Muslim Mob Abducts Christian Nurse From Her Home and Gang Rapes Her Over And Over Again

If the world thinks that pretending that this is not happening, or worse, ignoring it, is going to spare them the same fate, they are gravely mistaken.

This is the jihad that Obama aided and abetted in ushering in. This is Obama's Libya - after his surrender in Benghazi.

The abduction of this young Filipino Christian took place only a few days after a Filipino construction worker was beheaded, amid allegations that he was killed for not being a Muslim.

But the UN seeks to prosecute Israelis for "war crimes" for defending themselves against this pox against humanity.

Every rational and freedom-loving man cannot fathom why the world is submitting to such savagery.

    "A Filipino Christian nurse in Libya was abducted by Muslims from her home and gang raped by up to six Muslim men. According to one report:

    A Filipino nurse has been kidnapped and gang-raped in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

    The woman was seized outside her residence on Wednesday and taken to an unknown location, where she was sexually abused by up to six men, the Philippines' Foreign Affairs spokesman Charles Jose told reporters.

    She was released about two hours later and taken to hospital for treatment.

    The incident took place only a few days after a Filipino construction worker was beheaded, amid allegations he was killed for not being a Muslim.

    Following the latest incident, the Filipino government called for the evacuation of its 13,000 citizens in Libya, which has been rocked by violence in the last few months.

    A recent report explains how the Filipino government is now escorting all of its people from Libya:

    The Philippines has dispatched its foreign secretary to oversee the evacuation of 13,000 citizens from Libya after a Filipino construction worker was beheaded and a nurse gang-raped there.

    Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario said on Thursday he was flying to Djerba island in neighbouring Tunisia to "try to convince our people to leave [Libya] because the situation there is very dangerous".

    The Philippine government ordered a mandatory evacuation on July 20, hours after the discovery in Benghazi city of the beheaded remains of a Filipino construction worker who had been abducted five days earlier.

    On Wednesday a Filipina nurse was abducted by a gang of youths outside her residence in the capital Tripoli, then taken elsewhere where she was gang-raped by up to six suspects, the foreign department said.

    She was released about two hours later and a Filipino consular team took her to hospital for treatment, a foreign department spokesman said.

    "We condemn these crimes that have been committed against our people," President Benigno Aquino's spokesman Herminio Coloma said in Manila.

    Why would the Muslims do this? Because their Filipino victims were Catholics, and anyone who has read Church History, will know what vicious and violent hatred Islam has had for the Papacy from the beginning. One news agency connected the rape and the beheading to the anti-Catholic vitriol of the Muslims in Libya:

    Despite broad acceptance, the Filipino community has been harassed by Islamic extremists, partly because of the Catholic faith practiced by most Filipinos.

    From the Reconquista to the Crusades, the Catholic Church was, and is still, the primary enemy of the Muslim heresy.

SOURCE

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Joy for the Dutch

Once such a sane country

 A senior employee of the Dutch Justice Ministry said the jihadist group ISIS was created by Zionists seeking to give Islam a bad reputation.  Yasmina Haifi, a project leader at the ministry’s National Cyber Security Center, made the assertion Wednesday on Twitter, the De Telegraaf daily reported.  “ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. It’s part of a plan by Zionists who are deliberately trying to blacken Islam’s name,” wrote Haifi, who described herself on the social network LinkedIn as an activist for the Dutch Labor Party, or PvdA.

Haifi later removed her original message, explaining, “I realize the political sensitivity in connection with my work. That was not my intention.”

Two right-wing lawmakers, Joram van Klaveren and Louis Bontes of the VNL faction, asked the ministry how one with such views reached a prominent position in the ministry and if Haifi’s employment constituted a security risk.

A series of rallies supporting ISIS, which is considered a terrorist organization in many Western countries, were held in the Hague in July and earlier this month. Some demonstrators called for violence. The demonstrations on July 2 and 24 featured calls to kill Jews.

When anti-ISIS demonstrators tried to march through the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Schilderswijk on Aug. 10 to express their disapproval, a crowd of approximately 200 men barricaded the main street and staged an illegal counterdemonstration in support of ISIS.

Some of the protesters hurled stones at police who tried to remove the obstacles. Six people were arrested.

SOURCE

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Muslim aggression has been a problem for a long time. Time to stop the rot?

In 732 AD the Muslim Army which was moving on Paris was defeated and turned back at Tours, France, by Charles Martell.
                 
.in 1571 AD the Muslim Army/ Navy was defeated by the Italians and Austrians as they tried to cross the Mediterranean to attack southern Europe in the Battle of Lapanto.              

...in 1683 AD the Turkish Muslim Army, attacking Eastern Europe, was finally defeated in the Battle of Vienna by German and Polish Christian Armies.                    

...this crap has been going on for 1,400 years and half of the  politicians don't even know it !!!  If these battles had not been won we might be speaking Arabic and Christianity could be non - existent;
     
Judaism certainly would be... And let us not forget that Hitler was an admirer of Islam and that the Mufti of Jerusalem was Hitler's guest in Berlin and raised Bosnian Muslim SS Divisions: the 13th and 21st Waffen SS Divisions who killed Jews, Russians, Gypsies, and any other "subhumans".

More recently:

1. In 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by a Muslim male.  
2. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, athletes were kidnapped and massacred by  Muslim males.
3. In 1972 a Pan Am 747 was hijacked and eventually diverted to Cairo where a fuse was lit on final approach, it was blown up shortly after landing by Muslim males.
4. In 1973 a Pan Am 707 was destroyed in Rome, with 33 people killed, when it was  attacked with grenades by Muslim males.
5. In 1979, the US embassy in Iran was taken over by Muslim males.
6. During the 1980's a number of Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by Muslim males.
7. In 1983, the US Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by Muslim males.
8. In 1985, the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked and a 70 year old American passenger was murdered and thrown overboard in his wheelchair by Muslim males.
9. In 1985, TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens , and a US Navy diver trying to rescue passengers was murdered by Muslim males.
10. In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed by Muslim males.
11. In 1993 , the World Trade Center was bombed the first time by Muslim males.
12. In 1998, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by Muslim males.
13. On 9/11/01, four airliners were hijacked; two were used as missiles to take down the World Trade Centers and of the remaining two, one crashed into the US Pentagon and the other was diverted and crashed by the passengers. Thousands of people were killed by Muslim males.
14. In 2002, the United States fought a war in Afghanistan against Muslim males.
15. In 2002, reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and beheaded by---you guessed it was a--- Muslim male.
16. In 2013, Boston Marathon Bombing 4 Innocent people including a child killed, 264 injured by Muslim males.
         
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Australia: We’ll fight radical Islam for 100 years, says ex-army head Peter Leahy



AUSTRALIA needs to prepare for an increasingly savage, 100-year war against radical Islam that will be fought on home soil as well as foreign lands, the former head of the army, Peter Leahy, has warned.

Professor Leahy, a leading defence and strategic analyst, told The Weekend Australian the country was ill-prepared for the high cost of fighting a war that would be paid in “blood and treasure” and would require pre-emptive as well as reactive action.

“Australia is involved in the early stages of a war which is likely to last for the rest of the century,” he said. “We must be ready to protect ourselves and, where necessary, act pre-emptively to neutralise the evident threat. Get ready for a long war.”

Senior intelligence officials have moved to shore up public support for the Abbott government’s tough new security laws, including enhanced data-retention capabilities enabling agencies to track suspect computer usage.

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation director-general David Irvine said the proposed data laws, which require phone and internet companies to retain records for two years, were “absolutely crucial” to counter the jihadist terror threat.

The government’s security package also includes a $630 million funding boost to intelligence agencies and police to help prevent domestic terrorist attacks.

Professor Leahy — a former lieutenant general who ran the army for six years, from 2002-2008 — said the threat of radical Islam would require action on several fronts, including a strengthening of controls against biological, chemical and nuclear attacks.

It would also include greater protection for critical infra­structure and iconic targets against attack.

The Western withdrawal from Afghanistan did not constitute the end of the so-called war on terror, “nor, as was claimed by prime minister Julia Gillard, in January 2013, a transition from the 9/11 decade”, he said.

Michael Krause, a former senior Australian Army officer res­ponsible for planning the coalition campaign in Afghanistan, said he agreed “absolutely” with Professor Leahy. “I have seen these people,” the retired major general said.

“I know how they think. I know how they fight. There is no compromise possible.

“These long wars require long commitment to outlast radical ideas and provide viable, meaningful alternatives which require a whole-of-government response, rather than assuming the military can or should do it all.’’

Professor Leahy said politicians needed to “develop an honest and frank dialogue” with the Australian public.

“They should advance a narrative that explains that radical Islam­ism and the terrorism it breeds at home and abroad will remain a significant threat for the long term, it will require considerable effort, the expenditure of blood and treasure and it will, of necessity, restrict our rights and liberties,” he said.

Professor Leahy is the director of Canberra University’s National Security Institute and part of the Abbott government’s team carrying out a comprehensive review of Defence.

He said radical Islamists intent on a new world order were already a threat to the survival of nations in the Middle East and Africa.

If the declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq survived, bases would be established there for attacks on the West and that would embolden “home grown” radicals to attempt attacks in Australia. Military action would be needed to eliminate the threat.

Radicals saw the West as “the far enemy” and they were undoubtedly planning more attacks in Australia. Senior intelligence believes the view that the threat posed by radical Islam would pass was “optimistic”.

Mr Irvine, who took the unusual step of speaking to the media yesterday, said the current terrorism threat level of “medium” meant that a terrorism “event” in Australia was likely.

“Where our volume of work has increased is that this event could occur in a dozen different places now, whereas before it was in a small, refined area,” he said.

Professor Leahy said that when Australia did choose to be involved its aims must be measured and realistic, with nations under the greatest threat from radical Islamists supported while care was taken not to inflame local tensions.

The solution had to come from within the Muslim world, which so far seemed disinclined or unable to imagine a path to peace.

Professor Leahy said the threat was likely to worsen as radicals returned from overseas and the internet dumped Islamist propaganda into Australian
living rooms.

Some efforts at deradicalisation had begun but a much greater effort must be made to engage Muslim clerics and Islamic thought leaders to debunk radical ideologies being offered to young Australians.

“Dual nationality must be reviewed and, where appropriate, terrorists and their sympathisers either expelled from Australia or denied re-entry,” he said.

Professor Leahy said Australia must support moderate nations with radical Islamist problems, such as Indonesia and The Philippines.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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Picture of Michael Brown (on right), the black who was shot in Ferguson, Missouri

He certainly displays attitude in the pic. He appears to have attacked police and you can see that he is a big guy.  Police may have had no choice but to shoot him in self defense.  If there were shots in the back, however, the police story falls apart



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Truth is First Casualty When Hamas Intimidates Media

In the ongoing Israeli/Hamas hostilities, a dark and unsavory feature of reportage has clearly emerged — journalists reporting the war from Gaza have often been in no position to tell the true or full story. The evidence that truth has been thus the first casualty is already abundant.

For example, Hamas maintains a major military headquarters in a basement beneath the Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Yet, during this conflict, we saw no footage of Hamas occupying the hospital.

We also saw hardly any footage of Hamas terrorists firing rockets or operating in residential areas of Gaza, though this is occurring literally every day. Not one of 37 images from three slideshows published by The New York Times during July showed even a single Hamas gunman.

Why? Intimidation of journalists. Consider the following cases:

French-Palestinian journalist Radjaa Abu Dagga wrote that he was forcibly blocked from leaving Gaza, detained and then interrogated by members of Hamas at a room in Shifa hospital next to the emergency room. He wrote an account of his treatment in the French newspaper Liberation — before asking the paper to take it down.

Italian reporter Gabriele Barbati disclosed that Israeli was telling the truth and Hamas was lying when he confirmed that the deaths of 10 people at the Al-Shati refugee camp on July 28 was not the result of Israeli fire, as had been widely reported (and, in the case of NBC, never corrected), but of a misfired Hamas missile. But when did Barbati disclose this? — only when he was out of Gaza, beyond the reach of Hamas retaliation.

Israeli filmmaker Michael Grynszpan recounted on Facebook the reply of a Spanish journalist who had just left Gaza to his question regarding the absence of footage of Hamas in action: “It’s very simple. We did see Hamas people there, launching rockets. They were close to our hotel, but if ever we dared pointing our camera on them, they would simply shoot at us and kill us.”

After Australian Channel Nine News reporter Peter Stefanovic tweeted that he had seen rockets fired into Israel from near his hotel, a pro-Hamas tweeter issued a scarcely veiled threat: “in WWII, spies got shot.”

The conclusion is obvious: When journalists operate in a terror haven under the close scrutiny of pitiless murderers, we cannot simply rely on terrorist-compliant reports. All too often, the reports we have seen or heard of Israeli strikes on schools or of killing large numbers of Palestinian civilians have proved to have been fabricated by Hamas.

Thus, on Aug. 3, media reports claimed that Israel had targeted and hit a UN school in Rafah, resulting in 10 deaths. Israel was widely condemned. Yet, only a few publications, such as The Wall Street Journal disclosed that the Israelis had in fact targeted three Islamic Jihad terrorists on a motorbike outside the UN facility, which is where the missile struck, as the Israelis said all along.

In fact, of three UN schools that Israel was reported to have hit in the last two weeks — and for which it received strong international condemnation — the evidence now shows that the civilian deaths in one case was probably the result of a misfired Hamas rocket, a second was hit by Israel fire while Palestinian terrorists were firing from within it and a third was simply never struck directly by Israel at all.

The media also shows a propensity to accept Hamas casualty figures and report them as coming from something seemingly respectable, like “the Palestinian Ministry of Health” or the United Nations. The trouble is that the Palestinian Ministry of Health is part of Hamas, which is not only an internationally recognized terrorist organization but has a vested interest in inflating Palestinian casualty figures. It also turns out that the UN normally has made no precise estimates of its own. It generally repeats the figures Hamas gives it, which are then often reported as being “UN figures.”

One example of Hamas inflating figures: as of July 29, the Meir Amit Intelligence Center, staffed by seasoned former Israeli military and intelligence officers, estimated that Israel had killed 335 terrorist operatives, 347 civilians and 440 as yet unidentified Palestinians. In contrast, Hamas’ claim that 852 civilians had been killed was being regularly reported that day.

More than doubling the figures of Gazan civilian fatalities, has a clear political purpose: it enables Hamas to claim that something like 70 percent of Gazan casualties are civilians, thus helping to paint Israel as a reckless bully rather than the most careful army in the world.

The combination of fear, intimidation and willingness on the part of journalists and NGOs to retail Hamas propaganda distorts vital truths about this war. Israel has not developed incisive methods for dealing with this. As Winston Churchill once said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

SOURCE

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Study: 'Cash for Clunkers' an even bigger lemon than thought

 The government’s "Cash for Clunkers" program – pitched as a plan to jump-start U.S. auto sales and clean up the environment by getting gas-guzzling vehicles off the road -- may have been a clunker itself, according to a new economic study.

Researchers at Texas A&M, in a recently released report, measured the impact of Cash for Clunkers on sales and found the program actually decreased industry revenue by $3 billion over a nine-to-11-month period. Meanwhile, the "stimulus" also cost taxpayers $3 billion.

The Car Allowance Rebate System, commonly called Cash for Clunkers, was part of a 2009 economic stimulus program that was sold as a lifeline from the federal government to a sinking U.S. auto industry.

The program let people turn in their old cars for up to $4,500 in cash to be used toward the purchase of a more fuel-efficient alternative. Nearly 700,000 vehicles were traded in through the program.

But the Texas A&M University study, for the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows the program may have actually created a drag on the economy. While the program’s fuel-efficiency restrictions led to the purchase of more fuel-efficient cars, Americans ended up buying cheaper cars than they otherwise would have, the study found.

"Strikingly, we find that Cash for Clunkers actually reduced overall spending on new vehicles," the researchers reported, noting households "tended to purchase less expensive and smaller vehicles such as the Toyota Corolla, which was the most popular new vehicle purchased under the program."

They found buyers who participated "spent an average of $4,600 less on a new vehicle than they otherwise would have."

During the two months of the program, the frequency of purchasing a new vehicle was around 50 percent higher for those who qualified for the program compared with those who did not. But after the program ended, the researchers found, car-buying habits returned to normal.

Congress originally appropriated $1 billion to the program but was forced to add another $2 billion when the program ran out of money a month after it started and two months sooner than the government expected.

SOURCE

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More bureaucracy we don't need -- in Maine!

The Portland (Maine) Press Herald had a fun slice-of-life feature on their hands. They found a woman, Reilly Harvey, who takes a small boat out into the state's waters full of delicious homemade pies and entire lobster dinners to sell to boaters. Here's a quick, mouth-watering description:

The desserts were just the beginning. Harvey's boat, Mainstay, is rigged with a three-burner propane stove set in the stern, and three pots sat waiting for lobster, clams and butter, all of which Harvey had aboard. There were tubs of cauliflower-curry tofu salads with yogurt-lime-cilantro dressing and homemade biscuits that had come out of the oven less than an hour ago. Very deliberately, Harvey tries to make Mainstay look like a boat you'd see on a Venetian canal, loaded down with beautifully arranged wares. She'd succeeded. The vase full of flowers tipped the whole thing over the top. Her new customers couldn't stop gushing. "This is like a Fellini movie," said Peter Polshek, as the dog made a valiant attempt to board.

By now his wife, Nina Hofer, was perched on the gunwale of the Adeline, smiling like the Cheshire cat, her hands clapped together in glee. "Who are you and where are you coming from?" she asked Harvey.

I want one to show up here right now, even though I'm about eight miles from the Pacific Ocean, very, very far away from Harvey. She started her business in 2012, looking for a way to build a stable life for herself in the area. The Press Herald thoroughly profiles her background and tags along as she serves happy boaters thrilled at the opportunity to buy fresh food without having to leave the water.

The day after the story appeared in the newspaper it was over. The state shut her down. There are rules, man! Where are her sinks? She has to have running water! From the Press Herald's follow-up coverage:

"It makes me feel sick to my stomach and sad," said Reilly Harvey, who runs Mainstay Provisions out of an old boat she keeps on Andrews Island. Harvey said she was contacted by a state health inspector and told she must pass health inspection standards for mobile vendors – think food trucks – and get her vintage 22-foot wooden launch, the Mainstay, fitted with sinks and hot and cold running water if she is going to continue to serve hot food.

That licensing would happen through the Division of Environmental Health's inspection program. If she wants to continue to serve desserts, she must pass an additional inspection by the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.

There are only 3½ weeks left in her season. Unless she is able to comply with the regulations, it is unlikely she'll be able to operate Mainstay Provisions as usual in 2014.

The state requires her to add to her little boat a three-bay sink and a separate hand sink, and must have hot and cold running water and follow the same rules as food trucks. They also complained about her being barefoot in the boat. They've offered to "expedite" her application as soon as she gets one in, though it's unclear in the story how her small boat could meet these requirements. It sounds like she may be done, at least for this summer season.

UPDATE: Ira Stoll has alerted me that Harvey has been granted a reprieve, requiring her to have a wash basin, five gallons of water, a food thermometer and a bucket to drain hot water. The permission-based society is so kind!

SOURCE

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The big lie of Gaza

As a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is hammered out, much talk is heard about aid packages for Gaza, as though none previously existed. The refrain is heard that Gazans are living in a teeming, open-air prison. Repeated endlessly by those under obligation to know the facts, the myth has it that Gaza is, according to:

Robert Fisk, veteran Middle East correspondent: “the most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world.”

Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency: “one of the most densely populated parts of this planet.”

Amjad Attlah and Daniel Levy of the New American Foundation: “the world’s most densely populated territory.”

James Zogby, founder and president of the Arab American Institute: “one of the most densely populated places on earth.”

Untrue.

Yes, Gaza is heavily populated. But its urban density is neither extreme nor the source of its woes.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 Statistical Abstract, Gaza had in 2010 11,542 people per square mile. That is about as densely populated as Gibraltar (11,506).

Gaza is considerably less densely populated than Hong Kong (17,422) or Singapore (17,723). It is far less densely populated than Monaco (39,609). And Macau (52,163) is over four times more densely populated than Gaza.

No one has called Hong Kong, Singapore, Monaco or Macau teeming, open-air prisons –– with reason.

Hong Kong has the world’s third largest financial center. Singapore has the third highest per capita income in the world, the fourth biggest financial center and the fifth busiest port. Monaco has the world’s highest GDP per capita. Macau is one of the world’s richest cities –– testimony enough to what hard work, solid industries and responsible government can achieve in small, resource-poor territories.

The idea of Gaza being the most densely populated place in the world is a propaganda fabrication with a very clear underlying logic. Meshing that claim with scenes of poverty easily conjures up the idea that Palestinians lack land and resources.

Once you believe that, it is a small jump to the conclusion that Israel should be giving them both.

In fact, Gaza has been in Arab control since Israel evacuated it in 2005, withdrawing every living and dead Israeli from its soil. Israel left behind an expensive infrastructure of greenhouses and empty synagogues, all of which were swiftly destroyed in an orgy of hate. Hamas ejected Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah from Gaza in 2007 and has exponentially increased rocket assaults on Israel –– over 9,000 since that date.

Gaza could be home to a large, prosperous population, providing that it was industrious, prudentially managed, well-governed and –– above all –– peaceful. It could be the Singapore of the Middle East. But it isn’t –– it’s governed by Hamas, whose Charter calling for war with the Jews until their obliteration is well-known to those who elected it. (Unsurprisingly, Gazans are more supportive of Hamas and of anti-Israel terror attacks than West Bankers).

Gaza, along with the West Bank, has been the recipient of the highest levels of per capita aid in the world. Investment not siphoned off by Hamas has produced results: Gaza boasts shopping malls, five theme parks and 12 tourist resorts.

Compare that to dismally poor Niger, with high infant mortality, life expectancy of a mere 52 years and only one doctor for every 33,000 people. But as Niger is not dispatching terrorists to murder its neighbors, few know and fewer care –– and Niger gets little aid.

In the last two years, Hamas has spent an estimated $1.5 billion, not on schools, hospitals or businesses, but on an underground infrastructure of terror tunnels deep into Israel for the purpose of mounting Mumbai-like mass-casualty terror assaults. Hamas’s leaders see jihadist terror as a paramount objective, while death and destruction in Gaza is not their concern.

“Their time had come, and they were martyred,” spoke a Hamas TV host of the Gaza dead during the current fighting, “They have gained [Paradise] … Don’t be disturbed by these images … He who is Martyred doesn’t feel … His soul has ascended to Allah.” More succinctly, Hamas ‘prime minister’ Ismail Haniyeh has said, “We love death like our enemies love life! We love Martyrdom.”

The woes of Gaza are not the creation of population density, but of hate and jihad density. The answer lies not in more territory, resources or aid, but in its population and leadership prioritizing life and peace over death and war. As yet, there is no sign of this on the horizon. Irrespective of the eventual ceasefire, we can expect further wars in Gaza.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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Gladwell

Steve Sailer demolishes in short order the ideas of Malcolm Gladwell here.  Gladwell is a real intellectual lightweight.  His grades were not good enough for graduate school. There is nothing creditable about propounding striking ideas if those ideas are wrong or unproven. I think it is mainly the bush of African hair on his head that gets Gladwell uncritical acceptance. He runs fast, though.  I have mentioned previously the demolition of Gladwell's most recent book by Christopher Chabris, a psychology professor and psychometrician.

It is generally conceded, however, that Gladwell is a good entertainer.  It is perhaps in that light that we can understand the success that his academically unsatisfactory writings have brought him.

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Democrats Pay Black Staffers 30% Less

Campaign staffers who are people of color routinely get paid less than their white counterparts, and are often given less glamorous jobs. How an antiquated understanding of race relations results in minority staffers getting the short shrift.
If you’re a person of color hoping to get hired by a political campaign, here’s the ugly truth: You’ll probably get paid less than your white counterparts, if you’re even hired at all.

On both sides of the aisle, there is a racial pay gap in campaign politics. Asian, Black and Latino staffers are paid less than their white counterparts, according to an analysis by the New Organizing Institute.

For example, African-American staffers on Democratic campaigns were paid 70 cents for each dollar their white counterparts made. For Hispanic staffers in Democratic campaigns, the figure was 68 cents on the dollar.

And a recent study by PowerPAC+, funded by a major Democratic donor, revealed that less than 2 percent of spending by Democratic campaign committees during the past two election cycles went to firms owned by minorities.

Political operative Michael Gomez Daly worked on two congressional campaigns in 2012 with similar budgets. On one campaign, Daly, who describes himself as “a very light-skinned Hispanic,” was brought in as a field director, primarily for his skills as a Latino operative who could reach out to the Hispanic community. On the second campaign, where they did not know he was Hispanic, “I just came in as ‘Michael Daly,’ instead of ‘that Latino operative,’” he said. “Right off the bat they offered me twice the amount for the same job.”

Most of the operatives interviewed for this article, all of whom have years of experience in campaign politics, said they had to make an early, conscious decision to avoid being pigeonholed as a specialist in minority outreach. For minority campaign staffers, they said, the path to enduring success lies in saying “no” to jobs like that early on in your career.

“It was pretty clear to me early on that you can get put in a box pretty quickly. You get offers for jobs: African-American outreach, Asian-American outreach. Oftentimes when you start doing that work, it's hard to get out of it.”

“It was pretty clear to me early on that you can get put in a box pretty quickly. You get offers for jobs: African-American outreach, Asian-American outreach. Oftentimes when you start doing that work, it’s hard to get out of it,” said Sujata Tejwani, president of Sujata Strategies, a Democratic firm.

Added Rodell Mollineau, a past president of the progressive tracking organization American Bridge, “As a person of color [at the start of your career], you’re always put in situations where a primary part of your job is communicating with or working with other people of color.”

The NOI statistics on the campaign race pay gap compare all staffers of each race, and average out the salaries. One of the explanations for lower minority wages could be that they tend to be represented in lower-paying campaign roles.

“Most minority staffers get hired in campaigns in field jobs, and field jobs pay less,” explained Jamal Simmons, a Democratic political operative. “The problem is: they don’t hire African Americans, Latinos in the parts of the campaigns where they spend the most money. The most money in campaigns is spent in communications, polling and data. In those parts of the campaign, it’s very much mostly white.”

Conventional campaign wisdom is that voters best respond to pitches made by those who are similar to them. But this limits the roles that minority campaign staffers are able to play.

“There’s a presumption that minorities can’t manage ‘white’ issues. There’s a presumption that white voters won’t like to see a black press secretary, or that white voters won’t want to see an African-American or Latino political director,” Simmons said. “There’s just a general prejudice factor,” he said, that’s based in an antiquated understanding of race relations.

The issue of race can sometimes create doubts even in the minds of the most experienced operatives. “If the swing population [in an election] are white, you do wonder if you’re going to get hired,” said Tejwani, an Indian-American with decades of experience on campaigns.

The hidden prejudices present in broader American society are part of the problem. One operative compared campaigns to business startups that are constantly shutting down and restarting. With deadlines looming, top campaign staff may lean subconsciously on stereotypes about minorities.

Said one operative with experience in Virginia and Georgia: “The structural racism that happens in the United States, and how it is reinforced by a lot of presumptions, don’t get dropped because you’re working on a campaign.”

SOURCE

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Who Is Responsible for the Death of the Young Black Man in Ferguson?

In a black neighborhood of Los Angeles called Watts, a six-day riot erupted in August 1965, covering 46-square miles and causing 34 deaths. The spark that set off the riot was a simple traffic stop, but it quickly turned into a confrontation pitting angry mobs against police. Afterward black leaders met with the police, the mayor ordered a blue-ribbon study and three years later the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a hearing in Los Angeles. Sound familiar?

It’s easy to sympathize with the frustration of LA blacks in 1965 when racism and discrimination were genuine problems. But big change has occurred in the ensuing 50 years. On a per capita basis, blacks have been the majority beneficiaries of the trillions spent on entitlement programs ostensibly meant to ameliorate the causes of black-white inequality. Yet black racial animus is stronger than ever, which one might argue was the point – developing and maintaining an angry Democrat constituency. Author Larry Elder says that whites would be shocked to hear what’s said about them in black barbershops.

Last weekend in Ferguson, Missouri, another riot followed the shooting of a black teenager by a police officer. Local black outrage was followed by another commentary from the “Rev.” Al Sharpton and another promised federal probe by Attorney General Eric Holder.

CNN tells us that Ferguson was “wracked by violence,” but that’s actually nothing new for this St. Louis suburb. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was just visiting Ferguson that day, and he might have been the victim of a wrongful police shooting – details are still in question so we’ll reserve judgment. Whatever the case, we’re saddened by his untimely death. The biggest problem isn’t this incident, however. It’s the people that created and perpetuate the conditions that killed him. In fact, it could be argued Al Sharpton killed Brown.

People like Sharpton, with no personal stake in the game except the big bucks they collect, play the role of black “leader,” legal advocate, sympathetic social scientist or aggrieved professor. From them comes the dogma that this “community” – this 12% of the American population living in diverse places, having diverse interests and diverse levels of education – is for some unfathomable reason obliged to follow.

As someone once said, “Sometimes [among] African-Americans … there’s the notion of acting white, the notion that there is some authentic way of being black, that if you’re going to be black you have to act a certain way, and wear a certain kind of clothes, that, you know, that has to go.”

Who said it? Barack Obama.

Kids are at once demotivated to do well in school or get a job and simultaneously afraid to do so. Apparently, the message isn’t understood by kids under eight because until about third grade black kids keep up with their peers.

As economist Thomas Sowell has frequently noted, in the post-World War II years, American blacks experienced the best conditions in their history. They still suffered harassment and harm from evil people, but things had improved significantly since the pre-war years. Most lived in well-maintained communities in which they took great pride. They had their own professional class and enjoyed both lower unemployment and divorce rates than whites. Then, in the space of a decade, all these things that took centuries to achieve against such great odds began to unravel. We all know why.

The last thing the Leftmedia wants to report is the effects of a child’s being raised by a single, barely literate mother in a dangerous environment. And it’s no surprise that so many black men become violent offenders when they’ve been raised by third generation 18-year-old welfare “baby mommas.”

Black gangs have been around for a century, but it took the Great Society to free them to become the vicious thugs represented by Crips and Bloods. Once, black fathers would have stood against gangs, but there are few black fathers now. Gangs have more freedom than the mafia did because the Leftmedia won’t honestly report on them, opting instead to blame “gun violence” and the like.

While we’ve focused on blacks, Latinos are also in moral free-fall, following the same path of self-segregation and wallowing in grievances that blacks have taken. They too have their advocates, lawyers and professors. And they even have their own media.

Change can only come from within the two groups, though unfortunately any genuine reformer has been slandered as being “too white” or an “Uncle Tom.” There’s a long way to go to repair the cultural rot of our inner cities, but it can be done. We close with the words of Ronald Reagan, who in the 1980 election campaign said, “I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself under mediocre leadership that drifts from one crisis to the next, eroding our national will and purpose. The time is now, my fellow Americans, to recapture our destiny, to take it into our own hands.”

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Healthcare Gouging Culprits

It’s no wonder why routine healthcare costs in the United States are so ridiculously high, and why health insurance premiums are skyrocketing. Today’s healthcare providers are gouging patients like highway robbers.

They do it because they can.

Hospitals are charging patients a small fortune for the most minor of services; treatments like applying a Band-Aid to a small cut.  A New Jersey man found this out the hard way when he was gouged almost $9,000 after an ER aide treated a small cut on his middle finger.

The man cut his finger with a hammer and thought he might need stitches so he went to the local ER at Bayonne Medical Center. He didn’t need stitches. He got a tetanus shot from a nurse practitioner who sterilized the cut, applied some antibacterial ointment, a bandage and sent him home.

Later he received the bill: $8,200 for the ER visit; $180 for the shot; $242 for the bandage; $8 for the ointment; and nearly $370 for the nurse. "I got a Band-Aid and a tetanus shot. How could it be $9,000? This is crazy," the man told reporters.

Yes, this is crazy.

Now the hospital says it charged that amount because the man’s insurance carrier refuses to offer fair reimbursement rates.  This hospital apparently believes that $9,000 is a fair charge for applying a Band-Aid to a small cut.

The insurance carrier says that this hospital is just trying to gouge its patients.

Gee, do ya think?

A spokesperson for the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute says that the right price for getting a finger bandaged should be $400 to $1,000.

That, of course, is equally ridiculous. In fact, it’s outrageous! I say that if a hospital can’t apply a Band-Aid to a small cut and then send the patient home for less than $100, that hospital shouldn’t be treating patients. Its administrator’s and staff should be in jail.

This is a primary reason why healthcare costs are out of control in the U.S. Just about everyone now has insurance to cover every treatment from the most insignificant to the most complicated. When everyone has insurance covering everything, they go to the doctor or hospital for things like cut fingers, and the healthcare providers start gouging.

They do it because they can. After all, the insurance company or the government is paying the bill. If patients had to pay for minor medical treatments out of their own pockets this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.


That’s how healthcare was administered in the old days and it worked quite well. But those days are gone and today we have only healthcare gouging culprits.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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American Conservatives Are the Forgotten Critics of the Atomic Bombing of Japan

The large civilan deaths must surely concern any conservative  -- particularly since Japan was already on its knees at that point.  The man who ordered the bombing was a Democrat  -- Truman

“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul,” he wrote. “The only difference between this and the use of gas (which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had barred as a first-use weapon in World War II) is the fear of retaliation.”

Those harsh words, written three days after the Hiroshima bombing in August, 1945, were not by a man of the American left, but rather by a very prominent conservative—former President Herbert Hoover, a foe of the New Deal and Fair Deal.

In 1959, Medford Evans, a conservative writing in William Buckley’s strongly nationalistic, energetically right-wing magazine, National Review, stated: “The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed.” Just the year before, the National Review had featured an angry, anti-atomic bomb article, “Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe.” Like Hoover, that 1958 essay had decried the atomic bombing as wanton murder. National Review’s editors, impressed by that article, had offered special reprints.

Those two sets of events—Hoover in 1945 and National Review in 1968-69—were not anomalies in early post-Hiroshima U.S. conservatism. In fact, many noted American conservatives—journalists, former diplomats and retired and occasionally on-duty military officers, and some right-wing historians and political scientists—criticized the atomic bombing. They frequently contended it was unnecessary, and often maintained it was immoral and that softer surrender terms could have ended the war without such mass killing. They sometimes charged Truman and the atomic bombing with “criminality” and “slaughter.”

Yet today, this history of early anti-A-bomb dissent by conservatives is largely unknown. In about the past 20 years, various American conservatives have even assailed A-bomb dissent as typically leftist and anti-American, and as having begun in the tumultuous 1960s. Such a view of postwar American history is remarkably incorrect.

Journalists

In mid-August, 1945, in the conservative United States News (now U.S. News & World Report), with a circulation somewhat under 200,000, that magazine’s founder and longtime editor, David Lawrence, condemned the atomic bombing in a spirited editorial, “What Hath Man Wrought!” America, he asserted, should be “ashamed” of the atomic bombing. During the next 27 years, on some A-bomb anniversaries, Lawrence, a well known conservative who died in 1973, proudly republished his 1945 editorial.

Felix Morley, the former editor of the Washington Post and ex-president of Haverford College, felt similarly about the atomic bombing. A recognized conservative, he published in 1945 a strong anti-A-bomb editorial—“The Return to Nothingness”—in his small circulation, conservative newsletter, Human Events. He called Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor atrocities. The atomic bombing, he charged, was “an infamous act of atrocious revenge.”

The right-wing journalist Walter Trohan of the conservative Chicago Tribune periodically contended that the atomic bombing had been unnecessary and that an early Japanese surrender could have been otherwise achieved. Charging a coverup, he implied there had been a Roosevelt-Truman conspiracy to prolong the war. Beginning in August 1945, Trohan’s anti-A-bomb articles received front-page attention, and the Tribune in 1947 termed the bombings “criminality.”

In 1948, the rightward-leaning Time-Life-Fortune publisher Henry Luce told an international Protestant meeting that “unconditional surrender” had violated St. Thomas’ just-war doctrine, and that softer surrender terms in 1945 could have ended the war without the atomic bombing, which “so jarred the Christian conscience.”

Ex-U.S. Diplomats

Truman’s former 1945 Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew, who retired shortly after Japan’s surrender, and two of his former State Department associates, Japan experts Eugene Dooman and Joseph Ballantine, later angrily castigated the atomic bombing. Recognized as conservatives, they sharply criticized the defense of the bombings by President Truman and the retired Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who had presided over the wartime A-bomb project.

Grew, Dooman and Ballantine all believed that the atomic bombing had been unnecessary, that softer surrender terms (mostly allowing a constitutional monarchy) would have ended the war, and that Truman had gravely erred. Dooman often charged that the bombing had been immoral.

Similar harsh judgments came from William Castle, a close associate of Herbert Hoover who had served as Hoover’s Under Secretary of State when Stimson was secretary. Castle complained that Stimson’s postwar, widely publicized A-bomb defense “was consciously dishonest.” Japan, Castle believed, had been near surrender before the atomic bomb was used. He even suspected that Stimson and others had prolonged the war in order to use the A-bomb on Japan.

U.S. Military Leaders

Perhaps surprisingly, after V-J day, the right-wing Gen. Curtis LeMay, whose Air Force had pummeled Japan in the last months of the Asian war, periodically criticized the atomic bombing. In mid-September 1945, for example, he publicly declared that it had been unnecessary and that Japan would have speedily surrendered without it. The bomb, he asserted, “had nothing to do with the end of the war.”

Public criticism of the atomic bombing also appeared in the postwar memoirs by two retired military leaders on the moderate right—in 1949 by Gen. Henry H. Arnold, the wartime head of the Army Air Forces, and in 1952 by Admiral Ernest J. King, wartime chief of naval operations.

Shortly after the end of the war, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a fervent anti-New Dealer, had publicly contended that the atomic bombing was unnecessary. In 1960, in discussing that bombing with ex-President Hoover, MacArthur condemned it as unnecessary “slaughter.”

MacArthur’s 1945 psychological-warfare chief, Gen. Bonner Fellers (later Colonel) after retiring from the Army, wrote a widely read article contending that Japan had been near surrender and that the nuclear bombing had been unnecessary. A proud conservative serving as public relations director for the Veterans of Foreign War (VFW), he published his article in the VFW’s monthly, “Foreign Service,” with a circulation of over a half-million. That month, the conservative-leaning Reader’s Digest, with a readership probably exceeding 10 million, reissued it in slightly compressed form.

The strongest postwar criticism of the atomic bombing by a prominent American ex-military leader probably came from Admiral William Leahy, a conservative who had also been a top military adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. In his 1950 memoir, the recently retired Leahy declared, “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of not material assistance in our war against Japan.” That nation, he contended, was defeated and ready to surrender before the atomic bombing. He likened the use of the bomb to the morality of Genghis Khan. The crusty admiral wrote about the 1945 bombing, “I was not taught to make war in that fashion.” The United States, he asserted, “had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

Meanings

Spirited contentions that the atomic bombing was unwise, unnecessary and immoral are not new, nor did they start in the 1960s. These charges appeared in much of the earlier post-Hiroshima criticism, which came substantially from conservative American publications and people. Such conservative support does not necessarily make those criticisms right or wrong, or good or bad history, but certainly an important part of an earlier postwar dissenting culture.

That is an important but mostly forgotten part of the past, which Americans today—whether young or old, Republicans or Democrats—usually do not know. Mistakenly, many believe that the loose conservative-liberal/radical divide of recent years on attitudes toward the 1945 atomic bombings and that prominent American conservatives in contrast overwhelmingly endorsed those atomic bombings. That history is far more complex, and is important to understand to gain perspective on American attitudes and values on war-fighting, forms of killing, and uses of nuclear weapons on enemies.

SOURCE

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Effects of Lead Pollution in gasoline

The original proponent of the lead scare -- Needleman -- was an outright crook so I have always been skeptical in the matter.  But there are nonetheless some real correlations between gasoline usage and crime.  I have always dismissed such correlations with the basic truth that correlation does not prove causation.  That point is however rather weak if one cannot propose a third factor which is the real cause. Steve Sailer below fills that gap with the proposal that increased automobile use was the causative factor in crime rise etc -- with gasoline usage merely a byproduct of that

Here’s a new lead pollution causes bad behavior study by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes using National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 and NLSY97 data. I reviewed her first attempt on this important topic back in 2007 in “Lead Poisoning and the Great 1960s Freakout.”

Now by comparing self reports and parental reports of behavior problems in the NLSY studies versus state results of average lead levels in blood, she finds more support for the lead > bad behavior, but less so for lead > violent crime nor for lead > black bad behavior. This is big news because it helps explain why Robert Heinlein’s 1939 prediction that the 1960s-1970s would be the Crazy Years turned out pretty accurate, but it shoots down explanations for the black-white crime gap based on putative lead pollution.

LEAD EXPOSURE AND BEHAVIOR: EFFECTS ON ANTISOCIAL AND RISKY BEHAVIOR AMONG CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes

Abstract

It is well known that exposure to lead has numerous adverse effects on behavior and development. Using data on two cohorts of children from the NLSY, this paper investigates the effect of early childhood lead exposure on behavior problems from childhood through early adulthood. I find large negative consequences of early childhood lead exposure, in the form of an unfolding series of adverse behavioral outcomes: behavior problems as a child, pregnancy and aggression as a teen, and criminal behavior as a young adult. At the levels of lead that were the norm in United States until the late 1980s, estimated elasticities of these behaviors with respect to lead range between 0.1 and 1.0.

“These are sizable elasticities, suggesting a substantial effect of early childhood blood lead on criminal behavior as a teenager. To assess effects on more specific crime categories, I construct two (non-comprehensive) sub-categories: violent crime, comprised of assault and robbery, and property crime, comprised of theft, burglary, destruction of property, and other property offenses.56 For violent crime, the results are insignificant. For property crime, the elasticity is significant in the NLSY79 sample but not in the NLSY97 sample. ….

Indeed, gasoline lead seemed to hurt middle class white children more than poor blacks:

“To investigate these factors in the NLSY data, I perform the above analyses separated by parental education (less than high school vs. high school vs. college or more), income (less than twice the poverty line vs. more than thrice the poverty line), and race/ethnicity (black or Hispanic vs. white). I find that, while all children are harmed by lead, advantaged groups are harmed more by lead.

In other words, this might explain why times at Ridgemont High were so fast in the 1970s compared to the 1930s — the movie was filmed in Sherman Oaks at the shopping mall right at the Ventura (101) and San Diego (405) freeways, the busiest freeway interchange in America for much of the era. But, this data can’t support the idea that blacks were hurt worse by gasoline lead pollution than whites were:

"The estimated effects of lead are larger and more consistently significant for children whose parents are more highly educated, whose families have higher income, or who are white. For the education and income breakdowns, this divergence between advantaged groups and disadvantaged groups is particularly apparent when looking at lead’s effects on child behavior problems."

In order to understand this result, recall that lead from gasoline was ubiquitous in the 1980s: it was in the very air children breathed, and everyone was affected regardless of income, education, or race. While children in more advantaged families might have been protected from many of the adverse environmental or social influences that children in disadvantaged families had to contend with, they were not protected from gasoline lead. Thus, whereas for the disadvantaged children lead may have been just one more adverse influence (on top of numerous others), for many of the advantaged children it was perhaps the only or the primary adverse influence. In a way, the advantaged children had more to lose. Consequently, gasoline lead may have been an equalizer of sorts.”

That’s what I wrote a awhile ago in Taki’s: lead might have been a major cause of what Heinlein predicted to be The Crazy Years, but it doesn’t explain why blacks have worse average civic order before during and after the Lead Years

Yet one of the more obvious differences between Chicago’s black and white areas is the heavier traffic in the expensive, safe zones. People who can afford cars tend to move away from black slums, leaving them bleak. In the Chicago area, race and class palpably determine the homicide rate. For example, compare the next-door neighbors Oak Park and Austin west of The Loop. The Eisenhower Expressway runs through Oak Park, but not through Austin. Yet the homicide rate is several dozen times worse in Austin.

[Kevin] Drum, who lives in Irvine, at least should be familiar with Southern California, where South-Central is fairly light in traffic compared to the jammed freeway interchanges of upscale West LA and Sherman Oaks.

And across the country, the densest neighborhoods are typically the various Chinatowns, which suffer little street crime and enjoy high math scores.

Reyes goes on:

"Note that the story for paint lead may be substantially different, since paint exposures are likely to follow the familiar pattern whereby the disadvantaged suffer greater exposure and the advantaged are largely insulated."

But fears of poor children eating lead paint flakes off the walls were a big deal in the newspapers in the middle of the 20th Century. In Chicago, liberals argued for tearing down old tenements and constructing giant high rise public housing projects like Cabrini Green specifically to cut down on poor children’s exposure to lead paint.

How’d that work out?

I’d add that Reyes should watch out for statistically assuming that the amount of lead spewed into the atmosphere by cars roaring about is the causal variable on more risky, more liberated youth behavior. It could be that cars themselves were what were causing youths in states with lots of driving to behave in less old-fashioned ways by getting them out from under the supervision of elders.

A measure of gasoline lead pollution in a state also serves as a measure of the number of automobiles and the number of miles driven in a state, which over the course of the 20th Century tended to correlate with loosening strictures on the behavior of young people, who were off gallivanting about doing who knows what in the back seats of their cars. See American Graffiti and countless other movies for details

For most of the 20th Century, for instance, California tended to be car crazy and tended to lead the country in youth trends, a point made by Tom Wolfe in his first breakthrough essay The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby. As noted brain chemical researcher Brian Wilson pointed out:

And she’ll have fun, fun, fun 
Until her daddy takes the T-Bird away

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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Piper's Lament

by Mark Steyn

Mark Levin was on cracking form the other day on the superiority of certain cultures and what he calls "the decomposition of this society". This passage will strike a chord with SteynOnline readers:

"They're putting in place laws and programs and bureaucracies to smother us, so the social engineers can manipulate. Come this fall many of you with young children going to public schools, you're going to see a change in the bake sales at your schools because the federal government, the First Lady has determined that your kids shouldn't be selling cupcakes. And your kid should be eating cupcakes."

Now, I've said this before: a government that has the power to dictate whether or not your kids can sell or eat cupcakes as a result of late local bake sale is a tyranny. It is a government way, way out of power, out of sync. And it's gonna get worse. It's not gonna get better.

I'm with the Great One on this. We reported here recently on a modest victory against the Cupcake Comissars, but it was an exception that proves the rule. I've got a whole section on bake sales et al in After America (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc, he pleads pitifully with an eye to his current lawsuit) - because, as Mark says, it's not a small thing. Page 89 of my book:

"No matter how you slice it, this is tyranny. When I first came to my corner of New Hampshire, one of the small pleasures I took in my new state were the frequent bake sales – the Ladies' Aid, the nursery school, the church rummage sale. Most of the muffins and cookies were good; some were exceptional; a few went down to sit in the stomach like overloaded barges at the bottom of the Suez Canal. But even then you admired if not the cooking then certainly the civic engagement. In a small but tangible way, a person who submits to a state pie regime is a subject, not a citizen – because participation is the essence of citizenship, and thus barriers to participation crowd out citizenship. A couple of kids with a lemonade stand are learning the rudiments not just of economic self-reliance but of civic identity."

I mentioned one of these stories on Rush a year or two back and some guy responded, "Why are you talking about this? It's not important." That's why I'm talking about it. Because if you won't push back against the small-scale stuff, by the time they come for the big things you'll no longer know how to rouse yourself. In old, settled societies, tyranny starts at the edge and works its way inwards. And the essence of tyranny is its capriciousness. It's easy to say, "Well, I don't go to bake sales, so what do I care?"

Every day in this country tyranny's whimsy descends on some law-abiding person out of the blue. You buy an imported vintage car, and you wake up with Homeland Security agents surrounding your home and confiscating your property. This weekend it was two of my fellow Granite Staters - 17-year-old Campbell Webster and Eryk Bean, of Concord, New Hampshire.

Instead of enjoying meth and twerking like normal well-adjusted teens, they like bagpipes. Master Webster comes from a long line of bagpipers: his father Gordon was pipe-major for the 1st and 2nd Batallion the Scots Guards and personal piper to the Queen. So he passed on the 1936 family bagpipes to his son, and young Campbell uses them to play in pipe championships in North America and around the world. So this weekend he was returning to New Hampshire from a competition in Canada, which is how a newspaper story comes to open with a sentence never before written in the history of the English language:

"BAGPIPERS have expressed their fear over a new law which led to two US teenagers having their pipes seized by border control staff at the weekend"

They can chisel that on the tombstone of the republic. On the northern border, bagpipers are "expressing their fear", while on the southern border gangbangers have no fear and stroll through the express check-in. Putin has no fear of American power, the mullahs have no fear of American power, the Chinese politburo has no fear of American power, ISIS has no fear of American power, but the world's bagpipers fear it, and with good reason.

The figleaf of a pretext for seizing Messrs Webster and Bean's bagpipes is what The Scotsman (as usual, any real news about America has to be gleaned from the foreign press) calls "new laws" introduced a month ago. By "laws", they don't mean something passed by the people's representatives in a legislature - there's not a lot of that going on these days - but a little bit of regulatory fine-tuning by some no-name bureaucrats at the Department of Paperwork. The upshot of which is that, if you own a vintage bagpipe containing ivory and you wish to take it to a competition in Montreal, you have to get a Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) certificate from the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

Got that? You have to get your musical instrument approved by Fish & Wildlife.

Oh, but Messrs Webster and Bean were on top of that. They'd gone to Fish & Wildlife, gotten their CITES certificates, and presented them to the US Customs & Border Protection agent upon returning to the United States via a Vermont border crossing (presumably either Highgate or Derby Line, both of which I use frequently).

At which point the Commissar of Bagpipes said, "Ah, yes, the CITES certificate is valid but..."

Here it comes, boys and girls! Stand well back; it's the Bollocks of the Day from your friendly all-American Bureau of Compliance:

"The CITES certificate is valid but...it's only valid at 38 designated ports of entry." And this wasn't one of them. So he confiscated the bagpipes.

Why don't they just put a big sign up on the border? "US Government Paperwork Not Accepted At This US Government Border Post."

So Customs & Border Protection will wave through "unaccompanied minors", but if the minor's accompanied by a bagpipe the guy in the full Robocop will seize it and tell the kid he's "never going to see them again". And then the Robocop goes home having done a full and rewarding day of work.

Americans should be ashamed at what Mark Levin calls the "decomposition of the country". In all manner of areas from banking and health care to bake sales and bagpipes, US citizens now enjoy less freedom than those of countries they regard as socialist basket cases. When I've said as much before, I get emails from readers saying, "Ah, yes, but we have the First Amendment and the Second Amendment." But they're meant to be bulwarks against tyranny, so, if you never actually use them to defend liberty, eventually they have no more real-world meaning than all the theoretical freedoms listed in the Soviet constitution. It's easy to say, "I don't do home-baking. Or buy imported cars. Or play bagpipes" - or whatever next week's provocation is. But by the time they come for something you value, it will be too late. As Mark Levin says, "It's gonna get worse. It's not gonna get better." And then he adds a further point:

"Have you heard a single Republican in leadership talk to you the way I'm talking to you? Have you heard a single Republican in leadership talk about the seriousness of what this nation is facing? Have you heard any guests for the most part on our favorite cable channel, FOX, discuss this in any logical way? Nope... The problem is Republican administrations participate in the deconstruction of the country, in the decomposition of the country. They're not ideological about it and in some ways they're unwitting about it. Very few tried to push back. Very few try to unravel this federal leviathan that's been created over the last century."

Have any of my somewhat unsatisfactory roster of New Hampshire Senate candidates said anything about their constituents' bagpipe seizure? America has a two-party system in which one party is committed to making things worse and the other party isn't committed to making things any better. And, like the Great One, I'd like a bit more of a choice than that.

To be sure, a lot of these things are kinda fringey activities. Why can't the vintage-car guy drive a Toyota Corolla like a normal person? Why can't the bagpiper get into rap like a regular kid? Increasingly in America any deviation from the norm is enough to attract the attention of the punitive bureaucracy. But a society that agrees to be that cowed and compliant will not be a dynamic or innovative one, and eventually will be in steep and terminal decline.

The degeneration of "law" into regulation is a problem. The post-constitutional order is, too. But something bigger is in play. To remain free, a people need something more basic - the spirit of liberty. Once you've lost that, there are no easy roads back.

SOURCE

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Fed court ruling: Police can kick in your door and sieze guns without warrant or charges

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals may have just dealt a serious blow to the U.S. Constitution

In a unanimous decision earlier this month the Court determined that law enforcement officers are not required to present a warrant or charges before forcibly entering a person’s home, searching it, and confiscating their firearms if they believe it is in the individual’s best interests.

The landmark suit was brought before the court by Krysta Sutterfield of Milwaukee, who had recently visited a psychiatrist for outpatient therapy resulting from some bad news that she had received. According to court records Sutterfield had expressed a suicidal thought during the visit, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, when she said “I guess I’ll go home and blow my brains out.” This prompted her doctor to contact police.

For several hours the police searched for Sutterfield, speaking with neighbors and awaiting her return home. They received an update from her psychiatrist who said that Sutterfield had contacted her and advised that she was not in need of assistance and to “call off” the search, which the doctor did not agree to. Police eventually left and Sutterfield returned home, only to be visited later that evening by the lead detective on the case:

    Sutterfield answered Hewitt’s knock at the front door but would not engage with her, except to state repeatedly that she had “called off” the police and to keep shutting the door on Hewitt. Sutterfield would not admit Hewitt to the residence, and during the exchange kept the outer storm door closed and locked. Unable to gain admittance to the house, Hewitt concluded that the police would have to enter it forcibly.....

    Sutterfield called 911 in an effort to have the officers leave; as a result of that call, the ensuing events were recorded by the emergency call center. Sutterfield can be heard on the recording telling the officers that she was fine and that she did not want anyone to enter her residence....

    After informing Sutterfield of his intention to open the storm door forcibly if she did not unlock it herself, Berken yanked the door open and entered the house with the other officers to take custody of Sutterfield pursuant to the statement of detention. A brief struggle ensued.

    Sutterfield can be heard on the 911 recording demanding both that the officers let go of her and that they leave her home. (Sutterfield would later say that the officers tackled her.) Sutterfield was handcuffed and placed in the officers’ custody...

    At that point the officers conducted a protective sweep of the home. In the kitchen, officer James Floriani observed a compact disc carrying case in plain view. He picked up the soft-sided case, which was locked, and surmised from the feel and weight of its contents that there might be a firearm inside. He then forced the case open and discovered a semi-automatic  handgun inside; a yellow smiley-face sticker was affixed to the barrel of the gun, covering the muzzle. Also inside the case were concealed-carry firearm licenses from multiple jurisdictions other than Wisconsin. Elsewhere in the kitchen the officers discovered a BB gun made to realistically resemble a Glock 29 handgun.

    The contents of the case were seized along with the BB gun and placed into police inventory for safekeeping.

    Berken would later state that he authorized the seizure of the handgun in order to keep them out of the hands of a juvenile, should a juvenile enter the house unaccompanied by an adult while Sutterfield remained in the hospital.

Sutterfield subsequently filed a lawsuit against the City of Milwaukee with the district court, a case that was initially dismissed. She then filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th District claiming that her Second and Fourth Amendment rights were violated.

In a 75-page opinion the court, while pointing out that the intrusion against Sutterfield was profound, sided with the city of Milwaukee:

    “The intrusions upon Sutterfield’s privacy were profound,” Judge Ilana Rovner wrote for three-judge panel.

    “At the core of the privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment is the right to be let alone in one’s home.”

    But the court also found, that on the other hand, “There is no suggestion that (police) acted for any reason other than to protect Sutterfield from harm.”

    “Even if the officers did exceed constitutional boundaries,” the court document states, “they are protected by qualified immunity.”

As noted by Police State USA, the court may have just created a legal loophole for law enforcement officials around the country, giving them immunity from Constitutional violations if they merely suggest that exigent circumstances exist and that they are acting in the best interests of the health and safety of an alleged suspect, regardless of Constitutional requirements:

    In short, Sutterfield’s privacy (which was admittedly encroached upon) was left unprotected by the Bill of Rights because of the “exigent circumstances” in which police executed an emergency detention — with no warrant, no criminal charges, and no input from the judiciary.   Similarly, the gun confiscation was also deemed as acceptable due to the so-called “emergency” which police claimed had been taking place for 9 consecutive hours.

    The federal ruling affirms a legal loophole which allows targeted home invasions, warrantless searches, and gun confiscations that rest entirely in the hands of the Executive Branch. The emergency aid doctrine enables police to act without a search warrant, even if there is time to get one.  When the government wants to check on someone, his or her rights are essentially suspended until the person’s sanity has been forcibly validated.

The implications of the courts legal decision are alarmingly broad. Though this particular case involved exigent circumstances in which an individual suggested she wanted to commit suicide, albeit tongue-in-cheek, the court’s opinion suggests that such tactics can be applied for any “emergency” wherein police subjectively determine that an individual may be a danger to themselves or others.

Under new statutes passed by the federal government these emergencies and dangers could potentially include any number of scenarios. Senator Rand Paul recently highlighted that there are laws on the books that categorize a number of different activities as having the potential for terrorism, including things like purchasing bulk ammunition. Last month, when a group of concerned citizens assembled at Bundy Ranch in Nevada to protest government overreach, Senator Harry Reid dubbed them “domestic terrorists.” Even paying with cash or complaining about chemicals in water can land an American on the terror watch list.  Non-conformists who do not subscribe to the status quo can now be considered mentally insane according to psychiatrists’ Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders.

Law enforcement has an almost unlimited amount of circumstances they can cite to justify threats to one’s self or others, and thus, to ignore Constitutional requirements when serving at the behest of the local, state or federal government.

Has the Federal Court’s latest decision made it possible for these vaguely defined suspicious activities to be molded into exigent circumstances that give police the right to enter homes without due process, confiscate legally owned personal belongings, and detain residents without charge?

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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Obamacare



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Business Startups Dwindle as Government Jobs Thrive

Rabi Molla at the Wall Street Journal notes, "Nearly 1 in 6 jobs in the U.S. are working for the government, more than any single private industry." The number actually peaked in 2009, then took a bit of a nosedive that caused panic—not in the streets, but in punditry hallways. But it's rising again, largely because of state and local government hiring. By contrast, at the beginning of the 20th century, "one out of 24 workers was on a government payroll," according to an economic paper published in 1949, with only 1 out of 15 taking goverment paychecks right after World War I.

So, blips aside, the state has been a growth industry.

The people taking government jobs certainly aren't matched by counterparts starting new businesses. The U.S. economy is increasingly dominated by older, established firms, according to a new Brookings Institution study.

Like the population, the business sector of the U.S. economy is aging. Our research shows a secular increase in the share of economic activity occurring in older firms—a trend that has occurred in every state and metropolitan area, in every firm size category, and in each broad industrial sector.

The share of firms aged 16 years or more was 23 percent in 1992, but leaped to 34 percent by 2011—an increase of 50 percent in two decades. The share of private-sector workers employed in these mature firms increased from 60 percent to 72 percent during the same period. Perhaps most startling, we find that employment and firm shares declined for every other firm age group during this period.

What's causing the ossification of American enterprise? Authors Ian Hathaway and Robert Litan say "a secular decline in entrepreneurship is playing a major role." What they refer to as "business dynamism" has been on the decline for three decades.

Hathaway and Litan don't have a clear explanation for the decine in entrepreneurship, though they note that business failure rates have been on the rise for younger firms, while flat for already established businesses. That suggests that starting and running a new firm has become more difficult than in the past.

Hathaway and Litan refer to this development as "especially disturbing" because of the innovative breakthroughs made by startups. They suggest we "find ways to encourage and make room for the startups of the future," but don't go into detail about what that means.

It's worth pointing out here that the United States has been sliding on both major international rankings of economic freedom. The Index of Economic Freedom puts the U.S. in 12th place, behind Estonia, and notes, "The U.S. is the only country to have recorded a loss of economic freedom each of the past seven years."

The Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World: 2013 Annual Report (PDF) is even tougher, noting that the U.S. slid from third place to 19th place from 2000 to 2011. While there was widespread slippage, the biggest problem, noted the report, was with eroding government respect for legal systems and property rights.

Is declining economic freedom smothering the entrepreneurial spirit that once made the United States such a hotbed of innovation? That looks suspiciously likely. And we'll all suffer if, instead of creating new businesses, Americans flock to safe government sinecures instead—paid for by whoever remains in the sclerotic private sector.

SOURCE

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Live by Big Government, Die by Big Government

Given that our commander in chief is a surprisingly decent firearm salesman, it’s a little odd that one of America’s most prolific gun manufacturers might soon be facing an agonizing financial death. But, that’s exactly where Colt’s Manufacturing Company is headed if things don’t change drastically.

It takes a very specialized form of failure for a gun company to miss out on the President Obama-inspired run on guns, the “assault weapon” craze of the 2000s, and the proliferation of concealed carry in the 1990s, but that’s exactly what happened. And, worse, this isn’t Colt’s first foray into fiscal failure.

In fact, this tendency of Colt to stumble onto hard times has a name in the industry: It’s called the “Colt curse.” It’s been around since Samuel Colt first bankrupted his hopeful arms company in the 1830s. God may have made man, and Samuel Colt may be credited with making men equal; but, it has always been an uphill battle. It turns out Colt was pretty good at making guns, but he was a failure at marketing and selling his contribution to the world of weaponry.

Lucky for Colt (and the generations that would later benefit from his contribution to the industry), the war with Mexico broke out in the 1840s. The aspiring gunsmith quickly found an audience in the U.S. Army for his innovative firearm designs. Realizing the full potential of crony-capitalism, the entrepreneur almost went broke entertaining politicians, generals, and frontiersmen. He was, undoubtedly, the Solyndra lobbyist of his day. With the helpful contract from America’s military, Colt quickly etched his name in America as the creator of the “gun that won the West.”

The company, however, was never quite capable of shaking their addiction to government contracts. In fact, it quickly became a centerpiece of their business model.

In the 1970s firearm manufacturing in the U.S. was adopting the model of America’s automotive giants. Unionization was prolific, and innovation was an afterthought. It didn’t work out for Detroit, and it almost ended in disaster for the firearm industry as well.

While most American companies scrambled for ways to avoid the Union-led decline into mediocrity, Colt happily hummed along with the help of military contracts and large government shipping orders.

The iconic manufacturer’s business was booming, right up until the moment that unions decided to do what they do best: go on strike. By 1988, the company had lost a number of high-dollar contracts, and the end of their beginning was clearly at hand.

In the decade to follow, their competitors warmly embraced America’s new-found fascination with the civilian market, concealed carry, and home defense. Colt, on the other hand, decided to take a more pragmatic approach. And, by pragmatic, I mean liberal approach:

A wealthy industrialist from the heart of a non-gun-owning Manhattan family decided he could steer the company to better times. With a man who knew nothing about guns at the helm, Colt embarked on their reimagined path to prosperity by introducing (and supporting) the idea of smart guns and federal gun permits.

As strange as it might seem, telling your most ardent customers that they should ask a fickle and hostile federal government for permission to handle your product isn’t a great business practice.

The new CEO (the last one was fired pretty quickly) still decided to put civilian ownership on the back-burner as he focused on appealing to the same Pentagon cronies that nearly drove the company into the trash-bin of history. There are only a handful of industries that relish the advent of war, and they all have something in common: they work for the Pentagon. As the Iraq War picked up, and with their sudden boom in government contracts, it looked like good times might finally be on the horizon.

In fact, good times seemed inevitable. Well, at least in theory. But if Colt had proven anything in its 178 years of existence, it’s that turning a profit is kinda tough sometimes. The company’s decision to whittle their civilian division down to a few obligatory 1911s wasn’t really doing them any favors, given that their competitors were rushing to fill the demand of a gun-hungry republic.

While Vice President Joe Biden, Obama, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) rambled on about gun control, Colt casually dismissed the idea of focusing on the civilian market. Heck, it was only within the last few years that Colt finally got around to deciding that a pocket pistol (the .380 Mustang) might be a good idea.

Today, the industry is seeing a decline from last year’s boom in sales. Colt’s civilian offerings are proving to be “too little, too late” for a market that is currently saturated with high-quality alternatives. And so, with a very specialized degree of failure, Colt has managed to paint itself into near bankruptcy. Their corporate bonds are rated as junk, and they’re continuing to pile on millions of dollars’ worth of debt.

The company might still survive. After all, they represent a history, a quality, and a heritage that is rare in today’s world. Their guns are quality products (even if you do pay a premium for those ponies on the slide) and their reputation is strong. But the company embraced too many values of the Left to survive long in a world that has proven to be hostile to their industry.

In the end, there are really only three things that are responsible for killing Colt: cronyism, support for gun control, and unions. You would think a gun manufacturer would know better than to sleep with government. I guess nobody shared that lesson with Colt’s management.

SOURCE

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Federal Court Refuses To Block N.C. Voter ID Law

At Netroots Nation, liberals slammed voter ID laws, labeling them something akin to “Jim Crow” laws. Yesterday, the U.S. District Court For The Middle District Of North Carolina refused to block the state’s voter ID law, which will be enforced in the upcoming midterm elections.

Here's what the Court said in their opinion:

"After careful consideration, the court concludes that Defendants’ motion for judgment on the pleadings should be denied in its entirety. Plaintiffs’ complaints state plausible claims upon which relief can be granted and should be permitted to proceed in the litigation. However, a preliminary injunction is an extraordinary remedy to be granted in this circuit only upon a “clear showing” of entitlement.

After thorough review of the record, the court finds that as to two challenged provisions of SL 2013-381 [ NC’s voter ID law], Plaintiffs have not made a clear showing they are likely to succeed on the merits of the underlying legal claims. As to the remaining provisions, the court finds that even assuming Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits, they have not demonstrated they are likely to suffer irreparable harm - a necessary prerequisite for preliminary relief - before trial in the absence of an injunction. Consequently, the motions for preliminary injunction and the United States’ request for federal observers will be denied. This resolution renders the motions to exclude expert testimony moot."

Over at PJ Media, J. Christian Adams, who served as an election lawyer in the Voting Rights Section at the U.S. Department of Justice, wrote that the DOJ actually spent tax dollars on a "turnout-doesn’t-matter-because-life-is-harder" expert to help make their argument:

"The Justice Department had actually argued that even if black voters turned out at higher rates under voter ID (which they do), because blacks have to take the bus more and their life is generally harder, then voter ID and curtailing early voting violates the Voting Rights Act....

The Justice Department actually used your tax dollars to pay for an expert to introduce the turnout-doesn’t-matter-because-life-is-harder argument. Enterprising folks will submit a Freedom of Information request to find out how many tens of thousands of dollars that nonsense costs you.

Hans von Spakovsky, former DOJ voting official, says it is going to be a very bad weekend for lawyers at the Justice Department Voting Section. “Eric Holder has been beaten now twice in the Carolinas on voter ID. Today’s ruling shows just how wrong he is when it comes to election law.”

SOURCE

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Three Reasons Why It's No Surprise Hamas Violated the Latest Ceasefire

I think they continue to attack because they are enraged by the neutering of their tunnel strategy -- JR

(1) By my unofficial count, this is the seventh ceasefire or truce that Hamas has rejected, violated, or broken since the current conflict began last month. The genesis of this war, by the way, was the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers, perpetrated by a Hamas-funded terrorist cell in the West Bank. When Israeli entered the West Bank in search of the perpetrators (local Palestinians pelted the ambulance carrying the boys' bodies with rocks), Hamas stepped up its rocketing campaign targeting Israeli civilians. That bombardment has been going on for years, ticking up ever since Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2005.

Israel responded with force, culminating in the land incursion aimed at destroying Hamas' network of terror tunnels -- the purpose of which was to bypass Israel's weapons blockade, and to allow militants to slip into Israel to carry out attacks. The tunnels were built over a period of years, using supplies earmarked for projects such as schools and infrastructure construction. Child labor was reportedly exploited to built the passageways, reportedly resulting in approximately 160 deaths during the treacherous process.

(2) Hamas explicitly warned that it was preparing to resume its rocketing as soon as the latest 72-hour ceasefire expired. In fact, it looks like a miscue may have accidentally blown up a few of their own men in preparation for the resumption of hostilities. They ended up not just breaking the pause, but outright violating the temporary truce. Again. Perhaps they don't have functioning clocks, or perhaps they had itchy trigger fingers, or perhaps Hamas doesn't have control over the hive of violent radicals that pervade the Gaza strip.

Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the Egyptian government were all in favor of an unconditional extension of the truce. Hamas said no. Israel is now fighting back.

By the way, a New York Times analysis of recent casualties in Gaza determines that the most disproportionately represented demographic group among the dead are…young men in their 20's -- a.k.a. the people most likely to fit the militant profile. Women and children under the age of 15, meanwhile, "were the most underrepresented." Why, it's almost as if Israel has been going to extraordinary lengths to narrowly target terrorists and avoid civilian collateral damage -- even as Hamas uses the latter group as human shields, firing salvos from crowded neighborhoods, storing rockets inside UN schools, and using a crowded hospital as a command center.

(3) The most depressing and most elementary reality is this: The Hamas radicals don't want peace. Their demands are slippery and ever-shifting; most recently, they're insisting that Israel lift its blockade in such a way that would allow Hamas to re-arm, unfettered, so they could gear up for the next war. (Israel already allows food, medicine, fuel, and legitimate commercial goods to pass through. Israel also provides much of the strip's electricity).

The spokesman that Hamas has selected to represent them in Western media has been unable to answer questions about his own insane blood libel against Jews, nor has he backed away from they group's charter, which openly calls for genocide. If Hamas would simply acknowledge Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and renounce violence, they would have peace. But they don't. People who reflexively blame Israel for the other side's genocidal hatred are flat-out siding with terrorism and barbarity over pluralism, peace and democracy.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, 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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