‘Palestinian’ Statehood is America’s Longest Nation Building Project

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

In the spring of ’77, President Jimmy Carter visited the town of Clinton, MA, and called for a ‘Palestinian’ state. Why did Carter choose a town of 15,000 at a town hall where most of the attendees were asking him questions about the economy to announce what would become the single longest running nation-building project in American history?

No one knows.

But almost 50 years, 7 presidents and countless billions of dollars later, there’s still no ‘Palestinian’ state. And we are still nation-building that terror state in the name of peace.

Even as America struggled through a recession, Carter traveled around insisting on the urgent need of “the Palestinians to have a homeland”. The ‘Palestinians’ repaid him by hijacking a German plane that included American passengers and holding them hostage in Somalia.

After futilely pleading with Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad to come to America, Carter finally met him in Switzerland, praised him as a “moderate leader” who had demonstrated “good will” and called for a “resolution of the Palestine problem and a homeland for the Palestinians.”

Carter nodded along while Assad made multiple antisemitic statements and then acknowledged that when it came to the ‘Palestinian’ issue, “I have not studied it.”

America was dragged into 48 years of disastrous ‘Palestinian’ nation building because Carter decided to call for a ‘Palestinian’ state, by his admission, without having studied the issue.

Why did Carter call for a ‘Palestinian’ state if he hadn’t even studied the issue? A year earlier, the Soviet Union and its Muslim and Communist allies, primarily Syria, had launched a major propaganda push that climaxed in a UN resolution (preceded by a bomb being planted at the UN) calling for a ‘two-state solution’ that was vetoed by the Ford administration.

Carter, knowing nothing, but eager to distinguish his foreign policy from Ford, played up to Syria and called for a ‘Palestinian’ homeland. Even though Carter knew nothing going in, he made that failed ‘nation building’ project into his defining legacy, until he eventually embraced Hamas.

(After being forced to leave office, Carter’s ties to the Pakistani BCCI bank which was also accused of aiding ‘Palestinian’ terrorism may have played a role in his growing radicalism.)

But bad ideas, no matter how poorly thought out, never go away, they just get passed around like a leaking ball from party to party.

In his second year in office, President Ronald Reagan delivered a baffling TV address announcing the ‘Reagan peace plan’ and claiming that “the military losses of the PLO have not diminished the yearning of the Palestinian people for a just solution of their claims”.

A few days later, Reagan awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Philip Habib, a Kissinger crony, the son of Lebanese immigrants who negotiated the PLO ‘ceasefire’ that resulted in a disastrous peacekeeping mission that would cost the lives of 220 Marines.

Habib had served as a useful catspaw for King Fahd of Saudi Arabia who used him to sideline American diplomats even as the Saudis allowed him to play ‘mediator’. Much like Qatar and Hamas today, the Saudis used the PLO to gain leverage over America and Israel.

Both Israel and the PLO rejected Reagan’s peace plan, and more hawkish members of the Reagan administration opposed it, but Carter and Ford praised it in a joint op-ed. The two former presidents had become ‘friends’ after visiting Egypt and urged Reagan “to commit every political resource” to the “tiring, bewildering, and even politically dangerous” task.

Wisely, Reagan did not listen to them and stake all his political resources to create a terror state. His vice president, George H.W. Bush, however proved less wise. And in his final year in office, with Reagan fading and some staffers actively undermining him, his secretary of state announced the Shultz Initiative. “The whole history of the Middle East shows that violence — terrorism, war — just has not worked,” he claimed. “It is negotiations that work.”

The history of his proposal would prove just the opposite.

After the Saudis and other Arab Muslim states dragged the United States into the Gulf War, the first Bush administration followed up with the Madrid Conference, which for the first time had the PLO running the ‘Palestinian’ side of the negotiations.

That led to the Oslo Accords under Bill Clinton and the creation of an ‘autonomous’ territory that, much like in the original Reagan proposal, wasn’t supposed to be a state, but would be anyway.

Contrary to Secretary of State Shultz’s claims, terrorism had worked quite well. And it worked so well that Yasser Arafat and the PLO saw no reason to stop. It worked so well that Hamas realized that if it killed enough people, it would overtake the PLO and dominate it.

And that too is happening.

Half a century after Carter reacted to a UN resolution by calling for a terrorist state, terrorism is worse than ever. The on and off peace negotiations involving the United States that led the world and the region to the current state of disaster have been taking place for 37 years.

And none of it has worked.

The first Bush and Clinton administrations tried legitimizing the PLO. The second Bush administration tried democracy leading to elections that Hamas won followed by the Hamas takeover of Gaza. The Obama administration tried negotiating a ceasefire with Hamas.

11 years later, the Trump administration presided over another ceasefire with Hamas.

After flying to Israel, Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed concerns about Hamas violating the ceasefire and claimed that “the way that we’re going to get to peace is to focus on the future” and achieve a “long-term, durable peace between Israel and Gaza” while Jared Kushner insisted that “everyone believes that it is possible to create something better in Gaza.”

Vance then finished by holding out for a “miracle”.

Searching for miracles or dreams of a beautiful future is how we got into nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for that matter in the West Bank and Gaza, it’s how seven administrations and now an eighth have been suckered into the same failed nation building project in an Islamic terrorist territory that for all the fantasies, dreams and cash has never produced peace.

And never will.

What none of the administrations understood was that the root cause wasn’t territory, it was Jihad. There was never a ‘Palestinian’ people. It was a marketing term invented by the USSR to legitimize the cause of its terrorists. The only cause there is not statehood, but the destruction of Israel in order to establish an Islamic state, not only over Israel, but around the world.

After a generation of fighting these same terrorists, who killed thousands of Americans on September 11, not because of land or statehood, but to create a global Islamic caliphate, our leaders still believe that what the Islamic terrorists want is a negotiated settlement.

Even though Hamas had named its attack ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ after the mosque in Jerusalem, making it abundantly clear that like Al Qaeda’s war on America, motivated by the alleged provocation of American troops too close to the sanctity of Mecca and Medina, this was a religious conflict and not amenable to any negotiations, peace plans or settlements.

Before we made the catastrophic mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost us the lives of some of our best young men, we made that same mistake in the West Bank and Gaza.

And we’re still making it because we refuse to recognize the motivations of the enemy.

Nation building in the Muslim world cannot and will not work, no matter how many experts are put on the job, because the Islamic religion of the terrorists is not, as too many presidents have insisted on believing for 48 years, a mere technicality underneath which they are just like us and want the same things that we do. If that were so, peace would have been here a long time ago.

The issue is that we have very different definitions of such foundational concepts as “peace”, “nation” and “rights”, and in the Islamic lexicon these definitions fundamentally exclude a long term settlement based on any terms other than the submission of non-Muslims to Islam.

And that’s been our problem for the longest time.

George Washington, America’s first president, left with a weak hand by British pressure and Muslim piracy, initiated the ‘Treaty of Peace and Friendship’ signed by Adams which appeased by the Jihadist pirates by claiming that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen.”

The appeasement proved futile. The Muslim regime did not even bother recording this plea for tolerance. And Jefferson refused to continue appeasing pirates. When he asked why the violence continued, Jefferson was told that Islam “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Jefferson went to war. Not to teach them about democracy, or plead for tolerance, or to nation build afterward, but to deal them a blow hard enough that they would stop attacking us.

In the process, Thomas Jefferson made America a force to be reckoned with.

That is the only kind of ‘nation building’ that works. Fools build up nations for our enemies. Wise leaders build up our own nation. The ‘Palestinian’ nation building project is the fool’s errand of the Carter administration, bequeathed like a curse down to 7 administrations, all of which came to believe that the only hope for the future rested in achieving the happiness of our enemies.

In the 60 Minutes interview, Jared Kushner insisted that Israel has “to find a way to help the Palestinian people thrive and do better.” That’s a foolish mission for Israel and more so for us.

As the 50th anniversary of Carter’s disastrous proposal approaches, it’s time for America to stop building nations for terrorists and start trying to build our nation for our own people once again.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Nothing Is Ever As It Appears In China: Military Intimidation

By Rich Kozlovich 

It appears China's top boss, Xi, who over the years positioned himself as the new Mao, with absolute power.... and now..... he's in trouble. "The CCP is more of a mafia organization than a political party", and many of it's ranking members are part of the CCP's royalty, kids who had prominent and powerful CCP parents, in his case his father.    

He's purging communist party members, prominent military leaders, many of which were his biggest supporters.  Prominent members are ignoring meetings, the economy is in trouble, and given the recent events taking place in China over trade, and what seems to be Xi's diminishing power  I originally published this article on July 26th, 2021, but for some reason it's been hit everyday this week, which means it's being passed around, so I think this is worth another look.

One more thing.  For those who've read about Xi's history it becomes clear he's never been the brightest pebble in the brook.  Because of connections he failed upward, and he's been and amazingly successful schemer. 

First, we have to understand that whenever you read anything about China you must see past what's written. China is a complicated country, with a long and profound history. China's culture is considered the world's oldest culture by many, and China houses most of its population, which is one quarter of the world’s population, in an area about the size of everything east of the Mississippi River in the United States, and they are ethnic Han. The rest of China is sparsely populated and mostly occupied by other ethnic groups that hate the Han and consider the central government illegitimate, and the general population has grown to doubt the legitimacy of the central government as a result of all the incompetence and corruption.

The government’s one child policy has created a large male/female imbalance in the population as a result there isn’t enough women to go around. This creates serious social consequences and dissatisfaction. Pollution is terrible and the government is spending huge amounts of money to keep everyone working, including building cities that no one occupies, and the banking system has troubles the government hides.

What is clear is the Chinese leadership is striving for two things. Social and economic stability, world dominance in both and continued central control of all things in the hands of the communist leadership. 

Make no mistake about it, they’re still commies, and commies are dictators, and so what do dictatorships do to distract the population from their problems? They start a war! Only this is far more problematic than it was decades ago.

 So who do you start a ruckus with? Taiwan, Japan, India or the maybe the Philippines? 

There are a handful of tiny Islands off the coast of China known as the Diaoyu in China and the Senkaku in Japan which are barren and uninhabited. These five islands “encompass a grand total of seven square kilometers” and were won from the Chinese in the first Sino-Japanese war of 1895. But after 1968 the Chinese decided that they wanted them back; after it was discovered “the islands may be sitting on top of huge oil and gas reserves”, which China has none.  A lot of coal, but no oil, or at best very little.

This gives the Chinese a potentially legitimate gripe, especially when you consider what the Japanese did to them in WWII and were then the losers of that war. By pushing this they then bring into play far more than these islands and its potential wealth. They create a Munich Moment. The real goal of the Chinese government is to be the big dog in the South China Sea and ultimately all of South East Asia. 

If they push this and win; it seriously weakens American influence, militarily and economically. The rest of the countries in the area then can be much more easily bullied into falling into line, including India and the Philippines, and of course even Australia.  But all these threats and seeming preparations for military action is triggering a backlash.  Taiwan is now building their own submarine, bypassing China's successful efforts blocking Taiwan's efforts to acquire one from other countries. 

Taiwan is also seeking "allies" in other non-neighboring nations like Lithuania:

Taiwan will set up its first office in Europe using the name “Taiwan,” drawing a rebuke from China and praise from the U.S. as the island democracy seeks to strengthen its diplomatic presence around the globe in the face of pressure from Beijing............. Taiwan’s other diplomatic outposts on the continent are under the name of “Taipei.”  “Lithuania has firmly believed in universal values such as democracy, freedom and human rights, and is a like-mined partner of Taiwan,”.....Taiwan and Lithuania are both at the strategic front line to safeguard democratic and free regimes.......Lithuania has firmly believed in universal values such as democracy, freedom and human rights, and is a like-mined partner of Taiwan.”

An outright war with these nations isn't going to happen, in spite of the threat to use nuclear weapons against Japan if they oppose an attack on Taiwan, with China saying they will make an exception in their first use policy in the case of Japan.  

And of course everyone believes them when they say they have a first use policy.  Right?  

The result?  

The World Is Laughing at the CCP’s ‘Stupidity’: Taiwan Official on China’s Threats to Nuke Japan.  

"Japan’s annual defense white paper issued on July 12, for the first time expressed concern for Taiwan’s stability, linking it to Japan’s national security."  

Article 9 of their Constitution prohibits war as a means to settle international disputes, however, they do have a Self Defense Force, albeit with restrictions.  Article 9 is being reinterpreted to understand that self defense my require acting in defense of allies, and they're building ships to do it.   Their conclusion?  

 “There are two sides … you can either join the West or you can join China,” 

According to Geopolitical Futures:

"Japan, France and the U.S. held trilateral drills on Japanese soil for the first time over the weekend. Australia joined in on Saturday for naval drills. Among all European powers expressing renewed interest in Indo-Pacific military affairs lately, France has perhaps the biggest direct interests at stake." 

While that's caused some turmoil in Japan, this kind of rhetoric from China gives impetus to such moves, and I've explained why I don't think there will be an attack on Taiwan in this June 13th article, and the conclusions I state there are now playing out.  

• Beijing Warns Japan Over Defense of Taiwan: ‘China Is No Longer What it Was’
• Japan Suggests Deploying Forces to Protect Taiwan from Chinese Invasion
• Beijing’s Mouthpiece Calls for Missile Strikes on Australia
• Japan's Road: Past, Present and Future

What they are doing is Waging Gray-Zone Warfare:

"......... gray-zone warfare can be divided into three levels: low, medium, and high. He said that the ‘high’ level includes nuclear posturing, military threats, large-scale clandestine operations that ‘create fait accompli situations,’ the use of special forces to deny mobilization of the target country’s military, and support of large-scale proxy wars........... the CCP’s actions have reached this highest level of gray-zone warfare.”............

 “China’s deployment of maritime militia around Philippine-claimed features in the West Philippine Sea and the rest of the South China Sea is an example. But Bautista, who is also former executive director of National Task Force West Philippine Sea, said gray zone tactics involved other means. ‘Even as we speak, war is being fought in the gray zone. In information and propaganda realm, economic and other areas.”

Infringement on the territorial waters of the Philippines, even using naval vessels to force the Philippines to allow fishing in their waters.  This another example of how the CCP simply ignores international law.  Understand this:  The CCP will honor no agreement or treaty once they decide it's inconvenient, just as they've done regarding all their violations of the Sino-British Joint Declaration regarding Hong Kong, which I will address later.

They practice what's been called "object lesson wars", such as the 1962 Sino-Indian War, which they've reenacted, as explained in this piece from the Jamestown Institute:  Expanding and Escalating the China-Bhutan Territorial Dispute, constantly claiming some piece of land or even an entire sea, as in the , belongs to them. 

("Himalayan squabbling. The end of winter in the Himalayas means the return of squabbling season along the Line of Actual Control, the Indian-Chinese disputed border. Both India and China appear to be positioning for another summer of skirmishes, reportedly doing drills and building out new infrastructure." From Geopolitical Futures)

The lessons to be gleaned from the 1962 Sino-Indian War, is the Chinese think they have a right to "punish" nations like India, Japan and the Philippines when those nations stand in their way or have something they want.   In the case regarding their invasion of India, the Indian military was ill-equipped and unprepared to deal with the Chinese.  Being communists, they play the bully.  China was the aggressor, as they were in Tibet, which I will deal with this in another post.  There was no declaration of war.  It was a sneak attack.  The world isn't going to be fooled now. 

Their goal is to neuter America's military status, not only in South East Asia, but worldwide, and it's a threefold attack.  Military, diplomatic and economic, all of which I will address later.  Militarily that's not so easy.  Below is a map published by Geopolitical Futures defining America's assets in South East Asia.

 

 

This whole thing is symptomatic of the problem with the Chinese government. 

• They have a huge economy that may not be real.
  
• They have a banking system that's an illusion. 
• They have a huge national debt. 
• They absolutely need trade with world to maintain their economy.
• They don't have oil reserves. 
• They have a huge military that may not be effective. 
• They have competent economic neighbors in Japan, India and the Philippines, to whom China has made threatening moves. Economies they don’t really want to compete with because they may not be capable. 
• They have a central planning system that is clueless, and an economy predicated on total employment, not profitability.  They were smart enough to leave Hong Kong alone because it was a huge money machine for the government, but they won't allow the nation to go down that path because it would destroy the elitists that run the country. A course of action they've now abandoned because they fear that kind of freedom Hong Kong had would spread to the mainland. 
• They have serious internal problems with the general population, many of whom consider the central government illegitimate and staggeringly corrupt. 

The problem still remains that has been foundational of all of their problems since Mao. They’re still commies! They think like commies, they act like commies, ergo, they’re commies, and commies are now, and have always been, aggressive, unreasonable, murderous and failures at basic economics and human rights.  Both of which I will address in other pieces.  And they're staggeringly corrupt. 

Pay attention to this whole South East Asia economic situation. There is a reason China is expanding it's navy, including air craft carriers.  It's all an effort to instill an economic hegemony through Asia via military intimidation.  There are serious internal and/or external events in the offing with China that will impact the whole world, and the world is taking notice and recognizing China is the world's biggest threat, and one thing all this military intimidation has done is make everyone aware of how dangerous they are, and the world is going to react.  

Dem Officials are Incentivizing Anti-ICE Violence

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

At a meeting with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Rep. Robert Garcia announced that the House Democrats on the Oversight Committee would be launching a ‘Master ICE tracker’. This follows the previous removal of ICE trackers by Apple and Facebook after the apps and sites tracking activity by immigration law enforcement personnel led to multiple violent confrontations with illegal alien activists, ugly acts of violence and at least one death so far.
These confrontations are not just the work of random extremists, but of a leftist activist base supported by top Democrats and the media which have promoted ICE trackers, distributed the contact information for groups interfering with ICE arrests and subsidized the perpetrators.

Before Carlitos Ricardos Parias, an illegal alien TikTok influencer, was arrested in an alleged car ramming assault on federal agents in Los Angeles, he had received a ‘Certificate of Appreciation’ from Councilmember Curren D. Price Jr for his “tireless efforts to safeguard our neighborhoods from illegal raids”.

Such close cooperation between illegal alien rioters and local Democrat officials first attracted national attention during what some have called ‘Newsom’s Riots’ when leftist groups funded by the governor and other top Dems set off violent confrontations in L.A.. While the riots died down once the National Guard took decisive action, the violence has continued on a smaller scale as the Parias arrest shows with local confrontations by activists backed by California Democrats.

The situation is much more blatant in Portland, Oregon, where the city council unanimously endorsed the ‘Protect Portland Initiative’. Mayor Keith Wilson declared that the move reaffirms that the city is a “proud sanctuary city in a sanctuary state” for illegal aliens. Criminals.

The resolution imposes close oversight on the Portland police to prevent any cooperation with ICE federal law enforcement and to refuse any assistance to ICE personnel, and further orders officers to challenge immigration law enforcement personnel, to ‘log’ information about ICE officers, including ‘badge numbers’ to feed into an ICE tracker, and to protect “protesters”, “medics” and “legal observers”: the latter of which are categories used by Antifa rioters.

Portland police have been recorded shielding rioters from federal law enforcement and coordinating efforts to identify ICE personnel with them. Antifa and illegal alien rioters operate with local police as their human shields in an extension of the illegal ‘sanctuary city’ concept from harboring illegal aliens citywide to providing cover for rioters during confrontations.

This is not just illegal, it is the definition of an insurrection. States and localities providing tactical support and cover for militia groups and other irregulars engaged in attacks on federal personnel have historically met the legal test for being engaged in an insurrection.

California and Oregon Dems are playing a dangerous game, coming closer to a confrontation between local and federal law enforcement by drawing the police into a fight with ICE.

Local California elected officials have pressured police departments to confront ICE since this summer, they’ve urged police chiefs to interfere in arrests and demand identification from federal immigration law enforcement in order to pass on that information to leftist groups who then target those officers personally. They’re passing unenforceable laws ‘banning’ ICE personnel from wearing masks during arrests while leaving it to the police officers on the street to try and enforce them.

All of these activities have moved the status of the so-called sanctuary states and cities from passive refusals to cooperate with immigration authorities to direct confrontations, for now through radical proxies like the rioters and trackers, but that given enough incidents are likely to escalate into ‘blue’ on ‘blue’ violence. And that outcome is exactly the goal they are seeking.

Police officers are being told that their job is to ‘protect’ illegal aliens and rioters, and that federal enforcement, including the deployment of the National Guard is ‘unconstitutional’, and it will only take one or two police officers buying into this insurrectionist and secessionist rhetoric to trigger an incident on the street that begins with a physical confrontation and ends in a firefight.

That will not be a “tragic accident” or an “unfortunate incident” that Democrats and their media will blame on President Trump’s “overreach” and “militarization”, but the result of their plans.

In Portland, the scene of the worst anti-ICE violence, city officials and their local allies have worked to force immigration enforcement out through a variety of means, including zoning regulations and using a nearby housing project and its inhabitants as human shields.

A decade ago, REACH Community Development, a housing nonprofit, plunked down a housing project named Gray’s Landing across the street from where an ICE facility is now located. REACH is run by Margaret Salazar, a former member of the Biden-Harris transition team.

In an interview, Salazar has said that she supports the anti-ICE protests.

The housing project appeared there a few years after ICE leased the site of its current facility in what the New York Times fancifully describes as “a showcase for the state’s history of innovative urban design.” In reality, the ICE facility is in a generic office park across the street from a machine tool shop, right by an overpass, and in the vicinity of the kind of ugly new modernist buildings that cities slap together to attract hipsters to their slums. It’s hard to know whether Gray’s Landing set up shop there to sabotage the ICE facility or because it was cheap.

Gray’s Landing has been appealing for help from what it falsely describes as “Federal violence” and begs for support for “seniors, families, and veterans” from “violent tactics” by Federal agents. As its people know quite well, Gray’s Landing is not dealing with “clean up” costs and violence because ICE is there, but because rioters in support of illegal aliens keep attacking the facility. If there were no riots, there would be no ‘clean up’ and no “chemical agents”.

But the propaganda is a key part of the campaign to oust the ICE facility by abusing zoning regulations, overloading the facility’s ability to transport illegal alien criminals, while then hitting it with zoning violations because the criminals inside it are being detained too long according to the rioters and the police who have been turned into their accomplices to back up their claims.

Democrats and their rioter allies have manufactured a crisis to protect illegal alien criminals.

The political, regulatory, lawfare and street assaults on ICE are a multi-front war to protect a form of organized crime, human trafficking and illegal border invasion, that the Democrats disproportionately benefit from. And California and Oregon Dems are testing out strategies that will be copied by their colleagues across the country as part of a campaign of insurrection.

The anti-ICE violence is not random, it’s not extremist, it’s coming from the top down. It’s a coordinated insurrection and it should be treated like one.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Why Doesn't The Precautionary Principle Apply Here?

Precautionary double standards - Wind turbines kill birds and harm people. Why doesn’t the “precautionary principle” apply?

 Rich Kozlovich 

 

Editor's Note:  I originally published this on June 19,2013, and was updated on 6/20/2013 with input from Paul Driessen. None of the links work any longer work. RK

Jessica Marszelek, federal politics reporter for Australia’s News Limited Network, recently posted an article titled, “Australia: Wind power 'terrorising' rural communities.” Some 150 people turned up for a three-hour rally at Canberra’s Parliament House, she reported, to express their concern about the health effects of wind turbines.

The residents from small towns around the country complain that the giant turbines cause “a constant rumbling and pulsing in their heads and a feeling of oppressive anxiety,” she noted. “Everyday farmers” are upset over growing numbers of turbines in their communities. 

“Retired Naval electronics engineering officer and beef farmer” David Mortimer receives Aus$12,000 a year to allow these avian Cuisinarts on his land, and 17 more are planned. However, Mr. Mortimer says he now “suffers night-time panic attacks, acute anxiety, heart palpitations, tinnitus, earaches, headaches and angina-like pains, and his wife has dizzy spells.”

Doctors can’t find anything wrong, but the problems continue, and he claims that he gets “this sensation of absolute acute anxiety, and it feels like someone is pushing an x-ray blanket over me and weighting me down into the chair and I can’t get out. We’ve got this constant turmoil, constant pulsing in our head, constant rumbling,” he continues, and is afraid the added windmills will kill him and his wife.

Clean Energy Council Policy Director Russell Marsh dismissed the claims, saying no international research has confirmed the health impacts attributed to wind power. One rally attendee said there is “not enough research into the effects of wind energy.”

I don’t know whether more research needs to be done – though the dearth of such studies seems unjustifiable – or if these monsters of the skyline really are causing any or all of the health problems these people are suffering. However, there is a monumental lack of consistency in all of this.

These are essentially the same kinds of complaints, comments and anecdotal evidence that the green movement repeatedly raises over just about every chemical on the market, and every drilling, pipeline and other hydrocarbon development proposal they dislike. These are the same speculative, anecdotal arguments that prompted governments all over the world to pass anti-chemical regulations such as the European Union’s costly, burdensome and complex regulatory system known as REACH.

 

In the USA, REACH has inspired the Safe Chemicals Act of 2011 ( SCA), which is intended to replace the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), supposedly to “modernize” the country’s chemical laws. In promoting the bill, the late Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said it would impose “a mandate on companies to confirm safety before chemicals reach the market.” 

 

In short, he wanted to impose the Precautionary Principle (PP), which asserts two precepts.

• First, all products must be proven totally safe under all circumstances before they can be used – which is physically and scientifically impossible (and the greens know it). It’s like demanding that spouses prove they aren’t cheating on their mates; it can’t be done. 
• Second, even if there is no scientific evidence of harm, everyone should assume there is harm and forbid the sale and use of – well, just about everything.

As one observer noted, with the Precautionary Principle, “no evidence is needed that something is harmful or even could be harmful.” In many cases, no amount of scientific evidence is ever enough to counter the argument that a refinery, pipeline, nuclear power plant or other technology  is “not proven safe” beyond all doubt – even if it is “astronomically unlikely” that a particular harm would occur.

“The Precautionary Principle insists that no new technology should be permitted until it can be shown that it will pose no threat to human health or the environment,” environmental analyst Paul Driessen adds, “even if there is no evidence that cause-and-effect dangers actually exist.” 

 

This too is impossible.

The PP “focuses on the risks of using chemicals and technologies – but never on the risks of not using them,” Driessen notes. “It highlights risks that a technology might cause, but ignores the risks that the technology would reduce or prevent.” 

This brings me to the thrust of my concern. Why aren’t these assertions of adverse health effects from wind turbines – especially from citizens who are receiving royalties for having turbines on their property – just as important as wildly speculative claims by green activists regarding insecticides and other chemicals?  Why isn’t the Precautionary Principle being applied in this case?

We absolutely know these monsters are killing at least 573,000 birds every year, including some 83,000 eagles, hawks and other raptors – in clear violation of US laws. Other estimates put the toll at closer to 13,000,000 birds and bats annually. Why are the “precautionary” activists stone-cold silent about that? 

Larry Katzenstein, in his chapter in the book Silent Spring at 50, credits Rachel Carson’s work as the inspiration for the so-called “principle.” The PP can certainly be traced to Europe, where it was first brought up in the context of the 1969 Swedish Environmental Protection Act. That’s probably why the “principle” is so deeply entrenched in the EU, compared to the rest of the world, and was included in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. 

As Katzenstein points out:

 

“In the united States Silent Spring’s popularity spurred enactment of key federal laws that embody aspects of precaution regulation: the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act; the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act; the Safer Drinking Water Act, Environmental Pesticides Control Act, Toxic Substances Control Act and Endangered Species Act.” The PP may be a European creation, but “it was inspired by Silent Spring, as was REACH.”

Rachel Carson’s real legacy, the Precautionary Principle, has become a potent weapon for anti-technology activists. The problem with regard to consistency get larger as we come to realize that whatever they support is permitted; whatever they oppose violates the precautionary principle. They support windmills; therefore there is no violation. They oppose fracking; therefore it violates the principle.

Moreover, as Driessen has observed, eco-activists “never use the precautionary dictum to control regulatory excess, by insisting that regulators refrain from implementing new regulations, policies or energy programs, until they can prove their proposed actions will not harm people, wildlife or the environment.” In the view of activists and regulators, regulations exist to delay, block or destroy things they oppose. The fact that regulatory actions may well cause prolonged energy deprivation, poverty, unemployment, disease, malnutrition or premature death is irrelevant to them. 

Returning to where we started: Why do “eco-minded” activists, regulators and politicians fail to use the Precautionary Principle to assess the harmful effects of wind turbines on birds and bats, and thus on insects and other pests that these creatures control? Why do they fail to consider the impacts that constant subsonic noise and vibrations from wind turbines have on human health and welfare?   

 

Because these are deliberate oversights!

The hard reality is that the green movement does not care about facts, wildlife or humans – and logical consistency is totally alien to them – because advancing environmentalism as the secular religion of urban atheists is all that matters. Green elites “know” what is best for all of humanity. The Precautionary Principle is merely another weapon to promote junk science and Hard Green ideologies, in order to destroy every advancement mankind has made over the last 100 years – advancements that have given us better, longer, healthier lives than at any other time in human history – and keep others from enjoying them.

We need to understand that and stop pandering to these misfits. Why is that so difficult to grasp?

The October I Owned the October Surprise

Jack Cashill Oct 29, 2025 @ Jack's Substack 

As this October winds to a close I find myself reflecting back to October 2008, the month I might have changed the course of American history but—spoiler alert—did not. In September of that year, I stumbled onto the likelihood that candidate Barack Obama commissioned terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers to put in superior prose the memoir Obama proved incapable of writing himself, the 1995 Dreams from My Father.

For Obama the revelation that Ayers was his muse would have been doubly problematic. For one, it would have dispelled the notion, widely believed among the literati, that Obama was about to become “the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln.” For another, more importantly, it would prove Obama lied boldly during a primary debate when he dismissed Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” In fact, the communist Ayers lived inside Obama’s brain.

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My thesis, conceded New Yorker editor and Obama biographer David Remnick, “if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of his candidacy.”

After some preliminary articles in WND.com, I knew that to make my case before the 2008 election, I needed considerable space in a prominent conservative publication. Unfortunately, establishment conservatives had become cautious to the point of cowardly—especially on the issue of race.

After much back and forth, Human Events punted on my research. The National Review did too. The FOX producers downstairs showed interest, but the suits upstairs did not. The once bold American Spectator waffled and then waved the white flag.

The feckless response of the Weekly Standard, a publication for which I occasionally wrote, echoed the others: “An interesting piece, but I’m rather oversubscribed at the moment, the length is considerable, and cutting would not do it justice. (Also, we had a long, rather critical, piece on Obama’s ouevre not too long ago.) So permit me to decline with thanks for allowing me take a look.” The kind of editors who would use a word like “oeuvre” in the heat of an election proved themselves so perfectly disdainful of Donald Trump that they oeuvred themselves out of business.

As I was about to despair, Thomas Lifson, publisher of the upstart American Thinker, came to my rescue. In 3700 words, I was able to summarize most of what I had learned to date: Obama’s failed publishing history, his lack of any prior quality work, the stunning parallels in imagery and style with Ayers’s books, and the often identical arguments.

My claims enraged those of the Left who bothered to read them. Wrote Remnick in his 2010 Obama biography The Bridge, “Cashill’s assertions might well have remained a mere twinkling in the Web’s farthest lunatic orbit had it not been for the fact that more powerful voices hoped to give his theory wider currency.” No voice would be more powerful than that of Rush Limbaugh, a man who haunted the liberal imagination the way Kong did Skull Island’s.

On October 10, at noontime, I checked my voice messages only to discover my inbox was full. The first voice mail explained it all, “Are you listening? Rush is talking about you.” Limbaugh was playing audio excerpts from Dreams and commenting on them. The one that triggered my name was this, “A steady attack on the White race, the constant recitation of black people’s brutal experience in this country served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal responsibility . . . . “

“Stop the tape,” said Rush “What is this? Ballast? He doesn’t talk this way.” Ayers, a one time merchant seaman, did talk that way. “You know,” Rush continued, “there are stories out there, he may not have written this book. There’s a guy named Jack Cashill . . . . “

Observed Remnick, whose chief hobby seems to be imputing racism to people who live west of 10^th Avenue, called Rush’s remarks one of the “most racist insinuations of the campaign.” He concluded that our collective “libel about Obama’s memoir—the denial of literacy, the denial of authorship—had a particularly ugly pedigree.”

Through some combination of naiveté and courage, author and attorney Andy McCarthy came to my defense in National Review Online. McCarthy called my analysis of Obama’s Dreams “thorough, thoughtful and alarming – particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama’s memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers’ memoir.”

The Left quickly pounced on McCarthy and the National Review, not with counter arguments but with ad hominems. The Atlantic turned to emerging black superstar Ta-Nehisi Coates to put McCarthy in his place. He extracted one of McCarthy’s quotes in my defense and introduced it with the barb, “How desperate can it get? This desperate.” The Atlantic added another quick review that began thusly, “At The Corner, Andy McCarthy evaluates Cashill’s argument and proves himself to be an idiot.”

Before the emergence of Donald Trump, Republicans reflexively folded their hands when the Left played the race card. As the weeks wound down to the election, I found myself mouthing the lyrics to that old Randy Travis song, “Is it still over? Are we still through? Since my phone still ain’t ringing, I assume it still ain’t you.” Despite my efforts to prime the pump, I did not receive a single call from anyone in the print or television media—right, left, or center.

In the years to come, all new evidence strengthened my case. In April 2011, when testing the presidential waters, Trump told Sean Hannity, “I heard [Obama] had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard. He wrote a book [Dreams] that was better than Ernest Hemingway, but the second book [Audacity of Hope] was written by an average person.”

“You suspect Bill Ayers?” said Hannity.

“I said, ‘Bill Ayers wrote [Dreams],’” Trump replied.

The media ignored Trump’s claim and zeroed in on his birth certificate challenge. The authorship challenge, they knew, could blow up in their faces.

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What Happened to Climate Change, the "Existential Threat" of our Time?

Critically Thinking about alarmists

By John Droz Oct 29, 2025 @ Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues  

As readers know, I periodically repost another author’s column that I believe is consistent with my Critical Thinking objective.

This is a good example from Ron Hart who frequently has good insights.

FYI: interestingly, Bill Gates just publicly backed off of his climate alarmist rhetoric. Not surprisingly Bill never had a hard Science degree, so his climate commentaries were based on political science, not Real Science.

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Just 10 short months ago, Biden and Kamala told us that “Climate Change,” closely followed by “White Supremacy,” were the two biggest threats to America.

Global warming is the perfect fashionable worry for you liberals so you can talk about it like you know something about science, seem deeply concerned to make you look empathetic, and so you can tax other people to act like you are doing something about it – all with no quantifiable metrics to ever dispute your “grave” concerns.

Apparently, we have won the war on “global warming” the same way government “wins” most wars, like Covid in 2020 and the Vietnam War in 1975; they got too expensive and we got tired of hearing about them, so we just declared them over.

Can you remember any of the fearful warnings that government rained on us that panned out? The Domino Theory in Vietnam, Acid Rain, Smog, Holes in the Ozone Layer, Nuclear plants shuttered, Y2K, Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, the marauding Muslim armies that would come to our shores if we did not fight them “over there…” Then came the Russian Hoax, and Draconian Covid-shutdowns.

Those in power tend to scare us with fake fears, and then they act like they solved the problem. Government’s mantra seems to be “Everything is worse than you think, but I can fix it.” The murkier and more pretentiously moral the “crisis,” the better; then they set out to solve those mythical problems of their own creation. Every answer Dems come up gives them more power and taxes us more.

Maybe the earth just warms and cools over time. No need for hucksters to make money from it. Put in words Dems might understand, maybe the earth’s temperature is just “transitioning.”

To believe all the climate change propaganda, you must subscribe to the following: The Earth is warming, man is causing it (a fraction of a degree), it’s not cyclical and politicians are so smart that if we give them trillions more dollars, they can change the temperature of the Earth.

Bartender-turned-thought-leader of the Democrat party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has turned her considerable intellect to opining on climate change. With the precision that can only come with $100,000 of student loan debt for a dubious liberal arts degree from a party school, she said at a climate forum in D.C. years ago that global warming “will cause the world to end in 12 years.”

The other global warming leader was 22-year-old Greta Thunberg. She has since turned her condescending scowl to helping Hamas. She demands the creation of a Palestinian state. You know, so it can be destroyed in 12 years by climate change.

Leftist dogma defies reason. We are led to believe that the polar ice caps are breaking up, but the Clintons are still together.

Time and facts are tricky things. Glaciers are now gaining ice. Miami is not underwater. The United Nations, which is promoting global warming as a shakedown excuse, leaked a U.N. study that said solar activity played a greater role in global warming than originally thought. Wow — the sun? It’s always the last place you think to look, ain’t it?

Gavin Newsom even tried to blame the Pacific Palisades wildfires on global warming (not that his policies have limited the water in the area to only hot tubs and bongs). Then it turns out the fires were started by an Uber driver. Whoops, wrong again. If Newsom is ever right about something, it will be one in a row. To err is human, but to blame it on others shows potential for presidential Democrat nominees.

The media and the Left bully people into believing the theory by saying, “The science is settled.” Then they set about calling those who do not cower in line with them “flat-earthers,” which is the kind of arrogant, derisive statement at which the Left is particularly good. Academic careers end in the liberal enclaves they gain tenure in if they point out any facts contrary to the religion of global warming.

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Actors without a high school diploma, like Leonard DiCaprio, lecture us on driving SUVs as he flies super models to his yacht in his private plane. Al Gore’s factually incorrect PowerPoint presentation wins Oscars. I do know one climate change fact: Global warming is the number one cause of documentaries.

Leftists make their point as they do now, with violence. The Mona Lisa got vandalized by climate activists. They threw paint on it. I say give them no attention and just reclassify the masterpiece as a Jackson Pollock.

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C19Science.info is my one-page website that covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

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Magical Thinking Is Why Socialists Get Everything Wrong

October 28, 2025 By Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

What is the source of the wealth of a nation? That’s actually the question addressed by Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations.” Smith doesn’t put it in these exact terms, but his answer lies in some combination of hard work of the people plus figuring out how to work more efficiently through specialization and exchange.

And then there’s the other theory that the wealth just appears somehow, by luck or magic (or maybe by oppression of marginalized peoples). Which theory you buy into has everything to do with what you might think are appropriate public policies.

At Hot Air on October 16, David Strom embeds a clip of Bernie Sanders and AOC appearing together the previous day on CNN with host Kaitlin Collins. In the clip, Sanders launches into a rant, where he starts by declaring that in the U.S. we have a “housing crisis” and a “healthcare crisis” and an “education crisis.” And then he gets to this key quote:

We're living in the richest country in the history of the world. Right. Alright, you tell me why we're the only nation not to guarantee healthcare to all people. The only nation, not to guarantee paid family and medical leave. Why We have a $7 25 cents an hour minimum wage. 

Bernie clearly thinks this is shameful. That conclusion follows from a worldview where the country’s wealth came not from hard work and specialization and exchange, but rather from luck or magic or something like that. Apparently, Bernie has never stopped to consider that maybe we are the richest country in the world precisely because we don’t have the government dragging down the productive economy by raising taxes to provide, as an example, free healthcare to “all people,” which is a term that includes not just the poor but also the well off and the productive and even the rich. Instead, we provide the free healthcare only to the poor (with a very broad definition of that), and expect the majority of the citizens who are capable of doing it to provide for themselves. That’s how we free up resources to enable the people to apply them to productive uses and make the country wealthier.

If you look around, you can find endless examples of politicians — mostly of the Democratic persuasion — proceeding on the same assumption that wealth has come from luck or magic and now the only thing left to do is to issue government orders to achieve fairness and justice. For a second example today, I’ll take New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill and her views on electricity generation.

Here’s some background on the Sherrill situation. Back in June the electric utilities in New Jersey increased rates by what they say is an “average” of 17-20%. Here is a piece from the Regional Plan Association reporting on that event. An average of 17-20% is high to begin with, but many New Jersey residents have reported that their own increases range up to a doubling of rates, or close to it. Unsurprisingly, many are upset. Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli has been making some headway blaming the increase on the current Democratic Governor, Phil Murphy.

And in fact Ciattarelli is completely right. Murphy has gone all in on the intermittent renewable energy fantasy, apparently never bothering to read the 50 or more posts at this website explaining in excruciating detail why increasing intermittent wind and solar generation would inevitably multiply the cost of electricity to consumers. Here is a piece from Philly Voice on October 19 explaining the basics of the Murphy energy and electricity policy as his term winds down. Excerpt:

Murphy's energy goals were always ambitious. In successive pronouncements, the governor called for New Jersey to draw 100% of its energy from clean sources, first by 2050 and then by 2035.

So New Jersey built lots of solar farms, and shuttered plants that used fossil fuels. Meanwhile, ambitious plans for offshore wind did not materialize (they would only have made things worse):

Murphy presided over a broad expansion of solar power in New Jersey, his greater plans to produce thousands of megawatts in offshore wind generation ultimately failed to create any new power, even as some existing power plants were shuttered, reducing the electricity New Jersey sends to its multi-state grid. . . .

Not mentioned in the Philly Voice piece, but covered in the RPA write-up, is that as it closed power plants New Jersey has had to buy more power in auctions from its regional grid, PJM. Of course, it now needs power when the intermittents aren’t working, which means it must buy just when everyone else wants to buy, and thus pay premium prices at the auctions.

So what is Sherrill’s answer? Declare a “State of Emergency” and order a freeze of utility rates! Here is Sherrill’s webpage laying out her “plan,” if you want to call it that. Some key quotes:

Utility costs are out of control in New Jersey. Families are spending almost their entire budget just to pay the electric bill this summer. It’s time for action, because people just can’t wait any longer. So on Day One as New Jersey’s next governor, I’m going to declare a State of Emergency on Utility Costs and freeze your utility rates. . . .

Then there’s chasing down the hoarders and wreckers or other hobgoblins who are making the electricity expensive:

I’ll immediately open up [the utilities’] books to see where rising costs to families are going, . . . I will instruct my Attorney General to take Trump and New Jersey’s grid operator, PJM, to court — in coordination with governors in our region — to force them to end their mismanagement. . . .

And don’t forget building more of those fantasy solar panels and battery farms that, after all, provide the “cheapest” electricity:

This means immediately breaking ground on new solar and battery storage projects. . . .

To her partial credit, Sherrill does concede a need to keep some natural gas and nuclear in the mix, at least for now. But the overall thrust of her approach is that producing electricity is an easy job to be done by the little people. If rates are going up it can’t because of counterproductive government policy, and therefore it must be because bad people are ripping the consumers off behind their backs.

Good luck to New Jerseyans if you elect this half-wit. If you do, you will be in for a fate not so different from that of New York, or Germany.

The Left Hijacks Language to Promote the Unspeakable

By Rich Kozlovich

Editor's Note:  I originally published this on August 18, 2013.  RK

Over the years I have marveled at the ability of the left to hijack language in order to promote the most contemptible things, such as abortion, always disguised as rights supporting individual liberty.  As you watch or hear the news, read articles in the newspapers, magazines or on-line, the terms used to describe the abortionists and anti-abortionists are pro-choice and pro-life.  Both misnomers! Those terms do not represent what they really stand for.  

The left is so hot to promote ‘choice’ but what choices are acceptable to the left.  My friend Dave Dietz sent a Peanuts cartoon to me today showing Lucy and Linus having a conversation with Lucy self-righteously stating she is “pro-choice”.  Linus asks as series of questions.

Can I choose to smoke?

Lucy says no because it’s bad for your health. 

Can I choose a large soda?

No, that’s bad for your health!

Can I choose to own a gun?

No, that’s not safe for children!

Can I choose incandescent bulbs?

No, that’s not good for the planet!

Can I choose Low-cost coal?

No, that’s not good for the planet!

Can I choose to honor God?

No, that’s offensive!

Finally Linus asks - So what can I choose?

Lucy answers - An abortion!

Pro-choice isn’t about choice, it’s about deception.  Those who support the phrase are deliberately misleading the public into believing they are for individual rights when in reality they support the murder of innocent unborn children; they are not pro-choice they are “pro-abortion”.   But “pro-choice” sounds so much better than “pro-abortion”, or “embryocide”, “infanticide” or just plain “murder”.   How can this be construed in the minds of any moral rational people as anything less than a crime against humanity?

As for the term pro-life, that is also a misnomer, and it is used by the left to vilify the morality of those who hold that position.   The left is constantly throwing up the idea that “pro-life” people are hypocrites because they also typically support the death penalty. 

First of all the so-called pro-life people are not pro-life, they are anti-abortion.  They have no problem with the execution of those who have committed unspeakable crimes; criminals who have been given a chance to prove their innocence over and over again.  Executing those guilty of terrible crimes is not murder….it’s justice; and it’s justice because they are not innocent. What they support is execution of the guilty, not the murder of the innocent.   Innocent ones who have no say, no trial, no appeal, nor have committed any crime for which they should suffer the death penalty.

I don’t know where this picture came from but it is truly disturbing.  This is what we all looked like at 12 weeks in the womb.  The wanton destruction of this child’s life is legal in all fifty states.   Tell me why you don’t think this is a person deserving the love, care  and protection of a moral society!

 

There is only one reason to support aborting innocent life. You don’t believe its murder! There is only one reason to be against aborting innocent life. You believe its murder! If killing the innocent unborn is murder then it’s murder…… always. It isn’t murder on Monday and an option on Tuesday because of unpleasant circumstances.

I have said this in the past and I will repeat it here. In ancient times pagans murdered their newborn children for economic and political reasons by throwing them alive into burning pits as sacrifices to appease their gods.

Today we are murdering our unborn children for economic and political reasons to prove we have no God. Our minds are so clouded with secular liberalism that we can’t see reality clearly.  Society has accepted an unstable philosophy for which we have abandoned traditional values. A concept where nothing is right and nothing is wrong. A value system that isn’t much more that the latest philosophical flavor of the day, which may change tomorrow, leaving untold damage to humanity in its wake. Then we wonder why society is getting so out of control, especially among the young.

Once again, we need to properly define the problem. Traditional wisdom is based on values that have stood the test of time, and are foundational to a stable society. Conventional wisdom is merely what people have chosen to believe right now based on immediate expediency. There is no historical or moral foundation to conventional wisdom, and generally is based on warping traditional values.  Once that happens how long can a society stand?