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| From Maksim at the People's Cube |
PINING FOR THE OASES
Two years ago, Obama had declared that he was the defender of Benghazi, protecting it against a massacre that was never going to happen. And once Benghazi was liberated to be under Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood rule, the man who had sent in the air force to protect Benghazi Islamist militias against Gaddafi, couldn’t be bothered to send in the planes to protect his diplomats against the militias.
There is not one single place where a major Arab Spring transformation has led to a happy ending.
Egypt is a political, social and economic disaster. Obama had been counting on Islamists transforming Egypt into another Turkey on a slow and sensible schedule. But Morsi had a little too much in common with Obama. Like Obama, he couldn’t wait a decade to crush his opponents and enact repressive policies that would fracture the country. He could barely wait a month.
How Syria Killed the “Arab Spring”
WAR ON ERROR
In February of 2012, Amine El Khalifi was arrested for plotting to carry out a suicide bombing in the US Capitol building. Before he began his mission, he visited the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center, whose former Imam was Al Qaeda leader Anwar Al Awlaki and whose parishioners included Fort Hood terrorist Nidal Hasan. At his sentencing, El Khalifi said, “I just want to say that I love Allah.”
But that did not stop the FBI from announcing a few days later that it had completed purging references to Islamic terrorism from its training materials. A month earlier, Tamerlan Tsarnaev had begun his trip to Russia and by the time he returned, the training materials meant to prepare agents for the reality of the terrorist plot that he and his brother would carry out had been buried out of sight.
In 2011, the year that the Russians were warning America about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole was issuing another kind of warning.
Cole, an Obama recess appointment, said, “All of us must reject any suggestion that every Muslim is a terrorist or that every terrorist is a Muslim. As we have seen time and again – from the Oklahoma City bombing to the recent attacks in Oslo, Norway – no religion or ethnicity has a monopoly on terror.”
How Many Americans Has Obama Killed?
FOR LOVE OF EVIL
A New York Times article titled “Jihadist or Victim” described Al Qaeda member and Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg as a “soft-spoken man with a professorial air”. When the media finally succeeded in winning Begg’s release, he went back to the UK where he was invited to participate in the University College of London’s “War on Terror Week” by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Two years later, Abdulmutallab became the Christmas Day Bomber. The New York Times described Abdulmutallab as “soft-spoken” and a “gifted student”.
Most terrorists in the pages of the New York Times are soft-spoken, except when they are being passionate. Sometimes they are even soft-spoken and passionate. They have curly hair and piercing black eyes. Like Salim Hamdan, Bin Laden’s driver, they are possessed of a “quick grin” or like Walid bin Attash, a mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, a “wry smile”.
The difference between these Tiger Beat for the NPR crowd descriptions by the #FreeJihad media and the #FreeJahar collages is polish. Both romanticize terrorists and show a studied disdain for their victims. The New York Times is just better at hiding what it is about than some suburban teenage girl.
What the Media’s #FreeJihad and #FreeJahar Have in Common
LET THEM EAT ANTS
A new report from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization says Western societies should get over their “disgust” at the idea of eating bugs and join in.
So are UN bigwigs eating bugs?
Oddly enough bugs don’t appear on the menu for the United Nations Delegates Dining Room. New Zealand Rack of Lamb, Roasted Loin of Lamb, Crispy Red Snapper with Langoustine and Medallion of Filet Mignon do.
Meanwhile at the 2002 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization summit on food security, delegates ate lobster and foie gras.
UN Bigwigs Eat Filet Mignon and Foie Gras, Tell Everyone Else to Eat Bugs
UNLESS YOU'RE BARACK OBAMA, YOU CAME FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE
The latest amnesty gimmick from Obama Inc. is the hashtag “Immigration Nation” and the declaration that, “Unless you’re a Native American, you came from someplace else.”
Technically speaking, American Indians came over the Bering Strait. DNA records show that they came out of Siberia. (That makes them the original Russian immigrants.)
Every Nation is an Immigration Nation
TAKE A PENNY, TAKE A COUNTRY
The Heritage study on the cost of amnesty (6.3 trillion) has gotten predictably tangled in accusations of racism. And we are now somehow debating IQ.
The social safety net, like the take-a-penny jar, is an honor system. There are all sorts of regulations and policing mechanisms, but the welfare state and the country are too big to police. Those who want to defraud, do. The rapid growth in the disability rolls tell the tale.
There are different motives not to cheat. Personal integrity. A sense of honor. But the largest one is a sense of investment in the country. Patriotism. The belief that we are all in the same boat and that we occasionally even sacrifice for one another.
Large scale entitlements use by a population is a cultural statement of a sense of detachment from the country and its people. You are more likely to take pennies, instead of putting them back, if you don’t identify with the people who put the pennies in.
The Amnesty Issue Isn’t IQ, it’s the Free Ride
IF ONLY THE ALABAMA DEMOCRATIC PARTY COULD PRINT ITS OWN MONEY
Acting state Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy Worley lowered her head and slowly shook it side to side when summing up the financial condition of her once powerful party.
“This is my 18th day as chair and thirty minutes after I took over on April 22nd the landlord of the building where our party headquarters are came in and said he wanted us out, that the rent was overdue and was always overdue,” said Worley.
Next came the water company with a message, said Worley: pay up by the next day or we’re cutting off the water. Next came the same warning from Alabama Power. Next came news from banks that party credit cards had been maxed out and were now cancelled.
Alabama Democratic Party Broke, Faces Eviction for Not Paying Rent
IT'S A RACISM PARADOX
Slowly but surely, a growing number of states are eyeing policies to select academically stronger individuals for their teaching programs as one avenue to improve the quality of new teachers.
Academically stronger individuals is the politically correct way of saying, “Teachers who can both read and write.” Their counterparts are the Differently Academically Abled who dominate the Chicago school system.
Underneath the attention such plans are attracting, though, run deep-seated fears about their potential consequences–particularly whether they will result in a K-12 workforce with fewer black and Latino teachers.
On nearly all the measures states are considering, from GPAs to licensure-test scores, minority candidates tend to have weaker scores than their white counterparts.
Wait… but we support education… but not racism… but what if our support for getting better teachers for minority students leads to lower rates of minority teachers… it’s a racism paradox.
Hiring Better Teachers May Be Racist, Say Bad Teachers
THE FUTURE OF MARRIAGE EQUALITY
The pedophiles’ core issue was to bring down Section 176 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalizes sexual acts with children. With the Greens they found for the first time a political force that was willing to entertain this debate. Indeed, in March 1980, the Greens held their second national convention in the southwestern city of Saarbrücken, where they approved a program that opposed “discrimination against sexual outsiders.” The convention established a “pedo-commission” to specifically address the interests of pedophiles.
In 1983, an ad for the Greens ran in the gay newspaper Torso. It featured a drawing of the party’s trademark sunflower and the text: “Sections 174 and 176 should be amended to read that only the application or threat of violence, or the abuse of a dependent relationship in connection with sexual acts should be criminalized!” In plain terms, this meant: Adults could have sex with children, as long as they weren’t their own and they weren’t threatened with violence.
The pedophiles celebrated their greatest success in March 1985 at the Greens’ state manifesto conference in Lüdenscheid, in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. There, the party approved a position paper that sought to generally allow “non-violent sexuality” between adults and children.
How Green Were the Paedos
REPUBLICANS ARE A SUPERSTITIOUS AND COWARDLY LOT
Reporter Bob Woodward, meanwhile, refers to Hillary as “the Jill Wine Volner of the impeachment inquiry committee,” much to her chagrin. Because of this comment, John Doar, who heads the committee, suggests that Hillary ditch her skirts for pants. “From this day forward, she will always wear pantsuits,” says the script.
So we even have a pantsuit origin story. Is Hillary Clinton a superhero? Must her costume have an origin story?
Are You Ready for Hillary Clinton: The Movie?
THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS BAD PUBLICITY
You may be wondering what the Newseum is; besides a really stupid portmanteau with a suspicious resemblance to Nauseam. The Newseum is three things. It’s big. It’s ugly. And it’s in D.C.
With The New York Times–Ochs-Sulzberger Family Great Hall of News, the Bloomberg Internet, TV and Radio Gallery and the NBC News Interactive Newsroom… the Newseum exists to honor itself. It’s an example of the corporate media doing its own hagiography. It’s a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the teleprompter crowd.
Despite costing nearly half-a-billion dollars, most people, who weren’t stuck in D.C. for four hours with no air conditioning and nothing to do, were not aware of the Newseum’s existence.
Newseum Honors Hamas Terrorists Alongside Daniel Pearl
AL GORE WANTS HIS ROUTINE BACK
"As some of you may know, I serve as the Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in the U.S. House of Representatives. I have teleported here over the Internet.
"Ladies, gentlemen…avatars, thank you for joining me today on the virtual island of Bali created by One Climate in Second Life."
Ed Markey Claims Credit for Inventing Smartphones and Facebook
THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN THREE COMMISSIONS BY MORNING
Amazingly, the predators seem to have been allowed by local authority managers to come and go from care homes, picking their targets to ply them with drink and drugs before abusing them. You can be sure that if the situation had been reversed, with gangs of tough, young white men preying on vulnerable Muslim girls, the state’s agencies would have acted with greater alacrity.
UK Imam Blasts Muslim Racism Behind Sex Abuse of British Girls
ACCOUNTABILITY
The Real Deal is this: The higher-ups in the MSM won’t say much about the abuses they suffer at the hands of the Obama administration because they answer to an extra-political power base. You think the consumer has sway anymore? When the New Media erupted and the Old Media saw their chuck wagon headed over the cliff, they kicked the consumer-based power structure to the curb. They just didn’t tell the consumer. Or their advertisers. They have gladly embraced devils who wield more money and power in just a few hands, rather than put up with the likes of you.
There may be an Invisible Hand in the market place, but the executives of the MSM are no longer licking that hand. They are not in the losing, exhausting game of brands and marketing. They are now in the game of thrones unlike any we’ve experienced in our country before. They will NOT cede power or betray allegiances to their source of income. Oh, they’ll allow awful financial reports about their circulatory health to ease Tea Party types into a hollow sense of accomplishment, but even after all that, the neighbors are still watching the infernal evening news every night.
that's from Joan at Primordial Slack.
I have moved in these circles a tiny bit and I would say that the consumer-based structure in the big media never mattered much, just as it doesn't matter very much in fashion or television or most creative fields.
The difference is that in fields where the consumer does have buying power, consumer rejection is possible. The insulation is there, so that the creatives will keep running the same incestuous garbage that they like up the flagpole, accepting the occasional setback, but plugging onward (How many Iraq Anti-War movies got made? How many made money? How many lost money? The figures are staggering, but they changed very little) in the hopes of eventually scoring one win that will tide them over for a while and let them justify doing the same thing for another 5-10 years. (Gay TV shows are the new Anti-war movies.)
The situation in the news media is much worse because it's a monopoly. Yes, FOX will beat them with the majority of the minority of independent viewers, but they'll swallow up what's left. And their consumers are not the people watching television. Their consumers are media buyers, who are just as left-wing as they are.
Most professions are miniature societies. And the people in them don't work for the approval of the audience, but of the approval of their fellow pros. (How many awards are voted by pros and how many are voted by the public.)
All corners of the profession are largely liberal, from the writers to the on-air talent to the producers all the way up to the top executives and then vertically to the various buyers and branders who want to associate their product with the "seriousness" of their news network or news hour.
The New Media, as Joan mentions, has made it worse. Yes, the internet has cracked the monopoly. But it also unleashed a lefty blogsphere that pushes media coverage to the left and on the pro-side, at places like Think Progress, preps talking points for the media to use, essentially outsourcing their editorial staff to lefty Think Tanks. (Which is one more reason why the editorial side of the media has gone into the toilet.)
The big media business was always largely incestuous. It's now mostly impermeable. Financially it's in bad shape, but that just means it will be around in a reduced form. Its people have figured out how to plug in internet memes in place of their human interest stories and that's enough to keep them going.
There is no longer a big picture vision of Walter Cronkite's America. Just a bunch of guys and girls browsing Reddit and Think Progress and assembling their sites and stories that way. They don't care about getting everyone on board. They care about shaping their part of the fragmented consensus so that you don't just see the same thing on the 2 news networks no one watches but on the 1,000 sites everyone visits or sees in their news feed.
OBAMA OBER ALLES
In the afterglow of the last week I have come to realize that what is deeply wrong with this country is that so far we have neither heard enough nor seen enough of President Obama.
I now think we need to see more. Much more. We need to bask in his warm visage and be lulled with the hum of his valved voice. We need to have a morning message from the President every day on all cable news channel. Indeed, we need to have it broadcast on all TV channels, especially ESPN and other places where citizens dodge their need to know the truth and their duty to look up from their coffee and upon the wonderful latte-tanned visage that is Obama.
We need to see his face with his honeyed message oozing out of his mouth in the lead-in to Good Morning America and Fox and Friends both without fear or favoritism.
Weather Channel too.
We need to have Barack Obama’s message, whatever it might be on whatever day, delivered dripping from his lips to all of us on the front page of whatever newspaper we are still reading online with a video-embed set on autoplay.
More Obama I Say. MORE O!-BA!-MA!
YOU CAN'T STOP GOVERNMENT
WV Senator Joe Manchin has been trying to breathe life back into his background checks bill
Mr. Kercheval said Mr. Manchin’s legislation makes sense, but that the IRS situation doesn’t help the prospects of its reintroduction.
“Sure, it doesn’t help us – heck no,” Mr. Manchin replied. “But the bottom line is, you cant stop government; you can’t stop this great country, you can’t stop the entrepreneurial spirit.”
One of the three doesn't fit. See if you can spot which one.
A BRIEF NOTE
JewishNews.co.uk rolls out today across the pond. They will occasionally be running some of my columns.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Much of the book looks at the way Internet technology threatens to destroy the middle class by first eroding employment and job security, along with various “levees” that give the economic middle stability.
“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?”
This is a bit imprecise. Instagram does software, if you can even call it that. Kodak did hardware. The hardware is still being done, but much less so in the United States.
Kodak didn't make way for Instagram. It made way for an Instagram front end for hardware being made in China. And that's the real story of the destruction of the American middle class.
American brands employing a small number of creatives and slightly larger number of service people are creating the illusion of prosperity while the manufacturing jobs are gone because Asia had the determination to get them and we were making those jobs impossible.
How many Americans was Kodak employing toward the end when it was popping out mediocre cameras with clunky software? Software allows for the illusion that we're buying prime rib, when we're buying an overlay on poorly manufactured hardware that doesn't last and isn't designed to last and creates few American jobs.
The internet has made it much easier than ever to ship jobs overseas. Which is not a problem for the sort of libertarians who insist that the god of the marketplace will rebalance all. But what if the marketplace only works with a certain standard of civilization? The Middle East had marketplaces for a very long time. The marketplace alone doesn't get us to this point. It's culture that does.
The marketplace allows us to buy cheap crap while funding a war machine that shifts the balance of power. And one day we'll have to face that war machine, while using equipment filled with its chips. Or maybe we won't. Maybe we'll let it take Asia and get an even bigger monopoly. And then all that will be left will be for the worshipers of the marketplace to get jobs working for it and explaining to us why dying at 35 is now a good thing. For the marketplace. Their marketplace.
HOW PEOPLE LOSE THEIR FREEDOM
Seraphic Secret has a close friend who was born and lived in Communist Hungary until he and his family managed to escape to America in 1969.
...
A few days ago, my friend, a mild-mannered accountant who never comments on politics, told me that he fears for America. The Benghazi lies peddled by Obama, Hillary Clinton, the State Department, and (until a few days ago) covered up by a pliant press corps, remind him, he said, of the Communist regime he fled.
“America is not that bad,” he allowed, “but the model, the structure of state power supported by a state press, is how people lose their freedom.”
“It can’t happen here,” I quoted with no little irony.
My friend nodded: “That’s what they all say.”
from Seraphic Secret: It Can't Happen Here
IT'S OBAMA'S WORLD, WE JUST LIVE IN IT
Here’s Your $40,000 EPA Chief Waterfall Portrait
Or, possibly, Lisa Jackson was actually the embodiment of a nature spirit, who, when she was forced to quit after a fake email scandal, became transformed into a waterfall, and is now flowing somewhere in Virginia.
Socialism Causes Toilet Paper Shortage in Venezuela
Chavez died and reportedly returned to his successor as a little bird. Sadly the Socialist leader did not, while in bird form, warn Maduro, that the country would shortly run out of toilet paper
Kuwait Arrests 215 Gays and Lesbians in Internet Cafe Roundup
Article 2 of the Kuwaiti Constitution states, “The religion of the State is Islam, and the Islamic Sharia shall be a main source of legislation.” It also says in the Hadiths that “When a man mounts another man, the throne of Allah shakes.”
National Park Service Malfeasance Exposed in Battle Over California’s Last Cannery
But this isn’t really about the real world impact on the harbor seals. In environmentalist theology, animals are always victimized by human presence. Civilization destroys the wilderness and must be destroyed in turn for the wilderness to thrive.
WINNING!
Ruin the educational system in the name of federal compassion for the children, accuse those who give more to charity (namely, the working poor, the middle class, the Christians) of being cold-hearted. Applaud those who give the least to charity (namely, the idle poor, the rich, the Politically Correct) as being compassionate for their willingness to take more money via taxes from us and give it to the idle poor.
Disintegrate the bonds of faith, the standards of decency, the definition of marriage, and heap opprobrium on men of good character, and praise villains and mass murderers and sexual deviants as heroes and martyrs, and you will eventually get a generation that has no character, no faith, no reason, no logic, no courtesy, no honor, and no ability to distinguish true from false, valid from invalid, reality from television but which has but loads and loads of self-esteem and a selfish sense of entitlement. They will have so much self esteem that they will never listen again to a logical argument or a scientific proof, because their self-esteem tells them that no one is smartasticer than are they.
And once you have made a whole generation into selfish, whining, inflated-egoist know-nothings, they will beg for chains, and riot when they do not get them.
...from John C, Wright's excellent blog
I'm reminded of what Frank Capra credited the collapse of his career, post-Wonderful Life, to
Forgotten among the hue-and criers were the hard-working stiffs that came home too tired to shout or demonstrate in streets ... and prayed they'd have enough left over to keep their kids in college, despite their knowing that some were pot-smoking, parasitic parent-haters.
The winds of change blew through the dream factories of make-believe, tore at its crinoline tatters.... The hedonists, the homosexuals, the hemophilic bleeding hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who substituted shock for talent, all cried: "Shake 'em! Rattle 'em! God is dead. Long live pleasure! Nudity? Yea! Wife-swapping? Yea! Liberate the world from prudery. Emancipate our films from morality!".... Kill for thrill – shock! Shock! To hell with the good in man, Dredge up his evil – shock! Shock!
HOPE AND CHANGE
Article 2
Using the powers of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in disregard of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.
This conduct has included one or more of the following:
1. He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.
... well that's one place to start.
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