The Saudi connection and 911 – why is this the deadest issue in the world?

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This is now treated everywhere like fact, How US covered up Saudi role in 911. And there are, it is said, 28 pages of secret analysis that spell it out.

In its report on the still-censored “28 pages” implicating the Saudi government in 9/11, “60 Minutes” last weekend said the Saudi role in the attacks has been “soft-pedaled” to protect America’s delicate alliance with the oil-rich kingdom.

The New York Post and 60 Minutes are reporting this so why is it not absolutely at the top of every news report every day everywhere in the world? Here’s more:

Case agents I’ve interviewed at the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in Washington and San Diego, the forward operating base for some of the Saudi hijackers, as well as detectives at the Fairfax County (Va.) Police Department who also investigated several 9/11 leads, say virtually every road led back to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles. . . .

Those sources say the pages missing from the 9/11 congressional inquiry report — which comprise the entire final chapter dealing with “foreign support for the September 11 hijackers” — details “incontrovertible evidence” gathered from both CIA and FBI case files of official Saudi assistance for at least two of the Saudi hijackers who settled in San Diego.

It defies understanding that the entire government of the United States would suppress such information, and then not just punish the Saudis but attack Iraq, its largest enemy in the Middle East. Why there is no bi-partisan clamour for those 28 pages is beyond me, since you would at least think there is Democrat advantage in attacking a Republican President. Or for the media who hated the War, or for Obama who made his name by not going along with the attacks on Iraq. And no outright denial, but silence.

America today has the lowest ratio of education to years of schooling in history

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A kind of before and after. This is the before: Bernie is my comrade

And this is the after still to come to the US but a genuine model of a Bernie future: Yellow Water, Dirty Air, Power Outages: Venezuela Hits a New Low

The only thing one learns from history is that no one ever learns from history.

You can see why they prefer Hillary to Trump

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What’s the problem? Sounds like a good return on investment.

GIVE $300K TO CLINTON FOUNDATION, GET $13M BACK IN STATE DEPARTMENT GRANTS! Not a bad deal, at least for former Nobel Prize winner and long-time Clinton friend Muhammed Yunus. Government panels in Bangladesh and Norway accused him of extensive banking and charitable corruption but that didn’t disqualify Yunus from receiving millions in U.S. tax dollars via loans, grants and contracts from Hillary Clinton’s State Department, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock.

“The awards, totaling $13 million, were issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the development arm of the State Department, beginning when Clinton became secretary of state. Another $11 million in federal funds went to organizations allied with Yunus,” Pollock reports.

Yunus “is a high-profile fixture at most of the Clinton Foundation’s major gatherings. The foundation features him at 37 places on its website,” according to Pollock, who also reports that when he asked for details about the $13 million, “USAID Spokesman Raphael Cook said the agency didn’t have the ‘manpower’ to respond to questions about the transactions.” The agency has nearly 4,000 employees.

Inexplicable

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How can such a party come into existence after all we have learned? From AFP: German right-wing AfD party under fire over anti-Islam comments:

Germany’s right-wing populist AfD party drew heavy fire Monday after two of its leaders labelled Islam incompatible with the country’s values and constitution.

The three-year-old Alternative for Germany party, which harshly opposes Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy, plans to adopt an anti-Islamic manifesto at a conference this month.

The chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany Aiman Mazyek charged that “the AfD is riding a wave of Islamophobia”.

“It is the first time since Hitler’s Germany that there is a party which discredits and existentially threatens an entire religious community,” he told public broadcaster NDR.

The opposition Greens’ senior lawmaker Konstantin von Notz accused the AfD of trying to “deliberately turn Islam into a bogeyman to capture voters”.

They were reacting to AfD deputy leader and member of the European parliament Beatrix von Storch who had said that “Islam is a political ideology that is incompatible with the German constitution”.

She had also said her party would call for a ban on Islamic symbols such as minarets on mosques, muezzins’ calls to prayer and full-face veils, speaking to newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

The anti-immigrant AfD made strong gains in three regional elections last month, profiting from public fears over an influx of more than one million migrants and refugees who arrived last year.

Another AfD deputy leader, Alexander Gauland, has warned of an “Islamisation of Germany” and said that “Islam is not a religion like Catholic or Protestant Christianity but intellectually always associated with the takeover of the state”.

The secretary general of the Council of Europe, Thorbjorn Jagland, warned that such statements are “contrary to European values”.

“It is right and necessary to have a debate about important issues like integration and education, but to depict Islam as a threat to our society is wrong and hurtful to millions of European Muslims,” he said in a statement.

“We need to strengthen the respect for common values in Europe, not to create new divisions in society.”

Merkel’s top spokesman Steffen Seibert reiterated Monday the government’s often-stated position that “Islam is now, without doubt, a part of Germany”.

Germany is home to four million Muslims, and many of the country’s most recent arrivals adhere to the faith.

You can be whatever you want to be

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The heading is Dictatorship Of The Dimwits but it’s much much worse than that. Before you watch the video, find out first what you will witness.

This is an extraordinary short video making the rounds. A 5’9″ white guy goes onto the University of Washington campus and asks students to explain why he isn’t a 6’5″ Chinese female child in first grade. They can’t do it. They are so afraid of being judgmental, and offending against the sacred dogma of Self-Definition that they are unable to deny anything he claims about himself. (Not strictly true: one woman of the bunch politely doubts that he is 6’5″.) You have to watch this:

Since they all know he is not a 6’5″ first grade Chinese female student what does it mean that they will not say so?

The very model of a modern econ-illiterate

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Joe Stiglitz, that is. Here the article is on What’s Wrong With Negative Rates? But first, this admission.

I wrote at the beginning of January that economic conditions this year were set to be as weak as in 2015, which was the worst year since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008. And, as has happened repeatedly over the last decade, a few months into the year, others’ more optimistic forecasts are being revised downward.

So even he can see that our economies are going nowhere. But why is that, you may ask?

The underlying problem – which has plagued the global economy since the crisis, but has worsened slightly – is lack of global aggregate demand.

I’m afraid that is a capital-F Fail. Wrong, wrong, wrong!!! These Keynesians don’t get it, since it never seems to dawn on them that aggregate demand can only rise if there has first been an increase in value adding aggregate supply. It’s the value adding bit in particular they don’t get, whose absence in their analyses renders everything they say about the economy completely wrong and nauseating. The are creating the poverty they say they wish to end. Hopelessly wrong on every aspect of how an economy works.

But as it happens, the article is about interest rates in particular. And as I have tried to explain time and again, as every classical economist understood, keeping interest rates unnaturally low will SLOWS THE ECONOMY AND DOES NOT SPEED IT UP. This, too, he doesn’t know, so he cannot make sense of what he sees right before his eyes. And this is what he sees right before his eyes:

In many economies – including Europe and the United States – real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates have been negative, sometimes as much as -2%. And yet, as real interest rates have fallen, business investment has stagnated. According to the OECD, the percentage of GDP invested in a category that is mostly plant and equipment has fallen in both Europe and the US in recent years. (In the US, it fell from 8.4% in 2000 to 6.8% in 2014; in the EU, it fell from 7.5% to 5.7% over the same period.) Other data provide a similar picture.

He never said don’t do it before, but now that it hasn’t worked, here it comes. He has only an ad hoc explanation for why low rates haven’t worked, but it is such nonsense that it is painful to read. You know, I do despair at such stuff. If you want to understand these things more clearly, you should go to my text, now in its second edition. If nothing else, you can at least find out what Joe doesn’t understand, why expenditures must be value adding and interest rates need to rise.

The tribalisation of the West

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From Victor Davis Hanson, Sleeping Dogs Are Waking, the sleeping dogs of ethic and racial division.

The Obama era has reawakened ethnic chauvinism and multiculturalism in a way we have never quite seen before in recent American history. Who would have thought that in 2009, the racist firebrand, tax-delinquent, anti-Semite, former FBI informant, and conspiracist Al Sharpton would become the chief presidential advisor on race, or that the attorney general would refer to blacks as “my people” and the rest of the country as “cowards,” or that the president would urge Latinos to “punish our enemies,” or that something chauvinistic called “Black Lives Matter” would consider a corollary ecumenical “All Lives Matter” as racist, or that “white privilege” would be a slur hurled against the largely working white classes by mostly minority and white elites in academia, politics, journalism and the arts?

Coupled with years of open borders, a failure to enforce immigration laws, hostility to integration and assimilation, and racial preferences in hiring and admissions, the Obama administration in just over seven years has nearly achieved its aims of racializing the American experience to such a degree that everyone must now belong to his particular tribe first, and begrudgingly remain an American a distant second.

Obama may be the worst president ever, but only those of us with enough historical memory can even tell. Soon all that will be gone, and the whiners who write the history will think their new civilisation of ethnic identity and tension is a higher achievement than what will by then have completely gone. His final words are “far, far worse is on the horizon” and on this score he is almost certainly right.

The Great Dictator returns

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Charlie Chaplin’s grand-daughter is alive and attacking Merkel. This is The Great Dictator brought back to life:

Jan Böhmermann faces up to five years in prison for insulting a foreign head of state, after Mrs Merkel gave permission for him to be prosecuted under Germany’s controversial lese-majeste law.

Before I say anything, I better check whether it would be legal to say something uncomplementary about the German head of state. This is not, however, a laughing matter, but our reality right now.

Modern education

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Somehow these two stories belong together. First this: University students are struggling to read entire books. And then this, Professional Educator: Grades, Showing Up On Time Are A Form Of White Supremacy:

While the traits listed [being rigorous and punctual, speaking grammatical English] may simply be regarded as positive traits for success in the modern world, Dr Heather Hackman described them as traits chosen and emphasised to favour whites to the detriment of non-white groups, who are forced to assimilate ‘white’ traits such as good discipline and goal orientation or else be left behind. Hackman’s solution, then, is to train teachers to move away from all these aspects of ‘white privilege’ in education. She routinely touted the benefits of collective assessments (measuring student learning at the class level instead of determining whether each student knows the material), as well as eliminating all school grades entirely.

There is more craziness in the world than you can ever believe and it is getting worse and not better.

The media and political lying

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We all know this, but what is anyone going to do about it? What can anyone do about it?

Poll: Vast majority of Americans don’t trust the news media

We all lie, scientists say, but politicians even more so

The cynicism of the media-favoured side of the political class knows no bounds because they know there is nothing you can do and no matter what you know and believe, they have the power and you don’t.