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ISIS’ European Matrix How the terror commandos spin their web of death. Emerson Vermaat

Posted By on March 31st, 2016

“ISIS have 400 trained fighters in Europe who are poised to unleash more terror attacks with orders to wait for the right time to cause maximum carnage,” the British Daily Mail reported on March 23, 2016. ISIS terror commandos already struck in Paris on November 13, 2015, and in Brussels on March 22, 2016.

Abdel Hamid Abaaoud, the suspected mastermind of the terror attacks in Paris who operated from Belgium, said that around 90 jihadists had traveled from Syria to France and that “they were spread out around the Paris region: Syrians, Iraqis, British, French and Germans.”

ISIS jihadists receive their training in special training camps in Syria and Iraq. The focus of their training is on how to plot and carry out terror attacks in Europe. Last January, the European police organization Europol claimed in an alarming report that such training camps not only are in existence in Syria and Iraq, but also in the European Union and the Balkan countries. Terror attacks on soft targets are also being planned in Europe itself, the report warns. This finding proved to be right: Both terror attacks in Paris and Brussels were partially planned and prepared from Brussels.

On Saturday March 26, 2016, the Italian anti-terror police arrested Jamal Eddine Ouali, a 40-year-old Algerian who forged lots of identity papers for illegal immigrants and terrorists linked to the ISIS attacks in Paris and Brussels. Ouali was arrested near the southern city of Salerno. He had provided forged identity papers to Mohammed Belkaid, Salah Abdeslam and Najim Lachraaoui, all of whom were members of the ISIS terror commandos that struck in Paris and Brussels.

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Terrorism, Enclaves and Sanctuary Cities How sanctuary cities facilitate the growth of terror enclaves in America. Michael Cutler

Posted By on March 31st, 2016

In the wake of the terror attacks in Belgium, news reports once again focused on how so-called “No Go Zones” in Europe create neighborhoods where communities develop that, although are geographically located within major cities, insulate themselves from their surroundings, fostering the mindset that cooperating with law enforcement is dangerous and even traitorous.

The residents eye law enforcement officers with great suspicion if not outright animosity. The situation is exacerbated because while they fear law enforcement, they may well also fear their neighbors who may take revenge against them for cooperating with law enforcement.

These neighborhoods become “cultural islands” that eschew the cultures and values of the cities and countries in which they grow — a virtual malignancy that ultimately comes to threaten its host city and country because within this cocoon radical Islamists are shielded from law enforcement, find shelter and support and an ample supply of potential terror recruits.

These communities are inhabited by many Muslim refugees who cannot be effectively screened.

This makes assimilation by the residents of these isolated communities unlikely if not impossible and creates breeding grounds for crime and, in this era and under these circumstances- breeding grounds for terrorism.

While there are no actual “No Go Zones” in the United States, there are neighborhoods scattered around the United States, where the concentration of ethnic immigrant minorities is so great that police find themselves unable to make the sort of inroads that they should be able to make in order to effectively police these communities. Adding to the high density of these aliens in these communities is the issue of foreign languages often being the prevalent language in such “ghettos.” This gives new meaning to the term “Language Barrier.”

Back when I was an INS agent, we had an expression- “Big cases- big problems; Little cases- little problems; No cases- no problems!” That phrase applies to all law enforcement officers.

When police or other law enforcement officers are put into a classic “no win” situation, their commonsense solution is to make their own survival and well-being their priority by minimizing their contacts with such enclaves and taking the fewest actions possible within those communities.

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Arrest George Soros Use existing criminal and civil laws to shut down his anti-American juggernaut. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on March 31st, 2016

It is time to hold radical ringleader George Soros to account for the growing civil unrest that he has helped to foment in this presidential election cycle and his efforts to shut down Donald Trump rallies using physical force and intimidation.

Soros, the billionaire speculator, is the preeminent funder of the activist Left in America, which means he is the Number One funder of the domestic terrorism that is part and parcel of the Left.

Soros makes no secret of his contempt for leading GOP candidate Trump. In January he said “Donald Trump is doing the work of ISIS.” Ideas like banning entry to the U.S. by Muslims might “convince the Muslim community that there is no alternative but terrorism.”

Soros favors the decline of the U.S. and spends lavishly on activism to bring that collapse about. He has spent an estimated $7 billion or more on giving left-wing groups the resources to screw up the country.

He has used his vast fortune to topple governments in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. He “broke” the British pound, was accused of wreaking havoc on the Malaysian ringgit, and was called an “economic war criminal” in Thailand. A French court convicted him of insider trading.

America is his current target.

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Daniel Johnson:Culture And Politics In The Age Of Trumpery

Posted By on March 31st, 2016

Trumpery is an archaic word for fraud, taken from the French tromper, to deceive somebody. Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of his rogue Autolycus, who boasts of defrauding the gullible with his worthless trinkets: “Ha, ha! What a fool Honesty is! And Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman! I have sold all my trumpery . . .” (A Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Scene IV.)

The dictionary definition of Trumpery is threefold:

1. Worthless thing: Often something showy that seems appealing at first glance.
2. Nonsense: Empty or ridiculous talk.
3. Deception: The deceiving of somebody, or schemes conceived for the purpose of deceiving.

In all three senses, “Trumpery” denotes the bill of goods that Donald Trump is seeking to sell to America. The subject of this essay, indeed, is not Trump the man, but the meaning of Trumpery. Millions of words have been devoted to the political, psychological and satirical dissection of the Donald, but far fewer to the cultural phenomenon of Trumpery. What we are witnessing is more than the rise of an individual, mesmerising though he may be, not only to Americans, but to the entire free world. Trumpery is the cult of a personality, certainly, but it is also the ascendancy of a cast of mind, a climate of opinion, a broadly-based sociological fact. Never before have we witnessed such a prodigious confidence trick perpetrated on the most powerful and prosperous people on the planet. The free world looks on in bewilderment at the prospective triumph of Trumpery in the land that gave us pragmatism.

Trumpery is the revenge of the rejected in more ways than one. Though Trump himself disclaims ideology, he is in fact one of the “madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air” evoked by Keynes: they “are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”. More by osmosis than by design, he has picked up the ideas of Reagan’s former communications director, Pat Buchanan, and his “paleoconservatives”. Buchanan ran three times for the presidency between 1992 and 2000, but he fell out with mainstream Republicans, while relishing the notoriety provoked by his thinly-disguised anti-Semitism. The paleocons’ ideology of “nativism, protectionism and isolationism” was dismissed in 1996 as “a philosophical corpse” by Charles Krauthammer, the neoconservative Washington Post columnist. Now the paleocons are back with a vengeance, in the guise of Trumpery. Conspiracy theorists, kooks and crazies of all kinds flock to the Donald’s banners, from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. But so, too, do millions of decent, law-abiding, God-fearing Americans, oblivious of Trumpery’s dubious, even nefarious pedigree.

Long before Trumpery actually has a chance to take the White House by storm, however, the blame game has begun. In the dock, indicted by friend and foe alike, is the Establishment. It is revealing that 21st-century Americans, of all people, should have latched onto this word, popularised in the 1950s by Henry Fairlie as a catch-all phrase to characterise the English ruling class — the antithesis, supposedly, of democracy in the America he later embraced. Sometimes this term is qualified, as in “the Republican Establishment”, but often it is used in a more general sense to indicate the ruling elites — social, economic and cultural — whose arrogance, greed and incompetence are blamed for the rise of Trumpery. The Establishment, it seems, is everything that Trumpery is not. It is rich, educated and cosmopolitan; the followers of Trump are poor, ignorant and nativist. Establishment Americans mostly live on the East or West coasts in colonies of globalised urbanity such as New York, Washington, San Francisco or Seattle. Trumpery flourishes in the contemptuously nicknamed “flyover states”, the struggling, small-town communities that are looked down on by the elites from a great height.

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A Recipe For Disaster Mark Falcoff

Posted By on March 31st, 2016

Democrat billionaire, now a born-again “conservative” Republican, whose presidential campaign seems to have caught fire like no other. As he wends his way across the republic in a private jet, drawing record crowds, trampling on all the sacred pieties of American politics, he spreads fear and trembling among the political and chattering classes. From the Left, Village Voice columnist Lucien Truscott IV accuses Trump of practising a kind of “toy fascism” which, however, he claims, is bleeding into “one of the classic tactics of real fascism, com[ing] up with fake problems and then present[ing] fake solutions.” The Right has been no less categorical. Days before the first caucuses in Iowa, National Review, flagship journal of the respectable Right, summoned 22 of the most distinguished American conservatives to explain why Trump was not an appropriate person to be the Republican presidential candidate. Its ideological sister journal, The Weekly Standard, was even more emphatic. In a bitter article entitled “The Nominee We Deserve?”, Stephen F. Hayes asks the question, “Do Republicans deserve to lose? . . . The Republican frontrunner is a longtime liberal whose worldview might best be described as an amalgam of pop-culture progressivism and vulgar nationalism . . . He’s a narcissist and a huckster, an opportunist who . . . over the past several decades . . . was often funding the other side.” The fact that each of these accusations is correct seems not to matter at all to the voters in Republican primaries.

Although in the Iowa caucuses — the first in the nation — he was edged out by Senator Ted Cruz and followed at an uncomfortably close margin by Senator Marco Rubio, Trump subsequently went on to further victories in New Hampshire and then in states as diverse as Michigan, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Hawaii and Mississippi. In Nevada he even did well among Hispanic voters. He won North Carolina and Missouri, not to mention delegate-rich Illinois and Senator Marco Rubio’s Florida (causing the latter to end his candidacy). It is becoming increasing clear that no other candidate, not even Ted Cruz, the darling of Evangelicals, and Governor John Kasich, who won the key swing state of Ohio, can knock him out of the box. In the meantime, Trump has won endorsements from retiring candidates New Jersey governor Chris Christie and neurosurgeon Dr Ben Carson.

It is true that in many of these contests Trump has not won a clear majority, but that may be due more than anything else to the fact that there were several other candidates on the ballot. He may indeed go to the Republican presidential convention with the largest number of delegates, but still fall short of the number needed to seize the prize. Theoretically this calls for a brokered convention, which is not an unusual event in the history of the Republican party. President Warren G. Harding was nominated in 1920 only after 102 ballots (no misprint). In the days when Americans were accustomed to politicians deciding on a candidate in the proverbial “smoke-filled room”, voters accepted their party’s choice. But in the age of the populist primary, involving scores of millions of voters across the country, the voice of the people will not easily be denied.

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Democratic attorneys general to initiate witch hunt of climate change ‘deniers’ By Rick Moran

Posted By on March 31st, 2016

Sixteen attorneys general have banded together to go after oil companies and utilities who they claim have committed fraud by downplaying the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. They are going to investigate claims that ExxonMobile and other fossile fuel companies knew about the dangerous effects of global warming and hid the facts from the public.

The urge by Democrats to criminalize certain political opinions is nothing new, as we’ve seen in the abortion debate and gay marriage laws.

Washington Times:

Standing beside former Vice President Al Gore, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said the state officials are committed to “working together on key climate-related initiatives,” including queries into whether fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil have committed fraud by deceiving the public and shareholders about the impact of man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

Two states — California and New York — already have launched probes into ExxonMobil, while attorneys general from Massachusetts and the Virgin Islands indicated Tuesday that they would follow suit. Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker, an independent, is the only non-Democrat involved in the campaign, called AGs United for Clean Power.

“The bottom line is simple: Climate change is real; it is a threat to all the people we represent,” Mr. Schneiderman said. “If there are companies, whether they’re utilities, whether they’re fossil fuel companies, committing fraud in an effort to maximize their short-term profits at the expense of the people we represent, we want to find out about it. We want to expose it and want to pursue them to the fullest extent of the law.”

Mr. Schneiderman also announced that 20 attorneys general representing 18 states, the District of Columbia and the Virgin Islands filed a brief Tuesday in support of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan rule, which has been challenged by attorneys general in 25 mostly red states.

The campaign was spurred by articles last year alleging Exxon hid research conducted by its own scientists linking fossil fuel emissions and global warming. Exxon officials have denied the claims and countered that the investigation was conducted by journalism entities that receive funding from foundations known for their climate change activism.

Suzanne McCarron, Exxon’s vice president for public and government affairs, said Tuesday in a statement that the accusations are meritless.

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Alan Oxley They Make It Easy Being Green

Posted By on March 31st, 2016

Until they are stopped, the Greens will use regulatory stealth to stymie growth and throttle industries they want to see brought down. The Illegal Logging Prohibition Act is one of their nastiest and handiest tools, so why hasn’t the Coalition done away with it?
While there has probably never been a stronger sentiment in the Liberal National Party (LNP) government that environmental policy is off the rails, little has been done in its two years in office to repeal or amend the raft of legal constraints which now purport to protect the environment. Reversal of excessive restrictions on agricultural chemicals levels is about all the LNP Government has achieved.

On the policy front, provisions to promote renewable energy were introduced and justified as a less costly way – than imposition of a carbon tax – to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. There was no international legal obligation to do this. Restrictions imposed by Labor on access to water in the Murray Darling basin, where agricultural production has shrunk, also remain unaddressed.

Following LNP backbench agitation, a parliamentary enquiry into tax exemption privileges of environmental groups is underway. While backers think it will help curb green rorts (why should Greenpeace have that privilege when part of its modus operandi is to damage property and assets?) it does not strike at the heart of the problem. The activists have a far more formidable strategy. That has to be tackled.

They and the Greens have perceived something which parliamentarians in the mainstream parties disregard, some wilfully, but most by default. The formal duty of parliamentarians is to legislate. Under the Constitution the Senate is supposed to be a house of review. In practice it isn’t. Regulations are rarely scrutinized. It’s a Greens hunting ground.

As well, wily politicians can and do slip new laws into Parliament and delay the tabling of regulations. Sometimes regulations are never produced. Both sides of politics have done this. The regulations are all-important. They define how laws are to be interpreted. The Greens know this.

They love regulation. It can be used to create legal hurdles to delay and increase the costs of projects to which they object. They also understand the most powerful environmental tool is to arm a regulator with the widest discretion to rule compliance. It sits alongside vague law. The looser its terms, the wider is the scope for the regulator to rule.

They work relentlessly to put this broad scope into law where they can. The Federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, for example, gives the Environment Minister very wide discretion. This is little understood. Policies can be rejected if the Minister considers there is a “risk” for which no criteria are set. No wonder WWF rate it the best environmental regulation in the world.

Yet even that looks half reasonable when set against what is possibly the most ridiculous piece of supposedly environmental legislation ever adopted by Parliament. This is the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act. It makes it an offence to import a timber product unless the importer has records demonstrating laborious and costly efforts to ascertain in the country of origin if the product is not or does not contain illegally logged timber. Yet there is no record illegal timber has ever entered Australia.

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Tony Thomas Climateers Come Another Cropper

Posted By on March 31st, 2016

Grant-gobbling catastropharian fabulist Ed Maibach’s plan to survey TV meteorologists must have seemed a good idea at the time, the object being to pump out fresh PR releases lambasting sceptics. Alas, like the climate itself, the results confound warmist expectations
Of course, as we have so often been assured, 97% of scientists believe in dangerous global warming, mostly caused by human activities’ CO2 emissions. Except that the 97% claim is hokum. A survey of members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) was published last week detailing their support — or rather, lack of it — for the alleged consensus. There were 4092 of 7682 members who responded and of the 4092, only 67% endorsed the consensus.

That is, one-third of the respondents, who include many hundreds of academically credentialed TV weathercasters and other weather communicators, don’t buy the party line on global warming. Twenty-seven percent don’t believe humans are mostly responsible and 6% are don’t-knows.

The scientific community, we’ve been told, is virtually unanimous about CO2-caused warming. That alleged consensus justifies the trillion-dollar spending on windmills and solar farms, as opposed to, say, Third World electrification, clean water, the eradication of malaria and other health scourges now damning billions to poverty and despair.

The reality is that the CO2 emissions dogma is now so shaky – especially given the 21st century’s pause or halt to warming – that peer-reviewed papers sceptical of the orthodoxy are flooding into scientific journals. Kenneth Richard has been tabulating these papers and lists more than 660 published in just the past 27 months – including 133 since the start of 2016 and 282 last year. The mainstream media ignores them, ditto the IPCC whose remit is to look exclusively for evidence of human-induced, rather than natural, climate change.[1]

Returning to the AMS survey, its members are well qualified in science generally and weather in particular. Most respondents had a Bachelor (32%) or Masters (30%) science degree, or PhD in meteorology or atmospheric science (33%). More than a third rated themselves ‘expert’ in climate science, whatever either term may mean. The discovery of one-third sceptics in AMS ranks undoubtedly understates the real level of scepticism in the organisation. The key issue concerns the 3592 non-respondents. In fact 3,364 of them didn’t even open the emails, despite being reminded up to five times.

A plausible reason for a sceptic not to respond was that the survey was run by Dr Ed Maibach, of George Mason University, a communications specialist. Maibach is has been bluntly described in the sceptic blogosphere as a ‘slimebag’ because he was second signatory on the “RICO20” petition to President Obama last September, calling for sceptics to be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced & Corrupt Organisations Act. Thus any sceptic AMS member getting an email from Maibach asking, among other things, whether they are sceptics, could suspect that Maibach might misuse such information to threaten, sue and blacklist them.[2] As Anthony Watts put it, “The man asking the questions might flag you for criminal prosecution for having an opinion he doesn’t like.”

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Europe Courting Godfather Erdogan by Judith Bergman

Posted By on March 31st, 2016

Erdogan has boasted that he is proud of boldly blackmailing EU leaders into paying him protection money.

Erdogan’s threats were almost criminally sinister: “… the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?”

According to the agreement, 80 million Turkish citizens will have visa-free access to the European Union.

The nightmare scenario for a desperate EU is that no matter how much it bows to extortionist demands from Turkey, the migrant crisis will continue to grow. Even if Turkey closes down all migrant routes from Turkey into Europe, refugees could take new routes through North Africa or the Caucasus.

Meanwhile, 800,000 migrants are currently on Libyan territory waiting to cross the Mediterranean, according to French Defense Minister Jean-Yves le Drian.

“We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and we can put the refugees on buses … So how will you deal with refugees if you don’t get a deal? Kill the refugees?” This was the question Turkish President Recep Taayip Erdogan, in true mafia style, asked European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on November 16, 2015 in a closed meeting in Antalya, Turkey, where the three met after the G20 summit.

While Tusk and Juncker have both declined to comment on whether the meeting took place, Erdogan has since then boasted that he is proud of the leaked minutes of the meeting, where he boldly blackmails EU leaders into paying him protection money.

Erdogan’s threats were almost criminally sinister: “… the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?”

Turkish President Recep Taayip Erdogan (left) has boasted that he is proud of blackmailing EU leaders, including European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (right), into paying him protection money.

Finally, feeding into the denial/ignorance of the European elites, who were at that time reeling from the Paris terror attacks that had occurred just three days earlier, Erdogan — who himself has hosted and supported terrorist groups from Hamas to Hezbollah to ISIS — told his European colleagues, “The attacks in Paris is [sic] all about poverty and exclusion. These people… will continue to be terrorists in Europe”.

The leaked minutes furthermore showed Tusk and Juncker pleading with Erdogan, almost begging him to see reason, pathetically telling him that the EU has been treating him “as a prince in Brussels.”

“Like a prince?” Erdogan retorted, “Of course. I’m not representing a third world country.” He also told Juncker, who is the former prime minister of Luxembourg, not to compare Luxembourg to Turkey: “Luxembourg is just like a town in Turkey.”

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Journalism in Turkey: Newsroom vs. Courtroom by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on March 31st, 2016

According to a report by the Turkish Journalists Association, 500 journalists were fired in Turkey in 2015; 70 others were subjected to physical violence. Thirty journalists remain in prison, mostly on charges of “terrorism.” There are also many journalists among the 1,845 Turks who have been investigated or prosecuted for insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan since he was elected in August 2014.

After the secular daily newspaper Cumhuriyet published evidence of arms deliveries by the Turkish intelligence services to Islamist groups in Syria, President Erdogan himself filed a criminal complaint against Cumhuriyet’s editor-in-chief, Can Dundar, and the Ankara bureau chief, Erdem Gul.

At a March 25 hearing, the Istanbul court ruled for the whole trial to be held in secret.

“We came here today to defend journalism…We said we would defend the people’s right to access information. We defended that and we were arrested.” — Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet.

The trial clearly exhibits how Erdogan’s authoritarian rule diverges from Western democratic culture.

“Turkey is where many journalists may have to spend more time at their attorneys’ offices or in courtrooms than in the newsrooms, where they should be,” a Western diplomat joked bitterly. “Don’t quote me on that. I don’t want to be declared persona non grata,” he added with a smile.