GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — A man who owns a gold-mining claim on federal land in southwestern Oregon asked for help defending it after U.S. authorities ordered him to stop work, but he is now telling his armed supporters to back off.

Rick Barclay said Thursday that he hoped to prevent his fight with federal regulators from turning into the kind of high-profile standoff at a Nevada ranch last year.

He initially called in a local chapter of constitutional activists known as the Oath Keepers because he thought the U.S. Bureau of Land Management would seize the equipment on his mining claim outside Grants Pass. The agency had served an order to stop work at the mine after finding it lacked the necessary paperwork.

Armed activists started showing up Monday at the mine and a rural property about 20 miles away, Oath Keepers spokeswoman Mary Emerick said. She said the group was still recruiting people to help provide security for the mine but would not say how many activists were there.

A total of eight people, two of them armed with pistols, could be seen at two staging areas outside Grants Pass. They refused to answer questions.

The Oath Keepers’ website said the group was not trying to confront the Bureau of Land Management, and Emerick said the group was vetting everyone who showed up.

Bureau of Land Management spokesman Jim Whittington said the agency has fielded threatening phone calls, but he would not give details because the calls were under investigation.

Now, Barclay is telling his supporters that the mine is not under attack, posts online by “keyboard warriors” have gotten out of hand and he was not interested in a repeat of the Cliven Bundy ranch standoff.

“We are not looking for Bundyville. We are not looking to challenge anything. We are just holding our constitutional rights and property rights in reserve until we get our day in court,” Barclay said.

He and his partner, George Backes, believe they do not have to file an operations plan demanded by the Bureau of Land Management because they hold the surface rights on the mining claim, Barclay said. The claim has been continuously owned since 1858, predating the Bureau of Land Management’s authority and other mining laws, he said.

Read the rest @ http://news.yahoo.com/owner-mining-claim-urges-armed-supporters-stand-down-201642510.html

ROME (AP) — Italy’s migration crisis took on a deadly new twist Thursday as police in Sicily reported that Muslim migrants had thrown 12 Christians overboard during a recent crossing from Libya, and aid groups said another 41 were feared drowned in a separate incident.

Palermo police said they had detained 15 people suspected in the high seas assault, which they learned of while interviewing tearful survivors from Nigeria and Ghana who had arrived in Palermo Wednesday morning after being rescued at sea.

The 15 were accused of multiple homicide aggravated by religious hatred, police said in a statement.

The survivors said they had boarded a rubber boat April 14 on the Libyan coast with 105 passengers aboard, part of the wave of migrants taking advantage of calm seas and warm weather to make the risky crossing from Libya, where most smuggling operations originate.

During the crossing, the migrants from Nigeria and Ghana — believed to be Christians — were threatened with being abandoned at sea by some 15 other passengers from the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and Guinea Bissau.

The statement said the motive was that the victims “professed the Christian faith while the aggressors were Muslim.”

Earlier Thursday, the International Organization of Migration said four migrants who were picked up in recent days by the Italian Navy reported a shipwreck to aid workers after arriving in the Italian port of Trapani Thursday. They were among 580 migrants brought to the port on Thursday and said 41 others were believed to have died.

The IOM said the migrants — two Nigerians, a Ghanaian and one Nigerien — were found floating in the sea by a helicopter and were rescued by the Italian Naval ship Foscari. They had left Tripoli in Libya on Saturday and stayed adrift for four days. The location of the rescue was not immediately known.

The new tragedies come just days after aid agencies reported 400 presumed dead in the sinking of another ship near the Libyan coast. The deaths have raised calls for a more robust search and rescue of the seas between Libya and Europe amid a surge in migration between the Middle East and Africa toward Italy.

Via Fred Reed @ http://www.fredoneverything.net/Vassar.shtml

Vassar…Vassar?

Watching the Leper’s Fingers Fall

April 12, 2015

Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. At Vassar some ditzbunny got blitzed, got laid, and a year later decided that she had been sexually assaulted. I guess she didn’t notice it at the time. You have to be alert to know when you have been raped. It can happen when you are distracted, maybe working on your laundry list, and you don’t find out about it for a while.

Congruent with the national fantasy that college girls don’t know about sex or the effects of beer, a conventionally imbecilic judge found the guy guilty. No surprise here. (“What part of “yes” don’t you understand, your honor?”)

But check out the astonishing email she wrote to the offender:

“I’m really sorry I led you on last night I should have known better then [sic] to let my self [sic] drink yet, I really don’t want this to effect [sic] our team dynamic or friendship. I don’t think any less of you at all I had a wonderful time last night I’m just too close to my previous relationship to be in one right now.”

Doesn’t sound very raped to me, but what do I know? I love her grammar. The child is semiliterate. I couldn’t have gotten away with such stuff in the sixth grade. Vassar? The national fingers drop. Drop, drop, drop they drop.

Next, in Stars and Stripes, we find that American Special Operations troops do not believe that women can succeed in their death-in-the-bushes outfits. The shame. How can they believe that women, who obviously can’t do certain things, obviously can’t do the things they obviously can’t do? This discriminatory position has no support at all, other than common sense, observation, and experience.

You see: Women, imperiled by frat parties, want to be SEALs. The only conclusion possible is that women are crazy.

Next, Rolling Stone retracts its story about yet another imaginary rape, this time at the University of Virginia. The magazine admits that it just invented the story. This too is traditional, as in the Towana Brawley and the Duke lacrosse unrapes. The magazine called the story’s fabricator, one Sabrtina Erdely, ”a really expert fabulist storyteller.”  This is flackspeak for “an accomplished liar.” The magazine says that Sabrina will not be fired. Apparently the story was in the nature of a typo. It could happen to anyone.

I find myself wondering what is going on in the swirling minds of American women. I asked Natalia, my Mexican stepdaughter, whether rape was a concern on her university campus in Guadalajara. “No,” she said, and apparently thought she had exhausted the subject. There is in these rape rhapsodies a whiff of lurking bogeymen, an hysteria reminiscent of the spinster looking under her bed every night for fear, or in hopes, of finding a man.

Something curious goes on with our indigenous females. What? Is it that they can’t decide whether they want to be biochemists or mommies? That they really aren’t comfortable in the workplace? The insecurity of not having a place in society with which they are comfortable? Have stopped quite being women without quite being men, and it boggles them? Get things through affirmative action but know that they got them that way? Their personal systems seem to be under some nameless stress.

Next, the US has become a continental Vassar. Fortune headline: “American Millennials are among the world’s least skilled.” It warms a curmudgeon’s heart, as it will lead to something apppallingly stupid but interesting. Wilful collapse is wonderful entertainment.

Yes. We gringos are all brainless now, men and women together, koom bah yah. This is the unsurprising conclusion of a sprawling international exam.
Here we go:

“Sponsored by the OECD, the test was designed to measure the job skills of adults, aged 16 to 65, in 23 countries. When the results were analyzed by age group and nationality, ETS got a shock. It turns out, says a new report, that Millennials in the U.S. fall short when it comes to the skills employers want most: literacy (including the ability to follow simple instructions), practical math, and — hold on to your hat — a category called “problem-solving in technology-rich environments.”

Actually, our larvae fall way short, being behind everyone but Spain, Ireland, and Poland. Welcome to Vassar.

Not to worry, though. Nobody can hope to challenge America, us, the indispensable country. In particular, the Chinese are lazy, narcissistic, stupid, immature, lacking in ambition, and very, very bad at math. They enroll only in victims’ studies, and spend most of their time in studying rape or taking selfies.

As proof of this inferiority, I offer a column of the other day by Pat Buchanan.

By way of introduction, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Fairfax County in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, accepts only seriously smart kids. I mean, pretty seriously seriously smart kids.

Writes Buchanan, “According to the Post, 70 percent of the incoming freshmen are Asians, the highest percentage ever…White students make up only 22 percent of the entering class.”

Ye gods and little catfish. And big ones too. This is worse than it seems since whites much outnumber Asians in suburban Virginia. Seventy freaking percent? But the snowballing inadequacy is everywhere, like corruption and sinus drainage. At CalTech, with probably the highest entrance standards in the US, and no affirmative action: Asians 40%, whites 29%, Hispanics 10%, and blacks 1.7%. In the elite high schools of New York, the same pattern holds.

But not to worry. Writes Buchanan, “Jeremy Shughart, admissions director at TJ, has a committee “reviewing the application process to improve diversity at the school.” Oh good. Affirmative action. Heartwarming morons. Dumbed-down classes will presumably follow.

More specifically, the school will admit unqualified blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites, or at the expense of Asians. That will fix things.  The white kids will probably have to take Ritalin, attend rape-consciousness seminars, and discuss feelings.

Being as I am incorrigible, and weary of bureaucratic capons, in Shughart’s place I would have told the entitlement doxies, “Bugger off. TJ is not a remedial institution for the mentally lame and halt, the ethnically challenged and gender-deficient. If you can’t cut the mustard, get a federal job.”

But the man—I use the term loosely—doesn’t have the glands. Dimmer and dimmer we get, and dimmer, and dimmer. What else could one expect in a feminized system of schools hostile to academics, boys, talent, and competition? And unable to see the consequences of their sillinesses? Not to worry, though. Not for a little bit.