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Bernie Sanders’ appearance at Liberty University today made clear that he’s no independent socialist, but in fact a true-blue Democrat of the Stephen Douglas variety. John took note of these remarks already, but they deserves a bit more gilding:

And I will also say, that as a nation — the truth is a nation that in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact.

Good to see that Sanders is keeping faith with Stephen Douglas (and also Chief Justice Taney in Dred Scott) and is opposed to Abraham Lincoln’s view of America’s “title deeds.” (Also Martin Luther King Jr. for that matter.) Douglas, remember, said that the Declaration of Independence—and its great principle that “all men are create equal”—only applied to white people, and he repeatedly scorned the “black” Republican Party.

Richard Fernandez explores the fantasy world of ‘virtue signalling’.

In the world of anything goes “virtue signalling” can be substituted for the needless art of competence.  That term, invented by British writer Libby Purves, describes an exhibition of moral superiority which wins the day.  Moral superiority is now all it takes to fix things.  Engineering — especially social engineering — has been radically simplified. Will it, and it is. In place of “true or false”, “correct or incorrect” the contemporary thinker can merely substitute the term “good or bad” or better yet “progressive or reactionary” to characterize any approach to a problem and make a judgment on that basis.

The two interesting things about relativistic world based on “virtue signalling” is that 1) there are an infinite number of solutions to any problem; 2) all these solutions  are equally valid.  This absurdity holds because answers in a progressive world are always compared to intentions.  It becomes equivalent to solving a dependent system of equations, like the intersection of a line and a line equal to itself.  High school algebra shows this yields an infinite solution set.  To the question: what is the right policy in the Middle East comes the certain answer: anything Obama does.

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John Hinderaker fisks Bernie Sanders’ ideas about religion, economics, medicine, and race.

Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke at Liberty University today. You can read his speech here. It is useful, in that it exposes the extent of Sanders’s ignorance and radicalism.

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I guess he looked at their campaigns and said ‘How hard could it be?’.

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I have a Casper mattress. It is superb.

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My son, Cory, will leave our Northern California home to start college back East in the fall, prompting other mothers to offer condolences about my soon-to-be-empty nest. Though they expect me to break into tears, my overriding emotion when my youngest departs will be relief. I will finally be freed from the constant scrutiny of the ever-vigilant eco-warrior I raised.

I can do nothing right in my teenage son’s eyes. He grills me about the distance traveled of each piece of fruit and every vegetable I purchase. He interrogates me about the provenance of all the meat, poultry, and fish I serve. He questions my every move—from how I choose a car (why not electric?) and a couch (why synthetic fill?) to how I tend the garden (why waste water on flowers?)—an unremitting interrogation of my impact on our desecrated environment. While other parents hide alcohol and pharmaceuticals from their teens, I hide plastic containers and paper towels.

In my parents’ house, that would have happened once, and I would have spent the next month lisping through my split lip.

It would not have happened a second time.

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Robert Ménard is the mayor of the French town of Béziers. Fed up with the national government’s attitude towards the “refugees” that are now overrunning France and the rest of Europe, Mr. Ménard decided to personally evict those who had taken up illegal residence in his town.

What’s interesting about this video is the fact that as he made his rounds, the mayor had to be accompanied by an interpreter to put his words into English so that the culture-enriching squatters could understand what he was saying.

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First, Iran must be held to answer for its support of Assad’s tyranny, which is also backed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. At the same time, Barack Obama’s diplomatic courting of Iran has never addressed Iranian interference in Syria or Iraq. Treating Iran as a responsible and respectable power while Iranian military regulars and Hezbollah personnel have inflicted terror in Syria and Iraq contributed directly to the Syrian refugee horrors. Failing to connect Russian aggression in Ukraine with Moscow’s backing for Assad falls in a similar, if less obvious, pattern.

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In the specific case of the unfortunate Kurdi family, now reduced to the father, Abdullah, Turkey also bears some culpability. As a Syrian Kurd from the embattled Turkish-Syrian border town of Kobani, attacked by ISIS in 2014 and successfully liberated by Syrian Kurdish militia at the beginning of this year, Abdullah Kurdi must understandably have wished to get his family out of harm’s way. Turkey is no friend of the Kurds; during the fight for Kobani the Turkish army lined its tanks up at the border, pointed against the Kurdish peshmerga fighters rather than against ISIS.

Turkey has recently carried out air strikes that, we are told, are aimed against ISIS. It has also struck Iraqi Kurdistan, reflecting the insistent resentment of Kurdish nationalism on the part of the Turkish state. The air campaign, conducted from the Turkish airbase at Diyarbak?r in Turkish Kurdistan, was advertised as another outstanding achievement of the Obama administration. Since the battle of Kobani, President Erdo?an has pursued a clear policy of using his forces as a hammer against the Kurds, with ISIS as an anvil. The outcome? The Kurds, long allied with the United States, now wonder if they, too, will be abandoned by President Obama.

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Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands introduced border controls on Monday, as Germany’s decision over the weekend to set up checks began to ripple across a bloc struggling to deal with the influx of migrants coming to the Continent.

In Hungary, the authorities said that a near-record 5,353 migrants had crossed into the country from Serbia before noon on Monday — even as Budapest continued to seal off that border with the construction of a 109-mile fence made with razor wire.

Around 50 police officers, wearing riot gear and equipped with pepper spray, converged Monday afternoon on the train tracks linking the villages of Roszke, Hungary and Horgos, Serbia, which thousands of migrants had used to cross in recent days. An official in a bright yellow jacket turned away migrants seeking to enter Hungary.

Starting Tuesday, Hungary will classify unauthorized entry into the country as a criminal offense, punishable by up to three years in prison. In response, Serbia said it would set up reception centers in the north of the country and pleaded for the European Union, of which it is not a member, to take action.

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Yet another reason to avoid flying.

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We missed noting the story reported in the Washington Post late last week about an aspiring poet named Michael Derrick Hudson of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who was having trouble getting his poetry accepted in any poetry journals. So what did he do? Pretended to be Chinese….

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I’ve been thinking for a while that if people can self-identify as anything (gender or race) that they want, then everyone should start declaring themselves to be a racial minority (except Asian—the only officially disfavored minority) on college applications, mortgage loan applications, Census forms, etc, until this whole corrupt edifice collapses.

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As mentioned in last night’s news feed, a violent confrontation took place yesterday afternoon between Turks and Kurds in the Swiss city of Bern (or Berne, for Francophones). A number of people were injured in the battle, several of them when a Turk drove his car at full speed into a crowd of Kurdish demonstrators. Early accounts saying that two people were killed seem to be false; there are no reports of fatalities.

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In most of my classes I will either show the picture nearby of federal agency acronyms (remember that none of these are cabinet departments spelled out in the Constitution), or start writing them one-by-one on the blackboard while rattling off their name and purpose. If I show the slide I’ll see how many agencies students can identify from their acronym (usually not very many, and I’ve forgotten some of these myself), but if I recite them seriatim, after a few minutes students get the point: the government is massive, and largely beyond the direct—or even indirect—control of voters. (Recall Obama saying that he couldn’t control the “independent” National Labor Relations Board when it tried to stop Boeing from opening a plant in South Carolina. No reporter thought to follow up: “Mr. President, just who does control the NLRB if it’s not you?”)

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DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent?

The notion may seem absurd on its face. The lecture is an old and well-established tradition in education. To most of us, it simply is the way college courses are taught. Even online courses are largely conventional lectures uploaded to the web.

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students. This is not a matter of instructor bias; it is the lecture format itself — when used on its own without other instructional supports — that offers unfair advantages to an already privileged population.

People get paid good money for writing this stuff.

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Fredrik deBoer, the socialist lecturer at Purdue University who is quickly becoming one of the most interesting commentators on American higher education, has a provocative piece in the New York Times Magazine that attempts to offer a unified theory of what is ailing campus political culture. It’s not, as the right typically argues, left-wing ideological intolerance (though he concedes that this is a problem), nor is it, as the campus left would have it, widespread racism and sexism (though there is progress to be made on this front, too). Rather, deBoer suggests that the real source of the campus insanity that has been circulating in the popular press for the last few years—the trigger warnings, the speech codes, the “Yes Means Yes” rules, the coddling and political correctness—is what he calls corporatization, or “the way universities operate, every day, more and more like corporations.”

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DeBoer is clearly on to something here. Campus bureaucrats, like all bureaucrats, are often more concerned with protecting their institution and advancing their own interests than creating the best outcomes for the people that they serve. Some of what the right sees as left-wing ideological militancy on the part of college administrators—for example, the recent adoption of guilty-until-proven-innocent sexual assault policies at some schools—is actually driven more by a corporate desire to protect the college from bad press than any particular political commitment. (The reverse is also true: some of what campus activists see as right-wing oppression by campus administrators—such as letting athletes off the hook for well-substantiated sexual assaults—has just as much to do with the university’s self-interest as it has to do with the patriarchy). Moreover, the proliferation of administrators who advertise the campus, manage publicity, and cater to their students’ every need is related the decades-long transformation of higher education from a type of public service designed to invigorate American democracy into a private service to be sold in at exorbitant prices.

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All children are psychopaths. Some grow out of it; some run for elective office.

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A hungry truck driver stopped at a roadside diner for lunch. He ordered a cheeseburger, french fries, and a chocolate milkshake.

No sooner had the waitress brought the trucker his lunch than three motorcycles pulled up, and three burly bikers came inside. The first grabbed the trucker’s cheeseburger, the second took his fries, and the third took his milkshake.

Saying nothing, the trucker got up, paid the cashier, and left.

When the trucker was gone, one of the bikers said, “He sure ain’t much of a man.”

“He’s not much of a driver, either,” said the waitress. “He just backed his truck over three motorcycles.”

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Abstract: This thesis will examine how the Middle Ages are historically interpreted and portrayed in the United States. In order to keep this study within reasonable bounds, the research will exclude films, television, novels, and other forms of media that rely on the Pre-Modern period of European history for entertainment purposes. This thesis will narrow its focus on museums, non-profit organizations, and other institutions, examining their methods of research and interpretation, the levels of historical accuracy or authenticity they hold themselves to, and their levels of success. This thesis ultimately hopes to prove that the medieval period offers the same level of public interest as popular periods of American history.

The link is to a PDF and of course the SCA figures prominently.

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Those would appear to be prime candidates for immediate return to Syria. It’ll never happen, of course, but I like to have these fantasies.

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A liberal arts college in North Carolina is pledging to identify and potentially punish students who heckled a play about sexual assault the college forced them to attend.

“It Stops Here,” an original play produced by students at Greensboro College, was first performed last Wednesday before a crowd of students, but the performance didn’t go as planned. According to people at the play, members of the audience frequently heckled the cast and shouted sexually explicit remarks.

Well, who let those jerks in, anyway?

Notably, though, the hecklers do not appear to have been invading the performance to disrupt it. Rather, attendance at the play was mandatory for all incoming freshmen at Greensboro, as well as for some older student-athletes who were required to attend by coaches.

Well, there it is. Had I been forced to attend that play, I would have been even more obnoxious than that. I have, after all, many decades of experience on those puny college boy amateurs.

I guess they take ‘liberal arts’ pretty seriously in North Carolina.

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Wow, I guess that Affordable Care Act really works, huh.

Thank you, Barack Hossein Obama. (um…um..um)

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If, of course, the environazis will let us have them.

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When they tell you America is steeped in a history of racism, you can’t help but check the tag on the racists they’re talking about. It said “Democrat: Do not remove under penalty of law,” but someone tore it off.

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Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism eloquently documents the “secret history of the American left from Mussolini to the politics of change.” Thomas Jefferson wanted to free all the slaves but the 200 he owned. Andrew Jackson saw America as a “country for white men.” The KKK was all Democrats. The segregationists were Democrats. The Civil War was Democrats vs. Republicans, and Lincoln was a Republican. FDR put Japanese Americans in internment camps. He appointed many racists to the Senate and made KKK member Hugo Black a Supreme Court judge. President Truman said, “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s not a nigger or a Chinaman.” They were all Democrats.

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Of course. The Welfare State is going broke. They need the money.

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And here I thought ‘Big Mountain Jesus’ was a brand of marijuana. Shows how much I know.

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Very few would have predicted on September 11, 2001 that the headlines 14 years later would feature an American president arming Iran; that there would be millions of Middle Eastern Arabs flooding into the heart of Europe.  Or  Saudi Arabia, while refusing to accept any refugees from an Islamic civil war in Syria, would instead offer to build 200 mosques in Germany,  one for every hundred who has arrived to spare the Germans the trouble and expense of building the mosques themselves.

Few could have imagined that rail and road transport from Hungary to Germany would be interrupted to hold back floods of people in numbers unseen since World War 2.  Not many would have guessed that the Palestinian flag would fly over the UN in New York, despite the objection of the United States.

Hardly anyone would have foretold the return of the Russia to the Middle East, spearheaded by a legion of forces who had honed their skill at “hybrid warfare” — then and unknown term — in Ukraine.  Not just anyone mind you, but as Michael Weiss in the Daily Beast notes, “the Kremlin isn’t sending just any troops to prop up the Assad regime. It’s dispatching units that spearheaded Russia’s slow-rolling invasion of Ukraine.”

Except one man: Osama bin Laden.  Unlike the American public, which still expected its leaders to defend them against aggression on that fatal day, Bin Laden had come to the conclusion the American elite would run at the slightest difficulty.  What convinced him was the precipitate withdrawal of American troops from Somalia in 1996 following the incident popularly known as Blackhawk Down.

Steve Sailer points out an inconvenient truth.

With the Obama Administration Justice Department announcing, after many embarrassments trying to persecute white non-criminals such as Ferguson policeman Darren Wilson, that they are finally going to focus upon white collar crime, it’s worth taking a look at the FBI’s Most Wanted List for white collar criminals.

White collar crime, it appears, is today a vibrantly diverse field, with native born American whites having been relegated to a small minority of the most wanted offenders.

Reading from left to right, the Most Wanted were born in Israel, Unknown (Asian), Brazil, Nigeria, South Korea, Syria, Laos, America (Asian), America (white), Russia. The one American-born white guy is named Hamed Ahmed Elbarki.

Now that’s diversity!

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“Feminist humor” is one of those terms describing a hypothetical category, like “honest Democrat.”

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Her comedic repertoire consists mainly of repeatedly mentioning that, in case you didn’t get it the first time, she’s a lesbian. It’s as if Jerry Seinfeld had made a career of standing onstage pointing out that he is Jew from New York, rather than actually, y’know, telling jokes.

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No, really. Dead babies are hilarious. Ask any feminist.

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As I’ve said before, it’s not a ‘refugee problem’, it’s an invasion.

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The New York Times today offers up a table examining the Democratic (but not Republican) Senators and House members opposed to Obama’s Iran agreement, noting whether they are Jewish and the proportion of Jewish constituents in their state or district.

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Nice that they use yellow highlight for this feature. Only thing missing is the Star of David in place of an asterisk.

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None of which, of course, ought to be degree programs at all.

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And since Every Kid Is Necessarily As Good As Every Other Kid, they will round up the usual suspects and throw more taxpayer money down the usual ratholes.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surpried? I’m sure surprised.

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Further proof that Harvard is a force for evil in the world. Paging James Bond….

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Turns out the only people more stupid than the TSA work for the Washington Post.

Anybody who subjects himself to the TSA deserves what he gets.

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Barack Obama was elected to be our First Black President. That was, really, his only claim to fame; he was unqualified for the office by experience, ability and work ethic. Electing Obama was supposed to put a capstone on two generations of racial progress. That was the main reason millions of people voted for him.

Somehow, though, it hasn’t worked out that way. Rasmussen Reports recaps its recent findings: only 17% of Americans rate race relations as good or excellent, a drastic drop from numbers in prior years. Only 8% think race relations have gotten better since Obama was elected, and those 8% are trying to fool the pollster.

Why are race relations so bad? Obama’s actions are an important culprit in the eyes of a strong plurality of Americans. Forty-seven percent say that Obama’s actions have driven the races apart, while only 20% say he has brought them together. It is hard to think of a more damning indictment of Obama’s six and one-half years in office. And I can’t imagine that many of those who think Obama has driven the races apart could nevertheless approve, overall, of his administration.

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Quick, send some to Washington.

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It didn’t happen, of course — ‘progressives’ are always long on talk and short on action. If every narcissistic lefty who promised to move abroad if (insert random Republican here) were elected actually did so, the country would be in much better shape than it is.

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It’s all about population numbers.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask.

The German chancellor is being celebrated for finally redeeming her subjects’ innate Nazi bloodguilt by inviting into the European Union huge columns of helpless Syrian refugees.

Or at least that’s what you are supposed to think, just as you were supposed to assume the innocence of Michael Brown and the guilt of Haven Monahan.

On the other hand, you may have some questions. Such as, if these are civilian war refugees, where are all the women, children, and elderly? Why are the incoming masses instead so heavily made up of young louts with smartphones? One of my readers, Lot, looked at a half-dozen photographs of the new arrivals and estimated, “Overall, these migrants are more male than the United States Army.”

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Notice how nobody ever risks his (or her) life to get to a Muslim country?

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Young Jewish entrepreneurs face forbidding obstacles in France: economic regulations that are hostile to start ups and flexible business models; anti-Semitism on the street and in the suites; a slow growth climate that is bad for all companies, new ones especially.

And so many have moved to Israel—and the French government is now trying to woo them back. We give points to the French government for realizing the cost of the brain drain and trying to lure people back, but it won’t be easy; France is a hard country to leave and people don’t make that decision lightly. It would be much smarter for the government to work harder to correct the conditions that made emigration so attractive in the first place.

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Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao Cheng—the man caught on a security camera video driving over a grandmother five times—ended up paying only about $70,000 in compensation.

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Richard Fernandez turns over a rock.

For many years, the Third World has functioned as the sump of toxic Western ideas. Ideas too dangerous for any sane person to actually try were boldly exported there. Years ago, a Bavarian friend remarked that the most destructive German export of all time was Karl Marx; far more catastrophic in effect than that perennial rival for ideological malpractice, Adolf Hitler.

There’s something to this. Marx’s disciples like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, and the Kim family have between them killed many more people than perished at the hands of Adolf. Yet after each catastrophe, the intellectuals would go back to the drawing board and try again with the highest hopes, since the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and South America seemed perpetually ready to be sacrificed on the altar of “scientific” socialism.

One of the characteristics of Leftism is that it always works best for the “masses.” The Vanguard are somehow always exempted from its strictures, as they have important work to do. Individuals who sincerely decry “carbon footprints” see nothing wrong in flying by private jet to denounce the use of fossil fuels. The bigger the private jet, the more credible the environmentalist.

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Very clever.

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I have no evidence that Hillary Clinton ever met a tax she didn’t like.

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Why is it that countries that don’t have lavish welfare systems are not target destinations? And also–why is it that the migrants are overwhelmingly young men? There are a few women, children and families; but numerically, young men predominate. This is not what one would normally expect from a group of refugees fleeing a war zone.

It’s not a migration, it’s an invasion. Western politicians, their heads wrapped in their own rhetoric, just can’t see it.

But a lot of damage will be done before the sentimentalists throw in the towel.

A LOT of damage.

It is often said that a country can have a welfare state or it can have open borders, but it cannot have both. In a world in which billions of people live in poverty and oppression, this strikes me as blindingly obvious. I am not optimistic that the current migration from the Middle East, Asia and North Africa into Europe will end well.

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All this without one shred of evidence that sea levels are rising or are going to rise. It’s all just fearmongering by ‘climatistas’.

Sky falling; film at 11.