A caller to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, laying out why he prefers Trump to Cruz:
We’re sick and tired of fighting with people who won’t fight, and when it comes to down to Cruz, you know, my instincts with Cruz is that, yeah, he’s a nice guy. And don’t get me wrong, if he magically wins this nomination, of course I’ll support him. But the problem is, I suspect he won’t fight. Three days ago there was an article in Breitbart where he’s being interviewed and he said, “You know, if I’m elected,” he said something to that effect of, “I’m not gonna get personal. This is gonna be about issues.”
Okay, great. You just handed them the election, ‘cause you know what they’re gonna do? They’re gonna make it personal against you and you’re gonna be like the new George Bush just sitting up there like Jeb. You won’t fight. You’ll just sit there and take it and we’re gonna lose again. And the thing is, Trump, you know what? I disagree with probably 80% of the stuff that he believes in, or he purports to. But the thing is, I think we’re facing an existential crisis. It comes down to immigration, illegal immigration and Obamacare.
Think about this: Cruz, the man probably most responsible for the government shutdown, is perceived as a guy who won’t fight — on Obamacare, no less!
.. I don’t understand how you can look at Ted Cruz and, out of all possible flaws, conclude he isn’t willing to fight for what he believes in. (His flaw is more likely the opposite, quixotic fights and antagonism to potential allies that isn’t helpful in the long run.)
.. Secondly, if you elect a ferocious fighter who you disagree with on four out of five issues, it means he’ll be fighting ferociously against you on four out of five issues. You’ve empowered a guy who you mostly disagree with in the hopes that he really comes through on that 20 percent. (Somehow I suspect the caller isn’t focusing extensively on the “touchback amnesty” portion of Trump’s immigration plan.
Out of Africa, Part II
Tell these young African men that their odds of getting to Europe are tiny and they will tell you, as one did me, that when you don’t have enough money to buy even an aspirin for your sick mother, you don’t calculate the odds. You just go.
.. After a series of on/off droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, the weather patterns stabilized a bit, “until about 10 years ago,” the chief added. Then, the weather got really weird.
The rainy season used to always begin in June and run to October. Now the first rains might not start until August, then they stop for a while, leaving fields to dry out, and then they begin again. But they come back as torrential downpours that create floods. “So whatever you plant, the crops get spoiled,” the chief said. “You reap no profits.”
.. The father started to tear up. These people live so close to the edge. One reason they have so many children is that the offspring are a safety net for aging parents. But the boys are all leaving and the edge is getting even closer.
.. Which means they are losing the only thing they were rich in: a deep sense of community.
.. Lake Chad alone has lost 90 percent of its water
.. Gardens or walls? It’s really not a choice. We have to help them fix their gardens because no walls will keep them home.
How Islam Created Europe
In late antiquity, the religion split the Mediterranean world in two. Now it is remaking the Continent.
Indeed, early in the fifth century a.d., when Saint Augustine lived in what is today Algeria, North Africa was as much a center of Christianity as Italy or Greece. But the swift advance of Islam across North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries virtually extinguished Christianity there, thus severing the Mediterranean region into two civilizational halves
.. Islam had defined Europe culturally, by showing Europe what it was against. Europe’s very identity, in other words, was built in significant measure on a sense of superiority to the Muslim Arab world on its periphery. Imperialism proved the ultimate expression of this evolution: Early modern Europe, starting with Napoleon, conquered the Middle East, then dispatched scholars and diplomats to study Islamic civilization, classifying it as something beautiful, fascinating, and—most crucial—inferior.
.. With these dictatorships holding their peoples prisoner inside secure borders—borders artificially drawn by European colonial agents—Europeans could lecture Arabs about human rights without worrying about the possibility of messy democratic experiments that could lead to significant migration.
..Though Europe’s elites have for decades used idealistic rhetoric to deny the forces of religion and ethnicity, those were the very forces that provided European states with their own internal cohesion.
..Europe has responded by artificially reconstructing national-cultural identities on the extreme right and left, to counter the threat from the civilization it once dominated.
.. “The West,” if it does have a meaning beyond geography, manifests a spirit of ever more inclusive liberalism. Just as in the 19th century there was no going back to feudalism, there is no going back now to nationalism, not without courting disaster. As the great Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen observed, “History does not turn back … All reinstatements, all restorations have always been masquerades.”
Out of Africa
In Libya, say migrants, you can get beaten at any moment — or arbitrarily arrested and have the police use your cellphone to call your family in Niger and demand a ransom for your release.
.. Just as Syria’s revolution was set off in part by the worst four-year drought in the country’s modern history — plus overpopulation, climate stresses and the Internet — the same is true of this African migration wave.
.. Chaifou explains that West Africa has experienced two decades of on-again-off-again drought. The dry periods prompt desperate people to deforest hillsides for wood for cooking or to sell, but they are now followed by increasingly violent rains, which then easily wash away the topsoil barren of trees. Meanwhile, the population explodes — mothers in Niger average seven children — as parents continue to have lots of kids for social security, and each year more fertile land gets eaten by desertification. “We now lose 100,000 hectares of arable land every year to desertification,” says Chaifou. “And we lose between 60,000 and 80,000 hectares of forest every year.”
.. Says the U.N.’s Barbut, “Desertification acts as the trigger, and climate change acts as an amplifier of the political challenges we are witnessing today: economic migrants, interethnic conflicts and extremism.” She shows me three maps of Africa with an oblong outline around a bunch of dots clustered in the middle of the continent. Map No. 1: the most vulnerable regions of desertification in Africa in 2008. Map No. 2: conflicts and food riots in Africa 2007-2008. Map No. 3: terrorist attacks in Africa in 2012.
All three outlines cover the same territory.
.. “If we would invest a fraction of that amount helping African nations combat deforestation, improve health and education and sustain small-scale farming, which is the livelihood of 80 percent of the people in Africa, so people here could stay on the land,” says Barbut, “it would be so much better for them and for the planet.”