THECOCONUTWHISPERER

Sunday, 23 February 2020

Another Political Assassination of an Opponent of Sharia in USA?

DHS whistleblower who criticized the Obama administration's handling of Islamic terrorism is found dead on a road side with a 'self-inflicted gunshot wound'

Whistleblower Philip Haney, 66, was found dead in Plymouth, California
Authorities say he had a 'single, self-inflicted gunshot wound' and was found near his car Friday morning
A formal cause of death, motive or details surrounding Haney's death have not been released by authorities
Haney criticized the Department of Homeland Security under the Obama administration for its handling of radical Jihadists and Islamic extremists
He claimed that DHS ordered him to delete hundreds of files pertaining to people with ties to Islamist terrorist groups
Haney argue that several terrorist attacks in the U.S. could have been prevented if certain files were maintained
He testified in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 2016

PUBLISHED: 01:51 EST, 23 February 2020 | UPDATED: 02:18 EST, 23 February 2020

e-mail

Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Philip Haney, who spoke out against his own agency during the Obama administration, was found shot dead in California.

The Amador County Sheriff's Office said that authorities responded to reports of a man lying on the ground with an apparent gunshot injury near Highway 124 and Highway 16 in Plymouth.

Red State and Heavy said Haney had been missing since Wednesday, and that the gunshot wound was found in his chest.

'Upon their arrival, they located and identified 66-year-old Philip Haney, who was deceased and appeared to have suffered a single, self-inflicted gunshot wound,' said authorities, according to the Washington Examiner.

Philip Haney (pictured), a former Department of Homeland Security official who blew the whistle on the agency, was found dead Friday with a gunshot wound

'A firearm was located next to Haney and his vehicle. This investigation is active and ongoing. No further details will be released at this time.'

Authorities have not shared any further details as they investigate Haney's death, no arrests have been made and a motive has not been made clear.

Although the nature of Haney's death has not determined, a Fox News contributor suggested he was murdered.

'Somebody I deeply respected and considered a friend Phil Haney - a DHS whistleblower during the Obama Admin was apparently killed yesterday in Southern California. Pray for his family and pray they find the person who murdered him,' she wrote on Twitter.

Fox News contributor Sara A. Carter suggested shared condolences to Haney's family and suggested the former official was murdered

Sources said Haney, who formally retired in 2015, was recently in contact with top government officials about return to work with DHS. He was also engaged to be married.

Haney gained national attention after he called out the DHS under the Obama administration, of which he criticized for its handling of radical Jihadists and Islamic extremists, in 2016.

He would testify that DHS ordered him to delete hundreds of files pertaining to people with ties to Islamist terrorist groups and argued that several terrorist attacks in the U.S. could have been prevented if certain files were maintained.

'It is very plausible that one or more of the subsequent terror attacks on the homeland could have been prevented if more subject matter experts in the Department of Homeland Security had been allowed to do our jobs back in late 2009,' Haney wrote in an opinion piece for The Hill in 2016.

Haney (pictured) testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in 2016 that DHS deleted hundreds of files about people with ties to Islamist terrorist groups

In regards to a thwarted terror attack on a Christmas Day flight to Detroit, Michigan, Haney recalled how Obama cast blame on DHS for not identifying the threat

'President Obama threw the intelligence community under the bus for its failure to 'connect the dots.' He said, 'this was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.'

He also called out the administration for prioritizing 'political correctness' over safety.

'I can no longer be silent about the dangerous state of America's counter-terror strategy, our leaders' willingness to compromise the security of citizens for the ideological rigidity of political correctness—and, consequently, our vulnerability to devastating, mass-casualty attack.'

Haney said the devastating 2016 Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting and 2015 San Bernardino terror attack could have been prevented if DHS took the right precautions.

In a 2015 interview with Fox News, Haney said his and other DHS employees efforts were stalled after they were accused of unfairly targeting Muslims.

If not halted, he said, they could have prevented the San Bernardino attack orchestrated by Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik that killed 14 people.

The couple could have 'very plausibly' been flagged to the security services over their connections to Deobandi Movement, and its sub-groups al-Huda and Tablighi Jamaat,' Haney said.

'Either Syed would have been put on the no-fly list because of his association with that mosque, and or the K-1 visa that his wife was given may have been denied because of his affiliation with a known organization,' he said.

At the time of Haney's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republicans questioned former Obama-era DHS Secretary Jet Johnson about the allegations.

Sen. Ted Cruz asked: 'Was Mr. Haney's testimony that the Department of Homeland Security order over 800 documents ... altered or deleted accurate?'

Johnson replied he had 'no idea' and denied ever knowing who Haney was.

'I don't know who Mr. Haney is. I wouldn't know him if he walked into the room,' he said.

Red State and Heavy said Haney (pictured) has been missing since Wednesday and was not seen until he was found Friday

During that same year, Haney released his first book, See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government's Submission to Jihad' about his experiences in DHS.

He told the Washington Examiner through text that he planned on writing a sequel.

'The National Security Meltdown sequel will pick up right where SSSN left off,' he wrote.

'My intention is to have it ready by early-to mid-Spring of 2020 (just before the political sound wave hits), then ride that wave all the way to the Nov. elections.'

Haney became a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 as a Customs & Border Protection agricultural officer.

He would go on to serve as an armed CBP officer before being promoted to its Advanced Targeting Team.

Haney specialized in Islamic theology and the strategies used by the global Islamic movement.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8034145/DHS-whistleblower-Philip-Haney-shot-dead-self-inflicted-gunshot-wound.html

Recipes - Old Fashioned Chicken and Dumplings

Cowboy Kent Rollins is an authentic cowboy cook. His videos are both informative and entertaining, and here's his take on a traditional favorite, old fashioned chicken and dumplings (video below in comments):

Old Fashioned Chicken and Dumplings
https://kentrollins.com/old-fashioned-chicken-and-dumplings/

Ingredients

4 (about 7 oz) boneless chicken breasts

2 teaspoons salt

½ stick butter, softened

1 quart heavy cream

1 teaspoon black pepper

2 cups flour

3 teaspoons baking powder

3 tablespoons oil

¾ cup buttermilk

2 tablespoons cornstarch

1 cup cold water

Directions

In a pot add enough water to generously cover the chicken breasts. Add the salt. Bring to a boil and cook until chicken is tender, about 25 minutes. Remove chicken and allow to cool enough to handle. Cut into bite-sized pieces.

Return the chicken to the pot along with 6 cups of the chicken stock. Add the butter and the cream to the broth. Cook over medium heat cook, stirring occasionally, for a couple minutes. Stir in the chicken. Cook over for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Meanwhile, in a mixing bowl add the flour and baking powder, stir well Add the oil and buttermilk and begin stirring until it forms a soft dough (like the consistency of pie dough). Knead over about 4 - 5 times. Pinch off into balls (any size you prefer) and drop into the broth.

Let the dumplings cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally

Dissolve the cornstarch in the cold water and stir into the broth. Continue stirring the soup until it thickens slightly, about 3-5 minutes. Season, to taste. Serve warm.

🍅🍠🍤🍗🧀 Please recommend this page & be sure to follow the Coconut Whisperer which continues the traditions of Cheese the top Food and Recipe channel on Disqus 2017-2019 🍅🍠🍤🍗🧀

https://disqus.com/home/forum/the-coconut-whisperer/

Count the martyrs: UK to review funds for Palestinian schools whose books incite

UK HAS GIVEN $427 MILLION IN AID TO UNRWA IN PAST FIVE YEARS

London says it’ll look at tens of millions given to UN refugee agency; one physics book discusses use of slingshots against IDF soldiers, others praise terrorists

By TOI Staff. 22 Feburary 2020

www.timesofisrael.com/uk-to-review-funds-for-palestinian-schools-using-textbooks-encouraging-violence/

An image said to be from a Palestinian school textbook covering physics which shows a Palestinian boy shooting a slingshot at Israeli soldiers. The caption, according to the Daily Mail, reads: 'What is the relationship between the elongation of the slingshot's rubber and the tensile strength affecting it? What are the forces that influence the stone after its release from the slingshot?' (Courtesy)

British officials have pledged to urgently review the tens of millions of dollars in aid the UK provides to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, after an investigative report found that a majority of the funds have been going to schools in the West Bank and Gaza Strip which use textbooks that incite violence against Israelis.

According to a Friday report in the UK-based Daily Mail, the Department for International Development and its secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, vowed to raise the issue with the Palestinian Authority, adding that London was working to carry out an independent review of the Palestinian textbooks.

“The UK Government has a zero tolerance approach toward incitement to violence,” a spokesman for the department told the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail report included several examples of alleged incitement uncovered in textbooks used at schools funded by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). In one math textbook for nine-year-olds, students are asked to add up the number of martyrs from Palestinian uprisings, accompanied with images of their funerals. In another, 11-year-olds are taught Newton’s Second Law of Physics with a depiction of a boy pointing a slingshot at Israeli soldiers.

Other photos showed Palestinians using slingshots against Israeli forces and quizzed students on their potential use and effectiveness, as well as precautions to employ while using them.

An image said to be from a Palestinian school textbook shows Palestinians using various weapons against Israeli soldiers. The caption, according to the Daily Mail, reads: ‘During the Palestinian Stone Uprising of 1987, the youth of Palestine used a slingshot or the ‘shu’ba’ to confront the bullets of the Occupation army soldiers who were breaking into Palestinian towns. The Palestinians had no other means of defending themselves. Answer the questions: 1. Have you seen a slingshot in your environment? What are its uses? 2. What is its usefulness for shooting stones? How does it work? 3. Examine the forms of energy transformations of the stone, from the moment it is set in the slingshot position until its launch toward the target. 4. Formerly, bows and arrows were used as a means of self-defense. Explain the principle of how it [the bow] works in launching an arrow toward the goal and compare it with the principle of how slingshots worked in the Palestinian stone uprising. 5. What safety precautions should be taken into account when using the slingshot?’

Textbooks were found to praise Palestinian “martyrs,” including Dalal al-Mughrabi, who led the 1978 Coastal Road Massacre during which Palestinian terrorists hijacked a bus and murdered 38 Israelis.

The materials revealed by the Daily Mail appeared to have been provided to the paper by the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based right-wing think tank that was quoted in the article and which has released a report of its own calling for funding to UNRWA to be reconsidered.

The UK has given some $427 million in aid to UNRWA over the past five years with another $84 million pledged for the coming year. Roughly 62 percent of that funding goes to schools in the Palestinian territories, which could be using such textbooks.

Responding to the Daily Mail report, UNRWA said in a statement that it “cannot alter host government curriculum as this is a matter of national sovereignty, but it does have robust systems in place to ensure education delivered in its schools reflects UN values.”

An image said to be from a Palestinian school textbook praises Palestinian terrorist Dalal al-Mughrabi, who took part in the 1978 massacre of 38 Israelis (Courtesy)

Last May, the European Union announced that it would conduct an examination of new Palestinian school textbooks following a study that found them to be more radical than in the past and containing incitement and rejection of peace with Israel.

The development came after the European Parliament in April 2018 passed legislation geared to prevent hateful content in Palestinian textbooks. In October of that year the parliament’s budgetary committee recommended freezing more than $17 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority over incitement against Israel in its textbooks.

The EU hands the PA 360 million euros ($404 million) per year, with most earmarked for its education ministry. In addition, the European body donates $178 million to UNRWA, much of which goes to its schools that teach the PA curriculum.

Could we live in a world without rules?

February 20, 2020 6.54am GMT
By Nick Chater
theconversation.com/could-we-live-in-a-world-without-rules-128664

Image result for Could we live in a world without rules?

I’m in my late twenties and I’m feeling more and more constrained by rules. From the endless signs that tell me to “stand on the right” on escalators or “skateboarding forbidden” in public places to all those unwritten societal rules such as the expectation that I should settle down, buy a house and have a family. Do we really need all these rules, why should I follow them and what would happen if we all ignored them? Will, 28, London

We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten – it’s practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations are rife with regulations and red tape that seemingly are there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they’re “there to be broken”.

But as a behavioural scientist I believe that it is not really rules, norms and customs in general that are the problem – but the unjustified ones. The tricky and important bit, perhaps, is establishing the difference between the two.

A good place to start is to imagine life in a world without rules. Apart from our bodies following some very strict and complex biological laws, without which we’d all be doomed, the very words I’m writing now follow the rules of English. In Byronic moments of artistic individualism, I might dreamily think of liberating myself from them. But would this new linguistic freedom really do me any good or set my thoughts free?

Some – Lewis Carroll in his poem Jabberwocky, for example – have made a success of a degree of literary anarchy. But on the whole, breaking away from the rules of my language makes me not so much unchained as incoherent.

Byron was a notorious rule breaker in his personal life, but he was also a stickler for rhyme and meter. In his poem, When We Two Parted, for example, Byron writes about forbidden love, a love that broke the rules, but does do so by precisely following some well-established poetic laws. And many would argue it is all the more powerful for it:

In secret we met
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?–
With silence and tears.

Consider, too, how rules are the essence of sport, games and puzzles – even when their entire purpose is supposedly fun. The rules of chess, say, can trigger a tantrum if I want to “castle” to get out of check, but find that they say I can’t; or if I find your pawn getting to my side of the board and turning into a queen, rook, knight or bishop. Similarly, find me a football fan who hasn’t at least once raged against the offside rule.

But chess or football without rules wouldn’t be chess or football – they would be entirely formless and meaningless activities. Indeed, a game with no rules is no game at all.

Lots of the norms of everyday life perform precisely the same function as the rules of games – telling us what “moves” we can, and can’t, make. The conventions of “pleases” and “thank yous” that seem so irksome to young children are indeed arbitrary – but the fact that we have some such conventions, and perhaps critically that we agree what they are, is part of what makes our social interactions run smoothly.

There are no games without rules. Shutterstock

And rules about driving on the left or the right, stopping at red lights, queuing, not littering, picking up our dog’s deposits and so on fall into the same category. They are the building blocks of a harmonious society.

The call of chaos

Of course, there has long been an appetite among some people for a less formalised society, a society without government, a world where individual freedom takes precedence: an anarchy.

The trouble with anarchy, though, is that it is inherently unstable – humans continually, and spontaneously, generate new rules governing behaviour, communication and economic exchange, and they do so as rapidly as old rules are dismantled.

A few decades ago, the generic pronoun in written language was widely assumed to be male: he/him/his. That rule has, quite rightly, largely been overturned. Yet it has also been replaced – not by an absence of rules, but by a different and broader set of rules governing our use of pronouns.

Or let’s return to the case of sport. A game may start by kicking a pig’s bladder from one end of a village to another, with ill-defined teams, and potentially riotous violence. But it ends up, after a few centuries, with a hugely complex rule book dictating every detail of the game. We even create international governing bodies to oversee them.

The political economist Elinor Ostrom (who shared the Noble Prize for economics in 2009) observed the same phenomenon of spontaneous rule construction when people had collectively to manage common resources such as common land, fisheries, or water for irrigation.

She found that people collectively construct rules about, say, how many cattle a person can graze, where, and when; who gets how much water, and what should be done when the resource is limited; who monitors whom, and which rules resolve disputes. These rules aren’t just invented by rulers and imposed from the top down – instead, they often arise, unbidden, from the needs of mutually agreeable social and economic interactions.

The urge to overturn stifling, unjust or simply downright pointless rules is entirely justified. But without some rules – and some tendency for us to stick to them – society would slide rapidly into pandemonium. Indeed, many social scientists would see our tendency to create, stick to, and enforce rules as the very foundation of social and economic life.

Our relationship with rules does seem to be unique to humans. Of course, many animals behave in highly ritualistic ways – for example, the bizarre and complex courtship dances of different species of bird of paradise – but these patterns are wired into their genes, not invented by past generations of birds. And, while humans establish and maintain rules by punishing rule violations, chimpanzees – our closest relatives – do not. Chimps may retaliate when their food is stolen but, crucially, they don’t punish food stealing in general – even if the victim is a close relative.

In humans, rules also take hold early. Experiments show that children, by the age of three, can be taught entirely arbitrary rules for playing a game. Not only that, when a “puppet” (controlled by an experimenter) arrives on the scene and begins to violate the rules, children will criticise the puppet, protesting with comments such as “You are doing that wrong!” They will even attempt to teach the puppet to do better.

Some rules help keep things running smoothly… and us safe. Shutterstock

Indeed, despite our protests to the contrary, rules seem hardwired into our DNA. In fact, our species’ ability to latch onto, and enforce, arbitrary rules is crucial to our success as a species. If each of us had to justify each rule from scratch (why we drive on the left in some countries, and on the right in others; why we say please and thank you), our minds would grind to a halt. Instead, we are able to learn the hugely complex systems of linguistic and social norms without asking too many questions – we simply absorb “the way we do things round here”.

Instruments of tyranny

But we must be careful – for this way tyranny also lies. Humans have a powerful sense of wanting to enforce, sometimes oppressive, patterns of behaviour – correct spelling, no stranded prepositions, no split infinitives, hats off in church, standing for the national anthem – irrespective of their justification. And while the shift from “This is what we all do” to “This is what we all ought to do” is a well-known ethical fallacy, it is deeply embedded in human psychology.

One danger is that rules can develop their own momentum: people can become so fervent about arbitrary rules of dress, dietary restrictions or the proper treatment of the sacred that they may exact the most extreme punishments to maintain them.

Political ideologues and religious fanatics often mete out such retribution – but so do repressive states, bullying bosses and coercive partners: the rules must be obeyed, just because they are the rules.

Not only that, but criticising rules or failing to enforce them (not to draw attention to a person wearing inappropriate dress, for example) becomes a transgression requiring punishment itself.

And then there’s “rule-creep”: rules just keep being added and extended, so that our individual liberty is increasingly curtailed. Planning restrictions, safety regulations and risk assessments can seem to accumulate endlessly and may extend their reach far beyond any initial intention.

Restrictions on renovating ancient buildings can be so stringent that no renovation is feasible and the buildings collapse; environmental assessments for new woodlands can be so severe that tree planting becomes almost impossible; regulations on drug discovery can be so arduous that a potentially valuable medicine is abandoned. The road to hell is not merely paved with good intentions, but edged with rules enforcing those good intentions, whatever the consequences.

Individuals, and societies, face a continual battle over rules – and we must be cautious about their purpose. So, yes, “standing on the right” on an escalator may speed up everyone’s commute to work – but be careful of conventions that have no obvious benefit to all, and especially those that discriminate, punish and condemn. The latter can become the instruments of tyranny

Rules, like good policing, should rely on our consent. So perhaps the best advice is mostly to follow rules, but always to ask why.