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David DeGerolamo
The fall of Damascus and Baghdad, or large slices thereof, into the rapacious hands of the Islamic State, is no longer a debatable subject of strategic forecasts. Today, the capital cities of Syria and Iraq are within the Islamists’ grasp. The Middle East is about to pay the price for President Barack Obama’s single-minded obsession with a US détente with Tehran and a nuclear accord. It is the end product of Washington’s insistence on playing down ISIS as a formidable opponent and contention that the meager US-led coalition air campaign destroyed much of its operational capabilities, which proved to be an illusion. Equally fallacious was Obama’s trust in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its terrorist arm, the Al Qods Brigades, to curtail the Islamist momentum.
Washington’s trust has since faded. Tehran too has cooled to the idea.
In March, a group of Iraqi Shiite militias commanded by Al Qods chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani, managed to snatch parts of the Sunni Iraqi town of Tikrit from Islamist grasp. That was Iran’s first and last engagement against ISIS in Iraq. After that, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decided to pull back from engaging Sunni Muslims in an overt sectarian showdown. It was clear to him, that the battlefield was not Iran’s forte, but rather subversion, clandestine warfare and limited support for local Shiite surrogates.
Did you know that if you took every single penny away from everyone in the United States that it still would not be enough to pay off the national debt? Today, the debt of the federal government exceeds $145,000 per household, and it is getting worse with each passing year. Many believe that if we paid it off a little bit at a time that we could eventually pay it all off, but as you will see below that isn’t going to work either. It has been projected that “mandatory” federal spending on programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare plus interest on the national debt will exceed total federal revenue by the year 2025. That is before a single dollar is spent on the U.S. military, homeland security, paying federal workers or building any roads and bridges. So no, we aren’t going to be “paying down” our debt any time in the foreseeable future. And of course it isn’t just our 18 trillion dollar national debt that we need to be concerned about. Overall, Americans are a total of 58 trillion dollars in debt. 35 years ago, that number was sitting at just 4.3 trillion dollars. There is no way in the world that all of that debt can ever be repaid. The only thing that we can hope for now is for this debt bubble to last for as long as possible before it finally explodes.
It shocks many people to learn that our debt is far larger than the total amount of money in existence. So let’s take a few moments and go through some of the numbers.
When most people think of “money”, they think of coins, paper money and checking accounts. All of those are contained in one of the most basic measures of money known as M1. The following definition of M1 comes from Investopedia…
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I understand that most readers understand
A judge has halted the approval of gas drilling operations in North Carolina until a higher court weighs in on the legality of the appointment of several boards that manage state resources and the environment.
Superior Court Judge Donald Stephens’ decision earlier this month prevents the Mining and Energy Commission from approving drilling units for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” until the state Supreme Court decides a separate case regarding how the state panels are formed. No drilling units had been approved before the judge issued his order.
Stephens issued a preliminary injunction that stops the commission from accepting or processing applications for drilling units. He also delayed proceedings in the lawsuit filed against the state’s Mining and Energy Commission pending the other case’s outcome.
The state’s highest court will hear arguments in late June on the separate lawsuit by Gov. Pat McCrory and two of his predecessors that challenged how several other state commissions were appointed. A panel of judges sided with McCrory earlier this year in striking down the way lawmakers appointed those boards, and the decision was appealed to the high court.
China tried to electronically jam U.S. drone flights over the South China Sea in a bid to thwart spying on disputed island military construction, U.S. officials said.
Global Hawk long-range surveillance drones were targeted by the jamming in at least one incident near the disputed Spratly Islands, where China is building military facilities on Fiery Cross Reef.
Disclosure of the jamming came as a U.S. Navy P-8 surveillance flight on Wednesday was challenged eight times by the Chinese military to leave the same area.
In a time when anti-Semitism is reaching its peak, again, in Europe, and the forces of Islam are trying to eradicate the world of Christianity and Judaism, the Vatican,which has a profound influence on more than one billion Christians around the world,choose to sell the Jews, again, to their own persecutors.
This is the meaning of Catholic Church’s recognition of the “State of Palestine”, which is a totalitarian project aiming to destroy the Jewishness of the State of Israel and to expel(or kill) 600,000 Jews from their homes in Judea and Samaria.
But we should not be surprised. In every moment of crisis, the Vatican has sided with Israel’s enemies.
Gulf War, 1991. When Iraqi scuds are fired against Israel, the Pope condemns attacks against “civilians”, without even mentioning the Israeli people.
2000, a few months before the beginning of the Second Intifada: Pope John Paulvisits Damascus. Bashar el Assad proclaims that just as Jews murdered Jesus, Israel is torturing Palestine. The Vatican stands silent, de facto justifying the horrible anti-Semitism emanating from the Syrian regime.
April 2002. The Palestinian Arab terrorists enter Bethlehem and the Nativity Church. The Catholic authorities become the world wide leaders of an unprecedented campaign of verbal assault against Israel. The Vatican, from the Catholic NGOs to Pope John Paul II to the official daily L’Osservatore Romano, sanction the terrorists’ right to use the church as a shelter, turning Israel into the aggressor.
A suicide bomber blew himself up at a Shi’ite mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia during Friday prayers, residents said, killing and wounding several people.
One witness described a huge explosion at the Imam Ali mosque in the village of al-Qadeeh. He estimated there were at least 30 casualties in the attack, where more than 150 people were praying.
Observers say Islamic State has captured the last Syrian-controlled border crossing between Syria and Iraq.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Syrian forces fled the al-Tanaf crossing, giving the militants control of the border.
The monitors say Islamic State now controls about half of Syria after seizing the ancient city of Palmyra, putting its irreplaceable 2,000 year old artifacts at risk of destruction.
U.S. officials say the capture of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra by Islamic State militants is “unfortunate gains” for the militant group.
Pentagon spokesman Colonel Steve Warren said Thursday the U.S. was unable to coordinate air support to help in the fight for Palmyra.
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The pResident’s response: climate control is our greatest threat to national security.
The reality is that the federal government is our nation’s greatest threat to the security of the country.
David DeGerolamo
A group of foreign militants infiltrates the U.S. using student visas, weak borders, bribery and cooperation with drug cartels. Secret cells integrate within metropolitan areas and blend with the populace. At the precise moment, they activate, unleashing small attacks across the country in coordinated blitzkrieg-style terror campaigns against everything from suburban neighborhoods to public schools to shopping malls, striking fear into the citizenry, which now believes no one is safe, even in the heartland. With normal law enforcement overwhelmed, the economy on the brink and the populace ready to riot, the military is deployed domestically; curfews, price controls and rationing are initiated; and special operations agents act as infiltrators in order to subdue the terrorist factions. The loss of common liberties is welcomed by most as safety and security become the paramount motivator.
A glimpse into the future? Well, perhaps. Actually, it’s the plot narrative to a Chuck Norris movie called “Invasion U.S.A.” The terrorists in that movie were communists from places like Cuba and Venezuela (hey, it was the 80s, and we had no idea that the communists were elitists that had already taken over from within), but the premise is strangely not far from what the government is trying to sell to us as a potential real-life scenario today.
Thirty-seven MS-13 gang members have been indicted in Charlotte, North Carolina on numerous offenses including murder and attempted murder, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina announced Wednesday.
Wednesday morning, a law enforcement dragnet rounded up 16 of the alleged gang members. While five remain “at large” the remaining 16 are in state custody.
“As outlined in today’s indictment, the alleged MS-13 gang members have committed numerous violent crimes, including armed robberies, assaults, and murders, for the benefit of the criminal enterprise,” Jill Westmoreland Rose, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, said in a statement. “Today’s charges send a clear message to gangsters who think their gang affiliation puts them beyond the law’s reach.”
While all 37 alleged gang members have been indicted on racketeering conspiracy charges, 22 of them are charged with additional crimes including those violent felonies Rose indicated.
Saudi Arabia is making a bid to head the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (HRC) just days after it posted a slew of new job openings for executioners who would help carry out beheadings amid a massive uptick in state-sanctioned killings in the country.
Saudi Arabia, which has come under increasing criticism from human rights groups for an uptick in the number of executions in the country, has been a member of the U.N.’s top human rights body since 2014, along with Russia, China, and Cuba.
It is now making a bid to assume lead control over the HRC after 2016, when the presidency rotates to a new nation.
While the HRC has often been dismissed for hosting nations with some of the worst human rights records in the world, its importance in the coming year could be critical to how the international community deals with atrocities in Syria and other Middle Eastern nations.
