Today's Link Sink

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But Bernie is wrong about everything else, so why not this? WSJ: Why Bernie Sanders Is Wrong About Sweden. My first reaction was, Why should Sweden be the exception? But in fact, Sweden is not socialist at all.

The ‘Nordic model’ of socialism, which he and other leftists tout, is more like ‘ruthless capitalism,’ says [Swedish historian] Johan Norberg.

He idealized the simple life of his ancestors in the 19th century. 

“I had this romanticized idea about them, and I looked at pictures of them: Look at that rural lifestyle, happy farmers.” Eventually he realized 19th-century life wasn’t all he cracked it up to be. “I thought it would come with penicillin, and sort of modern surgery, and instant access to all of the calories I needed to survive another day, and so. And I think history really saved me there, because then when I read up on my ancestors in northern Sweden, I realized that they didn’t live ‘ecologically.’ They died ecologically, at a very young age.” ...

A couple of days after our interview, Mr. Norberg emailed a warning for Americans: “The most dangerous place to be is top of the world, think you have it all made and can afford to experiment with socialism or protectionism, because you have plenty of room for mistakes before you hurt yourself,” he wrote. “That’s where Sweden was in 1970. It almost destroyed us, and it took some heroic efforts to get back on track.”

BTW, that's this Norberg:

Not the Police Squad character:

(Whose name was spelled Nordberg, anyway. But what the heck. Go with it.)

David Goldman: The Chinese will hand Trump his head on a platter. Goldman supports Trump and will vote for him next year, but says there are certain realities that Trump is not integrating. Read it and weep.

Speaking of the Chinese  - Africans to Chinese: Get out! Why? Because the Chinese build them nothing without strings (Strings? Heck, chains!) attached and the Chinese con has worn too thin to live with. Besides, I know very well a retired Marine officer who did years of State Dept. assignments in Africa after the Corps, He saw first hand many, many places where the Chinese had done infrastructure work - roads, pipelines, building projects. He told me that without exception they were of very poor quality and would not last. There was no doubt in his mind that the Chinese did not do the work to advance the African's interests, but their own, and saw the contracts as foothold for a permanent presence there.

Which helps explains why Trump wanted to buy Greenland. Because Greenland's government (it self governs although the island is still a Danish colony) asked the Chinese in 2017 whether they would build infrastructure that the Danish government declined to fund.

According to the South China Morning Post, Greenland had been seriously courted by China due to its strategic location and its mineral resources.

BTW, Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland, too, and even offered to swap part of Alaska for it.

Forbes: Trump Might Want to Buy Greenland But His Nemesis, China, Is There Before Him

CNBC: Here’s why Trump wants to buy Greenland

The Smithsonian Institution is not exactly run by the Vast Right-Wing, White-Supremacy Conspiracy, but it sure knocks the New York Times' "1619 project" into the can. The Misguided Focus on 1619 as the Beginning of Slavery in the U.S. Damages Our Understanding of American History

The year the first enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown is drilled into students’ memories, but overemphasizing this date distorts history

But to the NYT, that's a feature, not a bug.

The "lungs of the earth" are still breathing. Reason: Don't Panic: Amazon Burning Is Mostly Farms, Not Forests. As Brazilians attained a higher per-capita standard of living over the years, they decreased clearing Amazon basin jungle. What made the difference? Capitalism, of course.

A 2012 study found, after parsing data from 52 developing countries between 1972 and 2003, that deforestation increases until average income levels reach about $3,100 per capita. As it happens, Brazilian per capita incomes reached $3,600 per capita in 2004,which is when deforestation rates began trending decisively downward.

Global warming falls on the Sahara Desert

Snow in the SAHARA: Desert sees snow for the FIRST time in 37 years. 

Who says there's no good news about Islam?

Islam is the FASTEST DYING RELIGION in the world

According to Shaykh Ahmed Katani, in Africa, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity every year:

Islam used to represent, as you previously mentioned, Africa's main religion and there were 30 African languages that used to be written in Arabic script. The number of Muslims in Africa [a land of 1 billion] has diminished to 316 million, half of whom are Arabs in North Africa...In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Everyday, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Ever year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity. These numbers are very large indeed. ...

United States

According to research carried out by the respected Pakistani-born American Muslim Dr. Ilyas Ba-Yunus (1932 - 2007), 75% of new Muslim converts in the US leave Islam within a few years.

Growth of Islam in the US stems from immigration.

Roughly two-thirds (65%) of adult Muslims living in the United States were born elsewhere, and 39% have come to the US since 1990. May, 2007

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life says its latest report contains "the most up-to-date and fully sourced estimates of the size and distribution of the worldwide Muslim population." . . .

When it comes to the U.S., however, the Pew survey offers a figure significantly smaller than those favored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other organizations. Pew says there are 2.454 million Muslims in the U.S., about 0.8 percent of the country's total population.

HT: Gerard

Islamist murders in the Congo

United Methodist Bishop Unda Yemba Gabriel is resident bishop of the East Congo Episcopal Area. He preached at the Tennessee Annual Conference last summer, of which I am a member. He sent this message to Tennessee Conference Bishop Bill McAlilly this week.

To brothers and sisters in Christ:

Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 

As I write these few lines, my heart is too heavy because of the situation going on in Beni territory, northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is part of my Episcopal Area. The efforts of our army (are) insufficient to protect people. 

People there are killed every day in the neighboring villages and we run the risk of losing all our believers. Two weeks ago, a group of Uganda rebels killed people in the villages (of) Kamango, Oicha and Mbawu. A Methodist family (a father, his wife and their two children) were killed with machetes. 

Many people are fleeing to Beni. Our local congregations there are crowded with displaced people who flee from villages for their lives. We need your prayers. But, as you know, food and basic needs must be met. Our evangelization should reach people in need. 

I am sending this SOS message to all those who may want to help. 

May God be with us all during Christmas, but let’s keep in mind that our brothers and sisters are dying somewhere because of selfish interests. 

Bishop Unda Yemba Gabriel
Resident Bishop, East Congo Episcopal Area

Two thousand years ago, King Herod sent his soldiers into Bethlehem to kill every male child two years old or younger, thinking that the dragnet would surely include the young Jesus. But Jesus and his family had already left town. The killing of the children has become knows as the "slaughter of the innocents."

Der Kindermord zu Bethlehem (The Slaughter of the Innocents)
Original lithograph, 1960, by Otto Dix

The world's opposition to Christianity certainly did not stop at Herod. In our present day the Islamist murderers of ISIS have been slaughtering Arab Christians by carload lots in Syria and Iraq. They have recorded the killings on video and posted them on the internet. I'll not post any here, they are shocking and gruesome, but according to Western Muslims who have translated the audio, the ISIS killers use actual formal phrases of sacrificial Muslim worship when killing the Christians. Clearly, they say, ISIS sees the murders not merely as holy duty but literally as human-sacrificial worship.

The situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is not so clear, however. There have been anti-government insurgencies there with varying degrees of intensity for about 20 years. Presently, more than 15 different armed groups operate in the Beni region and even more in nearby Lupero. Attacks and abductions for ransom have intensified all around with many hundreds per year. These groups include but are not only Muslim gangs. Some are simply outlaw bandits. For example,

KINSHASA, 10 December 2014 (IRIN) - The murders of more than 250 men, women and children in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) Beni Territory in recent weeks have widely been blamed on an insurgency of Ugandan origin known as the Alliance of Democratic Forces-NALU (ADF-NALU). But several armed groups and racketeering gangs are active in the area and the culprits of these killings have not been incontrovertibly identified. 

Who is the Alliance of Democratic Forces? GlobalSecurity.org explains:

The Alliance of Democratic Forces (ADF) is made up of Ugandan opposition forces, supported by the Government of Sudan, which fought the Government of Uganda. The ADF was formed in the late 1990s. According to the UN, most of its members are Islamists who want to establish Sharia law in Uganda. This Ugandan Muslim rebel group has conducted limited activities in Uganda and DR Congo. The Allied Democratic Forces, originally a Ugandan based insurgency, now operates in eastern DRC and is listed as a terrorist organization.

Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Beni Territory is on the DRC's east, bordering Uganda.

Bishop Gabriel did not identify who carried out the murders in the villages of Kamango, Oicha and Mbawu, although his identification of them as "Ugandan" reasonably points to the Islamist ADF. Originally, the ADF was made up of a coalition Ugandan refugee groups who found themselves marginalized after the fall of Uganda's dictator, Idi Amin. Taking refuge in Congo, they originally oriented toward agressing the Ugandan government, which they still do, but have over time attempted to cement Islamist rule in larger areas of the DRC. About the middle of last year the ADF began a resurgence in the Congolese district of Beni. The Congolese government says that the ADF is receiving training, equipment and funding from Al-Shabaab in Somalia, an Islamist group that rivals ISIS in its brutality and insistence on enforcing strict sharia law. It was Al-Shabaab that gained widespread notoriety for its kidnapping of dozens of Christian girls and young women to use as sex slaves, a deed that earned the Obama administration's condemnation. Some Western analysts affirm the ADF's relationship with Al-Shabaab but others do not.

Fortunately for Beni, the ADF is not very large, estimated to include no more than about 1,500 combatants. The ADF claims it is growing daily, however, and it is apparently very efficiently organized and managed. The great majority of Muslims in Congo and Uganda are not politicized and are not easily attracted to Islamist groups. (Interestingly, the ADF's leader, Jamil Mukulu, is a Christian convert to Islam. He has been under UN sanctions since 2011.)

ADF Leader Jamil Mukulu addresses some fighters and children. The Allied Democratic Forces rebels indoctrinate children as young as 3 years, before they become terrorists.

On the other hand, there is widespread disaffection among the population in and around Beni, who believe, on the whole, that they have been neglected and shortchanged by the central government in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Flush with new, foreign cash, the ADF has been literally buying the people's loyalty with simple but valuable gifts such as new bicycles.

Congo's government has not mounted effective actions against the ADF but, rather, just a series of individual firefights with no apparent organizing principle or strategy. A Western journalist noted that government forces, "will come in, handle fighting, declare their victory and go home. At this point the rebels move back in again... and the villagers are punished as a whole,"

All of which is to say that there is no good omen for this part of Bishop Gabriel's episcopal area.

Bombing girls

Schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram are being used as suicide bombers

The speculation has arisen following a number of female suicide bombings in Kano, Nigeria, while a ten-year-old girl wearing explosives was found in Katsina state.

DAILYMAIL.CO.UK

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In Iraq, suicide bombers were often jihadist volunteers from Syria or elsewhere who were sent on a mission to drive a truck from one place to another, and then turn it over to another driver at a certain, specific location. They were told no single driver could drive the whole way for security reasons.

What they were not told is that the truck carried a massive bomb and that when they reached the switch-over point it would be remotely detonated. We learned this from interrogating drivers who survived, usually because the bomb was faulty.

It was amazing how quickly those jihadist wannabes lost their fervor when they realized that al Qaeda had basically tried to murder them.

I have to wonder whether a similar tactic is being employed by Boko Haram.

Religion of pieces update

48 Kenyans dead: Witness: Gunmen spared Muslims

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Dozens of extremists attacked a Kenyan coastal town for hours, killing those who couldn't answer questions about Islam and those who didn't know the Somali language, officials and witnesses said Monday. At least 48 people were killed and two hotels were set on fire.

Islam's adherents starting with Mohammed have killed more people than anyone else in history. Hitler, Stalin, Mao - all pikers, mere beginners, compared to Muslims. Muslims killed 80 million people in India between 1000 and 1525. From Mohammed until today, Muslims have enslaved tens of millions of Africans and murdered more than  100 million. No wonder that Islam should rightly be called The Greatest Murder Machine in History.

A photo essay that does not blink at the blood is at the Daily Mail's site, as well as the connections to what happens in the name of Islam elsewhere.

Update: ISIS in Iraq has now boasted that it has murdered 1,700 Iraqi prisoners: "El ISIS anuncia en Twitter que ha ejecutado a 1.700 soldados iraquíes"

Update: Pasted from my 2005 essay, "A Muslim Scholar Looks at Islamism:"

Khaled Abou El Fadl, professor of Islamic law at UCLA's School of Law, wrote a fascinating and highly illuminating article, "Islam and the Theology of Power," on Islam for Today. IMO, it is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in the threat facing America today.

He relates that the classical period of Islamic civilization, culminating in the 11thy century, was marked by a high degree of discourse, a tolerance for disputation and a firm grounding in moral philosophy and principled thinking. Terrorism in classical Islamic jurisprudence was unconditionally condemned: "Regardless of the desired goals or ideological justifications, the terrorizing of the defenseless was recognized as a moral wrong and an offense against society and God." But classical Islam has disappeared. Continues Prof. El Fadl,

Much has changed in the modern age. Islamic civilization has crumbled, and the traditional institutions that once sustained the juristic discourse have all but vanished. The moral foundations that once mapped out Islamic law and theology have disintegrated, leaving an unsettling vacuum. More to the point, the juristic discourses on tolerance towards rebellion and hostility to the use of terror are no longer part of the normative categories of contemporary Muslims. Contemporary Muslim discourses either give lip service to the classical doctrines without a sense of commitment or ignore and neglect them all together.

There are many factors that contributed to this modern reality. Among the pertinent factors is the undeniably traumatic experience of colonialism, which dismantled the traditional institutions of civil society. The emergence of highly centralized, despotic and often corrupt governments, and the nationalization of the institutions of religious learning undermined the mediating role of jurists in Muslim societies. Nearly all charitable religious endowments became state-controlled entities, and Muslim jurists in most Muslim nations became salaried state employees, effectively transforming them into what may be called "court priests." The establishment of the state of Israel, the expulsion of the Palestinians and the persistent military conflicts in which Arab states suffered heavy losses all contributed to a widespread siege mentality and a highly polarized and belligerent political discourse. Perhaps most importantly, Western cultural symbols, modes of production and social values aggressively penetrated the Muslim world, seriously challenging inherited values and practices, and adding to a profound sense of alienation.

El Fadl says that Islamism is at its core a,

... supremacist puritanism that compensates for feelings of defeat, disempowerment and alienation with a distinct sense of self-righteous arrogance vis-à-vis the nondescript "other" -- whether the other is the West, non-believers in general or even Muslims of a different sect and Muslim women. In this sense, it is accurate to describe this widespread modern trend as supremacist, for it sees the world from the perspective of stations of merit and extreme polarization.

Read the whole thing. It's eye opening.

In American media, the sound of crickets chirping

Killing Christians and burning down Christian churches is the main business of Boko Haram,

but for some strange reason no one in the Christian west is zeroing in on it,

certainly not the New York Times or the Washington Post, and none of the main TV networks. The fact that it’s black African Muslims killing black African Christians still seems too sensitive an issue in our race conscious media, as if black on black crime is somehow a lesser evil than white on black crime, a real no-no.

White Devils for a Free Africa

Found at American Digest