05/16/17

DNC staffer Seth Rich spoke with WikiLeaks before he was murdered

By: James Simpson | BombThrowers

Seth Rich, the Democrat National Committee staffer murdered last summer on Capitol Hill, was speaking with WikiLeaks before he died, according to new reports.

Not satisfied with the pace or direction of the D.C. police investigation, the Rich family hired private detective Rod Wheeler to seek answers. That Rich was in touch with WikiLeaks is just one of the explosive claims Detective Wheeler has made.

The as-yet unsolved murder has been characterized as a botched robbery by D.C. police, even though evidence doesn’t actually point to a robbery. Rich was shot on July 10, 2016 after an apparent struggle, but his wallet, credit cards, cellphone and wristwatch were not taken.

Rich’s mother said, “There had been a struggle. His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they never took anything.”

She questions the claim that her son was working with WikiLeaks. “They took his life for literally no reason. They didn’t finish robbing him, they just took his life,” Rich said. “They hurt the community, and they hurt the long-term possibility of what he could have done.”

But Wheeler is standing by his story and he is getting backed up by the feds.

A “federal source” told Fox News Channel that the FBI generated a forensic report regarding Rich’s computer within 96 hours of his death. The report indicated Rich was in contact with WikiLeaks through the late Gavin MacFadyen, an American investigative reporter, documentary filmmaker, and WikiLeaks official who had been living in London at the time.

The Fox report continues:

“I have seen and read the emails between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks,” the federal investigator told Fox News, confirming the MacFadyen connection. He said the emails are in possession of the FBI, while the stalled case is in the hands of the Washington Police Department.

The revelation is consistent with the findings of Wheeler, whose private investigation firm was hired by a third party on behalf of Rich’s family to probe the case.

“My investigation up to this point shows there was some degree of email exchange between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks,” Wheeler said. “I do believe that the answers to who murdered Seth Rich sits on his computer on a shelf at the D.C. police or FBI headquarters.”

The federal investigator, who requested anonymity, said 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments between Democratic National Committee leaders, spanning from January 2015 through late May 2016, were transferred from Rich to MacFadyen before May 21.

On July 22, just 12 days after Rich was killed, WikiLeaks published internal DNC emails that appeared to show top party officials conspired to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont from becoming the party’s presidential nominee. That controversy resulted in Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigning as DNC chairperson.

Meanwhile, police have not revealed if the victim was able to identify his attackers or provide any information before he died in a hospital. A surveillance video shows Rich being followed by two men, but police have not made that video public.

After the shooting, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed he had been working with Rich and implied he was murdered because he was the source of the hacked DNC emails. Assange has offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the killers. D.C. police are offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s murderer. Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman is offered a separate $130,000 reward.

Assange’s claims and allegations of a DNC cover-up were widely dismissed as “conspiracy theories.” But Wheeler says FBI sources tell him that Rich was working with WikiLeaks, “absolutely, and that’s been confirmed.” Wheeler’s clear implication is that the DNC or some other political organization or individual could be involved.

“I want to find out who caused that man’s death, so we can put them behind bars. But if there’s somebody in politics, somebody in government – whether it’s the mayor’s office or anywhere else in this city that’s involved, you better believe they’re gonna be dragged in and questioned.”

Wheeler claims something is being deliberately hidden. Local police and the FBI “haven’t been cooperating at all. I believe that the answer to solving his death lies on [Rich’s laptop] computer, which I believe is either at the police department or either at the FBI. I have been told both… I have a source inside the police department that has looked at me straight in the eye and said, ‘Rod, we were told to stand down on this case and I can’t share any information with you.’” Wheeler says.

“I don’t think it comes from the Chief’s [of police] office, but I do believe there is a correlation between the mayor’s office and the DNC, and that’s the information that’s gonna come out tomorrow [i.e. Tuesday],” Wheeler said yesterday.

05/16/17

Dismantling the Marxist Madrassas

By: Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media

Changing academia has been much more difficult than changing the media. However, there is hope: President Donald Trump has asked Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. to head a White House task force on reforming the U.S. higher education system.

While the appointment has been known about since January, the selection took on more significance in view of Falwell’s remarks when presenting Trump with an honorary Doctorate of Laws at the school’s commencement ceremony on Saturday. Falwell said, “He deserves our respect and admiration for enduring relentless and often dishonest attacks from the media, the establishment on the left and the right, and from academia.”

Academia is not only a bastion of anti-Trump sentiment, but it has become the most important base of operations, next to the media, for attacks on conservative Americans devoted to saving their country and its traditional religious values.

It is anticipated that Falwell’s task force will recommend the increasing use of online courses in order to drive down the costs of higher education for students nationwide. This is a proven method to accomplish what we call “Defunding the Marxist Madrassas.” In this way, the academic bastions of Marxist thought that inhibit real diversity in thinking, and even prevent conservatives from coming on campus, can be reduced in their influence and even dismantled.

Dr. Tina Trent, who writes about problems in academia, says that non-ideological and technologically-oriented students are increasingly being drawn to online learning opportunities that prepare them for the real world.

Most students would rather not end up like Otto Warmbier, the University of Virginia economics major, who was so uneducated and misguided that he went on a “Young Pioneers” tour of North Korea and is now a captive of the regime. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for stealing a communist banner to bring home.

As the largest Christian university in the world, Liberty has been offering “distance” or online education since 1985. Online education is a proven way to avoid the effects (and costs) of brick and mortar universities which operate as Marxist Madrassas for America’s young people and brainwash them in totalitarian and bizarre sexual ideologies. So-called distance learning promises marketable skills and jobs in the real economy without supervision from expensive “diversity” officers and exposure to the latest fad in sexual politics.

According to its website, Liberty offers more than 250 programs of study and the lowest tuition rates among top online universities.

The university has a “Helms School of Government,” named after the former conservative Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), which offers a conservative Christian approach to world problems and international affairs. One course examines communist disinformation operations.

With a residential campus in Lynchburg, Virginia, Liberty University also has 65,000 students online. That gives it the second largest enrollment in online education courses of any non-profit university in the world.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, a leading source of news for academia, was forced to admit in a story that Liberty could be the model for the future of higher education.

Trump’s commencement address at Liberty was greeted with strong applause, as some students wore “Make America Great Again” caps. “Demand the best from yourself and be totally unafraid to challenge entrenched interests and failed power structures,” Trump told the graduates. He then asked, “Does that sound familiar by the way?”

Liberty has successfully challenged the “failed power structures” known as politically correct colleges and universities.

Since Jerry Falwell, Jr. became president of the university, “enrollment has increased from 9,600 to more than 15,000 residential students, and from 27,000 to over 94,000 online students,” his bio notes. It adds that Liberty’s net assets have “increased from approximately $100 million in 2007 to over $1.8 billion in 2016 as a result of increasing support from donors, responsible fiscal management, and unprecedented enrollment growth.”

By contrast, Burlington College, once headed by the wife of Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has gone bankrupt. And the national news media are finally covering the role played by Jane Sanders in the college’s demise.

Accuracy in Media covered the financial questions about her involvement in the college in several stories last year, during the presidential campaign, when Senator Sanders was posturing as a friend of college students with big debts, no jobs and useless degrees. Eventually, Burlington College went out of business, thanks to debt incurred under Jane Sanders’ leadership.

Nevertheless, Senator Sanders and his wife recently received the “Rage for Justice” awards at a special ceremony. He and his wife Jane were honored as “Public Servants of the Year.”

You may recall that after putting the college in a precarious financial situation, Jane Sanders was given a “golden parachute” worth $200,000. The college eventually went bankrupt and she is reportedly being investigated for possible bank fraud in connection with falsified loan documents that outlined a college expansion plan that was never fulfilled.

One of the useless degrees offered by Burlington College was a degree in “media activism,” symbolized by a clenched fist. The college said, “The degree is conceived explicitly for those who want to become media activists. Through technical training rooted in history and theory, students are encouraged to apply media making technique, craft, and art to issues of advocacy, activism and social change.”

It would appear the country has an overabundance of such media activists.

Now, it seems, the “social change” may involve Sanders’ wife, depending on whether federal charges are lodged against her.

Yet, Senator Sanders continues as if nothing is happening. Calling the controversy a Republican plot, he was the honored keynote speaker at the recent David W. Curtis Leadership Awards ceremony sponsored by the Vermont Democratic Party. The “Special Guest” was New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, known as “Red Bill” for his pro-communist views.

De Blasio and his wife, a former lesbian, went to Cuba on their honeymoon; Sanders and his wife went to the old Soviet Union.

“Sen. Sanders and Jane Sanders ignored a reporter’s questions about Burlington College at last week’s Curtis Leadership Awards ceremony hosted by the Vermont Democratic Party,” reported the Vermont-based VTDigger publication. It added, “Repeated requests to Jane Sanders for an interview regarding Burlington College have been ignored for more than a year and a half…”

05/16/17

HAMAS Charter redux: Can a leopard change its spots?

By: James Simpson | BombThrowers

One of Israel’s key demands of Palestinians is that the Jewish state be recognized as legitimate. This month the Palestinian terrorist group HAMAS published a revised charter that purports to show the organization has moderated because it dropped the call for Israel’s destruction contained in its original 1988 charter. The new charter contains flowery language about democracy and civil rights “for all,” and makes no mention of the Muslim Brotherhood, even though in the 1988 document it defined itself as a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. Despite these superficial changes the fundamental goals of HAMAS have not changed.

For decades the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and HAMAS (an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement) have played a good cop-bad cop routine on the world stage, with PLO as the “good cop” and HAMAS as the bad. While the PLO has engaged in endless negotiations to “resolve the Palestinian issue,” HAMAS has conducted a virtually non-stop campaign of terror. The West’s efforts to broker a solution highlight the absurd fantasy of this political dance, for how could the PLO ever broker any kind of agreement with Israel while HAMAS plainly rejects all peace efforts? And how are we to take the PLO seriously when its operatives raise their children to be suicide bombers?

Who speaks for the Palestinians, the PLO or HAMAS? The answer is “Yes.”

The old charter of HAMAS said “Israel will… continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it…” The new charter aims to “liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project.” What’s the difference?

The charter makes plain that HAMAS considers all of Israel to be Palestine. It refutes history by claiming that Jerusalem is Palestine’s capital, and claims, “Its Islamic and Christian holy places belong exclusively to the Palestinian people and to the Arab and Islamic Ummah.” It ignores the fact that Jerusalem was a city 2,400 years before Christ and that Islam didn’t surface until 3,000 years later in the seventh century A.D.

The PLO is no different. While the PLO has made repeated commitments to recognize Israel in its charter, the charter continues to explicitly call for Israel’s elimination:

Article 9 calls for armed struggle.

Article 10 calls for “commando action”.

Article 15 calls it a duty of the “Arab homeland” to eliminate Zionism in Palestine.

Article 19 says the creation of Israel was and remains “illegal.”

Article 21 rejects “all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine.”

In these particulars, the PLO Charter is scarcely different from the original HAMAS document and the latest one as well. The determination of HAMAS to ultimately occupy all of Israel is reiterated repeatedly in sections 21 through 27, concluding:

27. A real state of Palestine is a state that has been liberated. There is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital.

Articles 13 and 14 of the PLO Charter call Palestine and Palestinians “an integral part of the Arab nation,” and that Palestinian “liberation” and “Arab unity” are complementary goals. It makes “Arab existence itself” dependent on the Palestinians’ success in defeating Israel.

But in fact, the entire notion of a distinct “Palestinian” people is a fiction, as acknowledged by late PLO leader Zahir Muhsein:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism…

In backhanded fashion, HAMAS interior minister Fathi Hammad acknowledged the same thing. In this case, he was appealing for help from Saudi Arabia and Egypt on the basis that Palestinians are actually just Saudis and Egyptians:

Personally, half my family is Egyptian. We are all like that. More than 30 families in the Gaza Strip are called Al-Masri [“Egyptian”]. Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.

But he also makes clear for HAMAS what is explicit in the PLO charter, i.e. to wage jihad against Israel on behalf of all Muslims:

Al-Aqsa and the land of Palestine represent the spearhead for Islam and for the Muslims. Therefore, when we seek the help of our Arab brothers, we are not seeking their help in order to eat, to live, to drink, to dress, or to live a life of luxury. No. When we seek their help, it is in order to continue to wage Jihad.

The new HAMAS document nominally accepts a state of Israel based on the 1967 borders (a proposition Israel rejects), but makes clear that the ultimate goal has not changed:

20. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea…

One of President Trump’s main complaints about the Palestinians is that they raise their children “in a culture of hatred.” Trump met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas this month and Abbas told him, “I affirm to you that we are raising our youth, our children and grandchildren, in a culture of peace.” But as the Washington Free Beacon noted, during the last two weeks of April alone, the PA held events celebrating suicide bombers and other terrorists, including a rally with school children.

So welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss.

While the new HAMAS charter makes fluffy references to “free and fair elections” and tolerance “of other creeds and religions,” HAMAS is clear that achieving a Palestinian state necessitates the utter destruction of Israel.

Despite its endless posturing, the PLO shares this goal. No parsing of words can deny this fact. Unless and until HAMAS and the PLO explicitly and conclusively recognize Israel’s right to exist, negotiations to create a two-state solution are pointless. But as is plain from their guiding documents and overt behavior, they really aren’t interested in that anyway.

05/16/17

It Is Not If Change Will Occur But Rather When…I Think

By: Kent Engelke | Capitol Securities

Continuing with the mania theme, according to Reuters, it took 18 years for Amazon to match the capitalization of Walmart. Today and two years later, Amazon is twice the size of Walmart. Walmart’s revenue however is still three times greater than Amazon and Walmart’s profitability is five times greater.

Wall Street has fully embraced Amazon’s philosophy of future profits in exchange for revenue growth. I ask however, will Amazon’s revenues grow at the rate Wall Street may be suggesting? In many regards, the similarity between Cisco in 1999-2000 and Amazon today is uncanny.

And then there are stock indices. According to Bloomberg, there are now more stock indices than listed stocks. There are now over 5,000 indices. The number of stocks reached an apex in 1995 at 7,487. This number is now 40% lower. Wow!

The primary driver of this phenomenon is the massive proliferation of ETFs. About two years ago, the number of ETFs surpassed the number of stocks. I guess this is the next iteration of the trend.

I can draw numerous conclusions from the above data, but I would like to focus on two. First, the primary tenant of today’s investment strategy is passivity, a strategy based on capitalization.

Second is the collapse of the capital markets for most companies where funding if available is very expensive. Capital is the life blood of capitalization and without such by definition growth will be anemic.

Many times I commented that the last ten years is the longest period on record where the economy has not grown by 3% for at least one year, eclipsing the previous record of 4 years from 1930-34.

Change is the only constant. At some juncture, the environment will change, where capital will again be available for Main Street America and security research based upon geopolitical and macroeconomic will be the primary drivers for such security recommendations.

I believe if there is regulatory and tax reform, the odds of the economy growing at 3% per annum increases exponentially. Such would perhaps permit renewed interest in the individual equity, equities which I think represent considerable value.

At the risk of sounding flippant, a stock rises in value if there are more buyers than sellers and decreases in value when there are more sellers than buyers. It is evident the ownership of the largest capitalized technology issues is near manic levels, levels that require great energy to trade considerably higher.

Conversely, it is evident that ownership of the smaller issues is at considerably depressed levels, levels that should take little energy to trade higher.

For most, they do not want a change from the status quo, but as stated change is the only constant. It is the timing of this change that is unquantified.

Commenting upon yesterday’s market action, markets were lifted on oil. Oil advanced another 3% on the headlines that both Russia and Saudi Arabia will extend production cuts until March 2018.

According to Bloomberg, today is a good day to be long given that hedge funds have completely undone all their wagers for higher prices. The CFTC stated “long positions” are at the same level before OPEC announced its first production cuts last December.

Wow! Talk about the volatility of change.

What will happen today?

Last night the foreign markets were up. London was up 0.65%, Paris was down 0.21% and Frankfurt up 0.05%. China was up 0.74%, Japan was up 0.25% and Hang Sang was down 0.14%.

The Dow should open quietly higher as oil is extending its gains. The 10-year is off 3/32 to yield 2.36%.