The murder of Secoriea Turner, an 8-year-old black girl, during Atlanta’s Black Lives Matter riots is rolling back the curtain on what was really going on. Secoriea’s family has sued Atlanta’s authorities for enabling the violence and that, combined with the prosecution of her killers has turned up what was really going on in the so-called “protest zone” or “autonomous zone” taken over by BLM thugs.
‘Woke comedy’ will never compete with the despair of the online Right
“No great movement designed to change the world can bear sarcasm or mockery, because they are a rust that corrodes everything it touches.” So wrote the Czech writer Milan Kundera in his novel The Joke.
Humour has long been a magic ingredient in unlocking political change. In the medieval court, jesters had an almost unique privilege in being able to tell the monarch what he didn’t want to hear, and were often tasked with presenting bad news. In totalitarian regimes humour was a daily act of undermining the regime, to the extent that on Stalin’s death 200,000 of the Gulag’s 2.5m population were there for telling jokes.
AUGUST 15, 1967, was the first day of a tumultuous setback for free speech. At midnight pirate radio had been outlawed and all the stations but Caroline had gone off the air. Fifty-four years later the right to express what we think and feel is more under threat than ever. Speaking truth to power has never been more important as we face existential threats from Chinese communism, a resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda as well as a societal disintegration unparalleled since the closing stages of the Roman Empire.
Thousands of counterfeit COVID-19 vaccination cards from China have been seized by Customs and Border Patrol officers in Tennessee in the last year, the agency said.
Officers at the Port of Memphis have intercepted at least 121 shipments totaling 3,017 of the “low quality” cards being sent from Shenzhen, the CBP said in a statement Friday.
The bogus documents come with a CDC logo in the upper-right corner, blank spaces for names, dates and place of vaccination, birth dates and the vaccination provider, according to the agency.
When a British security guard was killed in an Iranian drone attack last month, the response from the government was robust. Boris Johnson warned that Iran will have to ‘face up to the consequences’. But has the West fully grasped the reality of what Iran and its ‘Ghost Armada’ is really up to at sea? And how can Britain deal with Iran’s silent partnership on the waves with China?
For Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole, what could be a make-or-break effort to define himself in the eyes of voters starts now.
Polling suggests his party begins a summer campaign behind the governing Liberals, who are eyeing a majority. The numbers also show that O’Toole, a former veterans affairs minister from a riding in the battleground Greater Toronto Area, is not particularly well-known or popular.
It hasn’t always been easy for O’Toole to get a word in edgewise since winning the Conservative leadership last August.
As the Taliban moves into Kabul and demands the unconditional surrender of the central government, Taliban commander Muhammed Arif Mustafa told CNN: “It’s our belief that one day, mujahedin will have victory, and Islamic law will come not to just Afghanistan, but all over the world. We are not in a hurry. We believe it will come one day. Jihad will not end until the last day.” The CNN “journalist,” demonstrating yet again its spectacular misunderstanding of the conflict (which, of course, is shared by the U.S. foreign policy establishment), followed that with “It’s a chilling admission from a group that claims it wants peace.” The Taliban does indeed want peace. It wants the peace that will follow the world’s submission to the hegemony of Islamic law.
They certainly have the weapons.
The Taliban are now in possession of more Blackhawk helicopters than 166 other nations around the globe. pic.twitter.com/2q9CyXcBNy
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) August 13, 2021
“…Our generals (when not playing on Twitter or studying CRT) now present ludicrous theories to us that a few teams of SEALs grabbing a guy and some drones flying around are the same as a division of troops deployed in a town. Yet, we somehow never pacified much of Afghanistan or Iraq after two decades. Is the argument that the German SS troops were not as motivated to fight a guerilla war as Al Qaeda has been (spoiler alert: they planned to do it)? Perhaps, like the SS, Al Qaeda would have realized when 10,000 troops and materiel were in every little town, that resistance was futile? If we deployed in Europe as we did in Iraq and had just a brigade covering all of Bavaria, would the SS simply have surrendered?”
The Taliban have 80,000 troops in comparison with a nominal 300,699 serving the Afghan government, yet the whole country has been effectively overrun in a matter of weeks as military commanders surrendered without a fight in a matter of hours.
It is a tale of two armies, one poorly equipped but highly motivated ideologically, and the other nominally well-equipped, but dependent on Nato support, poorly led and riddled with corruption.
The US aid spending watchdog for Afghanistan warned last month that the US military had little or no means of knowing the capability of the Afghan National Defense and Security forces (ANDSF) when required to operate independently of the US forces, despite spending $88.3bn (£64bn) on security-related reconstruction in Afghanistan up to March 2021.
A 20 year grift.
OTTAWA — Let’s get the obvious rant out of the way – the Sept. 20 federal election is not necessary, has no coherent rationale to justify Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s $500-million bid for a majority mandate and, worst of all, puts the federal government on hold at the precise moment when a fourth COVID-19 wave will hit the youngest the hardest.
Throw in the tragic Taliban storming of Afghanistan’s capital, leaving behind the hundreds of endangered interpreters and aid workers who helped Canada during its combat mission with no prospect of rescue, and there was a major wobble in the Liberal campaign rollout.
A worse President than Obama or Jimmy Carter…
This may become the most infamous — and devastating — press conference ever held by an American President. pic.twitter.com/j4kKwyPDVm
— BDW (@BryanDeanWright) August 15, 2021
Hamid Karzai international airport. 16 August, 2021. pic.twitter.com/LXsAQPpFXG
— BILAL SARWARY (@bsarwary) August 15, 2021
h/t Killer Marmot and Mauser
Our longest war ends in another abject failure
‘Your country just betrayed us.’ So Haji Sakhi, a resident of Kabul, recently remarked to a New York Times reporter. ‘Look at what they brought on us,’ the 68-year-old Afghan continued. ‘They lost the war and just fled the country.’ His they refers to us — the United States of America.
Haji Sakhi’s unsparing judgment deserves sober consideration. Kabul is about to fall to the Taliban, faster than even the most gloomy experts predicted. Our nation’s ‘longest war’ is now ending in abject failure.
How are Americans — at least those few of us who attend to such matters — to apportion responsibility for the outcome? Who or what is to blame for ‘losing’ Afghanistan? Was it ever ours to lose in the first place?
Instead of attacking Orban, European progressives should fix their own countries.
The brutal death of a French Catholic priest last week is grimly symbolic of liberal Europe’s direction under its open-borders ideology. The priest was beaten to death by a Rwandan immigrant to whom he had given shelter. The immigrant was a known threat to the French authorities: a year ago he had been arrested for trying to burn down the Cathedral of Nantes.
The French have become accustomed to these horrific stories in recent years. In 2020, a Tunisian immigrant beheaded a woman and killed two others at a church in the French city of Nice. In 2016, two jihadists slit the throat of a French priest, yelling “Allahu akbar” as they left the church.
Beijing is taking full advantage of the U.S. and NATO forces’ imminent departure from Afghanistan.
President Biden announced in early July that U.S. forces will leave Afghanistan by Aug. 31, a deadline moved up from Sept. 11.
Meanwhile, the Taliban is rapidly increasing its advances in Afghanistan as the American drawdown nears.
The past four decades in which the Khomeinist ideology has dominated Iranian state structures, a new breed of “Iranologists” has emerged in Western academic and media circles. Most old Iranologists saw Iran as a glorious but long dead civilization distinguished by religious tolerance, ethnic diversity and an abiding love of artistic creativity. Those who focused on Iran’s story after the advent of Islam recognized monarchy and the Shi’ite clerical institution that, while at times in conflict, played complementary roles in Iranian society.
With the seizure of power in 1979 by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a new breed of Iranologists emerged to declare the definite end of monarchy in Iran and the advent of a theocratic regime backed by re-energized clergy.
