It’s US versus THEM, and this is what THEY are doing to destroy us.

Must we despair?

 

The Left and Islam are at present in alliance against … the West, our civilization, the US, the rule of law, democracy, capitalism … in a word – liberty.

In that, the two ideologies are alike. And both are authoritarian, both demand strict obedience, both strive for domination.

But their prescriptions for government, laws, morals, life-styles are in direct opposition to each other. So the alliance cannot last.

When they clash, which they must, which of the two will prevail? Which is stronger?

A skirmish between them has broken out over a course of study in a school in Birmingham, England. The Leftists want the children to be taught that homosexuality is normal and good. But Muslim parents are angrily protesting that homosexuality is not normal, not good, really very bad, and the teaching – officially designated “LGBT awareness” and “relationship education” – is wrong and must be permanently abandoned. Right now there is a stand-off and neither side can be said to be winning.

However, a surprising event on the world stage indicates that the winner, the super-bully, is likely to be … Communism.

Daniel Greenfield reports and comments at Front Page:

The war of letters began when 22 countries penned a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning China’s treatment of Uighurs and “other Muslim and minorities communities”. 

The letter in defense of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang was signed by France, Germany, Canada, Sweden and 18 other, mostly Western and European, countries.

The case of the missing Muslim signatories was solved when the People’s Republic of China fired back with its own letter signed by 37 countries.

This letter in defense of China’s crackdown on Islam was signed by 16 Muslim countries.

While some of the Muslim signatories were drawn from African countries, the letter was also signed by ambassadors for the leading Arab governments including Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, and Kuwait. Pakistan, the world’s second largest Muslim country, also signed on.

While Western governments wailed about Muslim human rights in China, the leading Sunni nations of the world signed off on a letter praising “China’s remarkable achievements in the field of human rights”.

(At which point Greenfield interjects with sardonic disgust: “Mandatory abortions, organ harvesting and the mass murder of millions are remarkable achievements.”)

… The world’s top Muslim governments … explicitly defended China’s crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang.

“Faced with the grave challenge of terrorism and extremism, China has undertaken a series of counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures in Xinjiang, including setting up vocational education and training centers,” the letter reads. …

The People’s Republic of China’s idea of de-radicalization measures had allegedly included forcing Muslims to drink alcohol and eat pork, a ban on beards, hijabs and the name Mohammed.

Even Qatar, whose Al Jazeera propaganda outlet has broadcast claims of Islamist oppression in Xinjiang, was finally forced to sign on to a letter that effectively disavowed what its own media has been saying.

The Uyghur Muslims are a Turkic minority, its Islamists had sought to set up a separatist Turkic Islamic state, and the Islamist regime in Turkey had been vocal about their cause. Erdogan, the Islamist thug running Turkey, had in the past accused China of genocide. This year, the spokesman for Turkey’s foreign ministry had described China’s crackdown on Islamists as a “great cause of shame for humanity”. The spokesman had accused China of engaging in torture and brainwashing in concentration camps.

But then Erdogan, the most aggressive national exponent of Islamist causes in the region, visited China, and declared, “It is a fact that the peoples of China’s Xinjiang region live happily in China’s development and prosperity.” Then he told critics to keep quiet to avoid spoiling Turkey’s relationship with the PRC.

The People’s Republic of China had attained the complicity of the world’s most vocal Turkish nationalist in its crackdown on Turkic nationalism and won the support of the tyrant who had transformed Turkey from a secular democracy into an Islamist banana republic for its enforced secularization of Muslims.

It’s hard to imagine a greater diplomatic triumph.

Finally, the letters humiliated the United States, which had not signed on to either one, but, despite providing protection and billions of dollars in foreign aid to Muslim countries, has been repeatedly attacked for its limited counterterrorism efforts which fall far short of anything that the PRC has done.

Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have long been thorns in America’s side, backing Islamic terrorists abroad, funding subversion within the United States, and criticizing our counterterrorism.

What does China have that we don’t? …

China was able to get not only Muslim countries, but the worldwide sponsors of Islamism, to sign on to its letter because they understood that crossing the PRC would carry a serious economic price.

The United States hands out foreign aid and trade agreements to countries no matter what they do. …

In the United States, cutting off foreign aid to a country, no matter how awful, is nearly impossible. The worse a country treats us, the harder we work to win that country over with extensive outreach. …

The People’s Republic of China doesn’t view insults and threats as an incentive for outreach. Instead it uses its economic clout to reward or punish countries based on how those countries treat it. …

American diplomacy has a fantastic track record of failure. The only thing it ever really seems to succeed at is giving away money and abandoning our national interests to pursue meaningless global goals. …

The PRC does not dedicate its diplomacy to saving the planet, ending all wars, or any of the delusional nonsense that occupies American diplomats in between expensive lunches and pointless conferences. Its diplomacy is a blunt instrument meant to achieve simple ends. And, that makes it far more effective.

The war of letters demonstrated that China could recruit 16 Muslim countries to endorse forcing Muslims to eat pork, while Western countries couldn’t get even one to sign on in opposition. …

America spends a great deal of time worrying about being loved. Our diplomacy is meant to convince the world to love us. China does not need to be loved. It never apologizes for its strength.

We should stop apologizing for our strength. And start putting our national interests first.

Which is the strongest principle and fixed goal of our president – and for that goal and principle (along with all his others) the Left furiously condemns him.

Man-made global warming?

Malcolm Roberts sizes up the lie:

 

(Hat-tip to Cogito)

It is sober, serious, strict, stern, grim, hard, austere.

The great short-story writer Joseph Epstein wrote earlier this year at Claremont Review of Books (CRB) on The Menace of Political Correctness:

Political correctness started out as a minor project of the international firm known as the Good Intentions Paving Company. … But political correctness soon came to be about much more than social decorum. As with so many projects of the Good Intentions Paving Company, things haven’t worked out quite as planned.

It is a vast Company, centuries old. It was largely responsible for the sentimental policies that weakened Rome and spread Christianity.

Epstein sees plainly what devastation it is busybodying to bring about now, with its current “be nice” project.

We quote part of his article (and recommend the reading of all of it):

[W]ith the campaign for a misguided equalizing in all American institutions, political correctness took a large leap forward in its ambitions. Criticism of any action or attempt to bring equality soon became, ipso facto, politically incorrect. Affirmative action—the rigging of admissions requirements at the country’s most prestigious universities in favor of what were deemed oppressed minority groups—was an early gambit in the campaign for equal outcomes and a boost, too, for political correctness. Criticizing affirmative action carried with it the penalty of being thought racist.

How could one admit minority students, it was felt, without catering to their special interests? So an ample buffet of courses in African-American, Chicano, and other studies were offered at universities. These courses would, naturally, be taught by matching minority-group faculty. To denigrate these courses, to argue that they were largely victimology, and as such that they lowered the standard once in place for the liberal arts in higher education, would in itself of course be politically incorrect, and most people who knew better were hesitant to step forth and say so.

What became known as the women’s movement soon claimed oppressed status, since it could not claim actual minority status. Homosexuals, male and female, were next on board. Hispanic Americans surely qualified, and so others who could construe a history—or, in the cant phrase of the day, a narrative—of inequality forced upon them.

The United States began to seem a country of victims—and victimology, the study of victimhood from the point of view of the victims, became a dominant subject in high schools and especially in the social science and humanities departments of universities.

Political correctness meanwhile became the new national etiquette, at least among the self-acclaimed cognoscenti, or as they came to think of themselves, the “woke”—a word meaning those awake and responsive to the important social and political questions and issues of the day. In universities and in public life generally one violated this etiquette at one’s peril. A violation could be as trivial as telling the wrong joke, not being sufficiently inclusive (inclusivity, like diversity, would soon become one of the P.C. shibboleths) in one’s speech or writing, or being insensitive about observing the new dispensation on proper pronoun usage. …

Political correctness contravenes the US Consitution:

Under political correctness the First Amendment calling for free speech somehow didn’t apply, for lots of speech was now clearly out of bounds and entire subjects disallowed. Nor did political correctness have anything like a statute of limitations. One could be held responsible, and thereby punished, for what were deemed violations of the political correctness code committed half a century ago and longer—well before there was such a code. Aided by the internet’s social media, the surveillance exerted by political correctness became total, the impulse of political correctness itself totalitarian. …

If political correctness had stopped at the request for civil behavior, there would have been no difficulty in acceding to it. If homosexual men wish to be called “gay,” if blacks wish to be called “African-American,” if women prefer “Ms.” over “Mrs.” and “Miss,” there would be no problem whatsoever. But the program inherent in political correctness has evolved into something much more ambitious than that. In its current phase, it is revolutionary, seeking a utopia of complete fairness in all institutions—educational, cultural, political—which in its advocates’ interpretation means utter equality for all, excluding only those who violate political correctness’s underlying assumptions and well-known restrictions. …

The least perceived differences between individuals and groups, whether inherent or acquired through upbringing, are for now to be ignored in order that they may ultimately be eradicated. Political correctness doesn’t allow leeway for differences in intelligence, talent, or strength. Not equal opportunities but equal outcomes are its monomaniacal goal, and it is not overly concerned about the punishing means required to achieve it.

Under political correctness, righteous indignation and tender sensibilities must be protected. Hence the politically correct have no compunction in removing statues of figures from the Confederacy from their long inhabited public places. Nor must the young be put to undue stress in the classroom. So trigger warnings have been installed in universities alerting students to courses that may contain material painful to them. If minority students wished to remain exclusively among themselves—thus all but killing the once grand ideal of integration in American life—this, too, could be arranged by setting up separate dormitories and dining rooms, clubs and extracurricular activities for their use. A tenet of political correctness is that students must above all feel safe.

Along with rewriting the past and protecting the young from the harsh realities of life, the political correctness program emphasizes diversity, which has become one of the great desiderata of the contemporary university, itself the hearth and home of political correctness. … Admissions offices are instructed to accept fixed percentages of incoming students on the bases of race, national origin, and gender, replacing the old quotas once in place against Jews, Catholics, and blacks. Provosts and deans are hired to ensure this diversity is enacted. Schools without such staff or without the right ethnic mix are in danger of having federal funds denied them, for by now, such has been the spread of political correctness through the culture, that the federal bureaucracy is in on the game.

But President Trump has has threatened to cut off funding from colleges that stifle free speech.

In the contest for scholarships, prizes, and honorary awards, political correctness holds the cards, and deals from an unapologetically stacked deck. A good gauge of this is the list of any recent year’s honorary degrees bestowed by universities. The roster of recipients is sure to include at least one African American and more than one woman. Not to do so is to risk being called racist, misogynist, and to have one’s school judged egregiously behind the times. White male commencement speakers, no matter how impressive their scientific, artistic, or scholarly accomplishments, are rarer than honest politicians. Under the reign of political correctness, all other things being equal, which they rarely are, African Americans, women, and other presumably oppressed minority group members are naturally chosen over drab white males for professorships, administrative posts, scholarships, and other university appointments.

As for literary prizes, from the Nobel Prize on down, juries for such awards now feel that the time has come to give their prizes to women, or African Americans, or poets from Greenland, for one rarely any longer has the sense that the truly best writers are being honored. I once remarked in print, in the Times Literary Supplement, that the Pulitzer Prize usually goes to one of two types: those who don’t need it and those who don’t deserve it. When some years ago Katharine Graham won the Pulitzer Prize for her rather weepy poor-little-rich-girl autobiography, the critic Hilton Kramer remarked that she was awarded it on both grounds. …

The university has long been the institution where utopias go to die. After World War I, socialism’s chief home was the university. (Dig round a university’s History or an English Department today and you might still discover a Marxist napping in his office.) Of course the youth rebellion of the 1960s found its home in the university. All these may now seem passing fancies, but political correctness figures to have a longer, and more significant, life than any of them, for it has affected not merely the institution of the university but the wider culture of the country.

The goal of political correctness is to level American culture, to reduce the role of elite culture, slowly eliminating merit and intellectual authority as the main standards in the country’s culture. If one were to argue that the result of applying the criteria of political correctness is a general dumbing down of learning, or choosing to value artistic productions on a political rather than an aesthetic basis, an advocate of political correctness would likely respond that this isn’t necessarily true, but even if it were, it would be worth it. A great flattening equality is the goal of political correctness. This is what makes it revolutionary.

What’s in it for the more strident advocates, or at least for those who are not themselves members of victim groups? Nothing so mercenary as profit, nor so obvious as direct power, but something perhaps grander than money or power—the assurance of their own splendid virtue.

The role of virtue in politics or any social movement ought never to be underestimated. Outside the corridors of power, the feeling of righteousness, both on the Left and on the Right, is behind much political sentiment. The word “virtucrat” describes those whose sense of themselves is motivated by the feeling of their own superior public morality. Those who subscribe wholeheartedly to political correctness, especially those who have no direct stake in the game, do so because they feel doing so is right and just—and expressing these feelings makes them feel damned fine about themselves.

What they may not realize is the deep cultural implications of political correctness. The New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books currently review an overwhelming number of novels by women and African-American writers. In recent years much of the fiction published by the New Yorker also seems to be by women or by Asian writers. By publishing him extensively in its pages the Atlantic has made a prominent figure of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose writings—asking for reparations for slavery days, worrying about his young son’s growing up in what he assumes to be an obviously and thoroughly racist country—are heavy contributions to the victimology of our time. The market for writing of this kind, by turns angry and sad, appealing above all to the guilt of its readers, is there, one imagines, because it makes those who publish it feel they are on the side of social justice, decency, righteousness—and thereby feel good about themselves. Virtue rides high again.

Consider the movies. Roughly half the movies up for Oscars this past year were, essentially, political correctness movies. …

Political correctness comes at no direct cost to those who endorse it. The cost is ultimately to the culture, which in so many ways is sadly diminished.

Political correctness meshes nicely, too, with the phenomenon known as identity politics, which has dominated the Democratic Party in recent decades. Identity politics entails groupings of people—chiefly minorities—by their victim status, whether race, sex, sexual orientation, or religion. Behind identity politics is the demand for equal rights, always with the supposition that they do not already exist and the added presumption that no progress toward this goal has genuinely been made, so that it is assumed that vast numbers of whites stand implacably opposed to black equality and men to equality for women, while homophobes are everywhere blocking acceptance for gays, and on and on. Under identity politics, sides are chosen up as in a sandlot baseball game: Victims versus Victimizers, the Woke versus the Deplorables. No one has to be told on whose side in this game virtue lies. …

As for humor, while one might have thought political correctness itself supplies an ample target, comedians have tended to shy away from it, lest they, too, be put out of business by public censure. Under the reign of political correctness, one is allowed not a single mistake. … One of the hallmarks of the politically correct, of course, is a grave and abiding humorlessness.

The role of political correctness in politics has also greatly expanded. … The hearings over the Supreme Court candidacy of Brett Kavanaugh were little more than trial by political correctness. …

One can only hope that political correctness will go so far as to make evident its absurdity … Until then there is nothing to do but to wait things out, in the hope that the deep illogic of political correctness and its widespread perniciousness, like that of Prohibition and other programs of enforced virtue that have gone before, will indubitably reveal itself for the grievous mistake it is.

Will it? And will it then be abandoned?

If so, you can bet on its immediate replacement with some other enforced oppressive virtue to sadden human hearts and in the dark to bind us.

Brilliant Stephen Miller, speech-writer and adviser to President Trump, eloquently and accurately puts mischievous Left-leaning Chris Wallace right, when Wallace tries to defend the “hate America” message of the four Congress women known as “the Squad”, by analogizing what they have said with things President Trump has said that are in fact the absolute opposite.

The four – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley – are “stoking racial divisions”; the president most certainly is not.

Germany dominates Europe. Now a new German leader of the EU – selected, not elected – is taking over the presidency of the European Commission, in effect becoming President of Europe.

She has the instincts of a dictator. 

This time the would-be German dictator of Europe is a woman. Gynocracy is the political fashion among the totalitarians.

Bruce Bawer writes at Front Page:

No sane person could have witnessed the coronation this week of the new grand poobah of the European Union without recognizing just how utterly undemocratic – and dangerous – this institution is.

Her name is Ursula von der Leyen, a name that instantly communicates two important facts: (1) she is German; (2) she is a member of a hereditary elite.

To be sure, the “von” is courtesy of her husband, who belongs to an aristocratic family. But her own blood also runs blue. In addition to having a tony Teutonic lineage – she was born into the patrician Albrecht clan – she’s descended from a couple of the biggest slave traders in the American South. Her grandfather, Carl Albrecht, was a psychologist famous for his studies of “mystical consciousness.” Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was one of the very first bureaucrats to tread the corridors of power in what would later become the European Union.

Raised in Belgium, von der Leyen studied in Germany and Britain, and lived for a while in the U.S., along the way picking up degrees in economics and public health and also becoming a gynecologist. But she eventually settled on politics, hitching her wagon to Angela Merkel and climbing the ladder of power in Germany, getting herself elected to the Bundestag and serving in turn as Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth; Minister of Labor and Social Affairs; and Minister of Defense.

In the last-named position, she didn’t exactly cover herself in glory: as President Trump has pointed out, Germany has consistently failed to pull its weight in NATO; British journalist Andrew Neil recently referred to her as a “failed” Defense Minister and as “the second most unpopular politician in Germany”.

None of which should come as a surprise, because the top Brussels jobs are routinely the next stop for failed, unpopular European politicians. You don’t need to be competent to get tagged for a leadership position in the EU, and you definitely don’t need to be popular. Von der Leyen got picked to be the most powerful official in the EU – with a population upwards of 500 million – by the twenty-eight members of the Council of Europe.

On Tuesday, the European Parliament got to weigh in on her appointment and to vote to ratify [read “rubber-stamp”] her selection, but it was hardly an exercise in democracy: as in the Soviet Union and other Communist states, it was an “election” with one candidate. …

Consequently, as the EU continues its long metamorphosis from a coal and steel community into a hyperstate, the closest thing it has to a president is a woman who has said that she looks forward to a United States of Europe and is eager to build an EU military. Perhaps one reason for her disastrous tenure in the German Defense Ministry (as Andrew Neil put it: “Sixty percent of their planes can’t fly. A hundred percent of their submarines can’t take to the sea”) was that she wasn’t really all that interested in upgrading her own country’s armed forces and keeping NATO strong – her real goal is to establish the EU as a major military power, effectively replacing NATO.

Before the EU Parliament voted on her candidacy, von der Leyen was given a chance to address its members. Her speech was a cavalcade of clichés about “turn[ing] challenges into opportunities” and “tak[ing] bold steps together”,  not to mention developing “frameworks”, creating “mechanisms”, and introducing new “schemes”. Banal stuff.

But the actual content was frankly scary, even for those of us who are already onto these people’s dark intentions. Speaking in the chamber of the EU Parliament, von der Leyen sounded for all the world like a dictator, calling for her subjects to march in unison, to “move together” in “solidarity”, because “we all share the same destination”. She made it clear that there is something called “the European way”, and she knows what it is – it is now her job to define what it is – and everybody had better get on board pronto and move in lockstep into the golden future time.

She promised a new “European climate law”, a new EU unemployment-insurance arrangement, and a variety of other new laws and regulations.

She vowed to order member states to provide equal numbers of male and female EU commissioners – and she vowed that if they failed to comply, she would reject their nominees and force them to bend to her will.

“The world,” she pronounced, “is calling for more Europe. The world needs more Europe….Europe should have a stronger and more united voice in the world.” Note that “more united” bit – this is a canny way of saying that the duly elected governments of supposedly sovereign EU nations should henceforth be even more obedient to her than they were to her predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker. Then there was this: “We must have the courage to take foreign policy decisions by qualified majority and to have the courage to stand behind them.” This is a sheer power grab: what she’s saying here is that she plans to compel member states, whatever the will of their citizens, to subscribe to a single foreign policy to be determined by Brussels.

She even compared the EU to a marriage. Nor was it possible to ignore her fondness for the words “strong” and “strength”.

The idea of herself as Führer of a mighty realm stretching from Portugal to Finland, from Ireland to Cyprus, manifestly gets this woman’s juices flowing.

After the European Parliament confirmed her as President of the European Commission, she gave an acceptance speech in which she actually told the legislators that “your confidence in me is confidence in Europe.” Translation: L’État, c’est moi. What is it about the spectacle of a power-hungry German envisioning an omnipotent European empire – with herself at the helm – that sounds so unsettling? Who was it, again, who said “Ich bin Deutschland, und Deutschland bin ich”?

As Nigel Farage commented in the European Parliament on Tuesday, von der Leyen is plainly out “to take control of every single aspect of our lives … she wants to build a centralized, undemocratic, updated form of communism”. The second the word “communism” passed his lips, the hall was filled with cries of outrage. But it was scarcely an exaggeration. (Imagine if he had said “Nazism”!)

Noting von der Leyen’s enthusiasm for an EU military, Farage pointed out that “what is there for defense can also be used for attack”. Indeed, there can be little doubt that one reason von der Leyen and company are itching to build a European army is that they want to prevent any more Brexits: try to pull your country out of the EU a few years from now and, if she has her way, Brussels will do to you what Moscow did to Hungary in 1956 and to Czechoslovakia in 1968.

There is no comfort in prospect for Europeans who prefer freedom. Change will come, but not for the better. It will not be long now – a few decades – before the indigenous European dictators will be replaced by Muslim dictators. They will be even worse. Less likely to be female, but likely to be more savage.

If the British accomplish Brexit, they will save themselves from humiliating subjugation in this solidifying Fourth Reich, aka the EU. But to judge by the way they are trending – inviting in yet more Muslim immigrants, having few children of their own, punishing criticism of Islam – they too will accept Mohammedan supremacy.

 

So it’s 50 years today (July 20, 2019) since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the flag of the United States on the moon.

Why planting a flag on the moon was so hard

With virtually no atmosphere on the moon—and, therefore, no wind—flags that fly freely on Earth would hang like limp cloth in the lunar environment. So engineers had to rethink flagpole design entirely. …

To deploy the flag, one astronaut used a sampling hammer to pound the lower vertical section into the ground. The other astronaut extended the telescoping crossbar and raised it to a 90-degree angle with the vertical section to click it into place. Then the two astronauts slid the upper part of the pole into the lower one.

Once they got the flag up, several factors made it look as though it was flying, First there were wrinkles in it because of how tightly it was packed. And these add to the illusion that the flag is waving. Also, the astronauts didn’t always get the horizontal crossbar extended all the way—they were working in pressurized spacesuits and really cumbersome gloves, after all—which caused the flag to bunch up in places. That also made it look like it’s waving.

President Trump has new designs on the moon.

Charlie Spiering reports at Breitbart:

President Donald Trump welcomed Apollo 11 astronauts at the White House on Friday to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Americans landing on the moon and planting the American flag there. …

Trump called the moon landing event “one of the greatest achievements ever” and said that the United States was committed to continuing the exploration of space.

Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 lunar module pilot, and Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 command module pilot, came to the White House for the event as well as Neil Armstrong’s two sons. Other family members of the three astronauts also attended the event. (Armstrong, the first man to land on the moon, died in 2012.) …

Trump said he was pleased that the United States no longer had to rely on Russia to get up into space, thanks to the private space industry working with NASA.

Yes, that’s what Obama had brought the US down to! (He had assigned a different, earthbound task to NASA – “to reach out to the Muslim world”!)

Now that we have a visionary – with sound business sense – in the Oval Office, NASA will go back to doing its proper job.

“NASA is back,” Trump said. “We’re having rich guys use it and pay us rent; I like that.”

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine also attended the event, declaring that it was important for the United States to return to the moon long-term in order to launch a mission to Mars.

“We prove that out on the moon, then we go to Mars,” Bridenstine said.

But Collins appeared to disagree.

“Mars direct,” he said shortly.

Aldrin disagreed. “You’re impatient,” he interjected off camera.

Trump brought up the debate live in the Oval Office during the Oval Office meeting with the press.

Aldrin supports building a moon base and space station to help launch future trips to Mars, a proposal that Vice President Mike Pence and Bridenstine also favor.

“Who knows better than these people right?” Trump asked, pointing at the two astronauts.

But Bridenstine repeated that NASA needed to learn how to live onsite on the moon using available resources for long-term exploration. He argued that the mission to Mars should be launched from a space station to escape the earth’s gravity. …

Trump seems fascinated by the idea of going straight to Mars and only favors talk about returning to the Moon as long as it is focused on the ultimate mission to Mars.

Where did this madness come from, this idea that the earth is burning up, and that we human beings, as a species, are to blame for it?

Who initiated it? Why do millions believe it? How have otherwise sane men and women become obsessed with it?

James Delingpole writes at Breitbart (12 July, 2019):

The Prince of Wales has warned global leaders that if we don’t tackle climate change in 18 months the human race will go extinct.

Eighteen months to the end of us! And this from the probable next monarch of the United Kingdom and its vast Commonwealth!

No, really. Here are his actual words, in a speech in London yesterday to foreign ministers from the Commonwealth:

I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival.

For our survival! He raves. Look at the madness in his eyes:

Delingpole soberly considers the crazy prophecy as if it could be grounded in reality – which well he might, since it is widely believed all over the world:

So assuming, for a moment, that the Prince of Wales isn’t just spouting gibberish, what kind of measures might we need to adopt in the next 18 months to “keep climate change to survivable levels”?

Happily, we have a good idea courtesy of Lord Deben, chairman of the government’s Climate Change Committee. Writing in the Prince of Wales’s favourite magazine Country Life, he says:

It simply demands that we live more sustainably – that we stop wasting water, become really energy efficient, cut food waste, eat 20 percent less meat, take all our energy from renewable sources and ensure our homes are properly insulated and ventilated.

That word “simply” is doing a lot of work there.

If you’re a carnivore like me, for example, you might not take too kindly to the notion that some dodgy peer who has made at least part of his fortune by promulgating green hysteria has the right to issue directives on how many bacon sarnies or burgers you can reasonably consume per week.

But I have an even bigger red flag waving over that glib suggestion that we should “take all our energy from renewable sources”.

All of it? Really??

The late Professor David Mackay, a Cambridge engineer and chief scientist at the UK government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change once looked at what decarbonizing the economy by going 100 per cent renewable might look like for the British landscape. Needless to say, it wasn’t pretty.

It would involve:

Building 61,000 wind turbines.

Covering 5 per cent of the UK landmass — the equivalent of Cambridgeshire,    Gloucestershire, Lancashire, and Staffordshire combined — with solar arrays. (That would be 100 x  more solar PV than his been installed in the whole world to date.)

Damming most of the rivers in the West Highlands of Scotland to generate hydropower.

Building huge barrages across rivers such as the Severn, destroying intertidal mud flats and devastating bird and fish species.

Using the entirety of Britain’s agricultural land to grow biofuels.

David Mackay was by no means a climate change sceptic. But he was honest enough a scientist to be able to tell his government employers what they didn’t want to hear: that the idea that the UK could power itself by 100 per cent renewable energy was an “appalling delusion”.

Though it’s claimed that 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, this is misleading. The majority of this — three quarters — comes from burning what is euphemistically called ‘biomass” — most of it what you and I call wood.

In other words the environmental movement is claiming as a triumph something that actually is a disaster: millions of people in the Third World are still reliant on the same inefficient, environmentally destructive, health-damaging energy technology that was used by cavemen.

As for wind turbines — ugly and seemingly ubiquitous a nuisance though they are — these currently provide less than one per cent of global energy.

Global energy demand, meanwhile, has been growing at about two per cent per year for the last 40 years. So, just to provide sufficient wind power to cover that increase in demand, how many wind turbines would need to be built?

Matt Ridley answers that question here:

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area [half the size of] the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area [half] the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.

Apart from the obvious visual blight, the environmental cost of building so many wind turbines would be enormous.

… [N]othing damages the environment quite like a wind farm….

By coincidence, yesterday I found myself driving past the Prince of Wales’s country house near Tetbury in the Cotswolds, a strong competitor for the most beautiful area of England.

I drove through valley after valley of idyllic, unspoiled countryside, interrupted only by the occasional chocolate box village of honey-coloured stone with ducks and moorhens being photographed by Chinese tourists who clearly couldn’t believe somewhere quite so perfect-looking could actually exist.

This is the kind of place where you choose to live if, like the Prince of Wales, you are very, very rich. His net worth has been estimated at around $400 million — not unusual for a climate change alarmist.

Here are the Lords of Ruin – he names them, or some of them. They are in the grip of a shared delusion, but where did they get it from?

From multimillionaire Leo Di Caprio to multimillionaire Al Gore, multimillionaire Sir David Attenborough to multimillionaire Tom Steyer, from multimillionaire Sir Richard Branson to multimillionaire Emma Thompson, environmentalism is a hugely attractive religion which enables you to achieve two perfectly wonderful things simultaneously.

First, it enables you to parade your moral virtue by showing that even though you are disgustingly rich you are still in fact an incredibly caring person.

Second, it means you can lecture the revolting lower orders on how they should live their lives and you can campaign to make everything more expensive and miserable for them, as Sir David Attenborough did earlier this week when he urged that air tickets should be hiked up. Obviously, people like Attenborough will go on flying regardless because they’ll still be able to afford it whatever environmental levies are imposed. But stopping other people from doing it will mean that airports and holiday destinations will be less crowded, just as Mother Gaia intended.

Anyway, as I drove through Prince of Wales country, marvelling at the deliciousness of the views, I wondered how many of the people living on the gorgeous private estates in which the Cotswolds abounds share Prince Charles’s views on the environment. Quite a few I suspect. I know of one super-rich hedge fund manager who has donated to Extinction Rebellion, for example, which strikes me as a classic example of the cognitive dissonance to which the super-rich seem prey. On the one hand they are clever enough and, presumably, capable of sufficient due diligence to have been able to have made vast fortunes; on the other, all their powers of discernment, intelligence and research appear to have left them when it comes to the issue of climate change.

How are we going to get it into their thick, overprivileged heads that the Net Zero carbon dioxide by 2050 targets for which they are so passionately advocating will destroy everything they hold dear?

They’ll only learn, I think, when they finally get what it is they’ve been asking for:

Piles of shredded raptors landing with a thud on the estates around Balmoral, sliced and diced by wind turbines.

Solar farms and wind farms obliterating every last stretch of the Cotswolds.

Wading birds driven forever out of the Severn Estuary by a tidal barrier.

Their cleaning ladies, gardeners, and grooms turning up to work in tears because their parents have just frozen to death in fuel poverty.

They won’t like it. But by then it will be far too late.

These Lords of the Earth are plainly deluded. They have been gulled. But who has gulled them, and why?

Is there a clue to be found here in the US?

The Washington Examiner reports:

In Europe, you will often hear politically savvy people refer to Green Party politicians as “watermelons.” The reason is that although they might be environmentalist “green” on the outside, these leftists are secretly communist red if you look beneath the surface.

They typically resort to such subterfuge because environmentalism is more popular than Marxism. A former East German communist is bound to be unpopular, but perhaps not so much if he rehabilitates himself as a renewable energy enthusiast.

The case of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, is different in that she openly advertised herself as a socialist in a country with a well-grounded historical aversion to such alien ideologies. But her grand policy initiative, the $93 trillion Green New Deal, was still billed as if it were a legitimate environmentalist idea. We were supposedly trying to save the world from imminent destruction. As Ocasio-Cortez herself put it, “We’re, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

Twelve years. Should we be grateful? That’s ten and a half more years than the Prince of Wales allows us.

She would have us think, then, that this is a conversation about science. We need the Green New Deal, or else humanity is doomed. But now we know a lot more about this proposal, and it appears that that isn’t what the Green New Deal is about at all.

Her chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti (the brains and the money behind her political operation ever since her 2018 primary victory) divulged in an unintentionally blunt comment in the Washington Post that the Green New Deal was not only not based in the science of climate change, but in fact not even designed with climate change in mind. “It wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” he is quoted as saying.

In other words, it’s not that they looked for a way to save the world, and just happened to find a way that involved full employment pledges, the retrofitting of millions of buildings, income for those unwilling to work, high-speed passenger rail, and the curtailment of plane travel and carnivorousness. That’s precisely backwards. The Green New Deal came about because Chakrabarti wanted to transform the U.S. economy into something more primitive, and environmentalism struck him as the best excuse for doing so.

Think of the Green New Deal as an updated (and we hope less lethal) version of the “Year Zero” concept. Americans will be reassigned under a new socialist order to environmentally friendly tasks. The saving of the planet is not the goal of the Green New Deal but rather the excuse for it: the common purpose around which we all unite to pursue the deindustrialized, Utopian America of tomorrow.

And we need that Utopian socialist society because … wait, why exactly? Because of the despotic cruelty of our tsar and the grinding poverty of his recently enslaved subjects? Because none of the peasants own any land in our impoverished feudal society?

That doesn’t seem right, does it?

Perhaps the problem is that workers’ wages are at all-time highs and unemployment is at all-time lows. Or perhaps it’s that our nation is so poor and bereft of opportunity that everyone who can walk or even crawl is literally risking life and limb and crossing deserts to get here.

The sarcasm is justified. What is that envisioned Utopia really like? What is the Cause for which nothing less than all must be sacrificed?

The Lords of Ruin – those multibillionaires, the likes of Prince Charles, Al Gore, Tom Steyer – are ingenuous, you could even say innocent, gulls who would lay civilization waste with the best of intentions.

But the Chakrabartis of the movement are not innocent. They are cynically exploiting many people’s naivety, or urge to be good, or personal despair.

The naive, the would-be-good, the desperate are such as are exploited by an evil manipulator in Dostoyevsky’s great novel The Possessed (also titled The Devils or The Demons). Their Saikat Chakrabarti, one Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky, would set the world on fire out of sheer spite, and actually persuades a pathetic bunch of five foolish idealists to burn down half a town and commit murder for the Cause. He makes them believe there is a plan, that they are one cell of hundreds all working for the Cause; that there are, at some vague “center”, anonymous Controllers who know exactly what must be done to fulfill the Vision, and all that the five have to do – all that the believers, the dreamers, the visionaries, the desperate have to do – is obey. The distraught Governor of the district, watching the town burn, diagnoses the madness driving the terrible events. “The fire is in the minds of men and not in the roofs of houses,” he says.

The story explains what Russia had become in the late 19th century that made the Communist Revolution of 1917 possible.

Of course there is not just one Saikat Chakrabarti or Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky. There is a whole sub-race of them, not idealists but cynics. Out of their spite emerges the Rumor, the great Lie that ignites the minds of multitudes, including every sort from every class and nation, among them young women in New York, billionaires in California, crocodiles at the United Nations, Kings in Europe.

says who? President Bill Clinton?:

It would be gratifying to know that most Americans at last, after patience, tolerance and good-will have all been worn out, are doing the decent thing and allowing themselves to hate Ilhan Omar, the spiteful Somalian Congresswoman who hates them with passion.

We like what George S. Bardmesser writes at American Greatness:

I am an immigrant.

I want Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu) to go back to the shithole country she came from.

And I want her to stay there.

I spent some time on the Internet looking for even one positive thing that Omar has said about America—but my search was in vain. Omar hates and despises her adoptive country unequivocally and unconditionally. She hates everything about America today, and she hates everything about the America of yesterday.

Omar hates white people. Omar hates Jews—and she is not shy about letting everyone know it (“It’s all about the Benjamins baby”). Omar hates our ally Israel (“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel”).

Ilhan Omar is a one-woman hate factory.

Maybe I missed a public statement where Omar praised America. But after looking through countless webpages and many gigabytes, I think I am on solid ground when I say: Ilhan Omar hates everything and everyone around her, except possibly her brother, whom she married, and perhaps the 9/11 terrorists who killed 3,000 people (“some people did something”—no biggie).

As an immigrant from the no-longer-with-us USSR, I believe I have as much moral authority as anyone to tell Omar: you should return to the country you represent and take up permanent residence there.

America can never measure up to Omar’s high standards—but no doubt Somalia will. Omar need not suffer in our land of toxic xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism, sexism, lookism and speciesism—because she can live out the rest of her life amidst the tolerance, understanding, and mutual respect that Somalis are famous for.

(For those interested, Somalia today is still a land mostly of anarchy, fundamentally not all that different from what you probably saw in “Black Hawk Down,” with a civil war, Islamic terrorists slaughtering civilians, corruption, hunger, poverty, torture, rape, refugee camps, and all the other usual things associated with that jewel of East Africa.)

This past week, President Trump once again detonated the brains of the Left, when he tweeted (without even naming names) that those who came here and enjoyed all the benefits of this country, but had nothing good to say about America, can go back to their original countries. The reaction from the Left was instantaneous and explosive: Racist! Sexist! Nativist! Islamophobe! Bad Man! Really Bad! Trump is Hitler! Trump is Mussolini! Trump is a Dictator! Trump is Satan! We hate Trump!

As an immigrant, I would like to tell Ilhan Omar: I love America. America gave my family and me opportunities I never would have had anywhere else. Unlike you, I am proud to call myself an American. America is incredible and special. My family has never asked for a handout—but what my parents and I have, we have because we grasped the opportunities offered and protected in our new country. For these opportunities, we are eternally grateful. …

As an immigrant, I can assure native-born Americans that Ilhan Omar does not speak for immigrants. Not for Russian-Jewish ones like me, not for (I am quite confident) Latinos, Asians or Europeans. Omar and the vitriol she constantly spews is not typical of immigrants who come here legally. So I salute President Trump for once again sticking a fork in the eye of the leftist PC crowd, and saying publicly what millions of people are thinking privately. Republicans agree with him. Independents agree with him. In fact, Trump just gave us all even more reasons to vote for him in 2020. And if Democrats don’t agree—who cares?