HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Modernized Missile Defense Is Vital To Counter Iran, North Korea Threats Peter J. Ferrara

Posted By on November 24th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/23/restart-

The modern core of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative is called Ground-based Midcourse Defense technology (GMD). That technology can engage and destroy intermediate and long-range ballistic missiles in space to protect America’s homeland.

It relies on ground-based interceptor (GBI) rockets to deploy exoatmospheric kill vehicles (EKV) into the path of incoming nuclear warheads. Those EKVs use globally deployed sensors and sensor/propulsion technology onboard to guide the vehicle to use kinetic energy from a direct hit to destroy the incoming target vehicle. That has been proven to work to stop incoming missiles in recent tests.

The Pentagon was planning to modernize this system by replacing the old EKVs with new redesigned kill vehicles (RKVs), specifically intended to defend against possible ballistic missile attacks from North Korea and Iran. But in May this year, the Pentagon reported a two-year delay in the RKV’s development and announced a pause in the modernization as a result.

Now Michael Griffin, undersecretary of Defense for research and engineering, has issued a stop-work order to Boeing on further development of the new, more modern RKV “due to technical design problems.” Raytheon is the actual developer of the RKV, serving as a subcontractor to Boeing.

The RKV was meant to replace the EKVs on all current and future GMD interceptor rockets, a total of 64 ultimately. Currently, there are 44 GBIs at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with plans to add 22 additional missile silos at Fort Greely to support 20 more GBIs.

Under the new Defense Department budget, the RKV is now planned for its first intercept test in fiscal 2023. The plan is now to deploy the RKV on GBI missiles in 2025 at the soonest.

Meanwhile, the old EKV is still working, now better than ever, given the most recent tests. The Missile Defense Agency needs to complete its modernization with the new RKV before missile defense is dangerously degraded.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Fourteen Years after Cartoon Crisis, Norway again Knuckles Under to Islam by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on November 24th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15198/norway-pakistan

While one can hardly imagine the Pakistani government responding to Norwegian pressure to stop oppressing Ahmadiyya Muslims, Hindus, women, gays, and so on, Pakistan has not hesitated to complain about developments in Norway that offend its delicate cultural sensibilities.

So it was that the representative of a purportedly free country fell all over himself assuring officials of an “Islamic Republic” that, at least when Islam is in the picture, freedom of speech and of assembly in Norway have their limits.

Once again, alas, it appears that when the exercise of fundamental Norwegian freedoms causes offense, the powers that be in Norway have no hesitation about choosing the wrong side.

There has long been what you might call a “special relationship” between Norway and Pakistan. Although they have since been overtaken statistically by Somalis, Iranians, and Iraqis, Pakistanis used to be the major Muslim immigrant group in Norway. The area around the city of Kharian in the Punjab is even known as “Little Norway” because so many people from this region have settled in Norway. Indeed, many of those folks from Kharian, having made a bundle on Norwegian welfare payments or by driving cabs in Oslo, running kebab joints, or whatever, have built veritable palaces back home. They come complete with servants (or near-slaves), and are the principal residences of some of their wives and children and where they themselves spend months at a time.

So many Norwegian voters have “second homes” of this sort in or around Kharian that Norwegian politicians have actually campaigned there. Muslim children born in Norway are routinely sent back to Kharian and environs to go to school — more specifically, to attend the madrassas, or Koran schools — so that they will not be poisoned by Western values. In recent years, Norwegian Muslim politicians and journalists have proposed that the Norwegian government finance at least one school in Kharian for local children who hold Norwegian passports.

Traffic back and forth between the two countries by people with double residency is heavy: if some day you find yourself at Oslo Airport, you will invariably see at least one long line consisting largely of bearded men, women in hijab, and armies of children, each family accompanied by tons of luggage, who are awaiting the next flight to Islamabad, Karachi, or Lahore.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brexit and the Deficiencies of Parliament by Malcolm Lowe

Posted By on November 24th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14849/brexit-parliament

What has characterized the last year of UK politics is that individual MPs in the various parties have begun to seek the same freedom of action as US Members of Congress. So far, however, they are both fearful of suffering the same fate as the 21 banned by Johnson and remain inexperienced in the exercise of such freedom.

Johnson now has two alternatives. One is to reinstate the 21. His defenders claim that this would encourage similar defections in the future. The other alternative is to stick to his unpopular decision and risk being dismissed himself by his party. Either way, the unwitting heritage of Johnson may include the end of the tyrannical powers of the UK PM.

The Bank of England in its latest report estimates that the consequences of no-deal on October 31 will be less dire than it thought a year ago, but dire they will be: GDP will shrink by 5.5%, inflation will rise from 2% to over 5%, unemployment will “surge to 7% rather than 7.5%, up from a current 45-year low of 3.8%.” In short, a very healthy economy will turn into a problematic economy. The most worrying problem, however, is that the Bank is engaged in guesswork about an event without precedent. If things turn out much better or much worse than estimated, nobody should be surprised that the Bank got it wrong.

It is remarkable that the UK Parliament has spent almost a year of debates about the Brexit deal agreed by Theresa May’s government and the European Union. Indeed, about one small detail of that deal. We shall briefly describe what that detail is before explaining that the inordinate resulting delay reflects deep and longstanding dysfunction in the whole parliamentary system of the UK.

The deal consisted of two documents, the Withdrawal Agreement (WA, 585 pages) and the Framework for the Future Relationship (FFR, 26 pages). Most of the WA consists of regulations obviously needed for winding up UK participation in EU institutions, settling mutual debts, safeguarding the interests of UK citizens resident in the EU and vice versa, and the like. Even Boris Johnson regards all that as basically good and necessary.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Disruptive Energy vs. the Deep State With just about any other president, the deep state’s victory would be all-but-assured. With Trump, hedge your bets. Roger Kimball

Posted By on November 24th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/23/trumps-disruptive-energy-vs-the-deep-state/

For the last 56 years, this time in November has been an occasion—at first pious and lachrymose, latterly perfunctory—to commemorate the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That event was certainly a cultural cataclysm. America was a changed place after November 22, 1963.

But for all the reams of commentary that event elicited, there is one irony that has not perhaps been sufficiently appreciated. Although the president’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a rabid Communist, the murder was almost instantly reframed as an expression of right-wing hatred.

I say that this irony has not been sufficiently appreciated. I do not mean that it hasn’t been pointed out. It lies at the center of James Piereson’s fine book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, for example. But somehow in the texture of public sentiment, in the semi-articulated tissues of popular understanding, the notion that Kennedy was really, deep down killed by the equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” shows us how malleable, how susceptible to political manipulation is the Narrative, the assumed horizon of understanding.

There are contemporary lessons to be drawn from the metamorphosis of Kennedy’s assassination at the hands of a pro-Soviet Communist into an object lesson in the perils of right-wing animus.

The only Russian collusion on offer in 2016 was between the Hillary Clinton campaign and various Russian and Ukrainian operatives, but somehow we all got saddled with a nearly three-year, multimillion-dollar investigation into Donald Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia.

Get Ready for Media Obfuscation Like Never Before

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Progress or devolution? By Eric Utter

Posted By on November 24th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/progress_or_devolution_.html

We have entered an era of almost limitless tolerance for former taboos, yet extreme intolerance for traditional norms. And the concept of “norms” itself.

Every aspect of what is mainstream and what is fringe is being inverted, flipped, reversed. Christianity is becoming a fringe belief, mocked by elites and shunned by youth. Many progressives view its adherents as backward folk, hicks who “cling to their guns and their Bibles” while worshipping a “guy in the sky.” The LGBTQIA+ community is now mainstream. Drag queens are reading to grade-school age kids all across the ever fruitier plain. “Queer” has become a term of endearment, one used so frequently it is anything but odd or unusual. The “work ethic” is now a fringe concept seen as a tool of white supremacy, while an entitlement mentality is mainstream, ubiquitous. “Faith, family and freedom” has morphed into “State, village and socialism.” The ethos of “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps” has been supplanted by “what’s in it for me?”

The Marlboro Man has been replaced by the Metrosexual. The bigger tragedy is we think that’s a good thing. Cigarette smoking is now essentially regarded as a crime. As is being a traditional male. The “strong and silent type” was once considered the model. Now it’s more often considered “toxic masculinity.” Smoking pot, however, is seen as cool, possibly even healthy. Which is why it’s being legalized in state after state. Pass the Doritos.

The First Amendment has been forced to yield to tiny “free speech zones” on college campuses. Nearly as many Millennials believe in banning “hate speech,” meaning speech with which they disagree, as believe in freedom of speech. The Second Amendment, guaranteeing the right to protect oneself and one’s family, is under fire as we speak and will — at some point — almost certainly be stripped, gutted and possibly even repealed.

In America, we used to talk about how lucky we are and count our blessings. Everyone was born with equal rights, granted by the Creator, to pursue life, liberty and happiness. That mindset, which had been mainstream for two centuries, is now a fringe notion. The idea that American society is unfair, racist, bigoted, misogynistic and xenophobic is now mainstream. It pollutes and infects virtually all of academia, Hollywood, the entertainment industry, Big Tech companies, the Democratic Party, and the mainstream media. This is as ironic as it is wrong. The wealthier we have become, the more tolerant and open, the more those in these positions of influence berate America. Today, as I write this, we have the lowest unemployment rate in history for African-Americans, Hispanics and women. An African-American has been president. A woman will likely be president soon. There are multiple Muslims in Congress. Gays and lesbians, too. Yet the “progressive” elites, in Chicken Little-like fashion, louder and louder yell: “The Sky is Falling.” 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Abolish the Ivy League Already By Roger L. Simon

Posted By on November 24th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/abolish-the-ivy-league-already/

I attended two Ivy League schools (Dartmouth and Yale) some time ago, roughly the Early Paleolithic Age, and, best as I can remember, sort of liked them. But lately I’m beginning to think the whole elite school thing has turned into one big shuck, maybe it even was then—and not just because of the revelations of all the cheating surrounding admissions or that the institutions apparently discriminate against Asians as they did against Jews back in the day.

No, it’s more basic than that. These formerly august institutions have morphed into kindergartens for jejune, virtue-signaling wannabe Trotskys and Rosa Luxemburgs (a.k.a. social justice warriors) who can’t even let us watch a farshtunkene football game in peace.

In the middle of this year’s Harvard-Yale game, the great activistes spewed out onto the field to demand, what else, action on climate change—delaying the game for over an hour.

But all these Ivy League smarty-pants couldn’t come up with a slogan more original than “Hey hey, ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go.”

Who’d they learn that from, their grandparents?  Decades ago, during Vietnam, it was “Hey hey, ho ho, LBJ has got to go.”

And he did. Of course, if fossil fuels went, we’d all freeze to death, but never mind. It’s the thought that counts—assuming there really is some thought involved in these climate protests, which I doubt, even and especially those held by Harvard and Yale students and alumni at sporting events.

It’s all rote, a pseudo-religion—and maybe a good way to meet a partner of the opposite or same sex, depending on your preference. That’s the way it was during Vietnam too. (Mea very culpa!)

(It would be interesting to know how much litter was left on the field by these environmentalists. The Women’s March immediately after Trump’s election was notorious for leaving a giant mess.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The First Glimpse into Horowitz’s FISA-Abuse Report By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on November 24th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/the-first-glimpse-into-horowitzs-fisa-abuse-report/

CNN reports that an FBI attorney tampered with documents related to the Carter Page application. How much does it matter?

I s this the tip of a scandalous iceberg? Or is it a signal that Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s much anticipated report on investigative irregularities in the Trump-Russia probe will be much ado about nothing much?

A low-ranking FBI lawyer altered a document that was somehow related to the Obama Justice Department’s application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for a national-security surveillance warrant. The application, approved by the FISC in October 2016, targeted former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page — an American citizen, former naval intelligence officer, and apparent FBI cooperating witness — as a clandestine agent of Russia. Apparently, the document tampering made at least one of the application’s factual assertions seem more damning than it actually was.

The FBI attorney, who has not been identified, is also said to have falsified an email in an effort to provide back-up support for the fabricated claim. The lawyer, who was reportedly pushed out of the Bureau when the tampering incident came to light, was interviewed in Horowitz’s inquiry and is said to be a subject of the related criminal investigation being conducted by Connecticut U.S. attorney John Durham.

The news was broken on Thursday night by CNN. That in itself is noteworthy. The FBI’s former deputy director Andrew McCabe is a CNN contributor, and the Bureau’s former general counsel James Baker is a frequent CNN guest. The IG’s probe has scrutinized the conduct of both. CNN commentators also include other former federal law-enforcement officials, who have ties to the Bureau and to some of the former officials under scrutiny. CNN’s news story about the evidence tampering is sourced to “several people briefed on the matter,” who were not identified. The IG report is scheduled to be released on December 9, and witnesses have recently been permitted to review a draft of it under tight restrictions.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Peggy Noonan Reminds Us Why Trump Won The NeverTrumpers’ fundamental error. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on November 24th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/peggy-noonan-reminds-us-why-trump-won-bruce-thornton/

Three years after outsider Donald Trump blew up the political world with his implausible victory over the consummate insider, Hillary Clinton, many establishment Republicans still don’t get it. From their elite cocoon, they continue to indulge the hauteur that put off ordinary voters who had grown tired of a fossilized political class that serially ignored their interests, and seemed more concerned with their own insider perks and privilege, rather than in repairing the damage that decades of bipartisan progressive technocracy had inflicted on the Constitutional order.

The grande dame of the disgruntled NeverTrump Republicans has been the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, whose columns on Trump usually sound like a mash-up of the prescriptions of Emily Post and a snobbery redolent of Lady Violet Crawley from Downton Abbey.

Noonan’s latest is an attack on the Republicans’ behavior during the House impeachment hearings, coupled with a scolding of the anonymous author of the anti-Trump book A Warning. We should credit her takedown of “anonymous” as “self-valorous and creepy.” But her comments about the Republicans reveal the underlying grounds for NeverTrump hatred: the resentment against those who don’t accept the progressive assumptions that politics is the business of a self-proclaimed guild possessing knowledge, techniques, and professional manners and decorum that the voting masses don’t have.

As typical of a Noonan column, she starts with some sly preening of her insider-status as a wise political guru: “A young foreign-affairs professional asked last week if the coming impeachment didn’t feel like Watergate.” Unlike hoi polloi, Noonan knows “foreign-affairs professionals,” and they seek her out for her wisdom. She then proceeds to contrast the “dignity and professionalism of the career diplomats” whom the Democrats––“disciplined in their questioning and not bullying and theatrical”––called on to testify, with the Republicans’ “interruptions and chaos-strewing” that she compares to “some of what the Democrats did during the Kavanaugh hearings.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Who Is Winning The Climate Wars? Francis Menton

Posted By on November 24th, 2019

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&

If you get most of your news passively by just reading what comes up in some kind of Facebook or Google feed or equivalent, you probably have the impression that the Climate Wars are over and the Climate Campaigners have swept the field of battle. In my case, I certainly don’t rely on those kinds of toxic sources of information, but I do regularly monitor many of the media sources in the “mainstream” category — the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Economist, Politico, and several of the television networks like CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN. All of those (and plenty more) have clearly put an absolute ban on any news or information that would cast even the slightest negative light on the proposition that there is an imminent “climate crisis” that must be solved by government transformation of the world economy.

I’ll give a couple of examples of the lengths to which this has gone. Back in September, mentally unstable Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose only qualification was her ignorant passion for climate extremism, got the platform of the UN “Climate Action Summit” for a big speech. Excerpt:

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

You would think that sane people would want to stay as far from Greta as possible lest they get accused of child abuse. But instead, Greta is feted as a heroine. In October something called the Nordic Council awarded young Greta its 2019 Environmental Award. (It seems that she has rejected the award, thus claiming for herself an even higher level of holiness among true believers.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Impeachment: 3 Crucial Questions, 3 Answers, So Far By Charles Lipson

Posted By on November 24th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/23/impeachment_3_crucial_qu

Question 1: What did the president want from Ukraine?
 
The Democrats presented testimony that Trump cared much more about getting Ukraine to investigate the Biden family than he did about advancing American national security. That’s the most likely explanation for the five-week hold on aid to Ukraine. But the Republicans have offered a plausible alternative, though not an entirely convincing one. Given Ukraine’s dismal record on corruption, they say, wasn’t it prudent to wait briefly and see whether country’s new president lived up to his big promises?
 
Question 2: Can the Democrats prove their case?
 
Can they show conclusively that the president wanted something illicit and was using official resources to get it?
 
Democrats need firsthand proof of Trump’s motives to demolish the Republican case. That means they need documents or testimony from people who dealt directly with the president. Democrats have subpoenaed some of Trump’s close aides; the president ordered them not to testify. Nancy Pelosi has decided to skip over them rather than wait for the Federal Courts to adjudicate the conflict between the two branches.
 
The result, so far, is what Scottish courts call “unproven.” Crimes that carry draconian punishment rightly require conclusive evidence to match. The Democrats simply cannot produce it without firsthand accounts.
 
Question 3: What’s the rush?

The Democrats argue — and have presented testimony — that Trump cared a lot more about getting Ukraine to investigate the Biden family than he did about advancing American national security. If Trump’s real goal was bringing down the Bidens, and if he tried to get Kyiv to do that by leveraging U.S. foreign aid and the prospect of a White House meeting, then he would be wrongly seeking personal, political benefits from a foreign government against a likely 2020 competitor.

Those are reasonable arguments. Indeed, they are the most likely explanations for the 55-day hold on aid to Ukraine, which Congress had authorized. Still, other explanations are possible, and the White House and its Republican allies have offered them. They say Trump had perfectly legitimate national-security concerns about U.S. policy in Ukraine, that he had often mentioned them to advisers, and that he paused the aid as he evaluated them.