Australian Couple Travels Through Asia To âBreak Stigmaâ Of Countries Getting A âBad Rap.â Theyâre Reportedly In Jail In Iran.
By Hank Berrien
An Australian couple traveling through Asia who wanted to “break the stigma around travelling to countries which get a bad wrap [sic] in the media,” reportedly found out the hard way that some countries may well deserve the reputation they have: the couple was reportedly arrested 10 weeks ago in Iran.
Jolie King, who has dual U.K. and Australian nationality, and Mark Firkin, have over 20,000 followers on Instagram and YouTube, where they document their travels. According to the BBC, the couple was traveling through Asia to Great Britain, starting in 2017. The pair had a drone they used to take footage of the dozen countries through which they were passing.
According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, that drone landed them behind bars in Iran 10 weeks ago. “The pair has been held as prisoners for about 10 weeks after being arrested for reportedly flying a drone without a permit,” ABC reports.
The BBC reports that the couple is “believed to be being held in Tehran’s Evin prison.”
Another British-Australian woman, reportedly a University of Cambridge-educated scholar, has been jailed for 10 years in Iran, according to the BBC.
Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said she spoke to the Iranian government about all three people last week. “Since they were detained, the Australian Government has been pressing the Iranian Government for their release,” said Payne. “I have communicated with my Iranian counterpart, Foreign Minister Zarif, many times about these cases, including through face-to-face face meetings. We met as recently as last week.”
“Our biggest motivation … is to hopefully inspire anyone wanting to travel, and also try to break the stigma around travelling to countries which get a bad wrap [sic] in the media,” King and Firkin had written about their travels.
In July, Australia announced that it would join the U.S. and the U.K. as they monitored the Strait of Hormuz. Reported Iranian provocations involving other nations’ ships have been rampant near the Strait in recent months.
The BBC reported that U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab met the Iranian ambassador and “raised serious concerns about the number of dual national citizens detained by Iran and their conditions of detention,” according to the Foreign Office.
The story of King and Firkin bears similarities to another story reported by The Daily Wire in August 2018 in which a “young American couple who took a year-long bike trip around the world, believing that evil was a make-believe concept, took a fatal route in Tajikistan near the Afghan border, where alleged ISIS terrorists stabbed them to death. Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, 29, quit their jobs last year in order to make their trip.”
Austin had written:
You watch the news and you read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. People are axe murderers and monsters and worse.
I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our ownâit’s easier to dismiss an opinion as abhorrent than strive to understand it. Badness exists, sure, but even that’s quite rare. By and large, humans are kind. Self-interested sometimes, myopic sometimes, but kind. Generous and wonderful and kind. No greater revelation has come from our journey than this.
In June 2019, the man who was the alleged ringleader in the attack on Austin and Geohegan was asked if he interacted with the tourists at the gas station they stopped at just prior to the attack, Hussein Abdusamadov replied,“Yes. I talked to them. I asked them where they were from. I asked them what nationalities they were and they told me they were Americans ⌠They said they were Americans and laughed.” He concluded, “Americans had to be killed.”Â
MCDONALDS TO REPLACE MORE HUMAN EMPLOYEES WITH DRIVE-THRU AI
Howâs that $15 an hour looking now?
McDonalds is set to replace more human employees with automated technology after the company announced that it intends to use a new AI program to take drive-thru orders.
The food chain has acquired Mountain View-based voice tech startup Apprente in order to âalleviate pressure on restaurant employees.â
More like alleviate them of their jobs.
The technology can handle âcomplex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item conversational ordering,â allowing for âfaster, simpler and more accurate order taking,â according to reports.
âMcDonaldâs plans to roll out self-service kiosks across all US restaurant locations by 2020 â reducing the need to employ as many human cashiers,â reports Zero Hedge.
Howâs that $15 dollars an hour paycheck working out for you now?
Some airplanes did something?! New York Times article âde-terrorizesâ 9/11 attacks
On the anniversary of the most devastating terrorist attack on US soil, a story by the New York Times suggested that âairplanesâ brought down the twin towers. The seeming shift of responsibility did not sit well with readers.
â18 years have passed since airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center,â read a tweet from the New York Times on Wednesday. âToday families will once again gather and grieve at the site where more than 2000 people died.â Inside an accompanying article, the same bizarre sentence was repeated.
Though technological dystopia was all the rage in 2001, what with the success of âThe Matrixâ two years earlier and the passing of Y2KÂ after that, the 9/11 attacks were not carried out by sentient airplanes, but by terrorist hijackers. Enraged readers made sure the NYT knew that, slating the newspaper for omitting the terms âIslamic terroristsâ or even the less-loaded âAl Qaedaâ from its story.
The Times later deleted the tweet and amended its story, which, this time around, read: âEighteen years have passed since terrorists commandeered airplanes to take aim at the World Trade Center and bring them down.â Responsibility was placed squarely with Al Qaeda in the updated article.
But why the strange phrasing in the first place? The Times did not report the recent mass shootings in Texas as the work of a disembodied AR-15. Nor does the paper attribute President Donald Trumpâs executive orders to levitating pens, or climate change to fossil fuels deciding to burn themselves.
To some observers, the watered-down description of the attacks was an effort to… not offend anybody, including ordinary Muslims who risk guilt-by-association for sharing their religious beliefs with the perpetrators. âSome airplanes did something,â jibed one commenter, comparing the Timesâ coverage to a much-maligned soundbite from Democratic Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar earlier this year, in which Omar summarized the attacks as âsome people did something.â
To be fair, radical Islamic terrorists arenât alone in having their deeds sanitized by the New York Times in recent days. The paper marked the 43rd anniversary of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedongâs passing on Monday with a tweet describing how Chairman Mao âbegan as an obscure peasantâ and âdied one of historyâs great revolutionary figures.â
After a similar backlash, the tweet was deleted, with the paper apologizing for not providing âcritical historical context;â namely the famines that occurred on Maoâs watch and his role in the 1966-1976 âCultural Revolution,â events that left tens of millions of Chinese citizens dead.
âSAVE THE TREES, KILL THE CHILDRENâ: AUSTIN, TEXAS CITY COUNCIL GIVES $150,000 TO FUND ABORTIONS
Measure will invariably lead to deaths of more unborn babies
SEPTEMBER 11, 2019
The Austin, Texas, city council this week passed a measure giving $150,000 of taxpayer money to fund abortions.
On Tuesday, the council announced a budget package allocating the cash to the cityâs Public Health Department, which in turn will distribute the money to groups helping poor women secure abortions.
âPro-choiceâ Austin City Councilman Greg Casar praised the bill for increasing âaccess to abortion,â a move that will invariably lead to the death of unborn babies.
âEvery day the anti-abortion elements in Texas, in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, wake up and think, âHow can we restrict access to abortion today,ââ Casar told NBC. âThat makes it our job, every day, to work to expand access to abortion and health care and other basic services related to abortion.â
Texas pro-life groups, however, lamented the fact the city passes resolutions to protect the environment and not the unborn.
âIt is appalling the city of Austin doubled-down on its policies to âsave the trees, kill the children,ââ said Nicole Hudgins with the pro-life group Texas Values. âThis budget amendment is a political stunt attempting to circumvent the law. If the city really wants to help women, they should lower their taxes and stop killing innocent children.â
LifeNews.comâs Micaiah Bilger notes Texas Gov. Greg Abbott passed a resolution this year preventing local governments from funding organizations which perform abortions, however, the cityâs new measure appears to be an attempt to skirt that law by instead giving the money to groups that assist women in obtaining abortions.
Bilger writes the money could in effect fund late-term abortions by paying for women to travel to states where the practice is legal.
Pro-life group Texas Right to Life labeled the councilâs measure âgrotesque news.â
âThis grotesque news is another example of the abortion industry exploiting taxpayers to profit off vulnerable women and kill preborn children,â they wrote.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: REPUBLICAN PARTY IS âSCAREDâ OF US âBECAUSE THEY KNOW HOW POWERFULâ WE ARE
âThey know how powerful we are more than sometimes our own â frankly I think â our own party does.â
SEPTEMBER 12, 2019
The far-left members of the âSquadâ â Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) â participated in an NAACP forum Wednesday evening and declared that members of the Republican Party are âscaredâ of them âbecause they know how powerfulâ they are.
Ocasio-Cortez talked about her background as a waitress and told the moderator, Angela Rye, that she does not âshy awayâ from her background of working in restaurants because it prepared her for her current job as a congresswoman.
âNothing will give you the ferocity of advocacy like having that kind of experience,â Ocasio-Cortez said.
âNo one can tell me about things like sexual harassment. No one can tell me things like working for tips on a wage that is less than the minimum wage. No one can tell me about taking the subway at 3 oâclock in the morning home from a night shift,â she said, claiming that âno one else has those experiences on the other side of the aisle.â
The freshman lawmaker added that the Republican Party is âscaredâ of the âSquad.â
âItâs because theyâre scared because sometimes I think that the Republican Party recognizes our power more than we do sometimes,â she said.
House Judiciary Committee Passes Resolution on Impeachment Inquiry Rules
By Joshua Caplan
The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a resolution which defines the scope of a potential impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.
The party-line 24-17 vote occurred after two hours of debate between Democrats and Republicans about the so-called inquiryâs parameters.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) tried to clear up any misconceptions as the committee approved guidelines for impeachment hearings on President Trump. Some of Nadlerâs fellow Democrats â including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) â have stumbled over how to explain what theyâre doing.
âSome call this process an impeachment inquiry. Some call it an impeachment investigation. There is no legal difference between these terms, and I no longer care to argue about the nomenclature,â Nadler said as he opened the meeting. âBut let me clear up any remaining doubt: The conduct under investigation poses a threat to our democracy. We have an obligation to respond to this threat. And we are doing so.â
Republicans disagree with Nadler and they argue that the House has never voted to open an official inquiry. Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA), the top Republican on the committee, said the committee âhas become a giant Instagram filter ⌠itâs put in there to look like something, but itâs really not.â
Collins said Democrats are trying to have it both ways.
âMy colleagues know very well they donât have the votes to authorize impeachment proceedings on the House floor, but they want to impeach the president anyway,â Collins said. âSo, they are pretending to initiate impeachment.â
Impeachment has divided Democrats who control the House. Democrats on Nadlerâs committee, including some of the most liberal members of the House, have been eager to move forward with the process. But moderates, mostly first-term lawmakers who handed their party the majority in the 2018 election, are concerned about the committeeâs drumbeat on impeachment and the attention that comes with that continued action.
With regard to impeachment, the biggest elephant in the room is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has long opposed Congress taking the lead on ousting the president. Instead, Pelosi has insisted that committees continue their investigations into President Trump and his associates in search of possible wrongdoings. Earlier this week, the speaker dismissed concerns that Nadlerâs recent maneuvers exhibit how sheâs losing control over her caucus. âI think you should characterize it [the resolution] for what it is,â Pelosi told Fox News. âItâs a continuation of what we have been doing. You know, we all work together on these thingsâ
Not only is Pelosi unwilling to move the ball forward on impeachment, but the speaker also believes the American people do not want to see lawmakers take up the matter at this time.
âThe public isnât there on impeachment. Itâs your voice and constituency, but give me the leverage I need to make sure that weâre ready and it is as strong as it can be,â Pelosi said during a caucus-wide conference call last month.
âThe equities we have to weigh are our responsibility to protect and defend the Constitution and to be unifying and not dividing. But if and when we act, people will know he gave us no choice,â she added.
Meanwhile, President Trump took to Twitter following the vote to seemingly underline the political motivations behind an impeachment inquiry and quoted Rep. Al Green (D-TX), who introduced articles of impeachment in June.
ââWe canât beat him, so lets impeach him!â Democrat Rep. Al Green,â the president recounted the lawmaker proposing earlier this year.
FLASHBACK: On This Day in 2001, Bush Officials Announced That $2.3 Trillion Went Missing at the Pentagon
And then we all know what happened a day laterâŚ
By Shane Trejo
While the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon are remembered every year with heavy hearts, the bizarre and inexplicable events that happened the day before are usually glossed over, lost down the memory hole due to the war on terror that has gripped the nation for nearly 18 years now.
On Sept. 10, 2001, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that $2.3 trillion had gone missing at the Pentagon. He made a statement blaming the corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy for these funds vanishing essentially into thin air.
CBS News issued a report as apart of their âEye on Americaâ series about the loss of funds, and how that scandal was conveniently lost in the shuffle only a day after it was made public:
While Rumsfeldâs announcement could have garnered widespread outrage and eventually sparked an impetus to reform the out-of-control Pentagon bureaucracy, that was made impossible after the attacks as the public suddenly supported even more national defense spending to defeat global terrorism.
Since the attacks, the problem of disappearing defense funds has gotten exponentially worse. It was widely reported earlier this year that the Pentagon can not account for $21 trillion in spending as the military-industrial complex has swelled to unforeseen proportions while endless wars continue throughout the Middle East.
Forbes published an analysis by top economists of the astronomical military waste at the Pentagon:
Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, conducted a search of government websites and found similar reports dating back to 1998. While the documents are incomplete, original government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.
While government budgets can be complex, our government, like any business, can track receipts and payments and share this information in ways that can be understood by the public. The ongoing occurrence and gargantuan nature of unsupported, i.e., undocumented, U.S. federal government expenditures as well as sources of funding for these expenditures should be a great concern to all tax payers.
Taken together these reports point to a failure to comply with basic Constitutional and legislative requirements for spending and disclosure. We urge the House and Senate Budget Committee to initiate immediate investigations of unaccounted federal expenditures as well as the source of their payment.
While the credible reports of unprecedented government waste are disheartening enough, new developments show that more than bureaucratic incompetence may have proceeded the 9/11 attacks. A recent academic study commissioned by the University of Alaska-Fairbanks has concluded that office fires could not have caused the fall of building seven of the World Trade Center, casting aspersions on the official story offered by federal investigators.
Until a new independent investigation is commissioned, serious and troubling questions will always remain about arguably the most consequential day in American history.
SHIP CARRYING âCLIMATE CHANGE WARRIORSâ CONCERNED ABOUT MELTING ARCTIC ICE GETS STUCK IN ICE
Well, this is awkward.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2019
A ship carrying passengers who included a group of âClimate Change Warriorsâ who are concerned about melting Arctic ice got stuck in the ice halfway between Norway and the North Pole.
Oh, the irony.
âArctic tours ship MS MALMO with 16 passengers on board got stuck in ice on Sep 3 off Longyearbyen, Svalbard Archipelago,â reports the Maritime Bulletin. âThe ship is on Arctic tour with Climate Change documentary film team, and tourists, concerned with Climate Change and melting Arctic ice.â
The passengers were safely evacuated by helicopter.
âSomething is very wrong with Arctic ice, instead of melting as ordered by UN/IPCC, it captured the ship with Climate Change Warriors,â joked Erofey Schkvarkin.
The story is similar to a 2014 incident when a Chinese icebreaker had to be sent to rescue dozens of global warming researchers and environmentalists who got stranded on a ship which got stuck in the Antarctic ice.
Poster child environmentalist Greta Thunberg has not commented on the latest incident.
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