See Europe now.

Please DO NOT consider donating …

(Hat-tip Chauncey Tinker)

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine:

Wikileaks has released transcripts of three speeches that Hillary Clinton gave for Goldman Sachs in 2013. These were events hosted by Goldman, presumably for clients – e.g., the “Builders and Innovators Summit”.  You can download the transcripts here. Hillary reportedly was paid $225,000 apiece. …

The first thing that struck him about the Goldman speeches was –

How utterly pedestrian they are. By 2013, Mrs. Clinton had served eight years in the Senate and four as Secretary of State, yet she never has an original observation or an insight worth paying for.Everything in them, you have heard 50 times before. They could have been delivered by anyone who has never held public office, but who spends Sunday mornings studying the New York Times. … I think her speeches reflect her limited ability.

Oh, yes! They are utterly pedestrian, they do reflect her limited ability – and her dull mind.

Trump is not eloquent. He distinctly lacks the gift of oratory. But what he is saying is worth listening to:

We quote from Breitbart:

“Our Independence Day is at hand, and it arrives finally on November 8,” Trump told voters.

Our great civilization, here in America and across the civilized world, has come upon a moment of reckoning. We’ve seen it in the United Kingdom, where they voted to liberate themselves from global government and global trade deal, and global immigration deals that have destroyed their sovereignty and have destroyed many of those nations.

But, the central base of world political power is right here in America, and it is our corrupt political establishment that is the greatest power behind the efforts at radical globalization and the disenfranchisement of working people. Their financial resources are virtually unlimited, their political resources are unlimited, their media resources are unmatched, and most importantly, the depth of their immorality is absolutely unlimited.

Trump highlighted the now well-documented collusion between the global special interests, corporate media, and Hillary Clinton who champions policies to cede “U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends. and her donors”.

Trump slammed what he described as our “illusion of democracy”– explaining how our political process is controlled “by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system”.

Trump explained that the “Clinton machine”, working through its arm in the corporate media, has declared “war” not just against him, but against the American people, who want to reclaim their government to represent their needs and interests, rather than simply representing the desires of corporate donors and transnational elites. Trump said:

Let’s be clear on one thing. The corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism. They’re a political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda, and the agenda is not for you, it’s for themselves.

And their agenda is to elect crooked Hillary Clinton at any cost, at any price, no matter how many lives they destroy. For them it’s a war, and for them nothing at all is out of bounds. This is a struggle for the survival of our nation, believe me. And this will be our last chance to save it on November 8, remember that.

The only thing Hillary Clinton has going for herself is the press. Without the press, she is absolutely zero. 

The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration, and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry … The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure.

We’ve seen this first hand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors …

With their control over our government at stake, with trillions of dollars on the line, the Clinton machine is determined to achieve the destruction of our campaign… They knew they would throw every lie they could at me and my family and my loved ones. They knew they would stop at nothing to try to stop me. But I never knew how bad it would be. I never knew it would be this vile, that it would be this bad, that it would be this vicious …

I will not lie to you. These false attacks are absolutely hurtful. To be lied about, to be slandered, to be smeared so publicly, and before your family that you love, is very painful. What is going on is egregious beyond any words … It’s reprehensible beyond description, it’s totally corrupt.

But, I also know that it’s not about me. It’s about all of you and it’s about our country. I know that. I fully understand that. That’s why I got involved. It’s about all of us together as a country. It’s a movement the likes of which we have never in history in this country seen before. Never in history.

I take all of these slings and arrows gladly for you. I take them for our movement so that we can have our country back. …

The corrupt political establishment is a machine … I knew these false attacks would come. I knew this day would arrive; it was only a question of when. And I knew the American people would rise above it and vote for the future they deserve.

The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine is you. The only force strong enough to save our country is us. The only people brave enough to vote out this corrupt establishment is you, the American people. 

This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy, but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged. This is reality, you know it, they know it, I know it, and pretty much the whole world knows it.

The establishment and their media enablers will control this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed. 

They will attack you, they will slander you, they will seek to destroy your career and your family, they will seek to destroy everything about you, including your reputation. They will lie, lie, lie, and then again they will do worse than that, they will do whatever is necessary … 

This is our moment of reckoning as a society and as a civilization itself. I didn’t need to do this, folks, believe me — believe me. I built a great company and I had a wonderful life. I could have enjoyed the fruits and benefits of years of successful business deals and businesses for myself and my family. Instead of going through this absolute horror show of lies, deceptions, malicious attacks — who would have thought? I’m doing it because this country has given me so much, and I feel so strongly that it’s my turn to give back to the country that I love … 

This election is about every man, woman and child in our country who deserves to live in safety, prosperity, and peace … We will rise above the lies, the smears, the ludicrous slanders from ludicrous and very, very dishonest reporters. 

We will vote for the country we want. We will vote for the future we want. We will vote for the politics we want, and we will vote to put this corrupt government cartel out of business and out of business immediately. …  

They’ve betrayed our workers, they’ve betrayed our borders and, most of all, they’ve betrayed our freedoms. We will save our sovereign rights as a nation. …

Our Independence Day is at hand, and it arrives finally on November 8.

Theoretically at least, Hillary Clinton could still be prosecuted.

If corrupt crooked Hillary fails to become president, she and her rapist husband will have no power base. No one will have a reason to bribe them any more. And President Trump could have her crimes re-investigated.

Ah, the glittering vision of justice that depends on a Trump victory!

In this time of painful stress and deep dread leading up to the most important US presidential election ever, the great actor Jon Voight speaks eloquently to us and for us. (We politely overlook his appeal to “God”.)

*

Why was Obama, the Islam-loving communist, twice voted into the presidency of the capitalist, Islam-attacked, United States?

Why do most Americans “think” that Obama is doing a good job – though they know the economy is bad, millions are unemployed, businesses are overburdened with regulations, travelers are manhandled and humiliated at airports, an American ambassador was killed abroad with impunity, the Taliban is back in business in Afghanistan, the Middle East is in flames since Obama assisted the displacement of allied rulers with Islamic fundamentalists … and so on and on?

Why do millions of Americans “think” that economic equality is morally desirable?

Why are tens of millions content to live on state support without attempting to improve their standard of living by their own efforts?

Why do millions of university students in America admire intellectuals who hate America, such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and make an icon out of the sadistic mass-murderer Che Guevara?

Why? Because they’ve been told to. They’ve been told that good people do and “think” these things. They want to be good. They believe what they’ve been taught.

The same answer applies to: Why Muslim women believe they must put up with being sexually mutilated and enslaved to men. Why multitudes the world over believe that there was a nation called Palestinians who were driven off their land by aggressive usurping Jews. Why Christians believe that a man who once lived and died lives on as one part of a three-part god. Why Muslims and Christians imagine that when you are dead you are still alive in another place. Why Jews believe that their benign and omnipotent God has some unknowable but just purpose in having six million of them enslaved, starved, tortured and murdered by Nazis.

They believe these things because they were taught them. All this was drummed into them. They were raised to know that that is how it ought to be. 

Few if any ideas are easy to spread. To get an idea accepted by large numbers of people takes patience, persistence, conviction, tireless energy on the part of those who want to spread it. The idea need not make good sense, be reasonable, come with proofs that it will work as its advocates say it will. It doesn’t even have to appeal strongly to the emotions. It just needs to become what “everybody” accepts.

If you want your idea to prevail over others, this is what it takes. First the conviction that it is right and everyone should know it. Next, a decision to spread it. Then energy, persistence, patience – and eventually force.

What made Christianity catch on? It wasn’t the life-style – poor, austere, hard, humble. Even the promise of eternal life was not a reliable recommendation as anyone’s eternity could as easily be endless agony as endless bliss (it was and is a 50-50 tossup). The theology was so hard to make sense of that the Church itself to this day has not settled it. And the morality it demanded was against human nature. So what made it succeed? Energy, persistence, patience, indoctrination, force.

See how long it took. From the time St Paul invented “Jesus Christ” to the time the emperor of Rome (Constantine) accepted the new god and the doctrines that had accreted to him, thus making it fashionable to be Christian (just a few decades before force was applied and it became compulsory), nearly three hundred years had passed. Three hundred years of persistent, patient, energetic proselytizing. Even then, it was not securely implanted in the minds of the subjects. One Emperor – Julian – came along and actually tried to reverse the trend by suppressing Christianity and re-instating paganism. He didn’t have enough time. He died in battle, his successors went back to favoring Christianity, and the Emperor Theodosius decreed that Christianity was to be the religion of the state. With him the final phase of force arrived.

Marxist Communism took less time to get a real grip on the minds of multitudes. Means of communications had speeded up considerably between the 4^th and the 19^th centuries, but still it took half a century (if one arbitrarily dates it from the first publication of Marx’s Das Kapital in 1867 to the success of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917). And still the same method had to be employed: energetic, patient, persistent proselytizing. Much repetition was required. The fever of enthusiasm had to be caught by two generations of intellectuals before the infection became a pandemic. Then came force. 

The creed must become the norm. So pervasive must the doctrine be that anybody who does not subscribe to it wholeheartedly will appear egregious; an oddball, a rebel, a danger to everyone else and even to himself. The orthodoxy must be accepted without question as good, so anyone who opposes it is ipso facto a bad person.

By the late 20^th century communications had become even faster, so the New Left, rising in 1968, could achieve the peaks of power in Europe in less than thirty years, and  in America in forty years. It started as a weak revolutionary movement which brought nothing good with it to Western Europe and America, but much that was bad: recreational drugs, AIDS, and terrorism as self-expression. New Leftists complained that they had too much freedom, too much choice, that tolerance of their politics was repressive. And this irrational case was widely accepted, even while, on the other side of the iron curtain, a young man burnt himself to death to protest against the lack of freedom, choice, and tolerance.

The New Left movement was ignorant, blind, puerile, unreasonable, sadistic – yet it became, it has become, the prevailing belief-system of the greater part of the Western world, and at present in almost all “free” countries the standard ideology (or religion) of the state, no matter what political party is in power. How?

The plan was made. The plan was put into execution. Gramsci supplied the phrase for the overall strategy: “The Long March through the Institutions”.   It wasn’t enough that the New Leftists should protest, should threaten and carry out violent attacks, should shout and write and display their slogans. They must take over the institutions of power, everyone of them: the smallest citizens’ groupings – such as library committees – were not too small. But none were too big. Town councils had to be infiltrated and eventually dominated; then newspapers, radio and TV channels; boards of education very importantly; the schools, the universities; the civil service; the law courts; a major political party; then the country’s legislative body, and eventually the pinnacles of power, prime ministerships, presidencies. Police forces and the military were formidable challenges. The tactic was first to discredit them and pressure them from outside by means of public opinion guided by the converted press; then to infiltrate them; finally bend them from within to conform to the doctrine and advance the cause.

Meanwhile books, films, articles, lessons, lectures, systems of reward, prizes must all promote the cause. It took decades, but it succeeded. Even in America now there have been at least two generations raised on New Left doctrine through schools, universities, books, films, the press, and TV.

How otherwise could the free Western world, whose policies and armies opposed the oppressing, enslaving Communist Eastern world, have been successfully converted to the very doctrine that oppressed, enslaved, tortured and mass murdered? It didn’t take reason. It didn’t take persuasion. The idea was no more innately and manifestly true and good than the idea of Christianity. But as in the case of spreading Christianity, it took conviction, decision, planning, energy, persistence, repetition, and finally force.

Only Leftist doctrine – government control of the economy, government provision of welfare, confiscatory and punitive taxation – is politically correct now in America. Collectivist thinking is the norm. Good people vote left. (When, in 2008, a Californian woman came upon a stall set up on a main street to canvass votes for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain, she called the police, and was astonished to learn that to solicit public support for the anti-collectivist Republican Party was not illegal.) Again, as with Christianity, the allegiance to the doctrine has little or nothing to do with its ideas. Most adherents could not explain what the ideas are. But they know that good people find them good, that good people vote for them. And that is all they need to know. Who doesn’t want to think of himself as a good person?

But the question of how did this become the case has not been fully answered. There is another aspect to the story. In order for one doctrine to succeed, it is necessary for other, counter doctrines to fail. If the ancient world had had enough confidence in paganism, enough enthusiasm for it, hadn’t taken it for granted, hadn’t become bored with it, hadn’t ignored the Christian missionaries with their crazy talk, could the weird, obscure, muddled, sorrowful, other-worldly new religion of Christianity have prevailed?

And the success of Leftism now – would it have happened if the conservative Right had been paying attention? Remember that old saying that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance”? Well, the Right was not being vigilant. It didn’t bother to argue against political correctness. It disregarded the cynical shenanigans going on in the United Nations as if it were nothing but a zoo housing many clamorous beasts who were safely confined and could in no way threaten American life, liberty or happiness. If it was made to feel now and then the bullying, deceitful, sly, sometimes violent tactics of the Left, it shrugged them off. Conservatives went on being civil and preferring honesty when the world’s mood had changed to favoring lies and abuse. They put their confidence in the fact that America had been founded as the political embodiment of the idea of personal freedom; had demonstrated to the world – forever, they believed – that freedom brought prosperity and might and stunning innovation. They assumed that the rightness of individual liberty, the capitalist system, and government by the people had been established forever. So strong and free a country could afford to be tolerant. Let some wild, immature, misguided persons preach despotism (Communism, Socialism, Progressivism, Greenism, whatever), the system was strong enough to be hospitable to alien ideas, and to allow dissent or even rebellion. Tested, it would prove itself inviolable. It could not only withstand opposition, it could absorb it and dissolve it. No special effort was required. American history was on the side of those who would defend freedom and the constitution. The separation of powers would protect them. The free press would dilute propaganda. Open enquiry in the academies would ensure that all points of view were argued and the most rational, the most humane, would persuade serious scholars. But they were wrong.

In their complacency, conservatives did not even notice the Long March. They could not mark its stations of success. Even now there are deluded Republicans who have not absorbed the fact that most Americans like collectivism; that they don’t object to electoral fraud; that they accept a failing economy; that many would rather live on government handouts than become rich; that being rich has become a morally bad thing; that it’s okay for foreign powers to develop weapons that can kill vast numbers of Americans; that the press does not report what is happening in the world but only what it wants to happen; that courts of law are willing to prefer foreign law to the Constitution; that it doesn’t matter if American representatives abroad are attacked and murdered; that freedom has become a term worthy only of contempt; that American history is a trail of shame; that a cruel religion is being allowed to seep through the body politic, and is protected and advanced by the government itself.

But now millions of conservatives are waking up and are asking, how did this happen? It happened because people patiently, energetically, persistently planned it and made it happen.

What can we do about it, they ask themselves and each other.

What they have to do about it is change the minds of the people. First they must be sure that they want the free republic the founders established; that they want to maintain free markets; that they don’t want a welfare state; that they do want to preserve national defenses; that they want indoctrination in the schools to stop; that they want to forbid the application of foreign law; that they do not want to go on funding an institution – the UN – that consistently works against their interests. Then they must decide that their political philosophy is right, uniquely right, and must be implemented at any and all costs. Then they must start teaching it. With energy, persistence, patience and fiery enthusiasm. It will take time. But that is the only way. Teach, preach, argue, use every method that works. Give up the idea that it’s better to be gentlemanly than to sink to using the methods of the opposition; that if you do as they do you will have betrayed the very values that you are fighting for. They have made the fight low and dirty. Get down in the dirt and fight it.

How badly does the conservative right want to win power in America? How important is it to them that they should?

If it is important, tell the voters, tell the children that the free market is the only means of creating general prosperity, and why. Tell them that central planning of an economy cannot work, and why. Tell them why competition is good for everyone, producers and consumers alike.

Tell them what profit is and why it is essential for ensuring abundance.

Tell them that only where people are free can there be discovery and innovation, improvement in everyone’s daily life, better technology, the advance of civilization. Explain why. Show them the proofs of history.

Tell them the truth about life in the Third World. Not politically correct sentimental drivel, but the actual awful facts about life in most other countries.

Tell them why impartial judgment is the only means to justice; why all sane adult citizens must be treated equally by the law; why people must be judged by their actions, not their intentions or feelings.

Tell them why government should be kept small and its powers limited. Tell them what the essential tasks of government are: protection of the nation, of the individual, of liberty, of the rule of law itself. And why governments should not be allowed more power and money than it needs to fulfill its few essential functions.

Shout down the shouters. Tell Muslims what is wrong with their creed and why American secularism is better. Don’t allow them to build a protective wall around themselves to shut out criticism of their absurd and savage beliefs.

Tolerate only the tolerant and tolerable.

It will take time. Start now. Stop short of force. But tell them.

That is a statement of fact. Russia IS preparing for war with the United States.  

If Putin wants war – and it seems that he does – this is the time for him to start it.

Europe without its own defense, a demoralized NATO, a feckless president of the US to be possibly followed by an incompetent woman, and an American public distracted by the invention of new pronouns – what has he to fear?

We quote from Western Journalism (making use of information from the Daily Mail here):

A new order from Russian leader Vladimir Putin has stirred fears across the globe that Russia is preparing for a massive conflict.

Russia has ordered all government officials to fly home any relatives living abroad, including college students regardless of any impact this has on their studies. “This is all part of the package of measures to prepare elites to some ‘big war’, ” said Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky.

“It’s a fallacy to think that this is like the Cold War. The current times are different and more dangerous,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said of the rising tensions between Russia and the West.

According to the Russian-language site Znak.com, administration staff, regional administrators, lawmakers of all levels and employees of public corporations are covered by the order. They are warned that their chances for promotion depend upon their compliance.

The action comes in the context of many troubling developments. Putin recently cancelled a planned Oct. 19 visit to France, which has denounced Russia’s role in the Syrian civil war. Further, the U.S. recently broke off talks with Russia regarding finding a diplomatic solution to the Syrian crisis. Cancelling a visit so close to its date is a “serious step… reminiscent of the Cold War,” said Russian foreign policy analyst Fyodor Lukyanov. “This is part of the broader escalation in the tensions between Russia and the West, and Russia and NATO,” he said.

Recent Russian saber-rattling has included Russia’s action on Saturday to put nuclear-capable missiles in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.  …

Russia recently … held civil defense drills that included 40 million citizens. … [And] bunkers capable of holding all of Moscow’s 12 million residents have been constructed to protect citizens in the event of a nuclear attack.

The Free Thought Project reports:

Amid collapsed diplomatic efforts over Syria and increasing tensions with the United States, the Russian government is beginning emergency response exercises [this week] that will include the participation of thousands of government officials and many millions of citizens who will respond to a mock nuclear attack or other large-scale catastrophe.

The four-day drill will reportedly include 200,000 rescue professionals, tens of thousands of emergency vehicles, and an estimated 40 million civilians from around the country.

“Our priority during the drill is to train evacuation of the civilian population from potentially-risky areas,” Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov, who oversees all civil defense in Russia, told the Interfax news agency. “The main goal of the drill is to practice organization of management during civil defense events and emergency and fire management, to check preparedness of management bodies and forces of civil defense on all levels to respond to natural and man-made disasters and to take civil defense measures.”

The exercise, versions of which have been held in the country since 2012, take place following an announcement by Russia that it will pull out of a long-term plutonium disposal agreement if the U.S. and its NATO allies do not reverse a recent military build-up in eastern Europe and the Baltic countries.

The emergency drills also comes on the heels of the announcement by the U.S. State Department on Monday it was severing diplomatic communications with Russia over the deteriorating situation in Syria following the collapse of a cease-fire agreement and an intensifying assault by Syrian and Russian armed forces against the rebel-held city of Aleppo.

“The United States is suspending its participation in bilateral channels with Russia that were established to sustain the cessation of hostilities,” announced State Department spokesperson John Kirby on Monday. Kirby said it was “not a decision that was taken lightly” as he blamed Russia for failing to “live up to its own commitments” on the joint effort.

As the U.S. and Russian officials traded blame, outside critics of the White House called the suspension of diplomatic channels by the U.S. troubling.

James Carden, writing for The Nation, said the “collapse of talks takes the United States one step closer to an unnecessarily deadly ‘military solution’ to the Syria crisis” as he called it the “most dangerous development in a New Cold War”. Such a development deserves fierce rebuke, Carden indicated, especially when it comes amid growing calls among influential members of the national security apparatus to impose a “no-fly zone” in Syria as a way to counter Russian and Syrian targeting of jihadist rebel forces aligned against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“A military solution, and facile promises of easy answers like the imposition of no-fly and/or safe zones (which are neither easy nor answers) is not the way forward,” warned Carden. “Obama and his advisers have made a potentially grave error in cutting off talks with the Russians, and even a cursory glance back through the history of recent American military interventions should steer them back to, not away from, the negotiating table.”

In an analysis published Monday under the title, Do We Really Want Nuclear War with Russia?, veteran journalist Robert Parry openly condemned the Obama administration’s foreign policy position vis-a-vis Russia and Syria.

According to Parry, a “propaganda war against Russia” in the U.S. and western mainstream press “is spinning out of control, rolling ever faster downhill with a dangerous momentum that threatens to drive the world into a nuclear showdown.” Though he acknowledges the Syria-Russia situation is deeply complex, Parry argues that a misinformation campaign is putting the United States on a worrisome, yet familiar, path:

This propaganda apparatus now has so many specialized features that you get supposedly “progressive” and “anti-war” organizations promoting a major U.S. invasion of Syria under the guise of sweet-sounding policies like “no-fly zones” and “safe zones,” the same euphemisms that were used as the gateway to bloody “regime change” wars in Iraq and Libya.

There exists what intelligence veterans call a Mighty Wurlitzer, an organ with so many keys and pedals that it’s hard to know where all the sounds come from that make up the powerful harmony, all building to the same crescendo. But that crescendo may now be war with nuclear-armed Russia, which finds in all this demonizing the prelude to either a destabilization campaign aimed at “regime change” in Moscow or outright war.

Yet, the West can’t seem to muster the sanity or the honesty to begin toning down or even showing skepticism toward the escalating charges aimed at Russia. We saw similar patterns in the run-up to war in Iraq in 2002-2003 and in justifying the ouster, torture and murder of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Western propaganda also has enveloped the conflict in Syria to such an extent that the American people don’t understand that the U.S. government and its regional “allies” have been supporting and arming jihadist groups fighting under the command of Al Qaeda and even the Islamic State. The propaganda has focused on demonizing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while downplaying or ignoring the real nature of the “moderate” opposition.

Carden also summoned Iraq and Libya as cautionary tales for the Obama administration, but said the stakes are perhaps even more elevated given the numerous military interests now operating inside Syria. Unlike Iraq and Libya, he explained, “both the Russians and Iranians have personnel on the ground in Syria, while the Russian and the Syrian Arab Air Forces are executing an air campaign over rebel-held (or more accurately, jihadi-held) east Aleppo. The mainstream media continue to gloss over the rather salient fact that civilians who are trying to flee the Russian-Syrian bombardment are often blocked from doing so by US and Gulf State funded ‘rebels’.”

Also raising concerns, a group of veteran officials from the U.S. intelligence community on Monday issued an open memo to President Obama warning him against the continued erosion of U.S.-Russian relations. As opposed to cutting ties, the former intelligence officers called on Obama to increase cooperation by holding direct one-on-one talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin as a way to avert deeper divisions and a more protracted war inside Syria.

“We strongly recommend that you invite President Putin to meet with you in a mutually convenient place,” the memo asserts, “in order to try to sort things out and prevent still worse for the people of Syria.”

It remains unclear as of this writing whether or not Obama received, or has read, the memo’s warning.

It remains unclear whether Obama has any understanding at all of what is happening in the Middle East, or cares.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize soon after he became (absurdly!) president of the United States – for no achievement whatsoever. Perhaps he is earning it now by not paying any attention to the loud sound of Russia’s saber-rattling.

Is Putin to be taken seriously?

If so, where is the Western leader who knows it and will act?

Is there any precedent in history for this?

Has any other head of state ever done what President Obama is doing to help empower an enemy?

Far from preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power, as he and Hillary Clinton glibly claim to the nation, Obama goes to extreme lengths to make sure that Iran WILL BE ARMED WITH NUCLEAR WARHEADS AND THE MISSILES TO DELIVER THEM. 

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

As another part of the secret ransom deal with Iran, [Obama]  lifted UN sanctions on Bank Sepah … [which is] owned and operated by Islamic terrorists.

Bank Sepah is an IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] bank. The IRGC, despite Obama’s denials, is an Islamic terror group with American blood on its hands. It is to Shiite Islam what ISIS is to Sunni Islam. And even the Democrats know it. …

[And it ]  had been sanctioned for something bigger than terrorism … . It had helped Iran buy ballistic missile technology from North Korea.

Iran’s nuclear weapons program would only be halfway complete if it gets the bomb. It also needs missiles to be able to strike Israel, Europe and eventually America. That’s where North Korea and Bank Sepah come in. Bank Sepah helps keep Iran’s ballistic missile industry viable. By delisting it, Obama aided Iran’s ballistic missile program just as he had earlier aided its nuclear program.

Obama’s holistic approach to the Iranian bomb is to help the terror state assemble the physical components it needs to become a nuclear power. …

[He has claimed that] “every pathway to a nuclear weapon is now closed off.” … [But]  under his deal, in 13 years Iran’s breakout time will, “have shrunk almost down to zero”. …

[A] secret document revealed earlier this year by the AP showed that Iran would be able to get its uranium enrichment in gear after 11 years and more than double its enrichment rate. What happens by the thirteenth year? Then Iran gets a blank check on centrifuges … [and] breakout time to the bomb drops from a year to six months. Or even less. Until it hits zero.

But Ernest Moniz, Obama’s sniveling Secretary of Energy, assured the AP that it wouldn’t be a problem because Iran would only be allowed to store 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium.

He lied. …

Obama wanted to lift sanctions on Iran. But Iran was not in compliance with even his mostly worthless agreement. So Obama decided that it was time to help the terror state fake it.

Iran was only allowed to keep 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium. Obama agreed to upgrade that amount to “unknown quantities”. How much is an “unknown quantity”? Like the rest of Iran’s nuclear program, we don’t know. Low-enriched uranium, even in unknown quantities, doesn’t sound that scary. Except that according to a former U.N. weapons inspector,it can be used to produce highly enriched uranium. And that’s how you go from zero to a mushroom cloud over your city.

And then there are the large hot cells that Iran was allowed to keep running.

Secretary of Energy Moniz didn’t just lie to the AP. Lying to the media is practically an Obama indoor sport. He told the same lie in his testimony to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee. Senators were assured that Iran would be allowed to keep “only 300 kilograms of low (3.67 percent) enriched uranium hexafluoride, and will not exceed this level for fifteen years”.

Iran didn’t have to wait 15 years to exceed that amount. Or even 15 minutes. Obama gave them a pass on it right out of the gate.

But Moniz wasn’t a rogue liar. He was telling the lie that he had been told to tell. …

Obama has lied about the Iran deal from the very beginning. And that’s not about to change.

The fairy godmother of Iran’s enrichment was Hillary Clinton. The “breakthrough” in the negotiations took place when she accepted some Iranian nuclear enrichment. And then it was just a matter of determining how much enrichment would take place officially and how much would take place unofficially that would be officially ignored or covered up by our own government.

That is how we got to the ticking atomic time bomb.

Obama hasn’t just turned a blind eye to Iran’s race to the bomb. He has empowered and enabled all elements of it from its nuclear program to its ballistic missile program. He has ensured that Iran would have the money, the manpower and the resources to become a nuclear power. He directed elements of our intelligence services and military to prevent Israel from striking Iran’s nuclear program. He even aided its core terrorist organization and its ballistic missile program.

This isn’t an error. It’s not cowardice. It’s treason.

A coldly calculated plan to turn Iran into a nuclear power is coming together. On the other end of it lies the horrifying death of millions.

Why would Obama and Hillary do such a horrifying thing? The American scientists and spies who helped the Soviet Union get the bomb believed that they were making the world a better place by limiting our ability to use nuclear weapons. Their treason almost led to the end of human life on earth.

The Iran deal is the second great wave of nuclear treason of the left. And the full truth is yet to be told.

What motive can Obama possibly have?

The only way to to guess the answer to is to look at what Iran is likely to do when it has its nukes.

Will Iran use them against America? The threat has been made.

Is Iran likely to use them against Israel? Iranian leaders have said repeatedly that they want to destroy Israel. (See here and here.)

So the harming of America and the destruction of Israel are Obama’s objectives?!

Is there any other possible explanation?

Of course nobody can stop the collapse of Western civilization.

What do those of us who speak and write in favor of that colossal achievement and cry out warnings that it is under threat, think we are achieving?

Persuading multitudes to resist the flood? Can we? Can they?

Perhaps, at most, a few among us – Nigel Farage, Donald Trump – can try putting a finger in the dyke.

Mark Steyn defines “the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and call into question the future of much of the rest of the world”.

“The key factors” he lists are these:

i) Demographic decline;
ii) The unsustainability of the social democratic state;
iii) Civilizational exhaustion.

And here’s our abstract of his article:

Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 per cent of the global population to just over 20 per cent, and the Muslim nations increased from about 15 per cent to 20 per cent. Is that fact less significant to the future of the world than the fate of some tree or the endangered sloth hanging from it? In 1970, very few non-Muslims outside the Indian sub-continent gave much thought to Islam, but in little more than a generation the world is utterly altered. By 2020, it will be impossible to compare statistics between “the Muslim world” and the West because Islam is currently responsible for most population growth in English, French and German cities, and the principal supplier of immigrants to Canada, and already 25 per cent of the population of the European Union’s capital city, Brussels. September 11th 2001 was not “the day everything changed”, but the day that revealed how much had already changed. We’re seeing one of the fastest population transformations in history, whereby an aging ethnic European population is being replaced by a Muslim population. And the Muslims understand that, in fact, Europe, as they see it, is the colony now. I think the average Muslim does, in some basic sense, when he immigrates to the Netherlands, when he immigrates to the United Kingdom, when he immigrates to Canada or Michigan, want eventually to live in a Muslim society in those places. I am not saying he wants to fly planes into buildings, but his expectation is that the host society will assimilate with him rather than the other way around. This is the biggest story of our time, and the West’s leaders still can’t talk about it to their own peoples, not honestly. And they’re increasingly disinclined to let you talk about it.

Civilizational decline: whatever its causes – and the reluctance of Europeans to have children is certainly one of them – it is a fact.

You cannot miss it. It is here in America.

It is in the universities which have largely been transformed from institutions of disinterested learning into fortresses of Orthodox Thought.

It is in the schools, where text books teach that Islam is a beautiful pacific religion, not the primitively superstitious creed of a ruthless warlord which is what it really is.

It is in the media, which defend Orthodox Thought, the advance of Islam,  and the dissolution of the West, with passionate pertinacity.

It is in the failure of conservatives to accept that it is happening at all, so they cry out against the last hope America has of holding back that tide for a little while at least – the possible presidency of Thumb-in-the-dyke Donald Trump.

Acolytes of the Left like to say that they are “on the right side of history”. Whether it is the right side or not, they are on the side of what is happening. The side of civilizational decline, of Muslim colonization, of the dissolution of borders, of Orthodox Thought. 

Hillary Clinton, the Left’s candidate for the presidency, wants to increase Muslim immigration into the United States; wants “open borders”; wants to forbid the criticism of Islam. Hillary Clinton is on the side of civilizational decline.

Conservatives complain that Donald Trump is immoral in that he talks boastfully of his sexual conquests as most men do. But they seem not to have noticed that far more important moral principles are being discarded – to widespread popular indifference. At least half the voting citizens of America do not give a toss that Hillary Clinton is a corrupt, venal, lying scofflaw. Not that they don’t know she is all that – it’s just that they don’t care about her immorality. They see her as the right person to be president of the United States at this time.

And is she not? Isn’t she perfectly suited to the time?

The FBI has been corrupted by the Clintons.

Specifically, the FBI’s director, James Comey, has been corrupted by the Clintons.

It is good to learn that there are FBI agents who hate the corruption and are prepared to say so publicly. Unfortunately, they are all retired.

Paul Sperry writes at the New York Post:

Veteran FBI agents say FBI Director James Comey has permanently damaged the bureau’s reputation for uncompromising investigations with his “cowardly” whitewash of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information using an unauthorized private e-mail server.

Feeling the heat from congressional critics, Comey last week argued that the case was investigated by career FBI agents, “So if I blew it, they blew it, too.”

But agents say Comey tied investigators’ hands by agreeing to unheard-of ground rules and other demands by the lawyers for Clinton and her aides that limited their investigation. “In my 25 years with the bureau, I never had any ground rules in my interviews,” said retired agent Dennis V. Hughes, the first chief of the FBI’s computer-investigations unit.

Instead of going to prosecutors and insisting on using grand jury leverage to compel testimony and seize evidence, Comey allowed immunity for several key witnesses, including potential targets.

The immunity agreements came with outrageous side deals, including preventing agents from searching for any documents on a Dell laptop owned by former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills generated after Jan. 31, 2015, when she communicated with the server administrator who destroyed subpoenaed e-mails.

Comey also agreed to have Mills’ laptop destroyed after the restricted search, denying Congress the chance to look at it and making the FBI an accomplice to the destruction of evidence. Comey’s immunized witnesses nonetheless suffered chronic lapses in memory, made unsubstantiated claims of attorney-client privilege upon tougher questioning and at least two gave demonstrably false statements.

And yet Comey indulged it all. What’s more, Comey cut a deal to give Clinton a “voluntary” witness interview on a major holiday, and even let her ex-chief of staff sit in on the interview as a lawyer, even though she, too, was under investigation. Clinton’s interview, the culmination of a yearlong investigation, lasted just 3 ½ hours. Despite some 40 bouts of amnesia, she wasn’t called back for questioning; and three days later, Comey cleared her of criminal wrongdoing.

“The FBI has politicized itself, and its reputation will suffer for a long time,” Hughes said. “I hold director Comey responsible.”

Agreed retired FBI agent Michael M. Biasello: “Comey has singlehandedly ruined the reputation of the organization.” The accommodations afforded Clinton and her aides are “unprecedented,” Biasello added, “which is another way of saying this outcome was by design”. He called Comey’s decision not to seek charges “cowardly”.

“Each month for 27 years, I received oral and computer admonishments concerning the proper protocol for handling top secret and other classified material, and was informed of the harsh penalties, to include prosecution and incarceration” for mishandling such material, [Biasello] pointed out. “Had myself or my colleagues engaged in behavior of the magnitude of Hillary Clinton, as described by Comey, we would be serving time in Leavenworth.”

Former FBI official I.C. Smith knows a thing or two about Clinton corruption. After working at FBI headquarters as a section chief in the National Security Division, he retired as special agent in charge of the Little Rock, Ark., field office, where he investigated top Clinton fund-raisers for public corruption and even Chinese espionage. “FBI agents upset with Comey’s decision have every reason to feel that way,” Smith said. “Clearly there was a different standard applied to Clinton. I have no doubt resourceful prosecutors and FBI agents could have come up with some charge that she would have been subject to prosecution,” the 25-year veteran added. “What she did is absolutely abhorrent for anyone who has access to classified information.”

What’s needed is a revolt within the FBI. Resignations. Protests. Statements of fact and opinion to those few media who are not subjects of the Clinton imperium and will publish them.

But hope that that will happen is fading.

Donald Trump won last night’s presidential candidates’ debate overwhelmingly – not only against the other candidate, the smugly grinning criminal Hillary Clinton who he rightly said should be in jail, but also against the moderator, Martha Raddatz: