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March 2020

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Italy is locking down much of the north, its economic engine.

By on March 8th, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/world/coronavirus-news.html?emc=edit_na_20200307&ref=cta&nl=breaking-news&campaign_id=60&instance_id=0&segment_id=21987&user_id=2dfc89bd6c52e6103e5ac62f916a8f0d&regi_id=2636639

Italy’s government is taking the extraordinary step of locking down entire sections of the country’s north to fight the virus.

Italy’s government is taking the extraordinary step of locking down entire sections of the country’s north, restricting movement for a quarter of the population in a sweeping effort to fight the coronavirus not seen outside of China.

“We are facing an emergency, a national emergency,” Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in announcing the government decree in a news conference after 2 a.m.

The move is tantamount to sacrificing the Italian economy in the short term to save it from the ravages of the virus in the long term. The measures will turn stretches of Italy’s wealthy north — including the economic and cultural capital of Milan and landmark tourist destinations such as Venice — into quarantined red zones until at least April 3. They will prevent the free movement of roughly 16 million people.

Funerals and cultural events are all banned under the measures. The decree required distance of one meter, including in sporting events, bars and supermarkets.

The Italian outbreak, already the worst in Europe and the worst outside of Asia, has inflicted serious damage on one of the Continent’s most fragile economies and triggered the closing of Italy’s schools.

Italy’s cases more than doubled this week from about 2,500 infections on Wednesday to more than 5,800 on Saturday, according to Italian authorities and the World Health Organization. Deaths rose by 36 to 233.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Danish prisons turn overwhelmingly Islamic; non-Muslim inmates abused and forced to participate in Islamic prayer By Arthur Lyons

By on March 7th, 2020

https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/03/danish-prisons-turn-overwhelmingly-islamic-non-muslim-inmates-abused-and-forced-to-participate-in-islamic-prayer/

It’s not exactly breaking news that immigrants, particularly third world immigrants, are vastly over represented in Western Europe crime statistics. What hasn’t been seen, up until lately is that prisons that are filled primarily with Muslim inmates. 

The Danish Prison Federation has now raised the alarm about such conditions plaguing Danish prisons.

In the last survey on the populations of Danish prisons in November 2018, 50.5 percent of the inmates were foreigners or immigrants of the first of the second generation. In Copenhagen prisons, this number was 66.3 percent, Rights Norway reports.

Without a doubt, this has affected daily life in prisons.

Muslim prisoners are using their numbers to take control of the food other inmates are allowed to eat, and they are forcing them to participate in Islamic prayer. Reports have also surfaced about Muslim inmates pouring boiling oil with sugar on Danish prisoners.

The Prison Federation leader, Bo Yde Sørensen, says to newspaper Berlingske that the development is alarming.

Since being elected leader of the Prison Federation in 2007, he has sounded the alarm. However, the problems, he says, are only getting worse.

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Michel Gurfinkiel: Islamists Stand a “Very Good Chance” of Conquering France by Marilyn Stern

By on March 7th, 2020

https://www.meforum.org/60539/islamists-very-good-chance-of-conquering-france

Michel Gurfinkiel, founder of the Paris-based Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute and a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum, spoke to Middle East Forum Radio host Gregg Roman on February 12 about the consequences of massive Muslim immigration into France.

Domestically, the past fifty years of steady immigration from Islamic countries into France is “transforming the fabric of French society” from within. Demographic and sociological surveys indicate that 10-15% of the French population is now of Muslim origin, including 20-30% of French citizens or residents under the age of 25. Some integrate successfully, but many align with the most radical and militant expression of the religion. Their rejection of France’s secular constitution is matched by resentment of the French military’s fight against global jihadism in Africa and the Middle East, seen as a “deliberate assault … on Islam.”

Whereas religious zeal is steadily increasing among French Muslims, Gurfinkiel said that “the classic national religion of France, Catholicism,” is declining, citing research found in The French Archipelago (L’archipel français) by French pollster, demographer and sociologist Jérôme Fourquet. Traditional family and marriage are “unraveling among the native French,” while birthrates drop.

Islamic groups observing this change respond in two ways: those who support jihad to take control of France and those who see the inevitable ascent of Islam through non-violent “dawah” (proselytism) as the answer to a society “ripe for change.” One way or another, according to Gurfinkiel, “Islam stands a very good chance to simply conquer … this country.”

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

FISA Reform and National Security By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on March 7th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/fisa-reform-and-national-security/Repealing vital national-security powers is not the right way to hold government officials responsible for abuse of power.

National security has become an afterthought in the latest national-security debate. The debate centers, instead, on what is called “FISA reform,” the imperative of which appears to be making foreign intelligence surveillance powers harder to use.

I’ve long been worried that this was the way the wind was blowing. That would be apparent to anyone who read Ball of Collusion, my book about the absurd political narrative that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Democrats through cyber-espionage operations (mainly hacking), after which the new president was to become the Kremlin’s agent in the White House.

This narrative fueled a wide-ranging government investigation, launched by the Obama administration. Under the rubric of highly classified foreign counterintelligence operations, the investigation prominently featured FBI spying on the Trump campaign. (As I noted yesterday, the New York Times is back to describing the FBI’s covert monitoring as “spying,” so I’m assuming the era of garment rending at utterance of the dread s-word is over.)

In the course of that investigation, as catalogued by the Justice Department’s inspector general and highlighted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI serially abused its authority: providing misleading information to the FISC, falsifying a key document, running confidential informants at Trump campaign surrogates in the absence of a sound investigative predicate, making public statements that suggested the president was a criminal suspect (while privately telling him he was not), making private statements (dozens of them) that have convinced reasonable people that bureau decisions were influenced by political bias, and so on.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Anyone Notice That Trump’s Economy Keeps Beating Expectations? John Merline

By on March 7th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/03/07/anyone-notice-that-trumps-economy-keeps-beating-expectations/

February’s jobs report “smashed expectations.” That’s how one news site described the latest monthly employment numbers out of the Commerce Department, which showed the economy created 273,000 jobs last month. Smashing expectations has become a regular feature of the Trump economy. Anyone care to guess why?

Based on the consensus forecast of economists, the first two months of this year should have seen a total of 335,000 jobs created. The actual number was 63% higher: 546,000.

For the past four months, job growth has averaged 248,000, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised several previous months’ gains sharply upward. In the best year under President Barack Obama, job growth averaged 250,000 a month.

The current job growth is even more impressive given that it’s coming more than 10 years after the last recession ended, and long after the experts told us we were already at full employment.

There’s more. To get a full picture of how much better than expected the Trump economy is performing, take a look at the forecast put out by the Congressional Budget Office just as Trump was taking office in January 2017.

According to the CBO, which based its forecast on the assumption that the economic policies of the Obama administration remained in place, the economy should have created only 2 million new jobs by this point.

The actual number: 6.9 million.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany: Left Party conference speaker talks about executing the rich by Arthur Lyons

By on March 7th, 2020

https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/03/germany-left-party-conference-speaker-talks-about-executing-the-rich/

Germany’s ‘Die Link’ (The Left) party gathered over the weekend at its ‘Strategy Congress’ to talk politics and its own role in Germany.

During the gathering, one woman who gave a speech was caught on video saying that, once in power, they may need to execute the rich, Die Welt reports.

“An energy transition is necessary after a revolution as well. Once we have shot the one percent of the rich, we will still want to heat our homes and travel,” the woman says to applause.

After the woman finishes speaking, instead of directly pushing back against such a statement, Die Link’s party leader, Bernd Riexinger, replies to the woman, saying: “I would like to say, we won’t shoot her, we will use her for useful work.”

The crowd laughed and applauded at Riexinger’s comments.

After the video had been seen by scores of people on Twitter, Riexinger addressed the woman’s comments again, saying that they had been “taken completely out of context”. However, he did say that “It was and is unacceptable. I regret that I did not immediately reject him unequivocally.”

But it may be too little, too late. For many, statements like these only confirm what other German parties accuse Die Link of regularly, namely that they are not in favor of a democracy and that they would like to see the German system changed back to what it was under the GDR.

Markus Blume, the CSU party secretary, has called on Riexinger to step down in light of the scandal.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

I’ve Been Fired. If You Value Academic Freedom, That Should Worry You by Bo Weingarten

By on March 7th, 2020

https://quillette.com/2020/03/06/ive-been-fired-if-you-value-academic-freedom-that-should-worry-you/

“I followed all of the protocols of academia. I published articles in peer-reviewed journals. I shared my ideas, always politely, on Twitter, and I encouraged people to debate me and to criticize my ideas. And I was fired. If it can happen to me, then it can happen to any academic who challenges the prevailing views of their discipline. You may disagree with everything I believe, say, and write, but it is in everyone’s interests that you support my freedom to believe, say, and write it.”

…….Until a week ago, I was a tenure-track assistant professor at a small college. Then I was fired. And although I am but one professor at one small college in one small town, I want to persuade you that, if you care about free speech and free inquiry in academia, you should be alarmed by my termination. My troubles began in October 2019 when I was invited to address an evolutionary group at the University of Alabama. I had decided that I would discuss human population variation, the hypothesis that human biological differences are at least partially produced by different environments selecting for different physical and psychological traits in their populations over time. I planned to defend this view as most consistent with a Darwinian understanding of the world.

My first day in Tuscaloosa was uneventful. On the second day, I visited a class and had an enjoyable discussion with students about various topics, including human evolution and social signaling. I was then supposed to meet professors and students for lunch, but instead my guide delivered me to an empty room where I received a number of texts from my host: The professors had found my RationalWiki entry, which accuses me—inter alia—of writing “racist bullshit for the right-wing online magazine Quillette.”

Notwithstanding its name, which indicates a commitment to thought and reason, RationalWiki is a highly partisan and tendentious site which its authors use to mock and defame their political opponents.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

DNC Changes Debate Rules After Tulsi Gabbard Reaches Previous Requirement

By on March 7th, 2020

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/03/06/dnc-changes-debate-rules-after-tulsi-

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Friday announced its updated debate guidelines, which essentially eliminate the chance of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) participating in the upcoming CNN/Univision debate.

In order to participate in the March 15 debate, a candidate must have earned at least 20 percent of the pledged delegates allotted up to that point. That effectively eliminates the chance of Gabbard, who remains in the race, participating, as she currently stands with two delegates.

The previous debate requirement allowed a candidate to participate if he or she had a single pledged delegate. If the DNC stuck to the previous rules, Gabbard, who did not qualify for any of the debates ahead of the caucuses in Iowa and Nevada or the primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina, would have been able to participate.

Joe Biden (D), as of Friday, held the lion’s share of delegates — 664. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) easily surpasses the 20 percent threshold as well, with 573 delegates. According to Politico, “Biden had earned 48 percent of delegates awarded thus far, while Sanders had 41 percent. (Some delegates have not yet been awarded from states that held primaries this week on Super Tuesday.)

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Sydney M. Williams-” Intemperance of the Left

By on March 7th, 2020

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Just this past week, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) Spoke outside the Supreme Court to protestors, while the Court was hearing a case that would require doctors in Louisiana who operate at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Senator Schumer, standing on the courthouse steps and speaking to protestors, called out Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh by name, threatening them: “ I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” When called out by others, including Chief Justice John Roberts, some Republican Senators and a few in the media, Senator Schumer claimed to regret his choice of words. Yet everything he says is predetermined and politically motivated. He is not stupid but has had no real-world experience. Since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1974, he has spent his entire career (forty-five years) in public service. He parses his words carefully.

This is not to absolve the Right, but vitriol among the sanctimonious left who feel a God-granted right to dictate to “deplorables” and others has become ubiquitous. Progressivism has become a religion in that it claims a moral code of wokeness, political correctness, identity politics, victimization and intolerance, the glue of shared values and mythologies. They clamor for diversity, as long as there is conformity in thought.

Nastiness and incivility have long been present on the political scene and always most venomous during political campaigns. There have always been fringe elements on both sides of the political divide who urge violence and recrimination against those with whom they disagree. However, incivility was generally limited to those on the political stage and to a few commentators whose bigotry is their success. Reporters and the general public were once more restrained in their observations. In our age of better educated citizens who have more free time to think about candidates and politics, unadulterated hatred should have given way to reflection and perspective. It hasn’t. Hatred, on the part of the left, has gone mainstream. Consider a few selections: White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family were asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Kentucky by the co-owner, because of her ties to the “inhumane and unethical” Trump Administration. Senior White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller was accosted in a Washington, D.C. restaurant and called a “real-life fascist.” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielson was forced to leave another restaurant when fifteen protestors showed up shouting “Shame!” Such acts were encouraged by the establishment. In June 2018, Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) told attendees at an event to continue publicly harassing members of President Trump’s Cabinet.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Wyoming Public School Salaries Finally Posted Online – Payrolls Cost Taxpayers $1 Billion Adam Andrzejewski

By on March 7th, 2020

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/03/06/wyoming-public-school-salaries-finally-posted-online–payrolls-cost-taxpayers-1-billion/#4c061b522f60

Transparency Victory in Wyoming!
It was a three-year fight to open the books on the entire payroll of the Wyoming public schools — and we’ve officially won! 

Finally, the salaries of every educator, administrator, staffer, and employee have been posted online. 

It was a three year fight to open the books on the entire payroll of the Wyoming public schools. Finally, the salaries of every educator, administrator, and staffer have been posted online.

Starting in 2017, our organization at OpenTheBooks.com filed open records requests with the 48 public school districts. Some districts wanted to charge us fees up to $3,600. Only 18 of the districts produced a responsive record of their payrolls – the rest of the districts arguably violated transparency law.

Enter Tom James a new state senator. He learned that the Superintendent of Public Instruction compiled the records each year. So James filed his request and successfully captured three years of data. Then, our organization requested a copy as well.

“Public school employees are paid by taxpayers and therefore taxpayers get to see where their dollars are going. For the first time in history, I made sure the books were open to the public.”

Hon. Tom James, Wyoming State Senator

The new data shows that there are 16,306 full-time employees making $816.5 million in cash compensation. Adding the cost of benefits such as paid time off and pensions, taxpayer costs are estimated to exceed $1 billion.

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