RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/art-laffers-chinese-curve-ball/

God bless Arthur B. Laffer, the author of the eponymous curve. If statesmen are hedgehogs (with one big idea) or foxes (with many little ideas), Art is the mayor of Hedgehog City. His big idea is that lower taxes give you more economic growth. Along with my former business partner Jude Wanniski, Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, and a handful of other economists and publicists, Art sold the idea of dramatic tax cuts to Ronald Reagan and thus stood midwife to the greatest U.S. economic boom of the past century. All of them were the intellectual children of the great Robert Mundell, but that’s another story. Years ago I had the honor to write the occasional paper for Art’s consulting service. He’s an American treasure.

Art had one magnificent idea. I took his economic service when I ran research groups at Credit Suisse and Bank of America, and he stopped by once a year for a talk. In 2001 he stopped by at Credit Suisse. American manufacturing jobs were disappearing and America’s trade deficit was exploding, but Art wasn’t fazed. Americans shouldn’t manufacture anything, Art averred: We would do the design, like Apple, and foreigners would dirty their hands making the actual goods.

In 2007 he was still bullish on U.S. stocks. I told him that the financial system was about to crash (at the time I was working in the bowels of the hedge fund world, manufacturing some of the toxic waste that would blow up in 2008). He thought I was mad; after all, taxes were low and the Republicans were in office. How could anything go wrong? On July 18, 2007, I appeared on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC show and warned of a “trillion-dollar AAA asset bubble” that would bring down the banking system. Larry didn’t believe me, either.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/09/10/chinas-technology-war-with-america/Nothing less than global dominance is at stake

‘Self-determination and innovation is the unavoidable path . . . to climb to the world’s top as a leading player in technology. We [should] hold innovative development tightly in our own hands. . . . The situation is pressing. The challenges are pressing. The mission upon us is pressing.”

With those words, spoken at the opening of the joint annual conference of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering in May, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party declared war on the United States. Not an actual war, of course, or even a cold war like the one we fought against the Soviet Union. No, this is a war for control of key sectors of the global economy, as laid out in Xi’s “Made in China 2025” initiative at the 19th Party Congress last October: a struggle for high-tech supremacy over everything from robotics and advanced telecommunications to artificial intelligence, supercomputers, and the quantum computers of the future.

The stakes of this conflict are in many ways as serious as those of the race for nuclear supremacy during the Cold War. It isn’t being fought over military hardware such as Minuteman missiles or even today’s stealth fighters and nuclear submarines — although the ultimate utility of such weapons will depend on who finally wins this high-tech race. The technologies in question are ostensibly civilian: cell phones, microchips, supercomputers, and the coming Internet of Things, as well as basic research and development in areas such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Yet these are precisely the technologies that will power and network the world’s most advanced weapons systems — and, especially in the case of quantum technology, become weapons systems themselves.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12908/turkey-qatar

Ahmed Charai, in an article for The National Interest, has forcefully reminded the world that: “As Qatar faces international pressure to stop harboring senior [Muslim] Brotherhood figures, there are clear indications that it will facilitate their migration to Turkey. So among the urgent challenges for the U.S. allies to address is the question of how to weaken this budding alliance.”

Charai has a point. There is a “more-mature-than-emerging” anti-U.S. alliance among U.S.’s presumed Middle East allies

What should matter to Washington in this Turkish soap opera is the fact that Turkey is getting support, in its confrontation with the U.S., from “like-minded” countries: Russia, China and Qatar. It is clearly time for Washington to rethink its theoretical but fake alliance with Qatar, a tiny Gulf sheikhdom that is trying to neutralize U.S. efforts to sanction Turkey — another theoretical ally that is more like-minded with Russia than with the West.

In theory, the oil-rich sheikhdom of Qatar is an ally of the United States. The peninsula hosts more than 10,000 U.S. military personnel and approximately 72 F-15 fighter jets at its Al Udeid military base. In this turbulent part of the world, alliances, like enmities, can be treacherous. In March, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives was already looking at four alternatives that could become the military headquarters when the Al Udeid contract with Qatar will expire in 2023. After “closely observing its [Qatar’s] financial and banking system due to fears of support for terrorist organisations and individuals associated with them,” Washington apparently decided it had to rethink Al Udeid and its Qatari “allies.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/08/23/australia-leadership-crisis-peter-dutton-cleared-remain-parliament/

Scott Morrison was on Friday picked as Australia’s new prime minister after a Liberal Party coup in a stunning upset against key challenger Peter Dutton.

An ally of deposed leader Malcolm Turnbull, Mr Morrison, Australia’s former Treasurer, won a party-room ballot 45-40, ending an internecine battle that has scarred the conservative government ahead of an election due by May 2019.

He will be Australia’s sixth prime minister in less than 10 years, after emerging victorious from a three-way race with Mr Dutton, the former home affairs minister, and foreign minister Julie Bishop.

“My course from here is to provide absolute loyalty to Scott Morrison,” Mr Dutton, who was accused by Mr Turnbull of bullying and intimidation, said in brief comments afterwards.

Mr Turnbull, who called the second leadership meeting in a week after losing the majority support of the party, opted not to contest the vote. The ballot on whether to spill the leadership (declare it vacant) had been narrower than expected, with the same numbers: 45 votes to 40.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/08/24/jeremy-corbyn-praised-nick-griffin-former-kkk-leaderafter-video/

Jeremy Corbyn has been praised by the ex-leader of the BNP and a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after a video emerged in which he claimed that British Zionists “don’t understand English irony”.

Nick Griffin and David Duke rallied behind the Labour leader on Friday morning amid a backlash over the remarks, which were made during a speech in 2013.

Mr Corbyn faced widespread condemnation when footage emerged of him appearing to suggest that Zionist-supporting Jews were not fully accustomed to English culture.

Speaking alongside Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian Authority representative in Britain, Mr Corbyn referred to one of the envoy’s recent speeches, which he said had been “dutifully recorded by the thankfully silent Zionists who were in the audience”.

He continued: “[They] berated him afterwards for what he’d said. So clearly two problems. One is that they don’t want to study history and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either.

“Manuel does understand English irony and uses it very, very effectively so I think they need two lessons which we can help them with.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/viktor-orban-isnt-the-illiberal-revolutionary-you-think-he-is/

A first-time visitor to Hungary could be excused for thinking he’d arrived at an intensely religious country. In Budapest, the spires of several churches are visible from either bank of the Danube, and the Hungarian double cross is proudly emblazoned across the nation’s ubiquitous coat of arms.

Hungarians are rightly proud of their religious heritage. But such sentiment should not be confused with genuine spiritual conviction. Few people regularly attend religious services, the country’s historic Roman Catholic and Calvinist Churches are shedding adherents, and Hungary’s public square is notably secular. Religious holidays have been absorbed into a broader celebration of Hungarian culture that retains the trappings of Christianity without much in the way of substance. Christmas markets, not Midnight Mass, are the order of the day.

Against this increasingly secularized backdrop, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has famously endorsed “illiberal democracy,” a vaguely defined political project that is partly aimed at shoring up Hungary’s Christian identity. Orbán’s ambitious political agenda has at least one thing in common with Hungary’s historic churches: both are impressive edifices that conceal a hollow core.

Orbán’s recent speech in Romania, supposedly the most concrete explanation yet of what “illiberal democracy” might look like, was just a banal restatement of principles that no center-right party in the United States or Western Europe could possibly object to. Orbán will almost certainly continue to be a hero to right-wing populists and immigration skeptics, but his latest address should put to rest the idea that he is fashioning a comprehensive ideological alternative to political liberalism.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12906/multiculturalism-britain-july

Not a single Christian was among the 1,112 Syrian refugees resettled in Britain in the first three months of 2018. The Home Office agreed to resettle only Muslims and rejected the four Christians recommended by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“Why, when so many in authority knew the scale and severity of this crime, did it take until 2014, with the publication of the Jay report, for a large-scale investigation to occur? How many lives could have been protected if swift action had been taken a decade before?” — Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham.

“I’ve got no respect for any law other than Allah’s, so I don’t care about the law to be honest… I care for the law of Islam. I don’t care for the law of any man.” — Imran Waheed, a 41-year-old psychiatrist working for the National Health Service in Birmingham, and also working as an expert witness to British courts.

July 1. Mubarek Ali, a 35-year-old former ringleader of a Telford child sex abuse gang, was sent back to prison after breaching the terms of his parole. In 2012, Ali was sentenced to 22 years in prison for child prostitution offenses, but he was automatically released in 2017 after serving only five years. Telford MP Lucy Allan said that there are “many questions to be answered” about why Ali was released, and also about how the justice system treats so-called grooming cases:

“Now he is back in jail, justice demands that he must serve the remainder of his sentence in custody; anything less would show a casual disregard for the nature of his crimes and for the victims whose lives he changed forever.”

July 2. Abdul Rauf, a 51-year-old imam from Rochdale, was imprisoned for one year and five months after admitting to assaulting more than 20 children at a mosque. Inspector Phil Key, of Greater Manchester Police, said:

“Abdul Rauf is a nasty, bully of a man who beat the children in his classes until it became normalised. The children were left cowering and holding onto their ears, their arms and their legs after he repeatedly used violence as a punishment. The parents of the children had no idea that they were leaving their children in the care of a man who would leave them writhing in pain and covered in marks and bruises.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271087/then-islamic-europe-ridiculous-now-islamic-europe-bruce-bawer

One week back in 2007, I was paid a not inconsiderable sum of money to fly first class from Oslo to Washington, D.C., on the Tuesday and to fly back on the Thursday, so that I could give a hour-long lunchtime talk on the Wednesday to an audience of American and international diplomats. Given that I had been compensated so well and given, as it was explained to me, that I had been accorded the star spot, the sole solo turn, in the middle of a day-long conference consisting otherwise of panel discussions about Western Europe, I foolishly expected a friendly reception.

My first doubts in this respect began to arise only moments after the event kicked off. Sitting through the morning’s panels, I heard one highly credentialed individual after another – professors, politicians, and retired and active diplomats from various countries – join in predicting a glowing future for Western Europe. Socially and economically, they all agreed, prospects looked a lot brighter for Western Europe than for America. Not a single one of the dozen or so panelists diverged from this consensus.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/23/the-bombs-of

On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped a uranium-fueled atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 repeated the attack on Nagasaki, Japan, with an even more powerful plutonium bomb.

Less than a month after the second bombing, Imperial Japan agreed to formally surrender on Sept. 2. That date marked the official end of World War II—the bloodiest human or natural catastrophe in history, accounting for more than 65 million dead.

Each August, Americans in hindsight ponder the need for, the morality of, and the strategic rationale behind the dropping of the two bombs. Yet President Harry Truman’s decision 73 years ago to use the novel, terrifying weapons was not considered particularly controversial, either right before or right after the attacks. Both cities were simply military targets.

Hiroshima was the headquarters of a Japanese army unit, and a key manufacturing center and port. Nagasaki—a secondary target after clouds and smoke obscured the city of Kokura—was the site of a huge Mitsubishi munitions plant.

Yet the sheer destructive power of the two bombs—the 15-kiloton “Little Boy” Hiroshima bomb, and the 21-kiloton “Fat Man” Nagasaki bomb—ensured catastrophic civilian casualties well beyond soldiers and munitions-plant workers. During the blasts, and long afterward due to radiation showers, perhaps 150,000 Japanese were killed.

http://www.atimes.com/writer/david-p-goldman/

The United States starts a tariff war with China. Japan and Germany jump at the chance to gain market share in China’s booming auto industry and boost their capacity in China, the world’s fastest-growing passenger car market.

The United States imposes sanctions on Turkey. Germany announces that it will offer economic aid to Turkey, Qatar pledges $15 billion in new investment and a $3 billion foreign exchange swap line, and Chinese banks provide billions of dollars in new loans to the cash-strapped Turks. Chinese commentators declare that crisis is a great opportunity to integrate Turkey into China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy.

US President Donald Trump chides German Chancellor Angela Merkel for buying Russian natural gas through the Nord Stream II pipeline. Merkel summits with Russian President Vladimir Putin and confirms the pipeline arrangement, and also strikes a deal to aid the reconstruction of Syria in cooperation with Russia.

The United States imposes economic sanctions on Iran, and Western insurance companies stop insuring Iranian oil cargoes. China responds by accepting Iranian insurance on oil imports, increasing oil imports from Iran, and shipping the oil in Iranian tankers, Reuters reported August 20. India was offered Iranian insurance on oil shipments as well, but Indian refiners reportedly will reject the offer. Western insurance companies have told them that if they import Iranian oil, they will cancel insurance on refinery operations.

And German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas proposes a new international payments system independent of the dollar sphere, a new interbank transfer system, and a European Monetary Fund, to “protect European businesses from [American] sanctions. He also proposed a digital tax on American Internet firms. Writing in the German daily Handelsblatt on August 21, Maas declared, “We will not let the United States go over our heads.” No representative of a major Western European government has suggested anything remotely like this in public before.