A major DDoS attack brought down a substantial portion of the Internet on the East Coast of the United States today. The attack was directed at Dyn, a cloud-based provider, and affected Twitter, Spotify, and a number of other major websites.
In other news, due to the housing shortage in Germany, an elderly couple in the city of Bonn are now faced with the choice of living in a refugee home with asylum seekers, or becoming homeless.
To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.
Thanks to JD, Jerry Gordon, MC, Nick, Reader from Chicago, Srdja Trifkovic, 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.
’Tis the season for telephone polls, and earlier tonight I got a call from one of the poll robots. A lot of the time I hang up on the pollsters, because I don’t have the time or the patience to sit through all the yap-yap. But tonight I was in a mellow mood for some reason, so I went ahead and answered the questions.
For quite a few years now all the political polls that come in to Schloss Bodissey have been fully automated. This one wasn’t a robot voice, as far as I could tell — they’d actually hired a woman to record all the questions and all the numeric options for responses — but there was no human being on the other end of the line during the call.
Strangely enough, it didn’t begin with “Para continuar en español, oprima nueve.” That’s what I get when I talk to the electric company, or the bank, or the credit card company, or the phone company. Could the polling company’s algorithms tell from my south-of-the-Mason-Dixon-Line “Hello” that I was a native English speaker from the South — a moderate rebel, as it were?
Anyway, the digital voice launched into its spiel. It gave the name of the polling company, and said it would like to ask me a few questions. I pressed “1” to continue.
It said, “First of all: Is this Edward?”
Well. I tend towards paranoia, but I also assume that I have no privacy left. So I pressed “1” to tell the robot lady that yes indeed, I was Edward. But the thing is, anyone who calls me “Edward” doesn’t know me. That’s what tells me to hang up immediately when a salesman calls and asks for Edward. So wherever this polling company got the connection between our number and Edward, it wasn’t a from a friend of mine.
From there on, however, I lied. It’s my policy to lie to pollsters. I don’t want the social engineers to get an accurate reading of the pulse of the American public. I don’t let them know how I feel until I actually enter the voting booth.
If you feel the same way, I recommend that you lie to pollsters whenever they call.
I strongly approved of Hillary Clinton and most of her policies — minimum wage, health care, taxing the rich at a higher rate, etc. etc. I strongly disapproved of Donald Trump and all his hateful xenophobic racist policies.
But I didn’t punch the button for the exact opposite of my opinion in every case. I varied it a little bit (mostly by pressing “3” for “it doesn’t matter”) just to randomize the result.
But then, when the robot reached the end of its (her?) list of questions, it told me…
Geert Wilders is not the only defendant on trial in The Netherlands for speaking out against Islam. The following report by Dr. Van Helsing describes the case of Raffie Chohan, an Islam-critical immigrant from Indonesia who was convicted of “hate speech” last month in a Dutch court.
Another free speech trial in the Netherlands
By Dr. Van Helsing
On September 28, 2016, Mrs. Raffie Chohan stood trial for statements she made during a speech she gave at a Pegida demonstration on November 11, 2015, in the Netherlands.
Statements she made during her 15-minute speech were:
‘The Islamisation of the Netherlands has already begun, supported by the Dutch government and the EU.’
‘The left doesn’t realize that they are being used by Islam, and once Islam achieves a majority they will be finished, too. Just look at Iran, look at Libya etc. The left thinks that it will never become a victim of Islam. (…) Islam will use the Western concept of freedom of speech to practise its own ideology. As long as Islam is a minority, we can live alongside it in a multicultural society. Because Islamic ideology doesn’t know freedom of religion, it will not tolerate a multicultural society.’
‘Without Islam, the Netherlands would be a fantastic country.’
She placed the written version of her speech on Facebook and added: ‘Another reason to hold Muslims in contempt and to hate is for their insane ideology, because it isn’t a religion of peace anywhere.’ For this statement she was charged with hate speech (Sections 137d (1) and 137c (1) of the Dutch criminal code).
Another statement she made was: ‘The massive inbreeding in the Islamic culture inflicts irreparable damage on Muslims.’ This statement wasn’t used to bring charges against her.
Raffie Chohan’s final statement during her trial:
‘Thank you, your honour, for the opportunity to have the last say in this trial. Today, Wednesday September 28, 2016, I stand trial in Utrecht before a court of three justices. It affects me quite a bit, and it is the first time ever for me to stand trial in a criminal court. I don’t feel like I have done anything wrong, I just shared my knowledge with people who were taking part in a demonstration. It is freedom of speech that is at stake. Any person who reads my speech can come to only one conclusion: I am sharing my opinion. My opinion, however, has been taken out of context. I will give a few examples of behavior of people who are followers of Islam.
My experience with Islam started early in life. My father was a Muslim and my mother a Christian woman. Growing up in Indonesia, I learned early that my mother wanted to raise her children in a different way than my father. I learned how it felt to have the rules of Islam imposed upon oneself. My father wanted to familiarize my sister with his relatives in Pakistan and left her there for five years, without my mother’s consent. Diverting from the Western values that we share, my father brought another woman into the house. My mother and her five children, of which I was the youngest, were confined to two separate rooms in our large house. My brother had to join him in attending the mosque, which led to furious quarrels between my parents. My father considered him a devout Muslim. Once my parents were divorced, my mother, my sister and brother, and I moved to the Netherlands. I was eight at that time.
I gathered my knowledge of Islam by reading a lot, studying papers and having conversations with Muslims, and former Muslims too. Many women where afraid to share their knowledge with me for fear of retaliation. I understood this, because you cannot build confidence if they don’t feel safe.
After a meeting between Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Horst Seehofer, the Minister President of Bavaria, the two men spoke briefly at a joint press conference.
Many thanks to CrossWare (Hungarian) and Nash Montana (German) for the translations, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
About forty asylum seekers, most of them Algerians, staged a violent protest at a facility in Spain. After smashing furniture, the discontented refugees climbed to the roof of the building and stayed there for eleven hours.
In other news, a California man who had just been convicted of child sexual assault slit his own throat with a smuggled-in razor blade while sitting at the defense table in the courtroom. His self-inflicted injury is not life-threatening, however, and he is recovering in the hospital.
To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.
Thanks to Dean, JD, Nick, Reader from Chicago, 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.
A business owner in the Ruhr town of Schwerte got tired of asylum-seekers loitering on his property, so he went all Western Front on them and built a barbed-wire barrier to keep the invaders out. The municipality is not happy with him, but I took a liking to the guy when I read his only comment: “I don’t talk to the press.”
Many thanks to Nash Montana for translating this article from Ruhr Nachrichten:
Private company installed a fence against refugees
Steel pipes and NATO-security razor-sharp barbed wire: With a fence straight from a war zone, a company in Schwerte-Ost seals itself off against a neighboring refugee home — because the refugees were loitering on the property for better cell phone reception.
The city is still examining on how to proceed with zoning laws and regulations against the “structure”. The martial structure blocks a carport and a garage which until now had only been accessible via city-owned property.
Two dozen asylum seekers
The city bought the adjoining property a year ago and converted it into an home for asylum seekers. Roughly two dozen asylum seekers live in the home.
Jutta Pentling from the complaints department at the courthouse has no words: “Something like this just has never happened in this administration. We are now examining what we can do and what we must do.” First and foremost, a barrier tape has been put up to prevent refugees from getting too close to the border structure.
The volunteer helpers at the asylum home are indignant and horrified. Because the city didn’t furnish the asylum home with wifi, the inhabitants have to be creative when they want to maintain contact with their families in their home countries. Therefore it only took a few steps onto the neighboring property and wifi connections were improved.
Deeds follow words
Rolf Siegel is one of two CEO’s of the long-established steel company Hesse. He first tried to have conversations with the inhabitants of the home and with the city’s social workers responsible for the refugee home, asking them to forbid further trespassing on the company’s property. The workers themselves confirm they warned their protégées multiple times not to trespass on the property.
The following video is an excerpt from a recent debate in Germany on a proposed burka-ban. It took place in the Landtag, the State Diet or regional parliament of Baden-Württemberg, in the city of Stuttgart. The speaker is Dr. Christina Baum, a member of the AfD party (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany).
Many thanks to Ava Lon for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
The following report from yesterday’s Fria Tider contains explicit descriptions of sexual violence that may be disturbing to sensitive readers.
Many thanks to Tania G. for having the fortitude to translate this nasty piece of business:
Asylum seeker participated in gang rape — and is awarded 140,000 (Swedish crowns) in damages
One of the African asylum seekers from Eritrea who was present when a woman in Ludvika was brutally gang-raped has now been granted 140,000 Swedish kronor in damages from the Swedish taxpayers. This despite the fact that he had participated in the rape and even kissed the woman, reports the Dala-Democrat.
The gang rape took place in central Ludvika at 12:30am the night of Saturday, 17th of October last year.
The woman was on her way home when she stopped at the ATM machine at Fredsgatan. At the ATM several African men stopped her and asked her for cigarettes. Upon leaving, one of the Africans followed her to an alley by the restaurant Trädgården where he asked her to give him a kiss.
“No, I have a boyfriend,” the woman explained to no avail, as the African then shoved his tongue into her mouth.
Two other Africans suddenly appeared and the woman thought they would come to her rescue. Instead, the Africans formed a circle around the woman, pulled down her pantyhose and panties and subjected her to both anal and vaginal rape while the others helped hold her.
The woman was shocked, and screamed for help during the gang rape, which lasted fifteen to twenty minutes. Finally a Swedish man arrived at the scene and asked the Eritreans what they were doing, which led to the Africans scattering in different directions.
When she was found she lay completely battered on the ground without both panty-hose and panties.
Many thanks to Nash Montana for the caption. Nash is a genius at meme captions — she thought up several more for it, which we’ll be using in later versions of the same image.
If anyone wants to create their own meme caption for this picture, here’s the original with no text-over.
Note: This post was a “sticky” feature originally published on October 18, and was on top for a couple of days. Scroll down for more recent items, including last night’s news feed.
As we reported last week, a presentation on refugees was scheduled last night at the St. Ann Catholic Church in Arlington, Virginia. The event took place as planned. It was entitled “Refugee Resettlement in the U.S.: A National and Local Humanitarian Response”, and was jointly presented by officials of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement and Catholic Charities.
Last night’s event was more important than it might seem at first glance. After all, it was just a little PowerPoint slide show given to a few dozen people by a government official about the wonderful cultural enrichment that will be brought to America by “Syrian” “refugees”, and about how essential it is for Americans to help these poor suffering people. What’s so important about that?
I’ll explain.
The presentation was led by Anastasia Brown, the Director of the Division of Refugee Services in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement. Ms. Brown is also the former Director of Refugee Programs for Migration and Refugee Services of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
She was assisted by Patricia S. Maloof, the Program Director of Migration and Refugee Services of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington.
Patricia Maloof at a conference at Virginia International University, ‘Dissecting a Complex Conflict: ISIS, the Syrian Refugee Crisis, and the Humanitarian Response’, October 2015
The event was sponsored by Marie Powell, the former superintendent of schools in the Arlington, Virginia Diocese of the Catholic Church and the retired executive director of the Secretariat of Catholic Education for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
So what we saw at St. Ann Church last night was, in effect, a joint venture by the United States Government and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Catholic charitable organizations rake in hundreds of millions of dollars every year for their assistance in the Refugee Resettlement program, so the Church and the Diocese of Arlington are hardly disinterested parties.
Ms. Brown told the audience that she was not there in her official capacity as an employee of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). However, as you’ll see in the more detailed report below, her slide show was watermarked not with her own name, but with the official logo of a federal agency. So Anastasia Brown seems to be Schrödinger’s bureaucrat — both official and unofficial at the same time.
The fact that she was ostensibly speaking ex officio provided the justification for her refusal to answer questions on the record. In addition, the organizers were at pains to emphasize their request that there should be no record of the event at all. Sources who were present say there was an implied attempt to intimidate attendees into keeping the presentation off the record. Marie Powell told the audience that they were “not allowed to write or blog about the event.” The leaders explicitly said “no press coverage” several times. They forbade any taping of the event.
Well, it got taped, anyway. A 90-minute audiotape recorded via a handheld microphone is below.
Why should such events go unrecorded and unreported?
Why the secrecy? What happened to the most transparent administration in history?
And, if they want to keep it a secret, why are they talking about it at a parish church in Arlington? Are they perhaps recruiting well-meaning but unpaid volunteer drones to help them with the resettlement process?
This is important, because these refugees — most of them unvetted Muslims — are, in effect, being parachuted into communities in the dead of night. Localities are not being consulted. Local residents are largely unaware of what is happening. And religious “charities” working in close cooperation with the federal government (thank you, George W. Bush, for those “faith-based initiatives”) receive lucrative contracts for managing the logistics and doing the initial placement of the migrants.
This audio is raw, and has not yet been transcribed. I’m calling on the distributed intelligence of the Internet for help with a transcript. In particular, readers who were actually present at last night’s event should be able to tell us which parts to focus on. Only some of the tape is interesting and worth transcribing, so listen to it and see what sort of nuggets you can find amidst all the dross. Unfortunately, the quality of the audio leaves something to be desired.
And email me first (gatesofvienna [at] chromatism [dot] net), before you get started on any transcribing. Let me know the start time and finish time of the section you intend to transcribe, and I’ll tell you if anyone else has already started work on it. We want to avoid duplication of effort, if possible. Then, when you send in the completed transcript, include the start and finish times, so Vlad will know where to cut when we produce shorter excerpts based on the tape.
Here’s the raw audio that we want to crowdsource. Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for uploading this video:
A Gates of Vienna reader named Belinda attended the event at St. Ann Church, and kindly sent us this description of what happened:
The audience was told by Marie Powell, who sponsored/led the event, that they were “not allowed to write or blog about the event”. She didn’t say that the speakers were merely speaking off the record but that “no press coverage” was allowed. They also forbade any taping of the event.
The federal employee presenting, Anastasia Brown, read off a PowerPoint presentation labeled “Office of Refugee Resettlement”. Every slide had “Administration for Children and Families” at the bottom. You can see the logo in her PowerPoint here, in the bottom right of the page right above “Department of Health and Human Services”. Her name did not appear to be in the presentation at all — just her office.
Ms. Brown claimed that she was not speaking on behalf of the federal government, and that therefore she could not be quoted, as she had not received permission to speak to the public. However, when questioned, she repeatedly declined to comment, implying that in fact she was speaking on behalf of ORR, and ORR did not want to comment.
She refused to answer how much the program would cost. She refused to answer what percentage of screened refugees were rejected. When members of the audience asked questions the presenters didn’t like, they shut down the Q&A and told attendees the event had concluded.
Belinda also included these observations:
There was a public hearing given by a federal official, and the public was instructed that they’re not permitted to write about it or record it. This is why people don’t trust the federal government.
They refused to answer any pertinent questions.
They refused to talk about the cost of refugee resettlement.
They refused to talk about the disparity between Muslim refugees and those who are Christians.
They refused to say what percentage of those who had been screened were rejected.
This was presented as though they were consulting the public, but in actuality they were telling the public how it was going to happen, and the public just had to accept it. They were not interested in the public’s input, or what the public thinks.
It was tantamount to attempted intimidation when they implied that there would be consequences if people wrote about it — they explicitly said “no press coverage” several times before the event. They could have simply said, “This is Chatham House rules, and therefore not attributable to any speaker.” But they didn’t say that.
The person who said, “You’re not allowed to write or blog” about the event was the representative of the sponsor, Marie Powell. Ms. Powell also introduced everyone, including the federal official who was speaking to the public.
Through the magic of technology, Bill Whittle answers the prevarications of the Democrat ‘front runner’. Beloved she is not, but her Nero complex may be enough to finally bring our country to its knees, the very position where so many in the world think we belong.
Americans aren’t worried about the coming “election”. We know it’s as rigged as money and mortal threats can make it. No, it is the après-election that has us concerned. If she machinates a victory, we will be ruled by an Obama-droid who has undergone surgery to remove the charm. We remember the first Clinton reign: rule by grifters with long memories. They don’t need an Enemies List – those huge crowds are inscribed forever on their hard drives. On the other hand, a scrap of foolscap on which to write the names of their friends would be useful.
As for the numerous U.S.- haters who would love to see America knocked out of position? With the “election” of Mrs. Clinton,, they may well get their wish for an end to American hegemony. But given the rule about vacuums, these folks ought to consider whether or not they’ll like any better whatever entity will rush in to take our place. My preference would be Russia, but it’s China and the Saudis who already own much of our real estate. Perhaps they can rule together. Instead of ObamaCare, we’ll have ChinaCare. Death Panels won’t be necessary or needed.
As for us average Americans, “electing” Hillary Clinton will prove what many have long claimed: we really are a banana republic headed by a tin-pot tyrant who raids the Treasury for her ‘friends’…while her consort hunts for a safe space in the Big House for himself and his cigars. Perhaps the Map Room, under the table? For sure, Hillary don’t need no maps to craft her foreign policy. Some scalpels, maybe, and a Catherine wheel or three.
As the “child” refugees begin pouring into Britain from Calais, questions are being raised in Parliament about how old the allegedly minor migrants actually are. Facial analysis of photos indicates that some of them are much older, possibly as old as 38.
In other news, the Malaysian Islamic Development Department, a government body, has ruled that food vendors must change the name “hot dog” before the product can receive a halal certification.
To see the headlines and the articles, click “Continue reading” below.
Thanks to AF, DV, Fjordman, JD, Vlad Tepes, 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.
A major DDoS attack brought down a substantial portion of the Internet on the East Coast of the United States today. The attack was directed at Dyn, a cloud-based provider, and affected Twitter, Spotify, and a number of other major websites.
