sad to see the hatred that still exists for Israel and Jews across the world,” Kevin Youkilis tweeted, along with the hashtags “StopTheHate” and “NeverAgain.”

Youkilis’ Twitter followers responded in kind, with comments such as, “so true and so sad,” “Amen” and “That is absolutely nauseating to see, especially in my hometown!” One social media user even thanked the former professional baseball player for “speaking up.”

As The Algemeiner reported, eyewitnesses at the Wells Fargo Center, where the DNC is being held, said protesters were burning Israeli and American flags on Tuesday night, while chanting “Black Lives Matter” and “Long Live Palestine.” Activists also waved signs that read, “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,” a slogan calling for the elimination of the state of Israel.

The National Jewish Democratic Council condemned the flag-burning on Twitter, calling it “Disgusting and totally reprehensible. These protesters aren’t only wrong, but are fundamentally anti-progressive.”

Meanwhile, inside the convention center, Palestinian flags were prominently displayed and attendees were seen holding up signs that read, “I support Palestinian human rights.”

The DNC started on Monday and continues until Thursday.

NFL’s Richard Sherman Stands by ‘All Lives Matter’ Comment “I find it difficult to fully support [the Black Lives Matter] movement.” Trey Sanchez

Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman is standing behind comments he made last year in which he stated, “If black lives matter, then they should matter all the time,” including deaths due to black-on-black crime.

In an interview with The Undefeated, Sherman was asked to reflect on his previous comments and provide any additional thoughts:

“I stand by what I said that all lives matter and that we are human beings. And speaking to police, I want African-Americans and everybody else treated decently. I want them treated like human beings. And I also want the police treated like human beings. I don’t want police officers just getting knocked off in the street who haven’t done anything wrong.

“Those are innocent lives.”

He was asked to give his opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement:

“It’s hard to formulate an opinion and generalize because they have several different messages. Some of them are peaceful and understandable and some of them are very radical and hard to support. Any time you see people who are saying, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ and then saying it’s time to kill police, then it is difficult to stand behind that logic. They are generalizing police just like they are asking police not to generalize us. It is very hypocritical. So, in that respect, I find it difficult to fully support that movement.”

Sherman, a Stanford graduate, doubled down on what he’s said before, stating that at some point, black-on-black crime and the problems in the inner city have got to be addressed by the BLM movement:

“There is low funding for education and very few jobs to go around. But there are also people who work hard to take care of their families. My parents did a great job, same inner city, Watts, South Central. They worked hard, didn’t make the most money, but took care of the kids in the neighborhood, took care of us, made ends meet, kept us out of gangs and all the nonsense. But I think there is also a mentality that we want to blame someone else for black fathers not being there for all these people having all these kids and nobody raising them. We want to say that’s systematic, but when do we stop saying it’s systematic and move forward and make a difference?”

Sherman was asked about the NFL’s role in offering support to the black community. The interviewer wondered if the white players on his team “should feel the same obligation as the black players.”

Islam, Sexual Violence, and the West by Noah Beck

The mass rape of hundreds of German women mostly by Muslim migrants last New Year’s was recently revealed to be far worse than originally acknowledged. Authorities now believe that more than 1,200 women were sexually assaulted – more than twice the original estimate of 500. While more than 2,000 men were allegedly involved, only 120 suspects — about half of them recently arrived migrants — have been identified.

One explanation for why it took half a year for the full extent of the crime to be revealed is the German police’s effort to avoid a public backlash against refugees. But ultimately, Holger Munch, president of the German Federal Crime Police Office, acknowledged to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that there is “a connection between the [sexual assaults] and the rapid migration in 2015.”

Denial is not a strategy. Western countries that cherish women’s rights must wake up to the fact that many migrants could challenge those values. Most of the mass migration comes from violence-plagued, Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where women are second-class citizens subject to honor killings and various legal restrictions, and where the local culture often condones rape, encourages wife-beating, and treats women as sexual objects (with 72 virgins promised to Muslim men who reach heaven).

Thus, just as the mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa raises the specter of regular Islamist terror on European soil, it also augurs the kind of sexual abuse that those regions have traditionally tolerated. German officials implicitly seemed to acknowledge as much with their laughably impotent campaign to re-educate migrants using signs that explain acceptable behavior towards women.

MY SAY: PLEASE HELP GEERT WILDERS

I attended a private function on Tuesday July 26,2016 to hear Geert Wilders the head of Holland’s Freedom Party and and author of the prophetic book:

Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me

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AFSI’s Helen Freedman, also attended the event and wrote the following:

“People may remember his film FITNA, exposing the Islamic reign of terror brought on by quotes from the Koran. Wilders was put on trial for making the film, but was acquitted. He is now on trial again in the Netherlands and in Austria for hate speech, and has been on a death list for over a decade. This courageous Dutchman’s message is that Europe is collapsing – surrendering to the results of an open door policy without the demands of assimilation. Islam, which means submission, incorporates sharia law. Wilders explained that Islam comes to dominate, NOT to integrate. He declared that WAR has been declared in Europe, but the leaders are all Chamberlains. He spoke about France, Germany, England, and Sweden where honor killings, genital mutilation, rapes, and rampant terror are everyday occurrences. He believes the populace is ready to identify the threat, but NOT the leaders. Instead of a First Amendment guaranteeing free speech, there are hate speech laws; Islamic lawfare is used against anyone who speaks out against Islam. However, Wilders declares that we must NEVER BE SILENT, that free speech is the breath of democracy.
Wilders seemed to echo the American popular message when he declared that the people are tired of the ruling elite. They want the borders closed, criminals expelled, and detention for suspected terrorists. They want to regain their national sovereignty. The political correctness that has infected America is rampant in Europe and Wilders calls it the biggest disease. If his party succeeds in the next election, his goal will be to make it unattractive for Moslems to live in Europe – whether they be from Syria, Morocco, or Africa. He concluded with the statement that Bat Ye’or’s prediction about Europe becoming Eurabia has come true, but he must remain hopeful for the future. If the people prevail over the corrupt leadership, Europe will survive.”
Geert Wilders faces astronomic legal fees as he must defend himself against the charges of “hate speech” in Holland and Austria. I will forward the information on a tax deductible contribution to help defray his legal expenses. rsk

When a War Went Worldwide 75 Years Ago The irrational aggressiveness of the Axis powers teaches us not to expect our enemies to be reasonable. By Victor Davis Hanson ****

Seventy-five years ago, the world blew up in just six months.

World War II ostensibly started two years earlier, when Germany invaded Poland. In truth, after the rapid German defeat of Poland in September 1939, the conflict was mostly confined to Western Europe for nearly the next two years. By summer of 1940, only Britain had survived Hitler’s European victories.

The dormant European war only went global on June 22, 1941, when Germany suddenly surprise-attacked the Soviet Union, its former partner.

America and Asia were still not directly involved in the 1941 expansion of the war until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and British Malaya on December 7–8.

Yet the war was even then not truly global until Germany and Italy inexplicably declared war on the United States on December 11.

America was suddenly mired in a two-front war on land, sea, and in the air against the Axis powers — from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert, and from the coast of Florida to China.

These three calamitous events of 1941 marked the real beginning of World War II, in which some 65 million perished, more than 60 percent of them civilians.

Hitler had no need to attack the Soviet Union, a vast country that even Napoleon could not successfully invade and one that was supplying vast amounts of natural resources to his German war machine.

Japan likewise had no reason to bomb the British and Americans in the Pacific. Neither democracy was planning to start a war with the Japanese.

Industrial Japan could have gotten most of its oil from the Dutch East Indies, modern Indonesia. Its colonial master, the Netherlands, had been conquered by Germany and was no longer a colonial power.

An aggressive Japan likewise could easily have had all of Indochina and other orphaned European colonies without triggering a war against the world’s two largest navies.

Had Germany not declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, it is likely that America would have focused on Japan and left Britain alone to fight Germany — just as it had done since 1939.

So why did the three Axis powers commit such blunders that would lose them the new global war in less than four years?

Red flags and anti-Semitism: Ruthie Blum

The current American election campaign is being touted as the most fraught in recent history. After arduous internal battles, the Republican and Democratic parties have finally nominated their candidates for the presidency of the United States — presenting the public with a choice between two unpopular and widely vilified candidates.

This turn of events is disheartening, as it is causing many voters to claim they will shun the ballot box in November. Far more disturbing, however, is the societal genie it has let out of the bottle — open expressions of Jew-hatred across the political spectrum. Thanks to social media, it is neither necessary nor possible to sugarcoat or qualify the nature of the comments on Facebook and Twitter. Nor can the words of angry mobs defending their candidate of choice by attacking their opponents be interpreted as political criticism.

The cat is out of the bag, and its name is anti-Semitism.

First came the white supremacists sending Donald Trump’s critics — whether Jewish or only perceived as such — to the gas chambers and bemoaning the fact that “Hitler didn’t finish off the job.” And now there are the Black Lives Matter and Students for Justice in Palestine gangs, banishing “Zionist pigs” from the Middle East and American universities. Oh, and burning the Israeli flag outside the Democratic National Convention — to protest Hillary Clinton’s victory over contender Bernie Sanders, a Jew. The irony would be sweet if it weren’t so tragic.

Meanwhile, as was revealed by the latest report released by the AMCHA Initiative — a watchdog organization that monitors anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses — Jewish students are the group most targeted for systematic attack. According to the report, which bases its findings on the State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism, this phenomenon has sharply increased since last year alone. And the top institutions of higher learning at which Jews feel least safe are Columbia, Vassar and the University of Chicago — illustrious schools filled with Jewish students, academics, alumni and donors.

As the late historian Robert Wistrich told me in an interview nearly a decade ago, “On the substantive issue of when criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitic, I think that there are good criteria. Every rational person understands the difference between criticism and defamation. If you talk about an individual in a defamatory way, you’re going to the heart of his character, his essence. The same is true of countries.”

The PCE, Pt. 25: In the (Russian) Tank for Hillary : Diana West

Think the Soviets were the only ones to invert reality?

—“The Post-Constitutional Election, Part 24,” is here.

The world has left merely-bonkers behind when Clinton, Inc., the most corrupt, corruptible and corrupted political duo in modern history, is held up as the nation’s bulwark against the Russian Bear; when Donald Trump, the man who seeks to save US sovereignty, the military, the 2nd Amendment and to stop Muslim immigration is smeared as “a Russian stooge.”

Welcome to the Democrats’ last stand.

It really is desperation-time for the Left (which includes much of the Right) when the only way to spin the most recent Wikileaks’ email dump showing unabashed MSM-DNC collusion to rig the presidential nomination for Hillary Clinton is to try to ignore the systemic corruption the leak reveals, and instead blast the leak itself as a Russian hack that is evidence that Donald Trump is “Putin’s candidate.”

But let’s imagine that this Wikileak gusher is proven to be a Russian hack. How can any self-respecting intelligence student not at least consider whether Putin is in fact throwing a lifeline of an issue — Trump as “Russian stooge” — to his own ever-pliable but catastrophically damaged candidate, Crooked Hillary?

All leaks aside, however, it is a fact that it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who gave her required approval to the sale of a Canadian company holding 20 percent of U.S. uranium stocks to Putin’s Russia — after nine members of the company’s board kicked $145 million into the Clinton Foundation. (Thank you, Peter Schweitzer.) That’s not “promoting Putin’s polices,” as the rap on Trump goes; that’s executing them.

What Russian strongman could possibly want a President of the United States more pliable, or, as Barack Obama, mentored and advised by a troika of Communist progeny himself, might say, more “flexible” than that?

Only by omitting such a “link” between Clinton and Putin’s Russia (and $145 million for the Clinton Foundation) can the media-political complex possibly paint Hillary as some kind of latter-day J. Edgar Hoover, anti-Communist firebrand — and never, ever the Alinskyite candidate. So omit it they do.

Here’s their storyline:

Supposedly, because of Trump’s (failed) attempts to do business in Russia; supposedly, because, as described, for example, by Anne Applebaum, among Trump’s advisers are 1) Carter Page, who, she writes, has “long-standing connections to Russian companies, including Gazprom, and has supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine”; and 2) campaign manager Paul Manafort, who “worked for many years in Ukraine on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president ousted in 2014,” Donald Trump is “finally” America’s honest-to-goodness “Manchurian candidate.”

Applebaum writes: “But now it is 2016, truth is stranger than fiction, and we finally have a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, with direct and indirect links to a foreign dictator, Vladimir Putin, whose policies he promotes.”

“Finally”? This presumes US presidential candidates and, by extenstion, their administrations, have had no such “links” before. This is like saying FDR didn’t have Harry Hopkins et al (to the max); as if FDR’s Veep and 1948 presidential candidate Henry Wallace didn’t have at least two top Soviet spies in waiting to fill top cabinet posts (FDR alumni Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White); as if Harry Truman, with full knowledge from the FBI, didn’t appoint Soviet agent White to head the IMF; as if Robert Kennedy didn’t have an ongoing “back-channel” relationship with Soviet agent Georgi Bolshakov; as if Bill Clinton didn’t mysteriously vacation in Brezhnev’s Moscow in December 1969 and Prague less than a year after Soviet tanks crushed Prague Spring; as if Obama wasn’t mentored and guided by a troika of Soviet-linked Communist progeny, and more.

France’s Bleeding Heart The meaning behind Islamic terrorists invading a church, murdering a priest and giving a sermon in Arabic afterwards. Stephen Brown

For centuries, France has always proudly borne the title “Eldest Daughter of the Church.” But two days ago, the Roman Catholic Church’s beloved child was barbarically violated and desecrated in a manner probably unseen since Clovis I was baptised in Reims on Christmas Day in 496 C.E.

Striking at France’s religious heart and traditional roots, two Islamic terrorists invaded the sixteenth-century St. Etienne church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, a town of about 30,000 near Rouen in Normandy, Tuesday morning after 9:00 a.m during mass. Eighty-four year-old priest Jacques Hamel was presiding over the ceremony with several nuns in attendance when the two entered the church by a back entrance armed with knives and “fake explosive belts.”

With reported yells of “Allahu Akbar,” present at all such horrifying Islamic undertakings, the two terrorists forced Father Jacques to his knees and proceeded to slit his throat before the terrified onlookers attending morning mass.

One nun, Sister Danielle, reported the “shocking details” of Father Jacque’s murder.

“They forced him to his knees. He wanted to defend himself. And that’s when the tragedy happened,” she said. “They recorded themselves doing it. They did a sort of sermon around the altar in Arabic. It is a horror.”

More shockingly, Sister Danielle said the terrorists told her: “You Christians, you kill us.”

One nun, however, managed to slip away and notify authorities.

“I left when they began to attack Father Jacques,” she said. “I do not even know if they realised that I was leaving.”

The Islamic murderers used two nuns “as human shields” for about an hour inside the church, during which time security forces had surrounded the building. When they exited the holy place, both terrorists were shot and killed. An elderly parishioner was also critically injured, but the circumstances concerning this person’s wounding are unclear. Three other hostages were reported unharmed.

The Islamic State (IS) was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, calling the two murderers its “soldiers.”

Creeping Sharia in Health Care By Carol Brown

Islamic supremacy is arriving in medical settings using stealth means, or what is often referred to as creeping sharia. Common themes include Muslim health care workers refusing to uphold infection control protocols, Muslim medical students refusing to study topics they deem forbidden according to Islamic law, Muslim visitors in hospitals ignoring hygiene guidelines to protect patients, and hospitals bending over backwards (or is it forwards?) to accommodate Muslim demands above and beyond anything done for members of any other religious or demographic group. Also covered are outright acts of violence perpetrated by Muslim men who attack hospital personnel.

Islamic supremacy + dhimmitude = the end of civilized societies. Before I begin the (by no means exhaustive) list of how this equation is playing out in health care settings throughout the West, I’d like to share a personal story.

Shortly after the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks I had occasion to speak with a Muslim doctor who lived down the street from me. At that point in time I was completely ignorant about Islam and was, in fact, still a leftist (though wouldn’t be for much longer).

The doctor, a meticulously groomed, soft-spoken, modern-appearing man made it clear that, among other things, he believed that Muslim females become “mature” when they turned nine and therefore can be married at that age. I ignored the alarm bell that went off in my head when he made that statement. Of course I’ve long since realized that this highly educated doctor who worked at a prestigious hospital had sanctioned, at the very least, child rape (in keeping with the teachings of his prophet, the king of all pedophiles, Mohammed).

And therein lies the rub with Muslim doctors, as with all Muslims. If they are good Muslims and follow the teachings of the Quran, their values will necessarily be in direct conflict with our own.

So with that in mind, let me begin our tour through Islamic supremacy in medial settings right here in the United States.

An Islamic medical association operating in this country was identified by the Muslim Brotherhood as one among several “organizations of our friends” — friends that could help the MB advance their goal of destroying America from within. Part of the association’s oath includes: “We serve no other God besides [Allah] and regard idolatry as an abominable injustice.”