- Times Change Out From Under Us – Paul Craig Roberts Opens "The Floodgates Of 'His' Memory"
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
He had lugged the 50 lb. bag of Milorganite into the garden in order to discover, as on many prior occasions, that he had nothing with which to open it. He blamed this on the war on terror and the TSA. As a youth he, as did every boy, had a pocket knife. Always. It was expected. There was no school rule against pocket knives. Once for a period they even all had switchblades. You could get them for 99 cents, a large amount in those days, enough to buy a case of 24 Coca-Colas. The switchblades met with school and parental disapproval as they smacked of New York gangs. But before teachers and parents came up with a policy, the boys had abandoned the switchblades. The knives had weak springs. Fascinated with the speed with which the knives opened with a satisfying click and locked the blade into place, the boys quickly wore out the springs on their switchblades. Unlike their trusty pocket knives, the switchblades quickly became useless.
He no longer carried a pocket knife. He had learned long ago that things that go into pockets become habitual. He would forget to take the knife out when he rushed to catch his flight, just as he always forgot to put the knife in his pocket when he went to work in the garden. There would be a scene at the airport, confiscation of the knife, which had been his grandfather’s, and TSA questioning. They might want him to be strip searched. He could miss his flight. Such a large expensive organization as TSA needs justification, and so whereas the TSA officers might be reasonable, he could not count on it. Under the law he could be accused and prosecuted. One never knew.
He could remember the air shuttle between Washington and New York. The planes flew on the hour. You could show up 10 minutes before takeoff and be seated. If one airplane wasn’t enough, they would provide a second. There was no security, no delays.
He didn’t like being drawn back into memories of the past. It made him acutely aware how difficult just simple things had become over the course of his life, like carrying a pocket knife.
A couple of weeks ago he had been on vacation at a gated mountain resort. He enjoyed hiking along the streams and visiting the waterfalls. He had managed to rent at the airport a sports sedan and was looking forward to a morning workout at the exercise center and then a semi-spirited drive along mountain roads outside the resort. As he was changing into his workout clothes, the telephone rang. As he rushed to stay on schedule his billfold with driving license did not make the clothes change.
He discovered this at the exercise center. It was 10 minutes back to his cabin and then 10 minutes back in the direction of the exit gate. Why had he agreed to a telephone interview? If he went back for his license, his drive would be rushed and not enjoyable. He could go without his license, but suppose something happened, such as a collision with a deer. Would the police accept a reasonable story and the car rental papers for ID, or would he be hauled to jail, a long flight away from his lawyer? The days of reasonable police, he thought, were bygone days. The morning was shot. The only thing to do was to vent his frustration in exercise and return to his cabin for the telephone interview.
Even the innocence of words had been lost. There were many words that could no longer be used. They had been banished down the memory hole. A professor friend had told him that he was subjected to a dressing down by a dean because he had used the word “girl” in class. “Girl” is now considered offensive to womyn.
In restaurants in the South, waitresses called the men “honey.” “What will it be, honey?” The men called the waitresses “darling.” He wondered about that today. Perhaps in small towns. Since the advent of interstate highways, small towns had passed out of his experience. He wondered if they still had restaurants or just fast food franchises.
It got worse. The floodgates of memory had opened. He was given his first firearm at age 10. It was a single barrel .410 shotgun. When he was 12 he was given a .22 pistol. Many of his friends had guns. The countryside was nearby and many urban families had farm relatives. He remembered, too, that all the kids were subjected to corporal punishment. Today a parent who spanked a kid or provided one with a firearm would be arrested, likely prosecuted, and the kid put into foster care where there was risk of being leased out to a pedophile group.
He could remember riding his horse into the town three miles from his grandparents’ farm with a real pistol strapped to his side and a rifle in the scabbard when he was 12 or 13. No one said a thing. Today a SWAT team would be on the scene. He would be lucky not to be shot dead and never know the fate of his grandparents, who would be guilty of all sorts of offenses, including failure to supervise a minor.
That reminded him of what he had recently read in a newspaper. On a cul-de-sac devoid of car traffic a mother sat in a chair outside the house while her child played in the front lawn. A busybody neighbor, trained to report parental malfeasance, whose view of the mother was blocked by shrubbery, saw an unsupervised child at play and called the police. When the police arrived, they arrested the mother on the basis of the unverified report from the neighbor. The mother was taken to jail. The newspaper did not say what had happened to the child, whether the kid was taken to foster care and whether the husband had to rush home from his job and ply lawyers with money to help put his family back together. These kinds of horrors inflicted on families by public authorities often have worse consequences than the predations of criminals. He wondered if parents and children would be safer if the police were disbanded and outlawed.
Yet, society had accepted these abuses as justified. What, he thought, would have been the public reaction when he was a kid? The policemen would have been fired, the chief disciplined, and the mayor would have lost the next election. It would not have been possible for them to become heroes by destroying a family. The busybody neighbor would have become a pariah in the community.
Just the other day he had seen a grandmother at the supermarket with tattoos and face piercings. A grandmother? How had this come about? At the mountain resort pool and exercise center it wasn’t just the men. He had seen young women who were covered in tattoos. A friend told him that some women not only had face and tongue piercings, but also navel, labia, and clitoris piercings. Piercings were what he remembered from boyhood days of looking through stacks of National Geographic magazines from the 1940s and 1950s. Articles explained with words and photographs facial piercing practices by tribes in “darkest Africa.” Now they were the practices of upper class womyn who played in resorts.
He recalled his father’s first rule of business: “Never hire anyone with a tattoo.” Tattoos were what sailors did who got drunk in Asian ports. They demonstrated poor judgment and a lack of self-restraint. If anyone sober got a tattoo, it indicated a lack of self-respect. If an employee did not respect himself, he would not respect the job. His father would have a hard time assembling a work force today.
A couple of years ago a college classmate told him that their noble old fraternity had been suspended by the college president. A black female student claimed that racial slurs had been shouted at her from an open window. The fraternity was able to show that all the windows had been painted shut for years, probably dating back to when the house was air conditioned. But the college president wasn’t going to dispute a black female’s word on the basis of evidence. It could mean protests, charges of racism, broken windows, newspaper and trustee inquiries. Bad PR for the college. It was safer to hand the fraternity a bit of injustice.
Recently, he had arrived at the supermarket in a cloudburst. There were a dozen parking spaces by the entrance, but they were marked “Handicapped Parking $500 Fine.” He remembered when the handicapped said that they wanted to be treated like everyone else. Now they had privileges. He wondered about those signs. Did they give offense? “Handicapped” was one of those discarded words. They hadn’t got around to replacing the signs.
He remembered, too, when males did not use four-letter words in front of parents or females. Now the young womyn could out-cuss his male generation.
More memories. If you scraped a car while street parking, you were expected to leave a note with name and telephone number and expect to pay for the repair. He had once told some young people this and they laughed at the joke.
Something had happened. He had been brought up to be a citizen in a world that no longer existed.
At least there still were gardens. He put away his thoughts and went to get his knife.
- Is It Racist? Most Americans Would Not Hire Hairy Women
A slight majority of U.S. adults, 53 percent, would say ‘no’ when asked if they were likely or unlikely to hire a woman for a public role who had hair on her face.
You will find more statistics at Statista
As Statista's Isabel von Kessel notes, this is the result of a YouGov survey of 2,159 adults at the end of June 2017. Also, many participants were unlikely to hire a woman for a job which included public appearances if she had hairy armpits (36 percent unlikely to hire, 33 percent likely), legs (36 percent unlikely, percent likely) or face (53 percent unlikely to hire, 20 percent likely).
Broken down by gender, the survey indicates that men were generally more critical of female facial appearances: 57 percent stated that they would not hire a woman with facial hair, while 48 percent of women subscribed to this statement. Broken down by age groups, it's baby boomers (55+) who are least open to women sporting facial hair (64 percent), while 39 percent of millennials suggest that they are more likely to hire hairy women if they were the hiring manager for a company.
Of course, the big question from all of this is… How long before the Leftists begin to side with the 'hirsute'?
Isn't it time someone stood up for the rights of women with more hair than average? Make America Hairy Again?
- Photos Of Aleppo Rising: Swimsuits, Concerts And Rebuilding In First Jihadi-Free Summer
When taxi and bus drivers take journalists into Syria via the Beirut-Damascus Highway these days, there’s a common greeting that has become a kind of local tradition as the drivers pull into their Damascus area destinations. They confidently tell their passengers: “welcome to the real Syria.” Local Syrians living in government areas are all too aware of how the outside world perceives the government and the cities under its control. After years of often deceptive imagery and footage produced by opposition fighters coordinating with an eager Western press bent on vilifying Assad as “worse than Hitler”, many average Syrian citizens increasingly take to social media to post images and scenes of Syria that present a different vision: they see their war-torn land as fundamentally secular, religiously plural, socially tolerant, and slowly returning to normalcy under stabilizing government institutions.
As the most intense phase of fighting in Aleppo was unfolding in 2016, veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer took to the editorial pages of the Boston Globe to remind Americans that the media has created a fantasy land concerning Syria. Kinzer painted a picture quite opposite the common perception:
Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press… For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents: “Don’t send your children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the coffin.” Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it…
The United States has the power to decree the death of nations. It can do so with popular support because many Americans — and many journalists — are content with the official story.
Now, during the first summer of relative calm Aleppo residents have seen in over four years of grinding conflict, the city commonly referred as “the jewel of Syria” is once again rising from the ashes. Foreign journalists are also accessing places like East Aleppo and the heart of the walled ‘old city’ for the first time. Some few honest correspondents, unable to deny the local population’s spirit of hopefulness and zeal with which they undertake rebuilding projects, acknowledge that stability and normalcy have returned only after the last jihadists were expelled by the Syrian government and its allies.
Aleppo orchestra concert, Summer 2017/via Sarah AbdallahA Western press and political class which generally mourned the liberation of the city from al-Qaeda groups like Nusra (AQ in Syria), calling government actions a ‘massacre’ and ‘genocide’, now finds a reality that can’t be ignored or denied: Aleppines are returning to ravaged parts of the city to rebuild, they are enjoying nightlife, going to music concerts, staying out late at cafes; families are swimming at local pools, women are strolling around in t-shirts and jeans free of the oppressive Wahhabi fighters that once ruled parts of the city.
Kinzer’s Boston Globe piece further concluded that the entire web of assumptions on Syria woven by the media and fed to the public over the years were “appallingly distant from reality” and warned that these lies are “likely to prolong the war and condemn more Syrians to suffering and death.” As new photos continue to emerge of the real Aleppo and the real Syria it is essential to revisit the most destructive among the lies that have helped serve to prolong this tragic and brutal war.
Aleppines didn’t want to live under Wahhabi Islamist rule
Andalusia Swimming Pool in Aleppo, Summer 2017/via Syria DailyAccording to multiple eyewitness reports and studies, the story of how war entered Aleppo’s environs was not primarily one of mass public protests and government crackdown, but of an aggressive jihadist insurgency that erupted suddenly and fueled from outside the city. According to then Indian ambassador to Syria, V.P. Haran (Amb. to Syria from 2009 to 2012), Aleppo on the whole was unwillingly dragged into the war after remaining silent and stable while other cities raged. In an interview which detailed his own on-the-ground experience of the opening years of war in Syria, the ambassador said:
Soon parts of Latakia, Homs and Hama were chaotic but Aleppo remained calm and this troubled the opposition greatly. The opposition couldn’t get the people in Aleppo to rise up against the regime so they sent bus loads of people to Aleppo. These people would burn something on the streets and leave. Journalists would then broadcast this saying Aleppo had risen.
Why did it take until July 2012 – well over a year since conflict in Syria began – for Aleppo to see any fighting? Why did residents not “rise up” against the government?
The answer is simple. The majority of Syrians, whether Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Christian, Kurd, or Ismaili, are sane individuals – they’ve seen what life is like under the “alternative” rebel rule marked by sharia courts, smoke and alcohol bans, public floggings, street executions, desecration of churches, and religious and ethnic cleansing of minorities. They recognize that there is a real Syrian national identity, and it goes beyond mere loyalty to the current ruling clique that happens to be in power, but in Syria as a pluralistic Levantine society that rejects Saudi style theocracy.
Rebuilding Aleppo, Summer 2017. Latin Parish of St. Francis/via Sarah AbdallahThe kind of religious and cultural pluralism represented in the liberal democracies of the West are present in Syria, ironically, through a kind of government-mandated “go along, get along” policy backed by an authoritarian police state. One can even find Syrian Jews living in the historic Jewish quarter of Damascus’ walled old city to this day.
Syrian urban centers have for decades been marked by a quasi-secular culture and public life of pluralist co-existence. Aleppo itself was always a thriving merchant center where a typical street scene would involve women without head-coverings walking side by side with women wearing veils (hijab), cinemas and liquor stores, late night hookah smoke filled cafés, and large churches and mosques neighboring each other with various communities living in peaceful co-existence. By many accounts, the once vibrant secular and pluralist Aleppo is now coming back to life (and largely never left government-held West Aleppo).
“Moderates” did not “liberate” Aleppo, but gave cover to an ISIS and al-Qaeda invasion
Image: “moderate” rebels mock a Christian government soldier—This photo was originally posted online by a Swedish based terror group in Syria after the Summer 2013 rebel offensive against the Menagh airbase near Aleppo. A rebel fighter mocks a captured Christian government soldier’s cross. Another photo posted in the original set reveals that the soldier was later tortured by being crushed with a large rock on his chest as he lay on his back.One of the most under reported and least understood events surrounding the history of how all of Aleppo province and the Northern Syria region became a hotbed of foreign jihadists is the fall of the strategically located Menagh airbase near Aleppo. As a Reuters timeline of events indicates:
In early 2012 rebels take control of the rural areas northwest of Aleppo city, besieging the Menagh military air base and the largely Shiite towns of Nubl and Zahra.
After a lengthy siege of Menagh, the base finally fell to jihadist factions under the command of the US-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) in August of 2013. This event was key to rebel fighters gaining enough territory to cut off the Aleppo-Damascus Highway, which allowed them to encircle all of Aleppo for much of that year. But a little known yet hugely important detail of the Menagh episode is that rebels only got the upper hand after being joined by ISIS suicide bombers commanded by Omar the Chechen (ISIS’ now deceased most senior military commander). The fall of this government base is what opened a permanent jihadi corridor in the North, allowing terrorists to flood the area. The commander for the operation was US Ambassador Robert Ford’s personal friend, Col. Abdel Jabbar al-Okaidi, who was head of the US and UK funded Revolutionary Military Council of Aleppo (FSA). Okaidi worked in tandem with ISIS military commander Omar the Chechen and his crew for the operation – all while being supported by the United States and Great Britain.
Concerning US-backed Okaidi’s close relationship to the ISIS faction in the summer of 2013, there is actually video evidence and eyewitness testimony (US Ambassador Ford himself later admitted the relationship to McClatchy News). Amazingly, the video, titled “US Key Man in Syria Worked Closely with ISIL and Jabhat al Nusra” never had very widespread public distribution, even though it has been authenticated by the top Syria expert in the U.S., Joshua Landis, of the University of Oklahoma, and author of the hugely influential Syria Comment. Using his Twitter account, Dr. Landis commented: “in 2013 WINEP advocated sending all US military aid thru him [Col. Okaidi]. Underscores US problem w moderates.”
The video, documenting (now former) U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford’s visit to FSA Col. Okaidi in Northern Syria, also shows the same Col. Okaidi celebrating with and praising a well-known ISIS commander, Emir Abu Jandal, after conducting the joint Menagh operation. In an interview, this U.S. “key man” at that time, through which U.S. assistance flowed, also praised ISIS and al-Qaeda as the FSA’s “brothers.” Abu Jandal was part of Omar the Chechen’s ISIS crew assisting the FSA. Further video evidence also confirms Omar the Chechen’s role at Menagh. The videos also show Okaidi proudly declaring that al-Nusra (Al-Qaeda in Syria) makes up ten percent of the FSA. The FSA was always more of a branding campaign to sell the rebels as “moderates” to a gullible Western media than a reality on the ground; it was a loose coalition of various groups espousing militant jihad with the end goal of establishing an Islamist polity in Syria.
Foreign fighters flooded Aleppo Province. The U.S. State Department’s own numbers: read the full report at STATE.GOVIn the end, terror groups like ISIS enjoyed a meteoric rise in Syria due to US government and media support for these so-called “moderate rebels” – all entities which collectively sought regime change at all costs – even the high cost of mass civilian death and suffering that inevitably results from unleashing an insurgency in urban areas.
The Syrian Army and government were never “Shia” or sectarian-based
Al Aziziyah neighborhood in Aleppo/via Syria DailyThe Arab Spring narrative was the ideological lens through which experts initially pit the oppressive supposedly “Alawite/Shia regime” against a popular uprising of Syria’s majority Sunnis. As Sunnis make up about 70% of Syria’s population, it was simply a matter of numbers, and of time. But this view proved overly simplistic, and according to one little known West Point study, utterly false. It was commonly assumed that the Syrian Army was a hollowed out Alawite institution with its Sunni conscripts apprehensively waiting for the right moment to defect to the rebel side. This was the fundamental supposition behind years of repetitious predictions of the Assad regime’s impending collapse, and predicated upon a view of the Syrian military as a fundamentally weak and sectarian institution. But West Point’s 2015 study entitled Syria’s Sunnis and the Regime’s Resilience concluded the following:
Sunnis and, more specifically, Sunni Arabs, continue to make up the majority of the regular army’s rank-and- file membership.
The study’s unpopular findings confirmed that the Syrian Army, which has been the glue holding the state together throughout this war, remains primarily a Sunni enterprise while its guiding ideology is firmly nationalistic and not sectarian.
The highest ranking Syrian officer to fall victim to rebel attack was General Dawoud Rajiha, Defense Minister and former chief of staff of the army, in a major 2012 bombing of a Damascus national security office. General Rajiha was an Orthodox Christian. Numerous Christians and officers of other religious backgrounds have served top positions in the Syrian Army going back decades – a reflection of Syria’s generally nationalist and religiously tolerant atmosphere.
Mainstream press did not report from Aleppo, but was hundreds of miles away.
Outside the Citadel of Aleppo: life returning to normal, Summer 2017/via Syria DailyThe heavily populated urban areas of Syria continue to be held by the government. But most reporting has tended to dehumanize any voice coming out of government held areas, which includes the majority of Syrians. The war has resulted in over 6.5 million internally displaced people – the vast majority of which have sought refuge in government territory.
The fact remains that there are some popular figures in the establishment media and analyst community who speak and write frequently about Syria, and yet have never spent a significant amount of time in the country. Throughout much of the war they’ve primarily reported from Western capitals – thousands of miles away – or, if they are in a Middle East bureau, without ever leaving the safety of places like Beirut or Istanbul. Fewer still have the necessary Arabic language skills to keep pace with local and regional events. Some have never been to Syria at all. They become willing conduits of rebel propaganda beamed through WhatsApp messages and Skype interviews, which was especially the case when it came to the battle for Aleppo. That much of the world actually considers these people as authorities on what’s happening in Syria is a joke – it’s beyond absurd.
Outdoor concert venue and Aleppo springs back to life, Summer 2017/via Maram KasemWe are hopeful that the jihadist menace will be fully expelled and that the international proxy war which has taken so many lives and reduced much of a beautiful nation to rubble will finally come to an end. Aleppines and other Syrians are rebuilding – they are optimistically preparing for the future. Welcome to the real Aleppo.
Final national exams just before summer 2017/via Syria Daily - Research Team Slams Global Warming Data In New Report: "Not Reality… Totally Inconsistent With Credible Temperature Data"
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
As world leaders, namely in the European Union, attack President Trump for pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement which would have saddled Americans with billions upon billions of dollars in debt and economic losses, a new bombshell report that analyzed Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data produced by NASA, the NOAA and HADLEY proves the President was right on target with his refusal to be a part of the new initiative.
According to the report, which has been peer reviewed by administrators, scientists and researchers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and several of America’s leading universities, the data is completely bunk:
In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. And, it was nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.
As a result, this research sought to validate the current estimates of GAST using the best available relevant data. This included the best documented and understood data sets from the U.S. and elsewhere as well as global data from satellites that provide far more extensive global coverage and are not contaminated by bad siting and urbanization impacts. Satellite data integrity also benefits from having cross checks with Balloon data.
The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever –despite current claims of record setting warming.
Finally, since GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings. (Full Abstract Report)
Of course, this won’t stop global climate normalcy deniers from saying it’s all one big conspiracy to destroy the earth. They’ll naturally argue that data adjustments to the temperatures need to be made for a variety of reasons, which is something the report doesn’t dispute. What it does show, however, is that these “adjustments” always prove to be to the upside. Always warmer, never cooler:
While the notion that some “adjustments” to historical data might need to be made is not challenged, logically it would be expected that such historical temperature data adjustments would sometimes raise these temperatures, and sometimes lower them. This situation would mean that the impact of such adjustments on the temperature trend line slope is uncertain. However, each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history.
In short: The evidence has been falsified.
Karl Denninger sums it up succinctly:
It is therefore quite-clear that the data has been intentionally tampered with.
Since this has formed the basis for plans to steal literal trillions of dollars and has already resulted in the forced extraction of hundreds of billions in aggregate for motorists and industry this quite-clearly constitutes the largest economic fraud ever perpetrated in the world.
I call for the indictment and prosecution of every person and organization involved, asset-stripping all of them to their literal underwear.
The real data looks something like this:
(Via ZeroHedge.com)
And the establishment, along with their fanatical global warming myrmidons, continue to push the need for massive, costly initiatives to reduce green house gases and global temperatures to “normal” levels.
The problem, of course, is that there is no global warming according to the above referenced report.
Moreover, none of those supporting the Paris Climate Agreement and other initiatives have any idea what these behemoth regulations will actually do to curb climate change, as evidenced by the following video of Miami Beach Mayor Philip Levine, who despite his best efforts, can’t seem to figure out exactly how these agreements actually lower temperatures and help Americans:
- Italy Threatens EU With "Nuclear Option": Give 200,000 Migrants EU Visas, Sending Them North
Two weeks after Italy reacted with anger to Austria’s deployment of troops and armored vehicles to the border between the two nations, while reactivating border controls at the Brenner Pass over concerns that Italy will be unable to handle the roughly 85,000 migrants and refugees who have entered the country so far in 2017, the Italian government has threatened to retaliate in way that assures an imminent migrant crisis as well as an escalation of tensions between the two EU nations.
According to The Times, an Italian minister and a senator have threatened to issue temporary EU visas to thousands of migrants in an effort to “resolve” Italy’s escalating migrant and refugee crisis, which would then allow the refugees to travel north. The move, which has been described as a ‘nuclear option,’ would allow the nearly 200,000 migrants currently stranded in Italy, to travel across Europe using a Brussels directive loophole.
Paolo Gentiloni, the prime minister, is livid that the rest of Europe has refused to take its fair share of migrants and that they have closed ports to rescue ships as the number of refugees attempting the treacherous crossing from Libya to the Continent has surged.
Italy previously called on its EU neighbors to help with the escalating humanitarian crisis but it has been disappointed by their complete lack of action. The face off prompted former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to shock the European liberal establishment, when last Friday he released excerpts from a new book in which he said that “we need to free ourselves from a sense of guilt. We do not have the moral duty to welcome into Italy people who are worse off than ourselves” adding that “we need to escape from our ‘do gooder’ mentality.“
Migrants disembark from the Medecins Sans Frontiers ship Vos Prudence after
being rescued at sea, at Salerno’s harbor, Italy, on FridayRenzi also warned last Friday that Rome would look to curb funding to EU nations that had refused to offer help. “They are shutting their doors. We will block their funds,” he said, sounding suspiciously like Turkey’s Erdogan who has so far prevented a new refugee crisis in Europe by gating some 2 million migrants inside Turkey’s borders.
One week later, not even Renzi’s dramatic reversal has prompted a reaction from the EU, leaving Italy in the same place as before, which as a reminder is that due to its geographic location, Italy has been one of the first entry points for people fleeing from the south to reach Europe. More than 86,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean to Italy already this year, leaving the nation scrambling – and struggling – to cope with the huge increase of people fleeing north Africa.
Meanwhile, hundreds of asylum seekers are packed into overcrowded centers – dubbed ‘human warehouses’ by locals – scattered across small villages throughout the country. Mattia Toaldo, a senior analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told The Times: “If migrants continue to arrive and Italy decides to give them papers to cross borders and leave Italy it would be a nuclear option.“
And since “Italians have lost any hope of getting help from the EU” they may say, “If you won’t make it a common challenge, we will” Toaldo added.
This is precisely what some in Gentiloni’s government are already doing: Mario Giro, Italy’s deputy foreign minister, and Luigi Manconi, a senator with the ruling Democratic Party, told The Times that issuing migrants with temporary visas was under discussion. Giro believes that Italy can exploit European Council Directive 2001/55, developed after the Balkans conflict to give temporary European entry permits to a large number of displaced people.
Needless to say, if Italy pursues this course of action, and ultimately activates the “nuclear option”, support for the Schengen scheme, which allows all EU citizens to travel freely across the Continent, may be in jeopardy. Worse, since for most of the migrants the final destination will be Germany, it may rekindle the same migrant crisis which at the end of 2015 saw Angela Merkel’s approval rating plummet as her countrymen slammed her “Open Door” (since shut) policy.
The Italian rescue ship Vos Prudence arrives in the port of Salerno carrying 935
migrants, including 16 children and 7 pregnant women on FridayThe move will also drastically escalate tensions with not only Austria, but neighboring Frace, which have used dogs and the threat of armoured vehicles to push back migrants who try to enter through Italy’s northern border. France 24 reports that perhaps in anticipation of such a move, vast white tents erected in a former military zone on the outskirts of the tiny village of Conetta, house some 1,400 men from across Africa, packed onto endless rows of bunks.
“I used to call this place a modern lager,” Cona mayor Albero Panfilio told AFP, referring to concentration camps. The commune of Cona includes the little village of Conetta. “After two years this is (still) a place where human beings are squashed in together, with no hope for the future.”
“Now I call it a human warehouse. The migrants arrive, they don’t know where to put them, they have a warehouse, they dump them here.” He added that the asylum seekers were treated “like garbage.”
Meanwhile, 10 kilometers away, in Bagnoli di Sopra, 700 migrants are crowded into another former military base surrounded by barbed wire fences with no access to journalists.
Finally, a question emerges: with Europe helpless to prevent Italy from pursuing this path should Rome choose to do so, will Brussels activate its own “nuclear response” in retaliation. Recall that in 2011, a “united Europe” and the ECB removed then-PM Sylvio Berlusconi almost overnight when the former premier threatened to exit the Eurozone, by sending yields on Italian bonds soaring above 10%. While this time Italy’s economy is (relatively) sound, should Rome proceed to dump 200,000 unwanted migrants in Europe’s lap, the one certain response would be a financial one, with Mario Draghi sending a very clear message if not to his native country, then certainly the current government, which will immediately be blacklisted by Europe, with any and all measures taken to remove it.
- Global Stocks Soared $1.5 Trillion This Week – Now 102% Of World GDP
Thanks, it seems, to a few short words from Janet Yellen, the world's stock markets added over $1.5 trillion to wealthy people's net worth this week, sending global market cap to record highs.
The value of global equity markets reached a record high $76.28 trillion yesterday, up a shocking 18.6% since President Trump was elected. This is the same surge in global stocks that was seen as the market front-ran QE2 and QE3.
This was the biggest spike in global equity markets since 2016.
For the first time since Dec 2007, the market value of global equity markets is greater than the world's GDP…
Of course – the big question is – how long can 'they' keep this dream alive?
President Trump hopes a little longer…
Stock Market hit another all-time high yesterday – despite the Russian hoax story! Also, jobs numbers are starting to look very good!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2017
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- Canada's Multi-Million-Dollar Pay-Out To A 'Foreign Terrorist Fighter'
Authored by Ruthie Blum via The Gatestone Institute,
- "Has any soldier who fought FOR Canada ever received as generous a reward as this soldier who fought against us?" — Canadian Senator Linda Frum.
- In 2003, Khadr confessed to throwing the grenade that killed U.S. Special Forces Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer and caused Sgt. 1st Class Layne Morris to lose an eye. Years later, he retracted his confession, claiming it had been extracted under duress. In fact, it was part of a plea deal that enabled him to be extradited to Canada to serve the rest of his sentence there.
- "There was a Canadian flag flying along with the American flag at our base there, so it's quite a thing that now Canada is giving millions to a guy who would attack a compound where Canadians were serving. I don't see this as anything but treason. As far as I am concerned, Prime Minister Trudeau should be charged." — Sgt. 1st Class Layne Morris, who lost an eye from the grenade thrown by Omar Khadr.
The government of Canada recently issued an official apology — and acknowledged awarding an "undisclosed" sum of money — to Toronto-born Islamist terrorist Omar Khadr for his "ordeal" at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and "any resulting harm" he was caused by the "torture" (specifically, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and threats) that led to his confession.
On July 7, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Ralph Goodale released a statement announcing the "hope that this expression, and the negotiated settlement reached with the Government, will assist him in his efforts to begin a new and hopeful chapter in his life with his fellow Canadians."
The civil settlement was reached with Khadr, 30, who was 10 when his family returned to the Middle East, and 15 when he was arrested fighting in Afghanistan with al Qaeda and the Taliban, the terrorist organizations to which his father was affiliated — on the basis of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In 2003, Khadr confessed to throwing the grenade that killed U.S. Special Forces Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer and caused Sgt. 1st Class Layne Morris to lose an eye. Years later, he retracted his confession, claiming it had been extracted under duress. In fact, it was part of a plea deal that enabled him to be extradited to Canada to serve the rest of his sentence there.
With news of the large settlement he received — 10,500,000 Canadian dollars (approximately USD $8,000,000) — he gave an extensive interview to CBC's Power & Politics host Rosemary Barton, in which he said he thinks that the apology from the Canadian government "restores a little bit my reputation here in Canada, and I think that's the biggest thing for me." He declined to comment on having just received multi-millions in tax-free dollars.
He also had the effrontery to say that he just wants "to be a normal person" and finish his nursing degree to help under-served communities. "I have a lot of experience with… and appreciation of pain," he explained, expressing only sorrow that the Speer and Morris families consider him responsible for their own pain.
Amid harsh criticism against the Liberal government by opposition Conservatives and members of the public outraged that their tax dollars are going to a convicted terrorist, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau responded to reporters' questions on the matter during a press conference marking the July 8 close of G20 summit in Hamburg.
Trudeau said that the settlement had nothing to do with Khadr's 2002 actions on the battlefield in Afghanistan, but rather with the fact that his rights had been violated. This is precisely what the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in 2008 and 2010, after Khadr's lawyers sued for damages.
Trudeau added that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects all Canadians, "even when it is uncomfortable. When the government violates any Canadian's Charter rights, we all end up paying for it."
Meanwhile, Goodale tried to evade responsibility, by casting aspersions on the previous government, headed by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in power when Khadr was returned to Canada in 2012 to serve the remainder of his prison sentence for five counts of war crimes. Goodale accused Harper of having "refused to repatriate Mr. Khadr or otherwise resolve the matter."
In spite of the fact that Khadr was arrested and detained when Liberal governments were in power in Canada, Goodale was referring to appeals during Harper's tenure — which began in 2006 — by Canadian Liberal and human rights lawyers to "bring Omar Khadr home."
In 2008, former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler wrote:
"I join other scholars and associations of jurists in calling for Omar Khadr to be transferred into the custody of Canadian law enforcement officials, to be afforded due process under Canadian law, with prospects for appropriate rehabilitation and integration."
Cotler also stated,
"Admittedly, the Khadr family has emerged, as some have put it, as synonymous with terrorism. But, the test of the rule of law is not its application in the easy cases, but its retention in the unpopular ones… Omar Khadr, a child victim, should now be afforded the justice denied him all these years, however unpopular and unpalatable his case may appear to be."
In response to Goodale's implication that had it not been for the previous government, the current one would not have been forced to apologize to and pay Khadr, Harper immediately took to social media, writing:
The government today attempted to lay blame elsewhere for their decision to conclude a secret deal with Omar Khadr. The decision to enter into this deal is theirs, and theirs alone, and it is simply wrong. Canadians deserve better than this. Today my thoughts are with Tabitha Speer and the families of all Canadian and allied soldiers who paid the ultimate price fighting to protect us.
Canadian Senator Linda Frum railed against the settlement, tweeting: "Has any soldier who fought FOR Canada ever received as generous a reward as this soldier who fought against us?"
Given Khadr's family history, Frum's fury is justified.
As the New York Post reported, Khadr is the son of a Palestinian mother and an Egyptian father (Ahmed Khadr), who had strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and became one of Osama bin Laden's loyal lieutenants. After 9/11, Ahmed Khadr was placed on the FBI's most-wanted list in relations to the attacks. He was arrested in Pakistan in 1995 on suspicion of financing the suicide bombing at the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, in which 16 people were killed. Protesting his innocence, he went on a hunger strike, and the Canadian government, then headed by Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, rallied behind him.
While on a trade mission to Pakistan, Chrétien appealed to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and a few months later, Ahmed was released from prison and sent back with his family to Toronto. However, according to the New York Post, the Khadr clan soon returned to Pakistan, where Ahmed Khadr resumed his connections with al Qaeda and the Taliban. Young Omar Khadr not only met with the leaders of these terrorist groups, but lived with his parents and siblings in the bin Laden family compound, attending al Qaeda training camps, which his father — who was killed in 2003 — partly funded.
The report continued:
"A month before he joined an al Qaeda cell in 2002, Omar was sent by his father for private instruction in explosives and combat… [where he] learned to launch rocket-propelled grenades and became skilled at planting improvised explosive devices that were used to blow up US armored vehicles in Afghanistan."
In his interrogation about the incident that led to his arrest and subsequent incarceration at Guantanamo, Omar Khadr said he had been on a suicide mission "to kill as many Americans as possible."
In this still image taken from a video found in the rubble of the compound where Omar Khadr was captured on July 27, 2002, a 15-year-old Khadr constructs an improvised explosive device. (Courtesy U.S. Defense Operations/Wikimedia Commons)
This did not prevent the U.S. military from flying an ophthalmologist to the Bagram Air Base — where was being treated for wounds he sustained while fighting American and Canadian soldiers — to save his eyes and keep him from going blind.
Nor did it cause Omar to experience gratitude on the one hand, or remorse on the other. On the contrary, as military court documents revealed, when he was informed that Speer had died, he said he "felt happy" for having murdered an American. He also said that whenever he remembered killing Speer, it would make him "feel good."
According to a report in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto lawyer representing Morris and Tabitha Speer — who won a default judgment in 2015 in the U.S. against Omar for $134 million – began proceedings to contest the Canadian government's settlement and prevent it from going forward.
It is clearly too late for that; the money has already been transferred to Omar. Furthermore, the transaction was done swiftly and "quietly," to make legal action by taxpayers in Canada or the Morris and Speer families in America virtually impossible.
Morris is understandably angry and hurt. "The fact is Chris Speer and myself were fighting with Canadians in Afghanistan," he said.
"We were alongside the PPCLI (Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry). There was a Canadian flag flying along with the American flag at our base there, so it's quite a thing that now Canada is giving millions to a guy who would attack a compound where Canadians were serving. I don't see this as anything but treason… As far as I am concerned, Prime Minister Trudeau should be charged."
Thus far, the administration in Washington has remained silent on Khadr pay-out, which came to light during the weekend of the G20 summit in Germany, where U.S. President Donald Trump heaped praise on his Canadian counterpart.
Trump even opened his speech at a World Bank event to promote and finance women entrepreneurs in developing countries by declaring: "We have a great neighbor in Canada and Justin [Trudeau] is doing a spectacular job… Everybody loves him, and they love him for a reason…"
This assertion, given the information that has since emerged about Khadr case, was unfortunate. Far more ironic under the circumstances, however, was the "Statement on Countering Terrorism," signed by the leaders of the G20.
Its 21 clauses include a commitment to "address the evolving threat of returning foreign terrorist fighters … from conflict zones such as Iraq and Syria and remain committed to preventing [them] from establishing a foothold in other countries and regions around the world," and to "facilitate swift and targeted exchanges of information between intelligence and law enforcement and judicial authorities… [to] ensure that terrorists are brought to justice."
Such words are empty without actions to back them up. Omar Khadr is a classic example of a "foreign terrorist fighter." Yet the Canadian legal system categorized him — in Cotler's words — as a "child victim, [who] should… be afforded the justice denied him all these years."
It is bad enough to describe a teenager who set out to "kill as many Americans as possible" in this way. It is far worse that he is a free — and still very young — man, paid not only respect by the government whose values he was raised to abhor, but millions of dollars, to boot. If anything serves to encourage other terrorists to leave North America and Europe to fight in the Middle East, it is stories such as this one.
The Trump administration must call Trudeau to task for this perversion, and offer an immediate and very public apology to Khadr's American victims, who did not receive a penny for their patriotic sacrifice.
- Friend Insists Death Of Republican Operative Behind WSJ Collusion "Bombshell" Wasn't A Suicide
Yesterday we reported how the death of Peter Smith, a longtime Republican operative and financier, had been ruled a suicide. Smith was the primary source for a bizarre WSJ story that tried to link National Security Adviser Mike Flynn with a group of individuals organized by Smith who bargained with a Russian hacker group for copies of what were purportedly Hillary Clinton’s missing 30,000 emails.
Smith died on May 14 – 10 days after he was interviewed by WSJ for the piece. Though a reporter initially described his death as stemming from natural causes, the Chicago Tribune reported Friday that it had been, in fact, a suicide, citing local police records that describe the manner of death – asphyxiation due to helium poisoning – and an alleged suicide note that cited his recent ill health and the coming expiry of a life insurance policy as Smith’s reasons for taking his own life.
But before that narrative could catch hold, a longtime associate of Smith who may have been the last person to speak with him has come forward, telling the Daily Caller that he doesn’t believe the police’s suicide ruling…and neither should you.
Charles Ortel, a Wall Street investment banker and market analyst, told the DC that there were no indications the Chicago businessman and anti-Clinton political investigator was about to take his life when the two spoke on the phone the day before his death.
“He may have been a fantastic actor but I certainly didn’t leave that phone call saying, ‘oh shit, the guy’s at the end of his rope,’” Charles Ortel, a Wall Street investment banker and market analyst, told The Daily Caller News Foundation’s (TheDCNF) Investigative Group.
“This does not seem like a settled story. It made perfect sense to me he might have died of natural causes, but little chance he would have killed himself,” Smith said.
Ortel and Smith had a common interest in the Clintons. Ortel has dug deeply into the financial operations of the Clinton Foundation. He first came to public attention in 2007 by exposing questionable accounting practices at General Electric, according to the DC.
And Smith reportedly had a hand in exposing then Gov. Bill Clinton’s “Troopergate” scandal, where the future president used state troopers to guard him while he was having sex with various women who were not his wife.
Ortel said in his last phone call to him, Smith seemed to be upbeat and very interested in future projects.
Initially, Ortel assumed Smith died of natural causes, but after reading the police report, which included a description of a jerry-rigged suffocation device that’s widely used by terminally ill patients who opt to take their own lives, he’s not so sure.
“There are lots of older guys like him who still ‘have it ‘and they’re still smart. They like projects. They like the intellectual stimulation. He was very interested and pleased with his work,” Ortel said.
Ortel also said the description of the suicide note – with its all-caps type – was out of character for Smith, and that, out of all the emails they’d sent to each other, he couldn’t remember a single example of Smith typing in all caps.
Ortel also was suspicious about the note Smith allegedly left behind, written in all caps, stating “NO FOUL PLAY WHATSOEVER.”
He also noted that many life insurance policies typically exclude payments to beneficiaries in the case of suicide.
He wrote that he was taking his own life because of a “RECENT BAD TURN IN HEALTH SINCE JANUARY, 2017” and that his timing was related “TO LIFE INSURANCE OF $5 MILLION EXPIRING.”
Assuming, for a moment, Smith’s death was the result of foul play: what’s the explanation? Could it have been a politically motivated attack? In the original WSJ story, Smith said he’d received a cache of documents purporting to be the missing 30,000 emails that Clinton withheld from the FBI and State Department, but withheld them because he had doubts about their veracity. Maybe Smith was in possession of the legitimate emails, but lied about turning them over to Wikileaks. What if the Democrats were somehow warned about what Smith had in his possession, or at least what he believed he might have had. Is another "Seth Rich" scenario emerging?
- 3 Examples That Show How Common Core Is Destroying Math Education In America
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Whenever you let federal bureaucrats get their hands on anything they are probably going to ruin it. During the Obama administration, the Department of Education spearheaded a transformation of American education that was absolutely breathtaking. Over a period of about five years, Common Core standards were implemented in almost every state in the entire nation. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a huge step backward for public education in this country. Common Core has been called “state-sponsored child abuse”, and it is a big reason why U.S. students are scoring so poorly on standardized tests compared to much of the rest of the world.
According to Wikipedia, at one point 46 states had adopted Common Core, but now some states are having second thoughts…
46 states initially adopted the Common Core State Standards, although implementation has not been uniform. At least 12 states have introduced legislation to repeal the standards outright,[1] and Indiana has since withdrawn from the standards.
Sadly, many parents don’t even understand how dramatically our system of education has been tampered with. In her book entitled The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids, Joy Pullmann exposes how the Gates Foundation has been one of the key players in the effort to get Common Core introduced into classrooms all over America…
Organized in seven chapters, her book describes how the Gates Foundation promoted and continues to promote one extremely wealthy couple’s uninformed, unsupported, and unsupportable ideas on education for other people’s children while their own children are enrolled in a non-Common Cored private school. It explains how (but not exactly why) the Gates Foundation helped to centralize control of public education in the U.S. Department of Education. It also explains why parents, teachers, local school boards, and state legislators were the last to learn how the public schools their local and state taxes supported had been nationalized without Congressional knowledge or permission; and why they were expected to believe that their local public schools were now accountable for what and how they teach … not to the local and state taxpayers who fund them or to locally-elected school boards that by law are still supposed to set education policies not already determined by their state legislature … but to a distant bureaucracy in exchange for money to their state department of education to close “achievement gaps” between unspecified groups.
But this isn’t just an issue about control. The truth is that the approach to teaching basic fundamentals such as how to add and how to subtract is fundamentally different under Common Core.
Let me share just three examples that show how much Common Core is changing the way that U.S. students learn math. All of these examples have been floating around Facebook, and if you have never seen these before they are likely to make you quite angry.
If I asked you to subtract 12 from 32, how would you do it? Well, the “new way” is much, much more complicated than how we were all taught to do it…
If that first one seemed bizarre to you, than you really aren’t going to like this one…
And this last one was so confusing that a parent with a degree in engineering decided to include his own commentary on his child’s homework…
How are kids supposed to function in the real world if this is how they are learning to do basic math?
Personally, I am going to teach my daughter that 9 + 6 equals 15. But that isn’t how it is supposed to be done under Common Core. You can watch a video of a teacher explaining the very convoluted Common Core way to solve that math equation right here.
And of course it isn’t just math that is the problem. Common Core is systematically “dumbing down” our young people, and that may help to explain why the average U.S. college freshman now reads at a seventh grade level.
So what is the answer?
The first step in fixing our education system is to repeal Common Core. But even in red states such as Idaho there is a lot of resistance…
Since their inception, the Idaho Core Standards have been enmeshed in controversy.
Some legislators and citizens have pushed for a repeal of the Idaho Core Standards, the state’s version of Common Core standards in math and English language arts. Those repeal efforts have gone nowhere in the Legislature.
I don’t know what is wrong with our legislators. The Republicans have full control in this state, and so there is absolutely no excuse for not getting something done.
As I end this article, I want to give you an idea of just how far the quality of education in America has fallen over the past 100 years. In Kentucky, an eighth grade exam from 1912 made a lot of headlines when it was donated to the Bullitt County History Museum. As you can see, it is doubtful whether many of our college students would be able to pass such an exam today…
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