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No Man’s Land by Mark Steyn

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

Further to my video observations about civilizational suicide as a form of moral narcissism comes this stark statistic from The Daily Mail:

In 2001 there were 1.5 million Muslims in England and Wales.

By 2014 there were 3 million Muslims in England and Wales.

So Britain’s reaction to the cultural fault line revealed by 9/11 was to double its Muslim population. So for the most part did the rest of the west. The Mail reports:

England is home to more than three million Muslims for the first time ever, new figures show.

The number in the country has doubled in just over a decade as a result of soaring immigration and high birth rates.

In some parts of London, close to half the population are now Muslims, according to detailed analysis by the Office for National Statistics obtained by The Mail on Sunday. On current trends they will be the majority in those areas within a decade…

A detailed breakdown obtained by this newspaper shows that Muslims are much younger than the general population. One in four Muslims in England and Wales – 746,000 – is aged under ten. In the whole country, the proportion is about one in seven.

The ONS has also identified eight areas around the country where Muslims make up a significant number of local residents.

In the East London borough of Tower Hamlets the proportion stood at 45.6 per cent in 2014, while in neighbouring Newham it is 40.8.

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Non-Muslim Minnesotans donning hijab to show support As more women don scarf to show support, reaction is divided By Allie Shah

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

Nade Conrad’s long black hair disappeared under the cover of a lilac hijab.

“I feel different,” she said.

Conrad, who is not Muslim, had donned the scarf to show support for a Muslim friend at Normandale Community College in Bloomington.

Such acts of “hijab solidarity” are on the rise.

World Hijab Day, a global event inviting people of all faiths to post pictures of themselves in a hijab on social media, is gathering steam. It was at a World Hijab Day event at Normandale — one of several such events held at Minnesota colleges in early February — that Conrad first tried on a hijab.

Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges has worn a head scarf when meeting with leaders of the city’s Somali-American community. And a professor at a Christian college in Illinois just resigned after a backlash over her choice to wear the scarf.

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American Muslims Caught Trying to Join ISIS, Offer Astounding Legal Defense By Walter Hudson

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

You can’t accuse us of conspiracy to commit murder, because we were actually solders engaged in war. That’s the argument offered by a group of five Muslim men from Minnesota who were caught last year attempting to flee the country to become ISIS fighters. From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

[The defendants] are asking a federal judge to drop murder conspiracy charges on grounds that they have “combatant immunity” under both common and international law.

They say combatants are immune from criminal prosecutions for acts of war, including murder, against military targets.

…

“ISIL has engaged in atrocious acts,” attorneys for the five said in one motion. “But however one might describe it as an entity, it has an organized professional army engaged in traditional military warfare — an army with which the defendants are alleged to have intended to join in ‘combat.’ ”

Federal prosecutors who brought the case argued in a court filing last month that the men were “grossly mistaken” in claiming ISIL fighters are combatants as part of a regularly constituted military force.

Regardless of how the case pans out, do we need any further evidence that ISIS is a declared enemy of the United States? They’re literally asking to be treated as such.

It’s ironic. On the one hand, you have folks advocating that terror suspects be treated like civilians and given criminal trials with full constitutional rights. On the other hand, you have these guys trying to dodge criminal prosecution by claiming to be non-civilian combatants. Which is it? It can’t be both.

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The Death Throes of Venezuela By Rick Moran

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

I suppose one shouldn’t gloat about the misfortune of your enemies, but what’s happening in Venezuela — politically and economically — is enormously satisfying.

This horrifying report on the state of the Venezuelan economy in The Economist, and the prospects for the future, seems like what a nation that celebrated a loony, paranoid view of the United States deserves.

The government has admitted that in the 12 months to September 2015 the economy contracted by 7.1% and inflation was 141.5%. Even Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s hapless heir and successor, called these numbers “catastrophic”. The IMF thinks worse is in store: it reckons inflation will surge to 720% this year and that the economy will shrink by 8%, after contracting by 10% in 2015. The Central Bank is printing money to cover much of a fiscal deficit of around 20% of GDP.

The government has run out of dollars—liquid international reserves have fallen to just $1.5 billion, thinks José Manuel Puente, an economist at IESA, a business school in Caracas. While all oil-producing countries are suffering, Venezuela is almost alone in having made no provision for lower prices.

This spells misery for all but a handful of privileged officials and hangers-on. Real wages fell by 35% last year, calculates Asdrúbal Oliveros, a consultant. According to a survey by a group of universities, 76% of Venezuelans are now poor, up from 55% in 1998. Drugmakers warn that supplies of medicines have fallen to a fifth of their normal level. Many pills are unavailable; patients die as a result. In Caracas food queues at government stores grow longer by the week. Shortages will get even worse in March, worries a food-industry manager. Violent crime is out of control.

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Can Rubio Recover? By Roger L Simon

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

What happened to Marco Rubio — the vaunted debater — at Saturday night’s debate (massacre)? Was he unmasked by that “bull in a New Jersey China shop” Chris Christie?

Hard to say, but I am with a huge standing room only crowd at McKelvie Intermediate School (yes, same place as Bush yesterday, but a lot more people) in affluent Bedford, NH, waiting for Marco and trying to find out. But unlike Jeb, Marco will be speaking from a thrust stage in the middle of the folks, which I think is smart because it’s more personal.

Rubio is still hanging in with a solid second place to Trump in the polls, but talk on the ground was he was poised to pull an upset here. Now, having been savaged by the pundits, he doesn’t look so good.

What happened? No question Marco tends to repeat himself. All candidates do, but he did so last night excessively in a way that is/was way too pre-planned.

But what I think was going on was what we call in Spanish an “ataque de nervios.” Rubio simply got too tense under attack and went to his default position — reciting. He has to learn to deal with that. He also may have had a case of potential “frontrunneritis.” Too much, too soon.

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Hillary and the Suspension of Disbelief By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

In a September 2007 congressional inquiry about the ongoing surge in Iraq, then Senator Hillary Clinton all but called Gen. David Petraeus a liar. After Petraeus gave a cautiously optimistic—and prescient—appraisal of the growing quiet in Iraq, Clinton curtly dismissed him with the literary term “suspension of disbelief,” which describes the creation of a fantasy world.

Clinton sarcastically rebutted Petraeus’s quite accurate data with the curt dismissal, “I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.”

But Iraq was no make-believe place. Petraeus went on to quiet Iraq and it stayed that way until President Obama, with eyes on the 2012 election, yanked all peacekeepers out in December 2011—with the full support of Hillary Clinton.

In ironic fashion, Hillary’s own vocabulary best describes her conduct. A “willing suspension of disbelief” most aptly sums up Hillary Clinton’s disastrous 2016 primary campaign, which so far seems more disastrous than her 2008 disastrous campaign.

This time around, she is again blowing a huge lead in the polls, but not to an inexperienced, charismatic young African-American trailblazer. Instead she is neck and neck with a white 74-year-old socialist from Vermont who wants to make college free and up taxes to a 90% rate.

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The Debate that Just Won’t Matter By Ned Barnett

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

Saturday night’s Republican debate could have made all the difference for any one of the candidates. Instead, it didn’t make any difference at all, not for any of them. The men at the top of the polls didn’t stand out, so nothing’s changed there. Yet the men at the bottom all stood out – all of them did about as well as they could have hoped – and each turned in his best performance to date. This means that none of them gained an advantage over his fellow low-polling contenders.

This means that the status quo will not be rocked, and the New Hampshire primary will turn out about the way the polls predicted.

The media, in the immediate aftermath of the debate, didn’t think so – but they are wrong.

The big “headline” from the debate was the media’s assumption that people would care about Marco Rubio’s repetition of the point he was trying to make – but they won’t care, because it is irrelevant to the voting public. It’s the kind of debating point that the media likes to jump on, but voters tend to ignore. As my wife said, “when you’re trying to make a point and nobody seems to be listening, you repeat yourself.” In other words, “it was no big deal.”

But in tracking the news coverage after the debate, ABC, Politico, Fox and others were almost identical in their comments – even similar in their examples from the past of why it would matter.

One commentator compared Rubio’s repetition moment to the Reagan-Carter Debate moment when the Great Communicator said, “there you go again.” That was a decisive moment, but only because the two men were in a head-to-head battle for the Presidency, and this was the only debate between the President and his rival. However, in New Hampshire, it was a “debate” among seven men, each trying to score points.

Another commentator compared the repetition to that moment in the vice presidential debate in 1988 when Dan Quayle struggled to explain what a man as young and inexperienced as he was would do if he suddenly became President. In frustration, he eventually cited JFK, to which Democrat Lloyd Benston said, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Everyone agreed that Benston won the debate – but lost the election. However, once again, this was the final head-to-head debate between two men running for the same office, rather than seven men trying to stand out from the crowd.

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The Goldilocks Approach to Global Warming By S. Fred Singer

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

Maybe you’ve heard or read somewhere that all kinds of terrible disasters will happen if the (global mean surface) temperature rises just 2⁰C above the pre-industrial level; according to some datasets, we are already more than halfway there. Further, activists want to lower the threshold to 1.5⁰C — thus advancing the date of the “apocalypse.”

Note, however, that these same activists never bother to define “mean temperature” or tell you how to measure it — if indeed that makes sense. Temperatures vary not only geographically, mainly with latitude and altitude, but also with season, time of day, and weather conditions.

Have you ever wondered where the 2⁰C number comes from? Does it sound like the Y2K scare all over again? Well, let me tell you, because I have something to do with provoking its original publication.

In 1995, I published an article in Eos, the journal that goes to every member of the American Geophysical Union, a professional society of which I am a life-member and an elected Fellow. I claimed there that we couldn’t see any evidence for a significant human contribution to global warming. Naturally, this provoked some immediate responses — which I commented on in turn.

One response came from two Swedish scientists, Henning Rodhe and Christian Azar of Stockholm University. This was the first time I saw this magic 2⁰C value. Of course, they gave a reference for this number, which turned out to be a publication in the Swedish journal Tellus — by the same authors. In other words, it was a self-reference — or a circular argument if you prefer. It may even have been self-refereed; I don’t know. Anyway, there is nothing to indicate that anything drastic will happen at the 2⁰C limit. None of the climate models suggest any particular disaster; there will be no runaway warming; and climate warming will not become irreversible.

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Is Trump a True Conservative? By Howard Richman and Raymond Richman see note please

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

Even gross louts can be conservative….rsk

During Saturday’s Republican presidential candidate debate in New Hampshire, Donald Trump was asked:

Mr. Trump, you’ve heard the argument from many of the candidates on this stage that you’re not a true conservative. Tell the voters watching tonight why you are.

He replied:

Well, I think I am, and to me, I view the word conservative as a derivative of the word “conserve.” We want to conserve our money. We want to conserve our wealth. We want to conserve. We want to be smart. We want to be smart where we go, where we spend, how we spend. We want to conserve our country. We want to save our country. And we have people that have no idea how to do that, and they are not doing it, and it’s a very important word and it’s something I believe in very, very strongly.

Trump gave a general definition of conservative, which is valid. But there are more specific definitions as well. A political conservative is one who believes in a limited role for government, a strict construction of the constitution, fiscal discipline, rule of law and free enterprise. Social conservatives support the traditional family and oppose abortion, pornography, sexual promiscuity and redefinition of marriage. One can be politically conservative without being socially conservative and vice versa. We are not experts on social conservatism, but we do know something about economics, so we will examine whether Trump is a political conservative.

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Mass Murderers & Radical Environmentalists by Paul R. Hollrah

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

If we were to compile a list of history’s most prolific mass murderers, who would we put on our list? Attila the Hun ravaged the Roman Empire during the 5th Century, killing and maiming all who stood in his way. In the 13th Century, Ghengis Khan and his Mongol hordes roamed far and wide, creating a bloody empire that stretched from China and the Korean peninsula all the way to Iraq and Eastern Europe.
From 1921 to 1959, Josef Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with a cruelty unprecedented in human history, killing some millions of his own countrymen. In the 1930’s and 40’s, Adolph Hitler murdered millions of people – mostly Jews, Gypsies, and others who were deemed ineligible for membership in the “master race.” And from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, murdered nearly 4 million in a wanton political “cleansing” of the Cambodian countryside.
But who would we select as the greatest mass murderer of all time? The leading candidate for that title would be American marine biologist Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, the principal force behind the banning of the pesticide DDT and the godmother of radical today’s radical environmentalists of the political left.
DDT is an odorless chemical pesticide used to control disease-carrying and crop-eating insects. Developed in Germany in 1874, it did not come into common usage until World War II when it was effectively used for pre-invasion spraying of jungles and marshes. Following the war, it was widely used throughout the world as a means of combating yellow fever, typhoid fever, malaria, and other diseases carried by insects.