Muslim rioting in the Netherlands

Sundance at The Last Refuge has coverage of Saturday's political violence in Rotterdam.

Muslims rioted in the streets, after Holland refused to allow the Turkish foreign minister’s aircraft, sparking a furious reaction by Turkish president Recep Erdogan and escalating a diplomatic dispute between the two NATO allies.

The primary concern of the Dutch was the Islamic Turks inability to assemble without violence in Rotterdam. Throughout the day tensions grew until finally a full-blown Islamist riot began and the Dutch government were forced to respond with riot police.

The Dutch elections are this Wednesday.Gert Wilders may win. Here is what he has to say to Turkey.

Insights into Trump and Obama from the Afghanistan Ambassador to the United States

Benny Johnson of IJR writes,

Afghan Ambassador to the United States, Dr. Hamdullah Mohib. Friday night, Mohib hosted a dinner at his residence for Gold Star wives, the wives of American soldiers who gave their lives fighting in his home country. This reporter was invited to attend and report on the events of the evening. The ambassador graciously received approximately one dozen Gold Star wives and members of the military community at his residence.

Iraq, Afghanistan, and subsequently Syria, sunk further and further into chaos during the Obama years. The Obama administration announced highly controversial military pull-out dates in the region, which begat a skyrocketing of terrorist attacks in both the Iraq and Afghanistan. Ultimately, Iraq and Syria were plunged into a barbaric war with ISIS forces, which gained control of vast swaths of the region under Obama's watch. Afghanistan experienced a sharp, bloody uptick in terrorist attacks by Taliban forces and an economic upheaval during the later Obama years.

...The Obama administration was hesitant with us. The enemy could sense that. When the Obama administration announced its plans to pull troops out of the region, they announced the exact date they would do it. All our enemies had to do was wait [Obama] out. They knew the date they had to hang on until — which gave them the will to fight. They used that time to recruit and build up resources.

...we were pleasantly surprised at how much time President Trump spent asking very informed questions. The first time the presidents spoke, the questions Trump asked impressed us. “How can you win in this fight [against terrorism]?” he asked. “What do you need to become financially independent?” and “How can American business invest in Afghanistan? How can we develop businesses and mining in your country?”

Trump would listen intently after each question, often asking follow-ups. Trump's second call with our president was even longer than the first. Asking these types of questions for our country is something the Obama administration never did. The Obama administration was the most academic administration we have ever had to deal with but the Trump administration has been the most thoughtful and intelligent.

Trump continually asked “How can you win? What does Afghanistan need to win?” in reference to our fight with terrorism. Trump wants to win. Sincerely. All the Obama administration wanted to do was not lose.

Read more here.

An address by Victor Davis Hanson just after the election

If anything, Trump is too authentic, too transparent! He is the anti-Nixon!

Obama was the most divisive president in memory!

Victor Davis Hanson is as impressive in person as he is in writing his books and essays!

Replacing 46 political appointees at Justice? Exactly what Trump and Sessions should have done!

Andrew McCarthy writes,

...Resources are finite. Administrations must choose how many assets to dedicate to counterterrorism, immigration enforcement, health-care fraud, organized crime, and so on. Should the feds focus on the importation of illegal narcotics and their distribution by interstate criminal syndicates? Or should prosecutors and agents team up with state agencies to tackle street-level trafficking? Are the civil-rights laws an enforcement measure to protect fundamental liberties? Or are they a social-justice tool for transforming nationwide policing practices?

U.S. attorneys are the instruments through which the president exercises his policy discretion. That is why they are political appointees. They do not have power of their own. Under our Constitution, all executive power is reposed in the president alone. Every officer of the executive branch is thus a delegate. The U.S. attorney exercises the president’s power and can be removed at the president’s will.

Nowadays, there is unprecedented policy consequence in the execution of federal law enforcement, as much in the civil as in the criminal arena. It matters more than ever that the president has his appointees, who are chosen because they support his policy preferences. If Donald Trump has determined that the immigration laws must be enforced, and has won an election with that as a signature issue, why would he retain the U.S. attorneys Barack Obama appointed — prosecutors plainly sympathetic to Obama’s non-enforcement policies?

Why would he keep in place Obama’s Justice Department appointees when the first notable action taken by the one of highest rank, acting attorney general Sally Yates, was the insubordinate refusal to defend a lawfully issued executive order endorsed by Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel?

But when Clinton purged his 93 in ’93, that altered expectations forever.

...After taking office as attorney general in 2009, Eric Holder explained that the newly elected Barack Obama would soon announce “our first batch of U.S. attorneys” to supplant Bush incumbents. Elaborating, he matter-of-factly said, “Elections matter. It is our intention to have the U.S. attorneys that are selected by President Obama in place as quickly as [we] can.” The Bush appointees were replaced — not because they did a bad job but because that is what presidents do. They have their own enforcement priorities, and they have every right — subject to the Senate’s advice and consent — to have their own U.S. attorneys executing those priorities. That is exactly what President Trump has done. It is also exactly what he should have done.

Read more here.

Sanctuary cities roulette

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

There are an estimated 300 or so jurisdictions -- entire states, counties, cities, and municipalities -- that since the early 1980s have enacted “sanctuary city” laws, forbidding full enforcement of federal immigration law within their jurisdictions.

...The liberal Migration Policy Institute conceded that there are over 800,000 illegal aliens with criminal records, nearly 700,000 of them with felony arrest records.

Those numbers, of course, reflect only those who have been arrested and faced trial, not the unknown number who have committed crimes without being apprehended or charged. In some sanctuary cities, lawlessness among undocumented immigrants has reached epidemic proportions.

Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute found that two-thirds of all outstanding felony warrants in the city of Los Angeles involved illegal aliens -- as well as 95% of outstanding murder warrants.

Sanctuary cities are on record as having released over 10,000 known criminal aliens into the general population whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were attempting to deport. In addition, hundreds of thousands of criminals are currently protected from deportation as they await trials and sentences. Among them, most infamously, is Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a seven-time convicted felon and five-time deported illegal alien who was not turned over to ICE by the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department that held him in custody on a drug charge. He was instead released just weeks before he murdered Kate Steinle.



The apparent principle of sanctuary cities is akin to roulette. The odds suggest that most illegal aliens detained by officials are not career felons and thus supposedly need not be turned over to ICE for deportation. On the chance that some of their 10,000 released criminals will go on to commit further crimes in the manner of Juan Lopez-Sanchez, officials then shrug that the public outcry will be episodic and quickly die down, or will at least not pose political problems as great as would come from deporting aliens.

Read more here.

"He owes no one anything!"

Kellyanne Conway at her rapid-fire best! "People are still clinging to power, to status, to money." "I'm there to serve the President, who is there to serve the American people! I'm not there to read about myself!" To be recognized as a feminist, you have to be pro-abortion and anti-male!"

"He is a very family friendly, very pro-woman boss to have!"

And the Oscar goes to...a terrorist group!

"You are president of the Syrian Republic. At the same time you are a loving husband and the father of three. How do you balance those responsibilities?"

Assad: "If you cannot succeed in your small duties, you cannot succeed in your larger duties"

Interviewer: "Have you ever thought of leaving your country for the sake of your family?"

"Never! Whenever you have any kind of reluctance, you will lose. You will lose not with your enemies; you will lose with your supporters!"

At The Last RefugeAssad, Sundance emphasizes these points:

CNN has intentionally broadcast a filtered version of this interview focusing on the “foreign invaders” perspective. However, pay close attention to the 06:15 point of the video above where Assad discusses President Trump and his policy, and how Assad (correctly) views Turkey as facilitating ISIS.

“We have hopes that this administration in the United States is going to implement what we have heard, taking into consideration that talking about ISIS doesn’t mean talking about the whole terrorism; ISIS is one of the products, al-Nusra is one of the products, you have so many groups in Syria but they are not ISIS – but they are al-Qaeda. They have the same background of the Wahhabi extremist ideology”. [ie. The Muslim Brotherhood]

Asked about cooperation with President Trump specifically, President Assad expands:

“In theory, yes. But practically not yet. Because there is no link between Syria and the United States on a formal level. Even their raids against ISIS which I have just mentioned, which are only a few raids, have been without the cooperation or consultation with the Syrian Army, or the Syrian government – which is illegal as we always say. So theoretically we share those goals, but practically – not yet.”

Do you have personal contact with the United States, direct or indirect:

“No. Not at all. Indirect we have so many channels but you cannot bet on private channels. It should be formal, that way we can talk about direct discussion with another government.”

How about tonight's moon?

Three hens pretend to be tightrope walking on a juniper log, but their rooster keeps a close watch.

So, what has become of RussiaGate?

John Nolte writes at The Daily Wire,

...the media has not only found less than nothing, what has been found is a Team Trump behaving responsibly and appropriately in their dealings with Russian officials.

Best of all, the only real scandal that appears to have been uncovered involves highly-inappropriate Obama Administration surveillance of a political rival, felonious leaks from an out-of-control intelligence community, and an extra-legal federal bureaucracy.

...in just two days, two lonely reporters and a single source had already connected the Watergate break-in to President Nixon's re-election campaign. By the time six months had passed, two Nixon officials had already been indicted, tried, and convicted!

So isn't it time to ask the following question of our Keystone Cop Media….

At what point do those few words we usually find hidden below a hysterically dishonest headline and 14 paragraphs of innuendo become The Story; at what point do those words that read "Government officials stress that there is no evidence of any wrongdoing" become The Headline…?

At what point do we demand our mainstream media put up or shut up?

I think that point has arrived.

Read more here.

Colorado House votes to end ban on switchblades and gravity knives

H. Clay Aalders reports at The Truth about Knives

Great news out of the State of Colorado. The bill to lift the ban on automatic and “gravity knives” has passed the Colorado House by a wide margin and is headed to Governor Hickenlooper.

Read more here and here.

hat tip Glenn Reynolds

Cuteness

hat tip Misanthropic Humanitarian

Climate change, Calvin Coolidge, and questions from viewers

This is a very good Mark Steyn show. In the first half, he discusses climate change as only he can. In the second half, he has a delightful conversation with Amity Shales about the Calvin Coolidge presidency. Then, Mark reads and answers questions from viewers.

"Why do they all have the same signs?"

"The fight is just starting!"

A massive new oil find in Alaska

A massive oil discovery has been made in Alaska this last week which is considered to be the largest onshore find in 30 years according to CNN Money.

CNN Money reported: “The massive find of conventional oil on state land could bring relief to budget pains in Alaska brought on by slumping production in the state and the crash in oil prices.

The new discovery was made in just the past few days in Alaska’s North Slope, which was previously viewed as an aging oil basin.

Spanish oil giant Repsol and its privately-held U.S. partner Armstrong Energy announced the find on Thursday, predicting production could begin as soon as 2021 and lead to as much as 120,000 barrels of output per day…

…All of this is a big win for Alaska, which last year had to freeze hiring and limit state employee travel due to trouble in the oil industry. Alaska, which relies on oil and gas taxes for the vast majority of its state revenue, has been hit by the one-two punch of shrinking production from its mature fields and the fact that oil prices have been cut in half in recent years.”

U.S. dependence on foreign oil is already at a 30-year low according to Forbes. A discovery of this magnitude will certainly reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil even further.

South Korea's president impeached and removed from office

So, the South Korean president has resigned. I tried to find out more about the controversy. But what news sources are reliable? Elise Hu reported at NPR in October,

The old friend of the president's, Choi Soon-sil, also runs two non-profit foundations that prosecutors say boasted of its ties with the president to collect more than $70 million in donations from the country's major conglomerates. Prosecutors opened up an investigation into the foundations in early October, and are seeking Choi, who is accused of siphoning some of those funds for personal use — including to cover equestrian training for her daughter, Chung Yoo-ra. (Choi emerged in Germany over the weekend and denies any wrongdoing.)

Much of the public anger now gripping the nation broke open over Choi's daughter in the first place. Chung, the equestrian, attended the nation's prestigious woman's college, Ewha University. Ewha's president was forced to resign this week as students protested Chung's preferential treatment and shady admission — which seemed to give her extra credit for being a champion dressage competitor. Media began looking closer at the ties between Park and Choi.

And the ties are interesting, indeed. Choi Soon-sil is the daughter of a man the president considered her mentor, Choi Tae-min. He claimed to be a pastor from a tiny pseudo-Christian sect, but a leaked diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy describes him as a 'Rasputin'-like character and his "church" is described by Korean media as more of a "Shamanistic cult." The New York Times explains further:

"Mr. Choi was the founder of an obscure sect called the Church of Eternal Life. He befriended Ms. Park, 40 years his junior, soon after her mother was assassinated in 1974. According to a report by the Korean intelligence agency from the 1970s that was published by a South Korean newsmagazine in 2007, Mr. Choi initially approached Ms. Park by telling her that her mother had appeared in his dreams, asking him to help her.

Mr. Choi was a former police officer who had also been a Buddhist monk and a convert to Roman Catholicism. (He also used seven different names and was married six times by the time he died in 1994 at the age of 82.) He became a mentor to Ms. Park, helping her run a pro-government volunteer group called Movement for a New Mind."

Read more here.

Park Geun-hye was impeached and removed from the presidency yesterday. When I did a Google search, I found that the only news report filed this year on the scandal was this one by CNN.

...The drama surrounds Park's friend and informal adviser, Choi Soon-sil, who is accused of abuse of power and attempted fraud following claims she had access to secret government documents and intervened in state affairs.

Park's relationship with Choi and her father Choi Tae-min has long been controversial in Korea.
The elder Choi first became close with Park following the death of her mother at the hands of a North Korean assassin in 1974, while Park's father, dictator Park Chung-hee, was president.

According to the Korea Times, Choi founded the Eternal Life Church in the 1970s, mixing aspects Christianity, Buddhism and indigenous Korean religion Cheondism, which incorporates elements of shamanism.

Choi named himself a modern day Buddha and called for all people to strive for eternal life.

"The family has had an extraordinary influence over Park Geun-hye for essentially her entire adult life," David Kang, a Korea expert at the University of Southern California, told CNN.

"It's much more than simply, 'oh she knows this person,' it's deeply intertwined, almost like they're Rasputin and Park Geun-hye is just a puppet."

Though she never held an official position, recent revelations showed that Choi was given advance access to presidential speeches and other documents.

Local media and opposition parties have accused Choi of abusing her relationship with the president to force companies to donate millions of dollars to foundations she runs.

Where else have we heard about presidential foundations getting pay-for-play donations?

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about Rasputin.

Back to the CNN story:

While much of the outrage has surrounded Choi's alleged influence over Korean politics, the scandal has also shone a light on the prevalence of cults and alternative religious movements in the country.
Korean shamanism, or Muism, is an ethnic Korean religion with similarities to Japanese Shintoism.

According to the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Muism "focuses on solving the problems of daily life through communication between humans and the spiritual world, with shamans acting as liaisons."

The country is also home to the Unification Church, known as the "Moonies" for founder Sun Myung Moon, famous for mass weddings and allegedly forcing members to disconnect from their families.

While Christianity and Buddhism dominate Korean religious life, some churches incorporate shamanistic practices and many people consult with fortune tellers or shamans.

Choi's movement mixed strands of all three faiths, and claimed the ability to communicate with the dead and produce objects offering magical protection, according to Korean media.

Read more here.

Trump's first fifty days

The White House has released a report on President Trump's first fifty days.

JUMPSTARTING JOB CREATION: President Donald J. Trump is looking out for the American workers who Washington has left behind.

President Trump has worked with the private sector to deliver tens of thousands of new jobs for Americans.
President Trump ordered the United States to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and negotiations.
President Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum to clear roadblocks to construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
President Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum declaring that the Dakota Access Pipeline serves the national interest and initiating the process to complete its construction.
President Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum to help ensure that new pipeline construction and repair work use materials and equipment from the United States

CUTTING GOVERNMENT RED TAPE: President Trump has quickly taken steps to get the Government out of the way of job creation.

President Trump directed each agency to establish a Regulatory Reform Task Force to identify costly and unnecessary regulations in need of modification or repeal.
President Trump has required that for every new Federal regulation, two existing regulations be eliminated.
President Trump directed the Department of Commerce to streamline Federal permitting processes for domestic manufacturing and to reduce regulatory burdens on domestic manufacturers.
President Trump signed legislation, House Joint Resolution 38, to prevent the burdensome “Stream Protection Rule” from causing further harm to the coal industry.
President Trump ordered the review of the “Clean Water Rule: Definition of Waters of the United States,” known as the WOTUS rule, to evaluate whether it is stifling economic growth or job creation.

REFORMING WASHINGTON: President Trump has taken actions to reform the old Washington way of doing business and to ensure that his entire Administration are working for the American people.

President Trump put in place a hiring freeze for Federal civilian employees to stop the further expansion of an already bloated government.
President Trump signed an Executive Order establishing new ethics commitments for all Executive branch appointees, putting in place a five-year lobbying ban and a permanent ban on lobbying for foreign governments, so that appointees serve the American people instead of their own interests.

PUTTING PATIENT HEALTHCARE FIRST: After years of false promises, rising costs, and shrinking accessibility, President Trump is championing reforms to put patients first.

President Trump has supported efforts by Republicans in Congress to repeal the worst parts of Obamacare and replace them with the American Health Care Act.
President Trump acted on his first day in office to instruct Federal agencies to minimize the burden of Obamacare on Americans.

PRIORITIZING AMERICAN NATIONAL SECURITY: President Trump has taken action to ensure the safety and security of the United States homeland, its borders, and its people.

Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of the Treasury sanctioned 25 entities and individuals involved in Iran’s ballistic missile program.
President Trump implemented new protections against foreign terrorists entering our country.
President Trump has proposed increasing the military’s budget by $54 billion so that it can begin to rebuild.
As a result of a Presidential Memorandum President Trump signed on January 28, he has received a plan to defeat ISIS designed by the Secretary of Defense and other members of his Cabinet.
President Trump ordered a review of military readiness and made it the policy of the United States to rebuild the United States’ Armed Forces.
President Trump has negotiated to bring down the price of the F-35, saving millions of dollars.

DELIVERING ON IMMIGRATION REFORM: President Trump has made enforcing the Nation’s immigration laws a priority of his Administration.

President Trump signed an Executive Order to start work on a southern border wall.
President Trump signed an Executive Order to enhance the public safety of Americans through enforcement of immigration laws.
President Trump signed an Executive Order to halt funding to jurisdictions in the United States that do not comply with Federal immigration rules.
President Trump signed an Executive Order to begin the removal of illegal immigrants who have committed certain crimes.
Following through on President Trump’s direction, the Department of Homeland Security will hire 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and agents and 5,000 border patrol agents.

RESTORING PUBLIC SAFETY TO AMERICAN COMMUNITIES: President Trump is following through on his promise to restore public safety for all Americans.

President Trump signed an Executive Order directing the Attorney General to develop a strategy to more effectively prosecute people who engage in crimes against law enforcement officers.
President Trump signed an Executive Order to establish a task force, led by the Attorney General, to reduce crime and restore public safety in communities across America.
President Trump signed an Executive Order re-focusing the Federal Government’s energy and resources on dismantling transnational criminal organizations, such as drug cartels.

HELPING WOMEN AND MINORITIES SUCCEED: President Trump knows the country cannot reach its potential unless every American has a chance to prosper.

President Trump signed an Executive Order strengthening and repositioning the Historically Black Colleges and Universities initiatives within the White House to foster better opportunities in higher education.
President Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched the United States-Canada Council for Advancement of Women Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders.
President Trump signed into law the Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act to encourage the National Science Foundation’s entrepreneurial programs to recruit and support women to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and into the commercial world.
President Trump signed into law the Inspiring the Next Space Pioneers, Innovators, Researchers, and Explorers (INSPIRE) Women Act to encourage women to study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), pursue careers in aerospace, and further advance the nation’s space science and exploration efforts.
KEEPING HIS PROMISE TO DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION: President Trump promised a U.S. Supreme Court justice in the mold of late Justice Antonin Scalia selected from his previously announced list of 20 judges

President Trump nominated Judge Neil M. Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court because of his consistent record defending the Constitution.

Ending an entitlement!

Secretary of State Tillerson is going to Asia, but has made no arrangement for American media to travel with him. They are very upset. Read more here.

You go, Jeff!

AP reports,

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is seeking the resignations of 46 United States attorneys who were appointed during the prior presidential administration.

In a statement Friday, the Justice Department said the request was similar to ones made in past presidential transitions. The department said many federal prosecutors appointed in the Obama administration have already left their positions, but that Sessions is now seeking the resignations of 46 holdovers.

Read more here.

Does this graph jibe with your own experience?

The Conservative Treehouse provides us with this graph and an intriguing discussion of main street economics vs. global economics.

"The Central Intelligence Agency lost control of its entire cyberweapons arsenal!"

JUlian Assange of Wikileaks answers questions about the catastrophic CIA loss of control of their cyberweapons arsenal.

"Historic act of devastating incompetence" "There are more than 22,000 IP addresses corresponding to CIA activities in the United states!" "Historic incompetence!" "CIA prominently involved in domestic politics!" "CIA is automating malware attacks into systems." CIA has built its own drone airforce, and aggressively expanded its hacking operations. CIA conducted an operation against the Senate Intelligence Committee! Can there be meaningful oversight? Assange does not thinks so, "although one has to try!" The technology is designed to be untraceable! The CIA is causing potentially billions of dollars of damage to companies! Many CIA hackers work out of the consulate in Frankfort, Germany. Stored their arsenal all in one place unsecured! The CIA has known for a couple of months that they had lost control of their entire cyber arsenal to Wikileaks. Did they tell Obama? Trump?

This lasts 34 minutes and 34 seconds. There is another one on You Tube that lasts 1:02:05. It is here:

A miracle drug!

Glenn Reynolds links to an article by Maggie Fox at NBC News.

Everyone hopes and wishes for that last-minute cancer breakthrough that will save doomed patients. It almost never actually happens. With Gleevec, it did.

The once-a-day pill turned chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, from a certain death sentence into a manageable disease. Now data shows it's helped 83 percent of patients live 10 years or longer, even with side-effects that include a characteristic rash, nausea and fatigue.

Read more here.

Now, it's yellow fever!

Glenn Reynolds links to an article in US News

According to the experts, yellow fever has the potential to be the fifth mosquito-borne infection to appear in the continental United States since the 1990s, following dengue, West Nile, chikungunya and the Zika virus.

Yellow fever is perhaps the most dangerous of those five, however. In one outbreak that began in the Congo in December 2015, there were 137 deaths among 961 confirmed cases, the report noted.

And in the current Brazilian outbreak, there have so far been 234 cases and 80 confirmed deaths, according to health authorities.

More ominous in the Brazilian outbreak is the fact that the illness appears to be moving from its typical rural setting towards the cities.

The disease is not a complete stranger to the United States, although scientists say the last major outbreak lies far back in history.

"The Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, for example, killed approximately 10 percent of the city's population," Fauci and Paules noted.

Luckily for Americans today, the yellow fever vaccine -- first developed in 1937 -- is effective in preventing illness. The current vaccine is thought to be 99 percent effective over a lifetime.

For those already infected, it's crucial that symptoms are spotted early.

However, "early recognition may be difficult in countries such as the United States, where most physicians have never seen a case of yellow fever," the experts pointed out. Early symptoms include a fever that can mimic flu, followed by a period of remission, and then a stage called "intoxication" -- high fever, liver dysfunction and jaundice, and even kidney failure, heart and nervous system dysfunction, and shock.

No such cases have emerged in the United States, but international travel means unvaccinated people might bring the illness back home after visiting an endemic area.

The yellow fever outbreak comes as the Zika virus continues to affect countries throughout the Americas. Both viruses are spread by the same mosquito species.

To prevent the Brazil outbreak from spreading, "early identification of cases and rapid implementation of public health management and prevention strategies, such as mosquito control and appropriate vaccination, are critical," Fauci and Paules concluded.

"International Women’s Day should be a day to raise our voices on behalf of women with no recourse to protect their rights."

At The Daily Beast, Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes,

...International Women’s Day should be a day to raise our voices on behalf of women with no recourse to protect their rights. Yet I doubt Wednesday’s protesters will wave placards condemning the religious and cultural framework for women’s oppression under Sharia law. As a moral and legal code, Sharia law is demeaning and degrading to women. It requires women to be placed under the care of male guardians; it views a woman’s testimony in court as worth half that of a man’s; and it permits a husband to beat his wife. It’s not only women’s legal and sexual freedoms that are curtailed under Sharia but their economic freedoms as well. Women generally inherit half of the amount that men inherit, and their male guardian must consent to their choosing education, work, or travel.

In Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and parts of Nigeria, where Sharia law underpins the judicial system, women’s rights suffer greatly.

There is a growing trend among some feminists to make excuses for Sharia law and claim it is nothing more than a personal moral guide, and therefore consistent with American constitutional liberties. Yet the rules that such “Sharia-lite feminists” voluntarily choose to follow are also invoked to oppress women—to marry them off, to constrain their economic and human rights, and to limit their freedom of expression—who have not consented to them. The moral conflict between Sharia and universal human rights should not be dismissed as a misunderstanding, but openly discussed.

Many Western feminists struggle to embrace universal women’s rights. Decades ago, Germaine Greer argued that attempts to outlaw female genital mutilation amounted to “an attack on cultural identity.” That type of deference to traditional practices, in the name of cultural sensitivity, hurts vulnerable women. These days, relativism remains strong. Too many feminists in the West are reluctant to condemn cultural practices that clearly harm women—female genital mutilation, polygamy, child marriage, marital rape, and honor violence, particularly in non-Western societies. Women’s rights are universal, and such practices cannot be accepted.

The revival of part of the women’s movement, catalyzed by the election of Donald Trump, has deeper roots than can be seen on the surface. Like Wednesday’s protest, a large portion of Western feminism has been captured by political ideologues and postmodern apologists. Rather than protecting women’s rights, many feminists are focused on signaling opposition to “right-wing” politics.

One of the organizers of the Women’s March movement recently tweeted: “If the right wing is defending or agreeing with you, you are probably on the wrong side. Re-evaluate your positions.”

I’m all for dissent, but that “us vs. them” mentality has caused political gridlock, even on humanitarian issues where the left and right should work together. Hostility and intolerance to others’ views have made rational discussion on important issues taboo. A robust defense of universal women’s rights should welcome support from both the left and the right, overcoming domestic partisan divisions in order to help women abroad attain their full rights.

This International Women’s Day, we should protest the oppression of women who have no access to legal protections. We should support those Muslim reformers, such as Asra Nomani, Zuhdi Jasser, and Irshad Manji, who seek to reform Islam in line with full legal equality between men and women. And we should strive to overcome domestic political divisions to defend the universality of women’s rights.

Read more here.

Next time try asking, "May I dance with you?"

Trump, the master persuader

Scott Adams writes,

...Trump persuaded us that immigration was a big problem. And in so doing, he pushed the issue of income inequality off the page. Do you remember the last time you saw CNN obsessing about income inequality? I thought it was the public’s biggest issue two years ago. Did it just sort of stop being one?

...President Trump is in our heads. He told us what our priorities were and we accepted it, even if we hated his plans. Some people think is it a priority to get tougher on immigration, some think the opposite. But we all agree the issue is important.

If you had asked me in 2014 to list my country’s top 10 problems, immigration would not have been on the list. Now it’s usually at the top of the news. Trump did that. And by doing it he showed us a level of leadership that I have never seen in my lifetime. Even if you don’t like where he is leading us.

But here’s the interesting part. If you want to address income inequality, what is one of the best ways to do it? Answer: Limit immigration. That means higher wages for American citizens and lower profits for the top 1% who want cheap labor.

I saw a factoid yesterday that illegal immigration from Mexico is way down lately, presumably in anticipation of the Trump administration being tough. That’s an indicator of rising wages to come. I suppose the top 1% can pass along the higher costs to some extent. But the jobless guy who gets a job won’t be too unhappy that his food is 10% more expensive. He still comes out ahead. And if the employer gets a Trump tax cut, she doesn’t need to pass along as much of the higher wage expense to consumers.

Speaking of jobs, if Trump’s job-creation hype evolves from anecdotal to real, that’s a great way to reduce income inequality too. As I have often said, economies run on psychology, and Trump is a master of psychology. He proved that already by injecting enough optimism into the system that it goosed the stock market, and business confidence in general. That should translate into more investments and a better economy.

...As I said above, the main reason that income inequality is no longer a major headline is that Trump made us believe that other issues are more important. But the other reason that you no longer see liberals make the trend toward greater income inequality their flagship issue is funnier.

Trump is solving it.

Read more here.

"I would end ideological subversion!"

"The torpor of the West derives in part from the annexation by government of most of the core functions of adulthood." "A dependence on mass immigration is a sign of structural defect." Peter Robinson's 2010 interview of Mark Steyn is as relevant today as it was in 2010.

"The Left thinks that by declaring necessities rights somehow overcomes the individual rights of others!"

Are you "woke?"

At Ace of Spades, Oregon Muse offers us a handy guide to see if we are "woke."

1. "Woke" is pretty much the same as what the old-time Marxists called "class consciousness", i.e knowing that the human race is divided by economic class and that the "proletariat" class needs to overthrow the "bourgeois" class in order to establish the epitome of human perfection, the world-wide communist state.

2. The Marxists also had a term they called "false consciousness." I think it means something like this: you know what "class consciousness" is but you reject it, because you know it's bullcrap.

3. I once heard erg use this term to describe ace.

4. Don't know if there is any comparable term like "false woke". Maybe sleepwalking?

5. Anyway, the point is, "woke" is a concept that was basically lifted from rat bastard commies.

6. Eventually, as blue vs. blue conflict increases, we're going to start seeing "woke fights."

7. They won't be called that, but that's what they are.

8. At some point, the various factions of woke will start making distinctions between "woke" and "woke woke."

9. And these woke groups will be all "woker than thou" to each other

10. To a "woke" person, the only thing worse than not being "woke" is being "woke", but insufficiently "woke."

11. These blue-on-blue slap fights will be hilarous to watch.

12. Even better with popcorn

13. "Woke" is just a way for the in-group kids to communicate their bona fides to other in-group kids and to signal the exclusion of the out-group kids they don't want to let in to the in-group.

14. Yes, we're all living in one big high school now.

15. And "woke" people don't like the new principal.

16. By the way, this is all thanks to progressive politics.

17. A "woke" person's life is consumed by progressive politics, 100% of the time.

18. For example, when he takes a dump, the "woke" guy worries that his poo is opressive to women.

18a. i.e. fart rape.

19. I would not be surprised if they did a survey of "woke" people and discovered above-average rates of mental illness.

20. The opposite of "woke" is normal. That is, if you're not "woke", that means you're a normal person living a normal life.

21. The founding fathers would not have considered "woke" to be an especial virtue.

22. Even if it was their kind of "woke", and not the progressive kind, which they undoubtedly would think was lunacy.

23. The government they implemented is designed to function without everyone having to be "woke."

24. And that's a major selling point of the American system.

25. You know who else was "woke"? Hitler.

26. Also Stalin. And Mao.

27. You don't have to work hard or achieve anything in order to be "woke".

28. You just have to have the proper attitude about things progressives care about.

29. For example, Anita Sarkesian's "wokeness" is what got her on Twitter's Committee For Public Safety where she helps decide who gets censored and who gets banned.

30. In other words, being a "woke" internet loudmouth was pretty much her only qualification.

31. "Woke" people tend to be very adept at this, i.e. worming their way into positions of decision-making authority.

32. Telling normal people what to do is what "woke" people like doing best.

33. And normal people just want to be left alone.

34. But what not many normal people understand is that while they may not be interested in "woke", "woke" is very interested in them.

Do we really have free will?

Scott Adams does not believe we have free will. He writes,

I would not have said this was possible five years ago. But in 2017, cognitive scientists know how to reprogram a human brain fairly effectively. They have weaponized what hypnotists have been doing for decades.

As luck would have it (sort of) we can test persuasion ideas at Guantanamo Bay without any cruelty whatsoever. There would be no hardcore “brainwashing,” just a series of pleasant experiences engineered to get a certain outcome.

The key to making all of this work is what businesses call A/B testing. The idea is that you rapidly test one approach after another until you get the best result.

I believe that current facial recognition technology can tell us how a subject is responding to a suggestion. When one approach works well, we don’t stop – we keep testing until we find the one that works best. And different approaches would work with different personality types. So we need a number of persuasion approaches. The A/B testing would be perpetual by design, so our results would improve over time. Once we can reliably reprogram the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, we take that weaponized persuasion to ISIS.

Regular readers of this blog have seen me discuss lots of examples of persuasion at work. But you haven’t seen anything yet. Your opinion of free will will evaporate in the next few years. I had that experience when I trained to be a hypnotist. Once you see a subject’s brain get reprogrammed in real time, you never believe in free will again. That’ll happen to you within five years – you will see examples of brains being reprogrammed right in front of you. The science on how to do it is super strong now. It will be everywhere. And it is totally legal. We used to call it “marketing” when it didn’t work that well. This new stuff is something else. It works so well it makes your ethical alarms go off.

I’ll make a prediction, just for fun: If President Trump orders the release of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners in 2-3 years, it won’t be as risky as you think.

Read more here.

"Capitulation to know-nothing name-callers"

Peter Wood writes at The Federalist about the violent protestors at Middlebury College who prevented Charles Murray from speaking.

...Some things go without saying, but should be said anyway. Middlebury is in trouble. It is not alone. Many colleges and universities are in similar trouble. They have lost the key to open intellectual debate. They can no longer distinguish between tolerating dissent that respects open discourse, and licensing mob action aimed at preventing the free exchange of ideas. They respond with timidity and cowardice at the first mention of racial sensitivities, and flee in panic from their public responsibility to free speech when leftist bullies unleash their projectile accusations.

Race in America is a fraught topic. But allowing the epithet “racist” to silence any and every view not currently in vogue with Black Lives Matter is cringing. What kind of progress can we make as a nation if our college presidents, entrusted with the integrity of higher education, respond to such demagoguery with abject submission? The same more or less applies to such epithets as “sexist” and “anti-gay,” as well as other imputations that anyone who disagrees with a progressive formulation of who is oppressing whom is therefore a bigot.

Murray doesn’t fit the jacket that the Middlebury protesters tried to hang on him. Anyone who has read his books knows that. Shame on President Patton and others in the Middlebury community who could have spoken up and didn’t. But shame on a hundred other college presidents—at least a hundred—who have similarly taken the easy path of capitulation to know-nothing name-callers over the last year or two.

College boards of trustees, are you listening? Why do you appoint people whose only talent is to appease bullies? Why do you sit back and let them do what President Patton just did? Do you think Middlebury just purchased “peace in our time”? I think Middlebury purchased a long lasting scar on its reputation. It will be known as a place more concerned about political posturing than education.

...But, again, Middlebury is only one of many colleges and universities caught in this situation. Higher education today recruits college presidents in part by ascertaining their willingness not to get in the way of whatever progressive causes are currently fashionable. We hire college presidents who are all-in on diversity, sustainability, world-citizenship, and so on. Boards of trustees, charged with making these decisions, generally recline into accepting the advice of “stakeholder” committees in which each ideological faction wields a veto. We then wind up with college presidents whose superpower is appeasement.

Read more here.

Marijuana suppositories

Do you smoke marijuana? Your doctor may prefer that you take it up your butt! Stephen Green links to this article in Vice:

...researchers are increasingly warning Canadians about the negative health effects that come from smoking cannabis. The Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse says "smoking cannabis may be even more harmful to a person's airways and lungs than smoking tobacco, since cannabis smoking often involves unfiltered smoke, larger puffs, deeper inhalation and longer breath holding."

"The bureaucratic state infantilizes people. It takes away from them the difficulties of life, that also lay the ground work for the achievements of life."

Mark Steyn interviews Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College. "Modern liberalism attempts to be value-free, but in the end becomes prey to every petty tyranny that comes along!" I really enjoyed this one!

The Mark Steyn Show

Mark Steyn addresses the faculty, alumni and student body of Hillsdale College. With Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, these last twelve months have been amazing. On both sides of the Atlantic free people said "ENOUGH" and voted for major course correction! What the Left wants: the abolition of men!

"The real fight is just beginning!"

Why did Mattis pick her?

Anne Patterson has been appointed by General Mattis to be the top civilian in the Defense Department. At PJ Media, Raymond Ibrahim wants to know why. She was hated by many Egyptians, when she supported the Muslim Brotherhood there. Read the Ibrahim article here.

Should we really welcome all of them?

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page,

The left thrives on its moral narcissism. It parades around its false spectacles of victimhood. But its policies leave behind real victims. When the left fought against President Trump’s common sense immigration security reforms, a little girl in a village in New York became one of its many victims.

He goes on to write about how New York Senators Schumer and Gillibrand used their influence to bring into this country a Muslim pedophile. Read more here.

More on the story from The Daily Mail:

Saranac Lake Village police Sergeant Casey Reardon told the Adirondack Daily Enterprise that the 12-year-old girl and her parents reported that Hussain kissed and touched her in an 'intimate area over her clothing'.
The U.S. embassy in New Delhi initially rejected Hussain’s visa application to come to the U.S. to compete in the World Snowshoe Championship, but Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand contacted the New Delhi embassy, which allowed the racer to reapply and he was granted a visa.

General Flynn, the lobbyist for Turkey!

The Daily Caller is fast becoming one of the best investigative journalism sites on the web. Today they have a story about General Flynn, which makes me glad Trump fired him. Read it here.

How many Arab, Assyrian and Kurdish women celebrated International Women's Day

At PJ Media, Bridget Johnson reports,

On International Women's Day, the Islamic State is under threat from a force bearing down on their declared capital, Raqqa, that includes Arab, Assyrian and Kurdish women commanders and fighters.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner today reiterated U.S. government support for the Syrian Democratic Forces, an anti-ISIS, anti-Qaeda, anti-Assad coalition currently leading the major Wrath of Euphrates offensive to oust ISIS from their greatest stronghold. The SDF consists of more than 50,000 fighters, female and male commanders, Arabs, Assyrian Christians, Kurds, and other minority ethnic groups.

"They've been very effective -- we've talked about this many times -- in removing ISIS from the battlefield and dislodging them, and ultimately destroying them," Toner said.

Since launching the Wrath of Euphrates operation against ISIS at the beginning of November, the U.S.-backed SDF has liberated more than 3,700 square miles of territory in the drive toward Raqqa.

SDF General Commander Rojda Felat is the Kurdish woman leading the operation. In a June interview with a Kurdish newspaper, she vowed that "wherever there is an attack against humanity we, as the Syrian Democratic Forces, will be there; wherever there is a suppressed woman, that is a battleground for us."

She hailed the "very many" women's units under the SDF umbrella, including Arab and Assyrian women fighters, noting "people are joining the SDF and YPJ [Kurdish Women's Defense Units] by the droves."

"Not only for the women of Shengal [Yazidis], wherever a woman is being suppressed, wherever a man is threatening a woman, our forces will struggle against this. Our struggle for the liberation of our people will become a beacon for all resisting peoples," she added. The SDF says it has already freed hundreds of Yazidis held as sex slaves by ISIS.

Read more here and view photos of the women fighters.

"Being a left-winger on an elite campus like Middlebury is the most conformist thing imaginable. The anti-Murray protesters were defending a failed status quo against a genuinely radical critic of the system."

Robert Stacy McCain writes in the American Spectator,

...The goons who attacked Charles Murray at Middlebury College probably think of themselves as rebels, defending “diversity” against a fascist enemy, but the truth is the complete opposite. Murray is the real rebel, and the mob who attacked him are the real enemies of diversity. Being a left-winger on an elite campus like Middlebury is the most conformist thing imaginable. The anti-Murray protesters were defending a failed status quo against a genuinely radical critic of the system. Murray is a man who creates controversy because he asks tough questions and follows wherever the facts lead. Does this sound familiar?

...Charles Murray has been looking below the surface for a long time. A native of Iowa whose SAT scores were his ticket to Harvard, he has become a leading critic of the liberal ideology that prevails at his alma mater and other elite universities. Liberalism simply doesn’t help the poor people for whom liberals claim to feel so much sympathy, and liberalism doesn’t help poor white people any more than it helps poor black people. Murray’s 2012 book, Coming Apart, examined the declining fortunes of non-college-educated white Americans. Progressives who talk of “white privilege” simply ignore the data showing that drug abuse and the unraveling of family life (to name two key factors in the persistent problems of black communities) are also associated with socioeconomic decline among working-class whites. Liberals insist that poor blacks are victims of racism, but they have no simple explanation for the problems of poor whites, few of whom ever make it to the Ivy League, or to Middlebury College, for that matter.

Read more here.

"We are putting the world on notice!"

Sundance reports,

Commerce Secretary Wilbur “Wolverine” Ross put the trade world on notice today when he announced a staggering $1.19 billion penalty on Chinese company ZTE for violating U.S. sanctions and selling electronics to Iran and North Korea.

China’s ZTE has agreed to pay the United States the fine. Remember, in China all private businesses are politically attached to the central government.

Ross: With this action, we are putting the world on notice: "Improper trade games are over with!

Read more here.

Needed to repeal Obamacare: 60 votes!

Sundance writes at The Conservative Treehouse:

A clean repeal bill, meaning a law to repeal the entire ObamaCare construct only, would require another 60 vote hurdle in the Senate.

Republicans, while in the majority, only control 52 seats. Without 8 Democrats voting to approve a “repeal bill”, any House (Or Senate) bill that repeals ObamaCare cannot pass the Senate.

This is why Mark Levin is a con-man; selling snake oil as outrage to keep a listening audience angry, yet clueless and hopeless. That’s what I don’t like.

A complete repeal of ObamaCare is currently impossible. The House Freedom Caucus can push all the repeal bills they want, but they cannot get a clean repeal bill through the Senate because they cannot get the 60 votes needed. Period.

...Accepting the Democrats will not vote to repeal their signature law… The only way to fully repeal ObamaCare as an independent bill, and overcome the 60 vote threshold, would be to eliminate the filibuster rule (3/5ths vote threshold or 60 votes) in the Senate and drop the vote threshold to 51 votes, a simple majority, for all legislation.

However, if the Senate was to drop to a simple majority vote for all legislation the entire premise of the upper chamber minority party protection is gone. Forever.

...You would think that constitutional conservatives would be necessarily predisposed against the dropping of a constitutional republic in favor of a pure democracy (mob rule).

However, within this current argument over the Price/Ryan approach to replacing ObamaCare you find exactly that. Emotional conservatives, and crony-constitutional conservatives like Mark Levin, arguing against the current House bill leaving only the option to drop the Senate filibuster on legislation and pass laws with a simple majority.

Read more here.

"There is a very dangerous and very effective destabilation campaign underway against this president, his administration, and his agenda.

"This is a war!" I hope to God that he is strong enough to withstand this!"

"He may be feeling like a woman, but he wasn't acting like one."

Guest post by School Psychologist Colleen Warshawer

Today is International Women's Day. Let me tell you what happened to me. I drove the kids to their schools, then stopped in at a gas station to use the restroom. There were two: one for men, and one for women. Both were occupied. One effeminate-looking man was waiting in line in front of me. The women's room opened first. The man walked right in. I turned to his male friend and asked, "WTF?" He did not reply.

The men's room then became unoccupied. However, I waited for the women's room, since I am a woman. The man came out of the women's room eventually. I greeted him, "WTF, It says women!" He did not reply.

I have never had a woman do this. What makes it okay for a man? If it had been another woman who did this, she would have said something to explain why. What makes this man, who may be feeling like he is a woman, decide that it is okay to use the women's room when there is a woman standing right behind him?

Here is the answer. He has a male brain. The male brain is not as interconnected between the two hemispheres, which makes him more singularly focused and less able to be in tune to the feelings and reactions of people around him.

He may be feeling like a woman, but he wasn't acting like one.

"I find much to love in my life and it brings me great joy. Why would I want to take a day off from all that I love and enjoy?"

Suzann Darnall writes today's guest post:

It is “International Women’s Day”. A day that many (so-called) Progressive women are using to bash men, family, President Trump, their jobs, our country, and just about anything else they can find to complain about. Hmmm . . . I haven’t seen much in their never-ending litany that is actually in praise of women or womanhood.

“International Women’s Day” was originally “International Working Women’s Day”. It was supposedly meant to commemorate the movement for women’s rights. Surprise, surprise, it was begun by the Socialist Party of America. It was predominantly celebrated in communist countries and by socialists until the United Nations adopted it in 1975. And, we all know how concerned the UN is with women’s rights, considering some of the completely inappropriate members they have sitting on various organizations that supposedly protect women throughout the world.

So, I suppose one should not be surprised that the color they chose for showing solidarity is red, the traditional color of socialism and communism. Nor, should it come as a shock that their way of celebrating a day about working women is to encourage women to NOT work.

Well, I am here to let them know that if I am wearing any red today it is ‘cause it is one of my most very favorite colors and I look good in it. I love red. Friends used to call me “lady in red” since I wore it so much. I adore the good ole’ red, white and blue of America, too.

I also want the Progressives to know that I WILL be working today. As I generally am working every day. Yes, even on the Lord’s Sabbath. ‘Cause let’s face it, there’s feeding gotta take place no matter what. I like to eat, my husband likes to eat, and my critters most certainly rely on me to feed them. Everyone around here gets fed at least twice a day and some eat three times or more. So, yes, I most emphatically have work to be done seven days a week. It is my job. I am a wife, homemaker, and “zookeeper” 24/7.

I am also a quilter several days a week ‘cause I have a small in-home business. So, I do not take a day off for some silly idea a group of dissatisfied Progressive women came up with that is supposed to make some idiotic statement about them demanding rights that they already have!

Not only do these women not speak for me, they do not speak for almost all the women I know. They are out there demanding rights we already have. Rights we are already exercising. Yet, they are encouraging women to not only not exercise their right to work, but are encouraging them to not support the schools that are there to educate the next generation, including girls and young women.

While I support the right of these Progressives to march and protest, I object to their trying to usurp my right to speak for myself. I do not need a celebrity spokesperson or a terroristic organization trying to cow me, my government, and my country into surrendering to their socialist demands. The unity these so-called feminists preach about is not a march to freedom. Rather, it is about fitting into their little pre-formed and quite rigid boxes of who and what women should be, all according to their agenda. And, it would seem there are puppet masters in the shadows further manipulating their movement so that such anti-woman and anti-freedom ideas as Sharia Law are being floated as somehow pro-feminist. What???

Well, I am not going to buy into their false news narrative. I am a free woman. I was raised by a free woman. I raised two free women. They are now raising five free girls . . . and one rather outnumbered (but still free) boy. We are supported in our choices by strong men. My mother was a stay-home wife and mother. I was a stay-home wife and mother. One of my daughters has opted to be a stay-home wife and mother. My other daughter is a wife and mother who also works outside the home. We are ALL working women ‘cause making a comfortable home for a husband and family is a lot of work.

Most of the women I know are also wives and mothers. Some work only at home, some also have jobs outside the home, and some work from home at additional careers. Many have hobbies, pets, animals, church, charities, and other demands upon their time. They are in a constant state of juggling their calendar to meet the needs of all those around them. They do not often get to take a day off. Even their days off, weekends or vacations are filled with the care of themselves and others.

Why do we do it? While I cannot answer for all women, I can answer for me and I think I am not that different from many other women I know.

Why do I do it? Mostly out of love. Love for my husband. Love for our children and our grandchildren. Love for our animals. Love for our home. Love for our property. Love for quilting. Love of cooking. I find much to love in my life and it brings me great joy. Why would I want to take a day off from all that I love and enjoy?

I think women like me are the real feminists. The truly liberated women of the world. We have found what we love, we do what we love, and we don’t give a dang about what others think of our choices. I am truly free to be me. And, I do not mind giving a measure of the credit to the man I love, my husband, who has very much made it possible by all the ways he supports me in doing what I do.

Perhaps this is the difference between most of the women I know and the Progressive feminists that are constantly bitching in the news: love. The shrill screechers always being shown in media seem to ever be focused on hate and dissatisfaction. At times it seems there is nothing they approve of or enjoy.

Well, I want to give a shout-out to the women who enjoy their lives. Who love their choices. The women who happily started a load of laundry this morning. The mothers who fed their kids and got them off to school with a hug. The wives who kissed their husbands as they left for work. The women who took donuts or cookies to share with their co-workers. The ladies going out to lunch at a favorite restaurant. The girls planning a get-together for after work to celebrate a friend’s promotion, engagement, or pregnancy. The homemakers who are planning tonight’s dinner. The working gals who are giving themselves a break and picking up a pizza on the way home. These are the women who really get what International Women’s Day means.

It means another day when women can choose to be who they want to be. Another day we can be wives, mothers, daughters, workers, friends, citizens, homemakers, or a combination of as many of the options as we desire. We are American women. We already have rights. We exercise them each and every day. We don’t have to listen to a group of disgruntled women who seem to be too ignorant to realize it.blockquote>

Sayonara,
Suzann
http://www.suziezoo.com
http://www.woolymammoth.org

Andrea Mitchell ushered out of State Department before being able to ask questions of Tillerson

hat tip The Daily Caller

"Podesta Didn’t Register As A ‘Foreign Agent’ When He Represented A Bank With Ties To Russian Spy Agencies"

At The Daily Caller Richard Pollock reports,

Democratic super lobbyist Tony Podesta failed to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) when he agreed to represent Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank.

Sberbank allegedly has close ties to Russia’s intelligence services, The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned.

...Sberbank was once known informally as the “KGB bank,” and now has a reputation for close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and to Russian intelligence services.

...John Schindler, a former National Security Agency analyst and a former professor of the National War College, has charged Sberbank has operational ties to Russian intelligence.

Writing in an opinion article in the New York Observer last April, Schindler asserted that, “funds moving through Sberbank are regularly used to support clandestine Russian intelligence operations, while the bank uses its offices abroad as cover for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR.”

...Former U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova told TheDCNF Podesta should have registered with the Justice Department.

He said Sberbank’s ties to Russian intelligence agencies clinched it. “It’s all the more reason why they should have registered. They were representing a direct organ of the Russian government engaged in espionage.”
Read more here.

US unpreparedness and vulnerability: Our top secret computer assets are compromised!

Wikileaks today: The software that enables the US to spy on anyone in the world has been stolen! We're well-defended against the threats that happened in World War II. But are we prepared for 2017 threats? Cyberattacks?

"I like Swedish blondes, and I shall miss them when they're gone!"

Is nationalism the province of dying white men? Mark Steyn says no!

Medical nanobots

Instapundit links to an article by Megan Scudellari in IEEE Spectrum.

It’s science-fiction-turned-reality: Researchers are developing micro- and nanoscale robots that move freely in the body, communicate with each other, perform jobs, and degrade when their mission is complete. These tiny robots will someday “have a major impact” on disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, according to a new review in Science Robotics from a top nanoengineering team at the University of California, San Diego.

Read more here.

What happens inside a woman's body during pregnancy

hat tip Glenn Reynolds

"The European Union is dying before our very eyes. The only question is, how long will it take?"

I did not know that there are voices in the European Union who would counsel Germany to forget about NATO obligations and just build a European army. Nigel Farage makes that allegation in this video. He also says Obama's biggest ally in Europe was Germany, while Trump's is Great Britain.

"Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger."

Have you wondered what Barack Obama is doing these days? Daniel Greenfield reports,

...Valerie Jarrett has moved into the shadow White House to plot operations against Trump. Meanwhile Tom Perez has given him control of the corpse of the DNC after fending off a Sandernista bid from Keith Ellison. Obama had hollowed out the Democrat Party by diverting money to his own Organizing for America. Then Hillary Clinton had cannibalized it for her presidential bid through Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Donna Brazile. Now Obama owns the activist, OFA, and organizational, DNC, infrastructure.

But that’s just half the picture.

Obama controls the opposition. He will have a great deal of power to choose future members of Congress and the 2020 candidate. But he could have done much of that from Chicago or New York. The reason he didn’t decide to move on from D.C. is that the nation’s capital contains the infrastructure of the national government. He doesn’t just want to run the Democrats. He wants to run America.

The other half of the picture is the Obama Deep State. This network of political appointees, bureaucrats and personnel scattered across numerous government agencies is known only as Obama Anonymous.

...Trump had locked down the GOP nomination in May. Next month there was a FISA request targeting him. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court denied the request, and it is still unknown whether the request targeted Trump, or only his associates, but it’s silly to pretend that the submission of such a request a month after he became the presumptive GOP nominee was apolitical.

In its last days, Obama Inc. made it easier to pass along unfiltered personal information to the other agencies where Obama loyalists were working on their investigation targeting Trump. The NSA pipeline now makes it possible for the shadow White House to still gain intelligence on its domestic enemies.

And the target of the shadow White House is the President of the United States.

There is now a President and an Anti-President. A government and a shadow government. The anti-President controls more of the government through his shadow government than the real President.

...When he was in power, Obama hacked reporters like FOX News’ James Rosen and CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson. He eavesdropped on members of Congress opposed to the Iran Deal. Two men who made movies he disliked ended up in jail. But what he is doing now is even more deeply disturbing.

...Obama’s third term has begun. Our Republic is in danger.

Read more here.

Wait, I thought it was the Republicans who had the Russia connections!

The Daily Caller has another scoop. Richard Pollock reports,

Democrat super-lobbyist Tony Podesta was paid $170,000 over a six-month period last year to represent Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank, seeking to end one of the Obama administration’s economic sanctions against that country, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.

Podesta, founder and chairman of the Podesta Group, is listed as a key lobbyist on behalf of Sberbank, according to Senate lobbying disclosure forms. His firm received more than $24 million in fees in 2016, much of it coming from foreign governments, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Podesta is the brother of John Podesta, who was the national campaign chairman for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s losing 2016 campaign for the presidency. Former President Barack Obama imposed the sanctions following the Russian seizure of the Crimean region of Ukraine in 2014.

The lobbying campaign targeted Congress and the executive branch, with Podesta and other lobbyists arranging at least two meetings between Sberbank officers and Department of State officials, according to Elena Teplitskaya, Sberbank’s board chairman, who spoke to House aides in August.

The discovery of high-profile Democrats like Podesta being paid lucrative fees for lobbying to lift U.S. sanctions on Russia contrasts with charges from Democrats that President Donald Trump and his key aides are soft on Russia while the Obama administration was tough on Moscow.

Podesta’s efforts were a key part of under-the-radar lobbying during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign led mainly by veteran Democratic strategists to remove sanctions against Sberbank and VTB Capital, Russia’s second largest bank.

The two Russian banks spent more than $700,000 in 2016 on Washington lobbyists as they sought to end the U.S. sanctions, according to Senate lobbying disclosure forms and documents filed with the Department of Justice.

The Podesta Group charged Sberbank $20,000 per month, plus expenses, on a contract from March through September 2016.

Podesta is one of the Democrat’s highest profile lobbyists who enjoys close personal and business connections to former Presidents Obama and Bill Clinton. John Podesta was chief of staff in Clinton’s White House and special counselor in the Obama White House.

Both Sberbank and VTB Capital face severe cash shortages due to plunging oil prices, plus the U.S. sanctions. If the economic sanctions were lifted, however, both banks could legally seek funds from American financial institutions.

“The Democrats are sitting there trying to convince us that the Russians are trying to throw the election to Trump,” a congressional aide who requested anonymity and met Teplitskaya told TheDCNF.

“And then they’re with us here in the House and meeting directly with the administration behind closed doors on the issue of the sanctions. The hypocrisy could not be any richer,” he said.

...The Sberbank-Podesta relationship goes back many years. Sberbank was the lead financial institution in the Russian deal to purchase Uranium One, owned by one of Bill Clinton’s closest friends, Frank Giustra.

Giustra and Bill Clinton lead the Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership, an integral part of the Clinton Foundation. Giustra has additionally donated $25 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Giustra sought to sell his stake in uranium reserves that included ore deposits in the Western United States, and Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state, approved the sale. And in one felled swoop, 20 percent of America’s uranium ore was sold to the Russian state atomic agency.

During the pending sale, the Podesta Group represented Giustra’s company and tried to advance the transaction.

Read more here.

The Middlebury College disaster

You have probably heard about what happened recently at Middlebury College in Vermont. Charles Murray gives us his account here.

"Let’s shine some light on what the Obama administration was doing during this election."

So says Glenn Reynolds in his column today at USA Today. Read the whole thing here.

"Trick or tweet?"

Andrew Mccarthy writes at National Review,

...You will hear more righteous indignation in the coming days, no doubt. The first brushback pitches came this weekend: the claim that if President Trump dares to demand that the FBI and Justice Department show him the supposed FISA applications, he will be engaged in unprecedented political interference in the independence of law enforcement. It’s a silly assertion; as I explained over the weekend, FISA surveillance is not law enforcement, it is national security. A chief executive who demanded to review FISA information (obtained by exercise of the executive’s power) would be doing his main job — to protect the country — not interfering in a judicial proceeding.

But have you noticed? While all this head-spinning legal jibber-jabber goes back and forth, the foundation of the false narrative we’ve been hearing since November 8 has vanished.

...the media and Democrats have been playing with fire for months. The use of law-enforcement and national-security assets to investigate one’s political opponents during a heated election campaign has always been a potentially explosive story. Let’s not kid ourselves: If the roles were reversed, and a Republican administration had investigated officials tied to the campaign of the Democrats’ nominee, we would be drowning in a sea of Watergate 2.0 coverage.

Well, this weekend, the potentially explosive story detonated. It happened in the now familiar way: jaw-dropping tweets by President Trump.

Here’s the most interesting part: Now that they’ve been called on it, the media and Democrats are gradually retreating from the investigation they’ve been touting for months as the glue for their conspiracy theory. It’s actually quite amusing to watch: How dare you suggest President Obama would ever order surveillance! Who said anything about FISA orders? What evidence do you lunatic conservatives have — uh, other than what we media professionals been reporting — that there was any investigation of the Trump campaign?

But have you noticed? While all this head-spinning legal jibber-jabber goes back and forth, the foundation of the false narrative we’ve been hearing since November 8 has vanished. Now that we’re supposed to believe there was no real investigation of Trump and his campaign, what else can we conclude but that there was no real evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia . . . which makes sense, since Russia did not actually hack the election, so the purported objective of the collusion never existed.

Trick or tweet?

Read more here.

Was Trump targeted by the intelligence apparatus operated by the Obama administration?

JE Dyer at Liberty Unyielding comprehensively analyzes the wiretapping controversy and concludes,

...So essentially, a picture emerges of the FBI being under the gun to make some rain against Trump, and coming up dry. Since the FBI wasn’t getting the job done, the leadership of the DOJ and intel community – Obama loyalists – wrote themselves a “FISA warrant” to get other agencies into the unminimized NSA database.

There would be a data trail on this. You’d just have to know where to look. If this is what the Trump administration has uncovered, it would mean (a) that Clapper is telling the truth with his denial about “wiretapping”; (b) James Comey has a reason to respond exactly as he has to the allegation (since he may not know what people on the Justice Department staff may have tried to do with NSA data); and (c) Trump is right. He was targeted by the intelligence apparatus operated by the Obama administration.

Read the whole thing here.

CRTV dumps Mark Steyn. Why?

Have you been wondering why Mark Steyn got dumped by CRTV? Sundance does us all a big favor at Conservative Treehouse. He digs into the matter and offers a very plausible perspective here.

"Our enemies often use our own freedom and generosity against us!"

Sessions, Tillerson, and Kelly explain the President's new executive order.

Pretending...

Bookworm writes, in part,

...The reality, not the Progressive magical science, but the actual reality of the world is that men are men and women are women . . . which is why it’s a lousy idea to lock men and women together on ships at sea and expect that biological reality won’t happen. Anomalies are so infinitesimally small that they should not be allowed to shape the debate.

A sane society rejects the social justice warriors’ contention that gender is fluid and that people are what they say they are. This goes beyond bathrooms and sports competitions. This goes to whether a society operates in the world as it is — meaning that it treats the mentally ill with compassion but still recognizes that XX does not equal XY and that gender, unlike race, is not a continuum — or whether a society tries to operate in a fantasy-land, entirely disconnected from reality.

You know what happens when you give the reins to the fantasy-land crowd? You get a country controlled by magical thinking and that’s never good. In that country….

People in power pretend that 10% of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims aren’t religious fanatics who dream of world domination with the winner carried into power on a mountain of bloodied corpses.

People in power pretend that puny humans have greater power over the climate than the sun and the atmosphere and, damn it!, they’ll manipulate all the data they can to prove their point. Moreover, as was the case in California, they’ll spend untold sums on this fantasy while ignoring necessary repairs to an important dam and spillway only because they’ve convinced themselves that a cyclically reappearing drought will suddenly last forever.

People in power pretend that guns are so dangerous that only criminals should be allowed to have them.

People in power pretend that government, rather than merely printing money, is an instrument of wealth creation, headed by people with extraordinary economic insight. They then use this belief to justify taking money and spending it on favored political constituents — never mind that this system has never worked anywhere, at any time.

Perhaps worst of all, people in power, on the one hand, pretend that sexual identity is utterly fluid and that we can all make it up as we go along while, on the other hand, they pretend that men and women are so fundamentally different that all men are rapists and all women can be Navy SEALS. Even acknowledging those two world views creates a painful cognitive dissonance. I don’t know how people can function if they actual believe those two entirely inconsistent theories.

A world ruled by people steeped in fantasy is a dangerous world. President Trump may exaggerate but, where it counts, he’s plugged into reality. That makes me feel much more secure than I did during the last eight years of President Fantasy’s administration.

Read more here.

Which do you prefer, science, or fantasy?

hat tip Bookworm