90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, June 21, 2020

The White Slaves of Barbary

Much attention and condemnation has been directed towards the tragedy of the African slave trade, which took place between the 16th and the 19th centuries. However, another equally despicable trade in humans was taking place around the same time in the Mediterranean. It is estimated that up to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved by the so-called Barbary corsairs, and their lives were just as pitiful as their African counterparts. They have come to be known as the white slaves of Barbary.

Slavery is one of the oldest trades known to man. We can first find records of the slave trade dating back to The Code of Hammurabi in Babylon in the 18th century BCE. People from virtually every major culture, civilization, and religious background have made slaves of their own and enslaved other peoples. However, comparatively little attention has been given to the prolific slave trade that was carried out by pirates, or corsairs, along the Barbary coast (as it was called by Europeans at the time), in what is now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, beginning around 1600 AD.

Anyone travelling in the Mediterranean at the time faced the real prospect of being captured by the Corsairs and taken to Barbary Coast cities and being sold as slaves.

However, not content with attacking ships and sailors, the corsairs also sometimes raided coastal settlements in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, England, Ireland, and even as far away as the Netherlands and Iceland. They landed on unguarded beaches, and crept up on villages in the dark to capture their victims. Almost all the inhabitants of the village of Baltimore, in Ireland, were taken in this way in 1631. As a result of...

The Mandalorian Jango Fett was cloned because his genetic material was able to be manipulated by the Kaminoans to create an utterly loyal, fearless, and aggressive soldier. They did not want force-sensitive soldiers because it would take even longer to train them and they might be less tractable.

It’s Now Clearer Than Ever Before, Science Bends Itself To Fit Left Wing Politics

I don’t know if you heard, but according to the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), we only have six months left to prevent total climate change disaster.

“This year is the last time we have, if we are not to see a carbon rebound,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol told the Guardian on Thursday in an article with the headline: “World has six months to avert climate crisis, says energy expert.”

Birol continued: “If emissions rebound, it is very difficult to see how they will be brought down in future. This is why we are urging governments to have sustainable recovery packages.”

I’m old enough to remember when we still had 12 years left to save the planet just two years ago. That dire prediction was just as laughable as what Birol is saying today. The scientific “consensus” we used to hear so much about doesn’t support this alarmist claim at all.

What’s really going on is that Birol is using his cachet as a prominent “expert” to push bogus claims to further his political agenda. Those goals also rather conveniently align with the wishes of Democrats and the liberal media.

We’ve recently seen a lot of this type of weaponizing of science for political purposes. A couple weeks ago, we learned of one of the most egregious examples of this to date.

Late last month, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, the Lancet, published a huge study purporting to find that the decades-old anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine increased the risk of death in COVID patients.

To sum it all up, this observational study of 96,000 patients around the world found that treating COVID patients with hydroxychloroquine increased their risk of death by 34 percent, and there was a 137 percent increased risk for heart arrhythmias.

Since President Trump came out as supportive of using hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus, the liberal media quickly pounced. The study’s release also conveniently came after the Lancet put out a shockingly unusual editorial statement opposing Trump’s reelection.

“Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics,” the journal editorial board wrote.

All the pieces were in place for the media and medical establishment to set a new narrative — hydroxychloroquine kills! And President Trump is responsible for those deaths.

SUPERCUT:

The media fearmongered over the now retracted study from the Lancet that showed Hydroxychloroquine was dangerous to covid patients. pic.twitter.com/myKihDkYbj
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 4, 2020

Amid all the alarm, the World Health Organization and National Institutes of Health temporarily halted clinical trials into hydroxychloroquine. The hype also made it harder for doctors and researchers to recruit volunteers for hydroxy studies.

Given the real world consequences, we have to ask, did anyone in the media or medical community really take the time to read the Lancet’s new bombshell study?

Thankfully, curious reporters at the Guardian (yes, the same Guardian that published the climate drivel I mentioned earlier) did take the time to read it and found what they called “glaring errors” in the study’s data on Australia.

But that wasn’t all — the Guardian found more problems with the data, and then they raised serious questions about the U.S.-based company that provided it.

The Guardian reported: “[T]he US-based company Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model … has so far failed to adequately explain its data or methodology.”

After Surgisphere’s CEO refused to hand over his data to independent investigators, the Lancet, to its credit...

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) quietly deleted a six-year-old Father’s Day message from her social media profiles Tuesday morning, tacitly acknowledging critics who highlighted it Monday night to question her marital history.

Mohamad Tawhidi, an Islamic reformer who refers to himself as the “Imam of Peace,” revealed a 2013 post on Omar’s Twitter and Instagram profiles which named her father, “Nur Said.” Tawhidi then argued that, in keeping with Muslim culture, any children of this man would bear the surname “Nur Said” — which he said proved the ongoing speculation that when Omar married U.K. citizen Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, she married her brother.

Imam Mohamad Tawhidi

✔@Imamofpeace

Your father is Nur Said?
Not: Nur Omar Mohamed?

So you’re Ilhan Nur Said?

And you married Ahmed Nur Said,

You married your brother.

(Most Americans don’t know that in most Muslim countries, the surname is actually the father’s name)

R E S I G N

Ilhan in 2013 BUSTED. https://twitter.com/ilhanmn/status/346398031572250625 …

9,732

10:59 PM - Sep 16, 2019

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Tawhidi made these statements between 11 PM and midnight EST on Monday evening, linking to the 2013 post from Omar, which remained visible overnight, according to archives of the page. Between 7 and 8 AM Tuesday morning, Omar or someone who manages her account deleted the post. Tawhidi quickly pointed out the scrubbing to his followers.

“Ilhan Omar has just deleted this tweet from 2013 that proves her father is Nur Said, which makes her Ilhan Nur Said (surnames are the fathers names in most Muslim/MENA countries), and that Ahmed Nur Said, who she married, is in fact her brother,” Tawhidi wrote. “Why did you delete it, @IlhanMN!?”:

UPDATE: A spokesperson for the congresswoman put out a statement Tuesday afternoon, claiming “Nur Said” is only a “nickname” for her father:

Rep. Omar and her family are subject to constant threats. When people write vile things on posts about people she loves—including disturbing doctored images of her father—she takes them down. Nur Said means “Happy Light” and it’s been her dad’s nickname since he was a kid. He has a public page with the same name. She isn’t deleting it for the disturbing and hateful reasons that are being implied by conspiracy theorists and legitimate media outlets shouldn’t be spreading conspiracy theories.

Before this statement, conservative journalists and activists questioned her actions, especially as Omar kept silent about the accusations.

“Did Ilhan Omar delete MORE evidence she married her brother?” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton wrote:

“Ilhan Omar has now deleted this tweet from 2013. This is extremely concerning because Ahmed Nur Said Elmi is her brother and this appears to be further evidence that she married him,” said Caleb Hull, a videographer and consultant.

“If there was some kind of explanation for this, why would she delete the tweet?” he...

On Father’s Day 2008, candidate Barack Obama made his most honest speech on race, maybe his only halfway honest speech on race. The media barely noticed.

The site was the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. From the pulpit Obama spoke to the gathered voters -- excuse me, congregants -- with uncharacteristic audacity. He reminded his audience that too many black fathers were missing from “too many homes.” He knew something of the phenomenon himself given that his father “left us when I was two years old.” Yes, that con again.

Putting aside for a moment his personal story, however fictitious, Obama made the traditionally conservative argument that fatherless children were five times more likely to grow up poor, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to get into serious trouble than children who grow up with both parents.

Those absentee fathers, Obama scolded, “have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.” In that it was Obama who made this argument -- not, say, Dan Quayle -- the mainstream media reported the speech uncritically.

Progressives, however, were uneasy about Obama giving voice to what one wag called his “inner Cosby,” and no progressive more so than Jessie Jackson. Even in a whisper, Jackson made his voice heard.

For all of Obama’s politically conscious life, Jackson’s had been the face of the American civil rights movement. From the moment Jackson descended on Chicago in April 1968 wearing a shirt allegedly drenched in Martin Luther King Jr.’s blood -- Obama was six at the time -- he showed that a movement leader with sufficient charisma and media access need not overly worry about the truth.

Jackson was not to be messed with. Three weeks after Obama’s Father’s Day sermon, Jackson got his message across. As reported by Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times, “He specifically took issue with how Mr. Obama had singled out black men in recent speeches for failing to uphold their responsibility as fathers.”

In that Jackson himself had famously sired a love child, he took Obama’s words personally. A hot mic at the Fox News studio caught Jackson whispering to another black guest, “See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith-based -- I wanna cut his nuts out… Barack -- he’s talking down to black people -- telling n***ers how to behave.”

On saying “cut his nuts out,” Jackson made a sharp slicing motion with his hands. One hopes he was speaking metaphorically, but he definitely “took issue” with Obama. There was no denying his rage.

Had any network other than Fox News recorded these remarks, they might never have surfaced, but surface they did, at least in part. Fox News edited out the “n-word” sentence. "We don't want to hurt Jesse Jackson,” Bill O’Reilly told Politico’s Jonathan Martin. “We're not in business to do that. So we held it back. And then some weasel got the whole thing and leaked it out to the Internet, and here we are."

Reporting on what O’Reilly left out, Martin began with the amusingly Orwellian lede, “It turns out Jesse Jackson whispered something even worse than his desire to cut off Barack Obama’s manhood.” Most males, I suspect, would think the threat of castration a...