…“I think we are having a discussion that is absolutely divorced from reality this week. It is astonishing,” she quipped as she reminded them of how then candidate Obama (not President-elect Obama) set up a highly covert back channel with the Iranians:
Let me set the scene for you: It’s 2008, we are having an election and candidate Obama, he’s not even president elect, sends William Miller over to Iran to establish a backchannel, and let the Iranians know should he win the election they will have friendlier terms. Okay? So this is a private citizen going to foreign soil, obviously in order to evade U.S. intelligence monitoring and establishing a backchannel with a sworn enemy of the United States who was actively disrupting our efforts in the military in the Middle East.
Of course there is more to this issue than the MSM has led on to… such as this BLOOMBERG (2014):
President Barack Obama’s administration has been working behind the scenes for months to forge a new working relationship with Russia, despite the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown little interest in repairing relations with Washington or halting his aggression in neighboring Ukraine.
This month, Obama’s National Security Council finished an extensive and comprehensive review of U.S policy toward Russia that included dozens of meetings and input from the State Department, Defense Department and several other agencies, according to three senior administration officials. At the end of the sometimes-contentious process, Obama made a decision to continue to look for ways to work with Russia on a host of bilateral and international issues while also offering Putin a way out of the stalemate over the crisis in Ukraine.
[….]
Kerry has been the point man on dealing with Russia because his close relationship with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov represents the last remaining functional diplomatic channel between Washington and Moscow. They meet often, often without any staff members present, and talk on the phone regularly. Obama and Putin, on the other hand, are known to have an intense dislike for each other and very rarely speak….
Funny that “back-channels were an Obama thing… for reals!
(HOTAIR) “….’Liberals think they are tolerant but often they aren’t,’ Zakaria said. He then cited a 2016 PEW survey which found 70% of Democrats said Republicans were close-minded as compared to 52% of Republicans who said the same of Democrats. ‘But each side scores about the same in terms of close-mindedness and hostility to hearing contrarian views,’ Zakaria said….” (More at NEWSBUSTERS)
One of the few times I agree with him. But as HOTAIR notes, he bungles his commencement speech a bit.
Are organic foods really healthier than non-organic foods? Are they better for animals? Are they better for the environment? Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, explains.
Dennis Prager interviews Michael Walsh who writes for the NEW YORK POST as well as PJ MEDIA. Michael is on for his book being released in paperback, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West.” The conversation was interesting, I even enjoyed the “conductor talk,” but alas, I am keeping this upload directed at the political. A great conversation and a humbling of myself who stayed anti-Trump till the last month-and-a-half before the election. The article mentioned by these two, “The Flight 93 Election,” can be found at CLAREMONT INSTITUTE … near the end they discussed the previous hour about cultural appropriation, that segment can be found HERE.
I am a new fan of Michael’s and look forward to reading his work. Follow him on TWITTER.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has declined a request to host an event to mark Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, two U.S. officials said, apparently breaking with a bipartisan tradition in place with few exceptions for nearly 20 years.
Since 1999, Republican and Democratic secretaries of state have nearly always hosted either an iftar dinner to break the day’s fast during Ramadan or a reception marking the Eid al-Fitr holiday at the end of the month, at the State Department.
Tillerson turned down a request from the State Department’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs to host an Eid al-Fitr reception as part of Ramadan celebrations, said two U.S. officials who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
According to an April 6 memo seen by Reuters, the office – which typically initiates such events – recommended that Tillerson hold an Eid al-Fitr reception.
His rejection of the request suggests there are no plans this year for any high-profile Ramadan function at the State Department. The month of fasting and prayer for Muslims gets under way in many countries on Saturday….
Dee, the woman who posted the link to the story, said this:
Frankly, after 8 yrs. of Obama’s PRAISE & ADORATION of the Muslim’s, I’m sick & tired of hearing how GREAT they are. The ”Asswipe” abandoned CHRISTIANS & all other Religions [editor’s insert: even moderate Muslim communities in the Middle-East or secular movements in Iran], except them! It’s another day, just like Easter is for Protestants to worship their faith… In today’s ”WAR ON ISIS”, the Muslims are KILLING CHRISTIANS, which is what America was built on… Judeo-Christian beliefs… RAAMADAAN is not a ”National Holiday” either… Let the Muslims worship the way they want, that’s fair, but let’s not make a big ”WhoopDeeDo” out of it… I have nothing against any religion & don’t dislike Muslims… WHAT SAY YOU?
I SAY that I am happy that we shouldn’t see anymore of this by our Commander and Chief (BREITBART and my post –RPT– are the source for the text below):
If you’re a white person, you have no business running a restaurant that serves Asian, Latin, African, or Indian cuisine.
That’s according to the creators of a “white-owned appropriative restaurants” list, which accuses several Oregon establishments of engaging in cultural appropriation—a tool of “a white supremacist culture.”
The list, a Google Docs spreadsheet, includes about 60 Portland-area restaurants, the names of their white owners, and the kind of cuisine they serve. (For example, the list informs us that Burmasphere “was founded by a white man who ate Burmese food in San Francisco.”) The spreadsheet also lists competing restaurants that are owned by people of color and urges customers to try them instead.
“This is NOT about cooking at home or historical influences on cuisines; it’s about profit, ownership, and wealth in a white supremacist culture,” wrote the spreadsheet’s authors. “These white-owned businesses hamper the ability for POC [people of color] to run successful businesses of their own (cooking their own cuisines) by either consuming market share with their attempt at authenticity or by modifying foods to market to white palates. Their success further perpetuates the problems stated above. It’s a cyclical pattern that will require intentional behavior change to break.”
The spreadsheet seems to be a response to the controversy over Kooks Burritos, a Portland-area pop-up food truck run by two white women. In an interview with Williamette Week, Kooks owners Kali Wilgus and Liz Connelly explained how they fell in love with authentic Mexican tortillas during a visit to Puerto Nuevo, Mexico.
[….]
Anyway, if you’re saying that white people shouldn’t serve ethnic food at all, even if it’s really authentic and popular with customers, you’re going to drastically shrink the pool of non-ethnic people trying, eating, and learning about, ethnic cuisines. That might satisfy the enemies of cultural appropriation, but it doesn’t seem like it would ultimately be in the best interests of anyone, including the ethnic restaurateurs.
Here is another example:
“If you’re not Mexican, how is it your holiday? It’s not your holiday!… That’s for white people to figure out, or f**king know! Cinco de Mayo is NOT YOUR HOLIDAY!”
DAILY CALLER has a story about an owner of a Construction company in New Jersey being part of a beat-down of protesters outside the Turkish embassy. This business owner is clearly seen kicking Lucy Usoyan (more on her below) along with others.
Mind you, Erdoğan clearly ordered the initial attack on the protesters (first video below), and the second video is showing the view of Erdoğan’s body-guards punching and kicking U.S. Citizen’s. BUT, one of the people identified is a business owner, and he can be seen repeatedly kicking a woman (second video below).
…Yildirim, the owner of a construction company in New Jersey, was one of the most visible figures spotted in videos recorded of last week’s attack.
Completely bald and wearing a white shirt, Yildirim joined dozens of other Turkish men in a full-frontal assault on a group of peaceful Kurdish protesters gathered outside the embassy.
The attackers were a mixture of supporters of Erdogan and bodyguards working for the authoritarian ruler. Erdogan was at the embassy following a White House visit with President Trump…
He works/owns “Carpenter Care” ~ and, since this isn’t Turkey, I would expect the word to spread around that the owner of this business is a thug who beats women.
The above is another example of this Eco-Fascism… “…Justice Scalia released the Court’s opinion, with Justices Ginsburg and Alito seperately concurring, that private property and due process trump government “strong-arming of regulated parties.” And it feels so good.” (TOWNHALL)
I think this is an important story posted by HOTAIR. The whole topic of Leftist Eco-Fascism is in fact:
…Out in California, a farmer is facing millions of dollars in fines for plowing a field that he purchased and planting wheat. If that sentence sounds like something out of a George Orwell novel to you, you’re not alone. His supposed crime was to have “disturbed” the Waters of the United States, a term which gained massive popularity under the Obama administration’s EPA rules. In this case, the land that John Duarte purchased and was plowing did not include a river, or even a stream, but rather “seasonal wetlands” which develop swampy areas during the rainy season but then dry up for the rest of the year. (Free Beacon)
A California farmer is facing a $2.8 million fine for failing to get a permit to plow his own field.
John Duarte bought 450 acres of land near Modesto in 2012 and is now being sued by the federal government for plowing near areas the government considers to be “waters of the United States.”
The case will head to trial in August. The government claims that Duarte violated the Clean Water Act because he did not obtain a permit to work near the wetlands.
USA Today has all the details here but it’s reminiscent of other cases brought against landowners in the past. One of the major sticking points is that farmers are supposed to be exempt from these rules. But the government is claiming that the “ripper” blades he used while plowing were “discharging material” into “wetlands.” And for that he’s being fined millions of dollars.
Duarte never even got to harvest the wheat that he planted because the government was all over him. Keep in mind that we’re not talking about dumping chemicals into a stream or building some sort of permanent structure. The guy was plowing. He was literally moving dirt a foot or so to the side so he could plant his crops….
BTW, LANGUAGE WARNING for the following video (he is an atheist):
One must take note I am a creationist (in fact, a young earth creationist) and reject many of the artistic representations of entire clans and family units from a couple of teeth. I will merely assume “evolutionary” thinking to make my point[s]. Also note that the “out of Africa” and now, “out of Europe” theories have racial overtones and consequences if evolutionary naturalism is true.
If one throws all-in-to naturalistic evolution, you get an “ethnicity” [some call race] evolving before or after others ~ or ~ devolving from an ethnicity [or, species].
Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1850, but they have increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory
Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 1977), 127.
Several skeletons up end the sparse evidence for the human evolutionary tree (via TELEGRAPH).
“The history of human evolution has been rewritten after scientists discovered that Europe was the birthplace of mankind, not Africa… two fossils of an ape-like creature which had human-like teeth have been found in Bulgaria and Greece, dating to 7.2 million years ago.”
“The Races Of Man – At the present time there exists upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent in structure. These are the Ethiopian or Negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the Islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America”
George William Hunter, A Civic Biology Presented in Problems (New York, NY: The American Book Company, 1914) 196. (For those that do not know, this was a textbook used in classrooms in public schools.)
7.2 million BC is a HUGE jump back in time that negates MOST of the African fossils. If proto-humans were already living in Bulgaria, or in sites now sunk under the Mediterranean Sea, the ENTIRE collection of African fossils is meaningless.
That is, some Europeans wandered SOUTH around 1 million years ago instead of some Africans wandering NORTH. It would also explain why negroid features exist only in Africa: they’re mutations from the common European stock from which the rest of the world descends.
It should be interesting to see what else turns up in Europe.
Sorry Black Lives Matter, so sad that you are not the cradle of civilization (assuming naturalistic evolution). Two books that just got a boost:
An earlier story has thrown a monkey wrench into the old story of human ancestry:
The thighbone of the 400,000-year-old hominid from Sima de los Huesos, Spain.
Scientists have found the oldest DNA evidence yet of humans’ biological history. But instead of neatly clarifying human evolution, the finding is adding new mysteries.
In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.
The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans. Until now, Denisovans were known only from DNA retrieved from 80,000-year-old remains in Siberia, 4,000 miles east of where the new DNA was found.
The mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years….
Consider the following excerpt from a letter written by Charles Darwin in 1881:
“I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit…. The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.”[1]
Lest this be considered merely an aberration, note that Darwin repeated this sentiment in his book The Descent of Man, he speculated,
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes … will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”[2]
In addition, he subtitled his magnum opus, The Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
And Darwin was not alone in his racist ideology. Thomas Huxley, who coined the term agnostic and was the man most responsible for advancing Darwinian doctrine, he argued that:
“No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins, though it is by no means necessary that they should be restricted to the lowest. But whatever the position of stable equilibrium into which the laws of social gravitation may bring the negro, all responsibility for the result will henceforward lie between Nature and him. The white man may wash his hands of it, and the Caucasian conscience be void of reproach for evermore. And this, if we look to the bottom of the matter, is the real justification for the abolition policy.”[3]
Huxley was not only militantly racist but also lectured frequently against the resurrection of Christ, in whom “[we] are all one” (Galatians 3:28). In sharp distinction to the writings of such noted evolutionists as Hrdlicka, Haeckel, and Hooton, biblical Christianity makes it crystal clear that in Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Galatians 3:28). In Christianity we sing, “Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” In the evolutionary hierarchy blacks are placed at the bottom, yellows and reds somewhere in the middle, and whites on top. As H. F. Osborn, director of the American Museum of National History and one of the most prominent American anthropologists of the first half of the twentieth century, put it.
“If an unbiased zoölogist were to descend upon the earth from Mars and study the races of man with the same impartiality as the races of fishes, birds and mammals, he would undoubtedly divide the existing races of man into several genera and into a very large number of species and subspecies.
“ … This is the recognition that the genus Homo is subdivided into three absolutely distinct stocks, which in zoölogy would be given the rank of species, if not of genera, stocks popularly known as the Caucasian, the Mongolian and the Negroid.
“The spiritual, intellectual, moral, and physical characters which separate these three great human stocks are far more profound and ancient than those which divide the Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean races. In my opinion these three primary stocks diverged from each other before the beginning of the Pleistocene or Ice Age. The Negroid stock is even more ancient than the Caucasian and Mongolian, as may be proved by an examination not only of the brain, of the hair, of the bodily characters, such as the teeth, the genitalia, the sense organs, but of the instincts, the intelligence. The standard of intelligence of the average adult Negro is similar to that of the eleven-year-old youth of the species Homo sapiens.”[4]
Think of the historical consequences that are the direct and logical results of the naturalist worldview. For instance, Adolf Hitler, appealed to the people of his country to have a backbone to advance the logical outworking of their worldview. Now mind you, not all naturalists are racists or killers of the less fortunate… however, this is a logical outworking of philosophical [or, metaphysical] naturalism.
“The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law [natural selection] did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all…. If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.”[5]
Hitler referred to this dispensation of nature as “quite logical.” In fact, it was so logical to the Nazis that they built concentration camps to carry out their convictions about the human race as being “nothing but the product of heredity and environment” or as the Nazis liked to say, “of blood and soil.”[6]
It is significant to note that some of the Crusaders and others who used force to further their creeds in the name of God were acting in direct opposition to the teachings of Christ.[7]
The teachings of Osborn, Huxley, Hitler and others like them, however, are completely consistent with the teachings of Darwinian evolution. Indeed, social Darwinism has provided the scientific substructure for some of the most significant atrocities in human history. For evolution to succeed, it is as crucial that the unfit die as the fittest survive. Marvin Lubenow graphically portrays the ghastly consequences of such beliefs in his book Bones of Contention:
“If the unfit survived indefinitely, they would continue to ‘infect’ the fit with their less fit genes. The result is that the more fit genes would be diluted and compromised by the less fit genes, and evolution could not take place. The concept of evolution demands death. Death is thus as natural to evolution as it is foreign to biblical creation. The Bible teaches that death is a ‘foreigner,’ a condition superimposed upon humans and nature after creation. Death is an enemy, Christ has conquered it, and he will eventually destroy it. Their respective attitudes toward death reveal how many light years separate the concept of evolution from Biblical creation.”[8]
Adolph Hitler’s philosophy that Jews were subhuman and that Aryans were supermen (mirroring the beliefs Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood) led to the extermination of about six million Jews. In the words of Sir Arthur Keith, a militant anti-Christian physical anthropologist: “The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consistently sought to make the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.”[9]
Karl Marx, the father of communism, saw in Darwinism the scientific and sociological support for an economic experiment that eclipsed even the carnage of Hitler’s Germany. His hatred of Christ and Christianity led to the mass murder of multiplied millions worldwide. Karl Marx so revered Darwin that his desire was to dedicate a portion of Das Kapital to him. In 1983, the dissident Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn had been awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize for religious progress. In accepting the award, he gave a clear assessment of the tragedy that had been so devastating to his homeland:
“I have spent well-nigh fifty tears working on the history of our Revolution. In the process, I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own towards the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were to asked today the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that has swallowed up some sixty-million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened’.”
It should be noted as well that Darwinian evolution (man evolving from lower creatures) is sexist as well. Under the subheading “Difference in the Mental Powers of the Two Sexes,” Darwin attempted to persuade followers that…
“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by mans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can women – whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands…We may also infer…[that] the average of mental power in man must be above that of women.”
In sharp contrast to the evolutionary dogma, Scripture makes it clear that all humanity is created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27; Acts 17:29); that there is essential equality between the sexes (Galatians 3:28); and that slavery is as repugnant to God as murder and adultery (1 Timothy 1:10).
Appendix
Sir Arthur Keith, Evolution and Ethics (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1947):
p 15 – “Meantime let me say that the conclusion I have come to is this: the law of Christ is incompatible with the law of evolution … as far as the law of evolution has worked hitherto. Nay, the two laws are at war with each other; the law of Christ can never prevail until the law of evolution is destroyed.”
p 28 – “To see evolutionary measures and tribal morality being applied rigorously to the affairs of a great modern nation we must turn again to Germany of 1942. We see Hitler devoutly convinced that evolution produces the only real basis for a national policy.”
p 72 – “Christianity makes no distinction of race or of color; it seeks to break down all racial barriers. In this respect, the hand of Christianity is against that of Nature, for are not the races of mankind the evolutionary harvest which Nature has toiled through long ages to produce? May we not say, then, that Christianity is anti-evolutionary in its aim? This may be a merit, but if so it is one which has not been openly acknowledged by Christian philosophers.”
p 150 – “The law of evolution, as formulated by Darwin, provides an explanation of wars between nations, the only reasonable explanation known to us. The law was in existence, and wars were waged, for aeons of time before Darwin was born; he did not invent the law, he only made it known to his fellow men.”
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, last paragraph.
“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”
Footnotes
[1] Charles Darwin, Life and Letters, I, Letter to W. Graham, July 3, 1881, p. 316; cited in Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959), p. 343.
[2] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1874), p.178.
[3] Thomas Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews (New York: Appleton, 1871), pp 20-1.
[4] Henry Fairfield Osborn, “The Evolution of Human Races,”Natural History (January/February 1926), reprinted in Natural History, vol. 89 (April 1980), p. 129.
[5] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translator/annotator, James Murphy (New York: Hurst and Blackett, 1942), pp. 161-162.
[6] “The SS Blood and Soul,” one of four videos in a video series entitled, The Occult History of the Third Reich (St. Lauret, Quebec: Madacy Entertainment Group, 1998); Now in DVD – ISBN: 0974319465).
[7] This is a side note for those who are of the Christian faith: The Bible does not teach the horrible practices that some have committed in its name. It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the details it produces evil because the individual people [“Christians”] are actually living in rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it [religion] can produce evil, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism (non-religious practices) actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of à God. For example: the Inquisitions (2), Crusades (7), and the Salem Witch Trials killed about 40,000 persons combined (World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana). A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religious criminals have committed; the Chinese regime of Mao Tse Tung, 60 million [+] dead (1945-1965), Stalin and Khrushchev, 66 million dead (USSR 1917-1959), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia 1975-1979) and Pol Pot, one-third of their respective populations dead; etc, etc. The difference here is that these non-God movements are merely living out their worldview, the struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that, no natural law is being violated in other words (as atheists reduce everything to natural law – materialism). However, when people have misused the Christian religion for personal gain, they are in direct violation to what Christ taught, as well as to Natural Law.
[8] Marvin L. Lubenow, Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1992), p. 47.
[9] Sir Arthur Keith, Evolution and Ethics (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1947), p. 230. See appendix for more quotes by Keith.
