[Quillette via Instapundit] On January 15, and well into the morning of the next day, terrorists affiliated with the Somali Jihadi group Al Shabab forced their way into an upscale Nairobi hotel and business centre, killing 21 innocent civilians. Kenyan authorities, with some help from Western allies, killed some of the terrorists and captured the rest. Al Shabab justified the attack by denouncing the Kenyan government’s participation with African Union forces in Somalia, which has been in a state of civil warfare since the early 1990s.
I had driven by the targeted complex a couple of days before the attack, and once lived in this neighbourhood back when Kenya was my permanent home. On this visit to the country, I’ve noticed that‐notwithstanding January’s terrible tragedy‐tourism is booming, agriculture is bountiful and the Kenyan elite are benefiting from the massive Chinese investments that have transformed the landscape. The overall degree of improvement depends on which expert you believe. But the plethora of expensive cars that now jam the streets of Nairobi, and the building boom on display in many parts of the city, do suggest a surging economy.
Anyone who knows the history and tribal dynamics of East Africa and the Horn will understand that even if the Kenyan government pulled all its troops out of Somalia, Al Shabab likely would still try its best to destabilize this country. I outlined the reasons for this decades ago, when I first briefed visiting Canadian and U.S. military personnel here in Nairobi. Many of the things I told them remain as true now as they were then. That’s because the most important factors at play are rooted in history, not in recent geopolitical developments.
Specifically: Many modern problems in the area are rooted in the Indian Ocean slave trade‐a scourge that was distinct from the better known slave trade that preyed on West Africa. In the eastern part of the continent, there was little to no European involvement. The practice was indigenous and ancient, and lasted more than a thousand years.
The rise of Islamic societies propelled young Arab and Persian men to the Indian Ocean coast, from Somalia down to Mozambique. There, they married local women, converted locals to Islam and established sophisticated coastal trading cities that featured advanced stone architecture, relatively high rates of literacy and even, in some cases, indoor plumbing. This is where they developed the lateen sail (though its origins remain disputed by historians), which allowed them to take advantage of alternating monsoon winds, so as to sail their trading dhows to India and back to East Africa every six months. These were the seas plied by the fictional Sinbad the Sailor. East Africa’s coastal elites brought gold, ivory, spices and slaves from the interior of Africa and sold them to customers in the Middle East and India.
BLUF:
[Hot Air] Though the White House has worked to prepare an emergency declaration invoking the president’s sweeping executive powers, several West Wing aides have warned that invoking it would alienate some conservatives who have otherwise been loyal to the White House...
A more modest executive order has been under review by the White House counsel’s office for weeks, which Mulvaney has termed "legal executive authority." Both choices are likely to provide much less money than what the president has been demanding for a border wall...
Privately, Mulvaney and other senior officials, including White House policy adviser Jared Kushner, have been warning Trump about the drawbacks of taking executive action or employing emergency powers. The president’s chief of staff has described an emergency declaration as something he hopes to avoid due to expected legal backlash, according to six people familiar with his thinking.
#5
Lil' ap p lost me during the Clivan Bundy standoff, where he was all government intrusions and principles, but within 2 seconds of hearing somebody might have said an impolite word, they became dirt people who deserved to lose the situation.
[National Review] The real-life Supreme Court justice has accomplished much for the cause of formal gender equality. The pop-culture RBG is a different character.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent series of hospital visits began when she took a tumble in early November, breaking three ribs. That first visit was a short one ‐ she fell on Thursday, was released on Friday, and returned to work on Tuesday ‐ but the reaction was dramatic nonetheless. Actress Leslie Grossman took to Twitter: "If Ruth Bader Ginsburg needs any of my bones or internal organs I don’t need mine." Stephen Colbert made a similar offer: "No! Does she need ribs? I’ve got ribs. She can take mine!" Laypeople joined in, calling for witch spells to protect Ginsburg and demanding that she don an inflatable sumo suit for protection.
Though it’s not always serious, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has an intense fan following that no political figure can match. It’s nothing short of a pop-culture phenomenon, complete with merchandise, movies, and a recurring Kate McKinnon impression on Saturday Night Live. For many, RBG is simultaneously a fun rock-star celebrity and the final bulwark between us and a future resembling The Handmaid’s Tale. The reputation and the reality of Ruth Bader Ginsburg have often clashed, but they have also transformed each other ‐ in five short years, she has became "notorious," a radical feminist, and a legendary dissenter.
Justice Ginsburg’s fan following exploded thanks to a combination of timely cases, Supreme Court trends, shifts within progressivism, and of course the Internet. Its most immediate spark was the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder. In Shelby, the Supreme Court struck down a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that singled out certain states and counties for extra federal scrutiny. The decision in Shelby was 5‐4, split along partisan lines, and responsibility for the dissent fell to Ginsburg, who’d been the Court’s senior-most liberal since John Paul Stevens’s retirement three years earlier. The majority had reasoned that the conditions justifying a then-decades-old standard for federal scrutiny had changed and that the states in question remained under scrutiny for voting-rights violations that they hadn’t committed in decades. Ginsburg characterized this logic as punishing the Voting Rights Act for being successful ‐ like "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."
Ginsburg’s characterization of the ruling caught fire on social media. Countless young people embraced it as a witty rebuke to what they saw as unintelligent, racist conservatism. One such person was Shana Knizhnik, a New York University law student spending the summer at a law firm specializing in advocacy for death-row inmates. On Facebook, a friend had shared Ginsburg’s opinion with the hashtag #notoriousRBG, "as a comment on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s amazing writing style and force in that opinion." The hashtag caught Knizhnik’s attention. "It immediately clicked with me," she explained in an interview for the NYU website, "that this must be a thing."
The same day the Shelby ruling appeared, Knizhnik opened Tumblr and started a blog that she named "Notorious R.B.G." Her first post was Ginsburg’s "umbrella" line from Shelby. It didn’t take long for the blog to establish its identity: a mix of quotations by and about Ginsburg, links to news articles, merchandise, GIFs, and myriad images ranging from a painting of a nude Barack Obama riding a unicorn while holding RBG to a photo, captioned "Squad Goals." of the female Supreme Court justices.
#1
Her sainthood will dissolve very quickly if she retires or passes while Trump is still President. Lefties will shriek that she should have stepped down halfway through Obama's administration.
[AmericanThinker] At the height of Western dominance over Islam in the early twentieth century, the European historian Hilaire Belloc (b. 1870) made a remarkably prescient observation that may have seemed exaggerated at the time:
Millions of modern people of the white civilization -- that is, the civilization of Europe and America -- have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past" (from Belloc’s The Great Heresies, emphasis added).
... Returning to Hilaire Belloc, one can also see how an accurate understanding of true history -- as opposed to an indoctrination in mainstream pseudo-histories -- leads to an accurate prognosis of the future. That's why Western left always starts with revising history --- e.g. "the horrors of American slavery" (like serfs in Russia been treated any better)
[Right Scoop] John Roberts just became the new favorite judge of liberals everywhere as he sided with the liberals on the court to block a Louisiana abortion law:
WASHINGTON TIMES ‐ A divided Supreme Court stopped Louisiana from enforcing new regulations on abortion clinics in a test of the conservative court’s views on abortion rights.
The justices said by a 5-4 vote late Thursday that they will not allow the state to put into effect a law that requires abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court’s four liberals in putting a hold on the law, pending a full review of the case.
President Trump’s two Supreme Court appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, were among the four conservative members of the court who would have allowed the law to take effect.
Kavanaugh wrote a dissenting opinion in which he said the court’s action was premature because the state had made clear it would allow abortion providers an additional 45 days to obtain admitting privileges before it started enforcing the law.
If the doctors succeed, they can continue performing abortions, he said. If they fail, they could return to court, Kavanaugh said.
The law is very similar to a Texas measure the justices struck down three years ago. Roberts dissented in that case.
Does Roberts want to be the new swing vote? I don’t know the particulars, but the AP is suggesting that Roberts dissented three years ago but then switched his position this time? Is he trying to protect the court again like he did with Obamacare?
#2
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court’s four liberals in putting a hold on the law, pending a full review of the case.
Not exactly "BLOCK". "Delayed" would be more accurate
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/09/2019 6:31 Comments ||
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#3
Yes, and I can see him doing an RBG just as an intentional balance so that it CAN get before the SC. He delayed it, but didn't block it, just as Frank G. said.
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
02/09/2019 8:17 Comments ||
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#4
The overturned milk truck "blocked" traffic causing many motorists a delay.
#5
John Roberts has been a disgrace, but not a particularly surprising one, for most of his career. Only fools keep getting surprised by a useful idiot continuing his ways.
#13
I don't know but I'm guessing the purpose of this law is so if something goes wrong with the abortion the abortionist can have the victim admitted to hospital. What happens if he can't? Delays could be disastrous.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/09/2019 14:14 Comments ||
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#14
RBG did vote. No one needed to pick up the slack.
This was a procedural vote, not a final disposition of the case.
And the LA law clearly runs afoul of a 2016 SCOTUS ruling. If the court is going to reconsider after just 3 years, I'm not against dotting the i's and crossing the t's.
#15
O dM2118 may be right. The Bezos flap suggests to me that quite a few people have access to surprising details about other people's lives.
I suspect that the big data trawling won't find a lot of terrorists, but the same data might be very useful for drilling down on particular people's details.
Posted by: james ||
02/09/2019 14:58 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
