9/11… Never Forget: This week commemorates one of the saddest days in our country’s history. The radicalization of politics and religion (not to mention politicization) have caused more death, violence, and grief than any other factor in the history of the world.
We need to “never forget” and remember that terrorism, in any form, whether it’s radical Islam or radical white supremacists – terror, violence and the violation of the rule of law is NEVER the answer. Never acceptable.
As America mourns, let us hope we have NOT forgotten.
Have you Forgotten? September 11th Tribute (Video)
9-11 Sounds of Silence Tribute by Steve A. (Song)
24 powerful and moving photos from the September 11 attacks that Americans will never forget
America Armed: According to VoxDotCom; “Americans make up less than 5% of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45% of all the world’s privately held firearms.”
Yes, however since the War of 1812, America has never been invaded by a foreign army.
- No gulags
- No Holocaust
- No Mao’s Great Leap Forward
- No Armenian genocide
- No Cambodia genocide
It’s almost as if the Second Amendment is the greatest political achievement in history!
H/T Mike Cernovich
NRA: Many of my friends (and opponents) have asked about positions the NRA takes and why. I tried to respond to most, but a friend shared this link that has a “non-emotional”, rational discussion of the law of the land and some of the proposals being tossed out there. Its important to understand the laws that exist, and what if any of these proposed “solutions” would actually do any good to avoid these kind of tragedies in the future.
Politically, it’s easy to blame the NRA, the reality many of these problems stem from lack of values, home environment, terrorism, drugs, mental health and hate.
Disarming law abiding citizens is NOT the answer
NASA: Admits that climate change occurs because of changes in Earth’s solar orbit, and the plain truth is that our orbit around the sun is inconsistent at best, sometimes placing us nearer to the sun than at other times. That is why planets like Mars shows the effects of global warming despite no burning of fossil fuels whatsoever.
See the article below on climate change… destroys the left’s narrative!
Weekly News Summary:
Kamala Harris and Trump campaign spar over plastic straws Sen. Kamala Harris came out in favor of banning plastic straws Wednesday — a position the Trump campaign promptly pounced on.
Biden claims ‘details are irrelevant’ after getting caught telling inaccurate war story Former Vice President Joe Biden is downplaying the inaccuracies he has repeatedly told in a story about an American military service member during the war in Afghanistan, saying the “details are irrelevant” after being called out by a newspaper last week.
Trump Administration Announces Nearly $2 Billion in New Funding to Combat Opioid Crisis The Trump administration is awarding nearly $2 billion in new funding to states and local governments to help fight the opioid crisis.
Watch Our Weekly News Summary Video Here
-Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
Donald Trump’s ‘Nationalism’ isn’t Racist or Wrong, it’s What America Needs Right Now
Donald Trump was recently criticized harshly for embracing nationalism, but the patriotic appeal for national unity and pride is what America needs.
You know America is in trouble when the president is viciously slammed simply for saying good things about the country.
Appeals to the inherent goodness and manifest greatness of America used to be a staple of political oratory. It was so commonplace that it was entirely noncontroversial. Love of country was taken for granted.
But when President Donald Trump described himself as a “nationalist” at a rally in Texas, it set off a firestorm of criticism. Nationalism is now the new “n-word.” CNN’s Jim Acosta pathetically insinuated the president was making a secret appeal to racism. MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace invoked her History Channel-based education to tie in Nazi appeals to German nationalism, while perhaps being unaware that the Nazis also were ardent socialists. Maybe she missed that program.
This predictable progressive panic is baseless and tiresome. It is a willful misunderstanding of what Trump means when he says nationalist. The president framed the term against “globalist,” which in his words is “a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about the country so much.”
This has always been part of the president’s America First agenda, to represent U.S. interests in dealings abroad rather than promoting the internationalist agenda of his predecessors of both parties.
Trump’s Base Fooled by Phony Populism? Hardly
President Donald Trump is a phony populist. Everyone in the intertwined worlds of politics, the mainstream media, and show business understands this. Then-president Barack Obama made the charge during a self-described “rant” in mid-2016, just before appearing at a campaign rally for the decidedly non-populist, and ultimately defeated, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
The only Americans supposedly holding any illusions to the contrary are his core supporters. Those at the lower reaches of the national income scale are supposed to be among the most pathetic victims of this epic con.
Except an obscure set of official national statistics has undermined this thesis. Overlooked as usual when it was released in May, the latest version of the Labor Department’s quarterly County Employment and Wages reports contains abundant evidence that the Trump victory in 2016 has paid off handsomely for the everyday Americans who gave him his Electoral College margin.
That’s because the Labor Department data make possible examining the incomes of workers in the counties that voted for Obama twice and then flipped to Trump. These counties number 206, and statistics are available for 203.
Is Civility a Lost Cause?
I know there is vitriol on both sides of the political aisle, but the left is adept at smugly throwing around what Carrie Lukas, president of the Independent Women’s Forum, calls “progressive privilege,” which slams the door on civility.
Bias against conservatives is seen all too often, with individuals on the right getting ostracized. This happened in Detroit, when the Women’s March held its convention here in 2017. None of the speakers remotely identified as conservative, even though the event claimed to be inclusive of all women.
Similarly, a “Take on Hate” rally Thursday at the University of Michigan-Dearborn to “address the rise of divisive rhetoric, attacks and hatred” was hosted by only Democratic members of Congress from Michigan — including Reps. Debbie Dingell, Rashida Tlaib and Brenda Lawrence.
By not including at least one Republican host, that struck me as code for an event that would call out President Donald Trump and lump in all his supporters as a major cause of the “hate” problem.
The political dynamic is such that anyone who identifies as a conservative or Republican is too quickly labeled by the left as a “racist” or “white supremacist.”
Yes, Gun Ownership Is a God-Given Right
God doesn’t necessarily want you to own an AR-15, but there is a natural right to self-defense.
The fastest way to trend on Twitter, and not in a good way, is to say that the right to bear arms is a God-given right.
Texas state representative Matt Schaefer established this beyond a doubt in a Twitter thread in the aftermath of the West Texas shooting spree. He said that he wouldn’t use “the evil acts of a handful of people to diminish the God-given rights of my fellow Texans.”
Progressives were aghast, and when actress Alyssa Milano objected, Texas U.S. senator Ted Cruz jumped in to support Schaefer’s argument (in less bombastic terms).
The basic proposition isn’t hard to defend, and indeed it is written into our fundamental documents. This doesn’t mean that God wants you to own an AR-15, or that every jot and tittle of our current gun regime is divinely mandated. Far from it. Yet there is a natural right to self-defense, and gun ownership is inherently connected to that right in a modern society.
Nevin Nunes Warns U.S. About ‘Tech Oligarchs’ Censorship, Bias Against Conservatives: ‘I Am Very Concerned’
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, told Breitbart News he is “very concerned” about the rising threat of the “tech oligarchs” at Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other tech giants censoring conservatives in an effort to stymie free speech and push a leftist agenda.
Nunes, who is suing Twitter right now in Virginia, said in an exclusive appearance on Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 this weekend that that company “has been the worst” and that tech companies have gotten away with bias against conservative for years because of a special “carveout” in federal law.
“Well, in general, I have a real concern overall about what I call the ‘tech oligarchs,’” Nunes said. “But Twitter has been the worst, especially to me. So if you look at what they’ve done, specifically to me, is they enforce their rules selectively. So I’m arguing they’ve operated their property negligibly. They’ve been negligent with the operation of their property, and they’re actually content developers. They have had it their way for a long time by having this ability to get out from lawsuits because Congress has actually carved out a special provision in law for them because they were supposed to be an open square—an open public square; they’re the Internet. So they’re not treated like someone like, say, some other kind of product would be treated like a car, for example, or a kitchen appliance. They’ve had this special carveout for 20 years.”
The 2020 Electoral Map Could Be The Smallest In Years. Here’s Why.
In a politically divided nation, with attitudes among many voters hardened and resistant to changing, the 2020 general election could be contested on the narrowest electoral terrain in recent memory.
Just four states are likely to determine the outcome in 2020. Each flipped to the Republicans in 2016, but President Trump won each by only a percentage point or less. The four are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida. Many analysts point to Wisconsin as the single state upon which the election could turn.
Shifting demographics, the growing urban-rural divide and the gap between white voters with and without college educations have helped to create an electoral map unlike those of the recent past. So too have Trump’s unique profile, messaging and appeal.
“Because of the partisanship of the country and the partisanship of the president, we are now looking at the smallest map in modern political history,” said Jim Messina, who was the campaign manager for former president Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
The Trade War Is Smart Geopolitics
The president’s China tariffs may inflict short-term pain on American consumers, but it’s a small price to pay to combat an existential threat to the U.S.
When President Trump first took office, American tariffs on Chinese imports stood at 3.1 percent, little more than a barnacle on the hull of a $600 billion trading relationship. After the latest round of tariffs took effect on Sunday, that number stood at 21.2 percent, and if the next round is implemented on schedule, it will soon reach 30 percent. Economists and business leaders used to nervously reassure themselves that China tariffs were a temporary negotiating tactic to get President Xi to make concessions in a future trade agreement, but the truth is emerging that trade war is the new normal. The Trump administration has ceased talk of soybean-purchase agreements and begun talk of “decoupling.”
Trump’s decision to change our posture toward China from free trade to trade war is one of the most significant policy shifts in recent American history — and one of the most misunderstood.
Free-trade advocates tend to think of tariffs as misbegotten economic policy, intended to give the American economy a leg up by protecting domestic businesses from Chinese competition.
They point to data indicating that tariffs are injuring the American economy more than they are helping it, notably by increasing prices. Americans for Tax Reform has protested that China tariffs “harm American companies and consumers who rely on low-priced products to run their businesses and budget their households.” The George W. Bush Institute has claimed that when consumers have to pay more for products, “the nation is less prosperous.” Thomas Donohue, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, announced his opposition to trade war with China by noting that tariffs are “taxes paid for by American families and American businesses.”
What You Need To Know About Foreign Interference And The 2020 Election
Foreign interference didn’t begin in 2016. It didn’t end with that election. And U.S. officials expect it to remain an issue through the 2020 elections as well.
Here’s what you need to know.
What is it?
Governments always have sought to shape political and other conditions around the world to their own benefit. Most recently, foreign governments have used cyberattacks and agitation on social media to influence the information environment in the United States and Europe.
For Americans, the best-known case is that of Russia in 2016, which sought to keep Hillary Clinton from being elected and to help Donald Trump win. Other governments also have been detected in clandestine attempts to influence opinion in the U.S., including those of Iran and China.
How does it work?
Several ways:
There’s a New Player Leading the Kremlin’s Moves Abroad: the Russian Army
Investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov talks about why the Kremlin’s brazen actions on foreign soil are about what’s going on back in Russia.
For the last 20 years, the Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan have been reporting about their country’s security services, and—as they point out in their forthcoming book, The Compatriots—they have a bloody history.
From the 1940 assassination of the Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico to the attempted killing of the former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the United Kingdom in 2018, the Russian security services have always aimed to settle their scores abroad. Centuries of repression—from the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union to today—have left Russia with the world’s third-largest diaspora, making monitoring, co-opting, and sometimes assassinating members of the vast emigre community one of the central functions of Russia’s elusive spy services.
The most recent targeting appeared to occur in late August, when an ethnic Chechen rebel soldier who had fought Russian troops and sought refuge in Germany was gunned down in broad daylight in Berlin. His alleged assassin was later apprehended and identified as a Russian citizen.
Fareed Zakaria: “It Pains Me To Say This,” But Trump Was Right About Asylum System
Given President Trump’s mean spirited and often bigoted attitudes on immigration, it pains me to say this, but he is right, that the United States faces a crisis with its asylum system. Democrats might hope that the out-of-control situation at the southern border undermines Trump’s image among his base as a tough guy who can tackle immigration. But they should be careful. It could actually work to the president’s advantage.
Since 2014, the flow of asylum seekers into the United States has skyrocketed. Last year, immigration courts received 162,000 asylum claims. A 240 percent increase from 2014. The result is a staggering backlog with more than 300,000 asylum cases pending and the average immigration case has been pending for more than 700 days. It’s also clear that the rules surrounding asylum are vague, lax and being gamed.
The initial step for many asylum seekers is to convince officers that they have a credible fear of persecution in their home countries. And about 75 percent meet that criteria. Some applicants for asylum have suspiciously similar stories using identical phrases. Many simply use the system to enter the U.S. and then melt into the shadows or gain a work permit while their application is pending.
Asylum is meant to be granted to a very small number of people in extreme circumstances. Not as a substitute for the process of immigration itself.
How Putin’s Stalinist Nostalgia Made Him an Enemy of Democracy
Certainly, new developments have made the challenge even more daunting: Social-media platforms, buttressed by TV propaganda and old-fashioned corruption, have given today’s malefactors impunity with global reach. But there has always been interest in luring democracies, powered by the will of the people, to bend to the will of those who trample on democratic rights in their own states.
In our era, no country has embraced this kind of trespass – warfare, really – with greater abandon than Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
His goal is simple: discredit democracy. By making elections seem like pointless contests of extremes in which moderate views are trampled, he seeks to bolster dictatorship as an alternative. By taking issues that have historically made democracies strong and turning them against those very societies, the Kremlin seeks to promote confusion and chaos.
His inspiration is similarly easy to understand: Mr. Putin’s efforts are fueled, ultimately, by his halcyon view of the Soviet Union.
In his lifetime, he bore witness to its rise, so he sees its dissolution as a tragedy; reversing this catastrophe has required dramatic methods. It has meant ending freedom of speech. It has meant that the Kremlin now redirects, often by the crudest possible means, Russia’s decades-old Orwellian machinery of internal disinformation toward international audiences. It has meant invading Georgia in 2008 to frustrate that country’s bid to join the more prosperous Euro-Atlantic community of countries.
Russians Begin to Consider Life Without Putin
After a summer of discontent, a series of elections in Russia opens up a new chapter in its political history.
At the height of summer, the Russian capital was plunged into an unexpected political crisis as thousands of people took to the streets week after week to protest the election commission’s decision to bar opposition candidates from running in this Sunday’s elections for Moscow city council.
The largest anti-government protests since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 were greeted with a heavy-handed response: Armor-clad riot police beat unarmed protestors with batons, and more than 1,300 people were arrested in a single day at the peak of the crackdown.
The Moscow city council elections were an unlikely political lightning rod. The body has long been regarded as largely insignificant with little real power. But the outcry shone a light on a new political reality emerging in Russia as Putin approaches his constitutionally imposed term limit in 2024. Economic stagnation and the lingering uncertainty of what’s to come after 2024 has already begun to place strain on the system that has become synonymous with the Russian president as unrest has been brewing not only at the grassroots level, but also among a political elite that has shown signs of doubt in the country’s trajectory.
“The situation is so fluid right now that the horizon is only a few months,” said Sergei Medvedev, a professor of political science at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “You would be an idiot to be planning too far ahead in today’s Russian politics.”
Book Reveals How Chinese Intelligence Steals U.S. Tech Secrets to Dominate World
‘Hey there, do you sell the ‘Poisonivy Program’? How much do you sell it for? i wish to buy one which can not be detect and killed by the Anti-Virus software.”
The email was sent to a Chinese cyber security company from a military officer in a special part of China’s People’s Liberation Army intelligence service, formally known as the Third Department of the General Staff Department.
American intelligence officials know the spy service simply as 3PLA, and it has been one of Communist China’s most successful tools for stealing American military technology through cyber means. A second Chinese military intelligence-gathering arm is called the Second Department of the General Staff Department, or 2PLA. The Fourth Department, or 4PLA, conducts both electronic spying and electronic warfare.
Together the PLA intelligence units have placed China at the forefront of the most significant foreign intelligence threat to American security. All three cooperate closely in stealing a broad array of secrets from the United States. If the information is in digital form, the Chinese steal it.
PoisonIvy is well known in international hacker circles as the favored software of the PLA. It is a remote access tool (RAT) and, while not the most advanced software on the international hacker black market, would turn out to be an extraordinarily effective cyber intelligence-gathering weapon for 3PLA.
NASA Admits That Climate Change Occurs Because of Changes in Earth’s Solar Orbit, and NOT Because of SUVs and Fossil Fuels
After many years of ignoring the left’s false claims on global warming, NASA has come out and said that changes in the weather are due to our solar orbit and not because of the use of fossil fuels. Under Barack Obama, NASA actually used their money to perpetuate the myth of global warming, even though there has been no warming since 2005.
The plain truth is that our orbit around the sun is inconsistent at best, sometimes placing us nearer to the sun than at other times. That is why planets like Mars shows the effects of global warming despite no burning of fossil fuels whatsoever.
This Startup Helps You Find Any Place on the Planet Without an Address. Traditional Addresses Don’t Work.
That’s the argument of London startup what3words, which says such addresses are expensive to provide, restrictive and prone to error.
The company’s answer is to divide the world into 57 trillion squares and give them each quirky, three-word addresses that what3words says can track down pretty much any place on the planet, from homes in an Indian slum to a refugee camp in Uganda to an alleyway in Hong Kong.
“It’s user-friendly GPS,” said Giles Jones, the company’s chief marketing officer. “Everybody’s got a story of where location has not been good enough.”
The idea came from what3words CEO Chris Sheldrick, a former live music organizer. Sheldrick often grew frustrated at poor addressing when he needed to drop off equipment at a convention center or direct a band where to go, Jones said.
Addresses “either didn’t exist, they weren’t accurate enough, or they were really difficult to communicate,” Jones added.
Sheldrick started using GPS coordinates to fix that problem, but the numeric combinations were difficult to remember or share with others.
One day, about six years ago, he and a friend stumbled onto a solution.
Detailed Maps of the Donors Powering the 2020 Democratic Campaigns
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has a huge lead over other Democratic presidential candidates in the number of individual donors they have each accumulated so far.
This is the first time since the primary race began in earnest that we can estimate how many individual donors each candidate has attracted — a key indicator of how much they are catching on with voters.
Mr. Sanders is relying heavily on small donors to power his campaign, and he entered the 2020 race with a huge network of online donors who supported his 2016 presidential bid. The map above shows the breadth of Mr. Sanders’s roster of donors across the United States.
A map that includes the rest of the Democratic field without Mr. Sanders offers a picture of where the other major candidates are picking up donors. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the other leading progressive in the race, is outpacing the rest of the field across much of the country — a sign that her strategy of relying on grass-roots donors, and refraining from holding high-dollar fund-raisers, is working.
The Cobra Effect: Lessons in Unintended Consequences
Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended.
Human decision brings with it unintended consequences. Often, they are inconsequential, even funny. When Airbus, for example, wanted to make its planes quieter to improve the flying experience for travelers, it made its A380 so quiet that passengers could hear, with far too much clarity, what was happening in the plane’s bathrooms. Other times unintended consequences have far-reaching, dramatic effects. The US health care system is a case in point. It emerged in its present form in no small part because of two governmental decisions.
First, wage and price controls during World War II caused employers to add health insurance as an employee benefit. Why? The law prohibited employers from raising wages, so to attract workers, they offered to provide health insurance. Then, in 1951, Congress declared that employer-provided health insurance benefits would not count as taxable income. This made it cheaper for employees to take raises in the form of increased tax-free insurance benefits rather than in the form of increased taxable wages.
