Now, About That Role as Commander in Chief ... - NYTimes.com

Do you think this, in the International New York Times, is an unfair assessment of Trump's Tuesday speech to Congress? Surely not.
It's true -- not "fake news" -- that he barely mentioned foreign policy. And when he did it was in terms of war.

No Richard, it's Socialism wot done it

Venezuela is down to its last $10 billion

So runs the headline in the CNN article. 

Just now Richard Quest of CNN money has been on TV saying that the reasons Venezuela is barreling  towards bankruptcy are the falling price of oil, corruption, economic mismanagement and so on. 

Well, no doubt these are factors. The clue to the real underlying cause of Venezuela's meltdown is in the "economic mismanagement" factor. 

In turn, the reason for that?

One word: SOCIALISM. 

I've lived, studied and worked in socialist countries (China, North Korea, Vietnam). There's not one that works well. Socialism leads to economic mismanagement. It leads to corruption. 

As for the oil price? Sure it's down. 

But when it was up, Chavez and Maduro just gave the windfall away. Free or nearly so. Petrol at $0.01 / litre, for goodness sake!  Nice for drivers. Idiocy for the country. 

Meantime what did Norway do with its own oil windfall? Invested it in a well-managed and transparent Oil Fund. As a result they now have £700 billion, €130,000 for every. Norwegian man, woman and child. 

One is liberal, free market capitalism, boosted by benign nationalism (Norway).

The other - the failing one -- is Socialism (Venezuela). 

Why don't the Left media - the likes of CNN and BBC too -- ever pin the blame on the donkey? The donkey of always-failed always-failing socialism. 

Meantime I gotta have pity for the poor people of Venezuela. Crushed by an outdated, inane ideology, which should have been on the scrap heap of history 40 years ago. 

McCain and Graham

Watching a live Town Hall meeting with John McCain and Lindsay Graham on CNN.
These two men, these senators and foreign policy / military policy experts, are fine and honorable men. They know whereof they speak.
Trump should listen to them on all matters
from ISIS and Palestine/Israel to red lines for North Korea. On the latter the red line is them developing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear weapon.
Graham knows the regime. He jokes that it lost him when they claimed Great Leader Kim Il-sung had shot a round of golf of 38.
China should be told to tell Kim Jong-un that if he develops the nuke-able ICBM that can reach the US, then there will be consequences. Not just for North Korea but also for China.
These are sound, thoughtful, capable guys.
John calls Lindsay "entertaining and capable". True! He's got a real sense of humor.
Lindsay says John is "loyal to his friends and loyal to his country. He would die for his country." True again!  In fact he nearly did die for his country in Vietnam. John tears up....
A lovely finish. I'm really with these guys.

Trump's speech to Congress

I'm watching this now and so far seems pretty much of the same. As we've seen through the Primaries, Debates, Inauguration speech and since.
Some random observations:
Exporting motor vehicles: he bemoans the alleged fact the countries US could export cars and motor bikes to have high tariffs whereas the US has none. He's wrong on at least the export side: Europe and Japan have zero tariffs on vehicle imports. Zero.
There are other good reasons the US exports hardly any vehicles. One of which is, or at least used to be up to eight years ago when I last drove a US car in the US, that they're crap. Another is that the US is itself a big market that doesn't need to export.
Obamacare: why is it that the rest of the world manages to have health care cheaper than the US without having to re-legislate it and change it every year. What's wrong with you America??
Then again isn't it weird that Trump tweeted yesterday "nobody knew that Heath care was so complicated"! Well, I think Hillary and Obama do.
Crime: the same old false ""fact": that US has record crimes. Truth is - and there IS a truth here - that US crime including murder rates are at historical lows.

Ben Shapiro Knocks EVERY Question out of the Park in Q&A

Some I don't agree with, but much I do. And Shapiro can certainly put an argument together, at lightning speed.

Sean Spicer once said only dictatorships would ban media access | The Independent

For John LEE (Editor of the SCMP LETTERS page). 

Hi John,

The link below is *FOR* the Editor, not a Letter TO the editor. In case they haven't seen it. 

It supports the Post's editorial today "Trump has gone too far with media ban". 

(Indeed he has. He's gone too far in heaps of other ways, though that's another story)

The story below highlights Trump spokesman Sean Spicer's hypocrisy. He said as recently as December 2016 that "only a dictatorship would prevent the media from access to public information".  

Welcome to the dictatorship, then. 

The quote is available somewhere in a video so we know the words are not doctored or "fake news". 

Spicer is hoist, as they say, by his own petard. 

This flagrant hypocrisy needs more widespread circulation by "the enemies of the people". 

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer once said that only a dictatorship would prevent the media from access to public information. And just two months later he blocked several high-profile news outlets from the daily press briefing.

Read the rest....

My letter on "moderate Muslims" is the featured one in today's paper

Moderate Muslims should not deny Islam terror links

Letter in full below:

"Clarifying the Muslim Brotherhood", 22 February

LETTER TO THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Gehad El-Haddad paints a picture of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a kind of Rotary Club for the middle east. It simply pursues  "social justice, equality and the rule of law... uplifting society's most marginalised". Don't worry, we're benign, says El-Haddad. (Clarifying the Muslim Brotherhood, 22 Feb)

Let's not be fooled.

The MB set up Hamas, a proscribed terrorist and genocidal organisation.  The two remain "as close as lips and teeth", as the Chinese say. 

The MB inspired Osama bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda. Thence ISIS who also acknowledge their MB provenance.

The MB's founder, Hassan Al-Banna urged its members to follow Jihad as holy war in the name of Allah. That remains its aim.

An official document at the 1991 meeting of the MB  in the US, outlines its strategic goals for North America.  The document was entered as evidence in the 2008 Holy Land Terror Trial  by US Federal investigators.  This document says:

"The MB must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilisation from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hand and the hands of the believers."

Do you think, perhaps, that your running El-Haddad's opinion piece on the front page of the NYT  might help this MB goal?

The aims of Al-Qaeda, ISIS and the MB are the same: a global islamic caliphate.  The only difference is that Al-Qaeda or ISIS want to do this openly and by violence while MB wants to do this quietly and non-violently.

The MB mission statement makes it clear:

"God is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of God is our highest hope. God is greater!"

Surely that's pretty clear and has nothing much to do with the Rotary Club vision El-Haddad wants us to believe.

I'm not sure why the NYT would think that running a front page opinion piece, by an avowedly islamist organisation -- one of gross duplicity -- is a good idea. 

it's not. Let's not be fooled.

PF etc...

Trump bans BBC, CNN, New York Times, Politico

Actually it wasn't Trump specifically but his spokesman Sean Spicer who blocked them from a post-CPAC briefing in his office. In their place he allowed Breitbart in. Breitbart! My god that's crazy!
But, get this: the move was so outlandish that even Fox News is criticizing it! Fox also joined in a letter of protest sent to Spicer by the White House Press Association.
It may help that O'Reilly's show is hosted this morning by Chris Wallace and comment is by Bernie Goldberg, both decent and fair men.
Trump has not only reiterated the "press are enemies of the people" meme, but he's also demanded that press reveal names of sources in any story. No one to be anonymous any more. Yeah, right. That's not going to run. Imagine how long such an identified poor sap would last.
This is not so much like Germany in the 1930s as so many are saying. It's more like China. And they way they control the media.
Had it not been for Deep Throat, we would never have known about Watergate. Or about Flynn's possibly illegal pre-inauguration discussions with the Russian ambassador.
And the people need to know these things. That's what the press is there for. And they are included in the constitution for that purpose.
Meantime, in place of CNN, BBC, etc, Spicer let in Breitbart and Washington Times.
Breitbart is too crazy right-wing, too Muslim-hating, too anti-immigration even for me. It's awash in clearly fake news.
Preferring them to BBC is batshit crazy.
And that's Spicer. And that's Trump.

Danish man who videoed himself burning the Quran charged with blasphemy

Who said Europe is not becoming Islamicised? (Well, The Left, of course).
This is implementation of sharia law in Denmark.
Who imagines that the fellow charged with the outdated notion of blasphemy would have been charged if the book burned had been the Bible?
No, it's the Koran, because Muslims are just so triggered they might go on a rampage.
So let's not upset the "religion of peace".
Shame on the Danish prosecutors!

Kim Jong-nam Was Killed by VX Nerve Agent, Malaysians Say - NYTimes.com

Kim Jong-nam's son Kim Han-sol (L) with an unidentified
mate.  Rather slimmer and better looking than his father...

The second "wow!" Item for today.
The New York Times reports that Kim Jong-nam was killed by a poison called VX. That's short for "venomous substance X".
So I hied me to Mr Google and find, via Wikipedia, that the Poms had a rainbow code-name for the stuff: "Purple Possum".  Cute name for something really vile.
This is simply THE most poisonous substance in the world. Period. Full stop.
A single drop on your skin will kill you.
It's a horrible death. First your muscles contract uncontrollably. Then they relax completely so you can't even breathe. You die of asphyxiation. Imagine. You try for breath and can't even gasp. The terror. The horror.
Purple Possum is the consistency of motor oil, but colourless and odourless. It's so toxic that production and storage is limited by international treaty to just 100 grams per country. That's about one-third of a can of beer.
For me that seals it as being the work of North Korea, specifically of his younger brother, dictator Kim Jing-un.
You can't get VX if you're not a country. And what other country wanted Jong-nam dead? Certainly not China. And Malaysia or Indonesia? Hardly.
This is the paranoia of Jong-un. Who I incorrectly predicted years ago would not last long. So what do I know? Well I do know that Jong-un is a special kind of batshit crazy and has killed close relatives before.
If I were Jong-nam's son, I wouldn't be feeling too flash. He ought to be traveling with the VX antidote. It's all there in Wikipedia, son.

LATER: Turns out that Jong-nam's son, Kim Han-sol (kind of like a Star Wars name, that) is indeed living in fear of death.  The Sun reports that he's turned down a place at Oxford Uni, fearing he'd be murdered in the U.K.. Reasonable fear, I reckon.
Also, BBC Radio is reporting that VX can't be made in a backyard lab.  It's needs a sophisticated lab, and North Korea is known to have these, including making chemical weapons, which is the only use for VX

Exoplanet discovery: Five facts you need to know about Nasa’s new solar system | The Independent

Plenty of stories about the seven planets discovered around the nearby (40 light years) "super cool dwarf" star Trappist-1. Three of them may be habitable.

Google did a Doodle...

The story in The Independent is one of the best. Be sure to click on the internally-linked ESO video "what could the planets look like?".

According to the Cambridge University astronomer Amaury Triaud "The spectacle would be beautiful because every once in a while you would see another planet in the sky bigger than the moon".
The sky would be salmon-pinkish (my favorite!)
The dwarf star Trappist-1 is going to last trillions of years, 700 times longer than our own sun and "longer than the life of the universe" according to this article. (Though I don't quite get how that could be...).
I've often hoped we would find, in my lifetime, evidence of life elsewhere in the universe. In a poll at this article, 75% of people think we may do so in "our lifetime". We may just do it and soonish.
Should we send a probe to Trappist-1? After all, it's "only" 40 light years away.
I did the calculation. The fastest man-made object is the Juno Jupiter Explorer which was slingshot out of earth orbit in 2013, then accelerated by Jupiter's gravity to 210,000 km per hour. That's 1,839,600,000 km per year.
Trappist-1 is 378 Trillion km away. So it would take Juno 205,000 years to get there (round about...).
I guess we'd best just watch its dim-beautiful light for now. Apparently it would be like a salmon-pink sunset on earth, but with the sun much larger in the sky. And sister planets would look twice the size of our moon.
More exciting news may come next year when the James Webb telescope will take over from the venerable Hubble. It can look at the three likely planets, Trappist 1-e, 1-f and 1-g, the three in the habitable zone, and see if there are traces of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, ozone or methane, all markers of life.
Can't wait!
LATER: how nice that this comes as we learn that Churchill wondered about life in the universe outside our solar system, in a recently found essay. It receives much praise, for being clear headed and scientific.

What Sharia says about homosexuality....

From here. The Umdat al-Salik, the Classic Manual of Islamic Jurisprudence: 

P17.0 SODOMY AND LESBIANISM

P17.1 In more than one place in the Holy Koran, Allah recounts to us the story of Lot's people, and how He destroyed them for their wicked practice. There is consensus among both Muslims and the followers of all other religions that sodomy is an enormity. It is even viler and uglier than adultery.

P17.3 The Prophet (PBUH) said:

(1) "Kill the one who sodomizes and the one who lets it be done to him."

(2) "May Allah curse him who does what Lot's people did."

(3) "Lesbianism by women is adultery between them."

Note the reference to "other religions” (p17.1) which believe sodomy is an "enormity". There are similar verses in the Old Testament. But the Bible is many voices; it is a library. So it's been subject to exegesis.  Moreover, the New Testament abrogates the Old Testament and Jesus never told his followers to kill homosexuals.  

The Koran, by contrast, is the inerrant word of Allah.  Exegesis is blasphemy and blasphemy is punishable by death.  It is one book, and where there is abrogation, it is usually more violent for the less violent verses.

In most Islamic countries homosexuality is illegal and in a number it is  punishable by death.  ISIS tosses alleged homosexuals off tall buildings with gay abandon (sorry...).  ISIS is not "perverting the religion of peace", as so many apologists would have it.  They are doing what is in the Koran and in the direct words of Muhammad, as recorded with authorised Islamic jurisprudence. 

It is not islamophobic to point this out.

Food trucks

LETTER TO South China Morning Post:

There's been a lot of news lately about Hong Kong's food trucks. Not all of it good. 

The New York Times ran a full-page article yesterday by my namesake Michael Forsythe (no relation). The headline was that there are more regulations than customers. City's food truck rules outnumber patrons.

Today the BBC had a story about the high costs the truck owners had to bear because of onerous government regulation. 

A number of letter writers, including myself, have mocked the government's dead hand of regulation in getting the concept to reality. The elephant laboured mightily and produced a flea. After a year of labour, eight trucks!
The NYT article quoted an official of the Tourism Bureau as saying that the trucks should be in places where there were no restaurants. Obviously this anonymous official knows nothing of the concept of "clustering ". The reason restaurants cluster close to each other is because it generates more business for all.  That's why home furnishing shops in Causeway Bay or car repair shops in Mongkok are clustered: it's good for everyone. 

There are three major faults with the scheme as it stands. 

One: the approval process is onerous and expensive. Two: the trucks have to be in government determined fixed locations. Three: menus can change only with government approval (!) 

Rather than further mock the government let's suggest a simple solution. 

Since our now, sadly, infamous food trucks are subject to international attention could an adult please take charge? Simplify application. Allow the trucks to move freely to any legal spot. Allow them to change their menus freely.: they will soon sink or swim based on their popularity. Enough of the Tourism Bureau's dead hand over all these restrictions. 

It would be a morning's work for the Chief Executive to bang heads together and bring some sanity to what is, after all, a pretty simple concept. Simple, but currently reflecting badly on our reputation for freedom and efficiency . 

PF etc. 

I Am a Member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Not a Terrorist - NYTimes.com

Whenever you see something labeled "destroying the myth of ..." or "countering the stereotype of ..." you should run a mile because you're going to be swaddled in apologia.
And so it is with this one by a Muslim Brotherhood member in his "Clarifying the Muslim Brotherhood " in the New York Times, international edition. (That's the printed version headline. The online has a different headline, as above, perhaps in recognition of my point here - they suddenly realized! )
Remember: the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas (a proscribed terrorist organisation) are, as the Chinese say, like "lips and teeth ". Hamas' Charter is specifically judeocidal.
The MB inspired Osama bin Laden.
The founder of MB, Hassan al-Banna, said that Muslims must be sure to understand that the primary Jihad is holy war against infidels.
The Jihad of the MB retains as its main aim the creation of a worldwide caliphate.
The MB has been responsible for many acts of terror.
None of this is "clarified" in this apologist article. An article, it must be stresssed, was *front page* in the New York Times.
So... read on and be "clarified"...

Donald Trump & Sweden -- Fake News or Real Problem? | National Review

I've written several times and years ago about the troubles Sweden's been having with its large and rapidly-growing immigrant population. Some of them have been pretty sinister: drug gangs, rapes and no-go zones.
This does not stop being true just because Trump mentioned it in a speech in Melbourne, Florida.
Yet the left MSM is all huffy about it. "What problems?" "What crime waves"? "Nothing to see here, please move on."
If these HuffyFolk are genuinely baffled and not just pushing back because it's Trump who raised the issue, then they haven't been paying attention. Or have been paying attention only to the MSM. For it's only the specialist blogs that have reported the problems. Which you can then fact-check for accuracy with Swedish government statistics, as I've done.
Swedish government data confirm the problems assimilating hundreds of thousands of different-culture immigrants into a country of fewer than ten million. A liberal secular population hosting deeply conservative (to say the least) immigrants hewing to resurgent political Islam. Hundreds of thousands into a population less than New York. What could go wrong?
Quite a lot, obviously. Such that even the (in)famously welcoming Sweden has had to slow down the immigration of more people, which recently, in per capital terms, has been more than other country in the world.
The majority have not managed (or don't want) to integrate. No wonder they've got problems. No wonder they've - finally, maybe - woken up.
It may be too late though.

Sharia, a dark ages death sentence – Blazing Cat Fur

Sharia again.
Not much to argue with in this piece

Comment on: "Singling out Muslims as the main terrorist threat is grossly unfair"

LETTER TO THE SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST

(340 words):

Mr Bazarwala seeks to assure us that we should not worry about Islamically-inspired terrorist attacks in the United States because white supremacists kill more people. (Singling out Muslims as the main terrorist threat is grossly unfair, 16 February)

That is indeed true: if you don't count the 9/11 attacks (3,000 deaths).  And if you don't count the Orlando killings (49 deaths).

Still, this should not be about body count.  After all more people are killed in bathtub accidents than by terrorism.  Also by bee stings or lightning strikes.  Random gun deaths dwarf all these put together.

Bazarwala's argument is classic tu quoque, that is: "you/they do it too".  This is a logical fallacy of moral equivalence that distracts from the issue at hand. 

The issue at hand is intent.  Bathtubs, bees and lightning intend you no harm.  Far-right terrorism is a mish-mash of motives: racist, anti-government, anti-abortion.  They don't murder innocents while shouting "Jesus is Lord".  With Islamic terrorism the intent is clear.  It is to kill "infidels".

Killings in the name of Islam are usually accompanied by shouts of "Allahu Akbar" (god is great).  The 100+ Jihadist terror groups in the world explicitly root their actions in the doctrines of Islam.  This may be uncomfortable to many, who claim terrorists "have nothing to do with Islam" or have "hijacked the religion of peace". 

But this is obscurantism.  To students of Islam, it is clear that there are parts of its foundational books – the Koran, the Hadith, the biography of Muhammad –

which lend themselves to terrorists horrors we see around the world, including the Sunni-Shia civil war.

All we seek, we critics of Islamism, is that the troublesome aspects of doctrinal Islam are admitted and contested, by Muslims.

Obfuscation will not do away with the global terror threat.  We are constantly told moderate Muslims are the "vast majority". Surely they wish to see terrorism eradicated, just as much as we infidels do.  That requires some plain speaking, not dubious moral equivalence and dissimulation.

PF, etc...

The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto: Great for Facebook, Bad for Journalism - The Atlantic

I wasn't that aware of the "Zuckerberg Manifesto" till I read a critical article in today's South China Morning Post. And so I find, through Mr Google, that the overwhelming reaction to his manifesto is negative. 

Below is an example from The Atlantic. 

I feel one of the most disturbing facts in the article is that civic engagement drops when local newspapers go to the wall. Seattle and Denver are examples. 

I agree with the importance of local magazines and papers. Here in Discovery Bay in Hong Kong we have a couple of monthly magazines, an online forum and regular updates from management about what's going on in our little city of 17,000. As a result there are lots of communal activities happening: fun runs, charity drives, flea markets, town halls to debate local issues and so on. It's a very together and civic place!
From The Atlantic:

It's not that Mark Zuckerberg set out to dismantle the news business when he founded Facebook 13 years ago. Yet news organizations are perhaps the biggest casualty of the world Zuckerberg built.

There's reason to believe things are going to get worse.

Standing With Israel on the Golan Heights | Foundation for Defense of Democracies

For two successive Assad regimes, first Hafiz and now his son Bashar, restoring full Syrian sovereignty over the Golan has been an axiomatic demand. Israel floated partial Golan withdrawals during several rounds of peace talks with Syria over the past two decades, but the Syrians were never satisfied with the deals on offer.

With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the facts on the ground have changed. Had Israel ceded the Golan to Syria, Islamic State, al Qaeda or Iran would be sitting on the shores of the Galilee across from the Israeli city of Tiberias.

More.... 

Islamic Terrorism: How I Plan To Counter It

In the video embedded in this story, "The Jihadi Next Door", a born-in-the-U.K. Muslim who says that he's had his passport cancelled because he wanted to go the the Islamic State. With his family! He says that if May gave them all their passports back "there would be no more extremists in the U.K."
Well why not then?! Give them back. Let them go. No one needs people who believe the penalty for being gay is death. "Toss 'em off a building" says this POS.
He talks of the U.K. coming under sharia law, which he says is inevitable. As it is for the rest of the world. Including punishments like death by stoning for adulterers. In the still lovely village square.
This is scary stuff and a growing in influence.
Why doesn't May just give them all their passports back so they can head off to their Islamic hell holes? And cancel them when
they're away.
Really!

A Step Toward Mideast Peace: Tell the Truth | Max Singer, WSJ

From the Wall Street Journal, Feb 14, (subscription).
Full text below.

By MAX SINGER

Feb. 14, 2017 6:52 p.m. ET

Donald Trump ran for president pledging to throw off political correctness and tell bold truths. That’s something to keep in mind this week. On Wednesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit the White House. Thursday will bring Senate confirmation hearings for David Friedman, Mr. Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the Jewish state. Both events offer an opportunity for the fearless truth-telling that Mr. Trump promised.

Trumps Two-State, One-State Diplomacy Pressures Palestinians | National Review

Trump got hammered on CNN my time this morning for what he said to Bibi last night. Like "two states, one state, meh! You guys work it out". Fareed Zakaria said it was either lazy or wilfully ignorant. Dangerous even. And I can see his point. I go for laziness. After all he's said he doesn't need briefings.
But when I first saw Trump speaking at the press conference, I didn't think that. I thought it showed commendable detachment and a new approach. After all, they've been pushing the rock of "two states solution" up that hill for fifty years with the same success as Sisyphus.
The article in the National Review by Jonathan Tobin explores this thought in more and intriguing detail.

Muslim Apostates in North America Face Leftist Scorn, Muslim Death Threats | National Review

Via Sam Harris' twitter feed:
Leaving Islam can be notoriously difficult in many Muslim-majority countries. Certain countries, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have laws that make apostasy an offense punishable by death. In others where apostasy is not explicitly criminalized, accused individuals can still face charges through religious courts.

Read more at the National Review

Re: The Umma needs to step up!

HI P,

Agree 100%.  I noted Andrew McCarthy in my post here.

Dateline London

Dear BBC,
Couldn't you have a more diverse group on your current affairs show "Dateline London"?
I mean someone a little bit to the right of the reliably left-of-centre crowd you usually have? (Which, too often in my view, includes one or other of that opinionated duo Polly Toynbee and Yasmin Alibhai Brown).
I don't like Trump. Would not have voted for him were I American*. But there's no way your panel is representative of left and right in the view of our Trumpian world.
It would be such a relief to have someone more conservative to challenge your distinctly lefty balance. There *are* eloquent spokespeople on the other side. Uncrazy ones...
Also: could you not run a chyron more regularly with the names of the panel participants?
Peter Forsythe
*An Aussie in Hong Kong

The possibility of war | Why Evolution Is True

Above vid is Dave Rubin with Jerry Coyne, or Why Evolution is True... (I saw Jerry when he gave a talk at The Fringe Club here in Hong Kong a few months back).
Part II here.  
Below, he links to professor Tom Nichols and the concerns about a new nuclear war....

... The other possibility is a flat-out war with Russia. That's the possibility discussed by Tom Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S.'s Naval War college, in the video below. Nichols is a conservative, and no fan of Obama, but he's not a fan of Trump, either. (He's also an undefeated five-time Jeopardy champion.) If you click on the screenshot below, you'll go to a three-part interview with him on various topics, including why Americans distrust the media. The most interesting part was the third (click on "Part 3" at lower left of the site you reach by clicking on the screenshot): a five-minute discussion on what Russia may do with Trump at the helm.

"Nichols thinks that because Putin isn't all that savvy, but is bellicose, and because Trump has repeatedly denigrated NATO, Putin may test NATO by "pushing" at member countries like Poland or Estonia. Since we and other countries in the alliance are sworn by treaty to defend NATO countries that are attacked, that could lead to war. And Nichols, who is no slouch, is worried that that possibility could escalate naturally into nuclear war: as he says, that could either "shake apart" NATO (see Jeff Tayler's piece in Foreign Policy on how NATO would bridle at a full-fledged response to a Russian attack on a small country), or, worse, escalate into a third world war.

Read more here.

Donald Trump is literally shameless. That will make it impossible to hold him to account

I googled "Trump is shameless" and got this link.
Why google that? Because of the breathtaking fact that Donald Trump last night ET, tweeted criticism of Nordstrom for dropping his daughter Ivanka's line of fashion goods. And he did this 21 minutes into a briefing he was taking on national security!
The man is not only shameless. He has simply no knowledge and no care for the dignity of the presidency. Or of the gross lack of propriety in using the Office of the President of the United States to attack a public company.
It's sickening to see his spokespeople and acolytes defending this gross lack of dignity and shameless lack of propriety.
"Shameless" really is the word here.
What a shockingly horrible president he is turning out to be, just three weeks into the job.
Shame on you Donald. (Except shame, as this link shows, is something he just doesn't have. No matter how gross the outrage).
And shame on his continuing supporters that will excuse his any outrage.

Muslims are responsible for what ails Islam | Fatah | Columnists | Opinion | Tor

Tarek Fatah with some inconvenient truths about Muslims and Islam.
He's a Muslim, so he can't be a horrid "Islamophobe".
Basic message: Islam has a lot of problems. It's Muslims who must fix them. They can't -- or should not -- deny the problems. They can't -- or should not -- shy away from trying to fix them.
Right on, Brother Tarek!

My views on Obama's foreign policy

I said this recently and got taken to task for it.  I'll get back to this in the next few days to say more about it: (Later: below):

Syria was an Obama own-goal. Obama’s failure to punish Assad's crossing of the “Red Line”, a line Obama himself had set, made Assad contemptuous of the US.  Obama's failure to be more robust in Iraq and then Syria, led to ISIS and now to Russia ruling this radical roost. Line them up these Obama errors: withdraw from Iraq (>> Al Qaeda, then ISIS), do nothing in Lybia and Syria (ditto), do nothing about Crimea or Ukraine (weaken Nato, embolden Putin), diss the EU (ditto), fold to China’s South China Sea hegemony (embolden Xi Jinping)…. so much, so sadly much…. and then his valedictory stabbing of Israel: not in the back but in the chest.  An ally and the only democracy in that part of the world, frontally skewered by a dishonest, biased UN resolution supported by such bastions of probity as China, Russia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Senega, Uruguay, Ethiopia and Egypt. A sick joke. 

Obama’s foreign policy, I’m convinced, will go down in history as a monstrous avoidable failure.  I think he may even be judged the uniquely awful foreign policy president in the pantheon of presidents.  The worst in 44.  It’s hard to deny that his presidency has made the world more dangerous.  Yet that’s the same Obama that won a Nobel Peace Prize. (And an Obama I would have voted for….). Obama Foreign Policy summary: a signal, unique, avoidable, disastrous, catastrophic, failure. 

As for those “refugees” from outside Syria, well, blame Mad Mutti Merkel.  The bulk are single young men, out for a better life. Young men who saw her say “refugees welcome” on social media. Can we blame them, for taking to the road, the sea?  No.  But they are not refugees. The are economic migrants. There’s a process for economic migrants.  Unless you’re Merkel. In which case you simply tear up the process, because you’re still guilty over the Nazis (she is).

*************

LATER (10 Feb): I should have said that Obama's failures to be "more robust" in Iraq and Syria leading to ISIS gains, is arguable, but that there are judgements on both left and right the come to that conclusion.  If there's evidence that they didn't lead to ISIS, I'd like to read them.
Also, I didn't say anything about Obama's domestic policies, which were arguably more successful than his foreign policies.  But even they are arguable.
Fact is: one can be, or have been (like me) an Obama supporter, but be deeply disappointed by his foreign policy failures.  Failures mainly because he was pusillanimous, perhaps by character, perhaps by principle ("leading from behind").
There are critiques on the Left, which pretty much echo mine:
The Human Rights Watch
The Washington Post
And at the conservative centre:
No, He didn't: Obama's legacy