Happy Talk: None of that depressing true stuff. There is nothing called Islamic Extremism. Just bad Christians.

I don't want to hear it.  I don't want to know.  Don't tell me.  You're wrong. 
I think this guy's creds are in order.

Exclusive — Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn: Obama, Hillary Ignored Intelligence They Did Not Like About Middle East, Only Wanted ‘Happy Talk’

by Matthew Boyle

 28 Aug 2016

 NEW YORK CITY, New York

NEW YORK CITY, New York — Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who served for more than two years as the director of President Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), leveled explosive charges against the President and his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an exclusive hour-long interview with Breitbart News Daily on Friday.

Specifically, during an exclusive interview about his book The Field of Fight, Flynn said that Obama and Clinton were not interested in hearing intelligence that did not fit their “happy talk” narrative about the Middle East. In fact, he alleged the administration actively scrubbed training manuals and purged from the military ranks any thinking about the concept of radical Islamism. Flynn argued that this effort by Obama, Clinton and others to reduce the intelligence community to gathering only facts that the senior administration officials wanted to hear—rather than what they needed to hear—helped the enemy fester and grow, while weakening the United States on the world stage.

“The administration has basically denied the fact that we have this problem with ‘Radical Islamists,’” Flynn said during the interview. “And this is a very vicious, barbaric enemy and I recognize in the book that there is an alliance of countries that are dedicated basically against our way of life and they support different groups in the Islamic movement, principally the Islamic State and formerly Al Qaeda—although Al Qaeda still exists. The administration denied the fact that this even existed and then told those of us in the government to basically excise the phrase ‘radical Islamism’ out of our entire culture, out of our training manuals, everything. That was a big argument I had internally and I talked a little bit about it in the Senate testimony that I gave two years back.”

Later in the interview, Flynn was even more specific, calling out Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for not wanting to hear all the facts about what was happening in the Middle East—only some of them.

“There’s a narrative that the President and his team, including Hillary Clinton, wanted to hear—instead of having the tough news or the bad news if you will that they needed to hear,” Flynn said. “Now, there’s a big difference. And the one thing about intelligence is we should stand for truth to power—meaning we should always say what we believe, and lay the facts out, lay the tough right facts out and then you let the policymakers make the decisions that they have to make. What has happened in the last 10 years, frankly in the last 8 years, is we have seen a level of dishonesty coming out of both the policy and the decision making structure with the American people.”

Because of the President’s and the Secretary of State’s—among other officials in the Obama administration—unwillingness to hear all the facts, including ones they needed to but didn’t want to hear, Flynn says the President has presented a narrative to the American people about the war on terrorism and radical Islamism that is simply inaccurate.

“The President has said they’re jayvee, they’re on the run, they’re not that strong, what difference does it make what we call—that’s being totally dishonest with the American public,” Flynn said. “There’s one thing that Americans are, and we’re tough, resilient people but we have to be told the truth. I think what a lot of this is, in fact what I know a lot of it is. It’s a lot of happy talk from a President who did not meet the narrative of his political ideology or his political decision-making process to take our country in a completely different direction and frankly that’s why I’m sitting here talking to you here today, Matt. The intelligence process starts really at the ground level, but the priorities—the priorities, Matt, for an intelligence system and the intelligence community in our country and that’s the President of the United States.”

The Obama administration’s refusal to take these threats seriously and his, Flynn said, “has allowed an enemy that is using very smart, savvy means to impact our way of life.”

“That means infiltrating into refugee populations, that means conducting of smart information operations,” Flynn said. “Most people don’t know but these guys have very sophisticated information operations going on, with publications of magazines and websites. They have leaders in their groups that have thousands and thousands—I’m talking tens of thousands of followers on social media and Instagram and Twitter. So we are not even allowed to go after these kinds of things right now. This is the problem—it’s a big problem. In fact, if we don’t change this we’re going to see this strengthening in our homeland.”

Flynn also laid out how to defeat radical Islamism, a plan he has stated repeatedly that the Obama Administration has ignored.

“The very first thing is we have to clearly define the enemy and we have to get our own house in order, which this administration has not done,” Flynn said. “We have to figure out how are we going to organize ourselves. Then I call for in the book a new 21st century alliance. This is where we really come to how we take the Arab community to task on how they plan to fix this cancerous disease inside of their own body that has metastasized and grown exponentially over the last five or six years and certainly actually over the last eight to 10 years. So it’s one thing to go after the ideology, just like we went after Communism for 40 years, but I also say in the book we have to crush this enemy wherever they exist. We cannot allow them to have any safe haven. We are dancing around the sort of head of a pin, when we know these guys are in certain places around the world and our military is not allowed to go in there and get them. The ‘mother may I’ has to go all the way back up to the White House.”

He said the fight has to be very similar to how the United States, over decades, thoroughly degraded Communism on the world stage.

“There’s no enemy that’s unbeatable,” Flynn said. “We can beat any enemy. We put our minds to it, we decide to do that, we can beat any enemy. And there’s no ideology in the world that’s better than the American ideology. We should not allow, because they mask themselves behind the religion of Islam, we should not allow our ideology, our way of life, our system of principles, our values that are based on a Judeo-Christian set that comes right out of our Constitution—we should not fear that. In fact, we should fight those that try to impose a different way of life on us. That’s what we did against the Nazis, that’s what we did against the Communists for the better part of a half a century—in fact, more than half a century. Now we are dealing with another Ism, and that’s radical Islamism, and we’re going to have to fight it—and we’re going to be fighting it for some time. But tactically we can defeat this enemy quickly. Then what we have to do is we have to fight the ideology, and we can do that diplomatically, politically, informationally and we can do that in very, very smart ways much greater than we’re doing right now.”

Flynn is a lifelong Democrat, and again served in this senior Obama administration position for more than two years, but is now publicly supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump for president. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in support of Trump, and has been publicly speaking out in favor of the GOP nominee for some time now.

“My role as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency—that’s almost a 20,000 person organization in 140 plus countries around the world,” Flynn said. “I was also the senior military and intelligence officer not only for the Defense Department but for the country. So I mean I was basically told ‘hey, you know what, what you’re saying we don’t like. So you’re out.’ To Donald Trump, though, and I haven’t known him that long but I met him a year ago—in fact a year ago this month. The conversation that we had, which was an amazing conversation, I found a guy that like I to say, ‘he gets it.’ He gets it. He is a street savvy strategic leader type person who has a vision for this country, and he’s turned it into this phrase of ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Flynn said Trump’s campaign theme of wanting to “Make America Great Again”—along with his detailed policy speeches on foreign policy, economic policy, immigration policy and more—means that Trump is a “guy who sees our country like I see it.”

“The elements of that, and the things that you hear him talking about—particularly recently with his foreign policy speech and his economic policy speech and his immigration policy speech,” Flynn said. “Some of the things he is saying, this is a guy who sees our country like I see it. I will tell you, and I lay this out in the book—you know, Matt, I can clearly see what it is that we are facing. It’s not just the rise of radical Islamism, it’s also the direction that China is going and it’s also the direction that I see Russia taking. We have an alliance of nations that are opposed to our way of life and we should not kid ourselves and think that we’re just going to be around forever because we’re the United States of America. Countries only last so long, and in order to last, you have to fight for that belief system that we have, and I like to say it’s American patriotism—that’s the Ism that I’m for—and that’s where Donald Trump steps in, because here’s a guy who when you look at what he did over the past year just slaying the Republican establishment and he’s facing a current adversary in Hillary Clinton whose criminal behavior and just dishonesty is just stunning. Yet there’s still people who are trying to, that are weighing in to bring her back into government? Oh my God, I mean, to me this is an easy choice. This is a choice about the direction of the United States of America going forward.”

Flynn noted that the impacts of the choices voters make in this upcoming presidential election will affect the United States for generations—perhaps centuries—to come.

“And Donald Trump is not doing this for Donald Trump,” Flynn said. “Donald Trump is not doing this for the next four years. Donald Trump is doing this for the next 40, or the next 400, years. I have children, I have grandchildren, I have a son who has served overseas in the combat zones three times. I have a couple of grandchildren. My God, I want those grandchildren to grow up in a country that is recognizable to those of us that are in this country today. Right now, it’s starting to become unrecognizable and if we continue down the path that this administration has set over the past eight years—and that includes the path that Hillary Clinton was part of setting—we are going to find ourselves waking up one day in America saying ‘this is not America anymore. This is not what we were founded upon.’ Frankly, in order to keep that belief system that we have, we have to sort of fight for it and we’re going to have to fight for it overseas, and we’re going to have to fight for it here in the homeland and the way we do it here in our country is we do it at the voting booth. People have got to get out and vote.”

Flynn bashed the so-called “Never Trump” Republicans who say they will never vote for Donald Trump in November as “part of the problem” in America, too. He said that based on his own conversations with Trump, he believes he is seriously interested in helping the United States win again on the world stage.

“All these sort of Republican establishment types who are having a very difficult time checking their egos at the door, well, check your egos at the door because you’re part of the problem,” Flynn said. “The establishment that we’ve had, all they do is whine, whine, whine. And they have no solutions—what I want to start seeing is solutions. That’s where Donald Trump comes in because this is a guy—in my conversations with him, he’s like ‘alright I’m done talking about the problems, what are we going to do to fix it?’ That’s what I like about him. He was very serious about those—that’s the conversations that I’ve had, multiple conversations, now about solutions and how do we get to those solutions? That to me is the sign of a leader, back to your use of Churchill and what I talk about in the book, people don’t recognize people for who they are. Donald Trump is not kidding—he’s not kidding. He wants to Make America Great Again, like many of us—and that’s why I’m with him.”

If the United States doesn’t elect Trump, and seriously start dealing with the enemy, Flynn believes the problem is only going to get worse—and continue spreading more into the United States.

“If we don’t deal with it, then we’re going to be fighting it for a long, long time—and frankly, as a military guy, I’m sick of just participating in conflict,” Flynn said. “I want to win.”

Flynn said that the FBI is currently working on cases in every U.S. state—all 50 of them—regarding people who are allegedly aiding the Islamic State.

“Our FBI director, our current FBI director, has stated that the FBI is working a thousand—one thousand—cases right here in the homeland of the Islamic State,” Flynn said. “And he’s working those cases in all 50 of our states. So there’s a problem at home, and we definitely have a problem overseas, and our current President and frankly this administration to include Hillary Clinton—they denied the existence of it. And they tried to say ‘this is a religion of peace.’ Islam is Islam. It is a political ideology.”

Sudan and the Rape of Americans (and Everyone Else)

South Sudan: Soldiers ‘Singled Out Americans’ in Rape Spree

by Edwin Mora

 15 Aug 2016

Troops loyal to the U.S.-backed government of South Sudan have reportedly embarked on a rampage of rape and murder, targeting civilians — a testament to the mayhem that has spread across the world’s youngest country, the birth of which the Obama administration helped midwife.

The Associated Press (AP) learned from a number of witnesses:

On July 11, South Sudanese troops, fresh from winning a battle in the capital, Juba, over opposition forces, went on a nearly four-hour rampage through a residential compound popular with foreigners, in one of the worst targeted attacks on aid workers in South Sudan’s three-year civil war. They shot dead a local journalist while forcing the foreigners to watch, raped several foreign women, singled out Americans, beat and robbed people and carried out mock executions…

One witness described how members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), loyal to the Obama administration-backed government in the fledgling country, were targeting Americans.
“He definitely had pronounced hatred against America,” Gian Libot, a Philippine witness, said, referring to one of the troops.
Libot quoted the soldier as saying, “You messed up this country. You’re helping the rebels. The people in the UN, they’re helping the rebels.”
The United Nations peacekeeping troops deployed to South Sudan and various embassies there, including the U.S. consulate, have been accused of turning a blind eye to the recent violence against civilians, notes AP.
According to the news agency, the UN and the U.S. Embassy did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Consistent with what the witnesses told AP, the UN mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), at the beginning of this month, highlighted and denounced what it described as “unspeakable acts” of:

[W]idespread sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, of women and young girls, by soldiers and unidentified armed men…

Moreover, members of the country’s army have also been accused of executing civilians.
The recent incidents have taken place in various locations across the country, noted UNMISS in a press statement on August 1.
Less than a week later, the UN reported:

Preliminary United Nations investigations into the recent fighting in South Sudan reveal Government security forces carried out killings and rapes, and looted and destroyed properties, the UN human rights chief said today, calling on the Security Council to take stronger action…

Highlighting a sexual violence incident against an aid worker, AP reports that the victim recalls the soldier saying as he pointed his AK-47 at her, “Either you have sex with me, or we make every man here rape you and then we shoot you in the head.”
“The woman took the first option. But by the end of the evening, she had been raped by 15 South Sudanese soldiers anyway,” adds AP.
Despite at least two ceasefire agreements, deadly clashes between armed groups loyal to South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and his sacked Vice President Riek Machar have kept raging since the civil war erupted in December 2013, soon after the country was formed in 2011, resulting in the death and displacement of thousands.
The war continues to pit South Sudan’s most prominent ethnic groups against one another: the SPLA and other members of the Dinka, the largest tribe in the country led by President Kiir, versus the rebel forces that include defected soldiers and militias from the Nuer, the second-largest group headed by Machar.
According to the UN, the most affected by the acts of sexual violence have been displaced Nuer women and girls (minors).
“Those responsible seem to have been mostly SPLA,” added UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.
In the capital of Juba alone, the UN documented 217 cases of sexual violence between July 8 and 25, primarily at the hands of the SPLA.
Citing witnesses and victims, the UN reported that besides being sexually assaulted, women and girls were also “robbed of their belongings, beaten up and verbally abused by SPLA soldiers and other security officers.”
Last Friday, the UN approved the deployment of an additional 4,000 peacekeeping troops from various African nations, granting them the power to use “all necessary means” to protect UN personnel and facilities and to take “proactive” measures to protect civilians from threats.
The deployment, which has been opposed by Kiir’s government, would bring the total number of UN peacekeeping forces in South Sudan to nearly 17,000.
Kiri’s rival Machar welcomed the proposed deployment.
The South Sudanese government has reportedly established a court martial to try the SPLA soldiers accused of committing atrocities against civilians.
Zeid from the UN noted that the government “has made similar promises in the past, but the violations continue unabated.”

Oh Canada: I can't See Much Use for Trudeau.

Really.  His platitudes and cliches are inspiring.

He is truly quite useless and repeats rubbish.

Shame on Trudeau and Canadians for electing him.

Canada’s Trudeau says Americans should know more about the world

By Ishaan Tharoor March 4, 2016

Ahead of his first official trip to Washington, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has suggested his counterparts south of the border would do well to know more about the rest of the world.

In an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes", to be aired Sunday, Trudeau was asked about what Canadians perhaps disliked about Americans. He answered in stereotypical Canadian fashion, suggesting "it might be nice" if Americans "paid a little more attention to the world."

That polite response carries a bit of an edge in the current climate, with the United States in the grips of an election cycle that has been marked by its particularly ghoulish debates and ugly political rhetoric.

"Having a little more of an awareness of what’s going on in the rest of the world, I think is, is what many Canadians would hope for Americans," Trudeau said, in a transcript released to the Associated Press on Thursday.

In myriad polls and surveys, Americans are often found to be among the most "ignorant" populations in the developed world. Contrary to trends elsewhere, the rate of foreign language study by college students in the United States is declining, not increasing.

[I don't believe the polls and I believe if you focus in on the data, it would show something very different]

About a third of Americans hold passports, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, which also points out that passport holders number about 50 percent in Australia, more than 60 percent in Canada and some 80 percent in Britain.

Sure, there has always been a pronounced isolationist streak to Americans, a nation that in many senses is a continent unto itself. But in an age when the United States is the world's only superpower and to varying degrees entangled in myriad conflicts abroad, it does behoove Americans to know more about the world their country so profoundly impacts.

In the interview, Trudeau sets his sights more modestly. Just start with Canada -- you know, that place a lot of Americans are starting to see as safe haven.

“I think we sometimes like to think that, you know, Americans will pay attention to us from time to time, too,” Trudeau told CBS.

Trudeau and his Liberal party came to power after elections in October, ousting the once-entrenched conservative government of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Since then, the photogenic, well-coiffed new prime minister has championed something of a progressive renaissance: Trudeau's cabinet is the most diverse in the country's history; he has reasserted Canada's role at the forefront of climate change policy; his government has brought in more some 25,000 Syrian refugees in the space of just a few months. Throughout his own election campaign and in the months after its triumph, Trudeau remained a vocal defender of the principles of multiculturalism and feminism.

For these and other reasons, WorldViews suggested earlier this week that Trudeau represented the anti-Donald Trump. The Canadian prime minister seems everything the Republican front-runner is not.

And when it comes to this supposed American obliviousness about the rest of the world, Trudeau has a point. As WorldViews has cataloged over the past few months, the Republican debates have been a showcase for crude, simplistic discussions about foreign policy and global challenges, heavy on sound and fury, light on substance.

Unfortunately, the conversation reflects wider attitudes. A poll of Trump supporters found that more than two-thirds claimed to actively "dislike" American Muslims, let alone Muslims overseas. A lack of understanding of the strictures of the U.S. refugee vetting process led many in the United States to see Syria's destitute refugees as terror threats rather than people desperately fleeing a hideous, brutal war.

In a town hall in December, Trudeau stated his disapproval at the way Trump's nativist rhetoric was affecting American politics, though he didn't mention the former reality star by name.

"I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that I stand firmly against the politics of division, the politics of fear, the politics of intolerance or hateful rhetoric," Trudeau said. "If we allow politicians to succeed by scaring people, we don’t actually end up any safer. Fear doesn’t make us safer. It makes us weaker."

Still, don't expect Trudeau to directly confront Trump when he arrives in Washington.

"The prime minister will always state his values," said a Canadian government official, quoted anonymously in an article by the Canadian Press news agency. "But he’s not interested in stirring up domestic politics."

Evil

So, I have a short story.  One day at college, I was talking to my Humanities teacher - Dr. Robert Sullivan.  And for whatever dimwit reason, I decided to tell him about a book I had read - The Amityville Horror.  For me it was the scariest thing I had ever read, and I knew he was an academic and very philosophical ... he never exhibited any degree of interest in anything so ... purely emotional.  He taught us about Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, and was by no means overly demonstrative except when it came to being rational or critical of ideas.  He was also a former priest who married a former nun and together they had ten children.  He spent decades teaching philosophy at the college and passed away in 2007.  Anyway, so I was telling him about this book and as it all vomited forth, my first reaction was - OMG, he is going to think I am a whack job (partly because listening to the words I was spewing forth - I thought I was a nut job).

 Instead he said to me - if you had seen the things I saw in [South America] (I don't recall now if it was Bolivia or Peru), you'd believe in the evil you've just described ... and it was even worse than the book, I read the book. 

He walked into his office, picked up some books and said we had to get to class.  That was the last time we ever discussed that.

He explained that he had been a priest in South America for years, and during that time, what he experienced and saw made him a believer, not only in what he preached, but in the deep and dark parts so often marginalized as too theatrical today - the evil that lurks and possesses men.  Just because we do not come face to face with the evil everyday, doesn't mean it or worse, isn't there.  We are just fortunate, as of that moment, to have not experienced that evil.

A few days ago I was reading an article/interview with Father Gary Thomas from the Diocese of San Jose, California.  He is one of 14 mandated, trained exorcists in the United States.  One of the last statements he made in the interview caught my attention (interview had been on evil / Satan / exorcists):

 "There’s lots of people in our culture that think it’s all make-believe. If people saw what I saw, they’d be at church every single week.”  


Two men, many years apart, one a former priest turned PhD; the other a mandated exorcist for the Catholic Church, one from Arizona and wherever it was in South America, the other up in San Jose and wherever it is he has been.  Both men said the same thing.

60% !! Nearly that many students have mental issues!!

I wonder what the percentage is for the faculty??

New Concerns Arise About Mental Health Of College Students

August 25, 2016 5:46 PM By Dr. Mallika Marshall

Filed Under: Dr. Mallika Marshall, MIT

BOSTON (CBS) – New concerns arise about the mental health of students on college campuses all across the country.

Dr. Gene Beresin, a psychiatrist and Executive Director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, says 50% to 60% of college students have a psychiatric disorder. 

“What I’m including in that is the use of substances, anxiety, depression, problems with relationships, break-ups, academic problems, learning disabilities, attentional problems,” says Dr. Beresin. “If you add them all up 50% doesn’t seem that high.”

Some undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) agree.

“People go through tough times,” says Dane Erickson, a rising junior from Naples, Florida. “It’s really stressful sometimes here at school.”

“I know a couple of friends who had a difficult first semester last year,” explains Maddie Burgoyne, a rising sophomore from Michigan.

Dr. Beresin says the suicide rate in college in astronomical. “A college student kills himself every day,” he says.

Maddie is also concerned about the higher than average suicide rate a MIT. “I think that’s something unique to MIT,” she says, “you can’t blame the institute itself. The type of student that goes here often puts a lot of pressure on themselves.”

Dr. Beresin says the brain doesn’t fully mature until age 26 so college students are put in a difficult situation.

“Living alone, not being prepared to be on your own,” says Dr. Beresin. “Peer pressure. I mean, the ability to kind of freely use alcohol or drugs and make those decisions on your own without supervision.”

And for international students, the challenges are even greater.

“There are a lot of new factors that play when you come to college especially for international students who don’t know the area at all but yeah, it can be overwhelming at times,” explains Andrea Jaba, an MIT freshman from the Philippines.

But Andrea has at least one strategy she learned from upperclassmen to help her keep her sanity.

“You better join a lot of clubs aside from academics so you don’t drown yourself in all that stress,” says Andrea.

And some colleges are being proactive. For the first time, MIT is requiring incoming freshman to complete an online simulation program that will teach them the warning signs of depression, suicide and other psychiatric issues before starting classes.