Author: Kate

Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

Time, that tattered, shrunken revenant of a once-popular news magazine, continues in its endless decline to delude itself that it has either the authority or the competence to name the “Person of the Year.” Brilliantly it named journalists — “The Guardians” — as 2018’s collective heroes, with Jamal Khashoggi given pride of place on the once-iconic cover. Time neglected to check on Khashoggi and now finds that it nominated a Qatar stooge, whose columns were midwifed by officers in the Qatar government, and whose “journalistic” career was but a distracting pendant to his many more serious activities, latterly as an anti-Saudi lobbyist, nephew to the one-time world’s biggest arms dealer, and a host of other shadowy mésalliances.

Rex Murphy, with a blow torch, in the National Post.

When The FBI Does It, That Means That It’s Not Illegal

Former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen issued new denials on Thursday that he was in Prague, in the Czech Republic, during a period of time in 2016 when an anti-Trump intellignce dossier’s author wrote that he met there with Russian agents about how to interfere with the presidential election.
 
‘I hear #Prague #CzechRepublic is beautiful in the summertime. I wouldn’t know as I have never been. #Mueller knows everything!’ Cohen tweeted.
 
His flat rejection came after McClatchy reported that a cell phone belonging to him was detected near Prague during the late summer months before Trump beat Hllary Clinton. The story was based on four separate sources with independent contacts in unnamed intelligence circles.
 
[…]
 
McClatchy didn’t explore in print the possibility that a Cohen adversary might have obtained the unique digital ID of his phone and put it on another one, a simple task for the technically inclined.

 
What sort of adversary would do such a thing?

Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

The Federalist;

The Post says they were unaware of this, although Khashoggi’s Qatar connections were well known. They will have to answer for what is either incompetence in connecting these dots or simply not caring as Khashoggi’s attacks on President Trump and the Saudis fit right in with their narrative. The Qatar Foundation denies they were paying him to produce the anti-Saudi material.
 
But during Security Studies Group research for our report on the information operation after his death, we heard from reliable sources familiar with the investigation that documents showing wire transfers from Qatar were found in his apartment in Turkey. They were immediately put out of reach by Turkish security services, so they did not show the collusion between Khashoggi, Qatar, and Turkey prior to his death. We have published a new, unredacted set of findings about the case. It is damning to Qatar, Turkey, and the Washington Post.
 
Khashoggi may have been operating in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act by doing this on behalf of Qatar. This is the same law that caused both Gen. Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort legal jeopardy by not filing their attempts to influence the U.S. government on behalf of a foreign entity. The op-eds published in the very influential Washington Post certainly qualify as attempts to change U.S. policy against Saudi Arabia and in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Qatar supports in spite of its status as a terrorist organization with most other Gulf countries.

Social Disease

Brain rot:

[A] new study from Norway, which examines IQ scores from 730,000 men (standardized tests are part of military service there) disproves all these ideas, because it shows IQ dropping within the same families. Men born in 1991 score, on average, five points lower than men born in 1975. There must, in other words, be an environmental explanation, and the chronology throws up a clear suspect: the rise in screen-time.
 

Kids brought up with Facebook and Instagram are more politically bigoted, not because they don’t hear alternative opinions, but because they don’t learn the concentration necessary to listen to opponents — a difficult and unnatural skill.

Not blogs though. Blogs are good for you.

2 Year Recession Watch Remains On High Alert

Doom!

Shoppers delivered the strongest holiday sales increase for U.S. retailers in six years, according to early data.
 
Total U.S. retail sales, excluding automobiles, rose 5.1% between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24 from a year earlier, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which tracks both online and in-store spending with all forms of payment. Overall, U.S. consumers spent over $850 billion this holiday season, according to Mastercard.

and gloom… Stocks rise in volatile trading

Update.

More numbers here.

Not A Muslim

NOOOnonononono……

“On March 23, 2015, President Obama himself took the unusual step of releasing a video message directly to Nigerians all but telling them how to vote… In that video, Obama urged Nigerians to open the ‘next chapter’ by their votes. Those who understood subliminal language deciphered that he was prodding the electorate to vote for the [Muslim-led] opposition to form a new government.”

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