Thursday, September 21, 2017

Challenging Africa’s Established Order

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The Arab empire’s extent in ancient times was outlined by Berber wanderer Ibn Batuta who spent forty years touring countries from western China to modern-day Mali without once leaving Arab hegemony. It is recorded that in the fourteenth century, Timbuktu’s greatest ruler, Mansa Musa, arrived in Cairo with a magnificent caravan of soldiers, courtiers, wives, concubines and 12,000 slaves. A baggage train of 300 camels carried three hundred pounds of gold. By the time of the first European visits to Africa, the slave trade of native tribes and Arab had been long-established.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Challenging Africa’s Established Order

“Beyond its attraction as a center of great wealth, no city was more worthy of discovery for geographical and scientific reasons. Arabic texts documented that merchants from Tripoli to Morocco had gathered at Timbuktu since the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries, when it was incorporated into the great Malian Empire, to buy gold and slaves in exchange for prized European manufactured goods, cloth, horses, and the mined salt of the desert.

[Evidence in Moroccan archives indicate] that trade had been conducted across the [Sahara] region since early times . . . [and] it seems likely that gold, animal skins, ivory, gemstones, perfumes and black slaves from the Sudan states were exchanged for the manufactures and trinkets of the Phoenician, Roman and Byzantine worlds.

Having taken their empire, the Arabs sealed it off. Foreigners who dared set foot in any part of it were confronted with a harrowing choice: either take a vow of abiding allegiance to Islam, forsaking all others loyalties, or face decapitation.

[In the Arab empire . . .] Gold and slaves were paramount. The importance of the slave trade is illustrated by estimates suggesting that from the seventh to the end of the nineteenth centuries, between 9 and 13 million slaves were transported north across the Sahara. This is comparable to the numbers shipped seaward during the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, though the Saharan traffic has received less public discussion.

Timbuktu grew to become an opulent city boasting real infrastructure – markets, mosques, and important Islamic libraries and schools. The wealth to fund this cultural and intellectual development was generated from the gold mines of West Africa, worked by black slaves for their black and Arab masters, and the merchants who carried their goods on camels, oxen and asses, and men’s heads, and in the canoes of tropical Africa’s rivers and lakes.

Though Africa was a cipher to white men, caravan routes and rivers were familiar to those black Africans along the western coastline who traded in their own kingdoms, and to the Arabs who had ventured deep into the interior centuries before Europeans arrived. These men were willing risk their lives . . . and thought nothing of inflicting untold suffering to secure the three commodities Africa offered in abundance: slaves, ivory, and gold.

To these Africans and Arabs, European travelers were “the devil’s children” and “enemies of the Prophet,” meddlesome interlopers who, with their idle talk of abolishing the slave trade and supplanting Arab caravans with British shipping, challenged the established order.”

(The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa’s City of Gold; Frank T. Kryza, HarperCollins, 2006, excerpts, pp. xii-xxi)

Lesbian Couple Who Abused Son So Badly He’s Had Two Strokes Gets 20 Years in Jail

 

A lesbian couple arrested and convicted of beating and torturing their five-year-old boy so badly that he had two strokes from years of beatings has been sentenced to 20 years in jail.

Police in Muskogee, OK, arrested the boy’s mother, Rachel Stevens, 28, and his “stepmother,” Kayla Jones, 25, last year for what doctors said appeared to be months of vicious child abuse.

Police became involved after the child was transferred from a Muskogee, Oklahoma, clinic to St. John Medical Center in Tulsa because of lesions on his face and after a series of seizures. But when he got to Tulsa, doctors became suspicious over his injuries and determined that he was abused and not just suffering some sort of ailment as claimed by the lesbian couple.

The women even had the gall to create a GoFundMe page to raise money to help them pay for the child’s medical care.

More @ Breitbart

GOP senator questions whether FBI warned Trump about Russia during campaign

Via Billy

 GOP senator questions whether FBI warned Trump about Russia during campaign


The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday demanded the FBI disclose whether it ever briefed or warned President Trump during the 2016 presidential election about alleged attempts by the Russian government to infiltrate his campaign.

In a letter to FBI Director Chris Wray, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) cites recent reports that the bureau was wiretapping Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort in the summer of 2016 over concerns about ties to Russian figures.

It also noted past reports in The Washington Post and Circa that Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) 2008 presidential campaign got a warning from intelligence officials about possible foreign ties to Manafort and McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis when they were associated with the senator.

Grassley asked whether the bureau ever delivered a similar "defensive" briefing to Trump last year.
"If the FBI did provide a defensive briefing or similar warning to the [Trump] campaign, then that would raise important questions about how the Trump campaign responded," Grassley wrote.

"On the other hand, if the FBI did not alert the campaign, then that would raise serious questions about what factors contributed to its decision and why it appears to have been handled differently in a very similar circumstance involving a previous campaign."

Judge Louie Gohmert Backing Judge Roy Moore In Alabama: ‘He Absolutely Cannot’ Be Bought, Sold Like Luther Strange

 Planned Parenthood

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), a top conservative and former judge before he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, is in the house here in Montgomery’s RSA Activity Center for the debate between conservative Judge Roy Moore and establishment-backed Luther Strange for the GOP primary runoff for the U.S. Senate on Thursday evening.

The runoff is on Tuesday, Sept. 26, but Gohmert is here for the only televised debate between Moore and Strange—and Gohmert is supporting Moore.

“No he cannot [be bought or sold],” Gohmert said of Moore in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News before the debate began. “He absolutely cannot.”

More @ Breitbart

Terrorism, Chivalry, and “The Great Compromise”

 

It is unsurprising that one of the antifa groups that have been making the news lately identifies itself with John Brown, the revolutionary abolitionist who was hanged shortly after leading an attack upon Harper’s Ferry in 1859.  Brown’s career embodies the progressive fixation with being on the ostensibly “right” side of history, and as the attempted massacre of Republican senators by an unhinged Bernie Sanders activist suggests, Brown’s spirit is alive and well in 2017 America.  Antifas and James Hodgkinson’s failed rampage are not the only signs of said spirit’s continuing presence, however.  The ongoing purge from the South of Confederate symbols also reflects the triumph of Brown’s totalitarian utopianism over novelist-historian Shelby Foote’s “Great Compromise.”

NC Senate leader wants Gov. Cooper to withdraw request to move Confederate monuments

 This June 23, 2015 file photo shows the statue To The North Carolina Women of the Confederacy on the NC State Capitol grounds.

Senate leader Phil Berger said Gov. Roy Cooper’s attempt to move three Confederate monuments from the Capitol grounds would not stand up in court if he succeeds.

In a letter to Cooper his office released Thursday, Berger, a Republican, said the commission does not have the authority to approve the petition. The commission would lose if the residents challenged the move in court, he wrote.

The N.C. Historical Commission is set to consider the Cooper administration’s request Friday morning to move three monuments from Raleigh to Bentonville Battlefield in Johnston County, the site of the state’s largest Civil War battle.

4 Ways Carl Schurz, a 19th Century Missouri Socialist, Impacts America TODAY

Via Billy

Abraham Lincoln, Marxism, Socialism, Communism, Carl Schurz, Lincoln's Marxists, Missouri, History

A friend recently shared with me a short audio CD entitled “Lincoln’s Marxists” – which consisted of a lecture given by Al Benson Jr. (editor and publisher of the Copperhead Chronicle, and author of the book “Lincoln’s Marxists“). The lecture basically consisted of how Karl Marx, author of the Communist Manifesto, praised Lincoln in 1865 as a “single-minded son of the working class” (Also see our resource: A perspective on the American “Civil War”). The lecture examines why Marx and other socialists supported Lincoln’s War and notes their negative influence on modern society today.

As part of this, Benson talks about the Forty-Eighters, a group of radical socialists who sought positions of prominence in American society and government, and supported Abraham Lincoln and his administration in a variety of ways. One of these Forty-Eighters was none other than Missouri’s own Carl Schurz.

More @ Camden Point

Trump DACA/Dreamer Amnesty? Uncomfortable Facts and Huge Political Risks

Via Mike

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I voted for Trump in 2016 and was there sooner and with more effort, enthusiasm, and financial support than most Trump supporters. I voted for him because I think the Trump agenda will not only make American Great Again but is also vitally necessary to reverse our rapid moral and cultural decline.

I especially liked his tougher stances on immigration and realism about the nature of Islamic terrorism and Jihad. I have probably written at least 75 articles on immigration and the same number on Islam in the last twelve years. I still believe Trump has a right gut-feel for these issues, even though I have sometimes been annoyed by his wobbling because of a lack of specific knowledge on immigration issues, especially the explosive, multi-layered, and destructive consequences of amnesties.

Trump cannot know everything, but he especially needs to know the likely fiscal, economic, social, cultural, national security, and political consequences of amnesties. They have never boded well for American workers and middle class taxpayers and their families. They do not bode well for any conservative political issues, including gun ownership, right-to-life, and free speech.

More @ The Tribune

Congress, fix and pass this Obamacare replacement

Via Billy

It should be axiomatic among Republicans that Obamacare must be repealed and replaced during the current Congress. The last opportunity to do so appears to be the Graham-Cassidy bill. That being so, it must pass, and it must be improved before it passes. Specifically, the bill's experiments in actual health insurance markets, need to be made more robust. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
The urgency of replacing Obamacare cannot be understated. Give competitive federalism a chance; it's what the country's founders had in mind. It's urgent that senators improve this bill, then pass it.

It should be axiomatic among Republicans that Obamacare must be repealed and replaced during the current Congress. The last opportunity to do so appears to be the Graham-Cassidy bill. That being so, it must pass, and it must be improved before it passes. Specifically, the bill's experiments in actual health insurance markets, need to be made more robust.

It is only by passing a repeal and replace bill that Republican politicians can avoid breaking the cardinal promise they have made to voters for the past four election cycles. It was the central rallying cry of John Boehner's successful retaking of the House in 2010. Running Mitt Romney, author of Obamacare's state-level prototype in 2012, proved a Republican mistake that helped save Obama.

Campaigning against Obamacare helped Republicans take the Senate in 2014. Repealing Obamacare was the only policy agreed upon by all 17 GOP presidential candidates in the 2016 campaign.

If Republicans, while in control of government, do not replace Obamacare after promising so many times over, there is no reason for voters to trust another GOP legislative promise.

Ding Dong Maxine Waters I can 'guarantee' Trump colluding with Russia to 'undermine' US

Via Billy

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Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said Thursday she can "guarantee" President Trump is secretly and illegally working with Russia.

"How many of you in your organizations have said 'Impeach 45? ... Well, they don't have what it takes, they don't have the laws yet.' Impeachment is about whatever the Congress says it is. There is no law that can dictate impeachment. What the Constitution says is high crimes and misdemeanors and we define that. Bill Clinton got impeached because he lied," Waters told attendees at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Town Hall on Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., Thursday morning.

Exposing SJP as a Terrorist Front at UC-Berkeley

Via Billy

 

Berkeley campus is one of the “Top Ten Worst Schools that Support Terrorists.” 

 

The David Horowitz Freedom Center today announced the University of California-Berkeley as the first school named in its new report on the “Top Ten Worst Schools that Support Terrorists.” Coinciding with the release, the Freedom Center placed posters on Berkeley’s campus exposing the links between Students for Justice in Palestine and the terrorist organization Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of the Jewish state.


As revealed in recent congressional testimony, Students for Justice in Palestine is a campus front for Hamas terrorists. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestrated and funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and other Islamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. The report and posters are part of a larger Freedom Center campaign titled Stop University Support for Terrorists. Images of the posters that appeared at UC-Berkeley may be viewed at www.stopuniversitysupportforterrorists.org.

More @ Front Page

Former UN Ambassador Samantha Power attempted to unmask more than 260 Americans:

Via Billy

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Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power attempted to "unmask" more than 260 Americans' identities during 2016, even during the final days of the Obama administration.

Power is scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill in October, one of several Obama administration officials slated to do so, for her actions regarding revealing Trump associates' identities in intelligence reports, according to Fox News.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., submitted a letter in July to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats that said the committee was aware "that one official, whose position had no apparent intelligence-related function, made hundreds of unmasking requests during the final year of the Obama Administration."

It is suspected that the official referenced is Power.

A Quote

Via David

 Girl Screaming with Scary Rattle Snake : Stock Photo

"When it comes to matters of honor, ethics, morality, the Rule of Law, adhering to the Constitution, or loving America, I'd sooner French-kiss a rattlesnake than trust a Democrat."

& many Republicans, for that matter

McMaster: Trump’s North Korea rhetoric ‘completely appropriate’ + Iran

Via Billy

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White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster on Thursday said President Trump's warning that the U.S. might be forced to "totally destroy" North Korea was "completely appropriate," given the threat from Pyongyang.

"The president's rhetoric as completely appropriate because what is even more dangerous is if there's a lack of clarity," McMaster told host Chris Cuomo on CNN's "New Day."

McMaster said Trump maintained a standard set by past presidents during his comments earlier this week at the United Nations. He added that the North Korean threat is more dangerous now due to advances in its nuclear weapons program.  

"Previous presidents have made very similar statements, and the clause is 'if' — 'if North Korea attacks,' 'if North Korea takes these provocative actions.' *We may not have a choice," he said. *He does have a point. 

More @ The Hill 

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