[Independent.UK] 'For Trump to just step in and undermine centuries worth of morale and discipline undercuts the very military that he's trying to command'
US veterans decried Donald Trump's orders to restore an accused war criminal's rank in the Navy, saying the decision "sets a dangerous precedent" and suggests the commander-in-chief views the military "as a tool for massacres".
Numerous veterans spoke out about the move to The Independent after Secretary of Defence Mark Esper confirmed he was ordered by the president to retain Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher's status in the elite service, as well as his Trident pin, a prestigious special warfare insignia.
"Ever since Donald Trump became president he's been tearing the military apart, putting troops in the difficult position of needing to choose between obedience to his unhinged orders, and staying true to our code of honour," said Alexander McCoy, a former Marine and political director of the veteran group Common Defence. "By pardoning war criminals because Fox News told him to, Trump showed he sees our military as a tool for massacres, not as the professional, honourable force we aspire to be."
Gallagher, who was accused of killing Iraqi civilians and an unarmed Islamic State fighter, was acquitted in July of murder but found guilty of posing in a photograph with a war casualty. Mr Trump later intervened in the case, restoring Gallagher's rank to E-7, otherwise known as a chief petty officer, and demanding he be allowed to keep his Trident and retire at the rank and pay grade he earned before the allegations were brought against him.
The defence secretary announced on Monday that Gallagher "will retain his Trident as the Commander in Chief directed and will retire at the end of this month", adding that the case "has dragged on for months" and "must end".
In his statement, Mr Esper said the firing was not about Gallagher, but rather "Secretary Spencer and the chain of command".
The president's demands could cause "significant long-term damage to the Naval Special Warfare community," according to James Waters, a former Navy SEAL platoon commander and White House staff member in the Bush administration, who told The Independent: "The only people who weigh in on whether a Navy SEAL deserves to keep his Trident are people who have their Trident." Aquaman too ?
"Every SEAL knows he must 'earn your Trident every day' Wholly out of context and spouted here for semantic emphasis, like a grade school coach using mil-speak.
even after officially qualifying - and the same standard should apply here," Mr Waters said. "Unless you've been through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training and served in the Teams and know the specific facts related to a person's performance, you're not qualified to weigh in."
He added: "This is vital to maintaining the high standards required to be effective in the Teams and on the battlefield. The absolute last thing the nation needs is to open the floodgates to outside interests determining who gets to wear and keep the Trident." I see now why it's difficult to vote for ex-soldiers.
It goes on about Geneva conventions and the glory of the American Navy in danger. Read this at the Independent !
Common Defense was founded in 2016 by veterans who oppose Trump’s corrupt agenda of hate. Together we will reclaim our democracy and build a truly grassroots movement to fight for our future.
#10
Common Defense was founded in 2016 by veterans who oppose Trump’s corrupt agenda of hate.
So it's like five guys?
Just turned on the radio. An NPR call-in talk show on the Gallagher thing.
Some guy is bitterly ranting about how Trump, a civilian, has no business telling the military how to run their business. Jeez Louise! Never mind that he is the Commander in Chief. Did you morons sleep thru 9th grade Civics class? *CLICK*
[660citynews] WASHINGTON - The Latest on President Donald Trump and the case of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher (all times local):
2:50 p.m.
President Donald Trump says "I have to protect our war fighters" as he explains his actions in the case of a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes in Iraq.
Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher was acquitted of murder in the stabbing death of an Islamic State militant captive but convicted of posing with the corpse in 2017.
Defence Secretary Mark Esper allowed Gallagher to retire with his Trident pin, retaining his status as a SEAL. He says he did so at the president's direction.
Trump said Monday that he is sticking up for members of the armed forces.
Esper fired Navy Secretary Richard Spencer on Sunday, accusing him of secretly offering to the White House to rig the Navy disciplinary process to ensure that Gallagher not lose his Trident.
11:10 a.m.
Defence Secretary Mark Esper says President Donald Trump gave him a direct order that a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes in Iraq be allowed to retire without losing his SEAL status.
Esper told reporters at the Pentagon on Monday that was the reason he announced Sunday evening that Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher would be allowed to retire with his Trident Pin, retaining his status as a SEAL.
Esper also accused Navy Secretary Richard Spencer of secretly offering to the White House to rig the Navy disciplinary process to ensure the Gallagher not lose his Trident. Esper fired Spencer on Sunday.
#2
Listening to the Beeb, they keep using the phrase, "Gallager, who was accused of war crimes..." which is true, but somehow they never get around to the acquittal part. Wankers.
Seems to me, if you earn the right to be called a SEAL, then you're a SEAL. They may kick you out of the club for doing something heinous, but you still earned the badge. And no, peeing on the carcasses of your dead enemies doesn't count as heinous.
#3
Esper also accused Navy Secretary Richard Spencer of secretly offering to the White House to rig the Navy disciplinary process to ensure the Gallagher not lose his Trident.
"Secretly offered to rig" ... Good Grief! This is (A) beyond stupid and/or (B) deliberate sabotage of Trump because there is no way that this would not leak. The "rigging" would be seen as a corrupt act be everyone!
#6
The "posing for a selfie with a dead Taliban" is what has come to be a (quote) War Crime (un-quote) these days. Part of the Geneva Accords to not "denigrate enemy corpses"...If you compare it to historical events this case is a trivial case that only a REMF JAG would get into spasms over... The Mimizuka(耳塚, "Ear Mound", often translated as "Ear Tomb"), an alteration of the original Hanazuka (鼻塚, "Nose Mound")[1][2][3] is a monument in Kyoto, Japan, dedicated to the sliced noses of killed Korean soldiers and civilians[4][5] as well as Ming Chinese troops[6] taken as war trophies during the Japanese invasions of Korea from 1592 to 1598. The monument enshrines the severed noses of at least 38,000 Koreans killed during Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasions.
[Jpost] Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit issued a legal opinion on Monday that amounts to deflecting all three ways that critics have sought to force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of office in any immediate time frame.
Mandelblit issued the blockbuster opinion only days after announcing a final indictment for Netanyahu for bribery, fraud and breach of trust last Thursday.
[Jpost] A rocket was launched from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit confirmed Monday evening.
"A short time ago, one launch was identified from the Gaza Strip to Israeli territory. As a result of the launch, only an open area warning was activated," the IDF said.Sirens did not go off in neighboring towns.
[Daily Caller] A dangerous myth has been propagated by the media: that there is an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black people (primarily black men) in America, by the police.
The false narrative claims that individual police officers, motivated by overt racism or implicit racial bias, are rampantly targeting black Americans. Some go further to allege these shootings are proof of "systemic racism" within American law enforcement. Nonstop broadcast of the anti-police message by radical activists, Hollywood celebrities, professional athletes, politicians, academics, and most mainstream media outlets have made this myth pervasive. The myth, and the powerful voices who perpetuate it, are rarely challenged ‐ even by law enforcement leaders. The result has been fear, distrust, hatred of the police, and a breakdown of the rule of law.
However, this destructive delusion has been completely demolished by a recent study that demonstrates there is no epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black people, that black citizens are not more likely to be shot by white officers, and that the shooting of unarmed people of any race is extraordinarily rare. In fact, an individual American citizen is substantially more likely to be struck by lightning than he is to be shot by the police while unarmed.
In the article, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Joseph Cesario of Michigan State University and David Johnson of the University of Maryland assess hundreds of fatal police shootings since 2015. Their groundbreaking study exposes what is, at least for the anti-police mythmakers, an inconvenient truth indeed ‐ that police shootings of citizens are not motivated by race or racism.
#1
Soon expect scholarly articles and theses on law enforcement and social justice with the words 'po po' in them. The internet and affirmation has empowered a delinquent subset of society to profess their angsts as information.
[Guns America] In the summer of 1992, a violent confrontation between Randy Weaver and federal Law Enforcement agencies led to three needless deaths and an 11-day standoff.
The repercussions of this horrible event still resonate today. The very mention of Ruby Ridge still elicits powerful emotions.
In 1992 with a Republican in the White House, the full might of the US government was unleashed on an American citizen and his family. I’ll not debate the man’s politics or the righteousness of the investigation. What is indisputable, however, is that a 14-year-old boy, an unarmed mother holding an infant, and a US Marshal died violently in a miserably botched Law Enforcement operation.
#2
Law Enforcement officials accused Weaver of creating two illegal short-barreled shotguns but offered to drop the charges if he would infiltrate nearby white supremacist organizations.
The recruitment of Carter Page may (or may not) have been a bit more subtle.
#4
My family lived a few miles from there. This whole thing stunk. BTW the FBI set contracts for the hotels and for food at restaurants. When it all went bad and the FBI left, mostly from fear of the locals, they did not pay a single bill, bilking small towns in Idaho. Second, after they shot the wife, residents put flowers at the mailbox. FBI agents took turns running over the mailbox and flowers. They entrapped a guys, blackmailed him, played by no real legal boundaries, and killed two innocent people. The FBI lost in court, but that does not bring back the dead. From Sandpoint to CDA this is not just an emotional event, this was what big government has become.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
11/25/2019 14:57
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#5
And dems and rinos want to give the govt more unlimited facial recognition powers, like the ChiComs do?
The Feral Govt keeping up with the despots?
Surely you jest. When US Attorneys and their FBI lackeys never get repremanded, fired, or convicted of transgressions, there are two standards of justice in this country: for the deep state denizens and for the dirt people.
[and don't call me Shirley]
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
11/25/2019 18:23
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Article from 1 month ago. Missed this tidbit until now.
Biden learns an old Clinton trick.
BTW, Burisma owner Nikolai Zlochevsky has warrant for arrest in Ukraine. He is reported in Monaco.
[GatewayPundit] Even worse, Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach revealed Joe Biden was paid nearly $1 million for lobbying activities by Burisma Holdings while he was US Vice President.
Derkach publicized the documents at a press conference at the Interfax-Ukraine agency last Wednesday as he said the records, "describe the mechanism of getting money by Biden Sr."
"This was the transfer of Burisma Group’s funds for lobbying activities, as investigators believe, personally to Joe Biden through a lobbying company. Funds in the amount of $900,000 were transferred to the U.S.-based company Rosemont Seneca Partners, which according to open sources, in particular, the New York Times, is affiliated with Biden. The payment reference was payment for consultative services," Derkach said.
also its chickenfeed compared to what bill and Hillary were pulling in
Posted by: lord garth ||
11/25/2019 11:54
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#5
Through the lobbying firm Blue Star Strategies? That's the one (of many) full of lie-level ex-Clinton hacks who made a specialty out of shaking down southeast European ex-Warsaw Pact countries' governments seeking access to Western pols.
[DailyWire] An Ohio mother suffocated her three young sons to death over the course of two years and told police she did it because she worried the boys would grow up to abuse women.
Brittany Renee Pilkington, 27, was sentenced to 37 years in prison after pleading guilty on Tuesday to the murders, The Daily Mail reported. She will serve seven years for an involuntary manslaughter charge and 15 years to life for each of the two murder charges.
The first son she killed was an infant named Niall in July 2014. She then killed four-year-old Gavin in April 2015. Three-month-old Noah was smothered in August 2015. She confessed to what she had done when Noah was found.
In a taped confession, Pilkington told police she was depressed and feared her sons would one day abuse women.
Her husband, 47-year-old Joseph, pleaded guilty “to a misdemeanor charge of sexual imposition for having sex with her before they were married, when she was underage,” the Mail reported. Joseph had originally been charged with sexual battery because he started his “relationship” with Brittany when she was 17 and impregnating her at that time. Joseph had previously dated Brittany’s mother and lived with the family for years when Brittany was a teenager. Joseph eventually married Brittany.
#1
I would call her a victim. If you read the story, the real culprits are her mother and her 'husband', who insinuated himself into her life as her mother's boyfriend. A predator.
The courts cannot hope to begin to understand the subjective nature of this mess. So they send her off to 15 years and forget about it. Just another topic of discussion for the golf game with Judge Anderson.
I read the piece, and chanced upon the news clip. It shows she is a mentally challenged girl of a single adventurist mother. She was preyed upon at 13, by the mother's boyfriend and made pregnant by 17, finally forced to marry him. The girl clearly is not equipped to be mother or wife or anybody.
The death of the babies is tragic, but if anybody's more responsible it's the family that expects a normal role out of her. They began raping a retarded girl at 13 and married her in her teens too. She's not even a matured person. Probably won't ever be. Just another case that got by the CPA maybe.
[Right Wing Tribune] President Bill Clinton’s name appears a whopping 31 times in the court documents that also reveal the former president traveled to the infamous island owned by Epstein, Little St. James, otherwise known as Pedophile Island.
Newly released court documents that were made public the night before Epstein allegedly committed suicide reference Clinton 31 times, including an excerpt revealing Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous island, often referred to by media as Pedophile Island.
#1
Clinton is a grifter as much as he is a perv. Trying to bilk money out of a rich guy could easily explain a number of the visits (certainly that's the line he used with Hillary).
#5
Was that the time when Bill slipped his secret service detail? Or that time he was out there with Kevin Spacey? Or that other time with Alan Dershowitz?
[Aljazeera] Private military contractors and the future of war; plus, Saudi Aramco's IPO and OPEC, and Google's Stadia.
Increasingly, nations are deploying private security contractors to troubled and remote parts of the world.
Beyond the scope of democratic accountability, opaque and operating beyond and around international law - they are proving to be useful agents of diplomacy and proxy wars.
But there have been well-publicised failures. In 2007, Blackwater contractors killed 17 unarmed Iraqis and injured 24 others. Blackwater went on to change its name to Academi and continues to provide services to the Pentagon around the world.
Also in Iraq, the Pentagon hired CACI Premier Technology to run the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. The logistics company is alleged to have told military police to soften up prisoners for interrogation.
And it is estimated the US government lost as much as $60bn to fraud by contractors in the early years of the Iraq conflict.
Right now, the industry is estimated to be worth up to $249bn.
More nations are deploying mercenaries to reshape battlefields. Russia has used the Wagner Group in Ukraine, Libya and Syria. And as Nicholas Haque reports exclusively from the Central African Republic, Russia is training government forces at the request of the president.
"The danger of using mercenaries or contractors is that they can get in scraps or fights that can suck others into a larger conflict," said Dr Sean McFate, professor at Georgetown University and author of The New Rules of War. "Mercenaries' accountability and safety have been a problem from the start. Mercenaries are the second-oldest profession. So how do you control mercenaries?
According to McFate, "We don't have a good international framework to deal with modern mercenaries. The international law is very thin and the will to enforce it is very small ... So mercenaries are expanding in the 21st century, yet we don't have any sort of legal framework or norms to competently deal with this problem."
#2
The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skillful, you are ruined in the usual way.
#3
Another crap piece. America has used contractors on the battlefields since the revolution. Who guards the embassy's? Not the Marines, they guard the classified documents. And no not the Ambassador, he has another security firm to protect him. The crimes at Abu Ghriab were performed by US servicemembers. And the whole Blackwater event was a fraud, the Blackwater truck were shot to shit, but there was no evidence allowed to show they were shot at. All of the Blackwater brass was used as evidence, but not one other round was allowed in.
There is a big difference between contractors on the battlefield, armed or not, to mercenaries. This is just more slander to the men and women who protect our soldiers and politicians.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
11/25/2019 15:06
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#4
Right now, the industry is estimated to be worth up to $249bn.
[Aljazeera] British man and his Filipino wife were rescued unharmed after 10-minute gun battle with members of armed group.
Philippine troops on Monday rescued a British man and his Filipino wife who were abducted from a southern beach resort last month by gunmen linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) and taken to their jungle hideouts.
Regional military commander Lt Gen Cirilito Sobejana said troops caught up with the Abu Sayyaf captors of Allan Hyrons and his wife, Wilma, in the mountainous hinterlands of Parang town in Sulu province and rescued the couple after a fight.
"There was a running gun battle," Sobejana said. "They left the two behind because they could not drag them any more. They scampered in different directions but our troops are in pursuit."
The Hyrons were not hurt in the 10-minute exchange of fire, the military said, adding that no ransom had been paid to the group.
Posted by: Besoeker ||
11/25/2019
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[18 views]
Top|| File under: Abu Sayyaf (ISIS)
#1
Wow, usually they just shoot them rather than let them be rescued.
There's been a long line of extremely stupid Westerners who go to the south of the Philippines and get kidnapped. Too dumb to live, and then the Philippine military has to risk their lives trying to get them back.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
11/25/2019 8:30
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#2
When Jesus said "The poor will always be with you," he could have continued in that vein and said that the stupid will always be with us too. People who can afford a plane ticket to some inadvisable distant locale should certainly be charged the cost of any military or police operation done on their behalf.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
11/25/2019 10:41
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[Aljazeera] Hong Kong, China - Hong Kong's pro-democratic parties swept the board in highly anticipated local elections seen as a barometer of public opinion after nearly six months of increasingly violent protests that have polarised the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.
Total turnout exceeded 2.94 million voters, a rate of 71 percent, surpassing a record from the previous legislative council election in 2016 of about 1.47 million.
As of 12pm (04:00 GMT), pro-democracy candidates had won a clear majority with 390 seats of the 452 district council seats, according to local broadcaster RTHK.
In the wake of the landslide win, Hong Kong's leader Carrie Lam said she would "listen humbly" to voters. and then...crush them as directed by Beijing
It's Kurt
[Townhall] Mark this day on your calendar because here is the moment that I admit that Barack Obama did something right. He fired Army General Stanley McChrystal.
Now, I would have fired him well before for failing to win the Afghanistan War. In World War II, which America incidentally won, we fired lots of generals and admirals for failing to win. It was nothing personal. You aren’t winning, so "Next!" Obama did (gently) fire McChrystal’s predecessor for failing to win; he was a good officer who, by coincidence, was literally onstage talking to my Army War College class the moment Obama’s firing of McChrystal was announced. But that’s about the only big-name general fired for not winning since the not-coincidentally Endless War on Terror™ began.
#1
The boss of the navy was fired, for violating the chain of command by going around the secretary of defense.
What happens at lower levels is not yet clear. From what you say it seems like other heads should roll.
It did seem odd that the only thing Gallagher should be convicted of is 'posing'. Who knew that that was a serious crime? Is it a felony?
Something more significant, like jay walking, or picking one's nose in public, would sound like a better justification for demoting him.
Posted by: Daniel ||
11/25/2019 2:03
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#2
I polished up that handle so carefully
That now I am the ruler of the Queen's Navy.
You know the personnel system was ****** when successful battlefield commanders were not accelerated in promotion cause the 'system' was too bureaucratic. Fairness is not a word for the Darwinistic environment of combat and war.
Naval Academy Rocked By Drug Scandal;www.zerohedge .com/news/2018-02-24; Drug Ring Bought Cocaine With Bitcoin. Current reports estimate ten midshipmen were part of the elaborate scheme to supply midshipmen throughout the Naval Academy with powerful drugs including cocaine, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and Ketamine. ... the criminal ring used Bitcoins to purchase the drugs on the dark web then distributed the product throughout campus.
Two Dozen Expelled in Naval Academy Cheating Scandal By Paul Valentine The Washington Post. Navy Secretary John H. Dalton ordered 24 U.S. Naval Academy midshipmen expelled Thursday in the biggest cheating scandal in the school's history, ending a wrenching 16-month investigation of the venerable military institution in Annapolis.
h/t Instapundit
[BoingBoing] The China Law Blog (previously) reports on the kinds of questions that western businesses operating in China are raising; China's serious economic downturn and rising authoritarianism have turned the site's normally businesslike posts into a glimpse of a kind of cyberpunk stranger-than-fiction dystopia (for example).
A new post on the site describes the consequences of a sharp downturn in the Chinese economy: a new mood among many Chinese businesspeople that they are at the end of the long Chinese boom and that there's no reason not to burn their bridges with non-Chinese firms, because they're not going to be doing business with them for much longer no matter what.
The site's author, Dan Harris, compares the mood in China today with the situation in Russia in the 1990s, when outside businesses would get repeatedly ripped off by their Russian partners, and would go away mystified that these partners would take the short term payouts of burning a foreign partner, at the expense of the much larger upside they could realize from an ongoing arrangement. For these Russian entrepreneur/bandits, Harris says, "They do not believe they will be able to operate freely five years or even one year from now. So though you see them as having irrationally sacrificed massive long term gains for much smaller short term rewards, they see themselves as having quite rationally grabbed what they could while it was still there."
#1
WTF. This isn't new. Chinese businessmen have long ripped off foreign customers. Give him a choice between a quick ten grand right now by screwing you, or do the right thing and make millions over a five year contract, he'll take the ten grand every time. Not even a question.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
11/25/2019 6:31
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#2
No question the Chinese have a different view of business than Westerners. Many stories over the years about taxi drivers stopping mid-ride at night demanding more money, manufacturers wanting to re-negotiate a better price the day before a production run is due, and so on.
We look for happy customers and win-win. Saw an article the other day about how from a Chinese perspective, a happy customer meant you left money on the table. So yeah, nothing new there.
What *is* new is that the Chinese economy is crashing and *that* changes the calculations. Without any possibility of long-term profit, all the chiseling and cheating that would normally take place over time in the future gets pushed into Now.
[Big League Politics] Brett Kavanaugh has spoken of progressive idol Ruth Bader Ginsburg that terms that are sure to leave many conservatives worried about the judge’s commitment to originalist principles.
Kavanaugh said that the progressive judicial activist was an "inspiration" to him on the court when speaking in one of his first public events since being confirmed to the Supreme Court in one of the most contentious confirmation processes in Supreme Court history.
Somewhat curiously, Kavanaugh neglected to thank President Donald Trump for nominating him and refusing to shelve the nomination when progressives launched a slander campaign accusing the federal judge of sexually assaulting a woman in high school. The smear campaign was totally uncorroborated, and Kavanaugh was ultimately confirmed to the court.
Kavanaugh did thank his supporters broadly for their steadfast battle for his confirmation, however. He was speaking at an annual event of the right-leaning Federalist Society, some of whose members might have been surprised to hear him take inspiration from a progressive known to stand against virtually everything the organization supports.
It’s not without precedent for a conservative Supreme Court judge such as Kavanaugh to speak of a far-left progressive jurist in a favorable light. Deceased Judge Antonin Scalia was known to have a friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, although it doesn’t appear he ever went so far as to refer to the historically unmatched progressive as an "inspiration."
It could be said that Kavanaugh has given some of his conservative supporters cause for concern. Since arriving on the Supreme Court, he’s generally voted in accordance with conservative judicial principles, but he’s had a few notable hiccups, including voting against a proposal that would allow states to block Planned Parenthood from receiving funding from Medicare programs.
#3
I recall reading that, while on the Circuit Court, Judge Kavanaugh voted the same way as his colleague 95% of the time.
That judge's name was Merrick Garland. From the WSJ, Sep 5, 2018:
Sen. Ted Cruz [compared] Judge Kavanaugh’s D.C. Circuit Court votes with those of Chief Judge Merrick Garland. In nearly every panel on which they both sat, they joined each other’s opinions more than 95% of the time, Sen. Cruz said.
“I think we’re trying hard to find common ground,” Judge Kavanaugh said. “As I’ve said before, he’s a great judge, a great chief judge. He’s very careful, hard working, we work well together,” Judge Kavanaugh said, adding that Chief Judge Garland is a jurist “who does not impose any personal preferences” onto his opinions.
Not criticizing or snarking about Kavanaugh... just pointing out the surreal nature of this country's rolling Shitshow that falsely, slanderously painted this middle-of-the-road, thoroughly establishmentarian milquetoast as Genghis Epstein.
#6
Professional courtesy that one does not speak ill of the dead?
However you are correct, never ever have 'lifetime' appointment cause they morph into an aristocracy that knows its above the law because they say what the law is.
People forget that Kavanaugh is an exceedingly gracious man with close ties to Elena Kagan, who reached out and hired him to teach Cobstitutional Law at Harvard when she was Dean of HLS.
Kavanaugh is a gent. What was done to him last year was monstrous and should have resulted in long prison sentences for at least a dozen people who slandered and tried to destroy this good man with their absurd lies.
h/t Instapundit
[Algemeiner] Anti-Zionist students at Oberlin College in Ohio erected a memorial last week commemorating the death of multiple Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists.
Oberlin Students for a Free Palestine shared in a Facebook post on Thursday that it had installed a display in "commemoration of the 34 Palestinians killed by Israeli rocket fire this last week" in Wilder Bowl, a central outdoor space on campus where students often congregate.
Prior to joining Lion’s Head, Chris was Director of Global Policy Development at Soros Fund Management, where he spent nine years working on a variety of initiatives for the firm’s founder. ... He received his B.A. from Oberlin College, where he is now the Chair of the Board of Trustees.
#12
On a serious and deeply sad note, the father in the Gibson's Bakery matter, David Gibson, son of the patriarch and father to the young man who apprehended the shitty little Oberlin thug-thief whose idiocy launched this absurd horrific nightmare, has died of pancreatic cancer.
#15
Supporting terrorists is terrorism, arrest them, send them to Gitmo, and after their trial, give them a good old fashioned German suicide, two rounds to the back of the head.
[Big League Politics] Steven Robert Setzer, a former U.S. Marine Corps pilot who once escorted former President Bill Clinton on the crew of the Marine One, is facing years in prison after being hit with child sex charges.
Setzer was put behind bars in May with sexual exploitation of a minor, sodomy, enticing a child for indecent purposes, statutory rape, and aggravated child molestation. He has been forced to shut down his aircraft charter company, Strategic Moves, due to loss of clients after his incarceration.
On Thursday, WBTV in Rowan County, NC broke the news of Setzer’s arrest and associated charges. This report was only revealed due to the shuttering of Setzer’s company, an entire six months after Setzer was accused of the heinous victimization of minors.
Strategic Moves made the announcement that they were shuttering on their website: "Thank you for your patronage and loyalty over the last 15 years as clients of Strategic Moves. Strategic Moves has discontinued operations as of 10/31/2019. Many of our clients have transitioned to Davinci Jets who are capable and excited to provide an excellent level of service."
According to Setzer’s biography, he learned quite a bit while helping Clinton jetset throughout the world. Setzer claimed that he learned precise attention to detail, which assisted him in being able to achieve excellence for the VIPs who obtained his services. One can only wonder what details Slick Willy wanted Setzer to handle while they were aboard the Marine One.
Setzer is not the only cretin with whom Clinton has shared an aircraft. Clinton was among the most high-profile companions of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein aboard his infamous "Lolita Express." Clinton is one of the powerful individuals who allegedly participated in Epstein’s illicit child sex trafficking network.
Big League Politics reported earlier this year on how Clinton had flown on the "Lolita Express" during on least 26 separate occasions:
[Reuters] A year after the U.S. stock market plunged, many investors believe conditions are in place to avoid another year-end pullback and possibly set the stage for a rally to finish off 2019.
A more accommodative Federal Reserve compared with a year ago is an important argument for investors who are confident the market is unlikely to see a repeat of 2018’s swoon.
Last year, investors were concerned the Fed was raising interest rates too quickly. By contrast, the Fed has been cutting rates this year, and while the central bank is not expected to lower rates again in December, it also is not expected to raise them.
Another change from a year ago, cited by investors: Stock markets globally are more synchronized in their strong performance.
"The prospects this year are better," said Michael Antonelli, market strategist at Robert W. Baird in Milwaukee. "It’s not just the U.S. that’s doing well right now. It’s happening in lots of places around the globe, and that puts investors in a more risk-taking mood."
One wild card for markets heading into year-end is the United States’ trade war with China. The dispute remains unresolved, but there is optimism about a preliminary U.S.-China trade agreement that could also lift stocks into the new year.
Investors are still wary of last year's stock market collapse. The benchmark S&P 500 .SPX fell 19.8% - barely avoiding a bear market - between Sept. 20 and Dec. 24.
[PJ] The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which is made up of 56 nations plus the Palestinian Authority, met Thursday in Jeddah and called for the adoption of an international law criminalizing criticism of Islam. But that kind of law could never be adopted in the United States, could it? Think again.
The OIC’s secretary-general, Dr. Yousef al-Othaimeen, called upon the nations of the world, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to crack down on speech that was "insulting religions or prophets." It was clear, however, that al-Othaimeen couldn’t have cared less about speech insulting Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism or any of the revered figures of those religions. He cared only about criticism of Islam.
"There are laws against anti-Semitism and racism," said al-Othaimeen. "So we request a law against mocking religions." He didn’t explain why laws against racism should lead to laws against criticizing belief systems, since, after all, contrary to the assumptions of Rachel Dolezal, Shaun King, and Elizabeth Warren, one cannot change one’s race, but one can change one’s beliefs, including religious beliefs. Al-Othaimeen likely knows this, but cited racism because he knows how to pull the right strings to get the Western intelligentsia to do what he wants.
"Islamophobia," he continued, "is a sentiment of excessive fear against Islam that is transformed into acts of intolerance and discriminations against Muslims and even violent crimes against people with Islamic attires."
No one should discriminate against Muslims or anyone, and genuine intolerance, when it shades over into illegal activity, and violent crime should always be prosecuted. But the OIC wants to go much farther than that, and get Western societies to criminalize criticism of Islam altogether.
#6
yet they call for the destruction of Israel on a daily basis. FOAD
Posted by: chris ||
11/25/2019 9:51
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#7
If we had a law criminalizing criticism of Christianity here, most universities and colleges would have to close. We do have a defacto practice of outlawing criticism of Marxism as demonstrated by the amount of his worshipers who've driven non-believers from those universities and colleges.
#9
Can you believe it, India actually applied for membership into this noble collective back in 2000-02, when we had a Leftist dynastic regime for a Govt. Thanks to Pakistain, we were denied.
[PJ] Whatever reasons protesters in Iraq originally took to the streets to express their frustration with the government hve now been tossed aside and outright revolution has become their goal.
The demonstrations all across Iraq began last month, triggered by the graft and corruption of the political class. But as many of their number were gunned down in the streets by snipers believed to be a part of the Iranian-controlled Shia militias, the crowds are now demanding nothing less than an overturning of the entire political system, starting with election laws that perpetrate the corruption.
These are Shia kids dying in the street, children of the post-Saddam revolution that saw Shiites go from being second class citizens to dominating the government. But with youth unemployment at 30 percent and intermittent electrical and water service making their lives frustrating and difficult, many of them don't care what religious sect is in charge, they want change.
Posted by: Besoeker ||
11/25/2019
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#1
I had such hopes for Iraq after Saddam got his ass kicked. OK, it wasn't hope hope, but they deserved a chance to get beyond the tribal thing and become a modern country. Pity they couldn't pull it off.
#2
^ Shoulda left the post-Saddam Ba'athists in power to keep the lights on, air conditioning running, garbage picked up and [human] garbage disposed of.
Probably also shoulda partitioned the country, with a forward US Airbase in an independent Kurdistan to keep a lid on Iranian mischief.
Posted by: Bob Grorong1136 ||
11/25/2019 16:06
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#5
Shoulda left the post-Saddam Ba'athists in power to keep the lights on, air conditioning running, garbage picked up and [human] garbage disposed of.
When PM of Israel & king of Saudi give you the same advice, you should listen.
#6
Just a reminder that it was the neo-cons who decided to disband the Baath party.
These were the same people who came up with the idea for the invasion in the first place. They aren't too bright. Their entire idea was "overthrow Saddam" with absolutely no plan for what they were going to do afterwards. That it turned out poorly is no surprise.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
11/25/2019 23:24
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#7
I was one of those neo-cons. The fact is that under Saddam Hussein, all sorts of terrorists — including Al Qaeda cadres among the Moslem jihadis and the Catholic Irish Republican Army among others — were trained at the Salman Pak facility by Iraqi Special Forces in all sorts of terror techniques, from how to hijack an airplane (using the passenger jet parked on the grounds) to advanced bomb making and bio-weapons manufacture. We have 66 articles touching on Salman Pak in the Rantburg archive — take a look.
But the fact is, bad things got in Iraq and therefore Syria, at least they don’t have the training and research of a very rich and vicious nation state training and guiding them to ever higher levels of competence, In fact, as I recall something like 50,000 ISIS fighters have been killed since we reconquered their little caliphate, among whom are no doubt a great many who had that professional training. What the world will be dealing with going forward is mostly the second and third tiers of ability, which may explain why there have been fewer and smaller attacks recently.
(Gateway Pundit) ‐ On Tuesday NSC leaker Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Jennifer Williams testified in front of the Adam Schiff Show Trial.
They made it through their basement star chamber auditions and were ready to go live in front of the American public on Tuesday morning.
During his testimony Lt. Col. Vindman testified that he did not know the leaker but refused to answer questions on the leaker after saying he did not know who the leaker was. Vindman said he went around his chain of command and did not go through his boss Tim Morrisson. Vindman insisted he was in charge of Ukraine policy but then said he wasn’t.
It was not a good day for anti-Trumper Lt. Col. Vindman.
His boss Tim Morrison earlier testified that he did not trust Vindman and that he suspected Vindman was a leaker. (He was!)
#1
(a) here's the link https://libertynewsnetwork.com/breaking-lt-col-vindmans-peers-from-ranger-school-just-exposed-his-nastly-little-secret/
(b) According to Cernovich, his source who went through Ranger School with Alexander Vindmann, said he was lazy and a chow thief His Ranger School classmate said his peers wanted him out..
#7
I repeat, "Chow thief" doesn't make sense unless their food was limited. I mean, every recruit learns in the first week to carry at least a loaf of bread on marches.
#10
Food and sleep deprivation are part of Ranger School experience. You get less than half of the calories and sleep needed during the 2 months and will lose 30 pounds. Surprised his evaluators and classmates didn't find a way to fail him.
In Maraniss's doorstop of a book, Obama first meets Siddiqi at a New Year's Eve party in San Francisco, the young, gangly, would-be president greeting his future roommate with pitch-perfect Urdu, asking: "How are you, Boss?"
It was a phrase [Obama] had picked up from his best buddies at Occidental College in California – Pakistani students Imad Husain, Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid who, like Siddiqi, were part of Karachi's wealthy elite. So close were the group that Obama went to Pakistan with them for a three-week holiday in 1981, staying with Hamid and Chandoo's families.
Maraniss argues in his book that the group has distanced itself from Obama for fear of hurting his presidency, but they remain friends: "The Pakistanis were a fun-loving bunch," he laughs, talking on the telephone from Washington DC, "but they were intellectuals." Despite their party harder reputations, the three went into highly paid corporate finance: Husain is a Boston-based banker; Hamid works for one of the world's biggest private equity firms in Dubai; and Chandoo – who is recorded to have fundraised some $50,000 to $100,000 for Obama's current campaign – is a financial consultant, living with his family in upmarket Westchester, New York.
#19
#17 the Donks are running that gambit right now for 2020. They missed the horse and barn door back in 2016. Don't worry they've set the new ground rules for themselves because someone else now has access to all that data collection they've been doing on everyone.
#20
Ranger training is all about limited food. I mailed my friend power bars and jerky every day and he told me later the guys in charge “let” some get through.
#21
I 'suspect' the food getting through was a test and anyone that didn't share was considered a chow thief. More of a self-bastard non-team player than actual thief.
[CANADAFREEPRESS] "Gawd, please strike him dead! Turn him into a pillar of salt! Smite his family root and branch, yea, unto the seventh generation! Amen!"
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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“The artillery firing drills that North Korea mentioned are in violation of the Sept 19 military agreement that the military authorities of the two countries agreed to and that have been fully implemented," defense ministry spokesperson Choi Hyun-soo says. https://t.co/4Ne3p0ml7E
[Libya Observer] The United Nations ...a formerly good idea gone bad... High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Libya has confirmed the release of 60 asylum seekers from a detention center in Souq al-Khamis, awaiting an evacuation trip to Rwanda.
In a statement, the UNHCR welcomed the step, clarifying that the migrants colonists are currently hosted in a shelter in Misrata.
Earlier this month, the UNHCR welcomed the release of more than 100 illegal immigrants colonists, who were accommodated in the immigration centre of Sikka Road in Tripoli ...a confusing city, one end of which is located in Lebanon and the other end of which is the capital of Libya. Its chief distinction is being mentioned in the Marine Hymn... .
This viral @Forbes story about koalas is false. Please ignore it! Koalas aren’t suddenly “functionally extinct” & the fires have NOT destroyed 80% of their habitat.
Hundreds of koalas have been hurt in the fires, and it’s very sad, but it’s so important to get facts right. pic.twitter.com/tvaoSTBi2q
#3
Forbes went to sh*t after Malcolm died. Same thing is happening at FauxNews since Murdoch sons took over. WSJ became useless when Murdoch bought it.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
11/25/2019 4:24
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[BREITBART] A newly appointed municipal police chief in central Mexico resigned this week after surviving a fierce attack by cartel button men while traveling in an armored patrol vehicle. The attack took place two weeks ago and left two of the chief’s bodyguards maimed. His armored truck sustained more than 100 bullet strikes.
Celaya, Guanajuato, Police Chief José Carlos Ramos-Ramos turned in his resignation this past Friday ‐ just 21 days after being named the Police Director of Celaya, according to a local media report. The departure from his newly appointed post comes one week after he survived a fierce attack by cartel hitmen while traveling as part of a two-vehicle convoy on the Celaya-Salamanca highway on November 15.
US politicians and military officials are speaking up about their support for the Lebanese military following confirmation that the Trump administration is withholding $105 million in security aid to Lebanon.https://t.co/ZATlIx8nudpic.twitter.com/SodRFcIS3h
Earlier this month, it was reported the Trump administration has frozen $105 million in security aid to Lebanon, including military vehicles, weapons and ammunition.
David Hale, the top career diplomat at the State Department, confirmed the freeze on Wednesday, saying there was apparently “a dispute over the efficacy of the assistance.”
The US State Department told Congress on October 31 that the White House budget office and National Security Council had decided to withhold the foreign military assistance, according to two US officials, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity. The officials did not say why the aid was blocked.
The aid was frozen before massive demonstrations, protesting against economic hardship and corruption, began in Lebanon on October 17.
The Trump administration, which has not publicly explained its decision to withhold funding, has been pressing for the isolation of Lebanese Hezbollah, which is allied with Iran and has seats in the government.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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#1
Hezbollah controls the Lebanese government and appears to control its army which we have been paying for through this 'security aid'.
There is now unrest in Lebanon; nobody really understands its cause.
One unstated possibility is that the Lebanese people are afraid that Hezbollah, which is controlled by Iran, will involve Lebanon in a war with Israel which will probably destroy much of the country, since Hezbollah has rockets everywhere in it aimed at Israel.
The conventional view of the state department and those supplying this now traditional support to the Lebanese army despite its control by Hezbollah, is that it should continue forever. This is apparently in the hope that this will serve some useful purpose. What that purpose is, is a bit obscure at this time.
Trump has shown a tendency to shake up such arrangements, even sometimes seeking something in exchange for continuing them.
Posted by: Daniel ||
11/25/2019 2:35
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#2
The conventional view of the state department and those supplying this now traditional support to the Lebanese army despite its control by Hezbollah, is that it should continue forever. This is apparently in the hope that this will serve some useful purpose.
#4
#1 Trump has shown a tendency to shake up such arrangements, even sometimes seeking something in exchange for continuing them.
Kissinger on Trump last year: "Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses."
#6
So now the media thinks that any aid given in the past is just automatically supposed too continue. I wish these idiots would learn too report the news instead of being political asshats.
Posted by: chris ||
11/25/2019 9:37
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[DAWN] Security forces opened fire on protesters in Baghdad and several cities in southern Iraq on Sunday, killing at least nine people and wounding dozens of others, police and medical sources said, the latest violence in weeks of unrest.Anti-government protests erupted in early October and have swollen into the largest demonstrations since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A Rooters tally of the dead as given by security and medical sources shows at least 339 people have been killed.
Iraq's state news agency quoted the health minister on Sunday as saying 111 people had been killed, including protesters and members from security forces, without breaking down the tally or elaborating over what period. It was the first official figure issued by a government official since October 25.
A government report last month had said there were 157 deaths during the first week of October. Protests paused after then and resumed on October 25.
Protesters are demanding the overthrow of a political class seen as corrupt and serving foreign powers while many Iraqis languish in poverty without jobs, healthcare or education.
In Nassiriya, security forces used live ammunition and tear gas canisters to disperse protesters who had gathered overnight on three bridges.
Police and health officials said three people were killed, and hospital sources said another person died later from bullets wounds to his head.
More than 50 others were maimed, mainly by live bullets and tear gas canisters, in festivities in the city, they added.
Three people were killed and around 90 maimed near the Gulf port of Umm Qasr near Basra when security forces used live fire to disperse protesters, police and medical sources said.
The protesters had gathered to demand security forces open roads that authorities have blocked to try to prevent protesters from reaching the port's entrance.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] French naval base in Abu Dhabi will serve as the headquarters for a Europe ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... an-led mission to protect Gulf waters that will be operational soon, La Belle France’s defense minister said on Sunday.
La Belle France is the main proponent of a plan to build a European-led maritime force to ensure safe shipping in the Strait of Hormuz after tanker attacks earlier this year that Washington blamed on Iran.
Tehran has denied being behind the attacks on tankers and other vessels in major global shipping lanes off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in May and which increased tensions between the United States, Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan, the abbreviation IRGC is a cognate form of Stürmabteilung (or SA), the term Supreme Guide is a cognate form of either Shah or Führer or maybe both, and they hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... and Gulf Arab states.
"This morning we formalized that the command post will be based on Emirati territory," Defence Minister Florence Parly told news hounds at a French naval base in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE.
The command center will host around a dozen officials representing the countries involved, she said. In a speech to French military personnel, she said the next time she visited the base she hoped the mission would be operational and thanked the UAE for supporting it.
The UAE has tempered its reaction to the attacks and has called for de-escalation and dialogue with Iran.
On Saturday, Parly said the initiative could start early next year and around 10 European and non-European governments would join, pending parliamentary approval.
First announced in July, the plan is independent of a US-led maritime initiative which some European countries feared would make US-Iranian tensions worse.
Parly said the two missions would coordinate in order to ensure safety of navigation in an already tense area.
[CNBC] Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has asked for the resignation of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer amid controversy over the handling of a case involving a Navy SEAL convicted of illegally posing for pictures with the corpse of an ISIS fighter.
Spencer had reportedly threatened to quit his post after President Donald Trump ...The tack in the backside of the Democratic Party... intervened in the case of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher. Trump said on Twitter Thursday he would not allow the Navy to strip Gallagher of the Trident pin denoting his membership in the elite SEAL group.
Spencer responded by telling the White House that a Twitter post is not an official order and Trump would have to order the end of the disciplinary proceeding in writing. The Navy Secretary had denied over the weekend that he had threatened to resign.
In his letter of resignation, Spencer said the rule of law is what sets the United States apart from its adversaries and he could not in good conscience obey an order that would violate the oath he took to support and defend the Constitution.
Spencer said it had become clear that he and Trump no longer share the same understanding of the key principles of good order and discipline.
"The President deserves and should expect a Secretary of the Navy who is aligned with his vision for the future and our force generation and sustainment," Spencer said.
Trump said in a Twitter post Sunday that Spencer was fired over the way the Navy handled Gallagher’s case as well as cost overruns that were not addressed to his satisfaction. Ken Braithwaite, admiral and ambassador to Norway, will be nominated to replace Spencer, Trump said.
DISPUTE OVER SEAL CASE
Gallagher, 40, was demoted in rank and pay grade after being convicted by a military jury in July of illegally posing for pictures with the corpse of an ISIS fighter. He was acquitted of premeditated murder for allegedly killing a maimed captive during his 2017 deployment to Iraq. Earlier this month, Trump ordered that the Navy restore Gallagher’s status.
Last week, Spencer said that Gallagher’s membership in the SEAL community should be decided by a board of his peers.
The Pentagon said in a statement that Defense Secretary Esper had lost trust and confidence in Spencer over "his lack of candor" over conversations with the White House regarding Gallagher’s case.
The Pentagon accused Spencer of privately proposing to the White House that Gallagher’s rank be restored and allow him to retire with his Trident pin, contrary to the Navy Secretary’s public position. Spencer never informed Esper of his private proposal, according to the Pentagon.
Esper has directed that Gallagher retain his Trident pin and will meet with Navy Under Secretary Thomas Modley, who will now serve as acting Navy Secretary, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday on Monday to discuss the way forward.
#3
The USN certainly has been in the news a lot lately. And not for anything good.
We're certainly accumulating a long list of failed institutions and organizations. IRS, FBI, the intel community, colleges, science, etc. And that's just here at home. Don't get me started on Europe.
[Metro.UK] Cinema on lockdown after ‘gang with machetes brawl and assault police officers’
A number of police officers have been assaulted after a large brawl broke out at a cinema in Birmingham.
Armed police were deployed after reports of people with machetes at Star City, in the Nechells area of the city, shortly after 5.30pm on Saturday.
They found a group of more than 100 people there, and said ‘pockets of fighting’ had broken out.
The cinema was packed as children queued up to see Frozen 2.
West Midlands Police confirmed that several arrests had been made and said a dispersal order had been put in place, meaning officers can arrest anyone who refuses to leave when asked.
Rival gangs were reported to be fighting in a screening of ‘Blue Story’ in the Vue complex.
A second cinema chain has banned Blue Story from all its cinemas after a mass brawl in Birmingham last night - as the director defends his BBC-funded movie as 'about love not violence.'
Showcase Cinemas has followed Vue by axing screenings of the gangster film.
Five teenagers, including a 13-year-old girl, have been arrested by police after they swooped at around 5.30pm. They also seized two machetes and a knife from a nearby roundabout.
A senior police chief said today the disorder 'may be the worst thing' the responding officers had seen.
Blue Story director Andrew Onwubolu, known as Rapman, has said the gang film is about 'love not violence', after seven police officers were injured in a disturbance at a screening.
[DAILYWIRE] Last Saturday, the NFL’s most controversial quarterback, Colin Kaepernick ...Formerly a petulant quarterback for the San Francisco Giants, now looking for a job. He was willing to stand up for his princles by kneeling during the national anthem, which he had every right to do, but not willing to take the consequences, which he apparently thought shouldn't apply to him... , participated in a workout to try to spark interest in his employment. So far, no NFL team has reached out to him about a potential job.
Kaepernick has been unemployed for three years. He led the the Socialist paradise of San Francisco ...where God struck dead Anton LaVey, home of the Sydney Ducks, ruled by Vigilance Committee from 1859 through 1867, reliably and volubly Democrat since 1964... 49ers to the Super Bowl in 2012 and did quite well as quarterback in 2013, but then his career started to wane. In 2016 he started kneeling during the national anthem as a protest of police brutality. His move angered fans but delighted political pundits who loved his anti-America message. Kaepernick was on his way out of the NFL due to his mediocrity, but the protest made him one of the most famous NFL players in the country. Despite not having a playing job, he was hired as a Nike front man.
#6
Everyone forgets that in his last season he led the 49ers to a 2-14 season. They are doing much better (10-1) with someone else at quarterback this year. The lesson is not lost on NFL hiring managers.
Posted by: Tom ||
11/25/2019 11:44
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#7
The Italians wouldn't put up with his sh*t.
The Canadians wouldn't pay him any attention.
Mushroom Boy has nowhere to go.
#9
tom, I remember but if that was brought up it would crush the narrative and be considered rayciss
Posted by: chris ||
11/25/2019 12:02
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#10
My recollection is that San Francisco was one of the first teams that embraced the Run-Pass Offense(RPO). By 2013 the defensive coordinators had plenty of time to analyze it and Kaepernick's "One-Trick Pony" talents.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Rescue authorities found the bodies of seven migrants colonists, including five women, after their boat capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa, coasties officials said on Sunday.
A patrol boat recovered the bodies of three of the women and customs workers found two more washed ashore after a vessel with some 150 people aboard went down on Saturday, the coasties said.
Another two bodies were found on Saturday on the beach at Cala Galera on the south side of the island.
Survivors had said late Saturday around 20 people were missing after coastiess reported rescuing nearly 150 migrants colonists when their vessel overturned around 1.5 miles (1.8 kilometres) off the coast.
The coasties said rescue operations had been complicated by rough seas "but also owing to the large number of people who fell into the water simultaneously."
Italian media reported one Eritrea ...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age... n man and a Libyan man as saying they had lost their wives.
The public prosecutor in the Sicilian port of Agrigento announced an investigation had been opened into the incident.
Spanish NGO Open Arms, which Thursday rescued 73 migrants colonists in a separate operation, meanwhile urged Europe ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... an governments to authorize "immediately" the migrants colonists’ disembarkation in a safe port, citing a "critical" situation.
"We continue to demand that people’s rights, established under international conventions and maritime law, be respected," tweeted Open Arms’ chef de mission Riccardo Gatti.
[BREITBART] More Virginia counties declared "Second Amendment Sanctuary" status this week in an effort to get ahead of the gun control promises from Gov. Ralph Coonman Northam ...Governor of Virginia, another Dem Great White Hope. He won election by calling his Publican opponent Ed Gillespie a racist, but then, don't they all?... (D) and newly-elected Democrats.
On November 19, 2019, Breitbart News reported that Appomattox County Board of Commissioners passed a "Second Amendment Sanctuary" resolution, with the goal of opposing any efforts that would "unconstitutionally restrict gun rights."
WHSV 3 reports that Giles County and Dinwiddle both adopted "Second Amendment Sanctuary" resolutions on November 21, 2019.
Dinwiddle Supervisor William Chavis said, "We have rights to bear arms. Point blank. And our county, we have a lot of hunters, lots of sportsmen that like to sport shoot."
On November 8, 2019, Breitbart News reported that Gov. Northam responded to Democrat election victories by readying a war on guns.
Northam introduced a number of gun controls following the May 31, 2019, Virginia Beach shooting in which 12 people were shot and killed with guns that were legally acquired. The gun control push failed to survive Republican opposition, but Northam sees hope for more Second Amendment restrictions now that Democrats will be in control.
Northam told CNN he will push universal background checks, as well as bans on "high volume magazines," bump stocks, and more.
None of Northam’s gun controls would have hindered, must less prevented, the Virginia Beach shooting.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] A grenade was thrown at a vehicle belonging to United Nations ...an organization originally established to war on dictatorships which was promptly infiltrated by dictatorships and is now held in thrall to dictatorships... in the Afghan capital Kabul on Sunday, killing a foreign national and wounding five others, a government front man said.
Nasrat Rahimi, the interior ministry front man, did not give the nationality of the dear departed.
Five Afghans, including two United Nations local staff, were slightly maimed in the attack.
No group has grabbed credit.
The attack took place after a week’s lull in the heavily fortified capital following a series of kabooms in recent months.
A hand grenade attack occurred in Kabul’s police district 9 (PD9) near Makrorayan area on Sunday evening, targeting a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) vehicle, the Ministry of Interior confirmed.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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#3
^ The SNL hipsters have come to the conclusion that the Dem candidates are all liars, whores and poltroons. The Dems are losing the SNL writer crowd.
How did they get there? Prob'y a combination of the spectacularly repulsive, indefensible Shitshow that is Hoover Burisma Biden, and the equally repulsive Shitshow that is Schoff's Star Chamber-- which was, to an SNL writer, unforgivable for being not just a waste but mind-numbingky BORING.
The next phase is Acceptance, of Trump's impending re-election.
#5
A satirist cannot long put up with virtue-signaling assholes, no matter how much his personal political views may align with those of the virtue vultures. They're BORING. That's professional suicide for a satirist.
#6
The other weird thing about recent Democratic presidential candidates is how ludicrously self-important they are.
They truly believe they've been called forth to Save the Republic -- even though not one of them has ever accomplished anything meaningful in their 200+ collective years of public life. The oldest of them, Bernie Trotsky, has literally achieved NOTHING in over 50 years of public office.
Their humorlessness increases in direct proportion to their fecklessness. The only q is how the SNL writers ever thought these clowns were not worthy of scorn.
#8
The only q is how the SNL writers ever thought these clowns were not worthy of scorn
My guess is, a big part of the performance arts, sports, entertainment industry is hostage to some virtue signalling producers who are wolves in tuxedos, friends of the Clintons. Also, most heads of creative depts must be hippie marxists. And faux-altruistic poseurs seeking the next Golden Lion for their saga of quiet rebellion by black women against slave owners in a bygone era.
#9
True. Most of the entertainment industry, like the finance industry and the tech sector and so many others now, is essentially a small oligopoly consisting of mammoth corporations: Disney, Comcast, AT&T, "National Amusements."
Think about the parent companies' executive leadership: these are TV salesmen, cable entrepreneurs, financial engineers, or even (in AT&T's case) network engineers.
Does any of these money-grubbing ROI hawks know anything about drama or comedy? About anything remotely creative?
No wonder our media & entertainment culture produces so much conformist, unfunny, boring, trite, redundant and derivative shite.
It's an industry seeking to optimize production and revenue, no less than the specialty chemicals or industrial lubricants industries.
#10
(possible exception to the above: Disney's leadership isn't devoid of creative knowledge. The little girls seem to greatly enjoy the 'Frozen' money-spinner franchise.)
#11
Maybe most actors themselves hate the liberal creed, but to keep getting roles and invitations they have to play along. And this might be a factor in their battles with depression, rage, dysphoria, addictions...
I could never fathom healthy, male, white leads making way for ugly, rancid, 'diverse' trannies of their own sweet will. Or dissing Trump, whining about gun control and professing love for muslims and illegal mexicans. It's all because they want to stay employed by the studio bosses. Who knows who funds all these woke movies ? We know the Obamas have a stake in ni netflix now. How much of cartel money went into the making of the latest Terminator pie-fight, 50 percent of which is in spanish and shows ICE officers being mean to saviors of humanity.
#12
We know the Obamas have a stake in netflix now
= Repayment of a debt incurred by that company when their friends in Washington protected NFLX's rickety business model via the "net neutrality" scam. At $68 million for Zero's cut, that represents a bargain for the company.
Hedge fund managers describe investing in that profitless company as akin to "believing in Jesus."
#14
Netflix is being seen as an effective tool by the left. It's reach and quick adaptation strategies to directives inserted periodically by the left must make it pretty valuable to some people. But once again, the downside of nurturing sycophancy by implied coercion, like Kim Jong is that you will see graphs pointing upwards even when you're tanking ! Good.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Ottoman Turkish President His Enormity, Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First ...Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey. In Anatolia did Recep Bey a stately Presidential Palace decree, that has 1100 rooms. That's 968 more than in the White House, 400 more than in Versailles, and 325 more than Buckingham Palace, so you know who's really more important... will visit Qatar ...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi... on Monday for discussions on Middle East issues, according to the Ottoman Turkish Presidency.
"The means to further deepen the cooperation between The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire... and Qatar in all areas will be addressed and views on regional and international issues will be exchanged during the talks," the Ottoman Turkish presidency said in a statement.
It said Erdogan would attend the fifth meeting of the Turkey-Qatar Supreme Strategic Committee at the invitation of Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani.
The Qatari emir was the first world leader to call Erdogan following the July 2016 attempted coup and congratulate him on his victory.
While Doha provided support to Ankara after its military launched an offensive on October 9 against a Syrian Kurdish militia, Arab countries including 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... condemned Turkey’s "aggression".
The burgeoning relationship saw Turkey’s military presence in Qatar increased while Doha promised economic support to Ankara during last year’s currency crisis.
The two countries also have similar policies with regards to Islamist groups, primarily the Moslem Brüderbund.
[DAWN] The government has decided to bring all unregulated sectors of the national economy under an interim regulatory framework to address at the earliest outstanding reservations on money laundering and terror financing (ML and TF) of the international financial watchdog ‐ Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
The decision was taken by the National FATF Coordination Committee (NFCC) at its recent meeting. Prime Minister Imran Khan ...aka The Great Khan, who ain't the sharpest bulb on the national tree... had set up the high-powered 12-member NFCC in the first week of October to ensure execution of all FATF-related tasks till Dec 1.
A senior government official told Dawn that the NFCC has decided to appoint the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) as an interim regulator for the real estate sector in view of disagreement among key stakeholders over creation of proposed Real Estate Regulatory Authority. The FBR will also act as a regulator for jewellers, jewels, diamonds and precious stones because there was no regulator at present for the sector.
Likewise, the NFCC has recommended the role of regulator for lawyers, legal advisers and law firms to the Ministry of Law and Justice. It authorised the Audit Oversight Board to act as a regulator for chartered accountants, accountants, financial consultants and all those relating to accounts groups.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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[DAWN] KARACHI: A 40-year-old man did away with himself by jumping off the fourth floor of his apartment building in Shadman Town on Saturday allegedly after hammering his eight-year-old daughter to death and leaving his wife and 10-year-old son badly injured, police said.
The chilling episode in the densely populated locality was reported early in the morning and remained a mystery even after several hours, but by the evening the Sherlocks found reasons to suspect the dear departed man was behind the tragedy.
"A 40-year-old man, Mohammad Kashif, and his eight-year-old daughter were found dead," said an official at the Sir Syed Town cop shoppe. "His 34-year-old wife, Sofia, and 10-year-old son Ayan were found almost unconscious with multiple wounds on their bodies. Both the injured were shifted to hospital for treatment where they are said to be in a stable condition. The bodies were moved to hospital for medico-legal formalities as well."
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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[DAILYCALLER] The Howard County, Maryland, school board voted to implement a massive, 1970s-style busing program Thursday, despite overwhelming opposition.
After one vote failed, members went into a back room, and when they came out, one of the members who voted "no" was crying. They did a do-over and she changed her vote.
Board member Jennifer Mallo lectured to constituents who voiced displeasure, saying it was a "privilege" that they got to witness the meeting, admonishing them not criticize her on social media, and complaining about her salary.
Immigrants colonists from China and the former Soviet Union said that what they were witnessing reminded them of the totalitarian regimes where they grew up.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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#1
It's tough when they throw out real history in school and replace it with 'studies' -
We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
#2
County Executive Calvin Ball, a Democrat, has a “chauffeur and personal security,” while the school system is spending on more buses instead of educational programs, Steil said. “Ball sat in the audience of his church while the pastor talked about sending black children to ‘white schools’ — we do not have ‘white schools’ in this county since the student population is only 35.8% white. FARMs students is only 18.9% of the county,” she said.
No, reeeeally. Calvin Ball?
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/25/2019 6:53
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#3
Immigrants from China and the former Soviet Union said that what they were witnessing reminded them of the totalitarian regimes where they grew up.
I hear this comparison made frequently these days by immigrants from the former USSR and those old enough to remember the Cultural Revolution.
What's most astonishing to them is the eerie resemblance between the 'woke' practice of denouncing thought-criminals and what they and their parents endured -- sometimes with terrible consequences -- in Mao's China or under Soviet Communism.
A man was found dead with his face skinned in Abyar, east of Benghazi. Unconfirmed reports say the body belongs to the commander of the western operations room of Haftar’s forces, General Abdul Salam al-Hassi, who has disappeared since the recapture of Gharyan by GNA in June pic.twitter.com/hZtzXxfnbu
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] There is a current standoff between the Lebanese people and the ruling establishment, who for two consecutive weeks has been trying to force a parliamentary session to pass an amnesty law, which would absolve the ruling elite from a number of crimes, including tax evasion.
This standoff comes as part of a nationwide uprising, which has seen millions of people take to the streets, demanding a change to the archaic and corrupt governance structure that their country is infamous for.
This amnesty law is no mere legislation but rather part of an elaborate scheme by the ruling elite to create schism and chaos in the midst of the protesters by placing them at odds with each other while at the same time providing the different political factions with legal leverage going forward.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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#2
That was part of the 'O's' flexibility program, Glenmore.
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
11/25/2019 12:09
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#3
Another f---up by our incompetent foreign-policy elite.
Something is seriously wrong with the way these people form their conception of the world. Seems to be a reinforcing dynamic in which they start with spurious ideas that no one has really examined closely - the "Arab Soring" conceit, for ex. - and then dig the hole deeper by shutting out dissenting views.
#4
Colonel Khadaffy (and all his alternative spellings) had become arrogant again after a period of cowering following turning over Libya’s nuclear bomb materials to President George W. Bush; he was openly threatening to release pent up jihadis on Europe if they didn’t indulge his every wish. Britain, France, and Italy, as I recall, requested President Obama aid them as they put Qaddafi in his place. Obama’s female squad of advisors, Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton persuaded him to join in the fun.
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] A senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has urged the country’s judiciary to mete out harsh sentences to what he described as "mercenaries" involved in protests against a fuel price hike last week, the judiciary’s Mizan news site reported.
"We caught all the mercenaries who openly confessed they were doing mercenary work for America and, God willing, the judicial system of the country will give them maximum punishments," Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, a deputy Guards commander, was quoted as saying.
Iran’s holy manal rulers have blamed "thugs" linked to exiles and foreign foes - the United States, Israel - for stirring up unrest which has led to some of the worst violence in the country in a decade.
Fadavi said several people were killed during the protests after being shot at with a handgun from a close distance behind themselves, which he said indicated the shooters were among the crowds.
Rights group Amnesia Amnesty International said in a release earlier this week that security forces shot into crowds of protesters from rooftops and, in one case, from a helicopter.
Amnesty said at least 115 people have died in the unrest. Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan, the abbreviation IRGC is a cognate form of Stürmabteilung (or SA), the term Supreme Guide is a cognate form of either Shah or Führer or maybe both, and they hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... has rejected corpse count figures as "speculative."
Iranian authorities have said about 1,000 demonstrators have been arrested.
The Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based advocacy group, said on its website that a tally based on official figures and credible reports suggested that "a minimum of 2,755 people have been arrested with the actual minimum number likely being closer to 4,000."
[DAWN] British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ...pro-Brexit British prime minister, succeeding no-Brexit Theresa May. BoJo is noted as much for his sparkling personality and his hair as for his Conservative policies.... promised on Sunday "to get Brexit done", pledging in his Conservative Party's manifesto to bring his deal to leave the Europe ...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum... an Union back to parliament before Christmas and ruling out any more delay.
With less than three weeks before Britannia heads to the polls on December 12, the governing Conservatives and opposition Labour Party are trying to tempt voters with different visions of the country's future, but both pledging to spend more.
Johnson's manifesto aims at drawing a distinction with Labour, which has promised to raise taxes on the rich and businesses to fund a big expansion of the state, by promising not to increase taxes if the Conservatives win the election.
Opinion polls show Johnson's Conservative Party commands a sizeable lead over the Labour Party, although large numbers of undecided voters mean the outcome is not certain.
#9
This hate would be one to remember:
Two real brexiteers to dismember!
Screamed Winston, chest heaving,
"We've always been leaving!"
The date: 32nd Brexember.
BREAKING: We at ICIJ have obtained a NEW trove of highly classified Chinese govt documents, including the operations manual for China's concentration camps.
I served as ICIJ’s lead reporter for the China Cables, with 17 media partners from 14 countries.https://t.co/l1mMVajLVQ
Now on to the “Integrated Joint Operations Platform”-- the “cybernetic brain” behind many detentions in Xinjiang. @jmulvenon said IJOP isn’t just “pre-crime,” it’s a “machine-learning, artificial intelligence, command and control” platform that substitutes AI for human judgment.
#1
Now on to the “Integrated Joint Operations Platform”-- the “cybernetic brain” behind many detentions in Xinjiang.
@jmulvenon
said IJOP isn’t just “pre-crime,” it’s a “machine-learning, artificial intelligence, command and control” platform that substitutes AI for human judgment.
The China Cables provide inside details about what all the mass surveillance and data collection is FOR. It is fed into IJOP, which learns from the data and uses it to produce lists of names, sometimes 1000s at a time, for police to detain.
For example, in a seven-day period in June 2017, IJOP flagged 24,412 names as “suspicious.” In that week alone, Xinjiang security officials rounded up 15,683 of those people and placed them in internment camps.
The noble journalists of ICIJ should expend their energies in cases of grooming, kidnapping, sex slavery through polygamist marriage among muslims across Europe and Asia. The trafficking of young children by jihad sympathizer criminal networks. The illegal funding of politicians and lawfarers to chip away at liberties of indigenous majorities to establish shariah and armed militia in guest countries.
But they won't, because then they will not be recognized by their islamophile leftist betters, will miss out on the cocktail parties and awards. May even have to face threats from actual human-rights abusers, like muslim gangs and their islamist networks. Fucking self-righteous, faux-humanist, idiot bastards. 'Trove' indeed. Shove your f↻cking Trove up your f↻ckety f↻ckin' arse !
Any responsible nation is obligated to do exactly what China is doing to its muslims. The fact that others have not will be rued by their future generations one day. After 9/11, when the Americans didn't do exactly this, now there are militia in NY roaming around in blue and whites with the mullah crecent stickers and some fucking inanity in Arabic.
Germany, England, france are all fucked ! Fucked ! And it's only the American gun culture and resilience of conservatives in some countries that they haven't been set upon by marauding hordes.
In no country except China do we see a responsible, State approved approach to purging the menace of islam. Everybody else is simply in denial about what the bloody thing is. This is why we pay taxes, why we enter the goddamn social contract and why we agree to respect and obey the tin man with the truncheon and the piddly zap gun in the first place. If a State cannot protect a population from its sworn enemy and cultist predators, the State is useless. Might as well leave the policing to us.
#5
Third option: build more and better walls, physical and virtual. And more aggressive policing and use of facial recognition in many more instances. I don't buy into the libertarian extremism, which owes as much to liberal kumbaya nonsense as it does to crackpot economics.
I'd like to see a new party emerge from the ashes of the NeverTrumper GOP and the Democratic Debacle parties, one focused intensely on SECURITY: economic security, physical security, securing the blessings of our cultural heritage and our birthright as a free but not suicidal people, distinct from other nations, not in any way beholden to idiotic globalist notions of universality.
#6
For sure, it's time the USA had a new party replace the Democrats. They are just too far gone. A more centrist approach maybe, with strong nationalist ethos. Which is why people voted for Trump I think, he wasn't the quintessential GOP man.
#7
I think there is a concept of nationalism, that is based on putting citizenship at the center of the nation.
That citizens are defined by their rights, which in turn are secured chiefly by keeping bad people out of the nation, and by not bringing into the nation people whose claims will impair the security and prosperity of the citizenry.
Citizens need walls. Only then can we cultivate our garden.
Otherwise, it will be trampled and pissed and shat upon by all manner of characters who care not for the ordinary citizen and his family-- not just foreign invaders but our own crapulous virtue-signaling morons, our greedy and rapacious wannabe oligarchs, and our shit-culture mongers.
We need to start by building walls, and moats, virtually speaking. Secure the citizenry's property, health, families, our heritage. Security first.
#8
And law enforcement. At the enforcement stage, not when it's passed on into the black robed arbiter domain. An overhaul of police and bureau policies and recruitment is also necessary too. I greatly applaud the ICE people in this regard. And the DEA.
In my little experience, almost every problem can be avoided at the stage of law enforcement.
#9
Well said. It seems almost surreal to me that so many people in NYC, or at least those morons who voted for De Blasio, have forgotten that the renaissance of that city was made possible by a revolution in policing.
Aggressive policing, compustat policing, going after the broken windows perps and the squeegee men: it was this relentless focus on tough, smart, unapologetic law enforcement under Bratton and Giuliani that made it possible for NYC to survive and even thrive after 1994.
So many of our problems are either cultural or else connected to weak rule of law. Which is in a way a reflection of a cultural problem.
#10
The culture you can't get back, may only preserve what's left in places. The social momentum of hoo ha impiety with the scientific atheism wave is just too much now. We shall all be 'secular democracies' until the end now. But at least a studied intolerance for anti-nationalist culture can be displayed. Of course you'd require empowering certain unruly specimens against muslims, antifas and wakandan types.
We all have to understand because our old systems were so effective, they gave rise to corruption. This led to disaffect and commie adventurism in the masses. In almost every modern republic. Today, 'the domestic enemy' has a momentum, a justification behind their 'ism'. The only way we can win against him is by sometimes descending into the villainy we are accused of.
#11
The Boer War was a war of aggression against a farmers' republic by an evil empire. The empire couldn't win on the battlefield, the farmers kept beating them. So they invented the concentration camp and imprisoned their women and children.
How heroic.
Posted by: Herb McCoy ||
11/25/2019 6:29
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#12
NOTE: I have seen nothing in this story to suggest that the AI will only be used on Muslims.
This is a really evil turn of events.
Anybody with behavior outside of some norm will get flagged by this computer program.
Anybody!
#15
The system just flags odd behaviours, tags patterns of known and under-investigation criminals and assists law enforcement in profiling criminals. And criminals, their families and associates need to be profiled. This is an Asian society which westerners cannot begin to understand, so the translations from the frontend the journos are reading will appear malicious and 'inhumane' to them. The AI is innovative and wholly chinese, in that it does not adhere to globalist conventions of humanist propriety, it only seeks to eliminate any chance of survival for criminals.
It flags purchases of large quantities of corrosive substances, and surgical gloves for example by people not registered as hardware toolers or nurses respectively. Then there are subsystems like those for detecting a car registered to a different person, driven by an unrelated person. You have to understand, in Asia this is odd.
The software classifies 36 types of persons and subsets like 'convicted criminal' to 'white collar/con man' and people with regular domestic fights who bruise their wives enough to send them to hospitals. The system is being stated as some kind of skynet thingy, but it's only 'evil' part lies in that it wasn't built in consultation with or adherence to some globalist 'expert' approved checklist of liberties a corporation may take with data but a State should not.
3dc is right, it's not just for Uighurs. It's for detecting criminality, and has just happened to catch many practicing muslims. And this says more about muslims than the system.
But it's not a tool for violent oppression, just security. I don't care for the State of china at all, but I have no beef with the little people the Uighurs will attack. They won't be the buzz cut Han autocracy or the CPC bigwigs certainly.
China does not love the right to expression of liberties so much as to allow people to bend their knees at the Anthem, to have hijabed women chant for the safety of their asshole sons in the streets, to throw shoes at state leaders and try to establish a utopia by changing everyone's sex forcefully. It kills people who try to.
It is our failing if we cannot bring ourselves to set our priorities right and insist on recognizing islam as a religion with a place for it in our secular republics.
There is an intense campaign to vilify this Xinjiang thing and the 'concentration camps', but whom does the campaign favour ? What did the Uighurs do, and what do they want that is so innocent and worthy of surviving over everything the modern world has achieved. How did it start ? From a stabbing spree the likes of Paleos, ordered by Turkic mullahs west of China and followed up fervently by the Uighurs. Emboldened by what they'd achieved in the desperately dumb EU nations, they thought they could get away with the 2014 Kunming attack. They attacked hundreds, killed 31 people.
This was the response. As a measure of service for tax Yuan, I'd say it was fine service. And what have we done ? After 9/11, 26/11, charlie hebdo, the munich rapes, the Rochdale grooming gangs... fucko !
Instead of learning from them, and wishing the li'l chinks well, we mustn't try to imperil their innocent populations by chipping away at their sovereign right to fistfuck the muslim whichever way they want to.
Forgive me, but this is similar to a thing I've pitched often to my own govts so it's close to me. I'd rather die as a Bond-villian, then deliberate effetely as the muslim and the leftist emasculates my society.
#16
^ Actually, much of our western advanced algorithms aiperate on behavioral features, Dron.
The entire programmatic ad industry i.e. Google and FB's meal tickets are derived from ingesting and extracting meaning from millions of behavioral inputs about each of 2 billion internet users. We do behavioral, in spades. It's just swathed in all kinds of globalist virtue-signaling Silicon Valley corporate BS -- "organizing the world's information and making it useful," "connecting the world", "lining our pockets" etc.
#18
Let’s see.. I buy large boxes of surgical gloves for lastly first aid. There main use is when fixing stuff around the home and autos. I buy corrosive. Chemicals for repair jobs around the house or autos and electronics. Nano-abrasives to clean tile, cement or copper pipe. I have tools that would cause the average ChiCom to bug their eyes out. None of this for anything bad but I am sure an AI would flag. I’ve even been known to mix up my own anti-fungal medicine for my personal fruit trees as I don’t trust the ingredients in some of the commercial products.
The algorithm is helped in no small way by certain typical conceits of the average muslim brain. If you want to catch muslims for being... muslimy, the process is really simple.
#20
3dc, but you're not called Abubakr PinPong, neither is your wife missing teeth every saturday. ☺
Also, I'm pretty sure if an officer simply asked you to explain the purpose of your purchases you'd gladly open the garage to them and explain every bit until he yawned and left. I wouldn't mind.
#22
3dc - location-based behaviors are the most powerful signals. Add to each behavioral event the user's latitude/longitude and a time stamp, some audio of what he said or heard & video of what he might have seen at that time and place, and you've got the inputs needed to make good predictions of intent.
#25
I'd like to say that in the USA, a more effective form of thought/moral/social policing is being done already. You don't need a machine, if there's already a loosely connected community of closet-maoists in academia, bureaucracy, media... all ready to go out on a limb for their chosen socialist deity of the day. Attacking careers to beating up people for wearing hats, they are far more effective because a computer is a just a dispassionate thing.
#28
Dron66046, if you would be so kind as to give us a link for 2014 Kunming attack, that would be helpful. Your rant at #15 just had words where a URL should have been. We followed events at the time (see here), but I’m sure you had a particular article in mind.
#29
Separately, necessary as it is to put a stop to Uighur jihad ambitions, Communist China is a totalitarian society with a history of finding even small instances of independent thought — playing Western classical music, for instance — worthy of severe punishment, The Cultural Revolution was not an aberration, but a natural development as the country went down the totalitarian path.
Nowadays Christians as well as Moslems are in the crosshairs. As Mussolini said, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
China is being vilified by Vatican flunkies, just as India is at times. A christian is safe anywhere except with muslims around. I have friends in Changsha, belonging to a 500 strong flock who have no affiliations to denominational christianity. They are regarded as 'fringe', 'cool-aid drinkers', 'holy rollers' by the ecclesiastical bureaucracies of the world. And they get by just fine, because an unpretentious man or woman of God gives no trouble to Caesar. It's Gawd who gives trouble to Caesar if Caesar does.
Globally distributed bureaucratic churches' various methods of intervening in social and familial aspects of citizens and then leveraging political and economic outcomes for certain communities to benefit ultimately themselves is what such States are concerned about. As for the freedom to worship, speech, sing, I'm told nobody is actually complaining. Else, how could you have this ? Do note the lyrics. Chinese Choir
The church of Almighty god is an anti-communist thingy which reveres a certain chin chong lady as the second coming, and the CPC suffers them because it'd just have to jail close to 3 million people ! And we're being told by the MSM how China is rounding up christians and selling their organs. What bullshit !
#31
The Chinese can do as they please, IMHO, in their wretched kingdom.
We need to keep a close wrap on the use of AI here, especially by virtue-signaling oligarchs who couldn't care less about our democracy or our cultural heritage.
#34
3dc, there was a great interest in AI to act as a conduit in a system of signals and actions for disabled people, and it was met with huge success, but a lot of the research branched off into military and expensive medical procedures. That's the way every promising research goes, it delivers a product to the rulers of the world, then the tech trickles down. Unfair as it is.
Now there's interest in AI on space pods that shall judge the commercial viability of excursions into asteroids and such for mining. The best use of AI would be to eliminate human partiality and ideological bias from major decisions like legislation. I'll bet if that happened, unreasonable laws, litigation and high handed corruption would be history. Also a lot of valueless, but charismatic rabble rousers would be jobless.
#35
Dron, somebody has to program the AI. Chances are their biases will seep into the AI.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
11/25/2019 21:33
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#36
it delivers a product to the rulers of the world, then the tech trickles down. Unfair as it is.
New things are very expensive, because there is as yet no scale to have economies of. So the very rich pay top dollar, driving the cost of production down to the point where the rest of us need no longer choose between getting the thing and eating. Not unfair at all, though there are those who will argue it isn’t fair that early adopters have to pay so much more than those who come later.
#37
Rambler, it's very hard for bias to seep into programs without being easily detectable by an approving committee, from what I have understood. Although I'm still a dunce in these matters.
Algorithms are unsubtle things, unlike the legalese of legislation and judgements. The only compromise will be by the admins who pass on gathered knowledge, analysts who will color the data or stack it visually to suit their narratives. I have decided to just stop being afraid of so many things the MSM says are 'potentially' evil, now that I understand they are only protecting the thousand year old turf of the arbiters of our lives.
AI is extremely spot on at predicting crime but look at the arguments and where they come from and you'll see a pattern behind this anxiety. Biased AI vs Crime
Lebanese Civil Defense hospitalizes five protesters with different injuries after Hezbollah supporters attacked protests at the capital Beirut. https://t.co/1JXk0V1327
[FOXNEWS] An 18-year-old suspect wanted in connection with the shooting death of an Alabama sheriff was taken into custody shortly after midnight Sunday following a nearly four-hour manhunt, according to reports.William Chase Johnson, who authorities said earlier had driven off in the sheriff's vehicle after the 8:15 p.m. shooting -- with the vehicle found a short time later -- returned to the scene of the crime with a firearm in his hand and surrendered, AL.com reported. I'm sure the lefties are so confused, since the sheriff was black and shooter boy is white.
Fatally shot Saturday evening was Lowndes County Sheriff John Williams Sr., known as "Big John," a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who had been sheriff in the community near Montgomery, the state capital, for nearly a decade.
Williams had responded to a call from a convenience store in Hayneville, about 24 miles southwest of Montgomery, when he was fatally shot "over something silly," Alabama Trooper Sgt. Steve Jarrett told AL.com. Further details of the incident were not immediately available.
Authorities quickly posted an online alert about Johnson, with the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency describing the suspect as "a serious risk to the public."
After Johnson allegedly drove off in the sheriff's vehicle, it was later spotted abandoned and was recovered, AL.com reported.
A heavy law enforcement presence was seen at the convenience store following the shooting, according to WSFA-TV of Montgomery.
Jarrett did not immediately share information on where Johnson fled or how he was able to return to the scene of the crime.
"All that's going to be investigated," the sergeant told WSFA.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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[Almasdarnews] The U.S. military reportedly attacked four tanker ferries on Saturday that were attempting to smuggle oil from the SDF-held areas in eastern Syria to the Syrian government territories.
According to local reports, the U.S. warplanes targeted these ferries while they were traveling through the southern region of Syria's Euphrates River Valley.
The reports said the U.S. military managed to destroy the four ferries before they could reach their intended destination, resulting in a number of explosions that were heard in the Euphrates River Valley.
The total number of casualties are still unknown at this time.
While the ferries did not belong to the Syrian government, they were believed to have been transporting the oil to their territories, which is something that many people in Syria have been forced to do as the U.S. currently occupies some of the Levantine nation's biggest oil fields.
Neither the Syrian government nor the U.S. Armed Forces have reported on this attack that took place on Saturday.
It should be noted that the U.S. Armed Forces have carried out similar attacks in the past, especially in the Deir Ezzor Governorate.
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/25/2019
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[BREITBART] A dipshit teenager was reportedly killed during after subway surfing on top of a train in Queens, New York, Saturday night. Brilliant to the last...
The hilarious tragic incident happened around 8:45 p.m. on Saturday when he fell from the outside of a Manhattan-bound No. 7 train, according to the New York Daily News. "Hey, y'all! Lookit me! Lookit me! Lookit-- Aaaiiieee! I am undone!"
Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) motormen found the teen’s carcass body lying about 20 feet beyond the Queensboro Plaza station. He was pronounced dead at the scene, CBS New York reported. "He's dead, Jim!"
Police said the genius youth, who was believed to be just 14 years of age, appeared to have hit his head on a piece of metal hanging over the tracks. It was empty at the time. The head, not the piece of metal.
The New York City Transit Authority issued a statement via Twitter following the incident.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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ht insty
[rthk.hk] Pro-government candidates knew they were in tough for Sunday's District Council polls, with voters highly motivated to express their views on the months of unrest through the ballot box.
But they didn't expect to be crushed on this scale – few did.
At counting stations across the territory, similar pictures emerged. Huge piles of votes for pro-democracy candidates, dwarfing the stacks of ballots for their pro-government rivals.
Of 13 pro-establishment legislators who fought for a District Council, nine lost. The four winners were DAB Chairwoman Starry Lee, who barely managed to stave off a challenge from former League of Social Democrats legislator Leung Kwok-Hung; Lee's party mate Wilson Or, who only defeated People Power's Tam Tak-chi by 187 votes; the Federation of Trade Union's Kwok Wai-keung; and Paul Tse, who hung on to his seat in Wan Chai.
Outside of those races, it was a bloodbath.
The DAB's Holden Chow, Horace Cheung, Vincent Cheng, and Edward Lau were all upset.
Vincent Cheng apologised to his supporters after his loss, saying he had tried his best. He said while he's confident that his constituents fully affirm his past work as a District Council over the past decade, the "events over the past few months have influenced the outcome of this vote."
But Horace Cheung – who's also an Executive Councillor – told reporters it was "too early to draw any conclusions" from the results, saying his party will be holding a central committee meeting to discuss the election later on Monday. But he said many aides to his election campaign had faced 'threats of violence'.
Three Federation of Trade Unions' legislators – Alice Mak, Ho Kai-ming, and Michael Luk, lost.
Mak made no bones about who she thought was to blame for her shock election loss: the Carrie Lam administration.
"The administration's governance has given rise to so many public grievances. In the election campaign, pro-government candidates have been unfairly treated. This is a very important reason [for our poor performance]", she said.
She added that she has been faithfully serving her constituents' interests in Kwai Tsing for the past 26 years, and said in this polarised society, "it's not about our work, it's about our political stance." Mak added that she hopes things will stay as peaceful going forward as it was on election day, where no major incidents were reported.
Other prominent losers include outspoken Roundtable legislator Michael Tien, and one of the most controversial politicians on the ballot, Junius Ho.
Ho was apparently shocked by his defeat, saying in a concession speech on his Facebook page that "heaven and earth have been turned upside down", and characterising the polls as ‘abnormal' and ‘regrettable.
Ho's remarks, as hyperbolic as they may seem, may not be so far off the mark. While most analysts had expected the pan-democratic camp to make solid gains, no one expected this sort of one-sided rout.
[DAWN] A multi-party conference has been called by JUI-F chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman ...Deobandi holy man, known as Mullah Diesel during the war against the Soviets, his sympathies for the Taliban have never been tempered by honesty... to decide on the next course of action in the anti-government campaign by the opposition, his spokesperson told DawnNewsTV on Sunday.
The conference, to which a total of nine parties have been invited, will be held in Islamabad on Tuesday and hosted by the JUI-F chief.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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#1
Oh Gawd, this guy ! That turban. Same color palette. He's becoming as recognizable as donald duck !
[DAWN] Twenty-three bodies were recovered on Sunday after a small plane crashed on takeoff into a densely populated area of the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo aka Republic of Congo, which is much smaller and much more (for Africa) stable. DRC gave the world Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Mobutu, followed by years of tedious civil war. Its principle industry seems to be the production of corpses. With a population of about 74 million it has lots of raw material... , rescue workers said.
"We are up to 23 bodies now," Goma rescue service coordinator Joseph Makundi told AFP.
The dead are believed to include all those on board the plane as well as people on the ground.
Images from the scene showed plumes of black smoke and flames apparently from the burning plane as locals looked on.
Rescue workers were also seen combing through the plane's burned-out fuselage.
Goma airport official Richard Mangolopa told AFP no survivors were expected from the disaster.
The Dornier-228 aircraft had been headed for the city of Beni, 350 kilometres (220 miles) north of Goma when it went down in a residential area near the airport in the east of the country.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/25/2019
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"The Dornier Do 228 is a twin-turboprop STOL utility aircraft"
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.
[Guns America] In the summer of 1992, a violent confrontation between Randy Weaver and federal Law Enforcement agencies led to three needless deaths and an 11-day standoff. 
[Right Wing Tribune] President Bill Clinton’s name appears a whopping 31 times in the court documents that also reveal the former president traveled to the infamous island owned by Epstein, Little St. James, otherwise known as Pedophile Island.
[Aljazeera] British man and his Filipino wife were rescued unharmed after 10-minute gun battle with members of armed group.
[Aljazeera] Hong Kong, China - Hong Kong's pro-democratic parties swept the board in highly anticipated local elections seen as a barometer of public opinion after nearly six months of increasingly violent protests that have polarised the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.
[Big League Politics] Brett Kavanaugh has spoken of progressive idol Ruth Bader Ginsburg that terms that are sure to leave many conservatives worried about the judge’s commitment to originalist principles.
[Big League Politics] Steven Robert Setzer, a former U.S. Marine Corps pilot who once escorted former President Bill Clinton on the crew of the Marine One, is facing years in prison after being hit with child sex charges.
[Reuters] A year after the U.S. stock market plunged, many investors believe conditions are in place to avoid another year-end pullback and possibly set the stage for a rally to finish off 2019.
[PJ] Whatever reasons protesters in Iraq originally took to the streets to express their frustration with the government hve now been tossed aside and outright revolution has become their goal.
Surprised his evaluators and classmates didn't find a way to fail him.
[CANADAFREEPRESS] 
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for 
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has asked for the resignation of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer amid controversy over the handling of a case involving a Navy SEAL convicted of illegally posing for pictures with the corpse of an ISIS fighter.
...The tack in the backside of the Democratic Party...
...Formerly a petulant quarterback for the San Francisco Giants, now looking for a job. He was willing to stand up for his princles by kneeling during the national anthem, which he had every right to do, but not willing to take the consequences, which he apparently thought shouldn't apply to him...
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
...Governor of Virginia, another Dem Great White Hope. He won election by calling his Publican opponent Ed Gillespie a racist, but then, don't they all?...
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
...aka 
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for 
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...
The noble journalists of ICIJ should expend their energies in cases of grooming, kidnapping, sex slavery through polygamist marriage among muslims across Europe and Asia. The trafficking of young children by jihad sympathizer criminal networks. The illegal funding of politicians and lawfarers to chip away at liberties of indigenous majorities to establish shariah and armed militia in guest countries. 
[FOXNEWS] An 18-year-old suspect wanted in connection with the shooting death of an Alabama sheriff was taken into custody shortly after midnight Sunday following a nearly four-hour manhunt, according to reports.William Chase Johnson, who authorities said earlier had driven off in the sheriff's vehicle after the 8:15 p.m. shooting -- with the vehicle found a short time later -- returned to the 
[BREITBART] A 
...Deobandi holy man, known as 
...formerly the Congo Free State, Belgian Congo, Zaire, and who knows what else, not to be confused with the Brazzaville Congo aka 
