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Southern Patriot
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| Washington: From the outside, there is not much to differentiate Washington Yu Ying from any other elementary school in the American capital.
Children with names like Skye, Tenaya and Soleil arrive on a frosty morning, chirping hello to their friends and hugging their parents goodbye. But that all stops the moment they walk through the school’s front door – the speaking in English, that is, not the chatter. With a bright smile and a zaoshang hao! (good morning), Yu Ying’s executive director and founder Mary Shaffner greets each child. As they troop down the corridor, their teachers from China and Taiwan welcome the youngsters into brightly decorated classrooms, giving instructions in Mandarin for them to hang up their coats and bags in little cabinets outside the rooms. Yu Ying has 200 pre-kindergarten to Grade 2 pupils (four- to seven-year-olds). Half are African-American, 30 per cent are Caucasian, and the rest are Asian (16 per cent) or Hispanic (4 per cent). The children are getting a very different education from most of their peers in other schools. Half of all their classes, which include mathematics, art and PE, are taught in Chinese. Students have alternate English and Chinese days, learning entirely in one language on a given day. They also move between separate Chinese and English classrooms. Yu Ying, which opened in September 2008, is Washington DC’s first Chinese language immersion school and the only one that offers a 50-50 instructional model in the city, said Ms Shaffner. It hopes to extend its programme to high school eventually. Language immersion programmes here are different from traditional language classes, as the majority of subject content is taught in the second language. As a charter school (an independent, publicly funded school), Yu Ying has more autonomy than US public schools in curriculum and hiring. Half of Yu Ying’s 18 teachers are native Chinese speakers, the other half are native English speakers. Yu Ying may go further than most schools in the United States, but Chinese language programmes are becoming much less uncommon as more American students say ‘ni hao’ to learning Chinese. It is their second day back at Yu Ying after the three-week year-end break, and the kids need a refresher. Teacher Liang Chia Chu, 36, warms them up by getting them to sing ‘Head, shoulders, knees and toes’ in Chinese. Then she launches into the first exercise of the day. ‘What’s the date today? What month, what day of the week is it?’ she asks in Chinese. Twenty-five young faces stare back at her. It takes some coaxing, but five-year-old Simon Toro Raciborski, who is half-Polish and half-Bolivian, finally writes the Chinese characters for five, one and two on cards pasted on the classroom wall. Scenes like this are playing out in more classrooms across the US, evidence of what experts are calling a boom in Chinese language learning in a country which has not done as much to encourage the learning of foreign languages compared with multi-lingual Europe and Asia. The US does not have a national bilingual mandate, and education policy is left up to individual states and school districts to decide. A decade ago, seven million public school students in Grades 7 to 12 were enrolled in foreign language courses, representing 33.8 per cent of total enrolment in those levels. Only about 5,000 were students of Chinese, according to a 2000 survey by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. But a new survey that the council is releasing next month found that the number of students studying Chinese has exploded to some 66,000, said council spokesman Marty Abbott. The new study also shows that Spanish is still the most popular foreign language in US schools, with about 80 per cent of students who chose to learn a foreign language studying it. French is a distant second, followed by German and Latin. Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Italian come next. But among the more ‘exotic’ languages, Chinese is by far the fastest-growing language being taken up by students, Ms Abbot said. US colleges have traditionally offered Chinese language and China studies, but Chinese programmes in elementary, middle and high schools are relatively new. Most were started in the past five years or so, said Mr Christopher Livaccari, associate director of the New York-based Asia Society’s education and Chinese language initiatives. Although there is no definitive figure, it has been estimated that at least 550 schools now offer Chinese classes as part of their curriculum. Experts attribute the phenomenal popularity of the Chinese language to China’s rising economic and political presence in the world, as well as a growing desire among American parents to expose their children to other cultures and new perspectives. ‘There is the perceived value of learning Chinese for the future economic and business applications of the language, but also more people are becoming aware that they are part of a globalised world,’ said Mr Livaccari. Conscious of the geo-political power shift away from the West, the federal government has led the effort to address the lack of proficiency in Chinese and other languages. The US State Department has classified Mandarin Chinese as one of its six ’super critical needs’ languages, along with Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Hindi and Urdu. These are languages which are extremely difficult to master and are deemed critical to US political, economic and cultural interests. To dramatically boost the number of Americans learning, speaking, and teaching critical foreign languages, former president George W. Bush introduced the US$114 million (S$158 million) National Security Language Initiative in January 2006 to expand programmes from kindergarten to university. The US Department of Education’s Foreign Language Assistance Programme has allocated millions in funding to schools wishing to start, beef up and innovate on Chinese language instruction. Seeing the upsurge in interest as an opportunity to expand its soft power, China’s National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (also known as Hanban) has also been active in the promotion of Chinese language learning in the US. It has, for example, teamed up with the US College Board – which administers university entrance exams, the SAT and Advanced Placement exams – to recruit teachers from China to start new Chinese language programmes or teach existing ones in US schools. Experts say the heavy investment reflects official thinking that Chinese language learning is not just a passing fad. ‘I don’t see China’s rise or the importance of US-China cooperation on global issues like climate change and economic recovery changing any time soon,’ said Mr Livaccari. Interest in learning Chinese is also cutting across racial and socio-economic lines. ‘The growth is not limited to urban or coastal areas, it is everywhere. And what is most significant is that kids who have no cultural or ethnic link to Chinese are taking it up,’ noted Ms Abbott. Chicago, which has the largest public school Chinese programme in the US, teaches the language to at least 6,000 students out of some 421,000, the majority black or Hispanic, according to news reports. The growing demand prompted the US College Board to introduce Chinese Advanced Placement tests, which allow students to earn placement or college credit, in 2007. That year, 3,261 students took the exam from 433 schools in the US. The appetite for Chinese, however, has created several problems. The number of certified, high-calibre Chinese teachers cannot keep pace with the demand, said experts. ‘The issue is finding highly qualified teachers who can connect with US students and to engage them in learning Chinese in a meaningful way,’ said Ms Abbott. Instructional and assessment materials in Chinese are also in short supply in the US. Yu Ying’s Chinese teachers had to create worksheets, lesson plans and even word and picture cards from scratch. To help schools, the non-profit Asia Society, which works to promote understanding about Asia, is teaming up with Hanban to set up an online network of schools that offer Chinese language programmes. Designed to be a platform for schools to share resources and ideas, the network will launch later this month with its first 20 schools. It hopes to grow to 100 schools over the next three years. Beyond the infrastructural challenges, sometimes cultural differences get in the way. Yu Ying’s kindergarten teacher Ms Liang is from Taiwan, where she says students ‘do not question their teachers. Here, kids can’t wait to voice their opinions.’ She admits that the outspokenness sometimes gets in the way: ‘To learn Chinese, you have to be focused.’ The State Department classifies Mandarin Chinese as one of the five hardest languages for English speakers to learn. It takes about 2,200 class hours, compared to 600 hours needed to learn French or Spanish. What their kids go through can also be stressful for parents who do not speak a word of Mandarin. ‘Parents have to be on board 100 per cent,’ said Ms Shaffner. “They can help by buying Chinese music, books, exposing their kids to Chinese culture.’ Dr John King, 37, an economist, makes sure to include Chinese picture and story books along with English books when he makes a trip to the library with his kids. His son, Nico, four, attends pre-kindergarten at Yu Ying, and he plans to enrol his two-year-old daughter, Quincey, in a year’s time. Dr King reckons he is readying his kids for the future by exposing them to Chinese now, despite risks that they might initially lag behind their peers in English. ‘It is cognitively good for kids to speak two languages, and China is just going to be so prominent,’ he said. After three months in Yu Ying, Nico is making great strides in Chinese. He manages short sentences and his pronunciation impresses his proud father. Dr King said: ‘It’s great. I’ve always wanted to go to China and now, I hope my kids will take me there one day.’ This article was first published in The Straits Times. |
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Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, January 22, 2010
Prominent NASA global warming alarmist Dr. James Hansen has endorsed an eco-fascist book that calls for cities to be razed to the ground, industrial civilization to be destroyed and genocidal population reduction measures to be implemented in the name of preventing climate change.
Hansen, who was back in the news today commenting on a NASA press release that claims the last decade was the warmest on record, said that Keith Farnish, author of a new book called Time’s Up, is correct in calling for acts of sabotage and environmental terrorism in blowing up dams and demolishing cities in order to return the planet to the agrarian age.
Hansen is a key figure in the global warming movement, for it was his 1988 with testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore that really got the ball rolling for the elite in their mission to hijack the environmental movement and promote apocalyptic fears of climate change as a means of seizing absolute power over humanity.
Author Farnish “believes – as the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt does – that mankind is a blot on the landscape and that breeding (or for that matter, existence) should be discouraged,” writes James Delingpole.
“The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization,” writes Farnish, adding that “people will die in huge numbers when civilization collapses”.
Farnish echoes similar talking points to those featured in White House science czar John Holdren’s Ecoscience textbook, which called for a “planetary regime” to carry out forced abortions and mandatory sterilization procedures, as well as drugging the water supply, in an effort to cull the human surplus.
Farnish explains his desire to see rampant population reduction in the name of saving the planet.
“In short, the greatest immediate risk to the population living in the conditions created by Industrial Civilization is the population itself. Civilization has created the perfect conditions for a terrible tragedy on the kind of scale never seen before in the history of humanity. That is one reason for there to be fewer people,” he writes.
And how is the collapse of industrial civilization to be achieved? By indiscriminate acts of sabotage and eco-terrorism.
“Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage,” writes Farnish.
But surely the respected and authoritative individuals we have been told by the media to trust when it comes to the science behind global warming would rebuke such outlandish, deranged and extreme methods of addressing climate change?
“Keith Farnish has it right: time has practically run out, and the ’system’ is the problem,” wrote Dr. James Hansen on the Amazon website. “Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests – they will not look after our and the planet’s well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort.
It has also come to light that Hansen wasn’t even asked to comment on Farnish’s book, he freely volunteered his opinion. “Just to put the quote into context, it was indeed spontaneous from James and surprised me a little at first,” wrote author Farnish on the Yahoo Answers website.
“It’s an important thing to remember when we talk about AGW: many of the activist-scientists pushing it passionately want the earth to be getting hotter and it for it to be largely man’s fault. These watermelons certainly don’t want the opposite to be true, because then they wouldn’t have the excuse they so desperately need to destroy the capitalist system and take us all back to the agrarian age,” comments Delingpole.
The entire climate change takeover is being spearheaded by self-hating psychotics who want to impose a global one child policy in the name of curbing overpopulation. As we have vehemently proven, the overpopulation hype is a debunked myth with no basis in reality. The real reason global eugenicists want to implement such policies, along with taxing the life-giving gas carbon dioxide, is because it would give them absolute control over every single aspect of our lives – a control freak’s utopia.
The propagandistic method of depicting humans as the enemy is perfectly tailored to this agenda, because it elicits the response of making people call for their own kind to be regulated, controlled, and even killed under the contrived pretext of preventing an ecological apocalypse.
This approach was again evident in a recent United Nations sponsored poster campaign which depicted humans as evil horror movie monsters intent on slaughtering wildlife and killing the earth.
The global elite resolved to take this approach back in 1991 when the Club of Rome, a powerful globalist NGO committed to limiting growth and ushering in a post-industrial society, said in their report, The First Global Revolution, “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
Genocidal psychotics are now trying to obtain the power to carry out the kind of nihilistic blueprint for terror Farnish outlines in his book in pursuit of their “post-industrial society”. What makes it all the more galling is that these eco-fascists present their lunacy in such a reasonable and sober tone. In reality, although they try to characterize humanity as a virus upon the planet, the only real cancer upon the earth is their virulently neo-fascist doctrine of warped environmentalism and population control.
The only real threat to humanity’s survival is not climate change, which has naturally occurred for eons since the very incarnation of planet earth, but the insane, self-destructive and monstrous plans to “solve” the issue being proposed by eco-fascists like Farnish and endorsed by people in prominent positions of influence like Hansen.
WPXI
January 22, 2010
Pittsburgh police Chief Nate Harper said three plainclothes officers have been reassigned during an internal investigation into the beating of an 18-year-old student violinist from the city’s Creative and Performing Arts High School.
Police charged Jordan Miles, 18, with assault and resisting arrest Jan. 11 because, they said, he fought with the officers who thought a “heavy object” in his coat was a gun. It turned out to be a bottle of Mountain Dew.
Miles said he resisted because he thought the men were trying to abduct him and didn’t identify themselves as police.
Miles’ family and attorney said he was hit with a stun gun and hospitalized after the violent Homewood struggle during which a chunk of his hair was yanked out and a tree branch went through his gums.
“I was accused for something I never had anything to do with,” said Miles, an honor student at CAPA. “I was completely innocent. They couldn’t find anything.”
Source: WND – Michael Carl Domestic agents could be used in ’shaping an environment before a conflict’
A newly released Rand Corporation report proposes the federal government create a rapid deployment “Stabilization Police Force” that would be tasked with “shaping an environment before a conflict” and restoring order in times of war, natural disaster or national emergency.
But civil libertarians are worried just exactly what the force would do, domestically or overseas.
Page 16 of the 213-page report says the new elite unit’s purpose depends on where it is and who would be in command.
“The answer to this question (about its purpose) depends on the situation into which an SPF might be inserted. The SPF could be used for missions such as: shaping an environment before a conflict; law enforcement duties in an active conflict environment; or security, stability, transition and reconstruction (SSTR) operations after a conflict. It could operate as an independent entity under a U.S. ambassador or a U.N. Senior Representative to the Secretary General (SRSG), or as a force element reporting to a Joint Task Force (JTF) commander,” the report states.
The purpose statement doesn’t say where the new unit would be deployed. However, Rand Corporation report co-author Terry Kelly said the Army-commissioned study primarily focuses on a force that would be sent overseas.
“The unit is supposed to deploy to places like Iraq or Afghanistan or maybe even places like Haiti where there’s a tremendous disaster,” Kelly said.
“Really, the purpose would be to help our military forces or whoever is in charge of maintaining stability to catch terrorists or prevent major criminals from operating,” he added.
Mark Taylor, a private investigator and intelligence analyst with experience in Iraq, says he can’t see the purpose for such a force.
“With regard to overseas missions, there is the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. If they need assistance, you have private military contractors such as XE and DynaCorp,” Taylor said.
“In my case, the company I worked for moved in, did the mission and left. Period. In the case of a federal bureaucracy, you will fund it and it will do nothing but grow into a bureaucratic nightmare,” Taylor said.
Taylor believes the additional force would just add to the confusion in any overseas situation.
“In addition the military and private contractor options, there are always the United Nations blue helmets, for whatever good they do. A federal police force would amount to nothing more than another colored helmet,” Taylor said.
Taylor’s comments about the U.N. point to the command structure of the overseas force. One of the statements in the report says the unit could serve under a U. S. foreign service officer or under U.N. authority.
Kelly admits the U.N. connection.
“It might be a U.S. ambassador who is in charge. It could work for the U.N. because there are plenty of U.N. missions that are working in different countries,” Kelly said.
“That would be the decision that our government would make that this unit would work under U.N. authority. Usually when we have our forces under U.N. authority they’re operating for a U.S. commander who is working with the U.N.,” she said.
Although the report by the federally funded think tank spends most of its pages on overseas deployment, civil libertarians wonder if the proposed unit will only focus on foreign operations.
Kelly confirmed the force could be deployed in the United States.
“If there were a major disaster like Katrina it could be deployed in the U. S. but that’s not the purpose of the research,” he said.
“It’s important to point out that the goal was to create a force that’s deployable overseas. If it’s to be used in the United States it would be a secondary thing and then only in an emergency,” Kelly said.
But Taylor believes there is no need for a federal police force to function in the U.S.
“I cannot see any positives in setting up a national police force. Cities, counties and states have control over their own law enforcement and it should remain that way. Granting the federal government the power to police each individual locality is a Gestapo waiting to happen,” Taylor said.
“If it became necessary to supplement local law enforcement in the case of another New Orleans, where a disaster situation is made more dangerous by lawless thugs looting, it would be more practical to hire a private contactor such as XE or DynaCorp to send their highly trained professionals in to stabilize the area. Once the job is done, they go on to the next (assignment),” Taylor said.
Darrell Castle is a retired Marine Corps officer with service in Vietnam, a practicing attorney and the Constitution Party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee. Castle is skeptical of the report and believes the unit could be used in the U.S. against Americans.
“First, you have to approach anything done by or for the federal government in light of what I believe the ultimate goal of the federal government to be,” Castle said.
“As I see it, the goal is to do the bidding of the international cartel of central bankers and financiers in order to assist them in building a world government police state which would entail total surveillance, total control, and the absence of what we think of as constitutional rights,” he said.
Castle added that even though the report focuses mostly on foreign deployments, some of the language leaves open the possibility for domestic use.
“To that end, the question becomes, how does a stability police force for the United States move the federal government closer to its goal of totalitarian control? When the question is asked in that manner, the answer becomes fairly obvious,” Castle warned.
Castle believes the goal is power, and a major springboard for such a power grab comes from the economy.
“Conditions have been intentionally created within the United States which make some kind of chaotic catastrophe very likely. This event could be anything the mind of man can dream up due to the overwhelming public debt and huge deficit which is budgeted to grow by trillions over the next few years,” Castle said.
“Hyperinflation and the resulting loss of the dollar’s reserve status seems unavoidable. The United States is now at deficit spending which is 40 percent of the budget and climbing,” Castle said.
To illustrate his point, Castle turned to history.
“The Weimar government in pre-Hitler Germany accelerated deficit spending to 70 percent of budget and when it did, hyperinflation occurred with its ruination of the German nation that started a cataclysmic chain of events in motion,” he said.
“The Stability Police Force then is necessary to control the population much as the U.S. military is attempting to control the remaining population of Haiti right now. It is part of a long existing effort to mingle and combine all law enforcement, federal, state, and local with the military into one force,” Castle said.
Castle is not the only one who thinks the Stabilization Police Force is the next step in establishing a totalitarian state. The Rand Corporation’s Kelly said that since the report’s release, he’s received a number of letters and phone messages making the same claim.
However, Kelly insists the study is not a master plan for authoritarian rule.
“There are all kinds of aspects of government that can be manipulated in a bad way. But it would require a whole bunch of things to go wrong. Any means of coercion that exist in the government can be manipulated if the right things go wrong,” Kelly said.
“Is it is conceivable that it could be used for a malevolent purpose? Yes, but it’s not designed to do that and its purpose would not be for power. Frankly there would be much easier tools for someone with bad intentions,” Kelly said.
“The two options we thought were viable were as a reserve option where call a whole bunch of police officers from a whole bunch of precincts. That’s a really hard thing to do,” Kelly said.
“If someone wanted to use the unit for a bad purpose it would require the cooperation of a whole bunch of people and a whole bunch of organizations,” he said.
“The other option we picked was a military unit, to create a military police unit to do the specific tasks. Military police units do military police work, not civilian police work which is what you need in these countries like Iraq and Afghanistan,” Kelly said.
“I don’t think this unit will create any more danger than already exists. If somebody wanted to do something unfortunate, there are easier ways to do it than manipulating this force,” Kelly said.
Command of the Stabilization Police Force is still a concern. Page 123 of the Rand Corporation report says the force would work best under a civilian federal agency or the military police.
“They (the data) suggest that the U.S. Marshals Service and the MP options are the only credible ones. The Marshals Service has sufficient baseline capabilities and a policing culture to build a competent SPF, and its location in the Department of Justice makes it well suited to achieve broader rule-of-law objectives. This finding is consistent with a significant body of academic and policy research, which strongly concludes that civilian agencies are optimal for the execution of policing functions.”
Taylor’s concerns about the creation of such a response force and placing the unit under a federal department come from seeing how federal operations have functioned in the past.
“Once you establish a government agency or program, it does nothing but grow into a huge bureaucratic monstrosity that feeds on the taxpayer. And, as with the case of health care, bank bailouts and the like, should the federal government even consider such an undertaking, it would amount to just another intrusion into the states’ rights to govern and intrude into the liberties of the American people,” Taylor said.
“Greatest medical scandal of the century” to come under scrutiny
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, Jan 19, 2010
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a 47 nation body encompassing democratically elected members of parliament, has begun hearings to investigate whether the H1N1 swine flu pandemic was falsified or exaggerated in an attempt to profit from vaccine sales.
A PACE resolution, passed last month, gave context to the hearings which began yesterday in Strasbourg.
“In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards to alarm governments worldwide and make them squander tight health resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly expose millions of healthy people to the risk of an unknown amount of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines. The “bird-flu”-campaign (2005/06) combined with the “swine-flu”-campaign seem to have caused a great deal of damage not only to some vaccinated patients and to public health-budgets, but to the credibility and accountability of important international health-agencies.”
Heading the hearings will be chairman of the Health Committee of PACE, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, a former German lawmaker, a medical doctor and epidemiologist. Wodarg has referred to the swine flu pandemic as “one of the greatest medical scandals of the century.”
Wodarg charges that the WHO altered the definition of a pandemic from an outbreak in several continents at once with an above-average death rate, to one where the spread of the disease is constant.
The Parliamentary inquiry will determine if a “falsified pandemic” was declared by WHO in June 2009 on the advice of medical advisors, many of whom have close financial ties to the very pharmaceutical giants – GlaxoSmithKline, Roche, Novartis, – that produced the H1N1 vaccines.
It will also look into the controversy surrounding the fact that two shots were initially advised when it was later revealed that one dose was entirely suitable.
Pharmaceutical companies are thought to have made a profit of somewhere in the region of $7.5-$10 billion on H1N1 vaccines. The worldwide death toll from H1N1 is thought to be around 13,500, just over a third of the number who die from regular flu every year in the U.S. alone.
PACE has noted that the alleged conspiracy could have exposed “millions of healthy people to the risk of side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines”.
Many countries have begun offloading huge stockpiles of unused vaccines and canceling outstanding orders. The latest to do so is Greece, where the government had announced that it would make H1N1 vaccination mandatory.
PACE will also hold a debate next week entitled ‘Faked pandemics, a threat to health’, to be attended by representatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the European pharmaceutical industry.
“Unlike the European Parliament, it has no decision-making powers, but, as was demonstrated by its report into extraordinary rendition, it does have the power to make life uncomfortable for the powers that be,” notes the Irish TImes.
By Bruno Waterfield Published: 8:53PM GMT 19 Jan 2010
US officials have drawn up emergency plans to cope with a mass migration crisis and have cleared spaces in detention or reception centres, including the Navy base at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay.
The unprecedented air, land and sea operation, dubbed “Vigilant Sentry”, was launched as a senior US official compared Haiti’s destruction to the aftermath of nuclear warfare.
“It is the same as if an atomic bomb had been exploded,” said Kenneth Merten, America’s ambassador to Port-au-Prince, as officials estimated the numbers of those killed by last weeks earthquake to over 200,000.
As well as providing emergency supplies and medical aid, the USS Carl Vinson, along with a ring of other navy and coast guard vessels, is acting as a deterrent to Haitians who might be driven to make the 681 mile sea crossing to Miami.
“The goal is to interdict them at sea and repatriate them,” said the US Coast Guard Commander Christopher O’Neil.
Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador to Washington, recorded a public information message in Creole warning his countrymen not to “rush on boats to leave the country”.
“If you think you will reach the US and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case,” he said.
“They will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.”
In response to America’s closed door, Abdoulaye Wade, Senegal’s President, has offered Haitian descendants of African slaves the chance to resettle in “the land of their ancestors” and offered them plots of land.
“Africa should offer Haitians the chance to return home. It is their right,” he said.
US Homeland Security officials said hundreds of immigration detainees have been moved from a South Florida detention centre to clear space for a first wave of Haitians expected to reach America’s shores.
The plans, first drawn up in 2003, are aimed at avoiding a repeat of previous Haitian refugee influxes in the 1990s and the “Mariel boatlift” when as many as 125,000 Cubans fled to the US 30 years ago.
In 2004, following political upheaval in Haiti over 3,000 Haitians were stopped attempting to reach America and officials are braced for greater numbers following the worst natural disaster in the region for 200 years.
Janet Napolitano, America’s Homeland Security Secretary, appealed to Haitians “not to divert our necessary rescue and relief efforts by trying to leave at this point”.
Thousands were said to be on the move out of Port-au-Prince on Tuesday as continuing aid shortages and growing street violence drove people from the city to the countryside.
“Prices for food and transport have skyrocketed since last Tuesday and incidents of violence and looting are on the rise as the desperation grows,” warned the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Dieumetra Sainmerita, the manager of Port-au-Prince’s main bus terminal, said people were selling whatever they had left of value to buy tickets out of the city.
“First there were the people who lost their houses. Then there were people who lost relatives. Now the people I see, they are afraid of the thieves trying to steal from them in the night,” he said.
Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean called on the international community to help with the evacuation of the capital. “Port-au-Prince is a morgue,” he said. “We need to migrate at least two million people.”
Cass Sunstein discusses the 2nd Amendment during a lecture at the University of Chicago Law School on October 27, 2007.
In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated “cognitive infiltration” of groups that advocate “conspiracy theories” like the ones surrounding 9/11.
Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.
Abstract:
Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event. A recent example is the belief, widespread in some parts of the world, that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out not by Al Qaeda, but by Israel or the United States. Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories may create serious risks, including risks of violence, and the existence of such theories raises significant challenges for policy and law. The first challenge is to understand the mechanisms by which conspiracy theories prosper; the second challenge is to understand how such theories might be undermined. Such theories typically spread as a result of identifiable cognitive blunders, operating in conjunction with informational and reputational influences. A distinctive feature of conspiracy theories is their self-sealing quality. Conspiracy theorists are not likely to be persuaded by an attempt to dispel their theories; they may even characterize that very attempt as further proof of the conspiracy. Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology, in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups. Various policy dilemmas, such as the question whether it is better for government to rebut conspiracy theories or to ignore them, are explored in this light.
Read the pdf here
