When is the Trump Ban not a Ban?

When It's a temporary hiatus, that's when.

Much is being said in the News about the Trump "Ban", but it is nothing of the sort, It is a 90 or 120 day halt to immigration from "countries of concern". Those countries not being selected by Trump, but by the State Department many months ago. Trump is acting on information that has not been sufficiently acted upon previously. i.e. having enhanced vetting of people from areas considered as high risk.

The indefinite ban on people from Syria acknowledges the issues that accepting people from an ISIS hotbed contains. The fact that there is no way to easily confirm who is a friend of the US, happy to accept safe haven there or who is an agent of terror. The fact that the majority of refugees are men of fighting age and not women or children (where's the equality in that, by the way?) tends to suggest that ISIS is exporting their fighters as refugees or at the very least hiding their fighters amongst a lot of young male refugees where it's hard to tell the difference.

It's not a racist order either, as many in the media have reported, because it doesn't discriminate against race. By it's definition a ban on people from a country is not a ban on race, nor is a ban on one particular religious group racist.

The ethics of such a ban is for others to argue about, but when one is at war (as we all are with ISIS) but morals tend to be flexible and is something where the UK cannot claim to be squeaky clean on. For instance the firebombing of German civilians in cities by the RAF, or the death of innocent civilians caused by the invasion of Iraq, which was at best based on flaky intelligence or at worst just a political publicity stunt.

But it's not like temporary halts on immigration haven't been implemented by the US government before. Other administrations have had temporary bans on accepting people from countries deemed a security risk.

Many News stories have quoted Emma Lazarus' poem on the base of the Statue Of Liberty.. "Give me your tired, your poor..."etc. as a way of stating America's change of heart regarding immigrants. But in the times that poem was written, all the people arriving in America did so to better themselves, to strive for a better life than they could have at home, to make the most of the opportunities afforded by their new home.

Today it is a different story. Yes, there are many arriving in the USA that do genuinely want to take advantage of the same opportunities and freedoms granted to it's citizens. 

But there is a significant number of people arriving in the USA, just as there are in Europe and other free countries around the world, that intent harm, destruction and chaos. 

Those are the reasons for the temporary halt, to take stock and work harder to identify those that mean harm. Those that present a clear and present danger to the USA and the freedoms it holds dear.

However, I will say against it, in it's implementation, Trump's executive order was immature, not understanding the chaos that was caused at airports as immigration officers had to abide by an ill-thought-out order. An easier option would have been to specify implementation on new flights into the USA and to allow those in the air to land an be processed. Unless (and we will probably never know the answer to this) there was an immediate threat to the US identified by the intelligence agencies.

I will also say I'm appalled at the amount of negative publicity given to Trump's order by the mainstream media. It's almost as if they're being paid to push the agenda. What is it with the very forceful pro-immigration sentiment in the media today? So much so they're clouded to the very obvious failings in their own arguments. Should we really take in millions of unvetted refugees? Would the reporters forcing the pro-immigration agenda be happy if (for instance) an unvetted refugee who turned out to be an ISIS member killed a member of their family? Are they happy undermining the security of their own country? If the answer is yes, then why? 

It always amuses me when you get people on news reports getting emotional about the "refugees" in Calais trying to get to the UK, saying the UK must do something to help, we should take in those poor people. But those "poor people" are again young men of fighting age, who just happen to be in France, a very safe country. They are France's problem, not ours. We have no obligation to accept economic migrants (or fake refugees) at all. We do have UN obligations to accept real refugees which the UK and we do abide by our obligations by taking families and children from camps in Jordan, close to Syria where it's easier to confirm the true identity of the refugee and their true status). Families who are in genuine need and who will be thankful for our help and grateful for the sanctuary we give them.

They will not be some angry young Ethiopian who has had to survive the crossing of two continents having been promised streets of gold by people smugglers only to illegally arrive in the UK. An angry young man made even angrier by being exploited by the dark economy. Unable to work because he has no legal status in the UK, denied that pot of gold he was promised in exchange for his life savings. A young man who needs to be saved by making it plain that there is no pot of gold here before he makes the perilous journey, who needs to be encouraged to stay at home and increase the prosperity of his homeland. A homeland free from religious zealots forcing the slaughter of milions in the name of Jihad. A homeland that can trade freely on the world market and is not hampered by huge tariffs on any goods he makes when shipped to the western world and especially the EU. A homeland that educates it's people out of poverty and religious exploitation. A homeland that has the opportunities of prosperity and freedom, free from corruption he would otherwise seek out in the West. 

The real inequality, the real racism the Western Media should be reporting is not the Trump "Ban", nor the plight of refugees in Calais, but the corruption, religious exploitation and inequalities of world trade and global corporate politics that provide the push factor for refugees in the first place..

Trident Tragedy Storm in Teacup

A lot is being made of teh Trident misfire as a way to Bash Teresa May.

The key issue is why the information about the misfire wasn't given out before the debate on Trident oin the commons.

From what I can make of it, the misfire happened just before the debate. Given that such information relates to National Security and our Nuclear deterrent, the information is classified.

It takes weeks for various committees and such to debate the information and eventually declassify it such that the PM can release it to the defence select committee, let along the comkmons at large.

I suspect that the timing is such that the information was still classified at the time of the debate and the PM couldn't release it even if she wanted to.

I Give Trump 3 Months

Before an assassination attempt, successful or otherwise.

He's running a narrative that is the very opposite to the one the intelligence agencies are trying to push.

"The Russians hacked the election!" is being shouted by the CIA and others, yet "It didn't impact the election result!" they say.

Now excuse me for being a bit dumb, but IF the election was hacked, IF it didn't cause a problem, why is it such a big deal?

Now, is this a ploy to piss off the half of the US population that didn't vote for Trump? Is this a ploy to de-legitemise him?

As far as I can tell, the Russian hacking amounted to breaking into the Democrat's poorly secured computers and passing the information to Wikileaks. Hardly the crime of the century or an attempt to destabilise a country. In fact its almost the sort of thing that journalists should be doing, if they were true journalists. The exposure of yet more high-level emails on unsecured servers just shows how poor the Democrats view net security.

I thought it was a felony in the US to have top security documents on unsecured servers or to export them from high security servers to low security ones.

I remember my time working for big finance companies. Cyber security was taken extremely seriously.
The data centres were like Fort Knox, with x-ray scans of baggage and metal detectors for the human traffic, lest you secrete a memory stick on your person.

Emails were only sent internally and to vetted addresses whose network was confirmed as secure as the home network in advance. Emails transferred between networks were always encrypted by a secondary encryption system.

Now that's just a financial company. For feck's sake, this is government traffic we're talking about in the US. Something that should NEVER be on servers less secure than the source.

Anyway, I'll stop digressing. The CIA "briefings" for me are pretty strange. Either they affected the election result and are actionable, or they didn't and aren't. A handful of Russian teenagers hacking into Democrat email servers is not a reason to go to war. The intelligence agencies are not chumps and they don't like being made to look fools. Okay, this time they sort of did it to themselves, but still...

Obviously there's a bit of disagreement between Trump and the intelligence agencies. If I were him, I'd watch out. If just one anti-Trump person is incensed enough to take a pot shot then the intelligence agencies have the smokescreen they need to cover any attempt to get rid of Trump and impose a replacement. Better look into who the vice-president is a bit closer  then....