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April 2017

NUTS IN THE BIG APPLE-!!!!!?????

New York Recognizes 31 GENDERS—NOT a Typo—Crazier Than California!By Stephen Frank

thanks e-pal Joan Swirsky

Congratulations to Jerry Brown and his Sacramento buddies—California is no longer the weirdest State in the Union—New York may have won that honor. While we are taught there are two genders—m ale and female, in New York there are 31 genders recognized by the Socialist/hedonistic government of the city that never sleeps (It can’t sleep since it is working hard to create new genders.

Yes, there are males and females. Lesbians are not a gender, they are women that sexually like women. Homosexuals are not a gender, they are men that like men sexually. Transgenders are either men who feel like women, or women that feel like men.

Dictionary.com says this, “noun

either the male or female division of a species, especially as differentiated by social and cultural roles and behavior:

the feminine gender.

Compare sex (def 1).”

a similar category of human beings that is outside the male/female binary classification and is based on the individual’s personal awareness or identity.

See also third gender.”

Here are some of the “new” genders” recognized by New York:

Two-Spirit
Trans
Agender
Third Sex
Gender Fluid
Non-Binary Transgender
Androgyne
Gender Gifted
Gender Blender
Femme
Person of Transgender Experience

This is not a comedy routine—Mayor Di Blasio is serious! Please do not laugh too hard.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Narrow Win Could End Up Undermining Him Instead of cementing Turkish president’s authority, winning by such a thin—and contested—margin may threaten his ability to govern unchallenged By Yaroslav Trofimov

This isn’t the kind of victory that Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted.

Turkey’s president, after all, has long enjoyed most of the executive powers that he formally obtained in Sunday’s vote on constitutional changes. His role as head of the country’s governing party, with its pliant parliamentary majority, ensured that real authority was already concentrated in the presidential palace.

What Mr. Erdogan needed, after the July coup attempt against him, was a public affirmation of his leadership—and of his drive to root out dissent. That drive saw hundreds of thousands of opponents, including most leaders of the second-largest opposition party in parliament, hounded from their jobs or thrown behind bars.

With the broadcast media under tight state control and “No” campaigners branded by government officials as traitors or terrorists, Mr. Erdogan’ aides just a few weeks ago confidently predicted that “Yes” would carry the referendum by 60% or more.

Instead, despite all the intimidation and the widespread reports of fraud during Sunday’s vote, the preliminary results, as released by Anadolu state news agency, showed “Yes” barely eking it out at 51.2% versus 48.8%.

That didn’t deter Mr. Erdogan from issuing congratulations on the victory. “The entire country has triumphed,” he said, calling for an end to “unnecessary discussions.”

In a speech to a crowd of supporters gathered under the rain in front of the ruling party’s headquarters, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim described the vote as providing a popular mandate for Mr. Erdogan. “It’s a turning point in the history of our democracy,” he said. “Against the traitors and dividers we stood united as a nation.”

Yet, instead of cementing Mr. Erdogan’s authority, such a thin—and contested—margin may end up threatening his ability to govern unchallenged in the months to come.

“Erdogan may discover that this is a Pyrrhic victory,” said Henri Barkey, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “He may have won now, but he may find that in the medium term opposition to him at home and abroad may harden.”

Turkey’s opposition politicians have already claimed that massive fraud has occurred, particularly in the ruling party’s strongholds in rural Anatolia and in the war-ravaged Kurdish areas of southeast Turkey. These complaints are likely to further delegitimize the result in the eyes of many Turks opposed to Mr. Erdogan.

“It’s the first election in which people have serious doubts about the legitimacy of the process,” said Asli Aydintasbas, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “This means nothing gets solved, and this remains a deeply polarized and divided country. That’s a very dangerous place to be in.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump’s Art of the China Deal Will Xi Jinping really help the U.S. contain North Korea?

President Trump is reversing some of his foreign-policy positions, but this should be no great surprise and so far the changes are mainly for the better. Mr. Trump is never going to pursue a consistent geopolitical strategy because he doesn’t think that way. As President he is approaching the world as he does everything else—as a transactional deal maker who wants agreements that he can sell as a security or economic success. Exhibit A is his recent engagement with China over North Korea’s nuclear missile program.

Mr. Trump campaigned last year as the President who would challenge China’s trade practices, naming Beijing a currency manipulator “on day one.” But after the election President Obama advised him to make North Korea’s nuclear advances a priority. Mr. Trump had no problem shifting quickly from threatening China on trade to using trade as a lever to get China to help the U.S. restrain or end North Korea’s nuclear threat.

“Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem? We will see what happens!” Mr. Trump tweeted on Easter Sunday, explaining why his Treasury Department chose not to slap the manipulator label on China. This policy shift has the added benefit of recognizing that China has been trying for months to prop up its currency, not devalue it for trade advantages.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has made a theme of ramping up political pressure on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The Pentagon sent a carrier group to the East China Sea for maneuvers with the Japanese navy. Mr. Trump tweeted after his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping this month that “I have great confidence that China will properly deal with North Korea. If they are unable to do so, the U.S., with its allies, will!”

H.R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, warned North Korea on Sunday that its “destabilizing” behavior “can’t continue” after the North launched another missile Saturday, albeit a failure that exploded soon after launch. There’s been much media speculation that a U.S. cyber attack helped to scuttle the missile launch. We’d like to think so, though no one in government has confirmed it.

The problem is that so far there’s little evidence that China is changing its policy toward Pyongyang. The case for optimism includes some editorials in Chinese state media criticizing the Kim regime, as well as reports that China has turned back North Korean ships carrying coal exports. The White House also points to China’s decision last week to abstain at the U.N. and not join Russia in vetoing a resolution condemning Syria’s chemical attack.CONTINUE AT SITE

Opening Our Borders Would Overwhelm America When I screened visa applications as a foreign service officer, I learned how many want to come. By Dave Seminara

The immigration debate in America is often framed in absolutes: Those who want the law enforced, support the construction of a wall along the southern border, or are concerned about vetting migrants from troubled parts of the world are denounced as racist, xenophobic bigots. As a former foreign service officer who screened more than 10,000 visa applications, I’ve seen firsthand why tough immigration enforcement is necessary.

The question I hear most frequently regarding my time as an immigration gatekeeper is: Why can’t we just let people in? It’s a reasonable question. Anyone who has never lived in a corrupt country with no rule of law, unsafe drinking water, foul air and few opportunities to escape poverty may find it hard to fathom the desperation that drives millions to strike out for the United States.

Understanding how attractive life in America is to the 1.5 million legal and illegal aliens who arrive on these shores every year is vital to understanding why strict immigration enforcement is a necessary evil. How many might come if we loosened or even removed visa restrictions?

Last year more than 76 million foreign visitors were admitted at U.S. ports of entry. We have no idea how many of them worked illegally or overstayed, because we still don’t have mandatory E-Verify or a reliable entry/exit visa-tracking system. And while we don’t know how many visitors would stay if we let them, we can draw some conclusions from the Diversity Visa Program, better known as the green-card lottery.

The annual lottery received more than 40 million applications from around the world from 2013-15, including more than a million each from Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Nepal, Sierra Leone, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. More than 1.7 million Ghanaians played the lottery last year.

To enter the 2018 lottery, you must come from a country that sent fewer than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. in the previous five years. For this reason, nationals of Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Pakistan and more than a dozen other countries are ineligible. Further, only those with a high school diploma or sufficient work experience qualify.

Polls bolster the case for immigration enforcement. A 2008 Gallup survey of residents in 82 countries revealed that 26% of the world’s population wanted to move permanently to another country. Rolling surveys conducted by Gallup of 452,199 adults in 151 countries between 2009 and 2011 estimated that 640 million people wanted to emigrate, with the U.S. being the desired destination for 150 million. A 2014 Pew Research study found that 34% of Mexico’s 120 million people would like to move to the U.S. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hungry Venezuelans Demand Change Protests are growing larger and more frequent as food shortages worsen.By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

Images of protesters in Caracas running through clouds of tear gas and bloodied by state security forces have been front and center in recent media coverage of Venezuela. Other cities around the country also have been hit hard by police, national guard troops and the regime’s paramilitary forces as the dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro tries to contain a wildfire of rebellion.

Since 1999, when Hugo Chávez launched his Bolivarian revolution, sporadic periods of social unrest have been quashed with force. But this time things are different. The government is running out of money to buy imports, and since it has crippled domestic production, privation is growing more profound.

These protests were initially sparked by the Supreme Court’s attempt to shut down the opposition-controlled National Assembly. They have flourished because of hunger. Venezuela remains a long way from a return to the modern liberal democracy that its 1961 constitution envisioned. But the status quo is unsustainable.

So far this month pro-government militias or the police have allegedly killed three protesters in and around Barquisimeto, the capital city of Lara state. A demonstrator was fatally shot in Valencia—the third largest city in the country—and the governor of Carabobo state has admitted that the police were responsible. Another young protester was killed in a satellite city of Caracas, and an 87-year-old Caracas woman died when tear gas inundated her home.

Roving bands of government-sponsored militias terrorize civil society as they have for more than a decade. On Wednesday one gang burst into the Basilica of St. Teresa in Caracas, where Cardinal Jorge Urosa was to say Mass, and began attacking parishioners.

Yet protests are swelling and becoming more frequent. Video taken from a tall Caracas building on April 8 captures a mass of humanity blanketing the wide Avenida Francisco Miranda as far as the eye can see.

At a February forum for youth in Miranda state, a 16-year-old girl politely informed Mr. Maduro that students in her school often faint from hunger. She also reported a hole in the school roof and a shortage of desks.

The young men in the streets have a different way of communicating, oozing fury as they dart among heavily armed security forces. Casualties only stiffen their resolve. Mr. Maduro was pelted with stones as he left a military rally in Bolívar state last week. CONTINUE AT SITE

The FDA’s Pizza Minders Your government at work: The pepperoni calorie-count rule.

The Food and Drug Administration can’t possibly fulfill all of the responsibilities it claims to have, and here’s one way the Trump Administration can set better priorities: Direct the agency to end its effort to inform Americans that pizza contains calories.

An FDA rule to take effect May 5 requires chain restaurants to post calorie counts on menus. The regulation also covers movie theaters, grocery stores, breweries and other establishments with more than 20 locations. The rule, required by the Affordable Care Act, has been revised and twice delayed in six years, mostly due to objections from a trade coalition called the American Pizza Community. (Regrettably, it does not issue membership cards.)

The more than 100-page rule, perhaps the longest meditation on fast food ever published, says that pizza purveyors must display per slice calorie ranges. Dominos offers 34 million potential combinations, and the number of pepperonis on a pizza can vary based on whether a customer also tosses on green peppers or something else. FDA suggests displaying verbiage like “pepperoni—200 added calories for a one-topping pizza” for every topping. Better have a calculator when ordering.

The regulation also defines menu to include advertisements or flyers that list a phone number or website for ordering—in other words, marketing material. The restaurant must certify that the store made “reasonable” efforts to ensure that calorie estimates are accurate, though the minds behind this rule don’t sound like reliable arbiters of reasonableness. The penalty for noncompliance is fines, jail or, this being America, class-action lawsuits.

The micromanaging extends to menu font and colors, which must be “the same color or in a color at least as conspicuous” as other types, according to FDA guidance. By the way, none of this will help consumers eat less pizza: Most customers place orders online or over the phone, not from a menu board. Dominos offers an online Cal-O-Meter to help customers know what they’re eating. Restaurants are already required to make this information available in stores and the web for those who wish to know.

Trump juggles the foreign policy balls Obama dropped by Claudia Rosett

The Trump administration is taking heat for striking a Syrian air base with Tomahawk missiles and hitting ISIS terrorists in Afghanistan with a MOAB, a conventional bomb so big that it has been dubbed the “Mother of All Bombs.” No doubt there are useful debates to be had about the pros and cons, both tactical and juridical. But one sure upside of these strikes is that they are a step toward restoring abroad the credibility of America as a power to be reckoned with.

That’s big, in ways that go way beyond the immediate battlefields. In a world grown dramatically more dangerous during President Obama’s eight years of appeasement and retreat, America badly and urgently needs to restore its lost credibility.
It would be great if diplomats could protect America, its allies and its interests with words alone. But in matters involving aggressive tyrannies, words don’t mean much unless they are backed up by military muscle and the credible willingness to use force. When that threat goes missing, predators take notice.

It’s also clear that when America backs down, the threats tend to compound. Predatory regimes tend to do business together, observe each other and learn from each other. When Russia snatches turf from a neighbor and gets away with it, that sends a message to China.

Beijing, with its interest in building artificial islands topped with military bases in the South China Sea, can see that it’s open season in Asia for accelerating such territorial grabs. When North Korea conducts an illicit nuclear test and gets away with it, we can reasonably assume that Iran takes note.

For the world’s most dangerously ambitious and threatening tyrannies — from Russia to China, from North Korea to Iran — Obama’s neutering of American power over the past eight years created a host of opportunities that they eagerly seized. The sorry truth, given the character of these regimes, is that they would have been fools not to.

By the time Obama left office this January, America’s official words meant almost nothing. Take, for instance, Obama’s declaration in 2013 of a “red line” over the use of chemical weapons in Syria. That gave way to former Secretary of State John Kerry’s Lilliputian assurance that an American strike on Syria’s chemical weapons facilities would be “unbelievably small.” That turned into no strike at all, as Obama entrusted Russia with the supervision of its client despot in Damascus, President Bashar Assad — whose resignation Obama had called for, to no effect, two years earlier.

Lois Lerner Demands Secrecy for IRS Targeting Lawsuit Deposition By Rick Moran

Lois Lerner, the former head of the IRS tax exempt division, is asking a federal judge to keep her deposition in a class action lawsuit related to the targeting scandal secret.

Lerner and another IRS manager, Holly Paz, claim they were harassed and received death threats for their role in the scandal and believe that releasing their depositions will lead to further threats.

Washington Times:

The two women submitted secret evidence to the judge that they said backed up the death threat claim. They said the threats they’ve already gotten contained “graphic, profane and disturbing language” that they said has caused them embarrassment.

The groups suing the IRS in the class action lawsuit have objected to the secrecy order, leaving the matter to Judge Barrett to decide.

So Lerner feels “embarrassment”? She is afraid of “threats”? Imagine what went through the minds of ordinary citizens who felt the heavy hand of the IRS tearing apart their lives, asking for the most personal information, and violating the most sacred principles of individual and political freedom.

Suck it up, Lerner, and come clean.

Both Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz are among the IRS figures who’ve been ordered to be deposed in the class action lawsuit. Ms. Paz already gave one deposition in the case in 2015.

The women want that past deposition and their future testimony to remain hidden from the public and only available to the lawyers involved in the case. They asked that the seal be permanent.

Ms. Lerner has refused to talk in public about her role in the targeting, famously engaging in a showdown with the House Oversight Committee after she appeared, delivered a statement of innocence and then balked at answering any questions.

The House eventually voted to hold her in contempt, but an Obama administration prosecutor — acting just hours before his resignation became effective — announced the Justice Department wouldn’t pursue the case.

The Justice Department also cleared Ms. Lerner in a criminal investigation, saying she was one of the first in the IRS to realize they were acting wrongly, and took steps to clean up the mess.

House Republicans asked Wednesday that the Trump administration reopen the case. They say Ms. Lerner obstructed official investigations and pointed to evidence from emails in which Ms. Lerner mocked conservatives and Republicans as evidence of malice, which the GOP said helped foster the environment that led to tea party groups being targeted by the IRS.

The IRS still faces several legal cases stemming from the targeting.

The class action lawsuit involves 428 groups who were snared by the IRS targeting procedures. That case, which is being heard in a federal court in Ohio, is in the discovery phase, and Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz are supposed to give testimony.

IRS officials also agreed to turn over the system reports it generated for each of the 428 groups targeted. CONTINUE AT SITE

Elizabeth Warren answers a question no one has really asked by Andrew Malcolm

An extremely large percentage of America’s 326.5 million citizens did not run for president last year. Only one of us non-candidates, however, decided to write a new book to explain why.

If you’re one of the many Americans who hadn’t thought to wonder why Elizabeth Warren did not run for president — or don’t really care — join the crowd. Warren’s new book about her non-candidacy comes out next week and would-be buyers are not yet lining up.

The book is heavily biographical, which means Warren is definitely running for the presidential nomination of what’s left of the Democrat Party in 2020. First, of course, she needs to win reelection next year in Massachusetts.

Warren is the darling of far-left Democrats, who are running the show way out there nowadays. The book and attendant publicity appearances will provide a bully pulpit to explain her progressive views publicly and more private opportunities to fundraise and meet and chat up donors in those same cities.

And the book will give MSNBC and CNN easy excuses to have her on many times to talk about it and to fret about the country’s endangered middle class. Warren may not have enough time, you understand, to go into how badly the middle class suffered with stagnant wages and lost jobs during the long eight years of the most recent Democrat president and how as a result last fall so many millions of those voters opted instead for the uncertainty of an outlandish Republican.

Warren will lay blame for hard times on Donald Trump, who’s rolling back the regulations she fought so hard to impose as a government bureaucrat. Warren probably will not explain either what an awful candidate Hillary Clinton was. Nor how the 2016 Democratic nomination was a rigged gimme for Clinton.

But Warren will have nice things to say about fellow New Englander Bernie Sanders, who shares her views on evil banks, Wall Street and big business rigging everything for the wealthy.

If all works out as planned, every single media interviewer will ask about the 2020 presidential race. And Warren can smile and say, Oh, no, she hasn’t thought that far ahead. She just wants to serve the good people of Massachusetts.

A Month of Islam and Multiculturalism in Britain: March 2017 by Soeren Kern

“Have you seen some of those ISIS propaganda videos, they are cut like action movies. Where is the counter narrative?” — Riz Ahmed, actor.

Britain’s foreign aid budget is reportedly funding at least two dozen Palestinian schools, some of which are named after terrorists and murderers and which openly promote terrorism and encourage pupils to see child killers as role models.

An estimated 400 home-grown jihadis have returned to the United Kingdom after fighting in Syria, but only 54 of those have been prosecuted, according to a Mail on Sunday investigation, which also discovered that some returned jihadis are roaming free on the streets of Britain.

March 1. A new Channel 4 documentary series called “Extremely British Muslims” showed the inner workings of a sharia court inside Birmingham’s Central Mosque. In the first episode, viewers witnessed the case of mother-of-four Fatima, 33, as she sought permission to divorce her drug dealer husband she says has abused her throughout their 14-year marriage. According to sharia law, Muslim women must plead their divorce cases in court, while Muslim men need only to say the words “I divorce you” three times to obtain a divorce. Birmingham Central Mosque said it allowed the sharia proceedings to be filmed in an effort to “break down misconceptions about Islam.” Some 100 sharia courts in Britain are now dispensing Islamic justice outside the remit of the British legal system.

March 2. English actor Riz Ahmed warned that the lack of Muslim faces on British television was alienating young people, driving them towards extremism and into the arms of the Islamic State. Delivering Channel 4’s annual diversity lecture in Parliament, Ahmed said that television had a pivotal role to play in ensuring that Muslims felt heard, and valued, in British society:

“If we fail to represent, we are in danger of losing people to extremism. In the mind of the ISIS recruit, he’s the next James Bond right? Have you seen some of those ISIS propaganda videos, they are cut like action movies. Where is the counter narrative? Where are we telling these kids they can be heroes in our stories — that they are valued? If we don’t step up and tell a representative story we are going to start losing British teenagers to the story that the next chapter in their lives is written with ISIS in Syria.”

March 3. The Amateur Swimming Association changed its swimsuit regulations to allow Muslim women to wear full body outfits, after a request from the Muslim Women’s Sport Foundation. The rule was changed to encourage more Muslim women to take part in the sport. Rimla Akhtar, from the Muslim Women’s Sport Foundation, said:

“Participation in sport amongst Muslim women is increasing at a rapid pace. It is imperative that governing bodies adapt and tailor their offerings to suit the changing landscape of sport, including those who access their sport.”

March 4. Ryan Counsell, 28, a jihadist from Nottingham who left his wife and two small children to fight with the Abu Sayyaf Islamist group in the Philippines, blamed his behavior on the Brexit vote. He told the Woolwich Crown Court that increased tension within the local Muslim community after Brexit sparked his decision to leave. He said that he wanted to escape Britain’s political climate and seek an “idyllic life” under sharia law. He was arrested at Stansted airport in July 2016 and was later sentenced to eight years in prison.

March 5. Homegrown terrorism inspired by the Islamic State poses the dominant threat to the national security of the United Kingdom, according to a comprehensive new report on violent Islamism in Britain. The 1,000-page report — “Islamist Terrorism: Analysis of Offenses and Attacks in the UK (1998–2015)” — was published by the Henry Jackson Society, a foreign policy think tank based in London.

The report found that number of Islamism-related offenses (IROs) in Britain doubled between 2011 and 2015 from 12 to 23 a year. More than half (52%) of IROs were committed by individuals of South Asian ancestry: British-Pakistanis (25%) and British-Bangladeshis (8%). Other offenders had family ties to countries in Africa, the Middle East and the Caribbean. Forty-seven percent of IROs were committed by individuals born in the UK.

The also report showed a clear link between terrorism and growing up in Muslim-dominated neighborhoods. London was the place of residence of 43% of IROs, followed by West Midlands, with 18%. Of the latter, 80% of IROs were in Birmingham. The third most common region was North West England, with 10% of IROs. Together, these three regions contained the residences in almost three-quarters (72%) of cases. East London was home to half (50%) the London-based offenders, while the three most common boroughs — Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest — contained the residence of offenders’ in 38% of all London IROs (and 16% overall).

March 6. British security services have prevented 13 potential terror attacks since June 2013, according to Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, the UK’s most senior counter-terrorism police officer. He also said that there were 500 live counter-terror investigations at any given time, and that investigators have been arresting terror suspects at a rate of close to one a day since 2014. The official threat level for international terrorism in the UK has stood at severe — meaning an attack is “highly likely” — for more than two years.

March 7. The National Health Service (NHS) revealed that there were 2,332 new cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Britain between October and December 2016. That brought the total of new cases in 2016 to nearly 5,500.

March 7. The managers of the cash-strapped Sandwell General Hospital near Birmingham are considering the construction of a special kitchen for preparing halal meals for Muslim patients and staff. The move follows complaints about the quality of halal meals that the hospital has outsourced to local vendors. A spokesman said: “We are still reviewing options around creating a separate halal kitchen and the best ways to provide a range of healthy halal options to patients and staff who want them.”

March 10. The BBC announced that it would begin outsourcing production of Songs of Praise, a Sunday worship program that has been produced in-house for 55 years. Critics of the move said they feared that Songs of Praise will lose its Christian focus in favor of Islam. Anglican priest Lynda Rose said a recent Songs of Praise episode featuring a segment about the Muslim faith, including Church of England children visiting a mosque, exemplified the “Islamization of the BBC.” More than 6,000 people have signed an online petition calling for MPs to investigate the BBC after it appointed Fatima Salaria as the BBC’s head of religious programming — the second Muslim in a row to hold the post.