An oldie but goodie that demonstrates the awesome durability of the New York Times‘ writer’s acumen. Uncovered by my wife.
Category Archives: culture
Free Speech Turkey-Style
Enes Kanter, a Center for the New York Knicks, has expressed his opinion of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and a Turkish prosecutor has indicted him in absentia for this heinous crime and wants Kantor jailed for four years. Among other things, Kantor has said that Erdogan is the “Hitler of our century,” in the aftermath of the Turkish government’s revocation of his passport and its having forced his father, still in Turkey, to disown him—and then was thrown into jail, anyway. All because Kanter supports the equally Erdogan-hated Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen.
Here’s Kanter:
People don’t understand. They’re saying your family is still back in Turkey — why are you doing all of this? Why are you talking? I’m just trying to be the voice of all of these innocent people, man. Because all of these innocent people are just going through really tough times. Journalists, innocent people in jail getting tortured and killed and kidnapped. And it’s pretty messed up. And (the government) hates it. They hate when I talk to you guys in front of all of these cameras, these microphones. They hate it. That’s why they’re saying, “Oh, we’re going to take his dad away, we’re going to put him in prison.”
In response to the indictment and jail threat, here’s Kanter again:
That’s it? Only four years? All the trash I’ve been talking?
I have said less than that honorless (man) deserves. Add another 4 years for me, master.
Here’s to Enes Kanter.
Oh, and I say that Recep Tayyip Erdogan is an idiot and a tin despot.
Whose Information Is It?
Information belongs to the government of the People’s Republic of China, apparently. Especially when it’s investment information, information that might facilitate the prosperity of individual citizens and their businesses, information that might lessen their dependence on and control by, that government.
A Chinese quasi-regulator told the country’s top raters of investment funds to stop publicizing the sizes of money-market mutual funds, in what is being seen as another attempt by Beijing to slow the industry’s rapid pace of asset accumulation.
Because an informed investor can make his own decisions instead of the decisions Government wants him to make.
A copy of an internal directive reviewed by The Wall Street Journal told firms that rate and rank investment funds to avoid publishing the asset sizes for money-market funds, which could have the effect of drawing more investors to the largest funds.
Which would (in a free market) have the knock-on effect of competition raising rates paid investors in those not-largest funds, which would benefit the investors. And the further knock-on effects of drawing yet more money into the funds and of adding liquidity to these short-term instruments which would facilitate the short-term borrowing (useful for inventory control, meeting payroll, etc) of businesses. Which would have the further knock-on effect of spurring the private economy and not the Communist Party of China’s controlled economy.
Gotta keep the peasants down on the farm. The cities are collecting too many of them, anyway.
Unless it’s proprietary or a matter of national secrets, information isn’t controlled by Government beyond a couple of laws protecting intellectual property and those secrets. In free nations, anyway.
Progressive-Democrats and Taxes
The Wall Street Journal asked in their Sunday op-ed how it came to be that
the party of the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s and the co-writers of the Reagan reform in the 1980s [became] implacably opposed to pro-growth tax policy?
The WSJ‘s editorialists should know better. This isn’t their (or your or my) grandfather’s Democratic Party. This is the Progressive-Democratic Party of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and all of its rank-and-file politico members.
These politicians and their nine-year-old Progressive-Democratic Party that is the inevitable evolution of that prior entity do not want the folks who earned the money to be able to keep it and spend it IAW their own needs and wants and imperatives. The Progressive-Democratic Party and its members need to have control over our money, and they are thoroughly dismayed over the loss to their political power that’s represented by the reduction in the amount of our money they’ll be able to control. That’s power they’ll have much less of.
It has nothing to do with ideology. It has nothing to do with income inequality. It has only to do with political power. It’s that nakedly simple.
Progressive-Democrats, Drugs, and Nuclear Weapons
It’s a long read, but Politico‘s piece is worth the time.
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.
Project Cassandra was making serious headway against Hezbollah’s drug dealing and money making—a $1 billion per year business that would seem to dwarf its terrorist activities—but as ex-President Barack Obama (D) and his (ex-)Secretary of State John Kerry got closer and closer to concluding Obama’s Executive Agreement with Iran that put a fig leaf over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Cassandra was increasingly restricted. David Asher, a DoD finance forensics analyst who helped establish Project Cassandra:
The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away. So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations—even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission—it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.
And here is the confession of all of that by Obama administration personnel who are figuratively hiding their faces so as not to be identified and called to account:
Former Obama administration officials declined to comment on individual cases, but noted that the State Department condemned the Czech decision not to hand over Fayad.
Because ObamaTalk always was so effective at changing the behavior of our nation’s enemies.
And
Several of them, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were guided by broader policy objectives, including de-escalating the conflict with Iran, curbing its nuclear weapons program and freeing at least four American prisoners held by Tehran, and that some law enforcement efforts were undoubtedly constrained by those concerns.
There it is. Curbing the drug trade, cutting Hezbollah off from its major source of money were not as important as that administration’s public appearances regarding peace in our time with Iran. What else was less important than appearances?
…insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan, and Russian governments—all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad, and Putin….
And more directly, getting at “the Ghost,” Abdallah Safieddine, Hezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who was—and still is, courtesy of these decisions
a major supplier of conventional and chemical weapons for use by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his people.
All bought and paid for with the proceeds from that drug trade. Al Assad gassing his own people, after all, just wasn’t that important. All enriching Hezbollah, too, and funding its own weapons inventory and increasing its threat to Israel. Notice, too, that drug trade connection to Iran, with whom Obama and his Kerry were so desperate to conclude a deal with which they could pretend to look good in the eyes of the American Left.
There’s lots more in the Politico piece.
It’s hard to believe that the Progressive-Democrats in Congress at the time, at the very least the Party’s leadership, didn’t also know about this preference for an enemy’s—a terrorist organization’s—prosperous drug trade.
This is the set of priorities, the level of morality, that the Progressive-Democratic Party will have on offer in the 2018 mid-terms, the 2020 general election—imagine another Progressive-Democrat President—and beyond.