I wish the controversy over confirming Judge Brett Kavanaugh had been about his court decisions on executive power, which I believe grant the chief executive too much authority. Instead, Democrats emphasized their prevailing issue, abortion. Of course, they say it’s about the unsubstantiated allegations against what he did when he was 17, or a bar fight in college. But if you listen to them, it’s really about abortion.
I look differently on the Tech Left’s “deplatforming” of Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and others. It’s not a show of strength, but a symptom of weakness. The whole point of the Internet is it’s dispersed. It’s not true it was created to survive a nuclear war, although it was created by the Defense Department in the late 1960s as a dispersed system, “The idea being that defence projects being carried out at universities and research labs could communicate with each other, without worrying about the unreliable network links of the late 1960s.” Those earlier links depended on central areas that...
I laughed when I read ex-CIA Czar John Brennan’s gripe that taking away his security clearance was “part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump to suppress freedom of speech & punish critics.” I once had a security clearance. Although not as high as his, it was pretty high, Top Secret-Special Intelligence. When I was training to be a Russian linguist and radio intercept operator, 1978-89, the FBI talked to everybody in my background, asking such questions as: Did you ever vote for the Communist Party-USA? They talked to my next door neighbor, and receive a glowing report. “He’s been...
In American political parlance, an October Surprise is something launched to affect an election just before voters go to the polls, this year on November 6. There also are run-ups to the October Surprises, such as Vyshinsky’s – I mean Mueller’s – witch hunts against President Trump’s associates, which have had nothing to do with Mueller’s portfolio to look into non-existent Russian rigging of the 2016 election.
“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence – it is force.” – George Washington (attributed) “All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.” – de Maistre “Who – Whom?” – Lenin My title refers to the chapter of that name in Solzhenitsyn’s “In the First Circle,” now “free” with Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Under the all-compassionate Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union abolished the death...
The phrase “climate change” itself is fake; it means nothing. The climate always changes. It took over from “global warming” a little over a decade ago when it was clear there was no, or close to no, global warming.
In 1970, a year in office, President Nixon gave an address to the UN titled “A Generation of Peace.” With the Cold War hot in Vietnam and elsewhere, and American campuses and cities erupting in riots, it didn’t seem peace was at hand. Yet Nixon soon went to Moscow and Beijing in his still-famous trips. “Only Nixon can go to China” has become a saying meaning someone who is strong in one area using that to work out a compromise with an enemy. In his 1972 campaign, Nixon’s slogan was “A Generation of Peace,” and he won 49 states in...
Summits between the two major nuclear powers are essential to keep world peace. It’s good to meet the competition, know how he thinks, work on common problems and form a personal link.
As to Russiagate because on this site I’ve disproved it many times; there’s no way the Russians could have influenced the U.S. election because it was too complex for almost anyone to figure out, certainly anyone in Moscow. Trump figured it out because he won by campaigning nonstop the final weeks in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
I don’t think anyone else spotted why President Trump picked Singapore for his summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Any number of places could have been picked, in Asia or elsewhere. But here’s the key: Singapore, like North Korea, is run by a dynasty, the Lee family. Lee Kwan Yew operated Singapore as boss from after independence in 1965 until 1990.
