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David Archibald China’s Implacable Belligerence

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

Unthinkable as it may be after all these decades of nuclear-enforced peace, Beijing’s determination to make the South China sea its own is day-by-day raising the likelihood that a full-blown shooting war will erupt. Australia’s prospects in such a conflict are especially parlous
China’s preoccupation with its past humiliation by foreign powers didn’t start with the communists: a public holiday, National Humiliation Day, was instituted by the Nationalists in 1927. Similarly, Chinese irredentism isn’t just a recent phenomenon. Chinese primary school textbooks from 1938 have a map of China that extends well beyond its current borders in all directions. Now the map in Chinese passports includes the South China Sea as Chinese territory, as well as parts of India on its northern border.

The current situation is that China is in the process of completing bases on seven artificial islands in the South China Sea. Three of those bases will have 3,000-metre airstrips with attendant taxiways and aprons. Most of the bases include flak towers. Similarly, most of the bases have ramps up to the first level of their forts, probably so that mobile radars get some elevation and have a greater range.

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Merv Bendle Green Salvation’s Hellfire Preachers

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

Apocalypticism used to be packaged as the forever-looming punishment for man’s sins against God. These days it is Gaia who has been sinned against, according to her legion of environmental Jeremiahs. Unlike the Old Testament prophet, these retailers of the woe to come richly deserve to be scorned
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/10/scared-silly-road-green-salvation/

Once again, the Australian people are about to be sold out, offered up as human sacrifices on the altar of the new religion of Gaia. Having successfully staged a coup to dislodge climate change moderate Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, along with Greg Hunt and Julie Bishop, can now make their pilgrimage to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the objective of which is to establish a legally binding and universal agreement on draconian climate change action from all the nations of the world.

In this fashion they will deliver us all into the gaping, insatiable maw of the global warming racket, with hundreds of billions of dollars to be expropriated annually from the middle-classes of the West and funneled into financial institutions, giant rent-seeking corporations, UN bureaucracies, and Third World kleptocracies.

The mendacity, gullibility, and self-interest of these politicians and their accomplices (especially in academia and the media) is breathtaking, but ultimately they are building upon a carefully choreographed campaign of eco-apocalyptic agitation and propaganda that has been underway for decades. While the machinations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and similar agencies are notorious, the longer-term history of the campaign to enchain the people of the world under the pretense of preventing a climate catastrophe is extremely illuminating as it discloses the true nature of the crusade presently being waged.

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Who are Poland’s victorious Law and Justice party, and what do they want?By Charles Crawford

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

Usually denounced as nutty Catholic right-wingers, Law and Justice are in fact a sui generis movement of truculent, carefully Eurosceptic étatist-patriots.

Charles Crawford was the British Ambassador to Poland from 2003– 2007

The official results are not yet out. But it is clear that Poland’s 2015 Parliamentary elections have given the Law and Justice party led by Jarosław Kaczynski a thumping victory, with up to 40 per cent of the vote. Depending on the final numbers and how many smaller parties squeeze over the 5 per cent threshold into parliament, Law and Justice could have an absolute majority in the Sejm, the first time any party has achieved that since communism ended 25 years ago.

The scandal-ridden pro-EU Citizens Platform party that has presided over one of Europe’s most successful economies for eight years saw its vote slump from 39 per cent in 2011 to 24 per cent this time round. A maverick party led by a Paweł Kukiz that favours the UK first-past-the-post election system achieved a respectable 9 per cent. (Imagine rock guitarist Brian May of Queen galumphing around UK politics as an idiosyncratic conservative, and you’ll get a rough idea). The motley Kukiz MPs will find it easy to work with Law and Justice.

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Navy Day in New York, 1945 The biggest display of military might the nation had ever seen. By Elliot Rosenberg

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

Seventy years ago, on Oct. 27, 1945, New York City was the site of the most spectacular homefront display of American military might the nation had ever seen. Navy Day was in effect a monumental victory lap, coming seven weeks after the signing of the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri.

Now the “Big Mo” and other stars and supporting players from the Pacific Fleet had come home. Along a six-mile stretch of the Hudson River, 47 warships gathered—battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines and submarine chasers.

President Truman was there. So was I. About 3.5 million people crowded along Manhattan’s West Side, with another 1.5 million viewing from New Jersey, according to press reports. Joining the USS Missouri, with its 16-inch turret guns bristling from its 56,000-ton frame, were the USS New York (an older battle wagon) and the USS Enterprise, the only aircraft carrier that had been active from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day.

At midafternoon, President Truman boarded a destroyer for a two-hour review of the assembled firepower. Twenty-one-gun salutes boomed from many of the vessels. Overhead, 1,200 Hellcat and Corsair fighters, Avenger torpedo planes and Helldiver bombers circled in 12-mile ovals. For half-hour spells on two successive nights the ships turned on their 24-inch and 36-inch searchlights, sending brilliant blue-white beams, with millions in candle power, flashing across the sky and illuminating the city’s skyscrapers. No fireworks display could compare.

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Iran’s Indecent Proposal Khamenei haggles over the price of American surrender. Bret Stephens

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—better known as the Iran nuclear deal—was officially adopted Sunday, Oct. 18. That’s nine days ago. It’s already a dead letter.
Not that you would have noticed by reading the news or tuning in to State Department or White House briefings. It’s too embarrassing to an administration that has invested all of its diplomatic capital in the deal. Also, too inconvenient to the commodity investors, second-tier banks, European multinationals and everyone else who wants a piece of the Iranian market and couldn’t care less whether Tehran honors its nuclear bargain.
Yet here we are. Iran is testing the agreement, reinterpreting it, tearing it up line by line. For the U.S.—or at least our next president—the lesson should be clear: When you sign a garbage agreement, you get a garbage outcome.

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The Myth of Hillary the Inevitable Her big money has had its intended effect: scaring off any serious challenger.By William McGurn

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

So now Hillary Clinton is invincible.

Such is the new received wisdom. It replaces the old received wisdom that she was a fatally flawed candidate sowing despair among Democratic Party bigwigs.

The new wisdom comes after a good two weeks that began with Mrs. Clinton trouncing her rivals in the televised Democratic debate and ended with her besting her Republican inquisitors on the House Benghazi Committee. In between, Joe Biden announced he would not be making good on his dying son’s request to keep the White House from the Clintons after all.

For all this, the idea that Hillary is unstoppable is nuts. Not least because her victories are less about defeating opponents than making sure the serious ones are removed before the contest has begun.

Start with the money. Back in the spring we learned that Mrs. Clinton and her outside supporters were aiming to raise $2.5 billion for her campaign even as she decried the role of money in politics. To put that $2.5 billion in perspective, it’s more than Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent combined in 2012.

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Hillary Clinton Flunks Economics She says we’re better off with Democrats in the White House. Is that so? Carly Fiorina

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

There can be no doubt now: The U.S. economy is struggling, inequality is on the rise and too many Americans feel uncertain about their future.

On the campaign trail, I have met many of these men and women, who sit at the kitchen table each week, straining to stretch their dollars from shrinking paychecks. Families who can’t save for retirement with near-zero interest rates. Young parents who are being crushed by their student debt. Shop owners who can’t get a loan because their community bank went out of business.

We’ve had more than six years to watch the left’s prescriptions in action and the verdict is in: They don’t work. Under President Obama, the economy has been hobbled. The 73,000-page tax code is too complex to navigate without an army of accountants. The administration has added $7 trillion in new federal debt, and has doubled down on environmental regulations that crush business owners and farmers while raising energy prices.

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Palestinians have become obsessive “tragedy tourists” by Ryan Bellerose

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

Ryan Bellerose is a Métis from Northern Alberta. His father, Mervin Bellerose, co-authored the Métis Settlements Act of 1989, which was passed by the Alberta legislature in 1990 and cemented his land rights. Ryan founded Canadians For Accountability, a Native rights advocacy group, and he is an Idle No More movement organizer. He is also a founding member in the Calgary United with Israel (CUWI) organization. Ryan is a self-proclaimed Zionist.

Dear Palestinians,

Let’s get a few things straight. You do not get to claim a genocide when your population has exploded. As someone whose family has gone through one, I am telling you to cut that s*** out, it’s offensive and it’s annoying.

You did not “go through what Native Americans went through.” Nobody forced you to speak an alien language, worship God in an alien manner and steal your sacred places. As a matter of fact THAT’S WHAT YOU DID. You stole sacred places, forced indigenous people to speak Arabic and worship god as Muslims. So seriously cut that out too.

You did not in fact have a civil rights struggle like black people in America. Black people in America didn’t blow up school buses or pizzerias filled with school kids in order to achieve equal rights, and they damn sure didn’t talk endlessly about pushing white people into the sea.

You are not persecuted like gay people, for something that is beyond your control. Nobody throws you off buildings because you love someone you shouldn’t. So again, cut that out, it’s getting old, especially when some of us are well aware that your society not only hates gay people but actively persecutes them. You are the guys throwing them from buildings.

You do not get to keep stealing stories. You stole the identity of what was known as ‘Palestinian’. Before World War II the term meant Jews. But that’s OK, it’s a colonialist term, and I am sure that my Jewish friends don’t want it. They prefer to be called Jews, Hebrews, Israelites or Israelis, so you can take your colonialist garbage and get lost.

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Sweden: It Is Considered Racism Only If the Victims Are Not White by Ingrid Carlqvist

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

“Then he stuck his sword in my friend’s belly. One student started screaming but we all still thought it was a prank.” — Student, quoted in Expressen.

After the double murders at IKEA, there were no such discussions. We have yet to hear anyone condemn the racist motive of the IKEA murderer, Abraham Ukbagabir. When questioned by the police, he said that he had chosen his victims because they “looked Swedish.”

What does Sweden’s Prime Minister hope to achieve by condemning all violence from Swedes, but ignoring all violence from immigrants?

Just last week in Sweden, six would-be housing facilities for asylum seekers were set ablaze.

There is the risk that as Swedes become more and more convinced that no one speaks for them, they may feel an increasing need to take matters into their own hands.

“Once the lid blows in Sweden, it will happen with much larger force.” — Hans Davidsen-Nielsen, editorial columnist for the Danish daily, Politiken.

On Thursday, October 22, Sweden was shocked by yet another act of madness apparently connected to multiculturalism.

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The Holocaust is OVER by Shoshana Bryen **** see note by the author

Posted By on October 27th, 2015

To All: The Holocaust is an essential part of Jewish history, but the current kerfluffle over the relative awfulness of the Mufti and Hitler is a distraction from Israel’s real problems that the pro-Israel community cannot afford. Israel’s enemies hope we’ll stay fixed on our past instead of our present and future. Best always, Shoshana

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, set off a firestorm on October 21 by saying that the Mufti of Jerusalem had actually planted the idea of exterminating the Jews in Hitler’s mind; that Hitler would have simply ousted them from Europe.

Scholars, academicians, politicians, friends and enemies of Jews, Israel, and Netanyahu leapt to the barricades. The Washington Post had the story on the front page. Twitter and blogs have overflowed with it. The Chancellor of Germany found it oddly necessary to say, “Germany is responsible for the Holocaust.”

But enough about who, between two long-dead anti-Semites, was the worst. It is a distraction and provides cover for today’s racists and those who would destroy Israel.

Palestinian agitator Saeb Erekat used the tumult to weigh in. In the latest Palestinian effort to rewrite history, he said, “Palestine’s efforts against Nazis, are deep-rooted part of our history.”