An Environment For Peace, Killing Elephants To Make Bombs and Bless Their Souls!

Speaks to values!
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And that's how you create and environment for peace- Arab style! (See 1 below.)
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In order to get more people, and particularly younger ones, to sign up for Obamacare, this administration has been funneling money to various Hollywood producers to make TV ads selling the program.

In other words, millions of tax payer dollars are being sent to Obama supporters so they can make movies etc. about the joys of Obamacare.  The Lear Film Department, at one of the prestigious California Universities, is a significant recipient among several others.

Propaganda is what it is all,about and smacks of a previous organization that was part of a nation run by a mad man who sought to control the world.
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My friend Avi, tracks  money flows.  He has written a very interesting report outlining how terrorism is now using sought after animal parts to fill their coffers and finance their plots..

While the earth and wind folks are meeting in freezing weather to talk about the growing problem of global warming  populations of animals are being slaughtered so bombs can go off  to disrupt human activity.  Am I missing something here? (See 2 below.)
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I have a liberal Swedish sister in law whom I dearly love. She visited for a few days and I asked her had her view of Obama changed. She fell back on her usual defense about conservatives not favoring abortion , blah blah blah. I pointed out that in my mind, though I favored women having a right to their body, science was working against those who believed life began later, one, and two, abortion is not the most critical issue facing our nation.  She remain adamant as I knew she would so I tried another tack and failed miserably as well.

I explained, Obama had withdrawn 700 billion annual funding from Medicare to finance his unaffordable "Affordable Health Care Act" and that would seriously impact the medical care of a lot of women with serious health issues and yet, liberals claimed conservatives are engaged in a war on women.

Logic is not something that penetrates the mind of liberals because they think with their hearts - bless their poor souls!
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Dick
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1) Palestinian leadership threatens to turn Tel Aviv into “ball of fire” amid peace talks

According to news just released by watchdog group, Palestinian Media Watch, (PMW) the Palestinian leadership has published a threat to bomb Tel Aviv. The message said the Israeli city would be turned into a “ball of fire.”

The threats were published yesterday on the Facebook page of Fatah, the leading faction within the PLO, and which is headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader.

“We swear to you that we will turn the beloved [Gaza] Strip into a graveyard for your soldiers, and we will turn Tel Aviv into a ball of fire,” the message said.

It came in the form of a video posting from Fatah's military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. As PMW notes:

“The Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, has been declared a terrorist organization by the US, Canada, the EU and others.”

The group has perpetrated numerous atrocities, mainly against Israeli civilians, rather than against soldiers in uniform.

The United States has protested against Palestinian incitement on many occasions, and analysts say the latest outburst will make life even more difficult for Secretary of State John Kerry as he attempts to broker a peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Few observers are optimistic about a successful outcome to the current round of negotiations.

PMW described the video, which can be seen by clicking on the link above, in the following terms:

“[The] threats are made by a masked man in uniform standing in front of a group of other masked men, all of whom are holding weapons. The full video is eight minutes long and shows footage of masked men in military training, arsenals of weapons, missiles being launched, as well as footage of Israelis running for shelter during missile attacks.”
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2)End the Terror of Ivory Trade

by Avi Jorisch

Transnational criminal syndicates, terrorist organizations and Islamic extremists are increasingly turning to wildlife trafficking to bankroll their operations. Specifically, elephant and rhinoceros ivory accounts for an increasing share of the budget of Somali militant groups and al-Qaeda affiliates. So far, the White House and international agencies have failed to effectively address this emerging threat.

The United Nations has categorized trafficking in wildlife products as a "serious crime" in order to protect the animals that produce ivory. Nevertheless, their tusks are in demand throughout Africa, Asia and the West.

Wildlife poaching is lucrative, yielding an estimated $19 billion annually. The only other illicit industries that generate more money are drugs, counterfeiting and human trafficking. A kilogram of elephant ivory commands about $2,000, and the same amount of rhino horn fetches $65,000. The enormous sums of money involved, coupled with trans-African corruption, extreme poverty, poor law enforcement capabilities and weak judicial enforcement, have led to a thriving illicit market.

As a result of these staggering numbers, poaching has grown exponentially in recent years. In the last two years alone, almost 60,000 elephants and over 1,600 rhinos were hunted down for their ivory.

According to the Stimson Center, a respected Washington DC think tank, "the spike in poaching and wildlife crime coincides with the increased involvement of sophisticated transnational organized criminals and terrorist organizations." Al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda affiliate that carried out the recent attacks in Nairobi's Westgate Mall, now reportedlygenerates over 40% of its revenue from illicit ivory sales. Other groups, such as Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army and Darfur's Janjaweed, are also said to be turning to wildlife trafficking to bankroll their operations.

The goal of al-Shabab, which Australia, Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom and theUnited States have designated a terrorist organization, is to implement its own Salafi brand of Islamic rule in Somalia. It subsidizes its budget — approximately $70-$100 million annually — not only through wildlife trafficking, but also through a wide variety of other means, including extortion of Somalia's traders and shopkeepers and donations from the Somali Diaspora and sympathetic Islamic charities.

Al-Shabab appears to get the vast majority of its elephant tusks from Kenya. The 420-mile Somalia-Kenya border is porous and serves as a transit route for contraband. According to the Elephant Action League, a series of brokers provides al-Shabab with the ivory. It is then generally taken overland to ports, where it is placed in crates of charcoal and taken out to sea in dhows, small sailing vessels, which transfer their wares to larger vessels of Arab, Chinese, Iranian and Korean origin.

The two biggest markets for illicit wildlife products are the United States and Asia, specifically China, but the problem is ultimately global. Ivory is considered a status symbol, and among the uneducated, it is thought to cure diseases such as cancer and to treat hangovers.

How can the international community curb poachers' ability to operate? The Obama administration's Executive Order onCombating Wildlife Trafficking, issued in July 2013, created an inter-agency task force, called for assistance to foreign governments combating traffickers and encouraged global enforcement. This is a good start, but much more should be done. The U.S. Treasury Department should identify and blacklist wildlife poachers and others involved in the illicit ivory trade, and the Department of Defense should provide African nations with drones to track and target illegal activity, as they do on the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada.According to retired general Carter Ham, who headed the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) until last April, "the use of drones is not only desirable, but is also likely to be very effective."

International organizations like the U.N. and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) have an important role to play. The U.N. could work with high-risk countries such as Kenya and South Africa to improve their intelligence-gathering capabilities, track the trade routes used by poachers, and help follow the financial trails of terrorist organizations trading in ivory.

For its part, the FATF, an intergovernmental body that sets standards on terrorism finance and money laundering, should highlight the issue of wildlife poaching and how illicit actors use it to launder money and raise funds. This would make policymakers, law-enforcement agencies, and banking authorities around the globe more aware of the issue.

As the international community grapples with the threat of terrorism and the fate of species on the brink of extinction, it is time to consider bold action. The cost of allowing poachers free rein to traffic in blood ivory is high. Both conservationists and counter-terrorism officials can agree that poaching needs to be curbed for the benefit of all humankind.