Two Americans Stabbed By 19 Year Old Afghan Man In Netherlands

Two people stabbed in a knife attack at the Dutch capital’s main railway station on Friday are both American citizens who were visiting the Netherlands, the U.S. ambassador said Saturday as police investigated possible motives, including the possibility it was an extremist act.

Police shot and wounded a 19-year-old Afghan man with a German residence permit immediately after the attack and are questioning him as a suspect.

A dramatic photo captured by a passerby shows two police officers pointing their pistols at a man wearing jeans and sneakers lying on the ground inside a tunnel in the station.

Photo credit: Associated Press

The stabbings occurred shortly after noon (1000 GMT; 6 a.m. EDT) on Friday at Central Station in downtown Amsterdam: “Something happened, we don’t know yet what, but during that two people were stabbed and one person with a knife in his hand walked away and he was shot by police,” police spokesman Rob van der Veen said Friday.

Central Station is a busy entry and exit point for visitors to Amsterdam, with regular trains linking it to the city’s Schiphol Airport. Friday is one of the busiest days of the week for train travel as tourists arrive for the weekend.

Photo credit: De Telegraf

Ambassador Pete Hoekstra issued a written statement saying embassy officials had been in touch with the victims or their families. Police say they have serious but not life-threatening injuries. Authorities did not disclose the identities of the victims.

“We wish them a speedy recovery and are working closely with the City of Amsterdam to provide assistance to them and their families,” Hoekstra said.

Police say they are still trying to establish a reason for the attack, including whether it was motivated by extremism.

According to the Associated Press, a statement issued late Friday by Amsterdam’s city council said that the Americans did not appear to have been victims of a targeted attack.

Initial police inquiries did not indicate that the victims were chosen deliberately or with a clear reason, Amsterdam authorities said, however “the investigation is still underway, and all scenarios remain open for the investigation team,” the City Hall statement said.

Police said in a statement Saturday that the Afghan man was being questioned in the hospital with the help of an interpreter. His identity has not been released, but police say he has a German residency permit.

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Luongo: Trump Doesn’t Want Peace With The EU

Authored by Tom Luongo,

Donald Trump is on a mission.  His goal? Destroy the post-WWII institutional order that has outlived its usefulness.

And there have been a number of major moves that fundamentally tear at the fabric of that order.  In a span of a day we’ve had the following things occur in quick succession.

  • French President Emmanuel Macron holds a press conference calling for a new “strategic relationship with Russia and Turkey.”

  • At the same time he softened the EU’s stance on Russia’s reunification with Crimea, saying Russian – EU relations needed “to be brought up to date.”

  • On the trade and tariff war with Trump, Germany called Trump’s bluff about free trade on cars by offering to scrap all import tariffs on theirs in exchange for the U.S. lifting them on light trucks and pickups, which Trump promptly rejected.

  • Trump then called the EU “Worse than China” and threatened to pull the U.S. out of the World Trade Organization.

  • Ayatollah Khamenei put pressure on the EU to stand up to Trump over the JCPOA, clearly threatening a return of their nuclear program.

Just last week German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, clearly frustrated with Trump’s endless dollar belligerence called for the EU to develop, like Russia and China, it’s own electronic interbank payment system to skirt U.S. sanctions.

So in one week we’ve had the Germans threaten SWIFT, the French question the validity of NATO and Trump threaten to leave the WTO.

All against the backdrop of the end of the Syrian Civil War and the potential withdrawal of U.S. troops from there while the Taliban arrive in Moscow to discuss peace terms with the Afghan government.

Is it just me or are things about to look very different very soon.

If we take Trump at his word then we were supposed to believe Trump wanted peace and free trade with the EU.  In this case his word was this tweet from July 24th where he said:

The European Union is coming to Washington tomorrow to negotiate a deal on Trade. I have an idea for them. Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be called Free Market and Fair Trade! Hope they do it, we are ready – but they won’t!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2018

Oops, Donald.  They were.  And as I said above, his big bluff on this was called.  Trump doesn’t want free trade with Germany.  He rejected the offer to scrap all automobile tariffs because “their consumer culture doesn’t buy our cars.”

Yes, because our cars suck, frankly.  And they’ve sucked for a long time.   And you can’t mandate they buy them.

But, I digress.

This sequence of events highlights exactly what I said about Trump last week, that he is purposefully driving a wedge between Europe and the U.S. to end NATO, among other things.

By driving a wedge between Germany and the U.S. over NATO and attacking the foundations of the German economy Trump is ensuring the current rapprochement between Germany and Russia?

Merkel, for her part, has been so terminally weakened by her immigration policy and strong-armed approach to dissent that this whirlwind weekender by Putin was as much for her benefit, politically, as his.

The implication being that if Merkel wants to stay in power with her weakening coalition and poll numbers it’s time for her to reverse course. And if that means cozying up to Russia then so be it.

Merkel will continue to talk a good game about Crimea and Ukraine while Putin will speak directly to the German people about ending the humanitarian crisis in Syria as a proxy for ending the threat of further immigration.

He knows most of the people who are behind the opposition to his Presidency are the same people driving the globalist bus, those I call The Davos Crowd.

He knows that Merkel and Macron both work for them.  And The Davos Crowd are hell-bent on destroying the multiplicity of cultures that make Europe what it is.

So, Trump doesn’t want a solution to this trade spat.  He wants to inflict maximum pain on them to force a radical realignment while extricating the U.S. from subsidizing their march towards centralized tyranny from Brussels.

At the same time this gives Macron and Merkel all the breathing room they need to patch things up with Russia while the Brits fume over not being able to destroy both Trump and Putin, since MI6 and the British Deep State are the ones doing the dirty work to undermine Trump and Putin at every turn.

Macron’s statement about Crimea was the first made by a major European leader that didn’t explicitly mention the Minsk II agreement as a prerequisite for normalizing relations with Russia.

Trump has pushed the EU into a corner, essentially saying, if you want to choose Russia, China and Iran over us, you’ll do so without our money and our banks.

Trump has all the subtlety of a wolverine in rut, but he’s pretty clear about what his intentions are if you are listening.

*  *  *

Join my Patreon if you want to see the U.S. out of NATO.

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“We Crashed, But It’s Ok”: Passenger Records Dramatic Video Of Russian Airplane Crash

Early on Saturday, more than 160 passengers and crew on a Russian Boeing 737 skidded off the end of a runway during a rough landing in the Russian city of Sochi, plunging into a river and exploding into flames.

All passengers and crew managed to escape, about 18 people received medical treatment, the Russian Health Ministry said in a statement, adding that rescue crews swiftly evacuated everyone from the plane.

“At the moment, there are 18 injured, including three children. There are no fatalities,” the ministry said in a statement. All 160 people on board were evacuated. The blaze has been put out, local emergency services said.

The inflatable chutes from the doors of the plane reportedly slow in opening, passengers said (Source/ Daily Mail/AP)

Some of those on board jumped from the wings of the plane to escape (Source/ Daily Mail/AP)

Dramatic images show the plane on fire after people had been evacuated from the runway in Sochi, Russia (Source/ Daily Mail/ east2west news)

Initial reports say one of the wings clipped the ground during landing in the bad weather (Source/ Daily Mail/ east2west news)

All passengers on-board the Boeing 737 plane escaped but one rescuer is said to have died from a heart attack (Source/ Daily Mail/ east2west news)

The Utair airline said Flight UT579 going from Moscow to Sochi had difficult landing due to poor weather. It took the aircraft two attempts to land, with strong wind and rain behind the first failed attempt.

On the second attempt, the pilots managed to land the plane but it overshot the runway, crashing through a barrier and plunging a dozen or so feet into a riverbed and caused the left engine to catch on fire, an Utair spokesman told RIA Novosti.

Early Saturday morning flames were extinguished (Source/ Air Crash)

Both wings broke and there was damage to the undercarriage (Source/ @JacdecNew)

Severe damage to the fuselage (Source/ @JacdecNew)

“There were 164 passengers and six crew on board. Sochi airport firefighters extinguished the flames and evacuated the people. There are no fatalities,” the air carrier said.

Utair said a joint investigation into the crash had been started with aviation authorities. At the time of the incident, there were no delays at the airport.

Passengers said after the impact, emergency inflatable chutes were deployed from the airplane’s exits. Some exits were blocked due to intense fire, so many passengers had to exit on the plane’s wing then jump to the ground.

The video shows the moment the plane erupted into flames, as a passenger using his smartphone caputed the aftermath.

“We crashed, but it’s OK, I guess,” a man can be heard saying in a short video minutes after the jet skidded into a riverbed. The video shows intense flames, as faint screams of distressed passengers can be heard in the background.

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Einhorn’s Greenlight Crashes 25% YTD After 8% Drop In August

Two months ago, in our ongoing chronicle of the pain suffered by David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital, we reported that based on interim monthly numbers, the fund had lost a massive 8% in the month of June, bringing his – and his LPs’ – total loss for the year to 19%. The reason: Einhorn got clobbered on both side of his portfolio, with his 20 biggest long positions falling sharply, while his 20 largest shorts – most of which are the prominent growth and tech names that have been beaten down recently – surged.

Then, a month ago, in his latest Q2 letter to investors, Einhorn not only confirmed the poor performance had continued, but also noted that “over the past three years, our results have been far worse than we could have imagined” and while hoping he will be vindicated in the end, he admitted that “Right now the market is telling us we are wrong, wrong, wrong about nearly everything. And yet, looking forward from today we think this portfolio makes a lot of sense.

However one month later, it still does not make sense, and according to the latest monthly performance report for his Greenlight Capital, the pain for the beleagureed billionaire investor just keeps growing.

According to Reuters, Einhorn – whose bets on car companies General Motors and Tesla both moved against him in August – and whose short tech basket has been a constant source of L in the P&L, lost another 7.6%, leaving the fund down 25.1% for the year, and deepening his worst slump on record.

Einhorn sent investors his monthly update after the market closed on Friday but gave no specific reason for the fresh losses, people who received it said.

One of Greenlight’s largest positions, General Motors, fell 3.4% on concerns about rising input costs as a result of Trump’s tariffs. Meanwhile, Greenlight also got hit on his Tesla short, which first rose then fell during the month fueled by Musk’s decision to remain a public company after all, closed the month higher, hurting short sellers.

Commenting on the Greenlight Capital Aug 1 conference call, Einhorn said that “this has been a frustrating environment for us and for value investing styles,” adding that “the market is cyclical and given the extreme anomaly, reversion to the mean should happen sooner rather than later, we just can’t say when.”

Einhorn – who was the subject of an unflattering July WSJ profile piece  – has seen his investors, who have been increasingly losing patience with his poor performance, pulling money out. August’s numbers could prompt more departures at year-end when the manager will next let investors redeem money, one person told Reuters.

Commenting on his deplorable results, Einhorn remained resolute:

We have been accused of being stubborn, but one person’s stubbornness is another person’s discipline. We will continue to be disciplined.

Will Einhorn’s stubbornness finally throw in the towel, or will he carry his losing positions to Greenlight’s grave? The answer remains elusive. For those who missed it, and for some insight into his thinking, below we republish the key excerpts from his latest letter to investors.

Dear Partner:

We had another difficult quarter and lost an additional (5.4)%,1 bringing the Greenlight Capital funds’ (the “Partnerships”) year-to-date loss to (18.3)%. During the quarter, the S&P 500 index returned 3.4%, bringing its year-to-date return to 2.6%.

Over the past three years, our results have been far worse than we could have imagined, and it’s been a bull market to boot. Yes, we have made some obvious mistakes – the worst of which was not assessing that SunEdison was a fraud in 2015 – but there have been others. A number of years ago one of our investors said Amazon would surpass Apple and become the most valuable company in the world. We didn’t get it then and, truthfully, we don’t really get it now. But, there is a reasonable possibility that he will be proven right.

Some have looked for reasons other than isolated mistakes. Theories include getting older, changing lifestyles, and an unwillingness to adapt to new market environments. We have been accused of being stubborn, but one person’s stubbornness is another person’s discipline. We will continue to be disciplined. Although it might be nice to have something to blame for the poor results, the truth is that we have been making every effort and leading with our best thinking.

Even if it isn’t the whole explanation, the environment for value investing has been tough. AllianceBernstein recently reported that value investing strategies are performing in the bottom one percentile since 1990. In just the past 18 months, the Russell 1000 Pure Growth index has outperformed the Russell 1000 Pure Value index by 54%. The reality is that the market is cyclical and given the extreme anomaly, reversion to the mean should happen sooner rather than later. We just can’t say when.

Our friend Vitaliy Katsenelson once wrote an essay about value investing that articulates what the past three years have felt like better than we can. He wrote:

Investing is a nonlinear endeavor that is full of ups and downs. Every investor will have periods when his or her strategy is completely out of sync with the market. When the market is roaring on its way up and your portfolio is down, you may be sure that pain will rear its ugly face.

Value investing is almost by definition a contrarian endeavor. Growth investors ride the train of love, harmony, peace, and consensus – they buy companies that Mr. Market is infatuated with and thus prices them for love. (But just so you know, love ain’t cheap and rarely lasts forever, at least when it comes to growth stocks.)

Value investors, on the other hand, live in the domain of hate – they buy what others don’t want. Ironically, value investors may end up owning the same companies that growth investors used to own. When the love is gone, hate goes  on a rampage; and trust me, you won’t find anyone who’ll pay extra for hate. It is cheap.

Investment styles go through cycles. Sometimes your stocks are really out of favor. Nothing you do works. You keep telling yourself that in the short run there is little or no link between decisions and outcomes. That’s a truism of investing, and even you believe it on an intellectual level. But every day you come to work and the market tells you you are wrong, you are wrong, you are wrong.

Right now the market is telling us we are wrong, wrong, wrong about nearly everything. And yet, looking forward from today we think this portfolio makes a lot of sense.

One of our general goals is never to be your biggest problem. Unfortunately, we have been lately, and a good number of our partners have had enough and redeemed. We appreciate you for sticking with us through this challenging period. We certainly understand those who have run out of patience as this period has lasted longer than we could have envisioned. Maximizing the size of our capital base has never been our goal; maximizing returns is and always has been. In our history, we have raised ~$6 billion, and paid out ~$8 billion to investors.

Bad results aren’t fun, but we are determined to show up to work every day to engage in solving the puzzles in the market, as we always have. It remains exciting when we think we have figured something out – which doesn’t happen every day or even every week, but historically has been lucrative when we do.

Full letter below:

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Lula Barred From Presidential Election By Brazilian Court

Traders who were bidding up the Brazilian real and local stocks on Friday on the expectation that Lula would be barred from running for president in Brazil’s upcoming presidential elections proved to be right: late on Friday, Brazil’s top electoral court barred jailed former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from running in this year’s presidential because of his prior corruption conviction.

In the 6-1 ruling, the country’s top electoral court decided that Lula’s candidacy cannot stand, given his 12-year sentence for corruption and money-laundering by an appeals court earlier this year Bloomberg reported.

The ruling came after a dramatic and gruelling late-night session broadcast live on television and across news sites, and defied a request from the United Nations human rights committee that he be allowed to stand.

“I declare the candidate ineligible and I deny his application to run for the presidency,” said Luis Roberto Barroso, the lead judge reading out a summary of the ruling at the court. “I veto electoral propaganda until the candidate’s name is replaced on the ballot.”

“What is at stake here today is the equality of all citizens before the law and the Constitution,” Judge Og Fernandes told the court in his vote to declare Lula ineligible. Judge Admar Gonzaga, who as a lawyer worked for Lula’s handpicked successor Dilma Rousseff’s 2010 election, cast the decisive vote in the 6-1 decision that sealed the leftist icon’s ejection from the presidential election.

From behind bars, Lula, the hugely popular, two times former leftist president and union leader leads polling in Brazil’s most unpredictable and polarised presidential election in decades. The decision to bar his candidacy plays to the advantage of extreme rightwing candidate Jair Bolsonaro, running second in polls and ahead without Lula.

The widely expected decision removes a cloud hanging over Brazil’s most uncertain election in decades, in which polls gave Lula – widely seen as a “market unfriendly” – a huge lead over his challengers, though Lula’s lawyers and the Workers Party have said they would appeal an adverse decision to the Supreme Court.

Lula, who had a 20 point lead ahead of his closest competitor, far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, and is the most influential political figure in Brazil’s recent history, has been in jail since April after an appeals court confirmed a 12 year sentence for corruption and money laundering. His Workers Party registered him as its presidential candidate for the Oct. 7 vote anyway, saying he is innocent.

Despite his conviction and several graft cases pending against him, Lula leads the presidential race by a long stretch, with 39% of voter support, according to pollster Datafolha. His nearest rival, far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, has 19%.

However, barring an extraordinary upset through appeal, it looks all but certain that the iconic former metalworker won’t run on Oct. 7 and will be replaced by his running mate, former Sao Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad, who is expected to head the ticket hoping to inherit the bulk of Lula’s votes.

The Workers Party has until Sept. 17 to swap their names on the ballot; The court also ruled that Lula should not appear in the Workers Party’s television and radio ads campaign until the ticket has been officially altered to remove him.

The question now, according to Bloomberg, is how much of his huge support Lula can transfer to Haddad from his prison cell. Opinion polls suggest it could be enough to push his protege, a 55 year-old academic into a runoff with the front-runner, former Army Captain Jair Bolsonaro.

Campaign ads that circulated on social media in recent days showed images of Lula before he was jailed, and of Haddad, both promising better days for Brazil. Free radio and TV air time allotted to presidential candidates begins on Saturday

That said, investors remain concerned about the possible return of the same left wing party that oversaw the worst recession on record, and whose president Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016. The leftist party proposes to ramp up government intervention by taxing banks who charge high interest rates and introducing capital controls to reduce volatility.

With the chances for market-friendly candidates increasingly gloomy, investors have dumped Brazilian assets, exacerbating the impact of an emerging market selloff. The real has lost 19% in 2018 making it one of the worst performing currencies after the Argentine Peso and Turkish Lira.

A left-wing victory that would boost social spending would be seen as a disaster for markets: as Bloomberg warns, if the next president doesn’t adopt draconian austerity measures, including far-reaching cuts to pension benefits, government spending would break through constitutionally imposed limits, putting at risk the creditworthiness of $950 billion in federal government debt.”

Of course, the reason why Lula remains so popular in the first place, is that the local population fondly remembers the Brazilian growth phase in the early part of the century under the former two-time leftist president – if not the painful depression that followed – and equates the current period of economic pain with precisely the economic policies that Brazil will need to implement in the coming months to avoid an even bigger economic meltdown.

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Trump Notifies Congress He Will Sign Trade Pact With Mexico, Keep Talking To Canada

With trade talks between the U.S. and Canada ending on Friday with no deal to revamp NAFTA after “insulting” Trump comments from his Bloomberg interview were leaked by the Canadian press, the US president notified Congress of his intent to sign a bilateral trade pact with Mexico in one month, while agreeing to keep talking to Canada.

The move by Trump to notify Congress that he planned to sign a deal with Mexico in 90 days and would include Canada “if it is willing” avoided what many in the U.S. business community and Congress had seen as a worst-case scenario, according to Bloomberg.

The president threatened earlier this week to go ahead with a bilateral trade agreement with Mexico that would leave out Canada, which he on Friday again accused of “ripping us off.”

Sending the notification to Congress effectively sets a new clock for the Nafta negotiations. Under rules set by Congress, the administration is now facing a 30-day deadline to provide a full text of the agreement.

Following four days of intensive talks in Washington between Canada and the United States during which “progress” was made – but not enough to reach a successful deal – the biggest sticking points remained open: U.S. demands for more access to Canada’s closed dairy market and Canadian insistence that the “Chapter 19” trade dispute settlement system be maintained, not scrapped as Trump wants.

“We know that a win-win-win agreement is within reach,” Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian foreign minister, told reporters in Washington after talks wrapped up on Friday. But “Canada will only sign a deal that’s a good deal for Canada, we are very, very clear about that,” she added. She declined to identify the trickiest issues that were holding up a deal.

Initially deal sentiment was optimistic, and markets expected a favorable outcome from the negotiation after a bilateral deal was announced by the US and Mexico on Monday which paved the way for Canada to rejoin the talks this week with a Friday deadline looming. But on Friday sentiment turned, partly on Trump’s explosive off-the-record remarks made to Bloomberg News that any trade deal with Canada would be “totally on our terms.” He later confirmed the comments, which the Toronto Star first reported.

“At least Canada knows where I stand,” Trump said on Twitter later.

Later on Friday, Trump notified Congress that he intends to sign the trade pact by the end of November. Text of the deal will be published by around Oct. 1.

Congressional approval of a bilateral deal as replacement to the trilateral NAFTA, however, is unlikely.

According to Reuters, U.S. lawmakers and business groups have expressed concern about Canada’s not yet being not yet part of the agreement. “Anything other than a trilateral agreement won’t win Congressional approval and would lose business support,” the chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, said in a statement.

There are other potential complications: Trump had been pushing to get a new Nafta approved under a process known as fast-track authority that allows him to seek a simple yes-or-no vote in Congress on trade deals, as long as his administration clears certain procedural hurdles.

Under fast-track rules, Trump must notify Congress 90 days before signing the deal. The White House set a deadline for Friday because it wanted to notify Congress in time for Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to sign the accord before his successor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, takes office on Dec. 1.

However, any vote in U.S. Congress is unlikely to take place before 2019. By then, the Democrats may control at least one chamber of Congress, and Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, made clear on Friday that any deal must include Canada.

* * *

Meanwhile, even as the US announced it would continue talks with Canada next Wednesday, it is unclear who will compromise first or when, especially after Trump’s controversial comments were leaked.

U.S. Trade Rep Robert Lighthizer has refused to budge despite repeated efforts by Freeland to offer some concessions on dairy to maintain the independent trade dispute resolution mechanism under Chapter 19 of NAFTA, The Globe and Mail reported on Friday.

In response, a USTR spokeswoman countered that Canada had made no concessions on agriculture, which includes dairy, but said that negotiations continued.

Trump has argued that Canada’s dairy tariffs are hurting U.S. farmers, an important political base for his Republican party. But as Reuters notes, “dairy farmers have great political clout in Canada, too, and concessions could hurt the ruling Liberals ahead of a 2019 federal election.”

On Saturday morning, Trump echoed a statement he made during a Friday speech in North Carolina when he took another swipe at Canada. “I love Canada, but they’ve taken advantage of our country for many years,” he said.

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This Decoupling Has Never Been Greater

The divergence between financial conditions in the U.S. and Asia ex-Japan has got to extreme levels, according to the Bloomberg data.

As Bloomberg’s Ye Xie details, the tighter the conditions are, the harder it is for companies to raise capital, the higher the risk of a growth slowdown, which appears to be getting priced into US and Asia stocks…

Conditions in the U.S. are about one standard deviation more accommodative than normal, while Asia is tighter by a similar amount.

The euro-zone is about neutral. Bloomberg doesn’t have data for Latam, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume it’s a similar situation as in Asia, if not worse.

This is another way of saying that global growth is becoming less synchronized.

The question is, whether the U.S. pulls the EM up, or EM pulls it down.

One way or the other, the current divergence won’t last long.

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Food Freedom and the First Amendment: Is Feeding the Homeless a Constitutional Right?: New at Reason

Last week a federal appeals court ruled that a Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, ban on sharing food with the homeless is probably unconstitutional because it prohibits “expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.”

The case stems from efforts by a local chapter of Food Not Bombs to share vegetarian and vegan food with the needy in a Ft. Lauderdale park. The city passed an ordinance in 2014 to crack down on this practice. The law limited hours of operation, established food safety requirements, and required those who want to share food to obtain a conditional use permit. The city arrested several Food Not Bombs members for violating the ordinance.

Food Not Bombs sued, and in an interesting 20-page ruling that references an eclectic mix of sources and events—including Shakespeare, the first Thanksgiving, Cass Sunstein, the Bible, and the Boston Tea Party—the appeals court embraced the Food Not Bombs chapter’s view.

What’s next for the law? Hopefully nothing, writes Baylen Linnekin in his latest piece for Reason.

View this article.

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We Don’t Need Soccer Moms—or Dads, or Coaches: New at Reason

Between the two of them, Carlo Celli and Nathan Richardson—both language professors at Bowling Green State University in Ohio—have coached youth soccer for about 30 years.

Sweet, right? Actually, they say they were doing it all wrong. The problem isn’t that they were coaching improperly. It’s that they were coaching, period, writes Lenore Skenazy.

View this article.

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Is There A Plan In South Africa To Take White Farms And Kill White Farmers?

Authored by Dr. Don Boys, op-ed via The Daily Caller,

President Trump was not wrong about the South African land-grab, according to the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), a liberal think tank. SAIRR said that the Trump had exposed the “damage” the policy was doing.

He did not, however, expose the extent of the damage. Nor the intent.

The current President of South Africa wrote an article for London’s Financial Times just two weeks ago defending the acquisition of land from white farmers by black South Africans without compensation:

“This is no land grab; nor is it an assault on the private ownership of property. The ANC has been clear that its land reform programme should not undermine future investment in the economy or damage agricultural production and food security.”

It seems in this era of words not having any valid meaning that bad is good, war is peace, weakness is strength, and up is down. But thievery is still thievery even if done by government.

The Agri SA agricultural union in Pretoria, South Africa, released new figures that reveal black criminal gangs have killed one white South African farmer every five days so far this year! Is this “only” random crime taking place in a troubled and dark land or a plan to drive all farmers off their land by intimidation?

South African officials suggest that these killings are only “burglaries gone wrong” but informed and honest people (black and white) know the truth. The government stopped accounting for such deaths since it is too embarrassing. Hence, “burglaries gone wrong” headlines result in less negative press than “another white farm family wiped out by roaming black thugs.”

The head of Genocide Watch, Dr. Gregory Stanton in 2012 conducted a study in South Africa and came to an incredible conclusion: “There is a coordinated campaign of genocide being conducted against white farmers.” Many of the Whites surrendered their guns when the African National Congress (ANC) government passed gun laws to confiscate the farmers’ weapons.

Genocide Watch said, “Disarmament of a targeted group is one of the surest early warning signs of future genocidal killings.”

The South African government currently estimates there are 31 murders per 100,000 people per year, which comes out to about 50 per day. Outside groups suggest that it is double that! No one knows for sure because the ANC banned crime statistics from being accumulated, analyzed, and admitted because they scare off foreign investment and drive people out of the country. Does anyone blame people for their concern and fear?

The London Daily Mail, April 28, 2017, reported, “Unemployment is 90 percent in some townships, and riots–described as ‘service delivery protests’ by the ANC–are so widespread and frequent they barely get reported.” So, the numbers are as suspect as Bill Clinton’s vow of chastity.

Political leaders, however, are determined to take the farms from white farmers and intimidate others into acquiescence to make up for perceived and real discrimination under white administrations.

The nation’s leading politicians are involved in this genocide of Whites as their words and actions clearly prove.

President Zuma in 2012 was caught on tape singing,

“We are going to shoot them with the machine gun, they are going to run/You are a Boer, we are going to hit them, and you are going to run/shoot the Boer.”

His followers may be stupid and Communist, but their protest signs scream the same message: “Kill the Boer! Kill the Farmers!”

Julius Malema, far-left leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) charged that all whites are criminals and the ANC Youth League was going to take all the white farmers’ land without compensation. Big problem here apart from the organized thievery: the Rural Development and Land Reform Minister told Parliament that more than half of the farms that were purchased for black farmers by the government had either failed or were failing!

When Zimbabwe did the same thing in 1999–2000, it was followed by massive famine and astronomical inflation where hamburgers at the capital city of Harare sold for fifteen million Zimbabwe dollars.

Free housing, free college tuition, single-payer healthcare, doubling the welfare state and the minimum wage is the dream and plan of the leftists in the EFF. The EFF is the third largest political party in South Africa led by Julius Malema who said at a rally, “Go After A White Man…We Are Cutting The Throat Of Whiteness!”

Malema declared, “Through land expropriation, we are forcing white people to share the land which was gained through a crime against the humanity of black and African people.” They are not sharing the land; it is being taken from them by force and they did not acquire the land via a “crime.”

Malema said the time for “reconciliation is over.” 

News24 quoted him saying, “Now is the time for justice.” He told the Parliament, “We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land.”

One cannot restore what never was, so restoring dignity will not happen. Watch the daily activities of their Parliament to know what I mean. Plus, ANC leaders having witch doctors living in their homes giving advice about abortion and how to enlarge a penis, etc., does not add to one’s dignity or credibility!

And of course, the white farmers did not steal anyone’s land. Much of it has been in the same families for generations and others are paying high-interest payments while working literally from daylight to dark in order to make their payments.

Malema promised, “Only death will stop us, not Trump, not sanction, not all of them. We know the consequences that are coming.”

So do I! I’ve seen this movie before starring Robert Mugabe with a supporting cast of grasping, ghastly, gloomy Communists filmed on location in Zimbabwe just next door to South Africa.

Few informed people doubt that South Africa, like many African nations, is headed into total chaos; but are the murders a part of the strategy to totally eliminate the white farmers?

In an interview with TRT World News, Julius Malema said, “We have not called for the killing of white people. At least for now. I can’t guarantee the future.” When the reporter mentioned that some people might view these remarks as a call to genocide, Malema responded, “Crybabies. Crybabies,” but later warned white South Africans that “the masses are on board” for “an un-led revolution and anarchy.”

That dude should not be in Parliament but in prison.

A widely reprinted letter that originally appeared in the Business Day newspaper also highlighted the feelings of despair. “South Africa is in a serious moral crisis. We are a violent society disintegrating by the day. Ghastly murders are committed daily,” wrote Farouk Araie from Johannesburg. “We have become delusional. Forgetting that life is absolutely intrinsic and inviolable, our country is awash with demonic monsters in human garb, savages fit only for the wild, and satanic beasts ill-equipped for civil society.

“One child raped every three minutes, three children murdered each day,” Araie added. “We are sliding towards the edge of the abyss and our people are crying out for sanity to prevail.”

Approximately half-a-million rapes occur on an annual basis, of which only one-in-nine are reported. This amounts to 132.4 rapes per 100,000 people per year, far and away the highest total in the world. And for every 25 men brought to trial for rape, only one is convicted.

A study conducted by the Medical Research Council, for example, found that more than one in four South African men — 27.5 percent — admitted to having raped at least one woman or girl. Almost half of those said they had raped multiple victims. Another survey by the same organization later found that 37.4 percent of men admitted to perpetrating a rape with more than one in four women saying they had been raped.

The South African ANC government gave whooping cheers for Zimbabwe when they stole white farms and the world watched as Zimbabwe spiraled into anarchy, murder, and rape, destroying their economy.

The dangerous policies in South Africa have resulted in Whites fleeing the country, chaos in the streets, debased currency, and job losses while manufacturing output has stumbled, the rand is in a freefall, and people have slowed their spending either because of unemployment or fear of the future.

When the South African economy grinds to a halt under the leadership of black Reds; when the treasury has been looted and funds safely stored in secret Swiss bank accounts; when crops rot in the fields and inoperable tractors stand rusted and idle; when the phones, johns, elevators, and trains refuse to work; when the banks, insurance companies, and mines have been nationalized; when whites have fled the nation or have been butchered in Mau-Mau type uprisings; and when the dream of black rule has turned into a nightmare; then will the busy-body globalists in Britain, Canada, and the U.S. be satisfied?

I think not — because their attention will be focused on some other “noble” cause. Globalists have almost choked on many an African bone but they usually cough it up, spit it out, and grab another one.

Sanctimonious liberals never learn and they have a compulsion to feel noble. Honest people have a compulsion for truth even though it stings at times and it’s a truth, a stinging truth, that the legally chosen government in South Africa is stealing white farms and has plans to decimate white families.

Their own words testify to that tragic truth. And truth does set one free.

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