- The UK Is Among Europe's Least Family-Friendly Countries
A new analysis of OECD data by UNICEF has revealed the European countries with the most and least family-friendly policies…
You will find more infographics at Statista
As Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes, at the top of the overall ranking, Sweden has the highest average ranking when considering the following indicators: paid parental leave available to mothers, paid parental leave reserved for fathers, childcare enrollment (under 3) and childcare enrollment (3 to school age).
The United Kingdom however, is among the least family-friendly countries in Europe according to these measures, with an average ranking among the 31 countries of 26.75. The UK performed best in terms of childcare enrollment for children under the age of three – 29 percent leading to a rank of 19th.
- Covering Up Our Culture To Avoid Giving Offense
Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,
Three years ago, the Italian government made a shameful decision. It veiled its antique Roman statues to avoid offending Iran’s visiting President Hassan Rouhani. Nude statues were encased in white boxes. A year earlier, in Florence, another statue featuring a naked man in Greco-Roman style had also been coveredduring the visit of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. Now, one of the most famous British art galleries has covered two paintings, after Muslim complaints that they were “blasphemous“.
At the Saatchi Gallery in London, two works, again featuring nudes, this time overlaid with Arabic script, prompted complaints from Muslim visitors, who requested that the paintings be removed from the Rainbow Scenes exhibition. In the end, the paintings were covered with sheets. “The Saatchi is behaving like Saudi Arabia, hiding from public view artworks that blaspheme against Islam”, commented Brendan O’Neill on Spiked. One expert described the paintings as “The Satanic Verses all over again“. The reference was to the book by Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, published in 1988. Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 condemned Rushdie to death for writing the book. The bounty on Rushdie’s head was increased to $4 million in 2016 when a group of Iranians added $600,000 to the “reward” — with no protest from Britain.
It was after Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses that many Western publishing houses began bowing to Islamist intimidation. Christian Bourgois, a French publishing house that had bought the rights, refused to publish The Satanic Verses. It was the first time that, in the name of Islam, a writer was condemned to disappear from the face of the earth — to be murdered for a bounty.
In 1988, The Satanic Verses was published, written by Salman Rushdie (left), a British citizen. Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (right) in 1989 condemned Rushdie to death for writing the book. The Rushdie affair seems to have deeply shaped British society. (Image sources: Rushdie – Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images; Khomeini – Mohammad Sayyad/Wikimedia Commons)
Rushdie is still with us, but the murder in 2004 of Theo van Gogh for producing and directing a film, “Submission”, about Islamic violence toward women; the death of so many Arab-Islamic intellectuals guilty of writing freely, the Danish cartoon riots and the many trials (for instance, here and here) and attempted murders (such as here and here), the slaughter at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the attacks after Pope’s Benedict speech in Regensburg, the booksand scripts cancelled, the depictions of Muhammad closeted in the warehouses of museums, and the increasing threats and punishments, including flogging, to countless journalists and writers such as Saudi Arabia’s Raif Badawi, should alarm us — not bring us to our knees.
As the Saatchi Gallery’s capitulation shows, freedom of speech in Europe is now exhausted and weak. So far, we have caved in to Islamic extremists and Western appeasers. It is the tragic lesson of the Rushdie case 30 years later: no author would dare to write The Satanic Verses today; no large publishing house such as Penguin would print it; media attacks against “Islamophobes” would be even stronger, as would the bottomless betrayal of Western diplomats. Also today, thanks to social media as a weapon of censorship and implicit mass threats, any author would probably be less fortunate than Rushdie was 30 years ago. Since that time, we have made no progress. Instead, we have been seeing the jihad against The Satanic Verses over and over again.
“Nobody would have the balls today to write ‘The Satanic Verses’, let alone publish it,” said the writer Hanif Kureishi.
“Writing is now timid because writers are now terrified”.
According to the author Kenan Malik, writing in 2008:
“What we are talking about here is not a system of formal censorship, under which the state bans works deemed offensive. Rather, what has developed is a culture of self-censorship in which the giving of offence has come to be seen as morally unacceptable. In the 20 years since the publication of The Satanic Verses the fatwa has effectively become internalised”.
The Rushdie affair also seems to have deeply shaped British society. The Saatchi Gallery’s surrender in London is not unique. The Tate Britain gallery shelved a sculpture, “God is Great”, by John Latham, of the Koran, Bible and Talmud embedded in glass. Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine the Great” was censoredat the Barbican Centre. The play included a reference to the Prophet of Islam being “not worthy to be worshipped” as well as a scene in which the Koran is burned. The Whitechapel Art Gallery in London purged an exhibit containing nude dolls which could possibly have upset the Muslim population. At the Mall Galleries in London, a painting, “ISIS Threaten Sylvania”, by the artist Mimsy, was censoredfor showing toy stuffed-animal terrorists about to massacre toy stuffed-animals having a picnic.
At the Royal Court Theatre in London, Richard Bean was forced to censor himself for an adaptation of “Lysistrata”, the Greek comedy in which the women go on a sex strike to stop the men who wanted to go to war. In Bean’s version, Islamic virgins go on strike to stop terrorist suicide bombers.
Unfortunately, in the name of fighting “Islamophobia”, the British establishment now appears to be submitting to creeping sharia: and purging and censoring speech on its own.
Recently, some major conservative intellectuals have been sacked in the UK. One is the peerless philosopher Roger Scruton, who was fired from a governmental committee for saying that the word “Islamophobia” has been invented by the Muslim Brotherhood “to stop discussion of a major issue“.
Then it was the turn of the great Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose visiting fellowship at Cambridge University was rescinded for posing with a man wearing an “I’m a proud Islamophobe” T-shirt. Professor Peterson later said that the word “Islamophobia” has been “partly constructed by people engaging in Islamic extremism, to ensure that Islam isn’t criticised as a structure”.
The instances of Scruton and Peterson only confirm the real meaning of “Islamophobia”, a word invented to silence any criticism of Islam by anyone, or as Salman Rushdie commented, a word “created to help the blind remain blind”. Where is the long-overdue push-back?
Writing in 2008, The Telegraph‘s Tim Walker quoted the famous playwright Simon Gray saying that Nicholas Hytner, director of London’s National Theatre from 2003-2015, “has been happy to offend Christians,” but “is wary of putting on anything which could upset Muslims.” The last people who did so were the journalists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. They paid with their lives. By refusing to confront the speech police, or to support freedom of expression for Salman Rushdie, Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Hebdoand Jyllands-Posten — just the tip of a huge iceberg — we have started down the road of submission to sharia law and to tyranny. We all have been covering up our supposedly “blasphemous” culture with burqas to avoid offending people who do not seem to mind offending us.
- The Road To Perdition – 10 Cautionary Tenets About US Air Power
Authored by William Astore via TomDispatch.com,
The American Cult of Bombing and Endless War
From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet.
Its stated purpose: combatting terrorism.
Its primary method: constant surveillance and bombing — and yet more bombing.
Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. “boots on the ground” and so American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington’s many conflicts.
Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required).
Its reality for various foreign peoples: a steady diet of “Made in USA” bombs and missiles bursting here, there, and everywhere.
Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America’s wars are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What’s driving this process?
For many of America’s decision-makers, air power has clearly become something of an abstraction. After all, except for the 9/11 attacks by those four hijacked commercial airliners, Americans haven’t been the target of such strikes since World War II. On Washington’s battlefields across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, air power is always almost literally a one-way affair. There are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses. The skies are the exclusive property of the U.S. Air Force (and allied air forces), which means that we’re no longer talking about “war” in the normal sense. No wonder Washington policymakers and military officials see it as our strong suit, our asymmetrical advantage, our way of settling scores with evildoers, real and imagined.
Bombs away!
In a bizarre fashion, you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and missile count replaced the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress. Using data supplied by the U.S. military, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that the U.S. dropped at least 26,172 bombs in seven countries in 2016, the bulk of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, ISIS’s “capital,” the U.S. and its allies dropped more than 20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city to literal rubble. Combined with artillery fire, the bombing of Raqqa killed more than 1,600 civilians, according to Amnesty International.
Meanwhile, since Donald Trump has become president, after claiming that he would get us out of our various never-ending wars, U.S. bombing has surged, not only against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq but in Afghanistan as well. It has driven up the civilian death toll there even as “friendly” Afghan forces are sometimes mistaken for the enemy and killed, too. Air strikes from Somalia to Yemen have also been on the rise under Trump, while civilian casualties due to U.S. bombing continue to be underreported in the American media and downplayed by the Trump administration.
U.S. air campaigns today, deadly as they are, pale in comparison to past ones like the Tokyo firebombing of 1945, which killed more than 100,000 civilians; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year (roughly 250,000); the death toll against German civilians in World War II (at least 600,000); or civilians in the Vietnam War. (Estimates vary, but when napalm and the long-term effects of cluster munitions and defoliants like Agent Orange are added to conventional high-explosive bombs, the death toll in Southeast Asia may well have exceeded one million.) Today’s air strikes are more limited than in those past campaigns and may be more accurate, but never confuse a 500-pound bomb with a surgeon’s scalpel, even rhetorically. When “surgical” is applied to bombing in today’s age of lasers, GPS, and other precision-guidance technologies, it only obscures the very real human carnage being produced by all these American-made bombs and missiles.
This country’s propensity for believing that its ability to rain hellfire from the sky provides a winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age. Whether in Korea in the early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, or more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the U.S. may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn’t led to ultimate success. In the case of Afghanistan, weapons like the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB (the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military’s arsenal), have been celebrated as game changers even when they change nothing. (Indeed, the Taliban only continues to grow stronger, as does the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory, nor closure of any sort; only to yet more destruction.
Such results are contrary to the rationale for air power that I absorbed in a career spent in the U.S. Air Force. (I retired in 2005.) The fundamental tenetsof air power that I learned, which are still taught today, speak of decisiveness. They promise that air power, defined as “flexible and versatile,” will have “synergistic effects” with other military operations. When bombing is “concentrated,” “persistent,” and “executed” properly (meaning not micro-managed by know-nothing politicians), air power should be fundamental to ultimate victory. As we used to insist, putting bombs on target is really what it’s all about. End of story — and of thought.
Given the banality and vacuity of those official Air Force tenets, given the twenty-first-century history of air power gone to hell and back, and based on my own experience teaching such history and strategy in and outside the military, I’d like to offer some air power tenets of my own. These are the ones the Air Force didn’t teach me, but that our leaders might consider before launching their next “decisive” air campaign.
Ten Cautionary Tenets About Air Power
1. Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with relative impunity doesn’t mean that they should. Given the history of air power since World War II, ease of access should never be mistaken for efficacious results.
2. Bombing alone will never be the key to victory. If that were true, the U.S. would have easily won in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. American air power pulverized both North Korea and Vietnam (not to speak of neighboring Laos and Cambodia), yet the Korean War ended in a stalemate and the Vietnam War in defeat. (It tells you the world about such thinking that air power enthusiasts, reconsidering the Vietnam debacle, tend to argue the U.S. should have bombed even more — lots more.) Despite total air supremacy, the recent Iraq War was a disaster even as the Afghan War staggers on into its 18th catastrophic year.
3. No matter how much it’s advertised as “precise,” “discriminate,” and “measured,” bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk) rarely is. The deaths of innocents are guaranteed. Air power and those deaths are joined at the hip, while such killings only generate anger and blowback, thereby prolonging the wars they are meant to end.
Consider, for instance, the “decapitation” strikes launched against Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and his top officials in the opening moments of the Bush administration’s invasion of 2003. Despite the hype about that being the beginning of the most precise air campaign in all of history, 50 of those attacks, supposedly based on the best intelligence around, failed to take out Saddam or a single one of his targeted officials. They did, however, cause “dozens” of civilian deaths. Think of it as a monstrous repeat of the precision air attacks launched on Belgrade in 1999 against Slobodan Milosevic and his regime that hit the Chinese embassy instead, killing three journalists.
Here, then, is the question of the day: Why is it that, despite all the “precision” talk about it, air power so regularly proves at best a blunt instrument of destruction? As a start, intelligence is often faulty. Then bombs and missiles, even “smart” ones, do go astray. And even when U.S. forces actually kill high-value targets (HVTs), there are always more HVTs out there. A paradox emerges from almost 18 years of the war on terror: the imprecision of air power only leads to repetitious cycles of violence and, even when air strikes prove precise, there always turn out to be fresh targets, fresh terrorists, fresh insurgents to strike.
4. Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely works. If it did, the U.S. would have swept to victory in Vietnam. In Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, for instance, Operation Rolling Thunder(1965-1968), a graduated campaign of bombing, was meant to, but didn’t, convince the North Vietnamese to give up their goal of expelling the foreign invaders — us — from South Vietnam. Fast-forward to our era and consider recent signals sent to North Korea and Iran by the Trump administration via B-52 bomber deployments, among other military “messages.” There’s no evidence that either country modified its behavior significantly in the face of the menace of those baby-boomer-era airplanes.
5. Air power is enormously expensive. Spending on aircraft, helicopters, and their munitions accounted for roughly half the cost of the Vietnam War. Similarly, in the present moment, making operational and then maintaining Lockheed Martin’s boondoggle of a jet fighter, the F-35, is expected to cost at least $1.45 trillion over its lifetime. The new B-21 stealth bomber will cost more than $100 billion simply to buy. Naval air wings on aircraft carriers cost billions each year to maintain and operate. These days, when the sky’s the limit for the Pentagon budget, such costs may be (barely) tolerable. When the money finally begins to run out, however, the military will likely suffer a serious hangover from its wildly extravagant spending on air power.
6. Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading. Command of the high ground is not synonymous with god-like “total situational awareness.” It can instead prove to be a kind of delusion, while war practiced in its spirit often becomes little more than an exercise in destruction. You simply can’t negotiate a truce or take prisoners or foster other options when you’re high above a potential battlefield and your main recourse is blowing up people and things.
7. Air power is inherently offensive. That means it’s more consistent with imperial power projection than with national defense. As such, it fuels imperial ventures, while fostering the kind of “global reach, global power” thinking that has in these years had Air Force generals in its grip.
8. Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens wars rather than shortening them. Consider Vietnam again. In the early 1960s, the Air Force argued that it alone could resolve that conflict at the lowest cost (mainly in American bodies). With enough bombs, napalm, and defoliants, victory was a sure thing and U.S. ground troops a kind of afterthought. (Initially, they were sent in mainly to protect the airfields from which those planes took off.) But bombing solved nothing and then the Army and the Marines decided that, if the Air Force couldn’t win, they sure as hell could. The result was escalation and disaster that left in the dust the original vision of a war won quickly and on the cheap due to American air supremacy.
9. Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact over time. The enemy, lacking it, nonetheless learns to adapt by developing countermeasures — both active (like missiles) and passive (like camouflage and dispersion), even as those being bombed become more resilient and resolute.
10. Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war.
The Road to Perdition
If I had to reduce these tenets to a single maxim, it would be this: all the happy talk about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results.
For this reason, precision warfare is truly an oxymoron. War isn’t precise. It’s nasty, bloody, and murderous. War’s inherent nature — its unpredictability, horrors, and tendency to outlast its original causes and goals — isn’t changed when the bombs and missiles are guided by GPS. Washington’s enemies in its war on terror, moreover, have learned to adapt to air power in a grimly Darwinian fashion and have the advantage of fighting on their own turf.
Who doesn’t know the old riddle: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Here’s a twenty-first-century air power variant on it: If foreign children die from American bombs but no U.S. media outlets report their deaths, will anyone grieve? Far too often, the answer here in the U.S. is no and so our wars go on into an endless future of global destruction.
In reality, this country might do better to simply ground its many fighter planes, bombers, and drones. Paradoxically, instead of gaining the high ground, they are keeping us on a low road to perdition.
- Cat-Filter Clusterf**k Crushes Pakistani Government Credibility During Live Presser
A Pakistani politican’s very serious press conference turned into a feline fiasco on Friday after the entire meeting was broadcast over Facebook Live with the “cat filter” setting turned on.
Secretary General Shaukat Yousafzai of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government conducted the meeting, completely unaware that he was sporting a pair of moving cat ears, a black nose and whiskers.
pakistan live facebook debate still has the cat filter on lol ! pic.twitter.com/ABDH7IN9jA
— Neiljetel (@neiljetel) June 17, 2019
The man sitting to his right was also given feline features.
As Mr Yousafzai spoke, the comical filter superimposed pink ears and whiskers on his face, and that of other officials sitting beside him.
“I wasn’t the only one – two officials sitting along me were also hit by the cat filter,” Mr Yousafzai told AFP news agency. –BBC
According to KP government’s social media team we now have a cat in the cabinet #Filter pic.twitter.com/LNl7zwOfLU
— Mansoor Ali Khan (@_Mansoor_Ali) June 14, 2019
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I propose all parliamentary proceedings around the world to be recorded with Cat Filters. Please start with the British Parliament! @HouseofCommons @UKHouseofLords @UKParliament https://t.co/7vAJRcEN3m
— अजय (@RuralHuman) June 15, 2019
We’re guessing Pakistan’s furry community has never been more interested in politics.
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- The "Mass Shootings Map" Propaganda Should Convince You To Carry At All Times
Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
If you use any form of social media whatsoever, you’ve probably seen the scary “mass shootings map” published by PBS, leading people to believe that they live in a terrifying place and that strict gun control is the only answer. You’ve probably read some of the cries for gun control and the stat of “more than one mass shooting a day” happening in the US. To see this propaganda, you’d think that people walk around with Uzis, randomly opening fire all the time. You’ve probably had this map indignantly posted at you in response to something you said about guns on social media.
But, you see, the map is BS. It’s a big old truckload of baloney sandwiches, steaming in the sun. It’s a manipulation that is being used to frighten people into thinking they’d be safer if none of us had the tools that we need to protect ourselves.
These terrifying dots are not all brazen shoot-outs in malls or movie theaters, during which someone takes out as many people as they can. But that’s how it’s portrayed. It’s posted without any real criteria except for the fact that it is incidents in which 4 or more people are shot, including the initial perpetrator. (A reader pointed out that these dots indicate shootings, not deaths in every case. This reduces the dramatic effect of the map even more.)
Since biblical times, murders of groups have been recorded. I’m obviously not saying it’s okay, by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m saying that acting like this is a new thing fueled by ammo this is a blatant misrepresentation, designed to scare people into begging the government for protection.
But why would responsible gun owners being disarmed make anyone safer?
I know it has been said so many times that it’s become a cliche, but when law-abiding people give up their guns, who do you think will have guns?
We’ll have another horrifying incident and no one…NO ONE… will be prepared to stop it.
The Mass Shootings Map is missing important information
There are many vital stats missing. Here are just a few of the questions you should ask yourself when you look at that ridiculous mass shooting map.
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Are any of these homeowners protecting their family from a home invasion? We don’t know – we just know that 4 people were shot.
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Are any of these incidents of gang violence? We don’t know – we just know that 4 people were shot. Also, I’m pretty sure they don’t register their firearms or get permits to carry them
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Are any of these shooters victims of the mental health industry, taking SSRI anti-depressants? Actually we do know that quite a few of them were. Despite the fact that SSRIs don’t work on everyone who takes them, and on some they actually cause the person taking them to become violent and act on their thoughts, I don’t see anyone calling for a ban on SSRIs.
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Are these all legally obtained guns? We don’t know – we just know that 4 people were shot. This most recent incident happened in California, home of some of the most stringent gun laws in the country. (It was nearly an 8-month process to get my own concealed carry permit here, and many were the hoops I had to jump through.)
If anything, this map should make you more convinced of the importance of carrying a firearm everywhere you go. You have an inalienable right as a human being to preserve your own life.
This is a scare tactic for non-critical thinkers
It’s full of holes. It’s a scare tactic, meant to frighten those who won’t think more deeply about the issue. It’s for people who read the headlines, but not the articles.
The map was published by PBS, who is sponsored in part by Pew Charitable Trust. While the map makes it look like gun violence is on the uptick, Pew reported in a recent article that it actually dropped in half a decade ago, and has remained steady since.
Several mass shootings this year have brought renewed attention to the issue of gun violence in America, and President Obama has again called for Congress to change the nation’s gun laws.
But the increased spotlight on guns does not reflect the overall gun violence trend in the country. Although most Americans think the number of gun crimes has risen, the U.S. gun homicide rate has actually stabilized somewhat in recent years, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of death certificate data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Between 1993 and 2000, the gun homicide rate dropped by nearly half, from 7.0 homicides to 3.8 homicides per 100,000 people. Since then, the gun homicide rate has remained relatively flat. From 2010 to 2013, the most recent year data are available, the number of gun homicides has hovered between 11,000 and 12,000 per year.
More mass shootings since Obama became president than… umm… forever
And speaking of Obama, there was a dramatic increase in “mass shootings” since he took office. And by dramatic, I mean it will blow your ever-loving-mind when you see the numbers.
Truthstream Media collected the following statistics on mass shootings since the Reagan administration. I knew it was bad under Obama, but wowza. Seeing it in print like this certainly shows that increased gun control isn’t slowing down the criminals one little bit.
When all incidents where four or more people were shot in a single event are broken out by president going back to Reagan (considering the database only stretches back to 1982), there just so happens to have been a startling increase in mass shootings since Obama, the most pro-gun control president America has had in modern history, took office.
Mass Shootings under the Last Five Presidents
Ronald Reagan: 1981-1989 (8 years) 11 mass shootings
Incidents with 8 or more deaths = 5George H. W. Bush: 1989-1993 (4 years) 12 mass murders
Incidents with 8 or more deaths = 3Bill Clinton: 1993-2001 (8 years) 23 mass murders
Incidents with 8 or more deaths = 4George W. Bush: 2001-2009 (8 years) 20 mass murders
Incidents with 8 or more deaths = 5Barrack H. Obama: 2009-2015 (in 7th year) 162 mass murders
Incidents with 8 or more deaths = 18(You can download the full list of names, dates, locations, and numbers of deaths per mass shooting by president prepared for this article here.)
This article was originally written before Donald Trump became president, but as of 2018, there were 4 mass shootings under his watch. President Obama finished off with 24 mass shooting events.
I like a good conspiracy as much as the next prepper, even though I take a lot of them with a grain of salt. But ONE HUNDRED SIXTY TWO????????????
So no, this doesn’t make me want gun control.
Coincidentally, the day of one recent shooting, I had just written an article explaining why I felt it was vital that preppers be armed. The day before the Pulse night club shooting, I used a gun to protect my family. These incidents did nothing to change my mind. In fact, they solidified my stance even more.
Gun control does not keep you safer, which is a lesson we learned with the 2015 atrocity in Paris. No one had a firearm with which they could fight back. They hid. And when hiding didn’t work, they were slaughtered. They were as helpless as a newborn kitten with its eyes closed. They were victims and weren’t even allowed a fighting chance to level the playing field.
It’s maps like these that make me more determined than ever to exercise my 2nd Amendment right and protect my family, wherever we go.
According to this mass shootings map, criminals are everywhere. According to this mass shootings map, a jaunt to the mall, a field trip to the museum, walking into a bank, or going to a movie are all adventures that are fraught with danger. This mass shootings map doesn’t make me want to give my gun away. It makes me want to double up and avoid any place I’m not able to carry.
In fact, I think I’ll go throw a couple of extra magazines in my purse.
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- China To Roll Out New Rare Earth Policy As Soon As G-20 Meeting
Amid the ongoing trade war with the US, consultations between China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and rare earth industry executives have laid the groundwork for limiting rare-earth element (REE) exports.
During a Monday press conference, the Chinese NDRC said it was developing new state policies on rare earth metals, and intends to make them public as soon as possible.
According to Deutsche Bank, the key conclusion from the recent meetings is that Chinese authorities are preparing to limit shipments of rare-earth permanent magnets in addition to rare-earth elements, thereby closing off what was termed an “escape route” by the Global Times. Beijing’s veiled threats to restrict exports of rare earth metals to the US have been called by many as one of China’s nuclear options in a trade conflict with Washington. The US relies on China for about 80 percent of its rare earths supplies. The metals are used in everything from electric car motors and electronics to oil refining.
This corroborates the widespread assessment that REE exports are hardly the only outlet for such strategic materials. In order for China to more effectively leverage its strategic position, downstream products will also be included. The dollar value of US imports of two key categories of downstream product, NdFeB and SmCo magnets, is larger than the total imports of REEs from China.
A second key conclusion, according to Deutsche Bank’s Michael Hsueh, reflected the idea that traceability and illegal mining must be considered as possible circumvention modes. Traceability was tagged by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) as an objective in January, along with suspension of licenses for companies violating limits. While China has yet to provide a description of the tracing technology, traceability would be doubly helpful in preventing the use of illegally mined materials domestically and enforcing any export ban. Illegal production was estimated at 40-50 kt in rare-earth oxides in 2015, compared to official output of 105kt that year.
As a reminder, the June 4-5 symposium between the NDRC and officials from key production regions resulted in recommendations to:
- broaden, deepen and advance development of the rare earth materials industry,
- study suggestions from local levels for innovation,
- tighten total output control and crackdown on illegal activities,
- strengthen export management with a traceability and review mechanism, and
- improve protection of intellectual property in the rare earth industry.
What happens next?
In terms of timing, Deutsche believes that a post-G20 escalation of the trade conflict would likely be required for China to enact any export ban. From China’s point of view, the ideal scenario would preferably involve a short period of export limits. Without the assurance of sustainably high prices, the rest of world is more likely to remain cost challenged and deficient in investment. In this regard, the ability to engineer rapid price declines is just as much of a ‘weapon’ as price spikes. To the extent that ex-China investment was hampered by the decline in prices after 2011, this suggests ex-China incentive costs are likely above the USD 40/t level for PrNd oxide.
- Why The Empire Is Failing: The Horrid Hubris Of The Albright Doctrine
Authored by Doug Bandow via National Interest,
Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob…
How to describe U.S. foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate.
Since 9/11, Washington has been extraordinarily active militarily—invading two nations, bombing and droning several others, deploying special operations forces in yet more countries, and applying sanctions against many. Tragically, the threat of Islamist violence and terrorism only have metastasized. Although Al Qaeda lost its effectiveness in directly plotting attacks, it continues to inspire national offshoots. Moreover, while losing its physical “caliphate” the Islamic State added further terrorism to its portfolio.
Three successive administrations have ever more deeply ensnared the United States in the Middle East. War with Iran appears to be frighteningly possible. Ever-wealthier allies are ever-more dependent on America. Russia is actively hostile to the United States and Europe. Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity.
Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors’ policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela.
U.S. foreign policy suffers from systematic flaws in the thinking of the informal policy collective which former Obama aide Ben Rhodes dismissed as “The Blob.” Perhaps no official better articulated The Blob’s defective precepts than Madeleine Albright, United Nations ambassador and Secretary of State.
First is overweening hubris. In 1998 Secretary of State Albright declared that
“If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”
Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People’s Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe.
U.S. officials rarely were prepared for events that occurred in the next week or month, let alone years later. Americans did no better than the French in Vietnam. Americans managed events in Africa no better than the British, French, and Portuguese colonial overlords. Washington made more than its share of bad, even awful decisions in dealing with other nations around the globe.
Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected—hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world’s industrialized national states.
The U.S. record since September 11 has been uniquely counterproductive. Rather than minimize hostility toward America, Washington adopted a policy—highlighted by launching new wars, killing more civilians, and ravaging additional societies—guaranteed to create enemies, exacerbate radicalism, and spread terrorism. Blowback is everywhere. Among the worst examples: Iraqi insurgents mutated into ISIS, which wreaked military havoc throughout the Middle East and turned to terrorism.
Albright’s assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. When queried 1996 about her justification for sanctions against Iraq which had killed a half million babies—notably, she did not dispute the accuracy of that estimate—she responded that “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” Exactly who “we” were she did not say. Most likely she meant those Americans admitted to the foreign policy priesthood, empowered to make foreign policy and take the practical steps necessary to enforce it. (She later stated of her reply: “I never should have made it. It was stupid.” It was, but it reflected her mindset.)
In any normal country, such a claim would be shocking—a few people sitting in another capital deciding who lived and died. Foreign elites, a world away from the hardship that they imposed, deciding the value of those dying versus the purported interests being promoted. Those paying the price had no voice in the decision, no way to hold their persecutors accountable.
The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why “they” often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because “they” believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions—imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more.
This mindset is reinforced by contempt toward even those being aided by Washington. Although American diplomats had termed the Kosovo Liberation Army as “terrorist,” the Clinton Administration decided to use the growing insurgency as an opportunity to expand Washington’s influence. At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia.
However, initially the KLA, determined on independence, refused to sign Albright’s agreement. She exploded. One of her officials anonymously complained: “Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothingballs to do something entirely in their own interest—which is to say yes to an interim agreement—and they stiff us.” Someone described as “a close associate” observed: “She is so stung by what happened. She’s angry at everyone—the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO.” For Albright, the determination of others to achieve their own goals, even at risk to their lives, was an insult to America and her.
Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington’s far-sighted leaders.
As Albright famously asked Colin Powell in 1992:
“What’s the use of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” To her, American military personnel apparently were but gambit pawns in a global chess game, to be sacrificed for the interest and convenience of those playing. No wonder then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell’s reaction stated in his autobiography was: “I thought I would have an aneurysm.”
When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said “what I thought was that we had—we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again.” Although sixty-five years had passed, she admitted that “my mindset is Munich,” a unique circumstance and threat without even plausible parallel today.
Such a philosophy explains a 1997 comment by a cabinet member, likely Albright, to General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “Hugh, I know I shouldn’t even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event—something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough—and slow enough—so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?” He responded sure, as soon as she qualified to fly the plane.
For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob.
Anyone of these comments could be dismissed as a careless aside. Taken together, however, they reflect an attitude dangerous for Americans and foreigners alike. Unfortunately, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy suggest that this mindset is not limited to any one person. Any president serious about taking a new foreign-policy direction must do more than drain the swamp. He or she must sideline The Blob.
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Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.
- Iran's UK Ambassador: "Unfortunately We Are Heading Towards A Confrontation" With The US
The Iranian Ambassador to the UK Hamid Baeidinejad warned that the United States and Iran are “unfortunately headed toward a confrontation which is very serious for everybody in the region.”
In an interview with Christiane Amanpour, the Ambassador reacted to rapidly escalating tensions between the two countries – late on Monday the US announced it was sending another 1,000 troops to the Middle East – as the United States continues to blame Iran for an attack on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.
Ambassador Baeidinejad, a senior Iranian official within the Foreign Ministry, denied the allegations, and cautioned the White House would be “very sorry” to underestimate Iran, should a military conflict ensue. Baeidinejad stopped short of predicting the possibility of U.S. plans for a limited strike in the Persian Gulf, but argued that such plans may already be underway in a bid to spark a fight.
“I’m sure this is a scenario where some people are forcefully working on it, they will drag the United States into a confrontation. I hope that the people in Washington will be very careful not to underestimate the Iranian determination,” Baeidinejad told CNN. “If they wrongly enter into a conflict, they would be very sorry about that, because we are fully prepared by our government and our forces that we would not be submitting to the United States.”
He explained that Iran was not opposed to negotiations but that the U.S. should “not interfere” Iran’s economic relationships with other countries, a tactic he referred to as “economic terrorism.”
When asked who else could be responsible for the attack, Baeidinejad pointed to other countries in the region “who have invested heavily, billions and billions of dollars to draft the United States into a military conflict with Iran.”
And since everyone knows who they are, he didn’t even have to name them.
- Are Microsoft & The Pentagon Quietly Hijacking US Elections?
Authored by Lee Camp via TruthDig.com,
Good news, folks! We have found the answer to the American election system!
Why do we need an answer? Well, our election system is… how do you say… a festering rancid corrupt needlessly complex rigged rotten infected putrid pus-covered diseased dog pile of stinking, dying cockroach-filled rat shit smelling like Mitch McConnell under a vat of pig farts. And that’s a quote from The Lancet medical journal (I think).
But have no fear: The most trustworthy of corporations recently announced it is going to selflessly and patriotically secure our elections. It’s a small company run by vegans and powered by love. It goes by the name “Microsoft.” (You’re forgiven for never having heard of it.)
The recent headlines were grandiose and thrilling:
“Microsoft offers software tools to secure elections.”
“Microsoft aims to modernize and secure voting with ElectionGuard.”
Could anything be safer than software christened “ElectionGuard™”?! It has “guard” right there in the name. It’s as strong and trustworthy as the little-known Crotch Guard™—an actual oil meant to be sprayed on one’s junk. I’m unclear as to why one sprays it on one’s junk, but perhaps it’s to secure your erections? (Because they’ve been micro-soft?)
Anyway, Microsoft is foisting its ElectionGuard™ software on us, but worry not that we Americans will be tied down by laborious public debate as to the effectiveness, efficiency and accountability of said software. According to MintPress, “The election technology is already set to be adopted by half of voting machine manufacturers and some state governments for the 2020 general election.” Hardly any public discussion will plague our media or tax our community discourse.
Microsoft describes ElectionGuard™ as “a free open-source software development kit” that “will make voting secure, more accessible, and more efficient anywhere it’s used.” Wow, those are genuinely great words to hear—free and open source. The only words I like more than “open source” are “open bar,” but my dream of an open bar at every polling location remains elusive.
MintPress News’ Whitney Webb recently reported on ElectionGuard™ (and in fact much of the information in this column is coming from her impressive exposé). She spoke to journalist Yasha Levine, who said, “What open source does is give a veneer of openness that leads one to think that thousands of people have vetted the code and flagged any bugs. But, actually very few people have the time and ability to look at this code. So, this idea that open source code is more transparent isn’t really true.”
And as WikiLeaks proved when it revealed the CIA’s Vault 7, whenever the CIA discovers holes in important code, they don’t reveal it to the American people. They keep it to themselves to exploit secretly, which is what could be done with ElectionGuard™, resulting in America’s continued descent into Banana Republic™ (in both senses of the phrase).
So while open source is better than not open source, it’s also not a silver bullet. It’s like saying that having 90 zombies chasing you is better than 100 zombies chasing you. Sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to sit down and have a cold beer.
The press releases on ElectionGuard™ also touted a dizzying array of election security measures. I’ve reprinted the list of security measures, beginning with the most powerful measure and ending with the least powerful.
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Homomorphic encryption
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Waterproof keyboards
I imagine some of you are a bit overwhelmed by such an extensive and confusing list. Feel free to take a mental breather now and rejoin this column in a few minutes. Also, I made up number two.
I do acknowledge that “homomorphic encryption” sounds pretty freaking awesome. “Homomorphic” makes you think there might be a gay member of the X-Men. But in fact, it’s a malleable form of encryption, which apparently is not the most secure nor most sought-after form of encryption according to nerds who study the Crypto-verse (a term I conjured up just now to sound smarter). I won’t get into the details, but the experts seem to agree homomorphic encryption will not turn our elections into an impenetrable wall of democracy, renowned the world over.
On top of that, as Webb stated: “… there is an added layer of concern given Microsoft’s past, particularly their history of working with U.S. government agencies to bypass encryption.”
So, the company setting up the encryption for our elections is a company with a resumé of helping the U.S. government break encryption. This is like setting up a system to test for steroids in baseball and asking Sammy Sosa to help you do it.
Yet, the Microsoft takeover gets even worse because it’s not only Microsoft. They’re doing it in partnership with a cyber security firm called Galois. Whitney Webb again:
“Though it describes itself as “a privately held U.S.-owned and-operated company,” public records indicate that Galois’ only investors are DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and the Office of Naval Research, both of which are divisions of the Department of Defense.”
Did you catch that? Galois claims to be a private company, but its onlyinvestor is the fucking Pentagon. To rephrase something you already understood in another way so that you get mildly annoyed with me: Microsoft and our war machine are taking over the American election system.
Honestly, who would put election software in the hands of DARPA? DARPA’s the department that tries to put microchips in soldiers’ brains to create Terminators or Robocops or other dystopian hounds of hell. If your first response upon hearing about an invention is, “That’s fucking awful!”—DARPA came up with that.
I wouldn’t even let someone from DARPA look after my cat for the weekend. We all know I’d come home, the cat would have half a head and a Game Boy duct-taped to its ass. “Fuck you, DARPA! I don’t care if the Mario Kart theme song plays when it shits. Get out of my apartment!”
Now, imagine that scenario but replace the cat with our entire election system.
MintPress further revealed Galois has a spin-off company called “Free & Fair” that creates technology for elections and worked with Microsoft to make ElectionGuard™.
Unfortunately, Free & Fair is connected to every form of neocon think tank, government agency and large corporation. They’re especially in bed with the Department of Homeland Security.
So what’s wrong with that?, you might ask.
As Webb details, “before, during and after the 2016 election, the Department of Homeland Security was caught attempting to hack into state electoral systems in at least three states — Georgia, Indiana, and Idaho — with similar accusations also made by Kentucky and West Virginia. … DHS, which initially denied it, later responded that the attempted breach was ‘legitimate business.’ ”
Legitimate business? Anytime someone from DHS says they’re involved in legitimate business, immediately duck and put your head between your knees.
Plus the fact that Microsoft wants to introduce this software to us for freeshould set off an alarm bell the size of Lake Michigan. Microsoft doesn’t do anything for free. Microsoft execs don’t say hello to their grandmas for free. Microsoft is one of the most powerful companies in America because of its predatory practices. If the Mafia offered you something for free, would you just say “Thanks!” and wander off? Or would you start appreciating your final days with knees that bend?
In this world free does not mean no ulterior motive. One motive could be to control or rig our entire government. But who would want that? A tiny little country like America? Please. Our country is so inconsequential that we have a third-rate game show host as president.
MintPress may have found another ulterior motive.
“Microsoft President Brad Smith announced that the company ‘is going to provide the U.S. military with access to the best technology … all the technology we create. Full stop.’ ” A month prior to that, “Microsoft secured a $480 million contract with the Pentagon to provide the military with its HoloLens technology.”
So right after getting hundreds of millions of dollars from our military, Microsoft partners with Pentagon front companies to develop free software to safeguard our elections. It seems clear the real goal is to hand over our elections systems to the military industrial complex—your friendly neighborhood death machine—and bury the reality of our votes under enough encryption and complex technology that no average citizen really knows what’s happening.
Then, if (read: when) an election is rigged with this technology, we won’t be able to prove it because we don’t have reliable exit polls anymore.
There’s essentially only one remaining exit poll company, Edison Research, and they say outright that they manipulate the exit polls to fit the machine results, which is the opposite of a legitimate exit poll. That’s the same as a math teacher saying, “I give the kids an algebra test, and when I’m comparing their answers to the correct answers, I adjust their answers to better fit the correct ones.” That sounds lovely, but it means you’re going to have idiots getting into MIT on fake math scores. If you do it with elections, you have idiots getting into Congress. Won’t that be a sad day … when Congress is filled with idiots.
Election forensics analyst Jonathan Simon said, “The great irony, and tragedy, here … is that we could easily go the opposite direction and quickly solve all the problems of election security if we got the computers out of the process and were willing to invest the modicum of effort needed for humans to count votes observably in public as they once did.”
Jonathan Simon, god bless him, has used 55 words to say 11: We could easily fix our fraudulent election system, but we won’t.
The answer is not to hand it over to Microsoft and the Pentagon and the ass clowns who make robotic death machines. The Pentagon can’t keep track of $21 TRILLION DOLLARS over the past 20 years—what makes us think they can keep track of hundreds of millions of votes?
The ruling elite have no interest in making sure our voices are heard. They want that as much as they want nunchucks to the balls. If they sought to have our voices heard, we would have paper ballots, ranked choice voting, real exit polls and a president who doesn’t look and act like an over-cooked ham-and-cheese sandwich.
It’s time to demand real elections.
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