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June 30, 2015

The Black Dilemma, Ian Duncan of The Baltimore Sun [nc]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Business, crime control, Econonics, Education, Elections, gun control, handguns, Historical context, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism — Tags: 2nd Amendment, Africa, African-American Culture, Baltimore MD, Baltimore Sun, Christianity, civil rights, constitutional law, democrats, education, federal government, Furgeson MO, hillary clinton, History, Ian Duncan, Lamestream Media, legal trends, liberty, obamacare, Politics, Racism, republicans, riots and looters, Secession, Socialism, tea party, the experiment, us constitution, Welfare — justplainbill @ 7:28 pm

The Black Dilemma – Baltimore Sun Editorial 5-30-15

The Black Dilemma

Ian Duncan, The Baltimore Sun , May 30, 2015

�The Baltimore Sun� is definitely not known as a Conservative newspaper, so this very well written assessment of the situation in the USA comes as something of a surprise.

The Black Dilemma

“For almost 150 years the United States has been conducting an interesting experiment. The subjects of the experiment: black people and working-class whites.

The hypothesis to be tested: Can a people taken from the jungles of Africa and forced into slavery be fully integrated as citizens in a majority white population?

The whites were descendants of Europeans who had created a majestic civilization. The former slaves had been tribal peoples with no written language and virtually no intellectual achievements. Acting on a policy that was not fair to either group, the government released newly freed black people into a white society that saw them as inferiors. America has struggled with racial discord ever since.

Decade after decade the problems persisted but the experimenters never gave up. They insisted that if they could find the right formula the experiment would work, and concocted program after program to get the result they wanted. They created the Freedmans Bureau, passed civil rights laws, tried to build the Great Society, declared War on Poverty, ordered race preferences, built housing projects, and tried midnight basketball.

Their new laws intruded into peoples lives in ways that would have been otherwise unthinkable. They called in National Guard troops to enforce school integration. They outlawed freedom of association. Over the protests of parents, they put white children on buses and sent them to black schools and vice-versa. They tried with money, special programs, relaxed standards, and endless hand wringing to close the achievement gap. To keep white backlash in check they began punishing public and even private statements on race. They hung up Orwellian public banners that commanded whites to Celebrate Diversity! and Say No to Racism. Nothing was off limits if it might salvage the experiment.

Some thought that what W.E.B. DuBois called the Talented Tenth would lead the way for black people. A group of elite, educated blacks would knock down doors of opportunity and show the world what blacks were capable of. There is a Talented Tenth. They are the black Americans who have become entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors and scientists. But ten percent is not enough. For the experiment to work, the ten percent has to be followed by a critical mass of people who can hold middle-class jobs and promote social stability. That is what is missing.

Through the years, too many black people continue to show an inability to function and prosper in a culture unsuited to them. Detroit is bankrupt, the south side of Chicago is a war zone, and the vast majority of black cities all over America are beset by degeneracy and violence. And blacks never take responsibility for their failures. Instead, they lash out in anger and resentment.

Across the generations and across the country, as we have seen in Detroit, Watts, Newark, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and now Ferguson, rioting and looting are just one racial incident away. The white elite would tell us that this doesn’t mean the experiment has failed. We just have to try harder. We need more money, more time, more understanding, more programs, and more opportunities.

But nothing changes no matter how much money is spent, no matter how many laws are passed, no matter how many black geniuses are portrayed on TV, and no matter who is president. Some argue its a problem of culture, as if culture creates peoples behavior instead of the other way around. Others blame white privilege.

But since 1965, when the elites opened Americas doors to the Third World, immigrants from Asia and India people who are not white, not rich, and not connected have quietly succeeded. While the children of these people are winning spelling bees and getting top scores on the SAT, black youths are committing half the country’s violent crime, which includes viciously punching random white people on the street for the thrill of it that has nothing to do with poverty.

The experiment has failed. Not because of white culture, or white privilege, or white racism. The fundamental problem is that American black culture has evolved into an un-fixable and crime ridden mess.
*They do not want to change their culture or society, and expect others to tolerate their violence and amoral behavior. They have become socially incompatible with other races by their own design, not because of the racism of others – but by their own hatred of non-blacks.*

Our leaders don’t seem to understand just how tired their white subjects are with this experiment. *They don’t understand that white people aren’t out to get black people; they are just exhausted with them. They are exhausted by the social pathologies, the violence, the endless complaints, and the blind racial solidarity, the bottomless pit of grievances, the excuses, and the reflexive animosity.* The elites explain everything with racism, and refuse to believe that white frustration could soon reach the boiling point.”—

“You can’t legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government can’t give to anybody anything that the government doesn’t first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they don’t have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation.

You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”

Ian Duncan
The Baltimore Sun , May 30, 2015

Comments (1)

June 17, 2015

Postcolonial Rot Spreads Beyond Middle East Studies, by Bruce. S. Thornton, [nc]

Filed under: Econonics, Education, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Iran, Islam, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Racism, Religion, Uncategorized, Valerie Jarrett, Yemen — Tags: Christianity, civil rights, democrats, Economics, Freedom, Government, hillary clinton, History, Islam, liberty, Media Watch, News Media, Obama, pelosi, Politics, republicans, Secession, Socialism, tea party — justplainbill @ 5:21 pm

The Postcolonial Rot Spreads Beyond Middle East Studies
June 17, 2015 3:06 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

middle-east-scholarshipsIn theory, Middle East Studies programs are a good idea. One of the biggest impediments to countering modern jihadism has been the lack of historical knowledge about the region and Islam. But even the attention and urgency that followed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have not led to such knowledge. The result has been policies pursued both by Republicans and Democrats that are doomed to fail, as the current chaos in the region attests.

Rather than enlightening citizens and policy-makers, Middle Eastern Studies programs have darkened our understanding. As Martin Kramer documented in his important 2002 study Ivory Towers on Sand [3], most programs have become purveyors not of knowledge but of ideology. Under the influence of literary critic Edward Said’s historically challenged book Orientalism––“a work,” historian Robert Irwin has written [4], “of malignant charlatanry, in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations”––Middle East Studies programs, Kramer writes, “came under a take-no-prisoners assault, which rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology.” The ideology, of course, comprised the old Marxist narrative of Western colonial and imperial crimes, a Third Worldism that idealizes the dark-skinned, innocent “other” victimized by Western depredations, and the juvenile romance of revolutionary violence.

Yet Said’s baleful influence has not been limited to Middle East Studies programs, one of which has been created at my campus of the California State University, replete with theproblems [5] Kramer catalogues. It has insidiously corrupted much of the humanities and social sciences, operating under the innocuous rubric of “postcolonial” studies, which to the unwary suggests a historical rather than an ideological category. Through General Education courses that serve students across the university, and in departments like English that train primary and secondary school teachers, Saidian postcolonial ideology has been shaping the attitudes and presumed knowledge of Islam and the Middle East far beyond the reach of Middle East Studies programs.

Said’s dubious argument in Orientalism is that the work of Western scholars on the Middle East embodied “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” thus creating the intellectual infrastructure for justifying colonialism and imperialism. As such, every European scholar perforce was “a racist, an imperialist, and totally ethnocentric.” For social science and humanities departments committed totally to the multiculturalist melodrama of white racism and oppression of the dark-skinned “other,” Said’s work seemingly provides scholarly bona fides to ideas that are in fact expressive of illiberal grievance politics.

English departments have been particularly vulnerable to Said’s work, for he overlaid his bad history with watered down Foucauldian ideas about the relationship of power to discourse. Thus English professors seduced by the poststructuralist theory ascendant in 1978 when Orientalism was published found in that book a seemingly sophisticated theoretical paradigm that shared both poststructuralism’s disdain for objectivity and truth, and its “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the notion that the apparent meaning of a discourse is a mask for the sinister machinations of power at the expense of the excluded “other.”

More important, postcolonialism is a politically activist theory, bound up as it is in the politics of the Middle East, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict. Now English professors could avoid the legitimate charge that poststructuralism, despite its patina of leftist ideology, was in fact an evasion of politics, a “symbolic politics,” as historian Russell Jacoby put it, “a replacement for, and a diversion from, the gritty politics of the community and the street.” On the contrary, the purveyors of postcolonialism were on the barricades, struggling to liberate Palestinians and other Muslims oppressed by a neo-imperialist America and its puppet Israel. Rather than pampered elitists guaranteed jobs for life, now the professors could fancy themselves freedom fighters and champions of the ex-colonial brown peoples still exploited and oppressed by the capitalist, racist West.

Finally, the dogma of multicultural “diversity” now firmly enshrined in American universities likewise has found Saidian postcolonialism a useful tool for interpreting and teaching literature, one that exposes the Western literary canon’s hidden racism and oppression. Moreover, in a university like Fresno State, half of whose students are minorities, a postcolonial perspective can establish a rapport with minority students who are encouraged to interpret their own experiences through the same lens of unjust exclusion and hurtful distortions of their culture and identity. At the same time white students are schooled in their privilege and guilt, minorities can be comforted by a narrative that privileges them as victims of historical oppression, one masked by the unearned prestige of the classics written by “dead white males.” Now minority students learn that Shakespeare’s Caliban is the true hero the Tempest with whom they should identify, the displaced victim of rapacious colonialists and slavers like Prospero who unjustly define the indigenous peoples as savages and cannibals in order to justify the brutal appropriation of their lands and labor.

Over the thirty years I have taught in the California State University, I have seen this transformation of the English department. Reading lists dominated by contemporary ethnic writers are increasingly displacing the classics of English literature, and even when traditional works are on the list, the books are often taught from the postcolonial perspective. New hires more and more comprise those Ph.D.’s whose specialties lie in ethnic or “world” literature, replacing the Shakespeare scholars and others trained to teach the traditional English and American literary canon. The traditional content of a liberal education––“the best which has been thought and said in the world,” as Matthew Arnold wrote––is disappearing, replaced by multicultural melodramas of Western crime and guilt.

More important for the culture at large, many of these students will go on to earn teaching credentials and staff public schools. They will carry the postcolonial ideology into their own classrooms, influencing yet another generation and reinforcing a received wisdom that will shape their students’ understanding of the important threats to our national security and interests emanating from the Middle East, especially jihadism. And it will encourage ordinary citizens to assent to the demonization of our most valuable regional ally, Israel, currently battling the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement that can more easily gain traction among those who from grade school to university have been exposed to the postcolonial ideology.

The damage done to our foreign policy by Middle East Studies is obvious. The influence of the godfather of such programs, Edward Said, on the social sciences and humanities departments like English is more insidious and subtle. But it is no less dangerous.

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/bruce-thornton/the-postcolonial-rot-spreads-beyond-middle-east-studies/

URLs in this post:

[2] Middle East Forum: http://www.meforum.org/

[3] Ivory Towers on Sand: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/pubs/IvoryTowers.pdf

[4] written: http://www.amazon.com/Lust-Knowing-Orientalists-Their-Enemies/dp/0140289232/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1434065002&sr=1-1&keywords=robert+irwin+for+lust+of+knowing

[5] problems: http://www.campus-watch.org/survey.php/id/70

Leave a Comment

May 21, 2015

1895 8th Grade Final Exam, Salina KS [I failed. :-)]

Filed under: Education, equalizers, Historical context, Humor, Media Check, Political Commentary — justplainbill @ 2:21 pm

This is the
> eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It
> was taken from
> the original document on file at the Smokey Valley
> Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, and reprinted by
> the Salina Journal.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 8th Grade Final Exam:
> Salina, Kansas – 1895
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Grammar
> (Time, one hour)
>
>
> 1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
>
>
> 2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no
> modifications.
>
>
> 3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
>
>
> 4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal
> parts of ‘lie, ‘play,’ and ‘run.’
>
>
> 5. Define case; illustrate each case.
>
>
> 6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of
> punctuation.
>
>
> 7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show
> therein that you understand the practical use of the rules
> of grammar.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Arithmetic (Time, 1
> hour 15 minutes)
>
>
> 1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
>
>
> 2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide.
> How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
>
>
> 3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at
> 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?
>
>
> 4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000.. What is the
> necessary levy to carry on a
> school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for
> incidentals?
>
>
> 5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
>
>
> 6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at
> 7 percent.
>
>
> 7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft.
> long at $20 per meter?
>
>
> 8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10
> percent.
>
>
> 9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the
> distance of which is 640 rods?
>
>
> 10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a
> Receipt.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> U.S. History (Time,
> 45 minutes)
>
>
> 1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
>
>
> 2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
> .
>
>
> 3. Relate the
> causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
>
>
> 4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
>
>
> 5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.6. Describe
> three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
>
>
> 7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell,
> Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
>
>
> 8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607,
> 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Orthography (Time,
> one hour)
>
>
> [Do we even know what this topic is?]
>
>
> 1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic,
> orthography, etymology, syllabication.
>
>
> 2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
>
>
> 3. What are the following, and give examples of each:
> trigraph, subvocals,
> diphthong, cognate letters, linguals.
>
>
> 4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u.'(HUH?)
>
>
> 5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e.’
> Name two exceptions under each rule.
>
>
> 6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate
> each.
>
>
> 7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with
> a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono,
> sup.
>
>
> 8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the
> following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card,
> ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
>
>
> 9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site,
> sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise,
> rays.
>
>
> 10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate
> pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by
> syllabication.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Geography (Time, one
> hour)
>
>
> 1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
>
>
> 2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in
> Kansas?
>
>
> 3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
>
>
> 4. Describe the mountains of North America.
>
>
> 5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa,
> Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez,
> Aspinwall and Orinoco.
>
>
> 6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
> Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of
> each.
>
>
> 8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the
> same latitude?
>
>
> 9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean
> returns to the sources of rivers.
>
>
> 10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the
> inclination of the earth.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Notice that the exam
> took FIVE HOURS to complete.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Gives the statement
> “he only had an 8th grade education” a whole new
> meaning, doesn’t it?
>
>
> No wonder they dropped out after 8th grade. They already
> knew more than they needed to know!
>
>
> No, I don’t have the answers! And I don’t think I
> ever did!
>
>
> Have fun with this … pass it on so we’re not the only
> ones who feel stupid!

Comments (2)

April 15, 2015

On Abraham Lincoln and the Inversion of American History, by Boyd D. Cathey, [nc]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, Econonics, Education, Elections, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Military, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism, Treason, US Constitution — Tags: 14th Amendment, 2nd Amendment, A Lincoln, Civil War, Confederate States of America, constitutional law, Government, History, Jefferson Davist, liberty, Media Watch, Politics, Racism, Secession, Socialism, taxation without representation, tea party, us constitution, War of 1861 — justplainbill @ 7:24 pm

On Abraham Lincoln and the Inversion of American History
By Boyd D. Cathey • April 15, 2015 • 1,700 Words • 15 Comments
• Reply
shutterstock_115238551

Back in 1990 in Richmond, Virginia, as part of the Museum of the Confederacy’s lecture series, the late Professor Ludwell Johnson, author and professor of history at William and Mary College, presented a fascinating lecture titled, “The Lincoln Puzzle: Searching for the Real Honest Abe.” Commenting on the assassination of Lincoln now 150 years ago, here is a portion of Dr. Johnson’s prepared remarks:

[After his death] for many, Lincoln became a symbolic Christ, for some, perhaps, more than symbolic. They could scarcely help themselves, the parallels were so striking. He was the savior of the Union, God’s chosen instrument for bringing the millenium to suffering humanity, born in a log cabin (close enough to a stable), son of a carpenter. . . . He was a railsplitter (close enough to carpentry), a humble man with the human touch, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, called by his followers to supreme greatness, struck down by Satan’s minions on Good Friday.

Said one minister in his Black Friday sermon: ‘It is no blasphemy against the Son of God and the Savior of Men that we declare the fitness of the slaying of the second Father of our Republic on the anniversary of the day on which he was slain. Jesus Christ died for the world, Abraham Lincoln died for his country’. . . . Another spoke of his ‘mighty sacrifice . . . for the sins of his people.’ Yet another proposed that not April 15, but Good Friday be considered the anniversary of Lincoln’s death. ‘We should make it a movable fast and ever keep it beside the cross and grave of our blessed Lord, in whose service for whose gospel he became a victim and a martyr.’

For years after the war the rumor persisted that Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield was empty. Lincoln was also frequently compared to Moses, who led his people to the Promised Land that he was not allowed to enter, and, like Moses after viewing Canaan, was taken by death.

It is right and fitting, then, given the legacy now increasingly laid at Lincoln’s feet, the resultant and seemingly unstoppable growth of the “Behemoth” managerial state that has occurred since his presidency, and the anniversary of his death, to examine again his actual meaning in the context of our history.

Probably too much has been written about Abraham Lincoln. Most school age children know almost nothing about him, except that “he freed the slaves,” which, of course, is patently untrue: he freed not one slave. Yet, his looming presence as a pre-eminent national lodestar, his role as a kind of holy icon after death, and the radical task he accomplished in completely restructuring the original American nation that the Founders created, remain constantly with us. In a real and palpable sense, as the text excerpted from Professor Johnson shows, Lincoln immediately became the founder and canonized “saint” of a “new” nation, in which the ideas of “democracy” and “equality” were enshrined as bedrock principles.

As the late Professor Mel Bradford illustrates abundantly in his signal volume, Original Intentions, with Lincoln and his successors, concepts rejected outright by most of the Founders and eschewed by the Authors of the Constitution, replaced the original understanding of what this nation was supposed to be and represent. The Gettsyburg Address makes clear that Lincoln based the American founding on the Declaration of the Independence (“Four score and seven years ago….”) and on his shaky reading of that war time document.

As such, today the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that are the most heinous, the most grave, in our benighted land are “crimes” against “equality,” whether committed against racial minorities, or against “women,” or against homosexuals who want to force the rest of us to fully accept their lifestyle…and “crimes” against “full democracy,” including voter IDs, and preventing illegals from full participation in all the goodies that the Federal government can dole

This is not to say that there is an unbroken, direct line connecting the “Lincolnian Revolution” of the 1860s with the public and private defecated culture and corrupt and managerial political system that engulf us today. Indeed, the history of the USA since 1865 is filled with vicissitudes and “curves and variations.” It would be unfair perhaps to blame Lincoln directly for these present happenings. Indeed, more than likely, as a 19th century liberal, he would be offended and shocked by much of what besets us today culturally and socially. But Lincoln, like other leaders of 19th century Liberalism, opened the door to future, much more radical change. So, while it is assuredly not correct to hold him responsible for, example, same sex marriage, there is a torturous genealogy that can be traced without injury to the historical narrative.

Of those radical changes that came as a result of the Lincolnian Revolution and that directly affect us today, the cataclysmic effects of the (illegally passed) 14th Amendment must be highlighted. Indeed, one could suggest that it is under the rubric of the 14th Amendment that most all of our present decay and distress has occurred. If there had been no 14th Amendment, would most of the horrendous court decisions we’ve seen have been rendered? Yet, the 14th Amendment grows directly out of the consequences of Southern defeat in 1865, in a War begun by Abraham Lincoln.

Certainly, there are those who would argue that the “Reagan years” or even the 1920s represented respites in this ongoing revolution. Nevertheless, the general and overwhelming propulsive movement, the historical dynamic, has been in just one direction. In sum, the triumph of the Lincolnian Revolution in the American nation was, in fact, the real triumph of the 19th century “Idea of Progress” and the belief in the inevitable and continuing liberation and enhancement materially and intellectually, of human kind.

It is interesting, I think, to focus the great Iliad of the Confederacy in the context of the brutal and vicious universal war between the forces of 19th liberalism and the forces of tradition and counter-revolution. The Confederacy, the old South, played a not unimportant role in that conflict, and, even if most Southerners did not recognize that context at the time, many European traditionalists, Legitimist royalists, and Catholics most certainly did.

In my research over the years, specifically while I studied in Spain and Switzerland, and then taught in Argentina, I was struck by the fact that almost without exception, all 19 th century traditional conservatives, Legitimists, and Catholics not only favored the Confederacy in its crusade against the North, but they did so enthusiastically, to the point that thousands of European traditionalists found their way to cities like New Orleans to volunteer to fight for the Confederate cause. As many as 1,800 former soldiers of the old Bourbon Kingdom of Naples (Two Sicilies) arrived in Louisiana in early 1861 to offer their services to the South after their defeat by the arms of the liberal Kingdom of Piedmont-Savoy. Volunteers from the Carlist Catholic traditionalists in Spain came by way, mostly, of Mexico. According to Catalan historian, David Odalric de Caixal, as many as many as 4,000 Carlists enlisted in Confederate ranks, many in the Louisiana Tigers (see M. Estella, “Un historiador investiga la presencia de carlistas en la Guerra de Secesion,” El Diario de Navarra [Pamplona], December 9, 2011). French Legitimists (the “ultra-royalists” who opposed the “democracy” of the Citizen-King Louis Philippe) also volunteered, mostly notably the Prince Camille Armand de Polignac, a hero of the battle of Mansfield.

The Italian Duchy of Modena, under its duke Francesco V (called by modern writer and historian Sir Harold Acton, “the most reactionary ruler in all of Europe”), actually recognized the Confederacy. And Pope Pius IX offered de facto recognition to the Confederate cause, and his sympathies were quite open, as were the Confederate proclivities of the official publication of the Vatican, “La Civilta Catolica.” The Crown of Thorns that Pius IX wove with his own hands for President Jefferson Davis while Davis was a post-war prisoner in Fortress Monroe remains in a museum in New Orleans, a memorable relic of papal sympathy for the Confederacy.

And who can forget the favor given by and collaboration of the Habsburg emperor of Mexico, Maximilian? It was to his empire that many Confederate soldiers fled after Appomattox and Palmito Ranch. (Recall the John Wayne classic, “The Undefeated,” and other cinematic representations of that relationship?)

The traditionalist press in Europe openly believed that the Confederacy was part of a much greater conflict—a conflict, a universalized war, to halt the advance of the effects of the French Revolution, and to–if possible–reverse the worst aspects that resulted from the opening of that Pandora’s Box. And in particular, they visualized the Confederacy as a co-belligerent in the effort to stop the growth of “democratism” and “egalitarianism.”

Certainly, one can debate if this vision by European traditionalist conservatives was completely valid, or mere fancy. But the reasons supporting it, given our subsequent history, are strong in an ex post facto way.

What we are talking about is, then, the triumph in the 19 th century of a radical transformation in the way our society and our citizens look at history and change. Indeed, the result was the enthronement of the “Idea of Progress” as the norm, such that movement in history always is “progressive” or, better described, “a la Sinistra”–to the Left. And, given this template, does not the ongoing Leftward—”progressive”—movement of both Democrats AND Republicans in the US, as well as both Socialist and establishment “conservative” political groupings in Europe, make sense?

Until this narrative–this sanctified and blessed “progressivist” idealization–is overturned and reversed, we shall continue to be at the mercy of faux-conservatives who continue to lead us into more Revolution, even if by a slightly different route from the hardcore revolutionaries.

Thus, Professor Johnson’s account of the apotheosis of Lincoln and the enshrining of the “Lincoln Myth” go hand-in-hand with the mythologization of Garibaldi in Italy, or of Louis Blanc in France, as symbolic of what happened to an older, pre-Revolutionary civilization…and to the “exceptional” American nation along the way.

In the USA it really began in earnest, as Ludwell Johnson recounts, almost immediately after Lincoln’s death, and it continues full force today.

Comments (1)

April 4, 2015

thereligionofpeace.com [nc]

Filed under: Anti-American Politicians, crime control, Econonics, Education, Elections, Foreign Affairs, Global Intel, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Iran, Islam, Law Enforcement, Media Check, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama Foreign Policy, Political Commentary, Racism, Religion, US Constitution, Valerie Jarrett, Yemen — Tags: 2nd Amendment, Christianity, civil rights, constitutional law, democrats, Economics, education, federal government, Freedom, Government, hillary clinton, History, Islam, Lamestream Media, legal trends, liberty, Media Watch, msnbc, Obama, obamacare, pelosi, Politics, Racism, Secession, Socialism, tea party, us constitution — justplainbill @ 2:51 pm

TheReligionofPeace.com
Guide to Understanding Islam

What does the
Religion of Peace
Teach About…

Violence

Question:

Does the Quran really contain dozens of verses promoting violence?

Summary Answer:

The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding. Muslims who do not join the fight are called ‘hypocrites’ and warned that Allah will send them to Hell if they do not join the slaughter.

Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by the historical context of the surrounding text. They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subjective as anything else in the Quran.

The context of violent passages is more ambiguous than might be expected of a perfect book from a loving God, however this can work both ways. Most of today’s Muslims exercise a personal choice to interpret their holy book’s call to arms according to their own moral preconceptions about justifiable violence. Apologists cater to their preferences with tenuous arguments that gloss over historical fact and generally do not stand up to scrutiny. Still, it is important to note that the problem is not bad people, but bad ideology.

Unfortunately, there are very few verses of tolerance and peace to abrogate or even balance out the many that call for nonbelievers to be fought and subdued until they either accept humiliation, convert to Islam, or are killed. Muhammad’s own martial legacy – and that of his companions – along with the remarkable stress on violence found in the Quran have produced a trail of blood and tears across world history.

The Quran:

Quran (2:191-193) – “And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And Al-Fitnah [disbelief or unrest] is worse than killing…

but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah [disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah] and worship is for Allah alone. But if they cease, let there be no transgression except against Az-Zalimun (the polytheists, and wrong-doers, etc.)” (Translation is from the Noble Quran) The historical context of this passage is not defensive warfare, since Muhammad and his Muslims had just relocated to Medina and were not under attack by their Meccan adversaries. In fact, the verses urge offensive warfare, in that Muslims are to drive Meccans out of their own city (which they later did). The use of the word “persecution” by some Muslim translators is thus disingenuous (the actual Muslim words for persecution – “idtihad” – and oppression – a variation of “z-l-m” – do not appear in the verse). The actual Arabic comes from “fitna” which can mean disbelief, or the disorder that results from unbelief or temptation. Taken as a whole, the context makes clear that violence is being authorized until “religion is for Allah” – ie. unbelievers desist in their unbelief.

Quran (2:244) – “Then fight in the cause of Allah, and know that Allah Heareth and knoweth all things.”

Quran (2:216) – “Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.” Not only does this verse establish that violence can be virtuous, but it also contradicts the myth that fighting is intended only in self-defense, since the audience was obviously not under attack at the time. From the Hadith, we know that this verse was narrated at a time that Muhammad was actually trying to motivate his people into raiding merchant caravans for loot.

Quran (3:56) – “As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.”

Quran (3:151) – “Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority”. This speaks directly of polytheists, yet it also includes Christians, since they believe in the Trinity (ie. what Muhammad incorrectly believed to be ‘joining companions to Allah’).

Quran (4:74) – “Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.” The martyrs of Islam are unlike the early Christians, who were led meekly to the slaughter. These Muslims are killed in battle as they attempt to inflict death and destruction for the cause of Allah. This is the theological basis for today’s suicide bombers.

Quran (4:76) – “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah…”

Quran (4:89) – “They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks.”

Quran (4:95) – “Not equal are those of the believers who sit (at home), except those who are disabled (by injury or are blind or lame, etc.), and those who strive hard and fight in the Cause of Allah with their wealth and their lives. Allah has preferred in grades those who strive hard and fight with their wealth and their lives above those who sit (at home). Unto each, Allah has promised good (Paradise), but Allah has preferred those who strive hard and fight, above those who sit (at home) by a huge reward ” This passage criticizes “peaceful” Muslims who do not join in the violence, letting them know that they are less worthy in Allah’s eyes. It also demolishes the modern myth that “Jihad” doesn’t mean holy war in the Quran, but rather a spiritual struggle. Not only is this Arabic word used in this passage, but it is clearly not referring to anything spiritual, since the physically disabled are given exemption. (The Hadith reveals the context of the passage to be in response to a blind man’s protest that he is unable to engage in Jihad and this is reflected in other translations of the verse). Allah will allow the disabled into Paradise, but will provide a larger reward to those who are able to kill in his cause.

Quran (4:104) – “And be not weak hearted in pursuit of the enemy; if you suffer pain, then surely they (too) suffer pain as you suffer pain…” Is pursuing an injured and retreating enemy really an act of self-defense?

Quran (5:33) – “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement”

Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them” No reasonable person would interpret this to mean a spiritual struggle.

Quran (8:15) – “O ye who believe! When ye meet those who disbelieve in battle, turn not your backs to them. (16)Whoso on that day turneth his back to them, unless maneuvering for battle or intent to join a company, he truly hath incurred wrath from Allah, and his habitation will be hell, a hapless journey’s end.”

Quran (8:39) – “And fight with them until there is no more fitna (disorder, unbelief) and religion should be only for Allah” Some translations interpret “fitna” as “persecution”, but the traditional understanding of this word is not supported by the historical context (See notes for 2:193). The Meccans were simply refusing Muhammad access to their city during Haj. Other Muslims were allowed to travel there – just not as an armed group, since Muhammad had declared war on Mecca prior to his eviction. The Meccans were also acting in defense of their religion, since it was Muhammad’s intention to destroy their idols and establish Islam by force (which he later did). Hence the critical part of this verse is to fight until “religion is only for Allah”, meaning that the true justification of violence was the unbelief of the opposition. According to the Sira (Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 324) Muhammad further explains that “Allah must have no rivals.”

Quran (8:57) – “If thou comest on them in the war, deal with them so as to strike fear in those who are behind them, that haply they may remember.”

Quran (8:67) – “It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war until he had made a great slaughter in the land…”

Quran (8:59-60) – “And let not those who disbelieve suppose that they can outstrip (Allah’s Purpose). Lo! they cannot escape. Make ready for them all thou canst of (armed) force and of horses tethered, that thereby ye may dismay the enemy of Allah and your enemy.”

Quran (8:65) – “O Prophet, exhort the believers to fight…”

Quran (9:5) – “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them.” According to this verse, the best way of staying safe from Muslim violence is to convert to Islam (prayer (salat) and the poor tax (zakat) are among the religion’s Five Pillars). This popular claim that the Quran only inspires violence within the context of self-defense is seriously challenged by this passage as well, since the Muslims to whom it was written were obviously not under attack. Had they been, then there would have been no waiting period (earlier verses make it a duty for Muslims to fight in self-defense, even during the sacred months). The historical context is Mecca after the idolaters were subjugated by Muhammad and posed no threat. Once the Muslims had power, they violently evicted those unbelievers who would not convert.

Quran (9:14) – “Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of a believing people.” Humiliating and hurting non-believers not only has the blessing of Allah, but it is ordered as a means of carrying out his punishment and even “healing” the hearts of Muslims.

Quran (9:20) – “Those who believe, and have left their homes and striven with their wealth and their lives in Allah’s way are of much greater worth in Allah’s sight. These are they who are triumphant.” The Arabic word interpreted as “striving” in this verse is the same root as “Jihad”. The context is obviously holy war.

Quran (9:29) – “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” “People of the Book” refers to Christians and Jews. According to this verse, they are to be violently subjugated, with the sole justification being their religious status. Verse 9:33 tells Muslims that Allah has charted them to make Islam “superior over all religions.” This chapter was one of the final “revelations” from Allah and it set in motion the tenacious military expansion, in which Muhammad’s companions managed to conquer two-thirds of the Christian world in the next 100 years. Islam is intended to dominate all other people and faiths.

Quran (9:30) – “And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah; and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah; these are the words of their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah destroy them; how they are turned away!”

Quran (9:38-39) – “O ye who believe! what is the matter with you, that, when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of Allah, ye cling heavily to the earth? Do ye prefer the life of this world to the Hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the Hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place.” This is a warning to those who refuse to fight, that they will be punished with Hell.

Quran (9:41) – “Go forth, light-armed and heavy-armed, and strive with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah! That is best for you if ye but knew.” See also the verse that follows (9:42) – “If there had been immediate gain (in sight), and the journey easy, they would (all) without doubt have followed thee, but the distance was long, (and weighed) on them” This contradicts the myth that Muslims are to fight only in self-defense, since the wording implies that battle will be waged a long distance from home (in another country and on Christian soil, in this case, according to the historians).

Quran (9:73) – “O Prophet! strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites and be unyielding to them; and their abode is hell, and evil is the destination.” Dehumanizing those who reject Islam, by reminding Muslims that unbelievers are merely firewood for Hell, makes it easier to justify slaughter. It also explains why today’s devout Muslims have little regard for those outside the faith.

Quran (9:88) – “But the Messenger, and those who believe with him, strive and fight with their wealth and their persons: for them are (all) good things: and it is they who will prosper.”

Quran (9:111) – “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain: a promise binding on Him in truth, through the Law, the Gospel, and the Quran: and who is more faithful to his covenant than Allah? then rejoice in the bargain which ye have concluded: that is the achievement supreme.” How does the Quran define a true believer?

Quran (9:123) – “O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness.”

Quran (17:16) – “And when We wish to destroy a town, We send Our commandment to the people of it who lead easy lives, but they transgress therein; thus the word proves true against it, so We destroy it with utter destruction.” Note that the crime is moral transgression, and the punishment is “utter destruction.” (Before ordering the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden first issued Americans an invitation to Islam).

Quran (18:65-81) – This parable lays the theological groundwork for honor killings, in which a family member is murdered because they brought shame to the family, either through apostasy or perceived moral indiscretion. The story (which is not found in any Jewish or Christian source) tells of Moses encountering a man with “special knowledge” who does things which don’t seem to make sense on the surface, but are then justified according to later explanation. One such action is to murder a youth for no apparent reason (74). However, the wise man later explains that it was feared that the boy would “grieve” his parents by “disobedience and ingratitude.” He was killed so that Allah could provide them a ‘better’ son. (Note: This is one reason why honor killing is sanctioned by Sharia. Reliance of the Traveler (Umdat al-Saliq) says that punishment for murder is not applicable when a parent or grandparent kills their offspring (o.1.1-2).)

Quran (21:44) – “We gave the good things of this life to these men and their fathers until the period grew long for them; See they not that We gradually reduce the land (in their control) from its outlying borders? Is it then they who will win?”

Quran (25:52) – “Therefore listen not to the Unbelievers, but strive against them with the utmost strenuousness…” “Strive against” is Jihad – obviously not in the personal context. It’s also significant to point out that this is a Meccan verse.

Quran (33:60-62) – “If the hypocrites, and those in whose hearts is a disease, and the alarmists in the city do not cease, We verily shall urge thee on against them, then they will be your neighbors in it but a little while. Accursed, they will be seized wherever found and slain with a (fierce) slaughter.” This passage sanctions the slaughter (rendered “merciless” and “horrible murder” in other translations) against three groups: Hypocrites (Muslims who refuse to “fight in the way of Allah” (3:167) and hence don’t act as Muslims should), those with “diseased hearts” (which include Jews and Christians 5:51-52), and “alarmists” or “agitators who include those who merely speak out against Islam, according to Muhammad’s biographers. It is worth noting that the victims are to be sought out by Muslims, which is what today’s terrorists do. If this passage is meant merely to apply to the city of Medina, then it is unclear why it is included in Allah’s eternal word to Muslim generations.

Quran (47:3-4) – “Those who disbelieve follow falsehood, while those who believe follow the truth from their Lord… So, when you meet (in fight Jihad in Allah’s Cause), those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them, then bind a bond firmly (on them, i.e. take them as captives)… If it had been Allah’s Will, He Himself could certainly have punished them (without you). But (He lets you fight), in order to test you, some with others. But those who are killed in the Way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost.” Those who reject Allah are to be killed in Jihad. The wounded are to be held captive for ransom. The only reason Allah doesn’t do the dirty work himself is to to test the faithfulness of Muslims. Those who kill pass the test.

Quran (47:35) – “Be not weary and faint-hearted, crying for peace, when ye should be uppermost (Shakir: “have the upper hand”) for Allah is with you,”

Quran (48:17) – “There is no blame for the blind, nor is there blame for the lame, nor is there blame for the sick (that they go not forth to war). And whoso obeyeth Allah and His messenger, He will make him enter Gardens underneath which rivers flow; and whoso turneth back, him will He punish with a painful doom.” Contemporary apologists sometimes claim that Jihad means ‘spiritual struggle.’ Is so, then why are the blind, lame and sick exempted? This verse also says that those who do not fight will suffer torment in hell.

Quran (48:29) – “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And those with him are hard (ruthless) against the disbelievers and merciful among themselves” Islam is not about treating everyone equally. There are two very distinct standards that are applied based on religious status. Also the word used for ‘hard’ or ‘ruthless’ in this verse shares the same root as the word translated as ‘painful’ or severe’ in verse 16.

Quran (61:4) – “Surely Allah loves those who fight in His way” Religion of Peace, indeed! The verse explicitly refers to “battle array” meaning that it is speaking of physical conflict. This is followed by (61:9): “He it is who has sent His Messenger (Mohammed) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam) to make it victorious over all religions even though the infidels may resist.” (See next verse, below). Infidels who resist Islamic rule are to be fought.

Quran (61:10-12) – “O You who believe! Shall I guide you to a commerce that will save you from a painful torment. That you believe in Allah and His Messenger (Muhammad ), and that you strive hard and fight in the Cause of Allah with your wealth and your lives, that will be better for you, if you but know! (If you do so) He will forgive you your sins, and admit you into Gardens under which rivers flow, and pleasant dwelling in Gardens of ‘Adn – Eternity [‘Adn (Edn) Paradise], that is indeed the great success.” This verse refers to physical battle in order to make Islam victorious over other religions (see above). It uses the Arabic word, Jihad.

Quran (66:9) – “O Prophet! Strive against the disbelievers and the hypocrites, and be stern with them. Hell will be their home, a hapless journey’s end.” The root word of “Jihad” is used again here. The context is clearly holy war, and the scope of violence is broadened to include “hypocrites” – those who call themselves Muslims but do not act as such.

Other verses calling Muslims to Jihad can be found here at AnsweringIslam.org

From the Hadith:

Bukhari (52:177) – Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

Bukhari (52:256) – The Prophet… was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The Prophet replied, “They (i.e. women and children) are from them (i.e. pagans).” In this command, Muhammad establishes that it is permissible to kill non-combatants in the process of killing a perceived enemy. This provides justification for the many Islamic terror bombings.

Bukhari (52:65) – The Prophet said, ‘He who fights that Allah’s Word, Islam, should be superior, fights in Allah’s Cause. Muhammad’s words are the basis for offensive Jihad – spreading Islam by force. This is how it was understood by his companions, and by the terrorists of today.

Bukhari (52:220) – Allah’s Apostle said… ‘I have been made victorious with terror’

Abu Dawud (14:2526) – The Prophet (peace_be_upon_him) said: Three things are the roots of faith: to refrain from (killing) a person who utters, “There is no god but Allah” and not to declare him unbeliever whatever sin he commits, and not to excommunicate him from Islam for his any action; and jihad will be performed continuously since the day Allah sent me as a prophet until the day the last member of my community will fight with the Dajjal (Antichrist)

Abu Dawud (14:2527) – The Prophet said: Striving in the path of Allah (jihad) is incumbent on you along with every ruler, whether he is pious or impious

Muslim (1:33) – the Messenger of Allah said: I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah

Bukhari (8:387) – Allah’s Apostle said, “I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: ‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah’. And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally.”

Muslim (1:30) – “The Messenger of Allah said: I have been commanded to fight against people so long as they do not declare that there is no god but Allah.”

Bukhari (52:73) – “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘Know that Paradise is under the shades of swords’.”

Bukhari (11:626) – [Muhammad said:] “I decided to order a man to lead the prayer and then take a flame to burn all those, who had not left their houses for the prayer, burning them alive inside their homes.”

Muslim (1:149) – “Abu Dharr reported: I said: Messenger of Allah, which of the deeds is the best? He (the Holy Prophet) replied: Belief in Allah and Jihad in His cause…”

Muslim (20:4645) – “…He (the Messenger of Allah) did that and said: There is another act which elevates the position of a man in Paradise to a grade one hundred (higher), and the elevation between one grade and the other is equal to the height of the heaven from the earth. He (Abu Sa’id) said: What is that act? He replied: Jihad in the way of Allah! Jihad in the way of Allah!”

Muslim (20:4696) – “the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: ‘One who died but did not fight in the way of Allah nor did he express any desire (or determination) for Jihad died the death of a hypocrite.'”

Muslim (19:4321-4323) – Three separate hadith in which Muhammad shrugs over the news that innocent children were killed in a raid by his men against unbelievers. His response: “They are of them (meaning the enemy).”

Muslim (19:4294) – “When the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) appointed anyone as leader of an army or detachment he would especially exhort him… He would say: Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war… When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them… If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them.”

Bukhari 1:35 “The person who participates in (Holy Battles) in Allah’s cause and nothing compels him do so except belief in Allah and His Apostle, will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty ( if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise ( if he is killed).”

Tabari 7:97 The morning after the murder of Ashraf, the Prophet declared, “Kill any Jew who falls under your power.” Ashraf was a poet, killed by Muhammad’s men because he insulted Islam. Here, Muhammad widens the scope of his orders to kill. An innocent Jewish businessman was then slain by his Muslim partner, merely for being non-Muslim.

Tabari 9:69 “Killing Unbelievers is a small matter to us” The words of Muhammad, prophet of Islam.

Tabari 17:187 “‘By God, our religion (din) from which we have departed is better and more correct than that which these people follow. Their religion does not stop them from shedding blood, terrifying the roads, and seizing properties.’ And they returned to their former religion.” The words of a group of Christians who had converted to Islam, but realized their error after being shocked by the violence and looting committed in the name of Allah. The price of their decision to return to a religion of peace was that the men were beheaded and the woman and children enslaved by the caliph Ali.

Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 484: – “Allah said, ‘A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives. A slaughtered enemy is driven from the land. Muhammad, you craved the desires of this world, its goods and the ransom captives would bring. But Allah desires killing them to manifest the religion.’”

Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 990: – Lest anyone think that cutting off someone’s head while screaming ‘Allah Akbar!’ is a modern creation, here is an account of that very practice under Muhammad, who seems to approve.

Ibn Ishaq/Hisham 992: – “Fight everyone in the way of Allah and kill those who disbelieve in Allah.” Muhammad’s instructions to his men prior to a military raid.

Saifur Rahman, The Sealed Nectar p.227-228 – “Embrace Islam… If you two accept Islam, you will remain in command of your country; but if your refuse my Call, you’ve got to remember that all of your possessions are perishable. My horsemen will appropriate your land, and my Prophethood will assume preponderance over your kingship.” One of several letters from Muhammad to rulers of other countries. The significance is that the recipients were not making war or threatening Muslims. Their subsequent defeat and subjugation by Muhammad’s armies was justified merely on the basis of their unbelief.

Additional Notes:

Other than the fact that Muslims haven’t killed every non-Muslim under their domain, there is very little else that they can point to as proof that theirs is a peaceful, tolerant religion. Where Islam is dominant (as in the Middle East and Pakistan) religious minorities suffer brutal persecution with little resistance. Where Islam is in the minority (as in Thailand, the Philippines and Europe) there is the threat of violence if Muslim demands are not met. Either situation seems to provide a justification for religious terrorism, which is persistent and endemic to Islamic fundamentalism.

The reasons are obvious and begin with the Quran. Few verses of Islam’s most sacred text can be construed to fit the contemporary virtues of religious tolerance and universal brotherhood. Those that do are earlier “Meccan” verses which are obviously abrogated by later ones. The example of Muhammad is that Islam is a religion of peace when Muslims do not have the power and numbers on their side. Once they do, then things change.

Many Muslims are peaceful and do not want to believe what the Quran plainly says. They reach subjectively for textual context across different suras to try and mitigate the harsher passages. Even though the Quran itself claims to be clear and complete, Muslim apologists speak of the “risks” of trying to interpret the verses without their “assistance.” Like many religious people, they want the text to fit their pre-established moral framework.

Far from being mere history or theological construct, the violent verses of the Quran have played a key role in very real massacre and genocide. This includes the brutal slaughter of tens of millions of Hindus for five centuries beginning around 1000 AD with Mahmud of Ghazni’s bloody conquest. Both he and the later Tamerlane (Islam’s Genghis Khan) slaughtered an untold number merely for defending their temples from destruction. Buddhism was very nearly wiped off the Indian subcontinent. Judaism and Christianity met the same fate (albeit more slowly) in areas conquered by Muslim armies, including the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Europe, including today’s Turkey. Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of a proud Persian people is despised by Muslims and barely survives in modern Iran.

So ingrained is violence in the religion that Islam has never really stopped being at war, either with other religions or with itself.

Muhammad was a military leader, laying siege to towns, massacring the men, raping their women, enslaving their children, and taking the property of others as his own. On several occasions he rejected offers of surrender from the besieged inhabitants and even butchered captives. He actually inspired his followers to battle when they did not feel it was right to fight, promising them slaves and booty if they did and threatening them with Hell if they did not. Muhammad allowed his men to rape traumatized women captured in battle, usually on the very day their husbands and family members were slaughtered.

It is important to emphasize that, for the most part, Muslim armies waged aggressive campaigns, and the religion’s most dramatic military conquests were made by the actual companions of Muhammad in the decades following his death. The early Islamic principle of warfare was that the civilian population of a town was to be destroyed (ie. men executed, women and children taken as slaves) if they defended themselves. Although modern apologists often claim that Muslims are only supposed to attack in self-defense, this is an oxymoron that is flatly contradicted by the accounts of Islamic historians and others that go back to the time of Muhammad.

Consider the example of the Qurayza Jews, who were completely obliterated only five years after Muhammad arrived in Medina. Their leader opted to stay neutral when their town was besieged by a Meccan army that was sent to take revenge for Muhammad’s deadly caravan raids. The tribe killed no one from either side and even surrendered peacefully to Muhammad after the Meccans had been turned back. Yet the prophet of Islam had every male member of the Qurayza beheaded, and every woman and child enslaved, even raping one of the captives himself (what Muslim apologists might refer to as “same day marriage”).

One of Islam’s most revered modern scholars, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, openly sanctions offensive Jihad: “In the Jihad which you are seeking, you look for the enemy and invade him. This type of Jihad takes place only when the Islamic state is invading other [countries] in order to spread the word of Islam and to remove obstacles standing in its way.” Elsewhere, he notes: “Islam has the right to take the initiative…this is God’s religion and it is for the whole world. It has the right to destroy all obstacles in the form of institutions and traditions … it attacks institutions and traditions to release human beings from their poisonous influences, which distort human nature and curtail human freedom. Those who say that Islamic Jihad was merely for the defense of the ‘homeland of Islam’ diminish the greatness of the Islamic way of life.”

The widely respected Dictionary of Islam defines Jihad as “A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad. It is an incumbent religious duty, established in the Qur’an and in the Traditions as a divine institution, and enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling evil from Muslims…[Quoting from the Hanafi school, Hedaya, 2:140, 141.], “The destruction of the sword is incurred by infidels, although they be not the first aggressors, as appears from various passages in the traditions which are generally received to this effect.”

Dr. Salah al-Sawy, the chief member of the Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America, stated in 2009 that “the Islamic community does not possess the strength to engage in offensive jihad at this time,” tacitly affirming the legitimacy of violence for the cause of Islamic rule – bound only by the capacity for success. (source)

Muhammad’s failure to leave a clear line of succession resulted in perpetual internal war following his death. Those who knew him best first fought to keep remote tribes from leaving Islam and reverting to their preferred religion (the Ridda or ‘Apostasy wars’). Then, within the closer community, early Meccan converts battled later ones. Hostility developed between those immigrants who had traveled with Muhammad to Mecca and the Ansar at Medina who had helped them settle in. Finally there was a violent struggle within Muhammad’s own family between his favorite wife and favorite daughter – a jagged schism that has left Shias and Sunnis at each others’ throats to this day.

The strangest and most untrue thing that can be said about Islam is that it is a Religion of Peace. If every standard by which the West is judged and condemned (slavery, imperialism, intolerance, misogyny, sexual repression, warfare…) were applied equally to Islam, the verdict would be devastating. Islam never gives up what it conquers, be it religion, culture, language or life. Neither does it make apologies or any real effort at moral progress. It is the least open to dialogue and the most self-absorbed. It is convinced of its own perfection, yet brutally shuns self-examination and represses criticism.

This is what makes the Quran’s verses of violence so dangerous. They are given the weight of divine command. While Muslim terrorists take them as literally as anything else in their holy book, and understand that Islam is incomplete without Jihad, moderates offer little to contradict them – outside of opinion. Indeed, what do they have? Speaking of peace and love may win over the ignorant, but when every twelfth verse of Islam’s holiest book either speaks to Allah’s hatred for non-Muslims or calls for their death, forced conversion, or subjugation, it’s little wonder that sympathy for terrorism runs as deeply as it does in the broader community – even if most Muslims personally prefer not to interpret their religion in this way.

Although scholars like Ibn Khaldun, one of Islam’s most respected philosophers, understood that “the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force”, many other Muslims are either unaware or willfully ignorant of the Quran’s near absence of verses that preach universal non-violence. Their understanding of Islam comes from what they are taught by others. In the West, it is typical for believers to think that their religion must be like Christianity – preaching the New Testament virtues of peace, love, and tolerance – because Muslims are taught that Islam is supposed to be superior in every way. They are somewhat surprised and embarrassed to learn that the evidence of the Quran and the bloody history of Islam are very much in contradiction to this.

Others simply accept the violence. In 1991, a Palestinian couple in America was convicted of stabbing their daughter to death for being too Westernized. A family friend came to their defense, excoriating the jury for not understanding the “culture”, claiming that the father was merely following “the religion” and saying that the couple had to “discipline their daughter or lose respect.” (source). In 2011, unrepentant Palestinian terrorists, responsible for the brutal murders of civilians, women and children explicitly in the name of Allah were treated to a luxurious “holy pilgrimage” to Mecca by the Saudi king – without a single Muslim voice raised in protest.

For their part, Western liberals would do well not to sacrifice critical thinking to the god of political correctness, or look for reasons to bring other religion down to the level of Islam merely to avoid the existential truth that this it is both different and dangerous.

There are just too many Muslims who take the Quran literally… and too many others who couldn’t care less about the violence done in the name of Islam.

TheReligionofPeace.com Home Page

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January 22, 2015

Education and Class, From The Economist [Applies everywhere, not just U.S.]

Filed under: Bail-out, Business, Econonics, Education, Global Intel, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Islam, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism, Religion, US Constitution — Tags: affordable care act, civil rights, democrats, Economics, Freedom, harry reid, hillary clinton, History, Islam, liberty, Obama, pelosi, Politics, republicans, Secession, Socialism, tea party, Welfare — justplainbill @ 7:43 pm

Education and class
America’s new aristocracy
As the importance of intellectual capital grows, privilege has become increasingly heritable
Jan 24th 2015 | From the print edition

Timekeeper

WHEN the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination line up on stage for their first debate in August, there may be three contenders whose fathers also ran for president. Whoever wins may face the wife of a former president next year. It is odd that a country founded on the principle of hostility to inherited status should be so tolerant of dynasties. Because America never had kings or lords, it sometimes seems less inclined to worry about signs that its elite is calcifying.
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Thomas Jefferson drew a distinction between a natural aristocracy of the virtuous and talented, which was a blessing to a nation, and an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, which would slowly strangle it. Jefferson himself was a hybrid of these two types—a brilliant lawyer who inherited 11,000 acres and 135 slaves from his father-in-law—but the distinction proved durable. When the robber barons accumulated fortunes that made European princes envious, the combination of their own philanthropy, their children’s extravagance and federal trust-busting meant that Americans never discovered what it would be like to live in a country where the elite could reliably reproduce themselves.
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America’s new aristocracy
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Unblocking the pipes
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Now they are beginning to find out, (see article), because today’s rich increasingly pass on to their children an asset that cannot be frittered away in a few nights at a casino. It is far more useful than wealth, and invulnerable to inheritance tax. It is brains.

Matches made in New Haven

Intellectual capital drives the knowledge economy, so those who have lots of it get a fat slice of the pie. And it is increasingly heritable. Far more than in previous generations, clever, successful men marry clever, successful women. Such “assortative mating” increases inequality by 25%, by one estimate, since two-degree households typically enjoy two large incomes. Power couples conceive bright children and bring them up in stable homes—only 9% of college-educated mothers who give birth each year are unmarried, compared with 61% of high-school dropouts. They stimulate them relentlessly: children of professionals hear 32m more words by the age of four than those of parents on welfare. They move to pricey neighbourhoods with good schools, spend a packet on flute lessons and pull strings to get junior into a top-notch college.

The universities that mould the American elite seek out talented recruits from all backgrounds, and clever poor children who make it to the Ivy League may have their fees waived entirely. But middle-class students have to rack up huge debts to attend college, especially if they want a post-graduate degree, which many desirable jobs now require. The link between parental income and a child’s academic success has grown stronger, as clever people become richer and splash out on their daughter’s Mandarin tutor, and education matters more than it used to, because the demand for brainpower has soared. A young college graduate earns 63% more than a high-school graduate if both work full-time—and the high-school graduate is much less likely to work at all. For those at the top of the pile, moving straight from the best universities into the best jobs, the potential rewards are greater than they have ever been.

None of this is peculiar to America, but the trend is most visible there. This is partly because the gap between rich and poor is bigger than anywhere else in the rich world—a problem Barack Obama alluded to repeatedly in his state-of-the-union address on January 20th (see article). It is also because its education system favours the well-off more than anywhere else in the rich world. Thanks to hyperlocal funding, America is one of only three advanced countries where the government spends more on schools in rich areas than in poor ones. Its university fees have risen 17 times as fast as median incomes since 1980, partly to pay for pointless bureaucracy and flashy buildings. And many universities offer “legacy” preferences, favouring the children of alumni in admissions.

Nurseries, not tumbrils

The solution is not to discourage rich people from investing in their children, but to do a lot more to help clever kids who failed to pick posh parents. The moment to start is in early childhood, when the brain is most malleable and the right kind of stimulation has the largest effect. There is no substitute for parents who talk and read to their babies, but good nurseries can help, especially for the most struggling families; and America scores poorly by international standards (see article). Improving early child care in the poorest American neighbourhoods yields returns of ten to one or more; few other government investments pay off so handsomely.

Many schools are in the grip of one of the most anti-meritocratic forces in America: the teachers’ unions, which resist any hint that good teaching should be rewarded or bad teachers fired. To fix this, and the scandal of inequitable funding, the system should become both more and less local. Per-pupil funding should be set at the state level and tilted to favour the poor. Dollars should follow pupils, through a big expansion of voucher schemes or charter schools. In this way, good schools that attract more pupils will grow; bad ones will close or be taken over. Unions and their Democratic Party allies will howl, but experiments in cities such as battered New Orleans have shown that school choice works.

Finally, America’s universities need an injection of meritocracy. Only a handful, such as Caltech, admit applicants solely on academic merit. All should. And colleges should make more effort to offer value for money. With cheaper online courses gaining momentum, traditional institutions must cut costs or perish. The state can help by demanding more transparency from universities about the return that graduates earn on their degrees.

Loosening the link between birth and success would make America richer—far too much talent is currently wasted. It might also make the nation more cohesive. If Americans suspect that the game is rigged, they may be tempted to vote for demagogues of the right or left—especially if the grown-up alternative is another Clinton or yet another Bush.

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January 12, 2015

The Progressive Racial Narrative and Its Beneficiaries, by Bruce Thornton [nc]

Filed under: Bail-out, Business, Econonics, Education, Elections, Historical context, Law Enforcement, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism, US Constitution — Tags: Christianity, civil rights, democrats, federal government, finance, Freedom, harry reid, hillary clinton, History, Lamestream Media, liberty, Media Watch, News Media, Obama, obamacare, pelosi, Politics, Racism, Secession, Socialism, tea party, us constitution, Welfare — justplainbill @ 5:04 pm

The Progressive Racial Narrative and Its Beneficiaries
January 11, 2015 7:41 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
Debunking the lies about race in America.

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

al_sharpton_speaking_reuters-450x337A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reveals that nearly 6 in 10 people believe race relations are bad, with 23% saying they are “very bad.” The causes of these perceptions are many, including nationally publicized police killings of two black men, disorderly and violent demonstrators ignoring the facts of the cases to brand the police “racist,” a lazy media neglecting to dig up and then publicize those facts, and a president, Attorney General, and mayor of New York willing to exploit and widen racial division and consort with hustlers like Al Sharpton.

What we see at work in these events is the long established racial narrative in which endemic white racism accounts for all the ills that afflict black people. Not just individual whites harbor this original sin, but our educational, political, social, justice, and economic institutions are racist as well, favoring white people and hence conferring on them “white skin privilege.” The wide scope of racism means that no matter how well meaning towards blacks, or how socially and economically disadvantaged, individual whites cannot purge themselves of racism. Only radical transformation of all our institutions can redeem America from racism.

This fairytale regularly ignores numerous facts. The decline in black poverty, for example, calls into question the notion that there is “institutional racism” warping the economy. Thanks to postwar economic growth, the black poverty rate decreased from 87% in 1940 to 28% today. Similar improvement can be seen in the growth of the black middle class and increases in black home ownership. And the claim that blacks are shut out of the job market is hard to square with the fact that millions of illegal aliens are working in this country, and immigrant entrepreneurs are creating small businesses.

Similarly, the idea that the police are an “occupying army” targeting blacks, a cliché we heard repeatedly during the recent demonstrations over the police shootings in Ferguson and Brooklyn, is exploded by simple statistics that show about 200 blacks a year––most shot while possessing a gun or knife––are killed by police officers, while almost 6,000 a year are killed by other blacks. It’s a strange “army” that endangers itself in order to protect and save the lives of those it’s allegedly “occupying.”

Then there’s the “voter suppression” charge, the assertion that attempts by states to ensure only legal voters cast ballots really are designed to discourage black voters. The increasing numbers of black people registering and turning out to vote belie this claim, as does the much greater number of blacks holding elected office. Indeed, in 2012 the proportion of black voters turning out in the national election was greater than that of white.

The fact is, by global standards the largest number of politically free and well off blacks is in the United States. As for those blacks still mired in dysfunctional communities filled with crime, violence, unemployment, drugs, and fatherless children, those evils do not reflect white racism or a “legacy of slavery.” Rather, they can be traced to what Michael Gerson called the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” the culture of dependence and the erosion of self-reliance and self-responsibility created by government handouts and the liberal narrative of endemic white racism that demeans blacks as helpless victims incapable of improving their lives or being accountable for their actions, since through no fault of their own they are imprisoned by “institutional racism.” And don’t forget progressive government policies that inhibit economic growth, historically the great engine for improving black lives, and the culture-wide degradation of sexual mores and the collapse of traditional marriage.

So cui bono, as the lawyers say, who benefits from this narrative? The federal and state entitlement industry, of course, whose agencies and bureaucrats profit from having a permanent underclass of clients. So too the Democratic Party, which buys black votes with promises to keep the transfers and set-asides flowing. So too the racial grievance industry, that gang of activists, academics, ethnic studies professors, “diversity” consultants, and shakedown artists like Al Sharpton who use black misery as leverage for more power and pelf. So too the leftover leftists, who find in racial discord a weapon for attacking the country that kicked their cherished collectivist ideology into the dustbin of history.

Most black Americans aren’t invested in this narrative. They’re too busy working and raising their families. But let’s not forget the role this narrative plays in camouflaging the privilege of those millions of blacks who live better and have more social clout than millions of white people. By ignoring their economic advantages and brandishing their scars from alleged racist wounds, many in the black upper-middle and upper class, particularly those in education, sports, entertainment, and government, can gain vicarious victim-privilege and hence social leverage. Thus through a spurious claim to racial brotherhood, they plunder and spend the capital of black suffering many of them have never experienced. They then can enjoy a social cachet and a whiff of exotic authenticity that sets them apart from their bland white counterparts, and that gives them an air of gnostic racial wisdom embodied in the cant phrase, “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

The phoniness of this ploy can be seen in the various claims well off blacks make about their personal experiences of racism. In the 90s it was the epidemic of racist cabdrivers refusing to pick up black passengers. That one faded when research showed that many of the cabdrivers were themselves black, and were prudently avoiding the murder and mayhem they often experienced at the hands of black passengers. Then there was the “driving while black” trope, which focused on the disproportionate number of blacks pulled over for traffic violations like speeding. Department of Justice investigations ended up with sanctions imposed on states for “racial profiling.” But the study done of drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike, a much-publicized case of “profiling,” revealed that while blacks were 25% of all speeders, they were 23% of those pulled over. That is, they were underrepresented, not overrepresented, among those stopped.

More recently we have heard affluent, privileged blacks like Eric Holder, and the white father of a half-black son, New York mayor Bill De Blasio, indulge another hackneyed trope, the “talk.” This is the conversation black fathers must have with their sons in order to “train them to be very careful when they have . . . an encounter with a police officer,” as De Blasio said, lest they give a policeman a pretext for the violence incited by their racism. The irony of this claim is that if reflects just how privileged these children are, for people who grow up in the dangerous neighborhoods the police must frequent drink that wisdom in with their mother’s milk. Worse yet, it assumes that a white kid who resists arrest, fights a cop, curses him, or otherwise challenges his authority will be treated with kid gloves. I’ll have to see some hard data before I believe that. The reality is, the biggest danger to a young black man today is not a policeman, but another young black man.

No doubt some blacks have experienced rude cops or cabdrivers, or have been subjected to the other evidence of racism like those Obama claims to have experienced, such as women clutching their purses more closely in an elevator, or locking their car doors at the approach of a black man. But even if true, these slights don’t amount to “systemic racism.” They more likely reflect prejudices, many acquired through unpleasant experiences. If you want to see what real racism looks like, visit this site and peruse its collection of lynching postcards. You’ll see just how much progress has been made over the last half-century.

But facts or even common sense don’t matter when it comes to a narrative with so many beneficiaries, the biggest one being Barack Obama, who never would have become president without it. The saddest part of all this, however, is that the black people truly suffering today aren’t on that list. In the racial narrative, black lives don’t matter.

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/bruce-thornton/the-progressive-racial-narrative-and-its-beneficiaries/

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December 29, 2014

Race Mongers All, by Sylvia Thompson [nc]

Filed under: Econonics, Education, Historical context, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians, Racism — Tags: 2nd Amendment, civil rights, constitutional law, democrats, federal government, Freedom, harry reid, hillary clinton, History, liberty, Media Watch, Obama, Politics, Racism, Secession, Socialism, tea party, us constitution, Welfare — justplainbill @ 7:24 pm

Sylvia Thompson column
Race mongers all, with blood on their hands

Sylvia Thompson
Sylvia Thompson
December 28, 2014

President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and race-hustler Al Sharpton are most definitely complicit in the recent deaths of two New York City police officers. I refuse to listen to the blather that says otherwise. These four race mongers set the stage for the hateful act committed by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the murderer. Furthermore, I reject the playing down of this hater’s guilt by branding him “mentally unstable.” He was a typical hateful black person spawned by the Left’s decades-long campaign to brainwash American blacks.

Police officers across the country are rightfully enraged at these despicable men, wielding their enormous political power against the entire law enforcement community. Shunning de Blasio is the least these officers could do to show the leftist mayor how much they despise him. All of America should despise all four of these men.

That said, I focus this commentary on the incredible naivety of so many pundits, such as Greta Van Susteren’s. The pundits are puzzled by Obama’s and Holder’s lack of a convincing response to the murders. These two men, in their positions of authority, refuse to make any genuine attempts to quell the hatred that spawned Brinsley’s murderous scheme, which is why they are culpable.

Classic liberals (and I consider Ms. Van Susteren one of them) are completely clueless when it comes to assessing black behavior. That naivety is what accounts, in my view, for the assumption that most of us blacks are in need of their protection and guidance. It is a condescending attitude, but many of them are completely ignorant of how they come across. I learned this fact over the years, which is why I ignore classic liberals. I follow closely, however, the diabolical leftists. Failure to understand leftism is dangerous.

This naivety also explains why many pundits and educated white Americans are baffled over Obama’s choice of a character, such as Al Sharpton, to be a legitimate representative of black America. It requires an understanding of black elitism to comprehend this behavior. As a non-elite, I have found that black elites, like their counterparts in other ethnic groups, are adept at using people whom they perceive to be beneath them to do their bidding. Blacks of Sharpton’s character are ripe for manipulation. They possess little in intellect and they crave great power. They acquire a perceived power in being near the powerful.

Obama and Holder, and all of their ilk, know that some activities (such as street rabble-rousing) are beneath them. Therefore, they plant the seeds of hatred; Sharpton and his ilk stir up the soil so that the seeds will grow. They provide the poison; the Sharptons stir it into the water and encourage blacks to drink up. In Obama’s eyes, Sharpton is merely a tool.

Greta Van Susteren laments that Obama does not approach blacks such as Senator Tim Scott to assist with issues of race. Simply stated, Senator Scott cannot be used.

Sharpton may well understand this thinly vailed disdain, and it could be that a mutual “using” is taking place. The elitist using the despised black of “the other class” to foment unrest and hatred, as part of the Left’s grand plan to destroy America, and the lower-classed hustler gaining a level of recognition that the circumstances of his birth denied him. Hustlers are skilled manipulators in their own right, and Sharpton has many years of experience under his belt.

We often hear pundits of both races decrying “America still has racism and something has to be done about it.” That excuse is used to further the Left’s agenda of “transforming” (meaning “destroying”) America. Newsflash: We will never be completely rid of racist thinking until Almighty God removes it from the flawed psyche of those who refuse to let go of it. And He will indeed do that, in due time.

Meanwhile, I truly hope that more white Americans will come to an understanding that this whipping rod of “perpetual racism” is a ploy. People on the Left use it because it works. The solution is that Americans who are not racist must stop allowing the Left to use the ploy against them. Reject it; call it out for what it is – a pernicious scheme.

I offer a fervent plea to my fellow Americans of any color who are really sick and tired of it all – stop listening to the race baiters. Even the ones who sound reasonable or wear white collars of the clergy, but will not task blacks with any of the responsibility for their circumstances. The plight of disadvantaged black Americans will not improve until they remove themselves from the yoke of leftist liberalism. They must begin to take personal responsibility for how they live, behave, and rear their children, as well as which leaders and educators they accept into their communities.

This rethinking needs to happen soon, because there will not always be race-baiting professed black leaders in control of this country. There will come a time when leaders will be in charge who are immune to overwrought cries of “racist” and “racism.” And we had better hope that they are decent men, because the game of “payback” will be detrimental if they choose to play it against us twelve percent of the American populace.

Sylvia Thompson is a black conservative writer whose aim is to counter the liberal spin on issues pertaining to race and culture.

Ms. Thompson is a copy editor by trade currently residing in Tennessee. She formerly wrote for the Conservative Forum of Silicon Valley California Newsletter and the online conservative blog ChronWatch, also out of California.

She grew up in Southeast Texas during the waning years of Jim Crow-era legalized segregation, and she concludes that race relations in America will never improve, nor will we ever elevate our culture, as long as there are victims to be pandered to and villains to be vilified. America is better served without victims or villains.

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Col. Bud Day, USAF/ Medal of Honor Recipient, on torture [nc]

Filed under: Education, Elections, Global Intel, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Islam, Media Check, Military, Political Commentary, Politicians, Religion, US Constitution — Tags: 2nd Amendment, Christianity, civil rights, constitutional law, democrats, dhs, Economics, federal government, Government, harry reid, hillary clinton, History, Islam, liberty, Military, Obama, Politics, Racism, Secession, Socialism, tea party, us constitution, Welfare — justplainbill @ 7:19 pm

Colonel Bud Day

I JUST ENJOY HOW HE RELATES TO OBAMA & THE REST OF CANDY ASS WASHINGTON CROWD!!!!

I got shot down over N Vietnam in 1967, a Squadron Commander.
After I returned in 1973…I published 2 books that dealt a lot
with “real torture” in Hanoi . Our make-believe president is
Branding our country as a bunch of torturers when he
has no idea what torture is.

As for me, I was put thru a mock execution because
I would not respond.. Pistol whipped on the head….same event..
Couple of days later… Hung by my feet all day.
I escaped and a couple of weeks later, I got shot and recaptured.
Shot was OK…what happened afterwards was not.

They marched me to Vinh…put me in the rope trick, trick…almost
pulled my arms out of the sockets. Beat me on the head with
a little wooden rod until my eyes were swelled shut,
andmy unshot, unbroken hand a pulp.

Next day hung me by the arms…re-broke my right wrist…
wiped out the nerves in my arms that control the hands….
rolled my fingers up into a ball. Only left the slightest movement
of my L forefinger. So I started answering
with some incredible lies.

Sent me to Hanoi strapped to a barrel of gas in the back of a truck.

Hanoi ..on my knees….rope trick again. Beaten by a big fool.

Into leg irons on a bed in Heartbreak Hotel.

Much kneeling–hands up at Zoo.

Really bad beating for refusing to condemn Lyndon Johnson.

Several more kneeling events. I could see my knee bone
thru kneeling holes.

There was an escape from the annex to the Zoo. I was
the Senior Officer of a large building… because of escape…
they started a mass Torture of all commanders.

I think it was July 7, 1969…they started beating me with a car fan-belt.
In the first 2 days I took over 300 strokes, then stopped counting
because I never thought I would live thru it.

They continued day-night torture to get me to confess to
a non-existent part in the escape. This went on for at least 3 days.
On my knees… fan belting…cut open my scrotum with fan belt stroke.
Opened up both knee holes again. My fanny looked like hamburger…
I could not lie on my back.

They tortured me into admitting that I was in on the escape…
and that my 2 room-mates knew about it.

The next day I denied the lie.

They commenced torturing me again with 3- 6- or 9 strokes of
the fan belt every day from about July 11 or 12th..
to 14 October 1969.
I continued to refuse to lie about my roommates again.

Now, the point of this is that our make-believe President
has declared to the world that we (U.S.) are a bunch of Torturers…
thus it will be OK to torture us next time when they catch us…
because that is what the U.S. Does.

Our make-believe president is a know nothing fool who thinks
that pouring a little water on some one’s face, or hanging a
pair of women’s pants over an Arabs head is TORTURE..
He is a meathead.

I just talked to Medal Of Honor holder Leo Thorsness, who
was also in my squadron, In jail…as was John McCain…and
we agree that McCain does not speak for the POW group
when he claims that Al Gharib was Torture…
or that “water boarding” is torture.

Our president and those fools around him who keep bad mouthing
our great country are a disgrace to the United States . Please pass
This info on to Sean Hannity. He is free to use it to point out the
stupidity of the claims that water boarding…
which has no after effect…is torture.

If it got the Arab to cough up the story about
how he planned the attack on the twin towers in NYC …
Hurrah for the guy who poured the water.
____________________________________________________________________

“Bud” Day, Medal Of Honor Recipient

George Everett “Bud” Day (born February 24, 1925) is a retired
U.S. Air Force Colonel and Command Pilot who served during the
Vietnam War. He is often cited as being the most decorated U.S.
Service member since General Douglas MacArthur, having
Received some 70 decorations, a majority for actions
In combat. Day is a recipient of the Medal of Honor.
————–
Please pass on to your
Family and friends

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December 17, 2014

Must See, if necessary go to: face book, Jan Ziech, public

Filed under: Education, Law Enforcement, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians, US Constitution — Tags: 2nd Amendment, civil rights, constitutional law, Economics, Politics, Secession, Welfare — justplainbill @ 3:56 pm

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = “//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1”; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, ‘script’, ‘facebook-jssdk’));

Post by Jan Ziech.

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December 16, 2014

Garner Death Facts, by Bryan Fischer [nc]

Filed under: Education, Historical context, Law Enforcement, Media Check, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians — Tags: civil rights, democrats, federal government, Freedom, garner, grand juries, History, liberty, News Media, nypd, Politics, Racism, Socialism, tea party, Welfare — justplainbill @ 4:36 pm

Almost No Truth in Media Reports on Garner Death

By Bryan Fischer, American Family Association

It turns out that almost everything bleated out by the race-mongers and the low-information media about the Eric Garner tragedy has turned out to be wrong.

Eric Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, is dead. This is a tragedy, regardless of the circumstances. We rightly mourn with his wife and children. They will never see their husband and father again, and that should break everyone’s heart.

When we witness a gut-rending tragedy like this, we want to know ! who is responsible. Who is to blame for depriving this family of its husband and father? As the facts emerge, it becomes increasingly clear that, as tragic as this situation is, in the end the culpability for Eric Garner’s death rests with… Eric Garner.

To put it as simply as possible, if Mr. Garner had not broken the law and then resisted arrest, he would be alive today.

While protesters are trying to make this about race, it must be noted that the police showed up in response to complaints from black business owners. The arrest was ordered by a black officer, and the arrest itself was supervised by a black officer, a female sergeant.

A crackdown on the sale of illegal, untaxed cigarettes – called “loosies” since they are sold in singles rather than in packs – had been ordered just days before Garner’s arrest by the highest ranking black police officer in the NYPD, Philip Banks.

So a black officer ordered the crackdown, black business owners called for the arrest, a black officer ordered the arrest, and a black officer supervised the arrest itself. It’s also worth noting that the 23-member grand jury which refused to indict the arresting officer included nine non-white members. Ask yourself how many of those facts you have heard from any member of the race-obsessed, low-information media.

Garner had been arrested 31 times, and eight of those had been for selling loosies. His rap sheet goes back decades and includes arrests for assault and grand larceny.

At the time of his death, Garner was out on bail after being charged with multiple offenses, including illegal sale of cigarettes, marijuana possession, false impersonation and driving without a license.

So he certainly knew the law, knew he was in violation, and knew doing it again would likely lead to his arrest, a drill he’d been through dozens of times before.

There were 228,000 misdemeanor arrests in New York City in 2013, the last year for which figures are available. All of them put together led to precisely zero deaths.

Garner, all six-foot, three inches and 350 pounds of him, clearly resisted arrest, swatting away the arresting officer’s hands while loudly exclaiming, “Don’t touch me!” After he was taken to the ground, he growled, “This ends here!” That could be taken any number of ways, but in the heat of the moment it certainly could be read reasonably as a declaration that he was going to fight arrest until he was subdued by compelling force.

The patrolman who wrestled Garner to the ground, Daniel Pantaleo, did it by the book, using a takedown maneuver every policeman is taught at the academy. He did not, in fact, use a chokehold, which is defined by the NYPD as “any pressure to the throat or windpipe, which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air.” Now Garner was clearly able to breathe, since that’s the only way he could repeatedly say, “I can’t breathe.”

The autopsy explicitly declares that there was no injury to Garner’s windpipe or to his neck bones. This was a wrestler’s headlock, not a ch! okehold. (As a sidenote, chokeholds, while contrary to police policy, are not in fact illegal in the state of New York when an officer uses one to restrain a resisting subject. They are not even illegal in New York City, at the insistence of liberal mayor Bill DeBlasio.) Patrolman Pantaleo was not indicted for the simple reason that he did nothing wrong.

Garner’s death likely should be attributed to the fact that he himself suffered from severe asthma, something the arresting officers had no reason to know. According to Garner’s friends, his asthma was severe enough that he was forced to quit his job as horticulturist for the city. He wheezed when he talked and could not walk so much as a city block without having to stop to rest. Garner “couldn’t breathe” because of his asthma, not because of a chokehold.

In addition, he suffered from heart disease, advanced diabetes, hypertension, obesity and sleep apnea. Contrary to public perception, he did not die on site, nor did he die of asphyxiation. He suffered cardiac arrest in the ambulance and was declared dead about an hour later at the hospital.

So it turns out that almost everything bleated out by the race-mongers and the low-information media has turned out to be wrong. As the wisest man who ever lived wrote 3,000 years ago, “The one who states his case first seems right until the other comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17).

Eric Garner and Michael Brown both fought the law, and the law won. In the end, they have no one to blame but themselves.

New York Post columnist Bob McMcanus concluded his column on Eric Garner this way:

“There are many New Yorkers – politicians, activists, trial lawyers, all the usual suspects – who will now seek to profit from a tragedy that wouldn’t have happened had Eric Garner made a different decision.

“He was a victim of himself. It’s just that simple.”

Bryan Fischer is director of issues analysis for the American Family Association. He hosts “Focal Point with Bryan Fischer” every weekday on AFR Talk from 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. (Central).

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December 9, 2014

The Economist on Advertising Euphemisms [c]

Filed under: Econonics, Education, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Islam, Law Enforcement, Political Commentary, Politicians — Tags: advertising, affordable care act, Christianity, civil rights, Economics, hillary clinton, History, language abuse, left wing propaganda, liberty, misdirection, Obama, pro-choice, Racism, Secession, Socialism, tea party, Welfare — justplainbill @ 8:14 pm

Johnson: Euphemism
Everyone does it
Dec 5th 2014, 14:26 by R.L.G. | BERLIN

Timekeeper

THE language of marketing usually promises wonderful things: whiter whites, sex appeal, adventure, excitement, a whole new you, just do it, I’m lovin’ it, have it your way, think different… Whether or not a shoe or a tablet computer can really transform our lives, the slogans briefly make us think they can.

But other marketers and advertisers have to be cleverer still—for they sell products inherently connected with unpleasant topics. A colleague and former defence correspondent for The Economist describes a tour of a French arms factory. His guide, showing off a certain item, touted it as “highly efficient in the anti-personnel function”. In other words, very good at killing people.

Many if not most of our products offer not some supplemental happiness, but release from some unpleasantness. The many inconveniences that plague the human body alone keep a large industry of product-makers in profit, and an equally large number of marketing-copy writers busy talking around them.

The ways marketers manage to get their point across without mentioning the unpleasantness in question offer a school of euphemism in miniature. One venerable strategy: speak not of the thing itself, but of a thing near the thing, letting the association do the work. This is how the toilet became the “bathroom” in American English; the “bathroom” at a petrol station will not have a bath, but the one at home does, and that is good enough. In much the same way, products like Danone’s Activia yogurt, are touted as helping “digestion”. Digestion is technically an earlier stage of the process in question. What Activia is really meant to do is better conveyed by the downward arrow on the yogurt’s label.

Feminine products get an extra dose of euphemism. In visual form, this means that those made for absorption are famously shown doing so soaking up pale blue fluid, and women riding horses or doing yoga. In words, it means talking not about the problem, but the desired outcome: “freshness”, “security”, “protection”. One brand, Kotex, decided to parody the typical evasiveness of such mealy-mouthed marketing in an advert—a brilliant idea, until American networks refused to air spots that mentioned where the product would be used. The word vagina was unacceptable on three big American networks, and even “down there”, a wink-wink workaround, was unacceptable for two. The spot is still pretty funny—but loses much of the punch it would have had in the original form.

Kimberly Clark, the makers of Kotex, lamely protested that American networks have no problem mentioning “erectile dysfunction”. But this just highlights another misdirection strategy: the use of long technical words for problems and touchy bits of the body. Johnson looked at how German and other cousin languages to English are shockingly frank about the body—Durchfall, or “fall-through”, is typically blunt; English-speakers, by contrast, resort to Greek for “flow-through”, or diarrhoea. This reflects a centuries-long habit of using the classical languages to guide our gaze away from the grubby reality. The Greco-Latin “Erectile dysfunction” is hardly direct; the word penis is never mentioned, and dysfunction is pretty highfalutin for something that simply isn’t working as it should.

And the technical-looking, Greco-Latin name offers up another avenue. These names are such a mouthful that it is natural to convert them into initialisms and acronyms: the companies that aim to treat it encourage you not to talk about erectile dysfunction, but ED, leading to a fixed catchphrase: “Ask your doctor about ED.” And those advertising to men are just as evasive with another, increasingly common problem, telling men to “ask your doctor about low T”, or low testosterone.

Some of this is just good old psychology: focus on the solution, and don’t dwell on the problem. But in too many other cases, failure even to mention the problem makes the sufferers of life’s ordinary ailments feel abnormal, or even that they should be ashamed. The language of advertising nudges broader social trends, making it hard for friends or parents and children to talk about life’s necessities. In some ways, children’s literature is rather more sensible than advertising for grown-ups: witness the English title of a popular Japanese children’s book, with the frank life lesson that “Everybody Poos”.

[Include words like diversity, multi-cultural, and pro-choice.]

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Dick Lamm, former Gov of Colorado (pre-weed) [nc]

Filed under: Business, Econonics, Education, Elections, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Islam, Media Check, Political Commentary, Politicians, Religion, US Constitution — Tags: 2nd Amendment, affordable care act, Christianity, civil rights, democrats, Economics, education, Government, harry reid, hillary clinton, History, Islam, Lame Stream Media, legal trends, liberty, Media Watch, Obama, pelosi, Politics, Racism, Secession, Socialism, tea party, us constitution, Welfare — justplainbill @ 7:57 pm

AMERICAN SUICIDE

Isn’t it rather amazing how a past Governor of Colorado can focus and zero
in on a major issue facing this State of California.â€”and now the U.S.

Wherever you stand on this issue, please take the time to read this; it
should wake you from your slumber on this important truth.

We know Dick Lamm as the former Governor of Colorado. In that context his
thoughts are particularly poignant.

Last week there was an immigration overpopulation conference in Washington,
D.C., filled to capacity with many of America’s finest minds and leaders. A
brilliant college professor by the name of Victor Davis Hansen talked about
his latest book, “Mexifornia”, explaining how immigration – both legal and
illegal was destroying the entire state of California. He said it would
march across the country until it destroyed all vestiges of The American
Dream.

Moments later, former Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm stood up and gave a
stunning speech on how to destroy America.

The audience sat spellbound as he described eight methods for the
destruction of the United States. He said, “If you believe that America is
too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let’s destroy America. It is
not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.
Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall and that
â€˜An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit
suicide.â€™â€

“Here is how they do it,” Lamm said.

“FIRST, to destroy America, turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual
and bicultural country. History shows that no nation can survive the
tension, conflict, and antagonism of two or more competing languages and
cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it
is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar, Seymour
Lipset, put it this way: â€˜The histories of bilingual and bicultural
societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and
tragedy.â€™ Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, and Lebanon all face crises of
national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not
independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an
ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons,
Corsicans and Muslims.”

Lamm went on:

“SECOND, to destroy America, invent ‘multiculturalism’ and encourage
immigrants to maintain their culture. Make it an article of belief that all
cultures are equal; that there are no cultural differences. Make it an
article of faith that the Black and Hispanic dropout rates are due solely
to prejudice and discrimination by the majority. Every other explanation is
out of bounds.”

“THIRD, we could make the United States an ‘Hispanic Quebec’ without much
effort. The key is to celebrate diversity rather than unity. As Benjamin
Schwarz said in the Atlantic Monthly recently: ‘The apparent success of our
own multi-ethnic and multicultural experiment might have been achieved not
by tolerance, but by hegemony. Without the dominance that once dictated
ethnocentricity and what it meant to be an American, we are left with only
tolerance and pluralism to hold us together.’ Lamm said, “I would encourage
all immigrants to keep their own language and culture. I would replace the
melting pot metaphor with the salad bowl metaphor. It is important to
ensure that we have various cultural subgroups living in America enforcing
their differences rather than as Americans, emphasizing their similarities.”

“FOURTH, I would make our fastest growing demographic group the least
educated. I would add a second underclass, unassimilated, undereducated,
and antagonistic to our population. I would have this second underclass
have a 50% dropout rate from high school.”

“My FIFTH point for destroying America would be to get big foundations and
business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic
identity, and I would establish the cult of ‘Victimology.’ I would get all
minorities to think that their lack of success was the fault of the
majority. I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure
on the majority placation.”

“My SIXTH plan for America’s downfall would include dual citizenship, and
promote divided loyalties. I would celebrate diversity over unity. I would
stress differences rather than similarities. Diverse people worldwide are
mostly engaged in hating each other – that is, when they are not killing
each other. A diverse, peaceful, or stable society is against most
historical precedent. People undervalue the unity it takes to keep a nation
together. Look at the ancient Greeks. The Greeks believed that they
belonged to the same race; they possessed a common language and literature;
and they worshipped the same gods. All Greece took part in the Olympic
games. A common enemy, Persia, threatened their liberty. Yet all these
bonds were not strong enough to overcome two factors: local patriotism and
geographical conditions that nurtured political divisions. Greece fell. “E.
Pluribus Unum” — From many, one. In that historical reality, if we put the
emphasis on the ‘pluribus’ instead of the ‘Unum,’ we will “Balkanize”
America as surely as Kosovo.

“NEXT TO LAST, I would place all subjects off limits. Make it taboo to talk
about anything against the cult of ‘diversity.’ I would find a word similar
to ‘heretic’ in the 16th century – that stopped discussion and paralyzed
thinking. Words like ‘racist’ or ‘xenophobe’ halt discussion and debate.
Having made America a bi-lingual/bi-cultural country, having established
multi-culturalism, having the large foundations fund the doctrine of
‘Victimology,’ I would next make it impossible to enforce our immigration
laws. I would develop a mantra: That because immigration has been good for
America, it must always be good. I would make every individual immigrant
symmetric and ignore the cumulative impact of millions of them.”

In the LAST minute of his speech, Governor Lamm wiped his brow. Profound
silence followed. Finally he said, “Lastly, I would censor Victor Davis
Hanson’s book ‘Mexifornia.’ His book is dangerous. It exposes the plan to
destroy America If you feel America deserves to be destroyed, don’t read
that book.”

There was no applause. A chilling fear quietly rose like an ominous cloud
above every attendee at the conference. Every American in that room knew
that everything Lamm enumerated was proceeding methodically, quietly,
darkly, yet pervasively across the United States today. Discussion is being
suppressed. Over 100 languages are ripping the foundation of our
educational system and national cohesiveness. Even barbaric cultures that
practice female genital mutilation are growing as we celebrate ‘diversity.’
American jobs are vanishing into the Third World as corporations create a
Third World in America. Take note of California and other states. To date,
ten million illegal aliens and growing fast. It is reminiscent of George
Orwell’s book “1984.” In that story, three slogans are engraved in the
Ministry of Truth building: “War is peace,” “Freedom is slavery,” and
“Ignorance is strength.”

Governor Lamm walked back to his seat. It dawned on everyone at the
conference that our nation, and the future of this great democracy, is
deeply in trouble and worsening fast. If we don’t get this immigration
monster stopped within three years, it will rage like a California wildfire
and destroy everything in its path, especially The American Dream.

If you care for and love our country as I do, take the time to pass this on
just as I did for you. NOTHING is going to happen if you don’t!

“If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a
nation gone under” – Ronald Reagan

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December 8, 2014

Muslims force Sikh principal out, push for Sharia in Birmingham, NY Times [nc]

Filed under: Education, Global Intel, Historical context, Islam, Media Check, Political Commentary, Politicians, Religion — Tags: 2nd Amendment, Christianity, civil rights, federal government, Government, History, Islam, liberty, Obama, Politics, Racism, Socialism — justplainbill @ 10:44 pm

A Sikh Principal, Too English for a Largely Muslim School

By KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA DEC. 7, 2014

BIRMINGHAM, England — As a Sikh and second-generation Briton running a public school made up mostly of Muslim students, Balwant Bains was at the center of the issues facing multicultural Britain, including the perennial question of balancing religious precepts and cultural identity against assimilation.

But in January, Mr. Bains stepped down as the principal of the Saltley School and Specialist Science College, saying he could no longer do the job in the face of relentless criticism from the Muslim-dominated school board. It had pressed him, unsuccessfully, to replace some courses with Islamic and Arabic studies, segregate girls and boys and drop a citizenship class on tolerance and democracy in Britain.

“I suppose I was a threat, giving these children more British values, for them to be integrated into society,” Mr. Bains said in his first interview since the controversy over his departure.

His experience has helped bring to life the often deeply emotional and highly contentious conflicts unearthed by a British government investigation this year into whether organized groups of conservative Muslims were having undue influence on public schools.

The topic has become especially sensitive at a time when Britain is concerned about the radicalization of young Muslims in the country and their involvement with jihadis in Syria and Iraq. The investigation was prompted by an anonymous letter, sent last year to local officials in Birmingham, alleging an organized Islamic takeover of British schools in Muslim neighborhoods.

Conducted by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills, or Ofsted, the inquiry found the allegations to be overstated. But the agency found much that was troubling about Muslim efforts to promote changes in secular public schools, and it has recently widened its investigation to 46 schools across the country.

The investigation found that five schools in Birmingham, including Mr. Bains’s, shared a pattern of behavior similar to what was described in the anonymous letter. The letter also cited Mr. Bains’s impending resignation, a month before it was made official and which only a few knew about, suggesting that the author was someone with detailed knowledge of the schools.

“The Sikh head running a Muslim school,” the letter said, “will soon be sacked and we will move in.”

The investigation found that some teachers and school board governors at the other schools were encouraging homophobia, anti-Semitism and support for Al Qaeda, sometimes inviting speakers who endorsed the establishment of a state run under Sharia law.

One school stopped music and drama lessons as well as Christmas and Diwali celebrations, and subsidized trips to Saudi Arabia for Muslim students.

In another school, the report found, girls and female teachers were discriminated against, and compulsory sex education, including discussions about forced marriage, was banned. Girls and boys seen talking for too long or considered flirtatious were reprimanded, while boys were given worksheets that said a wife had to obey her husband.

The report, released in July, highlighted Mr. Bains’s case and concluded that there had been a “coordinated, deliberate and sustained action, carried out by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos into a few schools in Birmingham.”

Muhammad Khan, the chairman of the board of governors at the time, who is no longer at the school, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Three governors who were also present at meetings with Mr. Bains also refused to comment on his allegations.

Muslim leaders in Britain have condemned the report’s findings, saying it was wrong to conflate conservative Muslim practices with an alleged agenda to Islamicize school systems.

Mr. Bains, 47, was born to Indian immigrants in a suburb of Coventry notorious for prostitution and violent crime. He grew up listening to stories of how his father, a teacher in Punjab State, walked 30 miles each day to and from school. He would study by candlelight because his village had no electricity. After arriving in Britain and securing work as a laborer, he put his son and daughters through college.

“It made me value education more, and because it is free in this country,” Mr. Bains said. “I lifted myself out of poverty because of education. If I could do it, if I could break the cycle, other children could, too.”

His background, he said, is that “I’m an inclusionist.”

He added that he saw his role as being to “educate children to live and function in a multicultural Britain, to be appreciative of the views of other people, but also to express themselves.”

In 2012, he became head teacher of Saltley, a school where grades were falling behind the national average. In spite of his ordeal throughout 2013, the school achieved its best General Certificate of Secondary Education grades ever — roughly equivalent to the high school diploma in America. Britain’s school inspectorate judged the school as one of the most improved state schools that year.

“But I never got a single congratulation” from the school’s governing board, a mix of elected parents and other people from the community and members appointed to represent the staff and the local government, Mr. Bains said. “It was emotional harassment.”

The chairman of the governing board took to challenging his day-to-day decision making, Mr. Bains said. In one instance he was required to justify every decision he made during a three-month period, Mr. Bains said, including why he had students walk on the right side of the corridor instead of the left, what he said at assemblies and why he made changes to the school website. He had to print and distribute the resulting 300-page document to each of the 15 members of the governing board.

When a student threatened six classmates with a knife, he expelled the boy, a Muslim, in a decision supported by parents and the local authority. But governors reinstated the boy. Because Mr. Bains did not suspend another student, a white boy who had surrendered the weapon, talk spread among staff that he was racist and Islamophobic. He discovered a Facebook post and text messages calling on parents and students to protest against him, he said, and later learned that the message had even been circulated among local mosques.

“Some of the children would come in and tell me, ‘Mr. Bains, they’re going to egg your car today, so you better move your car,’ ” he said. “I felt very isolated, I was despondent. I was a head teacher going into work without any power.”

The treatment, he said, lasted 11 months, beginning just two months after he was appointed head teacher, until he resigned.

By then, all non-Muslim governors except one at his school had left. He was immediately replaced by a friend of the chairman of the board of governors. A number of staff members at other schools cited in the government investigation also resigned because they disagreed with the attitudes taken by some administrators. They also claimed that teachers had been appointed based on their religious zeal, not their teaching qualifications.

The government report partly vindicated him, Mr. Bains said. But if nothing changes, he said, “then it means anyone can just go in and destroy a school and get away with it.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 2014, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: British Principal Who Resigned Believes He Was Seen as a Threat.

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The Economist Explains Grand Juries [nc]

Filed under: Education, Historical context, Law Enforcement, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians — Tags: 2nd Amendment, civil rights, democrats, federal government, Freedom, harry reid, hillary clinton, History, liberty, Obama, pelosi, Politics, Racism, Secession, Socialism, tea party, us constitution, Welfare — justplainbill @ 9:37 pm

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The Economist explains
How a grand jury works
Dec 7th 2014, 23:50 by R.W.

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ON DECEMBER 3rd a grand jury in New York decided not to indict a white police officer who choked and killed an unarmed black man. Protest marches were quickly organised across America. The decision followed on from another grand-jury decision not to indict a white police officer for killing Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. In that case, the officer claimed self defence and no video footage existed to show what had happened. But bystanders filmed the death of Eric Garner, the man in New York. The chokehold manoeuvre that was used has been banned by the NYPD since 1993. Several officers were at the scene; at no point was there a suggestion that they were in danger from Mr Garner. All this makes the decision by the grand jury not to indict the policeman particularly baffling. What is a grand jury, and how does it work?

America is one of the few countries to use grand juries. The Fifth Amendment requires that the federal legal system uses grand juries for all capital and “infamous” crimes. Grand juries are meant to weed out ill-conceived prosecutions and are particularly useful in cases of terrorism, public corruption and organised crime. Most Americans know little about the process, as the proceedings are not open to the public or to the media. Such secrecy is meant to ensure that investigations are free from outside influences and that witnesses are more forthcoming. State rules are different: only around half of the states use grand juries. And practices can vary widely. The size of a grand jury, for example, differs from place to place: in Missouri, it was made up of 12 people. In New York some 23 people sat on the jury.

In an ordinary trial there are two attorneys (one for each side), a presiding judge and a jury of 12 people who must convict beyond a reasonable doubt. Grand juries have an easier job. All they decide is if there is enough evidence to bring a case to trial—they do not determine whether or not someone is guilty or innocent. Unlike in ordinary trials no judge oversees a grand jury. Instead the presiding officer is the prosecuting attorney, who also instructs the jury on the law. This means that the prosecuting lawyer has a lot of sway. In 1985 Sol Wachtler, a former chief judge in New York, told the New York Daily News that “district attorneys now have so much influence on grand juries that ‘by and large’ they could get them to indict a ham sandwich.” Nearly three decades on it is still rare for a grand jury not to return an indictment. According to one calculation, federal attorneys brought 162,000 cases before federal grand juries in 2010. Only 11 did not result in an indictment.

Police officers are rarely charged for on-duty homicides. In 2011 the Department of Justice found that the police, who are often responding to the threat of violence, kill roughly one person every day. But between 2005 and 2011, only 41 officers were charged with murder or manslaughter for on-duty shootings, according to research by Philip Stinson of Bowling Green State University. Even so it seems shocking that the video of the police officer using the deadly chokehold was not enough to warrant an indictment. One theory as to why the officer was not indicted is that local prosecutors work closely with the local police and prefer to remain on good terms with them. This means grand juries are more likely to trust the police, too. Some people are now calling for special prosecutors to preside over grand juries in cases against police officers. Others are calling for the complete elimination of the whole grand-jury system.

Dig deeper:
Police departments would do well to look at Camden, New Jersey (Dec 2014)
Race is America’s deepest problem (Nov 2014)
How America’s police became so well armed (Aug 2014)

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November 26, 2014

The Legalities of Shooting People, by Correia [nc]

Filed under: Education, Elections, Global Intel, Historical context, Law Enforcement, Police, Political Commentary, Politicians — Tags: 2nd Amendment, anarchy, civil rights, common sense, concealed carry, democrats, Ferguson, firearms, grand juries, guns, History, Law, liberty, looters, Michael Brown, News Media, Obama, Politics, Racism, riots, Socialism, tea party, us constitution, Welfare — justplainbill @ 3:56 pm

http://monsterhunternation.com/2014/11/25/the-legalities-of-shooting-people/

The Legalities of Shooting People

Posted on November 25, 2014 by correia45

I’m writing this blog post because I’ve seen a lot of really ignorant comments from a lot of otherwise intelligent folks about some recent shootings. It is really easy to be swayed by knee jerk emotion, but luckily we live in America, where we have a justice system based on evidence and the rule of law. I’m not going to get into the Brown shooting too much because I wasn’t on the grand jury and haven’t read the evidence presented in that particular case, but I’m going to explain how use of force laws work so I don’t have to keep repeating myself.

This will vary state by state, but these are the fundamentals for most places in the US. There are some legal differences between police and regular folks shooting people, but basically the rules are similar. I’m not an attorney in your state, and this is not meant as legal advice for your state. Again, this isn’t meant as legal advice, rather as a primer to get people to not be so damned ignorant about the fundamentals of how the law works.

And the law usually does work.

I’m going to keep this simple. Before I became a novelist, I was a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor for many years. I’m condensing a few hours of lecture and discussion into one article. Again, this will vary state by state.

First off we must understand some terms.

Lethal Force is exercising an action against someone which may potentially take their life. If you shoot somebody and they don’t die, you still exercised Lethal Force. If you shoot somebody in the leg or arm, legally that is still Lethal Force, and contrary to the movies, you can still die if get shot in the arm or the leg (but we train to shoot for center of mass, more on why later).

Serious Bodily Harm (often called Grievous Bodily Harm) is any injury that is potentially life altering or life threatening. Rape is serious bodily harm. A beating is serious bodily harm. Anything that may render you unconscious is serious bodily harm.

Reasonable Man – I will often refer to this. The question isn’t whether the shooter perceives themselves to be justified, but whether a “reasonable man” would perceive you to be justified. Contrary to popular opinion, you can’t just say “he was coming right at me!” and be justified in shooting somebody. The evidence will be examined and the question will be if you made the assumptions a reasonable man would make, and acted in a manner which seems reasonable based on that evidence. This is where the jury comes in, because they are a group of reasonable people who are going to look at your actions and your situation and make a call. Basically, do your actions make sense to them? Would they believe similar things in the same situation?

To be legally justified in using lethal force against somebody you need to meet the following criteria.

1. They have the Ability to cause you serious bodily harm.

2. They have the Opportunity to cause you serious bodily harm.

3. They are acting in a manner which suggests they are an Immediate Threat of serious bodily harm.

If your encounter fits these three criteria, then you are usually legally justified in using lethal force.

Let’s break each one down a bit.

Ability just means that they have the power to hurt you. A gun or a knife can obviously cause serious bodily harm. However, a person does not need a weapon to seriously hurt you. Any blow to the head sufficient to render you unconscious or cause internal bleeding is sufficient to kill you.

Opportunity means that they can reach you with their ability. A hundred yards away with a gun, they can still hit you, so they have the opportunity. A hundred yards away with a knife, pipe, or chain, and they aren’t a danger to you. However, thirty feet away with a contact weapon is easily within range to cause most people serious bodily harm before they are capable of using a firearm to neutralize the threat. I’ll talk more about distances later.

Immediacy (often called Jeopardy) means that they are acting in a manner that suggests they intend to cause serious bodily harm right now. Somebody can have the ability and opportunity, but if a reasonable person wouldn’t believe that they are acting like a threat, then they aren’t one.

###

Now let’s break this down in more depth.

Under Ability you will see self-defense experts refer to Disparity of Force, this is where there is such a physical disparity between two individuals that Ability is assumed. I’m 6’5, 300, and I’ve rendered people unconscious with my bare hands. If I’m unarmed, but I am attacking an average sized person, and they shoot me, then a reasonable person could assume that there was a disparity of force, and they were justified in shooting me. Usually when a man attacks a woman, or a fit strong young person attacks a frail old person, then disparity of force is assumed.

However, you don’t have to be bigger or stronger (it only helps convince the reasonable people you are justified). Regardless of size, if you knock someone down and are sitting on them and raining blows on their head, then you are demonstrating the ability to cause them serious bodily harm. A small woman could brain a big strong man over the head with a rock and proceed to beat them, thus demonstrating ability.

A person doesn’t need to even demonstrate that he’s got the ability, he just needs to act in a manner that would suggest to a reasonable person that he did. If you tell somebody, “Give me your purse or I’ll shoot you,” but you don’t show them your gun, a reasonable person would assume that you wouldn’t make that threat if you didn’t have the ability. You don’t need to wait to see the muzzle flash to confirm their gun is real. That’s suicidal.

On the distance someone can reasonably be a threat with just a contact weapon, you’d be surprised. It is easy to underestimate how much distance a human being can cover in a very short period of time. During my classes I used a series of role playing scenarios to demonstrate various issues and test the shoot/no shoot decision making process. While playing an aggressor I routinely covered in excess of twenty feet and caused serious bodily harm before most students could even draw their gun, let alone aim.

Gun people have all heard of the Tueller drill, which demonstrated that the average person could cover about 21 feet before the average police officer could draw and fire a shot (and as we’ll see later, one shot doesn’t often mean much, assuming it hits something vital). That’s average. Basically, without going into a whole lot of detail, the reasonable people are usually stunned to learn how much distance can be covered to provide opportunity.

The last one is the most complicated. Say a man with a gun has Ability and Opportunity, but if he is just minding his own business with the gun in the holster, slung, or being carried in a non-threatening manner then he’s not acting as an immediate threat. But if he is acting like he is going to use it or waving it around, now he is acting like an immediate threat. Again, it all comes down to how a reasonable person would perceive it.

This is why it is silly when anti-gun people start ranting about how they’re justified in harming people who are openly carrying firearms on their person. Nope. #3, unless they’re acting in a manner that suggests they’re an immediate threat, then they’re fine. Otherwise it would be legally justifiable to shoot everybody like me that shops at the Xtra Large Casual Male outlet because of disparity of force. You can’t just have Ability or Opportunity, they must be acting in a manner which a reasonable person would take to be a threat.

You’ve got to have all three.

In most states these rules apply to yourself or a third person being the potential recipient of serious bodily harm, however I believe there are still some states where it is only for you, and not a bystander. Some states suck.

You’ll hear people talking (usually ignorantly) about Castle Doctrine or Duty to Retreat. Some states require you to try and flee before exercising Lethal Force, and it allows the prosecution to question your inability to flee. Some states require you to flee your own home. Most states don’t have that.

Not that escaping or avoiding isn’t a great idea if given the opportunity, but it sucks to have a prosecutor second guessing your running ability.

###

Violent encounters are a triangle. There are three aspects to every violent encounter, the legal side (the decisions that keep you out of jail), the tactical side (the decisions that keep you alive), and the moral side (the decisions that let you sleep at night). These don’t always all match up neatly. There are times when you can be totally legally justified but tactically stupid.

Say somebody breaks into your house. Before you’ve even seen them you can make some assumptions, they came into your house while you are home, they probably wouldn’t do that if they didn’t have the ability, now they’ve certainly got the opportunity, and their presence is an immediate threat. So you’re legally justified, however you still need to identify the target before firing to make sure that it is actually a threat, and not some mistaken identity shooting, your drunk teenager, or the neighbors autistic kid.

I worked primarily with regular folks, and a little with the police. Their triangle is different. There are situations where a permit holder might be legally justified in getting involved, but tactically they are probably going to get killed, so their best bet is to run away. In fact, in most scenarios avoidance is the best answer, and in the vast majority of real life violent encounters involving a permit holder, no shots are fired, because simply producing the gun is enough to deter the attacker.

One thing the permit holders I taught needed to get through their heads was that they weren’t cops. Their permit was simply a license to carry a concealed firearm in order to defend themselves from violence. Luckily the vast majority of permit holders get that.

###

Cops on the other hand are expected to respond to violent people and apprehend them. As a result police have what is known as the Use of Force Pyramid. That means that they are to respond with the lowest amount of force necessary to stop any given situation. That is why they are expected to use tasers or pepper spray before they use physical force or guns. Their goal is to stop the situation, and they’ll try to respond with one level more force than the person they’re trying to stop. However, and this is a BIG damned however, just like the rules for regular people above, if they are in immediate danger of serious bodily harm, then they are justified in using lethal force.

Tasers and pepper spray are not magic. Most people’s understanding of these tools comes from TV and TV isn’t reality. Tasers don’t knock you unconscious. They stream electricity through your body which causes your muscles to lock up for a moment, and if the circuit ends (the tiny wires break or the barbs fall out) then you are back to normal and it is game on. (and I’m talking about air tasers, the little stun guns or “drive tasers” are useless toys. They feel like being pinched with a red hot pair of pliers, which sucks, but if you’re tough enough you can play tag with the damned things). Pepper spray hurts and makes it hard to see and breathe, but you can build up a resistance to it (ask anybody in prison) and it can also bounce back on the user. In reality these tools work sometimes and sometimes they don’t. You’ll note that when you see cops dealing with actual violent types and they use the less lethal tools, there is usually cop #2 standing there with a real gun in case Plan A doesn’t work.

Then there is going hands on, “pain compliance techniques” (arm bars, wrist locks, and wrestling until you say enough of this crap and let them put the cuffs on) but like anything in life that requires physical force one human being to another, these things are dangerous too, and bad things might happen. Bones break, arteries are cut off, people get hurt, sometimes they die.

But the cops are going to try to respond to their subject a level above what the subject is using, until they surrender or comply. Which means that if they think you are going to lethal force, they are going to go to lethal force, and the time it takes to switch gears is measured in fractions of a second.

When a cop shoots somebody, depending on the state, it now goes before whatever they use for Reasonable People.

If you try to wrestle away a cop’s gun, that demonstrates Ability, Opportunity, and Immediacy, because right after you get ahold of that firearm, the reasonable assumption is going to be that you’re intending to use it. If you fight a cop, and he thinks you’re going to lethal force, he’s going to repeatedly place bullets into your center of mass until you quit.

Everybody who carries a gun, whether they be police or not, are trained to shoot for the middle of the largest available target, which is normally the center of mass, and to do so repeatedly until the threat stops. Contrary to the movies, pistols aren’t death rays. A pistol bullet simply pokes a hole. Usually when somebody is stopped by being shot it is A. Psychological (as in holy crap! I’m shot! That hurt! I surrender), but if they keep going it is until B. Physiological (as in a drop in blood pressure sufficient for them to cease hostilities) If that hole poked is in a vital organ, then the attacker will stop faster. If it isn’t in a vital organ, they will stop slower. Pistols do not pick people up, nor do they throw people back. Pistol bullets are usually insufficiently powerful to break significant bones.

Shooting people who are actively trying to harm you while under pressure is actually very hard, which is why people often miss. This is why you aim for the biggest available target and continue shooting until they stop doing whatever it is that caused you to shoot them in the first place.

You’ll hear ignorant people say “why didn’t you just shoot them in the arm/leg?” That is foolishness. Legally and tactically, they’re both still lethal force. Only if they bleed to death in a minute because you severed their femoral artery, they’re not any less dead, only they had one more minute to continue trying to murder you. Basically limb hits are difficult to pull off with the added bonus of being terribly unreliable stoppers.

In a fatal shooting you’ll often hear someone say “there was only one side to the story told.” That is false

In the aftermath of any shooting, whether it is police or the general public, there is going to be an investigation. There will be evidence gathered. There will be witnesses. There will be an autopsy. There is always multiple sides to any shooting, even if it is just the autopsy results.

Contrary to the media narrative, most police officers don’t want to shoot anyone, regardless of their skin color. Those of us who carry guns don’t want to shoot anybody. One big reason is that because after we had to make that awful shoot/no-shoot decision in a terrifying fraction of a second, then hundreds of people are going to spend thousands of man hours gathering evidence, then they are going to argue about our actions, analyze our every move, guess at our thoughts, and debate whether we were reasonable or not, all from the comfort of an air conditioned room, and if they get hungry, they’ll order pizza. When all is said and done, these people will have a million times longer to decide if what you did in those seconds was justified or not. No pressure.

Each state is different, but if there is any question as to the justification of the shooting, there is usually some form of grand jury, and if there is sufficient question or evidence of wrong doing, then the shooter will be indicted.

Now, an argument can be made as to how shootings—especially those committed by law enforcement officers who are expected to exercise a higher standard of care—should be investigated. However, no matter how the shooting is investigated, it should be done through our constitutional protections and our agreed upon legal system. No one should ever be convicted through the court of public opinion or the media.

In ten years of studying violent encounters and learning everything I could about every shooting I could, I never once found a newspaper article that got all the facts right. Usually they weren’t even close. In that same time period I offered free training in Use of Force to reporters or detractors, and never once had any of them take me up on it.

You may believe that grand juries are too soft on police involved shootings. That may be a valid argument. You may believe that prosecutors are too lenient on police officers because they both work for the government and there is an existing relationship between the prosecutors and the police. That may be a valid argument. Burning down Little Ceasers isn’t the answer.

There are stupid cops, and there are cops who make mistakes. As representatives of an extremely powerful state, they should be held to a higher standard. Just because somebody works for the government doesn’t make them infallible, and if they screw up and kill somebody for a stupid reason, they should have the book thrown at them, but damn if it doesn’t help to know what actually happened before you form up your angry lynch mob!

Violent encounters are complex, and the only thing they have in common is that they all suck. Going into any investigation with preconceived notions is foolish. Making decisions as to right or wrong before you’ve seen any of the evidence is asinine. If you are a nationally elected official, like say for example the President of the United States, who repeatedly feels the need to chime in on local crime issues before you know any facts, you are partly to blame for the resulting unrest, and should probably go have a Beer Summit.

You can’t complain about the bias in our justice system against some groups, and how the state unfairly prosecutes some more than others, and then immediately demand doing away with the burden of proof, so the state can more freely prosecute. Blacks are prosecuted more and sentenced more harshly, so your solution is to remove more of the restraints on the state’s prosecutorial powers, and you think that’ll make things better? You want people to be prosecuted based on feelings rather than evidence, and you think that’ll help? The burden of proof exists as a protection for the people from the state. We have a system for a reason. Angry mob rule based on an emotional fact-free version of events isn’t the answer.

So my request is this, at least learn how stuff works before forming a super strong opinion on it.

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November 25, 2014

When a Country goes Bust, The Economist Explains [c]

Filed under: Bail-out, Business, Econonics, Education, Elections, Global Intel, Historical context, Political Commentary, Politicians — Tags: Business, civil rights, democrats, Economics, finance, Government, hillary clinton, History, liberty, Obama, Politics, Secession, Socialism, taxation without representation, tea party — justplainbill @ 9:12 pm

The Economist explains
What happens when a country goes bust
Nov 24th 2014, 23:50 by S.N.

Timekeeper

FROM the days when monarchs over-borrowed for their mercantile adventures, to Argentina’s recent failure to pay its creditors, countries have long run into trouble paying back what they have borrowed. Spain’s 16th-century king, Philip II, reigned over four of his country’s defaults. Greece and Argentina have reneged on their commitments to bondholders seven and eight times respectively over the past 200 years. And most countries have defaulted at least once in their history. But what precisely happens when countries stop paying what they owe?

When a country fails to pay its creditors on time, it is said to go into “default”, the national equivalent of going bankrupt. But sovereign defaults are quite different from business bankruptcies as it is far harder for creditors to repossess the assets of a sovereign entity than to repossess the assets of a company (an unarmed Argentinian naval vessel detained in Ghana for ten weeks in 2012 was an exception). In the first instance, to curry favour in international markets, defaulting countries tend to restructure their debt rather than simply refusing to pay anything at all. But these so-called “haircuts”, where the original value of a bond is reduced, can be much more painful for the holders of government bonds than a simple clip of the scissors. After its $81 billion default in 2001, Argentina offered to pay its creditors a third of what it owed—93% of the debt was eventually swapped for performing securities in 2005 and 2010. But the remainder, which is held by vulture funds and other investors, is still in dispute. These “holdouts” are waiting for $1.3 billion plus interest. And when Greece defaulted in 2012, bondholders were forced to take hits as high as 50%. In less severe cases, countries may choose to restructure their debt by requesting more time to pay. This has the effect of reducing the present value of the bond—so it isn’t entirely pain-free for investors. Some suggest that this is the right course of action for Ukraine as it struggles to balance its immediate domestic priorities against its obligations to bondholders.

Defaults can also be very painful for the offending country, particularly if they are unexpected and disorderly. Domestic savers and investors, anticipating a fall in the value of the local currency, will scramble to withdraw their money from bank accounts and move it out of the country. To avoid bank-runs and precipitous currency depreciation, the government may shut down banks and impose capital controls. As punishment for default, capital markets will either impose punitive borrowing rates or refuse to lend at all. And credit-rating agencies will no doubt warn against investing in the country. But as history shows, in most countries yield-hungry lenders will eventually start lending again so long as they are adequately rewarded for the risk they are taking on. Moreover, credit-default swaps—financial instruments which act as a form of insurance against sovereign and corporate defaults—allow bondholders to hedge their risk. But not all defaults are the same: Argentina defaulted again this year by refusing to pay $1.3 billion plus interest to the “holdouts” from 2001.

Critically, there is no international law or court for settling sovereign defaults, which helps explain why they are so varied in length and severity. More international regulation has been proposed—including powers to prevent minority holders from hijacking the process—but such conditions ultimately remain up to the issuing country. The first bond issuances since the new proposals (by Kazakhstan and Vietnam) include these clauses. Other countries might follow suit, but this doesn’t resolve the $900 billion of bonds outstanding that were issued under the old rules. Like any messy divorce, drawn out negotiations around defaults can be costly for all parties involved. Working towards better pre-nuptial terms might not be such a bad idea.

[Not mentioned, is that the domestic GDP has historically shrunk between 7 and 19%, with corresponding increase in box 6 of the employment stats, meaning REAL unemployment, not the misleading box 3 stats released by the gov’t.]

Comments (1)

Note specifically Paragraphs one and two, (The Economist is London UK based)

Filed under: Business, Econonics, Education, Elections, Global Intel, Historical context, Islam, Media Check, Military, Political Commentary, Politicians, US Constitution — Tags: Business, civil rights, democrats, Economics, federal government, Freedom, Government, hillary clinton, History, liberty, Military, News Media, Obama, Politics, Racism, Secession, Socialism, tea party, us constitution, Welfare — justplainbill @ 5:18 pm

The Economist Espresso
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The Economist Espresso via e-mail for Tuesday November 25th

Today’s agenda

Race, justice and protest: the Michael Brown verdict
“There is inevitably going to be some negative reaction, and it will make for good TV.” So Barack Obama concluded a press conference late last night, after prosecutors in Ferguson, Missouri, announced that a grand jury had decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who in August shot an unarmed black man, Michael Brown. The decision, inexplicably, did not come until 8pm, by which time protesters in Ferguson were facing off with police. Even as the president spoke, cable-TV channels screened pictures of men throwing bottles and bricks and the police firing tear gas. There were mainly peaceful demonstrations in several other cities. Mr Obama condemned violence, but he also pointed out that “communities of colour are not just making these problems up.” As the tear gas clears, the investigation goes on: Eric Holder, the attorney-general, said that the federal Justice Department’s investigation into the shooting of Mr Brown continues.

Collateral damage: Obama fires Hagel
When you’re in a hole, fire someone. That being Washington’s way, Barack Obama’s national security team is now wondering who will be next, after the easing out yesterday of Chuck Hagel, the defence secretary. Mr Hagel was picked for his Obama-like caution less than two years ago. His mission: to help wind down the Afghan conflict and shrink America’s war machine to fit a new era in which military force would be a tool of last resort. Then Team Obama learned that, alas, in foreign policy, others get a vote: from Islamic State fanatics to muscle-flexing Chinese generals and revanchist Vladimir Putin. Poor, decent, briefed-against Mr Hagel—a former Republican senator who came by his war-wariness honourably, seeing action in Vietnam—was judged an inept salesman for the old Obama doctrine, and never penetrated the president’s inner circle. More departures surely loom. Some inner-circle sackings would actually help, but don’t count on them.

Indian Kashmir: Modi’s new frontier
Polls open in the perpetually disgruntled Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir today, in the first of five rounds of voting for the state assembly. For the first time the Bharatiya Janata Party of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, known for its Hindu nationalism, stands a chance of leading a coalition government in the Muslim-majority state. It is expected to win by a landslide in the largely Hindu Jammu, but may find allies even in the troubled Kashmir valley. The insurgency there, fired by local resentment at Indian rule and by infiltration from Pakistan, which still claims sovereignty over all of Kashmir, is at a low ebb. So turnout will be high, despite separatists’ call for a boycott. The election will not bring peace, however, without an agreement between India and Pakistan. And, though their leaders may talk at a summit in Nepal this week, that is not on the cards.

Time is money: the IMF and Ukraine
A mission from the IMF leaves Ukraine today, after a two-week visit for talks with the newish coalition. In April, when Ukraine was at real risk of defaulting on its debts, the fund promised it $17 billion: $4.6 billion has arrived. Ukraine wants more; the IMF wants a commitment to reform. Ukraine could yet default: foreign-exchange reserves are probably about $10 billion, and $14 billion-worth of external repayments fall due before the end of 2016. The currency, the hryvnia, has lost half its value this year: some think it may soon fall to 25 to the dollar, from 15 now. The country’s banks are struggling: one, VAB Bank, was declared insolvent on Friday. Meanwhile the conflict with Russian-backed separatists in the east drags on, despite a notional ceasefire. Arguments within the coalition could delay the next slug of IMF money until next year. That may be too late.

Printing banknotes: no more easy money
De La Rue, a British company that prints banknotes for dozens of countries, reported gloomy half-year results today: revenues fell by 8%, year-on-year, and profits by 36%. Its new boss, Martin Sutherland, who joined last month, will have to work hard for his cash. A profit warning in September, the second within a year, caused De La Rue’s shares to plunge by 34%, shortly after the firm won the contract to print plastic banknotes for the Bank of England from 2016. Overcapacity in the industry and growing competition have squeezed margins; De La Rue is thought to have won the Bank of England contract only by offering a huge discount. Fortunately, its other area of expertise—printing passports—offers brighter prospects, as governments everywhere add new security features. For Mr Sutherland, more emphasis on travel documents may be just the ticket, now that producing banknotes is no longer a licence to print money.

The world in brief

The “P5+1” countries (America, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia) and Iran pushed back their deadline for an agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme from yesterday to the end of June. Iran insists its motives are peaceful and wants sanctions lifted; the other powers want to cut Iran’s enrichment capacity.

Hong Kong’s government began removing tents and barricades from roads in the volatile Mong Kok area, amid signs that public support for the two-month-old pro-democracy protests has started to fizzle, and the movement itself appears increasingly divided between a peaceful majority and a more confrontational splinter group.

Tunisia’s presidential election is heading for a run-off next month between the favourite, Beji Caid Sebsi, and the incumbent, Moncef Marzouki, after Sunday’s first round. Mr Sebsi’s secular Nidaa Tounes (“Tunisian Call”) came top in recent parliamentary elections; Mr Marzouki may attract supporters of Nahda (“Awakening”), an Islamist party with no candidate of its own.

BT, Britain’s biggest fixed-line telecoms provider, said it was in preliminary talks with two mobile operators about a possible merger. One is O2, a mobile network owned by Spain’s Telefónica that BT spun off in 2002. The other is reportedly EE, owned by Orange, of France, and Deutsche Telekom.

The chief executive of United Technologies, which makes Otis lifts, Pratt & Whitney engines and Sikorsky helicopters, resigned unexpectedly. The company did not say why Louis Chenevert had stood aside, to be replaced by Gregory Hayes, the chief financial officer, but insisted it had nothing to do with its unspectacular financial performance.

Executives from Sony told investors today that they expected revenues in the company’s troubled electronics division to rise by 70% in the next three years. They are pinning their hopes mainly on the PlayStation 4, a successful games console, and image sensors; they warned of cuts to Sony’s TV and smartphone units.

A museum in Bern said it would accept a bequest of artworks from the estate of Cornelius Gurlitt, whose hoard of paintings included many collected by Jewish families in Nazi Germany. The museum said it would work to return looted art to its rightful owners.

Markets & Currencies

International markets
At last close

DJIA : 17817.90 (+7.84 / +0.04%)

S&P 500 : 2069.41 (+0.00 / +0.00%)

FTSE 100 : 6729.79 (-20.97 / -0.31%)

DAX : 9785.54 (+52.99 / +0.54%)

Nikkei 225 : 17407.62 (+50.11 / +0.29%)

Hang Seng : 23843.91 (-49.23 / -0.21%)

Crude Oil (WTI) : 76.04 (+0.26 / +0.34%)

Gold : 1201.00 (+5.30 / +0.44%)

Major world currencies
Last updated: Tue 25 November, 11:06 GMT

Currency

EUR – USD 1.2439

GBP – USD 1.568

USD – JPY 118.115

AUD – USD 0.8551

USD – CAD 1.1293

USD – CHF 0.9666

EUR – GBP 0.7933

That’s it!

“Cultivation of the mind is as necessary as food to the body.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero

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November 23, 2014

As Goes the National Cathedral, So Goes the Nation … If We Allow It, by Sylvia Thompson [nc]

Filed under: Education, Elections, Historical context, Media Check, Political Commentary, Religion, US Constitution — Tags: civil rights, constitutional law, democrats, federal government, Government, hillary clinton, History, legal trends, Media Watch, Obama, Politics, Racism, Secession, Socialism, tea party, us constitution, Welfare — justplainbill @ 11:22 pm

Sylvia Thompson column
As goes the National Cathedral, so goes the nation…if we allow it

Sylvia Thompson
Sylvia Thompson
November 22, 2014

Christians need only look at the travesty of Muslims praying to Allah in a house of Almighty God to understand the degree to which Christian leadership has deteriorated in America – the nation founded by Christians for the worship of Christ Jesus.

The worship service was orchestrated by leaders of the National Cathedral, which is an Episcopal denomination. It was touted as outreach.

The Episcopal Church has experienced a decline in membership over recent years, like so many mainline churches, because of its disdain for Holy Scripture. The church has undergone much controversy over its ordination of women as spiritual leaders, its embrace of the homosexual agenda, and its “nuanced” stance toward the killing of the unborn (as characterized by the presiding Bishop, Katherine Jefferts Schori).

True adherents to the Bible in the Episcopal Church broke away from church leadership when Gene Robinson was ordained a bishop. Robinson is a practicing homosexual who was, at the time, in a scripturally condemned relationship with another man. The biblical Christians formed new congregations, unaffiliated with the main congregation, and they are thriving.

Given this history, the decision by leftist Episcopalian leadership (represented by Gina Campbell, pastor of the cathedral) to host a Muslim worship service is not at all surprising. Church leaders may call it outreach, but to allow the worship of a faith that is blatantly antagonistic to Christianity is an agenda, not outreach.

I listened to a couple of Muslim spokesmen in attendance make the case that this event represented a coming together of Muslims to “condemn” the radical hijackers of their faith. Somehow none of their smooth talk rang true in light of the hatred of Christianity that Islam fosters. Muslims could make a statement of condemnation from one of the many mosques proliferating this country. Why is it necessary to make it in a Christian church? Quick answer, it is not.

This action is a blatant, in-your-face to America’s Christian community, aided and abetted by the Left. The goal of Islam is for its adherents to infiltrate and overthrow whatever land Muslims are allowed to reside in, and a weak American Christian community is perfect fodder for overthrow. I have not heard a lot of comments from Christians to counter this latest Muslim affront.

That is, except for Pastor Franklin Graham and one gutsy Christian woman named Christine Weick.

Ms. Weick maneuvered her way into the Cathedral, which in her telling of the event was something of a miraculous feat in itself. Before this Christian woman was booted out, she was able to announce this statement to those worshippers of another god in God’s house:

“Jesus Christ died on that cross. He is the reason we are to worship only Him. Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior,” she said. “We have built…allowed you your mosques in this country. Why don’t you worship in your mosques and leave our churches alone? We are a country founded on Christian principles.” [1]

With that, she was led from the room by security and handed over to police. She assumed that she would be thrown in jail but she was not. In her description of the response of the men removing her (none of whom said a word), I get the impression that these men detected the irony of it all – a Christian thrown out of a Christian church to accommodate Muslims, in America.

Pastor Graham was the only Christian leader, that I am aware, who took a firm stand. He has exhibited leadership many times in the past when other presumed Christian leaders cowered in fear of speaking out. Or, they have themselves moved away from Scripture and capitulated to our rotting culture. Pastor Graham posted this comment on his Facebook page:

“Tomorrow, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. – one of the most prominent Episcopal churches in America – will host a Muslim prayer service to Allah. It’s sad to see a church open its doors to the worship of anything other than the One True God of the Bible who sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to earth to save us from our sins. Jesus was clear when He said, ‘I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me’ (John 14:6).” [2]

All biblical Christians know that a church structure does not in itself make a “church.” Christianity is something that a follower of Christ embraces and incorporates into his very being. Knowledge of Scripture and an acceptance of and adherence to its teachings is what makes a Christian, not the building in which services are held. Many Christians around the world have no buildings because they must worship clandestinely.

I make this point to show that the affront to American Christians by Muslims worshipping with their backs to the cross in the National Cathedral is a minor thing, spiritually. But it is a major thing when we assess what it truly represents. It shows that American Muslims, minus the violence, are no different from their radical counterparts. Their goal is to worm their way into American culture so that eventually there will be no other sanctioned worship besides Islam.

It is no coincidence that the rise of the liberal Left in America is accompanied by the spread of Islam in America. Both entities have as a goal the destruction of America as it was founded. And neither will succeed if we do not allow them to succeed.

NOTES:

[1] See WND.com http://www.wnd.com/2014/11/christian-booted-from-national-cathedral-speaks-out/#KDJsJzTVVXOhTfyA.99

[2] See Newsmax.com http://www.Newsmax.com/US/Franklin-Graham-Billy-Graham-Muslims-Washington-National-Cathedral/2014/11/17/id/607906/#ixzz3JXMZt9an

Sylvia Thompson is a black conservative writer whose aim is to counter the liberal spin on issues pertaining to race and culture.

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November 20, 2014

1862 Quote by Dr. Henley of SC, how prophetic is this?

Filed under: Econonics, Education, Elections, Historical context, Illegal Aliens, Media Check, Military, Political Commentary, Politicians, US Constitution — Tags: 2nd Amendment, affordable care act, Business, Christianity, civil rights, constitutional law, dhs, Economics, education, finance, Government, harry reid, hillary clinton, History, Military, Obama, pelosi, Politics, Racism, Secession, Socialism, taxation without representation, tea party, us constitution, Welfare — justplainbill @ 10:03 pm

“If they (the North) prevail, the whole character of the Government will be changed, and instead of a federal republic, the common agent of sovereign and independent States, we shall have a central despotism, with the notion of States forever abolished, deriving its power from the will, and shaping its policy according to the wishes, of a numerical majority of the people; we shall have, in other words, a supreme, irresponsible democracy. The Government does not now recognize itself as an ordinance of God, and when all the checks and balances of the constitution are gone, we may easily figure to ourselves the career and the destiny of this godless monster of democratic absolutism. The progress of regulated liberty on this continent will be arrested, anarchy will soon succeed, and the end will be a military despotism, which preserves order by the sacrifice of the last vestige of liberty. They are now fighting the battle of despotism. They have put their Constitution under their feet; they have annulled its most sacred provisions; they future fortunes of our children, and of this continent, would then be determined by a tyranny which has no parallel in history.” ~Dr. James Henly Thornwell of South Carolina, In Our Danger and our Duty, 1862

[Secession.]

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