The top executive of a Southern California private charter airline says the Golden State’s hostile business environment propelled his company’s decision to relocate to Texas.

“Not being viewed as an enemy, but being viewed as an asset is so refreshing,” said Alex Wilcox, Chief Executive Officer of JetSuite Inc., who, on Thursday, spoke to the Dallas Business Journal. He described the air carrier’s decision to move to North Texas this summer as a “welcome change.”

He even shared a glaring example of one difference between California and business-friendly Texas. “I tried to start flying out of Santa Monica, California. And they sued me because I was trying to bring a service to the city,” said Wilcox. “When I got to Dallas, literally, people in City Hall were like, ‘How can we help you?’”

The CEO said the company contemplated exiting California “for a couple of years.” JetSuite intends to make the Dallas-Fort Worth area its new home, although officials have not announced a location for their headquarters. Wilcox anticipates 60 employees will move with top brass to the Lone Star State and they will fill 180-200 jobs with Texans. The company’s chief executive said they will recruit qualified individuals for “behind-the-scenes” operational functions, dispatchers, maintenance controllers, “and the people who actually make airlines move.”

He quipped: “There are probably more people in aviation in Dallas than there are people in Newport Beach, in total.”

Previously, Wilcox told Bloomberg other selling points Texas offered included lower costs and a larger aviation infrastructure which exists because of the Dallas-based Southwest Airlines and Fort Worth-based American Airlines.

The boutique charter airline allows travelers to rent a private, small jet. Currently, their daily flights only cover select California cities and Las Vegas, Nevada. JetSuite intends to expand its destinations. The CEO also has high hopes for the other side of their business, JetSuiteX, where individuals can purchase a seat on one of their charter flights to avoid the hassle of larger airports. One-way ticket fares start at $129.

The company plans to grow its consumer reach with a fleet of regional small jets to 100. Wilcox told the Business Journal that JetSuite revenues range between $55 million and $60 million while JetSuiteX accounts for $50 million in earnings.

“In six years I want to take JetSuiteX to a $1 billion in top line revenue,” said Wilcox. He also believes over time JetSuite Inc. will “probably triple or quadruple.”

In 2009, Wilcox co-founded the Irvine, California, based business. Previously, he was a founding executive of JetBlue Airways. In 2016, JetSuite sold an expanded stake of the company to JetBlue, which allowed the private airliner to beef up JetSuiteX.

This week, JetSuite announced it sold a minor stake to Qatar Airways. Federal law limits foreign investments in a U.S. air carrier to 25 percent, noted Bloomberg. The size of this investment has not yet been disclosed, however, it follows the Qatari airline’s failed attempt to acquire 10 percent of American Airlines.

JetSuite’s website says the company is certified by the International Standard for Business Aircraft Operations (IS-BAO). Recognized independent safety auditors ARG/US ranked them #1 in light jet utilization. They also rated them with highest safety rating achievable in civil aviation.

The airline’s move to Texas highlights the continued exodus of companies from the business-unfriendly California. From 2008 to 2015, an estimated 9,000 companies left California, of which Texas was the top beneficiary of the relocations, During those seven years, California corporations accounted for 15 percent of companies that moved their headquarters or expanded operations into pro-business Texas. In many instances, the state incentivized out-of-state companies to expand into the state with the goal of creating more jobs and economic growth within Texas through the Texas Enterprise Fund.

Likewise, Californians comprise the largest number of the state’s transplants.

Follow Merrill Hope, a member of the original Breitbart Texas team, on Twitter.

 

When does an alleged sexual predator become the victim?

That’s the question that one community is facing after a man supposedly tried to have sex with an underage girl … but it ended up being the girl’s parents who were put in handcuffs.

The incident occurred in British Columbia, Canada. According to CTV News, an adult man allegedly came to a home to meet the 13-year-old minor. That’s when the girl’s mother and stepfather tackled the man and retrained him with zip ties.

“In a video posted to Facebook Live, the girl’s mother can be heard berating the 28-year-old Port Albernie, B.C. man as he lay face down on the floor with his hands bound behind his back,” CTV explained.

“He come to my house to meet my 13-year-old f—ing daughter to f— her. He wanted to be her first,” the mother declared on the smartphone camera footage. “We f—ing tackled him, and Zap strapped him and called the police.”

It might have been an open-and-shut case if that was all there was to the story. Man comes to house, man preys on underage daughter, man gets body-slammed. However, the incident was not that clear-cut.

CTV News reported that the girl’s parents took matters into their own hands and set a “trap” for the suspected predator, despite the fact that police had told them not to.

“The mother claims she asked police to investigate the man six weeks ago, when she discovered explicit messages sent to her daughter’s Instagram account. She said police told her to block the man and forget it,” the Canadian news station explained.

“Frustrated by the response, she set up the meeting. The mother said she asked police to be present during the ambush, but claims authorities would not help,” CTV continued.

Despite the couple’s claim that authorities did nothing about the situation, a spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police stated that they did, in fact, open a child luring investigation last month.

“The police had directed her not to take matters into her own hands,” insisted RCMP Cpl. Amelia Hayden. “We still do have an active and ongoing investigation on the matter.”

Officers pointed out that the couple’s actions compromised the ongoing investigation and put more people in danger.

“It hasn’t resolved one issue. It’s caused another, and put people in danger,” Cpl. Hayden said.

RELATED: London Mayor’s Office Threatens Death for Children Carrying Knives

“This is ridiculous,” said the stepfather, who also stated that the alleged predator was already an acquaintance of the family.

“Shouldn’t a guy be able to protect his own family in his house?”

The parents are facing charges of assault causing bodily harm and forcible confinement, while the man they “lured” to the house was not charged.

What do you think? Scroll down to comment below!

Corey Lewandowski may no longer work for Donald Trump, but the president’s first campaign manager is staying in the spotlight as a prominent surrogate for the president, this time over the Syria airstrikes — and he’s hitting Barack Obama hard.

In an appearance Saturday on “Fox & Friends,” Lewandowski said the crisis in Syria wouldn’t be in place if the Obama administration had enforced its “red line” policy on the Syrian regime.

The former campaign manager also praised the president for a decisive move against the Assad regime.

“I think the American people wake up today, I think people around the world wake up and thank the United States, Great Britain and France for standing up to a brutal dictator who was killing his own people with chemical weapons, and they are thankful that the American people and this president is not the previous administration,” Lewandowski said.

“And we have now seen, on two separate occasions, that the United States is responding when a brutal dictator decides to kill his own people, there are repercussions,” he added. “What we have seen is that we are the greatest military in the world. The precision with which we acted last night and early this morning shows exactly why we are the greatest superpower on the Earth.”

Lewandowski said partnering with the United Kingdom and France for the military response “was a very important process for us to demonstrate to the world we are in this together.”

Lewandowski also struck out at liberals who were decrying the strike as dangerous in what they said was a lack of a cohesive strategy on Syria.

“The liberals can discuss this all they want,” Lewandowski said. “The reason we’re in this situation with Assad is because Barack Obama drew a line in the sand which meant nothing.

“There were no teeth behind it,” he said of Obama’s uol. “The chemical weapons, which were supposed to be a red line in the previous administration, meant nothing. And we’re here today, and people lost their lives in Syria, because the previous administration did nothing to prevent it from happening.”

Lewandowski’s remarks seemed to be intended for prominent Democrats who criticized the strike.

“President Trump’s decision to launch airstrikes against the Syrian government without Congress’s approval is illegal and — absent a broader strategy — it’s reckless,” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, said of the action.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also said that “one night of airstrikes is not a substitute for a clear, comprehensive Syria strategy.”

RELATED: Watch: Panic on Zuck’s Face When Sen. Asks About Facebook Helping Obama

Somewhat surprisingly, nobody in the party of the donkey seemed to complain about the Obama administration’s lack of a comprehensive Syria strategy or made note of the fact that just last week, Defense Secretary James Mattis pretty much laid out before Congress what the comprehensive strategy was.

“We are not going to engage in the civil war itself,” Mattis said. “Now, you can look back to a year ago when we did fire missiles into Syria unrelated to ISIS, and that was, of course, the use of chemical weapons. And some things are simply inexcusable, beyond the pale, and in the worst interest of not just the chemical weapons convention, but of civilization itself.”

That seems to be a pretty decent sketch of a “clear, comprehensive Syria strategy” without revealing specific strategic points. That’s also something we didn’t typically get under the Obama administration, when “red lines” were drawn and then ignored when they were crossed.

America needed to respond to the atrocities committed by Bashar al-Assad — and thankfully, we now have an administration willing to do so.

What do you think? Scroll down to comment below!

This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

• American, British, French attack on Syria signals sharp change in Western policy
• Britain publishes its legal justification for military action
• Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria threaten retaliation against Israel

American, British, French attack on Syria signals sharp change in Western policy

Audience for Saturday’s speech by Hezbollah leader Nasrallah (Reuters)

As we reported on Friday evening, the joint attack on Syrian targets by American, British, and French forces ended as quickly as it started. The attack was in retaliation for the attack on April 7 by Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad on civilians in Douma, using chemical weapons.

The attack occurred at 4 a.m. Syrian time and was over in minutes. 105 missiles were launched, striking three Syrian chemical weapons targets. The military said that all missiles reached their target, and denied Syrian claims that most (or any) were shot down.

The attack was “one and done,” according to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. However, Mattis and other U.S. officials have stated clearly that another attack will follow if al-Assad uses chemical weapons again.

So America’s message to Bashar al-Assad is pretty clear: “You may use barrel bombs, missiles, gunfire, and any other conventional weapons on neighborhoods, markets, schools, and hospitals, and you may massacre and kill as many women and children as you want, with no retribution. Just don’t use chemical weapons.”

The targets and time of day of Saturday morning’s attack were carefully chosen so as to avoid civilian casualties, particularly Russian casualties. The Russian military did not respond, and it was clear that both the U.S. and Russian side did everything possible to avoid confronting each other.

However, the language used by Russia on Saturday was extremely bitter and angry. And according to Pentagon spokesman Dana White,

The Russian disinformation campaign has already begun. There has been a 2000 per cent increase in Russian trolls in the last 24 hours.

As someone who is attacked constantly by Russian trolls, this is disheartening news.

At Saturday’s UN Security Council meeting by Russia’s ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya expressed deep anger:

The U.S. and its allies continue to demonstrate blatant disregard for international law. You are constantly tempted by neocolonialism. You have nothing but disdain for the UN charter, and the Security Council. As a pretext for aggression, you mention the alleged use of chemical weapons in Douma, but after an investigation by Russian experts, it was proven unequivocally that no such attacks took place.

The invocation of international law by Russia is really laughable, as Russia has done everything from invading and annexing Crimea to support the worst genocidal monster so far this century, Bashar al-Assad, without getting approval for anything from the UN Security Council, yet Russian officials become apoplectic when the U.S. or the West does anything to avoid their UNSC veto.

As I’ve been writing starting in 2011, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin adopted a policy of using the UN Security Council to take control of U.S., NATO, and Western foreign policy. Russia took any military action it pleased without getting UNSC approval but demanded that any other country got UNSC approval for everything. By using its UNSC veto, Russia could effectively control American foreign policy.

This Russian policy has been extremely successful for years, crippling not only Western foreign policy, but the UN Security Council itself. I believe that success reached its peak with the March 4 poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, using a Russia-developed nerve agent Novichok. The British public was incensed that Russia put ordinary British citizens at risk by using Novichok in public, where anyone could be affected, but Russia made matters worse when Russia’s president Vladimir Putin smirked and gave a sarcastic answer when a BBC reporter asked about it.

This was followed by a series of claims by Russia, including accusing Britain of poisoning the Skripals in order to embarrass Russia. Britain’s foreign secretary Boris Johnson gave a furious response to these claims: “There is something in the kind of smug, sarcastic response that we’ve heard that indicates their fundamental guilt. They want to simultaneously deny it, yet at the same time to glory in it.”

The Skripal poisoning was an international tipping point, uniting Britain and other nations to no longer tolerate Russia’s strategy to use the UNSC to cripple Western foreign policy.

That is why Russian ambassador Vasily Nebenzya and other Russian officials are so bitterly angry. The policy they had successfully used for years is now collapsing in front of them.

Further remarks by the Russians have the appearance of hysterical desperation. There have been horrifying videos of al-Assad’s April 7 chemical attack on Douma, but Nebenzya and other Russian officials are claiming that the chemical attack did not even occur. They claim that the British government paid the “White Helmet” humanitarian workers in Douma to stage the horrifying videos as a Hollywood production. One gets the impression that the Russians as a nation are becoming completely delusional.

Meanwhile, Syrians in Damascus were dancing in the streets on Saturday, because the military strikes were not as bad as feared. Guardian (Australia) and The Hill

Related Articles:

Britain publishes its legal justification for military action

I have always believed that there was plenty of legal justification for American and Western military intervention in Syria. After al-Assad began targeting peaceful protesters in 2011, and particularly after he massacred thousands of innocent women and children in a Palestinian refugee camp in Latakia in August 2011, millions of Syrian citizens began fleeing into neighboring countries, including over a million reaching Europe. Any country has a responsibility to control its own population, but al-Assad had essentially weaponized refugees. If al-Assad cannot control its own population, but instead uses them as a weapon, then any target is justified in intervening in the country.

In addition, al-Assad’s attack on the Palestinian camp caused tens of thousands of Sunni jihadists to travel from around the world to fight al-Assad. These foreign jihadists formed the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh), which has launched terror attacks on other countries. Once again, if al-Assad cannot control ISIS, then any country threatened by ISIS is justified in intervening. In fact, the U.S. military intervention in Syria has succeeded in recapturing all territory formerly occupied by ISIS, although ISIS is far from completely defeated.

So the West certainly has plenty of justifications for military intervention in Syria, but al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons doubles down on those justifications.

But in the end, the justification for this kind of military action has less to do with international law, and more to do with domestic politics. For that reason, the British government has published a humanitarian justification policy paper for Saturday’s military action. Here is a brief summary:

The Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons is a war crime and a crime against humanity.

Under international law, the UK may use force for humanitarian intervention, provided that three conditions are met:

• Convincing evidence of extreme humanitarian distress on a large scale, requiring immediate and urgent relief;
• There is no practicable alternative to use of force, if lives are to be saved;
• The proposed use of force must be necessary and proportionate to the aim of relief of humanitarian suffering.

The policy paper goes on to explain why all three conditions have been met. BBC and UK Government

Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria threaten retaliation against Israel

Although the debate over Saturday’s airstrikes has dominated news coverage since the April 7 chemical attack, there is a completely different parallel issue in play, which may be even more dangerous.

On Monday last week, Israel is believed to have attacked Syria’s T4 airbase (Tayfur airport), because the airbase is considered a threat to Israel. Apparently, seven Iranians were killed in the attack.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah says that the attack put Israel into direct combat with Iran:

You made a historic mistake and a great folly which brings you into direct confrontation with Iran.

This is the first time in 7 years that the Israelis have deliberately killed Iranian revolutionary guards. Attacking T-4 airport is a pivotal incident in the history of the region that can’t be ignored.

Iran is not a weak or a cowardly state, and you know that well. The Israeli have false calculation. You will have to face the Islamic Republic of Iran.

All those thousands of terrorists in Syria do not concern the Israeli while they have every kind of weapons, however, they are afraid of just few revolutionary guards there.

According to the BBC, Syria, Iran, and Russia are all expressing quiet relief that Saturday’s missile attack was considerably more limited than was expected. But it did evoke a sense of greater defiance, with the three entities calling themselves the “Axis of Resistance,” and referring to Western powers as “paper tigers,” a phrase used by China’s Mao Zedong in the 1960s to describe the United States.

It is generally believed that Iran must retaliate for Israel’s airstrike, killing several Iranian revolutionary guards. This could be a far more dangerous confrontation than even Saturday’s missile strikes.

Longtime readers are aware that Generational Dynamics predicts that the Mideast is headed for a major regional war, pitting Jews against Arabs, Sunnis against Shias, and various ethnic groups against each other. Events appear to be moving very quickly now. Al Manar (Hezbollah) and Reuters and Al-Jazeera

Related Articles:

KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Syria, Bashar al-Assad, Russia, Iran, France, Britain, Syria, Damascus, Homs, Vasily Nebenzya, James Mattis, Nikki Haley, Dana White, Vladimir Putin, Boris Johnson, Sergei Skripal, Yulia Skripal, Novichok, Islamic State / of Iraq and Syria/Sham/the Levant, IS, ISIS, ISIL, Daesh, Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah
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