Remembering 2015

Thomas Sowell

"How shall we remember 2015? Or shall we try to forget it?

"It is always hard to know when a turning point has been reached, and usually it is long afterwards before we recognize it. However, if 2015 has been a turning point, it may well have marked a turn in a downward direction for America and for Western civilization.

"This was the year when we essentially let the world know that we were giving up any effort to try to stop Iran -- the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism -- from getting a nuclear bomb. Surely it does not take much imagination to foresee what lies at the end of that road.

"It will not matter if we have more nuclear bombs than they have, if they are willing to die and we are not. That can determine who surrenders. And ISIS and other terrorists have given us grisly demonstrations of what surrender would mean.

"Putting aside, for the moment, the fateful question whether 2015 is a turning point, what do we see when we look back instead of looking forward? What characterizes the year that is now ending?" . . .

Blowhards Beware: Megyn Kelly Will Slay You Now

Vanity Fair  “ 'If it’s fair to question Mrs. Clinton for failures leading up to [Benghazi],” she says, looking into the camera at her 2.7 million viewers, “why is it unfair to question Jeb about his brother’s failures leading up to September 11, 2001,” as Donald Trump had just done. She turns the question to Jeb, speaking via satellite video hookup. “Is it a double standard?”

“ 'Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” replies Bush.

"She points out that Jeb’s in fifth place in the polls, and she wants to know, “What would it take to make you get out [of the race]?” Bush, looking as if he were wearing a scratchy, too tight suit, replies that he’s going nowhere." . . .

Space: The visionaries take over

Charles Krauthammer

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Dec. 21.

. . . "[Elon] Musk predicts that the reusable rocket will reduce the cost of accessing space a hundredfold. This depends, of course, on whether the wear and tear and stresses of the launch make the refurbishing prohibitively expensive. Assuming it’s not, and assuming Musk is even 10 percent right, reusability revolutionizes the economics of spaceflight.

"Which both democratizes and commercializes it. Which means space travel has now slipped the surly bonds of government — presidents, Congress, NASA bureaucracies. Its future will now be driven far more by a competitive marketplace with its multiplicity of independent actors, including deeply motivated, financially savvy and visionary entrepreneurs." . . .

Blocks of Pluto's water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains in this high-resolution image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

“First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people”

Legal Insurrection
"A phrase I read for the first time today, but which explains how the fates of Jews and Christians are intertwined."

"I’m surprised I had not heard the phrase in the title of this post before today.

"Though I’m certainly familiar with the concept, it’s one we’ve explored here many times when discussing (i) that the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the inability of Muslims to accept any non-Muslim entity in the Middle East, but particularly not a Jewish national entity; (b) the plight of Christians in the Middle East who are on the receiving end of what would happen to the Jews in Israel if Israel ever lost a war; and (c) the Islamist-Leftist anti-Israel coalition, in which useful Western leftists are oblivous (at best, giving them the benefit of the doubt) to the threat they would be under if forced to live under the rule of their coalition partners as they demand of Israeli Jews.

"I got to the phrase in a round-about way. First, I saw Martin Kramer’s Tweet linking to his Facebook post:

Exactly 40 years ago, Commentary published Bernard Lewis’s landmark article, “The Return of Islam.” Remember, in January 1976, the Shah was still firmly on his throne, the Muslim Brothers were nowhere to be seen, and there was no Hamas, Hezbollah, or Al Qaeda. So how did Lewis discern the “return”? He saw that regimes, including secular ones, were beginning to invoke Islam. This, he surmised, must be a reaction to a more profound trend. Perhaps the most prescient article ever written about the Middle East." . . .

 "Then I read through (skimmed parts) of Lewis’ Commentary article, The Return of Islam (Jan. 1, 1976), which is quite long.

"The central thesis of the article is that the West completely misunderstands the nature of the conflict, seeking to put it in the types of “left” and “right” disputes that dominate Western politics:"

The article referred to is posted next to this one in the Tunnel Wall:  "The Return of Islam"; prescience from forty years ago

"The Return of Islam"; prescience from forty years ago

BERNARD LEWIS / JAN. 1, 1976

Chris de Burgh Crusader live in Glasgow

"From the beginning, Christians played a leading role among the exponents, ideologists, and leaders of secular nationalism. As members of non-Muslim communities in a Muslim state, they occupied a position of stable, privileged, but nevertheless unmistakable inferiority, and in an age of change even the rights which that status gave them were endangered. In a state in which the basis of identity was not religion and community but language and culture, they could claim the full membership and equality which was denied to them under the old dispensation. As Christians, they were more open to Western ideas, and identified themselves more readily in national terms. The superior education to which they had access enabled them to play a leading part in both intellectual and commercial life. Christians, especially Lebanese Christians, had a disproportionately important role in the foundation and development of the newspaper and magazine press in Egypt and in other Arab countries, and Christian names figure very prominently among the outstanding novelists, poets, and publicists in the earlier stages of modern Arabic literature. Even in the nationalist movements, many of the leaders and spokesmen were members of Christian minorities. This prominence in cultural and political life was paralleled by a rapid advance of the Christian minorities in material wealth."

A quick run-down of Donald Trump's positions

Ed Straker  "ConservativeReview.com, which is edited by conservative talk show host Mark Levin, has emerged as a great ranking service for politicians. Recently the site ranked the positions of Donald Trump based on his public comments. Since everyone knows that Trump has spent most of his adult life as a liberal but has since recanted nearly all of his former positions, I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and exclude any quotations over one year old. Everything you read below has come from Trump's own plush lips in the past twelve months:" . . .  Read more.

"Except for immigration, foreign policy, and energy, all of Trump's contemporary positions are more identifiable with liberal positions, which is not surprising, considering he has spent most of his life as a liberal Democrat.  Now, if you're a conservative and immigration is your number-one issue, you can still justify a vote for Donald Trump.  But Ted Cruz is almost as good – promising to build a wall, oppose amnesty, and enforce the law –  and he's much better on just about every other issue."

Americans not who Obama wants us to be

O.C. Register

A banner depicting a manipulated image German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Barack Obama is carried at a demonstration Oct. 7 in Erfurt, Germany, initiated by the Alternative for Germany party against the uncontrolled immigration and asylum abuse.

"Have you noticed the incongruity lately? Barack Obama has taken to telling us that, “This is not who we are.”

"The presidential rebuke usually comes as a scolding for doing things that we do precisely because they are things that actually represent who we are. This appears to annoy the president to no end.

"Obama recently scolded opponents of his plan to flood the country with Syrian refugees because, he said, “That’s not who we are.”

"Of course, he’s wrong. That’s precisely who we are, as evidenced by the overwhelming public opposition to his intention to admit unvetted and largely unvettable foreigners into our nation from places on Earth where anti-American sentiment is rampant. Deadly rampant, which everyone but the president seems to intuitively grasp.

"The U.S. has long had policies that limit admission to the country by foreigners based on their nationality, ethnicity and yes, even their religious affiliation.

"One may disagree with one or more of those preferences, or applaud them as reasonable and necessary, but to deny they are not based on “who we are” is simply disingenuous." . . .

Kentucky State Democrat LEAVES The Party and Joins GOP…I Cannot “Support Obama’s Policies”

Courier-Journal:  Rep. Jim Gooch latest Democrat to switch to GOP
 In a move that further weakens the Democratic Party's tenuous control of the Kentucky House of Representatives, State Rep. Jim Gooch  has switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican.
. . . "Gooch said that in his final year as president Obama will belittle Kentuckians "for not understanding the 'true science' behind climate change. We will be told that 'climate change' is the biggest threat to our nation and our planet."

Proud Conservative  . . . "Rep. Jim Gooch sent a resignation email to House Speaker Greg Stumbo and House Minority Floor Leader Jeff Hoover stating this decision is “a personal one, free of any negotiation for personal benefit to me.”

"Gooch has openly stated that he “cannot support any of the Democrats running for President.”

"He went on to say, “At a recent political gathering Speaker Stumbo acknowledged that the Democrat party was the ‘Party of Barack Obama’. I deliberated that thought and I came to the conclusion that I could be a member of the party of Obama, but that I cannot be a member of the party that supports Barack Obama’s policies. The majority of Democrats do support his radical agenda.' ” . . .

CBS WYMT covers Googh here.

A Tale of Two Shootings

 Victor Davis Hanson

"Obama and his MSM operatives live in a world of fable."

". . . [Michael] Brown almost immediately assaulted Wilson and went for his gun, which discharged. He then ran, but reversed course and charged the officer, who shot Brown numerous times until he collapsed and died.

"Those facts are now not in dispute and were the eventual conclusions of both local and state authorities. An investigation from Eric Holder’s Justice Department confirmed that Wilson’s behavior was justified. Immediately after Brown’s death,riots overwhelmed Ferguson. The shooting soon became a national rallying movement and begat the new “Black Lives Matter” movement. The latter adopted as its slogan the purported last words of Brown -- “hands up, don’t shoot!” -- a plea that, according to both reliable witnesses and the investigations, was entirely fabricated post facto. Nevertheless, it resonated and was voiced by professional athletes, celebrities, the news media, and members of Congress.

"Nearly a year later, 32-year-old Kathryn Michelle “Kate” Steinle was fatally shot in the back, allegedly by illegal alien Francisco Sanchez, on July 1, 2015, in the Embarcadero district in San Francisco. Sanchez had either stolen or acquired a stolen firearm and fired off three shots, one that pierced the aorta after entering the back of Ms. Steinle. Her murderer was a seven-time convicted felon." . . .

"Barack Obama is the most politically driven president since Richard Nixon and the most racially polarizing chief executive since Woodrow Wilson, whose combination of progressive politics and racialism (the former supposedly exempting the latter) in uncanny fashion he emulates." . . .

Bill and Hill: do we really want them in the White House again?

Bill and Hill - and the Evil that Men Do  "If you asked one hundred people what they think about when they hear the name Bill Clinton, a goodly number will say womanizer, cheater – a few will use the dreadful word rapist. And that number will increase. Time and neurology are working against the Clintons.

"Most memory training programs are simply a matter of learning how to associate memories with emotionally charged ideas. This is because the brain is designed to remember where the dangers and the goodies lie and to forget the dry statistics. The brain is more inclined to remember Jennifer Flowers than the unemployment rate in 1996. 
This effect has tainted the collective memory of many presidents, for example, disclosures about the mistresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Kennedy. This effect will increase for Bill Clinton both because of the outrageous nature of his conduct and the way it has and will be reported."

The Clinton Honor Roll: Those Bill and Hill call liars  . . . "Most folks believe that that moniker, Slick Willie, was appended to Bill in recognition of his political skills; after reviewing his history of sexual assaults, many would agree that it most likely alludes to his ability to avoid felony prosecution for criminal assaults that would long ago have jailed a lesser figure.

"Hillary's early entry to the honor roll must remain nameless for the reason that the victim, like so many other Honor Roll members, fears retaliation from the Clinton Mafia – that and the fact that she was a 12-year-old rape victim whom Hillary accused of lying, who now wishes to maintain her anonymous normality."

24 days to Al Gore’s ’10 years to save the planet’ and ‘point of no return’ planetary emergency deadline

CBS News

"On January 25th, 2006, while at the Sundance film festival, screening “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore said this as chronicled in an article by CBS News:

The former vice president came to town for the premiere of “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary chronicling what has become his crusade since losing the 2000 presidential election: Educating the masses that global warming is about to toast our ecology and our way of life.

Gore has been saying it for decades, since a college class in the 1960s convinced him that greenhouse gases from oil, coal and other carbon emissions were trapping the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, resulting in a glacial meltdown that could flood much of the planet.

Americans have been hearing it for decades, wavering between belief and skepticism that it all may just be a natural part of Earth’s cyclical warming and cooling phases.

And politicians and corporations have been ignoring the issue for decades, to the point that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said.

He sees the situation as “a true planetary emergency.”

“If you accept the truth of that, then nothing else really matters that much,” Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have to organize quickly to come up with a coherent and really strong response, and that’s what I’m devoting myself to.”

"Well, the 10 years are about up, by now, warming should have reached “planetary emergency levels” Let’s look at the data:"

Satellite data since 1979:

A history of the disastrous global warming hoax  . . . " 'Ridiculous claims – like the science is settled or the debate is over – triggered a growing realization that something was wrong." When the global warming advocates began to tell people that cooling is caused by warming, the public has realized how absurd the entire UN climate change argument has been." . . .  
By Alan Caruba, late and lamented.

Juries Not Buying Into Obama's Racist-Cop Conspiracy Theories

IBD

. . . "It was supposed to be a slam dunk case of a racially motivated police shooting. But newly enhanced surveillance video made it "indisputably clear" that the boy approached the cop, lifted his shirt and reached for the pellet gun, which was "indistinguishable" from a real gun.

"Before shooting, the officer yelled repeatedly, "Show me your hands" as loud as he could. But the boy refused to comply, brandishing the gun instead.

T

"he grand jury also learned that Tamir Rice appeared much older than 12. At 175 pounds and wearing size 12 shoes, he looked like a young man when the officer and his partner responded to a call of a "guy with a pistol" scaring people.

Of course, that's not how Black Lives Matter protestors have portrayed the facts. They convinced the gullible media that the two racist patrolmen pulled up on an innocent little boy as he played with a toy in the park and gunned him down in cold blood. They demanded city officials charge the cops with murder.

"Jurors heard the actual facts in the case and concluded there was no reason for the cops to know that Rice was threatening them with a pellet gun and therefore had reason to fear for their lives. And they found no racial animus in the tragic shooting." . . .

Guardian

Two Activist Groups Stuck in the Past  . . . "People born in 1962 grew up with The Jeffersons in the 1970s, Bill Cosby in the 1980s, Living Single in the 1990s, and a black-dominated music industry in the 2000s.  There is now a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr.  Schools across the country teach important authors like Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright for February, Black History Month.  We get it.  Who cares what random accusers at Emory or Columbia think about white people?  The average white person in America has been force-fed a steady diet of Barack Obama's propaganda on Facebook, Twitter, CNN, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NBC, NPR, Instagram, T-shirts, billboards, and the pages of every major publication in the country." . . .