We are to a large extent libertarian conservatives.

We agree with Libertarians on many issues.

Where we part company with them is chiefly over foreign policy. A realistic understanding of what is happening in the world cannot but be pessimistic. War is raging in the Middle East as a horrifying army of Islamic savages – ISIS – spreads its tyranny and commits atrocities. The war sends millions of Muslim “refugees” into Europe, which will before long become a continent dominated by Muslims and subjected to the cruelties of Islamic law.

The evil tentacles of ISIS stretch far and reach America. The worst terrorist attack in America since 9/11 was carried out by ISIS affiliates late this year at San Bernardino in California. Islam is a growing menace to the Western world, to America, to liberty.

Deliberately to ignore this reality is obviously and astonishingly foolish.

Yet Libertarians do ignore it. Or, if they have to notice it, they play it down and brush it aside. They prefer to look on the bright side of current events.

John Stossel, a cheerful Libertarian, writes at Townhall:

Terrorism! Crime! Deadly storms! Hillary Clinton!

We like the inclusion of Hillary Clinton among the horrors.

We reporters focus on bad news, but at year’s end, let’s remember what went right. 2015 was a better time to be alive than most any prior point in history.

He means, of course, to be alive in America.

The rich got richer. Some people think that’s a problem, but why? Do rich people sit on their piles of money and cackle about how rich they are? Do they build giant houses that damage the environment? Well, they sometimes do.

But mostly they invest, hoping to get richer still. Those investments create jobs and better products and make most everyone else richer. Even if the rich leave money in banks, banks lend it to people who put it to productive use.

Sure, income inequality has grown – but so what? The rich don’t get richer at the expense of the poor. Poor people’s income grew 48 percent over the past 35 years. Bernie Sanders says that “the middle class is disappearing”. But that’s mainly because many middle-class people moved into the upper class. Middle class incomes grew 40 percent over the past 30 years.

We receive all that with nods and smiles.

This year we heard more horror stories about bad schools and students who don’t learn. But take heart: Seven more states passed education choice legislation.

That means more students can opt out of bad schools and pick better ones, and over the long haul competing schools will have to get better at what they do. That will lead to a brighter future for all students – and for society, which will benefit from their improved skills.

That too is good news.

In 2015, two more states and Washington, D.C., legalized marijuana. Authorities are always reluctant to give up control, but gradually the end of the expensive, destructive and futile drug war will come.

We have no quarrel with him there.

Meanwhile, real crime – violence and thefts – continue to fall. We cover horrible mass shootings and spikes in crime in cities like Baltimore and St. Louis, but overall, crime is down – over the past 20 years, down by about half.

And that is very good news.

He comes back to terrorism:

Unfortunately, terrorism has increased – mainly because of ISIS in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, there are far fewer deaths from war and terror than there were 30 years ago, and in America, the odds of you or your family being killed by a terrorist are infinitesimal compared to disease, accidents and a thousand more-ordinary threats.

And that is where our nodding stops and our smiles vanish.

In our experience – not inconsiderable  – of dealing with terrorism, we have all too often heard glib apologists, mainly spokesmen of the Left but also Libertarians, bring up the statistics of deaths in accidents outnumbering deaths in terrorist attacks. To do so is not just stupid, not just irrelevant, but bad. Accidents are by definition events that nobody is responsible for. To compare the danger of accidents with the danger of terrorism – to treat terrorism as just another hazard in contemporary living – is to remove the moral dimension from the frightful business of deliberately terrifying, killing, maiming, and shattering lives which is what terrorists do.

To disregard the immorality of terrorism is tantamount to condoning it.

Nothing ensures the triumph of evil as effectively as the abandonment of moral judgment.

Of course John Stossel does not mean to abandon moral judgment. He, like most Libertarians, has simply not given enough thought to the matter.

So on that point his optimism lapses into sheer insouciance.

But he moves on to other topics:

Marriage is good for civilization. This year the Supreme Court declared that gay people may get married. Government shouldn’t be in the marriage business at all, since marriage is a contract between individuals, but if it’s going to wade into that issue, it’s better to have one clear rule instead of ugly ongoing fights about it.

Ending the political squabble means we can all go back to minding our own business and worrying about our own marriages.

We won’t quarrel with him over that either, although we think the word “marriage”, with its age-long connotations, is unsuitable to describe a contractual union between two people of the same sex.

In 2015, women in Saudi Arabia got to vote.

But a woman in Saudi Arabia still may not drive. Or walk abroad without a male relative escorting her. Or inherit as much her brothers. Or be fully believed in court unless a second woman backs up her testimony.

More countries elected leaders, rather than inheriting them.

But some may not be able to replace them in another election.

With what he says next, we heartily agree:

The picture isn’t all rosy. As I mentioned, terrorism is up. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are on track to lead America into bankruptcy. We have eternal problems like hunger and disease.

But even those “eternal” problems are closer to being solved than they used to be.

Thanks to better vaccines, 6 million fewer children under the age of 5 die each year compared to 30 years ago.

Twenty-five years ago, 2 billion people lived in extreme poverty – that meant surviving on about a dollar a day, often with little access to basic needs like water and food. “Experts” predicted that number would rise as the population grew. Happily, thanks to the power of free markets, they were wrong. In the space of a generation, half the people most in need in the world were rescued.

Ten percent of the world’s people still live in dire poverty, but the trend is clear: Where there is rule of law and individual freedom, humanity is better off.

But then again, he makes a recommendation we cannot like:

As Marian Tupy of HumanProgress.org puts it, “Away from the front pages of our newspapers and television, billions of people go about their lives unmolested, enjoying incremental improvements that make each year better than the last.”

So enjoy it.

Away from the sources of news about what’s going on in the world? There again is the misguided aspect of the Libertarian outlook. See, hear, speak no evil and it will be just as if there is none? Dangerous nonsense!

But with his last words we cordially join in:

Happy New Year!

I have been asked: If elite colleges do not create lower admission standards, how are they going to have enough black students? My response is: That’s their problem. Black people cannot afford to have our youngsters turned into failures in order to support the agendas of diversity race hustlers and to lessen the guilt of white liberals.

So writes Professor Walter Williams in an article against “affirmative action” – ie. discrimination on grounds of race – here.

Walter Williams

Derryck Green of Prager University makes it plain on which side of the political divide the racists are – and it isn’t the conservative side.

(Hat-tip for the video to our Facebook commenter Robert Nabors)

Trump talks about building a wall on the US-Mexico border .

Stephen Colbert tries but fails to score jokes at Trump’s expense.

Who talks sense and who talks nonsense? Which one is the clown?

Is there a war on Christianity?

In Islamic countries, in Arab countries in particular, there is. In the Islamic State it is a war of annihilation. And the Christian Powers do nothing to save the victims. There does not even seem to be any emotion about it among Christians in Europe or America.

Is there a war on Christianity in America itself? Some say there is, and a lot of emotion has been aroused over it.

Jay Michaelson writes at the Daily Beast:

Why try to understand complicated things like demographics for the decline of your faith when you can blame gays and liberals for waging a “war on religion”?

Among the Christian Right, and most Republican presidential candidates, it’s now an article of faith that the United States is persecuting Christians and Christian-owned businesses —that religion itself is under attack.

Religion has been under attack for a very long time. But are Christians under serious threat? Now? In the United States?

“We have seen a war on faith,” Ted Cruz has said to pick one example. “His policies and this administration’s animosity to religious liberty and, in fact, antagonism to Christians, has been one of the most troubling aspects of the Obama administration,” he said.

Well it is true that the Obama administration does not seem to like Christians. It is reluctant to admit Christian refugees from the wars in the Middle East, while it insists on bringing in tens of thousands of Muslims. But is it against religious liberty?

The writer thinks the very idea that Christianity is under assault is a “bizarre myth”. But he also thinks it is true “in a way”:

Why has this bizarre myth that Christianity is under assault in the most religious developed country on Earth been so successful? Because, in a way, it’s true. American Christianity is in decline — not because of a “war on faith” but because of a host of demographic and social trends. The gays and liberals are just scapegoats.

The idea that Christians are being persecuted resonates with millennia-old self-conceptions of Christian martyrdom. Even when the church controlled half the wealth in Europe, it styled itself as the flock of the poor and the marginalized. Whether true or not as a matter of fact, it is absolutely true as a matter of myth. Christ himself was persecuted and even crucified, after all. So it’s natural that Christianity losing ground in America would be seen by many Christians as the result of persecution.

According to a Pew Research Report released earlier this year, the percentage of the US population that identifies as Christian has dropped from 78.4 percent in 2007 to 70.6 percent in 2014. Evangelical, Catholic, and mainline Protestant affiliations have all declined.

Meanwhile, 30 percent of Americans ages 18-29 list “none” as their religious affiliation (the figure for all ages is about 23 percent). Nearly 40 percent of Americans who have married since 2010 report that they are in “religiously mixed” marriages, which means that many individuals who profess Christianity are in families where not everyone does.

These changes are taking place for a constellation of reasons: greater secular education (college degrees), multiculturalism, shifting social mores, the secular space of consumer capitalism and celebrity culture, the sexual revolution (including feminism and LGBT equality), legal and constitutional changes (like the banning of prayer in public school, and the finding of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage), the breakdown of the nuclear family, the decline of certain forms of family and group identification, and the association of religion in general with nonsensical and outdated dogmas. The Pew report noted Americans are also changing religions more than in the past, and when they do so, they are more likely to move away from Christianity than toward it.

While we like to hear talk of “nonsensical and outdated dogmas”, the rest of that paragraph needs critical examination. Quite a few of the impersonal causes listed are in fact the result of liberal policies: multiculturalism, the legal and constitutional changes, the breakdown of the nuclear family. Feminism is a leftist cause. And the Left has promoted “LGBT equality” for political rather than moral reasons.

So while changes in public morals regarding women and LGBT people (and how the law treats them) are part of the overall shift, they are only one part of an immensely complicated set of factors — and I’m quite sure I’ve left out some of the most important ones. Probably the never-ending stream of sex scandals, from the Catholic clergy  to the Duggar mess, haven’t helped either.

But no one likes a “constellation of reasons” to explain why the world they grew up in, and the values they cherish, seem to be slipping away. Enter the scapegoat: the war on religion, and the persecution of Christianity.

It’s much easier to explain changes by referring to a single, malevolent cause than by having to understand a dozen complex demographic trends. Plus, if Christianity is declining because it’s being attacked, then that decline could be reversed if the attack were successfully repelled. Unlike what is actually happening — a slow, seemingly irrevocable decline in American Christianity — the right’s argument that “religious liberty” is under assault mixes truth and fantasy to provide a simpler, and more palatable, explanation for believers.

We think he is right that there’s a “constellation of reasons” for the decline of religion. While we think a decline in religion is highly desirable, we cannot help but notice that Leftist intolerance is among the reasons for it. 

Take, as an example, Christmas. The weird idea that there is a “War on Christmas” orchestrated by liberal elites — Starbucks cups in hand — is, on its face, ridiculous, even if it is widely held on the right. Shop clerks saying “Happy Holidays” aren’t causing the de-Christianization of Christmas — they’re effects of it. Roughly half of Americans celebrate Christmas as a cultural, not a religious, holiday: Santa Claus and Christmas trees, not baby Jesus in a manger. So that’s what businesses celebrate. It’s capitalism, not conspiracy.

And long may it flourish!

Unfortunately, even if the war on religion is fictive, the “defense” against it is very real and very harmful. This year alone, 17 states introduced legislation to protect “religious freedom” by exempting not just churches and religious organizations (including bogus ones set up to evade the law) from civil rights laws, domestic violence laws, even the Hippocratic Oath, but also private individuals and for-profit businesses. Already, we’ve seen pediatricians turn children away because their parents are gay, and wife-abusers argue that it’s their religious duty to beat their spouses, and most notoriously that multimillion-dollar corporations like Hobby Lobby can have religious beliefs that permit them to refuse to provide health insurance to their employees on that basis.

Meanwhile, the “war on religion” narrative appears to be gaining ground.

The fining of Christian business men and women for refusing to bake cakes or supply floral decoration for gay weddings makes the “narrative” plausible enough. (See eg. here and here.)

According to data from the Public Religion Research Institute, 61 percent of white evangelicals believe that religious liberty is being threatened today. (Only 37 percent of non-white Christians believe this, suggesting that what’s really happening is an erosion of white Christian hegemony; the “browning of America” goes hand in hand with the de-Christianizing of America.) They believe they have lost the culture war, and even that LGBT people should now pity them.

In other words, “religious liberty” is not merely a tactic: it is a sincerely held belief among the religious right, which, not coincidentally, feeds into the belief that we are living in the End Times — something an astonishing 77 percent of American evangelicals believe.

We shouldn’t think of Kim Davis and her ilk as motivated by hate. Actually, they are motivated by fear, which is based in reality but expressed in fantasy. Christianity is, in a sense, losing the war — but the fighters on the other side aren’t gay activists or ACLU liberals but faceless social forces of secularization, urbanization, and diversification.

There’s not really a villain pulling the strings of social change, but like the God concept itself, mythic thinking creates a personification of evil who is fighting the war on religious liberty, the war on Christmas, the war on Christianity. These malevolent evildoers are like a contemporary Satan: a fictive embodiment of all of the chaotic, complex forces that threaten the stability of religious order.

Leftists really do have “a sincerely held belief” that they are on “the right side of history” – as Obama likes to say he is. History itself, according to Marxist dogma, is a force moving inexorably towards global collectivism. Leftism is itself a religion. (See our much read essay Communism is Secular Christianity, January 14, 2015, listed under Pages in our margin.) How many adherents does it have world-wide? For all we know, they outnumber the 1.6 billion Muslims, and the 2.2 billion Christians.

Jay Michaelson believes that inexorable forces determine the direction of human affairs; that human agency has little or nothing to do with it.

He “mixes truth and fantasy”. Christianity may well be a declining religion. We hope it is. It did much harm in its time, and we cannot see that its fading away is a regrettable loss to humankind. And the fading away of Islam would be an enormous boon. An abandonment of old religious beliefs generally would remove a major cause of conflict. But other than Islam, they no longer pose a serious threat.

The serious threat comes from the Left. The Left is in power in most of the institutions of the West, most notably and dangerously in the media, the academy, and above all the executive branch of government of the United States. The Left, in the person of journalists and educators teach and preach statism and collectivism, and the Obama administration forces its will on the nation by executive order.

They are “pulling the strings of social change”. Many of them may believe – just as Christians and Muslims do – that what they are doing is to achieve good ends. They may not all be malevolent in intention. But they are doing much harm nonetheless, by making war on personal liberty.

Donald Trump is not the sort of steady conservative we hoped would be the Republican front runner for the presidency.

But he does say, loud and clear, one thing after another that urgently needs to be said. (And he is not overly religious,)

So while we cannot help laughing as he destroys Leftist taboos in his swaggering manner, we seriously welcome much of what he says.

We are in agreement with what David Horowitz writes about him at Front Page:

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration until we can figure out why Islamic terrorists have been able to enter our country and devised ways to protect ourselves. This has caused the left and right establishments to dogpile on Trump. Echoing the sentiments of virtually all Democrats and many Republicans, a Washington Post editorial has declared that Trump’s proposal disqualifies him as a candidate because in the Post’s view what he recommends is unconstitutional and therefore un-American. But President Obama has issued executive orders – as it happens orders that sabotage our borders – that he himself has called unconstitutional (“I don’t have the authority to stop deportations”).  Has the Post editorialized that this is un-American and disqualifies him for the presidency? Has it called for Obama to be impeached? Have Democrats ridiculed Obama for his un-American prescriptions?

Consider the nature of the threat. A 2009 “World Opinion” survey by the University of Maryland showed that between 30% and 50% of Muslims in Jordan, Egypt and other Islamic countries approved of the terrorist attacks on America and that only a minority of Muslims “entirely disapproved” of them. ISIS has acknowledged its plans to use refugee programs to infiltrate its terrorists into the United States and other infidel countries. In Minneapolis we have a Somali refugee community many of whose members have returned to Syria to fight for ISIS. Other Muslim immigrants like Major Hassan and Tashfeen Malik have carried out barbaric acts of terror here at home. Today Muslim terrorists are using assault rifles and pipe bombs, but we know they have Sarin gas and other chemical weapons which they might use tomorrow.

The terrorists inexorably arrive along with the other immigrants, no one in authority apparently knowing who’s who. Who, then, in his right mind does not think that Muslim immigration poses a serious security threat to us?

The outrage against Trump should properly have been directed at our president who refuses to identify the enemy as Islamic terrorism, who has opened the door to nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to the Islamic America-haters in Iran, whose policies have created the vacuums that ISIS has filled, and who even after Paris and San Bernardino is determined to bring 100,000 immigrants from Syrian war zones to our unprotected shores. This outrage is missing and it is precisely because it is missing that Trump’s unconstitutional* proposal resonates with so many rightly concerned Americans. When the man in charge of our security is by general consensus out to lunch in regard to fighting the war on Islamic terror, or protecting us at home, a proposal like Trump’s, which at least recognizes the threat, is going to resonate with the public.

In middle of a crisis of national security, the Democratic Party seems to think that climate change and especially gun ownership are greater threats to our survival than the one that comes from hundreds of millions of Muslims who think America should be attacked and who believe the whole world should be put under medieval Islamic law. In the face of this threat, the Democratic Party and its leaders seem to have no problem with the fact that we have more than 350 “Sanctuary Cities” that are dedicated to sabotaging our immigration laws; that we have no southern border and as a result have 179,000 illegal alien criminals and who knows how many terrorists in our country today.

Once again we have Trump to thank for changing the surreal conversation about whether having a border at all is compatible with American values, and forcing people to focus on the dangers we face. Republicans are generally defenders of this country, but not in this controversy over Donald Trump. Would that they would use the same ridicule and outrage over the Democrats’ many betrayals of our country and its citizens through proposals to expose us to our enemies as they do over a proposal to protect us from them. Trump’s idea may be unconstitutional* and unworkable, but it springs from a desire that is honorable and patriotic. The appropriate response would be to propose alternatives that recognize the same dangers and serve the same ends but do so within constitutional limits.

Donald Trump’s great contribution is saying the unsayable; putting things on the table that would otherwise be buried; calling a spade a spade in a time when political correctness has made us unable to discuss things that have to do with our basic national survival.  This is the crux of the issue.  Every time he creates a controversy like this he also tells this country that its emperors, Republican and Democrat, have no clothes. That they prefer propriety over defending the country.  That they are dedicated only to keeping the lid on a cauldron of threat and challenge they have allowed to boil over.

The 2016 election will be a referendum on the defense of this country and its survival. Let’s see who answers the call.

* It would not be unconstitutional to bar Muslims from entering the United States.

The law says:

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

Now for a little Christmas joking, because we want all our readers to have a merry time no matter what they call this day:

We quote Paul Sperry’s article at Investor’s Business Daily, titled Can America Survive Obama’s Pro-Muslim Bias?:

In a new NPR interview, President Obama complains that “strains in the Republican party suggest that somehow I’m different, I’m Muslim, I’m disloyal to the country, which unfortunately is pretty far out there”.

Is it?

While there’s no evidence to suggest Obama is a practicing Muslim, there is plenty to suggest he is disloyal. He not only shares Muslim hatred for America and Israel, but actually sympathizes with the endless anti-Western grievances lodged by Muslim terrorists.

The reason the president won’t engage this enemy is because he sides with it, not because he can’t see it or understand it. It is not a matter of incompetence. It is a matter of bias.

If this sounds like betrayal, that is because it is.

Here is a bill of indictment:

Count 1:In 1995, in his first memoir, Obama shares the “rage” of his Kenyan Muslim grandfather who he claims was tortured by British colonizers, while exalting his Muslim-convert brother Roy, who swore off “the poisoning influences of European culture,” as “the person who made me proudest of all”.

Count 2:In 2004, in a little-noticed preface to his re-released memoir, the newly elected senator implied that America was punished for past wrongs on 9/11, writing that “history returned with a vengeance” on that terrible day.

Count 3:In 2006, in his second memoir, Obama vowed that he “will stand with” Arab and Pakistani Muslims to protect “their sense of security” should their community be implicated in another terror attack on America.

Count 4:In 2009, Obama in his first foreign speech apologized to world Muslims for the War on Terror, inviting banned Muslim Brotherhood leaders to sit on the front row of his Cairo address, while declaring “Islam is not part of the problem” and demanding that Israel give Palestinians “a state of their own”. 

Count 5:That same year, Obama stopped cold a major investigation of terror-supporting Muslim Brotherhood front groups and mosques following the successful prosecution of Brotherhood charities by U.S. attorneys.

Count 6:Then he ordered the FBI and Homeland Security to delete “jihad” from counterterrorism manuals and fire all trainers who linked terrorism to Islam.

Count 7:Obama vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison and bring 9/11 terrorists to America, where they would enjoy full rights, including habeas corpus, in civilian courts.

Count 8:As Obama kicked off a two-day summit on combating generic “violent extremism”, he argued that Muslim terrorists have “legitimate grievances” that must be addressed.

Count 9:He also asserted that “the Muslim world has suffered historical grievances”, and blamed the rash of global terrorism in part on “a history of colonialism” in the Mideast, Africa and South Asia.

Count 10:At the National Prayer Breakfast, Obama told Christians to get off their “high horse” about Muslim terrorism and “remember the terrible deeds in the name of Christ” committed by Crusaders 1,000 years ago.

Count 11: He credited Muslims with “building the very fabric of our nation” and “the core of our democracy”.

Count 12:The president boycotted January’s world march against terrorism in Paris following the slaughter of anti-Islamist cartoonists by two French Algerians, in a shocking move that would have made Obama’s late hero, Algerian mujahedeen Frantz Fanon, proud.

Count 13:Obama agreed to release five Taliban commanders for a POW who he knew was a deserter and who may turn out to be a traitor.

Count 14: Obama removed sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missile program, despite overwhelming evidence by Israeli and U.S. intelligence showing that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons to wipe our closest and most trusted Mideast ally off the map.

Count 15:Obama broke his promise to 9/11 families to release the 28 pages documenting Saudi Arabian and other foreign Muslim sponsorship of the 9/11 attacks.

Count 16: The president insists on calling ISIS “ISIL” — which stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — because it includes “Palestine”, a slap at Israel.

Count 17: Despite his entire security team warning that such Muslim immigrants cannot be screened for terrorist ties and evidence that ISIS has infiltrated their ranks, Obama stubbornly insists on bringing another 10,000 Syrian refugees to the U.S.

Count 18: In the heat of the San Bernardino attacks, as bodies were being removed from the scene, Obama called a high-level security meeting to keep a lid on the Muslim connection.

Count 19: In his prime-time terrorism speech, the president spent half his time warning Americans not to blame Muslims.

Count 20: Obama insists on emptying Gitmo of terrorist prisoners, even after one of his earlier releases re-emerged as a leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Count 21: The Obama regime has invited members of Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood front groups to serve in the Homeland Security and State departments, and meet regularly with the attorney general, as well as the president and his security advisors in the White House.

Obama is hellbent on shuttering the detention camp and is queuing up for release another 17 dangerous al-Qaida terrorists, earlier classified as “forever detainees” due to the high threat they pose to America.

Americans should know that if we are attacked again in a major way in his remaining 13 months in office, Obama “will stand with” Muslims over Americans, meaning that he will continue to back off radical mosques, refuse to connect terrorism to Islam and continue to hold open the floodgates to mass Muslim immigration.

This president, who had Pakistani roommates in college, is more concerned about “their sense of security” than non-Muslims threatened by Muslim terrorism like the massacre carried out by the two Pakistani Muslims who attacked San Bernardino.

What if the enemy of the state is actually the head of state?

The bill of indictment, long and bad as it is, is incomplete. It does not, for instance, include Obama’s instruction to NASA to concentrate on reaching out to Muslims rather than to outer space; nor his close friendship with President Erdogan of Turkey; nor his persistent persecution of Israel; nor his long refusal to allow the assassination of Osama bin Laden and his reluctance in finally permitting it; nor – worst of all –  his fanatical wooing of Iran, in the course of which he has given the regime everything it has demanded, and swept away every impediment to its becoming a nuclear armed power.    

Sperry’s list is more than sufficient, however, to make the case. As we have been saying for years: Yes, the enemy of the state is actually the head of state.

From the annals of the Settled Science, here are just some of the vast number of disaster predictions by Coolists and Warmists none of which came true:

Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada, Professor Gregory of Yale University stated that “another world ice-epoch is due.” He was the American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress and warned that North America would disappear as far south as the Great Lakes, and huge parts of Asia and Europe would be “wiped out”. – Chicago Tribune August 9, 1923

The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to the conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age. – Time Magazine 9/10/1923

After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder. – New York Times, January 30, 1961

Like an outrigger canoe riding before a huge comber, the earth with its inhabitants is caught on the downslope of an immense climatic wave that is plunging us toward another Ice Age. – Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1962

The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. – Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968)

It is now pretty clearly agreed that the CO2 content [in the atmosphere] will rise 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit. This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington, for that matter. – Presidential adviser Daniel Moynihan, 1969 (later Sen. [D] from New York 1976-2000)

In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. – Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)

Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor “… the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” – Newsweek magazine, January 26, 1970.

New Ice Age Coming—It’s Already Getting Colder. Some midsummer day, perhaps not too far in the future, a hard, killing frost will sweep down on the wheat fields of  Saskatchewan, the Dakotas and the Russian steppes – Los Angles Times, Oct 24, 1971

“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” – Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971

Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000. – Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1972

U.N. OFFICIAL PREDICTS DISASTER SAYS GREENHOUSE EFFECT COULD WIPE SOME NATIONS OFF MAP – entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of “eco-refugees”, threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect. – Associated Press, June 30, 1989

Ha! ha! ha!

Increasingly in recent years, European governments, NGOs, universities, and media organizations have been handing over positions of power to Muslim immigrants and their children …

So writes Bruce Bawer, who lives in Norway, in an article at Front Page on Norway’s conquest and colonization by Islam. It is conquest by invitation. Has such a thing ever happened before?

And this is from Breitbart, by Virginia Hale:

Sweden prides itself on being a “humanitarian superpower”, and it displays and polishes its halo via granting asylum, almost no questions asked, to anyone who claims to be from dangerous parts of the world. The country, with a population of eight million, is now taking more than 100,000 refugees per annum and it’s rising 20% year on year.

The country has a zero-tolerance attitude towards any scepticism of the country’s masochistic levels of immigration and politicians constantly denigrate native Swedes and their culture.

Mona Sahlin, a former leader of the currently ruling Social Democrats said she hated anything Swedish and that Swedes were jealous of immigrants because they have “a culture, an identity, a history” and that Swedes don’t, and Sweden’s previous Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said, last December, that Sweden belongs to immigrants, and not to Swedes.

Well, in less than 10 years, that will be literally true.

Multicultural Sweden is very different from the rainbow paradise Sweden likes to pretend, but the debate on immigration is so toxic that to criticise or question any aspect of it is toattract the attention of the violent “anti-fascist” thugs AFA and the self-proclaimed “Swedish Stasi”, Researchgruppen.

Sweden’s insanely thuggish “anti-fascist” organisations carry out their punishments of supposed “intolerant” and “hateful” people – basically anyone who questions Sweden’s current immigration policies, and members of the Sweden Democrats party which is just so obscenely fascist and offensive its immigration policy is to suggest it be brought in line with the rest of Scandinavia.

After AFA invaded an SD candidate’s home, beat him and carved a swastika on his forehead with a knife, ex-Prime Minister Reinfeldt said SD supporters “should not be surprised when things like this happen” because of their politics.

What is particularly bizarre is that even SD supporters and critics of Sweden’s immigration policy who are not ethnic Swedes are not immune to this kind of brutality either. Sweden Report, a blog by an American writer living in Sweden, gave an example of  this ludicrosity – that “anti-fascists” beat Nima Gholam Ali Pour, a politician of foreign descent, because of his membership of the Sweden Democrats party. He describes the incongruous scene:

Let’s just pause there for a second and ponder a very simple scene: A group of masked young white Swedes are kicking a dark-skinned man lying on the ground. But this is not a hate crime. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The masked white Swedes are doing a good and noble thing for the antifascist cause, because the dark-skinned man on the ground is a contemptible racist.

Native Swedes tend to live in areas away from areas inhabited by migrants and so are removed from the fact that their immigration policies are actually harming the people – genuine asylum seekers fleeing persecution in the Middle East – they say they’re wanting to help.

Conservative newspaper Svenska Dagbladet carried a guest column by Swedish-Assyrian journalist Nuro Kino, who has won awards for his reporting on human rights issues highlighting the plight of minorities in Iraq and Syria. In his article he describes a trip to a Syrian man’s hairdressing salon where the hairdresser and other men in the salon, Christian Syrians and Assyrians who had fled religious persecution, voice passionate opposition to the Swedes’ policy of giving refugees purporting to be from Syria automatic permanent residency.

The men brandish an iPhone playing a video of the funeral of a religious leader, a black Islamic flag being flown by a man in the procession who vows, “We will do our utmost to fulfil your dream of an Islamic State!” and express horror that this is happening in Sweden.

One of the men recounts his cousin bumped into the al-Nusra member who killed his brother, in a nightclub in Sweden.  One asks “What’s with the Swedes? Why does not the government do anything? Why are these people not in jail? Will they really get to threaten us and get away with it? Anyone wishing for an Islamist state in Sweden will also demand that we all bow down to Islam or die, whether you are a Muslim who refuses to follow the extremists, Christian or atheist. That’s what we have fled!”

Another unfortunate incident, reported by Swedish daily newspaper Borås Tidning and translated by blogger Swedish Surveyor, took place in a Swedish language school for immigrants at the end of last month. Emergency services had to be called because a Muslim student told students to be quiet because “Allah forbids us from laughing.” Having given this glimpse of the sort of diversity he was going to be enriching the country with he proceeded to point at a woman and tell her, “You are a Christian, that is not good. Here everyone shall be Muslim and wear a veil.” … It emerged that the student had behaved in this way for some time, and though he was investigated by police and Sweden has incredibly stringent “hate crime” laws, the politically correct Swedish police decided that his actions did not constitute a crime.

The Swedes’ ever universalist outlook means they have kidded themselves to think they can allow huge swathes of people from war-torn countries to live in Sweden, indiscriminately, and that people will come to enjoy the illusory paradise of a multicultural society rather than bringing their wars and poverty to Sweden with them.

Their fear of being accused of Islamophobia has resulted in a system in which extreme behavior goes unchallenged, which has led to their job agency’s “assimilation guides” being found to be recruiting for ISIS, and their multicultural centre’s “expert on Islamophobia”, an Islamic convert, going on to defect to the Islamic State.

It may not be absurd to ask: how long will it be before ISIS takes over the government of Sweden? Of Norway? Of Western Europe? …

Iran is free to go. Free, that is, to become a nuclear power.

Caroline Glick writes at Front Page:

Given the Democrats’ allegiance to Obama’s disastrous policies, the only hope for a restoration of American leadership is that a Republican wins the next election. But if Republicans nominate a candidate who fails to reconcile with the realities of the world as it is, then the chance for a reassertion of American leadership will diminish significantly.

To understand just how high the stakes are, you need to look no further than two events that occurred just before the Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate.

On Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency voted to close its investigation of Iran’s nuclear program. As far as the UN’s nuclear watchdog is concerned, Iran is good to go.

The move is a scandal. Its consequences will be disastrous.

The IAEA acknowledges that Iran continued to advance its illicit military nuclear program at least until 2009. Tehran refuses to divulge its nuclear activities to IAEA investigators as it is required to do under binding UN Security Council resolutions.

Iran refuses to allow IAEA inspectors access to its illicit nuclear sites. As a consequence, the IAEA lacks a clear understanding of what Iran’s nuclear status is today and therefore has no capacity to prevent it from maintaining or expanding its nuclear capabilities.

This means that the inspection regime Iran supposedly accepted under Obama’s nuclear deal is worthless.

The IAEA also accepts that since Iran concluded its nuclear accord with the world powers, it has conducted two tests of ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons, despite the fact that it is barred from doing so under binding Security Council resolutions.

But really, who cares? Certainly the Obama administration doesn’t. The sighs of relief emanating from the White House and the State Department after the IAEA decision were audible from Jerusalem to Tehran.

The IAEA’s decision has two direct consequences.

First, as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Wednesday, it paves the way for the cancellation of the UN’s economic sanctions against Iran within the month.

Second, with the IAEA’s decision, the last obstacle impeding Iran’s completion of its nuclear weapons program has been removed. Inspections are a thing of the past. Iran is in the clear.

As Iran struts across the nuclear finish line, the Sunni jihadists are closing their ranks.

Hours after the IAEA vote, Turkey and Qatar announced that Turkey is setting up a permanent military base in the Persian Gulf emirate for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Their announcement indicates that the informal partnership between Turkey and Qatar on the one side, and Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic State on the other hand …  is now becoming a more formal alliance.

Just as the Obama administration has no problem with Iran going nuclear, so it has no problem with this new jihadist alliance. …

In other words, with the US’s blessing, the forces of both Shi’ite and Sunni jihad are on the march.

On the warpath, that is. But will the war be between Sunnis and Sunnis, and Sunnis and Shi’ites, or will it be a much wider conflagration?

Peter Apps, a Reuters defense correspondent and Executive Director of The Project for Study of the 21st Century, writes at Newsweek:

On Sunday, Nov. 28, Californians watched with bemusement and in some cases alarm as a bright light moved across the sky. It wasn’t a UFO. It was a U.S. Navy Trident ballistic missile.

It was, of course, just a test — the first of two in three days. They coincided with tough talk from U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, who earlier that month had criticized Russia for engaging in “challenging activities” at sea and air, in space and cyberspace. Days earlier, he had been in the South China Sea aboard an aircraft carrier, sending a similarly robust message to China about its actions in the disputed region. …

The Project for Study of the 21st. Century recently published its survey of major conflict risk. Over six months, we polled 50 national security experts on the risk of a variety of potential wars.

The results make interesting reading. The most striking thing, though, is not the numbers themselves — it is the fact that there now seem to be multiple potential routes to a variety of potentially devastating state-on-state wars.

Our poll showed the experts — who ranged from current and former military officials to international relations professors and insurance and risk specialists — putting a 6.8 percent chance on a major nuclear war in the next 20 years killing more people than World War Two. That conflict killed roughly 80,000,000 at upper estimates. …

A majority – 60% –  of the respondents believe that “the risk of nuclear had risen over the last decade” and 52% “expected it to rise further in the decade to come”.

The increasing confrontations with China and Russia have, of course, become increasingly obvious. Of our respondents, 80 percent said they expected a further rise in the kind of “ambiguous” or “asymmetric” conflict between major states. …

The world could see bloodshed on a previously unimaginable level. …

Despite this year’s nuclear deal, our experts saw a 27 percent chance Iran would end up in a shooting war with its enemies, be that the United States, Israel, the Gulf States or all. On average, they saw a 6 percent chance of such a war including at least one nuclear detonation.

At least one? Wouldn’t there be a retaliation? Could there possibly be fewer than two? And then probably many more?

Overall, our panel estimated the risk of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization fighting Russia in at least a limited military confrontation at 22 percent. That compared to only a 17 percent chance of U.S. and Chinese forces fighting (as well as a slightly higher 19 percent chance of Japan and China doing the same). …

After a generation in which major European war was simply never thought possible, it’s worth remembering the continent is still home to more than half the world’s nuclear weapons.

And they are all likely to fall into the hands of a Muslim majority around the middle of this century.

The experts, hampered by the usual myopia of experts, do not apparently take that into account:

And yet, amid such apocalyptic talk, our survey shows that all of these conflicts remain on balance unlikely …

Unlikely? Why do they say that?

At one of our events earlier this year, Harvard geopolitics expert Professor Joseph Nye pointed out that nuclear weapons have so far acted to avert war by functioning as a brutally effective “crystal ball”. What their existence meant, he said, was that national leaders knew what the consequences of going over the edge would be — complete and utter destruction and a war which everyone would lose.

Had the leaders of Europe experienced such clarity before World War One, he suggested, they could well have stepped back from the brink. And sure enough, it’s true that we have avoided such conflicts in the era of “mutually assured destruction”.

The dark-minded mullahs who rule Iran don’t care a fig about “mutually assured destruction”. They say that the state of Israel can be destroyed with one nuke, and even if Iran lost millions in a counter-attack, Iran would still survive as a large and powerful nation.

And, they believe, the Iranian dead would all be martyrs who’d dwell in paradise forever. And there they long to go.

For all their warnings and nice academic calculations in percentage terms of the chances of our civilization being destroyed, The Project for Study of the 21st Century experts – though made nervous by something they gingerly sniff in the wind – are, in our view, far too optimistic.

And out of touch.

Caroline Glock is closer to making the prediction that needs to be spoken. But even she stops short of actually making it.

We will make it:

Unless “a Republican wins the next election” who  does not fail “to reconcile with the realities of the world as it is”, Iran will use its nukes.

“Apocalyptic” destruction will follow.

And that will be Obama’s legacy.