It is all about economics (and Trump)

This morning in the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance has a report on

The Brexit Deal, The EU, and the North American Trade Aspect…

Read it here.

"reaching new levels of Tokyo Rose disinformation and propaganda."

Sundance writes at The Conservative Treehouse,

The level of absurdity from the official media channel of the U.S. Department of State, CNN, is reaching new levels of Tokyo Rose disinformation and propaganda.

♦ ‘President Trump’s temporary pause and reassessment of visa approvals, combined with the implementation of “extreme vetting” will make our mid-east allies unhappy’… they say.

♦ ‘President Trump’s request for a reevaluation of our relationship and structure with NATO will make our European allies unhappy’…. they say.

Let’s think about this factually and logically. Who are these “mid-east allies” who would be upset? Seriously, think about it.

President Trump has already formed good foreign policy relationships with: Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel), Fattah Abdel el-Sisi (Egypt), King Abdullah II (Jordan), King Salman (Saudi Arabia) and influential agent Vladimir Putin (Russia). OK, so these guys are in the “All Good” column of ongoing discussions etc.

Syria (Bashir Assad) is trying to put a country together from the ashes of a civil war started by Obama’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood. Libya has no central government thanks to Obama/Clinton/Rice/S.Power , and is in a state of total governmental crisis. Yemen is even worse than Libya and Iran is now testing ballistic missiles.

So what ally exactly is going to be “unhappy” with a Trump policy enhanced visa scrutiny? Seriously. Genuine question. Who? Who over there is going to be unhappy?

Turkey? They are not on the restriction list. (though IMHO they should be).

Brexit is ongoing to remove the U.K. from the European Union (27 member states). Prime Minister Theresa May and President Trump are earnestly working on bilateral trade and security. U.S.A and England are on good terms and Winston Churchill looks daily upon President Trump’s desk.

France is attempting to join the U.S. and U.K. amid team freedom with Frexit. Election forthcoming. The non socialist “normies” in France always get along with Americans. Heck, without us they’d be speaking German in The Louvre. Their election is a few months away, and the freedom candidate Marine Le Pen is in the lead.

So that leaves Germany’s Angela Merkel and 25 EU countries (26 if they let in Turkey). And they have been talking for over a decade about putting an EU defense force, and EU military together.

What exactly do they still need NATO for?

If the EU is indeed an assembled group of unity nations, like they claim it to be, then why can’t they form their own version of NATO?

Read more here.

Things are changing fast in Europe

Christopher Caldwell writes at the Weekly Standard about how Germany's Merkel started off as a heroine to the Muslim hordes migrating out of Syria.

But on September 15, this picture changed. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, the easternmost outpost of Europe’s so-called Schengen zone, sought to restore order to his country’s border checkpoints, which had been overrun. New laws required newcomers to file asylum applications, and introduced criminal penalties for those who entered the country unlawfully. Almost immediately, groups of migrants rioted outside the town of Röszke and were driven back only with the help of water cannons. Gone were the little girls—because, however photogenic little girls may be, the lion’s share of the travelers are young men, and now they were heaving rocks at the authorities and showing up on YouTube videos shouting Allahu Akbar. Gone, too, were the stories of Syria—because only a fifth of those coming to Germany are from Syria in the first place. The rest are from Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and other places, and they are following a route on which large-scale smuggling operations have carried all sorts of migrants for months and even years.

European leaders have generally mocked Orbán for his provincialism, then denounced him for his immorality, and then pursued his policies to the letter:

In Austria, the Social Democratic premier Werner Faymann likened Orbán to the Nazis. Faymann leads a coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, who joined forces two years ago to keep the hardline anti-immigrant Freedom party (FPÖ) out of power. Now the FPÖ appears to have a shot at winning the municipal elections in Vienna in early October, and Faymann has imposed his own border controls.

In Croatia, a new EU country not yet in the Schengen zone, President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic has long professed herself shocked at certain of Orbán’s policies. When Orbán introduced controls at the Hungarian-Serbian border, she offered to let the migrants pass on an alternative route leading through Slovenia. That idea lasted barely a day. As we went to press on September 17, her interior minister said Croatia had reached capacity and could accept no more refugees. Grabar-Kitarovic herself had put the army on alert. (Slovenia closed its own border with Hungary shortly thereafter.)

But the greatest reversal was in Germany. The Christian Social Union’s leader (and Merkel’s ally) Horst Seehofer had called her invitation a “mistake that will keep Germany busy for a long, long time.” Even the left-wing government of Baden-Württemberg had been urging a three-month limit on asylum stays. Merkel carried on regardless. But on September 12 alone, 10,000 migrants walked out of the Munich train station, and the city was overwhelmed. Merkel’s interior minister Thomas de Maizière announced that Germany was closing its border. (And here we should stress that the borders in question were not the EU’s external borders but internal borders with other EU countries, which have been open for two decades.) As generally happens, Orbán’s vindication only deepened his adversaries’ resentment. Even after closing his own country’s borders, de Maizière was threatening to cut off Hungary’s EU funds should Orbán not agree to a larger refugee quota.

It was one of the bitterest episodes of German-Hungarian squabbling over human rights since 2002, when Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize for literature. Hungarians resented it when Germans boasted of Kertész’s Berlin domicile as a sign of their country’s moral progress. Hungarians took this bragging for an assertion that their own country had not made such progress. Kertész, though, has made an appearance in the latest migrant controversy, and now it is Hungarians who want to cite him. In The Last Refuge, Kertész’s diaries of 2001-2009 (not translated into English), he wrote a few remarks on Muslim migration that have in recent weeks become staples of political websites, both moderate and extremist. “I would talk,” Kertész wrote,

about how the Muslims are invading, occupying—to put it bluntly, destroying—Europe, and about Europe’s attitude towards that. I would speak, too, about suicidal liberalism and dumb democracy, the kind of democracy that envisions giving chimpanzees the right to vote. [Note: Kertész is referring here to an actual proposal of animal-rights advocates, not likening any group of voters to animals.] This story always ends the same way: Civilization reaches a stage of overripeness where it can no longer defend itself and doesn’t even particularly care to, where, for reasons that are hard
to understand, it comes to idolize its own enemies. And, which is worse, where none of this can be said openly.

Orbán’s decision to enforce border controls changed everything, although one should note that Orbán has not acted in a rash or undemocratic way—the legal changes at the border were announced well in advance, and his changes to state of emergency laws were passed through parliament, not asserted by decree. One can, if one wishes, fault Orbán for irrealism, to the extent he believes Hungary’s maintenance of its traditional culture and demography is consistent with EU membership. The EU aims to do away with such considerations.

But it was Merkel’s rash invitation that forced Orbán’s hand. Merkel may wind up a kind of twenty-first-century equivalent of Günter Schabowski, the East German functionary who, at a press conference in 1989, misread a list of instructions he had been given and incited the stampede of East Germans who broke through the Berlin Wall. One can blame Merkel for setting millions of migrants on the road to Europe to redeem promises that Europe cannot possibly keep.

The big danger ever since this migration got underway is that it would get stopped up somewhere. The day after Germany closed its border with Austria, there were 20,000 migrants stuck in the Austrian villages of Nickelsdorf and Heiligenkreuz. And the further south you go, the fewer resources residents have to give the travelers a welcome. The migrants are largely young men from rough, tough parts of the Muslim world. There is now a queue of them that stretches all the way east to Bangladesh and beyond, and deep down into sub-Saharan Africa. People have sold cattle, abandoned houses, robbed employers, left wives and children, and burned all sorts of bridges to come. There are now hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of them. Many are war-hardened. They are looking for money, food, and female companionship, and they are convinced that Europeans are gullible sissies. This is where Frau Merkel’s Willkommenskultur has led: With the impending closure of the Croatian border, hundreds of thousands of young Muslim men are about to hit a brick wall in Serbia. Serbia!

Ukraine: the border between West and East

The Vlog Brothers give us an historical context for Ukraine. "The number of mysterious poisonings has skyrocketed since Putin was elected."


Thanks to Gerard at American Digest.

Take the money and run!

Václav Klaus has a recommendation to the Ukrainians: take the money (from the EU) and run! "Vote for sovereignty. Vote for freedom."

The Atheist Conservative quotes at length from Klaus, and also from Bruce Bawer at Front Page:

It’s in Europe, and it’s huge – after Russia and the top five EU members, it has Europe’s largest population, and twice as many inhabitants as all the Scandiavian countries put together – but Ukraine isn’t a nation we often think of in the West, except when, as in recent days, it’s in the midst of a crisis. It has spent most of its history being conquered and brutalized by its more powerful neighbors, and in the last century underwent one savage chapter after another: 1.5 million people died in the civil war that ended with its absorption into the USSR; millions more died in Stalin’s deliberately engineered famine in 1932-33; during World War II, Hitler slaughtered an additional three million in what was intended to be the first stage of a program of exterminating two-thirds of the country’s population and enslaving the rest.

Today, unsurprisingly, Ukraine is a basket case of a country, riddled with corruption and living in the shadows of its historic horrors. It’s also a linguistically and philosophically divided land, torn between a western chunk whose people speak Ukrainian and identify with Europe and an eastern chunk whose people speak Russian and still feel an attachment to their massive neighbor to the east.

And yet, The Atheist Conservative adds,

And, it should be added, its own historical record of brutal persecution and oppression is fully equal to any of its neighbors’.

Above all, writes Klaus, Europeism “is based on the idea that states, more precisely the nation states, represent the Evil – because they were once the cause of wars among other things – while the supranational, continental and global entities represent the Good, because they – according to eurocrats – eliminate all forms of nationalist bickering once and for all”. This understanding of things, he adds, “is obviously childish, yet it is generally accepted in Europe”. Yes, it’s accepted because millions of today’s Europeans have been brainwashed into thinking that national feeling – patriotism – was the root of all of the worst things that happened to the continent in the twentieth century. No, ideology was the root – ideology in the form of Nazism, fascism, and Communism. And Europeism – which, by the way, has multiculturalism and fanatical environmentalism built into it – is the twenty-first-century heir of those wretched systems of thought.

Why the pretentious without real wings should not try to fly

Victor Davis Hanson refers to President Obama as our Icarus-in-Chief. Naturally, I went scurrying to Wikipedia where I learned that Icarus was the Greek god who had great ambition but failed when his hubris got the best of him.

He ignored instructions not to fly too close to the sun, and the melting wax caused him to fall into the sea, where he drowned.

Recent events have exposed some fantasies about the EU, China, and the Arab Spring, all of which Hanson analyzes succinctly. His final comment:

The nosedive of the melting Obama will leave the world a more dangerous place, but also serve as another mythological reminder of why the pretentious without real wings should not try to fly.