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Ruth King

Christianity is Rattling: “Lights Out” in Germany by Giulio Meotti

The fall of German Christianity leaves an emptiness that seems likely to be filled by a more multicultural and Islamic society. Germany today houses Europe’s largest Muslim community.

Christians in Germany, Die Welt reports, will become a minority in 20 years.

The falling birth rate will remove a piece of Germany larger than the former communist East Germany. It will result in a demographic loss equivalent to the population of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt combined.

The German army just spent 428 million euros on various operations relating to migrants during the past year. It has been the costliest mission within German borders that the army of the Federal Republic of Germany has ever undertaken.

In the decades after WWII, Germans have turned into hard-core pacifists, enjoying their role on the sidelines of global conflicts. The army was then turned into a humanitarian organization.

“Contemporary historians … right now, have failed to find a single historical example of a society that became secularised and maintained its birth rate over subsequent centuries,” the former UK chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, recently argued.

“Falling fertility has coincided so closely with massive secularization that we must at least ask whether the two phenomena are related, even if not in a neat one-to-one relationship”, the scholar Philip Jenkins also said.

Emails show CNN pundit fed Hillary question before town hall !!!!! By Daniel Halper

WASHINGTON — CNN political commentator Donna Brazile appeared to give the Clinton campaign advance notice of a question that came up at the cable network’s presidential town hall, according to e-mails released Tuesday.

“From time to time I get the questions in advance,” Brazile, who was then vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee, wrote in a March 12, 2016, e-mail to Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri.

“Here’s one that worries me about HRC,” she added, as she sent along a detailed death-penalty-related question.

“19 states and the District of Columbia have banned the death penalty. 31 states, including Ohio, still have the death penalty. According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, since 1973, 156 people have been on death row and later set free. Since 1976, 1,414 people have been executed in the U.S. That’s 11% of Americans who were sentenced to die, but later exonerated and freed. Should Ohio and the 30 other states join the current list and abolish the death penalty?”

In the CNN presidential town hall — which took place the next day, March 13 — Clinton was asked a question on the death penalty.

That question, however, was differently worded.

The e-mail to the Clinton campaign from Brazile, who is currently on leave from CNN as she serves as the interim chair of the DNC, was made public by WikiLeaks, which has been slowly releasing a trove of hacked e-mails from campaign chair John Podesta.

In a statement released by the DNC, Brazile claimed she helped all Democratic campaigns, but denied forwarding particular questions to candidates.

“As a longtime political activist with deep ties to our party, I supported all of our candidates for president. I often shared my thoughts with each and every campaign, and any suggestions that indicate otherwise are simply untrue,” Brazile said.

Emails Show Hillary Clinton Campaign’s Response to Fallout New WikiLeaks release shows the political team’s communications By Byron Tau and Colleen McCain Nelson see note please

PODESTA, THE PARAMECIUM WHO HEADS HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN IS GOING TO THE FBI???!!! HILARIOUS NOW THAT THE AGENCY IS IN HILLARY’S CORNER THANKS TO THE DUPLICITY OF LORETTA LYNCH AND COMEY….RSK

WASHINGTON—Hillary Clinton’s political team sought to contain any potential fallout over her use of a private email server by communicating with government agencies, enlisting help of congressional allies and managing public statements, newly released emails show.

Hacked emails belonging to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta were posted by the website WikiLeaks this week, showing her staff candidly debating the tone and substance of responses to media after the 2015 disclosure of her use of a private email server while leading the State Department during President Barack Obama’s first term.

In several electronic exchanges, almost all from last year and this year, Mrs. Clinton’s staff appeared to be in communication with government officials about the email issue. One campaign official is shown telling colleagues about a coming procedural step, which was part of the public record, that he suggests he learned from Justice Department officials.

In another case, an attorney for Mrs. Clinton appeared to know the contents of a State Department document release concerning speeches by former President Bill Clinton before it was made public.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign hasn’t confirmed or denied the authenticity of the email trove posted by WikiLeaks, but a campaign spokesman said the release of apparently stolen internal communications showcases Russian attempts to interfere in the U.S. election on behalf of Mrs. Clinton’s Republican rival, Donald Trump. U.S. intelligence agencies have publicly accused Russia of directing hacks and leaks aimed at top Democratic Party officials, but they haven’t reached a conclusion in the specific breach of Mr. Podesta’s emails.

Mr. Podesta told reporters Tuesday that he had been in touch with the Federal Bureau of Investigation about what he called a “criminal hack.”

“If you think you’d like all the contents of all your emails for 10 years dumped into public, think about how that feels. It doesn’t feel great,” Mr. Podesta said. “But I’m kind of Zen about it at this stage.” CONTINUE AT SITE

U of M to Monitor Students’ ‘Cultural Sensitivity Levels’ as Part of New $85 Million Diversity Push By Katherine Timpf

The University of Michigan is going to start using an “Intercultural Development Inventory” to monitor its students “cultural sensitivity levels” as part of its new $85 million diversity initiative — and it’s pretty clearly an irresponsible use of money.

The point of the inventory — which is explained in this very creepy video — is, according to the school website, to judge students’ “ability to shift cultural perspective and appropriately adapt behavior to cultural differences and commonalities,” give students a “customized learning plan and a variety of intercultural training opportunities designed to improve cross-cultural engagement by targeting specific areas for skill development and increased personal capacity” based on their answers, and then test them again later to see if they’ve “improved.”

According to an article in the school’s official newspaper, The Michigan Daily, the school plans to spend $85 million on diversity initiatives over the next five years — in addition to the $40 million it’s already allotted to spend annually — at a school where tuition has increased 3.9 percent this year.

Now, it isn’t clear how much of this money will be spent on the monitoring program itself, but the fact is that any amount would be too much. Not only is it obviously invasive and creepy, but it’s also just not going to accomplish what the school is hoping it will. Any student at U of M, “insensitive” or not, will probably be smart enough to figure out what answer the school wants and choose that answer. After all, choosing the “wrong” answer will brand students as a “racist” in the eyes of their school — and what’s more, as Reason’s Robby Soave points out, the fact that a student’s answers will determine his or her “individual learning plan” means that “students who are judged to be too insensitive might be given more work to do.” Who wants to do sign themselves up to do more work . . . especially when it’s work that’s so likely to be patronizing and pointless? Zero people. Punishing students for telling the truth about their opinions is the best way to ensure that real discussions about those opinions will never happen — which is hindering the exact kind of learning experiences that the school claims it wants to cultivate.

Trump Tapes and Clinton Morals Only the Clintons can protect our moral values. Daniel Greenfield

“Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life,” President Clinton whined.

It was the late hot summer of ’98 and the man dubbed “Slick Willie,” the nickname he claimed to dislike the most, was facing the prospect of becoming the first president to be successfully impeached.

These days the Clintons seem to have changed their minds about whether presidents should have private lives that ought to be pried into. So did the media, which back then insisted that it was “just sex,” but has belatedly decided that a president’s sexual conduct ought to be subject to scrutiny after all. But then again double standards are its stock in trade. They always have been.

Bill’s bedroom is off limits, but Trump’s isn’t.

Unable to run on national security, the Clintons want to run on the same subject that they once eschewed. And they want Trump’s sex life to be up for public debate, but not Bill’s.

The media has joined in this chorus which insists that when Trump mentions Bill’s rapes, he’s climbing into the “gutter,” but that when Hillary references Trump’s tape, she’s taking the “high ground.”

How can the same subject be both the gutter and the high ground? It’s either one or the other.

Meanwhile the clock to the next Islamic terror attack goes on ticking.

Back in ‘98 Bill Clinton complained, “Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long, and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do. Now it is time, in fact, it is past time to move on,” he added. “We have important work to do — real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face.”

These days the Clintons don’t want to move on. They want to discuss the Trump tape as often as possible. Why? Because they don’t want to deal with what the Clintons did move on to.

Hours before 9/11, Bill Clinton was giving a speech in Australia and boasted that he could have gotten Osama bin Laden, but chose not to because of the collateral damage in Kandahar.

“I nearly got him. And I could have killed him,” he admitted.

The planned airstrike had been vetoed in late December ’98. Congress had postponed debate on impeachment a few days earlier to allow Bill Clinton to bomb Iraq in peace. The raids accomplished little except to distract from the impeachment debate and from his refusal to take out Osama bin Laden.

Iranian Cause and Effect Tehran’s Houthi allies fire at U.S. ships after U.S. sanctions relief.

The Obama Administration keeps stretching the limits of the nuclear deal with Iran to provide the type of sanctions relief the mullahs believe they are owed, no matter what the deal says. So what better way to repay White House’s generosity than by firing on U.S. ships?

That’s one way to understand Sunday’s incident off the coast of Yemen, when the USS Mason, a guided-missile destroyer, and the USS Ponce, an amphibious ship, were attacked by two Chinese-built C-802 cruise missiles fired from territory controlled by Iranian-backed Houthi militia. Iran is a major operator of the C-802; its proxy Hezbollah used it in 2006 to punch a hole in an Israeli corvette off the coast of Lebanon.

On Sunday neither missile hit its target, though the USS Mason launched SM-2 air-defense missiles to defend against the threat. The episode could have ended differently: Last week the Houthis scored a direct hit on the HSV Swift, an unarmed transport shift used by the United Arab Emirates to resupply the Saudi-led military coalition that has been fighting the Houthis for 18 months.

The U.S. contributes limited intelligence support to that coalition, part of a grudging effort by the Administration to reassure Riyadh that the U.S.-Saudi alliance could survive the nuclear deal. Tehran would dearly like to dissolve that 71-year alliance, which also has been frayed by Saudi targeting mistakes that have resulted in major civilian casualties. It’s probably no coincidence that Sunday’s attacks on the U.S. ships came a day after a Saudi air strike mistakenly killed more than 140 mourners at a funeral in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

That attack is a tragedy, but the Administration should remember that the U.S. military has committed similar errors before it cuts Riyadh loose. If the U.S. is uncomfortable with Saudi Arabia as a friend, it will find even less to like should the kingdom ever become an enemy.

More significantly, the attack on the Navy ships—with hundreds of American sailors aboard—is another reminder that the nuclear deal has done more to embolden than moderate Tehran’s ambitions, despite a cascade of U.S. concessions.

Hillary’s October Surprise: WikiLeaks Releases Camp Clinton E-mails Hackers release evidence that shows Hillary was exactly what everyone thought she was By Mark Antonio Wright

://www.nationalreview.com/node/440980/print

Although it’s been almost entirely drowned out in the furor over last weekend’s release of Donald Trump’s hot-mic lewd comments to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush and Sunday night’s no-holds-barred presidential debate, a third explosive story emerged in the last several days: WikiLeaks has begun releasing long-promised tranches of information on Hillary Clinton — so far in the form of three batches of e-mails purportedly from the hacked account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The e-mails contain information ranging from the mundane to the embarrassing to the politically damaging (e.g., what appear to be excerpts of Hillary’s Wall Street–speech transcripts) to the slightly bizarre — such as the fact that Tom DeLonge, the former lead singer of the punk-rock band Blink-182, was in contact with Podesta on the subject of aliens and what the government knows about UFO crashes.

WikiLeaks, the anti-privacy organization headed by Julian Assange, claims that the e-mails are proof of a web of corruption that surrounds the former secretary of state and her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

While neither the Clinton campaign nor John Podesta has directly confirmed the veracity of the e-mails, neither have they specifically denied the provenience of their content (there are allegations, including from Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, that at least some of the e-mails have been edited or manipulated to put Clinton and her associates in the worst light possible).

So what exactly has WikiLeaks exposed? As of Tuesday afternoon, the e-mail that has grabbed the most headlines — and the one that may be the most politically damaging — is a roundup of Clinton’s paid speeches to financial firms. The e-mail, apparently written by Clinton campaign researcher Tony Carrk and sent to Podesta and other senior Clinton campaign operatives in January 2016, “flags” sensitive topics and subject matters. “I put some highlights below,” Carrk writes. “There is a lot of policy positions that we should give an extra scrub with Policy.”

Carrk goes on to provide transcript excerpts along with his own headers indicating how the sections could be politically problematic, e.g., “Clinton Admits She Is Out of Touch,” “Clinton Says You Need to Have a Private and Public Position on Policy,” “Clinton Talks about Holding Wall Street Accountable only for Political Reasons,” etc. Written in the heat of the Democratic primary and facing a Bernie Sanders–led insurgency on her left flank, the e-mail focuses on how Clinton could be seen as too centrist, too business-friendly, or too out of touch to appeal to a liberal-activist base fired up by the “independent socialist” senator from Vermont.

What Should We Make of WikiLeaks as a Source? Publishing stolen private e-mails is wrong, but if those e-mails are authentic, we must take them seriously. By Andrew McCarthy

eliminary consideration to the source, and to the degree, if any, that questions about the manner in which the documents were procured diminish their reliability.

Understandably, the Clinton camp has stressed the questionable nature of WikiLeaks’s operations. That is what lawyers tend to do when documents show up that cast their clients (and themselves) in an unflattering light. There is some persuasive force to these complaints. They are too convenient, though. When it came to top-secret information stolen and leaked by Edward Snowden, the reaction on the left and among many libertarians was that the documents appeared authentic and thus it was proper — essential, in fact — to base reporting and arguments on them. Concerns that what Snowden had done was illegal and treasonous, and that the leaks immensely damaged national security, were said to be trivial compared to the imperative of exposing supposedly monstrous government surveillance activities. Many to this day regard Snowden as a hero.

As I am often constrained to observe, our progressive politics today are not about right and wrong but about us and them — logic is out, “narrative” is in. So we shouldn’t go looking for the Left to take consistent positions. If theft and leaks help The Cause, what matters is the substance of the documents; if they hurt, then it’s time to start worrying about authenticity, moral hazard, etc.

But let’s try to sort out right and wrong, even if the answers are unsatisfying.

The basic rule applied in American courts is that even an atrocious source can produce authentic, reliable evidence. The more atrocious the source, though, the higher the burden to establish authenticity and reliability (there are salient differences between the latter two things, which we’ll get to presently). This is easier to grasp with documents than testimony: It can be very hard (often impossible) to establish the trustworthiness of testimony from a dubious source, while the authenticity of a document can often be verified pretty easily. If, upon examination, the document appears to be what it is represented to be, and especially if its authenticity is not refuted by those with a reason to refute it, it is generally admitted into evidence for the jury’s consideration. But how much the jury should rely on the document’s contents (the “weight” to be given them) depends on how much reason there is to suspect the document is fraudulent or misleadingly incomplete.

Leaked emails show State Department gave special attention to Bill Clinton’s friends after Haiti earthquake

A State Department official close to Hillary Clinton appeared to give preference to former President Bill Clinton’s friends after the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, emails leaked to ABC News revealed on Tuesday.

The official, Caitlin Klevorick, was one of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior aides. She was managing Clinton Foundation contacts who were offering assistance to the State Department.

In one email, Klevorick wrote, “Need you to flag when people are friends of WJC,” referring to William Jefferson Clinton. “Most I can probably ID but not all.”

She wrote in another email: “Is this a FOB [Friend of Bill]! If not, she should go tocidi.org,” referring to a general government website.

The person was emailing to offer medical supplies in the wake of the earthquake.

In another case, billionaire Clinton Foundation donor Denis O’Brien wrote to Clinton aide Doug Band and Clinton Foundation foreign policy director Amitabh Desai for help figuring out how to fly supplies into Haiti and get employees of his company, Haitian telecom firm Digicel, out of the country.

Desai referred to O’Brien as a “WJC VIP” in an email with the subject line “Friend of Clintons.”

O’Brien later wrote in an email to Band that he was “not making any progress through conventional channels.” Band then wrote to Desai to “pls get on this.”

While some offers of help were charitable, others might have been seeking lucrative government contracts as part of the Haiti reconstruction and recovery efforts, ABC noted.

Klevorick told ABC News that she asked questions about whether the contacts were friends of Bill Clinton to determine whether they had previously worked in Haiti or with disaster relief. She said the priority “was to get the necessary resources to the right places as soon as possible to save lives.”

Media Polling Fully Exposed – About That NBC/WSJ Clinton +11 Point Poll….

Media Polling Fully Exposed – About That NBC/WSJ Clinton +11 Point Poll….https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/10/11/media-polling-fully-exposed-about-that-nbcwsj-clinton-11-point-poll/#more-123009

The Real Battle, is The Battle For Your Mind

Researchers and political analysts frequent CTH because we bring you hard, factual, and fully cited research enabling you to make up your own mind about the headlines.

What you are about to read (and see) below is a fully cited example of something we have discussed frequently, but withheld until today, so the oppositional forces cannot change strategies in their attempts to manipulate your mind.

It is now time to lay all media polling naked for you to grasp. Everything below is fully cited so you can fact-check it for yourself. However, we present this with a disclaimer: the entities exposed will industriously work to change their approach from this day forth.

You have probably seen the latest example of the media claiming a released presidential poll from NBC and The Wall Street Journal as an example of Hillary Clinton expanding to an 11 point lead in the weekend following the “controversial” leaked tape of Donald Trump.

The claim is complete and utter nonsense. Here’s the proof.

We begin with a google search showing hundreds of media citations referencing theNBC/WSJ Poll: