President Trump invited the Pope for lunch on his mega yacht, the Pope accepted and during lunch, a puff of wind blew the Pontiff's hat off, right into the water.
It floated off about 50 feet, then the wind died down and it just floated in place.
The crew and the secret service were scrambling to launch a boat to go get it, when Trump waved them off, saying "Never mind, boys, I'll get it.
Then Donald climbed over the side of the yacht, walked on the water to the hat, picked it up, walked back on the water, climbed onto the yacht, and handed the Pope his hat.
The crew was speechless. The security team and the Pope's entourage were speechless.
No one knew what to say, not even the Pope.
But that afternoon, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, CNN all knew how to cover the story. Their banner headlines read,
#4
SHHH! Donald knew where all the rocks were.....
Posted by: USN, Ret ||
01/03/2017 15:09 Comments ||
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#5
USN, Ret -- he didn't know just know where the rocks were, he'd had them built on hydraulics, because landlubbers are forever losing their hats to the wind there. The hydraulics allow the rocks to be stored at the bottom of the sea until he puts his hand on a certain spot in the rail, causing them to rise up to just below the surface. It's the job of the winter boat crew to test them in early spring, and effect any necessary repairs before the start of boating season. ;-)
[Hurriyet Daily News] The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... has become a country that cannot protect the lives of its own citizens or of its foreign guests, whether tourists or diplomats. It can now compete with Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of the frequency of terror attacks and the intensity of casualties.
This is not the only thing accelerating Turkey’s slide into the category of "third world countries."
It is not just the feeling of insecurity or instability that surrounds us. It is the feeling of hopelessness - characteristic of badly governed third world countries - that is a key indicator of where Turkey is heading.
What is particularly concerning is the fact that the feeling of hopelessness is becoming even more widespread among the young generations.
Evrim Kuran is the Middle East director of Universum, a research group active in over 50 countries. According to a survey they conducted among the young generation, the biggest dream most had is to leave the country.
"The second answer we came across was equally sad," Kuran said in an interview published in daily Hurriyet last Sunday. "The answer most gave to the question ’what is your biggest dream?’ was ’I want to be happy.’ Being happy cannot be a dream. They feel so cornered and so unhappy that they want to be happy. They are trying to overcome the barriers of hopelessness and the lack of opportunities, but they don’t know how."
Kuran also believes Turkey is becoming increasingly "mediocre," which is another characteristic of third world countries. "This is not just in art and literature, but even the business community is becoming more mediocre," she said.
Turkey’s rulers probably have no problem with this tendency, because a society where mediocracy reigns is one that is easier to rule without transparency or accountability.
Only a decade ago Turkey was the shining star of the region. Expats raced to come to Turkey and representatives of different sectors from all over the world were rushing to hold their annual meetings in Turkey. You could not find any rooms in Istanbul’s hotels.
Today, not just expats and youngsters but also older generations from the secular segments of the society want to flee Turkey. Rumors that the government could impose additional special taxes targeting higher income levels is increasing the anxiety, which no one dares to talk about publicly. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him... ’s rhetoric that Turkey is under attack both from within and from without increases the fear that extraordinary measures, running against the principles of the liberal market economy, could be implemented by the government citing extraordinary circumstances.
All these fears, which may turn out to be baseless, are in line with the patterns of a third world country. In fact, I have no doubt that many in the West have already categorized Turkey as such.
As for those remaining in Turkey, as has been said by another colleague, either we will have to resist, run away or just get used to it.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/03/2017 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Sublime Porte
#1
I didn't know Turkey was not considered a third world country?
Maybe the place to start "deradicalisation" would be in the madrassehs that are openly run by outfits like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi?
Common sense, Fred? What an odd idea.
[DAWN] DEALING with the scourge of militancy requires multipronged efforts. One way is to fight Death Eaters on the battlefield and uproot the infrastructure of terror, as has been done, to an extent, in the tribal areas as well as in our cities through Zarb-e-Azb ..the Pak offensive against Qaeda in Pakistain and the Pak Taliban in North Wazoo. The name refers to the sword of the Prophet (PTUI!)... and ’intelligence-based operations’, respectively. However, some men learn by reading. A few learn by observation. The rest have to pee on the electric fence for themselves... efforts must also be made to prevent young minds from falling into the trap of extremism, and to help them find a way back into the mainstream once they forsake the way of the gun. Pakistain has experimented with deradicalisation programmes, most notably in Swat, where the army-led effort has produced mixed results. Now, as reported in this paper yesterday, Sindh also wants to initiate a deradicalisation project. Officials of the provincial Counter Terrorism Department have said that they plan on deradicalising and rehabilitating around 300 Death Eaters lodged in Sindh’s prisons. Help would be sought from professional psychologists to understand the factors that drew these individuals towards militancy. The officials went on to say that two youngsters who were on their way to Syria to fight for the bad boyIslamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... group renounced militancy through the efforts of the Sindh CTD.
It is well known that bad boycriminal masterminds prey upon the weak and the poor, luring them towards bad boy violence with a mix of religious rhetoric and worldly enticements. Certainly, youngsters who had been brainwashed and who now renounce militancy deserve a second chance. However, some men learn by reading. A few learn by observation. The rest have to pee on the electric fence for themselves... we must approach deradicalisation efforts with caution. For example, with the aforementioned programme in Swat, there is little transparency and it is not known quite how successful the effort really has been, with rumours that some of the programme’s graduates have returned to militancy. Even with militancy reform programmes in other countries, such as Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... , there is a considerable number of supposedly ’reformed’ Death Eaters that return to violence once reintegrated into society. Perhaps the state -- with the help of law enforcers and psychologists -- should investigate which Death Eaters have been drawn towards extremism due to financial and socio-economic reasons, and which fighters are hard-core ideological supporters of bad boy causes. In the case of the latter, deradicalisation efforts would have little, if any, effect. Coming back to Sindh’s efforts, while the deradicalisation plan may seem like a good idea, the provincial authorities must also pay attention to more basic efforts, such as building high-security prisons for ’hard-core’ bad boys, as that has yet to get off the drawing board.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/03/2017 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
#1
they plan on deradicalising and rehabilitating around 300 Death Eaters lodged in Sindh’s prisons
Perhaps 'Cult Deprogramming' will work, as a bullet alternative. It's worked so well for sexual identity reassignment.
[DeutscheWelle] China blocked a recent Indian move to blacklist Jaish-e-Mohammad's chief Masood Azhar at the UN. In a DW interview, Siegfried O Wolf, a South Asia expert at the University of Heidelberg, explains why China is protecting the Pakistain-based krazed killer group's head.
DW: China blocked a recent Indian move to blacklist Jaish-e-Mohammad ...literally Army of Mohammad, a Pak-based Deobandi terror group founded by Maulana Masood Azhar in 2000, after he split with the Harkat-ul-Mujaheddin. In 2002 the government of Pervez Musharraf banned the group, which changed its name to Khaddam ul-Islam and continued doing what it had been doing before without missing a beat... chief Masood Azhar at the UN. In April, Beijing put a similar move on hold. Why is China protecting Azhar?
Siegfried O. Wolf: China's diplomatic support for Pakistain-based bully boyz is multi-faceted. Therefore, one must look at Beijing's latest action at the UN in a larger context.
China's protection of Masood Azhar is only one component of the Chinese campaign to provide Pakistain its diplomatic support, which includes informal "lobbying work" to prevent Pakistain from being listed as a state that sponsors terrorism. The possible sanctions would not only have immense political and economic implications for Islamabad, they will also reflect poorly on Beijing as Pakistain is widely seen as a close China ally. Therefore, Chinese authorities try to undermine all Indian attempts to officially name Pakistain as a state-sponsor of terrorism on international platforms like BRICS or the Heart of Asia conference.
Beijing is now also drawing on Islamabad's improved relations with Moscow. China is increasingly involving Pakistain in multilateral dialogues on regional cooperation and security in relation to the Afghanistan-Pakistain region and Central Asia in an attempt to minimize Pakistain's international isolation.
Another dimension of China's move to block the Indian effort to designate Azhar as a terrorist is the threat that anti-Indian krazed killer groups like the JeM could turn against the Pak state. This would have dangerous implications for China, especially for its massive investments and development initiatives in the South Asian country, including the multi-billion dollar China-Pakistain Economic Corridor (CPEC) project. We must not forget that international terror groups like al Qaeda, "Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not really Moslems.... " (IS) and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) oppose Beijing for its alleged anti-Moslem policies against the Uighurs in its western Xinjiang province. China doesn't want an additional confrontation with Islamist groups.
Finally, there is no doubt that the India-China rivalry might also be a factor in Beijing's support for Islamabad and Pakistain-based terrorists. In this context, China's major development projects like "One Belt, One Road" to link China with Europe and the Middle East, and several other infrastructure projects show that Beijing considers Afghanistan an important country for its economic, security and geopolitical interests.
If there’s any single statement that Barack Obama probably wishes he could undo, it was his mockery of Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates. Referring to Romney’s characterization of Russia as America’s greatest geopolitical foe, Obama said the 1980s are now calling, and they want their foreign policy back.
Now of course, Democrats are up in arms about the Russians, sounding like madcap John Birchers from the 1960s. As Twitter wag IowaHawk noted, they didn’t get upset when Russia invaded Crimea, they didn’t throw down when Russia shot down a civilian airliner over Ukraine, but stealing John Podesta’s password via a phishing scam is apparently grounds for restarting the Cold War. Well, only one of these crimes constitutes a threat to Democrats’ political power.
...So let’s look ahead: In the next administration, we need to pay a lot more attention to cyber security. People love to be online -- Obama famously refused to give up his Blackberry when he took office, even though experts thought it insecure, even with modifications. But anything that’s online is vulnerable to hacking. In Neal Stephenson’s futuristic novel The Diamond Age, all the really important people do everything, from correspondence to reading the news, on paper, in part because it’s more secure. That future may soon be our present, at least if we want to be safe from spies.
#1
Ifthere’s any single statement that Barack Obama probably wishes he could undo, it was his mockery of Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential debates.
Undo? The 'mockery' was totally effective. Given the opportunity, Obama would use it again and again. Lying and deception are the tools of his trade.
#2
If any of Baraq's earlier statements become inconvenient or inconsistent with today's narrative, no worries. He has the MSM's Ministry of Truth's Memory Hole to make those statements go away.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/03/2017 12:11 Comments ||
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[Bloomberg] The "Russian hacking" story in the U.S. has gone too far. That it's not based on any solid public evidence, and that reports of it are often so overblown as to miss the mark, is only a problem to those who worry about disinformation campaigns, propaganda and journalistic standards -- a small segment of the general public. But the recent U.S. government report that purports to substantiate technical details of recent hacks by Russian intelligence is off the mark and has the potential to do real damage to far more people and organizations.
The joint report by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a catchy name for "Russian malicious cyber activity" -- Grizzly Steppe -- and creates infinite opportunities for false flag operations that the U.S. government all but promises to attribute to Russia.
The report's goal is not to provide evidence of, say, Russian tampering with the U.S. presidential election, but ostensibly to enable U.S. organizations to detect Russian cyber-intelligence efforts and report incidents related to it to the U.S. government. It's supposed to tell network administrators what to look for. To that end, the report contains a specific YARA rule -- a bit of code used for identifying a malware sample. The rule identifies software called the PAS Tool PHP Web Kit. Some inquisitive security researchers have googled the kit and found it easy to download from the profexer.name website. It was no longer available on Monday, but researchers at Feejit, the developer of WordPress security plugin Wordfence, took some screenshots of the site, which proudly declared the product was made in Ukraine.
Continued on Page 49
#1
I lack the impolite words to respond to this properly.
And I lack the knowledge of whom to direct these impolite words towards, which might affect my selection of these words. So I find myself bound by a dilemma.
But there are a few RBers out there who don't have our limitations. :-)
#2
Reference #1 - Here, let me be of assistance. Plan A: Target your wrath at the presidentially appointmented intelligence community directors. From there, take your wrath downstream among the literally thousands of Senior Executive Service employees empowered by the their directors over the past 10 years or so.
Too large an undertaking, too difficult to sort out? Too much fly shi* in die rooibos tin? I fully understand. Then initiate plan 'B' by sacking the entire organization and beginning anew.
Gov't hacking and monitoring of networks (theirs or ours) is not entirely unlike wanking. Denial is futile.
#3
If Obama and his so called security experts really wanted to help they would publish the ranges of IP addresses in the .ru and .ua domains, those IP addresses that belong to Russia and Ukraine. That way, computer network administrators all over the country could put those addresses into their firewalls thereby blocking access from Russia and Ukraine. They should have done this years and years ago and they should have included the .cn, .ro, .tr, .ir domains as well. The fact that this has not been done indicates they really don't care about cyber security. That's the scariest part of this whole episode. I can say with all honesty that I fear Obama far more than Putin. Putin might be a bad guy but he is far away in Russia. Obama is right here and he has power over my own country.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/03/2017 12:26 Comments ||
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#4
But not for very much longer. :)
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/03/2017 12:27 Comments ||
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#5
I lack the impolite words to respond to this properly.
How about closing the barn door after the cows have escaped?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
01/03/2017 12:36 Comments ||
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#6
The hacking story is just disinformation aimed at Democrats hoping to get them mad and deligitimze the election in their eyes. Sadly it worked well and a large number thing voting machines were hacked or some such nonsense instead of it being Podesta fell for a fairly obvious Phishing trick.
Let’s step back and think about who Trump has shown himself to be. Sure, he’s vulgar, and his knowledge of traditional conservatism is … limited. But he’s a competitor, and if he’s stupid like the liberals say then what does that make the liberals who Trump keeps beating as enthusiastically as Josh Marshall tweeting past midnight? Look, the guy is a property developer. If he does not deliver what he promises, the buyer won’t take occupancy and he loses money. Trump knows from his own experience – and the painful experience of the follow-through-free GOP – that the way to win is to deliver on his promises. It may ruffle our conservafeathers, but Trump promised to keep Carrier in the USA and he did it. As promised, the market is in the stratosphere and consumer confidence exists again. Trump promised to nominate conservatives and he did – do you think that whiny puffball Jeb Bush would have put up a cabinet full of Mad Dogs and activists aching to burn their own useless agencies to the ground?
People babble on about how “Trump will never do anything about illegals” and “He’ll never repeal Obamacare.” Yeah, put your money on Trump failing – I did, and the guy I wrote checks to lost. News Flash: Donald Trump is not only going dance with the ones who brung him but afterwards he is going to take them to his limo to make out. This guy is interested in trying to please the people who elected him, not the urban swells who write for or read the NYT or WaPo – he knows they will never stop loathing him even if he somehow simultaneously cures cancer, brings world peace, and convinces Coldplay to disband.
#1
and if he’s stupid like the liberals say then what does that make the liberals who Trump keeps beating as enthusiastically as Josh Marshall tweeting past midnight?
Maybe the kind of submoron who doesn't recognize himself in a mirror?
#6
Expect see the Dims establish a rebel government. Not a shadow government but a rebel government. Their constituents will be illegals, radical left, Muslims.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
President Trump invited the Pope for lunch on his mega yacht, the Pope accepted and during lunch, a puff of wind blew the Pontiff's hat off, right into the water.
DW: China blocked a recent Indian move to blacklist 
[Bloomberg] The "Russian hacking" story in the U.S. has gone too far. That it's not based on any solid public evidence, and that reports of it are often so overblown as to miss the mark, is only a problem to those who worry about disinformation campaigns, propaganda and journalistic standards -- a small segment of the general public. But the recent U.S. government report that purports to substantiate technical details of recent hacks by Russian intelligence is off the mark and has the potential to do real damage to far more people and organizations.
