Thomas Sowell @ThomasSowell”More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.” 1:03 PM – Feb 27, 2019
https://quillette.com/2019/03/03/forget-about
The campaign by left-wing student protestors and some faculty to force Western universities to “decolonize the curriculum” has been surprisingly successful. A movement that started at the University of Cape Town in 2015, with the demand that the city’s university remove its statue of Cecil Rhodes—“Rhodes Must Fall”—quickly made its way to the U.K., with student activists calling for his statue at Oriel College, Oxford to be taken down. At its heart, the movement seeks to challenge what it characterizes as the dominance of the Western canon in the humanities and social sciences, as well as the under-representation of women and minorities in academia. It also, like many movements inspired by critical theory, maintains that a person’s beliefs and worldview are largely determined by their skin color, sexual orientation and gender.
In a bizarre turn of events, this movement now enjoys the endorsement of the British Royal Family. In February 2019, on a visit to a London University, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, lent her weight to the movement, having had her eyes opened by a presentation about the relatively small number of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) staff within the U.K. higher education sector. According to the Times, the Duchess visited City University in London in her capacity as the patron of the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) and responded to the presentation by announcing that Britain’s universities need to “open up that conversation so we are talking about it as opposed to continuing with that daily rote . . . sometimes that approach can be really antiquated and needs an update.” When presented with evidence about the lack of black and female professors in British universities she reportedly exclaimed, “Oh my God!” One of the organizers, Meera Sabaratnam, said it was “wonderful to see the Duchess standing up for female equality” as many “of the issues around racial equality are similar and it is great to see her embrace this. Change is long overdue.” The Duchess’s call for British universities to “decolonize the curriculum” may well become the policy of the British Labour Party, and potentially the U.K.’s next government. Angela Rayner, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, recently made a similar observation to the Duchess: “Like much of our establishment, our universities are too male, pale and stale and do not represent the communities that they serve or modern Britain,” she told the University and College Union conference earlier this month. If Labour comes to power, she said she would use the powers of the newly-established Office for Students to address this shortcoming. For Rayner, U.K. universities must “do much more, and under Labour they will be held to account.”
https://quillette.com/2019/03/04/china-is-gearing-
On February 18, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that a “sophisticated state-actor” had launched a cyber attack on Australia’s major political parties and parliamentary computer system. The Australian government has not yet identified which state-actor is responsible but suspicions almost instantly fell on China. The Chinese military maintains a dedicated unit (the People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398) for cyber attacks. While several other nations maintain the capabilities for this kind of attack, they do not have China’s record of interference in Australian politics. The Chinese Communist Party puts significant resources into neutralizing opposition to its interests within Australian politics and society. Its increasingly flagrant acts of interference prompted the nation to pass sweeping foreign interference laws in 2018.
If China is responsible for the cyber-attack on Australian parliament, it fits a very clear pattern of increasing antagonism by China against the West. This points towards a worrying and unstable future for Western middle-powers with high economic exposure to China. Moreover, China’s increasingly threatening posture suggests that it no longer believes that it can radically reshape the international order without waging a long-term strategic conflict with the West. Until recently, China was careful to maintain the West’s support for the nation’s rise by refraining from activities that would trigger too much anxiety. Not only is China now engaging in these activities with little pretense of restraint (including militarizing the South China Sea) but it has gone one giant leap further by directly threatening the autonomy and stability of Western societies with extensive interference operations.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/04/tulsi
Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is the latest victim of the corporate media’s smear machine. Although a liberal Democrat, Gabbard is a retired U.S. Army major who served in a medical unit during the Iraq War. Despite a number of untenable domestic policy positions, her foreign policy instincts reflect a far more conservative predilection than many in her party’s elite appreciate. Gabbard’s skepticism about humanitarian military intervention and regime change have made her a pariah among the elite of both parties. Gabbard in January announced her plans to run for president in 2020. Even though she is an ideological leftist, the fact that she opposes perpetual warfare in places like Syria makes her prospects of winning her party’s nomination very low. What’s more, Gabbard’s track record on foreign policy decision-making since entering Congress in 2012 is far better than that of the permanent bipartisan fusion party. That alone makes her a threat to the democratic globalist elite.
Gabbard served in Iraq in 2005, a year after the American position there became mired in a brutal ethno-religious insurgency, and a year before the David Petraeus-led “surge” put a band-aid on the deep, festering wound that was U.S. war policy at the time. She has seen up-close what the hubris of America’s political elite costs the nation.
After all, the Iraq War was not just about removing (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction from a rogue state. Nor was the conflict only about ridding the world of Saddam Hussein, a tyrant who truly was among the world’s most brutal dictators. No, the war was a social engineering experiment applied by “competent” technocrats in the sterile halls of power and the stuffy Ivory Towers of think tanks in Washington, D.C.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/anonymous-editorial-resistance-trump-administration/
Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump.
The premise of efforts to undermine Trump is that the establishment has such power, prestige, and authority to overturn the verdict of the 2016 election.
On September 5, 2018, the New York Times published an anonymous editorial by a supposed “senior official” in the Trump administration. In astounding fashion, the unnamed writer claimed that he/she was part of a legion of administration appointees and government officials who were actively working to undermine the Trump presidency by overriding his orders, keeping information from an unknowing Trump, or acting independently of his directives. Or as Anonymous unapologetically put it:
Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
The Times author then continues by confessing to a sort of slow-motion coup to undermine the Trump presidency:
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
The result is a two-track presidency.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/trump-resistance-government-anonymous-james-baker-samantha-power/
The same old, same old faces
W e are still trying to fathom the apparent but transient palace-coup attempts of Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe. No one has gotten to the bottom of the serial lying by McCabe and James Comey, much less their systematic and illegal leaking to pet reporters.
We do not know all the ways in which James Clapper and John Brennan seeded the dossier and its related gossip among the press and liberal politicians — only that both were prior admitted fabricators who respectively while under oath misled congressional representatives on a host of issues.
The central role of Hillary Clinton in funding the anti-Trump, Russian-“collusion,” Fusion/GPS/Christopher Steele dossier is still not fully disclosed. Did the deluded FISA court know it was being used by Obama-administration DOJ and FBI officials, who withheld from it evidence to ensure permission to spy on American citizens? Could any justice knowingly be so naïve?
Do we remember at all that Devin Nunes came to national prominence when he uncovered information that members of the Obama administration’s national-security team, along with others, had systematically unmasked surveilled Americans, whose names then were leaked illegally to the press?
One day historians will have the full story of how Robert Mueller stocked his legal team inordinately with partisans. He certainly did not promptly disclose the chronology of, or the interconnected reasons for, the firings of Lisa Page and Peter Strozk. And his team has largely used process-crime allegations to leverage mostly minor figures to divulge some sort of incriminating evidence about the president — none of it pertaining to the original mandated rationale of collusion.
https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/somali-gangs-battle-in-minneapolis-somalis-demand-that-cops-do-something/
EXCERPT: “Which brings us to Little Mogadishu, in the city soon to be formerly known as Minneapolis, where the good people of Minnesota — of Scandinavian, German, and Irish stock — have been busily importing people from perhaps the most culturally alien region of the world, Muslim East Africa. In Charles Dickens’s masterpiece, Bleak House, Mrs. Jellyby ignores her own brood while busily organizing aid to Africa; today’s Mrs. Jellybys have instead have brought East Africa to them.
East African community reeling from weekend violence, demands solutions
A group of Somali volunteers including Abdirahman Mukhtar, left, and Abdullahi Farah gave out pizza and tea to young people from a stand Friday in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.The men hope by connecting with youth and engaging them in conversation they can combat the shootings that have recently plagued the neighborhood. After the latest spasm of gang violence, Minneapolis’ Somali residents and business owners on Monday stepped up their calls for help from City Hall and police headquarters to help curb the senseless shootings that they say too often go overlooked. On Friday alone, five men of Somali descent were shot in separate attacks, one fatally.
Police and community members pinned the blame for the bloodshed on an ongoing feud between Cedar-Riverside neighborhood gangs like 1627 and Madhiban With Attitude (MWA) and their rivals, the Somali Outlaws, whose territory includes the area around Karmel Mall. Friday’s shootings were a repeat of a familiar pattern: a shooting on one gang’s turf is usually followed hours, if not minutes later by an “eye-for-an-eye” response so as not to appear weak, community members say. Two shootings last month are also blamed on the conflict. As with other recent shootings, police immediately stepped up patrols in both neighborhoods to prevent further retaliation. But some in the community wondered whether they could be doing more.
What more, one wonders, can they do? If a bunch of white cops come pouring into Little Mogadishu, both coasts will be able to hear the howls unaided. Should they do nothing, then the likelihood is that the neighborhood — represented by the ineffable Ilhan Omar in the United States Congress — may well descend into the levels of violence that characterize, well, Mogadishu. Meanwhile, the media’s Complaint Department is open for business:
Russom Solomon, owner of the Red Sea Bar and Restaurant, said that responsibility for curbing the violence falls equally on police and the community, but he questioned why the two Somali-American officers recently assigned to the Cedar-Riverside beat aren’t working nights, when many of the shootings occur. “The problem we’re dealing with is that they work during the day and not during the night, so they’ve just had little effect,” said Solomon, who also chairs the West Bank Community Coalition’s safety committee. “The perception of safety is not good, people don’t feel that safe — they’re just poisoning the whole neighborhood now.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/432654-trump-is-upsetting-dcs-negotiating-model
President Donald Trump’s negotiation with North Korea hasn’t yielded verified denuclearization by Pyongyang, but it has changed the way future presidents may deal with “difficult” countries.
Trump scandalized the national security establishment, first by trading insults with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, then personally taking charge of negotiating denuclearization with the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ instead of waiting until American and North Korean staff officers had negotiated the technical details, a process that could take several years.
Trump, as an elected official and an impatient man, is mindful of the political calendar and is shaping aspects of his foreign policy to advance the 2020 campaign: The troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan are proof he is ending the “forever wars” and not embarking on new, costly foreign adventures.
Likewise, Trump wants to show the voters that, after 65 years of muddle on the Korean peninsula, he is taking charge. High risk? Sure, but if it doesn’t work, Trump can tweet “We did all we could!” and likely not suffer at the polls.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/432595-trumps-approval-rating-on-economy-hits-new-high-gallup
President Trump’s approval rating on the economy has reached a new high, according to a Gallup poll published Tuesday.
The poll showed that 56 percent of adults in the U.S. approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, the best mark of Trump’s presidency and the highest approval rating for Trump on any of the 14 issues in the poll.
The poll also found that a majority of voters approve of Trump’s handling of unemployment and of the situation with North Korea, with 54 percent approving of Trump’s job with unemployment and 51 percent approving on North Korea.
But the president’s overall approval rating still sits at just 43 percent, according to the poll. Another 54 percent of adults, meanwhile, disapprove of Trump’s performance as president.
https://spectator.us/jerry-nadler-get-trump/
What does desperation smell like? It smells like House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, who is reprising his ‘Impeach Trump!’ act from 2017, this time with a gavel in his hand.
No one knows when Robert Mueller will deliver his report to Attorney General William Barr, and no one knows what portions, if any, General Barr will make public. But the hissing sound you have heard over the last several weeks is the air going out of Mueller’s Get Trump probe as story after story has been crafted to manage expectations down regarding ‘Individual 1,’ aka Donald J. Trump. Mueller bagged Paul Manafort for tax related issues a decade or more ago, and folks like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn for making the mistake of testifying before Congress (Stone) or talking to the FBI (Flynn).
But no one not named Bill Kristol now thinks that Mueller’s expensive, long-running entertainment will issue in any actionable charges against the President. Hence the ‘insurance policy’ being framed by Congressman Nadler. The headline of a column in Politico yesterday cut to the chase: ‘House Democrats open sweeping corruption probe into Trump’s world.’ They’ve sent letters to 81 people associated with Donald Trump demanding ‘documents.’ Which documents? All the ones that show the President in a bad light or that might be used to frame him for misconduct or ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’Like what? Well, they aren’t quite sure, but it is not stopping them from ‘demanding documents from the White House and Trump’s namesake company, charity, transition team, inauguration and 2016 campaign, as well as several longtime associates and the president’s two adult sons.’ Hoover it all up, boys! There has to be something, somewhere in Trump’s past we can nail him for.
