John Barleycorn

National Reckoning, My Eye
photo credit: Bigstock
National Reckoning, My Eye
Okay, sports fans, get your wallets out and start giving. That’s the latest brainstorm from a New York Times columnist who makes however unconvincing a case for reparations to black people. For slavery, that is. And that means you, whitey—or brownie, and I guess that goes for yellow ones also. He wants these reparations to be legislated into law, and everyone except African-Americans has to pay. His idea is hardly original. Race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Kamala Harris, even Jesse Jackson, have been dropping heavy hints for years. Black Americans want money, and the rest of us have to give it to them, “punto basta,” as they say in the land of pasta.

The media has managed to impose a kind of groupthink that tells us that America is rife with racism and bigotry, but looking around and watching television, the only racism I seem to notice nowadays is the one against whites who go to church and raise law-abiding families. Watch any Netflix or Amazon series and you’ll see what I mean. (Better not watch it, actually.) The priest is always a pervert, the religious families are selling drugs on the sly, and all cops and soldiers are rapists, racists, and bigots. All criminals are white, blond, and sporting Nazi tattoos. Well, you know the rest. Political correctness and diversity training have now become standard, and lockstep conformity is the order of the day. The media is most responsible for spreading this plague, and now we have a columnist for a malignant, anti-Christian, antiwhite, anti-male newspaper suggesting that we are all responsible for slavery and should lighten our wallets.

George Orwell had it right in 1984, except Big Brother turned out to be the media, controlling our thoughts and condemning anyone who steps out of line. Nabokov’s Lolita would land him in jail today, not that it would get published. The sisterhood would lynch the publisher. But 1984 is here, and all one has to do is read the news and watch political programs on television. There is social oppression and narrow dogmatism against anyone who doesn’t toe the PC line, in fact anyone who dares utter those four letters of MAGA. Who would have thought the massive yearning for, and pillar of what America stands for, freedom of speech, would be done away by a bunch of lefty greaseballs masquerading as journalists and pundits.

“There is no such thing as a collective inherited crime.”
The unprecedented media hostility and the Deep State’s determination to depose the 45th American president is indicative of how far the unelected will go to do away with the majority’s choice. Far-left radicals are now calling the tune, and the Fourth Estate is acting as their mike. All restrictions on immigration are deemed racist, and the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants has been erased. And now some moron wants to make wage earners pay reparations.

One Ms. Blum writing to the Times compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany, praising Germany for, after the war, paying reparations to her family, who not only survived, but immigrated to America and are collecting to this day. America has sinned and has done nothing about it, is her message. (Knowing her kind, she might follow Ms. Warren’s example and claim to be a Red Indian, and collect.) The trouble with reparations is they don’t work—they exacerbate rather than heal. The process of deciding who deserves reparations would bring on another civil war, this time between those who receive and those who don’t.

And what about all the immigrants who arrived after slavery was abolished? What about me? I arrived here in 1948 and never owned a slave, although lots of females have accused me of asking them to act as slaves. (I don’t cook, don’t do laundry, don’t take the kids to school, and insist the fairer sex does the driving. I also only see movies I like, and always take the window seat on first-class travel.) In fact, I think the dreaded Turks who occupied Greece—not where I come from on the Ionian, we were under Venice—should pay reparations because they enslaved Greece for 400 years, a bit longer than slavery existed over here.

There is no such thing as a collective inherited crime. The call for reparations is a con trick by African-American race hustlers, or a Times jerk desperate to show his liberal, bleeding-heart credentials. Nothing more. It is bullshit of the kind one encounters every day in places like New York and Los Angeles, and as a very wise man once reminded a black firebrand who called America the most oppressive state in the world, “There is always Liberia and other African countries who would welcome you with open arms.” Incredibly, there were no takers.

Best of all is the notion that although no one today is guilty, assuming American citizenship also means taking on the liabilities of the American past. Actually, what the Times hack wrote about national sin and a national reckoning for that sin leading to a spiritual renewal is probably the easiest way to throw up if you have an upset stomach through too much drink or bad fish. National reckoning, my eye. Less PC bull would renew our spirit quicker than you can say “MAGA.”

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Hide the truth at all costs.

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The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday frontier the Consulate at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard of temperatures in the Arctic zone.

Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.

Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coast cities uninhabitable.

I must apologize. I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2 , 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post 96 years ago. This must have been caused by the Model T Ford’s emissions or possibly from horse and cattle farts

THE WOLF STREET REPORT
by Wolf Richter • Apr 14, 2019 • 18 Comments • Email to a friend

Wolf RichterApr 14, 2019
The Biggest Risk for Stocks: The moment share buybacks get slashed.

A stock market that is so uniquely dependent on corporations buying back their own shares in record amounts is in a very fragile position because share buybacks have a history of suddenly getting slashed when times get tough. And then, who’ll be the buyers? (11 minutes)

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Canadian Government Cracking Down On Asylum Laws
Jennifer G. HickeyApril 10, 2019
More than two years after his infamous #WelcomeToCanada tweet declaring his nation open to all, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is facing a border crisis of his own due to an “elevated number” of refugees and illegal border crossers. So, his government is moving to close a legal loophole often exploited by those claiming asylum.

The government’s 2019 budget includes a provision which would prevent refugees from seeking asylum if they made similar claims in countries with whom Canada has an immigration information-sharing agreement, such as the U.S. and U.K.

It stipulates that “failed asylum claimants who entered into Canada at irregular crossings or between official ports of entry will also be removed on a priority basis.”

The 392-page omnibus budget bill also calls for increased spending on enforcement to deal with the rise in asylum seekers and illegal border crossings that has “challenged the fairness and effectiveness of Canada’s asylum system.”

One of the reasons why more aliens are trying to cross illegally is because the Safe Third Country Agreement between the U.S. and Canada says asylum-seekers are prohibited from claiming refugee protection in Canada if they arrive at an official border checkpoint from a safe country, such as the U.S.

According to Globalnews, an internal memo prepared for Canada’s immigration minister prior to a January 2018 meeting with then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristjen Nielsen showed the Canadians were increasingly concerned the effectiveness of the agreement, which it maintained was “no longer working as intended.”

In an effort to sidestep the law, the memo said asylum seekers were “crossing into Canada between ports of entry where the agreement does not apply. This has brought to our attention gaps that may be creating a pull factor for people to cross illegally into Canada.”

Like its southern neighbor, the Canadian government has been struggling to deal with the surging numbers of illegal immigrants in the last few years, specifically financing enough immigration judges to respond to asylum claims.

The 2018 budget allocated an additional $72 million to the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) over two years to increase capacity so they can deal with the growing number of refugee protection claims. Last year, there were almost 30,000 preapproved refugee arrivals, which is distinct from asylum claims.

Just as radical activists and open-border advocates in the U.S. have criticized efforts to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, groups in Canada fired up their rhetoric and fear-mongering too.

“We are shocked that the government would use an omnibus budget bill to strip away human rights protections from vulnerable refugee claimants,” said Maureen Silcoff, Litigation Committee Chair of the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers. “Removing these protections will result in costly legal challenges, and is bound to create further delay and confusion in the refugee system.”

One could assume from of those “costly legal challenges” would be lodged by Silcoff and her associates.

Since the surge of illegal crossings began in 2017, the Canadian government has also struggled to house the growing numbers. They were forced to open up Olympic Stadium in Montreal as a temporary shelter, and the Canadian military was tasked with building other shelters to process the asylum seekers crossing into Quebec.

The problem of illegal border crossings goes both ways. Data released in March by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), shows 4,316 people were apprehended along the border last year, up from 3,027 in 2017 and 2,283 in 2016.

Although the U.S. has a less-than-cooperative partner along the southern border, perhaps there is some hope for closing legal loopholes and stopping violations of immigration law on both sides of the northern border.

Migrants break border gate, force their way into Mexico

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican authorities said a group of about 350 migrants broke the locks on a gate at the Guatemalan border Friday and forced their way into southern Mexico to join a larger group of migrants trying to make their way toward the United States.

The National Immigration Institute did not identify the nationalities of the migrants, but they are usually from Central America.

A similar confrontation occurred on the same border bridge between Mexico and Guatemala last year.

The institute said the migrants were acting in a “hostile” and “aggressive” way, and accused them of also attacking local police in Metapa, a Mexican village that lies between the border and the nearby city of Tapachula.

The group of 350 pushed past police guarding the bridge and joined a larger group of about 2,000 migrants who are walking toward Tapachula in the latest caravan to enter Mexico.

Claudia Jaqueline Sandoval, 43, from El Progreso, Honduras, was walking toward Tapachula with her 6-year-old daughter. Another son and a daughter are already in the United States.

“I have been HIV positive for 16 years,” said Sandoval, but her reason for going north was not just medical treatment. “It has been two years since I heard from my son” in the United States, and money is scarce, she said.

There are already several groups of migrants in the southern border state of Chiapas who have expressed frustration at Mexico’s policy of slowing or stopping the process of handing out humanitarian and exit visas at the border.

A group of several hundred Cuban, African and Central American migrants have been waiting at the immigration offices in Tapachula for documents that would allow them to travel to the U.S. border, where most plan to request asylum.

Some members of that group have scuffled with immigration authorities and broken windows at the offices in recent days, accusing officials of making them wait too long for papers.

And another group of an estimated 2,500 Central American and Cuban migrants have been stuck for at least a week further west in the Chiapas town of Mapastepec, also waiting for papers.

Russia Says ‘New World Order’ Being Formed
by L Todd WoodApril 12, 201978 90435
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Russia Says ‘New World Order’ Being Formed
Image by Kremlin.ru
Meeting of CIS Council of Heads of State. September 16, 2016. Bishkek

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared today that the Western, liberal model of society is dying, and a new world order is taking its place. Lavrov made the comments at his annual meeting with students and professors at the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy, reported Russian state news agency TASS.

“The Western liberal model of development, which particularly stipulates a partial loss of national sovereignty – this is what our Western colleagues aimed at when they invented what they called globalization – is losing its attractiveness and is no more viewed as a perfect model for all. Moreover, many people in the very western countries are skeptical about it,” Lavrov said.

According to him, global development is guided “by processes aimed at boosting multipolarity and what we call a polycentric world order.”

Tensions flare up in the Union State…again

“Clearly, multipolarity and the emergence of new centers of power in every way requires efforts to maintain global stability and search for a balance of interests and compromises, so diplomacy should play a leading role here,” Lavrov went on to say. “Particularly because there are a lot of issues that require generally acceptable solutions. These include regional conflicts, international terrorism, food security and environmental protection. This is why we believe that only diplomacy can help make agreements and reach sustainable decisions that will be accepted by all.

“The US and its allies are trying to impose their approaches on others,” Lavrov noted. “They are guided by a clear desire to preserve their centuries-long dominance in global affairs although from the economic and financial standpoint, the US – alone or with its allies – can no longer resolve all global economic and political issues,” he said.

“In order to preserve their dominance and recover their indisputable authority, they use blackmail and pressure. They don’t hesitate to blatantly interfere in the affairs of sovereign states.”