Posts Tagged ‘Foreign Policy’
Thursday, December 20th, 2018
President Donald Trump is evidently pulling combat troops out of Syria, having declared:
This is not correct. While Hajin itself has just been taken, a core of Islamic State fighters still remains in the remainder of the Hajin pocket:
If President Trump actually means it, this withdrawal is probably some 4-8 weeks premature if the goal is to crush the last remnants of the Islamic State and stabilize SDF territory. Maybe we can let Syria crush the remaining Islamic State remnants, and maybe we can’t. Will we be leaving the Kurds enough weapons and supplies to stand up for themselves against an emboldened Syria, Russia and Turkey? It’s unclear that we will.
Note that the phrase “returning United States troops home as we transition to the next phase of this campaign” leaves a lot of wiggle room. There may well remain a small troop contingent to support SDF forces and direct coalition air power based in Iraq, where some 5,000 U.S. troops are still supporting Operation Inherent Resolve. Also, the British governemnt noted: “Much remains to be done and we must not lose sight of the threat they (ISIS) pose…. (but) as the United States has made clear, these developments in Syria do not signal the end of the Global Coalition or its campaign.” The French still have a hand in as well.
This comes two days after the Trump-skeptical David French called Trump’s previous policy in Syria both wise and unconstitutional. “The Trump administration is doing the right thing the wrong way, and that matters. The failure to follow the constitutional process means that American forces are in harm’s way without the necessary congressional debate and the necessary congressional approval.”
Cue Bunk Moreland:
Assuming it is a complete and almost immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Syria, I view President Trump’s move with some skepticism, and suspect that it is slightly premature. Clearly we need to exit Syria at some point, probably sooner rather than later, but I’d prefer Trump to wait just long enough (again, another four weeks) to make sure the Islamic State holds no significant territory upon which to claim the legitimacy of its caliphate. I fear we’re inviting more instability by leaving slightly too early.
I’d love to be proven wrong.
Tags:David French, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, France, Hajin, Iraq, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Kurds, Military, Russia, Syria, Syrian Democratic Forces, Turkey, UK
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 14th, 2018
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Austin just had a wind storm, to top off a year of weird weather.
Apple to spend $1 billion on Austin campus. This is going to be a couple of miles from my house. Expect more detailed examination in a latter post.
This Andrew Sullivan piece is half-useful for it’s look at Social Justice Warrioring as a religious substitute:
For many, especially the young, discovering a new meaning in the midst of the fallen world is thrilling. And social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself. I think of non-PC gaffes as the equivalent of old swear words. Like the puritans who were agape when someone said “goddamn,” the new faithful are scandalized when someone says something “problematic.” Another commonality of the zealot then and now: humorlessness.
And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. “Social justice” theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution.
Unfortunately, the second half is just Christian-concern-trolling as a way to bash Trump. Pace-Sullivan, there’s nothing new in his critique that couldn’t also be applied, to say, the “prosperity gospel” movement of the 1980s on, and it all boils down to “Those stupid Christians voted for Trump rather than the positions we enlightened betters believe in.”
“Census confirms: 63 percent of ‘non-citizens’ on welfare, 4.6 million households.” The ideal number there should be “zero.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Incoming New York Democratic attorney general vows to get Trump and his little dog Toto, too.
“Mexican National Sentenced to 8 Years for Trafficking Girls into U.S., Forcing Them into Prostitution.”
ICE workplace arrests up 700% in President Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year.
Think the Paris riots are bad? Just think what would happen if the biggest climate alarmists got their way:
If Paris streets burned over a proposed 25 cents per gallon climate change tax, imagine the global conflagration over a $49 per gallon tax.
That’s what a United Nations special climate report calls for in 12 years, with a carbon tax of $5,500 per ton—equal to $49 per gallon of gasoline or diesel. That’s about 100 times today’s average state and federal motor fuels tax.
By 2100, the U.N. estimates that a carbon tax of $27,000 per ton is needed—$240 per gallon—to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Of course, that isn’t going to happen. The economic wreckage of such a punitive tax would plunge the global economy into a permanent depression—and that’s assuming politicians could enact such huge tax increases over the will of their voters.
Keep in mind that the unrest in France was triggered by a looming 25-cent hike, which is a little less than 10% more in taxes than French drivers already pay. To meet the $49 per gallon tax hike recommended by the U.N., fuel taxes in France would have to go up 17-fold.
“When you said, ‘Paris is going to be so hot,’ I did not realise it would actually be on fire…’Eye-watering opportunities’ did not, in my mind, involve tear gas.”
The weirdness of the Huawei story.
How corrupt is the Chicago Way? A college student running against Democratic Party boss Michael J. Madigan’s hand=picked alderman Marty Quinn found out:
To get on the ballot, Krupa was required to file 473 valid signatures of ward residents with the Chicago Board of Elections. Krupa filed 1,703 signatures.
But before he filed his signatures with the elections board, an amazing thing happened along the Chicago Way.
An organized crew of political workers — or maybe just civic-minded individuals who care about reform — went door to door with official legal papers. They asked residents to sign an affidavit revoking their signature on Krupa’s petition.
Revocations are serious legal documents, signed and notarized. Lying on a legal document is a felony and can lead to a charge of perjury. If you’re convicted of perjury, you may not work for a government agency. And I know that there are many in the 13th Ward on the government payroll.
More than 2,700 revocations were turned over to the elections board to cancel the signatures on Krupa’s petitions. Chicago Board of Elections officials had never seen such a massive pile of revocations.
Mark Steyn: “If you’re having trouble keeping track, the French protests, Trump, Brexit, the Austrian and Italian elections, and the sudden cancellation of the ‘Murphy Brown’ reboot are all the work of Russian bots. Whereas the Tijuana caravan, the UK grooming gangs and that rental car heading toward you on the sidewalk outside the Berlin Christmas market are the authentic vox populi.” Plus some Max Boot bashing, which is now a year-round pursuit. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
1. Google gets accused of anticompetative practices. 2. Google donates money to the American Enterprise Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. 3. Same think tanks write pieces defending Google. 4. Google boosts those studies in its search results. It’s like the human centipede of political policy studies…
Another drawing Mohammed death.
Boy Scouts file for bankruptcy. Get woke, go broke.
Texas constitutional carry bill introduced.
Nike: It’s fine to insult patriotic Americans by kneeling at NFL games, but criticize Islamist scumbag Recep Tayyip Erdogan? That’s not allowed.
Janitor in Greece is facing a decade in prison after 18 years on the job for lying about the years of primary school she completed.
Keith Richards gives up drinking. And I saw seven angels blowing seven trumpets… (Hat tip: Iowahawk.)
Scott Adams nails it:
Tags:American Enterprise Institute, Andrew Sullivan, Apple Computer, Austin, Border Controls, Boy Scouts, Chicago, Chuck DeVore, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Crime, Democrats, Draw Mohammed Day, Foreign Policy, France, Global Warming, Google, Greece, Guns, Huawei, Keith Richards, LinkSwarm, Mark Steyn, Marty Quinn, Media, Michael J. Madigan, New York, Nike, Paris, Scott Adams, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Turkey, Welfare State
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Global Warming, Guns, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Welfare State | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, December 12th, 2018
Theresa May survives:
Prime Minister Theresa May has won a vote of confidence in her leadership of the Conservative Party by 200 to 117.
After securing 63% of the total vote, she is now immune from a leadership challenge for a year.
Speaking in Downing Street, she vowed to deliver the Brexit “people voted for” but said she had listened to the concerns of MPs who voted against her.
Her supporters urged the party to move on but critics warned of a stalemate over finding an acceptable Brexit deal.
The prime minister won the confidence vote with a majority of 83, with 63% of Conservative MPs backing her and 37% voting against her.
The secret ballot was triggered by 48 of her MPs angry at her Brexit policy, which they say betrays the 2016 referendum result.
May also promised she would not lead the Tories in the next general election:
She has survived by promising her colleagues she will die another day. She has vowed not to lead her party through the next general election, and therefore has the consent to lead her party for the next few months, or days, or hours.
It was a bad week for May. The Brexit deal she has negotiated with the heads of state of the other 27 EU countries was so unpopular with her colleagues that she had to delay Parliament’s vote on it. Her government was found to be in contempt of Parliament and had to be forced to disclose the legal advice it had received about the deal’s wording. She has spent much of the week seeking wiggle room from Brussels, assurances that the “backstop,” which would have the U.K. continue to follow EU rules in the absence of a trade deal, is not a permanent trap.
May appeared at the 1922 Committee ahead of the vote. At that weekly gathering of Tory backbenchers, May essentially promised that in exchange for her party’s consent to lead it right now, she would resign before the Tories face another general election, opening up the possibility she would exit in the spring.
Perhaps no one should be shocked that the 40-year split in the Tory party over Europe has not been healed by the Brexit referendum’s result or the post-Brexit manifesto the party ran on, promising a speedy, orderly, and thorough exit.
What to make of the rebel MPs? Tory MPs do not want to vote for May’s deal because, like all compromises, it disappoints. But the unwillingness to make a more serious bid to unseat her shows that they do not believe there is a better deal to be made or that they will not take the political risks of trying to make one. What they want — and what May gave them — is her assurance that she will pay a political price for her deal and get no credit whatsoever. That is, the Tory party believes more in ending May’s reign than in a better Brexit.
Tags:Brexit, Conservatives, Elections, Foreign Policy, Theresa May, UK
Posted in Elections, Foreign Policy | No Comments »
Sunday, December 9th, 2018
The “yellow vest” protests/riots have continued throughout France, and spread to other countries as well:
1,700 arrested in France, with 1,200 still in custody. I’m betting that Interior Minister Christophe Castaner’s estimate of 100,000 protestors nationwide lowballs it, possibly by an order of magnitude.
“Hundreds” arrested in Brussels:
Belgian police detained more than 400 people on Saturday after “yellow vest” protesters inspired by riots in France threw rocks and firecrackers and damaged shops and cars as they tried to reach official buildings in Brussels.
In the second violence of its kind in the capital in eight days, a crowd which police estimated at around 1,000 faced riot squads who used water cannon and tear gas to keep people away from the European Union headquarters and the nearby Belgian government quarter. Calm was restored after about five hours.
1,000 protested in Sweden, but evidently over the “migrant pact” that reportedly makes criticism of of EU migrant policies a crime.
Also scattered “yellow vest” protestor sightings in Spain, Hungary, Germany, a member the Serbian parliament, and even Iraq, though there the protests don’t seem to be against high fuel taxes.
Far left intellectuals are always calling for the masses to take to the streets, but most probably never anticipated that it was high fuel prices and objections to uncontrolled immigration that would do the trick…
Tags:Anthropogenic Global Warming, Christophe Castaner, EU, Europe, Foreign Policy, France, Germany, Global Warming, Paris, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Taxes, Welfare State
Posted in Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Welfare State | No Comments »
Friday, December 7th, 2018
This week was bears all the way down, but there may be some light at the end of the tunnel. So enjoy a free Friday LinkSwarm:
President Donald Trump wants to end green energy subsidies for electric cars. Good for him.
Don’t lean on me man if you cant afford a ticket back from geezer Dem city.
Clues suggest Chinese hackers behind Marriott breach.
Remembering the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia during Prague Spring 50 years ago. (Hat tip: Ace of Spaces HQ.)
Another day, another fake hate crime. (Hat tip: Charlie Martin on Twitter.)
In a follow up to this story from January, Charlie Geren aide David Sorensen admits he filed a false CPS report against Geren’s primary opponent Bo French:
A former political operative for State Rep. Charlie Geren (R–Fort Worth) has now admitted that he made a factually inaccurate and anonymous report to Child Protective Services against Geren’s opponent during a contentious 2016 Republican primary campaign.
As part of a settlement resolving a lawsuit brought by Bo French, David Sorensen has acknowledged he made the anonymous and incorrect election eve report to CPS alleging that French was abusing his children. The former Geren political aide has also acknowledged the report was not accurate, and he has apologized to the French family for submitting it.
“Before and after Geren’s campaign, Sorensen worked as an operative on Democrat political campaigns and for the Democrat Party.” After this confession, Sorensen should never work on the campaign of any candidate for any political party ever again…
“John Stossel: Google and Facebook cross ‘The Creepy Line’ of censorship every day.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Armed woman kills South Carolina jail escapee who kicked in her door.” Good. (Hat tip: @davilch’s Twitter feed.)
“More on the demise of the Weekly Standard:
Just as Milton’s Satan would rather reign in hell than to serve in heaven, so also neoconservatives would never be part of any movement if they were not acknowledged as the movement’s intellectual leadership. Neoconservatives were content to have John McCain win the GOP nomination and lose to Obama, since this result did not impair the market for what Kristol, et al., were selling — political commentary and policy analysis. What really threatened their racket, however, was when Republican primary voters in 2016 refused to be herded into the camp of any of the neoconservative-approved candidates. Make no mistake, Bill Kristol would have much rather seen Jeb Bush or Chris Christie win the GOP nomination and then lose to Hillary, than to have a Republican president who wouldn’t take advice from Bill Kristol.
Questions of policy — is Bill Kristol in favor of enforcing our immigration laws, or not? — were ultimately less important to the fate of the Weekly Standard than their intellectual pride. Neoconservatives decided in 2015 that Donald Trump should not be the Republican nominee and, when their advice was rejected by GOP primary voters, the neoconservatives doubled-down and decided that Hillary Clinton should be president. When that didn’t happen, they doubled down again, and declared Trump’s presidency illegitimate. At no point, apparently, did it ever occur to them to ask, “What if we’re wrong?” The possibility of error was not something Bill Kristol (Harvard, Class of 1979) was willing to consider.
Low dose aspirin did not increase the lifespan of the elderly in a study, but did increase deadly hemorrhages. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Dog food recall.
“Elon Musk Cancels Boring Project After Delving Too Deep, Unearthing Balrog.”
Avengers: Dendgame trailer drops.
There are few presents that beat a Golden Retriever puppy:
Tweet containing a video of President George H.W. Bush’s body being borne by train to its final resting place next to his wife and daughter:
America is not a kingdom, and a president is not a king, but the pagan power of a dead king’s passage still stirs some part of our ancient souls. These rituals of our civil religion (the lying in state, the transport of the coffin, the missing man flyover) are both objectively a little silly and subjectively profoundly important as part of the social glue that still binds the nation together.
Rest in peace, Mr. President.
Tags:Bush41, Charlie Geren, China, Communism, Crime, Czech Republic, David Sorensen, Democrats, dogs, Elon Musk, Facebook, Foreign Policy, George H. W. Bush, Google, green subsidies, Guns, John Stossel, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Slovakia, Soviet Union, Texas, The Weekly Standard, video, Welfare State, William Kristol
Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Guns, Media Watch, Texas, video, Welfare State | 1 Comment »
Sunday, December 2nd, 2018
Here’s some news, tributes, roundups and reactions to President George H. W. Bush’s death:
Bush’s body to lie in state in the capitol rotunda. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
The Other McCain:
Former President George Herbert Walker Bush will be universally praised in the wake of his death because it is always the policy of liberals to celebrate the dead Republicans they formerly defamed, as a means to impugn the living Republicans they currently defame. Those of us old enough to remember how liberals hated Bush when he was president (and before that, as vice-president under Ronald Reagan) will not be deceived by their panegyrics to his “civility” and “bipartisanship.”
Snip.
Bush was one of the leaders of the GOP’s effort to break the Democrat stranglehold on the “Solid South.” He defeated the powerful Texas Democrat machine to win two terms in Congress, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1970, and served as Ambassador to the United Nations (1971-73) and later as director of the CIA. In the interval, Bush was chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973-74 when it fell his duty to inform President Nixon that he would have to resign, as the Watergate revelations had destroyed his support within the GOP. In all of these roles, Bush was a man of honor who did what duty required, as a patriotic servant of his country.
Scott Johnson at Powerline: “He led an almost impossibly full life, capped by his election to the presidency as Ronald Reagan’s successor in 1988. A good man and a good president, he was perhaps more than anything else a great American of the old-fashioned variety that is passing from the scene.” Plus a reminder of how the New York Times fabricated stories about him.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, hails Bush as the man who ended the Cold War. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Tweets:
Finally, America’s journalist class in action:
Tags:Bush41, Cold War, Communism, Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, George H. W. Bush, James Baker, Media Watch, Mikhail Gorbachev, New York Times, Obituary, Republicans, Texas
Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »
Friday, November 30th, 2018
Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!
Trump Derangement Syndrome is breaking up marriages as “woke” women leave their sane husbands. “Part of what causes fights is that I don’t want to hear his side, and he hates that. Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it, and then I walk away.” Golly, can’t imagine why their marriage isn’t a Hallmark movie.
Texas speaker-in-waiting Rep. Dennis Bonnen will speak at the Texas Public Policy Foundation orientation in January. “One of the open secrets about the capitol in recent sessions has been the degree to which the Straus/Gordon Johnson team despises TPPF. The Straus/Gordon Johnson team loathes TPPF more than any conservative organization. That includes Empower Texans.” That’s some bold talk…
MSBNC in action:
Hamas is still freaking out over that Israeli raid a few weeks ago. “Hamas officials suspect Israel has been operating a base inside Gaza, and Hamas is turning itself inside out trying to figure it out.”
ESPN has lost 14 million viewers over seven years. How’s that “all social justice warrioring, all the time” format working out for you? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Deutsche Bank offices raided:
In what appears to be the latest in a string of financial crimes and scandals that have generated some $18 billion in fines since the financial crisis, prosecutors are investigating whether two employees in the bank’s wealth management division helped clients set up accounts in offshore tax havens, including the British Virgin Islands, and possibly allowed criminals to move money through these shelters, some of which may have flowed through accounts at the bank (other employees may also have been involved, prosecutors said). According to Frankfurt prosecutors, the investigation, which stems from revelations contained in the ‘Panama Papers’, covers behavior that stretched through this year, meaning that it could become a blemish on the performance of the bank’s newly-installed CEO Christian Sewing.
Another jihad attack against Jews the media won’t label as a jihad attack:
GM’s destructive subsidies:
General Motor’s announcement that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing several plants has met intense criticism because the company was the beneficiary of a $50 billion government bailout in 2009—which wound up costing taxpayers $11 billion—even as the government awarded the United Auto Workers’ health-care fund a 17.5 percent stake in the restructured company. Like many big American companies, GM has been the recipient of government-subsidized largesse over several decades. One particular piece of this history is especially noteworthy now. Nearly 40 years ago, in one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain abuse in American history, GM built a plant on land seized from homeowners and businesses in Detroit, obliterating a multi-ethnic neighborhood known as Poletown—all for a plant that will now be shuttered so that GM can invest somewhere else in new manufacturing facilities.
Beset by foreign competition, America’s automakers began retrenching in the late 1970s, closing manufacturing facilities in and around Detroit even as the city struggled to rebound from the riots of 1967. Dodge had closed a giant plant in Hamtramck, a suburb that adjoins the Poletown neighborhood, and when GM announced that it wanted to build a new plant somewhere in America with modern industrial technology—though it was closing plants elsewhere—Detroit officials pleaded for an opportunity to find a site for the new facility. Mayor Coleman Young came up with a plan: seize some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses in Poletown, a low-income community of 3,500 where Polish immigrants had once settled. By the early 1980s, Poletown was a more diverse neighborhood, housing older Poles but also more recent immigrants and black Detroit residents. As the city deteriorated, Poletown remained relatively stable. “There is no place for us to go, no place we want to go,” two elderly residents told the New York Times in 1980, to no avail. To Detroit officials, Poletown’s appeal was its proximity to the Dodge site, providing some 465 acres for GM—if officials could just move out those inconveniently located businesses and people. To help make it happen, in April 1980 the Michigan legislature passed its infamous “quick-take” law, providing that government agencies could seize land deemed necessary for a “public purpose” and determine later how much to compensate the private landowners. That law accelerated the process of clearing out Poletown.
The Second Amendment was always an individual right.
Detecting a stealth aircraft is one thing, but shooting it down during the terminal tracking phase is another.
Don’t be Dick’s.
Things to be thankful for:
The cost of the ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast for ten are now said to cost an average worker their wages for under 2.25 hours of labor. A 16 pound turkey now costs less than what an average worker earns in an hour.
We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any ancient potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries.
Whence comes this bounty? It is not because of union organizing, or minimum wage laws, or the triumph of the proletariat over the evil factory owners. Indeed, a few centuries ago, there were few mass production factories to triumph over.
No, the source of this bounty is productivity, and the engines of productivity are deferred consumption being invested in improved infrastructure (that is, capital accumulation), improved technology, and specialization. Thanks to our better means of making things and the sacrifices needed to construct those means, productivity per worker is orders of magnitude higher, and thus there’s more stuff to go around.
Centuries ago, it required something like 750 hours of human labor to produce a simple tunic; today it requires minutes of human labor. Almost no one is capable of truly internalizing this change. The shirt on your back once was a valuable capital good requiring four months of constant labor to produce. Now it’s not even worth repairing if it tears, it’s too inexpensive to replace it. Because of this change in productivity, even quite poor people in developed countries own many sets of clothing.
Centuries ago, there was barely enough food to go around, and often far too little, as a result of which starvation was common. It required constant labor by most of the population to produce enough food. Then, mechanization of agriculture set in, and the production of synthetic fertilizer, and pest control, and improved breeding methods; today, it requires very few people to grow more than enough food for everyone. There is so much food, in fact, that obesity has become a disease of the poor, an unprecedented development in human history.
So it is across the span of consumer goods. The amount of labor it requires to produce enough light to read at night has gone down by orders of magnitude, and the quantity of light produced by an ordinary lightbulb is 100 times greater than that of a candle at a tiny fraction of the price. Many goods didn’t even exist before; in my father’s youth there were no televisions, and now people can buy 4k 130cm flat screens.
(Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“The case against carbohydrates gets stronger.”
People have a hard time believing that weight control isn’t just a matter of calories eaten and calories burned. But there is an alternate hypothesis about obesity, which is what my group studies. The carbohydrate-insulin model argues that overeating isn’t the underlying cause of long-term weight gain. Instead, it’s the biological process of gaining weight that causes us to overeat.
Here’s how this hypothesis goes: Consuming processed carbohydrates (especially refined grains, potato products and sugars), causes our bodies to produce more insulin. Too much insulin, one of the most powerful hormones, forces our fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. These rapidly growing fat cells then hoard too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. So we get hungry, and if we persist in eating less, our metabolism slows down.
Snip.
We started the participants on a calorie-restricted diet until they lost 10%-14% of their body weight. After that, we randomly assigned them to eat exclusively one of three diets, containing either 20%, 40% or 60% carbohydrates.
For the next five months, we made sure they didn’t gain or lose any more weight, adjusting how much food they received, but keeping the ratio of carbohydrates constant. By doing so, we could directly measure how their metabolism responded to these differing levels of carbohydrate consumption.
Participants in the low (20%) carbohydrate group burned on average about 250 calories a day more than those in the high (60%) carbohydrate group, just as predicted by the carbohydrate-insulin model. Without intervention (that is, if we hadn’t adjusted the amount of food to prevent weight change), that difference would produce substantial weight loss — about 20 pounds after a few years. If a low-carbohydrate diet also curbs hunger and food intake (as other studies suggest it can), the effect could be even greater.
This result could explain in part why U.S. obesity rates have been going up for decades. Individuals have a sort genetically predetermined weight — lighter for some, heavier for others. Despite this, the average weight for American men has gone from about 165 pounds in the 1960s to 195 pounds today. Women, likewise, have gone from an average of 140 pounds to about 165.
“Half As Many Google Employees Protested Building Chinese Surveillance Tech As Protested Pentagon Project.”
Evidently Creepy Porn Lawyer is considered a crook even by his porn star client.
Actual headline, not from The Onion or The Babylon Bee: “PETA Defends Graphic Animal Mutilation In Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built.”
“Aides Force Ocasio-Cortez To Watch Entire Run Of ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’
Ricky Jay, RIP.
Tags:Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Atkins, Border Controls, China, Democrats, Dennis Bonnen, Deutsch Bank, Economics, ESPN, feminists, Foreign Policy, Gaza, Germany, GM, Google, Gordon Johnson, Guns, Hamas, Jews, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Michael Avenatti, MSNBC, PETA, Social Justice Warriors, technology, Texas, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Trump Derangement Syndrome
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Texas | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, November 27th, 2018
Continuing our tour of ongoing wars the American media isn’t paying attention to, Boko Haram, AKA the Islamic State in West Africa, AKA Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (People Committed to the Prophet’s Teachings for Propagation and Jihad), attacked a Nigerian army base over the weekend, killing up to 100 Nigerian soldiers:
The claims by Nigeria’s government that terrorist group Boko Haram has been “defeated” continue to ring hollow.
An attack by the terrorist group on an army base last Sunday led to as many as 100 soldiers being killed, Reuters reports. The attack has been attributed to Islamic State West Africa (ISWAP), a breakout faction of Boko Haram that’s affiliated with the Islamic State terror group. The attack is one of the deadliest by Boko Haram since president Muhammadu Buhari took office in 2015.
The brazenness of the attack on a military base raises questions on the lack of equipment for Nigeria’s soldiers in the front-lines—a recurring theme since the Boko Haram insurgency began in 2009. Several reports have previously suggested Nigeria’s army lacked the necessary gear to combat the terrorists. Last year, Nigeria purchased arms valued at nearly $600 million from the US to boost its army.
The timing of the attack is also crucial given Nigeria’s upcoming elections in February. Insecurity was a prominent factor in the last elections as president Muhammadu Buhari strongly campaigned on his strengths as a former army general. Indeed, under his administration, Nigeria’s army quickly made gains on Boko Haram, winning back seized territory, rescuing some abductees and sacking the militants from their Sambisa Forest stronghold.
But regardless, the government’s claims of victory have proven premature. Boko Haram has continued to launch attacks in Nigeria’s northeast notably bombing the University of Maiduguri, once described as the safest place in the city at the peak of the insurgency. The group has also began increasingly targeting aid workers with two nurses abducted and executed in the last two months.
This is reportedly a splinter group, but remember that Boko Haram itself pledged allegiance to the Islamic State back in 2015. The split occurred when the Islamic State backed Abu Musab al-Barnawi over Abubakar Shekau in 2016.
Some reports say the attackers were foreign fighters:
The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) responded with brute force following the attack on a military base in Metele, Borno State by Boko Haram terrorists, amid reports that the attackers were foreigners who spoke Arabic and French as they dished out deaths to a hapless unit by the hundreds.
A faction of Boko Haram led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi, is affiliated to ISIS and is now known as the Islamic State West Africa (ISWA).
On Monday, November 19, 2018, members of terrorist sect Boko Haram, stormed the 157 Task Force Battalion in Metele and killed over 100 soldiers.
According to PRNigeria, an agency that dispenses information on behalf of the federal government of Nigeria, the latest air-strikes from NAF in the wake of the Metele attack, destroyed a convoy of vehicles linked to the Boko Haram fighters who wreaked havoc and deaths on the military base.
Boko Haram reportedly used rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and AK47 rifles to raid the base before destroying a slew of armored vehicles and killing every army officer in sight.
The foreign fighter angle may be true, or it may by a CYA face-saving measure to explain why Nigerian troops were taken unawares.
A South African mercenary lays the fault at the feet of President Buhari for cutting his group’s contract short:
Jihadist group Boko Haram’s continued killings and assault on Nigeria should be placed squarely at the door of its president, Muhammadu Buhari, former South African Defence Force commander and mercenary Eeben Barlow said at the weekend.
In a Facebook post, Barlow also criticised Buhari for claiming that Boko Haram had been technically defeated, adding that the militants were causing numerous casualties and capturing massive amounts of equipment and ammunition, the Premium Times reported on Monday.
The former mercenary said that Buhari’s government had cut short his contract after his company STTEP (Specialised Tasks, Training, Equipment and Protection), helped reclaim swathes of territory back from Boko Haram at the peak of the nine-year Islamist insurgency in 2015.
“Pressure forced only a small part of the campaign to be successfully implemented before we were ordered to pack up and leave.
“Many of the men we trained as part of 72 Mobile Strike Force have remained in contact with us (STTEP), pleading for our return to Nigeria,” he said.
“They have also told us that they have been used to a point of exhaustion,” Barlow said.
That statement sounds both very self-serving and quite possible, given that the South Africa had the best military in Sub-Saharan Africa and that the SADF conducted a successful counterinsurgency campaign against SWAPO in Southwest Africa/Namibia in the 1980s, and even kicked the asses of Cuban troops in Angola during operations Modular, Hooper and Packer.
Insurgencies are notoriously difficult to put down, and African nations are relatively poor, even if Nigeria is the wealthiest state in west Africa. My guess is that the STTEP was effective, but also benefited from the factional split, giving a false impression of Boko Haram’s defeat rather than a mere pause while they regrouped.
Boko Haram doesn’t have the strength to take over Nigeria, but they can probably continue to wreck havoc on outlying areas for years to come.
Tags:Abu Musab al-Barnawi, Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram, Eeben Barlow, Foreign Policy, Islamic State in West Africa, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Jihad, Military, Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | No Comments »
Monday, November 26th, 2018
The war between Russia and Ukraine, the one that never actually went away because Russia is still holding on to Ukrainian territory, has gone hot again in the Azov Sea:
Russia has fired on and seized three Ukrainian naval vessels off the Crimean Peninsula in a major escalation of tensions between the two countries.
Two gunboats and a tug were captured by Russian forces. A number of Ukrainian crew members were injured.
Each country blames the other for the incident. On Monday Ukrainian MPs are due to vote on declaring martial law.
The crisis began when Russia accused the Ukrainian ships of illegally entering its waters.
The Russians placed a tanker under a bridge in the Kerch Strait – the only access to the Sea of Azov, which is shared between the two countries.
This is one of those times where the original BBC picture is indeed worth 1,000 words:
Ukrainian armed forces are on full alert.
Vladimir Putin has evidently decided that he can incrementally add Ukrainian territory to Russia every few years and neither the EU nor the “world community” will be willing to do anything about it.
Tags:Azov Sea, Foreign Policy, Military, Russia, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin
Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | 1 Comment »
Friday, November 23rd, 2018
Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I for one am stuffed…
For those freaking out about Chief Justice Roberts saying there are no Democratic or Republican judges…¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He’s the head of a co-equal branch of the United States federal government, of course he’s going to defend the institutional independence of the court, no matter the evidence to the contrary. It’s pretty much required for his position.
Now here’s a LinkSwarm to enjoy before girding your loins to do battle over a $99 stereo marked down to $69…
“Is this NYT article really about how people are exhausted or is it about how the Democratic Party needs to admit it has a problem? The end of the article sounds like a loud wake-up alarm for Democrats.”
I’m so old I remember when the American Civil Liberties Union actually cared about Civil Liberties:
Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.
First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.
Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due process protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”
The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Reminder: The Rev. Jim Jones was a big wheel in San Francisco’s far-left Democratic party establishment:
Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.
Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.
Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.
Snip.
Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.”
Another day, another Antifa riot in Portland. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Iran threatens U.S. bases and aircraft carriers within missile range.” Boy, could Obama pick him some partners for peace or what? (Hat tip: Patrick Poole on Twitter.)
More than a quarter-million French take to blocking roads to protest high gas prices.
Reminder:
So Jamal Khashoggi – a former Saudi intelligence agent, a man who was close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a sworn opponent of MBS’ reform program– was in the process of setting up a centre to promote the ideology of the MB. He was setting it up in Turkey with Qatari money. The Saudis wanted to stop him. In September they offered him $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia and to live there unhindered. They wanted him out of play. Khashoggi refused and the rest you know. The Saudis killed him.
Let me make two points. First, there is no justification for murdering Khashoggi. Secondly, this man wasn’t some Western-oriented liberal brutally murdered because of his passion for freedom. This man was a player.
Five more MS-13 members deported from Houston by ICE. (Hat tip: Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Twitter feed.)
Old and busted: “Believe in science.” The New Hotness: “Social justice Astrology is so cool!”
Laura Loomer banned from Twitter. I have had zero interactions with Ms. Loomer, and she sounds like quite a piece of work, but banning her for criticizing a Muslim politician for supporting female genital mutilation is asinine.
1. Become head of ABC programming. 2. Cancel Roseanne. C. Become ex-head of ABC programming.
Divorced Texas woman blows up wedding dress with twenty pounds of Tannerite.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to disappear.”
The DB Cooper hijacking mystery: solved?
I had more links planned for this LinkSwarm, but they got eaten along with the turkey…
Tags:ABC, ACLU, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, antifa, astrology, California, Democrats, Foreign Policy, France, gas prices, Houston, Iran, Jamal Khashoggi, Jihad, Jim Jones, John Roberts, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Military, New York Times, Oregon, Portland, Roseanne Barr, San Francisco, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Taxes, Texas, Thanksgiving
Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »