Nearly half of Americans believe the media fabricates stories about Trump to harm him. The media is horrified that they aren't believed by much of the public. But the problem isn't that the media fabricates stories, but that the media interprets every nothing fact as something bad and that the media passes along any partisan allegation against Trump without stopping to ask if it is plausible or true (and whether those telling them the stories have motives to spread disinformation). Add this to the unwillingness of the same media to investigate the Obama administration (other than to dismiss the allegations or charge Republicans of "over-reaching" in response), and this is what you get. May the media enjoy their well-deserved reputation.
As our nation continues to search and destroy Confederate statues, could we spare a moment for the very real threat that communism and the failure to confront its evil poses to us? Remember that the New York Times has been giving us a happy view of communism on the centennial of the Russian Revolution that gave the world that mass murder and poverty machine as an example for others to use, too. Nobody ever says that the Confederacy was great in theory and only awaits someone better to put it into practice.
Yeah, I suspect that Putin wanted a damaged and compromised Clinton in the White House. That's what I thought from the beginning.
Strategypage looks at the multi-war clusterfuck that Yemen is. As long as the territory isn't used to invade Saudi Arabia or interdict Red Sea traffic, I don't pay much attention.
The blowback from the ill-advised independence referendum in Iraq Kurdistan has gotten disturbing. Will an oasis of order become more like the chaos all around it? And Barzani feels the personal blowback for the mistake.
Japan will help the Philippines rebuild from the damage of fighting jihadis. Which will also help keep the Chinese at bay.
I'm not shocked that Democrats funded the Steele Dossier. Opposition research is ugly big business. What is disturbing is that it looks like the flimsy excuse for our government to eavesdrop on a presidential candidate for political purposes. This is banana republic stuff.
Has North Korea over-used their nuclear test site to the point that the peak could collapse and release radiation? I imagine North Korea's neighbors are checking the wind direction a lot lately.
"The only thing preventing both parties from defeating themselves is the fact that elections are a zero-sum game in which one side must win." This is true until people choose a third party. Our winner-take-all two-party system doesn't say anything about which two parties compete for votes.
This is horrifying if true. Although trying to tie it to the Niger ambush is media malpractice.
I haven't worried that Islam will essentially colonize Europe. I figured that Europe's long bloody past would see a reaction before that got close. What I worried about is that a refusal of European polite society/government to allow a debate over the problem of mass migration and lack of assimilation would lead to the rise of extremist parties willing to deal with the problem in a horrible fashion that creates problems just as bad or worse for Europe (and for America). And here we are with cultural suicide being resisted by increasingly intolerant types. We wouldn't be in this position if most of our Western elites had pride in Western society and culture rather than a bizarre disdain and shame.
There are some really stupid people with advanced degrees. How do these credentialed idiots get (and keep) their jobs? Tip to Instapundit.
Strategypage takes a tour of Iran's campaign against Israel and America by fighting to the last Arab.
Useful Idiots--NYC Chapter: Thousands of liberals marched and chanted at an anti-Trump rally organized by a Russian front group. Well, no torches were carried so all is forgiven.
It is odd that Democrats have gone all-in on hunting for Russkies given their long sympathy for and ties to the Russians, including during the last campaign. Funny enough, while Democrats hoped to gain an advantage by those ties, the Russians may have only been interested in revenge. The question is whether Putin wanted revenge against America or against Clinton. Although if directed against Clinton it still doesn't mean that Putin wanted Trump to win or believed his tiny influence operation had any chance at all of doing that rather than just damaging Clinton once in the White House.
Are leftists so attuned to identifying Confederate "dog whistles" that they literally can't hear a jihadi yelling "Allahu Akbar" while on a killing spree? Yet the headline notes the killer had "New Jersey ties." Odd, that is. And of course this doesn't mean Islam as a whole is guilty. But the jihadis who would define Islam in their hateful vision and make all Moslems follow that form must be stopped for our sake and for the sake of Moslems who would suffer even more under that kind of religion. Fighting and killing jihadis is not "Islamophobic."
While Canadians may be horrified that Trump's America may want to restrict immigration to lower levels of legal immigration, America apparently won't ever get to the restrictive conditions that Canada places on immigrants to benefit Canada: "'If you are just coming because you want a better life and a better opportunity, then you have to apply,' [Canada's Minister of Immigration] says. Just crossing the border is 'illegal and potentially dangerous.' ... 'Look, you are welcome to Canada,' he says, 'but it doesn't mean you can just show up because of your perception of what Canada is about.'" Why can't America also have a "balancing act" on immigration to benefit America?
Yes, seeking to overturn a valid American election is more of a threat to American democracy and rule of law than Trump could possibly be. It is unhealthy and dangerous to believe that only an election that validates your preferred outcome is legitimate. I'll note that you never saw any of that attitude here after the election and reelection of Barack Obama. Even if liberals are right that America was absolutely wrong to elect Trump, the solution is to use future Congressional elections and the next presidential election to make the case that America should correct that error--not invalidate the election.
Before the Internet era, getting a paper copy of this CRS report on use of American force abroad was quite the coup for me personally. I know. I should look into getting one of those "life" things.
Our submarines will have a sub-launched UAV at their disposal. That should help with long-range targeting should we put anti-ship missiles back on our subs to fight for control of the seas.Yeah, before we expand the fleet we should make the fleet we have is capable of shooting at enemy ships.
The New York City truck killer was a
My "Bring Back the Dragon Swarms" article was cited in this article on the problems of amphibious warfare in the face of anti-ship missile proliferation. Neat.
Hillary Clinton should worry about Russian campaign ties--unlike Trump. The nerve to accuse someone of doing what you did is just astounding. Lock her up, indeed. Tip to Instapundit.
It looks like Catalan independence will collapse under the weight of national power and local sentiment of non-voters who want to remain in Spain. Apparently the heavy-handed Spanish response to the vote did not drive those people to support independence. A deeper dive. The EU backed Madrid against the separatists. I think the EU has an interest in Balkanizing the states that have the power to oppose EU centralization into an actual empire. That the EU does not now support separatists shows that the EU is still a proto-empire, I think. Divide and conquer. So if Europe isn't breaking apart (and remember that Europe is already broken apart as separate states, notwithstanding the ambitions of Brussels) from all the separatist movements, just wait until the EU has more power than the states that make up the EU. Then the separatists will start winning regularly.
I wasn't aware that this is news. What part of Iran supporting Shia terrorists in Iraq while Iran's client Syria funnelled in Sunni terrorists was unclear? There were ties before 9/11. And we've known that Iran sheltered al Qaeda after 9/11.
A comparison of the Chinese J-20 stealth fighter and the F-35. As I've noted, the J-20 is stealthy from a frontal aspect only--not all-around stealth as the F-35 has. We might want stealthy drones well ahead of our F-35s in a line of outposts capable of spotting and targeting the J-20s as they pass by while approaching our aircraft well before the F-35s can spot them.
A CRS report on Syria's multi-war.
Tell me again--as the media fixates on--how it is the Republicans who are in the midst of a virtual civil war. And even in a piece on a Democratic civil war the author has to start with slamming Trump. Amazing.
Of course Hillary Clinton thinks Russia rigged an election here. She did it, after all.
Some time ago I noted that "the pause" of flat temperatures over the last two decades could be coming to an end. Well, the uptick was just an El Nino event and temperatures have dropped back to "pause" levels. I don't know how people can say we see the problems of global warming today when we basically haven't seen global warming in almost two decades.
You don't have to like Trump to understand he is no threat to our democracy and rule of law. Just keep calm and carry on. Of course, the overblown always turned to 11 reaction to Trump by those wrongly convinced he is a threat could easily undermine our democracy. And not only if some loon convinced he or she is part of the Resistance takes a shot. Get a grip, people. We didn't have a god in office when Obama was president and we don't have a devil now that Trump is in office (and vice versa, obviously).
The Unfortunate Collapse of Military Justice: I see Bergdahl won't face prison time for attempting to defect to the Taliban. Somehow their better judgment in refusing to trust him than our military had in enlisting that soldier counts to Bergdahl's advantage. The UCMJ is weakened. If this is push-back against "command influence" by Trump, why isn't the lauding of Bergdahl's so-called "honorable service" by President Obama and his team a balancing factor to nullify that questionable motive? As for the "social stigma" the judge said Bergdahl will face, I pretty much guarantee that within 5 years he will be an honored lecturer at some university in America. This really is disgraceful.
I don't understand how 50 scientists can claim humans are to blame for the "rapid pace of global climate change" when the global temperature has been largely unchanged for close to two decades now. Yes, people are putting CO2 into the atmosphere which is a factor in warming the planet. But obviously natural factors are more important in countering that effect given the whole "pause" thing we are in, no?
The Tehran chapter of the Resistance: "Chanting 'Death to America' and burning the US flag, thousands of Iranians protested in Tehran Saturday against President Donald Trump's policies and to mark the anniversary of the 1979 US embassy siege."
Those who want President Trump gone should be working hard to make Trump's term a success. I think that Trump would love to go out on a high note, claiming he restored American greatness and so it is time to move on. Why risk his legacy with the weariness that often drags down American presidents in their second term? Lack of full success before 2020 will only make Trump want another term to gain the success he wants. And is it so bad if America succeeds while Trump does, too?
