Canada: an obituary 163
Whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.
So writes the Canadian writer David Solway at PJ Media.
Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous [people’s] sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.
The link leads to another article of his, at American Thinker (February17, 2020), in which he gives details of the totalitarian legislation:
Bill C-25 seeking to impose “diversity” on all corporations; financial penalties against organizations that do not comply with government programs; a teeming brigade of government surveillance “inspectors” — that is, spies: wage spies, speech spies, feminist spies, pay equity spies, Human Rights spies; paralegal bodies known as Human Rights Tribunals with the power to levy crippling fines, bankrupt families, and shut down businesses, impose prison time for contempt of court, and compel conformity via “re-education”. …
Bill C-16 prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression … The bill effectively mandates that citizens address others by their preferred pronouns and transgender fantasies — or else! It’s “zir,” “ze,” “zem,” or “zeir,” or you’re done for. … There are other laws on the books, bills such as C-59, C-75, and C-76, that reduce and even criminalize freedom of expression, infringe on privacy rights, compromise due process, and render government transparency a thing of the past.
The assault against normalcy, common sense, civil rights, and charter freedoms gives no indication of relenting. Bill S-202, an act to amend the Criminal Code now before Parliament, would outlaw what the government misleadingly calls “Conversion Therapy” — that is, by criminalizing parents, lawyers, physicians, and church leaders who object to state-compelled hormone-drugging and genital mutilation procedures, the bill would effectively prevent minor children [who are] undergoing forced transgender operations, surgical and hormonal, from receiving the help they need. “This whole agenda to sterilize and mutilate children,” write the editors of Action4Canada, “is pure evil and in violation of … the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as a physician’s ethical commitment promising to ‘First, do no harm'”. …
Not satisfied with … conducting dodgy prosecutorial attacks on individuals whom the party wishes to intimidate, silence, or arrest, Trudeau’s Liberals are considering a motion requiring all news content–creators to procure a government license for approved content, thus controlling public access to information. …
Not content with such despotic measures, the CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission) proposes to identify news sites that are “accurate, trusted, and reliable” with the intent to enhance the “diversity of voices”. Truth be told, there are precious few “accurate, trusted, and reliable” news sites in Canada. … Moreover, we know that emphasizing “diversity of voices” is equivalent to the imposition of the grievance-driven identity-group and social justice model on public broadcasting while constraining factual reporting and bridling the dissemination of genuine news. It is … tantamount to a government monopoly on information …
All of Canada’s political parties signed on to Bill C-76, which … imposes further restrictions on third-party speech during extended election periods. … Every political party steers to the Left, including, as noted, the Conservatives, who are essentially Liberal Lite. Trudeau is simply the most visible embodiment and effective bellwether of the political virus infecting the country. …
He cites the case of Omar Khadr (see our post and the video here) as an example of the inverted values of the governing elite.
He characterizes the form of government as “soft totalitarianism”:
Soft totalitarianism is a considerable way from hard totalitarianism. …
But the soft leads to the hard, and is doing so:
To say it can’t happen here … is an expression of overweening confidence and lack of historical awareness. One does not have to think back to the demise of the Weimar Republic in Germany. A mere glance at the European Union’s unelected, bureaucratic authoritarianism, or a recognition of what the Democrat Party is demonstrably planning for the United States, should awaken us to the danger. To be awakened, we might remark, is the opposite of being woke. Canada stands as a vivid illustration of what would be in store for the U.S. under a Democrat administration.
It can happen here, and it is happening right now, right here, in Canada.
He continues in his PJ Media article (written on February 24, 2020 – one week after his American Thinker column):
Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc—and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a week swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here. A wock pupper [? – woke puppet?] politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.
Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity—although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations”, based on two founding peoples, the French and the English … But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.
The latest entry in the exit sweepstakes is oil-rich but hard-done-by Alberta, a province which suffered under the National Energy Program introduced in 1980 by the current PM’s father Pierre Trudeau, and is currently struggling under a concerted left-wing campaign, sponsored by Green-progressivist foundations (American consortiums masking via proxies as Canadian coalitions), clueless Nobel laureates at their virtue-signaling best, and a Liberal government ideologically aligned with the NDP (New Democratic Party) and the Greens, to prevent the development of its vast oil reserves. Alberta has always resented the indifference to and domination of the Canadian West by the so-called Laurentian Elite comprising “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central Canada. There is now a Wexit movement gathering momentum.
It might just as plausibly be argued that Canada is composed of a veritable congeries of competing, self-identified mini-nations—English, French, Islamic, Chinese, Sikh, native tribes with multiple patrimonies and unpronounceable names, and sundry political constituencies affiliated with the global left. Contributing factors like indiscriminate immigration from dysfunctional countries, metastasizing socialist doctrine verging on nascent totalitarianism, a state-funded national broadcaster and a deeply compromised print media subsidized by the Liberal government added to the destabilizing brew. Meanwhile, to quote lawyer and former philosophy professor Grant Brown, “the education system invites Extinction Rebellionkooks into the classroom to terrify the children”. … An army of little Gretas will carry the country-killing revolution even further.
It is often noted that America is a nation evenly divided between progressivist and conservative populations, a civil dilemma not easily resolved. But Canada is divided approximately 65-35 by these constituencies, and if one considers that the federal Conservative Party in its present manifestation can fairly be described as Liberal Lite, the breakdown is more like 95-5. This means there is no chance of reconciliation between our political disparities, such as they are, and Canada is doomed to plummet down the esker of every failed socialist experiment that preceded it and, indeed, that is presently on display in various foundering nations around the globe—North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and counting.
Trudeau père invoked the War Measures Act in 1970 to quell the Quebec separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), after a series of bombings and murders. It is obvious that the son has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble.
Nor, it would seem, the will. Is Justin Trudeau not the leading destroyer of the country which he believes never had a “core identity” anyway?
And there we find the proof that, whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.
What hope have the remaining good Canadians? Perhaps they could hope that President Trump will make an offer on behalf of the US to buy the remains of Canada from the Queen, at the bargain price the corpse is now worth, and resurrect the nation as Canadian North Americans, annexed to the Republic, happy, prosperous, and free.
The man with the golden mane 83
The Democratic Party had gone wholly over to the dark side and had to be toppled from power.
But its only possible replacement, the GOP, had become so boring! Feeble, flaccid, sotto voce, forever falling as if by uncontrollable reflex into the posture of the pre-emptive cringe.
Until suddenly the busy, brash, boisterous, boastful Donald Trump arose in it and above it, roaring out terse insults and extravagant insincere praises.
Arose like a lion, like a leader.
The man with the golden mane.
Whatever conservatives might hold against him is beside the point. He fights to win. And that is so new, so surprising, so revolutionary to Republican politicians that they can’t bring themselves to stand behind him even now that he’s their front runner.
But for as long as he is their front runner – perhaps all the way to the White House – they need to urge him on with thunderous (even if feigned!) enthusiasm.
David Solway writes at the New English Review:
The GOP failed to use its congressional majority to assert its foundational doctrines on the misguided assumption that it could woo Democrat voters away from their traditional loyalties or perceived entitlement advantages by presenting itself as the lite version of the opposition. …
But why would left-leaning voters go for Leftism Lite when the real thing is available to them?
Stark examples of Republican surrender abound. Most recently, a Republican Congress signing on to Obama’s omnibus funding bill has brought itself into tawdry disrepute. Another instance involves the infamous Corker Bill, which could just as easily have been engineered by Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi. Senate Republicans refused to deal effectively with the deficiencies of the Corker Bill – a bill, as Andrew McCarthy explains, that was totally inadequate from the beginning to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. The affair smacks of RINO business as usual.
As Andrew Bostom writes in a critical blog entry for April 15, 2015, Senate Republicans “have cravenly acquiesced to cynical, perverse Obama Administration bullying so as not to be labeled ‘warmongers’.” Once again, we observe the standard right-wing capitulation from what should have been a position of strength.
One recalls, too, the shameful spectacle of John McCain, a Republican presidential candidate, and the bloviating Lindsay Graham doing Obama’s bidding in Egypt in defense of the Muslim Brotherhood, or of McCain coming to the aid of Hillary Clinton’s Brotherhood-tainted adjunct, Huma Abedin, when she was challenged by Michele Bachmann. Such complicity – voting with or parroting the enemy – is a surefire recipe for yet another Republican electoral defeat …
In an interesting article for American Thinker, James Arlandson comes to the defense of the GOP establishment, which knows that society “moves by degrees”, that “incrementalism is the only way to retransform America”, and that the party must appeal to a majority of undecided voters. It is not an entirely convincing article. Such temperateness as Arlandson recommends sabotaged Mitt Romney’s campaign and did not prevent the installation of the most radical president in American history, whose skin color did not overlay his bred-in-the-bone Marxism. And we recall that Ronald Reagan, arguably the best president of the 20th century, was anything but temperate.
It comes down to this: Republicans need to change their game plan and go on the attack, abide by their core tenets, use their congressional majority to stymie a rogue president on every front without fear of electoral blowback, take on a corrupt and partisan media (as Donald Trump is doing, and as Romney did not when he failed to rein in CNN’s Candy Crowley’s illegitimate intervention during the second presidential debate between Romney and Obama), and stop being polite to their political enemies. They must rally behind their nominated candidate, whoever that turns out to be, turn a deaf ear to the “strategies” of political advisers and so-called experts (who are habitually wrong about everything), counter the debilitating sickness of political correctness, tackle issues like Muslim immigration and cross-border infiltrations on a consensus basis, and, generally speaking, appeal to principle rather than to the opposition.
A tall order, but RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] will not win the 2016 election. Blue Republicans will not convince a partisan, cynical, wavering, or undecided electorate. Canada’s Conservatives lost the [recent] election in part because they shrank from being truly conservative. Similarly, should the Republicans lose in November 2016, it will be because they failed to be truly republican.
Or perhaps because they’ll fail to follow a new leader who is only just republican enough, only just conservative enough, but is above all a mover and shaker, who could lead them to victory.
Will he? Or will the sober and serious Marco Rubio do it? Or the strong steady Ted Cruz? One of them must.
Must beat the Democratic nominee, whether the crook or the commie.
In any case, the unfolding drama is exciting.
An exciting GOP at last!
(Hat-tip for the Solway link to our commenter cogito)
Islam is our enemy 11
Islam, not “Islamism”, is our enemy.
Not “radical Islam” or “radical Islamism” but Islam is our enemy.
Pro-Muslim advocacy in whatever form is inherently fatuous and incoherent.
We quote from an article by David Solway:
The culture that has sustained us for centuries is being breached, infested, eroded and is ultimately on the verge of being brought down by a primitive horde of invaders who represent its antithesis. …
Regarding the effort by most liberals and some conservatives to lay the blame for Muslim violence on something called “Islamism” rather than Islam, it just won’t wash. …
“Islamism” is an invented concept, like “Islamophobia” (a synonym for a fictitious “hate crime”). It is meant to make Islam palatable, in the same way “Islamophobia” is meant to marginalize and discredit those who know it is not. …
“Islamism” is merely a word minted to obscure the truth of Islam as a theo-political ideology camouflaging its claim to world domination under the cloak of religious observances and domestic cultural practices …
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali states — and she should know — “Islam is not a religion of peace. It’s a political theory of conquest that seeks domination by any means it can.” …
“Some,” Solway says, “have taken vehement exception” to his thesis that Islam and Islamism are “fundamentally the same”. He answers one critic who “affirms that I am missing … the myriad moderates who are waging battle against Islamist forces, for example, the Kurds”, with this reminder:
The fact is, the Kurds, heroic as they may be, are not fighting for freedom, equality, the rights of assembly and unfettered expression, habeas corpus or the institution of impartial justice as we know them in the West … They are engaged in an intra-faith conflict that is a perpetual feature of the Islamic world. We should not forget that the Kurds, too, are Muslims. …
The situation is deteriorating even as we speak. The so-called “economic migrants” and displaced refugees swarming the borders of Europe constitute the latest Muslim push into the West, on the one hand consisting of (let’s call them) “welfare migrants” who will deplete state budgets and create housing turmoil, and on the other of an army of incendiaries that will burn, rape and plunder what remains of a liberal civilization. …
The torrent of Muslim migrants into Germany, to take a particularly conspicuous example, has led to a 65 percent increase in criminal activity. The fate of the small German town of Sumte, population 102, soon to be home to 750 Middle Eastern and African migrants, is literally over the top, but 50 would be enough to change the face of the community forever. Such scars cannot be healed. In Sweden violent crime has increased by 300 percent … since the time “the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country”. (There are now 55 no-go zones in Sweden.) In the Netherlands, 50-70 percent of former asylum seekers live on permanent welfare. Prison statistics for Muslims are through the roof in most European countries with Muslim immigrant populations. In Denmark alone, among the most peaceful of European countries, the crime rate differential of Muslims to non-Muslims is in the order of 450 percent.
Most western countries with a rump population of Muslims will experience different levels of social, cultural and economic distress, ranging from insistent legal demands to acts of terrorism. Parasitism, violence, political and religious fanaticism, the fostering of hate speech legislation, the proliferation of no-go zones, the re-uniting of families that will bloat the influx to even more unmanageable proportions, the insinuation or imposition of Sharia law (according to a Pew Poll analysis, one billion Muslims worldwide favor Sharia), high-casualty attacks like the recent Paris atrocity — Islam is a delivery system that fires multiple warheads. And it is happening before our very eyes and with the willing complicity of our preceptorial betters, aka the political class, the intellectual clerisy, the corrupt academy and the media camarilla. …
The fundamental equation continues to hold: Islamism=Islam. Or perhaps the reverse formulation is even more accurate: Islam=Islamism.
Any way we want to look at it, jihad is codified in Islam; it is the command of Allah, the religious duty of all Muslims when they are in a position to perform it. According to the Grand Ayatollah of Iraq Ahmad al-Baghdadi, there are really two major kinds of jihad: “defensive jihad” to reclaim “occupied” territory (Israel, of course, as well as Portugal, Spain, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Crete, Cyprus, and parts of Russia ) and “offensive jihad” to conquer non-Muslims. …
And we would do well to note that Salat [Muslim prayer] … comprises execrations against infidels, such as: “We forsake and turn away from the kafirs”, “O, Allah, punish the kafirs of the people of the book who are preventing other from following your way”, and “Surely the kafirs will receive your punishment”. …
As for the migrants inundating Europe … the majority may be described as aggressive columns of young men, a large number from North Africa, seeking to establish ribats (outposts from which to conduct jihad) and spread their way of life at the expense of Western societies. They are not “moderates” and they are certainly not “Islamists”. They are votaries of Islam who bring with them the Muslim conviction of innate superiority to all other human beings, as well as the habits, tenets, injunctions and commands of a faith perennially at war with Western civilization.
And thousands of these are ISIS-trained gunmen smuggling their way into Western nations where they are destined to unleash havoc.
We have admitted them, as we have admitted Islam, into our midst, at the price of our customary assumptions about cultural usages and social decorum, the residual integrity of our universities, the even-handed dispensation of justice and what remains of political probity, fiscal resilience, the safety of our streets, and indeed our very security. “Paris” will happen over and over again.
We can pretend all we like that we are the avatars of “diversity” and that the culture will prosper by accepting the soldiers of Allah into our homeland, but … so long as we continue to insist on the false distinction between Islamism and Islam, which clouds our vision and weakens our resistance, Islam will be poised to prevail against us.
End of the last best hope? 155
Today we dare to go further than we ventured a few days ago when we wrote about the systematic weakening of America by its elected leader. (The taking down of America, December 1, 2014.)
We declare that Obama and his gang, and the greater part of the political party that put him in power, and the international Left, in alliance with Islam, are deliberately destroying America. That is to say, destroying America as the embodiment in a free republic of the idea of liberty under the rule of law. And are close to succeeding.
It is dumbfounding, gobsmacking, how blatant they are about it. How large their plan is writ across their term in power. How openly they do their dirty deeds. They hardly take any pains to disguise their ugly intentions. And yet how the people of America and the world beyond it have managed not to notice, or fully comprehend, what is happening!
David Solway, writing at PJ Media, assembles the evidence that the general public seems unable or unwilling to see, and ponders the horrible work in progress towards the destruction of America.
In [his book] Marked for Death, Geert Wilders argues that Islam has marked not only him but ultimately every freedom-loving individual and so-called “Islamophobe” for death because of the supremacist nature of its doctrines. What outrages Wilders, in addition to the Islamic threat and the demographic inroads the religion of war is carving into the European urban landscape, is the scandalous complicity of Europe’s governing elites, leading to the eventual subversion of the continent. Although Wilders does not address American vulnerability in any detailed way, what must surely strike a disinterested observer is the equal complicity with which the commander in chief of the United States is pursuing a program of American decline. On the domestic, economic, military, and foreign policy fronts, Obama is energetically and probably irretrievably weakening the country he has sworn to defend, with surprisingly little concerted opposition, or even awareness, from many politicians or from the still-infatuated members of his constituency.
We think the infatuated members of his constituency, or most of them, are aware – and applaud him for it. They want what he wants.
To start with Islam, it is mind-boggling to observe an American president vigorously facilitating the Islamic imperial agenda in a number of different but equally effective ways. He could not do better — or worse — if he were a transplanted Qatari sheikh. One notes the infamous Cairo address with its bloat of lies and factoids. The UN speeches, such as “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” The elevation of Muslim Brotherhood operatives into sensitive posts in his administration. Islamic outreach through official institutions such as NASA, once designed for space exploration, now, apparently, for Muslim apologetics. Iftar dinners at the White House. Congratulatory letters to mosques and his designation of terror attacks as “workplace violence”, “man-caused disasters” and “traffic incidents”. His concessionary engaging in a secret correspondence with Iran’s anti-American and anti-Semitic Ayatollah Khamenei. The withdrawing of troops from Iraq, thus opening the way for the establishment of the Islamic State. The purging of FBI training manuals of all reference to jihad. And the interviews in which Obama claims that the U.S. is “one of the biggest Muslim nations”. (In actuality, professing Muslims count for 1.5% of the American people, in comparison, for example, to Muslims amounting to 13% of India’s census.)
But it doesn’t stop there. Obama is not only manifestly pro-Islam; he is demonstrably anti-American. His policies across the board are all of a piece. Domestically, his economic projects have been calamitous. Obama has pied-pipered the nation to the brink of fiscal ruin … His racial interventions have set race relations back a generation or more — most recently his urging the Ferguson rioters to “stay on course“. His attack on the Constitution is systematically undermining the republican nature of the US. Former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey cites the president for violating the Constitution 24 times with regard to Obamacare alone. …
Obama’s refusal to secure the permeable southwestern border is an open invitation to a veritable invasion of illegals and jihadists. His executive order to issue a temporary reprieve on the grounds of prosecutorial discretion, to delay deportation, and to provide work permits for millions of illegals is certain to create dismay, resentment and confrontation on a national scale … His mishandling of the Ebola crisis is only another example of anti-colonial politicking, placing American citizens at risk by allowing flights from infected West African countries into the U.S. The list goes on.
In terms of foreign policy, all of Obama’s actions seem dedicated to weakening American strength and resolve in a hostile world. His innumerable blunders — if that is what they are — whether the result of incompetence or, more likely, intention, …
Intention – we see no reason seriously to doubt it.
… have been scrupulously and abundantly documented in scores of books and hundreds of articles. (As an audience member at a recent Freedom Center symposium joked, Obama is “the most competent president we’ve ever had” — most competent, that is, as a malevolent and destructive force whose blunders are not accidents.) It might almost seem as if Obama’s “crimes and misdemeanors” are acquiring encyclopedic dimensions. Here we need only mention his clear bias against international allies, in particular Israel, his funding of the terrorist organization Hamas, his inability or unwillingness to deal effectively with ISIS, which he notoriously regarded as a jayvee outfit, and, most worrisomely, his pampering of the Iranian mullocracy in its determined march toward nuclear status.
His campaign against the American military is perhaps the most telling if under-the-radar sign of his animus toward his own country. His aim to reduce the military to pre-WWII levels and his sacking of ranking military personnel are especially troubling instances of a malign agenda. As retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, an original member of Delta Force and currently executive vice president of the Family Research Council, has argued, “our military is being devastated at the same time that all of our enemies, all of our potential adversaries are ramping up.” It is time, he insists on Twitter, that “top military MUST stand up to President + reckless policies.” It is hard to understand how a powerful military establishment could allow itself to be serially gutted, unless it is helmed by hand-picked Obama supporters.
For there is no evident, top-brass pushback against a president who has signaled to the enemy a timetable for withdrawal; who has shackled his forces in Afghanistan with so-called “rules of engagement,” putting their lives in jeopardy; whose concept of military propriety is a latte salute and whose concept of diplomatic propriety is chewing gum in the face of a prestigious welcoming delegation of a formidable power. This is a president under whose watch veterans were neglected and abused; who has exchanged an alleged deserter for five mid-to-high tier Taliban terrorists; and who has blithely abandoned servicemen under fire or held in captivity. The American armed forces find themselves in a position analogous to the Turkish military, once the guarantor of the country’s Kemalist experiment, now decimated under the authoritarian stewardship of Obama’s good friend, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose example Obama appears to be emulating.
As a result of Erdogan’s actions, a secular Muslim state has been transformed into an Islamic theopolitical nightmare. What the future augurs for America under Obama’s cataclysmic leadership is equally distressing.
Equally? While we agree with Solway’s argument, and value the useful list of proofs that he has gathered, at this point we murmur a respectful correction: What happens to America is immeasurably more important than what happens to Turkey.
And is he too pessimistic in this next passage? Is America “no longer the world’s only superpower” – or even not a superpower at all any more?
In the conclusion of his seminal book, Geert Wilders warned that the Islamic incursion into the body politic and social matrix of the U.S. is well underway; in the course of time, the nation will have lost itself in the Wilderness. But the gradual emirization of the U.S. is merely one among a host of premonitory indices. The nation’s spirit appears increasingly stagnant. It is drowning in a Noah’s flood of debt, it is coming apart at the racial seams, it is riven by a red/blue ideological conflict that appears unbridgeable, it is no longer the world’s only superpower — indeed, it is moot whether it is still a superpower, and it is considered either a hindrance or an irrelevance on the global proscenium. It is debatable whether the rot has gone too deep to be scoured, or if the recent change in party representation in Congress or a future Republican presidency would amount to anything more than a temporary hiatus. … The rot is not only political but has eaten deep into the culture as well, with growing levels of violence, welfare dependence, historical ignorance and general cynicism. In any event, once a nation has forfeited its pre-eminence, history shows it unlikely to reclaim its former position of authority and grandeur.
Finally he gives more reasons to be pessimistic, and they are all cogent:
Many have pointed out, as has Dinesh D’Souza to persuasive effect in America: Imagine a World without Her, that Obama’s main endeavor is to promote national enfeeblement, an enterprise which the American left, via its political, media, intellectual and academic elites, has been advancing for the last fifty years. When the fundraiser-in-chief is pastured out to the golf course or the United Nations and should the Democrats be returned to power, someone else will replace him to carry on his work. Certainly, should Alinsky-friendly Hillary Clinton or populist fraud and gentrified socialist Elizabeth Warren succeed to the presidency, one could write an early finis to the great American adventure in republican governance.
The question remains partially open. Can the country slip out from under the withering curse laid upon it by a runaway president, his subversive administration and the radically corrupt Democratic Party? Can the Augean Stables of a decaying political, intellectual and media culture be cleansed and fumigated? Can the Republicans connect with their staunchly conservative base to eventually form a credible, unified and revitalized governing party?
In the meantime, with the help of his compliant accomplices, Obama has, both as effect and cause, probably done more damage to American interests, security and patriotic fervor than any single president before him. Indeed, he has done more than any of his predecessors to ensure that America as we once knew her is marked for death.
Beyond hope? Not quite:
One can only hope against hope that the American spirit is still at least subliminally resilient.
Islam is Islam and that’s it 138
President Obama said: “ISIL is not Islamic.” Of all the absurd things he’s said, this must be the most absurd.
ISIL stands for “the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant”. It is the same organization as ISIS: “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”, and IS, “the Islamic State”.
These are excerpts from an article by David Solway at PJMedia:
Thirteen years after 9/11, after some 24,000 terror attacks perpetrated by Muslims since that fateful date, after the atrocities carried out and still being carried out by Caliphate-aspiring terrorist militias, after civil wars, incursions, the mass extermination and eviction of Christian populations in Muslim lands and territories, hostage-takings, kidnappings, beheadings, bombings, missile barrages — after all this, many Westerners still appear to endorse a strict distinction between Islam and Islamism. The former, we believe or have been led to believe, is a “religion of peace” whose doctrines have been twisted and misinterpreted by a cadre of extremists. Islam, according to this perspective, cannot be held accountable for a band of criminals willfully violating the tenets and premises of a venerable Abrahamic faith.
The claim is unsustainable. Where it is not advanced disingenuously — for profit, power or position — it is plainly a function of culpable or lazy ignorance or, at best, of a desire to be (or to seem) tolerant and supremely civil. I suspect that the majority of such Western apologists have not cracked a single page of the Koran or perused even a scattering of the ahadith and sirah, where the chasm on which they insist between Islam and Islamism is nowhere to be found. The Koran, in particular, brims with exhortations to violence against unbelievers, which the 1400-year imperial history of Islam has honored to the letter. The religious mandate as well as the empirical practice are undeniably Islamic, not “Islamist” — a concept that has no meaning in the theological literature.
Far too many of us cannot bring ourselves to understand that the enemy we are facing is not some fringe minority of “radicals” who are abusing not only their victims but the principles of the faith they proclaim. For one thing, the jihadists and their enablers may be a “minority,” but they number in the millions … A not unreasonable estimate of 10% gives 150-160 million. Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of people determined to kill you. When one considers that this number amounts to half the population of the United States out for one’s blood, it puts the issue into perspective.
For another thing, the shahids and mujahidin know perfectly well how to read their sacred texts, far better than their victims, dupes, extenuators and fellow-travelers who neglect to study either the scriptures or the history of Islam in order to gain a more acute and comprehensive knowledge of the enemy who plots their destruction. Others, of course, have been bought, suborned by donations or bribes and subsidized by petrodollars, or they are trimmers who have capitalized on business interests and opportunities. …
Cruelty, oppression, the call to perpetual warfare … are actually integral to Islam, bred in the unabrogated scriptures which permit, approve and ratify such depravities as slavery, child marriage, polygamy, gynophobia, deception (taqiyya), the breaking of treaties, the doctrinally sanctioned acquisition of booty and of women as the spoils of war, dhimmitude and, most terrible of all, wanton slaughter of unbelievers. As Koran 8:39 commands, “Make war on them until idolatry is no more and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.”
It is not difficult, then, to see that ancestral Islam is demonstrably contemporary Islam since the Koran is understood to be an eternal book, coterminous with Allah, and thus does not allow for revision.
Further, critics of Islam who wish to spare the individual communicant, commendable as their attempt at fair-mindedness may be, are caught in a contradiction. In separating the institution of the faith, which they denounce, from peaceable and decent individual Muslims, whom they profess to applaud … they succeed only in undermining their own argument. Who or what can a “good” or moderate Muslim possibly be if he or she has no connection with or relation to the institution — the structure, practice, canons and prescripts — of the very faith from which he or she is said to be divorced? There is a blatant conundrum of identity at work here, which our charitable detractors apparently refuse to countenance or explain. Can there be such a chimera as a “Muslim” absent the institution of Islam? What is left but an empty jalabiya?
Muslims must be equally conflicted. Raheel Raza, whose film Honour Diaries decries some of the worst practices of her co-religionists, remains a pious Muslim who is comforted and nourished by her faith. What, we may ask, defines that merciful and solacing faith for her if it is based on the Koran, the ahadith, the sirah, the shariah and the diverse schools of a grim and stringent jurisprudence governing every detail of quotidian life? And if it is not predicated on authoritative Islam, what can possibly be left over from so aliquant a commitment except a few abrogated tropes and a number of rituals and customs? Perhaps it is a private faith she is espousing, but a private faith is not a religion and does not merit a historical name. …
What is the true core of Islam? … The larger, Medinan portion of the Koran consists to an alarming extent of messages that would make any harbi (non-Muslim living in a country not subject to Islam) or apostate fear for his safety, freedom and very existence. …
We can no longer temporize and procrastinate. … The fact is, radical Islam is Islam, whose war against the West is transacted through the twin instruments of violence and infiltration, the latter a generally unacknowledged but even more effective form of terrorism. Merely remark the ruined neighborhoods, boroughs and suburbs of towns and cities in both Europe and America where Muslim immigration and mosque construction have gone unhindered.
Standard Islam is a war machine, an invading army with multiple techniques and weapons at its disposal.… Terror, however we define it, is a genuine expression of Islam.
“Islamism” is a figment of weak or frightened, naive or complicit minds …
Countering the pabulum of American presidential farceurs Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (and the equally mealy-mouthed claptrap of British PM David Cameron) that the conduct of Muslim terrorists is “not Islamic,” Daniel Pipes … avers that “anyone with eyes and ears realizes that ISIS, like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda before it, is 100 percent Islamic.” Nota bene: Islamic, not Islamist.
A former Muslim who goes by the pseudonym of Brother Rachid is even more emphatic: the terrorist franchises are marching in lockstep with the Prophet, their every abomination sanctioned by a command in the Koran, a passage in the ahadith, and an example in the sirah. They live in a veritable reverie of slaughter and conquest and thus fulfill what they conceive as a pledge and a duty. They are attending to the text. And in so doing, they also march in lockstep with their covert accomplices, namely, the asylum seekers, the refugee streams, the vast number of residential immigrants, the “re-united” families (often consisting of multiple wives masquerading as relatives and eligible for welfare), the firebrand imams and dawah-spouting [proselytizing] preachers, the second-generation, born-again jihadists, and the pitiable revisionists who strive to re-interpret and redeem what is constitutively resistant to their efforts, yet cannot extricate themselves from the snare of creedal affirmation. There is much truth to Burckhardt’s observation that “obedience to a non-Islamic dispensation could never be enforced.”
Perhaps Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said it best: “There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” “Islamism” is a Fata Morgana, a conceptual mirage that beckons in a mental desert.
Erdogan’s slogan merits repeating, its content worth absorbing. Islam is Islam and that’s it.
Here is “Brother Rachid” addressing President Obama, to inform him emphatically that IS/ISIS/ISIL is Islamic.
The greatest scandal of them all 196
David Solway surveys Obama’s abysmal record and the recent scandals that have engrossed those who’ve heard of them. He diagnoses the source of everything that has gone so very wrong for America since Obama came (absurdly!) to lead and injure the most successful nation on earth. It is Obama himself.
Here are some extracts (but read it all):
We have been reading of late of the blizzard of scandals that has buffeted the Obama administration. Every week or so a major storm wracks the political climate in the U.S., so much so that it is hard not to grow somewhat blasé. Whether it’s the odium of the Benghazi betrayal and ensuing cover-up; or the IRS training its sights on conservative and pro-Israeli organizations; or the DOJ seizing the phone records of News sources; or the Attorney General caught lying (or conveniently forgetting) about a subpoena against a FOX News reporter; or NSA snooping on Verizon customers … the time comes when we expect nothing less of a meretricious administration.
The scandals go back years: the Affordable Health Care Act passed in the middle of the night and encrypted in thousands of pages that nobody seems to have read; a multi-billion dollar stimulus project that didn’t stimulate anything; the defrauding of Chrysler’s secured creditors in favor of the UAW when the auto company went bankrupt; the Fast and Furious gun-running plan yet to be clarified by the Attorney General; the loans and grants to crony Green entrepreneurs who regularly fail to meet their goals and end up in default; the numbing disgrace of a Muslim outreach scheme that has seen known terrorists and dubious Islamic groups and individuals welcomed at the White House and operating to influence policy at the highest levels of government. The net result is always the same: a modest degree of public indignation followed by business as usual. …
The real scandal is Barack Obama himself, a man demonstrably unfit to be president of the United States, who makes the hapless Jimmy Carter and the sleazy Bill Clinton look like choir boys. The scandal is that America is being led by a man about whom we know all too little, who has placed his salient records under seal (including his original birth certificate) — a man who … is assiduously liquidating the economy; who is gutting the military while rendering it a politically correct monstrosity; whose foreign policy lies in shambles as he cozies up to dictators and theocrats or sits on the sidelines twiddling his thumbs; and who gives every indication of having managed to evade the responsibilities not only of his position but of genuine adulthood.
One might be forgiven for thinking of him as a paragon of cluelessness, except for the fact that, like a spoiled child, he is determined to get his way and has mastered the art of persuasion all along the spectrum from the temper tantrum to surreptitious appeal to feigned innocence — whatever works. … The child … is certainly precocious, shows himself adroit at manipulating both his peers and his elders, and has been educated by a battery of mentors whose outlook on the world is indisputably malign — theft masking as “social justice” and “redistribution”, antisemitism, unchecked spending, ends justifying means, the evils of free speech, deception as virtue, self-indulgence rather than duty and obligation. The president has been well schooled in the arts of his masters. … Barack Obama [is] … freighted with a leftwing agenda that has faltered everywhere save in his own sectarian mind.
Manifestly, he is not presidential material, not by any stretch of the most enamored imagination, as the country will belatedly learn to its own prohibitive cost.
America has put a disaster in the White House. … Under Obama’s leadership, the nation is in full retreat on every front, both domestic and foreign. Domestically, the debt and the deficit are rising exponentially; real unemployment remains staggeringly high and remunerative jobs are drying up, except for the burgeoning public sector and government sinecures; fiat money continues to be printed; a proliferating tangle of business regulations is garroting the economy; entitlement spending is creating an underclass of dependents and parasites that weakens the fiber of the nation; confiscatory taxes are shrinking the Middle Class; environmentalism-gone-mad is sapping productivity; and FBI training manuals are being scrubbed of references to the Islamic source of local terrorism and thus increasing the likelihood of jihadist atrocities on American soil.
The international theater is equally menacing. Obama likes to boast that al-Qaeda is on the run. This is true in a way, for al-Qaeda is indeed running — straight toward us. North Korea is exporting its nuclear technology to America’s enemies while America dithers. China is militarizing and expanding its influence in the Pacific. Russia is flexing its geopolitical muscles. Turkey is aiming for a neo-Ottoman Caliphate. The Palestinians are bloodsuckers on American largesse, offering nothing in return but self-righteous intransigence, a false historical narrative and systemic Jew-hatred. Egypt, Libya and Syria are imploding — the first two thanks to American meddling and the last — well, we recall that Hillary Clinton lauded Assad as a “reformer”. Iraq and Afghanistan are going rogue. Terror-sponsoring Iran is on the verge of nuclear capability and has made no secret of its enmity toward the U.S.
Meanwhile Obama does nothing but take vacations, preen on television, switch to campaign mode, target his local adversaries, appoint fools, political dandiprats and ideological doppelgängers to positions of power, and blab about “red lines” to no effect but his own embarrassment. …
We’re not sure that he is embarrassed, though he should be. But we delight in the writing, savor the “political dandiprats and ideological doppelgängers”.
Apart from pursuing a narrow and rigid social(ist) agenda, Obama is in way beyond his depth, especially in the field of foreign relations. Arguably, this may be his intention, to render the United States unrecognizable to itself and ultimately to turn it into an international laughing stock, a waning power no longer to be taken seriously. … But Obama’s glaring mismanagement of America’s interests may also indicate, perhaps no less plausibly, a feckless and myopic understanding of realpolitik and a complete inability to play with the big boys. His political immaturity coupled with his natural cynicism is equaled only by his bloated self-regard, and America’s adversaries have taken definitive advantage of the debilitating flaws of his temperament.
There should be no doubt about this in any rational mind. The various scandals plaguing the current administration are distractions. … There is a catastrophe afflicting the U.S. and it is summed up and embodied in the person of Barack Obama — his election to the Oval Office, the policies he has subsequently enacted, the vectors of his character on daily display, the progressively devastating consequences of his tenure.
“Let us make no mistake about this,” as the president is fond of saying. The greatest scandal of them all is the present occupant of the White House.
America’s most formidable enemy – it’s president 21
From Canada, David Solway surveys what Barack Obama has done and is doing, and sees a multitude of reasons to fear for the United States. He writes:
I have been suspicious of Obama from the very beginning of his meteoric national career. I could not understand how a man with so obscure a dossier, very few salient records disclosed to the public; with little or no executive or working experience; and affiliated with a host of decidedly shady characters — communist poet and activist Frank Marshall Davis, former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, unrepentant former terrorist Bill Ayers, America-and-Jew bashing Jeremiah Wright, corrupt financier Tony Rezko, racist leader of the Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan, to name only a few — could captivate the media, bask in the glow of an adoring public, receive the Democratic nomination, and then be elected to the presidency of the United States.
We too were astonished and bewildered. And distressed.
My suspicion of the man’s bona fides deepened even more after the Honduras affair in July 2009, in which Obama (and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton) sided with leftwing strongman Manuel Zelaya, implicated in a conspiracy to overturn the civil Constitution of the country, and against the democratic legislature that had deposed him.
The historically invalid and politically tendentious Cairo speech, the evident shilling for the Palestinians and their flagrantly concocted narrative of ancestral title, the clear animus against Israel and the outrageous treatment meted out to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu only confirmed my misgivings concerning the president’s political agenda.
That an American president should cozy up to the Venezuelan leftist dictator and bow from the waist to the Saudi monarch was beyond my comprehension. (And more recently, his hearting of Turkish autocrat and neo-Ottoman jihadist Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his personal “friend and colleague” is only a further indication of Obama’s troubling and discreditable policies.)
That he should see to the massive increase of the American debt within only a few years and apply himself, in the words of Victor Davis Hanson, to “tun[ing] a properly moribund economy,”—i.e., “ensuring 50 million on food stamps, putting over 80,000 a month on Social Security disability insurance, and extending unemployment insurance to tens of millions”—was another sign that something was profoundly amiss.
His bruited release of criminal illegals from American prisons defies common sense, as does his refusal to patrol and seal the incendiary border with Mexico.
And that he should eagerly adopt the lifestyle of a Hollywood playboy and the jet-setting 1% … while the country was foundering economically and absorbing one setback after another in the international theater, should have earned him the distrust of every sentient American citizen.
Another stain on this dismal record of political degeneracy is his abandonment of the American ambassador and his entourage in Libya, leading to the death of four Americans.
That, we think, is one of the worst stains on his not merely dismal but shocking record.
… At the same time that ordinary Americans may be deprived of their guns, or forced to scale back on legitimate ownership of certain models and magazine capacities, the Department of Homeland Security has ordered millions of weapons and over a billion rounds of hollow-point bullets (banned internationally), as well as riot gear and other military equipment. The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has followed suit, putting in an order for 46,000 rounds of .40-caliber hollow-point bullets. Why, we may wonder, is a weather service being armed to the teeth? Are U.S. citizens now at risk from their own government? …
The National Defense Authorization Act provides for indefinite detention without warrant or probable cause. … The bill does not apply exclusively to terrorists or terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay … As Senator Rand Paul objected, “Saying that new language somehow ensures the right to habeas corpus … is both questionable and not enough. Citizens must not only be formally charged but also receive jury trials and the other protections our Constitution guarantees. Habeas corpus is simply the beginning of due process. It is by no means the whole.”
Some patriots are profoundly apprehensive over these developments, fearing something like a “hostile takeover” of civil society by a growing state apparatus.
Reason piles on reason to fear Obama.
… This is a president who has presided over an imploding economy, a ballooning deficit, a deteriorating international situation, an out-of-control Department of Justice, a diminished military, political and racial divisions that are tearing the nation apart, the specter of restrictions on freedom of expression, the appointment of indisputable incompetents and highly dubious characters to sensitive positions of authority (read: Lew, Hagel, Brennan and Kerry, who are only the most recent), and a de facto alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood whose self-admitted project is the destruction of the United States …
This is a president who traffics in blatant lies, cover-ups and misdirections at the cost of American interests and consequently merits being suspected of nefarious designs. …
I say this to my American readers: One way or another, your trophy president is going to bring down your country.
All the evidence points to the likelihood that he is not only an enemy of the United States of America, but its most formidable enemy in the world today. …
I am scared to death of Obama.
You should be too.
*
From the first 6 minutes of this video we learn about an adviser to Obama who condones the oppressive treatment of women in Afghanistan and would have no objection to the blinding of children if it fulfilled a religious obligation.
(Hat-tip Frank for the video)
The quiet jihad 20
Day by day, step by step, Islam advances towards dominance in every Western country, including America.
This is from Front Page, by David Solway:
Terrorism is an effective Islamic tactic, but “entryism” — the penetrating of academia, the media, government, labor unions, protest groups and the very social climate — is even more so. What we are observing is the practice of subversion … The neighborhood mosque, as we have seen, is only the beginning of our troubles. If its pacific nature cannot be guaranteed and its respect for local statutes and civic life assured, its effects will spread outward in waves of destabilization, one of the chief aims of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The mosque’s “pacific nature” and “respect for local statutes and civic life” certainly cannot be assured. And while they last, the forms and institutions of Western civic life are all too easily exploited by the quiet invaders.
Here’s an example of how it’s being done in Britain (via Vlad Tepes):
Note how easily the polite, reasonable, unaggressive voices of opposition are overruled by the bad-tempered chairwoman.
And here we quote from an article by Alan Caruba at Family Security Matters:
“The Faith of the Prophet Mohammed will continue to impact and transform all aspects of American life: social, political, and economic. Save for a cataclysmic event that will shatter demographics, Islam by 2050 will emerge as the nation’s dominant religion.”
The author quotes from a book by Paul L. Williams titled Crescent Moon Rising: The Islamic Transformation of America.
Williams offers facts that are nothing less than astounding.
“Muslims continue to pour into the country occupy positions (vacated by aging Americans) as physicians, engineers, and scientists. Others arrived to perform tasks that American workers are unwilling to perform in food-processing plants, agricultural facilities, and telecommunications. In addition to the Muslims who come here with employment visas, thousands more arrive with student visas to enroll in colleges throughout the country. Still others with ‘diversity’ visas to enrich America’s racial composition.”
“In 1992, nearly fifty thousand Muslims arrived in the United States and received permanent residency status. In 2009, that number soared to 115,000. In truth, no one knows for certain how many Muslim immigrants are presently living in the country.”
“In addition to the legal and illegal Muslim immigrants, eighty thousand refugees enter this country under resettlement programs. Nearly seventy-five thousand from Islamic countries.”
“Islam, at present, is the most rapidly growing religion in the country, with outreach programs on college campuses, in prisons, and within the military.”
“Islam provides an antithesis to secular America”, says Williams, offering a version of “traditional values” that would impose restrictions that few Americans anticipate; a ban on liquor, a reduced status of women, dress codes, and much more. “Muslims do not recognize the legitimacy of all faiths,” warns Williams. …
And those few – Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism – that they do recognize as “legitimate”, are suffered to exist, but sharia requires their adherents to be subjugated, and blood money (the “jizya” tax) to be extorted from them.
In an earlier America, there were restrictions on immigrants from various parts of the world deemed antithetical to the nation’s values. The early waves of immigrants came mostly from England and Nordic nations. They were followed by those from Italy, Germany and Eastern Europe as the need for more workers for America’s growing industries required more immigrants. Asians were not particularly welcome and Arabs were even less welcome. This changed with the Hart-Celler Act, signed into law by President Johnson in the wake of the Civil Rights Act. It ended an immigration quota system that had governed America for most of his history. It was, for the record, widely opposed by a two-to-one margin. It is a legacy from Edward Kennedy who shepherded the bill through the Senate.
It wasn’t until the shock of 9/11 that most Americans became aware of the hostility, the malevolence, and the spread of Islam.
Williams notes, “September 11, 2001, was not a day that changed everything. It was rather the day that revealed how much had changed. The real shock came not only from the devastation, but also the demographics. The world for many Americans became a place suddenly unrecognizable.”
This has already become a fact of life for Europeans and is rapidly become one for Americans, particularly in large urban centers where the presence of Muslims is visible for their dress, the many restaurants and outlets that cater to them, and the increasing number of mosques found everywhere. USA Today reported in February 2012 that “The number of Islamic places in the United States soared 74% in the past decade…the overall number of mosques quietly rose from 1,209 in 2000 to 2,106 in 2010.”
Largely unseen and unknown are the many Muslim organizations throughout the U.S., some of which have been found to have terror connections, and all funded not merely to spread the faith, but to ultimately impose it on our present political structure and open culture. …
Even so, Americans elected and reelected Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Muslim father and adopted son of a Muslim step-father. He is a President who keeps insisting that al Qaeda is receding as a threat when it is, in fact, a growing threat everywhere. And, soon enough, here again.
On the other hand, offering a ray of hope, there is this by David Goldman, aka Spengler:
By 2050, elderly dependents will comprise nearly a third of the population of some Muslim nations, notably Iran — converging on America’s dependency ratio at mid-century. But it is one thing to face such a problem with America’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of $40,000, and quite another to face it with Iran’s per capita GDP of $7,000 — especially given that Iran will stop exporting oil before the population crisis hits. The industrial nations face the prospective failure of their pension systems. But what will happen to countries that have no pension system, where traditional society assumes the care of the aged and infirm? In these cases it is traditional society that will break down, horribly and irretrievably so.
My 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too) assembled evidence that the decline of Islam as a religion explained collapsing fertility, just as the decline of Catholicism explained collapsing fertility in lands once blessed by large families — Spain, Italy, Poland, Ireland, and Quebec. Iran’s total fertility rate plunged to an estimated 1.6% in 2010, barely above Europe’s rate of 1.5 children per female. In 1979, when the Islamists took power in Iran, the average woman bore seven children. Nothing like this sudden snapping shut of the national womb has ever happened before in all of history. And the rest of the Muslim world is headed in the same direction. …
Islamist leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been shouting from the rooftops about the trend for the past five years, as my book reports. Excluding the independence-hungry Kurdish minority, Turkey’s fertility rate is probably around 1.5 children per female, about the same as Iran’s, and a guarantee of national decline.
We are cheered by this information. Though we don’t understand why David Goldman writes: “In September 2006 I warned that the Muslim world was heading towards a demographic catastrophe.”
It may be a catastrophe for the Muslim world, but if the Muslim womb really is “snapping shut”, it is surely extremely good news for the rest of us.
At present the Muslims who are colonizing Europe are bearing children at a higher rate than the indigenous populations. Will the European Muslim womb “snap shut” too? And if so, will the snap come in time to save Europe from falling under the savage totalitarian rule of Islam?
Debunking Big Green 397
It has been reliably estimated by many researchers into the subject of “Global Warming” (or any of the other sobriquets by which it is known) that in fulfilling the draconian prescriptions of the Kyoto Accord or its successors, such as the United Nations IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, millions of jobs will be lost in the developed world, the quality of life in the industrialized nations will sink to substandard levels, and the inhabitants of the Third World will be deprived of the minimal immunities, comforts, and amenities to which they aspire.
Are the warmists aware of that? Do they want to spread poverty?
Seems so. But they are not succeeding.
This is from PJ Media, by David Solway:
Fiona Kobusingye, coordinator of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda, has vehemently denounced the attempt to impose energy restrictions on African nations in the name of fighting global warming. “These policies kill,” she writes. As for the combustible Al Gore, he “uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year.” Her conclusion: “Telling Africans they can’t have electricity — except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels — is immoral. It is a crime against humanity” . …
H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the nonprofit National Center for Policy Analysis, would clearly agree. He correctly argues that recommendations based on “flawed statistical analyses and procedures that violate general forecasting principles” should be taken “into account before enacting laws to counter global warming — which economists point out would have severe economic consequences.” Such consequences are already in evidence. Benny Peiser, editor of CCNet science network, speaking at the Heartland Institute’s 2009 climate conference in New York, sounded the death knell of the green movement in Europe owing to huge costs and minimal results … Environmentalist Lawrence Solomon quotes Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada, whose studies show that “every green job created ploughs under 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy” and that green jobs are proving to be unsustainable since the creation of even one such job costs $1 million in government subsidies …
These are costs that may be suffered in other, frankly ludicrous, ways as well. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) in its 2008 Annual Report, published in 2009, jubilates over the replacement of motorized vehicles by “bicycle rickshaws”—which, it must be admitted, will certainly help to decongest metropolitan traffic. That it would reduce America and the West to Third World Status does not trouble UNEP overmuch. Perhaps that is the plan.
The much-ballyhooed T. Boone Pickens strategy of introducing large-scale windmill technology is now proving to be a similarly quixotic project, unsightly, land-consuming, bird-killing, neurosis-inducing, expensive and totally inadequate to its declared purpose of meeting even a fraction of our electricity needs. Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute has laid the cards on the table for all to read: green electricity bills are rising exponentially; Europe is gradually abandoning many of its green energy programs as cost-ineffective and injurious to both wildlife and human health; and, as of the end of 2008, American solar and wind-power stocks had lost 80% of their value … Rhode Island’s Public Utilities Commission has rejected a deal to build an offshore wind farm that would have entailed “hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs…” New Zealand has repealed its carbon tax scheme and Australia’s opposition party is vowing to follow suit.
The writing is on the wall in majuscule. The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) has closed shop, putting an end to its estimated $10 trillion carbon trading scheme. In August 2011, President Obama’s pet green project, the California-based Solyndra solar plant, filed for bankruptcy, costing the U.S. $535 million in wasted stimulus funds and 1,100 jobs … Other such futilities are impending. The Beacon Power Corp, recipient of a $43 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, has filed for bankruptcy after being delisted by the NASDAQ … The solar cell company Spectrawatt, recipient of a federal stimulus boost, and Nevada Geothermal, which profited from Federal DOE and Treasury Department subsidies, are on the brink of failure … Ener 1, which received a $118 million stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop lithium storage batteries for electric cars, has filed for bankruptcy protection … This is bad news for the plug-in Chevy Volt, the president’s car of choice, which is beset with problems anyway; GM had to suspend production to cut inventory owing to anemic sales … Abound Solar, which makes cadmium telluride solar modules to the tune of a $400 million federal loan guarantee, has laid off 300 workers, amounting to 70% of its workforce … And now the electric vehicle battery company A123 Systems, beneficiary of $300 million in Obama’s Recovery Act funds and $135 million in state tax credits and subsidies, courtesy of Michigan’s former Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm, is about to go belly up …
The reason for many of these failures in green energy-production companies is simple. … As author Rich Trzupek explains, the energy density of convertible wind and solar is risibly low and dispersed, which renders electricity-generating power plants, whether large or small, “the most inefficient, least reliable, and expensive form of power we have” … As happened in Spain, Europe’s bellwether country for climatophrenic ruination, Obama’s “solar alchemy,” which demonizes traditional forms of energy extraction and application, has become a recipe for an American economic debacle.
Finnish professor Jarl Ahlbeck, a former Greenpeace member and author of over 200 scientific publications, points out that “real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming.” Contrary to common belief, he continues, “there has been no or little global warming since 1995” … His findings have been supported by many other studies. To adduce just a few instances: geophysicist Phil Chapman, basing his results on careful analyses from major weather-tracking agencies, reports that global temperature is “falling precipitously” ; … geologist Don Easterbrook, associate editor of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, Professor Emeritus at Western Washington University and former U.S. representative to UNESCO, is also convinced that recent solar changes suggest the advent of a new cooling cycle which could be “fairly severe” ; … and a new study conducted by three Norwegian scientists, Jan-Erik Solheim, Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum, indicates that the next solar cycle, which is imminent, will see a “significant temperature decrease” over and above the current decline …
Moreover, as Robert Zubrin has decisively shown in his recent Merchants of Despair, there exists robust scientific proof derived from ice core data and isotopic ratios in marine organism remains that Earth’s climate is a stable system, that CO2 emissions create surplus plant growth that in turn absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus restoring climate equilibrium over the long haul, and that under cyclical conditions of global warming agricultural productivity naturally increases and human life immensely improves.
In a brilliant article for the Financial Post … analyzing the eleven logical fallacies on which the argument for man-made climate change rests, Lord Christopher Monckton, known for tracking and exposing scientific hoaxes, has effectively proven that the anthropogenic thesis has absolutely no basis, neither in fact nor in theory. So-called climate skeptics need nerves of steel to oppose the reigning ideology. It takes no less courage and perhaps even more for a climate “Warmist” to buck the trend, as culture-hero James Lovelock has recently done. Lovelock, who in his 2006 The Revenge of Gaia prophesied the charring of the planet, now admits he had been “extrapolating too far.” Despite predictably hedging his bets and deferring catastrophe into the indefinite future, he avers that “we don’t know what the climate is doing” and disparages his previous work, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, as “alarmist” (MSNBC.com, April 30, 2012).
Nevertheless, the Global Warming meme continues to circulate in defiance of the accumulating evidence, which leads one to wonder who the real “deniers” are. In my own country of Canada, “Warmist” foundations are determined to continue issuing environmental fatwas, in particular to tie up state-of-the-art, economically productive oil pipelines in endless litigation. That such a move would impact national revenues and cost thousands of potential jobs is a matter of no concern.
But the cost of environmentalism is becoming of ever greater concern. Must do.
If the deceit and self-righteousness of Big Green don’t rouse voters and tax-payers to vocal opposition, the cost will surely do it.
Spot the vampire 195
David Solway asks in a PajamsMedia article, “Who and what is the vampire?”
Here’s part of his answer:
It presents itself as a composite figure — a political party, an ostensibly liberal bringer of gifts and cachet, a potent ideology that strives to transform the world, a utopian philosophy that promises bliss upon conversion to its purposes but leads only to a society of the locavore undead. Its acolytes and minions swarm through the world infecting the gullible with the serum of its malignity… It proceeds systematically to undermine the strength of those among whom it freely moves, surviving by transfusions of the energy and substance of others who remain unaware that they are the quarry and not the beneficiaries. It redistributes the lifeblood of nations throughout its own body and the collective body of its adherents. It offers ease, comfort, and security, but at the insidious expense of vitality and freedom — and ultimately of the very ease, comfort, and security it has guaranteed. Its manner can be suave and polished though often enough a rough impatience pokes through its carefully constructed veneer. It responds to challenges with aristocratic haughtiness and gutter ruthlessness. It is clever and unscrupulous. It is a purveyor of lies and deceptions. It loves the accoutrements of power and the grand architecture of its residence. It embraces what appear to be noble causes the better to hide its appetite for dominion. …
Doesn’t it remind you of … you know … Whatshisname?