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August 2016

MORE PAT CONDELL:EUROPE’S LAST CHANCE

“European Politicians Are Out of Control & One in Particular is Out of Her Mind” (video)

“We are importing a hostile parallel society that is never going to integrate … We are importing war.”

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2016/08/european-politicians-are-out-of-contril.html
If you want to stop the islamisation of the West, speak up if you can, he urges, but whatever you do, vote against the “arrogant political class” that is leading us into a “political dead end” that will result in disaster for our children and grandchildren.

Pat Condell at his very best.

Departing U.S. Commander Says Islamic State Losing, But Still Dangerous More than 25,000 enemy fighters have been killed; swaths of territory reclaimed in Iraq and Syria By Gordon Lubold

WASHINGTON—The U.S. commander overseeing the coalition fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria said it has made progress but cautioned that the extremist group continues to pose a danger.

The U.S., Iraq and its allies have killed more than 25,000 enemy fighters and reclaimed swaths of territory from the militant group in Iraq and Syria, trained nearly 14,000 Iraqi forces and struck at Islamic State’s oil and gas assets, said Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland.

But, he added, Islamic State persists as a threat.

“Military success in Iraq and Syria will not necessarily mean the end of Daesh,” Gen. MacFarland told reporters at the Pentagon, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “We can expect the enemy to adapt more into a true insurgent force and terrorist organization, capable of horrific attacks, like the one here on July 3 in Baghdad and those others that we’ve seen around the world.”

Gen. MacFarland is completing a year as commander of the Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, the name the military has given the fight against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. His departure amounts to an inflection point for the fight against Islamic State, as forces both in Iraq and Syria prepare for difficult campaigns against two Islamic State strongholds—Mosul in Iraq, and Raqqa in Syria. CONTINUE AT SITE

Mesopotamia’s Balkanization By Andrew Harrod

“Within the culture in the Middle East, if you are the other, you will never be embraced,” stated Murad Ismael, executive director of the Yazidi advocacy organization YAZDA during a July 28 Georgetown University conference. Describing the plight of various minorities facing the genocidal onslaught of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), he and his fellow conference speakers indicated why only power decentralization could stabilize this long troubled region.

Naomi Kikoler from the Holocaust Memorial Museum discussed learning during her trips to Iraq of a “deep distrust both towards the Iraqi government and the Kurdish regional government by many of the minority communities.” “In the U.S. this idea persists that all Iraqis can live together” in a “melting pot,” stated Sherri Talabany, president of the SEED Foundation, a Kurdish aid organization. Yet bitter experience had taught various ethnic and religious groups that “you really are not safe unless your group is in charge.”

Father Behnam Benoka, an Iraqi Catholic Chaldean priest and humanitarian worker, particularly noted that “we don’t accept as Christians anymore to be under Arab or Muslim tutelage or custody.” Distrust of Iraq’s central government meant that Iraqi Christian communities now seek “to govern our cities by ourselves” and have “our house to be our own house” in some form of local autonomy under international protection. Echoing comments by Turkmen Rescue Foundation President Ali A. Zainalabdeen, Benoka noted that Iraqi government soldiers fleeing ISIS’ 2014 Iraqi conquests had “delivered all the religious minorities as a gift for ISIS.”

Left defenseless, Iraqi minorities often perceived their own Sunni Muslim neighbors in the area of ISIS’ advance as more of a threat than ISIS foreign fighters, Talabany stated. As these minorities would recount, “our neighbors came to the Christian family and said, ‘you have lived next to us for 100 years and so for that reason I am going to give you and your family ten minutes to go and I won’t kill you.’” She noted Yazidi ISIS sex slaves often knew their captors and dismissed trying to “re-integrate people with their torturers,” while segregation often helped pacify refugee camps. Benoka asked of treacherous neighbors “how could we continue living in peace with them.”

Syria Justice and Accountability Centre Executive Director Mohammed Al-Abdallah noted that the region’s Sunni Muslims themselves feared various groups fighting ISIS such as the Kurds, with whom they had a conflicted history. Precisely Shiite domination of Iraq’s central government had alienated the country’s Sunni minority in western Iraq, causing them to favor ISIS. Concerning Sunnis, ISIS’ Kurdish and Shiite opponents effectively “want to liberate you in spite of you, and you should be happy with our governance even if we do not represent you. And of course that will bring only another ISIS.”

Amidst the region’s bloodbath, Talabany cited Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) as a unique “safe haven” for minorities, including numerous refugees, as indicated by a multiplicity of diverse recognized religious holidays. Nonetheless, Kurds “need to get rid of Islamic religious teaching in the schools and replace that with tolerance and world religion.” Abdallah criticized as well Syrian Kurd use of female child soldiers in their fighting against ISIS and others, while Zainalabdeen noted recent fighting between Iraqi Kurds and Turkmen.

Trump’s Contribution to Sound Money The source of trade anxiety is a broken global monetary system that distorts price signals with sharp currency moves. By Judy Shelton

The surest way to become alienated from Donald Trump supporters is to invoke the word “global” with regard to trade or economic interests. Even if you embrace the Trump economic agenda for enhancing U.S. competitiveness by lowering taxes and easing regulation, even if you support an “America First” approach for tackling domestic shortcomings from education to infrastructure—there is still a negative stigma attached to proposing any kind of global economic initiative.

Yet by insisting that the U.S. Treasury label China a “currency manipulator” and by promoting trade that is both free and “fair,” Mr. Trump may be laying the groundwork for a significant breakthrough in international monetary relations—one that could ultimately validate the rationale for an open global marketplace and restore genuine free trade as a vital component of economic growth.

The notion that something good might come out of a Trump policy elicits guffaws in certain economic circles. And questioning whether today’s exchange-rate regime serves the cause of beneficial cross-border commerce is tantamount to advocating protectionism. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump’s emphasis on currency manipulation brings into focus the shortcomings of our present international monetary system—volatility, persistent imbalances, currency mismatches—which testify to its dysfunction. Indeed, today’s hodgepodge of exchange-rate mechanisms is routinely described as a “non-system.” Or, as former International Monetary Fund chief Jacques de Larosière termed it at a Vienna conference in February 2014, an “anti-system.”

If monetary scholars once diligently sought to explain the relative virtues of fixed-versus-flexible exchange rates on global economic performance, they have largely abdicated any responsibility for the escalating political backlash against trade that blames currency manipulation for lost business.

No serious economist would claim today that the “dirty float” intervention tactics practiced by numerous countries would be remotely acceptable within the freely flexible exchange-rate system envisaged by Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman. Nor would anyone suggest that any coherent mechanism exists comparable with the fixed-rate system anchored by a gold-convertible dollar that reigned in the decades following World War II. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Clinton Default Mistake Her presidency will use the federal enforcement agencies to entrench political correctness. By Daniel Henninger

The decision to default one’s vote to Hillary Clinton comes in many forms. She is the lesser of two evils. She is the devil we know.

By all accounts, hell is still hell. Before volunteering to spend four years in it, voters about to commit the sin of despair might consider the consequences of a default vote.

The greatest is the economy. Mrs. Clinton will contribute nothing to lift the flatlined aspirations of the eight Obama years.

There is also the matter of Clinton mores, revealed again Monday in a Washington Post story about the way former Sen. Clinton dealt with the economic plight of upstate New Yorkers. Most relevant was the account of Sen. Clinton pushing federal money to the Corning company on behalf of its emissions-reduction technology:

“Corning’s chief executive co-hosted a 2015 fundraiser for her. The company paid her $225,500 in 2014 to speak to Corning executives. Corning also has given more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, its records show.”

Also worth reading are details of the $315,000 eBay gave her for a 20-minute speech last year, but we digress. Our subject is what surely will be the decline and final fall of the American higher-education system under a President Clinton.

The onslaught of political correctness that overwhelmed American campuses the past year may not come up in the presidential debates. But for many voters the campus pillaging of free speech symbolizes a country off the rails.

The New York Times recently ran a piece describing how colleges and universities are experiencing a pull back in alumni giving because of the PC madness. Donations at Amherst fell 6.5% in the last fiscal year. A small-college fundraising organization named Staff reports that giving in fiscal 2016 is down 29% from the year before.

Enraged alumni vent frustration throughout the piece, but one in particular asks, “Where did this super-correctness come from?” There is an answer to that question.

A Clinton victory will empower, for a very long time, the forces now putting at risk one of the country’s incomparable strengths, its system of higher education.

What happened can be explained in one word: diversity. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary’s Latest ‘Old News’ Mrs. Clinton has set herself up for an October Surprise.

Funny how the word “email” continues to haunt Hillary Clinton even as she dismisses every new revelation as “old news.” The latest new-old news comes in the release by Judicial Watch of 44 emails from her personal server that Mrs. Clinton failed to turn over in the batch she told the State Department included everything that was work-related. The emails paint a picture of top Clinton aides at State eager to do favors for Clinton Foundation donors.

At the heart of these documents is the glaring conflict of interest that Mrs. Clinton carried into the State Department—and then spread to those around her. Only months after the Clinton Foundation agreed to ethics protocols designed to keep Mrs. Clinton’s department from mixing State with foundation business, these new emails show her two closest aides— Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills—doing the bidding of Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band.

On April 22, 2009, Mr. Band emailed Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills to say it’s “important to take care of [name redacted]. The subject line reads: “Fw: A favor.” Far from suggesting the favor was inappropriate, Ms. Abedin responded that the person was on State’s “radar,” and that “personnel has been sending him options.” Shouldn’t Americans know who this person was and why he was so important to Mr. Band?

The ties among Mrs. Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and State would become more incestuous. Two years after Mr. Band sent this email, he founded Teneo, a consulting firm. Ms. Abedin would soon draw a paycheck from Teneo at the same time she was also working for both State and the Clinton Foundation.

Another 2009 email has Mr. Band telling Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills that “We need Gilbert chagoury [sic] to speak to the substance person re lebanon.” Within hours, Ms. Abedin replies that the “substance person” is Jeff Feltman—the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and former U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. A follow up email from Mr. Band urges her to call him “now.”

The email doesn’t spell out what Mr. Chagoury wanted from the ambassador, but let your imagination run. Mr. Chagoury is a Lebanese-Nigerian whose family businesses thrived under Gen. Sani Abacha, the military dictator who ruled Nigeria for years. According to a 2001 British court decision, the Nigerian government agreed not to prosecute Mr. Chagoury and unfreeze his Swiss bank accounts if he paid back millions it claimed had been stolen. CONTINUE AT SITE

US must invest more in advanced computing By Chuck Brooks and David Logsdon,

Over the course of the last year, our writings in The Hill have addressed emerging technology issues including big data, the Internet of Things, automation/artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. Our focus has been the growing implications of these new technologies for both the public and private sectors. There is a common threat that ties all these tech innovations together: the collection, analysis, and utilization of data via advanced computing capabilities, specifically supercomputing and high-performance Computing (HPC).

In today’s world, computing rules almost all that we do. The exponential upsurge of data and its uses directly impact the critical infrastructure of society, including healthcare, security, transportation, communications and energy. Organizing, managing and analyzing data, though, is more important than ever. The U.S. military and the intelligence community depend on maintaining a qualitative edge in processing power that factors in the design, creation and operations of many technologies and programs of national security interest. Supercomputing and the corollary of high-performance computing have become the means mechanisms for those vital tasks.

Seymour Cray is commonly referred to as the “father of supercomputing” and his company, Cray Computing, is still a driving force in the industry. Supercomputers are differentiated from mainframe computers by their vast data storage capacities and expansive computational powers.

The website Techtarget.com provides a strong working definition of HPC: “the use of parallel processing for running advanced application programs efficiently, reliably and quickly. The most common users of HPC systems are scientific researchers, engineers and academic institutions. Some government agencies, particularly the military, also rely on HPC for complex applications.” HPC works hand-in-hand with supercomputing as it requires the aggregation of computer power to address problems and find solutions.

The New Threat of Very Accurate Missiles By Dr. Max Singer

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Precision-guided medium-range missiles, a relatively new technology, are beginning to proliferate in the Middle East. When they work as designed, they can deliver half a ton of high explosive to within meters of their targets. This means that for many targets, they are almost as effective as nuclear weapons. With their capacity to destroy capital facilities like power plants, the loss of only a few of which would severely harm Israel’s economy, they introduce a new way for Israel to decisively lose a war. Israel will have to get the difficult balance between offense and defense right before the next war or it may not have a second chance.

Throughout history, until 1945, a country was basically safe as long as no enemy army could invade and defeat its army. This basic strategic fact became obsolete with the invention of nuclear weapons, which could be thrown or delivered by plane over a defender’s undefeated army and kill hundreds of thousands of a defender’s population with a single warhead.

The first generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) was not accurate enough to present much of a threat to military or strategic targets. They could not reliably hit close enough to destroy an airfield. But large nuclear weapons, each with destructive effects measured in miles, combined with ICBMs whose accuracy was similarly measured, turned the focus of war thinking toward attacks on cities. This represented a new kind of war.

A special kind of “deterrence” thus became the central topic of strategic thinking: deterrence based on the threat of a retaliatory attack that hurts the country to be deterred, but doesn’t necessarily turn the balance of forces in the deterrer’s favor. This new style of deterrence says, “If you hit me, I will hit you back even if I have to do so in a way that does me no good. I will commit myself to hitting you, regardless of its effect on my situation, to stop you from hitting me first.”

This paper is a narrow analysis of strategic concepts in a historical context, omitting diplomatic and arms control considerations as well as several technical issues. Throughout history, countries have faced dangers other than those posed by military attack. And in a nuclear world, there are ways of protecting yourself other than through your own nuclear deterrence.

ICBMs eventually became accurate enough that smaller nuclear weapons could be used, but not so accurate that ballistic missiles without nuclear weapons could be a strategic threat.

More recently, however, technology driven by the computer revolution began to create a new strategic situation for the great powers. This technology controlled a warhead’s accuracy not by improving the precision of the missile’s launch, but by guiding the missile’s warhead as it approached its target.

“Terminal guidance,” as this technology is known, can enable warheads to be delivered over very long distances and to hit within meters of their aim-points. The launch does not have to be perfectly accurate if the final trajectory of the warhead is controlled by guidance that depends not on the initial trajectory of the missile but on equipment on the warhead.

Hillary Clinton’s loose e-lips

Normally, Iran’s execution of a nuclear scientist who gave information to the United States would draw no unusual attention — but this one popped up in Hillary Clinton’s infamous e-mails.

The then-secretary of state discussed Shahram Amiri with several aides in communications kept on her unprotected private server — including just days before he abruptly left America to return to Tehran.

That raises a fresh flood of questions about Clinton’s home-brewed setup — which she insists was well protected but the FBI believes was most likely hacked by “hostile” interests.

Amiri’s is a bizarre case, to be sure. For years, he reportedly provided info from inside Iran about its nuclear program. Then he went missing in Saudi Arabia in 2009, only to resurface a year later in two Internet videos. In one, he claimed he’d been kidnaped and tortured by the CIA. In the other, he said he was free and safe in America.

In July 2010, he appeared at the Pakistani embassy in DC saying he wanted to return to Iran, where his wife and young son still lived. He did so days later and was given a hero’s welcome — before vanishing.

Last week came word Iran had hanged Amiri for treason — having likely lured him home with threats against his family.

In one e-mail to Clinton, just days before he showed up at the embassy, Clinton energy envoy Richard Morningstar urged that “our friend has to be given a way out” and claimed his was a “psychological issue.”

Proper stuff for top folks at State to address — on secure systems, unlike Clinton’s. Even with zero sign that these e-mails contributed to Amiri’s fate, it still underscores just how reckless Clinton was with classified information — a fact she still won’t admit.

And if US enemies did hack her server, this may just be the tip of the iceberg.

Want a job? Give to the Clinton Foundation right away!

Here’s fresh proof that Hillary Clinton can indeed create jobs — for loyal patrons of Clinton, Inc., that is.

Documents released Tuesday by the good-government group Judicial Watch show Clinton’s top State Department people doing favors for Clinton donors.

The information includes 44 e-mail exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department by the ex-secretary or her aides — despite their sworn statements to have shared all records.

In April 2009, then-Clinton Foundation chief Doug Band pushed Hillaryites Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills to find a position for an associate: It’s “important to take care of [name redacted].” Abedin replies: “We all have had him on our radar. Personnel has been sending him options.”

Without the name, we can’t know who got what job — but other e-mails show Band intervening for a foundation donor.

That same year, he pushed for State to give high-level access to Clinton Foundation donor Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire. Noting that Chagoury is a “key guy there [in Lebanon] and to us,” he tells Mills and Abedin to connect the donor with State’s “substance person” on Lebanon.

Abedin supplies the name: “its jeff feltman,” the US ambassador to Lebanon and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. And, she says, “Ill talk to jeff.”

Band doesn’t let go: “Better if you call him. Now preferable. This is very important. He’s awake I’m sure.”

Chagoury has a murky past: In a 2000 plea deal on Swiss money-laundering charges, he repaid $66 million to the Nigerian government. But, hey, he also gave at least $1 million to the foundation and pledged a cool $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative.

The e-mails show other “employment opportunities”: Big-time Clinton fundraiser Lana Moresky asked Clinton to arrange another hire at State. The secretary told Abedin to follow up and “help” the applicant — and to “let me know” how the job hunt ended.