Read it while you got it! Links 1, May 8th, 2018

Today has been a busy news day, in both amplitude and frequency. Trump cancelling the Iran deal is going to produce hundreds of hours of gossip level videos on all channels, but the event itself is monumental. As one of the people I follow on Twitter today said, (it might have been James Woods but I can’t find it now) we may be witnessing the brith of a great man. I think this is true.

It is better to do a difficult right than an easy wrong. And Obama was all for the easy wrong. The virtue signalling, tornado of sanctimony which would make him look noble at the expense of the security, culture, and wealth of the United States and all her allies. And all the while, their media clapped like trained seals.

Churchill was not elected again when the war ended. They couldn’t recognize his value at the time. And Trump, after having brought peace to the Korean Peninsula, taken Saudi Arabia from the source of our ills to well on its way to a secular state and a near ally of Israel and the West already, a likely renegotiation of the free trade deal with Canada and Mexico that will actually be fair to the USA and hopefully will put in check China’s odd and historically unusual imperialist moves in the region, will probably have to compete in 2020 with someone like Oprah Winfrey and have a tough go of it.

Actually Trump’s accomplishments so far are astonishing. I cannot even remember them all off the top of my head but there is a long list and they started on day one with removing the global warning nonsense from the White House Web site. I believe he has also shut down the CVE, which we Stephen Coughlin fans understand all too well how important that was to do.

There will be some limited wars because of these decisions. But US policy, with the exception of Obama, since WW2 seems to have been to encourage limited wars early in the game so we don’t get another total war like the ones in the 20th century.

Iran of course is a great example. Each month of delay, as with North Korea, means the inevitable conflict would be orders of magnitude more serious to achieve what could have been done in days or weeks when the threat was first identified.

But in any case, here we are. Things are getting dealt with and in the case of North Korea, possibly not too late to avoid disaster. For Iran, a price will be paid for sure, and President Trump’s critics will lay that cost down on him as opposed to on the preceding several administrations where it belongs.

And on to the news:

1. Israel orders Golan shelters open over Iran ‘activity’ in Syria.

The Israeli army said Tuesday it had asked authorities in the Golan Heights to open and prepare missile shelters over “irregular activity by Iranian forces in Syria”, across the demarcationline.

 

“Following the identification of irregular activity of Iranian forces in Syria, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) has decided to change the civilian protection instructions in the Golan Heights and instructs local authorities to unlock and ready shelters in the area,” the army said in a statement.

 

The announcement came shortly before US President Donald Trump made public his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

2. ‘Israel attacked stockpiles of Iranian missiles’

Syrian media report heavy explosions in the Damascus area. According to some reports, Israeli planes attacked Iranian targets near Damascus.

Syrian media reported on Tuesday evening that a number of explosions were heard south of the Syrian capital, Damascus.

 

According to some of the reports, Israeli planes that missiles at Iranian targets near Damascus.

The official Syrian news agency reported that Syrian air defense systems had destroyed two Israeli missiles south of the capital.

 

Earlier on Tuesday evening, the IDF asked authorities in the Golan Heights to open and prepare missile shelters over “irregular activity by Iranian forces in Syria”, across the demarcationline.

 

“Following the identification of irregular activity of Iranian forces in Syria, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) has decided to change the civilian protection instructions in the Golan Heights and instructs local authorities to unlock and ready shelters in the area,” the army said in a statement.

3. The beginning of a flood of material on the Iran deal change.

4. Penzance man urges takeaways and restaurants in Cornwall to stop using halal and kosher meat.

A man from Penzance has revealed why he is urging Cornish food outlets to quit using halal meat in meals for good.

 

Animal lover, Viv Wills, hasn’t eaten any halal or kosher products in more than seven years and regularly asks staff in restaurants and takeaways about the origin of their meat.

 Viv, who runs West Cornwall Pet Transport, claimed that businesses and takeaways often buy Halal meat from the abattoirs because it is more affordable.

(There are some significant errors in this article about Kosher and halal slaughter. But glad to see his mission to have places stop buying halal is going well in any case.)

5. Some of the comments under this one are wonderful as well.

Here is another example of her deceptive hypocrisy

6. Australia: Accused terrorist ‘practised’ Vic stabbing

A Bangladeshi student accused of stabbing her Melbourne homestay host in an act of Islamic State terrorism allegedly practised on a mattress.

Momena Shoma, 24, appeared before Melbourne Magistrates Court via video link on Wednesday, charged with engaging in a terrorist act, after she allegedly stabbed her homestay host at Mill Park on February 9.

“She (allegedly) did the practice run on the mattress with the first family that hosted her and they felt intimidated enough to go to whoever organised it … to say ‘We’re scared, we don’t want her to continue living with us’,” magistrate Charlie Rozencwajg said.

(Yes I am surprised also that Amnesty International would do anything reasonable like this. There must be more to it.)

Amnesty International has urged the government to release Alnoldy Bahari, a farmer from Pandeglang regency in Banten, who was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay Rp 100 million (US$ 7,150) by Pandeglang District Court on April 30  for blasphemy.

 

In November last year, Alnoldy was reported by his neighbors who accused him of insulting Islam and spreading hate speech on Facebook.

 

The offending statements included “I am a Muslim and I truly testify that there is no god but Allah. I have seen Allah, have you?” and “If a fake Muslim cleric has entered the political realm, then Quranic verses are not absolute truth anymore”.

 

He was arrested in December 2017 and charged with blasphemy under Article 156(a) of the Criminal Code, and Article 28(2) of the Electronic Information and Transaction (ITE) Law.

 

“Having only peacefully expressed his right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, Alnoldy Bahari is a prisoner of conscience and must be immediately and unconditionally released,” Amnesty International said in an official release on Tuesday.

 

Amnesty International called on the authorities to immediately and unconditionally release Alnoldy and all other individuals who have been detained solely for peacefully exercising their human rights and also to repeal or amend all blasphemy provisions set out in laws and regulations, which violate the rights to freedom of expression and thought, conscience and religion.

Thank you Xanthippa, Richard, M., Wrath of Khan, EB., and MANY MANY more who sent in volumes of important information and links to news stories in the past few days. There really is a lot more in the Reader’s Links post. Please dive in. You really don’t get these perspectives from official Western media anymore. The CBC is worse than any modern Russian media for sure. The UK has a far far better media than anywhere in Canada but its getting worse everywhere in the West.

So take this opportunity while it still exists. Social media we have all seen is becoming more and more restrictive against classical liberal thought. They are actively killing the Enlightenment on Facebook and Youtube appears to be not too too far behind.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

7 Replies to “Read it while you got it! Links 1, May 8th, 2018”

  1. The Trump Land Mine by Victor Davis Hanson
    Explosives require careful handling. Sometimes they blow up in your face.

    After the 2016 election, the so-called deep state was confident that it had the power easily to either stop, remove, or delegitimize the outlier Donald Trump and his presidency.

    Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops: implanting Obama holdover appointees all over the Trump executive branch; filing lawsuits and judge shopping; organizing the Resistance; pursuing impeachment writs; warping the FISA courts; weaponizing the DOJ and FBI; attempting to disrupt the Electoral College; angling for enactment of the 25th Amendment or the emoluments clause; and unleashing Hollywood celebrities, Silicon Valley, and many in Wall Street to suffocate the Trump presidency in its infancy.

    But now the administrative state’s multifaceted efforts are starting to unwind, and perhaps even boomerang, on the perpetrators. If a federal judge should end up throwing out most of the indictments of Paul Manafort on the rationale that they have nothing much to do with the original mandate of the special counsel’s office, or if Michael Flynn’s confession to giving false statements is withdrawn successfully because the FBI politicized its investigation and FISA courts were misled in approving the surveillance of Flynn, then the Mueller investigation will implode.

    Indeed, the Mueller investigation would likely lose so much public support that the Department of Justice could probably dismiss it with impunity. So, in an ironic sense, Mueller’s overreach might well end once and for all the absurdities of the special counsel/prosecutor law that for nearly half a century has plagued the nation.

    Until recently, deep-state apparatchiks such as John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe seemed immune from accountability after lying either to Congress or to federal authorities. In a perverse sort of way, the more Robert Mueller plays the role of the obsessed but impotent Inspector Javert, the more he demonstrates that there is no Russian-Trump collusion. Meanwhile, he is establishing precedents that those whom he exempts from his own zeal will inevitably have to account for their own lawbreaking. One cannot justifiably hound Michael Flynn for supposedly misleading FBI agents, when agency investigators were told by Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills that they had known nothing about Hillary Clinton’s private server during her tenure as secretary of state — despite evidence that they themselves had communicated over it (as had the former president of the United States).

    In his increasing desperation, Mueller may manage to finish off the declining reputation of FBI’s Washington office to the degree that there is not much left of it after the work of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok. And he may only fuel more criminal complaints against deep-state bureaucrats who worked at the FBI and the DOJ.

    In truth, the multiplex world of the establishment is crumbling in a variety of arenas, from entertainment to the workplace. Certainly, the NFL is both bleeding viewers and now seen as an ancillary of the progressive movement. The sports channel ESPN is losing its audience that is tired of being lectured about its supposed ethical shortcomings instead of being enlightened about three-point shots and no-hitters. The century-old White House Correspondents’ Dinner is going the way of the 90-year-old Oscars: It’s an increasingly incestuous night of progressive virtue-signaling, crudity, and mediocrity that permanently turned off millions of former viewers. Americans can forgive a lot of shortcomings in their entertainers; boredom is not one of them.

    Between the Me Too movement and the Russian-collusion hysteria, not much remains of the reputations of Hollywood and the media. When, fairly or not, Tom Brokaw is lumped into the ranks of Mark Halpern, Dustin Hoffman, Garrison Keillor, Larry King, Matt Lauer, Ryan Lizza, Charlie Rose, Tavis Smiley, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and a host of others, there is really not much left of the old power brokers. Once upon a time, Americans assumed that a Tom Brokaw, Matt Lauer, Dan Rather, or Charlie Rose were their go-tos for ethical and sober journalism. Again, justly or not, that norm no longer holds. NBC and CNN, which have long routinely parodied Fox News, are far less likely than Fox to permit ideological and political diversity on the air.

    Silicon Valley likewise has lost its luster. Once upon a time, America loved a hip Steve Jobs, decked out in black, fiddling with a new Apple gadget on stage in front of an entranced televised audience of millions. Jobs appeared as a brilliant and typically American entrepreneur, not a partisan talking down to hoi polloi.

    Things have radically changed since then. The reputation of Big Tech is one of hyper-partisan politics, data miners, snoops, Bowdlerizers and censors, monopolists, progressive multibillionaires, and adolescents in arrested development who exempt themselves from the consequences of what their ideologies inflict on others.

    In Wizard of Oz fashion, it’s as if the public is no longer frightened of the omnipotent imperial faces on their screens — once it drew apart the high-tech curtains and exposed tiny little nerds with nasal voices furiously working levers and gears to project deceptive all-powerful images. Even a four-trillion-dollar industry can take only so many scandals like those at Theranos, Facebook data mining, deliberately slowed-down iPhones, fatally texting drivers, and Mark Zuckerbergs.

    Donald Trump proved to be a catalyst for much of the implosion of the deep state. Land mines require careful handling. Only arrogant naïfs think that they can rush in, grab them, and carelessly and safely toss them away — clueless that they themselves are exposed as reckless moments before they blow themselves up.

    If the deep state really wanted to dismantle and disarm Donald Trump, it would have been wise first to carefully learn how he was constructed and wired — and thus why he was especially dangerous to them. Then to disarm him, elites would have had to offer superior agendas to his supporters, while engaging in reasoned debates and alternative visions — working with him when they found common and shared solutions, playing the loyal opposition when there did not.

    Instead, the government, the political apparat, the media, tech, and entertainment conglomerates sought to reduce Trump to some monstrous entity deserving of hanging, stabbing, decapitation, incineration, and shooting. It sought to indict, impeach, and remove a sitting president, as the ancien régime rushed to break federal law with assumed ethical exemption — tapping, surveilling, lying, and leaking with impunity, assured that supposedly morally superior ends justified any means necessary to achieve them.

    In other words, the custodians of the status quo arrogantly grabbed up the Trump land mine and thought they could easily toss it away — as it has blown them sky-high.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/president-trump-deep-state-critics-risk-blowback/

    • The reputation of Big Tech is one of hyper-partisan politics, data miners, snoops, Bowdlerizers and censors, monopolists, progressive multibillionaires, and adolescents in arrested development who exempt themselves from the consequences of what their ideologies inflict on others.

      Really says it all, eh?

      Even a four-trillion-dollar industry can take only so many scandals like those at Theranos, Facebook data mining, deliberately slowed-down iPhones, fatally texting drivers, and Mark Zuckerbergs.

      Especially those Zuckerbergs but, hey, there’s plenty of room in the High Tech blame boat for Alphabet, Twitter, Instagram, and all of the other modern day digital martinets.

      • That pretty much said everything about what is wrong, they did leave out that the left thinks of themselves as the elite who doesn’t have to pander to the inferior masses. We are suppose to let them run things and not bother them with how they are hurting us.

  2. Someone posted on your Lily Allen thing —
    Byron McDonald
    4 months ago
    This is entirely a troll channel, after watching all of the videos on it. Not one of these stories is accurate or true. Lily Alan still does plenty of refugee care to this day, and the Italian diplomat story is completely fabricated, was made to defame her. Just like most videos on this channel, disgusting. I can’t believe people have the time to make garbage like this. Has to be the most ironic situation posted on youtube, does anyone have Lily Alans number? This guy is horribly misinformed and needs to sit down and take correction.?

    Are you sure this is a true story?

    • The Express is pretty solid. If you find the Express story to be untrue I will remove it. There seems to be a lot of video of her talking about the diplomats she rented to and them screwing her though using diplomatic immunity. Dont really know much for sure.

      If you find info to the contrary please do let me know and Ill publish a correction right away.