- Air Force Deploys Stealth Fighters To Middle East For First Time
Amid the threats of war with Iran, the U.S. Air Force has forward deployed Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jets to the Middle East, reported Air Force Times.
Air Force Central Command (AFCENT) announced last week that F-35s from the 388th and 419th Fighter Wings at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, have arrived at Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates to continue air superiority missions across the region.
It’s the first time Air Force F-35s have been sent to the Middle East.
“We are adding a cutting-edge weapons system to our arsenal that significantly enhances the capability of the coalition,” Lt. Gen. Joseph T. Guastella, commander of AFCENT, said in the release. “The sensor fusion and survivability this aircraft provides to the joint force will enhance security and stability across the theater and deter aggressors.”
“The F-35A provides our nation air dominance in any threat,” added Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein. “When it comes to having a ‘quarterback’ for the coalition joint force, the interoperable F-35A is clearly the aircraft for the leadership role.”
The F-35’s deployment comes one month after Rockwell B-1 Lancer bombers completed their deployment at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which left an operational gap of planes in the Middle East. The F-35s will support regional allies in airstrikes against the Taliban and Islamic State in Afghanistan.
The F-35 is expected to replace aging airframes such as the F-15, F-16, and A-10. The stealth jet’s advanced sensor package is designed to integrate and share data with other assets on the modern battlefield.
“The F-35A provides our nation air dominance in any threat,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein said in the release. “When it comes to having a quarterback for the coalition joint force, the inter-operable F-35A is clearly the aircraft for the leadership role.”
AFCENT spokeswoman Maj. Holly Brauer told the Air Force Times that upcoming missions would be on behalf of Operation Inherent Resolve.
“During their deployment, the Airmen will fly operational and other missions as assigned,” she said. “Consistent with operations security, we will not discuss employment details in advance. The F-35A and their crews will bring the advanced capabilities to the CENTCOM commander’s wide range of options.”
The deployment comes as the Trump administration formally designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization. Thus setting the stage for potential escalation with Iran.
- Spain: Does The Term 'Islamist' Constitute Hate Speech?
Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,
Vox, a fast-rising Spanish populist party, describes itself as is a socially conservative political project aimed at defending traditional Spanish values from the challenges posed by mass migration, multiculturalism and globalism. Vox’s foundational mission statement affirms that the party is dedicated to constitutional democracy, free-market capitalism and the rule of law.
Pictured: Santiago Abascal, President of Vox, arrives at a party rally in Granada, Spain on April 17, 2019. (Image source: David Ramos/Getty Images)
Spanish prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation to determine whether the secretary general of Vox, a fast-rising Spanish populist party, is guilty of hate speech for warning of an “Islamist invasion.”
The criminal inquiry, based on a complaint from a Muslim activist group, appears aimed at silencing critical discussion of Islam ahead of national elections on April 28. More broadly, however, the case poses a potentially immeasurable threat to the exercise of free speech in Spain.
Prosecutors in Valencia, the third-largest city in Spain, said that they were investigating Javier Ortega Smith, the second-ranking leader of Vox, for an alleged hate crime after they received a complaint from a Muslim group called “Muslims Against Islamophobia” (Musulmanes Contra la Islamofobia).
At a rally in Valencia on September 16, 2018, Ortega Smith declared that Europe’s “common enemy” is the “Islamist invasion”:
“Spain is facing threats from internal and external enemies. The internal enemies are perfectly identifiable: the [Catalan] separatists, the friends of [Basque] terrorists, those who want to tear our nation apart….
“The external enemies want to tell us how to run our country…. Angela Merkel and her fellow travelers, George Soros, the immigration mafias, believe that they can tell us who can and cannot enter our country. They demand that our boats pluck so-called castaways out of the sea, transfer them to our ports and shower them with money. Who do they think we are? We say enough is enough….
“We will unite our voice with those of millions of Europeans who also are standing up. Those voices are saying, long live Germany, long live Switzerland, long live France, long live Great Britain. These Europeans understand the need to respect national sovereignty and national identity. They have no intention of being diluted into the magma of European multiculturalism.
“Together we will be stronger against the common enemy that has a very clear name. I will not stop saying it. Our common enemy, the enemy of Europe, the enemy of freedom, the enemy of progress, the enemy of democracy, the enemy of the family, the enemy of life, the enemy of the future is called the Islamist invasion.
“What is at stake is what we understand or know as civilization. It is under serious threat. We are not alone. More and more Europeans are standing up because they are suffering in their cities, on their streets and in their neighborhoods due to the application of Sharia law. They are not willing to have their cathedrals torn down and forcibly replaced with mosques.
“They are not willing to have their women cover their faces with a black cloth and be forced to walk ten steps behind — to be treated worse than camels. They are not willing to extinguish what we understand as civilization and a respect for rights and freedom.”
The founder of Muslims Against Islamophobia, Ibrahim Miguel Ángel Pérez, saidthat Ortega Smith’s comments are “completely untrue and undermine social peace and coexistence” by “encouraging the creation of an atmosphere of fear and rejection towards Muslim communities.” Pérez, a Spanish convert to Islam, added:
“We believe that the content of the video, which is circulating on the Internet, is highly alarmist and could threaten coexistence and social peace, which is why we have decided to act, to determine if the content could be constitutive of an alleged hate crime.”
Prosecutors must now determine whether Ortega Smith is guilty of a hate crime as described in Article 510.1 of the Criminal Code, which establishes prison sentences of between one to four years for those found guilty of “publicly fomenting, promoting or inciting, directly or indirectly, hate, hostility, discrimination or violence against a group […] for racist, anti-Semitic or other motives associated with ideology, religion or beliefs.”
Ortega Smith said that he would be “delighted” to explain to prosecutors what the “Islamist invasion” means, namely “the attempt to end freedoms, to end respect for family, life, women and democracy.” If the prosecutor determines that there is some alleged crime, “there will be no problem to explain that Europe and Spain are facing an attempted Islamist invasion because of the Europeans themselves and their erroneous policies regarding national borders and their control,” he added.
Vox, founded in December 2013 in response to the degeneration of Spanish conservatism, has been soaring in the polls — in large measure because it is filling a political vacuum created by the center-right Popular Party (PP), which in recent years has drifted leftward and is viewed by many Spanish voters as having abandoned its role as standard bearer of conservative values.
Often derided by Spain’s political and media establishment as a “far right” party, Vox does not fit the traditional left-right paradigm. During regional elections in Andalusia in December 2018, for instance, Vox was catapulted into the Andalusian Parliament by voters from across the political spectrum: 45% of those who voted for Vox in 2018 backed the PP in 2015; another 15% of Vox voters previously supported the centrist party Citizens (Ciudadanos); and a whopping 15% of Vox voters previously opted for center-left and far-left parties.
Vox (based on the Latin word for voice) describes itself as is a socially conservative political project aimed at defending traditional Spanish values from the challenges posed by mass migration, multiculturalism and globalism. Vox’s foundational mission statement affirms that the party is dedicated to constitutional democracy, free-market capitalism and the rule of law. In foreign policy, Vox is pro-Israel, pro-American and pro-NATO. Party leaders have called for Spain to double its defense spending to meet its commitments to the transatlantic alliance. In domestic policy, Vox’s stated priority is to enact constitutional reforms aimed at preventing the territorial disintegration of Spain from threats by Basque nationalism and Catalan separatism.
Vox’s growing appeal also rests on the fact that it is the only political party in Spain to fundamentally eschew political correctness. Vox leaders speak with a frankness and clarity of conviction long unheard of in multicultural Spain.
“We are neither a fascist party, nor the extreme right, nor do we eat children, nor are we totalitarians,” Ortega Smith recently said in an interview with the Espejo Público television program.
“We are the only party that is defending the constitution and democracy [against Catalan separatists].”
Vox could be described as “civilizationist,” a term coined by historian Daniel Pipes to describe parties that “cherish Europe’s and the West’s traditional culture and want to defend it from assault by immigrants aided by the left.” In an essay titled, “Europe’s Civilizationist Parties,” Pipes wrote:
“Civilizationalist parties are populist, anti-immigration, and anti-Islamization. Populist means nursing grievances against the system and a suspicion of an elite that ignores or denigrates those concerns….
“Civilizationist parties, led by Italy’s League, are anti-immigration, seeking to control, reduce, and even reverse the immigration of recent decades, especially that of Muslims and Africans. These two groups stand out not because of prejudice (‘Islamophobia’ or racism) but due to their being the least assimilable of foreigners, an array of problems associated with them, such as not working and criminal activity, and a fear that they will impose their ways on Europe.
“Finally, the parties are anti-Islamization. As Europeans learn about Islamic law (the Shari’a), they increasingly focus on its role concerning women’s issues, such as niqabs and burqas, polygamy, taharrush (sexual assault), honor killings, and female genital mutilation. Other concerns deal with Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims, including Christophobia and Judeophobia, jihadi violence, and the insistence that Islam enjoy a privileged status vis-à-vis other religions.”
Since Vox’s inception, party leaders have warned against creeping Islamization. In December 2014, for example, Vox President Santiago Abascal criticized the Spanish government’s decision to approve a law that promotes Islam in Spanish public schools. In an essay entitled, “Trojan Horse,” Abascal wrote that the government was conceding a “dangerous privilege” to Islam:
“The Spanish state is allowing the Muslim community to preach in schools and propose Mohammed as a role model…. This law, according to experts, has been drafted in its entirety by the heads of the Muslim community in Spain, with little review by the competent ministry. The law surprises by its markedly confessional character in each of its articles, and it develops a proselytizing vocation, covering with tolerance the most controversial aspects of a strict theocratic system. The controversial preaching of the imams in our mosques, often bordering on the criminal, is well known. And we all know about the lack of freedom, if not direct persecution, suffered by women and Christians in Islamic countries, while here they enjoy the generosity characteristic of freedom, democracy and reciprocity, of course, all of which they systematically deny….
“We already know that a part of the Western world is determined to commit suicide and many governments know that, to achieve this, they must destroy their own foundations. The beautiful multiculturalism of the progressive myth — reflected in nonsense such as the Alliance of Civilizations, or false notions of peaceful coexistence of the ‘Three Cultures’ in al-Andalus — is fed above all by the contempt for one’s own culture. The best ally of intolerance is the relativism of those who have no principles.
“Today we have to face two fundamentalisms that, as we are seeing, are allies: Islamism and radical secularism. Every day they seem less opposed to each other and more complementary.”
After members of the Muslim community accused Abascal of being “anti-democratic,” “Islamophobic,” and “reactionary,” Abascal replied:
“It is somewhat curious that the Islamic Commission of Spain accuses me of trying to ‘create permanent confusion’ by identifying the political dimension of Islam with the religious dimension, when, precisely, the mixture of the religious and the political is so obviously constitutive of the Muslim world. It is worth remembering in this regard that, while our Christian civilization was built precisely on the separation of the civil and religious, you cannot say the same about yours….
“Of course, not all who profess Islam share the most extreme expressions of Islamist intolerance or support terrorism; but it is also true that the failure of multiculturalism is clearly visible throughout Europe. I reiterate that there are better and worse civilizations, a view that, I’m sure, you share. As I said, putting them all on the same level is just paving the way to barbarism.
“Finally: you refer the ‘myth’ of the invasion (I suppose that refers to the year 711), historical evidence that you seem to question in line with the darkest historical revisionism. We Spaniards, however, know very well that such a ‘myth’ is an unquestionable historical reality, for which we must thank the formation of a deep sense of national identity forged during the eight centuries of struggle for the recovery of the fatherland of our ancestors.”
In an August 2017 interview, days after the jihadi attacks in Barcelona and nearby Cambrils, in which 14 people were killed and more than 130 injured, Abascal was asked if Spain is at war. He replied:
A: “We are in a global war. They have declared war. It’s not a war between regular armies. It’s a war that is distinct and very different from the wars we have known unto now. It is a global war against radical Islam.”
Q: “Is Spain responsible? Are Spaniards responsible? Are Europeans responsible? Do we have to ask for forgiveness for something?”
A: “Those who have to ask for forgiveness are the politicians for their failure to protect us. The politicians are guilty for accepting the massive Islamic invasion, for failing to value the importance of borders, for providing migrants with economic assistance paid for by Spanish taxpayers.”
Q: “Are we responsible for people who see no other option than to immolate themselves?”
A: “Are we responsible because they want to kill us?”
Q: “An MP from the far-left party Podemos said that we have to assume responsibility.”
A: “We are not responsible. My children are not responsible. I am not going to accept that my children have to bow the knee to Mecca. I am not going to accept that my daughters are forced to wear a veil. If the far left like these guys, fine. If they like these jihadis, they should invite them into their homes and have them force their daughters to wear the veil. These politicians lack the courage to defend our borders and they lack the courage to defend Spaniards.”
Q: “What about Islamophobia?”
A: “The danger is Islamophilia. I am tired of this constant preoccupation with Islamophobia. Muslims do not face persecution in Spain. I do not like that Muslims are incapable of making a distinction between religion and politics. I don’t like the way they treat women. I don’t like their concept of liberty. I don’t like it. And to say this I’m called an Islamophobe. I can criticize a Communist and they don’t call me a Communistphobe. If I criticize the separatists, they don’t call me a Separatistphobe. But if I criticize a Muslim because I don’t like their worldview, they call me Islamophobe. Why?”
In a radio interview in November 2018, Abascal commented on the growing popular support for Vox:
“I am very aware of the responsibility we are assuming. More and more people trust us. People are disappointed because the other parties have failed them. We have been able to connect with people who say in their homes the same things we say in public. This is the key to the great support we are getting. We know that people who come to our meetings do so not because of Vox, but because they are worried about their country and because we are not ashamed about talking about Spain.
“Vox is not ashamed to use words such as ‘Reconquest.’ To a large extent, the success we are reaping is because we have rescued words that seemed to be proscribed. From a historical perspective, the Reconquest is not a bad thing. On the contrary, we avoided Islamization and we live in freedom.”
Meanwhile, Ibrahim Miguel Ángel Pérez, the man who reported Ortega Smith to Spanish prosecutors, says that he is dedicated to imprisoning those who, according to him, “profess the discourse of hatred against Islam.” Pérez, who married a Moroccan woman before converting to Islam, is a member of the far-left party Podemos. He has bragged of his efforts to force the closure of the social media accounts of dozens of people who are critical of Islam.
A blogger named “Elentir” wrote about the significance of the hate crime allegations against Ortega Smith:
“For years the left has maintained a curious double discourse on religious matters: it promotes hatred of Christianity, calling it retrograde and macho, while it is friendly with Islam.
“With the same ease with which they accuse you of the crime of ‘micro-machismo’ if you compliment a woman, the left defends the use of the Islamic veil and does not dare to criticize the atrocious discrimination suffered by women in Muslim countries.
“While here in the West the left does everything possible to uproot our Christian heritage, the left considers it respectable that there are countries that have Islam as their official religion and that treat religious minorities as second-class citizens, or even subject them to persecution.
“Likewise, the left defends any gratuitous offense, even the most beastly ones, against Christians as ‘freedom of expression.’ At the same time, the mere criticism of Islam is branded as ‘Islamophobia.’
“Note that Ortega spoke of ‘Islamist,’ an adjective used to refer to Islamic extremism.
“Apparently, now they do not just want us to stop all criticism of Islam: they do not want us to oppose the more extreme version either. On April 4, many media outlets reported that the Prosecutor’s Office will investigate Ortega to verify if there is such a ‘hate crime.’
“That is to say, that public resources will be used to investigate whether a person had the audacity to meddle with Islam.
“Is this still Spain or are we in Iran?
“It was to be expected that sooner or later some Muslims would try to transfer to Spain an environment of intolerance to any criticism of Islam such as that which exists in most Islamic countries.
“When a Muslim association tries to censor a critique of Islamism, the political and media left remains silent as a grave. It is more: yesterday the progressive media loaded their inks not against the denunciating association, but against the denounced politician.
“Every time that the Association of Christian Lawyers makes a denunciation against acts of Christianophobia, the leftist media speak of an ‘ultra-Catholic group.’ Yesterday, not one progressive used the term ‘ultra-Islamic group’ to describe an organization that is trying to impede the right to criticize Islamism.
“Rather, the news seemed designed to imply that the mere fact of being investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office already makes Ortega guilty. No presumption of innocence, no freedom of expression or tolerance. When it comes to Islam, the left changes the relativist ‘anything goes’ for an authoritarian ‘shut your mouth.'”
Meanwhile, popular support for Vox is higher than ever, according to the Center for Sociological Research (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, CIS), a Spanish public research institute. A recent poll found that Vox is projected to win around 12% of the vote in the upcoming national election on April 28. Vox would win between 29 and 37 seats in the next parliament, positioning the party as king-maker in any potential center-right coalition government.
- America's "Triumph Of Evil" Exposed, PCR
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
On Wednesday, April 17, I heard a NPR “news” report that described the democratically elected president of Venezuela as “the Venezuelan dictator Maduro.” By repeating over and over that a democratically elected president is a dictator, the presstitutes create that image of Maduro in the minds of vast numbers of peoples who know nothing about Venezuela and had never heard of Maduro until he is dropped on them as “dictator.”
Nicolas Maduro Moros was elected president of Venezuela in 2013 and again in 2018. Previously he served as vice president and foreign minister, and he was elected to the National Assembly in 2000. Despite Washington’s propaganda campaign against him and Washington’s attempt to instigate violent street protests and Maduro’s overthrow by the Venezuelan military, whose leaders have been offered large sums of money, Maduro has the overwhelming support of the people, and the military has not moved against him.
What is going on is that American oil companies want to recover their control over the revenue streams from Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. Under the Bolivarian Revolution of Chavez, continued by Maduro, the oil revenues instead of departing the country have been used to reduce poverty and raise literacy inside Venezuela.
The opposition to Maduro inside Venezuela comes from the elites who have been traditionally allied with Washington in the looting of the country. These corrupt elites, with the CIA’s help, temporarily overthrew Chavez, but the people and the Venezuelan military secured his release and return to the presidency.
Washington has a long record of refusing to accept any reformist governments in Latin America. Reformers get in the way of North America’s exploitation of Latin American countries and are overthrown.
With the exceptions of Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua, Latin America consists of Washington’s vassal states. In recent years Washington destroyed reform governments in Honduras, Argentina and Brazil and put gangsters in charge.
According to US national security adviser John Bolton, a neoconservative war-monger, the governments in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua will soon be overthrown. New sanctions have now been placed on the three countries. Washington in the typical display of its pettiness targeted sanctions against the son of the Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega.
Ortega has been the leader of Nicaragua since for 40 years. He was president 1985-1990 and has been elected and reelected as president since 2006.
Ortega was the opponent of Somoza, Washington’s dictator in Nicaragua. Consequently he and his movement were attacked by the neoconservative operation known as Iran-Contra during the Reagan years. Ortega was a reformer. His government focused on literacy, land reform, and nationalization, which was at the expense of the wealthy ruling class. He was labeled a “Marxist-Leninist,” and Washington attempted to discredit his reforms as controversial leftist policies.
Somehow Castro and Ortega survived Washington’s plots against them. By the skin of his teeth so did Chavez unless you believe it was the CIA that gave him cancer. Castro and Chavez are dead. Ortega is 74. Maduro is in trouble, because Washington has stolen Venezuela’s bank deposits and cut Venezuela off the international financial system, and the British have stolen Venezuela’s gold. This makes it hard for Venezuela to pay its debts.
The Trump regime has branded the democratically twice-elected Maduro an “illegitimate” president. Washington has found a willing puppet, Juan Guaido, to take Maduro’s place and has announced that the puppet is now the president of Venezuela. No one among the Western presstitutes or among the vassals of Washington’s empire finds it strange that an elected president is illegitimate but one picked by Washington is not.
Russia and China have given Maduro diplomatic support. Both have substantial investments in Venezuela that would be lost if Washington seizes the country. Russia’s support for Maduro was declared by Bolton today to be a provocation that is a threat to international peace and security. Bolton said his sanctions should be seen by Russia as a warning against providing any help for the Venezuelan government.
Secretary of state Mike Pompeo and vice president Pence have added their big mouths to the propaganda against the few independent governments in Latin America. Where is the shame when the highest American government officials stand up in front of the world and openly proclaim that it is official US government policy to overthrow democratically elected governments simply because those governments don’t let Americans plunder their countries?
How is it possible that Pompeo can announce that the “days are numbered” of the elected president of Nicaragua, who has been elected president 3 or 4 times, and the world not see the US as a rogue state that must be isolated and shunned? How can Pompeo describe Washington’s overthrow of an elected government as “setting the Nicaraguan people free?”
The top officials of the US government have announced that they intend to overthrow the governments of 3 countries and this is not seen as “a threat to international peace and security?”
How much peace and security did Washington’s overthrow of governments in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and the attempted overthrow of Syria bring?
Washington is once again openly violating international law and the rest of the world has nothing to say?
There is only one way to describe this: The Triumph of Evil.
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” — William Butler Yeats
- Watch: Shocking Video Shows Parked Tesla Spontaneously Exploding In Chinese Garage
Karma can be quite the funny thing.
About 24 hours ahead of Tesla’s coming “Investor Day” and just moments after we broke the news that Tesla had been granted a restraining order on a short seller who has been critical of the company on Twitter, stunning video has surfaced of a Tesla catching fire and exploding, while parked.
It did not appear that anyone was in the vehicle at the time of the explosion.
A self proclaimed Tesla owner in Shanghai that Tweets under the name @ShanghaiJayIn posted video on his Twitter moments ago of what appears to be a Tesla Model S, 1st generation, catching fire spontaneously in a Chinese parking garage.
Good or bad, negative or positive I will post anything about Tesla or EVs in China. This happened today in Shanghai, China 🇨🇳 1st generation Tesla Model S caught Fire 🔥 underground car park.#Tesla #TeslaChina #ModelS #Fire #China #Shanghai #特斯拉 #中国 $TSLA pic.twitter.com/HOwMcvulV1
— Jay in Shanghai (@ShanghaiJayin) April 21, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The video shows what appears to be security footage of a white Tesla that starts with smoke pouring out of the bottom of it. As people can be heard in the background talking in Mandarin, the car simply appears to spontaneously combust.
Before the video is written off as big oil conspiracy FUD, we should note that the Twitter user also has his own YouTube channel, which appears to mostly be positive content toward the brand.
We will be following this story and updating this post with further information, as it becomes available.
- Here Are The Richest Zip Codes In America
Personal finance site GoBankingRates has published a new report identifying the wealthiest zip codes in America.
The report shows that Sagaponack, a community in the Town of Southampton in Suffolk County, New York, is the most expensive zip code in the nation. GOBankingRates studied how much an upscale lifestyle would cost in the town, the result: more than $850,00 per year. On top of that, the median home price jumped from $5,125,000 in 2015 to $8.5 million in 2018, with the most expensive homes and recent sales being logged around Daniels Lane.
GOBankingRate calculated the annual cost of necessities and the annual income needed to live luxuriously in each zip code using the traditional 50-30-20 budgeting method.
Coming in at number three is Alpine, New Jersey, with a cost of living of $499,244 per year.
Fisher Island, Florida, located on a barrier island south of Miami Beach, ranked fourth with a cost of living of $452,630 per annum.
Aspen, Colorado, number five on the list, costs $380,590 to live comfortably, due in part to the region’s $3 million median home price.
Sea Island, Georgia, ranked sixth, with a $354,366 annual cost of living. The privately owned, unincorporated area of Glynn County, Georgia, has a median home price of $2.75 million.
Greenwich, a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, is in seventh, with an annual cost of living around $340,000.
Nantucket, an isolated island off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, came in eighth, with a $331,558 cost of living that exceeds living expenses that of Martha’s Vineyard.
Sullivans Island, South Carolina, placed ninth, with a cost of living around $300,000. The area is a town and island in Charleston County, has a median home price of $2.2 million.
And number 10 was the 96821 zip code in Honolulu, where residents needed $288,000 to live a lifestyle of comfort.
Last on the list, coming in at 51, was Brookhaven, West Virginia, which only required a yearly income of $79,786.
Here is the complete list of the wealthiest zip codes in America:
- Seattle's Revolt Of The Elites
Authored by Christopher Rufo via City-Journal.org,
With residents fed up by the homelessness crisis, city leaders and their allies coordinate a PR campaign to convince them that everything is fine…
In Seattle, people are losing patience with city leadership over the homelessness crisis, but the frustration is running in both directions: the city’s political, cultural, and academic elites are conducting their own revolt—against the people.
Since the release of Eric Johnson’s documentary Seattle Is Dying, which depicts an epidemic of street homelessness, addiction, crime, and disorder, city elites have launched a coordinated information campaign targeted at voters frustrated with the city’s response to homelessness. Earlier this month, leaked documentsrevealed that a group of prominent nonprofits—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Campion Advocacy Fund, the Raikes Foundation, and the Ballmer Group—hired a PR firm, Pyramid Communications, to conduct polling, create messaging, and disseminate the resulting content through a network of silent partners in academia, the press, government, and the nonprofit sector. The campaign, #SeattleForAll, is a case study in what writer James Lindsay calls “idea laundering”—creating misinformation and legitimizing it as objective truth through repetition in sympathetic media.
The key messages of the campaign include a number of misleading claims, including:
“Seattle is making progress to end homelessness,”
“1 in 4 people experiencing homelessness in our community struggle with drug or alcohol abuse,” and
“[62 percent of Seattle voters believe] we are not spending enough to address homelessness.”
All three contentions fail to meet basic scrutiny:
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street homelessness has increased 131 percent over the past five years;
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King County’s lawsuit against Purdue Pharma admits that “the majority of the homeless population is addicted to or uses opioids” (not one in four);
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and 62 percent of Seattle voters agree to the statement “we are not spending enough” only when it is directly prefaced in the polling questionnaire by the phrase “other cities of the same size are spending 2 to 3 times the amount that Seattle is and are seeing significant reductions in homelessness”—itself an unsubstantiated claim. (When the same question is presented neutrally, without the framing, support for “we are not spending enough” drops to 7 percent).
Nonetheless, the media have widely circulated or echoed Pyramid’s talking points. “New poll shows the majority in Seattle say we have a moral obligation to help homeless people, and we need to spend more,” declared Seattle Timesdata journalist Gene Balk. Catherine Hinrichsen, director of Seattle University’s Project on Family Homelessness, published “6 reasons why KOMO’s [Seattle’s ABC affiliate, which broadcast Seattle Is Dying] take on homelessness is the wrong one” in the local magazine Crosscut, arguing that the documentary “conflates homelessness with drug use, mental illness, and crime.” And Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan told reporters that “we have made a lot of progress” and dismissed the documentary as “an opinion piece.” Her office pushed the #SeattleForAll messaging on government social media channels.
Many of the authors and news outlets that published the #SeattleForAll messaging failed to disclose that their work is funded by the same group of foundations that hired Pyramid Communications, and that their content is distributed in direct coordination with Pyramid and the City of Seattle. For example, in her story, Hinrichsen neglects to mention that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the sole funder of her work at the Project on Family Homelessness; the publisher, Crosscut, does not reveal that the Gates and Raikes foundations are major funders of their operations and their homelessness coverage.
In its own widely circulated story on the polling data, the Seattle Times does disclose that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Campion Advocacy Fund, and the Raikes Foundation support their homelessness coverage—but not that Pyramid commissioned the polling and coordinated the campaign with the city and the mayor’s office. (Pyramid’s Chris Nelson confirmed via email that the #SeattleForAll coalition works in tandem with “City and County advisors working in the homelessness space,” but he refused to answer whether the coalition deliberately withheld this information from the Seattle Times and other media.)
The inner workings of the #SeattleForAll campaign tell a clear story: a group of well-funded philanthropies hired a PR firm to produce misleading polling results, distributed them through the city’s main newspaper and other media outlets (many of which enjoy generous donations from those same philanthropies), and then concealed the fact that the messaging was part of a broader campaign coordinated with the city. The “counter-narrative” to the Seattle Is Dying documentary was not a spontaneous reaction of a diverse group of experts; it was a planned effort by Seattle’s philanthropic, academic, media, and governmental elites to steamroll critics. Seattle’s institutional powers, in other words, attempted to quash the emerging public consensus that the city’s approach to homelessness is failing.
A quarter-century ago, social critic Christopher Lasch observed the beginnings of this kind of phenomenon, arguing that America’s political and cultural elites were starting to revolt against the people. While during Lasch’s time this elite contempt was directed against “middle America”—an early iteration of today’s “deplorables”—coastal progressivism has now reached the point that the new elites have gone into revolt against themselves. In Seattle, the emerging activist class—billionaire philanthropists, multimillionaire politicians, and like-minded commentators in academia and prestige media—has begun an information offensive against the liberal, wealthy, educated residents of a city that gave Hillary Clinton 92 percent of its votes. Scolding the public to be more “compassionate,” this new hyper-elite has shown only contempt for middle-class residents in Seattle’s hardest-hit neighborhoods.
The biggest problem with such top-down management of public knowledge is that it prevents honest debate—which Seattle desperately needs. The gap between elite rhetoric and on-the-ground reality continues to widen. In the most recent polling, 68 percent of Seattle voters say that they don’t trust the mayor and city council to solve the homelessness crisis—yet the foundations, the communications firms, and the mayor’s office keep lashing out at dissenters. In The Revolt of the Elites, Lasch revealed the danger of ignoring public opinion and limiting debate to elite influencers: “Since political debate is restricted, most of the time, to the ‘talking classes,’ as they have been aptly characterized, it becomes increasingly ingrown and formulaic. Ideas circulate and recirculate in the form of buzzwords and conditioned reflex.”
The #SeattleForAll campaign is destined to fail. The more that majority opinion gets muzzled, the stronger the eventual backlash will be. Seattle Is Dying spoke to the anger of hundreds of thousands of residents whose voices haven’t been heard. City leaders would be wise to give the PR efforts a rest and do some listening. The residents of Seattle are demanding change.
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- This Is How Crazy The Climate Alarmists Are Getting
Authored by Tom Rogan via The Washington Examiner,
George Monbiot and the climate change heart of darkness
George Monbiot appeared recently on Frankie Boyle’s far-left political chat show, “New World Order.” A columnist and environmental activist, Monbiot explained how we have to save the planet. And boy, does Monbiot have some ideas.
The easy things we need to change, Monbiot said, are to end air travel flying and cease consumption of meat. If that doesn’t sound easy to you, then you’re not alone. Indeed, those ideas are so destructive of modern life, economics, and the pursuit of happiness, that they could justifiably be regarded as insane.
But Monbiot was just getting started. Next up, he took us down the intellectual river, into the heart of activist darkness.
“We have to overthrow this system which is eating the planet: perpetual growth,” Monbiot declared. And the writer pulled no punches. Annual economic growth targets of 3% represent “madness,” he said. The columnist reached his crescendo.
“We can’t do it by just pitting around at the margins of the problem; we’ve got to go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it.“
The morons in Boyle’s audience lapped this up.
In a way, I’m glad Monbiot said what he did. With this interview, Boyle, a terrorist sympathizer and champagne socialist, unwittingly gave us a rare window into the malicious faux-humanitarianism that motivates many climate change ideologues. I don’t exaggerate when I say it’s malicious.
The free market system has, since the 1980s, lifted billions of people out of poverty worldwide, exceeding all of the achievements of all the nonprofits in history. Monbiot and his comrades, in seeking to overthrow the modern way of life, are proud servants of moral darkness. They seek to impose socialism, communism, or some other defective ideology precisely because these will limit economic growth and human flourishing.
History proves that capitalism uniquely serves a growing and broadly shared prosperity, new innovations for health, technology, and science, and sustaining democratic government.
And yes, that makes economic growth moral.
There may also be a moral imperative to adopt reasonable climate change policies — it’s something I’m quite willing to accept. But we must call out the intellectual and moral deceptions offered by people like Monbiot. Failing to do so, we entertain the growing chance of a poorer, less happy, and morally darker world.
- Telepathic Russian Troops Trained For Psychic Warfare – Something The US Has Studied For Decades
Earlier this month, it was reported that the Russian military has been training “psychic” special forces to use in combat to “defeat the enemy with non-contact methods,” according to the official magazine of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Armeysky Sbornik (Army Digest).
“Fighters can see right through the enemy soldier: what kind of person they are, what their weak and strong sides are and whether they can be recruited [as a spy],” read the magazine.
“By force of thought, it is possible to shut down computer programmes, burn crystals in generators, listen in on conversations and disrupt radio and telecommunications,” the article continues.
These ‘goat-staring’ specialists in “parapsychological” warfare are said to have honed their skills during combat in Chechnya, using their purported abilities for applications ranging from managing the amount of pain felt by a wounded soldier, to locating caches of enemy weapons
Russia’s chief skeptic, Yevgeny Aleksandrov who chairs the Russian Academy of Science’s committee for combating “false science” called claims of psychological warfare capabilities “complete rubbish,” according to Sky.com
“Such research did indeed exist and was developed in the past but it was made secret. Now it’s being brought out into the light again but such research is recognised as a false science,” Aleksandrov added.
Screenshot: The Men Who Stare At Goats Long history of parapsychological research
The study of parapsychology began in the mid-1800s with the founding of the London Society for Psychical Research in 1882, research which has continued for over 100 years in some form or another.
The United States as been officially conducting forms of parapsychological research since the 1930s within various government agencies, however in the 1970s a specific emphasis was placed on “remote viewing“ – a technique which purportedly allows one to project their consciousness over vast distances and even time. Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff of Stanford Research Institute (SRI) received a $20 million government grant for the “Stargate Project” in 1975.
How does one get $20 million to study “the men who stare at goats?” A film of Russians performing telekinesis is a good start. From a declassified CIA document:
In April of 1972, Targ met with CIA personnel from the Office of Scientific Intelligence (PSI) and discussed the subject of paranormal abilities. Targ revealed that he had contacts with people who purported to have seen and documented some Soviet investigations of psychokinesis. Films of Soviets moving inanimate objects by “mental powers” were made available to analysts from OSI. They, in turn, contacted personnel from the Office of Research and Development (ORD) and OTS. An ORD Project Officer then visited Targ who had recently joined the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Targ proposed that some psychokinetic verification investigations could be done at SRI in conjunction with Puthoff.
These proposals were quickly followed by a laboratory demonstration. A man was found by Targ and Puthoff who apparently had psychokenetic abilities. He was taken on a surprise visit to a superconducting shielded magnetometer being used in quark (high energy particle) experiments by Dr. A. Hebbard of Stanford University Physics Department. The quark experiment required that the magnetometer be as well shielded as technology would allow. Nevertheless, when the subject placed his attention on the interior of the magnetometer, the output signal was visibly disturbed, indicating a change in internal magnetic field. Several other correlations of his mental efforts with signal variations were observed. These variations were never seen before or after the visit.
…
For a cost of $874, one OTS and one ORD representative worked with Targ and Puthoff and the previously mentioned man for a few days in August, 1972. During this demonstration, the subject was asked to describe objects hidden out of sight by the CIA personnel. The subject did well. The descriptions were so startingly accurate that the OTS and ORD representatives suggested that the work be continued and expanded. –CIA Reading Room P.7 (link goes to CIA website)
Eventually, the program run by Targ and Puthoff was formally given code name PROJECT STAR GATE, with the goal of evaluating “potential adversary applications for remote viewing” at Fort Meade, MD.
1995 evaluation of remote viewing program (via scribd) The Gateway Process
In order to induce remote viewing and other psychic phenomenon, The US Army studied the “Gateway Process” – essentially perfecting meditation techniques developed by the Monroe Institute which allow humans to harness their own electromagnetic energy waves, control them, and effectively traverse time and space.
The procedure is performed by synchronizing both hemispheres of the brain.
Fundamentally, the Gateway Experience is a training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between the left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness, moving it outside the physical sphere so as to ultimately escape even the restrictions of time and space. The participant then gains access to the various levels of intuitive knowledge which the universe offers.
…
the Gateway process is designed to rather rapidly induce a state of profound calm within the nervous system and to significantly lower blood pressure to cause the circulatory system, skeleton and all other physical organ systems to begin vibrating coherently at approximately 7–7.5 cycles per second. The resulting resonance sets up a regular, repetitive sound wave which propagates in consonance with the electrostatic field of the earth.
…
To enter these intervening dimensions, human consciousness must focus with such intense coherence that the frequency of the energy pattern which comprises that consciousness (i.e. the brainwave output) can accelerate to the point where the resulting frequency pattern, if displayed on an oscilloscope, would look virtually like a solid line. Achievement of this state of altered consciousness sets the stage for perception of non-time-space dimensions because of the operation of a principle in physics known as Planck’s Distance.
…
Moreover, once the individual is able to project his consciousness beyond time-space, that consciousness would logically tend to entrain its frequency output with the new energy environment to which it is exposed, therein greatly enhancing the extent to which the individual’s altered consciousness may be further modified to achieve a much heightened point of focus and a much refined oscillating pattern.
Declassified document below (searchable here)
In short, the US Government has been intimately involved in psychic research, and has devoted untold resources towards developing it as a tool for various uses.
Former President Jimmy Carter admitted that the CIA had once consulted a psychic without his knowledge to help locate a missing government plane in Zaire. .
According to Carter, U.S. spy satellites could find no trace of the aircraft, so the CIA consulted a psychic from California. Carter said the woman “went into a trance and gave some latitude and longitude figures. We focused our satellite cameras on that point and the plane was there.” -CNN (archived)
Meanwhile, one can read examples of remote viewing sessions at the following links:
- In this report, the remote viewer appears to explore a building some have interpreted to be the Kremlin (via archive.org)
- And in a bizarre demonstration from 1984, a remote viewer is directed to specific coordinates on Mars, where they describe a dying race of Martians who were trying to escape the planet more than 1 million years B.C. (via archive.org)
The race of Martians – who wore “cut to fit” silken clothing, were apparently hiding in some sort of underground bunker while the planet’s environment was slowly killing them. They were able to escape in a “shiny metal” craft “to find another place to live” – where the remote viewer saw “a really crazy place with volcanos and gas pockets and strange plants.”
Whether or not you think this is all tin foil, the US Government took it very seriously, and thought it might even led to breakthroughs in human potential.
1991 Star Gate summary (via MediaFire) A declassified 1991 summary of Star Gate reveals that the “primary mission of the STAR GATE project is to pursue a broad range of parapsychological activities to include external research and foreign assessments,” and was described as “a new dynamic approach for pursuing this largely unexplored area of human consciousness/subconsciousness interaction.”
1991 Star Gate Summary from CIA archive, P. 16 (alternate download via Media Fire) Research has been conducted at various locations across the United States, including Duke University, SRI International, Princeton University, SAIC and elsewhere since 1930.
Project Star Gate summary from CIA archive, P. 15 (alternate download via Media Fire) It’s a real, yet unreliable phenomenon
The declassified materials make clear that “remote viewing is a real phenomenon,” with potential applications in counternarcotics, counterterrorism and counterintelligence – with limited potential for predictive intelligence.
According to a declassified 1981 threat assessment, “Laboratory demonstrations have shown that gifted individuals using remote viewing can describe small details in a room or describe a SIGINT site and particular types of antennae.”
Project Star Gate summary from CIA archive, P. 16 (alternate download via Media Fire) Telekinesis too
The 1981 memo describes telekinesis as well – noting that “Laboratory demonstrations have shown that gifted individuals using telekinetic abilities can alter the state of objects or change electrical or magnetic fields.”
Declassified memorandum via CIA.GOV. One can find on their own by googling the alphanumeric sequence starting with “NSA” at the top right. In 1973, meanwhile, the CIA studied the cryptologic aspects of ESP (link goes to CIA website).
Meta analysis
In a 1995 executive summary of the government’s remote viewing experiments to that date, a “blue-ribbon” panel was assembled which included two noted experts in parapsychology; Dr. Jessica Utts of the University of California at Davis, and Dr. Raymond Hyman of the University of Oregon – who was more skeptical of the phenomenon. After reviewing “all laboratory experiments and meta-analytic reviews conducted as part of the research program” they concluded:
- A statistically significant laboratory effort has been demonstrated in the sense that hits occur more often than chance.
- It is unclear whether the observed effects can unambiguously be attributed to the paranormal ability of the remote viewers as opposed to the characteristics of the judges or of the target or some other characteristic of the methods used.
- Evidence has not been provided that clearly demonstrates that the causes of hits are due to the operation of paranormal phenomena; the laboratory experiments have not identified the origins or nature of the remote viewing phenomenon, if, indeed, it exists at all.
Utts concluded that “anomalous cognition is to some extent possible in the general population,” it also appears that “certain individuals possess more talent than others, and that it is easier to find those individuals than to train people.”
Hyman pushed back, arguing that Utts’ conclusion was premature and that the findings needed to be independently replicated, and suggested that the psychic abilities could be “nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation.”
In short, the 1995 report does not confirm or deny whether remote viewing is an actual phenomenon, despite a Defense Intelligence Agency summary which clearly states that it is. The program was officially terminated in 1995 after it did not produce reliable intelligence, and was featured in the book (and movie) The Men Who Stare At Goats.
And so while the phenomenon is real according to the US Government, it is also fairly unreliable. In 1988, the Defense Department called in researcher Ed Dames and two psychics to use remote viewing for the location of Marine Lieutenant Colonel William Higgins – who was kidnapped by Hezbollah.
While the psychics were able to pinpoint the village Higgins was held in, they were wrong that he was alive, along with that he was being held “on water.” Subsequent reports revealed that Higgins was already dead – while Hezbollah later released a video of his corpse with a noose around his neck, according to New Republic. That said, his body was kept on ice for months – possibly the “water” seen by the psychics.
According to the same project summary that the above screenshots came from, remote viewing was also used with some success during Operation Desert Shield/Storm, and explored for applications within Joint Tactical Force support.
If one wants to hear directly from the horse’s (goat’s?) mouth – Russell Targ did an interesting TED Talk about his experiences.
Controversial TEDTalk about Psychic Abilities | Russell Targ from SuzanneTaylor on Vimeo.
- 23.2 Million Hack Victims Used '123456" As Their Password
A shocking number of people who have been hacked used mind-numbingly simple passwords, according to a breach analysis conducted on behalf of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
According to data obtained from the website “Haver I Been Pwned,” more than 23 million people who were hacked used the password ‘123456,’ followed by ‘123456789’ (7.7 million) and ‘qwerty’ (3.8 million).
Top 10 most-frequently used passwords by hack victims:
- 123456
- 123456789
- qwerty
- password
- 111111
- 12345678
- abc123
- 1234567
- password1
- 12345
Separate of the release, the NCSC conducted its first “UK Cyber Survey” ahead of their CYBERUK 2019 conference in Glasgow this week, which found among other things;
- Only 15% say they know a great deal about how to protect themselves from harmful activity
- The most regular concern is money being stolen – with 42% feeling it likely to happen by 2021
- 89% use the internet to make online purchases – with 39% on a weekly basis
- One in three rely to some extent on friends and family for help on cyber security
- Young people more likely to be privacy conscious and careful of what details they share online
- 61% of internet users check social media daily, but 21% report they never look at social media
- 70% always use PINs and passwords for smart phones and tablets
- Less than half do not always use a strong, separate password for their main email account
“We understand that cyber security can feel daunting to a lot of people, but the NCSC has published lots of easily applicable advice to make you much less vulnerable,” said NCSC technical director Dr. Ian Levy.”
Password re-use is a major risk that can be avoided – nobody should protect sensitive data with somethisng that can be guessed, like their first name, local football team or favourite band.
Using hard-to-guess passwords is a strong first step and we recommend combining three random but memorable words. Be creative and use words memorable to you, so people can’t guess your password. -Dr. Ian Levy
“Given the growing global threat from cyber attacks, these findings underline the importance of using strong passwords at home and at work,” said David Lidington, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office.
“This is a message we look forward to building on at CYBERUK 2019, an event that reaffirms our commitment to make Britain both the safest place in the world to be online and the best place to run a digital business.”
Read the cyber survey below:
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