I didn’t have time to do much of a news feed tonight — just a few items here.
The news doesn’t have much Yuletide cheer in it, anyway. Rather than read the news, you’d be better off lacing your eggnog with something strong and then decorating the tree.
Merry Christmas, everybody!
To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.
Thanks to Dean, JD, Steen, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.
Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.
Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.
58 Facts About the U.S. Economy From 2015 That Are Almost Too Crazy to Believe
The world didn’t completely fall apart in 2015, but it is undeniable that an immense amount of damage was done to the U.S. economy. This year the middle class continued to deteriorate, more Americans than ever found themselves living in poverty, and the debt bubble that we are living in expanded to absolutely ridiculous proportions. Toward the end of the year, a new global financial crisis erupted, and it threatens to completely spiral out of control as we enter 2016. Over the past six months, I have been repeatedly stressing to my readers that so many of the exact same patterns that immediately preceded the financial crisis of 2008 are happening once again, and trillions of dollars of stock market wealth has already been wiped out globally. Some of the largest economies on the entire planet such as Brazil and Canada have already plunged into deep recessions, and just about every leading indicator that you can think of is screaming that the U.S. is heading into one. So don’t be fooled by all the happy talk coming from Barack Obama and the mainstream media. When you look at the cold, hard numbers, they tell a completely different story. The following are 58 facts about the U.S. economy from 2015 that are almost too crazy to believe…
#1 These days, most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. At this point 62 percent of all Americans have less than 1,000 dollars in their savings accounts, and 21 percent of all Americans do not have a savings account at all.
#2 The lack of saving is especially dramatic when you look at Americans under the age of 55. Incredibly, fewer than 10 percent of all Millennials and only about 16 percent of those that belong to Generation X have 10,000 dollars or more saved up.
#3 It has been estimated that 43 percent of all American households spend more money than they make each month.
#4 For the first time ever, middle class Americans now make up a minority of the population. But back in 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle class households.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
It’s Official: Over a Trillion Dollars a Year Will be Added to the Debt During Obama’s Presidency
Under Barack Obama, the U.S. national debt has risen from $10,626,877,048,913.08 on January 20th, 2009 to $18,795,033,928,275.59 on December 21st, 2015. That means that the debt that we are passing on to future generations has increased by 8.16 trillion dollars since Barack Obama was inaugurated. There is still a little more than a year to go in Obama’ s presidency, and it is already guaranteed that Obama will add more than a trillion dollars a year to the national debt during his presidency. In fact, when you do the math, we are stealing more than 100 million dollars from future generations of Americans every single hour of every single day. It is a crime of a magnitude that is almost unimaginable, and at this point it is mathematically impossible for the U.S. government to pay off all of this debt. To say that we are in trouble would be a massive understatement.
And of course not all of the blame goes to Obama. The Republicans have had control of the House of Representatives for all but two years while Obama has been in the White House, and they have gone along with all of this reckless spending. Without the approval of the House, Obama could not spend a single penny, but the Republicans have consistently chosen not to stand up to him. In fact, the Republicans in Congress just approved another massive 1.2 trillion dollar spending bill that essentially gave the Democrats every single thing that they wanted. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi even admitted that the Republicans “ were willing to concede so much” during the negotiations.
So why do we even have a Republican Party? They always just go along with pretty much whatever the Democrats want anyway. Why shouldn’ t we just disband the Republican Party and let the Democrats completely run things? How would Washington D.C. be any different if the Republicans didn’ t even exist?
At this point, even Rush Limbaugh is completely disgusted with the Republican Party…
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
What Fresh Horror Awaits the Economy After Fed Rate Hike?
There is one predominant reality that must be understood before a person can grasp the nature of the Federal Reserve and the decisions it makes, and that reality is this: The Fed’s purpose is not to defend or extend American markets or the dollar; the Fed’s job is ultimately to DESTROY American markets and the dollar. I have been repeating this little fact for years because it seems as though many otherwise intelligent people simply will not accept the truth, which is why they have trouble comprehending the actions that the Fed initiates.
When analysts make the claim that the Fed has positioned itself “between a rock and a hard place” in terms of policy, this is not entirely true. The Fed is exactly where it wants to be in terms of policy; but the central bank has indeed positioned the U.S. ECONOMY between a rock and a hard place, by design.
Globalists see the U.S. dollar and the U.S. economy as expendable (for the most part), and this sacrifice is meant to create distracting chaos as well as geopolitical advantage towards a new fully centralized world economic system. You can read the considerable evidence for this agenda in my article ‘The Fall Of America Signals The Rise Of The New World Order’…
I believe the Fed will continue to hike rates throughout 2016 despite any current or future negative economic signals. It has ignored the global contraction so far and will ignore future events. Why? The Fed is setting the stage for a collapse. Period.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-24/unstoppable-california-gas-leak-now-being-called-worst-catastrophe-bp-spill
“Unstoppable” California Gas Leak Now Being Called Worst Catastrophe Since BP Spill
Since initially reporting on California’s Alison Canyon gas leak, more details have emerged on the scale (and potential for no solution) of the problem as the infamous Erin Brockovich writes, “the enormity of the Aliso Canyon gas leak cannot be overstated. Gas is escaping through a ruptured pipe more than 8,000 feet underground, and it shows no signs of stopping,” as according to the California Air Resources Board, methane — a greenhouse gas 72 times more impactful in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide — has been escaping from the Aliso Canyon site with force equivalent “to a volcanic eruption” for about two months now.
New infrared footage exposes the massive leak.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Criminal Roots: A Shocking Exposé on the Clinton Family and Their Rise to Power
A plethora of controversy and allegations of steamy sexcapades, treasonous business scandals, illicit criminal activity, drug trafficking, and even a number of mysterious deaths has surrounded the Clinton family for years.
In fact, these scandals, many of which have been documented, may be some of the best kept secrets hidden from the American people to this day.
According to an underrated documentary film titled “The Clinton Chronicles,” which contains scores of multiple eyewitness testimonies, the Clinton family is “sick” and may be one of the biggest criminal syndicates to have ever occupied the White House, aside from maybe the Obama Administration.
The film points out just how energetic and inspirational former U.S. President and Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton was in his younger years before he started trafficking cocaine and successfully laundering drug money from the illicit operations conducted through the Arkansas Development Finance Authority ( ADFA) and other channels — to the tune of millions of dollars.
Larry Nichols, former Director of Marketing for the ADFA, was brought in by Clinton in 1988 to help with “loan” operations when he stumbled upon what Bill Clinton had previously touted to Nichols as “the best kept secret in Arkansas” at the time.
Nichols spoke a little about his time at the ADFA, about a month into his employment:
“I was literally working, setting, in the middle of Bill Clinton’s political machine. It was where he made payoffs, where he repaid favors for campaign support. I was in an interesting seat and I knew it.”
Nichols said the ADFA was the “epicenter” of the Clinton’s money laundering operations.
Doc DeLaughter, a former Arkansas police investigator, also came forward in the film, detailing how law enforcement had a grand jury case with witnesses built who would confirm that Dan Laster was indeed involved in cocaine trafficking and was one of Clinton’s largest financiers and best friends.
According to Larry Nichols, Dan Laster and the Clinton crew would give “piles and piles of cocaine […] ashtray after ashtray full at parties and they were giving it to young girls,” including a 14-year-old girl who eventually became devirginized after the group had a physician place her on birth control.
Nichols also reported that both Bill and Hillary were complicit in the money laundering scheme, which used a state program, the ADFA, that was ostensibly set up “to provide low-interest bond loans to churches, schools, and colleges”. Moreover, Nichols also reported that Bill Clinton’s signature had to be on every single loan, which would theoretically empirically link the former U.S. president to the alleged scandal…
And on one last note, did you know that over 90 people surrounding the Clinton family have mysteriously ended up dead?
[Comment: Read it all. Trail of bodies in Arkansas linked to drug operations. Don’t forget the tainted blood scandal (innocent people infected and died from tainted blood supply from Arkansas).]
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Researcher Tim Lott longs for the days of old, describing the ugly reality that 21st century humanity is beginning to create. He wrote, “The physical apparatus we use to process the world is being re-shaped, and if we don’t preserve what we once had, our very sense of being will shift permanently and irreversibly. The content of our digital lives is no longer an appendage to life — it is reaching a point where it is life, in the sense that the imagination can conceive of nothing else.”
In researching the problem, he found some startling statistics. For one, the average teenager now manages 4,000 text messages a month. Five years ago, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that adolescents from 8 to 18 years of age were spending seven hours a day on handheld devices and phones. Tim also made a startling connection in his research. In a compilation of 72 studies, he found that the current online generation had 40 percent lower levels of empathy than previous generations.
Indeed, throwing away human interaction for electronic communication is destroying the human ability to relate, to perceive, to understand one another, and to accomplish new things. Technology destroys the empathetic connections between people. The addiction to hand-held screens cuts off one’s soul from the universe around him and the universe within him. Needing continuous partial attention also corrupts character, destroying human empathy for all living things.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Iranian Nuclear Deal is a Catastrophic Hoax
The mainstream media blindly championed the Iranian deal at the expense of reason, celebrating its “signing” and every prospective step for implementation. But the not-so-surprising revelation is that there is, in fact, no Iran deal. There are just a number of political commitments made by each of the so-called P5+1 countries, in the hope that Iran will somehow reform itself. Iran, on the other hand, seems barely, if at all, committed to the non-agreement.
Rather, it is poised to receive international sanctions relief while continuing on its belligerent course. The Obama administration acknowledged in November that neither America, nor the Iranians, nor the other P5+1 members have actually signed the accord ostensibly designed to stall Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. Yet a review of Fox News, The New York Times, and other media organizations shows that the mainstream media remain uniformly committed to misleading the public. These reporters must know by now that the deal has not been signed—meaning that there is no deal—yet they continue to pretend that it is.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Police Kill Teen Gunman Inside Northlake Mall
Christmas Eve descended into chaos Thursday when shots were fired between two groups at a north Charlotte mall and a responding off-duty police officer shot and killed one of the alleged gunmen.
Northlake Mall was jammed with last-minute holiday shoppers when an argument broke out between two groups involved in an ongoing dispute. At least two of the people involved pulled guns and opened fire, on the mall’s lower level near Dick’s Sporting Goods, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said.
Witnesses say hundreds of panicked bystanders screamed and shoved to get away from the area. Others dove under tables at the nearby food court.
Police working at the mall responded. CMPD Chief Kerr Putney said witnesses told police that when off-duty officer Thomas Ferguson reached the scene, one of the gunmen turned and pointed his weapon at Ferguson.
The officer fired his service weapon, Putney said. Daquan Antonio Westbrook, 18, was pronounced dead at the scene. At an evening news conference, Putney said police did not know if the teenager fired any shots at the officer.
Records indicate Westbrook had a lengthy criminal record involving guns, drugs and violence…
| — Hat tip: Dean | [Return to headlines] |
Efforts to suppress religious observations are not restricted to the holiday season. The Department of Veterans Affairs director of the Houston National Cemetery, Arleen Ocasio, banned saying God or Jesus at funerals. VA Press Secretary Josh Taylor responded, “The idea that invoking the name of God or Jesus is banned at VA national cemeteries is blatantly false.” However, this policy was observed by several witnesses, including Congressman John Culberson.
Fox News has reported that soldiers at Fort Hood were warned that donating money to evangelical Christian groups or Tea Party groups could result in military punishment. The report claims that an Army Reserve training brief listed Catholics and Evangelical Christians as examples of religious extremism. Training instructions designating religious groups as extremists led Army Secretary John McHugh to write the following memo:
On several occasions over the past few months, media accounts have highlighted instances of Army instructors supplementing programs of instruction and including information or material that is inaccurate, objectionable and otherwise inconsistent with current Army policy.
Examples of intolerance toward religion in the public school are too numerous to count. One example illustrates the technique used by educators to cover their tracks. A teacher in the Willis school district in Houston, Sara Flottman, allegedly confiscated two bibles from students and threw them in the trash. She also allegedly threatened to call Child Protective Service. A school district investigation claimed that the incident never occurred. However, the school’s credibility may be questioned. School Superintendent Kay Karr admitted that Flottman had mentioned calling CPS but that she had said it “in jest.” When disciplining students, it is not a time for humor, especially concerning such dire punishment.
| [Return to headlines] |
Facing Death Chants and Hate Crimes, Sweden’s Jews Live in a Climate of Fear
‘A lot of Jews are scared’ in this Nordic community of 15,000, as lines blur between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism
On a chilly fall day, passersby on a central street in Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, were greeted with chants in Arabic urging the killing of Jews.
“Death to the Jews,’ and “More stabbings,’ the protesters screamed,” recalls Jehoshua Kaufman, head of communications for Malmö’s Jewish community. The protesters at the October pro-Palestinian rally were referring to the near-daily stabbings of Jews by Arab assailants over the past couple of months in Israel.
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Swedish politicians, including two parliament members, were present at the protest. However, after Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, Isaac Bachman, condemned the event, they distanced themselves, claiming they had not understood the meaning of the Arabic slogans.
Kaufman questions how such an event had been permitted to take place, and why the politicians had not demanded a translation of the chants.
“The politicians could have left and said, “We don’t know what you are saying, but we won’t participate unless we know what you are saying,’“ he says…
| — Hat tip: Steen | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Bolton Boy Accused of Raping Girl, 7, Just Three Days After His 11th Birthday
A schoolboy has been accused of raping a seven-year-old girl, just three days after his 11th birthday.
The primary school child was seen trembling when he appeared at Manchester Youth Court, alongside his father.
He allegedly raped his friend’s younger sister at their home and is also accused of boasting about it to two friends.
[Comment: Very likely the public school sex promotion “education” played a part in twisting the youngsters mind.]
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
A young woman who falsely claimed she had been hauled into bushes and raped twice by the same man in the same park five months apart has been jailed for two years.
A court heard former Edinburgh Academy pupil Naima Shereen Mirza, 21, ‘spun a web of lies and deceit’, causing police to waste hundreds of hours investigating her malicious allegations.
Officers became suspicious when Mirza named her attacker as a man from Perth, who was actually in jail at the time the alleged offences took place, which was when she was a pupil at Edinburgh Academy.
After searching her property, they found a journal where she documented her increasingly alarming thoughts and fantasies, including the names and offences of rapists and sexual offenders from around Scotland.
She later told detectives she concocted the attacks to explain her poor exam results after failing to get in to Strathclyde University, in Glasgow.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Assad: Europe, Turkey, Qatar, And Saudi Arabia Made Syria a “Hotbed of Terror”
“If you are worried about [refugees], stop supporting terrorists,” Assad said in an interview with Russian news organizations in September. “That’s what we think regarding the crisis. This is the core of the whole issue of refugees.”
In other words, were it not for the all-out effort to destabilize the government in Damascus by channelling weapons and money to militants, the war in Syria might not have ever happened and thus residents of bombed out former urban centers like Aleppo wouldn’t have been forced to run for their lives to Western Europe.
If you believe Seymour Hersh’s latest exposé, even The Joint Chiefs of Staff understood the problem with the anti-Assad strategy adopted by Washington, Riyadh, Ankara, and Doha. According to Hersh, the Joint Chiefs passed intelligence to Assad via a series of intermediaries in an effort to undermine the White House and the CIA’s support for militants.
In a new interview with Die Presse, Assad once again exposes who exactly is behind Syria’s five-year conflict and accuses the UN of being a puppet of the US. Assad also bemoans Saudi Arabia’s support for Wahhabism, which he calls a “dark” and dangerous ideology that’s now being exported to Europe. Read the full interview (translated) below.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Facebook Censors Story About ‘Refugee’ Raping Swedish Woman
Facebook has sensationally banned a story about a ‘refugee’ raping a Swedish woman in line with the company’s new policy to censor anti-migrant posts deemed to be “xenophobic”.
The Infowars story, which explained how a north African migrant who participated in the gang rape of a woman in Stockholm got off without charge, was posted on Facebook yesterday but disappeared from the website within hours.
A query of the URL on Facebook’s ‘Debugger’ website reveals that, “this link is blocked.” Any attempt to post the link on Facebook results in failure.
Apparently, Facebook feels it is more important to control the narrative on the migrant crisis than to defend rape victims.
The company’s policy was leaked during a conversation between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and German Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier this year which was caught on a hot mic. Zuckerberg promised Merkel that he was working on censoring anti-migrant posts.
It subsequently emerged that the German government and Facebook were working with ex-Stasi agent Anetta Kahane to identify “xenophobic” posts made on the social networking website and punish people who make them with fines and jail sentences.
[Comment: That is the whole purpose of these “fad” sites like face-build-your-own-dossier-book. To fool people into using them as a “portal” to the real internet. That way poeple never leave the fenced-in yard whose boundaries are determined by the private organization in concert with government edicts.]
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
There are many kinds of disruptive sounds, some heard, some unheard and yet audible in the chambers of the mind, which in their way are no less disturbing than the physical and domestic variety. A sound of this nature may be described as a form of psychological dissonance caused by social friction and cultural discord. It is a public vibration that may sometimes erupt in rumble and thunder but frequently sinks into the background as an ever-present murmur, distressing enough to keep one awake and ruin the harmony of a country retreat.
This is how I began to hear Islam, not as the muezzin’s call to prayer that Barack Obama registered as one of the loveliest sounds in the world, but as a vector-borne oscillation in the air, an electrical hum, always there even in the absence of sudden detonations, as it were.
No doubt I was primed for it. After years of studying Islam, following its bloody trail across the globe from 9/11 to the present day, experiencing a number of unpleasant encounters with Muslims asserting their sense of privileged inviolability, remarking the tsunami of migrants inundating Europe and gradually destroying its inheritance and cohesion, and now observing hundreds of these interlopers, aka “Syrians,” bivouacked not 20 miles from the house we bought, the hum of Islam is perpetually in our ears.
It is easy enough to lay the blame for our discomfiture on an irresponsible and mentally insolvent Liberal government that has rolled out the ceremonial carpet for a problematic cohort of refugees and asylum seekers whose culture and history are wholly incompatible with our own. Those of us who are still sentient know that Islam is a foreign body among us and that it is inherently destructive, irrespective of reformist efforts to achieve the impossible and which result only in creating an eidolon that Stephen Kirby has called “Fantasy Islam.” Islam itself cannot be fixed and to complicate matters, as Diana West writes in a fascinating Breitbart article, it is undergoing a “recurrent cycle of…expansionism into the wider West.”
But we must look to the people who elected the rash and short-sighted Liberal establishment that has abetted this expansionism. Our savior electrician was one of these voters. As we got to know him after several visits, the conversation turned to the political scene and the inevitable controversy surrounding Islam, a faith about which he knew absolutely nothing apart from the pap the mainstream press had fed him. As far as he was concerned, Islam was a “religion of peace” whose adherents would enrich our multicultural social fabric. 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam. The nearly 27,000 terror attacks since then were a figure of pure exaggeration. On the contrary, Muslims would add an element of vibrancy to our culture.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Merry Christmas to you, too, and to all who have Christian beliefs and hopes.
There are “men of goodwill.”
Moments of peace are possible in one’s personal space.
The door to the universe was opened a long time ago.
Oslo’s “Citizen of the Year”: “Death to Israel,” “Long live the Sharia”
Pakistani promoted as Citizen of the Year in Norway’s capital in 2015. Never mind the social media picture where he is posing with a gun. “This is a photo from Pakistan, where everyone has a gun in his home. It was taken in 2010 and I posed to look cool”.
Saint Hallvard is the patron saint and official symbol of Oslo. In the framed drawing of this symbol, handed to the “Citizen of the Year“, Saint Hallvard has been replaced with Mohsan Raja.
“Unanimiter et constanter” (Latin: United and constant)
Irony over irony…
Saint Hallvard was born 1 000 years ago, in 1020, and died a martyr in 1043. “He is considered a martyr because of his defence of an innocent thrall woman”
“Volunteers in the the group Nattevaktene describe Raja, who has also worked in the group Refugees Welcome to Norway, as controversial …
Several pointed out that Raja especially has had an inappropriate tone towards female volunteers.”
However sad, in all its irony, with endless numbers of Allah-soldiers pouring into Europe, this Citizen of the Year award may stand as a picture of how civilization is being turned into barbary Anno Domini 2015.
Why is it so important for a muslim to assist the – muslim – “refugees” to/at their destination in Europe?
Hijrah
“My main goal for leaving Syria is to lead people to the acceptance of Islam”
“Hijrah, or jihad by emigration, is, according to Islamic tradition, the migration or journey of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Yathrib, later renamed by him to Medina, in the year 622 CE. It was after the hijrah that Muhammad for the first time became not just a preacher of religious ideas, but
a political and military leader”