USA / FBI: Agent Peter Strzok removed from Russia investigation for anti-Trump messages.

Breiatbart/AP, 2017-12-02:

A veteran FBI counterintelligence agent was removed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russian election meddling after the discovery of an exchange of text messages seen as potentially anti-President Donald Trump, a person familiar with the matter said Saturday.

The removal of the agent, who also had worked on the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, occurred this summer. The person who discussed the matter with The Associated Press was not authorized to speak about it publicly by name and spoke on condition of anonymity. ...

CIA to Pakistan: Destroy Taliban bases or we will.

Dawn:

CIA Director Mike Pompeo has warned Pakistan that if it does not eliminate the alleged safe havens inside its territory, the United States will do “everything we can” to destroy them.

As Defence Secretary Jim Mattis arrives in Islamabad on Monday to persuade Pakistan to support the new US strategy for Afghanistan, the Trump administration is sending mixed signals to its estranged ally. The new strategy seeks Pakistan’s support to defeat the Taliban in the battlefield as Washington believes that only a defeat will force them to reconcile with the Afghan government. ...

(Via Zalmay Khalilzad at Twitter.)

Economic Times:

Since 2004, the CIA has conducted drone strikes in Fata and recent media reports have suggested that the Trump administration may expand those strikes to cover other areas inside Pakistan.

See previous post at CL: World Today 2017-11-30.

Identity

Liberals often think that conservatives are obsessed with guns, flags, and bibles. But the truth is there's a place for bibles, there's a place for flags, there's a place for guns. As Natan Sharansky understood, a cultural identity and a shared set of moral values can give you the strength to defend your individual identity.

Donald Trump UN Speech

Donald Trump's speech at the United Nations is magnificent.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/09/19/remarks-president-trump-72nd-session-united-nations-general-assembly

'The scourge of our planet today is a small group of rogue regimes that violate every principle on which the United Nations is based. They respect neither their own citizens nor the sovereign rights of their countries.

If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph. When decent people and nations become bystanders to history, the forces of destruction only gather power and strength.

No one has shown more contempt for other nations and for the wellbeing of their own people than the depraved regime in North Korea. It is responsible for the starvation deaths of millions of North Koreans, and for the imprisonment, torture, killing, and oppression of countless more. ...

It is far past time for the nations of the world to confront another reckless regime -- one that speaks openly of mass murder, vowing death to America, destruction to Israel, and ruin for many leaders and nations in this room.

The Iranian government masks a corrupt dictatorship behind the false guise of a democracy. It has turned a wealthy country with a rich history and culture into an economically depleted rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed, and chaos. The longest-suffering victims of Iran's leaders are, in fact, its own people. ...

We cannot let a murderous regime continue these destabilizing activities while building dangerous missiles, and we cannot abide by an agreement if it provides cover for the eventual construction of a nuclear program. (Applause.) The Iran Deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into. Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don’t think you’ve heard the last of it -- believe me. ...

The entire world understands that the good people of Iran want change, and, other than the vast military power of the United States, that Iran's people are what their leaders fear the most. This is what causes the regime to restrict Internet access, tear down satellite dishes, shoot unarmed student protestors, and imprison political reformers.

Oppressive regimes cannot endure forever, and the day will come when the Iranian people will face a choice. Will they continue down the path of poverty, bloodshed, and terror? Or will the Iranian people return to the nation's proud roots as a center of civilization, culture, and wealth where their people can be happy and prosperous once again? ...

The problem in Venezuela is not that socialism has been poorly implemented, but that socialism has been faithfully implemented. (Applause.) From the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela, wherever true socialism or communism has been adopted, it has delivered anguish and devastation and failure. Those who preach the tenets of these discredited ideologies only contribute to the continued suffering of the people who live under these cruel systems.

America stands with every person living under a brutal regime. Our respect for sovereignty is also a call for action. All people deserve a government that cares for their safety, their interests, and their wellbeing, including their prosperity. ...

Patriotism led the Poles to die to save Poland, the French to fight for a free France, and the Brits to stand strong for Britain. ...

The true question for the United Nations today, for people all over the world who hope for better lives for themselves and their children, is a basic one: Are we still patriots? Do we love our nations enough to protect their sovereignty and to take ownership of their futures? Do we revere them enough to defend their interests, preserve their cultures, and ensure a peaceful world for their citizens?

One of the greatest American patriots, John Adams, wrote that the American Revolution was "effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people."

That was the moment when America awoke, when we looked around and understood that we were a nation. We realized who we were, what we valued, and what we would give our lives to defend. From its very first moments, the American story is the story of what is possible when people take ownership of their future....'

Ambassador Friedman: "Settlements Are Part of Israel"

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/236102

'David Friedman, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, said on Thursday that he believes Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are part of Israel.

“I think the settlements are part of Israel,” Friedman said in an interview with the Hebrew-language Walla website.

“I think that was always the expectation when Resolution 242 was adopted in 1967. It remains today the only substantive resolution that was agreed to by everybody,” he added.

“The idea was that Israel would be entitled to secure borders,” said Friedman. “The existing borders, the 1967 borders, were viewed by everybody as not secure, so Israel would retain a meaningful portion of the West Bank, and it would return that which it didn’t need for peace and security.” ...'

AfD and the Jews

Tuvia and Isy Tenenbom at Arutz Sheva:



Orit Arfa visits a German AfD victory party:

'So, it was not out of character for me to enter an AfD victory party on the eve of elections, at a Munich beer hall no less, and find Nazis to expose and challenge. After all, the AfD is widely considered the neo-Nazi party. Take a walk inside with me into the lion’s den…'



[English captions available at Settings control in lower left.]

Jonathan Spyer on Ukraine's Jews

Jonathan Spyer:

In summer, Kiev is a charming city, filled with cafes and light. But the peaceful atmosphere is deceptive. History has not departed. Ukraine has been shaken in recent years once again – by revolution, and its handmaiden, war.

The ‘Euromaidan’ revolution toppled the pro-Russian government of President Victor Yanukovych in March, 2014. Yanukovych’s departure was followed by the Russian seizure of Crimea, and then the outbreak of a Russian-supported ,separatist insurgency in the Donbass – the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. The ill-equipped, rusty Ukrainian forces moved to crush the insurgency, but were then met by the entry of conventional Russian troops in August. The Ukrainians suffered bloody setbacks in the battles of Iovitsk and Debaltseve, before a ceasefire agreement was signed in Minsk on February 11, 2015.

The war is not over, and the issues that led to its outbreak have not been resolved. Today, the Ukrainians and their Russian enemies face one another along a static 400 kilometer front line. Observers from the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) monitor the ceasefire. This reporter spent several days in the warzone of eastern Ukraine, and shooting across the lines is a nightly occurrence. Not just rifles. RPG, self propelled grenades and machine guns too. 10,090 people have died in this largely forgotten conflict over the last three years. Over 2 million people have been made homeless.

The war has impacted on Ukraine’s Jewish community in two central ways. Firstly, Jews resident in eastern Ukraine have suffered the direct physical effects of the fighting. Most of Donetsk and Luhansk’s Jews fled westwards as the frontlines approached their homes in 2014. The provisions offered by the Ukrainian authorities to those made homeless by the war are minimal. Efforts are ongoing by a variety of Jewish organizations to provide for those Ukrainian Jews made refugees by the events.

The second impact is a little less tangible. The war of 2014 was an important moment in the ongoing development of national identity in independent Ukraine. ...

Melanie Phililps on Liberal Rabbis and Trump

Melanie Phillips:

'In America, four liberal rabbinic organizations have scrapped their participation in the annual conference call in which the president traditionally offers his greetings for the Jewish New Year.

Their reason? President Donald Trump’s statements about the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville were “lacking in moral leadership and empathy for the victims of racial and religious hatred.”

After that rally, which gave rise to a violent counterprotest and the murder of a young woman when a white supremacist driver plowed his car into a group of “antifa” (or anti-fascist) protesters, Trump provoked widespread fury by observing there had been violence on both sides. ...

There is now ample evidence of the hatred, intimidation and violence these supposed anti-fascists direct – not just against far-right extremists, but against all conservatives and white people, and Israel, too.

Last weekend on the Berkeley campus, more than a hundred antifa members attacked a small number of Trump supporters, injuring six, while screaming their true intention – to destroy the USA.

If anyone is “lacking in moral leadership and empathy” for the victims of hatred, it’s surely those liberal rabbis.

Faced with left-wing aggression and bigotry, many American Jews display a high degree of cognitive dissonance. That’s because they think not as Jews, but as leftists – not least because they can’t discern the difference. ...'

The Rally

So, I went to the June 4 rally at Terry Schrunk Plaza in Portland.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1927691894133941/

Short version first: It was an amazing experience. I saw Andy there, and finally got to meet Athena and Leo and a number of other local people that I'd only interacted with online. Marco and Harim came up from Cali and I got my picture taken with Harim. A street preacher talked about sin and forgiveness, and a trans activist stomped on a communist flag. This big, friendly Polynesian guy named Tiny started the whole thing off with a warrior dance.

The folks on the other side tried to make trouble for us, but they didn't even make a dent. The Portland police did a good job of keeping order. I had been a bit apprehensive about the event, and didn't decide until the last minute that I was going to go at all. But it was incredible, energizing, and a great chance to build bonds with people I hadn't met before but needed to.

I've already posted (without much context) a few pictures from the event. I'll have more to say soon, both about the rally itself and events leading up to it. But I've had a super busy day and I need to be turning in soon.

Originally posted here: http://asher63.livejournal.com/653076.html

UPDATE: The Federalist has photos.

Trump

The people who formed a caricatured, cartoon-villain image of Trump based on his persona are deeply invested in their perception. At stake is the validity of their whole system for categorizing people based on speech, mannerisms, and other markers of "sophistication". Threaten this, and a whole world-view comes crashing down in ruins.

Religion and Politics

Maybe you think my religion is stupid. That's fine - sometimes I think my religion is stupid too.

I like being free to explore, question, and re-affirm my beliefs from one day to the next. I love being able to discuss and debate these things with others without fear. One of the great achievements of Western civilization has been the creation of a broad cultural consensus, enshrined in law but deeply rooted in hard-won social norms, that makes possible the free and open discussion of matters of faith without fear of reprisal or persecution.

We are in danger of losing this.

No one will be burned at the stake or imprisoned for attacking Christianity in any Western country. Well and good. But today's self-styled "liberals" who are so proud of their indifference to Jewish and Christian doctrine will bend over backwards to defend Islam against any perceived slight, and to smear and silence those who critique the Muslim faith.

I am under no moral obligation to have a good opinion of Islam, and I don't. Maybe I'm wrong, and you're certainly welcome to debate me on the matter; but I reserve the right to form my own opinion. That doesn't mean that I'm blind to the fact that there are people who are fine, beautiful human beings, and also devout Muslims. It does mean that I'm capable of judging individual human beings by their character - and also of forming judgments about the belief systems that influence the behavior of millions of people.

On my coffee table at this very moment sits a slim, attractively bound paperback titled 'Tolerance: The Beacon of the Enlightenment'. Edited and translated by Caroline Warman and others, it's an anthology of the founding texts of the European Enlightenment.

The book was conceived and produced in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders as a tribute to the highest ideals of the French Republic. A far nobler and more constructive gesture than lighting candles and posting "Je Suis Charlie" on social media - and yet, still tragic. Because in the end, the jihadis unequivocally won. Charlie Hebdo continued publishing, but never again dared incur Muslim wrath with cartoons of Mohammed.

"Can Islam be reformed?" This is a question asked by many well-meaning Westerners. Personally I think it is only answerable by the Muslim world as a whole. Whether Muslims "reform" their religion or abandon it altogether is of no concern to me; what I care about is the practical outcome.

I do not entirely understand the solicitude of Western non-Muslim liberals for the well-being of Islam. They want to defend it from criticism and even save it from itself. It's almost as if, having abandoned church and synagogue themselves, they remain in the grip of an unacknowledged craving for religion.

What I do know is that I care about my relationship with the Creator and with the sacred tradition that I (however imperfectly) follow. I care about the freedom to use my gift of reason to investigate the meaning of the Scriptures and the findings of science. I care about living in a world where people treat one another with the kindness and dignity befitting beings made in the image of G-d.


Originally posted here: http://asher63.livejournal.com/655133.html

Senate Democrats Snub Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Nomani

Andy Ngo in the New York Times:

On Wednesday, Democratic senators appeared to ignore Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Asra Nomani after they gave brief testimonies on the ideology of Islamism at a U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing, sparking a social media outcry.

It was the first time a Senate hearing was devoted to discussing the ideas motivating both violent and nonviolent Islamist movements around the world, but, through a strategy of deflection and demonization, the Democratic senators — mostly women — ignored the scholarly and lived expertise of Hirsi Ali and Nomani.

Viewers in the Twittersphere took immediate notice as they watched the live stream on C-SPAN. ...

Go to the link for the rest. Great reporting by Portland's Andy Ngo, who clearly has gone on to bigger and better things since leaving the Vanguard.

Andy Ngo on Free Speech in Portland

Andy Ngo in Conservative Review:

After Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler referred to two upcoming conservative political rallies as “alt-right demonstrations” peddling “hatred and bigotry,” the event organizers are pushing back.

“I am calling on the federal government to immediately revoke the permit(s) they have issued for the June 4th event and to not issue a permit for June 10th,” Wheeler wrote on Twitter. He cited the deadly knife attack police say was carried out by suspect Jeremy Christian, a homeless man with a violent criminal history, as reason for the proposed free-speech bans.

The ACLU of Oregon also weighed in on the controversy, pointing out that Wheeler’s call for censorship is unconstitutional. ...

Read the rest at the link. More on the rally to follow soon.

Jonathan Spyer on Syria

https://jonathanspyer.com/2017/05/09/assads-hollow-crown/

The old city was tense, behind a veneer of strained normality. There were checkpoints every hundred meters or so. These were maintained not by the army, but by the National Defense Force (NDF), an Iranian-sponsored paramilitary force created to fill the gap presented by the Assad regime’s lack of loyal manpower. Young men mostly, with a sprinkling of older types and a very few girls. Supervised by Mukhabarat officers with pistols in their belts. They were suspicious of foreigners. There had already been a number of suicide attacks by members of the jihadi organizations in regime-controlled areas.

For the most part, though, the atmosphere of strained normality held. Undoubtedly, fear of the regime played its part in the exaggerated professions of loyalty and love for Bashar that one would hear. But there was also justified fear of the Islamist rebels, and what their advance would mean. And, of course, there was mainly fatigue, and the desire of people to live in their own private circle, and willingness to cope with any governing authority which appeared able to provide for that. The Syrian pound had plummeted in value since the start of the war – from 48 pounds to the US dollar in March 2011 to 625 to the dollar now. There were long queues each morning to buy subsidized bread at the state bakeries. The traffic was on the roads, the shops were open, pictures of the dictator and his family were everywhere. But all was far flimsier and more brittle than it initially appeared.

I should explain first of all how I came to be in Damascus. I have been writing about Syria now for over a decade. I have visited the country numerous times since the outbreak of its civil war in mid-2011. My visits, though, were always to the areas controlled by the Sunni Arab rebels or the Kurdish separatist forces. This was a notable gap in my coverage. I wanted to remedy it. ...

Read the rest at the link. At JS's Facebook page, here is the 'Aleppo is in our eyes' billboard.

Portland's Riot Problam

Bill Currier (Chairman of the Oregon Republican Party) at The Oregonian:

On Monday [May Day], protesters all over the world marched on behalf of world socialism, communism, and a bunch of other causes popular with the political left. In Portland, they rioted. To be fair, many protesters did not riot, but the ones who did showed that they rule the streets of Portland. The rioters were clad in black with scarves covering their faces, burning things, breaking windows, damaging property, and terrorizing afternoon commuters just trying to get home.

In other words, it was a Parade for Rioters. ...

Socialism is a conspiracy of losers against achievers ...

... and so is anti-Semitism.

The fliers use Pew Research Center data in an attempt to validate the statement, including that while Jews make up 2 percent of the population in the United States that “44% of these Jewish Americans are in the top 1%.”

“Is the 1% straight, white men? Or is the 1% Jewish?” the flier questions.

Obama's Legacy: Nuclear Iran

Emily Landau at Middle East Quarterly :

There is little doubt that Barack Obama deems the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of July 2015 to be his crowning foreign policy achievement and an important pillar of his presidential legacy. To his mind, the deal is a shining nonproliferation success story achieved via peaceful diplomacy and an important catalyst to improving decades-long, moribund U.S.-Iranian relations.
But, Obama's assessment is wrong....

Read the rest at the link.

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Jonathan Spyer on the post-Daesh ME

Jonathan Spyer:

The Islamic State is on its way to ceasing to exist as an entity controlling significant territory.  This process is set to continue many months.  But IS, having lost tens of thousands of fighters and with the flow of new recruits drying up, facing enemies with complete control of the skies and vast superiority in numbers and equipment, has no means of reversing the trend.

In Assad’s war further west, meanwhile, the rebellion is in retreat and its eventual eclipse seems a near certainty.  The regime, with its Iranian, Russian and Hizballah allies, is currently seeking to reduce and destroy isolated rebel held enclaves in the midst of regime-held territory in western Syria.  Hence the attacks on  eastern Ghouta, and on Wa’er in the Homs area.  Once this is done, the pro-regime forces may well turn their attention to south west Syria, and eventually also to rebel-held Idleb province in the north.

The regime is also now engaging in the war against Islamic State.  Government forces  reached the Euphrates River this week, after sweeping through IS-held territory in the east Aleppo countryside.

As the direction of events becomes clear, so the possibility emerges of the Iran-led alliance achieving an overall victory in the Syria and Iraq wars...

  For more on what such an outcome might look like - and how it might be prevented - go to the link.

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They said, "Be our Nazis."

How do you explain self-proclaimed "liberals" and supposed "feminists" becoming eager apologists for radical Islam?  I don't think I can do any better than Dystopic at The Declination in this post on Cenobites.  Don't worry if you don't get all the Hellraiser references.

In the manosphere, the various hodgepodge collection of sites emphasizing a return to masculinity for men, I encountered a comment some years ago which stuck with me. In it, a man who had been banging a number of women lamented that every woman he encountered was a Cenobite, one of Clive Barker’s seekers of pain through pleasure. They would say “choke me until I pass out, hit me, spank me until I bleed, cut me…” They would demand ever-greater excesses, because they were unable to feel pleasure if it did not include pain. He didn’t care — all he wanted was to get laid, so he’d do whatever they asked of him — but he didn’t understand why women were this way, or why he could find so few who weren’t like this. He seemed to have a sense that things were not always this way. ...

As that commenter lamented, so I’ve seen first-hand. These SJWs, the radical feminists who spend their lives fighting the Patriarchy? They come to my clubs to be beaten senseless on crosses, chained to them by men dressed in uniforms very reminiscent of the Nazis. Yes, it’s a thing, as anybody who has ever been to a Goth club can attest. They demand to be tied up, burned, bruised, and battered. ...

I see it everywhere. I see women spurning “lesser” men, finding the most intimidating, scarred, barbaric thug on the dance floor and making out with him all night, and it hits me. I see barbaric men starting fights over stupid shit, and everybody drinking until they can’t see or walk straight, filing out of the club at 3AM to try and crawl their way home. This is our entire civilization right now. These people are in power, and are doing on a meta level exactly the same sort of thing I see from my DJ booth.

They scoured the world for the most barbaric and twisted belief systems they could possibly find, and said “come to our home. Beat us. Be our Nazis.” Islam, certainly, can do that well enough. It is more than willing. ... These RadFems don’t want less Patriarchy, they want more Patriarchy. They don’t want less Nazis, they want more Nazis. A civilization full of weak-minded fools has broken them, somehow. Deprived of any form of constructive masculinity, people have gone out to seek it among the barbarians. ...

 Now go read the whole thing at the link. 

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Toni Morrison

American novelist Toni Morrison has celebrated her 86th birthday. Toni Morrison's politics are not necessarily mine (it would be an understatement to say that I do not share her admiration of the Clintons), but I am a great admirer of her work.

I've read (and am now re-reading) all of TM's eleven novels to date, from 'The Bluest Eye' (1970) to 'God Help the Child' (2015). You can read my reviews of the first four at my LiveJournal page:

The Bluest Eye
http://asher63.livejournal.com/520790.html

... The book begins with a flash-forward to the fall of 1941, when marigolds failed to grow; how those marigolds came to be planted is revealed in the story. This is our first hint of TM’s non-linear narrative style. The narrative voice alternates between a third-person voice and Claudia, who is 9 years old at the time of the story and would have been the same age as TM; her name phonetically evokes TM’s birth name, Chloe. Later in the book, some of the back story is filled in by Pecola’s mother Pauline (“Polly”).

The Breedloves’ perception of their own “ugliness” is intimately tied to their awareness of their dark skin in a racist environment, and to the tragedy of Pecola’s story. As TM explains in the foreword,

The novel [written during the height of the ‘Black Is Beautiful’ movement] tried to hit the raw nerve of racial self-contempt, expose it, then try to soothe it not with narcotics but with language that replicated the agency I discovered in my first experience of beauty.

When I first read ‘The Bluest Eye’ as a young adult, I did not understand the centrality of Pecola’s baby to the story. This baby is the reason for the marigolds mentioned cryptically at the beginning of the story and not explained until near the end. It is concern for this baby - conceived in an act of rape and incest - that draws Claudia and her older sister Frieda out of their shells and propels them toward emotional maturity.

Sula
http://asher63.livejournal.com/521417.html

... Where youth sees “hypocrisy”, maturity often sees pragmatism. Where youth sees the “unconventional”, maturity may see the dysfunctional. I think Toni Morrison succeded in conveying a great truth in ‘Sula’, but perhaps not the one she intended. “Outlaw women are fascinating,” Morrison writes in the foreword, but the consequences of irresponsible acts are painful and exceedingly dull. If there is a moral insight to be gained from reading ‘Sula’, it is the danger of romanticizing the ‘rebel’ - both in literature and in life.

Song of Solomon
http://asher63.livejournal.com/529120.html

’Song of Solomon’ (1977) is Toni Morrison’s third novel, and it’s the one that put her on the literary map, winning the National Book Critics award, getting chosen for Oprah’s book club, and inspiring at least two collections of critical essays and the name of a punk-rock band. Written following the death of Morrison’s father, it is her first book to feature male leading characters. The first part of the book is set in an unnamed city in Michigan. The part of the city called ‘Southside’ - i.e. away from the desirable lakefront property to the north - is implied to be the black neighborhood. (The geography is somewhat ambiguous, as some of the landmarks named in Chapter 1 are consistent with Morrison’s native Ohio.) And like Pecola Breedlove in ‘The Bluest Eye’, its chief protagonist, Milkman Dead, is born in the same year as Morrison herself - in fact, one day after TM’s own birth date. The main action of the story takes place in September 1963, in the days following the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. ...

Tar Baby
http://asher63.livejournal.com/625442.html

Who or what is the 'Tar Baby' of the title?

Apparently it refers to Jadine, whom Son calls a "tar baby" (along with a string of other colorful terms) during a fight in their New York apartment. As TM explains in the Foreword, the tar baby legend implies a love story: "Difficult, unresponsive, but seducing woman and clever, anarchic male, each with definitions of independence and domesticity, of safety and danger that clash."

I wonder, though, if there is another level to the role of the tar baby - the feminine, irresistible image that first seduces, then traps the rabbit. Both Son and Jadine are drawn toward the island by inexorable, almost supernatural forces: Son by the ocean's current in the prologue, Jadine by the mysterious figure of the African woman in the yellow dress. And it is Jadine who becomes trapped in the island's black, tarry mud in chapter 5. So I wonder if the 'Tar Baby' of the title also refers to the island itself.

I want to come back to politics for just a moment. There are some ideologues, on both the right and the left, who feel they need to read everything through a political filter. I am not among them. I'm a registered Republican and I vote Republican, but I don't submit my favorite writers to a litmus test, and I don't require that my books be on Dennis Prager's or Hugh Hewitt's reading list.

Good literature is a braid woven of three strands: the universal, the cultural, and the individual. What good writers do well is to observe human relationships: between a person and society, or between individuals, or between a person and himself. I don't have to admire Toni Morrison's diatribe against Donald Trump to respect her talent in doing what she does best: creating vivid, memorable characters that help us understand ourselves.

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Urban Visitor Attends LVF Rally in John Day, Oregon

Free Range Report:

LaVoy’s memorial on January 28 was given the title, “The Meeting that Never Happened” because the gathering would fulfill the aims of those who traveled with LaVoy Finicum on January 26, 2016, to meet with local folks, and talk about the constitutional rights to life, liberty and property which he came to Oregon to defend. The Meeting that Never Happened was attended by around 500 people, many from other states, who wanted to tell the story that LaVoy Finicum simply wanted to share when he was gunned down; the story of a rancher who loved his God, his family, his country, and his freedom, more than life itself. ...

Following are the reflections of Macon Richardson, a 41 year-old technology professional from Bellingham, Washington, which is located about 9 hours north of John Day, Oregon.

FRR: Please share your impressions of eastern Oregon. How is it different than Bellingham?

Driving south to John Day from Bellingham, I thought to myself just how far away from the urban setting eastern Oregon is. Not just far in the sense of distance but far in the sense that people out here live a different life than most people in America. Out here folks care about each other, they know each other. They look out for each other. They have to, if they don’t look out for each other, who will? Without all of the comforts of large emergency service infrastructure and a grocery store on every corner the people of eastern Oregon have to be there for each other.

FRR: Being unfamiliar with the people out here, what did you expect after hearing media accounts of the Oregon Standoff? Did anything surprise you about your interactions with them?

A day in eastern Oregon made it clear to me that these folks are good, hardworking, caring Americans. I don’t understand why have some of them been deemed terrorists by the media. Why did a small group of ranchers decide to form a protest in such a remote part of Oregon? Why not protest in a big city like normal protesters? Why didn’t they burn things and assault people like the “normal” protesters that we’ve seen throughout America? I wanted to take a good look at it first-hand. There has to be more to the story than it just being some fringe group taking over a federal building with guns, as CNN reported.

FRR: What did you know about the background of the story, and the motives of the Oregon Standoff protesters before tonight?

I knew a little. The Harney basin has been a real hotbed of land deputes and outright destruction of natural resources for decades. By reading the news about the protest in Oregon last year you may think that all of this wrong-doing must be caused by the people who live there. But I learned that all of these transgressions and aggressions have been perpetrated by our own Federal Government. ...

Read the rest at the link.

Beyond the Hipster Ghetto

I like Portland, and I mix well with the hipsters here, culturally speaking. We can talk about books, art, music, exotic food, whatever, and it's all good. The minute we get into politics, though, everything changes. It's always the "elephant in the room" - so to speak - and there is just no getting away from the fact that I simply don't see the world the same way they do. This is what I mean when I affectionately refer to Portland as "the hipster ghetto". It's a densely populated place with a certain culture, a very rich culture to be sure, but it is a walled garden. There's this whole world of social norms, social signals, social codes, that you have to navigate. And politics is very much a part of that world. Deviate from the codes at your own peril.

Go outside of that walled garden, though, and the picture changes rapidly. A hundred miles to the east, across the Cascades, lies another Oregon entirely. It's a land of ranchers and Tea Partiers and Three Percenters; travel east from Bend and you're in John Day, the site of a recent memorial rally for LaVoy Finicum where they held a teach-in on why ordinary Americans should care about LaVoy. And to the north, across the Columbia River, you're in Vancouver, Washington, a town I've so far only briefly visited but which seems more moderate and down-to-earth than my beloved Portlandia.

In the coming year, I'm looking forward to exploring the West (which lies east of the West Coast) and in particular that other Oregon.

"These protestors have convinced themselves that they are 'anti-fascists'."

Elbert Lee Guillory:  "Theirs is a movement with no cause, a temper tantrum with no purpose."

Out Like Flynn

You don't have to be an admirer of Michael Flynn, or even of his (now former) boss, to have concerns about the way he was forced out of his role as national security advisor.

Here's Eli Lake at Bloomberg:

Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.

In the past it was considered scandalous for senior U.S. officials to even request the identities of U.S. officials incidentally monitored by the government (normally they are redacted from intelligence reports). John Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was derailed in 2006 after the NSA confirmed he had made 10 such requests when he was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control in George W. Bush's first term. The fact that the intercepts of Flynn's conversations with Kislyak appear to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red flag. ...

And Damon Linker at The Week:

The whole episode is evidence of the precipitous and ongoing collapse of America's democratic institutions — not a sign of their resiliency. Flynn's ouster was a soft coup (or political assassination) engineered by anonymous intelligence community bureaucrats. The results might be salutary, but this isn't the way a liberal democracy is supposed to function.

Unelected intelligence analysts work for the president, not the other way around. Far too many Trump critics appear not to care that these intelligence agents leaked highly sensitive information to the press — mostly because Trump critics are pleased with the result. "Finally," they say, "someone took a stand to expose collusion between the Russians and a senior aide to the president!" It is indeed important that someone took such a stand. But it matters greatly who that someone is and how they take their stand. Members of the unelected, unaccountable intelligence community are not the right someone, especially when they target a senior aide to the president by leaking anonymously to newspapers the content of classified phone intercepts, where the unverified, unsubstantiated information can inflict politically fatal damage almost instantaneously.

... Those cheering the deep state torpedoing of Flynn are saying, in effect, that a police state is perfectly fine so long as it helps to bring down Trump. ...

 It's a little bit perplexing why the President sacrificed Flynn so readily.  Perhaps Flynn was only ever a sacrificial offering, meant to draw enemy fire.

Roses are red, violets are blue. You and me, we are gonna be yuge.

Donald J. Trump valentine generator.

Israel / India Relations at 25 Years

Legal Insurrection:

This week, India and Israel celebrate 25 years of bilateral diplomatic ties. On January 29, 1992, foreign ministers from Israel and India signed an agreement establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to visit Jerusalem in June or July to highlight the significance of this growing bilateral relationship, India’s envoy to Israel Ambassador Pavan Kapoor confirmed.

“The time is ripe for our two countries to explore the full potential of commonality and the complementary nature of our respective economies and work in tandem for the mutual benefit of our peoples,” Indian Embassy in Tel Aviv said in a statement marking this occasion. ...

 Read the rest at the link.  The relationship is bearing strategic fruit, for example the Israeli-made Heron XP drone that will help India keep an eye on Pakistan:

While the Israeli-made Heron 1 is already in service with the Indian armed forces, India is looking for a longer endurance drone. Enter Heron TP XP.

The XP variant of the drone will make its global debut at the upcoming Aero India at Yelahanka air base located outside Bengaluru. The MALE (medium-altitude long-endurance) drone can loiter over the designated target area for more than 30 hours at a stretch and can send back live images from a height of 45,000 feet. ...

Dear Hollywood Celebrities

"You exist for my entertainment. Some of you are great eye candy. Some of you can deliver a line with such conviction that you bring tears to my eyes. Some of you can scare the crap out of me. Others make me laugh. But you all have one thing in common, you only have a place in my world to entertain me. That’s it. You make your living pretending to be someone else. Playing dress up like a 6 year old. You live in a make believe world in front of a camera. And often when you are away from one too. Your entire existence depends on my patronage. I don’t really care where you stand on issues. Honestly, your stance matters far less to me than that of my neighbor. You see, you aren’t real. I turn off my TV or shut down my computer and you cease to exist in my world. Once I am done with you, I can put you back in your little box until I want you to entertain me again. I don’t care that you don't like Mr.Trump. But I bet you looked cute saying it. Get back into your bubble. I’ll let you know when I’m in the mood for something blue and shiny. And I'm also supposed to care that you will leave this great country if Trump becomes president? Ha. Please don't forget to close the door behind you. We'd like to reserve your seat for someone who loves this country and really wants to be here. Make me laugh, or cry. Scare me. But realize that the only words of yours that matter are scripted. In my world, you exist solely for my entertainment."

- anonymous, via Facebook

Donald Trump mocks ...

... everybody.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/09/14/did-trump-really-mock-reporters-disability-videos-could-back-him-up.html

http://www.newstandardpress.com/did-trump-mock-that-disability/

https://www.catholics4trump.com/the-true-story-donald-trump-did-not-mock-a-reporters-disability/

Same gestures, voice, and mannerisms. He's imitating the contortions of somebody trying to deny what they said in the past. Serge Kovaleski was one of numerous targets that Trump ridiculed in this manner, but the mainstream media would have you believe he was the only one. To this day, large numbers of Americans are convinced that Trump mocked a man's disability out of spite.

Religious / Secular Encounters in Israel

Rami Livni, Ha'Aretz:  Why Israelis abandoned secularism.

...  It’s secular Israelis who have changed.

What used to irritate, inflame and drive them to revolt two decades or even a decade ago, they now greet with a nonchalant shrug, forgivingly, all in the name of openness, tolerance and, of course, “Jewish identity.”

It is doubtful whether it is possible to fill a school with the number of secular parents who are disturbed by the fact that their children are delving deeply into topics like laying tefillin (phylacteries), kashrut laws and prayers in the context of “Jewish-Israeli culture.” Veteran religious functionaries at the Education Ministry must be rubbing their eyes in disbelief: How have we been able to achieve this blessed occasion when secular folk are retreating of their own free will – and even asking for more? ...

Peter Berkowitz, RealClear Politics:  Teaching Enlightenment liberalism to Israeli haredim.

... Having established that the responsible exercise of political judgment involves the blending of competing principles and that Israel is founded on the conviction that political freedom is an inseparable dimension of the Jewish state, we turned to our main topic. We explored the foundations of political freedom in John Locke’s “Second Treatise”; the constitutionalization of freedom in “The Federalist Papers”; the tensions that arise between democracy and freedom in Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”; and liberty of thought and discussion in Mill’s “On Liberty.”

The students were particularly intrigued by the limits on the exercise of individual rights that Locke grounded in God’s sovereignty, the priority that the U.S. Constitution gives to the protection of religious freedom, and Tocqueville’s insistence that religion makes a surpassing contribution to political stability in America by remaining separate from politics.

Passions flared when we turned to Mill. Students readily appreciated the importance of a public sphere—newspapers, broadcast media, and parliament—in which the condition of their freedom of speech was the freedom of speech of all others. After all, the ultra-Orthodox too have interests to advance through the political process. At the same time, they immediately grasped the danger to their way of life posed by the vigorous promotion within the private sphere, embracing their families and communities, of Mill’s core conviction—indeed the conviction at the core of all moral and political education worthy of the name—that “he who know only his own side of the case knows little of that.” Exposing their sons and daughters to Mill’s case for the sovereign individual, they justly feared, might weaken their children’s attachment to the stringent ultra-Orthodox interpretation of God’s commandments. ...

What's interesting to me about Rami Livni's kaddish for Israeli secularism is that he sees secular culture, not merely in terms of freedom from religious compulsion, but as an explicitly anti-religious force.  Any gain by religion is a loss for secularism.  Livni's tug-of-war metaphor is telling:  for this writer, it is a zero-sum game.

Berkowitz, by contrast, believes that "both the ultra-Orthodox and broader Israeli society stand to profit from rapprochement."  While the motivations may be pragmatic (Israel's growing haredi, or ulta-orthodox, population will at some point need to come to terms with the rest of Israeli society), the philosophic premise of the Tikvah Fund lecture is that free inquiry can co-exist with religious faith.

Fantasy Battle

The younger generation of "feminists" and "liberals" feels cheated by history, deprived of their chance to fight the glorious civil rights battles they read about in books. So instead of seeking out the real battles of our age - which might involve some real danger - they fight yesterday's battles on a fantasy battlefield, like Civil War re-enactors.

Michael Totten on PRC and Taiwan

My friend Michael J. Totten has a new piece on Red China and the Republic of China:

'I’d love to see the United States recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation as long as the Pacific Rim doesn’t blow up. For one thing, Taiwan is a sovereign nation whether or not Beijing and Washington say so. It has its own democratically elected government and its own institutions. It makes its own domestic, foreign and trade policies with zero input from the Chinese Communist Party. Its citizens have their own passports with "Republic of China" written across the top. Recognizing these facts is just an acknowledgement of reality. Ari Fleischer might not have been allowed to refer to the government of Taiwan, but those of us who don’t work for the government are free to recognize, talk about and write about reality. ...

... We all have to deal with the world as it is, but sacrificing Taiwan to the wolves is outrageous. Taiwan had a “permanent” seat on the United Nations Security Council until Richard Nixon, neverminding tens of millions of corpses, gave it to Mao Zedong. Nixon told Taiwan that the US was engaging instead with the mainland Chinese “not because we love them. But because they’re there.” Fine. It may have been necessary, but it was a nasty business. A bully got its way for four decades not because it is right but because it is bigger. Professional diplomats may have to bite their tongues but the rest of us don’t.'

Read the whole thing at the link.

The Day After

Salem MacGourley at Erin Palette's blog Lurking Rhythmically:

The red bar was reaching ever closer to the middle point of 270, until it finally crossed it, leaving the blue bar behind.
The world ended. Nuclear missiles were launched simultaneously from Russia, China, Japan, North Korea, and Mauritius. Yes, even Mauritius. Simultaneously, a zombie virus outbreak happened in New Jersey, parts of California fell into the ocean due to a fault line collapse, and there were riots in Albuquerque. People who weren't straight, white, cisgendered, heteronormative, neurotypical, Christian men were rousted from their homes, beaten, and dragged across the Mexican border

The riots were unrelated. Albuquerque just likes to riot. We don't even send the news to report on them anymore.

Actually, none of that stuff happened....

 Read the rest at the link.

Source Bias Checklist

1. Internal consistency.
2. External consistency.
3. Dialog and dissent.
4. Awareness of objections.
5. Snarl words and purr words.
6. Implicit bias.
7. Narrative.
8. Red herrings and straw men.
9. Fallacies.
10. Psychological factors.
11. Source's experiences, perspective, perceptions.
12. Debts and favors.
13. Medium is the message.
14. The human voice.
15. Encourage anonymous sources to go on the record.
16. Judge source's reliability and disclose potential biases.
17. More specificity is better.
18. Do not rely on anonymous sources for sensational reports.
19. Source must have first-hand knowledge.
20. Do not lie to protect a source.
21. What is the source's ideological orientation?
22. What are the source's financial interests?

On Trump

 I didn't vote for Trump in the primary - I was a Cruz guy and thought Trump was a buffoon. But the voters thought otherwise. At some point I realized I needed to get over myself. I stopped asking "What's wrong with all these other idiots?" and started asking "What are they seeing that I'm not?"

New Beginnings

In 2004 I began posting at this blog under the title Deams Into Lightning.  The new title, 'Covenant Lands', is what I'll be using as we go forward.  (The phrase is a literal translation of 'Artzot ha-Brit', the Hebrew name for the United States.) The URL for this blog remains the same:

http://asher813.blogspot.com/

In the twelve and a half years that I've been posting here, my personal life has taken various turns, including moves from Portland to San Francisco and back to Portland, and overseas trips to Israel, Iraqi Kurdistan, and East Africa.

I'm now at a phase where my life is starting to become a little more settled, which I hope will allow me to devote more time to studying, and providing meaningful commentary on, the events in our complex and dangerous times.  Stay tuned.

How Not to Fight Radical Islam

Any rational and civilized approach to the threat of radical Islam in a free society must be based on a clear understanding of what the threat is, and what it is not.

There has been discussion recently of banning certain types of Islamic dress in western countries, particularly France.  This leads to other questions.  Marine Le Pen is quoted on Arutz Sheva as saying, “If we banned the burka, we should also ban kippahs in the entire public sector ... in the name of equality we have to do this. We cannot just ban Muslim dress because then they will say we hate Muslims.”

A superficial response to radical Islam focuses on superficial issues. Distinctive dress, head coverings, or other articles of clothing worn by any religion should not be a problem for a pluralistic society. A better strategy would have been to target those islamic/islamist practices that are the problem, or that can be exploited to cause problems: child "marriage", FGM, sanctioning of domestic abuse, incitement to violence, and full-face coverings that can serve to disguise persons with criminal intent.

A generic ban on religious head coverings does not advance the cause of liberty, but rather sets it back.

What if ... ?

There's been a lot of speculation lately about whether the Kremlin was the driving force behind the recent Wikileaks revelations about Hillary Clinton; and if so, "Why does Russia want Donald Trump to win the election?"  Following upon this, there is no shortage of theories by HRC supporters regarding Trump's supposed weakness toward Russia, ties with Russia, and so on.

I think it's important to ask questions about the provenance of new information, and to wonder what other parties might stand to gain from passing it on.  But when you start down this path, it's easy to build conjecture on top of conjecture, speculation on top of speculation, guesswork on top of guesswork.  And then you're going down the rabbit hole.

Look, as a pro-Trump guy I can play this game too.  Trump a Russian puppet?  But that's just what they want you to think!  You think Putin and his old KGB buddies are stupid?  They're putting out stuff that's damaging to Clinton with Russian fingerprints all over it, so that the Americans will trace it back to Russia and say, "Hey, all this anti-Clinton stuff is just Russian propaganda!"  And then the Americans will dismiss anything unfavorable to Clinton, and she'll be immunized against any and every scandal, because Russia!  And in fact that's exactly what is happening, you can see it on the social media if you don't believe me.  

Do I believe that that is in fact what happened?  I don't know.  And that's my point here:  I don't know.  I prefer to stick with what's known with some degree of certainty, where we can remain on reasonably firm ground.  Often in life we must form theories, hypotheses, or suppositions about the unknown; but we are safest if we start from a firm foundation of facts and stick to known facts as closely as possible.

Information and Sources

1. Is it true?
2. Is it relevant?
3. What are its implications?

These are the basic questions we ask ourselves when assessing the value of new information.  When the information comes by way of an unfamiliar source, it is perfectly rational and appropriate to question what motives may be at work.  

But when speculation along the lines of "Why do they want me to believe this?" takes precedence over accurately answering the basic questions, we are starting to wander down the rabbit hole of paranoid conspiracy thinking.

David Wong on America's Urban Elites

Cracked editor / writer David Wong (aka Jason Pargin) - himself a native of rural Illinois - has a splendid article on how half of America went crazy during this election season.  Yes, it's about Donald Trump, but it's not really about Donald Trump.

Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes -- either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away. ...
Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down -- the fact that hard work is better than dependence on government, that children do better with both parents in the picture, that peace is better than rioting, that a strict moral code is better than blithe hedonism, that humans tend to value things they've earned more than what they get for free, that not getting exploded by a bomb is better than getting exploded by a bomb.

Go read the whole article at the link.

Election 2016

Until recently, I've refrained from debating the upcoming Presidential election, or even discussing it at all.  The 2016 election season has been extremely contentious, and I decided it wasn't worth potentially losing friends over.  Besides, I like to take my time coming to an important decision.

So with all that said, I have made up my mind about this year's race, and I will be writing more about it soon, probably after the holiday season is over (Simchat Torah is the Tuesday after next).

Sophistication

'Everyone who lived here said those things: provincial, self-satisfied, boring. If you said that, it showed you recognized these qualities but did not partake of them yourself.'

-Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

Liberalism

When anarchy is passed off as so-called "liberalism", the defense of true liberal values appears "right-wing".

Refugees

The Left wants to represent the immigrant/refugee crisis as a referendum on humanitarianism and tolerance. It is not. Nobody is objecting to lawful immigration by people of good intentions who are willing to work, nor to the offering of safe quarter to those innocents who have a well-founded fear of being persecuted in their home nations.

What is objected to, is the indiscriminate admission of foreigners whose intent is less than honorable, without the consent of the citizens of the host nations.

Iran

Why Obama let Iran's Green Revolution fail. '... Obama wasn't just reluctant to show solidarity in 2009, he feared the demonstrations would sabotage his secret outreach to Iran. In his new book, "The Iran Wars," Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon uncovers new details on how far Obama went to avoid helping Iran's green movement. Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America's support.'

The Iranian naval threat. '... Meanwhile, the Iranians keep improving the firepower of their fast patrol boats and adapt Western technology to further raise the threat level. They now have a semi-submersible fast patrol boat they acquired from North Korea and improved. This carries significant firepower and is hard to find and hit. They have taken British technology from the superfast Bladerunner speedboat and turned it into the Seraj-1, which exceeds 55 knots on the surface. A newer version, thought to be the Seraj-2, may reach 80 to 85 knots, far faster than anything in the U.S. inventory. And the Iranians appear able to acquire diesel engines, surface drives and other sophisticated gear from Western sources without any practical interference.'

200 yards is too close. '“Too close” has to be publicly defined. The Iranians should be put on notice that if they close to within 500 yards of any ship or boat, they will be fired on, not just given the courtesy of warning shots. Five hundred yards is about the range of a rocket-propelled grenade (though it’s hard to hit anything smaller than a large ship from that distance).'

Cruz, Trump, and Open Primaries

Citing Michael Harrington's post, the Washington Post observes that so far, Donald Trump has fared well in open-primary states (such as South Carolina) while Ted Cruz has won three of the four closed-primary states (Iowa, Oklahoma, and Alaska, with Nevada going to Trump).

US primary elections, in which each party chooses its respective candidate for the Presidential election in November, are held throughout the 50 states on varying dates. Rules regarding the primary process vary from state to state.

In a state with "open primaries",  any eligible voter may vote in either party's primary, regardless of the voter's own affiliation.  In such states, it's possible for voters to vote in the opposing party's primary, and damage that party's chances by choosing a weak candidate.

And that's what may have happened here:  Democrats in South Carolina may have voted for Trump in the Republican primary, because they are confident that he will lose the election to their own candidate, presumably Hillary Clinton.

Harrington concludes that Trump's victories in open-primary states were largely attributable to Democrats voting for Trump in Republican primaries.

The good news for Cruz, according to the Post's Zywicki, is that most of the upcoming primaries - and all of those being held this Saturday, March 15 (Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Maine) - are closed.  So this may be Cruz's chance to pull ahead - without interference from Democrat voters.

"If we don't have a country, we don't have trans issues."

Caitlyn Jenner favors Ted Cruz for President, and would like to serve as his trans ambassador, according to reports. 

This is being reported in the appropriate sneering tones by the leftist press, of course, but better understanding between transgender people and conservatives would certainly be a good thing.  (Good for everybody except leftists, of course.) 

While this draws a puzzled "Wait, what?" from the towering intellects at the Huffington Post, Caitlyn herself puts the issues pretty clearly in the People article:

"I get it. The Democrats are better when it comes to these types of social issues. I understand that," she said, but countered, "Number one, if we don't have a country, we don't have trans issues. We need jobs. We need a vibrant economy. I want every trans person to have a job. With $19 trillion in debt and it keeps going up, we're spending money we don't have. Eventually, it's going to end. And I don't want to see that. Socialism did not build this country. Capitalism did. Free enterprise. The people built it. And they need to be given the opportunity to build it back up."

 Queer issues matter, but they're not the only issues that matter.  It's unfortunately still true that many conservatives are behind in their understanding of lesbian, gay, and transgender people, but there's opportunity for dialog.  Queer folk will gain if they do not tie their fortunes exclusively to the leftist star; conservatives will gain if they understand that queer folk do not want to "destroy society" but rather want the same things the rest of us want:  dignity, liberty, and the right to earn their own place in the world.

Twelve Years and Counting

Next month will mark 12 years of posting hear at DiL.  The last few years have been off-and-on, and I'm looking forward to getting back into blogging.

Within the past year I've made two trips overseas to places I really wanted to visit:  Iraqi Kurdistan, and the African Jewish communities of Kenya and Uganda.  In the coming year I expect to be getting more involved in local politics (no, I'm NOT running for office!) and focusing on the areas of current events that interest me the most.

I plan to be writing primarily about Israel and the Middle East, Africa, the global jihad threat, the free market vs. socialism, classical liberal values, USA politics, Oregon politics, and Western lands issues.  I'll also probably write on science, books, music, and social issues from time to time.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned.

Nairobi