Wednesday, December 20, 2023

The Pentagon Can't Account For 63% Of Its Assets But Congress Gives Them $886 Billion Just The Same...,

thepressunited  |   The US Department of Defense has failed its sixth annual audit in a row, but taxpayer money will keep going down that drain

Recently, the Pentagon admitted it couldn’t account for trillions of dollars of US taxpayer money, having failed a massive yearly audit for the sixth year running.

The process consisted of the 29 sub-audits of the DoD’s various services, and only seven passed this year – no improvement over the last. These audits only began taking place in 2017, meaning that the Pentagon has never successfully passed one.

This year’s failure made some headlines, was commented upon briefly by the mainstream media, and then just as quickly forgotten by an American society accustomed to pouring money down the black hole of defense spending.

The defense budget of the United States is grotesquely large, its $877 billion dwarfing the $849 billion spent by the next ten nations with the largest defense expenditures. And yet, the Pentagon cannot fully account for the $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities it has accrued at US taxpayer expense, ostensibly in defense of the United States and its allies. As the Biden administration seeks $886 billion for next year’s defense budget (and Congress seems prepared to add an additional $80 billion to that amount), the apparent indifference of the American collective – government, media, and public – to how nearly $1 trillion in taxpayer dollars will be spent speaks volumes about the overall bankrupt nature of the American establishment. 

Audits, however, are an accountant’s trick, a series of numbers on a ledger which, for the average person, do not equate to reality. Americans have grown accustomed to seeing big numbers when it comes to defense spending, and as a result, we likewise expect big things from our military. But the fact is, the US defense establishment increasingly physically resembles the numbers on the ledgers the accountants have been trying to balance – it just doesn’t add up. 

Despite spending some $2.3 trillion on a two-decade military misadventure in Afghanistan, the American people witnessed the ignominious retreat from that nation live on TV in August 2021. Likewise, a $758 billion investment in the 2003 invasion and subsequent decade-long occupation of Iraq went south when the US was compelled to withdraw in 2011– only to return in 2014 for another decade of chasing down ISIS, itself a manifestation of the failures of the original Iraqi venture. Overall, the US has spent more than $1.8 trillion on its 20-year nightmare in Iraq and Syria.

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

The Fight Against Anti-Semitism Is A Thinly Disguised Celebration Of White Supremacy

scheerpost  |  srael will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted

But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy. 

Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John HageePaul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Pre-Modern vs. Modern Discrimination

africasacountry |  By pre-modern I mean the period before the establishment of the centralized structure of power known as the modern nation-state. This period differs from one part of the world to another. In Africa and the Middle East, the nation-state is a recent colonial creation. 

Before the development of centralized power, there were different forms of political powers that coexisted in society. The rulers, whether one calls them kings or emperors or sultans, held one form of political power, which we shall call royal power. In places like Buganda, this royal power could be further subdivided into the power of the kabaka (king), the power of the namasole (queen mother), the power of lubuga (royal sister), and so on. 

But there were also other society-based political powers held by the clans, the shrine, the church, and so on. In the lands of Islam, the mufti produced (i.e. interpreted) the Shari’ah (Islamic law), which coexisted with the laws made by the rulers. The mufti’s legal opinion, though nonbinding, informed many judgments in the courts of law. Thus the mufti was an important political authority even if he held no government office. Elsewhere, the church made its own laws that coexisted with the laws of the kings and emperors. 

This kind of political arrangement in which power was spread rather concentrated in one entity means that there was no single political authority that determined who should be included in or excluded from the political community. An outsider who was rejected by one clan could be admitted by another. A heretic who was persecuted in one village could find peace in a neighboring village. A cultural stranger who was denounced today could be accepted tomorrow. The terms of inclusion and exclusion were contestable, flexible and abstract. There was no permanent or universal outsider. 

The modern state, on the other hand, does two things. First, it centralizes and monopolizes all political power, including the power to determine who is a citizen and who is not. Even if a clan in northern Uganda admits a Somali as its member, the state of Uganda reserves the authority to revoke the citizenship of this new clan member. 

Second, the modern state institutionalizes and reifies the criteria for determining who is included and who is excluded in the political community. In Uganda, a full citizen must be a member of an indigenous community that was living within the borders of Uganda by February 1, 1926, as noted earlier. 

This makes the nation-state an inherently and extremely discriminatory form of political association with no precedent in history. It seeks to dominate society completely with specific emphasis on marginalizing and colonizing certain sections of society. 

To mitigate the marginalization of the minorities, liberals (such as John Locke) introduced the ideas of tolerance within the framework of secularism. The liberal nation-state creates two spheres, namely, the public sphere and the private domain. The private is the domain of religion and other cultural identities while the public is the sphere of reason. 

To ensure peaceful coexistence between the national community and the minorities, liberals prescribe that matters to do with religion, culture, and identity should be personal business confined to the private domain. Public principle, including state law, should be based on reason, not religion or any other cultural prejudice. The assumption is that reason is neutral and objective rather than being socially constructed. How can reason and public principle be neutral and objective in an identity-based state? How can an identity-based state produce a law that is detached from the cultural identity of the state? 

But there is even a bigger problem. If liberal tolerance appears to have worked, it has only worked where the minorities are too weak to threaten the dominance of the national majority. Where the minorities gain some power and influence, they are seen as a threat that must be dealt with. The rising popularity of far right parties in Europe is partly fuelled by the supposition that the minorities, including the Muslims and migrants, are purportedly gaining ground in these countries. 

Indeed, Zionist ethnic cleansing possibly seeks to reduce the Palestinians to small manageable numbers that could eventually be tolerated without threatening the dominance of the Jewish national community. The liberal notion of tolerance only requires the national majority to tolerate the minorities, but it does not ask why there should be a national majority in the first place. Thus liberal tolerance does not offer a meaningful solution to the fundamental problem of the nation-state, which is rooted in the distinction between the national community and the minorities.

All liberal interventions have failed to end ethnic cleansing because liberalism operates within the framework of the nation-state. Liberalism has no critique of the nation-state as nation-state—it only critiques certain manifestations of the nation-state. In other words, liberalism has no critique of the problem itself; it only focuses on certain manifestations of the problem. 

It is this conceptual narrowness of liberalism that prompts political actors to create more nation-states as a solution to the violence of the nation-state. When Jews were persecuted in Europe, the European powers could not think of a better solution than creating a separate nation-state for Jews. The consequence was to reproduce the violence of the nation-state, this time in the form of Zionist ethnic cleansing in Palestine. It is for this reason that the ongoing problem in Palestine cannot be meaningfully addressed by resorting to the so-called two-state solution. 

If such a solution was to be adopted, what would happen to the non-Jews living in the Jewish state and what would happen to the non-Palestinians living in the Palestinian state? Considering that neither Jews nor the Palestinians are a homogenous category, how would the state deal with internal differences in the form of religious sects and ethnic factions of its national community?

Monday, December 18, 2023

Chaos And Distraction Will Prevent Trump From Getting Things Done

thehill  |  New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) went after former President Trump on Friday, arguing that a second Trump term would be hampered by “chaos and distraction.”

“The guy just has chaos and distraction that follows him,” he said in an MSNBC interview Friday. “He’s not going to be able to get the stuff that we need done to fix this country.”

“Republicans want to go forward with the next generation of conservative leadership,” he continued, downplaying the former president. “We always want to be looking forward to the next opportunity to actually get stuff done. Not just looking in the rearview mirror, worrying about Trump litigating things.”

Sununu endorsed former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley for the GOP nomination on Tuesday. He used Friday’s interview to springboard more reasons why he believes Haley is better suited for the White House.

“Her numbers were surging long before I even got on board because she’s connecting with folks,” he said.

“By doing that, by spending time on the ground with our voters, she’s earning their trust, and trust is a very rare thing in Washington nowadays. People are liking it,” he continued. “She’s got that charisma, more than any other candidate out there. And that connection is why you’re seeing her numbers jump up.”

Despite the endorsement, Sununu complimented her GOP primary rivals Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, calling them “great friends of mine” and “good candidates.” He offered no compliment for Trump or biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

Haley has been gaining momentum in the polls, notably in New Hampshire, and often coming in second place. But, Trump still remains the clear GOP front-runner.

 

 

Sunday, December 17, 2023

$Trillions Are At Stake

 TCH  |  Corporations, mostly modern multinationals (special interest group), write the legislation. The corporations then contract the lobbyists.  Lobbyists then take the law and go find politician(s) to support it. Politicians get support from their peers using tenure and status etc. Eventually, if things go according to norm, the legislation gets a vote.

The last item of legislation written by congress was sometime around the mid 1990’s. Modern legislation is sub-contracted to a segment of DC operations known as K-Street. That’s where the lobbyists reside.  Lobbyists write the laws; congress sells the laws; lobbyists then pay congress lucrative commissions for passing their laws. That’s the modern legislative business in DC.

When we talk about paying-off politicians in third-world countries we call it bribery. However, when we undertake the same process in the U.S. we call it “lobbying”.  Most people think when they vote for a federal politician -a House or Senate representative- they are voting for a person who will go to Washington DC and write or enact legislation. This is the old-fashioned “schoolhouse rock” perspective based on decades past. There is not a single person in congress writing legislation or laws. In modern politics not a single member of the House of Representatives or Senator writes a law, or puts pen to paper to write out a legislative construct. This simply doesn’t happen.

Over the past several decades a system of constructing legislation has taken over Washington DC that more resembles a business operation than a legislative body. Here’s how it works right now.  Outside groups, often called “special interest groups”, are entities that represent their interests in legislative constructs. These groups are often representing foreign governments, Wall Street multinational corporations, banks, financial groups or businesses; or smaller groups of people with a similar connection who come together and form a larger group under an umbrella of interest specific to their affiliation.

The for-profit groups (mostly business) have a purpose in Washington DC to shape policy, legislation and laws favorable to their interests. They have fully staffed offices just like any business would – only their ‘business‘ is getting legislation for their unique interests. These groups are filled with highly-paid lawyers who represent the interests of the entity and actually write laws and legislation briefs.

In the modern era this is actually the origination of the laws that we eventually see passed by congress. Within the walls of these buildings within Washington DC is where the ‘sausage’ is actually made.

Again, no elected official is usually part of this law origination process.

Almost all legislation created is not ‘high profile’, they are obscure changes to current laws, regulations or policies that no-one pays attention to. The passage of the general bills within legislation is not covered in the corporate media. Ninety-nine percent of legislative activity happens without anyone outside the system even paying any attention to it.  Once the corporation or representative organizational entity has written the law they want to see passed – they hand it off to the lobbyists.

The lobbyists are people who have deep contacts within the political bodies of the legislative branch, usually former House/Senate staff or former House/Senate politicians themselves. The lobbyist takes the written brief, the legislative construct, and it’s their job to go to congress and sell it. “Selling it” means finding politicians who will accept the brief, sponsor their bill and eventually get it to a vote and passage. The lobbyist does this by visiting the politician in their office, or, most currently familiar, by inviting the politician to an event they are hosting. The event is called a junket when it involves travel.

Often the lobbying “event” might be a weekend trip to a ski resort, or a “conference” that takes place at a resort. The actual sales pitch for the bill is usually not too long and the majority of the time is just like a mini vacation etc. The size of the indulgence within the event, the amount of money the lobbyist is spending, is customarily related to the scale of benefit within the bill the sponsoring business entity is pushing. If the sponsoring business or interest group can gain a lot of financial benefit from the legislation they spend a lot on the indulgences.

Within every step of the process there are expense account lunches, dinners, trips, venue tickets and a host of other customary financial way-points to generate/leverage a successful outcome. The amount of money spent is proportional to the benefit derived from the outcome.

The important part to remember is that the origination of the entire process is EXTERNAL to congress.

Congress does not write laws or legislation, special interest groups do. Lobbyists are paid, some very well paid, to get politicians to go along with the need of the legislative group. When you are voting for a Congressional Rep or a U.S. Senator you are not voting for a person who will write laws. Your rep only votes on legislation to approve or disapprove of constructs that are written by outside groups and sold to them through lobbyists who work for those outside groups.

While all of this is happening the same outside groups who write the laws are providing money for the campaigns of the politicians they need to pass them. This construct sets up the quid-pro-quo of influence, although much of it is fraught with plausible deniability.

This is the way legislation is created.

If your frame of reference is not established in this basic understanding you can often fall into the trap of viewing a politician, or political vote, through a false prism.

The modern origin of all legislative constructs is not within congress.

Once you understand this process you can understand how politicians get rich.

When a House or Senate member becomes educated on the intent of the legislation, they have attended the sales pitch; and when they find out the likelihood of support for that legislation; they can then position their own (or their families) financial interests to benefit from the consequence of passage. It is a process similar to insider trading on Wall Street, except the trading is based on knowing who will benefit from a legislative passage.

The legislative construct passes from K-Street into the halls of congress through congressional committees. The law originates from the committee to the full House or Senate. Committee seats which vote on these bills are therefore more valuable to the lobbyists. Chairs of these committees are exponentially more valuable.

Now, think about this reality against the backdrop of the 2016 Presidential Election. Legislation is passed based on ideology. In the aftermath of the 2016 election the system within DC was not structurally set-up to receive a Donald Trump presidency.

If Hillary Clinton had won the election, her Oval Office desk would be filled with legislation passed by congress which she would have been signing. Heck, she’d have writer’s cramp from all of the special interest legislation, driven by special interest groups that supported her campaign, that would be flowing to her desk.

Why?

Simply because the authors of the legislation, the originating special interest and lobbying groups, were spending millions to fund her campaign. Hillary Clinton would be signing K-Street constructed special interest legislation to repay all of those donors/investors.

Congress would be fast-tracking the passage because the same interest groups also fund the members of congress.

President Donald Trump winning the election threw a monkey wrench into the entire DC system…. In early 2017 the modern legislative machine was frozen in place.

The “America First” policies represented by candidate Donald Trump were not within the legislative constructs coming from the K-Street authors of the legislation. There were no MAGA lobbyists waiting on Trump ideology to advance legislation based on America First objectives.

As a result of an empty feeder system, in early 2017 congress had no bills to advance because all of the myriad of bills and briefs written were not in line with President Trump policy. There was simply no entity within DC writing legislation that was in-line with President Trump’s America-First’ economic and foreign policy agenda.

Exactly the opposite was true. All of the DC legislative briefs and constructs were/are antithetical to Trump policy. There were hundreds of file boxes filled with thousands of legislative constructs that became worthless when Donald Trump won the election.

Those legislative constructs (briefs) representing tens of millions of dollars worth of time and influence were just sitting there piled up in boxes under desks and in closets amid K-Street and the congressional offices. Legislation needed to be in-line with an entire new political perspective, and there was no-one, no special interest or lobbying group, currently occupying DC office space with any interest in synergy with Trump policy.

Think about the larger ramifications within that truism. That is also why there was/is so much opposition.

No legislation provided by outside interests means no work for lobbyists who sell it. No work means no money. No money means no expense accounts. No expenses means politicians paying for their own indulgences etc.

Politicians were not happy without their indulgences, but the issue was actually bigger. No K-Street expenditures also means no personal benefit; and no opportunity to advance financial benefit from the insider trading system. Republicans and democrats hate the presidency of Donald Trump because it is hurting them financially.

President Trump is not figuratively hurting the financial livelihoods of DC politicians; he’s literally doing it. President Trump is not an esoteric problem for them; his impact is very real, very direct, and hits almost every politician in the most painful place imaginable, the bank account.

In the pre-Trump process there were millions upon millions, even billions that could be made by DC politicians and their families. Thousands of very indulgent and exclusive livelihoods attached to the DC business model. At the center of this operation is the lobbying and legislative purchase network. The Big Club.

Without the ability to position personal wealth and benefit from the system, why would a politician stay in office? It is a fact the income of many long-term politicians on both wings of the uniparty bird were completely disrupted by Trump winning the 2016 election. That is one of the key reasons why so many politicians retired in 2018.

When we understand the business of DC, we understand the difference between legislation with a traditional purpose and modern legislation with a financial and political agenda.

When we understand the business of DC we understand why the entire network hates President Donald Trump.


Friday, December 15, 2023

Tucker Carlson Interviews David Grusch

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Well Dayyum....,

 

These Muhukkas Find New Ways To Disappoint Us On A Weekly Basis...,

 

"To add a personal note to this— 

I know @RepMikeTurner has been catching much of the flak for spearheading the watering down of the UAPDA, but a special mention must be made to my home state’s 4th district Rep and HPSCI ranking member @jahimes for also reportedly running around during the NDAA conference committee and making last minute efforts to lobby for removal of the most important enforcement and oversight provisions from the original Schumer-Rounds amendment. Thanks to @ChrisUKSharp and his investigative journalism for that anecdote. 

People need to understand it wasn’t just the NatSec wing of House Republicans that sunk the UAPDA. I myself am a registered Democrat who is informed on this topic and has found common cause with many Republicans to want to see transparency. Publicly playing coy with and seeming hopelessly mystified by the topic of UAP on late night shows, while quietly thumbing the scale behind the scenes like this will not be looked upon kindly. 

To whatever staffer of @jahimes is tasked with managing his Twitter account, make no mistake—people with the knowledge and agency to make noise about this issue know what happened here"

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Clever By Half - Elise Stefanik Now Caught In Her Vindictive Lie

politico  |  Elise Stefanik’s viral line of questioning of an elite trio of university presidents last week over how to respond to calls for the genocide of Jews didn’t just spark bipartisan outrage and lead to a high-profile resignation. It settled a personal score the congresswoman had with her alma mater, which had all but disowned her in the wake of Jan. 6.

Back then, in 2021, the dean of Harvard University’s school of government said the New York congresswoman’s comments about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election had “no basis in evidence,” and the Harvard Institute of Politics removed Stefanik from its senior advisory committee. Stefanik at the time criticized what she described as “the ivory tower’s march toward a monoculture of like-minded, intolerant liberal views.”

Mitch Daniels, the retired former president of Purdue University and a former Republican governor of Indiana, called it “higher ed’s Bud Light moment” — referring to the beermaker’s divisive ad campaign featuring a transgender influencer — “when people who hang out with only people who adhere to what has become prevailing and dominant ideologies on campuses and suddenly discover there’s a world of people out there who disagrees.”

Republicans, of course, have been the loudest voices defending Stefanik. Daniels, who has also testified before hostile lawmakers on behalf of his university, mocked that the administrators Stefanik questioned retained the white-shoe law firm WilmerHale to prepare.

 

DEI Handing Out A Formidable Ass-Whooping To Rich And Powerful Jews....,

dailycaller  |  “[DEI] is the main cause of anti-Semitism today. It divides students along racial and religious lines and creates a zero-sum game. If you’re in favor of one group you’re [against] another group,” Dershowitz told Fox Business host Larry Kudlow. “It is a real problem. It is anti-intellectual, it is dishonest in many ways. Look, it uses the word diversity, but only means racial diversity. Less than 3% of the faculty at Harvard identify as conservative. They say equity, which suggests equality, but equity is the exact opposite of equality. Indeed under equity, if you dare to quote Martin Luther King’s dream of a world where children are judged not by the color of their skin, but by content of their character, you have committed a microaggression. Inclusion, Larry Summers made it clear that inclusion has excluded Jews over the years.”

“So, it’s a fraudulent concept, a dangerous concept, but 700 of my colleagues at Harvard, professors have come out pandering to President Gay and calling for her to remain on,” Dershowitz continued. “They don’t want people like you and me, who are now outsiders to have any influence on Harvard but they refuse to answer the legitimate points made by people like Bill Ackerman, they just dismiss him out of hand because he’s a rich alumni.”

Gay issued a clarification in a statement posted on X Wednesday, a day after she was grilled by Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York about antisemitic actions on the university’s campus.

“Schools are, colleges and universities are not only the current faculty, not only the current students but they are alumni and they are the future students, they are great institutions and DEI is destroying these institutions and President Gay is a product of DEI,” Dershowitz said. “She championed it. That’s how she became president. She is the symbol of DEI and the symbol has failed and she must also recognize her own failure and her role in that failure.”

 


Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Al Gore Ithms...,

modernity  |  Al Gore says that people having access to information outside of mainstream media sources is a threat to “democracy” and that social media algorithms “ought to be banned.”

Yes, really.

Gore made the comments during an appearance at the Cop28 climate change hysteria conference in Dubai.

Gore whined that social media had “disrupted the balances that used to exist that made representative democracy work much better.”

The former Vice President said that functioning democracy relied on a “shared base of knowledge that serves as a basis for reasoning together collectively” but that “social media that is dominated by algorithms” upsets this balance.

According to Gore, people are being pulled down “rabbit holes” by algorithms that are “the digital equivalent of AR-15s – they ought to be banned, they really ought to be banned!”

Gore claimed, “It’s an abuse of the public forum” and that people were being sucked into echo chambers.

“If you spend too much time in the echo chamber, what’s weaponized is another form of AI, not artificial intelligence, artificial insanity! I’m serious!” he added.

Apparently, the only echo chamber that should be allowed to exist is Gore’s own rabbit hole, wherein the earth is constantly on the brink of destruction thanks to people not obeying his technocratic mandates.

Perhaps Gore is unhappy at his own misinformation being fact checked by individuals who have access to information not produced by corporate media sources that are friendly to him.

Gore infamously predicted that the north polar ice cap would be “ice free” within 5 to 7 years.

 

The Three College Presidents Were Right

popehat  |  Stefanik’s purpose was transparent. No matter how the college presidents answered, she won. If they answered accurately — that the question depended on the context - she could shriek neeeeeerrrrrrdddd like a football player bullying a kid with glasses, and credulous people would eat it up. If the presidents answered inaccurately but simply “yes,” she could make her next point: then why aren’t you punishing people who advocate intifada? Why aren’t you expelling students for saying “from the river to the sea”? Why aren’t you punishing people for accusing Israel of genocide? That was her express, explicit purpose:

Congresswoman Stefanik: Dr. Kornbluth, at MIT, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate MIT’s code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or no?  

President Kornbluth: If targeted at individuals not making public statements. 

Congresswoman Stefanik: Yes or no, calling for the genocide of Jews does not constitute bullying and harassment? 

President Kornbluth: I have not heard calling for the genocide for Jews on our campus.

Congresswoman Stefanik: But you've heard chants for Intifada. 

There’s the rhetorical trick. Calling for Intifada is not the same as calling for the genocide of the Jews, and it’s just dishonest to say it is. Not all Jews are Israeli. Arguing that a particular group has a moral right to violent revolution against the power over it is not a call for the genocide of a group. The argument about when violent revolution is morally justified is ancient. Whether or not you agree that Israel is tyrannical or the Palestinians are unjustifiably oppressed, you can’t outlaw arguments that they are and pretend you’re anything but an absolute censor. The hearing was full of gripes like that — contentions that the slogan “from the river to the sea” should be outlawed and complaints that colleges had invited speakers with radical pro-Palestinian views. The crystal clear message was we think protecting Jews from antisemitism requires suppressing a broad range of speech from Them.

And many people bought it, and now it’s being used as part of the culture war against higher education, and too many of you fucking fell for it.

You might say I am being more than usually uncharitable in this post. That’s because I think people falling for Stefanik’s gambit have been more than usually gullible. They’ve become useful idiots for evil. They’ve become the dupes of people who will wave the banner of “fight antisemitism” while pushing Great Replacement Theory. They’ve become the patsies of people who transparently want to use Jews as an instrument and excuse to suppress speech they don’t like. They’ve become the creatures of cynical, dishonest politicians who want to treat hard things like they are simple to rile up mobs.

Monday, December 11, 2023

Gov. Kathy Hochul Is Extra Special....,

dailycaller  |  Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York warned colleges and universities in a letter on Saturday that she would order legal action against them if they fail to address antisemitism on campus.

Three university presidents appeared before Congress on Dec. 5 to testify about antisemitism on their campuses, after which they were heavily criticized for failing to say whether “calling for genocide against Jews” violated their institutions’ codes of conduct. Hochul wrote to all colleges and universities in New York that a failure to address antisemitism would result in legal action from the state under New York State Human Rights Law and Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“I assure you that if any school in New York State is found to be in violation, I will activate the State’s Division of Human Rights to take aggressive enforcement action and will refer possible Title VI violations to the federal government,” Hochul wrote in the letter, which was posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.

UPenn’s president and chairman of the board of trustees resigned on Saturday, while Harvard’s president issued a public apology amid calls for her removal.

“The moral lapses that were evidenced by the disgraceful answers to questions posed during this week’s congressional testimony hearing cannot and will not be tolerated here in the State of New York,” Hochul wrote.

Hochul has previously dealt with fallout from an antisemitic controversy at a university in her own state. Police arrested Cornell University undergraduate student Patrick Dai on Oct. 31 for allegedly making violent threats to commit a mass shooting against Cornell’s Center for Jewish Living.

“Gov. Hochul cannot command colleges and universities to violate the First Amendment. Nor may she enforce state law to compel action against speech protected by the First Amendment,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Broad, vague bans on ‘calls for genocide,’ absent more, would result in the censorship of protected expression.”

 

Sunday, December 10, 2023

Imagine Elise Stefanik Kwestioning Henry Kissinger...,

newrepublic  |  The question of Kissinger’s alleged antisemitism is a complicated one. Yes, he told a friend in the 1970s that Judaism “has no significance for me,” according to Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography, and is also quoted as having said in 1972, “If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic.” Another gem from that year: “Any people who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong.”

But to be fair, these views were not as uncommon among German Jews in the United States as one might wish them to have been. One can find similarly disturbing quotes in the private discussions of say, the great pundit and political philosopher Walter Lippmann and the longtime New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. When confronted with Richard Nixon’s frequently hysterical antisemitic rants about “dirty rotten Jews from New York” who dared to reveal the truth about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in the Times or some such thing, Kissinger usually tried to placate the president without explicitly agreeing or disagreeing. But when he felt Jews, whether American or Israeli, were refusing to cooperate with his plans, he was more than happy to join in, once complaining to Nixon that he had “never seen such cold-blooded playing with the American national interest” as when American Jewish leaders supported Israel’s position over that of the Nixon administration. The Israelis at various times were “as obnoxious as the Vietnamese,” “boastful,” “psychopathic,” “fools,” “a sick bunch,” and “the world’s worst shits.” As for American Jewish leaders, “They seek to prove their manhood by total acquiescence in whatever Jerusalem wants.”

Kissinger was a Jew who found other Jews exceptionally annoying—none more so than Israelis, with whom he frequently negotiated but failed to get to do things his way. The question is, was he worse about Jews and Israel than about anyone else who refused to genuflect before what he understood to be his genius? To be fair to someone who really doesn’t deserve it, Kissinger, like Nixon, would tend toward churlish, racist reactions when anyone rebuffed him. When, for instance, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi refused to go along with his plans for a secret opening to China, he informed the president that “well, the Indians are bastards anyway,” and Gandhi herself was “a bitch.”

But Kissinger also engaged in explicitly antisemitic actions himself. When, in September 1973, Nixon appointed him to be secretary of state, Kissinger thanked him for saying nothing about his “Jewish background.” And as he doled out jobs to his aides, he made certain to count the Jews to ensure there were not too many of them. He explained that while he knew that it required 10 Jews for a minyan (Jewish prayer service), he could not “have them all on the seventh floor.” Kissinger also once removed a counselor, good friend, and fellow German Jew, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, from a list of aides scheduled to accompany the president to Germany because he said, “I don’t think too many Jews should be around.” But here again, he was likely not acting out of personal anti-Jewish animus. Rather he was behaving cravenly in the face of what he judged to be the Jew-hatred of others, especially Nixon, who famously ordered an aide to count the number of Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

For the purpose of history, the most important aspects of Kissinger’s hostility to Jews and Israel can be seen in his conduct related to the 1973 “Yom Kippur War.” Kissinger apologists have consistently attempted to give him the credit that belongs almost entirely to Jimmy Carter for the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Martin Indyk, a longtime diplomat and Kissinger acolyte, actually published a 688-page book titled Master of the Game, making exactly this comical claim.

The truth is that Kissinger’s machinations were at least partially responsible for the fact of the war itself. Egypt’s visionary leader Anwar Sadat made clear to Kissinger and company that he was interested in a peace agreement with Israel (and moving his allegiance from the Russians to the Americans). The Israelis expressed interest at the time, but Kissinger instructed them that they were “wasting time” in taking Sadat seriously. To make certain the Israelis went along with his plans, he secretly bribed them with a promise of over 100 U.S. Phantom fighter jets. His overture rejected, Sadat eventually decided that another war to avenge the humiliation of 1967 was his only choice to lay the groundwork for an eventual deal. Even Indyk, who treats Kissinger’s famous “shuttle diplomacy” between Israel and Egypt after the war as one of the great achievements of American diplomatic history, admitted in his book that Kissinger “might have averted the Yom Kippur War” by taking Sadat seriously earlier.

Kissinger also helped ensure that Israel would be unprepared for the Egyptian attack. According to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s secret testimony before Israel’s 1974 Commission of Inquiry, just before the war began, Kissinger warned Israel that if it wanted any help from the United States in the event of hostilities, then it should not make a preemptive strike against Egypt or Syria or to mobilize the reserve army before the war actually started. These warnings were given after Kissinger insisted that all other Americans leave the room and no notes be taken. Dayan then canceled his air force’s preemptive operation and objected to Golda Meir’s plan to mobilize the reserves. Kissinger is not known to have given any similar warning to the Egyptians. Indeed, according to Sadat’s memoirs, Kissinger actually encouraged the attack, via secret messages, in order to improve Egypt’s negotiating position in the war’s aftermath. To my knowledge, Kissinger never addressed this.

Kissinger wanted Israel to suffer a significant setback before it finally won the war. He succeeded at this at an enormous cost in lost lives on both sides. As the Egyptian army marched toward Tel Aviv, he informed Sadat and company that the United States was doing merely the minimum to aid Israel that was possible under the circumstances. After eight days of fighting, however, Nixon insisted, over Kissinger’s objections, on implementing a massive emergency weapons airlift. He did this despite Kissinger’s warning that victory would make Israel “even more impossible to deal with than before.”

Kissinger came in for extremely harsh criticism from some American Jews in this period. Hans Morgenthau, a respected international relations scholar whom Kissinger personally revered, went so far as to compare the pressure he was applying to Israel to the way the West had treated Czechoslovakia in 1938 when it was threatened by Hitler. To try to disarm such critics, Kissinger undertook a series of off-the-record meetings with Jewish writers and intellectuals and another with leaders of Jewish organizations.

The former group spanned the political spectrum, from the democratic socialists Irving Howe and Michael Walzer to neoconservatives such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Norman Podhoretz. There was no room for disagreement between the two poles, however, because the only issue discussed was Israel’s security and how to best ensure it. Kissinger posed as Israel’s savior and warned of a noticeable turn against all-out support for Israel in Congress. (Actually, the opposite was true. Congress was far more pro-Israel than Kissinger was.) He pointed out that, given the “critical opposition” to Israel within the international community, the perfidy of the “European vultures,” and the likely success of the “extremely effective” OPEC oil embargo, which would give the Arab world more leverage over the West and turn consumers in both the U.S. and Europe against Israel. Israel was “in great danger.” What he needed, he explained, was for influential American Jews to “privately … make clear to the Israelis that you understand the situation.” The meeting broke up, according to the notes taken by an aide to Kissinger, “with warm expressions of gratitude.”

Kissinger Understood You Can't Be Both Oppressor And Victim

NYTimes  |  Richard M. Nixon has long been the Freddy Krueger of American political life. You know in your bones that he is destined to keep returning.

Sure enough, though dead 16 years, Nixon is back onstage, with the release of a fresh batch of tapes from his Oval Office days. They show him at his omni-bigoted worst, offering one slur after another against the Irish, Italians and blacks. Characteristically, he saved his most potent acid for Jews. “The Jews,” he said, “are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.”

But Nixon’s hard-wired anti-Semitism is an old story. What has caused many heads to swivel is a recording of Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser. Mr. Kissinger is heard telling Nixon in 1973 that helping Soviet Jews emigrate and thus escape oppression by a totalitarian regime — a huge issue at the time — was “not an objective of American foreign policy.”

“And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union,” he added, “it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

In New York, the epicenter of Jewish life in the United States, some jaws are still not back in place after dropping to the floor.

Bad enough that any senior White House official would, without prodding, raise the grotesque specter of Jews once again being herded into gas chambers. But it was unbearable for some to hear that language come from Mr. Kissinger, a Jew who as a teenager fled Nazi Germany with his family, in 1938. Had he not found refuge in this country and in this city — the Kissingers settled in Washington Heights — he might have ended up in a gas chamber himself.

“Despicable,” “callous,” “revulsion,” “hypocrite,” “chilling” and “shocking” were a few of the words used this week by some leaders of Jewish organizations and by newspapers that focus on Jewish matters.

Conspicuously, however, many groups and prominent individuals stayed silent. They include people who would have almost certainly spoken up had coldhearted talk of genocide come from the likes of Mel Gibson or Patrick J. Buchanan, neither a stranger to provocative comments about Jews.

Even some who deplored Mr. Kissinger’s remarks tempered their criticism. The Anti-Defamation League called the recorded statements “outrageous,” but said they did not undermine “the important contributions and ultimate legacy of Henry Kissinger,” including his support of Israel. The American Jewish Committee described the remarks as “truly chilling,” but suggested that anti-Semitism in the Nixon White House might have been at least partly to blame.

“Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question as to where his loyalties lay,” the committee’s executive director, David Harris, said in a statement.

There was no hedging in editorials by Jewish-themed newspapers like The Forward and The Jewish Week. Separately, in a Jewish Week column, Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a New York lawyer who is active in Holocaust-related issues, dismissed Mr. Kissinger as “the quintessential court Jew.” And J. J. Goldberg, a Forward columnist, wrote, “No one has ever gone broke overstating Kissinger’s coldbloodedness.”

Now 87, Mr. Kissinger confined himself this week to a brief statement that said his taped comments “must be viewed in the context of the time.”

Back then, American Jewish groups strongly supported legislation that would have made any improvement in American-Soviet trade relations contingent on freer emigration by Soviet Jews. The president and Mr. Kissinger rejected that approach, which was rooted in human rights concepts not suited to their power politics, or realpolitik. They were bluntly angry at Jewish organizations for pushing hard on the issue.

In his statement, Mr. Kissinger said of Jewish emigration that “we dealt with it as a humanitarian matter separate from the foreign policy issues.” That approach, he said, led to a significant rise in the number of Jews permitted to leave the Soviet Union. In fact, it did, for a while anyway.

Still, that “gas chamber” line is about as ugly as it gets. It seems unlikely to change many views of a man who is both widely admired and widely hated, but there is one word that just might haunt Mr. Kissinger to his final days.

Genocide is “not an American concern,” he said, but “maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Maybe, the man said.

 

 

 

Ben Shapiro: Deeply Conflicted Intersectional White Supremacist

dailysignal  |  First, the Left—and university presidents are almost the Platonic ideal of intellectual leftists—believes that Jews are not part of the intersectional coalition of the oppressed. By leftist logic, Jews are part of the superstructure of power, since all success is merely a reflection of hierarchies of power, and Jews are disproportionately successful. Thus Jews cannot be victims.

Then there’s the second reason: The hard Left hates Israel. The Left hates Israel because, like American Jews, Israel is too successful in the region in which it is located. Israel, according to the Left, is a colonialist outpost of the West, and the West is evil because it too is successful—which means that it is exploitative and oppressive.

Hence the Left’s rabid attachment to the idea that calls for Israel’s destruction are somehow not antisemitic, but actually a reflection of a more universalistic humanitarian creed.

Sure, that creed would actually materialize in the death of millions of Jews and the dominance of radical Muslim terrorism. But that doesn’t matter. After all, Israel is the real problem, because the West is the real problem—and we know that’s true because the West and Israel are successful.

According to the Left, radical Muslim regimes that impoverish their citizens aren’t worth one bit of attention. Israel, by contrast, ought to be destroyed.

So, what ought to be done?

First, donors ought to pull their money from such universities.

Second, businesses ought to start hiring directly out of high school and stop treating the bizarre credentialing process of major universities as worthwhile. It isn’t. Chances are better that you’ll get a great employee by selecting a high school graduate with 1500 SAT and a 4.0 GPA than by selecting a Harvard graduate with the same statistics.

Finally, parents ought to stop subsidizing this nonsense with their own children.

The universities are corrupt through and through. Their endorsement of DEI has been a curse to reason and decency. Their politics are vile, and those politics also make the universities corrupt factories of moral depravity.

It’s time to end the system.

Saturday, December 09, 2023

14 State AG's Sign Letter Threatening Media Outlets With Prosecution For Reporting On Hamas

foxnews  |  More than a dozen state attorneys general signed a letter to media outlets such as the New York Times and Reuters, putting them "on notice" that providing material support to terrorist organizations such as Hamas is illegal, Fox News Digital exclusively learned. 

"We will continue to follow your reporting to ensure that your organizations do not violate any federal or State laws by giving material support to terrorists abroad. Now your organizations are on notice. Follow the law," 14 state attorneys general stated in a letter to the chiefs of CNN, The New York Times, Reuters and The Associated Press on Monday afternoon. 

Republican Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird spearheaded the letter, which detailed concerns that journalists embedded with Hamas may actually have deep connections with the terrorist organization "and may have participated in the October 7 attack." 

"Reporting credibly alleges that some of the individuals that your outlets hire have deep and troubling ties to Hamas—and may have participated in the October 7 attack. In the wake of those alarming reports, some of you have cut ties with these so-called journalists whose connections to terror groups have become too obvious to hide. Good. But one factor in determining whether an organization has provided material support for terrorism is that it be ‘knowing,’" the letter states. 

The attorneys general said the four outlets have a responsibility to fully vet potential hires and ensure they have no connections to terrorist organizations before putting them on the payroll and embedding them during armed conflicts. 

"If your outlet’s current hiring practices led you to give material support to terrorists, you must change these policies going forward. Otherwise, we must assume any future support of terrorist organizations by your stringers, correspondents, contractors, and similar employees is knowing behavior," they wrote. 

The state AGs pointed to a recent letter sent by a bipartisan group of lawmakers to Reuters asking "how its journalist knew to be available for the October 7 attack," and called on the outlet to address whether it had prior knowledge of the attack or if one of the organization’s journalists had been in contact with Hamas before the attack. 

The letter went on to argue that the issue of providing material support to terrorist organizations is not new, pointing to a watchdog group telling the AP five years ago that "one of its journalists worked for the Hamas-affiliated Quds TV." While The New York Times, the AGs continued, published an op-ed in 2020 penned by Taliban deputy leader Sirajuddin Haqqani. 

"Mr. Haqqani himself is on the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control Sanctions List. Did the Times pay for that piece? If so, whom did it pay? Was that payment consistent with federal and State laws? These questions are still unanswered," the letter stated.

When The "People In Charge" Have To Answer To THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE

leefang  |  As the Israel-Hamas war began to heat up in late October, Courtney Carey, a Dublin-based employee of the Israeli website building company Wix, posted the Irish words “SAOIRSE DON PHALAISTIN” -- “Freedom for Palestine” -- on her LinkedIn page.

Within 24 hours of Carey’s LinkedIn post appearing, Alon Ozer, a Miami-based investor, took a screenshot of the post and shared it with a WhatsApp group of more than 300 like-minded investors, tech executives, activists, and at least one senior Israeli government official. Ozer took care to note that Carey worked for Wix.

Oded Hermoni, a tech journalist-turned-venture capitalist, piped up to assure everyone that Batsheva Moshe, Wix’s general manager for Israel and a member of the group chat, had been “on it since Sat[urday] night.”

Moshe then chimed in to assure her peers that the issue with Carey had been “taken care of since it was published.”

“I believe there will be an announcement soon re our reaction,” she added.

Wix terminated Carey the following day.

Moshe was apparently aware of Carey’s LinkedIn comments, which also included a denunciation of the “Zionist ideology which promotes an exclusivist state,” before Ozer flagged them in the WhatsApp group. 

The interaction nonetheless reflects the heightened coordination among pro-Israel forces in Silicon Valley and the global tech sector.

Following Hamas’s terror attack on Oct. 7, a loose network of pro-Israel investors, tech executives, activists, and Israeli government officials have stepped up their efforts to combat the slightest deviations from the pro-Israel script.

The WhatsApp group where Carey’s case came up serves as a kind of switchboard where the various independent players in Silicon Valley’s pro-Israel community swap ideas, identify enemies, and collaborate on ways to defend Israel in the media, academia, and the business world. 

We have obtained access to thousands of the group’s WhatsApp messages dating back to mid-October, and an intricate spreadsheet where group participants request and claim tasks ranging from social media responses to IDF support shipments. Separately, we have viewed a number of video meetings charting best practices for “hasbara” – an Israeli term of art for “public diplomacy” whose detractors see it as a euphemism for propaganda -- that offer a window into Israel’s public-relations war that is not limited to the tech sector.

In addition to Moshe, the WhatsApp group includes prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Jeff Epstein – a former CFO of Oracle – and Andy David, a diplomat-cum-venture capitalist who also serves as the Israeli foreign ministry’s head of innovation, entrepreneurship, and tech.

The WhatsApp group, officially named the “J-Ventures Global Kibbutz Group,” is a project of J-Ventures, a U.S.-Israeli investment fund that calls itself a “capitalist kibbutz” -- a reference to Israel’s historically collectivist farming communities. Hermoni, the WhatsApp group’s founder, is a managing director of J-Ventures, and David, the foreign ministry official, is internally listed by J-Ventures as a member of the "PR/Political Team" that makes decisions on messaging and lobbying.

OK Kirby If You Say So...,

timesofisrael  |  ‘Charbu Darbu’ by Ness Ve Stilla promises to rain fire on Israel’s enemies, capturing the righteous indignation felt by Israeli youth during the Israel-Hamas war.

A new song became a number-one hit in Israel over the last week, an angry hip-hop war anthem by the duo “Ness Ve Stilla,” whose real names are Nesia Levy and Dor Soroker.

The song’s title, “Charbu Darbu,” comes from Syrian Arabic and means literally “swords and strikes.” In Hebrew slang, it is a reference to raining hell on one’s opponent — which is what the rappers promise the IDF will do to Hamas. 

With a minimalist beat produced by Stilla (Soroker) and quick cuts of the rappers in various urban and desert landscapes, the two-and-a-half-minute video is in many ways typical of Israeli hip-hop.

Lyrically, though, the piece encapsulates a feeling of righteous fury that has been prevalent in Israel since the October 7 atrocities.

“Left, right, left, how is it that the whole country is in uniform from Galilee to Eilat… We’ve brought the entire army against you and we swear there won’t be forgiveness, sons of Amalek,” Stilla raps, comparing Hamas to the Biblical enemy of the Israelites who must be obliterated.

The chorus is a roll call of the IDF’s most storied combat units (“Golani, Givati, Air Force, Navy, Commandos!”) and ends with the phrase “All the IDF units are coming to ‘Charbu Darbu’ on your heads, oy oy.”

Ness lends a feminine counterpoint to Stilla’s bravado, but her verses are equally militant. After complimenting all the men in uniform for being handsome, she raps, “For mom and dad, all my friends are at the front, for grandma and grandma, let’s write names on the bombs, for the children of the Gaza envelope.”

The song ends with an up-tempo section where the rappers promise to “X out” their enemies. They call them out by name, including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and Mohammed Deif, head of Hamas’s military wing and one of the likely masterminds behind the October 7 massacres, saying in Arabic, “Every dog gets his day.”

The rappers also include in their list of enemies Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa and Mia Khalifa, prominent Western celebrities who expressed support for the Palestinian cause shortly after the war began.

Since its release about a week ago, “Charbu Darbu” has become the number-one song in Israel on YouTube, Spotify and other streaming platforms. The duo’s PR team told The Times of Israel that based on the feedback they have received, the song was currently the most popular song in the country.

Friday, December 08, 2023

The Deliberative Branch Of Congress Told Biden To "Go Fuck Yourself"

zerohedge  |   On Wednesday President Joe Biden suggested that if Congress doesn't send Ukraine more money, now, it may 'embolden' Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade a NATO ally, which would precipitate "American troops fighting Russian troops."

The threat was not persuasive.

In response, Senate Republicans channeled Elon Musk (G...F...Y...), blocking Biden's $111 emergency supplemental package that would also include aid for Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and a smattering of border funding.

The Senate voted 49-51, failing to reach the 60-vote threshold required to allow the proposal to come up for consideration. Notably, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted against the measure, while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) flipped his vote to 'no' to preserve the option of revisiting the bill at a later date.

President Joe Biden has raised the possibility of "American troops fighting Russian troops" in a speech urging Congress to put aside "petty, partisan, angry politics" which is holding up his multibillion-dollar aid package for Ukraine. He said that he's willing to make "significant compromises" with Republicans but that it's they who've been unwilling to back down from their "extreme" demands. 

"This cannot wait," Biden stressed in the televised remarks from the White House. “Congress needs to pass supplemental funding for Ukraine before they break for the holiday recess. Simple as that. Frankly, I think it’s stunning that we’ve gotten to this point in the first place. Republicans in Congress are willing to give Putin the greatest gift he can hope for and abandon our global leadership."

"I’m willing to make significant compromises on the border. We need to fix the broken border system. It is broken. And thus far I’ve gotten no response," Biden pleaded. He made the speech after speaking with G7 leaders, who are reportedly alarmed that US funding to Ukraine is set to run dry in a mere three weeks.

"If we walk away, how many of our European friends are going to continue to fund and at what rates are they going to continue to fund?" he posed.

And that's when the fear-mongering really kicked into overdrive. He went so far as to say that if Ukraine's defense isn't funded, this will lead to the country being steamrolled by the Russian military machine, and an emboldened Putin will then seek to gobble up more territory.

 

 

When Big Heads Collide....,

thinkingman  |   Have you ever heard of the Olmecs? They’re the earliest known civilization in Mesoamerica. Not much is known about them, ...