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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Monday, January 27, 2020

A Tale of Two Englands

By Daniel Greenfield 13 Comments Saturday, January 25, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog (Emphasis added by me. RK)

Call it a tale of two girls. And a tale of two Englands.

One is an actress who grew up to marry a prince, lavished with luxuries, amassing a fortune, before her tantrums and antics drove her to depart her newfound royal family for a Canadian billionaire’s manor.

The other was put into foster care when she was only 8, by the age of 13 she was being raped by a Muslim sex grooming gang, and by 15, Victoria Agoglia was already dead of a heroin overdose injected by the 50-year-old Muslim pedophile who had been abusing her. Today, she would have been a woman.

Unlike Meghan Markle, Victoria never got the opportunity to marry a prince or even grow up. And while the media weeps for Markle, who is departing for Canada because of some tabloid tales, the story of Victoria, once again in the news because of the release of an independent report on the sex grooming gangs of Manchester, shows what true social injustice looks like. It’s not bad publicity for a celebrity.

It’s a girl who was abandoned to the worst imaginable abuses because intervening would have been politically incorrect.

The report chronicles how Operation Augusta was launched and then scuttled after her death in 2003, despite identifying 97 suspects and 57 victims. The victims were, “mostly white girls aged between 12 and 16”, and the perpetrators were, “mostly men of ‘Asian heritage’”. By ‘Asian’, the report means “predominantly Pakistani men” though at least one of the perpetrators was apparently Tunisian.

Constable B, the anonymous cop responsible for some of the most revealing quotes in the report, said, “What had a massive input was the offending target group were predominantly Asian males and we were told to try and get other ethnicities.”

Mohammed Yaqoob, the pedophile who had forcibly injected Victoria with heroin and was cleared of manslaughter charges, was not the sort of pedophile the Manchester cops were supposed to find.

A meeting at Greater Manchester Police headquarters “acknowledged that the enquiry was sensitive due to the involvement of Asian men” and worried over “the incitement of racial hatred.” There were concerns about “the damaged relations following Operation Zoological.” Those were the police raids targeting Iraqi refugees involved in an alleged Al Qaeda plot to bomb a soccer stadium in Manchester.

Some in the GMP didn’t see the point to stopping the rape of young girls because of cultural differences.

“There was an educational issue. Asian males didn’t understand that it was wrong, and the girls were not quite there. They were difficult groups to deal with. We can’t enforce our way out of the problem,” Constable B said.

And so they didn’t.

More young girls and women were raped. Some of the perpetrators were later arrested. The full scope of the abuse and the cover-up will never be known. The independent report tells us a little of the horror.

The Muslim sex grooming gangs in South Manchester targeted girls from broken families who were taken to care homes. This was not accident or chance. As the report notes, the “offenders understood that a specific children’s home in Manchester was used as an emergency placement unit for children entering the care system and this maintained a steady supply of victims.” And the Muslim sex groomers made sure to be on hand and ready so that the “children were befriended as soon as they arrived.”

These were some of the same tactics used by Muslim sex grooming gangs in Rotherham, Bradford, Huddersfield, Rochdale, Aylesbury, Oxford, Newcastle, Bristol, and Telford, suggesting some level of coordination between grooming gangs from various cities. Possibly over the internet. It’s an angle that the authorities have shown no interest in following up because of its potentially explosive nature.

Some previous Muslim sex grooming gangs were set up among taxi drivers. This gang, according to the report, was based out of the “Asian restaurant and takeaway trade.” Again, by Asian, they mean Indian, Afghan and Pakistani cuisine, kabobs and curry, not Egg Foo Yung and General Tso’s Chicken. These traditionally Muslim businesses served as coordinating networks for the rape and abuse of children.

The migrant populations that destroyed the English working class, displacing them and taking their jobs, leaving men without purposeful work, wives without husbands, and children with broken homes, then completed the hat trick by drugging, raping, and killing the daughters of the working class. And the authorities shrugged because the girls were the worthless leavings of broken homes and a declining populace, the Mohicans and Incas, the Bushmen and the Picts, ragged remnants of defeated tribes brokenly making way for a new conquest, their daughters subjugated by the arrogant colonizers.

There are brief snapshots of the horror of this New Britain: notes from a lost investigation into lost lives.

“Carers reported to police that a child had provided information stating that she was being pursued/threatened/coerced into having sex by two men who were Asian,” a brief summary mentions. “A child begged her carers to get her away from Manchester as she was too involved with Asian men. She disclosed that an Asian man known by his nickname ‘made her do things she didn't want to do’”.

While girls have been the focus of many of the stories, some of the predators also went after boys.

“Child 14 was a male looked after child who regularly went missing,” the report also notes. There were “references from other young people that he was being prostituted by Asian and gay men.”

Despite its thorough documentation, the report ends in a bureaucratic sea of missing information.

In 2005, senior officers of the Greater Manchester Police and Manchester City Council members attended a meeting at Manchester Town Hall and announced the shutdown of the investigation. The report mentions that, "The review team has requested a copy of the minutes for that meeting but neither GMP nor Manchester City Council was able to provide a copy."

It’s no doubt been logged and filed in the same place as Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide videos.

Constable B’s rough answers tell us certain truths about the cover-up. The investigation of Muslim sex grooming gangs was too likely to offend the wrong people. And the behavior of the Muslim pedophiles, who abused young girls and addicted them to drugs, was attributed to cultural differences.

The nameless Constable B tells us the true scope of the problem. Manchester cops like him know that this is habitual and that it’s taking place on a level vastly beyond the scope of Operation Augusta. It’s not 57 girls or 97 suspects. It’s thousands. “We can’t enforce our way out of the problem,” he said.

That’s what you say about vast social issues that involve entire communities and a way of life.

Muslim sex grooming gangs, like drugs or prostitution, are too widespread to be enforced out of existence because, like college students and pot, the culture doesn’t accept that they are wrong.

The police did nothing because these were not isolated crimes by criminals, but clashes of morals and values between two communities, one of which does not believe that child rape is wrong because its sacred texts tell it that Mohammed married Aisha and consummated his marriage when she was 9.

There are nearly 2 million child marriages in Pakistan. The notion that a woman’s consent to sexual relations matters is an utterly foreign concept in a culture where unaccompanied women are fair game.

The child rapists did not believe that their actions were wrong under Islamic law. And they weren’t.

The Manchester City Council and the GMP just accepted this reality as they have accepted it so often. They buried the minutes, shut down the investigation, and walked away from the screams of the girls.

They did it for multiculturalism, integration, and community relations. They did it for social justice.

We know that no real action was taken because the girls were troubled. They didn’t matter. And their bodies and lives could be sacrificed for the greater good.

The real tragedy is not that the rapists didn’t understand it was wrong. It’s that the UK no longer does.

As the media moans over Meghan Markle, sob stories rolling in of the injustice of tabloid headlines and the prejudice of the Brits, it is worth remembering those nameless girls who were sacrificed to progress.

They were not worked to death in factories. The brand of progress is no longer Dickensian. Instead it’s Markleite. It demands that we look away from the broken bodies in the chimneys of social justice, to bury away these cinderellas of the postmodern age until Blake’s angel comes with his bright key.

The princess of social justice is in. And the cinderellas who never get asked to the ball, who never grow up or meet their prince, who are taken by taxi to drug dens, shot up, abused, and then turned out, are obstacles to the brand of progress that Markle, Stormzy, and the rest of the social justice crowd of the ‘Cool New Britain’ that is quick to stomp on offensive speech and quicker to look away from the horrors of the new golden age of acid attacks, sex grooming gangs, and nail bombs at teen girl concerts, represent. There is no fairy godmother for them. Only little black coffins and filing cabinets.

Bodies are buried in coffins and the truth is buried in filing cabinets, along with the unasked questions

There is a red Mercedes linked to four of the young girls. Who was behind the wheel of the car “used in the procurement of the victims”? Where did it go? Who knows.

Ask the GMP. Ask the lost and the dead.

The notes and minutes are missing. The truth has been buried in little black coffins along with the bodies of young girls like Victoria. England might once have been theirs. Now it belongs to their abusers.

Senator Warren’s Redistribution Agenda Will Erode Societal Capital

January 26, 2020 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
 
Barack Obama’s strategy during the 2008 campaign was very shrewd. His statist policy positions and doctrinaire Senate voting record (almost identical to Bernie Sanders) made him very appealing to the left, yet he also made himself acceptable to other voters with a calm and moderate demeanor (Mayor Buttigieg is trying to follow the same strategy for 2020, albeit with less success so far).

Obama’s one major “oops moment” in an otherwise very disciplined campaign occurred one month before the election when he admitted that he wanted to “spread the wealth around.”

Elizabeth Warren isn’t following Obama’s script since she’s running as an out-of-the-closet leftist, but she just experienced her own “oops moment.”

Writing for PJ Media, Megan Fox explains that Senator Elizabeth Warren inadvertently – but very clearly – acknowledged that her plan penalizes people with individual integrity and personal responsibility.
Elizabeth Warren was confronted at an Iowa town hall event by a voter who wanted to know if he could get back the money that he paid for his daughter’s college education since Warren’s running on forgiving student loan debt. “My daughter is in school,” he said. “I saved all my money just to pay… Can I have my money back?” Warren replied, “Of course not!” The man continued to push Warren for an explanation for why some people can have a free education while others have to pay. “So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?” he asked. …the plan is really just a bribe to current college students with debt as it does not address students who take out student loans in the future. …That’s what we would normally call a hustle.
Katherine Timpf of National Review has a first-hand account of why Sen. Warren’s scheme rubs many people the wrong way.
…this guy…is…absolutely right… When he references the sacrifices that he and his family had to make to pay for his daughter’s college, what he’s implicitly saying is that his choice to be financially responsible has cost him things that money cannot replace. …I wrote about some of the sacrifices that I myself had to make to avoid shouldering a debt that I knew I couldn’t repay. …I found out that I’d been accepted to Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism. I was absolutely thrilled by this; it had been my dream since childhood to attend this exact school… Then, I realized I’d never be able to repay the $80,000 loan I’d have to take out to attend my dream school. …I withdrew. It was a tough decision — and the consequences were even tougher. …Unless Elizabeth Warren can go back in time and put me in a Columbia classroom during the time I spent cleaning those Boston Market bathrooms, her plan wouldn’t be “fair.” Unless she can give me the hours of my life back that I spent sitting alone covered in scabies cream, her plan wouldn’t be “fair.” …Elizabeth Warren can’t “pay me back” for a loan that I decided against taking out — a decision that I’d made precisely because I did not expect that anyone else would pay it back for me. …In other words? No — I don’t think that I should have to pay for someone else making an irresponsible decision when they could have made a responsible one.
Warren’s comments are getting lots of negative attention because people now have an easy-to-understand example of how her policies reward bad behavior and punish good behavior.
  • If you save for your kid, you’re a chump.
  • If you display personal responsibility, you’re a chump.
  • If you work hard, you’re a chump.
  • If you sacrifice today for a better tomorrow, you’re a chump.
  • If you invest, you’re a chump.
  • If you think it’s your job to take care of your family, you’re a chump.
There are many reasons to oppose redistribution programs. For instance, I was on TV just last month explaining how government programs encourage debt instead of savings.

What Warren has done, though, is to remind us something more important – that these programs are especially bad because they erode societal capital. They teach people it’s okay to live off the government and that they don’t need to worry about hard work and self reliance.

And when enough people adopt that attitude and a nation reaches a “tipping point,” then you wind up with a society where too many people are riding in the wagon and not enough people are pulling the wagon.

Think Greece.

P.S. I thought the big “oops moment” for Obama in 2008 occurred when he openly argued that he wanted higher capital gains taxes even if the government didn’t collect any extra revenue because of concomitant economic damage. In other words, like many folks on the left, he was willing to impose hardship on ordinary people just to hurt people with high incomes.

Sunday, January 26, 2020

Cartoon of the Day


Quote of the Day

"People often ask me if there are guidelines in our practice of what I like to call MacNeil Lehrer journalism. Well, yes, there are, and here they are. Do nothing I cannot defend. Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me. Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story.

Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and as good a person as I am. Assume the same about all people on whom I report. Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise. Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label everything.

Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously. And, finally, I am not in the entertainment business." - Jim Lehrer

A Water Rule the EPA Got Right

Contrary to reports, the EPA is not raising the limits on the level of a certain herbicide allowed in drinking water. Unfortunately, Tucker Carlson and others may have been taken in by left-wing propaganda on the issue.

Steve Milloy January 25th, 2020

I’m a big fan of Tucker Carlson. Like his fellow disruptor, President Trump, he’s willing to take on all sides of the establishment, Left, Right, and the deep state. And, in my opinion at least, he’s almost always right over the target.
 
But in one particular case, an issue he addressed recently—the EPA’s review of the herbicide atrazine—he hit way wide of the mark, accusing the agency of risking the public health by loosening standards for atrazine in water.
 
As editor of JunkScience.com, I’ve worked on environmental regulatory issues for three decades now. No one would accuse me of being a fan of the EPA. In fact, I’ve sued the EPA, called for reforms, and otherwise endlessly written about the agency’s willingness to throw science under the bus to achieve its often left-wing political agenda. As a member of the Trump transition team on EPA issues, I developed a long list of badly needed reforms for the agency, many of which have been instituted.
 
But that doesn’t mean that EPA always gets it wrong.
 
The agency’s position on the chemical atrazine is one instance in which—despite its track record—the regulators appear to be coming out largely in the right place. First, a few baseline facts about what EPA’s review says and doesn’t say.
 
Contrary to some reports and Tucker’s shot on atrazine, the EPA is not raising the limits on the level of atrazine allowed in drinking water. These will remain exactly where they are now, which is an almost infinitesimal 3 parts per billion on a yearly average. Neither is the monitoring program coming to an end. Atrazine levels will continue to be monitored as before under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), which requires testing for a large number of naturally occurring chemicals, microorganisms, and possible synthetic contaminants.
 
Here’s what’s changing: In 2003, EPA set up a separate Atrazine Monitoring Program (AMP) to more frequently sample drinking water in communities with heavy atrazine use to make sure the SDWA monitoring wasn’t missing anything. It wasn’t.
 
The AMP—which tested for both atrazine and its breakdown products—demonstrated a clear lack of health concerns. The vast majority of samples came in below 1 part per billion, none exceeded the SDWA standard, and the clear trend was declining atrazine levels over time. EPA reasonably decided that the extra monitoring wasn’t needed. The decision will be reviewed in a year.
 
In any case, monitoring will continue as always under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
 
It’s important to understand that EPA sets its limits on contaminants by building in huge safety margins. This is especially true for pesticides (herbicides are one kind of pesticide), where allowable levels are many orders of magnitude below what has been demonstrated in the lab to have “no effect.” At each point in the process, EPA assumes a “worst case” scenario and purposefully errs on the side of caution. This includes assuming maximum exposure to the most sensitive parts of the population (infants and pregnant women) and multiplying “uncertainty factors” together for any issue on which the science can’t give a definitive answer.
 
When the 3 parts per billion limit was set in the early 1990s, this created an “uncertainty” buffer, or margin, which was 1,000 times below the no-effect level. What the EPA said in its recently published review is that toxicological science has advanced considerably in the past 30 years, and that means many of the “uncertainties” the EPA built in back in 1991 are no longer uncertain and could, theoretically, be dispensed with. The EPA doesn’t say this, but if one were to calculate safety limits according to the up-to-date science, the allowable limit could easily be set above 500 parts per billion and still achieve a wide margin of safety.
 
But EPA isn’t going to do that. It’s keeping the 3 parts per billion. It works for farmers and the agency doesn’t see any compelling need to change it.
 
One could complain, perhaps, that if they were basing their regulations on the best science, they really ought to raise it; but it makes no sense to complain that EPA has done an incredibly thorough job and is accurately reporting out on their findings.
 
The problem is that environmental groups such as the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) have, as usual, mischaracterized the EPA’s findings and in their news releases and seemingly conflated EPA’s drinking water limits with its ecological review, which has nothing to do with human health.
 
The eco-review does, in fact, recommend raising these eco limits in light of extensive new studies, but these limits are based on the effect of atrazine on algae, which sits at the bottom of the food chain for lots of aquatic wildlife. Algae, like most other plants, engage in photosynthesis to turn sunlight into energy. Atrazine works by disrupting photosynthesis in plants. Humans don’t do photosynthesis. The eco-limits don’t apply to drinking water and they will have no effect whatsoever on any human health issues.
 
If you read all this and still think the safety factors aren’t enough, think about the difference between drinking one cup of coffee, which is harmless and may possibly have positive health effects, and drinking 1,000 cups of coffee in one sitting, which would probably kill you.
 
If you’re worried about NRDC’s claims that atrazine is an “endocrine disruptor,” understand that this is only true in the sense that any food that contains naturally occurring phytoestrogens is an endocrine disruptor, including (and this is a short list) rice, beans, wheat germ, apples, carrots, coffee, tea, and—sorry to break it to you—beer. Most of these foods are thought to have positive health effects. Phytoestrogens like resveratrol and genistein—two famous “antioxidants”—are even marketed as health supplements, and there is evidence that they fight inflammation and may be protective against cancer.
 
If you still say that pesticides are yucky and you don’t want artificial chemicals in your diet, I’m sorry to tell you that you’re out of luck. All farmers who grow to scale, including organic farmers, use chemical pesticides, and they have for centuries. NRDC and EWG won’t tell you this, but organic farmers use older pesticides like sulfur, neem oil, and copper sulfate, which is highly toxic to people, plants and wildlife and is a known carcinogen. And because these “natural” chemicals are less targeted and less effective, they dump them on their fields in truly astounding quantities.
 
A final word about “big agriculture.” My first response is, “if only it still existed.” I carry no brief for ethanol mandates (which are stupid) and farm subsidies, but the political power of the “farm lobby” has become increasingly attenuated as, ironically, farming has become ever more efficient and fewer and fewer people have any direct connection to the land. If you doubt this, pick up a copy of the Des Moines Register sometime, which has effectively become an environmentalist, anti-farmer mouthpiece.
 
Meanwhile, the power of the environmentalist movement grows ever greater by the day. Many of the “nonprofit” anti-pesticide and anti-GMO groups are the same, and funded by many of the same money sources, as those that are pushing the global warming agenda, including the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the McArthur Foundation, as well as the organic industry and the trial bar.
 
Environmental “nonprofits” that are in part or wholly devoted to a “Green New Deal”-style attack on modern agriculture have a war chest in the neighborhood of $10 billion a year, which goes into producing nothing but environmentalist propaganda that barely disguises its true anti-capitalist, big-government agenda.
 
I’d take everything they say with a heavy helping of salt—which according to NRDC standards, is also an endocrine disruptor.



Trump: ‘Unborn Children Have Never Had a Stronger Defender in the White House’

By Melanie Arter | January 24, 2020

“It is my profound honor to be the very first president in history to attend the March for Life,” President Donald Trump told attendees of the 47th Annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., on Friday.

“We’re here for a very simple reason: to defend the right of every child born and unborn to fulfill their God-given potential. For 47 years, Americans of all backgrounds have traveled from across the country to stand for life, and today as president of the United States, I am truly proud to stand with you,” he said..........To Read More....

My Take - He's totally secure with large segments of the nation's population for this stand.  I find it difficult to see how Catholics, who strongly trend Democrat, cannot vote for him.  Let's be clear.  To be a Democrat and a Catholic is to be a heretic.

How the Golden State Embraced Corporate Socialism

California is its epicenter, and it is an unmitigated disaster.

Edward Ring  January 24th, 2020

Gavin Newsom, the lily white, urbane, coiffed scion of San Francisco’s posh royalty, is California’s highest-ranking Democrat. He presides over a party that has taken progressive ideals beyond absurdity to the brink of tyranny, a socialist party that openly disparages whiteness and wealth. One would think that the party of Gavin Newsom is bent on destroying everything Gavin Newsom represents. So what’s going on?

To understand the rise of Newsom, and every other hyper-privileged Democrat who even today remain in firm control of the progressive movement, it is necessary to define a 21st-century version of corporate socialism. This goes well beyond the use of the term merely to describe government subsidies for, say, the oil and gas industry, or, for that matter, the wind and solar industry..........To Read More.....

NYC's new police commissioner challenges the Left, confirming NY's new bail laws have caused an explosion in crime

January 25, 2020 By Peter Barry Chowka

At the behest of radical left-wing Democrat politicians, New York — like other states — has recently instituted criminal-coddling "reform" laws that require that violent offenders be released on the streets immediately after their arrest for crimes including violent felonies.  A recent example was the release from custody several times in one week on no-bail personal recognizance of a career criminal who allegedly robbed banks six times in a two-week period.  After his sixth bank robbery, he was finally remanded to custody............ To Read More

American Education Can Be Saved, but Not by the Left

January 25, 2020 By E. Jeffrey Ludwig

Two threads of educational reform can be discerned during the past 25 years. Both miss the need for real reform and have contributed thereby to the further dumbing down of our public schools. One involves greater federal involvement and funding through No Child Left Behind legislation followed by Common Core initiatives extending federal involvement even further into the realm of standardized testing. The other thread of reform blames racism as an underlying cause of educational failure, and through busing and various regulatory requirements seeks more racial balance in neighborhoods and in schools.

The increase in federal control of educational policy is unconstitutional because the Tenth Amendment relegates control of all powers not enumerated in the U.S. Constitution to the several states. Common Core got around this with a deceitful strategy. Common Core says the federal government is not telling the states what to teach, only that the federal government will supply the standardized tests that will give the states greater feedback about whether they are meeting “standards.” Thus, states would begin teaching to the tests, the tests would be controlling, but the federal government – not requiring curriculum x, y, or z -- on a technicality would not be literally “in control” of state education...........To Read More.....

Righteous Anger vs. Politics as Usual

January 25, 2020  By Shoshana Bryen

There is anger and then there is righteous anger. Peter Finch yelling out the window, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

From Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, where parts of a whole are coming undone, to Hong Kong to Puerto Rico to France and Venezuela, people are mad as hell.

Consider Lebanon. Independent in 1943, but occupied by Syria from 1975-2005, and brought into Iran’s orbit through the creation of Hezb’allah in the early 1980s, the same constellation of politicians have held power since the end of the civil war in 1990. Americans appear to worry most about the security implications of Hezb’allah, a U.S.-designated terror organization with its own army and a drug/weapons/money racket in South America, pulling strings in Beirut. And worry, too, about the U.S. armed and trained Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), working alongside and sometimes in cooperation with Hezb’allah. Hassan Nasrallah calls the LAF “a partner.”

But how did Lebanon come to this point and why are people angry now?..........To Read More....

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Quote of the Day

"Americans are a stubborn and independent people. They are not a passive citizenry; they will never be French. They will never surrender their rights when demanded to by an unholy alliance of politicians, media, and an unelected elite." - William L. Gensert

Polar bears: The end of a climate delusion icon

By | January 22nd, 2020 | Climate | 104 Comments @CFACT

One of the climate delusion’s greatest frauds was issued by the Center for Biological Diversity which said “Climate change is drowning and starving polar bears. If greenhouse gas fueled climate change keeps melting their sea ice habitat, an arctic apocalypse will wipe them out in a century – and they will disappear from the United States by 2050.”

This was echoed by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which stated in 2013 “Our analyses highlight the potential for large reductions in the global polar bear populations if sea ice loss continues which is forecast by climate models and other studies.”

In May of 2008 the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Specie Act, predicting that  polar bear populations would decline by two thirds as the sea ice they rely on for hunting continued to shrink. This conclusion was not based on numbers observed but were put on the list by mathematical models woven from thin air.  The actual numbers observed during these years showed the opposite to be true.

Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute, disputed the flawed models and perverted science saying that “this was the first time an animal was ever placed on the threatened or endangered list based on a mathematical model”. The reader should understand that such models guess at the controlling variables and are actually only of value when attempting to learn what variables if any might be of importance.

But it must be understood that the real measured data would be inconvenient for the environmental groups trying to raise money on their claims of harm coming to these cute and cuddly creatures.

Creatures which in fact are as dangerous as any of the grizzly bear, brown or black bear species.

The real facts of the matter are that polar bear populations are increasing and that the regions with the greatest ice loss are thriving. Susan Crockford, considered to be among the world’s leading experts on this species, reports from a recent study, that the current population of between 22,000 and 31,000 is the highest it has been in the past 50 years.

A recent study of Canadian polar bears found stable or increasing numbers in 12 of 13 colonies in their country.  The evidence is really overwhelming.

The chart below shows Crockford’s estimates since 1960 based on actual surveys in Canada and the Arctic region.

Polar bears: The end of a climate delusion icon

Even more interesting and telling are the results of recent polar bear research. It has been learned that the belief that declining sea ice is detrimental to these white furry animals is untrue.  They actually are healthier and heavier in the areas of greater ice loss. Below is a map showing two areas of the Arctic Ocean, the Chukchi Sea and the Beaufort Sea.  The Chukchi Sea has lost twice as much ice as the Beaufort Sea in recent decades of slight warming.  While researchers supported by the global warming alarmists had expected to find that the polar bears in the Chukchi Sea would have suffered as a result, they found the opposite to be true. The females in the Chukchi Sea were on average 70 pounds heavier and the males 110 pounds heavier than those in the Beaufort Sea.

Polar bears: The end of a climate delusion icon 1
 
Furthermore the females gave birth to larger litters with the yearlings weighing as much as 50 pounds more than their counterparts on the Beaufort Sea where the ice loss was double that of the Chukchi Sea.

The saddest part of the story was the confusion voiced in the researchers reports trying to justify the unanticipated outcome for their funders who were certain they would be gaining more evidence of the negative impact of man-caused Climate change. A joint report by the US Geological Survey, a once great government science agency, and the University of Wyoming, a once fine academic institution developed a negative reason for the outcome of their study claiming that with less sea ice they needed to devour more seals to keep their strength up.

So it appears now that the “simple bear necessities” may not actually include ice.  Indeed it will be a lot harder to raise money for The World Wildlife Fund once it gets out that warmer temperatures mean more polar bears. The bears after all originated on land and migrated to the ice about 150,000 years ago.  Like us they are warm blooded creatures and like us they prefer warmer than colder weather.

As time goes by you will see less and less of the polar bear as an icon of the climate change delusion.
Note: Portions of this essay have been excerpted from the outstanding book INCONVENIENT FACTS: The Science That Al Gore Does Not Want You To Know, with permission of the author Gregory Wrightstone. For detailed discussion of the many frauds in the climate change delusion, his book is among the very best sources.

Author

  • CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. 

Biden Unbound: Three idiotic statements from Malarkey Joe just this week

January 22, 2020 By Monica Showalter

With impeachment drawing headlines, and Bernie Sanders sucking all the air out of the room with socialist schemes, Joe Biden is back to making gaffes, except that in this age of fantastical impeachment charges and unreal socialist schemes, gaffes are just business as usual.

Here are three idiocies from Biden this week, and this was just Tuesday:
Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed on Tuesday that illegal immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program are "more American than most Americans" because they had "done well in school." Biden, who recently said he believed drunk driving should not be crime that warrants deportation, made the statement during a campaign rally in Ames, Iowa.
Fact-check for old Joe: DACA recipients as a whole are underachievers, ranking well below most Americans in academic achievement, including learning English, as well as adherence to rule of law...........

Which brings us to Gaffe Two, from Breitbart News:...............

But he was not done, and that brings us to Gaffe Three............To Read More......

Joe Biden: Worse than Barack Obama, Worse than Hillary Clinton

January 22, 2020 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
Given their overt statism, I’ve mostly focused on the misguided policies being advocated by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

But that doesn’t mean Joe Biden’s platform is reasonable or moderate.

Ezra Klein of Vox unabashedly states that the former Vice President’s policies are “far to Obama’s left.”
This is an issue where folks on both ends of the spectrum agree.

In a column for the right-leaning American Spectator, George Neumayr also says Biden is not a moderate.
Biden likes to feed the mythology that he is still a moderate. …This is, after all, a pol who giddily whispered in Barack Obama’s ear that a massive government takeover of health care “was a big f—ing deal,”…and now pronouncing Obamacare only a baby step toward a more progressive future. It can’t be repeated enough that “Climate Change” Joe doesn’t give a damn about the ruinous consequences of extreme environmentalism for Rust Belt industries. His Climate Change plans read like something Al Gore might have scribbled to him in a note. …On issue after issue, Biden is taking hardline liberal stances. …“I have the most progressive record of anybody running.” …He is far more comfortable on the Ellen show than on the streets of Scranton. He has given up Amtrak for private jets, and, like his lobbyist brother and grifter son, has cashed in on his last name.
If you want policy details, the Wall Street Journal opined on his fiscal plan.
Mr. Biden has previously promised to spend $1.7 trillion over 10 years on a Green New Deal, $750 billion on health care, and $750 billion on higher education. To pay for it all, he’s set out $3.4 trillion in tax increases. This is more aggressive, for the record, than Hillary Clinton’s proposed tax increases in 2016, which totaled $1.4 trillion, per an analysis at the time from the left-of-center Tax Policy Center. In 2008 Barack Obama pledged to raise taxes on the rich while cutting them on net by $2.9 trillion. Twice as many tax increases as the last presidential nominee: That’s now the “moderate” Democratic position. …raising the top rate for residents of all states. …a huge increase on today’s top capital-gains rate of 23.8%… This would put rates on long-term capital gains at their highest since the 1970s. …Raise the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%. This would…vault the U.S. corporate rate back to near the top in the developed world. …the bottom line is big tax increases on people, capital and businesses. There’s nothing pro-growth in the mix.
And the ever-rigorous Peter Suderman of Reason wrote about Biden’s statist agenda.
Biden released a proposal to raise a slew of new taxes, mostly on corporations and high earners. He would increase tax rates on capital gains, increase the tax rate for households earning more than $510,000 annually, double the minimum tax rate for multinational corporations, impose a minimum tax on large companies whose tax filings don’t show them paying a certain percentage of their earnings, and undo many of the tax cuts included in the 2017 tax law. …as The New York Times reports, Biden’s proposed tax hikes are more than double what Hillary Clinton called for during the 2016 campaign. …Hillary Clinton…pushed the party gently to the left. Four years later, before the campaign is even over, the party’s supposed moderates are proposing double or even quadruple the new taxes she proposed.
The former Veep isn’t just a fan of higher taxes and more spending.

He also likes nanny-state policies.
Joe Biden says he is 100% in favor of banning plastic bags in the U.S. …let’s take a quick walk through the facts about single-use plastic bags at the retail level. …the plastic bags typically handed out by retailers make up only 0.6% of visible litter. Or put another way, for every 1,000 pieces of litter, only six are plastic bags. …They make up less than 1% of landfills by weight… 90% of the plastic bags found at sea streamed in from eight rivers in Asia and two in Africa. Only about 1% of all plastic in the ocean is from America. …Thicker plastic bags have to be used at least 11 times before they yield any environmental benefits. This is much longer than their typical lifespans. …Though it might seem almost innocuous, Biden’s support for a bag ban is symptom of a greater sickness in the Democratic Party. It craves unfettered political power.
Let’s not forget, by the way, that Biden (like most politicians in Washington) is corrupt.

Here are some excerpts from a Peter Schweizer column in the New York Post.
Political figures have long used their families to route power and benefits for their own self-enrichment. …one particular politician — Joe Biden — emerges as the king of the sweetheart deal, with no less than five family members benefiting from his largesse, favorable access and powerful position for commercial gain. …Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, has been an integral part of the family political machine… HillStone announced that James Biden would be joining the firm as an executive vice president. James appeared to have little or no background in housing construction, but…the firm was starting negotiations to win a massive contract in war-torn Iraq. Six months later, the firm announced a contract to build 100,000 homes. …A group of minority partners, including James Biden, stood to split about $735 million. …With the election of his father as vice president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused to his father’s power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue’s gallery of governments and oligarchs around the world. …Hunter’s involvement with an entity called Burnham Financial Group…Burnham became the center of a federal investigation involving a $60 million fraud scheme against one of the poorest Indian tribes in America, the Oglala Sioux. …the firm relied on his father’s name and political status as a means of both recruiting pension money into the scheme.
I only excerpted sections about Biden’s brother and son. You should read the entire article.

And even the left-leaning U.K.-based Guardian has the same perspective on Biden’s oleaginous behavior.
Biden has a big corruption problem and it makes him a weak candidate. …I can already hear the howls: But look at Trump! Trump is 1,000 times worse! You don’t need to convince me. …But here’s the thing: nominating a candidate like Biden will make it far more difficult to defeat Trump. It will allow Trump to muddy the water, to once again pretend he is the one “draining the swamp”, running against Washington culture. …With Biden, we are basically handing Trump a whataboutism playbook. …his record represents the transactional, grossly corrupt culture in Washington that long precedes Trump.
I’ll close by simply sharing some objective data about Biden’s voting behavior when he was a Senator.

According to the National Taxpayers Union, he finished his time on Capitol Hill with eleven-consecutive “F” scores (hey, at least he was consistent!).


And he also was the only Senator who got a lifetime rating of zero from the Club for Growth.


Though if you want to be generous, his lifetime rating was actually 0.025 percent.

Regardless, that was still worse than Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren.

So if Biden become President, it’s safe to assume that America will accelerate on the already-baked-in-the-cake road to Greece.

P.S. Of course, we’ll be on that path even if Biden doesn’t become President, so perhaps the moral of the story is to buy land in Australia.

The Women's March Fails Miserably

Daniel Greenfield 8 Comments Wednesday, January 22, 2020 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Three years ago, the Women’s March brought a million anti-Trump protesters to Washington D.C.

This year, 25,000 people signed up online. That was unrealistically optimistic because organizers had only obtained a permit for up to 10,000 protesters. And they only ended up with thousands.

Impeachment should have encouraged a bigger turnout, but the snowflakes couldn’t handle the snow.

The first person quoted in D.C.’s WUSA9 report explained that she couldn’t come because, "it’s supposed to be really cold and snowy and that is definitely a factor for me."

There were few pink hats among those who did show up and a lot of black and brown winter gear. Among the few march attendees to wear pink was a bedraggled dog in a pink halter, pinks slacks, white socks and Mary Janes, while her owner waved a sign reading, “Public Cervix Announcement.”

Another dog, missing two legs, looking utterly miserable, was draped in a coat and a pink wreath while trying to move forward over the slick street on wheels while wearing a, “I’m With Her” sign.

A third dog’s sign read, “Fight like a dog for equality.” If the dog were equal, it wouldn’t be here.

At times it seemed as if there were more dogs than people burdened with trite feminist signs. And more vendors selling march paraphernalia than there were march attendees to actually wear it.

The Women’s March had not lost its capacity for its feminist bookstore brand of embarrassing stunts, but the people weren’t showing up, and the participants were being reduced to animal cruelty.

And then a blindfolded Chilean feminist collective in red jumpsuits disharmoniously performed a song in Spanish to remind everyone that the Women’s March was also capable of human cruelty.

There were the expected feminists wearing red Handmaid’s Tale costumes and the drag queens because nothing says fighting for women’s rights like a man in a wig dressed up to look like Marilyn Monroe.

The Women’s March was there to attack President Trump. But he wasn’t in D.C. No one really was.

And the weather wasn’t kind to the marchers who had come out to protest against not only President Trump, but global warming. The sleet turned their paper and cardboard signs into brightly colored mush. Only the truly dedicated hard-core Communists could keep going in the snow and sleet.

A Washington Post reporter tweeted a video of a group of Revolutionary Communist Party marchers singing their song and carrying a banner praising Chairman Bob Avakian while incorrectly identifying them as "Virginia residents" who were "celebrating the ERA vote."

That’s like describing a Nazi rally as local Munich residents protesting against the outcome of WW1.

But the media has always deliberately mischaracterized the political extremism of lefty protests, calculatedly refusing to report on the Trotskyists and assorted professional cranks who fuel them. Coverage of the decline in attendance at the Women’s March due to revelations about anti-Semitism and support for Farrakhan among its former and current leaders has been sparse.

USA Today quoted Carmen Perez, a Farrakhan supporter who serves as co-chair, without mentioning anti-Semitism. It is inconceivable that a conservative organization whose leaders had pledged allegiance to David Duke, Richard Spencer, and the Groypers would have gotten that kind of pass from the media.

But it was hard to cover up the fact that the Women’s March in D.C. had gone to the Commies and the dogs, and could barely manage to turn out a fraction of the million activists it had once unleashed.

With Jews and blacks both boycotting the Women’s March (Black Lives Matter is feuding with its fellow hate group), all that was left were the angry WASP Communists descended from the Mayflower who had to listen to a Chilean feminist collective while cold sleet ran down their pink hats and black signs.

The weather wasn’t on the side of the Women’s March in New York City either.

The New York’s Women’s March was such a disaster that it made the D.C. march look like a success.

In 2017, the Women’s March in New York City had boasted of 400,000 attendees. This year, 400. Media accounts described “hundreds” of attendees. That surely wasn’t what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had been expecting when he arrived at the event to shake hands while wearing black gloves.

Schumer might have been afraid of the cooties of the pink hat brigade. But, more likely, the snow.

Once again, the winter weather defeated the Gaia worshipers who believe that everything from Australian wildfires to the election of President Trump is the expression of Mother Earth’s wrath.

It was cold. It was wet. And there were two competing Women’s Marches in Manhattan.

This year, the two competing marches, one against the organization’s racist leadership and the other for it, were supposed to come together and unite. The weather however had other plans and it began to snow. Just like in D.C., snowflakes began to pepper the snowflakes who wanted to fight global warming.

And the reunion of the two marches at Times Square, where the dueling feminists and racists of the two Women’s Marches could have competed for attention with the El Salvadoran illegal aliens dressed as Disney characters who mug tourists for photos and spare changes, never did take place.

Since there were only a few hundred of them, the illegal aliens dressed as Elsa would have won.

Instead hundreds of marchers had to settle for Senator Schumer waving a red Planned Parenthood sign as the wind tried to tear it out of his hands before he made his way out of the small crowd of white lefties while his African-American bodyguard looked skeptically at them.

Other Women’s Marches didn’t even try.

In Denver, the Women’s March was cancelled. In Akron, the snow forced it indoors. In Eugene, Oregon, the old march of 7,000 had been pared down to 40 people who didn’t have a permit. The Chicago march was noted mainly for its celebration of Leila Khaled, a PFLP terrorist who participated in the Dawson’s Field hijackings of four airplanes that were seen as an inspiration for the attacks of September 11.

It could have been worse. But it’s hard to see how.

The Women’s March ought to be having its moment as the impeachment that the hate group had long demanded is underway. But instead, like so much of the anti-Trump activism, it’s fading away. The Women’s March gained its power from raging suburbanites, as they pull back, the crazies remain.

And, whether they’re waving Communist banners in D.C. or terrorist banners in Chicago, they’re harder to ignore without the protective camouflage that the useful idiots at previous marches offered.

Once the cover was pulled back from the Women’s March leadership, the end was not long in coming.

The weather, the snow, rain, and sleet, didn’t help attendance at this year’s events. Neither did the bigotry of the Women’s March leadership. But the larger story may be the onset of TSD fatigue.

The media and activist groups have spent four years whipping up Democrats into a frenzy of Trump Derangement Syndrome. After a week in which the media was promising the onset of WWIII, without actually delivering, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for the fourth iteration of the march.

All the marchers know that impeachment is doomed. The Impeachment rallies failed. Now the Women’s March, the grandma of all the anti-Trump rallies, failed along with them. And the activist groups and funders behind these hate rallies face a terrifying prospect. What if TDS burnout has set in?

Imagine a political and media landscape in which selling hatred of Trump no longer works?

There’s a reason this year’s big Women’s March drama involved old photos of them in the National Archives, not Trump. The marches are winding down and the participants are worrying about how history will remember them.

Their TDS world is ending and they know they’re history.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Democrats Seek Civil War, But Will Get Revolution

January 22, 2020 By William L. Gensert

Democrats conspired with foreign agents, lied, cheated, and denied due process to Donald Trump. If they were willing to do that to a duly elected president in order to obtain power, what should Americans expect them to do to them should they refuse attempts to be disarmed?

Democrats understand that an armed America can say, “No!” And they can’t have that. If they want to radically change the America extant for more than two centuries, they need to first disarm Americans. And they realize asking nicely is not going to accomplish this.

Therefore, the ever-equable Democrats have suffered a recrudescence of their desire for the disease of civil war… a disease that has lain dormant for more than 160 years.

Democrats will do their utmost to create a situation where blood is spilled and lives are lost to engender this war. They believe that only bloodshed will finally get the people on their side, willing to cede to them the control they need to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”

And they have reached a point where they think they can win........To Read More.....

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

IMF Research on the Adverse Impact of Government Bureaucracy on Private Employment

January 20, 2020 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
 
When I did this video about public-sector compensation almost 10 years ago, I focused on why it is unfair that bureaucrats get much higher levels of compensation than people working the private sector.



Today, let’s consider the economic consequences of excessive bureaucracy.

And what will make this column particularly interesting is that I’ll be citing some research from economists at the International Monetary Fund (a bureaucracy which is definitely not an outpost of libertarian thinking).

The two authors, Alberto Behar and Junghwan Mok, investigated whether nations lowered unemployment rates by employing more bureaucrats.
The contribution of this paper is to investigate the effects of public hiring of workers on labor market outcomes, specifically unemployment and private employment. In particular, does public hiring increase (“crowd in”) private employment or decrease (“crowd out”) private employment? …It is arguably the case that a private-sector job is more desirable than a public-sector job from a public policy point of view…there is evidence that a large government share in economic activity can be negative for long-term growth because of the distortionary effects of taxation, inefficient government spending due in part to rent-seeking or lower worker productivity, and the crowding out of private investment. …Crowding out could occur through a number of channels. Derived labor demand can be affected through crowding out of the product market, possibly via higher taxes, higher interest rates, and competition from state-owned enterprises. It can occur through the labor market, where higher wages, more job security, or a higher probability of finding a public-sector job can make an individual more likely to seek or wait for public-sector employment rather than search for or accept a job in the private sector… Finally, it can occur in the education market, where individuals seek qualifications appropriate for entering the public sector rather than skills needed for productive employment
As you can see, the authors sensibly consider both the direct and indirect effects of public employment.

Yes, hiring someone to be a bureaucrat obviously means that person is employed,
but it also means that resources are being diverted to government.

And that imposes costs on the economy’s productive sector.

So the real question is the net impact.

In their study for the IMF, the authors cite other academic research suggesting that government employment crowds out (i.e., reduces) private employment.
…there is prior evidence that crowding-out effects are sufficiently large to increase unemployment in a number of advanced countries. However, there has hitherto not been a thorough investigation of how public employment affects labor market outcomes in developing countries. We fill this gap in the literature by investigating the effects of public employment on both private employment and on unemployment. An important part of our contribution lies in the assembly of the dataset to expand the number of non-OECD countries… The most related and relevant work to this paper is by Algan et al. (2002), who explore the consequences of public-sector employment for labor market performance. Using pooled cross-section and annual time-series data for 17 OECD countries from 1960 to 2000, they run regressions of the unemployment rate and/or the private-sector employment rate on the public-sector employment rate. Empirical evidence from the employment equation suggests that the creation of 100 public jobs crowds out 150 private-sector jobs.
In the study, the authors look at two main measures of public sector employment.

And, as you can see in Figure 4, they look at data for nations in different regions.


They wisely utilize the broader measure of public employment, which includes the people employed by state-owned enterprises.
We have collected data for up to 194 countries over the period 1988–2011. …Our contribution to the literature includes the assembly of data on public and private employment and other indicators for a wide range of developing and advanced countries. …Definitions of “public sector” are different across countries and organizations, so we choose two definitions and generate corresponding public employment datasets, namely a “narrow” measure also referred to as “public administration” and a “broad” measure. …This dataset includes not only governmental agencies but also state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We call this the ‘broad’ measure of public employment, preserving the term ‘public sector’.
In Figure 7, they use a scatter diagram to show some of the data.

The diagram on the left is most relevant since it shows that private employment (vertical axis) declines as government jobs (horizontal axis) increase.


And when they do the statistical analysis, we get confirmation that government jobs displace employment in the economy’s productive sector.
…all coefficients indicate a very strong negative relationship between public- and private-sector employment rates. For example, 100 new public jobs crowd out 98 private job… Taken together with the unemployment results, public employment just about fully crowds out private-sector employment regardless of the definition, such that a rise in government hiring would be offset by decreases in private employment… Regressions of unemployment on public employment and of private employment on public employment, each of which is based on two definitions of public employment, find robust evidence that public employment crowds out private employment. …Public-sector hiring: (i) does not reduce unemployment, (ii) increases the fiscal burden, and (iii) inhibits long-term growth through reductions in private-sector employment. Together, this would imply that public hiring is detrimental to long term fiscal sustainability.
The final part of the above excerpt is critical.

In addition to not increasing overall employment, government jobs also increase the fiscal burden of government and undermine long-run growth.

So the long-term damage is even greater than the short-run damage.

P.S. The IMF isn’t the only international bureaucracy to conclude that government employment is bad for overall prosperity. A few years ago, I shared research from the European Central Bank which also showed negative macroeconomic consequences from costly bureaucracy.

P.P.S. While I’m usually critical of the IMF because it has a statist policy agenda, it’s not uncommon for the professional economists who work there to produce good research. In the past, I’ve highlight some very good IMF studies on topics such as spending caps, the size of government, taxes and business vitality, fiscal decentralization, the Laffer Curve, and class-warfare taxation.

Obama Vs. Bernie

Daniel Greenfield Tuesday, January 21, 2020 0 Comments @ Sultan Knish Blog

In November, Barack Obama paid a call on George Soros. After maintaining a low profile since leaving office, the former chosen one showed up at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington D.C. where the Democracy Alliance was having its annual conclave to decide how to destroy the United States.

After a long Friday afternoon of hearing from assorted minions, members of the Democracy Alliance, who had contributed at least $200,000 to be part of Soros’ real-life SPECTRE alliance, minus the white cat, trooped into the Grand Ballroom for a “fireside chat” before a private dinner with Valerie Jarrett.

And Obama had a simple message for the mandarins in the Mandarin Oriental who had spent fortunes to elect lefties and transform the country. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it,” he told his radical audience. And warned that the Democrat agenda should not be driven by “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party.”

Soros and the Democracy Alliance’s activist wing elected Obama to implement a radical agenda. Now he was warning his old backers that they were in danger of backing agendas that were just too radical.

The outreach was striking because Obama had tried to keep his distance from George Soros. In an interview, Soros had complained about being frozen out by Obama. “He made one phone call thanking me for my support, which was meant to last for five minutes,” the leftist billionaire whined.

Obama had no interest in letting Soros set his agenda. But now he was trying to set Soros’ agenda.

His sudden call for moderation had a target.

A Politico writeup in November, ‘Waiting for Obama’, noted that, “Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him.”

“If Bernie were running away with it, I think maybe we would all have to say something. But I don't think that's likely. It's not happening,” an anonymous Obama adviser said.

Bernie supporters furiously shot back. Headlines like, "The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself", popped up on Jacobin: the Sandernista equivalent of Pravda, Der Sturmer, and Al Jazeera.

That same month, Deval Patrick, a favorite potential candidate of Valerie Jarrett and other Obamaworlders, suddenly and disastrously jumped into the 2020 race. With a Patrick event attracting two people, Obama switched his focus and began working behind the scenes to support Warren.

By December, Obama was urging Wall Street donors to back Elizabeth Warren. It didn’t work.

Bernie Sanders shot up to second place. And Obama was not counting on Biden to stop him. “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden," he had privately observed.

It’s January and Obamaworlders keep grousing about how to stop Bernie. And going nowhere.

“The strongest argument against Bernie will be showing that you can defeat Donald Trump,” one recently complained. “And he cannot.”

That’s certainly one problem.

Bernie Sanders has zero appeal to anyone except the white lefties who once backed Obama. Meanwhile Obama’s black voters remain solidly behind Biden. Obama’s only real way to stop Bernie would be to call on black voters to solidly support Biden creating a deep racial divide within an already divided party.

But there’s also the personal element. It’s not just Hillary who hates Bernie. The average Democrat operative views the socialist as a foreign element who undermines the party when he doesn’t need it, and is bringing in a ragged mob of radicals to take it over and fundamentally transform it. And, unlike Obama’s radicals, they have no social skills and little interest in working together with anyone else.

The Bernie base views Obama as a sellout. His signature policy trashes ObamaCare. And Obama cares.

Bernie’s rise is Obama’s nightmare. A race between Bernie and Trump leads to two bad outcomes. Either Trump wins, becomes a two-term president, and trashes Obama’s legacy. Or Bernie wins, and trashes Obama’s legacy while purging his allies and staffers from the DNC and the government.

The return of Bernie divides the party the same way he did in 2016. Either he loses and many of his voters stay home. Or he wins and more moderate Democrats become the ones to sit out the race.

And yet the man who had turned the party into his own cult can’t stop the next cult of personality.

The lightworker, the anointed one, the messiah has discovered that not only George Soros, but the earnest young lefties who once swooned for him have moved on. The arc of history is no longer his.

Obama’s comments at the Democracy Alliance’s shindig also a reflect tactical difference between his preference for remaking the system without tearing it down, and Bernie’s call for socialism now. It’s the same old division between working within the system or destroying it that divided the American Left.

The Obama era was the greatest triumph for the radicals, including the Weathermen, who ultimately decided that they could achieve more by working within the system than by setting off bombs. It was also the subject of that ancient argument between Vladimir Lenin and H.G. Wells about revolutions.

That consensus bypassed Bernie, once an obscure socialist crank, whose political life got a new lease when some ex-Obama marketers decided they need a way to cash in when Hillary wouldn’t hire them, and who was then embraced by a new generation of radicals who saw Obama as insufficiently radical.

Bernie’s political philosophy has been massaged to make it more appealing for a new era. But underneath the new embrace of identity politics and open borders, things he once opposed, he’s an unreconstructed radical with no interest in tactics, strategy, and how things work in the real world.

He just wants a revolution. That revolution threatens the hard work of Obama, Soros and many others.

And what does George think?

Earlier, Soros had been hinting that he might support Elizabeth Warren. He picked Hillary over Sanders in 2016. But Our Revolution, Bernie’s dark money organization, planned to solicit money from Soros. Due to the secrecy of both Soros and Our Revolution, it’s hard to know whether Soros ponied up.

But we do know that Our Revolution got its largest contribution of $100,000 from the Sixteen Thirty Fund which is partly funded by George Soros. And the activists powering Sanders, like Zack Exley, have often come through Open Society and other Soros network organizations.

Obama’s pitch to Soros and the rest of the radical donor class was that Bernie’s approach was outside the comfort zone of most Americans. Bernie, in George’s terms, was a bad investment who wouldn’t connect with voters and would hand President Trump another four years in the White House.

Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the squad, and the rest of the old new and new old radicals don’t actually do anything except talk. Bernie’s Medicare-for-All scam was so inept that it unintentionally brought down the campaigns of Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris.

Our Revolution lost a quarter of a million to an email scam. So much for that investment.

The single real-world accomplishment that Cortez has to her name took place outside the House, when she helped scuttle Amazon’s New York City HQ and the tens of thousands of jobs that came with it.

George Soros likes to invest in organizations and people who get things done. Obama wants a successor who will lock in and expand on his legacy. Neither of the two men are likely to get what they want.

Soros has already suggested that he won’t be supporting a primary candidate. Obama has tried two.

Obama is testing the waters. He’s hesitant to act openly because if he comes out against Bernie, and Bernie still sweeps through New Hampshire and Iowa, his credibility will be in ruins. Ever since leaving office, Obama has secretly nurtured the idea that he is the wise man and kingmaker of the party.

But what if he’s not?

Obama’s very real fear is that he’s irrelevant. Black voters will still follow him. Few others will. An endorsement from him would not be a profound game changer, but worth a few percent at best.

Coming out against Bernie would mean testing his brand against, not only Bernie, but Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and dozens of radical Bernie proxies scattered across social media. While Obama vacationed, millennials like Cortez built social media cults of radical narcissism.

And Obama, the former radical narcissist-in-chief, has been out-radicalized and out-narcissicized.

The man who had once defined a political generation of Democrats has, like Bill Clinton, grown old and tired. The routines that Barack and Bill once pulled to seem hip, are passé. The celebrities they posed with are yesterday’s news. Their attempts to revive Kennedyesque political cool have become as antiquated as Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat and JFK’s preppy yachting outfits.

Worse still, Barry hasn’t been bypassed for a younger politician, but a formerly obscure elderly radical.

When your power is rooted not in ideas or principles, but hipness, then you live by the trend and die by it. George picked up Barry as his boy toy when he was a young crush. Now Barry’s old and only good for sonorously reciting clichés in the Mandarin Oriental while Soros uses him to collect another few million.

Obama so often spoke of the future, whom it would belong to, and whom it wouldn’t. Now he faces the fact that the future has passed him by. Whomever the future belongs to, it will not belong to him.

Daniel Greenfieldis a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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