Author: Arran Gold

CBC’s Don Murray follows the Muslim attack template

On April 20, 2013 your correspondent wrote a “Template for a terrorist attack” which contained the following point.

6. Articles will appear lamenting about the inevitable oncoming brutal backlash against the Muslims although this has never occurred before. BBC – Boston bombings: Muslim Americans await bomber’s ID. As an aside, notice how some of the savvier news organisations, like BBC, thread the needle on the knotty topic of terrorist identification? They don’t want to wait to write about the brutal backlash after the terrorist have been identified in case they get relegated with the slow-moving and slow-thinking print press. They also do not want to jump the gun and identify them as Muslims because that would be, oh gosh, so judgemental, so they write about how the Muslims wait for the identity of the terrorist with trepidation and are “braced for a backlash”.

On Nov 14, 2015 CBC’s Don Murray dutifully obliges.

Taken together with the poisonous right-wing tweets, the mixture is explosive. Soon, the political truce will be broken. A backlash against French Muslims can be expected along with stoked-up right-wing rhetoric decrying the flood of Syrian refugees and migrants into Europe.

The next weeks and months in France will not be pretty.

The fact that this has not happened before despite repeated predictions is not enough to bring a semblance of common sense to leftist..

Britain wants every book people read recorded

Sorry, wrong headline but what if that was true? How does that differ from this headline “Britain wants every website people visit recorded”?

The British government plans to make telecommunication firms keep records of every website that customers visit under a new law regulating cyber-snooping.

The draft Investigatory Powers Bill is designed to regulate authorities’ access to Internet activity, replacing a patchwork of laws, some dating from the Web’s infancy.

Obamacare deathwatch?

Oct 19th, 2015. NY Post

ObamaCare is heading toward a death spiral.

The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, premiums have to be hiked to cover the costs of older, sicker people, discouraging even more young people from signing up.

Last Thursday, the administration predicted enrollment for 2016 will be less than half what the Congressional Budget Office predicted in March.

Nov 2, 2015. Wall Street Journal

When it passed Congress in 2010, the Affordable Care Act offered substantial financial support to create nonprofit health-insurance plans. Today 11 of the 23 such regional Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans have failed – seven since the beginning of October.

Of course ObamaCare isn’t going to die easily. Not if it is held up as Obama’s signature achievement. Large amount of money will be poured into it to resuscitate it.

Political right learns from the political left

Leftist politics and below-the-belt tactics, whilst simultaneously sneering at those who are right-of-centre, have always gone hand-in-hand. One example that typifies leftist politics is the Cloward-Piven strategy.

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty”

Now things have gone full circle. What could possibly go wrong here?

A small crossroads village in Germany, population 102, was informed by email recently that 1000 refugees would be resettled in their town. The mayor originally believed the news to be a hoax. But sure enough, regional officials assured the mayor that the town, Sumte, would have to take nearly 10 times the number of asylum seekers than there were residents.

Maybe this?

One of the few people, in fact, who seem enthusiastic about the plan for Sumte is Holger Niemann, 32, an admirer of Hitler and the lone neo-Nazi on the elected district council. He rejoices at the opportunities the migrant crisis has offered.

“It is bad for the people, but politically it is good for me,” Mr. Niemann said of the plan, which would leave the German villagers outnumbered by migrants by more than seven to one.

On the other hand, we are talking about National Socialist here so maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the political right. 😉

Understanding the world power structure

The way the world works:

To be a civil servant, you give a highly competitive entrance exam.

To manage those civil servants, you get elected (even if you’re a crook lining your own pockets; country be damned).

To make/break those politicians and their economies, you be a central banker – going through neither an entrance exam, nor an election.

Political trends: Obama, Trudeau, Morales….

First we had Obama, the guy with the thinnest resume. Then Trudeau Jr., a guy who never held a cabinet post or an executive position. Now meet Morales, a guy who has “never held office”. Well at least this guy will be funny.

Jimmy Morales, a former TV comedian who has never held office, swept to power in Guatemala’s presidential election on Sunday after milking public anger over a corruption scandal that deepened distrust of the country’s political establishment.

The 46-year-old Morales overwhelmingly beat center-left rival and former first lady Sandra Torres in a run-off vote despite his lack of government experience and some policy ideas that strike many as eccentric.

The headquarters of Morales’ center-right National Convergence Front (FCN) party erupted in celebration as official returns showed he had around 68 percent support in a landslide victory.

EUSSR, just like the old USSR

So much for EU being a democratic institution.

For the first time since the creation of Europe’s monetary union, a member state has taken the explicit step of forbidding eurosceptic parties from taking office on the grounds of national interest.

Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s constitutional president, has refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.

Harvard-NY Prison, Kennedy-Khrushchev and Obama-Putin

What do these three disparate phrases have in common? Consider these two historical facts.

June 4, 1961. Vienna, Austria. (NYT)

Kennedy’s assessment of his own performance was no less severe. Only a few minutes after parting with Khrushchev, Kennedy, a World War II veteran, told James Reston of The New York Times that the summit meeting had been the “roughest thing in my life.” Kennedy went on: “He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts. Until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him.”

October 7, 2015. Napanoch, NY (The Guardian)

Months after winning a national title, Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York prison inmates.

The showdown took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club. Last month they invited the Ivy League undergraduates and this year’s national debate champions over for a friendly competition.

In light of the above two facts, consider this outcome.

October 9, 2015. Washington DC (Bloomberg)

White House Is Weighing a Syria Retreat

A week into Russia’s military intervention in Syria, some top White House advisers and National Security Council staffers are trying to persuade President Barack Obama to scale back U.S. engagement there, to focus on lessening the violence and, for now, to give up on toppling the Syrian regime.

Summary: It doesn’t matter which Ivy League university you went to or the colour of your skin, thugs using street smarts will beat you up both physically and intellectually. .

French train terror attack heroes targeted?

Oct 2, 2015
Umpqua Community College shooting

In a taped interview with Ellen DeGeneres on Thursday, Skarlatos said he was supposed to be in the building where Thursday’s shooting took place.

“I had classes in Snyder Hall,” said Skarlatos.”It’s a fairly small community college, the town in general, everybody knows each other. So with that many deceased, I mean everybody’s going to know at least one person.”

Oct 8, 2015
Sacramento stabbing

.Spencer Stone, hailed as a hero after a French train terror attack, has been stabbed in Sacramento, California.

He is currently in a stable condition and is being treated at a local hospital, an Air Force official confirmed to the BBC.

CBS News first reported that he was “stabbed repeatedly” on a Sacramento street corner on Thursday morning.

Mr Stone, 25, is one of three Americans that helped to thwart a terror attack on a French train in August.

 

Ian Fleming – “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

So we wait.