On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35% of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt. The private banks want to avoid any losses either by forcing the Greek, Italian, and Spanish governments to make good on the bonds by imposing extreme austerity on their citizens, or by having the European Central Bank print euros with which to buy the sovereign debt from the private banks. Printing money to make good on debt is contrary to the ECB's charter and especially frightens Germans, because of the Weimar experience with hyperinflation.Obviously, the German government got the message from the orchestrated failed bond auction. As I wrote at the time, there is no reason for Germany, with its relatively low debt to GDP ratio compared to the troubled countries, not to be able to sell its bonds. If Germany's creditworthiness is in doubt, how can Germany be expected to bail out other countries? Evidence that Germany's failed bond auction was orchestrated is provided by troubled Italy's successful bond auction two days later.Strange, isn't it. Italy, the largest EU country that requires a bailout of its debt, can still sell its bonds, but Germany, which requires no bailout and which is expected to bear a disproportionate cost of Italy's, Greece's and Spain's bailout, could not sell its bonds.In my opinion, the failed German bond auction was orchestrated by the US Treasury, by the European Central Bank and EU authorities, and by the private banks that own the troubled sovereign debt.
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Intro | ||
Change is difficult, especially for children, but I was almost used to it. When I was a child, my daddy, Raymond Oakley, would travel to wherever he was hired to cure tobacco on large farms, as some men did trying to take care of their families. We were tenant tobacco farmers. Each year until about the time I entered high school, we moved to a different farm about Christmastime.
In Granville County, as a family of five, we farmed and faced lean years when there was no car and no money for frivolity. A two-horse wagon and our legs provided our transportation. Before tractors and electricity were widely used, before farmers gave up nighttime work for the comforts of home and the flicker of television sets, we found our entertainment in various simple ways.
It was 1949, and I was in the fifth grade at Creedmoor High School. Tobacco was cured in an old log barn where the sticky green leaves were strung up on sticks and dried by burning hardwood night and day. Daddy sometimes would allow me, along with my sister Margaret (“Monk”) and brother Archie (“Buck”), to spend the night at the curing barns where he’d wake up to check on the temperature and stoke the fire in the wood-burning flues. We listened as summer’s cicadas sang under a pale moon on into the night. We thought it was exciting to sleep on the table used to string tobacco, wrapped in one of the patchwork quilts made by my mama, Prudie Brogden Oakley.
One day early in the year, Daddy was cutting down trees that he would later split with a maul and wedge, then burn in the barn flues. He spotted a crow’s nest in a tall pine tree that he had chopped down. The nest had in it a young crow whose head feathers were not yet glossy, but more fluffy. It was just a baby. Young crows usually remain with their parents until they can find a home of their own, and this one had no family that we could see. But he had found a home.
Daddy kept his wings clipped, and our whole family loved Blackie. He would eat grain, earthworms, insects, seeds, fruit and bird eggs. Daddy fed Blackie small chunks of liver once in a while.
Soon Blackie was my constant companion, playing and working on the farm. He rode the handle bars of my shiny, maroon bicycle as Monk and I pedaled just short of a mile to the neighborhood store where we’d meet the school bus. Blackie would return home alone. In the afternoon, he’d be at the store, and we’d ride home together. I sometimes wondered how he could tell the time. With Blackie perched on the polished chrome bars of my bike, my head thrown back and the wind racing through my long hair, we sped along, skimming happily down the road. Once, Mr. Yeargin, the store owner, said to Daddy, “There’s a crow that keeps flying around my store. I got my gun to shoot at him.” Well, Daddy didn’t like that, and in a no-nonsense manner replied, “You’d better not shoot that crow! He’s my children’s pet.”
When work time came, Blackie joined our family in the fields. I thought that worming tobacco was disgusting, but Blackie would wander up and down the rows of plants plucking off the hornworms that ate large holes in the tobacco leaves. I tried but couldn’t bring myself to take off the nasty worms and crush their heads like my family did. So I used an old pair of scissors to snip off the head while the worm was still on the leaf. At harvest time, I drove a harnessed mule to the barn, hitched to slides that carried primed, green leaves of tobacco for stringing on the sticks. Blackie rode on my shoulder or bummed a ride on the back of the slide.
Blackie’s stash
Around about this time, Mama started missing items from her kitchen. She especially missed her good scissors. It turned out that when Blackie saw the opportunity, he’d hop into the house, select an object and fly to a hollow in a huge oak tree at our back door. When my parents realized what was happening, Daddy climbed a ladder and retrieved Blackie’s stock of hoarded goods, including silverware and Mama’s scissors. It seemed that gleaming items caught his sharp eye.
The stable that housed the work mules was down the path from our house. Sitting in the loft of the stable with the end door open, Blackie would look out with piercing eyes watching for Mama’s hens to lay fresh eggs in their nests. He would then perch on the small ladder the hens used to walk up to their nests. Daddy would say, “He can pop his bill in an egg and suck it out before you know it!”
That summer he sometimes became frightened by the loud noise of discharging dynamite set off by men building a huge pond on the farm. He didn’t have a companion crow to watch out for him as crows often have. A watch crow will fly out and keep a keen eye focused to warn others of danger.
As the long days of summer came to a close, the tobacco crop was sold at the warehouse in town, and the corn was pulled and stored in the corncrib to feed the animals. Winter was on the way. We noticed that Blackie would stay away from the house for extended periods of time. Daddy had ceased clipping his wings. He said one day, “The other crows sit in the trees close to the stable and call out to him.” And we also heard Blackie’s common call, a harsh “caw,” in answer. Daddy eventually said, “We won’t hold him any longer. We’ll let him go free.”
Sad as we were, our hearts knew it was the right thing to do. “Blackie wouldn’t have gone if he hadn’t wanted to,” Daddy told us. “Let him do as he pleases.”
I began to understand that no matter how much you love something or someone, for whatever the reason there comes a releasing time. And it does hurt.
And at the end of that year, we moved too, on to another farm.
Finally
Finally in 1955, we landed on a farm that Daddy loved. It had cleared fertile land, a big roomy house for our family, ponds to water the crops, wide open spaces, excellent barns and outside buildings, and a small tenant home where Daddy could house folks to help us work. And most important, it was very close to our church. We were thankful for a fair-minded landlord who respected and trusted Daddy’s wisdom and ability to raise tobacco. We could draw water from a hand pump instead of from a bucket on a chain. And for the first time, my parents owned the equipment to work the farm and could purchase the livestock.
Those long-gone days of my childhood are treasured memories of the post World War II years. They were simple times with simple pleasures, when little was much and seemed to be enough.
Even though I’ve had numerous pets throughout my life, there is a special part of my memory reserved for a fantastic, down-to-earth, ordinary black crow, simply called “Blackie.”
Peggy Norwood lives in Creedmoor, Granville County.
Starting next year, jaguars will be the target of an extensive network of remote cameras placed across Southern Arizona and southwest New Mexico.
In a three-year, $771,000 project that has been greeted warmly by environmentalists but warily by cattle growers, University of Arizona researchers will try to learn more about the status and presence of the endangered animal.
Fifteen years after the jaguar was listed as endangered in the U.S., this project will try to determine how often it roams from Mexico to the United States and back, said Melanie Culver, the project's principal investigator and a geneticist for the U.S. Geological Survey and the UA's School of Natural Resources.
Referring to the adult male jaguar photographed in Cochise County Saturday, Culver added that the project will try to learn, "Is this the only one?"
The Fed’s latest actions in cooperating with foreign central banks to undertake liquidity swaps of dollars for foreign currencies is another reason why Congress needs enhanced power to oversee and audit the Fed. Under current law Congress cannot examine these types of agreements. Those who would argue that auditing the Fed or these agreements with central banks harms the Fed’s independence should reevaluate the Fed’s supposed independence when the Fed bails out Europe so soon after President Obama promised US assistance in resolving the Euro crisis.
Rather than calming markets, these arrangements should indicate just how frightened governments around the world are about the European financial crisis. Central banks are grasping at straws, hoping that flooding the world with money created out of thin air will somehow resolve a crisis caused by uncontrolled government spending and irresponsible debt issuance. Congress should not permit this type of open-ended commitment on the part of the Fed, a commitment which could easily run into the trillions of dollars. These dollar swaps are purely inflationary and will harm American consumers as much as any form of quantitative easing.
Embattled Attorney General Eric Holder today demanded The Daily Caller stop publishing articles about the growing calls in Congress for his resignation because of the failed Operation Fast and Furious gun-walking program.
As Holder’s aide was escorting the attorney general offstage following his remarks Tuesday afternoon at the White House, a Daily Caller reporter introduced himself and shook Holder’s hand. The reporter asked him for a response to the growing chorus of federal legislators demanding his resignation.
Holder stepped towards the exit, then turned around, stepped back toward the reporter, and sternly said, “You guys need to — you need to stop this. It’s not an organic thing that’s just happening. You guys are behind it.”
Holder then walked offstage without answering TheDC’s request for comment about calls for his resignation.
Watch:
There have been several serious attempts to rein in the decidedly pro-union National Labor Relations Board in 2011. While some bills were passed in the House, they stalled in the Senate. The result is that there’s been little real progress in trying to control an unaccountable, “independent,” but tax-payer funded federal agency that arbitrarily promotes rules and regulations that heavily favor unions.
The NLRB, which gained considerable notoriety for the Boeing incident, is currently engaged in trying to rush a new rule into effect that would reduce the time required for a unionization election process to as few as 10 days. Because of public outcry over complicated and controversial political techniques by the Board, the original NLRB union rule proposal has been scaled back somewhat. However, the principle that a federal agency residing in the Executive Branch shouldn’t legislate, as that is the sphere of the Legislative Branch, is still being violated. Congressman John Kline (R-Minn.) therefore, introduced new legislation that will be considered in the House on November 30 that counters the NLRB’s newest rule.
House Resolution 3094, the Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act, would “amend the National Labor Relations Act with respect to representation hearings and the timing of elections of labor organizations under that Act.” It also in effect, “reverses the NLRB's August 26, 2011, decision in Specialty Healthcare and Rehabilitation of Mobile and its June 22, 2011, rulemaking regarding proposed changes to procedures involving the election of collective bargaining representation.”
Under H.R. 3094 employers would have at least 14 days to prepare their case for a NLRB election officer, and no union election could be held until at least 35 days after a petition is filed for an election. This legislation ensures that employers are able to participate in a fair union election process, guarantees workers have the ability to make a fully informed decision, reinstates the traditional standards for determining which employees will vote, and also safeguards privacy by allowing workers to decide how much personal information can be provided to a union.
After an October 12 congressional hearing regarding H.R. 3094, the Associated Builders and Contractors stated in a press release, “the NLRB’s ‘ambush’ elections proposal” would “significantly impede the ability of construction industry employers to protect their free speech rights” and “hinders the free choice of workers to make a fully informed decision in a union election campaign.” Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson described the NLRB proposal as an "abusive power grab by the NRLB.”
It’s difficult enough in today’s economic crisis to run a business that is often burdened by mountains of costly regulations from various government agencies without having unfair and unjust edicts from the NLRB to cope with as well. While H.R. 3094 certainly doesn’t fix all that is wrong with the NLRB, at least the latest and most blatant pro-union action by the NLRB can be rectified through passage of this bill.
Stop the NLRB from circumventing Congressional authority by pressuring your Representative and Senators into supporting H.R. 3094. Tell them to help protect free enterprise by reducing the power of the NLRB, a federal agency that costs our nation jobs and hurts small businesses, as well as discounting and undermining workers' and employers’ rights.
Thanks,
Your friends at The John Birch Society
America's newest Medal of Honor recipient has filed a lawsuit against his former employer, defense contractor BAE Systems, alleging the company and his supervisor there punished him for his opposition to a weapons sale to Pakistan and prevented him from finding other work by portraying him as a problem drinker and mentally unstable.
Dakota Meyer, who was awarded the honor in September, objected to the company's sale of high-tech armaments to Pakistan, according to the lawsuit, saying the U.S. weapons sale is "giving to guys who are known to stab us in the back" and "the same people who are killing our guys."
In response, BAE is carefully pushing forward with defending itself in the case while not personally criticizing the Medal of Honor recipient.
The famous oak tree was toppled by high winds this past June. Now, thieves have stolen the "remains.""A 350-year-old oak known as the Stonewall Jackson Prayer Tree was reported stolen Tuesday, the Augusta County Sheriff's Office said."The owner had donated the tree from which items were to be crafted and sold, with the funds being donated to the Wounder Warriors project.I'm curious as to why someone would steal it though. They can't sell it without being caught. Perhaps some ole boy is, as I type this, warming his feet by a log fire. Oh, perish the thought. Let's all pray the thief/thieves get caught.Fellow CW blogger Robert Moore gives a good summation of how the tree came to be known as "Jackson's Prayer Tree" here.More here.
Three days before the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt was warned in a memo from naval intelligence that Tokyo's military and spy network was focused on Hawaii, a new and eerie reminder of FDR's failure to act on a basket load of tips that war was near.
In the newly revealed 20-page memo from FDR's declassified FBI file, the Office of Naval Intelligence on December 4 warned, "In anticipation of open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii."
The federal government has offered western Wake towns a double-edged deal. The General Services Administration will divulge details about an immigration-law enforcement and short-term detention facility slated for the area, but the towns must agree to keep quiet.
GSA officials say they're being as open as possible under federal laws that require secretive planning for the 19,000-square-foot facility, which could land anywhere from Garner to Morrisville. But some local leaders say the offer is a Catch-22, and they're unsure whether they could oblige without breaking state public records laws.
"If you sign the contract, then you can't tell citizens what's going on. And if something bad comes up, then you're screwed," said Cary Mayor Harold Weinbrecht. "If you don't sign the contract ... if something comes up, people get ticked off and you're screwed."
President Barack Obama has one of the worst approval ratings of any president in modern political history, Paul Bedard notes in his Washington Whispers blog in US News.
Obama’s 43 percent rating in Gallup’s daily presidential job approval index today is far below Democrat Jimmy Carter’s 51 percent at the same point in his presidency. Carter has been considered one of the 20th century’s worst presidents, according to the index.
Political experts consider the ratings a crystal ball with the potential for predicting a president’s chances for re-election.
Historically, it has been difficult for incumbents to remain in office if their approval ratings are below 47 percent. At this same stage of Dwight Eisenhower’s term, the popular Republican president had an approval rating of 78 percent.
Bedard chronicles the approval ratings of other presidents at this point in their presidencies:
The pat answer from the Fed is that propping up failed banks long enough to be taken over by "healthy" institutions is better for the system than letting them fail. On the surface that's true, but it's what's under the surface that's destroying America's free market foundation.
Here's what's come as a result of the Fed's actions: The "Super-Six" – JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C), Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) – which held $6.8 trillion, or about half the industry's assets in 2006, had increased their holdings by 39% to $9.5 trillion as of September 2011.
So what's really going on is that the country's biggest banks, which weren't healthy when their CEOs lied to us (as they still do), have gotten even bigger.
With size comes power – the power to pay lobbyists, the power to pay for legislators, and the power to change regulations.
These banks don't always get what they want exactly when they want it, but they do eventually get what they need to make money hand over fist.
The whole thing reminds me of a Ponzi scheme.
The Federal Reserve might as well be Bernie Madoff and the banks "feeder funds" in this nationalized scheme to perpetuate the channeling of depositor money into banks and investor money into bank stocks and debt securities.
For the chain to be broken the Federal Reserve is going to have to be overhauled – seriously overhauled – and big banks are going to have to be broken up, once and for all.
US Budget in 1/100th of a Second - $1210For the year 2011:
- The US Government spends $1210 per 1/100th of a second (both portions)
- The portion to the right is money borrowed by US Government to fill the the gap caused by the budget deficit.
President Obama has said that one quality he prizes highly in his judicial appointments is empathy. “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom,” he told a Planned Parenthood conference way back in 2007. “The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.”
Alas, according to the American Bar Association, empathy isn’t good enough. Last week, news leaked that the ABA has secretly informed the White House that it rated 14 out of a potential 185 nominees for federal judgeships “unqualified” — most of them women and minorities put forth in the name of “diversity.”
Fourteen may not seem like many, but The New York Times (which broke the story) reports that it’s more than the combined number of judges the ABA “flunked” during the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (who stopped submitting his nominations to the ABA).
After some huffing about racism and discrimination against women, the administration chose not to nominate any of the 14. With Republicans continuing to block many of Obama’s choices, it’s no time for another losing fight.
But this won’t stop Obama & Co.’s mad pursuit of “diversity” (narrowly defined in terms of race and sex) or from elevating politically correct “empathy” over what should be a judge’s chief consideration, fidelity to the law.
Verbatim Post
For atheists, the First Amendment is a one-way street. They don’t believe in “freedom of religion” but “freedom from religion.” The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) sent a letter to the Onslow County Board of Commissioners on Nov. 16, asking the board to stop Sheriff Ed Brown from creating any more ads about religion.
Sheriff Brown published an advertisement in The Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C., written in letter format and addressed it to “All Decent and Respectable Citizens of a Decent and Respectable Society.” The FFRF wants the Board of Commissioners to stop him from publishing similar advertisements in the future. The FFRF also wants Brown to issue an apology, and says the board should take disciplinary action against him.
The First Amendment, if it even applies to the states, states the following:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
As you can see, the prohibition is addressed to Congress not to the state of North Carolina or its counties. In fact, the first Amendment was demanded by the states to keep the national government and its courts out of the religious business of the states. Even if the First Amendment does apply to the states, there is this line: “Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. So what the FFRF is attempting to do is have the county commissioners violate the Constitution.
Then there are the provisions that prohibit the government from “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” So it seems to me that Sherrif Brown is on solid constitutional ground.
North Carolina’s constitution has an interesting history when it comes to religion. Article XXXII of North Carolina’s 1776 Constitution is specifically Christian by stating the following qualifications for public officers in the state:
“No person who shall deny the being of God, or the truth of the Protestant religion, or the divine authority of the Old or New Testaments, or who shall hold religious principles incompatible with the freedom and safety of the State, shall be capable of holding any office or place of trust or profit in the civil department within this State.”
This provision remained in force until 1835 when it was amended by changing the word “Protestant” to “Christian,” and as so amended remained in force until the Constitution of 1868 which describes North Carolina as a “Christian State” (Art. XI, sec. 7). The present Preamble reads:
“We, the people of the State of North Carolina, grateful to Almighty God, the Sovereign Ruler of Nations, for the preservation of the American Union and the existence of our civil, political and religious liberties, and acknowledging our dependence upon Him for the continuance of those blessings to us and our posterity, do, for the more certain security thereof and for the better government of this State, ordain and establish this Constitution.
The following was included in Sheriff Brown’s ad: “When America turns back to God’s Law and man’s standards established from God’s Law, good and decent things will turn around for All Americans.” How is this statement a violation of the North Carolina Constitution when it describes God as “the Sovereign Ruler of nations”? A sovereign ruler has rules. Rules are laws.
Is their historical precedent for government officials publishing religious statements in newspapers?
George Washington’s 1789 “Thanksgiving Proclamation” was published in the October 14th issue of the Massachusetts Centinel and includes the president’s signature. The Preamble states that “it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.” Like North Carolina’s present constitution, Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation describes God as “Lord and Ruler of Nations.”
If Sheriff Brown’s advertisement violates either the Federal or state of North Carolina constitution, then President Washington, who was present at the drafting of the national Constitution and the First Amendment, was a significant violator of the law. I guess that puts Sheriff Brown in good company.
Just so you know, Sheriff Brown paid for the ads with this own money.
The people at the Freedom From Religion Foundation are either ignorant of this history or hope that the majority of people who read The Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C. are. They are also playing the “fear factor” card. They’re hoping that a threat of a lawsuit will persuade the commissioners to issue a reprimand to the sheriff. I’ll keep you posted.
Newly released White House Visitor Logs list Grindler as having visited the White House 40 times, but only four times with the President himself. All four meetings with the President occurred over a two-week period, between 7 May 2010 and 19 May 2010. . .
Summary: In early 2010, Gary Grindler was intimately involved in all aspects of Operation Fast and Furious. During the height of the operation, Grindler visited the President on four separate occasions in only two weeks -- his only documented meetings with the president at the White House.
So my question is this:
V. Official Opposition to the Transatlantic Counterjihad
The Origins of Anti-Islamic Sentiment
The Islamization of Europe was a (perhaps inadvertent) byproduct of the need to import foreign labor to the continent in the decades after the Second World War. The process fed on itself, as liberal immigration laws and “family reunification” policies brought ever-increasing numbers of unassimilable foreigners, most of them Muslims, into Western Europe. The official state policy of Multiculturalism allowed newcomers to disappear into ever-growing enclaves, where they could live and function as if they were in their native countries, without any requirement that they integrate into the host population.
The Cape Fear Historical Institute will have an information table at this Saturday’s Christmas Open House at Harmony Hall, Noon to 6PM -- one of the few remaining plantations of the colonial era of North Carolina and which is experiencing an ongoing restoration. The plantation was self-sufficient and raised crops and livestock for the inhabitants and export, including turpentine shipped down the Cape Fear River to Wilmington.
The circa-1768 house and property was the 12,000 acre home of Col. James Richardson, with outbuildings typical of a plantation of that era and into the nineteenth century – it remained in the Richardson family till 1874. On display are weapons of that period and working blacksmith shop, music in the nearby Chapel, storytellers, tours of all buildings – as well as costumed guides in colonial through antebellum planter attire. Please plan to attend.
The address is 1615 River Road in White Oak, near Elizabethtown. See www.HarmonyHallNC.com for more info.
Verbatim Post
The Look Like America bill, originally H.R. 1533, seemed a perfectly ordinary piece of feel-good legislation when proposed by Barack Osama Obama. “Our diversity is our strength,” he said. “We must increase the representation of minorites in our institutions to reflect our diverse population and ensure the fairness for which America stands.” Congress passed the bill without reading it. It was the sort of thing one passed. Besides, there was no money involved, and the bill was not obviously anti-Semitic.
Not obviously. But then one of the obscure policy shops that abound in Washington, the Committee for Ethnic Piety, filed suit against Harvard for noncompiance. The proximate cause was an article in the Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper, about a course called Math 55, the hardest math course at the univrsity and thus, Harvard liked to think, in America. The students in Math 55, reported the Crimson, were 45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, and 100 prcent male. The class didn't, said the Committee for Ethnic Piety, look like America.
It certainly didn't.
Harvard, ever sensitive to questions of justice, which it conflated with federal funding, agreed to make the class Look Like America. The administration asserted that only through inadvertence had it failed to notice the clear racism, sexism, and continent-ism occurring under its nose. It established a committee of reform, which set to work.
The first and most ticklish hurdle was The Jewish Question. Jews were two percent of the American population. At 45 percent in Math 55, they were over-represented by a factor of over twenty. The injustice was undeniable. Two percent of a class of twenty-five meant that Math 55 should contain half a Jew. It would then look like America. The Jewish students would have to go.
As news of the proposed ethnographic hecatomb spread across the country, alarm erupted among the prejudiced. Over seven hundred departments of engineering across the country protested. They could see where Looking Like America was going. Math departments, Silicon Valley, the National Institutes of Health—all reeked of injustice, meaning Koreans, Jews, Indianss, and Chinese, and were conscious of sin. They didn't Look Like America. They Looked Like Math 55. In the Bay area, the proportion of geniuses from India in computing was alarmingly high. Some laboratories Looked Like the Punjab. These malefactors knew well that the coming of justice would gut their enterprises.
Desperate to maintain their positions of racial and patriarchal privilege, they pointed out that the Jewish kids, like all the students in Math 55, had 800 math Boards and had done things like independently develop tensor calculus by the age of three. The view from the Gulch was expressed off-the-record by Dr. Gud Soma Darjeeling, president of Santa Clara Neurocomputing, which employed seventy PhDs in solid-state physics, including three Anglos. “Look, the US is in intellectual collapse. The average American university wouldn't qualify as a high-school in Japan. It's crazy. The whole world know it's crazy. But take out the Kims, Khans, Nguyens, Wangs, and Cohens, and what's left is Albania in 1750.”
The lead attorney for CEP, Patricia Mikoyan-Gurevich, wasn't having it.
“Ability doesn't exist, and occurs equally in all groups, and anyway justice is more important than patriarchal-racist abstractions. Sexism is clear at Harvard. When an entire class is male, it isn't by accident.”
With this, no one was in disagreement.
Asians were as problematic as Jews. If a Jewish pppulation of two percent required half a Jew in a class of twenty-five, then a six percent population of Aisans required an Asian-and-a-half. Various solutions were proposed. Perhaps a short, light-weight Gujarati would do, or maybe a prodigy of ten from Mumbai. Otherwise, admitting three Asians every two years might serve.
The paucity of females in Math 55 was easier to address. Harvard had already established that there was no difference in mathematical ability by firing a president who thought there might be. Since ability didn't exist and was found equally in everyone, the sxual balance was quickly rendered equitable by eliminating entrance requirements.
Harvard then set about the intricate matter of making the class thirteen percent black, sixteen percent Hispanic, a tenth of a percent Iroquois, and so on.
Meanwhile, CEP turned its attention to the lush pastures of music. The New York Philharmonic, being in New York, was discovered to consist disportionately of Italians, Jews, Hungarians, and so on. It Looked Like New York, which wouldn't do. The American Association of the Musically Hopeless, consisting of the deaf, tone-deaf, mutes, and amputees, filed suit on grounds that their membership was not represented at all. (They carefully overlooked the fact that they were over-represented among rock bands.) This brought up an important juridical question: Since most Americans could not play an instrument, should not the orchestra reflect this?
Thirteen years after the passage of the Look Like America bill, the United States ranked in international measures of mathematics just behind the Central African Republic, the New York Phil couldn't play Happy Birthday, and racial and sexual justice flourished. Yet the vexed problem of Math 55 had not been entirely solved. Progress had been made, yes. The class looked almost like America, counting on its fingers and showing no trace of patriarchalism, which in any event it couldn't spell. However, CEP's Committee on Oppressed and Marginalized Indigenous Peoples of Color noted that the class contained no student from oppressed peoples of the Amazon rain forest. CEP regarded national boundaries as essentially phallic, since they were longer than they were wide, and thus beneath notice.Harvard, distraught at finding yet another instance of its institutional racism, cast about for a suitable indigene.
After a laborious search the university discovered Wunxputl, a member of the Tloxyproctyl tribe of the Amazon Basin, consisting of twelve people who lived on yams and the flesh of the Three-Toed Sloth. Wunxputl was at Wellesley, where he served in a minor administrative position that had no responsibilities. He had been brought there seven years earlier by the anthropology department, so it could atone for White Guilt. It didn't matter that Wellesley was guilty of nothing. The atonement was a pleasant form of narcissism, allowing the faculty to congratulate themselves on their moral purity.
Harvard arranged with Wellesley to borrow Wunxputl for three minutes every seven years, which it had calculated would satisfy the demands of ethnic proportionality. Justice, at last, had been achieved.
Her language is crude; her feelings are real. Who can deny that her native London has been destroyed? Certainly not the Diversity on the tram, who, mouthing television commetary, can only claim they're doing jobs the Brits won't.
This woman has apparently been arrested for "racially aggravated public order offence." If any were in doubt of the true tolitarian nature of Cool Britannia, let Epic Tram Lady stand as an example.
Ramzpaul makes a powerful response (if a bit stretched analogy-wise): when European cities are overrun, none dare call it genocide.
Immediate action required!
Deep inside the National Defense Authorization Act (S. 1867) that the Senate is currently considering is a dangerous and unconstitutional portion that needs to be stripped out. Congress would grant the President the power to use the military in order to detain certain individuals, including American citizens, without trial or due process, indefinitely.
Section 1031 of the National Defense Authorization Act reads: “Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force … includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons…. [including] [d]etention under the law of war without trial....” This “indefinite detention” section hands over to the Executive Branch the power to have the military arrest U.S. citizens. No trial needed. Simple suspicion would suffice.
This could be quite reminiscent of Stalinist Russia where a knock on the door in the middle of the night meant that the person taken by the military was often never seen again, perhaps having been imprisoned in Siberia or executed. The Japanese American Citizens League has warned that this measure’s detention principles are similar to the ones that sent innocent Japanese-Americans into concentration camps during WW II.
Sadly, this bill has already been passed in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives with nary a whimper by a 322-96 vote. The excuse given for such an egregious disregard for the Constitution by supporters of the bill including authors Senators John McCain (R- Ariz.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) is that the provision would strengthen and codify the legal framework necessary for dealing with “terrorists.” Other supporters insist that the language doesn’t necessarily include American citizens.
U.S. Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) who voted against the bill in the House, thinks differently. Amash says the act would indeed “permit the federal government to indefinitely detain American citizens on American soil, without charge or trial, at the discretion of the President.” He notes that the language “does not preclude U.S. citizens from being detained indefinitely, without charge or trial, it simply makes such detention discretionary,” therefore it is misleading and outrageous.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is speaking out in opposition to the "indefinite detainment" provision of S. 1867. He is also offering an amendment that would simply strike out Section 1031 of the bill. As this alert is being written on November 29, the Senate is debating S. 1867 and could vote on the Paul amendment this evening or tomorrow, November 30. A related amendment by Senator Udall to revise the detainee provisions of S. 1867 has already been defeated today by a vote of 37 yeas and 61 nays.
Indefinite detention without due process leaves citizens without the legal protection of the Constitution and strikes at the heart of the essence of U.S. law. It is positively shameful that any elected representative would even consider voting for such an assault on so sacred a fundamental value as the right to due process.
Far too much power has already been either usurped or given over to the Executive Branch under the guise of national security. Contact your Senators immediately and demand that they safeguard individual freedom and liberty by upholding the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Have them support the Rand Paul amendment that would completely strike Section 1031 from S. 1867, or any other amendment that would accomplish the same purpose.
If one or more amendments are added to S. 1867, it will likely go to a conference committee and then return to both the House and the Senate for a final vote. So, a word to your Representative on this issue is also advised. Make sure you find out how he or she voted on the NDAA before getting in touch.
Thanks.
Your friends at The John Birch Society
Reporting from Colorado Springs, Colo.—In the still of a cold November evening, a small gathering of pagans, led by two witches, begins preparations for the coming winter solstice. But these are not just any pagans, and this is not just any setting. They are future officers of the United States Air Force practicing their faith in the basement of the Air Force Academy's cadet chapel.
Their ranks are slim. According to the academy's enrollment records, only three of 4,300 cadets identified themselves as pagans, followers of an ancient religion that generally does not worship a single god and considers all things in nature interconnected.
Still, the academy this year dedicated an $80,000 outdoor worship center — a small Stonehenge-like circle of boulders with propane fire pit — high on a hill for the handful of current or future cadets whose religions fall under the broad category of "Earth-based." Those include pagans, Wiccans, druids, witches and followers of Native American faiths.
This is the perfect time to view this video exposé of Newt Gingrich by John F. McManus, President of The John Birch Society. This video, an updated version of a 1996 video about Newt Gingrich, was released in 2009.
IV. The Rosetta Stone Projects
Beginning in 2008, the Transatlantic Counterjihad has developed a streamlined system for the translation of texts and the subtitling of videos. The process we use has been dubbed the “Rosetta Stone Project”, in honor of the famous ancient Egyptian stele deciphered by Jean-François Champollion in 1822.
When an important article, essay, or speech is published, a move is initiated among the various Counterjihad groups to have it translated into as many languages as possible. The influence of the text can be greatly extended if it is spread in multiple languages, and gives the author a much wider audience.
If the text is needed for subtitling a video, the propagation of the resulting translations can multiply the impact of the original version far past its initial range. Generally speaking, the typical Internet user prefers videos over articles, and YouTube is particularly effective at the “viral” spread of video-based ideas.
The importance of any text or video is determined by reader responses. When a critical threshold is reached — say, requests for seven different languages — it triggers the convening of the Rosetta Stone Group, and word goes out to volunteer translators that their help is needed. Multiple translators are potentially available for all the major European languages, which increases the likelihood for a quick turnaround in any given project.
David Codrea, Gun Rights Examiner
November 28, 2011
Persons within the Department of Justice whose identities are not yet publicly known apparently broke the law by leaking firearms trace data to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, which she introduced in the Senate Judiciary Committee record in the hearing on Department of Justice oversight earlier this month.
“If I may,” Senator Feinstein requested at the beginning of her questioning of Attorney General Eric Holder (see webcast, at the 69:45 mark), I’d like to put in the record the official firearms trace data from the Department of Justice from 12/1/2006 to 2000…excuse me, 9/30/2011…this is guns [unintelligible] Mexico.”
Left unchallenged and unsaid is how Feinstein obtained the data, which is prohibited by the Tiahrt Amendment from being shared with anyone but law enforcement agencies and prosecutors, and only then in the course of a criminal investigation. That prohibition extends even to Senator Feinstein, as evidenced by the failed attempt earlier this year by Rep. Adam Schiff “ to allow Congressional committees to be included on the list of entities to which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms can disclose part or all of the contents of the Firearms Trace System database.”
While there is no reliable evidence that Sen. Feinstein knew she was improperly disclosing data she had been provided, a Senator so active in promulgating new gun laws not knowing existing ones is the most innocuous explanation if she did not. If that’s the case, it strongly implies someone at Justice used the Senator.Per an anonymous congressional source:
Farris defends major parental rights case (medical decisions) in Michigan
The Nato air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers went on for almost two hours and continued even after Pakistani commanders had pleaded with coalition forces to stop, the army has claimed.
Nato has apologised for the deaths in Saturday's incident and promised a full investigation.
The coalition has yet to give its side of the story, but unnamed Afghan officials have said that a joint Afghan-Nato force on the Afghan side of the border received incoming fire from the direction of the Pakistani posts, and called in air strikes.
Ties between Pakistan and the United States were already deteriorating before the deadly attack and have sunk to new lows since, delivering a major setback to American hopes of enlisting Islamabad's help in negotiating an end to the 10-year old Afghan war.
Army spokesman major general Athar Abbas said the Pakistani troops at two border posts were the victims of unprovoked aggression.
He said the attack lasted almost two hours and commanders had contacted Nato counterparts while it was going on, asking "they get this fire to cease, but somehow it continued".
Sources tell Sispey Street that the home of John Matthews' daughter was broken into over the weekend and although a television, an X-box and a small steel lockbox containing papers and a handgun were stolen, the burglars left behind prescription pain medicine, cash, and other valuable items. It wasn't because the burglars didn't find them, for "the entire place was completely trashed, they even tore apart the beds and bedding," said one source. "It was as if they were searching for something they didn't find it," the source said.
Other sources tell Sipsey Street that private email files belonging to Matthews and people who have corresponded with him have literally disappeared from folders on home computers without explanation.
When I informed another DC source of mine of these developments, he commented, "Well, they're either looking for more documents they think Matthews has hidden or they are just trying to send a message that they can get to his daughter so he'd better shut up." The source then added, rhetorically, "Do you really think that the FBI ever gave up the black bag job as a tool of enforcement?" He paused, and added, "And I don't mean law enforcement."
Last week, The Blaze covered the story of Clara and Johnnie Russell and the massive fine ($7,200) levied against them for posting this sign on their property:
The more digging we do into this story, the more questions arise:
- Is a squabble over a small yard sign that has been associated with Glenn Beck really about enforcing the rules of the local Homeowners Association or is it politically motivated?
The Judge who levied the huge fine has ties to at least one of the board members of the complaining HOA. These photos used to live on the Facebook page of Kathy Kornegay
- If the Judge in the case has ties to one side of the argument, why has she not recused herself?
Willis Eschenbach calls out the foremost science scammer and "serial liar", Dr. Phil Jones:Here’s my problem with all of this, Dr. Jones. You tried out a variety of claimed reasons for not responding to a request for your data. None of them were even remotely true. They were all intended to hide the fact that you didn’t know where the data was. Dave clearly spelled out the problem: “we don’t know which data belongs to which stations, right?”Again, I repeat: there is no global warming outside of the usual range of temperature fluctuations caused by natural process. Contra all the climacaustal predictions, there has been no global warming at all for the last decade. There being none, it is not caused by human activity. What is described as "climate science" is not science, but corrupt government-funded scientific fraud and the greatest science scandal in the history of science.
You claimed that the data was out there on the web somewhere. You claimed you couldn’t send any of it because of restrictions on a few datasets. You claimed it came from GHCN, then you said from NCAR, but you couldn’t say exactly where.
You gave lots and lots of explanations to me, everything except the truth—that your records were in such disarray that you could not fulfill my request. It is clear now from the Climategate emails that some records were there, some were missing, the lists were not up to date, there was orphan data, some stations had multiple sets of data, some data was only identified by folder not by filename, you didn’t know which data might have been covered by confidentiality agreements, and the provenance of some datasets could not be established. The unfortunate reality was that you simply couldn’t do what I asked.
Rather than just saying that, however, you came up with a host of totally bogus reasons why you could not give me the data. Those were lies, Phil. You and David Palmer flat-out lied to my face about why you couldn’t send me the data.
Now, I’ve come to accept that you lied to me. Here’s what I think. I think you are a scientist, and a reasonably good one, who was hard squeezed by two things—the Peter Principle, and Noble Cause Corruption. When you began your scientific career, your sloppy record keeping didn’t matter much. And you didn’t want to be the record keeper in any case, you wanted to do the science instead, but you kept getting promoted and you ended up curating a big messy dataset. Then things changed, and now, climate decisions involving billions of dollars are being made based in part on your data. Disarray in your files didn’t make a lot of difference when your work was of interest only to specialists. But now it matters greatly, money and people’s lives are at stake, and unfortunately you were a better scientist than you were a data manager.
So when my FOI request came along, you were caught. You were legally required to produce data you couldn’t locate. Rather than tell the truth and say “I can’t find it”, you chose to lie. Hey, it was only a small lie, and it was for the Noble Cause of saving the world from Thermageddon. So you had David tell me the data was available on the web. You knew that was a lie. David, apparently, didn’t realize it was a lie, at least at first. You hoped your Noble Lie would satisfy me, that I would get discouraged, and you could move on.
But I asked again, and when I called you on that first answer, you thought up another Noble Lie. And when that one didn’t work, you invented another Noble Lie.
OK, so you are a serial liar. Like I said, I’ve made my peace with that. It used to rankle me, but not any more. I just accepted that you can’t be trusted and I moved on. I do have compassion for you, Dr. Jones. None of you guys set out to do the ugly things you ended up doing. You all got caught by Noble Cause Corruption, by the vision of being smarter than everyone else and of being the only people standing between us and global destruction. It’s heady, treacherous stuff.
I have been a victim of that same self-delusion myself. I understand the sweet seduction that arises from the conviction that your mission is of vital, crucial importance to the whole planet. However, I quit that kind of nonsense around the time the sixties wound down … but again I digress. I have compassion for your position, and I was, although not satisfied, at least at ease with the outcome.
So if I made my peace with you, why am I writing this letter now?
I’m writing because in response to the new Climategate 2.0 email release, over at the UEA website, you have a new post in which you are up to your old tricks, trying to peanut-butter up the cracks in your stories.
If you still believe in "anthropogenic climate change" at this point, you obviously possess far more blind religious faith than the average illiterate religious fundamentalist.
MORERemember a few weeks back when a Tea Party group in Virginia made a fuss about fees they paid the city for meeting space? Their argument, with which I agree, was that it was unfair for them to be charged thousands of dollars in fees when the city of Richmond was allowing occupiers to use public land without permits:
It’s not fair, the City of Richmond’s picking and choosing whose first amendment rights trump someone else’s first amendment rights and we thought – well that’s fine, then they can refund our money. If that’s how they’re going to run the city then they owe us our fees back.
Two weeks after this complaint hit the local papers, the Tea Party group received notice that they were being audited:
In May of 2007, the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team deployed to the Konar Province of Afghanistan. The 2/503rd Infantry Battalion occupied the Pesche River Valley, which is the mountainous tribal region along the Pakistani border where the Russian military was pushed out in the 1980’s. I was an active duty soldier who served there until our deployment ended in August of 2008. While we were there, ABC’s “Nightline” ran a special about one of our platoons, calling the area “the most dangerous place on Earth.” The White House and DOD (Department of Defense) publicly proclaimed that we were at the tip of the spear of the Afghanistan campaign in the “War on Terror.”
During this deployment, our Unit dropped more ordnance than any other unit in any other area in Iraq or Afghanistan. Journalist Tim Hetherington of Vanity Fair covered part of our experience which led to the Oscar-nominated documentary, “Restrepo.” Tim would later be killed covering the U.S. intervention into Lybia. Many of the soldiers he covered would come home to find that they had been so affected by combat experiences, they could no longer function as average members of society. Many would go back to Afghanistan again, or to Iraq… again. Some of them had already been to both… again… and again… and again. Some would choose to take their own lives. I came home with a combat-related disability and was honorably discharged via medical retirement. American forces were pulled out of the Korengal Valley in 2010. That whole region of Afghanistan is still in chaos as of this writing.
There certainly hasn’t been any lack of attempts by the U.S. government -- elected Representatives and Senators, and White House -- to try to regulate/control the Internet in this session of Congress. It seems a new cybersecurity bill pops up at least once a week. The latest one catching all the attention is the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261. SOPA is a beefed-up version of the failed Protect IP Act.
Whereas SOPA is heavily supported by Hollywood producers, the recording industry, and large media companies and their lobbyists as a way to protect their copyrighted material, SOPA's opponents include major Internet giants like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as civil liberties groups, Tea Party groups, and investors.
Under the proposal any website, including search engines like Google, could be forced to delist whole domains on the basis of a copyright claim by a content provider. Internet Providers would be forced into monitoring websites that contain user-generated content because embedding and posting and sharing videos, etc., could be a violation of SOPA. This would be a severe limiting of the currently used and understood Fair Use doctrine. Unauthorized streaming would become a felony. And SOPA could eliminate the alternative media so prevalent on the Internet for simply unknowingly embedding unauthorized videos or links; perhaps even quoting from copyrighted material would be enough to “delist” the domain name of the website.
David Ulevich, an expert in Internet security calls the legislation “dangerous” for three reasons: 1) “there is no way to censor only illegal content without harming legitimate uses on sites as well,” 2) it will create a firewall to “censor websites similar to those countries we criticize for the same behavior,” and 3) it will "burden companies with an onerous level of liability for all user-generated content.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said this about the bill: "It could set a precedent for further control and censorship of the Internet by foreign governments, and risk the fragmentation of the global domain name system.” Reporters Without Borders said the bill is “clearly hostile to freedom of expression.” While a Harvard Business Review blogger stated the bill would “give America its very own version of the Great Firewall of China,” because of the imposition of content filtering and blocking without any independent judicial control. That’s right. According to a C-Net analysis of the bill, SOPA “would let content owners bypass cops, courts, and any semblance of due process, and ‘disappear’ entire Web domains like some kind of privatized secret police force.”
The bill, so broadly written, is a danger to Internet freedom, has devastating penalties that are rather disconnected from alleged violations of the bill, could certainly kill any new e-commerce or normal Internet usage, issues rather vague requirements to Internet Service Providers, and has the potential for International consequences that could result in court challenges by foreign countries, all because the measure is so completely out of sync with the current Internet structure and how it operates.
The Internet has become an incredible force that promotes free speech and alternative views and information. Also, according to a "Dear Colleague" letter written by Representatives Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) on November 8, 2011: "Online innovation and commerce were responsible for 15 percent of U.S. GDP growth from 2004 to 2009, according to the McKinsey Global Institute." However, after reviewing SOPA, many venture capitalists say there is no way they would invest money in the Internet under the risky conditions SOPA would impose.
Speak out about Internet censorship by contacting your Representative and Senators immediately, as this bill is sure to see more action before the end of the year. It is a government-interference Internet bill of great magnitude that would in fact destroy the Internet as we now know it, creating a new bureaucracy with the U.S. Government as the Internet police.
Thanks,
Your friends at The John Birch Society
