There is an old maxim among conservatives: everything government does, it does badly.

The very opposite can be said of the present head of the US federal government: everything President Trump does, he does well.

(We say “does”, not “says”. He lacks the gift of eloquence – and it doesn’t matter. He’s better without it. Instead of being a great orator, he’s a great communicator.)

For one thing – the most important thing – President Trump has made America prosperous again.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

How extraordinary is this job boom? The government says that the number of jobs available has never been higher. There were 7.14 million jobs in August ready to be filled, an increase from July’s 7.1 million, which was also a record. This is the best time in decades to be seeking a job, even if you’re unemployed.

That’s the easily drawn conclusion from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTs) report, which is important but gets much less attention than the monthly payroll jobs and unemployment numbers.

The JOLTs data say many things about our economy right now.

For one thing, economic growth is blazing hot. August was the fifth month in a row in which the number of jobs exceeded the official number of unemployed. The 7.14 million of open jobs in August exceeded the number of unemployed, now at 5.96 million, by about 1.2 million. That’s never happened in the history of the series, which dates back to the end of 2000. Moreover, the number of new hires, at 5.78 million, is also a record.

So let that sink in for a moment: We now have more jobs than unemployed people to fill them. …

Wages are starting to rise, along with productivity. …

If current torrid job growth continues, businesses will have to pay productive workers more, or suffer slower growth and perhaps market share erosion as a result. So, absent major changes in economic conditions, higher wages are coming.

Which leads to our final point, made many times before, but which bears repeating: Rising wages do not cause inflation. This is a categorical mistake that has somehow become a part of many of the world’s economic models. …

All of this is happening because of the tax cuts and deregulation put in place by President Donald Trump. … Once again this magic elixir worked to bestir a seemingly stagnated economy. How much longer will it be until supply-side ideas that clearly work get the respect they deserve? And how much longer will it be until Keynesian ideas that clearly don’t work get relegated to the junk pile where they belong?

So let wages rise. And don’t expect us to join the inevitable sudden “economic” consensus that rising wages will require the Fed to hit the economy’s brakes with a series of punitive rate hikes. That would be yet another in a long line of mistakes by the nation’s central bank.

And the president is warning against it.

From Breitbart:

President Trump said … the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates too quickly, a move he blamed on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

My biggest threat is the Fed. Because the Fed is raising rates too fast. And it’s independent, so I don’t speak to them. But I’m not happy with what he’s [Powell’s] doing. Because it’s going too fast.

[And he] cited “very low” inflation numbers.

Thanks, Mr. President!

Down with the Fed!

(Continuing from the post immediately below)

Stories of horrific torture are commonly told in the Levant and the Middle East. They are often untrue, the expression of fear rather than fact. But then again, they often are true.

If a “Turkish source” is to be believed, Jamal Khashoggi was dismembered while alive and conscious. Nasty as he was, he cannot have deserved that horror. It’s hard enough just to think of it.

What had he done to offend the Saudi rulers so much that they ordered such a punishment for him?

This report by David Hearst comes from the Middle East Eye:

It took seven minutes for Jamal Khashoggi to die, a Turkish source who has listened in full to an audio recording of the Saudi journalist’s last moments …

Khashoggi was dragged from the consul-general’s office at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and onto the table of his study next door, the Turkish source said.

Horrendous screams were then heard by a witness downstairs, the source said.

“The consul himself was taken out of the room. There was no attempt to interrogate him. They had come to kill him,” the source told MEE.

The screaming stopped when Khashoggi – who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate on 2 October – was injected with an as yet unknown substance.

Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, who has been identified as the head of forensic evidence in the Saudi general security department, was one of the 15-member squad who arrived in Ankara earlier that day on a private jet.

Tubaigy began to cut Khashoggi’s body up on a table in the study while he was still alive, the Turkish source said.

The killing took seven minutes, the source said.

As he started to dismember the body, Tubaigy put on earphones and listened to music. He advised other members of the squad to do the same.

“When I do this job, I listen to music. You should do [that] too,” Tubaigy was recorded as saying, the source told MEE.

That can only mean that he often does it. Often cuts up people while they are still alive. And calmly prepares himself not to be troubled by their screams.

That, then, is the Saudi way. 

A Turkish source told the New York Times that Tubaigy was equipped with a bone saw. He is listed as the president of the Saudi Fellowship of Forensic Pathology and a member of the Saudi Association for Forensic Pathology.

In 2014, London-based Saudi newspaper Asharaq al-Awsat interviewed Tubaigy about a mobile clinic that allows coroners to perform autopsies in seven minutes to determine the cause of death of Hajj pilgrims.

The newspaper reported that the mobile clinic was partly designed by Tubaigy and could be used in “security cases that requires pathologist intervention to perform an autopsy or examine a body at the place of a crime”.

These are the first details to emerge of the Saudi journalist’s killing. Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October to retrieve paperwork.

The paperwork was for his divorce from his Saudi wife. He planned to marry a Turkish wife.

To date, Saudi officials have strongly denied any involvement in his disappearance and say that he left the consulate soon after arriving. However, they have not presented any evidence to corroborate their claim and say that video cameras at the consulate were not recording at the time.

But, says the Middle East Eye –

Saudi Arabia is preparing a report that would admit missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed as the result of an interrogation that went wrong.

And “that would be a sharp reversal of earlier statements in which Saudi officials said they had nothing to do with the journalist’s disappearance and said he left the Saudi consulate minutes after he first arrived on 2 October.”

Lying is an art. Some do it well. The Saudi rulers do it badly.

A Turkish-Saudi Washington Post columnist named Jamal Khashoggi, a close friend of the late Osama bin Laden of 9/11 infamy, has disappeared possibly because he has been violently murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

The American media, and the Western media generally, are distraught over his disappearance.

Why? Who is/was he?

He is or was the nephew of a very rich arms dealer named Adnan Khashoggi, who declared as he looked back over his life shortly before he died:

What did I do wrong?  Nothing.  I behaved unethically, for ethical reasons.

Whatever the cause of Jamal’s disappearance, his absence is not to be regretted if he is judged by common ethical standards.

Daniel Greenfield has written about him at Front Page. Here are some of the things he tells us:

In high school, Jamal Khashoggi had a good friend. His name was Osama bin Laden.

“We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” Khashoggi reminisced about their time together in the Muslim Brotherhood. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.” 

The friendship endured with Jamal Khashoggi following Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan. Khashoggi credited Adel Batterjee, listed at one time as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers” by the Treasury Department, with bringing him to Afghanistan to report on the fighting.

The media calls Khashoggi a journalist, but his writings from 80s Afghanistan read as Jihadist propaganda with titles like, Arab Mujahadeen in Afghanistan II: Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah.

And when Osama bin Laden set up Al Qaeda, he called Khashoggi with the details.

After Afghanistan, Jamal Khashoggi went to work as a media adviser for former Saudi intel boss, Prince Turki bin Faisal, alleged to have links to Al Qaeda.

“The real Khashoggi”, Greenfield writes, is/was …

… a cynical and manipulative apologist for Islamic terrorism, not the mythical martyred dissident whose disappearance the media has spent the worst part of a week raving about. …

Like his old friend, Jamal Khashoggi went into exile in a friendly Islamist country. Osama bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan and Khashoggi ended up in Turkey. The Khashoggi family had originated from Turkey. And Turkey was swiftly becoming the leading Sunni Islamist power in the region. Living in Turkey put Khashoggi at the intersection of the Turkish-Qatari backers of the Brotherhood and the Western media.

His disappearance has touched off fury and anger from the Islamist regime that harbored him.

And it has also set off an unprecedented firestorm of rage and grief by the American media which adored him. …

Before the summer coup of 2016, Turkey was said to have 50,000 political prisoners. Many of them were members of the country’s oppressed Kurdish minority which is deprived of its most basic civil rights. These include even the use of their own language. Doing so can carry a prison sentence.

In that terrible summer, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamic tyrant, finished securing his absolute hold on power with the coup as his Reichstag fire. The alleged coup became a [pretext] for the mass arrest and torture of countless thousands of political prisoners. Amnesty International estimated that 50,000 had been detained. … They included 300 journalists. …

Erdogan went after professors, judges, law enforcement, the military and the last remnants of a free press. A Human Rights Watch report documented electric shocks, beatings with truncheons and rubber hoses, and rape by Erdogan’s Islamic thugs. Heads were banged against walls. Men were forced to kneel on burning hot asphalt. Medical reports showed skull fractures, damage to testicles and dehydration.

The media didn’t show any of the hysterical outrage at these crimes that it has over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. The media cares more about Khashoggi, a former media mouthpiece of the Saudi regime before it turned on his Muslim Brotherhood brothers, than about 300 Turkish reporters.

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s consistency.

Erdogan and Khashoggi are both militant Islamic activists. [And] the  media will always take the side of Islamists over non-Islamists. That’s why it bleeds for Khashoggi. …

This is about Islam.

The struggle between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand, and Turkey, Qatar and Iran on the other, is the next stage of the Arab Spring. And, from Yemen to Turkey, the media has made no secret of being on the Islamist side. Its outrage over Khashoggi … [is] not journalism, [but] political spin of the Islamist axis. …

Before the media and the politicians who listen to it drag the United States into a conflict with Saudi Arabia over a Muslim Brotherhood activist based on the word of an enemy country still holding Americans hostage, we deserve the context.

And we deserve the truth.

The media wants the Saudis to answer questions about Jamal Khashoggi. But maybe the media should be forced to answer why the Washington Post was working with a Muslim Brotherhood propagandist?

The real mystery isn’t Khashoggi’s disappearance. It’s why Republicans aren’t asking those questions.

The media’s relationship with Khashoggi is far more damning than anything the Saudis might have done to him. And the media should be held accountable for its relationship with Osama bin Laden’s old friend.

To whom will the media ever be accountable?

Islam and the media are happily married. If either of them does, or both of them together do unethical things, it is for their own good ethical reasons.

As the word “humane” means to be merciful, it implies that human beings are by nature merciful beings.

Is human nature innately merciful, kind, compassionate? We know it is not. People are not only commonly unmoved by suffering; people deliberately hurt other people.

Perhaps the fact that cruelty often requires an excuse – a claim that the cruel act was committed to serve a higher virtue – suggests an intuitive recognition that it is wrong to be cruel?

What are such higher virtues?

They lie in those fantasies of fulfilled desires: religions.

To do this or that for a god, on the command of a god, in the name of a god; to help realize the great promises a god has made for all mankind – to abolish all suffering forever, to put an end to death, to lay a path to eternal bliss … that is the higher calling, such ends are the higher ends, the goodness that serves those purposes of that god, is the higher – the highest – virtue, says religion.

But don’t religions teach that to be good to other people is the highest service their acolytes can render to divinity?

No. Very few teach “humaneness” as a principle.

One religion that does not, is the religion with the second-largest following in the world: Islam.

Oh, it implies that “mercy” is highly valued by calling Allah, its god, “the Merciful” (“Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim” – “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful”.) But it commands Muslims to be merciless to non-Muslims. A multitude of surahs in the Koran order Muslims to do violence against “unbelievers”. (“Fight those of the unbelievers who are near you and let them find ruthlessness in you.” 9:1123. “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah and those with him are ruthless against the unbelievers and merciful among themselves.” 48:29. “Enmity and hate shall reign between us until you believe in Allah alone.” 60:4.)

Islam is plainly a great horror afflicting the human race. But it was a late-comer among the world’s religions. It lit its flame from Christianity and Judaism, both of which did actually order that kindness be shown to both neighbor and stranger as a principle, but prescribed mercilessly cruel punishments for disobediance of their laws. Judaism commanded stoning to death for blasphemy; and blasphemy was an unforgivable sin in Christianity, punishable by an eternity in Hell. (“And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.” Leviticus 24: 6. “But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.” Mark 3:29.)

Believers must fear the criticism they call blasphemy. Criticism threatens the very existence of their religion.

The Enlightenment woke the West out of the nightmare of religion, and led slowly to the abolition, in the 20th century, of blasphemy as a crime in most Western countries. Notable exceptions still being, in 2017: Spain, Italy, Greece, Austria, Germany, Canada, and Ireland (which is holding a referendum this month, October 2018, on whether its blasphemy laws should be repealed).

No one in any of those countries or anywhere in Western Europe has been put to death by the state for blasphemy since 1765, when – to quote RealClear Politics:

A young man named François-Jean de la Barre … became the last person executed for blasphemy in Europe. … For a long time, this tragic tale was a distant chapter in the story of Western civilization’s road to a secular, pluralistic society; the issues it raised had long been settled in favor of freedom of speech. … [But] twelve people — artists and journalists from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo — [were] killed in the heart of Paris for perceived blasphemy against Islam [on January 7, 2015].

Islam, yes. In Islamic states blasphemers can still be sentenced to death.

In our post Thirst: a story of religious injustice, May 10, 2016, we told the story of Aasiya Noreen, brought to trial in Pakistan for blasphemy.

We tell it here again, with some changes and additions to bring the story up to date:

Aasiya Noreen is called “Asia Bibi” in the court and the press. That means “Asia Woman” – the common way women are named and titled in the Islamic culture which systematically demeans women.

Aasiya Noreen (aka “Asia Bibi”)

She was a poor, illiterate woman who worked in the fields to help support her family of five children, two of them her own and three of them her husband’s from a former marriage.

She was a Christian. A Catholic. Her  family were the only Christians in the small village where she lived some thirty miles outside Lahore, the capital of the Punjab in the Islamic state of Pakistan. The Christians of the region were an underclass, traditionally assigned to menial jobs.

One hot summer’s day in June, 2009, Aasiya was harvesting berries along with some Muslim women. They all became thirsty. The Muslim women sent Aasiya to fetch water from a well. Aasiya found a battered tin cup abandoned near the well, and had a drink from it  before refilling it and carrying it to her fellow workers. One of them accused her of drinking from the cup and so making it unclean. Christian lips should not contaminate a cup that Muslims drink from. All the Muslim women agreed on that.  

A dispute arose. Which was the one true religion? The Muslim women knew that Islam was the truth. Aasiya knew that Christianity was the truth. She dared to say (according to her own account), “Jesus Christ died on the cross for the sins of mankind. What did your Prophet Muhammed ever do to save mankind?”

The Muslim women were deeply offended. They went to their imam and told him that the Christian woman Aasiya Noreen had insulted the Prophet Muhammad.

The imam took action. He gathered together a number of good Muslims willing to defend the Prophet and the true faith of Islam, and led them to the house where Aasiya and her family lived. They set upon her and her husband and her children with righteous blows. The police arrived in time to save the Christian family from being beaten to death. The avenging mob agreed to spare them on condition that the police laid a charge of blasphemy against the woman. The police duly arrested her and put her in jail, where she waited until November, 2012 to be brought to trial.

Aasiya told the court that the woman who accused her of blasphemy had a grudge against her, resulting from an old quarrel, and the accusation was made out of a desire for revenge. The judge did not accept her story as a defense. He also chose to overlook inconsistencies in the testimony of the witnesses against her. He decided that she was guilty of blasphemy and sentenced her to death.

The description in Pakistani law of the crime she was fund guilty of, is: “Use of derogatory remarks, spoken, written, directly or indirectly, … defiles the name of Muhammad 1986.” The prescribed penalty is: “Mandatory Death and fine (Feb. 1990).” And the law stipulates that the judge must be a Muslim.

She was to be hanged for blaspheming against the Prophet Muhammad. 

She was the first woman ever to be condemned to death in Pakistan for blasphemy – her crime being considered so heinous that even death was not sufficient punishment. She was also to pay a fine equivalent to $1,100. She and her family had never in all their lives possessed a sum approaching $1,100. Nor did they know of any way they could raise it.

When the verdict was pronounced, the crowd in the court rose to its feet, applauding and shouting “Yes, kill her! Kill her! Allahu Akbar!”. And yet more enthusiasts for justice, more celebrants of the glory of God, broke down the doors to swarm into the court, their furious, triumphant shouts swelling the chorus of “Allahu Akbar!”  The greatness of their merciful God could hardly have been more passionately attested.

Aasiya’s husband, Ashiq Masih, appealed the verdict. He and Aasiya hoped that the High Court would at least suspend the sentence.

There were humane men in authority; men who felt compassion, cared about justice, and wanted mercy for Aasiya Noreen.

There was a man in a high position who was deeply moved by the fate of Aasiya and determined to do all he could for her. He was Salmaan Taseer, the governor of the Punjab. He persuaded the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, to come to her rescue. In December 2012, Taseer publicly announced that if the High Court did not suspend her sentence, the president would pardon her. And Zardari would have done so, but the Lahore High Court hastened to issue a stay order against a presidential pardon.

So Aasiya remained in prison in Lahore, in solitary confinement in an 8 by 10 foot dark windowless cell, for another six years.

At first the governor would visit her, with his wife and daughter. But then the court ruled that only her husband and lawyer (not her children) could see her.

On January 4, 2011, Salmaan Taseer was assassinated by one Mumtaz Qadri who resented the governor’s concern for the blasphemer. (He was hanged for the crime in February 2016.) 

The Minister of Minority Affairs, Shahbaz Bhatti – himself a Christian, and the only Christian member of the cabinet – was so disturbed by the case that he set about doing all he could to get the laws of blasphemy changed. He announced that he was prepared to die fighting for Aasiya Noreen’s release. He received many death threats, and on March 2, 2011, he was shot dead in his car near his home.

Many times Aasiya’s appeal was postponed. In October 2014, the High Court finally heard her case – and upheld her death sentence. Her husband then appealed to the President. But he was restrained from issuing a pardon, so her lawyers appealed to Pakistan’s Supreme Court. In July, 2015, the Supreme Court suspended her death sentence “for the duration of the appeals process”.

On Monday October 8 this year, 2018, the Supreme Court, after long delay, heard her last appeal and said it had reached a judgment, but has not yet announced what it is.

The judges have reason to fear for their lives if they do not sentence her to death. Will that fact ensure her execution?

And after men in high places have been killed for sympathizing with her, what chance would she herself have of surviving the killers’ indignation if she were to be acquitted? Her family have gone into hiding, and they fear for her safety and survival if she were to be released.

Hundreds of Pakistanis have publicly protested against her being still alive. An imam offered $10,000 reward to anyone who would kill her, and apparently some 10 million citizens declared themselves ready and willing to do the noble deed. 

And, Reuters reports:

The ultra-religious Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan (TLP) party, which makes punishing blasphemy its main campaign rallying cry and lionizes the bodyguard who killed Taseer, warned the court against any “concession or softness” for Bibi.

“If there is any attempt to hand her over to a foreign country, there will be terrible consequences,” TLP said in a statement.

Are Christians doing anything to help save Aasiya Noreen?

The British Pakistan Christian Association reported on the eve of the appeal hearing: 

BPCA Outreach Officer Leighton Medley, who is in Pakistan on his 6 monthly mission has told us that many churches in Lahore, particularly in Bahar Colony, have declared a day of fasting and prayer as Christian communities seek justice for Asia Bibi. He tells us that many were praying throughout the churches, asking for the final release of this innocent woman and the end of this sordid chapter in Pakistan’s history. … Leighton spends time encouraging Christians to respond peacefully, and take to take in acting in a peaceful way, proclaiming non-violence the way that Jesus Christ did. [He says:]

We must have faith that God can intervene in this situation and this mountain will be removed. It is very much like going into the lion’s den.

For nine years, prayers for Aasiya Noreen have been prayed: by herself, by her family, by quite a lot of fellow Christians, for her acquittal and release. The praying has not resulted in her acquittal and release. So why not go on doing it?

One way or another, this long-suffering woman, Aasiya Noreen, is most likely to be killed soon.

She is under sentence of death for taking a drink of water from a cup that was afterwards used to quench the thirst of other working women on a hot day, and for saying something she had been taught to believe to the other women who had been taught that it was something that should not be believed and should not be said.

Because of fantastic rumors about a man called “Jesus” and a man called “Muhammad”, who lived (if at all) many hundreds of years ago; because of religion, lives are ruined, lives are lost. Cruelty and injustice reign. Again. 

Everyone in Britain who has a TV, or even just a radio, Internet connection, or a Smartphone, has to pay to keep the BBC going – under threat of severe penalty for delinquency.

What has this once much respected, once thoroughly trusted, sensible institution become?

Not respectable, not trustworthy.

Silly and menacing.

As Virginia Hale reports in an article at Breitbart:

The BBC is to fight a “heteronormative culture” with a raft of pro-LGBT reforms, despite figures showing sexual minorities are already overrepresented as much as fivefold in the broadcaster’s workforce.

Staff will be told to use gender-neutral pronouns for workers who say they are “non-binary” — identifying as neither male or female — under new BBC policies, which also detail plans to put additional support in place for transgender individuals, especially while they are “transitioning”.

Workforce training on diversity, inclusion, and “unconscious bias” will also be expanded to include LGBT issues, while non-heterosexual mentors will guide less senior staff who identify as a sexual minority.

Teams working in television, news and radio broadcasting have been told to increase representation of sexual minorities, specifically that they insert more “incidental” portrayals of LGBT relationships and individuals not directly related to a storyline or news item.

In addition, the BBC said it will raise the profile of employees who are not heterosexual and urge them to “bring their whole self to work”.

“Straight Ally” badges will be handed out to heterosexual members of staff.

The reforms were brought in following an internal survey of 300 LGBT members of staff, who called for “improvement” in a number of areas including the demand that the BBC adopt the umbrella term LGBTQ+ for sexual minorities so as to be “inclusive” towards people who claim to belong to identities other than Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender, including “Queer”. 

James Purnell, director of radio and education, said: 

One of our big challenges currently is around young audiences. In a recent YouGov survey only 51 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds said they identified as completely heterosexual. An organisation that appears to have a heteronormative culture is not one that is going to cut ice with them either as a consumer or an employee.

As Breitbart London reported last year, official government figures showing that just 4.1 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds reported themselves to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) was published just a week after an Ipsos Mori poll for the BBC showed only 66 per cent of young people said they were heterosexual.

Pause. Only two-thirds (at most) of the 16 to 25-year-old people of Britain are “completely” heterosexual?

No. To use an overused and much abused word correctly for once – INCREDIBLE!

Announcing in July the results of a confidential staff survey revealing that sexual minorities were overrepresented by about five times at the corporation the BBC praised the “very, very high” proportion of LGBT workers but insisted there was more to be done, suggesting a drive to hire lesbians.

According to the figures, more than 400 transgender individuals are employed at the BBC, while 11 per cent of its total workforce and 12 per cent of senior staff identified as sexual minorities.

The broadcaster’s seeking of an ever-more “diverse” workforce in terms of employing increasing numbers of staff from ethnic and sexual minorities is driven by the BBC’s “commit[ment] to reflecting and representing the diversity of the UK”, it claims.

It is unclear then why the significant underrepresentation of heterosexuals has at no point been raised as an issue of representation in the way lesbian staff numbers were.

Well, because Whites and heterosexuals are born despicable. Criminal. Because their ancestors were patriarchal imperialists. See? Understand now?

And about those “gender-neutral pronouns”. Surely it is not enough that they be used inside the temple itself?

Should they not also be used in the programs? In the news reports? In the drama, the movies, the documentaries? 

Let’s review those Newspeak pronouns.

Here’s an American guide for university students (almost all US universities now being propaganda factories for the far-Left):

So the BBC has gone over, holus-bolus, to the dark side. 

Ne is obsessed to the point of lunacy, as is the entire international Left, with race, “gender”, and the weather a hundred years from now.

(And – yes – also with promoting Islam.)

And the citizens of the United Kingdom are forced to pay for nem.

Professor Janice Fiamengo of the University of Ottawa explains with brilliant clarity how hugely Christine Blasey Ford profited from wickedly defaming Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.

A new IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report has been emitted by the UN.

It says in effect, like all the other IPCC reports before it, “Hurry up and do something to save the earth from being burnt up by human activity – or else!”

Not a single prediction by the Warmists, since the first IPCC uttered its dire warning, has come true. But that does not discourage them.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

Assume for the sake of argument that everything environmentalists say about global warming is true. If that’s the case, then there is no chance of stopping it.

That’s what the latest UN report on global warming clearly demonstrates.

The headlines in stories reporting on the UN’s latest climate change report all say something along the lines of: “Urgent changed is needed to prevent global catastrophe.”

If global temperatures climb more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — compared with preindustrial temperatures — all hell will break loose, the UN says. There will be catastrophic flooding, drought, more weather extremes. Hundreds of millions will be susceptible to poverty by midcentury. Even at 1.5 degrees, terrible things will happen. …

Here’s an example of what the UN says would have to happen within the next 12 years [to avoid total disaster]. Keep in mind, this is the low end of the UN’s proposed changes.

• 60% of the world’s energy would have to come from renewable sources by 2030, and 77% by 2050. (The Department of Energy forecasts that renewables will account for just 27% of the U.S.’s electric power generation by 2050.)
• Coal use would have to drop 78%, oil 37% and natural gas 25% — compared with 2010 levels — within 12 years. (Last year, global coal demand increased, and use of natural gas has massively climbed in the U.S.)
• There’d have to be a 59% increase in nuclear power by 2030, and a 150% increase by 2050. (Good luck getting environmentalist to buy into that).
• Farmers would have to figure out how to cut methane emissions by 24% by 2030 (and still feed a growing world population).

Even those massive reductions won’t reduce enough CO2. So, the UN assumes the world will also remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. That’s despite the fact that nobody knows how to do that today.

The UN itself admits [actually hopes – ed] that achieving anything like these levels of greenhouse gas reductions “would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure, and industrial systems”.

It goes on to say that such an undertaking would be “unprecedented in terms of scale”. And it would require a “significant upscaling of investments”. In other words, massive amounts of money.

To say that changes of this magnitude within that time frame are unrealistic would be putting it mildly.

The last big attempt to get the world to cut CO2 emissions turned out to be a farce. As the UN itself admitted, the CO2 reduction pledges made by the 195 countries that signed on to the Paris Accords won’t come anywhere close to the level of CO2 reductions it says are needed to avoid “catastrophe”.

And countries aren’t even living up to those pledges.

On the whole, populations prefer to continue to exist. Obstinate, sinful, on they go.

In the EU, carbon emissions started climbing again last year. Germany is way off its carbon reduction goals, despite plans to spend $580 billion to overhaul its energy system. A recent report showed that only nine of 195 countries have submitted their CO2 reduction plans to the UN.

Does anyone honestly believe that these countries will suddenly decide to entirely decarbonize their economies in three decades?

So, if the chances of avoiding a climate “catastrophe” are gone, what should be done?

To be clear, we are highly skeptical of these doom-and-gloom scenarios. Past predictions of global warming catastrophes have failed to emerge. In the U.S., for example, there’s been no trend toward more extreme weather, drought or flooding, even though the planet has already warmed 1 degree Celsius. This year’s tornado season, in fact, has been the mildest on record. What’s more, environmentalists have issued these “point of no return” warnings for decades, only to revise them once the supposed deadline passes.

But if the alarmist predictions are true, there’s nothing that can plausibly be done at this point to stop it. That’s the real message of the annual UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The chart contained in the Summary for Policymakers shows projected changes in global temperatures over the next 100 years. It also shows that temperatures will top the supposed 1.5-degree limit by around 2040, even if the world makes drastic reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions within the next two decades.

How drastic?

… The entire world [would have to] become entirely carbon free by 2055 at the latest. That’s just 37 years from now.

THE ENTIRE WORLD? MADE ENTIRELY CARBON FREE? 

If all CO2 is removed, there will be nothing for green plants to feed on, so animals will starve, and then we must starve too.

Right. That’s the message.

For total carbon elimination, the world must be freed of all living things. Then whirl on, Earth, as a bare rock, cleansed of all polluting life and thus saved from overheating.  

Steven Hayward points out that we are a highly adaptable species, and would not find it difficult to live in a world that was warmer by a few degrees.

Trouble is, as we see it, the alarmists would only become more importunate. Ever more drastic changes to our lives would be demanded. We can tolerate warmth, but  can we tolerate the Warmists?

They claim the earth is doomed as long as we live and breathe. So we really have no choice. We must destroy the plants, mercy-kill the animals, and then commit suigenocide. 

Okay. We’ll start getting used to the idea.

But there’s one thing we would like to do first.

WE MUST DESTROY THE UN.  

And who knows but by that one small action we might save ourselves, all the kingdoms of living things, and the planet on which we dwell?

Not new (published August, 2010), but persistently topical.

Has the Kavanaugh affair united the Republican Party behind President Trump?

And if so, will it now defeat the ever more berserk Left?

Of the Republican reaction to the tactics of the Democrats opposing the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, Gavin Wax writes at Western Journal:

The silver lining in this disgusting spectacle is a unified GOP moving forward with the singular goal of crushing the left. The line in the sand has been drawn, and there is no turning back. Even the most stubborn Trump haters of the right see that now. The Kavanaugh hearing will be a seminal movement in this fractured era of politics, and if the GOP can muster the courage to get ferocious with their contemptible enemies, it can be the turning point toward Making America Great Again.

He sees the affair as a vindication of President Trump’s leadership. It’s not only the Kavanaugh victory that proves the Trumpian way is the right way, but it provides the moment for full realization:

Anyone watching intently during the Obama years could see what was forming on the left, but it has reached critical mass due to Trump’s meteoric success. People who do not closely follow politics are seeing what the left is really all about aside from that flowery veneer of tolerance and diversity. The average blue-collar supporter of Trump has their eyes wide open, never to be closed again. This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment that we have to capitalize upon while there is still time.

“No turning back” for the GOP?  Never again will the average blue-collar worker believe the Democratic Party serves his interests?  Never again will the Republicans allow the Left an inch if by any means they can be stopped?

Well, it still depends on whether Republicans can “muster the courage to get ferocious”.

The writer hopes that “the most stubborn Trump haters of the right” see now how good is President Trump’s leadership is.

He hopes that certain Republican commentators who were against Donald Trump’s presidency have been brought by the Kavanaugh affair to see the light. They ought to have been, but he is not certain that they were:

Commentators like Erick Erickson, David French and John Podhoretz have to be realizing that Trump’s approach is vindicated. They can bemoan Trump for swatting the hornet’s nest and stirring up the left, but the communist threat is coming to destroy the lives of anyone who is to the right of Karl Marx. If you are white, Christian, conservative or a male (just one of these attributes is enough), they will target you and your family with a heinous smear campaign, and that will just be the beginning. Trumpism is currently the only viable alternative to the Orwellian machinations of the left.

How many  Congressional Republicans formerly antagonistic to, or unenthusiastic about, Donald Trump have come round to his side because of the Kavanaugh affair?

A new eclectic coalition of surprising allies has coalesced around the president.

The most vociferous defender of Kavanaugh during Thursday’s hearings was arguably South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. Graham ran for president in 2016 largely as a wet blanket attempting to cool the Trump revolution but has come around in years since. Trump has also been able to hatch out solid working relationships with Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, Rand Paul, Tom Cotton, and Mark Meadows — an interesting cross-section of political leaders. …. A coalition that seemed inconceivable just last year.

Some have been left behind — like now deceased former Sen. John McCain whose vendetta with Trump became personal, soon-to-be-gone Sens. Bob Corker and Jeff Flake who staked their careers on opposing Trump’s rise in the GOP, and Reps. Justin Amash and Walter Jones who went from constitutional heroes to pariahs over their stubborn opposition to the president — but the overwhelming consensus of the Republican Party is firmly behind Trump. Kavanaugh’s railroading has only strengthened Trump’s power over his constituency, and this party unity will be needed for what is to come.

If Kavanaugh’s confirmation was the convincing achievement, still it must be noted that Kavanaugh was not himself unwanted by Never Trumpers. The victory was not exactly a victory for Trumpism as such. Kavanaugh was “an establishment supported candidate”. 

In what may have been a fortuitous coincidence or was perhaps another example of 4-D chess, Trump picked an establishment supported candidate in Brett Kavanaugh as his second proposed Supreme Court nominee.

In fact, some Trump supporters did not consider Kavanaugh conservative enough:

Although some of Trump’s die-hard supporters were tepid on the pick at first, the attacks from the left quickly solidified him into a hero.

But –

He had the full-fledged support of the NeverTrump right from the outset because of his closeness to President George W. Bush …

So let’s enquire: what do Never Trumpers on the Right themselves have to say about warming to the president’s leadership?

What is the National Review saying?

The editor-in-chief of National Review, Rich Lowry, does not count himself a Never Trumper; but his colleagues, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes, firmly and sternly do.

Or have done.

Until now? Until the victory of President Trump, the Senate Republicans, and the new Supreme Court Justice himself, won the fierce and prolonged battle to get Justice Kavanaugh’s appointment confirmed?

It seems there has been a change of mind.

Significantly, the authorship of this National Review article is attributed to “The Editors”:

After one of the most intense political fights of the last two decades, Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has become Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the United States Supreme Court. This is a good thing for the integrity of our Constitution, for elementary American norms, and for the long-term health of our political institutions.

Justice Kavanaugh has demonstrated throughout his career a firm adherence to a constitutionalist jurisprudence; indeed, that was the root of the opposition to him. He will undoubtedly stay true to this approach, which has guided him during his years on the D.C. Circuit and is evident in black-and-white in his hundreds of opinions. All of this was pushed to the side, though, in the final frenzy to destroy and defeat him. …

Judge Kavanaugh was not “on trial” in a formal sense. But that fact in no way undermines the practices and norms that mark formal trials. Presumption of innocence and an insistence on corroborating evidence are integral parts of our system because they work. Had the Democratic party prevailed in its attempt to set them aside, the precedent would have been disastrous. …

Throughout this saga, the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee maintained that their job was to investigate credible charges of wrongdoing and to determine whether they could be verified. Shamefully, their counterparts exhibited no such interest. It was unclear whether Judge Kavanaugh’s record was being examined for rape or for rudeness, for drinking or for defensiveness, for temperament or for truth. At times the lack of focus took on a Stalinist quality: “He did it,” Kavanaugh’s accusers insisted day in, day out, “but even if he didn’t, the vehemence with which he denied it is itself disqualifying.”

It is a testament to the fortitude of the Republican party that these conceits were rejected in the end. Donald Trump had the good sense to pick Kavanaugh, and then the determination to stick by him. …

In America we do not sacrifice individuals on the altar of collective guilt, and we do not entertain that illiberal alchemy by which “nobody can corroborate this” becomes “he did it and must pay”. When the Senate met yesterday to put a bow on this squalid affair, there remained as much evidence for Judge Kavanaugh’s unfitness as there had been on the day was nominated: none. To have rejected him despite this, [Senator Susan] Collins observed, would be to have abandoned “fundamental legal principles”.

The Senate refused to do so. The Justice prevailed, and so did justice.

The praise of Donald Trump for his “good sense” in picking Brett Kavanaugh, and his “determination” in sticking to his choice, does imply that “The Editors” of National Review, as a body, now approve of the president.

What then lies ahead?

Back to Gavin Wax who writes that “Trumpism is the only way forward”:

What is left of the Buckleyites thought that they and the “sane voices in the room” on the left could sweep this Trump embarrassment under the rug and head back to the politics of the past. That delusion is no longer tenable. The inmates run the asylum on the left, and every denizen must submit to every ridiculous trope regarding gender, sex, race, etc. or face the social consequences. Because groupthink is their default preset, nobody can speak up against this institutional insanity without getting cannibalized by the jackals. …

But –

The left is never going to capitulate. They have gone too far to stop now. They will only escalate things drastically from this point forward. They will repeat any lie — no matter how absurd, cruel or disgusting it may be — to stop Trump and his supporters. Anyone who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law, due process, and the presumption of innocence is a racist Nazi guilty of sexual assault. This is the future that we will live in if the left is successful, and it is probably worse than what Orwell envisioned in “1984″.

Remember, the left has many institutional advantages that are difficult to overcome. The demographic realities are on their side. The cultural downslide has already reached epidemic proportions. We cannot expect another Trump to come along and move things forward if he is ultimately stopped. This may be our final stand, and we have to move ever more boldly as a result. Trump has taught us that we have to be willing to fight as ruthlessly as the left in order to win.

If the Republican Party now fully accepts President Trump’s leadership; if Republicans at last have the stomach for a fight, or better still an appetite for it; if they engage the fight and if they win it, then the Kavanaugh hearing will have been “a seminal movement in this fractured era of politics” and a turning-point.

Now for the ferocious battle.

Some Democratic Party candidates are speaking of providing all Americans with free health care, free college education, and free housing when they are voted into power.

Evil capitalists, who are only out to make a profit (wash your mouth out when you say that word aloud), laugh the idea to scorn. Nothing, they say, can be free. And if the government hands you goodies without asking you to pay for them, then you are not free. The government can withdraw the goodies. What then? You can’t go to wicked capitalists and order things in exchange for money, even if you have a stack of contraband dollars hidden somewhere. Because your great Lenins and your heroic Che Guevaras  have had all those “economic saboteurs”  shot.

So if the worst were to happen in November 2018 …

American enthusiasts for Socialism need to be informed what to expect when they have voted Bernie Sanders into the White House, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is Secretary of the Interior.

Be prepared to go hungry.

(Wymyn – a major constituency of both dear old commie Bernie and ingénue Alexandria – can look on the bright side of this and expect to lose weight and enjoy slender bodies without effort.)

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh writes at Canada Free Press:

People used to ask me what we ate when I was growing up in communist Eastern Europe. Women were quite thin and beautiful, on the “Ceausescu diet”.  We were not just told how much to eat by decree but food was quite scarce and highly rationed. If a person dared to stash more food than the Communist Party deemed necessary, that person paid dearly in fines and eventually jail. Of course the elite class, in the classless utopia of a socialist country on its way to communism, had its own stores and food supply at low prices, never having to suffer the indignity of a rumbling empty stomach. …

When the dear leader wanted to visit a grocery, dairy, or bread store to see how “his people” lived, fresh bread loaves and milk bottles were trucked in and then taken away as soon as he left. Staples like cooking oil, sugar, flour, and butter were also brought in from the communist apparatchiks’ stores and then whisked away before anyone had a chance to purchase anything.

The bread, milk, butter, oil, flour, and sugar lines were part of daily life and the socialist milieu. Walking around money was not to bribe politicians but to purchase food or scratchy and splintery toilet paper in case one encountered a long line where something needful would be sold that day.

In addition to fines and possible jail time, food hoarders were publicly shamed in the local and national newspapers which were run by the Communist Party.  Since their address was also provided, the readers were expected to ostracize them and sometimes beat them for their greed. …

Having experienced the indignity of standing in endless lines in cold and hot weather to buy rationed food with rationing cards, food that often ran out before everyone in line had a chance to buy something, it is economically ludicrous to believe the Communist Party lies that one man’s hoarding disrupted delivery of enough food to the starving proletariat.

It was the inadequate supply of everything that caused severe shortages of many items that Westerners take for granted in economies based on supply and demand. It was the centralized planning of economically ignorant community organizers who formed the Communist Party rank and file who made ill-advised production, supply, and distribution decisions. …

Nobody knew if they would find anything to eat the next day, when people fought in lines over bones stripped clean of any meat. … People used those bones to make soup. Extras in the pantry insured survival for many days without having to stand in those awful lines every day.