[Hot Air] Virginia Senator (and former Governor) Mark Warner used to be a thorn in the side of some members of the Democratic Party because of his "moderate" position on guns. In progressive circles, that pretty much means anyone who doesn’t favor repealing the Second Amendment, but Warner was opposed to any form of gun bans. Now that Florida school shooting has lit up the political playing field, however, Warner is finally starting to get weak in the knees. Last week he had the question put to him and conceded that he might be in favor of an "assault weapons" ban.
[DAWN] IN an interview with the news programme 60 Minutes, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman said of Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... before 1979, "We were living a very normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries. Women were driving cars, there were movie theatres in Saudi Arabia, women worked everywhere. We were normal people developing like any other country in the world until the events of 1979."
I was a teenager in the 1970s and grew up in Medina, Saudi Arabia. My memories of those years before the twin disasters of 1979 ‐ the siege of the Grand Mosque of Makkah and the Iranian Revolution ‐ are quite different from the narrative that the 32-year-old crown prince (known as MBS for short) advances to Western audiences. Women weren’t driving cars. I didn’t see a woman drive until I visited my sister and brother-in-law in Tempe, Arizona, in 1976.
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Posted by: Fred ||
04/06/2018 00:00 ||
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#1
He pretty much has to peddle revisionist history because if he said the truth about Islam they'd never reform and he'd lose any support in the West.
[DAWN] IN terms of Middle East politics, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ...Crown Prince of Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... as of 2016.... has recently made some statements that ‐ if indicative of Riyadh’s future policy ‐ could have a significant impact on the region.
On Monday, comments published in American magazine The Atlantic quoted the prince as accepting Israel’s right to exist, alongside a Paleostinian state, while last month, speaking to The Washington Post, he appeared to admit that the Saudis were responsible for the spread of Wahhabi ideology across the Moslem world as part of the Cold War. Considering Saudi Arabia’s place in the Moslem and Arab worlds, these words coming from the man who actually runs the show in Riyadh must not be taken lightly.
Concerning the spread of Wahhabism/ Salafism as a religio-political ideology, it is good that the prince has accepted this fact. In the Post interview, he said that the Saudis had promoted mosques and madressahs across the globe as a pushback to communism, and that Riyadh’s Western allies were on board.
This is no doubt true, as we experienced firsthand the use of religion to reverse the red tide in Afghanistan.
However, a poor excuse is better than no excuse at all... the prince indicated in the same interview that this policy of exporting a narrow brand of faith was being reviewed, which should be welcomed.
Coming to the recognition of Israel, it should be remembered that the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 ‐ spearheaded by the Saudis ‐ had already called for normalisation of ties with Israel if it went back to the 1967 borders and recognised the Paleostinian right of return, among other things. Mohammed bin Salman’s statement, however, is most likely inspired by his extreme dislike of Iran ‐ something he shares with Tel Aviv.
Interestingly, King Salman ...either the largest species of Pacific salmon or the current Sheikh of the Burnin' Sands, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and Lord of Most of the Arabians.... was swift to call for support to the Paleostinians in a phone call to Donald Trump ...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States... after his son’s remarks were published. While once any Arab state making peace with Israel was considered a pariah ‐ eg Sadat’s Egypt ‐ today’s sad reality is that Arab governments are willing to put the Paleostinian issue on the back burner to establish ties with Israel.
On the domestic front, the crown prince may be blazing new trails by ensuring greater freedoms for women and a more relaxed social order. However, a poor excuse is better than no excuse at all... true reform can only take root if political freedoms and free expression are also encouraged. This is something the Saudi leadership must ponder over. Meanwhile, ...back at the buffalo wallow, Yellow Wolf clutched at his chest and fell from his horse... there is great need for caution on the external front.
The ruinous war in Yemen, which the crown prince has led, is an unmitigated human catastrophe.
Moreover, the growing warm ties with Israel and the harsh rhetoric towards Iran ‐ the prince has placed Tehran as part of a "triangle of evil" and compared Iran’s supreme leader to Hitler ‐ could spell the beginning of a new conflict in the region. If growth and stability are what he desires, then a new conflagration must be avoided.
Posted by: Fred ||
04/06/2018 00:00 ||
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#2
Israel should go on the date - and show MbS some Krav Maga moves at last call...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/06/2018 5:35 Comments ||
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#3
Mohammad himself would retreat and regroup when his numbers were small. He would appeal to the kaffir and placate them. The main thing was Islam must be around to rule in the end.
[Guardian] The debate about how to resolve our nation’s housing crisis is stuck in a frustrating rut. One side of the divide, calling themselves yimbys (Yes in my back yard), say we should allow private developers to build more housing units. On the other side of the divide are anti-gentrification campaigners who maintain that unleashed private developers will construct luxury housing that pushes up neighborhood rents and displaces local residents.
What makes this debate so intractable is that both sides have a point. The only way to fit more people into an area is to build more housing units. This is just how physical reality works. At the same time, we have seen neighborhoods across the country change rapidly after an initial stage of new developments or amenities made living in the surrounding housing units more attractive to affluent renters. Adding luxury housing units can bring down the rents of an overall region while simultaneously raising them in a specific neighborhood, causing displacement.
There is a solution to this impasse though. In a paper released by People’s Policy Project (3P) on Thursday, my colleagues Peter Gowan and Ryan Cooper propose that municipal governments across the country build millions of units of social housing. An influx of publicly owned, efficiently built apartments would add to the housing supply while minimizing the displacement risks caused by luxury developments.
Under the 3P proposal, municipalities would finance the construction of new housing through municipal bond markets, loans from the federal government, and federal grants that mirror those already provided under the low-income housing tax credit program. The buildings themselves would be erected by construction companies through the same process that cities use to build libraries and other public facilities. Once constructed, the management of the new housing units could be done either through a public authority or by contracting with a property management company.
Expanding the housing supply through this social housing approach has many benefits over private, market-led development.
About the author - Matt Bruenig is currently the president of People's Policy Project (3P). Bruenig previously worked as a lawyer at the National Labor Relations Board and as a policy analyst at the Demos Think Tank. His prior work primarily focused on inequality, poverty, and welfare systems. Yes, the author is probably a communist.
Because it has worked so well in the past? East German, Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis public housing models are the most equitable? Firearm sales need a boost? The clustering of the unemployed actually helps them gain employment? 'Identity politics' is the key to the future ?
#3
Army of the poor. Still an army. There's an amendment that covers that....
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/06/2018 8:23 Comments ||
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#4
2 words: Cabrini Green
I'll raise you to three: Grove Parc Plaza (link) - Operated by the Habitat Company who's CEO was Valory Jarret. Even the Boston Globe found it a stunning failure.
#5
California has some kind of law that says they must have so many units of affordable housing for so many population or something like that, but there is a carbon-credit style loophole that allows rich communities to pay another community to house their poor for them. My city, Carlsbad has earned extra money by building such housing on behalf of La Jolla (really wealthy) and Rancho Santa Fe (also really wealthy).
It's a great idea for the budget of Carlsbad, but I went to a crime mapping website one day and found all of the crimes in Carlsbad seem to cluster around the housing complex near my home. Mostly domestic type stuff but a number of car break-ins.
I imagine if the housing was free it would be even worse.
#7
Carlsbad. I used to go there. After work we always went to Del Mar where the officers lived. Nice area.
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
04/06/2018 11:11 Comments ||
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#8
You can bet your bottom dollar that whenever somebody starts talking about affordable housing they are working some sort of a scam.
They've been talking about it here in San Diego County for as long as I can remember and that's a long, long time. They've been building as fast as they can all that time and the cost of housing continues to skyrocket. A house around the corner from me just went on the market for over a million dollars. In 1994 that same house sold for a little over $200,000. That is in spite of a building boom that has transformed vast rural areas into suburban sprawl with corresponding over crowding and degradation of the quality of life for people who already live here.
The developers get rich on the backs of illegal alien labor and they bribe local pols. Everything they say is a lie.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/06/2018 11:31 Comments ||
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#9
I actually visited this place with a number of senior Nixon Admin HUD officials. Colossal mistake as a policy matter.
#13
Still lots of cheap vacant land in the Dakotas. Small towns there are evaporating as the young leave for greener pasture$. Dirt is cheap, except in the popular areas.
[BBC] Viktor Orban presents himself as the defender of Hungary and Europe against Muslim migrants.
He hopes to win a third consecutive term as a prime minister who puts national sovereignty before everything else. But critics attack him as a racist and an authoritarian.
#1
When a good liberal like Roseanne Barr has a winning television show showing familY members with opposing politics getting along, she must be destroyed.
[The Federalist] This week, an assemblywoman from Brooklyn ‐ the New York City borough with approximately 2.7 million people, not some far-flung hamlet in flyover country ‐ went on an near-hour-long rant in which she accused Jews of conspiring to gentrify her district and steal her home. In the midst of this outburst, Diane Richardson reportedly referred to one of her rivals as the "the Jewish senator from southern Brooklyn."
This incident comes not long after a DC Council member named Trayon White Sr., a Democrat who represents the Eighth Ward of the capital of the free world in the twenty-first century, posted a video offering some of his thoughts on how "the Rothschilds" were controlling the climate to squeeze money out of the oppressed.
Both of these people have been treated as raving lunatics, which they might very well be. But a person could easily imagine the fate of any elected official in a large city had he or she aimed similar conspiracies at African-American neighbors. We would almost assuredly be plunged into a national conversation about the shameful bigotry that plagues our cities.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
04/06/2018 11:20 Comments ||
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#3
Rex Mundi is right — they get a pass on Jooo-hatred, and the soft bigotry of low expectations expressed in racism, misogyny, and too many programs for the poor and handicapped.
Excerpt:
[Breitbart] “When you first look at Google on the surface, it’s a great company. They give you this incredible search capability, this access to information basically for free, in the sense that you’re not paying a fee for it, but what you always have to keep in mind, the old saying, ‘The extent for which they can do something for you, they can do something to you,’ and then the question becomes is what are Google’s goals and ends?” claimed Schweizer. “We know they’re a business, we know these guys have become fabulously wealthy, that is certainly part of their goal. There’s a business, they want to make money, but there’s always been lurking this sort of Utopian sense of social mission. However you want to define it, that Google has.”
"We’ve had glimpses of it, but we don’t have a full picture," he continued, adding, "There’s no question they’re manipulating us. The question is why. Some of it, of course, is to monetize, but the other part of it resembles this sort of social mission, this desire to steer us into directions that we may not want to go. To get us to embrace certain ideas or our children to embrace certain ideas and values that they think are important, and the manner in which they do that is precisely what we’ve been discussing." A true knowledge and awareness 'deep dive.' You don't know what you don't know. Who knew ?
#5
Cause the death spiral in Caracas is covered nightly, right? Ssshhhh....don't mention socialism. How's that one payer health plan working in the land of abundant oil?
Journalism, covering a story, with a pillow till it dies.
[Townhall] "I am worried," writes Harvard geneticist David Reich in The New York Times, "that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science."
Reich was responding to anticipated resistance to his forthcoming book, "Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past." The "well-meaning people" Reich references are those who argue that race is a "social construct," that there are no significant genetic differences among people of different racial ancestry. Maybe there are differences in appearance and other physical traits, these people say, but there definitely aren't any in intelligence.
Such people responded with rage and fury to the publication in 1994 of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's book, "The Bell Curve." That book, solidly based on the then available psychological research, explored differences among races in intelligence as measured by rigorous IQ tests.
Herrnstein and Murray's conclusion was that those differences are the result of both nature and nurture -- genes and environment -- in as yet unknown proportions. They predicted that research like Reich's would provide a clearer understanding of just how much is genetic.
Skipping down to the bottom line:
The justification for quotas is the assumption that in a fair society, we would find the same racial mix in every school, every occupation and every neighborhood. Any significant deviation from statistical equality, in this view, can be evidence of persistent racial discrimination.
This notion suffuses the behavior of leaders in colleges and universities, in large corporations, in government at all levels. Many such leaders regard enforcing quotas as a moral duty, even if they place people in positions for which they're unprepared. For these "well-meaning people," David Reich has a (probably unintentional) warning: Science is undermining the rationale for the work you're doing.
#1
Any significant deviation from statistical equality, in this view, can be evidence of persistent racial discrimination. This notion suffuses the behavior of leaders in colleges and universities, in large corporations, in government at all levels.
#3
So many of these "social constructs" are being recognized as a problem. Maybe "society" needs to be downgraded to a necessary evil.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/06/2018 8:54 Comments ||
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#4
Race isn't the issue, culture is the issue.
There is nothing in the genetics stopping a man from working hard to support his family, keeping that family together, and making sure the kids study their buts off. This is an ancient formula that a number of cultures adopted thousands of years ago to great success. Some cultures embrace it while others actively push against such a thing as selling out.
Emulating success usually leads to success, emulating failure usually leads to failure.
#5
There is nothing in the genetics stopping a man from working hard to support his family, keeping that family together, and making sure the kids study their buts off.
Japanese culture is perhaps a pretty good example.
#6
..but the Japanese government doesn't subsidize single female head of household (and the Japanese are pretty plain racist particularly among accepting new arrivals - to which they say "So what?" as shown in their future demographics).
I liked Williamson's work until he took the Blue Pill
[LegalInsurrection] I didn’t want to write about Kevin Williamson. I even emailed Kemberlee and Mary earlier this evening and told them I “don’t feel like writing about Kevin Williamson.”
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you must not be on Twitter. Consider yourself lucky. Twitter is a pus pocket.
#1
I like to think of myself as a free-range capitalist, spend your money however you want (hopefully you made it honestly.) But, every time I look at the crap-ola that comes out of the political media, from the NYT to Infowars, and very time I look at athletes' salaries and what people spend following the doings of the Kardashians and so forth, I think to myself "I don't want to hear a f*cking thing about teachers who have to buy their own pencils and paper until this garbage stops."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/06/2018 5:18 Comments ||
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#2
If you are so concerned about the direction of American society that the election of Trump has given you a permanent migraine, put your G*dd*mn pencil down and get out there and fix it. Stop bitching about it in print. Fer Chr*sts*akes...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/06/2018 5:25 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Crown Prince of 
...either the largest species of Pacific salmon or the current Sheikh of the Burnin' Sands, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and Lord of Most of the Arabians....
[Townhall] "I am worried," writes Harvard geneticist David Reich in The New York Times, "that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science."
