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The Windmills of Bernie’s Mind Sen. Sanders better check with his Vermont constituents about the popularity of wind energy. By Robert Bryce

Posted By on February 8th, 2016

Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders in December introduced a sweeping renewable-energy plan that would, among other things, require tens of thousands of new wind turbines. Sen. Sanders’s “people before polluters” proposal may help rally his followers, but it won’t be so well received in rural America, where resistance to wind farms has been building. Nowhere is the backlash stronger than in Mr. Sanders’s state.

On Jan. 5, Vermont state Sens. John S. Rodgers and Robert Starr, both Democrats, introduced a bill (S. 210) that would ban wind projects above 500 kilowatts (an average industrial wind turbine has a capacity of 1.5 megawatts or more). Twenty-four co-sponsors filed an identical bill in Vermont’s lower chamber on Jan. 20.

Mr. Rodgers called the growing resistance to wind projects “a rebellion” at a news conference in Montpelier, the state capital. “I know of no place in the state where we can place industrial wind turbines without creating an unacceptable level of damage to our environment and our people.”

Wind-generated electricity in the U.S. has more than tripled since 2008, but opposition to the gigantic turbines, which can stand more than 500 feet, has been growing. In Vermont several protesters were arrested in 2011 and 2012 while trying to stop work on a wind project built on top of Lowell Mountain.

In March 2015 the Northeastern Vermont Development Association, a regional planning commission that covers 21% of the state’s land area, voted unanimously in favor of a resolution that said “no further development of industrial-scale wind turbines should take place in the Northeast Kingdom.”

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Slow-Motion Euthanasia Moral abandonment and the opiate epidemic By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on February 7th, 2016

It was strange to see Hsiu-Ying “Lisa” Tseng in chains, but there she was: shackled, in purplish county-jail scrubs, heavy chains swinging across her belly. She doesn’t look like much of a menace to society; in fact, she looks exactly like what she is: an unimposing, middle-aged, female doctor in Rowland Heights, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb that is home to a large and largely well-off Asian-American community, mainly of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean background.

She is going away, for 30 years to life, sentenced late last week on three second-degree murder convictions related to deaths in which she did not have a direct hand, at murder scenes she was nowhere near. It’s the rest of the charges that tell the story: 19 counts of unlawful prescription of a controlled substance, one count of obtaining a controlled substance by fraud.

Dr. Tseng is the first physician to be convicted of murder for contributing to the current epidemic of prescription-opiate addiction — the motive force behind the national heroin epidemic — through her criminally wanton over-prescription of pharmaceutical painkillers. She probably won’t be the last: Dr. Gerald Klein of Palm Beach, Fla., was charged with first-degree murder under similar circumstances last year, though in the end he was acquitted of all but one relatively minor drug charge. Other cases are in the works.

Dr. John K. Sturman Jr. had his admitting privileges revoked in the state of Indiana in 2012, and he had earlier been disciplined by state authorities in California for his irresponsible handling of opiate prescriptions. Naturally — inevitably, really — he was hired by our corrupt and incompetent Department of Veterans Affairs, to work at a VA hospital in Danville, Ill., where his responsibilities included — can you guess? — implementing an “opioid safety initiative.” Last summer, he was charged with three homicides and 16 felony counts related to improper prescriptions.

He was arrested at a VA hospital management meeting.

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Rubio’s Momentum Stalls in New Hampshire Debate By Tim Alberta & Alexis Levinson

Posted By on February 7th, 2016

Manchester, N.H. — Marco Rubio’s momentum just hit a brick wall in the Granite State.

In the home stretch of a New Hampshire primary famous for its last-minute voting swings, the Florida senator stumbled during Saturday night’s debate while under attack from Chris Christie and Jeb Bush. Both candidates will find themselves on the ropes if they can’t finish strong here Tuesday, and they ganged up on their chief rival early, questioning his readiness for the White House. Rubio appeared rattled by the onslaught, repeating the same talking point three times in a heavily scrutinized sequence that was easily his worst of the entire debate season.

Each of Iowa’s top-three finishers — Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump, returning to center stage after he skipped last week’s debate — had cause to believe they would be in the crosshairs of their opponents as the night began. But with Trump viewed as the clear front-runner to win New Hampshire, and Cruz courting a narrower slice of conservative voters in the state, it was Rubio who absorbed the most damaging blows as both Christie and Bush tried to stave off electoral extinction.

Polls have shown Rubio, Christie, Bush, and John Kasich competing for the same sprawling class of center-right voters in New Hampshire. Rubio had been surging coming into the debate, and seemed to be achieving some separation from the pack thanks to his stronger-than-expected third-place finish in Iowa. But a rocky performance at St. Anselm’s College may have opened the door for his rivals to halt his climb.

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Murray Walters Two-Faced Narcissism

Posted By on February 7th, 2016

“For the modern narcissist, refugees are the gift that just keeps on giving. In an age where nobody does much smiting of innocents (except for the nothing-to-do-with-Islam Islamic State), opportunities for the superlative differentiation of one’s enlightened self from evil brothers and sisters are thin on the ground. It seemed so easy in those halcyon Grade Five days to imagine you, personally, would never knowingly have given small pox or syphilis to an immune-naive native, released a cane toad into the bush or sentenced some starving tatterdemalion to transportation for stealing a loaf of bread. Virtue comes easy when there is no need to prove itself.”

In addition to their other perks and privileges, our political class and its Twitter camp followers enjoy the right to spray their virtue at will upon the public stage. And why shouldn’t they put their goodness on display? It is always someone else expected to pick up the tab.
Listening to the disappointments of your workaday narcissists throws up a few common utterances. The following phrases capture the nub of the problem:

“Well, after all I did for…” “I’m very sensitive and I get hurt very easily”“I feel like I’m always give, give, giving…”;

and much more like this, inevitably:“I was always, repeat always, there for Julie but she was just never there for me.”

For older readers, this apparent confusion about collecting Julie from life’s bus stop has nothing to do with a faulty GPS or daylight saving. “There“, is a mythical emotional “space”, as the current parlance would describe it, (for space think Fairyland, not Star Trek), where a sort of psychic symbiosis is the panacea for all of life’s troubles. The twin vanities of the narcissist are contained within these trite banalities: self-righteousness and the regret that others are failing their moral obligation to fuel the self-proclaimed victim’s ego, to do as wished and re-pay the aggrieved individual’s generosity with the full measure of interest demanded.

If narcissism is the fantasy of becoming ‘big’ to cope with the reality of being ‘small’ in the scale of the world, the invention of social media has plonked obscenely large helpings of ‘big’ social issues on the bain marie of our self esteem. For instance, only a matter of twenty years ago, the closest you could get to the modern phenomenon of ‘virtue signaling’, which teachers once knew simply as showing off, was the chance to read aloud to Grade 5 classmates your social studies project on Truganini or the crown of thorns starfish. But now, with one fell tweet, the entire world can hear how desperately you would like to see the Crown of Thorns stopped from puncturing the hulls of the refugee boats, not to mention flying Truganini from Manus Island for a medically safe abortion.

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Peter Smith The Tyranny of Clowns

Posted By on February 7th, 2016

“Western societies have moved from being self-confident, to being remorseful, to being crippled by self-flagellation. Unfortunately, it has now gone so far throughout politics, the media, universities and schools that the position is almost certainly irredeemable. It will need some mighty kind of backlash to right the ship. More likely it is that the Islamists will take over and all those rights that women and LGBTIs thought they’d won will disappear overnight; and in very unpleasant ways. Oh golly gosh, if only we’d known.”

The West’s political and purported moral leaders have traded self-confidence for guilt-stricken contortions borne of the compulsion to apologise. As we debase ourselves and recast traditional virtues as vices, Islamists are laughing their heads off — and ours too, sooner or later
For Quadrant readers who do not pore over letters to the editor of The Australian, it really is a worthwhile endeavour. The views of the writers vary, of course, but nonetheless, on balance, they strike a commonsense conservative chord which one can only wish the editor(s) would consistently emulate. This is the best recent example, in my view, published on January 29 from Ewan McLean, who lives in Avalon in NSW. It makes me want to go visit.

“Here we have senior army officer prostrating himself to the PC brigade only to be beaten over the head with handbag of one of his transgender subordinates. Stop the world, I want to get off.”

I watch Foyle’s War on TV. In most of the episodes he is a senior police officer in Hastings in England during the Second World War. It doesn’t matter that I might have seen an episode two or three times before. If it is on, I generally watch. Foyle epitomises common decency and commonsense. He is also ahead of his time on social issues – being non-judgemental, for example, when his son’s friend and fellow pilot in the RAF is revealed to be more interested in his son than in his own girlfriend.

I wondered what Foyle would have made of the ‘Australian of the Year’ saga and decided that the character and his times are so far apart from the contemporary world that it is completely ridiculous to contemplate such a question. He could not have made head nor tail of it. He would have thought it was a music-hall skit, a bizarre one at that.

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Lobbing Words at North Korea’s ‘Unacceptable’ Nuclear Missile Program By Claudia Rosett

Posted By on February 7th, 2016

Here we go again. In violation of a stack of United Nations sanctions resolutions, North Korea has just launched a rocket into space. Pyongyang is describing this latest blast-off as a satellite launch. But the requisite technology is also useful for developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, which is almost certainly what’s really going on. This launch comes just a month after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test, which Pyongyang advertised as a hydrogen bomb — meaning a weapon of even greater destructive power than the atomic bombs North Koreas has been testing since 2006.

In plain English, what does this portend? North Korea is working on long-range missiles that could deliver a nuclear strike on the United States. At the very least, such weapons could greatly enhance North Korea’s leverage in its longtime racket of nuclear extortion. There is also the deeply unpleasant possibility that at some point North Korea might use such weapons. There is also the growing danger that other countries (Iran comes to mind), observing the relative impunity with which North Korea has been pursuing its missile and bomb projects, will be quite rationally inclined to follow suit — or perhaps purchase Pyongyang’s presumably advancing nuclear missile technology and wares.

What are President Obama and his team doing about this? Secretary of State John Kerry has denounced this weekend’s test launch as — you guessed it — “unacceptable,” calling it “a major provocation.”

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Islam’s Sword Comes for Christians Muslim Persecution of Christians, December 2015 by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on February 7th, 2016

“It was very difficult above all when they said, ‘Become Muslim or we’ll cut your head off.'” — Rev. Jacques Mourad, Syriac Catholic priest, Syria.

“The only reason they [Muslim authorities] let you go is when they torture you to death…. They don’t want you to die in prison, it’s not their responsibility, so they send you home to die.” — Helen Berhane, gospel singer, Eritrea.

“[I]f they fear that people are offended by being surrounded by Christian symbols, then perhaps those [Muslim] people applied for asylum in the wrong country.” — A speaker for the Progress Party, Norway, on being asked to remove crosses from Christian camp sites to accommodate Muslim asylum seekers.

Hostility for Christmas was on full display. On Christmas Day, Muslims in Bethlehem, as documented here, set a Christmas tree on fire and greeted the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem with a hail of stones; in Belgium, Muslim “refugees” set fire to a public Christmas tree; in Nigeria, Muslim jihadis attacked churches during Christmas mass and killed at least 16; in the Philippines, on Christmas Eve, Muslim jihadis slaughtered 10 Christians to “make a statement;” in Bangladesh, churches skipped Christmas mass, due to assassination attempts on pastors and death threats against Christians; in Indonesia, churches were on “high alert,” with 150,000 security personnel patrolling; in Iran, Christians celebrating Christmas in homes were arrested; and three Muslim countries — Somalia, Tajikistan, and Brunei — formally banned any Christmas celebrations.

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Trump thinks conservatism means ‘conserving your wealth’ By Ed Straker

Posted By on February 7th, 2016

In the latest debate, Donald Trump made it clear, once again, that not only he is not conservative, but he has absolutely no idea what conservatism is.

When asked to define conservative, Trump, who usually gives expansive answers, managed to speak for less than 30 seconds before running out of ammo. His answer was that “Conservatism means … to conserve … your wealth”.

That’s not what conservatism is. A two-year transfer student into Wharton College (with an uncle in MIT) should be able to give a better answer than that. Marco Rubio, perspiring like a fire hydrant, nonetheless came closer to the mark with his canned answer to the same question: “Conservatism means limited government, free enterprise, and a strong national defense.” And he (or whoever prepared him with that answer) is right. Conservatism is about advocating the liberty of the individual and preventing the government from encroaching on it. Conservatism is about protecting private property rights and giving businesses the opportunity to grow without the stranglehold of regulation. It’s also about protecting our country with a strong national defense. And, although it didn’t occur to Marco or his debate prep team, it’s also about adhering to what’s in the Constitution.

But Donald Trump didn’t raise any of these points.

But this will not hurt him, because Trump’s supporters, by and large, are not conservatives. It seems as if a reason that he underperformed in Iowa was that he was competing with Marco Rubio for presumably more moderate voters, and when Marco Rubio surged, it was at Trump’s expense.

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More cooking the books at a VA clinic By Rick Moran

Posted By on February 7th, 2016

The VA inspector general has issued a scathing report accusing a Colorado VA clinic of manufacturing wait time data and delaying treatment for hundreds of veterans.

Washington Times:

Employees at a Colorado Springs VA clinic incorrectly reported wait times for veterans, making it appear that they got their appointments sooner than they actually did, while at least 288 veterans had to wait longer than the government’s 30-day target for an appointment, a federal watchdog said Thursday.

The VA inspector general found that 64 percent of veterans faced excessive wait times at the PFC Floyd K. Lindstrom Outpatient Clinic.

Excessive wait times ranged from 31 days to 200 days.

Staffers are also required to put veterans facing long wait times for appointments on the Veterans Choice List, which allows patients to receive outside care. However, investigators found that, for 288 veterans with excessive wait times, staffers either did not add them to the list in a timely manner or did not add them to the list at all.

One hundred veterans were denied care because they were not added to the list.

It was not made clear in the report whether staffers deliberately falsified records to make wait times appear shorter.

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A Lesson to Republicans in Canada’s Conservative Party Defeat By David Solway and Janice Fiamengo

Posted By on February 7th, 2016

The failure of Canada’s majority Conservative government to win re-election on October 17, 2015 should serve as an object lesson to the Republican establishment in the United States. Among a number of reasons for the debacle, the abandonment or weakening of first principles in the name of pragmatic and ideological compromise was a major factor leading to the Conservative defeat.

The Tories attempted to cater to non-conservative voters, to appeal to a broad constituency, to be liked, to be moderate, by softening the party’s message and gutting many of its programs. Perhaps most obviously, they drew back from significantly defunding and at least partially privatizing our deep-left state-supported national broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The CBC is a cultural Marxist production that never met a Conservative policy it liked. It sees its mandate as constantly attacking every Conservative idea or piece of legislation while propagandizing on behalf of multiculturalism; Islam as a religion of peace; anti-Zionism; and radical movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Idle No More, and #BlackLivesMatter. It sided with Canada’s two socialist parties, the Liberals and the New Democratic Party (NDP). But aside from legislating a small reduction in the CBC’s operating budget, the Conservatives allowed the “MotherCorp” to continue shilling for the opposition. Afraid of giving its foes something to be offended by, the Conservative government funded its own demise.

No less catastrophic, the Conservatives failed to pass legislation to radically protect free speech across the country – legislation that would outrank our provincial kangaroo courts, known as Human Rights Commissions, whose mandate has been to prosecute individual citizens and groups on the flimsy grounds of “hate speech.” Aside from the fact that leaving these provincial tribunals in place did not garner a single bit of support or sympathy from the social justice totalitarians, this signal failure guarantees that open discussions essential to Canada’s future as a robust democracy – especially conversations about mass immigration, Islamic terrorism, and the relation between the two – will continue to be curtailed by the left-leaning proponents of censorship in the name of social “harmony.” Such conversations are also, not incidentally, essential to the survival of a genuine Conservative party.