Filed under: Africa, Asia, Australia, China, Foreign Policy, Freedom, History, Japan, Literature, Politics | Tags: Best Books Ever, Great Writers, Sea Stories
I recommended a few books a few days ago to add to your knowledge. There are many kinds of reading, thrillers, histories, mysteries, westerns and romances, among others. If you are still locked down, or avoiding going out, you are likely to need more reading just for pure pleasure. To get lost in a book.
At the very tip-top of my list is Patrick O’Brien. with seventeen novels described variously as “the best historical novels ever written”, “the best sea story I have ever read,” books you will keep to read again and again. The series is about the Royal Navy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey R.N. and Stephen Maturin. ship’s surgeon and intelligence agent against the thrilling background of the Napoleonic wars.
Details of life aboard a man of war in Nelson’s navy are faultlessly rendered; the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging and the roar of the broadsides as the great ships close in battle.
The first, Master and Commander, was published in 1970, the last in 1995. You can get the whole series from Amazon for a hefty $240.75 or one at a time for $10.89. One of the best investments you will ever make.
Another series I recommend highly is James Clavell’s Asian Saga which begins in 1600 with Shogun, followed by Tai-Pan, 1841, Gai-Jin,1862, King Rat, 1945, Noble House,1963, and Whirlwind,1979. Clavell is an excellent storyteller. Today’s China and Hong Kong add to the interest although the books are fiction.
If you are female and do not read books about wars and battles, shame on you, but you might enjoy anything by Penelope Lively, Joanne Greenberg, or Elizabeth Spencer.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Coronavirus, Crime, Domestic Policy, Economy, England, France, Freedom, Health Care, History, Humor, Intelligence, Law, Media Bias, Police, Politics, Regulation, Seattle WA, The United States | Tags: Destroying Statues, Fury and Outrage, Rewriting the Past
Here’s the box they built around the statue of Winston Churchill in Britain. Police also protected the cenotaph, and protesters bravely threw some statues into the River Thames.
In Whittier, California, BLM protesters defaced a statue of John Greenleaf. Who is he? He was a prominent Quaker abolitionist, known for his anti-slavery writings. A picture shows the usual graffiti. Sometimes, it seems, we get a little over-excited about attacking statues. Of course, unlike attacking real people, statues just sit there and behave like the inanimate objects they are, and there’s no fuss unless the police catch you at it, and even then it depends on what the local rules are about attacking statues. It is entirely about the symbolism, and attacking a king symbolically ranks a little higher than a symbolic mere member of Parliament, for example.
Of course in America we went for bigger targets than mere statues (which were attacked as well) but that can’t compare to HBO blacklisting Gone With the Wind. Good Grief! Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Hattie McDaniels, who is black, won the first Oscar ever given to a person of another race. It was well deserved, but there’s the rub. She played the role of Mammy, a slave.
Well, never mind Oscars, the outrage was furious. Banning Gone With the Wind! America’s favorite movie of all time. What happened immediately was that everybody went out and bought a copy for their own, and just think through the economics of that little stunt, and how it would reverberate down through the years. I can even quote you the opening lines of the book: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm, as the Tarelton twins were.”
HBO decided that unbanning Gone With the Wind was probably the better idea, but because of George Floyd and all, they hired Black scholar and TCM host Jacqueline Stewart. She is a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Cinema and Media Studies is a major at the University of Chicago? It has not been yet announced just when GWTW and Scarlett and Brett will return to streaming services. Jacqueline Stewart will provide an introduction to the movie, so you understand the correct viewpoint. This is a very odd time, we can’t seem to decide whether we can allow history to remain unchanged, or if we have to have a do-over that we like better. Historically, we do recognize that the Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Southern forces fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and on April 15, President Lincoln issued a public declaration than an insurrection existed and called for 75,000 militia to stop the rebellion. It ended on April 9, 1865 when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S, Grant at the Appomattox Court House, with a remarkable lot of history in between those two dates. If you are unfamiliar with the Civil War, study up! You’ll be glad you did. Here’s a guide to books on the war.
You might want to look up the Emancipation Proclamation.
Race has come up as a major subject in the international outrage over the death of George Floyd. Statues are being destroyed in this country, in Britain, Australia, Scotland–Robert the Bruce, the Scottish King who freed Scotland from England’s clutches, and who knows where else, which accomplishes nothing at all, but expresses varying degrees of outrage over varying subjects. The Civil War in general, any generals who fought for the South, anything named for a general who fought for the South, that sort of thing. Fort Bragg and Fort Benning are especially mentioned as needing to be renamed immediately to appease the anger about race. Quick, can you tell me where Fort Bragg is, and who it is named for? Didn’t think so. How about Fort Benning — location, named for? If we are going to be outraged and change names, shouldn’t we know what we are talking about, and how it relates to, for example, “CHAZ” or “CHOP” as it is now, on six blocks of Capitol Hill in Seattle? And what does that have to do with putting a box around the statue of Winston Churchill in Britain?
What seemed to happen to George Floyd was clearly an outrage, but what actually happened was not as it seemed. The call to police about Floyd was that he was trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. We never learned if it was counterfeit or not. There must have been some kind of resisting arrest going on for him to end up on the ground with an officer holding him down with his knee.
Floyd was a very large man who worked as security in a night club, a “bouncer” as they are called, as did the police officer, and they apparently worked at the same establishment. The cause of death is unclear. Yes, he was saying “I can’t breathe” but before the choke hold as well. He was apparently high on fentanyl. The autopsies (there were two) also mentioned a heart attack, and another fatal condition. The officer has been charged with murder, but in the middle of international outrage. I have no idea. It just sounds like it is a lot more complicated than we were led to believe. The outrage over what was seen on film was huge. The emotion stirred up was huge and has led to all the rest.
Hopefully, enough information will eventually come out to clarify the whole thing. Why it has led to the destruction of Columbus statues, names of anything connected to the South in the Civil War, remains unknown. Aunt Jemima syrup has changed its name and picture. Kellogg’s Rice Crispies has been attacked for Snap, Crackle and Pop who seem to be three white boys. The same white boys are on the Cocoa Crispies box, although the cereal is brown. In other words, a big section of America has become certifiable. A City Councilman in Charlotte, SC has declared that it is time to proclaim that racism is a public health crisis. The worst reaction is the call to defund the police. which is beyond stupid. Unfortunately it has all been exacerbated by the CORONA-19 turmoil and societal shutdown and all the chaos that has caused. Emotions were already stirred up by people locked down.
This too shall pass. From the Federalist: “Why White People Will Always Be Racists: Whites are continually put into the position of forever having to prove the negative, that they’re not racists. This is impossible. And that’s the point.”
Filed under: Australia, Blogging, Bureaucracy, Domestic Policy, Economics, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Junk Science, Media Bias, Politics, Science/Technology | Tags: Australia, Climate Change, Trusted Scientists
Ian Plimer is a distinguished Australian scientist. He is a professor of Geology at the University of Adelaide, the author of 6 books and many scientific papers. Two of his books question the validity of man-made climate change. This is dangerous territory, for you will quickly be labeled a “Denier”, or guilty of “wrong think.”
There are huge amounts of money involved in the Climate Change battle. The climate, of course, has been changing for millions of years. There are dry years, long cold winters, and short winters with poor skiing and big losses for ski resorts. We have the strange example of Greta Thunberg who is now a foundation, AOC is plumping for the “Green New Deal”, a disastrously stupid idea, and she wants to abolish “fracking” which is responsible for lowering the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere more than any other country in the world, and allows us to use more clean natural gas in place of sooty coal for heating our homes and businesses.
When you start telling people that the climate will end life as we know it in just 10 or 12 years, people don’t know what to do and are frightened, and don’t know where to turn. Then the news is filled with images of what seems to be Australia burning up, (the fires are ‘contained’ and no longer a crisis) so you add in the hurricanes and tornadoes and start to believe that we must DO SOMETHING right now. Politicians who hope to be re-elected start promising electric cars and buses (I’ve read that electric cars don’t work in the cold, but don’t know if it’s true) and building wind farms and vast solar arrays which don’t do much for our energy. Australia has regular problems with bush fires, hurricanes have nothing to do with climate, and the 2017 survey of polar bears proves once again that they are fine and multiplying nicely. What one needs to do is study up. Find out just who are the scientists who know and understand what we do know and what we don’t. Ian Plimer is one of the good ones, as are William Happer, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer , John Christie, and many others. Read Climate Depot, Watts Up With That, and Roy Spencer’s blog regularly and you will start becoming knowledgeable.
Ian Plimer will start you off nicely with a geologic history of the Earth.
This is a very long video, but invaluable. I cannot urge you strongly enough to make the time to watch the whole thing. You will learn about the entire history of climate, about the deplorable current climate panic, that is basically a political ploy, not science.Professor Plimer is an excellent explainer.
Christiana Figures, who was general secretary of the IPCCÂ (the International Panel on Climate Change) announced at a news conference back in early February of 2015, that the object of the “climate crisis” was not to save the Earth from the degradation of a climate disaster, but to eliminate Capitalism. Much of the world hates our wealth and booming economy, the wealth of goods produced, and the way we go around the world trying to “help” other countries, tell them what to do, or just disapprove of them. They might learn that the source of our wealth and thriving economy is capitalism, and they too could share in it’s blessings. But that, in turn, might mean unpleasant things like freedom and elections and the rule of law.
Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Economy, Environment, Global Warming, History, Junk Science, Media Bias, National Security, News the Media Doesn't Want You to Hear, Politics, Regulation | Tags: Climate Panic, Destroying Capitalism, Why They Support It
The British Paper The Guardian, has just published an article with the headline “Australia Fires are Foretaste of Earth’s Future” by someone labeled Thomas D. Williams PhD.
The “apocalyptic” scenes of raging Australian bushfires will become commonplace around the world without a major drop in emissions, the Guardian newspaper warned Tuesday.
The Guardian, which has publicly pledged “to give global heating, wildlife extinction and pollution the urgent attention and prominence they demand,” insisting that the climate emergency is “the defining issue of our times,” has amped up its climate agitation by suggesting that Australian wildfires is the new normal. …
Citing one of the Guardian’s favorite climate “experts,” Richard A. Betts, head of the Climate Impacts strategic area at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, Harvey says that Australia’s fires would be normal if global temperatures were to rise by 3ºC above pre-industrial levels.
Betts, who along with others has pushed for an intensification of climate rhetoric, such as replacing “global warming” with “global heating,” said that Australia is “a sign of what would be normal conditions in a 3C world. It tells us what the future world might look like.”
Well, except that Australia has said that the fires are manmade and arrested a number of people for arson, including a few who had disobeyed the law by throwing lighted cigarettes out the car window. Scientists here have confirmed that Australia’s brush fires are not caused by “climate change.”
A Facebook glitch revealed that Greta Thunberg’s Facebook page is written by her father Svantes Thunberg and “Climate Crisis Activist” Ardash Prathap. It might be interesting to see who paid for her travel from Sweden across the Atlantic ocean to address the United Nations in New York by sailboat. or who arranged for the speech and her travel around the United States and visits with Hollywood celebrities. All very strange.
A website called “Interesting Engineering” points out that this year will mark the lowest solar activity in over 200 years. No sunspots! Yet we are told that the absence of sunspots represents a cooling phase.
I mention fairly often that Christiana Figueres, the general secretary of the IPCC, in a radio broadcast in early February of 2015, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy Capitalism.
The Canadian Minister of the Environment at the time, the late Christina Stewart, said “No matter if the science is all phony; there are collateral environmental benefits…Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
And I just got a notice from my congressman that indicates that he is proud to sponsor (with huge amounts of taxpayer money) efforts to delay Climate Change with wind and solar, which we have already determined just don’t work. So there you go.
A possible reason why one should be cautious about the activities of government, any government.
Addendum: I should probably add that the world’s 76 best Tide Gauges show a mean 0.34 mm (that’s 34% of one millimeter) rise in sea level. If you don’t recognize a millimeter, it’s smaller than the distance between the two ll’s in the word millimeter. Santa Barbara doesn’t need to paint the white line across the streets to prepare for the rise of the ocean just yet.
Also: Glacier National Park has quietly removed the signs that said the glaciers were shrinking from “climate change”, and replaced them signs and literature that acknowledged that the glaciers are indeed growing.
Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Canada, Capitalism, Crime, Domestic Policy, England, Global Warming, History, Junk Science, Media Bias, Politics, Progressivism, Science/Technology, The United States, United Kingdom, United Nations | Tags: Climate Change, CO2 is Essential to Life, Junk Science
On the 75th anniversary of D-Day, Elizabeth Warren announced that Climate Change is “A Bigger Threat Than World War II”, and launched a Two Trillion “infrastructure investment plan” to address the threat of climate change, which she claims is a bigger threat to the American way of life than the enemies the Allied forces faced in World War II. The climate crisis in this country is a threat to the very existence of every living thing on this planet.
Not to be outdone in the climate panic department, our very own governor, Jay Inslee, who is running for the presidency on a climate based campaign in which the American people have showed no interest whatsoever, told an NBC News correspondent that President Trump’s stance on global warming is “treason.”
Something that is becoming increasingly obvious about Democrats is that they simply do not do their homework. It is remarkably obvious as well in the other 23 declared candidates for the presidency. They open their mouths and say something that should disqualify them from not only the presidency, but from whatever office they currently hold. Before you start spouting about existential threats to all life on the planet, you should have actually looked into the science. You could start with Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr.Tom Christy who measure the temperatures of the Earth for NASA at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.
The climate of the earth has been warming and cooling for millions of years. When the current interest fading into panic first reared it’s ugly head, all sorts of grants became available to anyone who could write a good grant proposal. Science departments in many universities felt that they could accomplish something with more powerful computers and the program used by financial people to forecast what the markets would do. Trouble was there were all sorts of unanswered questions out there, like the part played by clouds. They entered what they knew for sure, which was not all that much, and then their best guesses, and a few wild ones, and so we arrived at the current state of affairs.
Thing is, the planet is actually cooling, not warming. Glaciers are not melting, they are growing. Glacier National Park has quietly removed the signs “Gone by 2020” after the glaciers just kept on not being gone, but actually growing. The increased CO² in the atmosphere is greening the earth, since carbon dioxide, which we exhale, is a natural fertilizer for plants.The increased greening is visible from space.
The major greenhouse gas (95%) of the atmosphere is not Carbon Dioxide (CO²) but water vapor. (Clouds) According to Dr. Tim Ball, the next most important greenhouse gas of relevance is methane CH4, but it is only 0.000175 percent of atmospheric gases and 0.036 percent or all greenhouse gases. Water vapor is 95% of the atmosphere by volume, and is by far the most abundant and important greenhouse gas. And we just don’t understand clouds at all.
Surely when you were a kid, at some point you lay out on the lawn on a nice summer day to just watch the clouds drifting across the sky. If the action of clouds is a major determinant of climate, how do you measure that? Sometimes there are layers of clouds, each layer going in different directions. Sometimes there are lovely white clouds in front, and off in the distance big black thunderclouds, everything moving.
Then there is Christiana Figueres. She was the general secretary of the IPPC who admitted in a press conference that the goal of environmental activists was not to save the world from ecological calamity — but to destroy Capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
There are numbers of others in the climate field who have made similar admissions. There are innumerable books on climate and the error of climate panic, from Britain, Australia, Canada and the U.S. There’s a wide range of websites devoted to climate, I’ve listed just a few in the sidebar.
*The photo is looking due north. If you head over to the snowy peak and jump off towards the North, you will be where I grew up. This mountain is the northernmost anchor of the West range of mountains in Idaho. Nice country.
Filed under: Africa, Asia, Australia, Canada, Cool Site of the Day, Environment, Europe, Heartwarming, Latin America, United Kingdom, United Nations | Tags: Saving Endangered Species, The World's Zoos, Zoo Borns
This is the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden’s little “Peanut”. He (or she) is a Tamandua, who was born December 20, 2018. His name is “Mani” which means peanut. The Tamanduas are also called “lesser anteaters.” They have long snouts to sniff out ant, termite and bee colonies. Long claws enable it to dig into nests and a long sticky tongue lets it lick up the insects. A single Tamandua can eat up to 9,000 ants in a single day! They are native to Spanish speaking countries. They didn’t say how they provide that many ants.
Here’s a wonderful website for days when you are finding the news too depressing. http://www.zooborns.com. Zoos around the world are engaged in helping to preserve endangered species. The website shows off the babies, and often their parent as well. Great fun, cute babies, and you are introduced to all sorts of animals and birds that are new to you. Fun site to prowl around. Enjoy.
Filed under: Australia, Canada, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Immigration, National Security, The United States | Tags: All About Immigration, Capitalism and Freedom, Change for the Better
William Voegeli, from The Pity Party:
” In contrast to America, countries like Canada and Australia treat immigration the way Harvard treats college admission or the New England Patriots treat the NFL draft as a way to get the talented that can benefit the institution and keep out the untalented. Here in America, we increasingly treat immigration as if it were a sacred civil right possessed by 7 billion foreigners.”
Economist Dierdre McCloskey:
In the countries that most enthusiastically embraced capitalism, some two hundred years ago, real per-capita economic growth has increased by 1.5 percent annually. Owing to the miracle of compound interest, this increase has meant a 19-fold increase in living standards over the past two centuries, which, she contends, is a “change in the human condition” that “ranks with the first domestication of plants and animals and the building of the first towns.” … this enormous economic result has a cause that was cultural rather than economic. Humans did not suddenly become more acquisitive or creative. Rather “when people treat the marketers and inventors as having some dignity and liberty, innovation takes hold.” The new respectability of bourgeois life, the belief that the creativity of capitalism’s creative destruction more than offset its destruction, was the decisive attitudinal change that rendered human life in the past two centuries decisively different from what it had been throughout the preceding millennia.
Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Canada, Communism, Economics, Europe, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Freedom, Germany, History, Immigration, Law, Military, National Security, Politics, Regulation, United Kingdom, United Nations, World War II | Tags: Anglea Merkel's Dream, Fixing Human Nature, The Pact to End all Pacts
There are faint signs that perhaps the tensions involved over the debate about “globalism” and “national sovereignty” may be clearing a bit. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that European Union (EU) member states must be prepared to transfer their powers over to Brussels at such a debate.
“In an orderly fashion, of course” Merkel said, as she explained that Germany had given up some of its sovereignty in order to join the EU, but national parliaments were in charge of deciding whether or not sign on to international treaties.
The CDU (Christian Democratic Union) leader said that trust and the willingness to compromise are essential in discussing the controversial UN migration pact, which the debate has continued to divide her own party.
Some important allies are pulling out of the agreement – Australia has left saying they will not risk their ‘hard won’ success in controlling their own borders. Trump has said no, and others are trying to figure out where they stand.
Chancellor Merkel accused critics of the Global Compact for Safe and Orderly Migration of “advocating ‘nationalism’ in its purest form.” She paraphrased her French counterpart Emmanuel Macron who recently claimed that “patriotism is the exact opposite because nationalism is treason.” Europe must surrender national sovereignty she said, to Brussels over “foreign affairs, migration, and development, as well as an increasing part of our budgets and even fiscal resources.” She also called for the creation of a real, true EU army and she stated that only through globalism can the world see peace.
This is an old, old argument — even on the original Thanksgiving we celebrate — can’t we all just get along? Well, no we can’t. It is now and always has been a pipe dream. And on throughout world history. The first humans probably started dispersing because they couldn’t get along together and were fighting about the kill that Roku dragged home for dinner, or who was going to get the choice piece of meat. You probably noticed in all the talk about happy family get-togethers for Thanksgiving dinner, there was also a lot of talk about how to deal with Uncle Harry who was a far Left Trump hater, or Uncle Ralph who was a bigoted Conservative.
The concept of a perfect society, or utopia, is as old as humanity. That is really the origin of communism and socialism and Nazism. They believed they were creating the perfect system. Here in America the Utopian Movement gained traction in 19th century America when thousands of people formed communities hoping to improve on existing society. The heyday was between 1820 and 1860. One of the remaining groups from that period is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or the Mormon Church, founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith. There was also the Oneida Community in upstate New York, the Shaker Movement, Brook Farm, a utopian community in Massachusetts.
We have had a lot of movements for “world peace.” There was the “war to end all wars” followed by the League of Nations”, followed by the rise of socialism with Mussolini and Hitler and World War II and the United Nations and the Cold War and another bunch of wars and Angela Merkel ought to be aware that the odds are quite definitely not in her favor.
In the present, Europe is suffering from Merkel’s invitation to all the unhappy people from the Middle East and Africa to migrate to Europe in the mistaken idea that Europe’s problem of declining birthrates and lack of young people to do the scut work and boring jobs would be solved by migration. Instead they got an invasion of Moslems whose religion demanded that those who did not submit to Allah should be killed. The migrants were welcomed all over Europe with gifts of food and clothing, flowers and song. The migrants were happy to accept the gifts, complained bitterly about the accommodations provided, and wanted to be supported by European generosity. They have instead proved willing to burn cars, rape any available women and girls, and engage in occasional shootings, and their communities have become dangerous ‘no-go’ districts. Merkel has just still not given up on her ideas of utopia.
In spite of all the Never-Trumpers, the deranged ‘celebrities’ in a constant search for the nearest microphone, and the newest “Democratic-Socialists”, plain old free-market capitalism in a constitutional republic seems to work better than anything else. The news of the day is not usually about how peaceful and happy the nations of the world are, but about their quarrels. Quarreling remains human nature, and we seem to be stuck with it.
Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Economy, Energy, Environment, History, Law, Politics | Tags: At Least 200 Years Worth, Australiam Energy, Fracking
Good news from our friends in Australia. The Northern Territory there has enough natural gas to supply Australia for 200 years or more. It is comparable to the shale resources that have revolutionized the American energy sector, according to Resources and Northern Australia Minister Matt Canavan. And maybe even twice that.
Such abundant gas should enable Australia to reduce its current high energy prices, which were the fault of southern states preventing development, Senator Canavan told an NT Resources Week conference in Darwin.
The NT government lifted a ban on the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing to access onshore gas this year, which is banned in Victoria and much of NSW.
Geoscience Australia estimates the NT has about 257,000 petajoules of shale gas to meet Australia’s demands for 200 years, Senator Canavan said.
Chief Minister Michael Gunner said he had been told by energy companies that figure could be doubled with the Beetaloo Sub-basin.
Have no clue what “fracking” is? Most people don’t or they wouldn’t be claiming that fracking is going to pollute their drinking water. Here’s a article from Popular Mechanics with a dandy illustration. Here’s the history of Fracking from Oil Price. Here’s a post from Morning Consult that points out the science to allay fears.
If you are curious about Russian influence, you should know that the Russians have indeed been trying to influence the United States, but by supporting fears of fracking and supporting environmental activists. The Russian economy relies heavily on their supplies of natural gas which they sell to European nations. They certainly don’t want American energy wealth to bring down their prices.
I have never been to Australia, but my mother has. She was raised in a little mining camp in Idaho, where her father was a doctor. Many of the prospectors she knew came from the gold rushes in Australia. After my dad died, she flew up to Point Barrow where she had an offer to teach school, but got married instead. When she got back from Alaska, she tooled off to Australia to see the gold fields there. She kept losing her camera, her purse and nice Aussies took good care of her. She was a fearless woman.
Filed under: Australia, Capitalism, Economics, Economy, Energy, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Freedom, Military, Unemployment | Tags: A Consequential President, Australia's Tony Abbott, Getting Things Done
The Wall Street Journal had a most interesting article titled “An Ally Sizes Up Donald Trump: When he says something consistently, it will happen. And his message is that America will remain a reliable partner, but don’t expect too much.” It’s by Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister of Australia, 2013-2015. (subscription barrier)
The truth is that the rest of the world needs America much more than America needs us. The U.S. has no threatening neighbors. It’s about as remote from the globe’s trouble spots as is possible to be. It’s richly endowed with resources, including energy and an almost boundless agricultural capacity. Its technology is second to none. Its manufacturing base is vast. Its people are entrepreneurial in their bones. From diversity, it has built unity and an enviable pride in country.
In many respects, America is the world in one country, only a better world than the one outside. If it decided to live in splendid isolation from troubles across the sea, it would lose little and perhaps gain much, at least in the beginning. A fortress America would be as impregnable as any country could be.
Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Canada, Crime, Domestic Policy, Europe, European Union, Immigration, Law, Media Bias, National Security, The United States | Tags: Democrat Talking Points, Ripped From Their Mothers Arms, Understand the Law
I frequently say something about “doing your homework”, by which I mean that you can no longer count on the information from our national media to be either true nor accurate. You have to make an effort to find out if what you are reading is actually true. If you just repeat the talking points, you are not only dishonest yourself, you are aiding a program specifically designed to make you support a lie.
The current line of attack is that the Trump administration is “ripping vulnerable children from the arms of their mothers” at the border, because of Trump’s demand for a border wall. Obviously if you want a big wall to keep citizens of other countries from entering our country, you must be racist, homophobic, xenophobic, Hitler, and just plain mean.
We have just had a chorus from the former first ladies, who think it’s perfectly awful that we are “ripping vulnerable children from the arms of their mothers.” Let’s clear this up a bit.
If you are a nation, you have a right to decide who you will allow to move in. William Voegeli in The Pity Party explained;
“In contrast to America, countries like Canada and Australia treat immigration the way Harvard treats college admission or the New England Patriots treat the NFL draft as a way to get the talented that can benefit the institution and keep out the untalented. Here in America we increasingly treat immigration as if it were a sacred civil right possessed by 7 billion foreigners.”
We allow asylum seekers to enter the country, but ‘asylum’ has a strict meaning. It means that you are escaping a government that wants to harm you for your religion, politics or ideas. It does not mean that you want to get away from an abusive husband, it’s about the government. We have embassies and consulates all over the world, where one can apply to immigrate to America. There are legal procedures and a long wait list, which is made long by “chain migration.” A citizen can currently “sponsor” all of his or her relatives. Mother, father, adult children, brothers. sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins. Our country believes that we can currently handle about a million new immigrants a year, who we help to find a residence, learn English and learn American History, find health care, get help in getting settled and help with their needs. Those who have legally applied, paid their fees, have often been on the wait list for years. Most of the numbers are used up by chain migration, and there is little room for those who just want to make their home and life here.
Contrary to our first ladies (who should have done their homework) children are not being “ripped from the arms of their mothers”. If the parent has entered the country illegally, they have committed a crime. They are detained. We have a law that says you can’t put a kid in prison with their parents. They are moved to facilities designed to help the children. I have described this thoroughly in a previous post, 4 posts back beginning “the evil Donald Trump.” It is the law, and the Trump administration must obey.
The Obama administration, ignoring the law, admitted many “parents” and their children without checking them out, only to find that the “parent” was a trafficker, and what were really unaccompanied children were turned over to egg farms to work in slave conditions, chicken packing, and even sex work. And yes, the Obama administration did park kids in cages. Democrats were trying to use the photos against Conservatives, but the photos were clearly from the Obama administration, so that claim quickly vanished, and we moved to the “ripped from the arms” bit.
The Center for Immigration Studies (cis.org) is the most reliable source for information about immigration. They describe themselves as pro-immigrant, anti-illegal immigrant. They work hard at providing accurate information for the public and for public official. Unfortunately, we have a lot of public officials who don’t do their homework either.
Filed under: Asia, Australia, Bureaucracy, Canada, Capitalism, China, Domestic Policy, Economy, Energy, Environment, Europe, European Union, Foreign Policy, History, Immigration, Japan, Latin America, Law, National Security, Politics, Progressivism, Technology, The Constitution, The United States, United Kingdom, United Nations, World War II | Tags: America as Patron, Global Stalinism, Globalization
Here I was, posting Jonathan Haidt’s commentary on Globalization, and I turned to American Greatness, and conveniently, there was Victor Davis Hanson, writing even more extensively about globalization.
After World War II, only the United States possessed the capital, the military, freedom, and the international good will to arrest the spread of global Stalinism. To save the fragile postwar West, America was soon willing to rebuild and rearm war-torn former democracies. Over seven decades, it intervened in proxy wars against Soviet and Chinese clients, and radical rogue regimes. It accepted asymmetrical and unfavorable trade as the price of leading and saving the West. America became the sole patron for dozens of needy clients—with no time limit on such asymmetry.
Yet what would become the globalized project was predicated on lots of flawed, but unquestioned assumptions:
The great wealth and power of the United States was limitless. It alone could afford to subsidize other nations. Any commercial or military wound was always considered superficial and well worth the cost of protecting the civilized order.
Only by piling up huge surpluses with the United States and avoiding costly defense expenditure through American military subsidies, could the shattered nations of Asia and Europe supposedly regain their security, prosperity and freedom. There was no shelf life on such dependencies.
Do read the whole thing. This is a major contention point with the Democrats in their current mental and moral breakdown. If we are going to fight back, we have to know what we are talking about.
American Elephants 