TBR News February 14, 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. February 14, 2017: “A reader asked us why we use RT (Russia Today) as a news source because ‘everyone knows RT is Russian propaganda.’

Of course RT is owned by the Russian government and would be expected to put Russian agendas first.

But the New York Times and the Washington Post are firmly in the pocket of the CIA and the British Guardian prints whatever official Washington wants along with moving stories about the Negro of the Week.

RT practices good journalism, state-owned or not, and on the front page of the two formerly respectable American papers, we can see such stories as a heart wrenching story about a Syrian trans-sexual hunchback that was denied entrance to the US only because of a contagious skin disease or a thrilling notice that a new pizza restaurant was opening in what was once a morgue.

Once mighty and a molder of public opinion, the American print media and their pathetic internet sites have descended, rapidly, to the level of a weekly news sheet from Buffalo Breath, a tiny town in Montana.

‘Cow loose on highway!’ and ‘Marvin Flab weds Nancy Wigglemeier’ headlines on the front pages of these catbox liners ape the bigger newspapers.

RT is a decent site and so also is Antiwar in the US.

And in that country, YouTube is very popular because many Americans are illiterate and like watching pictures while drinking beer with such evocative names as ‘Ruptured Pelican’ or ‘Slimy Frog’ and which tastes like carbonated defrost.”

 

Table of Contents

• Over 680 arrested in U.S. immigration raids; rights groups alarmed
• Trump says U.S. will deal ‘very strongly’ with North Korea after missile test
• In Shadow of California Dam, Water Turns From Wish to Woe
• Authorities ignored California dam warning for 12 years, say environmentalists
• Remote Viewing: A New World! And a Scientology-based con job
• Expanding settlements ‘absolute provocation‘ — Erdogan
• Armyworm pests invade southern Africa ‘like one of the 10 plagues of the Bible’
• Zimbabwe hosts emergency meeting on armyworm infestation
• America Third

• Truth is the first casualty of the propagandist.
• Interesting and entertaining new bumperstickers

 Over 680 arrested in U.S. immigration raids; rights groups alarmed

February 13, 2017

by Julia Edwards Ainsley and Kristina Cooke

Reuters

WASHINGTON- U.S. immigration officers last week arrested more than 680 people in the country illegally, the homeland security chief said on Monday, in a broad enforcement action that alarmed immigrant rights groups.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said the operations, conducted in at least a dozen states, were routine and consistent with regular operations carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Immigrant rights advocates said the operations, which they describe as raids, were not business as usual, and were more sweeping than operations conducted during the administration of former Democratic President Barack Obama.

Kelly said in a statement that 75 percent of the immigrants arrested have criminal records, ranging from homicide to driving under the influence of alcohol.

He said the operation also targeted people who have violated immigration laws.

Some had ignored final orders of deportation, according to ICE, the agency responsible for immigrant arrests and deportations.

Obama was criticized for being the “deporter in chief” after he deported over 400,000 people in 2012, more than any president in a single year.

In 2014, Obama’s homeland security chief issued a memo directing agents to focus on deporting a narrow slice of immigrants, namely those who had recently entered the country or committed serious felonies. Immigrants who were arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, for example, were treated as lower priorities for deportation.

Republican President Donald Trump promised to deport 2 million to 3 million migrants with criminal records on taking office.

At a news conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday, Trump said his administration had “really done a great job” in its recent arrests of immigrants.

“We’re actually taking people that are criminals, very, very, hardened criminals in some cases with a tremendous track record of abuse and problems,” Trump said.

ICE said in a statement on Monday that the operations targeted immigrants in the Midwest, Los Angeles, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and San Antonio.

The ICE statistics revealed regional differences in the profiles of the immigrants arrested. Of the 41 people arrested in New York City and surrounding areas, 93 percent had criminal convictions, while 45 percent of the 51 people arrested in the San Antonio, Texas area did.

Among the 190 people arrested in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, were 17 people who had no criminal convictions or a prior order to leave the country, according to ICE.

In a Jan. 25 executive order, Trump broadened an Obama-era priority enforcement system for immigrants subject to removal from the United States.

“Now it seems like anyone could be arrested,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. “The level of fear and anxiety is much higher than I’ve ever seen it.”

(Reporting by Julia Edwards Ainsley and Kristina Cooke; Additional reporting by Emily Stephenson; Editing by Peter Cooney and Lisa Shumaker)

 Trump says U.S. will deal ‘very strongly’ with North Korea after missile test

February 13, 2017

by Emily Stephenson

Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he would deal with North Korea “very strongly,” after that country said it successfully test-fired a new type of ballistic missile.

“Obviously North Korea is a big, big problem and we will deal with that very strongly,” said Trump, a Republican, during a joint press conference at the White House with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The U.S. leader did not detail how he would respond to North Korea’s actions.

(Reporting by Emily Stephenson; Editing by Chris Reese)

In Shadow of California Dam, Water Turns From Wish to Woe

February 13, 2017

by Mike McPhate and Jess Bidgood

The New York Times

OROVILLE, Calif. — It wasn’t so long ago that residents here had to drag their houseboats into a dusty field from the barren banks of Lake Oroville, which had almost no water left to keep them afloat.

Now after weeks of rain, that dusty field is swelling with water and nearly 200,000 people had to evacuate the area when the state’s second-largest reservoir developed a hole in its auxiliary spillway and threatened to catastrophically flood nearby towns.

“It was just pandemonium outside,” said Kurt Richter, a rice farmer living in Yuba City, who headed toward nearby Colusa, a town about 50 miles southwest of the dam in a two-car caravan with his wife and child, as the sudden evacuation order prompted chaos in the area. Mr. Richter described people driving on the shoulders, medians and the wrong side of the road.

The sudden chaos offers a dramatic reversal for this small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, which had been deeply affected by more than five years of drought and is now overwhelmed by winter storms.

A few years ago, “you couldn’t even see the lake,” said Jesse Hollis, a floor and tile contractor who grew up in Oroville. “It was empty.” He added, “Nobody thought that this was going to happen.”

Mr. Richter added, “We go from hard-core conservation mode — curtailments, restrictions, all these regulations that are imposed on us, justifiably so — and now we’ve got more water than we can physically manage.”

“There’s an element of human danger that’s hanging over our head for who knows how long,” he said. “We’ve got another huge storm system that’s coming this week.”

Since October, Northern California has been pounded by unrelenting rain and snow. The storms have replenished severely depleted water reserves, blanketed the Sierra Nevada in snow and turned brown hills to green across the state.

But they have also wreaked havoc and raised questions about whether the state could have done more to prevent a break. Rivers unable to contain the runoff from the mountains have repeatedly burst their banks, flooding homes.

The latest trouble started last week, after heavy rainfall rapidly lifted Lake Oroville, built into a canyon about 70 miles north of Sacramento.

As water was drained through two spillways over the weekend, officials became concerned that one was poised to collapse. If that happened, they said, it could unleash a 30-foot wall of water into the Feather River that would tear through several cities in the valley below.

On Sunday, emergency officials issued urgent warnings: Evacuate now or risk everything. Thousands heeded the call, streaming away out of town in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Gov. Jerry Brown has requested that the White House make an emergency declaration for Yuba, Butte and Sutter counties.

By Monday, the area remained precarious with more storms set to hit later in the week. Evacuation orders remained in place. “This is still a dynamic situation,” said Kory Honea, the sheriff of Butte County, which contains Oroville.

In Oroville, there were a few signs of life. There was light traffic. A handful of gas stations and restaurants were open. Charles Smith, an ironworker in town, said his neighborhood was high enough to avoid the danger. His neighbors, however, were not so sure.

“When I woke up this morning, we were the only people there,” said Mr. Smith, 36.

Water has since stopped flowing over the auxiliary spillway, allowing crews to assess the damage there. Water was flowing at the rate of 100,000 cubic feet per second over the main spillway, which has a hole of its own but is not worsening. There is no damage to the dam itself — which, at 770 feet, is the tallest in the country and a critical piece of the state’s water system. Saturday was the first time the emergency spillway came into use since the dam was completed in 1968.

On Monday, helicopters were bringing in large rocks and other building materials for engineers to use to shore up the damage. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had activated coordination centers in response to the situation at the dam.

Pentagon officials in Washington said they were closely watching the looming crisis. Capt. Jeff Davis, a Defense Department spokesman, said on Monday that all 23,000 California National Guard members had been put on alert. Those troops report to Governor Brown. Captain Davis also said the Pentagon was prepared to send emergency aircraft, reconnaissance equipment, water rescue units, medical supplies and tents, if needed.

The emergency spillway, like many others, is made largely of earth, with only a concrete weir, or sill, at the top. Water spilling over it cascades down an earthen hillside that is easily eroded. Environmental groups, including Friends of the River, a California-wide organization, requested in 2005 that the state cover the hillside with concrete. The request was rejected.

“They didn’t think they would ever need it, and they were confident that erosion was not going to be a problem,” said Ron Stork of Friends of the River. “Both of those have now been demonstrated to be inaccurate assessments.”

At a news conference on Monday, Bill Croyle, the acting director of the California Department of Water Resources said that he was not familiar with that request and that the use of the emergency spillway — and the resulting erosion — was a “new, never-happened-before event.”

In Colusa, evacuees found a place to rest at the fairgrounds. Roughly 200 people stayed in the parking lot or in exhibition halls opened up for the night.

The crisis has highlighted social issues that plague this area, which has historically suffered from high rates of unemployment and poverty. The region also has a very visible homeless population.

In Marysville and Yuba City, organizations rushed to evacuate the many homeless people. John Nicoletti, a former county supervisor and staff member with Habitat for Humanity, said local officials and nonprofit organizations pooled resources to bus those who did not have cars.

Miguel Vazquez, 41, who works in an auto paint and body shop, was worried about the prospect of losing work for a few days in Yuba City. He said residents, especially farmworkers and others reliant on the agricultural economy, were concerned.

“A couple of years ago everybody needs water,” Mr. Vazquez said. “Now there’s extra water.”

Some residents without transportation evacuated on foot. William Wright, 35, said it took him 12 hours to walk from Yuba City to the fairgrounds in Colusa.

“It makes no sense to sit there below a dam when it’s in question,” Mr. Wright said.

At one point the drought was so severe here that water levels in the lake dropped to just 33 percent of its capacity. The lake “looked like the moon,” Brad McKeehan, 42, a construction inspector in Oroville, said. “There was no vegetation. It was just rock. It looked like Mars or something.”

Now some of Mr. Richter’s farmland is already under water.

“The drought was basically limiting the water we would have access to,” Mr. Richter said. “Now there’s going to be so much water out there we might not even be able to put the crops in.”

But Mr. Richter said his major concern Monday was not his farm but his home and the safety of his family.

“It’s a flood plain — we know the history of the area and understand sort of the realities of it. I think if anything the drought maybe caused a lot of us to kind of ease into forgetting about that,” Mr. Richter said.

“We’ve all just gotten slapped back into reality about what really can go down in this part of the valley.”

Mike McPhate reported from Oroville, and Jess Bidgood and Henry Fountain from New York. Scott Bransford contributed reporting from Colusa, Calif.

 Authorities ignored California dam warning for 12 years, say environmentalists

February 14, 2016

RT

A warning issued 12 years ago that California’s Oroville Dam could be at risk of eroding was apparently ignored by the authorities. America’s tallest dam was reported to be at risk of collapsing Sunday night, forcing mass evacuations.

A document released by three environmental groups more than a decade ago said that the dam’s “ungated spillway” design could result in the “loss of crest control” and threaten people’s lives.

The potential risk from the Oroville Dam was highlighted in a motion from October 2005 by three environmental groups – Friends Of The River, Sierra Club, and South Yuba River Citizens League (SYRCL) – which was sent to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The document resurfaced when SYRCL said in its statement on recent events with the dam that it had raised the issue back in 2005. The group also released a link to the 2005 motion.

Back then, the groups called on the commission to check the existing structures at the dam, and if necessary to “reconstruct the ungated spillway and to make any other needed modifications so that the licensee can safely and confidently conduct required surcharge operations consistent with the Corps of Engineers Oroville Dam Reservoir Regulation Manual.”

“A loss of crest control could not only cause additional damage to project lands and facilities but also cause damages and threaten lives in the protected floodplain downstream,” the report stated.

According to the report, “the consequences of an ungated-spillway design that results in significant damages under operational use conditions have important policy and operational implications.”

On Sunday some 188,000 people were evacuated from California towns downstream of the Oroville Dam, after fears of an imminent collapse of the dam’s spillway prompted an evacuation order.

The situation later appeared to be less dire, as the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) issued a statement saying that there was no danger that the dam itself would collapse, as the incident had affected only an emergency spillway.

SYRCL reacted to the incident, saying that the situation “is extremely concerning.”

“Once the danger has passed, we will have time to do a full analysis of this situation, especially how extreme flood events will impact the future of public safety and river management in Northern California,” Caleb Dardick, executive director of SYRCL, said in a statement.

Late Monday the California governor asked President Donald Trump for help amid recent fears of an imminent collapse of the Oroville Dam spillway. He requested an emergency declaration in the states affected by the disaster.

“I respectfully request that you issue an Emergency Declaration for Direct Federal Assistance for the Counties of Butte, Sutter, and Yuba, as a result of the potential failure of the lake Oroville Dam emergency spillway,” Governor Jerry Brown wrote in a letter to President Trump.

 Remote Viewing: A New World! And a Scientology-based con job

February 14, 2017

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

Remote viewing (RV) is a procedure purportedly developed by parapsychologists at the Stanford Research Institute to perform clairvoyance under controlled conditions. Somewhat similar to astral projection, the phenomenon involves a belief in the projection of consciousness to remote locations, and is considered a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists.

Remote viewing is considered by the great majority of the scientific community and a pseudoscience, and that the experimental evidence is inadequate. Most critics liken remote viewing to dowsing, and accord remote viewing just as much validity as that procedure. And many say that remote viewing is just “clairvoyance” under a new name, made to seem more credible.

While proponents call the remote viewing technique “scientific”, it has only a extremely minority acceptance among scientists. Skeptics contend that an incorrect description of an object by a remote viewer is often considered a “hit” due to small similarities, and that visual cues and extraneous evidence under poorly designed testing protocols account for the more accurate descriptions. Positive results have only been achieved in tests designed and run by remote viewing proponents.

The program went through a number of changes over the years, both in structure and in name. Later code names include Gondola Wish, Grill Flame, and in 1991, Star Gate. Over the course of twenty years, the United States spent $20 million on Star Gate and related projects. Over the course of its existence more than forty personnel worked on the project, including more than twenty remote viewers. Though the program was classified throughout its existence, columnist Jack Anderson wrote about it in the mid-1980s.

It is interesting to note that from 2003 the entire scanate/grillflame/gondola wish/centrelane programs documents have now been mostly declassifed (1% or less still classified) and are available to the general public under the FOIA. Concerns about the program’s effectiveness led the CIA to contract the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to provide an evaluation. Their final report included an endorsement from statistician Jessica Utts, who found the government psychics’ 15% success rate statistically significant; and a rebuttal from noted skeptic Ray Hyman, who pointed to flaws in the ways the experiments were conducted and results were tabulated. AIR’s final recommendation to the CIA was to terminate the program, which it did in 1995. According to the CIA, ESP has never provided data used to guide intelligence operations

Since the end of the government’s involvement with Project Star Gate, remote viewing has entered the private sector. Companies such as PSI TECH claim to teach remote viewing procedures, and hundreds of books that detail remote viewing history and methods exist by various authors.

Though a minority believes strongly in the procedure, to date the existence of remote viewing as a psychic phenomenon has not been proven to the satisfaction of the mainstream scientific community.

Expanding settlements ‘absolute provocation‘ — Erdogan

Turkish president, on official visit to Bahrain, also slams Israel for trying to quiet Muslim call to prayer

February 13, 2017

by Sue Surkes

The Times of Israel

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday became the latest in a string of world leaders to criticize Israel’s decision to expand settlements in the West Bank, calling the move an “absolute provocation,” the Turkish news agency Anadolu reported.

Erdogan made the remarks on live TV during an official visit to Bahrain.

“Israel’s decision to construct new settlement units in East Jerusalem and West Bank is an absolute provocation,” Erdogan said.

The plan constituted a violation of international law, he added. “Ending the illegal settlement activity is a precondition for lasting peace and stability in the Middle East,” he said.

Erdogan’s criticism comes just months after Jerusalem and Ankara began patching up long-tense relations.

Turkey and Israel renewed bilateral ties in the summer. Ankara broke off relations with Jerusalem following a raid by Israeli forces on a Gaza blockade-busting ship, the Mavi Marmara, in 2010, in which 10 Turks were killed in a melee after they attacked IDF troops.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman approved the construction of around 3,000 new homes in the West Bank, some of them outside settlement blocs Israel hopes to keep in a future peace deal with the Palestinians.

The decision came a week after Israel had green-lighted the construction of 566 housing units in East Jerusalem and another 2,500 homes in the West Bank.

France, Germany, the EU and the Arab League are among those that have lambasted Israel’s settlement expansion decision. The Trump administration has said such construction “may not be helpful” in achieving peace.

Erdogan also used ernment moves to limit the volume of calls to prayer issued from the country’s mosques.

On Sunday, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a new draft of the so-called Muezzin Bill.

“Not only Muslims but everybody should be sensitive to all practices that disturb peace of the international community and hurt conscience in Jerusalem, which is our first qiblah,” Erdogan said.

Qiblah is the direction Muslims turn during prayer.

“Such steps will not be of any use other than heightening tension,” Erdogan warned.

Armyworm pests invade southern Africa ‘like one of the 10 plagues of the Bible’

February 14, 2017

by Ben Guarino

The Washington Post

Southern Africa has been struck by a pestilence so severe farmers have likened it to plagues of biblical proportions.

Hungry caterpillars called fall armyworms are on the move across the continent from Zambia southward. In early February, South Africa’s agricultural department issued a report, noting that for the first time that this unfamiliar pest had been spotted in the country’s Limpopo province.

“Little is known on how this particular pest entered Southern Africa,” according to the report. “Since this pest is very new in Africa, very little is known on its long term effects. ” It was positively identified as the fall armyworm a few days later.

“It has come in like one of the 10 plagues of the Bible,” said Ben Freeth, who operates a commercial farm in Zimbabwe, to South Africa’s Sunday Times. “It’s widespread and seems to be spreading rapidly. It can lay up to 2,000 eggs and its life cycle is very quick.”

Armyworms — which will grow into moths and are not, technically speaking, worms — are so named for their ability to destroy massive amounts of crops, in the manner of troops trampling over a countryside. Writing at the Conversation, Kenneth Wilson, who is studying the use of biological parasites to battle crop pests at England’s Lancaster University, described the recent havoc as the combination of two species: a surge in the population of the native African armyworm, plus the fall armyworm, an invader from the Americas.

African armyworms eat in hordes as dense as 1,000 caterpillars per square meter, Wilson noted, stripping maize plants bare. The newcomers may be no less destructive. “The impact of the fall armyworm is likely to be devastating because it eats the leaves of the plant as well as its reproductive parts,” Wilson wrote. “This damages or destroys the maize cob itself.” He cited an estimate that put Zambia’s possible losses of maize, an important grain staple, as high as 40 percent.

“The situation remains fluid. Preliminary reports indicate possible presence (of the pest) in Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has positively identified the presence of the pest while the rest are expected to release test results soon,” said David Phiri, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s southern Africa regional coordinator, in a news release.

The Food and Agriculture Organization has set an upcoming emergency meeting to discuss plans to combat the pests. The Zambian government acquired insecticides and has begun stockpiling seeds to help farmers replenish consumed crops, according to NPR. Meanwhile, South Africa planned to import pheromone traps to catch and identify the extent of the pests’ spread.

Pesticides have shown to be effective against armyworms in the past, Wilson noted at the Conversation. But it was not yet known if the current caterpillar outbreak had developed a resistance to the usual chemicals that kill them.

What’s more, as moths, armyworms are known to fly great distances. In 2012, U.S. Agriculture Department entomologists tracked fall armyworm populations traveling from southern Texas to Minnesota.

“Only time will tell,” Wilson wrote, “what the full impact of this armyworm invasion will have.”

Zimbabwe hosts emergency meeting on armyworm infestation

The United Nations is holding emergency talks in Harare to address the crop-eating “armyworm” caterpillars currently devastating farmland across several African countries.

February 14, 2017

by Ole Tangen Jr (AFP)

DW

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is holding a meeting in Harare on how to stop the spreading infestation of the “fall armyworm.” The caterpillar has already caused damage to staple crops in Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Ghana. There are reports that Malawi, Mozambique and Namibia are also affected.

According to experts, this is the first time that the fall armyworm has caused widespread damage in sub-Saharan Africa. The armyworm is actually a moth which burrows into crops in its larval stage. When they re-emerge, after a week to 12 days, it will be as moths that can fly up to 1,000 kilometers.

The armyworms usually attack fields en mass, consuming crops including maize, wheat, millet and rice, the main sources for food in southern and eastern Africa. These are regions where farmers are already struggling to grow their crops because of severe drought.

“Nobody seems to know how it reached Africa,” said David Phiri, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s coordinator for southern Africa adding that caterpillar only first appeared in Nigeria and Togo last year. “So, farmers do not know really how to treat it.”

Experts believe that the caterpillars arrived in Africa on commercial flights from South America or on plants that were imported from other continents.

A plan of attack

The meeting is bringing in experts from 13 countries who will spend three days in the Zimbabwean capital forming a battle plan to defeat the pests.

According to the FAO, the fall armyworm is unlike the native African armyworm as it does not “march” along the ground in huge numbers seeking more food.

“This sequence of outbreaks began in mid-December 2016 in Zambia,” wrote Kenneth Wilson, professor at Lancaster University in Britain, in a briefing paper Monday.

“It is now as far south as South Africa. Because armyworms feed on many of the staple food crops they have the potential to create food shortages in the region,” he added.

Zimbabwe’s Deputy Agriculture Minister Davis Marapira confirmed to the AFP that the armyworm has been detected in all of the country’s 10 provinces.

“The government is helping farmers with chemicals and spraying equipment,” Marapira said.

Options for eradication

Experts at the meeting stated that chemical pesticides are effective against armyworms. They have, however, developed resistance to traditional pesticides. According to the FAO’s Phiri, it all depends on the level of infestation.

“If it is a small level of the worms, it’s easy to control. Otherwise, it’s very difficult to control it, so they will have to use different methods, including sometimes burning the crops,” he said.

Aside from chemical options, experts are advising farmers to use biological or natural controls like digging trenches around a farm or deploying natural predators, like birds, to eat the pests

The FAOis concerned that the current outbreak of armyworms combined with the recent droughts in southern Africa caused by the El Nino climate phenomenon, could adversely affect food supplies in the region.

Zambia officials deployed its national air force in December to transport pesticides across the country to combat the spreading infestation of armyworms. The country claims that 124,000 hectares (306,000 acres) of its crops have been destroyed.

America Third

Donald Trump Is Giving the Phrase “Multipolar World” New Meaning

by Michael T. Klare

TomDispatpch

If there’s a single consistent aspect to Donald Trump’s strategic vision, it’s this: U.S. foreign policy should always be governed by the simple principle of “America First,” with this country’s vital interests placed above those of all others.  “We will always put America’s interests first,” he declared in his victory speech in the early hours of November 9th.  “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first,” he insisted in his Inaugural Address on January 20th.  Since then, however, everything he’s done in the international arena has, intentionally or not, placed America’s interests behind those of its arch-rivals, China and Russia. So to be accurate, his guiding policy formula should really be relabeled America Third.

Given 19 months of bravado public rhetoric, there was no way to imagine a Trumpian presidency that would favor America’s leading competitors. Throughout the campaign, he castigated China for its “predatory” trade practices, insisting that it had exploited America’s weak enforcement policies to eviscerate our economy and kill millions of jobs. “The money they’ve drained out of the United States has rebuilt China,” he told reporters from the New York Times in no uncertain terms last March.  While he expressed admiration for the strong leadership of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he decried that country’s buildup of advanced nuclear weapons. “They have gone wild with their nuclear program,” he stated during the second presidential debate. “Not good!”

Judging by such comments, you might imagine that Donald Trump would have entered the Oval Office with a strategic blueprint for curbing the geopolitical sway of America’s two principal potential great power rivals.  Presumably, this would have entailed a radical transformation of the strategy devised by the Obama administration for this purpose — a two-pronged effort that involved the reinforcement of NATO forces in Eastern Europe and the “rebalancing” of U.S. military assets to the Asia-Pacific region.  Obama’s strategy also envisioned the use of economic pacts — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — to buttress those military measures.  But Trump had made known his disdain for NATO and the TPP, so it was reasonable to assume that he would arrive in Washington with an alternative plan to ensure America’s primacy on the global strategic chessboard.

As President Trump has made clear in recent weeks, however, his primary strategic priorities do not include the advancement of America’s status in the race for global strategic preeminence.  Instead, as indicated by the outline of his “America First Foreign Policy” posted on the White House website, his top objectives are the extermination of what he calls “radical Islamic terrorism” and the enhancement of America’s overseas trade balance.  Just how vital these objectives may be in the larger scheme of things has been the subject of considerable debate, but few have noted that Trump has completely abandoned any notion that the U.S. is engaged in a global struggle for power and wealth with two potentially fierce competitors, each possessing its own plan for achieving “greatness.”

And it’s not just that Trump seems to have abandoned the larger geopolitical playing field to America’s principal rivals.  He appears to be doing everything in his power to facilitate their advance at the expense of the United States.  In just the first few weeks of his presidency, he has already taken numerous steps that have put the wind in both China’s and Russia’s sails, while leaving the U.S. adrift.

Trump’s China-First Foreign Policy

In his approach to China, Donald Trump has been almost exclusively focused on the issue of trade, claiming that his primary goal is to combat the unfair practices that have allowed the Chinese to get rich at America’s expense.  It’s hardly surprising, then, that his nominee as U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, is an outspoken critic of that country’s trade behavior.  “It seems clear that the U.S. manufacturing crisis is related to our trade with China,” he told Congress in 2010.  But while trade may be an important part of the U.S.-China relationship, Trump’s single-minded fixation on the issue leaves aside far more crucial political, economic, diplomatic, and military aspects of the Sino-American competition for world power and influence.  By largely ignoring them, in just weeks in the Oval Office, President Trump has already enabled China to gain ground on many fronts.

This was evident in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.  While no senior representative of the soon-to-be installed Trump administration even put in an appearance, China was represented by no less than President Xi Jinping himself, a first appearance for a Chinese head of state.  In a major address, denouncing (no names mentioned) those who seek to turn away from globalization, Xi portrayed China as the world’s new exemplar of free trade and internationalism. “Say no to protectionism,” he insisted. “It is like locking yourself in a dark room. Wind and rain are kept out, but so are light and air.” For many of the 1,250 CEOs, celebrities, and government officials in the audience, his appearance and remarks represented an almost mind-boggling shift in the global balance of political influence, as Washington ceded the pivotal position it had long occupied on the world stage.

Six days later, on his first weekday in office, President Trump appeared to confirm the Chinese leader’s derisory comments by announcing his intent to withdraw from negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, thereby abandoning U.S. leadership in efforts to vastly augment trade in the Asia-Pacific region.  From Trump’s perspective, the 12-nation trade deal (which included Australia, Malaysia, Japan, and Vietnam, while carefully excluding China) would harm American workers and manufacturers by facilitating exports to this country by the other participants (a view shared by some on the left).  At the same time, however, many in Washington saw it as bolstering American efforts to limit Beijing’s influence by increasing trade among the prospective TPP member states at China’s expense.  Now, China has an unparalleled opportunity to reorganize and potentially reorient trade in the Asian region in its direction.

“There’s no doubt that this action will be seen as a huge, huge win for China,” said Michael Froman, the trade representative who negotiated the TPP under President Obama.  “For the Trump administration, after all this talk about being tough on China, for their first action to basically hand the keys to China and say we’re withdrawing from our leadership position in this region is geo-strategically damaging.”

Among other things, China is expected to encourage Asian countries to join it in an alternative trade arrangement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).  Including the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and India (but not the United States), the RCEP aims to lower barriers to trade — without the environmental and labor-rights provisions incorporated into the TPP.

On January 28th, in a phone conversation that ended abruptly, President Trump further undermined America’s geopolitical stature in Asia by berating Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia, a country that has been a staunch American ally since World War II and which houses several U.S. military bases.  According to press accounts, Trump responded angrily to Turnbull’s plea to honor a promise made by President Obama to take in some 1,250 refugees — many from Iraq — being held by Australia in squalid conditions in offshore detention centers.  “I don’t want these people,” Trump is said to have shouted before hanging up on the Australian leader.  The insulting tenor of the call has provoked widespread revulsion in Australia, with many people there reportedly questioning the value of that country’s close association with the United States.

Above all, his rebuff of Turnbull is thought to be beneficial to China.  “Trump is needlessly damaging the deep trust that binds one of America’s closest alliances,” said Professor Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University in Canberra.  “China and those wishing to weaken the strongest alliance in the Pacific will see opportunity in this moment.”

Trump, China, and the Global Climate Fight

Perhaps the greatest gift Trump has bestowed on China, however, has been his drive to scuttle the Obama administration’s clean energy initiatives and its commitment to the Paris climate agreement.  By turning the clock back on climate action and putting in office a crew of climate-change deniers, Trump has opened the door for China to emerge both as the world’s leader in green technology (while creating millions of new jobs for Chinese workers) and in international efforts to slow global warming.

Recall that in pursuing progress on clean energy, President Obama was driven not only by a concern for the future depredations of climate change, but also by a desire to ensure American preeminence in what he perceived as a global race to master the green technologies of the future, a race in which China was feared to be a likely winner.  In 2013, he pointed out that, until recently, other countries had “dominated the clean energy market and the jobs that came with it, [but] we’ve begun to change that… As long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we.”

To assure American primacy in the clean-energy race, Obama channeled vast sums of money into the development and deployment of renewable technologies, including advanced solar power plants and electrical storage devices.  He also assumed a leadership role in the diplomatic drive to gain approval of the Paris accord, meeting personally with Xi Jinping and with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, among others.  From an international perspective, this lent the United States the aura of an enlightened, forward-looking world power.

Donald Trump aims to turn his back on all of this. More interested in pleasing his friends in the fossil fuel industry than saving the planet from ruin, he has repeatedly expressed his resolve to eviscerate Obama’s clean energy plan and withdraw from the Paris agreement.  “The U.S. will clearly change its course on climate policy,” said Myron Ebell, the climate-change denier who headed Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team. “Trump has made it clear he will withdraw from the Paris Agreement.  He could do it by executive order… or he could do it as part of a larger package,” Ebell told reporters on January 30th.

Whether or not Trump and his prospective EPA director, former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, succeed in unraveling everything that Obama achieved, the new administration has already ceded leadership in the global climate fight to the Chinese, who have been all too happy to seize the limelight.  In January, Beijing’s chief climate change negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, affirmed his country’s intention to be out front on climate issues. “China is capable of taking a leadership role in combating global climate change,” he told reporters from China Daily.

While gaining international recognition as the new leader in this area, China is also moving swiftly to assume primacy in the development and deployment of new green technologies, assuring future domination of a global market expected to grow by leaps and bounds in the decades to come.  On January 5th, the country’s National Energy Administration announced a plan to spend $360 billion on renewable energy systems between 2016 and 2020.  This is expected to create perhaps 13 million new jobs.  Although detailed spending plans were not disclosed, much of this largesse will undoubtedly be devoted to new wind and solar installations — fields in which China already enjoys a substantial advantage over the rest of the world.

From an economic perspective, the implications of this drive are hard to miss.  Many energy experts believe that the demand for oil and other fossil fuels will begin to decline in the years ahead as consumers increasingly favor clean energy over carbon-emitting fuels.  If so, the demand for renewables will skyrocket.  According to the latest projections from the International Energy Agency in Paris, the demand for wind power in electricity generation will grow by 440% between 2014 and 2040, and that for solar power by over 1,100%.  Given the world’s colossal thirst for energy, growth on this scale is bound to generate trillions of dollars in new business.  In other words, the anti-green posture of the Trump administration offers the gift of the century to China: an extraordinary shift in global wealth.

Trump’s Russia-Second Foreign Policy

If President Trump appears determined to make China the world’s leading power, he also seems strangely intent on elevating Russia to the number two spot.  In his single-minded drive to enlist Moscow’s help in fighting ISIS, he appears willing to eliminate any barriers to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s undisguised campaign to establish a sphere of influence in the territory of the former Soviet Union and other areas once under Moscow’s sway.

Ever since assuming the presidency in 2000, Vladimir Putin has made no secret of his determination to restore Russia’s former glory and to reverse what he and like-minded Russian analysts view as NATO’s encroachment on Russia’s legitimate security zone in eastern and southeastern Europe.  This led to the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and the barely-disguised Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine.  For the Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — and other Eastern European countries once under Moscow’s thumb, this has, in turn, rekindled fears of a new Russian drive to subvert their independence.  More recently, Putin has sought to reestablish the former Soviet Union’s ties to the Middle East, most notably through his military intervention in Syria.

In conjunction with America’s NATO allies, President Obama sought to curb Putin’s plans by imposing tough economic sanctions on Russia and by bolstering the defenses of NATO’s front-line states.  Last July, at a NATO summit in Warsaw, he and the leaders of Britain, Canada, and Germany agreed to deploy reinforced battalions to Poland and the three Baltic states as a deterrent to any future Russian attack on those countries.  Had she been elected president, Hillary Clinton was expected to step up the pressure further on Moscow.

For Trump, however, Putin’s transgressions in Europe and elsewhere seem to be of little consequence in comparison to his possible collaboration in fighting the Islamic State.  “I think it would be great if we got along with Russia because we could fight ISIS together,” he declared during the second presidential debate last October.  As for NATO and the Europeans, Trump has indicated little sympathy for their worries about Moscow and has shown little inclination to increase America’s contributions to their defense.  Not only did he claim that NATO was “obsolete” last March, insisting that it wasn’t doing enough to fight terrorism, but that it was “unfair, economically, to us,” because “it really helps them more so than the United States, and we pay a disproportionate share.”

Since assuming the presidency, President Trump has behaved as if Russia were indeed a key ally-in-waiting and the NATO powers were former lovers who had lost their appeal.  Yes, he met with British Prime Minister Theresa May before any other foreign leader, but he remained silent when she spoke of the need to maintain pressure on Moscow through sanctions, making her look at that moment like an unwelcome houseguest.

Later, he spoke at length with Putin by telephone. From published accounts of their conversation, they avoided awkward topics like Crimea and the Russian hacking scandal of the election past, discussing instead increased collaboration in counterterrorism operations.  While the Trump team had little to report on the specifics of what was said, Russian officials were effusive about the conversation.  “The two leaders emphasized that joining efforts in fighting the main threat — international terrorism — is a top priority,” they indicated.

According to the Russian media, Trump and Putin agreed in their January 28th phone call to arrange high-level meetings among their senior security staff to facilitate collaboration in the anti-ISIS war.  Included in many of these reports was speculation that the two leaders were moving towards a “conceptual understanding” whereby Washington would grant Moscow a “zone of influence” in the former Soviet space in return for Russian cooperation in battling ISIS.  Whether or not Trump agreed to any such plan, it appears that events are beginning to proceed as if he had, with Russia evidently playing a more aggressive role in eastern Ukraine in recent weeks.

In this way, Trump’s embrace of Russia as a legitimate partner in anti-ISIS operations has given Putin what he seeks more than anything else: recognition as an equal player on the world stage with the United States and China — despite the fact that he presides over a rickety petro-state with a weakened economy the size of Italy’s.

Choosing Number Three

For all his talk of placing America’s interests first, Donald Trump appears to be advancing the interests of China and Russia, not as the result of conscious policy, but because he’s driven by such a narrow view of America’s foreign policy priorities: counterterrorism against Islamic radicalism, the exclusion of Mexicans and Muslims from the U.S., and an improved balance of trade.  The broader dimensions of international relations do not seem to register on his mental radar screen, such as it is.

How does this affect us?  The biggest danger: that China and Russia will feel emboldened by Trump’s narrow-minded approach to seek geopolitical advantage in some area like the South China Sea or the Baltic Sea region that is either important to the United States or seen as bearing on its prestige and credibility.  In that case, the president, feeling personally threatened or affronted on the issue of America’s presumed paramountcy, might respond forcefully, possibly igniting a major crisis with nuclear implications.  Even if such a crisis is avoided, it’s likely that American influence in such areas as Eastern Europe and South Asia will diminish, resulting in fewer trade opportunities and possibly a rollback of rights and liberties (which could, of course, happen in the U.S. as well).  Certainly, if his first weeks in office are indicative of what a Trumpian vision of an America First policy means, we are entering a period when the phrase “multipolar world” will gain new meaning.

Most important of all, the abandonment of U.S. leadership in the struggle to slow global warming will mean both the surrender of technological preeminence in the fields most likely to dominate the world economy in the decades to come and a far greater chance of planetary catastrophe. This should be considered a betrayal of all Americans — and especially of those who voted for him in the belief that he would ensure America’s political and economic primacy.

Truth is the first casualty of the propagandist.

February 14, 2017

by Horst Gontermann (translation by Edmund Snepp)

hzn/Ger,amy

The argument is made that since it is “clearly evident” that six million European Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis under Hitler, the fact that nowhere in the through and extensive files of the Third Reich can be found any specific reference to such acts, the answer to this absence is also clearly evident; there are special and secret lists made of Jews who were not entered onto the rolls of the camps but who were immediately executed.

However, if there are no existing Third Reich documents proving the mass murders, neither are there any of the secret lists to be found.

The “secret list” theory is one of desperation, not a clever invention.

When the Glücks files emerged in Moscow, the archivists at the Central Archives stated that Jewish groups were well aware of these documents and had repeatedly insisted that the Russians not release them to “outsiders” who were “not able to properly understand them.”

What obviously was meant is that these extensive, and complete, files clearly did not support the murder of six millions of European Jews and their release would merely complicate the fundraising efforts of the proponents of the planned extermination theories.

As an historical footnote to this commentary, the following officially recorded conversation of Hitler’s is set forth. The first part of it has been widely quoted in a number of books but the second part, for obvious reasons, has not.

On Saturday, October 25, 1941, Hitler received Count Ciano, Italian Foreign Minister at his East Prussian military headquarters for a conference. Present were a number of senior government officials. Following the conference, Hitler held a small, private dinner for several of these personages. One of them was Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS and the other was (SS-Obergruppenführer) Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Main State Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt-RSHA) which controlled the Gestapo and the SD. During the course of the dinner, Hitler said:

“From the rostrum of the Reichstag I prophesized to Jewry that, in the event of war’s proving inevitable, the Jew would disappear from Europe. That race of criminals has on its conscience the two million dead of the First World War, and now already hundreds of thousands more.”

At this point, historians generally comment on Hitler’s obvious intention to slaughter all the Jews he could lay his hands on. The balance of the conversation conveys a rather different meaning.

“Let nobody tell me that all the same we can’t park them in the marshy parts of Russia! Who’s worrying about our troops? It’s not a bad idea, by the way, that public rumor attributes to us a plan to exterminate the Jews. Terror is a salutary thing.”1

The question of the number of persons who died in Auschwitz has been addressed in a publication entitled Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp.2 A chapter by Franciszek Piper entitled “The Number of Victims” addresses the issues discussed here and sections of it deserve to be quoted and enlarged upon.

“In erasing traces of the crimes perpetrated in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazis destroyed documents that could serve as the basis for determining how many people died there. When the Soviet soldiers liberated the camp in January 1945, they found documents that confirmed only 100,000 deaths. Yet surviving prisoners maintained that millions had perished at Auchwitz.

Faced with this disparity, officials of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, the organization entrusted with investigating the crimes committed at Auschwitz, conducted an in-depth study. Based on witness testimonies regarding the capacity of the camp and the length of time that its machinery for mass murder was operative, (emphasis added) the commission concluded that no fewer than four million (emphasis added) persons were put to death at the camp…Four million…is the number recorded in Polish literature, as well as in publications of other countries.”

In The Final Solution, one of the first books to deal with the Holocaust, published in 1953, the figure of four million was radically reevaluated. English art historian Gerald Reitlinger estimated the number of victims at Auschwitz to be roughly 800,000 to 900,000, (emphasis added) based on an analysis of the losses of Jews reported by specific countries…

The destruction by the Nazis of most Auschwitz records is the most important cause of divergent estimates…researchers had to rely on discrepant and imprecise data from testimonies and depositions of witnesses, former prisoners and Nazi functionaries and on court decisions and fragmentary and incomplete records of camp registries, archives, (sic) and other institutions. (Emphasis added).”

The question of the destruction of Auschwitz records has been raised over the years to support the claims that large numbers of people died in the camp but were not recorded. If the SS camp administration did destroy or remove official records from Auschwitz before the complex was overrun by the Soviets in early 1945, they did not and could not touch the records that had been sent to the headquarters of the camp system outside of Berlin, or any other copies sent to different agencies. According to the author of the article, the Soviets did find records indicating 100,000 deaths.

Reliance on anything originating from Stalin’s agents is totally unrealistic. The Soviets had no problem continuously rewriting their own history and obviously would have had no problem rewriting the history of other nations. The concurrence of the Poles in Soviet findings has no validity whatsoever. Poland was under complete control of the Soviets at the time of their reports and any official commission would do precisely as it was told by its masters.

It was only after the implosion of the Soviet Empire that their state archives became available to outside researchers, at least on a limited basis. As has been noted before, it was the standard policy of the Soviet government to denigrate and attack the government of West Germany, not support it. The microfilms released by the Russian archives in the early 1990s were copies of documents found at the SS camp headquarters in 1945 and had these supported the theory of extensive extermination programs, they certainly would have been released years before.

There is another argument used to explain the lack of documentation supporting the thesis of a million or more dead at Auschwitz. This argument claims that endless transports of Jews were delivered to the camp, not recorded anywhere and immediately executed. This, it is claimed, explains why there is such a disparity between official German figures and those proposed by others.

This argument has some fleeting validity but the question arises that if these transports were unrecorded in German records, how could anyone use them as references other than by supposition and speculation? It is very difficult to have one’s cake and eat it too.

The question of transport also needs to be addressed. When the German Reichsbahn scheduled rail transportation to Auschwitz, it was listed officially as special trains (Sonderzug) which indicated that the transports were privately contracted…in this case by the SS. If these transports were of an official, State nature, they would be listed as regular traffic, paid for by the government. While in the beginning of the forced Jewish emigration prior to the war, the Jewish community in Germany and overseas was compelled to pay for the emigration out of their own pockets, such accommodations were not operational during the war except in rare cases. It should also be noted that transport from Auschwitz taking manufactured products to various points in Europe were also listed as Special Trains. Auschwitz was part of the SS economic empire and as such, was run by the SS and not the German government. The Armed SS (Waffen-SS) was not an official part of the Wehrmacht and its operating expenses, as were the operating expenses for the entire SS, had to be paid for by the SS itself.

This in itself would cast considerable doubt on the thesis that a vast extermination program had been ordered by Hitler officially as State policy. When the SS ran out of operating capital, the transports stopped running.

The use of prisoner labor was certainly addressed in the numerous trials held after the war.

Another thesis often expressed is that the victims at Auschwitz were nearly all Jewish. Reports from the camp break down the exact number of inmates by groups, to include Jews. At Auschwitz, by far the largest group were those held in protective custody or as political prisoners.

With former Soviet archival material now available, a greater balance should be much easier to obtain. It was only their stubborn refusal to release these records that allowed inflated figures, supported only with anecdotal and unsupported material, to flourish and, like ivy, expand and cover every aspect of the building beneath.

This archival material has, in fact, been available on microfilm since 1989 but is rarely discussed.

An article in the New York ‘Times’ of March 3, 1991 quotes the Soviet sources with considerable accuracy. Forty-six camps are covered with a total death toll of more than 400,000. Auschwitz records contain approximately 70,000 death certificates and in addition the death totals of 130,000 among the forced laborers in all camps and 200,000 additional names of various classes of prisoners in all camps to include Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Gross Rosen. When queried about this article and the numbers reflected in it, Red Cross officials in Washington, DC agreed that they were indeed the figures contained in the microfilms they had received from Soviet sources but that “special secret lists” existed that boosted the death toll far higher. Further questioning elicited that no one had seen these “secret lists” but that they must certainly exist and that quoting from the official records was “misleading” and should not be done.

The records of the concentration camp system discovered by the Soviets at the system headquarters outside of Berlin in 1945 are complete. From a chronological point of view, there are no gaps. Many of the records found by the Soviets at Auschwitz are not complete but the headquarters files contain copies of all the Auschwitz records

The arrest, deportation and forced labor of a large number of people, including Jews, was repugnant and on a parallel with the British concentration camps (from whence the name came) instituted during the Boer War in which over 20,000 Boer women and children died in conditions of disease, filth and squalor, and is not possible to ignore or justify.3

Aside from the records of the camp headquarters siezed by the Soviets in 1945 from Oranienburg, another source exists that deals with the monthly population reports made by the individual camps to headquarters. These consisted of radio reports sent in to Oranienburg on a monthly basis. From early 1942 through February of 1943, British intelligence was monitoring these reports and in their official history of the British intelligence system, stated that,

“The returns from Auschwitz, the largest of the camps with 20,000 prisoners, mentioned illness as the main cause of death, but included references to shootings and hangings. There were no references in the decrypts to gassing.” (emphasis added) 4

Given inaccurate demographics about the post-war Jewish population, there is still a considerable gap in the number of Jews, mostly Polish Jews, who were living in Poland in 1939 and unaccounted for in 1945. The assumption was made, and is still being made, that these differences were clearly explained by the extermination theory.

The former Soviet Union maintained a rigid control over its files until its collapse, and it has only been since this point in time that a much clearer picture of events has become evident.

In 1995, Russian author Arkady Vaksberg, a Jewish writer, attorney, and investigative journalist, published a book entitled Stalin Against The Jews, the basic theme of which is the persecution of Soviet Jews by Stalin after he had used them against his enemies. Vaksberg goes into some detail about the Polish Jews who, in September of 1939, fled the German advance into Poland and went into the Soviet Union. Vaksberg states that these Polish Jews were siezed by Stalin’s agencies and put into prison camps.

The author states that exact figures of these prisoners are not presently available but speaks of “hundreds of thousands.” He also mentions that Soviet border police shot down many escaping Jews before they crossed the border into Communist territory. Survival in Soviet Gulags was very poor; of the 80,000 German prisoners of war captured at Stalingrad, only 6,000 were alive in 1955 to return to Germany. How many of these hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews survived the war is not known, but perhaps former Soviet archives hold the final answer to this issue, an issue that has persisted for half a century.5

After the breakup of the Yugoslav state in the 1990s, the “ethnic cleansing” by the winsome Serbs of anyone they disliked, including Catholics and Jews, was greeted with a chorus of dismay from other nations…but nothing more.

 

1“Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941-1945,” New York, 1953, p 72, Protocol 52.

2 “Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp,” ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, 1994, Indiana University Press. pps 61 et seq.

3Amery, vol.5, 252, 253, 601; vol. 6, 24-25

4 “British Intelligence in the Second World War,” Hinsley et al, London, 1980, vol. 11, p 673.

5 “Stalin Against the Jews,” Vaksberg, New York, 1995, pp 103-107.

Interesting and entertaining new bumperstickers

1. Jesus loves you… but everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.
2. Impotence… Nature’s way of saying “No hard feelings”
3. The proctologist called… they found your head.
4. Everyone has a photographic memory…some just don’t have any film.
5. Save your breath…You’ll need it to blow up your date.
6. Some people are only alive because it is illegal to shoot them.
7. I used to have a handle on life… but now it is broken.
8. WANTED: Meaningful overnight relationship.
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10. If you can read this… I can slam on my brakes and sue you.
11. Heart Attacks… God’s revenge for eating His animal friends.
12. Have a proctologist look at that hole under your nose.
13. Try not to let your mind wander… It is too small to be out by itself.
14. Some people just don’t know how to drive… I call these people “Everybody But Me”
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16. Guys… just because you have one… doesn’t mean you have to be one.
17. Welcome to America… NOW speak English.
18. Hire the Handicapped: They’re fun to watch!
19. Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down.
20. Asians don’t drive cars, they aim them.
21. Hillary’s space program: Circle Uranus searching for Kligons
22. Lindsay Graham for Queen!
23. What’s positive about Africans? HIV.
24. When Filipinos eat monkeys, it’s cannibalism.