ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Green Cult’s Holy Week The Left’s religion of destruction on full display. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

Hard upon Passover and Easter Week comes the two high holy days for the Green Cult, last Saturday’s Earth Day, and next Saturday’s People’s Climate March. This two-bit nature-worship calls itself “environmentalism,” but like another pseudo-science that ravaged the modern world, Marxism, this “ism” is definitely a “wasm,” its contradictions, hypocrisies, and cognitive incoherence patent. But just as Marx’s poltergeist lives on in various collectivists ideologies, environmentalism exacts a huge cost from those who can least afford it.

Resource management is an obvious imperative for human beings. We are practically and morally obliged to use nature in such a way that we maximize benefits for all people, and leave for those who come after us the resources for maintaining and improving their lives. Our earthly home is not the wild, the untouched nature that excites our romantic sensibilities, but the garden. We develop and improve nature so that people can survive, but also have clean air and water, and find aesthetic pleasure and solace in its beauty. But nature per se has no intrinsic value or meaning. Nature is matter and the laws of physics, literally inhuman and meaningless. It is indifferent to us, this one species of millions, most of which have disappeared. We give meaning and value to nature, because we are conscious of our uniqueness and its necessary end. Thus nature’s importance rests solely on how it sustains and benefits human beings.

Until the modern world and the development of revolutionary technologies that freed us from nature’s cruelty, people rarely idealized nature. The hard task of providing food made our relationship to nature an adversarial one, and our efforts often failed. It wasn’t until improvements in agricultural techniques in the 18th century began to liberate more and more people from this drudgery. As late as the early 20th century the majority of people farmed. Today two people produce food for a hundred. Freed from the harsh and destructive forces of nature, we began to idealize it. Taking for granted a steady supply of abundant, nutritious, and safe food, protected from nature’s daily cruelty and violence, we indulge fantasies of “harmony” with nature, and curse our encroachments on it. We have turned what Joseph Conrad called a “the shackled form of a conquered monster” into a house-pet.

Industrial capitalism, of course, and its soul-killing technologies are the villains responsible for a modern world that pollutes for profit and ravages mother earth. This stance is blatantly hypocritical, since most of us today would not last five minutes without the technologies that have given us clean water, abundant food, and protection from nature’s fury. Idealizing nature is a luxury of the well fed who don’t have to wrestle sustenance from a harsh indifferent environment.

Worse yet, environmentalism has become the ally of post-Marxist leftism, since both find an enemy in free-market capitalism. Raymond Aron explains why: capitalism “has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition, rather than State intervention, in other words by capitalism.” That’s why at every G8, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank protest, the Greenpeace flag can be seen waving side-by-side with the hammer and sickle. Anything that undermines the politico-economic order that kicked Marxism into the dustbin of history is collectivism’s ally.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

French Presidential Run-off Battle between Globalist and France-First Populist Macron versus Le Pen: the two major parties lose out. Joseph Klein

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

Amid tightened security following last Thursday’s deadly terrorist attack in Paris, French voters turned out in high numbers to the polls on Sunday for the first round of the country’s presidential election. Globalist Emmanuel Macron and populist Marine Le Pen, the two top finishers amongst the eleven candidates running to replace the Socialist French President Francois Hollande, will face each other in a run-off on Sunday, May 7th. Mr. Macron came out on top, with slightly over 23 percent of vote, and is the favorite to win the presidency outright in the May 7th run-off. Ms. Le Pen ran a close second. Neither of the top two finishers were candidates of France’s major mainstream left and right parties. The incumbent president is very unpopular, which no doubt burdened the Socialist candidate. The major right-of-center candidate has been mired in a scandal.

Not surprisingly, the lackluster economy, including 10 percent unemployment, and security concerns emanating from repeated terrorist attacks emerged as the leading issues in the race.

French voters will be choosing as their next president between two individuals with starkly different world views. As of now, according to Politico, Emmanuel Macron is ahead of Marine Le Pen by 20 to 30 percent in a one-on-one match-up. Moreover, in an initial positive response from investors to Mr. Macron’s first-place finish and prospects in the run-off, the Euro rose to a 5½-month high against the dollar. Nevertheless, given Ms. Le Pen’s close finish in the first round and her enthusiastic constituency, it is premature to count her out. After all, the pundits and pollsters were virtually unanimous in picking Hillary Clinton to win last fall over Donald Trump. We know how that turned out.

Emmanuel Macron, 39, who founded his own independent party just a year ago, is a pro-European Union centrist. He believes in gradual deregulation and fiscal discipline, while at the same time espousing even closer cooperation among the EU’s 28 member states. Several EU leaders expressed delight with Mr. Macron’s strong finish and prospects in the run-off. For example, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said, “He is the only pro-EU candidate.” Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel said he was “happy that Macron will represent in the second round democratic and European values that I share.”

Mr. Macron, speaking after the election results came in, congratulated the other candidates he ran against, except Ms. Le Pen. In a barb at his opponent in the May 7th run-off, he said he would lead “the patriots facing the nationalists.”

Marine Le Pen, 48, is the leader of the nationalist Front National party. She ran on a platform combining anti-globalist sentiments with economic populism.

In a recent debate, Ms. Le Pen summed up how she viewed her candidacy: “I’m a French woman, a mother and a candidate for the presidency. For me this election is about a choice of civilizations. Our country is overrun by insecurity, economic and social disorder and Islamist terrorism. Our values and identity are under threat.”

While not endorsing Ms. Le Pen outright, President Trump remarked that she was “strongest on borders, and she’s the strongest on what’s been going on in France.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America is experiencing ‘zugzwang.’ It needs a game-changer The global outlook for American interests is dismal. David Goldman

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

The global outlook for American interests is dismal. The country’s best hopes may well lie in the destructive power of its own innovation

Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle tells of a palace perched above a Bohemian village. Ineffable emissaries leave and enter in sealed coaches. The townspeople barely glimpse the denizens of the Castle, who govern the town by mysterious means. A telephone connects to the Castle, but the villagers can only speak to whomever might be listening on the other end of the line, without hearing a word of reply. It is interpreted variously as an allegory for the relation of the divine to the human, or as a satire on the Imperial Austrian bureaucracy.

An appropriate ending would be a visit to the Castle, where the inscrutable beings would sit in cavernous offices and complain about their inability to influence events. It would resemble the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, where the tyros of the Trump administration are learning how little influence America has in the world after eight years of Barack Obama (not to mention eight years of George W Bush), and how difficult it is to change a game in which America no longer sets the rules.

There is very little the United States can do about the Levant and Mesopotamia, and nothing it can do about the Korean Peninsula – not, in any case, without a long-term effort to change the game.

Bottom of Form

America has no European partner except for German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Union, whether we like it or not. The press chatter about personalities is irrelevant. The problem is not a “Wall Street” group (Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin, Jared Kusher) versus the “nationalists” (Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway). The problem is that no matter which adviser has the president’s ear, or whether the president acts on his own impulses, there are no good short-term outcomes.

Among Trump’s inner circle, the one individual whose star has risen fastest belongs to neither the “Wall Street” nor the “nationalist” wing of the administration. That is Wilbur Ross, the most influential Secretary of Commerce since Herbert Hoover and a billionaire investor who rescued Korean and Japanese banks after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. A past president of the Japan Society, Ross is Trump’s key man for Asian trade issues.

Japan is not only an American ally; it is a credible counterweight to China’s rising economic influence in Asia, where the US$100 billion One Belt, One Road infrastructure scheme is winning influence for Beijing among former American allies such as Thailand and the Philippines. There is a great deal of scope for Japanese-American collaboration in Asia, but that is a sole bright spot in an otherwise dismal world picture.

Probing Washington’s resolve

The sarin gas attack in Syria’s Idlib province earlier this month perplexed many America analysts: Why would the Assad regime, and its Russian and Iranian backers, subject itself to global condemnation, just after UN Ambassador Nikki Haley allowed that Washington was not focused on removing Assad? The plain facts, as I understand them, show that the Assad government ordered the attack at the highest level, and that Russia was aware of it beforehand and therefore complicit. US officials believe that they can establish these facts with virtual certainty, which means that the Russians knew that Washington would learn what occurred. I conclude that the Syrian government and its Russian ally used poison gas because they could, and wanted to probe Washington’s resolve.

That required a sharp American response, which came in the form of a cruise missile attack on Syria’s Al Shayrat airfield on April 6. There was no follow-up to the American gesture. Nor could there be.
Iran cannot be forced out of Syria. As I reported on March 14, Iran is arming tens of thousands of South Asian Shi’ites to join Hezbollah in its Levantine International Brigade. It can draw on practically inexhaustible resources of manpower from the oppressed Shia minorities of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and its objective is to replace the Syrian Sunni majority with Shi’ite settlers. It has the backing of Moscow and Beijing, who have to contend with Sunni rather than Shi’ite jihadists in their own territories (and, in the case of China, on its Asian periphery). Saudi-funded madrassas are proliferating through East Asia, as Asia Times warned a year ago.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How New is the New Hamas Charter? by Denis MacEoin

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

The Arab states that reject Israel today forget that they themselves would not exist without the Mandate system – a point seldom if ever acknowledged in public forums where the legitimacy of Israel is debated.

If there is any Palestinian desire for a two-state solution, it is questionable: according to current maps of “Palestine,” and the New Hamas Charter, it is supposed to be on its neighbouring state, Israel; not next to it. The wish of Palestinian leaders to have a Palestinian state is never realized solely due to the unending rejection of their Jewish neighbour.

Article 19 of the New Charter repeats that there will never be peace so long as Israel still exists. It declares: “We do not leave any part of the Palestinians’ land, under any circumstances, conditions or pressure, as long as the occupation remains. Hamas refuses any alternative which is not the whole liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

Anyone with a serious interest in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will be familiar with the oft-cited Charter (or Covenant [mithaq]) of the terrorist group currently ruling the Gaza Strip, Hamas. The Charter (in Arabic here) was published on 18 August 1988. Its proper title is “The Charter/Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement ‘Hamas’ Palestine”, Hamas being an acronym for “the Islamic Resistance Movement”.

This April, the Lebanese news site al-Mayadeen leaked a draft version of a much-revised version of the 1988 Charter, due to be released “in the coming days”. The anti-Israel website Mondoweiss subsequently provided an English translation of the draft, made by someone from the Ayda refugee camp in the West Bank. So far, I have been unable to find the Arabic text of the draft online, even though it has been discussed many times in the wider Arabic media. We shall turn to it later, but it is obviously sensible to look first at the 1988 version as a basis of comparison. And even before that, we need to see how the Hamas Covenant differed from, and resembled, the PLO Covenants of 1964 and 1968.

The full title of the movement is crucial to an understanding of the document and its aims. Hamas had been founded in 1987 as an intransigent extension of the Palestinian Mujamma linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and was explicitly hardline and neo-Salafi in its religious orientation. This was in conspicuous contrast to its rival Palestinian movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded by the Arab League in 1964 as an overtly secular and nationalist entity. The two PLO National Covenants of 1964 and 1968 exclude religion as a basis for the anti-Israel struggle.[1]

But in those versions, that secular nationalism takes two distinct forms. The 1964 PLO Charter is based on the concept of pan-Arabism as inspired by the Arab League and Egypt’s president at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Palestinians are simply Arabs among millions of Arabs, and their struggle for liberation was carried out with little emphasis on the creation of a Palestinian state. This view changed, however, after 1967, when the Six-Day War showed the powerlessness of the Arab states to resolve the Palestinian issue. When Egypt and Jordan attacked Israel (Egypt’s closing the Strait of Tiran was a legitimate casus belli, cause for war), Israel repelled them and ended up sitting on land — Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, Judaea and Samaria — which it immediately offered to return in exchange for recognition and peace. That offer was rejected in a matter of weeks at the Khartoum Conference.

During and after the “peace process” and the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, the Palestinian leadership promised that it would delete the most offensive and anti-peace clauses of the 1968 Charter. Many years later, nothing has been done, and the existing Charter remains unchanged.

Nationalism is not an Islamic concept. Even pan-Arabism falls outside the remit of Islamic ideology and practice. Almost from the beginning, Islam has been predicated on the idea of a global community (the umma), which embraces all Muslims and Islamic regions, allegedly since the beginning of time, with a promise of eventual Islamic control over the Earth. According to a sound tradition in the canonical collection by al-Bukhari, among the five things given to Muhammad that had not been given to any previous prophet was that, “Every Prophet used to be sent to his nation only but I have been sent to all mankind.”[2] In another version, he is recorded as saying: “I have been sent to all mankind and the line of prophets is closed with me.”[3]

This sense of global scale has characterized the Islamic world from its beginning in the form of empires. These started with the Umayyads (661-750) and ended with the Ottomans (1299-1922). The long history of Islamic imperialism had two imperishable effects: it prevented the development of nation-state polity and imposed the theory of religious rule. Self-identification for imperial citizens functioned only through the family, clan, tribe, village or town or city; or according to religious affiliations of various kinds. Everywhere, the only true citizens were orthodox Muslims; subjugated minorities such as Jews and Christians were kept strictly as inferiors, with a separate set of harsh laws and a special tax, the jizya, to pay for “protection”.

This legacy of Islamic dominance, of jihad as a legitimate and regular policy towards non-Muslim Europe, African regions, Central Asia and India, combined with the illegitimacy and unacceptability of Jewish, Christian or secular rule over Islamic territory, has left a deep mark on the Palestinian sense of identity. Formerly subjects of the Ottoman Empire in Syria, almost overnight in the 1920s the Arab Palestinians found themselves adrift in a sea of international rules and regulations concerning territory and national identity. This was the never-acknowledged pivot around which the growing conflict with the Jewish Palestinians revolved — and still revolves.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Deploys Floating Nuclear Power Plant to South China Sea by Debalina Ghoshal

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

A nuclear power plant on the sea would ensure a continuous supply of water as coolant — a necessity for any reactor.

China’s motive for building the nuclear reactors is clear: to exert its dominance and influence throughout the area.

In April 2016, reports began coming in that China has plans to build floating nuclear power plants in the South China Sea. A floating nuclear power plant consists of one or more nuclear reactors, located on a platform at sea. China apparently plans to “speed up the commercial development” of the South China Sea and views the nuclear power plants as part of that plan. [1]

Final assembly of the reactor is reported to start in coastal city of Huludao, in Liaoning province, and will be built by Bohai Shipbuilding Heavy Industry Co Ltd, a unit of China Shipbuilding Industry Corp (CSIC).[2]

China’s 2016 nuclear plan, a component of the China’s 13th five-year plan, is evidently to complete 58 nuclear reactors by 2020 and build another 100 gigawatt-sized reactors by 2030. These would make China the largest nuclear power producer in the world. China’s floating nuclear reactor initiative seems to be a component of this nuclear plan.
Reasons for such reactors

China’s stated reasons for venturing into such technologies include providing an inexpensive source of electricity and fresh water for both military and economic gains, as well as ensuring China’s strategic dominance in the South China Sea. Nuclear power plants could not only provide cheap electricity to defense facilities but also to desalination plants. Normally, the defense facilities such as airports and harbors depend on oil or coal for power generation. A nuclear power plant on the sea would ensure a continuous supply of water as coolant — a necessity for any reactor.

A 60 MWe reactor is said to be beneficial for supplying electricity, heat and desalination, and could be used on islands and on coastal areas or for offshore oil and gas exploration.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Vicious antisemitic sharia advocate to give CUNY commencement speech By Pamela Geller

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

The mainstreaming of evil leads to an unimaginable end. My colleagues and I have been demonized, marginalized and defamed by enemedia and cultural elites, while terrorists and their promoters enjoy promotion by these same quislings. Anyone who doesn’t think academia is aligned with jihad force is deluded. Stop taxpayer funding of these hotbeds of radical inculcation.

Adolph Hitler and his violent, antisemitic political party the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – DAP (German Socialist Workers’ Party) were on the outer fringe of German society until he was invited to join mainstream parties in opposition to the Versailles Treaty. Inviting Hitler to join mainstream political parties in supporting the German referendum of 1929 was key, as it gained the Nazi Party recognition and credibility it could never have hoped to have gained on its own. Influential German businessman and politician Alfred Hugenberg made a coalition with Hitler, which gave Hitler huge legitimacy. After failing at the ballot box, Hitler, like Islamic supremacists in the West, came to understand that that power was to be achieved not through revolution outside of the government, but rather through legal means, within the confines of the democratic system.

Sarsour says: “It just doesn’t make any sense for someone to say, ‘Is there room for people who support the state of Israel and do not criticize it in the movement?’ There can’t be in feminism. You either stand up for the rights of all women, including Palestinians, or none. There’s just no way around it.”

Remember: the woman saying this is an open supporter of sharia. She claims that “Palestinian” women are being oppressed by Israel, but doesn’t have a word to say about the genuine oppression that Muslim women suffer because of sharia, which sanctions wife-beating, allows for polygamy, and opens the door to female genital mutilation and honor killing. That’s oppression. But Sarsour, as the new leader of the feminist movement, is never going to say a word about that.

The media adores the Islamic supremacist bigot and rabid anti-Semite, Linda Sarsour, who wields her religion like a club. The Times did a puff piece on this annihilationist some time ago — what they’re puffing is anyone’s guess.

Robert Spencer wrote, “Linda Sarsour is an energetic purveyor of the ‘Islamophobia’ myth, and has hysterically claimed that ‘Muslim kids’ are being ‘executed’ in the United States. She was instrumental in prevailing upon de Blasio to end legal and necessary surveillance in Muslim communities in New York. She is also a frequent visitor to the Obama White House, and has claimed that the jihad underwear bomber was a CIA agent — part of what she claims is a U.S. war against Islam. She is a practiced exploiter of the ‘hate’ smear against foes of jihad terror and Islamic supremacism, and has never apologized for using the Islamic honor murder of Shaima Alawadi to spread lies about the prevalence of hate crimes against Muslims in America. She is also an enthusiastic supporter of the ‘Palestinian’ jihad against Israel. Given the general support for that jihad among Leftists, and the hard-Left tilt of the de Blasio regime in New York, it is not surprising that her hate-filled endeavors are taxpayer funded. But it is scandalous nonetheless: a grim sign of the times.”
ANTI-ISRAEL SHARIA ADVOCATE TO GIVE CUNY COMMENCEMENT SPEECH
ANTI-ZIONIST WHO PRAISED TERRORIST MURDERER, HAILED STONE THROWERS AS ‘COURAGEOUS’ TAPPED TO GIVE COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT PUBLIC NY COLLEGE.

A radical left-wing activist and advocate for Sharia law in the United States has been selected as this year’s commencement speaker at a branch of the City University of New York.

Linda Sarsour, 37, who helped organize the Women’s March in Washington in January and was arrested protesting outside of Trump Hotel in New York, was tapped by the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy to address this year’s graduating class.

An aide to the school’s dean confirmed in a statement that Sarsour had been chosen to speak at the commencement, The Daily Caller reported.

“I am delighted to confirm that Linda Sarsour will indeed speak at our June 1 commencement at the Apollo Theater,” said Barbara Aaron, chief of staff to the school’s dean, Ayman El-Mohandes.

Aside from her history of far-left activism, Sarsour has drawn criticism in the past for her advocacy of Sharia law in the United States and her attacks on prominent anti-Sharia figures.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

US Citizenship test requires understanding of only 64 words By Ed Straker (Appalling!!! rsk)

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

The US citizenship or naturalization test consists of two components, the civics test and the language test. The government has a preparatory website which has a list of vocabulary words needed for the language test. There are only 64 words or phrases needed to be learned to become an American.

With many of the words being proper names like “George Washington” and “Flag Day” and still more of the words being prepositions like “of” and “in” and “on”, it is very easy for someone to study for this test, pass easily, and yet lack the vocabulary to even understand “See Spot Run.”

There’s even a helpful guide to phrases the government interviewer may say that are not on the 64 word list:

Come! Sit!

Even doggies don’t need this helpful guide.

But immigrants who only learn the 64 words needed to pass the exam will be clueless when an inteviewer waves to them with their hand and asks them to come with them, unless they have this guide, or a well trained cocker spaniel to interpret hand gestures for them.

To pass the test, all you have to do is to correctly read aloud one out of three sentences, and write one out of three sentences correctly. That’s right, if you read or write two out of three easy sentences incorrectly, you can still become a citizen!

It’s no wonder the test has an over 90% pass rate.

But if that’s still too difficult, don’t worry, there are some exceptions for people over the age of 50 and people who can claim they are mentally challenged. They may not have to take the test at all!

I always wondered why ballots have to be in Spanish and other languages. If a person becomes a citizen, shouldn’t the citizen be able to read the ballot in English? Now I know why. Unless the ballot says things like “Where George Washington on Independence Day?” or “Abraham Lincoln has many senators”, immigrants may not understand it.

What key words in English do you think immigrants should understand?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Who Is Obama? By David Solway

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

Ex-President Barack Obama is the mystery man of American politics. Given the absence of a viable paper trail, nobody can say for sure who he is. He manifests for us as a figure of multiple identities: a Christian, a Muslim, a secularist, a socialist, a humanist, an intellectual, a man of the people. His lack of definable substance, his inner absence, has been an important political advantage. As Obama himself confessed (or boasted) in The Audacity of Hope, this layering of anonymities enabled him to “serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

Obama’s enigmatic personae and antecedents are an issue most people are reluctant to pursue, whether out of mere indifference, partisan allegiance or fear of ridicule. Even though he represents one of the most pivotal moments in American history, which saw a polarizing cipher with a neo-Marxist blueprint reduce the country to a social, political and economic shambles, Obama doesn’t get much traction in the news these days. Few wish to investigate his shadowy heritage, to confront the ongoing implications of the debacle he was instrumental in causing or to pursue its resolution. The unwillingness to grapple with what Obama signifies — in fact, personifies — is a sign of the failure of political will, a tendency to allow a crucial feature of national existence to subside beneath the welter of current events. “Nothing to see here,” seems to be the consensus, “time to move on.”

But there is more to see than meets the eye. The question that may exercise future historians is how a man so obviously unfit for the presidency and so patently inimical to the well-being of the nation could have been elected—twice. Was the race card in itself sufficiently instrumental to persuade a nation to embrace eight years of mayhem? Could a voting majority have been swept up in an access of reparation euphoria? Did John Dewey’s “progressivist” education gradually work to dumb down a significant portion of the electorate, rendering it ultimately susceptible to socialist manipulation? Was the influence of the Frankfurt School and its leftist agenda powerful enough to subvert the academy, the press, the entertainment industry and the culture at large, and thus to transform a free democratic society into a nascent authoritarian state? All these elements were certainly in play, but likely could not have borne their tainted fruit had Obama not appeared on the scene, like a diabolus ex machina. He acted as both catalyst and embodiment of a looming catastrophe.

The fact that there was little in the way of reliable biographical and formative data — vital records were (and are) either disputed or inaccessible — was not the liability one might have imagined. Rather, it may have been the critical factor in determining Obama’s electoral triumphs and the malign consequences that inevitably followed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump vs. Obama: A Study in Contrasts By Roger Kimball

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

A full recitation of the differences between Barack Obama and Donald Trump would fill a book.

Since this is a blog, not a book, I won’t assay that gargantuan task. But I wanted to say a word about two of the things that have repeatedly struck me about the differences between the two men.

I am going to leave to one side what might be the largest difference: that Obama was above all a man of lofty-sounding rhetoric, at once pragmatic in tone and utopian in aspiration, while Trump is a man of demotic and sometimes involuted rhetoric but decisive, almost impatient action.

An example on everyone’s mind is Syria. Obama had his red line, rendered inert (Whew!) by the as-it-turns-out-false assurance that “100 percent” of Syrias’s chemical weapons had been removed. Trump saw footage of the results of Assad’s early April sarin gas attack and responded a couple of days later with with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against the air base from which the attack originated.

Red line and inaction vs. infraction and response.

Many more examples of that sort could be adduced, but I wanted to call attention to two things that are more modest.

One concerns the character of their more personal interventions. Again, I am going to leave one large category out of consideration: everything that has to do with race. Instead, I would simply ask you to think about some of Obama’s signal actions with respect to race: his support of Eric Holder, the most patently racialist attorney general in history, his intervention while president into local controversies like the Skip-Gates-Cambrdige-Policeman episode or the “If-I-Had-A-Son-He–Would-Look-Like-Trayvon-Martin” wheeze. Such things, I believe, tell us a lot about Obama’s unspoken Weltanschauung: the value-laden background of assumptions out of which his immaculately accoutered pronouncements were uttered.

There is not, so far as I have been able to determine, anything similar in Donald Trump’s makeup. His approach to problems, to events generally, is less ideological than pragmatic. “What’s the right thing to do in this particular case?” That seems to be his cynosure. You might not like the answers he gives, but it is easy to see that they come not from a previously adopted program or ideology but from an ad hoc response to the case at hand. Critics call that “confusion” or “inconsistency” or “contradiction.” I’m not sure those categories have much purchase in this context.

In any event, this difference between Obama and Trump results in some striking contrasts between the two men. In 2014, Obama made headlines when he traded five senior Taliban leaders held captive in Guantanamo Bay for the release of Bowe Robert Bergdahl, the Army solider who deserted his post while on guard duty in June 2009 after announcing his loathing for America and hatred of the Army. “I am ashamed to be an American,” he wrote in an email to his parents. “And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. . . . The horror that is America is disgusting.” Who can forget the spectacle of Bergdahl’s parents, who came to the White House and praised Allah for the release of their son?

Donald Trump, through diplomatic intervention with Egyptian President al-Sisi when he visited Washington earlier this month, quietly secured the release of the Egyptian-American charity worker Aya Hijazi, her Egyptian husband, and four other humanitarian workers who had been held for three years by Egyptian authorities. Trump sent a government plane to pick up the entoruage and welcome Hijazi to the White House for a photo-op. CONTINUE AT SITE

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bill Maher Says College Anti-Free Speech Warriors Are the Liberals’ Version of Book Burning VIDEO

Posted By on April 24th, 2017

https://pjmedia.com/video/bill-maher-says-college-anti-free-speech-warriors-are-the-liberals-version-of-book-burning/

Bill Maher is a liberal, but even he doesn’t like the fact that liberals have silenced conservative speakers on college campuses. The latest victim of the social justice warriors’ attack on our civil rights is Ann Coulter, who was set to give a speech at UC Berkeley. Maher said that the anti-debate and anti-education nonsense at our college campuses is the liberals’ version of book burning. Let’s put aside the fact that most of the historic book burnings have been perpetrated by liberals, and focus on the one liberal, Bill Maher, actually standing up for our civil liberties.