The air in the San Joaquin Valley this late-June is, of course, hot and dry, but also dustier and more full of particulates than usual. This year a strange flu reached epidemic proportions. I say strange, because after the initial viral symptoms subsided, one’s cough still lingered for weeks and even months. Antibiotics did not seem to faze it. Allergy clinics were full. Almost every valley resident notices that when orchards and vineyards are less watered, when row cropland lies fallow, when lawns die and blow away, when highway landscaping dries up, nature takes over and the air becomes even filthier. Green elites lecture that agriculture is unnatural, without any idea why pre-civilized, pre-irrigated, and “natural” California was an empty place, whose dry, hazy climate and dusty winds made life almost impossible. The state is running on empty.
Earlier this year, a firestorm erupted when Connecticut College philosophy professor Andrew Pessin’s 2014 Facebook comments, in which he compared Hamas in Gaza to a “wild pit bull . . . chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape,” were deemed “racist” and “dehumanizing” by student activists, colleagues, and administrators alike. Meanwhile, Middle East studies academics regularly emit commentary that is unambiguous in its bigotry, tastelessness, and vulgarity, to nary a peep. Not coincidentally, the vitriol is directed at targets academe finds politically unpopular: Israel, pro-Israel Jews, and anti-Islamists.
Anonymous is a former member of the intelligence community who has had assignments in Europe and the Middle East. He previously wrote about intelligence agency influence peddling in the Fast and Furious scandal. He currently lives overseas.
Hillary Clinton handing over a sizable portion of US uranium production potential to Russia is not an isolated event, but rather is the logical convergence of decades-old Clinton era dealings with Russia and rogue states, for enrichment of the power elite. AT contributor Michael Curtis is correct when he says that the Uranium One deal has serious implications for our national security. In fact, the revelation of Hillary’s independent intel network, coupled with Clinton era national security policy changes in the form of counter-proliferation (CP) regimes, have been far more strategically harmful than many Americans realize.
A U.S. official engages with a top Venezuela politician who is under U.S. investigation.
What was a senior U.S. diplomat doing in Haiti recently meeting with a Venezuelan politician who is reportedly being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for running a giant cocaine-smuggling operation?That’s the question raised by photos that surfaced on the Internet last week showing State Department counselor Tom Shannon posing with Venezuelan National Assembly president Diosdado Cabello in Port-au-Prince. Also in the photos: Haitian President Michel Martelly, the Venezuelan foreign minister, and a French chavista with Venezuelan citizenship who is currently posted in Washington.
The Führer wanted to advance on the Soviet Union in a broad front—in full alliance with Warsaw. But the Poles declined.
Because of the recent centenary, debates over the origins of World War I rage with renewed vigor. By contrast, the origins of World War II seem ever more settled and uncontroversial. Adolf Hitler, so the conventional narrative runs, attacked Poland as the first step in the capture of lands to the east—thereby seizing the Lebensraum, or living space, that Germany supposedly required. He paused to neutralize France and Britain before moving on to an assault on the Soviet Union that was, in great part, ideologically motivated. Rolf-Dieter Müller’s refreshing new look at the events of 1939, “Enemy in the East,” does not challenge Hitler’s primary responsibility, to be sure, but it does compel us to look again at the whole origins story.
Mr. Müller, an accomplished German military historian, is the first specialist to explain Germany’s strategic planning in 1938-39 for a larger audience.
Reports suggest that the number of Islamic State (ISIS) recruits from Indonesia tripled to over 500 by the end of last year.
Home to the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia’s more than 200 million Muslims make up 13% of the world’s total Muslims. The nation’s history of extremist movements makes it a ripe location for ISIS recruits.
Wildan Mukholland was one of those recruits. He came from the same village in Indonesia as two militants convicted and executed for their role in the 2002 Bali terrorist bombings, which killed over 200 people and were carried out by Jemaah Islamiyah, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
” The first decision should be to recognize that those who kill in Islam’s name are not mere violent extremists but fanatics driven by a specific religion’s zeal. And their victims are anything but random.”
And got it stomped on. Israel’s former ambassador to the United States on the president’s naiveté as peacemaker, blinders to terrorism, and alienation of allies.
Days after jihadi gunmen slaughtered 11 staffers of the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a policeman on January 7, hundreds of thousands of French people marched in solidarity against Islamic radicalism. Forty-four world leaders joined them, but not President Barack Obama. Neither did his attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, or Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, both of whom were in Paris that day. Other terrorists went on to murder four French Jews in a kosher market that they deliberately targeted. Yet Obama described the killers as “vicious zealots who … randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli.”
It is not surprising that former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren is now in the sights of the Obama Defenders Corps, a collection of U.S. administration officials, sycophantic journalists and other obsessive critics of Israel.
The former ambassador has revealed in his new book what most Israelis and many Americans now know to be true: that U.S. President Barack Obama abandoned Israel ever since the beginning of his term in 2009, and that the breach in U.S.-Israel relations is primarily his doing. In fact it was a deliberate policy to create distance between the United States and Israel, since the president was far more interested in making nice to the likes of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim world in general. Close U.S. ties with Israel presented an obstacle in Obama’s path toward accomplishing these other goals.
ADL’s Foxman slams Amb. Michael Oren for mentioning Obama’s Muslim upbringing in an essay about Obama’s views on the Muslim world
And the fallout continues from former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren’s comments about and analysis of U.S. President Barack Obama.
In a furious press release issued during the waning minutes of his reign, national director of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman slammed Oren for expressing his views about U.S. President Barack Obama.
The other day at a party, a young man, earnestly secular and ultra-liberal on every single social issue, called Pope Francis a “really cool pope.” I guess as my e-pal Dan Friedman points out, there are many “really cool Reform rabbis” whose views on capitalism and climate change are completely consonant with those of Pope Francis. How hilarious that the coercive anti religion, anything goes, liberal groupies, who cringe at skull caps and phylacteries or celibate priests, suddenly find common ground with a religious leader who abhors gay marriage and any form of abortion, whether surgical or medically induced.
Mark Steyn found this pithy quote from Richard Tol
http://www.steynonline.com/7013/encyclical-variations
http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-pope-on-climate.html
“I am not impressed by normally a- or anti-religious intellectuals who suddenly discovered their inner papist. ”
That sums it up….rsk
