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N. Korea parades missiles, drones in anniversary celebration, Eric Talmadge

Posted By on October 10th, 2015

“After his speech, thousands of soldiers held up colored cards to spell out “Songun politics” and “Defending our homeland.”
“Our revolutionary force is ready to respond to any kind of war the American imperialists want.”

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un declared Saturday that his country was ready to stand up to any threat posed by the United States as he spoke at a lavish military parade to mark the 70th anniversary of the North’s ruling party and trumpet his third-generation leadership.
The parade, which featured thousands of goose-stepping soldiers and military hardware including missiles and drones mounted on trucks, kicked off what is expected to be one of the North’s biggest celebrations ever — an attention-getting event that is the government’s way of showing the world and its own people that the Kim dynasty is firmly in control and its military a power to be reckoned with.
Kim, clad in black, walked down a red carpet and saluted his honor guard. He then walked up to a podium and waved to the troops taking part in the parade in Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square. Visiting Chinese official Liu Yunshan stood clapping to Kim’s left, with senior North Korean officials on Kim’s right. Kim smiled as he spoke with Liu through an interpreter.

Kim then delivered a speech in which he said North Korea would stand up to the U.S., issuing the type of fiery rhetoric that is commonly used by the North.
“Our revolutionary force is ready to respond to any kind of war the American imperialists want,” said Kim, whose speech was interrupted by applause several times.
“Through the line of Songun (military-first) politics, our Korean People’s Army has become the strongest revolutionary force and our country has become an impenetrable fortress and a global military power,” he said.

BOOKS Comments turned off

A Dismal Anniversary—50 Years of the Immigration Act of 1965 John Derbyshire

Posted By on October 10th, 2015

On October 3rd, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Immigration Act.

The 1965 Act did two big things, and a multitude of small ones.ustoadmit

The first big thing it did: abolish the old National-Origins quotas, established in 1921, revised in 1924 and 1929. The idea of the quotas was to maintain demographic stability by limiting settlement from any European country to some fixed percent of that country’s representation in a recent census.

The 1921 Act used the 1910 census as its benchmark. The 1924 Act used the 1890 census in order to reduce the quota numbers on South and East Europeans, who it was thought did not make as good citizens as north and west Europeans. The 1929 revision went to the 1920 census.

To present-day sensibilities it all sounds very horrible: “Whaddya mean, an Italian or a Pole doesn’t make as good a citizen as a German or Irishman? Whoa!”

But that was then and this is now. And personally, I decline to join in the screaming and fainting. I take the old-fashioned view that a nation has the right to admit for settlement whomever it pleases, on any grounds at all, rational or otherwise. It’s up to the people of that nation and their legislators to say who they want to settle. It’s not up to foreigners.

If, when I applied for U.S. citizenship in 2001, the immigration authorities had said: “Sorry, pal, we don’t like the look of your teeth, and we have enough Brits anyway,” it would not have occurred to me that I had any grounds for complaint. I might have wheedled and pleaded a bit—”Come on, just one more won’t hurt, and I’ll find an orthodontist, I promise”— but if they’d sent me back to Blighty at last I would have understood. This country belongs to Americans. It’s for them and their legislators to say who they want joining them.

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1967: The end of Che and start of the myth By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Posted By on October 10th, 2015

The man who failed at revolution is now seen as a revolutionary icon!
Che Guevarra was captured and executed 48 years ago.

As Humberto Fontova wrote, Che’s revolution had been floundering down in Bolivia. He was a beaten man by the time that they caught up with him:

Had Ernesto Guevara not linked up with Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city that fateful summer of 1955 – had he not linked up with a Cuban exile named Nico Lopez in Guatemala the year before who later introduced him to Raul and Fidel Castro in Mexico city – everything points to Ernesto continuing his life of a traveling hobo, panhandling, mooching off women, staying in flophouses and scribbling unreadable poetry.

Although a fixture on modern college campuses, Che was no hero. It is thus fitting that when death came for him, on Oct. 8 1967, Che went not with a bang but with a whimper. “Don’t shoot!” I’m Che! I’m worth more to you alive than dead!” he pleaded when approached by two Bolivian soldiers, dropping the fully loaded weapons he had not hesitated to discharge against unarmed victims. To the very end, Che Guevara remained a coward.

We will never know for sure why Che ended up in Bolivia. Maybe someday Fidel and Raul Castro will clear it up in a memoir.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Carbon Tax Rainmakers By Craig Brown

Posted By on October 10th, 2015

In the 1956 film The Rainmaker Burt Lancaster portrays a drifter promising a 1930’s small Kansas town he will make it rain for $100. This is during the dust bowl in the American West and people were desperate to try anything to relieve the drought. Today the rainmakers offer the same relief. It is called a carbon tax. If townspeople will pay the rainmakers, they promise it’s not too late to change the weather. So what is the difference between the rainmakers today and in the 1930’s? Not much. A carbon tax: 1) will reduce CO2 in the atmosphere hardly a whit; 2) has huge costs; and 3) needs global participation, which costs will eventually be borne mostly by the American people. Beyond this, the premise by today’s rainmakers that anthropogenic CO2 is the significant driver of global temperatures is arguable.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Global Warming: Making the Ruling Class into the Crackpot Class By Norman Rogers

Posted By on October 10th, 2015

What links global warming and the ruling class? A fervent belief in the former seems to have a powerful inverse correlation with the impressiveness of the latter.

The ruling class is made up of people from privileged backgrounds. They are usually wealthy. They go the elite colleges and often hold important jobs. They are the class from which many of our important leaders are drawn.

The Italian sociologist Pareto theorized that ruling classes, after time, lose their vigor and sense of purpose. They go soft. When that happens, they are replaced by tougher upward strivers.

Compare two secretaries of state. John Foster Dulles was born in 1888 and was Eisenhower’s during the 1950s. John Kerry was born in 1943 and is the current one for Obama. Both of these men were born into the ruling class.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

University Language Campaign: ‘Get Over It,’ ‘Blind,’ and ‘Skinny’ Are ‘Violent’ Words And so are “whitewashed” and “gingers.” (?????!!!!!) by Katherine Timpf

Posted By on October 10th, 2015

A “Language Awareness Campaign” at Western University in London has declared a whole host of words and phrases to be offensive and “violent” – including “get over it,” “blind to something,” and “skinny.”

The point of the campaign, which was part of student orientation, was to warn against using language with an “inherently violent nature” — and featured posters of students explaining why certain words and phrases fall into this category.

For example:

“I don’t say that ‘I was “blind” to something’ because it ignores the experiences of differently abled individuals.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Ben Carson’s Response to PC Outrage Is Smarter than Trump’s By David French

Posted By on October 10th, 2015

For the fourth time this week, Ben Carson finds himself embroiled in controversy. This time, he’s in trouble with the Left for declaring that, “the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.” Before that, he caught flack for saying that people should rush mass shooters, that the loss of constitutional liberties is “more devastating” than a body with bullet wounds, and that not “every lifestyle is exactly of the same value.”

The list could go on — Carson has been touching off such online tempests for months.

Each time, the pattern is the same: Carson expresses his opinion — typically grounded in common sense and widely shared by the American people — the media declares that some people are “offended,” and he doubles down, restating his position again and again in the same calm, even tone.

Here he is, for example, addressing his comments about the Oregon shooting:

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A Reagan Doctrine for the 21st Century By Matthew Continetti

Posted By on October 10th, 2015

From Sweden in the Baltic to Tartus in the Mediterranean, Russian forces are on the offensive. The consensus among U.S. officials not beholden to the White House is that Mitt Romney was right. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the most dangerous threat to America.

And not only to America: Russia’s attempts to reclaim its empire spread conflict and misery, prolong war, destabilize the postwar alliance system that has brought security and prosperity to the world, and erode Western values such as freedom, equality, and individualism. Though Russia may no longer espouse global Communist revolution, the consequences of its militarism and aggression are not limited to a small geographic area. The Comintern is gone. But the goals of dominating the Eurasian heartland, Finlandizing Europe, and isolating and challenging the United States have returned. The stronger Putin becomes, the more despotic, poorer, and more corrupt is the world.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Criminal-Justice System Has Flaws, but Minimum Sentencing Isn’t One of Them By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on October 10th, 2015

Keep Minimum Sentencing, to Discourage Criminals
‘I know you lied in your testimony, but I understand why you believed you had to do it.”

If there was an audible sound in the courtroom after these words left the lips of the sentencing judge, it was my jaw caroming off the floor. I was a young prosecutor and it was the mid Eighties, before federal sentencing reforms substituted the public’s sensibilities for the judges’ in the matter of serious crime.

The defendant had been convicted of selling cocaine, an offense he compounded by perjuring himself in testimony so absurd that even my novice cross-examiner’s skills were enough to expose it. The judge was a notoriously defendant-friendly sentencer, but even jurists of that bent of mind do not like having their intelligence insulted: When a serious felony was complemented by blatant lying under oath, a serious jail sentence was in order.

But not this time. To my dismay, the judge shrugged his shoulders and did what lots of judges did in those days, and what Washington’s bipartisan political class seems to want them to start doing again: He walked the defendant out the door.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

America’s Fading Footprint in the Middle East As Russia bombs and Iran plots, the U.S. role is shrinking—and the region’s major players are looking for new ways to advance their own interests By Yaroslav Trofimov

Posted By on October 10th, 2015

Despised by some, admired by others, the U.S. has been the Middle East’s principal power for decades, providing its allies with guidance and protection.

Now, however, with Russia and Iran thrusting themselves boldly into the region’s affairs, that special role seems to be melting away. As seasoned politicians and diplomats survey the mayhem, they struggle to recall a moment when America counted for so little in the Middle East—and when it was held in such contempt, by friend and foe alike.

“It’s the lowest ebb since World War II for U.S. influence and engagement in the region,” said Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat who served as the Obama administration’s ambassador to Afghanistan and before that as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Pakistan.

From shepherding Israel toward peace with its Arab neighbors to rolling back Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and halting the contagion of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the U.S. has long been at the core of the Middle East’s security system. Its military might secured critical trade routes and the bulk of the world’s oil supply. Today, the void created by U.S. withdrawal is being filled by the very powers that American policy has long sought to contain.