Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State: Houston Stewart Chamberlain

From FEE.org:

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) is an exceedingly strange figure in the history of politics and ideas: a British-born German whose influence bled into Germany and back again to his home. As son-in-law to the famed composer Richard Wagner, he became a dear friend and fanatical admirer of Adolph Hitler and the most aggressive proponent of virulent anti-Semitism ever to come out of England.

He had decided early in life to locate the source of all political and economic evil in the Industrial Revolution, preferring his own made-up vision of what he called “Merry Old England” consisting of a beautiful aristocracy, hard-toiling and thrifty peasants, and patriotic citizens dedicated to preserving the language and race against the commercial forces of modernity. Under these conditions, unlike the demographic mess unleashed by capitalism, women were submissive to the wills of their fathers and husbands, devoted only to furthering the superior race.

His weird 1899 book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century became a bestseller, many times over, throughout the Continent. Heavily influenced by the racial typologies that were increasingly popular, he described the Jews as mindlessly materialistic and the source of most evil in the modern world.

The Jews, he said, caused the downfall of Rome, for example. He argued that Jesus cannot possibly have been a Jew since all good in the world emanates from the pure Aryan race. Instead, he was “of exceptional beauty, tall and slim with a noble face inspiring respect and love; his hair blond shading into chestnut brown, his arms and hands noble and exquisitely formed.” It was in this book that he laid out his theory that a Jewish plot was afoot to wipe out the Aryan race and turn all Europe into a race of “pseudo-Hebraic mestizos.”

His book, which was printed in eight editions in the first ten years of its publication, and eventually sold as many as 250,000 copies by 1938, catapulted him into the status of a celebrity intellectual. And so his every utterance became gospel for his followers, even his proclamation that the Great War, which he believed the Jews had started, had led England “totally into the hands of the Jews and the Americans” and capitalist machinery.

It was in the midst of his fame that he reached out to an emergently powerful Hitler. Hearing that both Hitler and Joseph Goebbels could be counted among his fan base, he wrote Hitler in 1923:

“Most respected and dear Hitler ... It is hardly surprising that a man like that can give peace to a poor suffering spirit! Especially when he is dedicated to the service of the fatherland. My faith in Germandom has not wavered for a moment, though my hopes were – I confess – at a low ebb. With one stroke you have transformed the state of my soul. That Germany, in the hour of her greatest need, brings forth a Hitler – that is proof of her vitality ... I can now go untroubled to sleep ... May God protect you!”

After Hitler’s conviction of high treason following the Beer-hall putsch, Chamberlain stuck by him and kept hope alive. Hitler was touched, and, following Hitler’s release from prison, Hitler paid a visit to Chamberlain in Bayreuth in 1927, accompanied by Goebbels. Chamberlain assured Hitler that he was certainly “the chosen one,” thereupon lifting Hitler’s spirits. The leading Nazi in-house philosopher, Alfred Rosenberg, was perhaps an even greater fan of Chamberlain. An ailing Chamberlain died in 1927, never knowing of the Nazi attempt to deal with the “Jewish problem” he had dedicated his life to exposing.

Source: Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State.

Communism Part II: The Scourge Spreads

Communism’s first leader — Vladimir Lenin — fell ill and died in 1924, setting the stage for Josef Stalin. Just as it had been under the first few years of communist policies, the Soviet Union fell into another great famine in the early ’30s. Stalin brutally kept food from starving people, ordering his soldiers to shoot and kill peasants that came near it. Adding to the five million who had succumbed to the famine of 1921, another six million people died.

Former Ukrainian president, Victor Yushchenko, in a speech to the United States, put the total number of his dead countrymen at 20 million. It was essentially a genocide of the Ukrainian people, believed to have been planned by Stalin to eliminate the Ukrainian Independence Movement.

By the 1920s and 1930s, an Austrian named Adolf Hitler, once considered a joke in Germany, was a joke no longer. After joining and rising to the top of the National Socialist German Workers Party — the Nazi Party — Hitler attempted a coup in 1925, winding up in prison where he wrote Mein Kampf.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler laid out his intentions for ridding Germany of Jews and invading multiple nations. Somehow, the book captivated the imagination of many Germans. Hitler himself made a fortune from the proceeds. In 1933, he became chancellor of Germany and began implementing the policies he’d laid out to the German people. Hilter saw his brand of National Socialism as much more progressive than Soviet Communism.

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By the end of World War II, Mao Zedong had gained control of northern China. He had convinced impoverished peasants to fight against Chinese nationalists, promising redistributed land and lower taxes.

Mao’s forces swept to victory, and the nationalists fled to Taiwan. But the poor in China never saw the promised equality or redistribution of wealth. Rather, Mao oversaw the starvation and slaughter of 60 million Chinese.

By 1981, five years after Mao’s death, 85 percent of China’s population lived in abject poverty. Yet Chairman Mao’s image appears on hipster T-shirts and coffee cups around the world, even showing up on Obama’s Christmas tree as a White House Christmas ornament in 2009.

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Unfortunately, communism eventually infected the Western Hemisphere, where another ruthless communist rose to power. Che Guevara, yet another Marxist revolutionary born to wealthy parents, was a ruthless, racist killer who seemed to have contempt for all those he pretended to care about. Like Mao, he is widely celebrated today by many on the American left as a hero of the worker and minorities.

According to the Black Book of Communism, during just the first year of Che’s revolution, firing squads executed 14,000 people. He sent thousands more, including homosexuals, to concentration camps. Che plotted the destruction of the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, the Washington Monument, as well as bombing Macy’s, Gimbels, Bloomingdale’s and Grand Central Station in New York City. In 1967, Che’s reign of terror finally ended, when he was executed by firing squad.

Despite the wake of oppression and death left by communism all over the world — 100 million peacetime deaths and millions more during revolutionary wars — many continue to glorify it to this day.  [read more]

Source: Communism Part II: The Scourge Spreads.

FEE.org articles:

• Communism's Legacy: Tyranny, Terror, and Torture
• How Communism Became the Disease It Tried to Cure

6 Cultural Reasons for Our Health Care Policy Mess

From FEE.org (Mar. 31):

1. The American middle class does not believe in saving up for health care expenses.
2. The American middle class does not believe in paying taxes in order to support people who are very poor or very sick. We are not Denmark.
3. Americans are not willing to say, “The proposed treatment for this problem is not worth the cost. The individual should accept lower-cost treatments and live (or perhaps not live) with the consequences.”
4. Americans, and especially health care providers, do not want to think of health care as a commodity.
5. Americans are not willing to give up being the “early adopters” of new treatments, which are often much more expensive when they first appear than when they have been available for many years.
6. Americans seem to be more willing to spend public money on medical services than on public health.

[read more]

Not only American’s are taught not to save for health care but not to save for retirement either. That’s what social security is for. It’s an entitlement. If Obamacare isn’t going to be replaced pretty soon it will be viewed as an entitlement too.

Basically, Big Gov is telling people us don’t plan for your future we’ll do that for you cause we are your Parents.

Communism Part 1: How It’s Marketed

When Karl Marx was born in Prussia (now part of Germany) in 1818, 94 percent of the world’s population lived in poverty. 84 percent lived in extreme poverty. Feudalism as an economic system left a lot to be desired, like food. The capitalist system, under the Constitution of the United States, changed all of that dramatically.

In one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind, just 9.6 percent of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty today. Back in 1818, America was just 42 years old and still developing, but it was already becoming the envy of the world. The capitalist — or free market — system was beginning to take hold and pull this country’s citizens out of poverty. It offered new opportunities for millions of citizens and immigrants were beginning to flood its shores.

Europe was a different matter. Monarchy and feudalism was still embedded throughout much of the continent. But great change was taking hold. Industrialization was bringing scores of people from the country to the cities — which were quickly becoming overcrowded. This led to massive discontent.

Marx, who despised what he saw of capitalism, would take advantage of this discontent, becoming radicalized at an early age.

After receiving his doctorate in philosophy, Marx and his wife moved to Paris in 1843, where he would meet a man who would become his life-long friend and colleague — Friedrich Engels. The two had supposedly been drawn to the plight of the workers from their childhoods. They both believed profits generated by the companies that employed them were stolen from wages the workers should have received.

As the two fed off each other, they became more and more radical in their thinking, until they became all-out revolutionaries and were both expelled from France. They moved to Belgium and in 1848, began to work on a pamphlet to share their beliefs. Initially entitled A Communist Confession of Faith, the pamphlet — written mostly by Marx — was published as The Communist Manifesto.

In 1867, Marx wrote another handbook for communist thinkers, Das Kapital. It was published in his home country, Germany, and translated into many other languages. In it, Marx made the point that capitalism exploited workers, and property rights simply kept rich people rich and poor people poor. He went on to write two additional volumes, which were published after his death at the age of 64 in 1883, by Engels.

Marx never experienced the Communist Revolution he sought in his lifetime. But his ideas would be remembered in the minds of others for decades to come. One young Russian was heavily and immediately influenced by Marx’s writing — a 17-year-old boy named Vladimir Lenin.

Source: Communism Part I: How It’s Marketed.

From FEE.org:

• Marx the Man
• Marx’s Flight from Reality

Taxes lecture notes

A Tax Foundation study found that the current U.S. tax code is over one million words in length.

The Office of the Taxpayer Advocate estimated that between 2001 and 2010, the tax code was changed over 5,000 times.

The complexity of our tax code leads to cronyism, loopholes and confusion.

A tax on income discourages earning income.

Economist Knut Wicksell argued that taxes and expenditures should be linked.

Dr. Clark states that when tax policy is used to reshape society, the result is typically unintended consequences.

If elected leaders simplified the tax code, the burdensome costs of taxation would decrease.

Source: “Taxes” from Hillsdale College’s Public Policy from a Constitutional Viewpoint course.

IBM plans to build the first commercially available universal quantum computer

From Fox News.com (Mar. 6):

IBM has announced a major new initiative to make universal quantum computers available commercially. IBM Q will offer up the power of quantum computation via the IBM Cloud platform, a first for the industry, and potentially a major step forward for the field.

Quantum hardware has already been made available by the likes of D-Wave, but its hardware is limited in the kinds of computation it can achieve. IBM Q marks the first time that a universal quantum computer is being offered up. A universal quantum computer is capable of tackling problems that are too large for a conventional system, so IBM Q would have many applications beyond what's possible with current technology.

IBM is pledging that universal quantum computing systems will be made available to select industry partners over the coming years. The company expects to increase the capabilities of the hardware as time goes on.  [read more]

If IBM can build the quantum computer it’s a game changer—no, it’s revolutionary. The reader might want to refer to my blog entry “New Step Towards The Quantum Computer” for more information about quantum computers.

For full disclosure, I own some IBM stock.

Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State: John Ruskin

From FEE.org:

John Ruskin (1819-1900) is inexplicably revered to this day as an aesthete, artist, and champion of small crafts, whereas in truth he was an absolute hater of commercial capitalism, laissez faire liberalism, and the modern world. A hugely influential thinker of the Victorian period, he romanticized a mythic England from the past, in which art and good taste prevailed over commercial frenzy and wealth-making. “I was, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school,” he said. In his view, he completely agreed with his friend Thomas Carlyle that the forces unleashed by Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment generally had destroyed the artistic sensibilities of generations, and they needed to be recaptured through a strong planning state.

His most political book is Unto This Last (1862) which took aim at the division of labor itself. Riffing off the Parable of the Vineyards, he finds it outrageous that the vineyard owner himself was in a position to decide pay at all. The merchant, wrote Ruskin, "does not know when to die."

The entire book is a long and tedious screed against merchants for their lack of loyalty, their obedience to impersonal market forces, and absence of a moral reason for existence. The merchant, he said, is “the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.”

Like other critics of classical political economy (he compared it to “alchemy, astrology, witchcraft”), he denied that exchange alone could produce any value or profit. “It is only in labor there can be profit,” he declared. He had a particular beef with John Stuart Mill, and critiqued his price and wage theory, showing near-zero competence in economic theory at all. For Ruskin, economics was not a science but an aesthetic. He summed up his outlook on political economy as follows: “Government and cooperation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.” It's no wonder that Ludwig von Mises said that Ruskin was "one of the gravediggers of British freedom, civilization and prosperity."

Source: Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State.

Terrorism Part IV: ISIS Success & Expansion

There are many vicious, bloodthirsty terrorist organizations operating today in the Middle East and Africa. But now, a decade and a half into the 21st century, even the dreaded al-Qaeda, which killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, has been somewhat supplanted in the minds of those in the West by a group called ISIS.

ISIS stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIL, which stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. To them, the Levant also includes Israel, a very important distinction. They are by far the most well-funded terror group in the history of mankind, with an annual revenue between $2-$3 billion. That would put ISIS ahead of the GDP of 31 nations on earth.

No one had ever heard the name ISIS or ISIL before 2011. ISIS began its rise in 2011, as American troops were leaving Iraq. For U.S. soldiers, the war in Iraq had come to an end. For Iraqis, the country was still extremely volatile. Yet, President Barack Obama celebrated the withdrawal and touted the now “self-governing” Iraqi government.

The very day of the announcement, the leader of Iraq — Prime Minister al-Maliki — received a message that some of his vice president’s Sunni bodyguards might be planning an uprising. He arrested the six vice presidential bodyguards the next day. The attacks on Sunnis only escalated from that time on.

Massive Sunni protests began to spring up. Although al-Qaeda had indeed been crushed by the U.S. military, the few surviving radicals banded together with the surviving members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, attacking Shia Muslims and Christians by the score.

The new leader of this emerging Islamic State — Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — sent some of these hardened terrorists to Syria to recruit and fire up the Sunni population. It worked.

Al-Baghdadi vision was much larger than simply attacking targets and killing people. He declared a caliphate, attacking and holding territory without recognizing borders. As far as he was concerned, all territory in the Middle East was now a part of this new Islamic State.

With no one to stop them, ISIL ushered in a reign of terror in northern Iraq, overrunning towns and villages and offering Christians three choices: convert to Islam, pay a tax amounting to all of their yearly income — or die. ISIL found vicious new ways to execute those who opposed them. Technologically savvy, they also distributed high production videos of their heinous crimes.

ISIL now controls an area larger than Great Britain. The vast majority of their revenue comes from oil wells seized in Iraq and Syria. Former CIA director Michael Morel once explained that the U.S. didn’t destroy ISIL’s main source of revenue because they “didn’t want to do environmental damage and . . . destroy that infrastructure.”

Men and women are being burned alive, drowned, executed and crucified in the name of radical Islam. Yet for the Obama administration, protecting the environment took precedence.

Source: Terrorism Part IV: ISIS Success & Expansion.

Islamic State thug news:

• Mar. 23: UK Prime Minister Defiant as ISIS Claims Responsibility for London Attack
• Mar. 16: Afghan officials: Islamic State kills 3 Shiite elders
• Mar. 15: Ex-Army Col.: 'Way Overdue' to Allow CIA to Drone-Strike ISIS
• Feb. 17: Car bomb in Baghdad claimed by Islamic State kills 59

Health reform: The road ahead

Commentary by Newt Gingrich on Fox News.com (Mar. 28):

Friday's decision to pull the House Republican health reform bill was not the end of health reform. In fact, it may have been the best step toward actually achieving real health care reform -- if congressional leaders learn from the experience.

The Republican congressional leadership erred because they decided to repeal and replace ObamaCare within the traditions of the pre-Trump legislative swamp.

By default, they accepted the fake scores of the Congressional Budget Office. By allowing the scores to exist, they let Democrats and the media quote "the non-partisan CBO" to their disadvantage.

Leadership applied the absurd limitations of Senate reconciliation rules to a House bill, even though it was guaranteed to frustrate their conservative members.

They established a deadline for failure – which we know is detrimental to large legislative achievements. Ronald Reagan took eight months to pass a tax cut, which was giving away money. We took 18 months to pass welfare reform, which had the support of 92 percent of Americans. Obama took eight months to pass ObamaCare – even while he promised it would cure all our health care ills.

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History has taught us: America doesn’t like political health care. There is a deep imperative for Congress to think through bipartisan health care reform.

The House and Senate GOP leadership can learn a lot of lessons from this failed experiment – if they are willing to.

THE ROAD AHEAD

There are a set of principles for successful conservative reforms. President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used them in the 1980s. We followed them in creating the "Contract with America" in 1994, reforming welfare in 1996 and passing the balanced budget in 1997.

As Thatcher said: "First you win the argument, then you win the vote." The best short book on her fight to reform Britain, Claire Berlinski's "There is no Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters," makes clear the moral, human arguments Thatcher used to dismantle socialism in Britain.

1. Communicate with the American people and convince them this will provide a much better future than the current system.
2. The key is to focus on health and health care, not on financing.
3. Health is the largest sector of the American economy and the most complex.
4. As the health reform plan evolves, it has to be described in very detailed question-and-answer systems online, so people can understand how it affects them, health professionals can understand how they will be impacted, the news media can understand it, and the elected officials can explain and defend it.
5. It should be possible to outline the entire new system in a series of very clear charts, so everyone can understand the goals and the directions before being asked to support the transition process. People both have to understand the long-term values-based goals and the policy changes, which will be bridges to achieve these goals.
6. Properly developed, a dynamic, innovative, science-based American health system will be the largest job creator, the largest sector of high-paying jobs, and the biggest earner of foreign exchange in the country.
7. Following a disciplined road map like this is hard work and requires more patience and more discipline than the inside Washington game. 

[read more]

A good idea not just for the healthcare bill but for any major piece of legislation. The House didn’t get a chance to read the bill and to debate it. It was more-or-less accept it or not accept it-- not to improve on it. Hannity is right Congress needs to get together and to debate and hash out a better bill. The bill should contain all the elements that President Trump campaigned on: Buying health insurance across state lines, and health saving accounts among others.

Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State: Johann Fichte

From FEE.org:

Johann Fichte (1762-1814) was the philosophical founder of German idealism, writing and teaching a generation before George Friedrich Hegel, and the first of a long line of obscurantist philosophers whose ideas somehow land with one solid political application: build a huge state led by one heroic dictator. It was he, and not Hegel, who first posited a meta-narrative of historical waves that could be characterized as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

In politics, he was a huge fan of Napoleon, but found himself devastated by the crushing victory of France over German territories, which motivated his “Addresses to the German Nation” (1808), the most influential lecture series on education to appear in the modern world. Here was the first complete outline of what German nationalism should look like.

The new education system should have “an absolutely new system of German national education, such as has never existed in any other nation.” The purpose is to educate a “new race of men” with a system that “must first be applied by Germans to Germans.” Its goal is to inculcate “the true and all-powerful love of fatherland, the conception of our people as an eternal people and as the security for our own eternity.”

Part of the point is to train for work so that “no article of food, clothing, etc., and, so far as this is possible, no tool is to be used, which is not produced and made” inside Germany. In other words: autarky. Germany should aspire to be “a closed commercial State” that rejects “our idolatrous veneration of coined metals.”

His template for what became fascist (right-Hegelian) thought is entirely predictable: statism, nationalism, loathing of the merchant class, and protectionism, spiced up with the inevitable doses of misogyny ("active citizenship, civic freedom and even property rights should be withheld from women, whose calling was to subject themselves utterly to the authority of their fathers and husbands”) and anti-Semitism (granting rights to Jews requires we "cut off all their heads in one night, and to set new ones on their shoulders, which should contain not a single Jewish idea”).

Source: Five Forgotten Champions of the Total State.

4 Questions to Ask When Debating Inequality

Commentary from Steven Horowitz on FEE.org:

The change in the presidency is not going to reduce the amount of time and energy people will be spending debating the question of rising inequality. In fact, I would expect to see such debates become even more frequent and more intense.

I have written a number of articles, and given many talks, on the issues surrounding the claim that inequality is getting worse. Those contain a whole variety of data (most of which can be found in this piece and this one) suggesting that most of the claims about rising income inequality are wrong, overstated, or ignore other evidence.

However, what I want to do in this piece is focus more on the questions that need to be asked in such debates. Specifically, I want to raise four questions that should be at the center of discussions of inequality.

Question One: Are we talking about inequality or poverty?

So often these two issues get confused in discussions about inequality. Those concerned about inequality frequently start talking about how bad things are for the poor. One explanation for this is that they are assuming that rising inequality must mean that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. More specifically, some seem to think the poor are poorer because the rich are richer. That is, they assume that economies are zero-sum so that if some are richer, those riches must have come from the poor.

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Question Two: Are we talking about income, wealth, or consumption inequality?

Those concerned about inequality often slide between income and wealth in these discussions. Even this well-known viral video does so. It starts by presenting data on wealth, but at several places along the way, including one extended discussion of a graphic, it refers to people’s salaries. That’s income, not wealth.

Wealth refers to the sum of our assets minus liabilities. It’s a stock. Income is a net change in our wealth in a particular period, such as when we get paid. It’s a flow. One can have high wealth, but low income, such as an older person living off savings but with a fully paid-for home. Conversely, one can have high income and low financial wealth if one has a large salary but spends it all immediately on consumption goods. The data and other issues are different depending on whether we’re talking about wealth or income. Be clear which it is.

Consumption inequality is yet a third possibility. Here we are talking about the differences between what the rich and the poor can consume.

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Question Three: What about income mobility?

Those concerned about inequality often argue as if the rich who are getting richer and the poor who are getting poorer are the same people year to year. They see the claims that the top 20 percent of income earners have a greater share of national income than 30 years ago and that the bottom 20 percent have less, and they seem to think that means those who were rich are richer and those who were poor are poorer.

But this ignores the question of income mobility. Those static comparisons of two years decades apart are static portrayals of a dynamic process. What those comparisons actually say is that “those who were rich in year x got y% of national income and the different set of people who were rich in year x + 25 got z% of national income.” In other words, which households and people comprise “the rich” changes year to year, as is also true of those in bottom 20 percent.

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Question Four: What exactly are the problems caused by inequality?

If you’ve clarified what everyone thinks about the first three questions, it’s worth asking exactly something like: if poverty is falling, and poor people have a decent chance to get out of poverty, what specifically is wrong with (rising) inequality?

In my experience, one common answer to this question is that even if the poor are getting richer, the even greater increase in the wealth of the rich gives them unfair access to the political process. The super-rich will turn their economic power into political power, often in ways that will redistribute resources to themselves and their friends.

That, of course, is a legitimate concern, but notice that the conversation has subtly shifted from inequality per se to the problems of cronyism and a state with enough power to engage in such redistributions. There are plenty of ways to attack cronyism and to reduce the ability of the rich to turn wealth into political power that are not about forcible redistribution away from the rich or other policy questions that arise from inequality.  [read more]

Good questions to clarify the issue.

Terrorism Part III: Al-Shabaab

Al-Shabaab is a Somalian-based, radical terrorist cell with ties to al-Qaeda in the Middle East and possibly Boko Haram in Nigeria. They believe in violent Islamic militancy and boast a troop strength of between 7,000 to 9,000 militants.

In 2006, Al-Shabaab gained control over Somalia’s capital city Mogadishu, raising the fear in Ethiopia that the group’s violence would spill over into their country. So, in December 2006, the Ethiopian military launched an offensive into Mogadishu and successfully drove Al-Shabaab out of the city. Ethiopia’s action inflamed the group, and Al-Shabaab attacked Ethiopia’s forces in central and southern Somalia, taking control of those areas. Al-Shabaab’s goal was to topple the Somalian government and replace it with Islamic rule and Sharia law.

One of Shabaab’s most infamous attacks took place in 2013 in Nairobi Kenya’s most upscale mall, which was owned at the time by Israelis. A group of Al-Shabaab terrorists stormed the mall, shooting patrons on a Saturday afternoon. At times, they asked their victims if they were Muslim. If the response was no, they were shot. In all, 67 innocent people died and 175 were wounded.

Strangely, Al-Shabaab’s radical brand of Islamic extremism has proven appealing to certain Americans. Al-Shabaab recently used a spokesman for one of their propaganda videos who sounded suspiciously American. At the end of his rhetoric, to accentuate his point, he used a clip of Donald Trump. [read more]

al-Shabaab news:

• Aug. 22, 2016: Somalia Suicide Bombings Killing 20 Claimed by al Shabaab
• July 1, 2016: Al Shabaab claims responsibility for deadly attack on Somalia hotel
• Feb. 26, 2016: Somali president: Al Shabaab attack killed nearly 200 Kenyan soldiers
• Feb. 14, 2016: Al Shabaab claims responsibility for plane explosion killing bomber
• May 15, 2015: Al-Shabaab Fighters Capture 2 Towns in Somalia
• Dec. 2, 2014: Kenya Quarry Attack by Somalia's al-Shabaab Kills 36