Friday Post

On this solemn Friday...


The much-lauded Iran deal changes nothing:

None of Iran’s nuclear facilities — including the Fordow center buried under a mountain — will be closed. Not one of the country’s 19,000 centrifuges will be dismantled. Tehran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium will be “reduced” but not necessarily shipped out of the country. In effect, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure will remain intact, though some of it will be mothballed for 10 years. When the accord lapses, the Islamic republic will instantly become a threshold nuclear state.

Even easing up on the sanctions gave Iran billions of dollars to put into its attempts to conduct clandestine wars in the region. They’ve shipped arms to Hamas, spent a fortune bolstering Hezbollah in their attempts to keep Bashar al-Assad in power in Syria, and also to threaten Israel from its north. Now the Iranians have used the Houthis and Ali Saleh to conduct a coup against the Yemen government that had been cooperative with the US and Saudi Arabia against al-Qaeda, giving Iran a potential opportunity to choke off shipping through the Suez Canal if they so choose.

What happens when that economic containment ends? Iran will have plenty of cash to fund Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and any number of proxy groups to further its ambitions of regional domination.

Not that stopping Iran was ever Obama's aim.



Hey- remember when some Muslim guy walked into a university, separated some people into two groups, killing one group and letting the other group live and everybody made a big deal about it?

Why so silent about this?

Al-Shabab gunmen rampaged through a university in northeastern Kenya at dawn Thursday, killing 147 people in the group’s deadliest attack in the East African country. Four militants were slain by security forces to end the siege just after dusk. Some of the Christians were targeted for beheadings, according to several reports.

The shocking massacre came during “Holy Week,” the solemn week before Easter on the Christian calendar.

The masked attackers – strapped with explosives and armed with AK-47s – singled out non-Muslim students at Garissa University College and then gunned them down without mercy, survivors said. Others ran for their lives with bullets whistling through the air.

Jesus would be spinning in His grave:

The latest #BlackLivesMatter protest took to the streets today using the hashtag #ReclaimHolyWeek.

Christ's sacrifice is nowhere near this ideological abomination.



This is the same president who blocked the Keystone Pipeline repeatedly:

The Obama administration on Friday finalized its recommendation to expand protected areas of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, calling on Congress to block about 12 million acres (5 million hectares) from oil and gas drilling.

Like Obama cares about Alaska's natural beauty.



Hhmmm... why would Lithuania raise its defense spending?

Lithuania, spooked by Russian military assertiveness, outlined plans on Friday to raise defense spending by a third in 2016, contributing the highest share of its economy to defense since it joined NATO in 2004.

The Baltic country has never met the informal NATO rule of spending 2 percent of its economy on defense and curbed its defense budget during the 2009-2010 financial crisis. By 2013, Lithuania was spending just 0.8 percent of GDP on defense, the second smallest share of NATO countries after Luxemburg.

The attitude changed in 2014, however, when Russia took over the Crimea peninsula and backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin denies sending troops and weapons to the region.

The Lithuanian Defence Council, a defense policy setting body, on Friday proposed raising military spending by 149 million euros ($164 million) in 2016, to 574 million euros, or about 1.46 percent of the economy, the Defence Ministry said in an e-mail.

Lithuania has already upped defense spending in 2014 and 2015, and its political parties have promised to reach the 2 percent of GDP goal no later than in 2020.

"This will get our army to a whole new level, it will be ready to ensure defense and deterrence, both in its own right and together with the allies," Defense Minister Juozas Olekas told reporters about the defense proposals.

The minister did not mention Russia by name on Friday, but Lithuania's leaders have frequently referred to the threat from its huge non-NATO neighbor and former Soviet master.

Most Russians think Stalin's purges were justified:

Nearly half of all Russians think the sacrifices made under dictator Josef Stalin were justified by the Soviet Union's rapid economic progress during his rule, a poll published Tuesday showed, reflecting a boost in Stalin's popularity in recent years.

Forty-five percent of those questioned by independent pollster the Levada Center said they definitely or to some degree thought that the sacrifices made by the Soviet people under Stalin's rule were justified in light of the country's rapid development. Two years ago, that figure stood at only 25 percent, according to the report.

The pollster also found that while a large number of respondents (46 percent) thought Stalin's death put an end to mass repression and terror, that figure was higher (56 percent) two years ago. During that same period, the number of Russians who saw Stalin's death as a great loss grew from 18 percent to 24 percent.

In a summary of its findings, the Levada Center said its latest poll indicated a growing shift in public perceptions of Stalin since the turn of the 21st century.

"If the prevailing attitude toward [Stalin] was negative at the start of the millennium, now a large proportion of respondents (39 percent) now evaluate him positively," the Levada Center said. While 25 percent said they viewed the Soviet leader negatively, a further 30 percent identified their feelings as neutral, the pollster added.

A Levada Center analyst said the findings were the result of the policies of the current government.

“[Stalin is being rehabilitated because] the current Russian authorities and [President Vladimir] Putin in particular seek the legitimization and justification of their actions by resorting to the past. It gives them a certain endorsement,” Alexei Levinson, head of the Levada Center's social and cultural studies department, told The Moscow Times on Tuesday.

Granted, these are the people who weren't starved, bombed, sent to the gulags or somehow un-purged themselves, so...

Please gaze upon these beautiful huskies to forget the love most Russians have for totalitarianism.



Gerry Adams proves what a sack of crap he is:

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams has described the notorious abduction and murder of Jean McConville as 'what happens in wars'. 

(Sidebar: yes, housewives somehow associated with you somehow end up dead, don't they?)

The comments have angered relatives of Mrs McConville, whose abduction, disappearance and subsequent murder became one of the most shocking events of The Troubles.

She was 37 when she was taken by a masked gang from her home in Belfast in front of her children. She was accused by republicans of being a British Army informer, suffocated with a plastic bag and shot dead.

Her remains were eventually discovered by a dog walker buried in a dune on Shelling Hill Beach in County Louth in 2003, ending decades of torment for her relatives and enabling them to finally give her a proper burial.

Last year Mr Adams, who has long denied he was even in the IRA, was arrested by police investigating Mrs McConville’s murder. He denied any involvement and was released without charge.

But then last month, the influential American magazine the New Yorker named Gerry Adams as a former IRA commander who personally passed ‘death sentences’ on its enemies. It published a damning 15,000-word assessment of allegations against him and claimed that Adams himself issued the order to ‘disappear’ Mrs McConville. …

In the preview of the interview, which will be shown in full on Sunday, CBS presenter Scott Pelley said: ‘It was known to the IRA and you’re saying you didn’t know?

Mr Adams said: ‘Yes’

Mr Pelley asked: ‘How do you orphan 10 children? What kind of depravity is that?’

Mr Adams said: ‘That’s what happens in wars, Scott.

 
Leave her there:

A 19-year-old British woman, one of a group of medical students that includes seven Britons, an American and a Canadian thought to have traveled to join the Islamic State group, has told her family she wants to go home, a Turkish lawmaker has said.

"A female student, 19-year-old Lena, sent a message to her family saying she wanted to go back. We will try tomorrow to bring her and those who are with her back, if we can persuade them," opposition CHP lawmaker Mehmet Ali Ediboglu said in an interview with Reuters television late on Wednesday.

Okay, this happened:

ABC-57 reporter Alyssa Marino’s editor sends her on a half-hour drive southwest of their South Bend studio, to the small town of Walkerton (Pop. ~2,300). According to Alyssa’s own account on Twitter, she “just walked into their shop [Memories Pizza] and asked how they feel” about Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Owner Crystal O’Connor says she’s in favor of it, noting that while anyone can eat in her family restaurant, if the business were asked to cater a gay wedding, they would not do it. It conflicts with their biblical beliefs. Alyssa’s tweet mentions that the O’Connors have “never been asked to cater a same-sex wedding.”

Then this:

Christian-owned Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Indiana has at least temporarily closed after a firestorm of social media criticism and threats:

And this:

It looks like Memories Pizza won’t have much trouble making up for any lost income after yesterday’s lib-fueled hate fest. Over $100,000 raised on this GoFundMe page, and climbing!

And now this:

CBS employee reports #MemoriesPizza GoFundMe for fraud — ‘just in case’

(sigh)

What started out as an unsolicited opinion on the right of private businesses to exercise their beliefs has meandered into extortion, then moderate fortune and then some sad, old cow's accusations of fraud.

Just as with Chick-Fil-A, Memories Pizza (and I suspect other businesses, as well) will come out swinging not simply because people have the right to their beliefs and practices against manufactured crusades that go on in the First World but because leftism truly is a mental illness that reduces its sufferers to violent, delusional, petty little creatures not unlike Gollum.

We don't likes normal people.

When homosexuals are thrown from roofs, how on Earth can a cake (or pizza, as the case may be) be of the utmost importance?


And now, a message from His Holiness, Pope Francis: