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Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Over 25 million Americans are affected by asthma, one of the most common allergy-triggered diseases of our time. By incorporating these anti-asthma super foods into your diet, you may be able to reduce unexpected asthma attacks. Here are 10 amazing asthma-friendly foods that boost your health. 1. Apples Studies show that apples possess anti-asthmatic properties. One study revealed that drinking apple juice could reduce the chance of wheezing by up to 50%. Apples provide many beneficial effects that may be linked to their high concentration of quercetin, known to possess strong antioxidant, anti-histamine, and anti-inflammatory properties. But be sure to buy organic, as apples are among the worst culprits for pesticide-laden foods. Other quercertin-rich foods include yellow and red onions, capers, broccoli, lovage, red grapes, cherries, citrus fruits, tea, and many berries, including lingonberries , raspberries, and cranberries 2. Avocados Avocado are listed as one of the healthiest foods to eat, thanks to their high concentration of L-glutathione. They are an amazing anti-asthma food that helps protect cells from free radical damage. Avocados also detoxify the body of harmful substances like pollutants, and enable other antioxidants to function. The L-glutathione helps fight inflammation and repair gut health. 3. Bananas Bananas are naturally rich in fiber, which helps prevent respiratory conditions from developing. According to a study conducted in 2011 by researchers from the Imperial College London, having just one banana a day could keep asthma away. Studies found that children who consume a single banana a day reduce their risk of developing symptoms of asthma such as wheezing by more than 30%. 4. Cantaloupe Cantaloupe is rich in vitamin C, which is an antioxidant that can fight free radicals and ward off lung damage. A recent study in Japan observed that preschool children with a low intake of vitamin C were more likely to suffer from asthma that those with a high intake. 5. Flax Seeds Give your asthma-friendly diet a boost by adding flaxseeds to your meals. Flaxseeds are filled with asthma-relieving minerals such as magnesium and potassium as well as omega-3 fatty acids. They are also an excellent source of selenium, as just one cup provides more than 60% of the daily recommended intake. 6. Turmeric Turmeric is an active ingredient that has proven to be one of the most powerful anti-inflammatory nutrients available. This yellow spice has been used for centuries in traditional Asian medicine to treat asthma and other ailments. Recently, western medicine has also started to take notice of this spice, as studies reveal that turmeric contains strong anti-inflammatory properties. You can use turmeric in curry or to add flavor and color to seafood, fish, rice, meat, pasta, and vegetable dishes. 7. Kale Kale is a great source of vitamin C, and this nutritional powerhouse helps block the free radicals that are responsible for sudden contractions in airway passages. Kale also contains beta-carotene, another powerful antioxidant phytochemical that is capable of relieving existing symptoms of asthma while preventing future signs of formation. Your Inbox Will Never Be The Same Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. It is one of the top vegetables with the highest rating in ORAC, or Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, which measures the food’s ability to fight free radicals that cause constriction of airway muscles. 8. Ginger Ginger is loaded with anti-inflammatory nutrients that process through the entire body. Its root is another rich anti-asthma herb that is said to work better than antihistamine drugs like Benadryl, as it stops inflammation and clears up airways. Ginger also does not cause any harmful side effects, making it safe for you to consume with your everyday diet for good health. 9. Spinach A recent study involving over 68,000 women found that high spinach intake was related to a lower risk of asthma. This may be due to the high vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, and magnesium content in spinach. Spinach is also high in potassium, which is said to exacerbate symptoms of asthma when deficient. Asthma is strongly related to magnesium deficiency, as treatments with magnesium have been revealed to help stop an asthma attack. 10. Tomatoes Tomatoes are known for providing lycopene, which helps alleviate symptoms of asthma. Raw tomatoes also contain beta-carotene and vitamin C, with a high amount of potassium in their calorie content. The key to living a long, healthy life is to eat well and stay active. Add these powerful asthma-friendly foods to your diet and see how well your body starts to feel. | 0 |
When the biggest political story of the year reached a dramatic and unexpected climax late Tuesday night, our newsroom turned on a dime and did what it has done for nearly two years — cover the 2016 election with agility and creativity. After such an erratic and unpredictable election there are inevitable questions: Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters? What forces and strains in America drove this divisive election and outcome? Most important, how will a president who remains a largely enigmatic figure actually govern when he takes office? As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team. We cannot deliver the independent, original journalism for which we are known without the loyalty of our readers. We want to take this opportunity, on behalf of all Times journalists, to thank you for that loyalty. Sincerely, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. publisher Dean Baquet, executive editor | 1 |
Derek Walcott, whose intricately metaphorical poetry captured the physical beauty of the Caribbean, the harsh legacy of colonialism and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds, bringing him a Nobel Prize in Literature, died early Friday morning at his home near Gros Islet in St. Lucia. He was 87. His death was confirmed by his publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. No cause was given, but he had been in poor health for some time, the publisher said. Mr. Walcott’s expansive universe revolved around a tiny sun, the island of St. Lucia. Its opulent vegetation, blinding white beaches and tangled multicultural heritage inspired, in its most famous literary son, an ambitious body of work that seemingly embraced every poetic form, from the short lyric to the epic. With the publication of the collection “In a Green Night” in 1962, critics and poets, Robert Lowell among them, leapt to recognize a powerful new voice in Caribbean literature and to praise the sheer musicality of Mr. Walcott’s verse, the immediacy of its visual images, its profound sense of place. He had first attracted attention on St. Lucia with a book of poems that he published himself as a teenager. Early on, he showed a remarkable ear for the music of English — heard in the poets whose work he absorbed in his Anglocentric education and on the lips of his fellow St. Lucians — and a painter’s eye for the particulars of the local landscape: its beaches and clouds its turtles, crabs and tropical fish the sparkling expanse of the Caribbean. In the poem “Islands,” from the collection “In a Green Night,” he wrote: He told The Economist in 1990: “The sea is always present. It’s always visible. All the roads lead to it. I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body. And if you say in patois, ‘The boats are coming back,’ the beat of that line, its metrical space, has to do with the sound and rhythm of the sea itself. ” There was nothing shy about Mr. Walcott’s poetic voice. It demanded to be heard, in all its sensuous immediacy and historical complexity. “I come from a place that likes grandeur it likes large gestures it is not inhibited by flourish it is a rhetorical society it is a society of physical performance it is a society of style,” he told The Paris Review in 1985. “I grew up in a place in which if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it. If you wanted to approximate that thunder or that power of speech, it couldn’t be done by a little modest voice in which you muttered something to someone else. ” Mr. Walcott’s art developed and expanded in works like “The Castaway,” “The Gulf” and “Another Life,” a inquiry into his life and surroundings, published in 1973. The Caribbean poet George Lamming called it “the history of an imagination. ” Mr. Walcott quickly won recognition as one of the finest poets writing in English and as an enormously ambitious artist — ambitious for himself, his art and his people. He had a sense of the Caribbean’s grandeur that inspired him to write “Omeros,” a transposed Homeric epic of more than 300 pages, published in 1990, with humble fishermen and a taxi driver standing in for the heroes of ancient Greece. Two years later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The prize committee cited him for “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment. ” It continued: “In his literary works Walcott has laid a course for his own cultural environment, but through them he speaks to each and every one of us. In him, West Indian culture has found its great poet. ” As a poet, Mr. Walcott plumbed the paradoxes of identity intrinsic to his situation. He was a poet living on a island whose people spoke Creole or English. In “A Far Cry From Africa,” included in “In a Green Night” — his first poetry collection to be published outside St. Lucia — he wrote: Derek Alton Walcott was born on Jan. 23, 1930, in Castries, a port city on the island of St. Lucia. His father, Warwick, a schoolteacher and watercolorist, died when he was an infant, and he was raised by his schoolteacher mother, the former Alix Maarlin. Both his parents, like many St. Lucians, were the products of racially mixed marriages. Derek was raised as a Methodist, which made him an exception on St. Lucia, a largely Roman Catholic island, and at his Catholic secondary school, St. Mary’s College. His education was Anglocentric and thoroughly traditional. “I was taught English literature as my natural inheritance,” he wrote in the essay “The Muse of History. ” “Forget the snow and daffodils. They were real, more real than the heat and oleander, perhaps, because they lived on the page, in imagination, and therefore in memory. ” He published his first poem at 14, in a local newspaper. With a loan from his mother, he began publishing his poetry in pamphlets while still at St. Mary’s. His early models were Marlowe and Milton. At the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, where he majored in French, Latin and Spanish, he began writing plays, entering into a lifelong but rocky love affair with the theater. His first play, about the revolutionary Haitian leader Henri Christophe, was produced in St. Lucia in 1950. After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1953, Mr. Walcott taught school in St. Lucia, Grenada and Jamaica while continuing to write and stage plays. His verse dramas “Ione” and “Sea at Dauphin” were produced in Trinidad in 1954. “ and His Brothers,” a retelling of a Trinidadian folk tale in which Lucifer tries to steal the souls of three brothers, was produced in Trinidad in 1958. Mr. Walcott studied directing with José Quintero in New York for a year and, on returning to the West Indies, founded a repertory company, the Little Carib Theater Workshop, which in the late 1960s became the Trinidad Theater Workshop. One of the group’s first productions was Mr. Walcott’s “Malcochon. ” His play was “Dream on Monkey Mountain,” which received an Off Broadway production in 1971. He later wrote the book and collaborated with the singer and songwriter Paul Simon on the lyrics for “The Capeman,” a musical about a Puerto Rican gang member who murdered three people in Manhattan in 1959. The show opened at the Marquis Theater in 1998 and closed after 68 performances, becoming one of the most expensive flops in Broadway history. With the publication of “In a Green Night” in 1962, Mr. Walcott captured the attention of British and American critics. Robert Lowell in particular was enthusiastic, and served as a point of entry to the American literary world. With each succeeding collection — “Selected Poems” (1964) “The Castaway” (1969) “The Gulf” (1970) and “Sea Grapes” (1976) — Mr. Walcott established himself as something more than an interesting local poet. “Aficionados of Caribbean writing have been aware for some time that Derek Walcott is the first considerable poet to emerge from the Arcadia of the old slaveocracies,” the poet and critic Selden Rodman wrote in a review of “The Gulf” in The New York Times Book Review. “Now, with the publication of his fourth book of verse, Walcott’s stature in the front rank of all contemporary poets using English should be apparent. ” The lyric strain in Mr. Walcott’s poetry never disappeared, but he increasingly took on complex narrative projects and expanded his vision of the Caribbean to accommodate an epic treatment of the themes that had always engaged him. The artistic of “Another Life,” with its rich, intertwining of the artist’s developing sensibility and the lush landscape of St. Lucia, set the bar for Mr. Walcott’s later, increasingly ambitious poetry. In “Omeros” — the title is the modern Greek word for Homer — Mr. Walcott cast his net wide, embracing all of Caribbean history from time immemorial, with special attention to the slave trade, and refracting its story through Homeric legend. In his hands, the Caribbean became not a backwater but a crossroads — what the scholar Jorge Hernandez Martin, writing in the magazine Americas in 1994, called “a dispersion zone, a sort of switchboard with input from and output to other parts of the world. ” Travel and exile were constants in Mr. Walcott’s poetry. “Tiepolo’s Hound” (2000) presented a dual portrait of the author and the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, who spent his childhood in the Caribbean before being transplanted to Paris. Like his father, Mr. Walcott was an accomplished watercolorist his landscape paintings appear on his book jackets, and in “Tiepolo’s Hound” they are interspersed through the book. The wanderings in “Omeros” were rivaled by Mr. Walcott’s own zigzag itinerary as a teacher and lecturer at universities around the world. He taught at Boston University from 1981 until retiring in 2007, dividing his time among Boston, New York and St. Lucia but constantly en route. “The Prodigal” (2004) a summation with a distinctly elegiac undercurrent, offered a glimpse of the author’s restless movements, which take him, in the course of the poem, to Italy, Colombia, France and Mexico. “Prodigal, what were your wanderings about?” he wrote. “The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure. ” Mr. Walcott’s three marriages ended in divorce. His survivors include his longtime companion, Sigrid Nama a son, Peter two daughters, Anna and Elizabeth and several grandchildren. His twin brother, Roderick, a playwright, died in 2000. In 2009, Mr. Walcott was proposed for the honorary post of professor of poetry at Oxford University. His candidacy was derailed when academics at Oxford received an anonymous package containing photocopied pages of a book describing allegations of sexual harassment brought by a Harvard student decades earlier. Mr. Walcott withdrew his name. “I am disappointed that such low tactics have been used in this election, and I do not want to get into a race for a post where it causes embarrassment to those who have chosen to support me for the role or to myself,” he told The Evening Standard of London. He added, “While I was happy to be put forward for the post, if it has degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination, I do not want to be part of it. ” Mr. Walcott was always conscious of writing as a man apart, from a corner of the world whose literature was in its infancy. This peculiar position, he argued, had its advantages. “There can be virtues in deprivation,” he said in his Nobel lecture, describing the “luck” of being present in the early morning of a culture. “For every poet, it is always morning in the world,” he said. “History a forgotten, insomniac night History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History. ” | 1 |
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An increasingly common form of theft has been occurring at gas stations around the country….
“Most of the time, gas station customers leave their car doors unlocked and items like purses and wallets are often left in plain view,” explains the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC). “A thief is able to drive up next to the victim’s car, open an unlocked door, and grab any valuables within reach. Then, the thief quickly drives off. It happens in a matter of seconds.”
[…]
As the gas station surveillance camera shows in the video below, a while a customer is pumping gas with her back turned away from her car, the driver of another car pulls up and “slides” into the passenger side door of the woman’s car, grabs her purse, and then drives off — all in a matter of seconds. | 0 |
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California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom’s (shown) campaign to run for something (either governor of the state or for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat when she retires) in 2018 is likely to get a significant boost when Proposition 63 passes next month. Prop 63 won’t do anything to restrict criminal gun violence, but it will raise him from obscurity, provide his campaign (which he announced in February last year) with mailing lists and funding sources, and propel him into national prominence.
In other words, Prop 63 is all about Newsom . As sponsor of the anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment bill, Newsom has taken plays from the Brady anti-gun playbook and sold them to the California low-information voters, who are being influenced by the bill’s support from Senators Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, various mayors, and three of the state’s largest newspapers. At last count, more than 90 percent of Democrats and a hefty majority of Republicans support the bill.
The bill, which Newsom calls his “Safety for All” measure, would, he says, “help save countless lives.” Its primary focus, according to Newsom, is on ammunition: It would, effective January 1, 2018, require purchasers of ammunition to undergo background checks and have the sale recorded permanently onto a new database maintained by the California Department of Justice. If a seller sells more than 500 rounds in any 30-day period, he would have to become a licensed ammunition vender and would be forced to sell ammunition only face-to-face, not by mail.
In addition the proposition would create a “new court process … for the removal of firearms from individuals upon conviction of certain crimes” according to the state’s voter information guide. In addition, it would ban the possession of magazines holding more than 10 rounds. That guide goes on to parrot the traditional anti-gun promises of similar bills: Proposition 63 will improve public safety by keeping guns and ammunition out of the wrong hands. Law enforcement and public safety leaders support Prop. 63 because it will reduce gun violence by preventing violent felons, domestic abusers, and the dangerously mentally ill from obtaining and using deadly weapons and ammo.
That it’s a phony political ploy is evident from the fact that the bill would only apply to California residents. Nonresidents would be exempt. Nonresidents such as criminals, illegal immigrants, out-of-state terrorists, gang members and convicted felons “can bring ammunition into California all they want,” according to Kim Rhode. Rhode, a six-time Olympic medal winner in the shooting sports and an honorary life member of the National Rifle Association, added: “This tells you how fundamentally twisted this proposition really is. It will cause the police and the state to divert resources to monitor law-abiding citizens [who] are not causing any problems, but will do nothing to stop criminals.”
Rhode is joined by numerous individuals and groups who see the bill for what it really is, including 10 professional law-enforcement associations and John Malcolm, director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation: This law would make criminals out of people who are morally blameless. These are special taxes and background checks on ammunition, just to make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. It’s an assault on the Second Amendment.
Agreeing with Malcolm’s assessment of the bill’s malevolent results is Michele Hanisee, president of California’s Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County: For one thing, this initiative would do nothing to stop criminals from acquiring ammunition, guns, or large-capacity magazines. But it would make it prohibitively difficult for responsible gun owners to obtain ammunition for sport and home defense. As prosecutors, we would enthusiastically support any proposed law that promised to be a realistic tool against gun violence. But Prop. 63 is simply bad public policy. Its passage would have zero effect on criminals — other than to encourage them to commit more crimes. At the same time, it would criminalize the conduct of ordinary citizens.
Passage of Proposition 63, which now appears to be certain, will turn out to be a two-fer: 1) a further infringement of precious rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the citizens of California, and 2) a boost from obscurity to national prominence the highly popular former mayor of San Francisco and current radio host who has his eyes set on 2018 political opportunities.
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . | 0 |
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[Ed. – Coming soon to a — oh, wait. It’s already here .]
Pupils at a primary school were forced to chant “Allahu Akhbar” and “there is no God but Allah”, an appalled father has claimed.
The father of the pupil at the girl’s primary school in German ski resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen discovered that his daughter had been forced to learn the Islamic prayer when he discovered a handout she had been given.
He claimed she had been “forced” by teachers to memorise the Islamic chants and forwarded the handout to Austrian news service unsertirol24.
The handout read: “Oh Allah, how perfect you are and praise be to you. Blessed is your name, and exalted is your majesty. There is no God but you.” …
The incident comes just weeks after parents complained to German newspaper Hessian Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA) that their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” to accommodate the “diverse cultures” of other pupils. | 0 |
THE NINE OF USGrowing Up KennedyBy Jean Kennedy SmithIllustrated. 262 pp. Publishers. $29. 99. She was the eighth and penultimate child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, shyer than most of the others, a sidekick to her siblings. Now, as Jean Kennedy Smith notes in her wistful memoir, “The Nine of Us: Growing Up Kennedy,” she’s the only one left. That’s reason enough to dip into this graceful if gossamer book. Her grandfathers who rose to power in Boston politics get their due, but “The Nine of Us” really begins in Hyannis Port, the playground and testament to Joe Kennedy’s great success, first as a banker and stock picker, then as a Hollywood financier, and above all as an investor who knew when to get out: right about the time Jean was born in 1928. Jean is too proper, of course, to address her parents’ marriage in any but the most reverent terms. The patriarch rarely at home in his striving days, romancing Gloria Swanson among so many others, is only the wise and devoted father here. Rose’s unconcern at their long times apart — their separate vacations, even — is no less a mystery than before. This is the story of children who made their beds, did chores, came to dinner at exactly quarter past 7 and endured both parents’ endless interrogatories about global events of the day. Jean’s brother Teddy, in his far weightier memoir “True Compass,” has already worked this ground, as have scores of biographers, but Jean has a few new stories of her own. Locked one day in a closet for stealing a cookie, she waited — and waited. Suddenly the door opened and in rolled Teddy, youngest of the nine, for some infraction of his own. Once again, the door was shut and locked. Her mother, Jean realized, had forgotten she was there. To dry their tears, Jean started playing . “Teddy,” I said, “do you think we will ever get out of this closet? Or do you think we’ll be like Amelia Earhart, stuck here forever?” Teddy giggled, she reports, and off they sailed to the isle where Earhart awaited them. When their mother at last let Teddy out, she did a at seeing Jean, too, but nothing more. “Mother,” she writes, “was not about to admit her mistake. ” It’s fun, too, to see statecraft through the eyes of an girl. By l935, Joe Kennedy had worn out his welcome with President Roosevelt, despite his brilliance in building the Securities and Exchange Commission: To Roosevelt, the Boston banker was a braggart. Still, Kennedy held some sway over the Irish Catholic vote best to keep him in thrall. When Kennedy mentioned to the president his son Bobby’s stamp collection, Roosevelt knew just what to do. “Roosevelt was himself an avid collector,” Jean explains, “and he found a moment . ’u2008. ’u2008. to dictate a note to Bobby. ” Later, when Roosevelt invited all the Kennedys to the Oval Office, Bobby walked in clutching his album. “President Roosevelt was delighted,” Jean recalls. “The two of them moved to the large desk, where the leader of the free world brought out his stamp collection, too. There they lingered, the president and the boy, necks craned over their albums. ” For his good offices, Kennedy asked to be named ambassador to the Court of St. ’u202fJames’s. Roosevelt reportedly laughed at the thought: No one was less diplomatic than Joe Kennedy. But fine, let him hang himself. And so, in l938, the Kennedys arrived in London to a roaring welcome. No one had ever seen such a large and dazzling brood. The eldest son, Joe Jr. and Jack stayed back at Harvard, but the rest of the children became social stars there, including Jean, who at age 10 attended a boarding school outside London. (The choice seems stern, but Jean never complained: No whining was the family rule.) Even Rosemary, third of the nine, managed at age 20 to get through her social debut despite a mental handicap that left her ever further behind her siblings. Jean, unsurprisingly, says nothing about the circumstances surrounding the end of her father’s ambassadorship — that his pleas for appeasement with Hitler had outlasted even Chamberlain’s. She does note that Rosemary stayed on with her father when Britain declared war on Germany and the rest of the family went home. “Dad felt he needed to stay in England, . ’u2008. ’u2008. and she was doing so well at a school there, better than she ever had before. ” Yet two years later, Papa Kennedy decided that Rosemary should have a new and promising but radical treatment: a frontal lobotomy. Jean omits any mention of it in her narrative. Only in an epilogue — could it have been at an editor’s insistence? — does she acknowledge that the operation went “tragically wrong,” leaving Rosemary with difficulties walking or communicating. In the Kennedy clan, each older sibling was made guardian of a younger one. Jean’s guardian was Joe Jr. oldest and most promising of the lot. Vividly, she recalls the summer day in l944 when two priests came up the driveway with news that Joe, a Navy pilot, had been killed in action. Jean recalls riding her bike to church to cry and pray, then going to the local hospital where she worked as a volunteer. “What else could I do?” Four years later, death took a second of the nine: Kathleen, or Kick, whose small plane went down over France. Kick’s lover, a dashing (and married) Brit, was with her, having pushed the pilot to brave an oncoming storm. Greater depths, for all these tragedies, simply go unplumbed. The Kennedys have never been ones for public expressions of grief. Jean ends her memoir on the high note of Jack’s presidency, after introducing her college roommate Ethel Skakel to Bobby (“The rest is history”) marrying the businessman and political strategist Stephen Smith, and doing all she can with her siblings to get Jack elected. Left to the epilogue are the assassinations, along with Joe’s devastating stroke. Of later painful episodes — Chappaquiddick, her son William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial, Teddy’s brain cancer, her sister Patricia Lawford’s fight with cancer and more — there is no mention. We can rue how much goes unsaid here, even about those Hyannis Port summers of the l930s and l940s. Or we can concede that the last Kennedy of her generation has the right to tell the story she wishes, and let it go at that. Slim as this volume is, it still makes for engaging reading — say, on a front porch by the sea, in that quiet time after lunch when the Kennedy children, at their parents’ insistence, read in their rooms every day, before the years when they lit up the sky. | 1 |
President Donald Trump signed legislation Monday that rolls back two education regulations — one regarding teacher training programs and another regarding requirements for states in meeting directives of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). [Trump signed H. J. Res. 58, which overturns the U. S. Education Department’s (USED) rule that relates to how teacher training programs are assessed. Additionally, the president signed H. J. Res. 57, which nullifies USED’s rule relating to state accountability requirements under ESSA. The teacher training program requirement, part of the Higher Education Act, mandated states to rate training programs for teachers each year based, in part, on student outcome measures. The Washington Post describes the Obama rule as “broadly unpopular”: Teachers unions said the regulations wrongly tied ratings of programs to the performance of teachers’ students on standardized tests colleges and states argued that the rules were onerous and expensive, and many Republicans argued that Obama’s Education Department had overstepped the bounds of executive authority. The ESSA rule concerned states’ accountability in identifying failing schools and reporting their plans for improving them to the federal government.. In his remarks about these two House joint resolutions, Trump said they “eliminate harmful burdens on state and local taxes on school systems that could have cost states hundreds of millions of dollars. ” “So it’s the states and school systems, and that was very important,” the president added. “Parents, teachers, communities, and state leaders know the needs of their students better than anyone in Washington by far. So we’re removing these additional layers of bureaucracy to encourage more freedom and innovation in our schools. ” The Congress and Trump are overturning some rules and regulations via the Congressional Review Act. | 1 |
Federally fund democracy by federally funding all political campaigns. No private or corporate money allowed. Bye bye lobbyist influence if we close the revolving door after office. Peace just may break out. | 0 |
Congress: Attorney General Lynch ‘Pleads Fifth’ on Secret Iran ‘Ransom’ Payments Free Beacon
Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon .
Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) initially presented Lynch in October with a series of questions about how the cash payment to Iran was approved and delivered.
In an Oct. 24 response , Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded on Lynch’s behalf, refusing to answer the questions and informing the lawmakers that they are barred from publicly disclosing any details about the cash payment, which was bound up in a ransom deal aimed at freeing several American hostages from Iran.
The response from the attorney general’s office is “unacceptable” and provides evidence that Lynch has chosen to “essentially plead the fifth and refuse to respond to inquiries regarding [her] role in providing cash to the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism,” Rubio and Pompeo wrote on Friday in a follow-up letter to Lynch, according to a copy obtained by the Free Beacon .
The inquiry launched by the lawmakers is just one of several concurrent ongoing congressional probes aimed at unearthing a full accounting of the administration’s secret negotiations with Iran. | 0 |
What I love about Marnie’s studio apartment in Chinatown on HBO’s “Girls” is that I used to have one a lot like it, with a shower in the kitchen and a bathroom in a closet. At some point before I moved in, someone had neatly tacked sheets to the ceiling to hide, I don’t know, probably a really terrible ceiling. I shared the place, a poor excuse for a in Little Italy, with a roommate, so it was larger than Marnie’s 250 square feet. The biggest difference was I lived there in 1999, when everyone was busy watching Carrie Bradshaw bound up the picturesque steps of her Upper East Side brownstone on “Sex and the City. ” Remember her closet? What freelancer has a closet? Even then, I knew it was absurd. But I could will myself to believe in it, because my friends could still afford to live in neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where the telltale markers of gentrification — construction cranes, restaurants and soaring rents — had yet to take hold. But the real estate landscape has shifted so profoundly over the last two decades that this generation’s occupies a very different kind of space. And it is one that keeps shrinking, which is why Desi, Marnie’s hapless husband, frantically builds a wall down the middle of Marnie’s tiny studio to try to save their crumbling marriage. “Welcome to your new apartment,” he says, to her horror. As rising rents squeeze young New Yorkers, the TV apartment has become grittier, dirtier and ever more cramped. You could almost say it is angry. A generation ago, Carrie could whine about the size of a closet in a $ apartment in the episode where she goes apartment hunting after being threatened with eviction. “I pay $750 for something that’s twice the size!” she laments. The broker is unmoved. Carrie, of course, has what most New Yorkers could only dream about, then and now: a apartment. Now we have Abbi on Comedy Central’s “Broad City,” with Pam, the broker in a neck brace. Abbi’s options include “a beautiful apartment in your budget” that is bright green, has no bathroom and might actually be a hallway. But it sure beats the place with the walls. “You guys know that television show ‘Friends?’ ” Pam asks as she jimmies the door with a penknife. “Here’s this place. ” What Abbi finds inside is the antithesis of the “Friends” apartment: austere, soulless and stark white, except, of course, for the blood spatter, remnants of an apparent double murder. “More good news! The walls are super thick,” Pam says. As you will recall, the “Friends” apartment, shared by a young barista and a struggling chef, was a palatial with amusing purple walls in the West Village. Even in 1994, few of us were fooled by the “Friends” fantasy, but we ran with it anyway. Television has become smarter since then — viewers expect more rawness. Well, maybe they expect more truth. It just happens to be raw. But dig deeper and shows like “Broad City” and “Girls” tell a different story, one that is experienced in the shadow of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. The characters on these shows are part of a generation burdened by student loan debt and stagnating wages. Netflix’s “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” doesn’t get a place with a balcony in the happening West Village. For her, there’s a grim garden apartment reached by a dicey set of steps in far Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “Younger generations are having to face this reality,” said Lindsay T. Graham, a psychologist at the Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. “When you see shows where the characters are existing in these sorts of struggles, I think that that’s actually comforting. ” We’ve traded crown molding for blooming mold in the bathroom. Furniture is worn and stained. None of the throw pillows match. “We make sure there’s no bedbugs and then we use it,” said Angelique Clark, “Broad City’s” production designer, about choosing furnishings for the set. The walls have been painted countless times, and Abbi definitely did not choose the puke green of the hallway wall of her apartment in Astoria, Queens. But the grime and the lack of space are the point. At a rent party that Abbi’s friend Ilana hosts, she trips over her guests as she tries to shield them from the rats that have overrun her in Gowanus, Brooklyn. “We were just trying to capture a New York that was more realistic to us,” Ilana Glazer told me during a phone call with Abbi Jacobson, her “Broad City” and . “We crack up looking at the ‘Friends’ set. It’s like a play, facing the audience. ” Although Marnie’s studio in Chinatown could have been modeled on my sad pad, its inspiration was an apartment the show’s art director once rented. “People can watch and be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I had an apartment like that,’ ” said Matt Munn, the production designer for “Girls. ” New York has never been kind to young people just starting out. But in recent years, it has become downright cruel. In early 1996, when “Friends” was in its second season, the median rent in Manhattan was $2, 000 a month. Over the next 20 years, it jumped 67 percent to $3, 344 a month in early 2016, according to Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. But while that may seem like an enormous increase, adjust those numbers for inflation, and the median rent in 1996 would have been $3, 645 a month, or 9 percent more than it is today. “Rents are actually somewhat lower than they were in the mid 1990s,” Mr. Miller said. “But because wages have leveled off, it doesn’t feel that way. ” Young people between the ages of 18 and 29 earned about 20 percent less in real wages in 2014 than they would have earned in 2000, according to a report by the city comptroller. Also, Brooklyn — at least the parts seen as hip alternatives to Manhattan — is no longer cheaper. The flow of young professionals looking for housing led to a rise in rents in those areas, while displacing many of the people who were living there. Consider Williamsburg, the epicenter of Brooklyn gentrification. A 1996 New York Times article about the neighborhood reported that rent for a started at around $700 a month. According to Mr. Miller, the minimum starting rent for a is now around $1, 832 a month. Grim reality brings us to “The Holdouts,” a web series about a grumpy guy named Kevin who lives in a rundown apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It is described as “a comedy about New Yorkers who can’t afford to live in New York anymore. ” The concept appears to have struck a nerve. It took less than a month for the creators to raise $35, 790 on Kickstarter in June to begin producing episodes. Filming began this month, and next month we will be able to watch the pilot episode in which Kevin resists his landlord’s overtures to buy him out. “He is living in the past,” Stephen Girasuolo, one of the show’s creators, said of Kevin. “You could sort of say, ‘Dude, maybe you should sort of let it go.’ ” | 1 |
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Gee, the State Department and Hillary Clinton’s campaign seem really cozy don’t they? If I’m not mistaken, not only is this unethical, it’s illegal. Last year, the State Department tipped off the Clinton campaign that a New York Times reporter was digging into her email scandal. The State Department had claimed that they had not worked to help Clinton during the whole corrupt mess. Guess what? They lied.
Mike Schmidt is the reporter that broke the original story on the Hildabeast using a private email account and a home brewed server. They were keeping tabs on the guy and running to the Clinton campaign to report on what he was doing so they could head it off at the pass. That’s called collusion. The State Department should go under immediate review and heads should roll over this. What blatant corruption.
From The Daily Caller:
The State Department tipped the Hillary Clinton campaign off last year that a New York Times reporter was asking questions about Clinton’s emails.
The revelation undermines the State Department’s claims that it has not worked to help Clinton during the ongoing email scandal.
“State just called to tell me that Mike Schmidt seems to have what appear to be summaries of some of the exchanges in the 300 emails the committee has,” Nick Merrill wrote in a March 14, 2015 email .
Schmidt is the Times reporter who broke the news that Clinton used a private email account as secretary of state. The article was published on March 2, 2015. Clinton had turned more than 50,000 emails over to the State Department in Dec. 2014. The State Department then provided around 300 emails to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which was chaired by South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy.
The emails seem to indicate that Clinton’s team suspected Trey Gowdy of leaking the contents of Clinton’s emails to Schmidt. “Again, it appears that he does not have the email but that someone, likely from the committee, is slipping him cherry-picked characterizations of the exchanges,” Merrill wrote. “I haven’t heard directly from Schmidt yet but will circle back when I do.” Other Clinton campaign officials were not pleased with the news. In fact, they were pissed and went on a war footing over it.
“This is no bueno,” communications director Jennifer Palmieri wrote. “This is some kind of bullshit.” “If Gowdy is doing selective leaks, we are in very different kind of warfare.” This exchange was of course exposed by WikiLeaks… man, the Hildabeast must really hate those guys.
And it gets even worse. Another email sent days before Schmidt published his first bombshell report on the Clinton emails, shows that Democrats on the Benghazi Committee also tipped off the Democrat’s team that the reporter was snooping around. There’s not a damned one of these Democrats that have any honor. Not one. “Talked to [Clinton attorney Heather Samuelson] late afternoon aand [sic] told her I’d heard from Dem Staff Director on Benghazi Select Comm that NYT was sniffing around, maybe to do a story on State production to Committee or on our production to State,” Clinton lawyer David Kendall wrote on Feb. 28th, 2015.
“I’d gotten a call from NYT’s Mike Schmidt (very young) about 2:00 pm–said nothing on background or on record. I didn’t feel he had anything, but. We may get a further inquiry from him over weekend.” This indicates to me that these idiots had no idea how big the NYT’s story would be.
Kendall also wrote that Schmidt attempted to get him to hand over copies of Clinton’s emails that had already been produced for the Benghazi Committee. “He knew that some of the HRC dox had been produced — wasn’t sure if they all had been. He knew that State had asked other former SOS’s for their emails but didn’t know what the response was. I couldn’t tell what his likely angle was (and even if he had one),” Kendall wrote.
This isn’t the first time there has been dirty dealings between the State Department and other government agencies with Team Clinton. It surely won’t be the last. Our government definitely needs an enema. Related Items Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton owns and blogs at NoisyRoom.net . She is a Constitutional Conservative and NoisyRoom focuses on political and national issues of interest to the American public. Terresa is the editor at Trevor Loudon's site, New Zeal - trevorloudon.com . She also does research at KeyWiki.org . You can . NoisyRoom can be found on Facebook and on Twitter . | 0 |
0 35 3 0 Two unnamed Americans were reportedly arrested in northern Tunisia on Tuesday, on suspicion of having ties to the terrorist group.
The brothers, aged 32 and 33, were born in Michigan and were arrested near the Algerian border. © Photo: Youtube/PressTV Documentaries US Not Ruling Out Daesh Involvement in Afghanistan Offensive They claimed to be in the North African country studying computer science at the University of Jendouba, according to a Tunisian Interior Ministry spokesman.
TunisiaLive reported that neighbors in the area where the brothers were renting a house alerted police to suspicious behavior. An investigation revealed that the two men were not students, but instead recent converts to Islam who had jihadist materials on their computers and wanted Tunisia to be placed under sharia law. They were described as unwashed and heavily bearded. Other reports show their laptops contained calls to Jihad and plans to blow up several institutions, and that both men had stamps from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in their passports.
One of the brothers recently married a Tunisian woman from Borj Louzir, Ariana. The marriage is considered "urfi," meaning a religious marriage not recognized by the Tunisian government. The wife was arrested in Lafeyette,Tunis, on Tuesday afternoon.
Daesh-affiliated gunmen conducted several major attacks in Tunisia last year, and the country has had difficulty keeping militants coming from Libya at bay.
After being detained in Jendouba, the men are set to appear in court, according to the Interior official. ... | 0 |
Kenny Baker, the British actor best known for playing the robot in six “Star Wars” films, died on Saturday at his home in northwest England. He was 81. His death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for Lucasfilm, the company that created and produces the enormously popular “Star Wars” franchise. The Associated Press reported that a nephew, Drew Myerscough, said he found Mr. Baker dead at his home in the town of Preston. Mr. Baker was a little person whose adult height was widely reported to be 3 feet 8 inches. He referred to his short stature as “my height difficulties” in an autobiographical sketch on his official website, but it would have been impossible for a taller man to play the role that made him famous. “They said, ‘You’ve got to do it we can’t find anybody else. You’re small enough to get into it and you’re strong enough to be able to move it,’” he said of ’s cylindrical metal costume in a video interview in Stockholm that he shared on his site. “I was a godsend to them, really. ” Mr. Baker was born on Aug. 24, 1934, in Birmingham, England. He began his entertainment career in 1950 as part of a traveling troupe in Britain called Burton Lester’s Midgets. He soon left that act and toured the country for many years, performing in theaters, nightclubs and holiday resorts in a variety of roles: circus clown, performer in an show and, later, part of a musical comedy and variety act alongside the performer Jack Purvis. (Mr. Purvis, who died in 1997, was also in “Star Wars,” as the cloaked Chief Jawa, who shoots and played roles in the second and third “Star Wars” films as well.) The traveling act brought Mr. Baker financial security and a measure of fame in Britain, but it was an entertainment ecosystem that was wiped out by the invention of television. Then came . That role began with the first “Star Wars” movie, released in 1977 — and now officially known as “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” — but it was a part he almost did not take. “This film came along and I turned it down,” Mr. Baker said in the Stockholm interview. “I said, ‘I don’t want to be stuck in a robot, what for, for goodness sake. ’” He ultimately relented and, he said, agreed to take the job as a favor to George Lucas. The role had no lines — the character’s signature beeps and boops were not voiced by Mr. Baker — and, seated inside the robot, he never showed his face. But so changed his career that in later years he told an interviewer that if he could go back in time, he would do it again without pay. “Had I known I would have done it for nothing because he was broke at the beginning, he didn’t have a penny, George,” Mr. Baker said. But he might have asked for a share of the film’s profits, he added, referring to the celebrated British actor who played Kenobi. “I’d be a millionaire like Alec Guinness was!” Mr. Lucas said in a statement on Saturday that Mr. Baker was “an incredible trooper who always worked hard under difficult circumstances. ” “A talented vaudevillian who could always make everybody laugh, Kenny was truly the heart and soul of and will be missed by all his fans and everyone who knew him,” he added. Mr. Baker played in six “Star Wars” films: the original, its two sequels, and the prequels released in 1999, 2002 and 2005. He also appeared in a number of other movies, including “Mona Lisa,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Time Bandits” and “Amadeus. ” No information about his survivors was immediately available. His niece Abigail Shield first reported his death to the British newspaper The Guardian. | 1 |
Paul Martin, through his sources has learned of an 18 state Swat Team Drill. The drill is exceptionally covert but The Common Sense Show has learned that the intent of the drill is centralize and coordinate martial law activities over a large swath of states at the same time.
It is apparent that the election is going to be stolen and the establishment and their minions are expecting a violent backlash. Remember, both the New York Times and the Washington Post contacted Dave Hodges and Mike Adams fishing for information regarding any potential headlines related to a planned violent backlash should Clinton steal the election.
More on this coming suppression of the will of the people is included in the following video.
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In the height of the summer travel season, Britain voted to exit the European Union, scrambling markets as well as the political picture. What happens in the aftermath of “Brexit,” as it is known, is far from clear, but American travelers heading abroad will see some immediate effects. How does the Brexit vote affect Americans traveling to Europe and Britain? The most immediate effect is in the exchange rates between the dollar and the British pound, which has recorded its lowest rate in about 30 years after the results of the vote were published, providing American travelers a discount on prices paid throughout Britain. “Since yesterday, you get a lot more bang for your buck in the U. K.,” said Zach Honig, editor in chief at ThePointsGuy. com, which covers travel and incentives. “For lots of people, London is traditionally an expensive tourist destination, and with this shift the U. K. and specifically London probably are now within reach for a lot of U. S. travelers. ” The dollar has also improved against the euro, making travel within countries using the euro cheaper. Is it a good time to book air travel? Yes, but it has been so for the last six weeks, according to George Hobica, the founder of Airfarewatchdog. com. “Airfares to Europe have been plummeting, especially for late summer travel, after the college kids go back to school around Aug. 28 and onward,” he said, noting that fares to Europe from the United States were appearing as low as $400 and $500 . “It may have been an anticipation of Brexit, but we don’t know,” he said. “It’s probably also the fact that the euro and the pound were drifting lower, and that means that fewer people were flying from Europe to the U. S. and the airlines had to fill those seats with people flying from the U. S. to Europe. ” Two to three years ago, he said summer airfares to Europe were running in the $1, 800 range. Current deals, said Gary Leff, the author of the travel blog Viewfromthewing. com, are “a function of some growth in capacity and some of the seats on carriers like Norwegian. And it’s what we all expected, with some lag, due to lower fuel prices. It’s been inexpensive, and now it’s inexpensive to be there, thanks to the currency. ” Will I get a better deal on a tour or package to Europe or Britain now? Maybe. It’s early days, but if exchange rates hold and travel softens within Europe and Britain, expect more enticing travel offers. “Usually when these things happen, the travel industry response is to bring people in,” said Mike Stitt, the North American president of Travelzoo, a publisher of travel deals. “The real area I would watch for are vacation deals. There are packaging companies and tour operators who work with airlines and hotels and can put together strong deals to entice U. S. travelers. ” When these deals might surface is unknown but probably later this year, assuming exchange rates hold. Will my experience at the U. K. or European borders change as a result of Brexit? No. Americans must still present a valid passport when entering European countries as well as Britain. When the dust settles and Britain is extracted from the European Union, which most believe will take some years, it is travelers from European and U. K. countries who may experience more hassles at foreign borders. One area of uncertainty is Northern Ireland. A member of the U. K. Northern Ireland shares a border with the Republic of Ireland now. No passports are required for transit between the two countries, which, though both were members of the European Union, use different currencies. With Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, the Ireland and Northern Ireland border would now represent a frontier between the U. K. and the European Union, though what form that would take is unknown. As Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda Kenny wrote in The Guardian this week, “What is not easy to quantify and mitigate is the psychological effect of a hardening border on the island. My fear is that it would play into an old narrative — one of division, isolation and difference. ” Will there be any effects felt in the travel industry in the United States? That’s another unknown, but the decline of the pound relative to the dollar could affect incoming visitors from Britain who tend to visit popular destinations like New York, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. “If British tourists, because of currency fluctuations, change their plans or don’t come to U. S. you may see some ability to get some better prices in some cities,” said Mr. Stitt of Travelzoo. “We’re seeing a little of that effect now with the Canadian travelers. As their currency has plummeted against the dollar, Canadians are staying home. ” | 1 |
It’s a tradition for politicians to deny any interest in the vice presidency. But this year, with the possibility of Donald J. Trump as the Republican nominee, they really mean it. “Never,” said Chris Schrimpf, a spokesman for Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who is still running against Mr. Trump. “No chance. ” “Hahahahahahahahaha,” wrote Sally Bradshaw, a senior adviser to Jeb Bush, when asked if he would consider it. “Scott Walker has a visceral negative reaction to Trump’s character,” said Ed Goeas, a longtime adviser to the Wisconsin governor. Or, as Senator Lindsey Graham put it, “That’s like buying a ticket on the Titanic. ” A remarkable range of leading Republicans, including Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, have been emphatic publicly or with their advisers and allies that they do not want to be considered as Mr. Trump’s running mate. The recoiling amounts to a rare rebuke for a : Politicians usually signal that they are not interested politely through back channels, or submit to the selection process, if only to burnish their national profiles. But Mr. Trump has a singular track record of picking fights with obvious potential running mates like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who has indicated a lack of interest in the vice presidency generally and has yet to reconcile with Mr. Trump publicly. Ms. Haley and another potential pick, Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, have sharply criticized Mr. Trump at recent party gatherings and do not want to be associated with his tone, according to advisers and close associates who have spoken with these Republicans. Several Republican consultants said their clients were concerned that Mr. Trump’s unusually high unfavorable ratings with all voters and his unpopularity among women and Hispanics could doom him as a general election candidate and damage their own future political prospects if they were on his ticket. Still, elected officials do have a way of coming around to the vice presidency, and Mr. Trump said in an interview on Saturday that he was in the early stages of mending fences and building deeper relationships with leading Republicans. And in a sign of growing acceptance that Mr. Trump is their likely nominee, several Republicans made it clear that they would join him on the ticket because they think he can win, or because they regard the call to serve as their duty. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, as well as Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama and the retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, said in interviews that they would consider joining the ticket if Mr. Trump offered. Two governors, Chris Christie of New Jersey and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, have also told allies that they were open to being Mr. Trump’s running mate. “If a potential president says I need you, it would be very hard for a patriotic citizen to say no,” Mr. Gingrich said. “People can criticize a nominee, but ultimately there are very few examples of people turning down the vice presidency. ” Mr. Trump, who could well become the presumptive Republican nominee on Tuesday by winning the Indiana primary, is just starting to mull prospects and has no favorite in mind, he said in the interview. Mr. Trump said he wanted someone with “a strong political background, who was well respected on the Hill, who can help me with legislation, and who could be a great president. ” He declined to discuss potential picks in any detail, but he briefly praised three governors as possible contenders — Mr. Kasich, Mr. Christie and Rick Scott of Florida — and said he would also consider candidates who were women, black or Hispanic. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Scott said he was focused on being governor.) Asked if he was surprised about the array of Republicans who are uncomfortable being his running mate, Mr. Trump said: “I don’t care. Whether people support or endorse me or not, it makes zero influence on the voters. Historically, people don’t vote based on who is vice president. I want someone who can help me govern. ” A cross section of leading Republicans agree that his most sensible choice would be an experienced female governor or senator, given that he would most likely face Hillary Clinton in November and need support from a majority of white women to offset her strong support among blacks and Hispanics. Yet Mrs. Clinton is currently ahead of Mr. Trump with white women by percentages, according to a recent CBS poll. The pool of Republican women in major offices is relatively small, and Mr. Trump has already alienated some of them. Governor Haley denounced him for not quickly disavowing support from the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and Governor Martinez has criticized his remarks about Hispanics. Both governors endorsed Senator Rubio for president a Martinez spokesman said she “isn’t interested in serving as vice president,” while a Haley spokesman declined to comment. “There are some Republicans who would’ve said yes to running with Romney or McCain or Bush but would say no to Trump,” said Curt Anderson, a Republican strategist, referring to the party’s last three presidential nominees. “The issue is, no one knows what we’re dealing with here. Is it possible that Trump faces a historic landslide loss? Sure. Is it possible he beats the hell out of Clinton? Sure. No one knows — no one has predicted Trump right for a long time. ” Even Governor Fallin of Oklahoma, who has not ruled out running with Mr. Trump, has expressed uncertainty about what he would be like as a leader, according to close associates who have spoken to her. Ms. Fallin, in a brief statement, would not discuss Mr. Trump, but said the nation’s challenges were too great for “business as usual” political solutions. “Any discussion of other service I might be asked to offer to my country is flattering but premature,” she said. David Winston, a veteran Republican pollster, said Mr. Trump’s first challenge in finding a running mate was lowering his unfavorability ratings of 60 percent or more, because prominent politicians would not want to join his ticket if he cannot turn those figures around. Mr. Winston dismissed the notion — put forward by some Trump advisers — that the candidate could improve his ratings by picking a woman, a Hispanic, or other figure with demographic appeal. “He simply won’t be able to convince any candidate to run with him if he can’t get those unfavorable numbers down,” Mr. Winston said. Mr. Trump’s best hope may be Republican enmity for Mrs. Clinton, some Republicans strategists said. They predicted that Mr. Trump would ultimately have more options than his skeptics might assume because Republicans will ultimately unify in June and July with a deep and shared determination to beat her, and the traditional thrill of being considered for vice president could then kick in. “I think he may have more choices than many people would suspect, because a lot of people will be flattered to be asked,” said Russ Schriefer, a Republican adviser to the Romney campaign in 2012 and to Mr. Christie during his 2016 presidential bid. Mr. Schriefer emphasized that he had not talked to Mr. Christie about the vice presidency, but other Christie confidants said that he supported Mr. Trump strongly and would be willing to consider the No. 2 spot. A Christie spokesman, asked about the governor’s willingness, pointed to Mr. Christie’s response about the vice presidency at a recent news conference, where he said he would evaluate the offer “for any position in government. ” As a political novice, Mr. Trump will be widely judged on whom he chooses — and how and why he chooses the person — because voters and other Republican leaders will look to his pick to evaluate his priorities for the kind of advisers he would want as president. “This is a big deal because it’s the first major decision he’ll be making as the nominee, and it’s important that the American public see his process and how he goes through making such a big decision,” said Scott W. Reed, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce’s senior strategist. Other than elected officials, Mr. Trump also said he was open to people with deep national security experience — which some Republicans think should be his top criterion. “What Donald Trump needs is the most experienced, most qualified foreign policy mind in Washington, and somebody that would immediately bring calm to the choppy political waters that always seem to be around him,” said Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida who now hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. He suggested Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, but was more circumspect when asked if he was willing to be Mr. Trump’s running mate himself. “I definitely have a lot of strong opinions about who it should be. (Not me! !),” wrote Mr. Scarborough, who served on the House Armed Services Committee and who has a good relationship with Mr. Trump. Other Republicans were more open about joining Mr. Trump on the ticket. Senator Sessions, who is advising Mr. Trump on foreign policy, said he would send his personal tax information to the Trump campaign if it wanted to vet him. Mr. Carson, who was a Republican presidential candidate and battled with Mr. Trump before dropping out and endorsing him, said he would prefer to remain an outside adviser to Mr. Trump, but added that he was willing to join the ticket if he would “bring something that other people wouldn’t bring. ” For others, the singular experience of being vice president in a Trump administration is still hard to imagine. Buttonholed on Capitol Hill last week, two prominent Republican senators, Tim Scott of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine, almost giggled when asked if they would be Mr. Trump’s running mate. “I’m not waiting by my phone,” Ms. Collins said. Mr. Scott, whose appeal as a black Republican could be an advantage for Mr. Trump, repeatedly sidestepped whether he would be willing to run with Mr. Trump. Finally, asked if he would not rule himself out, he replied, “I’m not ruling myself in. ” | 1 |
BERLIN — In the end, German prosecutors decided that a satirical poem was just that, an act of hyperbole in the name of art — not a criminal attempt to insult a foreign leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. An announcement Tuesday by state prosecutors in the western city of Mainz that they were dropping charges against Jan Böhmermann, who read aloud a poem about Mr. Erdogan on TV in March, brought to a partial close an international dispute over freedoms of speech and artistic expression that had threatened to unravel a major diplomatic deal and drove the German comedian underground for weeks. In a lengthy statement, prosecutors said their investigation, begun in April, had failed to turn up sufficient evidence of criminal intent on the part of Mr. Böhmermann, 35, an voice of Germany’s millennials. Instead, they determined that “it is characteristic of the art form of satire and caricature to work with exaggeration, distortion and disassociation. ” Mr. Böhmermann, who returned to the screen in May after a hiatus — albeit without further mention of Turkey, or Turkish politics — said on Twitter that he would respond to the ruling on Wednesday. His lawyer, however, criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel for initially calling his poem “deliberately offensive. ” Ms. Merkel later apologized for her first comments about the poem, calling her response “a mistake. ” She nevertheless allowed the Turkish leader to pursue his legal suit against Mr. Böhmermann under a law, declaring her faith that the protections provided under Germany’s Constitution would prove themselves in the end. The dispute over the poem earned the chancellor criticism that she was abandoning Europe’s core vales of free expression. It came only weeks after she helped orchestrate a deal between the European Union and Turkey aimed at preventing migrants and refugees from reaching Europe’s shores by boat in return for billions in aid to Turkey and other concessions. Weeks earlier, Mr. Erdogan’s government had seized the opposition newspaper Zaman. His objection to the poem caused fears among many Germans that he was seeking to extend his repression of free speech beyond the borders of his own country. The prosecutors upheld the argument of Mr. Böhmermann and the producer of his show, the public broadcaster ZDF, that the poem was satire. “An average, public could expect that any comments made there would involve exaggeration and hyperbole and lack in seriousness,” their statement said. And they said Mr. Erdogan appeared to have been aware of this fact because he frequently referred to Mr. Böhmermann’s television show as a “nonsense program. ” The decision was resoundingly welcomed by journalists and widely celebrated by many Germans over social media. “This is the only correct decision,” said Frank Überall, the head of the German Journalists Association. “It makes clear that in Germany, the freedom of satire is valued above the touchiness of an autocrat. ” Thomas Bellut, director of ZDF, welcomed the decision, noting that the detailed explanation makes clear “that an exceptionally high value is placed on the freedom of art and speech in our society. ” The Mainz prosecutors’ decision not to press charges will not affect a separate legal proceeding by a state court in the northern city of Hamburg, where Mr. Erdogan is seeking an injunction against the poem. That trial is expected to begin next month. | 1 |
We’ve got a Brexit plan for you called ‘F**k Off’, suggests Europe 16-11-16
EU OFFICIALS say if Britain does not have a Brexit plan they can offer one titled ‘F**k Off’.
The plan, which has been worked on by all 26 EU states, details exactly how, why and when Britain can leave the European Union and even what it can do with itself afterwards.
European Council president Donald Tusk said: “When Theresa May pretended she had a Brexit plan that was just six sheets of blank A4, we were inspired to create this.
“Fuck Off is a comprehensive plan, with clear instructions in 24 official languages and a few colourful regional dialects, which should leave the UK in no doubt about where it can go next.
“It minimises any economic impact – to the rest of us – while increasing the benefits of free movement within the EU by making sure the Brits do not have any.
“The UK should follow this plan absolutely to the letter, ideally while ensuring the door does not hit their arse on the way out.”
Brexit secretary David Davis said: “Well, it’s better than no plan at all.”
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Dr. Duke and Dr. Slattery show why our survival totally depends on defeat of Jewish Power!
Today Dr. Duke focused on the threat of Jews infiltrating and taking over movements with a potential to become a base for opposing Jewish power. The Alt-Right currently includes people who are extremely critical of Jewish power and those who either ignore it or downplay it. We must be wary of establishment efforts to parachute leaders into our movement who would focus attention away from the Jewish issue, whether it be Milo or Alex Jones.
Dr. Slattery joined the show and recounted how Jews created a culture of self criticism in the 1960s among whites and then used the resulting environment to push through an immigration act that fundamentally transformed the demographics of the country to the extent that it took a miracle for whites simply to elect the President of their choice.
This is an extremely informative and edifying show. Please share it widely.
Our show is aired live at 11 am replayed at ET 4pm Eastern and 4am Eastern. | 0 |
by Simon Black, Sovereign Man :
My friend Richard got destroyed by the system.
As a financial advisor in Sacramento, California, he spent years building a thriving firm and has even landed a few celebrity clients.
Richard did well for himself. Successful. Married. Wonderful kids. Financially secure.
But back in 2008 things started to turn sour.
His wife left him and took the kids, along with half of everything else.
The divorce forced the liquidation of many of their assets, including a substantial investment portfolio he had built up.
Richard didn’t want to sell; by the time the divorce was being fought, it was 2009 and the stock market had crashed.
But Richard had no choice. They liquidated and suffered major losses.
Most painfully, since Richard’s business was so successful, the judge ordered him to pay alimony of nearly $20,000 per month.
It didn’t matter that, practically overnight, most of his new business had dried up due to the Great Recession.
Thus began the long indentured servitude known as alimony.
The idea behind alimony is to make sure that the ex-spouse can maintain a comfortable standard of living while s/he gets rebuilds a life and financial base.
It shouldn’t be abused as a lottery ticket.
In Richard’s case, it’s been 7+ long years and nearly $2 million in alimony paid. But the payments never stop.
Even though the kids are now grown and out of the house, his ex-wife has zero incentive to go out and find a job to support herself.
Why would she bother working hard when she can do nothing and collect $20k from her ex-husband?
Yet due to the length of time they were married, and California’s ridiculous legal code, there’s no end in sight for Richard’s alimony payments.
So Richard has the government taking 50% (between federal and state income tax) from his left pocket, and his wife taking nearly a quarter of a million dollars per year out of his right pocket.
Naturally if he stops paying either one of them he’ll face the long arm of the law.
Speaking of the law, the Dodd-Frank Act that was passed several years ago to reform the financial system totally crippled his business.
It’s one of the costliest and most painful regulations ever created for financial services businesses, and Richard constantly has regulators breathing down his neck.
It’s amazing. Despite taking half of his income, the government makes it increasingly difficult for Richard to produce.
Richard turned 50 this year, and he was miserable.
Instead of slowing down and enjoying life, he’d been working harder than ever to earn less than ever, with very little time left over to build a personal life for himself.
His problems also started to manifest in other ways. He’d gained weight, and was drinking more, and I doubt he’d gone on a date since 2013.
Sadly, Richard is not an isolated case. There are countless people across the country who have been destroyed by the system.
He came to me for help earlier this year, which I was more than happy to extend.
Initially we established a new financial advisory business for Richard in a more favorable jurisdiction.
That jurisdiction was Puerto Rico.
Under Puerto Rico’s generous incentive laws, Richard’s new firm is able to provide financial services for worldwide clients without the pain of onshore US regulations.
It’s made things much easier for him so that he can focus on servicing his clients’ needs and winning new business, as opposed to filling out forms and pleasuring regulators.
The new firm is growing rapidly as a result. And best of all, his Puerto Rico profits are taxed at just 4%, instead of the 50% he was paying in California.
Richard still has the California business. And to reduce the taxes there, my advisors set him up with something called a “Captive Insurance Company”.
This one is a real goldmine. | 0 |
Hello Everyone,
I know many of you like to keep in touch with our website via Facebook. I’ve had several reports from people over the past week that Facebook has been censoring some of our posts again. Unfortunately, there isn’t much I can do about that but I wanted you to know that I’m aware of it and keeping an eye on the situation.
Many of you may not know that Facebook changed their algorithm this past June to favor “friends and family”. What this means is that Facebook now shows you more posts specifically from your friends and family, which is great! But, you may not be seeing as many posts from news outlets or small businesses that you follow and want to keep in touch with. You can read more about Facebook’s algorithm change here .
There is a way to fix this! If you go to our Facebook page and click the triangle next to the ‘Liked’ button, you can click See First, and this will ensure that our posts make it onto your news feed.
Facebook does not show all posts to people who follow pages. The new algorithm changes the way posts show up in your feed based on how many likes and shares a post accumulates within a short timeframe after it is published. This means that you may not have the opportunity to view information you might be interested in.
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On a Personal Note It’s been a bit of a struggle to get the news out this week as my computer is getting old and the hard drive is beginning to fail. This is not something that’s fixable and it’s time to get a new computer. I’ve been crossing my fingers and saying a little prayer each morning when I wake my computer from sleep hoping it will turn on for another day. So far so good, but the day is quickly coming that it will no longer turn on.
If you enjoy reading our website, please see this page for more information about the computer problem and ways you can help. Even small donations of $5 or $10 add up and your help would be greatly appreciated.
Have a great weekend! I have a handful of posts scheduled in the queue to go out throughout the weekend. I’ll pop in here and there on social media to make sure I don’t miss anything important, but my focus this weekend will be on finishing up Volume 2 of The Event Handbook !
…as well as doing a bunch of vacuuming and laundry because it seems Miss Ellie has brought home a flea or two. I think I’ve caught it in time so it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. Does anyone know of any good natural remedies that are safe for cats? Please let me know in the comments. Thanks!
You wanna see some pictures of my cat? Of course you do!
Miss Ellie Thanks Everyone. I love you ALL! | 0 |
Sunday on “The Cats Roundtable” on New York AM 970 radio, former Gov. Jeb Bush ( ) told host host John Catsimatidis “leadership” from President Donald Trump would be “helpful” to get Republicans to unite behind a common agenda. Bush said, “We haven’t come up with a compelling, unifying agenda that can replace that. And that’s where you see the struggles in Washington right now. The healthcare debacle is a good example of that. And presidential leadership would be helpful here. There’s a lot that could be done that I think has support. ” He added, “If he could focus on these positive things, our brand then could be solidified, I think. Being against what the other guys are for is not a sustainable political position ” ( The Hill) Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
Here’s how we analyzed in real time the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump, and our fact checks. Hillary Clinton dominated a final series of debate exchanges with Donald J. Trump about national security and gender, telling voters they could not trust her opponent with nuclear weapons and warning that he does not respect women. Here are a few of the highlights. ■ Asked about a remark he made that Mrs. Clinton lacked a presidential “look,” Mr. Trump repeated the claim, adding that “she doesn’t have the stamina. ” In response, Mrs. Clinton ticked off some highlights of her tenure as secretary of state, saying Mr. Trump “can talk to me about stamina” when he accomplishes as much. “He tried to change from looks to stamina, but this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs,” Mrs. Clinton said. Mr. Trump defended himself before adding that he had planned to say “something extremely rough” to Mrs. Clinton and her family, but decided against it. ■ Mrs. Clinton pressed Mr. Trump’s repeated claim, contradicted by public statements he has made in the past, that he had opposed the Iraq war from the beginning. “Donald supported the invasion of Iraq,” she said. “That is absolutely proved over and over again. ” “Wrong,” Mr. Trump interjected. “Wrong. ” ■ Mr. Trump insisted again that he had opposed the Iraq war, calling any suggestion otherwise “a mainstream media nonsense. ” Lester Holt, the moderator, said, “The record shows otherwise. ” Mr. Trump went on to appraise his own temperament, calling it “my strongest asset, maybe by far,” before attacking Mrs. Clinton’s. She smiled. “Woo! O. K.,” she said, beginning her response. ■ Mrs. Clinton hit Mr. Trump for his record of praise for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, lamenting that Mr. Trump had “publicly invited Putin to hack into” American communications, as Mr. Trump shook his head. Mr. Trump said he did not think “anybody knows” if Russia was behind the recent hacks of Democratic organizations, wondering aloud if it might instead be China or a single hacker who “weighs 400 pounds” and sits at home. ■ After Mrs. Clinton suggested she was worried about Mr. Trump getting his hands on the nuclear codes, Mr. Trump replied, “That line is getting a little bit old. ” Mrs. Clinton mocked Mr. Trump’s “secret plan,” as she called it, to fight the Islamic State, saying he had no true strategy. She also sought to reassure American allies that the country would honor its international commitments, saying some of Mr. Trump’s comments during the campaign had startled them. ■ Asked about his propagation of the conspiracy theory raising doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth, Mr. Trump tried to blame Mrs. Clinton, suggesting falsely that she, too, had questioned the president’s birthplace. “She failed to get the birth certificate,” he said. “When I got involved, I didn’t fail. ” Mrs. Clinton said Mr. Trump had “really started his political activity based on this racist lie that our first black president was not an American citizen,” calling his efforts “very hurtful. ” ■ Pressed on his refusal to release his tax returns, Mr. Trump repeated an line that he is facing “a routine audit” that precluded him from releasing the information. Mr. Holt noted that the I. R. S. had said he was free to release anything he wanted. Mr. Trump said he would “release my tax returns, against my lawyers’ wishes,” if Mrs. Clinton agreed to release a cache of her emails. ■ Asked if she believed police officers were “implicitly biased” against Mrs. Clinton suggested that all Americans were susceptible to bias. “I think unfortunately too many of us in this great country jump to conclusions about each other,” she said. ■ Asked about race relations, Mrs. Clinton said that race remained “a significant challenge” in the country, adding that the criminal justice system treated minorities differently. Mr. Trump said Mrs. Clinton “doesn’t want to use a couple of words” — law and order — before defending the contentious police strategy. “ and Hispanics are living in hell,” he said. “You walk down the streets, you get shot. ” ■ After Mr. Trump defended his plans to lower taxes on the wealthy, mixing in jabs at Mrs. Clinton, she joked, “I have a feeling that by the end of this evening, I’m going to be blamed for everything that’s ever happened. ” Mr. Trump replied, “Why not?” Mr. Holt reminded Mr. Trump that he was speaking during Mrs. Clinton’s allotted time. ■ Mr. Trump boasted about his campaign travels. “You’ve seen me, I’ve been all over the place,” he said. “You decided to stay home and that’s okay. ” Mrs. Clinton replied that she did indeed prepare for the debate, adding that she was preparing to be president, too. ■ Hitting Mr. Trump over his tax returns, Mrs. Clinton wondered if there was “something he’s hiding,” before addressing her own use of a private email as secretary of state. “I made a mistake using a private email,” she said. Mr. Trump cut in, “That’s for sure. ” Mrs. Clinton added, “I’m not going to make any excuses. It was a mistake. ” ■ Mrs. Clinton condemned Mr. Trump for refusing to pay contractors on several projects, saying she was grateful her father had never done business with him. She said the debate crowd included an architect whom Mr. Trump had not paid. “Maybe he didn’t do a good job,” Mr. Trump said. ■ Mrs. Clinton, seeking to portray Mr. Trump as an enemy of working people, said he had “rooted for the housing crisis” because of the financial opportunities it might afford him. “That’s called business, by the way,” he interjected. ■ Mr. Trump — criticizing trade deals approved by Bill Clinton, among others — suggested Mrs. Clinton had failed to improve people’s lives during her decades in public life. As Mrs. Clinton defended her record, he interrupted frequently. “You haven’t done it. You haven’t done it,” he said. “Excuse me. ” Mrs. Clinton shot back, “Donald, I know you live in your own reality,” before continuing her answer. ■ Mrs. Clinton, looking toward Mr. Trump, said it was “good to be with” him on the same stage at last. “You have to judge us,” she said, in a response to a question about job creation. “Who can shoulder the immense, awesome responsibilities of the presidency?” Mr. Trump replied that “our jobs are fleeing the country. ” ■ Mrs. Clinton criticized Mr. Trump’s fiscal plans as “ economics,” before saying he had received millions of dollars of support from his father. “My father gave me a very small loan,” he replied, before appearing to hesitate while addressing Mrs. Clinton. “Secretary Clinton? Is that O. K.?” he said of her title. “Good. ” | 1 |
The propaganda popsicle stand that is The New York Times is floating the idea that Trump supporters are calling for a new American Revolution if Hillary wins.
But beneath the cheering, a new emotion is taking hold among some Trump supporters as they grapple with reports predicting that he will lose the election: a dark fear about what will happen if their candidate is denied the White House. Some worry that they will be forgotten, along with their concerns and frustrations. Others believe the nation may be headed for violent conflict.
Jared Halbrook, 25, of Green Bay, Wis., said that if Mr. Trump lost to Hillary Clinton, which he worried would happen through a stolen election, it could lead to “another Revolutionary War.”
“People are going to march on the capitols,” said Mr. Halbrook, who works at a call center. “They’re going to do whatever needs to be done to get her out of office, because she does not belong there.”
“If push comes to shove,” he added, and Mrs. Clinton “has to go by any means necessary, it will be done.”
What’s ominous about this level of programming is that we know the system is already gearing up for this possibility with an election military drill that could go live at any time until a month after the election, as previously reported:
According to an unnamed source – who has provided accurate intel in the past – an unannounced military drill is scheduled to take place during a period leading up to the election and throughout the month after.
It appears that the system is gearing up to handle outbreaks of violence, chaotic rallies and poll stations, and the possibility that the people of the United States may become very dissatisfied with the outcome by using military force and martial law.
The drill could, of course, go live at any time; Homeland Security and the military are prepared to contend with a period of unrest, and restore order to a divided and broken country – regardless of whether people like their new leader or not.
As you know, DHS is already monitoring this election and prepared to take over its ‘critical infrastructure’. The scope of this drill would, of course, take things much further:
Hi Guys,
I got some gouge from a former military colleague who is in contact with active duty personnel and he received an email about an upcoming drill. We need confirmation on this, but if we put it out there we might get a leaker to come forward and confirm:
Date: October 30th – 30 days after the election
Suspected Region: Northeast, specifically New York
1st Phase: NROL (No Rule of Law) – drill involving combat arms in metro areas (active and reserve). Source says active duty and reserve service members are being vaccinated as if they are being deployed in theatre.
2nd Phase: LROL (Limited Rule of Law) – Military/FEMA consolidating resources, controlling water supply, handing out to public as needed.
3rd Phase: AROL (Authoritarian Rule of Law) – Possible new acronym or term for “Martial Law”. Curfew, restricted movements, basically martial law scenario.
Source said exercise involves FEMA/DHS/Military
If the Powers That Shouldn’t Be are planning to steal this election for Hillary as hard as it appears they are , then it makes sense they’d be planning to try and clean up their mess afterward.
Either way, the people have about reached their limit and are sick and tired of this level of corruption coming out of this government… and we know what happened the last time America finally got fed up with a tyrannical government. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ).
Contributed by Piper McGowin of The Daily Sheeple .
Piper writes for The Daily Sheeple. There’s a lot of B.S. out there. Someone has to write about it. | 0 |
Consider the chicken. Consider each part of the chicken. Consider eating each part of the chicken, one after another, grilled over charcoal at a yakitori restaurant called Torishin. Dark neck meat first, gathered in a ruffle around a bamboo skewer. When stuck to its long root of bone, the neck is picky business to eat, but it is full of flavor when it is pared away and the outer bits are singed over charcoal and the fat starts to spill over the rest. Now the tenderloin. Many tenderloins come to an ignominious end as “tenders,” encased in bread crumbs in the fingers of a toddler. But grilled lightly, so they firm up without scorching, they run with delicate pink juices. Livers, of course, are seared very fast so they don’t get leathery. The rich, red insides are as soft as yogurt. They take well to a few grains of ground sansho pepper, enough to spark a slow buzz on the tongue. So do the hearts, done like steak. On the bird’s back, above the tail feathers, are the oysters. At Torishin they go under their French name, ’ — “a fool leaves it. ” They are grilled with their skin, which puckers and hisses and goes from creamy blue to gold. For all I know the first yakitori chefs in Japan had nothing but efficiency in mind when they speared each anatomical bit on its own skewer. livers can be pulled from the grill to make space, while other pieces take their time. In the hands of the attentive chefs at Torishin, this technique produces something beyond convenience. Cooked separately, each part has a different pleasure to offer. Some you chew, and some you crackle. Some have cerebral appeal, others call to instinct. The house style is sensitive to timing, averse to charring and careful with seasoning. The chicken is salted, brushed with a sauce called tare, which is less sweet at Torishin than at some other yakitori specialists, and grilled about an inch above sticks of binchotan, a Japanese charcoal. The cooks wave bamboo fans at the fire when it needs a boost. Sitting on the tables and counters are vaguely humanoid gourds filled with sansho and the spice blend shichimi, as well as pitchers of soy sauce. “Which skewers are good with soy?” I asked Atsushi Kono, the chef, one night when he was tending the coals. His head bobbed noncommittally before he said, “It’s there for people who think they want it. ” Right, then. No soy. With minimalist cooking, the distance between dull and delicious can sometimes be measured in grains of salt. This became clear during my only meal at Torishin’s original location, on First Avenue in the 60s. There were many skewers. None of them seemed to have been seasoned. Even the pickled cucumbers and daikon that showed up at the start of the meal seemed to be under orders not to draw any attention to themselves. I knew that some people revered the restaurant, so I just figured that it fell into one of my blind spots. When Torishin moved to its current address in Hell’s Kitchen in 2015, I did not exactly rush over on my hoverboard. In fact, I didn’t make it there until last fall, a delay I regretted as soon as I had unskewered my first lump of chicken. Whatever had been missing from the chicken before was there, and it’s been there each time I’ve gone back. (I still think the pickles need more pep, though.) To the left as you enter is a small bar. The bartenders spend the quiet hours whittling big ice cubes into spheres, with knives. These rough globes are plopped into tumblers of shochu, and if you want to learn about this distilled spirit, Torishin is a fine place to start. The sake list is compact but varied. The few wines come from big, obvious names. At the end of a winding corridor is a dining room. The mezzanine might be the spot for privacy. The lower space is more active, with seating at tables or around a counter that hugs the open kitchen and a grill, the depth of a single skewer. If you know your favorite bird bits, ordering à la carte is simple enough. The menu is helpfully illustrated, from neck to tail. All but one of the skewers is under $10, and the package of seven chicken skewers plus three vegetables is a good deal at $65. But Torishin always puts me in the mood for surprises, so I like to ask for an omakase menu. The grill cooks serve up a mix of vegetables (the mushrooms are a particular treat, and I don’t think it’s possible to grill zucchini better than Torishin does) white meat (the piece wrapped in a shiso leaf and dabbed with salty plum paste is a nearly perfect bite) dark meat (chicken legs can be subdivided in more ways than you might think) and curiosities called “special skewers. ” This is where you will find the oysters, the kidneys, the nugget of meat from the base of the wing, the wrinkly and fatty neck skin, the smooth and supple belly skin. Most of the surprises have been positive, like “knee gristle. ” What about “main artery”? The nicest thing I can honestly say about this blood vessel, which ties the heart to some other vital organ, is that it is, in fact, edible. If hunger still calls after you have stripped all the bamboo sticks and left them standing in the ceramic cup in front of you, there is an excellent remedy in the form of . A homey dish of chicken and egg over white rice, can be filling or it can be almost ethereal, as it is at Torishin. To one side of the passage from bar to dining room is a narrow nook behind curtains. Inside is an bar, called the Select Counter, where Mr. Kono presides over extended menus that borrow from the kaiseki tradition. One recent meal began with a tiny simmered octopus with peppery sansho leaves. Sashimi followed. Chicken breast was steamed in cherry leaves and served with cucumber wheels and fresh shoots of spring ginger the flavor was lovely and transient, one of those Japanese miracles of putting the mood of a season on the plate. The $150 menu came with a complete fusillade of skewers as well as a choice of grilled luxury items: either Kumamoto beef (not as meltingly rich as it could have been) or king crab leg (smeared with some funky stuff from inside the crab’s head, and completely delicious). If Mr. Kono had kept cooking all night, I would have been happy, but to experience Torishin you don’t need to spend $150 and a couple of hours. Just a few skewers are enough to expand your sense of what’s possible in the department of chicken. Follow NYT Food on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. | 1 |
Did she look presidential? As silly as that sounds, that was part of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s job on Thursday in Philadelphia when she accepted the Democratic Party’s nomination as its presidential candidate. It was not just showing people who do not understand her and who do not trust her who she is as a person, or laying out her policy proposals, but also demonstrating that when she represents them on the world stage, she would do so with that aura of leadership and power. And she did. In her white suit, with her white crew neck underneath, Mrs. Clinton looked supremely unflappable: perfectly tailored and in control. Not a hair out of place (but some hair nicely waved). The kind of person who could carry the nuclear codes with aplomb. But since she is someone who famously does her homework, she also used her clothes to do a little more. That she chose to wear white at the convention did not at first seem particularly surprising. Mrs. Clinton has worn white jackets multiple times during the primaries, and when she joined Instagram she posted a shot of a clothing rack filled with red, white and blue jackets. On Thursday night, the pantsuit stood out against the blue background, and in the sea of people. But it was also layered with meaning, demonstrating that she understands the way fashion can be useful in contemporary politics and is willing to leverage that. That suit, quietly yet clearly, made reference to history, specifically the history of the women’s movement. White, along with purple and gold, were the official colors of the National Woman’s Party and the suffragist movement. In England, it was white, purple and green, the official colors of the Women’s Social and Political Union started by Emmeline Pankhurst, among others. According to a history of the National Woman’s Party from the Women’s Equality National Monument in Washington, an early mission statement for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage noted: “The colors adopted by the union are purple, white and gold, selected for the significance they bear in the work the union has undertaken. Purple is the color of loyalty, constancy to purpose, unswerving steadfastness to a cause. White, the emblem of purity, symbolizes the quality of our purpose. ” See the connection? Geraldine Ferraro, the first female candidate for vice president, certainly did when she wore white to the 1984 Democratic convention to accept her nomination. years later, Mrs. Clinton’s suit placed her, very firmly, in that continuum. That no designer has claimed ownership of the outfit, a typical event, the better to monetize the attention of the world, is notable and appropriate. Thursday night was Mrs. Clinton’s moment, and one for all women. Her clothes simply gave her the means to amplify her message. | 1 |
Pinterest
There have been plenty of stories of voter fraud across the country, but a photoshopped picture has taken the internet by storm. In it, Donald Trump’s name is left off of the ballot whil Hillary Clinton’s is listed twice.
The doctored photo hit Twitter and has since been re-tweeted tens of thousands of times. Take a look at the picture for yourself:
— Hatrick Penry (@Hatrick__Penry) October 24, 2016 Hey guys, seriously? How is this not viral yet? Are we going to be taken as that stupid and let it go? This is an Oregon Ballot. pic.twitter.com/4eSSrK3aaB
— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) October 27, 2016
About an hour after John Laussier started the hoax, he took responsibility for it and admitted that it wasn’t real: “In case its not super obvious that last tweet from me is a hoax. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet folks.” Is Trump on the Oregon ballot? YES. But a hoax grabbed a lot of retweets today. Official sample ballot >>> https://t.co/LR1smKW2pO pic.twitter.com/WvMIhyzUHz
— KVAL News (@KVALnews) October 21, 2016
“I’m hoping people figure out soon this was fake, and, in the future, look at what they’re passing on,” Laussier told KATU . “We’ve got to act responsibly. Get out your ballots, take a good hard look, and vote with some research!”
Laussier told KATU that it was “irresponsible of me to post the tweet,” and he apologized. LawNewz reported :
The Oregon Secretary of State’s Office told KGQ that they are evaluating whether the hoax violated election law. Spokesperson Molly Woon emphasized to the television station that the Oregon Secretary of State is “confident” in the election process.
While Laussier makes a good point about people being discerning about what they share on the internet, there are a couple of important points here.
First, there is good reason for people to be vigilant about voter fraud . There are numerous reports of the problem across the country and it’s good that people are paying attention.
Second, the mainstream media is largely in the tank for Clinton and operates as a propaganda machine. Most people don’t have the time — or if they do, don’t have the resources — to thoroughly vet something they come across. You know who has both? The media… but they refuse to do so because of their bias.
If this ballot was real, people may have been able to force change by bringing light to what would have been a serious problem.
That certainly doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be discerning or that they should repost or re-tweet everything they come across. There’s something to be said for people being vigilant, paying attention, and forcing those in the media and those in positions to do something about it to take a look.
Now, that doesn’t mean that people should automatically believe that something’s true and adjust their beliefs/voting decision because of it; it just means that it’s good that people are paying attention and forcing those in a position to check it out to do so.
While Laussier’s tweet was an interesting experiment, the timing was poor given the rampant voter fraud going on throughout the country. This was a hoax, but there are plenty of instances where it isn’t, and people shouldn’t be discouraged from being vigilant about it. | 0 |
PHOENIX — Donald J. Trump won Arizona’s presidential contest and its 11 electoral votes on Thursday after the latest count put him over the top, extending a long Republican winning streak in the conservative state. Mr. Trump had a solid lead over Hillary Clinton on Election Day, but a winner was not declared because there were so many uncounted votes — over 600, 000. The latest batch of returns tabulated on Thursday made him the clear winner. It marks a winning streak for Republican presidential candidates in Arizona. Bill Clinton was the last Democrat to take the state, in 1996. Before him, Harry S. Truman was the last Democrat to win here. Mrs. Clinton was closer to gaining Arizona than President Obama, who lost by nine or more percentage points during his two runs for president. She was losing by four points. Arizona was one of three races that had yet to be determined from Tuesday’s election, with Michigan and New Hampshire still too close to call. Mr. Trump made several swings through Arizona and capitalized on Republicans’ dislike of Mrs. Clinton and their frustration over illegal immigration, vowing to build a wall along the border. Sheriff Joe Arpaio and former Gov. Jan Brewer were some of his most vocal backers, especially on immigration issues. Gov. Doug Ducey was among those who introduced him at rallies and urged Arizonans to vote for him. Mrs. Clinton sought to tap into frustrations among Latinos over Mr. Trump’s talk and a favorable ballot that included a increase and Mr. Arpaio’s bid for a seventh term as sheriff of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. Many Hispanics reviled the sheriff over his immigration raids. Paul Penzone, a Democrat, beat the longtime sheriff handily. | 1 |
Within the preparedness community, there is a tendency for individuals to place an almost exclusive focus on acquiring the right supplies and tools for survival, and for good reason, but what is too often brushed aside in this pursuit are the tools that every person carries within his or her body, namely the muscular system. Whether due to personal neglect, lifestyle barriers or just plain lacking motivation, there is a tendency to put off strength and endurance training. Being physically fit is equally as important as having the proper resources when disaster strikes. Making sure that we are doing what we can to have able bodies with which to face and survive a major disaster should be a top priority, and this means starting today, doing basic strength training exercises to improve your overall health and mobility. Maybe you don’t consider yourself athletic, and maybe you haven’t worked out in years, but there is no good reason to let that hold you back from doing daily exercises now so that you can help yourself and your family when it counts. Here are three basic exercises that you can implement into your daily routine today (none of which require the use of weights):
Push-ups Push-ups seem fairly straightforward, but many people have been taught an incorrect way to do push-ups that can cause irreversible damage. Wide-arm push-ups, in which your hands are extended outside of shoulder-width, cause a bone in your shoulder called the acromion to rub against the supraspinatus tendon just beneath it, which can cause permanent damage. Avoid damaging your shoulder by placing your hands at or within the width of your shoulder. If it’s been awhile since you’ve done push-ups and you are finding it difficult to push your full body weight, then you can focus on pushing only your upper body weight by placing a pad under your knees and doing push-ups with only your knees on the ground instead of your feet. For someone who is just starting, you can do just 10 push-ups a day and gradually increase that number as you build endurance with this exercise. Push-ups are great for building strength in your chest, core and back.
Body Squats
Arguably one of the most important exercises you can do for overall leg strength, body weight squats are a great exercise that requires no weights. It’s important to maintain a straight posture as you squat down, and this will require that you shift your waist backward considerably as your waistline reaches your knees. Make sure that your knees do not bend over the tip of your toes to avoid injury.
A person’s ability to do a squat can be affected by a number of factors, from overall leg strength to ankle-, knee- and hip-related stress. Those who have not squatted much in their life tend to have a shortened Achilles tendon which impedes full range of motion and only allows these particular individuals to do a partial squat. By doing consistent partial squats, they can eventually form an elongated Achilles tendon and do full squats. As you grow in strength and body weight squats become easier, you can begin to add weight to the exercise by holding a weight in the center of your chest and increasing that weight as you increase in strength and endurance.
Reverse Plank Bridge
The reverse plank bridge is basically the opposite of a push-up; you hold yourself up by placing your hands directly beneath your shoulders in a sitting position and push yourself upward; either extend your legs and keep them straight, balancing on your heels, or bend them and keep your feet flat. Just by holding this position you are working a number of muscles. This exercise is exceptional for building your core, lower back, and arms.
By adding these three simple exercises to your daily routine, you can dramatically increase your full spectrum strength and mobility.
This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition
Originally published November 18th, 2016 See How You Stack Up Against The WW2 Fitness Test 4 Daily Strengthening Exercises That Will Push You to the… Book Review: “You Are Your Own Gym” Ancient Secrets to Relieving Back Pain The Synergistic Effects of Meditation + Exercise on… | 0 |
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Enemies of the United States are joyously watching its upcoming elections that are exposing this once great nation as deeply corrupt. It’s as if a huge rock has been turned over, exposing the swarming, slithering underside of America’s political system.
For those who admire America, like this writer, this week is a time to weep for the republic.
We see two candidates who are utterly unfit for the highest office: Hilary Clinton, engulfed by scandals, and blustering TV mogul Donald Trump, a man of profound shallowness who advocates Islamophobia, torture and environmental ignorance.
Hillary Clinton’s core supporters are black food stamp and welfare recipients, and legions of women who are voting simply by gender. Trump’s core supporters are tax-paying workers who have watched Wall Street loot America’s economy and send their jobs abroad.
Like many people, I’ve been tearing my hair trying to decide for whom to vote. I now favor Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson who gained worldwide fame as a dolt when asked about the destruction of Aleppo, Syria. ‘What’s Aleppo?’ asked this New Mexico Bismarck.
Now that’s the kind of president I’d like to see. No more regime-changers and empire-builders. No more Imperial America. No more crusaders or world super power bullying. No more mucking around the world and acting as the globe’s enforcer. Let’s forget Aleppo, Beirut, Gaza, Tehran, Islamabad, the South China Sea and North Korea.
We can no longer afford to play ‘Game of Thrones.’ We’ve got to rebuild bridges and airports, and clean the Augean Stables of Congress, America’s most corrupt institution. We just spent $2.8 billion on roads in remote Afghanistan while our own highways are crumbling.
Such is the folly of imperialism. The old Soviet Union did something similar, allowing its domestic infrastructure and industry to fall apart while adventuring in Afghanistan, and deploying 55,000 tanks in the Red Army. These tanks were useful in putting down the heroic Hungarian Revolution of 1956 – 60 years ago this week – but for nothing else.
But I fear that whoever wins the US election will very quickly face major problems for which they are woefully unprepared. Most obvious is the bloody mess the US has created across the Mideast.
I just learned that Trump recently named, as Mideast advisor, a notorious Muslim-hating fanatic, who is a Lebanese Maronite Christian fascist. His advice will likely be to invade Lebanon and Syria and kill more Muslims.
For her part, Hilary Clinton has long been a wholly-financed subsidiary of Wall Street and the mighty Israel lobby. Just have a look at the list of her largest donors. Her pro-Israel supporters are urging her to create a so-called ‘no-fly’ zone over Syria, which is code for full-scale war against Syrian government and Russian forces. Guess who will benefit from Syria’s destruction and disintegration?
This supreme idiocy could lead directly to nuclear war with Russia, something I’ve been warning against for years.
There has been no mention in the campaign of rebuilding the Arab world, ravaged by western imperial interventions. Little mention of some 12 million Syrian refugees created by the Saudis and US. Nor of five million Palestinian refugees, and who knows how many in Iraq, Libya, Somalia and now war-ravaged Yemen. And not a word about America’s stalemated war in Afghanistan. Nothing about a shaky Europe. Nor how to accommodate China’s rise.
Instead, we’ve heard tirades against the phony ISIS, which is funded by the Saudis, and Hilary Clinton’s absurd claims that wicked Vlad Putin is somehow behind America’s foreign disasters. It’s stupid and shameful demagoguery.
At least Trump has the good sense to urge that we end our pointless confrontation with Russia and scale back the unaffordable American Empire. Few Americans know that almost half their government’s budget is spent on the military.
Besides disgusting many Americans, the presidential campaign has made the US an object of derision and embarrassment around the globe. Many analysts claim that this grand fiasco marks the beginning of the end of US global hegemony. It’s certainly the beginning of the beginning.
This week alone, the Philippines and Malaysia, two staunch American allies, edged closer to China’s camp. Neither Trump no Clinton had a care for America’s reputation during their ugly debates.
My fear is that the election vitriol will not end America’ shame and misery but continue on, like an acid eating into the national fabric. (Reprinted from EricMargolis.com by permission of author or representative) | 0 |
Home › POLITICS › ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL TIPPED OFF CLINTON CAMP ABOUT DOJ INVESTIGATION ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL TIPPED OFF CLINTON CAMP ABOUT DOJ INVESTIGATION 0 SHARES
[11/2/16] On November 2, WikiLeaks released Part 26 of their emails from Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta.
A March 2015 email revealed Podesta attended a meeting with Clinton campaign General Counsel, the lobbying firm Dewey Square Partners and Clinton Super PACs. Several emails released by WikiLeaks suggest the Clinton campaign illegally coordinated with Super PACs, prompting Clinton loyalist Neera Tanden to say she thought that what the campaign was doing with Correct the Record was “skirting, if not violating” the law.
Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik tipped off Podesta and the Clinton campaign about what was going on at the Department of Justice. Kadzik, a friend of Podesta, will oversee the DOJ probe into Clinton aide Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner’s emails from Clinton’s private email server. “There is a HJC oversight hearing today where the head of our Civil Division will testify. Likely to get questions on State Department emails. Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails,” Kadzik wrote to Podesta in May 2015. Podesta forwarded the email to several top Clinton staffers. The email suggests the Department of Justice was biased in favor of Hillary Clinton , and Kadzik tip to Podesta was highly unethical. Post navigation | 0 |
0 comments Obama was speaking to donors at a private fundraiser in California when he railed against former House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa for calling his administration corrupt.
“Here’s a guy who called my administration perhaps the most corrupt in history — despite the fact that actually we have not had a major scandal in my administration,” Obama said!
Obama has had more scandals than any president in history! Just because the MSM refuses to report on them does not mean they do not exist!
Breitbart reports :
Issa was the key figure in several investigations of the Obama administration, including the Fast and Furious debacle with Attorney General Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton’s failure in Benghazi, the failures in the Veterans Affairs department, and the IRS using its power to target conservative Tea Party groups for investigations.
Obama accused Issa of wasting taxpayer money “on trumped-up investigations that have led nowhere.”
“This guy has spent all his time simply trying to obstruct, to feed the same sentiments that resulted in Donald Trump becoming their nominee,” Obama said.
We could list 77 scandals, but here are just 7 of the biggest!
1.) IRS Targeting Scandal
In 2013, Lois Lerner, former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division, admitted that officials in the IRS’ Cincinnati office acted improperly. 2.) VA Waiting List
The Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general first noted the waiting list problem at a Phoenix clinic in 2014 and then found other clinics with similar problems. Veterans were placed on phony waiting lists, and some even died while waiting for care. VA Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned from his position. 3.) GSA Spending Spree
In 2012, Martha N. Johnson, the administrator of the General Services Administration, resigned after the federal procurement agency was engulfed in a controversy. The department was accused of allowing excessive spending on travel and conferences for the agency and employees. 4.) Attack on the Benghazi Compound
On Sept. 11, 2012, weeks before a presidential election, terrorists attacked U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya. Obama administration officials initially blamed this attack on a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim YouTube video that spun out of control. 5.) Clinton Emails
It was the Benghazi committee that first discovered that before, during, and after her time as secretary of state, Clinton maintained a private email server. This prompted the FBI to investigate questions of whether Clinton violated the law in terms of storing classified information. 6.) Fast and Furious Gun Walking
Operation Fast and Furious was a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives program, meant to be a sting operation. It allowed about 2,000 guns to flow to Mexican drug trafficking organizations under federal supervision before authorities lost control of the guns. 7.) Solyndra Subsidies
The Energy Department provided a $535 million loan guarantee to the politically connected solar panel firm Solyndra as part of the 2009 stimulus bill. Not long after building its factory, the California firm filed for bankruptcy protection and an FBI investigation ensued. The company did not find a buyer and eventually closed down. So Barack Obama…just shut up! | 0 |
Rihanna In Child Porn Photos?
By Comment
Rihanna is no stranger to controversy, but this time, she is being accused of releasing a so-called child porn photo. The controversial picture, which was posted by the 28-year-old singer on Instagram, shows her and niece Majesty in the bathroom in a very intimate moment – and fully naked.
Although the photo of the “Umbrella” singer and Majesty was apparently done in good taste, netizens couldn’t help criticizing the Barbadian born artist for sharing such an intimate picture. Many of them perhaps believed that such private matters should not make their way to the public sphere.
In fact, social media is buzzing with comments which blast Rihanna for spreading what some describe as child porn photos. One troll commented on Instagram, “So inappropriate, what’s wrong with society,” while another dissenter wrote, “This is bad, OMG – I need to report this.”
“Isn’t this child porn?” asked one vocal critic. Another said: “Omg hell to the no, too many weirdos on here – take it down @badgalriri,” according to Yahoo! News .
ALSO READ: Brad Pitt, Rihanna Dating Rumors: RiRi Obsessed With Actor, Wants Romantic Nights With Him?
In the meantime, there are also other industry insiders who, instead of calling out the “Diamonds” singer for her supposed snafu, have praised her for her openness. Perez Hilton has even described the pop icon as the “coolest baby sitter ever.”
Instead of hitting the singing superstar, the popular celebrity blogger pointed out that Rihanna was far from releasing child porn photos, but was just showing her unconditional love for her niece with the “bath snap.”
Hilton himself has also been involved in a similar controversy after he posted a photo of himself on social media taking a bath with his son. Many of his followers unfollowed him after he released the said picture, reported Yahoo! News .
Many of Hilton’s fans came to his rescue, as they noted that nudity between parents and children are perfectly normal. It would be nice to hear Rihanna’s followers showing their support to their idol, and help reverse the rumor that she has proliferating child porn photos.
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WASHINGTON — America’s intelligence chiefs sat down with members of Congress behind closed doors on Friday for what they thought would be a straightforward briefing on Russian cyberattacks. What ensued instead was a confrontation Democrats have long sought with James B. Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Why, the House Democrats demanded to know, did Mr. Comey believe it was O. K. to make repeated disclosures during the campaign about the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails but to this day refuse to say if the F. B. I. is investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russia? His answers did not prove very satisfying. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, grew so frustrated that at one point she chastised Mr. Comey for being “condescending to members. ” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, who was chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee when it was hacked, asked why Mr. Comey had never called her about the intrusions, which began in August 2015 and continued over the course of many months. The F. B. I. notified the committee of the original hacking, but reached a tech support contractor and went back and forth with him for months before the leadership of the organization was informed and took steps to halt the intrusion. The committee and the bureau have blamed each other for the delay, and the pattern continued on Friday, according to multiple Democrats in the meeting. Afterward, Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, called the tenor of the exchanges “contentious at times. ” “I don’t want to go into the contents of what were discussed,” Mr. Schiff said. But “a great many members are concerned with whether the director has employed a double standard. ” The hearing took place a day after the Justice Department’s inspector general said it was investigating Mr. Comey’s decision during the campaign to hold a news conference announcing the end of the case — and then, just before the election, inform Congress there was possible new evidence only to say days later that it did not amount to anything. Mr. Comey “didn’t really answer,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York. He dismissively referred to Mr. Comey as “a policeman,” and added, “I don’t remember anything substantive he said. ” The reaction to the assessment by intelligence agencies that Russia sought to promote the candidacy of Donald J. Trump has been mixed. Mr. Trump has seen it as undermining his electoral victory and ridiculed the agencies, accusing them this week of using leaks to discredit him after it briefed him on a dossier of unsubstantiated reports of compromising personal information the Russians allegedly collected. But on Friday, Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and the panel’s vice chairman, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, announced that the committee would hold hearings on the Russian activity and its effect on the election. Before Russians were an issue, there was the F. B. I. investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton or her aides mishandled classified information that was in emails on a private server she was using. Mr. Comey discussed the investigation and sharply criticized Mrs. Clinton at a news conference announcing that no charges would be brought against her. He also wrote two letters near the end of the campaign that Clinton supporters say cost her the election. But Mr. Comey has not publicly commented on whether there are any open investigations of Mr. Trump or anyone associated with his campaign. Democrats said the closest Mr. Comey came on Friday to offering an explanation for his actions was to say he would only disclose an ongoing investigation if the public had an overwhelming need to know about it or if it was obvious there was one underway. He said he did not believe any possible investigation into Trump or his associates met either standard. The F. B. I. ’s position is that it does not discuss counterintelligence investigations that could compromise important methods and sources. Speaking to reporters afterward, Ms. Pelosi said that “really, the American people are owed the truth. ” “There is a great deal of evidence to say that this is an issue of high interest to the American people,” she continued. “For that reason, the F. B. I. should let us know whether they’re doing that investigation or not. They’re usually inscrutable. ” The F. B. I. declined to comment on the meeting. Mr. Nadler said he thought Mr. Comey should have been fired “months ago. ” Other Democrats, perhaps concerned about who Mr. Trump would name to replace Mr. Comey, either said that he should remain on the job or that they were still unsure. The meeting in the auditorium of the Capitol’s visitor center was standing room only. Some Republicans unsurprisingly had a different reaction. “Their questions and comments seemed to make the case that Hillary Clinton would be president if it were not for hacking,” Representative Steve King of Iowa said. Mr. King left the meeting unconvinced about the Russian hacking, which the intelligence chiefs did manage to discuss amid the questions about Mr. Comey’s conduct. The congressman added that he thought “some” intelligence officials were trustworthy. But “not all. People there need to be rooted out,” he said without elaborating. | 1 |
Minority Report-Style Mark Of The Beast ‘CLEAR’ Human Tracking System Gets Installed At Detroit Airport CLEAR will speed Houston travelers through airport security in minutes at both Bush and William P. Hobby. CLEAR's innovative biometric technology is transforming travel for individuals and corporations while enhancing homeland security and modernizing the checkpoint experience. 27, 2016 Metro Detroit Airport now has a new way to allow people to move seamlessly through airport security .
“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelation 13:16,17 (KJV)
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you are waiting for the Mark of the Beast , you should know that the system that will surround and support the MOTB is already here and you are already a part of it. Every time you access any feature on any smart device, you are creating a record of you activity that is then recorded and stored in places like the Utah Data Center . Aren’t you glad that the Pretribulation Rapture removes us believers before the Beast makes his appearance? I sure am. The future has already arrived people, pay attention.
It’s called CLEAR and it’s now in operation at the airport’s McNamara Terminal . Certified as a “qualified anti-terrorism technology” by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, CLEAR has been used more than five million times to move travelers quickly through airport security lines at 16 other airports. CLEAR Transforms Houston Travel Experience and Homeland Security:
“They validate their identity using a knowledge-based quiz, they use a government identification that’s validated using technology, and then we link it to their bio-metrics — we take 10 fingerprints with a digital reader, we take a scan of their iris, and we take a high-res photo of their face,” said CLEAR spokesperson David Cohen. Minority Report was like a prophecy of what the future would hold for us in the 21st century, and it’s all come true:
Cohen said the initial sign-up process takes about five minutes and after that, getting through security lines should be a breeze. He said there are special lines for CLEAR customers that can be a great time-saver for travelers, who will still have to pass through X-Rays and body scans.
“Our customers go through the TSA security process in minutes. They come to a CLEAR lane, that lane is going to be open and available for them to validate their identity on the spot, a process in itself that takes less than a second,” he said.
Membership to use CLEAR costs $179 per year. New members who enroll at the airport receive a one-month free trial and can use CLEAR immediately.
Airport officials they plan to install the CLEAR system at the North Terminal in the future. source SHARE THIS ARTICLE | 0 |
Washington Free Beacon October 26, 2016
Senior White House officials blocked the Navy from conducting needed freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea amid growing concerns that China is militarizing newly reclaimed islands, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.
A working paper produced in September 2015 by John Hamre, the policy board chairman, called for an immediate resumption of Navy warship passages to prevent China from taking over the strategic Southeast Asian waterway.
The internal document was disclosed Monday by WikiLeaks as part of its latest batch of hacked emails from the account of John Podesta, campaign chairman for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. The Obama administration has accused “Russia’s senior-most officials” of hacking and leaking the emails posted to WikiLeaks and other sites in order to influence the 2016 election.
The document was labeled “Chairman’s Working Notes of the Defense Policy Board – Chinese Island-Building in the South China Sea.” It was sent to Jake Sullivan, the Clinton campaign’s senior policy adviser, by Stuart Eizenstat, a Defense Policy Board member who was advising the campaign on internal Pentagon deliberations. This article was posted: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 7:35 am Share this article | 0 |
Al Qaeda reivindica la rotura del retrovisor de un BMW 325ci EL RECAMBIO TARDARÁ SEMANAS EN LLEGAR Este sitio web utiliza cookies para analizar cómo es utilizado el sitio. Las cookies no te pueden identificar. Si continuas navegando supone la aceptación de la Política de Cookies. Estoy de acuerdo. Más info. | 0 |
During the 2017 NRA Annual Meetings in Atlanta, Daniel Defense president and CEO Marty Daniel affirmed his conviction that Second Amendment rights come from God, not from government. [This is the same position our Founding Fathers held the same position they all supported with their signatures when signing the Declaration of Independence, which says: We hold these truths to be that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. It is crucial to note two things in this portion of the Declaration: 1. Thomas Jefferson sourced our rights in our “Creator,” not in government or in a majority vote of the population. 2. Jefferson sourced government’s power in the people. In other words, governments possess powers, not rights, and the U. S. government only has power because the people lend it a portion of the authority that they possess by birth. And the authority which the people lend government never communicates permission to infringe on the rights with which the people were endowed. (This is why James Madison used Federalist 46 to stress that “ultimate authority … resides in the people alone. ”) Enter Marty Daniel of Daniel Defense. Marty told Breitbart News that the Second Amendment must be protected because it is sourced in our Creator. He juxtaposed Second Amendment rights with the gospel and said that he views it as his job to protect both because both flow to us from God. Marty said, “We are in business, we believe, to be a supporter of the gospel. And, therefore, a supporter of the Second Amendment. In other words, not only do we have these Second Amendment rights because God gives them to us but also the gospel. ” Marty went on to stress his conviction that Daniel Defense “[supports] the freedom of the gospel by supporting the Second Amendment. ” It is interesting to note that President Donald Trump struck a similar tone when speaking to the Leadership Forum on April 28. Trump said, “Freedom is not a gift from government, freedom is a gift from God. ” AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 1 |
Being an utter cock no barrier to success 09-11-16 THERE is no ‘glass ceiling’ for utter cocks any more, it has been confirmed. Donald Trump’s election success has been hailed as a victory by the cock, arsehole and bellend communities, who have for centuries struggled to gain acceptance in mainstream society. Total cock Roy Hobbs said: “Farage gave us hope, Trump has given us freedom. No longer will being an utter penis be frowned upon. “I can polish the ‘No Turning’ sign at the end of my driveway with pride, and drive my white 2011 BMW 7 Series right up anyone’s arse without fear of reproach. “The world told me I was wrong. But I was right, or rather if I was wrong it doesn’t matter any more. “I am an utter cock, hear my cry.”
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PRIMEROS VIDEOS: las consecuencias del fuerte terremoto en Italia 18:14 GMT | Última actualización: 26 oct 2016 21:45 GMT
Dos sismos de magnitud 5,6 y 6,1 han sacudido este miércoles la parte central de Italia. El Coliseo de RomaTony Gentile Tony Gentile Reuters
Un sismo de magnitud 5,6 ha sacudido la parte central de Italia, según informa GEOFON . Sin embargo, el Centro Sismológico Europeo del Mediterráneo (IEMSC, por sus siglas en inglés) ha asegurado que la intensidad del terremoto ha sido de 5,5. — Claudio Paudice (@clapaudice) 26 октября 2016 г.
El temblor se ha registrado a 66 kilómetros de Perugia (Umbría, Italia) a las 19:11, hora local. El foco se ubicó a dos kilómetros de profundidad y el epicentro se situó 37 kilómetros al oeste de la localidad de Ascoli Piceno —gravemente afectada por un fenómeno similar el pasado 25 de agosto— y 132 kilómetros al nordeste de Roma, la capital del país, en donde también se ha sentido. Así se sintió el #sismo en el centro de Italia pic.twitter.com/b8QLLnvz6M [Vía @annap905 ] | 0 |
While much of Germany was at relative peace on New Year’s Eve the Bavarian city of Augsburg was not, as migrants carried out random acts of violence and sexual assault. [Police in Augsburg say that migrants were responsible for several incidents on New Year’s Eve including a stabbing that left one man injured. Several other incidents involving fireworks used as weapons also led to several victims being injured, and a firework that was shot at a police vehicle caused an accident costing 50, 000 euros’ worth of damage, reports Augsburger Allgemeine. Amongst the reported stabbings, an Iraqi migrant stabbed a Syrian migrant with a pocket knife during an argument. The Syrian was stabbed in the thigh and is not reported to have suffered severe injuries. Another stabbing occurred at the main New Year’s Eve party in the city as one man of German origin attacked a young man in the torso resulting in severe injuries and hospitalisation. Fireworks were also employed by several migrants to attack and cause damage to property. Police say that three Syrian migrants deliberately targetted revellers with fireworks at the main intersection at Königsplatz in the city centre. Emergency service workers were also targetted. In one case, a fireman attempting to aid a man who was hit in the eye with a firework was also shot at with fireworks. Police spokesman Friedhelm Bechtel said he was “sad and stunned” that those celebrating would turn on their fellow man on New Year’s Eve and that they would attack emergency services who were trying to help those injured. Sexual assault, which was rampant during the 2015 New Year’s celebrations across Germany, and specifically in Cologne, also occurred in Augsburg. Police say that three Afghan migrants sexually assaulted two women in a nightclub grabbing their buttocks and harassing them until the migrants were eventually removed. The men, aged 19, 21, and 37, fought on their way out of the club. The New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne went off without any major incident due to the heavily increased police presence this year, but not everyone was pleased with police tactics. activists have accused police of “racial profiling” because the authorities specifically controlled North African migrants, who were largely responsible for the attacks last year. During police operations in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, a Syrian migrant was arrested following intelligence that he was planning a terror attack that evening. The migrant had previously been arrested for offences. | 1 |
By Daisy Luther UPDATED: Although it doesn’t appear that Austyn Crites was trying to assassinate Donald Trump, it’s very interesting that he does appear in... | 0 |
Mark Bowytz Besides contributing at @TheDailyWTF, I write DevDisasters for Visual Studio Magazine, and involved in various side projects including child rearing and marriage.
"This building is sinking so fast that it lost 4 floors between the headline and the body," writes Hans .
"I was looking for a new fridge, for some reason this one didn't quite have the features I was looking for," writes Tim D.
Matt R. wrote, "Well, I guess the Microsoft Time Estimator has a new job!"
"Work is sponsoring a flu shot clinic and the clinic wants to make it really easy for Marylanders," writes Rick B. , "Or really hard...it rejects all but one of the MD entries!"
"So, does an inverted dropdown turn into a riseup?" wrote Tomi A.
Jordan B. writes, "Wait, exactly how much storage does Database Engine Tuning Advisor need? I don't think they make hard drives INT64_MAX megabytes in size..."
"I didn't know you could 'oSettingsEvent.comest' your audio setup or '.mog' into a meeting," writes Peter , "It doesn't get any easier in French either."
[Advertisement] Incrementally adopt DevOps best practices with BuildMaster , ProGet and Otter , creating a robust, secure, scalable, and reliable DevOps toolchain. | 0 |
Written by Peter Van Buren Saturday November 19, 2016 In the end, the emails mattered. How much they mattered — how many votes went to Trump, how many would be-Clinton supporters stayed home, how many voted third party — we’ll never know.Clinton supporters were surprised the emails mattered at all, because they had been fed a regular and often fully-factually wrong diet by the majority of the media. There was some good reporting on what the emails meant, and how classification works, but it was almost all on right-of-center websites Clinton people did not read, and blithely dismissed as biased when the sites were brought to their attention. And yeah, sometimes things got a bit too partisan in tone, but the facts were also there.After holding a security clearance for some 23 years, I tried, for some 18 months, to write as intelligently as I could about the damn emails. I tried to explain, in detail, what the whole thing meant, and that it was a significant problem for Clinton. Not bragging, just telling. If you’d like to read back through what I’ve had to say and judge yourself, here it is . There’s a lot there, so if you just want a taste, here .But I do want to make this as clear as possible, so… — All (not insignificant) questions of legality aside, the emails were about judgement, especially poor judgement. Clinton skirting/violating all rational thought and rules to set up a fully independent email server unprecedented in scope and scale, bypass federal records laws and the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, and establish no oversight on the flow of classified information, is not the level of judgment a president must display. Yeah, I know, Trump, but this is about why Hillary Clinton emails mattered and whether anyone likes it or not Trump is the president-elect in part because of the emails.— The most basic tenant of the classified world is that you simply do not expose classified material on an unclassified system. That’s why classified systems exist. This is at the “duh” level. Opinions differ on what should be classified, over-classification is a big problem, yada yada, but those issues are not resolved by circumventing the classified world. To more than a few voters, that seemed obvious. It also again speaks to judgement. There were many experts who explained this, but it seems most Clinton supporters listed to John Oliver instead.— Nobody (the Republicans, the FBI, etc.) created any of the core mess except Hillary Clinton. She then seemingly took every chance to dig the hole deeper, shifting her explanations, allowing information to drip drip drip out over the length of the campaign, and all the rest until everything collapsed around the pathetic human wreckage of Anthony Weiner. — As an added problem, “the emails” in many voters’ minds became shorthand for a range of issues related to trust, ethics, and propriety, including the Clinton Foundation, pay-for-play, and the Goldman-Sachs speeches. — Clinton’s opponents inside and outside the government took advantage of the emails — kinda what opponents do — but none of that would have been possible if Clinton had not created all of this herself. Take this campaign, put up Sanders or Biden instead of Clinton, subtract out all of the negatives associated with the emails, and run a little thought experiment on how many votes that may have been worth. Reprinted with permission from WeMeantWell.com . Related | 0 |
Next Prev Swipe left/right Unsurprisingly, this Ku Klux Klan leaflet has a spelling mistake The Ku Klux Klan are apparently handing out these leaflets in Louisiana ahead of the US election next week – sadly they’re so consumed with xenophobia they confused “polls” and “poles”. The Ku Klux Klan is distributing these packets in Sabine Parish, LA. Thankfully, they're asking voters go to the poles, not the polls. pic.twitter.com/4sFvFIQ7lB
— Lamar White, Jr (@CenLamar) October 31, 2016 | 0 |
Vladimir Putin: The United States continues to sleep with al-Nusra ‹ › South Front Analysis & Intelligence is a public analytical project maintained by an independent team of experts from the four corners of the Earth focusing on international relations issues and crises. They focus on analysis and intelligence of the ongoing crises and the biggest stories from around the world: Ukraine, the war in Middle East, Central Asia issues, protest movements in the Balkans, migration crises, and others. In addition, they provide military operations analysis, the military posture of major world powers, and other important data influencing the growth of tensions between countries and nations. We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by governments and mainstream media. Syrian War Report – October 27, 2016: Russian Strikes Destroyed Over 300 Terrorists’ Oil Facilities By South Front on October 27, 2016 …from SouthFront
In northeastern Aleppo, the Syrian army and Liwa al-Quds also continued operations against Jaish al-Fatah militants (mostly members of Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki). The main clashes took place inside the neighborhoods of Bustan Al-Basha and ‘Ard Al-Hamra. Pro-government forces argue that the Syrian military seized the whole ‘Ard Al-Hamra Neighborhood. However, this has not been confirmed. On October 27, the government forces also launched an offensive on the strategic Hanano Youth Housing Complex. Fierce clashes are ongoing there.
In southwestern Aleppo, the army and allies have repelled another attempt by militants to retake the Air Defense Battalion Base. 5 militants were killed. Local sources say that Iranian military servicemen were operating in the area along with Syrian troops.
The Kurdish YPG launched a series of attacks on the alliance of Turksih-backed militant groups known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the area northwest of Al-Bab.
YPG units entered the villages of Til Madîq, Hecinê, Qarami, Jabal Na’i and Mişerefê. Some pro-Kurdish sources argue that some villages have been already taken.
The Syrian air strike allegedly killed one of the FSA highest ranking commanders in northern Homs – the Chief of Staff for the Free Syrian Army, Colonel Shouki Ayyoub – on October 26. Ayyoub had played an important role in creation a brand of the FSA.
The Syrian Army and the National Defense Forces (NDF) continued to attacks Jaish al-Islam militantsnear the strategic city of Douma in Eastern Ghouta. Fierce clashes took place in the area of al-Reihan and along a road connecting Tal Kurdi and Douma. The army also advanced near near al-Shifouniyeh town. The clashes resulted in killing of 22 militants and destroying of 3 technical vehicles with machine guns. The government forces lost some 8 fighters and a vehicle.
Actions of the Russian air grouping in Syria have resulted in a 70% decrease of the oil trafficking by the ISIS terrorist group, Vitaly Naumkin, President of the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) said on October 26. According to the RAS’ information, the Russian Aerospace Forces have destroyed over 300 facilities involved in the production and transportation of oil and oil products.
Naumikn added that efforts of the Russian military allowed the government forces to liberate 568 settlements, including 150 towns. Some 3700 militants have surrendered to the Syrian government and 847 settlements jointed to the reconciliation process promoted by Moscow. Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by South Front on October 27, 2016, With 425 Reads Filed under Military . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments One Response to " Syrian War Report – October 27, 2016: Russian Strikes Destroyed Over 300 Terrorists’ Oil Facilities " JohnZ October 27, 2016 at 8:29 am
300 facilities destroyed. Looks like Erdogman is going to have to take a loss on this. Too bad he can’t use the IRS profit/loss. Ha, ha. Now one of his mistresses will have to drive that Mercedes for another year and that worthless son of his is going to have to get a real job; one he is more suited for like street cleaning. Things just keep going from bad to worse for the RKM/NWO gangsters.
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AMAZING VIDEO : Hispanics for Trump in Miami Storm the Polls, HORNS BLASTING, Shouting “USA! TRUMP!” AMAZING VIDEO : Hispanics for Trump in Miami Storm the Polls, HORNS BLASTING, Shouting “USA! TRUMP!” Videos By Amy Moreno November 2, 2016
Don’t listen to the LYING North Korea style media, who say minorities do not support Trump.
The truth is, Donald Trump has AMAZING minority support.
And his Hispanic support in Florida is outstanding!
At one Miami precinct, voters began a parade-like storm, shouting “USA” and “Make America Great Again” as they arrived at the polls to vote for America First!
Watch the video: @realDonaldTrump latinos storming precinct 10 sw Miami to vote for our one and only president Trump!! pic.twitter.com/liu4LDey4z
— El Galope Finca (@ElGalopeFinca) October 31, 2016 This is a movement – we are the political OUTSIDERS fighting against the FAILED GLOBAL ESTABLISHMENT! Join the resistance and help us fight to put America First! Amy Moreno is a Published Author , Pug Lover & Game of Thrones Nerd. You can follow her on Twitter here and Facebook here . Support the Trump Movement and help us fight Liberal Media Bias. Please LIKE and SHARE this story on Facebook or Twitter. | 0 |
TEL AVIV — The organizers of Wednesday’s International Women’s Strike, which includes a convicted Palestinian terrorist, have expressed their support for the “decolonization of Palestine” and said they are against the “white supremacists in the current government. ”[“Against the open white supremacists in the current government and the and they have given confidence to, we stand for an uncompromising and feminism,” the platform published on their website. “This means that movements such as Black Lives Matter, the struggle against police brutality and mass incarceration, the demand for open borders and for immigrant rights and for the decolonization of Palestine are for us the beating heart of this new feminist movement. We want to dismantle all walls, from prison walls to border walls, from Mexico to Palestine. ” One of the march’s is Rasmea Odeh, a former member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) designated by the U. S. as a terrorist group. Odeh was arrested for her alleged involvement in two bombings in the late 1960s. Two Israeli university students were killed and nine more were injured. In 1980, Odeh was freed from an Israeli jail as part of a prisoner exchange deal, and a decade later emigrated to the U. S. She recently made headlines again after being charged with immigration fraud for lying about her terrorist background when applying for U. S. citizenship. In an oped published by the Guardian last month entitled, “Women of America: we’re going on strike. Join us so Trump will see our power,” Odeh and her cohorts urged the mobilization of women — including trans women — to strike against “attacks on Muslim and migrant women, on women of color and working and unemployed women, on lesbian, gender nonconforming and trans women. ” Odeh has also been invited to deliver an address at the upcoming National Member Meeting for Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). The leftwing organization said it was “honored to feature the deeply respected Palestinian … feminist leader,” and added that the accusations against her “stem from a context of and persecution by both the Israeli state and the United States, policies which are escalating under the Trump administration. ” JVP added that that her label as a terrorist is a concoction of “Israeli apartheid. ” At the JVP summit, Odeh will speak alongside Linda Sarsour, the activist who made headlines for becoming the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Trump’s executive order on immigration. | 1 |
14 are believed to have been killed and over 30 wounded after an explosion on the Saint Petersburg metro on Monday afternoon. [Read the original story below. Russia’s international news agency RIA Novosti reports the Russian President Vladimir Putin has been alerted to the explosion, which the agency calls an “attack”. It is possible there have been up to ten fatalities and dozens of injured, according to the agency. According to reports in media several casualties have been reported at the Institute of Technology station, and Sennaya Square station of the Saint Petersburg metro. Security services and medical first responders are on the scene. All central Saint Petersburg metro stations have been closed, and security provision has been stepped up in other Russian cities including the capital, Moscow. Vladimir Putin has expressed condolences and said the state security services were looking into “all positive motives” including terror motives. #взрыв на двух станциях в Питере. Взрыв прогремел в вагоне поезда в петербургском метро, станции «Технологический институт» и «Сенная площадь» закрыты на вход и выход, сообщает подземка. «Станции «Технологический институт» и «Сенная площадь» закрыты на вход и выход, поезда следуют без остановки. Происходит эвакуация пассажиров, есть пострадавшие» — говорится в релизе. «Предположительно, в вагоне произошел взрыв неустановленного предмета» — сообщает метрополитен. A post shared by @jewelryhole on Apr 3, 2017 at 5:21am PDT, Several users of social media have shared images and videos that purport to come from the scene. One shared to YouTube shows a concourse between platforms. Other pictures shared through Twitter apparently show a wrecked train carriage and victims of the blast laid out on the platforms, with what appears to be blood smeared on the white marble columns that support the station’s roof. This story is developing | 1 |
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I woke up yesterday (Thursday) to a small but somewhat encouraging snippet on page 19 of my local (German) paper headlined "Trump: Clinton Risking World War," referring to Trump's remarks on Tuesday in a Reuters interview that was headlined "Trump says Clinton policy on Syria would lead to World War Three."
The five-sentence German article ended with this: "Critics noted that such [no-fly zones as proposed by Clinton] might have to be enforced militarily." This was apparently (back-translating from the German) a translation of "Some analysts fear that protecting those zones could bring the United States into direct conflict with Russian fighter jets" (Reuters).
The Reuters article goes on to say: "Clinton's campaign dismissed the criticism, noting that both Republican and Democratic national security experts have denounced Trump as unfit to be commander-in-chief.""'Once again, he is parroting Putin's talking points and playing to Americans' fears, all while refusing to lay out any plans of his own for defeating ISIS or alleviating humanitarian suffering in Syria,' Clinton spokesman Jesse Lehrich said in a statement."
The New York Times and other mainstream outlets reported similarly. I suppose this is considered "balanced" coverage -- as if what Lehrich or "Clinton's campaign" said was a substantive response to what Trump has finally said clearly and should be obvious. To their credit, the BBC did add (at the end of a 21-sentence article) that Trump "echoes concerns raised last month at a congressional hearing by the highest-ranking military officer in the US armed forces."
"Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford told lawmakers a 'no-fly zone' in Syria could spell war with Russia. 'Right now, senator, for us to control all of the airspace in Syria it would require us to go to war, against Syria and Russia,' Gen. Dunford told the Senate Arms Services Committee." - Advertisement -
At this point, just days before the election, it is probably too late, but it would be Trump's last opportunity to appear statesmanlike, and also save the planet from the catastrophic military adventurism that Clinton seems bound to embark on if she becomes commander-in-chief. At the least it would be a chance to ratchet up popular protest against the warmongering that has driven virtually all U.S. foreign policy since WWII, and is now taking us (and by "us" I mean the world) directly toward the precipice of WWIII.
"Stop demonizing Russia; work with them, not against them." This is the message that needs to be shouted from the rooftops, and surely Trump has access to experts like Stephen Cohen, Ray McGovern, Robert Parry and others who can help him do so. He should be able to easily "trump" the empty arguments of the bellicose Russia-bashers, even if the latter are aligned across party lines against him -- and against us, since the war they are pushing for will be global. How stupid does one have to be to propose "no-fly zones" when the highest military officer in the country says it would result in war with Russia? How stupid does one have to be to believe that Putin is "Hitler," that Russia shot down MH17 and is guilty of "aggression" on the eastern European borders, in Ukraine, and in Syria, without ever questioning the "evidence" for any of these assertions, much less the equally problematic role the U.S. has played in every case? Yet this is the mainstream narrative, repeated uniformly and relentlessly at every turn.
Trump is obviously not the best candidate in this race (Jill Stein is), but he is right on this most important issue of relations with Russia, which should have been the No. 1 issue from the beginning. So there is still a slight chance that Trump (and Stein also!) can at least go down with a (non-nuclear!) bang, not a whimper -- by giving peace, and reason, a chance. We should all hope that happens. - Advertisement - | 0 |
The circumstances sound eerily familiar: Donald J. Trump and his legal team had suffered a setback in a major court case. So they leveled an attack on the presiding judge, calling him irredeemably biased and unfair. “Your Honor,” wrote a lawyer for Mr. Trump, “harbors antagonism that would make impartial adjudication impossible. ” The year was 2008, and Mr. Trump’s arguments closely resembled those he is now making against Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, a federal judge in California overseeing a class action lawsuit against the defunct Trump University. Today, Mr. Trump claims that Judge Curiel, who was born in Indiana, is incapable of objectively judging the case because of his Mexican heritage and record of being, in Mr. Trump’s words, “a hater of Donald Trump. ” Between 2008 and 2010, Mr. Trump’s lawyers went even further — turning angry accusations into an unusual, legal campaign to remove not one but two New York judges who oversaw the lawsuit. One judge was an man, the other a white woman. Taken together, the episodes highlight Mr. Trump’s unusual approach to the American judiciary: Unlike most parties in court cases, who try to curry the favor of judges, he can turn publicly hostile toward them, assailing their motives, biography and fitness. Over the past 48 hours, Mr. Trump expanded his musings about courts, doubting whether a Muslim judge could fairly adjudicate a trial involving him. That earned him a rebuke from Hillary Clinton, who wondered on Monday whether Mr. Trump would soon claim “that a woman judge couldn’t preside. ” Throughout a career that has been marked by legal proceedings that either involved or fascinated him, Mr. Trump has not always seen judges as the ultimate arbiters of legal principle, but as adversaries who deserve mockery or bulldozing when they do not agree with him. Even in cases where he is merely a spectator, Mr. Trump has plenty to say about those on the bench. The judge overseeing the 2014 trial in South Africa of Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic runner, for the murder of his girlfriend, was a “moron,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Ridiculous decision,” he said of the sentence. Mr. Trump ridiculed a Pennsylvania judge appointed by President Jimmy Carter as “not his most brilliant appointment,” and wrote that the judge was “a willing accessory” to any crimes of convicts she had released from prison. He does this despite his close ties to a federal judge, Maryanne Trump Barry, his sister. The New York case stands out. Mr. Trump and his lawyers singled out Justice Richard B. Lowe III, who was first elected to the New York Supreme Court in 2003. Throughout the case, which involved a Trump real estate development on the West Side of Manhattan and a partnership with Hong Kong businessmen, Justice Lowe issued orders Mr. Trump’s lawyers said were biased. By the end of the case, Mr. Trump’s top lawyer, Jay Goldberg, apologized for seeking to oust Justice Lowe from the proceedings, promising to never level such accusations against him again. But when the litigation was going on, Mr. Goldberg forcefully challenged Justice Lowe’s “fitness to serve in a judicial capacity,” accused him of “unwarranted bias toward Trump” and said that, “at every turn, Justice Lowe has shown that he is unable to comply with his duties,” according to a 2009 complaint Mr. Goldberg submitted to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct. Mr. Goldberg, a longtime lawyer for Mr. Trump, claimed that Justice Lowe had betrayed a bias against Mr. Trump on two occasions. The first, he said, was when Justice Lowe declared, in his chambers and in the presence of a lawyer for Mr. Trump, that he would not allow Mr. Trump’s presence in the courtroom to intimidate him. The second, Mr. Goldberg said, was when Justice Lowe allegedly told Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York that he did not like Mr. Trump. Justice Lowe on Monday declined to comment on the case. During a 2009 hearing in which he denied Mr. Goldberg’s request for his recusal, he acknowledged that he had used the word “intimidate” in reference to Mr. Trump, saying he was generalizing that nobody could scare him. He also defended his rulings in the case and said any allegation that he had been unfair to Mr. Trump was “ . ” He questioned whether it was “an effort to change the course of this litigation by trying to get before another judge. ” In an interview, Mr. Rangel said he had not spoken to Justice Lowe in the past 20 years and had no recollection of ever discussing Mr. Trump with the judge. Mr. Goldberg, the congressman said, “has a hell of an imagination. ” The New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct, which oversees state and local judges in New York, took no action against Justice Lowe, a spokesman for the commission said. Steven Lubet, a Northwestern University law professor and legal ethics expert, said that filing a motion to remove a judge was “rarely sought and rarely granted,” not just in New York but across the country. The comments allegedly made by Justice Lowe, he said, would not be grounds for such a removal. “Those aren’t remotely close to what would disqualify a judge,” Mr. Lubet said. Neither Mr. Goldberg nor a Trump spokeswoman responded to a request for comment. As the real estate case wound its way through the legal system, morphing into a different suit with a different defendant, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought the removal of a second state judge, Justice Eileen Bransten. Justice Bransten, they argued, had shown bias against Mr. Trump by calling his previous attempt to remove Justice Lowe “reprehensible. ’’ They did not succeed. Soon after, Mr. Goldberg, the Trump lawyer, withdrew his request that Justice Bransten recuse herself. “I consider my conduct wholly improper,” he wrote, “and for that I apologize, particularly to Justice Lowe, with assurances that it will never be repeated again. ” | 1 |
What are the options?
Is Assange “still” alive (as WikiLeaks, perhaps tellingly, asserts), and if so, where is he? There are several possible permutations. Either: Assange is alive and well in the Ecuadorian Embassy in Hans Crescent, London, and simply keeping his head down (possibly in an attempt to create a news story and give more publicity to WikiLeaks). Assange is alive and has miraculously managed to escape from the Embassy without being picked up the UK police or CIA who were monitoring the building, and has reached or is making his way to, a safe haven (eg Russia). [Edit: It is also possible that Assange has been a spook all along, working for US/UK interests, and it was expedient to allow him to leave in secret – a face-saving solution for all concerned. He may yet re-emerge to continue his operation from somewhere slightly larger than a shoebox with access to sunlight and fresh air]. Assange is still alive, but now in captivity. This could be inside the Embassy, but far more likely, he has been removed and handed to the US authorities who have him in custody on “US controlled territory” (and where it is quite likely he is being tortured, like the thousands of nameless other “enemy combatants” before him). Assange has been murdered (possibly by poisoning). Either his body is being stored in a freezer at the Embassy building until the “appropriate” time to announce his death, or it may have already been removed. It is also possible that Assange was removed (or left) the Embassy alive, but has since been killed (ie a combination of 3 and 4). An option I did not initially consider is that Assange could have realised his arrest was imminent and taken an extreme, but logical step to ensure that he wasn’t captured. When faced with the prospect of torture, suicide would be the rational choice. Of course suicide may yet be presented as the official cause of death, and ironically, many people will not believe it.
What does the evidence point to?
The best “evidence” we have at the moment is several testimonials which purport that Assange is alive and well, inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, or news stories which are designed to make people infer that this is the case. However, these stories are either inconclusive, suspect or have been proven to be false, in other words they may just be distractions and misdirection. There have been other posts covering this subject , but these distraction stories include: the Pamela Anderson vegan sandwich visit on 15 October (somewhat compromised by her cryptic “torture” reference). Update: Pamela Anderson has tweeted this “gift” of two mice for Assange’s cat on 25 October the statement by Ecuador that they were cutting off Assange’s internet on October 16 (a cover story to obscure the fact Assange was already incapable of communicating?) the Wikileaks employee visit/tweet on 17 October (since disavowed) the Craig Murray whisky visit on October 18. the pointless Metropolitan police vehicle story the numerous old Assange videos being re-posted as “news” the idiotic red herring story involving images of Assange’s “escape” (which were actually Google StreetView images from two years ago) the 4-month old Michael Moore video being touted as current by WikiLeaks. the Wikileaks promises to provide hard evidence of Assange’s situation which have been reneged on. Weird tweets from WikiLeaks generally, including a ridiculous accusation that a major US ddos was the work of WikiLeaks supporters.
Conversely, whilst there is an “absence of positive evidence” that Assange has been harmed or abducted from the Ecuadorian Embassy, there are numerous reasons to suggest this might the case. Final tweet from account known to be controlled by Julian Assange (Embassy Cat) on 15 October. the release of Wikileaks codes on 16 October there have been at least 9 days of non-communication by Assange, no proof of life provided, and no PGP signed document, despite repeated requests no rational explanation for this silence the sudden death of Gavin MacFadyen, the third (known) senior member of Wikileaks to die suddenly this year this redditor who visited Hans Crescent on 22 October, to find there was no police presence guarding the Embassy. Assange was under siege for over four years, with a permanent police detail outside the Embassy, with orders to arrest him if he tried to leave. Why were they removed? Mark Halperin of Politico attempted to meet with Assange on Friday 21, but was refused by a goon: “Assange too busy”- video.
Bearing in mind the above, and the highly suspicious nature of the so-called “evidence” asserting that he is in good health, I think it is reasonable at this point to suspect that Assange has either been killed and/or is no longer inside the Ecuadorian Embassy, so either options 3 or 4, or probably both (option 5) bearing in mind that the US elite will not want to give Assange a trial where he could reveal any more information.
Finally, if Assange has been subjected to extraordinary rendition and/or killed, we must assume that the UK, the US and the Ecuadorian governments are all complicit. It would mean that Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa was somehow turned by the US authorities (be it via money or threats, or both concerning Ecuador’s gold reserves being held in the US ) into secretly revoking Assange’s asylum. It would also mean that the UK authorities have illegally handed over Assange to the Americans without due legal process, knowing that Assange would be tortured and probably killed.
But…let’s hope this has all been a bad dream.
At this point, however, I think the best we can hope for is that Assange is fine and still in the Ecuadorian Embassy, because I think the escape option is by far the least likely of all these scenarios.
TLDR: There has been no proof of life of Julian Assange for at least 9 days. Instead we have seen a raft of distraction stories (even from WikiLeaks itself) which are clearly designed to give the impression that Assange is alive and well. Some of these stories have been shown to be old footage or otherwise bogus. So it appears that WikiLeaks is compromised and that probably means Assange is no longer in the safety of the Ecuadorian Embassy. I supect the US authorities probably have the most information about Assange, and his current whereabouts, and we should probably fear the worst.
As mentioned briefly above, Julian Assange was due to be interviewed by Swedish prosecutors last week – on 17th October, at a meeting inside the Embassy. However, this meeting was called off just five days beforehand, on Wednesday 12 October, ostensibly because the lawyers “couldn’t make it”. This made me wonder whether it was perhaps Assange who was not available – in other words, could Assange have been out of commission earlier than we realised? Unlikely, perhaps.
Not knowing when the Assange disappearance timeline truly begins is making it harder to discover what has happened to him.That said, the publication of WikiLeaks codes on twitter shortly after the Pamela Anderson “vegan torture” visit on 15 October is the most obvious starting point in the chronology.
NOTE (26 October): I am updating this page as new information comes in. If you think there is something I have missed out, please notify me in the comments. | 0 |
Good morning. Here’s what you need to know: • The C. I. A. is scrambling to contain the damage from WikiLeaks’ release of documents on its hacking programs, temporarily halting work on some projects. The F. B. I. which suspects a disaffected insider was behind the leak, is preparing to interview hundreds of people. Want to shield your tech products — such as iPhones, Android devices, routers and Samsung televisions — from the C. I. A. ’s newly revealed hacking tools? Here are some tips. _____ • E. U. leaders are gathering in Brussels today and tomorrow for a summit meeting of the European Council. On the agenda: the future of Donald Tusk, the former prime minister of Poland, whose reappointment as president of the Council is opposed by his own country in an unprecedented situation. The Polish prime minister, Beata Szydlo, is expected to propose that Mr. Tusk be replaced by Jacek a Polish member of the European Parliament since 2004. _____ • International Women’s Day events in Europe included a strike in France starting at 3:40 p. m. — symbolically the time of day when Frenchwomen stop being paid because of wage inequality. In Russia, the holiday ranks as the country’s largest single sales day for flowers. Women in Spain, where sexism and machismo are still deeply entrenched in the political establishment, were urged to halt their work for 30 minutes. In New York, a Wall Street firm put up a statue of a girl in front of Lower Manhattan’s bronze bull, fearlessly staring it down. _____ • A senior American general told Congress that Russia has deployed a prohibited cruise missile, the first public confirmation by the U. S. that the Kremlin had violated a landmark arms control agreement. Russia had denounced as “fake news” a New York Times article last month that first reported the violation. _____ • Russia’s RT network is regarded by many Western countries as the heart of a disinformation campaign designed to sow doubt about democratic institutions. But Russia insists the network is simply offering “alternative views” to the news media. While U. S. intelligence agencies are investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters, “There is no reason that we have to think the president is the target of any investigation whatsoever. ” _____ • In his budget statement, Philip Hammond, above, the chancellor of the Exchequer, raised his growth forecast for the British economy, but said there was “no room for complacency” as Britain leaves the E. U. • Britain may have to pay the E. U. 2 billion euros in lost customs duties on Chinese clothing and shoes that were imported at artificially low prices. • Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told lawmakers that she learned about the Volkswagen emissions fraud from the news media, and that she doesn’t consider it “a gigantic scandal. ” • Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, could face calls to end quantitative easing at the bank’s monetary policy meeting today. • Christie’s, the international auction house, plans to close its secondary salesroom in London and scale back its operation in Amsterdam as part of a companywide review. • Here’s a snapshot of global markets. • The Azure Window, a limestone arch in Malta, collapsed into the Mediterranean Sea after being battered by a storm. [The New York Times] • Some leaders of the Islamic State are fleeing Raqqa, their capital, as U. S. Syrian fighters close in, the U. S. military says. [The New York Times] • A Danish father and son discovered the wreckage of a German plane from World War II, along with the remains of a man who might have been its pilot. [The New York Times] • António Guterres, the U. N. secretary general, is proposing to stop paying countries that fail to investigate sexual abuse claims against their peacekeepers “in a timely manner. ” [The New York Times] • Barcelona pulled off one of the greatest comebacks in soccer history, overcoming a deficit after its first game against Paris St. to secure a berth in the Champions League quarterfinals. [The New York Times] • Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels will be made into a Italian television series. [The New York Times] • More than 330 readers responded to our question on Monday about their morning routines. The top themes: exercise, breakfast and, of course, coffee. We’d like to help power these routines, so here are our guides to meditation, running and, yes, brewing a better cup of coffee. And we’d encourage those who start the day with a healthy breakfast to stick to it — but the rest of us need not worry. As our health care writer has explained, “There’s nothing magical about breakfast. ” • Recipe of the day: Spicy tofu and Swiss chard make for delicious vegetarian tacos. • The architect who designed the Dubai Frame, a landmark building set to open this year, is suing the municipality over copyright infringement. • “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a spiritual that evokes the darkness of slavery, has become an English rugby anthem. • In memoriam: Gustav Metzger, a artist and political radical who inspired Pete Townshend to smash his guitars and amps, has died at 90. Good night and good luck. The journalist Edward R. Murrow often ended his reports this way, but the signoff is usually remembered in connection to his CBS broadcast on this day in 1954. Murrow dedicated the entire episode of his show, “See It Now,” to analyzing Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s hunt for Communists within America’s borders and the spectacle of his nationally televised hearings. “And upon what meat doth Senator McCarthy feed?” Murrow asked. “Two of the staples of his diet are the investigation, protected by immunity, and the . ” One of Murrow’s more memorable quotes was, “We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. ” The senator was condemned by his colleagues later that year. The Times called the program “crusading journalism of high responsibility and genuine courage. ” The episode was depicted in a 2005 film directed by George Clooney. McCarthy responded to Murrow on his program a month later, calling him “the cleverest of the jackal pack which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual Communists and traitors. ” Remy Tumin contributed reporting. _____ Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings and updated online. Read the latest edition of the U. S. briefing here and the latest for Asia and Australia here. What would you like to see here? Contact us at europebriefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
Saturday, MSNBC “AM Joy” host Joy Reid suggested Attorney General Jeff Sessions may be participating in the “trolling of people of color” when he met with Police Sgt. Edward Mullins to accept an award on behalf of his New York City police union. Partial transcript as follows: He either is just indulging his obsessions or maybe some private prison interest maybe have an interest in him and he’s going to enrich them, or this is about a kind of trolling of people of color that is common in your party. Jefferson Sessions, amid the turmoil he’s facing now on Russiagate and other things, took the time out to be honored by a police union boss here in New York, a guy named Edward Mullens — an incredibly controversial guy. He’s been called “Crazy Eddie” by the former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton. This is a guy who objected to the Eric Garner settlement, who said it was a travesty, who walked out when police had to admit that they beat, I think, a man and they had to settle, he walked out and called that a travesty. He objected to Beyonce’s performance at the Super Bowl. This is an extremist and Jeff Sessions proudly stands next to him. Is this cultural trolling and Jeff Sessions is a member of a troll army? Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
By Brig Asif H. Raja on November 3, 2016
Asif Haroon Raja
The political temperature that had begun to boil from 28 October onward became menacing on the following three days, but mercifully it scaled down dramatically on the evening of November 01 after Imran Khan (IK) decided to call off his much hyped foray into Islamabad (Isbd) on November 2. IK led PTI had been drumming up the Panama papers scandal since April 2016 and straining their lungs to demean Nawaz Sharif (NS) and implicate him and his family on charges of corruption and money laundering. Earlier on, IK had made rigging in 2013 elections into a big issue and undertaken 126-day sit-in at D-Chowk Isbd to implicate PML-N and topple the govt. Despite the physical assault on the parliament, PM House and the PTV, the protest fizzled out without achieving any results. IK had to tender an apology to the judicial commission when his legal team failed to produce any evidence to prove the rigging charge. IK covered up his embarrassment by saying that “rigging was just a political stunt for point scoring”. He then shifted his goal post from rigging to corruption and in that Panama scandal came as a godsend opportunity to push his chief rival against the wall and possibly unseat him.
Irrespective of the fact that NS name was absent from the list of account holders in the offshore company in Panama, and several of his party’s leading lights including himself were maintaining offshore accounts, he insisted that accountability should start from NS and his two sons based in London and daughter Marium only and none else. He emphasized on immediate resignation of NS and quoted weak examples of PM of Iceland who had resigned and PM UK who presented himself for accountability. Other political parties like the PPP, JI, PML-Q and AML joined his battle to put NS in the dock. The two sides got locked over the issue of Terms of Reference (ToRs), the opposition demanding commencement of investigation by Supreme Court from NS and his family, while the govt maintained that NS name should be excluded since he had not been named, and that accountability should be across the board. The tussle consumed 6-7 months without any breakthrough.
Feeling frustrated, IK once again decided to show muscle power on the streets and after several public meetings held a big gathering at Raiwind on Sept 30. He had all the intentions to move forward and organize a sit-in in front of Jati Umra (private residence of NS), but truculence expressed by PML-N activists and reluctance of other political parties to join him, coupled with heating up of LoC and threat of surgical strike by India restrained him, and he decided to wrap it up the same night. He however, pledged to invade and lock down Isbd on October 30 and force NS to quit or offer himself for accountability. He built up the tempo throughout October and made efforts to take as many political parties on board. Social media and electronic media in particular demonized NS and made him into an object of hate. Most political parties and saner elements advised IK to change his plan of confrontation in the wake of acceptance of case of Panama scandal for hearing by the Supreme Court, but he refused and remained adamant.
Having discovered the foul intentions of PTI, the govt announced that all out efforts will be made to prevent the activists of PTI and their partners from besieging Isbd on October 30. Punjab Police and Frontier Constabulary were requisitioned to bolster the strength of Isbd Police and containers from all over Punjab were impounded to block the roads leading to Isbd. Hawks within the ruling party also flexed their muscles and showed readiness for the combat.
In the meanwhile, GHQ’s annoyance over security leak gave a shot in the arm to the agitators and it was assumed that the Army would be on their side and Gen Raheel would raise his finger once the desired chaos was stoked. To neutralize one front, NS hastened to sack Information Minister Pervaiz Rashid and a high powered inquiry was ordered to trace the culprits and punish them. Pervaiz ouster was rejoiced by PTI but the sacrifice was considered too small. They wanted a bigger head to be rolled and their obvious target was NS and none else. Quite a few critics of Pervaiz are now shedding tears of sympathy.
The date of incursion was advanced to November 2. Refusal of PPP and PAT to join up for the D Day was a setback for the PTI, but it decided to once again take the suicidal plunge single-handed. Its main dependence was on the main effort launched from KP by the PTI workers under the command of Chief Minister (CM) Pervez Khattak. IK repeatedly underlined that a force of one million will assemble in Isbd. Armed Tiger Force had been trained to deal with the police and paramilitary forces. Secondary effort was to be launched from the direction of Lahore and PML-Q activists under Ch brothers were to join the party from Gujrat. Purpose was to flood the capital city with people, choke the city, paralyze the administration, parliament and judiciary and give a fait-accompli to NS to either voluntarily step down peacefully, or be ready to be brought down forcibly. Tahirul Qadri’s zealots were expected to join the gathering to dig the last nail.
NS ouster on yet to be proven corruption charges in their view would cook the goose of PML-N and victory will be theirs. Knowing that the Panama case didn’t have required strength to convict NS, they wanted to decide the case their way through street agitation. They also understood that each passing day was tilting the balance in favor of PML-N due to fast paced developments and CPEC and in next elections PTI’s chance of winning will become very bleak. For them, this was the only chance to get rid of NS, and hence decided to take a huge risk without constitutional and legal cover. Like in 2014, they assumed that Army was on their side.
Blinded by their quest for power, they turned a blind eye to the possible socio-political turmoil that may erupt as a result of their reckless venture to scuttle the democratic process. They ignored the possibility of takeover by the Army in the wake of commotion. IK’s bellicosity and rashness was motivated by his rancor with NS family, and his obsession to acquire the coveted seat of PM. In every speech, he and Sheikh Rashid used foul language and ridiculed the PM brazenly. Many are of the view that IK may be having hidden malicious intentions to pursue sinister goals at the behest of hostile forces to Pakistan. His detractors particularly Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who himself has a shady past, dubs him as an agent of Israel.
Others say that his fascist methods resemble MQM’s fascism and give strength to Indo-US-Israel-Western agenda to foment chaos. They have seen the fate of Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria and know that Pakistan is the next target. They particularly noted the ill-timed attack on Isbd when India and Afghanistan are breathing fire, the US is in highly rasping mood and China is getting worried over political uncertainty. Last time the sit-in was timed with the scheduled visit of President of China which got postponed for six months and this time the Peshawar-Isbd road blockade coincided with the passage of first convoy from Kashgar-Khunjarab to Gwadar along the western route. They ask as to why IK and his ilk cannot wait for May 2018 elections and gain power through a legitimate course rather than using high handed tactics.
The preliminary offensive was intended to be launched under the garb of youth convention in Isbd on October 28. This gathering was to exert pressure from within the city once the pincers from KP and Punjab reached the premises of Isbd. Leaders and foot soldiers started collecting at Bani Gala which was to act as the command and control centre for “Operation Lockdown Isbd”. Having gained intelligence about the sinister plans afoot, the govt machinery sprang into action and ordered positioning of containers on all entry points into Isbd as well as in Bani Gala. When the protesters became rowdy, the police baton charged and arrested PTI workers of both genders. The scuffle and hide-and-seek which went on the whole night created a big scene and gave plentiful of grist to the media to sensationalize the event to the hilt. Planned meeting of Shiekh Rashid in front of his residence Lal Haveli could not take place on October 30 but the Sheikh managed to reach Committee Chowk riding a bike and delivered a short speech to the few people present there. This act of his was glorified by the media.
The situation took a serious turn when the CM KP Pervaiz Khattak started a caravan from Swabi on October 31 and not only hurled highly jingoistic statements but made things nasty by adding ethnic color to his diatribe against the govt. Unmindful of his skinny and frail physique, he behaved like a conquering Rambo ready to trounce any hurdle placed in his way. He expressed his determination to reach Bana Gala at all cost on the following day. He has nothing impressive to brag about in KP. Most of development funds of the last year could not be spent and lapsed and no headway has been made on corruption.
As regards the PTI, there are visible cracks within the party and several top leaders like Javed Hashmi and justice Wajihuddin have left the party. PTI leaders have tainted past and several leading lights are the turncoats of other parties. Performance of PTI in bye-elections, local bodies, Gilgit-Baltistan and AJK has been dismal. These factors when seen in the backdrop of impressive performance of PML-N in tackling energy crisis and existential threat of terrorism and in improving economic indicators, gives no plausible reason to the PTI to maneuver its premature downfall through hooliganism.
The govt in anticipation had placed series of containers on the three interchanges along the motorway at Swabi, Hazro and Burhan and deployed heavy contingent of police equipped with heavy stocks of tear gas shells. Khattak made use of the cranes to remove the containers but the barrage of tear gas shells and baton charge by police had a toll on the PTI tigers. The caravan lost its steam and was ultimately grounded at Burhan. It was in this timeframe that the first cargo convoy of 100 vehicles was to cross the interchanges to reach the motorway of CPEC. Cognizant of its importance the Army soldiers helped in clearing the mess on critical interchanges.
When IK realized that he and other leaders of his party stranded in his house in Bani Gala cannot move out and join party workers braving the hardships and that Khattak led men will not be able to reach Isbd, he was in a dilemma. Possibility of a bigger clash at Burhan resulting in casualties couldn’t be ruled out. The govt was in no mood to soften up its stance. The other factor was failure to mobilize the party workers and bring them to Isbd in sufficient numbers. The total strength didn’t exceed 20-25000. IK and his colleagues wanted to call off the sit-in but not the party men. The Supreme Court gave the much needed face saving formula by offering to frame the ToRs in case the govt and opposition parties failed to do so and also promised to start hearing the Panama case and expedite its completion as early as possible. IK was allowed to hold a peaceful meeting at parade ground. The court also ordered removal of containers.
These offers were promptly accepted and IK announced the withdrawal on a triumphant note saying that November 2 will be celebrated as ‘Thanksgiving Day’ with fanfare. Rather than appreciating his decision, hyper media sank into a pool of sadness. Same was the case with opposition parties and PTI activists that were expecting the party to remain in full swing for full month if not more. Eight RAW/IB agents based in Indian High Commission in Isbd in the garb of diplomats having dangerous plans up their sleeves felt so depressed that they became indiscreet and got exposed.
IK once again boasted of assembling one million but had to eat his words. True to commitment, the Supreme Court held its first session on November 3 in which NS and IK appeared. Next hearing of the court will be on Monday in which children of NS would also appear. IK and his team are very hopeful that the court would give verdict in their favor but in case of unfavorable decision, he will again come on the roads. Relations of PTI with PPP and PAT have become frosty, while Sheikh Rashid is also feeling out of sorts. Reportedly an understanding has been forged between PML-N, PPP and MQM-Altaf, but apparently the PPP is trying to change its posture from friendly to genuine opposition to outdo PTI.
The writer is retired Brig, war veteran, defence analyst, columnist, author of 5 books, Vice Chairman Thinkers Forum Pakistan, DG Measac Research Centre, Member Executive Council PESS. [email protected] | 0 |
Two Muslim American YouTube stars who were returning home to New York after a world tour said they were removed from a Delta Air Lines flight in London on Wednesday after other passengers expressed discomfort with their presence on the plane. Adam Saleh, 23, a filmmaker from Manhattan, and his friend Slim Albaher, 22, from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, said they had been asked by the captain to leave their flight at Heathrow Airport after Mr. Saleh spoke in Arabic to his mother by phone, and he and Mr. Albaher followed up by speaking to each other in Arabic, causing alarm among British passengers on the flight. The news was met on social media with anger at the airline industry, but also skepticism, though passengers who were on the plane when it landed in New York corroborated the men’s story. Mr. Saleh, who has more than two million subscribers on YouTube, has a history of perpetuating video hoaxes and pranks, some of them aimed at exposing stereotypes about Muslims. In his latest YouTube video, posted this month, he pretended to smuggle himself onto a plane in a suitcase. In a phone interview Wednesday from Heathrow before he and Mr. Albaher boarded a later flight, Mr. Saleh said this was not a stunt. “The only thing I can say is, I would never film a phone video,” he said. “That’s when it’s really serious, and I must film. ” His video camera was in his luggage. Delta said in a statement on Wednesday evening that, based on information collected so far, the two customers removed from the flight “sought to disrupt the cabin with provocative behavior, including shouting. ” “What is paramount to Delta is the safety and comfort of our passengers and employees,” the airline said. “It is clear these individuals sought to violate that priority. ” Earlier in the day, Delta said that it was taking allegations of discrimination “very seriously. ” Camilla Goodman, a spokeswoman for London’s Metropolitan Police, confirmed that two passengers had been removed from the flight and that they “didn’t do anything lawfully wrong. ” They were not arrested, she said. Mr. Saleh and Mr. Albaher later boarded a Virgin flight to New York. In Periscope videos and the phone interview, Mr. Saleh and Mr. Albaher gave their version of events. Mr. Saleh said he had just spoken to his mother on the phone, in Arabic, to tell her when his flight would land. After the call, he and Mr. Albaher continued to speak briefly in Arabic until they were interrupted by a woman in front of them, who asked them to speak English because they were making her uncomfortable. They did not respond aggressively, Mr. Saleh said, but told her that they were speaking Arabic and asked whether she had ever heard another language. Then, Mr. Saleh said, a man with a British accent who appeared to be traveling with the woman swore at them and said they should be “chucked” off the plane. “At this point, me and Slim looked at each other,” Mr. Saleh said in the interview. “We didn’t know what to do. We felt like we were terrorists. ” The situation escalated, Mr. Saleh said, and other passengers joined in asking that Mr. Saleh and Mr. Albaher be kicked off the plane. Some of them mentioned Monday’s terrorist attack in Berlin, he said. After the disturbance continued for what Mr. Saleh said was about seven minutes, the captain was summoned, and he asked that the two men leave the plane with their baggage. At that point, Mr. Saleh started filming with his phone. He later shared the video, and others from the airport, on Twitter, where he has more than 250, 000 followers. Chris Ashford, 47, who was aboard the plane after a layover in London, said he believed that the woman had “overreacted. ” “She heard somebody speaking in Arabic and assumed the worst,” he said. He added that while he thought Delta had acted in the interest of some of its passengers, “I do think it was kicking the guy off the plane and then removing his bags. ” The Rev. Karen Georgia Thompson, 51, was also on the plane. Although she said she could not judge the airline’s actions because she had only witnessed some of the disruption, Ms. Thompson did say that both parties should have been removed. “If you’re going to investigate, how are you going to investigate one side of an altercation?” she asked. In the video, Mr. Saleh is escorted from the plane as he points out passengers who were heckling him, yelling goodbye and waving at the camera. “You guys are racist,” Mr. Saleh shouts in the video as he describes the confrontation. “Six white people against us bearded men. ” With Mr. Saleh’s large following, the story quickly took off, and many people were immediately critical of Delta. Reports of Muslims’ being asked to leave planes have risen in recent months, according to advocacy groups. Zainab Chaudry, a spokeswoman for the Council on Relations, the United States’ largest Muslim civil rights group, said in a phone interview on Wednesday, “More and more reports have been made of Muslims or Arabs, or people who were perceived to be Muslim or Arabs, who were removed from planes by airline personnel. ” “There isn’t one particular airline I can point to and say, ‘We’ve been hearing more reports on this airline than others,’” she said. “Delta has not been one of the more common offenders. ” In April, a college student was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight in California when he was heard speaking Arabic, a week after a Muslim woman was asked to leave another Southwest flight when she sought to switch seats. In May, an Italian professor was removed from an American Airlines flight because another passenger was alarmed by his handwritten notes, which were in fact math equations. Mr. Saleh and Mr. Albaher, who are best friends and frequently work together, had recently traveled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Sydney, Australia, to perform their stage show, which mixes comedy with inspirational speaking. Their fans are largely young, Muslims from around the world, Mr. Albaher said, though he added, “A bunch of other people watch us too. ” Mr. Saleh was born and raised in New York City. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he recalled, he was afraid to tell people he was Muslim, but he later embraced his culture and religion. “I wanted to show people we can have fun,” he said. “We can be normal just like everyone else. ” | 1 |
On Saturday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox Friends,” Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz stated that former FBI Director James Comey is “all about preserving his reputation” and said Comey is “using his friends to get his point out. It’s cowardly. ” Dershowitz said that he’s always liked Comey, but Comey has been “using his friends to get his point out. It’s cowardly. And I think it’s about time that Comey is confronted directly with . He was a great director of the FBI, but when the whole Hillary Clinton thing began, he cared more about his reputation and his dignity than about what was good for America. ” Dershowitz added, “I’d want to find out if he was the source of the leaks of the memo that he was quoted in. Second, I would ask him why he didn’t talk directly, why he’s using his friends. I would go back to his decisions to speak to the public. ” He continued that while he disagreed with President Trump’s reported characterization of Comey as a “nutjob,” calling him a “showboat” is “not a bad characterization. ” He further stated Comey’s motives are “all about preserving his reputation above everything else. ” Dershowitz further argued that Comey revealed Clinton investigation because thought Clinton was going to win, and he would be faulted by Trump supporters for not revealing the investigation, and so Comey revealed the Clinton investigation to preserve his reputation. Dershowitz also stated that he believes Trump fired Comey due to Comey’s statement that he felt sick over the prospect that he might have influenced the election. Dershowitz concluded that the Russia investigation should be handled by an independent commission, not a special counsel, “because I don’t see any crimes. Let’s take the scenario, let’s assume that Trump — which it didn’t happen — the Trump campaign got together with the Russians and said, let’s make Trump president because he’s better than Hillary Clinton. Terrible politically, what’s the crime? … Or he leaks material — he shouldn’t have — to the Russians about the Israeli spy. Terrible, he shouldn’t have done it. … But there’s no crime. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
NATO fighter jets on constant watch for Russian jets above Baltic states 11/08/2016
DAILY MAIL Russian fighter jets are constantly probing Nato’s defences over the Baltic states, with more than 600 ‘interceptions’ so far this year. Ironically, considering the history, the Nato pilots defending the skies over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are often German. Seven German fighter pilots are based at an air base at Amari, west of the Estonian capital Tallinn. Lieutenant Colonel Swen Jacob, the commander of the German pilots, said they often flew as close as 10 yards from the Russian jets and one occasion a Russian pilot gave him a middle-fingered salute. Lt Col Jacob joked to the Washington Post : ‘Maybe he watched too much “Top Gun”.’ But the situation in the Baltic is deadly serious, with the Russian air force clearly under orders from President Vladimir Putin to be more aggressive in the air. An RAF Eurofighter Typhoon plane takes off over a field of poppies. German Typhoons are currently based in Amari, Estonia, and it is possible they will be replaced by British Typhoons in January The Typhoon jet (left) is flown by the German air force and the RAF aswell as the Italian and Spanish air forces. It is matched in the air with the Russian Sukhoi SU-27 Flanker (right) The German pilots have scrambled 34 times since they were posted in Estonia on August 31, with Sukhoi SU-27 Flanker jets the most common threat. The Russian planes are free to fly along an international airspace corridor running between St Petersburg and the Kaliningrad enclave and west as far as the Danish island of Falster. Russian pilots often fly without transponders, making them virtually invisible and increasing the danger of mid-air collisions. Lt Col Jacob told the Post: ‘The fighter aircraft are almost always armed to the teeth. Six kinds of missiles. They could carry up to 10.’ This Sukhoi SU-27 Flanker showed off its abilities at the Farnborough air show a few years ago, before the icy blasts of the new cold war descended on Europe The Flanker’s full armoury includes Vympel R-27, R-73 and R-77 air-to-air missiles, Zvezda Kh-35U anti-ship missiles, S-8 and S-13 rockets and a collection of guided bombs and cluster bombs. The French air force also has four fighter jets based at Šiauliai in Lithuania. Both the French and German contingents are due to be rotated out of the area in January and replaced by other Nato pilots, including possibly RAF pilots from Britain.
+20 Goodybe Mr President: Russia’s President Putin (left) has massively increased Russian military spending and anti-Western rhetoric and most experts agree he has outmanouevred President Obama (right) militarily and politically The Baltic states seized their independence from the collapsing Soviet Union in 1991 and, increasingly worried about the Russian bear on their doorstep, joined Nato in 2004. Putin was enraged that Nato was within 100 miles of Russia’s second city, St Petersburg, and in the last year he has been increasingly probing Nato’s defences in the region. Yesterday Nato chiefs announced plans to put together a force of 300,000 troops which they can put on ‘high alert’ in eastern Europe. Relations between Russia and the West have plunged in the last year, with Moscow’s insistence on backing its Syrian ally, President Bashar al-Assad, at all costs leading to serious tension with the US, Britain and France. Most Nato members cut their defence spending dramatically since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 but Russia has been bolstering its military capabilities, holding parades involving more than 100,000 troops each year.
+20 Nato soldiers stand on a pontoon bridge constructed across the Vistula river in Poland during the NATO Anaconda-16 exercise earlier this year Moscow has been throwing its weight around in recent years – in 2008 Russian troops humiliated the Georgians and in turn the White House by invading South Ossetia and Abkhazia in support of pro-Moscow rebels. Then in 2014 Russia annexed Crimea and supported ethnic Russian rebels in the eastern Ukraine. President Obama’s ‘Russian reset’ policy, which was designed to improve relations with Moscow, has looked increasingly like a policy of appeasement.
+20 At the weekend Russian soldiers, dressed in World War Two era uniforms, commemorate the 75th anniversary of a famous parade in 1941 when the Red Army headed out of Moscow to take on the Nazis Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been accused of attempting to interfere with the US election process by hacking into the emails of senior members of the Democratic party and recently moved the Iskander nuclear-capable missiles into the Kaliningrad enclave, on the borders with Poland. But Nato members like Estonia, Poland and Romania, who are feeling increasingly threatened by Moscow, are now being promised a rapid deployment force. Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told The Times this week: ‘We have also seen Russia using propaganda in Europe among Nato allies and that is exactly the reason why Nato is responding. We are responding with the biggest reinforcement of our collective defence since the end of the Cold War. ‘We have seen Russia being much more active in many different ways. ‘We have seen a more assertive Russia implementing a substantial military build-up over many years; tripling defence spending since 2000 in real terms; developing new military capabilities; exercising their forces and using military force against neighbours,’ added Mr Stoltenberg.
+20 Russia recently moved its nuclear-capable Iskander missiles into the Kaliningrad enclave. The missiles could take out targets in Berlin Britain’s permanent representative to Nato, Sir Adam Thomson, told The Times it would currently take Nato six months to deploy a force of 300,000, which was simply too slow. At the weekend British military intelligence officers issued a warning over a new Russian ‘super tank’ which they claim is far superior to anything which is available to Nato. The document claims that Britain’s Challenger II main battle tank could be overpowered by the Kremlin’s new Armata tank. Officials believe the new Russian tank is ‘revolutionary’ and blames the government for failing to provide a proper response. The new tank has several highly advanced features including an un-manned turret which makes the machine safer for crews Yesterday’s military parade in Red Square commemorated a pivotal moment in World War Two when German forces were turned back from the gates of Moscow | 0 |
When it comes to Europe’s lengthy investigations into Google, Margrethe Vestager, the region’s competition chief, is hoping that the third time’s a charm. Ms. Vestager announced on Thursday a new round of antitrust charges against the company — the third set since early 2015 — claiming that some of the company’s advertising products had restricted consumer choice. The efforts are part of her continuing push to rein in Google’s activities in the European Union, where the Silicon Valley company has captured roughly 90 percent of the region’s online search market. “Google’s conduct, based on our evidence, is harmful to consumers,” Ms. Vestager told reporters in Brussels on Thursday. “Google’s magnificent innovations don’t give it the right to deny competitors the chance to innovate. ” The announcement represents a setback for Google, which vigorously denied any wrongdoing in two previous European antitrust charges linked to Android, its popular mobile operating system, and some of its dominant online search services. It also comes at a difficult time for Europe’s competition authorities, which have been unable to land a knockout punch against Google’s perceived abusive activities in the region, despite investigations that date back to 2010. The stakes are high. Google could face fines of up to 10 percent, or about $7 billion, of its global annual revenue if it is found to have broken Europe’s tough competition rules. For months, both sides have been jockeying for position, with Google already filing lengthy legal arguments about why it believes its European activities are lawful. Ms. Vestager’s antitrust charges are just one of a number of regulatory challenges to Google’s activities in Europe, ranging from tax investigations in France and Spain to concerns that Google does not fully protect people’s online privacy rights. The company denies any wrongdoing. Other Silicon Valley technology companies, including Amazon, Apple and Facebook, have also faced regulatory investigations in Europe, raising questions over whether the region’s lawmakers are specifically focusing on these American giants, which have come to dominate much of the digital world. European officials deny any such bias. Google said in a statement on Thursday that it would provide a detailed response to Europe’s latest charges, but it added, “We believe our innovations and product improvements have increased choice for E. U. consumers and promote competition. ” The company has until the fall to respond. American competition officials have also reviewed claims that Google abused its market position to favor its services over those of rivals, though the Federal Trade Commission has yet to find any violations. Europe’s new antitrust charges represent a further ratcheting up of the region’s often frosty relationship with Google. In particular, European antitrust officials are taking aim at some of the company’s online advertising tools — the main engine for Google’s $75 billion in annual revenue. They say that the company may have abused its dominant market position when offering some of its search products on companies’ websites. These businesses — including publishers and online retailers — can use Google’s search engine on their sites so that people can find information like newspaper articles or promotions. Such agreements with companies, which date to 2006, also include showing advertising next to search results, often provided by Google. Ms. Vestager said on Thursday that the technology company may have abused its dominance — it holds roughly an 80 percent market share in this type of niche search — by forcing companies to sign onerous contracts that limited competition and reduced consumer choice. Since 2009, Google has made it easier for advertising rivals to show their offerings alongside its services. But Europe’s competition chief said that Google still required companies to show a minimum number of ads on their site. The Silicon Valley company also requires businesses using the service to ask for approval on where some rivals’ ads may be shown on their websites. “All these restrictions allowed Google to protect its market share and stifle competition,” Ms. Vestager said. Europe’s antitrust authorities have also doubled down on a previous competition charge, announced last year, which claimed that Google had diverted traffic from competitors in favor of its own site. On Thursday, Ms. Vestager said her team had found new evidence to buttress their claims, adding that because of Google’s actions, European consumers may not have access to the most relevant search results when looking online for goods and services. Yet when asked about the failure of European antitrust authorities to order fines or changes to the way Google does business, despite several years of investigations, Ms. Vestager said she aimed to ensure the charges against the company stood up in European courts. “Speed is of the essence,” but “the other side of that coin is quality,” Ms. Vestager said on Thursday. “Sometimes that kind of quality comes at the cost of speed. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — The White House is considering giving the Pentagon more independent authority to conduct counterterrorism raids as part of an effort to accelerate the fight against the Islamic State and other militant organizations, administration officials said on Thursday. Such a step would allow military commanders to move more swiftly against terrorism suspects, streamlining a process that often dragged on under the Obama administration, frustrating Pentagon officials. The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, called the proposal “a philosophy more than a change in policy. ” He said that “the protocol is not changing in terms of what has to be signed off,” but added that Mr. Trump believed “these are the experts in the field. ” Critics say that giving the military more authority could lead to more problematic outcomes like the Special Operations raid in January in Yemen, which left a member of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 dead, as well as about two dozen civilians. It could also leave the Pentagon to take the blame when things go wrong. But one Defense Department official pointed to comments by President Trump about the Yemen raid as a sign that military commanders would be held responsible for botched operations whether the president signed off on them or not. Mr. Trump and Defense Department officials have maintained that the January raid — the first such operation approved by the new president — was successful, saying that valuable intelligence was collected. Military officials have been advocating an increase in raids in Yemen in particular. On Thursday, the United States resumed its air attacks on targets in Yemen, conducting strikes against several suspected Qaeda sites across the part of the country. The coordinated series of attacks occurred in three Yemeni provinces — Abyan, Shabwa and Baydha — that have been linked to terrorist activity, according to the Pentagon. The strikes were conducted against targets that had been developed before the January raid, a senior official said. On Monday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis presented the White House, under Mr. Trump’s directive, with a series of options for accelerating the fight against the Islamic State. Pentagon officials say that while much of the proposal would continue what the United States was doing under President Barack Obama, Mr. Mattis and senior military commanders want to target not just the Islamic State, but also Al Qaeda and other extremist organizations in the Middle East. The proposal on counterterrorism raids, first reported by the Daily Beast, is the latest step in Mr. Trump’s increased reliance on military commanders to run American national security policy. Mr. Trump has become increasingly reliant on Mr. Mattis, a retired Marine general, upon whom he consistently lavishes praise. He has also appointed Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster as his national security adviser, to replace a retired general, Michael T. Flynn. His Homeland Security secretary is yet another retired general, John F. Kelly. “We’re at a point now in our nation where general officers have an outsize role in the direction of the country,” said Andrew Exum, a retired Army Ranger and a Defense Department official in the Obama administration. Still, Mr. Trump has already shown himself willing to blame the generals when things go wrong. On Tuesday, he told Fox News that the Jan. 29 Yemen mission that led to the death of the Navy SEAL team member, Senior Chief Petty Officer William Owens, known as Ryan, “was a mission that was started before I got here. ” He added that “my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe, and they lost Ryan. ” Jon B. Alterman, the director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that the administration faced a delicate calculation over how much authority to cede to the generals. “One extreme,” he said, is “giving in the White House veto power over generals in the field. ” That should be avoided, he said. “At the same time,” he added, “if you’re going to target and kill someone, there needs to be some kind of process to ensure that it serves a strategic purpose. We shouldn’t be comfortable with the other extreme, essentially handing out death sentences without much deliberation. ” Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the strikes on Thursday in Yemen, which numbered more than 20, were “conducted in partnership with the government of Yemen and were coordinated” with President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Captain Davis said the attacks had targeted Qaeda militants, equipment and infrastructure. After the January raid, Mr. Hadi’s government had withdrawn permission for the United States to conduct Special Operations ground missions, a decision prompted by anger at the civilian casualties incurred in the raid. Computers and cellphones seized during that raid offered clues about attacks that Al Qaeda might be planning, including insights into new types of hidden explosives that the group is making and new training tactics, American officials said. But it is still unclear how much the information advances the military’s knowledge of the plans of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, and some intelligence and congressional officials have questioned how significant the information analyzed so far really is. “There are obvious contradictions about the relative value of intelligence,” said Senator Kamala D. Harris, a California Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, who added in an interview this week that she would be seeking more explanations from intelligence officials. According to a Yemeni military official, the airstrikes on Thursday in the Abyan mountains began around 3:30 a. m. local time. The local news media reported that at least three people suspected of being Qaeda members were killed in Shabwa Province. Residents near the scene in the Saeid region said an airstrike had destroyed a house used by Qaeda operatives. The death of Chief Owens came after a chain of miscues and misjudgments that plunged the elite forces into a ferocious firefight with Qaeda militants in a mountainous village in central Yemen. Three other Americans were wounded, and a $75 million aircraft was deliberately destroyed. A month later, the mission remains under intense scrutiny, with questions unabated over the casualties, how Mr. Trump and his aides approved the raid over a dinner meeting at the White House five days into his presidency, and the value of the information collected from the raid. “It is reasonable for the White House to determine which decisions they need to be part of and which ones they are comfortable deferring to the Pentagon,” said Derek Chollet, an assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration. “But a president has to think very carefully about this, because he may choose to delegate authority, but he cannot absolve himself of responsibility. ” | 1 |
DURHAM, N. C. (AP) — Snow and sleet pounded a large swath of the East Coast on Saturday, coating roads with ice and causing hundreds of crashes. Thousands of people lost power and forecasters warned of conditions from Virginia to parts of the Northeast. [advertisement | 1 |
Kanye West, the rapper, fashion designer, showman and Twitter ranter, has maintained a low profile since canceling his “Saint Pablo” tour and being hospitalized in amid rumors of severe exhaustion. But he recently reappeared in the public eye, showing up at an exhibition of furniture designed by Rick Owens, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles last week, and at Trump Tower on Tuesday morning, to meet with the . In both cases, the rapper looked like his normal self, wearing white sneakers, a sweatshirts and his usual . One seemingly small change: He was blond. Speculation about the new look has already spawned a hashtag: #blondye (Ye is Mr. West’s nickname). The most popular theory by far centered on Mr. West’s recent emotional turmoil. “Whenever someone comes in and suddenly wants a major color change out of nowhere, it usually means something is up,” said Laurie Daniel, a colorist at the Marie Robinson Salon in New York. “A divorce, a breakup, a crisis of some sort. ” Cases in point: Lindsay Lohan’s conversion to a brunette in early 2008, after a year of arrests and stints in rehab Britney Spears’s bald head, reportedly shaved by the pop star herself amid her divorce from Kevin Federline in 2007 and a custody battle Joe Jonas’s spikes after his breakup from Gigi Hadid and Gwen Stefani’s bob, which came a month after the announcement of her divorce from Gavin Rossdale, her husband of 13 years. Ms. Daniel typically tries to steer clients away from radical hair alterations like these if they are a way of managing distress. “As professionals, most of us try to talk people out of doing such a drastic thing, because it’s coming from a place of helplessness and not being able to change other aspects of your life,” she said. “Inevitably, they want to go back the same color they had before. ” Donna Rockwell, a clinical psychologist who has done research into fame and celebrity, took a more positive view of Mr. West’s light locks, however, comparing the change to Megyn Kelly’s decision to cut her hair short this year, which the anchor attributed to “a stronger mood,” or to Sia’s use of wigs to shield her face, a method that the singer said created a sense of mystery and gave her a modicum of privacy. “Changing our look can be very empowering to us,” Dr. Rockwell said. “For Megyn Kelly, it wasn’t so much a style issue as about empowerment. And for Sia, it’s almost as a political statement: ‘You will see me when I deem so. ’” She noted that hair, as a physical feature, has a special role that can be traced back as far as biblical times. “You have Samson,” she said. “He was this big, burly fellow, but his strength was in his hair. He lost his power when his hair got cut. Hair is how we define our strength, prowess, identity. ” She concluded that for Mr. West, as for other celebrities, a hair transformation tells the public that despite the scrutiny and the competing narratives being told by onlookers, he is still in charge of his own life. “It’s a way of taking control back,” she said. “It’s him saying, ‘This might be going on in the media and in the greater public opinion of me, but I have control and I will do what I want. ’” Other hypotheses regarding the blond top focused less on Mr. West’s mental state and more on his history. They included the suggestion that he’s taking a cue from his wife — Kim Kardashian West regularly changes from brunette to blond — or showing support for the musician Frank Ocean, whose album “Blonde,” released this year, wasn’t nominated for any Grammys. Mr. West was a writer of one of the songs on the album, according to liner notes. In October, Mr. West threatened that he wouldn’t show up to the Grammy Awards if “Blonde” weren’t nominated. (Granted, neither Mr. Ocean nor his label or representatives submitted the album for consideration.) Perhaps he decided to take a stance now that the lists of nominees have officially been released. Of course, it’s possible everyone is overthinking the matter, and Mr. West just felt like changing things up. That’s the view the musician Pharrell took during an interview on the radio station Hot 97 last week. “I think he’s an artist,” he said. “I think as people we have to be able to express ourselves. No matter where we are or what we are doing. ” | 1 |
60 King World News
In the coming financial wipeout, this will figure prominently, and not in a good way.
By Bill Fleckenstein President Of Fleckenstein Capital October 27 ( King World News ) – Overnight bond markets were quite weak again and it is looking more and more like the bond blowoff that began last summer now clearly has ended (30-year Treasury yields having risen from 2.1% to 2.6%) — and perhaps the 35-year bond bull market along with it. (If so, it will be the top of a lifetime, and I will discuss it more prospectively as it starts to play out.)… IMPORTANT: To find out which company Doug Casey, Rick Rule and Sprott Asset Management are pounding the table on that already has a staggering 18.1 million ounces of gold that just added another massive deposit and is quickly being recognized as one of the greatest gold opportunities in the world – CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored
There is no way to know that for sure without more time passing, so it will be very instructive to see how bonds respond to stock market weakness when we finally get some.
What Could Go Right? The size of the changes, while not absolutely large, have been quite dramatic given the nonexistent coupons. However, thus far that development has been completely ignored by equity markets the world over. Apparently, folks who have deserted the bond market because of no yield somehow seem to think their foray into stocks — which may have been viewed as yield alternatives at the margin — won’t be impacted by declining bond prices. Which means that they are liable to be in for a very rude and large surprise…eventually, whenever it matters.
That angst, though, certainly wasn’t a feature of the early going today, as our market celebrated a variety of “wins” at beat-the-number in technology and the absolutely mindboggling takeover by Qualcomm of NXPI, whereby Qualcomm intends to add about $40 billion of debt onto a market cap of $100 billion. When the economic realities of all these policies that have been pursued eventually start to matter the chip sector, given all the debt that has been piled on, it is going to be a veritable financial black hole, but that is getting ahead of ourselves.
Tesla Says, “Just Charge It” Naturally, fun and games were rewarded, as Tesla spiked after supposedly reporting “strong” cash flow, although it closed just slightly higher. A friend who is involved pointed out that nowhere in the press release was it disclosed that the company’s accounts payable exploded by $692 billion (although it was in the SEC filings), thereby creating the apparent improvement in cash flow.
Out of Sight, Out of Mine However, winning at beat-the-number was not good enough for the miners, as for the most part they reported good results but went largely unrewarded. Both Agnico Eagle and Barrick reported strong results and continued improvement. Goldcorp was kind of “in line,” as its quarter was on the sluggish side, but that was pretty well known in advance and it looks like its operations are set to accelerate. The big clunker once again was Newmont, which is about par for the course for that company. Nevertheless, as noted, not being “normal” stocks, the results of the miners were ignored because the mood of the day is once again apathy toward mining and metals.
In the afternoon the indices slid a bit, led by the Nasdaq, which lost 0.6% while the Dow/S&P held up better. Away from stocks, green paper was higher, fixed income was hit pretty hard, with the long end especially weak. Oil rallied 1% and the metals were flattish. Included below are three questions and answers from the Q&A’s with Bill Fleckenstein. Bonus Q&A Question: A friend of mine came into some money(not a lot but a lot for her),and knowing I used to trade full time asked me if I could give her any investment ideas. Sadly thanks to the FED all I could say is that there are no investments,only speculation(gold volatility is not for her). In a normal time I would have told her if she didn’t need the money now buy a 1 year CD and pick up a little extra interest with no risk to principal-but what’s the point now,since it would pay nothing. All I could say is leave it in the bank and if something changes and there is an opportunity,I’ll tell her. The FED damage continues…. Answer from Fleck: “ That will continue to be the case until the bond market finally breaks. And maybe, just maybe, that process has begun.” Question: Hi Fleck – Hope all is well. I recently came across this article that is an excellent read and wanted to share with the community on Blackrock’s Alladin risk management platform. Excerpt: “But “Aladdin”, the risk-management platform that occupies all those computers in the orchards, is not just used to look after BlackRock’s $4 trillion. The firm makes its facilities available in whole or in part to managers looking after $11 trillion more, a tally that has recently been growing by about $1 trillion a year. All told, Aladdin keeps its eyes on almost 7% of the world’s $225 trillion of financial assets. This is unprecedented—and it means flaws in the system could matter to more than just BlackRock, its investors and its customers. If that much money is being managed by people who all think with the same tools, it may be managed by people all predisposed to the same mistakes.” The monolith and the markets IMO, technology is the Achilles’ heel of the financial system now as well as human psychology via greed and fear. One day the rubber band will stretch the other way …. and that time it will be an unprecedented reversion to the mean event. Answer from Fleck: “ In the next wipeout, computers will likely figure prominently, and not in a good way. 🙂 Question: Fleck: GLD and SLV dance along or just above their 200 DMA while, for the most part, miners stuck in ugly downtrend channel bumping their heads their and/or at 50DMA and getting concussed back into their channels. Would you buy any more miners if they broke up and out of this downtrend in meaningful way (e.g., high volume) along with some follow-through? Sounds like you have full position in miners but would you get fuller? Regards Answer from Fleck: “ If I saw the exact right setup, I’d probably add some exposure for a trade. “Concussed?” Geez, you take the price action kind of personally, I think.” *** To subscribe to Bill Fleckenstein’s fascinating Daily Thoughts CLICK HERE.
***ALSO RELEASED: Legend Says This Will Translate Into A $100 Spike Overnight In Gold CLICK HERE.
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Kathleen Purvis, the Southern food writer most likely to let you know when you have something wrong, made a peach declaration on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Peaches, she said, should never be eaten before the Fourth of July. From there, one has six weeks to fill up. Ms. Purvis, the food editor of The Charlotte Observer, adopted the rule after an interview in the 1990s with Jeanne Voltz, the pioneering food editor, who died in 2002. Ms. Voltz said that her Alabama father never wasted his calories or his jaw power on a peach before July 4. It just wasn’t worth it. The private Facebook post unleashed a peach debate among a circle of cooks and food writers. “That is a North Carolina rule, not a Georgia or South Carolina rule,” admonished Nathalie Dupree, another Southern food writer with deeply held opinions. Texans offered that their peach season was almost over. Cathy Barrow, who writes Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Kitchen from her home in Washington, D. C. reported that she had eaten some great peaches from Georgia and Virginia recently, blaming climate change for their early arrival. Peach fans from the Northeast weighed in, crying over what is shaping up to be an exceptionally lousy peach season because of a late frost. Californians were silent, even though the drought has affected the largest state. Here in the South, where high humidity, rain and long hot nights give peaches plenty of time to plump up, the crop isn’t as abundant as farmers would like. Still, the fruit itself is exceptional, with dense but yielding flesh so full of sugary juice that leaning over the sink is the best approach to eating one. And in Atlanta, they are indeed at their best in July and August. But for many people, the need to eat a peach overrides seasonal perfection. Juan Carlos Melgar, the peach specialist at Clemson University, ate his first peach around the middle of May. It was a clingstone, a type of peach that is not as good to eat out of hand as the freestones. In Florida, farmers are planting peach trees that produce fruit as early as April or May. “They are not so nice looking,” Dr. Melgar said. “But they are peaches for people who want them as early as possible. People need their peaches. ” Indeed, we all need our markers of summer. For Ms. Purvis, it’s a fresh peach not eaten until the Fourth of July. For others, it’s a peach whenever one shows up. “I always go in too early and stay too long when it comes to peaches,” Katie Monson, a Charlotte resident, posted on the Facebook peach debate. “I can’t help myself!” | 1 |
in: Science & Technology October 28, 2016 marks the official launch of Zerocash (“Zcash,” “ZEC”), a new cryptocurrency that has received tremendous attention from the Bitcoin community. The technology is named for its zero-identity function of shielding transactions on its blockchain, or digital ledger. “Zerocash is a new protocol that provides a privacy-preserving version of Bitcoin (or a similar currency),” its developers explain . “[I]n Zerocash, users may pay one another directly, via payment transactions that reveal neither the origin, destination, or amount of the payment.” The enthusiasm surrounding the coin is demonstrated in the recent price for Zerocash futures contracts, representing one unit and valued against the price of one Bitcoin (BTC). Between September 15th and October 26th the price surged almost 1,300%—from a low of $18 (0.027 BTC) to a high of $261 (0.379 BTC). Upon its October 28 debut the price of one Zcash actually exceeded $100,000,000 (one million) on some exchanges , with an average of about around $15,000. The high valuation and scarcity is at least partly influenced by the novel way Zcash is being introduced. The cryptocurrency will not be initially available to investors for over-the-counter purchases and can only be obtained in gradually increasing increments over a month-long period through “ mining, ” or digital production by those with the necessary computer equipment and technological expertise. An additional reason for the building excitement around Zcash is that its development team consists of notable computer scientists at University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Tel Aviv University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology state actors, including Amazon, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology. The entire list of funders is as follows: *Amazon.com *Tel Aviv University Authentication Initiative *Center for Science of Information (CSoI), an NSF Science and Technology Center *Check Point Institute for Information Security *U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) *Air Force Research Laboratory *European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme *Israeli Centers of Research Excellence I-CORE program *Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology *The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust *Office of Naval Research *Simons Foundation *Skolkovo Foundation Libertarians especially, with their philosophical antipathy toward state monopoly that central banking epitomizes have been among the most vigorous supporters of cryptocurrency development and use. This is accentuated by the fact that traditional markets for “hard money” investment such as precious metals are likewise subject to heavy manipulation by the same or allied central banking outlets. Yet one would be hard-pressed to come up with a greater illustration of centralized state power than the array of interests listed above. Indeed, the involvement of such actors in developing the “next Bitcoin” should be recognized vis-a-vis the Western financial community’s continued advocacy for the drastic reduction of conventional central bank-issued currency from circulation (i.e. here , here , here , here and here ). In theory Zerocash differs from Bitcion in that it represents a bolstered technology for anonymous transactions veiled from third party scrutiny. According to the mechanics such transactions may be viewed and recorded by the specific parties who obtains proper authorization. What if a Trojan Horse capability could be engineered into the currency that might later be utilized by lettered agencies? This is the greatest fear of those who rightly question the loss of tangible exchange. Further, such a development would defeat ZeroCash’s desirability and purpose. By dismissing the possibility of such a feature Zcash users implicitly rely on the integrity of the developers themselves, most of whom are junior faculty or graduate students whose research, as noted, is at least partly funded by such deep state actors. Many Bitcoin enthusiasts regard cryptocurrencies as a sort of deus ex machina against the state. Along these lines, Zerocash’s institutional and scholarly veneer cloaks the more complex grant-generating interests lurking in the shadows. Recently even strong advocates of Bitcoin have pondered if the financial medium may have been developed with direct or indirect participation of the intelligence community. In the case of Zcash there can be no doubt of such deep state interest and involvement, which is of no small concern as the world moves toward a seemingly inevitable “cashless society.” Submit your review | 0 |
Asda shoppers ‘just generally angry’ 31-10-16 SHOPPERS at Asda are generally very angry people, it has emerged. Following scenes of chaos at the budget supermarket as card machines failed, customers confirmed that they were angry about that, but angrier still about having to shop in fucking Asda. Mother-of-two Donna Sheridan said: “This isn’t Lidl or Aldi where the slumming bourgeoisie go to semi-ironically buy a frozen lobster and a scuba mask, this is Asda and shit here is real. “You don’t choose the Asda life. The Asda life chooses you. “Even in Morrison’s you get a bit of social mobility, the odd shopper scrabbles up the supermarket class system to Sainsbury’s while dreaming in vain of Waitrose.” She added: “If anyone blocks my access to the massive boxes of tea bags then I’ll serve them a family pack of kickass.” Teaching assistant Nikki Hollis said: “The worst thing about the card machines going down was having to hand over real money for some of this shit. “It really made the reality of Asda Smart Price Porridge Oats hit home. I think that’s when I went apeshit with a checkout divider and declared myself the barbarian queen of the prepared meats section.”
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For months, Speaker Paul D. Ryan had chosen to remain largely silent, hoping that his party’s nominee for president would simply get across the finish line, dragging congressional Republicans across with him. But a 2005 recording made public on Friday of Donald J. Trump speaking in extraordinarily vulgar terms about women became a new bridge too far across a seemingly endless landmass separating civil behavior and Mr. Trump’s campaign for the presidency. Mr. Ryan responded by uninviting Mr. Trump from a rally in his home state, Wisconsin, on Saturday, and said he was “sickened” by Mr. Trump’s remarks. But even as many congressional Republicans, including some very conservative House members, pulled away from Mr. Trump on Saturday, Mr. Ryan did not go so far as to withdraw his support for the businessman and former reality TV star. Mr. Ryan’s decision keeps him in the political purgatory of endorsing the Republican nominee for president while continually having to say why he finds his remarks and policy positions despicable. Looking tired and touting the virtues of congressional legislative processes, Mr. Ryan addressed a crowd of supporters on Saturday in Elkhorn, Wis. Some Trump supporters could be heard screaming the candidate’s name in the background. “It is a troubling situation,” Mr. Ryan said, alluding to the situation with Mr. Trump. “That is not what we are here to talk about today. Do you know what we do here at Fall Fest? We talk about ideas. ” The developments come as Republicans are trying desperately in the final weeks of a campaign season to maintain their control of the Senate and a firm majority in the House. Many are weighing, based on the particulars of their own states and districts and race dynamics, whether now is the moment to move away from Mr. Trump. In many cases, they are looking to Mr. Ryan to be their seer. Mr. Ryan’s tepid backing of Mr. Trump has been less about fear of alienating Mr. Trump’s supporters — many Republicans in Congress need his base of white, high men to win — than about worry of signaling to the thousands of Republicans who are ambivalent about Mr. Trump that they need not vote this year. Should those Republicans stay home, they could potentially set off a chain reaction down the ballot. A huge turnout collapse would deeply threaten Senate Republican incumbents and plenty of House members, too. “Donald Trump’s lewd comments are the latest in a series of remarks he has made ranging from inappropriate to reprehensible that demonstrate why he is unsuitable for the presidency,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. “It was comments like these — including the statements he made about John McCain, a disabled reporter, the family of a fallen soldier and more — that caused me to decide this summer that I could not support his candidacy,” said Ms. Collins, who is not up for . If Mr. Ryan were thinking of withdrawing his support from Mr. Trump, as of Saturday, he still had only sent the nominee back to his room to think about his remarks. “I hope Mr. Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests,” Mr. Ryan said. As the most senior elected Republican — and the party leader who most publicly agonized over his endorsement of Mr. Trump — Mr. Ryan has for much of this year held outsize importance as the role model for how Republicans should deal with Mr. Trump. His reluctant endorsement was pushed by his but it also beckoned to others to join the “Trump Train. ” Now, once again, the speaker’s actions are under intense scrutiny. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a statement even before Mr. Ryan uttered a (prepared) word: “There have been more than enough ‘final straw’ moments during this campaign, and Speaker Ryan has continued to unabashedly put party first in supporting the most repulsive candidate for president that our country has ever seen,” Kelly Ward, the group’s executive director, said. “If Speaker Ryan steps away from Trump, it will be an act of political expedience and desperate which won’t redeem him or House Republicans in the eyes of voters. ” For scores of elected Republicans, Mr. Trump’s clash with parents who lost a son in combat in Iraq, his call to ban all Muslims from entering the country, his disparagement of a federal judge, his of nearly $1 billion from his taxes and his derision of a former Miss Universe for gaining weight were not enough to force their hands. But for a growing handful of members of Congress, “hot mike” remarks aimed broadly at more than half the electorate were the final blow. “I’m out,” Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah, told a local television station Friday night. “I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president. It is some of the most abhorrent and offensive comments that you can possibly imagine. ” But many more continued to ride the line between appalled and resigned. “As the father of three daughters,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, “I strongly believe that Trump needs to apologize directly to women and girls everywhere, and take full responsibility for the utter lack of respect for women shown in his comments on that tape. ” Democrats mocked the “template” of that “father of daughters” construction, pointing to nearly a dozen elected Republicans who used it. For candidates in swing states, the pressure points have become more intense. This is particularly true in the case of Senator Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, who is in what many believe to be the tightest race in the country. Ms. Ayotte, who has awkwardly bounced between distance from and acceptance of Mr. Trump, found herself in scalding hot water last week by suggesting during a debate with her opponent that Mr. Trump was a role model. “It is beyond comprehension how Senator Ayotte could continue to support this man for the highest office in the land, let alone call him a role model,” said Gov. Maggie Hassan, who is challenging Ms. Ayotte for her seat. On Saturday morning, Ms. Ayotte completed her move away from Mr. Trump by saying she would not vote for him. She was followed by Representative Joe Heck, who is running for an open Senate seat in Nevada. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, last seen in photos looking mildly humiliated as he did phone bank work on behalf of Mr. Trump — a former rival who once put Mr. Cruz’s wife in his Twitter cross hairs — said on Twitter: “These comments are disturbing and inappropriate, there is simply no excuse for them. ” Mr. Ryan, who many believe wants to run for president himself, has not been actively urging his colleagues to vote for Mr. Trump, and has instead repeatedly talked about the House Republican policy agenda, clinging to a small pamphlet of policy ideas like a talisman in the storm, hoping his image survives. | 1 |
For six days beginning on Oct. 21, visitors to the crenelated, fortresslike Park Avenue Armory will find its interior transformed into a light, modern setting. Translucent scrims will obscure the lobby and period rooms, which will open to the public for the first time since their recent restoration. Muted colors will turn the Drill Room into airy galleries. There’s a message in this metamorphosis, which was commissioned for the American debut of the European Fine Art Fair, known as Tefaf. With its careful vetting of objects on display, dating from antiquity to the present, the fair is considered the most prestigious art bazaar in the world. Tefaf’s arrival in Manhattan from its home in Maastricht, the Netherlands, is more than just another event on the cultural calendar. It’s an attempt by the fair, whose 270 exhibitors face a shrinking audience in Europe, to secure and revitalize its future. It’s a chance for dealers in historical art — Tefaf’s forte — to staunch the stampede of collectors into contemporary art and show that works of older art can look just as good in a modern setting as in a grand, classical home. And it’s a test of the global art market, which shrank to $63. 8 billion in 2015, a 7 percent drop from 2014, and continues to wobble, judging by auction results, this year. “Many more people need to know what we are doing,” said Patrick van Maris, the fair’s chief executive. But can Maastricht convert Manhattan? The people Mr. van Maris refers to are, mostly, Americans, who buy more art than any other nationality but constitute only 2, 000 to 2, 500 of the 75, 000 people who visit Tefaf Maastricht, a number that may dwindle further in an age of terrorism fears. Some longstanding exhibitors, like Otto Naumann, a New York dealer in old masters, are debating whether to continue showing at Maastricht at all. After years of pressure from exhibitors, Tefaf last winter agreed to collaborate with Artvest Partners, a New York advisory firm, on a split spectacle: a fall event for art through the 1920s and a second fair, in May, for modern and contemporary art and design. Mr. van Maris dismissed the idea that a soft market is not the time to establish a new outpost. Marc Porter, the former chairman of Christie’s Americas who is soon to take a high post at Sotheby’s, also played down the market gamble. “You can’t time the market,” he said. “You enter when the space and calendar become available and you have a critical mass of dealers. ” But Tefaf New York Fall, which hopes to attract 22, 000 visitors, is still a “risky bet,” according to Jonathan T. D. Neil, director of Sotheby’s Institute of Angeles. “There’s so much that happens in New York already,” he said. “People have access to a lot of this material on a nonstop basis. ” New York, in other words, is the opposite of Maastricht, and that may not be good. “Maastricht is a great fair because people go for a few days and there is nothing else to do, except restaurants,” said George Wachter, chairman of Sotheby’s North America and South America. “They go with buying in mind. ” For the New York fair, from perhaps 300 applicants (Tefaf declined to provide the exact number) a committee selected 94 dealers, from 13 countries, with reputations for showing art that is fresh to the market. They will be offering not just old master paintings and sculpture, for which Maastricht is famed, but also jewelry, antiquities, books and manuscripts, American paintings and decorative arts, drawings, European furniture and African, Oceanic, Islamic and Asian art. About 20 dealers, from Buenos Aires to The Hague to Paris, have never exhibited in New York (or at least not in years). But Maastricht’s location is only one of Tefaf’s challenges. There is also fair fatigue. In 2015 collectors could choose from 269 art fairs around the world, up from 105 in 2005, according to The Art Newspaper. The rotation of taste toward postwar and contemporary art has also hurt. Fairs like Art Basel in Switzerland, the premier contemporary fair, which regularly attracts 90, 000 visitors, clearly helped enlarge the pool of collectors. Tefaf New York wants to show Americans that “a vast area of material, which they have really only seen in museums and a few galleries here,” can be theirs, said Frances Beatty, president of the New York dealer Richard L. Feigen Company, who will be exhibiting in October. And visitors may find price points “that are not available in art,” said Michael Plummer, a partner in Artvest. “You can get master works for less money. ” Some buyers may come from an emerging group called who buy in more than one category, starting, say, in contemporary and then adding traditional art. “I see more and more collectors going in both directions,” said Marc Spiegler, global director of Art Basel. The challenge is to enlarge that group. With Tefaf in New York, others are capitalizing on the moment. Christie’s, which has already created themed sale weeks and auctions that mix collecting categories, has moved up its sales of old masters and art to Oct. 26. Fifteen Upper East Side dealers have organized October Art Week, beginning with evening receptions on Oct. 20. Many things could go wrong for Tefaf. For one, there is less than a week available to transform the Armory, then set up and vet the offerings. The fair may not attract attendees who buy enough to offset the higher costs in New York compared with Maastricht. The average cost of a Tefaf booth in New York is $38, 500, more than twice that in Maastricht. Add to that “introduction” fees, setup and decorating costs (dealers do the interiors of their booths) shipping expenses, and money spent on staffing and travel. The total can run $100, 000 to $250, 000 per exhibitor, dealers say. Some dealers do not seem worried. “The business goes the whole year round,” said Jorge Coll, a partner at Colnaghi, a dealer with galleries in London and Madrid. “You may start things in Europe and finish them in the U. S. or vice versa. ” Mr. van Maris, too, is taking a longer view. “Our audience said, ‘You have to be here.’ Let me tell you in a few years whether we’ve succeeded. ” | 1 |
BARRY GREY, WSWS.ORG O ne week before Election Day, with the polls tightening and the outcome uncertain, the entire US political system has been thrown into turmoil by the unprecedented intervention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The letter sent Friday to Congress by FBI Director James Comey, informing it of a new avenue of investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, has lifted the lid on a raging conflict within the state apparatus. Long-simmering tensions are exploding into open political warfare. Since Friday, various officials within the FBI and the Justice Department have let it be known that the investigation into Clinton has generated sharp divisions, with local FBI offices demanding a more aggressive investigation into Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified information as well as a separate probe into allegations of corruption involving the multi-billion-dollar Clinton Foundation. This internecine conflict intensified after Comey announced last July that the investigation into Clinton’s emails was completed and no criminal charges would be brought. With his letter to Congress, Comey intervened on the side of the faction calling for more aggressive action against Clinton. Justice Department officials have let it be known that they opposed Comey’s decision to make public, just 11 days before the November 8 election, the agency’s review of additional emails. The Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, along with former attorneys general, Republican as well as Democratic, have bitterly denounced Comey’s action. Harry Reid, the top Senate Democrat, sent a letter accusing Comey of violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from publicly acting in support of one or another candidate. At least one Democratic congressman has demanded that the FBI chief immediately resign. Only a few weeks ago, Clinton and the Democratic Party were indignantly denouncing Trump’s charges that the election was rigged. Such charges, they claimed, were an unpatriotic slur on the pristine character of US elections and American democracy. Now, under changed circumstances, it is they who are shouting foul and accusing the FBI of trying to rig the vote against them. In fact, both factions of the ruling class have utilized the methods of scandal-mongering to fight out their battles. Over the past several months, the Democrats have centered their campaign against Trump on sex scandals and neo-McCarthyite, manufactured claims that Trump is a proxy of the Kremlin. In his letter to Comey, Reid doubled down on these charges by accusing the FBI of refusing to make public “explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government—a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States…” Trump, for his part, had pointed to the pro-Clinton bias of the media, denounced the failure of the FBI to prosecute Clinton, and made thinly veiled appeals to anti-immigrant and racist sentiment by charging that Election Day would see systematic ballot-stuffing in predominantly immigrant and minority communities. In fact, the entire election is a mockery of genuine democracy. Neither of the parties can offer any policies to address the real concerns of working people. Mud-slinging and scandal-mongering are used to bury the burning issues of war, social inequality and attacks on democratic rights. The latest turn in the presidential race underscores the reactionary basis on which Clinton and the Democrats have conducted their campaign. They have sought to oppose the fascistic Trump from the right, seeking to win the support of Republican leaders and voters as well as the military/intelligence establishment by promoting Clinton’s credentials as an advocate of military intervention, while declaring Trump unfit to serve as commander in chief. Their barely disguised indifference to the plight of workers and lack of support within the working class have made them highly vulnerable to the machinations of pro-Trump forces within the state. These developments have also underscored the treacherous role of Bernie Sanders. Having won mass support in the working class and among young people by portraying himself as a socialist and opponent of the “billionaire class,” he has sought to use his influence to channel social opposition back behind the Democratic Party and the campaign of Clinton, the favored candidate of Wall Street. He has thereby played a critical role in preempting and blocking the emergence of an independent political movement of the working class. Regardless which candidate wins the election next Tuesday, nothing will be resolved in the crisis of the two-party system. Both candidates, the two most unpopular in US history, are despised by broad masses of the population, and the election result will be seen as illegitimate by a majority of the American people. A Trump victory will be seen by tens of millions of workers as a declaration of war against the working class. A Clinton win will be seen as a continuation of the reactionary status quo. Nor will the ferocious conflicts within the state recede. These are rooted objectively in a historic crisis of American and world capitalism. Economic crisis and decay, ever-widening social polarization and intensifying geopolitical conflicts have fatally eroded the foundations of bourgeois democracy. The unprecedented political crisis that has erupted in the 2016 elections is the outcome of a protracted process. The breakdown of the political system emerged in open and explosive form in the 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton on the basis of a sex scandal. In an editorial titled “Is America drifting towards civil war?” published by the World Socialist Web Site following the vote by the House of Representatives to impeach Clinton, we wrote: “The crisis in Washington arises from an interaction of complex political, social and economic processes. Bourgeois democracy is breaking down beneath the weight of accumulated and increasingly insoluble contradictions.” That watershed event was followed by the stolen election of 2000 and the launching one year later of the “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks. Fifteen years of uninterrupted and ever expanding war, accompanied by a frontal attack on democratic rights and the erection of the framework of police state rule, the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and a further transfer of wealth to the rich have only increased the power of the military and intelligence “deep state” and further eroded the traditional constitutional framework of capitalist rule in America. These processes have found a toxic expression in the degrading spectacle of the 2016 election. In an election dominated by the growth of social opposition and disgust with the entire political system, voters are left with the “choice” between two corrupt, right-wing representatives of the richest 1 percent. It is crucial that the working class intervene into the political crisis as an independent force fighting for a program that addresses its needs and interests, not the drive for profit of the financial aristocracy. Short of this, the crisis of the two-party system will produce only a further lurch to the right, with more brutal attacks on working class living standards and an accelerated movement toward dictatorship and a new world war. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE ABOUT THE AUTHOR The author is a senior member of the Social Equality Party, publisher of wsws.org, and a formation which he naturally favors as an option in this election. 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Evgeny Demin and Elena Demina moved from the Krasnodar Territory in southern Russia to Moscow with a small idea and big ambitions. In 2000, when they were not yet 25 years old, they founded SPLAT, a company that today supplies personal care and household chemical products to 45 countries around the world.
“In the beginning, the company specialized in the production of biologically active additives and cosmetics based on Spirulina platensis seaweed — thus the company name,” explains Evgeny Demin.
They quickly decided to target their efforts in another direction: on the production of next-generation toothpaste.
“From the very start, we agreed to create the best toothpaste in the world, so that it would surpass all expectations,” he said.
Evgeny Demin and Elena Demina / Source: Press photo
The couple first rented a factory for their operations near Moscow and in 2009 they opened their own plant 300 miles northwest of the Russian capital in the Novgorod Region. Today it employs more than 350 people. A total of 700 people work for the company, including in sales and marketing offices abroad.
The company has opened a subsidiary and hired a local team in China and is now looking forward to working with its Chinese partners, according to SPLAT’s press service. The company’s premium products are particularly popular in Germany and SPLAT has also started to sell its products in France. The company currently owns more than 10 Russian and foreign patents. The right segment
From the very beginning SPLAT toothpaste was priced about twice that of its supermarket rivals. Entering the premium segment, where there were practically no competitors, was one of the factors of the brand’s success, says Alexander Yeremenko, managing director of the BrandLab marketing agency.
According to Yeremenko when SPLAT debuted, two major international players, Procter&Gamble and Colgate, had claimed the middle segment of the Russian market, while the lower end was dominated by Russian producers selling very cheap toothpaste.
“In the high-price segment, besides LACALUT, there were no important players,” Yeremenko said.
Source: Press photo
Some of SPLAT’s exclusive offerings include black toothpaste made from Karelian coal and golden toothpaste featuring extracts of diamond and colloidal gold. SPLAT’s scientific laboratory and R&D center in Moscow are in charge of developing the toothpaste’s unique components.
In 2008 the company began exporting its products and by 2015 foreign sales made up 17 percent of its revenue. One of its most successful foreign markets is Turkey, where SPLAT was able to sign an exclusive contract with one of the country’s leading perfume and cosmetics chains.
The company has opened a subsidiary and hired a local team in China and is now looking forward to working with its Chinese partners, according to SPLAT’s press service. The company’s premium products are particularly popular in Germany and SPLAT has also started to sell its products in France. The company currently owns more than 10 Russian and foreign patents. A personal approach to customer loyalty
The company has not divulged any financial indicators, but in value terms SPLAT holds 9.7 percent of the Russian market and in terms of sales it has a 14.7-percent market share, says Timur Nigmatullin, an analyst at Finam Holding.
Nigmatullin attributes SPLAT’s success in part to its unusual marketing strategy. The company does not employ TV advertising on principle and focuses its energies on repeat sales to loyal customers.
Yeremenko believes that SPLAT’s marketing efforts were appropriate for a product in the high-end segment of the market where consumers value innovation and are ready to pay for it.
“SPLAT did not have money for promotion, which is why all efforts were directed at achieving a high-quality and innovative product,” Yeremenko said, adding that the firm’s unique offerings, such as being the first black toothpaste or having unusual taste and components are all elements of marketing, which requires constant research and experimentation.
The company also takes a personal approach to encouraging brand loyalty. Each SPLAT toothpaste package contains a letter from Evgeny Demin himself, the firm’s general director. At the end of each letter, he provides his personal email address noting that he responds to all messages himself.
“The director’s letters in the packages create the impression of the producer’s responsibility to the customer; [they] guarantee a quality approach and the company’s excellent result on the market,” Yeremenko said. Not just toothpaste
Today SPLAT has diversified and it produces more than 200 different products from its 50,000 sq. ft. plant in the Novgorod Region. The company’s offerings include toothpastes, brushes, foams and mouthwashes, the BioMio ecological line of housekeeping products, the organic LALLUM Baby line of natural cosmetics for children and mothers and the HEYA series of natural shampoos and conditioners.
Source: Press photo
HEYA is one of SPLAT’s latest developments and is one of co-founder Elena Demina’s proudest accomplishments.
“The idea of creating products for health and hair beauty that would be just as unique and effective as all the other SPLAT products, came to us a long time ago,” she said. “Our team spent more than five years working on it.”
The market for hair care products is highly competitive, but SPLAT’s offerings, made exclusively from natural ingredients without silicon or parabens, are unique. The company took its time developing the HEYA series components, but Demina says she is very happy with the result.
“We do not compete with other hair care producers because, all modesty aside, we believe that our products are unique and unrepeatable,” she said.
Source: Press photo
Nigmatullin considers the Russian market robust and large enough to accommodate new products, despite the unfavorable economic situation and the difficult investment climate.
“The SPLAT phenomenon is not the only one,” Nigmatullin said. “There are many other examples: UAZ, Ural motorcycles, a long list of medicine produced in local plants, confectionery and so on.”
According to Yeremenko SPLAT’s success can be attributed to hard work and planning.
“Actually, SPLAT’s story is not as magical as it seems,” Yeremenko said. “It is proof of a solid marketing approach, which basically any producer can adopt.”
In his view, SPLAT’s founders demonstrated sound judgment and perseverance in developing their idea.
“The problem with most Russian companies is not the lack of ideas, but that they don’t know where they’re going,” he said. “But SPLAT had a strategy and most importantly, it patiently implemented it.” Subscribe to get the hand picked best stories every week Related | 0 |
Tuesday on CNN’s “Situation Room,” while reacting to a New York Times report that in February President Donald Trump asked former FBI Director James Comey to end the investigation into Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, network chief political correspondent Dana Bash said the deep state knew “how to get back, even if you’re the president of the United States. ” Bash said, “So explosive. So incredibly serious. The Times report also says that James Comey created similar memos after the other meetings that he had with the president. So this could be just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe the most explosive, but it’s very clear that James Comey wanted to get out there that this happened, created this paper trail real time, contemporaneously rather, in order to protect himself from exactly what happened last week, him being fired, him being blamed. You know, wanting to know that he has sort of the information at his disposal if, in fact, this happened. ” She continued, “If you just take a step back, Wolf, just in the past 24 hours, right or wrong, what this president has done, his first 100 plus days, even before he came into office is pick fights with the intelligence community and now the law enforcement community. Particularly the way, never mind he fired James Comey, but the way in which he did it, not giving him the respect of actually telling him in person or at least not having him find out from cable news. So we know that they talk about the deep state — well these are communities that have a lot of loyalty within and know how to get back, even if you’re the president of the United States. ” “And the fact is that when the intelligence community found out about the conversation that the president had with the Russians, talking about classified information, we don’t know all the details,” she added. “We’re told that it wasn’t as bad as it might have seemed initially, that’s what the White House sources are saying, but still, the intelligence community leaked that out. Now we know that the FBI director was keeping notes on many things. But the fact that this is the first one that he made clear and made public and it’s so incredibly explosive, as Jeff said, is the clearest most dangerous sign yet of potential obstruction of justice. Makes you think, what else is going to happen? And it’s very hard for Republicans who have in the past 24 hours been more aggressively critical of the president begging for a day or hour, very hard for them not to take this incredibly seriously. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
WASHINGTON — When President Trump welcomes President Xi Jinping of China to his Florida club for two days of meetings on Thursday, the studied informality of the gathering will bear the handiwork of two people: China’s ambassador to Washington and Mr. Trump’s Jared Kushner. The Chinese ambassador, Cui Tiankai, has established a busy back channel to Mr. Kushner, according to several officials briefed on the relationship. The two men agreed on the club, as the site for the meeting, and the ambassador even sent Mr. Kushner drafts of a joint statement that China and the United States could issue afterward. Mr. Kushner’s central role reflects not only the peculiar nature of this first meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi, but also of the broader relationship between the United States and China in the early days of the Trump administration. It is at once highly personal and bluntly transactional — a strategy that carries significant risks, experts said, given the economic and security issues that already divide the countries. While Chinese officials have found Mr. Trump a bewildering figure with a penchant for inflammatory statements, they have come to at least one clear judgment: In Mr. Trump’s Washington, his is the man to know. Mr. Kushner first made his influence felt in early February when he and Mr. Cui orchestrated a phone call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi. During that exchange, Mr. Trump pledged to abide by the “One China” policy on Taiwan, despite his earlier suggestion that it was up for negotiation. Now Mr. Trump wants something in return: He plans to press Mr. Xi to intensify economic sanctions against North Korea to pressure the country to shut down its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. He has also vowed to protest the chronic trade imbalance between the United States and China, which he railed against during his presidential campaign. China’s courtship of Mr. Kushner, which has coincided with the marginalization of the State Department in the Trump administration, reflects a Chinese comfort with dynastic links. Mr. Xi is himself a “princeling”: His father was Xi Zhongxun, a major figure in the Communist revolution who was later purged by Mao Zedong. Not only is Mr. Kushner married to the president’s daughter Ivanka, but he is also one of his most influential advisers — a with no previous government experience but an exceptionally broad portfolio under his . “Since Kissinger, the Chinese have been infatuated with gaining and maintaining access to the White House,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a senior director for Asia in the Obama administration. “Having access to the president’s family and somebody they see as a princeling is even better. ” Former American officials and China experts warned that the Chinese had prepared more carefully for this visit than the White House, which is still debating how harshly to confront Beijing, and which has yet to fill many important posts in the State Department. Several said that if Mr. Trump presented China with an ultimatum on North Korea, it could backfire. “China will either decide to help us with North Korea, or they won’t,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Financial Times that was published on Sunday. “And if they do, that will be very good for China, and if they don’t, it won’t be good for anyone. ” The president said that he had “great respect” for the Chinese leader, but that he would warn him that “we cannot continue to trade if we are going to have an unfair deal like we have right now. ” Shortly after winning the election, Mr. Trump said he might use the “One China” policy, under which the United States recognizes a single Chinese government in Beijing and has severed its diplomatic ties with Taiwan, as a bargaining chip for greater Chinese cooperation on trade or North Korea. Mr. Trump had thrown that policy into doubt after taking a congratulatory phone call from the president of Taiwan. That caused consternation in Beijing, and Mr. Xi refused to get on the phone with Mr. Trump until he reaffirmed the policy. After the two leaders finally spoke, the White House said in a statement that the men had “discussed numerous topics, and President Trump agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honor our One China policy. ” Mr. Trump insisted on that wording, according to a person briefed on the process, because he wanted to make clear that he had made a concession to Mr. Xi. Since that call, Mr. Cui has continued to cultivate the Kushner family. Later in February, he invited Ivanka and the couple’s daughter, Arabella, to a reception at the Chinese Embassy to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Inside the White House, the most visible sign of Mr. Kushner’s influence on China policy came in March at the beginning of a meeting of the National Security Council’s “principals committee” to discuss North Korea. He was seated at the table in the Situation Room when Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, walked in. Seeing no chairs open, General Dunford headed for the backbenches, according to two people who were there. Mr. Kushner, they said, quickly offered his chair to General Dunford and took a seat along the wall. While administration officials confirm that Mr. Kushner is deeply involved in China relations, they insist that Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has taken the lead on policy and made many of the decisions on the choreography and agenda of the meeting at . In March, Mr. Tillerson made his first trip to Beijing as secretary of state, during which he and Mr. Xi discussed the planning in a meeting. He was criticized afterward for repeating the phrases “mutual respect” and “ solutions,” which are drawn from the Chinese diplomatic lexicon and have been interpreted to assert a Chinese sphere of influence over the South China Sea and other disputed areas. A senior American official said that Mr. Tillerson applied his own meaning to those phrases — “” he said, was originally an American expression — and was not accepting China’s definition. He said the secretary had adopted a significantly tougher tone in private, particularly about China’s role in curbing North Korea’s provocations. Mr. Kushner has passed on proposals he got from Mr. Cui to Mr. Tillerson, who in turn has circulated them among his staff in the State Department, officials said. But the department’s influence has been reduced as many positions remain unfilled, including that of assistant secretary for East Asian affairs. Though Mr. Tillerson has kept a low profile, officials said he was trying to develop his own relationship with Mr. Trump at regular lunches and dinners. Mr. Kushner’s involvement in China policy prompted questions after reports that his company was negotiating with a politically connected Chinese firm to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in his family’s flagship property, 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. On Wednesday, amid the glare of negative publicity, Mr. Kushner’s company ended negotiations with the firm, the Anbang Insurance Group. Another question hanging over the meeting is whether the in the White House will wield their influence. Mr. Trump ran for the presidency on a stridently platform, accusing the Chinese, wrongly, of continuing to depress the value of their currency, and threatening to impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports. The architects of that policy — Stephen K. Bannon, the chief strategist, and Peter Navarro, the director of the National Trade Council — have said little publicly about China since entering the White House. But on Thursday, Mr. Trump predicted that the meeting would be “very difficult” because, as he said on Twitter, the United States would no longer tolerate “massive trade deficits. ” By inviting Mr. Xi to Mr. Trump’s “Southern White House,” the president is conferring on him the same status as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, who spent two days in Florida, playing golf with the president and responding to a crisis after North Korea tested a ballistic missile. Such a gesture is particularly valuable, experts said, given that China is not an ally like Japan. Mr. Xi does not play golf — as part of his campaign, he cracked down on Communist Party officials’ playing the sport — so he and Mr. Trump will have to find other ways to fill the 25 hours that the Chinese president will be at the club. On Thursday evening, Mr. Trump and his wife, Melania, will host Mr. Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, for dinner. There are obvious parallels between the meeting and the 2013 summit meeting at Sunnylands in California, Walter Annenberg’s estate, where President Barack Obama and Mr. Xi got acquainted over long walks in the desert landscape and a dinner of grilled porterhouse steaks and cherry pie. But there are important differences, too. By the time Mr. Obama met with Mr. Xi in California, they had already met once before, when Mr. Xi was vice president. Mr. Xi held extensive meetings with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveling with him around the United States. Some former officials said the meeting might reveal the disparity in experience between the two leaders and their teams. “Sunnylands was difficult because Xi was new, while Obama had his sea legs,” said Mr. Medeiros, the former Obama administration official. “What’s interesting is that the polarity here is reversed. Xi has his sea legs Trump does not. ” | 1 |
BEIJING — “FAKE NEWS,” a Twitter post declared. “” another said. “Cleverly orchestrated lies,” a news article asserted. President Trump’s harangues against the American news media appear to have inspired a new genre of commentary in China’s state media, whose propagandists spiced up social media posts and news articles with Trumpian flourishes this week. People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, mimicked Mr. Trump’s characteristic bluster — and his fondness for capital letters — on Friday in denouncing Western news coverage of a Chinese lawyer and human rights advocate who said he had been tortured. An article on the topic a day earlier by Xinhua, the news agency, had accused the foreign news media of “hype” and suggested that legal activists were manipulating the press to “smear the Chinese government. ” “The stories were essentially fake news,” Xinhua wrote, adopting a phrase that Mr. Trump has embraced. The Chinese government has long denounced Western news organizations as biased and dishonest — and in Mr. Trump, Beijing has found an American president who often does the same. The irony in China’s criticism is apparent, given Beijing’s history of obscuring facts and censoring stories that officials deem a threat to the party. Experts said on Friday that Mr. Trump’s continuing attacks on the news media would help lend credibility to Chinese efforts to undermine Western ideals and foreign journalists. “Trump’s attacks on the media will offer a good excuse for Chinese officials to step up their criticism of Western democracy and press freedom,” said Qiao Mu, a journalism professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University. “China can turn to Trump’s attacks to say Western democracy is hypocrisy. ” Some of Mr. Trump’s remarks about the news media would not seem out of place in some of China’s leading broadsheets, where commentators regularly denounce independent reporting by foreign news outlets on delicate subjects like Taiwan or religious persecution. Rights advocates said Mr. Trump had given China an opportunity to further distort the boundaries of journalism. “If the Chinese version of journalism, which is really only propaganda, is considered mainstream, it will challenge the understanding of what real journalism should be,” said Patrick Poon, a researcher for Amnesty International in Hong Kong. The heated commentary in the Chinese news media came in response to foreign coverage of a Chinese lawyer, Xie Yang, whose account of torture at the hands of interrogators was widely reported in January, including in The New York Times. The reports about Mr. Xie, who is still in custody, were based on transcripts of his interviews with his lawyers. Xinhua’s report suggested that the account of the torture of Mr. Xie, who was formally arrested last year on a charge of inciting subversion of state power, was fabricated. “Investigations by reporters and an investigative team have showed that the accusations were nothing but cleverly orchestrated lies,” the report said. Xinhua said Jiang Tianyong, a prominent human rights lawyer, had invented the story and shared it with foreign activists. One of Mr. Xie’s lawyers, Chen Jiangang, denied that on Friday. In a statement, Mr. Chen reiterated that Mr. Xie had provided the account of his torture, describing in detail the meeting at which he had done so. Chinese officials routinely block efforts to report on topics that the government deems delicate. On Friday, the BBC reported that its journalists had been harassed by the authorities in a village in Hunan Province while trying to interview a woman who says her family’s land was stolen. The BBC said that its journalists were assaulted during the encounter, and that a crowd in the village had smashed the crew’s cameras. | 1 |
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Art Cashin: Director of Floor Operations for UBS Financial Services & CNBC Market Commentator – UBS has over $650 billion under management. Art has over 50 years of Wall Street experience, which gives him the ability to offer valuable insights to investors and traders. When he started in the industry, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was actually in the 700-800 range. He shares his analysis and gives the pulse of the market from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Art is one of the most respected people in the world when it comes to analyzing the action in the US stock market and provides an objective and unbiased view of the current market situation. His daily market commentary is read internationally by clients and peers. Biography from cnbc.com Art Cashin, CNBC Commentator & Director of Floor Operations for UBS Financial Services Art Cashin is the Director of Floor Operations for UBS Financial Services and a regular markets commentator on CNBC. Each trading day from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, he shares his analysis and pulse of the market with CNBC viewers. About author | 0 |
John Kerry’s Remarks at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs by John F. Kerry Voltaire Network | Chicago | 26 October 2016 Well, good evening, everybody. And thank you, very, very much to Ivo Daalder. Thank you, sir, Mr. Ambassador. And thanks to the Chicago Council for Global Affairs for inviting me here. And a profound thank you to Ambassador Lou Susman for his very generous introduction. And most importantly, Marge and Lou, thank you for many, many years of extraordinary friendship. I really value it. And I think everybody is grateful for the service of both of these ambassadors. Thank you.
With respect to my being here, I have to tell you I was surprised that you guys showed up given the Cubbies. (Laughter.) I figured that – I was surprised at the generous welcome, because I thought the only people who would come would be White Sox fans – (applause) – but I’m pleasantly, pleasantly surprised. More to say about that.
Ivo is one of our top foreign policy experts of the generation, and I had the occasion to be at his residence in Brussels with President Karzai and the then chief of staff of Pakistan’s armed forces, and we abused his premises significantly for hours while we negotiated. But I’m grateful for the job he did. He was an outstanding United States ambassador to NATO.
And Lou, folks, if you don’t know it, is a Chicago fixture. He is a former emissary to the United Kingdom to the Court of St. James, a lawyer, a businessman, and as I mentioned, a longtime friend. He is also one of those very irritating people who no matter what he tries he succeeds at it. (Laughter.)
So Ambassador Daalder and Susman, you guys make a great team. And my deepest respects to you, and thank you for continuing with the council in providing leadership. We really appreciate it.
To my former colleague on Capitol Hill, Senator Dick Durbin, to Secretary Bill Daley, to Ambassador Jim Dobbins, members of the consular corps, and to all of you, thank you very much for your warm welcome to Chicago, the hometown of my boss. (Applause.)
I’m not saying this for your consumption; I say it anywhere and everywhere. President Obama is going to go down in history as one of America’s significant and most accomplished chief executives. (Applause.) And lucky guy, he’s only in his fifties. He’s got a lot more to contribute to the country, so we’re all lucky.
And over the years, I have heard President Obama talk a lot about Chicago, as you could imagine. And I am sure he has heard me as a champion of Boston complaining about Chicago’s unconscionable kidnapping of Theo Epstein and Jon Lester. (Laughter.) Envy is a terrible thing, folks. (Laughter.)
We all know that for many decades, Boston and Chicago were linked by an evil curse hatched by demons dwelling thousands of miles beneath the Earth’s crust. (Laughter.) And a dozen years ago, with Theo’s help, Boston broke from the spell. And skies opened, the lotus blossoms fell like rain. (Laughter.) And because some of you may be superstitious – which actually means all of you are superstitious – I will say no more except to say: Forget about yesterday. Your Cubbies are wicked awesome, as we say in Boston. (Applause.) And I promise to get you home tonight before the seventh inning stretch. (Laughter.)
Now, my focus this evening is on diplomacy, the art of negotiating and building relationships. It is a skill that some people have and others do not. For example, when Ulysses S. Grant was a boy, he lived across the state in Galina. And at the age of eight, he got permission from his dad to buy a neighbor’s horse. So he went to the neighbor’s farm and he told the guy there, “Papa says I can offer you $20 for the colt, but if you don’t take it, I’m to offer twenty-two-and-a-half. And if you don’t take that, I’m to give you 25.”
Now, my friends, with that kind of transparency, we could put WikiLeaks out of business. (Laughter.) But I’ve got to tell you, it makes you wonder how the North ever won the Civil War. (Laugher.) Now, we can all read about the Civil War and have, and we can all sit in the grandstands and watch the World Series, but actually, we’re here tonight not as spectators. We’re here as real-life participants in a troubled world. And we know that we have choices to make as citizens and as a country that can spell the difference between security and suffering, progress and stagnation, in an era of rapid, breathtaking transition. And that breathtaking transition is at the heart of a lot of the discontent that we see playing out in the most disturbing and unattractive ways.
But we have to take seriously what’s underneath it. The stark and bipolar divide of the Cold War that I encountered when I first arrived in the United States Senate that I grew up with, as a kid who grew up through the Cold War, but which I arrived at in the Senate more than 30 years ago, that bipolar, simple world has disappeared, and I don’t think anyone regrets that. But we are confronted today by a globe that is both no less dangerous and far more complex, where the power to influence events is less hierarchical, far more broadly dispersed, and change is at least as likely to be driven from the bottom as it is from the top.
For better and often for worse, non-state actors have assumed a more prominent role on the global stage. Chicago’s MacArthur Foundation is one of the happier examples. And the astonishing march of technology has and continues to revolutionize the workplace, and seemingly it has shrunk time and space, and that makes neighbors of all of us. Political instability, economic hardships, and even climate change have caused record numbers of people to migrate across borders in search of a better life. And all of this has made the job of governing in a way that meets public expectations harder than it has ever been before.
Here in the United States, we saw our nation attacked on 9/11 and our armed forces enter a fight at great cost in Afghanistan and Iraq. In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of Daesh/ISIL and again experienced the tragedy of terrorist murders close to home. We are confronted as well by the specter of cyber warfare, and by the unwelcome return of vicious sectarian violence and extreme nationalism.
It is little wonder that some yearn for what seems like a far simpler time. But it would be foolish to think that we can move ahead with our eyes firmly fixed on the rearview mirror. International challenges can’t be wished away, they can’t be ignored. They have to be met with honesty and determination and confidence. And that is the approach that our country at its best has always taken. As a famous son of Illinois once said, “optimist” is just another name for an American. And I agree – on at least this point – with Ronald Reagan. (Laughter.)
Put simply, the tasks that we face in the world today are more diverse and more complicated than those that our predecessors wrestled with. And frankly, our strategies have to reflect that and they don’t always. Some problems are relatively narrow in scope or they’re confined to a particular region, but a few – such as those that are posed by poor governance, of which there is far too much in this world right now – corruption, climate change, violent extremism; these are problems and challenges that are literally generational in their scope, and they require both short-term and long-term actions – something that our politics is finding it really difficult to deal with to our great detriment as a country.
At times we will be able to count on global institutions, but more often we’re going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting ourselves. That’s what I’ve learned as Secretary. In every case, we have to act with our nation’s values and our best interests in mind. And I want to be crystal clear that is exactly what we are doing.
Now, we’ve all heard some people accuse the United States of standing aloof from the world’s problems or somehow being in retreat. I’ve heard that narrative. I hear people say why is the United States disengaging? Why are you pulling back? And I scratch my head, and I say, where are these people coming from? But those assertions are, to use a diplomatic term of art, absolute nonsense. The truth is that the United States today is more deeply engaged in more places simultaneously on more critical issues with greater consequence than ever before in the history of this nation, and I know that. (Applause.)
Now, let me run through that a little bit so it’s not just a sentence, it’s not rhetoric. Consider for a moment the world’s most dynamic region.
The Asia Pacific is essential to the security and the prosperity of the United States – period. Of our top ten trading partners in the world, five of them are in Asia. The globe’s most populous country and its largest democracy are located there. In East Asia, we have enduring defense alliances with Japan and the Republic of Korea that we continue to strengthen and reaffirm and that we have strengthened and reaffirmed in this administration twice since I have been Secretary.
We have a regional diplomatic agenda that covers everything from nonproliferation to the prevention of human trafficking. Just two days ago I chaired – because I chair the Interagency Task Force – we had the Attorney General of the United States, the head of the FBI, the Treasury Department, the entire government – Education Department, Commerce – all at the same table talking about how we’re going to deal with human trafficking and end the scourge of modern-day slavery in the year 2016. I don’t know any other nation. (Applause.) You tell me what other nation has every arm of its government sitting around the same table on the same day wrestling with a global international issue and offering leadership as we have been on the issue of trafficking. Young women who are sold into slavery and sex traffics; a young man with a shackle around his neck that The New York Times chronicled so effectively, who was two years at sea, shackled to a boat where he was made to fish illegally and as a slave. You can run through 27 million stories, folks. I don’t know them all, but I know that each is as horrible as the other, and so do you. And these are people who are powerless; people from whom it is only a country like us that is willing to work to try to stand up and bring them out of the shadows and liberate them that we are their only hope, their only possibility of survival in situations where otherwise they might be forgotten to anybody and everybody – a speck of history that disappeared in some horrible moment that we don’t even witness.
We are cooperating with local (inaudible) leaders to restrain North Korea’s dangerous nuclear program and we’re adding muscle to one of the toughest economic sanctions regimes ever imposed, and we led the effort to achieve that. We consult regularly with regional partners to prevent misunderstandings that would lead to even greater tensions in the South China Sea. And we are helping to guide Myanmar’s historic transition from global outcast to emerging democracy. Just yesterday, I met with leaders from Vietnam to deepen our ties to a one-time adversary with whom we have found areas of common ground that not long ago would have seemed literally unimaginable.
Yesterday, I sat across a man who told me he fought in Quang Tri in the north of Vietnam while I was in the south, improbable as it might have been years ago for me to imagine we would sit across the table from each other and talk about how we really make peace. We left there in 1975 – as you all know, ’73 – we left in ’75, the fall of Saigon, then-Saigon, and the rest is history. Well, I’m proud that the United States saw the President of the United States Barack Obama, together with the Secretary of State who fought in that war in Hanoi, in Ho Chi Minh City, forging stronger ties with what is now a raging capitalist country that is changing rapidly. And that is how you really make peace, my friends – by building, by diplomacy. (Applause.)
In September, I sat down with New York – in New York with representatives from many Asian nations, and they reiterated a message that I have heard over and over again as Secretary of State. They welcome America’s presence in their region. And they don’t go to bed at night wondering about when we’re going to leave; they worry that we might leave. They don’t want any one country to try and dictate to others what they can and cannot do. And they see the United States of America as a balancing and stabilizing force, but they’re also concerned about what the future is going to bring. And the question they ask, the critical test of our commitment above all others, is whether we will formally approve the Trans Pacific Partnership or the TPP.
Now, let me tell you, this 12-nation agreement which we sought, which we led to create, which we have put our credibility on the line in order to build this 40 percent of global GDP entity that will create a race to the top, not a race to the bottom. It’s a global economy, and this agreement includes three of the biggest trading partners of Chicago – Canada, Mexico, and Japan. Unlike any trade agreement that our country has ever previously signed, TPP includes unprecedented labor and environmental protections within the four corners of the agreement, unlike the others. It mandates a level playing field between private sector companies and state-owned companies. Who do you think benefits from that? We don’t have state-owned companies. Other countries do. And now we create a level playing field. And provided Congress approves it, this pact will abolish 18,000 foreign taxes on American goods and services, making it easier for our farmers, our ranchers, and our businesspeople to be able to export overseas.
That is why the TPP is both a good deal for the American economy and it is a litmus test of our country’s capacity to lead. Make no mistake; if we’re going to live up to our responsibilities in Asia, if we’re going to treat our partners with the respect that they deserve while earning their respect at the same time, and if we’re going to do what is necessary to protect our interests, we have to maintain a steady and a reliable presence in that region. And I’ll just share with you our involvement can’t be in one sector and not in others. We can’t focus on one country and not be inclusive. We can’t focus on security at one moment and then ignore the economic dimension. You can’t turn it on and off like a faucet. Whenever and wherever vacuums exist in this world today, others will move to fill them in ways that may not embrace the rule of law and that will certainly not reflect the kind of high trading standards that we, the United States, seek.
If we were to see the TPP rejected, it would be a gigantic self-inflicted wound on our nation – a setback to our own interests in the region, where our credibility as a country on any agreement we’re trying to negotiate would be in doubt. It would amount to a conscious turning of our backs on the Asia Pacific at the very moment that we ought to be linking arms. It would be an act that would hurt American workers, slow our economy, hinder our ability to advance the full range of U.S. objectives in a region that is just, by common sense, with five of the fastest-growing nations in the world, a region that is important to our future.
Now, the good news is most of our citizens realize this. A recent survey by this council showed that a majority of Americans favor the TPP and believe that free trade is beneficial – and as I say free, I say fair, because it’s important that it be an agreement like the TPP, where you have labor standards and environment standards. But it is beneficial to our economy and is helpful to America’s standard of living.
And those people who are the majority in America who say they do support it realize that if America is going to keep growing – just think about this, it’s sort of basic common sense. You want the economy to grow, folks? Then you have to be able to sell to the places where 95 percent of the world’s customers live, and that’s not in the United States. Ninety-five percent of the world’s customers live in other countries – beyond our borders – and we can’t grow our economy unless we’re willing to engage in trade. So don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. That’s not what this is about. The problem is not that the average American worker is penalized by trade itself. The average American worker is penalized by a system that doesn’t allow them to share in the benefits of that trade, which sees the top 1 percent take most of the benefits away with them. And what we need is a measure of fairness in our tax structure, in our social structure, education, ongoing education, that provides opportunity for all Americans, so that whatever disruption or dislocation might come is adjusted for because we understand what we’re doing.
So I call on Congress when it returns to Washington after the election to take up and approve the TPP. It is the right thing to do for America – and no matter what the loudest voices may be shouting – it is also the popular choice. (Applause.)
Now even – but even as we demonstrate sustained leadership on the rebalance of our national security policy towards the Asia Pacific, we have to confront a lot of other tests as well. And none is more urgent than responding to the threat that is posed by violent extremists. This is a danger that has evolved steadily since 9/11 and we work constantly to defend against it, both here and at home; and in helping Nigeria to push back against the terrorist kidnappers of Boko Haram, which we are doing successfully; of helping Somalia to reclaim land from al-Shabaab, which we are doing successfully; of helping Afghanistan to safeguard its citizens from the Taliban; to help friends in the Middle East who are confronted by the most ruthless terrorist organization of all.
I want you to think back to the summer of 2014, ask yourself who is retreating. In 2014, Daesh terrorists were rampaging across Syria and Iraq, and you remember seeing on TV the Toyotas and the black flags and the sweeping columns moving through town after town plundering cities, murdering and torturing the innocent, and claiming to establish a caliphate that would rule all Islam. We heard dire predictions that Baghdad was about to fall and that young people from every single corner of the globe were going to flock to Daesh to kill and die in the name of hate.
It was a time to provide leadership, and that is exactly what President Obama did when he ordered U.S. planes to engage and bomb those terrorists and help rescue an endangered group of Yazidis on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, where we stopped a slaughter from taking place. We led the effort to mobilize a diverse coalition that now numbers 67 countries. And together with our partners on the ground, we took on the terrorists and began to liberate the cities that they had occupied – Kobani, Tikrit, Fallujah, Ramadi, and more. And today, the citizens who were driven out have returned to those communities. Day after day, we have been eliminating the leaders of Daesh, choking their finances, disrupting their supply lines, hammering their oil facilities, and reducing their recruitment to a trickle.
And from the outset, we warned that eliminating Daesh completely wasn’t going to happen overnight; it was going to take a number of years. And that remains the case. But I’m telling you, the terrorists haven’t been able to launch a significant offensive and hold territory since May of last year. We have closed off the strategic border between Syria and Turkey.
And just last week, Iraqi and Peshmerga forces began a campaign to free Mosul, the so-called spiritual capital of Daesh’s phony caliphate and its largest remaining stronghold. Now this is going to be a difficult and consuming assault against a dug-in foe; but I’ll tell you this, our resolve could not be more firm. Daesh is opposed to every value human civilization aspires to. Daesh kills Christians because they are Christians; Jews because they are Jews; Yazidis because they are Yazidis; Shiite Muslims because they are Shiite Muslims; and Sunni Muslims if they reject Daesh’s ugly view of the world. Daesh sells little girls into slavery and brags about it. It cuts off the heads of innocent people in public, and sometimes forces children to watch and to even participate in executions. I said it earlier this year and I will say it again: Daesh is guilty of genocide and we will hold Daesh accountable. (Applause.)
My friends, it matters that every time we defeat these terrorists in one place, we seize files that help us to disrupt the networks that they are trying to establish in others; we learn more about how Daesh operates and who is aiding or conspiring with them. No one hears much about the attacks that don’t happen. We’re glad; we like it that way. But by sharing information, our coalition is helping to deter and break up plots on a regular basis before anyone gets hurt.
We are also engaged in a nonstop effort to rebut the lies that fuel propaganda. Here, too, we are making gains. Daesh’s presence on social media has plummeted and it has become apparent that its pledge to create Paradise on Earth is crumbling into a hand full of dust.
So here’s the bottom line: Because of the determined use of our diplomacy backed by our armed forces and the commitment of our partners, and the leadership that we have provided, we are going to win the fight against Daesh. And we are going to prevail without altering the nature of our societies, without succumbing to bigotry, without closing our borders, without betraying the democratic values that terrorists have vowed to destroy.
We will also persist in our effort to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Syria, and I believe we will find a way to ultimately end the most severe humanitarian crisis since World War II. It is a crisis, I might add, that is not going to be solved by just writing checks for refugees. We’re the largest donor in the world to the Syrian refugees. But what we have to do is stop the flow of refugees; we have to end the war. And this is as complicated a bit of diplomatic business as I’ve ever seen.
The situation in Syria is made worse by the multi-sided nature of the fighting as well as the utter depravity of the Assad regime, and there are so many different forces there. But precisely because the war is so complex, clear principles are required to end it. And because some outside powers have been playing an unhelpful role, international cooperation is essential as well. That’s why a year ago, we, the United States, brought together a group of stakeholders – the International Syria Support Group. It includes every single country that is involved in the conflict, including Russia and Iran.
And some people say, “Well, why are you sitting at the table with those guys?” Because they’re involved. Because without them being part of the solution, they are part of the problem. Each and every one of those countries promised to support a cessation of hostilities, the unfettered delivery of humanitarian aid, and negotiations that would lead to a political transition. Now, these remain the right principles for ending the war; but as the world knows far too well, the promises made on paper have not yet been matched by actions on the ground.
And this failure to keep faith has been both deeply tragic and unbelievably frustrating, piling misery on top of misery, and squandering opportunities for progress when they’re staring us right in the face. And despite the many setbacks, my friends, there’s a simple reality. The need for diplomacy remains, because the fact remains that a military solution in the judgment of most people is simply not possible – at least not if Syria is ever to be a whole country again.
This is complicated because there are many wars taking place simultaneously in the same place – Kurd on Kurd, Kurd on Turkey, Iran versus Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia versus Iran; Iran and Hizballah versus Israel versus us and those who have labeled Hizballah a terrorist organization; a lot of people against Assad; the whole world against Daesh; Daesh against Assad and civilization and everybody else; Shia versus Sunni; Persian Shia versus Arab Sunni. I think that’s more than six.
So let me be clear: There’s nothing inevitable about this war. The Syrian disaster resulted from choices that people made. And what people have the power to choose, they have the ability to change. I don’t think it’s hard to envision the changes that we need: a real and lasting ceasefire, representatives from both sides coming together in Geneva and coming together in the country, coming together in the country to defeat the terrorists and coming together in Geneva to define the transitional governing body of the Geneva Communique; to agree on new leadership and on new forms of governance; and to prepare for elections.
And why can I say that? Because every single country at the table of the International Syria Support Group has said they support that – elections, a transition government, a whole Syria, respect for rights of all minorities, secular, non-sectarian. The problem is there remains a mountain of mistrust between where we are and where we need to get to. And as we try to chip away at that mountain, we will make – I will make and President Obama will make zero apology for using every single diplomatic tool at our disposal to try to end this war. And we make no apology for not giving up when hospitals are being bombed, when children are still dying in the streets, and more and more refugees are added to the most horrific mass exodus in modern times. We owe the world our best effort to end this war, and we will continue to provide it. (Applause.)
Now, the impact of our diplomacy is also being felt in Europe, which is in the process of responding to an array of economic and other dilemmas, including the influx of refugees from Syria, from the Middle East, from Afghanistan, from Africa, and the decision, of course, by Great Britain to leave the European Union.
And we take these concerns very seriously, but they don’t diminish our faith in the future of the European project or the resilience of the transatlantic relationship partnership. I was in Brussels earlier this month, and I found that the sense of common purpose across the Atlantic is being demonstrated every single day. The United States and Europe continue to maintain tough economic sanctions against Russia because of its aggression in Ukraine, and our unity has been made even stronger by Russian President Putin’s repeated efforts to interfere in the functioning of our democratic systems. In July, at the NATO Summit in Warsaw, we agreed to bolster our security efforts in the Baltics and in Central Europe, and we’re doing that. We’re emphasizing energy diversification, helping to lead countries that have a one-place energy source and try to diversify for them in order to avoid the potential of being exposed to economic blackmail. And as I’ve said clearly on both sides of the English Channel: Brexit does not alter in the least American’s unwavering commitment to a strong Europe, a strong United Kingdom, and close diplomatic cooperation on matters of importance to all of us.
One illustration of that kind of diplomatic cooperation was the nuclear agreement that was referred to in Lou’s introduction regarding Iran. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action would never have gotten off the ground without firm European support for the sanctions that helped to bring Iran to the bargaining table. And that support was critical because before negotiations began, Iran had developed the ability to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb in just two months. In fact, they had enough nuclear material for 12 bombs. That’s where we were. The clock was ticking. So we made the decision to negotiate, and it is a good thing we did.
Under the plan that we reached, Iran agreed to ship 98 percent of its enriched uranium out of the country, to shut down two-thirds of its centrifuges, to take the core of its plutonium nuclear reactor and fill it with concrete rendering it unusable forever, and they acceded to a state-of-the-art, rigorous verification regime.
Now, as we know, this was a contentious debate here in this country. Many people argued against negotiating with Iran, let alone coming to an agreement, saying it would be a terrible mistake. I’ll tell you, to my core, I still believe they were and are wrong. The Iran agreement wasn’t a miscalculation. It has made the whole world safer, and it shows the value of diplomatic engagement even – and perhaps especially – when the governments involved disagree with another on as many issues as we did. When we came together to begin this negotiation, we hadn’t even talked formally to an official of Iran in 35 years.
Now, I’m not standing here pretending to you that diplomacy can solve every problem. It can’t. But the peaceful breakthroughs that it can provide are well worth the attempt. Nothing has ever been accomplished by an unwillingness to try. And I’ve always said I’d rather be caught trying.
Our diplomacy is also making a difference on global issues, and at the top of that is the historic progress that we are now beginning to make with regard to climate change.
Here in Chicago, as elsewhere around the world, you’ve experienced record high temperatures. If the present trend continues, average thermometer readings in the Midwest are going to reach those traditionally associated with the deep South. Each last month was the hottest month in human history – July the hottest month in recorded history. May, June, run the list – so much so that the last 10 years add to the fact that not only was last year the hottest year in human history, the last 10 years are the hottest year – or the hottest decade. And guess what? The decade before that is the second-hottest in human history, and the decade before that is the third-hottest in human history. You’d think with those trend lines that everybody would catch on. But in fact, we had a political party in our country that didn’t allow – not one single candidate running for president – to say anything about climate change. And in the debates that we just had for president, out of six hours of debates, the vice president and president combined, not one single question was asked about climate change.
Now, here in Chicago, you’ve been responding to this challenge by implementing flood protection measures, by planting trees, by committing to green technology. But for these steps to be fully effective, they’re going to have to be matched by a concerted international campaign that is now, because of our efforts, gathering steam. And no one country can solve this problem alone. If we went to zero tomorrow, we’d still have a major problem.
Last December in Paris, the United States joined governments from nearly 200 nations in approving the most far-reaching agreement on climate change ever negotiated. And to arrive at that point, we had to put the environment where it belonged: right at the top or near top of our foreign policy agenda.
In 2009 in Copenhagen – I remember being there – the world convened to talk about climate change but adjourned in total disarray, a famous implosion where the Chinese were involved with the G77 in moving in the opposite direction. So recognizing that, one of my first initiatives as Secretary of State was to prevent that from happening again. I went to Beijing to create in the early – within a month and a half or so of being Secretary, we created a bilateral working group in order to see if it was possible for us to find a different way to move forward with the exact purpose of trying to have our presidents be able to announce the level of reductions that we would jointly engage in.
Well, that effort paid off when, in January of 2015, President Obama and President Xi stood side by side in Beijing, representing the world’s two largest economies and the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and together we set ambitious targets for action while encouraging other countries to do the same. That is what broke open the possibility of the Paris Agreement.
And the Paris Agreement was a diplomatic milestone, but it’s still far from the finish line. We began this year hoping to take additional strides. First, we wanted to ensure that enough countries would formally ratify the Paris Agreement so that we could bring it into force by the end of the year. That required a whirlwind effort to gain the approval of cabinets and parliaments, the kind of process that often consumes – ask Ivo or ask Lou – could consume a decade. We did it in 10 months.
Our second goal was to map out a path towards carbon-neutral growth for the international aviation industry. We achieved that goal in September.
And two weeks ago, I flew to Rwanda in pursuit of our third goal: a plan to phase down the use of heat-trapping hydrofluorocarbons in air conditioners, refrigerators, and other devices. And this is probably the single-most important step that we could take to limit the severity of global warming in ways because it, by itself, if properly implemented, will save one-half a degree Centigrade in the warming of Planet Earth. This negotiation also was the product of years of painstaking diplomacy, and it, too, had a positive outcome.
So as I said earlier, shielding our planet from the worst consequences of climate change is a generational challenge. But in the three decades that I have been working on this issue, I have never seen the kind of positive momentum that we have now. Across the globe, leaders from the private sector, from civil society, the scientific community, the religious organizations, and governments at all levels are all together moving in the same direction. Yes, there are still pockets of blindness and denial, some right here in America, as I mentioned. And yes, the agreement does not by itself guarantee that we will halt the temperature increase at 2 degrees Centigrade.
But by acting boldly on all three fronts – Paris Agreement, civil aviation, hydrofluorocarbons – we have sent an unmistakable, powerful message to entrepreneurs and investors everywhere in the world that now is the time to revolutionize the way we produce and use energy. And as I have said many times, the solution to climate change is staring us in the face. It’s not something we have to discover in the future. It’s here, it’s now, it’s energy policy, it’s moving to make better choices about how we power our transportation, our buildings, our electricity. That’s the solution. And the sooner we move to a low-carbon, no-carbon economy, the sooner we will solve this problem for future generations. (Applause.)
And by the way, it is the biggest market in the history of human beings. The market that grew my state of Massachusetts unbelievably and even our country in the 1990s was a $1 trillion market with a billion users. That was the high-tech market – computers, personal computers, and communications. This market is a 4 to 5 billion user market today going up to 9 billion users, and it’s a multi-trillion-dollar market today and it’s going to go up into the 40, 50 trillion mark in terms of investment over the course of the next years. This is the way you put people back to work. If there is one piece of advice I will have for my successor, it will be to ensure that environmental diplomacy remains an integral part of our foreign policy, because we cannot safeguard the future of this planet for our children and our grandchildren if we fail to defend the fundamental principles of a safe and clean Mother Earth. (Applause.)
Now, you should know – now, maybe you’re beginning to get the sense of our engagement. What I’ve discussed so far is really just the tip of a very big iceberg. Every day, the State Department’s Foreign and Civil Service professional are hard at work on issues affecting places like Colombia, where we’re aiding President Santos’s effort to end a 50-year war, the longest-running civil conflict in our hemisphere; Cuba, where we have restored diplomatic relations for the first time in more than half a century; Yemen, where we’re trying to work every day now to establish a roadmap towards a durable peace; Libya, where we are working to strengthen the government of national accord, and I will be meeting in London on Monday of next week on that very subject; Sub-Sahara Africa, where we’re training young leaders, promoting connectivity, supporting the empowerment of women; Central Asia, where we’re engaged on energy security and helping civil society to take root.
And as the men and women who work in our country’s diplomatic posts can attest to you, being the face of America abroad is an honor, yes, but it’s also a continual challenge filled with personal sacrifice and even risk. I have nothing but admiration for the members of our overseas teams, which is why I think the Chicago Council’s new Youth Diplomats program to help prepare the leaders of tomorrow is a fantastic idea. Let no one doubt the effort by the United States to assist people in other nations makes a major difference to them, but also it makes a major difference to us. And it has done much to shape what our country means to the world.
Back in 1949, a junior State Department official named Benjamin Hardy had an idea. He thought that some of the concepts behind America’s New Deal might work if they were applied internationally. He proposed a large-scale program that would harness popular, Quote: , “enthusiasm for social and economic improvement,” and thereby repulse Communism and create a decent life for the Earth’s millions.
Mr. Hardy sent his suggestion up the State Department chain-of-command only to see it come back down with the deadly words, “Needs further study.” He sent it up again; it came down again. And here I assure you that nothing like this would ever happen in the flawlessly managed State Department of today – (laughter) – but after trying and failing a third time to get support from above, he did something which I do not recommend to anyone’s who’s aggrieved in my department, he reached directly out to the White House. And the next thing he knew, President Harry Truman was unveiling a program of international assistance as the featured fourth point in his Inaugural Address.
This was truly something new. Never before had a country launched a major effort to help people to whom it had no special ties except a shared interest in peace and prosperity. And it’s no accident that that country was the United States of America.
I’m not going to tell you that in the time since we’ve solved every problem or that every indicator of international progress is due to America. No, it’s not. But I do know, because I’ve seen it firsthand in country after country, the difference that our leadership and our resources have had a lot to do with what is happening for the good in so many places in the world today. Children born today can expect to live longer and healthier lives than in any previous generation. Did you know that? Compared to just 20 years ago, we have cut in half the number of mothers who die during childbirth and the number of infants who perish because of malnutrition. We’ve vastly expanded access to education for girls and boys. In Afghanistan in 2001, only about a million kids went to school, and they were all boys. Now there are more than 9 million kids in school, and 40 percent of them are girls. (Applause.)
We have driven extreme poverty below 10 percent for the first time in human history. We defied predictions to save hundreds of thousands of people who were at risk of Ebola. Remember they said a million people were going to die two Christmases ago, and we never got close to that because President Obama dared to send 3,000 troops over to build health care delivery capacity, and doctors and nurses and aides provided courageous assistance to save lives. We joined forces with the global health community to turn the tide in the fight against HIV/AIDS. I remember 15, 20 years ago it was death sentence and people didn’t even want to talk about it. Now we can look forward, thanks to our program that we put together first in the Senate and then globally, to the first “born free from AIDS” generation in more than three decades. (Applause.)
And with the help that we have just received from Congress, you can bet we are going to go after the Zika virus with all the energy that we have, because the prospect of becoming a parent should be a source of joy for everyone everywhere, not a source of fear. (Applause.)
This, my friends, is really just scratching the surface of a record in which all Americans can take pride. And yes, it comes at a cost. But do you know that amazing surveys show that many of our citizens think we devote a full quarter or even a third of our federal budget to foreign aid? Do you know what the reality is? One single penny of every dollar that our government spends abroad in terms of diplomacy and all of the programs and all of our aid – one single penny of every dollar is used for international operations and includes everything from counterterrorism to assistance to providing security at our embassies and paying for the staffs of embassies around the world. One penny out of every dollar. One percent. Without doubt, the biggest and best single bargain in the government today.
Now, in October of 1937, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived in Chicago to dedicate the Outer Drive Bridge. He was expected to talk about local issues, but instead he had a global message in mind. Congress had earlier approved a neutrality law prohibiting the Executive from sending aid to the democratic countries of Europe. And there were many in our country who said that to remain safe, America should close its eyes to the storms gathering abroad and avoid making an enemy of Hitler.
Standing in front of an array of microphones, legs supported by clamps, hands gripping the podium for support, Roosevelt warned that a “reign of terror and international lawlessness” was threatening “the very foundations of civilization.” In vivid terms, he denounced the rise of fascism in Europe, aggression in the Pacific, and the slaughter of defenseless civilians in Abyssinia and China. He said that trying to ignore these outrages would bring not peace, but more of the same – and he compared them to a disease that people everywhere should join in isolating.
FDR’s so-called “quarantine” speech, as it came to be known, was denounced by many as “warlike,” and his summons to action was rebuffed by the European advocates of appeasement. But as history was soon to demonstrate, Roosevelt’s every word was proven true.
As I enter my final three months as Secretary of State, I am as convinced now, as FDR was then, of the need for peace-loving people on every continent to band together to reject the apostles of hate, the authors of aggression, the manipulators of truth who threaten to hold us back and do us harm. We need to fulfill the responsibility that we all share to uphold the global norms, to defend freedom in all of its dimensions, and to respect the rights and the dignity of every single human being.
Also like Roosevelt, I recognize – as I think everyone here does – the importance of flexible and creative U.S. leadership in making that happen. Our country is blessed with an $18 trillion economy. We should be asking ourselves not how quickly or sharply we can shed the responsibilities of leadership, but rather how much more can we do. We have our own storm clouds and our own foundations of civilization to protect. And let us never forget that America is the exceptional nation that so many people in public life like to talk about, but we’re not exceptional because we make speeches about being exceptional, and we’re not exceptional when we shove our face in other people’s faces and tell them how exceptional we are. We are exceptional when and because we do exceptional things. That’s what makes America exceptional. And America can do more, even today, with greater impact. But we have to be willing to put resources on the table and empower people to live our vision – not view it with envy from the outside.
I believe that we should look to the future with every ounce of optimism that has always inspired and energized our nation, but we should also acknowledge that we will not be able to chart a sure course for others unless we are at peace with ourselves.
A great American from this state once warned, in the words of the scriptures, that, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Whatever happens in the next two weeks, our country is going to have to begin a process of healing, of reconnecting with one another, of listening, of forgiving, and remembering that every action we take is being carefully observed by our global allies and adversaries, and that what they see will have a direct impact on our future ability to be able to lead.
I think that we have one of the greatest stories in the world to tell. The strength of America, unlike some places where they’re defined by ethnicity or by centuries of homogeneity – we are not. We are defined by an idea, unlike most other countries, and that idea is about freedom and the pursuit of happiness and all people being created equal with the opportunity to make the most of themselves.
Ladies and gentlemen, American greatness is not an entitlement and it cannot be taken for granted. It has to be demonstrated; it has to be earned by every generation. And one of the great strengths I hear from other people whenever I travel is how they see in America a country that is always changing, always moving forward, always looking to the future, always able to redefine itself. That effort demands the best from us and it demands the best within us. The world will be watching to see whether we, the American people, remain up to that challenge. There is not a scintilla of doubt in my mind that the answer is yes, but we are going to do a better job – all of us together, I believe – or we need to all do a better job in proving it to people.
This Administration still has miles to go before we pass into history, and I intend to work with the president as he does until January 20th to advance the cause of our country. And in doing so, I will be grateful for as long as I live for the privilege I have been given to serve, just as I am now grateful for your hospitality in welcoming me to the matchless city of Chicago. Thank you and go Cubs. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Please, please, please (inaudible).
MR DAALDER: Mr. Secretary, I think I speak for all of us here to thank you for your service and for this really rousing call for continued strong American leadership and engagement in the world. We have a couple more minutes, so we’ve gotten some questions that we’ve collected, and I wanted to start with a question of a young man who is a political science student here in – at DePaul University who wants to think about his future by asking you something about his past. He asks: “How has your experience as a Vietnam veteran influenced you not only throughout your life, but particularly your service as Secretary of State?”
SECRETARY KERRY: Well, it’s a great question. Thank you for the question. I did a podcast earlier today with David Axelrod in which we talked a little bit about this. It requires a little bit of biography. But when I – I signed up for the United States military in 1965, not too long after Lyndon Johnson said we need 500,000 troops in Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin incident had allegedly happened. And I was, like many, many, many of my classmates, actually, I was surprised when I went back and looked in our reunion book how many classmates served. And I think it was part of our generation’s sense of responsibility – lucky enough to go to great university, mindful of President Kennedy’s call to action that we would bear any price and – pay any price, bear any burden, and recognizing we were in the Cold War and seeing things in a fairly simplistically defined way – East, West, Soviet Union versus the West, bipolar, pretty simple stuff, defend against Communism – and we tended to see most of our challenges within that lens.
Well, by time – the first draft card hadn’t been burned. I think it was first burned in about 1967. And by 1968, when I was training – when I left for Vietnam for a tour of duty in the Gulf of Tonkin in a ship, and then when I went over as skipper of a small gun boat, 1968 was an incredible year, as you all know from history and some of you from living it. Medgar Evers was assassinated, Martin Luther King was assassinated, Robert Kennedy was assassinated. There was tumultuous convention right here in this city. And I was in uniform and watching all of this and listening to the stories of those who were coming back from Vietnam and sharing with us what their experience was.
So when I went over in-country as we called in October, I think it was, of 1968, I saw a very different set of circumstances from those that we had mostly read about or had described to us. And I really found myself – as we did all of us who were there – wrapped up in a civil war with very few options in a sense and a war that, in my judgment, we were simply not going to win the way it was being fought and with the choices and options that we had, and perhaps couldn’t be in the long run depending on how you saw the North-South civil component of it.
So what I learned was, in answer to your question, and what I vowed was as a young man, that if I was ever in a position of responsibility to make a judgment about putting people like me in harm’s way again, I was going to make sure that we understood what we were doing, and I was going to make sure that we had the right lens and the right understanding of what it was. We haven’t done that, obviously, in every case, but I think that the notion – I think – when I testified before Congress and before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, I laid out my reasons for opposition to the war as a veteran. As I was leading a group of veterans and a small group of my friends – we brought about 5,000 veterans to Washington. We camped out on the Mall and we stared down the Supreme Court and the Washington police and the administration, and stayed on the Mall and delivered a message to Congress about the war. And it was a breakthrough moment where people began to really understand what was happening.
I think that the lesson I learned is – are several. Number one, make sure you really ask the right questions, examine all the possibilities, and get an understanding of the place you’re thinking about going so you understand what the dynamics are, what the downside risks are, and what is the what then, what next. Once you’ve succeeded in your immediate goal, how do you manage it as you go forward?
I also learned that not everything is Vietnam, and that’s a very important lesson, folks. Some people get trapped in that place in history, and I thought it was very important not to be trapped, that sometimes we do have to use force. I supported what we did in Kosovo and Serbia. I thought it was critical to save lives. And as you all know, President Clinton greatly regrets the fact that they didn’t respond in Rwanda. There are times when I think we do have a responsibility and we have to do some things that we don’t like to do. But it depends on what the stakes are, and you have to examine them very, very carefully.
So the real – I also learned an indelible lesson, because we were the veterans who first called to attention of the nation the treatment of vets in the VA hospitals, the lack of adequate allowances to go to school, the lack of adequate staffing in the hospitals, the absence of any kind of thank you or homecoming for a group of veterans who fought as hard as any other people in war at any other time, and I learned indelibly that this country should never, ever again confuse the war with the warriors. And I think we have learned that lesson, and it’s a good one. (Applause.)
MR DAALDER: Mr. Secretary, thank you for your service. Thank you for joining us here today. I very much appreciate you coming to Chicago. Particularly on this night, you’ve kept an audience for a long time, and particularly what’s going on right now.
SECRETARY KERRY: Do we have a score?
MR DAALDER: They’re winning, 2-nothing. Thank you. (Applause.)
SECRETARY KERRY: Two-nothing. That’s a good note to end on. Thank you. (Applause.)
John F. Kerry | 0 |
California Democrats made a surprise move late Friday to foil President Trump’s promise to repeal ObamaCare — by introducing a healthcare system in California. [The Mercury News reported that two California lawmakers Friday introduced legislation to replace private insurance with a health care system covering all 38 million Californians — including its undocumented residents. “We’ve reached this pivotal moment,” Sen. Ricardo Lara ( Gardens) told the Mercury News in an interview Friday, “and I thought to myself: `Look, now more than ever is the time to talk about universal health care. ’” The article went on to report that the proposal dubbed the ‘Healthy California Act’ introduced by Lara and former Assembly Speaker, now State Senator Toni Atkins, ( Diego) — was submitted just before the deadline for new legislation — and for such a sweeping proposal, it remarkably short on specifics. Atkins said in a prepared statement obtained by Mercury News, “In light of threats to the Affordable Care Act, it’s important that we are looking at all options to continue to expand and maintain access to health care. The Healthy California Act is an essential part of that conversation. ” After a week that has brought California’s crumbling infrastructure into focus — as back to back storms threatened the nation’s tallest dam in Oroville, California, and forced Gov. Brown to request Federal Emergency Funds from President Trump — Brown and Democrat legislators have come under scathing criticism for squandering money on benefits for illegal aliens and public sector unions at the expense of infrastructure. Only California Democrats would launch a new social program with no specific details or any identifiable funding source in a state that is perpetually broke, and where ObamaCare is unpopular with over 46% of voters — including a lot of Democrats. Calls for comment by Breitbart News were not returned. Tim Donnelly is a former California State Assemblyman. Author, Patriot Not Politician: Win or Go Homeless, FaceBook: https: . facebook. . donnelly. Twitter: @PatriotNotPol | 1 |
Evil Zionist Jew Warmonger Bill Kristol Calls Alt-Right “Scaredy Cats”
Lee Rogers Daily Stormer October 28, 2016 Bill Kristol is an evil Jewish war criminal who should be sentenced to hard labor for the rest of his miserable life.
Bill Kristol the evil Zionist Jew warmonger has called us Alt-Right Nazis “scaredy cats.” What a disgusting faggot this vermin is. The older conservatism: We’ll proudly fight for our country if need be. The alt-right: We’re scaredy-cats and proud of it. https://t.co/Qo58mfW91n
â Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 28, 2016
First off, the very fact that Kristol claims to be an American is ridiculous. He is a Jew and is looking out for the interests of Israel and the members of his vile tribe before anyone else. He is not fighting for the interests of White Americans.
Secondly, how many American wars has this Jew fought in? He certainly didn’t sign up to fight in Vietnam when he was of military age. This Jew would never fight on behalf of America. He’d flee to Israel at the first sign of trouble.
Kristol was one of the most prominent propagandists on television pushing Americans to support the 2003 Iraq invasion. The entire war was based on lies. Iraq had no WMDs and the war has thrown the entire region into perpetual chaos. Such a situation has only been of benefit to his Jewish friends in Israel. If the Arab world is in chaos, they cannot ever come together to defeat and destroy Israel. This is why a never ending war against terror was declared after the 9/11 attacks. It justifies a continued state of chaos, death and destruction throughout the Arab world to benefit Jews.
The good news is that almost every response to his tweet is negative and reflects my general commentary. If you’d like to pile on you can tweet him @BillKristol . | 0 |
This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics. com, Kim (L) the assassinated of Kim (R) (AP) Two events in the last week — North Korea’s test of a ballistic missile and the assassination, possibly by North Korean agents, of Kim the of president Kim — have infuriated and embarrassed China’s leaders, since they enormously complicate China’s foreign policy. The ballistic missile test is particularly troubling to China’s leadership for several reasons: China’s announcement on Saturday that it would suspend all coal shipments from North Korea was a surprise, but not totally unexpected. On Monday of last week, the day after the ballistic missile test, China prevented a North Korean ship from unloading a shipment of 16, 295 tons coal, worth about US$1 million, at a Chinese port, and ordered that it be returned to North Korea. However, China blamed the rejection not on the ballistic missile test, but instead on a claim that the coal contained level of mercury. China’s announcement could have significant economic impact on North Korea. In order to import foreign goods, North Korea needs foreign reserves. In order to get foreign reserves, it needs to export goods. About 90% of North Korea’s exports go to China, and most of that is coal. So this announcement will severely limit the foreign goods that North Korea can import. The intent is that by limiting North Korea’s ability to import, the country will be unable to import that equipment required for further development of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. It is not clear that this objective is realistic, as Kim has previously been willing to allow his people to starve rather than to allow his nuclear weapons program to starve. No matter what the intent, Kim will let his people starve and will torture, jail and execute anyone who objects. China implemented a partial ban on coal imports from North Korea last year but left open a loophole that would allow some coal imports if they would benefit the North Korean people. The partial ban turned out to be a joke because North Korean manipulated the loophole and actually increased coal imports to China by % after the partial ban was announced, which was extremely embarrassing to China. China criticizes other nations for destabilizing the region, even though China continually destabilizes the region by confiscating other countries’ territories and building illegal military bases in the South China Sea, while threatening Japan in the East China Sea. This entire political strategy is being thrown into chaos by the actions of North Korea. China has the ability to bring North Korea to its knees economically, but both China and Kim are well aware that doing so is a very strategy. A government coup in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital city, could bring to power someone that favors peaceful reunification with South Korea — something that is quite possible now that three or four generations have grown up since the end of World War II and the Korean War. Or an even worse scenario is that a retaliatory act by Kim might be directed at either China or South Korea (or Japan or the US) and this could lead to a war on the Korean Peninsula that would draw in the Chinese military and would result in millions of North Korean refugees pouring into China. The point is that China is rapidly running out of choices. Allowing Kim to continue ballistic missile and nuclear weapons development is extremely dangerous to China, but trying to stop that development with economic sanctions is also extremely dangerous. One can only speculate what China might try next — perhaps some sort of military action or commando raid on North Korean military targets. But this is just one more area, like the situations in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where China’s leaders are running out of time and they know it and may become desperate enough to do something stupid. Yonhap News (Seoul) and BBC and Washington Post, Related Articles, Police in Malaysia have arrested four suspects believed to be linked to the assassination on Wednesday Kim the of Kim the president of North Vietnam. A woman tentatively identified as Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam has been positively identified as the assassin from CCTV footage from Kuala Lumpur International Airport. She allegedly covered Kim ’s face with a cloth laced with poison, causing his death within minutes. Before being captured, she changed her appearance several times. On Wednesday, she was wearing a white shirt with the large letters “LOL” on the front. A second woman said that they both thought that the whole thing was a prank sponsored by a reality TV show. It has not been proven whether North Korea is responsible for the assassination, and there are other actors that might have wanted him dead. was a playboy, and one can even imagine that the assassination might have been launched by a former girlfriend. But most people believe that Kim was killed under orders of his Kim North Korea’s child dictator. This is not the first execution of a family member. On New Year’s Day 2014, Kim announced that he had ordered the execution of his uncle and mentor Jang calling him “factionalist scum. ” According to unconfirmed reports at the time, Kim had his uncle thrown into a room with several ravenous dogs that hadn’t eaten in several days. So although Kim wasn’t eaten by ravenous dogs, the execution of Jang provides a recent precedent for the execution of close family members. Malaysia has always gone out of its way to maintain good relations with China, but the assassination of Kim in Kuala Lumpur airport, whether ordered by North Korea or not, is causing a rift in relations between the two countries. North Korea demanded the immediate return of the dead body to North Korea. Malaysia responded that the death occurred on Malaysian soil, and a full series of autopsies would be performed first. Furthermore, Malaysia would not return the body to North Korea until a DNA sample from Kim was provided, in order to complete the autopsy. On Friday, close to midnight, North Korea’s ambassador to Malaysia, Kang Chol, stood in front of the morgue where the body was lying and gave a hysterical rant: We strongly urge and demand the Malaysian side not to be entangled with a political plot by the hostile forces towards the DPRK [North Korea] who want to damage image of our republic. And, to release the body immediately. … The Malaysian side forced the without our permission and witnessing. We will categorically reject the result of the conducted unilaterally excluding our attendance. They are colluding with the hostile forces towards us who are desperate to harm us of malice. It is not clear who the “hostile forces” are, but they’re assumed to be China or South Korea. On Saturday, Malaysia’s Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr S. Subramaniam responded to the North Korean ambassador: North Korea can reject or show disapproval. But we are doing things according to our law. Something happened in our country. We don’t do it according to their law. If murder or death (occurs) in our country, there is a process we go through. There is no short cut in forensics as far as we are concerned … We will release [the autopsy result] once it is ready, and hope to release it within this week. We are currently waiting for the toxicology report, which is an important test to confirm. Once it is done, the results will be given to the police as early as we can and it is up to the police to release it. We want to get correct results before releasing it. It’s very easy to get the feeling that both sides are hiding things, and that there’s a lot more to come out. The assassination of Kim has also further strained relations between China and North Korea, beyond the amount they were already strained by the ballistic missile test. Kim had been exiled from North Korea in 2001 after he was discovered using a phony passport. He’s been living in Macau in China under Chinese protection. On Wednesday, he was at Kuala Lumpur airport preparing to fly back to Macau. If North Korea performed the assassination, it would be a new major humiliation to China. China’s state media Global Times published a story on Wednesday saying that “It is sincerely hoped that [North Korea] will step up and provide answers to a world that right now can only patiently wait. ” That story also criticized North Korea for using assassination at all: Regardless of how intense a country’s political struggle might be, there is no doubt that it should never rely on assassination methods as means for its advancement. Human civilization is now in the 21st century, and such a savage and outdated political device should be cast into the museums of history. This is an interesting point. Assassination is so old, so savage, so outdated, so . It’s better to use more modern methods. If China doesn’t like someone, they like to use more modern techniques — kidnapping, and years of being thrown into a hole and starved, and receiving daily beatings and torture. For China in the 21st century, that’s so much more thoroughly modern and stylish. AFP and The Star (Malaysia) and Global Times (China) Related Articles, KEYS: Generational Dynamics, China, North Korea, Kim Kim South Korea, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, THAAD, Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Doan Thi Huong, Jang Kang Chol, Datuk Seri Dr S. Subramaniam Macau Permanent web link to this article Receive daily World View columns by | 1 |
This Viral Video Has Hillary Running Scared The wildest campaign ad you will ever see! Infowars.com - October 28, 2016 Comments
Share this video on YouTube and Facebook to join the fight and support the Infowar! NEWSLETTER SIGN UP Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars Crew. Related Articles Download on your mobile device now for free. Today on the Show Get the latest breaking news & specials from Alex Jones and the Infowars crew. From the store Featured Videos FEATURED VIDEOS A Vote For Hillary is a Vote For World War 3 - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . The Most Offensive Halloween EVER! - See the rest on the Alex Jones YouTube channel . ILLUSTRATION How much will your healthcare premiums rise in 2017? >25% © 2016 Infowars.com is a Free Speech Systems, LLC Company. All rights reserved. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notice. 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force Brain Force – 25% OFF 34.95 22.46 Flip the switch and supercharge your state of mind with Brain Force the next generation of neural activation from Infowars Life. http://www.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/brainforce-25-200-e1476824046577.jpg http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force http://www.infowarsstore.com/health-and-wellness/infowars-life/brain-force.html?ims=tzrwu&utm_campaign=Infowars+Placement&utm_source=Infowars.com&utm_medium=Widget&utm_content=Brain+Force | 0 |
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Hillary Clinton learned that the FBI had made the decision to reopen its investigation into her private email server while she was aboard a flight bound for Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
As soon as her plane landed, she was met by a barrage of questions from eager reporters, but she chose not to address any of them, instead rushing off the plane and into a vehicle waiting for her.
Watch: WATCH: Hillary Clinton does not comment on FBI email review as she deplanes in Cedar Rapids, IA https://t.co/J54RiABFFl pic.twitter.com/DNVnSOtlR1
— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 28, 2016
While Clinton ignored the elephant in the room, Twitter certainly did not. | 0 |
It's easy to imagine Obama or Kerry pissing him off, but I haven't heard specifically what the US did to set him off. | 0 |
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CONCERN has been expressed for the well being of national broadcaster RTÉ as it continues to insist country singer Nathan Carter ‘is a thing’, WWN can reveal.
Carter, liked by some, but nowhere near enough people to warrant his 439 appearances across RTÉ platforms this week, has been an ever present on Irish screens recently.
“You want Nathan Carter. You need Nathan Carter,” RTÉ insisted with a crazed look in its eyes, as it was surrounded in a supportive and safe environment by those who care about it the most.
RTÉ confirmed plans to launch a third channel, RTÉ Nathan Carter, later this year in a misguided attempt to cater for the Carter mad public that only exists as a figment of the national broadcaster’s mind.
“I don’t know what you’ve been told, but we didn’t ask for this,” a confused and slightly irritated Nation explained to RTÉ as it tried to wriggle free from its restraints, unwilling to engage in the intervention.
“If we let you go, you have to promise not to commission a ten-part series called Nathan Carter’s Favourite Days of The Week or some shite like that,” the Nation added, still weary of the Carter obsessed broadcaster.
BREAKING: RTÉ have commissioned a four hour documentary called Nathan Carter’s Wagon Wheel, which will just involve the country singer singing Wagon Wheel for 240 minutes uninterrupted. | 0 |
Posted on October 27, 2016 by # 1 NWO Hatr Published on Mar 22, 2015 by WhyKnot Make people happy with this fun Halloween prop. Instructions for how to make a hangman’s noose knot in this easy step by step video tutorial. The hangmans noose is a sliding noose knot making an adjustable loop at the end of the rope. It is also known as the collar knot or the hangman’s knot. It is claimed to be traditionally tied with nine or thirteen coils or wraps but the amount of coils can vary depending on the type and thickness or size of rope. It is knot #119 in the Ashley book of knots (ABoK). He claims that eight coils is the correct amount.
It is actually the same as the uni, Duncan or grinner knot which is used in fishing to tie hooks, swivels, lures and flies. The difference is in the way the knot is tied.
It is one of the strongest noose knots accounting for an enormous body count. It is most associated with lynching, hanging people from a tree, gallows and hanging executions, by tying the noose around your neck and causing neck injury. Death occurs either by breaking the neck or suffocation.
Uses: Made with paracord, it can make a knife lanyard or key chain. In jewelery it is used as a pendant on necklaces. It can also be used as a heaving line knot by arborists and in tree climbing to advance the climbing line. The main advantage in that situation being that if the knot becomes stuck in a branch union or crotch a firm pull will unravel the knot and the climbing line can be retrieved. Share this: | 0 |
Trump’s grandfather was a pimp and tax evader; his father a member of the KKK ‹ › Bio by Jack Heart : My earliest memories were of being surrounded by machinery and a constant deep mechanical humming rose and fell like the breath of fitful sleep. Maybe it was the "mother ship" or the "Montauk underground" like Preston Nichols author of the The Montauk Projects would later claim but I am inclined to believe it was the post natal care room at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn where I was born to a well to do family. I grew up in Brooklyn. My father had a Fur business on Twenty-Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. The city bought him and his partners out when they built the Fashion Institute of Technology. From grades one to five I attended the finest Catholic school in NYC. Before I was 12 my family moved to Amity Harbor Long Island and from there the volume on the strangeness was turned up full blast. My teenage years were spent working on fishing boats at Montauk Point where my father had been stationed at Camp Hero for the Korean War. Back home in Amityville we would wile away the night doing performance art for tourists milling around outside my best friend’s home gawking at the Amityville Horror House, some of you may have already met me I was one of the guys throwing beer bottles at you. Butchy to this day doesn’t know who was up in that room with him that night, nobody does but I can take a real good guess. By the time I was eighteen I realized that globalism had made the seas off Long Island barren and I would have to find a new way in life to make a living. I had always wanted to be a fisherman but I opened a landscaping business with my mother who was the top woman designer in her field. Our clients included many celebrities and denizens of Long islands gold coast. Back then it seemed life would always be good. I remember one day while dragging trees out some stock broker’s yard he pulled up his long driveway in his convertible sports car. I looked at his decaying body not much older than mine. Then I looked down at mine. Salty sweat encased sinewy bronze muscles pumped full of blood from the days exertion. I decided I was just where I wanted to be. He would make his 500$ for the day and he had to give it to me because there was no way he was dragging that tree down his long driveway. Little did I know that he and his tribal brethren had a plan. Over the next twenty years they would flood America with illegal “immigrants” to do my job for a hundred dollars a day. Things are not so good anymore even with an associate’s degree in architectural engineering I’ll never make 500$ a day again. He makes more because now the government that sold me out, not once but three times subsidizes his job. I wonder how many of his tribe are buried in veterans memorial cemetery’s. Practically every male member of my family is. I ended up on the wrong side of the law when I was 27 years old through no fault of my own. I was helping Geraldo Rivera film what I now realize must have been Ollie North's little cocaine contra excursion into NY. It was never aired. He quit his job but I was beaten and tortured by the police then branded as a felon for the rest of my life. In 1987 I was asked to remove the Pagans motorcycle gang from their clubhouse a strip club named Bogart’s. The person that asked me was Richard Capri who died abruptly a few years back. He owned Bogart's and a lot of other strip clubs on Long Island. He was a prominent figure in New York's underworld. Financially he dwarfed people like Gotti and the rest of the menagerie of mutts paraded on TV as “mob bosses.” It was during that period that I realized I was a member of a very elite unit. Some would call us soldiers of God others the army of Satan. You read what I write and you decide. LUCIFER in the Temple of the Dog I By Jack Heart on October 28, 2016 LUCIFER in the Temple of the Dog I By Jack Heart, Orage & Friends
Every story has a beginning and an end, everything in between is just a story…
The oldest stories known come from the Aborigine people of Australia. Their stories go back at least thirty thousand years. They are passed on orally by the tribe’s elders under a rigid tradition called “the law” which ensures the preservation of the Aborigines ancient tribal narratives. Linguistic scholars who have studied them have noted the Aborigines ability to sustain “the inter-generational scaffolding needed to transmit stories over vast periods.” 1
Aborigine tribal lore has been academically documented to chronicle the thawing of the Ice Age and the flooding of the Australian coastline thirteen-thousand years ago.2 According The Wisdom Keepers an episode of Ancient Aliens, the television show purporting to document alien intervention in human history, Aborigine lore also recounts meteorite impacts, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and solar eclipses…3
What is certain is that aborigine culture ignores the brutal realities of its own existence and focuses on what is now called the dreamtime. The word dreamtime itself is a mistranslation of the Aborigine word alcheringa, which means the uncreated source; a source which was always there, which perpetually yields fresh materials from which everything that is perceived is derived.
To the aborigine the dreamtime is an altered state of consciousness that lies across the uncharted chasms of the mind, a place where everything that ever was has been imprinted forever in the aether. Nothing that was, nothing that is, can be lost and it can always be accessed by going back to the beginning through ceremonies and dreams.
According to Ancient Aliens; “in many ways the concept of dreamtime mirrors the ancient Hindu idea of the Akashic records.” 4 This may not be true…
The idea of Akashic records go back no further than Madam Blavatsky and Theosophy, a system of mysticism which she founded. Akasha simply means aether in Sanskrit.
The expansion of the microcosm into the macrocosm and contraction back of the macrocosm into the microcosm is a doctrine of just about every reputable school of mysticism. “As it is above is so it is below” to the Hermitic. “And the living creatures rush forth and return” as it is written in verse 537 of the Zohar: Concerning the Eyes of Microprosopus…
If Blavatsky and her followers got the idea from anywhere other than a library that there was an astral hall of cosmic records it was from Tibetan lamas schooled in the all but forgotten ways of the ancient Bon religion. Bon was the mysterious religion of Tibet before Buddhism, a primal type of animism that believes all things animate and inanimate are sourced from an invisible world.
Ancient Aliens is a show that is often painful to watch yet is a necessity for any serious student of human history. The show has by far its finest moment in its decade long existence when it proposes that the Aborigines concept of the dreamtime matches a leading edge property of String Theory called the “Holographic paradigm.”5
There are tears in the fabric of Mans reality that upon scrutiny open to abysses of darkness. Quantum entanglement as been proven over and over again in laboratories whose annual budget would bankrupt a small country. Einstein was wrong and his precious “particles” do react with each other by some mechanism that travels faster than light. Anyone who’s ever had a premonition should have known that…
In the Holographic universe, quantum entanglement the enigma of superluminal interaction between particles –what a baffled Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” petulantly denying its existence in the face of all the evidence (even then) 6 – is easily explained. What are being observed in particle physics are not particles at all, but different aspects of interference patterns generated by the collision of spherical frequency waves emanating from an Event Horizon.
The Holographic paradigm postulates, in fact takes it as a given, that at the threshold of the time-space continuum, what physicists call the cosmological horizon, lay the source of everything that is, ever was, or will be. The information that composes the universe is never lost or changed. It’s immutable and is broadcast in oscillating signals, generating a chaotic sea of fluctuating frequencies that are picked up by mans senses and translated by the mind into the three dimensional world in which he finds himself.
In short; consciousness takes place inside a frequency receiver and “reality” is a television show…
The empirical evidence is overwhelming that the human brain works in the exact same manner as a hologram. This is called the Holonomic brain theory by neuroscientists. Many just cannot accept its implications. But its founder Karl Pribram, who held professorships for ten years at Yale and thirty at Stanford, was the Albert Einstein of neuroscience…
Pribram died in the beginning of 2015 at the age of ninety-five after a long and distinguished career working side by side with such giants in science as BF Skinner, Jon von Neumann and David Bohm; arguably the most brilliant physicist that the Anglo-American empire produced during the twentieth century.
Bohm collaborated closely with Pribram in the formulation of the Holonomic brain theory, but his earlier radical communist political affiliations would have barred him from the inner sanctums of the Stanford Research Institute.
There at Menlo Park, in the womb of madness, Pribram would have had access to at least some of the classified material of Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ. Throughout the seventies Puthoff and Targ were weaponizing the paranormal for Americas Department of Defense. They were working in the outer limits of quantum entanglement. In fact, Pribram admits to consulting with both Puthoff and Targ about it before beginning his collaboration with Bohm…7
In the same interview, from years ago, Pribram explains that “when an input comes in through one of the senses to the brain, it has to then become encoded in some way so that there is a representation.”8 Pribram calls these representations memory traces and says they have no localized point of origin in the brain.
“If you hack away at the brain” in surgery “you would expect that whatever representational process there is and –call it a memory trace if you will– that it would really be impaired tremendously, that you would remove a memory,” like cutting off a piece of a picture. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Pribram –a highly skilled neurosurgeon– noted among other things for his experimental work at the Yerkes Primate Center, of which he became director, recounts that “when lesions occur in the brain there is never any particular memory trace that is removed.” Recalling from over a half century of experience he continues “you may remove something, like the way to retrieve, to get back out the memory. For instance; you might not be able to talk about it but you can still write a note and say what it is you mean.”9
But the overall method by which these memories are spread throughout the brain, enabling them to avoid damage from injury, has always been a mystery.
Pribram explains that it was discovered in the late fifties that the input from the retina is organized in spots, then focused into lines in the cerebral cortex suggesting that the cerebral cortex is filled with cells that act as line detectors. These cells are sensitive to lines at multiple orientations and once you have lines you can create “circles, faces, stick figures, whatever” to formulate images.10
The idea that the cerebral cortex was interpreting interference patterns can be traced back to Germany in 1906.11 Decades later, John Lashley, Pribram’s mentor at the Yerkes Primate Center, reached the same conclusion.
Interference patterns can be seen in the water if you cast two stones in a pool. When the series of concentric waves generated by each of the stones clash the resulting confused ripples or wavelets are interference patterns.
In the interview Pribram asks “what might constitute those interference patterns in the brain” and “given interference patterns, how do you get an image out of that?”12 He then answers his own questions saying both problems were solved when people started building holograms at the University of Michigan and at Stanford (around 1962). He qualifies that by saying “because a hologram is a photographic store of ripples, of interference patterns. Instead of pebbles on a pond, what you have is light beams hitting the film.” 13The light then spreads in ripples over the surface of the film.
Pribram continues “Every light beam that hits does that and the neighboring ones do it and the neighboring ones and so you got every light beam, every part of a beam essentially spread over the entire surface. That’s why mathematically it’s called a spread function.”14
In a hologram that spread function is translated into images and with every passing year in neuroscience it becomes more and more apparent, Pribram uses the word “overwhelmingly,”15 that the brain functions in the same manner.
Pribram goes on to say that “over the last thirty years or so more and more evidence has accumulated to suggest strongly that the cerebral cortex acts as a resonator. It resonates to the frequencies of energies that are being transduced by the receptors; it’s the frequencies of energies.” He emphasizes that this is not an epiphany. German scientists were talking about it in 1906…16
Holography works by using interference patterns to encode information about a three dimensional object into what is, for all intents and purposes, a two dimensional light beam. The interference patterns can then be translated back into a three dimensional object. A tremendous amount of information can be stored and transferred this way.
Another profoundly functional feature of the hologram and analogous to the non-locality of memory in the human brain, is that all information is stored throughout the entire hologram. As long as a part of the hologram is big enough to contain the interference pattern, it can recreate the entire image stored in the hologram.
Holographic technology is based on the Fourier transform, a type of integral transfer sometimes called an improper Riemann integral. The Fourier transform itself is a mathematical function originally used in the nineteenth century to show the transfer of heat between two systems. Fourier transforms are the foundation of Spectral Analysis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
In a Fourier transform two graphs are created; one showing the frequency domain and the other the time domain. The differential is then mapped between the two domains and through various permutations of the equations a spread sheet is achieved of all the individual frequencies that constitute a function of time, what is defined as a signal…
Often it is easier to solve a problem in the time domain by working on it in the frequency domain. Afterwards transformation of the result can be made back to the time domain by reversing the equation, what is called an inverse Fourier transform. The entire signal can be filtered simply by changing the frequencies in the frequency domain…
A Fourier transform can, theoretically, be used to send a function of the three dimensional continuum into a moving four dimensional mass or vice a versa…
The father of the Holograph is 1971 Nobel Prize recipient Dennis Gabor, who right after WW II produced the math –called windowed Fourier transforms– necessary to make one. Gabor served in a Hungarian artillery unit during WW I and in the twenties was instrumental in the development of the electron microscope in Berlin. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933 Gabor, a Hungarian Jew that had converted to Lutherism, fled Germany to England.
By the time Gabor worked with them, Fourier transforms had been infused with the genius of Bernhard Riemann, the nineteenth century German mathematician who broke the back of Euclidian geometry for good, making quantum physics and relativity possible. Erwin Schrödinger, the twentieth century Austrian physicist whose wave equation would become one of the two pillars of quantum physics and the foundation of wave mechanics.
David Hilbert, the German mathematician who taught most of the others and after whom Hilbert’s Space is named, and Werner Heisenberg the discoverer of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the other pillar of quantum physics…
Gabor would have at least had access if not worked directly with the legendary Jon von Neumann, Hilbert’s best pupil. Gabor and von Neumann were both Jews, native Hungarians and born to money, although von Neumann’s education under Hilbert had been paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation. Von Neumann was in fact titled nobility, besides being the man who named Hilbert’s Space in Hilbert’s honor.
Von Neumann was perhaps the most brilliant mathematician who ever lived. He would leave Berlin upon concluding his tutelage under Hilbert and be in Princeton by the end of 1929…
At Princeton, von Neumann delighted in playing Prussian marching music so loud on his gramophone that Einstein, who was in an adjoining office, would have to ask the authorities to intervene. In vain, there was nothing Einstein or anyone else could do about it. Von Neumann wrote the textbook for Quantum mechanics; Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik, or in English Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.
His mathematical contributions to civilization could fill a library, but his real achievements remain classified till this day. It is said that when von Neumann was dying of cancer, while under sedation he was surrounded by a Special Forces guard to insure he didn’t blurt out any of the empires secrets.
Von Neumann would tell anyone who would listen, delighted in it, that he had mathematically proven Einstein wrong. Most academics, although they could not understand his math, believed him and still do… Although they are now fonder of the experimental results of John Stewart Bell for their Einstein bashing…17
Einstein had always insisted that there were hidden variables that when discovered would reconcile quantum physics, which is indeterminate, and relativity, which is determinate. In Einstein’s vision of the future there would be just one unified field of physical phenomena and that would be determinant.
In physics, determinant means events transpire as a result of a mechanistic necessity and are therefore predictable. They follow laws. All physical phenomena should follow rules.
But they don’t. In Quantum physics, quantum entanglement is not the only enigma. There is the double slit experiment where an individual particle is fired through a slit and another through a different slit at a screen. What shows up on the screen is a wave interference pattern which could have only been made by waves passing through the slit…
There is the wave function collapse and quantum randomness in general. If the observer calculates the position of a “sub-atomic particle” in space they cannot calculate its momentum because the very act of locating it influences its trajectory. If they find its momentum, the act of their doing so prevents them from finding its position. That’s the short definition of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
It’s all about predicting probabilities in a matrix, nothing is certain and the observer is part of the equation, anathema to ‘good science…’
Erwin Schrödinger, who won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for providing the equation that makes it all work, was more than just a scientist. A philosopher and poet at heart, he was a lifelong student of the Vedas and believed individual consciousness was a manifestation of the universal whole.
Back then, Schrödinger described the prevailing interpretation of quantum physics, now called the Copenhagen interpretation, as making no distinction “between the state of a natural object and what I know about it, or perhaps better, what I can know about it if I go to some trouble. Actually — so they say — there is intrinsically only awareness, observation, measurement.”18
The Copenhagen interpretation is the prevailing school of thought in quantum physics to this very day. As George Berkeley, the father of Immaterialism and therefore the Copenhagen interpretation, said three hundred years ago; nothing can exist if there is nothing to see it, “esse est percipi,” to be is to be perceived.
After serving as an apprentice to the mysterious German scientist; Max Wien, heir of Friedrich Paschen’s late nineteenth century experimental research on hydrogen spectral lines in the infrared region, Schrödinger would begin publishing papers about atomic theory and the theory of spectra in the early twenties…
He would publish his famous equation in 1926. In the twenty-first century, it’s still the tool mathematicians use to describe a wave function. In the Copenhagen interpretation the wave function is the most complete description that can be given to a physical system.
In Quantum mechanics the Schrödinger equation predicts probability distributions from which results are drawn. A probability distribution is a mathematical description of a random phenomenon. There are no exact results and at the time Schrödinger is quoted as saying “I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.”19
Einstein was livid. Not only was special relativity no longer feasible but perhaps relativity itself. As every school child knows he said “God does not play dice with the universe!”
Schrödinger worked closely with Einstein in the ensuing years, attempting to formulate a unified field theory and reconcile the whole mess into one determinant science, but by the end of the forties he had abandoned those efforts. In a 1952 lecture, he made the first documentable reference to what has become known as the multiverse, prefacing it by saying that what he was about to say might “seem lunatic.” 20
Schrödinger went on to tell his perplexed audience that when his equations seem to be describing several different histories they are “not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously…”21
Famously, in 1956 Schrödinger would refuse to speak about nuclear energy at an important lecture during the World Energy Conference, giving a philosophical lecture instead because he had become skeptical about the entire subject. He would cause a great deal of controversy in the physics community after that, abandoning the idea of particles altogether and adopting the wave-only theory also put forth by Hugh Everett III in his many-worlds interpretation of the multiverse.
In the many-worlds interpretation, the wave in the quantum state is the only thing that is real and under the appropriate conditions it will exhibit particle-like behavior. In Everett’s multiverse, everything that ever could have happened in the past did and every possibility spawns its own universe where that possibility did and does occur.
After Jon von Neumann died prematurely of cancer in 1957 Hugh Everett III would become the Anglo-American empires go-to guy on Quantum physics…
Pilot Waves were first proposed by Einstein in an effort to explain the wave interference patterns produced by particles in cases like the double slit experiment. He had hoped that they could be explained deterministically if the particle were somehow guided by an electromagnetic field; “which would thus play the role of what he called a Führungsfeld or guiding field.”22
The idea of a pilot wave was picked up and made mathematically feasible by Louis de Broglie in 1927, but with little support from a physics community now enamored by Heisenberg and the Copenhagen interpretation it died a slow death from neglect.
De Broglie’s math was resurrected by David Bohm in 1952 and renamed Bohmian mechanics. Heisenberg, who had been “profoundly unsympathetic”23 to the idea from its inception in the twenties wrote in 1955 that it was nothing more than an “exact repetition” of the Copenhagen interpretation “in a different language…”24
Regardless of the value of “Bohmian mechanics” the rest of what David Bohm had to say about the holographic universe may be a summation of everything that was really learned by man in the twentieth century (outside of course all those in this account who had an above top secret clearance…).
Bohm said there were two worlds. The primary one he called the Implicate Order or the enfolded order. He said the enfolded order was “the ground out of which reality emerges.”25The other world, “reality,” the world of the human senses, the world where consciousness dwells, he called the Explicate Order or the unfolded order.
“What we take for reality, Bohm argues, are surface phenomena, explicate forms that have temporarily unfolded out of an underlying implicate order. Within this deeper order forms are enfolded within each other so systems which may well be separated in the Explicate Order are contained within each other in the Implicate Order.”26
Superficially it would appear the two worlds are “dual forms related by an integral transfer” but the reality is the unfolded order cannot exist independent of the enfolded order.27
Bohm, always a pariah to the powers that be because of his politics sometimes had his work classified before he could even finish it. In the Manhattan project he was barred access to Los Alamos and was not allowed to write the thesis for his own scattering equations.
Einstein had always been his mentor, shielding him and preventing his ostracism from academia and Bohm had always worked closely with him in Einstein’s quest to save physics as he knew it. But by the end of the war Bohm had come to the conclusion that quantum mechanics would never become a deterministic science. He stopped looking for deterministic mechanisms as the cause of quantum phenomena and set out to show that the events could be attributed to a far deeper underlying reality.
Bohm’s idea of an Implicate and Explicate order mirror the conclusions reached by Mircea Eliade, the world’s foremost theological scholar of the WW II era… Eliade said there are only the Sacred and the Profane. The Sacred is the place of mythology, where the gods and archetypes dwell together with all the things that establish the very structure of this world. The Sacred is the First Cause of the Gnostics, the alcheringa of the Aborigine and the Implicate Order of Bohmian mechanics.
The Profane is the material things of this world, the things that have nothing to do with the Sacred. They are basically just like the set in an old black and white movie story… Eliade said they “acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.”28 In other words, it is only through its participation in the Sacred that the Profane finds validation.
Through his myths, his ceremonies and his rituals, even in his behavior and dreams, man manifests the Sacred into the Profane. It is Man himself that breaths reality into the fleeting and phantasmagorical world of the Profane…
Eliade said that in order to uphold the world of the Profane, the Scared must be manifested into it, over and over again. He called these incarnations, these places where the Sacred intersects with the Profane, the Eternal Return (not to be confused with Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, just as important but more to do with the cycle of the Yuga’s and the Mandela). Eliade called these manifestations of the Sacred into the Profane hierophanies.
Eliade maintained that all Shamanic practices in cultures uncluttered by the poisons of twentieth century rationalism, indeed the foundation of all Paleolithic spiritual practices, was an attempt to produce these hierophanies.
No one was, nor ever will be, more influential than Mircea Eliade, not even the vaunted Joseph Campbell. But present day academia with its penchant for semantics and cutting the whole up into smaller and smaller pieces till there is nothing left to see at all (both Pribram29 and Bohm30 warned the world about this), still rails against him. They say Eliade painted all cultures with too broad a brush stroke and seem to feel that their exceptions are more important than his whole, the same mistake Einstein made… But even Eliade’s staunchest critic; Geoffrey Kirk, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1974 to 1984 and prolific author himself, concedes that what Eliade said about the Eternal Return fit the culture of Australia’s aborigines like Cinderella’s slipper…
There has always been something dark and foreboding about Australia. Master of horror H P Lovecraft wrote about it in The Shadow out of Time. There is something menacing, something unspoken and threatening, a nameless fear of the stark and unforgiving land and an instinctual loathing of its native aborigine inhabitants that runs like an unseen current through the hard White men who dispossessed them.
In 1770 a British exploratory expedition led by James Cook would land in Botany Bay where the great city of Sidney now stands. They began shooting the natives immediately and the fighting would continue for over a hundred and fifty years. It finally subsided after the Coniston massacre in 1928 in the Northern Territory, which left over a hundred Aborigine dead.
Overall the fighting left thousands of Whites dead and hundreds of thousands of Aborigines. There were no pitched battles; the fighting was at close quarters, often hand to hand before repeating rifles were invented and savagely brutal, more like gang fights than military engagements. Atrocities were committed by both sides and in the interest of political correctness a well documented history of cannibalism among the Aborigine has been kept suppressed by the authorities.31
The Aborigine bore no animosity towards Whites because of their skin color. Eating the dead was strictly business in a land where distances are endless and the sun relentless. As settlers claimed the rights to all Australia’s fertile land the Stone Age hunting and gathering lifestyle of the Aborigine provided less and less sustenance. Resentment, and hunger, became inevitable.
But a journal from as late as 1849 explains how the Aborigine viewed Whites as their “ancestors who have returned to them again.”32 The archived diary describes how the Aborigine, before eating each other, would “scorch off the entire outer skin or epidermis which reveals the ‘true skin’ which in all branches of the human race is quite white.”33
“Their impression being that when they die ‘The black fellow England walk and by and by jump up white fellow.’”34 Australia is rivaled for geological anomalies only by its nearest neighbor Papua New Guinea. Both have stood in isolation for what academia says is sixty thousand years. Only their indigenous tribes, more like ghosts than men, can testify as to what cataclysmic events they may have witnessed.
In the Kimberley region of Western Australia four thousand year old cave paintings depict fantastic beings from the dreamtime called Wandgina. Local Aborigine believe the actions of the Wandgina in the dreamtime manifest themselves as features in the landscape of Australia’s Great Western Desert. They believe these beings control the wind, the rain and the lighting… The Wandgina
Rising like a specter out of the center of the Australian continent and on an otherwise almost unbroken horizon is Uluru or Ayers Rock, an isolated hill that appears like a single great stone has been imbedded into the earth. Uluru, a Mecca for tourists, is famous for its glowing red appearance at dusk and dawn and is sacred to the Aborigine.
At two miles long, over a mile wide and eleven hundred feet high Uluru is by far Australia’s best known geological anomaly. But just as striking is Kata Tjuta, fifteen and a half miles to the west and Mount Conner, slightly to the south and forty-five miles east of Uluru.
Kata Tjuta or the Olga’s consists of thirty six domes covering a little less than eight and half square miles, the tallest being Mount Olga at over seventeen hundred feet high. Mount Conner covers eight and half square miles and rises nine hundred and eighty-four feet at its highest point. All of them are conglomerates of granite-like stone and gravel cemented by a matrix of sandstone, about 50% feldspar, 25–35% quartz and up to 25% rock fragments.
Explanations abound for how the island mountains, called inselbergs by academics, got to be in the western desert. They range from the electric universe theory which postulates that they are the result of an immense electrical discharge, to creationism which of course believes they were scoured out by the deluge, all the way to academia’s old standby of a greased pig, erosion…
Local Aborigines believe most of the south face of Uluru is the result of a war fought in the dreamtime between the carpet-snakes (Kunyia) and the venomous-snakes (Liru). The northwestern corner of Uluru and most of its north face were formed as a result of the activities of the hare-wallaby’s (Mala) and the comings and goings of other dreamtime entity’s fill in the rest of Uluru’s geological features.
To the Aborigine it is the dreamtime that generates this world and with it the landscape…
Black Mountain National Park is located at the northern end of Queensland, a little over five miles from the Coral Sea. “The park” is just a restricted three square mile area around a pile of dark colored granite boulders, some the size of houses. The pile reaches almost a thousand feet in height. Academics have explanations for this striking geological anomaly but to the untrained and perhaps the more objective eye the boulders appear to have been placed there by unknown methods for unknown reasons.
Black Mountain has a sinister reputation among Whites as well as the Aborigine. The Aborigine call it Kalkajaka or place of the spear and avoid it. People disappear around Kalkajaka and the people who go looking for them disappear too.
Some believe the missing have simply been lost forever in the labyrinthine passages between the boulders. Others claim the missing were eaten or enslaved by reptilian aliens that, among other things, have been sighted around the rocks. They believe reptilian aliens have a secret base under Black Mountain where UFO sightings are a regular occurrence.
UFO’s have been receiving a lot of attention lately in Australia. An Australian himself, Duncan Roads –editor of Nexus Magazine for over a quarter century and the most respected name in the alternative media– recounts “Australia is certainly a hot spot of UFO sightings. We’ve had a phenomenal growth in the reporting of UFO sightings by the general public especially since the advent of the internet.”35
Roads points to the area around the Blue Mountains in Australia’s New South Wales “as a hotspot of UFO sightings and other mysteries. There is certainly a lot of mystery in the Blue Mountains. Campers, bushwalkers, explorers all have got tails of mystery, disappearing people, strange tunnels, strange noises and strange creature sightings…”36
According to Aboriginal tribal elder Kevin Gavi Duncan “the Blue Mountains is a very sacred area, sacred place, especially the highest places, because we would be closer to Baiame, closer to god.”37
The human disappearances in the Blue Mountains seem to be focused around Mount Yengo. Called the Uluru of the east, the flat top of Mt. Yengo rises about a thousand feet above a plateau and is believed by academics to be all that remains of an ancient volcano. Perhaps because of its prominent flat top, Aborigine tribes believe that after he was done with the act of creating this world their creator god Baiame leapt back up into the spirit world from Mt. Yengo.
Roads continues “UFO sightings of the Blue Mountains have triggered many magazine articles, radio shows and books. A lot of people have come forward over the last few decades to document and put onto the record their own experiences.”38 Rex Gilroy, author of Mysterious Australia, has unearthed accounts of UFO sightings in the Blue Mountains by nineteenth century pioneers…39
Ancient Aliens straight man David Hatcher Childress theorizes that the Blue Mountains are a “stargate, some portal to another dimension and jumping to hyperspace perhaps…”40 Childress speculates “For some reason Australia was the place where they put this hyperspace portal used by extra terrestrials.”41
Duncan continues “there are stories that elders would say, that some people have actually travelled back to the Morning Star and have come back again.”42 Earlier, standing in front of an ancient rock carving depicting Baiame about forty miles southeast of Mt. Yengo, Duncan explained “Baiame came from a place that we call the Morning Star within the Mirrabooka. Mira means stars and booka means river. That is the Milky Way that flows across the North Star. ”43 Baiame, Bulgandry Aboriginal Engraving site, Brisbane Water National Park, New South Wales, Australia
Duncan then gives his interpretation of the petroglyph. Baiame “holds the Moon in one hand and the Morning Star in the other. Which is a bit like what we call planet earth and these are the two moons which exist around the Morning Star in the Mirrabooka.”44
What the petroglyph shows is Baiame with his arms outstretched and a giant knife horizontal across his naval. The hilt is under his left arm. He is holding a circle in his right hand and a crescent in his left. Below the crescent is another circle suspended in mid air and slightly smaller than the one he holds in his right hand. To the right of the free floating circle, perfectly horizontal to it, is a much smaller almost tiny circle. Slightly to the right of the tiny circle and above it is another tiny circle.45
If the two tiny circles are rotated about two hundred and eighty degrees clockwise or ninety degrees counter clockwise so that the tiny circle that was furthest from Baiame is now in the hilt of the knife you would have close to an image of what, left to right, is in the middle of Australia. Mount Conner would be the large circle, now furthest right.
The Three Sisters rock formation is about fifty miles to the Southwest of Mt. Yengo. The three craggy pillars of sandstone tower above the lush Jamison Valley. No doubt conjuring memories in Australia’s early Anglo-Saxon settlers of the three Wyrd Sisters crouched at their cauldron casting spells on both gods and men in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Wyrd is an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning destiny, to come to pass, to become. By the fifteenth century it had come to mean having the power to control fate. In sixteenth century Scotland and northern England wyrd implied that an event was miraculous. It wasn’t till the early nineteenth century that weird came to mean something was odd. The Proto-Indo-European root is wert meaning to turn or to rotate…
In the 1965 epic science fiction novel Dune by Frank Herbert the Wyrding Way is an overwhelming close quarter fighting technique used by the story’s messianic hero and his rebel armies with devastating effectiveness. In hand to hand combat its adepts are able to maneuver around and strike their opponents at speeds that resemble teleportation to the observer and words and sounds can be amplified to become lethal weapons.
Mastery of the Wyrding Way required the adoption of a completely different concept of what the space-time continuum is and what its cause and effect are. The essence of the Wyrding Way is summed up in both the motto and the mantra of its practitioners “my mind affects my reality.”
Wyrd is a notion taken from the pre-Christian religion of the Norseman. In Old Norse the word is Urðr. It is also the name of the mother of the Norns, female beings who rule over the destiny of gods and men. There are many Norns, good and evil, who appear at a person’s side at their birth and decide upon their future.
Urðr (fate), Verðandi (present) and Skuld (karmic debt) are the most powerful of the Norns and said to have come to intervene in a time long past when the gods ruled too haughtily over men. The three beautiful maidens pour the purifying waters of the Urðarbrunnr (Well of Urðr) over the Yggdrasil (Tree of Life) to keep it eternally rejuvenated.
The Urðarbrunnr is said to be one of three wells, one under each of the three roots of the Yggdrasil. Each root reaches to a different far off land. The other two wells are Hvergelmir (bubbling boiling spring), located beneath a root in Niflheim (Abode of Mist), and Mímisbrunnr (Mímir’s well), located beneath a root near the home of the frost jötnar (Giant). It was said that Odin gave one of his eyes to drink from the Mímisbrunnr, the well of wisdom and understanding.
Aside from Tasmania and parts of New Zealand Australia’s Blue Mountains is the last real stop in the Pacific Ocean before the Antarctic. The Blue Mts. are about as far away as you can get from the land of the Norsemen on the Baltic Sea. But as Caroline Cory author of The Visible and Invisible Worlds of God notes “there are several umbilical cords on the planet. This particular location is located exactly at negative thirty-three latitude.”46
Cory then recites the standard alien enthusiast dogma about the thirty-three degree latitude of planet earth aligning with the center of the galaxy and how it is “continuously being visited from different parts of the planetary system from different parts of the galaxy and even from beyond this galaxy, from way out in the universe.”47
Most amateur UFO enthusiasts have never heard of Bruce Cathie and his book; Harmonic 33, published way back in 1968. But most professional researchers are well acquainted with the book and many new age authors use Cathie’s math to validate their Tinkerbellian speculations.
“Even while you read this interplanetary space ships are rebuilding a world grid system from which it appears they can draw motive power and they are possibly using the grid for navigational purposes.” 48
This is the cover sentence in Harmonic 33. There are rumors that the original book was immediately pulled from bookstore shelves, edited, then rereleased with Cathie put under wraps and assigned a handler, never to produce anything again of any consequence for the general public, though he would write a few more books.
Cathie, a New Zealand airline pilot, saw his first UFO in 1952. He would be fascinated till he died in 2013. He began collecting data and collating it with sightings by other pilots over New Zealand. Using techniques borrowed from French UFO researcher Aimé Michel he was able to establish two track lines where aerial anomalies were being regularly encountered. From there he “was able to form a complete grid network over the whole of the New Zealand…”49
Cathie learned that the American survey ship Eltanin had taken some of the strangest photographs of the twentieth century off the west coast of South America. There, thirteen thousand feet beneath the waves mounted on the pacific sea bed was an “aerial-like object” that was “two-to-three-feet high and had six main crossbars spaced evenly up its stem with a smaller one at the top. Each set of crossbars had a small ball at the end of each arm.”50
Later one of the scientists who had been on board the Eltanin told Cathie the object was thought to be metallic and an artifact of some kind. Cathie was able to align his New Zealand grid with the coordinates of the artifact fashioning what he reasoned was a world energy grid and perhaps used as a galactic navigational tool by extra-terrestrials.
Interestingly enough, in light of Erwin Schrödinger’s actions at the World Energy Conference in 1956, Cathie did not believe nuclear weapons could be detonated randomly but would have to be at exactly the right coordinates at exactly the right time to work. Using his world energy grid he started publically predicting the exact times and places of test sites before they got him muzzled…
In Cathie’s own words “It was only a matter of time before I realized that the energy network formed by the grid was already known to a powerful group of international interests and scientists. It became obvious that the system had many military applications, and that political advantage could be gained by those with secret knowledge of this nature. It would be possible for a comparatively small group, with this knowledge, to take over control of the world.” 51
Cathie concluded that the “whole of physical reality was in fact manifested by a complex pattern of interlocking wave-forms.”52
Aliens are a very grey area, as is reality itself. What the Explicate Order translates out of the Implicate Order, what the Sacred manifests in the Profane, they are like points in a wave that show up as a particle. Just as surely they are guided only by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle…
Something is going on in the Blue Mountains, always has been. It’s been categorized by twenty-first century academia as paranormal but it’s something Australia’s aboriginal people are well acquainted with.
Duncan Roads is the man who introduced Bruce Cathie to the general public. He knows words like von Neumann knew numbers. He says “the Australian aborigines have a connection and a relationship with what we call extra terrestrials and UFO’s which goes back tens of thousands of years. Their rather nonplussed by their existence, they have developed an awareness of individual types of visitors from what we call outer space.”53
The Three Sisters crouch at the south edge of the town of Katoomba, an Anglo-Saxon enclave of artists and artisans. They can be viewed from its golf course and are the most famous landmark in The City of Blue Mountains, a ribbon of contiguous towns, which lie on New South Wales Main Western railway line. The City of Blue Mountains has dubbed itself ‘The City within a World Heritage National Park.’ It has Sister City Relationships with Sanda City, Japan and Flagstaff, Arizona in the USA.
Located in the southwest of the Four Corners, an area famed for its paranormal activities, Flagstaff is the unofficial capital of the Navaho (Diné) Nation and the Hopi, the priestly tribe who are the keepers of the Diné’s most profound secrets.
Like a penitent kneeling at the foot of the alter Flagstaff prostrates itself at the south foot of Agassiz Peak, Freemont Peak and Doyle Peak in the Kachina Peaks Wilderness.
To the Hopi this area, part of the San Francisco Peaks, the remains of an eroded composite volcano, is the most sacred place in the Four Corners. In fact it is the most sacred place in the world…
The San Francisco Peaks are where the doorways open up for their gods, which they call Kachina, to come forth when they are called in the powerful ceremonies performed by the Hopi.
The Kachina are supernatural beings said to control the wind, the rain and the lighting…
At 11,464 feet Doyle Peak was the site of the world’s highest astronomical observation point from 1927-1932. Built by the Lowell Observatory, the stated purpose of the cabin on the south side of the summit was to scan the heavens and make spectroscopic observations, especially in ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths…
In 2005 “a collaborative project team formed, the heart of which is still active today, including NASA scientists, Navajo Medicine Men, and both NASA and Navajo educators.”54 Flagstaff is the home of the Lowell Observatory, the U.S. Naval Observatory and the United States Geological Survey Flagstaff Station… Rock art from Sego Canyon at the northern frontier of the Four Corners.
Citations
1 – Reid, Nick, and Patrick D. Nunn. “Ancient Aboriginal Stories Preserve History of a Rise in Sea Level.” The Conversation. 13 Jan. 2015. Web. 25 July 2016. http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010
2 – Ibid.
3 –“Ancient Aliens S11E07 – The Wisdom Keepers.” 11:00. YouTube, 7 July 2016. Web. 26 July 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-mX1eWoj6I
4 –Ibid. 29:33.
5 –Ibid. 30:09.
6– MARKOFF, JOHN. “Sorry, Einstein. Quantum Study Suggests ‘Spooky Action’ Is Real.” Science. New York Times, 21 Oct. 2015. Web. 3 Aug. 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/science/quantum-theory-experiment-said-to-prove-spooky-interactions.html?_r=0
7 – “Karl Pribram ‘Holographic Brain’ New Dimensions 1:12:52.” Youtube. Insightfreeman, 5 Dec. 2012. Web. 15 Aug. 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awFleswtH2Y
8 –Ibid. 23:34. | 0 |
BATON ROUGE, La. — Darren McKinney knows about floods, having spent days huddling in the upper rooms of a house when the waters of Hurricane Katrina drowned his New Orleans neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward, 11 years ago this month. And so on Saturday afternoon, at a house in a Baton Rouge subdivision that had been flooded a week earlier, Mr. McKinney passed his knowledge on to a group of volunteers from lowernine. org, a nonprofit organization founded after Hurricane Katrina: cut the drywall here, this high up, and pull out the insulation like this. “Because I’ve been through it,” he said, “I know the dos and don’ts. ” There are plenty here in south Louisiana who have been forced to learn this kind of thing, and plenty who have learned much larger lessons as well. Those lessons include how to get money most efficiently from the federal government and ways to avoid leaving thousands of people for years in temporary shelters, like the notorious Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, as the rebuilding proceeds. The big thoughts and small details constitute a grimly earned expertise here and particularly in New Orleans, which sits just 75 miles down the road. It is a that will now be drawn on considerably, with devastation across 20 parishes, at least 60, 600 homes damaged or ruined, and the long and often exasperating road to recovery just now beginning. “The silver lining, if there is any silver lining, is that this sits in a large region that has a lot of experience with rebuilding and recovery,” said Mary L. Landrieu, a former United States senator from Louisiana, and a veteran of funding fights during the hurricane recovery. “They don’t have to go far to find experts. ” Many organizations that came into existence to tackle problems after Hurricane Katrina are now on the front lines of this recovery, which President Obama will survey during a visit on Tuesday. The Louisiana Civil Justice Center, started in the months after the hurricane to respond to the many and confounding legal issues of the poor, is the official statewide legal aid resource in the state bar association’s disaster plan. The St. Bernard Project, a nonprofit rebuilding group which now calls itself SBP and was started by two volunteers in 2006 in a parking lot in a wrecked parish outside of New Orleans, is planning to open at least one office, if not several, in Baton Rouge. The group’s leaders have been in talks with advertising firms in New Orleans about campaigns to educate people about how to navigate the FEMA process for grants and loans, how to avoid being defrauded by contractors and how to do some work without any outside help at all. All are things that the group learned after Hurricane Katrina and in subsequent relief efforts elsewhere around the country. “The fact is, disaster recovery hasn’t worked well in America, ever,” said Zack Rosenburg, one of the founders of the group, which has done rebuilding work after floods in South Carolina and West Virginia. “It’s an extraordinarily challenging process. ” On Saturday, some of the original members of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state agency set up to oversee the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, met with local and state officials at the offices of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, a civic group, to talk about the lessons of the last 11 years. With homes in Louisiana still underwater, the talk was preliminary, said John Spain, the executive vice president of the foundation. But there was plenty to look back at and see as experiences not to repeat. “We’re 11 years after Katrina, and only 60 percent of the housing stock in St. Bernard Parish is back,” Mr. Spain said, referring to a parish just east of New Orleans that was almost entirely destroyed by the levee failures after the hurricane. This time, it was Livingston Parish, just east of Baton Rouge, that was almost entirely flooded. “It’s important that we don’t repeat mistakes whether it’s from Sandy or Katrina or Gustav. ” Part of the issue then was how long it took for homes to be rebuilt and essential services to come back. After Hurricane Katrina, thousands endured extended stays in FEMA trailers, and thousands of others eventually settled down permanently in cities elsewhere, bleeding New Orleans of its population. In this flood response, several officials said, FEMA is pursuing a strategy of getting people to move back as quickly as possible into at least one or two rooms of their houses, an aim that would depend on quick payments and a work force of volunteers. “Our efforts to help the schools get back open and get as many people back in their home as soon as possible is going to minimize the effect we had after Katrina,” said Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, a Republican, who praised the federal response. “Right after Katrina, we didn’t see that passion to really help,” he said. Still, there is plenty that has not been learned, or learned but not fixed. A report released last year by Save the Children, an advocacy group, found that few of the recommendations of a federal commission on children and disasters, which was set up after Hurricane Katrina, have been carried out nationally. And those who have worked with poor and families since Hurricane Katrina expect to see many of the exact same problems they saw over the last decade, even if they now feel more savvy about fighting them. “The kinds of things you’re going to see early on are things like people facing a potential eviction because housing is scarce,” said Laura Tuggle, the executive director of the Southeast Louisiana Legal Services, which helped the poor after Hurricane Katrina. She ticked off some more of what she expected: sudden sharp rises in rent, withheld deposits, increases in domestic violence for those stuck in close quarters and, for homeowners, complicated title problems that could jeopardize access to assistance. All of these are matters that lawyers with her group had to tackle after Hurricane Katrina. She has already gotten calls about some of them this time. “You know what needs to be done,” Ms. Tuggle said, recalling the months during which she was unable to get back to her home in New Orleans in 2005. “Because we’ve been there. ” Betty Michelli, 63, of Baton Rouge, has now been there, though she had never been there before. On Saturday, volunteers with the St. Bernard Project were gutting her house and piling debris out on the front lawn. She and her husband stood in the hot garage, going over all that they do not know about disasters, from how FEMA is supposed to contact them, to how one gets loans from the Small Business Administration, to what exactly they are going to be doing next. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just sit down and cry. ” | 1 |
Health Groups Urging Chart Topping Band the Chainsmokers to Change Their Name They may be one of the hottest acts in pop at the moment, but US dance music duo the Chainsmokers are being criticized by health organisations and campaigners because of their rather unhealthy-sounding name. The twosome, Andrew Taggart and Alex Pa... Adele helps pregnant mothers by telling them; "It aint no fun being a mum!" One of Britain's most famous exports, singer/songwriter Adele, has decided to go public and warned pregnant mother's about having babies, she say's "being a mum aint no fun!" Adele just happened to be paid a couple of million for telling her despe... | 0 |
The actress Carrie Fisher, best known for her portrayal of Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” movies, was hospitalized in intensive care on Friday night after a medical episode aboard a flight to Los Angeles from London, The Associated Press reported. [ Read our obituary for Carrie Fisher ] Her brother, Todd Fisher, told The A. P. that Ms. Fisher was receiving excellent care but that he could not classify her condition. He had earlier said that she was in stable condition and was out of the emergency room at a Los Angeles hospital. In a subsequent interview he said many details about her condition or what caused the medical emergency were unknown. The Los Angeles Fire Department said in a statement that paramedics responded to Los Angeles International Airport around 12:10 p. m. for a patient on an inbound flight who was in cardiac arrest. They “aggressively treated” the patient, who was not named. Several news accounts identified the passenger as Ms. Fisher, 60. Luke Punzenberger, a spokesman for United Airlines, said in an email that medical personnel met the flight after crew members reported that a passenger was unresponsive. News of Ms. Fisher’s medical episode prompted an outpouring of concern on Twitter from “Star Wars” and fans. Ms. Fisher is the daughter of the actress Debbie Reynolds and the singer Eddie Fisher. In addition to her performances in the original “Star Wars” trilogy and last year in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” Ms. Fisher has written books chronicling her life in Hollywood and battles with drug addiction. One of the books, “Postcards From the Edge,” was adapted into a 1990 movie that starred Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. | 1 |
Welcome to Watching, The New York Times’s guide. We comb through releases big and small to email readers twice a week with our timely recommendations. You can browse previous guides here, and to receive recommendations straight to your inbox, sign up here. Stay tuned for our coming website. I took a short vacation and now I feel utterly unable to function in normal society. Breakfast should begin slowly and quietly around noon, all sandwiches should be lobster rolls and every day should include some kind of beach excursion. But real life beckons, as it always does. The good news is that real life includes some exciting new TV shows this weekend — time to turn our brains toward the television future and embrace what comes next. That’s never really been my strong suit, though, so I’ll also probably rewatch a few episodes of “Mad Men,” since I found myself thinking about that show an awful lot in the last few weeks. I can’t help it — I still miss it. Have a joyous weekend, friends. “The Hindenburg Explodes! ,” Adult Swim (free, but it’s only up until Monday select it from the “Now Showing” menu). Watch if you wish “Children’s Hospital” was set on a doomed airship. Adult Swim has posted four pilots for new, short shows — three cartoons and one piece. The “Hindenburg,” by and Rob Corddry, is the best of the bunch. John Cho, Lauren Lapkus, Leslie Bibb, Nate Corddry, Kevin McDonald and Danny Pudi among others play passengers, time travelers, “adventurers” and historical figures on this silly, occasionally crass, spoof. It’s not clear how exactly the show would be expanded past these 10 minutes, but let’s try to believe that we live in a world full of good surprises. “The Jim Gaffigan Show,” Sunday, 10 p. m. TV Land. Watch if you like loosely autobiographical showbiz stories. “The Jim Gaffigan Show” has improved tremendously since its premiere last year, finding a little more edge and identity — though perhaps we have hit full cultural saturation on “comic plays comic in show about him or herself. ” This week brings the series’ season finale, and the show works just fine episodically. Don’t feel a need to “catch up,” but if you want to orient yourself a little, watch the surprisingly profound Season 2 episode, “The Calling,” in which Jim searches for meaning in his life. “I Love Dick,” “The Tick” and “ Van Johnson,” Amazon. Watch if you want to participate in the voting process or already like the creators and stars of these shows. Welcome to another round of Amazon pilots. The streaming platform’s “system,” in which viewer votes allegedly affect which shows go to series, ultimately seems as capricious and as the old network model: This spring, the platform introduced one compelling and one snoozy drama, “The Interestings” and “The Last Tycoon. ” And yet “Tycoon” is the one that’s moving forward. Alas! The world is cruel. But “I Love Dick” is pretty great. It’s based on Chris Kraus’s book of the same name, and (broadly) adapted by Jill Soloway, the creator of “Transparent. ” Soloway teams with her frequent muse Kathryn Hahn, who plays a stymied filmmaker spending a season in Marfa, Tex. with her academic husband (Griffin Dunne) when she meets the alluring, confounding Dick (Kevin Bacon, almost comically eroticized). Soloway’s loose, empathetic style and passion for slightly irritating characters are in full force. But “Dick” is less languid than “Transparent,” and has a steadier beat than her film “Afternoon Delight. ” Here’s hoping it goes to series. “The Tick” is the newest reboot in the cult “Tick” franchise — first a comic book, then an animated series, then a series and now another series. This version stars Peter Serafinowicz as the titular superhero, and Griffin Newman (“Vinyl”) as Arthur, a dweeby accountant who becomes the Tick’s sidekick. Originalists will probably grumble about this darker spin’s lack of camp and flair, but there’s plenty to like here, even with so many options. Finally, “ Van Johnson,” starring Van Damme as an star who moonlights as a secret operative, did absolutely nothing for me, but if you are a JCVD your mileage will almost certainly vary. Enjoy an summer blockbuster from the near comfort of your A. C. unit with “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation. ” In this latest “Mission: Impossible” edition, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) goes under the radar to try to thwart yet another covert organization bent on destroying his colleagues at the Impossible Mission Force (IMF). Boasting incredible stunts, car chases, explosions and a talented cast that includes Alec Baldwin, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Rebecca Ferguson, the fifth movie in the franchise pushes the boundaries of feats at every turn. You don’t need to have seen previous installments of this spy caper series’ to enjoy “Rogue Nation. ” But remember to breathe during the movie’s excruciating underwater scene and daredevil plane sequence. (Watch on Amazon Prime) — Monica Castillo ‘The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore’ Comedy Central announced this week that Thursday would be the final night for “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore. ” Based on the ratings, this isn’t a huge surprise — the show never found a big audience. It also never quite found its ideal form: While Wilmore’s openers were sharp, they often covered the same clips as “The Daily Show” had a earlier, and panel conversations are the worst possible format for telling jokes or conveying information. Here’s hoping there’s another, better show in Wilmore’s future. He spoke with The New York Times earlier this week about the abrupt end to the show and the work he’s most proud of. I’ve raved about this doc in the newsletter a lot, but, all five parts of ESPN’s fascinating, fantastic documentary “O. J. Simpson: Made in America” are now streaming on Hulu. | 1 |
Paleontologists excavating a basin in southern Tanzania have uncovered fossils belonging to one of the earliest relatives of dinosaurs. The carnivorous creature, which is not a direct ancestor to dinosaurs but more of a close cousin, is called Teleocrater rhadinus. The discovery, which was reported Wednesday in Nature, may help scientists fill in gaps in our understanding of how dinosaurs evolved as well as provide insight into what their earliest relatives looked like. “For the first time we have a good idea of what the very first forms on the lineage leading to pterosaurs, dinosaurs and birds looked like,” Randall B. Irmis, a curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah who was not involved in the study, said in an email about the study. “I think this will spark a lot of research into how and why pterosaurs and dinosaurs evolved into such different forms from their early relatives. ” The Teleocrater is an archosaur, a group that includes all birds, dinosaurs and the flying reptiles pterosaurs, as well as crocodiles and alligators. About 250 million years ago, at the beginning of the Triassic Period, the archosaurs broke into two main branches: the bird bunch, which includes dinosaurs, and the crocodile crew. Teleocrater is considered an early member of the archosaurs, appearing some 10 million to 15 million years before dinosaurs entered the lineage. But for a creature so closely related to dinosaurs, it did not look very dinosaurlike. It was between 6 and 10 feet long and resembled a Komodo dragon with an elongated neck. It also walked on four limbs. What paleontologists found most surprising about the creature were the bones in its ankles, which were more similar to those found in crocodiles than those found in dinosaurs and birds — even though Teleocrater was on team bird and not team croc. The unexpected finding suggests that features previously thought to have evolved in one branch may have existed in a common ancestor of both groups. “This is along the lines of rewriting our understanding of the very earliest history of the bird and dinosaur lineage,” said Kenneth Angielczyk, a paleobiologist at the Field Museum in Chicago and an author on the study. “It changes our understanding of what that first step in the evolution of dinosaurs was like. ” The first Teleocrater remains to be discovered were found in the 1930s by Francis Rex Parrington, a famous paleontologist from Cambridge University. Unsure of what he had collected, he stored the bones away until they were uncovered by his graduate student Alan Charig in the 1950s. He identified it as an archosaur and named it Teleocrater, but the designation was never made official, nor was the creature ever placed on the dinosaur family tree. It wasn’t until 2015 that Dr. Angielczyk, Sterling J. Nesbitt, a paleontologist from Virginia Tech, and their colleagues uncovered an unusual set of bones in Tanzania that proved Dr. Charig was right. “It seemed like a fairly strange animal,” Dr. Angielczyk said, “but it wasn’t until we got it back to the lab and got it cleaned that the full implications of its relationship to birds and dinosaurs became apparent. ” The team, which includes researchers from the United States, England, Argentina, South Africa, Sweden and Russia, identified several features, like a depression in its skull, that further showed the Teleocrater was an archosaur from the bird lineage. But by also finding that it had a ankle, the team connected the dinosaur and bird branch to the crocodile branch in a way that was not previously known. Kevin Padian, an integrative biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who reviewed the paper, said the findings showed that the features that have traditionally been associated with the line did not evolve in lockstep. “The bottom line is that we have so much new information that we’re seeing a far more complex picture than we had 30 years ago,” he said, “and that’s an important evolutionary insight. ” | 1 |
LONDON — A assailant driving a sport utility vehicle mowed down panicked pedestrians and stabbed a police officer outside Parliament on Wednesday in a deadly assault, prompting the hasty evacuation of the prime minister and punctuating the threat of terrorism in Europe. At least four people, including the assailant, were killed and at least 40 others injured in the confusing swirl of violence, which the police said they assumed had been “inspired by international terrorism. ” It appeared to be the most serious such assault in London since the deadly subway bombings more than a decade ago. Throughout a turbulent afternoon, ambulances, emergency vehicles and heavily armed security officers thronged the area outside Parliament, as one of the busiest sections of London was cordoned off and evacuated. Prime Minister Theresa May was rushed into a vehicle and spirited back to her office. She held a meeting of the government’s emergency committee and issued a statement on Wednesday night from her 10 Downing Street residence denouncing “the sick and depraved terrorist attack on the streets of our Capital this afternoon. ” Mrs. May also said that “the full details of exactly what happened are still emerging,” but she confirmed that the attack had been carried out by a lone male assailant. As of late Wednesday, his identity had not been released, but Scotland Yard officials said they believed they knew who he was. The attack unfolded around 2:40 p. m. Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said at a news conference. Driving a sport utility vehicle, the assailant slammed into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge near Parliament, killing two people and injuring many others, before crashing into a railing. After the crash, the driver left the vehicle and approached Parliament, where he stabbed an unarmed police officer to death and was fatally shot by the police. The dead officer was identified as Keith Palmer, 48, a member of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Command with 15 years of experience. “This is the day we have planned for but we hoped would never happen,” Mr. Rowley said. “Sadly, it’s now a reality. ” The attack came on the anniversary of suicide bombings in Brussels that killed 32 people, along with three bombers. It confirmed fears among counterterrorism officials that London, which had largely escaped recent terrorist attacks in Europe, would join cities like Paris, Brussels and Berlin as targets of mass violence. “Terrorism affects us all, and France knows the pain the British people are enduring today,” President François Hollande of France said at a news conference in Villepinte, near Paris. Mrs. May, who spoke with Mr. Hollande and President Trump, said in her statement that Parliament would meet as normal on Thursday. She vowed to never permit “the voices of hate and evil to drive us apart. ” Cmdr. B. J. Harrington of the Metropolitan Police said at a brief news conference earlier Wednesday that a “full counterterrorism investigation is underway. ” He asked members of the public to report any suspicious activity and to share any images or video of the violence. Commander Harrington said that the acting police commissioner, Craig Mackey, had been at the scene of the attack and was not injured, but was “being treated as a significant witness. ” At least three police officers were among those injured on the bridge. Also among the injured were three boys from a group of visiting students from the Brittany region of France, and a woman who fell or plunged into the River Thames. Mr. Hollande’s government said it had chartered a plane to London with families of the French victims. Tobias Ellwood, a minister in the Foreign Office, tried to save the life of the fatally stabbed police officer by giving resuscitation. The number of injured apparently included five South Korean tourists who were overwhelmed by a crowd fleeing the scene, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday morning. Three men suffered fractures, and a woman had surgery for a head injury, the ministry said. For more than two hours, astonished lawmakers inside the House of Commons, some of whom had ducked for cover, were told to stay in place as officers searched the premises office by office. “At the moment, the very clear advice from the police and the director of security in the house is that we should remain under suspension, and that the chamber should remain in lockdown until we’ve received advice that it is safe to go back to normal procedures,” David Lidington, the leader of the House of Commons, or lower house of Parliament, told lawmakers in remarks broadcast live on the BBC. Olly Grender, a member of the House of Lords, said that lawmakers were staying put. “We were in a meeting, I heard shouting through the window,” she said, adding that a colleague came in to tell them that a serious episode had taken place. Jayne Wilkinson, 59, from Birmingham, was near the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square with her partner, David Turner, 56, when they saw people suddenly running from Parliament. The couple said they had seen a man holding a knife. He ignored warnings from the police, running though the gates into the Parliament compound, she said. “They were shouting to warn him,” Ms. Wilkinson said. Soon after, she and her partner heard three gunshots and saw the man on the ground. Three construction workers inside the grounds of Westminster Palace said they had heard shots fired in rapid succession before they were escorted off the premises. “It was ” one said. Reuben Saunders, an American student at Cambridge University who was visiting Parliament, said he had been leaving the building when he saw a police officer accosted by an assailant armed with two knives or similar weapons. “He was at the gate, I heard screaming,” Mr. Saunders said. “I saw the man on the ground being repeatedly stabbed, or pummeled. ” Mr. Saunders said two or three other police officers arrived, and “there were two or three gunshots. ” Corinne Desray, a teacher who was outside Parliament with 39 teenage students on a school trip from northern France, said they had heard three shots. “My colleague saw bodies lying on the floor and someone said a policeman has been knived,” she said. “I told the kids to leave quickly, we’re heading back to the bus. ” Kirsten Hurrell, 70, who owns a newsstand opposite Big Ben, said she had seen a car swerve across a bicycle lane and into a fence around Parliament. She saw a body lying on the ground and called emergency services. “At first I thought it was an accident, but then I was told the car had already mowed down quite a number of people on Westminster Bridge,” she said, adding: “Now that it is a terrorist incident, it is a bit more daunting. ” Robert Vaudry, 52, a fund manager from said he had emerged from the Westminster subway station around 2:40 p. m. for a meeting with a lawmaker when he realized that something was amiss. “I came out of the Tube and there were two armed policemen,” he said in an interview. “One grabbed my arm, pushed me to the left and said, ‘Get out of here,’” he said. “They were shouting at everyone to get away. ” As he spoke, police officers were cordoning off the area. One officer shouted, “We need everyone to move back past Downing Street. ” Radoslaw Sikorski, a former foreign minister of Poland who was in the area, was in a taxi on Westminster Bridge when the pedestrians were hit by the other vehicle. “I didn’t see the impact, I heard it — it sounded like a car hitting a sheet of metal,” he said. “I saw these people lying on the tarmac, on the pavement. I saw five people down, one unconscious and one bleeding heavily from his head. He was not moving. The taxi driver rang the emergency services, and people rushed to help. ” Andrew Bone, the executive director of the Responsible Jewellery Council, an industry standards group, was on a bus heading toward Victoria Station when it was stopped at the edge of Parliament Square. Seeing the commotion, he initially thought an action movie was being shot, but quickly discerned the gravity of the situation as the bus was evacuated and he saw the vehicle that had crashed into a railing. “We had a seat as the first responders arrived,” Mr. Bone said. “I am of the generation who remembers I. R. A. bombs in London during the Troubles,” he said, referring to the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. “We are not indifferent, but police have reacted with calm. I saw no panic. ” Britain has not suffered a terrorist attack since July 7, 2005, when bomb attacks on subway trains and on a bus killed more than 50 people. Political violence is relatively rare in Britain, where gun ownership is stringently restricted. Jo Cox, a Labour member of Parliament, was assassinated in her constituency in northern England on June 16, a week before the contentious referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union. In 1979, a lawmaker was assassinated near the Parliament building. Airey Neave, a Conservative Party member, was killed when his car was blown up. Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that the London attack was consistent with the recent pattern of attacks in which a vehicle was used to kill people, citing assaults in France, Germany and Israel. “We’ve seen a gradual movement away from terrorist attacks on the West to attacks on softer and softer targets with more improvised weapons,” he said. “In a way, it’s a sign of desperation and a demonstration of the effectiveness of counterterrorism in the West. It’s spectacularly easy to kill a bunch of people with a car or a truck if you don’t care who they are. ” | 1 |
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Much to the surprise of the American electorate, both on the right and left, the FBI is reopening it's investigation into Hillary Clinton's email scandal. Whether this will amount to anything meaningful, or it is simply a distraction is any body's guess. Many are speculating that this could be the issue which would cause President Obama to cancel the elections. In my recent article "Corrupting One's Self is the Ultimate Morality in the Pursuit of Utopia," I discussed the possibility that the blatant corruption is deliberately being thrust in our face to create the necessary attitude for social change. This idea of course, is based on the writings of Alinsky and other "social engineers" skilled in the arts of propaganda and psychological manipulation. Looking at it from this perspective, cancelled elections are a possibility. The truth is, with Hillary Clinton you never know what to expect because she is operating from an "ends justify the means mentality," and she is willing to do anything to see her dreams of a collectivized America move forward.
According to Elizabeth Harrington from the Washington Free Beacon, the Clinton campaign began conducting focus groups to determine which approach Hillary should take concerning her run for the presidency. Hillary is diehard ideologue whose beliefs are right in line with Communists dictators like Stalin and Mao. She believes that ordinary people have no idea how to best conduct their personal business and the state should be involved in every aspect of our lives. The goal of these focus groups was to determine the attitudes of the electorate in order to mold her message and her personality into something they would vote for. Many people would attempt to ridicule and discredit anyone associating Hillary Clinton with communists because she comes across as compassionate and caring, always blaming everything on a vast, right wing conspiracy.
This has always been the modus operandi of the communist movement and it explains why so many young people have no idea about the atrocities committed under the regimes of communist rulers. Today's millennials are well aware of the holocaust and the millions of Jews murdered by Adolph Hitler. They may not however, know that Hitler murdered more than Jews. He started by eliminating the sick and disabled, then he murdered Christians, homosexuals and anyone else essentially, that didn't go along with his national socialism. The belief is that fascism is an extreme right wing world view. This explains the hostility towards today's conservative movement. They have been branded as fascists, when in fact, the truth is the exact opposite. On the true political scale, national socialism or fascism is to the right of communism, which represents complete state control, but it is still way left of center. A true, extreme right wing world view would be complete absence of government control over anything. With this being said, and understanding that the horrors of communism have all been forgotten simply because they are no longer being taught, the communists have been very successful in deceiving people because like Hillary Clinton, they pretend to be something they are not.
Millions of young people in America, due to left wing indoctrination in our universities, are falling for the communist propaganda under the guise that communism is a more fair, compassionate system of economics. Left wing professors, refusing to acknowledge the failures of communism because they believe the right leader has not come along to implement it the right way, have failed to teach these young minds that the pursuit of total equality has led to the death of 100,000,000 people under communist controlled governments. Communists, believing not in God but in evolution and science, believe that man can be trained into submission and a refusal to accept communist ideals is in fact, a sign of mental deficiency. Therefore, it is justifiable to eliminate them. To understand this read "Brainwashing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics." Communists also hide this belief by claiming their pursuit of equality is motivated by a pursuit of social and economic justice when in fact, it is motivated by a pure desire to control every aspect of human being.
The Black Book of Communism references the historical debate over the evil natures of both Communism and Nazism. Adolf Hitler, despite his cruelty was open about what his intentions were. He set out to create a perfect race that understood its role was to serve the state and nothing else. This isn't any different than the goals of communism truthfully, only insofar as communists seek to accomplish this on a global scale, (using the economic class issue as opposed to race) while national socialism focuses on achieving such a goal for the country itself. The communists on the other hand, as mentioned above, pretended to be compassionate about the poor and oppressed when in reality- they use these groups to organize for power while hiding behind the guise of compassion and the struggle to achieve social justice, while in reality-they are systematically imprisoning and murdering all that don't go along with their agenda. This, according to the Black Book of Communism, makes the communist ideology, if you could really assign degrees of evil, more evil than Nazism because of its deceptive nature.
We all know Hillary Clinton is a liar, and she wrote her college thesis on Saul Alinsky but do we know anything else about her? Given the fact that she conducted focus groups to help mold her campaign message it is obvious she is hiding something. Over the past several weeks we have seen references to leaked emails which show she has an obvious disdain for the average American and the common beliefs in liberty that most of us share. She has referred to many of us as "irredeemable deplorables" in an effort to brand us as the uncompassionate ones while pretending to care about the poor and so called oppressed. In fact, this is the whole strategy of the Democrat party because as we all know, they have taken a hard turn left and do not represent the views of most Americans. They will however, pretend to in order to get in office. What are her intentions if she were to assume office? Are the massive dehumanization campaigns where conservatives are labeled as fascists and whites as automatic racists a first step to a repeat of history where millions were slaughtered because they were deemed as undesirable by their own government? Looking at the deceptive nature of Hillary Clinton and the violent nature of the left, it sure seems like a distinct possibility.
The number of deaths under communist regimes from the Black Book of Communism Soviet Union- Vladimr Lenin and Joseph Stalin-20 million deaths China-Mao- 65 million deaths Vietnam- Ho Chi Mihn- 1 million deaths North Korea- 2 million deaths Cambodia- Pol Pot- 2 million deaths Eastern Europe- 1 million deaths Latin America- 150,000 deaths Africa- 1.7 million deaths Afghanistan (under soviet control) 1.5 million deaths
These are not deaths represented by wartime or revolutions, but by outright murder committed by evil men intent on creating perfect societies based on social justice and equality. I guess the question remains. Is man capable of bringing about a perfect society?
Article posted with permission from In Defense of Our Nation | 0 |
WASHINGTON — With congressional leaders once again at a stalemate over how to respond to a mass shooting, the Senate’s most moderate Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, is developing a compromise measure that would prevent some terrorism suspects from purchasing weapons, while sidestepping partisan flash points that have doomed similar legislation in the past and threaten to do so again next week. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, has already scheduled votes for Monday on four proposals — two sponsored by Republicans and two by Democrats — but all four are expected to fail in a nearly identical replay of votes last December after the attack in San Bernardino, Calif. “That’s what I am trying to avoid,” Ms. Collins said in a brief interview riding the subway from the Capitol back to her office on Thursday evening. “I don’t want ‘Groundhog Day’ here. I don’t want us to go through the same thing we went through last year with no result. ” With lawmakers feeling extreme pressure to take some action in the aftermath of last weekend’s shooting massacre in Orlando, Fla. the proposal by Ms. Collins is a long shot, but it seems to stand at least some chance of forging an agreement that has generally eluded lawmakers for decades amid a debate over how to balance gun rights and public safety. The legislation being drafted by Ms. Collins would bar the sale of guns to terrorism suspects who appear on either the government’s list or the “selectee” list, in which individuals are subjected to additional security screening before being allowed to board an airplane. Those lists are far more narrow than the federal terrorist screening database, which is the focus of a proposal sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, one of the four measures to be voted on Monday. But while the gun restrictions proposed by Ms. Collins would target a narrower group of individuals, her measure does not require federal prosecutors to demonstrate “probable cause” of criminal terrorist activity, which is required in an alternative to the Feinstein measure sponsored by Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican. Democrats say Mr. Cornyn’s measure, which will also be voted on Monday, sets such a high burden of proof that it renders useless the underlying gun restrictions. Instead, Ms. Collins has proposed an appeals process that would award attorney’s fees to anyone who successfully challenged the government’s effort to prevent the sale of a firearm. “If you are either on the list or the selectee list, which is the list where you are subjected to additional screening before you are allowed to board a plane, then you would be prohibited from purchasing a gun,” Ms. Collins said. She said she agreed that Mr. Cornyn’s measure set a standard too difficult to meet. “If probable cause is found, then probably law enforcement could arrest you,” she said. “If you have got that, you are going to be arrested, unless they are leaving you out there in order to catch others. ” Ms. Collins has already succeeded in piquing the interest of Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a centrist Democrat from North Dakota who has had a strong hand in some of the Senate’s more unexpected bipartisan deals in recent years, including a measure that lifted the prohibition on crude oil exports. A spokeswoman for Ms. Heitkamp, Abigail McDonough, said the senator was in talks with Ms. Collins and hopeful that an agreement could be reached. “Senator Heitkamp believes there needs to be a real bipartisan discussion about what any bill to address the terror watch list issue would look like so that it actually addresses the issue at hand and gets enough bipartisan support to pass in the Senate,” Ms. McDonough said. “She’s currently participating in discussions to try to reach such a compromise. ” Ms. Collins said she had also been talking to Senator Feinstein, as well as to an array of Republicans including Senators Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Jeff Flake of Arizona, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Ms. Collins and Ms. Feinstein have each added language to their proposals aimed at addressing the situation in Orlando, in which the gunman, Omar Mateen, had been on a government watch list but was removed before he bought his guns. Though they focus on different lists, their proposals would flag for the F. B. I. gun purchases by anyone who had been on the designated watch list within the past five years. “The F. B. I. is immediately notified that you have bought the gun and that you formerly were on one of these two lists,” she said. “Most likely that is going to lead them to put you back under surveillance or do other investigation and watch you closely. That’s an important provision. ” | 1 |
The president opened by celebrating Black History Month. Lady Democrats wore white. [Donald Trump delivered the most finely crafted speech of his political life Tuesday night in what will go down as one of the best speeches delivered to a joint session of Congress in the past two decades. He hit stirring emotional high notes. And he laid out his vision for his presidency. Mr. Trump stole the issue of affordable health care from Democrats. He unabashedly owned the fight against illegal immigration. “Obamacare is collapsing — and we must act decisively to protect all Americans,” he said. “Action is not a choice — it is a necessity. ” In other words, Democrats led by President Obama swindled poor Americans into this disastrous program with their usual host of lies and false promises, and now these good people are stranded. But Mr. Trump and Republicans are not going to leave these innocent Americans to dig themselves out of the mess Democrats put them in. “So I am calling on all Democrats and Republicans in the Congress to work with us to save Americans from this imploding Obamacare disaster. ” When the camera panned to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — who, inexplicably, is still the Democratic leader in the House — she looked like she had been sucking on the bitterest of lemons. Strategically, it was brilliant. It completely cuts Democrats out of the debate. And then the president’s salute to Megan Crowley, who is alive today because of the herculean efforts by her father to find a drug to combat Pompe disease, sealed the deal. Mr. Trump then laid out the broad brush parameters of a health care law he would like to see Republicans hammer out to replace Obamacare. On illegal immigration, Mr. Trump held firm. “To any in Congress who do not believe we should enforce our laws, I would ask you this question: What would you say to the American family that loses their jobs, their income or a loved one because America refused to uphold its laws and defends its borders?” Another question he might have asked those in Congress who do not believe in enforcing immigration laws: “If you don’t like the immigration laws, why don’t you change them? You are the only branch of government that can. ” Mr. Trump also deplored the hellfire violence in Chicago and called education “the civil rights issue of our time. ” The senator from Illinois and other Democrats offered only the most paltry, perfunctory applause. The entire speech was supremely presidential. But it wasn’t without humor. After excoriating both Democrats and Republicans for spending $6 trillion in the Middle East, he said, “We could have rebuilt our country — twice. ” He waited two beats. “And maybe even three times if we had people who had the ability to … negotiate,” Mr. Trump said, dropping into his finest “Apprentice” tone of voice. The camera panned to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who was exchanging perplexed glances with an equally befuddled senator. They didn’t get the line. Apparently, Ms. Warren never achieved her merit badge for reading smoke signals. In the end, Donald Trump so dominated the entire night that Democrats were left with nothing but sullen protests. The ladies wore white, but nobody was exactly sure why. In a shocking development, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not doze off during the hourlong address. At least not on national television. She did not show up. And in another development that absolutely nobody cared about, Rep. Eliot Engel, New York Democrat, announced he would not shake Mr. Trump’s hand. It was not clear at press time if Mr. Trump even knows who Eliot Engel is. There were so many protests on the Democratic side of the aisle, it was hard to keep track. Even the Democrats seemed confused about what they were protesting. Rep. Joseph Crowley, New York Democrat, wore a giant pin protesting, well, not sure exactly what. It simply featured a large question mark. In all honesty, that pin could be the party’s entire platform in the next election. • Charles Hurt can be reached at churt@washingtontimes. com follow him on Twitter via @charleshurt. | 1 |
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After catching all kinds of flack from his liberal counterparts for his opinion that racism is not as major an issue as race-baiting Democrats make it out to be, rapper Lil Wayne has doubled down and clarified his stance in an astounding video, sharing his memory of the day a white police officer saved his life at 12-years-old.
Watch: | 0 |
President Obama’s legacy looked on track, not long ago, to include a major push against America’s deeply entrenched housing segregation. In 2015, his administration rolled out a rule requiring local communities to assess their own patterns of racial and income segregation and make genuine plans to address them. The move followed years of debate and came as segregated cities like Baltimore and Chicago faced renewed bouts of racial unrest. The federal government, advocates hoped, was finally trying to repair a promise of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Now that rule is likely to be undermined — and possibly erased — by a Department of Housing and Urban Development headed by Ben Carson. On Monday, Donald J. Trump officially offered the cabinet post to Mr. Carson, a neurosurgeon and a former presidential candidate, who grew up poor in Detroit but has no experience in housing policy. While we know little about what Mr. Carson would do at the agency, he has played down the role of government in his own story. (“If you don’t succeed,” his mother taught him, according to his autobiography “Gifted Hands,” “you have only yourself to blame. ”) And he has specifically criticized the Obama housing rule. Known as “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” the rule has been politically contentious. Its backers argue that it is essential to remedying the long history of government and discrimination that has resulted in poor, segregated neighborhoods persisting to this day. Critics say that the rule amounts to government overreach into the decisions — and demographic makeup — of individual communities and a free housing market. Republicans in Congress have tried to defund its implementation. Mr. Carson wrote last year that the new policy followed the government’s history of failed “mandated schemes,” and would redirect housing primarily into wealthy, white communities that oppose it. If he is confirmed by Congress, Mr. Carson would have wide latitude to shape or slow the rollout of the rule, along with broader enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. Diane Yentel, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said Mr. Carson’s interpretation of the rule as a social experiment “reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of obligations that have been around since 1968. ” The Fair Housing Act passed that year included two mandates: one banning discrimination in the housing market, and the other requiring local communities to “affirmatively further” the goal of integration. The latter language means that it’s not enough to punish landlords or communities who intentionally deny minorities housing. Communities also have a responsibility to actively ensure open housing markets, which exist today neither in public housing clusters on Chicago’s segregated South Side nor in exclusive New York City suburbs that use zoning laws to outlaw multifamily housing. George Romney and Jack Kemp, past Republican HUD secretaries, acknowledged that second implication of the law. But for much of the time since the Fair Housing Act was passed, this “affirmative” mandate has been largely ignored by both local communities and HUD itself. The Obama administration rules were an effort to address that oversight. And some advocates have spent just as long fighting for it. Mr. Carson recently told Fox News that “we cannot have a strong nation if we have weak inner cities. ” “That is the very insight that motivated Senator Edward Brooke — another Republican — to include a provision in the 1968 Fair Housing Act requiring cities, counties and states to ‘affirmatively further fair housing’ as a condition of receiving federal funding,” Michael Allen, a lawyer with the law firm Relman, Dane Colfax, wrote in an email. The Obama administration rule “looks nothing like the partisan caricatures that have sprung up around it,” said Phil Tegeler of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. Many advocates wanted the rule to be much tougher than what emerged from several years of debate with local communities. In practice, the rule provides those communities with detailed data on factors like racial demographics, poverty rates, school quality and housing voucher use to help them determine whether and minority families are isolated from good schools or segregated from opportunity. The rule requires communities to use that information to draft plans to reduce segregation where it exists. Those that habitually defy the requirements risk lose funding from the agency. The first round of communities scheduled to complete the process have been at work on assessments due over the coming year. Before they’re done, a new administration hostile to the idea could begin writing another rule that would reverse this one, or it could simply halt implementation. Or Congress could pass a law defunding it, even as it remains on the books. For all the years that went into shaping the rule, a new administration could relatively easily set it aside. That would also fundamentally change the conversation in Washington about how poor, segregated communities came to exist in their current incarnation. Mr. Carson and other critics call efforts to dismantle them “social engineering,” but these places were created through policies that can themselves be labeled social engineering: redlining that denied blacks mortgages policies that concentrated public housing in poor, minority communities government decisions to locate highways that isolated them further. While many of these policies were first put into place decades ago, communities remain shaped by them today. The “affirmatively furthering” mandate was based on the idea that this history of active government intervention requires an active government remedy, too. A theme of Mr. Trump’s campaign was that structural forces hinder American workers in the Rust Belt and beyond (like the decline of manufacturing, the lack of educational opportunity, the opioid epidemic). At HUD, Mr. Carson would have ample opportunity to show whether he believes that structural forces undermine poor urban minorities (housing segregation, historic disinvestment, troubled schools) — and if government should take an active role in pursuing a remedy. | 1 |
comments circulating about the Republican presidential candidate Interesting: Not what I thought it was going to be. This is an eye-opener my friends. Please Read all the way to the bottom and pass it on! "He's been divorced and remarried. He can't commit to anything.""He's dangerously ignorant about international affairs. The Russianleaders will walk all over him.""He has no filter- doesn't think before he speaks.""Until recently, he was a Democrat. He's not a real Republican. Hehasn't paid his GOP dues.""He used to be Pro Choice. Now, suddenly he's Pro Life?""That can't be his real hair!""He's a loose cannon. No one wants HIS finger on the nuclearbutton.""His opponent has the experience and political savvy to bepresident. He does not.""His temperament disqualifies him from ever beingCommander-In-Chief.""He's proven himself to be mentally unstable.""The military will never accept him as Commander-In-Chief. He's notsmart enough.""The GOP doesn't want him to be the head of the party. He could never reach across the aisle to get anything done.""Most Republican voters will just stay home rather than go out andvote for him.""Evangelicals will never support him.""He says '(Lets) Make America Great Again'. How dare he say wearen't still great?""His intellect is thinner than spit on a slate rock."After all his gaffs, he doubles down on them instead of admittinghe made a mistake.""He's threatening to upend our treaties and relationships with ourallies by demanding that they pay for their own defense!""Because of his gross factual errors he might take rash action andneedlessly lead this country into open warfare!""He's racist, xenophobic, and fuels the fires of hatred!""The rising turnout of his voters are not loyal Republicans orDemocrats and are alienated from both parties because neither takes asympathetic view toward their issues. "The fact that he could be deemed a serious candidate for presidentis a shame and embarrassment for the country."Is he Safe? ...he shoots from the hip ... he's over his head ...What are his solutions?"Voters want to follow some authority figure, a leader who can takecharge with authority; return a sense of discipline to our government; and,manifest the willpower needed to get this country back on track -- Or atleast a leader from outside Washington." | 0 |
Dienstag, 22. November 2016 Cleverer Schachzug: SPD schickt ebenfalls Angela Merkel als Kandidatin ins Rennen Berlin (dpo) - Nur zwei Tage nach der Union hat nun auch die SPD ihre K-Frage geklärt. Wie heute bekannt wurde, wollen die Sozialdemokraten ebenfalls mit Angela Merkel als Kanzlerkandidatin zur Bundestagswahl 2017 antreten. Offenbar ist man in der Partei der Überzeugung, dass nur Angela Merkel die Sozialdemokraten siegreich durch den Wahlkampf führen kann. "Wen sollen wir denn auch sonst aufstellen?" so SPD-Generalsekretärin Katarina Barley auf Anfrage des Postillon. "Sigmar Gabriel etwa? Andrea Nahles? Ich bitte Sie!" Zudem zweifle ohnehin niemand daran, dass die Große Koalition auch nach 2017 bestehen bleiben wird. "Wieso sollten wir da plötzlich auf Biegen und Brechen einen eigenen Kandidaten ins Rennen schicken und so tun, als wären wir anderer Meinung als die Union? Das kauft uns doch ohnehin keiner ab." Beobachter begrüßen es, dass die SPD mit Angela Merkel erstmals in ihrer Geschichte eine Frau als Kandidaten für die Kanzlerschaft aufstellt. "Hier werden die Sozialdemokraten wieder einmal ihrer Vorreiterrolle in Sachen gesellschaftlicher Fortschritt voll und ganz gerecht", erklärt Politikwissenschaftler Uwe Laumann aus Rostock. "Zudem hat Merkel als sozialdemokratische Spitzenkandidatin den Vorteil, dass im Falle eines SPD-Wahlsiehihihi- … entschuldigen Sie bitte, ich musste gerade selbst lachen. Vergessen Sie den letzten Punkt einfach." Spannend dürfte es bei den TV-Duellen vor der Wahl werden, wenn Angela Merkel mit sich selbst wichtige grundsatzpolitische Fragen ausdiskutiert. Es ist davon auszugehen, dass Merkel versuchen wird, sich selbst mit ihrer betont ruhigen Art aus der Reserve zu locken und einen Wutausbruch zu provozieren. fed, dan, ssi; Foto: Armin Linnartz , CC BY-SA 3.0 Artikel teilen: | 0 |
Sounds like the Honorable Judge stepped in some Richard Pryor, no?
That Judge be all crazy and... October 28, 2016
The feminists agree.
And so do the media and Hillary Clinton who will appoint Zio-judges that will open the prisons (as is being done in California) and refuse to convict blacks that have committed crimes against Whites because of...slavery, oppression, racism, etc. | 0 |
The Possible Identity of the 3 Ribs Bones of Contention
Daniel 7 foretells a nation that will be on the earth just prior to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, symbolized as a bear (Russia) with three ribs in its mouth. We will discuss the possible identity of the three ribs on today’s edition of End of the Age! Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers, | 0 |
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