Italy Coronavirus Lockdown, No Cars, Pollution Up

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


It’s so fashionable and radical-chic to blame man, what he creates and what he produces for any environmental disaster, real or imagined, these days. Pollution and anthropogenic climate change spring to mind.

During the coronavirus lockdown, which in Italy has strongly reduced car traffic in cities and country, these theories of how our air is affected by motor-caused pollution can be put to test.

And surprise, shock, maybe horror! It’s not what we thought.

Italy’s ARPA, Regional Agency for Environmental Protection, with control units located all over Italy monitors in real time the quality of the atmosphere and publishes the findings daily.

An almost incredible picture has emerged. In the overwhelming majority of Italian cities, the air quality deteriorated after ten days of "zero traffic" due to the lockdown imposed by the government resulting in an absolute lack of cars and reflected in images of deserted cities like in a post-nuclear bombing era seen in movies.

A world without one car, a test that could never have been carried out without an exceptional event such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Everywhere there is more or less the same picture, from Turin to Naples, going through Milan and Rome. All the pollutants under control by ARPA have not decreased, even during long periods without traffic. If anything, the pollutants have gone up.

Rome: Traffic Zero, Particulate Matter Up

Let’s start from Rome, certainly a unique city due to its perennial history of civilisation always, like the Arab Phoenix from its ashes, being born again, not to mention its immense heritage of architecture and art masterpieces.

The atmosphere is full of microscopic particles of solid or liquid matter suspended in the air called particulate matter (PM), which is a very insidious and dangerous pollutant due to its nano-dimensions. The level of PM is considered an important indicator of air pollution.

It was known that all these fine particles in the air are not caused only by human activity but are of natural origin. But the constant drumbeat of environmentalism has led to an overestimation of their human cause.

In the Eternal City, particulates, nitrogen dioxide and ozone in the last few days have had values significantly higher than those of the previous week. With cars completely eliminated, showing that much pollution is not due to car traffic. If vehicles stop circulating, the situation does not improve.

It was not possible to organise a total block of traffic for several weeks to really see what would have happened. Now the coronavirus pandemic has brought to a halt all activities, creating a gigantic open-air laboratory. A joy for scientists and researchers to get an unrepeatable scenario to analyse.

In Rome, a week after the total lockdown ordered by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, the amount of fine dust in the air had increased.

After an accurate study of Rome district by district dated April 16 and covering more than a month in full lockdown, the Lazio Region section of ARPA published a 44-page report from which the experts’ embarrassment emerges. They couldn’t imagine this result: particulates don’t seem to care at all about what man does, they carry on regardless.

PM 10 is higher in March 2020 in every corner of the city than in March 2016 (the year most similar to 2020 from a meteorological point of view). In some recent days it has been almost double that of previous years.

The last four lines of the 44-page dossier, full of tables, are: «The particular situation generated by Covid-19 represents an event that has never occurred before, which will allow to deepen the study of air quality and will provide useful elements for the evaluation of the short and medium term measures that are adopted by the various authorities for the reduction of pollution ".

The hint is: if this is the reality, many things must be reviewed.

Milan and Po Valley: Data Deny the Anti-Pollution Effect of Lockdown

Milan, capital of the Lombardy Region, Italy's second city and industrial capital, has never been so car-free and yet the pollution level of its air has not changed.

The large amount of particulate matter (especially PM10) is due to the arrival of strong winds from the east, experts write. These are large-scale air masses from the Caspian Sea region that have brought great quantities of fine dust. Once they reached Italy they dispersed, while inside the Po Valley they were trapped by the Alpine and Apennine arches.

The reduction of air pollution that had been previously observed through photographs from the space in the Po Valley had deluded us: they had not detected the effect of the antiviral lockdown resulting in fewer cars and industrial activities but the effect of the wind from Central Europe while it was sweeping the smog away from the Po air.

Instead, before the lockdown started there was a clear and uncluttered atmosphere, the transparency of the air which the satellites photographed and we attributed to the effect of the anti-contagion restrictions.

What about the satellite images that convinced us of the best air quality in the days of the infection? They were photographs from space that had captured not the effects of the lockdown, since many satellite surveys had been taken in the days before the traffic stopped, but the effects of the weather.

The prime factor that thickens or disperses the polluting emissions of Northern Italy - of artificial or natural origin - is the weather. The wind and rain clean the air more than the confinement against the virus, or they bring the polluting dust of the deserts of Central Asia into the lungs of Lombardy, Piedmont, Emilia, Romagna and Veneto, as happened in the weekend of March 30 and 31 when from Venice to Turin, from Bologna to Varese, without the movement of a car, the air of the North was plagued beyond all limits.

All this this was revealed by a study by Arpa Lombardia, supported by data from the other regional agencies of Northern Italy, whose detection units measured increases in smog after the closure of activities, industries and road traffic imposed by health concerns. On Saturday 30 March, with the contribution of desert sands, the dust in Milan was 84.4 micrograms, in Venice 152, in Verona 125, in Bologna 98 micrograms of PM10 per cubic metre of air. The European air quality target indicates the limit of 50 micrograms, a limit exceeded generously everywhere in Northern Italy.

Nothing, therefore, suggests that the lockdown drastically helped the region.

The specificity of the Po Valley is confirmed once again. As a writer put it: “Milan is polluted for other reasons: because it is at the bottom of a windless basin called the Po Valley".

A Gigantic Open-Air Laboratory

Starting from 23 February, the progressive adoption of measures to contain the contagion from coronavirus has determined a uniquely faster alteration in human activities than in ordinary conditions.

This has allowed scientists to measure in reality the consequences of some measures aimed at improving air quality, and more crucially to test many theories and assumptions about what gives rise to air pollution that had been long accepted but not properly tested.

When the first results were known, the surprise and amazement of researchers was evident. How is it possible? Someone thought of an error: if cars stop, pollution can’t go up. But this mistaken, as it turned out, prediction was based on a wrong presumption on the main cause of pollution.

This is how science proceeds: if a proposition describing a future observable event is logically deduced from a hypothesis, and if the event predicted occurs, the hypothesis is confirmed, if not it is refuted (or debunked, as the neologism goes).

The scientists’ conclusions: "In fact, it has been observed that the drastic reductions of some sources [like road traffic, Editor's note] have not always prevented the limits from being exceeded, even though they contribute to reducing their size. This clearly highlights the complexity of the phenomena related to the formation, transport and accumulation of atmospheric particulates and the consequent difficulty of drastically reducing the values present in the atmosphere in ordinary situations".

In short: reducing pollutants in the atmosphere is not always possible, as it is influenced by a series of factors not always under human control, like weather influences.

Is It Worth It?

Environmentalist lobbies have a great power in our times over political decisions and media coverage influencing public opinion. But, before blaming cars for levels of pollution for which they are not responsible, think of this: due to the coronavirus pandemic and the fall in demand deriving from it, 14 million European workers risk losing their jobs, as explained by Eric-Mark Huitema, general manager of Acea, the association of European car manufacturers, who defines the coronavirus emergency as "the worst crisis ever" for its impact on the automotive industry.



REFERENCES AND PHOTO CREDITS
Il sole 24 Ore
Il Messaggero
Il Gazzettino
A rischio 14 milioni di posti di lavoro

Chinese Communist Regime Caused Coronavirus Pandemic, Says Asian Catholic Church Head

This is, in its bare truth, what communism, in spite of all its edulcorations, wishful-thinking illusions of a better world, lying promises, and deceiving claims of self-alleged philanthropism, really is.

Cardinal Charles Bo, president of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences, said in an official public statement on 1 April:

The Chinese regime led by the all-powerful Xi [Jinping] and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – not its people – owes us all an apology, and compensation for the destruction it has caused. At a minimum it should write off the debts of other countries, to cover the cost of Covid-19. For the sake of our common humanity, we must not be afraid to hold this regime to account. Christians believe, in the words of the Apostle, Paul, that “the truth will set you free” [in reality it is the Gospel of the Apostle John 8:32]. Truth and freedom are the twin pillars on which all of our nations must build surer and stronger foundations.

Cardinal Bo, the Archbishop of Yangon, in Myanmar, added: "[T}he Chinese people were the first victims of this virus and have long been the primary victims of their repressive regime".

The Cardinal recalled how the Chinese authorities silenced doctors, journalists and intellectuals who raised the alarm as early as December, and waited until 23 January to isolate Wuhan and Hubei:

When the virus first emerged, the authorities in China suppressed the news. Instead of protecting the public and supporting doctors, the CCP silenced the whistleblowers. Worse than that, doctors who tried to raise the alarm – like Dr. Li Wenliang in Wuhan Central Hospital who issued a warning to fellow medics on 30 December – were ordered by the police to “stop making false comments”. Dr. Li, a 34 year-old ophthalmologist, was told he would be investigated for “spreading rumors” and was forced by the police to sign a confession. He later died after contracting coronavirus.

Young citizen journalists who tried to report on the virus then disappeared. Li Zehua, Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin are among those believed to have been arrested simply for telling the truth. Legal scholar Xu Zhiyong has also been detained after publishing an open letter criticizing the Chinese regime’s response.

Moreover, he cited a damning study from an English university:

An epidemiological model at the University of Southampton found that had China acted responsibly just one, two or three weeks more quickly, the number affected by virus would have been cut by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent respectively. Its failure has unleased a global contagion killing thousands.

The Chinese Communist Party is a "threat to the world" were the words of the Yangon Archbishop, and Xi’s regime "is responsible, through its criminal negligence and repression, for the pandemic".

And even now, the subterfuge continues:

On top of all this, there is deep concern that the Chinese regime’s official statistics significantly downplay the scale of infection within China.

The British newspaper The Telegraph on 29 March reported the UK's Health Minister accusing China of hiding the true scale of Covid-19 and shockingly exposing China's reopening of the "wet" markets which were identified as the cause of the spread of Coronavirus.

China's communist government oppresses religious freedom, destroys thousands of churches, imprisons Muslims in forced labour camps, practice the removal of organs from prisoners of conscience, suppress the freedoms of lawyers, dissidents, intellectuals.

[All emphases are mine.]


SOURCE and PHOTO CREIDIT
Catholic Archdiocese of Yangon

Why Communism Dominates in the West

"Red Herrings" is a brilliant historical article by Andrew C. McCarthy that explains one of the most important reasons of the current dominance of the Left in the West (and more than that).

It's a review and a defence of Diana West's book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , which was published last year and provoked much controversy, as you can gauge from the review itself.

The way Joe McCarthy has been treated in America reminds me a bit of the way Enoch Powell has been treated in Britain: both were fundamentally right and both were vilified. But Farage wouldn't say that - especially about the latter - in a million years.

The only misconceived thing of the article is when it quotes Diana West's favourable view of "Enlightenment logic".

The Enlightenment has brought to Europe the first sparkles of totalitarian thought. Marx was an intellectual heir to the Enlightenment.

The problem is that we ourselves have been indoctrinated by intentional "disinformation" - possibly of Soviet origin -, and it takes us time to get through the fog.

Here's part of the very long article:

Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians” are in denial; their heroes did not really “win” the war, they just helped a different set of anti-American savages win—in the process striking a deal with the devil that blurred the lines between good and evil, rendering the world more dangerous and our nation more vulnerable.


To readers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, this heated debate will sound familiar. American Betrayal is the bestselling author and syndicated columnist Diana West’s cri de coeur against Anglo-American collusion with Stalin’s hideous Soviet Union in the war that vanquished Hitler’s hideous Nazi Germany. The controversy swirling around the book exposes a chasm on the political Right: on one side, admirers of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II leadership; on the other, detractors who blame FDR’s indifference to Communism (and, particularly, Communist infiltration of the U.S. government) for the rise of what Ronald Reagan dubbed “the evil empire.” The resulting acrimony is what put me in the mind of the aforementioned brawl I wandered into twenty years ago, involving a different, albeit related, episode: the Central Intelligence Agency’s collusion with the Afghan mujahideen, which hastened the Soviet death throes.

I was a federal prosecutor in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed. We indicted the offending jihadist cell for levying a terrorist war against the United States. Several of the terrorists had been major mujahideen figures. Their lawyers thus thought it exculpatory to claim that they could not have conspired to wage jihad against America; after all, they had actually been allied with America in the jihad against the Soviets. The provocative claim was implausible as a defense, the Soviets having left Afghanistan (and the USSR having collapsed) years before the Twin Towers bombing. Still, it is standard procedure to investigate even dubious defense claims. Hence, my unwitting stumble into a heated controversy.

The cia and Reagan administration veterans passionately proclaimed that the $3 billion in aid and armaments funneled to the mujahideen—matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia, with Pakistani intelligence as our “cut-out” for deniability purposes—was an unvarnished triumph. The war became the Soviets’ Vietnam, bleeding the Red Army to death even as a humiliated Kremlin buckled under the pressure of Reagan’s arms build-up. In sum, I was told, “Look, we liberated half the world from Communist tyranny. Case closed.”

Yet, it wasn’t that simple. The mujahideen begot al Qaeda. A fifth of the U.S. aid, plus most of the Saudi contribution (real money in those days), was channeled to virulently anti-American terrorists. They proceeded to take their jihad global . . . eventually to Manhattan. The rest is history—the history we’ve been struggling with for two decades.

French Minister Threatens to Expropriate Church

Showing that the socialists of today are no less totalitarian than those of Stalinist times, as they try to make us believe, or, since we are talking about France, no less authoritarian than the Jacobins during their revolutionary Reign of Terror, Cécile Duflot, French Minister of Territorial Equality and Housing - to give the woman her full title - in the government of Socialist Francois Hollande, has announced that she will carry out the requisition of properties from the Catholic Church and other institutions by the end of the year to house homeless people.

Bring back the good old times of the French Revolution, Cécile! Like in 1791, when the Jacobins decided to expropriate the Church to offset the debts of the state.

Duflot is a member of the Green Party, confirming the metaphor of environmentalists as watermelons, green outside but red inside.

Hers was not a request, but a real threat. On 3rd December, in an interview with Le Parisien, she said she found the solution to the winter cold problems faced by the homeless, adding that she would not understand if the Church did not share the government's goals of solidarity and hoping that there will be no need for a showdown: "Therefore the Church must provide its unspecified 'semi-empty properties' to accommodate the poor, or else".

The prestigious Le Figaro wrote in an editorial the next day: "It is the latest insult in the series of attacks that this minister delivers against an institution that interferes with her fight for homosexual marriage. It is irresponsible. Francois Hollande would do well to pay attention to the training of his ministers."

Duflot's attitude is not easy to understand: the French Catholic Church in effect has historically always been involved in helping and offering shelter to the homeless.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Paris, in a joint statement  with the religious organization Corref, said: "The church did not wait for the threat of requisition by the minister Madame Duflot to take initiatives”.

Someone also remarked that on November 14 of last year, when Caritas France presented its initiative to help the homeless in the winter, minister Duflot, although invited, did not attend.

And France's main national business daily, Les Echos, said that the Church is "by far the institution most committed to serving the homeless, also in terms of providing them with properties and accommodation." The same thing has been confirmed by Paris Prefecture (local authority).

Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, head of the Centre for Religious Freedom established by Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made some interesting observations:

The minister's threat is absurd, considering that the Catholic Church is the largest organization that provides homes for the homeless in France, and in this field its private charity is much more efficient than the state's public assistance. As the bishops have pointed out, the Church could do even more if it did not have to face bureaucratic obstacles that sometimes come from an entrenched anticlerical hostility prevalent in sectors of the French administration.

In short, for some governments all pretexts are good to attack the Church, and today targeting its real estate assets, with taxes and threats of requisitions, has become one of the main ways to attempt to silence it when its interventions are a problem.

Obama's Socialism is Making America Poor

The above video has been viewed almost half a million times (488,318) in less than two weeks, since October 23, on YouTube.

It is the most visually compelling indictment of President Obama and his administration’s policies, showing the outcome of the “hope” and “change” Obama promised in 2008.

It shows, inter alia, that Obama dedicated more time to golf than work “during the worst economy since the Depression.”

A report by the Government Accountability Institute in July revealed that "President Barack Obama averages just eight minutes more a week on economic meetings than the average dog owner spends walking their dog".

US radio host, writer and commentator Michael Savage said: “What’s relevant is that Obama is our first socialist president,” and added: “That’s what this election is about”.

Why is that important? Because, among other things, it fundamentally explains the horrific statistics of the current American economy:

Falling wages. 47 million on food stamps. In 2009 the economy was generating $13.2 trillion in wealth annually. After borrowing $6 trillion, the economy is generating $13.6 trillion. Good investment? His promise to cut the deficit in half. His agreement that if the economy was not better after four years, he would be a one-term president.

Since he is running again for president, that was another of his many lies.

“Green energy” scam. Climate-change fairy tales.

Only half of America paying taxes. Yet, even considering that fact, the average American must work 107 days just to make enough money to pay local, state and federal taxes.

When Obama took office in 2009, the average price for a gallon of gas was $1.85. The average American household spent $4,155 on gasoline during 2011. At the same time, the real median household income has declined by $4,300 since Obama entered the White House.

The poverty rate in the U.S. is 22 percent.

An average of 23 manufacturing facilities permanently shut down in the United States every single day during 2010.

30 percent of unemployed Americans have been out of work for 52 weeks or longer. 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty. 49.1 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives benefits from the government. And this is Obama’s constituency! This is his base.

Last year, 53 percent of all U.S. college graduates under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed. Student loan debt is at $1 trillion.

He [Obama] claims to feel our pain, but Americans buy 80 percent of the pain pills sold on the entire globe each year.

95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle-class jobs. America is losing 500,000 jobs to China every single year. The national debt is rising by more than $2 million every single minute. 88 million working-age Americans are not employed and are not looking for employment – an all-time record high.

The U.S. national debt has risen $6 trillion since Obama took office. In his first three years in office, Obama added more to the national debt than the first 41 presidents combined.

And the biggest reason of all to defeat Obama next Tuesday is this: You ain’t seen nothing yet. If Obama created this disaster in his first four years, what will he do in his second four years when he is unaccountable for re-election?

As they say, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Or, put it this way:

If Mr. Obama wins re-election, and his budget projections prove accurate, the National Debt will top $20 trillion in 2016, the final year of his second term. If GDP grows at an annual rate of 3%, it will take $120 of debt to create $100 dollars of GDP. (similar to Italy). More simply put, a household that earns $100,000 will need loans of $120,000 to support that income. Bottom line, the US is heading into bankruptcy and the American dream is becoming a nightmare.

And who is it that supports this president, besides the super elitist left media and the occupy stoners? His largest support base are the public sector unions. Let's take the average municipal worker in Wisconsin. These folks can retire after 25 years of service and continue to receive full salary and healthcare for the rest of their lives. Millions of parasites swarming all over the US economy and sucking the life out of hard working families and their children. Almost 50% of US citizens don't pay federal income taxes while Obama campaigns for the other 50% to pay their fair share. The Greek socialists would be proud of these figures.

In conclusion, its clear to anyone with an inkling of common sense that all this man cares about is re-election. If he is elected for four more years, extinguish the lights. The nightmare will quickly metamorphose into reality.

Socialist ideas are always deleterious for a country's economy (as well as for many other things). Just look around the globe and you'll see the poverty spread by communist and socialist regimes. China itself developed when it abandoned many of them.

And there is plenty of evidence for Obama's past and present communist affiliations:

Barack Hussein Obama was during his college years a committed Marxist, advocating the revolutionary overthrow of America’s capitalist system. His father was a communist. His main mentor as a young teenager, Frank Marshall Davis, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA.

Obama admits in “Dreams From My Father” that, during college, he was attracted to the “Marxist professors.” Indeed, the Marxist student leader at Occidental College at the time, John Drew, says Obama was far more radical than even Drew was, actually believing that Marx’s prophesied proletariat revolution to overthrow capitalism was imminent in the United States. Today Drew, who has long since repudiated his former radicalism, says that even in his Marxist days he attempted to rein in Obama by trying to persuade him to work within America’s political system to bring about the Marxist transformation they all desired.

After college, Obama followed in the footsteps of Chicago Marxist Saul Alinsky and went on to practice and teach Alinsky’s revolutionary street-organizing methods. Obama launched his political career in the living room of Bill Ayers, a self-described “small-c communist” and unrepentant Pentagon-bombing terrorist. Moreover, the evidence is indisputable that Ayers played a major role in writing Obama’s highly acclaimed autobiography, “Dreams From My Father.”

Obama’s pastor for two decades, whom he described as his “spiritual mentor,” was Jeremiah Wright, a perennially enraged, America-hating purveyor of “Black Liberation Theology” (Marxism disguised as Christianity). As president, Obama appointed as White House communications director Anita Dunn, who in a speech to students claimed mass-murdering Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong was one of her “favorite political philosophers,” and “green jobs czar” Van Jones, who in his earlier years admitted to being a communist and, in fact, founded the communist group Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM.

Regarding the interesting point of Marxism disguised as Christianity, it's worth noting that Obama has learned and applied that lesson from Jeremiah Wright very well.

He uses Christianity and the Scriptures as justifications for the government doing the good, charitable work for its citizens through high taxes, wealth redistribution and welfare state.

The reality is that the New Testament does not contain and can never be construed as providing such justifications.

The Holy Scriptures speak to individuals, not governments. The individual is the one who makes the choice of what and who to give to, and should not be coerced by the state who deprives him of this choice.

Man's free will is at the centre of Christianity.

Going back to the article on Obama's past and present communist affiliations:

I could go on and on. These oft-cited facts merely scratch the surface of Obama’s long-term radicalism.

... But now, sitting in the White House is a man who has spent most of his entire life immersed in Marxist ideology, influences, mentors and benefactors. He has proven, as president, that he is still fully committed to dragging America – kicking and screaming if necessary (recall the outrageous and illegal way Obamacare was passed) – into a new era of unprecedented, government-coerced redistribution of wealth and power. To be precise: Marxism.

It would be folly, of course, to imagine that Obama just magically appeared out of thin air to lead a nation of liberty-loving, responsible, moral, right-thinking grownups leftward. America has been moving in this sad direction for decades. No, not under the “Marxist” label, or any of those other nasty words of yesteryear, like “socialism” or “communism” or “collectivism.” They’ve all been carefully replaced by warm-and-cuddly terms like “fairness,” “economic justice,” “redistribution,” “progressivism” and – as an off-script Obama famously told Joe the Plumber – “spread[ing] the wealth around.”

The spirit of socialism has taken root and flowered spectacularly in America, especially in all of our elite, idea-generating institutions like education, the news and entertainment media, and, of course, government. The original American spirit – stout, risk-taking, God-fearing, responsible, adult – has progressively been displaced by the spirit of dependency and helplessness, of perpetual grievance and victimization, and most of all, of envy and resentment. All of which cries out for ever bigger government.
So the question is: Will we Americans re-embrace the values that made ours the greatest nation in history, or will we continue on our current path toward the godless mirage of “redistributive change” – and the poverty and loss of liberty that always follow?

In any event, for the present I can at least derive some solace from remembering that I was raised by parents and grandparents who appreciated their adopted country and all the blessings the Creator freely bestowed upon it – and weren’t angrily obsessed with “transforming” it into a socialist paradise. For that I am truly grateful.

Still in 2007, a year before his election, he was marching with hard-left members of the New Black Panther Party:

New photographs obtained exclusively by BigGovernment.com reveal that Barack Obama appeared and marched with members of the New Black Panther Party as he campaigned for president in Selma, Alabama in March 2007.

The photographs, captured from a Flickr photo-sharing account before it was scrubbed, are the latest evidence of the mainstream media’s failure to examine Obama’s extremist ties and radical roots.

In addition, the new images raise questions about the possible motives of the Obama administration in its infamous decision to drop the prosecution of the Panthers for voter intimidation.

It's worth remembering what Norman Thomas, 6-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, said in 1944:

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened."

We Know Very Little about Obama the Man

I don't know how the American people can trust as President a man who has been so, shall we say, economical with the truth even about himself as a person.

I'm not referring here to life details which concern someone's privacy. No, this is about things and events that the public has the necessity to know about a man's deep-seated beliefs, ideas and past and present behavior in order to form an opinion on his suitability as their President.

Barack Hussein Obama, about whom the overwhelming evidence is that he was born and raised a Muslim and remained a Muslim until until his late 20s, has repeatedly denied having ever been a Muslim.

A man's religious beliefs are important to understand the person in any case. In the current international political climate, with Islamism on the rise globally, Al-Qaeda much stronger than ever, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation urging the United Nations and the European Council to adopt their particular take on "human rights" through their Sharia-based Cairo Declaration while not signing the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights because in conflict with Islamic values, and the Muslim world asking for Sharia's blasphemy laws to be imposed everywhere, it is imperative for a US President at least to declare his Muslim background and sympathies, not to cover them up.

Obama lied about many facts of his life just because it suited him at the time.

Obama lied when he said that he had never been a member and candidate of the Chicago socialist New Party. Here again we don't have a little white lie, but a deception aimed at keeping the American people in the dark about his real beliefs and affiliations.

Obama lied on his country of birth, when in 1991, in order to sell his autobiography, he falsely claimed that he "was born in Kenya." Is this important? Yes, for a future President.

What all the dispute about his country of birth shows is that Obama, unlike all other US Presidents, was not vetted and scrutinized prior to or after his election.

During the 2008 Presidential election cycle, we as a nation witnessed the collapse of the American mainstream media, and the deterioration of journalism right before our very eyes. We watched the media become completely unhinged losing all journalistic integrity & moral objectivity as they jumped head first into the tank for Barack Obama openly cheer-leading for him, and essentially functioning as a political arm of the Democratic Party. The liberal media practically campaigned for him in a grotesque display of partisanship rendering themselves negligent to their own profession. The fawning media anointed Barack Obama as their “Savior” insulating him from criticism, and ignoring the extremely important Presidential vetting process which has always been a necessary step toward helping the American people select a candidate. The traditional rules & protocols that the media had applied to every other Presidential predecessor of history apparently did not apply to Barack Obama.

If Barack Obama was properly vetted and scrutinized in 2008 the way every Republican candidate is currently being looked at under the microscope, he would never have been elected by the American people. Obama’s extraordinary lack of applicable job experience required to run for the highest office in the land was glaring, but the media did its best to minimize, diminish, and flat out suppress vital information about candidate Obama from the misinformed public which would have disqualified him from contention. He had absolutely no executive/business experience, no leadership/governing experience, served less than 1 full term as a functioning U.S. Senator, had a murky past that is shrouded in secrecy, and also a history of associating himself with the most radical fringe elements of society. This included a friendship with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers along with spending 20 years in a church of hate with his bigoted mentor & father figure Jeremiah Wright preaching fiery racist rhetoric, anti-Semitic slurs, and spewing vicious anti-American rants from the pews. The fact that Obama spent 2 decades in this hostile environment listening to Wright’s hate filled sermons, and embracing this man so closely speaks volumes about his judgement, character, and world view. While campaigning in 2008, candidate Barack Obama told America, “Judge me by the people with whom I surround myself with.” This revealing statement should have been closely examined given Obama’s numerous relationships with highly questionable, and unsavory individuals yet it gained absolutely no traction within the elite media as they were far too busy drooling over Obama’s grand speeches, and trying to get his autograph.

...Liberals were so enamored by Barack Obama that they were practically ready to carve his face into Mount Rushmore, and inscribe his image onto U.S. currency before he was even sworn into the Oval Office.

If the upcoming election becomes a referendum on Obama’s disastrous economic policies, his failed stimulus packages, recklessly adding over 5 trillion dollars to our nation’s unsustainable debt, Obama-Care which continues stifling businesses from hiring, and sky rocketing gas prices, he will lose the election in a landslide. His far left divisive ideologies, and radical associations alone should be more than enough ammunition for the American people to come out to the polls in droves to ensure he is a 1 term President. Heading into the 2012 election cycle, we are about to embark on the most negative & outright vicious attack/smear campaign against the Republican nominee at the hands of Obama’s Marxist minions within the powerful liberal mainstream media establishment. If Barack Obama, and his billionaire overlord George Soros have it their way, the media conversation will be driven by an unprecedented all-out assault against the Republican opponent in a deliberately deceitful attempt to divert the attention away from Obama’s indefensible failures & abysmal Presidential record.

We are talking about a man who was given the Nobel Peace Prize just for having been elected. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction.

Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, contains such an enormous amount of lies to legitimately raise the question "Is President Obama A Pathological Liar?". In the book he fabricated an account of his Kenyan grandfather being racially persecuted.

The Obama Record: The most frightening aspect of this president may not be his radical ideology but his rank dishonesty in selling that ideology. Now he's been caught lying about family racism.

In "Dreams from My Father," his 1995 memoir, Obama used the story of his paternal grandfather's imprisonment and torture at the hands of British colonists in Kenya as an example of white cruelty. He claimed Hussein Onyango Obama was unjustly detained for six months before being released a crippled, lice-ridden "old man."

In fact, none of it is true, according to Washington Post editor and biographer David Maraniss, who traveled to Kenya to investigate the tale. His grandfather was not detained or beaten by his "white rulers," as Obama, writing as a 34-year-old lawyer, claimed.

This is only the latest example of a growing body of fabrications, embellishments and outright lies told by this president, who has a real and possibly pathological problem with the truth.

...Lie No. 11: Obama claimed he had only a passing acquaintance with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, when in fact they held a fundraiser for their Hyde Park neighbor in their living room, and years later, while Obama served in the U.S. Senate, hosted a barbecue for him in their backyard.

Lie No. 12: Obama claimed he never heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright spew anti-American invectives while sitting in his pews for 20 years, when in fact Obama was moved to tears hearing Wright condemn "white folks" and the U.S. for bombing other countries and even named his second book after the sermon.

Lie No. 13: Obama claimed he got in a "big fight" with old white flame Genevieve Cook, who after seeing a black play asked "why black people were so angry all the time," when in fact she never saw the play nor made the remark.

In both his autobiographies, Obama paints a false portrait of a still-racist America and West, where he, his friends and relatives are victimized by that racism. Conveniently, his remedy is redistributive justice through bigger government.

In Dreams from My Father he lied, among other things, about paternal grandfather, "his maternal grandfather, his father, his mother, his parents' wedding, his stepfather's father, his high school friend, his girlfriend, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright".

Victor Davis Hanson has the final word on this: "If a writer will fabricate the details about his own mother's terminal illness and quest for insurance, then he will probably fudge on anything."

Donald Trump may have followed an unorthodox procedure in trying to get to the truth, but he had a point when he said that Obama is the mystery candidate:

“I thought it would be a very easy way to get transparency from the president,” he answered, going on to accuse Obama of being the “least transparent of any president — ever.”

Trump maintains that Obama’s past remains a relative mystery. And since, in his view, not many people know about the president’s personal history, gaining access to his passport and college records would be telling.

“Passport applications tell you a lot,” Trump told TheBlaze. “I would hope to find nothing – but I have a feeling that might not be the answer.”

Given how little we all know about Obama and his life, authors have made plausible and valid explanations. Joel Gilbert produced a video on DVD, Dreams From My Real Father, in which he gives good reasons to believe that Barack Obama's real father, biologically as well as ideologically, was the late Communist Party USA activist Frank Marshall Davis:

At age 18, Barack Obama admittedly arrived at Occidental College a committed revolutionary Marxist. What was the source of Obama’s foundation in Marxism?

...The film begins by presenting the case that Barack Obama's real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist who likely shaped Obama’s worldview during his formative years. Barack Obama sold himself to America as the multicultural ideal, a man who stood above politics. Was the goat-herding Kenyan father only a fairy tale to obscure a Marxist agenda, irreconcilable with American values?

This fascinating narrative is based in part on two years of research, interviews, newly unearthed footage and photos and the writings of Davis and Obama himself. "Dreams From My Real Father" weaves together the proven facts with reasoned logic in an attempt to fill in the obvious gaps in Obama’s history.

Since there is a physical resemblance of Obama to communist Frank Marshall Davis, it is thought that Obama had cosmetic surgery in order to disguise that. Two nationally known cosmetic surgery experts independently reached this conclusion:

“It appears Obama had some aesthetic refinement,” said plastic surgeon J. David Holcolm.

...“Obama has gone to great lengths to obscure his past,” Gilbert said. “Now, in addition to the alleged document forgery and photographic forgery by Obama to hide his true identity, we now have evidence of facial forgery.”

Holcolm described in detail his reasons for concluding Obama has had cosmetic surgery.

“The upper and middle nasal vault are both narrowed. The tip and infra-tip are softer and the tip has been rotated up,” he said. “Alar height appears to have been reduced so the lower part of the nose that makes up the nostrils appears softer.

“These changes are not characteristic of the natural aging process,” Holcolm said, “where the tip tends to settle and rotate downward causing the appearance of a longer nose and where the tip also often widens noticeably.”

Wendy Lewis, a cosmetic surgery consultant and author of 11 consumer health and beauty books, including “America’s Cosmetic Doctors & Dentists” and “Plastic Makes Perfect,” agrees.

“In the three younger photographs, Obama appears to have a bulbous nasal tip with wide alar bases, not uncommon with males and with skin of color,” Lewis said. “The more current photos show a thinner nasal tip which suggests some finessing of his nose over the years, but it is a very natural-looking effect.”

...Gilbert suspects Obama had the surgery because he was “concerned he was looking too much like Frank Marshall Davis as he got older.”

“I don’t think it was a coincidence that Obama chose to undergo a rhinoplasty before running for U.S. Senate and facing the national spotlight,” Gilbert said. “If Obama was identified as Davis’ son, it would connect the Marxist dots of Obama’s entire life journey.”

Gilbert said Obama “needed the Kenyan father fairy tale to misdirect the public away from the fact that he is a red diaper baby, the child of a Communist Party USA propagandist and Soviet agent.”

Gilbert told WND he’s received hundreds of emails people who have received a copy of his documentary in the mail, and the main message is “good folks don’t like it when they’ve been lied to.”

Look at the pictures yourself.

The latest revelation comes from an in-depth research by Jerome Corsi of WND, author of many No. 1 N.Y. Times best-seller books on Obama:

Largely ignored [by establishment media] in 2008 was research by the Hillary Clinton campaign based on contacts developed with members of the church Obama attended for two decades, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. This is the first of a series of articles WND has developed from months of in-person interviews with church members who have known Barack and Michelle Obama over many years.

According to these sources Obama was one of the members of the Trinity United Church of Christ who benefited from a “matchmaking service” run by the Trinity Church and known as the Down Low Club. The latter is a well-known program to "help black men who engage in homosexual activity appear respectable in black society by finding them a wife" as well as to help them find homosexual lovers.

Ten years ago, the New York Times reported on a growing underground subculture in the black community known as Down Low, comprised largely of men who secretly engage in homosexual activity while living “straight” lives in public.

It’s within that subtext that opposition researchers for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign began investigating rumors that Rev. Jeremiah Wright was running a “matchmaking service” for members of his Trinity United Church of Christ known as the Down Low Club, which included Barack Obama.

Over the past several months, WND investigators have interviewed a number of members of the church who claim the president benefited from Wright’s efforts to help black men who engage in homosexual activity appear respectable in black society by finding them a wife.

The 2003 New York Times story, “Double Lives on the Down Low,” said that though many black men reject “a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate,” they “have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low.”

This is the kind of investigatigative journalism that the mainstream media should engage in to uncover the truth about the President of the United States, if they weren't too afraid of what they may find.

Why Communists Like Comrade Obama

Norman Thomas, 6-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America, said in a 1944 speech:

"The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened.

"...I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform."

Thomas was very prescient of things to come.

And more recently the Marxist-Leninist, formerly generally disliked, Communist Party USA has strongly supported the incumbent President of the United States, Muslim-born Barack Hussein Obama.

During Obama's presidential campaign in 2008, Joelle Fishman, chairman of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Political Action Commission, fully endorsed the Democratic Party’s candidate for the White House in a column entitled “Big Political Shifts Are Underway”. In it she said that Senator Obama is “ready to listen” to the “left and progressive voters” and appealed to all working people of the United States to back him, in order to cause “a landslide defeat of the Republican ultra-right.” "Fishman makes it clear that the CPUSA is part of this coalition."

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc official ever to have defected to the West, says in the article The Socialist Mask of Marxism:

That [2008] new alliance between the Democratic Party and the Communist Party was a first in the history of the United States, the world’s headquarters of democracy and free enterprise. In November 2008, over 65 million Americans who were unable to identify the stealth virus of Marxism that was infecting the Democratic Party voted to give this party the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Although we now live in an age of technology, we still do not have an instrument that can scientifically measure to what extent the Communist endorsement of the Democratic Party influenced the results of the 2008 election. But if there had been any doubt in my mind that the Democratic and the Communist parties had secretly joined forces, that doubt was erased in 2009, when Van Jones, part of a left fringe of declared communists, became the White House’s green jobs czar. Soon after that, the White House and the Democrat-controlled Congress began dutifuly following in Marx’s footsteps by redistributing our country’s wealth and putting under government control a part of its health care, banking system, and automobile industry.

... In his Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx urged his followers to replace capitalism with communism via a “socialist redistribution of wealth,” which “should displace capitalism and precede communism.” Marx advocated ten “despotic inroads on the rights of property,” and he called them the ten planks of communism. The most important are:

• A progressive or graduated income tax;
• Abolition of rights of inheritance;
• Centralization of credit in the hands of the state;
• Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state;
• Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

If you know the Manifesto, you will think Marx himself wrote the Democratic Party’s 2012 electoral campaign, which contains all of the above planks of Marxism. If you don’t know the Manifesto, click here and you’ll get it from the horse’s mouth.

In 2011, the Communist Party USA again supported Obama and the Democrats for re-election in 2012.

Endorsing the Obama campaign, the chairman of the Communist Party USA, Sam Webb, who had called Obama a friend back in 2008, wrote in an article in the People’s Weekly World, his party's official newspaper:

Despite the many frustrations of the past two years, the election of Barack Obama was historic and gave space to struggle for a people’s agenda.

If, on the other hand, the Republicans had been victorious in 2008, the character of class and democratic struggles would have unfolded very differently. Our movement would have been on the defensive from Day One, the Democrats would be running for cover, and the Republicans would have an unfettered hand in their efforts to liquidate the welfare state, roll back the rights revolution of the 1930s and 1960s, and crush the people’s movement – labor in the first place.

As if all this were not enough, the Communist Party USA has a history of infiltrating the Democratic Party and moving it to the left.

Remember all this on Tuesday, November 6.

Classical Liberal Human Rights Are Not Today Socialist Human Rights

The principle of human rights is derived from the political doctrine of classical liberalism (not to be confused with "liberalism" in the modern American sense of left-wing political orientation).

Consistently with the liberal theory's emphasis on the individual's need to be protected from state interference and power, the concept of human rights has an originally negative connotation (permitting or obliging inaction), as the right not to be killed or physically attacked (right to life), not to be unduly restricted by the state (right to liberty), or not to be hindered in one's legitimate ambitions (right to pursuit of happiness). These are also called liberty rights, i.e. not entailing obligations on other parties, but rather only freedom or permission for the right-holder.

The human rights principle that has been used in recent times has the same name but little else in common with the liberal, original one.

It has a positive connotation (permitting or obliging action): right to a job, a house, a minimum income, free health care, free education, social security, financial support during unemployment, sickness or retirement, welfare, and many more: the list is endless. These are also called claim rights, i.e. entailing responsibilities, duties or obligations on other parties regarding the right-holder.

The state in this perspective has become a provider, like a parent, it is a "paternalistic" state. Far from trying to limit its reach and power to control, people who advocate these ideas cause the state to expand its authority, become bigger and more influential on people's lives. The state becomes more and more like, well, a socialist state.

Karl Marx's formula for communism, his final goal after the intermediate, transitional socialism of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

This formula, especially in its latter part, is no other than the new re-definition of "positive" human rights by socialists.

Every need gives rise to a new human right.

The governed then expect everything from the state. But as rights are the other side of duties, and freedom is the other face of the coin of responsibility, inversely to delegate responsibility is to abdicate power and renounce some freedom. The more people expect from the state, the less control they have over their own lives.

So, what happened to "human rights" is what happens to a concept when used in a different theoretical context.

"Time" and "space" have very different meanings in Newton's classical physics than in Einstein's relativity theory.

Time and space are absolute in the former, relative in the latter. In addition, time becomes the fourth dimension of space in the theory of relativity.

Each theory redefines its concepts. So, modern-day socialists, who have virtually all ideological and doctrinal power in the Western world since the end of the Second World War, have redefined the liberal concept of human rights and transformed it into something antithetical to it.

Time and space are absolute in classical mechanics but relative in modern mechanics.

Human rights in classical liberalism are a protection from state power, but in contemporary socialist view they are a way to make that power never-ending. These two concepts, under the deceitful guise of the same name, couldn't be more in opposition to each other.

Can Mass Immigration and Multiculturalism End?

It's so true that, as philosopher Hegel said, the consciousness of a historical age comes at the end of it. Contemporaries usually think in terms of explanations, theories and the concepts defined by them derived from a previous epoch, which are inadequate to understand the new, developing realities.

This is related to an observation which could bring some hope.

Blogger Julia Gorin quotes James George Jatras, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and foreign policy analyst for the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, as saying:

In some ways, we [Bukovsky, Jatras, and their friends] were the heart of the Administration’s anti-communist line and the “fathers” of the National Endowment for Democracy. (As opposed to the prevailing view that communism was forever and we needed permanent detente with the Soviet regime. Looking back from today, it’s hard to believe how ingrained that view was). [Emphasis added]

Similarly, today Europeans think that mass immigration from the Third World and multiculturalism are here to stay for good.

Journalist and author Christopher Caldwell writes in his book Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Can Europe Be the Same with Different People in It? (Amazon US) (Amazon UK):

It is often noted with shock how long it took for European natives to realize that immigrants had settled in Europe to stay. Europeans went on thinking that immigrants would simply “go home” until at least the 1970s, when France first established programs to pay immigrants to repatriate themselves, and in some cases well into the 1980s. Today, however, Europeans often make the opposite mistake. They exaggerate how well established immigrants are in Europe. In high-immigration countries like Spain and Italy, the overwhelming majority of immigrants are first generation, and even in the oldest immigration countries, the immigrant population is much less rooted than it appears. In 2000, 60 percent of Germany's vast foreign population had arrived after 1985. Plenty of immigrants are full members of the society of their new homeland, with full claims on it. Just as many are not. [Emphasis added]