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deltamusings · 3 years

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The Democrats’ draft spending bill still includes huge changes to the nation’s migration laws, even after the Senate’s parliamentarian removed several amnesties from the multi-trillion dollar spending bill.

The bill would dramatically push up housing prices by expanding the inflow of chain migrants, and also would slash white-collar salaries by creating a new and uncapped migration category of college-educated workers for a huge variety of Fortune 500 jobs from coast to coast.

Together, both migration rules will transfer wages and wealth from employees to coastal investors, and will also shift corporate investment, real estate wealth, government spending, and political power from heartland states — such as Ohio, Montana, West Virginia, and Arizona — to the major coastal states of California and New York.

But the parliamentarian’s decision to exclude the amnesties from the bill may prompt Democratic leaders to drop the uncapped white-collar giveaway for the Fortune 500 companies and their investors.

“If we’re talking about getting [white-collar] visas so we can take care of businesses’ problems, I’m not supportive — in the absence of getting anything else done,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) told Bloomberg Government.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) also suggested that he might oppose the white-collar giveaway to the Fortune 500 if Democrats do not get their amnesties and new voters. “Bob [Menendez] and I have the same goal, which is to get as many people as possible on a path to citizenship,” he told Bloomberg.

However, Democrat leaders still want to turbocharge the chain migration process, even without the amnesties, Menendez indicated. “If we’re talking about recapturing visas for family backlogs … I certainly would consider that,” even without the amnesties, Menendez said.

For many years, Democrats have blocked business efforts to import more white-collar workers unless business leaders help them win more voters from amnesties. In January, for example, Menendez said, “we need the high-tech community who will benefit from the reforms we are proposing, to be an advocate of the overall [amnesty] reform movement.”

But “the chain migration [expansion] is something that is supported by the same left-wing activist community as the [excluded] amnesty, and so, as long as they get the chain migration, then the activist left will consider it a fair deal if the business community getting uncapped foreign workers,” former White House advisor Steven Miller told Breitbart News.

The underlying bargain– more cheap workers and consumers for the Fortune 500 in exchange for more poor voters for the Democrats — is cementing the strategic alliance between the progressives who run the Democratic Party and the corporate investors who run the Fortune 500, said Miller:

There’s a progressive-corporate alliance that has been forged inside of the Democratic Party and nowhere can it be seen more clearly than on migration and the current reconciliation bill. The progressive left wants unlimited chain migration and the corporate donors and lobbyists want uncapped foreign workers. The reconciliation bill delivers both. And if they’re also able to get an amnesty from the parliamentarian, which I fear they will be able to do in some form, then that will just further cement the alliance between powerful progressive and powerful corporations.

The Fortune 500 giveaway will allow companies to recruit an unlimited number of foreign graduates with dangled promises of green cards and citizenship, said Rob Law, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. “It will be the equivalent of having unlimited legal immigration for [foreign] college graduates,” he said.

The plan rewards the investor-run corporations that already use the green card workforce of at least one million imported H-1B, J-1, L-1, and OPT workers to drop white-collar salaries. The cheap and compliant workforce also excludes many outspoken American graduates from rewarding careers in healthcare, business, technology, design, or science.

Law continued:

These are the companies that have intentionally discriminated against American workers, have subjected American workers to training their unqualified foreign replacements as a condition of getting severance packages, and, and now it is going to be a permanent loop where they will have as many cheap foreign workers — with at least a college degree — as they want, and that will just further suppress wages.

Both of the huge immigration changes have been ignored by the establishment press, partly because their immigration reporters prefer to cover the fears and hopes of Haitians as they try to move from home in South America to jobs throughout the United States.

The proposed changes have been ignored by journalists even though they will damage the income and status of journalists — and of their friends and peers. With lower income and status, fewer journalists will be able to buy good homes and get their children into high-status universities.

The journalists have also failed to quiz critical swing-vote Democrats about the migration changes that would divert investments and jobs away from their homes states. So far, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Krysten Sinema (D-AZ), Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) have said little or nothing about the chain migration change or the white-collar indentured worker rule.

GOP leaders have also not challenged these proposed changes as violations of the Senate’s debating rules, even though both changes will damage GOP electoral support, and redirect wealth and political power from GOP-run states to Democrat-run coastal states.

GOP leaders have persuaded the Senate’s debate referee, the parliamentarian, to dismiss the Democrats’ proposed amnesties as policy changes disguised as budget changes. “The policy changes of this proposal far outweigh the budgetary impact scored to it and it is not appropriate for inclusion in reconciliation,” the parliamentarian wrote.

The amnesties are a direct threat to the jobs of GOP Senators because they would create many new Democratic voters.

But the silence about the chan migration plan and the white-collar giveaway reflects the reluctance of GOP legislators to protect Americans’ popular pocketbook interests amid donor demands for more migrants.

For example, on Wednesday, 34 House Republicans and 14 GOP Senators stayed silent as GOP leader Mitch McConnell approved a massive, expensive, and open-ended inflow of Afghans into Americans’ homes and jobs. The Senators were:

Roy Blunt (R-MO)

Richard Burr (R-NC)

Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV)

Bill Cassidy (R-LA)

Susan Collins (R-ME)

John Cornyn (R-TX)

Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

John Kennedy (R-LA)

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)

Mitt Romney (R-UT)

Mike Rounds (R-SD)

Richard Shelby (R-AL)

Thom Tillis (R-NC)

Todd Young (R-IN)

In September, Breitbart News described the still;-hidden chain migration expansion in the spending bill:

The Democrats’ amnesty bill quietly invites three million chain migration arrivals into the U.S. workforce, likely forcing Americans to pay higher rents.

“It’s a huge deal,” said Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

About four million people are now waiting many years to get one of the roughly 240,000 cards annually available for the foreign siblings and adult children of legal immigrants. The new bill would allow them to “Early File’” for conditional residency and work permits if they have been waiting for more than two years and can also fly into the United States.

…

The amnesty’s offer of residency to the 3 million chain migration migrants likely could create an additional inflow of 1 million per year — and an extra shortfall of roughly 800,000 apartments or homes.

Many states’ residents are already suffering from high housing costs. For example, several low-income Americans and immigrants died in early September when a storm flooded their affordable basement apartments in New York.

Breitbart has also described the bill’s plan to flood the job market for U.S. graduates with a massive supply of foreign graduates who will work for low wages plus the promise of U.S. citizenship for themselves and their families:

Democrat leaders “are blowing away all the numerical limits” on employers offering green cards to [college graduate] employees, said Rosemary Jenks, policy director for NumbersUSA. “There’s no limit anywhere.”

The pending bill would allow U.S. investors and executives to import and pay an unlimited number of foreign workers with the dangled reward of citizenship. That citizenship-for-work law would minimize executives’ need to recruit Americans or even offer good salaries.

The bill was revealed Friday, and on Monday, was quickly rushed through the House judiciary committee without C-SPAN coverage. Mark Zuckerberg’s astroturf empire is marketing it as a relief bill for deserving illegal migrants — but it boosts investors by dramatically expanding the flow of cheap workers, government-funded consumers, and room-sharing renters into the U.S. economy. Democrat leaders hope to squeeze the bill through the Senate via the 50-vote reconciliation process.

The expanded foreign worker pipeline will remain open until at least September 2031, even though many millions of Americans will need jobs during the next ten years after they graduate with debts and degrees in health care, accounting, teaching, business, design, science, technology, or engineering. “If you’re in the pipeline by September 30, 2031, you’re in [the 2021 amnesty bill],” Jenks added.

The push for cheap workers and more chain migration is being led by Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors. They stand to gain financially from more cheap labor, government-aided consumers, and urban renters.

Their network has funded many astroturf campaigns, urged Democrats to not talk about the economic impact of migration, and manipulated coverage by the TV networks and the print media.

Migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, equality-promoting civic culture.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

This pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.

#visa worker

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myrecordcollections · 5 years

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AK Musick

@ 1972 Germany Pressing

*****

AK Musick formed back in the early 70’s. They were interested in producing music in a very democratic way. Their legendary LP is now a very rare item of what I would call “German experimental era”. More about it in the following interview with Hans Kumpf, clarinetist. Special thanks goes to René Debot for helping me to get in contact with Hans.

There is not much known about your group AK Musick. Tell us about the formation of the band? Where did you find other members? We all five members were studying at the Teacher’s College (“Pädagogische Hochschule”) in Ludwigsburg close to Stuttgart in Southern Germany. Three of us (Alfred Lell, Winfried Koch, Hans Kumpf) had the same clarinet teacher. The singer Angela Weber I have known already from my hometown of Schwäbisch Hall, where we joined the same pupils’ choir. The Keyboarder Helmut Grab also studied with the famous composer of contemporary music Helmut Lachenmann, a Luigi Nono alumnus. Were you and other band members of AK Musick involved with any other projects before 1972? Helmut Grab was busy in improvised rock music; the others were more active in classical music. I was the only one who was really involved in jazz before. Let’s share a few words about your childhood and teen years. You grew up in Stuttgart. What did you study and what influenced you the most? I was born in Stuttgart in 1951, but the next six years I grew up in Markgröningen in the Stuttgart area. My parents moved then to Schwäbisch Hall, quite in the middle between Stuttgart and Nuremberg, in 1957. There I was impressed by foreign students of the University in Heidelberg who performed in my hometown: I could listen to the original music of Africa, Asia and America. When I was a teenager I was already interested in the music from the whole wide world. In an alternative youth club (“Alpha 60”) I attended interesting jazz concerts (like pianist Wolfgang Dauner and trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff) and later I organized “music weeks” (including classical + contemporary music, jazz an advanced pop/folk music). In my school, which was specialized in music, I as a pupil/student had the responsibility for culture. In May 1969 I organized a bus trip to Stuttgart, where Jimi Hendrix performed – even some months before the Woodstock festival. When I was eight years old, I began with a recorder (simple flute), later I learned in lessons trumpet, piano and clarinet. Now clarinet is my main instrument. AK Musick is a really avant-garde project consistent of free jazz influences. What can you tell me about the concept behind it and what does the name actually mean? We all were eager in new things, we wanted to make music in a very democratic way. Everybody had a classical education – this was the base. Of course we were also influenced by the avant-garde composer Helmut Lachenmann (who also was in the studio during our LP recording). He writes very intellectual compositions, and the parameters are very important (this we learned with the Stockhausen alumnus Johannes Fritsch in Darmstadt, too!). AK Musick? “AK” is a German abbreviation for “Arbeitskreis” (“workshop”), which was used at the universities quite often at that time. “Musick” is a mixture of the English “music” and the German word “Musik”. Even in medieval times they wrote “musick” in England. And in “Musick”, there is included the English word “sick”. We had humor.

Is the musical content a live-recording from the 13. German Jazz Festival Frankfurt, that held on 14.11.1972? Would you like to tell us a bit more about the pieces on the LP?

No, no – be careful! In March 1972 we played at the German Jazz Festival in Frankfurt at the Newcomer’s Concert – with more than thousand listeners and “live” a radio/TV recording. In the same hall the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin performed before, later Miles Davis and many others. On November 14 in the same year we recorded the LP at the famous Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg. We prepared the studio session very carefully – time is money. At least we did it in three hours. The sound engineer was Martin Wieland, who had recorded before the popular cologne concert by Keith Jarrett for the ECM label.

“Impro-Vision” sounds like electronical music – but we used only natural instruments, “Hava” is a feature for three clarinets, “Ron Do” is like a classical rondo, but with solo improvisations as the new parts. The theme we played only once, and it was later technically copied to fulfill the rondo form.

The “composition” of the first track of the AKM LP.

What can you tell me about the label AKM Records. Was this your label? The cover artwork and everything is all handmade. How did you decide to do so and how many copies were released. I believe 200?

We released 150 LP’s. We were students and had less money. Therefore it was the cheapest way to make the cover art for our own as handwork – with templates. The booklet we printed with the help of the student’s association. We worked for a December weekend at the floor of the Ludwigsburg teachers college. It made fun. It’s crazy: Today at Ebay they pay more than 700 Dollars for our old and historic long playing disc.

How long did the project last and did you play anywhere else? Are there perhaps any other recordings still unreleased? Besides of Frankfurt, we only played in the area round Stuttgart. AK Musick as quintet xisted for a decade. In 1980 we did the performances “Spuren einer Russlandreise” („Tracks of a Russian Trip“) after Winfried Koch and me were in Moscow and Leningrad/St.Petersburg. It was a multimedia combination of art and music. We all stayed friends, but we didn’t play in the old quintet ensemble. For instance, Angela Weber, Alfred Lell and me were singing in the choir of the musical “Cabaret” at the Stuttgart State Theater…

Twelve years ago I went with a radio tape of the Frankfurt festival concert to the Bauer Studios for digitalizing the analog recording. Then I burnt CD’s for my own. That is all.

‘Free Blacks’ is your next music project. You joined forces with Perry Robinson. Wolfgang Dauner was also part of this album. What can you tell me about it? This was again a very limited issue? Perry Robinson was famous as the leading free jazz clarinet player. So he was interesting for me. I heard him several times before, but when he played in 1974 (2 years after AK Musick) at the Frankfurt festival I spoke with him, and soon we settled a duo on a bark bench outside the festival hall. We played in harmony like two brothers. After that I organized a studio recording in Stuttgart. It was after a concert he did with Gunter Hampel – between 1 and 3 o’clock in the night. Because there was time left for the LP I added three solo pieces. There is one (“Mona-a-gogo”) with a little help of my friend Wolfgang Dauner. He had invited me for recordings at the Radio Stuttgart before, and after that I arranged this peace for me as a clarinet on two different tracks. These two tracks he transformed with a ring modulation of his synthesizer. I produced 200 LP’s of “Free Blacks” (it means the free black clarinet instruments…)

AKM Records released ‘In Time’, feat. Theo Joergensmann, Bernd Konrad, ‘Jam Session Leningrad’, feat. Anatoly Vapirov, Sergey Kuryokhin, Alexander Alexandrov and ‘Jam Session Moscow’, feat. John Fischer, Leonid Chizhik, Alexey Zubov. What can you tell us about projects you had together with previously mentioned musicians? You know, I established the AKM label for my own – with no business strength. Just for fun. My clarinet colleague Theo Jörgensmann (we met us in Remscheid – close to Cologne – at a jazz clinic in 1969) had no own label, then I said he could write “AKM” on the sleeve. My second trip to the passed away Soviet Union was in December 1980/January 1981 when I had my regularly vacancies as a teacher. But then I smuggled my clarinet in and a tape out – Jam Session Leningrad. There I improvised together with saxophonist Anatoly Vapirov, bassoon player Alexander Alexandrov and the late pianist Sergey Kuryokhin. I was the first Western jazz avant-gardist to play in USSR together with resident musicians. I came as normal tourist and had to hide my ambitions against the KGB. Some months later, I traveled with my New York based friend John Fischer (piano), to Russia and we did a Session in Moscow together with the well-known players Leonid Chizhik (p), and Alexey Zubov (ts). Chizhik now lives in Munich, Zubov moved to Los Angeles. In 1984 you released ”On a Baltic Trip” album on Leo Records. What’s the story behind it and what followed after this? Leo Feigin is a refugee of former Leningrad, who worked for the Russian Service of the BBC in London and found the label “Leo Records”. He had presented my LP’s recorded in Leningrad and in Moscow already in the British radio. And so he was so friendly to release my sessions done in the Baltic metro poles of Riga, Vilnius and Tallinn as a “real” record company. In Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia I played together with leading jazz musicians there. Of course I was quite famous in whole Soviet Union thanks to the underground propaganda of the free jazz dissidents…

What are you currently working on? In meantime I am retired as a teacher. I am busier in writing articles and working as a photographer than as a clarinetist. So have no special planes as a musician. If the people ask to perform with my Polish wife Katarzyna “Polish Poetry + Jazz”, I can do it. On other sides I like to play at openings of art exhibitions, and often I play a kind of Klezmer music at events for killed Jews by the Nazi regime. If you look back in the late 60’s and 70’s. How did you see this German scene. You were more part of jazz scene, rather than rock experimental scene with acts such as Amon Düül II, Embryo etc. But were you connected with what was happening at the time and what was the scene in your city? Hitler time was not long far away. We wanted to have a better Germany. We wanted to make a democratic and world open minded music. Of course, I have known and listened to Embryo, Amon Düül, but it was no influence to AK Musick. When we played at the Frankfurt festival Paul and Limpe Fuchs (often partner of the piano player Friedrich Gulda!) joined us as surprising guests on the stage. The best concert of my hometown Schwäbisch Hall in 1969 was “Black Sabbath” with Ozzy Osbourne… They played for 600 Deutsche Marks (approx. 200 Dollars) in a former church.

AK Musick with Limpe Fuchs. Thanks for taking your time. Would you like to send a message to It’s Psychedelic Baby readers?

Keep the eyes and ears open. International understanding is so important. Maybe music can help.

Klemen

#AK Musick #Jazz #Free Improvisation #Experimental #Germany #1972

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nerds4life · 5 years

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The Essence of Evil: Sex with Children Has Become Big Business in America

By John W. Whitehead for Global Research, April 24, 2019

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Children, young girls—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.

This is America’s dirty little secret.

Sex trafficking—especially when it comes to the buying and selling of young girls—has become big business in America, the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

As investigative journalist Amy Fine Collins notes,

“It’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a ‘righteous’ pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.”

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.

According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

Who buys a child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life.

“They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period of servitude.

It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

“Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,” said prosecutor Krishna Patel.

This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.

This is not a problem found only in big cities.

It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out,

“The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”

Don’t fool yourselves into believing that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.

It’s not.

It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves. They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have no choice.

In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.

For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.

No doubt about it: this is a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.

Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out,

“Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“

“For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”

Where did this appetite for young girls come from?

Look around you.

Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.

“All it takes is one look at MySpace photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”

This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”

“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”

In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?

Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported,

“Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.”

Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.

Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.

Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.

While Debbie was fortunate enough to be rescued, others are not so lucky. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).

With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.

For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.

Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.

Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:

Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”

What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become.

“They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”

Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted,

“We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”

“In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”

A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men. One woman recounts how her trafficker made her lie face down on the floor when she was pregnant and then literally jumped on her back, forcing her to miscarry.

Holly Austin Smith (image on the right) was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.

Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old.

“I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”

As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune:

“In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”

One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.

This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.

Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.

Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking—much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime—has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to make our communities safer.

So what can you do?

Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.

Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.

This epidemic is largely one of our own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.

Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.

Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.

Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.

That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.

But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

#spread this #make sure people know #get educated #be aware #save some lives #i worry many of you are prime targets for this #I can see the insecurity and desire for attention #rape culture #human trafficking #mine #this is a problem throughout the world

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onestowatch · 5 years

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From Childish Gambino to ‘Atlanta’ & Everything in Between: The Rise of Creative Genius Donald Glover [WHERE ARE THEY NOW?]

Photo: Ibra Ake Donald McKinley Glover Jr., more popularly known by his stage name Childish Gambino, or simply Donald Glover, is the very definition of a modern-day renaissance man. In the realm of entertainment and media, there is very little Glover has not tried his hand at and exceeded exceptionally well in doing so.

With an ever-growing list of accolades and awards, which must require both their own Wikipedia entry and a glorified trophy room somewhere in the artist’s house, Childish Gambino has not just left a mark on culture, but he has arguably shaped it. Set to headline both weekends of Coachella 2019 (where he will also be premiering his new film Guava Island, which co-stars Rihanna) and release his final album as Childish Gambino, we look back at the rise of Glover into one of the most important visionary minds of his generation.

Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Glover’s varied artistic pursuits were no hidden secret. From being voted “Most Likely to Write for The Simpsons” in his high school yearbook to producing an independent mixtape while at The New York University Tisch School of the Arts, every moment of Glover’s young adult life was tied together by a constant connecting thread–the passion to create. On that note, we would be remised if we did not mention Glover’s short-lived time as a DJ.

First going by the name MC D and later changing it to mcDJ, we are sure that mcDJ was a hit at every New York college art party, seeing as how the one album he chose to remix in its entirety was Sufjan Stevens’ acclaimed 2005 release, Illinois. While Illin-Noise! unfortunately may not be what Glover will go down in history for, he was, at the time, already making a name for himself online.

As part of internet sketch comedy group Derrick Comedy, Glover’s knack for irreverent humor was racking up fans and views in the millions on a budding video sharing platform called YouTube. It was also around this time that he was contacted by producer David Miner, who, along with Tina Fey, became noted fans of Glover after reading a spec script he had written for The Simpsons. Guess high school yearbooks are about the closest objects we have to crystal balls. Well, sort of. Miner and Fey would not invite Glover to write for The Simpsons, but instead, in 2006, would invite him to write for and occasionally cameo on 30 Rock.

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Writing for 30 Rock over the next four years, Glover would earn his first of many accolades, being presented the Writers Guild of America Award for “Best Comedy Series,” an award that Glover would take home as part of the writing staff, three years running. While the years from 2006 to 2009 would be the start of Glover’s critical acclaim, it would be that final year that would introduce him to his widest audience to date.

2009 saw the release Mystery Team, the artist’s first feature-length film, which was written by Derrick Comedy and featured Aubrey Plaza in her feature-length debut as well. However, it was another 2009 project that introduced the world at large to Donald Glover. The brainchild of Dan Harmon, who would later go on to help create Rick & Morty, Community introduced a primetime audience to Glover as jock-turned-nerd Troy Barnes. Starring in the show’s first five seasons, before departing the show in 2014, Community was, for many, the first real showcasing of Glover’s early promise as a rapper. Even if that early promise was demonstrated by Glover rapping about anthropology alongside Betty White covering Toto’s “Africa.”

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Not to skirt over the viral outcry that was 2010’s #donald4spiderman, an outcry that is still felt today thanks to Glover having cameos in both 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming and 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the crucial moment in defining his career as a culture-shaping artist was meeting Ludwig Göransson. A composer for the show Community, Göransson would become a close friend and collaborator of Glover, working on every one of his albums and EPs to date.

Before leaving Community in 2014, Glover would somehow find the time adopt the name Childish Gambino–a name given to him by a Wu-Tang Clan name generator–and release six mixtapes, an EP, and two studio albums, 2011’s Camp and 2013’s Because the Internet. Oh, and that’s not to mention the Comedy Central standup special, multiple festival performances, and television appearances that he squeezed in there as well. However, what is most impressive about Gambino is not the just the amount he accomplished but that with each new project, the progress he was making as an artist was palpable.

Camp was as straightforward a Childish Gambino rap album as they come–a blistering, raw, unfiltered 13-track run of one rap’s wittiest rappers. Yet, in Because the Internet, we see the first hint at the true depth of Gambino’s limitless talent. Enlisting the likes of Chance the Rapper, Jhene Aiko, and Azaelia Banks, and emanating a musical ambitiousness akin to early Kanye West, the sophomore effort would go on to earn a Grammy nomination for “Best Rap Album.” So, what does Glover, who is quickly making a name for himself as a series contender in the rap world do with his highly-anticipated follow-up album? He releases a funk album.

2016 was the year that defined Glover as more than just a talented rapper or a great comedic mind. It was the year that Gambino was spoken of in terms of lofty ideals like “critically-acclaimed artist” and “renaissance man.” For not only did he release the critically-lauded “Awaken, My Love!”, a mesmerizing fusion of psychedelic soul, funk, and R&B aesthetics, but he also created Atlanta.

While “Awaken, My Love!,”’s smash hit “Redbone” was played on repeat across the world, Glover was receiving equal praise for his comedy-drama series. The show, which is equal parts character study and an examination of Atlanta’s storied hip-hop scene, quite literally made history. Amongst the shower of awards Atlanta won, the show earned Glover an Emmy for “Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series,” marking the first time the award was ever awarded to an African-American.

Following “Awaken, My Love!,” and the ongoing critical success of Atlanta, it was difficult to imagine Glover climbing any higher. This was an artist at the peak of his game. Then, in May of 2018, Donald Glover both hosted and starred as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, otherwise known as the day he released “This Is America.”

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The deafening damnation of America’s obsession with gun violence, appropriating viral dance trends, and a history of discrimination, wasted no time in invading the world’s collective conscience. Once again, Glover had evolved, cementing himself as not just a purveyor of culture but a shaper of it. So, in 2019, what’s next for the proclaimed renaissance man? Well, an end of sorts, apparently.

2019 is expected to mark not only Glover’s first time headlining Coachella but also mark Gambino’s final studio album and subsequent retirement of the project. But hey, try not to fret too much. If the history of Glover has taught us one thing, it is that the departure from one creative endeavor only leads to continued artistic evolution.

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#where are they now #childish gambino #donald glover #rap #hip hop #this is america #coachella #soul #guava island

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xtruss · 3 years

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A US flag hanging from a steel girder, damaged in the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, blows in the breeze at a memorial in Jersey City, New Jersey on 11 September 2019 as the sun rises behind One World Trade Center building and the re-developed area where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood in New York City on the 18th anniversary of the attacks. (AP Photo/J. David Ake)

OPINION

Why Biden Has Decided to Lift Veil of Secrecy on 9/11 Inquiry Papers 20 Years After Tragedy

— By Ekaterina Blinova | Sputnik | September 6, 2021

The US Justice Department is expected to release several batches of documents related to the 9/11 terror attacks in the next six months. The first batch is due to be declassified no later than 11 September 2021. Here we examine what has prompted the Biden administration's move.

As the 20th anniversary of 9/11 looms, President Joe Biden signed an executive order on 3 September directing the Department of Justice to declassify the inquiry documents into the terror attacks. According to the president, "information collected and generated in the US government’s investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks should now be disclosed, except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise."

Last month, some families of 9/11 victims urged Biden not to attend any memorial events on 11 September this year unless his administration agreed to publicise documents related to the hijackers - 19 men associated with al-Qaeda,* 15 of whom were Saudi Arabian nationals. In July 2021, the 9/11 families sued Saudi Arabia for money, alleging that the country's officials could be complicit in the tragedy. Riyadh resolutely denies official involvement, and the 9/11 Commission also found no connection between the terror attack and the Saudi government.

Biden Needs to Divert Public Attention

"The timing for the release of the classified documents may be related to the Biden administration's need to justify the withdrawal from Afghanistan following [Donald] Trump's decision," says Dr Luciano Zaccara, an assistant professor and research coordinator at the Gulf Studies Center at Qatar University.

Biden's chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan caused his approval rating to plummet. Polling by FiveThirtyEight statistics-pooling website, shows that 48.4 percent of American respondents disapprove of the president's performance in office with his approval rating hovering around 45.9 percent. According to the Washington Examiner, these figures have prompted growing concerns among Democrats who are nearly a year out from 2022 mid-term elections in which they will struggle to maintain their congressional majorities.

"The criticism [Biden] received from inside the country related to the lack of US accomplishments during the past 20 years of occupation focused on the human cost, mainly in American lives, that the occupation represented, demanded such a measure to demonstrate the actions in Afghanistan accomplished the objective of punishing those who were behind the attacks," notes Zaccara.

Under these circumstances, the Biden administration is seeking to set a new foreign policy doctrine of the US regarding the whole Middle East which prioritises its own security concerns over other third countries, the academic highlights. Thus, the long-anticipated release of 9/11 documents could divert public attention from the botched withdrawal of Afghanistan and help identify new priorities, according to the professor.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman

Biden Risks Damaging Relations With MBS, Again

At the same time, some observers suggest that the documents might cast doubt over Saudi elites, given that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian nationals. If the forthcoming release contains any material of that kind, "this may certainly erode relations" between Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Zaccara suggests.

"We are seeing a greater reluctance by the Biden administration to 'protect' America’s Saudi allies from the release of potentially damaging information regarding the extent of Saudi involvement and subsequent cover-up by both the Saudis and by the Bush administration," echoes Dr Mehran Kamrava, director of the Center for International and Regional Studies and professor of Government at Georgetown University Qatar.

Previously, the Biden administration criticised the crown prince, suggesting that he could be involved in the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. On 26 February, the Biden administration released an intelligence report "linking" the crown prince with the incident but providing no evidence to back the claims. Some media suggested at the time that Biden's White House was seeking to "sideline" the powerful prince, known for his sympathy with former president Donald Trump.

Release of the documents related to the Saudi nationals' involvement in 9/11 is "20 years overdue", says Peter Kuznick, professor of History in American University, Washington, DC. According to Kuznick, "this lack of transparency is sometimes simply to avoid embarrassment and sometimes because of geopolitical calculations." Under George W Bush, the US was dependent on Middle Eastern hydrocarbons and tried not to infuriate its allies.

"As Gulf oil diminishes in importance in US foreign policy thinking, the US has been trying to extricate itself to some degree from the region, which is good," the professor notes. "Unfortunately, Biden and the blob think this will free them to confront more aggressively the real antagonists – Russia and China – which is in no one's interest at a time when collaboration is needed on so many fundamental global issues."

Congressman Charlie Wilson, who pushed the US Congress into backing the mujahideen

Docs May Expose US Complicity in 'Creating' Jihadi Criminals

At the same time, however, the documents may also shed some light on the US Cold-War era collaboration with jihadists, Kuznick says. He points out that the US used to train, arm, and finance Afghan Mujahideen in the late Seventies and Eighties in order to use them as Cold War proxies against the USSR. "Those insurgents included Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders as well as many of the Taliban*," according to the academic. Washington has long abstained from releasing 9/11 documents apparently because "it could have exposed the US complicity in creating the criminals who hit this country on 9/11," Kuznick suggests.

Meanwhile, on 3 September, CBS released an interview with Danny Gonzalez, a former FBI agent who participated in Operation Encore, the still-secret investigation into the two Saudi hijackers who were based in San Diego. Gonzalez told CBS News that "19 hijackers [could not] commit 3,000 mass murders by themselves," suggesting that they had a US-based support network. According to him, two of the culprits attended flight training in Arizona before the attack.

Twitter: Catherine Herridge@CBS_Herridge! #OperationEncore “I can’t sit on the sidelines when I know the truth,” retired FBI agent Danny Gonzalez told @CBSNews in his first network TV interview about the still secret FBI case + retired FBI agent Ken Williams who wrote the “Phoenix memo” that warned before 9/11 potential

Twitter: Catherine Herridge@CBS_Herridge! September 4, Replying to @CBS_Herridge. Terrorists were flight training in the US, said of the files, “The evidence is there. I've seen it. But I can't get into specifics because of the protective order.” Operation Encore drilled down on 2 hijackers who lived in San Diego + who helped them. (Former FBI agent who worked on still-secret FBI 9/11 case says hijackers had U.S.-based support...In an exclusive interview with CBS News, former FBI agent Danny Gonzalez said "19 hijackers cannot commit 3,000 mass murders by themselves." cbsnews.com)

It is still unclear whether the release would become a bombshell or whether "the government machinery [would] slow the process, provide excuses and redact documents so heavily that they are meaningless," says Bruce Eagleson, the son of a 9/11 victim who suggested in his September op-ed that "the first test" would be 11 September 2021 when the batch of files is due to be released.

Former FBI Agent Who Worked on Still-Secret FBI 9/11 Case Says Hijackers Had U.S.-Based Support Network

— By Catherine Herridge, Andres Triar | September 3, 2021 | CBS News

President Biden signed an executive order Friday directing the Department of Justice to oversee a declassification review of some documents related to the 9/11 attacks, amid pressure from families of victims who are demanding to know if Saudi Arabia helped the hijackers. The order requires the attorney general to release any declassified documents in the next six months.

Some records pertain to a still-secret investigation, code named "Operation Encore," which centered on the two hijackers that lived in San Diego and who may have assisted them. While it could take months for the documents to be released, Danny Gonzalez, a former FBI agent who worked on the operation, told CBS News that he's confident two of the hijackers had a U.S.-based support network.

"19 hijackers cannot commit 3,000 mass murders by themselves," Gonzalez said in his first television interview about the investigation.

"Based on what you found, do you believe there was a domestic support network for the hijackers?" CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge asked Gonzalez.

"Obviously," he said. "I can't comment on it, but you don't have to be an FBI agent with 26 years of experience to figure that out."

Gonzalez said the two hijackers — Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar — were helped by a number of Saudis, including Omar al-Bayoumi.

Bayoumi, who was working for the Saudi government, has said he randomly ran into the two hijackers at a restaurant in Los Angeles and urged them to move to San Diego. There, he helped them find an apartment and open a bank account. The two hijackers even started flight school nearby.

Gonzalez said he is under FBI orders not to reveal certain classified information about Operation Encore. As is another former agent, Ken Williams, who wrote a memo before 9/11 that warned potential terrorists were taking flight lessons in Arizona.

"The evidence is there. I've seen it. But I can't get into specifics because of the protective order," Williams said. Both former agents are now working for the families as investigators.

"I can't sit on the sidelines when I know the truth," Gonzalez said.

The 9/11 families are suing Saudi Arabia for money. The Saudis deny official involvement, and the 9/11 Commission report found no connection. The commission report also found that Bayoumi was an "unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists," and said there was "no credible evidence that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups."

CBS reached out to the Saudi embassy in Washington with questions and asked to hear directly from Bayoumi, among other Saudi nationals. An embassy spokesman had no comment.

Gonzalez said the public would learn "a lot" if records from Operation Encore — which began two years after the commission's report — were released, and that it would change the public's understanding of 9/11.

Brett Eagleson is leading a group of 9/11 families fighting for the documents to be released. He was 15 years old when his father, Bruce, was killed in the World Trade Center South Tower — and twenty years later, he said he wants his daughter to know the secrets of 9/11 and who killed her grandfather.

"Your grandfather was a hero," he told her.

Eagleson called Biden's executive order a "critical first step" but said he remains skeptical.

In response to the president's decision to declassify some of the documents, the FBI said in a statement that it will "continue to work in coordination with the Department of Justice and other agencies to declassify and release documents related to the 9/11 investigation."

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ayittey1 · 6 years

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Notable & Quotable

“Africa can feed herself. Even without using any modem farming techniques such as pesticides and with only the most casual approach to maintaining the soil, the 51 countries of Africa presently have the potential to feed a population three times as large as that now living in the continent, even allowing for the fact that 47 percent of the land surface is useless for crops.”

n A Food and Agricultural Organization study cited in a West Africa editorial Dec 14, 1981; p. 2959.

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“Despite noises being made about the exploitation of the people, it is the STATE, as the Chief Vanguard, and her so-called Public Servants, Civil Servants which actually exploit others in the country. The money used in buying the cars for Government officials, the cement for building estates and other Government bungalows which workers obtain loans to buy, the rice workers eat in their staff canteens, the soap, the toothpaste, textiles cloth which workers buy under the present distribution system all come from the farmers' cocoa and coffee money.

This STATE-MONOPOLY CAPITALISM has been going on since the days of the colonial masters and even our own Governments after independence have continued the system.

The farmers realizing this naked exploitation decided unconsciously that they would no longer increase cocoa and coffee production, they would not increase food production and any other items which the State depends on for foreign exchange. In effect, there will be no surplus for the State to exploit.”

Yaw Amoafo (The Daily Graphic (Feb 17, 1982; p.3).

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"Despotism and kleptocracy do not inhere in the nature of African cultures or in the African character; but they are now rife in what was once called British colonial Africa, notably West Africa."

n Lord Peter Bauer, the late and famous British Economist. Reality and Rhetoric: Studies in Economics of Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984; p.104.

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"The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership . . . We have lost the twentieth century; are we bent on seeing that our children also lose the twenty-first? God forbid!"

n Chinua Achebe (in The Trouble With Nigeria. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Press, 1985; p.3).

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“When, if ever, black people actually organize as a race in their various pulation centers, they will find that the basic and guiding ideology they now seek and so much need is embedded in their own traditional philosophy and constitutional system, simply waiting to be extracted and set forth.

n Chancellor Williams The Destruction of Black Civilization. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987; p.161)

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“Abuse of black people by Arabs, especially Syrians and Lebanese, has been ignored for too long. The painful fact is that this abuse occurs under our noses in African towns and cities where they have come to enjoy our hospitality. It is high time Arabs were made officially aware of this and reminded of the black solidarity they have enjoyed for years in their conflict with Israel.

In the late 1970s, it was an open secret in New York that Arab diplomats never invited their black counterparts to their receptions.

Kwaku O. Sarpong of Ghana (West Africa, March 7, 1988; p.27).

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"Here in Lesotho, we have two problems: rats and the government," said a tribal chief in a rural farming community.”

n A tribal chief in a rural farming community in Lesotho (International Health and Development, March/April 1989; p. 30).

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“Those who feel that the citizen should not continue to fight against monolithicism, political Illiberalism, tribalism, patrimonialism, bureaucratic inefficiency, public graft and corruption are at the end of the day the true enemies of Kenya (and indeed all of Africa). And they probably need to learn the lesson, often too bitterly learnt elsewhere, that those who do not accept the force of argument have often had to give in to the argument of force.”

n Wachira Nzina and Chris Mburu in The Nairobi Law Monthly, No. 31. March 1991.

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“Most African regimes have been so alienated and so violently repressive that their citizens see the state as enemies to be evaded, cheated and defeated if possible, but never as partners in development. The leaders have been so engrossed in coping with the hostilities, which their misrule and repression has unleashed that they are unable to take much interest in anything else including the pursuit of development. These conditions were not conducive to development and none has occurred. What has occurred is regression, as we all know only too well.”

n Claude Ake, Nigerian Scholar in). "How Politics Underdevelops Africa," in The Challenge of African Economic Recovery and Development, ed. Adebayo Adedeji, Owodumi Teriba, and Patrick Bugembe. Portland, OR: Cass, 1991; p.14.

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“To solve Zaire's economic crisis, we send three sacks of angry bees to the governor and the president. And some ants which really bite. Maybe they eat the government and solve our problems."

Amina Ramadou, a peasant housewife (The Wall Street Journal, Sept 26, 1991; p. A14).

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“Foreign aid has done more harm to Africa than we care to admit. It has led to a situation where Africa has failed to set its own pace and direction of development free of external interference. Today, Africa's development plans are drawn thousands of miles away in the corridors of the IMF and World Bank. What is sad is that the IMF and World Bank "experts" who draw these development plans are people completely out of touch with the local African reality.”

n Dr. Joshat Karanja, a former Kenya member of parliament, in New African, June 1992, 20.

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“One of the most urgent matters for Nigerians to address when they settle down to debate the National Question is the issue of collaboration by professionals and technocrats with corrupt and repressive regimes. We must devise effective sanctions against our lawyers and judges and doctors and university professors who debase their professions in their zealotry to serve as tyranny's errand-boys, thus contributing in large measure to the general decay of honesty and integrity in our national life.

n Chinua Achebe in African News Weekly (1 October 1993, 32).

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"I believe the worst form of civilian government is better that the most benevolent military regime."

n Chuba Okadigbo, former chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of Nigeria's dissolved Senate (The New York Times, Dec 2, 1993; p.A3).

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"Africa's biggest problem today lies with the leadership. They are so removed from the people that they are looked upon as foreigners. They are driven by self-interest, so excessive that their peoples' interests are forgotten -- hardly different from the colonial masters"

n John Hayford (New African, April, 1994; p.7).

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1“The problem in Africa is precisely that there is no state to speak of. What exists are ramshackle gangs, presided over by political thugs and military adventurists, generals who have never been to war, and rickety old men who lack vision, who simply pretend to be governing, talk less of ruling, a society. In no African social formation has this body, by whatever name it goes, been able to operate as a state.“ From “Pan-Africanism: Agenda for African Unity in the 1990s.”

n Julius O. Ihonvbere, in a Keynote address at The All-African Student's Conference, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, May 27, 1994.

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"In my view, Ghana's economic malaise is not the result of lack of opportunities or of resource. Ghana, like the rest of Africa, with the possible exception of South Africa and a few others, suffers from the affliction of dishonest leadership . . .I have put the emphasis on bad and corrupt leadership as the root cause of our economic woes. I make no apologies for this because we all know what is going on. On my part, I am quite disappointed that we in Parliament have not been courageous to say nay when this way is necessary."

n The Late and Hon. Hawa Yakubu-Ogede, former MP, Bawku (The Ghanaian Voice, Feb 12, 1995; p.8).

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"Nigeria, the comatose giant of Africa, may go down in history as the biggest country ever to go directly from colonial subjugation to complete collapse, without an intervening period of successful self-rule. So much promise, so much waste; such a disappointment. Such a shame. Makes you sick."

Linus U.J. Thomas-Ogboji (The African News Weekly (May 26, 1995; p.6).

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“Your modern politics [in Africa] is dictated by personal greed, power and suppression of thought. Our forefathers believed in participatory democracy. They saw politics as a way to liberate and build nations . . . The "modern" school [in Africa] taught us to read and write but not where we came from or where we are going to. The schools again teach us how to acquire money but not how wealth is created. We want to bring people's awareness back to their roots . . .

The chief represents the people. Without the people there is no chief. They have one goal. The people make the rules and the laws and both the chief and the people adhere to the same rules . . . We as a people have deserted our traditions in favor of [foreign ones]. We need to go back in time and learn every aspect of our traditions that served our forefathers well.”

n Nana Osei-Bonsu, Asantefuohene, a traditional chief in African Monthly, July, 1995; p.10.

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“Apart from the corruption, the army under Captain Valentine Strasser government (of Sierra Leone) has become totally incompetent, and is conducting a war against the people. The countryside is nothing but destruction, upon destruction. Whole towns and villages have been destroyed."

n Ibrahim Ibn Ibrahim, a Sierra Leonian journalist in Akasanoma, July 31-Aug 6, 1995; p.38).

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“A critical look at contemporary African military would bring one's eye closer to tears, and one's mind nearer to insanity. The caliber of people found in the military is an obloquy to the belated institution. Today, soldiers of most African countries are known as brutes, bullies and buffoons. Soldiers are always supposed to be in the barracks, either training or doing something profitable. But in Africa, the case is totally different and appalling. Come to Accra and you will see soldiers moving about, wielding guns, pistols, harassing citizens and causing needless trouble. Go to Lome and you will see them. Go to Burkina Faso. To Lagos. To Kinshasa. O! what a degradation of the military! Ghana has seen varied types of uncouth and undisciplined soldiers."

n Prince Oduro (Free Press, Aug 4-10, 1995; p.4).

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"No military coup in Africa has produced a vibrant economy to replace the bankrupt one it set out to redeem. In almost every case, the army boys have imbibed the ways of the corrupt politicians they pushed out of office and even taken their crookedness to a higher level."

n Editorial, African News Weekly, Sept 1, 1995; p.7.

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"I have written his article to register my protest and revulsion at the way leaders of African nations have been disgracing the black race. Just look at the way Ken Saro-Wiwa and co. were hanged like pigs without even the benefit of an appeal . . . In all hue and cry, what is both infuriating and irritating is the speed with which African countries together with their leaders are quick to blame all that go wrong on the continent on our supposed "Enemy" - the West. This sad culture is what has propelled me to protest with all the venom that I can muster . . . Why can't we accept our responsibilities as a race (black race), face the music for our deeds and always tend to pass the buck?

It is not only on the political field that our good-for-nothing so-called teachers blame the Western World for our own mistakes. Take the case of Ghana, for example. We always hear of the often quoted phrase "the unjust world economic order" being the cause of all our problems. Don't we use the same economic textbooks as the Western world? . . .All that I am saying is, we don't deserve to be treated like beggars, because we are not using our brains at all (that is, if we have brains anyway). The sage says charity begins at home."

Kwesi Obeng, UST university student (The Ghanaian Chronicle, Jan 21, 1996; p.4).

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“We have had to go back to our roots. We have to go back to our traditional ways of solving our problems, traditional ways of working together. Otherwise, Boosaaso a port in war-torn Somalia would not have peace.”

n Gen. Mohamed Abshir, Boosaaso's de facto administrator in The Washington Post, March 3, 1996; p.A29.

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“All symbols of military authority must be removed from our midst. Those arrogant photographs that desecrate public spaces, schools, hospitals, offices, even courts of justice. Street names, also, change them all. Remove them. Remove them by stealth, remove them openly, by cunning, remove them by bribery, remove them forcibly, remove them tactfully, use whatever method is appropriate, but remove them. I call on all who are resolved to play a role in our mutual liberation to participate in this exercise of psychological release, or mental cleansing and preparedness.

n Wole Soyinka – in The Open Sore of a Continent. New York: Oxford University Press.1996; p.59).

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“The [Nigerian] military has perfected the use of intimidation and disinformation to keep a passive population calm. In the process, a timid population became quiet and in some cases conspiratorial and accommodating of dictators for too long. The result is what you see today: a bunch of idiots terrorizing the nation, intimidating opponents and harassing dissidents. It is an equivalent of gangs taking over a whole town. Imagine John Gotti or Al Capone as President of the United States. Well, welcome to the reign of thieves and vagabonds, welcome to our Nigeria today, a gangster's paradise."

Ikenna Anokwute in African News Weekly (Sept 16-22, 1996; p.6).

******************************

“How safe is the state of Ghana in the hands of Rawlings and his gangsters at this critical moment when they are seeking the mandate of the people to continue their corruption, misrule, contempt for public opinion, and disregard to public property. Indeed, the record books are overflowing with evidence of Rawlings' wanton misuse of state property and abuse of power.

Editorial, Free Press (4-10 October 1996, 6).

******************************

"Many a time we have wondered if the so-called African leaders sometimes lack the capacity to think and understand the ramifications of their actions . . . After all the bloodshed in Rwanda you would think we have learnt a lesson but no! Idiocy of our power-hungry leaders seems to triumph over pragmatism and common sense. The rationale for the current fighting defies any logic . . . The world must be getting tired of us (Africans) giving our self-inflicted tragedies galore. We seem to lack any sense of urgency to handle problems in an expedient manner devoid of bloodshed. Lord Have Mercy!”

(Ghana Drum editorial, November, 1996; p.2).

******************************

“African Renaissance demands that we purge ourselves of the parasites and maintain a permanent vigilance against the danger of entrenchment in African society of this rapacious stratum with its social morality according to which everything in society must be organized materially to benefit the few . . . The call for an African Renaissance is a call to rebellion. We must rebel against the tyrants and the dictators, those who seek to corrupt our societies and steal the wealth that belongs to the people. We must rebel against the ordinary criminals who murder, rape and rob, and conduct war against poverty, ignorance and the backwardness of the children of Africa."

Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa in The Nigerian, October 1998; p.2).

******************************

“The turmoil in Africa today – famine, military coups and so on – is partly the result of African leaders who fought for independence but then enjoyed the fruits of their power and forgot about the people.”

n Tony Yengeni, chief whip of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, The Washington Times, May 6, 1999, A14).

******************************

"Your murderous military campaigns and strong-arm tactics have robbed African children of their youth, robbed African countries of hope and, in many instances, sentenced African people to lives no better than those of animals.” Wiping tears from her eyes, she said: “I don’t care what they do to me. The truth had to be told.”

n Anne-Marie Kabongo from Congo DR (The Washington Post (Sept 6, 1999; p.A21).

******************************

“I heard we have a new government. It makes no difference to me. Here we have no light [electricity], we have no water. There is no road. We have no school. The government does nothing for us.”

Simon Agbo, a farmer in Ogbadibo, south of Makurdi, Benue state capital in Nigeria in The Washington Times, Oct 21, 1999; p.A19.

******************************

“Most educated Nigerians, who are good copycats of foreign behavioral patterns, will like to flaunt their Euro-American amoral (and in fact immoral) tendencies in our face. Not even the decadence of those societies, despite their wealth and technologies, will make our elites have a rethink about those systems.

The quality of our elitism is so appallingly apelike that they are quite unable to distinguish a substance from a label. Whatever is out there is simply repeated here root, stalk and leaf. It is a shame today that we are being taught by Europe to breast-feed our babies. Today, almost every Nigerian woman wears a bleached skin and the curly hair strand of another race group.

It is time that we have a rethink. And we ask our elites to ship in or ship out."

Reverend S.J. Esu, a Nigerian pastor (Vanguard, Lagos, Aug 5, 1999. Web posted at www.allafrica.com).

******************************

"The Winds of Change has blown and gone, and, at the end of the century, not a single African country is in bondage to any power. But hundreds of millions of Africans have been in bondage since the first day of uhuru (freedom)."

n Jon Qwelane, a black South African journalist, (The Sunday Times, Nov 1999; p. 24).

******************************

“Billions of dollars of public funds continue to be stashed away by some African leaders – even while roads are crumbling, health systems have failed, school children have neither books nor desks nor teachers and phones do not work.”

Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (The African-American Observer, April 25 – May 1, 2000; p.10).

******************************

"Africa today is politically independent and can be said to have come of age but apart from Thabo Mbeki and Yoweri Museveni, we are sorry to openly admit that most of our leaders have nothing to offer except to be effective managers for the IMF and serve as footnotes to neo-colonialism. Most of the leaders in Africa are power-loving politicians, who in uniform or out of uniform, represent no good for the welfare of our people. These are harsh words to use on men and women who may mean well but lack the necessary vision and direction to uplift the status of their people.”

n Editorial, The Independent, Ghana, July 20, 2000; p.2.

******************************

“We Americans are so desperate for good news on the continent of Africa that it is almost irresistible when we find a good man in Africa. The only way we seem to be able to identify success in Africa is through personalization.”

n Edward P. Brynn, the former American Ambassador to Ghana quoted by Blaine Harden, “The U.S. Keeps Looking for a Few Good Men,” The New York Times, August 27, 2000, Section 4; p.1)

. ******************************

“Are we hanging too much on Obasanjo? That is clearly a danger we face. We have to invest in institution building – the military, the legislature, getting a handle on corruption. But we cannot do any of this stuff on the cheap. It has got to be sustained beyond this president and beyond Obasanjo.”

J. Stephen Morrison, who worked at the State Department quoted by Blaine Harden, “The U.S. Keeps Looking for a Few Good Men,” The New York Times, August 27, 2000, Section 4; p.1)

******************************

"What baffles me is that even the money recovered from the late General Sani Abacha has been stolen. If you recover money from a thief and you go back and steal the money, it means you are worse than the thief."

Uti Akpan, a textiles trader in Lagos The New York Times, Aug 30, 2000; p.A10.

*****************************

"When I listen to African leaders at international gatherings I cannot but feel ashamed at their quickness to blame the whiteman for all the woes of Africa. This, to my mind, is nothing but a childish case of passing the buck.

They blame the whites for the impoverishment of Africa outwardly to the hearing of the world and go indoors to cabinet and presidential offices to negotiate lopsided agreements with these foreigners. I am sure Europeans amuse themselves in their drawing rooms with how big-mouthed but small-brained African leaders are.

It will be funny if, in this millennium, we continue to blame the whiteman for our woes when we are actually the ones responsible for our backwardness."

Adedeji Adeyemi of Kaduna (Nigeria), inThis Day, Vol.6, No.1900, July 5, 2000; p.13).

******************************

"For many years, the continent’s problems and position as the poorest on Earth have been attributed to colonialism and the exploitative and repressive trade between the developed North and yet to be developed South. However, these excuses have become obsolete in the recent times and as Kofi Annan pointed out to the Heads of states at the Lome Summit (July 2000) that most of the problems can be placed at the doorsteps of its leaders who have failed over the years to pursue policies that would engender development. Mr. Annan was only giving credence to an opinion which many open minded analyst of the African political scene have long held, but which have been suppressed for good reasons by those who wield political power in the continent."

Editorial, The Mirror, July 15, 2000; p.12.

******************************

“If the twentieth century taught us anything, it is that large-scale centralized government does not work. It does not work at the national level, and it is less likely to work at the global level”.

Kofi Annan, U.N Secretary-General (The New York Times, Sept 13, 2000; p.A12).

******************************

"If you had told me a year ago that I would be in the streets rioting, I would have said you were insane. But then again, if you told me I would be praying to God to deliver us from [President] Robert Mugabe a year ago, I would have said the same thing. I am not a violent man; I am not an especially religious man. But whatever it takes for Zimbabwe to finally be rid of this man, I am willing to do."

Josiah Makawa, a 24-year-old warehouse worker in Harare (The Washington Post, Nov 23, 2000; p.A45).

******************************

“My family has not eaten meat in months. Sometimes we eat only raw vegetables for supper because we have no money to buy [fuel] for cooking. This government has had 20 years to do something about the land problem and they did nothing. Now that's all they want to talk about. No one is listening."

Josiah Makawa, a warehouse worker in Harare, Zimbabwe (The Washington Post, November 23, 2000; p.A45).

******************************

“Nigeria's foreign debt profile is now in the region of $25-$30 billion, but the president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, ICAN, Chief Jaiye K. Randle, himself an eminent accountant and social commentator has now revealed that individual Nigerians are currently lodging far more than Nigeria owes in foreign banks. With an estimate he put at $170 billion it becomes immediately clear why the quest for debt forgiveness would remain a far fetched dream.”

Laolu Akande, a veteran Nigerian freelance journalist, (http://nigeriaworld.com/columnist/laoluakande/articles.html)

******************************

“Africans want change because there is so much suffering here. But Africans are above all else devoted to their ancestors, and they do not want to betray that by becoming something that they are not.”

Patekile Holomisa, an inkhosi (chief) and head of the Congress of Traditional Leaders in South Africa in the The Washington Post, Dec 18, 2000; p.A1.

****************************

“The ANC [government of South Africa] wants to transplant customs from other countries here, and that will destroy the Zulu nation and all that we value. We are poor, but do you see any beggars in the streets like you do in the cities? The inkhosi (traditional chief) makes sure that we are all provided for. The municipality will make beggars of us. When I have a problem, I can go see the inkhosi any time, day or night. I don't need an appointment. They can have their civilization, brother.”

Benjamin Makhanaya in The Washington Post, Dec 18, 2000; p.A1.

******************************

"How can a politician decide what is right for my people better than myself or my son, who has been preparing his entire life for the moment when he must lead? I am not running for re election. This is not my career. It is my duty. I have served my people for 48 years and will continue to serve them until I die."

Mzunjani Ngcobo, tribal chief of Quadi in South Africa The Washington Post, Dec 18, 2000; p.A1.

******************************

"People cannot eat slogans, rhetoric or history; liberty must bring tangible benefits to the oppressed . . .This is also relevant in South Africa, (describing Mugabe's government as a "promising transformation project turned horrible." In the sharpest condemnation of recent developments in Zimbabwe by a South African leader, Mr. Vavi placed the blame for Zimbabwe’s troubles on the repression of critics and "near-dictatorial governance."

n Zwelinzima Vavi, head of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, at a seminar in Johannesburg, assessing the lessons of Zimbabwe for its neighbors (The New York Times, Feb 25, 2001)

.******************************

"As hopes wither and economies flounder, a new generation of Africans are turning their backs on the continent's old guard political leadership. From Zimbabwe to Uganda, Angola to Kenya, post colonial leaders and pre-independence political parties are falling from grace. Desperately holding onto power by political manipulation and old western-bashing slogans of the 1960s, they blame their nation's financial ills on foreign exploitation rather than on their own failings -- but with a new generation of educated African citizens, such transparent rabble rousing rings increasingly hollow.

Milan Vesely, in African Business, April 2001; p.41.

******************************

"How can we allow these MMD crooks to come to our villages to ask for more years to complete their destruction of our mother Zambia? . . . How can I lend my support to state-propelled hooliganism, vandalism, corruption and scandals? I ask Zambians to effect citizen's arrest, manhandle and cage all MMD big corrupt thieves into places designed for crooks and dangerous national law breakers because the police had failed to arrest them. All of them must be placed under wanted list by the people as the police have failed the nation lamentably."

Chief Bright Nalubamba of the Ila people of Namwala (The Post, Lusaka, May 29, 2001).

******************************

"You have a president who is a retired military man, a director of national security who is a retired military man, a defense minister who is a retired military man and a director of the State Security Service (SSS) or national intelligence, who is an ex-military man. Apart from the president and all the key office-holders in the land being of military background, we don't have enough elbow room to begin to talk about subordinating this system to civilian control."

Rev. Matthew Hassan Kuka, a member of the Oputa Commission set up to investigate past human rights abuses (The Washington Times, Nov 1, 2001; p.A18).

******************************

"We have been in terror for 10 years. We have destroyed our towns. We have killed each other. We have used all sorts of weapons against each other, except perhaps airplanes."

Abdiqassim Salad Hassan, President of Somalia's transitional government (The New York Times, Nov 4, 2001; p.A4).

******************************

“The more you read about Africa, the more it becomes evident that African leaders are a strange lot. These guys are worse than space aliens. And somebody wants me to believe our problem is the white man. Rubbish. I posit that colonial rule was better. Obasanjo, the Nigerian leader regards himself as the best black leader in the world today. Maybe Mandela is white. This is why Obasanjo gallivants all over the globe. Let's concede that perhaps he is. Then Africa is really in trouble. If the best rules like they are doing in Nigeria today, frittering away our poor income on nonsensical projects, you begin to wonder what hope the African?"

Horace Awi, a member of a Concerned Professionals Group and drilling engineering manager with a multinational oil company in Lagos, Nigeria, on naijanet,a discussion forum on November 16, 2001.

*****************************

"Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe seems to have gone bonkers in a big way. It is very dangerous when you subvert the rule of law in your own country, when you don't even respect the judgments of your judges . . . then you are on the slippery slope of perdition. It is a great sadness what has happened to President Mugabe. He was one of Africa's best leaders, a bright spark, a debonair and well-read person."

n Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Saturday Star, January 12, 2002.

******************************

"Afrcan leaders are the continent’s worst enemies . . .Which African leader can stand up today and say he/she did not know about Mobutu Sese Seko or Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s personalisation of their countries’ monies or the vast and obscene opulence they lived in while the natives in Kinshasa and Lilongwe, the centres of government that are supposed to reflect the country’s wealth or lack thereof, wallowed in dire poverty?"

Marko Phiri, a Zimbabwean student of journalism in The Financial Gazette, May 3, 2002.

******************************

“Ghana was the first sub-Saharan nation to win its independence from a colonial power in 1957. Yet the average per capita income of my people is lower now than in the 1960s, four decades after independence. Some of the blame for this we Ghanaians must accept. My country must acknowledge that corruption has been a canker on our public and economic life and must be contained.

One hundred years ago, our trading was limited to the supply of raw materials, mainly gold, timber and cocoa. One hundred years later, our trading consists of raw materials, mainly gold, timber and cocoa.

I must admit that Ghana's path towards self-reliance has not been smooth. I am painfully aware that our past can be characterized by one step forward and two steps backward.”

President John A Kufuor of Ghana (The Financial Gazette, May 3, 2002; p.5).

******************************

At the United Nations Children's Summit held in May 2002 in New York, youngsters ripped into their African leaders:

"You get loans that will be paid in 20 to 30 years... and we have nothing to pay them with, because when you get the money, you embezzle it, you eat it," said 12-year-old Joseph Tamale from Uganda (BBC News website, May 10, 2002).

"We must put an end to this demagoguery. You have parliaments, but they are used as democratic decoration," said Adam Maiga, from Mali: (BBC News website, May 10, 2002).

******************************

"All these people (African leaders) do is talk, talk, talk. Then if they do get any money from the wazungu (white men), they just steal it for themselves. And what about us? We have no food. We have no schools. We have no future. We are just left to die.".

Mercy Muigai, an unemployed Kenyan woman (The Washington Times, June 28, 2002; p.A17).

******************************

“In Biya's corrupt Cameroon, a ministerial appointment is not an opportunity to, as John F. Kennedy stipulated, serve your country; rather, it is brief and interrupted moment to savor the pleasures of what your country can do for you. A ministerial appointment is a letter of credit signed by Biya, the chief executive officer and mercenary overseer of France's Cameroon Incorporated, the French plantation of a corporation or micro state, for you to loot the national treasury of the banana republic and placate your tribesmen to support the exploitation of your country's resources. There is no jingoism or nationalism about it. It is the politics of satisfying the physiological needs of the stomach: `You chop and I chop.'

Claude Berri, a Cameroonian journalist (The African Nation, September 2002; p.33).

******************************

“It's however, also a fact that after the attainment of independence, many of these "heroes" grew into quarrelsome old men. They could not understand why their rabble-rousing speeches no longer elicited the same awe, or never had the selfsame electrifying effect on the masses. They also refused to understand why the people could not identify with their desire to die in power (and many actually did realize that desire). They were caught in a time warp. Most of these old politicians failed to move with the people. The people, after independence quickly wanted to get to the next stage from liberation that the independence struggle was all about, while the leaders continued to bask in the euphoria of kicking out the colonial master. For them, it was a continuous party that could only end with their death. So, when talk of popular revolt against them begun to waft through the air, their only response was to become repressive - hoping they could suppress the clamor for change. They failed."

Henry Ochieng in The Monitor (Kampala), Jan 22, 2003.

******************************

"The people being starved to death (in Zimbabwe) are not white; the majority of those killed by the regime's killing machine are not white; those who languish in jail as I speak to you and are subjected to incessant torture and sub-human conditions are not white; those in the rural areas who are daily subjected to brutal treatment are not white. It is therefore despicable and cheap for anyone to reduce such a tragedy to an issue of race for the sake of a fake African brotherhood and political expediency."

Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) in The Independent (Harare), Jan 24, 2003.

******************************

“The men haven’t done a good job of running our countries, so maybe now we are looking for a Big Woman, not a Big Man, to do the job. The list of corrupt, incompetent and just foolish male leaders is a long one.”

Chipo Lungu, Executive Director, Zambia National Women’s Lobby Group (The Herald-Tribune, June 8, 2003; p.1F).

******************************

“This is a vibrant, diverse country. Hardly anyone wants to see it homogenized into a pseudo-Gulf state. We are not Arabs”.

Nima El-Bagir, a Sudanese journalist in The Economist, June 28, 2003; p.48.

******************************

“People have noticed that some of the governors who have adopted sharia have no real interest in social justice. Rather, they want to harness religion to win or hold on to power, with all its perks. Not long after the first thieves had their hands cut off, people started to grumble that the big-time crooks in high places were going unpunished."

n Professor Abubakar Saddiq, of the Center for Democratic Development in Zaria, Nigeria, (The Economist, June 28, 2003; p.50).

******************************

“It is really difficult to ask foreign investors to come and invest on our continent when our own leaders are not investing here. There is no better factor to convince foreign investors than for them to see that our own people, both those based at home and those in the Diaspora, invest in Africa.

Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, President of the African Business Round Table on business partnership with New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) at the Commonwealth Business Forum on December 3, 2003 in Abuja, Nigeria, This Day, Lagos, Dec 4, 2003.

******************************

“Our leaders are incapable of being criticized without feeling rancor. When people say it is alien to our African culture to criticize leaders, they forget that in our traditional past even chiefs or kings were the subject of satirical orations and ribaldry. Even the ruthless Zulu dictator Chaka could be criticized openly. Now try to make some of our leaders the subject of satirical orations and ribaldry and see what happens to you. In their mistaken belief, it is “Western” to have freedom of the press and freedom of expression, which leaves us stuck in a culture of zealous leader worship – a culture which would look primitive is the eyes of our ancestors.

The acceptance of criticism implies the highest respect for human ideals, and its denial suggests a conscious or unconscious lack of humanity on our part. Intolerance must surely rank as one of the worst forms of immorality in human affairs, yet our modern African societies have established a reputation for intolerance that is difficult to match.

Until our leaders redress the imbalance between selfish pursuit of power and concern for the human lives they are elected to protect, between arrogance and self-respect and humility, between intolerance and mutual tolerance, we will forever be marching backwards in very long strides.”

Fred M'membe, editor of The Post, Lusaka, Zambia (Jan 5, 2004. Web posted at www.zamnet.zm/zamnet/post/)

******************************

“Each and everything they [the African National Congress] promised us is not materializing. This country is going to the dogs.”

Raphael Mohlala, 22, Johannesburg, quoted in the The Washington Times, April 15, 2004; p.A15.

******************************

"The average African is poorer (now) than during the age of colonialism. Whereas colonialists had developed the continent, planted crops, built roads and cities, the era of uhuru had been characterized by capital flight as the elite pocketed money and took it outside their countries. Among them were the late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. The money Abacha had plundered had been discovered in Switzerland . . . In the 1960s African elites/rulers, instead of focusing on development, took surplus for their own enormous entourages of civil servants without plowing anything back into the country. The continent's cash crops, like cocoa and tobacco, were heavily exploited by the state-run marketing boards with farmers getting little in return.”

Moeletsi Mbeki, Chairperson of the South African Institute of International Affairs, and brother of President Thabo Mbeki (The Mercury, Sept 22, 2004. Web posted: http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=283&fSetId=169)

******************************

"When this government first came, they had their own project" to build an Islamic state. But eventually it became survival politics -- to remain in power at any cost. If that means dropping an Islamic agenda and kicking out bin Laden, then fine. If that means making peace in the south, then fine. If that means reversing themselves on Darfur publicly, then fine. As long as they stay in power, they are willing to appease the international community and do just enough to maintain control"

Mahjoub Mohamed Saleh, editor of Al Ayam, an independent newspaper in Khiartoum, Sudan (The Washington Post, May 3, 2005; p.A14).

******************************

From Afrikan Insight, June 2005; p.11.

“I am astonished that anyone would use the words “statesmen” and “leadership” in describing these (African) rulers, given the level of suffering they have imposed upon our helpless people. Why is the BBC (and the BBC is the best news organization in the world in my view) always so reluctant to use the correct terminology? These rulers are no better than gangsters and scoundrels” UE, UK/Nigeria From Afrikan Insight, June 2005; p.11.

.“The fact that the continent of Africa has so few surviving presidents says a lot about the personalities of African leaders. The pathway of African Leadership usually starts off as revolutionary, corrupt, greedy, manipulators of the law to prolong power and eventually political death. As a young African, I am hopeful that we can reclaim our legacy if more African presidents consider “LIFE” after office.”

K.P. Sherman, Liberian in the U.S. From Afrikan Insight, June 2005; p.11.

******************************

"Our government is hopeless. If we don't have petrol, everything stops. Everything stops. What can we do?"

Arnold Mapfumo, a welder waiting in a line for gasoline in the suburb of Chitungwiza in Zimbabwe (The Washington Post, July 25, 2005; p.A15)

******************************

“I am often saddened by the leadership situation I see in Africa and also pained for the situation that sometimes, the populations are placed in because of errors of leaders. I think I was the first to go to the OAU summit to say that they should not encourage people who come to power through the barrel of the gun and they should not welcome in their midst with open arms and smiles people who have taken up power through a coup d'etat.

At that time, quite a lot of people were surprised and shocked. But several years later, they took the decision that they would not welcome them into their midst. And that also implies that we need to play by the rules. We need to accept and respect the constitution, we need to accept electoral laws, we need to accept the results of elections and we should not tamper with the constitution to perpetuate our rule.

What worries me is that, if this trend continues where leaders are able to change the constitution... the constitution is never written for an individual, it is written for a nation and must stand the test of time... if you change (it) to suit individuals and they extend their mandate in office, we may face the situation where the soldiers who are now in arracks will come back and say, since we cannot go through change in the normal democratic way, this may be the only way to do it. We don't want that.

Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General, in an interview with the Guardian, Nigeria, (May 11, 2006).

******************************

"I am just a working man, I don't know why the government doesn't help us . . . I don't know where the oil money goes. We become angry but we don't know what to do."

n Vieira Muieba, a construction worker in Luanda, Angola. (The New York Times, June 16, 2006; p.A14).

******************************

“What I want to talk about is the uncritical belief -- especially by African leaders -- that somehow Africa's salvation and development will come from outside. This state of affairs has in turn led to the development of a number of industries in Europe and North America to reinforce and sustain that belief . . . You would always hear of a conference on Africa, for Africans but not by Africans, to discuss this or that issue, being held in places like Paris, London, Stockholm, Washington, Toronto and, of course, Brussels. And as you are reading this piece now, there is one going on in Brussels - termed EU-Africa Week. This conference will discuss a range of issues such as (good) governance, social rights, corruption, inequalities and vulnerable groups and the role of the media in development among others.

Now most of these issues don't need a rocket scientist to actualize them and thus there is no need for these endless conferences. To make things even worse, the very same people who are supposed to implement most of the good practices in their countries and who are either unable or unwilling to; are the ones frequenting these conference halls. For them, of course, it's just another short holiday and opportunity for shopping and a bit of extra cash through S&T (per diem).”

Alexactus T. Kaure (The Namibian, Nov 24, 2006; web posted-- http://www.namibian.com.na)

******************************

“They only think of getting richer; they ignore us”

Phumnani Dlamini of Soweto. (The Washington Times, July 15, 2007; p.A7).

******************************

In 2003, the weekly newspaper Angolese Samanario published a list of the wealthiest people in Angola. Twelve of the top 20 were government officials; five were former government officials . . . Many Angolans take it as a given that those who shop at Luanda’s new upscale mall or tool about in Land Cruisers are state officials or their friends. One car dealership manager, who caters to government officials, said he ordered only the costliest luxury cars. “They want to be first with the latest model,” he said, speaking anonymously so as not to lose customers/”

(The New York Times, Oct 14, 2007; p. WK4).

*****************************

“The Nigerian political elite to a large extent are like maggots . . . They are creatures that enjoy the presence of corruption and stench.”

n Sola Adeyeye, a former member of the House of Representatives. (The New York Times, Oct 31, 2007; p.A8)

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How To Prune Japanese Maple Rochester Ny

Contents

Oriental garden supply

Photos. … 21gardens oswego

Laceleaf maple (acer palmatum var. dissectum

Japanese lace leaf maple tree (acer

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calorieworkouts · 6 years

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Which Are More Effective: Dumbbells or Kettlebells?

Walk into any gym, as well as you'll likely experience 2 basic type of barbells: the trusty pinheads and the new arrival, the kettlebells. Both have their advantages and also devotees, however one inquiry typically persists: When it pertains to obtaining results, is one far better than the other? Right here, specialists weigh in on which to select and also when.

Best for...

Dynamic Movements: Kettlebells

When it pertains to eruptive, physical motions, kettlebells are king. If your objective is powerlifting, plyo enhancements, or if you're competing in a sport that needs quickness (like basketball or CrossFit video games), study recommends kettlebells result in higher gains.Transference of kettlebell training to strength, power, and endurance. Manocchia P, Spierer DK, Lufkin AK. Journal of stamina and also conditioning studio/ National Toughness & Conditioning Organization, 2013, Jul.,27( 2):1533 -4287.

Choose these for exercises that hire several major muscle teams and also include relocating in a big, substantial means. Some normal kettlebell relocations include snatches, cleans, windmills, Turkish get-ups, and also of program, the kettlebell swing.

Swings are also great since they can spike your heart rate, providing cardiovascular along with toughness benefits, claims Dell Polanco, head train at BRICK New York. Unlike a simple crinkle or press, the kettlebell swing activates your whole posterior chain of muscles-- your glutes, hamstrings, and also erector spinae (back muscle mass), he explains.

Basic Movements: Dumbbells

" Dumbbells are excellent for a little bit of every little thing," sats Nikki Reifschneider, the assistant director of physical fitness and also personal training at the University of Miami. "You can start with more fundamental activities like a breast press, shoulder press, a row, or bows with pinheads held at the shoulders." The advantage is that you're not turning the weight around (like you perform in a snag or turn), making the relocations a bit much more straightforward, Reifschneider says.

Mixing up Your Workout: Kettlebells

" If you're unwell of doing burpees and mountain climbers, attempt kettlebells during a HIIT exercise," states Liz Barnet, licensed trainer at Uplift Studios in New York City. Barnet adds that it's easy to incorporate kettlebells into a workout finisher-- for instance, 30 to One Minute of full-scale initiative swings to top things off.

Newbies: Dumbbells

Stick to dumbbells unless you have instruction with kettlebells, Barnet says. All of the experts we talked with stressed that pinheads are the best option for weight training unless you have actually particularly worked with an individual instructor on kettlebells.

Improving Grip Strength:Kettlebells

Because the horn (deal with) of the kettlebell is typically more thick than a pinhead, they can be excellent for boosting grasp toughness, Barnet claims. 'As an example, a bent-over row with a kettlebell can reinforce the hold and aid prepare you for challenging exercises like pull-ups,' Barnet says.

General Fitness: Dumbbells

One research study showed that, as compared to vibrant relocations with kettlebells, basic weightlifting workouts (think power cleans up and also squats) resulted in considerably greater enhancements in strength over a six-week period.Effects of weightlifting vs. kettlebell training on vertical jump, stamina, and body make-up. Otto WH, Coburn JW, Brown LE. Journal of toughness and also conditioning research/ National Toughness & Conditioning Organization, 2012, Sep.,26( 5):1533 -4287. Simply puts, if your goal is general strength as well as fitness, there's absolutely nothing wrong with adhering to dumbbells-- and there's possibly not an advantage to utilizing kettlebells.

Adding an Extra Challenge: Kettlebells

" Kettlebells take the center of mass about 6 to eight inches away from your hand, whereas pinheads supply more security," Reifschneider states. This makes moves like a bottoms-up kettlebell press specifically challenging due to the fact that you're functioning to raise the weight and maintain it-- so the bell doesn't fall over and hit your arm. Fitness instructors also love kettlebells due to the fact that of that instability: They're merely like out of balance things you get everyday. But with that said included obstacle, kettlebells do offer an undesirable aspect of threat, so if you're fairly new to exercising, stick to dumbbells.

Progressing in Weight: Dumbbells

It's very easy to make your exercises much more tough with a dumbbell. "You don't need to use dumbbells in a slow-moving, separated push-press [movements]," Polanco spokens. "You can do hang cleans, squat cleanses-- every one of those are explosive movements." Polanco additionally claims it's ALRIGHT to exercise a few of those eruptive actions first with pinheads prior to updating to a kettlebell. As well as remember, 'to a specific extent, a weight is a weight,' Reifschneider says. "With any kind of piece of tools, you could make an exercise tough. It's all concerning your creativity."

Plus, kettlebells often don't come in small size increments like dumbbells, Polanco says. Great deals of firms make kettlebells in other weights, depending on exactly what your health club has readily available, it may be difficult to discover a 'best fit.' On the various other hand, the majority of gyms conveniently stack dumbbells at five-pound increments, making them excellent for going up in weight gradually.

The Takeaway

So which is much better? Well, it depends. Newbies and those planning to do fundamental strength movements at the gym need to head toward the pinhead shelf, while CrossFitters and people doing eruptive actions ought to grab a kettlebell. Select which sort of weight works with your workout strategy and fitness degree, and never ever be reluctant to seek advice from a certified trainer for a personalized analysis if you have any type of questions.

Expert-approved

Eugene Babenko Noam Tamir

#best workout #best workout routine #exercise #fitness #gym #health #health club #muscle fitness #personal training #weight #workout

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thesirenserenity · 7 years

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Miraculous Medley Chapter 5: Something New

Marinette, a Vocal Performance and Composition Music Major at a local community college, is secretly Ladybug, the lead singer and songwriter for Paris’ most famous band, The AKs. Adrien, a Cello Performance Major at the most elite Music Conservatory, joins them under the guise of Chat Noir to play Bass. Adrien grew up believing that music was all about following exactly what the composer wanted, but Marinette teaches him that there is so much that can be communicated through music - everyone has someting to say through this universal language. Marinette is closed off to the world after being burned from a recent breakup, and Adrien helps her break down the walls she built up arround her. Based off of gittana’s Musicans AU

Rating: T - swearing and some adult content

Also on: AO3 | Fanfiction

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5

Thank you guys for your patience! I got married on New Year’s Eve, so I’ve been a brief hiatus. I had an amazing wedding and adored every minute of it!! My husband is so amazing.

That being said, this was a hard chapter to write because it is a lot of exposition. The next few chapters will be bonding between the two and the actual plot will kick in ;) Love you all!

Open your eyes and make your entrance, your first step into this world Take my hand I will embrace you, know you'll never be alone Open your eyes and see the splendor of all the beauty all around Step by step you'll reach the summit, and I will help you on your road

- “Something New” - Noctilucent (Click for song)

Marinette nursed a cup of hot tea between her hands, perched on a stool in the kitchen as commotion swirled around her. Normally she would be bustling around with the rest of her band, but Nino had planted her in a seat, Alya had given her said of black tea, and they had scolded her to stay put.

I guess that’s what I get after composing a song in one night.

She shrugged to herself. Sure, she didn’t get a lot of sleep, okay, any sleep, but she did that all the time during the school session. Marinette rolled her eyes at their fussing, because they both pulled all-nighters before, and it wasn’t like she had to work that evening. She just currently felt groggy and like crap, but that would be remedied with sleep after their impromptu practice.

Normally, the AKs didn’t have a rehearsal the day after their concert, but it was around one in the afternoon; everyone had slept enough. She had composed late into the night, inspired by Adrien’s words and the melodies flowing around in her head, and then had taken time to put it all on paper for the instruments. A phone call had woken Nino up at 8:00 AM, asking him to get his butt outta Alya’s bed and come help her with the fine details. Nino had taken one look at the full song she had laid out, as well as the pieces of two more, and promptly called a rehearsal to work out the fine details of the songs.

“You have another song already?” A voice startled her out of her half-asleep daze.

She turned to face Adrien, who had sat on the stool next to her, a grin on his face and his green eyes sparkling at her.

Her tired smile followed, as she pulled her tea closer to her face. “Yeah, after you left last night, I just couldn’t stop until it was done. Nino called the practice shortly after that.”

Adrien looked at her in amazement, “You didn’t sleep to write a song in one night?”

Marinette shrugged, “I was inspired and wanted to get all the details hammered out before they left my mind. It’s not like I had anything to do today, so it wasn’t a huge deal.”

“You played a concert last night, which is a ton of energy, and then pulled an all-nighter. I’d say it’s a big deal.” He eyed her cup, “Coffee?”

Marinette shook her head, “No, that was consumed at six this morning. I can’t drink coffee before I sing because I like a lot of cream. It’s just black tea, containing caffeine, which is still super bad for singing, but a lot better than coffee with milk products.”

Adrien blinked in surprise, “I didn’t realize that singing was intensive that you couldn’t have milk or caffeine before.”

She laughed a little bit, “It’s my instrument. It would be like if you tried to play without tuning your strings – it just wouldn’t sound good.”

“Fair enough.”

They sat for a moment in amiable silence as the group bustled around them, pastries hanging from mouths and music clutched in hands. Everyone was greeting each other, jokes were flying.

“You know, I met some of the group, but not as the AKs. Would you point everyone out to me, Marinette?” Adrien asked.

She turned, smiling at him. “I think that can be arranged. I’ll point them out as they walk by.”

Spinning around on her seat, she pointed toward Nino, who was hauling a mixing table and his laptop to the rehearsal room. His red cap was perched on his head, and trusty headphones around his neck. “You already know Nino, who is known as the famous DJ The Bubbler. He only plays under that name for the AKs, and does remixes of our stuff. Otherwise, he uses his name, like at the club. He grew up playing piano and learned to mix music before coming to Paris Community College. What I love about him, is that a lot of his performances are mixed on the spot. He doesn’t like to pre-record sounds unless it’s needed.”

Adrien butted in, “He’s a music major, like you, yes?”

Marinette nodded, “Yea, composition major! He is killer at Music Theory and the best piano player at school. He and I are the original members of the AKs. We started recording and posting online, and got pretty popular.”

She pointed as Alya as she rushed by after Nino, a stack of music in her hands. “Alya started the Ladyblog before she knew. She was pretty infatuated with the music, not knowing that her best friend was Ladybug.”

“How did she find out?”

Marinette sighed, “It’s hard to hide secrets from your best friend, especially when you are hanging out more and more with the cute guy in your music classes. She got snoopy and wanted to see if I was dating Nino without her knowing. She followed us to our recording studio and recognized the music. Then she demanded to join.”

Adrien laughed, “That sounds like her. It’s cool that she sings too!”

“She is really good at everything she tries. Picked up a minor in music when she decided to join the band, but she is a journalism major. She sings and plays Saxophone, as I’m sure you saw at the Jazz concert.”

“Lady Wifi, yes? Does she run both blogs?”

Marinette winked at him, “Why do you think the Ladyblog has all the tips on the AKs?”

Adrien laughed, “I’m surprised that no one has figured it out yet.”

Marinette waved her hand at him. “She would have been figuring out all of that anyways. She is just that good!”

Juleka brushed by, carrying two drums for her drum set, with a pair of drum sticks balanced on top. One fell off, to be swooped up by the tiny blonde girl following her.

Marinette pointed her out, “You remember Rose, right? She is Juleka’s girlfriend and one of the dancers for the group. Juleka is actually majoring in business at PCC, but is going to cosmetology school as well.”

Adrien blinked in surprise, “She said she works at a tattoo parlor too? How does she fit all that in?”

Marinette grinned, “She is one of the most hard-working people I know, just never brags about it. Juleka never flaunts her talent or her schedule.”

Adrien watched the two girls, as Rose pressed a kiss to Juleka’s cheek as she set the drum stick back with the other pair. “Opposites attract, I guess. How long have they been dating? They are super cute together.”

Marinette’s sweet smile agreed with him. “They have only been together for a couple months, but it feels like forever. They have been really good friends for a long time. Juleka finally got the nerve to ask Rose out, and Rose said that she thought they were already dating.”

Adrien’s laugh rang through the kitchen. “She is a little spitfire for being so cute.”

“Yea, she is super sassy; I love it. She’s in a professional dance troupe and is a musical theater major. Rose wants to go to New York and perform or choreograph for Broadway.”

“That sounds perfect for her,” Adrien grinned.

Marinette pointed into the main hallway, where Ivan was talking with Mylene. “Those two are also dating, and have been since high school. Ivan is majoring in Psychology, and Mylene is studying business and theater. She wants to open her own theater company and follow in the footsteps of her father, who is a famous mime here.”

Adrien nodded, “They are really cute together. Ivan plays rhythm guitar, yes?”

“Yes, so he plays all the background chords and Lila plays lead. She is amazing at hearing a melody once and playing it by ear. Also, anything she makes up on the spot is really good.”

Adrien looked at her sideways with a small smirk. “I heard that you two don’t get along very well.”

Marinette rolled her eyes, “Alya likes to spread rumors. Granted, it’s a true rumor. Lila and I but heads a lot. She is a little egotistical and challenges me a lot as the composer and leader of the band.”

“Is she a music major too?”

Marinette nodded, “Yes, a jazz guitar major. Which causes some issues, because she likes to throw that in my face.”

Adrien smiled at her, “That sounds frusturating, but I’m sure you handle it well.”

“I just don’t like people like that,” Marinette muttered, almost too soft for Adrien to hear. “Is that everyone in the group? What about the other dancers?” Adrien asked.

“Well, there is Alix, who does a lot of the special effects and crazy dances. She’s a Kinesiology major, along with Kim, who is the other dancer and special effect coordinator. Kim also helps us by acting as a sort of body guard when we have shows and don’t want people to swarm the back stage. We met both of them through Max, who is our tech specialist. He is a computer science major, who does all of our research and helps Alya keep the blog going. He is usually the connecting point between us and our venues. Alya introduced us to him right after she got on board!”

“Who does all the art for your group?” Adrien asked. “After every concert, there is always this cool graffiti or presentation of your band name.”

Marinette grinned, “I’m really glad you noticed that. Nathanael is our resident artist, who hangs out with us. He kinda stumbled upon me by accident and offered to help us out. He uses all mediums for art, but loves graffiti and sketching. He is kind of quiet.”

Alya brushed by on her way to grab a water bottle from the fridge. “Quiet, as in he doesn’t talk to anyone but Marinette.” She cracked the water open and took a sip while she raised her eyebrows.

Marinette rolled her eyes. “He does not have a crush on me, Al, no matter how much you insist.”

Alya looked pointedly at Adrien, who put his hands up in surrender.

Marinette glared at her, “Al! Cut it out! He does not.”

Alya smirked and shrugged her shoulders innocently. “I’m just saying! He has said all of two words to me, but has had conversations with you. It’s the same way with everyone.” She sauntered toward the rehearsal room and brushed past Adrien, leaning over to whisper in his ear. “You have some competition, cat-boy,” punctuating it with a wink.

Adrien’s cheeks turned pink and she continued her walk. Marinette gave them a weird look.

“You two better join us soon, or people are going to think you’re making out in here!” Alya threw over her shoulder with a smirk.

“Alya!!” Marinette squeaked, her cheeks joining Adrien’s in a blush.

Xxxx

The group came pouring off the stage in the dark, an electric feel passing between them. They packed the stuff and piled into the van as quickly as possible, Max and Kim staying behind to grab the rest of the groups’ stuff.

Marinette jumped in, followed by Adrien who had just loaded his bass and amp into the back of the van. Alya jumped into the front seat, shouting at Nino to drive! The whole group was in giggles.

Adrien looked over at Marinette, who’s makeup mask was slightly melting off her face and her fingers were tugging up her thigh-high socks. Her hair was frizzy from the heat of the stage, but she had never looked more radiant. It had been one thing for him to watch Ladybug on the screen of his computer, or from the audience of the AK’s show, but to watch her as he played next to her on the stage! It had been absolutely breathtaking. Her energy fed the entire band, fed him. He had played better than any rehearsal, trying to support the energy she was producing. She really blossomed on stage.

The music had been breathtaking, ending with the song he had inspired lyrics for. She had also written a song with him, to feature the bass part a little more and introduce him, ‘Chat Noir,’ to the audience. The reception to having a bassist was astounding.

Alya was already reading them all the tweets, saying that their fans were amazed and super excited about the newest addition to the group. They had put out a teaser the night they had established Adrien’s persona, which gained quite a bit of interest, but the responses were so much larger after the concert.

Nino pulled into the girls’ house shortly after, the group piling out after checking to make sure that it was safe. The house was a flurry of unpacking and removing makeup and changing into different clothes. Everyone was a bundle of energy, compliments flying about each other’s performance.

Marinette came barreling down the stairs, her costume exchanged for leggings and a red and black checkered flannel shirt, her hair still in pigtails and red smudges on her face. In her hurry, she missed the last step and tripped right into Adrien’s chest. She looked up at him, grinning with a blushing ‘thank you.’

Adrien smiled down at her, his arm wrapped around her waist automatically. Even though they had known each other for a little while, he felt an immense connection to her. He wanted to support her and help her succeed as a musician as a person. She was so passionate about music and extremely talented in the area. In less than a year, she was able to found Paris’ most popular band and compose many amazing songs, all under the guise of someone else.

He was inspired by her.

Adrien pulled back, ruffling the top of her hair and grinning down at her blush.

She had already taught him so much about music and what it means to be a musician.

Step by step, she would reach any summit she tried to conquer.

And he would be with her every step of the way.

#miraculous medley #muse's musings #miraculous ladybug #miraculous ladybug au #miraculous ladybug fanfiction #adrienette #LadyNoir

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go-redgirl · 5 years

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The Essence of Evil: Sex with Children Has Become Big Business in America The Rutherford Institute ^ | April 23, 2019 | John W. Whitehead

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Children, young girls—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.

This is America’s dirty little secret.

As investigative journalist Amy Fine Collins notes, “It’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a ‘righteous’ pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.”

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.

According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

Who buys a child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life.

“They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period of servitude.

This is not a problem found only in big cities.

It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”

Don’t fool yourselves into believing that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.

It’s not.

For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.

Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“

Where did this appetite for young girls come from?

Look around you.

This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”

In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?

Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.

With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.

For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.

Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:

Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners--toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens--as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”

What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become. “They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”

This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said: “In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”

Holly Austin Smith was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.

Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old. “I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”

As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”

This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.

Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.

So what can you do?

Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.

Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.

_______________________________

OPINION: That’s one reason that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer don’t want a wall built in our country because their are aware of what’s going on with those that are coming into this country illegally.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer is very much part of the ‘deep state’ and they are aiding an abiding those criminals that are ‘child trafficking’ drugs trafficking and all other illegal crimes that’s coming across the border.

They are the ones supporting and advancing ‘criminals’ that coming into our country. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the rest of the ‘evil’ demons are protecting those that are destroying the ‘very fabric’ of this country.

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hurstmercado05-blog · 6 years

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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At 11:24 Eastern time on Sunday evening, President Donald Trump sent an all-caps tweet threatening war with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Trump had apparently heard part of a recent speech by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in which the Iranian leader warned that a US-Iran confrontation would be “the mother of all wars.”

The American president interpreted this as a threat and sent an extremely scary tweet in response.

“To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE,” Trump tweeted. “WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”

It’s important not to dismiss this as empty Trump rhetoric: War with Iran is an idea that has a lot of support among conservatives and members of Trump’s own Cabinet. Both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton publicly called for airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities prior to joining the Trump administration.

With the 2015 Iran deal on the ropes after Trump’s withdrawal, the potential for Iran to restart prohibited nuclear activities has never been greater — and no one is really sure how Trump will respond if that happens.

What this means is that, as scary as it sounds, we have to take the possibility of war with Iran seriously. We need to understand just what such a war would entail and what the consequences would be if it happens.

The best estimates we have suggest it would be a disaster.

Surgical strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities would only set back the program temporarily, but destroying the country’s nuclear capacity entirely would require a massive military effort. That would kill thousands of people, destroy whatever vestiges of political stability remain in the Middle East, and potentially wreak havoc on the global economy — all while likely failing to permanently end Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Given that the Iran deal has, so far, successfully rolled back the nuclear program, it’s hard to see why this would be worth it. But here we are.

Generally, advocates of military action against Iran propose a limited air campaign targeting the heart of Iran’s nuclear program. “An attack need not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure,” Bolton wrote in a 2015 New York Times op-ed. “By breaking key links in the nuclear-fuel cycle, it could set back its program.”

The key targets in such proposals are the nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Arak (the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan is also often referenced). Activity at these facilities has been slowed down or suspended entirely under the nuclear deal, but the buildings themselves have not been demolished. If Iran were to restart its push toward a bomb then those would be the places it would start — and thus would be the first target in any US attack.

Some of these, Fordow in particular, are fortified, but the US has bunker-buster bombs that are capable of doing real damage to them. But even such “limited” strikes would be a massive military operation.

The first issue is that the US would need to destroy Iran’s air defenses, including fighters and surface-to-air missiles, in order to ensure the bombs hit their targets and to prevent Iran from doing serious damage in response. According to Robert Farley, a professor at the University of Kentucky and an expert on air power, this “would involve long-range bombers, drones, electronic warfare, land-based fighter-bombers, carrier aircraft, and submarine-launched cruise missiles.”

Even the strikes against the nuclear program would need to hit a broad range of targets. Contrary to the assumptions of Iran hawks, the strikes couldn’t be limited to Iran’s big nuclear production facilities. The real problem, according to a Rand Corporation brief by Robert J. Reardon, would be Iran’s centrifuge production facilities. Simply destroying Iranian enrichment plants would not be enough to end the nuclear weapons program if Iran could just build centrifuges for new ones quickly. It’s not actually clear how many such facilities there are.

“Sites that have been identified, or ones that were known in the past, have typically been small, easily concealed from reconnaissance satellites, and located in densely populated urban areas,” Reardon writes. “Failure to destroy these sites would allow the Iranians to rebuild their enrichment program, because the machines could be manufactured relatively quickly.”

If the first round of strikes didn’t destroy every target, the US might need to return again and again. It would require the US to “continue a sustained campaign over a period of time and re-strike after an initial battle damage assessment [if] it is found that further strike sorties are required,” defense analysts Anthony Cordesman and Abdullah Toukan write in a comprehensive 2012 Center for Strategic and International Studies report.

And even that probably wouldn’t demolish the program. “Depending on the forces allocated and duration of air strikes, it is unlikely that an air campaign alone could … terminate Iran’s program,” Cordesman and Toukan argue.

They’re not the only ones who have come to this conclusion. A panel at the nonpartisan Wilson Center reviewed the military studies on the issue and concluded that even if extended military strikes were carried out “to near perfection,” the best case scenario is still only a four-year delay in Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon.

Ultimately, the only way military force could stop Iran from going nuclear is if the US committed to a more or less indefinite war.

“To fulfill the stated objective of ensuring that Iran never acquires a nuclear bomb,” the Wilson Center report finds, “the U.S. would need to conduct a significantly expanded air and sea war over a prolonged period of time, likely several years.”

The consequences of such a prolonged war, especially in today’s Middle East, would be disastrous. Iran has the power to make an unstable Middle East even worse: It could directly target and kill Americans in the region, exacerbate a number of the region’s festering conflicts, and potentially threaten the global oil supply — and thus the global economy.

Iranian proxy militias could also decide to attack American troops in Iraq if talks fall apart. While the US is particularly exposed in Iraq, it has people and assets across much of the region; Iran, too, has proxies across the Middle East. It’s difficult to imagine Iran staying its hand in the event of an outright US attack.

Iran could also attack oil infrastructure or blockade the Straits of Hormuz, a critical oil shipping route, all of which would have tremendous effects.

”Iran can use a mix of mines, submarines, submersibles, drones, anti‐ship missiles, small craft, and assault forces anywhere in the Gulf region to threaten the flow of oil exports,” Cordesman and Toukan write. “Any major disruption affects the entire economy of Asia and all world oil prices — regardless of where oil is produced. It can lead to panic and hoarding on a global basis.”

To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2018

Airstrikes would destroy what has been a key constraint on Iran’s nuclear program: the system of international inspections and sanctions that brought Iran to the negotiating table in the first place.

European and Asian countries have given the US strategy much of its force by helping to isolate and sanction Iran; that is what compelled Iran to negotiate and agree to make concessions in the first place. These countries are already angry at Trump for withdrawing from the deal, and seem totally uninterested in reimposing sanctions to try to get “a better deal.”

If the US attacked Iran, the international community would likely be appalled and abandon its support for sanctioning and isolating Iran altogether, leaving the country wealthier and in a stronger diplomatic position.

That would, in turn, cripple any serious attempt to prevent Iran from rebuilding its nuclear program.

”In the absence of clear evidence that Iran was dashing for a bomb,” Georgetown University’s Colin Kahl told Congress in 2012, “a US strike risks shattering international consensus, making postwar containment more difficult to implement. And with inspectors gone, it would be much harder to detect and prevent Iran’s clandestine rebuilding efforts.”

Striking Iran, then, wouldn’t be a “several-day” endeavor, as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), a congressional uberhawk who reportedly has Trump’s ear on national security issues, once suggested. It wouldn’t stop Iran’s nuclear program unless the United States committed to more or less permanent war with Iran — and may not work even then. And it would likely have devastating consequences for the US and its allies.

What’s ironic here is that the nuclear deal is working reasonably well to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the organization tasked with implementing the deal, has repeatedly certified that Iran is in compliance with its terms. Given the deal’s strict inspection provisions, it would be very hard for Iran to bamboozle International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors — meaning that, so long as it is in place, there’s very little risk that Iran becomes a North Korea-style nuclear threat anytime soon.

So far, the deal is holding even after US withdrawal. But Iran’s compliance is tenuous, and further belligerence from the US could give Tehran a reason to stop abiding by the deal’s limitations.

The logic of threatening a painful, pointless war under these circumstances escapes me. But the president of the United States, and several of his top national security advisers, seem to disagree.

Original Source -> What a US-Iran war would look like

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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