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SAS officer kills five jihadis with a shotgun in seven seconds

A British SAS officer armed with a shotgun took out five ISIS fighters in seven seconds in a raid on a terrorist bomb factory.

The unnamed officer was leading a dawn raid on the ISIS bombmaking facility outside of Baghdad, Iraq, acting on a tip received the previous night that a suicide bombing was planned for that day.

The successful operation was part of a covert mission that took place on an ISIS outpost in Baghdad, Iraq.  Working with Iraq’s special forces, MI6 agents had identified the building as a suspected bomb factory used by the terror group, from which militants would carry out attacks.

Leading a 12-man team, the officer burst into the facility, breaking through a doorway into a small courtyard.

He found himself just feet away from the ISIS fighters.

Unfortunately for the team, the terrorists were loading weapons into a truck at the time, meaning they were armed and had other weapons within reach.

That’s when the team leader, carrying a Benelli M4 Super 90 semi-automatic shotgun used to blow open door locks, leaped into action. (See video above for how the Bennelli performs.)

He “opened fire with a shotgun and shot dead three before they could get a shot off,” an unnamed source tells the Daily Star.

“Another two terrorists appeared from a building and he neutralized them as well,” the source added.

Using a shotgun at point-blank range had the desired effect.

“Several other terrorists emerged from the building but immediately surrendered and began panicking as two of the bodies didn’t have heads – they thought they were about to be executed,” the Daily Star reported.

Two of the terrorists were wearing explosive vests loaded with ball bearings, meaning the team intercepted and neutralized them just minutes before they were set to carry out the attack.

The Ministry of Defence does not comment on special forces operations.

Man brings emotional support clown to meeting about his firing

When Joshua Jack got an email from his employer saying they needed to discuss his future with the company, he figured it wasn’t to make him CEO.

The message reminded him that under New Zealand law he could bring someone as “emotional support.”

He hired a clown.

The clown made balloon animals as Jack’s bosses explained to him he was being fired, though he had to stop when executives complained about the squeaking rubber.

He even mimed crying as the company handed Jack formal notice of his firing.

The bosses thought the “emotional support clown” was unusual, but appreciated Jack lightening the mood.  “I mean he was one of the best clowns in all Auckland so they were getting something of a free service,” said Jack.

Jack has since found another job at a different ad agency, though he did not hire a clown for the interview.

Give the man credit. Nowadays people would show up with their Mom, sobbed through the whole thing, then sued for emotional distress.

VIDEO: Make a Copper Coil Water Heater

As the fall begins, many of us turn toward the question of heating our living spaces through the upcoming winter months.

If you want to make certain you and your family remain warm as the snow falls, check out this ingenious water heater/space heater.

This may be perfect for heating your cabin out in the woods or if the power fails for a long period and you need to keep warm.

Would You Pass (Gas) on this Fart Festival?

They have competitions for everything. Well, almost everything.

In what might be a first of its kind, flatulence has floated up to the competitive level.

Surat, India will be the location for a farting competition called What the Fart? on September 22nd.

Organizers Yatin Sangoi and Mul Sanghvi promote the contest as ” a test to see whose farts are the loudest, the longest and the most musical.”

They have even created a hashtag #freethefart to further their cause.

Winners will take home trophies and as sponsors are coming forward to provide Rs 5,000 to Rs 15,000 (about $60-$200) in prize money. The entry fee is only Rs 100 (about $1.40).

Do you think this will catch on in America?

Source: Facebook

Graphic video: Police shoot man in back. Take our poll!

There may have been a few reasons to want to see this man locked up. Apparently there was a warrant out for his arrest and reports indicate it was for possession of child pornography.

But here the cop turns judge, jury and executioner. After a few minutes of standoff, and AFTER the victim pocketed his weapon and turns to run away, the cop shoots him in the back with his rifle.

This is not righteous. Even if the guy was a scumbag. Even if he’d been wasting their time or previously threatening these officers. Their training should have stopped them from making a kill shot while he was jogging away. The cop could not demonstrate he had a  “reasonable fear of imminent, serious bodily injury or death.” Colorado gives the police a greater degree of flexibility in these kinds of shootings as their legal standard is looser.

The Rifle shooting remains under investigation by the Ninth Judicial District Attorney’s Office, the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office and the Rifle Police Department.  More in the Denver Post.

Weird Snake-Like UFO Spotted Over New York

Weird snake-like UFO’s over New York?

A new You Tube video shows what looks like a very strange object hovering over the skies of Clayville, New York.

This clip was the latest is a steady stream of similar sightings from across the world.

Another video from Wyoming showed a mysterious cylindrical object floating in the sky in the early morning hours.

Some believe these are top secret military experiments while other believe they are unusually shaped balloons.

What do you think they are? See it for yourself.

FBI reveals domestic terrorism on rise and it looks like Antifa is fueling it

Image: By Mobilus In Mobili CC BY-SA 4.0

The FBI is currently tracking 850 suspected domestic terrorists, and as many as 60 percent could be linked to Antifa and other leftist causes.

“There have been more arrests and deaths in the United States caused by domestic terrorists than international terrorists in recent years,” the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, Assistant Director Michael McGarrity, tells a U.S. House committee.

McGarrity says the Internet and social media allow groups to radicalize potential terrorists without meeting in person, and results in terrorists taking action more quickly, making tracking the threats harder.

He tells Congress that while 40 percent of the suspects are linked to racist groups, mostly white nationalists, “the vast majority of the other cases involve subjects who promote anti-government or anti-authority sentiments,” ABC News reports.

That appears to refer to the “Antifa” or “anti-fascist” movement, which claims to oppose fascism despite holding entirely fascist views.

It also includes what the FBI call “anarchists.” Antifa terrorists and those holding similar views also call themselves “anarchists,” even though actual anarchy is the absence of government and the rejection of violence and their cause is committed to increasing the size of power of government through violent means.

While racist groups have been around for decades, “Antifa” and their leftist counterparts are relatively new, or have been resurrected from the 1960s, which saw a national wave of liberal terrorism and assassinations, indicating the rising prevalence of domestic terrorism is fueled by the Left, as much as the FBI is reluctant to admit.

According to Wikipedia: Antifa is not an interconnected or unified organization, but rather a movement without a hierarchical leadership structure, comprising multiple autonomous groups and individuals. Activists typically organize protests via social media and through websites. Some activists have built peer-to-peer networks, or use encrypted-texting services like Signal. According to Chauncey Devega at Salon, antifa is an organizing strategy, not a group of people. The antifa movement has grown since the 2016 presidential election and, as of August 2017, approximately 200 groups existed, of varying sizes and levels of activity. The activists involved subscribe to a range of ideologies, typically on the left and they include anarchists, socialists and communists along with some liberals and social democrats.

According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University, San Bernardino, antifa activists feel the need to participate in violent actions because “they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist”. According to Mark Bray, the adherents “reject turning to the police or the state to halt the advance of white supremacy. Instead they advocate popular opposition to fascism as we witnessed in Charlottesville”.

The idea of direct action is central to the antifa movement. Former antifa organizer Scott Crow told an interviewer:

The idea in Antifa is that we go where they [right-wingers] go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that. And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don’t believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece

 Scott Crow

A manual posted on It’s Going Down, an anarchist website, warns against accepting “people who just want to fight”. Here it is.

VIDEO: Roasting an Ostrich!

Watch as a BBQ pitmaster attempts to roast an entire ostrich.

As far as we know, no one has ever attempted to roast a bird this huge before.

It seems almost unreal when you look at the scale of the chicken wing versus the ostrich wing.

And the massive deviled ostrich egg is just as amazing.

Even with this success, I don’t think you’ll be seeing a roast ostrich concession at Costco anytime soon.

He was missing for 22 years. Then someone saw something weird on Google Earth.

Image: A car is shown submerged in a retention pond in Wellington, Fla. Investigators found the remains of William Earl Moldt, who has been missing since 1997, in the vehicle. (Google Earth)

When Florida resident Barry Fay got a phone call from a former neighbor, no one imagined it would solve a 22-year-old mystery.

His neighbor’s ex-husband called Fay asking if he could take a look in the pond behind his house.  The former neighbor was checking out his old neighborhood on Google Earth when he spotted the faint image of what looked like a white car on its side, just yards from the shore.

Fay went to his backyard and looked out over the water.  From the shorelines, backyards and patios, at water level, no one could see a car in the articifial pond.  Fay had another neighbor fly a drone over the water to take a closer picture.

Sure enough, a car had somehow gotten into the water with no one noticing.

That’s when the mystery started.  There are no roads near the pond, which is completely surrounded by houses.  No one had seen a car go in the water, heard anything crash into the water, or noticed so much as tire tracks.

Fay assumed it was “just some junked-up old car” and called the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. Police divers arrived and confirmed someone put a car in the pond.  A tow truck was called, cables attached and the car pulled out.

The heavily-calcified car appeared to be an early 1990s model.  The windows were caked in mud, so divers broke the glass to see inside.

There was a skeleton in the front seat.

Police quickly pushed back onlookers and put up crime scene tape.

Investigators and medical examiners realized it was the answer to a two-decades-old mystery.

The white 1994 Saturn SL, and skeleton inside, belonged to William Earl Mondt.

His family and friends have been looking for him since 1997.

Mondt, then 40 years old, was at a nightclub on the night of Nov. 7, 1997 when he called his girlfriend to let her know he would soon be at their nearby Lake Worth home.  Witnesses say he didn’t appear intoxicated when he left alone at around 11:00 p.m.

He never made it home.  Mondt and his car seemed to have simply vanished.

It now appears Mondt somehow turned off the main highway home and into Fay’s neighborhood.  Fay’s home, behind which Mondt’s car was found, is between a T-shaped intersection and a sharp curve.

But in 1997, the houses weren’t there.  Developers had only just finished paving the steets and digging the pond.  Without street lights to illuminate the curve or houses to block his path, he seems to have missed a turn in the dark and driven directly into the pond.

His car would quickly sink to the bottom, where no one noticed it for 22 years as houses sprang up around him.  With only skeletal remains, no one can determine if Mondt was intoxicated, had a medical emergency or simply got lost.

Russian hockey team rewards player with AK-47

Something tells me Beto O’Rourke is not a hockey fan.

While other teams reward outstanding players with a plaque or a check, HC Izhstal, a second-tier hockey team from Izhevsk, Russia recognized the outstanding play of goaltender Saveli Kononov with one of its nation’s finest products.

An AK-47.

After Kononov stopped 36 of 38 shots in a game against Chelmet in a 3-2 win, the team presented him with the Kalashnikov.

While American sports teams give players “turnover chains” and hats, one of the world’s toughest and most effective weapons makes more sense.

His teammates joked the gift is motivating the rest of the team. “If we play poorly, they will shoot us,” they laughed to Pravda.

So-Called ‘Swatting’ Is On The Rise; That’s A Bad Omen When It Comes To Red Flag Laws

Image: Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/users/skeeze-272447/

The 15-year history of “swatting” should be borne in mind as several states and the federal government accelerate the push for “red flag laws,” also known as “emergency risk protection orders.”

It was in 2004 that a new and potentially deadly phenomenon appeared on the American legal landscape. That was the year a 14-year old boy, upset over being spurned in his sexual advances toward a girl, called in a false crime report designed to dispatch a SWAT team to the girl’s family’s home. Since then, there has been a surge in the number of cases in which calls or internet communications to law enforcement units claim that serious — but false — circumstances are about to unfold or have just taken place, which therefore requires immediate and serious law enforcement response against the “swatter’s” targeted victim.

The majority of swatting incidents thankfully have not resulted in serious injury or death, but there have been tragic exceptions. In one extreme swatting case in 2017 in Wichita, Kansas, for example, an innocent man was shot dead by a SWAT team responding to a false call from an irate “Call of Duty” player. The case spawned criminal charges against the alleged swatter that have yet to be resolved, but not charges against the police. Other cases have resulted in civilians and police officers being shot as a result of such surprise raids on the homes of unsuspecting victims.

Accurate figures on the number of swatting cases occurring each year are difficult to come by, especially since many jurisdictions, including the federal government, do not have explicit “anti-swatting” laws (such measures have been introduced in the Congress, but none has thus far made it to a president’s desk for signature). However, the number of such cases is estimated to be at least in the many hundreds each year.

The number of these cases is not likely to decrease anytime soon. This is because of the availability of increasingly sophisticated apps with which pranksters and evildoers can scour databases to obtain identifying information on victims to target. Moreover, improved and sophisticated technology allowing swatters to disguise the locations from which they make their calls and to hide other potentially identifying evidence from the authorities, continues to be available on the open as well as the dark web.

Even as police departments grapple with the already serious problem of swatting, another and similar potential problem looms. There is the distinct possibility that red flag gun confiscation orders that have been adopted in a number of states since the February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, will be abused by disgruntled family members, paramours, or others by making false or exaggerated allegations against a firearms owner who then becomes the target of a surprise police raid to seize his firearms.

While red flag laws incorporate measures intended to guard against the type of malicious pranksters that have caused the surge in swatting incidents, the laws allow for gun confiscation orders to be issued without notice to the intended targets, leading to surprise raids; also, the evidence required for the orders to be granted is troublingly vague in virtually every instance, and can be as easily abused as lawfully employed.

When swatters call in false information to police, they allege imminent and serious incidents, such as bomb threats, murder or armed hostage-taking, clearly designed to result not in routine dispatch of blue-uniformed officers, but rather heavily armed SWAT squads of the type today maintained by virtually every police department in the country. This same scenario will likely occur also when executing many red flag orders, which by their express terms apply to circumstances involving firearms and persons alleged to pose a serious risk to themselves or others.

For legislators thinking about enacting red flag laws, the swatting phenomenon should serve as more of a “red flag” than it has thus far.

Bob Barr (@BobBarr) represented Georgia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He currently serves as president and CEO of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation.

Originally published in the The Daily Caller. Reproduced with permission from FORMER REP. BOB BARR

The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda and the Domestic Fall-Out from America’s Secret War

With American military personnel now entering service who were not even alive on 9/11, this seems an appropriate time to reexamine the events of September 11, 2001 – the opaque motives for the attacks, the equally opaque motives for the counter-offensive by the United States and its allies known as the Global War on Terror, and the domestic fall-out for Americans concerned about the erosion of their civil liberties on the homefront. 

Before venturing further, it’s worth noting that our appraisal is not among the most common explanations. Osama bin Laden, his lieutenants at Al-Qaeda, and the men who carried out the attack against the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon are not “crazy,” unhinged psychopaths launching an attack against the United States without what they consider to be good reason. 

Nor do we consider then-President George W. Bush to be either a simpleton, a willing conspirator, an oil profiteer, or a Machivellian puppet whose cabinet were all too happy to take advantage of a crisis. 

The American press tends to portray its leaders as fools and knaves, and America’s enemies as psychopathic. Because the propaganda machine hammered away so heavily on the simple “cowardly men who hate our freedom” line, there was not much in the way of careful consideration of the actual political motives of the hijackers, the Petro-Islam that funded them, the ancient, antagonistic split between Sunni and Shi’a, the fall-out from the 1979 Iranian revolution or the 1970s energy crisis, the historical context of covert American involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War and the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, nor the perceived “imperialist humanitarianism” of American military adventures of the 1990s in Muslim nations like BosniaIraqSomalia and Kosovo. Alone, none of these factors were deadly. Combined, they provided a lethal combination.

It is our considered opinion that the events of 9/11 and those that followed in direct response to the attacks – including the invasion of Iraq – were carried out by good faith rational actors who believed they were acting in the best interests of their religion or their nation. There are no conspiracy theories here; sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

This opinion does not in any way absolve the principals from moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions. It does, however, provide what we believe to be a more accurate and nuanced depiction of events than is generally forthcoming from any sector of the media – because we see these principals as excellent chess players who, in the broad sweep of events, engaged in actions which are explicable.

Table of Contents

How the Hijackers Pulled Off the Intelligence Coup of the Century

The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda and the Domestic Fall-Out from America's Secret War

Very few people dispute one simple fact: On 9/11, 19 men hijacked four planes, three of which hit their targets: the World Trade Center Building 1, the World Trade Center Building 2, and the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania

What is less often talked about is perhaps an even more stunning feat the hijackers pulled off: Being able to evade the attention of the United States intelligence community while planning their attacks. Indeed, their acumen with regard to covert operations was so great that they were effectively able to steal an air force for the attacks. It’s not that they were absent from the radar of U.S. intel services – it’s that no one was ever able to connect the dots. 

Indeed, they understood the game so well that Osama bin Laden was able to call his mother two days before the attack to tell her: “In two days you’re going to hear big news, and you’re not going to hear from me for awhile.” He knew he was under surveillance by the NSA, but he also knew the turnaround time on intel was three days. 

Another oft overlooked quality that the hijackers had was discipline and intestinal fortitude. It is important to remember that courage is a virtue, but it does not carry a moral weight of its own. The men who perpetrated the attacks on 9/11 went to their deaths in a disciplined fashion, carrying out their orders to the letter. This is not something a coward, a simpleton, or a psychopath does. 

While the evidence for the attack was able to be collated in hindsight, it is not an exaggeration to say that the United States was more surprised by the attack of 9/11 than it was by the attack on Pearl Harbor

The U.S. Domestic Situation in the 1970s

It’s helpful to start with the domestic situation in the United States in the 1970s. Still in the throes of the Vietnam defeat, Congress had little appetite for defense expenditures or additional covert wars. However, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw an opportunity to use the Soviets’ favorite tool against them when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979: The sponsored war of national liberation. 

This was also post-Watergate era, and there was a focus on transparency in the government. This included sweeping changes to how intelligence operations were conducted in the United States. The battle against the spooks was fought by Idaho Senator Frank Church, who held hearings demonstrating that the American intelligence community was simultaneously untrustworthy as well as bad at its job. The end result was a hamstrung CIA and NSA, because they were found to be illegally spying on Americans

Thus you had an intelligence community both out of favor in Washington and discreetly called upon to oppose the Soviets in Afghanistan as part of the larger Cold War chess board.

American Intelligence Finds a New Ally: The Saudis

The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda and the Domestic Fall-Out from America's Secret War

Still, covert ops were needed. And while the CIA could covertly foot part of the bill, it could not afford the whole thing. But the CIA learned quickly that it had a natural ally both against the Soviets and against the new radical Shi’ite regime in Iran – the Sunni monarchy of Saudi Arabia, who at the time had what was effectively an endless supply of petrodollars without the constraints of public oversight and democracy to get in the way. 

The need was mutual. Having seen how badly the oil embargo hurt the United States in the 1970s, the Saudis were not eager to see enemies of the United States (namely Iran and the Soviets) emboldened. Instead the Saudis were eager to see the U.S. put its muscle into a covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. They had both the insight into the situation on the ground and the money to throw behind it. America had the muscle and the materiel. 

Common enemies make for uncommon allies, and the covert alliance between Washington and Riyadlah in the 1980s was no exception. 

The Saudis would provide funding and personnel to support a covert effort by the CIA to build an anti-Soviet guerrilla movement in Afghanistan. The goal was to build a quagmire for the Soviets while the U.S. urgently rearmed. The means was an alliance between the United States and Muslim fundamentalists. 

Such an alliance was not new. In fact, it was effectively American policy since the rise of Arab socialism (both Nasserism and the two flavors of Ba’athism housed in Syria and Iraq). The Arab Socialists cozied up to the Soviets without fully entering their sphere. In response, the United States sought refuge in the conservative monarchies of the region: The Hashemites of Jordan and Iraq (until 1968), the Shah in Iran (until 1979), and now the Saudis. 

The funds largely came not from official government coffers, but from the Saudi royal family and the aristocracy of the nation. This was to have some degree of plausible deniability. 

There was one additional factor: Pakistan. Pakistan was a long-term American ally, torn between the secularism of its founders and the Islamism of a large segment of its population. It was also terrified of being trapped between a Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and a pro-Soviet India. 

Pakistan did have a long experience in Afghanistan, as well as territory contiguous to Afghanistan – where training camps, logistics systems, and bases of operations could be constructed. The North Vietnamese had Cambodia and Laos; the United States had Pakistan. A three-way alliance was created. The United States would provide training, coordination, and strategic intelligence. The Saudis would provide money and recruitment of mujahideen. The Pakistanis would provide their territory plus their intelligence service, the ISI, to liaise with Afghan forces resisting the Soviet invasion. 

Jimmy Carter presided over the creation of this fateful alliance. Earlier in his administration, he had spoken of America’s “inordinate fear of communism.” He was not as interested in destroying the Soviet Union as much as he wanted to find a basis for accommodation with the Soviets and end what had been a decade of decline in American power. 

Carter certainly did not consider – nor would any reasonable person – that the result of aiding Afghan guerrillas against Soviet occupation would help stimulate the collapse of the Soviet Union and, a generation later, lead to the rise of Al-Qaeda. 

The Reagan Administration and Bill Casey

Enter the Reagan Administration and their point man William Casey. Bill Casey was a legend among the intelligence community, seen as something of a mad genius. Few people ever understood what he was talking about, but his results spoke for themselves. He was Reagan’s go-to guy for encircling and suffocating the Soviet Union. There were many aspects to Casey’s strategy, including baiting the Soviets into an arms race that would bankrupt them, underwriting Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland, and supporting resistance by Russian Jews. Afghanistan was simply part of this increasingly aggressive pattern of pressure on the Soviets. 

A key part of this strategy that would come back to haunt the United States later: Casey thought it was a great idea to encourage young Muslim men to travel to Afghanistan to wage jihad against the Soviet invaders. These men were, at the end of the war in 1989, equipped with captured Soviet equipment, generous gifts of cash and materiel from the United States military, and trained by United States Special Forces.

Al-Qaeda Forged in the Crucible of Afghanistan

The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda and the Domestic Fall-Out from America's Secret War

It is impossible to understand Al-Qaeda without first understanding what the Afghanistan resistance movement did to the men who formed it. It was a nine-year war against one of the biggest powers in the world, spanning the inhospitable Hindu Kush fought in an asymmetrical fashion. By the end, the men who fought it were hard as nails. 

The mujahideen descended upon Afghanistan for a variety of reasons. They were trained in Pakistan, before setting off to work with Afghan rebels. No matter the nation they hailed from, their Islamic faith and hatred of the Soviet Union were the fuel that powered them. The American government encouraged this and it even received public attention in Rambo III, released three months after the end of the war in 1988 (at the time, this was the most expensive film ever made). 

What’s more, the Islamic world was buoyed by the victory – it was the first time in centuries that an Islamic army had won a battle against foreign invaders. That this foreign invader was also an atheistic superpower was not a fact that was lost on the mujahideen. Nor was the fact that the force who defeated this army was a multinational Islamic force, not an “Afghan” one. 

American and Muslim views of the war were starkly different. The Americans viewed it simply as one piece of the larger Cold War puzzle, one that they had been the primary force behind. The mujahideen, and to a lesser extent, many within the Muslim world, saw themselves as having single-handedly brought the atheistic empire of communism to its knees. In contrast, the Americans felt that they were owed gratitude from the mujahideen and the Islamic world as a whole. 

Once the war was over, the United States did what it usually does with its allies: Maintained a casual relationship and expected to be reached out to by the Afghan fighters. This did not happen and is the genesis of the cleavage between the two. 

The Iran/Iraq War, the Fall of Communism, and Operation Desert Storm

The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda and the Domestic Fall-Out from America's Secret War

In Afghanistan, the U.S. was covertly working with the mujahadeen to defeat the Soviets, thanks to a covert alliance with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Elsewhere in the Middle East was another covert balance-of-power strategy: The U.S. was also working with Iraq and Saudi Arabia to contain Iran whilst also occasionally arming Iran against Iraq to prolong the Iran/Iraq War of the 1980s

Neither America nor Saudi Arabia wanted to see the Ayatollah Khomeini brand of Islamist radicalism spread around the Islamic world. America was in the throes of defeating one revolutionary ideology with the Soviets. It did not want to begin dealing with another, especially one controlling so much of the world’s energy supplies. 

The Saudis were obviously more well acquainted with the nuances of Islam than the Americans. They were also less concerned about the revolutionary aspect of the movement than the Shi’ism. This is the dominant strain of Islam in Iran, but also throughout a region of the Arab world known as the Shi’a Crescent

(The split between Shi’a and Sunni Islam is analagous to the split between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland – just taking place atop a much more strategically important portion of the world, the oil-rich Persian Gulf.) 

The Saudis were profoundly antagonistic toward Shi’a, belonging to an ultra-fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. From a more practical perspective, the Saudis saw Iranian power as a threat to their oil revenues. 

America and Saudi Arabia had similar interests that didn’t quite overlap in the 1980s, but were enough for an alliance of convenience – the goal was to keep Iran penned in and to stop the spread of revolutionary Shi’a Islam. What the Americans didn’t know at the time was that they were building up Wahhabism while combating Shi’a. 

To contain Iran in the 1980s, the United States encouraged Iraq, its ally at the time, to invade Iran. This encouragement was of the low-key variety, assuring Iraq that it would not stand in the way of an invasion of Iran and offering the U.S. plausible deniability through diplomatic channels. 

Iraq was looking to settle a score from a previous war against the Shah’s Iran in the 70s, one where the United States had backed Iran. What America really wanted was a protracted and exhausting conflict that would sap the energy of both countries. The Saudis and other Gulf oil nations were ready with cash. Iraq invaded in September 1980. 

Such a policy was not novel in American history. America allied with Stalin to defeat Hitler, and with Communist China to contain the Soviet Union. But as with both of these cases, America was creating a new problem while solving the old (known colloquially in intelligence circles as “blowback”). 

Iraq’s goal was to be the dominant power in the region, first through defeating Iran, then through conquering Kuwait. The United States simply wanted the balance of power maintained and used the Iran-Contra affair to arm Iran toward that end. The famous Iran-Contra affair, engineered by Bill Casey, was part of this strategy – with Americans delivering Hawk surface-to-air missiles and TOW anti-tank missiles to Iran in order to help stave off an Iranian defeat, while also arranging for supplies to Iraq. Under the circumstances, it was a clever move until better options emerged. 

The war between Iran and Iraq lasted over nine years and caused millions of deaths. Iraq won a Pyrrhic victory. 

After that war ended, Iraq turned its attention toward Kuwait – to the victor goes the spoils of war. The U.S. Ambassador to Iraq from 1980 to 1989, April Glaspie, quietly assured Saddam Hussein that it had no interest in internal Arab affairs. This was a good wink-and-nod during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, but state department policy had changed with the Fall of Communism, which Glaspie was somehow ignorant of. 

The subsequent response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Desert Storm, enraged the Muslim world because Christian troops were stationed in Islam’s holiest nation, Saudi Arabia. But the difference now was the mujahideen veterans. They didn’t share the more conservative view that the United States was a necessary ally. What’s more, they viewed those who had not fought in Afghanistan with a degree of contempt. 

There were three lessons the mujahideen had absorbed through their experience in Afghanistan: First, that Islamic nations are not as weak as they had previously believed. Second, that the current leadership, even the conservative, religious monarchies, were corrupt and unnecessarily reliant upon the United States. Third, the United States, a Christian nation, was the last super power and needed to be fought against and ultimately humbled to break the traditional reliance upon the country, as well as to inspire the Islamic masses with a greater degree of confidence. 

They also knew a great deal about how the Americans thought, collected intelligence, and how they would fight based on the Afghan experience. 

Their focus turned in two directions: First, to attack the United States in a manner that would provoke a massive response, the ultimate goal of which was to bait the United States into a war against the entire Muslim world. Second, to leverage the defeat of America and its allies in the Muslim world into a recreated caliphate. This was the kernel of the plan to attack the United States on September 11, 2001.

Former Mujahideen Turn on the United States

The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda and the Domestic Fall-Out from America's Secret War

The placement of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula during Desert Storm was seen as an invasion of Christian crusaders invited by the ostensible defenders of Muslim holy sites at Mecca and Medina, the Saudi royal family. This is when forces like those who formed Al-Qaeda began to see conservative Muslim monarchies as corrupt and weak. 

The Americans believed they were, for the most part, dumb farmers who couldn’t learn anything useful, but they were wrong. The mujahideen included many like Osama bin Laden who were wealthy, well educated and intelligent. They quickly learned from the American intelligence community about covert operations. They also had a ready-made financial network from the Afghanistan adventure that had never really shut down. Finally, while the Islamists hated the secular regimes of the region, they were happy to adopt their primary strategy – terrorism, the purpose of which is psychological rather than financial or military. 

The new grouping spent years working behind the scenes, testing holes in American intel and security, while at the same time figuring out what the intelligence community was paying attention to and what it wasn’t. It largely did this through orchestrating fake attacks, then monitoring the response. They also learned how to exhaust the resources of the system by sacrificing low-level operatives in an attempt to distract and hamstring the intelligence community. 

Throughout the 90s, radicalization of the Islamic world against the United States grew, thanks to extensive American involvement in Muslim nations like Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia and Kosovo. Al-Qaeda saw these recurring U.S. military interventions in the Islamic world as both a direct challenge and, more important, an opportunity to mobilize support by labeling the United States an enemy of Islam – which could be used to forment a pan-Islamic uprising and recreate the caliphate. 
Petro-Islam and the 9/11 Hijackers

In a cruel twist of fate, the radicalization of the Islamic world against the U.S. was further exacerbated in large part with American dollars in a process known as Petro-Islam

Consider the following cycle: The U.S. – along with just about every other industrialized country – buys oil from Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family uses a portion of their oil revenue to fund the spread of Wahhabism abroad, encouraging the creation of mosques and madras. 

From 1982 to 2005, during the reign of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, over $75 billion is estimated to have been spent in efforts to spread Wahhabi Islam to various, much poorer Muslim nations worldwide. By comparison, the Soviets spent about $7 billion spreading communism worldwide in the 70 years from 1921 and 1991. 

The money was used to establish 200 Islamic colleges, 210 Islamic centers, 1,500 mosques, and 2,000 schools for Muslim children in both Muslim and non-Muslim majority countries. The schools were “fundamentalist” in outlook and formed a network “from Sudan to northern Pakistan.” By 2000, Saudi Arabia had also distributed 138 million copies of the Quran worldwide. 

These Saudi-backed Wahhabi institutions radicalize Muslims. The majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and all of the hijackers are believed to have been practitioners of Wahhabism. 

To make this nefarious cycle worse, the U.S then sells weapons to the Saudi royal family so that they can maintain their grip on power via military force – all whilst vacationing abroad in opulence in places like the south of France, while their citizens suffer under totalitarian rule back home. It’s a sick, vicious cycle driven by petrodollars funneled from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia and then back to the American military-industrial complex
American Intelligence Underestimates Al-Qaeda

The American military and intelligence communities were largely caught with their pants down after the 9/11 attacks. This is precisely why so many conspiracy theories popped up in response. The American intelligence community had a plan in place for a war against Britain and Canada after World War I. It plans for even the most far-fetched contingencies. But it had not planned for anything remotely similar to what happened on 9/11. 

The intel community largely saw groups like Al-Qaeda as nuisances who were more likely to blow themselves up or kill themselves than anything. They were ready for an attack on the power grid. They weren’t worried about poisoning the water supply, because such an attack was simply logistically unfeasible. They weren’t worried about nukes, because they were hard to get and even if someone did, one intel agency or another would know within hours. Islamists had attacked the United States before, including at the World Trade Center, the USS Cole and attacks on embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, but none of these were terribly impressive. 

Hijackings were expected and well-worn territory. But hijackings with a suicide attack were unprecedented. There was no game plan for this. And unlike the response to the attack on Pearl Harbor when President Roosevelt cleaned house, President Bush left the same men in charge. It was business as usual. 

One question is always raised when discussing the twin post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq: Why did the United States invade Afghanistan and Iraq when most of the hijackers and the bulk of their funding and logistics hailed from Saudi Arabia, and to a lesser extent, Egypt? The answer to this question might surprise you.

Why the United States Government Invaded Afghanistan and Iraq

The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda and the Domestic Fall-Out from America's Secret War

Afghanistan was chosen as the place for counter-attack for a simple reason: The Taliban was there and had never fully consolidated power. The Northern Alliance opposed it and was available for hire at the right price

Strategically, it also brought in the Russians, who were facing both a homegrown Islamic threat in Chechnya as well as Afghan encroachment on Central Asian republics ethnically close to the tribes of the Northern Alliance. Finally, it was important to the United States to send a swift, sharp action against the Islamic world in response to the 9/11 attack. For a variety of reasons, Afghanistan was seen both as the easiest and the one with the least PR damage – the Taliban was widely perceived as an outlaw regime and wasn’t even recognized by the United Nations. 

Iraq was chosen for a distinct purpose: To shake the Saudis out of their slumber and bring them into the fight against Al-Qaeda – or at least pressure them into stopping their funding of Al-Qaeda, as the U.S. State Department noted in a cable leaked by WikiLeaks

While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) takes seriously the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority. Due in part to intense focus by the USG over the last several years, Saudi Arabia has begun to make important progress on this front and has responded to terrorist financing concerns raised by the United States through proactively investigating and detaining financial facilitators of concern. Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide. Continued senior-level USG engagement is needed to build on initial efforts and encourage the Saudi government to take more steps to stem the flow of funds from Saudi Arabia-based sources to terrorists and extremists worldwide. 

This had to be done without once again committing the error of putting American boots on the ground in Saudi Arabia, a la Desert Storm, and thus inciting a pan-Islamic counter-offensive as Osama bin Laden hoped. 

The claimed pretext of WMDs is laughable on its face: If the United States actually believed that Iraq had WMDs capable of striking America, it would not have spent months sabre rattling and provide a due date for invasion. It would just strike. 

What’s more, if the occupation of Iraq had gone smoothly, the United States would have become the preeminent power in the region, encircling Iran with U.S. forces in Afghanistan on Iran’s eastern flank – with a base of operations that bordered most of the major powers in the region: Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, and Kuwait.

In both cases, the United States underestimated both the continued resistance it would face from Islamic fighters in each nation and the depth of the old vendettas amongst the liberated. (Calling Iraq or Afghanistan a “nation” is akin to calling Frankenstein a man; both are heterogenous and held together by totalitarian regimes.) Sectarian violence erupted in the power vacuum in both Iraq amongst the Kurds, Shi’a and Sunni factions, and in Afghanistan amongst the 14 recognized ethnic groups and various tribes. 

To fundamentally understand the attack of 9/11 and the United States response is not to ascribe any moral weight to either side in either direction. But what is clear is that the fighters of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates are sincere in their desire to reestablish the caliphate of Islamic theocracy as it existed at the time of Muhammed – and that the United States intelligence community continually and woefully underestimated their seriousness.

The Domestic Response to 9/11

The 9/11 Attacks: Understanding Al-Qaeda and the Domestic Fall-Out from America's Secret War

It’s almost a cliche, but in some manner of thinking, the terrorists have been wildly successful. American civil liberties have been severely curtailed since 9/11 and a culture of unquestioning obedience to authority under the guise of “security” has been ushered in. The TSA has effectively groomed the American populace to accept totalitarianism at its airports, despite the fact that the TSA is ineffective at preventing terrorism in airplanes (some airports have a zero-percent compliance rate during audits and security checks, and all attempts at airplane bombings since 9/11 have been thwarted by passengers, not the TSA). 

It’s worth noting that 9/11 was a massive intelligence failure on the part of the NSA and the CIA. Rather than being held to account, they had their powers massively expanded in the wake of the attacks. Maureen Baginkski very candidly said just weeks after the attacks, “You have to understand, 9/11 is a gift to the NSA…We are going to get all the money we want.” 

The PATRIOT Act was passed with virtually no oversight after 9/11. It has not been dialed back one iota since, despite the revelations of Edward Snowden. Snooping agencies like the NSA and CIA, who had their power severely curtained in the 1970s, now effectively have a blank check, both literal and figurative. This doesn’t even include the number of private security firms receiving big money from the federal government. 

We are now all living in what is effectively a soft totalitarian state, where our every communication is tracked unless we are willing to take extreme measures to protect ourselves. By all outward appearances, there is no going back. 

What’s more, there is still a fundamental inability to acknowledge who the United States is actually at war with. The Global War on Terror is sometimes spoken of in terms of criminal justice and sometimes in terms of a war on a concept. It is telling that the enemy is now frequently referred to not even as “terrorism,” but “terror.” 

Such confusion did not exist after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. FDR did not speak of bringing the perpetrators to justice – he spoke of an act of war. What’s more, FDR was squarely focused on the state actor who committed the attack, namely Japan. He did not speak about Japan’s allies or even unrelated countries like George W. Bush did when he spoke of an “Axis of Evil,” none of whom had anything to do with the attack on 9/11, some of whom (North Korea) were tangentially related at best to a militant global revolutionary Islam. 

President Bush did not want to declare war on the Islamic world, so he chose Al-Qaeda. But then he confused the issue by invading first Afghanistan, then Iraq. President Obama created further obfuscation when he took pains to divorce the religion of the perpetrators from their ideology whilst massively expanding covert drone strikes all over the world, thus blurring the line between warfare and assassination. 

18 years later, we are no closer to a clear definition of an enemy and a statement of goals than we were on September 12, 2001. What would constitute victory in the Global War on Terror? No one knows. 

The Geneva Conventions have provisions for guerrilla fighters. Two rules must be met for protection under the Conventions: First, fighters must carry their weapons openly. Second, they must wear uniforms. The Islamist terrorists do neither and are thus not protected. During the Second World War, such fighters would have been treated to a perfunctory military trial and summary execution, whether caught by the Axis or the Allies. 

Unless the United States is clear about who its enemy is and the price it is willing to pay to defeat it, we are destined for an endless war with ever-growing encroachments on American liberties. If this is the path America chooses, then there can be no doubt that we have already lost the war. 

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License from Ammo.com and reproduced here with thanks. Original can be viewed here. Written by Sam Jacobs

Ms. Monopoly: A New Game Proving Women Can’t Compete

The woke warriors who run Hasbro, maker of the classic board game Monopoly, probably thought they were striking a blow for gender something or other when they announced a new version of the classic game called Ms. Monopoly.

The game changes the rules along gender lines . . . women get more money to start the game and get more money for passing GO.

Perhaps they thought they wold be hailed as truth tellers proving how unfair the capitalist system is to women.

But as news of their creation began to leak out, critics noted something else about Hasbro’s woke Monopoly:

The criticism continued:

And finally, though it almost doesn’t need to be pointed out, the original Monopoly game doesn’t discriminate just like capitalism doesn’t discriminate:

Another woke misfire from the leftist regime that controls culture here in America. Fortunately, there was still an avenue to point out their mistake.

Source: CNN Twitter

VIDEO: Robber Gets Played by Armed Clerk

You won’t find a write up of this incident anywhere in the mainstream media.

But this is an example of the thousands of times an armed and aware citizen uses a firearm to defend themselves from an evil attacker.

Watch as the knife-wielding robber attacks the clerk and how he grabs the firearm at his hip to immediately turn the tables on the crook.

Then watch as he keeps the perp until the cops arrive . . . 4 minutes later.

Self-protection is a big part of self reliance and this video shows how and why its so important.

Why you carry: Multiple victims in mass workplace stabbing

Photo: Kelly McCarthy

At least five people were wounded in a Wednesday mass stabbing attack in Tallahassee, Fla.

Police report Antwann D. Brown, an employee of door manufacturer Dyke Industries, wounded five people at the workplace with a “pocket knife-style weapon” in what the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper calls “a rampage.”

One of the victims, Bobby Riggins, Jr., had arrived at the site for a job interview and called his wife during the attack.

“The next thing I know, he said, ‘Baby, I’ve been stabbed five times,’” Campbell told reporters at the scene. “‘I’ve been stabbed.’”  Riggins was taken to Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare hospital with internal bleeding and was rushed into surgery.

Brown was arrested near the work site.

Employees were forced to try and stop the attack by throwing items at Brown as he stabbed victims.  It is not clear if Dyke Industries bans employees from carrying concealed at work or keeping firearms in their cars on site.

Mass stabbings are often associated with terrorist groups al Qaeda and ISIS, as well as the United Kingdom and China, where private gun ownership is practically illegal.

There have been several mass stabbing attacks in the U.S., largely in schools and shopping malls were guns are banned.

VIDEO: Calf Born With Human-Like Face

It doesn’t look like a deep fake.

Check out this new born calf with a mutated face that looks like it could be human.

It certainly doesn’t look much like a cow.

The federal government hoards so much land it doesn’t even know how much it has

Image: Public Domain, Bureau of Land Management

It is well-known that the federal government has a spending problem, but it is less well-known that the government also has a hoarding problem. As most Western state residents know, the federal government likes to hoard land. Unfortunately, it has not shown itself to be capable of managing the land that it holds. This hoarding impedes economic growth, and federal land mismanagement allows catastrophic fires that unnecessarily endanger lives and property. To address this problem, Congress should stop appropriating funds to buy more land and direct the administration to begin selling off unneeded federal lands to the private sector or turn the land over to lower levels of government that are closer to the people.

Just how much land does the federal government own? It turns out that the federal government owns so much land that it does not even know exactly how much it owns. According to a report issued this year by the Congressional Research Service, “The total federal land in the United States is not definitively known.” The government’s “rough estimate” is that it owns 640 million acres, which is equivalent to one million square miles. To put that in perspective, 640 million acres is about 28 percent of all the land in the country; and it is more land than is contained in the 21 states in the Northeast and the Midwest.

Just four federal agencies control 608 million acres, or 95 percent, of federal lands.

  • The Bureau of Land Management manages 246 million acres,
  • The Forest Service manages 193 million acres,
  • The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages 89 million acres, and
  • The National Park Service manages 80 million acres.

The Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture while the other three agencies are part of the Department of the Interior.

It is bad enough that the government holds so much land, but what is worse is that it is a poor manager of the land that it owns. Basically, the federal government acts much like an absentee landlord, which is part of the reason why there are huge maintenance backlogs on federal lands and why forest fires are so devastating. In fact, the four major land management agencies have a deferred maintenance backlog of more than $19.3 billion. Furthermore, the amount of lumber harvested from national forests has declined precipitously in recent decades, and the amount of wildland burned in an average year is dramatically higher than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.

Of course, the government’s failure to properly manage land is in spite of the efforts of dedicated public servants. Unfortunately, these workers must navigate through a maze of laws, regulations, and bloated bureaucracies that can hinder progress. Federal land management employees must also deal with constant lawsuits from left-wing groups trying to ensure that as much land as possible is locked up and made unavailable to loggers, miners, drillers, hunters, and other outdoor recreation enthusiasts.

With a national debt of over $22 trillion, Congress must take action. The federal government simply must get its finances under control — and stop hoarding land that it cannot properly manage. Some necessary budget changes might be painful, but halting the expansion of the federal government’s footprint should be an easy way to save hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Selling off federal lands or transferring them to state or local governments should lead to additional improvements in the federal balance sheet. With fewer federal lands, management and maintenance costs should decline, and money collected from land sales could be used to further reduce the deficit. Finally, selling off federal land would create economic opportunities likely leading to more jobs; and economic growth should lead to higher tax revenues at all levels of government, further offsetting the deficit.

Richard McCarty is the Director of Research at Americans for Limited Government Foundation. Reproduced with permission. Original can be viewed here.

When Bad Things Happen to Innocent Bystanders

Image: NASA. Eugene Cernan.

While pundits and politicians use the mass shootings in Dayton, El Paso, and Odessa to score cheap political points, I thought it would be a good time to take a deep breath and reflect on that age-old question, Why do bad things happen to good people — or, perhaps more accurately, to innocent bystanders?

To address this question, let’s start with the Universe and work our way down to Planet Earth and humankind.  The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it even exists.  Why does there need to be a Universe at all?  Why not just one galaxy?  Or one planet?  Or one rock?  Or nothing at all?

The second most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is its vastness.  The endless trillions of cosmic bodies that inhabit it are so far apart that we would know almost nothing about even our closest neighbors were it not for our knowledge of the language of the Universe, math.

Consider:

  • The nearest star — repeat, nearest — to our solar system is Proxima Centauri — 4.3 light years away. For the record, a light year is 186,000 (miles/second) x 86,400 (seconds in a day) x 365 (days in a year).By my calculations, that’s more than twenty-five trillion miles, or a hundred billion times further than the distance between the earth and the moon.Not exactly a good bet for a Sandals vacation, given that a 21st century spaceship would take at least 25,000 years to get there.  Or, if we could ramp that up to a futuristic spaceship that could travel at the speed of a million miles per hour, we could cut the time down to about 6,000 years.
  • As to our own little solar system — which is just one of trillions of such systems in the Universe — it’s still so big that no one will ever reach its outer edge. Although we cannot be certain of the exact distance, we know that it has to be at least three billion miles or so from where we reside.
  • Of course, the Universe is another thing altogether. The mathematically visible Universe is said to be a million million million million miles across.  That’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.  However, most scientists suspect that it’s really millions of times bigger than this.
  • There are 200 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and there are perhaps as many as 150 billion other galaxies in the known Universe.

The reality is that it’s impossible for the human mind to comprehend the vastness of the Universe.  The spaces between the planets, stars, and galaxies are far too great to be navigated by intelligent life, at least via any mode of travel that we understand today.

Back here on our own little world, you and I, on average, are comprised of seven billion billion billion atoms, but no one has a clue as to what caused these atoms to come together in just the right way to create us.  Nor do we know why atoms even exist.  Further, after having gone through all the trouble to make you, the atoms that formed you are dismissive of your existence.

That’s right, we’re nothing more than a collection of atoms that will someday desert us, at which time we will longer exist in human form.  But even though you disappear, the atoms that formed you go on to make up other things.  Strangely, those atoms are never alive in any sense that we understand, which, by secular standards of logic, makes no sense at all.

Which brings us to mankind’s eternal question:  What is the purpose of life?  Answer:  No one has a clue.  Nor does anyone know why there is such a thing as a Universe or why it developed in just the right way as to make intelligent life possible.  Perhaps astronaut Gene Cernan — the last man to walk on the moon — gave as good an explanation as any as to what otherwise makes absolutely no sense to the human mind:

“What I saw as I looked at the earth from the moon was that it was all too beautiful to have happened by accident.  This could not have been the result of two dust particles coming together.  I wanted to grab that crescent Earth, put it in my spacesuit and take it home and show it to people.  Looking up at the Earth, I had the sense that I was sitting on God’s front porch.”

Gene Cernan, NASA Astronaut

Given a complete lack of evidence to the contrary, until a more logical explanation comes along, Cernan’s view sounds pretty good to me.  But is the Earth really all that unique?  When all is said and done, it’s still just another ball of rocks and minerals spinning around in a seemingly unremarkable solar system located in a seemingly unremarkable galaxy, which itself is located in a seemingly unremarkable part of the Universe.  We know all this to be true because the human mind, compared to all other species, it is not unremarkable.  It is unique.

That said, it is somewhat ironic that we know so much about the physical Universe but almost nothing about preventing manmade tragedies like mass shootings.  And until that changes, notwithstanding the grandstanding of politicians, bad things will continue to happen to innocent bystanders.

So sad … and so frustrating.

ROBERT RINGER is a New York Times #1 bestselling author who has appeared on numerous national radio and television shows, including The Tonight Show, Today, The Dennis Miller Show, Good Morning America, ABC Nightline, The Charlie Rose Show, as well as Fox News and Fox Business. To sign up for a free subscription to his mind-expanding daily insights, visit www.robertringer.com. Copyright © 2021 Robert Ringer Reproduced with permission. Original article can be read Here

VIDEO: Man shoots self through face with speargun, survives

A South African priest miraculously survived despite accidentally shooting himself through the face and skull with massive speargun.

The Rev. Connie Hallowell was diving off the South African coast when he tried to set his speargun down on the sea floor.

He accidentally fired it, sending a 6.5-foot-long spear into his face underneath his right eye.

The spear passed through his skull and exited near his left ear.

Not only did Hallowell survive being shot through the face and skull, he was able to drag himself onto the beach and sit upright as someone used an angle grinder to cut off the end of the spear as he waited to be flown to an emergency room.

Hallowell was smart enough to remain upright, keeping the wounds above heart level to minimize bleeding, and to keep the spear in him. The cases of impalement, the penetrating object is often the only thing holding back blood. Removing it would leave open wounds that could quickly bleed out.

The grateful clergyman recovered enough to record a short video from his hospital bed, thanking people for their prayers and concern.

VIDEO: Amazing Rollercoaster Catch!

This might be the most amazing catch of all time!

Watch as this man plucks an iPhone X out of the air that flew out of the hands of a nearby rider.

This is the Shambhala coaster in Spain, one of the fastest in Europe, where riders can reach speeds of 80 mph.

It’s an amazing catch and a reminder to keep your phone in your pocket when you are on a coaster!

The Cobra Effect: Lessons in Unintended Consequences

Every human decision brings with it unintended consequences. Often, they are inconsequential, even funny. When Airbus, for example, wanted to make its planes quieter to improve the flying experience for travelers, it made its A380 so quiet that passengers could hear, with far too much clarity, what was happening in the plane’s bathrooms. Other times unintended consequences have far-reaching, dramatic effects. The US health care system is a case in point. It emerged in its present form in no small part because of two governmental decisions.

First, wage and price controls during World War II caused employers to add health insurance as an employee benefit. Why? The law prohibited employers from raising wages, so to attract workers, they offered to provide health insurance. Then, in 1951, Congress declared that employer-provided health insurance benefits would not count as taxable income. This made it cheaper for employees to take raises in the form of increased tax-free insurance benefits rather than in the form of increased taxable wages.

Unintended consequences happen so often that economists call them “Cobra Problems,” after one of the most interesting examples.

Consequently, not only do workers now receive health insurance through their employers (unlike, for example, their car and home insurance), but those insurance plans also tend to be more luxurious than what they would have been had Congress never given them special tax treatment. These two political decisions helped to create the health care system we now have, a system that nearly everyone agrees is broken.

No one set out to create a broken system, no more than anyone ever set out to make bathroom noises more conspicuous on airplanes. These were unintended consequences. And you can see them everywhere when you know to look.

Unintended consequences happen so often that economists call them “Cobra Problems,” after one of the most interesting examples.

In colonial India, Delhi suffered a proliferation of cobras, which was a problem very clearly in need of a solution given the sorts of things that cobras bring, like death. To cut the number of cobras slithering through the city, the local government placed a bounty on them. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution. The bounty was generous enough that many people took up cobra hunting, which led exactly to the desired outcome: The cobra population decreased. And that’s where things get interesting.

As the cobra population fell and it became harder to find cobras in the wild, people became rather entrepreneurial. They started raising cobras in their homes, which they would then kill to collect the bounty as before. This led to a new problem: Local authorities realized that there were very few cobras evident in the city, but they nonetheless were still paying the bounty to the same degree as before.In the end, Delhi had a bigger cobra problem after the bounty ended than it had before it began.

City officials did a reasonable thing: They canceled the bounty. In response, the people raising cobras in their homes also did a reasonable thing: They released all of their now-valueless cobras back into the streets. Who wants a house full of cobras? 

In the end, Delhi had a bigger cobra problem after the bounty ended than it had before it began. The unintended consequence of the cobra eradication plan was an increase in the number of cobras in the streets. This case has become the exemplar of when an attempt to solve a problem ends up exacerbating the very problem that rule-makers intended to fix.

There is, of course, nothing special about cobras. The same sort of thing happened in the late 1980s in Mexico City, which was at the time suffering from extreme air pollution caused by cars driven by its 18 million residents. The city government responded with Hoy No Circula, a law designed to reduce car pollution by removing 20 percent of the cars (determined by the last digits of license plates) from the roads every day during the winter when air pollution was at its worst. Oddly, though, removing those cars from the roads did not improve air quality in Mexico City. In fact, it made it worse.

Come to find out, people’s needs do not change as a result of a simple government decree. The residents of Mexico City might well have wanted better air for their city, but they also needed to get to work and school. They reacted to the ban in ways the rule-makers neither intended nor foresaw. 

The people released their cobras into the streets, except this time the cobras were cars.

Some people carpooled or took public transportation, which was the actual intent of the law. Others, however, took taxis, and the average taxi at the time gave off more pollution than the average car. Another group of people ended up undermining the law’s intent more significantly. That group bought second cars, which of course came with different license plate numbers, and drove those cars on the one day a week they were prohibited from driving their regular cars. What kind of cars did they buy? The cheapest running vehicles they could find, vehicles that belched pollution into the city at a rate far higher than the cars they were not permitted to drive. The people released their cobras into the streets, except this time the cobras were cars.

These examples of unintended consequences aren’t aberrations. Unintended consequences arise every time an authority imposes its will on people. Seat belt and airbag laws make it less safe to be a pedestrian or cyclist by making it safer for drivers to be less cautious. Payday lending laws, intended to protect low-income borrowers from high lending rates, make it more expensive for low-income borrowers to borrow by forcing them into even more expensive alternatives.

Requirements that corporations publicize how much they pay their CEOs in order to encourage stockholders to reduce CEO pay resulted in lesser-paid CEOs demanding more pay. Three-strikes laws, intended to reduce crime, increase police fatalities by giving two-time criminals a greater incentive to evade or even fight the police. The Americans With Disabilities Act gives employers an incentive to discriminate against the disabled by not hiring them in the first place so as to avoid potential ADA claims. Electrician licensing requirements can increase the incidence of injury due to faulty electrical work by reducing the supply of electricians, thereby encouraging homeowners to do their own electrical work.

But perhaps nothing illustrates the scope of the potential problems arising from unintended consequences better than Venezuela’s terrible game of whack-a-mole that began with the 1976 nationalization of its oil industry. The government’s intent was to keep oil profits in the country. And that’s how it went—for a while.

But when the government takes over a once-private industry, the profit incentive to maintain physical capital is lost, and physical capital deteriorates. The deterioration plays out over a decade or so, and that’s what made it appear—at least for a while—that unlike everywhere else socialism had been tried, Venezuela’s socialism was working. But as the oil industry’s physical capital broke down, oil production fell. Coincidentally, it was around this time that oil prices fell also—a fact socialism’s supporters point to as the real culprit. The ultimate unintended consequence Venezuela’s nationalizing its oil industry was slavery.

That is without question incorrect given that no other oil-producing nation suffered what Venezuela was to suffer.

As oil revenues and production plummeted, Venezuela’s government acted the way governments inevitably do when revenues disappear. It borrowed and taxed as much as it could, and then it started printing money. The printing led to the unintended consequence of inflation, then prices rose so high that people could no longer afford food. To respond to this unintended consequence, the government imposed price controls on food. But this created a new unintended consequence wherein farmers could no longer afford to grow food. And so the farmers stopped growing food. Finally, the government forced people to work on farms in order to assure food production.

The ultimate unintended consequence Venezuela’s nationalizing its oil industry was slavery.

None of this means there is no place for legislation. What it does mean is that lawmakers should be keenly aware that every human action has both intended and unintended consequences. Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended. So while there is a place for legislation, that place should be one defined by both great caution and tremendous humility. Sadly, these are character traits not often found in those who become legislators, which is why examples of the cobra problem are so easy to find.

Antony Davies
Antony Davies

Dr. Antony Davies is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Fellow at FEE, associate professor of economics at Duquesne University, and co-host of the podcast, Words & Numbers.

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Study: Vegans, vegetarians at higher risk for stroke than meat eaters

New research shows the new trend for “plant-based meat” may lead to a higher risk of stroke.

“(V)egetarians and vegans had a 20% higher risk of stroke than meat-eaters, particularly hemorrhagic stroke — caused when blood from an artery begins to bleed into the brain,” CNN reports. “This translates to 3 more cases of stroke per 1,000 people over 10 years.”

The study, conducted by the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford in England, followed 48,000 people for 18 years and is among the largest-ever studies of vegetarian diets.

“(Lead researcher Tammy) Tong’s research team followed more than 48,000 people in UK with an average age of 45, who were grouped into meat eaters (24,428), pescetarians (7,506), and vegetarians, including vegans (16,254),” CNN reports. “Participants were tracked on average for 18 years and during the study period there were were 2,820 cases of coronary heart disease and 1,072 cases of stroke.”

Scientists suggest the increased stroke cases may be caused by the overall lower nutritional value of vegetarian diets, particularly a lack of cholesterol and vitamin B12. Pescetarians, whose consumption of fish provides them with B12 and some cholesterol, did not experience a higher rate of stroke.

The study comes as candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination propose federal bans on meat and new federal programs to herd Americans into vegetarian diets.

VIDEO: Colorado boy fights off mountain lion with a stick

An eight-year-old Colorado boy is lucky to be alive, fighting off a mountain lion that had his head in its jaws.

Pike Carlson was playing with his older brother Gage outside when a mountain lion attacked the pair.

“I remember walking up and seeing this mountain lion on a rock,” Gage tells 9News. “Then I don’t really remember tumbling down the hill but I know I did.”

As Gage ran home to get their father, Ron Carlson, the lion grabbed Pike’s head in its jaws and began to drag the boy underneath a tree to eat him.

That’s when Gage fought back. Even at eight, Gage tells his father he knew to go for the animal’s eyes.

“I was punching, trying to grab anything I can, like a stick,” says Gage. “I did find a stick and tried to get it in the eye, but soon the stick snapped.”

His father arrived in time to see the lion release Gage and run away.

“When I first picked him up, I could see the whole side of his face was open,” says Carlson. “There was blood all over him. His scalp was ripped open in several spots. It was something that no parent should ever see.”

Gage survived, but suffered serious cuts to his face and a badly injured eyelid, though he can still see. He needed two surgeries and multiple stitches.

He has something to say for anyone who comes across a mountain lion.

“A mountain lion is a cheater!,” says Gage. “No one try to wrestle a mountain lion! It is a cheater!”

Recycling Folly

While it’s very good to have a clean environment, many environmentalists don’t understand cost-benefit analysis. As such, they make our lives less pleasant – inferior light bulbssubstandard toiletsinadequate washing machinescrummy dishwashersdribbling showers, and dysfunctional gas cans – for little if any benefit.

We can add recycling to that list.

To be sure, all the hassle and time of sorting our garbage might be an acceptable cost if something was being achieved.

Unfortunately, as Jeff Jacoby has explained, that’s not the case. Not even close.

Let’s explore the issue.

In an article for the American Institute for Economic Research, Professor Michael Munger explains that most recycling actually is a net negative for the environment.

…I was invited to a conference called Australia Recycles! …Everyone there, everyone, represented either a municipal or provincial government, or a nonprofit recycling advocacy group, or a company that manufactured and sold complicated and expensive recycling equipment. …Recycling requires substantial infrastructure for pickup, transportation, sorting, cleaning, and processing. …For recycling to be a socially commendable activity, it has to pass one of two tests: the profit test, or the net environmental-savings test. If something passes the profit test, it’s likely already being done. People are already recycling gold or other commodities from the waste stream, if the costs of doing so are less than the amount for which the resource can be sold. …The real question arises with mandatory recycling programs — people recycle because they will be fined if they don’t, not because they expect to make money… If you add up the time being wasted on recycling rituals, it’s even more expensive to ask each household to do it. The difference is that this is an implicit tax, a donation required of citizens, and doesn’t cost money from the public budget. But time is the least renewable of all resources… For recycling to make any sense, it must cost less to dispose of recycled material than to put the stuff in a landfill. But we have plenty of landfill space, in most of the country. And much of the heaviest material we want to recycle, particularly glass, is chemically inert and will not decompose in a landfill. …landfilling glass does no environmental harm… So, is recycling useful? As I said at the outset, for some things it is. Aluminum cans and corrugated cardboard, if they can be collected clean and at scale, are highly recyclable. …But for most other things, recycling harms the environment. …If you care about the environment, you should put your bottles and other glass in the regular garbage, every time.

Jon Miltimore explains, in a column for the Foundation for Economic Education, that hundreds of cities have repealed recycling mandates because they simply don’t make sense.

…after sending my five-year-old daughter off to school, she came home reciting the same cheerful environmental mantra I was taught in elementary school. “Reduce, reuse, recycle,” she beamed, proud to show off a bit of rote learning. The moral virtue of recycling is rarely questioned in the United States. …recycling is tricky business. A 2010 Columbia University study found that just 16.5 percent of the plastic collected by the New York Department of Sanitation was “recyclable.” “This results in nearly half of the plastics collected being landfilled,” researchers concluded. …hundreds of cities across the country are abandoning recycling efforts. …Like any activity or service, recycling is an economic activity. The dirty little secret is that the benefits of recycling have been dubious for some time. …How long? Perhaps from the very beginning. …there are the energy and resources that go into recycling. How much water do Americans spend annually rinsing items that end up in a landfill? How much fuel is spent deploying fleets of barges and trucks across highways and oceans, carrying tons of garbage to be processed at facilities that belch their own emissions? …It’s time to admit the recycling mania is a giant placebo. It makes people feel good, but the idea that it improves the condition of humans or the planet is highly dubious.

On a related topic, another FEE column even shows that anti-waste campaigns may actually increase waste.

To reduce waste, most governments run communication campaigns. Many try to make consumers feel guilty by telling them how much people like them waste (food, paper, water…). …The idea is that once people realise how much they waste, they will stop. Unfortunately, research has shown that when people are told that people like them misbehave, this makes them act worse, not better. In a June 2018 study, we confirm this backfiring effect in a series of studies on waste… Indeed, we found that backfiring effects of anti-waste messages happened because of difficulty. When consumer read that everyone wastes a lot, they think that it must be difficult to cut waste – so they don’t even try.

Let’s get back to the specific issue of recycling.

The fact that it doesn’t make sense is hardly a new revelation.

Way back in 1996, John Tierny had a very thorough article in the New York Time Magazine that summarized the shortcomings of recycling.

If you don’t want to read this long excerpt, all you need to know is that landfills are cheap, safe, and plentiful.

Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense — for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there’s no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there’s no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs…offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups — politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations — while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources. …Americans became racked with garbage guilt…  Suddenly, just as central planning was going out of fashion in eastern Europe, America devised a national five-year plan for trash. The Environmental Protection Agency promulgated a “Waste Hierarchy” that ranked trash-disposal options: recycling at the top, composting and waste-to-energy incinerators in the middle, landfills at the bottom. …Politicians across the country…enacted laws mandating recycling and setting arbitrary goals…, typically requiring that at least 40 percent of trash be recycled, often even more — 50 percent in New York and California, 60 percent in New Jersey, 70 percent in Rhode Island. …The Federal Government and dozens of states passed laws that required public agencies, newspapers and other companies to purchase recycled materials. …America today has a good deal more landfill space available than it did 10 years ago. …there’s little reason to worry about modern landfills, which by Federal law must be lined with clay and plastic, equipped with drainage and gas-collection systems, covered daily with soil and monitored regularly for underground leaks. …Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side. …This doesn’t seem a huge imposition in a country the size of America. …The millennial landfill would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the range land now available for grazing in the continental United States. …many experts and public officials acknowledge that America could simply bury its garbage, but they object to this option because it diverts trash from recycling programs. Recycling, which was originally justified as the only solution to a desperate national problem, has become a goal in itself… The leaders of the recycling movement…raise money and attract new members through their campaigns to outlaw “waste” and prevent landfills from opening. They get financing from public and private sources (including the recycling industry) to research and promote recycling. By turning garbage into a political issue, environmentalists have created jobs for themselves as lawyers, lobbyists, researchers, educators and moral guardians.

The bottom line is that most recycling programs impose a fiscal and personal cost on people for very meager environmental benefits.

Indeed, the benefits are often negative once indirect costs are added to the equation.

So why is there still support in some quarters?

In part, it’s driven by contributions from the companies that get paid to process recycled material.

But that’s only part of the story. Recycling is a way for some people to feel better about themselves. Sort of an internalized version of virtue-signalling.

That’s not a bad thing. I like a society where people care about the environment and feel guilty about doing bad things, like throwing trash out car windows.

But I’m a bit old fashioned in that I want them to feel good about doing things that actually make sense.

P.S. There’s a Washington version of recycling that is based on taxpayer money getting shifted back and forth between politicians and special interests.

Daniel J. Mitchell is a public policy economist in Washington. He’s been a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, an economist for Senator Bob Packwood and the Senate Finance Committee, and a Director of Tax and Budget Policy at Citizens for a Sound Economy. His articles can be found in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Investor’s Business Daily, and Washington Times. Mitchell holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. Original article can be viewed here.

Self-Reliance Central publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of SRC. 

Feds Strongarm Tech Giants to Hand Over User Data for Gun Sight App

The Department of Justice and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department have filed an unprecedented court order demanding Google and Apple hand over location and usage data for an app used to help calibrate gun scopes.

Never before has a case been disclosed in which American investigators demanded personal data of users of a single app from Apple and Google. And never has an order been made public where the feds have asked the Silicon Valley giants for info on so many thousands of people in one go.

The app is called Obsidian 4, a tool used to control rifle scopes made by night-vision specialist American Technologies Network Corp.

Over 10,000 users have downloaded the app from Google Play and an unknown number have downloaded it from Apple.

The court order would force Google and Apple to hand over to the feds “not just the names of anyone who downloaded the scope app from August 1, 2017 to the current date, but their telephone numbers and IP addresses too, which could be used to determine the location of the user. The government also wants to know when users were operating the app. ”

The feds claim this data fishing expedition is necessary to track illegal sales of the gun sights to terrorists.

However, the data would also be collected from Americans who have never left the country or have absolutely no ties to terrorists or other illegal activities.

Privacy advocates jumped on the implications of the governments data grab.

Tor Ekeland, a privacy-focused lawyer, said it amounted to a “fishing expedition.” (The DOJ hadn’t responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.)

“The danger is the government will go on this fishing expedition, and they’ll see information unrelated to what they weren’t looking for and go after someone for something else,” Ekeland said. He said there’s a long history of that kind of behavior from the U.S. government. And he warned that the government could apply this demand to other types of app, such as dating or health apps.

“There’s a more profound issue here with the government able to vacuum up a vast amount of data on people they have no reason to suspect have committed any crime. They don’t have any probable cause to investigate, but they’re getting access to data on them,” Ekeland added.

So far, Google and Apple have not complied with the government’s request for the data.

Beyond privacy concerns, there is the very real concern that data like this could be used to by government bureaucrats to create detailed profiles of gun owners and track their movements and location.

VIDEO: 14 Ways to Start a Fire Without Matches

Starting a fire can make a huge difference in a survival situation.

And sometimes you’ll find yourself in such a situation without matches or other survival tools.

That’s when mastering one or more of these techniques could come in handy.

Or if you just want to impress your friends or family with basic chemistry!

Vegan Goes to Supreme Court to Stop Neighbors From Grilling

An Australian vegan is going to the Australian Supreme Court in her bid to force her neighbors to stop grilling meat and fish in their own backyards.

Cilla Carden went to court claiming the meat smells were destroying her quality of life.

However, lower courts threw out her complaints saying the neighbors were well within their rights to enjoy their property.

Carden is not giving up and plans to continue the legal assault on her neighbors meat eating.

Carnivores fought back as they organized a BBQ outside the vegan’s home. Nearly 3,000 people responded to the event.

The BBQ was called off when Carden threatened organizers with legal action.

Yet another front is opened in the legal warfare against traditional life choices like eating meat and fish. Who knows when the first wafting smells lawsuit will hit the U.S. but it can’t be too far away.

In fact, several 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates attacked meat in the recent “climate change” debate.

Andrew Yang cited a United Nations study positing the world would halt climate change if the majority of the world went vegetarian.

“It’s good for the environment, it’s good for your health if you eat less meat,” he said.

Yang explained meat was “expensive” environmentally to produce and also unhealthy.

So not only are they coming for your guns, but they are coming for your t-bones and cheeseburgers.

Sanders: We must reduce populations of ‘poor countries’ to save Earth

Wednesday night’s CNN Democratic presidential town hall with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders turned into a full-on endorsement of eugenics and junk science.

Sanders backed participant Martha Readyoff’s claim the Earth was dying because there too many humans and endorsed her call for Americans to fund abortions in largely African “poor countries” to save the planet.

The exchange between the two reads:

READYOFF: Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years. The planet cannot sustain this growth. I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it’s crucial to face. Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?

SANDERS: Well Martha, the answer’s yes. The answer has everything to do with the fact women in the United States of Americas, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions. And the Mexico City agreement — which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control — to me is totally absurd. So, I think, especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, it’s something I very, very strongly support.”

Sanders’ plan would force Americans to resume taxpayer funding of programs like the United Nations Population Fund, which has been tied to forced abortions in nations like Peru and China.

It also echos claims by 1960s and 1970s environmentalists that the Earth is threatened by the rising numbers of people in largely African and Asian counties, and it is up to the United States and Europe to stop the growth.

“To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem,” declared Cornell professor Lamont Cole, a long-time leader of the Ecological Society of America.

“The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state,” wrote prominent enviromentalist Kenneth Boudling, author of “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.”

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States: We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are. And it is important to the rest of the world to make sure that they don’t suffer economically by virtue of our stopping them,” declared Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund

VIDEO: What To Do If Someone Grabs Your Gun

Using a gun for self-defense is a key right of all Americans.

However, when faced with a situation requiring use of your personal firearm, are you ready for every situation?

Imagine what would happen if your assailant went for your gun? Would you be ready?

Check out this video and learn some simple but effective techniques for defending your firearm in a scrape. They may save your life!

UN making American kids swear allegiance to Agenda 21

A United Nations program, partially supported by U.S. tax dollars, is indoctrinating American schoolchildren and making them take a sworn pledge to obey and follow Agenda 21.

The United Nations held a “Civil Society Summit” last week in Salt Lake City, Utah, where they unveiled a new program to make American school children sign themselves to a “Youth Climate Compact” pledging allegiance to the UN’s radical ecosocialist agenda.

Along other ecosocialist agenda points, such as banning tampons, kids must promise to weaken the United States by pledging to:

“Advocate for ethical reform in food production industries, calling attention to the hidden negligence allowing the continuance of factory farming, animal cruelty, and environmentally destructive agricultural practices around meat and dairy production; become responsible consumers that actively support non-monopolized food producers that grow non-genetically modified crops in an ethical and moral way”

“Divest from fossil fuels, mining, and other businesses that profit at the expense of our planet, and invest in climate solutions and green jobs, thereby transitioning our industries toward a zero-carbon economic future”

“Actively participate in political processes, maximizing the voice of the people and challenging the influence of business interests over government policy”

“Strongly condemn laws and regulations that deny environmental justice to and disproportionately affect minority and underclass groups”


It also makes kids pledge allegiance to Agenda 21.

“The compact calls for today’s youth to pledge to become green citizens, and to commit to cooperate and support the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development,” The New American reports.

“We seek cooperation and support from all generations, governments, civil society organizations, and the private sector in achieving the targets of Sustainable Development Goal 13, thereby furthering our commitment to the United Nations 2030 Agenda,” the Compact makes kids pledge.

Under the “2030 Agenda,” each nation designates a “focal point” to carry out the radical ecosocialist “sustainable development” plans.

In the United States, that plan is “Agenda 21,” which is promoted by the “Local Governments for Sustainability,” founded in 1990 as the “International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives” and still known as “ICLEI.”

Funded by “membership dues” from local and state governments, as well as federal tax dollars from the EPA and State Department, the ICLEI sends representatives to local government meetings around the country promoting “zoning changes” and “smart growth.”

They never reveal they are working at the direction of the United Nations, and their proposed changes come directly out of Agenda 21 and the 2030 Agenda.

The plan is to quietly impose Agenda 21 on the entire nation by slowly stitching it together like a quilt composed of thousands of patches.

That plan is now in overdrive, as the “Youth Climate Compact” drafts American children into the U.N.’s Agenda 21 army.

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