Angela Merkel's election result four years ago was, to be sure, extraordinary. It was clear from the surveys that her conservatives wouldn't be able to repeat it. But a fall like this? Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party Christian Social Union (CSU) saw their joint result fall by more than eight percentage points - their worst showing since 1949. During her first appearance after the election at her party's headquarters, the chancellor said she had, in fact, hoped for a somewhat better result. Those gathered at the headquarters dutifully chanted, "Angie, Angie."

Then things grew quiet again. Nobody waved the German flag. It was a far cry from 2013, when CDU politicians broke out into a spontaneous karaoke session after the results were announced. This time, the prominent members of Merkel's party who had gathered behind her on the stage seemed sobered by the tepid showing.

Merkel can keep her job as chancellor, the "strategic goal" has been achieved, as Merkel refers to it. But it comes at a high price. Voters have severely punished the parties of the current governing coalition, with Merkel's conservatives losing dozens of seats in parliament. The right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) will now enter parliament with a strong, double-digit result. And it will be extremely difficult for Merkel to build a government coalition that will be stable for the next four years.

Since 2002, when the Homeland Security Act was passed, numerous colleges and universities have been feeding from the DHS money trough. Each year they line up like good little bundists, promoting DHS's vision of terror. Think about that, everything you've been told about terrorism and extremism is coming from colleges! A HomelandSecurityEdu map shows that nearly every school in America, offers some type of Homeland Security degree or career.

Have you ever wondered why schools require student protesters to get a permit and stay in illegal free speech zones? 

Have you ever wondered why schools suspend students for committing microagressions? 

Have you ever wondered why schools are creating a generation of 'snowflakes'?

Look no further than DHS, whose vision of a police state is becoming a reality.

But they are different, aren't they? You don't need to be a professor of obstetrics to know that a bunion is different to a foetus. The question of whether the foetus has rights and, if so, what those rights are and at what point they come into effect is incredibly complex and emotive.

It is something philosophers, ethicists, doctors, lawyers, theologians and many of the general public have grappled with for years. There is no simple answer, and it is beholden on someone of Professor Regan's great office to at least acknowledge this fact, regardless of her personal opinion.

Let's be clear here, her announcement is not to do with medicine. It's a political statement — an alignment with a particular liberal ideology that states that abortion should be available on demand, no questions asked.

This demand was backed last year by the Royal College of Midwives' chief executive Cathy Warwick. But it has profound implications. It means that the UK would join a tiny handful of countries — such as China and Vietnam — where abortion is legal on demand up until birth. When it comes to human rights, I'm never one to feel comfortable following China's lead.

One in three women in the UK will undergo a termination before the age of 45, so this issue resonates with many people on a profound level. For feminists to politicise abortion in this way, and to insist that everything a woman wants she should get, regardless of the ethical issues, is nothing short of outrageous.

Their president, Professor Lesley Regan, believes terminations should be treated the same as any other medical procedure. But although the RCOG represents 6,000 senior doctors in England specialising in childbirth and women's health, only 33 members of the body's council will take part in the behind-closed-doors ballot.

A group of 650 doctors have now signed a letter to Professor Regan objecting to her 'extreme' views. The practitioners – including those who do not belong to the RCOG – say it is 'completely unacceptable' that the majority of members are being denied the chance to vote.

They also warn that the college risks 'severely damaging its reputation' by adopting such a radical stance. If the council members vote in favour, the RCOG will formally back decriminalising abortions and lobby the Government for a change in the law.

Since global mean temperatures rarely rise by even as much as 0.25 degrees C in a decade, that would mean the planet would have to do 20 years’ worth of extreme warming in the space of the next five years. This, the scientists admit, is next to impossible. Which means their “carbon budget” – the amount of CO2 they say is needed to increase global warming by a certain degree – is wrong. This in turn means that the computer models they’ve been using to scare the world with tales of man-made climate doom are wrong too.

The scientists who’ve written this paper aren’t climate skeptics. They’re longstanding warmists, implacable foes of climate skeptics, and they’re also actually the people responsible for producing the IPCC’s carbon budget. In other words, this represents the most massive climbdown from the alarmist camp.

“Rather than use its resources to improve Iranian lives, its oil profits go to Hezbollah and other terror groups that kill innocent Muslims and attack their Arab and Israeli neighbors,” he said, while adding that Iranian funds also “shore up [Syrian President] Bashar Assad’s dictatorship, fuel Yemen’s civil war and undermine peace in the entire Middle East.” “Iran’s government must stop funding terrorists,” he said, calling the regime in Tehran “murderous.”

Speaking of the 2015 nuclear deal, which placed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief and which Trump said Monday that the US may scrap, he continued, “we cannot abide by an agreement if it it provides cover for the eventual construction of a nuclear program.” “The Iran deal is one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the US has ever entered into. Frankly, that deal was an embarrassment to the US,” he said, echoing his previous criticism of the deal.

Trump, who has ramped up his rhetoric throughout the recent escalating crisis with North Korea, told the murmuring crowd that “it is far past time for the nations of the world to confront” Kim Jong Un and said that Kim’s “reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons” poses a threat to “the entire world with an unthinkable loss of human life.” He called the regime in Pyongyang and others like it “the scourge of our planet today” and said, “If the righteous men don’t confront the wicked few, evil will triumph.”

Addressing North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missiles program, Trump said, “No nation on earth has an interest in seeing this band of criminals arming itself with nuclear weapons and missiles.” He also issued a pointed warning to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un if war were to break out between the two countries over Pyongyang’s nuclear program. “We will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime,” he said in reference to Kim. “It is time for North Korea to realize that denuclearization is its only acceptable future.”

- America joined World War I largely to help a few bankers profit off the war (despite a long-standing Monroe doctrine that prohibited our involvement in European affairs)

- The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was supported by international financial interests in order to destabilize Russia and steal the wealth of the Russian people; and

- So-called "foreign aid" is merely a clever means of shifting the bad debt incurred by banks and wealthy financiers to American taxpayers. 

One that stood out is that over successive generations, people with concentrated wealth have sought to use the American military and the purse power of the taxpayer for personal gain. In fact, Griffin argues, the creation of the current iteration of the Federal Reserve System was a political act designed to hide the fact that a private banking cartel would manage the US currency. The Federal Reserve, as Griffin explains, is neither "federal" nor a "reserve." It is not owned by the federal government, and it does not hold real assets in reserve. In reality, it is a giant debt factory backed by the "full faith and credit" of the government, or taxpayers.

One thing is clear. In the aftermath of the global recession of 2008, America and the world have been swimming in debt. America’s national debt alone has skyrocketed. While the Fed continues to justify flooding the market with cheap "reserve notes" based on the theory that it must supply these notes in order to support asset prices, the overall effect has been to debase the currency and prolong the pain of the American people.

Workers lost because their spending power diluted drastically over the past 10 years. The costs of housing and energy have continued to rise in areas where the highest concentrations of jobs are located. Home prices are so out of line with average salaries that cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are seeing an epidemic of homelessness never experienced since the Great Depression of 1929.

Savers have lost because the interest income they were counting on earning from their lifetime of saving has dwindled to less than nothing. These days, in most cases, you actually have to pay the bank to keep your money there. And so many retirees have had to tap into their home mortgages or take on additional consumer debt merely to survive. As America faces the largest retirement boom in its history — the retiring baby boomers — more than two-thirds of them do not have enough savings to retire comfortably. And on top of that, the Social Security system that was to be a back-stop against poverty for older Americans is practically insolvent.

The great project to rescue the American economy by the Fed has hit an obvious wall. The debt it used to goose the economy is now gumming up the system and constraining real growth. The looming question of what actually happens when the debt bubble finally bursts is one that not even the soberest economists at the Fed have been able to confront effectively. Unless we deal finally with the false notion that "central economic planning" can replace actual capitalism as the driver of American growth, we may be in store for far, far worse.

Working class white males understand that they are the new underclass in a diversity country in which everyone has privileges except them. Many of the university educated group of heterosexual white males are too brainwashed to understand what is happening to them. Indeed, some of them are so successfully brainwashed that they think it is their just punishment as a white male to be downrodden.

Donald Trump’s presidency has been wrecked by hate groups, ie the liberal/progressive/left who hate the “racist, misognynist, homophobic, gun nut working class” that elected Trump (see Eric Draitser, “Why He Won,” in CounterPunch, vol 23, No 1, 2017). For the liberal/progressive/left Trump is an illegitimate president because he was elected by illegitimate voters.

America, the melting pot that produced a nation was destroyed by Identity Politics. Identity Politics divides a population into hate groups. This group hates that one and so on. In the US the most hated group is a southern white heterosexual male.

For a person who tries to tell the truth, writing is a frustrating and discouraging experience. What is the point of writing for people who cannot read, who cannot follow a logical argument because their limited mental capabilities are entirely based in emotion, who have no idea of the consequence of a population imbued with hate that destroys a nation in divisiveness?

“We are losing the acknowledgement of God and I’m standing here talking to Christians and pastors and I’m telling you we’re losing the acknowledgement of God,” Moore said, per CNN’s report. After, per Kaczynski, Moore began “reciting several verses from the Old Testament book of Hosea that deal with lack of knowledge of God,” the front-running candidate for the US Senate in Alabama argued that shootings and killings in US society today are because of the lack of God in public life.

“You wonder why we’re having shootings, and killings here in 2017? Because we’ve asked for it,” Moore said. “We’ve taken God out of everything. We’ve taken prayer out of school, we’ve taken prayer out of council meetings.” In a video of Moore’s speech to Citizen Impact USA, he can be heard saying, “There’s no truth, no mercy, no knowledge of God in the land.” He then referenced Hosea 4:2 (King James Version) saying, “By swearing and lying and killing and stealing... they break forth and blood touches blood.”