The moment the first world war ended 3

A curiosity.

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent.

By 1918, the British were using microphones to help pinpoint German guns. Signals were recorded on film. This image of what the microphones registered in the minutes either side of the armistice was recently discovered [2014] in the archives of the Imperial War Museum.

war-museum-pic

Posted under History, War by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, November 11, 2015

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Jesus’s very bad sermon 3

This is an interesting take on the advice “Jesus Christ” is reputed to have given in “the sermon on the mount”.

Matt Dillahunty is the (atheist) speaker. He posted this video on October 31, 2015.

(Note: the technical quality of the video is not good.)

Posted under Atheism, Christianity, Commentary, Religion general, Videos by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, November 10, 2015

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Zikr versus Fikr 123

Poetry is taken very seriously in Iran.

It is taken very seriously by the rulers of Iran, who stand high among the rulers of the darkness of this world.

And have been further elevated by the president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, who has bowed deeply to them, and crawled at their feet, and grovelling there has begged them to use him as their footstool.

The highest of them all, the Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, writes poems.

They know what a poem is. What it should be. What it must be: a hymn to Allah. If it is not that, it is not a poem.

And if anyone writes something about anything else and dares to call it a “poem”, he or she deserves at the very least to be flogged and flogged and flogged again, and shut away for many years, and have their writings banned. Some deserve nothing less than to be shot or bled to death. 

Amir Taheri writes at Gatestone:

Does a seminar on reforming the meter and rhyme schemes of Persian poetry violate “Islamic values” and threaten the foundations of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

That is the view of the Islamic Court in Tehran, which last month sentenced two poets, Fateme Ekhtesari and Mehdi Mussavi, to nine and 11.5 years in prison respectively, plus 99 lashes of the cane for each in public.

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One of the two, Mrs. Fateme Ekhtesari, was sentenced to 11.5 years for “undermining the security of the Islamic state” by composing and reciting in public a number of “poems full of ambiguity and capable of being read in deviant and dangerous ways”.

So if any of her images turns the devout reader’s imagination to blasphemy, flog her, imprison her, and ban the evil poem.

Ekhtesari is a surrealist poet whose verse could, and indeed is intended to, be read in many different ways. One of her diwans (collections of verse), for example, is called Crying on the Shoulder of An Egg. Another comes under the title A Feminist Discourse Before Baking Potatoes.

In the case of Iranian women – of all women under the yoke of Islam – we understand the need for a “feminist” movement; a movement to set them free, whatever it may be called.

And we do not argue with any poet’s subject matter, even if it is religious.

Feminism is a strong theme with Ekhtesari, who insists that, as God created both men and women from the same “red mud” mentioned in the Koran, there is no reason to prevent the latter from enjoying any freedoms available to the former.

In Islam, for a woman to claim equality with men is a sin, a crime, an enormity.

The Tehran Islamic Prosecutor insisted that Ekhtesari’s “ambiguous poems” were meant to pass “dangerous political messages that could encourage people to distance themselves from the True Faith”.

“She writes something but means something else,” the prosecutor claimed. “Her trick is to avoid saying anything in a straightforward way, creating space for all manner of dangerous thinking.”

The prosecutor based part of his case on the claim that what matters in Islam is “zikr,” that is to say, a constant remembrance of God by repeating, if necessary in silence and to oneself, the formula “There is no God but Allah”. Those who abandon “zikr” for its opposite — which is “fikr”, that is to say, thinking — move away from the Path of Faith.

Zikr versus Fikr. Faith versus Reason. The aim of Islam is to smother the world in Zikr. Snuff out Fikr. Put an end to Reason – the most dangerous thing in the universe. 

The irony in all this is that Ekhtesari is not a political poet. In fact, she has written that those who try to use poetry to advance political ideals betray both.

As editor of the monthly literary magazine Only One Tomorrow, Ekhtesari offered space to writers and poets across the ideological spectrum, including some Khomeinists. Her magazine was shut down soon after Hassan Rouhani became president.

However, as a poet, Ekhtesari cannot but be affected by the ambient social and political order in her homeland. She cannot turn her face the other way when she sees ugliness, oppression and terror – themes that force their way into some of her poems.

Ekhtesari is also an original theoretician of poetic modes. Her collection of essays entitled Linguistic Tricks in Postmodern Sonnet [Ghazal] is both intriguing and instructive.

Ekhtesari’s fellow convict-cum-poet is Mehdi Mussavi, who received a six-year [or nine-year?] sentence. Mussavi is the founder and principal animator of a poetry workshop in Tehran where Ekhtesari has often spoken and recited her poems. The workshop is supposedly dedicated to developing a new form that Mussavi calls “postmodern ghazal”.  The classic form of Persian sonnet, ghazal, has been the subject of numerous attempts at modernization, notably by Simin Behbahani, one of Iran’s greatest contemporary poetesses.

To call the ghazal a sonnet is misleading. It is a traditional form with rules, as is the sonnet, but its form is nothing like that of the sonnet. But we’ll let that pass.

What matters here is Mehdi Mussavi’s moral wickedness as a poet and the danger it poses to the Iranian state.

Like Behbahani, Mussavi argues that, having experimented with modern forms, including European-style prose-poetry, for almost a century, Persian poets need to return to traditional forms, albeit with changes to reflect modern realities.

Mussavi rejects the argument of the older generation poets such as Ahmad Shamlou, who claimed that the traditional ghazal is so beholden to the musicality of its meter and rhyme schemes that it cannot relay any meaning in a powerful way.

According to Mussavi, once the Persian poet has learned to play by the traditional rules, he could invent virtually countless meters and rhymes capable of expressing any sentiment.

Just literary controversy, you might say. Insiders chat. But in Islam, the literary is political, every idea is political, because Islam is a totalitarian religio-political ideology. 

Literary opponents of Mussavi’s theories, especially on the left, argue that he, like Behbahani and other reformers of the ghazal before them, suffers from a sense of insecurity in a changing world where the Iran they knew is being remolded into something repulsive in the name of Islam.

The Islamic Court charged Mussavi with propagating “immoral images” in his poetry and thus “insulting sacred values of the Islamic ummah”. 

Equally painful is the Islamic Court’s decision to impose a blanket ban on the publication and recital of any poems by Ekhtesari and Mussavi. Under an edict issued by the Islamic Guidance Ministry in 2003, people like Ekhtesari and Mussavi, who are found guilty of “insulting Islam” and thus put on the official index, become “non-persons” – even their names and pictures are banned.

Both Ekhtesari and Mussavi had spent several months in prison two years ago, but were released after the Islamic Prosecutor Ayatollah Ra’isi failed to prove any political crime.

That is why this time, the prosecutor focused on a claim that the poets had attacked “the sacred tenets of the faith”.

The sentencing was made easier thanks to a recent lecture by “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei laying down the rules of what he believes “good Islamic poets” should observe when writing poetry.

Iran is one of the few countries in the world where poetry has always been regarded as the highest form of literary creation. In Iranian cities, streets and parks were more often named after poets than conquerors or empire-builders or, until the mullahs seized power, Islamic saints and/or theologians. If an Iranian home has at least one book, it is likely to be a collection of poems.

And yet, with the seizure of power by mullahs in 1979, Iran has experienced one of the most dangerous phases in its long history, as far as poets – and intellectuals in general – are concerned.

Another irony is that both the founder of the regime, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and his successor as “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, cast themselves as amateur poets. Khomeini banned publication of his own divans while he was alive, believing that appearing as a poet might soften the dour persona he was building as leader of a revolution that could execute 4000 people on a weekend.

Since his death, however, hundreds of his poems, most of them traditional-style sonnets (ghazals) have been published by the foundation bearing his name.

Ali Khamenei does not publish his poems, but organizes private readings with a few dozen “appreciators” once or twice a year and is reportedly “in seventh heaven” when his entourage quote one of his verses.

Ekhtesari and Mussavi have been sent to jail, not killed. Other poets have not been so lucky.

Hashem Shaabani was hanged on the eve of President Rouhani’s visit to Ahvaz in 2014. Shaabani was not the first Iranian poet to be murdered by the mullahs. The left-wing poet Sa’id Sultanpour was abducted on the day of his wedding on Khomeini’s orders, and shot dead in a Tehran prison. Rahman Hatefi-Monfared, writing under the pen-name of Heydar Mehregan, had his veins cut and was left to bleed to death in the notorious Evin Prison. Under President Hashemi Rafsanjani, a plan to kill a busload of Iranian poets on their way to a festival in Armenia failed at the last minute. Nevertheless, Rafsanjani succeeded in eliminating more than a dozen writers and poets. The worst spate of killings happened under President Khatami, when more than 80 intellectuals, including the poets Mohammad Mokhtari and Mohammad-Ja’far Pouyandeh, were murdered by the Islamic regime’s security agents.

Next fiasco in Paris 175

The number of delegates to the upcoming climate-change “global warming”  conference in Paris – called COP-21 – is estimated to be close to 40,000.

They want to control the climate of the earth. In the words of the old Irish song, “They might as well go chasing after moonbeams, or light a penny candle from a star.”

This is from Canada Free Press, by Dr. Klaus L. E. Kaiser.

(Brief bio of Dr. Kaiser: “After receiving his doctorate in chemistry from the Technical University Munich, he joined Environment Canada’s National Water Research Institute where he served as research scientist and project manager for several research groups. He represented the institute at a variety of national and international committees, gave numerous presentations at scientific conferences, was editorial board member and peer reviewer for several journals, adjunct professor and external reviewer of university theses, and was the Editor-in- Chief of the the Water Quality Research Journal of Canada for nearly ten years. Dr. Kaiser is an author of nearly 300 publications in scientific journals, government and national and international agency reports, books, trade magazines, and newspapers. He has been president of the Intl. Association for Great Lakes Research, and is a recipient of the Intl. QSAR Award. He is currently Director of Research of TerraBase Inc., and is a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada. Dr. Kaiser is widely recognized for his expertise in environmental chemistry.)

Rather than the polar ice caps having shrivelled to mere remnants by now, forecast for many years by all climate modelling enthusiasts, the polar ice shields have been growing by leaps and bounds. For example, according to a recent report by NASA scientists H. J. Zwally et al., the Antarctic ice shield has been growing for 15 years already, even at an alarming rate. Then we learn that near the earth’s opposite pole, in Greenland, the rate of ice accumulation is breaking new records too …. and, last not least, the seasonal growth of the sea ice extent in the Arctic is not far behind.

It must come as total consternation to all those people who have claimed for years now that “climate change” or “global warming” as it used to be termed is about ready to “incinerate” all life on earth. For example, “climate modellers” like S. Rahmstorf …have claimed for years that the polar regions would be most sensitive to any warming and that the polar ice masses were going to recede in a great hurry and that the ocean levels would rise fast. In reality, none of that is the case.

In fact, the polar ice masses continue to grow, some reaching new all-time records in both ice extent and accumulated mass. Also ocean levels are NOT rising as previously predicted. … The climate fear-mongering is nothing but an elaborate hoax. …

Rather than “global warming” a lengthy period of “global cooling” could be in the offing. For some time already, NASA scientists (and others) have predicted the arrival of prolonged periods of low sunspot activity. Their predictions seem to be coming true. With some exaggeration, one could say that “sunspots are nowhere to be seen.” The current 11-year cycle, termed SC-24, is certainly quite reminiscent of those prevalent in the “Maunder Minimum” that are widely thought to have caused the medieval “Little Ice Age” with its mass starvations and general misery throughout Europe.

Perhaps with such facts in mind, the Mathematical Calculation Society of France has recently published a lengthy review with the title “The battle against global warming: an absurd, costly and pointless crusade”. It is available also in English at their web site and, apart from the title, contains some other fascinating statements like, for example, the following excerpt in the chapter on “rising” sea levels:

The level of dishonesty is rising much faster than the sea level. It has totally swept scientific literature, where a good many writers endeavor to produce models showing something worrying. The press disregards all the others and its various organs vie to bring them to public attention. 

… The number of delegates to the COP-21 event is likely to be well above 10,000; some reports even estimate the number to be near 40,000. Among the dignitaries [expected] to show up are Pope Francis, U.S. President Obama, and many other world leaders, together with their entourages, media reps and all others. One may actually wonder as to who will NOT be there?

At COP-21, the representatives of many developing nations and non-governmental organisations are hoping to get a binding agreement on massive climate “reparation” funds to flow to them from western societies. India alone appears to angle for $2,500,000,000,000 (over a few years). So far, however, the commitments (or promises) by “donor” nations are falling far short of the (initial) UN goal of $100 billion per year. “Carbon” taxes and other fiscal monstrosities are supposed to pay for all the shenanigans. … This UN “wealth redistribution scheme” may only benefit the ruling elites in poor countries and do next to nothing for the people who are in dire need of reliable, cheap, and plentiful energy.

Underlying all that effort to create a “new world order” is the claim that CO2 produces a runaway global warming. That hypothesis is the (faulty) lynchpin for the entire CO2-catastrophy story. Not only is that story easy to disprove, it is even easy to demonstrate that the opposite is the case.

Without CO2 in the air, there wouldn’t be any plants on earth; none at all, period. All land would be barren and inhospitable places … Without nature’s steady effort to supply the atmosphere with sufficient CO2 from volcanoes and other fissures in the earth’s crust to sustain all life on earth, we would not even exist. Though highly unlikely, a sudden cessation of nature’s CO2 emissions would lead to a rapid decline in the atmospheric CO2 from the current 0.04% to about 0.02% or less. At that level, all plant growth on earth would be slowing to a crawl. Food production would dwindle with mass starvations to quickly follow. Trying as hard as it might then, mankind’s contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere could not make up for nature’s shortfall.

In any event, regardless of who agrees to what at COP-21 in Paris, nature doesn’t care, the polar ice sheets will be waxing and waning as per her dictate alone.

The suicide of Europe 77

American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor explains how African boat people exploit the humanitarianism of Europeans. He concludes that Europeans have a choice: “Wake up or die”.

Posted under Africa, Britain, Demography, Europe, immigration, Islam, Italy, Libya, Refugees, Sweden, Videos by Jillian Becker on Saturday, November 7, 2015

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In the US army kissing is far worse than desertion 216

Did you know that blatant heterosexualism is now considered one of the worst of crimes – arguably the worst?

A combat photographer faces harsher punishment for making passes at women than Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl faces for desertion.

His name is Sgt. Aaron D. Allmon. He is accused of touching, kissing and making passes at women.

The pervert! The monster! He should be put away for a hunded years, says the Department of Defense.

This is from the Washington Times:

He is an award-winning combat photographer who stands accused of trying to pick up women in the public affairs office at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, and for that prosecutors wanted to put him in prison for 130 years.

The prosecutorial zeal was so great that an Air Force officer appointed to investigate the case said the piled-up charges were combined to “artificially exaggerate the criminality of the accused”,  who often was simply “socially maladroit and crass”.

This is a glimpse into the new U.S. Armed Forces and its gender wars. …

The accused is Tech. Sgt. Aaron D. Allmon II. The 39-year-old arrived at Minot, a nuclear arsenal on the northern edge of the continental United States, to teach others as one of the Air Force’s best at capturing war in photographs.

What he witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan stalked him all the way to North Dakota, along with diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol abuse. He carries prescription drugs to fight off nightmares and excruciating back pain.

But he doesn’t deserve medical treatment because …

His supporters say the stigma of being an accused sexual harasser is so deep-seated that Minot top brass isolated him and deliberately tried to block medical care.

Brace yourself to hear what the swine did:

A Washington Times examination shows that, over a 14-month span, the women’s accusations, in total, amount to three kisses and six touches, plus a series of reported inappropriate comments of a sexual nature. If the married Sgt. Allmon did what the women said, he was tastelessly hitting on them.

Sgt. Allmon’s sister, Lisa A. Roper, does not believe the women. The business executive in San Antonio, Texas, is her brother’s fiercest defender. She estimates she will spend $200,000 on his legal defense, which includes a former sheriff’s deputy as investigator, a civilian lawyer and a former Army judge advocate who took the case pro bono. Sgt. Allmon is also represented by an Air Force judge advocate.

“I want you to understand how women can destroy a man,” said Ms. Roper. “It was out and out vindictiveness set up to destroy a man who didn’t do what they wanted. A group of young women who are brand new in the military and because they didn’t get their way they set out to destroy a man of 19 years in the Air Force.”

But the US Air Force knows right from wrong. Its thirst for justice demands that such villainy be punished with no less than 100 years imprisonment.  

Maj. Jamie Humphries, a Minot public affairs officer, said the Air Force does not tolerate any form of sexual harassment.

When the Air Force convened a pretrial hearing, known as an Article 32, in December, the government had stacked so many charges against the enlisted man that, if convicted, he faced over a century in prison.

“I cannot fathom how this got to the level this got to,” Ms. Roper said.

On Sgt. Allmon’s legal team is Jeffrey Addicott, a former Army judge advocate who is now a law professor at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. The lead civilian defender is Virginia Hermosa, who practices law in Austin and has served as a prosecutor for the Texas attorney general.

Mr. Addicott is also director of the school’s Center for Terrorism Law from which he goes to bat for service members, pro bono, who he believes are treated unfairly by the military justice system.

What is desertion and endangering fellow soldiers compared to kissing, touching, and making comments of a sexual nature?

In the Allmon case, he expresses astonishment that the Air Force is trying him in a felony court instead of seeking other administrative or lesser judicial options. As a comparison, he notes that the hearing officer in the case of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who is charged with the serious offense of desertion for abandoning his buddies on the battlefield, recommended a special court-martial, the lowest level, for misdemeanors.

“The full weight of the military chain of command has come down on Aaron because the chain of command has abandoned justice and elected expediency,” Mr. Addicott said. … “The Air Force … has overreacted against Aaron in a manner that is absolutely an injustice but is also degrading the esprit de corps of unit cohesion all across the military. Even assuming all the charges are true, which they are not, this conduct as charged would warrant nonjudicial punishment, not the highest level of action at a general court-martial where Aaron could lose all his retirement benefits and go to jail. … The role the Article 32 officer is to make objective findings and recommendations to the convening authority putting aside all the inevitable ‘noise’ associated with any given criminal charge. … Sadly, he succumbed to the noise, which in this case involves the shrill screams of expediency. If nothing else, even a cursory review of the 32 officer’s report demonstrates how deep the insidiousness of political correctness has penetrated our military and its justice system.”

Who is this scoundrel Allmon? What is known about him?

Sgt. Allmon arrived in Minot in 2012 as one of the military’s most recognized combat photographers. After tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he worked with a joint unit in Hawaii tasked with recovering the remains of U.S. war dead in Asia. …

[His] previous stops seemed to have prepared him for anything. He hooked up with special operations warriors, fighter pilots and Army brigades to capture in pictures the horrors and glories of Iraq and Afghanistan.

He deployed with an Army regiment that took part in the battle for the town of Tal Afar, Iraq, on the Syrian border in 2005.

The regiment’s citation for January and February 2006 said he “demonstrated technical expertise and his efforts to preserve the legacy of the regiment was critical to completing the regimental history project and documentary. His actions reflect great credit upon himself, the regiment of riflemen, and the United States Air Force”. 

Sgt. Allmon had accompanied troops during the U.S. invasion’s earlier days. In 2004, he posted at the huge air base in Balad, Iraq, leaving 14 times to snap photos of American troops.

“He demonstrated exceptional composure by continuing to photograph, while receiving direct small arms fire and mortar rounds during combat patrols,” said a citation for an Air Force Achievement Medal. “He entered a tent moments after it was hit by mortar to ensure all occupants were out, and he assisted with the care of injured airmen.”

In 2008, he was named “military photographer of the year” for photographs titled “Solitude” of an F-16 jet fighter.

A war hero then?  Maybe. But –

At Minot, Sgt. Allmon’s tenure quickly started going bad. In early 2013, he and a co-worker got into a dispute over a work product and she filed a complaint that he hit on her. That complaint was handled administratively.

What exactly did he do?

The master sergeant who conducted the investigation said that in an office, with other airmen present, one knocked into her knee and Sgt. Allmon then touched the point right above the kneecap to show what had happened.

The master sergeant said he interviewed others in the public affairs office and none complained about Sgt. Allmon. The master sergeant could not substantiate the woman’s accusations of inappropriate remarks. …

Nevertheless …

The Minot personnel treated Sgt. Allmon as a malingerer. They resisted the PTSD diagnosis for fear of turning him into a sympathetic figure.

They tried to prevent him having back surgery at the San Antonio Military Medical Center:

Army doctors [admitted him] for emergency back surgery. … Minot officials immediately tried to get him back. …

[But]  Army doctors stood firm, and Minot backed off. Sgt. Allmon had his second back surgery, to widen the spinal canal, on Aug. 13 and is now recuperating at his sister’s home. His medical chart shows he has chronic cauda equina, which damages nerves and disrupts bladder function and lower-extremity movement.

But he will still be tried in a felony court for kissing, touching and making comments of a sexual nature.

May this story be a warning to us all.

Against doing what exactly? Well, …

Posted under Law, United States by Jillian Becker on Friday, November 6, 2015

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The rape of Sweden 3

Pat Condell tells Sweden the truth about itself again.

(Sweden, like most of Western Europe only more so, is letting itself be raped. Even, as a nation, insisting on it.)

The Lady Macbeth of America 8

 “Look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under it.” – Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, scene 5.

The Mistress of Deception” is the title the libertarian judge and Fox News contributor, Andrew Napolitano, bestows on the Lady Macbeth of contemporary American politics: Hillary Clinton.

The blood on her hands can never be washed off. And all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten them. Indeed, it is from the Arab world that the blood-stench comes.

Judge Napolitano writes at Townhall:

[Hillary] Clinton’s sordid behavior throughout this unhappy affair [the murder in Benghazi, Libya, of the US Ambassador and three other Americans] reveals a cavalier attitude about the truth and a ready willingness to deceive the public for short-term political gain. This might not harm her political aspirations with her base in the Democratic Party; but it will be a serious political problem for her with independent voters, without whose support she simply cannot be elected.

Yet, her name might not appear on any ballot in 2016.

That’s because, each time she addresses these issues – her involvement in Benghazi and her emails – her legal problems get worse. We already know that the FBI has been investigating her for espionage (the failure to secure state secrets), destruction of government property and obstruction of justice ([wiping her computer server clean of governmental emails that were and are the property of the federal government), and perjury (lying to a federal judge about whether she returned all governmental emails to the State Department).

Now, she has added new potential perjury and misleading Congress issues because of her deceptive testimony to the House Benghazi committee. In 2011, when President Obama persuaded NATO to enact and enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, he sent American intelligence agents on the ground. Since they were not military and were not shooting at Libyan government forces, he could plausibly argue that he had not put “boots” on the ground. Clinton, however, decided that she could accelerate the departure of the Libyan strongman, Col. Moammar Gaddafi, by arming some of the Libyan rebel groups that were attempting to oppose him and thus helping them to shoot at government forces.

So, in violation of federal law and the U.N. arms embargo on Libya she authorized the shipment of American arms to Qatar, knowing they’d be passed off to Libyan rebels, some of whom were al-Qaida, a few of whom killed Ambassador Stevens using American-made weapons. When asked about this, she said she knew nothing of it. The emails underlying this are in the public domain. Clinton not only knew of the arms-to-Libyan-rebels deal, she authored and authorized it. She lied about this under oath.

After surveying the damage done to his regime and his family by NATO bombings, Col. Gaddafi made known his wish to negotiate a peaceful departure from Libya. When his wish was presented to Clinton, a source in the room with Clinton has revealed that she silently made the “off with his head” hand motion by moving her hand quickly across her neck. She could do that because she knew the rebels were well equipped with American arms with which to kill him. She didn’t care that many of the rebels were al-Qaida or that arming them was a felony. She lied about this under oath.

My Fox News colleagues Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne have scrutinized Clinton’s testimony with respect to her friend and adviser Sidney Blumenthal. Recall that President Obama vetoed Clinton’s wish to hire him as her State Department senior adviser. So she had the Clinton Foundation pay him a greater salary than the State Department would have, and he became her silent de facto advisor.

They emailed each other hundreds of times during her tenure. He provided intelligence to her, which he obtained from a security company on the ground in Libya in which he had a financial interest. He advised her on how to present herself to the media. He even advocated the parameters of the Libyan no-fly zone and she acted upon his recommendations. Yet she told the committee he was “just a friend”. She was highly deceptive and criminally misleading about this under oath.

It is difficult to believe that the federal prosecutors and FBI agents investigating Clinton will not recommend that she be indicted. Inexplicably, she seems to have forgotten that they were monitoring what she said under oath to the Benghazi committee. By lying under oath, and by misleading Congress, she gave that team additional areas to investigate and on which to recommend indictments.

When those recommendations are made known, no ballot will bear her name.

That is greatly to be hoped. Justice is crying out to be done.

The question is, if evidence of her crimes, crowned by her perjury, is presented by the FBI to the Department of Justice, will its present head, Loretta Lynch, have the political will to indict her? Or is she too much under President Obama’s dictatorial thumb? Or as much in cahoots with him as was her predecessor Eric Holder?

If Hillary Clinton does not serve a long term in prison, there will be no reason to have faith any longer in the rule of law.

Another last chance 125

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One of the most dangerous lunacies of the Left is its paranoid obsession with “global warming”. The attempts to stop civilization in order to “save the planet” would be funny if they weren’t so threatening.

If the climate lunatics – such as Obama – get their way, our lives will be (as Thomas Hobbes put it) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

Activists are warning that the upcoming United Nations climate conference is the last chance to save the world. Fair enough. So if no deal is reached at the meeting, can we please stop hearing about global warming?

The 21st session of the Conference of Parties to the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change starts Nov. 30 and will ponderously drag on until Dec. 11. Call it the “Last Chance in Paris”, because that’s what the fearmongers, from the Vatican to Prince Charles, believe it is.

Of course we’ve heard all this before.

It seems as if every time there’s a U.N. climate conference, we hear the warnings: It’s the final opportunity to save Earth, the “last chance”.

  • In 2001, Time magazine said the U.N.’s Bonn conference was “a global warming treaty’s last chance“.
  • Four years later, activist Mark Lynas wrote in an open letter that the Montreal climate summit represented “a last chance for action“.
  • Before the 2007 meeting in Bali, Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth declared that the conference “could be the last chance to avoid the worst effect of global warming“.
  • Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery said in 2008 that the Poland “round of negotiations is likely to be our last chance as a species to deal with the problem“.
  • Then before Copenhagen in 2009, European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said that conference was “the world’s last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return“.

We could go on. The warnings have continued every year since without fail. So it’s unlikely we’ve heard the last of the “last chance” warnings, even if no agreement is reached in Paris.

But we should have.

There’s a growing stack of evidence that contradicts the alarmists’ warnings and refutes the scientific “consensus” that man is overheating his planet with carbon-dioxide emissions.

Start with NASA’s recent finding that Antarctica is actually gaining ice, not losing it, and the fact that the North Pole has not been ice-free in any summer although climate extremist Al Gore claimed it would be by now.

Then move on to the global warming models used to predict climate calamity. They have been about as accurate as wild guesses.

Why has this happened? Maybe because, as Australian electrical engineer David Evans discovered through mathematical calculation, CO2 is not as strong a greenhouse gas as the U.N. says it is. Evans found that it’s about “a fifth or 10th” of what activists claim it is …

Related to the flawed models is the measured reality that Earth hasn’t warmed in 16 to 18 years.

Other events and circumstances that hurt the warming narrative include: doctored data used by alarmists; admissions by former activists that they either overestimated temperature increases or were simply altogether wrong; and the work of credible scientists that goes hard against the warming claims. [Eg. see here.]

None of these counter-examples will move the activists from their position. They will continue to agitate for government-enforced limits on CO2 emissions and lecture us about how we live.

Their last chance should have come long ago, but now it looks as if they will never run out of them.

Posted under Climate, Environmentalism by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, November 4, 2015

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Trigger of terror: the Constitution of the United States 61

A woman student reports that she cannot bear it.

“Let’s shred it,” say the authorities at Vassar College.

This video is published today, November 3, 2015.

The video makers punctiliously correct an error.

CORRECTION: We incorrectly identified Colleen Cohen as being affiliated with Oberlin College. In fact, she is the Faculty Director of Affirmative Action and a Professor of Anthropology at Vassar College.

(She’s the one in the video who says she cannot use her shredder so must wait to shred the Constitution “when my secretary gets back”.)

So, Colleen Cohen, we fearmongers who think the US Constitution is the greatest document ever written, know where you live!

Posted under United States, US Constitution by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, November 3, 2015

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