People asked why Nancy Pelosi delayed passing a Wuhan coronavirus relief bill until now. One obvious reason was to avoid helping President Donald Trump’s reelection chances. Now that both houses of congress have passed this 5,593 page monster of a bill, another reason is evident: To cram as much special interest pork into it as possible.
How serious is this bill? Not very, but it spends serious money on unserious things. Tom Elliott of Grabien points out a few of the ridiculously beside-the-point items in this bill. They’re gobsmacking.
Snip.
Don’t worry. The Kennedy Center is getting yet another bailout. Why, exactly? Are they putting on shows right now? How many bailouts does it take to keep the lights on and the development department still working the phones calling on all those rich lobbyists living in the DMV?
And — thank God! — the government COVID stimulus package is there to keep teenagers from hooking up — as if there aren’t dozens if not hundreds of other programs doing the same thing. And let us take a moment to say thanks to all the HIV workers in other countries by giving them new cars. Funding for this is in the COVID bill. You? Buy used.
Also included is $453 million to Ukraine, on top of the $400 million Trump eventually released. No word on how much of that goes to the ‘big guy.’
$10 million for “gender programs” in Pakistan.
$1.3 billion to Egypt, and $700 million to Sudan.
$135 million to Burma, $85.5 million to Cambodia, $1.4 billion for an “Asia Reassurance Initiative Act,” and $130 million to Nepal.
If we have to pay money to Sudan for it’s peace deal with Israel, then the price is too high.
There’s so much pork in the bill that President Trump has threatened to veto it:
He notes that the bill provides stimulus checks for the families of illegal aliens, “far more than the Americans are getting.”
Alas, President Trump is a late convert to fiscal sanity. The budget deficit was just shy of $1 trillion in FY2019, before coronavirus shutdowns wrecked the economy. Alas, since the Senate passed the bill 92-6 (Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, Rand Paul and Rick Scott were the only senators to vote against it), a veto override seems likely.
All of the media chatter about this has been referring to it as a COVID relief bill. Yes, we’re all aware that this is how these spending bills get done. That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? This little pork dance just gets worse with each new spending bill. Ninety-nine percent of the people who get elected to the House or Senate immediately become afflicted with brain damage that renders them incapable of understanding the meaning of “fiscal responsibility.”
Election Day definitively confirmed the existence of hidden Trump voters. Undetected by polls and long denied by the establishment media, Trump’s surprising surge had to come from somewhere. Either these supporters were hiding from pollsters or pollsters were hiding them. Regardless, their existence raises disturbing questions about the role played by the establishment media and pollsters in influencing this election.
Election Day provided the startling revelation that a contest that supposedly had been over for months, actually would not be decided for days, and perhaps longer. In reality, the “blowout” proved a nail-biter. More unsettling is the fact that the race probably had been this close all along and that the false impression likely influenced the outcome.
As recently as October 12 the RealClearPolitics average of national polling had Biden at 52.3 percent and Trump at 41.7 percent. The average on Election Day was 51.2 percent to 44 percent. As of November 18, the actual popular vote figures are Biden at 51 percent and Trump at 47.2 percent.
From his October 12 level, Trump’s support increased over 13 percent. How could an error of such magnitude occur? Clearly a lot of hidden Trump voters came from somewhere. The question is whether they were hiding or were hidden.
Whether this was a sin of omission or one of commission has enormous implications for America’s elections. After years’ worth of concern about whether there had been Russian interference in our elections, it bears considering whether America has just fallen victim to internal tampering to a far greater degree.
The establishment media’s preferred answer to how the polls failed to detect millions of Trump voters is that the error was stupid, not sinister. “Whoops, we just missed them” — despite this being pollsters’ business, their assurance that they had “fixed” their polls’ problems from 2016, and the mistake being of incredible size. As results show, 2020’s error is greater than 2016’s.
The establishment media has readily blamed the pollsters, essentially exonerating itself by saying that it was just reporting what it was told. Yet neglected is the fact that the polls’ results were confirming the establishment media’s own bias. This bias has been repeatedly cited for decades and has never been clearer than over the last four years. As testament to the miraculous coincidence of pro-Biden polls and establishment media’s pro-Biden bias, consider the reverse: Would the establishment media have so readily regurgitated polling data showing the race as close as it turned out to be?
We say goodbye, then, to journalists elevating as worthy of public notice obvious liars and lunatics, including convicted felon Michael Avenatti, gossip columnist Michael Wolff, mental health quack Bandy Lee, and conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch — all because they oppose the administration.
Goodbye to weekly “bombshells” that land with a “splat!” instead of a “boom!”
Goodbye to near-daily input from presidential historians turned political assassins.
Goodbye to members of the press acting as if the cover artwork of the latest edition of a prestige news magazine is in some way provocative, stunning, or even particularly interesting.
Goodbye to White House correspondents pretending as if they are reporting from an active war zone or claiming they feel safer covering authoritarian regimes.
Goodbye to the Holocaust being invoked against the administration on a near-daily basis.
Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the Texas Rangers and other officials to help the City of Dallas respond to a spike in murders and other violent crimes that has gripped the city.
Abbott directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to send help to the Dallas Police Department (DPD) which will include special agents, state troopers, two helicopters, and two patrol planes.
“The rise in violent crime in the City of Dallas is unacceptable, and the Texas Department of Public Safety will assist the Dallas Police Department in their efforts to protect the community and reduce this surge in crime.”
Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell fined $1,000 for violating his own stay at home order to visit his grandson’s birthday party. Not quite a lobbyist-funded trip to The French Laundry, but still not a good look…
Austin leftwing journalists go after (checks notes) moms and sex trafficking victims for daring to oppose police budget cuts. Next up: The cishetronormative oppression of apple pie.
What real hope and change looks like in the Middle East:
This amazing map shows the transformation @realDonaldTrump fomented in the Mideast with his reality-based foreign policy. If the swamp creatures really return it will be a tragedy. But reality is stronger than their fantasies, which is why their ME policies have always failed. https://t.co/vxJDZlP9NG
China buys Pakistan, the Supreme Court gives Oklahoma back to the Indians, another cartel shootout in Nuevo Laredo, and cancel culture comes for everyone! Enjoy another Friday LinkSwarm!
“In a major Supreme Court decision Thursday, justices decided that a large swath of [Oklahoma], including part of Tulsa, is still an American Indian reservation. Tribal members can no longer be prosecuted by the state for crimes that happen in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.” I have not had time to read the decision, but my impression is that it’s somewhat less sweeping than the MSM is making it out to be.
China has become the ultimate fiscal lifeline for Pakistan. Decades of deficits, growing corruption, excessive defense spending and military domination have left Pakistan broke and few willing to give or lend enough cash to keep Pakistan solvent. A recent example of how this works was seen when despite economic recession and a public debt crisis (no one will lend to Pakistan anymore), the Pakistani defense budget was increased twelve percent for 2020, with annual spending now $7.85 billion. Spending on dealing with covid19 has averaged about $100 million a month and by the end of the year military spending will be at least five times what was spent on covid19. The India defense budget is also up (13.6 percent more) in 2020 to $66 billion.
The only economic relief available to Pakistan is China and CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic corridor). CPEC is a vast Chinese investment and construction effort that depends on vigorous support of the Pakistani military to succeed. China needs the Pakistani military to keep Islamic terrorists and tribal separatists from attacking the Chinese construction projects. Pakistan also helps China by keeping Indian forces occupied in Kashmir and the northwest Indian portion of the Pakistani border.
Northwest India (Ladakh State) is the current a hot spot because India has been building roads to the border and threatening to take back the portion of Kashmir Pakistan illegally, according to the agreement that established the India-Pakistan border after the British left in 1947, seized from India. Pakistan signed that agreement but had second thoughts as it was being implemented. Pakistan urged Pakistani Pushtun tribes in the area to “liberate” Kashmir from the Hindus and managed to grab about half of the disputed area. This dispute has remained unresolved ever since and led to several wars with India. Pakistan always lost but India never sent troops into Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The current Indian leader is openly questioning the wisdom of that policy.
India controlling all of Kashmir is a major economic threat to China, which has invested over $10 billion to build a highway and rail line from China to the Pakistani coast and it goes through Pakistani occupied Kashmir. This link is part of the Chinese OBOR/BRI (belt and road project) which aims to revive the ancient Silk Road that for thousands of years was the main economic link between East Asia and the rest of Eurasia. The Pakistani portion is called CPEC and is costing China at least $62 billion (so far). The Indian threats to the Kashmir road-rail link are minor compared to the problems China is having with Islamic terrorist and tribal violence against CPEC projects as well as the high levels of corruption in Pakistan which are also damaging CPEC projects. This is driving up costs while lowering quality and slowing progress. But China also claims ownership of much Indian territory so helping Pakistani keep what they have grabbed is considered something of a professional courtesy. At the same time the Pakistani military have gained an ally they cannot abandon or say no to.
In June China revived the border war over Pangong Lake, which is largely in Tibet and patrolled by a small Chinese naval force. This is the longest lake in Asia and part of the 134-kilometer long lake extends 45 kilometers into the Indian Ladakh region. China is using its usual “sneak, grab and stay” tactics to slowly move the border into territory long occupied by India. The portion of the lake shore in dispute has no native population. The only people who visit the area are soldiers from India or China.
Given this newly declared foreign threat China has, since 2019, sent new Type928D Patrol Boats to guard the lake. This fast (70 kilometers an hour) boat is armed with an RWS (Remote Weapons System) using a 12.7mm machine-gun plus two or more smaller (7.62mm) machine-guns that can be outed elsewhere on the boat and operated by one of the ten sailors on board. There is also seating below deck for up to twenty troops. India has smaller boats patrolling it portion of the 4,200-meter high lake, except for the few months when the entire lake is frozen over.
In the last decade China has been building roads into remote and formerly inaccessible (via vehicle) portions of the lake coastline. China has built some of these roads into areas claimed by India but not regularly patrolled because special mountain troops must be employed to get into these areas without coming in by boat or on foot over the ice.
India admits that the Chinese aggression along its northern border is active again and the Chinese are now actually taking control of Indian territory and apparently plan to continue doing so. Despite Indian nuclear weapons China believes it can get away with gradually gaining control over more than 100,000 square kilometers of Indian territory it claims. This will be done by grabbing a few square kilometers at a time without triggering a nuclear exchange. Fortune favors the bold, even in slow motion.
The dead were allegedly members of the Tropa del Infierno, or Hell’s Army, the armed wing of the Northeast Cartel, who attacked soldiers while they were patrolling the highway to the airport. No military personnel were reported injured in the shoot-out.
Investigators at the scene recovered two of the squad’s vehicles that were reported stolen in the United States, as well as 12 guns including two Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles and eight AR-15s.
The Northeast Cartel, a faction of Los Zetas, is headed by Juan Gerardo Treviño Chávez, alias El Huevo. A reward of 2 million pesos (US $89,000) has been offered for information leading to his arrest. Treviño is the nephew of the former leader of Los Zetas who was arrested in Houston in 2016.
Nuevo Laredo, which is right across the Mexican border from Texas, was also the scene of two previous massive cartel shootouts, in 2012 and 2018.
Her business, first and foremost, was keeping Jeffrey Epstein happy. He shared much with her father: a humble origin, a vast fortune derived by mysterious means, even rumors of ties to the Mossad and other intelligence agencies. Like Robert Maxwell, Epstein also attached himself to a woman of higher status. In those days, Manhattan was party central, a place where connections were made at night, person to person. “Ghislaine was at the epicenter of all that,” says Euan Rellie, a British investment banker who knew Maxwell in both London and New York. “She befriended everybody and had a massive Rolodex of influential people.”
Those connections proved pivotal to Epstein. “I always say that Ghislaine helped Jeffrey become who he became,” says one of Epstein’s victims. “He had the money, but he didn’t know what to do with it. She showed him.” Epstein built a 21,000-square-foot mansion on a 10,000-acre ranch in New Mexico, which he boasted made his New York town house “look like a shack,” and named it the Zorro Ranch. He also acquired a 72-acre island in the Virgin Islands and an 8,600-square-foot home in Paris, which is said to have featured a specially built massage room. Maxwell is said to have shared Epstein’s bed in each of the residences, as his girlfriend, before moving on to become his “best friend,” as he called her in Vanity Fair. (“When a relationship is over, the girlfriend ‘moves up, not down’ to friendship status.”)
Maxwell soon had a bed of her own in a five-story town house on the Upper East Side, tended by a live-in couple who served as her housekeeper and driver, two secretaries (one for her and a second for Jeffrey), and an immense budget for the six properties she was managing for Epstein. She had found a path back to the lifestyle she’d lost when her father died. “She was used to living very well,” says a friend who knew her then. “She didn’t want to go back to where she was.”
She wore a large diamond ring Epstein had given her, which she called her engagement ring, according to one of Epstein’s victims. “She would say things like she was the only one who Jeffrey slept with,” the woman says. “I know that she would have died to marry him. She would have done anything for him. He trumped everybody and everything.”
There is, of course, a big difference in saying you believe black lives matter versus saying you agree with the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a very important, key distinction to make in this debate. Unfortunately, “woke” reporters here in the U.S. often deliberately blur the lines by conflating the two as if they mean the same thing, so they can play the exact type of word games they did with [White House press secretary Kayleigh] McEnany over Trump’s tweets.
Across the pond in the UK, however, there’s been an unexpected development on this front. Unlike the mainstream media here that routinely fails to make the distinction between saying “black lives matter” (blm) versus saying you support Black Lives Matter (BLM), a growing number of media outlets there have started distancing themselves from the political group because of their calls to defund the police and after a series of anti-Israel, anti-Semitical tweets posted by BLM-UK were recently posted.
Is it too much to ask for our own MSM to start waking up as well?
Cancel cultures comes for Steven Pinker. “This transparently idiotic diatribe, previously dissected by folks such as Jerry Coyne and Barbara Partee — the latter of whom notes Pinker’s role in recruiting female and minority linguists to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences — can’t possibly succeed. Can it?” I wouldn’t want to bet money on that proposition. Reason and logic play no role in cancel culture.
On the other hand, Kurt Schlichter sees an opportunity to kill off academia as we know it. “Academia today is a pack of rabid reds, and we need to put it down like Old Yeller. And academia itself has loaded up the 12 gauge.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
I think I have successfully blocked enough #MAGAts for this to work now. Take this seriously, it's going to be used as part of my champaign advertisement. Thank you.
I would, first, urge future generations of Europeans to remember my generation as we really were, not as they may wish us to have been. We had all the same vices and weaknesses as today’s young people do: most of us were neither heroes nor monsters.
Snip.
Second, just as there is no such thing as a “heroic generation”, there is no such thing as a “heroic nation” – or indeed an inherently malign or evil nation either.
Snip.
Third, do not underestimate the destructive power of lies. When the war broke out in 1939, my family fled east and settled for a couple of years in Soviet-occupied Lwów (now Lviv in western Ukraine). The city was full of refugees, and rumours were swirling about mass deportations to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. To calm the situation, a Soviet official gave a speech declaring that the rumours were false – nowadays they would be called “fake news” – and that anyone spreading them would be arrested. Two days later, the deportations to the gulags began, with thousands sent to their deaths.
Those people and millions of others, including my immediate family, were killed by lies. My country and much of the continent was destroyed by lies. And now lies threaten not only the memory of those times, but also the achievements that have been made since. Today’s generation doesn’t have the luxury of being able to argue that it was never warned or did not understand the consequences of where lies will take you.
Confronting lies sometimes means confronting difficult truths about one’s self and one’s own country. It is much easier to forgive yourself and condemn another, than the other way round.
Couple plot to ambush the wife’s ex-husband and new wife, drive from North Carolina to Ohio to murder them. Big mistake:
According to the transcript of his Feb. 12 interview with sheriff’s deputies, Lindsey said he owns a gun, but had left it in the house earlier, and so he asked Molly if her gun was in the car. Both Duncans have Ohio conceal carry permits, which they told investigators they had obtained out of fear that Cheryl Sanders wanted to do them harm. They obtained the permits when they moved about four years ago to the area, where Molly has family nearby.
With Molly’s gun in hand, Lindsey said he exchanged fire with the man later identified as Reed Sanders. Lindsey said his ex-wife then pulled up in a vehicle, got out and also threatened them with a gun before being shot by Duncan.
The Greene County coroner said in February that the apparent cause of death for the Sanderses was multiple gunshot wounds. Investigators reported finding three weapons at the scene and multiple shell casings. The Duncans were not physically hurt in the altercation.
The ambush took place in February, but due to coronavirus-related court closures, the grand jury didn’t no-bill them until recently.
Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear — by his own account — that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.
Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.
What’s really going on here? Why have the Democrats, to put it bluntly, gone berserk? Why are they risking a backlash of cosmic proportions (other than appeasing their psychotically-inflamed base, of course)?
One, distraction. They live in absolute fear of the coming revelations about the Russia probe, from Inspector General Horowitz but even more from the DOJ’s John Durham, who can actually put people in jail. The Dems know — if they have a brain (and a few do) — these revelations are likely to point up the line at the leaders of the Democratic Party all the way to President Obama. They were all involved to one degree or another with illegally spying on or undermining Trump and his administration and supporters before and after the election. The extent of this we are only beginning to understand.
To put it mildly, not good. Whether you call this treason is up to you, but you can be sure Middle America (i. e. those elusive independent voters) will not appreciate it.
But there’s something worse — and Pelosi’s knows it. The only hope for Democrats to defeat Trump is, remote and quixotic as it may be, impeachment. In the midst of the current brouhaha, Joe Biden — their great (alas white male) hope — is being exposed as not just a senile plagiarist, but a senile, corrupt plagiarist with a freaky family out of a Southern gothic novel with tentacles reaching into China and Ukraine. Again, not good.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Dems have tacked so far to the left that they wouldn’t be able to win an election in Shenyang. Sanders, speaking of senility, is almost risible. He wants to restrict population for reasons of “climate change” when every one of the myriad social programs he so vehemently urges depends on strong continued population growth for economic survival, irrespective of taxes. (Is he that stupid? I don’t think so. He’s just a liar.)
As for his somewhat subtle clone, Ms. Warren, her proposals are if anything more extreme because she fails to acknowledge (though Colbert did his best to encourage her) that they are going to cost a ton of taxpayer money that approaches national bankruptcy. Even taxing the rich at one hundred percent won’t come near supporting her ideas. Wait until Trump gets ahold of that.
What’s the magic word that made Democrats go extra apeshit over the Ukraine meeting? Crowdstrike:
To understand how important this is, we must remember the foundation for the entire Russian election interference narrative, ‘Muh Russia – writ large, is built on the claim Russians hacked the servers of the Democrat National Committee (DNC), and subsequently released damaging emails that showed the DNC worked to help Hillary Clinton and eliminate Bernie Sanders.
Despite the Russian ‘hacking’ claim the DOJ and FBI previously admitted the DNC would not let FBI investigators review the DNC server or cloud-based network. Instead the original claim was that the DNC provided the FBI with analysis of a technical review done through a cyber-security contract with Crowdstrike.
According to the original FBI statements made by James Comey: Crowdstrike did the captured imaging of the DNC network (servers/cloud), then conducted analysis, then provided a report to the DNC with their findings; and that report was given to the FBI. At least that was the original 2017 claim. However, during court filings in the case against Roger Stone, the DOJ/FBI later admitted they never even saw the Crowstrike final report.
Lawyers representing Roger Stone requested the full Crowdstrike report on the DNC hack. When the DOJ responded to the Stone motion they made a rather significant admission. Not only did the FBI not review the DNC server or cloud data, the FBI/DOJ never even saw the final Crowdstrike report.
The narrative around the DNC hack claim was always sketchy; many people believe the DNC email data was downloaded onto a flash drive and leaked. Crowdstrike was a private contractor holding a strong conflict of interest over Clinton and DNC interests. With this FBI court admission the scale of sketchy increased exponentially.
There was, and still is, absolutely no evidence the DNC was “hacked” (WikiLeaks claims the information was an inside job of “leaking”), and even John Podesta admitted himself he was a victim of an ordinary “phishing” password change scam.
This admission meant the FBI and DOJ, and all of the downstream claims by the intelligence apparatus; including the December 2016 Joint Analysis Report and January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, all the way to the Weissmann/Mueller report and the continued claims therein; were based on the official intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and the U.S. Department of Justice taking the word of a hired contractor for the Democrat party….. despite their inability to examine the server and/or actually see an unredacted technical forensic report from the investigating contractor.
If politics were regulated the way that consumer goods are, Nancy Pelosi might be charged by the FTC with deceptive packaging for her ridiculous announcement yesterday that an “official” impeachment inquiry is underway. It is pure theater, designed to appease the radicals like Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, who two days ago denounced the failure to impeach as worse than Trump’s “crimes.” With radical primary challengers and a San Francisco constituency given to backing lunatic schemes and politicians, she fears for her political career.
The only way that impeachment begins is with a floor vote of the House, after which time subpoenas can be issued and the facts assembled for Articles of Impeachment to be presented to the House, and, if voted by a majority, submitted to the Senate for trial, which requires a two-thirds majority for conviction. What Pelosi offered was deceptively packaged oversight hearings by six committees. All she is doing is adding five more committees to the hearings already underway by Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s Judiciary Committee.
The obvious is that they are fishing for votes. Warren has a putative weakness with African American voters. Tom Steyer is unknown to them (as he is to a lot of people). Harris is sinking fast and needs to shore up her rep and Julián Castro’s campaign has barely been registering enough to keep him on the debate stage.
But beneath this are more disturbing beliefs, one of which is on the edge of disgusting and actually racist: that African Americans prefer to be lied to than told the truth. The corollary to this is that they are easily lied to if you stir them up. The level of disrespect in this is off the charts.
Also at play here, as it is everywhere in Democratic precincts, is Fear of Trump. African Americans are doing better under Trump than they ever have been in this country with unemployment at record lows and salaries up.
Further, Trump really did something never done before — spearheaded and signed criminal justice reform legislation. Better not remind black people of that. Distract them or lie to them instead. Call Trump a racist, though why would a racist do such a thing?
Man starts a program to help other men get off heroin. The Southern Poverty Law Center called him a white supremacist. Now he’s suing their ass for $4.8 million, and a district judge just gave the green light to start discovery.
“What’s Wrong With Chinese GDP Data?” “Since 2013, GDP figures look suspiciously smooth.”
If proven, this deserves serious prison time: “California Sheriff Under Investigation For ‘Pay To Play’ Concealed Carry Permits.” Namely to campaign donors. (Hat tip: Say Uncle.)
“Some 600,000 vacationers were stranded when Thomas Cook, a travel company that has been in business for 178 years, collapsed on Sunday.”
President Donald Trump asked for National Security Advisor John Bolton’s resignation. While Bolton was too interventionist for my tastes, I liked having him in the Trump Administration:
Whatever his faults, he actually understood foreign policy challenges like few in D.C.
Every administration needs heterodox thinks among its ranks to avoid complacency.
Having Bolton as National Security Advisor no doubt scared countries like Iran and Syria to no end, making them easier to negotiate with and keep in line.
In many ways, UN Ambassador (the role Bolton held on an interim basis under Bush43) was the perfect role for him, allowing him to call BS on rogue regimes without enabling his interventionist inclinations. But Bolton doesn’t seem to have learned several important lessons from aftermath of the Iraqi war, namely that the Middle East is a horrible place to install democracy, that the aftermaths of regime change tend to take far longer and cost far more (in lives and treasure) than the regime change itself, and there are no U.S. military accomplishments there which cannot be undone by the feckless policies of a Democratic presidency.
As far as maintaining U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the issue over which Bolton was reportedly fired, there are no good options, but the default (staying in and losing) is probably the worst of all. Unfortunately, without a willingness to directly confront nuclear-armed Pakistan, whose Inter-Services Intelligence is running and funding the Taliban, there’s no solution that doesn’t involve America eventually leaving in defeat.
Democracies around the world should hope that President Trump wins the trade war with China. “China’s victory [would] bring about a world in which democracies are enfeebled and the largest autocracy is emboldened.”
For this, Johnson is being pilloried as a dictator by Remainers. Why? By doing this, Johnson has made it harder for parliamentarians who oppose a no-deal exit from the European Union to interrupt Johnson’s Brexit negotiation strategy, which includes the possibility of no deal. Johnson has very sharply limited the time in which parliamentarians could organize to force the government to request another extension from the EU and thus make a mockery of Johnson’s promise of leaving the European Union — deal or no deal — by October 31. Essentially, parliamentarians will face a choice: Allow Johnson to proceed with his form of brinkmanship while negotiating with Brussels, including the possibility of no deal, or make Jeremy Corbyn prime minister.
Remainers should look into the mirror, however. They have shaped this outcome as much as any hardcore Brexiteer. At every single turn, in fact, it has been Remainers who have increased the chances of the U.K.’s not only leaving, but crashing out on a series of ad hoc emergency measures, rather than a comprehensive adjustment to its relationship to Europe.
While a handful of European UN employees act as the public face of UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees], the actual agency is run by Hamas operatives who control its schools, using them to recruit and to store weapons. The union representing UNRWA employees is controlled by Hamas and its employees implement Hamas policies.
Hamas had announced as much when its newspaper responded to a call to fire UNRWA Hamas members by writing, “Laying off the agency employees because of their political affiliation means laying off all the employees of the aid agency, because…they are all members of the ‘resistance.’”
The power struggle between the UN employees and Hamas was tested before during clashes over the teaching of the Holocaust in UNRWA schools and the use of UNRWA schools to launch attacks on Israel.
The real crackup came when the Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA.
Snip.
“I am the captain of the ship which has 13,000 sailors on it and they have basically thrown me off the bridge and consigned me to my captain’s quarters,” Matthias Schmale, UNRWA’s director of field operations in Gaza, whined.
Schmale had never actually been the captain. [Hamas co-founder Mahmoud] Zahar and other Hamas leaders had been running things.
The UNRWA was forced to evacuate most of its 19 international staffers from Gaza, including its ten senior leaders, leaving behind only 6 international staffers. This made no practical difference as the UNRWA operation on the ground was actually being run by the 13,000 Hamas UN employees.
But the UN isn’t moved by protests or violence. It runs on reports. And soon a report arrived.
Al Jazeera debuted an internal UN report alleging corruption and misconduct by UNRWA leaders. Al Jazeera is an arm of Qatar. The Islamic terror state is currently the biggest backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, supports Hamas, and is extensively involved in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s barrage of stories on the UNRWA report was a clear signal that Qatar was targeting the UN agency on behalf of Hamas.
Al Jazeera claimed that it had obtained a copy of the report from agency employees “concerned” that action wasn’t being taken against an “inner circle” running UNRWA. The inner circle consists of the international leadership that Hamas is angry at for trying to fire hundreds of its people.
The report, aired by Al Jazeera, claimed that UNRWA boss Pierre Krahenbuhl had carried on an affair with his senior adviser, Maria Mohammedi, which “embarrassed” their colleagues and donors.
Krahenbuhl, a Swiss NGO vet, is officially married to Taiba Rahim, the head of an Afghan non-profit, and Maria Mohammedi, is an Algerian who was, at least in the past, married to Rashid Abdelhamid, a “Palestinian filmmaker”, who is really an Algerian educated in France, and living in Gaza, and while this is all very multinational, it’s also the sort of “international diplomacy” that the UN frowns upon.
But if the allegations are true, the Swiss humanitarian had just gone native by adopting polygamy.
The report is filled with allegations of bullying, nepotism, abusing travel vouchers, and, the worst possible sin in a bureaucracy, bypassing official channels. And it might be more serious if the behavior being described weren’t slightly eclipsed by the fact that the rest of the UNRWA, which likely includes the employees behind the report, is an Islamic terror group dedicated to murdering children.
But in the UN, using schools as munition dumps isn’t a serious issue, going outside official channels is.
Result: Other nations, including the Swiss and the Dutch, are cutting off money to UNRWA.
In a grim determination never to take “Yes” for an answer, a different breed of feminist waddled onto the scene. Feminism had taken a vicious, vindictive and male-hating turn. Like other “civil rights” movements, it turned out to have less to do with “justice” and more to do with raw, abusive power, payback, quotas, unqualified people having set-aside slots based on their plumbing, and getting rich. Society needed to make some changes. And it did. However, we’ve all heard the expression “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” Well, don’t look now, but there goes the baby…literally.
Abortion was always a divisive subject. The first time Mr. AG and I heard a friend wax poetic about what a great thing abortion would be, I almost got into a fistfight with him, except he was also a pacifist! Where’s the fun in pummeling a pacifist? To a non-psychotic, the very idea of killing a baby is appalling, admit it. But by the early ’70s there was a growing consensus that in the first 12 weeks, the proverbial “clump of cells” should be able to be terminated. How quickly and predictably that morphed into abortion any time for any reason, including the sex of the baby, or no reason at all. I knew one certifiable, deranged feminist who used abortion as birth control. She had had 8 abortions that I heard of before I lost track of her.
Today, after ultrasound has proven that the clump of cells looks remarkably like a baby, only 7 percent of the American people agree with third trimester abortion. SEVEN PERCENT! You could get more than 7 percent to say they have had lunch with Bigfoot and Elvis. (Bigfoot selected the steak tartare; Elvis chose the Biscuits and Gravy.) Yet seven of nine black-robed arbiters set the stage for what has become legalized infanticide.
As they say on late-night informercials: But WAIT, there’s more! The old guard, who educated and litigated and lobbied for the rights and privileges women have today are driven from the movement, indeed from the public square. They have failed to get onboard with the quaint and unscientific notion that sex is a more or less imaginary construct and can change on a whim. How shocked Eve Ensler must have been to find that her tedious but lucrative play about chattering vaginas is now verboten because “some women don’t have vaginas.” Though she died in 1986, De Beauvoir herself wrote, “If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.” Gotta love those cheery existentialists!
Newly-minted women who are actually men can now win every athletic competition against real biological women. Title IX has been rendered meaningless. Protest if you dare, even if you’re an iconic lesbian tennis pro, and you will face a Twitter storm or legal action in Canada. Even backpedaling and groveling will not save you. As the famous novelist Max Cossack queried the other day over breakfast: “If men and women are exactly the same, why don’t we see women who’ve transitioned into ‘men’ winning athletic events against other men? How come that only goes one way?” Bueller? Mueller? Is that in anybody’s purview?
So what you might call Fairness Feminism is dead. The loony ghouls feasting on its corpse will carry on, but it will never again approach being any kind of mass movement.
Kurt Schlichter is delighted that our liberal media elites are being hoisted on their on petards:
You must have a heart of stone not to burst into uncontrollable, hysterical laughter at the agony of the failing New York Times and the rest of the media over how conservative activists are going to apply the same internet colonoscopy to lib journalistas as they apply to us.
Monsters!
Fascists!
Meanies!
Oh yeah, that’s the ticket.
Drink in their pain.
Drink it all in.
Mmmmm, that’s some delicious pain.
Yeah, conservatives are fighting back, and to the other side it’s an assault on the free press and further evidence that Trump is totally Hitler and probably Stalin too. But to us, it’s long-overdue counterpunching right into the progs’ soft gut. (Note: The author knows some of the conservatives allegedly involved, but was not involved in this glorious initiative).
This is righteous retribution, and the screaming and hollering about it is further evidence that there’s plenty of dirt to dig up.
Welcome to Accountability City. Population: All you liberal media jerks.
Ann Althouse wonders how a New York Times travel writer balances their job demands of selling air travel to rich people with his bedrock religious belief in global warming. Answer: with good old-fashioned hypocrisy:
After a few more tips — including buy carbon offsets — [Seth] Kugel ends with this mind-bogglingly elitist paragraph:
Most of this will make travel more expensive — and that may mean traveling even less. Think of it as a progressive tax paid by those lucky enough to travel for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in. It is a small price to pay. And maybe it will make you feel a little less shame.
No! You should feel MORE shame for even thinking like that. Kugel is saying that the people with the money to pay more will pay more and should feel lucky and less ashamed for “for damaging the world those who can’t travel must live in.” But refraining from doing what you can do is a core component of morality! To travel is to choose to cause damage. Kugel is just desperately trying to scare up every argument for continuing to travel by air…. other than relinquishing the idea that carbon emissions are destroying the world’s climate.
First came the floods, as weeks of monsoon rains deluged neighborhoods across Karachi, sending sewage and trash through Pakistan’s largest city. Then came the long power outages, in some cases for 60 hours and counting.
And then it got worse: Karachi is now plagued by swarms of flies. The bugs seem to be everywhere in every neighborhood, bazaar and shop, sparing no one. They’re a bullying force on sidewalks, flying in and out of stores and cars and homes, and settling onto every available surface, from vegetables to people.
Flies and flooding can often go together, and Karachi is no stranger to either. But Dr. Seemin Jamali, the executive director for the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center, one of Karachi’s largest public hospitals, said this was the worst infestation of flies she had ever witnessed.
“There are huge swarms of flies and mosquitoes,” she said. “It’s not just affecting the life of the common man — they’re so scary, they’re hounding people. You can’t walk straight on the road, there are so many flies everywhere.”
The city started a fumigation drive, but the flies remain, and frustrations are growing. It’s all drawing new attention, and anger, to the city’s longstanding problems with garbage and drainage — an issue that feuding political factions have wielded against each other for years, but that hasn’t gotten any better.
Experts say this infestation was probably brought on by the combination of stagnant rainwater, which stood in the city for days, with garbage on the streets and waste left behind from animals slaughtered during the recent Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha.
“Gun stolen during anonymous masked orgy, police admit ‘we’re probably not going to solve this one.'” Bonus: Exactly the state you think.
Critics hate Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because it’s not boring and woke. (I saw this last Saturday, and I highly recommend catching it in theaters while you can.)
“When black people agree with me, I very much want their voices to be heard,” said Helga Bannerman, 28, Portland, she/they/her/xen. “When they don’t agree with me, they’re pretty much just not black anymore. They’re basically an evil white person like me at that point. And the last thing we need on this planet is more white people like Dave Chappelle.”
A few bits of news about India have crossed my path this week, enough to do a little mini-roundup. India is a vast topic, and a vastly important one for the 21st Century, but the news we get about it light on insight and heavy on disasters and politics.
So naturally this post is about disaster and politics.
Disaster: India is suffering from an epic heat wave, hitting 123°F.
We didn’t see it coming. The tsunami of support that propelled Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into a second five-year term was a surprise to many of us reporting on the mammoth Indian general election.
Getting an accurate reading on how 900 million people will vote is extremely difficult and almost impossible to gauge from big cities like Delhi or Mumbai. Far in advance of the April-May voting, Reuters made a series of sorties into the farms and small towns where most of India’s people live to get a sense of what was being talked about, what was at stake.
Snip.
Despite the rural anger, at no time did we get a feeling that Modi was going to lose the general election. The assessment by Reuters’ correspondents was that he was going to win with reduced support from voters and might need partners to stay in power.
But instead, the BJP increased its seats tally to 303 against 282 in the 2014 election. And including its partners, Modi’s National Democratic Alliance has more than 350 MPs in the lower house, close to the two-thirds majority it would require to make transformative changes to the Indian constitution.
Snip.
But after a suicide bomber killed 40 Indian paramilitary policemen in Kashmir in February, and a Pakistan-based Islamist militant group claimed responsibility, the election focus immediately swung to national security from economic issues.
We decided to check back in the rural core of the country – and found that the attack and a strong response from Modi – including sending warplanes into Pakistan – had changed some minds and Modi was benefiting.
Is Modi an economic reformer, streamlining India’s economy? This piece argues yes, but in a way that distinctly tempers my enthusiasm:
First, he’s ensured that the government has more revenue to spend. Thanks to the Goods and Services Tax enacted in 2017, Modi has streamlined an enormously complex system of state and federal tax collection, broadening the tax base and sharply reducing the amount of money lost to fraud. That’s a historic accomplishment in a country with so many development needs.
Modi has directed unprecedented amounts of money toward the country’s seemingly endless need for new infrastructure. Construction of roads, highways, public transport and airports have sharply increased the country’s long-term economic potential. Although the process remains unfinished, the government has also brought electricity to remote villages that have never had it, a boon for economic potential, public safety and basic quality of life.
The BJP-led government has also expanded a biometric identification system, begun under the previous Congress Party–led government, that has already taken iris scans and fingerprints from well over a billion people to help citizens prove who they are so they can receive services. It has provided bank accounts for 300 million people who have never had them, creating new opportunities for these people to access credit and state subsidies. It also brings them into the formal economy to potentially make the government more responsive to their needs. The government says these measures have cut sharply into waste and fraud within India’s welfare system, allowing the state to provide more and better services at a much lower cost.
Health care reform could help half a billion poor people afford treatment for cancer and heart disease. A program known as Ujjwala Yojana has helped women in the countryside gain access to cooking gas for the first time. The Swachh Bharat program has built tens of millions of toilets for hundreds of millions of people. Modi’s commitment to renewable energy is part of his plan to make India a leader on climate change. None of these projects are complete, but all of them will help the vast majority of India’s people lead safer, healthier, more productive and more prosperous lives.
Some of that is good. Some of the infrastructure spending is probably necessary, on the order of the rural electrification and infrastructure projects the U.S. undertook in the 1930s. I would not want to live in a country that makes biometric ID mandatory for free citizens (also, it’s hardly immune to errors, fraud or hacking). And the “climate change” rathole just increases living costs for ordinary people to no demonstrable benefit.
When I was an idealistic 20-something in the late 1990s, my hope was that India would one day elect a free-market reformer like Ronald Reagan, who would begin to shrink the dysfunctional bureaucracy and free the economy to grow faster. Looking back, I see how clueless I was.
In Delhi every politician is wedded to big government, and there is no constituency for free-market reform. I kept hoping for Reagan, and India kept electing Bernie Sanders.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is no exception. Five years ago he led the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, known as B.J.P., to power on a Reaganesque promise of “minimum government,” and now he seeks a second term in the general election that ends on Thursday. But in office, Modi has wielded the tools of state control at least as aggressively as his predecessors. In this campaign, he went toe to toe with rivals, vying to see who could offer the most generous welfare programs, and it appears to have worked.
Snip.
Hopes for a big-bang Indian reformer revived years later with the rise of Mr. Modi, who in 2002 had been elected as chief minister in the western state of Gujarat. By courting multinational companies, building roads and streamlining the state bureaucracy, Mr. Modi oversaw a stunning boom. The state economy grew at a pace close to 12 percent annually in his first term. In 2014, Mr. Modi’s record in Gujarat helped lift him into the prime minister’s office.
Like many India watchers, I heard in Mr. Modi’s call for “minimum government, maximum governance” the voice of a red-tape and regulation-busting reformer in the Reagan mold. In retrospect this reading ignored how Mr. Modi had delivered “maximum governance” in Gujarat: by force of personality, cutting foreign investment deals himself and intimidating bureaucrats into building roads on time without demanding bribes.
This was economic development by executive order, not economic reform by systematically expanding freedom. Mr. Modi has tried to govern India the same way, but the top-down commands that rallied tens of millions of his fellow Gujaratis haven’t worked nearly as well on the sprawling Indian population of 1.4 billion. He centralized power in the prime minister’s office, and many private business people now say he treats them much as his socialist predecessors did, often suspicious of their motives and contribution to society.
One November evening in 2016, he ordered the withdrawal of large rupee bills — 86 percent of the currency in circulation — at midnight. The aim was to flush cash out from under the mattresses of rich tax dodgers. One of his cabinet ministers said Mr. Modi was delivering on a “Marxist agenda” to reduce inequality. Today, however, the aftershocks are still rippling through the economy, and have been especially painful for the poor.
In some ways Mr. Modi has proved more statist than the Gandhis. Before he took power he criticized Congress welfare programs as insulting to the poor, who “do not want things for free” and really want “to work and earn a living.” As prime minister, Mr. Modi doubled down on the same programs, expanding the landmark 2006 act that guaranteed 100 days of pay to all rural workers, whether they worked or not.
On the economic front, then, every Indian party is on the left, by Western standards. The Congress traces its economic ideology to socialist thinkers, but the B.J.P.’s thinking is grounded in Swadeshi, a left-wing economic nationalism.
The consensus from all this seems to be that Modi has indeed run a cleaner government than his Congress Party predecessors, has some real economic reforms under his belt, but isn’t what anyone in America would consider a real free market reformer.
You would think a simple condemnation of antisemitism would be an easy thing for House Democrats to do. You’d be wrong. Like the UK’s Labour Party, the Social Justice Warrior rot has crept into the Democrats to the point where they are institutionally hostile to Israel and Jews. The need for Muslim votes outweighs forthright condemnation of one of the world’s oldest (and deadliest) prejudices.
So enjoy a LinkSwarm while you wait for the blood-red tide of anarchy to be loosed on the world:
The Democratic Party Has Normalized Anti-Semitism: “No educated human believes [Democratic Rep. Ilhan] Omar inadvertently accused “Benjamin”-grubbing Rootless Cosmopolitans of hypnotizing the world for their evil. These are long-standing, conspiratorial attacks on the Jewish people, used by anti-Semites on right and left, and popular throughout the Islamic world.” (Hat tip: Sean Davis on Twitter.)
And the hits keep coming! New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls for and end to the U.S.-Israel special relationship. I’m sure such a position could never negatively impact reelection chances for a congresswoman representing New York City…
“Federal judge temporarily blocks Texas from purging voters in citizenship review. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery called the review “ham-handed” and ordered counties not to remove any voters from the rolls without his approval and “a conclusive showing that the person is ineligible to vote.” I know it will shock you to learn that Biery is a Clinton appointee. Can’t purge those precious illegal alien votes for Democrats off the rolls…
“Last week a new pro-illegal alien organization launched in the Lone Star State: Texans for Economic Growth. The group, which appears to contain more chambers of commerce than actual businesses, is directly tied to Partnership for a New American Economy, a “comprehensive immigration reform” (pro-amnesty) organization headed by two billionaires, the anti-gun former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch; a host of other media elites; big business CEOs; and mayors.” They oppose ending state subsidies for illegal aliens.
Is Pakistan finally doing something about terrorism? “Pakistan intensified its crackdown against Islamist militants on Thursday, with the government announcing it had taken control of 182 religious schools and detained more than 100 people as part of its push against banned groups.” Don’t believe it. As sure as the heat is off, expect those same militants to be released and go right back on the ISI payroll…
Saying "the USSR did not built its economy up through Indigenous genocide, stolen lands, and extensive use of slave labour" is like saying "At least Hitler came to power without antisemitism and violence."
It’s ten years since Obama’s Russian reset. “By the time Trump took office, just over two years ago, a greatly emboldened Russia had effectively digested Crimea, was engaged on a rapidly expanding scale in joint military exercises with China, was energetically cultivating such clients in the Western Hemisphere as the USSR’s old comrade Cuba and Putin’s pals in Venezuela, and was militarily entrenched in Syria as a mainstay of the Assad regime.”
Crenshaw might be the congressional GOP’s best answer to AOC, but he decidedly doesn’t want to be seen as a Republican version of the 29-year-old New York Democrat, who is “always trying to embrace radicalism,” he told me during a recent interview in his new office on the fourth floor of the Cannon House Office Building. He wants to take his party in a more traditional—not radical—direction. “We have to make conservatism cool and exciting again,” is how he described his mission in politics when I first met him a year ago. “We have to bring back that Reagan optimism.”
Crenshaw’s combination of traditional conservatism and rising popularity put him in an unusual position in Congress. He describes himself as a “plain old conservative”—he supports free trade, wants to reform Medicare and Social Security, and thinks American troops should stay in Afghanistan (where an IED took one of the veteran’s eyes) as long as they’re needed to prevent another 9/11. That puts him at odds with Trump, whom Crenshaw has been unafraid to criticize, going so far as to call his rhetoric “insane” and “hateful” during the 2016 presidential campaign. But Crenshaw is more “Sometimes Trump” than “Never Trump.” He is not pushing for a 2020 Republican primary challenge and is not trying to write off Trump’s wing of the party—hence, his warm reception at CPAC. In fact, Crenshaw has praised the president for his policies on immigration, even recently voting in support of Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build a border wall, a move many conservatives opposed.
Ignore the “dares to take on Trump” angle of the article. Crenshaw’s biggest advantage is a temperament almost completely opposite from Trump’s, which voters may look for in 2024.
Former Texas congressman Ralph Hall died at age 95. Hall was a conservative Democrat who endorsed George W. Bush for President in 2000, then switched to the GOP in 2004, one of the last conservative Democratic office holders to leave the party. “Hall had always been a thorn in Democrats’ side even before he changed parties. In 1985, he voted ‘present’ rather than support then-Speaker Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neill’s, D-Mass., reelection. ”
Two years ago, Wonder Woman proved a female-led superhero movie could reach the highest levels of the genre, with Gal Gadot proving robust and redoubtable, yet also charming and feminine. I spent Captain Marvel waiting for Gadot. What I got was Brie Larson: charmless, humorless, a character so without texture that she might as well be made out of aluminum.
Captain Marvel might be the first blockbuster movie whose animating idea is fear. Every page of the script betrays terror of what people might say about the film on social media. Give Carol Danvers a love interest? Eek! No, women can’t be defined by the men in their lives! Make her vulnerable? OMG, no, that’s crazy. Feminine? What century are you from if you think females should be feminine? Toward the end of the movie, when a villain preparing for an epic confrontation with Carol, the fighter pilot turned Superwoman, chides her that she will fail because she can’t control her emotions, there is no tension whatsoever. We’ve just spent two hours watching her be utterly unfazed by anything. Giving Carol actual emotions would, of course, lead to at least 27 people calling the film misogynist on Twitter, and directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are petrified of that.
Just to be completely, unerringly, let’s-bubble-wrap-the-universe safe, Boden and Fleck decided to make Danvers stronger than strong, fiercer than fierce, braver than brave. Larson spends the entire movie being insouciant, kicking butt, delivering her lines in an I-got-this monotone and staring down everything with a Blue Steel gaze of supreme confidence. Superheroes are defined by their limitations — Superman’s Kryptonite, Batman’s mortality — but Captain Marvel is just an invincible bore. The screenplay by Boden, Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, with a story by the three of them plus Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve, presents us with Brie Larson’s Carol being amazingly strong and resilient at the beginning, middle, and end. This isn’t an arc, it’s a straight line.
“Ilhan Omar Withdraws Support From Bill To Save The Earth After Learning That’s Where Israel Is.” “When I made the Green New Deal, I thought weather like storms and earthquakes were all caused by climate change, but now I’ve learned from Representative Omar that lots of that is actually from Jewish-controlled weather machines.”
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…
India and Pakistan seem to be cooling off slightly, and President Donald Trump prefers no deal to a bad deal with North Korea. So enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
“Previously Deported Illegal Alien Convicted of Child Rape After Release by Sanctuary City.”
Speaking of planes, Pakistan is swearing up and down that India shoot down an F-16…because the terms of the U.S. sale bar them from being used for offense.
“This is a nuanced discussion,” said Senator Kamala Harris, who voted against the act. “I mean, should we or shouldn’t we murder babies? It’s not really cut and dry for many Americans. What if the baby is inconvenient? What if the mother has already decided it’s a nuisance and might interfere with her school or work? What then?”
Borepatch co-blogger ASM826 calls a tool company to get a screwdriver tip replaced, ends up talking two hours with the owner who was a marine in the battle of Iwo Jima.
Evidently the Indian Air Force staged several mock runs to stress Pakistan’s air force before the actual strike.
Not buying all the points here, but the analysis of differing Pakistani and Indian nuclear strategy is interesting:
The Pakistani military’s fear is that the Indian army has an overwhelming advantage, in terms of men and tanks, so may mount a “Cold Start” conventional attack that quickly could seize the major Pakistani city of Lahore and effectively win a war without employing nuclear weapons. As a consequence, whereas India, initially at least, developed strategic nuclear weapons designed to reach all of Pakistan, the latter’s military switched to tactical nuclear weapons to stop dead any Cold Start Doctrine adventure.
But how easy would it be to halt Indian tank divisions pouring across the desert in the flat border region south of the mountainous terrain of Kashmir, where the current action is taking place? It may sound that I have strange friends, but I know people who have “run the numbers” on this. The answer is that it would take more than 20 Pakistani nuclear weapons to blunt an Indian attack.
The conventional wisdom is, or certainly was, that nuclear weapons create a balance of terror between rivals. That logic may have applied in the days of the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, but it no longer is valid — at least between India and Pakistan.
In both India and Pakistan, people are asking the important questions: Will the war interfere with the Cricket World Cup? In fact, Pakistan’s president Imran Khan is a former cricketer.
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(@ResitsTrump) 
(@usEbre) 