Monday, December 29, 2014

Buddhist militancy triggers international concern

James Crabtree in Colombo and Michael Peel in Bangkok December 28, 2014

Sri Lankan soldiers of the special task force patrol the streets of Aluthgama, a town in the south of the country, following clashes between Muslims and an extremist Buddhist group in June Shahabadeen Sahira had a traumatic first-hand view of a new wave of militant Buddhist nationalist groups, whose rise across parts of Asia has triggered growing international alarm. Wearing a black headscarf, the elderly Muslim former schoolteacher recalls her ordeal in June, when a gang burst into her home near the southern Sri Lankan coastal town of Aluthgama, during the worst religiously inspired violence to hit the tropical island nation in three decades.

“They came and took everything I had,” she recalls of the men from the country’s largely Buddhist Sinhalese majority, who burned dozens of homes in two days of clashes with Muslims. Three people were killed. “My house was ruined. All my money, all my jewellery, was gone,” she says. “If I could meet those responsible, I would ask: ‘Sir, does your Lord Buddha teach this?’” The bloodshed was sparked by a street-corner disagreement between a Buddhist monk and a young Muslim. But Alan Keenan, analyst at the International Crisis Group think-tank, says it is part of a wider trend: the rise of a new generation of militant anti-Muslim Buddhist organisations. The most prominent in Sri Lanka is the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), or Buddhist Power Force.......To Read More....

My Take: As I've said in the past, I've been following this story with special interest. On July 10, 2013 I posted a link to this story:

The Mad Monks of Myanmar

Myanmar is home to a growing wave of anti-Muslim sentiment, as seen in the troubling 969 movement. The numerical significance of the digits is rooted in Buddhism’s Three Jewels (Tiratana), which comprise 24 attributes: nine special attributes of Lord Buddha, six core Buddhist teachings, and nine attributes of monkhood. Co-opted by members of Myanmar’s nationalistic Buddhist majority, the number has become a symbol of religious division that has led to both discrimination and violence. Even the government, under President Thein Sein, has taken controversial actions that seem to align with its anti-Muslim stance, from its ongoing purge of the nation's Muslim minority Rohingyas to its highly contentious two-child policy, applied solely to the same group.

While the movement has infiltrated the country’s mainstream over a long period of time, a prominent Buddhist monk, Ashin Wirathu, has recently become its unofficial leader. A photograph of Wirathu in crimson robes, with the words “The Face of Buddhist Terror”, made the cover of the July issue of TIME Magazine, causing a furor in Myanmar and drawing international attention to the country's heated religious tensions……To Read More…

My TakeI have been following this story and my first link was on Thursday, April 18, 2013 with the article, Monks Gone Bad,To Read More…. “My Take” at the time was;

“There is a question not answered, nor is it asked in this article. Why? The author talks about poverty as a vehicle for inclusion into the religious orders, but that isn't an explanation as to why this particular group of monks she discusses have decided to be violent against Muslims. There is much more to this story that isn't being told, and it is my belief the right questions aren't being asked.

This article answers those unasked questions when a monk named Wirathu says;  “Muslims are fundamentally bad. Mohammed allows them to kill any creature. Islam is a religion of thieves, they do not want peace.”

I have stated in the past that at some point there is going to be a backlash against Muslim violence. What I didn’t expect was to see it started by Buddhists. What I also find interesting is how much the world bemoans violence against Muslims, and yet those same voices seem to be silent at violence perpetrated by Muslims. The world has gone nuts. This much is clear though. When it starts it will become more unpleasant than anything we have seen for a long time.

Further Comments: I stand by that prediction. This isn't going to be isolated. The West, and especially Americans, finds the idea of a religious war anathema. We just won't accept that concept. Well, much of the rest of the world, particularly the Muslim world, views religion as the basis for war as a very real concept, and in the case of Muslims it's a religious requirement. Furthermore, they don't much care what the West thinks, and in point of fact they like the West's reticence. That way they can use our own values against us and declare any effort to identify Islam as a warmongering criminal organization disguising itself as a religion as Islamophobia! All done with the help of ideologically corrupt elite leftists in government and the media. But reality will eventually overcome ideology. This is going to grow worldwide and become more unpleasant than anyone ever thought could happen in a modern world.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Russia Debt One Grade Above Junk With Downgrades Coming, How Likely is Default?

Mike Shedlock | Dec 28, 2014

All three rating agencies are expected to downgrade Russia's debt to junk soon and bailouts to Russian banks are on the rise, but how likely is default?

The Financial Times reports ...

Russia trebled the size of its bailout of troubled lender Trust Bank to Rbs99bn ($1.9bn) on Friday, laying bare the growing financial fallout from its currency crisis and the slump in the price of oil, its main export.

The rapidly rising cost makes the rescue of Trust bank, which foundered as the rouble collapsed early last week, the second-largest seen in Russia. It has now consumed a tenth of the money earmarked by the government last week for bank bailouts.

The authorities also said they would spend Rbs320bn ($5.9bn) propping up two other banks. Anton Siluanov, finance minister, said state-owned VTB, the second-largest lender by assets, could receive Rbs100bn before the end of this year and another Rbs150bn in 2015, while Gazprombank could be allocated Rbs70bn.

Trust Bank was the first financial institution to fall victim to the currency crisis as it suffered a run on deposits by customers panicked by the steep drop in the rouble’s value, which at one point on December 16 plummeted to an all-time low of 80 against the dollar.

The central bank said that the state-run Deposit Insurance Agency would provide Trust Bank with up to Rbs99bn. It would give an additional Rbs28bn loan to Bank Otkritie, one of Russia’s largest private lenders, to restructure Trust Bank, with the two then merging by the end of 2020.
 

Foreign Reserves

Although US and EU sanctions make it difficult for Russian companies to obtain financing, and although the Russian banking system is a mess, sovereign default will only occur if Russia cannot meet its foreign debt obligations.  Russia has about $4000 billion in foreign currency reserves, lowest since 2009, but foreign currency obligations for 2015 total about $120 billion.   On that score, the immediate risk seems slim. In fact, one has to wonder if the impending downgrade to junk is politically motivated.  Regardless, the US severely underestimates the fallout, especially to Europe, should default occur.  Sanctions are economic madness and Obama's claim they are working is preposterous. For further discussion, please see Russia Under Attack: Letter from CEO of Genoil to CEO of JPMorgan Chase on US Foreign Policy Blowback

This Appeared Here....... 



My Take - I know I'm going to surprise a whole bunch of people, but I don't know how this ends up being Obama's fault? Everyone demanded he do something and then complained when he didn't start a war. Well, somehow I think that starting a war with Russia isn't such a good thing. So if that's the case - just how many options did anyone think he had? In this case sanctions were all that was left, otherwise everyone had to take their toys and go home and be quiet. No one's forcing Putin to be stupid. That's his choice.

Some weeks back I commented that all the saber rattling everyone is so concerned about is nothing more than a big show by Putin to make him look strong, when in reality he's a typical arrogant economic idiot, just like Stalin, Lenin, Castro and the rest, and with the weakness that comes with going broke.  That leaves bluster and bluff, at which the Soviets excelled, especially when dealing with men like FDR and JFK.  

He destroyed Russia's opportunity to become an economic powerhouse. He and all those corrupt ex-security agents and their allies basically stole all the worthwhile businesses in the nation.  Eventually the only thing Russia had left as a economic base was energy, and those prices are collapsing as I'm writing.  He's broke, he's scared, he's clueless and his real concern is not whether or not he can hold power. I'm willing to bet his real concern is his own safety. Let's face it - he's surrounded by men as equally immoral as he.

Let’s get a little clarity here.  This economic problem in Russia is not the fault of the West, nor is it Obama’s.  It’s Putin’s fault!  No one forced him to attack Ukraine and occupy the Crimea.  Putin attacked Georgia , threatens Azerbaijan and stirs up animosity between them and Armenia , puts economic pressure on Kazakhstan and Belarus and uses his influence in Belarus for military action against Ukraine,  and has been privately threatening to invade Poland, Romania and the Baltic states.  And just who is it in the West that's responsible for all of this imperialism by Putin?

If Russia defaults I think it’s a wonderful thing.  I have a great deal of sympathy for the Russian people who will undoubtedly suffer, but as an entomologist once said, “There’s nothing like a good epidemic to get things started”.   If Russians have any hope of fixing their nation it will take a major economic downturn to dig these thoroughly corrupt people out from their positions of power.  As for the economy in the EU if Russia collapses economically – this will be a good opportunity to re-evaluate their own economic system and start to dump so many of the stupid policies they’ve adopted – including their idiotic green initiatives, especially involving energy.  Economic collapse is the beginning of wisdom for those living under the boot heel of socialism!


The Deadbeat Candidate

Debra J. Saunders | Dec 28, 2014

Carly Fiorina is gearing up to run for president. National Journal reports she already has begun hiring staff.  Fiorina has run for office only once, as the Republican challenger to Sen. Barbara Boxer of California in 2010 -- and she lost. Still, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO won prime attention by running and losing. She's on "Meet the Press" all the time. She's still rich and still good-looking. (In 2010, Fiorina and husband Frank claimed a combined net worth of $30 million to $120 million.) Insiders think she's probably running for vice president; if Hillary Clinton is the Dems' nominee, the GOP nominee likely will be looking for a female running mate. Or maybe "she's running for enhanced fame, image and possibly the Cabinet," opined GOP consultant Kevin Spillane. "There's really no downside with her running." So maybe it isn't totally crazy that Fiorina is running for president, even if she's never won an election. But it is totally crazy that Fiorina is running for the White House when, according to federal election reports, her 2010 campaign still owes $486,418 to creditors. Who wants a deadbeat for president?............ "The only effective way she could discharge that debt would be for her to write a personal check," Wilson added. Then again, she can afford it......... If Fiorina had not repaid herself that $1 mil, her campaign coffers would have had enough money to discharge all of the campaign's debts……To Read More…..

The Social Security Collection Agency

Paul Jacob | Dec 28, 2014

To those nattering nabobs of negativity who don’t trust government to do the right thing, or even to stop doing the wrong thing once discovered, I just want to say: “You’re right.”
Again.
Last April, a Washington Post exposé about a bizarrely tyrannical debt collection program caused the Social Security Administration (SAA) to publicly promise it would cease and desist from said program. The Social Security bureaucracy had been snatching the income tax refund checks of grown children whose parents, many decades ago, had allegedly been sent excess money intended for the care and feeding of these then-youngsters by this same incompetent outfit.
The booty? A not insignificant $75 million. The victims? A whopping 400,000 of them.
Due process? The SSA didn’t go before a judge to prove these people owed a valid debt, nor even bother to inform folks that their tax refunds were being seized. Instead, the Social Security gang just flat-out took the money . . . surreptitiously, like any other thief in the night........To Read More.....

Saturday, December 27, 2014

Book Review: Jerome Corsi's, Who Killed Kennedy, New Research into the JFK Assassination.

By Rich Kozlovich

Although I’ve had Jerome Corsi’s e-book, “Who Killed Kennedy, New Research into the JFK Assassination,” for some time I’ve been busy and didn’t want to do a review without giving this book the attention it deserves.

I found the George H.W. Bush connection in this book interesting but not compelling, although it does add a certain flavor to the whole account about the CIA’s potential involvement in JFK’s assassination. 

One thing that I find intriguing about the Bush segment is his inability to remember “exactly” where he was and what he was doing when it came over the news that JFK had been assassinated.  I was 16 years old and I was in history class. If a kid can remember that day so clearly a grown man involved in politics should surely remember.

What I find most compelling in this book is twofold.  First the ballistic science showing how it was impossible for all that damage to have been done by a single shooter, and the forensic science that supports it.   In years gone by I can remember seeing film that showed people ducking down in front of the grassy knoll as if there was a shot being fired.  I haven’t seen that in years.   

This book gives more than reasonable assurance there were a number of shooters, possible as many as four – I will allow everyone to determine that for themselves, but it’s abundantly clear there was more than one. 

The Kennedy’s were a strange lot, including old Joe Kennedy the father, JFK and his brother Bobby, and they ticked a whole lot of people off, including J.Edgar Hoover, the CIA, the Mob, and FDR has issues with Joe Kennedy when he was the ambassador to the Court of St. James, in England. 
 
The CIA is a secret organization whose job it is to deal in dirt.  Spies are by definition, liars, murders, thieves and people who live amoral lives.  That’s what’s expected of them.  That’s what they’re hired to do.  So why should we find it surprising when evidence turns up they act in nefarious ways by calling such evidence of their activities “conspiracy” theories.  I often wonder if those who tout that line ever read a history book.  Or do they have other motives? 

This book leaves a lot of loose ends because there are a lot of loose ends out there that need tied up.  And the government won’t tie them up.  If the government wants to end these “conspiracy” theories then all they have to do is release those 1000 pages of evidence they’re sheltering from the eyes of historians.  This isn’t a practice that is exclusive to communist or totalitarian states by the way. 

The British sealed records about WWII for thirty years and fifty years.  When the thirty year restriction ended we discovered all that information about the Egnigma code breakers, and found out the British Generals weren’t all that smart in North Africa after all.  Rommel sent messages to Berlin to outline his plans regularly.  Plans that might have succeeded except those messages were intercepted and decoded and then sent to Montgomery.  Perhaps Montgomery wasn’t really the brightest pebble in the brook after all.  

That brings me to the end of the fifty year restriction.  What did we learn?  Nothing!  That information has been deemed so important it is now classified indefinitely.  Why?  It’s my belief there are a great many families who are prominent in politics and business implicated in dirty dealings before and during the war on both sides of the pond, including the Duke of Windsor, FDR and all their cohorts, who now have prominent descendants in government and industry.  Remember this isn’t the Soviet Union, it’s the United Kingdom. 

Unraveling the Kennedy’s assassination is a continuing and unpleasant saga that seems clear involves organized crime, rogue government agents and foreign governments.  Is it possible elected American officials were involved?    Who knows at this point!  This book is another chapter in book that’s a continuing saga unraveling it a page at a time and that book may not be finished in my lifetime.    

Friday, December 26, 2014

I'm Such a Lucky Guy

By Rich Kozlovich

Years ago I had gotten some really good news. I won the Kenyan Lottery according to an email I received from a Nigerian prince. He was holding a million dollars of my winnings and he wanted to send it to me free! And all I had to do is give him all my bank account numbers, my official address, my social security number and my mother’s maiden name in order to transfer the money! Well, I knew there was something really strange about that! Why would a Nigerian prince have my money from a Kenyan Lottery? Anyway - I never bought a Kenyan Lottery ticket so I ignored this scam artist who claimed to be a Nigerian prince.

But in recent months I’ve gotten notices from a Kenyan prince, who is truly concerned about healthcare in America and wants to give me and everyone else in the nation free healthcare for life! All we have to do is give him all our social security numbers and all our confidential health care information in order for him to make this possible. Are we lucky, or what?

Oh, wait….I just had a thought.  If I thought the Nigerian Prince was a scam artist why should I trust this guy who claims to be a Kenyan Prince? Well, I guess it could be worse.  What if he claimed to be President of the United States? 

The Global Medieval Warm Period

Written by Science and Policy Institute Staff Thursday, 30 October 2014

Between the 10th and 14th centuries AD, earth's average global temperature may have been warmer than it is today, according to the analyses of Lamb (1977, 1984, 1988) and Grove (1988). The existence of this Medieval Warm Period was initially deduced from historical weather records and proxy climate data from England and Northern Europe. Interestingly, the warmer conditions associated with this interval of time are also known to have had a largely beneficial impact on earth's plant and animal life. In fact, the environmental conditions of this time period have been determined to have been so favorable that it was often referred to as the Little Climatic Optimum (Imbrie and Imbrie, 1979; Dean, 1994; Petersen, 1994; Serre-Bachet, 1994; Villalba, 1994)

[Illustrations, footnotes and references available in PDF version]

Google Goes Off the Climate Change Deep End

Paul Driessen | Dec 26, 2014

 Editor's note: This article was co-authored by Chris Skates.  (And I wish to thank Paul for allowing me to publish this work which appeared here.  RK)
 
In a recent interview with National Public Radio host Diane Rehm, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said his company “has a very strong view that we should make decisions in politics based on facts. And the facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. We should not be aligned with such people. They’re just literally lying.”

While he didn’t vilify us by name, Mr. Schmidt was certainly targeting us, the climate scientists who collect and summarize thousands of articles for the NIPCC’s Climate Change Reconsidered reports, the hundreds who participate in Heartland Institute climate conferences, and the 31,487 US scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition, attesting that there is no convincing scientific evidence that humans are causing catastrophic warming or climate disruption.

All of us are firm skeptics of claims that humans are causing catastrophic global warming and climate change. We are not climate change “deniers.” We know Earth’s climate and weather are constantly in flux, undergoing recurrent fluctuations that range from flood and drought cycles to periods of low or intense hurricane and tornado activity, to the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250 AD) and Little Ice Age (1350-1850) – and even to Pleistocene glaciers that repeatedly buried continents under a mile of ice.

What we deny is the notion that humans can prevent these fluctuations, by ending fossil fuel use and emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, which plays only an insignificant role in climate change.

The real deniers are people who think our climate was and should remain static and unchanging, such as 1900-1970, supposedly – during which time Earth actually warmed and then cooled, endured the Dust Bowl, and experienced periods of devastating hurricanes and tornadoes.

The real deniers refuse to recognize that natural forces dictate weather and climate events. They deny that computer model predictions are completely at odds with real world events, that there has been no warming since 1995, and that several recent winters have been among the coldest in centuries in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, despite steadily rising CO2 levels. They refuse to acknowledge that, as of December 25, it’s been 3,347 days since a Category 3-5 hurricane hit the US mainland; this is by far the longest such stretch since record-keeping began in 1900, if not since the American Civil War.

Worst of all, they deny that their “solutions” hurt our children and grandchildren, by driving up energy prices, threatening electricity reliability, thwarting job creation, and limiting economic growth in poor nations to what can be sustained via expensive wind, solar, biofuel and geothermal energy. Google’s corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.” From our perspective, perpetuating poverty, misery, disease and premature death in poor African and Asian countries – in the name or preventing climate change – is evil.

It is truly disturbing that Mr. Schmidt could make a statement so thoroughly flawed in its basic premise. He runs a multi-billion dollar company that uses vast quantities of electricity to disseminate information throughout the world. Perhaps he should speak out on issues he actually understands. Perhaps he would be willing to debate us or Roy Spencer, David Legates, Pat Michaels and other climate experts.

Setting aside the irrational loyalty of alarmists like Schmidt to a failed “dangerous manmade climate change” hypothesis, equally disturbing is the money wasted because of it. Consider an article written for the Institute of Electric and Electronic Engineers’ summit website by Google engineers Ross Koningstein and David Fork, who worked on Google’s “RE

Beginning in 2007, they say, “Google committed significant resources to tackle the world’s climate and energy problems. A few of these efforts proved very successful: Google deployed some of the most energy efficient data centers in the world, purchased large amounts of renewable energy, and offset what remained of its carbon footprint.”

It’s wonderful that the company improved the energy efficiency of its power-hungry data centers. But the project spent untold millions of dollars and countless man hours. To what actual benefits? To address precisely what climate and energy problems? And how exactly did Google offset its carbon footprint? By buying “carbon credits” from outfits like the New Forests Company, which drove impoverished Ugandan villagers out of their homes, set fire to their houses and burned a young boy to death?

What if, as skeptics like us posit and actual evidence reflects, man-made climate change is not in fact occurring? That would mean there is no threat to humans or our planet, and lowering Google’s CO2 footprint would bring no benefits. In fact, it would keep poor nations poverty stricken and deprived of modern technologies – and thus unable to adapt to climate change. Imagine what Google could have accomplished if its resources had been channeled to solving actual problems with actual solutions!

In 2011, the company decided its RE“green energy is simply not economically, viable and resources that we as a society waste in trying to make it so would be better used to improve the efficiencies in established energy technologies like coal.”

Skeptics like us reached that conclusion long ago. It is the primary reason for our impassioned pleas that that the United States and other developed nations stop making energy policy decisions based on the flawed climate change hypothesis. However, the article’s most breathtaking statement was this:

“Climate scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger.... A 2008 paper by James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies… showed the true gravity of the situation. In it, Hansen set out to determine what level of atmospheric CO2 society should aim for ‘if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.’ His climate models showed that exceeding 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’ve already blown past that limit. Right now, environmental monitoring shows concentrations around 400 ppm.…”

We would never presume to question the sincerity, intellect, dedication or talent of these two authors. However, this statement presents a stunning failure in applying Aristotelian logic. Even a quick reading would make the following logical conclusions instantly obvious:

1. Hansen theorized that 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2 would have catastrophic results.
2. CO2 did indeed reach, and then exceed, this level by a significant amount.
3. There were no consequences, much less catastrophic results, as our earlier points make clear.
4. Therefore, real-world evidence clearly demonstrates that Hansen’s hypothesis is wrong.

This kind of reasoning (the scientific method) has served progress and civilization well since the Seventeenth Century. But the Google team has failed to apply it. Instead, they resorted to repeating the “slash fossil fuel use or Earth and humanity are doomed” tautology, without regard for logic or facts – while Mr. Schmidt impugned our intelligence, character and ethics as CAGW skeptics.

We enthusiastically support Eric Schmidt’s admonition that our nation base its policy decisions on facts, even when those facts do not support an apocalyptic environmental worldview. We also support President Obama’s advice that people should not “engage in self-censorship,” because of bullying or “because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities of someone whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.”

In fact, we will keep speaking out, regardless of what Messsrs. Schmidt, Hansen and Obama might say.

Trying to Use the UN to Destroy Israel

By Alan Caruba

This appeared here and my thanks to Alan for his permission to post his work.  RK
 
The right of Israel to exist as a nation was officially recognized by the United Nations on November 29, 1947 when it adopted Resolution 181 favoring the partition of the area claimed by the Zionist movement. The resident Arabs refused to accept the land set aside for a "Palestinian" state.

The British “mandate” of the area dated from the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Previously the Balfour Declaration was issued by the British government, favoring the establishment of a Jewish national home in what was then referred to as Palestine.

In 1946 following World War Two and in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust that killed six million Jews in Europe President Truman announced his support for the creation of a Jewish state. Throughout 1947 the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine had examined the issues involved and recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

The Arabs, then and now never ceased to oppose the existence of a Jewish state. To have a state of their own would require acknowledging Israel and that is why, to this day, there is no Palestinian state, nor ever was one.

In the wake of several Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire, Emperor Hadrian changed the name of Judea, Samaria and the Galilea to “Syria Palaestina” and the name of Jerusalem to “Aelia Capitolina.” The name change did nothing to eliminate Israel whose restoration remained an active dream for two millennia.

Now, having refused to come to any agreement with Israel despite years of negotiations and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to give the Palestinians living space in addition to an area in the West Bank, the Arab League is turning to the United Nations.

In the years since the 1947 resolution the U.N. has long engaged in anti-Israel activities. As
Anne Bayefsky wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “From November 24, 2014 until December 5, 2014, the UN human rights headquarters in Geneva mounted a public exhibit that was pure incitement. UN-driven anti-Semitism that takes the form of seeking to demonize, disable and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.”
 
“The exhibit was entitled: ‘La Nakba: Exode et Expulsion des Palestinians en 1948’ or ‘The Nakba: Exodus and Explusion of the Palestinians in 1948.’ The occasion was the annual UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Solidarity Day marks the adoption by the General Assembly on November 29, 1947 of the resolution that approved the partitioning of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state.” It was rejected by Arab states. “Thus,” wrote Ms. Bayefsky, “the Arab war to deny Israel’s right to exist began.”

The day following the Fatah (formerly the Palestinian Liberation Organization) announcement of its intent to seek a U.N. resolution, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with a delegation from the Arab League to discuss the resolution that sets a timeline for an Israeli withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. Indeed, they want to declare East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital and want the assurance that “refugees” could “return”. The Obama administration has been the first to break with the long tradition of good will and solidarity that has existed between the U.S. and Israel.

As Rabbi Aryah Spero noted in a December 17 CNS News commentary, “Despite the partnership between the terrorist organizations Hamas and Fatah (the new name for Arafat’s PLO) some European nations are demanding that Israel immediately accede to the Hamas/Fatah demands or they will proceed in the U.N. to declare a Palestinian State and impose on Israel conditions that will not only strip her of her capital, Jerusalem, but place Israelis in instant jeopardy from rockets launched against her from this newly declared state abutting Israel. Like Gaza before, this newest Palestinian state will become a terrorist state and a proxy of Iran.”

European anti-Semitism is steeped in centuries of enmity and it is reasserting itself again within the living memory of the Nazi Holocaust that sought to kill every Jew in Europe. U.S. pressure is a major departure from decades of support for Israel. At the same time President Obama has lifted sanctions against Iran, giving it more time to develop nuclear weapons he has been threatening sanctions against Israel if it continues to permit the construction of housing in Jerusalem.

The Arab demand that it is the heir to “Palestine” and that Jerusalem is a holy city is absurd. As Rabbi Spero notes, “Unlike the Jewish Bible that mentions Jerusalem over 700 times, the Koran never mentions Jerusalem, even once. Jerusalem is simply a location they conquered and has become, as with other places, a symbol of Islamic power and control over Judaism and Christianity.” By this thinking, the Arabs should demand the return of Spain which they had also conquered.

In sum, the Arab League, Europe, and Obama's U.S. policy want Israel to accept terms that amount to suicide.

That is not going to happen. The months and years ahead will be no less filled with the kind of turmoil and threats that Israel has lived with since it declared its independence in 1948. A world that turns its back on Israel is asking for its own apocalyptic destruction.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Quotes of the Day!

Consider that in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio (born Warren Wilhelm, Jr.), who, like Obama, is a former community organizer, has accused the NYPD of being a gang of racists, even though, in the words of the old American Express slogan, he never leaves home without them. But it just goes to prove that once a community organizer, always a putz.......But none of this should come as a surprise to the voters in New York, who knew that this schmuck was a communist lamebrain when they gave him 73 percent of their votes, and would no doubt do the same today. Some of us assumed that New Yorkers couldn’t do much worse after electing Michael Bloomberg to three terms, but it just goes to show that one should never be too quick to overestimate the intelligence of the New York electorate.  Burt Prelutsky


Speaking of morons, even though I try to avoid watching football and basketball games on TV, there has been no way to avoid seeing LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers and a bunch of Cleveland Brown players wearing their “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts. Clearly, they can all breathe. Therefore, a more appropriate sentiment would have been “I Can’t Think.” Burt Prelutsky

Green Prospers Because None Dare Call it Treason!

"Consider the man who stands by his duty and goes to the stake rather than be recreant to it" (Mark Twain).

By Rich Kozlovich

The title of this article is based on a quote from Sir John Harington who said “Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason[?] "For if it prosper, none dare call it treason”.  It seems to me that Harington was explaining how important it is that treason must be defined and called to account for what it is in order to prevent the success of traitors.  Because if their treason should proper - none can dare risk calling it treason any longer – that opportunity would have passed because the traitors are now in charge!

But what if everyone stood up and called treason for what it is?  Would it prosper in the end?  Possibly, but the first stepping stone to clarity is the ability to properly define what constitutes treason.  Can we recognize treason when we see it?  And that’s the key isn’t it?  Defining treason – for without definition there’s no clarity, and there’s so much of it these days it’s hard to separate treason from opinion.  Let’s explore this!

Normally we associate treason with “the betrayal of allegiance or acts of disloyalty or treachery toward one's own country or its government” in an “attempt to overthrow the government”, especially by "committing hostile acts against it or aiding its enemies in committing such acts”.   It also involves efforts to “impair the well-being of a state to which one owes allegiance”.   But the very foundation of what constitutes treason reaches far beyond that.  It’s a betrayal of  trust, confidence or faith.   We’ll expand on that later. 

Treason is such an ugly word.  It imputes so many ugly negative qualities to a person.  It means being a collaborator with the enemies of one’s society, embodying qualities such as cowardice, disloyalty, subversion, dishonesty, double crossing, being a sellout, knavery, a lack of fidelity and moral character.  Traitors work against the common good of the people whose habits, language and garb and common culture they share, while slyly working what is harmful to their associates, friends and even family.
 
Treason is an ugly word - but it fits for what it means to be green.

History is the fountain head of truth, and truth once spoken remains truth forever, we just have to keep making ourselves acquainted with it – regularly – or we forget what it is and can be easily swayed by every new philosophical flavor of the day!   I’ve used this quote often in the past attrituted to Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 -43 BCE) , which is unendingly profound, even after 2000 years.

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”

Can any crime be feared more? 

People typically need some sort of intellectual justification to support and explain their actions, and yet often times the positions they take has nothing to do with intellectual reasoning.  Very often they do what they do because it makes them feel good, or enhances their position in society.  But what are the underlying forces the makes so many – from all over the world - want to embrace "going green”?

This is a multi-faceted problem requiring a multi-faceted answer.  There is a growing alliance between the media, the wealthy left,  academia, environmental activists, activist bureaucrats, unscrupulous politicians and people who believe they can “do business” going green.  Viv Forbes stated years ago that, "The public has been misled by an unholy alliance of environmental scaremongers, funds-seeking academics, sensation-seeking media, vote-seeking politicians and profit-seeking vested interests."

This cabal has become a hegemony that’s linked to instruments of state power all over the world, undermining the health and welfare of human societies with the theme “they’re saving the planet” and they're doing what they do because "it's for the children".  When we hear those kinds of emotional appeals we had better start looking deeper into the subject because it probably means the intellectual foundations for their views are shallow. 

Unfortunately for society this anti-human green hegemony is foundationally and functionally  anti-job creation, anti-industrialization, anti-technology and absolutely opposed to economic growth, (the Keystone pipeline vote is one such example of the influence they exert) which they claim is a threat to the environment and a lifestyle they wish society of follow, i.e., a return to nature, which makes me wonder at their sanity.  This puts them squarely at odds with working people and the most economically deprived people on the planet, especially in the third world where their policies and initiatives have had a devastating impact on their health and well being.  Fortunately that’s becoming more and more clear thanks to the internet, but it’s important to understand what all that means. 

The green movement’s foundation is firmly rooted with the nature worshipping religion of the Druids in the ancient dark mist covered forests of Germania.  As Gary Jason pointed out in his article, “Death by Environmentalism”, “I would suggest that there is a major strain of pagan or secularist religion, Gaea worship, that informs the movement. This strain of thought, a weird sort of neo-Romantic pantheistic nature cult, has been prevalent since Rousseau in the Enlightenment era, but it exploded throughout the culture in the 1960s. Not all environmentalists share this worldview, but it is the one that drives the movement. And it is one that often downplays the value of people — devalues them and, indeed, de-animates them. That is a topic I would love to see explored in depth.”

In the 1800’s German philosophers created an intellectual framework to explain all of this as “Weltanschauung”, which is a “comprehensive conception or image of the universe and of humanity's relation to it, or literally, world-view”.  This ‘green’ world view became codified in Nazi Germany, the world’s first green government. 

One the concepts that emerged from this is what is known as the Precautionary Principle.  Sonja Boehmer Christiansen points out in the book, “Interpreting the Precautionary Principle”, “the precautionary principle evolved out of the German socio-legal tradition, created in the heyday of democratic socialism in the 1930’s, centering on the concept of good household management.  This was regarded as a constructive partnership between the individual, the economy and the state to manage change so as to improve the lot of both society and the natural world upon which it depended for survival. This invested the precautionary principle with a managerial or programmable quality, a purposeful role in guiding future political and regulatory actions”. 

What could sound more reasonable?  The problem is –as always - in the application of these concepts.  The Precautionary Principle is absolutely the structural foundation for every bit of junk science and speculatory challenge to modern economic advancement  - whether it’s pesticides, genetically modified organisms, or the building of dams, roads, power plants, or mining and logging.  There are a great many areas of the world where people are suffering from poverty so dire these efforts are the difference between living decent lives versus living in dystopia with disease, squalor, early death and a high rate of child mortality as their standard of life.

The green movement is filled with irrational, misanthropic and morally defective people like "population guru" Paul Ehrlich, who has a “not-so-hidden agenda of stopping people from having children, viewing children as a kind of pollution”.  The most moderate among them want to eliminate between four and five billion people from the planet.  The “radicals” among them feel mankind is a virus and a plague on the planet and want humanity eliminated.

Forrest M. Mims III wrote about a speech at the Texas Academy of Science,  where “the speaker, a world-renowned ecologist, advocated for the extermination of 90 percent of the human species in a most horrible and painful manner……many of the Academy members present gave the speaker a standing ovation. To date, the Academy has not moved to sanction the speaker or distance itself from the speaker's remarks. If the professional community has lost its sense of moral outrage when one if their own openly calls for the slow and painful extermination of over 5 billion human beings, then it falls upon the amateur community to be the conscience of science.”

These “radicals” are never condemned by the rest of their cabal because they must represent a large and prominent minority.

Walter Williams, the founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, Alexander King, wrote in 1990: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guayana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” 

"Another charming quote comes from Dr. Charles Wurster, a leading opponent of DDT, who said of malaria deaths": “People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”

"Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialised civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?" -- Maurice Strong, head of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and Executive Officer for Reform in the Office of the Secretary General of the United Nations.

“Fact is, we all eat food, breathe air and require space, and the more of us there are, the less of those commodities there are for other people and, of course, for the animals.” Sir-David-Attenborough 

"The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself."-Club of Rome

“The present vast over population, now far beyond the world carrying capacity cannot be answered by future reductions in the birth rate due to contraception, sterilization and abortion, but must be met in the present by the reduction in the numbers presently existing. This must be done by whatever means necessary” - Initiative for the United Nations, Eco 92 Earth Charter.

"Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs." John Davis, editor of the journal Earth First!

Are all these statements about overpopulation and worldwide devastaton nothing more than insane misanthropy or are they justified?  In the real world overpopulation is a myth!  This view is also substantiated by Bjorn Lomborg in his book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist", Part 11. 

Wendell Krossa’s article Crimes Against Life, states the following: Based on numerous empirical studies,(actually observable, not models) the 100ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 content over the past 150 years has increased mean crop yields by the following amounts:

wheat, 60 percent;
other C3 cereals, 70 percent;
C4 cereals, 28 percent;
fruits and melons, 33 percent;
legumes, 62 percent;
root and tuber crops, 67 percent;
and vegetables, 51 percent.[103]”

“Were it not for the extra CO2 put into the atmosphere by fossil fuel combustion, either many people now living would not exist, or many forests now standing would have been cleared and turned into farmland—or both. CO2 emissions are literally greening the planet, enhancing biodiversity and global food availability. Continuing CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere will be necessary to feed a global population expected to increase by 3.3 billion over the next 50 years—and limit pressures to convert forests and wetlands into cropland.”

Yet we see the green movement staunchly defending their Anthropogenic Global Warming position that the world is doomed if we don’t “act now” and get rid of all CO2 emissions.  Virtually ending modern life.  They continue to cling to the global warming litany despite the fact that the world stopped warming officially 18 years ago, and all the computer model predictions are failing or have failed, and the Hockey Stick Graph has been shown so flawed it's considered fraudulent by a growing number.  Yet the green movement wants the world to abandon a culture that has caused more people to live healthier longer lives than ever in history, in favor of dystopia. 

The Global Warming movement is a religious movement without God.  It’s a religion of death whose proponents have been successful in “creating a suicide cult, which — if followed to its logical conclusion — will lead to human extinction. Ultimately, the Global Warming crusade is a frontal assault on procreation, the family and the future of mankind.”

How can this be construed as anything except a betrayal of trust or faith" that’s nothing short of disloyalty to humanity, which supports impairing the well-being of the societies to which they belong.  How can this be construed as anything except treachery in support of treason? 

There really is good and evil in the world.  There really is such a thing as right and wrong.  We need to come full face with the fact there are some very real bad guys out there.  They’re not boogey men hiding under the bed that will go away when you cover your head with a blanket.  Throughout human history bad guys have devastated whole societies all over the world, and they were all totalitarians of one sort of another.  They’re weren’t “just wrong”, they really were, and are, evil human beings who were more than willing to sacrifice untold millions to paganism or the neo-pagan secular religions of socialism and it's stepchild - environmentalism.  The green movement is an evil totalitarian movement that perpetrates mass murder, and when you side with them you become an enabler of mass murder.  That’s history.  Those are the facts, and those facts are are incontestable. 

If you think going green gives you a warm fuzzy feeling of self-righteousness – get over it because you’re dancing with the Devil and when you dance with the Devil, you won’t call the tune, you won’t pick the dance and you may not be able to leave the dance floor.  And you will be party to treason - not to any government - but to the human family itself.  A family to which we're all a part.  A family we owe loyalty to from birth.   

Government officials take an oath in the United State to "support and defend the Constitution", which means supporting the concepts as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, which are the logical foundation of our "unalienable rights". 

Everything the green movement stands for is antithetical to those rights and concepts and any public official supporting the green movement is guilty of treason against this nation, and against humanity, and if public officials are guilty of treason for supporting this movement can we be any less culpable? 



Thursday, December 25, 2014

Major media hide who's behind NYC protests

Radical leftists behind anti-police rallies


Missing from most news coverage is that the anti-police protests rocking New York are being openly coordinated and led by professional radical leftist agitators, primarily Occupy Wall Street and a communist aligned anti-war, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian extremist organization. 
A WND review of major news coverage of the protests finds headlines such as these:

USA Today: “NYC protesters defy mayor’s call for moratorium.”
Bloomberg: “Protesters Defy NYC Mayor’s Call to Hold Off While Slain Cops Are Mourned.”
Reuters: “NY protesters reject plea for hiatus despite police slayings.”
New York Daily News: “Protests resume in New York to oppose police brutality despite Bill de Blasio’s plea to suspend demonstrations.”

The headlines and coverage largely leave the impression the demonstrations are spontaneous reactions to recent actions by law enforcement officials that some contend were motivated by racism…..[when in reality they] are being organized openly by radical leftist groups whose intent may not simply be the protest of alleged racism…[the media fail to acknowldg] the protests were organized by the Act Now To End War & Stop Racism Coalition, or ANSWER, together with Occupy Wall Street and at least 10 other so-called economic justice and pro-Palestinian groups….[and] fail to give any context, such as ANSWER’s radical background and history, or mention of the other groups supporting the protest movement….To Read More….

The Cold War Cuban Detritus

By Alan Caruba

This appeared here.  My thanks to Alan for his permission to post his work.  RK
 
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the Cold War that had existed between it and the U.S. since the end of World War Two came to an end, but there was ditritus, loose ends like Cuba and it has taken until now for an end to the diplomatic obstacles whose roots reach back to the Eisenhower administration. In 1960 it had approved a CIA plan to arm and train a group of Cuban refugees to overthrow the Castro regime.

The Cuban dictator, Flugencio Batista, fled Havana on January 1, 1959 and Fidel Castro and his rebels entered the capital a week later on January 8. One sees the world through the prism of one’s own life and, that event was six months prior to my graduating from the University of Miami.

Among my friends in college were young men who were the children of well-to-do Cubans, so I was more aware of what was occurring than most my age when Castro took over. In 1960 I was inducted into the army and it was big news when the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred on April 14, 1961. President Kennedy had moved ahead on the CIA plan, but it was a failure and it was followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The nation was literally on the edge of nuclear confrontation.

In the lead up to that the Second Infantry Division of which my unit was a part ceased its training mission and converted to one of battle readiness. In my case, however, I had already been discharged in April 1962. Kennedy declared a blockage of Cuba which had installed the Soviet missiles. Wisely, the Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev agreed to remove them.

Cuba was and is the classic Soviet-style Communist regime. During the 1970s Fidel Castro dispatched troops to Soviet-supported wars in Africa. Cuba’s economy was always lean and its workers make about twenty dollars a month in U.S. dollars. In 1962 Cuba was suspended from the Organization of American States (OAS) that imposed sanctions against Cuba, but 1975 the OAS lifted its sanctions with the approval of sixteen member states and the U.S. but the U.S. has maintained its own sanctions from the days of the missile crisis.

Suffice to say Cuba has a long history of human rights abuses. It represses any political dissent and life for Cubans is devoid of free speech, free association, privacy, and due process of law; rights which Americans and others in free nations take for granted.

For some 53 years, the U.S has had no direct diplomatic relations with Cuba and when President Obama made the announcement that he was moving to normalize relations it was big news. It had been preceded by 18 months of secret negotiations about which, reportedly, no member of Congress was informed about. While it infuriated the Cuban-American communities most people, inside and outside of government agreed it was time, if not overdue, for this action.

There will be much speculation that normalization will be good news for the Cuban people and one can surely hope so, but until the brothers, Fidel and Raul—declared the new president in 2008 when Fidel resigned—are dead, the likelihood for any real improvement in their lives is distant.

In a similar fashion, many American business and agricultural interests are no doubt making plans to become a part of the Cuban economy, but they had better proceed with care. Cuba is still Communist in most respects despite Raul Castro’s efforts to portray himself as a reformer and Cuba a place where foreign business are welcome and can thrive. In 2012 he relaxed property rights, expanded land leases, and licensed businesses from pizza joints to private gyms.

In reality, Raul Castro has, as reported in McClean’s magazine in 2012, “scared off more joint ventures than he has attracted, jeopardizing the investment Cuba needs to succeed. Spanish oil giant Repsol quit the country. Canada’s Pizza Nova, which had six Cuban locations, packed its bags, as did Telecom Italia.” In one case after another, those who hoped to do business in Cuba were disappointed. In 2013 a British company, one of the biggest and most important business partners of Castro’s military and a key investor in the tourism industry was suddenly confiscated and its principals were imprisoned.

One dramatic example is Stephen Purvis, a British architect who, since 2000 had developed tourism projects, factories and docks through his company that was financed by private European backers. After living in Cuba for ten years with his family and investing heavily in it, he was rewarded by being imprisoned after being accused of spying. He would spend 16 months in Cuban jails until being able to flee. Everything his company owned was confiscated. He has since warned others against doing business with the Castros.

Since 1959, more than one million Cubans, about ten percent of the population, have fled Cuba, many of whom found a new home in America. When that many people wanted to leave, it tells you something is terribly wrong with life in Cuba. The tentative steps toward normalization after all this time are necessary, but the American government should proceed with care in the years ahead.

© Alan Caruba, 2014