Watch Paul Weston examine how the sheer demographics of Islam in the West coupled with the insane denial over the true nature of Islam will see our destruction to this sick cult of death. Unless our politicians FINALLY speak the truth of Islam as a demonic death cult (Mohammed the terrorist invented it – “I have been made victorious through TERROR”) it will be too late to do anything about Islam in the West. Please watch and share this important video – we must all do what we can to wake people up to the evil of Islam and its threat to our civilisation’s and our own survival.
|Soros’ “Islamophobia” Plot Against David Horowitz Revealed
The DCLeaks document dump exposes the pro-Islamist Left’s sinister attempt to slime truth-tellers about Jihad.
August 19, 2016
Radical left-wing billionaire George Soros developed a strategy five years ago to publicly disparage, delegitimize, and marginalize conservatives like David Horowitz who go to great pains to warn Americans about the threat posed by political Islam and the ongoing Islamization of the U.S.
It is part of the Left’s push to create an alternate reality in which world temperatures claimed to be rising at an imperceptibly slow rate pose more of a threat to mankind than militants flying commercial jetliners into skyscrapers.
Soros is a foreign-born atheist who as a 14-year-old collaborated with the Nazis in occupied Hungary, describing that time as “probably the happiest year of my life” and “a very positive experience.” He has described himself as “some kind of god, the creator of everything,” and has said his “goal” was “to become the conscience of the world.”
He is an enabler of Islam which has been expanding by conquest and deception for 1,400 years. To put things in Islamic terms, Soros’s proposed mass importation of Muslims would expand the ummah, or community of Muslims, by means of what Muslims call hijrah, or jihad through emigration, from the Islamic world, the Dar al-Islam (house of peace), to the Dar al-Harb (house of war).
Soros’s affinity for Islam makes perfect sense. Nazi sympathizers and Islamists have much in common. It is fair to say that Islamic terrorists are the last of Adolf Hitler’s World War Two coalition partners that have yet to be vanquished.
The Islamic world aligned with the Third Reich, and this alliance “has largely been whitewashed from the pages of history,” Pamela Geller reminds us:
Many Muslims fought on the German side during World War II. The Wehrmacht had six legions with a Muslim majority and the SS had three Muslim divisions, a brigade and a Waffenbrigade. Each Muslim unit got a mullah as an adviser. In November 1944, an SS mullah school was established in Dresden, founded by Himmler.
The end goal for Soros, long the preeminent funder of the Left, is to weaken America by making the country safe for Islam, a fascistic, religion-like ideology founded by Muhammad in the seventh century after the birth of Christ. Soros urges the dissolution of borders and demands that the U.S. accept unlimited immigration, including from regions that produce people who hate America and its values and founding principles.
A constellation of well-heeled funders are part of a long-term campaign aimed at making the tenets of Islam acceptable in American society and glossing over the problems associated with importing terrorism-prone Muslims. The 86-year-old Soros, whose estimated net worth is now at a record $24.9 billion, is by far the wealthiest of these funders.
Secret internal documents from Soros’s primary philanthropic vehicle, Open Society Foundations (OSF), were hacked by DCLeaks and published on the group’s website this past weekend.
One memorandum dated Jan. 12, 2011, bears the subject line “U.S. Models for Combating Xenophobia and Intolerance.” It is included in the document bundle labeled “Extreme Polarization and Breakdown in Civic Discourse.”
The memo identifies a plan that calls upon the Center for American Progress (CAP), founded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, to combat a phantom the Left calls “Islamophobia.” This neologism is wielded as a cudgel against those who dislike Islam and those who are merely skeptical of it. Leftists are determined to stamp out criticism of Islam, and they have an army of nonprofit organizations, foundations, academics, media outlets, and name-calling activists to help them.
The 57-member state Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is onboard with attacking Islamophobia. It wants to outlaw all criticism of Islam in every country on planet Earth. Such criticism is not only blasphemous but also defamatory, according to Islamic thinking.
The memo states:
We need a clearer understanding of what by all indications is a well-orchestrated and well financed system by which right-wing think tanks, pundits, and politicians are able to introduce false narratives and flawed research into the media cycle and use their misinformation to manipulate public opinion and thwart progressive counterterrorism policies.
It describes the “Examining Anti-Muslim Bigotry Project” espoused by the Center for American Progress. The project would:
(1) study anti-Muslim bigotry in the public discourse and respond on a rapid response basis throughout the 10-month grant period using CAP’s state of the art communications platform; (2) conduct investigative research on the Islamophobia movement and issue a major report on its findings in the first quarter of 2011; and (3) convene in the first quarter of 2011 two dozen experts, including representatives of progressive organizations and the Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian-American (AMEMSA) community, to formulate strategies for combating anti-Muslim xenophobia.
It also indicates that CAP “will research and track the activities of the most prominent drivers of Islamophobia,” including “David Horowitz’s Freedom Center,” Stop Islamization of America led by Pamela Geller, Foundation for Defense of Democracies led by Cliff May, and Liz Cheney’s group Keep America Safe. CAP will also examine “the role played by right-wing media, the Tea Party movement, prominent politicians, pundits, and conservative donors in spreading anti-Muslim hysteria.”
CAP took Soros’s money and did his bidding. Even today CAP is working hard to convince Americans that this make-believe mental illness of Islamophobia is a threat to American democracy and pluralism. CAP claims a $57 million network “is fueling Islamophobia in the United States.” The group created a sophisticated, flashy website (Islamophobianetwork.com) that identifies leading alleged Islamophobes. The site draws upon “Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” a 2011 CAP report, and “Fear, Inc. 2.0: The Islamophobia Network’s Efforts to Manufacture Hate in America,” a CAP report from 2015.
CAP warns that there is “a small, tightly networked group of misinformation experts guiding an effort that reaches millions of Americans through effective advocates, media partners, and grassroots organizing.” These people, particularly a handful of key individuals and their organizations, spread “hate and misinformation.”
The Podesta-founded Center’s top six targets for vilification are: David Horowitz, founder and CEO of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC); Robert Spencer, co-founder of Stop Islamization of America, director of the DHFC-affiliated Jihad Watch, and vice president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative; Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP); Steven Emerson, founder and executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT); Daniel Pipes, founder and president of the Middle East Forum (MEF); and David Yerushalmi, founder of the Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE), and general counsel for CSP and Stop Islamization of America.
The site also directs fire at author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born ex-Muslim who is a fierce critic of Islam.
Although political correctness dictates that Hirsi Ali’s opinions should be given greater weight because she is female, black, an immigrant, and a victim of violence (female genital mutilation), she is too important a target to ignore. The CAP-created website notes disapprovingly that she calls Islam “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death” and says we will lose the fight against terrorism “unless we realize that it’s not just with extremist elements within Islam, but the ideology of Islam itself.”
The website tries to discredit its targets by stating or implying, often without offering any proof, that they are “radical right-wing,” ignorant, misinformed, paranoid, or bigoted. It smears CSP’s Gaffney, for example, claiming he “makes unsubstantiated claims,” and publishes commissioned papers whose authors knowingly arrive at “exaggerated and incorrect conclusions.”
The site claims Robert Spencer “is the primary driver in promoting the myth that peaceful Islam is nonexistent and that violent extremism is inherent within traditional Islam.” It quotes Spencer saying Islam “is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.”
The site attacks David Horowitz, approvingly quoting the Southern Poverty Law Center which has dubbed him “the godfather of the anti-Muslim movement.” The site also pillories Horowitz for saying that “virtually every major Muslim organization in America is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of Islamic terror,” and for amplifying the voices of “fellow anti-Muslim bigots and their schemes of conspiracies and threats.”
And it claims the DHFC, which publishes FrontPage, “promoted the myth that Muslim extremists infiltrated an array of political organizations on both the left and the right.”
Soros’s “U.S. Models for Combating Xenophobia and Intolerance” memo is both an important leftist document and a window into the thinking of Soros operatives. It shows their preference for far-left talking points over the dispassionate analysis of facts. It also ought to disabuse any readers of the notion that OSF, formerly known as the Open Society Institute, is bursting with good people with good intentions. Many of these people viscerally hate those who disagree with them, viewing them not merely as ignorant or misguided, but as evil.
The memo is also a character assassination roadmap that enlists the assistance of disreputable left-wing groups including Media Matters for America, Muslim Public Affairs Council, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Addressed to OSF president (now president emeritus) Aryeh Neier, the memo is from OSF staffers Ann Beeson, Nancy Chang, and Raquiba LaBrie – all lawyers and veteran social justice warriors – plotting to smear those who dare to tell the truth about Islam. It lays out a plan “to counter xenophobia and intolerance in the U.S.”
ACLU alumna Beeson replaced current Democracy Alliance president Gara LaMarche in 2007 as U.S. Programs director at OSF. She now runs of the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin, Texas. Chang managed OSF’s National Security and Human Rights Campaign but it wasn’t clear at time of writing if she still worked at OSF. She was previously senior litigation attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a virulently anti-American public interest law firm. Harvard-trained LaBrie is director of philanthropy at L+M Development Partners in New York City and a board member of the Urban Justice Center.
The 2011 strategy memo is a template for a well-funded smear campaign against critics of Islam, associating them with the shooting that January of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). The attack “provides a grim backdrop to U.S. Programs’ consideration of rising xenophobia and intolerance.” The shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, turned out to be a paranoid left-winger.
The memo sets the stage by repeating the long ago debunked Daily Kos-originated smear that Sarah Palin, “the most visible Tea Party leader,” somehow caused the mass shooting in which Giffords was severely wounded because she supposedly contributed to the “extreme and violent rhetoric [that] pervades our political discourse.”
It regurgitates the leftist article of faith that “prejudice against Muslims, Latinos, African Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and other minorities is growing in a climate of fear, anger, and economic uncertainty.” It blames “anti-Muslim bigotry” for opposition to the construction of an “Islamic community center” at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. It claims that “[c]able television channels, talk radio and political blogs pander to people’s fears and privilege expression of extreme views.”
America is a fetid hellhole of racial and religious hatred, the memo continues.
There is “growing intolerance and fragmentation in U.S. society” and it is important to examine the “full range of actions from rhetoric to harassment to violence perpetrated by government officials and private individuals, or embodied in laws or policies.” More money “should be devoted to uncovering the connections between individual actors, hate groups and extremist ideologies.”
The memo authors recommend that Open Society Foundations contribute $200,000 of the project’s $225,000 budget. It states that as of that point in time OSF had given a total of $6,759,991 to CAP. However, IRS filings show that if OSF grants and grants from Soros’s other philanthropy, the Foundation to Promote Open Society, are combined, the total amount given to CAP rises to $10,541,376.
The OSF grant to CAP does not appear in philanthropy databases. Three separate $200,000 grants – two in 2011 and one in 2013 – to CAP for an “anti-Muslim bigotry” project do appear but they come from the Foundation to Promote Open Society.
Another OSF memo from April 26, 2010 (“Strategic Opportunities Fund – May 3, 2010 Docket Recommendation”) urges funding for the absurdly named Free Exchange on Campus Coalition which it states was created three and a half years earlier “to counter vigorous assaults on freedom of expression.”
OSF acknowledges it approved a $150,000 grant for FECC in 2009 and planned to give an additional $110,500 to its apparent fiscal sponsor, the American Federation of Teachers Educational Foundation. “Because FECC does not have its own 501c3 status, the coalition members decided to house the staff coordinator position at the American Federation of Teachers Educational Foundation,” the planning document states.
FECC was founded after an OSF-hosted meeting in 2006 “following which leading faculty, student and civil liberties organizations launched Free Exchange on Campus Coalition (FECC) as a joint effort to counter conservative activists and their allies’ ideological assault on higher education.”
At that time “assaults on free exchange on campuses … included public relations efforts to undermine popular support for the academy, on-campus student campaigns, and efforts to pass state and federal legislation, based upon the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s ‘Academic Bill of Rights’ (ABOR) proposal, to place restrictions on higher education.”
FECC began to organize students and faculty in key states to roll out a public communications strategy” and “played a major role in organizing students and faculty to oppose proposals to restrict the free exchange of ideas in Pennsylvania, Montana, Missouri, Virginia, Iowa, Arizona, Georgia and Texas.”
In fact the Academic Bill of Rights was drafted to protect students from abusive, indoctrination-oriented professors with the goal of returning the academy to traditional principles of open inquiry and true academic freedom that puts students and teachers on an equal footing.
Horowitz is also mentioned in an article from the OSF document dump called “9/11 at 10: Lessons Learned from Anti-Muslim Haters,” by Faiz Shakir, at the time vice president of CAP. According to his LinkedIn profile he left CAP in June 2012 to become “New Media Director & Senior Adviser” to House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, and In March 2013 he became “Senior Adviser” to “U.S. Senate Majority [sic] Leader Harry Reid[.]” (The article is one of several in a PDF file called “tab-7-usp-board-articles-oct-2011[.]”)
Shakir describes Horowitz as one of “a host of grassroots organizers and activists” who disseminates the work of “anti-Muslim experts.” After that, “[m]edia voices on the right-Fox News, National Review, and hate radio hosts like Michael Savage-then amplify the Islamophobic rhetoric. Ultimately, right-wing political actors like Newt Gingrich and Rep. Allen West (R-FL) help mainstream the ugly prejudice.”
The lesson is simple: We need to isolate the Islamophobia network. That means demanding the media not give a platform to this small cadre of voices. That also means demanding that politicians divorce themselves from the network’s propaganda. It’s possible.
Shakir’s right. It is possible to smear and intimidate people who want to speak the truth.
The Left, surfing on a tidal wave of Soros money, does it every day.
Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, “Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.”
More on Soros’ evil stirring- http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-Soross-campaign-of-global-chaos-464770
This the ‘migrant crisis’ was spontaneous? Think again – http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-08/how-george-soros-singlehandedly-created-european-refugee-crisis-and-why
The constant news of migrant rapes in refugee centres and of migrants raping ordinary women and children in Germany and Sweden are big news today. But let’s not forget that Muslims in the UK have been raping and systematically sexually exploiting young girls for decades now with few convictions to date, and the police having routinely rejected complaints by victims and their parents, considering their claims might stir problems with ‘community cohesion‘. Well God forbid anyone consider immigration from Muslim countries as anything but a great thing!
It’s not unreasonable to contend that since in Muslim countries women are deprived of freedoms and even of their LIVES, then Muslim immigration might not be conducive to the continuing freedom and safety of women. Female Genital Mutilation, ‘Honour’ Killings and mass rapes as well as child marriage and marital abuse are all common in Islamic countries. Sadly these evil practices are being carried across to the West when too many Muslims migrate here. A trip to most of our English towns today show there are thousands of Muslim women who wear the veil. 3,000 English girls were sexually exploited and abused in Rotherham ALONE by Muslim men who see white girls as sex-slaves, just as ISIS do.
More Muslim immigration is clearly bringing more of these problems to the West, and places that were safe for our women and children are no longer so. How long until YOUR favourite place becomes out of bounds for yourself or your daughters?
Make your voices heard – say NO to further Islamisation of the UK – come out with us and Anne Marie Waters THIS Saturday August 20th 2016 at Old Palace Yard in Westminster, SW1P 3JY starting at 2pm.
Those present will protest against the rising threat to the safety of European women, as a result of decades of mass immigration from Islamic societies. Join us.
Anne Marie Waters of Sharia Watch is organizing a protest in front of the House of Lords on August 20. Her aim is to address the harm being done to women by Sharia — the femicide, the FGM, the misogyny, and all the other aspects of Islamic brutality against women. In particular, she is speaking out against the silence of the feminists on this issue.
Here’s what she had to say in her Breitbart article:
Islam Kills Women is a joint effort between Sharia Watch UK and Examine-Islam.org. It aims to do one thing and one thing only: show the world just why it is that women are treated so utterly appallingly in every Muslim society on earth.
As well as producing articles from various writers and information packs and videos, I will challenge every feminist organisation in Britain to debate me, so that they can attempt to prove me wrong. When they realise that they cannot do this, I invite them to stand alongside me at the culmination of this campaign — a protest rally to be held outside Parliament on August 20th.
Islam kills women not only physically — although of course it does — but it kills the spirit of far greater numbers. From birth, girls are degraded and humiliated, most often by their own mothers. These girls accept their status and then pass it on to their own daughters in an endless cycle of what can only be described as evil.
Often forced into marriage, forced to live with domestic violence, and enslaved under a system of ‘honour’, life can be sheer misery for girls unfortunate enough to have been born in to Islam. To top it off, many will have their clitoris cut off so that sex will be painful and they can suffer the further humiliation of incontinence and other side-effects.
All of this, but all of it, is maintained and sustained and justified by Islam. That is a matter of fact.
And from her own website:
The Suffragettes didn’t stand around making statements about how wonderful it would be if the world was perfectly just and free. They didn’t spend their time debating theories and congratulating themselves for tolerating the oppression of women in the name of their culture. They took action, they demanded, they starved themselves, they chained themselves to Parliament, some even committed suicide. They did so for a reason, to win the right to vote, not to condemn misogyny in general.
I am asking you to do the same. I am asking you to cease the cowardice of making a virtuous statement and then going about your lives; this achieves nothing. If we are to preserve the freedoms won for us by our mothers and grandmothers, we must demand that men who pose a threat to those freedoms are not permitted to move here en masse. It’s a real solution, not a grand statement. We must also demand an end to sharia law, which is facilitating the slavery of women right under our noses in the UK. We must demand prosecutions for forced marriage and jail-time for the obscenity of FGM. If this occurred, not only will it save countless individual girls, but if you’re a fan of grand statements, one could hardly be grander than that.
Its time to show some courage, feminists, stand up to this. It won’t solve all the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are solved one at a time. To solve problems, you must fight, and to fight you must recognize who threatens you. Putting your head in the sand is not an option.
Its time to stop your virtue-signalling and do something worthwhile. Forget about all the nonsense and lies about “far-right” that you like to apply to others. This isn’t about labels, it’s about the freedom of women, and if you truly are a feminist, that should be your greatest concern.
I shall conclude by asking you to join me to protest against the mass migration that is bringing Islamic misogynist norms to our shores. Protect the places where women are free — it helps no woman anywhere when women’s rights go in to reverse.
I will be at the House of Lords in Westminster at 2 pm on August 20th. I will shout and protest and demand that I have the right to maintain my freedom from all threats — including immigration.
I suspect some of you will agree with me but have too much fear to say so. Come along anyway. Nobody needs to know.
We need numbers at this protest, we need loud voices at this protest, its time to stop being naïve about the world and the various societies and cultures within it. We are not all the same, we are not all alike, and we do not all value women or believe in our autonomy.
Take a step feminists, this time in the right direction.
See you on the 20th of August.
Anne Marie Waters is the founder of Sharia Watch UK, a former UKIP candidate for Parliament, and one of the leaders of PEGIDA UK.
Previous posts by or about Anne Marie Waters:
As more information on the August 20 event comes in, it will be posted here.
Please sign and share this petition far and wide – there are already calls for not only a second referendum from the Remain side but even Boris Johnson is starting to backtrack on the key pledge to control and reduce immigration. We need to make the new Brexit leadership know we will NOT find anything but a points-based immigration system acceptable.
To: The next Prime Minister and their Government
On June 23rd 2016 the British people voted to leave the EU. According to YouGov, the main reasons people voted Leave were immigration and sovereignty. The new post-Brexit Government and Prime Minister must therefore make immigration controls on a points-based system a precondition of any negotiations on trade with the EU.
Any decent negotiator will leverage the fact that the UK is now the EU’s largest single importer of EU goods and services – we buy more from the EU than we sell to them. We are also a farlarger market for the EU than Norway or Switzerland who by dint of their size were forced to accept the free movement of people as part of their deals.
There is no reason for us to make any concessions on immigration – we are the world’s 5th largest economy, it is in the EU’s self-interest to accommodate us on immigration in order to retain its valuable trade with the UK’s large market of wealthy consumers.
The new Prime Minister must not forget the UK can just as easily make trade deals with huge markets in China, India and the USA over the EU. The new Government should not be swayed by the rhetoric coming from EU leaders over the negotiations, but rather by the demands from the voting public of the UK. We are a great nation – we should not continue to be brought to heel by the undemocratic EU.
If the new post-Brexit Government fails to act on what the majority of the voting public instructed it to do it will be in contempt of the democratic process. Failing to act on immigration would be catastrophic for the cohesion of our society, the health of the NHS and of our schools, as well as ignoring the very real threat of terror from the millions of Islamic migrants Chancellor Merkel has just welcomed to Europe who are likely of course to become EU Citizens soon enough.
We the undersigned demand an end to open borders in favour of a points based system that puts the needs of the country and the will of its people first.
In order to ensure this happens we also demand the new Brexit Government sees Leave campaigners who stood firm on Leave taking the key cabinet roles of Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor. Nigel Farage of UKIP should also be involved in the negotiations with the EU since he ultimately must be thanked for the referendum.
The people have spoken – we want to leave the EU and end free movement of people – it is the duty of the new Brexit Government to implement our will. This new Government must be formed as soon as possible and Article 50 invoked immediately.
Facts and Sources:
Overall net migration stands at 333,000, and has risen more than a third since David Cameron came to power in 2010, with the aim of reducing numbers to tens of thousands a year.
While the rest of the EU accounts for about 6% of the world’s population, it’s now the source of about 49% of UK net migration. That’s up from 29% five years earlier, mainly because non-EU migration has steadied off, while EU migration has increased. It may be that the accession of new EU members has fuelled that rise.
Thursday’s win for Brexit is a huge step forward for freedom in the entire Western hemisphere. The majority vote amongst the British to leave the EU shows the world there IS an alternative to the current version of globalisation – one where the West has to forever ‘adapt’ and apologise for its own rich culture and heritage in the face of the third world ‘noble savages’ whom we are expected to bow down to, house, clothe feed and accept the destruction of OUR OWN homelands for.
Thanks to Nigel Farage and his UKIP party’s tireless work over decades, being ridiculed and lobbed with insults by all and sundry along the way, the people of the UK have finally been given a vote on where they see the future of their country – with an undemocratic, arrogant and failing EU or confident in our own worth as 5th largest worldwide economy, a nation which people from across the world want to migrate to, a nation which invented parliamentary democracy, modern computing, ended slavery and gave women the vote and gays the right to marry? We the British chose the latter – we have NOTHING to be ashamed of in so-doing. This was a vote for a brighter future – one where anything is possible and where small minded bureaucrats no longer make over half of our laws.
More than this however, we have voted for the chance to join with like-minded nations if we so wish in a formidable trading bloc that would make us into a TRULY great nation once more. There has been talk of a CANZUK union – the most powerful Commonwealth nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK all have the Queen as head of state and share common valued. Until Trudeau in Canada started pouring millions of Muslims into his country, this would have been a great idea – but since right now the biggest threat for all of us in the West is Islam and its violent, hateful, treasonous and seditious ideology, Canada would have to first cease its destructive actions to join this.
I would instead propose a union first of all with our great friends and allies during WWII Norway, looking to Switzerland who have just edged out of their application to join the EU as well as Iceland, Australia and New Zealand as potential partners in a trading bloc. We are all far more affluent nations than most of the EU (Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Croatia anyone?) with shared Judeo-Christian values despite richly different cultures. These similarities would create a bright and dynamic group of independently strong countries working together for their greater good.
The unexpected Brexit result has shown that the majority of the UK voting public will no longer put up with the single most dangerous aspect of the current world order – the obsession within the EU and the Left with political correctness at any cost. Frau Merkel’s obsession with open borders, which has flooded the EU with 3rd world incomers, most of whom are not fleeing war but are rather opportunistic economic migrants, has literally cost the EU its 2nd wealthiest member state. The repercussions to the rest of the EU of this migrant tide in terms of the safety of women and minorities is stark – but the long term economic impact will be much worse as most migrants are Muslim and Muslims have a rich history in the West of failing to work and rather bleeding the welfare state dry (when they are not busy plotting terror against us).
Sweden is now Number 2 globally after only Lesotho for the numbers of rapes its women have to contend with – 30 years after opening its borders to multiculturalism and Muslim immigration. Germany, since Merkel opened its borders to more than 1.5 million Muslim migrants is going the same way – and this is the Europe that wants to tell US what to do? It is supremely incapable of protecting its own citizens.
The reaction to the Brexit vote from the UK’s mainstream media has been disrespectful and offensive throughout the campaign but especially now the nation has voted, with even a second referendum being demanded by the sore losers on the Remain side. Voters’ very real concerns over immigration are outrageously swatted off as just so much ‘bigotry’ by the Left-wing media.
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) June 24, 2016
The talk has been of ‘fallout‘ and ‘panic‘ that the voice of the UK people has made itself heard. Many sources see this as ‘Cameron’s mistake’ to have given us, the people the choice in a democratic vote. The media and our elites are not interested in listening to the people – only in arrogantly telling us what to believe. It has worked for almost half the voting public but not for all of us. That is what is making the establishment shudder – that their self-serving narrative is being shot down.
The taints of ‘racist’ and ‘bigot’ which the Left hoped would shut down the Brexit vote have instead made us stronger. We will NOT be cowed by the doublethink that has been telling us that letting in millions of Muslims at a time when they are attacking us more regularly than even after 9/11 is a good idea. It is not. To protect the existing population of the UK the ONLY choice is to end Muslim migration to our shores. EU migration more widely has helped the economy but it has now gone too far – our schools are full up, there is a housing crisis, our poorest and our NHS are neglected and let down – we simply cannot take more people in our small island.
In 2000 the UN published a report telling the world the best solution for declining populations would be ‘replacement migration’:
— The numbers of immigrants needed to prevent the decline of the total population are considerably larger than those envisioned by the United Nations projections. The only exception is the United States.
— The levels of migration needed to prevent population ageing are many times larger than the migration streams needed to prevent population decline. Maintaining potential support ratios would in all cases entail volumes of immigration entirely out of line with both past experience and reasonable expectations.
The ‘migration crisis’ we are witnessing today, with the greatest human tide ever seen on the move and headed to the West from the Muslim world is this population replacement happening in front of our eyes. Our ‘leaders’ have been standing by and letting it happen as if it is unstoppable or even desirable. Neither is true – the Muslims headed to the West will follow in the footsteps of the majority already here – they will refuse to integrate, some will attack the local people as terrorists and others will refuse to work and claim welfare. This is NOT the best way forward for the existing populations of the West. And there ARE alternatives for these Muslims – far closer to home, the West could certainly fund refuges for them in empty, poor Muslim lands such as Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan. This would be a far better solution in every way – both better value for our tax money, and better for Muslims to stay in Muslim countries since they display daily how much they hate us and our Western ways.
The first duty of a government MUST be to protect its people – none of our world governments have been protecting us – and the UN vision of ‘replacement migration’ is the root of the current destruction of Western culture, and peoples, by an army of Muslims who completely reject our laws and our very existence. This is the current version of ‘globalisation’ which we in the UK have rejected with Brexit.
Whilst Cameron has stood firm against Merkel’s demands that we take ‘our share’ of the human tide she has invited to the EU, soon enough her incomers will be granted citizenship which under old EU free movement rules would have meant they could – and would have – moved to the UK. We are a magnet for the world’s dispossessed just as Germany and Sweden are, with our successful economy, generous welfare state and tolerant attitudes. We must use this to attract only the people we want and need rather than all comers. A points system is the solution.
Brexit has shown that the people will no longer be silenced by being called nasty names like ‘racist’ each time we complain of unlimited migration destroying our communities. Brexit is the first TRULY popular vote of modern times – Trump’s presidency will be next in November – then watch the world’s elites shudder as their plan to destroy the morale and strength of the people through unfettered Muslim immigration is no longer being accepted.
France, the Netherlands and Italy are also seeing popular demands for their own referenda on Europe. We the people will no longer bow down to the faceless rulers who time and again have shown their goals do not have OUR best interests at heart.
We have it in our power to reclaim our sovereignty not just from the EU but also from the yoke of political correctness and from the global elites currently busy replacing the greatest civilisation ever – the Judeo-Christian one with the worst ever – the Muslim one. There is nothing racist in stating this – Indian Hindus and Buddhists suffered the same fate when Muslims first came as migrants then began to slaughter and force conversions from them – killing 80 million and landing their ‘own’ lands, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Indonesia became Muslim in the same way – as did ALL the 50 or so Muslim majority nations worldwide today. Islam is nothing but a conquering ideology which uses the lie that it is peaceful to deflect from its true agenda. For some reason the UN and EU have been complicit in its attempted take-over of the West – we are now in a position to put a stop to it.
Brits must now demand our vote is fully acted upon by the Brexit government and Muslim migration stopped – we are a strong economy and MUST negotiate trade terms with the EU which do not include the free movement of people. A points-based system is perfectly workable and a decent negotiator can and must claim this as the people have made it clear that is what we want.
The US MUST vote in Trump, and the EU peoples which want to exit the EU must demand their votes soon – before it is too late and our populations are finally replaced, and the West turns to ruin like Pakistan or Afghanistan have since Muslim conquest.
UK lost pic.twitter.com/ZNCcgrUtqC
— Fernando (@FMiguel45) June 26, 2016
If you haven’t voted yet – think of what Merkel is doing to her country. It matters to us because the millions of army aged Muslim men she is bringing into her country will soon become EU citizens – and will therefore get the right to come and live here in the UK and rape women and girls here as they have been doing in Germany. The EU may be acceptable to you in its current state, but it is on a trajectory to EVER GREATER UNION – already over 50% of our laws are made BY The EU – and an EU army is being created – the future is a United States of Europe run by undemocratic unelected officials obsessed with destroying our countries’ cultures and heritage and replacing them with a multicultural (read Muslim) hell.
Watch this and VOTE LEAVE today:
— Vive Charlie (@ViveCharlieMag) June 12, 2016
Another day, another Muslim killer- this time in France – again.
It’s clear to see – there is one choice here. We can either have freedom, equal rights, tolerance for gays and others, and the rule of law, or we can have Islam. Islam teaches Muslims to hate the people of the West and the governments that rule our countries. Islam is therefore a treasonous as well as a terrorist ideology. Either we remove it and deport Muslims from the West, or we have to get used to CONSTANT terrorist aggression against all we hold dear.
Like to take your kids to Disney Land and Disney World? Twice terrorists have been found there – once casing the joint in the case of Orlando killer Mateen, and recently a Muslim was found in Disneyland Paris with a Koran and a Kalashnikov.
Enjoy eating out in restaurants and going to bars and to concerts – again, expect to be killed on a Friday night, letting off some steam after a week in the office. This of course happened to Parisians on the night of the Bataclan massacre. Or do you like to go to gay nightclubs or gay Pride parades? Again this year Muslims are turning this freedom into a behaviour as risky as swimming with a swimming pool full of hungry crocodiles.
Even as you spend increasingly long at airport security check-ins you can expect to be killed by a Muslim – always a Muslim, as in Brussels.
Made it to the beach? Again, expect Muslims to kill you – as in Tunisia. Same in your hotel in Mumbai or on the train in Madrid.
Let’s not forget the daily commute – you are likely to be blown to shreds, by Muslims, on a bus or an underground train. Once at work you can enjoy never knowing if a gunman or a plane flown by a Muslim will again signal the end of your life.
ALL these pleasurable ways to die we can enjoy safe in the knowledge we are being ‘understanding’ and ‘non-discriminatory’ towards our Muslim friends.
The LAST thing we want is for our Muslim friends to feel sad or prejudiced against in any way – even if time and again they prove how much they hate us and our way of life – by blowing us up or shooting us to death.
We should feel happy about being blown up and killed by Muslims – at least we’re not racist or intolerant! Of course, in Muslim countries Christians cannot build Churches – never mind that WE haven’t committed any terrorist acts in their countries. Dubai and Qatar use imported Indian labour – Dubai’s population is 70% Indian yet they are not allowed to become citizens nor to buy property there. And it is WE in the West who worry about being intolerant.
Meanwhile it is Christians who are rounded upon when they point out that Islam is an intolerant faith, NOT one of peace but of war. This is doublethink of the utmost degree. Look at Islam’s ‘holy’ texts – and tell me where the peace is –
Quran (2:191-193) – “And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out.
Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”
Quran (9:5) – “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush”
Islam is nothing more than a manual of war and hatred towards the infidel, us. If we want to live in peace without constant attacks by people who ALL believe in the same evil faith, the only solution is to deport Muslims to a Muslim country, Ban Islam in the West entirely, end all trade with Islamic nations and all migration from there. Until we do this we will never be able to live in peace or go about our daily lives without regularly some of us being killed by Muslims. They will not stop because their religion was invented by a mass murdering warlord to preached tolerance whilst simultaneously having his critics put to death.
The price for the status quo of Muslims living amongst us is that none of us can ever feel secure enjoying the fruits of civilisation and progress again. Muslims want to destroy us and destroying our happiness and security is the best way to do it. Each time a terrorist commits a massacre their lives are taken apart, and most often they were either known criminals allowed back into society despite a track record of terror-sympathising, or they were ‘nice people’ whose friends and neighbours never suspected a thing.
Because we cannot know a terrorist until they commit their final act – and by then it is too late, we need to remove Muslims from the West, or expect more attacks on a constant basis. They think it is their best hope of a Muslim heaven. No amount of ‘integration’ can compete with that. So choose – do you want your children to be at risk of increasing attacks? Or do you want to go back to a time when we could live normal lives free from attack by terrorists bent on their Islamic, treasonous fervour. Sure, we had murders before Muslim immigration brought 9/11, 7/7, Mumbai and all the other attacks, but at least usually if you associated with nice people you could avoid them.
Today wherever you go, whoever you are, you are at risk. Because of the 3 million Muslims in the UK today for example 20% of British Muslims sympathised with the 7/7 bombers. That’s 30,000 potential terrorists. We don’t know which Muslim is a terror lover, so surely, the safest solution for the innocent British people, the innocent people all over the Western World, is to politely ask Muslims to go back to Muslim countries. There are 50 of them worldwide, which, incidentally, they already once stole from other native people, usually by the sword, forcing conversion by intimidation and slavery.
Kind of puts a new perspective on what’s going on in the West today?
World Public Opinion: 83% of Egyptians approve of attacks on American troops.
26% of Indonesians approve of attacks on American troops.
26% of Pakistanis approve of attacks on American troops.
68% of Moroccans approve of attacks on American troops.
90% of Palestinians approve of attacks on American troops.
72% of Jordanians approve of attacks on American troops.
52% of Turks approve of some or most groups that attack Americans (39% oppose)
A minority of Muslims disagreed entirely with terror attacks on American troops.
About half of those opposed to attacking Americans were sympathetic with al-Qaeda’s attitude toward the U.S.
Yesterday’s horrific shooting in an Orlando gay club of over 100 people is of course a horror targeted specifically to the gay community. There is no doubt the gunman intended to terrorise gays. He wanted to broadcast his sense of superiority and arrogant belief that he had the right to not only judge gay people but also act as their executioner.
That this shooting happened in the middle of Gay Pride 2016 is however horrific not just for the LGBT community, but for all of us who value the freedom and joy that comes with love of any colour being able to freely speak its name.
We in the West have won these freedoms along with female emancipation and human rights for all. Yet in a very sinister fashion, the human right to choose the Islamic religion has begun to trump (yes) all other rights.
‘Why does the battle for gay rights stop at the borders of Islam?’ A piece from 18 months back: https://t.co/4F6q2ZUg0W
— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) June 12, 2016
The left-wing LGBT community has gone into overdrive to take ownership of the Orlando massacre, rejecting the right of anyone who is not part of their community to participate in the debate which must follow an event of this magnitude.
As Milo Yiannopoulos, the wonderful gay writer at Breitbart encapsulates:
“It’s mystifying to me why the progressive left has put Muslims at the top of the victimhood hierarchy … It’s particularly worrying because the Muslims want to kill everyone else on that pyramid. They want to kill the gays, the trannies, the blacks, you name it. They don’t have much respect for women. This is going to be a problem for America for decades to come.”
Further, far more frighteningly, the LGBT community and all those on the Left of politics are exhibiting a denial overdrive in refusing to state plainly that this was not just an homophobic act – but also one very clearly motivated by Islam’s teaching that homosexuality is not just a sin but one that must be punished by death.
This stonewalling (yes) of the plain truth – that Omar Mateen was a Muslim of Afghan descent, where not incidentally homosexuality is a crime that may be punished by death.
More than that, in Afghanistan the tradition is for men to take young boys as lovers – a favored Afghan expression goes: “Women are for children, boys are for pleasure”:
For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means “boy player.” The men like to boast about it.
“Having a boy has become a custom for us,” Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. “Whoever wants to show off should have a boy.”
Baghlan province is in the northeast, but Afghans say pedophilia is most prevalent among Pashtun men in the south. The Pashtun are Afghanistan’s most important tribe. For centuries, the nation’s leaders have been Pashtun.
In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called “dancing boys” a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.”
Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can’t even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.
Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: “Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are “unclean” and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli’s team “how his wife could become pregnant,” her report said. When that was explained, he “reacted with disgust” and asked, “How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?”
This warped, ISLAMIC teaching on sex and gender, can surely be seen to have warped the young, Afghan, Mateen’s entire psychology as regards sex and homosexuality.
The Islamic hatred of gays is not confined to Afghanistan however –
Abu Dawud (4448) – “If a man who is not married is seized committing sodomy, he will be stoned to death.”
al-Tirmidhi, Sunan 1:152 – [Muhammad said] “Whoever is found conducting himself in the manner of the people of Lot, kill the doer and the receiver.“
Interestingly, the same rules don’t seem to apply in paradise, where martyrs for the cause of Allah enjoy an orgy of virgins and “perpetual youth” Quran (56:17) (otherwise known as “boys”Quran (52:24)). Quran (76:19) bluntly states, “And immortal boys will circulate among them, when you see them you will count them as scattered pearls.” Technically, the mere presence of boys doesn’t necessarily mean sex, however it is strongly implied from the particular emphasis on the effeminacy, handsomeness and “freshness” of the boys. The female virgins of paradise are also compared to pearls (56:23). (From http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/homosexuality.aspx)
So is it really possible to hold Orlando to be purely a homophobic act? Or, especially since the shooter explicitly allied himself with ISIS in his telephone call to 911, and since he was a Muslim, and since he shouted in Arabic during the shooting, is it not more honest to point to Islam’s hatred of homosexuals, and its warped relationship with gay love?
I would say so. Further, I find this obsession with removing Islam from the equation as contemptible as Owen Jones found it when two commentators tried to downplay the homophobic element of the crime (see clip below).
Orlando was simultaneously an homophobic hate crime of the worst kind, but also an Islamic terrorist attack on our Western freedoms and way of life, and a crime by a clearly deranged man of Afghan origin with associated warped sexual psychology.
Pretending it was anything other than all of these is obscene – it is the latest in a non-stop stream of hate crimes by Muslims against the rest of the world – 28,576 at the last count since 9/11 alone. Islam is nothing but a hate crime against the rest of the world, since in trying to live our lives Islam teaches Muslims we are offending against Islam and should therefore be killed.
Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”
Thinking that if we focus on each one separate to the rest this truth will disappear of its own accord is insane – Orlando’s victims, just as those from the last 2 Paris attacks, the victims of the Tunisia attack, the Madrid, Mumbai, Boston, Brussels, 9/11 or 7/7 attacks are victims of Islam’s war against the rest of the world. The whole of Islam’s core texts is concerned with hatred towards non-Muslims – and Muslims to this day are taught to hate us – the proof is in their CONSTANT attacks on civilisations that reject Islam.
Some have called for better gun control. However this was in place in Paris in both the last attacks by Muslims – to no avail. Orlando’s killer even held a gun licence in Orlando.
There are calls to better protect gay bars and clubs and events – of course we must do this. But Muslims wanting to become martyrs won’t stop at this latest attack – and as we have seen from the over 28,000 attacks worldwide since 9/11 they are democratic in the targets they choose. We need to place this firmly amongst the thousands of attacks on the rest of the world BY MUSLIMS, informed by their faith, which has zero tolerance for non-Muslims and anyone else engaging in what Islam calls a sin.
Yes, in the other Abrahamic faiths there is a sin of homosexuality – and clearly this is a problem for gays in a religious community. But to equate that with the constant attacks by Muslims on the rest of us, gay, Jewish, or merely non-Muslim or Westernised is insane. Christians and Jews are simply not massacring people because their faith does not give them the right to do this, unlike Islam which exhorts violence without barriers of time or place, from Muslims.
Our best hope of winning this war is to engage in it and voice the truth of it – Islam is at war against the rest of us. If we try and appease our attackers into ending this fight which they started, and which they have zero intention of losing, we will continue to mourn the countless more souls that will die at the hands of Muslim murderers, because their faith gives them the ‘right’ to kill us!
Islam has a history of conquest and violence against non-Muslims since its inventor, Muhammad first took up the sword against innocent tribes who refused to join his followers. Islam is nothing but a war-manual conceived by a war-lord – it has zero relationship with the peace and love for humanity of Jesus or of other faiths.
We must fight Islam to protect our beautiful, civilised, free world – ONLY when we deport all Muslims, Ban Islam and end all trade and migration from the Muslim world will we be safe. There is no other answer to the problem of ISLAM.
— infidel (@infidel1) June 13, 2016
Owen Jones is an embarrassment,muslim massacres dozens of gay people & he still defends Islam https://t.co/sWF96kQf4o
— David Jones (@DavidJo52951945) June 13, 2016


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Ashley, Easton and Lawrence Hill
Get involved with decision making at a local level in the Ashley, Easton and Lawrence Hill wards.
Help shape what happens next for this area
Local people, elected councillors, community groups and service providers are looking at the different ways of working together for mutual benefit to help develop what happens next for local involvement and decision making.
Previous Neighbourhood Partnership meetings
No further meetings are scheduled. Read minutes of previous meetings.
Your Neighbourhood consultation
The consultation has now closed.
Neil Burwell: Neighbourhood Officer
- Telephone: 077 954 464 29
- Email: email@example.com

domain: sociology


text:
This abstract landscape art quilt depicts a pine tree branch with flowers blooming on a spring green background.
This work hints at patches of sunlight reflecting on water. The background is an abstract patchwork of hand dyed cotton and silk, some of which is highly textured in appearance.
The foliage in the foreground is couched with yarns for definition with metallic thread so a slight sparkle can be seen when viewed closely. The pine needles are made of organza and silk fabrics fused to the surface, then heavily thread painted with polyester and metallic threads in green and gold. There is a touch of paint used here and there on the surface to enhance the work.
46″ x 46″
There is a hanging sleeve and embroidered signature on the back.

domain: hobby


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Your Independent Movie Guide
| September 18, 2018
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In the battle between two films made by different freshman feature directors from the same original screenplay—as dramatically bared on the Starz...
"Big Man Japan" is the rare picture that has such a delightful premise that it would hardly matter if the film worked or not. Fortunately for fans of...
Cassie Townsend is a relatively new addition to the film acting world. However, she is definitely not new to acting itself as she has been performing and...

domain: artistic


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The Tampa Bay Buccaneers will play in the NFC Championship game on Sunday, and it almost doesn’t seem real. It’s been 18 years since Tampa has played in a title game, spawning the famous Ronde Barber pick six in Philadelphia.
On Sunday, the Buccaneers will face the Green Bay Packers, a team they destroyed 38-10 early in the season. But that means absolutely nothing now. Both teams have improved drastically since then, and a trip to Lambeau field will make the task even more difficult.
If the Buccaneers want to play in their second Super Bowl in franchise history, they will need to exploit vulnerable matchups, and keep doing what works. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel here, lets get into it.
Establish the Run
As someone who is a stat nerd, I can’t believe I just typed that heading. I usually like when teams throw the football early to set up second and third and short, but Green Bay is susceptible on the ground. Last week against the Rams, Cam Akers rattled off five yards a clip for 90 total yards on the day.
During the regular season, Green Bay ranked 18th in rushing defense DVOA. Their 15th rank in passing defense DVOA isn’t inspiring either, but their 4.5 yards per carry given up on the ground rank in the bottom of the NFL.
Long story short, I want to see a full dose of Ronald Jones.
Leonard Fournette has played well over the past two weeks, but Jones’ explosiveness and burst are a clear upgrade over Fournette on even the live broadcast.
Now to be clear, I’m not advocating for more first down runs, I don’t think I can handle any more without pulling my hair out. But keeping Rodgers on the sideline while pounding the rock will only weaken the defense for the fourth quarter, and take the pressure off Tom Brady.
I have a feeling this will be the game plan anyways, and I can’t argue against it this week. But this game will be dictated by the Buccaneers defense. Here is how they can repeat their performance from week six.
Rattle Rodgers Early
Aaron Rodgers was a very different quarterback against the Buccaneers. He was hit in the mouth early, and never really recovered.
Matt LeFleur had no answer for Todd Bowles’ blitzing scheme, and he left his offensive line on an island all afternoon.
The Packers will likely have a better answer this weekend, but much of their ideology is using play action. Going down early eliminates much of that threat.
Devin White will need to play to the caliber of last week’s superstar performance against the New Orleans Saints. Stopping the run will be manageable, but tracking Rodgers in the pocket will be a completely different task.
The Packers are the number one offense in the league, but the Buccaneers are humming on defense after rattling the Saints. If Todd Bowles can call a game like he did in week six, Tampa Bay will win this game, and ride home to the Super Bowl.

domain: news


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Casey Gerald knew he was special from a young age. Not in a conceited or entitled way – being poor, black, gay, “a damn near orphan”, and from the wrong side of Dallas meant he would often be told otherwise – but special because his mother insisted he was. “And she was the most magical creature I ever knew,” he says, “like something from the movies.”
Gerald’s mother was, he later recognised, a manic depressive – “with big, crinkly, burnt-blond hair [that] made her look like a high-yellow Whitney Houston”. She left home and disappeared when he was 13. Some time before, Gerald’s football star father, the son of a renowned Texas preacher, became hooked on heroin only to then carousel in and out of prison. And so this gifted, athletic teenager ended up in the care of his grandmother and older sister – until a football scholarship to Yale became his ticket “to live America from the very bottom to the very top”.
Gerald and I talk via a video call from Los Angeles. Now 31, he is eloquent, handsome, thoughtful – the rags-to-riches poster boy for the American dream that his book, There Will Be No Miracles Here, sets out to dismantle. On the surface, his life reads as the elevator pitch for a Disney movie, the Horatio Alger myth beloved of pop culture and politicians; so much so that after meeting Gerald in 2016, former president George W Bush used his story in a speech to illustrate the plucky, inspirational, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps narrative that feeds the country’s identity.
“I think of my book as an intervention,” says Gerald. “To turn this American dream on its head is like being the warning on a pack of cigarettes: people will still smoke, but the way we’re taught to live our life in this society can kill you and it is killing people – even if they’re not dead, they are miserable, sad, depressed. We need to have a referendum on the American machine.”
What would the question be?
“How do we build a society where every kid has a shot? It’s as simple as that. One exceptional case [like mine] does not justify the suffering of 13 million American children who don’t have enough food or one in 30 who don’t have a stable place to sleep. My generation has inherited a country that doesn’t work any more.”
Gerald says he feels traumatised not only by his childhood, but by his belief that a Yale degree in political science, a prestigious MBA from Harvard Business School and a glittering career on Wall Street would save him. “For sure, it’s one of the reasons I’m in therapy.”
As a student, he took an internship at Lehman Brothers in the summer the bank filed for bankruptcy. Enthusiasm undimmed, after graduating he worked in economic policy and as an entrepreneur, but neither wealth nor success resolved his internal conflicts. “I had to write this book to understand what was wrong with me,” he says. “It’s a long journey.”
Gerald’s memoir is a nonlinear collection of memories and experiences, often unsentimental and stark, sometimes elegiac and elliptical. By writing about the dual burden and invisibility of being a black American man, he plays with a literary tradition that has been canonised by the likes of Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s an ambitious exercise.
“There is a great tradition of people writing on the margins of society and I am grateful for them, but I had no interest in writing that kind of book,” he says. “I set out to tell the truth and understand why I and a lot of my friends were cracked up. I started this in 2016 and so the country and a lot of the world was cracked up too, but I was sad. I wouldn’t say I was having a nervous breakdown but I wasn’t far off.”
He wrote the first draft by hand, using “Morning Pages”, a writing style popularised by Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. This meant writing three pages of longhand every morning, on lined A4 paper, in a stream of consciousness. “I needed it to be a visceral exercise and lose myself in it.”
By 29, Gerald had successfully founded (and closed) MBAs Across America, a nonprofit organisation that matched business students with small businesses. Its aim was to “show that purpose and not profit is the new bottom line”. The model was made open source and taught as part of a curriculum at Harvard Business School.
According to New York magazine, Gerald seemed poised to either “run for national office in either party, become the youngest-ever CEO of a multinational business or produce and star in some viral reality show”. For now, he balks at the idea that he may consider a career in politics.
“I don’t have any political ambitions or willingness to be a politician,” he says, shaking his head. “I do believe I have been put on this planet to do real work but my priority is to be well. If I’m well, everything I do will be well.”
The experience of losing his grandmother last summer has underlined everything he wants his generation to rail against. “I was asked to write her obituary,” he explains, “and I got the draft [from his family] which was in essence: ‘she was born, she met this dude, she married him, she had seven of his children, she was a beautiful wife and mother and she died.’ And I thought: ‘holy shit, who is this? I thought she was a whole person and we’re supposed to go to her funeral and praise her for being submissive?’” He sighs. “I miss her so much. But eulogising her because she never complained? All that stuff, wow, that world is done. My sisters, my friends, my cousins, that is not a way of living for anyone.”
Gerald’s book mirrors the findings of a 2017 Pew study on the American dream that confirms “the myth of bootstrapping” – the fantastical notion that wealth and security can be achieved simply if you work and dream hard enough. The report reveals that social mobility between those at the bottom and those in the middle of American society has become increasingly harder, not easier. Given the choice, most families are happier to make ends meet and pay their bills than move up the economic ladder; this reads particularly true of African Americans who are stuck at the lowest levels and more likely to stay there and even potentially fall further behind from one generation to the next.
“Yes, this is Donald Trump’s America,” shrugs Gerald. “But let me be clear: I’m a black person, a queer person, my grandma’s grandfather was born a slave in Texas. Very few black people – if any I know – were shocked that Donald Trump was elected. Donald Trump may be the most American president we’ve ever had!
“For 200 something years we’ve been taught that the president was supposed to be better than everyone else – a Washington or Lincoln. Now is one of the few times we have a president that reflects a strong strain of depravity that has always been part of America. Life for people that Trump has been destroying with his policies – for poor people, people of colour, for immigrants – that has been intolerable and unsustainable for a long time.”
But Gerald isn’t without hope. “You can’t be a black American and not understand the extraordinary potential of the human spirit.” In any case, he believes a shift is under way. “Fundamentally, the way we are taught to be men in this country is a dead end and it’s changing – and I’m happy about that,” says Gerald.
His book, like the TED talk he delivered in 2016 titled The Gospel of Doubt, begins with the end of the world: a flashback of Millennium Eve when he was in church with his grandmother praying for the Rapture. “There’s a reason for beginning with that,” he says. “So much of my childhood was the world ending over and over again; no one called a family meeting and said: ‘Hey Case, how do you feel about your momma disappearing?’ It just happened and then you have to figure life out.”
Figuring things out included his place in the elite institutions he later found himself in, how he might make a difference, and his sexuality.
“I didn’t want to write a dissertation on being an oppressed gay person,” he says. “I wanted to bring worthy language to the beauty of loving another boy in a society that hates gay people – but that doesn’t mean I have to hate myself.”
The neighbourhood of Oak Cliff, where Gerald grew up, has barely changed in recent years, he says. Running east of downtown’s ever newer, ever shinier skyscrapers, it is still a predominantly African American area that straddles extreme wealth and deprivation.
“A lot of white people want to make the conversation about segregation, but I grew with incredible, dedicated black teachers, I had black crossing guards to get me across the street, there were hardly any white people and it did not occur to me then that I was inferior because I was black.
“Dallas, for all its faults, is not that much different to when I grew up except that there has been a continual material assault on the poor, working class, people of colour, that makes their lives materially more impossible. But that’s not a question of identity to me, that’s socioeconomics.”
Writing and talking about his experience, which he is clear “does not fetishise or commodify black bodies for entertainment”, has come at a cost to his mental health. “I don’t think it’s cathartic; catharsis implies purging and that didn’t happen. I can just see it clearly now,” he says.
“I don’t know what it will be like for us in 30 years or whether we will be happier. What I do know is that it will be different.”


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I am taking some time today to give some BLOG LOVE to two very special ladies on ESTY
I met this first lady Tracy, during a BNR on Etsy. She was kind enough to purchase some of my Kittie Whiskers for herself, her boys and her Mom >^.^<
Through these purchases her and I have had many convos, learned about each others lives, shared stories, and have become friends! Tracy is a wonderful lady and mother of two great boys. She is also a busy mom with a wonderful shop on Etsy called Denmark55033
Tracy specializes in handmade bracelets and homemade soaps. Her shop is beautiful, colorful and looks as though it would smell splendidly!!
She is currently running a Japan Relief Fund on her Etsy Shop
which proves she is not only a talented artist but a sweet, kind lady. Check out her Japan Relief Fund Items here: Japan Relief
Check out her facebook here:
Tracy was nice enough recently to have some kitty toys, made and sent to me from another super Etsian Crafty Cat Lady
These toys are wonderful! The organic catnip spelled so nice to my kitty clan of four that they had a hard time sharing! She was sweet enough to even include a bonus cat toy :)
The toys are made very well and beautifully colored also!
"I got my first cat 10 years ago. Before that, I had no idea how incredibly loving and intuitive cats could be. Making toys that cats love is my way of "giving back" all the love and support my cats have given me. I take this stuff pretty seriously. All the toys I make are my own design and are made from quality ingredients and organic catnip that is grown in my garden. I have a panel of "test cats" (made up of not just my own cats, who can be a bit jaded) to try out new designs for any potential issues before I make that design available for purchase"
Don't these two ladies just sound wonderful!
Fellow cat lovers unite!
Please check out these two fantastic ladies and give them some love on Etsy today!!

domain: pet


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serving the smoked and marinated watermelon...
Ducks Eatery in New York City has created a truly unique way to serve watermelon. They first strip the fruit of all its rind and skin, marinate it in the same preparations used for their smoked ham and smoked it until it has the look, smell and feel of real smoked meat, even when being sliced.
We process the melon similar to how we prepare our hams, but it is 100% melon (and vegetarian!).
Smoked watermelon is available at Duck's Eatery in New York City. The melon is cooked in the same way they've been smoking meat for years. It's no wonder the watermelon looks like a smoked ham! Seewww.invidio.us

domain: food


Classrooms and boarding rooms for children in Ta Ba Commune, Lai Chau Province, which are better built than their own thatched houses. Photo courtesy of Lao Dong
Ta Ba Commune is the poorest in the country's poorest province of Lai Chau, where the makeshift spirit is seen in every corner of the life.
Local authorities say that change is tough because many people are used to being poor and don't see it as a big deal.
People in the newly established commune are members of hill tribes that have lived in the jungle for hundreds of years and were only asked to move and settle in the new commune by the government months ago.
They have not taken to their new life and do not seem to understand it.
They were once known as the proud La Hu ("tiger and squirrel") tribe, known for ruling the forests with strength and cleverness.
But all that has been reduced to men waiting for food handouts and exhausted women overburdened by mouths they cannot feed without much hope for a better future.
"We have two seasons a year the full season and the hungry season. But the hungry one has been going on for nine or ten months a year," said Vang Pha Ly, chairman of the commune legislative unit, whose office is a makeshift shack.
Families that are only hungry four months of the year are considered "rich," he said.
His office is a small house standing alone on bare ground with no water or electricity. It has a power generator that is inoperative most of the time.
It has electric lights, a fan and a television but they are just for decoration as the power is not stable and the devices have broken down due to short circuits.
Ly said the commune is not a small one, but has little space for cultivation.
He said 1,696 people were living on 11,375 hectares with only one water supply. The supply is a ditch only large enough to water seven hectares of plants at most, so most farmers have to depend on rains.
The chairman said Ta Ba needs irrigation to turn wild land into fields and gardens.
"Locals are still using cultivation methods from a thousand years ago," said Ly. "So it's not strange when 93 percent of the families are officially poor."
He said the commune is facing "unsolvable puzzles": how to provide people with production land, how to provide the socioeconomic stability required for healthy lives, and how to get all kids in the area into school.
Xy Xi Pha, vice principal of Ta Ba Secondary School, said teachers in the area dream of the day a local graduate will leave the town for a university education and return to make the place better.
But Pha said the dream would remain just that -- a dream -- until having enough food to eat is not considered a luxury.
The teacher said one big problem is that locals seem to accept with their current life.
"They don't know that they are hungry," he said.
Locals were asked to leave the jungle to gather into a more urban community when the commune was set up recently.
They receive rice subsidies from the government every month, but not enough, so they still spend much time in the jungle relying on wide banana, bamboo sprouts or crabs on the streams. Or they just wait for the next subsidy.
Pha said experts have come to teach locals about cultivation and farming, and the locals have received cattle as gifts.
But the locals then questioned why they have to raise a pig for half a year when they can have a fish or a crab after just half a day at the stream, and why they have to plant vegetables when bamboo sprouts are every where.
Pha Gio Nu, a 35-year-old local woman, is married with five children.
Like any other woman in the neighborhood, Nu delivered at home, which used to be in the middle of the jungle and is currently a thatched house of around 5 square meters, exposed to wind.
The only furniture is a flashlight, three bags for harvesting, two knives and a smoking pipe.
She also cut the umbilical cord herself, using a piece of bamboo from the house's wall.
La Hu people are not familiar with modern medical intervention and do not know what services are available out there.
That is ironically why the parents of Ly Gio Xo, now an eighth grader, agreed to send her to school: she has a cleft palate and they believed she would be too ugly for anyone to marry. They also did not know the cleft palate could be fixed.
Her parents also thought that sending her to school would save some food by leaving the child in the care of the teachers who are volunteers from the lowland.
Xo was at some point noticed by people from the charity initiative "Rice with Meat," started by Vietnam Television former deputy director Tran Dang Tuan in 2011 to provide ethnic minority children with nutritious meals, blankets, warm clothes and school stationery.
They contacted experts from the non-profit Operation Smile to bring Xo to Hanoi for a surgery.
But then it was delayed as doctors at the Vietnam-Cuba Hospital found Xo was suffering from an inflammation inside her neck, which was made worse by the heat of wild leaves that her parents used to put on her neck in an attempt to cure the condition.
Doctors gave her some antibiotics and the inflammation was gone after three days.
Xo then received an operation and she is now able to smile a full smile.
She said she's going to be a teacher to tell her students about the world outside their community, and to inspire them to reach out.
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Dark Mode has been an increasingly common feature in many mobile applications and websites in recent years.
It is a feature that replaces the normal black text on a white backdrop with white text on a black or gray background.
Amazon is one of the world’s leading online shopping platforms, with millions of monthly users, and has yet failed to introduce Dark Mode on its app and website.
Amazon ‘Dark Mode’
Dark Mode has many benefits, such as reducing eye strain, saving battery life, and improving readability in low-light environments.
However, Amazon does not have a native dark mode option on its app or website, which frustrates some users who prefer to shop online at night or when in dimly lit rooms.
They argue that dark mode is not only a matter of personal preference but also a matter of accessibility and user experience.
This has led to many complaints and requests from Amazon app users who want a better user experience and more accessibility options.
Anyone else wonder why Amazon and other big names still don’t have dark modes for their web pages? I don’t think most ppl like staring at bright a white screen at night. I.e. Google Sheets and Docs have dark mode on mobile apps, but not on PC.
@amazon it’s 2023. Pls get dark mode for your app. Thx
We have come across potential workarounds that might help users get ‘Dark Mode’. Here are steps to do so on the Android app:
1. Open System Settings
2. Go to About Phone and then click on Device Identifiers
3. Click on the Build number seven times
You now have access to developer options. Next,
1. Open System Settings again
2. Go to Developer Options
3. Go down to the Hardware accelerated rendering section and turn on the Override force-dark mode option.
While Amazon has yet to announce any plans to introduce Dark Mode on its app or website, it is clear that users are eager for the feature.
Until then, Amazon app users will have to either stick with the bright light theme or use unofficial methods to darken their screens while shopping online.
Note: We have more such stories in our dedicated Amazon Section so be sure to follow them as well.
PiunikaWeb started as purely an investigative tech journalism website with main focus on ‘breaking’ or ‘exclusive’ news. In no time, our stories got picked up by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and many others. Want to know more about us? Head here.


Gone Baby Gone is a new film based on the Dennis Lehane novel about the search for a young girl who has been kidnapped in an area of Boston.
Ben Affleck makes his debut as director and his younger brother Casey Affleck stars as the private investigator who is asked to help out on the case.
It also stars Michelle Monaghan, Amy Ryan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, John Ashton and Amy Madigan.
I recently spoke to Ben and Casey about the film and you can listen to the interviews here:
Or you can listen to the older version here:[audio:http://filmdetail.receptionmedia.com/Ben_Affleck_and_Casey%20Affleck_on_Gone_Baby_Gone.mp3]
Gone Baby Gone is out at UK cinemas this Friday
> Download the interviews as an MP3 file
> Ben Affleck and Casey Affleck at the IMDb
> Official UK site for the film
> Check out the trailer for the film
> Read reviews of the film at Metacritic
> Q&A with author Dennis Lehane at his official website