America First, Britain First, France First - By Patrick J. Buchanan

In a surprise overtime victory in the finals of the Olympic men’s hockey tournament, the Russians defeated Germany, 4-3.

But the Russians were not permitted to have their national anthem played or flag raised, due to a past doping scandal. So, the team ignored the prohibition and sang out the Russian national anthem over the sounds of the Olympic anthem.

One recalls the scene in “Casablanca,” where French patrons of Rick’s saloon stood and loudly sang the “La Marseillaise” to drown out the “Die Wacht am Rhein” being sung by a table of German officers.

When the combined North-South Korean Olympic team entered the stadium, Vice President Mike Pence remained seated and silent. But tens of thousands of Koreans stood and cheered the unified team.

America may provide a defensive shield for the South, but Koreans on both sides of the DMZ see themselves as one people. And, no fool, Kim Jong Un is exploiting the deep tribal ties he knows are there.

Watching the Russians defiantly belt out their anthem, one recalls also the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City where sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the podium, black gloved fists thrust skyward in a Black Power salute, asserting their separate racial identity

Western elites may deplore the return of nationalism. But they had best not dismiss it, for assertions of national and tribal identity appear to be what the future is going to be all about.

Some attendees at the CPAC conclave this past week were appalled that Britain’s Nigel Farage and France’s Marion Le Pen were present.

But Farage was the man most responsible for Brexit, the historic British decision to leave the EU. Le Pen is perhaps the most popular figure in a National Front party that won 35 percent of the vote in the runoff election won by President Emmanuel Macron.

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And the most unifying stand of the NF appears to be “Let France be France!” The French people do not want their country invaded by unassimilable millions of migrants from Africa and the Islamic world.

They want France to remain what she has been. Is this wrong?

Is preservation of a country, the national family one grew up in, not conservative?

In Hungary and Poland, ethnonationalism, the belief that nation-states are created and best suited to protect and defend a separate and unique people, with its separate and unique history and culture, is already ascendant.

Globalists may see the U.N., EU, NAFTA, TPP as stepping stones to a “universal nation” of all races, tribes, cultures and creeds. But growing numbers in every country, on every continent, reject this vision. And they are seeking to restore what their parents and grand-parents had, a nation-state that is all their own.

Nationalists like Farage, who seek to pull their countries out of socialist superstates like the EU, and peoples seeking to secede and set up new nations like Scotland, Catalonia, Corsica and Veneto today, and Quebec yesterday, are no more anti-conservative than the American patriots of Lexington and Concord who also wanted a country of their own.

Why are European peoples who wish to halt mass migration from across the Med, to preserve who and what they are, decried as racists?

Did not the peoples of African and Middle Eastern countries, half a century ago, expel the European settlers who helped to build those countries?

The Rhodesia of Spitfire pilot Ian Smith was a jewel of a nation of 250,000 whites and several million blacks that produced trade surpluses even when boycotted and sanctioned by a hating world.

When Smith was forced to yield power, “Comrade Bob” Mugabe took over and began the looting of white Rhodesians, and led his Shona tribesmen in a slaughter of the Matabele of rival Joshua Nkomo.

Eighty-five percent of the white folks who lived in Rhodesia, prior to “majority rule,” are gone from Zimbabwe. More than half of the white folks who made South Africa the most advanced and prosperous country on the continent are gone.

Are these countries better places than they were? For whom?

Looking back over this 21st century, the transnational elite that envisions the endless erosion of national sovereignty, and the coming of a new world order of open borders, free trade and global custody of mankind’s destiny, has triggered a counter-revolution.

Does anyone think Angela Merkel looks like the future?

Consider the largest countries on earth. In China, ethnonationalism, not the ruling Communist Party, unites and inspires 1.4 billion people to displace the Americans as the first power on earth.

Nationalism sustains Vladimir Putin. Nationalism and its unique identity as a Hindu nation unites and powers India.

Here, today, it is “America First” nationalism.

Indeed, now that George W. Bush’s crusade for democracy has ended up like Peter the Hermit’s Children’s Crusade, what is the vision, what is the historic goal our elites offer to inspire and enlist our people?

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http://buchanan.org/blog/eternal-lure-nationalism-128811

Vox Popoli: The nations rise

The defiant song of the Russian national hockey team is a brave symbol for nationalists around the world:

In a surprise overtime victory in the finals of the Olympic men’s hockey tournament, the Russians defeated Germany, 4-3.

But the Russians were not permitted to have their national anthem played or flag raised, due to a past doping scandal. So, the team ignored the prohibition and sang out the Russian national anthem over the sounds of the Olympic anthem.

One recalls the scene in “Casablanca,” where French patrons of Rick’s saloon stood and loudly sang the “La Marseillaise” to drown out the “Die Wacht am Rhein” being sung by a table of German officers.

When the combined North-South Korean Olympic team entered the stadium, Vice President Mike Pence remained seated and silent. But tens of thousands of Koreans stood and cheered the unified team.

America may provide a defensive shield for the South, but Koreans on both sides of the DMZ see themselves as one people. And, no fool, Kim Jong Un is exploiting the deep tribal ties he knows are there.

Watching the Russians defiantly belt out their anthem, one recalls also the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City where sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on the podium, black gloved fists thrust skyward in a Black Power salute, asserting their separate racial identity

Western elites may deplore the return of nationalism. But they had best not dismiss it, for assertions of national and tribal identity appear to be what the future is going to be all about.

The shallow, saccharine falsity and Orwellian emotional manipulation of the Olympics is symbolic of the shiny, secular, and satanic New Babel that the globalists are attempting to construct. But just as the Russian hockey players drowned out the Olympic anthem, the nations of the world will defeat the latest attempt to chain them, control them, and rule over them.

God does not will the rule of the New Babel. We know this. He created the nations and He will inspire and defend them. He has even vowed the preservation of one specific nation. So, to deny and oppose nationalism is to deny and oppose God Himself.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-nations-rise.html

Vox Popoli: Voxiversity 001 - Announcement and first subject - Immigration and War! (15 minute video - will also be posted in the archive. I predict this will go viral!)

Voxiversity 001

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm96OmhQYas&bpctr=1519759039

I'm very pleased to announce the release of the first Voxiversity video, Episode One: Immigration and War. Thank you to all the backers for your support and for your patience; a transcript will be provided soon and I will be hosting a Q&A session about Episode One for all the subscribers next week. I will also send out a poll for the March Video of the Month as soon as I hear back from all of those with nominating rights. Please keep in mind that this is our first effort and we expect to gradually improve the overall quality as we get more practice.

• BitChute
• DailyMotion (HD)
• Facebook (HD)
• YouTube (restricted)

I'm also intrigued to observe that the video is apparently right over the target. It took all of 25 minutes for YouTube to officially deem it crimethink. Banned in Latvia!

Your video Immigration and War was flagged to us by the YouTube community. Upon review, we have placed restrictions on how the video will be shown. Please note that your video will continue to be available on YouTube.

Video content restrictions

We believe in the principles of free speech, even when that speech is unpopular or potentially offensive to some viewers. However, YouTube doesn't allow hate speech or content that promotes or incites violence. In some cases, flagged videos that do not clearly breach the Community Guidelines but whose content is potentially controversial or offensive may remain up, but with some features disabled.

Your video will be shown after a warning message. In addition, certain features such as comments, sharing, thumbs up, and suggested videos have been disabled. Your video is also ineligible for monetization.

After review, the following video: Immigration and War has been blocked from view on the following YouTube country site(s): Austria, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Czechia, Germany, Estonia, France, United Kingdom, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Croatia, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Martinique, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Poland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Reunion, Romania, Slovenia, Slovakia, French Southern Territories, Wallis and Futuna, Mayotte

If you would like to support Voxiversity, you can do so here. Doing so will send a powerful message to the SJWs that they cannot erase history and they cannot evade the truth. But if you'd like to comment on the video, I'm afraid you're going to have to do so here. And please feel free to download the video and spread it around. That's exactly what it's there for. You can do so by using Clipgrab.

Certain features have been disabled for this video

In response to user reports, we have disabled some features, such as comments, sharing, and suggested videos, because this video contains content that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/02/voxiversity-001.html

Vox Popoli: EXCERPT: Innocence & Intellect, 2001-2005 (Vox on Feminism)

Githyankee was kind enough to say the following about my early columns: I wish everyone could read Vox's columns from about 2005. The second book of essays. That's what really let me know I was dealing with an intellect. Vox was calling out feminists and muslims as allies before Obama was President, ten years before Conservative Inc even noticed. Those columns hold up extremely well - if you've been on the fence, each essay is about a five minute read and contains the perfect mix of military news, sports comments, leftist lunacy, conservative bumbling. Really good.

WL added: Those are really extraordinary. It's very interesting discovering how any intellectual figure develops his thought over time, especially when it's derived from logic and history, which is a rarity at this phase of our decline. Wish I had known about them when they were new. 
There are a hundred different points you can make about those early essays, but I'll save that for my own blog in the future. Really, the intellectual development of this sector of the counter-culture is more impressive than anything being done in academia, at least in the humanities.

That's very flattering, and more importantly, it reminded me that I've been remiss in actually making some of them available to prospective readers. The first volume of my Collected Columns was previously not available directly on Amazon, or through Kindle Unlimited, due to our experiment with the ill-fated Pronoun service offered by Macmillan. Having rectified that today, I can report that both Vol. I: Innocence and Intellect, 2001-2005 and Vol. II: Crisis & Conceit, 2006-2009, are available for Kindle and KU. The first volume is also available as a 764-page hardcover, on Amazon as well as via Castalia Books Direct.

An excerpt from June 2, 2003:

In which we examine a few of feminism’s favorite fairy tales.

Feminism is about choice.

Feminism is actually about having your choices made for you. Feminism is nothing more than a gender-based form of fascism, which attempts to control the behavior of individuals through government fiat. Fortunately, feminists have not been able to amass the power required to send unrepentant males and recalcitrant gender-traitors to the pink gulag. In the words of feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir:

No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such choice, too many women will make that one.

The reason that women have accomplished very little of note throughout history is primarily due to male oppression.

There is an element of truth to this, as the vast majority of women were denied access to the higher levels of education; then again, so were most men. However, it is also true that those women who did obtain excellent educations often chose to engage in light intellectual amusements instead of contributing anything of significance to the arts or sciences. There was nothing to stop the educated hetaerae of Greece from writing a “Metaphysics” or a “Republic”, nor anything preventing the mistresses of the famed Parisian salons from compiling, like Diderot, their own “Encyclopedia”; the fact remains they did not.

But the most damning argument against this myth is the appalling behavior of the leading female pseudo-intellectuals over the past 30 years. Instead of taking advantage of their intellectual freedom and unprecedented access to education, the feminist vanguard has embraced an anti-intellectual dogmatism that imprisons the current generation of young women in the academic convent of Women’s Studies, robbing them of both foundational knowledge and the capacity for rational linear thought, thus ensuring that this generation, like its foremothers, will also fail to accomplish anything worthy of historical regard.

Women entering the work force has been good for America.

The entry of women into the work force accomplished only one thing. It significantly lowered wages by doubling the size of the work force. According to the iron law of supply and demand, increasing the supply of X while demand remains constant means that the price of X will fall. The primary impact of women entering the work force in quantity has been to lower the price of labor so that two people must now work in order to maintain a household instead of one, as before.

While America does realize the benefit of the contributions of women whose talents might have otherwise been wasted, it pays a heavy price in terms of children who are abandoned to be raised by day-care centers, the state schools and television. And those many women who would like to make the choice to remain home with their children cannot, since their husband can’t earn enough money to support a family alone due to his wages having been lowered because of the increased supply of labor.

Anything men can do, women can do better.

This myth raises the question of how the nefarious Patriarchy could possibly have come to be established in the first place. Were the women of yore less intelligent, less aware, or otherwise less able than their modern counterparts? A lovely example of nonlinear fifth-stage thinking.

The Sexual Revolution liberated women.

It actually freed men from the responsibilities that traditionally accompanied access to sex. Whereas a man once needed to all but promise marriage before taking a lover, he now can freely expect a woman to satisfy his desires on the third date, if not the first. The real revolution was the wholesale transference of power in the male-female dynamic from women to men, and now any reasonably handsome young man can effortlessly rack up more sexual conquests in four years of college than did the legendary Casanova in a lifetime.

A woman has a right to control her own body.

This baseless assumption flies in the face of hundreds of long-standing American laws. A woman can be jailed for putting certain unapproved chemicals into her body, for failing to put certain required chemicals in her body (military vaccinations), for selling portions of her body or renting out her body on an hourly basis, or for displaying her body in public in an unapproved manner. The fact that some of these laws are, in my opinion, ill-founded, does not matter; they still serve to demonstrate the fallacy of this particular pro-abortion gynomyth.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/02/excerpt-innocence-intellect-2001-2005.html

Then and Now - By Fred Reed

OK, so why is the country falling apart? Specifically, why are kids blowing each other away? America has become a source of wonder the world over with its Columbines and hundreds and hundreds of dead in Chicago and Baltimore and its burning cities and riots. Other advanced countries don’t do these things.

America didn’t either until recently.   Why now? Something has changed, or some things. What?  People under forty have never seen the country when it was sane. Let me point out things that have changed, at risk of sounding like a boilerplate cadger: “By cracky, wen I was a boy, we could amuse ourselves for hours with just a piece of string and a couple of sticks.” Let’s compare today with the Fifties and Sixties. I mean this as sociology, not nostalgisizing.

I think that a combination of social changes have led to tremendous stress on today’s kids that my generation did not suffer. To wit:

In my rural Virginia school, there was no racial tension. We were all white: teachers, students, parents.

The black kids went to their own school, Ralph Bunche. We had virtually no contact with each other. There was no hostility, just no contact. The academic gap didn’t exist in the absence of contact. Integration would prove cruel when it came. and the black kid s sank to the bottom. The causes can be argued, but the fact cannot.

Nekkid In Austin: Drop...Fred ReedBest Price: $2.81Buy New $14.90(as of 10:45 EST - Details)

There was no black crime to speak of or, as far as I knew any black crime. Certainly blacks did not shoot each other, or anybody. Neither did we. The reasons I suspect were similar.

Divorce was extremely rare, so we all had parents. Whether it is better that unhappy couples stay together or that they divorce can be argued, but they then did stay together. It made a large difference in outcomes if one accepts the statistics. The welfare programs of the Great Society had not yet destroyed the black family, which I speculate accounted in part for low crime.

Drugs did not exist. These appeared only with the Sixties. A few of us had heard of marijuana. I read a clandestine copy of The Naked Lunch. That was it. We drank a lot of beer.

In the entire school I remember only one, moderately fat kid. Why? Because, I  will guess, we were very physically active. The school had PE classes, football and basketball teams, and so on. In summer kids aboard Dahlgren spent their days at the base swimming pool or swimming in Machodoc “Creek”{{it was perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide–bicycling, canoeing- playing tennis. The country kids chopped cord wood, lifted hay. There was ice skating for hours in winter. Gloria, my best girl, got up at four a.m. to help her father pull crab pots on the Potomac, Though feminine, she probably could have thrown a Volkswagen over a four-store building. Again, I offer this not as nostalgia but as biological fact with effects.

Physical fitness  has. I suspect  psychological consequences. For example, ADHD did not exist. Boys are competitive, physical animals full of wild energy and need–need–to work it off. Boredom and enforced inactivity are awful for them.  Two or three hours daily of fast-break pick-up basketball did this. If you force boys to sit rigidly in school, with no recess or only physically limited play, they will be miserable. If you then force them to take Ritalin, an approximate amphetamine, they will be miserable with modified brain chemistry. I don’t think this is a good idea.

Sex and, I think, its psychological consequences were different then. We were aware of sex. I am not sure we were aware of anything else. But the culture was such that, first, young girls, middle school, say, were sexually (very) off limits. When barely pubescent girls are taken advantage of by boys of seventeen or of thirty-five, the emotional effects are devastating. By contrast, boys hoped desperately to be taken advantage of.

Curmudgeing Through Pa...Fred ReedBest Price: $11.73Buy New $19.95(as of 10:45 EST - Details)

The de facto social theory was that girls should remain virgins until married. I  think few really believed this, and certainly many girls did not. However the necessity of pretending, plus the fear of pregnancy in those pre-pill days, allowed girls to say “no.” if they chose. The Pill, backed up by abortion, would make girls into commodities. If Sally said no, Mary wouldn’t, and boys, churning jhrmone wads, would go with Mary. Thus girls lost control of the sexual economy and the respect that went with it. More stress.

Anorexia and bulimia did not exist. We didn’t know the words. Both look to me like a reaction to stress.

Uncertainty is a formidable source of stress. We had little uncertainty as to our futures in the sense that the young do  today. We assumed, correctly, that jobs would be available for us. For kids who were not going on in school, there were jobs at Dahlgren, the local naval base,  as secretaries or guards or maintenance personnel, federal jobs with benefits. More remotely, Detroit was paying what seemed to us astronomical wages. Those of us in the college track, which meant those whose parents were grads and those who had high SATs, knew we could work in whatever field we had chosen. Starbucks and living in our parents’ basements never crossed our minds.

Social mobility existed, and girls had not yet been taught they were victims. Of my graduating class of sixty, two girls became physicists and my buddy Franklin, of non-college family an electronics engineer. Sherry a year  behind me, a nuclear biologist. All, I think, of non-college families. There must have been others.

Extremely important, I think, was that the school was apolitical. We didn’t know that it was. School was where you learned algebra and geography, or at least learned at them. The teachers, both men and women, assumed this. The white kids were not endlessly told that they were reprehensible and the cause of the world’s problems.  The boys were not told that masculinity was toxic. Hysteria over imaginary rape was well in the future. Little boys were not dragged from school by the police for drawing a soldier with a rifle. The idea of having police in a school would seem insane when it first appeared.

A Grand Adventure: Wis...Mr Fred ReedBest Price: $12.94Buy New $15.99(as of 03:15 EST - Details)

More speculatively: My wife Violeta recently commented that the young today seem about ten years younger than their age. There may be something go this. At least in the media and academic worlds, people in their mid-thirties  remind me of the young of the Sixties, displaying what appear to be the same hormonal rebellion and sanctimony. It has also seeped into high school. There is the same anger, the same search for grievance,  the same adolescent posturing.

I think feminism plays a large part in the collapse of society in general and specifically in pushing boys over the edge. In my school years boys were allowed to be boys. Neither sex was denigrated. Doing so would have occurred to nobody. Then came a prejudice against boys, powerful today

All of this affected society in its entirety, but especially white boys. They are constantly told that being white is shameful, that any masculine interest is pathological, that they are rapists in waiting. They are subjected to torturous boredom and inactivity, and drugged when they respond poorly. They go to schools that do not like them and that stack the deck against them. Many are fatherless. All have access to psychoactive drugs.

Add it up.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2018/02/fred-reed/kids-then-and-now/

Incompetence Wasn't the Problem in Broward County - By Jack Cashill

No one who follows the blogging collective known as the "Conservative Treehouse" will dispute my claim that its most prominent blogger, "Sundance" by name, is America's best reporter.  I got to know Sundance doing research for my book on the Trayvon Martin shooting, If I Had a Son.  So instrumental was the research of Sundance and his colleagues that I made the "Treepers" the protagonists of the book.

Sundance's research into the political dynamics of Martin's Miami-Dade school system led him to expand his research into neighboring Broward County years before the Parkland shooting.  We communicated the day after that shooting.  We had a shared sense of what had gone wrong.  I detailed some of this last week in an article on what one public interest magazine called the "Broward County solution."  In Broward County, they call it more modestly the "PROMISE Program."

In November 2013, Sundance first reported that Broward County was "willing to jump on the diversionary bandwagon."  As an attached Associated Press article noted, "One of the nation's largest school districts has reached an agreement with law enforcement agencies and the NAACP to reduce the number of students being charged with crimes for minor offenses."  The goal, as the article explained, was to create an alternative to the zero-tolerance policies then in place by giving principals, not law enforcement, the authority to determine the nature of the offense.

In a collaborative agreement among school officials and law enforcement, the presence of the NAACP might seem anomalous, but not in the Obama era, where considerations of race routinely shaped educational policy.  "One of the first things I saw was a huge differential in minority students, black male students in particular, in terms of suspensions and arrests," Broward's recently hired school superintendent, Robert Runcie, told the American Prospect.  A black American, Runcie assumed that the differential was due largely to some unspoken institutional bias against minorities.  As he saw it, these suspensions played a major role in the so-called "achievement gap" between white and minority students.

The first two "whereas" clauses in the collaborative agreement deal with opportunities for students in general, but the third speaks to the motivating issue behind the agreement: "Whereas, across the country, students of color, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ students are disproportionately impacted by school-based arrests for the same behavior as their peers."

The spurious "same behavior" insinuation would put the onus on law enforcement to treat black students more gingerly than they would non-blacks.  To make the issue seem less stark, authorities cloaked the black American crime disparity with EEOC boilerplate about "students of color" and other presumably marginalized individuals.  Although nonsensical on the face of it – one is hard pressed to recall a crime spree by the disabled – this language opened the door for Nikolas de Jesus Cruz.  An adopted son of the late Roger and Linda Cruz, the future school shooter had a name that fit the "metrics" of the collaborative agreement, regardless of his DNA.

It is not hard to understand why Broward County officials would be eager to adopt this program.  Miami-Dade had been receiving all kinds of honors for its efforts to shut down the dread "school-to-prison" pipeline.  On February 15, 2012, Miami-Dade County Public Schools put out a press release citing a commendation the Miami-Dade Schools Police (M-DSPD) had recently received.  The Department of Juvenile Justice had singled out Miami-Dade for "dramatically decreasing" school-related "delinquency."  Said M-DSPD Chief Charles Hurley, "Our mantra is education not incarceration."

Seventeen-year-old Miami-Dade student Trayvon Martin got neither incarceration nor education.  Eleven days after this self-congratulatory press release, Martin was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida, 250 miles from his Miami home.  For all the attention paid to the case, the media have refused to report why Martin was left to wander the streets of Sanford, high and alone on a Sunday night during a school week.

Sundance, who lives in South Florida, broke this story through old-fashioned gumshoe reporting.  He writes, "Over time the policy [in Miami-Dade] began to create outcomes where illegal behavior by students was essentially unchecked by law enforcement."  Sundance was alerted to the problem during the investigation into Martin's death when six M-DSPD officers blew the whistle on their superiors, the most notable of them being Chief Hurley.  The whistleblowers told of cases of burglary and robbery where officers had to hide the recovered evidence in order to avoid writing up the students for criminal behavior.  "At first I didn't believe them," writes Sundance of the whistleblowers.  "However, after getting information from detectives, cross referencing police reports, and looking at the 'found merchandise' I realized they were telling the truth."

One of those incidents involved Martin.  Caught with a dozen pieces of stolen female jewelry and a burglary tool, Martin had his offense written off as entering an unauthorized area and writing graffiti on a locker.  There could be no effort made to track the jewelry to its rightful owner, lest Martin's apprehension be elevated to the level of a crime.  Instead, Martin was suspended, one of three suspensions that school year.

When George Zimmerman saw him that night in the rain, Martin, now on his third suspension, was looking in windows of the complex's apartments.  Zimmerman thought he was casing them.  Given his history, Martin probably was.  Zimmerman dialed the police.  The rest is history – or, more accurately, would have been history if the media had reported Martin's brutal assault on Zimmerman honestly, but they almost universally refused to do so.

Broward County launched its "education not incarceration" experiment four months after Zimmerman was rightfully found not guilty in the Martin case.  By this time, Sundance and his fellow Treepers had exposed the corruption that Miami-Dade's seemingly enlightened policy had wrought within its school police department.  Given the mainstream media's failure to follow up on Sundance's work, even in Florida, it is likely that Broward officials did not know how deeply the policy had compromised police work in Miami-Dade.

What Broward County authorities did know is that the best "school resource officers," the euphemism for in-school sheriff's deputies, were those most sensitive to the objectives of the PROMISE program.  It is hardly shocking that in 2014, the now notorious Scot Peterson was named School Resource Officer of the Year by the Broward County Crime Commission for handling issues "with tact and judgment."  The motto of that crime commission?  "Evil triumphs when good people stand idly by."  Yikes!

Peterson, the commission noted, was also "active in mentoring and counseling students."  It appears that Nikolas Cruz got counseled a lot.  Better to educate him, after all, than incarcerate him.  Although there are many details still to be known, the Miami Herald reported on Friday that, in November 2017, a tipster called the Broward Sheriff's Office (BSO) to say Cruz "'could be a school shooter in the making,' but deputies did not write up a report on that warning."

The Herald added that this tip came just weeks after a relative called urging BSO to seize his weapons.  Two years prior, "A deputy investigated a report that Cruz 'planned to shoot up the school' – intelligence that was forwarded to the school's resource officer, with no apparent result."

That school resource officer just happened to be Scot Peterson.  He did not err by letting this misunderstood Hispanic lad go unpunished in any meaningful way.  Peterson showed his award-winning "tact and judgment."  He had to understand that to keep the PROMISE momentum going, the school would have to see fewer and fewer arrests each year.  This meant excusing worse and worse offenses, especially for students who counted as minorities.  As for the qualities real cops are expected to show – courage under fire comes to mind – those were obviously not Peterson's strong suit.

"The school resource officer was behind a stairwell wall just standing there, and he had his gun drawn.  And he was just pointing it at the building," said student Brandon Huff of Peterson.  "And you could – shots started going off inside.  You could hear them going off over and over."

In a surprisingly tough interview with Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, CNN's Jake Tapper cited the 23 incidents before the shooting that involved Cruz and questioned whether the PROMISE program might have been responsible for the inaction by the sheriff's office. 

"It's helping many, many people," said Israel in defense of the program.  "What this program does is not put a person at 14, 15, 16 years old into the criminal justice system."

Said Tapper, "What if he should be in the criminal justice system?  What if he does something violent to a student?  What if he takes bullets to school?  What if he takes knives to schools?  What if he threatens the lives of fellow students?"  As solid as these questions are, if CNN had raised comparable questions after the death of Trayvon Martin, 17 Parkland students might still be alive.

Says Sundance in conclusion, "I will give testimony, provide names, outline dates, and give all prior records to any lawyer for use in a wrongful death lawsuit – so long as their intent would be to financially ruin the entire system and personally bankrupt the participants."

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/incompetence_wasnt_the_problem_in_broward_county.html

US Threats Won’t Stop Them - By Thomas Luongo

Don’t tell the Iran hawks in D.C., isolating Iran won’t work.  Iranian President Hassan Rouhani met with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi this week and the two signed a multitude of agreements.

The most important of which is India’s leasing of part of the Iranian port of Chabahar on the Gulf of Oman.  This deal further strengthens India’s ability to access central Asian markets while bypassing the Pakistani port at Gwadar, now under renovation by China as part of CPEC – China Pakistan Economic Corridor.

CPEC is part of China’s far bigger One Belt, One Road Initiative (OBOR), its ambitious plan to link the Far East with Western Europe and everyone else in between.  OBOR has dozens of moving parts with its current focus on upgrading the transport infrastructure of India’s rival Pakistan while Russia works with Iran on upgrading its rail lines across its vast central plateaus as well as those moving south into Iran.

India is investing in Iran’s rails starting at Chabahar and moving north.

Just Part of the Much-Needed Rail Upgrade Iran Needs to Connect it to India

Chabahar has long been a development goal for Russia, Iran and India.  The North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC) was put on paper way back when Putin first took office (2002). And various parts of it have been completed.  The full rail route linking Chabahar into the rest of Iran’s rail network, however, has not been completed.

The first leg, to the eastern city of Zahedan is complete and the next leg will take it to Mashhad, near the Turkmenistan border.  These two cities are crucial to India finding ways into Central Asia while not looking like they are partaking in OBOR.

Also, from Zahedan, work can now start on the 160+ mile line to Zaranj, Afghanistan.

The recent deal between Iran and India for engines and railcars to run on this line underscores these developments.  So, today’s announcements are the next logical step.

The U.S. Spectre

As these rail projects get completed the geopolitical imperatives for the U.S. and it’s anti-Iranian echo chamber become more actute.  India, especially under Modi, has been trying to walk a fine line between doing what is obviously in its long-term best interest, deepening its ties with Iran, while doing so without incurring the wrath of Washington D.C.

India is trapped between Iran to the west and China to the east when it comes to the U.S.’s central Asian policy of sowing chaos to keep everyone down, otherwise known as the Brzezinski Doctrine.

India has to choose its own path towards central Asian integration while nominally rejecting OBOR. It was one of the few countries to not send a high-ranking government official to last year’s massive OBOR Conference along with the U.S.

So, it virtue signals that it won’t work with China and Pakistan.  It’s easy to do since these are both open wounds on a number of fronts.  While at the same time making multi-billion investments into Iran’s infrastructure to open up freight trade and energy supply for itself.

All of which, by the way, materially helps both China’s and Pakistan’s ambitions int the region.

So much of the NTSC’s slow development can be traced to the patchwork of economic sanctions placed on both Russia and Iran by the U.S. over the past ten years.  These have forced countries and companies to invest capital inefficiently to avoid running afoul of the U.S.

The current deals signed by Rouhani and Modi will be paid for directly in Indian rupees.  This is to ensure that the money can actually be used in case President Trump decertifies the JCPOA and slaps new sanctions on Iran, kicking it, again, out of the SWIFT international payment system.

Given the currency instability in Iran, getting hold of rupees is a win.  But, looking at the rupee as a relatively ‘hard’ currency should tell you just how difficult it was for Iran to function without access to SWIFT from 2012 to 2015.

Remember, that without India paying for Iranian oil in everything from washing machines to gold (laundered through Turkish banks), Iran would not have survived that period.

Don’t kid yourself.  The U.S. doesn’t want to see these projects move forward.  Any completed infrastructure linking Iran more fully into the fabric of central Asia is another step towards an economy independent of Western banking influences.

This is the real reason that Israel and Trump want to decertify the Iran nuclear deal.  An economically untethered Iran is something no one in Washington and Tel Aviv wants.

The Fallacy of Control

The reason(s) for this stem from the mistaken belief that the way to ensure Iran’s society evolves the right way, i.e. how we want them to, is to destabilize the theocracy and allow a new government which we have more control over to flourish.

It doesn’t matter that this never works. Punishment of enemies is a dominant neoconservative trait.

When the truth is that the opposite approach is far more likely to produce an Iran less hostile to both Israel and the U.S.  Rouhani is the closest thing to a free-market reformer Iran has produced since the 1979 revolution.  Putting the country on a stronger economic footing is what will loosen the strings of the theocracy.

We’re already seeing that.  Rouhani’s re-election came against record voter turnout and gave him a 57% mandate over a candidate explicitly backed by the mullahs.

That said, there is no magic bullet for solving Iran’s economic problems, which are legion, after years of war both physical and economic.  Inflation is down to just 10%, but unemployment is at depression levels.  It will simply take time.

The recent protests started as purely economic in nature as the people’s patience with Rouhani’s reforms are wearing thin, not because they aren’t for the most part moving things in the right direction, but because they aren’t happening fast enough.

And you can thank U.S. and Israeli policy for that.  Trump’s ‘will-he/won’t-he’ approach to the JCPOA, the open hostility of his administration has the intended effect of retarding investment.

The country’s current economic problems come from a woeful lack of infrastructure thanks to the U.S.’s starving it of outside investment capital for the past seven years alongside a currency collapse.

With the JCPOA in place the investment capital is now just beginning to make its way into the country.  It’s taken nearly three years for the fear of U.S. reprisal to wear off sufficiently to allow significant deals to be reached, like these.

Last summer President Trump began making noise over the JCPOA and John McCain pushed through the sanctions bill that nominally targeted Russia, but actually targeted impending European investment into Iran’s oil and gas sectors.

It didn’t and France’s Total still signed a $4+ billion exploration deal with Iran.  European majors are lined up to do business with Iran but the sanctions bill is stopping them.  And Trump is too much of a mercantilist to see the effects.  Iran is evil and blocking them is good for our oil companies.

Full Stop.

Don’t forget last year’s announcement of a new Iran to India gas pipeline, in a deal facilitated by Russia’s Gazprom to ensure a part of India’s future energy needs.  This was a pipeline project delayed for nearly two decades as the U.S. (and Hillary Clinton) tried to bring gas down from Turkmenistan, the TAPI pipeline, and cut Iran out of the picture.

Both countries have not benefitted from this mutually-beneficial energy trade for more than fifteen years because of U.S. meddling.

India’s Future Is Iran’s

What this summit between Modi and Rouhani ultimately means is that despite all attempts at intimidation and control, self-interest always wins.  There are too many good reasons for India and Iran to be allies economically.

And despite our increased military presence in both Afghanistan and Syria beyond all rationality, designed to surround and pressure Iran into submission, in the end it won’t work.  India imports 60% of its energy needs.

And while the two countries have been sparring over particulars in developing the important Farzad-B gas field in the Persian Gulf, Rouhani and Modi seem to have created a framework where the two can get a deal done.

On Farzad-B, [Indian Oil Minister] Pradhan said both sides agreed to reove “all the bottlenecks on capex, return (on indina investments) and timeline. We have decided today to reopen and re-engage on all three issues again.”

The oil deal appears to be the most crucial breakthrough since India had reduced Iranian crude imports by a quarter in retaliation for, what officials described as, Iran’s flip-flop over sealing a deal over Farzad-B.

Those words came after Iran cut a better deal for oil exports to India, up to 500,000 more barrels per day, more than doubling 2017’s 370,000 barrels per day.

If Rouhani’s visit can nail down these deals and build further trust between the two countries, he will have moved the ball way down the field for Iran as it pertains to its improving regional relationships with Russia, Turkey and even China.

Because, by getting India to help stabilize Iran’s energy industry and build its transport infrastructure in the east it’s assisting Russia and China’s goals of opening up the former Soviet ‘Stans as well as give them more leverage to craft a security deal in Afghanistan between the Kabul government and the amenable parts of the Taliban.