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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    Posted in Republicans, Texas | No Comments »

    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 »

    Ukraine-Russian War Goes Hot Again

    November 26th, 2018

    The war between Russia and Ukraine, the one that never actually went away because Russia is still holding on to Ukrainian territory, has gone hot again in the Azov Sea:

    Russia has fired on and seized three Ukrainian naval vessels off the Crimean Peninsula in a major escalation of tensions between the two countries.

    Two gunboats and a tug were captured by Russian forces. A number of Ukrainian crew members were injured.

    Each country blames the other for the incident. On Monday Ukrainian MPs are due to vote on declaring martial law.

    The crisis began when Russia accused the Ukrainian ships of illegally entering its waters.

    The Russians placed a tanker under a bridge in the Kerch Strait – the only access to the Sea of Azov, which is shared between the two countries.

    This is one of those times where the original BBC picture is indeed worth 1,000 words:

    Ukrainian armed forces are on full alert.

    Vladimir Putin has evidently decided that he can incrementally add Ukrainian territory to Russia every few years and neither the EU nor the “world community” will be willing to do anything about it.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | 1 Comment »

    Islamic State Expands Hajin Pocket

    November 25th, 2018

    I’ve needed to write this for a few weeks, but the torrent of election news and general busyness kept me from it. Instead of gradually being crushed as I (and most observers) expected, an Islamic State counterattack against Syrian Democratic Forces has actually expanded the Hajin pocket:

    A sandstorm settled on areas of the Syria-Iraq border over the last week. It turned the air into a reddish soup, where people could not see more than a few meters in front of their faces. Through the haze and dust, Islamic State launched a coordinated counter-attack along a front line near the Euphrates in an area known as the Hajin pocket. This is the last area that ISIS holds in Syria; the US-led coalition and its Syrian Democratic Forces partners have been seeking to defeat ISIS in Hajin for the last two months.

    On October 29, the SDF sent special forces to bolster the front line, according to a spokesman for the coalition. “The SDF is engaged in a difficult battle and fighting bravely to protect and free their people from ISIS. We salute the martyred SDF heroes as the intense fight against evil continues,” the spokesman wrote. More than a dozen SDF fighters were killed in the clashes; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said up to 40 had been killed.

    This is what the Hajin pocket looked like back when the Islamic State started their counterattack back on October 15:

    And this is what it’s looks like now:

    (Both shots via LiveMap.)

    The Islamic State has retaken areas to the north and south and expanded the southernmost portions east to the Iraqi border. There U.S. troops are supporting Iraqi troops fighting the Islamic State.

    The biggest question is how the Islamic State pocket in Hajin continues to get resupplied with men and material despite theoretically being surrounded on all sides.

    There are reports that Saudi Arabia and UAE have sent troops into Syria to support the SDF against the Islamic State:

    Saudi Arabia and the UAE have sent military forces to areas controlled by the Kurdish YPG group in north-east Syria, Turkey’s Yenisafak newspaper reported.

    The paper said the forces will be stationed with US-led coalition troops and will support its tasks with huge military enforcements as well as heavy and light weapons.

    Quoting the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the newspaper reported that a convoy of troops belonging to an Arab Gulf state recently arrived in the contact area between the Kurdish PKK/YPG and Daesh in the Deir Ez-Zor countryside.

    All Turkish news on the Syrian conflict should be taken with several grains of salt.

    Other Islamic State/Syrian theater news:

  • “US and Russian forces have clashed repeatedly in Syria, US envoy says.”

    American and Russian forces have clashed a dozen times in Syria — sometimes with exchanges of fire — a U.S. envoy told Russian journalists in a wide-ranging interview this week.

    Ambassador James Jeffrey, U.S. Special Representative for Syria Engagement, offered no specifics about the incidents on Wednesday, speaking to the Russian newspaper Kommersant and state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.

    Jeffrey had been asked to clarify casualty numbers and details of a February firefight in which U.S. forces reportedly killed up to 200 pro-Syrian regime forces, including Russian mercenaries, who had mounted a failed attack on a base held by the U.S. and its mostly Kurdish local allies near the town of Deir al-Zour. None of the Americans at the outpost — reportedly about 40 — had been killed or injured.

    Jeffrey declined to offer specifics on that incident, but said it was not the only such confrontation between Americans and Russians.

    “U.S. forces are legitimately in Syria, supporting local forces in the fight against Da’esh and as appropriate — and this has occurred about a dozen times in one or another place in Syria — they exercise the right of self-defense when they feel threatened,” Jeffrey said, using an Arabic term for the Islamic State group. “That’s all we say on that.”

    Asked to clarify, he said only that some of the clashes had involved shooting and some had not.

    That’s all from Stars and Stripes, so presumably it’s not complete garbage.

  • It seems that Syrian army forces have destroyed the last Islamic State pocket in southwest Syria.

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

    Colion Noir on Tucker Carlson: “The Goal is Gun Confiscation”

    November 24th, 2018

    Colion Noir and Tucker Carlson discuss the obvious: The real goal of gun control is always complete gun confiscation:

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    Posted in Guns, video | No Comments »

    LinkSwarm for November 23, 2018

    November 23rd, 2018

    Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I for one am stuffed…

    For those freaking out about Chief Justice Roberts saying there are no Democratic or Republican judges…¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He’s the head of a co-equal branch of the United States federal government, of course he’s going to defend the institutional independence of the court, no matter the evidence to the contrary. It’s pretty much required for his position.

    Now here’s a LinkSwarm to enjoy before girding your loins to do battle over a $99 stereo marked down to $69…

  • “Is this NYT article really about how people are exhausted or is it about how the Democratic Party needs to admit it has a problem? The end of the article sounds like a loud wake-up alarm for Democrats.”
  • I’m so old I remember when the American Civil Liberties Union actually cared about Civil Liberties:

    Future historians will have to reconstruct exactly how and why the tipping point has been reached, but the ACLU’s actions over the last couple of months show that the ACLU is no longer a civil libertarian organization in any meaningful sense, but just another left-wing pressure group, albeit one with a civil libertarian history.

    First, the ACLU ran an anti-Brett Kavanaugh video ad that relied entirely on something that no committed civil libertarian would countenance, guilt by association. And not just guilt by association, but guilt by association with individuals that Kavanaugh wasn’t actually associated with in any way, except that they were all men who like Kavanaugh had been accused of serious sexual misconduct. The literal point of the ad is that Bill Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and Bill Cosby were accused of sexual misconduct, they denied it but were actually guilty; therefore, Brett Kavanaugh, also having been accused of sexual misconduct, and also having denied it, is likely guilty too.

    Can you imagine back in the 1950s the ACLU running an ad with the theme, “Earl Warren has been accused of being a Communist. He denies it. But Alger Hiss and and Julius Rosenberg were also accused of being Communists, they denied it, but they were lying. So Earl Warren is likely lying, too?”

    Meanwhile, yesterday, the Department of Education released a proposed new Title IX regulation that provides for due process rights for accused students that had been prohibited by Obama-era guidance. Shockingly, even to those of us who have followed the ACLU’s long, slow decline, the ACLU tweeted in reponse that the proposed regulation “promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” Even longtime ACLU critics are choking on the ACLU, of all organizations, claiming that due process protections “inappropriately favor the accuse.”

    The ACLU had a clear choice between the identitarian politics of the feminist hard left, and retaining some semblance of its traditional commitment to fair process. It chose the former. And that along with the Kavanaugh ad signals the final end of the ACLU as we knew it. RIP.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Reminder: The Rev. Jim Jones was a big wheel in San Francisco’s far-left Democratic party establishment:

    Having moved his flock to northern California in the 1960s, Jones began leveraging their labor toward political ends, volunteering them for protests or electioneering on behalf of friendly aspirants to public office. Gaining the respect of San Francisco’s political class, Jones became a player in his own right. Many gave him credit for Moscone’s tight victory in the 1975 mayoral runoff, and he was appointed head of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Praised as a hero of social justice and a crusader for racial equality, Jones became an important figure in Democratic politics.

    Among his advocates was Harvey Milk, also a newcomer to San Francisco. Milk, formerly a Goldwater Republican, became politically radical in California and repeatedly sought election to office as an outsider to the political machine. Milk attended services at Peoples Temple dozens of times, and wrote effusive letters to Jones. “Such greatness I have found in Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple,” Milk proclaimed.

    Milk wasn’t Jones’s only fan. Many powerful people—Governor Jerry Brown, columnist Herb Caen, and Vice President Walter Mondale, to name a few—sought Jones’s blessings and expressed admiration for his dedication to racial equality and a better world. Flynn does a good job of laying out the social and political landscape of the Bay Area in the late seventies and situating the bizarre respect that the Jones cult received within the general fruitiness of the era. Jim Jones’s Bay Area was the same milieu that gave rise to the Zodiac killer, the lost-in-time Zebra murders, and the depredations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. In that context, a wacky preacher who healed the sick and ran drug-treatment centers while promising a racially unified heaven on earth seemed like a salutary influence by comparison.

    Snip.

    Jim Jones’s connection to mainstream Democratic politics has been suppressed. He and the Peoples Temple, which exalted racial diversity and social justice, have been cast as harrowing examples of Christian religious extremism, though Jones preached atheism and ordered his followers to use the Bible as toilet paper. A roster of leaders who remain dominant figures in California politics today embraced Jones publically. Jerry Brown, then and now governor of the state, approvingly visited the Peoples Temple, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who ascended to the mayoralty upon Moscone’s assassination, joined the Board of Supervisors in honoring Jones. Willie Brown, longtime speaker of the California state assembly, a mayor of San Francisco, and the mentor of Senator Kamala Harris, was especially lavish in his praise of Jones, calling him “a combination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Chairman Mao.”

  • Another day, another Antifa riot in Portland. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • “Iran threatens U.S. bases and aircraft carriers within missile range.” Boy, could Obama pick him some partners for peace or what? (Hat tip: Patrick Poole on Twitter.)
  • More than a quarter-million French take to blocking roads to protest high gas prices.
  • Reminder:

    So Jamal Khashoggi – a former Saudi intelligence agent, a man who was close to the Muslim Brotherhood and a sworn opponent of MBS’ reform program– was in the process of setting up a centre to promote the ideology of the MB. He was setting it up in Turkey with Qatari money. The Saudis wanted to stop him. In September they offered him $9 million to return to Saudi Arabia and to live there unhindered. They wanted him out of play. Khashoggi refused and the rest you know. The Saudis killed him.

    Let me make two points. First, there is no justification for murdering Khashoggi. Secondly, this man wasn’t some Western-oriented liberal brutally murdered because of his passion for freedom. This man was a player.

  • Five more MS-13 members deported from Houston by ICE. (Hat tip: Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s Twitter feed.)
  • Old and busted: “Believe in science.” The New Hotness: “Social justice Astrology is so cool!”
  • Laura Loomer banned from Twitter. I have had zero interactions with Ms. Loomer, and she sounds like quite a piece of work, but banning her for criticizing a Muslim politician for supporting female genital mutilation is asinine.
  • 1. Become head of ABC programming. 2. Cancel Roseanne. C. Become ex-head of ABC programming.
  • Divorced Texas woman blows up wedding dress with twenty pounds of Tannerite.
  • “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to disappear.”
  • The DB Cooper hijacking mystery: solved?

    • I had more links planned for this LinkSwarm, but they got eaten along with the turkey…

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