Unthinkable as it may be after all these decades of nuclear-enforced peace, Beijing’s determination to make the South China sea its own is day-by-day raising the likelihood that a full-blown shooting war will erupt. Australia’s prospects in such a conflict are especially parlous
China’s preoccupation with its past humiliation by foreign powers didn’t start with the communists: a public holiday, National Humiliation Day, was instituted by the Nationalists in 1927. Similarly, Chinese irredentism isn’t just a recent phenomenon. Chinese primary school textbooks from 1938 have a map of China that extends well beyond its current borders in all directions. Now the map in Chinese passports includes the South China Sea as Chinese territory, as well as parts of India on its northern border.
As he was concluding the calamitous nuclear agreement with Iran last summer, John Kerry asked the Iranians [1] to cut out the “Death to America” chants. (This was not long before he told [2] an astonished world that the chants did not really mean that the Iranian mullahs wanted to kill us.)
In yet another indication of just how disastrous the nuclear deal really is, the Iranians have not only rejected Kerry’s request, but are ramping up the genocidal rhetoric. On Monday [3], 192 of the 290 members of the Iranian Majlis (Parliament) declared:
The martyr-nurturing nation of Iran is not at all prepared to abandon the slogan of “Death to America” under the pretext of a nuclear agreement.
Remember: in an Islamic context, a “martyr” is not simply someone who dies for his faith. It is is someone who takes hold of the Qur’an’s promise of Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111). If the Iranian nation is “martyr-nurturing,” it is raising a generation of killers.
The Republican Senate caucus has been divided in its endorsements of candidates in the 2016 presidential primary, but a Colorado freshman has decided to formally back a senator who helped him with his own campaign last year.
Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who served in the House before defeating Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) a year ago, announced his support today for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
Rubio stepped in with a Spanish-language ad, released by the Chamber of Commerce, on behalf of Gardner in May 2014. More than one in five residents of Colorado is Hispanic.
Rubio and Gardner serve together on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!
—Ludwig von Mises, as quoted in the preface to The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.
This is a book about how we got here. It is also a book about good and evil; about creation and destruction; about capitalism and socialism; about God, Satan, and the satanic in men; about myths and legends and the truths within them; about culture versus politics; about the difference between story and plot. It is about Milton versus Marx, the United States versus Germany, about redemptive truth versus Mephistophelean bands of illusion and the Devil’s jokes. It concerns itself with the interrelation of culture, religion, sex, and politics— in other words, something herein to offend nearly everybody.
And, I hope, to inspire. For the taboos of our culture are also its totems, and the political arguments that rage around them are symptomatic of both disease and good health, of infection and immunity. They are not simply battlefields in the larger contemporary culture war— they are the culture war, a war that has been raging since the Garden of Eden but that manifests itself today in the unceasing attack of cultural Marxism (which molts and masquerades under many names, including liberalism, progressivism, social justice, environmentalism, anti-racism, etc.) upon what used to be called the Christian West.
Florida is supposed to be underwater soon, thanks to CO2. That’s one of the scary things that warmists firmly predict as “settled science,” in order to get billions of dollars a year in government research support and all those crony capitalist subsidies for their friends. You see, the polar ice caps are supposed to be melting thanks to the rise in temperatures (that haven’t risen for 18 years now – until you “adjust” the data, that is).
The word didn’t get out fast enough to some scientists that their data needed “adjustment,” and somehow the following made it past the peer reviewers. From the Christian Science Monitor:
In a paper published in the Journal of Glaciology on Friday, researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland in College Park, and the engineering firm Sigma Space Corporation offer a new analysis of satellite data that show a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001 in the Antarctic ice sheet.
That gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. (snip)
For now, the study authors say, these findings challenge current explanations for sea level rise, much of which is attributed to melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
“The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away,” said Dr. Zwally.
No more beating around the bush-Jeb should now leave graciously….he has lived graciously….before his name becomes a national joke…..rsk
The greatest fiction writers will tell you that the best way to describe a character in a story is to show him in action, not to describe him with adjectives.
Unfortunately, Jeb Bush doesn’t employ very talented novelists to write his speeches. In an effort to re-re-reboot his campaign, he gave a major speech in Miami in English on Monday.
First, Jeb started talking about his exciting new book – about his emails.
For eight years, I gave out my jeb@jeb.org email address to anyone who wanted to talk to me.
And email they did!
People across the state told me their stories.
Sometimes they asked questions.
In July 2015, President Obama paid a press-saturated visit to a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma. The cell blocks that Obama toured had been evacuated in anticipation of his arrival, but after talking to six carefully prescreened inmates, he drew some conclusions about the path to prison. “These are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” the president told the waiting reporters.
The New York Times seconded this observation in its front-page coverage of Obama’s prison excursion. There is but a “fine line between president and prisoner,” the paper noted. Anyone who “smoked marijuana and tried cocaine,” as the president had as a young man, could end up in the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, according to the Times.
This conceit was preposterous. It takes a lot more than marijuana or cocaine use to end up in federal prison. But the truth didn’t matter. Obama’s prison tour came in the midst of the biggest delegitimation of law enforcement in recent memory. Activists, politicians, and the media have spent the last year broadcasting a daily message that the criminal-justice system is biased against blacks and insanely draconian. The immediate trigger for that movement, known as Black Lives Matter, has been a series of highly publicized deaths of black males at the hands of the police. But the movement also builds on a long-standing discourse from the academic Left about “mass incarceration,” policing, and race.
Now that discourse is going mainstream. As the press never tires of pointing out, some high-profile figures on the right are joining the chorus on the left for deincarceration and decriminalization. Newt Gingrich is pairing with left-wing activist Van Jones, and the Koch brothers have teamed up with the ACLU, for example, to call for lowered prison counts and less law enforcement. Republican leaders on Capitol Hill support reducing or eliminating mandatory sentences for federal drug-trafficking crimes, in the name of racial equity.
At the state and city levels, hardly a single criminal-justice practice exists that is not under fire for oppressing blacks. Traffic monitoring, antitheft statutes, drug patrols, public-order policing, trespass arrests, pedestrian stops, bail, warrant enforcement, fines for absconding from court, parole revocations, probation oversight, sentences for repeat felony offenders—all have been criticized as part of a de facto system for locking away black men and destroying black communities.
There may be good reasons for radically reducing the prison census and the enforcement of criminal laws. But so far, the arguments advanced in favor of that agenda have been as deceptive as the claim that prisons are filled with casual drug users. It is worth examining the gap between the reality of law enforcement and the current campaign against it, since policy based on fiction is unlikely to yield positive results.
Two days before his Oklahoma penitentiary visit, Obama addressed the NAACP national conference in Philadelphia and raised the same themes. The “real reason our prison population is so high,” he said to applause, is that we have “locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.” This assertion is the most ubiquitous fallacy of the deincarceration movement, given widespread currency by Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow. That a president would repeat the myth is a demonstration of the extent to which ideology now rules the White House.
Recent media reports of government investigations indicate that throughout the United Kingdom’s category A prisons — those holding the most serious offenders — of Belmarsh, Long Lartin, Woodhill, and Whitemoor, gangs of Islamist extremists intimidate non-Muslim prisoners. Muslim inmates pressure non-Muslims to convert and extort money from prisoners who do not. It is unclear how long the problem has been going on. Media previously reported about pressure to convert three and a half years ago.
According to the UK’s Independent Monitoring Board, Muslims are overrepresented in Whitemoor prison, a maximum security facility holding about 450 inmates. Muslims make up about half of the total population of that facility. The board also noted, Muslim gangs make up the “biggest power bloc,” and “some prisoners and staff found the Muslim presence overwhelming.”
The Department of Education’s office of civil rights says that a disguised boy has been discriminated against because he is not allowed to shower naked with girls.
Federal education authorities, staking out their firmest position yet on an increasingly contentious issue, found Monday that an Illinois school district violated anti-discrimination laws when it did not allow a transgender student who identifies as a girl and participates on a girls’ sports team to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without restrictions.
The Education Department gave 30 days to the officials of Township High School District 211 to reach a solution or face enforcement, which could include administrative law proceedings or a Justice Department court action. The district could lose some or all of its Title IX funding.
In a letter sent Monday, the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education told the Palatine district that requiring a transgender student to use private changing and showering facilities was a violation of that student’s rights under Title IX, a federal law that bans sex discrimination. The student, who identifies as female but was born male, should be given unfettered access to girls’ facilities, the letter said.
When it passed Congress in 2010, the Affordable Care Act offered substantial financial support to create nonprofit health-insurance plans. Today 11 of the 23 such regional Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans have failed—seven since the beginning of October.
They’ve collapsed despite federal startup loans totaling more than $1.1 billion. These loans will likely never be fully repaid, while insurers and consumers will be on the hook for any unpaid claims left behind by failed insurers.
Consider CoOportunity Health, which operated in Iowa and Nebraska and received a federal startup loan of $146 million. The Iowa and Nebraska Life and Health Insurance Guaranty Associations, funded by insurers in the states, have begun paying more than $80 million to cover outstanding claims to providers which CoOportunity Health was unable to pay in its insolvency.
