Kurdistan Solidarity Campaign @KurdsCampaign

One year since the liberation of Raqqa

The struggle goes on, but the city is now completely free from the ISIS jihadists, rapists, enslavers ✌

“McConnell Blames Entitlements, Not GOP, for Rising Deficits”

Majority Leader McConnell says the budget deficit is “very disturbing.”

Bloomberg, 16 Oct 2018:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed rising federal deficits and debt on a bipartisan unwillingness to contain spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and said he sees little chance of a major deficit reduction deal while Republicans control Congress and the White House.

“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News when asked about the rising deficits and debt. “It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”

McConnell’s remarks came a day after the Treasury Department said the U.S. budget deficit grew to $779 billion in Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year as president, the result of the GOP’s tax cuts, bipartisan spending increases and rising interest payments on the national debt. That’s a 77 percent increase from the $439 billion deficit in fiscal 2015, when McConnell became majority leader.

McConnell said it would be “very difficult to do entitlement reform, and we’re talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid,” with one party in charge of Congress and the White House.

“I think it’s pretty safe to say that entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult if not impossible to achieve when you have unified government,” McConnell said.

Politically Unpopular

Shrinking those popular programs—either by reducing benefits or raising the retirement age—without a bipartisan deal would risk a political backlash in the next election. Trump promised during his campaign that he wouldn’t cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, even though his budget proposals have included trims to all three programs.

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The Independence March in Warsaw is the largest annual patriotic gathering in Europe. Photo: Radio Maryja

Visigrad Post, Poland will soon celebrate the Centenary of her recovered Independence”, 11 Oct 2018:

Poland – In a month, on Sunday, November 11, 2018, Poland will celebrate 100 years of recovery of her independence.

November 11 is a day of celebration and commemoration in Poland. For several weeks, the white and red flags float proudly to celebrate the freedom, so dear to the Polish people and for which they were long deprived. In 1795, the once powerful Poland was disappeared from the map of Europe for the benefit of its neighbors. From 1795 to 1918, the Russian Empire, Prussia and Austria took over the entire Polish territory.

During this long period of 123 years, the country was the subject of a major campaign of depolonization. In addition to the occupation of the territory, the Russian and German invaders also conducted a policy to annihilate the “polonity”. The mere use of Polish in the occupied territories was severely punished in this context of Germanization (in the West) and Russification (in the East). This partly explains the attachment of Poles to their identity (national, cultural, religious, …). It was not until the signing of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 that Poland reappeared on the world map.

It must be kept in mind that Poland is one of the oldest countries in Europe. The foundation of the Polish state dates from the year 966. During the seventeenth century, Poland was one of the largest European powers, with a territory extending over an area (largely) greater than that of the present day France (Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, 815,000 km²).

A war of words that went too far

Every year, an “Independence March” is organized on November 11 in the capital, Warsaw. This grand parade is organized by several patriotic-conservative movements to celebrate the anniversary of this “revival” of the homeland.

The people present are also very diverse. Entire families coming from the provinces are also present. Mothers with their strollers parade alongside groups of young people, themselves surrounded by older people.

The 2017 edition of the Independence March took place in a respectful and serene ambience, without major incident. The many smoke bombs gave the streets of the city center a football stadium atmosphere. Of a total number of citizens between 60,000 (police estimate) and 125,000 (estimate of organizers), a handful of extremists (between 50 and 100) unfortunately made themselves known by brandishing racist or hateful banners. One of them read: “Europe will be white or uninhabited. “

A large part of the foreign press (CNN, BBC, The Washington Post, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais, Le Monde, Libération, Russia Today, Al Jazeera …) quickly took the opportunity to launch a real campaign of denigration of this popular gathering, of the government which tolerates it and, by extension, of the country which hosts it.

These media painted tens of thousands of people with the same brush as these activists, not worrying in this case about the amalgam that they are so prone to denounce after each terrorist attack. In this case, no nuance: all the participants were treated as extremists.

“Fascists” “xenophobes” “anti-Semites”, “Islamophobes”, “racists”, “homophobes”, … One would have thought they were attending a contest for the most insulting term to designate this human wave of Poles parading peacefully to celebrate the recovered freedom of their homeland and their show of love for it.

The first prize in this defamation exercise undoubtedly goes to former Belgian Prime Minister, Guy Verhofstadt - now, President of the ALDE group in the European Parliament, he declared in the same Parliament that “60,000 Fascists walked on Saturday in Warsaw, neo-Nazis, white supremacists (…) about 300 kilometers from Auschwitz-Birkenau”.

It is hard to believe that such absurd remarks could have been made by an experienced politician. They nevertheless reveal two interesting observations. On the one hand, this statement shows Mr Verhofstadt’s profound ignorance of Poland’s history as well as its past and present geopolitical situation. On the other hand, it confirms the tendency towards the complex of superiority (moral, ideological, cultural, …) of many members of the “western” elite (of which Verhofstadt is one of the front runners) vis-à-vis what is pejoratively attributed “Eastern Countries”. This attitude makes it virtually impossible to discuss coherently the points of disagreement between “old Europe” and the CEECs (Central and Eastern European Countries) that joined the EU later.

A necessary clarification

If Mr Verhofstadt had even a minimum of good faith and / or basic knowledge of history, he would know that the Poles constitute the first European nation to have resisted Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist regime, at least as early as 1939, and consequently paid a heavy price. He would also know that the Germans looted and razed Warsaw in 1944 and that tens of thousands of civilians were killed by Wehrmacht soldiers throughout the Second World War.

To speak of “Polish neo-Nazis” is therefore at least intellectually dishonest and insulting, especially regarding the families of the victims who died under the “fascism” that Verhostadt claims to denounce.

The height of the perfidy of these remarks can be illustrated by the presence at this Independence March of veterans of the Second World War who themselves fought the real Nazis! A surrealism worthy of George Orwell’s “1984” universe.

By Sébastien Meuwissen, Belgo-Polish student in journalism at IHECS.

Time Traveller Wiki, “Record Breaker: 4 Huge Alien Planets Spotted Around Baby Star”, 16 Oct 2018:

An artist’s illustration of the very young CI Tau system, which appears to harbor four gas-giant planets.

Credit: Amanda Smith, Institute of Astronomy

In an astronomical first, four gigantic planets have been detected around a very young star, a new study reports.

The star in question is CI Tau, which lies about 500 light-years from Earth. CI Tau is just 2 million years old and is still surrounded by a swirling clump of dust and gas known as a protoplanetary disk.

The star was already known to host one planet, a world about 10 times more massive than Jupiter that circles CI Tau once every nine Earth days. This planet, called CI Tau b, was the first “hot Jupiter” ever discovered around such a young star. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

In the new study, a team of researchers observed CI Tau and its disk with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a network of radio telescopes in the Chilean Andes. ALMA spotted three additional gaps in the disk, at distances of 13, 39 and 100 astronomical units (AU) from the star, the astronomers report. (One AU is the Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers).

So it seems that CI Tau b has three siblings. And these newfound worlds are big, too: The team’s work suggests the innermost of the three is about as massive as Jupiter, while the outer two have Saturn-esque heft.

Astronomers had never spotted four gas-giant planets around such a young star before, study team members said. And the orbital range — the outermost planet lies about 1,000 times farther from CI Tau than the innermost world does — is extreme as well, the researchers added.

Indeed, it’s unclear how the two outermost planets were able to take shape.

“Saturn-mass planets are supposed to form by first accumulating a solid core and then pulling in a layer of gas on top, but these processes are supposed to be very slow at large distances from the star,” study lead author Cathie Clarke, of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in England, said in a statement. “Most models will struggle to make planets of this mass at this distance.”

It’s also unclear what role, if any, the sibling planets played in driving CI Tau b to its super-tight orbit, study team members said. Observing the bizarre system further with other telescopes may help answer these and other questions, study team members said.

The new paper was published this month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Mike Wall’s book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” will be published on Nov. 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published on Space.com.

Race Does Not Exist. But “Most White Americans’ DNA Can be Identified Through Genealogy Databases.”

UNZ Review, 12 Oct 2018:

Steve Sailer

Law enforcement investigators have recently begun to solve old cold cases by tracking down criminals via their relatives’ DNA. From the New York Times:

Most White Americans’ DNA Can Be Identified Through Genealogy Databases: Only two percent of the population needs to have done a DNA test to identify nearly everyone else, researchers found.

NY Times, Oct. 11, 2018

By Heather Murphy   … Already, 60 percent of Americans of Northern European descent — the primary group using these sites — can be identified through such databases whether or not they’ve joined one themselves, according to a study published today in the journal Science.

Within two or three years, 90 percent of Americans of European descent will be identifiable from their DNA, researchers found.

The science-fiction future, in which everyone is known whether or not they want to be, is nigh.

The science involves a search for third cousins. To identify a person through a DNA sample, an investigator uploads a previously analyzed genetic sequence to a database. The goal is to find someone who shares enough DNA to place them in the third cousin or closer range. Most of us have at least 800 people out there, somewhere in the world, who fall into this category.

I’m too lazy to check the arithmetic on that number. If you want to: assume a stable replacement rate of two children per generation for ease of calculation. The complication is that you have a lot of direct ancestors closer to you genetically than 3rd cousins and a fair number of uncles/aunts/nephews/nieces.

The team found that a DNA sample from an American of Northern European heritage could be tracked successfully to a third-cousin distance of its owner in 60 percent of cases. A comparable analysis on the MyHeritage site had similar results.The analysis focused on Americans of North European background because 75 percent of the users on GEDmatch and other genealogy sites belong to that demographic. To identify an individual of any ancestral background, all that is needed is a database containing two percent of the target population, according to Dr. Erlich.

In other words, even though we are constantly told that race doesn’t exist, in practice race turns out to look a lot like extended family.

The Times of Israel, 5 Oct 2018:

In rare criticism, Russian chief rabbi blasts supply of S-300 missiles to Syria.

Berel Lazar calls Russia’s decision to give advanced air defense system to Assad regime a ‘mistake,’
says he’s talked to Putin about it.

File photo of Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) lights up a candle watched by Russia’s chief Rabbi Berl Lazar during a ceremony in Moscow’s Jewish community center.REUTERS/Viktor Korotayev

The chief rabbi of Russia said that Moscow’s decision to give Syria advanced anti-aircraft missiles is a “mistake,” offering a rare rebuke of his country’s defense policy.

Berel Lazar, of the Chabad Hasidic movement, made his remarks Thursday at a conference organized by the Limmud FSU cultural group in Sighet, Romania.

Russia is giving Syria the S-300 system following the downing last month of a Russian intelligence gathering aircraft by Syrian forces responding to an Israeli strike over Syrian airspace.

Russia has blamed Israel for the incident, which killed 15 Russian soldiers.

“I think it’s a mistake that will only augment the region’s problems,” Lazar, who meets regularly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, told the Israeli journalist Eli Mandelbaum about the missile transfer.

Screen capture from video showing the delivery of Russian S-300 air defense missiles to Syria. (YouTube)

Lazar’s group, the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia, often speaks out against expressions of anti-Semitism in Russia and aspects of Russia’s policy concerning Israel, including its voting in 2017 in favor of a UN resolution that ignores Jerusalem’s significance to Jews.

But Lazar, who has said he opposes excessive involvement by Jewish community leaders in Russian politics, has seldom criticized Russia publicly over its bilateral relations with Israel on subjects devoid of a religious dimension.

The rabbi, a native of Italy who became a Russian citizen in 2000, went on to say that he and his organization “speak about [the S-300 issue] with the president,” referencing Putin. “We explain, I’d say, the sensitivity of this issue to our brethren in Israel, in Zion, and we hope Israel and Russia can continue to cooperate in stopping terrorism, stopping Iran, and that Israel will continue to guard its borders and neutralize any threat before it reaches its doorstep.”

Israel and its allies for years have lobbied Russia not to give Syria and other regional players the S-300 system, arguing that it would limit Israel’s ability to neutralize terrorist threats, including by the Lebanon-based group Hezbollah.

Several hundred people attended the event in Sighet, which is the birthplace of Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor who died in 2016. In August, Romanian police arrested a 37-year-old man whom they suspect wrote anti-Semitic slogans on Wiesel’s childhood home.

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New Observer, “EU’s “Relocation” of Fake Refugees and Invaders by Country and Number”, 28 Sept 2018:

       

According to statistics kept by the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), a total of 34,694 invaders—22,005 from Greece, and 12,689 from Italy—have been “relocated” to 24 other European states since the program began. This does not include the 11,000 who have been sent to the UK.

According to the IOM figures, as of April 30, 2018, the following nations had “received” invaders as follows:

Austria: From Greece 0; From Italy 43; Total 43.

Belgium: From Greece 700; From Italy 471; Total 1,171.

Bulgaria: From Greece 50; From Italy 10; Total 60.

Croatia: From Greece 60; From Italy 22; Total 82.

Cyprus: From Greece 96; From Italy 47; Total 143.

Czech Republic: From Greece 12; From Italy 0; Total 12.

Estonia: From Greece 141; From Italy 6; Total 147.

Finland: From Greece 1,202; From Italy 778; Total 1,980.

France: From Greece 4,400; From Italy 635; Total 5,035.

Germany: From Greece 5,391; From Italy 5,434; Total 10,825.

Ireland: From Greece 1,022; From Italy 0; Total 1,022.

Latvia: From Greece 294; From Italy 34; Total 328.

Liechtenstein From Greece 10; From Italy 0; Total 10.

Lithuania From Greece 355; From Italy 29; Total 384.

Luxembourg From Greece 300; From Italy 249; Total 549.

Malta From Greece 101; From Italy 67; Total 168.

Netherlands From Greece 1,755; From Italy 1,020; Total 2,775.

Norway From Greece 693; From Italy 815; Total 1,508.

Portugal From Greece 1,192; From Italy 356; Total 1,548.

Romania From Greece 683; From Italy 45; Total 728.

Slovenia From Greece 172; From Italy 81; Total 253.

Slovakia From Greece 16; From Italy 0; Total 16.

Spain From Greece 1,124; From Italy 235; Total 1,359.

Sweden From Greece 1,656; From Italy 1,392; Total 3,048.

Switzerland From Greece 580; From Italy 920; Total 1,500.

Britain is notably absent from these IOM figures, for reasons unknown. However, this does not mean that the UK has not participated in the scheme. So far, according to official figures, at least 11,000 fake refugees have been taken in by that country since the “relocations” began

The “relocation” program was adopted in September 2015 “to relocate asylum seekers from Italy and Greece, to assist them in dealing with the pressures of the refugee crisis.”

Under the scheme, up to 106,000 invaders “with a high chance of having their applications successfully processed (EU average recognition rate of over 75%) were to be relocated from Greece and Italy, where they had arrived, to other Member States where they would have their asylum applications processed.”

A majority of them were male (63 percent), adults (68 percent), and of Syrian (52 percent), Eritrean (35 percent) and Iraqi (11 percent) nationality. The scheme also included 585 “unaccompanied minors.”

It is this scheme to which the Hungarian and Polish governments have objected, and in which they have refused to participate, arguing that none of these so-called “refugees” are in fact fleeing for their lives, and that all have safe haven either in their country of origin or in states much closer to their homes.

In this photo July 21, 2016, photo, then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, right, watches with then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Manafort’s chief deputy Rick Gates, left, as Ivanka Trump rehearses for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

New York Times, “Rick Gates Sought Online Manipulation Plans From Israeli Intelligence Firm for Trump Campaign”, 8 October 2018:

WASHINGTON — A top Trump campaign official requested proposals in 2016 from an Israeli company to create fake online identities, to use social media manipulation and to gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton, according to interviews and copies of the proposals.

The Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald J. Trump. Though the Israeli company’s pitches were narrower than Moscow’s interference campaign and appear unconnected, the documents show that a senior Trump aide saw promise in a disruption effort to swing voters in Mr. Trump’s favor.

The campaign official, Rick Gates, sought one proposal to use bogus personas to target and sway 5,000 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention by attacking Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Mr. Trump’s main opponent at the time. Another proposal describes opposition research and “complementary intelligence activities” about Mrs. Clinton and people close to her, according to copies of the proposals obtained by The New York Times and interviews with four people involved in creating the documents.

Documents from Psy-Group laying out its proposals for the Trump campaign.

A third proposal by the company, Psy-Group, which is staffed by former Israeli intelligence operatives, sketched out a monthslong plan to help Mr. Trump by using social media to help expose or amplify division among rival campaigns and factions. The proposals, part of what Psy-Group called “Project Rome,” used code names to identify the players — Mr. Trump was “Lion” and Mrs. Clinton was “Forest.” Mr. Cruz, who Trump campaign officials feared might lead a revolt over the Republican presidential nomination, was “Bear.”

[An Israeli company drew up digital manipulation proposals for a Trump campaign aide. Read them here.]

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