Nigel Farage enjoying his favorite beverage

There are fewer than 30 days to go before the US presidential election.

It is a campaign which mirrors many of the arguments and conflicts that we have seen recently in British politics, especially during the recent Brexit referendum campaign. Essentially, this election is about continuity versus change, with huge doses of personal vitriol thrown in. 

When I arrived at the Republican Party convention in Cleveland, Ohio back in July, I was amazed at the reaction to me over the Brexit result.

One thing is for certain: our successful Brexit referendum is being talked about the world over and it may well be the first kick-back against the status quo that leads to a popular revolt across the West.

Like him or loathe him, Trump is not a part of the political elite and he most certainly is not constrained by political correctness.  This is why he is the leader of this popular revolt in America. 

In fact, I believe we are witnessing a popular uprising against failed politics on a global scale – and that if Trump wins in November, he will be the leader of it not just in the US but world-wide.

Joel Kotkin

In this disgusting election, dominated by the personal and the petty, the importance of the nation’s economic geography has been widely ignored.

Yet if you look at the Electoral College map, the correlation between politics and economics is quite stark, with one economy tilting decisively toward Trump and more generally to Republicans, the other toward Hillary Clinton and her Democrat allies.

This reflects an increasingly stark conflict between two very different American economies.

Ephemeral vs. Heartland

One, the “Ephemeral Zone” concentrated on the coasts, runs largely on digits and images, the movement of software, media and financial transactions. It produces increasingly little in the way of food, fiber, energy and fewer and fewer manufactured goods.

The Ephemeral sectors dominate ultra-blue states such as New York, California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Connecticut.

The other America constitutes, as economic historian Michael Lind notes in a forthcoming paper for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, the “New Heartland.” Extending from the Appalachians to the Rockies, this heartland economy relies on tangible goods production.

It now encompasses both the traditional Midwest manufacturing regions, and the new industrial areas of Texas, the Southeast and the Intermountain West. 

Contrary to the notions of the Ephemerals, the New Heartland is not populated by Neanderthals. This region employs much of the nation’s engineering talent, but does so in conjunction with the creation of real goods rather than clicks.

The greatest put-down in the history of presidential debates

Last night, at the lowest point in the second presidential debate Hillary Clinton tried to blame her compulsive lying on Abraham Lincoln. Not the real Lincoln, but the fictional version depicted in the Spielberg movie.

“She lied. Now she's blaming the lie on the late great Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said in exasperation. “Honest Abe never lied.”

The only thing Hillary and Lincoln have in common is Illinois.

It’s not just that Hillary is a liar and a crook. Plenty of politicians are. It’s that her dishonesty and corruption are so blatant as to be insulting to the intelligence of even the dimmest voter.

There she was stumbling around on stage, haggard and still laughing her horrifying brittle laugh and reciting canned applause lines in the hope that someone would cheer.

And to complete the pairing, Martha Raddatz was there as her doppelganger, berating Trump the way that Hillary would have liked to if she weren’t still delusional enough to think someone out there might still be fooled by her current act.

Jail is where Hillary belongs.

Geert Wilders

Last Tuesday (9/27), I visited Maassluis. It is town near Rotterdam, where the indigenous Dutch inhabitants have become the victims of immigrant youths of Moroccan descent.

Cars have been demolished, houses vandalized, people threatened. The Dutch no longer feel free and safe in their own city. When the local radio station interviewed some of the victims and referred to the perpetrators as Moroccans, it received an anonymous letter: “You are racists! Your time will come! I won’t take care of it because I am too old. But our boys are the new soldiers.”

Maassluis. It is just one of the many Dutch towns and neighborhoods terrorized by Moroccan or Turkish youth gangs. Others are Schilderswijk, Oosterwei, Kanaleneiland, Zaandam, Helmond… Not surprisingly, a poll shows that 43% of the Dutch people want fewer Moroccan immigrants in our country. These people are not racists; they are decent people, patriots who love their country and do not want to lose it.

The great Ronald Reagan once said that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” These wise words are more true today than ever before. We are the free men and women of the West.

Freedom is our birthright. But if we fail to defend it, we are bound to lose it. And, sadly, that is exactly what is happening today.

Keith Lamont Scott was scum.

He had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon in two different states and convicted of assault in three states. He had been hit with “assault with intent to kill” charges in the 90s. His record of virtue included “assault on a child under 12” and “assault on a female.” The media spin; “Family and neighbors call Scott a quiet ‘family man’.” This vicious monster’s career of crime ended when he was shot by Brentley Vinson, an African-American police officer, protecting himself from the latest rampage by this “quiet family man.” Brentley Vinson is everything that Scott isn’t. The son of a police officer, Brentley dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps. He used to organize his football team’s bible studies and mentored younger players. His former coach calls him a “natural leader” and says that, “We need more Brent Vinsons… in our communities.” Except that Obama, Black Lives Matter, the media, the NAACP and everyone else going after this bright and decent African-American officer has decided that what we really need are more Keith Lamont Scotts, not Brentley Vinsons.

James Lovelock

James Lovelock, inventor of Gaia Theory and godfather of the modern environmental movement, has finally renounced the green religion.

Climate alarmism, he says, is not “remotely scientific”; one volcano could make more difference to global warming than humans ever could; the computer models are “unreliable”; greens have behaved “deplorably”; and anyone who tries to “predict more than five to ten years is a bit of an idiot.”

Though this is not the first time Lovelock has rowed back on his earlier climate catastrophism – in 2012 he was already admitting “I made a mistake” – it’s his most emphatic rejection yet of the green litany.

Lovelock ascribes the dramatic change in his once fervently alarmist beliefs to the fact that he has “grown up.”

Only ten years ago – when the inventor, scientist and environmentalist was a mere spring chicken of 87 – Lovelock argued in his book The Revenge of Gaia that mankind was doomed.

Not any more.  What’s doomed are the computer models on which the religion of climate change are based:  “It’s only got to take one sizable volcano to erupt and all the models, everything else, is right off the board.”

Prime Minister Theresa May wants Britain to be “the most passionate, most consistent, most convincing advocate for free trade.”

With world trade stagnating, Britain has both a vital duty and a golden opportunity. It worked for us before.

Next year sees the 200th anniversary of David Ricardo’s insight of “comparative advantage” — the counterintuitive idea that trade benefits “uncompetitive” countries as much as efficient ones. If one country is better at making both cloth and wine than another, it can still pay it to get its wine, for example,  by making extra cloth to swap for the other’s wine.

Or, as somebody once put it, even if Winston Churchill is a very good bricklayer (he was), it still makes sense for him to write books or run governments, and pay somebody else to build his walls.

So the government’s view of trade should be: the more the better, the freer the better, and unilateral is fine.

There is no episode in history of a country opening itself more to world trade without getting richer. The Phoenicians, Athens,  Gujarat and Bengal,  Venice, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Victorian British, America, Singapore, Hong Kong, China after Deng Xiaoping — in every single case, countries that opened to trade got much richer very fast. 

Captured Moslem Terrorist Ahmad Khan Rahami

The wave of Moslem refugee terror began with a bomb targeting a U.S. Marine charity run in New Jersey. By evening a pressure cooker full of shrapnel has exploded outside a Manhattan building for the blind.

An hour later, a rampaging Moslem terrorist began stabbing people inside a Macy’s in Minnesota, asking them if they were Moslem and shouting the name of “Allah,” the genocidal Islamic deity of mass murder.

And that was one Saturday (9/24), two Moslem refugees and a wave of national terror 1,200 miles apart. What did Elizabeth, New Jersey and St. Cloud, Minnesota have in common?

New Jersey is a map of Moslem terror plots because of its huge Moslem population.  Minnesota has suffered from the presence of the largest Somali migrant population in the country. And so a state which used to be known for its Swedish and German immigrants instead became a recruiting ground for ISIS and Al-Shabab.

Chinese soldier guarding US “Flying Tiger” P-40 fighters during WWII

An American narrative is needed to disarm China’s victimization rhetoric.

The government in Beijing claims that China is the long-suffering victim of Western powers, Japan, and other countries. In this narrative, China’s rulers bear hardly any faults.

Without any sense of irony, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) repeats its Orwellian twist that China is the “victim” in the South China Sea, though it is the strongest claimant and bullies others to submit to China’s control of areas by using militarized, environmentally-damaging claims to fragile reefs, rocks, islands, and maritime areas within an egregious “nine dash line.”

The PRC propaganda machine manipulates messages by citing a so-called “century of humiliation.” In a self-serving story supposedly speaking for the people, the PRC’s English-language mouth-piece, China Daily, used this convenient definition this past August: “For many Chinese, the ‘century of humiliation’ started with the First Opium War (1840-1842) and lasted until 1949 when the People’s Republic of China was founded.”

A historically-grounded narrative is needed to counter China’s charges, which have real implications for American and other national policies. The PRC plays the “victim” card to its advantage, seeking to compel compliance by putting others on the defensive, to undercut American leadership, to deflect blame, to incite others to regurgitate its case, to indoctrinate internal opinion to support the regime, to stoke “nationalism” for leverage, and to arm psychological warfare that positions Beijing as “just.”

In fact, in a fuller history of more than 100 years, the United States has supported reforms in China for progressive government, liberalization, and education for generations of people, as well as integration of China into the international community (even for the regime of the Communist Party of China).

[TTPer Mike Ryan wrote a thoughtful commentary on the Forum regarding China Is Now the Epicenter of Global Risk by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.  Several TTPers suggested we publish it as a full article.  We are happy to comply.  Thanks, Mike.]

This is in response to a question asked on the Forum, “Can anyone explain the repercussions of the global risk of China to our economy?”  Here are my thoughts.

It is risky to predict the reactions of complex systems that are actively influenced by government, especially when the primary goal of government is power for insiders and the fleecing of outsiders. 

Example: The Clinton Global Initiative and its DOJ support.  Governments spend more on power and control every time there is a financial crisis. 

Some thoughts:

Alien greenery on Ascension Island – photo by Jack Wheeler

In July, the New Zealand government announced its intention to eradicate all rats, stoats and possums from the entire country by 2050 to save native birds such as the kiwi.

It’s an ambitious plan, perhaps impossible to pull off with the methods available today, but it’s a stark reminder that invasive alien species today constitute perhaps the greatest extinction threat to animal populations world-wide.

The dodo on Mauritius, emblematic of extinction, was wiped out less by hungry sailors than by the rats, pigs, dogs and cats they brought with them. Hawaii once had 55 species of honeycreeper; today just 17 remain, thanks largely to rats and avian malaria, transmitted by alien mosquitoes brought by people. Guam has lost nine species of bird to an introduced snake.

In the Mississippi River, it is Asian carp; in the Everglades, Burmese pythons; in the Great Lakes, Russian zebra mussels; in the South, Indochinese kudzu vine.

In Australia, cane toads from South America; in Lake Victoria in Africa, water hyacinth from the Amazon; in Germany, Chinese mitten crabs; in the Caribbean, lionfish from the Pacific. A fungus spread by African clawed toads (used in laboratories) has wiped out frogs in Central America.

But it turns out there’s a flip side.  None of this is to say that invasive species are always a threat. They can bring positive effects, too, by increasing biodiversity within a region.

America's terrorist shortage may be reaching an end. If Orlando didn't satisfy you and San Bernardino left you wanting more; if you thought, why can't we have more Boston Marathon bombings, Obama has your back.  And your front and any other directions that a pressure cooker full of nails can hit you from. The land of Washington, Jefferson, and Mohammed Atta has reached a new milestone by taking in Syrian refugee number 10,000. It’s unknown if the TSA will shower him with balloons and confetti once he passes the gate while clutching a Koran and a copy of the Caliphate Cookbook. Either way we hit the big explosive ten thousand. And the clock is ticking. Media outlets are puffing out sympathetic portrayals of the oppressed Syrians moving into some neighborhood near you, and far from the bosses behind the major media outlets. All these folks fleeing the violence of their own religion want is a safe place to live. And safe inevitably means non-Islamic. There’s an obvious lesson here that neither they nor our expertly chattering classes seem able to grasp.

Where does media bias come from?  Anyone who really wanted to know had that question answered when much of the media took a break from attacking Trump to attack the Associated Press.

What does the AP have in common with Trump? Both were hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances to score payoffs from dictators, arms dealers and tycoons with terrorist ties for the next four to eight years.

The Associated Press got in trouble with the rest of the media for digging up dirt on the Clinton Foundation. Instead of just repeating the usual Clinton denials, it actually ran the numbers and noted that more than half the “ordinary folks” who got meetings with her had donated to her Foundation.

Instead of reporting on the AP story, the media went to war on its own. It wasn’t just the usual suspects like Vox and Slate who have a reputation for attacking any actual reporters who stray off the reservation and actually do their jobs. This time all the big boys were on the job.

The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is approaching its annual nadir. By early September each year about two thirds of the ice cap has melted, then the sea begins to freeze again.

This year looks unlikely to set a record for melting, with more than four million square kilometers of ice remaining, less than the average in the 1980s and 1990s, but more than in the record low years of 2007 and 2012. (The amount of sea ice around Antarctica has been increasing in recent years, contrary to predictions.)

Meanwhile, the habit of some scientists of predicting when the ice will disappear completely keeps getting them into trouble.  But would it matter if it did all melt one year? Here’s the point everybody seems to be missing: the Arctic Ocean’s ice has indeed disappeared during summer in the past, routinely.

And when it did, during a period known as the “Early Holocene Insolation Maximum” (EHIM), it was the best thing that ever happened to humanity.  Here’s why.

Donald Trump has said publicly that he fears the next election will be rigged. Based both on technical capability and recent history, Trump’s concerns are not unfounded.

A recent study by Stanford University proved that Hillary Clinton’s campaign rigged the system to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders.  What was done to Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin is stunning.

Why would the Clintons not cheat again? 

Democrat voter fraud has a long history.  The most prominent example is how it enabled John Kennedy to be President in 1960 instead of Richard Nixon.

Here’s how it happened back then with plain voter fraud.  It’s much easier now with rigged electronic voting machines.

Donald Trump has been issuing warnings about Democrat voter fraud in America this November.  If it’s anything like what we Brits are experiencing, you Yanks should listen to him.

If ever you’ve worried that parts of Britain now resemble some hideously corrupt, Third World Islamic basket case hell hole then you’re going to love Sir Eric Pickles’s gloriously robust report on electoral fraud.

His target, it’s clear, isn’t just the Moslem communities in places like London’s Tower Hamlets (and Birmingham and many Northern towns) which have imported to Britain the kind of political skullduggery and malpractice routine on the Indian subcontinent.

More broadly what Pickles is attacking is the bankrupt philosophy of Multiculturalism and the entrenched, institutional political correctness that have made it all possible.

It’s morally bankrupting Britain and Trump is warning it could bankrupt America.

To explain the present, the Communist Party of China (CPC) often turns to the past. One of its favorite pastimes is to deploy China’s decorated history and the wisdom of its ancients to explain its policies and bolster its authority.

For example, the CPC frequently offers the (largely nonviolent) 15th century maritime voyages of Zheng He, who projected Chinese power and carried Chinese treasure to destinations as far flung as the Middle East and Africa, to support the notion of its “peaceful rise” in the 21st century.

Mao was fond of quoting Sun Tzu, while today Xi Jinping keeps a rolodex of wise sayings from political philosophers at the ready.

Yet despite the homage paid to these leading lights, Beijing’s behavior is growing increasingly at odds with much of their counsel. That is to the detriment of China and the world.

Many of China’s most prominent ancient political philosophers, including Guan Zhong, Laozi, Confucius, Xunzi, and Mencius, held that governing with humane authority—“winning the hearts and minds of the people at home and abroad”—was the key to becoming a leading world power, as Yan Xuetong points out in his book Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power.

In terms of its foreign policy, China has been doing little of this lately.

At the DNC Convention, Michelle Obama put on her victimhood hat one more time and declared, “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”

But that’s too past tense. Michelle’s house continues to be built and maintained by slaves. Her lavish lifestyle of endless vacations, parties and public appearances is funded by millions and millions of slaves. Michelle Obama lives a life that is vastly more lavish and luxurious than that of any plantation owner. She has 26 staffers that are part of a White House staff of thousands. That’s more than many crowned heads of state. Compare that to 12 servants for Thomas Jefferson. Michelle’s house, her luxurious lifestyle, is built by taxpaying slaves who are forced to turn over their money to fund her pleasures. She spent more money on one night in Morocco than the average American family will see in five years.

The Obama lifestyle is just the tip of the iceberg. Tens of thousands of more modest government plantation owners cling to their skirts living off the stolen toil of the government’s slaves. Government, like slavery, is an institution. Like slavery, it claims to civilize its dependents. In reality it exploits them. It promises them security in exchange for freedom. It takes away the products of their toil and then tells them that they didn’t build that. It claims a false moral authority to exploit them.

A Donald Trump presidency would be way more beneficial to the environment than a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Trump really needs to mention this point at his rallies, not just for the trolling, but also because it happens to be true.

Consider just one example: the hundreds of thousands of rare birds and endangered bats slaughtered in the US every year by the wind farms that Hillary Clinton applauds (and will no doubt go on subsidizing) and that Donald Trump loathes (and will no doubt starve of subsidies and cause to become as extinct as the Dodo).

As the Daily Beast recently noted, Trump’s hatred of wind farms is probably the most consistent and long-standing of all his political convictions.

Donald J. Trump Verified account ‏@realDonaldTrump "@noturbine: @realDonaldTrump Wind turbines kill up to 39 million birds a year, Industry hides evidence of kills http://www.cfact.org/2013/03/18/wind-turbines-kill-up-to-39-million-birds-a-year/ …"

Trump does have a point. If you care about flying wildlife, bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes really are about the most pointlessly destructive form of power generation there is – as a series of recent studies show.

On Monday (8/08), British Prime Minister Theresa May announced what is being called the “Frackpot” –  to redirect some of the future profits of shale gas production to households, rather than councils.

[Note that in the UK and most countries, unlike the US, the government owns the mineral rights under a landowner’s land.  Note also that – surprise – British environmentalists are denouncing May’s policy as a “bribe.” – JW]

After leaving the European Union, Britain will have to be quicker to adopt new technologies, the better to create wealth in the knowledge economy. For me that’s the biggest opportunity of Brexit.

But to grasp it we must find a way to persuade people to be more ready to embrace innovation and less suspicious. A country that can work out how to do that is going to steal a march on its rivals.

Innovation is the source of virtually all prosperity. It is the reason the average person now lives longer, feeds better, travels farther, is better entertained and sees more children survive than even a monarch did four centuries ago. A glance back through history shows that innovation nearly always does more good than harm.

So why is innovation so fiercely resisted?

Two recent news stories highlight how pernicious the welfare state has become in America today.

Fox News reported (7/18)  that food-stamp groceries can be delivered right to a recipient’s door. In New York, the program is being called Fresh Direct – note the website has a convenient En Español button.

Service with a smile. The Obama administration says it is too much of a hardship for those on welfare to actually travel to the grocery store. What’s next? Cooking the meal for them? If only the DMV would do home deliveries for drivers licenses.

The second story is the hullabaloo over a proposal by Maine Governor Paul LePage to prohibit food stamp recipients from using their food aid to purchase junk foods like sugary soft drinks and candy bars. He says that the state has an obesity problem and he will “implement reform unilaterally or cease Maine’s administration of the food stamp program altogether.”

The Obama administration rejected his request and the left activists act as if a welfare recipient can’t stuff themselves with Mars bars and Mountain Dew at taxpayer expense, it’s a violation of civil liberties.  The media in Maine promptly condemned LePage’s “food stamp recklessness” that shows “little respect for Maine’s poor.”

The welfare/entitlement state of mind has spiraled out of control in America. The cost of welfare is now well over $1 trillion a year.

The UN Commission of Experts identified 1,600 actual cases of rape in the Bosnian War that took place in the former Yugoslavia over a period of years. In Germany, 2,000 Moslem migrants sexually assaulted 1,200 women in a single night in cities across Germany.

The former was considered one of the worst war crimes of the decade. Its perpetrators were bombed and then faced war crimes trials. The perpetrators of the latter received a slap on the wrist. In Cologne, Hassan and Hussein were handed suspended sentences. Hassan, who had demanded that a man hand over two women to him by bellowing, “Give me the girls, give me the girls - or you're dead” was tried as a juvenile offender and was sentenced to community service and an integration course.

That’s because, given a choice between protecting women and sexual predators, the left chooses rapists – if they are Moslem.

On June 30, Hallel Yaffa Ariel, a 13-year-old girl, was asleep when she was murdered in her own bedroom. She had just graduated 8th grade. It was her summer vacation and she was taking it easy. The Moslem terrorist who broke into her bedroom stabbed her over and over again. Eventually he slit her throat. The mattress that she slept on was soaked in blood. Her room with its casual teenage disarray, clothes tossed around carelessly, was stained red with the last gush of life from the girl who had played there, danced there and dreamed of the future that would never be hers. The murder happened in Israel, but Hallel was an American citizen. Her government not only failed to protect her, it financed her bloody death. And it will go on rewarding her killer’s family.

The United States has officially condemned Hallel’s murder. Its current government however will do nothing to stop the Palestinian Authority from funding terrorism. Instead it will usE its power to continue funding it. Hallel was not the first American to be murdered by Moslem terrorists this year. She was the seventh.

I once tried the organic alternative to the herbicide Roundup for clearing weeds from garden paths: a flame-thrower.

It was brutal for the environment, incinerating innocent insects and filling the air with emissions. Next week I might have to go back to that. Roundup, the world’s safest, cheapest and most effective weedkiller, may be illegal within days in Europe.

Roundup (chemical name glyphosate) was due to have its licence extended for 15 years. Normally it would have been nodded through.

But this time the relevant French and German ministers, Segolene Royale and Barbara Hendricks, nervous about the Greenie vote, have blocked the renewal, and the best that farmers and gardeners can hope for is an 18-month extension till after French and German elections.

Yet almost everybody agrees that glyphosate is safe: the European Food Safety Authority, the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization, my own British government.

Even at absurdly high concentrations, lab tests show it is only one-tenth as carcinogenic as coffee – and you don’t drink Roundup.

FBI Director James Comey has decided not to recommend that Hillary Clinton be indicted for violating security laws concerning the handling of classified information, among other offenses.

By doing so he has compromised a fundamental principle of consensual government: that the laws apply equally to everybody, including those entrusted with the people’s power. Now it is up to voters come November to reaffirm that we are a nation of laws, not men.

Comey’s decision is just the latest in a long-developing trend. In recent years government officials from the president on down have demonstrated the progressives’ penchant for disregarding laws that don’t serve their private or political interests.

I am reminded by Comey’s decision of Aristotle’s definition of tyranny.  Here it is…

Long-developing cracks in the Western political establishment’s century-old paradigm suddenly widened this year.In the US Donald Trump, a reality television star and real estate developer, improbably became the Republican Party’s nominee for president. Bernie Sanders, a socialist and long-time Senate crank, challenged the Democrats’ pre-anointed nominee Hillary Clinton, who prevailed only by dint of money and un-democratic “super-delegates.” Meanwhile in Europe, the UK voted to leave the European Union, perhaps opening the flood-gates to more defections.These three events share a common theme: populist and patriotic passions roused by arrogant elites have fueled a rejection of Western establishments and their un-democratic, autocratic, corrupt paradigm.

A mob of starving people advanced on the presidential palace chanting, “We want food”. They were met by soldiers and police dispatched by the tyrant from his lavish palace decorated opulently with a golden sun, giant rock crystal mirrors, sparkling chandeliers and towering oil portraits.

The scene wasn’t 19th century France, but 21st century Venezuela. And if you are wondering why you haven’t seen it on the news, it’s because Venezuela is a Socialist disaster area that was once being used as a model by the left. Now it’s a place where the vast majority of people can’t afford basic food staples and a third are down to two or fewer meals a day. Obama laughed and joked with deceased monster Hugo Chavez, who handed him a copy of the anti-American tract, “Open Veins of Latin America” that had even been disavowed by its own author. Obama called the book a “nice gesture,” but Eduardo Galeano, its author, had told an audience that the left “commits grave errors” when in power.

Venezuela, once a wealthy oil state, where the doctors offering “universal health care” have no medicine and starving people loot government stores looking for food, is yet another example. 50 people are dead in the latest food riots. Their graves are yet another “grave error” of the left.

Islamic violence is nearly impossible to deny. But why is Islam violent?

The usual answer is to point to Koranic verses calling for the conquest and subjugation of non-Moslems. That certainly covers the theological basis for Islamic violence. But it fails to explain why Moslems continue to practice it. Even against each other. Violence has become the defining form of Islamic exceptionalism.

Islam made the standard tactics of tribal warfare far more effective. Its alliance was harder to fragment and its fighters were not afraid of death. But at the same time Islam remained fundamentally tribal.

It made tribal banditry more effective, but didn’t change the civilization. It codified the tribal suspicion of outsiders and women into a religious doctrine. That still drives Islamic violence against non-Moslems and women today. And yet Islam could have reformed. All it had to do was choose a different civilizational strategy.  Why didn’t it?

Last week I visited an island and stood among a crowd of puffins. If I turned my head I could see the lighthouse. If I looked up, the arctic terns were above my head. Yet I never left my living room.  How come? I was wearing a virtual-reality mask.

I have tried this “Oculus” technology once before, when visiting Facebook in California (which owns Oculus) and it is truly extraordinary to have an all-round, up-and-down view of the world depending on how you turn your head. All it involves is a special (Samsung) smartphone jammed into a pair of goggles.

Is it the next wave of tech? I have no idea. Apart from games, virtual visits to inaccessible nature reserves and maybe estate agents, it may not have many practical applications. But I may be wrong. Does the next wave lie in big data? Or robotics? Or the internet of things? Or something else entirely?

Nobody knows. The one thing that the history of technology shows above all else is our complete inability to see what comes next.

Yet something will come next, of that we can be confident. By 2025 there will be a vast new firm, valued at an astronomical sum and run by people who look like teenagers from a futuristic building in . . . well, where will it be? Can you imagine it being in Europe? Me neither.  Here’s why.