The Weekly Standard’s Ongoing Suicide Finally Achieves Results

December 6th, 2018

It looks like The Weekly Standard is going to shut down.

The easiest way to sum up the failure of the Weekly Standard is this: Why would anyone on the right offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free? And why would anyone on the left offer financial support to the Weekly Standard when CNN will call us a racist for free?

Sarcasm aside, that is the Weekly Standard’s primary problem. In the age of Trump, the publication offers nothing we cannot get everywhere else in the elite media, nothing we cannot find at the far-left Washington Post, MSNBC, New York Times, CNN, etc.

Smug virtue-signaling and superior Trump-bashing are the cheapest commodities in today’s news business. They are literally everywhere. And so, instead of offering a unique voice and perspective in an ocean of left-wing media, the Weekly Standard instead chose to sit in the middle of this ocean and sell saltwater.

Back in the late 1990s, I used to subscribe to The Weekly Standard, and they did some good articles. They were the first place I read about how the French government had lost control of the predominately Muslim banlieues. But I dropped my subscription because I wasn’t reading as many magazines any longer as my Internet reading increased, and National Review filled my “what I read at breakfast and dinner” needs.

There were always oddities in The Weekly Standard‘s worldview, including their embrace of “National Greatness” conservatism, which struck me as Big Government with a conservative facade. But judging from their Twitter timelines, the 2016 election seems to given them a more severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome than any other institution on the right. They became the voice for that tiny strand of elite conservatism that cared more about properly creased trousers and liking the right opera conductors than improving economic conditions for the middle class or reigning in the excesses of big government. They’d rather join forces with Democrats than let the uncouth ruffian Trump besmirch their class credentials by winning without them.

Now some tweets on the subject:

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Posted in Media Watch | 1 Comment »

Michael Avenatti Stops Pretending He’s Running For President

December 5th, 2018

In a devastating blow to political satirists everywhere, creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti has stopped pretending he’s going to run for President:

Twitter reaction was swift:

Well, yeah. That’s why we were urging him to run.



This leaves a core of hardcore Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers up for grabs from another delusional candidate.

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Posted in Democrats, Elections | No Comments »

All The Feels

December 4th, 2018

Don’t think I can put up anything today with more impact than this:

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Posted in Republicans, Texas | No Comments »

Maureen Dowd Talks About Maureen Dowd (And A Little About George H. W. Bush)

December 3rd, 2018

If you want to know why the rise of Donald Trump (or someone like him) was all-but-inevitable, this Maureen Dowd piece about how Maureen Dowd was so very, very chummy with George H. W. Bush provides several clues. On the surface its a lighthearted memoir about how a Republican President and a New York Times reporter were fond of each other and stayed in touch even after Bush41 was out of office. But what it’s really about is how both came out of a stratified eastern coastal elite where everyone’s brother knew someone else’s cousin at Yale or Harvard, and everyone knew their place.

And, being a Maureen Dowd piece, it’s mostly about Maureen Dowd.

Note how Dowd’s memoir is filled with praise for the same Bush patrician qualities the media so savagely attacked when actual elections were on the line. “The most polite man who ever lived” of Dowd’s gauzy memories is the one the media dubbed “wimp” and “waffle” back before he was safely out of office.

There’s really only one quality our Democrat Media Complex really respects in any Republicans: Being a gracious loser.

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Posted in Media Watch, Republicans, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

George H. W. Bush: Passing Reaction Roundup

December 2nd, 2018

Here’s some news, tributes, roundups and reactions to President George H. W. Bush’s death:

  • Bush’s body to lie in state in the capitol rotunda. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • The Other McCain:

    Former President George Herbert Walker Bush will be universally praised in the wake of his death because it is always the policy of liberals to celebrate the dead Republicans they formerly defamed, as a means to impugn the living Republicans they currently defame. Those of us old enough to remember how liberals hated Bush when he was president (and before that, as vice-president under Ronald Reagan) will not be deceived by their panegyrics to his “civility” and “bipartisanship.”

    Snip.

    Bush was one of the leaders of the GOP’s effort to break the Democrat stranglehold on the “Solid South.” He defeated the powerful Texas Democrat machine to win two terms in Congress, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1970, and served as Ambassador to the United Nations (1971-73) and later as director of the CIA. In the interval, Bush was chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973-74 when it fell his duty to inform President Nixon that he would have to resign, as the Watergate revelations had destroyed his support within the GOP. In all of these roles, Bush was a man of honor who did what duty required, as a patriotic servant of his country.

  • Scott Johnson at Powerline: “He led an almost impossibly full life, capped by his election to the presidency as Ronald Reagan’s successor in 1988. A good man and a good president, he was perhaps more than anything else a great American of the old-fashioned variety that is passing from the scene.” Plus a reminder of how the New York Times fabricated stories about him.
  • Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, hails Bush as the man who ended the Cold War. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

    • Tweets:

    Finally, America’s journalist class in action:

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

    George H. W. Bush Dead at Age 94

    December 1st, 2018

    George Herbert Walker Bush, forty-first President of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan’s Vice President, head of the CIA, U.S. Congressman, envoy to China, World War II fighter pilot, and father of forty-third President George W. Bush, has died at age 94.

    He led a pretty full life.

    Americans should be grateful for his steady foreign policy leadership that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, sweeping the Bolshevik Revolution into the dustbin of history. Likewise, Bush oversaw a continuation of the Reagan economic boom, setting the stage for the tremendous growth of the dotcom era. Bush was also instrumental in laying the foundation for the rise of the Republican Party to become the dominant political party of Texas.

    He was not perfect. His inability to control the deficit, his misjudgment of China, and his his administration’s inability to deter Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait all helped lead to his defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. Desert Storm’s ejection of Hussein’s forces from Kuwait was arguable Bush41’s finest hour, but the victory proved ephemeral, and led to a host of difficulties that America is still struggling with today.

    He was a good President. His calm, patrician leadership was the last gasp of (to use his own words) a “kinder, gentler America,” and history will probably regard him as a “steady hand” President in the mold of Truman, Eisenhower, and Ford.

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    LinkSwarm for November 30, 2018

    November 30th, 2018

    Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving!

  • Trump Derangement Syndrome is breaking up marriages as “woke” women leave their sane husbands. “Part of what causes fights is that I don’t want to hear his side, and he hates that. Mostly I tell him he needs to think about this more clearly before he talks to me about it, and then I walk away.” Golly, can’t imagine why their marriage isn’t a Hallmark movie.
  • Texas speaker-in-waiting Rep. Dennis Bonnen will speak at the Texas Public Policy Foundation orientation in January. “One of the open secrets about the capitol in recent sessions has been the degree to which the Straus/Gordon Johnson team despises TPPF. The Straus/Gordon Johnson team loathes TPPF more than any conservative organization. That includes Empower Texans.” That’s some bold talk…
  • MSBNC in action:

  • Hamas is still freaking out over that Israeli raid a few weeks ago. “Hamas officials suspect Israel has been operating a base inside Gaza, and Hamas is turning itself inside out trying to figure it out.”
  • ESPN has lost 14 million viewers over seven years. How’s that “all social justice warrioring, all the time” format working out for you? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Deutsche Bank offices raided:

    In what appears to be the latest in a string of financial crimes and scandals that have generated some $18 billion in fines since the financial crisis, prosecutors are investigating whether two employees in the bank’s wealth management division helped clients set up accounts in offshore tax havens, including the British Virgin Islands, and possibly allowed criminals to move money through these shelters, some of which may have flowed through accounts at the bank (other employees may also have been involved, prosecutors said). According to Frankfurt prosecutors, the investigation, which stems from revelations contained in the ‘Panama Papers’, covers behavior that stretched through this year, meaning that it could become a blemish on the performance of the bank’s newly-installed CEO Christian Sewing.

  • Another jihad attack against Jews the media won’t label as a jihad attack:

  • GM’s destructive subsidies:

    General Motor’s announcement that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing several plants has met intense criticism because the company was the beneficiary of a $50 billion government bailout in 2009—which wound up costing taxpayers $11 billion—even as the government awarded the United Auto Workers’ health-care fund a 17.5 percent stake in the restructured company. Like many big American companies, GM has been the recipient of government-subsidized largesse over several decades. One particular piece of this history is especially noteworthy now. Nearly 40 years ago, in one of the most egregious cases of eminent domain abuse in American history, GM built a plant on land seized from homeowners and businesses in Detroit, obliterating a multi-ethnic neighborhood known as Poletown—all for a plant that will now be shuttered so that GM can invest somewhere else in new manufacturing facilities.

    Beset by foreign competition, America’s automakers began retrenching in the late 1970s, closing manufacturing facilities in and around Detroit even as the city struggled to rebound from the riots of 1967. Dodge had closed a giant plant in Hamtramck, a suburb that adjoins the Poletown neighborhood, and when GM announced that it wanted to build a new plant somewhere in America with modern industrial technology—though it was closing plants elsewhere—Detroit officials pleaded for an opportunity to find a site for the new facility. Mayor Coleman Young came up with a plan: seize some 1,500 homes and 144 businesses in Poletown, a low-income community of 3,500 where Polish immigrants had once settled. By the early 1980s, Poletown was a more diverse neighborhood, housing older Poles but also more recent immigrants and black Detroit residents. As the city deteriorated, Poletown remained relatively stable. “There is no place for us to go, no place we want to go,” two elderly residents told the New York Times in 1980, to no avail. To Detroit officials, Poletown’s appeal was its proximity to the Dodge site, providing some 465 acres for GM—if officials could just move out those inconveniently located businesses and people. To help make it happen, in April 1980 the Michigan legislature passed its infamous “quick-take” law, providing that government agencies could seize land deemed necessary for a “public purpose” and determine later how much to compensate the private landowners. That law accelerated the process of clearing out Poletown.

  • The Second Amendment was always an individual right.
  • Detecting a stealth aircraft is one thing, but shooting it down during the terminal tracking phase is another.
  • Don’t be Dick’s.
  • Things to be thankful for:

    The cost of the ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast for ten are now said to cost an average worker their wages for under 2.25 hours of labor. A 16 pound turkey now costs less than what an average worker earns in an hour.

    We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any ancient potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries.

    Whence comes this bounty? It is not because of union organizing, or minimum wage laws, or the triumph of the proletariat over the evil factory owners. Indeed, a few centuries ago, there were few mass production factories to triumph over.

    No, the source of this bounty is productivity, and the engines of productivity are deferred consumption being invested in improved infrastructure (that is, capital accumulation), improved technology, and specialization. Thanks to our better means of making things and the sacrifices needed to construct those means, productivity per worker is orders of magnitude higher, and thus there’s more stuff to go around.

    Centuries ago, it required something like 750 hours of human labor to produce a simple tunic; today it requires minutes of human labor. Almost no one is capable of truly internalizing this change. The shirt on your back once was a valuable capital good requiring four months of constant labor to produce. Now it’s not even worth repairing if it tears, it’s too inexpensive to replace it. Because of this change in productivity, even quite poor people in developed countries own many sets of clothing.

    Centuries ago, there was barely enough food to go around, and often far too little, as a result of which starvation was common. It required constant labor by most of the population to produce enough food. Then, mechanization of agriculture set in, and the production of synthetic fertilizer, and pest control, and improved breeding methods; today, it requires very few people to grow more than enough food for everyone. There is so much food, in fact, that obesity has become a disease of the poor, an unprecedented development in human history.

    So it is across the span of consumer goods. The amount of labor it requires to produce enough light to read at night has gone down by orders of magnitude, and the quantity of light produced by an ordinary lightbulb is 100 times greater than that of a candle at a tiny fraction of the price. Many goods didn’t even exist before; in my father’s youth there were no televisions, and now people can buy 4k 130cm flat screens.

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

  • “The case against carbohydrates gets stronger.”

    People have a hard time believing that weight control isn’t just a matter of calories eaten and calories burned. But there is an alternate hypothesis about obesity, which is what my group studies. The carbohydrate-insulin model argues that overeating isn’t the underlying cause of long-term weight gain. Instead, it’s the biological process of gaining weight that causes us to overeat.

    Here’s how this hypothesis goes: Consuming processed carbohydrates (especially refined grains, potato products and sugars), causes our bodies to produce more insulin. Too much insulin, one of the most powerful hormones, forces our fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. These rapidly growing fat cells then hoard too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. So we get hungry, and if we persist in eating less, our metabolism slows down.

    Snip.

    We started the participants on a calorie-restricted diet until they lost 10%-14% of their body weight. After that, we randomly assigned them to eat exclusively one of three diets, containing either 20%, 40% or 60% carbohydrates.

    For the next five months, we made sure they didn’t gain or lose any more weight, adjusting how much food they received, but keeping the ratio of carbohydrates constant. By doing so, we could directly measure how their metabolism responded to these differing levels of carbohydrate consumption.

    Participants in the low (20%) carbohydrate group burned on average about 250 calories a day more than those in the high (60%) carbohydrate group, just as predicted by the carbohydrate-insulin model. Without intervention (that is, if we hadn’t adjusted the amount of food to prevent weight change), that difference would produce substantial weight loss — about 20 pounds after a few years. If a low-carbohydrate diet also curbs hunger and food intake (as other studies suggest it can), the effect could be even greater.

    This result could explain in part why U.S. obesity rates have been going up for decades. Individuals have a sort genetically predetermined weight  —  lighter for some, heavier for others. Despite this, the average weight for American men has gone from about 165 pounds in the 1960s to 195 pounds today. Women, likewise, have gone from an average of 140 pounds to about 165.

  • “Half As Many Google Employees Protested Building Chinese Surveillance Tech As Protested Pentagon Project.”
  • Evidently Creepy Porn Lawyer is considered a crook even by his porn star client.
  • Actual headline, not from The Onion or The Babylon Bee: “PETA Defends Graphic Animal Mutilation In Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built.”
  • “Aides Force Ocasio-Cortez To Watch Entire Run Of ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’
  • Ricky Jay, RIP.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Nancy Pelosi Crushes Her Democratic Enemies, Drives Them Before Her, Hears The Lamentations of Their Legislative Aides

    November 29th, 2018

    Just as the prophecy foretold, Nancy Pelosi easily crushed a small band of Democratic rebels to regain the Speaker’s gavel in 2019:

    Representative Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) was nominated Wednesday to serve as the next speaker of the House, despite strident opposition from a small subset of her Democratic caucus. Pelosi’s nomination was all but guaranteed as the House Democrats opposed to her nomination failed to present an alternative candidate.

    Awful hard to beat something with nothing, especially when the “something” has a steely, unwavering will to power, a vindictive streak and a long memory.

    With the nomination secured by a vote of 203-32, the California progressive must now win over a majority of the House in a floor vote in early January before she can claim the gavel. Since the entire Republican caucus will likely vote against her, Pelosi can only afford to lose the support of 17 Democrats if she hopes to win the speakership.

    There’s no living Republican House Democrats would be willing to back over Pelosi. Or even any dead one. Were Abraham Lincoln miraculously restored to life to seek the job, within minutes Democrats would be calling him a tool of patriarchy and running black-and-white attack ads in which the unseen, ominous-voiced narrator asks: “Lincoln: Is he really against slavery?”

    While Pelosi was running unopposed, the party modified the standard nomination ballot to include a “no” option, so that freshman Democrats who ran on opposing her could tell their constituents they followed through on their respective pledges.

    And last Saturday I went on a hunger strike to protest all the injustice in the world. Or, as other people call it, “skipped lunch.”

    Pelosi reportedly supported those freshmen lawmakers, giving them the go ahead to vote “no” to preserve their political capital.

    Translation: Democrats think their constituents are idiots who will forgive transparent lies as long as some sort of meaningless symbolic placating gesture is made. Given the sort of Democrats they elected, can we really say that judgment is wrong?

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    Posted in Democrats | 2 Comments »

    Dispatches From the Twitter Wars

    November 28th, 2018

    Twitter’s war on conservative users continues apace.

    First, they’ve kowtowed to the radical tranny brigade in declaring that you can’t refer to trannies by their birthnames (“deadnaming”) or sexes. So you’re not supposed to point out that:

  • Bruce Jenner is still a man
  • Bradley Manning is still a man (and a traitor)
  • Stephen Krol, AKA “Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt” was a man, and a fraud
  • Jonathan Yaniv is a man, and a pervert who sues women who refuse to wax his genitals.

    • Jesse Kelly was mysteriously banned, then just as mysteriously unbanned. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took a break from his busy schedule of destroying shareholder value to get asked by congress why he’s been lying to them like they’re Montel Williams.

    Instapundit announced that he deactivated his Twitter entirely, because it sucks:

    It’s the crystal meth of social media — addictive and destructive, yet simultaneously unsatisfying. When I’m off it I’m happier than when I’m on it. That it’s also being run by crappy SJW types who break their promises, to users, shareholders, and the government, of free speech is just the final reason. Why should I provide free content to people I don’t like, who hate me? I’m currently working on a book on social media, and I keep coming back to the point that Twitter is far and away the most socially destructive of the various platforms. So I decided to suspend them, as they are suspending others. At least I’m giving my reasons, which is more than they’ve done usually.

    Meanwhile, conservative Tweeter BigGator5 remains suspended.

    Maybe Twitter could start following their own rules. I hear that works for a lot of companies…

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    Posted in Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

    Boko Haram Kills 100 Nigerian Soldiers in Base Attack

    November 27th, 2018

    Continuing our tour of ongoing wars the American media isn’t paying attention to, Boko Haram, AKA the Islamic State in West Africa, AKA Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad (People Committed to the Prophet’s Teachings for Propagation and Jihad), attacked a Nigerian army base over the weekend, killing up to 100 Nigerian soldiers:

    The claims by Nigeria’s government that terrorist group Boko Haram has been “defeated” continue to ring hollow.

    An attack by the terrorist group on an army base last Sunday led to as many as 100 soldiers being killed, Reuters reports. The attack has been attributed to Islamic State West Africa (ISWAP), a breakout faction of Boko Haram that’s affiliated with the Islamic State terror group. The attack is one of the deadliest by Boko Haram since president Muhammadu Buhari took office in 2015.

    The brazenness of the attack on a military base raises questions on the lack of equipment for Nigeria’s soldiers in the front-lines—a recurring theme since the Boko Haram insurgency began in 2009. Several reports have previously suggested Nigeria’s army lacked the necessary gear to combat the terrorists. Last year, Nigeria purchased arms valued at nearly $600 million from the US to boost its army.

    The timing of the attack is also crucial given Nigeria’s upcoming elections in February. Insecurity was a prominent factor in the last elections as president Muhammadu Buhari strongly campaigned on his strengths as a former army general. Indeed, under his administration, Nigeria’s army quickly made gains on Boko Haram, winning back seized territory, rescuing some abductees and sacking the militants from their Sambisa Forest stronghold.

    But regardless, the government’s claims of victory have proven premature. Boko Haram has continued to launch attacks in Nigeria’s northeast notably bombing the University of Maiduguri, once described as the safest place in the city at the peak of the insurgency. The group has also began increasingly targeting aid workers with two nurses abducted and executed in the last two months.

    This is reportedly a splinter group, but remember that Boko Haram itself pledged allegiance to the Islamic State back in 2015. The split occurred when the Islamic State backed Abu Musab al-Barnawi over Abubakar Shekau in 2016.

    Some reports say the attackers were foreign fighters:

    The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) responded with brute force following the attack on a military base in Metele, Borno State by Boko Haram terrorists, amid reports that the attackers were foreigners who spoke Arabic and French as they dished out deaths to a hapless unit by the hundreds.

    A faction of Boko Haram led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi, is affiliated to ISIS and is now known as the Islamic State West Africa (ISWA).

    On Monday, November 19, 2018, members of terrorist sect Boko Haram, stormed the 157 Task Force Battalion in Metele and killed over 100 soldiers.

    According to PRNigeria, an agency that dispenses information on behalf of the federal government of Nigeria, the latest air-strikes from NAF in the wake of the Metele attack, destroyed a convoy of vehicles linked to the Boko Haram fighters who wreaked havoc and deaths on the military base.

    Boko Haram reportedly used rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns and AK47 rifles to raid the base before destroying a slew of armored vehicles and killing every army officer in sight.

    The foreign fighter angle may be true, or it may by a CYA face-saving measure to explain why Nigerian troops were taken unawares.

    A South African mercenary lays the fault at the feet of President Buhari for cutting his group’s contract short:

    Jihadist group Boko Haram’s continued killings and assault on Nigeria should be placed squarely at the door of its president, Muhammadu Buhari, former South African Defence Force commander and mercenary Eeben Barlow said at the weekend.

    In a Facebook post, Barlow also criticised Buhari for claiming that Boko Haram had been technically defeated, adding that the militants were causing numerous casualties and capturing massive amounts of equipment and ammunition, the Premium Times reported on Monday.

    The former mercenary said that Buhari’s government had cut short his contract after his company STTEP (Specialised Tasks, Training, Equipment and Protection), helped reclaim swathes of territory back from Boko Haram at the peak of the nine-year Islamist insurgency in 2015.

    “Pressure forced only a small part of the campaign to be successfully implemented before we were ordered to pack up and leave.

    “Many of the men we trained as part of 72 Mobile Strike Force have remained in contact with us (STTEP), pleading for our return to Nigeria,” he said.

    “They have also told us that they have been used to a point of exhaustion,” Barlow said.

    That statement sounds both very self-serving and quite possible, given that the South Africa had the best military in Sub-Saharan Africa and that the SADF conducted a successful counterinsurgency campaign against SWAPO in Southwest Africa/Namibia in the 1980s, and even kicked the asses of Cuban troops in Angola during operations Modular, Hooper and Packer.

    Insurgencies are notoriously difficult to put down, and African nations are relatively poor, even if Nigeria is the wealthiest state in west Africa. My guess is that the STTEP was effective, but also benefited from the factional split, giving a false impression of Boko Haram’s defeat rather than a mere pause while they regrouped.

    Boko Haram doesn’t have the strength to take over Nigeria, but they can probably continue to wreck havoc on outlying areas for years to come.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Military | No Comments »

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