Sunday, December 07, 2014



Multicultural swindler in Britain



A lonely hearts conman who scammed four women out of almost £100,000 by posing as a Royal Marine on dating website Match.com has been jailed for four years

Adewale Adewole, 31, a Nigerian immigrant, wooed his victims after falsely claiming to be an army captain who ran an orphanage in Africa.

Adopting the name Timmy Francis, he claimed he was looking for romance on the site with two profiles: 'Charismatic Brit' and 'To live and love'.

But the pictures he used to create an appealing profile were actually of a Royal Marine Commando called Joshua McGowan who was unaware his images were being used by Adewole.

The unnamed women who replied to his seemingly perfect profile fell for his charms but were then duped out of their money when Adewole claimed he was robbed at his 'orphanage'.

The women sent him cash and paid his hotel bills thinking they were bailing out their suitor - only for him to divert the money into the bank account of his wife who shared his home with their two children in Eccles, Greater Manchester.

Manchester Crown Court heard yesterday that Adewole, a father of three, also splashed out on iPads, TVs and designer clothes.

Police who investigated the scam discovered the women had tried to meet up with him but he always stood them up.

He now faces jail after admitting four charges of fraud but is disputing some of the facts and is running a 'trial of issue.'

Prosecutor Charlotte Brandon told the court the four victims were registered with Match.com and did not know each other.

She added: 'They were all contacted on the dating site by a man called Timmy Francis who had two profiles under the mottos 'To Live and Love' and 'Charismatic Brit'. 'They had contact with him during the period the fraud took place via text message, phone and email.

'He told them he had been a captain in the army. He also said he ran an orphanage in Africa called the Hope House Foundation, for which he set up a website with his own mobile phone number on.

'There was a profile picture on his Match accounts and he sent some of the women photographs of himself - all of these pictures were actually of a Royal Marine Commander called Joshua McGowan who knew nothing of what was going on.

'Although they arranged to meet, he never kept to the arrangements and never did meet any of the victims.'

Miss Brandon added: 'He told the women that on a trip to Africa he was the victim of a crime and needed money. The crime meant he could not access his own funds.

'He said they would get their money back and would be sent letters from the World Health Organisation to show that he would be able to pay them.

'These letters were sent, but from an M30 Manchester postmark. He also sent them links to websites which, when logging in with details he gave them, appeared to show that he had a huge bank balance and would eventually be able to pay them back.

'One woman was asked to pay for a hotel for him. When she rang the number he gave her for the hotel, they also confirmed the information and she agreed to pay it. 'She later received a cheque addressed to him for £35,000 to prove he had money, but this was later discovered to be a stolen cheque forged in his own handwriting.

'Over a number of months each woman transferred significant sums of money via bank accounts and Western Union moneygrams and sent items to the defendant's home address. They bought electronic items, took out credit cards and loans and bought clothes from Next.

'Many of the goods were sent to his home address in Eccles from where the victims believed they would be forwarded on to the defendant in Nigeria.  'When the women stopped sending money, they never heard from him again.'

The court heard the total amount stolen including the value of the household goods and Western Union transfers was £98,140.

Adewole was arrested in October 2012 at his flat and £4,500 in cash was found under his bed.

A digital camera was found purchased by one of the victims, but containing pictures of the defendant and his wife and children. Designer clothes and shoes were also found worth £2,000.

Adewole's wallet was also seized and contained several SIM cards, some of which contained the phone numbers of the victims.

His two Blackberry phones were also seized - on these three different email accounts were in use which were linked to the two Match.com accounts.

He was bailed and later tried to call one of the woman again under the name Timmy Francis and was arrested again.

When questioned he claimed to know nothing of the orphanage but that the £4,500 was his and claimed the majority of the items found in his flat were to go to his mother in Nigeria.

He added all he knew of the bank transfers was that his flatmate Samson Ajayi had asked him to have some money transferred to a relative - and claimed Mr Ajayi was responsible.

He admitted he had used Match.com between 2010 and 2012 but could not remember when exactly.

Detective Constable Sean Nicholls, from Greater Manchester Police, told the hearing: 'There has never been any evidence to prove there was someone else involved.

'There was possibly some help involved somewhere in Nigeria. There may well have been more than one person assisting him, male and female. 'But I believe any phone calls made to the victims were from the defendant himself.  'I believe Timmy Francis is a made-up name. I have made enquiries in our systems but there is nothing to suggest he exists.'

Adewole, who arrived in UK in 2009 on a visa to study, said: 'The fraud was Samson's idea. I got involved because I had a few financial difficulties at the time.   'I did not speak with the complainants. I did not know money was being sent to Nigeria but I knew it was being sent to my bank account and my wife's bank account.

'I do not know where Samson is at the moment. He travels a lot. I have no idea about the details of this fraud. I didn't even know how many victims there were.

'But I pleaded guilty because if I had not let my bank account or flat be used, these women would not have suffered in the way that they did.

'Samson said he was expecting some money. He said he had no bank accounts to receive the money so I wanted to help him. He was owing me rent at the time and this was the only way he could pay me. '

Sentencing Adewole today, Judge David Stockdale said: 'The evidence against the defendant is, in my judgement, overwhelming.

'I am satisfied on the evidence I have heard of the facts that the defendant's role in the enterprise in which these four women were defrauded was a leading role.

'He was not working alone and others were involved but the use of his bank account and phones and the items found at his flat all indicate overwhelmingly that the defendant was a principal player.

'The man called Samson has not been traced. He may have been an accomplice.. If Samson was an accomplice and took part in this operation, that does not undermine my conclusion. That is my ruling on the issue.'

SOURCE






Hobbit Author J.R.R. Tolkien's Anti-Socialist, Pro-Liberty Message

J.R.R. Tolkien, the British author best known for The Hobbit and his epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, was an astute critic of socialism and utopianism and a passionate defender of liberty, says Jay Richards, co-author of The Hobbit Party, which he calls “a study of the political and economic implications of Tolkien’s thought.”

“Certainly anyone that’s seen The Lord of the Rings, for instance, at the movies knows that he was deeply concerned about the dangers and the temptations of absolute power.

"The symbol of the one ring, of course. It’s not just a symbol of the sort of corrupting possibilities of power, but the especially corrupting possibilities of power to dominate the wills of others,” Richards, who is also an assistant professor at Catholic University’s School of Business and Economics, told CNSNews.com.

“His book and the ring are not a critique of all uses of power. In fact, the good guys fight in wars and battles, and so obviously you use force. But it’s rather a critique of the perennial human temptation to acquire power to dominate others.

"And so this is what gives his books, especially The Lord of the Rings, a kind of a deeply political character and we think makes him a strong advocate both for small and limited government, but also a strong defender of freedom.”

Sifting through hundreds of Tolkien’s private letters as well as his works of fiction, Richards and co-author Jonathan Witt found many examples in which he criticized “both the kind of hard socialism that he had witnessed in the Soviet Union, but also the sort of post-World War II soft democratic socialism he saw in Great Britain, which was very much in the ascendancy” when The Hobbit was published in 1937.

“And so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a lot of the kind of official literati and literary critics panned the books. They thought they were just absolutely terrible. One critic we quote in the book says: ‘These are not the sorts of books a person will read more than once,’ which of course is exactly the opposite of the case. These are books people read throughout their lives.

“But what’s interesting about Tolkien, one sign that’s there more economic message to these texts than people realize, is that the Soviet Union banned all of Tolkien’s writings. It’s not often known, but we tell the story at the end of the book about those great days during the collapse of the Soviet Union when thousands of civilians poured into Red Square and there was this question about what the tanks were going to do. And in the middle of those crowds a sign popped up that said: ‘Frodo is with us’.

“And that’s when a lot of Americans found out that in fact, the Soviets had been passing around this sort of contraband, mimeographed version, bad translation of The Lord of the Rings for decades.”

Although both the Russian dissidents and the Soviet Politburo clearly understood the underlying political and economic message in Tolkien’s trilogy, “ordinary English readers often don’t get it because we don’t suffer in the way that they did,” Richards said.

“Contrary to what a lot of people think about Tolkien, he wasn’t a Luddite,” he noted. “He wasn’t opposed to economic trade, and in fact he used widening circles of trade as an example of human flourishing. That’s something I think a lot of people don’t notice unless they’re looking for it.

“As far as we know, he never studied economics,” Richards continued. “It was just the result of having a very good theology and a rich anthropology, and so managing to intuitively come to some very sound economic conclusions. That was surprising. We knew he would be interesting and insightful, but I didn’t really expect him to be quite as acutely understanding of economic topics, far more so than his critics and many of his fans [are aware].”

“We know he was a Tory, and so he was essentially a political conservative, and was very skeptical of state power, especially the centralization of power even to his own party. But he was also a monarchist. That’s something that makes him challenging, I think, to modern Americans.

“And so I would just call him a small government conservative who didn’t like concentrations of power and had a genuinely benign view of human creativity and trade. He would probably be a curmudgeonly conservative in the United States today, but he doesn’t fit so neatly into American political categories.”

However, the underlying economic and political theme of Tolkien’s work “taps into these universal realities of life and death, love and sacrifice, good and evil,” Richards told CNSNews.com.                         

“On the first page of The Lord of the Rings he starts with the Shire. He says at that time, the Shire had hardly any government. In fact, the only government is the sheriffs who walk around without uniforms, and all they really do is protect people’s property. So if some sheep wander into another farmer’s field, the sheriff moves the sheep over.

“And then you come to the end of The Lord of the Rings in the book (not the movie), and there’s a chapter called ‘The Scouring of the Shire,’ which every interpreter recognizes as an obvious critique of socialism. The fallen wizard Saruman gets some of his toadies and some other Hobbits, and they essentially take control of the shire. They take down the Party Tree, tear down buildings and centralize the means of production.

“In the beginning, there’s this beautiful, bucolic, very small government image, and then at the end you have the Hobbits having to retake the Shire after it’s been overrun by these planners and controllers.”

Because Tolkien, a Catholic, had an “essentially Christian worldview,” Richards pointed out that he did not sugar-coat the realities of life on Earth, including Middle Earth. ”He believed in the goodness of creation, but he also believed in the Fall and didn’t think utopias were possible. So he didn’t want to have these overly saccharine happy endings in which everything just got put back into place.”

Tolkien was “bemused” when hippies in America discovered him during the 1960s. CNSNews.com asked Richards why he was so popular with the far-left crowd.

“It’s hard to say what is interesting to people who are dropping acid and smoking pot, but [Tolkien’s creation] is just so mind-blowing. It’s a fascinating, complete world. It’s ironic, because the drug culture was about an escape psychologically into Middle Earth and the literature is not escapist. In fact, it explores all the perennial difficult questions of life.

“But I do honestly think it was such a complete and mystifying world that a lot of people took a liking to it just for the greatness of it. It does Tolkien a disservice not to recognize that he’s such a great artist, such a great creator of an imaginary world that all sorts of people were drawn to him.”

“The sign of a classic is precisely that it stands the test of time. Tolkien’s work already stood that test because tens of millions of people are still reading his books,” he noted.

Cultural forces similar to those at work in Tolkien’s time and the popularity of Academy Award-winning director Peter Jackson’s cinematic tribute both play a part in the recent upsurge of interest in the “moral traditionalist’s” work, he added. Jackson’s latest film, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, will be released in theaters Dec. 17.

“The kind of apocalyptic dystopian novel and movie is really popular right now, and you do get that feeling in The Lord of the Rings, which is sort of the ultimate cataclysmic battle between good and evil. And with Saruman and the Orcs, you get a really unambiguous picture. Yes, he believed even the good guys are flawed and fallen, but there are good guys and bad guys. That’s the traditional view that is supposedly out of vogue.

“But the popularity of these books has actually grown. In fact, in many polls taken right around the turn of the [21st] century, The Lord of the Rings came in only second behind A Tale of Two Cities in terms of the most widely-read English books. And after the slow-growing, cultish fascination with Tolkien, the movies brought him to a whole new generation, and not just in the English-speaking world.”

However, in making films of such complex works of fiction, a lot of things necessarily got left out, Richards said. “My hope is that lots of people who otherwise would not have read Tolkien will eventually go back and read the books and discover things they wouldn’t have expected.”

SOURCE






Rev. Franklin Graham: ‘The War on Christmas’ in America is ‘A War on Christ’

Rev. Franklin Graham, son of world renowned evangelist Billy Graham, said the last few decades in America have witnessed an increased hostility towards “the sacred nature of Christmas,” a stripping away of religious references in the public square that is “at its root and core” a “war on Christ and His Followers.”

“The war on Christmas is a war on Christ,” said Rev. Graham, a “hatred” against a culture that celebrates the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh as a baby 2,000 years ago, and anticipates his second coming when, as a “conquering King,” He will “cast Satan and unbelievers into an eternal lake of fire.”

Analyzing the war on Christmas, Rev. Graham in his December commentary in Decision magazine, published by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, said, “Stores, schools and communities across America continue to find new and intolerant reasons to remove any religious references to Christmas, stripping it of any holy or historical significance. Christian songs, prayers and other spiritually vital connections to the Lord Jesus Christ are deleted or diminished.”

For example, in Ramsey County, Minn., he said, a courthouse “banned red poinsettias because someone deemed them a ‘Christian symbol,’” and in Pittsburgh the Christmas holidays are referred to “as ‘Sparkle Days,’ in an ironic attempt at avoiding offense.” Also, a VA hospital in Georgia banned “religious Christmas songs in public areas.”

Between the time that Jesus came as a baby and His second coming are “the last days,” said Rev. Graham, adding that, as the Apostle Paul wrote, the last days will be marked by “pride, brutality, treachery and heartlessness.”

“We should not be taken aback, then, when a day that should be devoted to meditating upon the marvelous, virgin birth of the Lord Jesus Christ is instead treated in a scandalously secular way that denies His deity and saving work,” said the reverend, who is the president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA).

“The Name of Christ is an offense to the unbelieving world,” he said.  “The mention of His birth, or life, or death and resurrection, is an insult. The world, the flesh and the Devil all hate the mere mention of His glorious Name. They are mortal enemies of the Savior.”

That “world system,” said Rev. Graham,  “is enthralled with power and greed, and it wants no part of the Messiah’s absolute authority.”

That rebellion against God is animated by the Devil, said Rev. Graham, the demon who, “knowing that his time to roam on Earth is short and that he will one day be cast into the lake of fire, he opposes Christ at every turn. He and his demons will help gather all the nations into a great last-ditch rebellion against the King of kings before he is defeated.”

Until that happens, however, “we should expect stiff, relentless opposition to the Gospel message from our culture,” said Rev. Graham.

He added that the brutal persecution of Christians in other countries may be “far into the future for us” in the United States, but we cannot expect “that it will not intensify and heighten.”

SOURCE





Black People the Media Hate (And Rand Paul Isn't Wild About)

By Ann Coulter

Now that the Ferguson grand jury documents have been made public, even MSNBC has had to quietly drop its fantasy of Michael Brown being gunned down like a dog in the street by Officer Darren Wilson. Instead, MSNBC is defending the looters.

On Monday night, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes objected to anyone referring to the people who “set fires or looted as ‘thugs.’”

His guest, former Seattle chief of police Norm Stamper, said, “I could not agree more.” (Stamper did such a bang-up job dealing with the World Trade Organization riots in 1999 that he was forced to resign – which may explain why he is the left’s favorite police chief.)

Hardworking black people in Ferguson poured their lives into their stores, depended on them to support their families and shopped at them to improve their quality of life. I wonder if they appreciated Hayes' principled opposition to calling the arsonists “thugs.”

Instead of exquisite sensitivity to the feelings of black thugs, how about considering the feelings of black citizens who want to live in safe neighborhoods?

There’s a reason so many black people supported Officer Wilson’s account and that a black woman walked into a burning convenience store in the middle of the riot to extinguish the fire with gallons of milk.

In “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama,” I told the true stories of dozens of allegedly racist crimes sensationalized by the media. In almost all of them, there were unheralded black heroes who stood up for law and order against “the community.”

When Exeter student Edmund Perry got himself killed by mugging a cop, at least a half-dozen black witnesses supported the cop’s version. While The New York Times was droning on about Perry as “a prized symbol of hope,” Perry’s black neighbors were testifying to the grand jury that his brother admitted they had mugged a cop.

At least three black friends of the Central Park rapists told the police that the defendants had confessed to attacking the jogger. (In what must have been an oversight, those witnesses didn’t make it into Ken Burns' movie.)

A young black woman, who was in Bernie Goetz’s subway car with her husband and child when Goetz shot four black muggers, told the jury, “Those punks got what they deserved.”

Goetz’s lawyer Barry Slotnick made no effort to keep blacks off the jury. His faith was rewarded: Goetz’s biggest defender on the jury was a black bus driver from Harlem. It is well known by prosecutors that working and married blacks make great jurors.

But we never hear about those black people. Why, that would spoil everything!

There are loads of movies about black criminals – rewritten the way the media were hoping the story would come out, but didn’t. (Movie: “Murder Without Motive: The Edmund Perry Story.” Spoiler alert! The tale of a racist white cop who shot an innocent black honor student for no discernible reason.)

How about a movie paying tribute to the African-American eyewitnesses in Ferguson who told the truth to the grand jury?

Who speaks for them?  It’s sure not Sen. Rand Paul.

We need video footage of blacks burning other blacks' stores down juxtaposed with clips of Sen. Paul saying that the reason “three out of four people in prison are black or brown” may be “because of the color of their skin or their economic status.” Another possibility – I’m just throwing it out there – is that the reason black, brown or white people are in prison is because they’ve committed crimes.

Improving their “economic status” doesn’t seem to help. The two men arrested for trying to buy bombs in Ferguson in order to blow up the Gateway Arch and kill the prosecutor and chief of police were prevented from buying as many bombs as they had hoped because they needed to wait for more money to be transferred onto a girlfriend’s EBT card (Electronic Benefits Card – food stamps).

For claiming the drug laws are racist, Sen. Paul seems to imagine his portrait is being hung in black homes across America, between pictures of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. “White people do drugs too,” Paul tells admiring white liberals in the media, “but either they don’t get caught or they have better attorneys or they don’t live in poverty.”

If Rand Paul thinks black people are rooting for black crack dealers to go free, he’s even crazier than his old man.

It was African-Americans, exploding in rage at the devastation crack was inflicting on their neighborhoods in the 1980s, who demanded severe penalties for crack cocaine. In a typical news story from 1986, Julius Lee, the black city commissioner in Fort Pierce, Florida, said, “Drugs are terrible things, but these cocaine rocks are the terriblest of the terrible.” Black grocer Eugene Gibson sadly remarked, while sweeping the sidewalk in front of his store, “We’re in a world of trouble here. … It’s these cocaine rocks.”

A few years later, in 1989, black columnist Dorothy Gaiter perfectly expressed the feelings of the (non-crack dealing) black community in The Miami Herald: “Crack sellers should be locked up and their bounty taken away from them. The jails are crowded with murderers and others who deserve to be there, but the crack seller is a murderer too. He’s a lethal seducer of our young, a destroyer of our neighborhoods. Being poor is no crime and should not result in a sentence to live among the lawless.”

But now Sen. Paul is pushing the idea that the drug laws black people begged for were actually part of a racist plot to lock up African-Americans. It’s like something out of Maxine Waters' dream journal.

The only people impressed with Rand Paul’s defense of black criminals are the ones who will never be victimized by them.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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