The man who let out secrets 203

Julian Assange, the man who published secrets stolen from the Pentagon by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London yesterday (April 12, 2019) and is being held in jail while an extradition request from the US is being considered.

https://youtu.be/rY6v63jMyl4

 

https://youtu.be/K8f1GVumAyQ

 

AP reports:

A bearded and shouting Julian Assange was pulled from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and hauled into court Thursday, the start of an extradition battle for the WikiLeaks founder who faces U.S. charges related to the publication of tens of thousands of secret government documents.

Police arrested Assange after the South American nation revoked the political asylum that had given him sanctuary for almost seven years. Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno said he took the action due to “repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols”.

In Washington, the U.S. Justice Department accused Assange of conspiring with former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to break into a classified government computer at the Pentagon. The charge was announced after Assange was taken into custody.

His lawyer said the 47-year-old Assange would fight extradition to the U.S.

Assange took refuge in the embassy in 2012 after he was released on bail in Britain while facing extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations that have since been dropped. He refused to leave the embassy, fearing arrest and extradition to the U.S. for publishing classified military and diplomatic cables through WikiLeaks.

Manning, who served several years in prison for leaking troves of classified documents before her sentence was commuted by then-President Barack Obama, is again in custody in Alexandria, Virginia, for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

Over the years, Assange used Ecuador’s embassy as a staging post to keep his name before the public, frequently making appearances on its tiny balcony, posing for pictures and reading statements. Even his cat became well-known.

But his presence was an embarrassment to U.K. authorities, who for years kept a police presence around the clock outside the embassy, costing taxpayers millions in police overtime. Such surveillance was removed in 2015, but the embassy remained a focal point for his activities.

Video posted online by Ruptly, a news service of Russia Today, showed several men in suits pulling a handcuffed Assange out of the embassy and loading him into a police van while uniformed British police formed a passageway. Assange … shouted and gestured as he was removed …

He later appeared in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where District Judge Michael Snow wasted no time in finding him guilty of breaching his bail conditions, flatly rejecting his assertion that he had not had a fair hearing and a reasonable excuse for not appearing.

“Mr. Assange’s behavior is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests,” Snow said. “He hasn’t come close to establishing ‘reasonable excuse’.”

Assange waved to the packed public gallery as he was taken to the cells. His next appearance was set for May 2 via prison video-link in relation to the extradition case.

Assange’s attorney, Jennifer Robinson, said he will fight any extradition to the U.S.

“This sets a dangerous precedent for all journalist and media organizations in Europe and around the world,” she said. “This precedent means that any journalist can be extradited for prosecution in the United States for having published truthful information about the United States.”

Asked at the White House about the arrest, President Donald Trump declared, “It’s not my thing,” and “I know nothing about WikiLeaks,” despite praising the anti-secrecy organization dozens of times during his 2016 campaign.

Speaking in Parliament, British Prime Minister Theresa May said the arrest shows that “no one is above the law”.

A stupid remark that, inapplicable to Julian Assange. It would apply to people in power who evade answering for their crimes, such as Hillary Clinton.

Moreno [President Lenin Moreno of Ecuador] said in a video posted on Twitter that Ecuador was no longer willing to give Assange protection. Other Ecuadorian officials in Quito accused supporters of WikiLeaks and two Russian hackers of trying to destabilize the country. …

Assange has been under U.S. Justice Department scrutiny for years for WikiLeaks’ role in publishing government secrets. He was an important figure in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe as investigators examined how WikiLeaks obtained emails that were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and Democratic groups.

WikiLeaks quickly drew attention to U.S. interest in Assange and said that Ecuador had illegally terminated Assange’s political asylum “in violation of international law”.

“Powerful actors, including CIA, are engaged in a sophisticated effort to de-humanise, de-legitimize and imprison him,” the group said in a tweet over a photo of Assange’s smiling face. …

Assange’s arrest came a day after WikiLeaks accused Ecuador’s government of an “extensive spying operation” against him. It alleges that meetings with lawyers and a doctor in the embassy over the past year were secretly filmed. …

Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa called [President] Moreno’s decision “cowardly”, accusing him of retaliating against Assange for WikiLeaks spreading allegations about an offshore bank account purportedly linked to Moreno’s family and friends.

Allegations were made that the publication by Wikileaks of the stolen information endangered American agents in foreign countries. Of course that would tell against Assange. But he has denied it, and it has not been confirmed.

Assange was at one time accused of acting for Russia, which he also denied.

We agree with Mark Steyn’s opinion of the matter.

At issue is not the honesty or the virtue or the motives of Julian Assange.

The issue is liberty. 

We would like to know our readers’ opinions. 

L: A Novel History 82

Posted under Britain, Collectivism, communism, Leftism, Marxism, revolution, tyranny, United Kingdom, Videos by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, April 9, 2019

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Britain debauched and infected by Europe 125

The British government is failing to accomplish Brexit – the country’s exit from the European Union, for which a majority of Britons voted in a referendum.

Why? Because the government and the Civil Service consist of people who want Britain to remain in the EU. They know the EU is undemocratic, deeply corrupt, and intent on Islamizing its member states, but that’s what they like about it.

The voters who put in the Tory [Conservative] government are angry. So angry, that when they were asked in a recent poll, “would you vote Tory or for the Brexit Party in the potential Euros (European Parliament elections]?”, 92 % said they would vote for the Brexit Party.

James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:

92 percent is a significant majority of Conservative voters who will be seeking to punish their own party in the likely Euro elections by voting for one of their more strongly Eurosceptic rivals — either Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party (the only other option offered in this ad hoc poll) or UKIP [the United Kingdom Independence Party].

The Conservatives are going to get creamed if and when the next Euro elections happen, of that there’s no question. Their natural constituency won’t easily forgive the party for betraying Brexit in the way that [Prime Minister] Theresa May and her Cabinet of Remainers have done.

But the bigger question is: what will happen when Conservative voters’ loyalties are tested in a general election?

It’s a very important question because on the answer depends the fate of Britain. …

Is there a terrifying possibility that the Labour Party, led by the Communist Islamophiliac Jeremy Corbyn, could be voted into power?

Delingpole fears the answer may be yes:

In normal times, there’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell that a terrorist-supporting, anti-Semitic, hard-left loon like Jeremy Corbyn would ever get voted into power by the generally sensible British electorate.

But these are not normal times. Various clever rich people have already made sure to move their assets offshore in preparation for the massive confiscatory spree and capital controls which will instantly follow the election of Corbyn’s socialist regime.

I used to think they were just being paranoid. Now I’m starting to worry they may have been prescient.

The now-far-left Labour Party might win not because the British want what it’s threatening them with, but … what? Because the Conservatives are threatening them with much the same thing?

There is no general appetite for our broadly free market democracy to be replaced by Venezuela-style collectivism. But collectivism, nonetheless, is what Britain may get because of what political analyst Matthew Goodwin correctly identifies as the “perfect storm” threatening the Conservative party with its greatest existential crisis in living memory:

Today, the dark clouds that are swirling above Britain’s most successful party are visible to all; the government’s disastrous handling of Brexit; a Cabinet that is deeply split; a parliamentary party that has fractured; a Conservative electorate and membership that are at logger-heads with their leaders; a rebooted and well-funded populist Right under a re-energised Nigel Farage; and a fundamentally damaged Conservative brand. At no other point in Britain’s post-war period has the Conservative Party looked so vulnerable.

You may say the Conservatives have brought this disaster on themselves. And you’d be absolutely right. To my mind this goes far beyond Brexit — which merely brought matters to a head.

The rot set in a long, long time ago when the Conservatives decided that they no longer wanted to be conservative. …

This tectonic shift has been building for some time, driven on the one hand by the forces of Fabianism and cultural Marxism, on the other by the Conservatives’ surrender of their core philosophies in favour of “pragmatism” (i.e. drifting leftward to shake off the “nasty” tag, which of course they’ll never lose because the people who dictate the terms are their even more left-wing opponents).

For a forensic analysis of what has gone wrong, I recommend this must-read essay by David Eyles at Country Squire titled Post-Brexit Tory Doom::

The result of the Conservatives having abandoned conservatism is the unintentional creation of a philosophical void. It has meant that the Conservatives, upon taking office, have found themselves unable to forge political direction for the country. Indeed, David Cameron almost prided himself upon this by describing himself as “pragmatic” – in other words he blew with whatever wind direction was prevailing at the time. Into this void has stepped the Civil Service, which instead of being politically neutral as it always used to be, is now heavily politicised towards the Left. In addition, the rest of the élites which oversee so much of our public life have ensured that the Westminster Conservative Party have been softened up socially and culturally over dinner party tables. The Civil Service has thus successfully guided the Conservative government into territory that is now firmly occupied by the Leftist Clerisy.

As in the US, the administrative state is a swamp in which reptiles of the Left work to transform the nation into something nearer to their Socialist ideal.

No doubt the forces of Fabianism and cultural Marxism have contributed to the turning of the Conservative Party into a party of the Left. No doubt the treason of the civil servants has worked to make the change. But what must have done more harm than anything else to the nation as a whole, wrecking its ability to govern itself is – the EU.

Britain’s membership of the EU has been one of the worst mistakes in the islands’ history. Perhaps the very worst. It was like an abusive marriage. Europe debauched Britain not by violence, not be rapine and plunder, but by psychological corruption. The British got into bad company and were led astray. Britain has caught the morbid sickness of Europe.

The British were never Europeans. They are greatly different from the continentals. Their kind live in North America and Australia. Regardless of what the maps contend, psychologically speaking the Atlantic Ocean is much narrower than the English Channel.  

The European states – at least those in the south –  never could govern themselves well. Could never get the hang of it. Their elected governments changed so often, the representatives who had far to come to the capital cities where the parliaments sat, barely had time to get unpacked before they were on their way home again. Unless they fell under tyrannous dictators.

The British had a talent for governing (even though they messed up with the American colonies).

And the British used to have contempt – healthy or inexcusably racist according to your point of view – for Europeans. They called them by abusive names: Frogs, Krauts, Spics, Wops … “Wogs”, originally a rude word for Africans, came to be applied to all foreigners generally. The expression “Wogs begin at Calais” was a common refrain. When Britain joined the European Union, many lamented, “Now Wogs begin at Land’s End” (the westernmost point of England).

The British became, or tried to become, Europeans. They caught the lethal European sickness. Can they recover? If Brexit is finally accomplished, will the nation start to heal?

We share James Delingpole’s worry that it might not.

Calumnies, collusion, conspiracy, and crimes 203

Victor David Hanson, writing at American Greatness, provides this summary of the lies that Hillary Clinton and a cabal of dishonest Obama-appointees told, and the crimes they committed, in a conspiracy to get the duly elected president, Donald Trump, falsely convicted of treason.

The irony of the entire Russian collusion hoax is that accusers who cried the loudest about leaking, collusion, lying, and obstruction are themselves soon very likely to be accused of just those crimes.

Now that Robert Mueller’s 674-day, $30 million investigation is over and has failed to find the original goal of its mandate — evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government to sway the 2016 election — and now that thousands of once-sealed government documents will likely be released in unredacted form, those who eagerly assumed the role of the hunters may become the hunted, due to their own zealous violation of the nation’s trust and its laws.

Take Lying

Former FBI Director James Comey’s testimonies cannot be reconciled with those of his own deputy director Andrew McCabe. He falsely testified that the Steele dossier was not the main basis for obtaining FISA court warrants. On at least 245 occasions, Comey swore under oath that he either did not know, or could not remember, when asked direct questions about his conduct at the FBI. He likely lied when he testified that he did not conclude his assessment of the Clinton illegal email use before he had even interviewed Clinton, an assertion contradicted by his own written report. I guess his credo and modus operandi are reflected in the subtitle of his recent autobiography A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership.

Andrew McCabe currently is under criminal referral for lying to federal investigators about leaking to the media. He and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein each have accused each other of not telling the whole truth about their shared caper of trying to force President Trump out of office by invoking the 25th Amendment.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has admitted to lying under oath to Congress — and since lied about his earlier admission of that lying. His recent sworn congressional testimony of not having leaked information about the Steele dossier to the media is again likely to be untrue, given that Clapper had admitted to speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper about the dossier’s contents. CNN, remember, would in turn go on to hire the mendacious Clapper as an analyst. And once on air, Clapper would insist that Trump was both a Russian asset and thus guilty of collusion crimes greater than those of Watergate. Lies. All lies.

Former CIA Director John Brennan has admitted to lying under oath to Congress on two occasions. He may well face further legal exposure. When he lost his security clearance, he repeatedly lied that Trump was guilty of collusion, however that non-crime is defined. And as the Mueller probe wound down, Brennan with pseudo-authority and trumped-up hints of phony access to secret intelligence sources deceitfully assured the nation that Trump within days would face indictment — perhaps along with his family members.

Brennan in 2016 also reached out to foreign intelligence services, primary British and Australian, to surveille and entrap Trump aides, as a way of circumventing rules preventing CIA monitoring of American citizens. And he may well have also reverse-targeted Americans, under the guise of monitoring foreign nationals, in order to build a case of so-called Trump collusion.

Finally, Brennan testified to Congress in May 2017 that he had not been earlier aware of the dossier or its contents before the election, although in August 2016 it is almost certain that he had briefed Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on it in a spirited effort to have Reid pressure the FBI to keep or expand its counterintelligence investigation of Trump during the critical final weeks of the election.

Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin likely also lied to FBI investigators when they claimed they had no knowledge while working at the State Department that their boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was using an illegal private email server. In fact, they had read her communications on it and actually inquired about its efficacy.

Samantha Power, the former U.N. ambassador, in her last year in office requested on more than 260 occasions to unmask names of Americans monitored by the government. Yet Power later claimed that most of these requests were not made by her. And yet she either does not know or does not cite who exactly used her name to make such requests during the election cycle. In any case, no one has come forward to admit to the improper use of Power’s name to request the hundreds of unmaskings.

Susan Rice, the former Obama national security advisor, could have made a number of unmasking requests in Power’s name, although she initially denied making any requests in her own name—a lie she immediately amended. Rice, remember, repeatedly lied on national television about the cause and origins of the Benghazi attack, denied there were cash payments for hostages in the Iran deal, misled about the conduct of Beau Bergdahl, and prevaricated over the existence and destruction of weapons of mass destruction in Syria.

Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr did not tell the truth on a federal written disclosure required by law when he omitted the key fact that his wife Nellie worked on Christopher Steele’s Fusion GPS dossier. Ohr’s testimony that he completely briefed key FBI officials on the dossier in July or August 2016 is not compatible to what former FBI attorney Lisa Page has testified to concerning the dates of her own knowledge of the Steele material.

Take Foreign Collusion

Christopher Steele is a foreign national. So are many of the Russian sources that he claims he had contacted to solicit dirt on Donald Trump and his campaign aides. In fact, John Brennan’s CIA, soon in consultation with the FBI, was used in circuitous fashion to facilitate surveillance of Donald Trump’s campaign through the use of foreign nationals during the 2016 campaign.

Foreigners such as Maltese professor Josef Mifsud, and former Australian minister for foreign affairs Alexander Downer and an array of intelligence contractors from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) mysteriously met with minor Trump aide George Papadopoulos and others. It is likely that to disguise American intelligence agencies’ efforts to besmirch, surveille, and leak to the press damaging unfounded rumors about the Trump campaign that John Brennan enlisted an entire cadre of foreign nationals. And it is likely to be the most egregious example of using non-U.S. citizens to affect the outcome of an election in our history.

If there is a crime of foreign collusion — a conspiracy of U.S. officials to use foreigners to interfere with an American election — then Brennan’s efforts are the textbook example.

Take Leaking

Many of the names unmasked by requests from Samantha Power and Susan Rice were leaked illegally to the media. James Comey himself leaked confidential memos of presidential conversations to the press; in at least one case, the memo was likely classified.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker is currently under criminal referral for improperly leaking classified documents. He seems to have been in contact with the media before the election and he may have been one of many FBI officials and contacts, along with Christopher Steele, that reporters such as David Corn, Michael Isikoff, and Julia Ioffe anonymously referenced in their pre-election published hit pieces on Russian collusion — all the result of the successful strategies of Fusion GPS, along with some in the FBI, to seed unverified anti-Trump gossip to warp the election.

Andrew McCabe also is under criminal referral both for leaking classified information and then lying about it.

In a fashion emblematic of this entire sordid mess, the always ethically compromised James Clapper in January 2017 had leaked the dossier to Jake Tapper of CNN and likely other journalists and then shortly afterwards publicly deplored just this sort of government leaking that had led to sensational stories about the dossier.

Take Obstruction of Justice

A number of FBI and Department of Justice high ranking employees such as James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, and Sally Yates all signed off on FISA warrants to surveille Carter Page without apprising the courts that they knew that their chief evidence, the Steele Dossier, was unverified, was paid for by Hillary Clinton, and was used in circular fashion as the basis for news accounts presented to the court. Nor did the Justice Department and FBI officials apprise the FISA justices that Christopher Steele had been terminated as a FBI source.

No one believes that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch just happened to meet Bill Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac and confined their conservations to a variety of topics having nothing to do with Hillary Clinton — at a time when Lynch’s Justice Department was investigating her. Note the meeting was only disclosed because a reporter got a tip and arrived on the scene of the two adjoining Lynch and Clinton private jets — which suggests that the only thing Lynch and Clinton regretted was being found out. Few believe that Lynch had recused herself as she promised, given her strict oversight of the sort of language Comey’s FBI was allowed to use in its investigation of Clinton.

Take Conflict of Interest

Andrew McCabe never should have been in charge of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton, given that just months earlier his wife had been the recipient of $675,000 in campaign cash donated by Clinton and Democratic Party-affiliated political action committees. And the apology of a “time line” that suggests conflicts of interest like McCabe’s expired after an arbitrary date is specious. McCabe knew his spouse had been a recent recipient of Clinton-related money, knew that he had substantial influence on the fate of her [Hillary Clinton’s] email investigation, and hoped and assumed that she was likely to be the next president of the United States quite soon.

Rod Rosenstein never should have been appointed acting attorney general in charge of oversight of the Mueller investigation. He knew Mueller well. In circular fashion, he had drafted the rationale to fire Comey that had prompted the Mueller’s appointment. He had signed off on a FISA warrant request without apprising the court of the true nature of the Steele dossier’s origins and nature. He had met shortly before the Mueller appointment with acting FBI director Andrew McCabe to investigate the chance of removing Trump under a distortion of the 25th Amendment. So, in essence, Rosenstein had been one of the catalysts for McCabe to investigate removing Trump for his own part in the removal of Comey and then in Orwellian fashion joined McCabe’s efforts.

Comey deliberately leaked a classified memo of a presidential conversation, in which he had misled the president about his actual status under FBI investigations, in order to cause enough media outrage over his firing to prompt the hiring of a special counsel. That gambit succeeded in the appointment of his own longtime associate Robert Mueller, who would be charged to investigate “collusion”, in which Comey played an important role in monitoring the Trump campaign with the assistance of British national Christopher Steele.

Robert Mueller did not need to appoint a legal team inordinately Democratic, which included attorneys who had been either donors to the Clinton campaign, or had been attorneys for Clinton aides, or had defended the Clinton Foundation. And he certainly should not have included on his investigative team that was charged with adjudicating Russian collusion in the 2016 election both Zainab Ahmad and Andrew Weissman, Obama Justice Department officials, who had been briefed by Bruce Ohr before the election on the nature of the Steele dossier and its use of foreign sources.

It will be difficult to unravel all of the above lying, distortion, and unethical and illegal conduct.

The motives of these bad actors are diverse, but they share a common denominator. As Washington politicos and administrative state careerists, all of them believed that Donald Trump was so abhorrent that he should be prevented from winning the 2016 election. After his stunning and shocking victory, they assumed further that either he should not be inaugurated or he should be removed from office as soon as they could arrange it.

They further reasoned that as high and esteemed unelected officials their efforts were above and beyond the law, and rightly so, given their assumed superior wisdom and morality.

Finally, if their initial efforts were predicated on winning not just exemption from the law, but even promotions and kudos from a grateful President Hillary Clinton, their subsequent energies at removing Trump and investing in the collusion hoax were preemptive and defensive. Seeding the collusion hoax was a way either of removing Trump who had the presidential power to call them all to account for their illegality, or at least causing so much media chaos and political havoc that their own crimes and misdemeanors would be forgotten by becoming submerged amid years of scandal, conspiracies, and media sensationalism.

And they were almost — but so far not quite — correct in all their assumptions.

They are people so low as to be truly beneath contempt. Their rightful place, as far from leadership positions in government and law-enforcement as any could be, is prison.

The continuing persecution of a hero 24

Tommy Robinson, the man who dared to object publicly and persistently to Muslim gangs raping, enslaving, debauching and pimping thousands of children in England, has just been charged for the umpteenth time. He is to be re-tried for the same “crime” – the name of which was changed with a wave of a prosecutor’s pen when his official tormentors couldn’t make their first choice stick – that he was sentenced for the last time, when his conviction was quashed by no less a power than the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales.

Tommy speaks for a great many of his fellow citizens. How many, no one knows; but tens of thousands have turned out in the streets to support him.  Now his supporters need to do more than gather, more than hold up banners, more than applaud speeches. They need to make their anger felt. But how? Tommy does not incite them to violence.

The craven authorities in Britain looked away from the Muslim rape gangs because they are afraid of Islamic terrorism. If Muslim criminals are brought to trial and found guilty, they are given as light a sentence as the quaking judges can apologetically impose on them. The lesson to be learnt is that no argument short of murderous violence commands attention in Islamized Britain. As Tommy does not commit or incite terrorist violence, he will be sentenced to a long term in a prison full of  violent Muslims. He will be beaten again, all too possibly to death.      

Posted under Britain, Islam, Muslims, tyranny, United Kingdom by Jillian Becker on Friday, March 8, 2019

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Portrait of a hero 14

We think it’s well worth the 160 minutes it takes to watch these three videos, to get to know what needs to be known about one of the few real heroes of our time.

Tommy Robinson:

https://youtu.be/xsVjeK5FT3A

Posted under Islam, jihad, Muslims, United Kingdom, Videos by Jillian Becker on Saturday, March 2, 2019

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Fun while it lasted 127

Paul Joseph Watson on the girl who joined ISIS and now wants to come back to Britain:

Posted under Islam, jihad, Muslims, United Kingdom, Videos by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, February 26, 2019

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Davos goes down 118

Have those arrogant globalist elites trying to rule the world been stopped at last?

Have the nationalists, slowly awaking from their passivity and apathy to vote for Brexit and Donald Trump, to put on yellow vests and shout angrily in the streets of their Western cities, stopped them?

We quote Michael Barone writing at Investor’s Business Daily on 2/1/2019:

Turnout at Davos was lousy this year. President Trump, preoccupied by the government shutdown, was a no-show at last week’s World Economic Forum there. So were British Prime Minister Theresa May (Brexit) and French President Emanuel Macron (“gilets jaunes”). Chinese President Xi Jinping, Davos’ 2018 star, and Russian President Vladimir Putin weren’t there either. Neither were some of the usual financial and media big names.

From all of this, you might get the impression that the world’s political, financial and media elites have lost much of their prestige these days, which, of course, they have.

It’s an enormous contrast with elites’ sunny confidence, over much of the quarter century after the fall of the Soviet Union, that they could remake the world … 

Consider Mexico. The NAFTA trade agreement was proposed by the Reagan administration, negotiated by the Bush administration and ratified by the Clinton administration, with plenty of support from both parties, especially Texans (Lloyd Bentsen, the Bushes) close to the border. They hoped to make Mexico more like the United States, and to regularize Mexican immigration.

There has been some convergence, with life in much of Mexico resembling Texas, but also with large parts of California resembling Mexico. Illegal immigration surged up until the 2007 economic crisis.

Even more ambitious was the bipartisan elites’ project of bringing China into the world trading system. The hope was that an increasingly prosperous Chinese populace would demand more freedom and democracy. That hasn’t happened; instead, Xi Jinping has regressed toward one-man rule.

Meanwhile, serious academic studies have substantiated non-elite charges that Chinese imports have cost America hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs. In return, American consumers have been able to buy clothes, toys and gadgets at increasingly low prices. But for many, it is at the cost of the dignity and sense of self-worth achieved by earning a paycheck.

The chief project of European elites, the “ever-closer” European Union, has arguably worked out worse. The Euro currency that was supposed to tie Europe together has instead (as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher predicted) widened the rift between the Mediterranean countries and an increasingly dominant Germany. Britain voted for Brexit — leaving the EU — in 2016, and elites, despite astonishing contempt for voters, have so far failed to reverse that verdict. …

In each case, these elites have underestimated the force and persistence of national cultures

Perhaps the success of American military leaders in transforming post-World War II Germany and Japan turned out to be misleading. Those two countries drew on ethical and parliamentary traditions rooted in those societies and not wholly destroyed by short periods of dominance by Nazi thugs and murderous militarists. Mexico and China have different traditions, and there is no vital tradition of European unity.

Elites are impatient with people they regard as their inferiors. If you question Eurocrats’ undemocratic drive for an “ever-closer Union”, you are told that without the EU, France and Germany would once again go to war — obvious nonsense. If you advise more respect for nationalist traditions, you are told that all nationalists are Nazis — obvious nonsense again.

If you say that competition from low-wage workers in Mexico and China might cause substantial job loss in the United States, you are told what every college grad learns in Economics 101 (but what sounds counterintuitive to non-college grads), that free trade benefits both importers and exporters. You can argue that Mexican immigration and Chinese job competition peaked before 2007, but they still obviously rankle many voters.

So the political, financial and media elites have taken beatings at the ballot box … Their failures to make course corrections and their lack of respect for decent nationalism have been costly. Something to talk about if they slink back to Davos next year.

“Slink back” is good!

But to answer our opening questions: No, there is still many a battle ahead before Merkel, Macron and May – probably never accepting that they were wrong – are driven from power. The rickety EU is not yet about to be pushed over to explode in a cloud of dust. And in the US, because badly educated 18-24 year olds who have no stake in the economy are allowed to vote, there is a real danger of socialist environmentalist race-obsessed feminist globalists coming to power in the next decade.

November 11, 1918 and 2018 47

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 100 years ago TODAY, the First World War came to an end.

But Europe did not recover from it.

The death of Europe – its slow suicide which is now well underway – began with the outbreak of that unnecessary war.

An entirely unnecessary war it was. It wasted a generation of young men. Ten million of them died and millions more bore life-altering injuries.

The suffering of the doomed young men – many if not most in their teens – was intense. Variously, they were shot; they felt the cold steel of bayonets piercing into their bodies; their lungs, throats and skins were blistered by mustard gas; they were blinded; they lost limbs; they lived and died in mud.

For what? For the vanity of rulers, most of them monarchs. That was all. Nothing more profound or complicated than that.

But the First World War and the Armistice itself necessitated the Second World War.

And the Western powers, Britain and America, deemed it necessary to fight it in alliance with Stalin, an ally as tyrannically oppressive and cruel as the axis powers they defeated.

Because of Stalin’s alliance, Eastern Europe was saved from one tyranny only to fall under another. The iron heel of Nazi Germany was lifted from that half of the continent, and the iron heel of Communist Russia came down upon it.

American generosity helped the economic recovery of the Western European nations. But their future is short.

The Western European peoples are letting themselves die out. They have few children. And they are giving their lands away to mostly poor, alien, uneducated settlers, whose customs and laws derive from the dark ages. 

These Third World migrants pour in at the invitation of the governments, and have many children. It is a form of conquest by the will of the conquered.

Before long the foreign colonists will be numerous enough to use the European system of democracy to gain power, and then, if they so choose, they can abolish democracy and replace it with their own systems of oppressive tyranny.  

For this the soil of Europe was soaked with the blood of its peoples in the wars of the last century.

For those who survived, for their dwindling descendants, is that eleven o’clock the bells are striking?

Socialized medicine and its groaning halls 156

The fastest way to reduce a nation from free to unfree is for its government to take charge of its health.

It may also be a reliable way to shrink the nation. Countries with national health services also have low fertility rates.

It’s a pleasant enough state of affairs for some members of the medical profession in such countries in this twilight of the West. True, the underpaid general practitioners are worked half to death, but obstetricians and pediatricians take early retirement, and geriatricians take long vacations from their stints of duty on the death panels. Undertakers buy stately homes.

If central government takes over health care in America, nothing will be different. Just bigger. To treat the only large demographics, young adults and the able-bodied middle-aged – in other words, those who escaped the abortionist’s scissors and are not yet old enough to be denied all curative measures – the inflictors of medical care will need large accommodations.

Justin Haskins discusses the prospect of a US national health service at Townhall :

Until recently, only the far left of the Democratic Party openly called for … socialized medicine. Few remember that when the Democrats last had control of the House of Representatives, in 2010, most Democrats chose to reject pushing for a single-payer health care model, despite the fact they had control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Even then-President Barack Obama, a longtime supporter of enacting a single-payer scheme, told members of his party that it would be better, at least temporarily, to pursue a more moderate course.

Fast-forward to 2018. Emboldened by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s success in pushing his “Medicare for All” single-payer model while running for president in 2016, many congressional Democrats have radically changed their tune. Not only has single-payer health care become one of the defining issues for Democrats today, in many respects, it seems as though it’s the party’s only issue … other than calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, of course.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to federal elections. Many gubernatorial candidates are saying it’s time for government to take over the health care marketplace. For instance, in “purple” Florida, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, the Democrats’ choice to recapture Florida’s governorship, has been a vocal supporter of Sanders’s single-payer scheme, although he admits it would be difficult for Florida to enact single-payer on its own.

But while the cries for socialized medicine have grown louder in the United States, across the pond, England’s national health care program, the National Health Service, is facing huge difficulties liberals in America don’t want you to know about.

Earlier in October, reports emerged that the National Health Service’s forthcoming 10-year plan will include a policy change that will make group appointments with primary care doctors the “default” option for those with long-term health problems. Under the new model, patients will be expected to meet with doctors in groups of 15 to save money and time. …

During these group primary care visits, which will reportedly last about two hours each, patients will be expected to share their health care concerns as they would normally in more traditional one-on-one appointments.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Who would ever want to discuss sex, obesity, hemorrhoids, or any other deeply personal health care problem in front of a group of 14 other strangers—or, even worse, neighbors? But fear not! The government masterminds in England have a solution: Groups will be formed based on common health problems, such as diabetes and erectile dysfunction, because, you know, all people with diabetes and erectile dysfunction are basically the same. And to ensure no one in the group discusses the ailments of others when the group primary care session ends, each person will be required to sign a confidentiality agreement pledging not to share what they heard with people who weren’t present for the appointment.

It’s astonishing the faith politicians and bureaucrats have in pieces of paper! They believe a sheet or two can forestall every peril from gossip to war.

I can’t think of a more bizarre and insulting way to treat patients suffering from serious and sometimes embarrassing diseases than to force them to discuss their problems in front of a group of their peers, but this is the sort of thing that happens when the good of collective matters more than the rights of the individual.

This isn’t the only controversy facing the NHS, either. For several years, critics of the health care system have complained that it’s wildly underfunded and, as a result, suffering from long wait times for patients. …

No one denies the United States has plenty of health care problems of its own, and the Obamacare model imposed on Americans by the Democrats in 2010 has only made things significantly worse. But the solutions to those flaws in our current system can’t be found in the government-controlled systems of Canada or Europe because government almost always creates more problems than it solves

This isn’t revolutionary thinking. Why would we put the same people who can’t operate the Postal Service, Amtrak, or the DMV in charge of the health care system?

The Dems’ proposal for an American national health service requires a wage decrease for doctors. Do the proposers understand that they may be launching a doctor shortage?

Will the American ill-paid doctors see people with similar conditions in batches of 15? As the population here is much bigger than in Britain, they may need to see them in batches of, say, 50. Row after row of examination tables in examination halls where the naked patients lie, hearing each other groan, seeing palsy shake each other’s few last grey hairs, or how youth has grown specter thin, and where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs. (Not original. Quoting John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale.)

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