Miscellaneous political debris

gotsnowgotslush

skates like Eck
Joined
Dec 24, 2007
Posts
25,720
Miscellaneous political debris

September 4, 2015

Ohio vs. Alaska mountain name change game continued Friday -- only this time Denali wasn’t actually involved, but instead Ohio’s tallest peak.

A White House petition was filed Thursday by a person from Texas only identified by the initials “M.R.” to change the name of Campbell Hill, the tallest peak in Ohio, to “Mount Sarah Palin” in honor of Alaska’s “most famous governor,” the petition states.

“Campbell Hill is a testament to the men and woman (sic) who strived to reach its well manicured, landscaped peak, some never to return,” the petition states. “If the people of Ohio feel it is their right to name Alaska's highest mountain, then it would only be fitting for Alaska to rename Ohio's highest peak.”

Campbell Hill stands at a mere 1,550 feet, while Denali stands at 20,310 feet. The petition would need 100,000 signatures by Oct. 3 to prompt a response from the White House. At 3:25 p.m. Friday, it only had five.

http://www.adn.com/article/20150904/online-petition-rename-ohio-peak-palin-emerges
 
There aren't very many people who want to mount Sarah Palin.
 
Major television and media outlets are content to let Trump! steer the news cycle.
What does that say about America, that we accept this swill ?
It is serving someone's purpose.

September 6, 2015

Retired NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw expressed great relief that he is out of the news business while appearing at the National Book Festival on Saturday to promote his latest book A Lucky Life Interrupted, telling the crowd he’s glad he doesn’t have to talk about Donald Trump on television every night.

According to tweets from multiple sources captured by Business Insider, a relieved Brokaw told the assembled press and fans: “If I were there now, and leading with Donald Trump every night, I would call in sick.”


Brokaw’s offhanded remark was reportedly greeted with applause and cheers from the crowd undoubtedly weary of daily reports on the blustery businessman’s outrageous statements and petty squabbles with anyone who challenges him.


https://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/to...-every-night-as-a-newscaster-id-call-in-sick/

I do not suppose, that any major TV channel or major media outlet, besides PBS or NPR mentioned this-

August 7, 2015

"As the literati strive to predict the future of the book, one thing is clear in the here and now: the best of popular science writing is still all about clarity, rigour and brio.

This year’s six-book shortlist for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books bristles with that mix."

The Man Who Couldn’t Stop by David Adam (Picador)

Alex Through the Looking-Glass: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life by Alex Bellos (Bloomsbury)


Smashing Physics: Inside the World’s Biggest Experiment by Jon Butterworth (Headline)


Life’s Greatest Secret: The Story of the Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb (Profile)


Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe Mcfadden and Jim Al-Khalili (Bantam Press


Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet we Made by Gaia Vince (Chatto & Windus)


The winner will be announced at a Royal Society public event on 24 September, hosted by Brian Cox, Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science.

http://blogs.nature.com/aviewfromth...ortlist-for-the-royal-society-prize#more-1935
 
What really became of Raoul Wallenberg?

January 1945, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, the Righteous Gentile responsible for saving many Jewish lives in Hungary by issuing documents attesting to their Swedish Nationality and letting them live in Swedish owned houses in Budapest, was seen leaving Budapest to meet with Soviet Army officials who had recently liberated the city from the Nazis. Wallenberg disappeared shortly thereafter never to be seen in public again.

When Wallenberg saw the plight of the Jews in Budapest, he was moved to help.

My father, Bruce Teicholz, who was a leader of the Jewish resistance in Budapest and who met with and worked with Wallenberg, never had any real doubts that Wallenberg had died in a KGB prison. Having lived under the Russians when they occupied his native Lvov between 1939-1941, my father knew of the NKVD (the precursor to the KGB) and their brutality. He also knew that Russian prisons were not all that well run and that if Wallenberg was indeed in the gulag he would have found a way to get a credible verifiable message out that he was alive. Nonetheless, my father felt that until the Soviets admitted their guilt and complicity in Wallenberg’s death, Wallenberg should be considered alive.

In less than four months in 1944, Eichmann arranged for the deportation of some 420,000 innocent Jewish men, women and children to be murdered at Auschwitz. That is the haunting truth that makes what Wallenberg did all the more remarkable. Imagine, my father used to say, if there had been 1000 Wallenbergs in Budapest.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomteicholz/2015/04/30/the-enduring-mystery-of-raoul-wallenberg/

"Searching for Wallenberg” by Allan Lelchuk (Mandel Vilar Press).

06.09.2015

Far-right extremists tried to disrupt the arrival of nearly 1,000 refugees in the city of Dortmund in western Germany last night. The police made several arrests.


Germany's approach to Europe's migrant crisis has widely been celebrated as a success. With Chancellor Angela Merkel easing travel conditions and scores of Germans welcoming refugees with care packages and applause at train stations, the country showed itself prepared to welcome thousands of new arrivals in the coming days.

But the latest events did not fail to attract the attention of Germany's far-right. While a train carrying almost 1,000 migrants arrived at the central station in Dortmund in western Germany on Saturday night, 26 supporters of the far-right party "Die Rechte" staged a protest rally.

http://www.dw.com/en/making-sense-of-germanys-rightward-shift/a-18128536

05.09.2015

Neo-Nazis have been staging marches in front of refugee homes, with some setting them ablaze almost nightly.

National Democratic Party

Germany's traditional neo-Nazi party has become somewhat marginalized in the current climate.

HOGESA, which stands for Hooligans Gegen Salafisten (Hooligans against Salafists), was an alliance of between 3,000 and 5,000 violent football supporters and far-right extremists who took over central Cologne on October 26 to demonstrate against "Islamization."

Pro Deutschland
This populist far-right political party founded in western Germany in 2005 is part of a conglomerate of organizations who all carry the "Pro" prefix - "Pro Köln" (for Cologne), "Pro NRW" (for North Rhine-Westphalia), Pro München (for Munich), etc.


PEGIDA?


Lutz Bachmann

Pegida leader Lutz Bachmann deleted his Facebook profile after this picture of him styled as Adolf Hitler was unearthed.

Morgenpost reader discovered the photograph, along with what appeared to be a closed Facebook conversation between Bachmann and one of his Facebook contacts, in which he described immigrants as “cattle”, “scumbags” and “trash”. The comments were posted on 19 September, aroundabout two months before the first Pegida march in Dresden.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/21/germany-pegida-adolf-hitler-lutz-bachmann

Neo-Nazis in pinstripes ?

Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West


08.06.2015

Tatjana Festerling of the anti-Islamization PEGIDA group has announced she will not participate in a run-off vote to elect Dresden's next mayor. She called on right-wing voters to support the pro-business FDP instead.

FDP ?

Free Democratic Party (FDP)

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)

By far the most successful of Germany's new political movements had one of the most unprepossessing of starts. Founded in February 2013 by a group of economics professors in response to the Euro crisis, the "Alternative for Germany" made its name as a euroskeptic party, but has increasingly won support from conservative voters unhappy with Merkel's centrism - particularly on social issues like same-sex marriage.

Christian Social Union (CSU)

The Bavarian sister-party to Merkel's CDU, which occupies three ministries in her cabinet, came under the most pressure from the AfD in the European election, and has persistently raised more populist proposal. Last week, after considerable ridicule, it was forced to backtrack on the idea to force immigrants to speak German in their own homes.

Christian Democratic Union (CDU)

http://www.dw.com/en/bergen-belsen-...-on-70th-anniversary-of-liberation/a-18409868

The silence at Bergen-Belsen's memorial center on Sunday was punctuated only by the sound of huge coaches rolling into the forecourt. The German president, survivors, and relatives of the camp's victims were among those descending from the buses.

As some 100 survivors took their seats at the Obelisk, the heavens opened, casting a heavy curtain of drizzle across the crowds gathered further afield on the sodden turf

Seventy years later, the world isn't moving on - it's moving backwards," warned Jewish World Congress President Ronald Lauder.

Speaking to DW, Anastasija (Gulej ) bypassed concerns of growing anti-Semitism in Europe. Now living in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, Anastasija believes there a greater danger to the continent.

My greatest fear and the biggest hindrance to Europe is Mr. Putin," Anastasija said.
"I'm speaking from my heart," she implored, pointing a warning finger. "No one can trust Russian programs and television. Russia is an aggressor."
 
08 September 2015

Monday, anti-Islam protesters marched from Berlin Main Station to Brandenberg Gate, as the far-right group 'Baergida' called on officials to take in less refugees and prevent the 'Islamification' of Germany and Europe.
'Bergida' is the Berlin branch of anti-immigration group 'Pergida', which have organised similar rallies in the past year nationwide.

Germany has seen several anti-Islam rallies this year, many taking place this week as German chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed the country would suspend the Dublin regulation, and will commit to taking in 500,000 Syrian refugees.

Theo Schneider, a journalist at the protest told The Independent that Baergida marches have become regular occurrences: "They march from Berlin Main Station to Brandenburg Gate every Monday."

Mr Schenider describes the group as "a small group of far-right hooligans, shouting slogans to and insulting the counter-protesters; it is rare that they are blocked".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...lly-takes-over-brandenberg-gate-10491399.html

PBS NewsHour/ World News Tonight

Footage of NPD party members, marching and shouting racist slogans about Syrian refugees

JUDY WOODRUFF: Leonard Doyle, does it matter how we refer to these people, whether we call them migrants or refugees? How do you see that?

LEONARD DOYLE: Well, it is, indeed, very important.

You have — the refugees are a specific category, those who are fleeing war or human rights abuses, and they are entitled to asylum under international law, under the Geneva — under the convention in 1951. So, it’s not for governments to decide. It’s an international compact.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/will-welcoming-refugees-actually-put-risk/
 
"The Last of the President’s Men,” Bob Woodward’s 18th book, will be published Oct. 13, 2015

Bob Woodward got access to thousands of documents , and he interviewed Alexander Butterfield for 46 hours.

Who was Alexander Butterfield ?

Alexander Butterfield testifies before the Senate Watergate Committee in July 1973
(Pic)

Alexander Butterfield, was the Richard Nixon aide who publicly revealed the existence of the secret taping system that eventually helped force the Nixon's resignation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...n-a-new-book-with-fresh-details-on-watergate/
 
What the fuck ?

National Geographic in the hands of Climate Change denier, Rupert Murdoch.

In exchange for $725 million, the National Geographic Society passed the troubled magazine and its book, map and other media assets to a partnership headed by 21st Century Fox, the Murdoch-controlled company that owns the 20th Century Fox movie studio, the Fox television network and Fox News Channel.

Under the terms announced Wednesday, Fox will control 73 percent of the operation, called National Geographic Partners, with the balance held by the National Geographic Society. The partnership, based in Washington, will include a portfolio of National Geographic-branded cable TV channels, digital properties and publishing operations, most notably the magazine that has advanced the society’s founding mission — “the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...ba2_story.html

Rupert Murdoch is a notorious climate change denier, and his family's Fox media empire is the world's primary source of global warming misinformation. Which would be no big deal here, I guess, were it not for the fact that the National Geographic Society's mission includes giving grants to (real) scientists.
(As opposed to "experts" that support FOX TV claims.)

http://boingboing.net/2015/09/09/rup...ought-nat.html

Rupert Murdoch is a raging asshole, but he is also a very much on-the-record climate change denier. A climate change denier with now even more power and influence over science grants in the United States.

Sadly this is not a prank, a joke, a satire. It is real.


Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox buys National Geographic

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/...rofit-venture/


The dramatic shift will place the venerable magazine, with its iconic yellow-rimmed covers, under a new venture called National Geographic Partners. Fox will own 73 percent of the new company, with the National Geographic Society owning 27 percent.

Those proportions are similar to the ownership split of National Geographic's cable TV channels. The new deal is being called an extension of that partnership, which began 18 years ago and now reportedly reaches more than 500 million homes worldwide.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-w...st-century-fox
 
gsgs comment-

Slate magazine brings up a good point.

The "Vicious" TV series did not spring out of thin air.

Boston PBS aired episodes of "Are You Being Served?" and almost
every episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, ever made. We enjoyed
all of the Fawlty Towers series.

Are the Far Right Republicans outraged, once again, over the fact that PBS has made a decision to support the "Vicious" TV series ?

I am almost certain that the Far Right Republicans are fired up, because someone has allowed the LGBT to have something.Is Newt Gingrich shrieking, again ?

/end gsgs comment

http://www.out.com/art-books/2015/9/10/star-wars-author-shuts-down-homophobic-commenter

gsgs comment-

I had hoped that the Far Right Republicans would have dropped their hate habit after Anita Bryant was trounced. After Phyllis Schlafly became a laughing stock. But, no. There is always someone waiting in the wings, to parade their hate in the spotlight.

/end gsgs comment

In the comments and reviews on Amazon for Chuck Wendig's latest Star Wars book, Aftermath, which takes place after the Empire is defeated in Return of the Jedi, one user was not happy about the introduction of a gay character, stating:

“I also don’t like the inclusion of so many gay characters because my personal opinion is that homosexuality is not normal. Sodomy is not normal and I am tired of the liberal media trying to make me accept this lifestyle.”

Wendig, however, who has no patience for such closemindedness, took to his blog with this incredible response:

"And if you’re upset because I put gay characters and a gay protagonist in the book, I got nothing for you. Sorry, you squawking saurian — meteor’s coming. And it’s a fabulously gay Nyan Cat meteor with a rainbow trailing behind it and your mode of thought will be extinct. You’re not the Rebel Alliance. You’re not the good guys. You’re the fucking Empire, man. You’re the shitty, oppressive, totalitarian Empire. If you can imagine a world where Luke Skywalker would be irritated that there were gay people around him, you completely missed the point of Star Wars. It’s like trying to picture Jesus kicking lepers in the throat instead of curing them. Stop being the Empire. Join the Rebel Alliance. We have love and inclusion and great music and cute droids."
 
"...it all goes back to the power of projection. Just as conservatives like to claim that MLK would have been a conservative or whatever other offensive shit they’re spouting about now, this is about trying to do something that’s got its historical roots in racism while deflecting guilt over it by insinuating that liberals are the real racists. It’s a little complex, but hear me out."


".. anti-choice and now anti-gay strategy has its roots in the pro-segregation strategies that cropped up in the 20th century when the courts started breaking for the liberal side and against the wishes of segregationists."

Through court orders and eventually the Civil Rights Act of 1964, all sorts of public spaces were desegregated: Schools, public pools and parks, transportation, and eventually private businesses that serve the public. But white people fought back by creating legal workarounds, often enacted on a local scale, to keep black people from sharing community resources.

A lot of it was centered around housing policy, which is an incredibly complex topic and which you should read Ta-Nehisi Coates on. Slowly but surely, a country that had once been publicly oriented became a country of gated communities and private pools and private schools and suburban spread. This was a direct result of this complex series of actions that were all pointing to the same goal: Defy the Supreme Court and the CRA and keep America segregated anyway.

Needless to say, the effectiveness of that is one major reason it’s become a go-to strategy for conservatives who want to destroy social progress. They did the same thing with abortion access.

And now they’re doing it on the gay marriage thing: Trying to create bureaucratic problems, legal workarounds, and leaning on privatizing schemes in an effort to make it impossible for gay people to access the legal rights they were promised.


http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/wha...ves-and-the-dred-scott-decision-an-explainer/

from

What’s with Christian conservatives and the Dred Scott decision? An explainer.

AMANDA MARCOTTE
 
Steve King (R-Iowa) was perplexed. Two long months had passed since the Center for Mrdedical Progress started releasing undercover videos in which current and former Planned Parenthood employees described the grim economics of fetal tissue harvesting. Since then, a long congressional recess had come and gone and Republican-run states had redoubled their efforts to defund the family planning titan. Yet in the most recent poll from Reuters/Ipsos, 54 percent of voters still favored federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

"Those numbers are news to me," said King. "I haven’t paid any attention to the polls. But am I surprised? Yes. That would explain some of the reasons why the leadership is not committing to defund."

gsgs comment

David Weigel gives Mallory Quigley, spokeswoman for the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, some page space to spew.

Is it not precious, how the abortion opponents clawed a good woman's name for their own purposes to deceive ?

/end gsgs comment


"When mainstream news organizations do decide to cover the videos, they’ve parroted Planned Parenthood’s talking points and added qualifying statements about the credibility of the videos," argued The Federalist's Bre Payton, in one of that conservative site's many critiques of the funding debate. "They also love to use the phrase 'highly edited' when talking about the undercover footage, which suggests to the reader there’s a slight chance the abortion provider deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Steve King had worried about that. "When this emerged, I said, 'Cut all funding and do it now,'" said King. "If we didn't do that, we'd give Planned Parenthood a whole year to spend millions of dollars on PR and lobbying. I wanted to do it like ACORN -- that vote came so quickly that I think many Democrats came to a conviction that ACORN funding was a threat to their re-election."

No such phenomenon has subsumed Planned Parenthood. Republican messaging has been impeccable -- female members at the head of the line to argue for defunding, the party fully committed to funding any "woman's health" that is not Planned Parenthood. From Carly Fiorina to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), the party's presidential candidates have insisted that it would be the fault of Barack Obama, not the GOP, if the government temporarily shut down over the funding issue. Yet the numbers haven't moved.


David Weigel
Washington Post


David Weigal is a weasel ?

http://www.salon.com/2010/06/25/david_weigel_resigns/


The backlash against Weigel — hired away from the Washington Independent, where his job was to cover the right-wing — began with this tweet, which was followed by angry folks at Newsbusters, the right-wing version of MediaMatters, followed by the conservative AOL political blog Politics Daily, among others.

“Perhaps Weigel will turn out two decades from now to have been prescient,” writes Matt Lewis at Politics Daily, “but ‘bigot’ is awfully strong language for a person who is making the case for tolerance – and this comment simply reinforced a longstanding view among social conservatives that The Washington Post and most of the rest of the mainstream media are not only implacably opposed to their policy agenda, but personally hostile to them as well.”

Wrong. Wiegel is, this very minute, “prescient.” He is calling out bigotry where he sees it, and he should be commended for doing so. It’s about time reporters begin identifying opposition to same-sex marriage as a religious-based affront to equality.


So it’s too bad that Wiegel is now caving — and apologizing for identifying marriage equality opponents.

First, I apologize for calling same-sex-marriage opponents “bigots.”

I was specifically referring to people who spend their working hours opposing gay marriage, not just people who vote to ban it. But those people aren’t bigots, either.


David Weigel

http://www.queerty.com/wapos-dave-w...onents-bigots-he-should-be-commended-20100505


Weigel’s politics are, as he says, “all over the map”: He views himself as a libertarian, though he opposes legal abortion in most cases. He is a registered Republican who voted for Ron Paul in his party’s primary, but says he has voted for the Democrat in every presidential election.


http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.c...C8008E97619708


David Weigel conveniently ignores the voices of women, who want abortion rights to remain legal and accessible.


"On April 12, Slate political reporter David Weigel declared the death of “the war on women” as a Democratic talking point."


David Weigel makes an announcement in 2012

"A moment of silence, please, for a talking point that was taken too soon. The “war on women” began its life in a February 2011 House speech about abortion. After a short life as a Democratic hobby horse, it died during the second week of April 2012."


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...he_democrats_war_on_women_talking_point_.html


“War on women” isn’t over

Just as pundits said the issue was fading, President Obama took up reproductive rights with new passion

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/war_on_women_isnt_over/
 
Channel 4.2 on my TV Decades Channel

They are showing a TV dramatization of War of the Worlds radio broadcast


It was a Halloween holiday broadcast.

Halloween 1938


http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...ic_myth_the_infamous_radio_broadcast_did.html



So the papers seized the opportunity presented by Welles’ program to discredit radio as a source of news. The newspaper industry sensationalized the panic to prove to advertisers, and regulators, that radio management was irresponsible and not to be trusted.

In an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” the New York Times reproached “radio officials” for approving the interweaving of “blood-curdling fiction” with news flashes “offered in exactly the manner that real news would have been given.”


Warned Editor and Publisher, the newspaper industry’s trade journal, “The nation as a whole continues to face the danger of incomplete, misunderstood news over a medium which has yet to prove ... that it is competent to perform the news job.”

The contrast between how newspaper journalists experienced the supposed panic, and what they reported, could be stark. In 1954, Ben Gross, the New York Daily News’ radio editor, published a memoir in which he recalled the streets of Manhattan being deserted as his taxi sped to CBS headquarters just as War of the Worlds was ending. Yet that observation failed to stop the Daily News from splashing the panic story across this legendary cover a few hours later.


Politics, or money (or both) always enters the picture. *sigh*



http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...ic_myth_the_infamous_radio_broadcast_did.html

Far fewer people heard the broadcast—and fewer still panicked—than most people believe today. How do we know? The night the program aired, the C.E. Hooper ratings service telephoned 5,000 households for its national ratings survey. “To what program are you listening?” the service asked respondents. Only 2 percent answered a radio “play” or “the Orson Welles program,” or something similar indicating CBS. None said a “news broadcast,” according to a summary published in
Broadcasting

In a few years, we will be celebrating the 80th anniversary of the hoax.

Goodbye, Age of Innocence...
 
What a difficult decision! Allow a coal company to rape the genetic diversity of wild salmon, poison a natural resource, so they can sell cheap coal to China, and add to the carbon problem.

Or, say no and keep the habitat as it is.


I love the way this woman writes!



In 1920, the Boston Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Even today we recognize that decision as one of the worst in the history of baseball.

Today, we Alaskans are facing an even worse trade: wild salmon for coal.

In the next two weeks, the Walker administration must decide whether to grant the right to keep water in a salmon stream -- something most Alaskans would consider a no-brainer -- or instead award the water rights to a coal company so it can dig up the stream, kill off the salmon there forever and export the coal.

http://www.adn.com/article/20151003/its-simple-alaska-fish-first-means-no-chuitna-coal-project


At that point, the coal company decided it better do something. So it filed applications to reserve the very same water. The coal company wasn’t trying to protect salmon; instead, it wanted the right to “de-water” Middle Creek so it could mine the coal for Chinese furnaces.


:eek:
 
gsgs comment-

Reading this, and related articles , is making my heart feel as if it were twice as heavy

Gov. Mike Pence announced a $3.5 million contract Monday with the anti-abortion organization, Real Alternatives.

He has decided to pay the expenses of running the fake farce of a women's health clinic by yanking it out of the TANF* account.

*Temporary Assistance to Families in Need


http://indianapublicmedia.org/news/indiana-contracts-antiabortion-group-real-alternatives-88416/


No health care for women. Just jobs for Mike Pence supporters, paid for out of the taxpayer's pocket.


It is not OK for people who need help to get taxpayer's money, but it is OK for Mike Pence and all of his pals. What do they offer ? A pee stick pregnancy tester, and scare tactics to scare you into keeping the fetus in your uterus.

If you are injured, raped, and frightened, you will find it difficult to find a shelter.
Mike Pence did not like the federal rules that went along with federal funding.
 
What became of Enoch Powell ?


This is the full text of Enoch Powell's so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.

One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: "If only," they love to think, "if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen."

Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.

After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country." I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn't last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: "I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.

I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's Office.

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.
The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: "How can its dimensions be reduced?" Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.
The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.
It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week - and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.
Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependants per annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of existing relations in this country - and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures be taken without delay.
I stress the words "for settlement." This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than would otherwise have been possible. They are not, and never have been, immigrants.
I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.
Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party's policy: the encouragement of re-emigration.
Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent.
Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.
The third element of the Conservative Party's policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr Heath has put it we will have no "first-class citizens" and "second-class citizens." This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.
There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it "against discrimination", whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.
The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.
This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.
Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.
Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another's.
But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.
They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.
In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.
I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me:
“Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.
“The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her 'phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week. “She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country." So she went home.
“The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house - at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist," they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.”
The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the
Whatever became of Enoch Powell ?


We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population - that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.
Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population.

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."
 
Last edited:
German politician stabbed in neck over pro-refugee views


The 44-year-old man slashed the neck of a mayoral candidate in the western city of Cologne yesterday and wounded four others in a crime that shocked Germany as it grapples with a record migrant influx.

The candidate, Henriette Reker, 58 — an independent close to the ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) of Chancellor Angela Merkel — suffered serious wounds but is in a stable condition.



http://www.thejournal.ie/german-politician-stabbed-2395792-Oct2015/


44-year-old man stabbed the 58-year-old Reker in the neck while she was visiting an outdoor market in Cologne's Braunsfeld neighborhood on Saturday. According to police, the man - an unemployed former painter and varnisher living on welfare – took issue with Reker's pro-refugee policies. Witnesses said he was shouting about refugees as he struck Reker.

As part of her work at the city of Cologne's social services department, Reker was charged with arranging accommodation for the thousands of asylum seekers in the city.

The assailant stabbed four more people before being subdued by police. No one was fatally wounded, but Reker was rushed to the hospital and immediately underwent surgery. A candlelit vigil to protest xenophobia was held in Berlin as well-wishers gathered outside Cologne's city hall to show support for Reker.

http://www.dw.com/en/stabbing-victi...e-majority-in-cologne-mayoral-race/a-18790149


Another woman, an aide to Reker, was also seriously wounded and three others were lightly injured as they sought to help fend off the attacker.

http://www.theatlantic.com/internat...-cologne-mayor-attack-henriette-reker/411139/
 
Last edited:
From the island you could look up and see, rising above the city and the harbour, the Berea and the grand library of the University of Natal. This was now exclusively white territory save for black students completing medical degrees. They could not live in digs on the campus. They were housed in another barracks, the University of Natal Black Section. One of the students was Steve Biko.

Despite the best efforts of the government and its security forces, the various tribes confined on the island, in Belville and Angoya, Turfloop and Fort Hare would come together, swiftly and potently. In 1972 students transferred to the new University of Durban Westville on the mainland, custom built to showcase apartheid education. Within months the islanders were the vanguard of a black consciousness inspired boycott of segregated universities. A strike by Durban’s dockworkers followed. The silence of the doldrum years had been decisively broken.

This footnote in history has been underpinned by the most remarkable of friendships, even as I remain trapped on another island, resisting the same hypocrisy. Dave Naidoo taught me to unpick the cryptic crossword. Almost 50 years later I remember the simple example he used. ‘Dogs in the east.Not a blessing’ (5).

I met Nash and Dave in 1969. I was 16 then. In the space of a fortnight I have learned they’ve passed on. So have others and I remember them well. Tomorrow in Tongaat the Indian Ocean will break upon Africa as usual. I will be at Dave’s funeral, somehow.



http://drowningwitches.com/2015/07/31/steve-2/#more-2357

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/12/newsid_3573000/3573054.stm

1977: Steve Biko dies in custody
The leader of the black consciousness movement in South Africa, Steve Biko, has died in police custody.

The 30-year-old's death was confirmed by the commissioner of police, General Gert Prinsloo, today.

It is understood Mr Biko died in hospital in Pretoria. The government minister of Justice and Police, James Kruger, stated that Mr Biko had been transferred 740 miles (1,191 km) from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria for medical attention following a seven-day hunger strike.

Mr Biko had been in custody since 18 August when he was arrested and detained under the Terrorism Act. He is the 20th person to die in custody during the past 18 months.

Medical student

Steve Biko was born in King William's Town in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in 1946.

He became active in the anti-apartheid movement in 1960s when he was studying medicine at the University of Natal.
 
Last edited:
Hillary Clinton survives the Benghazi Inquisition

One day after the former first lady, senator and secretary of state emerged unscathed from a marathon congressional hearing on Benghazi, she rallied thousands of fans outside Alexandria City.

The event in Alexandria was billed as a “grass-roots organizing meeting” with Clinton and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), a longtime personal friend and fundraiser who helped lead her failed 2008 presidential bid.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ernoon-rally/g


Virginia taxpayers may be on the hook for as much as $309,000 in legal fees racked up by Republican lawmakers in lawsuits over the makeup of the state’s congressional and House of Delegates districts.


Two lawsuits funded by a national Democratic group argue that the maps must be redrawn because they illegally concentrate African American voters into some districts to reduce their influence elsewhere. One lawsuit could go to trial this summer; the other is awaiting court action.



Del. Scott A. Surovell (D-Fairfax). “It’s crystal clear Republicans broke the law when they drew these lines.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...a64_story.html
 
2007, current House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa had a novel approach. During committee hearings into the slaughter of four private security contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, Issa defended Blackwater by mocking the victims' families to their faces.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/1...illary-Clinton


Darrell Issa had earlier in the day tried to pop into the hearing room, but it was empty for lunch; when he came back, things got a little heated between Issa and committee chair Trey Gowdy.


Wonkette dot com


June 17, 2015 -

Former House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) tried to crash former Hillary Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal’s deposition before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Tuesday.

Issa marched into the closed-door deposition and remained inside for about a minute before he was escorted out by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).

The pair briefly exchanged hushed words in a nearby hallway before Issa stormed off, throwing an empty soda can into a nearby trash bin.

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/24...azi-deposition


If Gowdy considered Blumenthal's messages to Clinton so crucial to the investigation at hand, why not release the transcript of the panel's behind-closed-doors interview with Blumenthal in June? Blumenthal's own lawyer has requested that the full transcript be released for public consumption.


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...lijah-cummings


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/1...illary-Clinton




Darrell Issa was not allowed to hear what Sidney Blumenthal said during the deposition. Neither was the public.


The Republicans were very interested in getting to the bottom of things, were they not ?

The Republicans voted against releasing the transcript.


Oct. 22, 2015



http://www.motherjones.com/politics...-sidney-blumenthal-trey-gowdy-elijah-cummings
 
Hobby Lobby is above obeying the law, unlike promiscuous, whoring hussies, that need birth control to keep medical conditions from killing them.


To those who have looked into the matter of how the ISIS and ISIL are getting the cash to get weapons, vehicles, and money to operate, have seen the systematic way they have looted heritage sites, and destroy the sites to erase evidence of what they have looted.

Hobby Lobby put money into the hands of people who have put people into slavery.

Why ? The Greens want to rewrite history, and erase the truth.

The Green family and their company, the Hobby Lobby, became household names in June 2014 when the US supreme court ruled in their favor in the famous Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores case. The family had objected to having to provide their employees with contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act.

The owners of the Hobby Lobby, the deeply Christian chain of craft stores that shot to prominence last year following a landmark supreme court ruling that extended religious rights to some corporations, has allegedly become embroiled in a investigation into the attempted importation of ancient antiquities from Iraq.


Devout Christian billionaire Steve Green who is CEO of the Oklahoma-based Hobby Lobby corporation, attempted to import the tablets in 2011 to add to the Green family’s vast collection of 40,000 other ancient artifacts.


The Greenns are the equivalent of a modern-day Indiana Jones who have been under investigation for the last four years for snatching and illicitly importing Iraq’s cultural heritage.


http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/28/hobby-lobby-investigated-ancient-artifacts-iraq



An estimated 40,000 ancient artifacts set to be on display at the Museum of the Bible, is it likely that this is the only case that’s not ethically free and clear? It seems doubtful. Even by Hobby Lobby CEO Steve Green‘s own admission, it’s unclear. When asked if he may have some illegally-acquired antiquities in his family’s collection, Green responded:

“Is it possible that we have some illicit [artifacts]? That’s possible.”

We’ll have to wait for the investigation to conclude to know for sure, but based on how we treat the wealthy and powerful in our country, if found guilty, something tells me they’d be told to return the artifacts and charged a fine that would be equivocal to pocket change.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friend...gation-for-smuggling-artifacts/#disqus_thread


Hobby Lobby’s Steve Green has big plans for his Bible museum in Washington


September 12, 2014

Hobby Lobby’s president Steve Green is bringing a massive Bible museum — with thousands of artifacts —to Washington.

Steve Green is standing in the basement of the eight-story Bible museum he’s building in Washington. Plans for the $800 million project are coming together nicely: the ballroom modeled after Versailles, the Disney-quality holograms, the soaring digital entryway with religious images projected on the ceiling, the restaurant serving biblically-themed meals.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...e20444-1410-11e4-8936-26932bcfd6ed_story.html

"They steal everything that they can sell, and what they can’t sell, they destroy,” said Qais Hussein Rasheed.


Washingtonpost

BAGHDAD — Islamic State militants have provoked a global outcry by attacking ancient monuments with jackhammers and bulldozers. But they also have been quietly selling off smaller antiquities from Iraq and Syria, earning millions of dollars in an increasingly organized pillaging of national treasures, according to officials and

The growing trade reflects how Islamic State fighters have entrenched themselves since seizing the Iraqi city of Mosul a year ago Wednesday, in a dramatic expansion of the territory they control in this country and neighboring Syria.

The extremist group’s recent capture of Syria’s majestic 2,000-year-old ruins at Palmyra threw a spotlight on the risk that the Islamic State poses to the region’s rich cultural heritage. It is, however, just one of 4,500 sites under the group’s control, according to the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force.

“They steal everything that they can sell, and what they can’t sell, they destroy,” said Qais Hussein Rasheed, Iraq’s deputy minister for antiquities and heritage.


“We have noticed that the smuggling of antiquities has greatly increased since last June,” he added, referring to the month in which Islamic State militants took control of Mosul and large parts of northern Iraq.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...5ea964-08a2-11e5-951e-8e15090d64ae_story.html


Kurdistan Democratic Party official Said Mamuzini told the Kurdish news site Rudaw that militants from the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, had begun looting and destroying the site with shovels.

"The city of Hatra is very big and many artefacts of that era were protected inside the site,” he said. “ISIS has already taken away all the ancient currencies from the city that are in gold and silver."

Iraqi officials from the tourism and antiquities ministry confirmed the reports.

The fortified and pillared city of Hatra, which once withstood an attack by the Romans, is a 2,000-year-old site that lies 110 kilometres (68 miles) south of Mosul and is known for its beautifully preserved temples combining Hellenistic, Roman and Eastern influences.



http://m.france24.com/en/20150307-islamic-state-militants-destroy-iraq-ancient-city-hatra-nimrud


The Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi viewed women held captive at a Syrian house as his private property, and forced himself upon a number of them, including the American hostage Kayla Mueller.

As systematic rape becomes an increasingly powerful recruiting tool for Isis, the full story of the ordeal faced by the aid worker killed in captivity is revealed by a 14-year-old Yazidi girl who was captured by Isis in Iraq, last August. Her version has been corroborated by US officials.


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ges-who-made-women-his-personal-10456237.html
 
The latest campaign promise for the 2016 election.

650x366


So expect another fixed election from the Bush family.
 
Back
Top