Trump Derangement Syndrome is actually a real thing.

"Is he gonna blow us all up?"

So inquired one of Elisabeth LaMotte's patients recently, fretting out loud about the volatility of U.S. President Donald Trump's actions during a therapy session at her Washington practice.

It was a rhetorical question — one that predated Trump's threats of a showdown with Iran this week. But if the question wasn't meant in earnest, the politically induced anxiety LaMotte is hearing about from her clients certainly is, says the founder of the D.C. Counselling and Psychotherapy Center.

She refers to it as a "collective anxiety" among patients who feel on edge about how potentially dire the president's decisions could be.

"There is a fear of the world ending," she said. "It's very disorienting and constantly unsettling."..

How Israel, in Dark of Night, Torched Its Way to Iran’s Nuclear Secrets

TEL AVIV — The Mossad agents moving in on a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran knew exactly how much time they had to disable the alarms, break through two doors, cut through dozens of giant safes and get out of the city with a half-ton of secret materials: six hours and 29 minutes.

The morning shift of Iranian guards would arrive around 7 a.m., a year of surveillance of the warehouse by the Israeli spy agency had revealed, and the agents were under orders to leave before 5 a.m. to have enough time to escape. Once the Iranian custodians arrived, it would be instantly clear that someone had stolen much of the country’s clandestine nuclear archive, documenting years of work on atomic weapons, warhead designs and production plans.

The agents arrived that night, Jan. 31, with torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees, hot enough, as they knew from intelligence collected during the planning of the operation, to cut through the 32 Iranian-made safes. But they left many untouched, going first for the ones containing the black binders, which contained the most critical designs. When time was up, they fled for the border, hauling 50,000 pages and 163 compact discs of memos, videos and plans...

A quick note on the dearth of blog posts

Those of you who read my blog, you happy breed of men and women, you precious stones set in a silver sea, we few, we happy few..may have noticed a dearth of blog postings lately.

I've been quite busy recently, one of the causes being that I'm in the process of producing a play which will premier in Toronto in January 2019.

I'm pleased to say that two Canadian television stars have already agreed to be in the play.

More will be forthcoming as we get towards the end of the year, and I do thank you for your interest and support.

Richard

Progressive leftist anti ICE protesters harass and insult a female reporter's appearance

I thought it was Trump supporters who were supposed to hate the mainstream media.

The "progressive left" is becoming more vile and regressive with each day:

The Unprecedented President Trump

Conrad Black discusses his new book about Donald Trump's presidency with TVO's Steve Paikin:

Today in sciencey stuff - Einstein proved right and blue sand on the Red Planet

Once again, Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity has held up — this time in another galaxy.

Using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, an international team of researchers found that gravity in a galaxy millions of light-years away behaves how the renowned physicist's theory predicted...

Crowds in Iran are chanting "Death to Palestine!" Not to Israel. Not to America. But to Palestine.

MUST-WATCH: Crowds in Iran are chanting "Death to Palestine!" Not to Israel. Not to America. But to Palestine.

Hamas and Hezbollah and Palestinian Jihad can kiss their Iranian funding goodbye if the regime falls. https://t.co/XM5CFAvjEH

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) June 25, 2018

#FakeNews and the Future of #MSM

An interesting discussion on TVO's The Agenda with my old pal Jon Kay, among others. Although some of the panelists are there to pontificate and dissemble to justify some of the absurd biases in mainstream media:

A note to readers - By Charles Krauthammer

This is tragic. I was lucky enough to meet and speak briefly with Charles Krauthammer at the Munk Debates a few years ago. A kind, thoughtful, good man. We need more like him, not fewer.

Obama Admin Granted Iran Access to U.S. Financial System Despite Sanctions

In selling the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran to Congress, the Obama administration assured lawmakers that Tehran would not have access to the U.S. financial system. But in 2016, the administration secretly granted Iran a license to do just that, according to a Republican-led Senate report released Wednesday.

The 53-page report by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), chaired by Ohio senator Rob Portman, also reveals the extent of Obama administration efforts to encourage foreign countries to do business with Iran. Its release comes after President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would be withdrawing from the agreement and reimposing nuclear deal-related sanctions on Iran.

The lifting of those sanctions in January 2016 allowed Tehran to tap into its previously frozen assets abroad, including $5.7 billion rials held in an Omani bank, Bank Muscat. Iran wanted to convert those funds to euros, which could be done most efficiently by first converting to U.S. dollars as an “intermediary step.” In an effort to allow Iran to convert its once-frozen rials, the Treasury Department granted a specific license in February 2016 that authorized the Iranian assets to be converted using the U.S. financial system, according to the report.

“A conversion to U.S. dollars on behalf of the [Central Bank of Iran] was prohibited under U.S. sanctions,” the report says. “Other options existed to convert the funds from rials to euros without using the U.S. financial system. But using the U.S. dollar as an intermediary step was the most efficient means, even though U.S. sanctions prohibited it.”...

In case you missed the Munk Debate about Political Correctness between Jordan Peterson, Stephen Fry, Michael Eric Dyson, and Michelle Goldberg

Watch it while you can, The Munk Debates tend to leave these things up for a limited amount of time:

The Ontario legislative term ended with the NDP and Liberals proving they will screw over your kids to keep teachers unions happy

Before the Ontario legislature dissolved to make way for our provincial election, the government’s last act was to try to end the strike at York University by imposing binding arbitration. Because the Liberals waited till the last minute before the election campaign started, they needed all the parties to agree. The NDP refused. 

This means that 50,000 York students have not only lost most of their spring term but likely there will be no summer school at all. On the plus side, it's a timely reminder of where the NDP's loyalties lie...

More at Quick Brown Fox

Matt Gurney: There’s no easy fix to the Gaza mess, but threatening to flatten Hamas will help

...while we can’t expect to see peace and normalization between Israel and the residents of Gaza anytime soon, we can at least reasonably hope for no further large-scale killings in the immediate future. And all that needed to happen was for Hamas to decide a bunch of dead Palestinians no longer served its interests.

The killings this week, which left 60 dead on Monday, occurred during a large protest, involving tens of thousands of people, along the fence that constitutes Israel’s southern border with Gaza. Gaza is controlled by Hamas, a listed terrorist group that also functions as Gaza’s government. The protesters were calling for the right to return to homes and villages they (or their ancestors) lost during previous Arab-Israeli conflicts, which typically end with Israel both victorious and larger.

It is difficult to overstate how ridiculous that claimed right is. Israel’s existence and massive military superiority are textbook examples of facts on the ground (heavily armed facts, at that). There isn’t going to be a return, period. Still, Hamas and other jihadist groups have had a role in organizing the protests, which are also fuelled by the genuine frustrations of Gazans tired of living in the densely populated, economically stagnant enclave, wedged between Egypt and Israeli checkpoints.

Israel, for its part, has been clear that any attempt to breach the border fence, including by approaching it within 100 metres, will be considered hostile and met with force. On Monday, reporters at the scene of the protest noted that Israel had deployed Arabic-language leaflets, which read, in part, “The [Israel Defense Forces are] prepared to face all scenarios and will act against every attempt to damage the security fence or harm IDF soldiers or Israeli civilians. Do not let Hamas cynically use you as its puppet. … Stay away from the security fence, from terror instigators and the violent rioters! Save yourselves and prioritize building your future!” When that didn’t work, tear gas was used, and warning shots fired into the dirt in front of protestors. When that didn’t work, live ammunition was used, resulting in the deaths and hundreds of injuries (further hundreds were apparently injured in the rush away from the shooting). Some of the dead were children.

That’s bad. But there’s an easy solution: Hamas makes the protests stop, or at least keeps them back from the border... 

John Bolton: The Iran deal was betrayed by its own abysmal record

On Tuesday, President Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the failed Iran nuclear deal. The president has famously referred to it as “the worst deal in history.” Its very premise has been betrayed by its own abysmal track record over the past two years.

The theory behind the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, was that the Iranian regime would, in the interests of its own people, trade its nuclear ambitions for economic incentives. But rather than focusing on behaving responsibly, Tehran has poured billions of dollars into military adventures abroad, spreading an arc of death and destruction across the Middle East from Yemen to Syria. Meanwhile, the Iranian people have suffered at home from a tanking currency, rising inflation, stagnant wages and a spiraling environmental crisis.

President Trump acted prudently. He spent more than a year studying the deal, soliciting information and assessments from within his administration, and consulting with our allies. He decided that this deal actually undermines the security of the American people he swore to protect and, accordingly, ended U.S. participation in it. This action reversed an ill-advised and dangerous policy and set us on a new course that will address the aggressive and hostile behavior of our enemies, while enhancing our ties with partners and allies...

Kathleen Wynne's "Care over Cuts" claim is built upon a dishonest premise

Few politicians have any real understanding of how the civil service works. The old British TV comedy Yes Minister, which had a clueless government Minister led around by the nose by a career civil servant was as accurate as it was amusing, and it was indeed both those things.

The civil service always claims it needs more funds, and provides excuses why it does. Politicians who have almost no understanding of how the the money is spent or how the bookkeeping is done almost always grant their requests. The politicians claim the increased money spent translates into advantages for the public, frequently without knowing to what extent, if at all, it benefits anyone outside the civil service and a few people connected to it. In very, very many cases it does not.

So when the head of Ontario's socialist New Democratic Party, Andrea Horvath, or Premier Kathleen Wynne say that the election is about "care over cuts," they speak from either total ignorance or deceit, because nothing could be further from the truth. It's possible to reduce government spending significantly without cutting services or firing employees.

How do I know this? Because I worked for the Ontario civil service for over a dozen years and saw how things work first hand.

The Ontario civil service operates on a fiscal year that goes from April 1 to March 31 of each year. Each fiscal year, every government department is allocated a budget. That budget may in fact exceed the actual needs of the departments' expenditures.

So what happens if a department doesn't spend all of its allocated budget by the end of the fiscal year? The money not spent goes back to the Treasury.

No civil service department head wants to give money back to the Treasury.

They don't want to give money back out of fear that someone higher up, seeing that a department needed less money this year, will then decide that it can make do with less money next year. They also don't want to give the money back because no one likes to give money back if it's in your hand and you can spend it, even if that means spending on things you don't really need.

And that's what they do. Towards the end of the fiscal year, government department after government department go on wild spending sprees. They hire consultants they don't need, they buy equipment they don't need, they do whatever it takes to make sure all the money is used up, so they can apply for the same or a bigger budget next year. I've worked in departments where as much as 15% of the annual budget was thrown away on those last minute, buy-anything-to-use it-all-up sprees.

It's a waste.

When Progressive Conservative leader Doug Ford says that 4% of the budget can be cut across the board without any service or employment cuts, if anything, he's understating the amount of potential savings he'll be able to find. Doug knows this, because he and I have spoken about it.

During her term in office, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has plunged Ontario into debt so huge that it's the biggest sub-national debtor in the world. California, which has a huge debt problem, has three times the population of Ontario and yet its State debt is less than Ontario's provincial debt.

The unfettered government waste in Ontario can't continue without dire consequences. Neither Wynne nor Horvath have any practical solutions to the debt and spending problem. Doug Ford does. That goes to the core of the choice that Ontario has to make on June 7.

The Iran Deal Is Strategically and Morally Absurd

It was surely Barack Obama’s profound aversion to the use of American military power that so enfeebled his nuclear diplomacy and made his atomic accord with Iran the worst arms-control agreement since the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. I do not know whether a more forceful president and secretary of state—say a Democratic version of Ronald Reagan and George Schultz—could have gotten a “good deal” with Tehran; it just boggles the mind to believe that a better deal wasn’t possible. A stronger president and secretary of state certainly would have been willing to walk away. Neither captured by Iranian demands nor the mirage of “moderate” mullahs and engagement, more astute, less fearful men would have been more patient, and more willing to let sanctions bite deeper into the economy and political culture of the Islamic Republic.

Obama was, to borrow from The New York Times’s Roger Cohen, America’s first “post-Western” president, a man deeply uncomfortable with American hegemony and the essential marriage of diplomacy and force. By 2013, when Hassan Rouhani won Iran’s presidential election, Obama made it increasingly clear that he was unwilling to fight over the clerical regime’s nuclear-weapons ambitions. He was also unwilling to do anything to brake the Islamic Republic’s rising Shiite imperialism, which in Syria led to the massive slaughter and flight of Syrian Sunnis who’d rebelled against Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny. And what happened in 2012-2013 in Syria and Iraq—with the absence of America—triggered the rise of the Islamic State and has now set the stage for a regional conflict that we haven’t seen since Saddam Hussein was running amok...

Happy birthday, Karl Marx: We could have done without the millions dead

On Saturday, Karl Marx turns 200 years old. A German dissident who spent most of his days in exile, Marx devoted his life to the notion that a literal heaven-on-earth was just a revolution away. Instead, he ended up inspiring one of the most prolonged epics of suffering in modern history.

Amazingly, this seems to have done very little to tarnish Marx’s apparently Teflon reputation. He just got a fawning biopic. He got glowing birthday wishes in the New York Times. And this weekend, EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker will be unveiling a statue of the man in Marx’s hometown of Trier, Germany.

Europe already had plenty of statues of Marx, although you might not know it because a lot of them got pulled down in the late 1980s...

Understanding context undoes the smear campaign against Doug Ford by the Ontario Liberals and the Toronto Star

With the election looming and the popular tide turning against her, Kathleen Wynne is anxiously flinging a barrage of smears at Progressive Conservative Party leader Doug Ford. She's been trying to twin Doug with Donald Trump, hoping that polite Canadian sensibilities will be repelled by the thought of Ontario being led by someone who may be as brash and mercurial as the US President.

Aside from the stark irony that Wynne's approval ratings are less than half of Donald Trump's, the mud didn't stick, and her cheap shot only made the Liberal Premier look ridiculous and desperate. Other than the superficial elements of both Doug and Trump being outspoken populists and businessmen, the similarities end, and the majority of Ontarians weren't going to be fooled.

From an article attacking Doug Ford
in The Toronto Star

But that reality still hasn't registered with Wynne's media enablers, such as the Editorial Board at The Toronto Star.They're doubling down on efforts to link Doug to Trump, and even detail, based, it would seem, on their close, inside relationship with Wynne, her struggle to fathom the Ford phenomenon by reading Hillary Clinton's memoir about the latter's election loss. It's akin to trying to learn why Venezuela's socialist dictatorship under Hugo Chavez and his successor was such an abysmal failure by trying to understand the world through the extraordinarily bungled analysis of Chavista Naomi Klein's nonsensical tome, The Shock Doctrine. It's an exercise in learning nothing about the subject you hope to understand, but plenty about the biases of the person writing about it, while thinking you're doing the opposite.

Since understanding Ford's success is obviously outside the confirmation bias bubble that Ontario's Liberals occupy, they also have to resort to smearing Doug Ford and lying about him, hoping their slander will be unquestioningly accepted.

That's another reason Wynne and her supporters at the Toronto Star will fail miserably. The only way their efforts work is if the people they hope to reach are too stupid or uninterested to learn anything about the context of the attacks being launched against Ford.

For example, an oft-repeated smear that Wynne and her media proxies have tried to attach to Doug for a long time is that he hates, or is insensitive to youth with autism. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The background to this matter is that Doug was critical of a group home for youth aged 12 to 18 situated in a middle class neighborhood in the Etobicoke ward he represented during his term as a city councillor. Area residents pleaded with Doug to intervene about the late-night disruptions, screaming, constant visits from police and emergency services, and sharp uptick in crime, including car break-ins, that occured in the neighborhood as a result of the presence of the youth home for the developmentally disabled.

Responding to these disturbing incidents and the desperate anxiety of the neighbors of the improperly supervised youth home, Doug tried to get a type of resolution which would protect the safety of area residents.

There are many degrees of severity with autism. In mild cases, it's barely noticeable, but the severity of the condition can change that drastically. I've worked at a psychiatric hospital and dealt with people with severe autism.They can sometimes be violent, often scream uncontrollably, and in such cases they are incapable of living independently, or even semi-independently in the community. Think of Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie Rain Man. His portrayal was only of someone with moderately severe autism. Many of the residents at the group home affecting Doug's constituents were in worse shape than that. It's worth noting that Alex Minassian, the Yonge Street van mass murderer, has autism.

According to Doug and the residents, they had been misled by the group home's organizers about the numbers, the extent they would be out in the neighborhood, and level of supervision that the residents with serious mental illnesses would have.

The root cause of the problems in the Etobicoke neighborhood where the group home was located were the fault, not of Doug Ford but Kathleen Wynne. It was Wynne's government which closed down the Thistletown Regional Centre, where youth with autism has been safely housed and supervised. That closure forced them to seek alternate housing in the community, but this was often done without appropriate safeguards.

Think about it. There are two alternate explanations for what went on. One is that after the Wynne government created a situation where people with mental challenges were housed in a neighborhood without proper supervision and Doug Ford was responding to the dire requests of his constituents to resolve a problem which was devastating their quality of life. The alternate explanation, the one the Liberal Party of Ontario and its media mouthpiece The Toronto Star would have you believe, is that Doug Ford, the most overworked councillor at Toronto's City Hall, would spend his spare time seeking out group homes for autistic people to criticize.

Take your pick, but the real answer is easy to recognize.

It also illustrates the very clear difference between Kathleen Wynne and Doug Ford.

Wynne is someone who isn't interested in doing right, and in fact will do things detrimental to the people she is supposed to represent, but will go to whatever length necessary to virtue-signal and pretend she's a champion of so-called "social justice."

Doug Ford, by contrast, is someone who puts the needs of his constituents first and foremost. He's someone willing to risk looking bad in the eyes of the media, and will set himself up for cheap shots from the likes of The Star's Martin Regg Cohn and Ford's political rivals, but doesn't care because his primary interest is helping people who need his help.

That's the choice Ontario has in the upcoming election of June 7. It's a choice that, as far as I'm concerned, couldn't be more clear.

Matthew Lau: Ontario's poverty numbers are growing again — the opposite of the rest of Canada

...Ontarians are struggling to get by, even as people living in other provinces are progressing out of low-income situations and bad provincial policy is surely to blame, given how poorly Ontario contrasts with nearly every other province. And it’s not just incomes that have been battered down by Liberal government policies: the 2016 Hunger Report by the Ontario Association of Food Banks contained a special feature on “energy poverty,” describing how Ontarians were suffering from “the rapidly increasing cost of hydro,” created by the Ontario Liberals’ “green” restructuring of the electricity grid.

People living in poor households and in rural areas are hit hardest by high hydro bills. “Ontario’s food banks are seeing an increase in the number of clients who say that they simply cannot keep up with their rising hydro bills,” the report warned. To compound the problem, food banks “with limited budgets are finding it increasingly difficult to pay the monthly hydro bill as well.”...

Douglas Murray: How many fourth-rate academics are first-rate bigots?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote two pieces about a very rum collection of ‘academics’ who had written to The Guardian defending Jeremy Corbyn from accusations of anti-Semitism.  Since then it is safe to say that the debate has not gone their way.  Or to put it another way – particularly after Tuesday’s debate in Parliament when Jewish Labour MPs and others testified to the racism now rife within the Labour party – there is even more evidence of anti-Semitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party today than there was when those forty ‘academics’ wrote to the Guardian.

Of course back then I had a bit of fun with the fact that the academics in question seemed not only to be at distinctly fourth-rate institutions, but also seemed to be ‘experts’ in non-subjects.  Almost every signatory was in a ‘media studies’ department, where their expertise ranged from ‘zombie studies’ to ‘Star Wars’.  One signatory was a saxophonist.  Personally I have no especially fixed attitudes either for or against the saxophone.  But why playing the saxophone should be said to give anyone any authority on the matter of anti-Semitism is quite beyond me.

Anyhow, imagine my surprise, nay my absolute amazement at the discovery that one of the signatories of that letter (zombie lady, as it turned out) should now turn out to have some very ugly views of her own. 

n what may be a journalistic first for the Huffington Post that publication has discovered that Jane Dipple of the ‘University of Winchester’ may not be a neutral voice on the whole issue of Jeremy Corbyn and anti-Semitism.

According to the Huffington Post, this ‘lecturer in media and communication’ has been very active in the past on social media on the matters of Jews and Zionism.  You could have knocked me over with a feather when I read that Ms Dipple had been chuntering away on Palestine Live (the anti-Semitic Facebook group of which Jeremy Corbyn and his son were also members) about these subjects.  Among her posts she refers to one ‘Icke’.  By which perhaps she is referring to David Icke – precisely the sort of thinker I would expect a ‘lecturer in media and communication’ at the University of Winchester to be in the habit of citing.  Anyhow Ms Dipple refers to ‘Icke’ who apparently referred to ‘rampant Zionism across the media.’  Elsewhere she refers to a ‘Zionist attempt to create a pure race’.  And she also merrily re-posts from the neo-Nazi website ‘The Daily Stormer’.  The piece from that disgusting publication which so impressed the University of Winchester’s ‘lecturer in media and communications’ was headlined ‘BBC To Replace Male Jew Political Editor With Female Jew.’

The University of Winchester has responded to the Huffington Poststory by saying ‘We were shocked by the content in these posts and we are investigating further as a matter of urgency.’  Well let me just say that I doubt that there is anyone outside the public relations department of the University of Winchester who is shocked by this...