Archive for 2016

HAS THE NRA EVER WITHDRAWN AN ENDORSEMENT BEFORE?

TRUMP NRA

THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE CLUB: Omar Mateen called local TV news producer Matthew Gentili from The Pulse.

“I’m the shooter. It’s me,” the man said. “I am the shooter.”

The caller then said he had carried out the Pulse attack for the Islamic State and began speaking quickly in Arabic.

“At the time, I didn’t know what he was saying,” Gentili told News 13 reporter Scott Fais. “He was speaking so fast. But it was … he was speaking fluently. Whatever language he was speaking, he knew it. And he was speaking it very quickly. And that is when I said to him, ‘Sir. Please. Speak in English, please.’”

“I did it for ISIS,” the caller said, according to Gentili, “I did it for the Islamic State.”

It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

FACED WITH A GAY MUSLIM DEMOCRAT AS THE CAUSE OF ORLANDO MASSACRE,  MSM FINALLY DISCOVERS REAL VILLAIN: Avoiding Islam, Media Squarely Focuses on Florida AG Pam Bondi as Real Evil After Orlando.

Or a one of one of Rod Dreher’s readers responds, “Here’s a pinch of incense, here’s the bust of Caesar. You know what you have to do.”

Related: This was a similarly inevitable spinoff of the massacre as well: an Orlando “Truther” appears, sadly quoted at the Zero-Hedge libertarian econo-blog.

 

THIS SEEMS LIGHT: Refugee Who Raped Boy At Vienna Swimming Pool Gets Six-Year Sentence. “During the court hearing the man said that he still wanted to bring his young wife and child to Austria, even though he was now facing jail and his asylum application had not been granted. The mother of the victim, who arrived in Austria herself as an immigrant from Serbia during the civil war says she regrets teaching her five children to offer the same hospitality to new arrivals that she had herself received.”

JOHN SCHINDLER: Unraveling the Orlando Horror.

It’s apparent that Mateen was able to get away with years of violent statements and threats due to a pervasive fear of Islamophobia. It even derailed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mateen’s bizarre statements to co-workers, including claims that he belonged to an international terrorist group, got the FBI’s attention, and in 2013 the Bureau opened a formal investigation into him.

That investigation lasted ten months and included the employment of confidential informants and wiretaps on Mateen, as well as two interviews with the security guard, but ultimately closed without adding Omar Mateen to any permanent list of suspected terrorists in the United States.

The FBI ultimately concluded that Mateen was a fantasist more than a terrorist. Although he claimed to have joined multiple terrorist groups, there was no evidence to back any of that up. To top it off, the FBI concluded that Mateen was engaging in bizarre behavior due to “co-workers discriminating against him and teasing him because he was Muslim.” In 2014, the FBI opened a second investigation into Mateen and reached the same conclusion: he was a fantasist not a jihadist.

People at the FBI need to acquaint themselves with Lee Harris and “Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology.” Fantasy is specifically what makes jihadis so dangerous.

BARACK OBAMA: There’s No Magic To The Phrase “Radical Islam,” Which Is Why I Won’t Say It’s Behind The Attacks.

Related:

It’s hardly a big secret that President Obama from the moment he arrived at the White House put the kibosh on any discussion of radical Islam as a security problem, even in classified channels. In 2009, the administration banned politically loaded words like “jihad” even in classified Intelligence Community assessments discussing terrorism – a message that was received loud and clear in the counterterrorism community. Missing the next 9/11 could be survived, career-wise, while accusations of Islamophobia would not be with Barack Obama in the White House.

During Mr. Obama’s first term, there was a thorough purge of personnel in the Intelligence Community and the Defense Department who were unwilling to follow the new party line. People were mysteriously reassigned, contracts were suddenly cancelled, meetings were delayed never to be rescheduled. The message was obvious to counterterrorism professionals. As someone who has tried for years to walk a fine line on jihadism—we must be able to discuss political Islam and terrorism without stigmatizing all Muslims—I witnessed this happen, and it was tragically clear what the long-term consequences of this institutionalized unreality would be.

Now the much-feared mass-casualty jihadist attack on American soil, by a native-born American Muslim no less, has happened. President Obama, who is deeply invested in the unreality he has foisted on our security services, cannot be expected to reassess his errors in the last months of his second term.

He’s never been much for reassessing his views. He knows it all already.

ASIA PIVOT: Association of Southeast Asian Nations issues stern statement against Chinese militarization of the South China Sea, but you won’t believe what happened next:

Less than three hours after the ASEAN statement was released by the Malaysian Foreign Ministry, a spokeswoman retracted the document, saying that “urgent amendments” were needed. By the end of the evening, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi had made his own statement refuting the contention that the South China Sea dispute was a sticking point between his country and the regional body as a whole.

“This isn’t an issue between China and ASEAN,” he said. “Cooperation between China and ASEAN is far greater than any specific discord, including the South China Sea dispute.”

That may be. China, after all, is ASEAN’s largest trading partner. One senior regional diplomat told TIME that, in the busy minutes after the ASEAN statement went out, Beijing had lobbied regional ministers to make the embarrassing backtrack. Beijing’s foreign-policy makers, he said, had specifically pressured Laos, which is this year’s ASEAN chair, to force the statement’s recall. (ASEAN requires consensus among all of its 10 members to issue any statement.)

“When the dragon roars, the little countries need to stay away from the fire coming out of its mouth,” says the diplomat. “We have no choice but to acknowledge this political reality.”

The ASEAN nations can hang together, or they can hang separately.

IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD, Robots Are Short-Circuiting Economic Growth.

Amidst all the fears that machines will lead to the unemployment of millions of Americans, the jobs robots are most eager to steal may in fact be in China. . . .

After all, automating factory work reduces the impact of labor costs, making it more attractive to keep production at home. That leads to fewer problems with global supply chains, faster response to consumer orders, fewer worries about intellectual property theft, and a more transparent legal and regulatory framework. In short, there are a lot of companies that will see upside in shifting production out of China—especially as the Chinese business environment becomes more hostile.
The return of manufacturing won’t mean a new wave of manufacturing jobs in the advanced countries, and given that a lot of the robots in the factories of the future will be immigrants, so to speak, from China and Japan, developed nations may not benefit as much as some hope.

Nonetheless, the biggest losers here are going to be the developing countries like India and Indonesia which had hoped low-skilled jobs would come to their countries as China transitioned to a high-skill manufacturing and services.

Rise of the machines.