RUTHFULLY YOURS

A mob of starving people advanced on the presidential palace chanting, “We want food”. They were met by soldiers and police dispatched by the tyrant from his lavish palace decorated opulently with a golden sun, giant rock crystal mirrors, sparkling chandeliers and towering oil portraits.

The scene wasn’t 19th century France, but 21st century Venezuela.

And if you are wondering why you haven’t seen it on the news, it’s because Venezuela is a Socialist disaster area that was once being used as a model by the left. Now it’s a place where the vast majority of people can’t afford basic food staples and a third are down to two or fewer meals a day.

Obama laughed and joked with deceased monster Hugo Chavez, who handed him a copy of the anti-American tract, “Open Veins of Latin America” that had even been disavowed by its own author. Obama called the book a “nice gesture”, but Eduardo Galeano, its author, had told an audience that the left “commits grave errors” when in power.

Venezuela, once a wealthy oil state, where the doctors offering “universal health care” have no medicine and starving people loot government stores looking for food, is yet another example. 50 people are dead in the latest food riots. Their graves are yet another “grave error” of the left.

Obama has not appeared too concerned at the meltdown in Venezuela. Unlike Syria, there are no threats of intervention to remove Maduro, Chavez’s successor, and the rest of the leftist regime illegally clinging to power while slaughtering Venezuelans, smuggling drugs and aiding terrorists.

When Hugo Chavez was killed by the wonders of Cuban medicine, a remedy that American leftists recommend to others while they obtain the best private health care for their own ailments, Obama offered a vague statement of support calling Chavez’s passing, “challenging”.

It was certainly that.

The United Kingdom has always had Europe’s most robust democracy, and with Thursday’s vote to leave the European Union it has given its Continental peers a powerful example of the meaning of popular rule. Now we’ll see if the British have the wisdom to make the best use of their historic choice.

We argued earlier this week that Britain should remain in the Union. But we also acknowledged that it was a close call, and we did so more out of concern for the EU’s future than for Britain’s.

The Brexit vote deprives the EU of its second-biggest—and most dynamic—economy, with the strongest growth rate among Europe’s major economies and a record-setting employment rate of 74%. Government spending as a percentage of GDP has also come down to pre-financial crisis levels, again disproving the Keynesian doomsaying about the perils of fiscal “austerity.”

Brexit may encourage other states—the Netherlands is often mentioned—to debate their membership in the EU, especially if Britain does not suffer the economic and diplomatic catastrophes forecast by the Remain camp, starting with Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne. Norway and Switzerland have shown it’s possible to have prosperity and security in Europe with less nannying by Brussels.

If the EU wants to prevent other countries from catching the Brexit bug, our advice is to avoid the temptation to punish the U.K. with an arduous renegotiation of terms for its re-entry into the common market. The perception of EU high-handedness is what alienates public opinion across the Continent. Brexit ought to be the wake-up call the EU needs to return to serving as a common market that encourages growth and competition, and not—as it has become since the late 1980s—an innovation-killing superstate obsessed with regulatory harmonization, tax hikes, green-energy dogma and anticompetitive antitrust enforcement.

London will have its own challenges. To adapt a line from Margaret Thatcher’s famous 1988 Bruges speech on Europe, Britain has not voted to free itself of a European superstate to see it return in the form of the nanny state exercising dominance from Westminster. CONTINUE AT SITE

London, England — I have been in England for only one-and-a-half days, and it is already clear to me that the Brexit debate has by no means represented business as usual. Customarily, British political affairs are milquetoast affairs, with little of the vitriol or panache that marks American politics. This one, though, is different. It is bitter. It is bad-tempered. And, for want of a better word, it is rude. All told, the British seem thoroughly fed up with the proceedings in general, and even more fed up with those who disagree with them as to the ideal outcome. Whatever happens tomorrow, reconciliation will be a protracted affair.

Almost all of my more cosmopolitan friends are for Britain’s staying in, and, when I express the opposite view, have a tendency to condescend. “Really?” they ask, eyebrows raised. “Really?” And then, their irritation rising, they look at me with a sort of detached fascination, as if I had just suggested putting erotically shaped ice cubes into the Pinot Noir. One woman, who has been a friend since we were both eleven, told me over coffee that I should reconsider my position because “all the smart people” are pro-Remain. Another, an extremely sharp pediatrician whom I would trust with my life, has been berating her pro-Brexit siblings for “canceling out” the “sensible votes” that she and her husband hope to cast. The charges of smugness, it seems, have not been overblown.

Nor, I notice, have the reports of reticence from the other side. Perhaps because they are expecting precisely the reaction I got, the Leavers of my acquaintance tend to start their explanations with an apology. “I’m sorry,” they say, “but . . . ”; “I just think that . . . ”; “I understand that this is tricky, however . . . ” Such is the cultural power of the BBC and the political class — both of which have done their level best to make Brexit seem outré — that some people I speak to pretend that they are on the fence when they are clearly not, and relax only when I volunteer that I’m pro-leaving and have been for as long as I remember. “Oh,” they say with a furtive look around, “well in that case.”

On the train from Huntingdon to London, I see these divisions in full bloom. Almost everyone is reading a newspaper — it feels a little as if I’ve stepped backwards in time, to the 1950s — and their choices betray their politics. Running my eyes across the carriage, I feel as if I am attending a bizarre, hyper-ecumenical protest march, at which anybody with a strong, 40-point-font opinion is welcome. From seat level, the front pages resemble low-slung protest signs: “Leave!” “Remain!” “Leave!” “Remain!” “Leave!” It is possible, I suppose, that the people sitting behind these slogans are less sure of their views than it appears, but you certainly wouldn’t know it from their conversations with each other, full as they are of hard-headed assurances and mild exasperation at any expression of dissent. The phrase, “no, but you see” is used a lot, along with the insistence — repeated as if by rote and used by both sides — that “they are just trying to scare you.” On the surface it is all very polite, as Britons typically are. But there is an edge this time — an edge I haven’t seen for a long time.

Last June 8—four days before the terror attack in Orlando—two Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank opened fire in a Tel Aviv café, killing four and wounding six.

Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai, a member of the left-wing Labor Party, was quick to respond—by blaming Israel.

Saying that Israel was “maybe the only country in which another people is under occupation and in which these people have no rights,” Huldai continued:

We can’t keep these people in a reality in which they are occupied and expect them to reach the conclusion that everything is all right and that they can continue living this way…. I know the reality and understand that leaders with courage need to aspire to reach [an agreement] and not just talk about it.

Considering that Huldai is a public official, mayor of a major city, it is putting it mildly to say that his words were full of ignorance and distortions. Israel is not an occupier in the West Bank. There are, however, numerous occupied peoples in the world. Palestinians in the West Bank have the prerogative to elect their own government and many other rights. The large majority of Palestinians—and certainly the terrorists among them—reject any Israeli claim to any land. So many attempts—by Israeli, American, and other leaders—to reach an agreement with the Palestinians have been turned down cold that any realistic Israeli leader understands that, at least for the time being, it’s an impossible goal.

But beyond those points, there’s another: shooting up people in a café is a crime, known as murder. No claim of political grievance is exoneration for murder. That point is widely understood in civilized societies—though not by the mayor of Tel Aviv.

Huldai’s words, which sparked fury, would be less significant if they were an aberration. Unfortunately, statements of that ilk are typical of the Israeli left—including, amazing as it may seem, in the case of left-wing politicians seeking to gain public favor.

Ehud Barak, a lifelong Laborite, is a former prime minister and defense minister. Before leaving politics in 2013, he was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense minister for four years. He was seen as Netanyahu’s close ally and fellow hawk on the Iranian issue, and worked hard—even dividing his party at one point—to keep Netanyahu’s coalition in power.

In a speech on June 16, Barak—who, as Netanyahu’s defense minister, had warned steadily that time was running out to stop Iran’s nuclear program—said that Israel faced “no existential threats.” He went on to accuse Netanyahu of “Hitlerizing” all threats to Israel, saying:

Hitlerization by the prime minister cheapens the Holocaust…. Our situation is grave even without [comparisons to] Hitler….

Not to say ‘I told them so’, but in June, 1975, I wrote to lament Britain’s dismissal of old friends, traditions and, indeed, national self-esteem itself. All these years later, as UK voters make their verdict known, I yearn to hear that decades of folly and false promise are finally at an end.
On June 4, 1975, I sat down at my clattering typewriter in the offices of the Daily Telegraph in Fleet Street and embarked on a melancholy task. As one of the leader-writers opposed to Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community (as it was then called), I had been asked by editor Bill Deedes to write a fairly light account of the referendum campaign that would appear on morning of the vote. Bill said he wanted my squib to offset the solemnity of the editorial, but my suspicion was that he was a secret No voter who wanted it to offset the Telegraph’s admonition to vote Yes.

In principle Bill could have ordered a “No” editorial, but pressure from the establishment for an endorsement of Britain’s EU membership was so overwhelming in 1975 that it would have seemed eccentric, unpatriotic, even treasonous. So I read through “the files” of the previous month and started bashing it out:

From the Establishment and the respectable anti-Establishment, from the Economist and the New Statesman, from the Lord Feather [of the TUC] and Mr Campbell Adamson [of the CBI], from Mr Wilson and Mr Heath, from the Royal Commission Volunteers to “Actors and Actresses for Europe”, from the farthest reaches of the civilized West End, the same advice, the same dire predictions of life outside the Market (“God, it was hell out there in 1972”), the same comforting assurances of a bright future inside, less ecstatic admittedly than similar forecasts before we had entered (“Come in, come in, the water’s lukewarm”) have been proclaimed with an almost religious fervour.

Religion itself had been conscripted for the European cause. The Bishop of London, preaching in St Paul’s, had said that those concerned about sovereignty were guilty of the heresy “My Country Right or Wrong” which was “essentially selfish and inward-looking”. As for Big Business, that spoke with one voice: the CBI’s Ralph Bateman declared that it would be “madness” to leave the EEC, and Mr Barrie Heath told the workers at Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds that membership of the EEC was not a political issue at all.

“Is he Sir Barrie?” asked Mr Enoch Powell, the leading right-wing campaigner for a No vote. “No? Well, he soon will be.” He was too—given a knighthood three years later “for services to exporting”.

Australia played a discreet part too:

There was a commendable reluctance on the part of overseas dignitaries to interfere in Britain’s internal political arguments. Mr Gough Whitlam, for instance, revealed how he had virtuously resisted the blandishments of certain anti-Marketeers to call for Britain’s withdrawal. Why had he refused? Because he did not wish Britain to lapse into the sad decline of Spain, he declared in neutral Australian tones.

But that, of course, might have been delivered in the spirit of “Let them have what they want—good and hard” in revenge for Heath’s betrayal of the Antipodes and the Commonwealth in the European negotiations. At least I sort of hope so.

In Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian novel, Submission (2015), which takes place in an imaginary France ‎in 2022, when the Muslim Brotherhood has won elections and rules the country in alliance with the Socialists, the non-Jewish protagonist, a professor at the Sorbonne, tells his Jewish student, who is escaping to Israel with her family, that there ‎can be “no Israel for me.” This is one of the most poignant observations in the book.‎

Another is the protagonist’s reflection that the increasing violence, even the gunshots in the streets of Paris as a ‎civil war threatens to explode during the run-up to the elections, has become the ‎new normal: something that everyone is resigned to as an inevitable fact, barely reported in the ‎media and treated as unremarkable by his fellow lecturers. Even after the Muslim Brotherhood wins the ‎elections, and the Sorbonne is turned into an Islamic university, with all that this entails, his colleagues treat ‎this development as nothing out of the ordinary. Houllebecq’s indictment against the silence and ‎complicity of his fellow intellectuals in the face of the Islamist encroachments on French society is ‎scathing. As a matter of course, in the new France, where freedom of speech comes at a prohibitive ‎price, Houllebecq now has to live under 24-hour police protection. Submission, by the way, was published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks.‎

The resignation and the precarious pretense that everything is normal in the face of rapidly deteriorating ‎circumstances, is a predictable human reaction, testimony to the sometimes practical but lamentable human capacity for adaptation to most circumstances, whatever they may be. ‎Historically, Jews have excelled in this discipline, simply because they had no choice. Just like Houllebecq’s ‎protagonist, they had nowhere else to go. However, whereas there “can be no Israel” for the lost ‎professor, today, unlike the last time Jews were threatened on a large scale in Europe, there is an Israel ‎for the Jews. Uniquely among all the peoples of Europe, the Jews have a welcoming place to go. ‎Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Western European Jews choose to stay put in Europe.‎

The great man-caused disaster of the last century is not global warming. It is socialism.

Consider the utter tragedy playing itself out in Venezuela, a formerly relatively prosperous, resource-rich, Western nation that now faces the economic, political and cultural abyss after embracing the Bernie Sanders-on-steroids policies the Left always promises will bring about justice, fairness and equality.

As one heart-wrenching account details:

In the last two years Venezuela has experienced the kind of implosion that hardly ever occurs in a middle-income country like it outside of war. Mortality rates are skyrocketing; one public service after another is collapsing; triple-digit inflation has left more than 70 percent of the population in poverty; an unmanageable crime wave keeps people locked indoors at night; shoppers have to stand in line for hours to buy food; babies die in large numbers for lack of simple, inexpensive medicines and equipment in hospitals, as do the elderly and those suffering from chronic illnesses.

Venezuela indeed has experienced a war, but not one involving armies. The nation has waged a war on liberty itself.

Even if Britain does vote to leave the European Union, it will still work with the EU, albeit as a separate diplomatic entity rather than having its voice submerged by the dead hand of Brussels bureaucracy.

Britain outside the EU will be just as vigorous in opposing further acts of Russian aggression as it has been as a member of the EU.

NATO, rather than the EU, is the most important organization for keeping Moscow in its place.

For all his claims to the contrary, there can be little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be taking a keen interest in the outcome of Britain’s historic referendum on its membership of the European Union on Thursday.

The Kremlin’s official line is that Moscow has no interest in whether the British people decide to leave or remain a member of the 28-state economic and political union. And in his first public comment on the vote last weekend. Mr Putin said the decision was “the business of the people of the UK,” even though he could not help having a gratuitous swipe at British Prime Minister David Cameron, accusing him of trying to “blackmail Europe” by calling the vote.

But even though the Kremlin’s official position is that it is observing a strict neutrality on the outcome, the reality is that there is nothing that would please Mr Putin more than a British vote in favour of Brexit.

China now has the world’s fastest supercomputer, faster than anything we’ve got by a factor of five. Forget the South China Sea. That’s rope-a-dope, and we’re the dope that’s getting roped. We lost that one. We’re about to lose the next round, too.

China has built the computer with chips that it designed and manufactured in China, after the United States banned Intel from selling its fastest chips to China.

China not only has the world’s fastest individual supercomputer, but it has more total supercomputing capacity than the United States. And its capacity is growing, and getting even faster; China claims it will add a zero to computing speed by 2020, which would make its top-of-the-line box 50 times faster than the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

This isn’t about virtual reality headsets. Supercomputers are a decisive instrument in economics and war. They break codes (or create hard-to-break codes), for example. They simulate nuclear explosions. They design air frames. They model the molecular properties of new materials. China’s economy, to be sure, is far behind America’s in many key areas–but not in chip-making, or computer architecture. Not any more.

China has surface-to-ship missiles (the DF-21 and its successors) that can sink U.S. carriers. It has satellite-killer missiles that can take out our space-based communications. It has high-speed maneuvering missiles. We know about all this. What should worry us is what we don’t know about yet. China’s super-computing capacity opens up a vast number of possibilities for industrial as well as weapons design. It turbocharges the rate of innovation and drastically reduces developing and testing time and costs. This is an advantage America used to take for granted. We controlled exports of fast computer chips, even the ones embedded in game boxes, because we wanted to maintain our edge. And now it’s gone. Not a single politician to my knowledge has mentioned it.

There can be no ifs and buts about it – the EU is a Dictatorship. How come? How dare I say such a thing? Answer: When the Commission headed by Herr Juncker issues a Regulation it has the force of law for all 28 member States immediately. Let me repeat that one word – immediately.

Nobody has the right to question this Regulation – it is incontestable. It simply arrives from the EU and it is Law! There are no discussions in Parliament, no processes, no debate, absolutely nothing. Once you clearly understand this my friends, and my friends also on the Remain side, I say to you “Think again.”

It is true that both the Lords and the Monarchy are an anachronism, in some ways logically indefensible. So we have a Monarch by whom all laws are promulgated by Royal Assent, but whose Assent is assured. The Monarch actually has almost absolute power, which in practice is never used. The House of Commons is the legislature, where laws are proposed by the majority Party and opposed by the Opposition. The Executive is formed by the leader of the majority Party, who becomes Prime Minister, but still has to report weekly to the Monarch. (Not everybody knows this.)

The Lords were originally landed gentry who had a natural stake in the Kingdom, and the Bishops, both of whom were reckoned to be above being bought and above Party politics, – precisely because they were not elected. Alas too many Prime Ministers have sought to fill the Lords with their cronies. Nevertheless, in spite of the abuses of power, the Lords has proved to be a wonderful brake upon the Commons, and a means of publicising issues to the general public and modifying laws.