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Ruth King

NYT op-ed: Trump assassination fantasies ‘a social necessity’ By David Zukerman

Howard Jacobson, in his June 24 New York Times op-ed piece, “Why We Must Mock Trump,” began by referring to the anti-Trump production of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in New York’s Central Park, as proof “that plays retain the power to shock and enrage.” Do productions of “Julius Caesar,” played straight, generally “shock and enrage”? I don’t think so. And this production is not straight Shakespeare – not with reference to President Trump’s apartment on “Fifth Avenue.”

At the end of his column, Jacobson asserted, “Derision is a social necessity.” Okay. Imagine, say, Kathy Griffin holding what looks like the severed head of…Hillary Clinton. Would Mr. Jacobson write a piece called “Why We Must Mock Hillary Clinton” – or would he denounce this as offensive, beyond the pale, an action to be condemned? And if the severed head resembled Barack Obama, does anyone doubt that a media firestorm would ensue, protesting this inexcusable example of wishful thinking on the part of a vicious racist who should be prosecuted for hate to the fullest extent of the law – and more?

Mr. Jacobson acknowledged the absence of humor in communist regimes. He continued: “The more monocratic the regime, the less it can bear criticism. And of all criticism, satire – with its single ambition of ridiculing vanity and delusion – is the most potent.” But where is the sense of humor among our anti-Trump leftists? Donald Trump makes a sarcastic comment about Russian hacking – suggesting that if they have emails on Democrats, why, let’s have them – and the left rushes to denounce Trump as a Putin agent. Are leftists, in giving us images of a dead Donald Trump offering satire or wishful thinking?

Mark Twain once wrote: “Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.” What personality on the left, political or otherwise, would Mr. Jacobson allow us to be irreverent to? My guess is that we’d be accused of hate speech if we dared be irreverent toward a leftist.

Germany and Islam By Mike Konrad

Germany has a bizarre historical connection with Islam that lies beneath much of the present day crisis in Europe. One could argue that these connections are just the product of historical coincidences, but with Germany the coincidences seem to add up regularly.

When one studies the age of European imperialism, Germany came late to the game, almost as an afterthought. Bismarck, for all his authoritarian faults, felt that imperialism would do Germany no good, and wanted no part of it. He was overridden by public opinion, and Bismarck’s policy was later repudiated by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted Germany to take her “Place in the Sun.”

Imperialism would not have destroyed Germany, per se; smaller and weaker nations such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and even backward Spain all had empires.

But what set Germany apart was a concerted love of Arabs and Islam. There was something deeper and darker to this than mere German MachtPolitik. One of his first acts, upon assuming power as Kaiser, was to visit the Ottoman Empire in 1889, He wore a fez. He offered to arm the Turks.

Sultan Mehmet V greets Kaiser Wilhelm upon his arrival in Constantinople

The Kaiser’s Islamic enthusiasm was fired by an 1889 visit to Turkey, which Bismarck opposed on the grounds that it would gratuitously alarm the Russians. Wilhelm met the murderous Sultan Abdul Hamid II and enjoyed the sinuous gyrations of the Circassian dancers in his Constantinople harem. – New York Review of Books

The Turks were astounded. The Ottoman Empire was on a death watch, and the only reason the European powers did not carve Turkey up is because they feared an intra-Christian war over the pieces. Now, the Kaiser was promising to make Islamic Turkey great again. Kaiser Wilhelm had resurrected the Islamic corpse.

It would only get worse. In 1898, during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, the Kaiser made the insane insinuation that were he not already Christian, he would be a Muslim.

A later visit to Jerusalem [in 1898], then under the auspices of the same flattering sultan, left the impressionable Kaiser declaring that, had he arrived agnostic, “I certainly would have turned Mahometan!” Soon the Kaiser was styling himself “Hajji Wilhelm”, the Protector of Muslims. – The Express

Peter Smith: Knavish Stupidy of the First Degree

Madness prevails. Cheered on by green zealots, governments have accepted a tenuous theory based on black-box models of no proven worth. As carpetbaggers rejoice with charlatans, those who can least afford it are bled dry for what was, until recently, cheap as chips: electricity.

It’s five o’clock on Sunday afternoon in Sydney in winter. By any reckoning Sydney doesn’t get that cold. But I have been at my computer for a couple of hours, with three layers on top and a beanie, and have been cold the whole of that time. When I was married the heater would have been on. Women sensibly don’t like putting up with cold. Me, I’m the son of my father who was always concerned about power bills.

He had reason to be concerned; big power bills seriously dented the household budget. Mind you, I can’t remember a time when a coal fire was not heating the living room on a cold afternoon. That’s progress for you; from warm to cold in the space of childhood to older age. I’ve finally just switched on my gas heater. Ah! The luxury of warmth will soon envelop the room.

Now, for a moment, imagine (if you have to) that you live in, say, Melbourne or Tasmania or Canberra and it’s a cold winter afternoon. Now imagine you are poor and must account for every dollar. Power bills matter to you.

You sit as a single mother with your young children wrapped in clothes and blankets. You’re old and clutch a hot-water bottle. You’re a coal power station worker thrown on the scrap heap, pacing the room, distraught at no longer being able to afford to keep your family warm.

Weep not at these Dickensian scenes for all is not bleak in each house. The poor find consolation in knowing they’re helping to save the planet by keeping their heaters off. An inspirational picture of Al Gore hangs over their cold mantelpieces. Big Al watches over them from his private gas-guzzling jet.

Meanwhile in Point Piper and Toorak the deeply-green Smug and Swank families are enjoying the warmth supplied by under-floor heating throughout every room. But there are no double standards here. They are renewal-energy junkies to their cores. They have taxpayer-subsidised solar panels fitted across their vast roofs, which often earn them a rebate for supplying power to the grid. True, managing this reverse flow of power increases power bills for others, but that’s not their fault.

Madness prevails. Cheered on by green zealots, governments have accepted as settled a tenuous scientific theory, based almost entirely on black-box model predictions which have been seriously astray. If that is not enough, cheered on by carpetbaggers and snake-oil merchants, intermittent, unreliable, ineffective and cripplingly costly renewal power has been foisted on working-class populations scared into compliance.

On the flimsiest basis, the world has been turned upside down. Power bills have soared. Our governments and politicians have shown themselves to be as susceptible to superstition as those in bygone ages who sought the future in the entrails of animals. And then there are those in the broader community who simply accept any old rope handed down from authority. Give them the Little Red Book and they would have been fodder for Mao.

I need to confess to an evolving mind. I entertained a small possibility that the received wisdom of catastrophic man-made global warming might be right, though the remedies being applied were totally misconceived (to some extent I was in sync with the Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lomborg positions). Now, the more I read, the more I am tending to believe that it is codswallop from start to finish.

Here, I think, is fairly persuasive scientific comment from Richard Lindzen, eminent Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT:

The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science’.
– Thoughts on the Public Discourse over Climate Change

The Senate Saves the 10th Amendment The health-care bill would liberate states to bypass ObamaCare rules and better manage Medicaid. By Avik Roy

For decades American conservatives have sought to restore meaning to the 10th Amendment, which recognizes the states’ right to manage their affairs free from Washington’s interference. Passing the Republican Senate’s health-care bill would represent historic progress toward that goal.

In nearly every state, Medicaid is either the largest or second-largest budget line, as well as the fastest-growing category. Every year state lawmakers, trying to carry Medicaid’s heavy burden, are forced to make difficult choices about what else to cut: education, roads, public safety.

Especially frustrating is that state officials have little control over how to manage their Medicaid programs. The 1965 Medicaid law contains dozens of limits on what states can do to avoid waste, fraud and abuse. In the half-century since, Washington has added to that burden with more laws and regulations.

Governors and state legislatures ask Washington every year for the right to receive their Medicaid funds in the form of a block grant, which would give them autonomy to manage the spending as they see fit. The Senate bill, for the first time, would allow that.

States that forgo the block grants would still receive additional flexibility through per capita allotments, an idea first proposed by President Clinton in 1995. The Senate bill would limit the growth of federal spending on each able-bodied enrollee to the rate of medical inflation, and on elderly and disabled enrollees to medical inflation plus 1%. After 2025, per-enrollee spending would be tied to overall inflation. The net effect would be to reduce overall federal spending on the pre-ObamaCare Medicaid program by up to 2% from projected levels over the next 10 years.

In exchange for putting Medicaid on a budget, states would gain substantial latitude to use funds more efficiently. Example: Thanks to ObamaCare, states are permitted to verify a recipient’s eligibility for Medicaid only once a year. As a result, scarce dollars continue going to people who become ineligible. Of the 10% (or more) of Medicaid spending that is improper, the majority goes to ineligible recipients, according to the Foundation for Government Accountability and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The Senate bill would liberate states from many other ObamaCare burdens. It would oblige the Secretary of Health and Human Services to grant all state waiver requests unless they increase federal spending, and to issue a final decision on waiver applications within six months of receiving them. Under current law, waivers are at the secretary’s discretion and there is no deadline.

The new waiver process would let states reduce premiums and health-care costs by bypassing a broad array of ObamaCare provisions, including benefit mandates and requirements that all individual policies be part of a single risk pool. Waivers would last eight years, with the option to renew. CONTINUE AT SITE

A Unanimous Rebuke to Judges on the Travel Ban The Supreme Court lets nearly all of Trump’s policy be enforced as it hears his appeal.

The Supreme Court on Monday began the process of rebuking lower courts for usurping the political branches on national security. The entire Court, even the four liberals, agreed to hear the Trump Administration’s appeal of appellate-court rulings blocking its immigration travel ban, and the Justices allowed nearly all of the 90-day ban to proceed in the meantime.

This is a victory for the White House, though it is more important for the Constitution’s separation of powers. President Trump’s ban is neither wise nor necessary, but that is not an invitation for judges to become back-seat Commanders in Chief. Yet that is precisely what liberal majorities on both the Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal did in blocking the travel bans, and the Supreme Court is saying those rulings will not be the last judicial word. The Court’s unsigned per curiam opinion set the case for an early hearing on the legal merits in the next term that begins in October.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, wrote a concurrence arguing that the Court should have lifted the lower-court injunctions in toto. He also added a cheeky aside that “I agree with the Court’s implicit conclusion that the Government has made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits—that is, that the judgments below will be reversed.”

Some Justices might not agree with that, but it’s notable that Chief Justice John Roberts managed to corral a unanimous Court for lifting nearly all of the injunctions. That means even the liberals understand that injunctions need to be issued with care, especially on national security where judges lack the knowledge and electoral accountability of the executive and Congress.

The High Court’s precedents are clear, especially Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972) that said courts should defer to the executive if there is a “facially legitimate and bona fide” justification on national security. Judges can’t run roughshod over the Constitution merely because an unpopular President issued the travel order.

Democrats and the media will now begin a ferocious lobbying campaign to turn five Justices against these precedents, in particular the Chief Justice and Justice Anthony Kennedy. We doubt this will succeed because this isn’t a close legal call, and it concerns the Presidency more than this particular President.

DIANA WEST:AYAAN HIRSI ALI WARNS THE WEST…..AGAINST GEERT WILDERS !!!!!

If there’s one thing that 31,065 deadly Islamic terror attacks since 9/11 teach us, it’s that there is no way to foster a fact-based discussion of Islam in the halls of Western power.

That’s right — I said fact-based discussion of Islam. After 15-plus years since our Twin Towers burned and collapsed, I am still not talking about “Islamofascism,” “Islamism,” “Islamist extremism,” or any other figleaf-word made up by blushing Westerners to cover up the embarassingly appalling facts about Islam: its defining laws which can be as revolting as they are repressive; its history of violent conquest and “radical” religious and cultural cleansing; its totalitarian goals to apply “sharia” (Islamic law) everywhere to eradicate freedom of conscience, speech, other religions, and, oh yeah, rule the world.

In other words, exactly the things the Powers That Be will not talk about since even before George W. Bush rebounded from the shock of the Islamic attacks of 9/11 to realize that Islam was a “religion of peace.” In the land of the free and the home of the brave, Islamic blasphemy law rules.

Last week’s Senate hearing — even the title of last week’s Senate hearing — was more of the same.

Co-chaired by an affable Sen Ron Wyden and an angry Sen Claire McKaskill, the hearing was called: “Ideology and Terror: Understanding the Tools, Tactics, and Techniques of Violent Extremism.”

Notice no official mention of Islam. Or, more to the point, no official interest in Islam — except to protect it. Sen. Wyden, the “good guy” of the hearing for allowing that there might possibly be some teeny tiny slightly Islamist-ic thing about jihad (not that I heard the word), actually commended the two Muslim-born witnesses on the panel for “bending over backwards” to avoid tarring Islam with a truthful brush (or words not quite to that effect).

Meanwhile, the four Democrats on Team Violent Extremism, all women, ignored the Muslim born witnesses — ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Muslim reformer Asra Nomani, asking neither witness a single question. Instead, they focused obsessively on the non-sense of Mr. See-No-Islam, former NCTC director Michael Leiter (whom we last met here). Perhaps the Democrats saw the two women of Islamic heritage as impediments to the indoctrination in the “Ideology” of “Violent Extremism” that causes “Terror.”

But did the Democrat senators really have that much to fear? I ask this after having read the op-ed Hirsi Ali and Nomani wrote for the New York Times about their dismal experience; also after having then watched much of the hearing. I cannot now un-notice their obvious determination to avoid speaking forthrightly about Islam — same as the Left.

Hirsi Ali and Nomani write:

What happened that day [before the committee] was emblematic of a deeply troubling trend among progressives when it comes to confronting the brutal reality of Islamist extremism …

Here goes, one more time: This “brutal reality” they write about is a consequence of the laws of Islam. It is neither “Islamist,” nor is it a form of “extremism” within Islam. This brutal reality is all part of Islamic Normal.

The women note their own personal suffering growing up in “deeply conservative Muslim families”: genital multilation, forced marriage, death threats for their so-called apostasy.

Despite any and all “ists” or “isms,” such horrors and more are part of mainstream Islam.

Then they point out:

There is a real discomfort among progressives on the left with calling out Islamic extremism…

OK, but there is real discomfort in these two women when it comes to calling out the extremism of mainstream Islam. Just look how confused their discussion becomes on acknowledging fundamental conflicts between “universal human rights” and “Islamic law,” and on listing a series of what they call “Islamist ideas” which, nonetheless, come straight out of any authoritative Islamic law book:

The hard truth is that there are fundamental conflicts between universal human rights and the principle of Shariah, or Islamic law, which holds that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s; between freedom of religion and the Islamist idea that artists, writers, poets and bloggers should be subject to blasphemy laws; between secular governance and the Islamist goal of a caliphate; between United States law and Islamist promotion of polygamy, child marriage and marital rape; and between freedom of thought and the methods of indoctrination, or dawa, with which Islamists propagate their ideas.

In sum, whether it’s Claire McCaskill or Hirsi Ali, discussion and education about Islam is completely off limits. “Political Islam,” “Islamism,” “Medina Islam” and Violent Extremism become interchangeable threats to theworldcommunity, including the pink bunnies and buttercups that make up The Real McCoy Islam. The only problem, all agree, are those dwedful extwemists.

Birth of a New Persian Empire: Jed Babbin

Lost in the rising tensions between Russia and the U.S. over Syria are the gains Iran continues to make.spectator.org/birth-of-a-new-persian-empire/

The United States is gradually being drawn into the war in Syria. That war began as a conflict in which we had no national security interest. That changed because two of our principal adversaries, Russia and Iran, took over that war, making the conflict much larger than just a civil war against the terrorist regime of Bashar Assad.

Syria still isn’t worth — in Bismarckian terms — the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier, far less an American soldier, sailor, airman or Marine. Three have died there, so far. One was the victim of an improvised explosive device, one was killed in a truck accident, and one reportedly died of natural causes. There will be more.

One American, a journalist named Austin Tice, is reportedly being held hostage by the Syrian government.

Things have been heating up in Syria lately. Two Sundays ago, a Navy F/A-18 shot down a Syrian Su-22 after it had dropped a bomb close to the Kurdish forces allied with us in striking at ISIS. After that, Russia announced that it would have its anti-aircraft missile batteries target any U.S. aircraft that strayed west of the Euphrates River.

Shortly after that, the Russians fired several Kaliber cruise missiles at ISIS targets to demonstrate that their naval forces in the area are as powerful as ours, though they obviously aren’t. And after that, a Russian fighter flew recklessly close (reportedly within five feet) to a Navy P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft over the Baltic near Kaliningrad. After that, a USAF F-15 intercepted (safely) a Russian aircraft carrying Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, also flying near Kaliningrad.

Wars have a way of spreading quickly but the flybys are, like the Russian cruise missile strike, of no real consequence other than to heighten tensions between the two nations.

Lost amid the underwhelming coverage of these incidents is the very real problem of what Iran is doing and what it’s accomplishing. A new Persian Empire is being born and we are not trying to stop it.

Ever since former president Obama pulled our troops out of Iraq, Iran has turned that nation into a Shiite satrap. It is “governed” by a Shiite-friendly regime and truly ruled by Iran through its Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Shiite militia forces more-or-less controlled by the IRGC. The IRGC is under direct command of the Tehran ayatollahs.

Iran and Russia both want hegemony over the entire Middle East. Russia’s permanent air and naval bases in Syria give them a grasp of Syria that can be extended almost at will. Iran, having grasped Iraq, now wants a clear path to the Mediterranean. That path is being created through Syria to Beirut, Lebanon where the Iranian Hizb’allah terrorist force has established itself as a ruling political party as well as a terrorist network with global aspirations. (I use Hizb’allah — as the terrorist network uses it, literally “the party of god” — instead of the bowdlerized “Hezbollah” commonly used by U.S. and European media.)

The Beguiled – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Some reviewers have found fault with the erasure of important issues such as slavery from Sofia Coppola’s version of The Beguiled based on a novel about a southern girl’s school set during the Civil War. The school is on a beautiful ante-belum estate surrounded by magnificent trees and woods that let us know we are in a place where innocence will come to a reckoning far more primal than politics. In the opening scene which captures the essence of so many fairy tales, a young girl with pigtails is walking through the deep woods gathering mushrooms in her basket. Instead of a wolf, she comes upon a wounded Union soldier and out of compassion for his plight, helps him back to the school There, he is confronted with a handful of girls and women, all of whom will eventually be implicated in his fate.

Played by Colin Farrell, the soldier can’t help being a sexual turn-on to the range of young lovelies held in check by Miss Martha, the headmistress played by Nicole Kidman. Steady and steely but also open to suggestions from the girls, she asks their opinion on how to deal with the “enemy soldier.” Cool and rational, she agrees to let him remain while he convalesces from her surgery on his leg. We watch as Farrell plays each of the women with intuitive skill while they compete for his attention and affection. Coppola maintains the tension with a minimum of histrionics and some quiet scenes of the girls saying their prayers, playing music and dressing for dinner set beautifully at a candle-lit table that offers a surprising bounty during a time of war. Quite obviously, this is not a kitchen drama about wartime privation.

Ms. Coppola is painting on a larger canvas than American history – the scale is more mythic than realistic and the outside world appears only once briefly with an unexpected appearance by two confederate soldiers who are quickly dispensed with. It would be a spoiler to discuss the plot beyond this set-up but this is a movie skilfully directed, beautifully filmed and more thought-provoking than it first appears. It may take you back much than the 19th century, perhaps as far back as the Garden of Eden.

India’s lesson to China (and the West) about OBOR by Francsco Sisci

China will be in the back of many minds as India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi prepares to meet US President Donald Trump in Washington. On the agenda are US drone sales to India, boosting intelligence, and military cooperation between New Delhi, Hanoi, and Tokyo — but perhaps most importantly, there is an initiative that could undermine Beijing’s pet foreign strategy, One Belt, One Road (OBOR).

In the past few days, the Indian press in fact beat the drums, arguing that the signing of the UN TIR Convention is a move to counter OBOR. The TIR system is the global customs transit system with the widest geographical coverage. As with other customs transit procedures, the TIR procedure enables goods to move under customs control across international borders without the payment of duties and taxes.

Actually India’s TIR will in no way challenge, at least for now, China’s OBOR. It covers only India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan; it doesn’t stretch to dozens of countries like OBOR; and it is not backed by a new rich international financial institution with over 100 billion of dollars of capital, like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

But the four countries’ trade and transportation agreement already creates a bloc with a population of about 1.4 billion, the same as or more than China’s. These people are younger than China’s aging population due to decades of one-child policy, the elite speak good English, they use British law and are full accustomed to international norms. All these elements are rare commodities in China.

All these points are in part or totally foiled by Modi’s dwindling enthusiasm for reforms of his internal market. Lack of infrastructure, excesses in bureaucracy, and poor progress in market liberalization have so far sapped international enthusiasm for the theoretically huge potential of the Indian economy. The declining GDP growth rate, which dropped below China’s in 2016 after a couple of years of surging ahead of it, is telling of all the problems facing Modi. Besides, the rivalry with Pakistan poses an objective barrier to India’s land route to Europe, bottling New Delhi in favor of Beijing in Eurasia.

On the other hand, the new TIR agreement could assist in breaking India’s internal barriers and help create a better unified market of goods and services.

ENLIST Act Would Undermine Military, Facilitate Insider Attacks

Although it has received scant, if any, attention in the mainstream media, Congress is now taking up a bill, H.R. 60, the ENLIST Act (Encourage New Legalized Immigrants to Start Training). It would potentially provide hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens, essentially “Dreamers,” who were granted temporary lawful status under the DACA program (Deferred Action, Childhood Arrival), with the opportunity to be fast-tracked to lawful immigrant status in exchange for enrolling and serving our military.

Thus far more than 200 members from both parties have co-sponsored this dangerous bill.

At first glance the concept of providing lawful immigrant status to illegal aliens who serve in the U.S. military may appeal to many Americans. Military service is properly seen as a most noble way of demonstrating patriotism for America and Americans.

However, upon closer scrutiny the alarming pitfalls to this approach become readily apparent.

Let us also be clear that there have been illegal aliens who joined our armed forces and served with distinction, and some of them paid the “ultimate price” in demonstrating loyalty to America. I do not want in any way to besmirch their reputations or sacrifices. I am however profoundly troubled that H.R. 60 could create a national security/public safety disaster.

This program could be subverted by international terrorists and transnational criminals who seek to obtain military tactics and weapons training to commit crimes and/or carry out terror attacks on-and-off military bases — “insider attacks.”

Criminals and terrorists could also seek to recruit adherents among those with whom they serve in the military.

We must begin with a clear understanding of how serious violations of America’s borders and immigration laws are. When aliens evade the inspections process conducted at ports of entry they are not entering “undocumented” as is claimed by advocates for immigration anarchy. They enter the United States without inspection. The inspections process conducted at ports of entry by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Inspectors is intended to prevent the entry of criminals, spies, terrorists, human rights violators, and fugitives from justice (categories of aliens under the aegis of federal law, contained within the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) Title 8, United States Code, Section 1182).