By Andrea Widburg

On Friday, Thomas Lifson wrote that last week’s news about the Flynn unmaskings was just the beginning. He cited a post by retired naval officer J.E. Dyer, at Liberty Unyielding, for insights about what Acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell was carrying in a sizable satchel he delivered to the Department of Justice on May 7, 2020. Anyone could see that the satchel contained substantially more information than the five pages revealing the myriad Obama officials who unmasked General Flynn’s name.

Dyer’s article is worth reading in its entirety, but Lifson gives a quick, elegant summary:

The key message is that for years the Obama administration was mining the incomparable database of the National Security Agency (NSA), which captured virtually all electronic communications – emails, text messages, everything – launched into the ether. The potential for abuse is breathtaking. Everything that political enemies said to each other, except in private in-person conversations or in snail mail letters, could have been spied upon. And now it looks like staggering numbers of intercepts were monitored. Dyer makes that case.

What especially caught my eye was the exponential growth rate of queries that “desk jockeys” in the various federal agencies made to view information about United States Persons of Interest during Obama’s second term, all without having to log the specific inquiry or the identity of the person unmasked. Here’s the data, straight from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

Two thoughts flow from this extraordinary data. First, I am indebted to Mary Theroux, of the Independent Institute, who alerted me to the National Security Agency’s collection and storage capacity. Its Utah Data Center, completed in May 2019 at a cost of $1.5 billion, is located at Camp Williams, near Bluffdale, Utah. The structure covers somewhere between 1 to 1.5 million square feet, with 100,000 square feet dedicated to the data center and the remainder for technical support and administration.

The Data Center’s storage capacity is estimated to exceed exabytes, plural. If you’re wondering, a single exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes (or 10 to the 18^th power of bytes). That’s a lot of information.

Mary Theroux pointed out that there is no way that the U.S. can scan this information in real-time. That is, there’s nothing in this massive database that will alert our intelligence agencies to a planned terrorist attack. Instead, this database exists as a repository to hunt down information after the fact. In that regard, it gives the government power that Levrentiy Beria only dreamed about.

As you recall, Levrentiy Beria was the head of the secret police under Stalin. He was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths (including the Katyn massacre) and hundreds of thousands of imprisonments. Beria’s job was to get rid of anyone whom the increasingly paranoid Stalin perceived as a threat.

In that capacity, Beria famously said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” In other words, because he was spying on everybody, should a person be unfortunate enough to catch Stalin’s eye, Bernie could sift through those saved records and retrofit a crime. A government with exabytes of computer data has a lot of material for retrofitting crimes should it need it.

Second, the Obama administration’s radical increase in inquiries during his second term demands explanation. It’s to be hoped that, in the coming months, John Durham and Bill Barr provide that explanation. In the absence of that information, though, it’s not unreasonable to guess that Barack Obama was getting his ducks in a row to preserve his legacy.

Barack Obama was always thinking about the long game. After all, he announced right before his election that he would “fundamentally transform” America. A good insurance policy for ensuring that legacy was to track the opposition and remove – or prepare to remove – anyone who looked like a risk. Once Obama was in his second term, the administration was in a position to consolidate power for a permanent Democrat government class.

If this was, in fact, what Obama was doing, it’s a dead certainty that Trump wasn’t the only person Obama’s administration spied upon. After all, while Trump incurred Obama’s wrath for poking at him with the Birtherism, Trump didn’t announce his candidacy until mid-2015 and, for quite a while, the political class assumed that he was a joke. Obama could not have been worried about Trump.

However, the numbers show that Obama’s minions were searching more and more records when Obama could reasonably be worried about other candidates: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee – any one of them might have a chance of becoming president. Moreover, although Hillary was the “anointed one,” Obama knew from his 2008 primary campaign and from Hillary’s stint as Secretary of State, that Hillary was a tin-eared candidate whom many people hated with a passion. She was going to need all the help he could give her if she was going to be Obama’s third term.

In sum, my best guess is that we’re going to discover that Obama had teams of faceless drones searching through that enormous NSA stockpile of data for information about every Republican whose head ever appeared above the parapet as a threat to a permanent Democrat presidency.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/was_obama_systematically_spying_on_everyone_who_could_threaten_his_legacy.html

In the night on Friday, around midnight, police officers discovered two dead children in an apartment in Schwarzach. The suspected murderer is a father from Schwarzach, reports the Idowa portal, but without mentioning that the suspected murderer of the two children is the 36-year-old migrant Samir A.

According to an acquaintance, the latter had called in the night of Friday. Due to the telephone call, the woman was afraid that Samir A. had suicidal intentions. The police then checked the man’s home address and other known addresses. In the meantime, the 36-year-old Samir A. telephoned his former partner and mother of the two children, who lives separated from him. However, he did not inform her of his whereabouts.In the father’s apartment, the police discovered two children, a little boy aged 8 and his little 6-year-old sister. Both were found dead.

Based on the initial investigations by the Straubing criminal investigation department, the suspicion of the crime was directed against the 36-year-old father, who took turns with their mother to look after the children during the night. A large-scale search was initially unsuccessful, according to the police press release. Shortly before 4:00 a.m., the 36-year-old turned himself in to the police in Straubing and was arrested. The Straubing criminal investigation department investigates in close cooperation with the Regensburg public prosecutor’s office, also with regard to the exact course of the crime and the background.

.journalistenwatch.com/2020/05/16/staatsanwaltschaft-samir-a/

A Turk born in Switzerland is allowed to stay in Switzerland, although he was sentenced to 28 months in prison in 2016 for raping a woman. The Administrative Court of the Canton of Berne has revoked the revocation of the settlement permit by the Berne Security Directorate. According to the verdict published on Friday, seven years ago the now 25-year-old man and two accomplices committed a crime against an unconscious young woman. The young Turkish man performed sexual intercourse unprotected.One of the accomplices recorded the act.The latter subsequently sent this video to at least seven people. The three young men also stole from the victim. The young woman suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Between 2011 and 2017, the young Turk was also punished for several minor offences, such as traffic violations. In 2016 the young Turk met a young Swiss woman whom he married in mid-2019.According to the Bernese Administrative Court, the young man has since completed an apprenticeship and has proven himself in his training. After a preliminary hearing, the court considered it plausible that the complainant had in the meantime matured and was making serious efforts to lead an orderly life in accordance with the law. His wife’s family supported him. In 2013, when the victim was raped, he was more of a hanger-on, according to the court that sentenced him. He has been without criminal record for three years.Admittedly, the rape was a serious offence, which would indicate that the person had to be expelled. The man also had a certain connection to his home country, although he was born in Switzerland. For example, he had spent several holidays in Turkey and at least one aunt and stepfather still lived there. According to his own statements, however, the young Turk has no contact with him. In this case, however, it should also be noted that the young Swiss wife of the Turk has no connection to Turkey at all. According to the court, expelling the young Turkish man would “result in a considerable impairment of his married life and would be particularly difficult for his wife to cope with”.In addition, there were no indications that the young Turk could relapse in violence and sexual offences. Sometimes the young Turkish man’s private interests were “of considerable weight” in view of growing up in Switzerland, the marital relationship and the rather difficult integration of the man in Turkey.

polizei-schweiz.ch/tuerke-darf-trotz-schaendung-einer-jungen-bewusstlosen-frau-in-der-schweiz-bleiben/?fbclid=IwAR1N39fCvZ8yxNz-LtqlNYdiAK20tfnANQPw8j004ZuLZ_53Cbt6gAzfduQ

In July 2018, Britain’s then Home Secretary Sajid Javid ordered a review into the characteristics of child sexual grooming gangs. “The scandal of child grooming gangs is one of the most shocking state failures that I can remember,” he said.

“I will not let cultural or political sensitivities get in the way of understanding the problem and doing something about it. It is a statement of fact… that most of the men in recent high profile gang convictions have had Pakistani heritage… I’ve instructed my officials to look into this unflinchingly.”

The review was long overdue, to say the least. In 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron told the BBC that the rape and sexual abuse of underage girls had been “on an industrial scale”: “Young girls… being abused over and over again on an industrial scale, being raped, being passed from one bunch of perpetrators to another bunch of perpetrators”. According to The Independent:

“The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal saw gangs undertake the organised sexual abuse of children from the late 1980s until the 2010s and the failure of local authorities to act. Rotherham Council finally commissioned an independent inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, which found in August 2014 that some 1,400 children, most of them white girls, were abused by predominantly British-Pakistani men”.

Girls as young as 11 were raped by “large numbers of male perpetrators“.

As the charity Parents Against Child Sexual Exploitation (Pace) told the BBC in 2014, the sexual abuse and rape of under-age girls and young women had been taking place for decades in nearly “every town” across the UK. In 2017, to mention one example, 17 older men and one woman were convicted of grooming, raping and sexually abusing under-age girls and young women from 2011-2014 in Newcastle. Those prosecuted, according to The Independent, “were from the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian and Turkish communities and mainly British-born…”

The review that Javid ordered was completed late last year and one would therefore expect a public debate about the issue as Javid, even before he ordered the review, insisted that there needed to be an “honest, open debate” about child abuse, “including racial motivation”.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government, however, has nevertheless refused to publish the review, which it says will “only be used for internal policy-making”.

“One of the main purposes of the exemption is to protect the ‘safe space’ necessary for ministers and officials to consider policy options in private without risk of premature disclosure,” officials told The Independent in response to a freedom of information (FOI) request.

“Disclosure would risk pre-empting decisions still to be made by ministers. In addition, the information could be misleading if made public and used out of context…. We recognise that this topic in general and any insight and learning are matters of strong public interest, although it does not necessarily follow that it is in the public interest to disclose any specific information relating to it.” [Emphasis added.]

The refusal to make the report public came even as The Independent reported in December 2019 that:

“Almost 19,000 children have been sexually groomed in England in the past year, according to official figures that have prompted warnings of an ‘epidemic’. Campaigners say the true figure is far higher and accused the government of failing to tackle child sexual exploitation, despite promises made after high-profile cases in Rotherham and Rochdale. More than 18,700 suspected victims of child sexual exploitation were identified by local authorities in 2018-19, up from 3,300 five years before”.

In 2018, police recorded crime showed that in the past five years there had been “a staggering twelve-fold (1,086%) increase in sexual grooming”.

It is hardly believable that authorities are seriously proposing that publishing specific information pertaining to a crucial societal issue — the heinous sexual exploitation of children and the need to protect them from gangs of male sexual predators — is not in the public interest. This is the kind of semantic acrobatics that are apparently needed to obfuscate the fact that the UK government is terrified of having the “open debate” Sajid Javid insisted was necessary only a few years ago.

Instead, the government has said that it will soon publish a national strategy that will set out a “whole system response to all forms of child sexual abuse” [Emphasis added.]

A parliamentary petition demanding that the government release the review in full currently has more than 120,000 signatures, which means that parliament has to consider the petition for a debate. A debate — and a different strategy — is very much needed. Survivors have tried to explain that grooming gangs operate differently than pedophiles in general. Ella Hill, a survivor of the Rotherham grooming gang, wrote in March 2018:

“Grooming gangs are not like paedophile rings; instead, they operate almost exactly like terrorist networks, with all the same strategies…

“As a teenager, I was taken to various houses and flats above takeaways in the north of England, to be beaten, tortured and raped over 100 times. I was called a ‘white slag’ and ‘white c***’ as they beat me.

“They made it clear that because I was a non-Muslim, and not a virgin, and because I didn’t dress ‘modestly’, that they believed I deserved to be ‘punished’. They said I had to ‘obey’ or be beaten.

“Fear of being killed, and threats to my parents’ lives, made it impossible for me to escape for about a year. The police didn’t help me…

“Like terrorists, [groomers] firmly believe that the crimes they carry out are justified by their religious beliefs.”

“The government’s repeated failure to acknowledge the role of racism and religious bigotry in grooming gang crime has led to inadequate investigation, protection and prosecution,” one survivor, who wanted to remain anonymous, told The Independent in December 2019.

In the era of “victimhood culture”, in which so many groups vie for the top spot of “most victimized”, being an actual victim of sexual abuse apparently has little currency among the social justice elites. Where, for example, are the feminists in all this? Where is the “me too” movement?

As the government is too squeamish publicly to debate the findings of the review, it is bound to be even more terrified of being seen as specifically targeting ethnic rape gangs to stop their crimes — yet that is what victims such as Ella are asking them to do. Not to mention that basic democratic principles of the public’s right to information are being completely disregarded. Ultimately, these kinds of politically correct theatrics can only lead to one thing: Bad policies. A refusal to talk openly and honestly about issues usually does. A generation of exploited children will pay the price, but that, apparently, is not something that bothers the authorities all that much.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15930/victimhood-culture-uk-rape

In an effort to encourage social distancing, a cafe in Germany has asked customers to wear …

I mean … I can’t even believe I’m going to type this out …

Pool noodles.

On their heads.

I can’t imagine how that conversation goes.

Maî​tre d’: How many in your party?

Customer: 3

Maî​tre d’: Excellent. We have a lovely table on the veranda. 

Customer: Great, we’ve been looking forward to this!

Maî​tre d’: Now, we have a strict dress code here at the club.

Customer: Oh, I understand completely. Gotta keep the riff raff out.

Maî​tre d’: Wonderful. Now, just put this on your head …

Customer: What?

We go now to CNN for hard-hitting journalistic analysis of this developing situation:

(CNN) — A cafe in Germany has celebrated its grand reopening to customers after lockdown by handing out pool noodles to maintain social distancing.

Last Saturday the owners of the Cafe Rothe in Schwerin — a town in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s home state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania — were allowed to reopen their doors to visitors after coronavirus restrictions were lifted.

While people enjoyed the company and the weather, the motto at the cafe was: “Keep the social distance.”

Rather than using floor markings and perspex screens to keep people apart, the owners of the cafe distributed straw hats with two colorful swimming noodles attached to the top.

To mark the occasion, owner Jaqueline Rothe posted a photo to the cafe’s Facebook page showing customers sitting at tables with their new headgear on.

“Today it’s like this: distance measurement,” she wrote in the caption.

Rothe, 52, told CNN numerous happy customers flocked to the cafe to enjoy a coffee, cake or a beer in the sunshine.

At least it was just pool noodles, and not hamster balls.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/jeff-reynolds/2020/05/15/not-the-babylon-bee-cafe-in-germany-asks-customers-to-wear-pool-noodles-on-their-heads-n394572#thm-comments

Recalling a scene from the famous 11th-century poem “The Song of Roland”, in which Christians in Spain threatened Muslims “to choose between baptism or death,” Pope Francis said: “We must beware of fundamentalist groups; each (religion) has their own. Fundamentalism is a plague and all religions have some fundamentalist first cousin”.And then, in the declaration on “human brotherhood” signed in Abu Dhabi, the Pope and the Imam of Al Azhar Al Tayeeb spoke of religious freedom and women’s rights. Beautiful words. They called it “a word of peace”.

Where is the word of Islam and the Imam on the conversion of Silvia Romano, the Italian girl we now know was forcefully converted to Islam after being held for18 months after her kidnapping in Somalia? Where are the imams who are always so good at talking to the newspapers?

The Pope condemned the conversions of Muslims as told in the “Chanson de Roland”. A thousand years ago. Very useful. Where are the high dignitaries of the Islamic world who are willing to nullify Silvia Romano’s conversion and free her from the religious yoke imposed on her under captivity?

Where is the Pope?

When we will open our eyes, while we still have them, on the need for some moral equivalency? Today, Christians are killed if they do not convert to Islam and Muslims who convert to Christianity are massacred. Meanwhile, in Europe mosques proliferate and churches in the Islamic world are burned to the ground.

Islamic fundamentalists kidnapped an Italian, Christian and Western girl who went to Africa to help people, they held her for a year and a half under chains, they released her after her conversion to Islam and after she suffered psychological as well as physical brutalization. Then there was the payment of a large ransom through the mediation of Islamic emirates (Qatar and Turkey) which have been working for Europe’s submission for years.

What a great success for the enemies of civilization who also enjoy the crazy applause on the media of important figures in Italy, including the Church to which the girl at least nominally belonged.

Many, most, do not understand or do not want to understand that the clamor about the Silvia Romano’s case is that of a weak and dying civilization.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/280307

German MPs voted for a bill by the Federal Council introducing an additional passage into the criminal code which means defaming the EU flag and anthem will be punishable. Until now, fines or imprisonment could only be imposed if state symbols of the Federal Republic of Germany were disfigured or abused.

Violations of the new regulation can – in line with the existing prohibitions – be punished with a custodial sentence of up to three years or a fine.

The regulation also includes destroying, damaging or defacing the EU flag and attempts to do so.If other flags are burned, for example during demonstrations, the penalty requirement that Germany maintains mutual relations with the other state and that the Federal Government must have authorized criminal prosecution does not apply.

Federal Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht (SPD) said: “The burning of flags in public has nothing to do with peaceful protest.

“It stirs up hate, anger and aggression and hurts the feelings of many people.”

The SPD had spoken out in favour of protecting the Israeli flag after it was set alight at a demonstration in Berlin in 2017.

With the decision to extend the law there is now uniform criminal protection for foreign flags and the symbols of the European Union.

The right-wing anti-EU Alternative for Germany (AfD) party opposed the new punitive provision on the EU symbols.

In an amendment, which was rejected by a large majority, they spoke of “excessive interference with freedom of expression and art”.

The move comes at a time of heightened tension within the bloc and a marked rise in anti-German sentiment as member states failed to get to grips with a united stance to tackle the coronavirus crisis.

Italy, which still bitterly resents its treatment by Brussels at the height of the Mediterannean migrant crisis, once again felt it was left to deal with an emergency on its own.

Opinion polls in the country showed record levels of dissatisfaction with the EU and even long-standing supporters of Brussels openly questioned its effectiveness in the face of a major international crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic.

Berlin caused further ourtrage thoughout the bloc when it ruled against the European Central Bank on the issue of financial aid for EU member states hardest hit by COVID-19.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1282687/EU-law-flag-burning-germany-european-union-protest