MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Katrina? Try the Media’s Waterloo By Mike Sabo

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

President Trump took on the Left’s politicization of the NFL last week. This week, he is taking on their appropriation of natural disasters and human caused horrors for political gain.https://amgreatness.com/2017/10/03/trumps-katrina-try-the-medias-waterloo/

The Left and its accomplices in the press couldn’t pin the blame on Trump for the administration’s responses to the hurricanes that struck the Gulf Coast states and U.S. territories early last month. But in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which hit the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico especially hard, they thought they finally got their story.

Instead of focusing on the myriad logistical challenges of reaching an island more than 900 miles away from the U.S. mainland, or on how FEMA has worked with the Puerto Rican central government and most municipalities, or the ins-and-outs of federal disaster management, the media pounced on Trump.

They couldn’t wait to allege that Trump’s response was akin to George W. Bush’s Hurricane Katrina performance. CNN ran an article with the headline, “‘Trump’s Katrina?’ No, it’s much worse.” A piece at The Daily Beast authored by noted Trump-hater Joy-Ann Reid of MSNBC was titled, “Puerto Rico is Trump’s Katrina.” The Leftist fever swamp Salon ran an article, “‘We are doing a great job’: Is this Trump’s Katrina moment?”

From the media’s lips to God’s ears.
The most transparent response came from the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz. Earlier last week, Cruz described FEMA as “wonderful” and doing an all-around “great job.” She noted further that federal officials “have been here since last week—helping us and setting up logistics.”

But at a morning press conference on Saturday, Cruz completely changed her tune. As she stood in front of pallets of water bottles and other supplies, she shouted, “We are dying, and you are killing us with the inefficiency, and the bureaucracy!” Cruz claimed if Trump didn’t do something quickly, “we are going to see something close to a genocide.” The irony of this scene, of course, was completely lost on the press.

Trump, understanding exactly what was taking place, fired back:
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.

Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They….
Donald J. Trump

✔ @realDonaldTrump

…want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

Trump’s refusal to serve as a Republican punching bag for Cruz, a rabid Hillary Clinton supporter, and other Democrats sent shock waves through the media. In marked contrast with previous Republican presidents, Trump understands the Democratic-Media complex’s playbook when it comes to natural disasters when Republicans are in office: shame them into submission for their errors—real or imagined. And for the coup de grace, hint in not so subtle language that race was the deciding factor in how the disaster was handled.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: A State Within a State? by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

The “reconciliation” accord they reached in Cairo paves the way for creating a state within a state in the Gaza Strip. The Egyptian-sponsored deal does not require Hamas to dismantle its security forces and armed wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam. Nor does the agreement require Hamas to lay down its weapons or stop amassing weapons and preparing for war.

This is a very comfortable situation for Hamas, which has effectively been absolved of any responsibility toward the civilian population. Hamas could not have hoped for a better deal. Like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip will be permitted to maintain its own security force, while Abbas’s government oversees civilian affairs and pays salaries to civil servants.

Offloading this responsibility frees up Hamas to fortify its military capabilities. Hamas is not being asked to recognize Israel’s right to exist or accept any peace process.

The latest “reconciliation” deal between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas brings the Palestinians closer to creating a state-within-a-state in the Gaza Strip. The PA and Hamas will now have two separate mini-states of their own in the Gaza Strip.

This arrangement is similar to the situation in Lebanon, where Hezbollah maintains a separate mini-state of its own there.

In state-like fashion, Hezbollah in Lebanon has its own army and territory. This situation, which has gone on for decades, has enraged many Lebanese politicians.

Earlier this year, when dozens of masked Hezbollah militiamen launched a nighttime raid to arrest drug dealers in Beirut, Lebanese politicians accused their government of giving up its authority in favor of Hezbollah’s “tiny state.” The militiamen belonged to Hezbollah’s “social security department,” a police force that operates independently of the Lebanese security authorities.

“This is what a country that has given up its authority in favor of the ‘tiny state’ (of Hezbollah) looks like,” said Ashraf Rifi, Lebanon’s former justice minister. Rifi said that the pictures of the Hezbollah militiamen conducting the raid testify for the umpteenth time how the very existence of Hezbollah goes against the state and its institutions.

Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority are now headed, willingly or unwillingly, towards plunging the Palestinians into a similar scenario as in Lebanon. The “reconciliation” accord they reached in Cairo paves the way for creating a mini-state within a mini-state in the Gaza Strip. These two “states” will be added to the mini-Palestinian Authority “state” that already exists in parts of the West Bank.

The Egyptian-sponsored deal does not require Hamas to dismantle its security forces and armed wing, Ezaddin Al-Qassam. Nor does the agreement require Hamas to lay down its weapons or stop amassing weapons or preparing for war.

All that is known thus far is that the agreement allows Abbas and his Palestinian Authority to resume civilian control over the Gaza Strip, while security remains in the hands of Hamas.

This is a very comfortable situation for Hamas, which has effectively been absolved of any responsibility toward the civilian population. Hamas could not have hoped for a better deal.

Like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip will be permitted to maintain its own security establishment and security force in the Gaza Strip, while Abbas’s government oversees civilian affairs and pays salaries to civil servants. It would be difficult in the extreme to imagine Hamas agreeing to relinquish security control or permit Abbas’s security forces to return to the Gaza Strip.

The Lebanon case seems better than the one shaping up in Gaza for several reasons. There, the government at least has its own army and police force. In the Gaza Strip, however, Hamas is unlikely to return to the pre-2007 era, when the Palestinian Authority had multiple security forces that maintained a tight grip and kept Hamas on the defensive by regularly arresting its leaders and members.

And, despite the hugging and kissing on display during the visit of PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and his delegation to the Gaza Strip on October 2 — the first of its kind since the violent and bloody Hamas takeover in 2007 — much bad blood remains between the two sides.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

More Jihadists in the West – Why? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

Western countries are much more lenient toward the jihadists and Islamists. In the Middle East, there are severe consequences if they preach against their own political system. They are permitted to grow only if they teach antagonism towards the West, Christianity, Judaism, and Western values.

In Iran, when the Islamist party of Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, it did not embrace all other Islamist and jihadist groups. It supported and promoted only those jihadist groups that agreed to focus on promoting two major issues: anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Other Islamist groups, which turned against the regime itself, were immediately removed from society even though they were practicing Khomeini’s version of radical Islam.

The issue becomes: Where do you draw the line? When a radical imam in the US or Europe is publicly inciting anti-Semitic, anti-American, and anti-Western hate, should they be allowed to continue? When many radical Muslim centers in the West preach jihad and terrorism, should you still let them enjoy freedom of speech and assembly? Their preaching is the major factor behind the increasing terrorism we have currently spreading throughout the West. If we allow them to continue, the vicious trend will only ratchet up exponentially.

One of the strategies of these groups is to tap into communities where young people are facing problems — financial difficulties, family hardship, maybe psychological issues. The imams superficially embrace them as fathers, as if embracing his children. Then, they create explanations for why these young people are faced with such problems. They teach them that the problem lies in their society, their government, their own people, even their own families.

Growing up under Sharia law and in Islamist schools, we were taught that the highest level a person can reach is to be a mujahid. A mujahid is a person that God truly loves. Once, I dared to ask what exactly the term mujahid meant. The imam said that a true mujahid is a person who does not just die defensively for protecting Allah’s values. A true mujahid, one who is most loved by God, is a person who acts offensively, including through violence, when he or she sees our religious values are being violated in any part of the world. That person is a true holy warrior, he explained.

That description has been echoed through the halls of schools, and whispered into the minds of children. It has followed me throughout my life. Now, as I reflect on the first time this thirst for violence was explained to me, an eerie reality comes into focus. If the teachings of these radical imams are accurate, then the rate of mujahidin in the West appears to be increasing far higher in the West than in the East.

As some clamored to reach this ideal, we were told that one major indicator of whether the number of mujahdin is increasing or decreasing in a society is to look at the rate of those who are becoming martyrs. The higher the rate, the more mujahidin are there, and the more satisfied God is. It was a powerful message delivered to young, impressionable minds, that were eager to please and learn.

Growing up in the Middle East, within Muslim-majority nations, I rarely heard of radical Islamists committing terrorist acts in the region. But in the few years that I have lived in the West, I have regularly heard of bombing and suicide missions committed by radical Islamists. Their targets have been Americans and Europeans, including attacks in London, Paris, Nice, Brussels, Boston and San Bernardino — and often one another.

Information about these attacks is splashed across the media, discussed between concerned citizens, and echoed throughout global politics. This situation prompted me to ask: Why do there appear to be more Islamist terrorists in the West, even though the homeland of their religious teaching is on the other side of the world?

It would seem implausible that the West, with freedom of education, would become a hotbed for these violent minds, and yet the numbers are clear.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Obama Too Conservative for Democrats? The Sandernista attack on a leftist. James Freeman

Posted By on October 4th, 2017

Leftist Jonathan Chait reports in New York magazine that he’s under rhetorical attack from other leftists. It seems that Mr. Chait has made some of his ideological comrades angry by admitting that the evidence does not exist to call President Trump a white supremacist.

Mr. Chait is being lampooned as some kind of squishy moderate. This has sparked a larger debate about how radical the Democratic Party should be and whether it has already moved well to the left of Barack Obama. Unlike Mr. Chait, many readers of this column probably don’t consider the nation’s 44th President to be a man of the “center-left.” But as Democratic Party leaders continue to lurch toward Bernie Sanders’ brand of Marxism, they are clearly making Mr. Obama appear more moderate.

The question is whether Democratic voters as well as independents who tend to vote Democratic are all coming along for the ride leftward. According to Mr. Chait:

Political activists and writers can get the impression that the Democratic Party is riven by conflict between leftists and liberals. But social media is deeply unrepresentative. On Twitter, which is swarming with communists and Nazis, every day feels like the 1932 German federal elections. The massively elevated concentration of political extremists of all varieties creates a deeply misleading portrait of the public. (This is why libertarians have managed to portray themselves as a significant proportion of the electorate, when practically speaking, they don’t exist.)

The actual Democratic Party is not divided between liberals and leftists. It’s divided between liberals and … moderates and conservatives.

Mr. Chait then marshals a variety of polling data to show that most of the party’s voters don’t consider themselves leftist or even liberal. For example, he notes Pew Research data showing that in 2016, a full 36% of Democratic voters described themselves as moderate, and another 15% called themselves conservative.

Of course such survey results can be misleading because political or philosophical labels mean different things to different people. For example, observing so many potential candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsing Mr. Sanders’ single-payer health plan, Mr. Obama might also be calling himself a moderate.

But it is striking, given that Mr. Sanders won 22 states and nearly 1900 delegates in the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, that even among Democratic voters almost nobody will cop to being “far left” and just 16% call themselves “very liberal.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Passionate Non-Sequiturs of the Gun Debate The legislation most gun-control advocates call for would not have stopped Stephen Paddock. By Rich Lowry

Posted By on October 3rd, 2017

The mind boggles at the horror of Las Vegas, where Stephen Paddock perched himself in the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay and sprayed bullets into a crowd of outdoor concertgoers in the worst mass shooting in American history.

If this slaughter of innocents were an act perpetrated by a foreign power, the U.S. military retaliation would begin immediately, and rightly so.

The impulse to act to stop the domestic massacres that have become a heartbreakingly metronomic feature of American life is laudable and understandable. “It’s time,” as Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said, giving voice to the sentiment, “for Congress to get off its a– and do something.”

The problem is that the “something,” namely all the usual gun-control proposals, isn’t well-suited to stopping mass shootings. But liberal politicians never let the inapplicability of their proposals stop them. The passion with which they advocate for new gun-control measures is inversely related to their prospective efficacy.

The go-to proposal is universal back-ground checks, although the perpetrators of mass shootings usually haven’t been adjudicated and therefore have passed background checks, as Paddock did in purchasing at least some of his guns.

He had no history of mental illness, and people who knew him didn’t report any bizarre behavior. He had no criminal record, beyond a minor violation years ago. He didn’t even have politics that anyone was aware of. ISIS is claiming responsibility, but the FBI says it hasn’t found any evidence of a connection. His brother seemed sincerely dumbfounded and called Paddock “just a guy.”

No enhanced background-check regime, no matter how vigorous, would have stopped him from purchasing guns.

Hillary Clinton immediately singled out so-called silencers, or suppressors. “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots,” Clinton tweeted. “Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make it easier to get.” This conjures an image of the killer shooting down people with a gun impossible to hear, a conception straight out of a James Bond movie.

In a piece on Republican-supported legislation to make suppressors easier to acquire (it currently requires a long approval process and purchase of a $200 tax stamp), the Washington Post notes that one of the devices would lessen the sound of an AR-15 to 132 decibels, or comparable to “a gunshot or a jackhammer.” In other words, a rifle still sounds like a gun even with a suppressor.

If Hillary cares so much about the issue, she might take ten minutes to learn something about it, but gun-controllers tend to be low-information advocates.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Are Wars Caused by Accidents? History shows that a lack of deterrence, not loose rhetoric, spurs aggression. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 3rd, 2017

As tensions mount with North Korea, fears arise that President Trump’s tit-for-tat bellicose rhetoric with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un might lead to miscalculations — and thus an accidental war that could have been prevented.

Is there evidence in history that wars break out largely because of an accident or over a misplaced word?

Seldom.

Enemies Fight, but Neutrals, Rivals, and Friends Rarely Do

The precise timing of particular outbreaks of war, of course, can depend on unique factors.

A sudden perception of a loss of deterrence can cause an army to mobilize. So can almost anything, from the introduction of a new weapon to a change in government.

Yet the larger events that originally drove two sides to fight are rarely, if ever, accidental in the manner of car wrecks.

Enemies go to war; rivals, neutrals, and friends rarely do. There is little chance that an accidental foreign incursion across the Canadian or even the Mexican border will result in war. The apparently accidental, but quite lethal, 1967 Israeli air attack on the USS Liberty did not result in a U.S. retaliatory strike on Tel Aviv, much less escalate to a general war. Yet a similar Soviet strike might have.

In general, the best deterrent policy in dealing with multiple aggressors is Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum to speak softly and carry a big stick — because loud speech is sometimes misinterpreted as a compensatory effort to disguise military incapability, and thus paradoxically it can lead to a fatal loss of deterrence.

Next best perhaps is speaking loudly while carrying a big stick. Intemperate words are not fatal if ultimately reinforced by overwhelming force.

Most dangerous is speaking loudly (and especially sanctimoniously) while carrying a twig — basically what we have seen in the past eight years with Russia, Iran, and Syria.

Was World War I Really an Accident?

It is often said that accidents and extraneous forces — nearly automatic and mindless mobilization, fumbled diplomacy, greedy arms merchants, archaic alliances on autopilot, confused messaging, or bellicose strutting and rhetoric in August 1914 — triggered World War I, which otherwise might have been prevented.

But a continental war had come close to breaking out earlier in 1911 over Morocco and again in 1912–13 in the Balkans. A war would likely have broken out later, if not in 1914. Berlin by 1914 held views that were incompatible with peaceful resolution:

1) Germany felt cheated that its economic dynamism, population, and military power somehow had not resulted in what Germany thought it deserved: commensurate colonial expansion overseas and dominant influence on the Continent;

2) the German army since 1871 had felt that its size, and organizational and technological excellence, increasingly replicated in a rising and powerful navy, made it nearly unstoppable vis-à-vis other European rivals;

3) any sudden German strike in either the East or West could not be immediately deterred or stopped by the existing forces of Britain, France, or Russia.

The net result of these unchallenged assumptions was a likely German war of aggression sometime in the second or third decade of the 20th century.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats Take a “Knee” Over Las Vegas Victims They won’t stand for the anthem or for a moment of silence. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 3rd, 2017

Congressman Seth Moulton will be boycotting the moment of silence for the victims of the Las Vegas mass shooting. It’s not just NFL football players who take a knee during the anthem. It’s also Harvard grads who like to announce that they were “approached” to run for President of the United States.

The NFL’s millionaire racists are taking a knee to protest America. But why protest a moment of silence for the victims of the worst mass shooting in this country’s history even if you, like some lefties, think they’re a bunch of country-music listening, Trump-voting Republicans who don’t deserve any sympathy?

If you can’t stand for the anthem, can’t you at least stand for the innocent victims of a monstrous killer?

But, Moulton, like many Democrats, will instead take a knee over the bodies of the Las Vegas dead.

According to Moulton, he’s protesting in support of gun control and demanding, what he calls a, “universal background check”.

“There’s a lot of evidence that shows it would reduce the chances of crimes like these,” Moulton insisted. While all the facts aren’t in (and that hasn’t stopped Moulton or Hillary Clinton), but the evidence does show that the killer’s only previous brush with the law was a traffic citation.

How was a background check supposed to stop a guy with nothing in his background? Ask Moulton or Congressman Chris Murphy, who right on cue, is bringing a background check bill back.

Moulton and Murphy don’t know. And don’t care.

Congressman Moulton is however obscenely eager to upstage a moment of silence for the victims of the Las Vegas shootings to get 30 seconds of attention from CNN. And then maybe a gun control donor with deep pockets will ask him to run for the White House. Walking out on the victims of a brutal massacre is a small price to pay for winning the heart of a big billionaire donor like Michael Bloomberg.

His disgusting behavior isn’t an aberration. A number of Democrats, including Moulton, have boycotted previous moments of silence by staging publicity stunts for gun control. After an Islamic terrorist carried out the Pulse massacre in Orlando, Democrats boycotted it and then disrupted the aftermath.

When Paul Ryan asked that, “the House now observe a moment of silence in memory of the victims of the terrorist attack in Orlando”, Democrats began walking out.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

San Francisco State University: Allied with Hamas “My heroes have always killed colonizers.” Sara Dogan

Posted By on October 3rd, 2017

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 SFSU and other campuses may be viewed at www.stopuniversitysupportforterrorists.org.

San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University (SFSU) has the distinction of being singled out by Jewish students and community members with a lawsuit in U.S. district court charging that “it has systematically supported these departments and student groups as they have doggedly organized their efforts to target, threaten, and intimidate Jewish students on campus and deprive them of their civil rights and their ability to feel safe and secure as they pursue their education.” This claim is borne out by SFSU’s record of enabling the anti-Semitism and threatening behavior of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), an SJP surrogate group which has repeatedly terrorized pro-Israel speakers and students—including Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat—by shouting exhortations to terrorist violence and succeeded in curtailing his address. At Barkat’s speech, demonstrators shouted “Intifada,” a call for terrorism against Israel, and chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” a call for the obliteration of the Jewish state. The former president of GUPS wrote dozens of social media posts threatening violence to pro-Israel students, Israelis, the IDF and others. He also praised Hamas and the violent Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). While he was eventually kicked off campus, GUPS continues to propagandize for Hamas and harass Jewish students at SFSU.

Supporting Evidence:

In June 2017, Jewish students at SFSU together with members of the local community filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against SFSU and the trustees of California State University charging that SFSU has fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students on campus who are “often afraid to wear Stars of David or yarmulkes on campus, and regularly text their friends to describe potential safety issues.” The lawsuit was prompted in part by an incident in April 2016 when a speech by the mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, was disrupted by anti-Israel protestors who chanted “Intifada” (a call for violence and terrorism against Israel) and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (a statement urging the genocide of Israel’s Jews). During this incident, university administrators told campus police to “stand down” and allowed the protest to continue.

The suit filed against the University claims, “SFSU has not merely fostered and embraced anti-Jewish hostility — it has systematically supported these departments and student groups as they have doggedly organized their efforts to target, threaten, and intimidate Jewish students on campus and deprive them of their civil rights and their ability to feel safe and secure as they pursue their education.” The suit also specifically names SFSU professor Rabab Abdulhadi, the director of SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Initiative (AMED) and the faculty advisor for SFSU’s Hamas-supporting GUPS chapter, who has a long history of supporting terrorists and their allies.

In April 2017, GUPS held a commemoration of the “Nakba,” a term used by Hamas and its allies to describe the creation of Israel as a “catastrophe.” Signs and advertisements for the event stated “Never Forget, Never Forgive,” and called for the Palestinian’s “Right of Return” which would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, one of Hamas’s chief aims.

In March 2017, GUPS again brought the anti-Israel hatefest “Israeli Apartheid Week” to campus. This year’s festivities featured a mock checkpoint and a “political discussion and film screening” at which a large banner was featured stating the Hamas libel that “Zionism is racism.”

SFSU GUPS held a March 2017 event on “Israeli Policies in Relation to the Trump Era” at which they attempted to smear both the Trump administration and the Jewish state. The event description claimed “Since the settler colonial project of Israel was established as a state in 1948, the Israel government has used ‘security’ as a pretext to further oppressive and racist policies and practices against the Palestinians. This include[s]… building an Apartheid Wall…a racist ID system… and torture, resulting in the policing, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”Israel’s “apartheid wall” is actually a security fence that has saved thousands of Jewish lives by preventing Palestinian terrorists from entering.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Vegas Atrocity As Political Opportunity Matthew Vadum

Posted By on October 3rd, 2017

The deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history has been cravenly transformed into anti-American propaganda by the Left, as Democrat commentators race to ghoulishly savage white men, gun rights and the NRA, Republicans, and President Trump, blaming them for what otherwise looks like a terrorist atrocity.

The president described the attack as “an act of pure evil.”

Nowadays there should be a working assumption – or perhaps a rebuttable presumption is a better way of putting it – that when a terrorist-style attack like this happens, jihadists are behind it either directly or indirectly. It is important to note that videos produced by Islamic State (also called ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh), specifically show the Las Vegas Strip, presenting the area as a prospective terrorist target.

The rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire rang out while country music performer Jason Aldean was on stage on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday night singing at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the massacre that was carried out several football fields away from a two-bedroom suite on the 32nd floor of MGM’s Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino by 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, who killed himself before police could apprehend him.

Relatives say the shooter kept to himself and wasn’t prone to angry outbursts. Described as a retired accountant turned professional gambler, Paddock owned several homes around the country. His brother said he was a “multi-millionaire.” He apparently owned an apartment complex in Texas.

The brother, Eric Paddock, told reporters that Paddock had no religious or political affiliations or history of mental illness. “He just hung out,” the brother added, leaving out the fact that the father of the two men, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was a violent psychopath who was on the FBI’s most wanted list.

Witnesses say a woman attended the concert and told people that they were all going to die that night. Sky News interviewed a concert-goer identified only as Brianna who said the incident happened about 45 minutes before gunfire broke out.

Former Chicago Police superintendent Garry McCarthy told Brian Kilmeade of Fox News that it is too early to rule out terrorism as Paddock’s motivation. “I’m not ready to dismiss the terrorism angle here until we find out for sure that that’s not the case because it certainly was executed like a terrorist operation, even though this guy, Paddock, doesn’t fit the profile.”

The extensive, meticulous planning and preparation required for this attack makes it very hard to believe a lone wolf was behind it. Merely getting all the materiel to his hotel suite would have required dragging a caravan of suitcases or boxes filled with heavy weapons and thousands upon thousands of live rounds through the casino grounds replete with eye-in-the-sky security cameras without arousing suspicion in a place where management views everyone, including employees, as potential cheats. The hauling operation could have taken days.

That the shooter apparently had fully automatic weapons, that is, firearms that fire continuously, eating up vast quantities of ammunition, is significant. Such weapons, referred to in federal law as “machine guns,” are extremely difficult and expensive to obtain. Owners are subjected to far-reaching, intrusive background checks at the federal level by ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It is also possible that the weapons used were illegally modified to allow continuous fire.

Anyone who follows the news knows that Muslim terrorists are increasingly targeting concert venues.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, on May 22 that killed 22. On August 23 authorities in Rotterdam in the Netherlands foiled a suspected Muslim terrorist attack that was to take place during a performance by Allah-Las at the Maassilo concert complex. On November 13, 2015, Muslim terrorists attacked the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, France, leaving 89 dead during a performance by Eagles of Death Metal. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the assault.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Peter Smith: Climate-Change Idolaters

Posted By on October 3rd, 2017

The recent wave of hurricanes that lashed the US had no sooner done their worst than all the paid-up and grant-fed members of Climate Catastrophe Inc., were crying ‘We told you so!’ Yes, they have told us, repeatedly. And just as often they have been wrong, as they are now and once again.

Don’t know why. There’s no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather. Ah! Gaia is very, very, angry.

Windmills providing expensive, intermittent and unreliable power — the idols of our age — must be built to appease Gaia. Deplorables are dispensable. Those without base-load power in developing countries, plus coal miners, the old, the infirm, the poor must all be sacrificed. Only then will Gaia smile on us again.

I told some ‘warmist’ friends about a Category 4 hurricane hitting Galveston in Texas, generating a fifteen-foot tidal surge, and killing an estimated 8000 people. The deadliest natural disaster in US history. I let it stew for a moment or two before revealing the time: September 1900. I don’t think it made an impression. The climate change ethos has etched itself so deeply into the minds of disciples that it is impervious to clashing information.

Effectively, climate change has become an idolatry masquerading as science. Destructive climate events, however commonplace historically, cause much wailing, finger-pointing and scapegoating. High priests in the guise of climate gurus, like Gore, Flannery, Mann and Suzuki, come into their own. Reason succumbs to superstition.

Take hurricanes.

The latest information, sourced from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), indicates that hurricane activity has not increased by either frequency or scale during recent decades – so far as can be determined. The data going back is patchy and unreliable; as, in fact, is all climate-related data.

I looked at the hurricane data from the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA for the Atlantic Basin for the period from 1851 to 2016. In the ten years to 2016, there were 28 “major” hurricanes recorded. In the previous ten years 39 were recorded. This is relatively high when compared with the whole period from 1851. However, 39 major hurricanes were recorded for the ten years to 1956 and 32 for the ten years to 1966, before dropping to 17 and 16 in the next two succeeding decades. So, what to say? Hurricanes come and go.

There is nothing markedly unusual happening. But, you wouldn’t think that if you suffer the unfortunate experience of tuning into widespread alarmist commentaries and news bulletins. Those who claim to believe in science are quick to dispense with it when it doesn’t suit their storyline. They point to the latest hurricanes as yet more evidence of climate change. And you can bet your life that every storm, drought and heat wave from now on will draw the same response.

They suffer no embarrassment in making such outlandish claims. They are impervious to any factual rebuttals. They have a higher calling.

I understand that the current scientific theory is that warmer water tends to engender more airborne turbulence. Maybe it does. I don’t know. I am not a climate scientist, just an ordinary Joe. But what I do know is that warmer water is not necessarily man-made. Maybe the climate is just warming as it has in early periods of time; and, in any event, maybe it is not warming as much as the high priests tell us. This brings me to a recent climatologist recantation.