The Totalitarianism of Modern Airports by Edward Cline

I hate flying, and have hated it for years ever since 9/11, and have sworn never to fly again. It’s for my blood pressure. I hate it not only because of the airlines’ treatment of passengers or customers as faceless widgets to be squeezed together as much as possible in an airport, but also on the planes, forcing one to come in physical contact with other passengers, many of whom one would not otherwise wish to touch. I hate it also because of the role of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

The typical large airport is a microcosm of a regulated, controlled society, an experiment in Progressivism. The miasma of the environment is repellent if not dulling to the senses. Modern, post-9/11 airports are intended to be soul-destroying because the only way to exercise the government’s power is to hold one’s business and purposes hostage and extort soul-destroying submission to the state’s will. “You have to go there?” says the TSA. “Well, you have to get past me first. Drop your drawers.”

All American airports have been turned into microcosms of totalitarianism. It’s not a hard concept to grasp, once one has passed through – or rather endured – being molested, fondled, spindled, stamped, x-rayed, bar-coded, ordered from here to there, stripped bare to reveal one’s secrets or shames, approved or disapproved, and made to conform to the government’s measure of good and acceptable behavior. The milieu demands total submission to the state’s will and ends. There is certainly no ambience left to an airport, except one of nonstop dread and mental numbness.

Everything seems to be designed and planned to distract one from observing that once one is in the clutches of the government, and also of the airlines, one has been reduced to the status of of an assembly line cog to be processed and dispatched as speedily as possible – speedily in terms of bureaucracy.

I remember the time when flying was somewhat romantic, something to look forward to with some excitement. I remember being greeted by a throng of friends when I stepped off a plane. Today, anyone not flying isn’t even allowed in most of the spaces and byways of an airport. One’s friends, family, and well-wishers have been banned from having any business inside an airport. One’s greeters are confined to an area outside of the processing center.

Ramadan Again: White Flags, Big Lies, Dead Bodies Diana West

In essence, my 2007 book, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, was an extended rumination on the cultural factors that made Americans unable to talk about, study, teach, debate, let alone face and ward off Islam like “grown-ups” — honestly, logically, fearlessly. It is a cultural history of how Americans and other Western peoples evolved into the perfect dhimmi.

Today, the taboo against telling the truth about our Islamic crisis, just like the Islamic crisis itself, is far worse because it has been institutionalized, deeply rooted, selected for, and otherwise set in the postmodern equivalent of stone.

After Orlando, after Trump’s response, unique in the annals of national politics for its discussion of protecting the nation from mass Muslim immigration, and after the predictable anger directed at Trump (not the Orlando jihadist and this latest cycle of Islamic conquest that spat him out), I thought it might be interesting to look back not at the beginning, of course, but at a beginning. The first post-9/11 Western counterattack — on the West.

Chapter 8 of The Death of the Grown-Up includes the question:

Who can forget the storm of censure that rained down on former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for illuminating the differences between Western and Islamic culture, and for finding- for stating out loud – that Western culture was superior?

A decade after writing that, I wonder if anyone can remember.

It was less than two weeks after 9/11 on “our civilization,” when he spoke out, in Italian, about the superiority of Western civilization due to its principles of liberty.

The BBC translated his remarks this way:

“We have to be conscious of the strength of our civilization. We cannot put the two civilizations on the same level. All of the achievements of our civilization: free institutions, the love of liberty itself–which represents our greatest asset–the liberty of the individual and the liberty of the peoples. These certainly are not the inheritance of other civilizations such as Islamic civilization.”

And the AP wrote:

“We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights and–in contrast with Islamic countries–respect for religious and political rights, a system that has as its values understandings of diversity and tolerance. [Western civilization is superior because] has at its core, as its greatest value, freedom, which is not the heritage of Islamic culture.”

Versions vary somewhat, but the gist is clear. Maybe the bilionaire media-mogul-turned-politician was an unlikely champion of the virtues of Western civ–or anything else for that matter. After all, the almost operatically buffoonish and scandal-ridden Berlusconi was in the public eye practically as much for his outrageous financial maneuvres as for his political programs. Nonetheless, this Italian prime minister was the lone ranger on the international horizon to seize on and uphold the essence of Western civilization-liberty, prosperity, human rights-and point out the obvious: Liberty, prosperity, and human rights are not part of Islamic civilization. We have to be conscious, we must be aware of this distinction. It was something worth fighting for, Berlusconi presumed, against Islamic terrorists and the Islamic nations and networks that openly, secretly, tactically, financially or religiously support them. Some reports included Berlusconi’s additional point-strangely overlooked–that just as Western liberty had defeated communism, so, too, would it vanquish Islam.

In a pre-PC time, such remarks would have been regarded as boiler-plate bromides, the platitudes of a politician trying out new applause lines at the outbreak of war. But back to real life. According to the “international community” circa September 2001, Berlusconi couldn’t have said anything more horrifying. …

Nick Turner Brexit, Part IV: A Question of Confidence

If the looming vote endorses the rejection of the EU, it will be Britain declaring, as it always has, that it is open to the world. More than that, it will be a statement of confidence, an affirmation of history and a declaration that it it is not scared nor has reason to be.
The current government is in a unique position to change Britain. While there seems to be a rise in socialist movements in both the UK and America, they are in no way mainstream. Despite Senator Bernie Sanders success in the Democratic primaries, an analysis of his supporters shows they are not the poorest, who have been voting for Mrs Clinton.[1]. Similarly in the UK, the movement that has recently taken control of theLabour opposition is an unholy alliance of unreformed hard-leftists and younger affluent voters attracted by the fresh smell of musty old ideas, the sport for whom its but a short step from social media to socialism. However the left is intellectually bankrupt, their ideas disproven by the history the right forgot to teach.

The old New Labour faction is reduced to clinging to the Big Government statists on the Continent while the new Old Labour group see the EU as corporate menace and wish to rewind the European clock to the 1970s. In the 2015 General Election the public revolted at the thought of a socialist-light party, never mind a socialist one. This is not to assume that the opposition is unelectable. There are political cycles, just as there are economic ones, and for all their faults Labour is still the alternative government. The Conservative Party made itself electable, but that is not to say it is particularly loved. A vote to leave would unquestionably be a vote for self-determination, and you cannot have political freedoms without economic ones. A radical move by the government could entrench lower tax rates for good, to paraphrase Milton Friedman “the important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically unprofitable for the wrong people to do the wrong thing.”

The reason the left can get any traction is due to the perceived failures of capitalism. One can make an argument for nationalised utilities or railways on the basis that no one is offering to build a new pipe into your home or introduce new tracks for mag-lev trains. The competition principle underpinning the free market gets no suction here. However this is to forget that nationalisation stymies innovation. It is an acceptance of the status quo. An acquiescence to the idea that this is as good as it gets. A surrender to managed decline.

The Answers

In recent times, putting one’s trust in the free market has been given a bad name. Whether it is for the 2008 crash or the behaviour leading up to it, capitalism has been under attack. Yet it was not the free market that crashed the world economy but government interventions. In both Britain and the US, the economic gains of the free market governments of Lady Thatcher and President Reagan were squandered by those that followed. While President Clinton governed as a centrist and was moderated by a Republican-controlled House, the Bush Administration that succeeded ended up spending in a most un-Republican way. The size of Mr Blair majorities effectively made him an elected dictator. After following the economic plans of Conservative Chancellor Kenneth Clarke in their first term, New Labour went on a very Old Labour spending spree in their subsequent ones. The results were to entrench crony capitalism in oligopolistic markets while government spending and regulations grew. By interfering in the markets they created bubbles. Addicted to high tax receipts, assured that all their regulators had everything in check and convinced they could manipulate the markets to solve domestic housing policy, they allowed firms to become too big to fail, then encouraged them to lend and spend like it was 1999 and we were all at the end of history. When the market tried to correct itself the systemic risk panicked policy makers into the biggest transfers of debt ever, yet seemed to absolve anyone of responsibility.

Peter O’Brien The War Not Prosecuted

Until the West’s leaders are prepared to call a spade an invasion, all this brave talk of fighting militant Islam will result in nothing more than a few more air strikes, more summits and, just maybe, additional special forces advisers on the ground. That is not enough. We will lose.
Last Wednesday, former Army officer and now poster girl for the LGBTI community, Catherine McGregor, had a piece in the Daily Telegraph. Here is the opening sentence:

Australia is engaged in a war, though you would never grasp that from listening to our political leaders or the political class.

Well, that’s refreshing, I thought. I had previously written McGregor off as, primarily, a self-promoting activist. Maybe there’s more to her than I thought, I thought. Let mes see what she has to say. The piece started promisingly with McGregor explaining that our present troubles had their genesis a long time ago.

I do not subscribe to the populist view that this began on September 11, 2001. There have been perennial frontier clashes between Islam and the West going back to The Crusades. Muslim invasions of Europe were defeated as recently as the lifting of the siege of Vienna in 1683.

She rightly criticizes the progressives’ position: that Islam was not the Orlando killer’s motivation. Unfortunately her piece goes rapidly downhill from there, degenerating into a lament at the way that conservatives have allegedly mistreated her LGBTI cohort:

Conservatives have been just as guilty of sophistry. The worst have instinctively blamed the victims for flaunting their “perversion” and ­ piously observed that Islam and homosexuality are each derived from Satan. I could not make this garbage up.

“I could not make this garbage up”? I rather think she did. Perhaps she should have named and shamed any conservative who spouted this ‘garbage’ – a conservative of standing, that is, not some lunatic on Twitter or the utter crazies who fill the pews at the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. Perhaps she didn’t think to cite them when writing her article, but the ABC certainly did. On Thursday’s Lateline, compere Tony Jones did a satellite interview with Louis Theroux that began by quoting the crackpot congregation’s delight at the Pulse massacre. Remember, it was a Muslim who killed 49 people in an orgy of bloodshed, but Lateline chose instead to place its focus on an entirely unrepresentative group of “Christians”. Why would that be, do you think? No need to answer.

But back to McGregor, who continued in a similar vein. And at the end we are not treated to any suggestions as to how Group Captain McGregor, a senior serving officer, thinks we should prosecute this war she claims we are involved in. On her initial point — Islam’s expansionist enmity for the West — McGregor is right. But like her former boss and mentor, Australian of the Year David Morrison, she seems unable to talk the talk, let alone walk the walk.

Yes, we are at war. Most Quadrant readers have known as much for years. After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Francois Hollande also said it, but whether the French president or any of the so-called leaders of the West genuinely understand what this means is highly doubtful. That they have the stomach for such a war for is an even more dubious proposition.

Europe is being invaded, an invasion that commenced many years ago and has been facilitated by one of the most self-destructive initiatives that the West could possibly devise: the European Union. That most of the invaders are unarmed is neither here nor there. Thanks to the mindless vacuity of the progressive Left and its infiltration of all our institutions, they haven’t needed to be armed. But the effect is the same. The sheer numbers of those so called ‘refugees’ guarantee that they will fester as sullen, unassimilated and parasitic communities, feeding off their host nations while coming to represent an ever-larger and more powerful demographic within them. Ultimately, as Mark Steyn has warned (see the clip below), they will take over.

ISIS Video Portrays Preparation for Times Square Suicide Bombing By Bridget Johnson

An official media affiliate of the Islamic State released a new video this weekend praising the Orlando attack, calling for similar attacks in multiple languages and portraying a suicide bomber striking Times Square.

Titled “You Are Not Held Responsible Except for Yourself,” the Al-Furat Media Foundation release was distributed online with a promotional banner featuring President Obama, Omar Mateen and scenes from the previous weekend’s carnage.

Al-Furat specializes in Russian-language messages to Muslims in the Caucasus and beyond. Earlier this year, for example, the media wing released the Philippine terrorist group Abu Sayyaf’s video pledging allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The video opens with the tag “USA” in the upper corner and shots of an unseen person assembling a bomb to put in a suicide vest. The person buttons up a blue shirt, straps on the bomb belt, and zips up a dark brown leather jacket to conceal it. He’s wearing a stainless steel wristwatch that reads 9:25.

That’s followed by scenes of Times Square and the torso of the leather-jacketed man walking along the street. A TGI Friday’s sign is shown.

In a close-up of the man with no location shown, he’s pulling the ring on his detonator.

It appears to be mock-up footage from an Al-Jazeera segment, with the network’s logo fuzzed out but still discernible.

News footage is then shown of the ABC News building banner in New York scrolling a headline about the November Paris attacks.

Then, pictures of Mateen along with closeups of the weapons he used in the June 12 attack on the Pulse nightclub: a Sig Sauer MCX .223 caliber rifle and Glock 17 9 mm.

Footage of the attack from American and Arabic TV is shown.

A black jihadist in fatigues with an outdoor backdrop that looks like IS territory in the Middle East is identified as Abu Isamil al-Amriki; he speaks perfect English and is referred to as an American, yet he speaks with a slight accent.

“Do you think you are at war with a small group of mujahideen in Iraq, Syria, Libya and other places? You are sadly mistaken. And do you think you will defeat us by bombing our homes with your drones and F-16s?” Abu Ismail says.

“O America, indeed you are at war with … sincere Muslims around the world who yearn and desire to see the honor of Islam returned,” he adds. “And O America, indeed you are at war with the people who wish to be killed and slain for the sake of Allah… you are at war with the holy Quran.”
CONTINUE AT SITE

Obama brings massive carbon footprint for his visit to Yosemite to hector us over global warming By Thomas Lifson

President Obama and his family are enjoying Father’s Day in Yosemite National Park, a place of stunning natural beauty that refreshes the mind, the heart, and the soul. But of course, Obama being Obama and America needing constant correction of the evils of our ways, the trip became yet another opportunity for Obama to lecture us on why we should never emit CO2 the way he does, because all that CO2 will warm up the planet, according to computer models that haven’t predicted anything correctly.

Oh, and it will also make the planet greener, literally, by providing the CO2 that plants need. But that is not what the president told us:

Obama remarked not just on the beauty of the parks but also the threats they’re under from climate change. He said officials at Yosemite told him climate change has already forced some bird habitats to move further north and long-standing wetlands have begun to dry up. Across the country, Obama said rising seas threaten everywhere from the Everglades to New York’s iconic State of Liberty.

“That’s not the America I want to pass on to the next generation. That’s not the legacy I think any of us want to leave behind. The idea that these places that sear themselves into your memory could be marred or lost to history, that’s to be taken seriously. We can’t treat these things as something that we deal with later,” Obama said. “On this issue, unlike a lot of issues, there’s such a thing as being too late.”

Not only did President Obama bring a 40 car motorcade to Yosemite, causing no small amount of mirth on Twitter:Strange lack of hand-wringing or condemnation of not taking climate change seriously with this huge carbon footprint

His aerial carbon emissions were spectacular:

Back at Castle Airport (formerly Castle AFB) near Merced. The CO2 has been spewing for days and days:

There already has been activity at Castle this week from jumbo jets delivering equipment and Marine One and Two, the presidential helicopters, said Joe Pruzzo, CEO of Castle Air Museum.

Down the Memory Hole: In 2008 Obama campaign booted 3 newspapers off his campaign plane By Thomas Lifson

The mainstream media have been hysterical this week in their response to Donald Trump’s revocation of the Washington Post’s campaign press credentials in response to coverage and headlines so unfair that the paper went back and changed them. Yet those same media outlets remained silent in 2008 when the Obama presidential campaign booted 3 major newspapers that had been writing unfavorably about the campaign off its press plane. Joe Concha of Mediaite remembers what happened 8 years ago, and contrasts the media response in the two instances:

The year was 2008. The candidate had a big lead in the polls going into election day. And in a preview of how petulant he would be act as Commander-in-Chief as it pertains to his treatment of the press, Barack Obama decided he didn’t like what three newspapers were writing about him, so he kicked its reporters off his campaign plane.

As Concha points out, the Obama campaign claimed that there sinply wasn;t enough space, instead of being honest, as Trump has been, about the unfavorable coverage being the rootof the matter. Somehow, on the Obama plane there was room for Glamour, Ebony, and Jet, but no room for the Dallas Morning News, New York Post or Washington Times.

The contrast in the treatment of Trump and Obama is stunning:

Chris Cillizza in 2016 on candidate Trump’s decision with the Post: “Barring reporters from public events because you disagree with what they write is a dangerous precedent.”

Chris Cillizza in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

Slate in 2016 on Trump’s decision: Trump’s Washington Post revocation “marks an unprecedented escalation in his war” against media.

Slate in 2008 regarding the same situation with candidate Obama: (Crickets)

The Speech Intimidation Game The left plays rough to shut down conservative ideas—as Visa and Coke learned the hard way. Kimberley Strassel

To this day, Lisa Nelson refers to it as the “corporate blackmail” letter. It arrived in the early spring of 2012 at her Visa office in Washington, D.C. Ms. Nelson at the time was in the government-relations department for the credit-card company and had seen her share of bare-knuckle political activism. But this letter was bigger, meaner, scarier.

The letter was officially addressed to Visa CEO Joseph Saunders and every member of Visa’s board; Ms. Nelson had been cc’ed. It came from a black advocacy group known as Color of Change, co-founded by liberal activist Rashad Robinson and by onetime Obama adviser Van Jones.

The month before, a 17-year-old African-American in Sanford, Fla., Trayvon Martin, had been fatally shot by a neighborhood-watch volunteer named George Zimmerman. The circumstances of the altercation proved confusing, but the black community instantly became angry over the police’s decision not to arrest Mr. Zimmerman. Florida has a “stand your ground” law, which authorizes a person to protect against a perceived threat. Within a few weeks, Color of Change was blaming this law on a center-right organization known as the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Visa was among a number of companies that gave money to ALEC, in support of its efforts to foster a pro-business environment in state legislatures. Color of Change’s letter was direct: Visa’s board must immediately pull all money from ALEC. If it did not, the advocacy group would air radio ads in the hometowns of Visa board members, holding them accountable for the death of a young black man.

The Visa board members weren’t alone. More than a few Fortune 500 companies had made the mistake of revealing, at an event here or there, that they donated to ALEC. The threatening letters flew out to board members at McDonald’s, John Deere, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Amazon, Wendy’s, Procter & Gamble.

Ms. Nelson, whom ALEC hired as its CEO in 2014, recalls thinking that “I needed to keep making the case that, as a company, we could not be put in a position where we could be told who we could work with.” Her boss agreed. Visa kept on with its ALEC donations. At least for a time. CONTINUE AT SITE

Britain and Obama’s ‘Back of the Queue’ I hope that Americans who know what self-government means to a free people will rally to the cause of an independent Britain. Andrew Roberts

On June 23 the British people will be going to the polls to choose whether they want to continue with the present system whereby 60% of British laws are made in Brussels and foreign judges decide whether those laws are legitimate or not, or whether we want to strike out for independence and the right to make all of our own laws and have our own British judges decide upon them.

It’s about whether we can recapture the right to deport foreign Islamist hate preachers and terrorist suspects, or whether under European human-rights legislation they must continue to reside in the U.K., often at taxpayers’ expense. The European Union is currently experiencing migration on a scale not seen since the late 17th century—with hordes of young, mostly male Muslims sweeping from the southeast into the heart of Europe. Angela Merkel invited them in and that might be fine for Germany, but why should they have the right to settle in Britain as soon as they get a European passport?

Surely—surely—this is an issue on which the British people, and they alone, have the right to decide, without the intervention of President Obama, who adopted his haughtiest professorial manner when lecturing us to stay in the EU, before making the naked threat that we would be sent “to the back of the queue” (i.e., the back of the line) in any future trade deals if we had the temerity to vote to leave.
Was my country at the back of the line when Winston Churchill promised in 1941 that in the event of a Japanese attack on the U.S., a British declaration of war on Japan would be made within the hour?

Was Great Britain at the back of the line when America was searching for allies in the Korean War in the 1950s?

When America decided to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War in the early 1990s, was Britain at the back of the line when we contributed an armored division that fought on your right flank during Operation Desert Storm?

Were we at the back of the line on 9/11, or did we step forward immediately and instinctively as the very first of your allies to contribute troops to join you in the expulsion of the Taliban, al Qaeda’s hosts, from power in Afghanistan?

Or in Iraq two years later, was it the French or the Germans or the Belgians who stood and fought and bled beside you? Whatever views you might have over the rights or wrongs of that war, no one can deny that Britain was in its accustomed place: at the front of the line, in the firing line. So it is not right for President Obama now to threaten to send us to the back of the line. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Impact of Islamic Fundamentalism on Free Speech by Denis MacEoin ****

The 57-member-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) have been working hard for years to render Islam the only religion, political system and ideology in the world that may not be questioned with impunity. They have tried — and are in many respects succeeding — to ring-fence Islam as a creed beyond criticism, while reserving for themselves the right to condemn Christians, Jews, Hindus, democrats, liberals, women and gays in often vile, even violent language. Should anyone say anything that seems to them disrespectful of their faith, he or she will at once be declared an “Islamophobe.”

Like almost every world leader, Obama declares, with gross inaccuracy, that “Islam is a religion of peace”. It is politically expedient to deny the very real connection to jihad violence in the Qur’an, the Traditions (ahadith), shari’a law, and the entire course of Islamic history. They do this partly for political reasons, but probably more out of fear of offending Muslims. We know only too well how angry many Muslims can become at even the lightest offence.

“If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name. … I hope nobody ever comes after them.” – Salman Rushdie, on the PEN members who objected to giving its award to Charlie Hebdo, after 12 of its staff were murdered by jihadists.

The OIC succeeded in winning a UN Human Rights Council resolution that makes “defamation of religion” a crime. But the OIC knows full well that only Muslims are likely to use Western laws to deny free speech about their own faith. Last year, the US Congress introduced House Resolution 569, also purportedly intended to combat hate speech. It contains an oddity: it singles out Muslims for protection three times. It does not mention any other faith community.

One of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment in Europe and the United States is the principle of free speech and reasoned criticism. Democracy is underpinned by it. Our courts and parliaments are built on it. Without it, scholars, journalists, and advocates would be trapped, as their ancestors had been, in a verbal prison. It is enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, in the words

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”