2013 could be the breakout year for Sweet Tammys.
They now cover Whole Food's in their north east market area.
If you have family and/or friends living in the areas where Sweet Tammys' products are sold I would very much appreciate if you would alert them.
Now available at a Whole Foods Market near you!
Bethesda
5269 River Road
Bethesda, MD
Cincinnati
2693 Edmondson Road
Cincinnati OH 45209
Cleveland
13998 Cedar Road
University Heights OH 44118
Devon
821 Lancaster Ave
Wayne, PA 19087
Jenkintown
1575 The Fairway
Jenkintown PA 19046
Mason
5805 Deerfield Blvd
Mason OH 45040
Mt Washington
1330 Smith Ave
Baltimore MD 21209
Philly
2001 Pennsylvania Ave
Philadelphia PA 19130
Pittsburgh
5880 Centre Ave
Pittsburgh PA 15206
Wexford
10576 Perry Highway
Wexford PA 15090
Wynnewood
339 E. Lancaster Ave
Wynnewood PA 19096
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Paddy's pregnant sister was in a terrible car accident and went into a deep coma.
After being in a coma for nearly six months, she woke up and saw that she was no longer pregnant.
Frantically she asked the doctor about her baby.
The doctor replied, “You had twins, a boy and a girl. The babies are fine. However they were poorly at birth and had to be christened immediately, so your brother Paddy came in and named them.”
The woman thought to herself, ‘Oh suffering Jesus no, not me brother. He's a clueless idiot! ‘
Expecting the worst, she asked the doctor, “Well, what's my daughter's name?”
“ Denise .” said the doctor.
The new mother was somewhat relieved and thought to her self, ‘Wow, that's a really beautiful name.
I guess I was wrong about my brother. I really like Denise .'
Then she asked, “So what's the boy's name then?”
The doctor replied : “Denephew.”
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Sowell: Part two.
Another brilliant academic speaks out about the age of falsity.(See 1 and 1a below.)
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The breakfast meeting with Jack Kingston was quite informative.
Jack visited Asia recently and met with Netanyahu and believes Israel will attack Iran but needs several more tanker airplanes and specific munitions to do the job they hope to accomplish.
He walked us through the various trade figures of nations in the region and Israel's economic relationship with America is vastly superior to the other regional nations.
Jack also commented that the recent Israeli election did not even come up in their conversation and he feels Netanyahu is secure politically. He had no insights on the upcoming Obama meeting with Netanyahu.
As for his run for the Senate seat of Saxby Chambliss, Jack gave a cogent explanation why it made sense for him personally. He is very frustrated with the management of The House and the wide disparity of views that prevents accommodation. He cited several instances where he had worked with Senate Liberals and got a lot accomplished and was complimented even by Dick Durbin for his cooperativeness and rational conservatism.
I find it ironic that Saxby is partly vacating his seat because he was deemed by the powers that be in the Republican Party for being too co-operative with Democrats and yet that is the only way things get done and Jack understand this.
In essence the Republican Party is pulling candidates too far to the right on social issues. These candidates have to be obeisant to the extremists and thus have lessened their appeal should they be nominated when it comes time to run in the general election. Winning may not be every thing but it beats losing and the Republican Party, as presently constructed, is hell bent on losing..
For what it is worth, I find Jack thoughtful, intelligent and I know his constituent work is first class. I had the same high regard and feelings about Sam Nunn and Paul Coverdell. Jack's conservatism is rational and well grounded in matters of economics and deficit spending.
Time will tell but those who are very close to Jack believe he will toss his hat in the ring. Jack says he has support among some of the party higher ups but they are not disposed to going public at this time and that invites more competition.
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Cliff May writes a letter from the West Bank. (See 2 below.)
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If you doubted what Brigette Gabriel had to say and I reported on then read this. (See 3 below)
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Is Turkey leaving the West? Read what Daniel Pipes has to say. (See 4 below.)
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Only a fool believes what we are doing is sustainable. We all know we will die. The question is when? (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)Prophets and Losses: Part II
People on both sides of tax issues often speak of such things as a "$300 billion tax increase" or a "$500 billion tax decrease." That is fine if they are looking back at something that has already happened. But it can be sheer nonsense if they are talking about a proposed increase or decrease in the tax rate.
The government can only raise or lower the tax rate. Whether the actual tax revenues that the government will collect as a result will go up or down is a matter of prophecy. And these prophecies have been far too wrong far too often to base national policies on them.
When Congress was considering raising the capital gains tax rate from 20 percent to 28 percent in 1986, the Congressional Budget Office advised Congress that this would increase the revenue received from that tax. But the Congressional Budget Office was wrong, not simply about the amount of the tax revenue increase, but about the fact that the capital gains tax revenue actually fell.
There was nothing unique about this example of tax rates and tax revenues moving in opposite directions from each other -- and also in opposite directions from the predictions of the Congressional Budget Office. Reductions of the capital gains tax rates in 1978, 1997 and 2003 all led to increased revenues from that tax.
The Congressional Budget Office is by no means the only government agency whose prophecies have been grossly unreliable. Anyone who looks at the history of the Federal Reserve System will find many painful examples of wrong prophecies that led to policies with bad consequences for the whole economy.
In a worldwide context, during the 20th century economic central planning by governments -- prophecy at the grandest level -- led to so many bad consequences, in countries around the world, that even most socialist and communist governments abandoned central planning by the end of that century.
The failures of governmental prophecies in so many different contexts cannot be blamed on stupidity. Most of the people who made these prophecies were far more educated than the average person, had far more information at their fingertips and probably had higher IQs as well.
Their intellectual superiority to others may well have given them the confidence to venture into areas where no human being has what it takes to make prophecies that lead to policies overriding the plans and actions of millions of other human beings.
As John Stuart Mill said, back in the 19th century, "even if a government were superior in intelligence and knowledge to any single individual in the nation, it must be inferior to all the individuals of the nation taken together."
People competing with each other, and being forced to make mutual accommodations with each other in the marketplace, are operating in a trial and error process.
Human beings are going to make errors in any kind of economic or political system. The question is: Which kind of system punishes errors more quickly, and more effectively, in terms of forcing errors to be corrected?
A market economy with many competitors has incentives and constraints that are the opposite of those in a government monopoly.
Anyone familiar with the economic history of businesses knows that their mistakes have been common and large. But red ink on the bottom line lets them know that they are going to have to shape up or shut down.
Government agencies face no such constraint. The Federal Reserve can keep making the same mistakes in the next hundred years that it made in its first hundred years. Or it can make new and bigger mistakes.
Nor is the Federal Reserve unique. The same thing applies to the Congressional Budget Office and to government agencies on down to the local DMV.
Elected politicians not only can keep making the same mistakes. They have every incentive to deny that they made a mistake in the first place, since such an admission can end their careers.
That is why these prophets can lead to our losses.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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We live in an age of falsity, in which words have lost their meanings and concepts are reinvented as the situation demands. The United States is in a jobless recovery — even if that phrase largely disappeared from the American lexicon about 2004. Good news somehow must follow from a rising unemployment rate, which itself underrepresents the actual percentage of Americans long out of work.
At the same time, we are supposed to be relieved that we are in a contracting expansion, where fewer goods and services are proof of a resilient economy. In our debt-ridden revival, borrowing $1 trillion each year is evidence that we don’t have a spending problem.
If an unemployment rate of 7.9 percent and the economy shrinking by 0.01 percent a year — with a fifth consecutive $1 trillion annual deficit — are indicators of recovery, what would the old 5 percent unemployment, 4 percent growth in GDP, and $300 billion annual deficits mean? Or do the meaning of words and the nature of “facts” depend on who is in the White House at the time, or rather on whether the president is trying to make us more equal or to enrich the 1 percent?
At key points, whole controversies vanish without a trace. Suddenly, about four years ago, Guantanamo was no longer a gulag. Then it became no longer much of anything — in the manner that renditions, preventive detention, tribunals, and drone assassinations likewise disappeared from public discourse even as they became institutionalized.
We can scarcely remember now that the country tore itself apart over the waterboarding of three confessed terrorists, as it snoozes through its government blowing apart 2,500 suspected terrorists — and anyone caught in their general vicinity when the drone missiles hit. I think the logic must have been that a reactionary George Bush wished to waterboard a few confessed terrorists more just to bend the law than to derive any information that might save Americans — whereas Barack Obama actually reads the great ethical philosophers as he “reluctantly” signs off on targeted assassinations that have no doubt saved more people than he ordered killed. And we have to understand that if we were to object to such a kill tally, we would thereby be endangering the greater good to come at home over bothersome details abroad.
We have only a faint memory of promises of no more lobbyists in government, no more revolving doors, a new civility, a new transparency, and a new bipartisanship. Do we now even remember all those slogans that went up on the barnyard wall, and have since been painted over? When the president lectured us that the captains of Wall Street were not to get bonuses for snagging federal bailouts, he was not speaking of his future secretary of the Treasury, a progressive who does what must be done for the people.
An ambassador and three other Americans were murdered, ostensibly because of an anti-Muslim video whose producer still languishes in jail in California. The party line was that Libyan demonstrators, irate over that Internet production and out for a walk one evening, brought along their GPS-guided mortars and machine guns to spice up a demonstration at our consulate. Things can always get out of hand, when a right-wing chauvinist makes a hurtful video.
In this age of fakery, what is legitimate dissent? Is it Hillary Clinton attacking an administration in 2003 (“I’m sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic. . . . We have the right to debate and disagree with any administration”) or Hillary Clinton nine years later, as an administration insider, turning on her interrogators in an effort to deflect inquiry (e.g., “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”)?
Al-Qaeda must be imploding, as its new profile from Libya to Mali is proof of its overstretched presence. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular; jihad is a personal spiritual journey; we ordered an overseas contingency operation to get bin Laden, who had been responsible for some man-caused disasters, and one of whose acolytes waged workplace violence that threatened our diversity programs. After Chuck Hagel forgot what he had said, what the president had said, and what his inquisitors had said, we knew he would be confirmed as defense secretary. All these are mere bothersome details that should not impede the general truth that the United States is now on the right side of history, at home and abroad.
Suddenly our troubles are blamed on those now known as the 1 percent, who make more than the new moral cutoff line of $250,000 per year. These public enemies are fat cats and they use corporate jets. Worse, they don’t build their own businesses, and they profit when it is no longer time to. They make money way beyond the point where they should have stopped, they don’t spread their wealth, and they don’t pay their fair share. Sometimes we would almost imagine that they worked for Citigroup, vacationed at Martha’s Vineyard, or used insiders to cash in on cattle speculations. Millionaires are rightly grouped with billionaires, who have 1,000 times the money, but they are not the same as thousandaires, who have one-1,000th the money.
Whether the president is responsible for the economy depends on the circumstances. Bush did nothing to improve the economy between 2001 and September 2008. But he is responsible for the bad economy from September 2008 to January 2013. Neither house of Congress has any real responsibility for our economic fate, so between 2007 and 2011 both were irrelevant. But one house of Congress does sometimes. So starting in 2011 the House of Representatives in two years caused the mess we’re in now, in a way that the Senate and House had not in the four previous years.
Golfing used to be proof of plutocratic remoteness and idle folly, where rich guys dress up in funny clothes and putter about. Now it is a green sort of downtime for our commander-in-chief to unwind in the best tradition of Dwight Eisenhower. Thanks to Barack Obama, golf is now finally recognized as politically correct recreation. The president shoots guns “all the time”; we know that because the White House both released one picture of him with a gun and earmuffs, and ridiculed those who thought the occasion unique rather than ordinary.
When watching Al Gore plug his latest alarmist book to progressive interviewers, I can no longer remember whether he is supposed to be a selfless public intellectual who, at enormous financial risk, started a new progressive television channel to promulgate long-needed awareness about politics and the environment, or whether as a rank speculator he scrambled to push through a secretive deal to sell his $100 million inflated interest in that channel to an anti-Semitic, anti-Western news conglomerate, run by an authoritarian Middle East dictator laden with oil-cartel profits — right before new higher capital-gains taxes might lessen his take by 5 or 6 percent. There are apparently two sorts of wealthy people: those on the left who reluctantly make big money and seek hyper-profits and tax avoidance as means to a noble social end, and those on the right who eagerly seek needless profits and tax reduction to enrich themselves and not society.
The world’s premier cyclist says that he was lying about his doping for most of his career, when it was in his interest to fabricate, but that he is no longer lying now that it is even more in his interest to come clean. The hottest singer in popular culture now confesses, after a long silence, that she faked singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Inauguration — that she lip-synched not a ballad at a football game, but the National Anthem at the president’s inauguration. And she faked it for our sake, she says, out of a sense of professionalism. Both believe that once they crossed the threshold of fame, the prosaic protocols no longer applied to them.
In the tradition of heroic Notre Dame football stars, we are moved by a collegiate football standout sharing his lamentations about a dying girlfriend on the eve of his Big Game — except that the story is so contorted and fanciful that most are more confused by the truth than they were by the lie. To reinforce the prevailing narrative of race and class in America, we want to believe that Trayvon Martin — no doubt innocently walking home from the store — was gunned down by a racist redneck vigilante, and so we must invent a new term to describe his shooter, “white Hispanic,” as our media endlessly air a doctored telephone transmission to produce the desired result. If the therapeutic culture wants something to be true, then why should inconvenient things stand in the way of what should have happened?
“Impartial moderators” in the media used to go through the motions of declaring that their intertwined Washington marriages or their prior partisan employment did not affect their objectivity; now they don’t even make the effort. If in 2008 Gwen Ifill had a hagiography coming out about candidate Barack Obama, as she was pegged to moderate the vice-presidential debate, by 2012 Candy Crowley had no inhibitions about fact-checking Mitt Romney — and only Mitt Romney — in the middle of his answers, even though her interruption and editorializing were less factually accurate than the statements by the object of her scrutiny. Again, there are no rules per se; the question is who has good intentions and who is without them. The facts follow accordingly.
Even on the rare occasions when public figures are caught, doublespeak follows. “I accept full responsibility” is the new nothing sentence of contrition, rarely to be followed up by resignation or demotion in rank and pay. “We will not rest until the guilty parties are brought to justice” means even less — nothing much other than to remind us that after six months the latest terrorist killing will be mostly forgotten. “My actions were entirely inappropriate” is a banality offered as verbal penance in order to continue, rather than end, a career. Plagiarism — ask Maureen Dowd or Fareed Zakaria — is an archaic word for a little borrowing, an e-mail confusion, an overzealous research assistant, the complexities of Microsoft Word, or a right-wing gotcha game. To preach against hubris, one must practice hubris.
Why do now live in an age of so many meaningless things?
Our elites in academia and the media have some culpability. Thirty years of nihilist postmodern relativism — no absolute truth, just constructs based on race, class, and gender privilege — have finally filtered down to the popular culture. An obsession with celebrity also has meant that we increasingly worship the antics of the wealthy and famous and decreasingly worry what they had to do to obtain or maintain both.
In the new progressive age, the exalted ends of equality sometimes require that the means of achieving a place on the public stage should remained largely unexamined. If there is no consistency, no transparency, no absolute standard, then it is because the task of fairness is hard and occasionally requires extraordinary sacrifices for the greater good. And to the degree that someone is deemed cool, then cool trumps most everything else: Google executives don’t outsource. Rappers are not misogynists. Green apostles don’t have conflicts of interest. And men in camouflage with assault weapons don’t just kill less than 1 percent of those Americans lost each year to gun violence, but account for all sorts of vastly more evil things that we cannot even begin to describe.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from Bloomsbury Books.
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2)Letter from the West Bank
By Clifford D. May
Islam, according to newly released data from the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, is now the fastest growing religion in America, verifying President Barack Obama's claim that the United States is “no longer a Judeo-Christian country.”
The world already has entered a currency war that began in 2010 on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s massive easing program, he tells Wall Street Journal Digital Network. Since then, plenty of nations have joined in, including Brazil, Switzerland and Japan, says Rickards, author of “Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crises.”
“All major central banks are easing,” he says. “Eventually so much money will be printed that this will lead to inflation. The endgame is collapse of the international monetary system — sometime sooner than later.”
In both the United States and Japan, the central banks are trying to “import inflation” to get their economies going, rather than trying to boost exports, through a weaker currency, Rickards says. “They’re scared to death of deflation. They’ve cut rates, and the last resort is to cheapen their currencies.”
The European Central Bank is actually doing the right thing, easing for liquidity reasons rather than to depress its currency, Rickards notes. The euro has risen to a 14-month high against the dollar as a result, and he thinks it can keep ascending.
His currency view makes Rickards a huge bull on gold. His long-term price estimate is $7,000 an ounce, more than four times the current price of $1,677. Gold could trade in a range between $3,000 and $10,000, Rickards says. “We’re not going to get there all at once.”
One major factor is that China is “in a scramble to acquire gold,” he explains. With about 1,000 to 3,000 tons, compared with 8,000 tons for the United States, China doesn’t have enough of the precious metal.
When the international monetary system collapses, major financial powers will convene to plan the aftermath, he says. When that happens, each nation must have enough gold relative to its gross domestic product.
“China needs to get to 4,000 to 5,000 tons to look the United States in the eye and be an equal country,” Rickards notes.
The global economy can muddle through this year, but major problems begin in 2014, he maintains.
“The biggest risk is the rapid collapse of confidence in paper money. They can’t just keep printing. Then gold really comes to fore, whether it’s a gold standard or … gold as a reference price.”
Francesco Guerrera, The Wall Street Journal's money & investing editor, agrees with Rickards that a currency war already has begun.
But he’s not as pessimistic about the future. “[T]here is a chance this confrontation might not end as badly as the destructive devaluations that followed the Great Depression or even the turmoil of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998,” Guerrera writes.
Like Rickards he thinks central bank easing isn’t designed to promote exports, but rather domestic demand.
The global easing represents “attempts to make up for non-existent fiscal policies,” Guerrera says. “The dirty secret is that using monetary policy to weaken a currency, whether voluntarily or not, is a shortcut to avoid unpopular decisions on fiscal and budgetary issues.”
But common sense could prevail, he says. The International Monetary Fund may be able to negotiate currency peace.
“If that sounds naive, consider the possibility that this huge bout of monetary stimulus will succeed in engendering a solid recovery driven by domestic demand,” Guerrera writes. “Or that fiscal policy will finally be put to work.”
Others are worried about the monetary system too. “I think the biggest danger is … a currency war,” hedge fund icon George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, tells CNBC.
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2)Letter from the West Bank
By Clifford D. May
Ramallah, West Bank — It’s difficult not to like Salam Fayyad. The prime minister of the Palestinian Authority has an avuncular demeanor and old-fashioned professorial charm. He boasts a doctorate in economics from the University of Texas at Austin and remains loyal to the Longhorns. He speaks in charmingly accented, rapid-fire English. In a spacious conference room in the palatial government complex where he maintains his offices, he is generous with his time, answering questions from me and other members of a delegation of American national-security professionals on a wide range of issues.
One need not agree with everything Fayyad says to appreciate that he is the kind of Palestinian leader with whom Israeli leaders could make peace — if Israeli leaders could negotiate with him, and if he could deliver a majority of Palestinians willing to accept a compromise solution to the conflict. Fundamentally, here’s what that would mean: Palestinians would have to unambiguously recognize Israel’s right to exist within secure borders. In exchange, Israel would do everything possible to facilitate the development of a free and viable Palestinian state.
What are the chances that Fayyad can achieve that? Roughly zero to none.
Fayyad has few supporters in the West Bank — and even fewer in Hamas-controlled Gaza. He was not elected prime minister; he was appointed in 2007 by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas who claimed the power to do so on the basis of “national emergency.”
As for Abbas, he was elected to his position in January 2005. His four-year term ended in 2009. New elections have been postponed indefinitely. Similarly, the Palestinian Legislative Council, which sits in Gaza, was elected to a four-year term in January 2006. The following year, Hamas staged a bloody coup against the P.A. in Gaza. New legislative elections also remain unscheduled.
American and European diplomats value Fayyad’s skills and trust his integrity. So long as he is prime minister, they feel better about pouring in aid — more per capita than to any country in Africa, Asia, or Latin America — that keeps the P.A. afloat. Israelis respect Fayyad, too. You do understand that all this makes him less popular — not more — with the broad Palestinian public?
Of course, popularity is not the only source — or even the primary source — of power in the Palestinian territories. But Fayyad does not command a militia. And, presumably because he is seen as a moderate, he receives no financial backing from such oil-rich Muslim countries as Iran and Qatar.
Hamas leaders — who do receive support from both Iran and Qatar — openly detest Fayyad. Finally, though Fayyad was appointed by Abbas, he is not close to Abbas, who, in addition to heading the Palestinian Authority, leads the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization which holds the reins — more or less — on the West Bank.
Halfway through our conversation, Fayyad asked not be quoted, so I’ll respect that. But I’m revealing nothing new if I say he gets that Hamas’s openly declared threat to exterminate Israel is not conducive to peace processing. He understands, too, that there is a desperate need for political reform and institution-building in the Palestinian territories. He has been working toward that goal determinedly, if not entirely successfully.
As we leave the prime minister’s offices, we see that demonstrators have gathered outside, mostly civil servants peacefully protesting the fact that it has been a long time since they have received their paychecks.
Ramallah, the de facto capital of the West Bank, lies six miles north of Jerusalem in the Judean Mountains. By the standards of non-oil producing Middle Eastern countries, it is neither depressed nor depressing. Buildings are of white Jerusalem stone with red tile roofs. There are mosques with tall minarets and green domes; palm trees and stone walls; modern hotels and good restaurants that serve cold, locally brewed beer. A fair amount of new construction is underway, but there also are empty lots, strewn with rubble. In some of them, goats graze.
Ramallah may not be the ideal Palestinian city of the future, but, as it happens, an attempt to build that metropolis is underway on hilltops less than six miles to the northwest. It’s called Rawabi and it’s the first planned city in the West Bank, a project that will cost $1 billion, most of which is coming from Qatar. The first residents are to begin moving in within a year. In five to seven years, it is to have homes for 10,000 Palestinian families, as well as a commercial center, a cultural center, medical facilities, stores, cafes, and a giant amphitheater.
Bashar Masri, the elegant and eloquent entrepreneur behind this project, acknowledges that, to succeed, Rawabi will need businesses and jobs — high-tech would be his preference. That will require foreign investors confident that their money will not end up in the foreign bank accounts of corrupt officials. It would help, too, if Rawabi and all of what Masri calls Palestine were to enjoy not just peaceful but cooperative relations with the little start-up nation to its west.
Both Masri and Fayyad favor that outcome — of that I have little doubt. But with Palestinian power divided between a jihadist Hamas and a vacillating Fatah, and with Islamists who are committed to Israel’s extermination ascendant throughout much of the Middle East, I have no idea how they get there from here.
Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security.
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3)America's Future Belongs to Islam
By Paul L. Williams, PhD (author of Crescent Moon Rising) Islam, according to newly released data from the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, is now the fastest growing religion in America, verifying President Barack Obama's claim that the United States is “no longer a Judeo-Christian country.”
How many Muslims now live within the country remains anyone's guess, since the U.S. Census Bureau neglects to collect data on religious identification. A 2008 study by Cornell University projected that the number of Muslims in America had climbed from 1.6 million in 1995 to 7 million.[i] A U.S. News and World Report survey, which was conducted at the same time, placed the figure at 5 million,[ii] while the Pew Research Center set the number at 2.35 million.
But Pew researchers admit that their survey was not thorough since it neglected to take into account immigrant and poor black Muslims.[iii] What's more, these researchers only contacted Americans with telephone landlines and failed to take into account the fact that nearly 50% of U.S. residents and age 18-35 and the nearly 100% of the illegal immigrants who communicate exclusively by cell phones.[iv]
Muslim organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), supported the Cornell University projection of 7 million – - based on mosque attendance.[v]
In any case, all demographers agree that throughout the coming decades, the faith of the Prophet Mohammed will continue to impact and transform all aspects of American life: social, political, and economic. They further maintain that, save for a cataclysmic sea-change in population trends, Islam by 2050 will emerge as the nation's dominant religion.
Such an assertion may seem hyperbolic, save for these findings:
The US fertility rate is now below 2.1 per woman, meaning Americans are no longer giving birth to enough children to keep the population from dwindling.[vi] But this statistic does not hold true for the average Muslim American woman who displays a robust fertility rate of 2.8.[vii]
Muslims continue to pour into the country to occupy positions vacated by aging Americans as physicians, engineers, and scientists. Others arrive here to perform tasks that American workers are unwilling to perform in food processing plants, agricultural facilities, and telecommunications. In addition to the Muslims who come here with employment visas, thousands more arrive with student visas to enroll in colleges throughout the country. Still others arrive with “diversity” visas to enrich America's racial composition. In 1992, nearly 50,000 Muslims arrived in the US and received permanent residency status. In 2009, that number soared to 115,000.[viii] In truth, no one knows for certain how many Muslims immigrants are presently living in the country. A GEO report released to the press released by Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) and Ranking Member Susan Collins (R-ME) show that half of the 12 million US illegal immigrants have entered the country legally but have overstayed their visas. Many of the over-stays are from Islamic countries. Five of the 9/11 hijackers overstayed their visas, and GAO found that 36 of the roughly 400 people convicted of terrorism-related charges since September 2001 had overstayed their visas.>[ix]
In addition to the legal and illegal Muslim immigrants, 80,000 refugees enter this country under resettlement programs. Nearly, 75,000 come from Islamic countries.[x]
As the now defunct Christian Church militant, America is witnessing the mosque militant. Muslims, unlike main-line denominational Christians, are fervent in their beliefs and are eager to spread the faith. Islam, at present, is the most rapidly growing religion in the country with outreach programs on college campuses, in prisons, and within the military.[xi]
Islam provides an antithesis to secular America. It offers a return to the country's “traditional values” with a vengeance. The vast majority of US Muslims oppose abortion and same-sex marriage. They call for a curtailment of women's rights and a return to “law and order” (as mandated by sharia). They are enterprising, hard working, and deeply devoted to their families.[xii]
Unlike America's political leaders, Muslims do not recognize the legitimacy of all faiths. Their religion, according to Bernard Lewis, divides the world into two: the House of Islam (dar al-Islam), where Muslims rule and the law of Islam prevails, and the House of War (dar al Harb), comprising the rest of the world. “Between these two,” Lewis writes, “there is a morally necessary, legally and religiously obligatory state of war, until the final triumph of Islam over unbelief.”[xiii] For this reason, Muslims are unlikely to relinquish the cherished claims of their tradition before the prevailing Zeitgeist.
The belief that America could be transformed into an Islamic state was first expressed by a small group Muslim missionaries in 1922, who declared to a gathering of disgruntled city blacks in Syracuse, New York: “Our plan is: we are going to conquer America.”[xiv] The audacity of this remark provoked the following commentary in the Syracuse Sunday Herald:
To the millions of American Christians who have so long looked eagerly forward to the time the cross shall be supreme in every land and the people of the whole world shall have become the followers Christ, the plan to win this continent to the path of the “infidel Turk” will seem a thing unbelievable. But there is no doubt about its being pressed with all the fanatical zeal for which the Mohammedans are noted.[xv]
Ninety years later, the remarks made by the early Islamic missionaries no longer seem audacious but prophetic. The transformation of America into an Islamic nation, Muslim scholars say, is a matter of destiny. It is kismet (quisma). The words of the country's future, such scholars contend, have been written – - and these words no mortal man may alter or erase.
[i] “Michigan Has Largest U.S. Muslim Population,” Psychiatric News, The American Society of Psychiatrists, Vol. 40, Number 2, January 21, 2005.
[ii] Susan Headden, “Understanding Islam,” U.S. News and World Report, April 7, 2008.
[iii] Paul M. Barrett, American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion (New York: Faraar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 8-9.
[iv] Kathleen Parker, “Pew Study of U.S. Muslims Isn't ‘Largely' Reassuring,” The Scranton Times-Tribune, February 28, 2008.
[v] http://www.cair.com/Portals/0/pdf/The_Mosque_in_America_A_National_Portal,pdf The most rigorous estimate was from the Mosque Study Project 2000 (Bagby, Perl, and Froehle, 2001) which combined seven lists of mosques, eliminated duplicates, and attempted to verify the existence of each place. This generated a final list of 1209 mosques in 2000. The researchers then drew a sample of 631 and were successful in obtaining information about 416 of the mosques. They found that 340 adults and children regularly participated in the average mosque, and that 1629 were “associated in any way with the religious life of the mosque.” This converts to a national estimate of 1,969,000 mosque-associated Muslims nationally. The study supports the projection of 6 to 7 million Muslims in the U.S. by assuming that for every Muslim associated with a mosque, three remain without association.
[vi] Rob Stein, “U.S. Birth Rate Falls Again: A Possible Effect of Economic Downturn,” Washington Post, August 27, 2010.
[vii] “A Demographic Portrait of American Muslims,” Pew Research Center, Auguhttp://www.people-press.org/2011/08/30/section-1-a-demographic-portrait-of-muslim-americans/
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Jim Kouri, “Almost Half of Illegal Aliens Entered U.S. Legally, But Overstayed Visas, Senators Say,” Family Security Matters, May 20, 2011, http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.9562/pub_detail.asp
[x] “Presidential Memorandum – - Refugee Admissions,” The White House, Press Release, October 8, 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/10/08/presidential-memorandum-refugee-admissions
[xi] “The Future of the Global Muslim Population,” Pew Research Center, January 27, 2011, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1872/muslim-population-projections-worldwide-fast-growth
[xii] “A Demographic Portrait of American Muslims.”
[xiii] Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 73.
[xiv] Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), p. 113.
[xv] Ibid.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul L. Williams is the author of The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World, The Al Qaeda Connection, and other best-selling books. He is a frequent guest on such national news networks as ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR.
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4)Is Turkey leaving the West?
By Daniel Pipes -
Recent steps taken by the government of Turkey suggest it may be ready to ditch the NATO club of democracies for a Russian and Chinese gang of authoritarian states. [The Shanghai Five, also know as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), has six full members accounting for 60% of the land mass ofEurasia with a quarter of the world's population. When observer states are included, its affiliates account for half of the human race. SCO has initiated over twenty large-scale projects related to transportation, energy and telecommunications holding regular meetings of security, military, defence, foreign affairs, economic, cultural, banking and other officials from its member states.
The SCO has nowestablished relations with the United Nations, where it is an observer in the General Assembly, the European Union, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Commonwealth of Independent States and theOrganisation of Islamic Cooperation. (source: wikipedia)]
Here is the evidence:
Starting in 2007, Ankara applied three times unsuccessfully to join as a guest member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (informally known as the Shanghai Five). Founded in 1996 by the Russian and Chinese governments, along with three (and in 2001 a fourth) former Soviet Central Asian states, the SCO has received minimal attention in the West, although it has grand security and other aspirations, including the possible creation of a gas cartel. More, it offers an alternative to the Western model, from NATO, to democracy, to displacing the U.S. dollar as reserve currency. After those three rejections, Ankara applied for “dialogue partner” status in 2011. In June 2012, it won approval.
One month later, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he had told Russia's President Vladimir Putin, “Come, accept us into the Shanghai Five [as a full member] and we will reconsider the European Union.” Erdoğan reiterated this idea on Jan. 25, noting stalled Turkish efforts to join the European Union.
“As the prime minister of 75 million people, you start looking around for alternatives,” he said. “That is why I told Mr. Putin the other day, 'Take us into the Shanghai Five; do it, and we will say goodbye to the EU.' What's the point of stalling?” He added that the SCO “is much better, it is much more powerful [than the EU], and we share values with its members.”
On Jan. 31, the Foreign Ministry announced plans for an upgrade to “observer state” at the SCO. On Feb. 3 Erdoğan reiterated his earlier point, saying, “We will search for alternatives,” and praised the Shanghai group's “democratization process” while disparaging European “Islamophobia.” On Feb. 4, President Abdullah Gül pushed back, declaring, “The SCO is not an alternative to the EU. … Turkey wants to adopt and implement EU criteria.”
What does this all amount to?
The SCO feint faces significant obstacles: If Ankara leads the effort to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, the SCO firmly supports the beleaguered Syrian leader. NATO troops have just arrived in Turkey to man Patriot batteries protecting that country from Syria's Russian-made missiles. More profoundly, all six SCO members strongly oppose the Islamism that Erdoğan espouses. Perhaps, therefore, Erdoğan mentioned SCO membership only to pressure the EU, or to offer symbolic rhetoric for his supporters.
Both are possible. But I take the half-year flirtation seriously for three reasons. First, Erdoğan has established a record of straight talk, leading one key columnist, Sedat Ergin, to call the Jan. 25 statement perhaps his “most important” foreign policy proclamation ever.
Second, as Turkish columnist Kadri Gürsel points out, “The EU criteria demand democracy, human rights, union rights, minority rights, gender equality, equitable distribution of income, participation and pluralism for Turkey. SCO as a union of countries ruled by dictators and autocrats will not demand any of those criteria for joining.” Unlike the European Union, Shanghai members will not press Erdoğan to liberalize but will encourage the dictatorial tendencies in him that so many Turks already fear.
Third, the SCO fits his Islamist impulse to defy the West and to dream of an alternative to it. The SCO, with Russian and Chinese as official languages, has a deeply anti-Western DNA and its meetings bristle with anti-Western sentiments. For example, when Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad addressed the group in 2011, no one refused his conspiracy theory about 9/11 being a U.S. government inside job used “as an excuse for invading Afghanistan and Iraq and for killing and wounding over a million people.”
Many backers echo Egyptian analyst Galal Nassar in his hope that ultimately the SCO “will have a chance of settling the international contest in its favor.” Conversely, as a Japanese official has noted, “The SCO is becoming a rival bloc to the U.S. alliance. It does not share our values.”
Turkish steps toward joining the Shanghai group highlights Ankara's now-ambivalent membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, starkly symbolized by the unprecedented joint Turkish-Chinese air exercise of 2010. Given this reality, Erdoğan's Turkey is no longer a trustworthy partner for the West but more like a mole in its inner sanctum. If not expelled, it should at least be suspended from NATO.
Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum
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5)James Rickards: Global Monetary System Headed for Collapse
The world currency system is riding down the road to catastrophe, says James Rickards, senior managing director of Tangent Capital Partners.
The world already has entered a currency war that began in 2010 on the heels of the Federal Reserve’s massive easing program, he tells Wall Street Journal Digital Network. Since then, plenty of nations have joined in, including Brazil, Switzerland and Japan, says Rickards, author of “Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crises.”
“All major central banks are easing,” he says. “Eventually so much money will be printed that this will lead to inflation. The endgame is collapse of the international monetary system — sometime sooner than later.”
In both the United States and Japan, the central banks are trying to “import inflation” to get their economies going, rather than trying to boost exports, through a weaker currency, Rickards says. “They’re scared to death of deflation. They’ve cut rates, and the last resort is to cheapen their currencies.”
The European Central Bank is actually doing the right thing, easing for liquidity reasons rather than to depress its currency, Rickards notes. The euro has risen to a 14-month high against the dollar as a result, and he thinks it can keep ascending.
His currency view makes Rickards a huge bull on gold. His long-term price estimate is $7,000 an ounce, more than four times the current price of $1,677. Gold could trade in a range between $3,000 and $10,000, Rickards says. “We’re not going to get there all at once.”
One major factor is that China is “in a scramble to acquire gold,” he explains. With about 1,000 to 3,000 tons, compared with 8,000 tons for the United States, China doesn’t have enough of the precious metal.
When the international monetary system collapses, major financial powers will convene to plan the aftermath, he says. When that happens, each nation must have enough gold relative to its gross domestic product.
“China needs to get to 4,000 to 5,000 tons to look the United States in the eye and be an equal country,” Rickards notes.
The global economy can muddle through this year, but major problems begin in 2014, he maintains.
“The biggest risk is the rapid collapse of confidence in paper money. They can’t just keep printing. Then gold really comes to fore, whether it’s a gold standard or … gold as a reference price.”
Francesco Guerrera, The Wall Street Journal's money & investing editor, agrees with Rickards that a currency war already has begun.
But he’s not as pessimistic about the future. “[T]here is a chance this confrontation might not end as badly as the destructive devaluations that followed the Great Depression or even the turmoil of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998,” Guerrera writes.
Like Rickards he thinks central bank easing isn’t designed to promote exports, but rather domestic demand.
The global easing represents “attempts to make up for non-existent fiscal policies,” Guerrera says. “The dirty secret is that using monetary policy to weaken a currency, whether voluntarily or not, is a shortcut to avoid unpopular decisions on fiscal and budgetary issues.”
But common sense could prevail, he says. The International Monetary Fund may be able to negotiate currency peace.
“If that sounds naive, consider the possibility that this huge bout of monetary stimulus will succeed in engendering a solid recovery driven by domestic demand,” Guerrera writes. “Or that fiscal policy will finally be put to work.”
Others are worried about the monetary system too. “I think the biggest danger is … a currency war,” hedge fund icon George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, tells CNBC.
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