 shuvubanim-international-logo https://ravberland.com Rav Berland: “The more falsehood there is, the more truth will be revealed in a clearer way”
 “The more falsehood there is, the more that the truth will be revealed in a clearer way. The truth will be revealed in the end. They didn’t tell all of the lies yet. It’s only the beginning…” Rav Eliezer Berland
by Kalman Wiseman – September 7, 2018 https://ravberland.com/the-more-falsehood-there-is-the-more-truth-will-be-revealed-in-a-clearer-way/
“The more falsehood there is, the more that the truth will be revealed in a clearer way. The truth will be revealed in the end. As much as the sheker (falsehood, lies) will be spread in the world, more sheker, more falsehood to fool everyone, that’s the degree that the truth will be revealed in the end. They didn’t tell all of the lies yet. It’s only the beginning…
“There are a still a lot of Tzaddikim in the world, in every generation, that aren’t listening to the sheker-falsehood, they’re not letting themselves be fooled by the sheker. There’s not enough sheker. As long as we see that there’s still Tzaddikim in the world so it’s a sign that the sheker is not dominating enough. We need the sheker needs to be victorious. Until the sheker is victorious, there can’t be the redemption. When the sheker is victorious, then the people will go through a birur (clarification process), they’ll be sifted out, according to all of the strong truth that’s inside of them.
“And that’s how Moshiach is going to be revealed. Moshiach needs to be revealed from the epitome of sheker, Moshiach and his people. They’re not going to be pulled by the sheker. The sheker wants to take everyone. The sheker says: ‘I didn’t say enough sheker. Maybe I’ll say a little bit more, maybe I’ll succeed in saying something else, a different way.’
“In every generation there are new lies. The sheker makes up things that never existed from the creation of the world. But specifically through this spreading of the lies, the sheker will take over the whole world and there won’t be even a drop of truth. Only a small number of people will hold strong to the truth, but the sheker will take over everyone, like Rav Natan says. And everyone will be taken over by the sheker and everyone will be fooled, and only then will the truth be revealed and Moshiach will come. Only through the increase of sheker.
“Therefore, we need to strengthen the people saying the lies. Don’t go against them, give them strength. This is the opposite of Likutey Halachot when we go against them. Likutey Halachot is always telling you the opposite way of what people think. We need to strengthen them even more, so they should make up more lies and do more articles.
“Without this commentary from Rav Natan we wouldn’t be able to understand what the verse says, that: ‘the lips of truth will be established forever, after the sheker will become / be fulfilled’. What does it mean that the sheker will ‘come to be fulfilled, will become’? That only when the sheker reaches its end and is completely satisfied, only then will the truth be established.
“We want the sheker to be satisfied and to get stronger and stronger without end, [in a way] that wasn’t since the creation of the world, and then whoever is still holding onto the truth, will merit seeing Melech HaMoshiach. Moshiach will come when he sees there are some people who aren’t being pulled and who know that it’s sheker and nothing is able to fool them or confuse them.
“Because as long as it’s possible to change people’s minds, to brainwash them to go for the sheker, and then to convince them to go against the sheker, Moshiach won’t have anywhere to go. Because then Moshiach will come and also convince people to come after him… No! We need that the sheker will be able to convince everyone until it’s no longer possible for them to change their minds again.
“When everyone’s minds are turned around to the sheker, if there’s even a minyan left, 10 people left, like it says ‘Bei Knishta Hada’, (one small group of people) whose minds haven’t been turned by the sheker, then the Moshiach can be revealed, and he’ll reveal himself to this group of people. And from here, it will go on and spread throughout the whole world.
“Like Rav Natan says, the main revelation of truth will be in the End of Days. The falsehood will be spread in the world until it reaches its satisfaction, until there are almost no more people left that it needs to conquer. There won’t be any space for a point of truth. Then, specifically, will ‘the lips of truth be established’, through the sheker being increased very much. When there’s more and more sheker, that’s when the truth will be established.
“Therefore, we shouldn’t try to stop it, we shouldn’t go against it. We shouldn’t do articles against articles to prove that they’re wrong. Why do we need more articles? We don’t need more articles against articles
“Like Rav Natan says, as it’s known, the sheker has strength to fool the whole world. The strength that it has, it got from the kedusha, the holy side. It all comes from the kedusha, anyways.
“So why did Hashem let it happen? Hashem let it happen so that the truth, a person’s truth that he has within him, should be so strong, should be so burning strong, and should get stronger the more he sees that the sheker is winning. That real truth from within him, the pure truth from within him, should get so strong they can’t brainwash him [anymore]. And then, they’ll reach the level of Atik Yomin, a very high level, and then Moshiach will be revealed.” |
|
Arab Arson Attack at Jerusalem City Hall 22April2020-Molotov Cocktails ThrownSuspected arson at Jerusalem City HallArab resident of Jerusalem arrested on suspicion of igniting fire at City Hall.Arutz Sheva Staff 22April2020 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/279066  Jerusalem City Hall Fire-20April2020 Molotov Cocktails Thrown – Arrest Made Eight firefighting and rescue teams were dispatched to extinguish a fire which broke out on the first floor of the Jerusalem City Hall building Wednesday. No one was hurt in the blaze.
Police have arrested a man suspected of igniting the fire. Kan News reported that several Molotov Cocktails were also found inside the building.
The suspect is a 40-year-old Arab resident of eastern Jerusalem.
A spokeswoman for the Jerusalem Municipality said: “Some time ago, a fire broke out in the Jerusalem Municipality building. The source of the blaze is unknown.
“The mayor, Moshe Leon, is there and personally managing the event, along with all the security forces,” she said.
 Jerusalem City Hall Fire-20April2020-Firefighters; Molotov Cocktails Thrown – Arrest Made
Photos and videos from: TERROR ATTACK? Massive Fire In Jerusalem City Hall; Molotov Cocktails Thrown – Arrest Made [VIDEOS & PHOTOS]April 22, 2020 https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/featured/1851849/terror-attack-massive-fire-in-jerusalem-city-hall-molotov-cocktails-thrown-arrest-made-videos-photos.html (YWN Israel Desk – Jerussalem) |
|
Doug Casey Reveals 3 Ways You Can Opt-Out Of The Rising Insanityby Tyler Durden 30September2021 – https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/doug-casey-reveals-3-ways-you-can-opt-out-rising-insanity Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,
International Man: Ever since the outbreak of the Covid hysteria, government control over everyday life has reached unprecedented levels. Petty bureaucrats now exercise control over who can open their businesses, whether you can go to a restaurant, and even whether children can go to school.
Where is this all going?
Doug Casey: There are basically two types of people in the world—people that like to manipulate the physical universe and create things and people who like to manipulate other people and control them. The people who go into government, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, are the latter. They’re dangerous.
The problem is that the average citizen in every country around the world has come to think that the government is the most important entity in society. It’s not; it’s a coercive fiction, a parasite that produces nothing. The wrong kinds of people are being given even more control.
Once people with a certain psychological mindset—that second type of person I just mentioned—take control, things inevitably get worse.
In Washington, DC, as well as in many state and local governments, we now have genuine Bolsheviks and Jacobins in control. That’s not to say that they’re necessarily believers in those philosophies, but they’re exactly the same psychological types. In other words, they’re exactly the kind of people who once destroyed France and Russia, reincarnated in today’s America.
Once these types get control of the machinery of the State, they won’t give it up. Power—the ability to coerce and control others—is central to their very beings. They’ll try to cement themselves in place now that they feel they can get away with it.
They’ll use their power aggressively, installing counterproductive and destructive policies. The worse things get, the more the public will look to the government to save them. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
The chances of getting a genuine lunatic as the president are very high. I’m very pessimistic because trends in motion tend to stay in motion—and this trend is accelerating rapidly.
International Man: As a result of this trend, more parents than ever have opted for homeschooling.
What’s your take on this?
Doug Casey: It’s cause for optimism.
First of all, education is something that you provide for yourself. It’s not something that somebody—certainly not the State—gives you.
The value—and the original purpose—of public schooling was basically to teach the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. With those essentials and the ability to use a library or the Internet, which places all of the world’s knowledge at your fingertips—you don’t need anything else beyond that.
The basics can be picked up in the first six or seven years of grade school—for anybody, even slow learners. Beyond that, school just bores most kids and is actually counterproductive. It not only wastes their time and money but actually makes them dislike learning. Homeschooling allows them to make the world their oyster while teaching individual responsibility.
Secondly, most schooling today—certainly once you get into high school and absolutely once you get into college—is little more than indoctrination. Schools are places where your kids pick up bad ideas from the educators and bad habits from other young yahoos they’re surrounded by.
Schools do not teach critical thinking—if indeed they ever did—at least since Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. Critical thinking is the habit of questioning all assertions and examining everything that we think we know in the light of knowledge, logic, the scientific method, and your own research. That doesn’t exist anymore in schools. In fact, the government and the establishment don’t want schools to turn out critical thinkers and free thinkers. To the contrary, they want obedient, indoctrinated serfs who will do as they’re told and act as cogs in the wheel.
I think it’s irresponsible on the part of parents not to properly educate their kids. And that doesn’t mean just sending them off eight hours a day where they sit behind a desk and listen to government employees lecture them.
It costs an average of about $12,000 per pupil per year—we’re talking a nine-month year with long vacations—to babysit and corrupt kids. That’s an outrageous amount. College, often over $50,000, can only be described as a scam.
Nobody has more of an interest in making education available to kids than their parents do; certainly not members of the teachers union. If the public schools vanished, it would be a good thing. That $12,000 per pupil could stay in society so that people that wanted to educate their kids properly wouldn’t have to pay the toll twice.
A couple families could easily get together and hire full-time, first-rate tutors to teach their kids one-on-one, as opposed to sending them off to a government factory to be indoctrinated.
The school system has become very corrupt from what it once was. Schools and universities are grossly overweight with grossly overpaid administrators. Ninety percent of these phony “educators” should be fired. Furthermore, most teachers now are overtly Marxist, and the rest are dim, but sympathetic to Marxist ideas. Schoolhouses at all levels should be intellectually cleaned, then fumigated, if they can’t be abolished.
I’m glad many people are dissatisfied with schools and some are doing something about it. It’s one of the few good things to come out of the Covid hysteria.
International Man: What other ways can people opt out and regain more control over their lives?
Doug Casey: The ideal solution is to become a PT—a permanent traveler or prior taxpayer—but that’s not easy for most people. As I mentioned last week, even if you don’t want to internationalize, the next best thing is to quit your job and become self-employed.
But beyond that, in order to have control of your life, you need capital, which gives you flexibility and room to run.
So how do you get that capital?
If you’re not in a position to quit your job and become self-employed, then take a second job— part-time. The advantage of that is your income will go up and your expenses, in the way of consuming, will go down. Put that money aside.
The key is to cut your spending to the bone and save. That means don’t buy that new car or trade up to a larger house. Don’t go out and get a new wardrobe.
Build capital while the economy and the currency are still held together. Capital will allow you to take advantage of opportunities in the future, as opposed to getting deeper in debt like a serf.
International Man: All the governments around the world are inflating away their currencies and taxing their citizens at ever-increasing levels.
How can the average person opt out or at least limit the government’s theft of their savings?
Doug Casey: You want to save, but saving in fiat puts you on a treadmill.
If you leave your money in US dollars or other currencies, you’re going to lose everything or almost everything. You really have to learn to invest and speculate.
Unfortunately, investing in the kind of chaotic, government-controlled economy we’re moving into is hard and becoming harder. On the bright side, the distortions the government is creating offer lots of avenues for speculation. I’ve discussed the differences between saving, investing, speculating, and gambling in the past. But unless you study economics and the markets, if you try to speculate, you’ll probably wind up gambling—which is very different.
The key is to educate yourself on the ins and outs of the markets—including crypto, currency, and commodity markets, not just the stock, bond, and real estate markets.
Right now, commodity markets are particularly interesting. For example, I’m of the opinion that natural gas, which is traded on the futures market, is currently around $5.00 per Mcf. I believe it could go much higher.
I’ve personally sold naked puts to capture the premiums, and I’ve bought long-term bull call spreads. If you’re not familiar with these things, then don’t take my advice. But try to become familiar with these things.
One of the reasons I’m bullish on commodities is that with the Bolsheviks in office in Washington, DC, and actual communists in control of a lot of countries around the world, commodity production of all kinds is being made harder. At the same time, all the money they’re printing is creating artificial demand, and all the regulations they’re passing are artificially restricting supply.
Commodities are about the only cheap things left; their prices are going a lot higher. You can capitalize on this as a speculator if you know what you’re doing. But be careful because you can easily wipe yourself out.
Any savings that you have should be in small gold and silver coins, not in fiat currencies. I don’t see gold as a good speculation at $1800. It is, however, ideal for saving. In addition to providing long-term upside, gold and silver coins are far more private than keeping US dollars in a bank account, which the government can monitor.
Lastly, if you’re going to keep your house and stay in the same place, you might want to save by buying things like cigarettes, whiskey, instant coffee, ammunition, and the like. If times get tough, all of those things are going to be hard to come by. They’ll be in high demand—and they’re an alternative to fiat.
International Man: Today, what we buy, who we interact with, and what we say are more easily tracked.
Everyone’s private information is under assault by a private-public partnership of governments and big corporations.
Where is this all going, and what do you suggest people do about it?
Doug Casey: As much as possible, keep a low electronic profile.
Get off Facebook and other social media platforms. I have a Facebook account, but I never use it or access it in any way for anything personal. It’s strictly a business tool—the same for LinkedIn and the rest of them.
Everybody should realize that social media is the primary way that they track you, learn what you think, and discover who you are. It’s just not good for that information to be in the hands of the bad guys.
Of course, everybody has a cell phone today; they’re tracking devices. Entirely apart from that, the things are a nuisance, and most people are addicted to them. I have one, but I never use it except when I’m traveling or at a conference.
I understand the value of apps for navigating and such. It might be good, however, to have two cell phones. The one you use for talking should be a flip phone. The other can be used selectively for whatever apps you need.
On a personal level, speak up about these things whenever possible. Even though it’s pretty hard to turn back the tidal wave of statism and collectivism that’s washing over society, everyone should do what they can. You might want to start by going to LiveandLetLive.org, run by my friend Marc Victor, for practical thoughts on what you can do. We just taped a videocast that’s pretty good, in my opinion. It will be released shortly.
I’m afraid the US and most advanced countries in the world are well on their way to combining the worst traits of George Orwell’s 1984 with those of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. * * * |
|
Escalation of Force: How to Choose the Appropriate Response to Potential Violence31August2020 https://www.theorganicprepper.com/escalation-of-force/ by Daisy Luther
“I’ll just pull out my Glock/HK/Ruger and deal with those punks. Once they see their buddies drop, they’ll back off soon enough.”
“We could end this by just killing anyone who sets foot on our block.”
“All good Americans need to do is start mowing down protesters with their cars if the roads get blocked.”
Chances are, if you ever read the comments or visit any type of social media outlet online, you’ve read some comments pretty similar to the ones above. After all, this is America, land of the free, home of the brave. It’s up to all good patriots to defend our property and our country from scumbags with deadly force.
But not so fast.
Things are never as cut and dried as people with 3-second solutions like to make it seem in the comments. You can’t escalate directly to lethal force in every situation.Let’s take a look at the situation Terry Trahan wrote about the other day, where the lady was sitting in a restaurant having dinner when she got surrounded by an unruly mob who insisted she raise her fist in the air in support of a group of activists. The comments section is filled with people who are apparently ready to open fire on a city street into a crowd of people.
Is that really the appropriate response? While I absolutely agree that the behavior of that mob is horrible and that these things shouldn’t happen, is this a moment that requires the use of uncensored deadly force?
Have any of these folks stopped to think about what happens after they open fire?
Because I can tell you what is very likely to occur if you unload a magazine in a public space in the middle of downtown Washington DC. At best, you will be arrested and charged with brandishing a weapon or illegal discharge of a weapon. At worst, one of your bullets will go through its intended target and hit an innocent bystander – maybe a child – maybe even your own child who is making his way back from the bathroom. Or you’ll kill a member of the angry mob and someone will take the gun away and turn it on you and you’ll be dead. Or you’ll valiantly take down three attackers and find yourself awaiting trial for homicide, among other charges.
And you know what else? Every idiotic off-hand comment you ever made online about blowing people away will come back to haunt you in court. If you think you’re anonymous online, I assure you that you are not. Even when you use a VPN, your actual IP can be traced given enough resources and time. Choosing how you escalate your responseWe’ve all heard the saying, “When your only tool is a hammer, you treat everything like it’s a nail.” The same is true when your only tool is deadly force.
Obviously there are life and death situations in which deadly force is the only possible response if you want to live. When someone bursts into your home waving a gun screaming that they’re going to kill you, when someone in a mask is trying to drag you into a van with dark-tinted windows, when someone is clearly intent on beating the crap out of you until you’re dead – all of these things are situations in which your use of a lethal response is entirely justified.
But… a lot of situations require more finesse unless you want to risk a) spending the rest of your life in prison and praying you don’t drop the soap or b) vengeance from your adversary’s friends or family or c) criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits forever and ever until you die.
You need to have an understanding of the appropriate escalation of force.
A book I read last year has a place on everyone’s shelf during these times in which a conflict can arise for just about anyone, just about anywhere. That book is Scaling Force: Dynamic Decision Making Under Threat of Violence and it’s by Rory Miller. If you’ve been around here for a while, you may have seen my review of another of Miller’s books, and you may have seen Toby Cowern and Terry Trahan reference him as well. That’s because, in my opinion, nobody knows more about the science of violence than Miller. As well, he spent years working in law enforcement settings, so he knows a lot about what happens after the violence takes place.
To make a long story short, your goal should always be to use the lowest amount of force possible to get yourself safely out of the situation. Your ability to do this depends on understanding the different strategies you can employee and your skill at reading your opponent. Identify what the threat actually is.If you are in a situation in which you may have to defend yourself, it’s important that you understand what the threat really is.
While all of these things may make you angry, if you are not in physical danger, you have to temper your response accordingly.
Part of the book is a detailed description of pre-assault indicators that can help you identify a potentially violent encounter before it happens. This goes a long way toward reducing the likelihood of you being injured, killed, or imprisoned due to your response. Here are some key steps to take during a potentially violent encounter.In Miller’s book – which I strongly recommend – he suggests a pattern that begins with simply leaving the situation, to verbal de-escalation when you are not in imminent danger, with other steps all the way up to and including lethal force. He discusses in detail how to rapidly assess your situation to see where you should start. You can find these steps on the internet but they’re not detailed. You should truly read the book to get a deep understanding of them – and you need that now more than ever.
This is my personal take on what he wrote. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine alone.
Presence: The encounter requires your presence and there are two components to this. First, is, don’t be there. Any time you ask Selco and Toby what you should do in a dangerous situation, their immediate response is “don’t be there.” And that is true of many of the things happening right now. Going to a protest, for example, is automatically putting you at high risk of being involved in a violent encounter.
Your second option is to leave the situation. If you find yourself in a scenario in which you could be embroiled in a violent encounter, leave. This is like “don’t be there” but in action form. If you see a crowd gathering up ahead chanting and raising their fists in the air, turn around and go a different way. If you are in a setting in which someone makes you feel uncomfortable, trust your instincts and leave. Don’t talk yourself out of listening to your gut. You’re not being silly. (This is especially true for women.)
Use your voice. First, you can try to de-escalate the situation. If you can’t avoid it and you can’t leave, verbal de-escalation is your next best bet. This depends heavily upon your understanding of psychology. You want to calm the situation down and one of the best ways to do that is setting up what Miller refers to as a “face-saving exit.” If you are dealing with one member of a crowd, that person will have a lot of personal investment in not being embarrassed in front of his or her friends. You’ll want to think of a way to defuse things while sparing the person from that humiliation. This, of course, sucks, because we all want to kick the butts of someone who is treating us unreasonably. However, your goal is to get away from this encounter without being hurt or killed. If you are alive and uninjured, you’ve won.
Your other voice option is a sharp command if you seem like the kind of person who can back this up. Take me, for example, a middle-aged mama. A command from me is unlikely to have a huge effect on an angry group. However, a command from me backed up by a gun in my hand would be a lot more convincing. (This is something that has actually happened to me – you can read about it here.)
Touch. In some situations, touch can be used to de-escalate a conflict. Touch can be soothing, it can help to distract someone fixated on potentially hurting you, and it can help to defuse situations that haven’t gone too far. If you are not stronger than your potential opponent, this should be used very cautiously, as touching them puts you within their reach as well. For many women, this is not going to be a viable option.
Physical control. This is another thing that won’t work for everyone. But if it is within your wheelhouse, you might be able to prevent the violence from escalating by physically controlling the attacker. This prevents them from harming you or anyone else around you. At this point, you’re beginning to get into territory that could have legal consequences. This is also another thing that may not be particularly viable for women against a male assailant.
Use less than lethal force. The next step up the ladder is less than lethal force. This might mean pepper spray, a taser, or a physical blow, to name a few options. This can be a defensive preventative that will work in some cases. If you are able to stun your attacker, it can be the thing that allows you to move back down the ladder to step one – not being there. Physically overpowering an assailant and injuring them to the extent they can no longer hurt you is an option but, again, you’ll very likely face legal consequences unless it is well-witnessed or provable that you had no less violent options.
Use lethal force. The final solution in this hierarchy is lethal force. This should not be your first choice unless your life is in imminent danger. You can’t just shoot someone because you decide they “deserve” it or because you feel they’re inflicting an injustice upon you. Well, you can, but you can also expect a trial that will empty out your bank accounts and cause your family to potentially lose their home and any other assets while you finance your defense. Then, if you win, you get to start all over again economically. If you lose, you spend five years to the rest of your life in prison. Lethal force must be legally justified and even then, you can end up suffering immensely for having used it.
Again – I strongly recommend you read Rory Miller’s book on this topic, as it is far more detailed than I can be in a quick article and filled with personal anecdotes that make it a very interesting read. You really do have far more options than just killing someone and most of the time, the other options will be better for your future as well as the future of your family. How do you plan to respond to the threat of violence?We’re living in a world where unruly groups of people are spending their evenings out trying to intimidate people who they feel “deserve” it, without actually knowing anything about their targets. Any of us could become a target.
Understand that I sincerely believe in the right to armed self-defense. It is our basic human right to protect ourselves, our families, and our property. But I urge you to use temperance when making rapid decisions that could have long-term consequences. These aren’t problems with three-second solutions, and to look at them that way is both ignorant and short-sighted.
Have you considered how you would respond to the threat of violence? To intimidation by an angry mob? To the looting of your property?
It’s good to think these things through ahead of time and consider what your own options are. You’ll need to weigh your personal abilities and limitations against these steps. Remember that your response to potential violence can affect the rest of your life and make your decisions with this in mind.
|
|
Shall We Continue To Weep And Fast? Or Shall We Fight the Times?By Molly Resnick – 15 Tammuz 5778 – June 28, 2018 http://www.jewishpress.com/judaism/holidays/shall-we-continue-to-weep-and-fast-or-shall-we-fight-the-times/2018/06/28/
Whenever I finally get my friends to reluctantly concede that the psychology-inspired panacea of endless unconditional love and self-esteem boosting does not seem to be diminishing the growing numbers of off-the-derech youth or curbing the lack of derech eretz in children, I’m inevitably confronted with that final line of defense:
“But what can we do? Times have changed.”
Remarkably, the great savior of 19-century German Jewry, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, records the same exact response to Judaism’s decline in his day:
“All of these facts are accepted with, perhaps, a shrug of the shoulders, and even those who most deplore such phenomena heave a sigh and add, ‘What can a person do against the trend of the times!’”
Rav Hirsch, of course, was fighting a different battle than the one we’re waging today; his was an overt war for the survival of Orthodox Judaism in Germany. But our battle, in its own way, is just as vital. Off-the-derech children are now almost commonplace, as we’ve moved on to dealing with drugs, suicides, and gender changes.
In our despair and helplessness before these new developments, many of us have become convinced that the best solution lies in offering the youth a mélange – a compromise of the old and the new. We must pick our battles, we tell ourselves. We must be flexible. But, according to Rav Hirsch, this attitude is pernicious:
Not true, says Rav Hirsch. Our ancestors “knew that the spirit of the era is the spirit of men, to which we all contribute.” He continues:
Nowadays, the universal mantra in chinuch is, “Be positive.” We think it prudent to not offend, to compromise when we encounter resistance to the Torah. After all, we don’t want to risk driving our youth further away. Rav Hirsch, though, sees this attitude as spinelessness:
Rav Hirsch argues that we fast multiple times for the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash – Asarah b’Teves, Shiva Asar B’Tammuz, Tish B’Av – because, up to the every end, we could have prevented the catastrophe had we done teshuvah. The Romans surrounded Jerusalem’s walls – but all was not yet lost. The Roman breached the walls – but all was not yet lost. Until the very last moment, we could have returned to God and been saved, Rav Hirsch writes.
We parents and grandparents have compromised a great deal over the last few decades. Like the Jews in mid-19th century Germany, we have stayed silent repeatedly for the sake of peace, careful not to offend our children and grandchildren even when they trample on values we hold dear.
But it is not too late to reverse course. For we are not talking about personal preferences. We are talking about truth, and for truth we cannot compromise. Rav Hirsch writes that compromise led to the destruction of the first Beis Hamikdash as people looked the other way when they saw idol worship in their family and community since they didn’t wish to “disturb the peace.” We must not make that same mistake.
And we cannot be wishy-washy. Compromise is not the answer. Truth is not “to be found in the middle course,” Rav Hirsch writes. “Falsehood is to be found in the middle course! Truth is something that is precise and unequivocal. Two times two is four, not four-and-a-half and not five-and-a-half.”
If we wish to bring the final ge’ulah, we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past. When our personal honor or comfort is at stake, we should always compromise. But when divine truth is being discarded or distorted, we dare not remain silent. We must fight. |
|
Boston Jewish council bars members from working with anti-Zionist Jewish groupsJewish Community Relations Council sets up showdown with a member, the Workmen’s Circle, which signed a statement by Jewish Voice for Peace, which supports BDSBy Josefin Dolsten 19 January 2019 https://www.timesofisrael.com/boston-jewish-council-bars-members-from-working-with-anti-zionist-jewish-groups/
 Young members of Jewish Voice for Peace protest Birthright. (Courtesy of Jewish Voice for Peace via JTA) Young members of Jewish Voice for Peace protest Birthright (Courtesy of Jewish Voice for Peace via JTA) JTA — Boston’s Jewish Community Relations Council passed a resolution saying its members cannot partner with Jewish groups that are anti-Zionist, setting up a showdown with one of its members, the local branch of the Workmen’s Circle.
The resolution, approved on Thursday evening, states that working with Jewish anti-Zionist groups, specifically by co-sponsoring events or signing statements organized or co-organized by such organizations, “could be grounds for removal from the JCRC.”
The vote follows discussions that started in July, when the member group Boston Workmen’s Circle signed a statement by Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
The council — made up of member groups, community representatives, as well as the organization’s officers, board of directors and past presidents — passed the resolution with 62 members voting in favor, 13 voting against and eight abstaining.
As of now, the Boston Workmen’s Circle, a group with socialist roots that promotes Jewish culture and Yiddish, is still a member of the umbrella organization, JCRC Executive Director Jeremy Burton told JTA on Friday.
“There are certainly decisions that they can make, which would ensure their remaining within our coalition, and there are certainly decisions that they can make that would involve withdrawing from the coalition or that would bring it back for another discussion at a council meeting in the future,” he said.
The Boston Workmen’s Circle slammed the resolution in a statement by its board of directors and said it would be holding a meeting for its “members to decide as a community how we choose to proceed from here.”
“This motion conflicts with traditional Jewish values that respect diversity of opinion and encourage robust, honest and inclusive dialogue,” the group said. “It sets a dangerous precedent of condemnation by association, by placing a political litmus test on Council membership based on partnerships.”
JTA asked Burton whether there was a way for the Boston Workmen’s Circle to remain a part of the JCRC if it stood behind its decision to sign the Jewish Voice for Peace letter and continued signing such statements.
 Jewish Voice for Peace action in New York, July 22, 2014. (courtesy Jewish Voice for Peace) Jewish Voice for Peace action in New York, July 22, 2014. (courtesy Jewish Voice for Peace)
“I don’t think so,” he said.
The Boston Workmen’s Circle said it was worried that the vote could alienate members of the Jewish community.
“We are particularly concerned about Jews who have long been marginalized within [the] mainstream community and with Jews who are feeling increasingly isolated from Jewish institutions because of red lines like the one approved last night,” its board said in a statement.
Burton said that his organizations was not trying to create divisions in the Jewish community.
“[W]e do not seek division, but there are divisions in our community that are unfortunate and sometimes it is necessary to take a stand on those divisions,” he said.
The JCRC has a longstanding policy that member groups cannot partner with Jewish organizations supporting BDS, Burton said.
“This clarifies what we’re talking about when we talk about BDS in the Jewish community,” Burton said.
BDS is a red line for nearly all major Jewish groups, although organizations that have rejected BDS but are critical of Israeli policies have also been subjected to scrutiny. In 2014, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations blocked the liberal Mideast policy group J Street from becoming a member, despite a number of leading Jewish groups coming out in favor of J Street’s membership.
 Students protest at an anti-Israel demonstration at the University of California, Irvine. (Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images/JTA)
Students protest at an anti-Israel demonstration at the University of California, Irvine. (Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images/JTA)
While J Street opposes BDS and considers itself pro-Israel, opponents said its frequent criticism of the current Israeli government and public disagreements with other Jewish groups were disqualifying. JVP, by contrast, embraces BDS and also states on its web site that “We unequivocally oppose Zionism.”
Burton said J Street’s membership had also been debated eight years ago at the JCRC, but that the group was ultimately allowed to remain part of the coalition. |
|
Why American Jews slander President TrumpWhile it is true that to date, white supremacist anti-Semitism has been the most lethal form of anti-Semitism in America, from a political and social perspective it poses a smaller danger to Jewish life in America than the three other forms of active Jew-hatred: Progressive/socialist, Islamist, and black anti-Semitism. Caroline Glick by Caroline B. Glick Published on 13December2019 https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/why-american-jews-slander-president-trump/
The past week has clarified a lot of things about the state of the American Jewish community – and its antagonists.
The two assailants who walked into the kosher supermarket in Jersey City Tuesday and opened fire intentionally targeted the Jews. The killers belonged to the black supremacist, virulently anti-Semitic “Black Hebrew Israelite” movement which claims its members are the true children of Israel and the Jews are satanic imposters.
The shooting in Jersey City marked a predictable escalation of the anti-Semitic attacks being carried out against Orthodox Jews in the New York area. The focal points of the attacks to date have been the ultra-Orthodox communities in Brooklyn. Over the past two years, the frequency of assaults has increased sharply. Most of them have been perpetrated by black anti-Semites. None have been carried out by white supremacist anti-Semites.
This is an important distinction because progressive politicians like New York Mayor Bill De Blasio and Senator Bernie Sanders routinely present the anti-Semitic violence in Brooklyn as the product of white supremacists. And while it is true that to date, white supremacist anti-Semitism has been the most lethal form of anti-Semitism in America, from a political and social perspective it poses a smaller danger to Jewish life in America than the three other forms of active anti-Semitism in America today: Progressive/socialist anti-Semitism, Islamist anti-Semitism and black anti-Semitism.
These forms of Jew-hatred pose a greater threat to Jewish life in America than white nationalist anti-Semitism for two reasons. First, whereas white supremacists are political orphans, with no political party willing to embrace them, progressive, Islamist and black anti-Semites are deeply embedded in the political left. Over the past 15 years, they have become powerful actors in the Democratic Party capable of bending the party to their will.
The second reason they pose a greater danger to Jewish life in America than white nationalists is because while socialist, Islamist and black anti-Semites will not cooperate with white supremacist anti-Semites, they are more than happy to work with one another to achieve their common goals. They cover for one another – as Sanders and De Blasio cover for the black anti-Semites in Brooklyn. They support one another, as both men embrace Islamist anti-Semite Linda Sarsour. Thursday Cong. Rashida Tlaib claimed that white supremacists were responsible for the attack in Jersey City.
The place where the three types of anti-Semites converge most powerfully and so present the greatest threat to Jewish life in America is on college campuses. On campuses throughout the US, Jewish Americans are compelled to keep their heads down or face abuse and harassment due to their common efforts to ostracize Jewish students and professors who fail to actively condemn Israel.
The most direct way to handle the problem is by applying the protections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to Jews. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of color, race and national origin in programs and activities receiving Federal financial assistance.
Over the past several years, Congress made several attempts to amend Title VI to include anti-Jewish discrimination. These efforts enjoyed broad bipartisan support. But they were all blocked by members of the progressive camp inside the Democratic congressional caucus. Like the anti-Semitic boycott activists ostracizing Jews on campuses, the progressive lawmakers claimed that expansion of the protections of Title VI to include anti-Jewish discrimination would undermine the free speech rights of anti-Israel activists on campuses. That is, they said the rights of anti-Semites to preach anti-Semitism superseded the rights of Jewish students not to be harassed.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump put an end to this madness by signing an executive order requiring federal agencies dealing with allegations of anti-Semitism on campuses to consider the complaints in light of the “working definition of anti-Semitism … by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.”
The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism was adopted by several governments and the US State Department. It provides examples of manifestations of anti-Semitic behavior including “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor; applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation; using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism…to characterize Israel or Israelis; drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis;” and “holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel.”
These are, of course, the standard practices of anti-Semites on college campuses and beyond. So by ordering the Federal government to use the IHRA definition as their framework for determining the validity of Title VI complaints of anti-Semitic discrimination on campuses, Trump provided Jews with the means they have lacked to defend themselves from that discrimination. He also carved a path to expose and fight the fastest growing and most politically and socially potent anti-Semitic forces in America.
Rather than report what he did, the New York Times seemingly deliberately mischaracterized Trump’s actions.
In its Twitter feed, the New York Times reported Trump’s action thus: “President Trump will sign an executive order defining Judaism as a nationality, not just a religion, thus bolstering the Education Department’s efforts to stamp out “Boycott Israel” movements on college campuses.”
This tweet was so off-base that it is impossible to view it as a mere misunderstanding by the paper of record for the liberal establishment. The assertion that Trump’s move “defined Judaism” smacks of cultural appropriation, and as such, it sounds like an act of aggression against Jews.
By falsely claiming Trump defined Judaism as a nationality, the Times made it sound like Trump was saying that Jews aren’t American nationals.
And by writing the purpose of the effort was to “stamp out ‘Boycott Israel’ movements on college campuses,” rather than protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic harassment, the Times made the order seem like a political ploy rather than a civil rights action long supported by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Liberal Jews pounced on the message and ran with it. Halie Soifer, the executive director of the Jewish Democratic Council of America accused Trump of being “partially responsible” for the rise of anti-Semitism in America.
“If President Trump truly wanted to combat anti-Semitism,” she said, “he would accept responsibility for his role in perpetuating anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and emboldening white nationalism.”
“We said it before and we’ll say it again – Donald Trump is the biggest threat to American Jews,” she added.
J-Street’s executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami echoed the criticism of BDS advocates in Congress and on campuses by claiming that the executive order harms the free speech rights of anti-Israel activists. In his words, “The executive order, like the stalled congressional legislation it is based on, appears designed less to combat anti-Semitism than to have a chilling effect on free speech and to crack down on campus critics of Israel.”
Undoubtedly, Soifer and Ben Ami were directing their statements towards the “a-political” Jewish establishment in the hopes of mobilizing them against the pro-Jewish executive order.
In the event, they failed. The Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee both applauded Trump’s executive order.
But Soifer and Ben Ami had grounds to think the ADL and AJC would join them in characterizing Trump’s friendliness and support for Jewish people as anti-Semitism. Earlier this week they did.
Last Saturday night, Trump delivered the keynote address at the Israeli-American Council’s annual conference in Miami. Trump’s hour-long event was a love fest. Trump exuded warmth and respect towards his audience and towards Israel and they returned the sentiments.
He promised to fight anti-Semitism in America with the same energy with which he defends Israel and brought people onto the stage to outline the work the administration has done to combat anti-Jewish bigotry in America and throughout the world.
Yet, immediately after Trump completed his remarks, the floodgates of hatred opened upon him from the Jewish establishment. Everyone from Soifer to Jennifer Rubin from the Washington Post and Paul Krugman from the New York Times, accused Trump of delivering an anti-Semitic rant. The ADL and AJC joined the band and tweeted angry denunciations.
What was it that Trump said that made them so angry?
Trump said, “A lot of you are in the real estate business because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers. (Laughter) Not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me; you have no choice. You’re not going to vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. (Laughter and applause.) You’re not going to vote for the wealth tax. ‘Yeah, let’s take 100 percent of your wealth away.’ No, no. Even if you don’t like me; some of you don’t. Some of you I don’t like at all, actually. (Laughter.) And you’re going to be my biggest supporters because you’ll be out of business in about 15 minutes, if they get it.”
The royal host of the American Jewish establishment hissed that in speaking thus, Trump reinforced the anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews love money.
Such twaddle.
As he said, Trump was addressing his fellow real estate developers in the crowd. He was talking to them as his competitors, not as his enemies. When he said, “You’re brutal killers” he was paying them a compliment. They understood, which is why they laughed.
Trump’s claim that they would vote for him even if they didn’t like him because they feared the Democrats’ confiscatory tax policies is his standard line on Democratic tax policy. He says it to everyone, not just to Jews. The audience knew this too – which is why they laughed and applauded.
The Jewish establishment types joined the bandwagon and agreed Trump’s playful, friendly statement was anti-Semitic because they want to believe Trump is an anti-Semite. If Trump is an anti-Semite then it’s reasonable for them to remain loyal to the Democratic party which, led by “the squad” is leaping towards the anti-Semitic cliff that Britain’s Labour Party jumped off when it elected Jeremy Corbyn its leader.
In other words, they slander Trump as an anti-Semite because they prefer their partisan interests to the interests of the Jewish community in America and the Jewish people throughout the world.
Luckily, as Trump’s consistent record of support for Israel and the Jews in America and worldwide and as his warmth for Jewish people makes clear, the President doesn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body. And he won’t become an anti-Semite no matter how poorly the American Jewish establishment treats him.
Trump’s Jewish critics said he was trafficking in anti-Semitic “tropes” when he told the IAC, that in the U.S. “you have people that are Jewish people, that are great people – they don’t love Israel enough.” But he was doing no such thing. He was telling the truth. Those Jewish people love neither Israel nor the children of Israel, the Jewish nation enough.
Thankfully, President Trump loves the Jews and Israel so much that he makes up for them. |
|
The Court Of Justice Of The European Union Limits Free Speechby Tyler Durden 09November2019 – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/court-justice-european-union-limits-free-speech
 The Court of Justice of the European Union
On October 3, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in a judgment that Facebook can be ordered by national courts of EU member states to remove defamatory material worldwide:
The ruling came after the Austrian politician Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, chairman of Die Grünen (The Greens) party, sued Facebook Ireland in the Austrian courts. According to the Court of Justice of the European Union:
The judgment has brought concern among free speech organizations. Thomas Hughes, the executive director of ARTICLE 19, a non-profit organization that works on “protecting the right to freedom of expression around the world,” said:
According to ARTICLE 19:
The judgment “undermines the long-standing principle that one country does not have the right to impose its laws on speech on another country,” Facebook commented in a statement.
The ruling “essentially allows one country or region to decide what internet users around the world can say and what information they can access,” said Victoria de Posson, senior manager in Europe at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, an industry group that includes Google and Facebook as members.
The judgment does indeed appear to be opening up a Pandora’s Box for the ever-shrinking space for free speech in Europe and potentially worldwide, although it is still unclear at this point, how the judgment might affect free speech worldwide.
Government efforts in Europe to censor free speech have long been ongoing: in Germany, the controversial censorship law, known as NetzDG, which came into effect on October 1, 2017, requires social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to censor their users on behalf of the German state. Social media companies are obliged to delete or block any online “criminal offenses” such as libel, slander, defamation or incitement, within 24 hours of receipt of a user complaint. Social media companies receive seven days for more complicated cases. If they fail to do so, the German government can fine them up to 50 million euros for failing to comply with the law.
The new judgment from the Court of Justice of the European Union, presumably, could mean that a German court could order what it deems to be illegal content, or its equivalent, under NetzDG to be removed in other EU member states that do not have a similarly draconian censorship law.
France is looking to adopt a similar law to that in Germany: In early July, France’s National Assembly adopted a draft bill designed to curtail online hate speech. The draft bill gives social media platforms 24 hours to remove “hateful content” or risk fines of up to 4% percent of their global revenue. The bill has gone to the French Senate. Again, if the bill becomes law, the judgment from the Court of Justice of the European Union could mean that French courts would be able to demand that Facebook remove what the courts consider illegal content or its equivalent under French law.
The judgment from the Court of Justice of the European Union, in other words, appears to give EU member states unprecedented power to determine public discourse online — to determine what citizens can and cannot read. It naturally remains to be seen exactly how the judgment will be interpreted in practice by national courts of the EU member states, but the prospects now look even bleaker for the future of free speech in Europe. |
|
Rachel Riley on combating antisemitism, 10 years on Countdown and getting girls into math |
|
Confirmed Again: “Survey reveals clear link between BDS and Jew-hate”Posted by William A. Jacobson 31January2019 https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/01/confirmed-again-survey-reveals-clear-link-between-bds-and-jew-hate/ Confirming what experience tells us.
 Jewish Chronicle-Survey reveals clear link between BDS and Jew-hate
There is a growing recognition that the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel is just a new form of the oldest hate, antisemitism.
We have documented here many times how BDS has a direct connection to the anti-Jewish boycotts in the 1920s and 1930s in the then British Mandate for Palestine, the anti-Jewish boycott of the Arab League (which was put in place three years prior to Israeli’s independence), and the gross antisemitic activism at the 2001 Tehran and Durban conferences which launched boycotts in the current form.
 BDS History Slide 1923-Electricity Boycott
The claim that BDS was a response to a 2005 call from Palestinian civil society is a demonstrable lie. That was the cover story to repackage an anti-Jewish boycott in the language of ‘social justice’, as documented in my lecture, The REAL history of the BDS movement:
The BDS movement on campuses, not surprisingly, stokes anti-Jewish sentiment under the guise of anti-Zionism, New study: BDS activists hostile toward Jewish students, not just Israel.
In the U.S., the BDS movement has made inroads mostly on campuses, fed by street intimidation from groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine, academic thuggery from faculty who take over academic associations, and libelous antisemitic conspiracy theories by groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace. But with the exception of a handful of Democrats representatives, BDS has not spread widely in the U.S.
In Britain, both BDS and antisemitism have spread through a major political party, the Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
 Jeremy Corbyn-Al Quds Day
The toxic mix of anti-Zionism and antisemitism on British campuses and in British Society is much worse than in the U.S. A new report documents the connection.
The Jewish Chronicle in Britain reports, Report finds clear link between antisemitism and hostility to Israel:
Jewish Chronicle-Survey reveals clear link between BDS and Jew-hate
While acknowledging the link between BDS and Jew-hate, the survey also found low levels of support for BDS among the population at large, as The Jewish Telegraph Agency reports
So the good news is that a relatively small percentage of the population supports BDS despite the high-profile celebrities and all the noise, but those who do are likely to express that support as antisemitism.
You can read the full report here. Click to Download the .PDF file |
|
‘Zionist world domination’ is no trope, Mr CorbynDavid Aaronovitch responds to the Labour leader’s refusal to apologise for his failings on antisemitism
 Andrew Neil grills Jeremy Corbyn
JerusalemCats Comment: If Labour loses, will individual Labour supporters blame the “Jews” and if so will the “Troubles in Ireland” be a taste if what the Jews have to go through?
Never mind he didn’t give an apology. Who’d have believed that he meant it?
No. This was the moment in the Andrew Neil interview when even the comrades from Jewish Voice for Labour must have secretly winced before pulling themselves together and writing a letter to the Guardian.
It came when Neil put to Mr Corbyn that the Chief Rabbi had not been wrong to dispute Labour’s claims that antisemitism in the party had been dealt with. The example Neil gave was one reported here in the JC last year. The council candidate for a ward in Liverpool, Liam Moore, had tweeted “Rothschilds Zionists run Israel and world governments”.
When this became a news story Mr Moore (who had a history of such utterances) according to the local constituency Labour Party “apologised for past tweets that have been inappropriate. Liam then offered his resignation as candidate for NG. This was refused, unanimously, by branch members.”
The Zionist world conspiracy is not an “antisemitic trope”, as Mr Cobyn said it was. It’s the full Monty. Until pretty recently it was the more or less undisputed province of neo-Nazi groups, and would generally appear amidst links to Holocaust denial literature and admiring biographies of the Fuhrer. These same sites would also feature material on the biological inferiority of non-whites and the dangers of miscegenation.
Can you imagine – even you, dear Jewish Voice for Labour – that same Liverpool Labour Party refusing the resignation of someone who had opposed race-mixing and endorsed replacement theory? Can you imagine them describing such sentiments as “inappropriate”?
Mr Moore remains in Labour a year later. A year. A fifth of the time that Labour plans to take for its peaceful socialist revolution and they can’t chuck one racist out of the party.
Neil to Corbyn: Let me ask you this. Is it antisemitic to say Rothschild’s Zionists run Israel and world governments?
JC: In the Chakrabarti report we asked that people did not use comparisons about conspiracies, not use…
AN: Is that antisemitic?
JC: …because in the belief of Shami, and I support her on this in that report, that can be constructed as being an antisemitic statement and therefore – and therefore should not be –
AN: Right, but let’s just get it clear. I asked you – I gave you a specific quote. Are the words ‘Rothschild’s Zionists run Israel and world government’. Is that antisemitic?
JC: It should not be used and it is.
AN: But you can’t say it’s antisemitic?
JC: Look, I just said that it should not be used.
Finally, painfully, he allowed that it was “an antisemitic trope”. Neil banked that and asked, so if the Chief Rabbi was wrong, why was Moore still in the party? After a short eternity of bluster (the transcript makes almost unbearable reading) Corbyn finally answered “Look, I don’t know the process that is involved with him.”
The man, a Labour council candidate, tweets out neo-nazi conspiracy theories about Jews, is then endorsed as a candidate by his local party, his antisemitism is described as “inappropriate”, a year later is still in the party and the party leader and putative prime minister, under intense criticism for just this, says “Look, I don’t know the process that is involved with him.” And, of course, there are plenty of others.
This week somebody who I quite like told me on social media that maybe the problem is that people unspecified seem to seek “special status” for racism aimed at them and perhaps that’s the problem.
We know who the people are. As for “special status”? I should cocoa. There we have activists attempting to purge entire universities of micro-aggressions and cultural appropriation because of their racist or colonial implications, but if you publish it that Jews seek to rule the world you get told off in today’s Labour Party for being “inappropriate”.
Inappropriate is farting in a lift. Inappropriate is asking an unpregnant woman if she’s expecting. As the great historian Norman Cohn said of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, accusing Jews of a massive world conspiracy is a warrant for genocide.
Come on Jenny Manson, Naomi Wimborne Idrissi, Jonathan Rosenhead, Miriam Margolyes and the rest of you in the Asajew roundrobinocracy – explain this one case to me. Explain to me why in an “anti-racist party” led by a man who “abhors all forms of racism” it was the Jewish MPs Luciana Berger and Louise Ellmann who were the targets of their Liverpool comrades’ venom, and not the antisemite?
Apology? You can keep it.
David Aaronovitch is a columnist for The Times |
|
CAA and KCL study finds far-left Jew-hatred has now overtaken far-right in Britain and two-thirds of Corbyn’s vanguard of strongest supporters hold antisemitic views01December2019 https://antisemitism.uk/caa-and-kcl-study-finds-far-left-jew-hatred-has-now-overtaken-far-right-in-britain-and-two-thirds-of-corbyns-vanguard-of-strongest-supporters-hold-antisemitic-views/
 Jeremy Corbyn For The Many
Today, Campaign Against Antisemitism is releasing the results of our Antisemitism Barometer research, a multiyear study by Campaign Against Antisemitism which was designed and analysed by one of the foremost academics in his field from King’s College London. The study makes shocking findings about antisemitism in the Labour Party and British society, and how Jews are reacting.
The research has revealed that:
In the report, Campaign Against Antisemitism calls on the Government to urgently implement a series of recommendations on law enforcement, and for all political parties to adopt our manifesto for fighting antisemitism.
Gideon Falter, Chief Executive of Campaign Against Antisemitism, said: “Far from being the champion of anti-racism that it holds itself out to be, the far-left is now home to even more anti-Jewish bigotry than the far-right. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the Labour Party, whose Jeremy Corbyn is now the politician of choice for antisemites. If the battles of old against the far-right tell us anything, it is that if we fail to unite against this toxic hatred, it will spread to threaten other minorities too.
“People will find it utterly chilling that in 2019, large swathes of the Jewish community are considering the drastic step of leaving the country they love because they fear racism in our politics. I believe in the people of our deeply decent country and I hope that this study will encourage them to stop and think how they can show their Jewish countrymen that regardless of politics, race or religion we stand together against antisemitism, that the Jewish community is not alone.”
The full report is available at antisemitism.uk/barometer.
YouGov was commissioned to survey the British population’s attitudes towards Jews in 2018 and 2019. The YouGov survey was designed and analysed by Dr Daniel Allington of King’s College London. The polling was conducted prior to a General Election being called. Campaign Against Antisemitism also separately worked with partners to survey British Jews’ responses to antisemitism in 2018 and 2019. Dr Allington also designed and analysed the survey of the Jewish community, which was also conducted prior to a General Election being called. YouGov sample sizes for the survey of the British population were 1,606 in 2018 and 2,040 in 2019 (including boost samples from the ‘very left-wing’ and ‘very right-wing’ of 197 and 204 respectively). Campaign Against Antisemitism sample sizes for the surveys of British Jews were 2,103 in 2018 and 2,695 in 2019.
On 28th May, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.
In recent months, thirteen MPs and three peers have resigned from the Labour Party over antisemitism, along with a large number of MEPs, councillors and members.
Over 58,000 people have now signed our petition denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and declaring him “unfit to hold any public office.”
On 8th December, regardless of religion, race or politics, Jews and non-Jews alike will gather in Parliament Square to declare that they stand together against antisemitism in the face of Jew-hatred in politics and mounting anti-Jewish hate crime. |
|
Irish antisemitism
As I See It: Ireland’s obsessional hatred of IsraelStrangely, the Israel issue has become emblematic in the battle over Irish identity.By Melanie Phillips 1February2019 https://www.jpost.com/International/Irelands-obsessional-hatred-of-Israel-579378 There’s a particularly sweet spot in the enormous technology deal Israel has just pulled off.
Over the next five years, the tech giant Intel will invest a whopping $11 billion in a new semiconductor fabrication plant in Israel. The investment will be worth around 0.7% of Israel’s gross domestic product and is expected to produce thousands of jobs.
The sweet spot is that in securing this deal, Israel beat off competition from Ireland. For Ireland has become the most extreme Israel-bashing country in the West.
Its Dáil, or parliament, recently gave a first reading to a bill which would make it a serious criminal offense to supply goods or services provided by Israelis in east Jerusalem or the disputed territories of Judea or Samaria.
Claims by the bill’s sponsor, the Irish senator Frances Black, that it doesn’t target any particular country are disingenuous. Its terms have been drawn up in such a way that they apply only to the disputed territories and east Jerusalem.
It is also uniquely vicious. For it wouldn’t just target Israeli “settlers.” It would also mean, for example, that an Irish tourist on a visit to the Western Wall for which he is paying an Israeli tour guide might be arrested when back in Ireland for an offense carrying a potential jail term.
The bill is promoted by a coalition of NGOs, including several Christian groups, and is seen as a Trojan horse for a wider onslaught against Israel, with many of its supporters actively campaigning to boycott this year’s Tel Aviv Eurovision Song Contest.
The Irish government may yet block the bill. It was promoted in the Dáil by Fianna Fáil, the largest opposition party and on which the ruling minority Fine Gael party depends.
Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, has warned, however, that the bill contravenes EU trade laws and would therefore place Irish companies in jeopardy.
Moreover, Irish-American companies might be in violation of American laws forbidding US-based companies from co-operating with trade bans on Israel.
Whether or not the bill becomes law, it once again raises the question of why Ireland is so consumed by the obsessive hatred of Israel it so regularly displays.
One obvious answer is that, as a country which believes itself to have suffered under British colonialism, it identifies with other peoples acknowledged by anti-colonialists as similarly “oppressed” among whom the “Palestinians” enjoy iconic status.
With the island of Ireland divided between the Irish Republic and the UK province of Northern Ireland, Irish republican terrorists have waged war against the UK on and off over the past century with a fragile peace finally brokered in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Strangely, the Israel issue has become emblematic in this battle over Irish identity, with the Protestant Unionists identifying with Israel and the Catholic Republicans identifying with the Palestinians.
As a slavish EU member, Ireland has allowed Brussels negotiators to use the fraught issue of the post-Brexit border with Northern Ireland as a weapon to force the UK to surrender its independence even after it formally leaves the EU.
The essence of this Irish passion for the EU is that Ireland doesn’t understand what it means to be an independent nation. Like so many cultures with a shaky sense of what they are, with an outsize chip on their shoulder and infantilized by being almost entirely dependent on others to survive (their “Palestinian” friends fall into that category too) the Irish hate Israel, the paradigm nation state of a people with an unequivocal sense of itself.
So, of course, Ireland bought wholesale into the whole farrago of lies and distortions that make up western left-wing globalist discourse about Israel, which is shared by the EU itself.
But there’s more to Ireland’s malevolence against Israel than this.
Over the years, Fianna Fáil governments have always been hostile to Israel. Currently, Fianna Fáil is jostling with its rival Sinn Féin – which heavily supported Frances Black’s election to the Irish Senate in 2016 – to maintain its political position.
Sinn Féin’s former military wing, the Provisional IRA, was responsible for the bloody campaigns against the UK in support of a united Ireland.
In the 1970s, Sinn Fein publicly supported the Palestinian cause. The IRA and the PLO became extremely close, training together and sharing terrorist strategies and tactics. The IRA received substantial funding and military aid from Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, and also collaborated with Hamas and Hezbollah.
In 1980, the minister for Foreign Affairs, Fianna Fáil’s Brian Lenihan, claimed the PLO was no longer a terrorist organization and described Yasser Arafat as a “moderate.” In 2006, Sinn Fein MP Aengus O’Snodaigh described Israel as “without doubt one of the most abhorrent and despicable regimes on the planet.”
During the Second World War, Ireland was neutral. Upon learning of Hitler’s death, its Taoiseach or prime minister, Eamon de Valera, visited the German Embassy in Dublin to express his condolences.
Some IRA members, such as the high ranking Sean Russell, collaborated with the Nazis. The Fianna Fáil government denied residential visas to many Jews trying to escape Nazi Germany and to Holocaust survivors after the war.
Historically, the Catholic church in Ireland bears a heavy responsibility for this anti-Jewish hatred. Over the years, the church has pumped out stereotypical hatred of Jews as parasitical moneylenders and exploiters of working people.
In 1904, a priest, Father John Creagh, organized a two-year boycott of Jewish businesses in Limerick. The town’s small Jewish community fled in what became known as the Limerick pogrom.
In 1970 the town’s Labour mayor, Steve Coughlan, made a speech defending the Limerick pogrom, referring to Jewish money-lenders whom he termed “warble fly bloodsuckers.”
That provoked an outcry. But all this is the context in which the hateful Frances Black bill must be placed.
Appallingly, some 15 Israeli luminaries, including the former speaker of the Knesset Avram Burg, former Knesset member Prof. Naomi Chazan, vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences Prof. David Harel, former ambassador Ilan Baruch and others wrote to the Irish Times in support of the bill on the grounds that “Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories is morally and strategically unsustainable, is detrimental to peace, and poses a threat to the security of Israel itself.”
Not for the first time Israelis who choose to blame Jewish “settlers” for the absence of peace, rather than the genocidal Arab and Muslim fanatics who want to wipe Israel off the map, are unwittingly sanitizing, facilitating and incentivizing Jew-hatred.
It’s not just a cause for dismay that so many Irish people refuse to acknowledge the right of the Jewish people to their own land. The deeper tragedy is that this venom has poisoned some Jews, too. |
|
‘Things have only gotten worse’: French Jews are fleeing their countryBy >Photographs by July 17, 2019. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2019/11/french-jews-fleeing-country/
Au revoir les enfantshttp://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=42839 Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20170606040913/http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=42839
Eden Madar was outside the Hyper Cacher supermarket when a terrorist murdered Jewish customers • Toulouse natives Liora Zano and her brother Eitan realized that Israel is their true home • All three made aliyah because “here, we feel like we’re together.”Jan. 9, 2015 was when Eden Madar’s life turned upside down. Eden, now 17 and a student at the Yemin Orde boarding school, was 15 years old and on her way from school to her home in the quiet 12th arrondissement of Paris. She was just about there when Islamic State sympathizer Amedy Coulibaly entered the Hyper Cacher kosher market and started shooting and taking hostages.
“Near the market, cops appeared out of nowhere and jumped on me. They wouldn’t let me by, but didn’t explain what was happening,” Eden says.
“Later, I realized there were hostages inside. Fearing [there was] another terrorist, they took me and two older people and told us to lie down on the street, underneath the police patrol car, and be quiet,” she says.
Eden spent two hours lying on the asphalt, surrounded by the noise of explosions and people losing their minds from fear.
Q: Do you remember what you felt?
“Mainly, I didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t understand anything. We were lying on the street underneath the police car while it was going on, but I was hot. Everything was a jumble. I didn’t realize what I was doing in that situation. I didn’t know what was happening and why I was there. When I saw on my phone that there’d been a terrorist attack, I called my mom to let her know there’d been a terrorist attack and I was okay, but couldn’t get home and was still in the street. I didn’t tell her I was lying flat on the ground. I waited, so as not to worry her. I remember that there was an older woman next to me. She called her family and told them, ‘You can come over for Shabbat, but it’s not certain I’ll be alive.’ She called to say goodbye. When I heard her I was in shock. Until then, I didn’t think it was serious or that we were in danger.”
Four Jews were murdered in the terrorist incident that shook France’s Jewish community to its core. Reports say that upon entering the market, the terrorist shot and killed at least two of the hostages. About 15 people who were in the store escaped and hid in the basement. Some hid in the walk-in refrigerator. Eden remembers that the incident dragged on.
“Every so often, the police officers would come and tell us that everything was all right. They brought us earplugs and told us to shut our eyes, and asked us to stay quiet,” she says.
Q: Did you cry?
“I didn’t cry. Actually, when I’m stressed, I try to laugh. It might have lasted two hours, but for me it felt like a week there under the car. Suddenly, from the direction of the market, we heard shots and the sound of glass breaking. A few minutes later everything was over. They got us out from under the car, and I ran home.”
After the attack, Eden didn’t want to leave the house.
“For a month, I didn’t go back to school. In the end, I decided I would distance myself and come to Israel to breathe. I was in Israel for a month, and then I went back to France and told my mom I didn’t want to go back to school or live in France — that I wanted to live in Israel. At first, she wouldn’t let me, because we’re really close, and she didn’t want me to leave her. But when she saw that I was having a hard time in Paris and I was always watching TV to see if there were any terrorist attacks, she understood and let up.”
Dreaming of combat service
Eden’s relatives looked for an appropriate framework for her and found the program Naaleh, which takes in minors who make aliyah before their parents. Naaleh sends Jewish youth from all over the world to live and study at boarding schools in Israel. Eden arrived at Yemin Orde, on the outskirts of the Haifa, where she has lived for two years with other young olim from France, Brazil and Russia, along with Israeli students. The school is only steps away from the dormitories, the synagogue is located at the heart of the complex, and the young denizens have access to a swimming pool and recreational activities.
When Eden thinks back to her early days at Yemin Orde, she remembers mostly tears.
“For a week, I just cried. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to leave my room. I didn’t even go to Hebrew class,” she says.
But even then, it was clear to her that she would not return to France.
“It was just a hard time I had to get through. At first, I didn’t want to meet anyone, but after a week I saw how all the girls here were just like me. Their families were in France and they were in Israel, too, and they could support and help me. So I left my room and started going to lessons and meeting girls. Today, they’re like my sisters. I was used to living in a city and here, it’s like a kibbutz. It’s quieter and there’s a lot of nature, a dining room, and friends. My two roommates and I are friends like sisters. We sleep, get up, eat, study and celebrate holidays together,” she says.
Q: Is it what you imagined?
“Until I got here, I didn’t know Israel. All I knew was Netanya [a coastal city with a large French population]. Since I’ve been here I’ve visited other places like the Golan Heights and the Negev. Israelis are warm people. They really help each other, always with a smile. In France, I didn’t feel that as much — people are more suspicious. Israelis are messier, but you get used to it.”
Q: What are your plans for the future?
“I want to serve in the Border Police, do something meaningful. I have a friend and a cousin in the Border Police, and another cousin serving in the Golani Brigade, so I want a combat position. Israel gives us so much, and I want to help the country and contribute to society and to the army.”
When Eden is asked what her biggest dream is, she doesn’t hesitate to reply: “That my family will make aliyah. And to be a child psychologist — I like giving advice, listening to people and helping them.”
‘We’re safer here’
Two of Eden’s friends at Yemin Orde are siblings Liora and Eitan Zano (18 and 17, respectively), who, like her, left their parents behind in France, along with a younger sister.
Liora arrived at Yemin Orde from Toulouse three years ago, when she was 15. After failing to find her place in various non-Jewish schools, she decided to come to Israel.
“As far as the studies went, [the schools] were really good, but socially it was hard to be the only Jew in school. There were a lot of Muslim students, and they would always ask questions like, ‘Why don’t you eat meat in the cafeteria or at your girlfriends’ houses?’ I felt uncomfortable. People didn’t understand what it was to be Jewish. As much as I tried to explain, it was unpleasant.
Q: Did you know what you were getting into?
“I didn’t know, but I heard that my cousin, whom I wasn’t in close contact with, was here. That calmed me a little and now we’re really close. When I got here, they put me in a room with two girls I didn’t know. On the one hand, it was a little scary and strange, but on the other hand, I was happy, because most of the girls had come from France, without their parents, so I realized I wasn’t alone.”
Eitan arrived at the school a year after his older sister. At first, he hadn’t even wanted to make aliyah, but over the course of her first year, Liora had told him about the special youth village, and her efforts paid off.
“I was happy in France. I was at a private boarding school with Jewish students, and I thought about coming to Israel to serve in the army, but only after I finished high school. I didn’t think I’d leave everything and come. I came for a summer program and really liked it. I realized that my place was in Israel. I came to visit the school, fell in love with it, and decided to stay,” Eitan says.
Liora kept tabs on terrorist attacks in France, including the one at the Hyper Cacher market, from Yemin Orde.
“Although I was in Israel and we felt protected, our families and friends were subjected to terrorism in France. Students here were worried and shocked, because some of them knew people who’d been murdered in the attack. I think that here, we believe we’re protected, that nothing like what happened in France can happen to us, but it was scary because there, our families can be targeted. Every time there’s a report of a terrorist attack, we call home right away to make sure everything is okay,” she says.
Q: There are terrorist attacks in Israel, too.
“We know there are more terrorist attacks here than in France,” Eitan answers. “But here we feel like we’re together, a strong people. There are soldiers in the street everywhere, at holy sites, on the train. We see that and feel safer in Israel. … It’s like when you visit a friend and then go home. I feel like this is my home, and when I lived in France I was ‘at a friend’s.’ I’m not saying I suffered there, I had a home and friends, but here I feel more complete.”
In a month, Liora will complete the 12th grade. She wants to get a draft deferral and finish a degree at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, which she will put to use as a professional when she does enlist. She is currently waiting to see whether she got in. “I intend to enlist [in the army] in any case. If things work out, I’ll study at the Technion on the deferral track, and if not, I’ll sign up for regular army service and I’ll try to get into the Oketz K-9 unit.”
Q: Will you leave the youth village?
“I still don’t know where I’ll live, but I know I can always come back here. This is my home — the door is never shut. There are quarters for adults if the need arises. I know I’ll be back for Shabbat and holidays,” Liora says.
Q: Do you feel independent enough?
“Yes, even when I came I felt independent. I needed to make decisions at every moment about what I had to do for my future. I think that I’m grown up enough now to leave the school and move on.”
Eitan, who has been at Yemin Orde for two years, has also matured at an accelerated rate.
“I missed home a lot. … The hardest thing was to change yourself and not screw up. Before [I came] I was less independent, less serious, and when I got here, I matured. I think that thanks to the counselors and the activities I became a better person. I developed a love for fitness. I was in almost all the sports clubs we had here: a running group, training for the army, a gym instructors course via the Wingate Institute, and almost every evening the kids here work out and play soccer and basketball. I’m preparing for the army — I want to join an elite unit. I want a position as a combat soldier, and even to go to officers training.”
Last Passover, Liora and Eitan’s family came to Israel to celebrate the Seder with them. Usually, they see their parents three or four times a years, but keep in close touch through social media, and still seek their advice on everything.
“We’re always in touch with them through our family’s WhatsApp group,” Liora says.
“I let them know almost everything and send a lot of pictures, show them what I’m doing here. If I bake a cake and I’m proud of myself, I take a picture and upload it to the group. They know where I’m going and what I’m doing, and when there’s anything major or decisions I need to make about the future, I talk to my dad, who advises and soothes me. I need that,” she says.
Eitan says he speaks to his parents over the phone twice a week. “I only tell them important things. With Dad, I talk about what I should do to be better — he keeps an eye on me from far away.”
Q: Which one of you watches out for the other?
Liora: “This year, Eitan took part in activities more, so I almost don’t see him because he’s busy. But I watch out for him, as the big sister.”
Eitan: “I think it’s the opposite — I look out for her.”
Liora: “We watch out for one another. I’m older than he is, but it’s like we’re twins because we’re almost the same age.”
Eitan thinks that eventually, under pressure from him and Liora, the family will follow the two oldest children to Israel.
“I worry about my parents and my younger sister. Liora and I are trying to convince her to do what we did and come to Israel with Naaleh. I would like her to come here, too. Our parents want to come. Maybe by that time, they’ll come with her. They’re thinking about it. The subject is always in the air,” he says.
|
|
Trump administration to snap ties with Palestinians, no peace plan, no more monetary aidDec 23, 2017 @ 18:44-https://www.debka.com/trump-administration-snap-ties-palestinians-no-peace-plan-no-monetary-aid/ https://www.debka.com/trump-administration-snap-ties-palestinians-no-peace-plan-no-monetary-aid/ The White House has decided to quietly withdraw from all its ties with the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas. DEBKAfile’s exclusive sources report that the Trump administration has resolved to scrap all ties with the Palestinian leadership in retaliation for its campaign against US President Donald Trump and his Jerusalem policy. Several warnings to Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) of what was in store if he did not desist from castigating the US president fell on deaf ears.
According DEBKAfile’s sources, Palestinian officials in Ramallah were devastated by news of the sudden cutoff of the main sources of the PA’s revenue. Even the Qatar ruler, whom Abbas visited last week as a last resort to save the PA from economic meltdown, refused to release any more funding. |
|
|
Israel will only attain peace through victoryNave Dromi November 24, 2019 https://www.jns.org/opinion/israel-will-only-attain-peace-through-victory/ Jewish refugees from the Middle East know the truth: Only a sovereign people seen as invincible and indestructible are secure in this region.(November 24, 2019 / JNS) Ever since the Muslim conquest, occupation and colonization of the Middle East and North Africa in the seventh century, the region’s Jews, among others, lived under a dhimmi status. While the Arabic term dhimmi has been translated as “tolerated,” the actual meaning is far more sinister.
Under Islamic law, Jews were less than second-class citizens. They were a brutally oppressed minority, forced to pay special taxes called jizya, frequently forced to place distinctive signs on their houses and clothing and sometimes brutally humiliated in other ways.
The Egyptian-born British author Bat Ye’or wrote that the dhimmi status was a “relationship between conqueror and conquered,” and that “the dhimmi peoples bore the role of victim, vanquished by force; and indeed, it is after a war, a jihad, and after a defeat, that a nation becomes a dhimmi people.”
The Jewish people had lived in the region for millennia before being expelled and forced to flee by Arab leaders in the 20th century. Almost a million Jews had lived in the Middle East and North Africa before their status turned from perilous to entirely unwanted around the middle of the past century, most fleeing to the nascent State of Israel.
On Nov. 30, we will remember them on the Day of Commemoration for the Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries and Iran. We will remember their history, culture and tradition, maintained under difficult circumstances, and also their ethnic cleansing.
However, there are also lessons we need to learn.
Those of us whose origins are in lands now known as Arab countries and whose families were dhimmis understand well this history of defeat.
Perhaps this is why, according to numerous surveys, Jews whose origins are in the Middle East and North Africa are disproportionately more hawkish than others—they understand, better than most, that in this region there are only two types of people: the conquerors and the conquered.
They lived as the conquered for far too long, and that is why they push harder for Israel to defeat its enemies and those who seek to turn us once again into a stateless people.
We have seen in recent years how the stateless are treated, whether it is the Kurds in Turkey, Syria or Iraq, the Christians in Egypt or the Yazidis in Iraq, among others.
This was the lot of the Jewish people for 1,300 years in the region.
When Islamist terrorist organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, and Islamist regimes like that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, talk about destroying Israel, their goal is to undo what they see as the unnatural emergence of Jewish sovereignty on territory previously conquered by Islam.
They see Israel as dar al-harb (literally, “land of war”), territory ruled by non-Muslims that was previously governed by Muslims and which must be reclaimed in battle. A cursory examination of the Hamas Charter, or the comments of leaders like Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, prove that for them, this is a very real religious obligation.
For Israel to survive in such a region, with such enemies, it unfortunately must prove itself on the battlefield by defeating its foes.
The only reason Islamist extremists do not try to reclaim Spain or parts of the Balkans that were also once under Islamic rule is that they do not believe they can.
Sadly, for many regimes and Islamist organizations in the region this is not true of Israel; they believe Israel can and will be defeated.
Iranian leaders have repeatedly stated that Israel will be “wiped off the map” as they move towards building a nuclear arsenal capable of accomplishing this genocidal task. Hezbollah leader Nasrallah regularly states that Israel will be “defeated” and ultimately “vanish.”
Even Palestinian Authority officials, who are deemed more secular than their Hamas counterparts, claim that like the Crusader state, Israel is a foreign implant in the Middle East that must be gradually constricted and finally expunged.
The expression—popular on European streets and university campuses today—khaybar, khaybar, ya yahud, jaish muhammad saya’ud (“Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, Mohammed’s army will return”) is a thinly veiled call to kill Jews today, as it refers to a battle in which Mohammed slaughtered scores of Jews.
The world wishes to see the Israel-Palestinian conflict as being about land and Palestinian statehood, whose resolution can be negotiated in foreign capitals.
The Jews whose origins are in the Middle East and North Africa know that is a massive oversimplification and, based on Israel’s past far-reaching concessions and generous offers to the Palestinian leadership stretching back almost a century, grossly incorrect.
The State of Israel continues to survive because we defeated those who sought our annihilation. Peace will only come when it is clearly understood that Israel will not be defeated and will not vanish. Then, when Israel’s enemies grasp this and are ready for peace, negotiations can begin in earnest.
An Israeli victory is good for the chances of peace, security and prosperity for all peoples of the region, because once our enemies cease seeking our destruction, they can redirect their energies and resources to social welfare, education, health and building a healthy democratic polity.
Only a sovereign people who are seen as invincible and indestructible are secure in this region. One doesn’t have to look at the many ethnic and religious minorities suffering in our region, either—just ask the Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa.
Nave Dromi is the director of the Middle East Forum in Israel. She previously served as the manager of the Blue and White Human Rights movement, founded by the Institute for Zionist Strategies. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. Prior to joining the Zionist Strategy Institute, Dromi was a Hillel fellow of the Jewish Agency to the University of Pennsylvania. |
|
 Commentary Magazine-logo https://www.commentarymagazine.com/
What Aid to Israel Buys AmericaEvelyn Gordon / Jan. 24, 2017 https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel/what-aid-to-israel-buys-america/ Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20180516153041/https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel/what-aid-to-israel-buys-america/
One demand that President Donald Trump repeatedly raised before taking office is for U.S. allies to contribute more to the costs of their defense. Given that Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid, it would seem an obvious target for this demand. Indeed, asked by a reporter last March whether Israel should pay for American protection, Trump replied affirmatively. Thus, it’s worth recalling why Israel is America’s largest recipient of military aid, and why it’s cheap at the price.
Unlike all the other allies Trump complains about, Israel isn’t under America’s military protection and doesn’t want to be. It never has and never will ask American troops to defend it. The annual aid is intended to ensure that this situation continues, by helping Israel purchase the weaponry it needs to defend itself by itself.
Israel is perhaps unique among American allies in that it genuinely doesn’t want America to protect it militarily. The belief that it must defend itself by itself is deeply ingrained in Israel and enjoys virtually wall-to-wall consensus, and this would remain true even if America gave it no military aid at all.
Moreover, while the price tag may sound astronomical–aid to Israel currently totals $3.1 billion a year, and is slated to rise to $3.8 billion in 2019–it’s cheap compared to the cost of U.S. troop deployments to protect other American allies. For instance, maintaining U.S. bases in Japan costs America about $5.5 billion a year, and that’s in a country where troops haven’t had to fire a shot in decades. The costs rise sharply when America actually has to send soldiers into action.
The 1991 Gulf War, for instance, was fought to liberate one ally, Kuwait, from Iraqi invasion and protect another, Saudi Arabia, from falling to Iraq as well. Even with allies picking up most of the estimated $61 billion tab, it cost the U.S. about $9 billion, and that’s just the money spent on the war itself. It doesn’t include the incalculable human cost of the 383 U.S. soldiers who were killed and the 467 who were wounded or the costs of treating the latter. Yet the Gulf War was a short, low-casualty war; most U.S. wars have been far more expensive and had much higher casualty tolls.
Nor can Israel be accused of failing to contribute financially to its own defense. It’s pathetic that 23 of NATO’s 28 members spend less than 2 percent of GDP on defense when that’s the alliance’s own agreed-upon floor, and most member states could easily afford it. But Israel can hardly be faulted on that score: Its defense spending constitutes 5.2 percent of GDP, well above America’s 3.5 percent, and is the largest single item in Israel’s budget by a large margin. By comparison, America’s defense spending comes in well below its spending on both healthcare and social security.
Needless to say, the U.S. also gets many tangible benefits from the Israeli defense capabilities that its aid helps finance. One is intelligence. Just last July, Haaretz reported that in the battle against ISIS, “According to Western intelligence sources, Israel has supplied more intelligence to its allies than any other intelligence organization.” Another is combat testing of weapons systems and ensuring beneficial modifications. For instance, America’s F-16 fighters contain over 600 modifications introduced by Israel. As Haaretz reported in 2010, “between 10 percent and 15 percent of every new F-16 made in America … consists of Israeli systems.”
In addition, America derives strategic benefit from having an ally willing to police its own neighborhood to some degree rather than relying on the U.S. to do so. For instance, as I’ve noted before, Israel’s destruction of a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 prevented ISIS from getting its hands on the raw material for a nuclear bomb. The reactor was located in one of the swathes of Syria ISIS captured. Similarly, America was able to defend its allies in the Gulf War only because Israel had destroyed Iraq’s nuclear program a decade earlier. After the war, then-Defense Minister Dick Cheney publicly thanked Israel for doing so, though the U.S. had condemned the operation at the time. Had America had an Asian ally willing to take similar action in, say, North Korea, the U.S. wouldn’t now be worrying about Pyongyang’s nukes.
Nevertheless, Israel would doubtless continue providing these services even if the U.S. slashed its military aid, and obtaining them is not the aid’s main purpose. Rather, that purpose is to ensure that American soldiers, who are expected to put their lives on the line to defend most other U.S. allies (at least as long as America continues to see defending its allies as an American interest), will never need to do so for Israel.
Consequently, the aid is a win-win situation. Israel gets help in buying the arms it needs to defend itself. And America gets an ally that doesn’t need or want its military protection. That’s infinitely preferable to having to put its soldiers in harm’s way. And it also turns out to be a lot cheaper.
|
|
“We are entering revolutionary times”Posted by William A. Jacobson Tuesday, May 1, 2018 at 9:05pm https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/05/we-are-entering-revolutionary-times/ Victor Davis Hanson on how “the Left has so destroyed the old protocols of the opposition party that it will be hard to resurrect them when progressives return to power”
Victor Davis Hanson recently spoke at Cornell, but unfortunately I was out of town at the time. I would have loved to meet him, he’s one of the most insightful authors.
In my 9th Anniversary post on October 12, 2017, Legal Insurrection is 9 years old, and filled with dread, I wrote about the “rising tide of absolutism in ideas and enforcement of ideological uniformity that is palpable” on the left, and “what it will mean to live without institutions.”
In a column at National Review a week ago, Hanson elaborated his thoughts on a similar concern, in a way far more articulate than I did.
As always, read the whole thing, here’s an excerpt from Hanson’s Revolution and Worse to Come:
Hanson apparently shares my dread.
We’ve lost the ability to reason with these people because they are so far gone. I wish it weren’t so, but we need to face reality. |
|
WeWork Disaster Aftermath: With 97% Of Companies Using Non-GAAP Metrics, Is Everything Fake?by Tyler Durden 10 November 2019 – https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/wework-disaster-aftermath-97-companies-using-non-gaap-metrics-everything-fake
Back in August 2018, long before WeWork’s historic implosion, we discussed how WeWork’s EBITDA is “whatever you want it to be” thanks to the company’s bizarre pro forma addbacks, which transformed a $933MM net loss and a $193 million adjusted EBITDA loss, into a “positive” $233 million “community-adjusted” EBITDA for 2017, and a net loss of about $1.9 billion using standard accounting, to a $467 million “profit” in 2018.
 WeWork’s community adjusted EBITDA 2016-2017
This is what we said:
We made this observation in the context of Moody’s inexplicably scrapping its B3 credit rating on WeWork. Commenting on this, we said:
Fast forward to today, when the topic of WeWork’s community-adjusted EBITDA has once again come up after the WSJ reported that in the weeks before its now failed attempt to go public, the SEC had “ordered WeWork to remove the measure, before the company offered to substantially change it.”
Specifically, according to a WSJ report on the “wrangling” that was taking place between WeWork and the SEC over whether or not to include the grotesque EBITDA adjustment, which the company had since renamed to the less jarring “contribution margin”, as the IPO loomed, “the SEC zeroed in on how WeWork framed its heavy losses, particularly through a bespoke profitability metric called “contribution margin,” a version of which had formerly been known as “community-adjusted Ebitda.” The agency had first ordered WeWork to remove the measure, before the company offered to substantially change it.”
Demonstrating just how seriously corporations takes the SEC, however, the day before WeWork had hoped to start the roadshow to peddle its IPO to investors, the metric was still mentioned in its revised prospectus more than 100 times (WeWork supposedly planned to amend the filing before starting the roadshow — but instead shelved the IPO, as investors questioned the company’s worth and its corporate governance.)
There are two key points here: the first, of course, is that WeWork was hoping to mislead investors (all of whom were sophisticated enough to know the garbage that “community-adjusted” anything is) by keeping this massive pro forma adjustment; the second is that WeWork appears to be openly defying the SEC’s instructions on cleaning up its prospectus – something it obviously couldn’t do if it hoped to deflect attention from the company’s massive losses.
The WSJ also reports that WeWork’s resistance to removing the metric was directed by Mr. Neumann himself, who had “previously boasted about the metric to reporters and investors, to show how the company’s core business was profitable.”
Of course, the core business wasn’t profitable as demonstrating previously just how dismal WeWork’s real bottom line was:  WeWorks Revenue – Loss From Operations 2016-2019 WeWork financials_3 Furthermore, if WeWork was “profitable” along any metric, it would not have scrapped its IPO and demanded a SoftBank bailout.
It wasn’t just the community-adjusted EBITDA that was a concern for the SEC: among other issues the SEC targeted was what the WeWork prospectus called “illustrative annual economics.” The agency questioned how the company had arrived at some rosy numbers. “Please explain to readers and tell us how your assumed workstation utilization rate of 100% is realistic,” its letter said. In reply, WeWork agreed to drop the illustrative economics section from the prospectus.
The bottom line, as the WSJ summarizes, “WeWork’s liberal use of customized metrics that don’t comply with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, was central to its wrangling with the SEC, according to people close to the process. The draft prospectus WeWork filed in December cited at least six non-GAAP metrics; by the time it issued the prospectus in August, the tally had fallen.”
Yet even after the back and forth with the SEC, and the IPO debacle, WeWork refused to change its way: on Friday, after markets closed, WeWork published a slide deck from Oct. 11—long after the company’s self-annointed messiah, Adam Neumann resigned, that showed financial results including a “location contribution margin” that appeared to be a renamed version of the metric at the center of its dispute with the SEC.
In short, once you start lying to the investing public in how you misrepresent your business, it is virtually impossible to stop, unless you are SoftBank of course in which case you just assume everyone is an idiot as Masa Son’s financial juggernaut did with these two slides.
 WeWork negative
 Hypothetical Illustration of EBITDA WeWorks turnaround
However, it is not our intention here to focus on WeWork’s fake financials – we did that last August. Instead, it’s to point out that there is never just one cockroach. In fact, when it comes to non-GAAP adjustments, and “fake numbers”, one can say that everyone is a cockroach: as the WSJ points out, nearly all big companies now use at least one non-GAAP financial metric. Last year, 97% of S&P 500 companies used non-GAAP metrics, up from 59% in 1996, according Audit Analytics.
Which begs the question: in the aftermath of the WeWork fiasco, which relied exclusively on non-GAAP, “community” adjustments to make its financials appear respectable even though fundamentally they were a disaster, is every financial report – and with 97% out of all companies using non-GAAP metrics one can be excused to use the term “ever” – nothing but fake financial news, and when the veil is finally lifted, as was the case with We Work, what will happen to all those trillions in market capitalization built upon “one-time”, “non-recurring” addbacks and pro forma, adjusted, recasted and otherwise fake foundations?
|
The United States Has Declared Defeat In Two More Warsby Tyler Durden 24April 2021 – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/united-states-has-declared-defeat-two-more-wars Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
President Biden announced last week that he planned to remove all combat troops from Afghanistan by September, which he says will mark the end of what is now a twenty-year war in the central Asian country.
A week earlier, the US and Iraq reaffirmed a deal to withdraw “any remaining combat forces” from Iraq, and to further wind down the US involvement there, which dates back to the 2003 invasion.
In both cases, of course, the stated plans to end military intervention have been framed in polite language designed to make it look like the US is leaving on its own terms—and also to allow the US regime some level of plausibility when it claims “mission accomplished.”
In reality, of course, both Iraq and Afghanistan are just two more wars that the United States has lost in a long list of botched military interventions dating back to Vietnam and Korea. Moreover, these withdrawals signal the US’s continued geopolitical decline in a world that is becoming multipolar and highly motivated to bring to a final end the US’s vanishing “unipolar moment.”
But what exactly do we mean by “lost” in this context? Well, by the standards of the objectives presented by the US regime itself when these wars began, these wars are complete failures.
For example, we were told Iraq and Afghanistan would become “democracies” where Western-style human rights are protected and valued.
That was the humanitarian justification.
We were also told these countries would become reliable allies of the United States, sort of like Germany or Japan.
That was the geopolitical justification.
The US has failed on both fronts.
The Failure of Global Democracy
When the United States first invaded Afghanistan, following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the US regime claimed the mission was both a punitive and a strategic one. The military intervention was, we were told, designed to punish and disable the Taliban regime, which was fostering terrorist training camps of the sort that supposedly led to 9/11.
But, not surprisingly, Washington then decided it was going to stay in Afghanistan for a long time. The voters were soon told to brace for a generational war, one that could last decades. After twenty or twenty-five years, though, we were told Afghanistan would become a liberal democracy where women could walk around in miniskirts and the youth would spend their days studying poetry and engineering at universities. Afghanistan, we were told, would end up like postwar Germany and Japan—outposts of Western liberal democracy.
Needless to say, the Pentagon never mentions that anymore. Even after twenty years, the political situation in Afghanistan can perhaps be most accurately described as an ongoing series of wars between warlords, with US-supported warlords on the “good” side. The idea that these US-aligned warlords represent the side of human rights, though, is wishful thinking at its most extreme.
Two years after the occupation of Afghanistan began, the promises of “global democracy” became even more grandiose as the regime tried to grow support for the Iraq invasion. The Bush administration pushed a grand vision for the entire region with claims that a new democratic Iraq would serve as the launching point for a total makeover of the Middle East, which would soon become a region of liberal democracies. The US repeatedly claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was something of a reincarnation of Hitler—rather than the run-of-the-mill dictator he was—and suggested that once Hussein was gone freedom and justice would flower throughout the region.
That didn’t happen. Indeed, even if life improved for some Iraqis—such as the Kurds—life became far worse for countless other Iraqis. As noted by NPR in 2018, as a result of the Iraq War,
Today, Iraq’s standard of living remains crippled by the US invasion, and the democratic government amounts to a regime that is little more than a group of competing kleptocracies.
Moreover, the US invasion paved the way for the rise of religious extremism in Iraq, which led to the near-total destruction of Iraq’s Christian population—which had enjoyed legal protection under Hussein.
Rather than spread notions of liberal democracy and human rights in the region, the US regime has only doubled down in its support for the most repressive regimes. The US remains an enthusiastic supporter of the Saudi regime, one of the most despotic and blood-soaked regimes on earth today. The US has been propping up the military dictatorship in Egypt. Through its interventions in Libya and Syria, the US has taken the side of terrorists and Islamic zealots who traffic young women for sex slavery and enforce the most draconian sorts of Islamic law—something much more rare under the Hussein regime, or under the secular regime still ruling in Syria.
The US’s regime change in Iraq supercharged al-Qaeda and ISIS, leading to humanitarian crises in northern Iraq and eastern Syria.
The Failure of Regime Change
But even if the US failed miserably on installing new human rights–loving regimes across the region, at least the US’s “national interests” are now much safer thanks to regime change. Right?
Well, not quite. Although Washington now claims that it is leaving Iraq and Afghanistan on good terms with the local regimes, the fact is that the US is leaving in power a great many enemies who are more than happy to see the US leave. And in many cases, the US strengthened those with an interest in undermining Washington’s interests.
In Afghanistan, for example, the anti-US warlords (i.e., Taliban-aligned groups) aren’t going away, and are likely to even increase in power as the US leaves. This, after all, is the central claim made by those who oppose Biden’s withdrawal plan. The US leaves behind an Afghanistan where anti-US powers are likely to quickly rush in and fill the power vacuum.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the main “accomplishment” of the removal of Sunni-aligned Saddam Hussein was to grow the power of the Shia minority. This now means the growth of Iran-aligned Shia militias, which are avowedly opposed to the US regime.
In other words, the US could maintain a foothold in both countries indefinitely, but it could only do so through old-fashioned—and very costly—military occupation. That’s certainly not what Washington promised twenty years ago.
With all its fanciful promises for fundamentally changing the calculus in the Middle East, the US has not come even close to shifting the balance of power toward the US by creating a new block of pro-US “democracies.” Mostly, the US has sown chaos in the region, paved the way for terrorist groups, and reaffirmed support for some of the worst dictators and regimes in the region.
All of this was bought and paid for by thousands of US lives and hundreds of thousands of lives in the invaded countries. And by trillions of US dollars.
The last twenty years have been little more than the US regime spinning its wheels, all while condemning millions to a new reality of greater death, disability, and poverty.
It’s not over yet, though. The fact some announcements have been made about ending wars doesn’t mean they’re really over. There’s no time frame for the final removal of combat troops from Iraq. In Afghanistan, the US may not be ending the war at all, but only shifting toward a war fought by US-employed mercenaries.
In any case, the global political situation has become expensive and hostile to the point that it now makes sense to at least ostensibly bring these conflicts to an end. Also, now that the average American voter is barely paying attention—and that the US is facing an economic crisis and weak recovery—it has become politically expedient to forget about those old wars, presumably with an eye to starting a new one with Russia.
|
|
Martin Armstrong On “The Coming Dark Age”by Tyler DurdenSep 21, 2016 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-20/martin-armstrong-coming-dark-age Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,
Question:
 Wild Tree – Dark Age
Answer:Hillary is just corrupt and rotten to the core. She represents everything that is wrong with our political economy. Politicians no longer care about the people. Every election promises “change” in some variation.
 Obama – Change we can believe in
That is admitting something is broken, but it always comes down to the same thing – it’s just about them.
 Mark Twain – If voting made any difference they would not let us do it Indeed, it was Mark Twain who put it best during the last century: “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” We must understand that this has been an age old battle between the rulers and the people. In Athens where Democracy was born, they constantly fought to seize power back and even made Pericles stand trial. Government has always sought to bribe the people creating a welfare state. The Romans knew that the way to power was to promise everything but give them bread and circuses (sport games) and they could maintain power. It was Decimus I?nius Iuven?lis, commonly known as Juvenal, who was a Roman poet active in the late 1st and early 2nd century AD that wrote that phrase:
… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses
[…] iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses. […]
(Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81)
Nothing has changed. Many people can name every person on some sports team but cannot name their political minister, congressman, or whatever lofty title they call themselves. The judge in a courtroom demands to be called “honorable” as do all public servants. They make a mockery of the very word.
 Athens – AR Tetradrachm 510-505BC (17-35 grams)
We are approaching the grave danger of a Dark Age beginning from the aftermath of 2032. Hopefully, I will be gone by then and will not have to face this horrible event. Yet Dark Ages are reoccurring events throughout history and in all cultures. The Greeks endured their between the Homeric Age that marked the end of the Mycenaean civilization around 1100 BC, to the first signs of the Greek cities (poleis) rising again in the 6th century BC (508–322 BC). It was during the 9th century BC (900-801BC) that we begin to see the rise of great cities outside of Greece including Carthage, which was founded by the Phoenicians.
Japan went through its Dark Age, which also lasted about 600 years and the same impact was endured in Europe with the collapse of Rome in 476AD. Dark Ages seem to come in units of 3 so they are 300 or 600 years. The cause is always political corruption.
 Japanese Debasement 760-958AD
In the case of Japan, each new emperor devalued the money in circulation with a decree that it was worth 10% of his new coins. There was no intrinsic value since they were bronze or iron. This process led people NOT to hoard money. Chinese coins were sought after since they would not be devalued. Eventually, nobody would accept Japanese coins and they ceased to be issued for 600 years. People used Chinese coins or bags of rice.
 Roman Follis 295-348AD
The Roman Monetary Crisis that saw silver vanish by 268AD, was naturally followed by an attempt to restore the monetary system. A new bronze coin was introduced in 295AD known as the Follis. Again, one 52 year cycle saw its collapse from over 16 grams to under just 2 grams.  Zenonis By the time you come toward the very end of the Roman Empire, you rarely find any bronze and when you do, it is less than an American penny. Coinage is debased because of the corruption in government. Those who think restoring the gold standard would do anything are wrong. Such monetary reforms appear repeatedly throughout history with little lasting impact. The system as we know it is always doomed to failure simply because we are satisfied as a whole with bread and circuses and let politicians run wild in their greed. Hillary is the example for everyone to see.
I will gather all the accounts and this is on my bucket-list of books to complete. We do have a choice. We can understand what is coming and WHY, and perhaps take that first step out of darkness and move into the light of a realistic political system that ends the bribing of citizens and this eternal battle of political corruption. We need a REAL democracy without career politicians. Only then can we hope to advance as a society. |
|
The Three Stages Of Empireby Tyler Durden Sep 21, 2016 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-21/three-stages-empire Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, I consider it self-evident that we are in the third and final stage of self-serving Imperial decay.
Though Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century CE to the Third is not specifically on the rise and fall of empires, it does sketch out the three stages of Empire.
Here is the current context of the discussion of Imperial lifecycles: the U.S. defense budget is roughly the same size as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined:
 US Defense budget
Luttwak describes the first stage of expansion thusly:
“With brutal simplicity, it might be said that with the first system the Romans of the republic conquered much to serve the interests of the few, those living in the city–and in fact still fewer, those best placed to control policy.”
The second stage spread the benefits of Empire much more broadly:
“During the first century A.D., Roman ideas evolved toward a much broader and altogether more benevolent conception of empire… men born in lands far from Rome could call themselves Roman and have their claim fully allowed, and the frontiers were efficiently defended to defend the growing prosperity of all, and not merely the privileged.”
The third stage is one of rising inequality:
“In the wake of the great crisis of the third century, the provision of security became an increasingly heavy charge on society, a charge unevenly distributed, which could enrich the wealthy and ruin the poor. The machinery of empire now became increasingly self-serving, with its tax collectors, administrators and soldiers of much greater use to one another than to society at large.“
That line describes the American state and central bank perfectly. The burdens of an increasingly self-serving hierarchy are falling most heavily on the middle and upper-middle class, while bread and circuses (i.e. Medicaid-paid opiates) are freely distributed to the restless masses to distract them from the immense concentration of wealth and power at the top of the pyramid:
 The Global Wealth Pyramid
At some point, Collapse Is Cheaper and More Effective Than Reform (November 5, 2015). The third stage Luttwak describes can be broken down into a chart of the Lifecycle of Bureaucracy, for every Imperial Project is ultimately the combination of a vast concentration of wealth/power and the sclerosis of self-serving bueaucracies that serve themselves rather than society at large:
 Lifecycle of Bureaucracy
I consider it self-evident that we are in the third and final stage of self-serving Imperial decay. That said, we don’t have to follow that trajectory; we can fashion a much better future outside the status quo, as I outline in A Radically Beneficial World.
* * *
If you find value here, please consider becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. My new book is #5 on Kindle short reads -> politics and social science: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition) For more, please visit the book’s website. |
|
Bread and Circuses. G-d Chose Circuses.by: Dov Bar-Leib October 31, 2016 http://yearsofawe.blogspot.com/2016/10/bread-and-circuses-g-d-chose-circuses.html It is said that when a formerly great civilization is in its death throes, the elites of that society want to keep the large pampered population happy and satisfied. Give them Bread and Circuses! Keep them happy and content with frivolity and gaity as the society’s fate hangs by a string over the Abyss. Bread kept them from pangs of hunger, and the Circuses kept them entertained when the Huns and the Visigoths were at the Gates of Rome clamoring for conquest. Of course this worked all the way until the bitter end when Rome was eventually sacked by its Germanic conquerors. It might be hard to look at America having a similar fate. Unlike Rome it is surrounded by a moat comprising two oceans, a friendly northern neighbor, a warm water gulf to its southeast with a weak link at its southern border. For that one might think that one just needs a “yuge” wall, and everything will be ok….right? Actually not. The global economy is so inter-connected that when it collapses, it will collapse everywhere. And America is so heterogeneous that the enemies are really inside the Gates of the empire. So when it collapses, one will have to spend more time protecting oneself from neighbors than and invading horde. Morally and ethically, the great American Empire is dead. The nation under G-d only exists in the minds of a minority of nostalgic dreamers while the majority party with wine, women, song, and yes, Sports. Ever since the financial collapse in 2008 and the 777.7 point drop in the Dow on the 29th of Elul at the end of the previous Shmittah year in 5768 (2008), Central Bankers the world over have taken over as a majority interest in the markets of the Western World. It is not a free market anymore. With Zero percent and negative target interest rates going into their ninth year now, the idea of a healthy boisterous free market recovery from the Great Recession and 2008 financial collpase is no more than smoke and mirrors, So for whatever reason, HaShem has granted the Central Bankers their right to control their Toy (the stock markets of their countries) for the last eight years so that the rich formerly prosperous job creating civilization until the 2008 financial collapse could be given pig’s lipstick so that no one complains about hunger pains as the mores and economic engine of this formerly great civilization wither away underneath the surface. Yet, as we entered the 49th year (Summer of 2015) since the beginning of the “Summer of Love” and promiscuous immorality which started in May/June 1967, HaShem began speaking to us all through the one vehicle besides the stock market which all men (and women) fallen or not seem to pay attention to…. Sports or those Circuses of old that kept people in their decrepit moral state entertained until the bitter end. The key is to look at the sporting events since May/June of 2015 since it was at that time that we entered the 49th year of Western Civilization’s reception of debased impurity. Because no one pays attention to anything else except money and sports, and because the stock market is rigged by Central Banks, HaShem seems to have taken to getting his message out through Sports for those who are paying attention. Heck, you can’t expect people yucking it up with wine, women, song, and Sports to be giving much heed to a dusty book like the Bible (Tana”kh) and its 2500 to 3000 year old prophets anymore, can we? When your average American spends a night at a hotel in Dubuque, Iowa, is he more likely to take the Gideon Bible out of the top desk drawer, or is he/she more likely to turn on the cable tv to watch a sporting event on ESPN? So HaShem knows His target audience, and He wants to tell the formerly greatest G-d centered civilization since Hizkiyahu’s Judea what will soon befall it. So here we go!
1. June 2015 was the beginning of the 49th Summer since and including the Summer of Promiscuous Love/Sex in San Francisco, CA Golden Gate Park in 1967. It was also in the first/second week of June that Yerushalayim was united in the 6 Day War. For those paying attention, starting that June one week before Shavuot, Jews were given an opportunity to grow through all 49 levels of purity to arrive at the 50th Gate this past Shavuot, the beginning of the 50th year since the reunification of Yerushalayim. The 50th physical gate in Yerushalayim is the Golden Gate “Shaar HaRachamim” from the Qidron Valley to the Temple Mount with a direct beeline to the Mount of Olives across the Valley. “Golden” almost always alludes to 50 or -50 in either direction. We have now already entered the 50th Gate. We will be inside that gate until Shavuot 5777 since we entered it between one week before Shavuot until Shavuot 5776. (Yom Yerushalayim is exactly one week before Shavuot.) To mark the beginning of the 49th year in June of 2015, American Pharoah, the horse representing America’s entrance to the 49th level of impurity, won the Triple Crown in horse racing precisely on that second Shabbat in June at the Belmont Stakes. Less than two weeks later the US Supreme Ct. forces homosexual marriage certificates on all 50 States including those states like Alabama and Tennessee that wanted to have nothing to do with it. The main forces pushing for this were leftist Jewish Judges Ruth B. Ginsburg and Elena Kagan. Also that June, as I remember, the Supreme Ct. ruled that if you are a Jew born in Yerushalayim, you can’t have Israel as the country of birth on your birth certificate. This all occurred about the same time. So America entered the 49th level with the victory of American Pharoah. The Gemorrah in Chullin discusses the two things which can totally cut even a gentile nation off from G-d’s providential love where He takes into account its previous generation of greatness. One of those two things is for the legal apparatus of that nation to start granting marriage contracts to homosexual men to sanctify what cannot be sanctified even in the mildest way. So as America entered the -49th Gate, it was well on its way to setting the stage to fall to -50. This did correspond with an event here in Israel, the beginning of the Stabafada on Hoshana Rabbah 5776 at the Lion’s Gate of Yerushalayim also from the Qidron Valley but into the residential part of the Old City in the mixed Arab/ Jewish Quarter. (It is the closest of all the other of Yerushalayim’s gates both inside the walls and at the entrances to the City to the Golden Gate. One could call the Lion’s Gate the Malkhut that is in Malkhut Eastern Gate which would lead to Machane Yehudah once Mashiach shows up and begins to reign. The present location of Machane Yehudah is to the West because the Mashiach ben Yosef Era that we are in placed most Jewish settlement to the west of the Old City.)
2. next event: the 50th Super Bowl and 49ers Stadium in the Mekabel tumah capital of the world, the same city of San Francisco, California (some write that as Californication). This was in the first week in February. Two days later Donald J. Trump won his first Primary in New Hampshire. From this we see that he was on shlichut to take the middle third of American culture from its station at -49 to -50 over the course of the Primary season with the last primary being in Californication one week prior to Shavuot. The Denver Bucking Broncos won the Super Bowl because this avodah by Trump would buck the rider on the horse (Esav) backwards, forever destroying his Malkhut. Previously from 1918 until 1967, the more avant garde leftist third of American culture had fallen through all 49 levels of impurity. So now it was time for the Middle third to crash through the basement.
3. next event: The Golden State (-50th Gate) Warriors have the best regular season EVER in the history of professional basketball played anywhere. I think their regular season record was 73 -9. Yes, their arena is in the San Francisco Bay Area. This event took place just to prove the point that Donald Trump succeeded in his shlichut so that by end of the first week in June 2016, 2/3ds of American culture had fallen to -50.
4. next event: The Golden State Warriors lost in the NBA Championship to the Cleveland, Cavaliers during the First, Second, and Third week of June. So now that the middle of American culture was at -50, it was time for Donald Trump to be coronated at the Republican National Convention in Middle America, in Cleveland, OH. But Cleveland was more than just the place. It represented Kaleivland, the lands in Eretz Yisrael which were specifically designated for yerushah by Moshe Rabbeinu himself while the rest of the Aretz was divided up by the lottery of Yehoshua bin Nun. So the potential to arrive at +50 BEFORE Yerushalayim arrives at +50, lay in the lands specifically bequeathed to Kaleiv by Moshe Rabbeinu. Kaleiv’s Lands were then partially divided up by Kaleiv himself as he gave part of his land as a yerushah to his son in law Othniel ben Kenaz. Kenaz was most likely a Kenizite convert, and therefore Othniel himself could not take part in the lottery. (The Kenizite territories were amongst the three Canaanite nations which did NOT dwell in Eretz Yisrael of the pre-Messianic Era whose borders are outlined in Sefer BaMidbar. So it was permissible to marry a Kenizite.) I believe that Kenaz was also Kaleiv’s step-father after his father Chur had been previously murdered by the Erev Rav. The name Kenaz with a Qoof is a completely foreign word to Hebrew. It only appears as a Hebrew shoresh in Tanakh referring to either one of the ten Canaanite nations or to one of the sons of Eliphaz who was also named Kenaz. That would make Kaleiv who as only 39 or 40 years old when he spied out the land, Betzalel’s uncle. He is NOT the same Kaleiv who was Chetzron’s son and Chur’s deceased father although he was likely named after him. As we entered through the 50th Gate here in Israel, we experienced the sad murders in the Lands of Kaleiv of Hallel Yaffa Ariel zt”l, HY”D of Qiryat Arba and Rav Mikki or Micha’el Mark zt”l, HY”D of the Othniel Yeshivah. Just before the 17th of Tamuz Trump was coronated in KaleivLand, Ohio which by the way was founded in the 1790s by a General MOSES Cleaveland! So even the Kaleivland of the New World was founded by Moses! But by the 17th of Tamuz, this Kaleivland was at -50. In a continuation of reaching +50 in the Lands of Kaleiv, it took Hallel’s mourning father Amichai who is a Kohein to almost immediately draw the connection between the Lands of Kaleiv at +50 and the Temple Mount. He very well knew the dictum that only when the sun rises in Chevron, can the mourning korban be brought on the Temple Mount because it is in Chevron that we do mitzvot bein Adam leChaveiro lishma at +50. Yet it is on the Temple Mount where we do mitzvot bein Adam leMakom lishma at +50. It is why the Avot may have preferred to live in Chevron to perfect their bein Adam leChaveiro midot day in and day out, and only on special occasions did they visit Har HaMoriah to also perfect their bein Adam leMakom. So right after the Shiva, the Ariel family decided to lead a large group of people to do Aliyat Har HaBayit. It was at that time that Amichai surreptitiously blesses the Olim with Birket Kohanim while he is ostensibly telling a story about how to do it!
And by the way, right on cue with the win by the Kaleivland Cavaliers in the NBA Championships when Middle America and its culture entered -50 territory, on the night of Tikkun Leil Shavuot Sefirat HaOmar Mateen went into that Gay Bar in Orlando and murdered 49 homosexuals, and at Alot HaShachar he himself became the 50th dead body in that Bar. Why was Orlando chosen to be the site of this worst terror attack ever on American soil? We learned about that two days later when that little two year old boy was dragged into the 7 Seas Lagoon at the Grand Floridian Resort at the Magic Kingdom in Disney World by an alligator. Disney since the mid-1930s has been carefully teaching little tots that the solution to their problems is to rely on Magic (Kishuf) and to seek out the assistance of the local witch. All of their fantasy movies are rooted in this premise even if their adventure movies are not. So at least half of all Disney movies from the 1930s onwards appeal to kishuf as a solution to the problems of little children, and I believe this has played a large part in the degeneration of American culture over the decades. Even the theme opening to the Wonderful World of Disney is to the music of “When You Wish Upon a Star” when Jimminy Cricket is singing to the cosmos (avodat kochavim) that this puppet made of wood may yet live and then we see Tinker Bell from Peter Pan wave her famous wand so that all the little tikes including Peter could fly over those alligators/ or crocodiles to confront Captain Hook and his nasty pirates. Well it did not work out so well for that two year old boy at the Grand Floridian Resort. And remember this was within 48 hours of Sefirat HaOmar Matteen’s dirty deed at the Pulse Gay Bar to indicate why HaShem in a sense chose Orlando as the place to get out His message.
5. The Fifth event: Well well well, I actually thought that these Sports messages had come to an end. But now I see that the Chicago (bear) Cubs have finally made it to the World Series against Kaleivland and its Native Americans for the first time since the end of the LAST WORLD WAR!. Talk about significance! Dubiel (Bear Power) is about to go forth to take over the world in the last world war in history, and America is about to fall apart at -50 (because -50 is spiritual quicksand) to be re-apportioned once again amongst its truly native peoples. Now this can only happen if the other two creatures in Daniel 7 destroy each other. The Lion with Eagle’s wings folk (rugged individualists in Great Britain (the lion) and in the United States(the eagle’s wings)) must mutually destroy the Four Headed leopard folks (the New Secular or Greek Order for the entire World) now that the rugged individualists in America and Great Britain are -50. Now one can begin to understand why Donald Trump and Nigel Farage are kindred spirits. The architect of Brexit and the one who loves his name in Gold in “Yuge” letters on his towers are the lions with eagles’ wings at the end of history, and in both cases the Globalists hate their guts. Did anyone notice that Billy Bush whose hot mic tape almost ruined Trump’s candidacy is both Gog H.W. Bush Sr.’s nephew and Gog ben Gog’s first cousin? Then there is the issue of his first name Billy which is Yiddish for “to bark” because at +50 and at -50, we all have the face of a dog (kaleiv). So choose your Kaleiv! Now why would the Bushes be supporting the Arkansas HillyBillies in their third run for the Presidency? because in this election cycle, the competition is NOT between liberals and conservatives but between rugged individualists/ patriots and Globalists. So in this cycle, the Bushes want the Clintons to win. So in both cases in England and in the US, the two philosophical powerhouses of the Galut (the rugged individualists and the NWO Globalists) are well on the way to destroying each other! And look who is waiting in the wings, Putin the Bear and his allies the Persian Bears! Go Cubs! and as America tears itself apart, Kaleivland will disintegrate into the Mouth of the Abyss, Pi Tehom. And as we find our red heifer, perhaps the Native Americans will find their White Buffalo and will return to their happy hunting grounds of old. Go Indians!
The Case of NO Merit: What must be stressed at this point in time is why there seems to have been an interlude since the 3 Weeks (17th of Tamuz to the 9th of Av) where Geulah events have been placed on hold and placed into Suspension. It is true that when Middle America entered -50 territory just before Shavuot 5776, that America in particular as the world’s most exceptional nation ceased to be exceptional, but the nation was still existing in a day to day reality of the Judgement from the previous Tishrei 5776 season (Rosh HaShanah 5776 b’Ruchniyut or spiritually and Hoshana Rabbah 5776 b’Gashmiyut in terms of its physical blessings from on High). It is one of HaShem’s characteristics of Mercy that He only judges the World and its fate once per year during the Month of the Scales in the Fall. The sign of the TZeDeQ (aka ZoDiaC) has no face because the Judge is the One True Judge where there are no angelic intermediaries during the month of Tishrei. So even though America was at -50 already by Shavuot, it was still existing off the merit of being at -49 from Tishrei 5776. With the Tishrei 5777 season behind us, this is no longer the case. No Prophet Yonah went to the nations of the world over the last several months to get Donald Trump supporters to repent from their rebellious ways. And as we learn from Sefer Yonah itself, without merit to the nations who are thinking of causing Klal Yisrael harm, they don’t have the merit to cause us harm if they themselves have no merit themselves. It is why Yonah boarded a ship to Tarshish. He knew that Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire and that that empire was destined to destroy the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Yet, the Assyrians would only succeed if they themselves repented of their sins while Klal Yisrael with numerous prophets at our disposal continued to refuse to repent of their sins. So Yonah, at first, adamantly refused to take part in the destruction of his own country. In his zeal to love his fellow Yisraeli, bain Adam leChaveiro, he tried to shirk his obligation to G-d Himself, bein Adam leMakom. Yet, upon being successful in G-d’s mission to Nineveh after being swallowed by the fish and spat out on dry land, he bitterly asked for G-d to take his life. How could he face his fellow countrymen in Eretz Yisrael ever again knowing that his prophesy to Nineveh had consigned them to total destruction!! Well now the world in total has fallen to -50 while Klal Yisrael hangs on at -49 for the last 99 years since the Bolshevik Revolution. Before the Bolshevik Revolution the majority of the world’s Jews were Shomrei Shabbat. After the Revolution that was no longer the case. That was the sure sign that a significant number of the world’s Jews were falling below -49 in the Fall of that Yovel year 5678 (Fall of 1917). Observing Shabbat is our “signpost” that we are still in business to perfect the World under G-d’s unchallenged rule. Giving it up is to take the plunge below -49. Yet, a significant number of the world’s Jews still keep Shabbat and give birth to Jewish children. So that is what counts. We now outnumber the Bolsheviks who by now don’t even have Jewish descendants. Therefore after 99 years, the nations of the world have beaten us to the sewer. Send them Congrats for winning that tortoise and the hare style race. It took 99 years, but it finally has happened. And in the words of the Gemorrah, we are a generation of NO Merit, but our enemies who want to divide us have even less merit!! So Baruch HaShem, b’itah, Obama will very likely be going to the UN Sec Council between election day Nov 8th and the tenth of Tevet to divide the Land of Israel and to create Paleostine. What is interesting is from what exact date does he have zero merit to succeed? Well calculate thus. On Rosh HaShanah, Rosh Chodesh Tishrei, along with that judgement being sent into the physical world on Hoshana Rabbah, the 21st of Tishrei, the world is judged for the coming year, BUT the judgement for Rosh Chodesh Tishrei itself is still on the previous year’s judgement because each year during Tishrei ten days of repentance out of love and fear and 21 days of repentance out of Lishma Joy are allowed for in each year’s judgement. So the actual process of judgement and repentance takes 21 days from the beginning of Rosh HaShanah to the end of Sukkot, the 7th or last day of that Moed. So once the judgement has been settled on in both the World to Come and in this world, almost three quarters of the month of Tishrei is already complete. So the Judgement only goes into effect at that time, BUT while the positive aspects of the Judgement can be accessed right away on the 22nd of Tishrei, the negative aspects must be filtered through and mitigated by the following Rosh Chodesh, Rosh Chodesh MarCheshvan. Then and only then does the day by day judgement including all of its negative aspects for the new year begin to enter the world. Yet, for 7 full days from the molad for that month, the Judgement of the New Year is mixed up with the Judgement for the previous month of Tishrei whose seal was placed on it in Tishrei one year ago that is from Tishrei 5776. So until the 7th of Cheshvan this year, the days of Cheshvan have aspects of the Judgement for both years 5776 and 5777. Only on Zayin MarCheshvan (7th of Cheshvan) do we begin anew with only the Judgement for 5777 being applied for and against us. This year Zayin MarCheshvan is American election day (Nov. 8th, 2016). So when Obama goes to the UN, guess what? The world that comes to divide the Land of Israel will have NO MERIT to accomplish its task. Maybe THIS is what HaShem has waited for!? |
Is The Left Trying To Start A Civil War?by Tyler Durden Via Michael Snyder of The End of The American Dream blog, An army of subversives is attempting to undermine the Trump administration from within the government, and at the same time a whole host of prominent leftist leaders are fueling the flames of hate against Trump and are promoting riots, civil uprisings and in some cases even violence. And of course the mainstream media is a more than willing accomplice, because pretty much everyone that works in the mainstream media absolutely hates Donald Trump. On a fundamental level, the United States is more divided today than it has been in any of our lifetimes, and the radical left is treating the presidency of Donald Trump as if it was the end of the world. We are seeing terms such as “Nazi”, “racist” and “dictator” thrown around very casually, but people need to understand that words really matter. When subversives on the left use such inflammatory language, there is a very real danger that they could actually spark a violent insurrection against the United States government.
Just think about this for a moment. If a “Nazi” had really become the president of the United States, what would the appropriate response be?
When the left calls Donald Trump and his supporters “Nazis” and “racists”, they are suggesting that people should act accordingly, and that is extremely dangerous.
Yesterday, I wrote about how the “deep state” is attempting to destroy the Trump administration from the inside, but meanwhile others are trying to spark an uprising from the outside.
Something that former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently said is extremely disturbing. She recorded a video message in which she suggested that in the struggle against Donald Trump there is going to be blood in the streets and some people are going to have to die…
Remember, this is not just some passionate young leftist radical saying these things.
This woman was the Attorney General of the United States not too long ago. For her to make statements such as these is irresponsible to the extreme. If you have not seen this video yet, you can find it on YouTube right here.
The mainstream media is also working very hard to fuel the flames of hate. MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinksi made headlines all over the world when she declared that Trump’s presidency “is fake and failed”, and she followed that up by boldly declaring that we are now “at a low point in American history”…
A video clip of her saying this can be found here, and to be honest it is really unprecedented in all of American history for journalists to be attacking the president of the United States in this manner.
When people hear this stuff about a “fake president” that is “racist” and “fascist” over and over again, it is only a matter of time before people start to act out in violent ways.
For example, just consider what happened in Berkeley on Saturday…
And it is being reported that anti-Trump protesters in Minnesota set off fireworks in the state capitol building over the weekend…
We need to take incidents like this very seriously, because often a civil war can be started by incidents that may seem quite small at the time. For instance, when the protests started becoming violent against President Assad in Syria back in 2011, who would have dreamed that it would ultimately spark a civil war that would kill more than half a million people and that would still be raging six years later?…
Many believe that a civil war has already started in America.
Americans may not be shooting at each other yet, but without a doubt we are in a battle for the soul of this nation. The following comes from an excellent article by Dennis Prager…
David Kupelian, the author of “The Snapping Of The American Mind“, is also concerned that we are in a life or death struggle for the future of our culture…
In the end, either the right or the left is going to completely defeat the other side, because both sides are attempting to take this country in completely opposite directions. When you examine the core values on the right and the left, you quickly come to the realization that there is not much room for compromise. One side will ultimately emerge victorious, and the values of the other side will be vanquished. Here is more from Dennis Prager…
This is why the radical left hates Donald Trump so much.
He represents everything that they have been taught to hate, and he stands in the way of the future that they have always been envisioning.
We are in a fight for the soul of America, and the fate of this nation literally hangs in the balance.
Unfortunately, there is also the possibility that this conflict could end up destroying this country no matter which side ultimately wins. It has been said that a house divided against itself will surely fall, and America is a very bitterly divided house at this moment in time.
|
|
Hidden Fragility – What Happens When The Electricity Is Off For Three Days?by Tyler Durden Oct 19, 2016 https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-19/hidden-fragility-what-happens-when-electricity-three-days Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
What happens when an electricity dependent society and economy has an extended loss of electrical grid and communications? One of the hidden realities of modern life is its fragility. For example, few people are aware of the precariousness of the supply chain that refills gasoline/petrol stations around the world every few days.
A new book, When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation explores the fragilities of our truck-dependent supply chains.
Longtime correspondent Bart D. (Australia) recently experienced a multi-day regional loss of electricity. His first-person observations help us understand what breakdowns in energy are like on the ground.
* * *
Observations of life in an extended power failure by Bart D. (Australia)
South Oz is continuing with its streak of extreme weather. The latest being our encounter with what’s being described as a category 2 ‘hurricane’ with the added bonus of a severe front preceding it that produced many low-grade tornados. A score of major power transmission towers were twisted off their footings, 80 000 lightning strikes fried out a lot of ‘secondary’ electricity infrastructure … 40% of power that is usually being generated from wind had to be shut down due to extreme winds and base load backup generators failed in many locations (including my region).
Power ‘gradually’ returning after blackout plunged state into darkness
End result … entire state without electricity for a day and a half. Some regions, including my home region, (about the size of the state of Tasmania) were without electricity for 3 nights and 2.5 days.
It was a fascinating opportunity to observe firsthand what happens when an electricity dependent society and economy has an extended and complete loss of electrical grid and communications.
Key observations for my local area are:
1. Many people have small petrol generators thanks to our lovely coastal wilderness and a preoccupation with Glamping (Glam Camping)
2. Very few people had a store of petrol at home more than 5 to 10 litres. (usually kept for use in lawn mowers, brush cutters, chainsaws). Some owners of small boats had up to 20 litres on hand.
3. When the electricity goes out … the pumps at fuel stations don’t work. To my great surprise, only 1 fuel station in my nearest city of about 14 000 population had (or quickly acquired) a back-up generator to work their fuel pumps. There was a 3 hour wait for customers to get from back of queue to the pumps … and a ridiculous show of ‘bulk buying’ where people didn’t just take fuel that they personally needed; they showed up with between 3 and 8 X 20 litre (5 gallon) fuel cans as well as filling their cars. Hopefully the canned fuel was distributed among family and friends. (My assertion is that the owners of the station should have rationed fuel to 40 litres per customer to keep the que moving faster and to make sure everyone had some, rather than creating an ‘all or nothing’ situation)
4. Due to the difficulty with getting hold of petrol after the blackout started … almost everyone with generators at home could only run them for a few hours over the course of the entire blackout. Even then, the small camping gensets usually lacked the capacity to run large modern refrigerator/freezers. So … most people lost the contents of their fridges by the end. Due to cold weather, at least freezers stayed cold for the most part.
5. Big shops had their own gensets … but they can’t power the banks of chillers for meat and dairy … so these items became unavailable by the evening of the blackout starting.
6. The full loss of grid, grid back-up and other smaller backups caused telecommunications and data transmission to practically cease. This meant limitations of EFTPOS in stores. Banks were shut, ATM’s didn’t work and some shops that were open could only take cash. Generally though, everyone muddled through the sketchy electronic payment systems one way or another. Internet access failed for the most part. Social media pretty much collapsed … my two daughters though their social lives were over. I didn’t miss it. My wife found more time to do other things too.
7. The items that disappeared from the shelves fast, and were tricky to find after 24 hours without power were : Bread, D cell batteries, 6 volt square batteries, matches, heat beads, butane gas cans, fresh meat, sandwich meats, cheeses. (not sure about bottled water – most here have rain tanks anyway). Everything else seemed fine, although fresh fruit and veg got limited after 48 hours.
8. In hardware/camping stores that managed to open: bottled LPG quickly sold out as did BBQ’s, camp stoves, camp lights and batteries to run them. Most here have a gas BBQ at home, but if you didn’t already have a full bottle of gas … it was very hard to get a replacement after 48 hours.
9. No one here knows how to use a road intersection properly when the traffic lights are out! I think this helped create major gridlock in the states capital but was even noticeable here at my much smaller regional city with just one such intersection containing lights. (public education urgently required on this)
10. The number of back-up gensets at critical locations (including hospitals and communications systems) that failed was disturbing. There needs to be a major inquiry into why the back-ups on critical services failed. This nearly caused a shutdown of mains water supply as our water is pumped out of aquifers and has to be lifted to storage tanks high up in the hills. More of a problem for sanitation than drinking, as rain tanks are common here.
11. Then there were a few people like me … I ran my big ‘workshop’ genset 7 hours a day (hour in the morning, hour at lunch time, 4-5 hours in the evening) and was burning about 7 litres of fuel a day in doing so. My home fuel reserve meant I could run at that extravagant level for a month if need be, or supply others who fell short. We ran refrigerators, lights and TV almost ‘as usual’ and offered to charge anyone’s batteries who needed it and supplied a small camping gas burner, full cylinder of gas and a good battery powered camping light to my parents-in-law who were seriously underprepared. The rest of my small home town (located 20km from a regional city) was rather dark and quiet for the three nights (in part due to the lack of pre-stored fuel to run camping gensets).
12. We have a gas stove in our kitchen, with bottled LNG that lasts 3 -5 months in normal use, so cooking was as normal for us. Since we didn’t try to use the gas to also heat washing/bathing water it would have lasted for the usual amount of time.
13. When most were having cold showers, no showers, wasting their BBQ gas to heat pots of water or crowding into friends and relations who had LNG hot water systems in their houses … our family had hot baths by candle light in huge volumes of wood heated water. (Picture of my old wood heater below.) It is very efficient, made in the 1940’s I think, but possibly much older. The inner bowl is copper and absorbs heat from a small fire lit behind the square opening in front. It can boil 70 litres in 20 minutes from a cold start, or 15 minutes for a refill of water once it’s already been going a while.
 Wood fired water boiler
14. Apart from the fuel distribution fiasco everything remained orderly, people remained calm and helpful and life went on. Strangers were a lot chattier with other strangers than usual … which is good to see. I saw examples of shops extending ‘unsecured credit’ for small amounts of basic food items to people who had no cash on them and whose cards didn’t work. No looting, no “Law Enforcement” out making trouble and plenty of sharing and cooperation.
15. Although about a quarter of houses have solar panels or solar thermal hot water where I live … none of it worked as it’s all grid connect AND doesn’t work under the heavy cloud/rain/cold of a 3 day storm.
I’ve been thinking about getting ‘stand-alone’ solar power (ie connected to my own batteries) since they closed the big coal fired station in the north of my region, (and the price of these systems has become quite affordable). Our region is at ‘the end of the line’ of our state grid now and I expect regular outages this summer when hot, calm conditions prevail that reduce our wind generation output at the same time as spiking power use for air conditioners. Our electricity now has to travel up to 1600km (1000 miles) from the state of Victoria to reach us when the windmills aren’t working here!
* * *
Thank you, Bart, for sharing your observations. The resilience (or lack thereof) of complex systems is difficult to assess until there are atypical strains placed on the system.
What seems effortlessly resilient on average days can break down dramatically if redundancies, proper maintenance and crisis response have been stripped from the system by incompetence, budget cuts and/or the self-serving priorities of managers and employees.
As a result, we only discover systems have become fragile and brittle in crisis, when it’s too late to restore resilience.
 Sorry! The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock |
No Power, No Running Water, No Toilets: Millions Of Americans Are Living In Third-World Conditionsby Tyler Durden 25November2019 https://www.zerohedge.com/health/no-power-no-running-water-no-toilets-millions-americans-are-living-third-world-conditions Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
Scattered around the nation, there are parts of the country in which millions of Americans are living without the basic amenities that most of us take for granted…
 Bad Water I’m not talking about high-speed internet or frivolous things. I’m talking about electricity, flushing toilets, and clean running water.
But this isn’t a problem that only exists in one state or to one demographic. It’s happening across the nation more and more. Let’s take a look.
Millions are living without running water.
A new report says that more than 2 million Americans in West Virginia, Alabama, Texas and the Navajo Nation Reservation in the Southwest are living without clean running water or indoor plumbing. They’re drinking from polluted streams. They’re carrying buckets of the same water home for washing. They’re urinating and defecating outside with no wastewater treatment.
As well, more than half a million homeless Americans don’t have access to basic sanitation. Nor do almost a quarter of a million people in Puerto Rico, where many of whom are still struggling after Hurricane Maria.
The lack of access to water is happening across the nation, often hidden within wealthier enclaves.
Don’t even get me started on all the diseases that can occur when people dispose of their human waste unsafely. I wouldn’t be shocked to see a return of diseases that have all but been eradicated linking back to the lack of plumbing.
Then there are places that have running water but it’s toxic.
It isn’t just a complete lack of running water that is a problem. There is a lack of safe water. Let’s look at Flint, Michigan.
Five years ago, it came out that the city of Flint had been providing tap water to its residents that was tainted with lead, bacteria, and trihalomethanes. At the time this information came to light, there was also an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease that traced back to the drinking water.
And to add insult to injury, officials lied about it instead of warning people.
The EPA says the water in Flint is safe now, but residents are not convinced. Many still rely on bottled water.
And some scientists are also not convinced.
Other scientists concur with LeChevallier.
Despite the fact that Michigan has disregarded his warnings, Zervos and other scientists have continued to study the water in Flint.
As I’ve written previously, the onus is on us to ascertain whether our water is safe or not. You can easily test your tap water for a wide variety of bacteria, viruses, and other harmful substances. And with Flint in mind, I can think of no reason on earth a person would trust the local government to warn them about unsafe water.
Contaminated water isn’t isolated to Flint.
While it would be easy to say that this situation only happened in Flint to poor families, that would be an incorrect assumption. At least ten other cities have dangerously high levels of contamination.
As you can see, dangerous contamination of water can happen anywhere. It’s extremely important to note that filtration devices do not remove all of these contaminants and boiling water can make some contaminants even more dangerous.
The California blackouts have a ripple effect.
Meanwhile in California, having electricity is no longer a given.
By now, you’ve heard about the arbitrary power outages throughout the state which leave millions in the dark. On a regular basis, PG&E is shutting off electricity to its customers in order to “prevent wildfires.” This isn’t just a minor inconvenience – for many who have well water and septic tanks, they’re unable to have running water or even flush the toilets. Schools are closed, businesses can’t run, and people are losing income and food.
And it gets worse. The last time the power was out, communications systems began to fail and Californians found themselves in the dark with regard to information, too. Radio stations, internet service providers, television stations, and even cell phone towers ran out of back-up power, and with it, the ability to warn residents of impending danger.
As far as demographics are concerned, many of the hardest-hit areas are actually conservative. Residents of Northern California have been trying to secede from the madness of more urban areas for years.
What area will be hit next?
It seems like the standard of living in our country is rapidly declining. It makes you wonder what area will be hit next with rolling blackouts or contaminated water. And as our economy continues to flail, many can’t even afford things like food or rent. It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to think that those who are struggling may have to make a choice to live without utilities.
The United States of America has always seemed like the epitome of a thriving, first-world country. But as these pockets of desperation spread, it’s beginning to look like that status is only true for some of us. I’ve always recommended a low-tech approach to prepping, and as things become more difficult for more people, going low-tech could be the only option.
|
|
In plain sight: How to stay hidden during a crisisApril 09, 2017 by: Frances Bloomfield https://www.naturalnews.com/2017-04-09-the-art-of-staying-invisible-in-a-crisis-situation.html
(Natural News) Life can throw you a curve ball at any given moment. One minute you’re on a nice evening walk, the next you’re evading a mob of looters or crooked cops hot on your tail. In moments like these the last thing you want is to draw attention to yourself. Staying out of sight is the best thing to do in a crisis situation. Sometimes, however, the best place to hide is in plain sight. Here’s how you do it.
Blend inThe best way to stay hidden is to dress the part. Forget wearing bold and eye-catching clothing and accessories. Unless everyone else dresses that way, looking like you’ve got fat pockets is an invitation for trouble. Dress appropriately for your environment and keep it simple. If it’s raining outside, wear a raincoat. If you’re in a business district, throw on a blazer and slacks. You need to blend in and appear as though you belong, and people will know if you do or don’t from how you dress.
When it comes to color choices, neutral colors are best. Gray, dark blue, and beige and anything in between are recommended. As for garments, safe and flexible choices include a plain shirt and a pair of khakis. Have these ready so you can make a quick change when needed.
Blending in doesn’t stop with you. Your home needs to be inconspicuous and fit in with the rest of the neighborhood. Do not make it obvious you’re ready for a crisis. Doing this ensures that everyone will be making a beeline for your home when a crisis does come along. Your home should be just like the homes of everyone else. The same goes for your vehicle. Make sure that your home and your car have no distinct markings that would associate either with you. Trim your lawn and keep your bumper free of stickers.
Other tipsLooking like you belong involves more than just dressing the part. You need to act like it too. The saying, “when in Rome, do as the Romans do,” has never been more appropriate. Do what other people are doing to avoid sticking out. Strike a conversation with someone, preferably of your own gender. You’ll seem less obvious if you’re with someone else or a group. If that’s not possible, carry a local newspaper as a prop. Even if it’s in a foreign language and you can’t read it, it’s still a good tool to have on you.
Only run in case of an emergency. Running draws attention, which is the last thing you want. Walk in a relaxed manner but at the same time don’t appear as though you’re wandering aimlessly.
Do your best to look calm. If you look uncomfortable, you look suspicious. Look like you belong and should be where you are. Act like you’re a good mood but don’t overdo it.
Know your surroundings. Take note of any hiding spots or shortcuts you can use. Try to avoid long, open stretches of road because you’ll look strange if you’re there by yourself.
If you know the language or local dialect then put your linguistic skills to use.
Remember: you don’t want to be remembered, you want to be forgotten. Don’t be remarkable, don’t be noteworthy. Be the person you wouldn’t look at twice because there’s nothing more to them. Those kind of people tend to stay far away from trouble, and so will you.
Stay informed about other survival techniques at Survival.news. Sources: |
Face It — America Doesn’t ‘Win’ a Lot of WarsU.S. Special Operations Command details dismal U.S. military recordby NICK TURSE https://warisboring.com/face-it-america-doesnt-win-a-lot-of-wars-6b1615b553fa#.kkcuztnvr Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20161012024429/https://warisboring.com/face-it-america-doesnt-win-a-lot-of-wars-6b1615b553fa
Winning. It’s written into the DNA of the USA. After all, what’s more American than football legend Vince Lombardi’s famous, if purloined, maxim — “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”?
Americans expect to be number one. First Lady Michelle Obama recently called the United States the “greatest country on Earth.” Take that, world public opinion, and your choice of Germany!
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton went even farther, touting America as “the greatest country that has ever been created.” Her rival, Donald Trump, who for political gain badmouths the country that made him rich and famous, does so in the hope of returning America to supposedly halcyon days of unparalleled greatness.
He’s predicted that his presidency might lead to an actual winning overload. “We’re going to win so much,” he told supporters. “You’re going to get tired of winning. You’re going to say, ‘Please, Mr. President … don’t win so much’ … And I’m going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again … We’re gonna keep winning.’”
As Trump well knows, Americans take winning very seriously. Look no farther than the U.S. gold medal count at the recent Rio Olympics — 46. The next highest total? Great Britain’s 27, almost 20 fewer than those of the country whose upstart rebels bested them in the 18th century, the nation’s ur-victory.
The young United States then beat back the Brits in the early 1800s, and twice bailed them out in victorious world wars during the twentieth century.
In the intervening years, the United States built up a gaudy military record — slaughtering native tribes, punishing Mexico, pummeling Spain — but the best was yet to come. “Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world,” Pres. Barack Obama boasted in this year’s State of the Union address.
In this he echoed his predecessor, George W. Bush, who, in May 2001, declared that “America today has the finest [military] the world has ever seen.” Buy ‘Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan’ In the years between those two moments of high-flown rhetoric, the United States military fought in nine conflicts, according to a 2015 briefing produced by U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, the umbrella organization for America’s most elite forces including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets.
The record of the greatest fighting force in the history of the world, according to SOCOM — zero wins, two losses and seven ties.
This dismal record is catalogued in a briefing slide produced by SOCOM’s Intelligence Directorate last September and obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information Act. “A Century of War and Gray Zone Challenges” — a timeline of conflicts ranked as wins, losses and ties — examines the last 100 years of America’s wars and interventions.
“Gray zone” is an increasingly popular term of the trade for operations conducted somewhere on the continuum between war and peace. “Traditional war is the paradigm,” the briefing slide asserts. “Gray zone conflict is the norm.”
While he finds a great deal to fault in SOCOM’s analysis, retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, believes its assessment of post-9/11 conflicts “is quite accurate.”
Although American politicians such as Clinton regularly insist that the United States possesses “the greatest military” on the planet, they avoid addressing the question of what the country’s armed interventions have actually accomplished when it comes to policy goals — the true measure of success in war. “We have not shown an ability to achieve our stated political aims in a conclusive way at an acceptable cost,” Bacevich says. “That’s simply a fact.”
 U.S. Special Operations Command details dismal U.S. military record
U.S. Special Operations Command details dismal U.S. military record
The greatest journeyman military in history?
Twelve wins and nine losses. In baseball, it’s the annual record of a journeyman pitcher like Bill Caudill of the Seattle Mariners in 1982, Dave LaPoint of the Saint Louis Cardinals in 1983 or Norm Charlton of the Cincinnati Reds in 1990, to mention just three examples. It’s certainly not the record of an ace.
Likewise, 12 victories and nine losses is a far-from-dazzling stat when it comes to warfare, especially for a nation that prides itself on its martial prowess. But that was the SOCOM Intelligence Directorate’s assessment of the last century of American war — 12 and nine with a mind-boggling 43 “ties.”
Among those 64 conflicts, the command counts just five full-fledged wars in which the United States has come up with three wins (World War I, World War II, and Desert Storm), one loss (Vietnam) and one tie (Korea). In the gray zone — what SOCOM calls “the norm” when it comes to conflict — the record is far bleaker, the barest of winning percentages at nine victories, eight losses and 42 draws.
“If you accept the terms of analysis, that things can be reduced to win, loss and tie, then this record is not very good,” Bacevich says. “While there aren’t many losses — according to how they code — there’s a hell of a lot of ties, which would beg the question of why, based on these criteria, U.S. policy has seemingly been so ineffective.”
The assessments of, and in some instances the very inclusion of, numerous operations, missions, and interventions by SOCOM are dubious. Bacevich, for example, questions its decision to include pre-World War II U.S. military missions in China — a draw, according to the command.
“I don’t know on what basis one would say ‘China, 1912 to 1941’ qualifies as a tie,” he adds, noting on the other hand that a good case could be made for classifying two of SOCOM’S gray zone “ties” — in Haiti and Nicaragua — during the same era as wins instead of draws based on the achievement of policy aims alone.
It’s even harder to imagine why, for example, limited assistance to Chad in its conflict with Libya and indigenous rebels in 1983 or military assistance in evacuating U.S. personnel from Albania in 1997 should make the list. Meanwhile, America’s so-called longest war, in Afghanistan, inexplicably ends in 2014 on SOCOM’S timeline.
That was, of course, the year that the Obama administration formally ended the “combat mission” in that country, but it would assuredly be news to the 8,400 troops, including special operators, still conducting missions there today.
Beyond that, for reasons unexplained, SOCOM doesn’t even classify Afghanistan as a “war.” Instead, it’s considered one of 59 gray-zone challenges, on a par with the 1948-to-1949 Berlin Airlift or small-scale deployments to the restive Congo in the 1960s.
No less bizarre, the command categorizes America’s 2003–2011 occupation of Iraq in a similar fashion. “It deserves to be in the same category as Korea and Vietnam,” says Bacevich, the author of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History.
Killing people and breaking things
Can the post-9/11 U.S. military simultaneously be the finest fighting force in history and unable to win wars or quasi-wars? It may depend on our understanding of what exactly the Department of Defense and its military services are meant to do.
While the 1789 act that established its precursor, the Department of War, is sparse on details about its raison d’être, the very name suggests its purpose — presumably preparing for, fighting, and winning wars. The 1947 legislation creating its successor, the “National Military Establishment” was similarly light on specifics concerning the ultimate aims of the organization, as were the amendments of 1949 that recast it as the Department of Defense.
During a Republican primary debate earlier this year, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee offered his own definition. He asserted that the “purpose of the military is to kill people and break things.”
Some in the armed forces took umbrage at that, though the military has, in fact, done both to great effect in a great many places for a very long time. For its part, the DoD sees its purpose quite differently. “The mission of the Department of Defense is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of our country.”
If, in SOCOM’s accounting, the United States has engaged in relatively few actual wars, don’t credit “deterrence.” Instead, the command has done its best to simply redefine war out of existence, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, in favor of those “gray zone challenges.”
If one accepts that quasi-wars are actually war, then the Defense Department has done little to deter conflict. The United States has, in fact, been involved in some kind of military action — by SOCOM’s definition — in every year since 1980.
Beyond its single sentence mission statement, a DoD directive delineating the “functions of the Department of Defense and its major components” provides slightly more details. The DoD, it states, “shall maintain and use armed forces to:
a. Support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Since the Department of Defense came into existence, the United States has — as the SOCOM briefing slide notes — carried out deployments, interventions, and other undertakings in Lebanon (1958), Congo (1964 and 1967), the Dominican Republic (1965), Cambodia (1975), Iran (1980), El Salvador (1980 to 1992), Grenada (1983), Chad (1983), Libya (1986), the Persian Gulf (1987 to1988), Honduras (1988), Panama (1989), Somalia (1992 to 1995), Haiti (1994 to 1995) and Albania (1997), among other countries.
You may have no memory of some, perhaps many, of these interventions, no less a sense of why they occurred or their results — and that might be the most salient take-away from SOCOM’s list. So many of these conflicts have, by now, disappeared into the gray zone of American memory.
Were these operations targeting enemies which actually posed a threat to the U.S. constitution? Did ceaseless operations across the globe actually ensure the safety and security of the United States? Did they truly advance U.S. policy interests and if so, how?
From the above list, according to SOCOM, only El Salvador, Grenada, Libya and Panama were “wins,” but what, exactly, did America win? Did any of these quasi-wars fully meet the Defense Department’s own criteria? What about the Korean War (tie), the Bay of Pigs (loss), the Vietnam War (loss) or the not-so-secret “secret war” in Laos (loss)? And have any of SOCOM’s eight losses or ties in the post-9/11 era accomplished the Defense Department’s stated mission?
“I have killed people and broken things in war, but, as a military officer, that was never the end. There was a purpose, a reason, a goal,” wrote Maj. Matt Cavanaugh, a U.S. Army strategist, in response to Huckabee’s comment. He then drew attention to the fact that Joint Publication 1: Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States asserts that “military power is integrated with other instruments of national power to advance and defend U.S. values, interests and objectives.”
Did the wars in Vietnam or Laos defend those same values? What about the war waged in Iraq by the “finest fighting force” in world history?
In March 2003, then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld laid out U.S aims for that conflict. “Our goal is to defend the American people, and to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and to liberate the Iraqi people,” he said, before offering even more specific objectives, such as having U.S. troops “search for, capture [and] drive out terrorists who have found safe harbor in Iraq.”
Of course, the invasion and occupation of Iraq would turn that country into a terrorist magnet, leading to the ultimate safe harbor — a terror caliphate extending over swaths of that country and neighboring Syria. The elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction would prove impossible for obvious reasons.
The “liberation” of its people would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands; the forced displacement of millions. And a country divided along sectarian lines, where up to 50 percent of its 33 million inhabitants may suffer from the effects of trauma brought on by the last few decades of war.
And what about the defense of the American people? They certainly don’t feel defended. According to recent polling, more Americans fear terrorism today than just after 9/11. And the particular threat Americans fear most? The terror group born and bred in America’s Iraqi prison camps — ISIS.
This record seems to matter little to the presidential candidate who, as a senator, voted for the invasion of Iraq. Regarding that war and other military missions, Clinton, as Bacevich notes, continues to avoid asking the most obvious question — “Is the use of the American military conclusively, and at reasonable costs, achieving our political objectives?”
Trump’s perspective seems to better fit SOCOM’s assessment when it comes to America’s war-fighting prowess in these years. “We don’t win. We can’t beat ISIS. Can you imagine Gen. Douglas MacArthur or Gen. Patton? Can [you] imagine they are spinning in their grave right now when they see the way we fight,” he recently told FOX News’s Bill O’Reilly, invoking the names of those military luminaries who both served in a “draw” in Mexico in the 1910s and U.S. victories in World Wars I and II, and in the case of MacArthur a stalemate in Korea, as well.
Neither the Clinton nor Trump campaigns responded to our requests for comment. SOCOM similarly failed to respond before publication to questions about the conclusions to be drawn from its timeline, but its figures alone — especially regarding post-9/11 conflicts — speak volumes.
“In order to evaluate our recent military history and the gap between the rhetoric and the results,” Bacevich says, “the angle of analysis must be one that acknowledges our capacity to break things and kill people, indeed that acknowledges that U.S. forces have performed brilliantly at breaking things and killing people, whether it be breaking a building — by putting a precision missile through the window — or breaking countries by invading them and producing chaos as a consequence.”
SOCOM’s briefing slide seems to recognize this fact. The United States has carried out a century of conflict, killing people from Nicaragua and Haiti to Germany and Japan; battering countries from the Koreas and Vietnams to Iraq and Afghanistan; fighting on a constant basis since 1980.
All that death and devastation, however, led to few victories. Worse yet for the armed forces, the win-loss record of this highly professionalized, technologically sophisticated, and exceptionally well-funded military has, since assuming the mantle of the finest fighting force in the history of the world, plummeted precipitously, as SOCOM’s Intelligence Directorate points out.
An American century of carnage and combat has yielded many lessons learned, but not, it seems, the most important one when it comes to military conflict. “We can kill people, we can break things,” Bacevich observes, “but we don’t accomplish our political goals.”
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for The Intercept. His book Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa recently received an American Book Award. His latest book is Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan. His website is NickTurse.com. This story originally appeared at TomDispatch. |
Are you only concerned about Bagels and Cream cheese? |
|
The Fourth Turning & War Of The Worldsby Tyler Durden 05Novemver2018 – https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-05/fourth-turning-war-worlds Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,
The paragraph above captures everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen during this Fourth Turning. It was written over two decades ago, but no one can deny its accuracy regarding our present situation. The spark was a financial crash. The response to the financial crash by the financial and governmental entities, along with their Deep State co-conspirators who created the financial collapse due to their greed and malfeasance, led to the incomprehensible election of Donald Trump, as the deplorables in flyover country evoked revenge upon the corrupt establishment.  4th Turning 1pic 11-2018
The chain reaction of unyielding responses by the left and the right accelerates at a breakneck pace, with absolutely no possibility of compromise. A new emergency or winner-take-all battle seems to be occurring on a weekly basis, with the mid-term elections as the likely trigger for the next phase of this Fourth Turning.
There is no positive outcome which will come from these elections. The no holds barred ad campaigns being waged by both sides have sunk to new despicable lows. Winning at all costs is what matters. The Republicans were always going to retain the Senate, but now look like they will gain seats. The overwhelming consensus among the fake news media for months has been for Democrats to retake the House by picking up 20 to 30 seats. The attempted Brett Kavanaugh lynching by left wing extremists and left-wing media, along with the left wing financed third world caravan, has dialed up the intensity and enthusiasm of Trump supporters. The tone of the mainstream media has grown worried and increasingly venomous as they see their lock on the House possibly slipping away.
Either result is likely to deepen the anger, hate, violence and turmoil, which has already been elevated to levels portending civil chaos, if not civil war. If Democrats take control of the House, their agenda will be to impeach Trump, pass legislation designed to make Trump look bad, block everything Trump tries to do, and position themselves to win back the presidency in 2020. The frustration of gridlock will lead to Trump utilizing Executive Orders as his means to accomplish his agenda. Not being able to accomplish his domestic goals will lead a bored Trump into foreign escapades, which could potentially lead to unanticipated military conflict. All previous Fourth Turnings have ended in all out war, with death on a grand scale.
If the Republicans pull a 2016-like upset and retain control of the House, the fury and rage from the left-wing haters will surely violently erupt in their social justice enclaves of loathing. There will be lawsuits and recounts as Soros and his minions fund dissent and violent uprisings. The Democrats will be apoplectic if they do not retake the House. If you think the fake Russia-gate witch hunt, surveillance state attempted coup, screeching pussy hat wearing feminazis perpetrating fake criminal accusations against good men, Soros funded illegal immigrant caravan photo ops, and libelous propaganda media inciting violence, was bad, the coming venom, viciousness, and violent upheaval will make the first two years of Trump’s reign look like a pleasant walk in the park. The linear thinking low IQ press and intellectual yet idiot academics are unable to conceptualize the mood change in this country which will drive events going forward.
The generational alignment of Fourth Turnings is creating the dynamics leading to the increasing intensity, distress and high likelihood of aggression, hostility and war. These crisis periods strike like clockwork on an eighty-year timetable. The 2008 financial crisis struck seventy-nine years after the 1929 stock market crash that catalyzed the Great Depression/World War II Fourth Turning.
In another example of history rhyming, this past week was the anniversary of the nationwide panic initiated by Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938 – exactly 80 years ago. A clearly fictional account of evil Martians attacking our country should not have done anything but entertain Americans still suffering through the Great Depression. But, the mood of the country certainly contributed to the terrified overreaction. According to History.com:
Orson Welles was not purposely trying to terrify the nation, but events during 1938 and the seemingly never-ending hard times had the nation on edge. Germany had invaded and occupied Austria before creating a crisis with threats about invading Czechoslovakia and starting another world war. Neville Chamberlin became notorious as the most famous appeaser in world history by declaring “Peace in our time” after handing Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
War would break out one year later, ultimately engulfing the entire world and resulting in the deaths of 65 million people. The economy and stock market had re-crashed again in 1937, leading to more pain and suffering across the land. The masses were mentally beaten down, frightened by the possibility of war, and susceptible to fear invoking events or narratives. Welles accidently touched a raw nerve and instantly created panic.
Here we are eighty years later and the mood of the country is similarly on edge. We are ten years into an “economic recovery” for Wall Street, while Main Street still struggles to make ends meet. Real wages have barely budged in two decades, while energy, healthcare, food, rent, and education costs have soared for the common people. The initial phase of the financial crisis devastated the retirement savings of millions and resulted in millions more getting kicked out of their houses by Wall Street bankers, who committed fraud and were rewarded by a taxpayer funded bailout and free money provided by their puppets at the Federal Reserve.
The billionaire bailouts provoked the populist revolution, resulting in the elevation of Trump to the presidency. Phase two of the financial crisis will erase two-thirds from the stock market and once again wipe out the life savings of millions.
With left and right already at each other’s throats, the devastation of another stock market crash will undermine what little trust remains in the debt ponzi financial system and the Ivy League educated MBA psychopaths in suits running Wall Street banks. The curtain will be pulled back and the feckless academics running the Federal Reserve will be revealed as nothing but doddering fool money printers who devalued our currency into oblivion.
Americans should be fearful about the bursting of the everything bubble, but they continue to be paralyzed by normalcy bias, cognitive dissonance, and propaganda from those in power, foolishly believing all is well. Instead, the mainstream media functions as Orson Welles, convincing large swaths of the public to fear phantom Russians, mad bombers sending fake bombs to leftists from his Trump decorated van, compensated marching Hondurans 1,000 miles from our borders, evil Syrian dictators, non-existent Iranian nuclear bombs, global warming, and worst of all – plastic straws.
The core elements of this crisis, as predicted by Strauss & Howe, continue to propel this Fourth Turning like the molten ingredients of an ongoing volcanic eruption engulfing everything in its path, leading to a global conflagration. The core elements of debt, civic decay, and global disorder continue to juxtapose and interact in unknowable ways, but the stormy passage towards death and destruction is undeniable. Our civic fabric has been torn asunder, while our financial house of cards teeters under the unbearable weight of trillions in unpayable debt, and proxy and trade wars morph into all out military conflict.
 4th Turning 2pic Weather-11-2018
My assessment of where we stand regarding the core elements of this crisis is as follows: Debt
 The National Debt
 Average hurly wages in the U.S. seasonally adjusted
 Car going off Cliff
Civic Decay
 Fergusson protest in Oakland
Global Disorder
 Russia War Games flags
Anyone who doesn’t perceive the darkening clouds portending the most dangerous portion of this Fourth Turning crisis is either willfully ignorant, an Ivy League educated “Intellectual Yet Idiot”, an MSM talking head, or a Deep State apparatchik. Ten years into the last Fourth Turning was 1939, the outset of the bloodiest global conflict in world history. Any doubt there really is a Deep State, controlling our lives, surveilling our electronic interactions, manipulating our minds through propaganda techniques, and keeping us distracted with technology, sports, and social media, has been obliterated by Trump drawing these evil characters out of the shadows and into the spotlight as they have attempted a blatant coup against a sitting president.
The current paradigm had been very profitable for the ruling elite, as their propaganda laden production convinced the masses they were making economic progress as they feel deeper in debt and were free as the surveillance state grew ever larger. The curtain will soon be pulled back to reveal it all as an illusion.
No one can predict the exact events which will propel the remainder of this Fourth Turning. But one thing is sure, things will not return to normal until we withstand and conquer the grim challenges ahead. Those who think the stock market can continue to ascend after being elevated by the Fed for nine years are delusional. Those who don’t think debt matters are ignorant of history and how societal mood changes drive greed and panic. Those who discount the possibility of global war because we are too civilized evidently do not understand human nature and our warring nature.
This Fourth Turning will intensify no matter the outcome of the mid-term elections. It will not end until the existing social order is swept away and there are clear winners and losers. I don’t pretend to know what will happen, but I won’t be surprised when things take a turn for the worse. You can’t sit this out. You should prepare as your resources and life situation allow. Courage, strength, wisdom and adaptability will be required to survive the coming challenges. Approaching the coming storms with eyes wide open, large doses of common sense, teamwork and self sufficiency offer you the best possibility of coming out the other side.
Strauss and Howe did not make predictions, but they put forth an educated guess of potential outcomes. Millions of factors and humans will interact in an unknowing way to produce the ultimate outcome. We all may have to make individual decisions which will impact the outcome. Shirking our responsibilities out of fear is not an option when the potential outcomes could end civilization as we know it. We should all do everything in our power to produce outcome #4.
 Breath Deep the Gathering Gloom
Breathe deep the gathering gloom
Cold-hearted orb that rules the night Breath Deep the Gathering Gloom – Moody Blues |
TRIGGER WARNING: Why precious college snowflakes will eliminate themselves from the human gene pool at the next natural selection eventSaturday, November 12, 2016  Caveman Hunter Wooly Mammoth (NaturalNews) In a society that teaches youth “everyone’s a winner,” no one learns how to lose. From this, we get a pampered, protected, hyper-triggered population of young, homogenized losers who all mistakenly think they are forever on the winning side of history. So when the power of the American Republic turns against their delusional fantasies and shatters their false beliefs by electing Donald Trump as President, they completely freak out, practically wetting themselves with horror as they desperately seek hugs, emotional trauma counseling, “primal scream” sessions or other expressions of lunacy that most U.S. adults outgrew before the age of ten.
If you know any of these precious college snowflakes, please send them a link to this article, because they need to come to their senses sooner rather than later.
Crybully snowflakes are an aberration of nature
Since they believe in the false narrative of man-made climate change, college snowflake “crybullies” all believe they are close to nature. But they’ve never actually studied anything in nature, and they don’t understand any real phenomena in the natural world, which is why reality is such a horrifying shock to them.
Case in point: Ask any anthropologist or naturalist about the survival of any species in the real world of natural competition. They will describe to you the laws of “natural selection,” which are sometimes called “Darwinism.” Natural selection is a process by which the weaker, more fragile and less adaptive members of any species are killed off or denied reproductive partners. This weeds them out of the gene pool of the species, resulting in a stronger, more adaptive and more successful species that can survive a challenging, competitive world.
This is true across populations of deer, songbirds, whales, squirrels, bacteria and even viruses. Everywhere you look in nature, these key principles are abundantly evidence in the survival of any species:
#1) COMPETITION: In competition, there are winners and losers. Winners get to live and pass their genes to the next generation. Losers die and are removed from the gene pool.
#2) ADAPTATION: Successful organisms in any population show strong adaptive capabilities to handle challenging stresses that require alteration of the organism’s goals or strategies to survive and thrive.
#3) STRONG MALES = REPRODUCTION: In mammals and many other types of living organisms, those males which are the strongest at protecting their families and beating out other competing males for reproductive rights are rewarded with genetic influence over the next generation of youth to be born. Because reproduction involves recombinant genetic “mixing” of genes from males and females, the most successful offspring will come from mothers who were able to mate with the males that were most adaptive and fit to survive.
These principles are universal across the natural world. Yet even as today’s college snowflake crybullies believe themselves to be informed about nature and even protectors of nature, in truth they are little more than aberrations of nature.
Fragile liberal youngsters thing competition is bad and adaptation is “bigotry”
Here’s why: In the liberal, leftist lunatic society we see today in cities and college campuses, the following dynamics are easily observed:
#1) NO COMPETITION results in the pathetic, pussified, metrosexual “everybody’s a winner” mentality that punishes achievers and rewards mediocrity. Children are taught to avoid standing out in a crowd. Conformity is more important than achievement, and achievement only really comes from “white privilege” anyway, children are taught, so achievement is bad.
#2) NO ADAPTATION: Generation snowflake crybullies are taught to be “triggered” by any words, events or circumstances which do not fully conform to their extremely limited, narrow-minded “safe space” beliefs built on sheer delusion. As a result, college snowflake crybullies are completely unable to adapt to changing circumstances and are therefore simply not fit to contribute to the future of the human gene pool.
#3) FEMINIZED MALES = BACKWARDS EVOLUTION: When males of a species become weak, feminized, “it takes a village” pathetic wankers, the entire population suffers as a whole. The role of the strong male in the population — as defender, protector, hunter or warrior — is not just diminished but vilified. Gay men and gender-confused individuals become worshipped as “progressive” — as if they are moving the human race forward — but they actually induce a backwards evolution of the species, producing weaker, less capable offspring who are less likely to survive in a competitive world.
In conclusion, today’s precious snowflake crybully pussified college youth actually represent the least fit (and most likely to fail) members of a vast human gene pool that will be radically cleaned out at the next natural selection event. They are the very kind of individuals that Mother Nature has weeded out as failures for countless generations of natural selection. This explains why, when the rest of us adults witness these snowflake children blocking traffic and foolishly protesting against fair, democrat elections, they all look like total failures to us. They ARE total failures!
Play-Doh, cry-ins and therapy dogs: This is how universities have become DAY CARE for sobbing crybully youth who are wetting their pants and screaming for mommy… WAAAAH!
From The NY Post: * The University of Michigan offered its traumatized students coloring books and Play-Doh to calm them. (Are its students in college or kindergarten?)
Anarchist-fueled violence and destruction can’t be tolerated. Nor should corporate (or anti-corporate) temper tantrums that blatantly violate free-speech rights.
Collegiate sobbing and wailing, on the other hand, shouldn’t be tolerated — especially not by the parents who are shelling out tens of thousands of dollars to pay for it.
And they all should consider that their reaction to Trump’s win goes a long way towards explaining precisely why he did.
When there is no competition and no natural selection, the entire population suffers as a wholeAs is obvious from observing recent history, natural selection has not played much of a role in the quality of the human gene pool for a very long time. Where our ancestors had to compete, achieve and adapt to survive and reproduce, today’s college snowflakes just have to drink, party and f##k.
There are no longer any obstacles they must overcome… not even academic grades, since liberal professors excuse “triggered” students from any academic accountability. Female college students don’t even have to be selective in their choice of possible sex mates because they always have abortion at the ready to remove any child that might start to form in their wombs. Thus, easy access to abortion services makes females “lazy” in their choice of reproductive partners, resulting in a kind of “backward evolution” force that drives humanity downward rather than forward.
There are no longer exercises of adaptation for college snowflakes, either, since they have been torturously taught that the entire world must adapt to THEIR ideas and beliefs, not the other way around. The very idea of “adapting” to a changing world makes college snowflakes pee themselves with fear. To them “adaptation” is inherently racism, or bigotry, or xenophobia or whatever other term they can fling out of their grab bag of ready-made leftist excuses. The real message from today’s crybaby college students is that “The rest of the world must conform to OUR views! WHAAAAAH!”
Not surprisingly, these college snowflakes shun any activity requiring adult maturity or accountability. The idea of showing up for work on time and actually WORKING is alien to them, because they see bosses who tell them to work as being “scary” or “intolerant.” In the minds of the snowflakes, “jobs” are places that pay them to use “work time” to check in with their friends, update their social media, watch live sports broadcasts or other socially-important activities. The idea that a job is a place where an individual contributes a service of value to an employer that compensates that person in accordance with the value of their contribution is totally foreign and unfair.
The idea that a person must stand out above the crowd in order to do something meaningful with their life is deeply frightening to them as well. They’ve been taught that achievement is WRONG because it makes losers out of some people who are lazy or stupid. Thus, their answer to navigating the world is to conform to the lowest common denominator of LOSERS while erecting psychological shields of intolerance against the real world that exists outside campus.
In effect, colleges are now indoctrinating a generation of LOSERS who exist in contradiction to the laws of natureThe upshot of all this is that generation snowflake losers will very likely be eliminated from the human gene pool by Mother Nature herself at the next natural selection event.
What sort of event might that be? A global debt collapse, international war, a grid down terror attack on the power infrastructure, a massive coordinated cyber attack on the banking infrastructure, a domestic civil war, a deadly viral pandemic, a collapse of the global food supply, and so on. In each of these possible scenarios, only those who are competitive and adaptive are the most likely to survive and reproduce. Those who are weak, pathetic and stupid — just go visit the UT campus in Austin if you want a peek — will find themselves obsolete and extinct.
Just because they’re dead, by the way, doesn’t mean they can’t still vote for democrats in the next election. But it does mean they can no longer produce living offspring, which effectively eliminates them from the human gene pool.
Libtard leftists, in other words, are all future winners of the Darwin award.
Watch this video where Paul Joseph Watson explains it all with amazing clarity and hilarity: If you want to see more amazing videos on all this, look for anything by Milo Yiannopoulos, a brilliant young gay conservative to whom I gave the “Most Dangerous Faggot of the Year” award a few months ago.
(Interestingly, Twitter BANNED Milo for challenging the stupidity of feminism, but Twitter refuses to ban libtards who are openly calling for the assassination of Donald Trump…)
In contrast, people on the right are competitive, adaptive survivors
You want to know who represents the real future of the human race? Competitive, adaptive survivors.
Donald Trump is a competitive, adaptive survivor. So am I, and so are tens of millions of gun owners, police officers, fire fighters, EMTs, paramedics, outdoorsmen, hunters, inventors and business entrepreneurs. These are the kind of people who are fighters and problem solvers. They don’t curl up into pathetic sobbing balls of whimpering slobber when things don’t go their way. Instead, they regroup, rethink the problem and start kicking ass in a new way to overcome and succeed.
Political conservatives tend to be practical, real-world people, while political leftists tend to be delusional snowflakes living in artificial worlds that run on fragile, psycho-babble constructs that fall apart at the merest touch.
But party affiliation is not important: It’s the mental fortitude to WIN that makes any man or woman a successful organism in a competitive world. That’s why Donald Trump’s insistence that he is going to make America WIN again was so universally welcomed and understood by people who live in the real world (i.e. people who have jobs or small businesses and who function like mature adults). At the same time, the “WIN” word was perceived as a threatening, bigoted assault on the psyche of the fragile left, composed of snowflake losers who have been taught from a very early age that “winning is bad.” To the snowflakes, LOSING is their goal, which is why all their political policies are also LOSING policies.
Mother Nature is crystal clear on the subject: WINNING is survival
If you’re wise enough to quietly observe the world around you, you’ll find that Mother Nature teaches us a tremendous amount on this subject, showing us that competition is good, winning is good and adaptability is absolutely essential to the progress of a species.
Simply and scientifically stated, competition is progressive, by definition, across every living ecosystem on the planet (including trees, grasses and microbes).
Thus, when liberals teach their children to stop being winners, stop competing and stop being adaptive, they are condemning their children to genetic obsolescence as their genes are cleaned out of the gene pool. Call it “Mother Nature’s eugenics,” if you must, but it’s a simple, scientifically valid phenomenon: Those most ill-suited to survive are weeded out sooner or later.
Teaching your child liberalism is, then, a form of genetic homicide against future generations, because when your pathetic, loser “snowflake” children are wiped out at the next natural selection event, your family tree gets cut off at the stump. Your genes are erased from the great canvas of humanity, and the laws of cause and effect grade your parenting efforts with an “F.”
Today’s snowflake college students are tomorrow’s self-eliminated losers in the human gene pool
In conclusion, when I look at the precious snowflakes wetting their pants across America’s universities today, what I really see is organisms on the verge of extinction who have no real role in the future of humankind. They are not fit to survive and not qualified to participate in human reproduction over the long term.
Sure, they may have a few children of their own in the years ahead, then raise them to be even more pussified and pathetic than their own generation, but that only makes their offspring even more likely to die off at the earliest fatal challenge to the human ecosystem.
Or, put another way, do you REALLY think that pathetic college losers who have never fired a gun, never changed a car tire and never even planted a seed in a garden are going to have what it takes to feed themselves, defend themselves and cleverly adapt in a world of war or chaos? Not likely. They won’t live more than 90 days, and before the 90 days are up, they will be lining up, begging to prostitute their bodies to trade sex for canned soup or personal protection.
Truly, we are only one natural selection event away from waking up in a world without any pathetic college snowflakes at all. And although I would never wish mass death upon anyone, Mother Nature tells us over and over again that the post-disaster population which survives the next great challenge will be far better qualified to carry humanity forward into the future.
The real world is raw, cruel and blunt… get used to itMother Nature is cruel, folks. The real world is cruel. It’s not all hugs and lovey dovey hugs and smoochey smoochey kisses. If you’ve never lived in nature, you may not know this.
If you live in a university, you don’t live in the real world. You live in a fantasy world that exists in total contradiction to nature. In the real world, animals compete. Predators hunt and kill. Innocents die. The strong survive. In today’s universities, the weakest, most pathetic feminizes males get worshipped, the professors give everybody the same passing grades for “effort,” and the archetype of the strong male protector and defender of society is vilified. Self-defense is condemned, and logic and reason are supplanted by “feel good” social conformity. Universities are now indoctrination centers for tomorrow’s pathetic LOSERS.
That’s why university graduates are now the most retarded people of all in modern society. I’ll hire a gifted car mechanic over a propagandized college student, because the car mechanic has lived and worked in the real world. Young farmers are far more brilliant than most PhD academics because farmers have to solve real problems in the real world, while PhDs can earn Nobel Prizes for dreaming up the most incredibly stupid economic theories that don’t even work in the real world.
Because of the influence of the libtard left, academia in America has almost become synonymous with STUPIDITY, weakness and failure.
And that, my friends, is why today’s generate snowflake crybullies are, quite literally, tomorrow’s obsolete and extinct dead failures. |
‘Useful’ List Of False, Misleading, Submitted by Alex Christoforou via TheDuran.com,UPDATED: List of False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” SourcesAlex Christoforou 17November2016 https://web.archive.org/web/20161201065523/http://theduran.com/updated-list-of-false-misleading-clickbait-y-andor-satirical-news-sources/ Having trouble makes sense of what news is real and what news is fake. Worry no more, The Duran has compiled a list of news sources you should avoid at all costs.
The Duran’s List of False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources.Disclaimer 1: All of the contents in this document reflect the opinion of the author and are for not educational purposes, because fundamentally I believe you are smart enough to make your own decisions. This resource was split into categories around 2:29pm GMT +2 on 17/11/16.
CATEGORY 1: Below is a list of fake, false, or regularly misleading websites that are shared on Facebook and social media. Some of these websites may rely on “outrage” by using distorted headlines and decontextualized or dubious information in order to generate likes, shares, and profits. These websites are categorized with the number 1 next to them.
CATEGORY 2: Some websites on this list may circulate misleading and/or potentially unreliable information, and they are marked with a 2.
CATEGORY 3: Other websites on this list sometimes use clickbait-y headlines and social media descriptions, and they are marked with a 3.
CATEGORY 4: Other sources on this list are purposefully fake with the intent of satire/comedy, which can offer important critical commentary on politics and society, but have the potential to be shared as actual/literal news. I’m including them here, for now, because 1.) they have the potential to perpetuate misinformation based on different audience (mis)interpretations and 2.) to make sure anyone who reads a story by The Onion, for example, understands its purpose. If you think this is unnecessary, please see Literally Unbelievable.
Note: I will not be updating the categorizations and will not be adding links gradually through the next couple of days, because i have better things to do with my life.
Many of the websites on this list continue to offer valuable journalism and/or satirical commentary. Finally, I do NOT care if you use plug-ins that automatically block any of the websites listed below. You are free to install anything you want on your computer. And as a reminder, not all of the sources listed below should be considered fake because this is just one man’s opinion. Feel free to make your own lists and send it to editor@theduran.com and maybe we will publish it.
Tips for analyzing news sources:
Bio: I am writing this post, and many other posts for The Duran. That is all you need to know. Update 1: I’ve received some of emails with suggestions, very few of which are duplicates, and I will do absolutely nothing about it, because as I said above I have other things to attend to.
Update 2: No, I am not considering further coding/categorizing these sources for clarity and creating a more durable/dynamic database. See Update 1.
Update 3: Some people are asking which news sources I trust, and all I can say is that I read/watch/listen to what I find interesting. Do the same. Don’t let some university assistant professor tell you what to think and do. Live your life the way you want to, on your terms. Do not become a tool for the neo-liberal hate mongers.
Update 4: No group of AWESOME librarians will be working with this list to provide more detail, examples of the news articles in question, etc…because I have no contact with AWESOME librarians
Update 5: It should be noted I am not the first person to call out some of these websites. When I first started compiling this specific large list this morning, I did it to poke fun at the ridiculous list compiled by a clueless liberal trying to impose their values onto society. They are free to do so, but I am also free to piss on your “fake news” list and chose what I want to read and what I want to believe.
© 2016 by Alex Christoforou for The Duran. The work “The Duran’s List of False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources.” is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Caroline Glick – The Ellison ChallengeFriday, November 18th, 2016 http://carolineglick.com/the-ellison-challenge/ The Democratic Party stands at a crossroads today. And so do the Jewish Democrats.
Out of power in the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats must decide what sort of party they will be in the post-Obama world.
They have two basic options.
They can move to the center and try to rebuild their blue collar voter base that President-elect Donald Trump captivated with his populist message. To do so they will need to loosen the reins of the political correctness and weaken their racialism, their radical environmentalism and their support for open borders.
This is the sort of moderate posture that Bill Clinton led with. It is the sort of posture that Clinton tried but failed to convince his wife to adopt in this year’s campaign.
The second option is to go still further along the leftist trajectory that President Barack Obama set the party off on eight years ago. This is the favored option of the Bernie Sanders’ wing of the party. Sanders’ supporters refer to this option as the populist course. It is being played out today on the ground by the anti-Trump protesters who refuse to come to terms with the Trump victory and insistently defame Trump as a Nazi or Hitler and his advisors as Goebbels.
For the Democrats, such a populist course will require them to become more racialist, more authoritarian in their political correctness, angrier and more doctrinaire.
It will also require them to become an anti-Semitic party.
Anti-Semitism, like hatred of police and Christians are necessary components of Democratic populism. This is true first and foremost because they will need scapegoats to blame for all the bad things you can’t solve by demonizing and silencing your political opponents.
Jews, and particularly the Jewish state, along with evangelical Christians and cops are the only groups that you are allowed to hate, discriminate against and scapegoat in the authoritarian PC universe.
From the party’s initial post-election moves, it appears that the Democrats have decided to take the latter path.
Congressman Keith Ellison from Minneapolis is now poised to be selected as the next leader of the Democratic National Committee. This position is a powerful one. The DNC chairman, like his Republican counterpart, is the party’s chief fundraiser. When a party is out of power, the party chairman is treated like its formal leader, and most active spokesman.
Ellison is the head of the Democrats’ Progressive caucus. His candidacy is supported by incoming Senate minority leader Senator Chuck Schumer and outgoing Senate minority leader Harry Reid. Obama has indicated his support for Ellison. Senator Bernie Sanders is enthusiastically supporting him.
Ellison made history in 2006 when he was elected to serve as the first Muslim member of Congress. As the representative of an overwhelmingly Democratic district, once he won the Democratic primary in 2006, he was all but guaranteed that he could serve in Congress for as long as he wishes.
As Scott Johnson, a prominent conservative writer who runs the popular Powerlineblog website reported extensively in 2006, Ellison is an anti-Semite. He also defends cop killers.
As Johnson reported, Ellison was a long standing member of the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. During his 2006 Congressional campaign, the local media gave next to no coverage to this association. But when it did come up, Ellison soothed concerns of Minneapolis’s Jewish community by sending a letter to the local Jewish Community Relations Committee.
In the letter Ellison claimed that he had only been briefly associated with Louis Farrakhan’s outfit, that he was unfamiliar with its anti-Semitism, and that he had never personally expressed such views.
The local media and the Jewish community were happy to take him at his word.
But as Johnson documented, his was lying on all counts.
Ellison’s association with the Nation of Islam dated back at least since 1989 and stretched at least until 1998. During that period, he not only knew about the Nation of Islam’s Jew hatred, he engaged in it himself.
As Johnson noted, in 1998, Ellison appeared at a public forum as a spokesman for the Nation of Islam. He was there to defend a woman who was under fire for allegedly referring to Jews as “among the most racist white people.”
Whereas the woman herself denied she had made the statement, Ellison defended and justified her alleged statement. Referring to her slander of Jews he said, “We stand by the truth contained in [the woman’s] remarks…Also it is absolutely true that merchants in Black areas generally treat Black customers badly.”
As Johnson reported, aside from engaging in anti-Jewish propaganda and actively promoting anti-Semitic messages and leaders, decades before the Black Lives Matter was formed, Ellison was a prominent defender of murderers of policemen.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Ellison likened the attacks to the Reichstag fire in 1933, intimating that the al Qaeda strike was an inside job. He then agreed with an audience member who said that “the Jews” gained the most from the attacks.
As a member of Congress, Ellison has been among the most hostile US lawmakers towards Israel. He has close relations with Muslim Brotherhood related groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Islamic Society of North America. Both groups were unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial, implicated in funding Hamas and al Qaida.
And now, Sens. Schumer, Sanders and Reid and President Obama along with the Democratic grassroots activists and other party leaders are supporting Ellison’s bid to serve as chairman of the DNC.
As Ellison’s statement about “merchants” makes clear, the Democrats’ Jew hatred may not be of the “Jews are the sons of apes and pigs,” variety. In all likelihood, it will be propagated through angry rhetoric about “bankers” and “financiers,” and “the rich.”
Ellison, a supporter of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, has libeled Israel by likening the Jewish state to apartheid South Africa. Under his leadership, we can expect for Democratic politicians to veer even further away from Israel and to embrace the slander that Zionism is racism.
The populist Sanders’ route seems more attractive to the Democrats than Bill Clinton’s moderate path because the notion is taking hold that Sanders would have been a stronger candidate in the general election than Clinton was.
This view is hard to accept. Most Americans reject socialism, and populist or not, it is difficult to see how Sanders would have sold his radical positions to an uninterested public.
The other problem with the “Sanders would have won,” argument is that it misses the distinction between Trump’s populism and Democratic populism.
Trump’s populism stemmed from his willingness to say things that other politicians and authority figures more generally wouldn’t dare to say. Trump’s allegation that the political system is rigged, for instance, empowered Americans who feel threatened by the authoritarianism of the politically correct Left.
Trump’s opponents insist that his populism empowered white power bigots. But that was a bug in his ointment. It wasn’t the ointment itself. Trump’s willingness to seemingly say anything, and certainly to say things that were beyond the narrow confines of the politically correct discourse, empowered tens of millions of voters. It also empowered white bigots at the fringes of the Right.
Whereas empowering white bigots was a side effect of Trump’s populism, empowering bigots is a central feature of leftist populism. And this is where it gets dicey for Jews.
As Obama – and Ellison – have shown, when Democrats channel populism, they use it to demonize their opponents as evil. They are “fat cats on Wall Street.” They are “racists,” and other deplorables.
There are scattered voices on the Left that are calling for their fellow leftists to revisit their authoritarian practice of labelling everyone who doesn’t walk lockstep behind them as racists and otherwise unacceptable. But for the most part, the populists are winning the argument by essentially demanding more ideological radicalism and more rigidity.
This policy is completely irrational from a political perspective. It’s hard to see the constituencies that will be swayed to support an angry, hateful party.
But this brings us to the Jews, who voted 3:1 for the Democrats, and to the American Jewish leadership whose support for Clinton was near unanimous.
When anti-Semitic, populist voices like Ellison’s began taking over Britain’s Labour Party, British Jews began heading for the exits. When push came to shove they preferred their individual rights and their communal rights as Jews above their partisan loyalties.
So far, this doesn’t appear to be the case among Jewish Democrats.
Consider the Anti-Defamation League’s unhinged onslaught against Trump’s chief strategist, former Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon.
While ignoring Ellison’s record of anti-Semitism and support for Israel’s enemies, as well as his ties to unindicted co-conspirators in funding Hamas, the ADL launched a scathing assault on Bannon accusing him of being an anti-Semite.
The ADL’s assault on Bannon follows its absurd claim in the final days of the campaign that Trump’s ad criticizing George Soros was anti-Semitic. It also follows the group’s bizarre condemnation of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s recent video clip in which he stated the plain fact that the Palestinian demand that Jews be ethnically cleansed from the territory they wish to take control over is an anti-Semitic demand.
As many prominent US Jews on both sides of the partisan divide have made clear, the accusation that Bannon, whose Breitbart website is one of the most pro-Israel websites in the US, is anti-Semitic is appalling on its face. The allegation is simply unsubstantiated.
So why do it? Why allege that a friend of the Jews is a Jew hater while ignoring the actual anti-Semitism of another man?
The answer is depressingly easy to discern.
The ADL appears to be trying to give cover to the rising forces of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party. By falsely accusing Bannon and through him Trump of anti-Semitism, the ADL defuses the real problem of Democratic anti-Semitism. And if the ADL doesn’t think there is a problem with Ellison taking over the DNC, but alleges that Republicans hate them, then rank in file Jews will stay put.
The ADL of course isn’t alone in sending this message.
Following the election, Conservative and Reform congregations in major cities throughout the US organized communal “shivas,” to mourn Clinton’s defeat as if it was a death in the family. Such actions, along with characterizations of Trump and his advisors as Nazis or Hitler or white supremacists work to bind Jews to a party that is inhospitable to their communal interests while blinding them to the fact that Republicans do not hate Jews or the Jewish state.
For decades, American Jews have been at the forefront of every major social movement on in the US. But the Democratic Party’s move towards anti-Semitism, a move made apparent through Ellison’s rise, is one movement the Jews mustn’t lead. |
|
The Tyranny At Standing Rock: The Government’s Divide-And-Conquer Strategy Is Workingby Tyler Durden Nov 28, 2016 https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-28/tyranny-standing-rock-governments-divide-and-conquer-strategy-working Submitted by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
What we’re witnessing at Standing Rock, where activists have gathered to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline construction on Native American land, is just the latest incarnation of the government’s battle plan for stamping out any sparks of resistance and keeping the populace under control: battlefield tactics, military weaponry and a complete suspension of the Constitution.
Militarized police. Riot and camouflage gear. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Drones. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Concussion grenades. Arrests of journalists. Intimidation tactics. Brute force.
This is what martial law looks like, when a government disregards constitutional freedoms and imposes its will through military force.
Only this is martial law without any government body having to declare it.
This is martial law packaged as law and order and sold to the public as necessary for keeping the peace.
These overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear.
What Americans have failed to comprehend is that the police state doesn’t differentiate.
In the eyes of the government—whether that government is helmed by Barack Obama or Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton—there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats, between blacks and whites and every shade in the middle, between Native Americans and a nation of immigrants (no matter how long we’ve been here), between the lower class and the middle and upper classes, between religious and non-religious Americans, between those who march in lockstep with the police state and those who oppose its tactics.
This is all part and parcel of the government’s plan for dealing with widespread domestic unrest, no matter the source.
Divide and conquer.
For too long now, the American people have allowed their personal prejudices and politics to cloud their judgment and render them incapable of seeing that the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.
The government’s oppressive tactics have not changed.
The same martial law maneuvers and intimidation tactics used to put down protests and muzzle journalists two years ago in Ferguson and Baltimore are being used to flat-line protesters and journalists at Standing Rock this year.
The same infiltration and surveillance of ranch activists opposing the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon and Nevada over the past several years were used against nonviolent anti-war protesters more than a decade ago.
The same brutality that was in full force 20-plus years ago when the government raided the Branch Davidian religious compound near Waco, Texas—targeting residents with loud music, bright lights, bulldozers, flash-bang grenades, tear gas, tanks and gunfire, and leaving 80 individuals, including two dozen children, dead—were on full display more than 50 years ago when government agents unleashed fire hoses and police dogs on civil rights protesters, children included.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The sticking point is not whether Americans must see eye-to-eye on these varied issues but whether they can agree that no one should be treated in such a fashion by their own government.
Our greatest defense against home-grown tyranny has always been our strength in numbers as a citizenry.
America’s founders hinted at it again and again. The Declaration of Independence refers to “one people.” The preamble to the Constitution opens with those three powerful words: “We the People.” Years later, the Gettysburg Address declared that we are a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Despite these stark reminders that the government exists for our benefit and was intended to serve our needs, “We the People” have yet to marshal our greatest weapon against oppression: our strength lies in our numbers.
Unfortunately, 318 million Americans have yet to agree on anything, especially the source of their oppression.
This is how tyrants come to power and stay in power.
Authoritarian regimes begin with incremental steps. Overcriminalization, surveillance of innocent citizens, imprisonment for nonviolent—victimless—crimes, etc. Slowly, bit by bit, the citizenry finds its freedoms being curtailed and undermined for the sake of national security.
No one speaks up for those being targeted. No one resists these minor acts of oppression. No one recognizes the indoctrination into tyranny for what it is.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, historically this failure to speak truth to power has resulted in whole populations being conditioned to tolerate unspoken cruelty toward their fellow human beings, a bystander syndrome in which people remain silent and disengaged—mere onlookers—in the face of abject horrors and injustice.
We can disassociate from such violence. We can convince ourselves that we are somehow different from the victims of government abuse. We can treat news coverage of protests such as Standing Rock and the like as just another channel to flip in our search for better entertainment. We can continue to spout empty campaign rhetoric about how great America is, despite the evidence to the contrary. We can avoid responsibility for holding the government accountable. We can zip our lips and bind our hands and shut our eyes.
In other words, we can continue to exist in a state of denial.
Whatever we do or don’t do, it won’t change the facts: the police state is here.
“There comes a time,” concluded Martin Luther King Jr., “when silence is betrayal.”
The people of Nazi Germany learned this lesson the hard way.
A German pastor who openly opposed Hitler and spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in a concentration camp, Martin Niemoller warned:
The people of the American Police State will never have any hope of fighting government tyranny if we’re busy fighting each other.
When all is said and done, the only thing we really need to agree on is that we are all Americans.
So if this isn’t your fight—if you believe that authority is more important than liberty—if you don’t agree with a particular group’s position on an issue and by your silence tacitly support the treatment meted out to them—if you think you’re a better citizen or a more patriotic American—if you want to play it safe—and if don’t want to risk getting shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton, thrown to the ground, arrested and/or labeled an extremist—then by all means, remain silent. Stand down. Cower in the face of the police. Turn your eyes away from injustice. Find any excuse to suggest that the so-called victims of the police state deserved what they got.
But remember, when that rifle (or taser, or water cannon, or bully stick) finally gets pointed in your direction—and it will—when there’s no one left to stand up for you or speak up for you, remember that you were warned.
|
|
Are the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and New Israel Fund Using Grant Money to Cover Up Their Role in Fomenting Campus Antisemitism?by Yona Schiffmiller / JNS.org November 28, 2016 https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/11/28/how-the-rockefeller-brothers-and-new-israel-fund-use-grant-money-to-cover-up-their-role-in-fomenting-campus-antisemitism/
 One of the anti-Israel mock eviction notices posted on campus dorm room doors by the Palestine Legal NGO. Photo: Palestine Legal. One of the anti-Israel mock eviction notices posted on campus dorm room doors by the Palestine Legal NGO. Photo: Palestine Legal. JNS.org — The New Israel Fund (NIF) recently received a grant to “research and report on antisemitism on US campuses.” On the surface, this appears to be a welcome development — a progressive group being mobilized to confront a major social malady plaguing institutions of higher education.
Beneath the surface of the Sept. 27 grant, however, are vested interests seeking to use this issue to cover up their role in fomenting the atmosphere that is hostile to Jewish students. The NIF is being paid by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), a main backer of the anti-Israel activism that contributes to, enables and devolves into the antisemitism on college campuses.
RBF provides hundreds of thousands of dollars to a number of organizations that delegitimize the Jewish state and promote the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, both on and off campus. These BDS-promoting grantees of the RBF active on American universities include Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Palestine Legal and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).
Several of the RBF grantees promote agendas that deny Israel’s legitimacy and advocate “one-state” formulas designed to eradicate the Jewish state. Zochrot, for example, envisions a “de-Zionized Palestine,” while Adalah systematically works in the US and Europe to label Israel as a fundamentally “racist” state. Additionally, Grassroots Jerusalem, Who Profits and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (formally the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation) are all leaders in BDS campaigns in the US and internationally.
In other words, the New York-based fund has made the waging of economic, political and cultural warfare on Israel a central theme of its grant-making.
As noted, many of RBF’s grantees are deeply involved in myriad anti-Israel activities, either by directly coordinating and participating in them, or by providing training and legal aid to activists. JVP, for instance, has chapters on campuses throughout the country and partners with Students for Justice in Palestine in promoting divestment resolutions and organizing the notorious “Israeli Apartheid Week.” Additionally, JVP members participate in numerous anti-Israel events, creating a façade of Jewish support and approval for the delegitimization of Israel.
In parallel, the Palestine Legal NGO offers guidance to campus activists on activities such as setting up mock checkpoints and posting mock eviction notices on dorm room doors, advising students to “post to every room in the dorm to avoid false accusations that Jewish students were targeted.” In addition, officials from RBF grantees including AFSC, U.S. Campaign and Breaking the Silence regularly speak at anti-Israel campus events.
As several in-depth reports and publications have shown, the marked increase in virulently anti-Israel activity on campuses throughout the US has coincided with higher rates of antisemitism at these same institutions. In October 2016, Brandeis University released another installment in a series of studies on the issue. In this latest installment, university researchers found that on many campuses in the country, “it appears that the high rates of anti-Semitic harassment and hostility are largely driven by hostility toward Israel.”
Considering RBF’s culpability in funding and enabling organizations that create this intimidating environment for Jewish students, it is curious that RBF would commission a publication that studies the rise of antisemitism at American colleges. Any serious publication would, ultimately, implicate RBF itself and cite its funding for anti-Israel campus groups and related organizations.
But the routine denials on the part of its grantees that anti-Israel activity can lead to or amount to antisemitism provide a clue as to RBF’s motivations and to its desired conclusions for the study. Both JVP and Palestine Legal have attacked and rejected the US State Department definition of antisemitism, which recognizes demonization of, application of double standards to and delegitimization of Israel as antisemitic. JVP and Palestine Legal falsely allege that this standard is “construed to silence any criticism of Israeli policies” and to “censor speech.” Similarly, JVP strongly opposed and campaigned against the March 2016 University of California Board of Regents statement that affirmed, “Anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism and other forms of discrimination have no place at the University of California.”
RBF’s choice of NIF to conduct this study should be considered in this light. As opposed to the researchers and experts at Brandeis, the various Jewish organizations that focus on Jewish life on campus and groups that closely monitor antisemitism in the US, NIF has no significant history of studying and commenting on antisemitism or campus activity.
Given RBF’s extensive funding of BDS and delegitimization of Israel, it is reasonable to ask if the fund is using its financial power to whitewash its grantees’ involvement in fanning the flames of anti-Jewish hatred. What is less clear is why NIF would lend its name to such a charade.
Yona Schiffmiller is the director of the North America Desk at NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institute. |
|
Bio Warfare? “Like 150 Bombs Going Off”: 6 Dead and 8500 Hospitalized in Australia Due to “Rare Thunderstorm Asthma”November 28, 2016 | Piper McGowin | The Daily Sheeple https://www.thedailysheeple.com/bio-warfare-like-150-bombs-going-off-6-people-dead-and-8500-hospitalized-in-australia-due-to-rare-thunderstorm-asthma_112016 Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20170225171412/https://www.thedailysheeple.com/bio-warfare-like-150-bombs-going-off-6-people-dead-and-8500-hospitalized-in-australia-due-to-rare-thunderstorm-asthma_112016
 Thunderstorm The official story on this just sounds totally made up.
More than 8,500 people were hospitalized last week and six have now died in Australia due to what is being reported as a rare phenomenon known as “thunderstorm asthma”.
(I told you it sounds totally made up.)
Right now if you search for this story on Google News Australia, there isn’t a peep about it in the top news. You have to type in the word “asthma”.
Then it’s like a horror show.
 Thunderstorm Asthma Strikes Thousands The Sydney Morning Herald reported that at the peak of this “thunderstorm asthma” outbreak, people were calling for an ambulance one every 4.5 seconds and “it was like 150 bombs going off”:
Here’s the “official story”.
What officials are suggesting happened is that pollen grains from rye grass fields surrounding Melboune were blown across the city just before a sudden downpour. Once the rain hit, the pollen grains absorbed the moisture and burst in the air, releasing thousands of much smaller allergen nanoparticles that were inhaled and became trapped in people’s lungs.
Once the rain stopped, thousands of people began suffering asthma symptoms all at once, everything from breathing issues to cardiac problems.
Some people suffered heart attacks. Six people have died so far. One girl died in her family’s arms in their front lawn after waiting more than half an hour for an ambulance. The system was completely overloaded. Apparently in Melbourne they ran out of ambulances and had to resort to every other emergency and even non-emergency vehicles they could find to help get people to the hospital. More than 60 people are still in the hospital, some in critical condition fighting for their lives.
Officials claim this can occur when weather conditions suddenly change, but in an era where they’re trying to get us to believe in man-made climate change, I call B.S. Doesn’t that just sound ridiculous on the surface? The weather suddenly changes all the time. If that’s really all it is, why doesn’t this “rare phenomenon” happen a lot more often?
The official story sounds fishy to say the least, which is why speculation has risen that some kind of biological warfare agent is being tested. Sure, that’s conspiracy talk, but for once the conspiracy sounds a hell of a lot more plausible than the official narrative of “thunderstorm asthma”.
Delivered by The Daily Sheeple We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos (Click for details). Contributed by Piper McGowin of The Daily Sheeple. Piper writes for The Daily Sheeple. There’s a lot of B.S. out there. Someone has to write about it. |
|
Merkel ally threatens Facebook with fines over online hate speechBy December 7, 2016 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-facebook-hatespeech-idUSKBN13W1NL ESSEN, Germany (Reuters) – A senior German conservative has warned Facebook it could face fines if it fails to act faster to tackle online hate speech, and he said the government could propose legislative measures in the new year.
Speaking at a party conference of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in Essen, western Germany, Volker Kauder suggested politicians were running out of patience with efforts by social media providers to crack down on hate speech.
“I expect from big companies like Facebook that they adhere to laws. If they are not respected than we must think about new possibilities, fines for example,” he said.
Facebook declined immediate comment on his remarks.
Germany is seen as a forerunner when it comes to forcing Facebook to step up efforts to police online hate speech, which has risen here following an influx of almost one million migrants, mainly from the Middle East, last year.
Politicians are also worried about how hate speech and fake news could sway public opinion ahead of elections next year in which Merkel will be running for a fourth term and facing an increasingly popular far right.
Kauder rejected an argument by Facebook – which has around 1.6 billion monthly users – that it is hard to quickly remove content due to the volume of data it has to deal with.
“They say there is too much. But a big auto manufacturer that produces millions of cars can’t say: ‘I produce so many cars that I can’t guarantee they are all secure.’ No, that is not on. I expect and demand from Facebook that laws are upheld.”
Last year, Justice Minister Heiko Maas set up a task force made up of representatives from Facebook, Google’s YouTube and Twitter as well as nonprofit groups to discuss ways to combat the rise in online hate speech.
The platform providers signed up to a voluntary code of conduct to take action to remove hate posts within 24 hours.
Results of a survey published in September by a group that monitors hate speech found Facebook removed about 46 percent of illegal content reported by users within 24 hours, significantly more than YouTube and Twitter which deleted just 10 percent and about 1 percent respectively.
Maas has repeatedly warned that he will propose legislation if the social media networks do not remove at least 70 percent of hate speech by March next year.
Kauder said Maas, a member of the Social Democrats, Merkel’s junior coalition partner, was being too easy on social media.
“We have a roundtable and now we must wait … but after the Christmas break is the end of the roundtables. We’ve sat at roundtables long enough. Now we want to see actions.”
(Reporting by Paul Carrel; Writing by Caroline Copley; editing by Mark Heinrich) |
|
Hypernormalisationby Tyler Durden Jan 7, 2017 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-07/hypernormalisation Submitted by Bryce McBride via Mises Canada, This past November, the filmmaker Adam Curtis released the documentary Hypernormalisation. HyperNormalisationThe term comes from Alexei Yurchak’s 2006 book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. The book argues that over the last 20 years of the Soviet Union, everyone knew the system wasn’t working, but as no one could imagine any alternative, politicians and citizens were resigned to pretending that it was. Eventually this pretending was accepted as normal and the fake reality thus created was accepted as real, an effect which Yurchak termed “hypernormalisation.”
Looking at events over the past few years, one wonders if our own society is experiencing the same phenomenon. A contrast with what economic policy-makers term “normalisation” is instructive.
Normalisation is what has historically happened in the wake of financial crises. During the booms that precede busts, low interest rates encourage people to make investments with borrowed money. However, even after all of the prudent investment opportunities have been taken, people continue borrowing to invest in projects and ideas that are unlikely to ever generate profits.
Eventually, the precariousness of some of these later investments becomes apparent. Those that arrive at this realization early sell up, settle their debts and pocket profits, but their selling often triggers a rush for the exits that bankrupts companies and individuals and, in many cases, the banks which lent to them.
In the normalisation which follows (usually held during ‘special’ bank holidays) auditors and accountants go through financial records and decide which companies and individuals are insolvent (and should therefore go bankrupt) and which are merely illiquid (and therefore eligible for additional loans, pledged against good collateral). In a similar fashion, central bank officials decide which banks are to close and which are to remain open. Lenders made freshly aware of bankruptcy risk raise (or normalise) interest rates and in so doing complete the process of clearing bad debt out of the system. Overall, reality replaces wishful thinking.
While this process is by no means pleasant for the people involved, from a societal standpoint bankruptcy and higher interest rates are necessary to keep businesses focused on profitable investment, banks focused on prudent lending and overall debt levels manageable.
By contrast, the responses of policy-makers to 2008’s financial crisis suggest the psychology of hypernormalisation. Quantitative easing (also known as money printing) and interest rate suppression (to zero percent and, in Europe, negative interest rates) are not working and will never result in sustained increases in productivity, income and employment. However, as our leaders are unable to consider alternative policy solutions, they have to pretend that they are working.
To understand why our leaders are unable to consider alternative policy solutions such as interest rate normalization and banking reform one only needs to understand that while such policies would lay the groundwork for a sustained recovery, they would also expose many of the world’s biggest banks as insolvent. As the financial sector is a powerful constituency (and a generous donor to political campaigns) the banks get the free money they need, even if such policies harm society as a whole.
As we live in a democratic society, it is necessary for our leaders to convince us that there are no other solutions and that the monetary policy fixes of the past 8 years have been effective and have done no harm.
Statistical chicanery has helped understate unemployment and inflation while global cooperation has served to obscure the currency depreciation and loss of confidence in paper money (as opposed to ‘hard money’ such as gold and silver) that are to be expected from rampant money printing.
Looking at unemployment figures first, while the unemployment rate is currently very low, the number of Americans of working age not in the labour force is currently at an all-time high of over 95 million people. Discouraged workers who stop looking for work are no longer classified as unemployed but instead become economically inactive, but clearly many of these people really should be counted as unemployed. Similarly, while government statistical agencies record inflation rates of between one and two percent, measures that use methodologies used in the past (such as John Williams’ Shadowstats measures) show consumer prices rising at annual rates of 6 to 8 percent. In addition, many people have noticed what has been termed ‘shrinkflation’, where prices remain the same even as package sizes shrink. A common example is bacon, which used to be sold by the pound but which is now commonly sold in 12 ounce slabs.
Meanwhile central banks have coordinated their money printing to ensure that no major currency (the dollar, the yen, the euro or the Chinese renminbi) depreciates noticeably against the others for a sustained period of time. Further, since gold hit a peak of over $1900 per ounce in 2011, central banks have worked hard to keep the gold price suppressed through the futures market. On more than a few occasions, contracts for many months worth of global gold production have been sold in a matter of a few minutes, with predictable consequences for the gold price. At all costs, people’s confidence in and acceptance of the paper (or, more commonly, electronic) money issued by central banks must be maintained.
Despite these efforts people nonetheless sense that something is wrong. The Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump to the White House represent to a large degree a rejection of the fake reality propagated by the policymaking elite. Increasingly, people recognize that a financial system dependent upon zero percent interest rates is not sustainable and are responding by taking their money out of the banks in favour of holding cash or other forms of wealth. In the face of such understanding and resistance, governments are showing themselves willing to use coercion to enforce acceptance of their fake reality.
The recent fuss over ‘fake news’ seems intended to remove alternative news and information sources from a population that, alarmingly for those in charge, is both ever-more aware that the system is not working and less and less willing to pretend that it is. Just this month U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act into law. United States, meet your Ministry of Truth.
Meanwhile, in India last month, people were told that the highest denomination bills in common circulation would be ‘demonetized’ or made worthless as of December 30th. People were allowed to deposit or exchange a certain quantity of the demonetized bills in banks but many people who had accumulated their savings in rupee notes (often the poor who did not have bank accounts) have been ruined. Ostensibly, this demonetization policy was aimed at curbing corruption and terrorism, but it is fairly obvious that its real objective was to force people into the banking system and electronic money. Unsurprisingly, the demonetization drive was accompanied by limits on the quantity of gold people are allowed to hold.
Despite such attempts to influence our thinking and our behaviour, we don’t need to resign ourselves to pretending that our system is working when it so clearly isn’t. Looking at the eventual fate of the Soviet Union, it should be clear that the sooner we abandon the drift towards hypernormalisation and start on the path to normalisation the better off we will be. |
|
Americans Prefer Cats To Kids After The Great Recessionby Tyler Durden Jan 5, 2017 12:46 PM http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-05/americans-prefer-cats-kids-after-great-recession
More and more Americans seem to prefer pets to children… and the resulting demographic trend has massive economic and investment implications.
The numbers are startling and affect everyone—whether you’re a parent, a pet owner, neither, or both. It’s also an investment opportunity you might try in 2017.
4 million missing babiesWhile the memories of the Great Recession may be fading, the effects are still very much with us. Among other places, the impact shows up in demographic data.
Last summer, I ran across some fascinating analysis by University of New Hampshire sociologist Kenneth M. Johnson. He found that US fertility levels dropped sharply beginning in 2008 and have yet to recover.
All those babies we didn’t have add up to a big number.
 Actural Births compared to Births using 2007 Birth Rates, 208 to 2015
Professor Johnson calculated that if births had continued at the pre-recession rate, Americans would have had 3.4 million additional babies in 2008–2015.
He found no evidence to suggest that this trend changed in 2016, so the total is likely near 4 million by now.
This happened even though the number of women of childbearing age actually increased during this period.
It’s no mystery why
People who are experiencing economic and financial difficulty are less likely to have children.
The missing babies have a macroeconomic effect. All those jobs that would have been created in hospital maternity wards and eventually day care centers, kindergartens, and public schools aren’t materializing.
And then there’s the billions of dollars that aren’t spent on baby food, diapers, and clothes. Plus, sometime around 2025, we may start noticing fewer new workers entering the labor force.
This plunge of birthrates is not a new phenomenon, by the way. Contrary to what many people believe, the developed world has been on the fast track to population decline since at least the 1970s—a trend visible in many countries, from Germany to Japan.
However, even without children, the primal human urge to care and nurture has to find an outlet. Which is where our furry friends come in.
A recession-proof industryFor many people, pets serve as a less expensive and less burdensome substitute for children. You get an idea just how much Americans adore their pets when you walk into PetSmart and see how much people spend on animal food, beds, and toys.
 Total U.S. Pet Industry Expenditures 1994 – 2016
Pets make our life better… but they definitely aren’t free.
According to the American Pet Products Association (APPA), US consumers will spend $62.75 billion on pet food, supplies, and services this year.
Even more interesting is the growth curve in pet spending. It’s been rising at the same time as human birth rates have been falling.
The APPA data shows that pet spending in 2007, before the Great Recession, was $41.2 billion. That means the market has grown over 50% since then, far faster than most other sectors of our sluggish economy.
Furthermore, pet spending has grown steadily every year for more than two decades.
You would think people cut back on pet expenses in recessions, but amazingly, that’s not the case. It’s that caring instinct again. Just as parents put their children’s needs ahead of their own, many pet owners will tighten their own budget in order to provide for their animals.
* * *
We live in an era of rapid change… and only those who see and understand the shifting market, economic, and political trends can make wise investment decisions. Macroeconomic forecaster Patrick Watson spots the trends and spells what they mean every week in the free e-letter, Connecting the Dots. Subscribe now for his seasoned insight into the surprising forces driving global markets. |
|
U.S. Healthcare Is A Global Outlier (And Not In A Good Way)by Tyler Durden Jan 1, 2017 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-01/us-healthcare-global-outlier-and-not-good-way Historically, the United States has spent more money than any other country on healthcare.
In the late 1990s, for example, the U.S. spent roughly 13% of GDP on healthcare, compared to about a 9.5% average for all high income countries.
However, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins notes, in recent years, the difference has become more stark. Last year, as Obamacare continued to roll out, costs in the U.S. reached an all-time high of 17.5% of GDP. That’s over $3 trillion spent on healthcare annually, and the rate of spending is expected accelerate over the next decade.
HIGH COSTS, HIGH BENEFIT?With all that money being poured into healthcare, surely the U.S. must be getting better care in contrast to other high income countries.
At least, that’s what one would think.
Today’s chart comes to us from economist Max Roser (h/t @NinjaEconomics) and it shows the extreme divergence of the U.S. healthcare system using two simple stats: life expectancy vs. health expenditures per capita.
 life expectancy vs. health expenditures per capita. Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist THE DIVERGENCE OF U.S. HEALTHCAREAs you can see, Americans are spending more money – but they are not receiving results using the most basic metric of life expectancy. The divergence starts just before 1980, and it widens all the way to 2014.
It’s worth noting that the 2015 statistics are not plotted on this chart. However, given that healthcare spend was 17.5% of GDP in 2015, the divergence is likely to continue to widen. U.S. spending is now closing in on $10,000 per person.
Perhaps the most concerning revelation from this data?
Not only is U.S. healthcare spending wildly inefficient, but it’s also relatively ineffective. It would be one thing to spend more money and get the same results, but according to the above data that is not true. In fact, Americans on average will have shorter lives people in other high income countries.
Life expectancy in the U.S. has nearly flatlined, and it hasn’t yet crossed the 80 year threshold. Meanwhile, Chileans, Greeks, and Israelis are all outliving their American counterparts for a fraction of the associated costs.
|
|
EU Parliament Committee Votes To Give Robots Rights (And A Kill Switch)Jan 14, 2017 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-14/eu-parliament-committee-votes-give-robots-rights-and-kill-switch Submitted by Jake Anderson via TheAntiMedia.org,
Foreseeing a rapidly approaching age of autonomous artificial intelligence, a European Parliament committee has voted to legally bestow electronic personhood to robots. The status includes a detailed list of rights, responsibilities, regulations, and a “kill switch.”
The committee voted by 17 votes to two, with two abstentions, to approve a draft report written by Luxembourg MEP Mady Delvaux, who believes “robots, bots, androids and other manifestations of artificial intelligence” will spawn a new industrial revolution. She wants to establish a European Agency to develop rules for how to govern AI behavior. Specifically, Delvaux writes about how increased levels of autonomy in robot entities will make usual manufacturing liability laws insufficient. It will become necessary, the report states, to be able to hold robots and their manufacturers legally responsible for their acts.
Sounding at times like a governmental whisper of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, the report states, “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”
The rules will also affect AI developers, who, according to the report, will have to engineer robots in such a way that they can be controlled. This includes a “kill switch,” a mechanism by which rogue robots can be terminated or shut down remotely.
The report acknowledges that robots and automation continue to intrude on the human workforce while noting that in certain instances — the cleanup of industrial waste and toxic pollutants, for example — this will be advantageous. However, Delvaux does not believe robots will completely replace humans in the near future; she believes they will work together.
Despite this optimistic note, she issued a stern warning:
This echoes a different warning issued by Stephen Hawking, who believes the combination of capitalism and automation holds the potential for emboldening a globalist oligarchy with disastrous levels of human inequality. An automated, machine-based economic system, Hawking believes, may pose a bigger existential threat to humans than the malevolent killer robots depicted in popular science fiction films.
Will Delvaux’s European Agency of robot regulations do anything to help curb economic inequality? Likely not, but it sounds as if at least some European leaders are taking seriously the idea of a sea change in robotics and artificial intelligence in the coming decade. The question that remains is how viable it is to think government can or should constrain exponentially advancing artificial intelligence with regulations.
The next step for the report is the full house, where it must receive a majority of votes to be ratified.
|
|
Examples of what has happened to Jews in New York City:
Friday, March 4, 2016 Guest Post: Greek Jews Syrian Jewshttps://shilohmusings.blogspot.co.il/2016/03/greek-jews-syrian-jews.html * * * Greek NYC Jews and Syrian NYC Jews * * * a short historical essay by Mr. Cohen, the moderator of the Derech Emet Yahoo Group: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Over the past 35 years, I noticed that the highest intermarriage rates [between Jews and non-Jews] are found in communities where Reform Judaism is most dominant, and the lowest intermarriage rates are found in communities where Reform Judaism does not exist.
Around the 1920s [of the Common Era], tens of thousands of Jews came from Greece to New York City, and tens of thousands of Jews came from Syria to New York City. In the 1920s, the numbers of Greek Jews and Syrian Jews in New York City were approximately equal. Their observance of Jewish rituals was also approximately equal.
Around that time, the Greek Jews of NYC decided to follow Reform Judaism, while the Syrian Jews followed Orthodox Judaism.
By the 1980s, the Greek Jews of NYC [and the USA] were so few in number that there was only ONE Greek Synagogue in NYC, and that ONE Greek Synagogue functioned mostly as a museum. The very few Greek Jews of NYC were intermarrying with Gentiles at a very high rate, and very few participated in any kind Jewish activities. One Greek Jew who I personally spoke to had decided to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day instead of Purim.
By the 1990s, the Syrian Jews of NYC had grown exponentially, with many new synagogues that did not exist in previous decades, and more-than-enough new Syrian Jews to fill those new synagogues with active members. Their rate of intermarriage with non-Jews was LESS THAN ONE PERCENT [<1%].
By year 2015, the Greek Jews of NYC were so few in number that their community had basically ceased to exist. They had no schools, and only that one synagogue which mostly functioned as a museum.
The Syrian Jews of NYC also added new mikvahs to their infrastructure, while the Greek Jews of NYC had no mikvahs. By year 2015 the Syrian Jews of NYC had two of their own monthly magazines, while the Greek Jews had none. By year 2015 the Syrian Jews of NYC had produced dozens of Rabbis, while the Greek Jews had none. In the early 1980s the Greek Jews still had their own social club, called The Pashas. In dramatic contrast, the Sephardic Community Center (which is misnamed, because it is really the Syrian-Jewish Community Center) has often been filled to capacity or near-capacity since it was built in year 1982, which is impressive, when you consider the large size of the SCC building.
The Sephardic Bikur Cholim (which is misnamed, because it is really the Syrian-Jewish Bikur Cholim) is very active with many programs and its own building. The Greek Jews of NYC do not have their own Bikur Cholim organization.
Less than a century later, the Greeks Jews [of NYC], who chose Reform Judaism, have vanished; while the Syrian Jews [of NYC], who chose Orthodox Judaism, enjoy a rapidly-growing community and seem to have a bright future. BOTTOM LINE: Reform Judaism causes entire communities of Jews to become extinct,
PS: This short essay reveals a piece of Jewish History
PS: The Persian Jewish community of NYC, which has never known Reform Judaism, also has an extremely low intermarriage rate. While I do not have exact statistics for Persian Jews, their intermarriage rate seems to be so low that it cannot possibly threaten their future.
PS: The difference between Greeks Jews and Syrian Jews is also demonstrated by their Hollywood celebrity representatives: 4 comments:Batya Medad said… Thanks for posting. Very interesting. 5/3/16 19:10 Anonymous said… Have always had the greatest respect for the Syrian Jewish community. They are probably the most intact Jewish community of all. Intermarriage was always almost unheard of; they were even reluctant for their offspring to marry within the Ashkenazic community; today, that is not true and, fortunately, the east/west are intramarrying, as should be. We are one people. They are even reluctant to having conversions within their midst. A great yasher koach to them – true descendants of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov. Whereas, apparently, the Greek community has kept up with the same hellinization as their ancestors, r’l. Just by turning to the Reform, rather than true Judaism, shows their mindset. 6/3/16 04:38 CDG, Yerushalayim, Eretz Yisrael Shlemah said… Unfortunately, my mother was cut off from the Syrian community she was born into by well-meaning Ashkenazi social workers in the 1930s and given to a non-religious Ashkenazi family. Long story; but to make it short, she married a non-religious Ashkenazi and I am the result. So, what’s a virtually infinitesimal percentage lost? It means a lot to me because I had a 100% chance of suffering the hardship it took me to return to Judaism at all, never mind the Syrian community; and, thankfully, I was still acceptable to return to our homeland. It’s been even harder for my mother. Note to Mr. Cohen: I just want to let you know that http://www.ArabsForIsrael.com doesn’t work any longer. You might want to check out the links you post to make sure they all work. It’s good that you spread them around. And, if your family comes from Haifa and goes back at least as long as 1900CE there (and probably much longer than that), there’s a chance I might be distantly related to you, sir. 6/3/16 19:39 Mr. Cohen said… www.ArabsForIsrael.com had been replaced by: http://ArabsForIsrael.blogspot.com/ |
|
White South Africans Are Preparing For “Removal of All Whites Within Five Years”by Tyler Durden May 5, 2017 https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-04/white-south-africans-are-preparing-slaughter-and-removal-all-whites-within-five-year Authoreed by Daniel Lang via SHTFplan.com,
Back in March, the President of South Africa made a shocking suggestion, which left many white landowners fearing that they may face a race war in the near future. In a speech, Jacob Zuma announced that he wanted the government to begin confiscating white owned lands, before redistributing them to black South Africans.
Obviously, this kind of talk doesn’t bode well for the future of South Africa. You have the leaders of the first and third most popular political parties, both of which promote socialist ideas, openly declaring that they want the government to steal from an entire racial group. Since these political parties wouldn’t be in power unless they had some degree of popular support, it’s clear that black South Africans are increasingly turning against their white neighbors. It’s a perfect recipe for genocide.
It’s conditions like that which have spawned organizations like the Suidlanders; a massive civilian-run civil defense group that is dedicated to protecting Afrikaaners in the event of social collapse or civil war. They’re currently getting ready for the possibility of a government implemented genocide of white South Africans. One of their leaders recently spoke to Infowars, and explained how they plan to respond to that threat.
However, the organization doesn’t plan to take up arms, and their best plan so far will only accommodate a minority of whites in the country.
It’s sad that it has come to this. Once the most wealthy and developed nation on the continent, South Africa is quickly turning into an economic basket case, brimming with racial tensions that could spill over at any time. Once again, socialism and multiculturalism have proven to be total failures. |
|
EU at clear risk of collapse, warns major new report by Gwythian PrinsWritten by Gwythian Prins https://briefingsforbrexit.com/eu-at-clear-risk-of-collapse-warns-major-new-report-by-gwythian-prins/ The European Union is at clear risk of collapse, according to a new study of the rise, decline and fall of human empires. The full study by Professor Gwythian Prins is published on the REPORTS page of this website.
The analysis concludes that the mounting complexity and declining legitimacy of the EU contains the seeds of its coming downfall, in much the same way that the Soviet empire imploded between 1989 and 1991.
The study declares: “The tentacles of regulation reached ever wider and deeper under such instruments as the Social Chapter and on the road to the single currency. But the gains came harder and were fewer; and the rebuffs became more frequent and bitter. “After much struggle and manoeuvre, in 1999 the Euro was launched and that was the apogee in the life of the EU so far… Since then, further added complexity has produced negative marginal gains.
“Since the turn of the century, things have been steadily falling apart. Belief in the triumph of the will to promote the Vanguard Myth has spun a vicious circle: the ‘project’ drives forward ever more relentlessly; and in reaction the people become ever more disaffected, making it necessary to impose more instruments of control more stringently.
“Gains for the ‘project’ have become increasingly pyrrhic because of the cost in social alienation.
“A major watershed was crossed in 2005-6. Divergence between the elite and their subjects was acute over the push for a formal EU Constitution. The grandiose …draft European Constitution was approved by governments but rejected by referenda in two core states, France and the Netherlands.”
The report has been written by Gwythian Prins, Emeritus Research Professor at the London School of Economics. It applies a research method to the EU that was created by the American archaeologist Professor Joseph Tainter, who has studied the factors behind the collapse of past empires such as Rome, Minoa and the Egyptian Old Kingdom.
Tainter in turn drew on techniques employed by investment managers to calculate the declining marginal returns of growing social complexity. The diagram summarises the report’s main finding.  Fig 2-marginal returns on complexity rising then falling the history of the EU superimposed
Professor Prins writes of the period after the curve turns downwards that seen from the point of view of those running the EU: “The dynamic has turned negative. The dragon we are riding has turned its head and it singes us with its fiery breath: for the greater the investment in more complexity at this point of our journey, rammed through because we Guardians know best, even as we know that many of our ignorant or stupid subjects are resentful and even mutinous, the more that investment is actually pushing our empire into the risk zone for collapse… “We even have to force populations who make the wrong choices in referenda (as we judge them) to vote again until they make the right choices. Or we run out of patience and just ignore their votes.”
He details trends and events that show the mounting internal resistance to the remorseless imposition of the Empire’s rules, regulations and interference. Two watersheds are highlighted: the Dutch rejection of the 2005 European Constitution later smuggled through as the Lisbon Treaty, which the Irish first rejected and then ratified and the period that opened with the 2015 Greek crisis, continued with the German backlash against Angela Merkel’s open-door immigration policy, the Brexit vote of 2016 and now the Italian crisis of 2018. “All this evidence of citizen rejection while the ‘project’ responds with further acceleration, has plainly taken the EU into the Zone of Risk of Collapse; and that is where now it stands, shakily but defiant, belittling, bullying, hoping to dishearten the British in order to deter any other prospective escapees and intent on punishing us for our sovereign decision to leave the EU. It is hardly a sign of self-confidence.
Professor Prins points out that the dictatorial and bullying Soviet Union lasted just 70 years and, when it fell, collapsed in a heap. He argues the EU shows similar characteristics which mean that it risks the same fate and that the vote to leave the EU by the British was a rational response to an organisation that was failing badly and no longer enhancing their lives.
He writes: “The ‘project’ is sixty one years old this month. Absence of cultural reproduction suggests that, like its older sibling (the Soviet Union), it should not expect to outlast a human life-span. In Tainter’s terms, people respond to sensed declining productivity of benefits from complexity quite logically, by opting to revert to a lower level of complexity commensurate with the public goods that they wish for and value. “Highly complex social organisations, Tainter reminds us, are recent in human history. If ‘loss of the umbrella of service and protection that an administration provides are seen as fearful events, truly paradise lost’ then collapse must be seen as catastrophe. “But with his archaeologist’s sense of time-scale, Tainter ends by reminding us that ‘collapse is not a fall into some primordial chaos, but a return to a normal human condition of lower complexity.’ Collapse is not a synonym for catastrophe. It can be a salvation. “Think about what this implies for the logic of Brexiteers: ‘to the extent that collapse is due to declining marginal returns on investment in complexity, it is an economizing process,’ the archaeologist writes.
“So on Tainter’s analysis, we see that far from being a failure to adapt to the progressive advance of history by ignorant or stupid or culturally primitive racists “driven by nostalgia”, as Sir Vince Cable has just informed us from his taxi-cab sized political base, the decision to leave an EU that on political, economic and cultural indicators is squarely within the zone of risk of collapse, may be – actually is – the most appropriate and prudent response.” |
|
India Faces Mass Hospitalizations As Mystery Disease Strikesby Tyler Durden 07December2020 – https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/mystery-disease-strikes-india-mass-hospitalization-one-dead
As coronavirus continues to spread across the world, a mysterious illness has been detected in India, with hundreds of people admitted to local hospitals and at least one dead.
New Delhi Television Limited (NDTV) reports that nearly 400 people have contracted a mystery illness that has emerged in Eluru, India. At least one person died on Dec. 5. Local health officials are baffled and have yet to find the source of the illness.
 India sick Source: AP Those who contracted the mysterious illness in the city, which is in the state of Andhra Pradesh, experienced seizures, loss of consciousness, and nausea over the weekend.
 TRT World Now-tweet-7December2020-Dead
This comes as Andhra Pradesh is one of the worst-affected states of COVID-19. Doctors ruled out that none of the patients were infected with the virus.
Andhra Pradesh’s Health Department published a notice that the patients’ initial blood tests didn’t detect any viral infection, such as dengue or chikungunya.
Government authorities are now testing water samples in Eluru for possible contamination after many of the patients said they received water from a similar source.
The mass hospitalization over the weekend has prompted a special team of doctors to arrive in the city early this week to conduct an investigation about possible sources of the illness.
 G Kishan Reddy-tweet-07December2020-statement of sudden illness
|
