Some global hotspots

This will just be a quick list of links to some important events taking place beyond the American presidential primary sideshow:

On Turkey, watch carefully, as Erdogan’s Turkey wobbles:

On China:

On Saudi Arabia:

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“I really don’t even know what I mean”

“I really don’t even know what I mean” (minute 4:40)….  yep, that about sums it all up!

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The great twit

Trump the “great” twit or tweet or perhaps it’s retweeter….  Hey someone said and pass it on – that’s so “presidential”, but here it is at minute 1:31, with his new sleaze attack on Marco Rubio’s citizenship:

And the “powederedwigsociety”, the original source of the tweet, has a copyright of 2015, although it’s hard to discern who put that website up or runs it, but that didn’t stop Donald Trump from retweeting their garbage.

 

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“Do your own homework”

Donald Trump, the politician, operates just like the Clintons, which should prove very interesting if he actually does hijack the GOP nomination.  He is a fraud!  His supporters can cough up his carefully crafted book, his sounding tough, he’s a successful businessman and reality TV star and I am sticking to he is a fraud, a con-man, as much a liar as Hillary Clinton, but most of all at heart he’s a petty bully.  Hillary is a very dangerous bully, because she is a woman and women like her (sociopaths) will stop at nothing to get what they want (refer back to The Woman’s Way of War).

Frankly, if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the best America can do for candidates, we deserve to be relegated to laughingstock status on the world stage.  Trump is no match for Putin, that’s for sure, but even worse he is no match for Hillary Clinton and besides, I still believe in time my suspicions that Trump hired dem political operatives in the beginning, who are operating in the shadows will prove to be true.  No political operatives who really want to win the general election would allow their candidate to intentionally drive his/her negative ratings sky-high and encourage the vile, outrageous outbursts that characterize Trump’s campaign style.  He won Iowa and South Carolina in the GOP primary, in a crowded field, but with way less than 50% of the GOP  primary voters supporting him.  His negative polling consistently is higher than Hillary Clinton’s, often polling above 60% and once the parties have their candidates selected (or a coronation, as the case may be for Hillary), the Clintons will unleash their dirt on Trump and bury him.

Here’s some new oddities in Trump’s sideshow antic out of Iowa, where he held that veteran’s fundraiser to divert attention away from the FOX News debate he was boycotting, because FOX would not let Trump control their choice of moderators.  He tried to strong-arm a cable network based on his “feelings” that he wasn’t “being treated fairly.”

So, what happened to the money raised for veterans?  Well, some has been disbursed to some veterans groups according to this Weekly Standard report, but their report highlights some warning bells that his Trump Foundation operates much like the Clinton Foundation.  When Michael Warren, the reporter emailed the Trump Foundation with questions about the fundraiser this is what happened:

“On Thursday, I contacted the Donald J. Trump Foundation by email with a few questions about how the $6 million had been or was being disbursed. Five minutes later, I received a phone call from Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s presidential campaign manager. Lewandowski said a list of the recipients had been made public and that more recipients were being added all the time. How much had those recipients received? Lewandowski couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say. As a non-profit organization, he said, the Trump Foundation would release all the required details of its disbursements at the end of the fiscal year. To find out before then, he said, I’d have to contact the recipients themselves.

“The list is publicly available,” he said. “You can do your homework and ask the veterans’ organizations.”

Why wouldn’t the Trump Foundation want to publicize how much it had donated? (Especially given the fact that in recent years, Trump’s charity organization had given more money to the Clinton Foundationthan to veterans.) And why, when asking about the Foundation’s disbursements, had a representative of the campaign called? With no other options, however, I took Lewandowki’s advice.”

http://www.weeklystandard.com/some-vet-groups-still-waiting-for-trump-foundation-checks/article/2001154

Why indeed did Trump’s campaign manager respond to questions about the Trump Foundation?  That melding of the “charity” with the “political operations” is vintage Clinton and as it turns out, the way Trump does business too.  There’s also some big pharmaceutical executive who rents space in Trump Tower, whom some recipients believe is connected to the Trump Foundation:

“”We found out like everybody else did, when the Trump Foundation put the list up on the website,” said Kerri Childress of the Fisher House Foundation, one of the groups on the Trump Foundation’s list. “And frankly we haven’t heard anything since.”

Childress says the Fisher House Foundation has yet to receive a donation, though she was quick to add that it’s not uncommon for pledged donations to take weeks or months to actually be disbursed. Neither has the Task Force Dagger Foundation received a check, says managing director Keith David. “We did receive a check from the Stewart J. Rahr Foundation, and they share the same floor with the Trump Foundation,” David adds. Rahr, a pharmaceutical executive-turned-Manhattan-playboy, is friends with Trump and rents office space in the Trump Tower. It’s not clear whether or not there is a relationship between Trump’s and Rahr’s foundations.

Another vets group, Operation Homefront, posted on its Facebook page that it received a $50,000 donation Monday from the Rahr Foundation, which the group says they “understand is made in connection with Donald Trump.” Beyond that, says Operation Homefront spokesman Aaron Taylor, they don’t know much about it.”

http://www.weeklystandard.com/some-vet-groups-still-waiting-for-trump-foundation-checks/article/2001154

The similarities between Donald Trump and his friends, the Clintons,  just keep multiplying, so if it ends up that Trump too hired dem political operatives to help him “win,” don’t act surprised!  Sure wish we could track the phone traffic between Trump, some key Clinton sewer rats, and then Bill Clinton…  Oh, to be a fly on the wall….

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For the girls, mostly

The cathedral theme in my previous post brought to mind this video I saw circulating on facebook recently.  Warning to men, agnostics, atheists and even those who hate schmaltzy stuff,  this is a female-empowerment, feel-good message with a strong religious message tossed in too:

 

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The sound of angels’ wings

Moving away from politics for a change, here’s a very interesting article from The Atlantic, “Hearing the Lost Sounds of Antiquity,” explaining how researchers are melding cutting edge technology with historical research to recreate the sounds from history, even sounds from the fourth century:

“History is mostly silent to us now.

Thousands of years of human stories have been told in paintings, and sculptures, and sheet music, and text; in shards and shells, and other fragments of things left behind. But because the history of recorded sound is only 160 years old, the original sounds of the distant past are lost to time.”

The article explains the technology used to recreate the lost sounds from history, but also offers some exciting ways the researchers believe their work could lead to new ways to understand history, beyond reading dry old histories or studying crumbling architecture:

“The data showing what happened to the chirp in each part of the church is fed to a computer, which then registers the impulse response for the unique space. And here’s where it gets really interesting: Once you have a building’s impulse response, you can apply it to a recording captured in another space and make it sound as though that recording had taken place in the original building.

“So you can take chanters with the original [Byzantine era] music and put them in a studio that has no acoustics,” Kyriakakis said. “They can sing a chant, and then we can process it … and all of the sudden we have performances happening in medieval structures. It’s like time travel to me.”

The implications go far beyond the ancient world. Kyriakakis, Donahue, and Gerstel imagine creating a catalog of impulse responses for historic buildings, then recreating the sounds of those structures in what would be, essentially, a museum of lost sound. With an integration of virtual reality technology, visitors could even get the experience of how the sound would have changed as people moved through a given space. (Theoretically, they could share these recordings online, too, but both Kyriakakis and Donahue say it’s harder to render the sound authentically over headphones. They talk more about the idea in a USC Engineering podcast.)

The museum they’re envisioning would include churches, like the ones they’ve already mapped, but other structures, too—everything from ancient theaters and the Parthenon (an experiment that would also require mathematical modeling to bring back the missing part) to modern baseball stadiums and train stations.  “If we open up this idea,” Kyriakakis told me, “there’s no limit as to what can be measured and recreated.””

Now, consider researchers in a free society devoting energy to something that benefits everyone, while in other parts of the world we have a retrogression taking place where all the worst horrors of barbarism and depravity are embraced by religious zealots and their view on preserving history is to loot and then destroy ancient sites:

“So why is Isis blowing to pieces the greatest artefacts of ancient history in Syria and Iraq? The archeologist Joanne Farchakh has a unique answer to a unique crime. First, Isis sells the statues, stone faces and frescoes that international dealers demand. It takes the money, hands over the relics – and blows up the temples and buildings they come from to conceal the evidence of what has been looted.”

Okay, I promised this wasn’t going to delve into politics, so let me end here before launching into a foreign policy rant and let’s think about how these researchers recreating sounds from antiquity have actually come up with a sound in ancient cathedrals referred to as:

““They also discovered something that we call slap echo,” Donahue added, “when you have walls fairly close to one another and the frequencies go back and forth. It goes ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta. [In the ancient world,] they described it as the sound of angels’ wings.””

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/byzantine-angel-wings/470076/

The sound of angels’ wings…….. now that’s pretty amazing!

 

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Who are the real Trump political advisers?

The Pope jumped into the American political race yesterday, so while the Vatican is trying to clarify the Pope’s comment about Trump’s always talking about building a wall, as not being Christian, and offering the building bridges between people as the proper Christian way, lest we get sidetracked, some things struck me as odd, that go well beyond the Pope’s statement and timing to interject himself into US politics.

First, the Pope gave Trump more oxygen to get back to his original appeal, from which he has drifted considerably in recent months – that America’s national security is threatened by uncontrolled borders and illegal immigration.  A “wall” and or whatever means are necessary to secure our borders is a primary duty of our federal government, one both political parties have abdicated for decades.

Second, the Pope allowed for Trump to monopolize the media coverage and news cycle heading into a critical GOP primary in South Carolina, on Saturday.

Who knows why the Pope gave Trump more attention, when a Trump loss in SC could speed up a Trump demise, which assuredly the Pope would welcome, as one who obviously aligns with leftist South American social justice politics.

As to Trump’s response, one thing struck me as very odd.  For once Trump came out and appeared to be reading prepared remarks and seemed at great pains to keep his emotions in check.  I wondered who wrote those remarks for him, because the remarks seemed very tempered compared to Trump’s usual rants and rambling spiels.  I’d love to know who Trump’s closest political advisers really are?  They aren’t his campaign manager or his snotty campaign spokeswoman, that’s for sure.  Once again, who are the real Trump political advisers?

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When new information comes to light

For a long while, I believed the analysis that our going into Iraq fueled the radical Islamic fervor and set the conditions for ISIS to form, but here’s a new look from David French, “The Rise of ISIS Predates the Fall of Saddam Hussein,”
that dismantles my view and it’s worth studying.  More information should prod us to reconsider our previous conclusions, especially on complex geopolitical issues.  French quotes extensively from Kyle Orton’s New York Times piece, “How Saddam Gave Us ISIS”, so please read both articles.  French begins:

“The New York Times has published a necessary corrective to those who view the invasion of Iraq as essentially Year Zero in the Middle East — the origin point for all the calamities that followed. Have you heard that ISIS is George Bush’s fault? Think again. Writing in the Times, Kyle Orton properly attributes the rise of ISIS in Iraq to cultural and religious forces that long pre-dated the American invasion of Iraq. It turns out that Iraq was no more immune to increased radicalization than any other Middle Eastern state, and Saddam reacted in part by embracing the new religiosity”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431380/rise-isis-predates-fall-saddam-hussein

Jay Nordlinger added, “Saddam and Fille,” which also expands on French’s piece.

Definitely worth taking time to reassess what we think we know about the history of Iraq and ISIS, because sometimes those things that Rumsfeld dubbed “known knowns” are shown to be incorrect, making it imperative to be willing to reassess when new information comes to light.

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XOXO

Happy Valentine’s Day!  Hopefully, I’ll come up with some original posts soon and in fact, although there’s one in my draft’s folder  already written on “Wholesale Public Corruption,” it’s probably best to wait to post that one until a few more bits of evidence pan out conclusively.  All of my Messages of mhere story did happen in 1998 and early 1999 – that story is the truth!  The larger mystery of why so much effort and money was expended to shut me up, over my comments posted at the online, public, Excite message boards on the Clinton impeachment scandal, has taken longer to unravel.  I believe it goes to something deeper than just the Clintons, as stated in recent posts, hence my post “Wholesale Public Corruption”.

Until the moment arrives when I decide to post that, let me express my deep sorrow and also deep fear at hearing of Justice Scalia’s passing yesterday.  Another blow to The Constitution being able to survive the forces at play to “fundamentally transform America,” it took only hours before the partisan forces, on both sides, took to the media to lob their attacks at each other. They didn’t even have the respect to let his body be laid to rest, before unleashing this new front in their ongoing battle, really just a smokescreen to dupe the American people, whom they think of as mindless idiots or low information voters. While Americans angrily join these manufactured  partisan battles, attacking each other, these power-brokers in America keep consolidating their own power among their elite group, where membership in either political party is by invitation only.  So, enough of poltiics today, instead here’s another fascinating historical tidbit from The American Minute:

People often sign Valentine cards with X’s and O’s.

The Greek name for Christ, Χριστό, begins with the letter “X” which in Greek is called “Chi.”

“X” became a common abbreviation for the name Christ.

This is why Christ-mas is abbreviated as X-mas.

In Medieval times, the “X” was called the Christ’s Cross, or “Criss-Cross.”

The “Criss-Cross Row” was the way colonial school children learned the alphabet, where they would start at the X and say “May Christ’s Cross grant me speed (success)” and then proceed to recite the 26 letters.

It reminded students that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”

“Mortals ne’er shall know
More than contained of old the Chris’-cross row.”

The Christ’s Cross was a form of a written oath.

Similar to the ancient practice of swearing upon a Bible, saying “so help me God,” then kissing the Bible, people would sign a document with or next to the Christ’s Cross to swear before God they would keep the agreement, then kiss it to show sincerity.

This practice has come down to us as “sign at the X”, or saying “I swear, cross my heart.”

This is the origin of signing a Valentines’ card with an “X” to express a pledge before God to be faithful, and an “O” to seal the pledge with a kiss of sincerity.

So, we still get the kisses part, the O,  of XO correct; it was the X meaning hugs that is not.  You can read the entire American Minute post at: http://www.americanminute.com/index.php

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It’s about FREEDOM!

Here’s another important American Minute by Bill Federer, which I have linked under American Inspirations on my home page:

    Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the exact same day, FEBRUARY 12, 1809, but their lives had opposite effects.

Lincoln is best known for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and freeing millions of slaves, claiming all men are created equal, as he stated in his Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863:

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Darwin’s theory of evolution claims men were not created, instead they evolved, and men are not equal, as some are more evolved than others.

In 1859, Darwin published “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”

Origin of Species was read and reread by Karl Marx, who used ‘survival of the fittest’ to formulate the ‘dialectical conflict’, where labor and community organizers would create social chaos enabling communist dictators to usurp power.

Karl Marx wrote to Lassalle, January 16, 1861:

“Darwin’s book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural selection for the class struggle in history.”

Karl Marx dedicated his book, Das Kapital, to Darwin, inscribing that he was a “sincere admirer” in Darwin’s personal copy.

Darwin also influenced Engels, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and others whose totalitarian regimes killed and enslaved millions.

Lincoln’s last act in office was to put on all National Coin the motto, “In God We Trust.”

Darwin’s theory has been used to deny a Creator God.

A year and a half into the Civil War, Lincoln told his Cabinet, September 22, 1862, as reported Treasury Secretary Salmon Portland Chase:

“The time for the annunciation of the emancipation policy can no longer be delayed. Public sentiment will sustain it, many of my warmest friends and supporters demand it, and I have promised God that I will do it.”

When asked by Secretary Chase to explain, Lincoln replied:

“I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee were driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves.”

Lincoln, the first Republican President, addressed the Indiana Regiment, March 17, 1865:

“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”

Abraham Lincoln stated August 14, 1862:

“It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels he is worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.”

Lincoln wrote to H.L. Pierce, April 6, 1859:

“This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God, cannot long retain it.”

Lincoln stated in his Second Inaugural, March 4, 1865, just 41 days before his assassination:

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God…He now wills to remove, and that He gives…this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came,

shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?…’the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”

Lincoln stated in his Second Annual Message, December 1, 1862:

“In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free… We shall nobly save – or meanly lose – the last, best hope of earth… The way is plain…which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”

In contrast, Darwin published his Origin of Species, 1859, and Descent of Man, 1871, in which he wrote:

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated…

We civilized men, on the other hand…build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick…

Thus the weak members propagate their kind. No one who had attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man…

Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed…”

Darwin continued:

“Civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world…

The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

Social Darwinism was used to justify racism, such as the Supreme Court opinion in Dred Scott v Sanford, 1856, written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who was appointed by Democrat President Jackson:

“Slaves had…been regarded as beings of an inferior order…so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

Darwin’s theory influenced Margaret Sanger, who promoted “eugenics” and “forced sterilization” to eliminate inferior races. Sanger founded a 501(c)3 called Planned Parenthood.

Margaret Sanger wrote in her autobiography of addressing a Klu Klux Klan rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey in 1938. She wrote in her book Pivot of Civilization, 1922, calling for the:

“Elimination of ‘human weeds’…overrunning the human garden; for the cessation of ‘charity’ because it prolonged the lives of the unfit; for the segregation of ‘morons, misfits, and the maladjusted’; and for the sterilization of genetically inferior races.”

Margaret Sangers’ magazine The Birth Control Review published in April 1933. an article by Nazi Party member Ernst Rüdin, one of the ‘fathers of racial hygiene.’

Ernst Rüdin, advocated eliminating those with hereditary defects – ‘untermensch’- from the human gene pool, which led to millions dying in the holocaust.

Darwin influenced Joseph Stalin, as recounted in the book Landmarks in the Life of Stalin:

“At a very early age, while still a pupil in the ecclesiastical school, Comrade Stalin developed a critical mind and revolutionary sentiments. He began to read Darwin and became an atheist.”

Joseph Stalin stated of the Soviet state-controlled ‘common core’ type indoctrination:

“There are three things that we do to disabuse the minds of our seminary students. We had to teach them the age of the earth, the geologic origin, and Darwin’s teachings.”

Stalin used intentional famines, forced labor and executions to eliminate over 7 million Ukrainians.

Stalin’s notorious 1937 order No. 00447 called for the mass execution and exile of “socially harmful elements” as “enemies of the people.”

Estimates of deaths during the Stalinist period range from 8 to 61 million.

Darwin influenced Mao Zedong who stated:

“Chinese socialism is founded upon Darwin and the theory of evolution.”

Mao Zedong’s atheistic Communist Party policies resulted in an estimated 80 million deaths.

Pol Pot’s communist Khmer Rouge killed 2 million Cambodians in his ‘killing fields’ between 1975 and 1979.

With Darwinist-utilitarian logic, Pol Pot stated:

‘Keeping you is no gain. Losing you is no loss.’

In the article “Nationalism in the Slave States of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany and now, China” (Dec. 23, 2010), Lev Navrozov, an immigrant from the U.S.S.R. who worked with the Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, stated:

“Once upon a time it was assumed that a slave should fulfill the slave-owners’ order as efficiently as a machine. But after Stalin, Hitler, and Mao…slaves must relive the order, and hence scream in their delight to kill and be killed.”

These genocides resulted from ascribing an unequal value to human life.

The statement in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “a new nation…dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” was echoed by other Presidents.

Franklin D. Roosevelt stated in his United Flag Day broadcast, June 14, 1942:

“The belief in man, created free, in the image of God – is the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face.”

Harry S Truman stated in his Inaugural Address, January 20, 1949:

“We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God. From this faith we will not be moved.”

Ronald Reagan stated to the citizens of Hambach, Germany, May 6, 1985:

“Each of us…is made…in the image of God, the image of God the Creator.”

Woodrow Wilson stated in Denver, Colorado, on the 300th anniversary of King James Bible, May 7, 1911:

“The finger of God that moves upon the face of the nations is against every man that plots the nation’s downfall or the people’s deceit…

These men are…groping and staggering in their ignorance to a fearful day of judgment; and…the glad day…will come in which men will sing by the host of the coming of the Lord in His glory,

and all of those will be forgotten – those little, scheming, contemptible creatures that forgot the image of God and tried to frame men according to the image of the evil one.”

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