A pansy President?



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Obama’s Seven Premises About Islamist Terrorism and Revolution

Barry Rubin sets out some strange and destructive Leftist delusions
     
So you want to understand Obama foreign policy? Ok, here is an explanation in clear, simple, and accurate form based on Obama’s recent speech at Fort McNair about terrorism:

* Obama Premise Number One:

If one wanted to come up with a slogan for the Obama Administration regarding the “war on terrorism” it would be this:

To win the war on terrorism one must lose the war on revolutionary Islamism.

because only by showing that America is the Islamists’ friend will it take away the incentive of Muslims, including radical Muslims, to join al-Qaida and attack the United States.

This is NOT the same thing precisely as showing that the United States is the Muslims’ friend. For, after all, the United States is taking sides for some Muslims and against others. And the side it is taking is that of the Islamist Muslims against the moderate, traditionalist, and nationalist ones.

In other words, the administration is largely assuming in practice that the Islamists are the proper representative and leadership of the Muslims. (That is also true, by the way, of domestic preferences.)

Thus, if the Muslim Brotherhood governs Egypt, Tunisia, the Gaza Strip, and Syria, they would have what they wanted and there would be no need for them to attack America and would have every interest in suppressing al-Qaida.

Ironically, though, the Benghazi attack disproved this thesis, which was one of the reasons why the information about it had to be suppressed. The United States “proved” that it was the friend of Islamist rebels, helping them win the war and get rid of the oppressive dictatorship, but they still were ungrateful and attacked Americans. The same thing happened in Iraq where the Sunni Islamists objected to U.S. policy.

It is true that in Syria, Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist radical Islamists are not the same as al-Qaida and might oppose it. But they are not necessarily hostile to its ideas. When the United States tried to isolate the Syrian branch of al-Qaida (Jabhat al-Nusra) in December 2012  by designating it as a terrorist group, even the Free Syrian Army, supposedly the moderates, denounced the move as did more than 30 Syrian Salafist rebel groups.  How would these groups choose sides between the al-Qaida affiliate and the United States? What would the policy of an Islamist Syria be toward the United States and its interests?  While there is no reason to believe the Muslim Brothers or Salafists would attack the World Trade Center, they can be expected to attack U.S. diplomats, facilities, and citizens in Syria and to help Salafists stage revolutions elsewhere that would do the same thing.

At the recent meeting of the Syrian opposition, the State Department spokesman explained:

“We have recognized the coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, and we will work with Prime Minister Hitto. Our assistance will be channeled in large part through him and his team into these towns in liberated parts of Syria.”

Translation: One among several opposition groups–the one controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood–is recognized by the United States as the legitimate representative (even though many groups are boycotting it); the Muslim Brotherhood’s guy is the “prime minister;” and the U.S. government intends to disburse a total of $1 billion raised internationally through the Muslim Brotherhood. How much patronage will that buy for the Brotherhood?

Kerry also announced that $250 million in U.S. taxpayer money is going to go directly to a group directed by the Muslim Brotherhood to spend as it wishes, presumably to go mainly to local Brotherhood groups and militias.

Actually, there was a much better way for the Obama Administration to have explained the Benghazi attack. It could have said that of course the attack was from al-Qaida but that was because the United States was doing a good thing– helping put into power a non- Islamist, democratic, moderate government. That is how other presidents–as with George W. Bush in Iraq–would have managed this issue. Listen to Obama’s words in his Fort McNair speech:

“What’s clear is that we quickly drove al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, but then shifted our focus and began a new war in Iraq. This carried grave consequences for our fight against al-Qaida, our standing in the world, and–to this day–our interests in a vital region.”

Suppose one substituted the words “Libya” or “Syria” for the word Iraq? After all, Bush’s surge defeated al-Qaida, though of course not completely, but in Syria al-Qaida is stronger than ever at this point, and in Libya it also murdered Americans.

And such a stance by Obama would also have required admitting that from the Libyan (and potentially Syrian) Islamist viewpoint the help given them wasn’t enough, that it resulted in Libya in an American “puppet” regime.

And that approach would have forced the Obama Administration to open itself up to the same criticism it keeps making against Bush in Iraq: that U.S. intervention strengthened terrorists.

* Obama Premise Number Two:

Think about the Benghazi attack in this context.

Real cause of attack: The Americans helped Islamists gain power so they could operate freely in Banghazi, a city where al-Qaida patrols the city and controls territory today. Thus, the mistake was that the U.S. government was too pro-Islamist.

Phony cause of attack: The Americans weren’t pro-Islam enough, i.e., they had this nasty video that offended Muslims.

In other words, the attack’s cause was reversed, it was made to seem as if it was the exact opposite of the truth.

Real lesson: Don’t arm radical Islamists. Fight them alongside Muslims who are also anti-Islamist.!

Phony lesson: Fight against Islamophobia.

Much more HERE

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Tony Blair to be in charge of £3billion plan to revitalise Palestine's economy, U.S. secretary of state John Kerry reveals

More delusions -- but great news for Arab corruptocrats

Secretary of State John Kerry has declared he believes a potential £3billion plan is emerging that could boost the Palestinian economy by up to 50 per cent in the next three years.

It could also cut unemployment by almost two-thirds, and average wages could jump 40 per cent, he said. But Kerry said it all depends on parallel progress on peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Kerry has been working with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and global business leaders to devise economic plans to revitalise the Palestinian economy.

He offered few specific details and acknowledged that his vision might easily be taken as fantasy in a part of the world that has suffered through decades of conflict, and where peace prospects remain dim.

'We know it can be done,' he insisted. 'This is a plan for the Palestinian economy that is bigger, bolder and more ambitious than anything proposed' in the last two decades.

Kerry, outlining his hopes at a business conference on the Dead Sea in Jordan, was unsparing in his bold economic predictions:

- Palestinian agriculture production could double or triple

- Tourism could triple

- 100,000 new homes, many of them energy efficient, could be built in the next three years.

The former Massachusetts senator, who has been trying as well to restart direct Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, was to meet later Sunday in Amman with Blair, American hedge fund investor Tim Collins and the foreign ministers of Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

He said he has been coordinating with leading business experts around the world and that the plan would explore new opportunities in tourism, construction, light manufacturing, agriculture, energy and communications.

'Is this a fantasy?' Kerry asked the crowd. 'I don't think so, because there are already great examples of investment and entrepreneurship that are working in the West Bank.

'We know it can be done, but we've never experienced the kind of concentrated effort that this group is talking about bringing to the table.'

He said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas support the plan, but he added that it won't truly take hold unless both sides make headway on restarting peace talks.

Abbas also attended the conference in Jordan, as did Israeli President Shimon Peres, though they offered two starkly different messages on the peace impasse.

The Palestinian leader spent much of the time criticizing Israeli intransigence, while the Israeli Nobel Peace Prize laureate pressed his government's view that negotiations should begin immediately without preconditions.

Kerry allowed that barriers to commerce would have to be removed to spur economic growth. The Palestinians have long complained about limitations on movement and investment that have hampered its economic potential.

Kerry has made four trips to Israel and the Palestinian territories over the last two months in an effort to rejuvenate the peace process. He hasn't made any tangible success so far but insists he is engaged in productive talks with both sides.

SOURCE

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America as we know it is ending and conservatives feel fine

Libertarians should welcome government failure

Now that Obama has won a second term, some conservatives seem ready to admit that the country really has changed. In "Obama's Four Horseman," Human Events editor David Harsanyi writes, "Let's not fool ourselves. There's been a fundamental shift, especially among young people, in how Americans view government's role in society... A Pew Research study conducted after the election found that nearly six in 10 of the voters under 30 supported a more expansive role for government in solving problems."

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Harsanyi then spends most of the book detailing how Obama's agenda (debt, dependence, weakness and devaluing human life) will forever end "this particular iteration" of the United States.

"If you happen to believe, as I do, that government should be strong, but limited... -- guess what? We're screwed. And how." It's safe to say Harsanyi is a bit depressed.

But 2008 Libertarian vice presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root isn't. His book, "The Ultimate Obama Survival Guide," is every bit as critical of Obama's agenda as Harsanyi.

"Our assets are melting away. Our incomes are in decline. Our job prospects are disappearing. Our bills are rising. Our options are shrinking. Our rights are being violated. The middle class is being squeezed out of existence... We are living a never-ending nightmare."

But unlike Harsanyi, Root sees opportunity amidst the destruction. "Did you know that more self-made millionaires were created during the Great Depression than any other epoch in our history," Root writes.

"For most Americans it was a terrible time. But for the smart and savvy few, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It's all about to happen again."

The rest of Root's book is a list of ways you can profit from "the Obama disaster," including investing in oil and gas, shorting profligate state bonds like Illinois and California, and moving to low-tax states like Texas.

"'The Ultimate Obama Survival Guide' is about "empowering and motivating you to higher levels of success than you've ever imagined possible."

National Review's Kevin Williamson takes Root's optimism, and raises it. Like Harsanyi and Root, Williamson's book, "The End is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome," also details how and why America's relationship with government is about to change forever. But for Williamson, this is an opportunity for everyone, not just a smart select few.

Williamson's main insight is that, just as the human body is a product of biological evolution, the institutions that make up human society are a product of evolution as well. The problem is, however, that government is simply incapable of evolving as fast as the rest of human society.

"Politics," Williamson writes, "almost alone among our contemporary institutions, lacks a strong and reliable feedback mechanism to help it learn."

"The model of organizing community life that has prevailed since the late eighteenth century is in the process of disintegrating. That fact is good news," Williamson continues.

"The historic challenge of our time is to anticipate as best we can the coming changes and to begin developing alternative institutions and social practices to ensure the continuation of a society that is humane, secure, free, and prosperous."

Williamson has no master plan as to how we can meet this challenge, but he does look at a number of issue areas (like Social Security, health care and education) and sketches out some possible non-governmental solutions.

It would be wrong to say that all conservatives are happy Obama won a second term, but it appears that some have accepted that Obama has changed the country, and they are eager to make the best of it.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Islamic murder in London due to British government "funding cuts"

That's the latest bit of Leftist "wisdom".  See below.  Surah 9 (etc.) in the Koran has nothing to do with it of course

The coalition's strategy to counter Islamist extremism is failing, according to an outspoken intervention by the former cabinet minister who ran the programme under the last government.

Speaking following the Woolwich attack, Hazel Blears MP, who as communities secretary led the Prevent strategy under Labour, told the Observer that people vulnerable to the messages of extremist preachers were being spotted too late. She said it had been a serious mistake to dismantle Labour's policy of funding local authorities that have a population more than 5% Muslim, to help them curb radicalism by engaging and funding community groups, Islamic societies and mosques.

Blears, who is a member of the cross-party committee of MPs that monitors the intelligence services, said she was very worried that Prevent was now "basically dealing with people who are already crossing that line" into radicalism, rather than making an early identification of those who were vulnerable to extremist Islamic preaching. Her comments come in another eventful day following the attack.

The former minister's comments will inevitably lead to a debate about whether the coalition rolled back the Prevent policy too dramatically. The Labour government's policy of encouraging local authorities to fund sympathetic Islamic groups was attacked in its latter years by critics who claimed that the government was establishing a network of spies to monitor Muslim communities. It was also claimed that extremist groups had received funding, and the strategy was redrawn in 2011. Funding was removed from organisations that were said not to support "British values" and Prevent funds were to no longer to be used for "community interventions".

Blears said the coalition had been mistaken in disengaging from local authorities and focusing Prevent solely on stopping extremists being drawn towards terrorism. She said that the case against Labour's Prevent strategy had proved largely false, with the Home Office reporting in 2011 that there was no evidence of spying nor anything to "indicate widespread, systematic or deliberate funding of extremist groups", although some with extremist ideology had received funding as part of the engagement strategy.

More HERE

That lovely government "funding".  Leftists just love it!

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This week's utterly disturbing Leftists

Much of the reaction on British Left has been to search for apologies to make and excuses to give. It's a devastating and destructive philosophy

There is one phrase that has stood out for me over the last few days. One jarring, horrible sentence that betrays the warped mindset of many on the Left when it comes to Islamic extremism: “What happened on Wednesday was terrible, but...”

We have heard it, and its variations, from almost all of the usual suspects since the Woolwich terror attack. Ken Livingstone gave a long condemnation of the terrorists on Friday, only to try to blame Tony Blair and the Iraq War for what happened.

Glenn Greenwald, very careful to thrust the words “horrific act of violence” into the first line of his utterly disturbing piece for the Guardian, compares the killing of a British soldier in London by terrorists to the killing of terrorists in the Middle East by western forces as like for like.

I had lunch with another Guardian journalist who believed this was just another murder on the mean streets of our capital; that the murder of a Muslim by racist white Britons is equally newsworthy.

Owen Jones, meanwhile, seems determined to draw attention away from Woolwich, away from Islamists, and towards the English Defence League (EDL). He would have us believe they were the real, dangerous evil here.

I find it incredibly sad that these four leading voices of the left - no doubt all intelligent men - would discard all semblance of rationality, particularly at such a sensitive time.

Livingstone ignores the fact that Al-Muhajiroun, the extremist group linked to Michael Adebolajo, and its offshoots have been peddling its evil long before Iraq and many other Western interventions in the Muslim world and has recently been shown to be connected to 18 per cent of convicted Islamic terrorists between 1998 and 2010. To attribute blame to Western foreign policy is as intellectually vacuous as it is offensive.

Greenwald’s equating of British soldiers to Islamist terrorists is even more repugnant. Of course the Left - and the Right for that matter - have legitimate criticisms over foreign policy, but to become so blinded by self-loathing that he blurs the distinction between good and evil, for me, makes Greenwald an apologist for terror.

My Guardian journalist lunch partner inspired gasps around the table with his own comparison of the attack to “any other murder”. How he fails to grasp that the unprecedented killing of a British soldier by an Islamist terrorist in London is of greater news value than a “normal” murder perhaps explains why he works for the newspaper he does.

As for Owen Jones, there is something utterly odd in obsessing with the EDL in the way he has. English nationalism is a weak ideology with few supporters that is powerless on the world stage, and pretty impotent even at home. Islamic extremism is arguably the greatest evil faced by the free world. The EDL is nothing; why even give them the time of day?

There is a sickness in the hard Left. Their unerring, almost sociopathic desire to direct the blame for terrible events onto our own country, our own ideology, our own people, is beneath contempt. Sometimes it is enough to just say “this was awful, this was evil, we will not waver”.

By attacking our own, the Left is doing exactly what the terrorists wanted all along. As a result, they have become the useless idiots who encourage the status quo.

SOURCE

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Department of (Social) Justice

When the Department of Justice is finished violating journalists’ First Amendment rights, perhaps it should look into this: Liberty Counsel, an international Christian litigation organization, has obtained a brochure entitled, “LGBT Inclusion at Work: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Managers, distributed to DOJ managers by DOJ Pride, the department’s in-house LGBT association, in advance of “LGBT Pride Month” (a.k.a. “June”).

Under each of the seven habits is a list of DOs and DON’Ts – but they are not just the usual diversity shtick. Argues Matt Barber, vice president of Liberty Counsel Action, “[The document is] “riddled with directives that grossly violate – prima facie – employees’ First Amendment liberties.” Among the helpful hints:

*    DO assume that LGBT employees and their allies are listening to what you’re saying (whether in a meeting or around the proverbial water cooler) and will read what you’re writing (whether in a casual email or in a formal document)” . . .

*    DO talk in staff meetings about why diversity is important to you as a manager, and make it clear you define diversity to include both sexual orientation and gender identity. . . .

*    DO provide explicit, verbal reassurance that advancement and development opportunities are based strictly on merit.

The fifth habit of highly effective managers? “Come out” as a “straight ally.”

One particular bit of advice, offered under the heading, “Know How to Respond If an Employee Comes Out to You,” seems to summarize the thrust of the whole brochure: “DON’T judge or remain silent. Silence will be interpreted as disapproval.”

For DOJ Pride, there is no longer a place even for private, unexpressed disapproval of homosexuality in the workplace. Regardless of personal beliefs, every manager ought to be a vocal advocate for the LGBT cause. If you are not an outspoken supporter, you must be an enemy.

That is justice at the DOJ these days.

SOURCE

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Congressional Black Caucus Member Shocked to Discover Farrakhan Speech He Was Nodding to was Anti-Semitic and Racist

You can sympathize with John Conyers, the longest serving member of the House of Representatives and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, who came to hear some inspirational words of wisdom from notoriously inspiring figure Louis Farrakhan, only to discover,  a week later, to his shock and surprise, that the speech he was approvingly nodding to was really racist.

Conyers, who attended Farrakhan’s speech Friday night at Fellowship Chapel, issued a strong statement that distanced himself from the Nation of Islam leader’s remarks, which were blasted earlier this week by a Jewish civil rights group and others.

“Farrakhan made unacceptable racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic statements, which I condemn in the strongest possible terms,” Conyers said. “It was my expectation that Minister Farrakhan’s speech would focus on the many challenges facing the city of Detroit. In previous days, he had discussed efforts to revitalize our city by purchasing property and investing in blighted neighborhoods. Regrettably, he used this opportunity to promote views that have no place in civilized discourse.”

Shocking. Who would have thought that Farrakhan would spew hateful bigotry when given a big shiny podium, instead of dealing with the challenges facing Detroit. Like the challenge of the Racist White Jew bloodsuckers created by a Black Mad Scientist named Yakub who will return in his UFO to banish the white beast-men from the earth… as Nation of Islam doctrine states.

According to the Detroit Free Press,“Conyers and Watson nodded in agreement during some of Farrakhan’s remarks”; however, the paper did not specify during which parts of the speech they nodded.

Was John Conyers nodding during the part where

1. Farrakhan defended former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick who may have been involved in the murder of a stripper

2. Farrakhan criticized Obama for surrounding himself with “Satan…members of the Jewish community.”

3. Told black people that they need to buy up Detroit before the Mexicans and the Arabs get it all

But it’s only natural that Congressman John Conyers would be utterly shocked that Louis Farrakhan would say horrible bigoted things in an appearance that was preceded by him saying on the radio of white people, “Genetically, you are inferior. … We can wipe you off the Earth just cohabiting with you and that’s why your population is going down.”

Rev. David Bul­lock of Greater St. Matthew Bap­tist Church stated that Farrakhan’s mes­sage was “impact­ful,” “timely,” and left him “inspired.”

Imam Mubarak Al-Mubarak of Warithud­din Mohammed Mosque said “Many are afraid of truth, and the Min­is­ter is more dynamic, more impor­tant, and rel­e­vant than we could ever imagine.”

You know, I hear the Tea Party is really racist.

SOURCE

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A quiz



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ONLY IN AMERICA

10) Only in America ...could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a $35,000.00 a plate campaign fund-raising event.

9) Only in America ...could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a black Attorney General, and roughly 18% of the federal workforce is black while only 12% of the population is black.

8) Only in America ...could they have had the two people most responsible for our tax code, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and Means Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.

7) Only in America ...can they have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.

6) Only in America ...would they make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, while they discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just 'magically' become American citizens.

5) Only in America ...could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be thought of as "extremists."

4) Only in   America ...could you need to present a driver's license to cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.

3) Only  in America ...could people demand the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas went up when  the return on equity invested in a major U.S. oil company ( Marathon Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes (Nike).

2) Only in America ...could the government collect more tax dollars from the people than any nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion dollars more than it has per year - for total spending of $7-Million PER MINUTE, and complain that it doesn't have nearly enough money.

1 ) Only in America ...could the rich people - who pay 86% of all income taxes be accused of not paying their "fair share" by people who don't pay any income taxes at all.

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Mark Steyn: Bystanders in their own fate
 
On Wednesday, Drummer Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, a man who had served Queen and country honorably in the hell of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, emerged from his barracks on Wellington Street, named after the Duke thereof, in southeast London. Minutes later, he was hacked to death in broad daylight and in full view of onlookers by two men with machetes who crowed "Allahu Akbar!" as they dumped his carcass in the middle of the street like so much roadkill.

As grotesque as this act of savagery was, the aftermath was even more unsettling. The perpetrators did not, as the Tsarnaev brothers did in Boston, attempt to escape. Instead, they held court in the street, gloating over their trophy, and flagged down a London bus to demand the passengers record their triumph on film. As the crowd of bystanders swelled, the remarkably urbane savages posed for photographs with the remains of their victim while discoursing on the iniquities of Britain toward the Muslim world. Having killed Drummer Rigby, they were killing time: it took 20 minutes for the somnolent British constabulary to show up.

And so television viewers were treated to the spectacle of a young man, speaking in the vowels of south London, chatting calmly with his "fellow Britons" about his geopolitical grievances and apologizing to the ladies present for any discomfort his beheading of Drummer Rigby might have caused them, all while drenched in blood and still wielding his cleaver.

This image taken from video made available by The Sun newspaper shows what appears to be one of the attackers speaking to the camera, holding a knife and a cleaver in his bloodied hands, after a brutal attack in broad daylight Wednesday, May 22, 2013 near a military barracks in London. The attack just a few blocks from the Royal Artillery Barracks in the Woolrich neighborhood of London left one man dead and two suspects hospitalized after a shootout with police.

If you're thinking of getting steamed over all that, don't. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of The Times of London, cautioned against "mass hysteria" over "mundane acts of violence."
That's easy for him to say. Woolwich is an unfashionable part of town, and Sir Simon is unlikely to find himself there on an afternoon stroll. Drummer Rigby had less choice in the matter.

Being jumped by barbarians with machetes is certainly "mundane" in Somalia and Sudan, but it's the sort of thing that would once have been considered somewhat unusual on a sunny afternoon in south London – at least as unusual as, say, blowing up 8-year-old boys at the Boston Marathon. It was "mundane" only in the sense that, as at weddings and kindergarten concerts, the reflexive reaction of everybody present was to get out their cellphones and start filming.

Once, long ago, I was in an altercation where someone pulled a switchblade, and ever since have been mindful of Jimmy Hoffa's observation that he'd rather jump a gun than a knife.

Nevertheless, there is a disturbing passivity to this scene: a street full of able-bodied citizens being lectured to by blood-soaked murderers who have no fear that anyone will be minded to interrupt their diatribes. In fairness to the people of Boston, they were ordered to "shelter in place" by the Governor of Massachusetts. In Woolwich, a large crowd of Londoners apparently volunteered to "shelter in place," instinctively. Consider how that will play when these guys' jihadist snuff video is being hawked around the bazaars of the Muslim world. Behold the infidels, content to be bystanders in their own fate.

This passivity set the tone for what followed. In London as in Boston, the politico-media class immediately lapsed into the pneumatic multiculti Tourette's that seems to be a chronic side-effect of excess diversity-celebrating: No Islam to see here, nothing to do with Islam, all these body parts in the street are a deplorable misinterpretation of Islam.

The BBC's Nick Robinson accidentally described the men as being "of Muslim appearance," but quickly walked it back lest impressionable types get the idea that there's anything "of Muslim appearance" about a guy waving a machete and saying "Allahu Akbar." A man is on TV, dripping blood in front of a dead British soldier and swearing "by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you," yet it's the BBC reporter who's apologizing for "causing offence."

To David Cameron, Drummer Rigby's horrific end was "not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life, it was also a betrayal of Islam. ... There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act."

How does he know? He doesn't seem the most-likely Koranic scholar. Appearing on David Letterman's show a while back, Cameron was unable to translate into English the words "Magna Carta," which has quite a bit to do with that "British way of life" he's so keen on. But apparently it's because he's been up to his neck in suras and hadiths every night, sweating for Shariah 101.

So has Scotland Yard's Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Brian Paddick, who reassured us after the London Tube bombings that "Islam and terrorism don't go together," and the Mayor of Toronto, David Miller, telling NPR listeners after 19 Muslims were arrested for plotting to behead the Canadian Prime Minister: "You know, in Islam, if you kill one person you kill everybody," he said in a somewhat loose paraphrase of Koran 5:32 that manages to leave out some important loopholes. "It's a very peaceful religion."

That's why it fits so harmoniously into famously peaceful societies like, say, Sweden. For the past week, Stockholm has been ablaze every night with hundreds of burning cars set alight by "youths." Any particular kind of "youth"? The Swedish Prime Minister declined to identify them any more precisely than as "hooligans." But don't worry: The "hooligans" and "youths" and men of no Muslim appearance whatsoever can never win because, as David Cameron ringingly declared, "they can never beat the values we hold dear, the belief in freedom, in democracy, in free speech, in our British values, Western values."

Actually, they've already gone quite a way toward eroding free speech, as both Prime Ministers demonstrate. The short version of what happened in Woolwich is that two Muslims butchered a British soldier in the name of Islam and helpfully explained, "The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day." But what do they know? They're only Muslims, not Diversity Outreach Coordinators. So the BBC, in its so-called "Key Points," declined to mention the "Allahu Akbar" bit or the "I-word" at all: Allah who?

Not a lot of Muslims want to go to the trouble of chopping your head off, but when so many Western leaders have so little rattling around up there, they don't have to. And, as we know from the sob-sister Tsarnaev profiles, most of these excitable lads are perfectly affable, or at least no more than mildly alienated, until the day they set a hundred cars alight, or blow up a schoolboy, or decapitate some guy.

And, if you're lucky, it's not you they behead, or your kid they kill, or even your Honda Civic they light up. And so life goes on, and it's all so "mundane," in Simon Jenkins' word, that you barely notice when the Jewish school shuts up, and the gay bar, and the uncovered women no longer take a stroll too late in the day, and the publishing house that gets sent the manuscript for the next "Satanic Verses" decides it's not worth the trouble. But don't worry, they'll never defeat our "free speech" and our "way of life."

One in 10 Britons under 25 now is Muslim. That number will increase, through immigration, disparate birth rates, and conversions like those of the Woolwich killers, British born and bred. Metternich liked to say the Balkans began in the Landstrasse, in south-east Vienna. Today, the dar al-Islam begins in Wellington Street, in southeast London. That's a "betrayal" all right, but not of Islam.

SOURCE

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The rise of the fourth branch of government

There were times this past week when it seemed like the 19th-century Know-Nothing Party had returned to Washington. President Obama insisted he knew nothing about major decisions in the State Department, or the Justice Department, or the Internal Revenue Service. The heads of those agencies, in turn, insisted they knew nothing about major decisions by their subordinates. It was as if the government functioned by some hidden hand.

Clearly, there was a degree of willful blindness in these claims. However, the suggestion that someone, even the president, is in control of today’s government may be an illusion.

The growing dominance of the federal government over the states has obscured more fundamental changes within the federal government itself: It is not just bigger, it is dangerously off kilter. Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.

For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.

The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.

This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But Capitol Hill’s relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight on more than a small percentage of agency actions. And the threat of cutting funds is a blunt instrument to control a massive administrative state — like running a locomotive with an on/off switch.

The autonomy was magnified when the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that agencies are entitled to heavy deference in their interpretations of laws. The court went even further this past week, ruling that agencies should get the same heavy deference in determining their own jurisdictions — a power that was previously believed to rest with Congress. In his dissent in Arlington v. FCC, Chief Justice John Roberts warned: “It would be a bit much to describe the result as ‘the very definition of tyranny,’ but the danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.”

The judiciary, too, has seen its authority diminished by the rise of the fourth branch. Under Article III of the Constitution, citizens facing charges and fines are entitled to due process in our court system. As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.

These agency proceedings are often mockeries of due process, with one-sided presumptions and procedural rules favoring the agency. And agencies increasingly seem to chafe at being denied their judicial authority. Just ask John E. Brennan. Brennan, a 50-year-old technology consultant, was charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure when he stripped at Portland International Airport last year in protest of invasive security measures by the Transportation Security Administration. He was cleared by a federal judge, who ruled that his stripping was a form of free speech. The TSA was undeterred. After the ruling, it pulled Brennan into its own agency courts under administrative charges.

The rise of the fourth branch has occurred alongside an unprecedented increase in presidential powers — from the power to determine when to go to war to the power to decide when it’s reasonable to vaporize a U.S. citizen in a drone strike. In this new order, information is jealously guarded and transparency has declined sharply. That trend, in turn, has given the fourth branch even greater insularity and independence. When Congress tries to respond to cases of agency abuse, it often finds officials walled off by claims of expanding executive privilege.

Of course, federal agencies officially report to the White House under the umbrella of the executive branch. But in practice, the agencies have evolved into largely independent entities over which the president has very limited control. Only 1 percent of federal positions are filled by political appointees, as opposed to career officials, and on average appointees serve only two years. At an individual level, career officials are insulated from political pressure by civil service rules. There are also entire agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — that are protected from White House interference.

Some agencies have gone so far as to refuse to comply with presidential orders. For example, in 1992 President George H.W. Bush ordered the U.S. Postal Service to withdraw a lawsuit against the Postal Rate Commission, and he threatened to sack members of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors who denied him. The courts ruled in favor of the independence of the agency.

It’s a small percentage of agency matters that rise to the level of presidential notice. The rest remain the sole concern of agency discretion.

As the power of the fourth branch has grown, conflicts between the other branches have become more acute. There is no better example than the fights over presidential appointments.

Wielding its power to confirm, block or deny nominees is one of the few remaining ways Congress can influence agency policy and get a window into agency activity. Nominations now commonly trigger congressional demands for explanations of agencies’ decisions and disclosures of their documents. And that commonly leads to standoffs with the White House.

Take the fight over Richard Cordray, nominated to serve as the first director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Cordray is highly qualified, but Republican senators oppose the independence of the new bureau and have questions about its jurisdiction and funding. After those senators repeatedly blocked the nomination, Obama used a congressional break in January to make a recess appointment. Since then, two federal appeals courts have ruled that Obama’s recess appointments violated the Constitution and usurped congressional authority. While the fight continues in the Senate, the Obama administration has appealed to the Supreme Court.

It would be a mistake to dismiss such conflicts as products of our dysfunctional, partisan times. Today’s political divisions are mild compared with those in the early republic, as when President Thomas Jefferson described his predecessor’s tenure as “the reign of the witches.” Rather, today’s confrontations reflect the serious imbalance in the system.

The marginalization Congress feels is magnified for citizens, who are routinely pulled into the vortex of an administrative state that allows little challenge or appeal. The IRS scandal is the rare case in which internal agency priorities are forced into the public eye. Most of the time, such internal policies are hidden from public view and congressional oversight. While public participation in the promulgation of new regulations is allowed, and often required, the process is generally perfunctory and dismissive.

In the new regulatory age, presidents and Congress can still change the government’s priorities, but the agencies effectively run the show based on their interpretations and discretion. The rise of this fourth branch represents perhaps the single greatest change in our system of government since the founding.

We cannot long protect liberty if our leaders continue to act like mere bystanders to the work of government.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Liberalism: An ideology of rage and hate

One thing has become crystal clear in the last few days; Liberalism is an ideology of hate.

After the Tucson shootings that left Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life, liberals twisted themselves into pretzels trying to convince Americans that “rhetoric” from conservatives was the culprit.

Almost immediately after the shootings, liberals blamed Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and cross-hairs.

At a memorial that looked more like a campaign rally, President Obama said Americans should “…listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together…”

Nevertheless, hardcore leftists continued their hate speech against conservatives.

Since the beginning of the Wisconsin Insurrection, Americans have seen the insane rage of the left, and it has not been pretty.   Consider the following examples:

A Massachusetts Democrat – an elected official, no less – encouraged union activists to “get bloody when necessary.”

Another elected Democrat compared Governor Scott Walker to a dictator.

Left wing bloggers and media personalities got into the act as well.  Liberal hate-talker Mike Papantonio complained elderly Tea Party activists weren’t dying fast enough.

A blogger writing for the radical left wing site Daily Kos compared the Governor to a southern slave holder.

Signs carried by union activists showed crosshairs superimposed on Gov. Walker’s face. Remember the furor over crosshairs used by Sarah Palin’s political action committee? We were supposed to believe the very presence of the graphic was enough to send people into uncontrolled fits of rage – perhaps enough to make them grab a gun and kill people.  But nothing was said about the use of the crosshair on Governor Scott Walker.

The result of all this hate?  Some took to the social networking site Twitter to call for the assassination of Governor Scott Walker.

Tabitha Hale, a young 5 foot 1 inch female employee of FreedomWorks, was assaulted by a union thug in Washington, D.C.  Another union thug threatened a Rhode Island cameraman with homosexual rape in very graphic terms.

A Tea Party activist was attacked by an unhinged union thug at a protest in Sacramento.

Breitbart.tv has video of a union activist claiming New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is a terrorist who would shoot workers.  But yet, the Tea Party is called violent and racist.

Politico reports that the attacks and threats against Walker did not go unnoticed by fellow Republican Mitch Daniels:  “This whole thing with bulls-eyes, people talking about assassinations — the hate speech here is really being directed at [Walker],” Daniels said.

In a recent column, Michelle Malkin documents what she calls the “vulgar, racist, sexist, homophobic rage of the Left.”  Malkin explains:

"Yes, the tea party movement is responsible — for sending these liberal goons into an insane rage, that is. After enduring two years of false smears as sexist, racist, homophobic barbarians, it is grassroots conservatives and taxpayer advocates who have been ceaselessly subjected to rhetorical projectile vomit. It is Obama’s rank-and-file “community organizers” on the streets fomenting the hate against their political enemies. Not the other way around.

Those of us who follow current political events from a conservative point of view are not really surprised by the level of vitriol from the left – we have seen it for years.  But lately, it seems the more radical left has gone completely berserk, openly calling for violence and revolution.

While interviewing liberal cartoonist Ted Rall shortly after the November election, MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan said:  "Are things in our country so bad that it might actually be time for a revolution?" Ratigan asked. "The answer obviously is yes," he added, and "the only question is how to do it."

Liberals like to say they want “dialogue” and “civil rhetoric” but they show time and again they are incapable of civil dialogue. For them, bipartisanship means you must agree with them.  If you don’t, you’re labeled a racist, homophobic bigot, or worse.

It is only a matter of time before one of these unhinged lunatics pulls a gun and commits a crime similar to the Tucson massacre.

Until liberals practice what they preach, they have absolutely no credibility on the issue of rhetoric.

SOURCE

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America hatred

Success in others makes Leftists BOIL

by Jeff Jacoby

BROADCASTING FROM BOSTON the day after the Marathon bombing, a correspondent for the French-Canadian TV channel LCN explained why Americans shouldn't be surprised when such atrocities occurred. It's the price they have to pay for being a superpower, Richard Latendresse told his viewers. It may be "un peu tragique," he conceded. But hey, that's what happens when a nation takes so much pride in its military power – and has inflicted similar suffering on others.

Writing in The Guardian the same day, Glenn Greenwald noted that so far there was "virtually no known evidence regarding who did it or why." Yet one paragraph later, he was railing against "attacks that the US perpetrates rather than suffers" and calling the bombings "exactly the kinds of horrific, civilian-slaughtering attacks that the US has been bringing to countries in the Muslim world over and over and over."

Then there was Richard Falk, a UN human rights investigator and professor emeritus at Princeton, who attributed the bloody mayhem in Copley Square to "our geopolitical fantasy of global domination." The marathon bombings, Falk suggested in an article for Foreign Policy Journal, were a fitting "retribution" for US actions abroad. He pointedly quoted poet W. H. Auden's "haunting" line: "Those to whom evil is done/do evil in return."

Truly, there is something grotesque about people whose first instinct after something as awful as the Patriots Day terror attack is to parade their moral superiority by indicting America's culture, society, or foreign policy. Yet there never seems to be a shortage of such paraders, particularly in academia, the media, and the arts. Back in 2001, The New Republic ran a feature in the weeks following 9/11 called "Idiocy Watch," in which it catalogued the barrage of bitter and fatuous comments being made about the attacks by well-known intellectuals for whom ideology apparently trumped everything, decency included.

"We in America are convinced that it was blind, mad fanatics who didn't know what they were doing," said Norman Mailer, to cite just one of many examples. "But what if those perpetrators were right and we were not?"

To reread those words 11 years later is to be disgusted all over again that one of the nation's leading literary figures could have proposed that Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda hijackers were "right" to plan and carry out their ghastly slaughter. On the one-month anniversary of the Marathon bombings, the suggestion that four people died and scores were maimed because of America's global iniquity is no less revolting.

Norman Mailer thought the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for 9/11 deserved the benefit of the doubt: "What if those perpetrators were right and we were not?"

Yet that didn't inhibit London's former mayor Ken Livingstone, who went on Iran's English-language TV channel to explain that the terrorists detonated those pressure-cooker bombs because "people get incredibly angry about injustices" such as "the torture at Guantanamo Bay" and "lash out." It didn't stop Mark LeVine, a University of California history professor, from advising Americans "to admit that as a society they produce an incredible amount of violence," which in turn "helps produce people like the Columbine, Newtown or Boston murderers." It didn't deter former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who wrote a blog post headlined "US leaders' fingerprints are on the detonators," since it is "blatantly obvious" that what motivated the terrorists was American policy in the Middle East.

There have always been Westerners quick to see the United States as culpable or contemptible in every crisis – the urge to "blame America first" was well known long before Jeane Kirkpatrick excoriated it in a famous speech in 1984. In the abstract, of course, there is nothing wrong with thoughtful self-criticism. For both individuals and societies, it is a mark of health to be able to look inward and acknowledge fault; no society can progress if it cannot be honest about its shortcomings.

But it is no part of constructive self-criticism to make excuses for those who commit acts of terrorism, or to explain why their victims, as citizens of the United States, had it coming. You don't demonstrate sensitivity to other cultures by treating willful savagery against ours as something less than savagery. Terrorism is never justified. Perpetrators are not victims.

In the wake of a bloody atrocity like the one in Boston last month, the first duty of civilized people – regardless of politics or ideology -- is not to start asking why the evildoers hate us, or how they became so angry.

It is to call their actions evil, and denounce them without equivocation.

SOURCE

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How JFK secretly ADMIRED Hitler

Interesting that the press never mentioned this when Kennedy was running for President

A new book out in Germany reveals how President Kennedy was a secret admirer of the Nazis.

President Kennedy's travelogues and letters chronicling his wanderings through Germany before WWII, when Adolf Hitler was in power, have been unearthed and show him generally in favour of the movement that was to plunge the world into the greatest war in history

'Fascism?' wrote the youthful president-to-be in one. 'The right thing for Germany.'  In another; 'What are the evils of fascism compared to communism?'

And on August 21, 1937 - two years before the war that would claim 50 million lives broke out - he wrote: 'The Germans really are too good - therefore people have ganged up on them to protect themselves.'

And in a line which seems directly plugged into the racial superiority line plugged by the Third Reich he wrote after travelling through the Rhineland: 'The Nordic races certainly seem to be superior to the Romans.'

Other musings concern how great the autobahns were - 'the best roads in the world' - and how, having visited Hitler's Bavarian holiday home in Berchtesgaden and the tea house built on top of the mountain for him.

He declared; 'Who has visited these two places can easily imagine how Hitler will emerge from the hatred currently surrounding him to emerge in a few years as one of the most important personalities that ever lived.'

Kennedy's admiration for Nazi Germany is revealed in a book entitled 'John F. Kennedy - Among the Germans. Travel diaries and letters 1937-1945.'

But his praise was not entirely without caveats.  'It is evident that the Germans were scary for him,' said Spiegel magazine in Berlin.

In the diaries of the three trips he made to prewar Germany he also recognised; 'Hitler seems to be as popular here as Mussolini in Germany, although propaganda is probably his most powerful weapon.'

Observers say his writings ranged between aversion and attraction for Germany.

The book also contains his impressions when walking through a shattered Berlin after the war: 'An overwhelming stench of bodies - sweet and nauseating'.

And of the recently deceased Fuehrer he said; 'His boundless ambition for his country made him a threat to peace in the world, but he had something mysterious about him. He was the stuff of legends.'

The book editor's believe that he was 'eerily fascinated' by fascism.

SOURCE

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After you read this kid's story, you'll think twice about what you post on Facebook. (And that's the problem.)

Meet Cameron D'Ambrosio. He's 18 and lives in a small town outside Boston. He wants to be a rapper and calls himself "Cammy Dee" in his YouTube videos.

Oh, and he's been locked up without bail for weeks -- facing terrorism charges and 20 years in prison -- all for something he posted on Facebook.

On May 1st, Cam was skipping school and messing around online. He posted some lyrics that included a vague reference to the Boston Marathon Bombing and called the Whitehouse a "federal house of horror." Shortly after that he was arrested and charged with Communicating a Terrorist Threat, a felony that carries 20 years in prison.

The post contained no specific threat of violence against any person or group of people, and in the context of the rest of the lyrics and Cams' rap persona, it was clearly nothing more than a metaphor. A search of Cam's house found NO evidence that he was planning any violence, but a judge still ordered him held without bail for the next 3 months, pending trial.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Cars

I may here be mentioning something as fraught as IQ.  It seems that I have a boffin-like disregard for what car I should drive.  It has always seemed inexplicable to me that people pay large sums of money for a car when another car at half the price would do all the same things.

I cheerfully confess that I am a Toyota man.  I own a small 15 year old Toyota and a small 8 year old Toyota. Neither has ever broken down.  I drive the more recent one most of the time and lend the other one out wherever that would help someone that I  know.

I have just been reading Kate Fox's book on the English, "Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour", which  is, I think,  the funniest book I have ever read.  And she does explain cars.

She shoots down most of the reasons that people give for buying expensive cars ("better engineering" etc.).  She says that in England cars are an index of social class. The makes of cars she mentions apply to England at the time she wrote (2004) so it would not mean much for me to quote specifics (though a Mercedes is not as prestigious as you might think) but what she says does fit with things I have noticed.  And in England it would seem that each position on the class hierarchy does tend to have a type of car that goes with it.

I am rather relieved at that explanation as I had seen the purchase of expensive cars as pure insanity.  My Toyotas are comfortable, reliable, easy to park and get me through city traffic at least as soon as any other car.  So why spend money on a German car at twice the price?

So, as indexed by cars, I am at the bottom of the social class heap in most people's eyes, I gather.

I may however be redeemed by the fact that I also have a really old car for Sunday driving  -- a 50 year old Humber Super Snipe, a big British luxury car of yesteryear.  The Humber sure gets a lot of admiring comments wherever I take it.  Which is ironic.  I gather that a lot of people buy a particular car in the hope that it will be admired.  But I can't think of any modern car that gets anything like the admiration that my ancient Humber gets.  It seems to give people joy just to see it.

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Calling all conservative educators (you know who you are)

I put up 9 blogs 6 days a week so it should be obvious that I can't give each one the attention that I think it deserves.  Despite that they all get a good audience as blogs go.

I have long felt, however, that some of them would benefit from having a co-blogger.  And that has recently been shown to be right.  I turned over the day-to-day running of  GUN WATCH to Dean Weingarten about 6 months ago.  He has put a lot of effort into it and now gets TREBLE the readership that I used to get.

So I live in hopes that something similar could be achieved with EDUCATION WATCH.  It gets about 300 pageviews every day, which may not seem much but which puts it in the top 1% of blogs.  A newly started blog would be lucky to average 10 pageviews each day.

So if you are a teacher at some level or are otherwise particularly interested in education, this may be a good chance for you to make your voice heard on a regular basis.  Email me  here

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Iceland says "No" again

The leader of the center-right Progressive Party was chosen as Iceland's new prime minister Wednesday and promptly announced a halt to talks with the European Union about joining the 27-nation bloc.

Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson spoke about the policy shift at a press conference after being selected premier.

'The government intends to halt negotiations between Iceland and the European Union,' he said. 'We will not hold further negotiations with the European Union without prior referendum.'

Iceland has engaged in on-and-off talks with the EU for several years. Gunnlaugsson's party has been opposed, in part because members fear that joining would mean giving up control of Iceland's vital fishing stocks.

The new government will also include Bjarni Benediktsson, head of the conservative Independent Party, who will serve as minister of finance.

Icelanders voted April 27, returning to power the parties who had governed for decades before the 2008 economic collapse, the Independents and the Progressive Party.

The two parties had ruled together from 1995 until the 2008 fiasco. After the collapse of the Icelandic banking sector that year, Icelanders voted in a liberal government led by the Social Democrats and the Left-Greens.

The small North Atlantic nation with a population of 320,000 went from economic powerhouse to financial disaster almost overnight when its main commercial banks collapsed within a week in 2008.

The value of the country's currency plummeted, while inflation and unemployment figures soared. Iceland was forced to seek a bailout from Europe and the International Monetary Fund.

SOURCE

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Truth Floats Despite Tyranny on the Potomac

Progressivism thrives best when truth is suppressed, but suppressed truth is still truth. You can try to sink it, shred it, cover it and destroy it, but truth eventually rises to the surface. Truth floats. Always.

Currently, the various scandals within the Obama administration have put Progressives in defensive mode to protect an ideology built on lies. Each day brings with it a new scandal or a new angle to a previous scandal. Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS, and the DOJ's seizure of phone records have one thing in common: suppression of truth.

Americans are discovering Progressivism isn't all it is cracked up to be. Even the coolest of Progressive presidents can't deliver the goodies they promise if what they really intended to deliver was hidden inside a bag of lies.

By now, most everyone understands Progressive-speak for "hope and change" translates into high unemployment, an abysmal economy, a disastrous healthcare bill, excessive poverty, starving children, ridiculous food prices, losing wars, and terrorist attacks on our homeland. Four bucks gets you a gallon of gas, a college degree gets you nowhere, and with each new scandal, the White House deflects the blame on someone else and runs off to play another round of golf. That, my friends, is Progressivism in a nutshell.

In a most enlightening article, "Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression," author David Martin nails it when he states "strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government" and "the success of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press and a mere token opposition party." Without a doubt, we have the makings of a perfect storm.

If you've never understood the connection between Progressivism and lies, all you need to do is take an objective look at the current administration's scandals. While all investigations are still active, a common thread weaves through each in that either the truth was suppressed to cover an action or an action was taken to suppress the truth.

In Benghazi it appears the administration suppressed the truth about an act (an al-Qaida-linked terrorist attack) to fit its pre-election "al-Qaida-free" story line. The same rings true regarding the seizure of reporters' phone and email records by the Department of Justice. Attorney General Holder claims records were seized for national security reasons, but that doesn't gel with what the Associated Press describes as an "unprecedented" seizure of records. In a recent statement, AP president Gary Pruitt said his organization held the in-question article describing a terrorist plot by an al-Qaida-linked group in Yemen "until the government assured us that the national security concerns had passed." With that in mind, might a more reasonable reason be that administration officials spent an awful lot of time traveling around the country pre-election reporting al-Qaida was no longer a threat?

Each day carries with it new discoveries about the heinous IRS scandal wherein acts of suppression served to squash the voice and rights of those who, unlike Progressives, have the intelligence to differentiate between the U.S. Constitution and a roll of toilet paper and embrace the freedoms and protections therein.

If you don't like what you see, it's time to get loud (not violent) Americans. Silence is acceptance. And so far, your silence is deafening... and dangerous...because silence becomes the well-insulated womb to which tyranny is given safe harbor to grow.

SOURCE

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The IRS Fiasco Shows the Incompetence of Liberalism

Scandals are nothing new in Washington. Just about every president has faced an accusation of misconduct, whether moral or criminal. It should be no surprise that the Obama Administration would find itself in the midst of one, well actually 3 at present.

Many Republicans have been quick to declare this the end of Obama, even calling for impeachment. However, these scandals are not the personal failings of the President himself, rather they are the failings of the liberal philosophy which he and his entire administration espouse.

In case you were out camping without a cell phone for the past week, here is a brief recap in order of appearance:

Benghazi: the White House has been accused of failure to act and misleading the public about the events surrounding the 9/11/12 attack on the US consulate resulting in the death of Ambassador Stevens.

IRS: Conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status were targeted for extra scrutiny, beginning shortly after Scott Brown special election victory in 2010 through the 2012 presidential campaign. Also, confidential tax documents of prominent conservatives were leaked to the media.

Associated Press (AP) wiretapping: the Department of Justice tapped the phones of AP reporters and offices for two months in an effort to locate an administration leak.

APgate is troubling, but the problem for Republicans is that it’s legal and part of the Patriot Act. Any attempts to role this particular part of the legislation back has been convincingly voted down by both parties. Suddenly, the Republicans realize that an overreaching Patriot Act may not have been a good thing, but it feels politically rather than ideologically driven.

The IRS scandal is the most relatable and represents the most immediate problem for our country. Only a fool would believe that 2-4 field workers took it upon themselves to single-handedly institute a policy of red taping conservative groups. It rises higher, but I seriously doubt the President directed such actions.

Finally, we have Benghazi. It was a tragedy; of that there is no doubt. Was there negligence involved? Yes. Was there a poor attempt at PR misdirection? Most definitely. Were different department figure pointing at each other? AS sure as the sun shines. Is anything that happened impeachable? No. More than anything Benghazi is another example of an administration getting caught flat footed and stumbling to fudge the facts for fear that the American people could not handle the truth, especially so close to the elections.

And that, my dear readers, gets to the heart of what the week was really about: the competence of a government ruled by a party that believe the solution to every problem is more government.

This is not about Obama the man, or even about Obama the president. This is not even about Republicans and Democrats. This is about the fundamental failure of progressive liberal ideology.

Logistics alone make it impossible for a government to solve every citizen’s problem. Yet, a bigger government is expected to do just that.

Big government is inflexible; it cannot respond to priorities because, over time, there are too many competing priorities. The greater the bureaucracy grows the more it becomes impersonal, wasteful, over-stretched, and difficult to reign in.

Furthermore, big government does not trust you to know how best to run your life, yet other imperfect beings are somehow capable of properly directing your life as soon as they are employed by the government. People are fallible, and so is the state.

If liberals are right about the role of government, then how did these scandals happen? Do we truly need more government to stop these things from happening?

In Benghazi, should even more officials debated whether to send troops to save our people? Should there have been more security?

Perhaps there should not have been a consulate in a hot zone in the first place, especially one so ill protected. How effective can an isolated diplomatic post on lock down really be? It seems more prudent to have a smaller footprint in the middle extreme conflict areas (esp. when our military is not in the field), which would save more lives and treasure.

Regarding the IRS, do auditors need more laws and supervisors to prevent such abuse? What happened is already illegal.

Then again, maybe a simpler tax code would solve the issue. If the law is so simple even a caveman can do it, then less IRS agents are needed, or conversely, it would free up existing agents to more quickly process paperwork.

And finally, regarding the DOJ wiretapping the AP--do we need more Patriot Act provisions to protect the US by suspecting every citizen and stopping potential whistle blowers? Does the government need more power to track everyone’s movements and communications now that modern technology gives them the ability to do so?  I think we need to take a serious look at the Patriot Act and begin rolling it back.

Sometimes, no matter how sound an idea is, both rationally and emotionally, no amount of debate will convince an opponent of the inherent fallacy of his position. In such cases, it is sometimes better to let our adversaries have their way so they can inadvertently hang themselves with their own errant ideas. This week is a perfect example of that. More government would never have solved these issues, nor many others faced by administrations past and present.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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More interesting challenges

A follow up to yesterday's discussion with an old friend.  In this episode he mentions his eldest son, Paul, who is very conservative

From a Google search it appears that very few people understand the terms leftist and rightist which sort of suggests that they shouldn’t be used. I Googled ‘right wing dictators’ and got a whole list from many sources so perhaps you should concentrate on correcting this apparent misconception.

Yes.  I think the term "rightist" has been so abused and distorted by the Left that it should no longer be used. The Left use it for anything they currently disapprove of. They have only the most childish analysis of what it means.   I use "conservative" only and analyse at length what that means here and here.

In England the Tories were known for their “Laissez Faire” politics and I was always a supporter of that attitude and still am. My apparent leftist views seem to have come from a humanitarian attitude to those less fortunate and an unfortunate tendency to play devil’s advocate with people who express strong opinions about anything whether I agree with them or not. Essentially I am afraid of people who think they know what’s what.

That is a very conservative attitude

I do find it confusing when people take an attitude that is more the opinion of an ‘ism’ than one that springs from their own thought process or empirical experience.

Laissez faire in UK was often interpreted as ‘leave it alone’ which I guess is a literal translation but I preferred to see it as ‘don’t interfere when not strictly necessary’

In that light I really don’t get both sides of politics’ attitude to same sex marriage. I don’t see that it’s any of their business nor how it has any effect on people not immediately concerned yet Paul is dead set against it on the grounds that it is ‘leftist’?

Yes.  I am a libertarian there.  I don't think any marriage is any government's business.  Governments should keep out of bedrooms.  Marriage was originally a religious matter and I would be happy for it to remain just that.  And there are always civil contracts for those who are not religious.

But the subtext is important.  Homosexuals want homosexual marriage as a sign of acceptance.  But many people will never accept them so advocates of homosexual marriage  are pissing into the wind.  A distaste for homosexuality is normal, which is why it was long penalized.  And no Bible-respecting Christian could accept homosexuality as right and normal

It is really no surprise that Paul is a conservative as he was brought up to defend for himself and was only ever given things that encouraged him to save or be entrepreneurial. He did, after all, run our company from a tender age against his mother’s wishes. Jenny wanted him to get a ‘trade’ or ‘a career’. I had no objections to that but it wasn’t what Paul wanted.

He has learned from life largely

I do, however, think that Paul lacks compassion and an understanding of less fortunate people and other peoples likes and dislikes, it is possibly because he has never had to struggle and experience deprivation himself (unlike myself) and I think this is a lack in his personality. As much as I don’t understand people who like team sports, tattoos, religion, horse racing, guns, violence, I can still find things to defend people who do, and I certainly don’t take the position of considering them idiots because I know that not to be the case.

Paul is extraordinarily kind and compassionate towards his family.  That may leave less room for others.  He has played a largely fatherly role towards his siblings, giving them all sorts of support.  Deeds, not words, again

I think your suggestion that schools could be segregated into ethnic groups in order to accommodate different levels of learning is totally unworkable in practice and would lead to massive social upheaval. They can’t even yet adjust the learning methods to accommodate the different learning patterns of girls and boys, so I’m sure that the other option would be impossible to implement. You would actually have to integrate people of equal IQ regardless of race but don’t you think that having a variety of IQ’s together is more stimulating and creates greater competitiveness? When some kids see others running faster they try harder and so it goes with academic achievement; if you isolate the lower achievers they will not have exposure to anything better and will therefore have little incentive to try harder in the belief that everyone is the same. Any form of difference between high and low creates ‘potential’ in science as in life. People need to see what can be achieved with application combined with talent in order to stimulate their natural competitiveness, don’t you think?

The dropout rate of American blacks from High School is phenomenal so almost anything would be better. And those who do graduate High School are often barely literate.  But there were some all-black schools in the past that did produce well educated graduates.  And single sex schools to this day seem to get good results.  And standards were undoubtedly higher in the past.  So we have proof from the past that streamed schooling does produce better results

I am all for an homogenous society where we can all learn to appreciate each other’s ideas, foibles, idiosyncrasies, foods, music etc and indeed influence each other.

I suspect that you mean heterogeneous.  I grew up in a very multicultural town so handle that readily as long as I am free to choose my degree of participation in what happens there.  Most people get on best with those most like themselves and organize their contacts accordingly.  There is a Sudanese Mosque near where I live.  Have you considered attending it?  If not, why not?  I am sure it is very heterogenous

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Trade as a means of Social Cooperation

Last week we explored the implications of man’s nature as a rational, and volitionally rational being. We’ve identified two major implications of this nature. The first of these is rights, which are the conceptual barriers to our self-owning actions and the negative obligation upon all others to honor such barriers. The second is trade. Trade is the process by which rational beings exchange or cooperate for mutual, but individually- and subjectively-calculated, benefit.

As the saying goes, “no man is an island.” This platitude is often lobbed at liberty advocates of all varieties, containing the unspoken assumptions that,

* coerced association is the only kind possible, and

* those who question its validity are advocating zero cooperation.

We can easily reject this classic argument just by examining these presumptions. The saying, however, is valid and illustrative of an undeniable truth about humanity. Humans have found interaction and interdependence to be both psychologically and economically advantageous to a degree that we can and should reject the idea of total isolation as an ideal. We need not reject this reality.

If we do accept that humans are better off connected socially, and cooperating, then the question is: on what basis should this cooperation be motivated? How do we obtain the cooperation from others we want or need, when each of these others is an individual self-owner who is entitled to her own determinations and free range of self-owning action? Trade is the answer to that question.

Trade is more than just a label for our economic activity. It is a concept that pervades all of our interaction with others. As an ethic for seeking and obtaining cooperation of other self-owners, trade requires that we honor their rationality and right of self-determination by finding a way to appeal to their desires as determined by themselves. This ethic can, and should, be applied to all of our social interactions.

* In a situation where we might be inclined to compel our child’s cooperation by a threat of punishment, guilt, etc., we might instead honor the logical capacity that they do have at a very early age by spending the extra time and effort to help them realize the way they individually benefit from the desired action.

* When we might expect assistance from a friend or family member in an endeavor to assist us out of obligation or as a response to a display of our need, we can instead find a way to appeal to their self-interest by offering an exchange, whether monetary or otherwise.

* We can see our marriages, instead of as a formality that entitles us to the obligatory endurance of our partner, as an exchange that we are required to continue to make desirable to the other in order to appeal to their self-interest.

One inescapable presumption contained in every act of voluntary trade is the validity of the self-interest of each participant. By making a voluntary exchange, whether I am exchanging a physical good, money, or my time and effort, I am presuming the validity of my self-interest and the self-interest of the other party to the exchange. Many of the “duties” imposed by our culture, whether governmental, traditional, or religious, seem to stem from an effort to circumvent this trade ethic and thus deny the principle of individual self-determination and self-interest.

As we can see, the notion of trade rests upon some very essential philosophical presumptions, and has some very undeniable implications. In future columns we’ll examine these in detail. Next week we’ll look specifically at the way trade requires diversity, and how voluntary trade (unlike its parasitic, coercive counterfeits) has formed the foundation and engine of everything we now recognize as civilization.

SOURCE

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Life in The Sunstein State

Whether imposed by psychological nudges or outright commands, the regulatory state is deeply opposed to America's heritage of liberty

By DONALD J. BOUDREAUX

To protect the red-cockaded woodpecker in the 1980s, the federal government prohibited the logging of old pine trees where the bird nests. Timber owners responded with more intensive logging, harvesting trees before they grew old enough to become suitable habitats for the woodpeckers. Even the best-intended regulations can spark unanticipated and counterproductive reactions.

Cass Sunstein understands the limits of the regulatory state. He was head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—"the cockpit of the regulatory state," as he calls it—in 2009-12. But the Harvard Law School professor still believes passionately in the promise of good government—government that not only intends to do good but is really good at doing good. In "Simpler: The Future of Government," he offers a breezy tract on how to render regulation more user-friendly and effective.

Mr. Sunstein is a long-standing champion of the cost-benefit analysis of regulation, and his criticisms are often spot-on. The idea is simple and sensible: If the costs of a regulation are greater than its benefits, the regulation is shelved, regardless of how splendid its benefits are in the abstract. It is encouraging to read that Mr. Sunstein and his colleagues "focused on economic growth and job creation, and . . . sought to ensure that regulation did not compromise either of those goals."

And given Mr. Sunstein's previous work, 2009's "Nudge," with the economist Richard Thaler, it isn't surprising to find that "Simpler" is deeply informed by the insights of behavioral economics—a field of research that reveals several psychological quirks that affect human decision-making. Mr. Sunstein deploys behavioral-economics notions such as "framing effects" (our interpretation of facts is affected by how they are presented to us) and "status-quo bias" (we prefer the status quo, simply because it is the status quo, over potential alternatives) to promote what he calls "libertarian paternalism."

Government, he thinks, should change behavior using "nudges" instead of commands. Regulations can tap into people's psychological quirks and prompt them to choose "better" behaviors—while still leaving them free in many circumstances to act differently. Cigarette packages with grisly images of cancer-ridden lungs are an effort to nudge—rather than command—people not to smoke. (A federal appeals court last August blocked a proposed Food and Drug Administration rule requiring such packages.)

All good, and the reader of "Simpler" might wonder if this is the same Cass Sunstein who clerked for the progressive Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and was denounced by Glenn Beck as "the most dangerous man in America" upon his appointment to the Obama administration. "Simpler" makes it clear that Mr. Sunstein is no despot in professor's clothing. But he is emphatically not a limited-government kind of guy. He is an enthusiast for active, expansive, "progressive" government.

But his faith in government combines with a scanty appreciation of the creative and disciplining powers of markets to render his case for active regulation, whether imposed through nudges or commands, less than persuasive. The pages of "Simpler" bubble over with examples of adults' weak capacity to choose wisely, which, in Mr. Sunstein's view, calls for more expansive government.

In his new book, “Simpler: The Future of Government,” Cass Sunstein says that the act of choosing is a muscle that gets fatigued. The more choices people have to make, the more likely they are to make bad ones.
The author boasts, for example, that "to save consumers money, we required refrigerators, small motors, and clothes washers to be more energy-efficient." Apparently producers are too benighted to compete for customers by offering such money-saving products. And consumers are too distracted by their own weaknesses to choose such offerings. Similarly, Mr. Sunstein believes that huge numbers of people really want to be organ donors but are prevented from agreeing to donate their organs simply by inertia.

In this worldview, people's weak wills and eccentricities make them prey both to shameless hucksters and to their own strange psychological traits. Ironically, however, Mr. Sunstein fails to explain why the irrational and impulsively childlike people who are apparently the nation's citizens will elect a government that is itself not irrational and impulsive—or why government officials won't exploit, for their own corrupt ends, the people's cognitive weaknesses. True, individuals often make poor decisions, and hucksters are never in short supply. Surely, though, the environment most favorable to poor decision-making and hucksterism isn't competitive markets but, rather, politics. Milton Friedman didn't need behavioral economics to know that each of us typically spends our own money on ourselves more wisely than a stranger spends other people's money on us.

The author assumes, without much reflection, that government's role in protecting us from ourselves has few limits, either ethical or legal. Seldom in the book does Mr. Sunstein pause to ask if this well-meaning nudge or that benevolent order, such as those that govern our diets or our pensions, is permissible under the Constitution. Nor does he worry that government regulation might, in the long run, make people even more behaviorally quirky. If government succeeds as Mr. Sunstein believes it can at protecting us from our thoughtless dietary choices and poor investment decisions, might we not become even more infantilized?

There is a deeper threat posed by a paternalist state, however "libertarian" we might wish it to be, and it isn't easily accounted for by cost-benefit analysis. Friedrich Hayek highlighted it in "The Road to Serfdom" (1944): "The political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means . . . that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that the new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit."

The regulatory institutions championed by Mr. Sunstein are certainly not the worst that various secular saviors have proposed over the years. If I must be regulated by a progressive, I choose Cass Sunstein. But the regulatory state as envisioned by Mr. Sunstein is nevertheless deeply opposed to America's traditions of liberty and individual responsibility. Such regulation will chew away like a cancer at those traditions. If Mr. Sunstein's blueprint for regulation is indeed the future of government, we might, as a result, be well-regulated—but we won't be free.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC,  AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

List of backup or "mirror" sites here or  here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to  update.  Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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