Limit the number of Marijuana Dispensaries in Pinellas County

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On Tuesday, April 25th, the Pinellas Board of County Commissioners will consider an ordinance to regulate marijuana cultivation sites and dispensaries. We have analyzed the ordinance and are concerned with the number of dispensaries it would allow.

The proposed ordinance says that it would allow each approved licensee with the state to have 2 dispensaries in unincorporated Pinellas County; this would mean 14 to 16 shops initially with more to come as additional licenses are granted by the state.

The Marijuana Policy Group research paper suggests the optimal number of dispensaries depends upon the number of patients likely to register, the local area population, and the required scale of operation for dispensaries to remain profitable. The average resident ratio among similar states (with laws similar to Amendment 2) is one dispensary per 67,222 residents (1:67,222). This ratio is found to be “optimal” by the MPG for cities an d counties in Florida.

Approximately 280,848 reside within unincorporated Pinellas County. Going by the numbers suggested by the industry, 4 dispensaries in unincorporated Pinellas would be preferred. Other counties in Florida have adopted one dispensary per 100,000 residents.

We respectfully suggest that the commission amend the ordinance to reflect language used by other Florida municipalities to reduce the number of allowed marijuana dispensaries and urge you to

Please click on the Action Alert button below and send a letter to the commissioners supporting a reduced number of dispensaries.

action alert

Where is the outrage over the millions of Americans ejected from their jobs?

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On April 10, 2017, The New York Times reported: United Airlines Passenger Is Dragged From an Overbooked Flight.

A followup article included this paragraph:

The video of Dr. David Dao, 69, of Kentucky, being bloodied as he was pulled off the flight in order to make room for four United employees has ignited conversation and outrage around the world. The three Chicago aviation police officers who removed Dr. Dao from the plane have been placed on administrative leave.

You may wonder what this news report has to do with the enforcement of America’s immigration laws and the way that our immigration laws have become politicized through the use of a false and pernicious narrative.

While people around the United States and, indeed, around the world, were angered to see a paying passenger physically yanked out of his seat and dragged down the airliner’s aisle and removed from the airliner, so that a “deadheading” United Airlines crew member could take his seat, the media did not delve into the political orientations of those who were upset by this report or the troubling images.

There were no polls asking if political “Liberals” or political “Conservatives” felt differently about the story.

All Americans, irrespective of political orientation, should be similarly united in being outraged about the failures of effective immigration law enforcement that have failed to protect the lives and livelihoods of Americans.

To understand my perspectives, I ask that you consider that today advocates for secure borders and effective but fair immigration law enforcement are generally identified as a position adopted by “extreme Conservatives,” while the media generally identifies advocates for Sanctuary Cities, massive amnesty programs for unknown millions of illegal aliens, as being “Liberals.”

Metaphorically, because of multiple failures of the immigration system and immigration policies promulgated by both the federal government as well as local governments, over the past several decades, millions of Americans have been, in effect, yanked from their desks at their jobs and displaced by foreign workers. This is because corporations were able to game the visa process whereby high-tech American workers have been displaced by foreign workers whose only claim to being “exceptional” is their willingness to work for exceptionally substandard wages under exceptionally substandard conditions — and by foreign students who have been granted authorization for Optional Practical Training (OPT) by USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services).

The Democratic Party of decades ago was seen as the party of working Americans.  Democratic leaders falsely still insist that they represent hard-working Americans. It is the Democratic Party, however, that has aligned itself with the push to displace American workers with foreign workers.

Today the Democratic Party exploits the economic principle of “Supply and demand” to seek to achieve “wage equality” by forcing highly skilled American workers to compete with ever increasing numbers of lower paid foreign workers to lower wages.

We will delve into this betrayal shortly but the obvious question is why would any American worker support immigration policies that undermine national security, public safety and result in the decimation of the middle class and opportunities for poor Americans, especially among the minority communities to climb the economic ladder out of poverty?

Where is the righteous indignation over this?

America’s immigration laws are utterly and completely blind about race, religion and ethnicity.  Our immigration laws were enacted to prevent the entry and continued presence, in the United States, whose presence poses a threat to national security, public safety and public health and the overall wellbeing of America and Americans.

Members of the news media accused United Airlines of failing to respect the rights of its passengers, yet ignore the far greater insult and damage caused to hard-working Americans by their corporate employers who have not only displaced them by hiring foreign workers, but demand that these loyal, experienced and talented American workers train their foreign replacements if they want to receive their severance packages.

This insanity was reported in the January 25, 2016 NY Times report, “Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers With Immigrants” and in the March 19, 2017 CBS News program “60 Minutes” important investigative report on “How the H-1B visas have been abused since the beginning.”

Nevertheless the overall narrative provided by the majority of news media has focused on the rights of foreign workers, whether they are legally or illegally working in the United States while ignoring the impact this has on Americans.

There is a question that asks “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound?”

Perhaps a more appropriate question is, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, how would anyone know that the tree fell in the first place?”

constrution workersWhen journalists fail to report on the plight of American workers and their families, the majority of Americans have no idea about this outrageous betrayal.

The only reason that so many people have become outraged by the forceful ejection of the American Airlines passenger was because the media reported on it.

These failures of the immigration system, it must be noted are, in reality, Immigration Failure – By Design.

Consider that mayors of Sanctuary Cities and other duplicitous politicians have pushed for providing illegal aliens with driver’s licenses because they openly state, these aliens need licenses so that they can safely drive to their jobs- jobs that under our immigration laws, they are  prohibited from doing.

Meanwhile the mainstream media supports these efforts to undermine American workers by referring to foes of effective immigration law enforcement as being “Pro-Immigrant” while branding anyone who would dare suggest that America’s borders must be secured and our immigration laws be enforced from within the interior of the United States as being “Anti-Immigrant.”

There have been precious few reports about how greedy corporate executives have not only shown contempt for American workers but have made it impossible for many Americans, especially young kids living in poverty to succeed by getting entry level jobs to help build a resume to ultimately enter mainstream economic America.
The unholy alliance of politicians, media and such anti-American groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) could not care less about the plight of these American and lawful immigrant workers, and their struggling families, who have forfeited their livelihoods and opportunities for success to foreign workers.

In point of fact, it is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporate interest groups that have been behind the push to import a virtually limitless army of foreign workers to drive down wages and working conditions.

Not long ago I wrote an article, “The Wage Equality Deception: The veiled attack on the middle class” in which I contrasted the position of then U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions and Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank on the issue of H-1B visas.

Sessions was crystal clear on how these visas undermine middle class American workers either costing them their jobs or their wages.

Greenspan, on the other hand, stated in his prepared testimony when he testified before a hearing on Comprehensive Immigration Reform conducted by the Senate Immigration Subcommittee on April 30, 2009, at the behest of Subcommittee Chairman Chuck Schumer, had the unmitigated chutzpah of referring to American middle class workers as the “Privileged elite.”

Greenspan advocated for the importation of ever increasing numbers of foreign high-tech workers a means of reducing the “wage premiums” paid to high-skilled American workers to ultimately, “… reduce at least some of our income inequality.”

Finally, with the exception of the occasional tragedy of a victims such as Kate Steinle who was, in a manner of speaking, brutally yanked from the bosom of her loving family when she was shot to death by an illegal alien with an extensive criminal history who had been previously deported from the United States multiple times, the thousands of other such senseless deaths each year, attributed to illegal aliens goes largely unreported.

The terror attacks of 9/11, the Boston Marathon attack of April 2013 and the San Bernardino terror massacre all resulted from failures of the immigration system.  Yet many journalists downplayed or flat-out ignored the obvious nexus between those attacks and the failures of the immigration system.

However, when any Americans speak out against the failures of the immigration system, the media and politicians have turned to the tactic of intimidation by bullying and accusing these understandably concerned Americans of being racists, xenophobes, haters and nativists.

The false narrative that has been carefully crafted over a period of decades by the open-borders/immigration anarchists and has become a part of the political landscape to the point where sensible Americans have been convinced of the outrageous lie that the sensible and necessary immigration policies of the Trump administration should be equated with racism, xenophobia and bigotry.

The only bigotry to be found in the immigration debate is the anti-American bigotry of the immigration anarchists.

If anyone should be yanked out of their seats, it is the politicians who refuse to make Americans workers and their families their true priority.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine.

CONTEXT: Our Own Neville Chamberlains Led to North Korea Crisis

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Appeasing a genocidal madman, allowing him access to terrifically destructive war machines, has never gone well for the world.

It’s just that the peace-desiring countries of the world never learn this difficult truth, too often cuddling up with the seductive mistress of appeasement. This is the precise dynamic we see after multiple U.S. presidents tried to stop North Korean dictator Kim Il Jung by giving him everything he wanted in return for empty promises. Now he has numerous nuclear weapons and increasingly sophisticated missiles. And appeasement may no longer be possible. The bill is coming due, as it always does.

This also happened a few generations ago when the progressive Prime Minister of Great Britain, Stanley Baldwin, spent more than a decade ignoring the rise of an obscure German corporal and his National Socialist Party and pretended everything was going great with the defeated German nation. Baldwin thought highly of himself and what he was accomplishing even while Germany spiraled into the economic abyss due to the unwise Treaty of Versailles after WWI.

The corporal gained control of not only his party, but slowly the government of Germany until, through a series of machinations, he named himself the Fuehrer, the almighty leader of a rapidly strengthening Germany — equivalent to Kim Il Jung

Baldwin deposited this growing menace in the lap of his successor, the better known for the wrong reason Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was also arrogant, progressive in his ideals and sold out on the concept that talk and international paperwork could appease a monster.

Chamberlain met with Herr Adolph Hitler repeatedly, each time he gave Hitler more of what the Nazi leader demanded by agreement or by inaction: remilitarizing the Rhineland with what was essentially a police force; the Austrian putsch; taking the Sudetenland; overrunning the Czech Republic; and vastly rebuilding the Wehrmacht in violation of the treaty. There was not even a military response as Germany and the Soviet Union carved up Poland, even though the allies were bound by treaty.

After one meeting with Herr Hitler in Munich, Chamberlain returned to London waving a paper and declaring proudly, and now infamously, “We have peace in our time.” Keep this picture in your mind.

France also just watched, but she was shell, worn out by WWI and wracked by Communists. Britain had the power to stop Hitler again and again and again — early on at virtually no cost, and then with increasing costs but still short of world war.

Instead, they appeased over multiple prime ministers. Only Winston Churchill clearly saw the threat and faced it head on. By the time he became Prime Minister, the cost of stopping Hitler had risen to horrific.

Baldwin and Chamberlain, meet Clinton, Bush and Obama

It’s important to remember that what the Trump administration faces in North Korea today did not just appear overnight. It has been many presidents in the making. (Heaven knows the rest of the world won’t do anything. They are collectively France before WWI.)

North Korea was born of the ashes of the back-and-forth Korean War in the early 1950s. It has been under family dictatorial rule since the end of that war, backed by the Communist China regime that came to its rescue during the war. China remains the only country with any influence over the North, which is a third-world country. But it’s never clear just how much. China games it time and again for their own pursuits.

The family leadership always had eyes on South Korea, which has developed into a prosperous, thriving, free, capitalist country while its northern neighbor languishes under tyranny and some form of Communism. In the late 1980s, North Korea began trying to develop nuclear weapons. We were sure we could appease them out of it with shiny objects and pieces of paper.

We were wrong.

Bill Clinton’s appeasement

Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush created agreements with North Korea early in the process, which turned out to be empty and ignored. But North Korea’s intents were not well-established at that point. By the time Bill Clinton came into office, it was clear that North Korea was determined to get nuclear weapons and thought nothing of agreements.

In 1994, Clinton sent former President Jimmy Carter to North Korea to negotiate an Agreed Framework to keep a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. This was a little like Neville Chamberlain sending Stanley Baldwin to negotiate with Hitler. Appeasement squared.

The deal Carter negotiated gave North Korea everything it wanted in return for what would turn out to be more empty promises. The North got two brand new reactors and $5 billion in “aid” in return for their promise to quit seeking nuclear weapons.

Clinton jumped on this appeasement train and with a strong whiff of Chamberlain’s infamous “peace in our time” speech, saying the agreement brought “an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula.” For this profound failure, in which the North admitted in 2002 they had violated from the first day, Carter was thusly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — a once relished prize that is now a progressive political farce.

George W. Bush’s appeasement

President Bush rightly identified North Korea as part of the “Axis of Evil” in 2002, which included Iran, Iraq and Libya — all of whom were tyrannies pursuing nuclear weapons. Bush recognized the growing threat, but in the end 9/11 forced his eyes off North Korea and on the Jihadist threat to the United States. Not altogether wrong, perhaps, but the result was kicking the nuclear can down the road.

Bush’s policies began to look like Clinton’s previous appeasements. His administration negotiated another Agreed Framework, in hopes of stopping North Korea’s nuclear weapons pursuit by lifting some sanctions, releasing some North Korean money in return for the North stopping its uranium enrichment and allowing inspections.

In essence, real stuff in return for a piece of paper.

Just like the Munich agreement with Hitler and the future Iranian agreement on nuclear weapons, this would turn out be be a piece of paper better used as a coloring pad for the children.

Part of the reason it was worthless was because the tyranny never intended to abide by it, while the other part is that the major powers who could enforce it had no will to do so.

So the North reneged, but Bush focused on Afghanistan and Iraq and ended up releasing money to them while not requiring inspections. Total appeasement.

Barack Obama’s appeasement

The Obama administration was content to appease and look the other way on North Korea as they were focused on committing the unforced error of repeating Munich and Pyongyang with Tehran — negotiate with killer tyrants and rely on their goodwill and a piece of paper.

In an interesting denial of reality, the Obama administration said it will “never accept” a nuclear North Korea — even though the North detonated a nuclear weapon in 2006, during the last year of Bush’s presidency.

Of course, Obama said precisely the same thing about Iran, then sent John Kerry to negotiate a deal with ayatollahs guaranteeing they will become nuclear.

Obama is, if possible, a more feckless version of the Baldwin, Chamberlain, Clinton line of appeasers as he sought out an opportunity to do it with Iran right when that nation was buckling under international sanctions. They were losing, sanctions were working, and Obama plucked them out and turned them into what will inevitably be much wealthier members of the nuclear club of tyrants.

The world has had sanctions of varying degrees on North Korea for years. They have given a lifeline by China. Relieving sanctions and providing aid is always the carrot to get good behavior on nukes. There is never a stick.

As the North was starving its people, the Obama administration agreed in 2012 to bail them out with 240,000 tons of food in exchange for nuclear concessions. Well, you know by now what happened. They got enough relief to placate their people and maintain their grip, and conceded nothing — this also being a cautionary tale of how sometimes humanitarian efforts for tyrannical regimes can cause more suffering in the long run, including for the people the efforts are aimed at.

Completely predictable and the third president failing at appeasement.

The bill for appeasement is coming due

This is the context in which President Trump enters office, with all the theoretically responsible countries of the West and elsewhere hopelessly trying to ignore the growing threat of North Korea. Maybe it’ll go away. Maybe it will magically solve itself. Maybe…and here’s the reality…the United States will do something.

The North probably has dozens of nuclear weapons and increasingly sophisticated delivery systems in the form of missiles. They are making more all the time. Truly reaching the United States with missiles seems unlikely. But the North can obviously reach South Korea, and Japan is just a few miles away.

No one was willing to stop Hitler when it would have been relatively easy to do so. No one was willing to stop North Korea when it would have been relatively cheaper in cost — even with the proximity of China.

Now, maybe, someone is willing. But at what cost? And who will be willing to look back at the Clintons, Bushes and Obamas and lay the blame where it belongs, like we rightly do Baldwin and Chamberlain?

And will we ever, ever learn?

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act.

The U.N. Has Absolutely No Idea How Economic Growth Works by Daniel J. Mitchell

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I’ve been at the United Nations this week for both the 14th Session of the Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters as well as the Special Meeting of ECOSOC on International Cooperation in Tax Matters.

As you might suspect, it would be an understatement to say this puts me in the belly of the beast (for the second time!). Sort of a modern-day version of Daniel in the Lion’s Den.

These meetings are comprised of tax collectors from various nations, along with U.N. officials who – like their tax-free counterparts at other international bureaucracies – don’t have to comply with the tax laws of those countries.

In other words, there’s nobody on the side of taxpayers and the private sector (I’m merely an observer representing “civil society”).

I could share with you the details of the discussion, but 99 percent of the discussion was boring and arcane. So instead I’ll touch on two big-picture observations.

What the United Nations gets wrong: The bureaucracy assumes that higher taxes are a recipe for economic growth and development.

I’m not joking. I wrote last year about how many of the international bureaucracies are blindly asserting that higher taxes are pro-growth because government supposedly will productively “invest” any additional revenue. And this reflexive agitation for higher fiscal burdens has been very prevalent this week in New York City. It’s unclear whether participants actually believe their own rhetoric. I’ve shared with some of the folks the empirical data showing the western world became rich in the 1800s when fiscal burdens were very modest. But I’m not expecting any miraculous breakthroughs in economic understanding.

What the United Nations fails to get right: The bureaucracy does not appreciate that low rates are the best way of boosting tax compliance.

Most of the discussions focused on how tax laws, tax treaties, and tax agreements can and should be altered to extract more money from the business community. Participants occasionally groused about tax evasion, but the real focus was on ways to curtail tax avoidance. This is noteworthy because it confirms my point that the anti-tax competition work of international bureaucracies is guided by a desire to collect more revenue rather than to improve enforcement of existing law. But I raise this issue because of a sin of omission. At no point did any of the participants acknowledge that there’s a wealth of empirical evidence showing that low tax rates are the most effective way of encouraging tax compliance.

I realize that these observations are probably not a big shock. So in hopes of saying something worthwhile, I’ll close with a few additional observations

  • I had no idea that people could spend so much time discussing the technicalities of taxes on international shipping. I resisted the temptation to puncture my eardrums with an ice pick.
  • From the moment it was announced, I warned that the OECD’s project on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) was designed to extract more money from the business community. The meeting convinced me that my original fears were – if possible – understated.
  • A not-so-subtle undercurrent in the meeting is that governments of rich nations, when there are squabbles over who gets to pillage taxpayers, are perfectly happy to stiff-arm governments from poor nations.
  • The representative from the U.S. government never expressed any pro-taxpayer or pro-growth sentiments, but he did express some opposition to the notion that profits of multinationals could be divvied up based on the level of GDP in various nations. I hope that meant opposition to “formula apportionment.”
  • Much of the discussion revolved around the taxation of multinational companies, but I was still nonetheless surprised that there was no discussion of the U.S. position as a very attractive tax haven.
  • The left’s goal (at least for statists from the developing world) is for the United Nations to have greater power over national tax policies, which does put the UN in conflict with the OECD, which wants to turn a multilateral convention into a pseudo-International Tax Organization.

P.S. The good news is that the folks at the United Nations have not threatened to toss me in jail. That means the bureaucrats in New York City are more tolerant of dissent than the folks at the OECD.

Republished from International Liberty.

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

Drain the Swamp: How Washington Corruption is Worse than You Think

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Drain the swamp book coverLavish parties. Committee chairmanships for sale. Pay-to-play corruption. Backroom arm-twisting. Votes on major legislation going to the highest bidder. Welcome to Washington, D.C., the swamp that President Donald Trump was elected to drain.

Congressman Ken Buck is blowing the whistle on the real-life House of Cards in our nation’s capital. Elected in 2014 as president of one of the largest Republican freshman classes ever to enter Congress, Buck immediately realized why nothing gets done in Congress, and it isn’t because of political gridlock—in fact, Republicans and Democrats work together all too well to fleece taxpayers and plunge America deeper into debt.

“It is an insular process directed by power-hungry party elites who live like kings and govern like bullies,” Buck reports.

Buck has witnessed first-hand how the unwritten rules of Congress continually prioritize short-term political gain over lasting, principled leadership. When Buck tangled with Washington power brokers like former Speaker John Boehner, he faced petty retaliation. When he insisted Republicans keep their word to voters, he was berated on the House floor by his own party leaders. When other members of Congress dared to do what they believed to be right for America instead of what the party bosses commanded, Buck saw them stripped of committee positions and even denied dining room privileges by the petty beltway bullies.

In Drain the Swamp, Buck names names and tells incredible true stories about what really happened behind closed doors in Congress during legislative battles that have ensued over the last two years including budget, continuing resolutions, omnibus, trade promotion authority, Iran, and more. If the Trump administration is going to bring real change to Washington, it first needs to get the whole story—from deep inside the swamp.

buck-4-14-1250x650

Congressman Ken Buck (R-CO)

ABOUT CONGRESSMAN KEN BUCK

Congressman Ken Buck is a Republican from Windsor, Colorado who serves on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He is also a member of the Judiciary Subcommittees on Immigration and Border Security and Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations.

One of three brothers, Ken worked his way through high school, college, and law school as a janitor, truck driver, furniture mover, and a ranch hand. After law school, Ken worked for Dick Cheney on the Iran-Contra Investigation and then became a prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. He has also served as a District Attorney in Weld County, Colorado and as a business executive at the Hensel Phelps Construction Company.

RELATED ARTICLE: Congressman Says Corruption in Washington Is ‘Worse Than You Think’

International Journal ‘New Concepts in Global Tectonics’ launched

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DARK WINTER BOOK COVERAs a past supporter of my efforts to get the government and media to help get our country prepared for the next cold climate epoch, I thought you might also be interested in an existing, yet newly commercialized science journal that pursues a similar quest. It is called the New Concepts in Global Tectonics (NCGT) Journal. We have just launched its first commercial version, the March 2017 edition. See it at www.ncgtjournal.com.

Though this internationally known, twenty year old, science journal has its roots in geology, it has expanded its list of covered fields of science. So whether you have a science background or not, this journal has papers and opinions on a wide variety of subjects including current subjects of interest among the general public like earthquakes, volcanoes, sea levels, and climate change.

Under the dedicated leadership of Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Dong Choi, in Canberra, Australia, the NCGT Journal has grown dramatically over the years in readership and its list of contributing authors. In addition to regular contributions of research papers and opinions of the Journal’s Editorial Board of distinguished researchers, the Journal also publishes and actively solicits papers from other researchers.

The NCGT Journal offers several advantages that may satisfy a curious mind. Most important among them is the question of value. Many science journals often charge $30 to $40 per research paper for a single download! The current NCGT Journal comes out each quarter with five or more papers per edition. For the March 2017 edition with over eight papers, the NCGT Journal is only $8.90 per copy! Prior Journal edition prices range from $4.45 each to as low as $2.50 each! With these average science paper prices at or below $1 each, you can now have access to top quality and often controversial science that challenges establishment thinking. That’s just the kind of journal I like and why I have decided to help Dr. Choi make his NCGT Journal a more successful science product.

You are cordially invited to examine this extensive compilation of research at www.ncgtjournal.com. There, you can freely view the table of contents for each of the nearly 100 Journals and past Newsletters going back to the founding edition from December 1996. In the current March 2017, edition you can review abstracts of the numerous papers published, prior to deciding whether the NCGT Journal fits your needs.

Importantly , when you contribute to the newly commercialized  NCGT Journal, you help us build the financial base for a needed science product that could be available long after the founders have gone.

Please go to the web site right now (www.ncgtjournal.com) and pick up one or more editions of the NCGT Journal today and help us make its launch a big success!

ABOUT THE NEW CONCEPTS IN GLOBAL TECTONICS

The NCGT Newsletter, the predecessor of the NCGT Journal, was initiated on the basis of discussion at the symposium “Alternative Theories to Plate Tectonics” held at the 30th International Geological Congress in Beijing in August 1996. The name is taken from an earlier symposium held in association with 28th International Geological Congress in Washington, D. C. in 1989. The NCGT Newsletter changed its name in 2013 to the NCGT Journal. Now in March of 2017 the NCGT Journal initiates its commercialized phase.

Aims include:

  1. Providing an international forum for the open exchange of new ideas and approaches in the fields of geology, geophysics, solar and planetary physics, cosmology, climatology, oceanography and other fields that affect or are closely related to physcial processes occuring on the Earth from its core to the top of its atmosphere.
  2. Forming an organizational focus for creative ideas not fitting readily within the scope of dominant tectonic models.
  3. Forming the basis for the reproduction and publication of such work, especially where there has been censorship or discrimination.
  4. Create a publication that can serve as an exchange of methods and concepts devoted to the prediction, well in advance, of catastrophic earthquakes. Forum for discussion of such ideas and work which has been inhibited in existing channels.

7,000 Africans made it to Europe over the Easter weekend as Muslim invasion heats up

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Also heating up is the exchange of words between the so-called rescue ships and the EU’s migration authority. EU agencies accuse NGO migrant rescue boats of creating a “pull factor” which only encourages more people to try to reach Europe in anything that floats.

Hillary Clinton.

I will never let you forget! Hillary Clinton is directly responsible for the invasion of Europe from Libya! Call it Gadaffi’s revenge.

There are a bunch of news stories today and yesterday about the increase in numbers of African migrants trying to get to Europe from launch-pad-Libya (we should call it Hillary’s invasion of Europe!).

Here is one at CNN:

Calm seas, desperate migrants and ruthless human traffickers all played a role in a record-breaking weekend of maritime rescues in the Mediterranean Sea between Italy and Libya.

But even as the rescue vessels race against time to save lives, another battle is brewing with accusations from the European Union’s border control agency Frontex against nongovernmental organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the Mobile Offshore Aid Station, or MOAS, that run so-called charity rescue ships. Frontex says the charity rescue vessels create a pull factor for migrants and traffickers; the NGOs say they are out there in the absence of an EU strategy to save lives at sea and a lack of initiative to provide a safe corridor option for migration and asylum.

On Sunday evening in Italy, the Italian Coast Guard estimated the number of those rescued since Friday was approaching 7,000, though that number will surely grow as a steady stream of rubber dinghies and rickety wooden fishing vessels were still being spotted off the coast of Libya.

[….]

In a press release, MOAS co-founder and director Regina Catrambone agreed. “Every day people continue to risk their lives while we, as civil society, stand witness. We must continue to call on European governments to act so that people, such as those rescued by us today, do not die, not in Libya nor in the Mediterranean Sea.”

Much more here.

For those who think this doesn’t affect you in America, it does.  We have an extensive archive on the fact that we have been taking some of the illegal migrants who reach the island nation of Malta to your towns as refugees. Here is one recent post.

Our ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive is here.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of ‘humanitarians’ picking Muslim migrants off the Libyan coast.

VIDEO: How President Trump can deal with the North Korean threat

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General HR McMaster

President Trump’s National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

Trump National Security Adviser, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, had an interview with ABC’s Martha Raddatz on  the network’s “This Week” program on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2017. The issue de jour was what to do about bellicose hermit state North  Korea . On the 105th anniversary of the birth of the founder of the dynastic Communist regime , grandfather Kim Il Sung,  a massive military parade was held in Pyongyang ,  Saturday April 15th. There with televised images of huge goose stepping marching formations  and displays of both mobile Musdan intermediate range and submarine launched missiles. As if on cue, North Korea attempted another missile launch following the celebratory parade that blew up on the launching pad, prompting a muted response from the White House.

This followed demonstrations of force with a US Navy Tomahawk missile strike on an airbase in Syria, allegedly the site from which gas attacks were launched against civilians and opposition in Idlib province. That was followed this week by the dropping of a MOAB,  so-called massive ordnance air burst bomb, from a USAF C-130 in Afghanistan. It allegedly  aimed destroyed  caves and tunnels used by ISIS, with conflicting reports as to casualties ranging from 36 to upwards of 100 casualties.

The parade in the vast Pyongyang square was held before hereditary leader Kim Jong-un and what passes for the North Korean Comintern leadership.  McMaster speaking from Kabul, Afghanistan said in response to Raddatz’s question about the Trump Administration would do against this threat overarching that of ISIS and Syria in the Middle East:

While it’s unclear and we do not want to telegraph in any way how we’ll respond to certain incidents, it’s clear that the president is determined not to allow this kind of capability to threaten the United States.

I think there’s an international consensus now, including the Chinese and the Chinese leadership, that this is a situation that just can’t continue. And the president has made clear that he will not accept the United States and its allies and partners in the region being under threat from this hostile regime with nuclear weapons. He said the National Security Council is working with the Pentagon and the State Department, and intelligence agencies  working on providing options “and have them ready” for President Donald Trump “if this pattern of destabilizing behavior continues.”

McMaster said it is the consensus of the US, along with allies in the region,that “this problem is coming to a head. And so it’s time for us to undertake all actions we can, short of a military options, to try to resolve this peacefully.”

Watch the ABC This Week  Martha Raddatz Interview  with National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. McMaster:

Trump tweeted Thursday that he had “great confidence” in China’s ability to “properly deal with North Korea.” He indicated openness to possible US intervention if China can’t convince North Korea to stand down in its nuclear and missile program saying, “If they are unable to do so, the U.S. with its allies, will!!”

Perhaps he was referring to the USS Vinson carrier battle group that was dispatched to the peninsula bristling with missiles, squadrons of carrier based attack aircraft and possibly nuclear warhead missiles  submarines.

Trump dispatched Vice President Pence to South Korea to confer with our ally on the front line of any threat, conventional or non-conventional , that Pyongyang might unleash if the US undertook a preemptive attack.

Japan’s  Premier Abe was concerned about the ability of North Korea to launch a missile with a Sarin gas warhead. That was eerily reminiscent of the domestic  Japanese terrorism attacks of the 1990’s by an apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo, whose chemical laboratory produced the deadly nerve agent that killed over two dozen and in a subway attack exposed thousands to its effects. Doubtless, Abe was prompted by the recent assassination of Kim’s half brother in Kuala Lumpur by two women who administered the deadly nerve agent VX.

Abe and tens of millions of Home Island Japanese are also concerned about possible delivery of a nuclear warhead equipped existing North Korean Missile with a range of 800 miles like the Nodong 1. Equally concerned are the 20 million residents of Seoul South Korean and tens of thousands of U.S. forces on the DMZ. Then there are US Air and Naval assets in Japan, Okinawa and the American Territory of Guam within the 2,000 mile range of those Musudan mobile missiles on display in Pyongyang.

We chanced to watch the PBS Charlie Rose Show on April 14th when he interviewed former acting CIA director Mike Morell about the North Korean threat conundrum.  When queried by Rose about what might Trump ask China President, Xi-Jinping Morrell,  said negotiate with China to intervene with North Korea’s Kin Jong-un  about the consequences of not standing down.

Gordon Chang said it best  in an April 4, 2017 Daily Beast article about what Trump might discuss with Xi-Jinping  just prior to the Mar a-Lago meeting  with President Trump. China should stop selling North Korea those mobile erector TEL launchers for the Musudan and future KN-08 and KN-14 intercontinental ballistic missiles, plans for the Chinese Jl-1 submarine  missile, uranium hexafluoride, pumps   and other components for its nuclear program. We would  also include the sale of  Chinese alumna power and technology used to mix solid propellant for those missiles.

The reality is that none of this is going to persuade  Kim Jong-un, a man who doesn’t stint for murdering his own family, relatives and  senior  Comintern members and  senior officers of North Korea’s military. Trillions of dollars of bribes wouldn’t suffice. Sanctions haven’t worked. What it suggests is some means of removing Kim and perhaps key Comintern leaders from that dias overlooking  the massive parade in Pyongyang on April 15th.

In all seriousness, the China syndrome is not something we want to trigger. Rather it is using the China opening to prevent that from happening along with whatever nuclear missile threat that North Korea has under looming development. The other suggestion was accelerating more effective anti-ballistic missile defense in the critical boost rather than mid-course or terminal phases.  We may know shortly if North Korea has mastered the re-entry shield for deployment of possible multiple targeted  warheads.

Trump has very limited options and time available to do something to stop North Korea before the 2018 midterm election if not the before 2020. He doubtless  will  request that  National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Pentagon chief Mattis and others on the NSC Principals Committee vet some plausible military and diplomatic  options to deny the hermit kingdom from a preemptive attack on our allies and US military assets in the region. Perhaps they might follow  Chang’s suggestions about what to negotiate with China to forestall North Korea achieving nuclear ICBM hegemony.

RELATED ARTICLE: Pence: ‘Era of strategic patience’ on North Korea is over

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Turkey rejects secularism, turns Islamic

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The news from Turkey is disquieting. The Guardian reported;” Erdogan clinches victory in Turkish constitutional referendum:”

Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has achieved victory in a historic referendum on a package of constitutional amendments that will grant him sweeping new powers.

Sadi Güven, the head of Turkey’s high electoral board (YSK), confirmed the passage of the referendum on Sunday night, based on unofficial results.

The yes campaign won 1.25m more votes than the no campaign, with only about 600,000 votes still to be counted, Güven told reporters in Ankara, meaning the expanded presidential powers had been approved.

However, disparities persisted into Sunday evening, with the opposition saying not all ballots had been counted and they would contest a third of the votes that had been cast.

Güven said the YSK had decided to consider unstamped ballots as valid unless they were proved to be fraudulent, after a high number of complaints – including one from the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP) – that its officials had failed to stamp some ballot papers.

The no campaign said the YSK’s last-minute decision raised questions about the validity of the vote. But Güven said the decision was taken before results were entered into the system and that members of the AKP and the main opposition were present at almost all polling stations and signed off on reports. He said official results were expected in 11-12 days.

The result of the referendum sets the stage for a transformation of the upper echelons of the state and changing the country from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential republic, arguably the most important development in the country’s history since it was founded on the ashes of the Ottoman Republic.

Erdogan said he would immediately discuss reinstating the death penalty in talks with the prime minister and the nationalist opposition leader, Devlet Bahçeli. The president said he would take the issue to referendum if necessary.

Not a resounding mandate was achieved  in today’s “muted victory” in the Turkish  national referendum leaving the country divided:

The narrow victory will nevertheless come as a disappointment for the country’s leadership, which had hoped for a decisive mandate for the plan that could see Erdogan remain in power until 2029 if he wins successive elections.

The result will set the stage for a further split between Turkey and its European allies, who believe Ankara is sliding towards autocracy. The European commission said on Sunday night that Turkey should seek the “broadest possible national consensus” in its constitutional amendments, given the yes campaign’s slim margin of victory.

Results carried by the state-run Anadolu news agency showed the yes vote had about 51.3% compared with 48.7% for the no vote, with nearly 99% of the vote counted. Turnout exceeded 80%.

The country’s three largest cities – Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir – voted against the changes, and so did the vast majority of Kurdish voters and many of the coastal cities, indicating a general decline in the ruling party’s support

In a press conference in Istanbul following his party’s declaration of victory, Erdogan said that unofficial results showed there were about 25m yes votes, 1.3m more than no.

But in an unusually muted victory speech, Erdogan said foreign powers should respect the referendum’s outcome. He said: “We’ve got a lot to do, we are on this path but it’s time to change gears and go faster … We are carrying out the most important reform in the history of our nation.”

Erdogan claimed support for constitutional change had risen in south-east Turkey and hailed a “profound” jump in support for a presidential system that was unpopular just two years ago. Overseas votes were a “big part” of that success, he said, adding that his new executive presidency would probably come into effect after the 2019 election.

Erdogan called the prime minister, Binali Yildirim, and other political allies to congratulate them on the victory, although, in an indication of the ruling AKP’s disappointment, the deputy prime minister said they had received fewer votes than they expected.

Turkeys Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Our comment

Erdogan and AKP celebrate while concerned opposition challenges alleged narrow victory requesting a recount of 60 percent of votes cast.

Was there the expected jiggery pokery over the ballot counting in the nation referendum? Without independent foreign monitors present, how do we know if this vote count wasn’t tampered with? How can Turkish voters trust the integrity of the ballot system under the Islamist autocracy of the neo Sultan Erdogan and his cronies conspiring to overturn the 1923 Constitutional legacy of Turkish Republic founder Kemal Ataturk.

In a land of Islamic ascendency under Erdogan, dystopia will follow today’s referendum under cover of darkness at noon.

Darkness at Noon in Erodgan’s Turkey

If you want to know what was at stake in today’s National Referendum in Turkey read this New York Times Magazine article, “Inside Turkey’s Purge”. The article by Suzy Hansen rivals the paranoia portrayed in the thinly disguised world of Stalin’s Great Purge of the 1930’s in Russia in former Communist Arthur Koestler’s classic novel, Darkness at Noon.

Great swaths of lives swept aside by the dystopian vision of President Erdogan, that if implemented by today’s outcome would end the last vestige of freedom of thought, free expression with random imprisonment, torture sending those desperate to leave to opt for refugee smugglers to bring them to exile in Europe and elsewhere.

All because Erdogan brooks no opposition following his faux coup of July 2016 allegedly perpetrated by exiled former ally Sheik Fethullah Gulen’s mythical FETO network. Then there are the Kurds whose liberal Peoples Democratic Party leader, (HDP) Selahattin Demirtas and thousands of elected officials he accuses of being stalking horses for the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, PKK, the cease fire of 2013 which he struck with jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan he overturned in July2015 with open warfare against the largely Kurdish southeastern region turning cities there into virtual moonscapes.

Erdogan’s quest of becoming autocrat for life will denude Turkey of its educated class, industrialists, journalists, educators, jurists, prosecutors and secular military. It will. likely lead to oppression of significant religious and ethnic minorities, prominent among them, Alevis and Kurds. The economy will suffer from lack of foreign investment, unemployment rising and real income plummeting. The Erdogan family and AKP operatives will reap enormous wealth from corruption. Foreign relations with the EU, UK and US may enter a dark period, with the threat of loss of NATO membership and alliance with another dystopian country Putin’s Russia.

Read this opening stanza of Ms. Hansen’s riveting and disturbing profile of Darkness at Noon :

The police officers came to the doctor’s door in Istanbul at 6 a.m. — dawn raids usually start then, sometimes 5:30 — and one of them said, “You are accused of attempting to kill President Erdogan.”

The doctor couldn’t help it; he laughed. “Really? I did that?”

The police officers smiled, too. “Yes. Also for attempting to destroy Turkey and for being a member of a terrorist organization.”

“Really?” He looked at them. They carried pistols. “Can I have a cigarette then?”

The police seemed surprised. They didn’t expect a Gulenist to smoke. I’m not a Gulenist, the doctor insisted. That didn’t help him. He would soon be one of the many thousands of people in Turkey caught in the machinery of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s purge.

The police searched the doctor’s house and his books and overturned his things, looking for evidence that he was a Gulenist, or a supporter of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric who began preaching in Turkey in the 1960s and whose followers number as many as five million. Gulen has been living in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, which partly explains why the police were looking for American $1 bills whose serial numbers start with “F” — the Turkish government claims that these were used in some mysterious way by something it has branded the Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organization, or FETO, which it blames for the attempted coup in Turkey on July 15, 2016.

At present, several pieces of evidence can suggest that you may be a member of FETO, including having had an account at Bank Asya, which was founded by Gulenists; running the ByLock encrypted communication app on your phone (thought to have facilitated planning for the coup attempt); possessing those F-series dollar bills; sending your children to a school associated with Gulen; working at a Gulen-affiliated institution (a university, say, or a hospital); having subscribed to the Gulen newspaper Zaman; or having Gulen’s books in your house. One action implicated the doctor: When he returned to Turkey after living abroad for three years and moved into a new house with his wife and children, he opened an account at the nearest bank up the street: Bank Asya.

(READ MORE)

RELATED ARTICLE: How Erdogan’s Victory Might Be Europe’s Defeat

Remembering the 1924 Democrat National Convention — The KlanBake

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It was also known as “KlanBake.”

In Madison Square Garden, New York City, from June 24 to July 9, a dispute during came up revolving around an attempt by non-Klan delegates, led by Forney Johnston of Alabama, to condemn the organization for its violence in the Democratic Party’s platform.

But Ku Klux Klan delegates defeated the platform plank in a series of floor debates.

To celebrate, tens of thousands of hooded Klansmen rallied in a field in New Jersey, across the river from New York City. This event, known subsequently as the “Klanbake”, was also attended by hundreds of Klan delegates to the convention, who burned crosses, urged violence and intimidation against African Americans and Catholics, and attacked effigies of Smith.

The final vote was 546.15 for the Klan, 542.85 against it.

According to Wikipedia:

The Ku Klux Klan was resurrected after the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith’s very popular motion picture The Birth of a Nation. After World War I, the popularity of the Klan surged due to connections of its public relations leadership to those who had promoted the successful Prohibition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, becoming a political power throughout many regions of the United States, not just in the South.

Its local political strength throughout the country gave it a major role in the 1924 Democratic Party National Convention (DNC). The 20th Century Ku Klux Klan was notoriously anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, in addition to being anti-black.

The Klan advocates opposed those supporting Catholics from the major cities of the Northeast and Midwest. The tension between pro- and anti-Klan delegates produced an intense and sometimes violent showdown between convention attendees from the states of Colorado and Missouri. Klan delegates opposed the nomination of New York Governor Al Smith because Smith was a Roman Catholic. Smith campaigned against William Gibbs McAdoo, who had the support of most Klan delegates.

KKK platform plank

The second dispute of the convention revolved around an attempt by non-Klan delegates, led by Forney Johnston of Alabama, to condemn the organization for its violence in the Democratic Party’s platform. Klan delegates defeated the platform plank in a series of floor debates. The final vote on condemning the Klan was 542.85 in favor, 546.15 against, so the plank was not included in the platform. To celebrate, tens of thousands of hooded Klansmen rallied in a field in New Jersey, across the river from New York City.[5] This event, known subsequently as the “Klanbake”,[1] was also attended by hundreds of Klan delegates to the convention, who burned crosses, urged violence and intimidation against African-Americans and Catholics, and attacked effigies of Smith.

Impact

The notoriety of the “Klanbake” convention and the violence it produced cast a lasting shadow over the Democratic Party’s prospects in the 1924 election and contributed to their defeat by incumbent Republican President Calvin Coolidge.

Smith’s name was placed into nomination by Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his first appearance at the Democratic National Convention since his paralytic illness. This signaled a political comeback for Roosevelt; he would be elected Governor of New York four years later and President eight years later. [Emphasis added]

IRONY: Twaddle About the Gender Pay Gap Actually About Women’s Choice

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You can find this particular slice of ironic baloney everywhere in liberal ideology. It always raises its fraudulent head during a political campaign because that is when it is most valuable.

Women make 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. Or 79 cents. Or 80 cents. It moves about a little. This is cited as evidence of the ongoing patriarchal oppression that American women suffer under. That’s the claim and that’s the cudgel with which to bash opponents and raise money.

Naturally, running as the XX-chromosome candidate, Hillary Clinton droned on about the gender pay gap on the campaign trail. President Obama, speaking at the 2016 Equal Pay Day, said, “Today, the typical woman who works full-time earns 79 cents for every dollar that a typical man makes.” Of course everything with Obama was about systemic discrimination, even when neither the specific system nor the specific discrimination could be identified.

The media duly “reports” the gender pay gap myth, and it is repeated with great dramatic flair by  endless streams of intellectually isolated celebrities. The picture with this article represents hundreds of such memes playing on the uninformed and not the reality.

Equal Pay Day is a part of this great political theater. It is in early April and is meant to symbolize how long a woman must work into the next year to make as much as a man from the previous year. Every April, Democrats crank up their reliable demonstration/protest mode to call attention to this terrible injustice in which the American patriarchal system oppresses women.

Democrats even push annually for the Paycheck Fairness Act because, of course, women making personal choices that may result in them making less money is “unfair.” There oughta be a law! (The Democrat solution for every problem.)

The real pudding proof on this fib is that if it were true, money-grubbing capitalists everywhere would be hiring women to save 21 percent on their labor costs. Duh. But of course, that is not happening. Because this is not true.

Why it’s mythological bunk

The thing is, there is actually no evidence of discrimination here. Even liberal economists cannot find it. It is simply rendered as true, and millions of people swallow it and react angrily at the wrongdoing. But there’s nothing wrong.

Here’s how this hokum is produced:

Using the most generalized data set from the Census Bureau, you take full-time working men’s median annual earnings and full-time working women’s median annual earnings and you find that, on the broadest of averages, there is a pay differential of 20 to 21 cents. That’s it. No glaringly obvious variables. No common sense applications. Just the two rawest data points because part of every feminist assumption is that men and women are exactly the same.

And then conclude discrimination.

But without an ounce of research from smart folks — who we’ll get to in a minute — anyone giving it actual thought knows that men and women approach jobs and careers differently when marriage and children are in the equation. A mother is likely to take time off from work, oftentimes months or even years. She will frequently seek out part-time work or jobs with flexible hours because her maternal drive prioritizes the time needs of her children. The man’s paternal drive prioritizes providing for the entire family.

Obviously, that puts those women — in the millions — at a slower career growth pace and therefore earning less than men. That pulls down the average woman’s pay and that is all the gender gap looks at. That is one huge variable that falls under the category of freedom.

We also know from observation that women tend to choose lower wage careers such as teachers and nurses while men tend to choose higher wage careers such as engineering and MBAs. That too drags down women’s salaries compared to men’s and as we will see, these variables explain almost the entire difference. And all of them fall under what one might call “a woman’s right to choose.”

Not discrimination.

It could be argued in the broadest terms that women’s career choices are more noble than men’s — if they must be compared — because they often involve serving others while men’s often involve building things. But the liberal feminist ideology clings to the pay gap myth because every movement needs an enemy, and for the feminist, that enemy is men.

Women choose children over careers

The first obvious variable is most women do double-duty as moms, and this impacts their careers and long-term earnings. Most women also find this an acceptable trade-off, hence they choose it. Secondary to this one is that women tend to be the primary caregivers when elderly parents need it. Both obviously affect careers and earnings.

Instead of going deeply into the numbers that back up all this common sense, and they are legion, let’s use the conclusions from those numbers of two liberal, feminist, Ivy League academics.

Claudia Goldin was the first tenured professor of economics at Harvard University in 1990. Goldin has done extensive research on the issue of women in the workforce and concludes almost the entire gap deals with women’s choices.

“Some of the best studies that we have of the gender pay gap, following individuals longitudinally, show that when they show up right out of college, or out of law school, or after they get their MBA — all the studies that we have indicate that wages are pretty similar then,” she said on the Freakonomics podcast. “But further down the pike in their lives, by 10-15 years out, we see very large differences in their pay. But we also see large differences in where they are, in their job titles. And a lot of that occurs a year or two after a kid is born, and it occurs for women and not for men. If anything, men tend to work somewhat harder.”

So it is the choices women freely make.

Princeton public-policy scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote in “Unfinished Business” about what she called the “care penalty” as the primary driver of gender pay inequity. Understand, she does not like this or even think it right, but she also does not find gender pay discrimination in the workforce. Slaughter wrote:

“If you take women who don’t have caregiving obligations, they’re almost equal with men. It’s somewhere in the 95 percent range. But when women then have children, or again are caring for their own parents or other sick family members who need care, then they need to work differently. They need to work flexibly, and often go part-time. They often get less-good assignments because their bosses think that they’re not going to want work that allows them to travel, or they’re not going to be able to stay up all night, or whatever it is. And so then you start — if you’re working part-time, you don’t get the same raises. And if you’re working flexibly your boss very typically thinks that you’re not that committed to your career, so you don’t get promoted.”

I’m purposely choosing liberals and feminists who have studied this, but are approaching it academically, not for its raw political value. Neither Goldin or Slaughter necessarily approve of this reality in women’s choices, and encourage women to change their decisions and even believe in programs directing them to. But their conclusions are rock solid.

It’s not discrimination. It’s women’s choices.

Women’s choose serving careers

Looking at the spread of career choices, something becomes obvious. Women tend to take lower-wage jobs that often involve serving others while men tend toward higher paying jobs that involve creating things.

A Georgetown University study on the income values of different college majors showed that nine of the 10 most lucrative majors  — such as petroleum engineering, naval architecture and aerospace engineering — were dominated by men. At the same time, nine of the 10 least lucrative majors  — such as education, social work and early childhood education — were dominated by women.

Well this is a sticky wicket, because women are not choosing rightly for the feminist social engineers. American Progress, a large, influential liberal think tank, suggests women aren’t really making these career choices but that the patriarchy “trains” them to think certain ways. American Progress writes:

“…there are several factors that lead women to traditionally female-dominated roles, including the gendered socialization that trains girls from childhood to embody the sorts of traits that translate well into traditionally feminine jobs centered on nurturing, service, and supporting other people in their jobs.”

This seems particularly insulting to women as it suggests they really are not making good choices — by the tens of millions. They are being tricked by wily men. And it further suggests that there is no natural nurturing in a woman, only what a patriarchal society inculcates in them.

This reflects a total detachment from reality that continues the thread that most women are not naturally more nurturing and caring of others but that that is a societal construct.

The reality is that women are different from men inside and out and they therefore frequently make different choices. In fact, for a culture to be strong, that is a necessity.

But the feminists despise that reality and will always work to change it. And because that is reality, there will always be a “gender pay gap” for Democrats to exploit come election time.

And really, that mixed with social engineering is the whole point of it.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act.

Top ten countries for persecution of Christians: North Korea and nine Muslim countries

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Why is this the case, and why is it the case year after year? Might it have something to do with these teachings?

“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or the Last Day, and do not forbid what has been forbidden by Allah and his messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, even if they are of the People of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.” (Qur’an 9:29)

Muhammad said:

“Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them…. If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim 4294)

Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Eritrea. Trump’s ill-fated travel ban included six of these countries: Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen, plus Libya. How racist.

“Christian persecution: How many are being killed, where they are being killed,” by Georeen Tanner, Fox News, April 14, 2017:

Is Christianity in the Middle East coming to an end?

This past Palm Sunday was a dark day in Egypt. Suicide bombings at two Coptic Christian churches, one in Alexandria and the other in Tanta left 45 people dead and many more wounded. Although there has been an uptick in violence against Christians in the region, Egypt is hardly alone in a long list of countries — many in the Middle East — that are violently hostile towards Christians.

A list generated by Open Doors USA, a nonprofit organization focused on serving persecuted Christians, shows the Middle East accounts for a majority of countries ranked in the top 10 for extreme persecution of Christians. In order, the countries are as follows:

1. North Korea
2. Somalia
3. Afghanistan
4. Pakistan
5. Sudan
6. Syria
7. Iraq
8. Iran
9. Yemen
10. Eritrea

Egypt ranks No. 21. According to the Christian advocacy group, one in 12 Christians today experiences high, very high or extreme persecution for their faith. Nearly 215 million Christians face high persecution, with 100 million of those living in Asia.

The Center for the Study of Global Christianity, an academic research center that monitors worldwide demographic trends in Christianity, estimates that between the years 2005 and 2015, 900,000 Christians were martyred — an average of 90,000 Christians each year.

From Nov. 1, 2015, to Oct. 31, 2016, Open Doors documented as many as 1,207 Christians who were killed around the globe for faith-related reasons during the 2017 list’s reporting period. This is a conservative estimate since it only includes documented cases and does not include statistics from North Korea and large areas of Iraq and Syria. Of the lists procured, these are the Middle Eastern or Muslim-dominated countries where Christian deaths occurred during the same time period:

1. Pakistan: 76
2. Syria: 24
3. Somalia: 12
4. Egypt: 12
5. Afghanistan: 10
6. Yemen: 4
7. Libya: 2
8. Iraq: 1

Open Doors also documented a total of 1,329 churches attacked worldwide for faith-related reasons. These are the Middle Eastern or Muslim-dominated countries where those attacks happened between Nov. 1, 2015, and Oct. 31, 2016:

1. Pakistan: 600…

RELATED ARTICLES: 

Palestinians’ Real Enemies: Arabs

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Video: Jihad Threat or “Islamophobia”? Robert Spencer at Truman State University, April 13, 2017

BUILD THE WALL: Why? To Reduce Murders and Rapes, for Starters

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Some horrific stories are just too common, and incensing. They do not need to be happening, but occasionally we need to be faced with the raw, brutal reality of an issue too often talked about in anti-septic terms.

In a New York City suburb an illegal immigrant, who has been deported four times and is a known member of the barbaric MS-13 street gang, sexually assaulted a two-year-old girl and then felt so little remorse he went out stabbed two women in a New York City suburb — including the girl’s mother.

A two-year-old girl. Deported four times. Tommy Vladim Alvarado-Ventura, 31, was in the country illegally for at least the fifth time.

But this is not unusual. Let’s look at several specific, heart-breaking stories that never should have happened and make a decent person’s blood boil.

The avoidable tragedies individually

  • The man who murdered Kate Steinle in San Francisco was an illegal immigrant (CNN uses the obfuscating milktoast phrase “undocumented immigrant”) and a repeat felon who has been deported five times to Mexico. Steinle’s last words to her father as she bled to death were “Help me, Daddy.”
  • An illegal immigrant transgender was arrested by federal agents in El Paso after the “woman” went to the courthouse to file charges for domestic abuse. Turns out the “woman” is actually a man, Irvin Gonzalez, who is a transgender involved with a man and that he/she is in the country illegally for the eighth time and has a lengthy criminal record including domestic violence and assault.
  • Illegal immigrant Tomas Martinez-Maldonado brutally raped a 13-year-old girl on a Greyhound bus in Kansas last September. He had previously been deported 10 times.
  • Illegal immigrant Eduardo Gonzalez-Rios, who had been previously deported three times over the past 11 years, ran over a police officer.
  • Illegal immigrant Guaymar Cabrera-Hernandez was previously deported from the country, returned, was arrested again and immediately after being released from jail allegedly carjacked a woman with a knife.
  • Illegal immigrant Javier Antonio Martinez was first deported from the United States in 1992 after a felony drug conviction. He returned to the U.S. and accumulated several additional convictions in Florida under aliases without ever being detected as a deportable alien. He ended up being sentenced to 65 years in Federal prison and is still waiting to be tried in Alaskan state court for the shooting death of his boss. He should never have been here.
  • Illegal immigrant Edgar Vargas Arzate: He was charged with attempted burglary, battery of a police officer, resisting arrest and tampering with a vehicle in 2014. Prior to that he had been deported twice before and had prior felony convictions. Arzate should have been surrendered to federal ICE agents but Orange County police twice refused to honor detainer orders.
  • Illegal immigrant Prudencio Fragos-Ramirez, who was deported in 2013 is accused of fatally shooting and burning a Washington woman and her son.
  • This could go on and on. Mercifully, here’s a final example that points to an ancillary breakdown. A 29-year-old illegal alien charged with raping and murdering a 64-year-old Santa Maria woman in her home had been arrested four times previously, and federal ICE officials issued a detainer to deport him. But local law enforcement released him because Santa Maria is a sanctuary city. In this case, he never even had to turn around and come back. He was just set free.
ms13 gang members

MS 13 gang members.

You see the pattern. The problem. And it is totally unnecessary.

We can and do deport illegals, but they just turn around and come back over. If they commit small-time crimes, it’s cheaper to send them back south of the border than house them in our expensive prisons. Except, of course, they come right back. For serious crimes, we have a duty to the American victims and sense of justice to try them and imprison them here.

These crimes are heart-breaking and they should enrage every decent person.

But so can the statistics, because there is a story behind every number.

The avoidable tragedies by statistics

No, Mexico does not “send” its worst people, as Trump said during the campaign. But in a very practical sense by policy, it does allow some of its worst people to come to the United States by having virtually no border protection on its border with us (but very tight border protection along its southern border) and by tacitly encouraging the crossings.

Mexico’s poorest and most needy residents come across illegally, taking a weight off the bottom end of the Mexican economy and the Mexican government. And yes, a disturbingly large percentage of them are criminals, some escaping sporadic Mexican justice and others expanding their crime syndicate here.

About 15 percent of the federal prison population are Mexican citizens, but only 3.4 percent of the people in the United States are illegal immigrants, not all Mexican, if you take the standard media metric of 11 million illegals here. So they are more than four times over represented in the federal prison system, although many of those may be immigration-related crimes.

But if we look at national crime statistics, illegal immigrants make up:

  • 14 percent of those sentenced for all committed crimes in the country
  • 12 percent of those sentenced for murder
  • 16 percent of those sentenced for trafficking

Those numbers are all many times higher than the percentage of illegal immigrants here, meaning that we are indeed getting a high percentage of Mexico’s criminals. Those are just undeniable numbers.

The wall is an essential tool

We have to build the wall.

It is not a silver bullet, but it is an absolutely essential tool to get ahold of our costly immigration mess. The expenses we are constantly paying associated with crimes by illegal immigrants and deportation must be counted against the cost of a wall and the personally devastating losses. It does not need to be the Great Wall of China, but it does need to be physical and all but impossible to scale. Multiple levels of protection. It is too important to not do right.

And as I said on ABC last week, if we do not, Trump is a one-term president and Republicans probably lose Congress. (This is all the more true with the failure to repeal and replace Obamacare.) Too many Americans have realized the danger of at least one element of the triple threat of illegal immigration — depressing low-end wages, running up service costs for governments, crime.

Opponents are throwing everything at stopping the wall. It’s disturbing.

It’s long been “racist” they claim self-righteously — although Mexicans are not a race. It has long been said that such a wall is “not who we are.” But actually we are indeed a nation of laws, and laws to mean anything require enforcement, and enforcement requires the necessary tools. So actually, it is exactly who we are. We are built on — apologies for doing this — LEGAL immigration, because we are a nation of laws.

These are all easy arguments.

So now the final big argument is that the wall could cost up to $34 billion! How are we going to pay for that? Entitlement programs in the United States cost about $2.6 trillion last year, out of a budget of $3.9 trillion. So that is less than nine-tenths of a percentage point of the federal budget — and it would be spread out over years.

A recent NAS study estimated the lifetime net cost — taxes paid minus services used — of immigrants by education. Taking the average cost estimates from that study and cross-tabbing them with the education levels of illegal border-crossers shows a net financial drain of $74,722 per illegal immigrant.

That adds up in a hurry when talking millions of illegal immigrants crossing the border, meaning the wall would start racking up savings quickly.

And the sorrow upon sorrow laid out above.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act.

America Under Siege: Civil War 2017

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They’ve fought to stop the inauguration. Now they’re fighting to destroy our nation.

Watch this video by Capital Research Center.

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Target CEO Admits Transgender Bathroom Policy a Huge Mistake

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A very damaging article just out from the Wall Street Journal clearly shows that Target CEO Brian Cornell regrets his company’s policy announcement welcoming men to use women’s restrooms and dressing rooms.

According to the article, Mr. Cornell expressed frustration about how the bathroom policy was publicized without his permission or knowledge, and told colleagues he wouldn’t have approved the decision to flaunt it with a public statement that is still on Target’s website today.

“Target didn’t adequately assess the risk, and the ensuing backlash [AFA boycott] was self-inflicted,” he told staff.

You can read the entire WSJ article here, but be aware that it requires a subscription. Copyright laws prohibit AFA from providing the entire article to you.

The WSJ article explained that Target headquarters sent an internal memo to store managers reiterating its official stance on men using women’s facilities. On April 15, 2016, a group Target calls its “risk committee” emailed executives informing them of a plan to post that message publicly. Mr. Cornell wasn’t among the recipients of that email.

At least two of Mr. Cornell’s lieutenants approved the post, including Target’s chief risk officer, Jackie Rice, and its chief external-engagement officer, Laysha Ward.

AFA agrees with Mary McCandless, a shopper in Winston-Salem, N.C. who told the WSJ, “Target picked a side and pretty much said to the rest of us that we don’t matter.” The 56-year-old financial analyst said she quit using her Target credit card and shifted most shopping online. “At least I don’t have to worry about using the bathroom on Amazon.com.”

Inside the company, executives predicted the backlash would die down. It didn’t, and foot traffic inside stores declined significantly in the months following AFA’s boycott announcement.

Since the boycott started, Target’s stock has lost 35% of its value, and shuttered plans for major expansion projects.

Together we are making an unprecedented financial impact on a corporation whose policy is to allow men to use women’s restrooms and dressing rooms. Target’s decision is unacceptable for families, and their dangerous and misguided policy continues to put women and children in harm’s way.

It is urgent the Target boycott reach 1.5 million signers by the end of April.

Help us reach the 1.5 million signature mark.

If you haven’t signed the boycott pledge, please sign it today!

If you have signed the pledge, please forward this email to your family and

At that point, AFA will personally return to Minneapolis with an additional 500,000 names. AFA will then discuss how Target can invite 1.5 million AFA supporters back to their stores by having a common sense bathroom and dressing room policy that links use of these rooms to a person’s biological sex.

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