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LinkSwarm for March 22, 2019

Friday, March 22nd, 2019

Hope you’re enjoying the spring weather! This week: Jexodus, Clinton emails (yet again), and a fair amount about aircraft. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • President Donald Trump calls for recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Since Israeli has controlled the Golan Heights for more than half a century, this would not be a radical and surprising move were it not for much of the world’s (and the Democratic Party’s) antipathy to the Jewish state. Expect liberal Jewish Democrats (see below) to fiercely condemn the move…
  • “How Trump is on track for a 2020 landslide.” Or so says those notorious pro-Trump shills at Politico. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • How dare Chelsea Clinton defend the Jews?

    For those of us who consider Chelsea Clinton a cringe-inducing banality, that she could be accused of anything so momentous, never mind a racist slaughter in the Antipodes, was puzzling indeed. And so it was with great curiosity that I read the Buzzfeed piece in which the pair explain their actions. In it, they accuse Clinton of having “stoked hatred against” all Muslims, everywhere, with a single tweet criticizing just a single one, Ilhan Omar. When the Democratic congresswoman complained about lawmakers being forced to pledge “allegiance to a foreign country,” she wasn’t repeating a hoary anti-Semitic trope which has instigated all manner of desecrations and violent attacks and pogroms. No, according to these NYU coeds, exemplars of American higher education as impressive as those Yale students who screamed at a distinguished professor for hours over Halloween costumes, Omar was “speaking the truth about the massive influence of the Israel lobby in this country.”

    It is Rep. Omar who is the victim here. “Chelsea hurt our fight against white supremacy when she stood by the petty weaponizers of antisemitism, showing no regard for Rep. Omar and the hatred being directed at her,” Asaf and Dweik declared. English translation: People who are left wing, Muslim or “of color” cannot be anti-Semites, and those who say otherwise will be condemned as handmaidens of Jim Crow. This is especially true if the person in question is, like IIhan Omar, all three.

    Reading the many progressive identity-based defenses of Omar, which repeatedly and pointlessly invoke the fact that she is a hijabi-wearing black refugee being criticized by a white native-born American woman, one gets the impression that this particular legislator can pretty much say whatever she wants and expect to be absolved for it: Her canonization as a left-wing hero is necessary, and irrevocable.

    Omar can’t be an anti-Semite because members of “marginalized” groups are inherently virtuous. This is the ultimate logic of identity politics. Jussie Smollett just had to be telling the truth; he is black and gay and progressive and his purported assailants were white and straight and wearing MAGA hats. But when Asaf and Dweik insist that she “did nothing wrong except challenge the status quo,” they are taking the side of anti-Semites over Jews. They are normalizing anti-Semitism.

    They are not the only ones. For a growing number of progressives, anti-Semitism has become an ideological obligation as central to their political identity as the Universal Basic Income, Green New Deal, a 70-percent marginal tax rate, and free higher education. These progressives, of course, cannot openly say this. Anti-Semitism is bad. Some of their best friends are Jews. The Holocaust happened. So they need to redefine anti-Semitism out of existence, while redistributing the valuable cultural capital of Jewish historical suffering to more deserving groups. Thus, the phenomena of “white Jews.”

    However, I think the author misses one obvious reason Democrats pander to Muslims: They’ve decided they need their votes more than they need Jewish votes, therefore Jews are expendable in order to keep the victimhood identity politics coalition together.

  • More of Jexodus:

    The negative Jexodus will be the aftermath of a radicalization that splits the Democrats, as it did Labour in the UK along dividing lines of militant socialism, Islamism, and anti-Semitism. These three ‘isms’ will split Jewish Democrats alone those same lines leaving the radicals on the inside and moderates outside. Those Jews who remain will be required to prove their loyalty by denouncing Jews and Israel. These demands will be put forward in the stridently anti-Semitic tones commonplace on the fringes of the Left.

    The 2020 season is just getting started and the Sanders campaign’s deputy press secretary, an illegal alien, already accused Jews of being disloyal, and Elizabeth Warren issued a statement in defense of Rep. Omar accusing Jews of inventing anti-Semitism accusations to silence criticism of Israel. It’s no coincidence that these overt shows of anti-Semitism are coming from the leftiest figures in the race.

    And it will only get worse.

    Jewish lefties have a high degree of tolerance for anti-Semitism. But ultimately the only Jews who will be able to remain in the Dem ranks will have very thick skins and career ambitions, like Chuck Schumer, harbor a complicated mix of shame and hatred for Jewishness, like Bernie Sanders, or have no connection to anything Jewish beyond their last names, like your average millennial Obama official.

    The Democrats have shown no ability to moderate their extremist drift. The movements pushing them leftward are, like the Democratic Socialists of America, openly supportive of anti-Semitism.

    That’s the easiest case to make for Jexodus because the Democrats will be the ones to make it.

    Jews will exit the Dems voluntarily or they will be forced out.

    Snip.

    Jewish Democrats have responded to the outbreak of anti-Semitism with the usual nebbish excuses, blaming Israel, Netanyahu, and the ‘politicization of anti-Semitism”. But socialist movements were anti-Semitic before Zionism and Jesse Jackson was slurring Jews as ‘hymies’ long before Netanyahu.

    Israel is a convenient excuse for anti-Semitism, not only by anti-Semites, but by their Jewish apologists who are eager to exercise a sense of control over a hatred that cannot be controlled, by taking the blame. And then placing it as far away as possible, on another country thousands of miles away.

    The anti-Semites blame the Jews. The Jews blame Israel. And nothing is learned from the experience.

  • Ukraine opens investigations of attempts to interfere in the U.S. Presidential elections in favor of Hillary Clinton. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Speaking of Clinton, in “newly revealed emails, [she] discussed classified foreign policy matters, secretive ‘private’ comms channel with Israel.” That is to say, emails from her secret, illegal, unsecured server, which means that back-channel might not have been so “private” after all. I might have to restart the Clinton Corruption Watch updates. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • A masterful takedown of Max Boot’s new book by Sohrab Ahmari:

    The liberal consensus, then, has emerged as a profoundly illiberal, repressive force—precisely because it grants the autonomous individual such wide berth to define what is good and true. If maximizing individual autonomy is the highest good and, indeed, the very purpose of political community, then for ­Chelsea Manning to exercise “her” autonomy requires the state to compel the rest of us to say that “she” wasn’t born male. And even absent state compulsion, as already exists in Canada and elsewhere, the institutions charged with upholding the consensus—corporations, big tech, universities, and elite media—can exact a high price for dissent.

    Snip.

    In Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the U.S., raising a peep about ­unrestricted mass migration was treated as phobic. Likewise, the guardians of the consensus drummed out of the public square those who questioned the wisdom of replicating the West’s political forms in ­societies shaped by history, and countless other factors, to favor order, community, and authority over individual autonomy. On the home front, economic growth, interconnectedness, and openness were treated as the only ideals worthy of the name.

  • Kurt Schilchter says we’re going to lose the coming war with China.

    We’re hanging our whole maritime strategy in the Pacific Ocean around a few of these big, super-expensive iron airfields. If a carrier battle group (a carrier rolls with a posse like an old school rapper) gets within aircraft flight range of an enemy, then the enemy will have a bad day. So, what’s the super-obvious counter to our carrier strategy? Well, how about a bunch of relatively cheap missiles with a longer range than the carrier’s aircraft? And – surprise – what are the Chinese doing? Building a bunch of hypersonic and ballistic anti-ship missiles to pummel our flattops long before the F-35s and F-18s can reach the Chinese mainland. We know this because the Chinese are telling us they intend to do it, with the intent of neutering our combat power and breaking our will to fight by causing thousands of casualties in one fell swoop.

    The vulnerability of our carriers is no surprise; the Navy has been warned about it for years. There are a number of ideas out there to address the issue, but the Navy resists. One good one is to replace the limited numbers of (again) super-expensive, short-range manned aircraft with a bunch more long range drones. Except that means the Naval aviation community would have to admit the Top Gun era is in the past, and that’s too hard. So they buy a bunch of pricy, shiny manned fighters that can’t get the job done.

  • Speaking of fighting the last war, the Air Force plans to buy more F-15Xs and less F-35s, supposedly because the non-stealthy F-15X can carry more weapons and work with F35s to deliver more ordinance. The F-35 has its issues, but this is probably the wrong decision. The Air Force still hasn’t figured out an optimal 21st century platform for carrying out close air support, a mission that institutionally has been among the least favored of its priorities.
  • Offutt Air Force Base sits near Omaha, the home of the Strategic Air Command and several vital aircraft, was affected by the recent flooding.
  • The compounding issues that led to the Boeing 737Max crashes.
  • Russia’s navy sucks:

    The Russian Navy is in trouble. After years of coasting on the largesse of the Cold War, Russia’s navy is set to tumble in size and relevance over the next two decades. Older ships and equipment produced for the once-mighty Soviet Navy are wearing out and the country can’t afford to replace them.

    Snip.

    Russia’s economy, flat on its back for more than a decade, started to claw back in the mid-2000s, thanks in large part to spiking oil prices. Today Russia is the fourth largest spender on defense worldwide. In 2017, the earliest year in which comparisons are possible, Russia’s gross domestic product amounted to $1.5 trillion dollars, of which it spent 4.3 percent on defense. That works out to $66.3 billion for Moscow’s war machine, trailing only the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia (yes, Saudi Arabia spends more on defense than Russia).

    Snip.

    Today, 28 years after the end of the Soviet Union, Russia still relies mostly on Soviet-era ships. The country’s sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has suffered from repeated mechanical problems and should be, but probably won’t be, retired immediately. Russia has built no cruisers since 1991, relying on the five impressive-but-aging Kirov and Slava-class cruisers to act as the country’s major surface combatants. Russia has built only one destroyer since the Cold War, the Admiral Chabanenko. Chabanenko was laid down in 1989 and commissioned into service in 1999.

    Likewise, most of Russia’s submarine fleet still consists of Soviet-era submarines, including Delta-class ballistic missile submarines, Oscar-class cruise missile submarines, and Akula, Sierra, Victor, and Kilo-class attack submarines, which have been in service for so long they are still referred to by the code names they were given in Soviet service.

    (Hat tip: CDR Salamander via The Other McCain.)

  • Inside the Russian Collusion Industry:

    Key Democratic operatives and private investigators who tried to derail Donald Trump’s campaign by claiming he was a tool of the Kremlin have rebooted their operation since his election with a multimillion-dollar stealth campaign to persuade major media outlets and lawmakers that the president should be impeached.

    The effort has successfully placed a series of questionable stories alleging secret back channels and meetings between Trump associates and Russian spies, while influencing related investigations and reports from Congress.

    The operation’s nerve center is a Washington-based nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project, or TDIP. Among other activities, it pumps out daily “research” briefings to prominent Washington journalists, as well as congressional staffers, to keep the Russia “collusion” narrative alive.

    TDIP is led by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator, Clinton administration volunteer and top staffer to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. It employs the key opposition-research figures behind the salacious and unverified dossier: Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Its financial backers include the actor/director Rob Reiner and billionaire activist George Soros.

  • Speaking of Soros, here’s a list of all the left-wing oprganizations Soros funds, over 200 of them. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Brexit slightly delayed. Probably until April 12. At which time Theresa May and the EU will probably find some other excuse to delay it again…
  • The MSM continues to lie about president Trump’s Charlottesville remarks. Scott Adams has been noting this for a long time:

  • How Democrats are going to ensure President Trump’s reelection:

    Democrats have floated radical proposals designed only to appeal to the far-left progressive wing of the party. Those ideas include stacking the Supreme Court or, at the very least, implementing term limits for justices; pushing for a constitutional amendment to end the electoral college; reducing the voting age to 16; and ending the legislative filibuster.

    These do not represent the return to norms and values moderate Americans want.

    It’s not fringe Democratic candidates floating such ideas but prominent presidential candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand.

    Mind you, that’s in addition to the Democratic support for the Green New Deal, a massive government undertaking that one former Congressional Budget Office director estimated could cost as much as $93 trillion.

    Let’s be honest: Democrats wouldn’t have offered up such ideas if Hillary Clinton had won the election in 2016. This is all about Donald Trump and supposedly creating an environment to react to the Trump presidency which can prevent someone like Trump from winning again (via the electoral college).

  • Vietnam veteran finally wins two decade battle against his homeowner’s association to fly the American flag. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • “Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years.”
  • Speaking of Facebook, Joe Bob Briggs notes that the best way to suppress hate speech is not to suppress hate speech.

    I’ve seen Klan rallies that are so lame they don’t get noticed. Why don’t they get noticed? Because they chose some town that was wise enough not to care whether they gathered there or not. The Klan has no power until it goes into an area that hates it. Clarence Brandenburg knew this. He could have spoken down in the Appalachian part of Ohio, but he chose sophisticated urban Cincinnati instead. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison. It was a great Klan recruiting year.

  • More corrupt featherbedding from Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner:

    Tomorrow, a Houston taxpayer named Darryl Chapman will ask a judge to stop the new contract with Cigna, calling it an illegal procurement, rigged from the start to make sure they won. The court hearing is scheduled for 1:00 pm in Judge Steven Kirkland’s court.

    One of the allegations is that Cigna was given information about medical claims that another company United Healthcare wasn’t given.

    But why would city hall ever play favorites? Isn’t it supposed to be what’s in the best interest of taxpayers and of city employees and their families?

    It’s hard not to notice that the Mayor’s close friend Cindy Clifford was in the room during the vote. Clifford was the head of Mayor Turner’s Inaugural Committee. She’s been on the winning side of a curious number of big city contracts since then.

    City records show she’s the lobbyist for Cigna. The Mayor pushed through the Cigna deal today, even after learning the legal action had been filed.

  • The end of SXSW plus St. Patrick’s Day equals a police shootout and a dead body in a Masarati. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Shut up and be funny.
  • Is Qatar staffing up a couple of foreign mercenary tank battalions?

    Qatar faces an ongoing and immediate threat of destruction by revolution [by] its population of foreign workers. Qatari citizens make up only 12% of the actual population of Qatar. 88% of the populace are imported labor, and Qatar treats them horribly. It is a case that the UK Independent rightly describes as “modern slavery,” and there are far more slaves being abused than there are citizens abusing them.

    For every Qatari citizen — male, female, adult, child, elderly — there are seven working age foreigners walking around who have legitimate reasons to hate them…. [this] explains Qatar’s sudden decision to purchase many new tanks and mobile artillery, allegedly to prepare itself against soccer riots in the 2022 World Cup. You don’t need tanks to stop a soccer riot. However, the Leopard tank variation they are purchasing is optimized for urban warfare; and the mobile artillery can be used to fire canister, while providing the gunners with cover from improvised weapons like Molotov Cocktails, or rifles seized from the police.

  • “Brazilian Nuclear Fuel Convoy Attacked By Heavily Armed Gangsters.”
  • Oklahoma sheriff and staff quit rather than return prisoners to unsafe jail. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Here’s a long (too long) essay about how the need for social media positivity is killing honest book reviewing. But it also displays that insular “only high literature talked about by inner circles of New York cognoscente is worth talking about” attitude that’s a contributing factor to most readers tuning out.
  • The shocking truth about Trump’s America:

  • The Who lead singer Roger Daltry is not impressed with Remainers having cases of the vapors:

  • Justice Brett Busby sworn in on the Texas Supreme Court.
  • Like a Netflix show? Good luck, because Netflix is never going to renew it, because long show runs are not part of their business models.
  • “When the Dominatrix Moved In Next Door.” Neighbors go all NIMBY on a “kink collective.” That’s what you get for moving into such a backward, sex-hating location as [checks notes] Brooklyn. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Is this a great state or what?

  • And you thought American sports fans were crazy.
  • Happy National Puppy Day!

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    Posted in Austin, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Media Watch, Military, Obama Scandals, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for March 15, 2019

    Friday, March 15th, 2019

    In one of the more important but confusing stories this week, UK’s Parliament rejected PM Theresa May’s Brexit deal, rejected a no-deal Brexit, and rejected a second referendum, but voted to delay Brexit until June. Whether the EU will consent to this delay or not remains to be seen. Borepatch thinks not, mainly due to EU elections coming up.

    Enjoy a complimentary LinkSwarm:

  • Democrats have a race problem:

    In the Trump era, Democrats are so intent on appealing to immigrants and minority voters they will tolerate insults to Jews, a constituency that voted for Clinton by better than a 3-to-1 margin in 2016. This is not inconsequential, as Jewish conservative Jeff Dunetz pointed out last week: “According to the FBI, almost 60% of the hate crimes in 2017 based on religion were against Jews.” Liberals would like us to believe that Trump supporters are responsible for this, but who is to blame when, for example, Somali immigrant Mohamed Mohamed Abdi is charged with attempted murder for allegedly trying to run over two men outside a Los Angeles synagogue? How can liberals claim Trump is responsible for three black men attacking Jews in Brooklyn? Police are alarmed by increasing anti-Semitic violence in New York City, which probably has a lot more to do with the “progressive” politics of that Democrat-run fiefdom than it does with who’s occupying the White House. Meanwhile, 11 white people were attacked in New York over the weekend, and a black transgender suspect has been arrested in what police say was an apparent hate-crime spree. Such is the toxic racial climate in the city that sends to Congress such Democrats as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spent her weekend trashing Ronald Reagan for a capacity crowd of liberals in Austin, Texas.

    Democrats and their media allies have spent years building this bonfire of racial resentment. CNN devoted hour upon hour of coverage to the “Black Lives Matter” movement that provoked riots in Ferguson, Missouri, and by the time of the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland, anti-Trump protesters were marching with Communist posters advocating revolution. Barely six weeks before Election Day 2016, a “Black Lives Matter” riot erupted in downtown Charlotte, N.C., and does anyone still wonder why Hillary lost North Carolina, a state that Obama had carried twice? Trump got 63 percent of the white vote in North Carolina, carrying the state by a margin of more than 170,000 votes. Is it likely that Democrats can reverse that verdict by doubling-down on identity politics? Yet liberals continue intensifying their incendiary rhetoric that has sparked incidents like the smearing of the Covington Catholic boys, the Jussie Smollett hoax, and a spree of attacks on Trump supporters across the country. Democrats and their media allies have done everything in their power to demonize the nearly 63 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2016, and what does that foreshadow for November 2020?

    Certainly by now, working-class white voters must be tired of deranged Trump-haters getting in their faces and shouting, “RAAAAACIST!” Perhaps that’s why the latest Iowa poll shows Democrat primary voters favoring two old white guys, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. However, the crowded field of Democrats contending for the 2020 presidential nomination, cheered on by their Greek chorus of left-wing journalists, will probably make it easier for Trump to get re-elected. The more white voters become alienated from the Democrats, the more extreme the Democrats become, and the media are so out of touch with voters in places like Iowa that Democrats are caught in a sort of feedback loop of extremism.

  • The left-wing crackup:

    The constituent elements of the American left have radicalized and they are tearing the Democratic Party apart. Meanwhile Donald Trump has delivered on a growing economy, deregulation, strong borders, the rule of law, and he is apparently going to leave the cows and their diapers for later.

    The radicalized Democrats are now running as socialists. In the middle of a growing economy they are casting their lot with Venezuela. They expect to win in 2020. Call it the left-wing crack-up.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Is Corbynism coming to America?

    Less than four years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was an obscure backbencher in the British Parliament. In his 30 years as a member of the Labour Party, his greatest legislative accomplishment was paradoxically the lack of any: From 1997 to 2010, when Labour was last in government, Corbyn was the MP who voted against his own party more than any other. Despite his perpetual insubordinations, successive Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown declined to expel Corbyn from their party. “There was no threat,” a deputy Labour chief whip told the Financial Times about Corbyn and his small band of hard-left rebels in 2016. “These people were tolerated because no one had ever heard of them.”

    Today, everyone in British politics has heard of Jeremy Corbyn, who, as leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition, has utterly transformed the Labour Party. Once a broad-based movement that could command large parliamentary majorities, today it is a sectarian personality cult, offering meager resistance to a shambolic Conservative government. Once the party whose leaders created NATO and stood stalwart against the threat of international communism, today Labour is led by people who sing the praises of anti-Western despots and terrorists. And once the natural political home of British Jewry, Labour today is mired in an anti-Semitic morass, to the point where 40 percent of Jews say they would “seriously consider” leaving the country were Corbyn to become prime minister. Indeed, Labour has become so toxic that, last month, nine MPs quit the party, calling it “sickeningly, institutionally racist,” “a threat to national security” and “a danger to the cohesion of our society, the safety of our citizens, and the health of our democracy.”

    How Labour reached this deplorable condition is one that should seriously concern liberals in the United States, where a similar dynamic is playing out in the Democratic Party. An insurgent progressivism favorably disposed to socialism, hostile to Jews and openly admiring of Jeremy Corbyn and all that he represents is steadily making inroads against an aging, centrist Democratic establishment. Here, a constellation of elected officials, media personalities, and activists are mimicking the tactics of their ideological comrades in Britain to take over and transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle for their extreme agenda.

  • Related: Jexodus.
  • “Migrants Use Almost Twice The Welfare Benefits As Native-Born Americans.”

    According to a report by Breitbart, in recently released research by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), analysts discovered that about 63 percent of non-citizen households, those who live legally and illegally in the U.S., use some form of public welfare while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare.

  • “Five adults arrested at compound in Taos County indicted on terrorism charges.”
  • “Twice-Deported Illegal Alien Charged With Raping 12-Year-Old Girl.”
  • Illegal alien arrested for murder of 59-year old woman. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said agents tried to deport Carranza nine times before, but their detainer requests were not honored in Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties, both so-called ‘sanctuary cities.’ In every occasion, local authorities declined to cooperate with a federal request to hold Carranza in jail due to his immigration status — as is often the policy with “sanctuary cities” and counties — and he was released back on the street.”
  • “At a 10-year high, wage growth for American workers likely to keep accelerating.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Meanwhile, some manufacturers can’t fill open jobs. (Hat tip: TPPF’s Cannon.)
  • Never Trump Bulwark writer attempts to take down Victor Davis Hanson. The attempt goes very, very badly for him.

    [Gabriel] Schoenfeld only fuels the popular perception of The Bulwark Never Trumpers as an angry, coastal elite who are anguished that their warnings about Trump were ignored by both hoi polloi and their conservative “grifters and trolls.” In careerist fury, he now damns others for his own self-immolation — as if the country must suffer for the sins of not listening to his own genius, which would probably have given the country a 16-year Obama-Clinton regnum.

    That Never Trumpers at The Bulwark were wrong about the Trump nomination, the general election, and the first two years of the Trump administration seems only to have fueled their spitefulness. If Schoenfeld is representative of this rump movement, then they are engaging in projection.

    Read the whole thing for a detailed, comprehensive takedown.

  • Another big money Democratic donor caught up in the college admissions scandal.
  • The CDC’s “gun violence” numbers are useless, says that well-known pro-gun outlet, 538.
  • How China is screwing Vietnam out of energy opportunities.
  • Another week, another UK Muslim rape gang.
  • SPLC founder Morris Dees fired, though evidently for sexual harassment rather than smearing innocent conservatives.
  • “California Veterans Home Threatens to Eject 84-Year-Old Widow for Bible Study Group.”
  • Some of the power has been restored, but Venezuela’s water runs black.
  • Venezuela’s premier university destroyed by socialism. A sad photo essay. (Hat tip: Wretchardthecat on Twitter.)
  • Related tweet:

  • “Son defends parents caught in college admissions scandal while smoking blunt.” Can’t imagine why such a fine specimen of academic scholarship would need a leg up in their college admissions. (Had tip: IowaHawk via Andrew Wimsatt.)
  • “Media Matters President Wrote Blog Posts About ‘Japs,’ ‘Jewry’ And ‘Trannies.’” Political correctness for thee, but not for me. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Democratic Governor of overtaxed New Jersey wants to hike taxes even more.
  • What if Ayn Rand was right?
  • “The Army’s Next-Generation Combat Helmet Has Arrived.”
  • “To Avoid Confusing Words, Ilhan Omar Will Now Respond To All Questions With ‘I Am Groot.'”
  • You know, Hayek’s Nobel Prize would look good on my mantle.
  • Random tweet:

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Military, Welfare State | 1 Comment »

    Seven Labour MPs Split Over Corbyn, Antisemitism

    Tuesday, February 19th, 2019

    Significant news from across the pond:

    Seven MPs have resigned from the Labour Party in protest at Jeremy Corbyn’s approach to Brexit and anti-Semitism.

    They are: Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Angela Smith, Mike Gapes, Gavin Shuker and Ann Coffey.

    Ms Berger said Labour had become institutionally anti-Semitic and she was “embarrassed and ashamed” to stay.

    More from NRO:

    The seven defectors have named themselves the “Independent Group,” and they hope more MPs will join them. Time will tell.

    “I cannot remain in a party that I have today come to the sickening conclusion is institutionally anti-Semitic,” said Luciana Berger, who has endured sustained anti-Semitic attacks and accordingly had a bodyguard at the party’s annual conference last year. Chris Leslie added, “We did everything we could to save it, but it has now been hijacked by the machine politics of the hard Left.”

    Snip.

    Since April, the Labour party has received 673 official complaints, according to its National Executive Committee, of anti-Semitism and has suspended 96 individuals. Much of this is visible at the grassroots level, for instance, in the movement Momentum (Jeremy Corbyn’s unofficial fan club), which was described last year by a Labour backbencher as “a party within a party” full of “Trots, Stalinists, Communists, and assorted hard-left” activists for whom “anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is fundamental to their politics and their values.”

    Since becoming leader, Corbyn has been personally implicated in a number of anti-Semitic scandals. Britain’s former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, compared Corbyn’s derogatory remarks about “Zionists” to Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. A survey conducted by the Jewish Chronicle found that 40 percent of British Jews say they would consider leaving the United Kingdom if Corbyn were to become prime minister.

    This schism has been building for a while. Way back under Tony Blair, the Labour Party decided there simply weren’t enough votes to be had among native Britons, Scots and Welsh to keep them in power, and undertook a deliberate strategy to open the floodgates of immigration to produce an electorate more to their liking. This included a number of unassimilated Muslims. As a result of this, and the general hatred of Israel by leftwing parties in Europe, the Labour Party now has significant institutional antisemitism, because significant portions of their unassimilated constituents are antisemitic.

    NRO also notes that Corbyn’s Euroskepticism, and thus his opposition to the “second referendum” scheme to derail Brexit, also had a role in the split, as did Corbyn’s unpopularity among MPs (as opposed to Labour voters). As John Gray wrote just after the Brexit vote:

    Leading Labour figures have denied adamantly that the party’s stance on immigration is central to the collapse of its working-class base. It was a complex of issues to do with de-industrialisation, they repeat, that led to mass desertion by Labour voters. There is some force in this, but it is essentially a way of evading an inconvenient truth.

    Free movement of labour between countries with vastly different wage levels, working conditions and welfare benefits is a systemic threat to the job opportunities and living standards of Labour’s core supporters. Labour cannot admit this, because that would mean the EU is structured to make social democracy impossible.

    Labour still hasn’t come to terms with the fact that it’s Europhilic, anti-Brexit leadership is diametrically opposed to the interests of its (pro-Brexit, anti-immigration) traditional working class base. The question is how many more schisms have to occur before it comes to grips with that fact.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy | 1 Comment »

    LinkSwarm for February 15, 2019

    Friday, February 15th, 2019

    There’s a much criticized spending bill with a lot of poison pill provisions and a tiny bit of border wall funding President Trump is expected to sign, and then declare a national emergency to get the wall built.

    While that’s up in the air, enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • Democrats don’t want to detain or deport violent felons. If that’s the hill they want to die on, bring on the shutdown. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “National Border Patrol Council president Brandon Judd told Breitbart News Tonight on Wednesday that Congress had ignored the advice of experts when reaching a deal to provide less than $1.4 billion for border fencing.”
  • The ludicrous nature of the Democrats’ “Green New Deal” continues to haunt them, leading to a lot of walking back economically insane socialist goals. NPR has the original text of the proposal.
  • Jonah Goldberg on the subject:

    These people think that they can adequately plan and run — for all time — an economic system from Washington that would guarantee: “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States” as well as “access to nature.”

    But they can’t even plan the roll out of a non-binding resolution and some press-release materials? And, when confronted by their own words, their immediate response was to accuse their enemies of sabotaging them? Gosh, by all means, let’s give them control of the entire economy. That couldn’t work out badly. I mean “Mistakes happen when doing time launches like this coordinating multiple groups and collaborators,” when uploading FAQs, not when doing anything as simple as commandeering the bulk of the U.S. economy.

  • Republicans pull the dirtiest trick on Democrats ever: forcing them to vote on the Green New Deal lunacy they just endorsed. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Bill Barr confirmed as Attorney General.
  • Amazon cancels it’s New York City HQ2 expansion plans. Government shouldn’t be throwing subsidies at targeted corporations (nor picking winners and losers). The decision is also rich, zesty schadenfreude for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez screwing over New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who both pushed hard for the Amazon deal.
  • This story should be absolutely infuriating to everyone on all sides of the political spectrum: rather than preserving or processing DNA rape kits, Oklahoma destroyed them.
  • How do Democrats expect to get socialism to work nationwide when they can’t even get it to work at one Panera Bread location?
  • Twitter bias is real. “Of 22 prominent, politically active individuals who are known to have been suspended since 2005 and who expressed a preference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, 21 supported Donald Trump.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Democrats cause climate change. The science is settled!
  • Those pesky peasants are threatening the EU by daring to vote for parties of which the EU elite disapproved.
  • Brexit update:

  • “Migrants” banned from Finnish schools and daycare centers because of all the rapes.
  • Here’s a phising scam that targets not only credit unions, but the credit union officers in charge of enforcing anti-money laundering laws.
  • Pro-tip: If you’re a phone scammer, try not to target the former head of the FBI and the CIA.
  • Meanwhile in Australia: “$500 per family for a single day’s electricity. There’s your Green New Deal.”
  • Germany and Japan are teaming up to oppose American foreign policy. I’ve seen this movie before, and I don’t think they’ll like how it ends…
  • Islamic State executioner enjoys death by tank. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • More semi-informed speculation than insider knowledge: “The Notorious RBG…is not dead. But she probably soon will be.” (Hat tip: Doug Ross on Twitter.)
  • New frontiers in unconstitutional legislation: “The Los Angeles City Council voted yesterday to require companies who want to contract with the city to disclose their relationships with the National Rifle Association.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Disgraced former Democratic state senator Carlos Uresti sentenced to five years for bribery. Unfortunately it will run concurrently with his fraud conviction, and therefore result in no additional time in prison. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Don’t mess with Texas, Part 8,192. Doesn’t say whether the attackers were illegal aliens or not. (Hat tip: HeidiL_RN.)
  • There’s low, and there’s “constable stealing Hurricane Harvey donations” low.
  • Tesla’s Buffalo Gigafactory workers are not happy campers.
  • Jussie Smollett’s hate crime allegations fall apart.
  • New Jersey hates high school football.
  • I don’t keep up with celebrity culture at all, but this is freaking hilarious. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse, who provides context for celebrity-challenged.)
  • “Millennials Have Discovered ‘Going Out’ Sucks.” And they only discovered this after cities pushed densification policies to hurd them all downtown where the clubs and bars are… (Hat tip: Millennial Conservative.)

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    Europe’s Dysfunctional Defense Dilemma

    Saturday, February 2nd, 2019

    Warfare is an endemic part of the human condition, but for at least two millennia, Europeans were the defining practitioners of it. From Alexander the Great and the Roman legions up through the Napoleonic Wars and the Blitzkrieg, Europe was at the forefront of finding new, innovative ways of killing people on a massive scale.

    Now the continent that defined warfare can’t figure out how to defend itself. Or, more accurately, they know how to do it but are singularly unwilling to spend the necessary money. For decades, Europe has let the United States do the heavy lifting on defense spending, with most nations falling below the 2% of GDP funding level called called for by NATO. (Only the United States, the UK, Greece, Estonia and Latvia met that threshold last year, with Poland and Lithuania just barely missing it.) It seems that stagnant economies and cradle-to-grave welfare states make adequate defense spending democratically unpopular in most of the EU.

    Many U.S. administrations have grumbled abut this. Only President Donald Trump grumbled about it loudly enough to make progress on the issue:

    NATO states have agreed to increase their defense spending by $100 billion over two years after President Trump went on a fiery tirade last July – calling on “delinquent” countries to boost their contributions by 2% to 4% of GDP. According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance heard Trump’s call “loud and clear” and that member nations are “stepping up,” according to the Telegraph.

    Right now these are only promises; it remains to be seen if the various European nations will carry-through.

    Weirdly, at the same time Trump was pushing for adequate funding for NATO, France and Germany were signing a treaty proclaiming that they were the same country, at least as far as foreign and defense policy were concerned:

    Europe’s most powerful personages on Tuesday signed a treaty for the “unification,” of Western Europe’s biggest countries. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel inked the deal at Aachen/Aix la Chapelle. It was there in the chapel that Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer had knelt at Holy Mass to celebrate the signing of the 1963 Franco-German treaty of cooperation that sealed their peoples’ vow of friendship and cooperation. In the ensuing half century, it produced just that. France and Germany became the core of the Common Market and then of the European Union.

    Today’s treaty, its pretensions notwithstanding, is between regimes that are overwhelmingly occupied trying, with decreasing success, to fend off domestic challenges to their legitimacy. The treaty is a desperate attempt by France and Germany to change the subject from their internal struggles. Nevertheless, the treaty cannot but have major and deleterious effects on intra-European relations as well as on relations between Europe and the United States.

    In 1963, de Gaulle and Adenauer had hoped for even greater coordination in foreign and defense policy as well but, under U.S. diplomatic pressure, the German Bundestag added a clause to the treaty’s ratification that privileged the Federal Republic’s defense relationship with America. By contrast, the 2019 treaty’s main thrust is to sever that clause. The two countries will act “as a single unit with regard to relations with third countries.”

    Lest there be any doubt, the final sentence reads: “The admission of the Federal Republic of Germany as a permanent member of of the United Nations Security Council [where it would share France’s seat] is a priority of Franco-German diplomacy.”

    For other European countries, and for the United States, Macron and Merkel’s real domestic worries matter far less than the fact that, henceforth, the European core’s main weight will be wielded in unison.

    Rules notwithstanding, the EU never was a club of equals. As the years passed, and especially after the advent of the Euro and the European Central Bank, Germany became primus inter pares, and then more to the point, other states learned that Berlin was the place to ask for EU favors, and Germans the folks to blame for not getting them. Henceforth, with Berlin and Paris jointly at the helm, other countries will wonder whether asking or blaming will be of any use. The EU will do whatever the two will dictate to Brussels from their joint councils of ministers.

    Snip.

    In sum, the new Franco-German core is sure further to erode the EU, NATO, and the United Nations. But even as the French and German alliance is poised to disrupt so many international institutions, it is soft inside because it arises from both regimes’ alienation from their own peoples.

    Neither has France’s Macron found, nor is he likely to find, a way of appeasing the anger that the French people, via the “yellow vest” movement, have demonstrated for the way they have been governed for a half century; nor have Merkel and her allies on the traditional Left and Right been able to stanch the hemorrhaging of their electoral support, for reasons that differ little from those that motivate France’s yellow vests. France’s 1958 Fifth Republic constitution and Germany’s 1949 Grundgesetz largely insulate the respective governments from immediate popular pressure. But these governments’ alienation from their citizens is substantive and cultural. It is not such as can be healed by time—or by treaties.

    Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, and the people then in leadership positions in their countries were in basic sympathy with their peoples’ civilization. They wanted to keep France French and Germany German. As Catholics, the notion of enforcing the religion of “global warming” would have been repugnant to them, as would any of the current, ever-changing dictates of “political correctness.” They did not imagine themselves regulators of energy usage or of the details of life. As nationalists, they rejected the notion of supranational institutions beyond the peoples’ electoral control.

    In all these regards, Merkel and Macron, and their recent predecessors, have abandoned their peoples. The abandonment is mutual. Consequently, their regimes are rotting. On January 22 they took another step that transfers this rot to the international institutions of which their countries are part.

    France has long pushed for a “European” military structure apart from NATO, and now it may (theoretically) have the political framework to actually carry it out.

    (But wait, you ask: What about that “European Defence Union?” Indeed, that does exist, in the form of the Common Security and Defence Policy under the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, bringing with it a host of other organizations and acronyms dwelling between national military command hierarchies and the EU’s luxuriant tangle of bureaucracy. Never doubt, citizen, that many connected Europeans are being paid extremely well to man the bureaucratic barricades of the CSDP…)

    The irony, however, is that after more than a century of being on the losing end of Germany military might, France’s new military best buddy now sucks at war:

    The biggest problem that Bundeswehr soldiers complained about was the lack of equipment, despite repeated government promises, dating back to a 2014 NATO summit, of a change in direction. That does not count as a surprising development, considering the barrage of poor press the German military has been facing.

    Heavy machinery was a particular concern: [Hans-Peter] Bartels found that often less than 50 percent of the Bundeswehr’s tanks, ships and aircraft were available at any one time, either for training or operational purposes.

    “Spare parts are still missing; maintenance in industry is dragging; the training programs are suffering,” Social Democrat Bartels said. “An absolute must is the acceleration of procurement.” (…)

    Another worry for the Defense Ministry is the stagnation of its post-conscription recruitment drive, which began after Germany scrapped national service in 2011. Though the Bundeswehr is expanding overall (the report found a net gain of 4,000 professional soldiers), most of these were won by extending existing contracts. In other words, the German military is aging.

    (Previously.)

    The further irony is that, while Merkel and Macron signed the treaty, it may very well be National Front leader Marine Le Pen and Alternative for Germany’s leaders like Alice Weidel who inherit it.

    In a parallel development, President Trump has informed Moscow that the United States is pulling out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. American deployment of nuclear-capable Pershing missiles in Europe were, along with SDI, key elements in forcing the Soviet Union to the bargaining table in the 1980s, but Russia has been cheating on it, and the treaty outlived its usefulness.

    Speaking of outliving its usefulness, America’s political establishment seems desperate to avoid debating whether NATO itself has outlived its usefulness. The old adage “Keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down” no longer seems to apply. Russia still has ample nuclear weapons and a formidable conventional force, but it’s not nearly as strong as it was before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While Vladimir Putin shows every sign of being willing to to bite more chunks off Ukraine (and I wouldn’t put trying to reconquer the Baltic countries past him), they can’t afford to deploy their next generation weapons in sufficient numbers, their navy is in a world of hurt, and their adventurism in Syria is looking more and more like costly overreach.

    This piece in National Review argues that (among other things):

    The irony is that the Trump administration actually has a success story to tell about its policies toward NATO and Russia, particularly in Europe. Under this administration, the U.S. has provided lethal aid to Ukraine to fight off Russian-backed insurgents. It has made no concessions to Moscow regarding that conflict. It has increased sanctions against Russia and boosted America’s military presence in Eastern Europe.

    All that is mostly true, except for the tiny, inconvenient facts that the “Russian-backed insurgents” include significant components of the Russian army and that all these efforts have been singularly ineffective at actually expelling Russian forces from Ukraine. This is not exactly a textbook definition of “success.”

    I’m willing to be persuaded that NATO is still a vital alliance, but the arguments I’ve seen thus far are not doing it. And letting Turkey remain a member while its Islamist government remains at cross-purposes to NATO’s stated goals is counterproductive.

    With a few exceptions, Europe’s transnational elites will continue to skimp on defense in order to continue feeding the maw of their failing welfare states as long as the United States lets them. And despite some moderate successes by the Trump Administration, I don’t see that dysfunctional dynamic changing as long as those same functionaries remain in charge.

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    No Deal Brexit?

    Thursday, January 31st, 2019

    In a turn of events that looked impossible, the UK may be headed for a no deal Brexit:

    In the latest thrilling parliamentary episode of Brexit, the hopes and expectations of, among other Remainers, House of Commons speaker John Bercow were largely disappointed, and the hopes of Brexiteers began to rise again. That was not supposed to happen.

    Before the actual votes on seven amendments to a government motion supporting Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union, it was generally expected that some would pass and either delay the date of Brexit, or transfer control of parliamentary business from cabinet ministers to a coalition of Remainers, or allow MPs to choose among several alternative versions of Brexit. All of these were departures from usual parliamentary conventions — which Bercow had approved, contrary to both precedent and his duty of impartiality — and almost all represented a reversal of what a vast majority of MPs had voted for a year ago. Most significantly, however, they would all have had the intended effect of delaying Brexit indefinitely and likely canceling it altogether.

    That was expected because it has become conventional wisdom that a House of Commons with a Remainer majority would inevitably vote only for a Brexit tolerable to the Remainers and thus disappointing to Leavers. It very much didn’t turn out that way. Of the seven amendments, the five most hostile ones were defeated, all by healthy majorities. The two amendments that did pass were (1) the Brady amendment, which the government had accepted as a way of keeping May’s plan alive, and (2) a non-binding amendment calling for the government not to pursue a No Deal Brexit but not providing any means to prevent it.

    The latter is an example of a rule I’ve just discovered: “Votes that matter matter more than votes that don’t matter.” It’s been very easy for Remainer MPs to posture as principled opponents of Brexit when only other MPs were paying attention and Remainer cabinet ministers were quietly cheering them on. Remain seemed to be gaining ground, and its parliamentary advocates were almost blasé about reversing the referendum result. But the high-octane Brexit debate in the media and the campaign by Remainers to erect clever parliamentary obstacles to its realization meant that more and more voters were paying attention. One effect has been that public support for a No Deal Brexit — in which the U.K. would trade with the EU on World Trade Organization terms, rather than through a separate trade deal — has been rising since Christmas. In two successive BBC Question Time programs, the audience cheered when a lonely Leaver on the five-person panel demanded a simple No Deal departure. And both ministers and whips began to fear that a defeat would weaken the government on more than Brexit.

    Under this combined public and party pressure, the rebels shrank in numbers and the government survived.

    The practical effect of the Brady amendment was a modest one: to unite the Tories around a policy of sending May back to Brussels to ask for a time limit on the so-called Northern Ireland backstop (which would keep the U.K. in the EU customs union in order to avoid a hard border in Ireland). She herself is time-limited; she has two weeks to get this concession. Already the grand EU panjandrums have issued statements saying it’s out of the question. Very likely they are determined to hold that line. If so, May will come back either empty-handed or with some agreeable form of words — “ideally we would like the backstop to be temporary” — that she would try to sell to her party.

    Remainers are painting all sorts of unlikely nightmare scenarios, from the specter of a “no-food Brexit” (because farmers and food companies hate selling food to willing customers, customs union or no customs union) or NHS being unable to buy drugs (because drug companies are notably unwilling to sell their product).

    Oh, and Brussels wants the exit money May foolishly agreed to, even if Parliament rejects the deal. People in Hell want icewater, too…

    Some related tweets. On the contempt the UK’s political class shows to voters:

    Nigel Farage:

    A Remainer who would now vote Leave:

    Pat Condell:

    And don’t forget the onions:

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    Jonathan Pie on Why May’s Brexit Deal Was So Horrible

    Saturday, January 19th, 2019

    Missed this in December, but everyone’s favorite fake UK reporter does a fine job concisely and succinctly explaining why PM Theresa May’s Brexit agreement was such a horrible deal for anyone who voted Leave:

    A hard, no-deal Brexit is infinitely preferable to the dog’s Brexit May cooked up.

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    Brexit Update: May Survives Again

    Wednesday, January 16th, 2019

    UK Prime Minister Theresa May survives a no-confidence vote 325-306.

    To quote Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review:

    there are two crises at work. The first is a crisis of responsibility in Parliament. Theresa May’s deal may not be what hard Brexiteers wanted. But they have neither the votes nor the courage to oust May and expose their own Brexit to parliamentary and public criticism. And they certainly don’t have the votes in Parliament to pass their preferred terms. By shooting down a deal that has been negotiated with over two dozen other European heads of state, with the clock ticking down, their rejection of their party leader’s deal makes the possibility of crashing out of the EU without a deal at the end of March more likely, or it will provoke the rest of Parliament to delay or cancel Brexit altogether, possibly inflicting yet another national referendum on the issue.

    The second crisis underlies the first. In the U.K. system, Parliament is supposed to be sovereign. But Brexit was won by national referendum, against the tide of media and parliamentary consensus. That result seemed to give the cause of Brexit a superior form of popular legitimacy. And yet many Tory and Labour MPs, despite running on election manifestos committing themselves to delivering Brexit, are against the project altogether. They hope to show that Brexit is harmful, or “impossible” in some way, thinking that the passage of time will increase an ascendant majority for Remain.

    Snip.

    Parliament may discover that it has no working political majority willing to stand behind any Brexit. Northern Irish ministers don’t want Northern Ireland to be treated differently and may be willing to tolerate the U.K. remaining in the customs union. English Brexiteers despair of being in a customs union if the U.K. loses its ability to shape the rules, thinking it vassalage. The Labour party is led by a not-so-secret Red Brexiteer, Jeremy Corbyn. The overwhelming political lagoon forces Labour to reject every May-negotiated Brexit as ruinous, trying to please their Remain and Leave constituencies at the same time.

    An unprecedented opportunity to reshape the laws and regulations governing the U.K. economy is being squandered. Right now, a solution to these twin crises is not within sight. Parliament has voted for its confidence in May’s leadership and demonstrated that it has none. Pretend confidence. Pretend governance. But there is no way to keep pretending. The U.K. must Leave or Remain, and it is up to Parliament to decide when and how.

    In other Brexit news, EU chief says May should cancel Brexit. Because of course he did.

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    Parliament Rejects May’s Dog’s Brexit

    Wednesday, January 16th, 2019

    UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s “let’s give the EU everything they want” abomination of a Brexit bill went down in flames:

    The only meaningful unity that the United Kingdom has seen in the past two years has been opposition to the Brexit deal Prime Minister Theresa May negotiated with the European Union. That agreement, as predicted, suffered a crushing blow in the House of Commons today, voted down by a 432-to-202 margin in what was instantly the worst parliamentary defeat in history.

    The defeat, as predicted, has prompted Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to propose a vote, expected to be held on Wednesday, of no confidence in the government. When future historians consider Brexit, they will surely marvel at May’s obstinate capacity for survival in the face of unending political humiliation. Though her authority is all but nil at this point, if she hangs on tomorrow, her leadership will be further cemented. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, though it still doesn’t bring me Brexit . . .

    The no confidence vote is expected around 7 PM UK time.

    Going from the absolute majority May inherited from David Cameron to handing the keys to power to loony leftist Corbyn would be an epic own-goal on May’s part. But Labour are themselves conflicted about how to proceed next.

    And the March 29 Brexit deadline looms…

    (Not entirely useless breakdown on May’s rejected Brexit bill here.)

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    Yellow Vest Protests Spread

    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…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Welfare State | No Comments »

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