Friday, 10 May 2024

Latest poll election 2024

If the election were held tomorrow. The result would be a wave of Red. A Trump landslide. 

“Does Biden’s Sabotage of Israel Remind You of Anything?” | Andrew McCarthy

Impeach Biden!

The GOP might want to hold back on the grounds that "we're not going to do tit-for-tat". That it's not good for the country to launch spurious impeachment cases just because your opponents did. Very well.

But at least they ought to make some noise about it. That the Dems sought to impeach Trump for exactly the same thing that Joe Biden is doing now to Israel. 

This point about Biden doing exactly what they accused Trump of doing was made on CNN last night! Amazing. 

Snip, from the great, the reliable Andy McCarthy


I

m old enough to remember when House Democrats impeached and Senate Democrats voted unanimously (though unsuccessfully) to convict and remove a president for withholding congressionally approved, taxpayer-funded aid from an allied country — one that desperately needed the aid while fighting a defensive war against a barbaric enemy — in order to pressure that desperate ally to help the president get reelected.

You're old enough, too — this happened less than five years ago.

And the Democrats who impeached and sought to convict and remove then-president Donald Trump are pretty much the same Democrats now holding House and Senate seats. Read on...

ADDED: Senator Ted Cruz on the Biden Betrayal.  At the end of the Trump presidency, Iran had around $4 billion in their coffers, according to the IMF. In country terms that’s like being on your uppers. After Biden had been in power for three years, Iran had over $100 billion, according to the IMF. That has allowed Iran to fund the terrorism by Hamas, by Hezbollah and by the Houthis. And for Iran to strike Israel with over 300 missiles. That’s what the Biden administration enabled. Facts. 

Israel, 16 April 2017, near Red Sea

Yonathan, Jing, Razi the camel driver. West Bank, Israel, 16 April 2017

Thursday, 9 May 2024

THE PATTERN OF BIBI’S DESPERATE PROPOSALS | Seymore Hersh

I pay money to Seymore Hersh for his Substack articles. He’s the guy who broke the Pentagon Papers. And I thought his article on Who Bombed the Nordstream pipelines was very good (his take: America). But I thought the latest pretty bad. My comment at the site of the article: 

What a dog’s breakfast of an article. “Analysis” by anecdote. The IDF soldiers are “grievously wounded” and thus, we are to assume, more insightful. Telling us that Bibi is “afraid of his own shadow” (and thus presumably should have been more forceful in Gaza), yet is somehow, and at the same time, to be negotiating with “Arab neighbours”. 

No mention of Hamas. No mention of the perfidy of Joe Biden. No mention of the severe constraint put on Bibi’s War Cabinet by the Biden gang. 

In one breath Bibi should resign or be ousted and in another breath it’s admitted there is noone capable of leadership. 

And yet, somehow, yet again the “two-state solution” lurches into view, the zombie, the Walking Dead, lall tattered raiments and blood-soaked bandages. Oh dear. 

And yet again, we have the comparison with Vientmam, Enough already. (Where the South Vietnamese are repeatedly described as “corrupt”, but not the North or the Viet Cong, equally corrupt, yet more venal, as they slaughtered their enemies, including baby Amerasians in orphanages, after America’s ignominious surrender. I know. I was there. 

And as for the war in Gaza being a defeat, that’s only if the Biden administration forces it. Had they not constrained Bibi, the cabinet and the IDF, it would all be over. 

There’s plenty of blame already to go around and a shitload of it is on Joe’s empty head. 

I’m a paying subscriber because of the excellent Seymour Hersh acticle on the Gazprom pipeline explosions. 

But I gotta say, Sy, this is a lazy and ill-thought out piece.

Disappointing.

Here

“How Marxism Subverted America” | David Josef Volodzko

Some are mocking the idea that the campus protests are driven by Marxism. Listen to the protesters, they say, they’re all about Gaza and Israeli genocide.

Well, not quite. At the outset, they knew nothing. We know this because many people went out to interview them. The main answer they got when asked “why are you here?” was a giggle and embarrassed glances to their giggling friends…who also had no idea.

Then the leaders of the protests, folks from outside, got strict. Don’t speak to the media, they said. Direct them to the Press Office, they said. And that’s what’s happened. You can see that from the videos I posted recently.

So, the folks that are now running the narrative make sure that it focusses on Gaza. And the reason they do that is that it’s fine to carry on about Gaza and Israeli perfidy, and so on. But it’s not ok to say “we’re all about bringing Marxism to the United States, and the world”. Oh, no, you can’t be so open. So.

Back in 2001, Osama bin Laden wrote “letters to the west”, in which he said that the reason he and his terrorist mates were attacking the west, 9/11 and all that, was because they were upset at the inequities in Palestine. And the west bought this. Even otherwise smart people like Glenn Greenwald, to this day, buy this line. They mock the idea that OBL attacked the west for our “freedoms”. 

But in fact that is exactly what they were doing. OBL wrote various essays aimed at the Muslim world. They are collected in a book by Raymond Ibrahim, The Al-Qaeda Reader. Which I’ve owned for decades and read and which forms the basis for this statement: the reason Al-Qaeda, the reason its leader Osama bin Laden, the reason to this day Islamic Jihadis attack the west is because of our freedoms. They hate that we are not believers. They hate that we are infidels. That’s clear in the essays for the Muslim world. But they knew they couldn’t say this outright, because it would lead to much more aggressive push back.

And so it is today with Marxism in the west. With the push for Marxism. With the whole concept of “the Long March through the institutions”. That’s what’s happening but it has to be hidden. At least from public discourse. 

It is hidden now in the issue of Gaza. Just as it was hidden in 2020 in in the issue of BLM, a movement led by open Marxists.  

Do I sound like a conspiracy theorist? But the aims of the push to Marxism, while hidden on the public level, are not hidden in the writings. There’s plenty out there, in the curricula of schools and uniiversities, in the book lists, in the essays, in the teaching of Marxist think tanks, to make clear what the agenda is. The agenda is Marxist. The push at American colleges is to bring down the edifice of American-led capitalism and bring about the utopia of Marxism. 

This is a conspiracy, NOT a "conspiracy theory". It's not theory when there's evidence to support it. 

Here is David Josef Volodzko, in his “How Marxism Subverted America”:
In his famous 1984 interview, Soviet dissident Yuri Bezmenov explained that Moscow knew it couldn’t defeat the United States in a head-on conflict. Instead, the Kremlin devised a four-stage plan to subvert U.S. society and turn the American public against itself.
The first stage, the former KGB agent said, was called demoralization and would take 15 to 20 years because that’s how long the media and sympathetic teachers needed to re-educate one generation of American students. But Bezmenov said this stage was already completed because the hippies of the 1960s, who were “contaminated” with Marxist-Leninist values, were entering positions of power by the time of the interview.
The next two stages would be marked by political polarization and the erosion of trust in our institutions. The final stage of communist subversion, normalization, would be realized once Americans began to freely express the views of their own enemies.
Forty years later, we have American teens on Chinese Communist-run TikTok telling us bin Laden had a point. We have champagne socialist vloggers on BreadTube arguing Russia invaded Ukraine in self-defense. We have Leninist antiwar activists cheering when Iran fires missiles at our allies, student speakers praising North Korea, and activists chanting “Death to America!” in California, Michigan, and New York.  
Read on...

Emerald City Flights


No, these are not photo shopped. They are really photos of what it was like to come into Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport until June 30 1997. 

We arrived in Hong Kong in August 1976, in the evening, exactly like this. It was magical. I thought we’d landed in Emerald City. A bright jewel of rainbow neons. A Hotel Furama, on the 75th floor, overlooking the harbour, a panoply of sights, sounds, smells. I’ve been in love ever since, with the city I still live in.





Wednesday, 8 May 2024

Funding the campus protests. Worth a careful read

“Unscientific American” | City Journal

There’s something similar -- Unscientific Australian -- happening in Australia at the moment, regarding Domestic Violence. And specifically, the number of women killed by their male partners. 

The concern is that Australian Domestic Violence, the number of murders of females by male partners, is out of control. 

There was a demo on the lawns of Parliament House, last week. Where the PM, Anthony Albanese, spoke, but got into trouble for “lying”, according the rally organiser, because he said that he’d asked to talk, but had been told that he couldn’t. But then he was asked. “That’s a complete lie”, said Sarah Williams

But the bigger picture. And the one that I want to highlight here. What is the case of DV in Australia. 

What’s happening? Because when people call for “more should be done”, well…the fact is.. there’s always more that can be done. 

It took about 4.7 seconds to find out.

Since 1990, the rate of homicide in Australia has declined 68%. That includes Domestic Violence homicide, which has also declined. The only homicide rates that have risen are those amongst Aboriginal communities. And thus — you’ve guessed it — you can’t talk about it.
Australia: Murder rates per 100,000. Source: Global Economy

Aha! You see the problem. You can’t really say, as PM, "things are OK". Amongst us non-indigenous, at least. The only problems are in the aboriginal communities. You just can’t say that. 

Even if that’s the truth. The carry on about DV is essentially hysteria. And to the extent that it is happening, it’s in the aboriginal community. 

Yet, even if the PM can’t say it, someone has to. Because if not there’s no data to back anything. Nothing is done on the basis of an facts. “The Other Side” does that, very well, IMO.

The same problem is affecting science and data and facts more generally. 

As the City Journal reports, in the case of the famous sceptic Michael Shermer: 
Michael Shermer got his first clue that things were changing at Scientific American in late 2018. The author had been writing his “Skeptic” column for the magazine since 2001. His monthly essays, aimed at an audience of both scientists and laymen, championed the scientific method, defended the need for evidence-based debate, and explored how cognitive and ideological biases can derail the search for truth. Shermer’s role models included two twentieth-century thinkers who, like him, relished explaining science to the public: Carl Sagan, the ebullient astronomer and TV commentator; and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a popular monthly column in Natural History magazine for 25 years. Shermer hoped someday to match Gould’s record of producing 300 consecutive columns. That goal would elude him.

In continuous publication since 1845, Scientific American is the country’s leading mainstream science magazine. Authors published in its pages have included Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, and J. Robert Oppenheimer—some 200 Nobel Prize winners in all. SciAm, as many readers call it, had long encouraged its authors to challenge established viewpoints. In the mid-twentieth century, for example, the magazine published a series of articles building the case for the then-radical concept of plate tectonics. In the twenty-first century, however, American scientific media, including Scientific American, began to slip into lockstep with progressive beliefs. Suddenly, certain orthodoxies—especially concerning race, gender, or climate—couldn’t be questioned. More...

ADDED: Back to Oz, with Bettina Arndt:

Message to our politicians: If you have deluded yourself that you could ever harness the angry women’s vote, take a good look at the Albanese debacle last week.

Our Prime Minister indulged in classic virtue signalling by sucking up to the Canberra women’s protest rally, joining hundreds of women who had been cynically whipped up into a frenzy over the latest domestic violence tragedies – with the usual false claims of an epidemic of violence being used to fuel anti-male hatred and demands for more funding.

From Winning over young men.

Why are students protesting Gaza? They don’t know (or won’t say)

 

Click above for the video

Click above for the video. A Short version

Click above for the video
Above: a selection of vids about the the student demos in the U.S. — really, look at them; they’re a flock of sheep who don’t dare to have their own thoughts. They’re truly idiots, even if “intelligent idiots”. Or “progressive dimwits”.

I’ve been following these since they began. At the beginning when asked what they were protesting about, they simply didn’t know. “From the River to the Sea”? they’d giggle inanely and admit they had no idea. 

That was clearly not a good look so the organisers have told them to shut up. All media have to go the “press people” who focus on the Gaza thing. Which is obvious for a Marxist group to do. You can’t say “we’re out to push Marxism”. You can talk about the horrors of Gaza. Just like Osama bin Laden said his whole thing — 9/11 and such — was about the Palestine issue, when in fact it was indeed about attacking the west because of its freedoms, because it’s not Islamic, because we are infidels. 

Tuesday, 7 May 2024

The roots of college protests are Marxism not Palestine | Chris Watson

Click above for the video
I agree with a lot of what Christian Watson says in the video above. I though the same of the BLM protests and riots in 2020, and many of the same people are recycled today, though Christian doesn’t mention that. 

Marxism is a powerful ideology. At least in prospect. It never does well in practice. 

This understanding also explains why George Soros is funding the campus protests. 

He does so through his Open Society organisation which money trickles down -- perhaps streams down is better analogy -- to the likes of Social Justice for Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace. Wondering over the years why Soros, a guy both Jing and I used to admire, was so committed to funding District Attorneys and Attorneys General who were soft on crime, it was explained to me, by Soros himself, when he said that “you have to destroy something in order to rebuild”. You can’t be incremental, he said. That’s an out-and-out Marxist concept. You have to destroy. Problem is the rebuilding never quite works out. 

Apparently it was Mao Tse-tung who said “you have to break some eggs to make an omelette”. And someone with quicker wit that me, who said “perhaps, but where’s the omelette?”

Chris Watson: @offiialCWATSON

There is nothing conspiratorial about believing that it’s all down to Marxism. When Socialism, Communism, had its great failures in the 1980s and 1990s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the failure of the Soviet Union and so on, we all, so many of us, include me, thought “well, that’s it. Communism’s over. No-one can push it now”. Well, we were wrong. Because they brushed themselves off and regrouped. The likes of Antonin Gramsci and Michel Foutcault, and a group known as the Frankfurt School, started the concept of “the Long March through the Institutions”. That’s what they’ve done. Through our schools and our universities, and through out government civil servants. It’s now having its flowering. They were never secret about it. That’s why it’s not a conspiracy theory. They were and are open about it. 

We just didn’t listen. 

Jack Dorsey praises Elon Musk’s X as ‘freedom technology’

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey had criticised Elon Musk. Now praises him and X, as being “freedom technology”. Australia’s battle with Musk makes Australia look stupid. 

The “e-safety commissar” is a sick joke. Just sad that so many, on both sides of the aisle, think it’s good and are behind it. 

Dear Campus Protesters: what you could do if you really cared about Gaza | George Washington Law professor

Monday, 6 May 2024

UCLA the aftermath. For the record

One of the “Rules” the protesters themselves set out: keep clean, don’t litter.

Conservatives are the real progressives

Click above for the video
Because they base their actions on learning from the past, and doing so is what gave us modernism. What gave us the enlightenment, what gave us the industrial revolution and the huge gains in material and health prosperity in the world over the last four hundred years. That’s what makes conservatives progressive. 

Historian David Starkey tells us the reasons why. 

Along the way, quoting Chaucer
For out of old fields, as men saith, cometh all this new corn from year to year; 
and out of old books in good faith, cometh this new science that men can learn 

Consider G.K. Chesterton’s Fence, an argument against hasty abolition of laws, institutions, or customs. A person comes across a fence in the middle of a field. If he’s progressive he doesn’t know why the fence is there, and so tears it down. If he's conservative he also doesn’t know why the fence is there, but thinks that perhaps someone else has put it there for a reason and so leaves it alone. We’re currently infested by people who don’t know why the fence is there, but don’t care to wonder why, and so they tear it down. With no agreement from others who think that perhaps we ought think about it a bit more. 

We are facing a very real threat to our western civilisation. Both from inside, in the case of the Woke new-Marxists, and from outside in the case of Islam. 

Brendan O’Neill was saying something similar in Australia recently. He, like the goat Thomas Sowell is an ex Marxist. In Brendan’s case “mugged by reality”; in Sowelll's’ case changed his mind “due to facts”. I’m something similar. Not that I was ever Marxist. But I was something of a squishy socialist in my uni days. Then was mugged by the reality of Marxist China in 1976. A poor, corrupt and polluting society. 

Starkey recommends a dose of Friderich Hayak to set one straight. 

And in the end, around here, takes of what Britain has given the world, of “historical transcendence” and quotes T.S.Eliot from the “Little Gidding” from the Four Quartets:
We hear the feet that walked before
the rustle of the clothes that have moved here before
The echo of the ideas and of the hopes 
and the fears and the achievements. 

“De-civilisation” | Brendan O’Neill

 

Click above for the video 
The unraveling of all our great achievements. As Homo sapiens 

Biden Unveils Official Campaign Slogan 'Death To America'

Parody. But…

But almost not. Given the refusal of Democratic Congress members to deplore the calls, on campuses all over America, for "Death to America”.

Memory Holes. (From “1984”)

Click above for the video 
I thought it was only China that did “memory holing” — of the Cultural Revolution, of Tiananmen June 4th…. 

But, no, it’s the west too. A whole political and media class have already forgotten how authoritarian they were during Covid. Horrid examples abound in Victoria, Australia, the United States and, as Brendan O’Neill says in his brilliant speech, in the U.K. 

Sunday, 5 May 2024

Yes, College Presidents are responsible for the College turmoil

An Occasional Reader has said something along the lines that the College presidents are “damned if they do, damned if they don’t”, in how they’ve handled the uprisings, the rioting, the encampments -- the “pro-Palestinians”, more correctly, I think called “pro-Hamas". That is, at the places they’ve been most radical, the likes of Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Penn, UCLA, this OR is saying if they crack down they’re damned and if they don’t crack down they’re damned. 

I beg to differ. At the University of Chicago (in a Blue city) and the Univeristy of Florida (in a Red State) the presidents have been robust. They said “it’s simple”. To their students they say:

  • You have the rights to free speech. 
  • You also have the obligation to follow the law. And to follow College guidelines. You must not interfere with the right of others. If you breach laws and codes, we will stop you. If you continue to do so, we will punish you, which may include expelling you. 

End of story.

The others, the presidents of Columbia and UCLA and the rest, are pathetic panderers. They are weak. They are cowards. There is no need for them to “negotiate”. WTF? Or else they agree with the protesters, which is another possibility, since almost all of the faculty and administration are very left of centre at US colleges. And that’s also crazy. 

In short, they are damned if they don’t. If they don’t take a clear stand. If they don’t stand up to principle. If they don’t stand for western values. If they don’t stand for the rule of law; for college regulations. 

If they do, they’re fine. If they don’t they’re damned. Cursed. Reviled. Shamed. There.

“Progressives ruin cities” | Michael Shellenberger

Click above for the video 
Michael Shellenberger is himself a progressive. He’d probably say that he’s now a lapsed progressive. A one time Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment”. He’s written a book about homelessness in San Francisco, called San Fransicko which I’ve got and read.

Above he talks to Zuby

A big part of the problem seems to be a classic case of “The Road to hell is paved with good intentions”. 

Saturday, 4 May 2024

Powerful speech to the United Nations General Assembly

Click above for the video 
Ambassador Erdan is right in all he says. The UN is rotten to the core. 

Hypocritical. Deceitful. Duplicitous. Corrupt. 

My Dad served in the United Nations New York from 1960 to 1962. My sister and I attended local American public primary schools.  

I recall he was not impressed by the UN even then. He would go on to represent Australia at the UN both in New York and Geneva. He lamented the careerists. Not surprising: they have comfortable sinecures, easy lifetime jobs with tax-free salaries and diplomatic immunity. 

And of course, of course, of course the single largest voting block in the UN is the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, 57 countries of which we can safely say: they are not enamoured of Israel. Or of Jews either, for that matter. Anti-Semitic. It’s no wonder the UN passes more anti-Israel resolutions than they do for the rest of the world combined. Pretty amazing when you consider the travesties of North Korea, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, Syria, China, Malaysia (Rohingya), Russia…

And that’s the United Nations!

“The cost of Destransition” | Megyn, Mary, Luka

 

Click above for the video 
This is such a fraught subject and people are suffering. Many because they are not getting the right advice from adults, the medical community, who should be taking more care. 

Please watch the above video. It is powerful. Luka is so eloquent. 

Stories from young people who have transitioned and then de-transitioned, as they realised they have made a grave mistake. 

J.K.Rowling has said that we will come to see this period as a shame, a scandal, on our society. The likes of lobotomy. Remember when we considered that lobotomies were “caring” and “kind”, too?

Friday, 3 May 2024

Why Biden Is Saving Hamas - Tablet Magazine

/Snip, from “Why Biden is Saving Hamas”:
Reports are circulating that the Israelis are planning an operation in Rafah to eliminate the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza. If so, the Netanyahu government will be acting against the very public wishes of the Biden administration, which has spent the last half year moving heaven and earth to save a terrorist organization from destruction. Bizarrely, the White House's statements and actions show that Hamas' survival is more important than the security of a traditional American partner, Israel; more crucial to American interests than the preservation of the U.S.-led order of the Middle East; more precious than the dozens of American lives that Hamas ended on Oct. 7; more valuable than however many Americans and Israelis are still alive in the terror army's tunnels.

Why? As the money and prestige that the U.S. has invested month after month in protecting Hamas demonstrate, the Biden administration sees the terror group as a valuable asset.

There are explanations in the article. I’m not sure about them all, but it’s surely been a head-scratcher why Biden & Co have stopped Israel in their tracks, when they were on the verge of winning the war. That is, of killing all the top-level Hamas leaders. Stopped them. And continue to stop them. Crazy.  

"I decided to go and see for myself what is happening at UCLA" | Montana Tucker

 
 
Montana Tucker
⁦@montanatucker⁩
After seeing everything on the news, I decided to go and see for myself what is happening at UCLA. I went in with the intention of having honest conversations to try and truly understand each others pain and suffering . However, no one would speak to me . The only thing they… x.com/i/web/status/1… pic.twitter.com/MuTlu2Ie5Z
 
28/4/2024, 11:28 PM
 
 

We have people close to us studying at UCLA...

University Gaza protests: Vietnam protests Redux? (in a word, No)

Oz (left) and me, “Forse”, in Canberra, 18 September 1970
This was a photo on the front page of the Canberra Times
That’s me on the right in the photo above there, at the Canberra, Australia, Moratorium demo of September 18, 1970. Age 20, with my old mate Oz. 

We were both in the conscription ballot, neither one of us chosen, though we’d both said that if chosen we’d go, even as we were anti the war. Some of our mates took off to Canada to escape the draft. We, neither Oz nor I, agreed with that. 

Apparently ex Twitter boss Jack Dorsey, commenting on the widespread demonstrations at U.S. College campuses -- and now also at my dad’s Alma mater, the Uni of Sydney --  that in time we may come to see that they are right; just as we came to see the anti-Vietnam demos in the late 60s to 1975 as being right.  

Many are saying similar: the current demos in the US are like the demos in the sixties. 

My take: No.

That’s me on the right in the photo above there, at the Canberra, Australia, Moratorium demo of September 18, 1970. Along with the others, of course I was a leftie and of course I thought that we should stop fighting in Vietnam and pull our troops out. The line was: the North Vietnamese, Ho Chi Ming, the Viet Cong are just fighting for nationalism. 

Well, since then, I guess most of my friends from those days still think the same. And I have for most of that time. 

But, “if in doubt, zoom out”. Zoom out and see that the war was not really against nice Vietnamese nationalists. It was against the sweep of communism. Only a few years before Soviet President Nikita Krushchev had said “we will bury you”. Communism was on the march in Asia and in Europe. 

It was not a crazy thing to want to stop it. It was not a crazy thing to talk about the “domino effect” of one country after another falling to communism. 

After all, as soon as the U.S. and its allies like us in Australia surrendered and pulled out in 1975, Pol Pot and his commie maniacs took over the whole of Cambodia and started the Killing Fields. They killed nearly 2 million Cambodians, a quarter of the population. Laos fell to communism and didn’t recover until recently. 

IOW: more people were killed in Kmer Kampuchea in the few years the the maniac communist Pol Pot was in power than in the whole of the Vietnam war. 

Also: the Vietnam war was very different from the current war in Gaza. And the North Vietnamese very different from Hamas. The former a communist, nationalist outfit; the latter an Islamic theocratic terrorist group bent on genocide of every Jew in the world. Different. 

In Vietnam the U.S. was in a jungle insurgency, where its superior firepower was blunted. It was tired, dispirited. 

In Gaza, it’s a city war, not a jungle war. It’s been going for seven months, not fourteen years. The IDF of Israel can prevail if it is let off the leash that American has put on it. Different wars, different times. Indeed if we were to listen to the loonies on the US campuses, and call a “Ceasefire”, it wold only lead to endless October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel. How do we know? Because they’ve said so. 

A “Ceasefire” now is surrender. Surely a way to peace. But surrender is the worst way to have peace. Especially if the surrender is forced on you by your alleged “friends”, influenced by zanies on campus. 

And, By the way, there is a Ceasefire on the table, one very favourable to Hamas -- releasing 1,000 Hamas criminals from Israeli jails in return for just 30 Hamas-held hostages -- but Hamas have said “no”. Clearly they think they’ll get an even better deal if they just wait. Because American university students are on their side. 

ADDED: “How US campus protests over Gaza differ from Vietnam war era”. Andrea Shalal and Bianca Flowers, May 4, 2024. 

Wednesday, 1 May 2024

"The Travesties of the Trump Trials” | Victor Davis-Hanson

This is really a case of one screen, two movies. That is, the same event seen two different ways by two people. Here, its the criminal cases against Trump. One side, the Left, sees the cases as legitimate. No one is above the law. The other side, the Right, sees it as Lawfare”. Election interference. As cases brought against Trump because he’s the Republican candidate the Left are so afraid of. Trumped up. heh!

Thing is: one of these is more correct than the other. I take the side of the Right here, both because of the cases themselves, and because on every other case where there are two movies on the one screen, the Right has been correct. Take it: the Russia Collusion. No, there was none; proof: Mueller Report and Durham Reports. Hunter Biden Laptop: Left said it was Russia disinformation; No it wasn’t. Proof: Hunter and Joe have admitted it, as even the NYT, MSNBC, CNN have acknowledged. 

The four cases against Trump are so absurdly andso patently invented. Everyone, even the supporterdre, call them “novel”. Even people on the Left acknowledge this. The likes of lifetime Democrats, legal experts, Law professors Jonathan Turley (D) and Alan Dershowitz (D). They’ve all said: there is no case here. None of them. They are invented. They are tortured to make a case. And in the current “hush trial” case, there is not even a crime they can see, to answer. 

Victor Davis-Hanson is a professor, a classics scholar, and he lays it out:

Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season.

These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him. More

"We have to take these guys at their word" | Ayaan Hirsi Ali

 
 
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
⁦@Ayaan⁩
We have to take these guys at their word. They were always open about their objectives.
we are sleepwalking into something really nasty.
 
30/4/2024, 4:13 PM
 
 

Who is the most ungrateful person in the world?

 My candidate: Ilhan Omar, US Congresswoman

Some people say we should not expect, or even wish for, people to be grateful for something like being allowed to live in a country. 

I disagree. I think gratitude is good for both sides of the equation. For the person who’s grateful and the person or place that is the recipient. 

I don’t expect that anyone do any more than I would. I think that’s a good measure of anything you propose: would you do it yourself?

Yes, I would and I did. When I went to China in 1976, I was the first western student of Chinese to be allowed into post-revolutionary China. Together with my Foreign Affairs colleague, Peter Rowe. We were the first to be allowed to go to Peking Languages Institute. Until then, we’d all had to go to Taiwan. 

So, we were grateful for that chance. We expressed this by wearing Chinese clothes, by eating Chinese food, by studying and learning the Chinese language. And I’ve been grateful ever since. 

Now, in Hong Kong, I’m grateful that I’m allowed to be a citizen here, with all the rights and obligations of a citizen. 

What about Ilhan Omar?

I don’t want to go to Wikipedia, so heres’s my summary from what I recall. 

She came as a young child, born in Omar, her parents Somali refugees to the United States. The U.S. accepted the family, gave them refuge. Young Ilhan went to school, and to a fine University. She then ran for U.S. Congress and won a a seat in the House of Reps, for the electorate, iirc, of Dearborn, Michigan. 

When she sat in the Congress, she asked if she could wear her hijab. Until then no minority had been allowed to wear head dress, not the Jews and their Kippahs, not the Seikhs and their turbans. But they made a special case and allowed her to wear her Muslim headwear. 

So: a young woman, given refuge in the US, given first world education, elected to US Congress, given special treatment in the Congress. And her reaction? Constant, bitter, nasty, hate on America. Her constituents call for “Death to America” and she cannot call it out. She is obliged by her oath to give her loyalty only to the United States, but openly gives her loyalty to Somalia. 

I think the reaction of people to criticism as “go back to where you came from” is a pathetic rejoinder. But... in the case of Ilhan Omar, well....

Rand Paul said recently that he didn’t agree with telling people to “go back to where you come from”, but that if someone took up a collection to buy Omar a ticket to Somalia, to visit to see what it’s like, he’d be happy to contribute. 

Me too. 

Ilhan Omar has done nothing to help the United States. She has done nothing to help the American people. She has only been a divisive influence. Her presence in the United States, no matter whether refugee or not, is a net negative for the world. 

If she went, it’d be good riddance.