NC: Lt. Clint Lorance could be any one of us

The vast majority of Americans cannot comprehend the reality of combat. Media portrayals, no matter how seemingly realistic, only dimly reflect the true nature of what it means to come under fire from an enemy.

Films like “Lone Survivor” and “American Sniper” may be gripping, but the reality is even more intense, unsettling — and consequential.

Serving in Afghanistan in 2006-2007 with the U.S. Army 10th Mountain Division, my platoon and I engaged Taliban combatants repeatedly along the Pakistan border area. My platoon was deployed 485 days, with one of the highest casualty rates of the entire war.

The hardest lesson I learned was that in a combat situation, sheer uncertainty stalks you constantly. Amid that uncertainty, you’re forced to make instantaneous >To grasp the price of that uncertainty, consider the case of Clint Lorance — a 29-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant sentenced to military prison for ordering his men to fire upon Afghan nationals he believed were a threat. The facts suggest the punishment rendered to Lorance is a stark injustice — and is a chilling example to all who have had to make tough decisions in complex combat situations.

Here’s what we know:

More @ Stars & Stripes

“They want us to pay for our own raisins that we grew, we have to buy them back!”

Via WRSA

........says Raisin Valley Farms owner Marvin Horne.

This is but one absurdity that Marvin and his wife Laura have faced during their decade-long legal battle with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Every year, the Hornes plant seeds, tie vines, harvest fruit, and place grapes in paper trays to create sun-dried raisins. And every year, the federal government prevents them from bringing their full harvest to market.

It’s called an agriculture marketing order. Depression-era regulations meant to stabilize crop prices endanger the livelihoods of small farmers across the country, but the raisin marketing order is particularly egregious. An elected board of bureaucrats known as the Raisin Administrative Committee decides what the proper yield should be in any given year in order to meet a previously decided-upon price. Once they can estimate the size of the year’s harvest, they force every farmer to surrender a percentage of their crop to raisin packers. The packers then place the raisins in a “reserve pool,” a special holding vat for raisins that cannot be sold in the U.S. Eventually, the packers can sell the reserve pool raisins overseas at highly discounted prices set by the government or funnel them into school lunch programs for next to nothing.

The farmers were always supposed to get a percentage of the money raised from the reserve pool raisins, but as profit margins dwindled over the years, so did the return to farmers. The tipping point came in 2003, when farmers received zero dollars in return for the 47 percent of the crop they had surrendered.

“You can’t work for a whole year and then give 47 percent of what you made away and still keep that business afloat,” says Laura Horne.

More @ The Burning Platform

Gun range's ban on Muslims draws fire

Via avordvet

In the five months since Jan Morgan banned Muslims from her gun range in Hot Springs, Ark., business has boomed and predictions of a lawsuit brought by federal civil rights enforcers have so far proved inaccurate.

Morgan, who claims keeping Muslims out of her Gun Cave Indoor Firing Range is a matter of public safety and not a constitutional issue, says she made the decision in September after two customers she deemed suspicious visited. She said their furtive behavior and cellphone ringtones of “Allahu Akhbar” prompted her to revise her range’s policies.

More @ Fox

Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Leaders Hosted at State Department

Via avordvet

The State Department hosted a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders this week for a meeting about their ongoing efforts to oppose the current government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, who rose to power following the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, an ally of the Brotherhood, in 2013.

One member of the delegation, a Brotherhood-aligned judge in Egypt, posed for a picture while at Foggy Bottom in which he held up the Islamic group’s notorious four-finger Rabia symbol, according to his Facebook page.

That delegation member, Waleed Sharaby, is a secretary-general of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council and a spokesman for Judges for Egypt, a group reported to have close ties to the Brotherhood.

More with video @ The Washington Free Beacon

THIS CHART Tells a Story… America’s Middle Class Thrived After WWII and Died Under Obama

 

The Davos World Economic Summit has long been a parade for the insider agenda, putting the power players’ plans for the world’s economies on display as a preview to their playing out for the rest of the year.

But so far, the 2015 elite retreat in the Swiss Alps has proven to be full of apprehension, and even horror… with many of its own members expressing regret at the world they have built.
The Guardian reported:

The billionaires and corporate oligarchs meeting in Davos this week are getting worried about inequality… even the architects of the crisis-ridden international economic order are starting to see the dangers. It’s not just the maverick hedge-funder George Soros, who likes to describe himself as a class traitor. Paul Polman, Unilever chief executive, frets about the “capitalist threat to capitalism”. Christine Lagarde, the IMF managing director, fears capitalism might indeed carry Marx’s “seeds of its own destruction” and warns that something needs to be done.

The scale of the crisis has been laid out for them by the charity Oxfam. Just 80 individuals now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. Last year, the best-off 1% owned 48% of the world’s wealth, up from 44% five years ago. On current trends, the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year. The 0.1% have been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the 1980s.

These billionaires are not concerned with a fair or truly equitable world, of course. But they may well be concerned about having pushed the system beyond the brink, and triggering global collapse or unrest as a result of things gone way too far.

More @ SHTF Plan

Demands begin for Ginsburg, Kagan to recuse themselves from gay marriage case

Via comment by Sioux on Justice Roy Moore strikes a major blow against jud...

 

In the wake of Friday’s decision by the Supreme Court to take a gay marriage case that could settle the question nationally once and for all, traditional marriage activists are calling for two of the court’s most liberal judges to recuse themselves.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan have each officiated at gay weddings, which traditional marriage supporters say destroys their pretense of impartiality on such an important case. While former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also officiated at a gay wedding, Kagan and Ginsburg are the only two sitting justices who have done so, according to the liberal Huffington Post.

And that distinction is enough for traditional marriage activists to demand they recuse themselves.

“Both of these justices’ personal and private actions actively endorsing gay marriage clearly indicate how they would vote on same-sex marriage cases before the Supreme Court,” the Defenders of the Catholic Faith website argued in a blog item Monday.

“In order to ensure the Court’s integrity and impartiality, Justices Kagan and Ginsburg must recuse themselves from same-sex marriage cases.”

In a statement, the American Family Association went even further:

More @ Biz Pac

If Obama.........

Via Joe

Justice Roy Moore strikes a major blow against judicial tyranny

Via Bill

The U.S. Constitution gives no jurisdiction whatsoever to any branch of the federal government to dictate marriage policy to the states. That's the argument Roy Moore is making – and he's on solid constitutional grounds in doing so.


Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court has taken a stand against judicial tyranny on the matter of natural marriage. And strikingly and importantly, he has called on the governor of Alabama to do the same.

Last Friday, another judicial activist, U.S. District Judge Callie Granade, overturned Alabama's marriage amendment, which was passed in 2006 by a staggering 81 percent of voters. (The judge has stayed her own ruling for two weeks.)

Justice Moore says he will not recognize the federal court ruling, and he is calling on Gov. Robert Bentley to do the same. And the beauty of it is that he is doing it all on solid constitutional grounds.

In Justice Moore's letter to the governor (which you can read here) he states the constitutional and legal facts plainly and correctly. The Constitution, he says bluntly, gives no jurisdiction whatsoever to any branch of the federal government to dictate marriage policy to the states.

"As you know," Judge Moore wrote, "nothing in the United States Constitution grants the federal government the authority to redefine the institution of marriage." This, of course, is manifestly true.

The authority to dictate marriage policy to the states is conspicuously absent from the list of powers "We the People" granted to the central government in Article I, Section 8.

More @ One News Now

An Incomplete Victory in Kobani

 

Throughout ISIS's three-month siege of Kobani, the heavily Kurdish Syrian border town, many wondered whether the battle would prove the Islamic State's Waterloo. For a group that so heavily relies on propaganda and momentum, its apparent defeat there this week at the hands of Kurdish forces (backed by American airstrikes) stings far beyond the battlefield.

"ISIL's defeat in Kobane further shatters the organization's claims to invincibility," Al Jazeera's Mohammed Salih writes, "particularly as it coincides with the group's retreat from Kurdish and other Iraqi forces in northern and central Iraq." Some experts have emphasized the importance of the defeat in the context of the group's efforts to mobilize foreign fighters⎯Australians, Canadians, Europeans, and recruits from across the Middle East were among the 1,200 killed in Kobani while fighting under the Islamic State banner.

More @ Yahoo

Inside South Africa's whites-only town of Orania & Rebuttal

Via comment by Sioux on "........we really should disarm everyone. That al...

 

In the sparsely populated Karoo desert in the heart of South Africa's Northern Cape, the spirit of apartheid lives on.

I spent a few days in Orania, a town established in 1991 where no black people live.

I was part of a BBC crew, including Zimbabwean journalist Stanley Kwenda, who were accredited to visit.

And during that time, I did not see any other black people in the town of 1,000 - an unusual experience in modern South Africa.

It is an Afrikaner-only town, where only Afrikaans is spoken, because of fears about "diluting culture".

"We do not fit in easily in the new South Africa. It [Orania] was an answer to not dominating others and not being dominated by others," says Carel Boshoff Jr, the community leader.

Mr Boshoff is one of the leaders of the town founded by his father Carel Boshoff Snr, an Afrikaner intellectual and son-in-law of apartheid architect, Hendrik Verwoerd.

More with pictures and video @ BBC

***************************

Via Nancy

Dear Pumza,

I’m writing this letter in English even though I know that you speak fluent Afrikaans, unlike many who will read his letter, including your employers at the BBC.

During your stay in Orania, you and your colleagues from the BBC, including Zimbabwean journalist Stanley Kwenda, regularly dined at my restaurant. You were served by white people – Afrikaners to be more precise. I myself even served you and assisted my staff in washing your dishes while you were sipping drinks like a lady of leisure on my veranda.

You enjoyed exactly the same level of service that all my patrons, regardless of race, would receive. Yet, in your article titled Inside South Africa’s whites-only town of Orania published on the BBC website on 6 October 2014, you say that “the spirit of apartheid lives on” in Orania.

 Hang on, come again?!

I find this statement completely absurd seeing that back in the day blacks, like Stanley and yourself, weren’t even allowed to use the same entrances, buses, benches etc. than whites, let alone getting served alcohol and food by whites in white owned restaurants. In fact, had apartheid lived on in Orania as you claim it does, you wouldn’t even have been allowed to set foot in my restaurant as a client.

 You wouldn’t  have been allowed to stay at the hotel you did, nor use the bathrooms you did for that matter. But according to what you wrote in your article, apartheid lives on in Orania. Bizarre. You go on to say that you didn’t see any other black people in town. Did the Karoo sun blind you perhaps? We see and serve black and coloured people every day in Orania. They use our services and labour, exactly as you did.

Seeing that you clearly can’t be accused of being a guardian of the truth, I would like to share a simple truth with you. In the 4 years that I’ve lived in Orania I have never witnessed racial intolerance or violence, while in sharp contrast, I nearly grew accustomed to it in Gauteng – coming from both sides of the fence. If you wanted to write an article on racism, you could’ve saved the BBC a lot of money by simply heading down to any of the hundreds of “black only” illegal shebeens littered across Joburg and asked the punters there what they think about the Afrikaners.

 In your article you refer to both “Mr. Boshoff Sr.” and “Mr. Verwoerd”. Either you didn’t research these individuals or you deliberately refused to use their correct titles of Prof. and Dr. respectively. Suffice to say that Prof. Boshoff, one of Orania’s founding fathers, was a missionary in Soweto during the heyday of apartheid and Dr. Verwoerd, the so called architect of apartheid, was the first white leader in Africa’s history to give black people fertile land of their own to govern as they deem fit, to build schools, universities and hospitals for black people and even invest millions (literally) of white tax payer money in black business and enterprise.

 You say that Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) was introduced to encourage more black participation in business. It’s obvious that you’re trying to make BEE sound like a noble cause to your western audience, while in fact it is nothing more than a racist and biased scheme privileging a select few black “tenderpreneurs” and costing South Africa billions in loss in revenue since it has been introduced by the largely corrupt ANC government.

 Listen, I’m an entrepreneur. I own many successful businesses that I started from scratch. I say that one doesn’t need to be empowered to participate in business, one must simply get an idea then go out and buy something for a rand and sell it for two. This in itself is encouragement enough.

No wonder why the vast majority of BEE and state run projects have failed so miserably or have become so totally corrupt and stripped of cash flow that the state, itself completely inept in running its own affairs, has to bail them out with tax payer money year after year.

Yet you criticize Dr. Verwoerd’s policies, which resulted in an average GDP growth rate of nearly 7%, while unemployment (black and white) was down to only 3%. Currently South Africa’s GDP growth rate stands at under 2% and unemployment stands at 25%. These are facts you simply cannot swindle your readers out of.

 There’s no denying that you’re an intelligent woman. It just baffles me that you haven’t asked yourself how a nation can ever create sustained wealth and success if it relies on the state to constantly empower it by taking from a minority in the hope of the majority accomplishing something. The results are so poor because the racially defined socialist system by which South Africa is governed is all wrong.

The ANC has ruled South Africa for 20 years now. You state that South Africa is considered to be one of the most violent societies in the world, with one of the highest murder rates. This is factually correct. Also factually correct is that the ANC is democratically elected by your people, i.e. the black majority.

No wonder why Afrikaners like myself have become disillusioned with your country. Less than 1% of Afrikaners vote for the ANC. We’re a small minority that is entirely capable of running our own affairs, as demonstrated by the above-mentioned statistics of the Verwoerd-era and current growth in Orania. We clearly do not want, nor need your government to run our society.

 It therefore comes as no surprise to me that more and more Afrikaners want out of your New South Africa and take up the call of Orania: our own land, our own labour and own rule. Don’t blame us for not wanting to dance with your nation, blame the system you so highly rate, you struggled for and obviously identify with. In the end, we’ll dance with whom we wish.

You and I discussed journalist integrity, objectivity and the media’s responsibility to uphold the truth. Your article is strewn with false information and subjective stereotyping, despite us having invited you in and making you part of our conversations. You joked and laughed with us, the whole time being fully aware of your intention to brand us according to your fallacious image of the Afrikaner.
    
The Afrikaner renaissance is just getting started from its core in Orania. It is based on principles of order, creativity, intellect, merit and productivity – those traditional western values that we in Orania uphold and out of which the modern free market economy and fundamental liberty was born. Had these concepts not been foreign to you, as they seem to be to so many of your fellow South Africans, you would’ve recognised them in Orania as they are in plain sight for all to see.

Your article is proof that you are simply trained to think in terms of black and white – nothing more, nothing less.

 Don’t expect my hospitality ever again. You being black has nothing to do with it, rather the fact that you are a sensationalist journalist that gets a kick out of spreading your misrepresented and flawed views to the world from your wee little desk at the BBC. The shame, it seems, is on you.

Cordially,

Quintin Diederichs

 Ps. Note the correct spelling of the above.