Wednesday, August 31, 2016

SECRETS OF THE IRAN RANSOM

SECRETS OF THE IRAN RANSOM

At the New York Sun last week, Claudia Rosett tentatively reported the mechanics of the Obama administration’s payment of the $1.3 billion tranche of the ransom to Iran. She discovered what Andy McCarthy calls “a bizarre string” of 13 identical money transfers of $99,999,999.99 each — all of them one cent less than $100 million — paid out of an obscure Treasury Department stash known as the “Judgment Fund.”
In the aggregate, Andy notes, the transfers amount to 13 cents shy of the $1.3 billion the State Department claims Iran was owed in “interest” from the $400 million that our government had been holding since the shah deposited it in a failed arms deal just prior to the Khomeini revolution. The administration added a fourteenth payment of $10 million — not necessarily for good measure. We don’t know why and the administration isn’t saying.
The administration’s payments to Iran bear the earmarks of a structured transaction intended to avoid detection by the authorities. Structuring deposits or withdrawals in this fashion to avoid bank reporting is a federal crime (the one that ensnared Dennis Hastert). Federally regulated financial institutions are required to look for such structured transactions and to report them. That’s undoubtedly how Dennis Hastert was caught.
What is going on in the matter of the payments to our enemies in Iran? Andy notes:
The administration refuses to divulge any further information about the $1.7 billion the president acknowledges paying the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Grilled on Wednesday about how Obama managed to pay the final $1.3 billion installment — particularly given the president’s claim that it is not possible to send Tehran a check or wire-transfer — State Department spokesman Mark Toner decreed that the administration would continue “withholding this information” in order “to protect confidentiality.”
Whose confidentiality? The mullahs’? That of the intermediaries the president used? Whose privacy takes precedence over our right to know how Obama funneled our money to our enemies?
Good question. I can’t believe that Andy is the only man asking it, as he does in “Why is Obama stonewalling on details of the $1.7 billion in Iransom payoff.”

WHO MADE AMERICA HATE AGAIN?

WHO MADE AMERICA HATE AGAIN?

I don’t think we have said much about Hillary Clinton’s speech in which she denounced Donald Trump as a racist of the “alt-right,” thereby confusing, no doubt, most of her audience. Much could be said about Hillary’s smears–a Republican racist running for president? Not again!–but I want to comment on just one aspect of it: her claim that “the billionaire businessman’s campaign [is] one that will ‘make America hate again.'”
My question is: where has Hillary been for the last eight years? Has she failed to notice that she was part of an administration that went a long way toward making America hate again? Her boss, Barack Obama, deliberately fomented racial conflict for the purpose of political gain.
Obama appointed Attorneys General who imposed a racial agenda on the Department of Justice, refusing, among other things, to redress civil rights grievances if they were asserted by whites.
In the earliest days of his administration, Obama began a pattern of stirring up hate against police officers by intervening in a trivial incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, deriding policemen as “stupid.”
Obama and others in his administration stirred up hate against whites on the part of African-Americans, as when Joe Biden outrageously told a black crowd that “[Republicans are] going to put y’all back in chains.”
Obama incited hatred against police officers in particular, and whites in general, as, for example, when he sent a White House delegation to the funeral of a black thug who had been killed in self-defense by a white police officer, as his own Justice Department later found.
The climate of hate that Barack Obama and his minions have fomented has contributed to the first significant increase in violent crime and homicide in 20 years, including a wave of murderous attacks against police officers.
It is no wonder that large majority of Americans say that race relations have gotten worse under the administration in which Mrs. Clinton served.
Make American hate again? Hate has been spreading in America for years, but the culprit isn’t Donald Trump, it is Barack Obama. Obama did more to make America hate again than any politician of modern times.

Supposed ‘Ground Breaking’ Study Only Proves Warming Proponents Have Jumped The Shark

They called it a “ground breaking study,” I call it rubbish. This new study claims that global warming began in 1830 just when the industrial revolution began to pick up steam (no pun intended). What they didn’t take into account was just around the same time the Earth was coming out of an unusually cold 40-year period caused by low sunspot activity called the Dalton Minimum (no relation to Timothy Dalton).
An international team of scientists, led by Associate Professor Nerilie Abram from the Australian National University, have analysed detailed reconstructions of climate going back 500 years. To their surprise, they’ve found that the current global warming trend began in the 1830s, further confirming that it is an anthropogenic, or human-induced, phenomenon. The study was published today in Nature.
Co-researcher Dr Helen McGregor, an earth sciences expert from the University of Wollongong, tells SBS Science the findings have a major impact on our understanding of how climate change works.
“If we know when global warming started, we know what the actual rates of warming are and we know when our climate is emerging above natural variability,” McGregor explains.
The scientists go on to explain they created a climate model (which have proven to be very flawed–for example none of these models have figured why the earth hasn’t warmed in over 18 years.).  So to create this model they took into account other account climate model simulations and experiments (that’s right a flawed climate model using data from a flawed climate model–almost like a double negative), major volcanic eruptions and, most importantly, natural markers of climate variation found in places like corals, tree rings, and ice cores obtained from glaciers.
Dr McGregor says the study provides new, independent proof that climate change is indeed caused by human activity.
“One thing that our study provides is that it’s an alternative line of evidence,” she explains. “We’re not using thermometers and satellite records, we’re using natural archives of climate, so it’s a completely independent source of information that shows that climate change and warming is occurring.
“The central tenet of climate change, that the planet is warming, doesn’t change.”
Well not necessarily, because nowhere in their analysis do the scientists take into account sunspot activity.
Note: The sun goes through a natural cycle approximately every 11 years. The greatest number of sunspots in any given solar cycle is designated as the “solar maximum” and the lowest number is referred to as the “solar minimum” phase.
The chart below shows sun spot activity for the past 400 years.
What scientists have observed is that when sun spot activity is low so is the earth’s temperatures. The time period of low sunspot activity below called the Maunder Minimum is also known as “The Little Ice Age.” not because glaciers covered the Earth, but because it was a long period of abnormally cold weather throughout the world. The period of low sunspot activity between 1790-1830 is known as the Dalton Minimum, again the weather was colder than normal.
Sunspot_Numbers

In the late 1950s sun spot activity peaked at a much higher level than normal and was called the Modern Maxim, this was reflected in the global warming scare show global temperature growth accelerating.
It seems as if the scientists behind this”ground breaking study,” picked the result they wanted and selected the elements that would give them that result.
Now here’s the good news they might have ignored.  It seems that solar activity is slowing down. The in the chart above it seems that activity started to decrease toward the end of the 1990s. Similarly the satellite temperature data shows the Earth hasn’t warmed since 1998.
pause-july-16-globe (1)
Vencore Inc.is  a company that has worked closely with a number of government agencies on weather-related projects, including NASA, NOAA, Naval Meteorological and Oceanographic Command, Naval Postgraduate School and the Intelligence Community. It is now suggesting that the extreme lack of sunspot activity now may be an indication of a major cooling period for the Earth.
sunspot-numbers
Not since cycle 14 peaked in February 1906 has there been a solar cycle with fewer sunspots. We are currently more than six years into Solar Cycle 24 and the current nearly blank sun may signal the end of the solar maximum phase. Solar cycle 24 began after an unusually deep solar minimum that lasted from 2007 to 2009 which included more spotless days on the sun compared to any minimum in almost a century.
It’s not just the fewer number of sunspots…its the pattern of their peaks:
The smoothed sunspot number for solar cycle 24 reached a peak of 81.9 in April 2014 and it is looking increasingly likely that this spike will be considered to be the solar maximum for this cycle. This second peak in the cycle surpassed the level of an earlier peak that reached 66.9 in February 2012. Many solar cycles are double peaked; however, this is the first one in which the second peak in sunspot number was larger than the first peak. Going back to 1755, there have been only a few solar cycles in the previous 23 that have had a lower number of sunspots during its maximum phase.
Now that doesn’t mean it’s definitely staying that way..but chances are it will. And here is where it gets interesting:
It is pretty well understood that solar activity has a direct impact on temperatures at very high altitudes in a part of the Earth’s atmosphere called the thermosphere. This is the biggest layer of the Earth’s atmosphere which lies directly above the mesosphere and below the exosphere. Thermospheric temperatures increase with altitude due to absorption of highly energetic solar radiation and are highly dependent on solar activity. Finally, if history is a guide, it is safe to say that weak solar activity for a prolonged period of time can have a cooling impact on global temperatures in the troposphere which is the bottom-most layer of Earth’s atmosphere – and where we all live.
Vencore’s prediction substantiates paper written by Russian scientists in 2013 who used sunspot activity topredict we are heading for a “Mini Ice Age.”
. The German Herald reported on March 31, 2013 regarding Russian scientist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov from the St. Petersburg Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, “Talking to German media the scientist who first made his prediction in 2005 said that after studying sunspots and their relationship with climate change on Earth, we are now on an ‘unavoidable advance towards a deep temperature drop.’”
There is a simple reason that the scientists that created the “ground breaking study,” ignored solar activity, it would disprove their hypothesis.  Like many scientists trying to push the global warming/climate change hypothesis, these scientists have jumped the
shark..er sunspots

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Blue cities are such cesspits of inequality

JOEL KOTKIN on why Blue cities are such cesspits of inequality.
There’s little argument that inequality, and the depressed prospects for the middle class, will be a dominant issue in this year’s election, and beyond. Yet the class divide is not monolithic in its nature, causes, or geography. To paraphrase George Orwell’s Animal Farm, some places are more unequal than others.
Housing represents a central, if not dominant, factor in the rise of inequality. Although the cost of food, fuel, electricity, and tax burdens vary, the largest variation tends to be in terms of housing prices. Even adjusted for income, the price differentials for houses in places like the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles are commonly two to three times as much as in most of the country, including the prosperous cities of Texas, the mid-south and the Intermountain West.
These housing differences also apply to rents, which follow the trajectory of home prices. In many markets, particularly along the coast, upwards of 40% of renters and new buyers spend close to half their income on housing. This has a particularly powerful impact on the poor, the working class, younger people, and middle class families, all of whom find their upward trajectory blocked by steadily rising housing costs.
In response to higher prices, many Americans, now including educated Millennials, are heading to parts of the country where housing is more affordable. Jobs too have been moving to such places, particularly in Texas, the southeast and the Intermountain West. As middle income people head for more affordable places, the high-priced coastal areas are becoming ever more sharply bifurcated, between a well-educated, older, and affluent population and a growing rank of people with little chance to ever buy a house or move solidly into the middle class.
Ironically, these divergences are taking place precisely in those places where political rhetoric over inequality is often most heated and strident. Progressive attempts, such as raising minimum wages, attempt to address the problem, but often other policies, notably strict land-use regulation, exacerbate inequality.
The other major divide is not so much between regions but within them. Even in expensive regions, middle class families tend to cluster in suburban and exurban areas, which are once again growing faster than areas closer to the core. Progressive policies in some states, such as Oregon and California, have been calculated to slow suburban growth and force density onto often unwilling communities. By shutting down the production of family-friendly housing, these areas are driving prices up and, to some extent, driving middle and working class people out of whole regions.
They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.

The Economic Stimulus Perplex: Could Regulation Be the Problem? Progressives and the failure of massive government spending to boost jobs and economic growth.

YA THINK? The Economic Stimulus Perplex: Could Regulation Be the Problem? Progressives and the failure of massive government spending to boost jobs and economic growth.

In his column, Samuelson asks, “What ails the private sector? Can we do anything about it? Those are the crucial questions.”
Perhaps the answer to what ails the private sector is excessive regulation. A recent study by the conservative American Action Forum estimates that the Obama administration is on track to adopt over 600 major regulations (those costing more than $100 million each) by the end of the president’s term. The total cost of complying with all of the new regulations will add up to $813 billion. The libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute calculates that extent and cost of Washington’s rules and mandates is $1.8 trillion annually, amounting to about $15,000 per household each year. Even the New York Times on Sunday called President Obama, the regulator-in-chief whose new rules have “imposed billions of dollars in new costs on businesses and consumers.”
I have reported earlier analyses that found that regulatory drag has made the U.S. economy $4 trillion smaller than it would otherwise have been. That amounts to a lot of foregone jobs and consumption. I would like to suggest that hugely escalating regulatory costs under the Obama administration have mostly offset whatever the benefits that orthodox Keynesians would expect from economic stimulus. In other words, President Obama has been trying to use Keynesian stimulation to rev the economy while simultaneously jamming down hard on the regulatory brakes.
Well, regulation is an important source of graft.

Don's Tuesday Column

             THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   8/30/2016

               Threats to freedom from the left

To paraphrase Forest Gump, “Freedom is as freedom does.” Consider America’s diminishing freedom—over the last 8 years, America’s freedom ranking dropped from 17th to 20th among 25 countries. You must take into account something that was not part of the surveys: The sense of freedom that individual Americans have, and how that feeling of being free to act upon our convictions as citizens, in our representative self-government, can be crushed.
I listened to an interview on July 5 with Kimberly Strassel, author of “The Intimidation Game: How the Left is Silencing Free Speech.” It occurred to me that, over those same 8 years, the increasing brazenness of leftist attacks on conservative activists has become a scourge on our streets, the Internet, in abusive lawsuits, and targeted judicial/IRS action. People are inspired to act to affect the legislative process, or weigh in in an organized way, with ads, flyers, petitions and contacts with officials. Those are basic freedoms, even responsibilities, of men and women in our America Republic, a representative democracy; progressives threaten it all.
This is not to say that people who are engaged on the other side of an issue, or an opposing campaign or candidate, are out of bounds to actively support, publicly weigh in, write letters to the editor or hold events of their own. People can be as vocal, as organized, and as passionate as they feel is appropriate to their cause. What they can’t do, if they value civil liberty and fair political practices, is engage in underhanded attacks on people, anonymous character assassination, efforts to hurt the families or businesses of opponents, or use legal means (also known as “law-fare”) to silence, restrict or punish their opponents.
Strassel referenced the California initiative, Proposition 8, which sought to define marriage as between one man and one woman. We all remember that people were passionate both for and against it. Now, I will divide readers based on their opinions of, not the issue itself, but whether it was wrong and out-of-bounds for certain things occur. You might want to think long and hard before answering that you approved of the tactics of the anti-Prop 8 crowds.
Was it wrong to disclose donors’ names, and amounts they contributed in favor of Prop 8, when the law said it was confidential? The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 50 years ago, in favor of the secrecy of NAACP donors, citing their vulnerability to intimidation and harassment. That meant the Prop 8 disclosures were wrong, even illegal and, given what subsequently happened, abominable as a matter of civic propriety.
Was it wrong for Prop 8 opponents (gay marriage supporters) to then use such information to attack fellow citizens who held an opposing position? Was it wrong to organize boycotts against their employers, their businesses, their spouse’s employers or businesses, their service groups, their theater companies, their vehicles, property, Prop 8 signage, and on and on?
I don’t recall Prop 8 opponents speaking out against gay marriage supporters that were hounding, harassing and physically attacking Mormon churches and church-goers, even little old ladies. Many of us have never forgotten and, never having been asked, we’ve never forgiven.
While at the Republican booth for that year’s fair, among the passers-by was a uniformed Sheriff’s deputy that engaged us in discussing our position supporting Prop 8; the male deputy was opposed. The discussion turned to debate with the deputy loudly saying we were hateful and intolerant—things totally irrelevant to anything we had said. Sounds intimidating, no?
Kimberley Strassel presents an “alarming look at how the Left, once the champion of civil liberties, is today orchestrating a coordinated campaign to bully Americans out of free speech…and how both disclosure and campaign finance laws have been hijacked by the Left as weapons against free speech and free association, becoming the most powerful tools of those intent on silencing their political opposition.”
Among the examples cited—each an outrageous political overreach and scare tactic—that constitute evidence, to this writer, of a “long train of abuses and usurpations”: 1) the left set off a wave of liberal harassment against conservative politicians after the Supreme Court decision, Citizens United (the Court ruled that private citizens, who formed a political corporation to fund and run anti-Hillary Clinton ads, acted legally); 2) the IRS used partisan standards to twist the tax code to target Tea Party groups;
3) Wisconsin prosecutors, state Attorneys General and a Democrat Congress attacked political activists and businesses; 4) the Obama administration politicized a host of government agencies including the FEC, FCC, and the SEC. There are others; I hope to read it this summer.
Here’s what conservative Jonah Goldberg said: Regarding the increasingly repressive climate towards free speech, “no books have connected the dots between the Obama White House, Congressional Democrats, and the spider web of ‘grassroots’ organizations the way Kim Strassel does…It is required reading for those who want to know what’s behind the supposedly spontaneous outrages we see every day.”
Stephen Hayes: “Public shaming encouraged by leading political figures. Pre-dawn police raids. Federal agencies targeting groups and individuals because of their political views. It’s hard to believe these things are happening, and more frequently, in the United States. But they are and in this searing indictment of the systematic attempt of the political left to shut down political debates they cannot win, Kimberley Strassel provides the often-horrifying details. It’s a shocking and assiduously well-reported chronicle of the illiberal tactics of the new progressives.”

When under attack, political freedom, if not vigorously defended, will wither away.

Monday, August 29, 2016

Hillary’s worst scandal is that she really thinks she’s clean

Hillary’s worst scandal is that she really thinks she’s clean



Step back from the endless news of Clinton Foundation/Clinton State Department sleaze and Clinton email abuse, and shake your head at this: Hillary Clinton still believes she did absolutely nothing wrong.
That jaw-dropper surfaced in Annie Karni’s report for Politico on the campaign’s damage-control efforts on the candidate’s scandals: Hillary’s minions plan to just “ride out” the clock to Election Day — “a strategy born … of a belief held deeply by Clinton herself that the email controversy is a fake scandal.”
A year-and-a-half after news of her use of a home-brewed server — plainly, to shield her work communications from Freedom of Information laws — Clinton still sees the whole thing as “nothing more than a partisan attack,” Karni writes after talking to top campaign aides.
Right, because FBI Director Jim Comey was a Republican tool when he condemned Clinton’s conduct — which exposed thousands of classified emails to hackers — as “extremely careless.”
The Associated Press must be partisan, too: This week it reported that more than half of the people outside government who met with Secretary of State Clinton had donated in some way to the Clinton Foundation.
At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who got face time with the secretary had donated to the foundation, according to State Department calendars released so far to the AP. Combined, the contributions total as much as $156 million.
And this on top of multiple email dumps showing Clinton’s top aides at State scrambling to arrange meetings and even jobs to please foundation donors.
Yet the Clintons plainly don’t think they ever did anything wrong. Why else refuse to shut the foundation down? Why now promise you’ll stop taking foreign or corporate donations at only some segments of the foundation, unless you think the giving is clean, because it’s all going to your cause?
Never mind the promises Clinton broke at State — to have the foundation take no foreign cash and insulate State decision-making from foundation influence; to safeguard classified info and ensure State had its own copies of all her work communiques . . .
If she makes it to the White House, be warned: Hillary Clinton will never stop breaking her word and the rules whenever she pleases, because in her mind, whatever she does is ethical.

http://nypost.com/2016/08/24/hillarys-worst-scandal-is-that-she-really-thinks-shes-clean/

WHY OBAMA TURNED HIS BACK ON THE “GREEN REVOLUTION” IN IRAN



WHY OBAMA TURNED HIS BACK ON THE “GREEN REVOLUTION” IN IRAN

Most readers, I’m pretty sure, recall that in the summer of 2009, after the dubious election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranians began an uprising. They hoped for support of some kind from the United States. That that support didn’t come.
Instead, as Eli Lake reminds us, President Obama publicly downplayed the prospect of real change, saying that the candidates whom hundreds of thousands of Iranians were risking their lives to support did not represent fundamental change.
Contrast that with his laughable claim that the election of the puppet Rouhani years later showed that Iran had changed to the point where we should end sanctions as part of a nuclear deal.
Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America’s support. He ordered the CIA to sever contacts it had with the green movement’s supporters — this according to a new book, The Iran Wars, by the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon, which Lake discusses.
Obama’s approach to Iran’s “green revolution” stands in marked contrast to how the U.S. has reacted to other democratic uprisings. Lakes points out:
The State Department, for example, ran a program in 2000 through the U.S. embassy in Hungary to train Serbian activists in nonviolent resistance against their dictator, Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic, too, accused his opposition of being pawns of the U.S. government. But in the end his people forced the dictator from power.
Similarly, when Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze met with popular protests in 2003 after rigged elections, George W. Bush dispatched James Baker to urge him to step down peacefully, which he did. Even the Obama administration provided diplomatic and moral support for popular uprisings in Egypt in 2011 and Ukraine in 2014.
Egypt’s Mubarak was America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East other than Israel. Iran was (and is) our biggest enemy. Yet, Obama supported the overthrow of Mubarak but not the mullahs.
It has been clear to me for years that Obama failed to back the green revolution because he wanted to negotiate with the Iranian regime. Lake thinks so too:
Obama from the beginning of his presidency tried to turn the country’s ruling clerics from foes to friends. It was an obsession. And even though the president would impose severe sanctions on the country’s economy at the end of his first term and beginning of his second, from the start of his presidency, Obama made it clear the U.S. did not seek regime change for Iran.
(Emphasis added)
How much of an obsession?
As Solomon reports, Obama ended U.S. programs to document Iranian human rights abuses. He wrote personal letters to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei assuring him the U.S. was not trying to overthrow him. Obama repeatedly stressed his respect for the regime in his statements marking Iran’s annual Nowruz celebration.
Obama’s obsession with dealing with the mullahs seems to have spilled over into his feckless Syria policy:
When he walked away from his red line against Syria’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, Solomon reports, both U.S. and Iranian officials had told him that nuclear negotiations would be halted if he intervened against Bashar al-Assad.
This was only the beginning of Obama’s disregard for his own red lines. As nuclear negotiations proceeded, the president and his Secretary of State demolished one red line after another. Lake provides the details, most of which we presented at or around the time of the deal.
What is the outcome?
“The Revolutionary Guard continues to develop increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, including ballistic missiles inscribed with threats against Israel on their nose cones,” Solomon writes in the book’s concluding chapter. “Khamenei and other revolutionary leaders, meanwhile, fine-tune their rhetorical attacks against the United States, seeming to need the American threat to justify their existence.”
Iran is also a key player in Iraq and Syria. It is the leading power in the Middle East and might well become the dominant one.
Would things have gone differently is the U.S. had backed the 2009 uprising? We’ll never know. Regime change might well have been a long shot, but its rewards would have been massive.
And the risk? Negligible, even if one likes the nuclear deal.
There’s no reason to believe that, in 2015, Iran would have turned down the super-generous nuclear deal Obama offered because of America’s stance in 2009. Either the deal is in Iran’s interests or it isn’t. If it is, the mullahs were always going to snap it up.
It is and they did — unfortunately for the U.S. and the Middle East.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/08/why-obama-turned-his-back-on-the-green-revolution-in-iran.php

Western Leaders Want Islamic Terror to Seem ‘Normal’

Western Leaders Want Islamic Terror to Seem ‘Normal’

As hardly a few days pass without an Islamic terror attack in the West -- recently an “Allahu Akbar”-shouting man stabbed a Jew in France and an “Allahu Akbar”-screaming woman ran over two policemen in Canada -- the West risks becoming desensitized. Of seeing Islamic violence as “just part of life.”
The words and deeds of Western leaders are not helping.
After the Islamic terror attack in Nice, France, where 84 were killed, counterterrorism chief Patrick Calvar said:
Today, France is clearly the most threatened country. The question about the threat is not to know "if" but "when" and "where."
Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared:
Terrorism … is a threat that weighs heavily on France and will continue doing so for a long time.
As if such resignation wasn’t bad enough, at the memorial event for the 84 Nice victims Vallsdeclared:
Times have changed and we should learn to live with terrorism.
Actually, the main thing in France to change with time is its demography. The largest Muslim population of Europe resides there and, in accordance’s with Islam’s Rule of Numbers, is the real reason why France “should learn to live with terrorism.”

More apathy was in the air during the Munich massacre, where a Muslim gunman killed nine.
While somberly addressing the massacre still in progress -- with the usual boilerplate “our hearts go out to [X victim of terror]” -- U.S. President Obama managed to crack a joke, grin, chuckle, and draw laughter from his audience.
After all, what is the big deal? Shouldn’t we be used to Muslims rampaging and killing by now? And really, what’s nine dead compared to the many hundreds killed by Islamic terrorists around the world in recent weeks?
The leader of the nation where the attack took place, Angela Merkel, waited almost 24 hoursbefore she delivered yet another perfunctory speech containing all the usual words, condolences, and platitudes.
Then again, what was the hurry? Muslims abusing, raping, and killing Germans in Germany is old hat.

A new poll by ZDF found that a record 75 percent of Germans “expect -- which is not unlikeaccept -- more terror attacks in their nation. Must a statement be made after every single one?
Smaller Islamic terror attacks which once would have been extremely newsworthy -- and received condemnation from the highest echelons of the political rung -- now receive obligatory or no media coverage, and little comment.
On July 18 in Germany, another “Allahu Akbar”-shouting, axe-waving Muslim attacked train passengers and critically injured five. The next day, in France, a Muslim man stabbed a woman and her three daughters -- the eight-year-old was left with a punctured lung and in critical condition -- for being “scantily dressed.”
There were no immediate comments from Merkel and Valls.
See here for numerous other examples of “minor” and “everyday” Muslim disturbances in Europe -- such as vandalizing churches and urinating on St. Mary statues -- that now receive little or no coverage or comment.

Westerners better wise up: in the field of behavioral psychology, “systematic desensitization” is a well-known and effective form of graduated exposure therapy used “to help effectively overcome phobias and other anxiety disorders.” Consider the following succinct definition with my examples in brackets:
Systematic desensitization is when the client [the West] is exposed to the anxiety-producing stimulus [Islamic violence] at a low level [reports and images of Islamic violence “over there” in the Mideast], and once no anxiety is present a stronger version of the anxiety-producing stimulus is given [reports of violence closer to home, in the West]. This continues until the individual client [the West] no longer feels any anxiety towards the stimulus [Islamic violence].
Is this the plan?
Are the “global elite” producing situations, such as the manufactured “migrant crisis,” that cause the West to experience incrementally worse forms of Islamic violence, until it becomes desensitized, loses its “phobia” -- in this case, “Islamophobia” -- and simply “learns to live with terrorism,” as in the words of France’s prime minister?
Indeed, if the attacks were to fall back to, say, just once a month, many might accept that as a “positive step” they can live with -- at least in comparison to what they’ve been living with, including four Islamic attacks during one recent week in Germany alone.
“Conspiracy theories” aside, a much better way exists.
Acknowledge the truth -- Islam is inherently violent and intolerant -- and build policies on this truth.
A ban on or serious vetting of Muslim immigration -- which a majority of Americans support -- and close monitoring of already existing mosques and Islamic centers would virtually eliminate Islamic terror from America.
The fact remains: unlike natural disasters -- earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and such -- we actually do not need to live with Islam.
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2016/08/22/western-leaders-want-islamic-terror-to-seem-normal/?singlepage=true