2017 WILL BE BETTER FOR ISRAEL WITH A GOP PRESIDENT
Obama’s visit to a pro-terrorist radical Moslem mosque last week (2/03) is a clear signal of how he intends to spend his last year in office. It tells us that during this period, Obama will adopt ever more extreme positions regarding radical Islam.
Obama’s apologetics for radical Islamists is the flipside of his hostility for Israel. This too is escalating and will continue to rise through the end of his tenure in office.
The US Customs authority’s announcement on January 23 that it will begin enforcing a 20-year old decision to require goods imported from Judea and Samaria to be labeled “Made in the West Bank,” rather than “Made in Israel,” signals Obama’s intentions.
Part of the reason Obama is acting with such urgency and intensity is that he knows that regardless of who is elected to replace him, the next president will not be as viscerally hostile to Israel or as emotionally attached to Islam as he is.
This is true even if it is a Democrat – but far more so if it is a Republican.
Join the forum discussion on this postTHE $3 TRILLION OIL DEBT BUBBLE
The global oil industry is caught in a self-feeding downward spiral as falling prices cause producers to boost output even further in a scramble to service $3 trillion of dollar debt, the world’s top watchdog has warned.
The Bank for International Settlements fears that a perverse dynamic is at work where energy companies in Brazil, Russia, China and parts of the US shale belt are increasing production in defiance of normal market logic, leading to a bad “feedback-loop” that is sucking the whole sector into a destructive vortex.
“Lower prices have not removed excess capacity from the market, but instead may have exacerbated it. Production has been ramped up, rather than curtailed,” said Jaime Caruana, the general manager of the Swiss-based club for central bankers.
The findings raise serious questions about the strategy of Saudi Arabia and the core OPEC states as they flood the global crude market to knock out rivals in a cut-throat battle for export share. The process of attrition may take far longer and do more damage than originally supposed.
PROGRESSIVES ARE ANYTHING BUT
What does a "progressive" stand for? How does this differ from what a liberal, conservative or libertarian stands for?
More so than in most years, the presidential candidates are debating about labels. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders got into an argument last week about what a progressive is, and Mrs. Clinton enlightened everyone by telling us "the root of that word, progressive, is progress."
There are two conflicting philosophical views as to the proper role of government. One sees the role of the state to protect the individual from the transgressions of others, while at the same time protecting the individual from the state in order to ensure individual liberty.
The other view is that the function of government is to protect the collective, and to directly provide for individual needs.
Correctly said, there is an endless struggle between "libertarians" and "statists."
LOVE AND VISIBILITY
When we love someone, and they enter a room, that room gets a little brighter for us, like the lights have been turned up a notch. What brings that glow, that brightness from another fellow human being? Love is too rich and complex to boil down to some single facet or data point; but one of the essential elements that goes into feeling love for one another, is the experience of being seen. Love is fundamentally about seeing, hearing, and knowing another human being deeply. We cannot do that from within our own idealistic fantasy. We have to come out and look into the eyes; listen to the voice, the thoughts, the dreams; and feel the heart of another.
That’s when we get to feel that great resonance; that sublime emotion of being touched with love by the soul of another; and reciprocating that love back in a benevolent cycle of visibility and trust.
THE SUPER BOWL AD YOU DIDN’T SEE
HALF-FULL REPORT 02/05/16
The winner:
Believe it or not, the New Hampshire primary is Tuesday. So it probably matters to fully grasp the fallout from Iowa first.
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In the aftermath of Monday’s shellacking, the one and two percenters started dropping like flies ...
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You have probably heard a lot about the Carson flap in Iowa, in which Cruz staffers sent out an email repeating a CNN story that seemed to indicate Carson was done. While the Carson flap has indeed hurt Cruz somewhat, Iowa has helped him more.
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It’s worth noting that Trump did not err in skipping the Fox News debate. It was a gamble, and it certainly would have paid off much better if Rupert Murdoch had caved, leaving Trump the master of the deal and even the media (“if he can negotiate that, he can negotiate anything!”).
THE CANCEROUS SYMBIOSIS OF TRUMP AND THE MEDIA
It’s the worst and most obvious political snow job in history. The media uses Donald Trump for ratings. Donald Trump uses the media to keep himself front and center in the Republican field, and as an object of two minutes’ hate for his crowd.
The media “attacks” Donald, knowing it will solidify his support with his crowd, and the Donald whines and moans about how “unfair” the media is to him ad nauseam. Lather, rinse, repeat.
You can get a sense for how the media really feels about things when the mask slips, and they say what they really think. With respect to Trump, that happened last week when Chris Matthews let slip his nakedly bigoted remark about not wanting to watch a debate between “two Cuban guys,” Cruz and Rubio.
In the same way, Donald Trump really has no idea what he would talk about if he were suddenly disallowed to claim that the media was being unfair to him. Just see the video clip below.
The symbiotic relationship between Trump and the media in which they pretend to be enemies while they profit off of each other has been great for both Trump and the media, but it’s been terrible and cancerous for the Republican party. Here’s why.
ENDING GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION BY ENDING SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY
A major reason for the growing distrust of government is the double standard whereby government officials and employees often suffer no consequences from incompetence, misbehavior and even criminal violations of the law.
In the common law, there is a general principle that if a person is damaged by the actions of others through negligence or illegal behavior, he or she has a right to redress.
The actions of government officials and employees are often far more damaging than those in the private sector, but they are protected by “sovereign immunity” and civil service protections.
Sovereign immunity is a “legal doctrine by which the sovereign or state cannot commit a legal wrong and is immune from civil suit or criminal prosecution.” It comes from the ancient concept that the “king can do no wrong.”
Since we don’t have kings in America, one way to get rid of much corruption and criminal malfeasance by government bureaucrats would be to substantially get rid of sovereign immunity. Let’s take what’s happened in Flint, Michigan as an example.
A COOL CURE FOR THE CLIMATE CHANGE SCAM
Let me tell you the worst thing about the climate change scam.
It’s not the lies, not bullying, not the perversion of the scientific method, not the establishment cover-ups, not the needless scaremongering, not the wasted money, not the nannying overregulation, not the destroyed wildlife and ruined countryside, not the stymied economic growth — bad though all these things are.
No, the worst thing about the climate change scam is that the people making money out of it are the scum of the earth.
It is now the biggest ripoff scam in world history, pulling in $1.5 trillion per annum — not a penny of which goes to anything remotely useful. It is a Potemkin industry, a racket, a form of state-sanctioned organized crime.
Could there be a way to get back some of the money stolen from us by our governments to be spent on their cronies at Solyndra and BrightSource or thrown casually into grants for junk science research like “ocean acidification” or squandered on shysters at tainted institutions like NASA, NOAA and the Royal Society or wasted on anti-capitalist bureaucracies like the EPA and the Department of Energy and Climate Change?
Finally, there is.
BRITAIN SHOULD PUT THE EU OUT OF ITS MISERY
You may have heard of the “Brexit” – Britain’s opportunity to leave the EU via a referendum. As early as this June, British voters will be asked this question: "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?"
The odds they will choose the latter greatly improved this week, with the United States slipping behind Great Britain to 11th place in the 2016 Global Index of Economic Freedom.
What is even more striking about the 2016 index released Monday (2/01) by the Heritage Foundation is the shockingly “unfree” state of the European Union.
Greece is 138th – between Bangladesh and Mozambique. Italy is 86th – between Morocco and Madagascar. France is 75th – between Kuwait and the Seychelles, and well behind Ghana and Kazakhstan.
Why would British want to be a part of this any longer?