Dying Pam Am flight bomber pleads to Scotland for drugs to stay alive

Eye on (Libya) Two years after being released by the Scottish government in which to go home and die, the only man convicted of bombing Pam-Am flight 103, former Libyan security chief Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, is apparently still at death's door. Yet this multimillionaire who resides in palatial surroundings has begged the Scottish government to supply him with the drugs in which to keep him alive. The man who the previous Libyan administration treated as a hero for getting out of jail early for the murders of 270 people, and whom the new people in power have said they will not hand over to the UK or US, is begging the very people he has publicly embarrassed by somehow staying alive against all the odds, is now asking for the hand of forgiveness to forgive him some more.

‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’

The stupid thing here is that I could see this starting out innocently and evolving into real hate. It was only fun because I'm sure they were getting their rocks off to edge so close to offensive... till the mob tripped it all up. What you do with your friends is not what should be tolerated in a mob. You want to call a friend a Jew because he is your pal that is one thing, but this was just a bunch of literal hooligans.

Anti-Semitism is a recurrent problem in the world of soccer. Nowhere else, however, is the origin of wide-spread anti-Semitic chants in stadiums as bizarre as in the Netherlands. Earlier this month, anti-Semitic slogans were the subject of a court case brought by BAN, an organization fighting anti-Semitism, against ADO. In March, this top league club from The Hague won a game against Ajax from Amsterdam. During the match ADO supporters frequently chanted “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas” and “Horrible Cancer Jews.” At a party after ADO’s victory, fans and two players sang in the presence of the trainer, “We are going to chase Jews.” The judge decided that ADO’s management would be held responsible to prevent repetition of similar outbursts at future games and if it could not, management should stop the match. However, the Jews at whom ADO supporters aimed were not Jews at all. They were the fanatic fans of Ajax who in a distant past had started to refer to themselves as “Jews.” These supporters accompanied their team with Israeli flags and Stars of David to the stadiums. Some fans even had tattoos of the Star of David. There was a time that when Ajax scored a goal, their fans would sing the Israeli song Hava Nagila. Ajax has had a few Jewish board members and it has a small number of non-violent Jewish supporters. They make up perhaps 1% of those present at home games. A number of them initially viewed the nickname and its accompanying phenomena favorably not realizing what its long-term consequences would be. Fanatic supporters of other soccer teams, principally from the big cities of Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, considered the Ajax nickname a provocation and started with the hate chants. Initially these were anti-Semitic in nature but not in context, as they were aimed at non-Jews. “Bomb Rotterdam” retorted the Ajax fans when they played against local team Feyenoord there. They were referring to the murderous bombardments of the town during the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. Jews must be on guard Anti-Semitic songs gradually spread in other directions. In October 2004, Referee Rene Temmink ended a game between ADO and the PSV of Eindhoven. There had been lengthy shouts of “Hamas, Hamas, Temmink to the Gas.” It was the first time in Europe that a top league game was halted midway due to hate chants. Soccer fans gradually started to sing the anti-Semitic songs elsewhere also aiming at real Jews. Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs — chief rabbi of the Dutch interprovincial rabbinate — said that he, together with a non-Jewish psychologist, once entered a train full of Feyenoord supporters. When these fans saw them, they started to chant: “Jews to the gas.” Jacobs said that he got the feeling that the whole train of “ordinary Dutchmen” was against them. The Rabbi added, “The psychologist shrank from fear. It seemed to me that signs of anxiety wouldn’t help us very much, thus I feigned that I was indifferent to it as a sign of strength. One may consider this incident as an act of hooliganism, yet if one of these idiots had attacked us, many more would have probably followed him.” Nowadays at anti-Israel demonstrations in The Netherlands, “Hamas Hamas, Jews to the gas” is also heard, mainly shouted by Muslims. Even though these kinds of outbursts are prohibited by law, offenders are rarely punished. In one such demonstration in January 2009, two parliamentarians from the left-wing Socialist party participated. They claimed afterwards that they hadn’t heard the shouts. There are also reports that Muslim students at various Dutch schools have sung the same hate song to insult Jewish students. In recent years, Dutch authorities have started to understand that this proliferation of hate songs must be stopped. In May, Amsterdam Mayor Eberhard van der Laan requested after Ajax became league champions that its fans stop using the nickname “Jews.” He observed: “It is a matter of changing this behavior, which may take 10 years.” There is a special lesson in the development of soccer related anti-Semitism to be learned by the small Jewish community in the Netherlands. It has been demonstrated once again that Jews must anticipate problems long before they spread into society at large. This issue is yet one more illustration that Jews have to be on guard far more than other groups in Western societies.

Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld has published 20 books. Several of these address European anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism Manfred Gerstenfeld Published: 08.30.2011 via Docs Talk

There's a precedent for Assad using chemical weapons: His father did it.

א מַשָּׂא, דַּמָּשֶׂק: הִנֵּה דַמֶּשֶׂק מוּסָר מֵעִיר, וְהָיְתָה מְעִי מַפָּלָה.

1 The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.

א מַשָּׂא, דַּמָּשֶׂק: הִנֵּה דַמֶּשֶׂק מוּסָר מֵעִיר, וְהָיְתָה מְעִי מַפָּלָה.

1 The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.

Isaiah Chapter 17 יְשַׁעְיָהוּ

Many countries, including the United States and Russia, gradually eliminated their chemical-weapons arsenals, but Syria refused to sign the U.N. Chemical Weapons convention and proceeded to develop an ever larger and deadlier stockpile. The CIA has concluded that Syria possesses a large stockpile of sarin-based warheads and was working on developing VX, a deadlier nerve agent that resists breaking down in the environment.
By early in the last decade, some weapons experts ranked Syria’s chemical stockpile as probably the largest in the world, consisting of tens of tons of highly lethal chemical agents and hundreds of Scud missiles as well as lesser rockets, artillery rockets and bomblets for delivering the poisons. Leonard Spector lays down some other scenarios in which Assad's chemical weapons could be used. Let's start with the possibility of civil war. According to researchers at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, open sources indicate that there are at least four, and potentially five, chemical weapons production facilities in Syria. One or two are located near Damascus, the other three situated in Hama, Latakia, and al-Safir village, near the city of Aleppo. Hama is one of the hotbeds of the Syrian revolt, which Assad's tanks attacked in early August and where, more recently, fighting has severely damaged the city's hospitals. Latakia is another center of unrest; it was shelled by the Syrian Navy in mid-August. Aleppo, Syria's second-largest city, has also seen significant demonstrations.

If anti-Assad insurgents take up arms, the chemical sites, as symbols of the regime's authority, could become strategic targets. And, if mass defections occur from the Syrian army, there may be no one left to defend the sites against seizure. This could lead to disastrous outcomes, including confiscation of the chemical weapons by a radical new national government or sale of the weapons as war booty to organized nonstate actors or criminal groups.

In such chaos, no one can predict who might control the weapons or where they might be taken. With these chemical weapons in the hands of those engaged in a possible civil war, the risks that they would be used would increase substantially. The problem would be worsened further if some possessors were not fully aware of the extent of the weapons' deadly effects.

And let's imagine that Assad is eventually removed: What leaders would gain control of these weapons after he departed? Saudi-backed Sunni groups? Iranian-backed Shiite organizations? Whoever they might be, it is unclear that the newcomers would follow the Assads' cautious-use doctrine and refusal to share chemical weapons with nonstate groups, or that the new leaders would be able to maintain strict security measures at the chemical sites.

Meanwhile, it's possible that an existential threat will cause the Assad regime to abandon its previous policy of restraint regarding chemical weapons. It is not a huge leap from attacking civilians with tank fire, machine guns, and naval artillery to deploying poison gas, and the shock effect and sense of dread engendered by even limited use could quash a citywide uprising within an hour. h/t Carl

What is more shocking? The betrayal of Iran or the betrayal of Time Magazine.

Time Magazine, Turkey, Iran and Hizballah Distancing from Assad in Syria: Assad, it seems, has forgotten the age-old Arabic saying: "If your sweetheart is made of honey, don't lick it all away."

the WPA, Government money and Robert Moses built this?

Spuyten Duyvil Mudslide via MTA

Hurricane Irene: A mudslide covered the tracks on Metro-North Railroad's Hudson Line at Spuyten Duyvil. Photo by Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Threatening the UN financially won't work if Obama and Clinton think the Jews will vote for them anyway.

Bush Sr. was no friend of Israel, and neither is Obama. In fact it was Bush's secretary of state Baker who said, "Fuck the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway"...and actually was kind of correct because the American Jews were for a welfare state for the most part. Little has changed now that the welfare state has cannibalized the Jewish community. Baker despite bigot barking then passed a financial bill that spooked the UN into turning down Palestine. The GOP didn't do it because they wanted to... the GOP looked a little like a Ron Paul party back then. The GOP did it because in the end they were worried that while the Jewish community was lost to the left, the Christian Zionist community would of been disenfranchised.

...And then there was Secretary of State James Baker's infamous "fuck the Jews" remark. In a private conversation with a colleague about Israel, Baker reportedly uttered the vulgarity, noting that Jews "didn't vote for us anyway." This was more or less true—Bush got 27 percent of the Jewish vote, compared with 73 percent for Dukakis, in 1988. And thanks in part to Baker, it was even truer in 1992, when Bill Clinton got 78 percent of the Jewish vote and Bush got only 15 percent—the poorest showing by a Republican candidate since Barry Goldwater in 1964. via slate.com

Baker's hand was forced... it wasn't like he actually wanted to do what he did... but it remains to be seen if Obama's hand can be forced... because unlike Baker... Obama thinks the Jews will vote for him rain or shine... and sadly Obama would be right on that analysis. The Jewish community really is ill from centuries of abuse and can not seem to let go of government mechanisms. Can anyone really see Obama NOT vetoing this bill? I suppose Congress can refuse to fund UN activities, but I doubt that will stop Obama and Clinton from continuing to do so .

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen knows just how to deal with the 'Palestinian' bid for 'statehood' at the United Nations: Threaten their funding. In 1989, Yasser Arafat’s PLO also pushed for membership for a “Palestinian state” in UN entities. The PLO’s strategy looked unstoppable until the George H.W. Bush administration made clear that the U.S. would cut off funding to any UN entity that upgraded the status of the Palestinian observer mission in any way. The UN was forced to choose between isolating Israel and receiving U.S. contributions, and they chose the latter. The PLO’s unilateral campaign was stopped in its tracks. This example demonstrates a simple but needed lesson: At the UN, money talks, and smart withholding works. With Arafat’s successors up to the same tricks today, the U.S. response must be as strong. Unfortunately, the Obama administration has consistently refused to use our strongest leverage — our financial contributions — to advance U.S. interests at the UN. If the executive branch will not demonstrate leadership on this issue, Congress must fill the void. I will soon introduce the United Nations Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act, which will reflect the executive branch’s previous successful policies by cutting off U.S. contributions to any UN entity that grants membership or any other upgraded status to the Palestinian observer mission. This legislation will also leverage U.S. taxpayer dollars to make sure they do not fund biased or wasteful UN activities, and to achieve other much-needed reforms that will make the UN more transparent, accountable, objective, and effective. It is time to use all our leverage to stop this unilateral Palestinian scheme — for the sake of our ally Israel and all free democracies, for the sake of peace and security, and for the sake of achieving a UN that upholds its founding principles.

Money talks - even at the UN - Carl

Sadly it remains to be seen if the Democrats have any incentive to do the right thing. Sometimes being on the other side is the best leverage an interested party can have.

Clinton wants Obama to veto foreign aid bill

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has asked President Obama to veto the foreign aid bill voted by the House Foreign Affairs Committee if it reaches him. In particular, she mentioned provisions cutting aid to the United Nations, and restricting aid to the 'Palestinians,' Egypt and Pakistan.

Clinton said in a letter Tuesday that she would urge President Barack Obama to veto the bill if it passes in both houses of Congress because the measure “would be debilitating to my efforts to carry out a considered foreign policy and diplomacy, and to use foreign assistance strategically to that end,” The Washington Post reported.

The bill cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week in an effort to cut $6.4 billion from the president’s request for $51 billion in foreign aid for 2012. While it has the potential to pass the GOP-controlled House, it’s seen as unable to get through the Democrat-led Senate.

The bill would impose “onerous restrictions” on State Department operations and foreign aid, Clinton wrote, and the “severe curtailing” of dues payments to international groups including the UN and the Organization of American States would be damaging.

The legislation’s proposal to block funding to countries that don’t meet corruption standards “has the potential to affect a staggering number of needy aid recipients,” as do proposals to restrict aid to Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen and the Palestinian Authority. The bill would only allow the flow of money to those countries if the Obama administration was able to certify that no members of terror groups or their sympathizers were serving in their governments.

Brad Goehner, a spokesman for Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the chairwoman of the House committee, told the Post that the letter was “disappointing, particularly given the current debt crisis, that the Obama administration is fighting to keep sending taxpayer money to foreign organizations and governments that undermine U.S. interests.”

More here.

America's One Child Policy

Vice President Joe Biden, Commissar of the Cracked Head Club, visited China and voiced his understanding of China's One Child Policy. The part that he understood was the forced abortions and the eugenics of baby girls. The part that he didn't understand was how the Chinese government expects one breadwinner to support four retirees. But as usual Biden had it backward.

The Chinese government isn't worried about how retirees will be supported, because they have no investment in them. They'll receive whatever social benefits are doled out, and that's it. China's brutal pragmatism and lack of democracy makes rationing health care and anything else easy. Massive rallies and protests happen all the time in the People's Republic, unreported by the media, and are ignored by the authorities. Tienanmen Square showed the limits of popular protest in creating political change. It's a lesson that neither the leadership nor the people have forgotten. Biden should have really been asking his question in Washington D.C. While America has no official one child policy, it has promoted a shift from family savings and support, to a government supervised safety net. Taxes have gone up, the single income family has become rarer and birth rates have dropped. Marriage and children have become more expensive, the former has dropped at a staggering rate among lower income families, and the latter has gone up leading to large numbers of single parents.

The modern state has all for intents and purposes tried to replace the family, providing an expensive cradle to grave social support network. A network that favors those most who work the least.

The government replaces fathers, mothers and children. Children are cared for by the government. So are their elderly parents. The utility of having children diminishes. And the entire system is funded by higher taxes and economic gimmicks that decrease jobs and diminish buying power which lowers the number of self-supporting families, and lowers birth rates in general and especially among the productive working class who usually provide the biological base for population expansion.

Boosting tax revenues means rewarding spenders over savers, which leads to a consumeristic society that drives even more people into the social welfare system. And even those who stay out of it and try to save, are operating in a system whose monetary policy and programs are set against them. The short term tax revenue gains and monetary policy gimmicks lead to much larger problem as again they create more dependency as everyone is forced into relying on the government social safety net.

Birth rate is the engine behind the social safety net. If the birth rate falls, then even when practiced with the best intentions, the whole system becomes a massive Ponzi scheme. But how do you keep the birth rate high when taxes are high, higher education has become mandatory and a consumer society teaches people to reward themselves now, instead of deferring instant gratification until later?

And without a high birth rate, a major revenue gap opens up. If solvent long term funds were used to prepare for the gap, then the day of disaster could be delayed. But the same political elite that created the problem is also guilty of uncontrollably spending all those funds, and then holding out their hand for more.

In Europe, one answer has been more government subsidies for children. A typical statist solution that tries to use the unacknowledged source of the problem to create incentives to bypass its consequences. While subsidies can marginally increase birth rates, they do not address the real problem.

Taking away people's money and then paying them to go shopping in order to stimulate the economy is common enough in the United States. And it never works. You can't restore a healthy economy with subsidies and you can't restore a healthy birth rate with some social benefits. It's not just about the money, it's also about the culture that was created by those policies. A post-family culture.

So the other Western solution is to import immigrants from a different culture with high birth rates. Europe has all but destroyed itself with that approach, and America is speedily following along. Sure, the total birth rate numbers look good, and no one is supposed to care how many European countries are set to be Muslim by 2100.

But the economics of it still don't work because social utilization goes up drastically to pay for all those extra children, many of whom will never work legally, others who will take far more out of the economy than they will ever put back in. The cost of trying and then imprisoning a single criminal for a year is staggering. Those rapes, murders and drug deals don't just have a human cost-- they have a shocking economic toll. And throw in a major riot like in London and the economic damage adds up to the loss of entire major cities.

And there we are back again to Europe set for a Muslim majority, and America set for a Hispanic majority, and both are going completely bankrupt anyway.

Chinese leaders could have pointed all this out to Biden, but they find it easier to let our civilizations collapse in their own time, while the Century of China gets underway. China may never make it, its own economy is parasitically interlinked with ours and its centrally planned economics and social unrest will probably take it down before 2050. This would be nothing new for China which has gone down this way before. And dynasty or party, it has never really learned from its mistakes.

And Europe arguably has never learned from the mistakes of the Roman Empire, instead again overreaching its conquests, outsourcing its defense, showing weakness at the worst possible time, opening cities to barbarians and engaging in absolute folly in a crisis have been repeated. And the United States is following along.

Peering at the world through the spyglass of history, it would seem as if every people are repeating their old errors again. The State of Israel looks a lot like the latter days of its kingdoms, placing its faith in an untrustworthy power, Egypt and Rome, and allowing itself to be led to disaster by internal division and treason. The Muslim world is aching to revive the Caliphate with the same end results, cultural decay and collapse.

It's astounding that no one has learned anything in thousands of years except how to make a better smartphone. We can put people on the moon and make dinner in five minutes, but we can't stop destroying ourselves in cycle after cycle of history while finding creative ways to justify our suicides.

America doesn't need a One Child Policy, but it has one anyway that punishes childbirth among productive populations and rewards it among unproductive populations. That leads to a division of lower income populations into a working class and a welfare class. With the working class supporting the welfare class. Marriage is down among both classes. It's too expensive for the working class and too unnecessary for the welfare class. Why bother getting married when the local aid office is already your husband, wife and parents combined? The more children you have, the more the government takes care of you.

If China's One Child Policy is a moral horror, the Western One Child Policy is an economic and social horror that has already destroyed major European and American cities. And it's just getting started.

The left's fear and loathing of Western self-perpetuation translates into shrill agitation for population control. Which means more tax penalized one child or no child families in the West alongside ten child Bangladeshi families living off social welfare since tax penalties can't be expected to apply to people who don't pay taxes.

The countries worried about population growth have too little of it, and the countries that aren't worried about it have too much of it. Globalists dream of some UN administered worldwide population scheme, but if no major country was willing to turn over its nuclear weapons to the UN, how likely is it that they'll turn over their babies?

Ted Turner has praised China's One Child policy and suggested that tax penalties could be used to dissuade large families, along with Cap and Trade for babies to allow those families or countries who don't have children to sell their childbearing rights to more fertile people and places.

Turner's plan would allow Europe to sell its child credits to Africa, but how would Africa afford it? China would have an entirely new export in baby credits, but the main countries buying it wouldn't be able to pay for it either. There's something ghoulish about such talk of trading unborn babies between the continents, aborted Western and Chinese babies being sold as credits to create new babies in countries subsidized by Western aid.

But we're trading enough live babies already. There is a booming trade in Chinese and African babies being adopted by Western couples. As with other Western industries, the manufacturing is outsourced to China, while the Western consumer overpays for a product that seems convenient in the short term, but is highly injurious to him and his society in the long term.

The consequences of using the Third World as a baby manufacturing factory, through immigration or adoption, are the end of the First World. You can outsource your energy production to countries that hate you and finance a way of global terrorism. You can outsource your manufacturing and industry to countries that hate you and lose much of your economy and gain a powerful new enemy. But when you outsource your population replacement to peoples that hate you-- then you're gone.

A country can survive anything but its own self-inflicted genocide. And low birth rates combined with population replacement amount to that. Suicidal genocide by a civilization that no longer thinks there's any reason to go on.

The West has subsidized population booms in the Third World with its medicine and its aid. Now it's subsidizing its own population replacement by them. Uncle Sam, John Bull and Madam Liberty are sitting in a skyscraper somewhere with pistols to their heads, cheerfully making plans for their farewell parties. The parties will have a very diverse invitation list. And the evening will end with the suicide of the cultures that contributed so much to the world in the last 500 years.

But the fecklessness of Western liberals and liberalized conservatives may stem their self-inflicted suicide. Before the populations are wiped out, the economies will be.

America and Europe are coming up against the impossibility of maintaining their governments and their economies at the same time. They will have to choose one or the other, and whichever choice they make will leave their countries much less attractive to immigrants.

Either the end of the social safety net or the end of economic growth will significantly reduce rates of immigration and even lead to the exit of some immigrants. It's already happening in America just on the current unemployment rates alone. A complete economic collapse would dramatically reverse the number of opportunistic immigrants who come for profits, rather than for freedoms. But this isn't any kind of solution, it's more like a suicide realizing that he can't hang himself and jump into the water at the same time. He'll have to choose one or the other.

But drowning a dog to kill the fleas on it is no answer. Even if you reduce the number of fleas, the dog is still dead. And it's not clear if the dog can be revived again. The Russian people have never recovered from the damage done to them by Communism. Neither have their birth rates. America isn't as badly off-- but many European countries may have passed the point of return. The easiest way to tell may be to see which countries have an active political movement dedicated to national survival and which don't.

The 2012 election looks set to come down to a contest between a candidate who favors open borders and economic growth-- and a candidate who favors open borders and big government. Lucky us. We'll get to choose between a man who still wants us to have hope and faith in being able to hang ourselves and jump in the lake at the same time-- and a man who believes the future lies in jumping into the Rio Grande and lowering taxes. As they say north of the border, Dios Bendice a Estados Undisos Mexicanos.

Not that it matters. The fleas aren't killing the dog, they're feeding off its self-inflicted wounds. And the wounds are economic and cultural. Japan kept out immigrants, but its low birth rate and falling marriage rate, under the shadow of a big government maintained recession puts it in the same club as the rest of the First World It may avoid filling its cities with Third Worlders doing manual labor and low level crime, and instead replace them with robots, but it's still on the path to extinction.

Meanwhile back in China, the Commissar of the Cracked Head Club, was explaining to his hosts who were trying to stifle their laughter, how unsustainable their system is.

"Poor dumb bastard," they think, "doesn't he understand that this is what drives our competitiveness. That Chinese parents push their child even harder to succeed when he is their sole source of support?

But how could Biden understand, what government control, estate taxes and the death of the family have robbed America of? Chinese families may have only one child, or two, but they still think in the long term. That child is their future. But Biden's own party is barely capable of thinking two weeks ahead. His opposition is hardly much better. Show me a Republican with a long term plan for the country, and I'll show you an unelectable candidate. Show me a Republican with short term solutions that ignore long term problems-- and I'll call him, Mr. President.

Having children is about thinking of the future. Cultures that stop thinking of the future, that cannot imagine the world going on after they die, find innovative ways to commit suicidal genocide. The left is right that having children is not selfless, it's long term selfishness. It's our willful desire to keep our blood and our people around on the planet long after we're gone.

Long term selfishness like that built this country. It built a lot of countries. It raised industries out of the ground and covered the continent with people. But when a culture loses its sense of long term selfishness, what replaces it is a short attention span and instant gratification. And as the economic reasons for having children vanish, and so does the structure of the family, the reasons for having children diminish. The biological need is replaced by housepets and casual sex.

China's competitiveness is personal, but it transcends the personal. Its leaders are venal, greedy and amoral-- but they also think of the future. American competitiveness is personal. It doesn't look to the future. Our companies are satisfied with making short term gains. Our politicians look for short term successes. Our culture seeks only to lock in the benefits of the present, while China sacrifices the present for the future. It does so in brutal and ugly ways, but you don't have to fight a duel nicely to win. You just have to play to win.

Children are the staying power of a nation. They are its long term projection into the future. When a nation does not think of the future, then it has no children and when a nation has no children, then it has no future.
Sultan Knish