Almost everyone resembles to be savvy travelers when you travel on road. At the primary stage, it is often quite common to make some mistakes. Here you will find 21 traveling tips that will make you the world’s smart Traveller.
The following infographic is courtesy of ViewTraveling.com:
Netflix is rumored to be considering doing a series based upon “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 political satire black comedy film that satirizes the Cold War fears of a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, Hollywood has been looking for a new theme that is top of mind with the movie going audience.
According to unnamed Hollywood investors, “Today the fears of a nuclear war have been replaced with the fear of being beheaded, particularly if you are the President of the United States, a Republican, Christian, Jew, Hindu, atheist, gay or just a non-Muslim. We see this as an opportunity to create a new reality show for our growing progressive audience. Fear sells at the box office!”
The Netflix original series working title, according to anonymous sources, is “Dr. Mohammed: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Came to Love the Beheadings.”
The series will be directed by former comedian and Hollywood favorite Kathy Griffin. The cast will be actors whose roles portray members of the Democratic National Campaign Committee (DNCC), Antifa, Muslim Brotherhood and Black Lives Matter. According to anonymous sources, ISIS (a Muslim Brotherhood organization) will be sending its displaced migrant members to be interviewed for the action sequences in the new Netflix series “Beheadings.”
This Netflix original series will be the comeback of Harvey Weinstein since the #MeToo movement. Mr. Weinstein said in a press release:
I’m glad to be back in the saddle again, no pun intended.
I am aroused and excited, no pun intended, to be working on/with Kathy Griffin and Netflix on this new series that raises beheadings to an art form. It is time for us to stop worrying about being beheaded.
As a heterosexual, white, migrant Jew it is important to understand how our Muslim brothers and sisters have used the beheading of others to express their deepest feeling and emotions. We will be using volunteers to be beheaded.
In this Netflix original series heads will actually roll, no pun intended.
Netflix in a statement noted:
The well know character Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellers in the original film How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, will be played by former British citizen, and member of ISIS, Mohammed Emwazi (a.k.a. Jihadi John, John the Beatle). John will play the role of Dr. Muhammad (founder of the Religion of Peace) in the series.
We are seeking Christians, Jews, Hindus, Confusions, and other non-Muslims for parts in our original series Beheadings. If you are looking for a part and making film history just call 1-800-BEHEADME. These positions are temporary and only require kneeling and bowing your head.
Any current or former employee of the White House is welcome to apply for this once in a lifetime opportunity.
Ms. Griffin, the Director of Beheadings, noted, “This is my comeback, my opportunity to show the world how a head in the hand is worth two in the White House.”
Al Hayat Media Center noted:
This gives our brothers and sisters a new lease on life. After being driven out of Syria and Iraq, we are looking for new opportunities to use our unique skills. We cannot think of a better place than Hollywood, California. Allah Akbar!
President Trump tweeted:
Fake news.
EDITORS NOTE: This political satire column originally appeared in the beheadings wanted section of the ISIS magazine Dabiq.
Click on the image to order Confronting The Deception by Tabitha Korol.
While reading Tabitha Korol’s new book “Confronting The Deception: Inflamed by 9/11, fired up by eight bad years” I came across this paragraph about Islamic jihad (holy war):
Jihad’s purpose is establishing Allah’s kingdom on earth, and expropriating booty and land. Defeat and death bring everlasting Paradise and spiritual benefit. The complete imperialism, Islam seeks to erase the past so the vanquished are culturally disemboweled, with nothing left of religion or relics of historical importance, their support system destabilized. [Emphasis added]
I suddenly realized that America is fading away much like H.G. Well’s the invisible man.
Korol does a masterful job in explaining how all of America’s cultural systems are being transformed. Korol notes:
Academia, from kindergarten to university, is disinviting valuable speakers, and turning patriots into globalists. Curricula, textbooks and teaching methods are being changed, inspiration quenched, and competition discouraged by an equalizing grading system, engineering the children’s psyche to produce a compliant, nonproductive generation.
“Confronting the Deception” challenges the insidious propaganda with arguments supported by irrefutable facts.
Korol exposes the gravity of the threats we face with copious links to Koranic quotes, historic accounts, and trustworthy documentation not available in any other single source, and reveals the mentality that creates the jihadi terrorist, in order to help the reader to navigate the distortions that are peddled as truths.
Deception lays out the modus operandi of Islam and the Left.
We are being indoctrinated to disrespect and dislike America, to devalue our freedoms, and to cast aside the advancements we’ve made since our founding. The “Eight Years” have brought us an increase in divisiveness, intolerance, street violence, rapes, honor killings and FGM, combined with a drip-feed of false narratives to direct the thinking of the gullible. This book is an attempt to redress our endangered world by Confronting the Deception.
Korol concludes “Confronting the Deception” with this warning:
With the end of the eight Obama years came the hope that we might quickly overcome and repair the damage done to America. Instead, we are being subjected to an intensifying twofold attack. If there is a design, as many suspect, then these twin jaws are evidently engineered to crush the substance of our culture.
While Islam slowly operates to grind down our current generation by intimidation and indoctrination, in academia, the media, and religious institutions, the Left has grown obsessed with destroying our core institutions; demolishing our historic monuments; erasing our common sense and freedoms; redefining the family unit, the sexes, our laws and policies; dismembering our language, and dividing our citizens into separate antagonistic camps. The danger of multiculturalism is that it intimidates the generous heart to suspend all intelligent discernment. Islamophobia curbs our inalienable rights and makes us submissive; and, as Aristotle warned, “the worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” We are in danger of losing the best of what we have achieved. [Emphasis added]
This is a must read book for those who want to understand what is happening to America. We can only hope that there are those valiant warriors who will deliver us from these evils.
It takes a lot of courage for a president to target almost a quarter of the federal budget for reform in an election year.
But this is exactly what President Donald Trump is doing with his executive order, “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility.”
We’re now spending more than $700 billion per year on low-income assistance, which is more than we are spending on our national defense. And there are plenty of reasons to believe this spending is inefficient, wasteful, and counterproductive.
Over the last half-century, some $22 trillion has been spent on anti-poverty programs and yet the percentage of poor in this nation remains unchanged. And it is not only a matter of the percentage staying the same but also that the people and families who are born poor stay that way.
The “Better Way” report produced by the House speaker’s office in 2016 reported that 34 percent of those born and raised in the bottom fifth of the income scale remain there all their lives.
The point has often been made that the greatest charitable gesture is teaching those in need to help themselves.
This principle defines the president’s reforms to our anti-poverty programs and spending. Let’s make sure that every dollar spent goes to those truly in need and that those dollars are spent to maximize the likelihood that the recipients will get on their feet and become independent, productive, income-earning citizens.
The executive order directs federal agencies to review the some 80 federal anti-poverty programs, consolidate where there is redundancy and overlap, and look to reform by applying the principles of hard work and self-sufficiency.
Needless to say, the usual left-wing megaphones, those that can’t tell the difference between compassion and spending billions of other people’s dollars, have wasted no time to go on attack.
The headline from the Southern Poverty Law Center screams, “Trump’s executive order on work requirements punishes low-income people for being poor.”
Calling the executive order “heartless,” the Southern Poverty Law Center rejects the premise that there are those receiving benefits from these programs who could work but don’t.
However, Robert Doar of the American Enterprise Institute reports that there are almost 20 million working-age Americans receiving benefits under Medicaid and food stamps who don’t work.
The Better Way report notes that “44 percent of work-capable households using federal rental assistance report no annual income from wages.”
But it’s not just about work requirements.
Vital to this reform project is moving programs out of Washington’s grasp and into the administrations at the state and local levels. Assistance programs need humanity and flexibility. This can only be done locally. There’s no way an army of bureaucrats in Washington can develop and implement programs for 50 million needy individuals that can properly recognize what unique individuals need to move out of poverty.
Assistance programs need to promote and embody those principles that go hand in hand with prosperity—ownership, investment, savings, and personal freedom and responsibility.
According to the Better Way report, almost 10 million Americans have no bank account and another 25 million have an account but get financial services outside of the banking system.
When I was a young woman on welfare, I saw the destruction that occurs when assistance programs penalize work, marriage, and saving, as was the case with the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. Subsequently, this was reformed and transformed with great success to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
We can’t go on spending hundreds of billions of dollars of limited taxpayer funds on programs that may have been conceived with sincerity and compassion but don’t work.
Trump deserves credit for exercising the courage and vision to move to fix what is broken in our anti-poverty programs. It is vital for the poor and vital for the nation.
Star Parker is a columnist for The Daily Signal and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. Twitter: @UrbanCURE.
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Ivy Imboden, originally from Anchorage, Alaska, clutching a warm drink after arriving at a new tent established for the homeless in San Diego, California. (Photo: John Gastaldo/Zuma Press/Newscom). The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now
Comrades! This brief instructional video will put you on the cutting edge in the gun debate. No more will you need to fear facts and logic because now they’re on your side! Master the basics of this video, and even lifetime members of the NRA will be silly putty in your hands.
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EDITORS NOTE: This political satire column by Komissar al-Blogunov originally appeared on The Peoples Cube.
About half the American people do not believe the mainstream media tell the truth. They believe the media are more interested in promoting their left-wing views than reporting the truth.
I am, I note with sadness, a member of that half.
Here is but one more example: The New York Times best-seller list.
As a writer (who, for the record, had a previous book on that list), I have long known it isn’t a best-seller list, and I don’t pay attention to it. But I paid attention last week to see if my recently published book, which opened up on Amazon as the second best-selling book in America, was on the list. It wasn’t.
The book, “The Rational Bible: Exodus,” the first volume of a five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible (the Torah), was No. 2 in nonfiction on The Wall Street Journal best-seller list; No. 2 on the Publishers Weekly nonfiction best-seller list; No. 1 on Ingram, the largest book wholesaler in the country; and, according to Nielsen BookScan, the organization that tracks 75 to 85 percent of book sales, No. 2 in hardcover nonfiction.
In fact, according to BookScan, it outsold 14 of the 15 books on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. But again, it is not even listed on The New York Times best-seller list.
I was told years ago that the Times best-seller list almost never includes overtly religious books. I believe it but cannot prove it. I was told the Times doesn’t even monitor Christian bookstore sales (though many Christians have bought my commentary, few of its sales thus far have been through Christian bookstores).
At least as suggestive of bias is that the No. 1 hardcover nonfiction book on The Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly lists, “12 Rules for Life” by Jordan B. Peterson, is also not listed on The New York Times best-seller list.
Is it a coincidence that Peterson is a conservative, and that I am a conservative and my book is a Bible commentary?
In order to think it is mere coincidence, you have to believe The New York Times more than reality itself, which about half the country seems to. While the Times occasionally lists conservative books and, very rarely, religious books, after comparing the list and the BookScan list, the Observer concluded in 2016:
If you happen to work for The New York Times and have a book out, your book is more likely to stay on the list longer and have a higher ranking than books not written by New York Times employees. … If you happen to have written a conservative-political-leaning book, you’re more likely to be ranked lower and drop off the list faster than those books with a more liberal political slant.
In other words, The New York Times best-seller list is not a best-seller list—which even The New York Times once acknowledged.
In the early 1980s, William Peter Blatty, author of the monumental best-seller “The Exorcist,” sued The New York Times for only listing his novel on the list one time, even though it sold in the millions. In defending itself before the court, as reported by Book History, the annual journal of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (Penn State University Press), the Times said, “The list did not purport to be an objective compilation of information but instead was an editorial product.”
Yet when asked last year about the announcement by Regnery Publishing (my book publisher) that it was no longer referencing The New York Times in any author publicity, New York Times spokesman Jordan Cohen told the Associated Press: “Our goal is that the lists reflect authentic best sellers. The political views of authors have no bearing on our rankings, and the notion that we would manipulate the lists to exclude books for political reasons is simply ludicrous.”
According to The New York Times, it is “simply ludicrous” to question why a conservative book and a religious book, which are the No. 1 and No. 2 books, respectively, on every best-seller list other than that of The New York Times, do not even appear on the Times list.
Here’s a different view: What is “simply ludicrous” is wondering why the “fake news” charge against mainstream American media resonates with half the American people.
Dennis Prager is a columnist for The Daily Signal, nationally syndicated radio host, and creator of PragerU. Twitter: @DennisPrager.
It’s official: Andrew McCabe lied.
The new report from the Justice Department inspector general concludes that McCabe, the former FBI deputy director, lied to then-FBI Director James Comey, to other FBI agents, and to officials of the Office of the Inspector General. Some of those lies came when McCabe was under oath.
What did he lie about? Unauthorized disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The information was leaked to a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
The inspector general has completed his work. The question now is, will the Justice Department prosecute McCabe? Or, put another way: Will the FBI and the Justice Department follow the same rules they apply to members of the public who lie to a federal agent?
Remember, the only charge brought against Gen. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was lying to the FBI, a felony. And Flynn wasn’t even under oath when he supposedly lied to the FBI.
Given that recent history, failure to prosecute McCabe would tell the American people that officers of the Justice Department and the FBI think they are above the law.
According to the inspector general’s report, “law enforcement sensitive information” appeared in an Oct. 30, 2016, Wall Street Journal article titled “FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe.” Until that time, the FBI had publicly refused to confirm that an investigation into the Clinton Foundation was underway.
Despite that official stance, the inspector general determined, McCabe told his special counsel and an assistant director in the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs that they could give information about the probe to Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett.
In particular, McCabe told them to disclose a phone call he had received in August from the Justice Department’s principal associate deputy attorney general. The report does not identify the person by name, but the principal associate deputy attorney general at the time was apparently Matthew Axelrod.
McCabe claims that the official called him and “expressed concerns about the FBI agents taking overt steps in the [Clinton Foundation] Investigation during the presidential campaign.” According to McCabe, he pushed back, asking, “Are you telling me to shut down a validly predicated investigation?”
McCabe told the inspector general the conversation was “very dramatic” and that he had never had a similar confrontation with a high-level Justice Department official “in his entire FBI career.”
The way The Wall Street Journal reported this was that a “senior Justice Department official” called McCabe “to voice his displeasure” that the FBI was “still openly pursuing the Clinton Foundation probe during the election season.” The “Justice Department official was ‘very pissed off,’ according to one person close to McCabe, and pressed him to explain why the FBI was still chasing a matter the department considered dormant.”
What spurred McCabe’s disclosure, according to the inspector general, was a prior Wall Street Journal story “that questioned McCabe’s impartiality in overseeing FBI investigations involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.” This was due, according to that Oct. 23 story, to the fact that a PAC run by longtime Clinton friend and associate Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D-Va., had donated nearly $675,000 to the unsuccessful 2015 state Senate campaign of McCabe’s wife.
Friday’s report from the inspector general presents a series of findings. It concludes that McCabe lied when he told Comey that he had not authorized the disclosures to The Wall Street Journal and did not know who did. He repeated that lie when questioned by agents from the FBI’s Inspection Division and again when questioned by the Office of the Inspector General.
Only in a second round of questioning by the inspector general did McCabe finally acknowledge that “he had authorized the disclosure to [The Wall Street Journal].”
The inspector general notes that McCabe could have authorized the disclosure of the existence of the Clinton Foundation investigation if it were in the “public interest.” However, the report concludes, that was not his motivation.
Instead, it finds, McCabe violated FBI policy because the disclosure was “designed to advance his personal interest at the expense of department leadership.” Therefore, what he did “constituted misconduct.”
The inspector general cannot prosecute. All he can do is provide his office’s report to the FBI “for such action as it deems appropriate.” And so we wait to see what, if anything, is next.
Flynn was charged with lying to FBI agents about conversations with the Russian ambassador. Lying to a federal agent is a felony, even if—like Flynn—you are not under oath at the time. It is clear from the inspector general’s report that McCabe lied to federal agents multiple times, including while under oath.
Will he be prosecuted as Flynn was? It seems as if the FBI and the Justice Department have no choice—unless they believe that their colleagues are somehow above the law.
And if the Department of Justice no longer believes in the rule of law, the whole notion of America is turned on its head.
Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research. Twitter: @HvonSpakovsky.
RELATED ARTICLE: How 4 Big Comey Claims Stack Up to His Senate Testimony
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe testifing before the Senate intelligence committee on May 11, 2017. (Photo: Jeff Malet Photography/Newscom)
We’ve seen this before, just on a smaller scale.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is following the infamous playbook of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who managed to convict an innocent man while the guilty one walked free — and Fitzgerald knew it.
They both went after and indicted people who either did not commit any crimes or were indicted for things unrelated to the purposes for which they were appointed. Both were in hotly political environments with supportive media. Both were open-ended investigations. And, it seems, both were hungry for convictions for the sake of convictions — not truth or justice.
Fitzgerald is the special counsel appointed in 2003 to investigate the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame (who it turns out was a desk jockey in the D.C. area, not an undercover agent who was endangered by the outing as the media liked to imply.) Nonetheless, there was a leak that identified her.
At the time it was thought this was done by the Bush Administration, and specifically Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, in retaliation for Plame’s husband writing an op-ed in the New York Times saying he doubted Saddam Hussein had bought uranium in Africa before the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The purchase, along with other intelligence, was part of the case for invading Iraq. Two weeks later, Plame was outed.
Fitzpatrick was appointed to find out who did it, and soon fixed his eyes on Cheney and his staff, for what appeared to be political reasons. In the end, he wrongly identified the leaker as Scooter Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff. Libby’s crime? Not being the leaker, but providing false or misleading information to the special counsel, for which he actually went to prison.
So we can draw a lot of comparisons between Mueller’s current investigation and Fitzgerald’s four-year-long investigation — it can take a long time to get someone to even accidentally contradict themselves. The one comparison that is not there is that Fitzgerald had an actual crime he was investigating in the illegal uncovering of a CIA agent, whereas Mueller’s original appointment was to investigate collusion, which is not a crime. So from the start, there was more legitimacy to the Fitzgerald appointment than to Mueller’s.
However, both prosecutors are following a similar path.
Fitzgerald’s long investigation came up with one indictment, that against Libby. Libby was not charged with leaking, the actual crime Fitzgerald was investigating, but with a “process” crime of misleading the FBI. That is exactly what Mueller charged Gen. Michael Flynn with. Not Russian collusion or really anything related to Russian collusion, but lying to the FBI (or not correctly remembering) about the timing of an event for which there was also no underlying crime. So it was a clever form of entrapment.
The tragedy of the Libby case is that apparently, Libby didn’t even lie or mislead. Much of his convictions were based on the testimony of New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who testified that she believed it was Libby who told her about Plame. Her testimony was the key to convicting Libby. However, after Miller read Plame’s autobiography “Fair Game” she realized that she had been misled by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
In April 2015, Miller published an autobiography in which she, “now concluded, after reviewing old notes, that her testimony about her conversations with Libby that led to his conviction may have been false … Had I misconstrued my notes? Had Fitzgerald’s questions about whether my use of the word Bureau meant the FBI steered me in the wrong direction?”
She realized that she was wrong and her testimony “made no sense.” However, her recantation meant nothing to Libby’s conviction during Obama’s presidency and was roundly ignored by the media.
In the same way, Flynn pleaded guilty to making statements inconsistent with tapped and taped conversations he had with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak during the transition. However, Flynn’s conversation was legal. He was not charged with the content being illegal, or even having the conversation with Kislyak. He was charged with giving the FBI the wrong time for the conversation, and part of his reason for the plea was because the investigation was bankrupting him personally. He has had to sell his house to pay his legal bills. But why was the FBI even questioning Flynn when they had the entire transcript of a conversation that they knew contained nothing illegal, and that conversation took place legally? Because they were looking to entrap him in a process crime, just as Libby was entrapped.
Worse yet, we later found out that it was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage that actually outed Plame. Apparently he did accidentally in a long interview about the intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Many news outlets thought they knew it was Armitage, not Libby. Fitzgerald also knew it was Armitage, but was going after Libby for lying under oath, and asked Armitage not to go public with the information. But Armitage, who had testified to the grand jury that indicted Libby, asked Fitzgerald again if he could go public and on Sept. 5, 2006, Fitzgerald relented. Two days later, Armitage admitted publicly to being the source in the CIA leak.
On March 6, 2007, six months later, a jury convicted Libby and to this day many people think that Libby was the one who leaked.
That’s why Trump rightly pardoned Libby, although even pardon seems like the wrong word.
Both investigations were also broad and open-ended, meaning the prosecutors could go after about anyone or anything. We see that with Libby, who had nothing to do with the outing and was charged relating to nothing to do with it.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was so negligent drafting the appointment of Mueller that he failed to limit the investigation in either scope or time. Totally open-ended. It appears that Mueller can investigated Trump until he dies. This resulted in Paul Manafort, former chairman of the Trump presidential campaign, being indicted for alleged financial crimes that happened years before he was on team Trump. Both the Flynn and Manafort charges have zippo to do with Russian collusion, just as Libby’s had nothing to do with leaking Plame’s identity — and he didn’t even do what he was charged with.
Another comparison is that they were and are both all political. There is no search for truth or justice. There is a search for political targets. Fitzgerald knew it was Armitage who leaked, but he accepted it was just an accident, but after four years, he had to show something. And so Libby.
But look at the comments from Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame on the pardon of Libby:
Wilson told the Huffington Post:
“Libby’s problem was with the Justice Department. He was indicted, tried and convicted on obstruction of justice and perjury charges for basically violating the national security of the United States of America…Now he’s being pardoned for it, which suggests of course that Mr. Trump is willing to allow people to violate the essence of our defense structure, our national security, our intelligence apparatus and essentially get away with it.”
Plame told MSNBC that “you can commit crimes against national security and you will be pardoned.”
There is no way that Wilson and Plame don’t know that Libby neither lied nor was the leaker. They are both misleading, shall we say, to make Trump look bad just as Wilson maneuvered with the New York Times to make Bush look bad.
In the same way, we see Mueller’s investigation going far and wide to get indictments for people that have nothing to do with the original charge he was given. And they all make Trump look bad.
Finally, the man who had oversight of Patrick Fitzgerald was none other than James Comey, a close friend and confidant of Mueller.
None of these comparisons bode well for actually getting to the truth of Russian collusion. Just as Fitzgerald let the actual leaker off the hook, it seems Mueller is not interested in the actual colluder, which resides in the Clinton campaign, DNC and the Russian dossier.
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act. Please join The Revolutionary Act’s YouTube Channel.
Note: This column was written and uploaded prior to the U.S. attack on Syria late last night [April 13, 2018]. The questions it raises about further developing just war theory, however, remain current – now perhaps even more than earlier. – Robert Royal
Over the centuries, “just war theory” was proposed and developed by a series of great thinkers – Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suárez, Hugo Grotius, and others.
In the past, what they had in common, aside from the intention of combating the incessant plague of wars, was a standard vision of what wars were like: namely, some nation with a formidable military force threatened another nation(s). The latter would have to deliberate whether their military resources were adequate, or whether non-military means might remove the threat; or whether, as a last resort, military action would protect them or make things worse.
The principles “just-war” theorists emphasized include: the urgency of the threat, whether negotiation might still be feasible, identification of the proper authority to declare and initiate war in various forms of government, whether the consequences of war might be worse than surrender, and also ethical considerations regarding lethal weaponry, treatment of war prisoners, the harm of noncombatants, etc.
A vision of massed armies, sometimes with allies, facing down and conquering other armies on the battlefield, was common to all these theorists – even in World War I and World War II, with the addition of powerful infantry and explosives, air power, submarines, and other products of modern engineering.
But the scenario began to change sharply during and after WWII – nuclear arsenals, guerilla warfare, tremendously lethal chemical and biological agents – in short, the possibility of mayhem in quantities and intensities never previously conceived. If Julius Caesar or Ghengis Khan had had the atomic bomb, they might have hesitated using it to conquer territories they planned to occupy.
Just this week, after discussing abandonment of Syria “very soon,” President Trump threatened to launch missiles against Syria, because of the deadly chemical gas attack on civilians in the rebel-held town of Douma. Russia’s foreign minister claims that a “foreign intelligence agency” staged this attack, and a member of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry points to evidence that rebels trying to oust Syrian president Bashar al-Assad were responsible.
It is indeed strange that Assad, who has been winning the war against rebels, would invite international retaliation at this time. But the United States along with allies Britain and France are all but convinced that Assad ordered the attack, and that that there must be a response both to punish Syria and deter future attacks of a similar nature.
But it’s precisely here that the kinds of “prudential judgments” (which were never very easy even in simpler times) have become quite complicated. An initial question in just-war theory would be: is there any clear threat to our country? There is obviously no direct threat to the U.S. from Syria. But in fact an attack on Syria, allied with Russia, could trigger a new cold war, or worse.
President Trump launched a successful missile attack on Syria in April, 2017, and is apparently confident that this could be repeated without enraging the Russian Bear. But such acts of brinkmanship not only challenge Constitutional war-making powers, but “throw away the script” on justifying wars. And deposing Assad, instead of improving the situation, could pave the way for a takeover by ISIS or Islamist rebels, certainly no improvement over Assad.
And such complexities are not limited to the Middle East. Traditional just war theory seems impotent in dealing with several contemporary realities and is desperately in need of further development if it is to continue to provide guidance to nations and their leaders. For example, here are some situations needing careful analysis:
- Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), in which two nuclear powers in a war could easily annihilate each other – or even bring about a “doomsday” state of affairs if other nuclear powers entered the combat – still prevails. Is there any contemporary crisis so dire that would justify a nuclear power to make a preemptive nuclear strike on a rival?
- Thousands of terrorist “cells” sprouting up throughout the world. Could any conventional army, navy or air force be effective against these?
- Widespread use of “human shields” – missile launchers set up in hospitals, explosive caches stored in schools, terrorists setting up shop in cities surrounded by innocent noncombatants, and refusing to allow any noncombatant to exit from the city. What could justify destroying a hospital occupied by terrorists manning artillery?
- Possible accidents as “the wrong button is pushed,” and war begins willy-nilly. The recent incident in Hawaii reminds us that similar incidents, which could have sealed the fate of the world, have happened in the past.
- Insane and/or suicidal leaders of nuclear-armed states, who don’t care about mutual annihilation. MAD is based on the supposition that world leaders are rational actors and not misanthropic and suicidal.
- Jihadists under the influence of religious beliefs bent on converting the world, by force, if necessary.
In an ideal world, we might seek:
- Universal nuclear disarmament and absolute prohibition of proliferation – although this is difficult to imagine after what happened to Muammar Gaddafi who obligingly disarmed in 2003.
- Fail-safe international intelligence systems capable of foiling electronically transmitted plans for attack.
- Refusal of any further building of mosques unless reciprocity in building of churches prevails in the Middle East. The prevailing lack of reciprocity has facilitated importation of violent religious operatives under the cover of uni-directional “religious freedom.”
But several more practical and less idealistic strategies might be:
- “Surgical” bombing of nuclear reactors in “rogue states,” as Israel did to Iraq in 1981 and to Syria in 2007– which would require incredibly accurate intelligence resources.
- Identification and destruction of all chemical and biological arsenals, as well as dismantling arsenals capable of producing a high-altitude nuclear explosion, causing an “electro-magnetic pulse,” which would disable electrical resources throughout nations.
- A nuclear “Marshall Plan” offering aid in transforming dangerous nuclear facilities to peaceful nuclear power plants – thus advancing the Biblical prophecy about “swords” being transformed into plowshares (Is. 2:4).
- Taking a cue from the targeted assassination of Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, the assassination of the most demonic leaders, who both enslave their populations and threaten destruction of the United States.
According to the famous Doomsday Clock published by the Atomic Scientists, mankind is now at “two minutes before midnight.” So those of us who dream of world peace feel a certain urgency. If this is not a starkly exaggerated urgency, it may be time to think “outside the box.”
Recent diplomatic developments indicate that an unprecedented meeting between President Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un may take place in May. The president has insisted that denuclearization is a precondition for such a meeting, and Kim seems to accept that precondition, saying, “The ‘issue of denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula can be resolved’ if the U.S. and South Korea respond ‘with goodwill’.”
After so many failed diplomatic efforts at removing one of the most serious threats to world peace, can we attach any realistic hope to such a meeting?
Kim is not in the vulnerable position that Gaddafi was in disarming. He has China at his back and South Korea open to reunification. Turning “swords into plowshares” in that area is not completely unimaginable – although certainly “outside the box.”
But actually, the most “impractical” strategy for world peace would probably be the most effective: I am thinking of the battle of Lepanto in 1571 in which a small Christian fleet defeated a Turkish Armada, as well as the nationwide Rosary crusade in Austria in 1955, leading to the withdrawal of Soviet armies. In other words, a worldwide Rosary Crusade. But I know, I know – this is too far “outside the box.”
Howard Kainz, Emeritus Professor at Marquette University, is the author of twenty-five books on German philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, and religion, and over a hundred articles in scholarly journals, print magazines, online magazines, and op-eds. He was a recipient of an NEH fellowship for 1977-8, and Fulbright fellowships in Germany for 1980-1 and 1987-8. His website is at Marquette University.
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of a mourning man in Douma Syria [Photo by Mohammed Hassan/UPI]. © 2018 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.
I had the pleasure of being on PIJN News to discuss how Facebook censors those that do not fit its mold.
During the first two segments I discussed with Dr. Chaps how Facebook uses its algorithms to censor. The last segment is a comparison of two films “Paul – Apostle of Christ” and “Chappaquiddick.”
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Paul, Apostle of Christ: Ancient Rome is a grim reflection of Today’s World
In the world today we hear about divisions among humanity. There are those who want to promote these divisions. These include, but are not limited to, the following categories of divisions:
Each of these are imposed divisions. These divisions are promoted to create inequity and inequality. Divisions are used to gain power over others. Many create a division when there is none. Division is used to start wars, oppress one group, pit one group against another group. Division is the most powerful tool ever created.
The way one begins to create divisiveness is to use a wedge.
We read about wedge issues every day via the media, in newspapers, on television, in our neighborhood and within families. Wedge issues are used in politics, business, by organizations and even between religions.
Merriam-Webster defines a wedge as:
a : something (such as a policy) causing a breach or separationb : something used to initiate an action or development
Answer: Satan
Bodie Hodge in Answers in Genesis writes:
The first use of the name Satan is found in 1 Chronicles 21:1; chronologically, Job, which was written much earlier, surpasses this. Satan is found throughout Job 1 and 2. Satan literally means “adversary” in Hebrew.
Another name appears in the Old Testament in the King James Version:
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! (Isaiah 14:12; KJV).
The first time Satan used his wedge was in the Garden of Eden when he separated man from his Creator. Satan, in the form of a serpent, caused “The Fall” of Adam and Eve. From that time on mankind had knowledge of good and evil.
What did mankind forfeit when Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of wisdom? Life everlasting.
As Genesis 3 reads:
22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
What did mankind gain from eating the fruit from the tree of wisdom? Pain and suffering.
Answer: The Truth
Knowing the truth is tantamount in the fight against Satan’s wedge. It is important to use mankind’s wisdom to know the truth when Satan uses his wedge to divide us socially, politically, economically, culturally, religiously and sexually.
Satan’s wedges are the absurdities one reads, hears and learns.
Ayn Rand wrote:
“The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other – until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.”
Uncontested absurdities have become today’s slogans. Below is list a top 20 uncontested absurdities of today:
Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Satan lives so long as he can drive a wedge between you and me.
The Southern California News Group and other Digital First newspapers have compiled a database tracking citizens’ acceptance of the marijuana industry voted into existence by Proposition 64 in 2016 and implemented as of January 1, 2018. Prop 64 made it legal to possess up to an ounce of marijuana and to grow it at home, but the law also gives California cities and counties the right to restrict or ban pot businesses within their boundaries.
So far, fewer than one-third of the state’s 482 cities and only 18 of its counties allow any kind of marijuana business to operate within their borders.
The database scores each jurisdiction according to how lenient they are in allowing pot commerce. To get above 96 points, jurisdictions must allow licenses for medical and recreational marijuana sales, cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, and testing. To get 100 points they must also allow marijuana lounges or festivals, meaning use in public, which nearly all recreational states ban.
More than five dozen cities score zero on the scale, banning all pot businesses, not allowing residents to grow outdoors for personal use, and requiring residents to obtain a permit to grow indoors for personal use.
The database can be accessed from this article. Read “Database of Marijuana Rules from Every City and County in California Shows Slow Acceptance of Prop. 64” here.
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It’s a Zuckerberg zoo on Capitol Hill again today, where the Facebook CEO sat down for his second day of questioning before dozens of House and Senate members. By far the most anticipated hearings of the year, the 33-year-old billionaire was grilled on everything from the company’s privacy policy to its position on free speech. After all, if Facebook is unfriending anyone lately, it’s conservatives!
Just this year, the company announced a change to its algorithm that seems to have radically affected conservative news feeds. The Western Journal’s analysis points to a huge rise in liberal site promotion, while conservative publishers are losing an average of roughly 14 percent of their Facebook traffic. Coincidence? Not hardly. While the company insists it’s all part of their “news curation” strategy, Hill members agree: it’s more like code for political censorship. As George Upper explains:
This algorithm change, intentional or not, has in effect censored conservative viewpoints on the largest social media platform in the world. This change has ramifications that, in the short-term, are causing conservative publishers to downsize or fold up completely, and in the long-term could swing elections in the United States and around the world toward liberal politicians and policies.
Facebook has argued that the company is “taking a step to try to define what ‘quality news’ looks like and give that a boost.” But who defines what “quality news” is? Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) made that exact point in his questioning of the tech mogul yesterday.
Mr. Zuckerberg, I will say there are a great many Americans who I think are deeply concerned that that Facebook and other tech companies are engaged in a pervasive pattern of bias and political censorship. There have been numerous instances with Facebook in May of 2016, Gizmodo reported that Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news, including stories about CPAC, including stories about Mitt Romney, including stories about the Lois Lerner IRS scandal, including stories about Glenn Beck.
In addition to that, Facebook has initially shut down the Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day page, has blocked a post of a Fox News reporter, has blocked over two dozen Catholic pages, and most recently blocked Trump supporters Diamond and Silk’s page, with 1.2 million Facebook followers, after determining their content and brand were, quote, ‘unsafe to the community. To a great many Americans that appears to be a pervasive pattern of political bias. Do you agree with that assessment?
Zuckerberg replied that he understood where the concern is coming from since “Facebook in the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place.” He told the group that he’s tried to make sure “that we do not have any bias in the work that we do.” Unfortunately, not very effectively. After insisting that no Republicans had not been marginalized by his new algorithms, the House’s Fred Upton (R-Mich.) read a campaign announcement from a conservative candidate for state senate in his home state that mentioned being pro-life and pro-Second Amendment. Facebook said it violated its standards. Zuckerberg faltered, suggesting that it might be an error, and they would follow up.
Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebr.) continued the theme, zeroing in on life. “There are some really passionately-held views about the abortion issue on this panel today. Can you imagine a world where you might decide that pro-lifers are prohibited from speaking about their abortion views on your content — on your platform?” Zuckerberg replied that he “would not want that to be the case,” only to go on to explain how artificial intelligence (A.I.) is proactively looking at content, which, as even he admits, will “create massive questions.” No one, Sasse continued, would want the Facebook CEO to leave and think “there’s sort of a unified view in the Congress that you should be moving toward policing more and more and more speech.” On the contrary, he continued, “Sex traffickers and human traffickers have no place on your platform. But vigorous debates? Adults need to engage in vigorous debates.” But, he shook his head:
I think you guys have a hard challenge. I think regulation over time will have a hard challenge. And you’re a private company so you can make policies that may be less than First Amendment full spirit embracing in my view. But I worry about that. I worry about a world where when you go from violent groups to hate speech in a hurry — and one of your responses to the opening questions, you may decide, or Facebook may decide, it needs to police a whole bunch of speech, that I think America might be better off not having policed by one company that has a really big and powerful platform. Can you define hate speech?
“I think that this is a really hard question,” Zuckerberg replied. “And I think it’s one of the reasons why we struggle with it. There are certain definitions that — that we — that we have around, you know, calling for violence or…” He didn’t finish. Unfortunately, he didn’t need to. As conservatives know, Facebook — just like Google, YouTube, Twitter, and others — have increasingly filtered out or shut down conversations on anything from pro-life movie trailers to its employees’ pro-Trump chatroom.
At the end of the day, what most Americans want is transparency. If Facebook holds itself out as a public service, a virtual public square, then they can’t have an algorithmic bouncer kicking people out just because they disagree with their political or moral views. As Senator Sasse pointed out, Facebook may be a private entity, but it’s virtually monopolizing the public square. And with that responsibility comes a higher expectation that civil conversations will be allowed. Just because Zuckerberg – or his leadership team — disagrees with someone doesn’t meant he should shut them down. This growing understanding that Big Tech is picking and choosing who can speak in the virtual public square may help explain why there’s been a jump in the number of Americans who want to see more government regulation. And in the end, that isn’t the answer. Responsible ownership is.
Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.
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When Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress Tuesday and Wednesday he will have plenty of explaining to do to answer a torrent of criticism that has been leveled at his company in recent weeks.
We’ve compiled a list of 10 of the most important questions we think lawmakers should ask Zuckerberg when he is scheduled to testify at a joint meeting of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on Tuesday and then before the House Commerce and Energy Committee on Wednesday. We list these below—but first, here’s some background.
Facebook’s handling of its users’ personal data has sparked privacy concerns as well as questions about how others—including political campaigns—have used that data.
Zuckerberg was invited to testify before Congress after multiple sources reported that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica gained access to as many as 87 million Facebook profiles. Cambridge Analytica allegedly used that information improperly after it was hired by the Donald Trump presidential campaign. This raises two questions.
First, what information did Cambridge Analytica acquire and how did it come by that information? Zuckerberg has indicated publicly that he knows the answers to these questions, so Congress should have no trouble sorting that out.
Cambridge Analytica used the information to craft sophisticated, targeted political ads. And that raises the second—and far more interesting—question: Did Cambridge Analytica’s actions constitute a novel use of Facebook user information, or is this precisely how the social media company intends the data to be used by its paying customers?
What members of Congress and the general public need to keep in mind is that nothing is free. While individuals who use Facebook don’t have to pay for it, Facebook makes money—and lots of it—using their information.
Facebook’s net income was nearly $16 billion last year. The company sells advertising to commercial clients seeking to target Facebook users based on profiles derived from those users’ online activities.
That very same ability—to identify and reach users most likely to be receptive to a client’s product or service—was valuable not just to the Trump campaign, but also to President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election effort. Indeed, it was the Obama campaign that pioneered the use of such data to win elections.
In light of this, here are 10 of the most important questions that we suggest lawmakers ask Zuckerberg when he appears before Congress:
1. Mr. Zuckerberg, you recently said: “At Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use.” If users of your platform are not the source of your income, who is?
2. Specifically, what services do you provide to your paying customers and how much access do you give them to the data of Facebook users?
3. How do political campaigns leverage your services, and what are your rules governing campaign-sponsored advertisements and access to individual Facebook user data? What will be the impact of new rules you announced Friday to require people to reveal their identities and verify their location before they are allowed to buy political or “issue” ads?
4. Carol Davidsen, the director of data integration and media analytics for President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, said: “Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized what we were doing.” She noted that “they [Facebook] were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.” Did Facebook, in fact, let the Obama campaign use Facebook data in ways that were outside of the company’s normal and acceptable use standards? If so, why? Who at Facebook made this decision?
5. Did the Mitt Romney presidential campaign receive access to the same information and company expertise provided to the Obama campaign? If not, why not? Who at Facebook made this decision?
6. You and other Facebook executives tell users that “we do not sell your data.” Are you asserting that all marketing and targeting data that is sold to commercial customers is anonymized and generalized so that no individual Facebook user can be specifically targeted or marketed to?
7. Doesn’t the Obama campaign’s use of your information to identify and target individual so-called “persuadables” on Facebook contradict the above claim?
8. Did the way that the Obama campaign used Facebook’s data influence your decision to change your data use policies in 2014? If so, how?
9. Does Facebook now, or has it ever, deliberately collected the content of users’ phone calls and/or messages via any of your company’s applications or services? If so, what have you done with that data?
10. Why have you suggested that the government may need to regulate you and other tech companies? Why don’t you simply adopt the practices you believe are necessary to protect the privacy of your users without requiring government coercion?
Modern technology is changing how we communicate. Those changes bring major advantages, but they also raise serious questions. One of those questions is: How much privacy do users of a social media platform like Facebook have a right to expect when they post personal information to share with their families, their friends, and the world at large?
Internet companies owe their customers straightforward answers to those questions. But government regulation should be a last resort. For now, calls for more such regulation are premature. We must first examine the extent and nature of the problem, and then assess the pros and cons of all possible solutions.
Originally published by Fox News.
Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research. Twitter: @HvonSpakovsky.
Klon Kitchen is senior fellow for technology, national security and science policy at The Heritage Foundation. Twitter: @klonkitchen.
With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.
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If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.
This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.
We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.
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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is by Brian Snyder/Reuters/Newscom.