True Lies

Brian Williams, Dan Rather, Fareed Zakaria, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Lena Dunham etc.  The lies from the Left never stop

“NBC Nightly News” anchorman Brian Williams frequently fabricated a dramatic story that he was under enemy attack while reporting from Iraq. NBC is now investigating whether Williams also embellished events in New Orleans during his reporting on Hurricane Katrina.

Williams always plays the hero in his yarns, braving natural and hostile human enemies to deliver us the truth on the evening news.

Former CBS anchorman Dan Rather tried to pass off fake memos as authentic evidence about former President George W. Bush’s supposedly checkered National Guard record.

CNN news host Fareed Zakaria, who recently interviewed President Obama, was caught using the written work of others as if it were his own. He joins a distinguished array of accused plagiarists, from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to columnist Maureen Dowd.

Usually, plagiarism is excused. Research assistants are blamed or clerical slips are cited – and little happens. In lieu of admitting deliberate dishonesty, our celebrities when caught prefer using the wishy-washy prefix “mis-” to downplay a supposed accident – as in misremembering, misstating or misconstruing.

Politicians are often the worst offenders. Vice President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race of 1988 once it was revealed that he had been caught plagiarizing in law school. In that campaign, he gave a speech lifted from British Labor Party candidate Neil Kinnock.

Hillary Clinton fantasized when she melodramatically claimed she had been under sniper fire when landing in Bosnia. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was more overt in lying under oath in the Monica Lewinsky debacle. Former Sen. John Walsh (D-Mont.) was caught plagiarizing elements of his master’s thesis.

President Obama has explained that some of the characters in his autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” were “composites” or “compressed,” which suggests that in some instances what he described did not exactly happen.

What are the consequences of lying about or exaggerating one’s past or stealing the written work of others? It depends.

Punishment is calibrated by the stature of the perpetrator. If the offender is powerful, then misremembering, misstating and misconstruing are considered minor and aberrant transgressions. If not, the sins are called lying and plagiarizing, and deemed a window into a bad soul. Thus a career can be derailed.

Young, upcoming lying reporters like onetime New York Times fabulist Jayson Blair and The New Republic’s past stable of fantasy writers – Stephen Glass, Scott Beauchamp and Ruth Shalit – had their work finally disowned by their publications. Former Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke got her Pulitzer Prize revoked for fabricating a story.

Obscure Sen. Walsh was forced out of his re-election race. Biden, on the other hand, became vice president. It did not matter much that the Obama biography by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss contradicted many of the details from Obama’s autobiography.

Hillary Clinton may well follow her husband’s trajectory and become president. The Rev. Al Sharpton helped perpetuate the Tawana Brawley hoax; he is now a frequent guest at the White House.

Why do so many of our elites cut corners and embellish their past or steal the work of others?

For them, such deception may be a small gamble worth taking, with mild consequences if caught. Plagiarism is a shortcut to publishing without all the work of creating new ideas or doing laborious research. Padding a resume or mixing truth with half-truths and composites creates more dramatic personal histories that enhance careers.

Our culture itself has redefined the truth into a relative idea without fault. Some academics suggested that Brian Williams may have lied because of “memory distortion” rather than a character defect.

Contemporary postmodern thought sees the “truth” as a construct. The social aim of these fantasy narratives is what counts. If they serve progressive race, class and gender issues, then why follow the quaint rules of evidence that were established by an ossified and reactionary establishment?

Feminist actress and screenwriter Lena Dunham in her memoir described her alleged rapist as a campus conservative named Barry. After suspicion was cast on one particular man fitting Dunham’s book description, Dunham clarified that she meant to refer to someone else as the perpetrator.

Surely the exonerated Duke University men’s lacrosse players who were accused of sexual assault or the University of Virginia frat boys accused of rape in a magazine article in theory could have been guilty – even if they were proven not to be.

Michael Brown was suspected of committing a strong-arm robbery right before his death. He then walked down the middle of a street, blocking traffic, and rushed a policeman. Autopsy and toxicology reports of gunpowder residuals and the presence of THC suggest that Brown had marijuana in his system and was in close contact to the officer who fired. Do those details matter, if a “gentle giant” can become emblematic of an alleged epidemic of racist, trigger-happy cops who recklessly shoot unarmed youth?

The Greek word for truth was “aletheia” – literally “not forgetting.” Yet that ancient idea of eternal differences between truth and myth is now lost in the modern age.

Our lies become accepted as true, but only depending on how powerful and influential we are – or how supposedly noble the cause for which we lie.

SOURCE

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Lies the Media Told Me

Marshall McLuhan's claim that ‘the medium is the message" is a rule of thumb adopted by today's news media. Truth is optional, and the means by which it is delivered to the public has become a matter of "style" and bias. If truth does not comport with an established narrative, falsehood is permissible. After all, the public, to whom the news is directed, doesn't know the difference.

Truth, in the news media, is becoming more and more as rare as a halal hamburger in Riyadh, or a wine list in a Tehran restaurant.

If a news event doesn't fit the New York Times's printable meme or mantra, it isn't going to be reported without slanting and bias so severe that even a cursory examination of it will capsize the story to reveal the rust and barnacles on its hull. The same rule of thumb goes for most news organizations and outlets, including the Washington Post and other "major" dailies. Almost every one of them delivers messages, not news.

Most of them don't even pretend to be paragons of journalism anymore. What, after all, is a journal? It is a record of significant or noteworthy events, entered without prejudice for or against the things in the events. The news media couldn't even report Paul Revere shouting "The British are coming!" without injecting some squib about gay rights, because some of the British officers were perhaps gay, and any shots fired at them could be said to be "homophobic."

"Cow bites milkmaid" won't be reported by the New York Times without some subtle, sub-textual message about animal rights or gender exploitation. Virtually the only realm of unbiased news reportage left in any medium is the obituaries, and sometimes even those are skewed when the deceased was a celebrity or a politician whose true character is not only suspect but so reeking with scandal (e.g., the passing of Ted Kennedy) that toxic fumes leak from the person's casket. That's another kind of "odor of sanctity." It can't be dispersed or disguised by a gallon of eau de cologne spritzers.

The phony war stories of Brian Williams are but the tip of the media practice and culture of rearranging reality to suit a fantasy world of political correctness and to satisfy a hankering for a "perfect" world. Perhaps he thought that if Hillary Clinton could get away with lying about her "dodging bullets" in Bosnia for so long before being found out, he could get away with claiming that the helicopter he was riding in Iraq came under RPG fire, when no such thing happened. Hillary claimed that she "misremembered" the imaginary sniper fire episode in Bosnia in 1996. "Misremembering" things seems to be as common a thing as zits on a high school sophomore.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Williams was photographed in waders sloshing thru flood waters. He claimed to have seen bodies floating under his hotel window, and that gangs had invaded his hotel and he was frightened. None of this happened, except for the photo-op. The rest was his imagination. He and his ilk can always claim, when the truth contracts their assertions, that the problem is a matter of "misremembering," or symptoms of "post-combat mental trauma."

As Daniel Greenfield put it in his FrontPage article of February 9th, "Brian Williams for President," about the major news networks abetting the "misdemeanor" of lying to the public because the lies help to advance the Progressive agenda of turning America into a minimum security correctional facility:

"Brian Williams is in trouble for lying, but he was part of a media culture of deceit where lies were acceptable for a good progressive cause. Williams isn't really in trouble because he lied, but because he got caught. Worse still, the lies were self-serving. They served Brian Williams; they didn't serve the left.

Williams had failed to draw the line between the "good lie" (ObamaCare is making life better) and the "bad lie" (I swam the flooded French Quarter with puppies on my back during Katrina while Al Qaeda shot RPGs at me). But the borders between the "good lie" and the "bad lie" have been vague when it comes to the titans of the left."

If he thought he could get away with another whopper, Williams probably would have also claimed that he hurt his index finger by sticking it into all fifty dikes and flood walls during Katrina to help stop the flooding.

For the longest time, for decades, in fact, I grew to despise news anchors. It began with the hectoring voice of Walter Cronkite in the 1950's. But Brian Williams is representative of the smarmy, sneering, cynically sanctimonious, slickly groomed face also telling me "that's how it is." Their offensive, know-it-all styles of delivery made them personalities, not newsmen, actors, not conveyers of truth, perhaps a rung and a half up from carnival barkers.

This false news reportage has become a tradition among news anchors, continued by the likes of Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, to whom news reportage/lying to the public is a "crude art form," akin to a Jackson Pollack canvas. These people are so desperate to adhere to their politically correct agenda, and want to be remembered as the electronic heralds of a "new world order," that they are willing to fabricate a glittering monstrance and substitute their glossy, patent leather faces for a eucharist.

SOURCE

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A Blow to Illinois Unions Is a Win for Jobs

While it’s debatable whether anything politically good can come out of Chicago, something good came out of the Illinois state capital of Springfield this week. In a blow to the state’s bloated government unions, newly elected Republican Governor Bruce Rauner signed an executive order Monday allowing state workers to opt out of paying union dues.

At issue is Illinois' lack of a “right to work” law, meaning workers can be required to pay either union dues or fees as a condition of employment. As a result, most government employees in Illinois have to dish out part of their paycheck to a union as a condition of getting that paycheck. And even those who refuse to join a union are required to pay “fair share” dues. After all, they “benefit” from union contracts.

Citing First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and association, however, Rauner took issue with this practice, saying compulsory payments to unions require some workers to “subsidize and enable union activities that they do not support,” and he ordered the state “to immediately cease enforcement of the Fair Share Contract Provisions.”

Naturally, unions aren’t taking this well. According to the state’s largest public union, “The governor’s proposal to bar public employees from participating in our democracy would further tilt a playing field weighted heavily in favor of big business and the wealthy.” Of course, participatory democracy has nothing to do with this. Instead, unions are downright petrified they’re going to lose their money.

Public unions play leading roles in the Prairie State’s corruption drama. While collecting forced dues from government workers, unions use the dough to lobby the government for more pay and benefits in a relationship Investor’s Business Daily aptly terms “incestuous.” In fact, The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk notes, “State employees in Illinois make 26 percent more than comparable private sector workers. They enjoy particularly generous retirement benefits.”

Meanwhile, the state’s pension system is the most underfunded in the country, and taxpayers are squeezed, dishing out the second-highest property taxes in the nation in a failed attempt to fund it all.

But it gets even better. To grease the skids, public unions donate heavily to lawmakers' re-election campaigns, meaning legislators have little impetus to fight union demands. The Illinois Policy Institute reports that between 2002 and 2014, a whopping 86% of state legislators received campaign contributions from government unions, including more than $1 million that went to the state speaker of the house – who also happens to be chairman of the Democrat Party of Illinois.

Of course, this dance doesn’t benefit Illinois residents, who bear the financial brunt of paying for the ongoing rendezvous. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the state’s economic situation is downright abysmal. While nationwide employment growth from 2003 to 2014 was 7.3%, in Illinois, it was 0.2%. And the state ranks consistently low in business climate, too.

Still, unions aren’t going to take this blow lying down. But proving he’s no dummy, Rauner coupled his executive order with a preemptive lawsuit asking a federal district court to uphold the order. There is precedent, too. In the 2014 Supreme Court case of Harris vs. Quinn, the Court raised the question of whether forced payment of union dues is constitutional.

At the very least, however, Illinois' public unions are now on the defensive and scrambling to keep the money and power that are their raison d'être. If Rauner’s actions are any indication, though, unions are fighting a losing battle.

SOURCE

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

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, 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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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Tanks in WWI

Tanks are now only a minor feature of WWI propaganda but I think it is important to combat propaganda wherever we see it.

The still widely-believed myth is that the invention of tanks by the British was a major factor in the defeat of Germany.  It wasn't.

It is true that the allies did produce and field large numbers of tanks, whereas Germany did not.  So it is clear that the allies at the time believed their own propaganda. Estimates vary but it is generally said that Britain produced around 2000 tanks and the French over 3000 while Germany produced only around 50. And the French Renault tanks were in many ways actually superior to the British designs.

The big flaws in WWI tank deployment were light armour, slow speed and a tendency to get bogged in the lush agricultural lands of Belgium and Northern France.  Even tracked vehicles could not traverse that ground whenever it was wet, and that was often.

The light armour was actually penetrable by rifle and machine gun fire in the early stages and up to the end was an easy kill for German field guns.  And Germany had a lot of those.

This handicap was greatly amplified by the slow speed of the tanks  -- 5mph for British heavy tanks.  It certainly gave German field gunners easy targeting.  So the tanks that did not get bogged were generally knocked out without too much trouble.

The British light tanks ("Whippets") did rather better than the heavy tanks but there were only about 200 of them fielded and the British themselves considered them as enough of a failure to cut  the numbers they had ordered.  They were designed as "fast" tanks but that was only 8mph.

But the tanks did have some engagements in which they helped so how can I be sure that they did not make a crucial difference overall?

I can be sure because almost up to the end Ludendorff was advancing. In his last great push, German troops got to within 50 miles of Paris.  But that push cost Ludenfdorff over half a million men and that left Germany with nothing like enough troops to take on the great wave of American troops that began arriving at that time.  The American troops did not play a large role in the actual fighting but the sheer number of them told Ludendorff that he was finished and so he asked for an armistice.  It was the arrival of the Americans that defeated Germany.  Just the prospect of fighting so many fresh and carefully-trained troops led to the surrender.

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Food authoritarianism poorly based

The dietary guidelines endorsed by the US and UK governments for the past three decades, which demonise fat as the number one nutritional villain, turn out to have been based on flimsy evidence.

A new study in the journal Open Heart has found that these guidelines, which advise restricting fat to no more than 30 percent of total energy intake and saturated fat to no more than 10 percent, should never have been issued. The guidelines were based on a non-randomised study of fewer than 2,500 middle-aged men, most of whom were already sick-hardly a sound basis for issuing dietary advice to millions of healthy men and women of all ages.

This is not the first time official diet advice has later been undermined by evidence. Saturated fat, it turns out, is not as bad for you as once was thought. Even the link between cholesterol and heart disease has been questioned.

Another public health myth that was recently debunked: the obesity explosion. Just one year ago, the National Obesity Forum in the UK was predicting rates of obesity were going to increase much more than expected and policymakers needed to prepare for an exponential rise.

As it turns out, rates of obesity have levelled off in the UK, especially among children. In Australia, childhood obesity plateaued a decade ago and in New South Wales may even be declining.

The same public health lobby that vilified fat 30 years ago has now moved on to sugar, with some scientists claiming that sugary foods are as 'addictive' as cocaine. This anti-sugar line is being used to justify policies like soft drink taxes and school candy bans.

But with its history of falling for dietary fads, like fat yesterday and sugar today, should we really trust these diet nannies to make food decisions for the rest of us? With their record of making doomsday predictions that don't come to pass, like the obesity 'bomb', should we trust them when they claim to have identified a crisis requiring urgent government action?

There is no one nutrient that is responsible for obesity. A person can grow to an unhealthy weight by eating too much fatty food or too much sugary food-the real problem is eating too much, period. This simple wisdom is something that most people already understand. The only problem with it, it seems, is that if everyone already understands it then there's no work left for nanny.

SOURCE

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Doubts About Obama's Hatred of Christianity Should Now be Erased

By Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson

“For the devil is come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has but a short time.” – Revelation 12:12
“This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.” – Barack Obama to Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev

If anyone doubted Barack Hussein Obama’s deep hatred of Christianity and abiding love for Islam, those doubts should now be erased after Obama verbally attacked some 3,500 Christians at the recent National Prayer Breakfast.

Just days after ISIS burned a Jordanian pilot alive, Obama used the occasion to minimize the escalating brutality by Islamists and lecture Christians about their supposed history of intolerance, incredibly reaching back as far as a thousand years to make his point:

“Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

And thus Obama’s hatred of Christianity has been revealed for the world to see.

Obama left out that the Crusades were a defensive measure against the Islamic conquest of the Christian world. Islam teaches war against “non-believers” and conversion by force. Christianity teaches that people must wage an internal spiritual battle that leads to repentance and inner peace.

Obama also failed to mention that some of the greatest abolitionists and civil rights leaders who eradicated slavery and Jim Crow were Christians. And that slavery still exists today in many Muslim countries!

Contrast Obama’s rebuke of Christianity to what he has said about Islam:

“Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance.”

"The Muslim call to prayer is “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”

“America is not – and will never be – at war with Islam."

Islam influenced Obama at a young age. His biological father and his stepfather were both Muslim. He lived in a Muslim nation. Obama was a close friend of Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. and a member of his America-hating, anti-Israel and racist black church. As a result of his background, Obama has an aversion to Christianity and for America’s exceptionality.

Fundamentally transforming … the world

Obama not only wants to fundamentally transform America, he wants to transform the world and prop Islam up as a “great religion.” He wants Christians and Jews to doubt their faith and turn a blind eye to the evil nature of Islam.

Case in point: Iranian officials claim that Obama administration officials are “begging” them to sign an agreement on nuclear weapons. According to the Associated Press, the United States is conceding ground to Iran in talks and will now allow it to “keep much of its uranium-enriching technology.”

Obama’s love for Iran, a major state sponsor of terrorism, is no secret. In the past, he has openly gushed about this murderous Islamic nation:

“To the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran … your art, your music, literature and innovation have made the world a better and more beautiful place. … We know that you’re a great civilization and your accomplishments have earned the respect of the United States and the world.”

Obama’s affinity for Islam, his hostility toward Israel and his selfish political aspiration to negotiate “peace for our time” is empowering Iran and jeopardizing the security of the U.S. and our allies.

Iran has stated that it wants to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, and a nuclear Iran could be the leverage Obama seeks to coerce Israel to allow a Palestinian state, which would be a major political and personal accomplishment for Obama.

Obama operatives are trying to undermine the upcoming March 17 Israeli elections – no doubt to support a more liberal Israeli leader. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that a U.S. taxpayer-funded nonprofit organization called OneVoice is actively working with a campaign operation called Victory 2015 (V15) – working hand-in-hand with Obama field director Jeremy Bird – in an effort to defeat Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Why Obama is revealing his dark heart now

Obama knows “his time is short” and that he has no more elections. Despite losing both chambers of Congress, Obama is still acting like he’s in control – and Republicans refuse to stop him. They’re caving in on almost every campaign promise. The weaker the opposing force, the bolder Obama becomes.

Republicans are weak with Obama, like the West is weak with Islamists. Obama said the sound of Muslim prayer is “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset.” If that’s true, what is the second prettiest sound – that of a man being burned alive or the sound of a human being’s head being sliced off by Islamic terrorists?

SOURCE

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COULD THIS BE THE CASE THAT ENDS OBAMACARE?

State officials in Ohio filed a lawsuit on Monday, Jan. 26 alleging Obamacare tax assessments against government agencies are unconstitutional. Unsurprisingly, the case was covered closely by major media outlets across the nation.

But while the Ohio case may be getting all the headlines, it could be a case brought forward by an unknown Pennsylvania tax collector that ends up taking down key provisions of President Barack Obama’s signature law when the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit considers the case in the spring.

Like countless other Americans, Jeffrey Cutler, currently the tax collector of East Lampeter Township, Pennsylvania, lost his health insurance in October 2013 when his insurance company notified him that his plan did not qualify for renewal due to provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. Cutler, who was covered by the same plan from 2007 to its cancellation in 2013, was pleased with his coverage and did not wish to obtain a different—and in his opinion an inferior—plan through the Obamacare exchange in Pennsylvania.

On Nov. 14, 2013, facing intense political pressure over thousands of cancelled policies, Obama announced a “transition policy” that promised to allow individuals like Cutler to keep, at least temporarily, health insurance plans that originally did not qualify for renewal under the ACA.

Cutler soon discovered, however, Obama’s promise was not a universal policy applying to all the states; only citizens in those states whose regulators chose to implement Obama’s transition policy would be able to keep their health insurance plans. In other words, the Obama administration gave individual states the power to decide for themselves whether or not existing federal law would be enforced in their own states.

Unfortunately for Cutler, Pennsylvania was not one of the states that mandated what became known as Obama’s “administrative fix.” Then-Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Michael Consedine did allow individuals to keep their insurance plans that would otherwise be cancelled by Obamacare mandates, but the decision was ultimately left to the insurance companies to decide whether or not insurance plans would be cancelled.

Cutler’s insurance company chose to cancel Cutler’s plan, and Cutler went without insurance in 2014, which means he now owes the federal government at least $95 for failing to have adequate health insurance coverage.

Critics of Obamacare, including House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), immediately questioned the constitutionality of the Obamacare administrative fix; they alleged the Obama administration violated the Constitution when it single-handedly, without the approval of Congress, altered the ACA’s clear provisions about when plans considered to be inadequate would be cancelled.

Cutler’s suit, filed on December 31, 2013, took a different approach. Cutler claimed the law violates the Constitution because it does not apply the law equally, which past Supreme Courts have determined is a guarantee of the Fifth Amendment.

Cutler, who is now represented by constitutional lawyers David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise of the American Freedom Law Center, argues that because the so-called administrative fix allowed states to apply federal law unequally, the Obama administration violated the Constitution.

Further, Cutler asserts that because the religious exemptions provided in the law do not apply to all religions—Cutler is Jewish born—the ACA violates his First Amendment rights as well.

The government filed for a dismissal in the district court on the grounds that Cutler, who initially sued without legal representation, did not have standing and that he did not sufficiently allege a legal claim. The court granted the motion and Cutler’s case was dismissed.

In an interview, Cutler said now that his case is being handled by expert constitutional lawyers Yerushalmi and Muise, he is confident his appeal will be successful. A brief laying out Cutler’s case will be filed in February and the government’s response is due in March. Oral arguments have not yet been scheduled.

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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Conservative and liberal brains again

Ever since the first twin studies of the matter came out in the '80s, I have been pointing out that political orientation has a substantial inherited component and hence arises from inborn differences in the brains of liberals and conservatives.  That is not at all a popular proposition among either the right or on the Left but the scientific evidence for it continues to accumulate.  We can now specify to a degree the actual brain regions involved.

The Left endeavour to "spin" the findings concerned in a way favorable to themselves so I do occasionally take a little time to "unspin" such claims.  Below is another example.  It was reported as "Liberals have more tolerance to uncertainty (bigger anterior cingulate cortex), and conservatives have more sensitivity to fear (bigger right amygdala)".  So conservatives are scaredy cats and liberals are fine tolerant people.

They base that on the following excerpt from the original research report:

"...[O]ur findings are consistent with the proposal that political orientation is associated with psychological processes for managing fear and uncertainty. The amygdala has many functions, including fear processing. Individuals with a larger amygdala are more sensitive to fear, which, taken together with our findings, might suggest the testable hypothesis that individuals with larger amagdala are more inclined to integrate conservative views into their belief systems... our finding of an association between anterior cingulate cortex [ACC] may be linked with tolerance to uncertainty. One of the functions of the anterior cingulate cortex is to monitor uncertainty and conflicts. Thus it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views."

As you can see, the report authors were much more tentative in interpreting their findings than were the commentators on it.  The commentators have turned maybes into definite statements.

Most such reports are however parsimoniously interpreted as conservatives being more cautious, which is hardly a discovery. And if there is something wrong with caution then there is everything wrong with a lot of things.  Science, for instance, is a sustained exercise in caution. So conservatives are born more cautious and Leftist brains miss most of that out.  So the "sensitive to fear" report above could be equally well restated as "cautious".  And the finding that liberals "have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts" is pure guesswork.  As the report authors note, that is just "one of the functions of the anterior cingulate cortex".

I give the journal abstract below, paragraphed to make it easier to follow:

Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults

By Ryota Kanai et al.

Summary

Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures [1]. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors [2, 3].

Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex [4]. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure.

In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants.

Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring [4] and recognition of emotional faces [5] by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure.

Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work [4, 6] to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.

Current Biology 21, 677–680, April 26, 2011 ª2011. DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2011.03.017

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Obama White House dithered for nearly a month before launching bid to rescue ISIS hostages Kayla Mueller, James Foley and Steven Sotloff

The United Kingdom gave the Obama administration intelligence in June 2014 about where in Syria the ISIS terror army was holding its American captives, but the White House dithered and missed its opportunity to rescue them, according to a shocking report published Thursday.

U.S. and British officials said the administration sat on the information for nearly a month before launching a military raid to recover American aid worker Kayla Mueller and journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff.

By the time a rescue was mounted on July 4, 2014, the hostages had been moved.

All three are now dead. ISIS militants executed Sotloff and Foley, and ISIS claims a Jordanian airstrike killed Mueller when it hit a buiding where she was being held.

The Daily Beast quoted an unnamed American official saying that Obama’s national security team refused to plan a rescue mission around information gathered by a foreign government.

'The issue was that they didn’t trust it, and they wanted to develop and mature the intelligence, because it wasn’t our own,' the American official said. 'They got the information. They just didn’t trust it. And they did sit on it, there’s no doubt about that.'

British officials and private security contractors said that hesitation was a source of frustration since a string of videotaped ISIS executions began in August and might possibly have been prevented.

British intelligence had learned in May of last year from released ISIS captives the locations of two or three places where hostages were being held captive, according to the Daily Beast.

The UK also had surveillance images from satellites and drones, and the results of some 'electronic eavesdropping.

The information wasn't certain until early June, however. By then the British government had a 'positive identification and that information was shared with Washington,' according to a British source who spoke with the Daily Beast.

National Security Council spokesperson Bernadette Meehan insisted that 'U.S. forces conducted this (rescue) operation as soon as the president and his national-security team were confident the mission could be carried out successfully and consistent with our policies for undertaking such operations.'

But Foley's mother Diane said the U.S. also had intelligence from the French government about the hostages' whereabouts as early as March 2014 but did nothing about it.  'That was part of our frustration,' she told the Daily Beast.

'The State Department said they were connecting with the French and everybody at the highest levels. Very specific information was available as early as mid-March.'

'And that’s what’s been so tough for us as families, because apparently they were held in the same place all those months,' Foley said.

Obama himself has pushed back against the idea that he acted too slowly.  'I don’t think it’s accurate then to say that the United States government hasn’t done everything that we could,' he told the Buzzfeed website on Tuesday.

SOURCE

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US Marines in Yemen Forced to Surrender Their Weapons!

Joe Otto

I am furious. I was going to write today about a different topic, but I just learned something that has left me absiolutely livid.

The Obama administration evacuated the U.S. Embassy in Yemen. That wasn’t too much of a surprise. We knew that this day would come.

Iran-backed rebel fighters toppled Yemen, a country that Obama once touted as a War-on-Terror success story, has.

Some of the last personnel to leave the embassy were the Marine guards. When they got to the airport, they were allegedly ordered to remove the firing pins from their weapons and surrender them to Yemeni officials. The Houthi rebels would not let them take their weapons with them and orders came down from Obama’s State Department for the Marines to hand them over to the rebels.

This story has created quite a scandal and the administration is trying to cover their actions. They’re now claiming that service rifles were destroyed at the embassy, but that the Marines’ personal weapons were surrendered to Houthi rebels at the airport.

Not a chance. As many as 100 Marines were providing security for the convoy travelling to the airport. When have on-duty Marines providing a security escort ever used their privately owned weapons? I’d venture to guess NEVER.

Words cannot describe how infuriating this is. I never served in the military, but I have enough friends who have served to know that Marines don’t surrender their rifles. Ever.

It is just so disgraceful. I mean honestly, what is the point of this?

The Marine guards could have taken their weapons with them. Instead, they were instructed to surrender them to Yemeni officials in some messed up ceremony straight out of Obama’s politically correct playbook!

The Obama administration can’t stop surrendering to our enemies! Demand that Congress intervene!

It’s one thing to surrender a diplomatic post. At the end of the day, the safety of our personnel has to be our top priority. If the country is going to hell and terrorists are taking control of the government, then it is time to move our personnel to safety.

But that’s not what happened today. What happened today was a surrender ceremony where U.S. Marines were forced to hand over their rifles to a rebel force.

The headline reads “U.S. Marines in Yemen Forced to Surrender Their Weapons” but the headline should read “Houthi Rebels Killed Trying to Seize Marines’ Weapons.”

Some media outlets are reporting that the rifles were destroyed. That is a LIE! The Marines removed the rifles’ firing pins. The only way to truly destroy a weapon is to take a blowtorch to it, which I doubt was done in the backseat of an SUV while these Marines were racing to the airport.

Now, these Iran-backed Houthi rebels have American rifles and 20 of our vehicles. They’ve also stormed the Embassy and taken it over.

Meanwhile, our perpetually stupid State Department announced that it is confident that these rebels will let the Americans back into the Embassy.

Yes, folks… it doesn’t get dumber than this. We evacuated our embassy, had our Marines surrender their weapons, and ran with our tail between our legs. And while the rebels are ransacking our embassy, State Dept. Spokesperson Marie Harf has the gall to say the administration is “confident” we’ll be allowed to return.

This is what I’m talking about. This wanton disregard for the facts that permeates through the entire investigation.

Islamic terrorists attack a Kosher deli in Paris? The administration says that is nothing but a random attack…

ISIS burns a captured pilot alive? Obama says we can’t judge because of atrocities committed by Christians 1000 years ago…

Shi’ite rebels seize and ransack our embassy after Marines are ordered to surrender their weapons? Don’t worry; they’ll let us come back…

These rebels are shouting “Death to America” from the courtyard of our embassy. It takes a special kind of stupid to believe that these extremists – who control the Yemeni government – would ever let Americans return.

I knew that the Obama administration’s weakness would come to a head sooner or later, but I never imagined something like this. I never imagined that Marines would be humiliated and forced to surrender their weapons…

Do you want to know why the world is in chaos? It is because the Obama administration is weak and unwilling to stand up to our enemies.

Now, the President wants Congress to give him a blank check to fight ISIS however he pleases. This Authorization for the Use of Military Force will determine how ISIS and other extremists are fought for the remaining years of Obama’s presidency. Barack Obama is telling Congress, “Don’t worry about the specifics… I know what I’m doing.”

Absolutely not! Barack Obama has proven himself to be unfit to fight the war on terror on his own. His idea of fighting terror is to remove the phrase “radical Islamic extremism" from our lexicon, send weapons to our enemies, and force our Marines to surrender their rifles to the enemy.

Six months after calling Yemen a success story, the U.S. Embassy is now in rebel hands.

Congress has the constitutional authority to decide how the fight against ISIS will be waged. It is imperative that you tell your Congressman and Senators to intervene!

SOURCE

UPDATE:  The USMC says the weapons were destroyed, not handed over

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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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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A genuinely funny political advertisement from Israel



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Obama is showing his colors

In the latter stages of his tenure and when he cannot be re-elected anyway, Obama has begun revealing his true anti-American, pro-Islamic colours and boy are they revealing.

“Christians did some terrible things, too”, he said at this week’s prayer breakfast. “Just look at the Crusades”, he said, when he again tried to defend Islamic atrocities as mere workplace incidents.

If Christianity can be blamed for the Crusades why shouldn’t Islam be blamed for terrorism?

Of course Christianity was responsible for atrocities equal to Islam’s, but Christianity moved into a modern world centuries ago while Islam still practises and promotes its abhorrent past as though scores still need to be settled.

Forget the conspiracy theories, there is now no doubt where Barack Hussein Obama’s faith allegiance lies: “There is no sweeter sound on Earth than the Muslim call to prayer.” “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.” “Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of promoting peace.” “Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation”, he said.

In childlike denial, both he and Abbott still refuse to identify terrorism with Islam. Charlie Hebdo and the Kosher deli store killings were, according to Obama, “random acts of violence” and “we should not over-react”.

Within six minutes of being notified of James Foley’s graphic beheading, he was back on the golf course. Yet within minutes of being notified of his beloved Saudi King Abdullah’s death he had cut short his Indian visit so he could be present at his wake. (Saudi Wahhabists were the original creators of the Islamic State, Al Queda and the “student” Taliban.)

Obama gave our enemies the dates and times American troops were to be withdrawn. He is now defining for the enemy where exactly American bombing raids will and won’t be carried out.

Among others he has freed five high-value Afghani terrorists in exchange for one American deserter who has converted to Islam and is about to face a Court Martial.

Two million Christians lived in peace under Syria’s Bashar Assad. But Obama sent the CIA to train and arm Sunni Al Qaeda fighters to slaughter those Christians. Obama says he is arming “moderates” but, just like the “moderates” he armed in Benghazi, he knows it is the terrorists who get the arms.

Obama has recently made arrangements to train and equip those same Syrian rebels in Saudi camps on Saudi soil.

Obama’s so-called “moderate” allies shoot and cannibalise captured American soldiers in cold blood, but this doesn’t stop Obama. He refuses to arm and train Kurdish Peshmergers, the only fighting force with the stomach to put boots on the ground to defeat the ISIS.

He has an overt hatred of Israel and is actively providing vast sums of money in an attempt to destabilise Netanyahu in the upcoming elections. He openly supports the Muslim Brotherhood who supports Al Queda.

The timetable for American withdrawal from Afghanistan is the same timetable for the Islamic State to join with the Taliban to further it’s caliphate across the Levant. Just wait and watch.

The Benghazi massacre, was "only a reaction to a silly video” said Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. The pleas for help from the murdered Americans were ignored as the White House watched a live feed for seven hours while Embassy staff battled for their lives.

The order that stopped all rescue efforts (a stand down order) could only have been given by Obama.

Obama is a Sunni Muslim of the Luo tribe who feigned conversion to electorally palatable Christianity in order fight the good fight from the White House.

In 2011, Malik’s “Barack H. Obama Foundation,” received quick approval as a charitable foundation. It was illegally backdated to 2008 and personally signed by Lois Lerner, the IRS chief who, under questioning, took the 5th (a legal refusal to answer on the basis it may incriminate the accused).

Funds from this “charitable foundation” now support Obama’s brother, Malik's 12 wives in luxury. Malik also owns and manages Sudan’s Islamic "Da’wa Organisation", which finances terrorism throughout northern and central Africa.

According to Judge Tahani al-Gebali of Egypt’s Supreme Court, Malik Obama also oversees the Muslim Brotherhood’s international investments.

Judge Gebali claims Obama, through his Egyptian Embassy, bribed Muslim Brotherhood leaders with over $850,000 per year and it claims that Barack Obama himself is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the same mob that slaughtered thousands of Coptic Christians and burned their churches... Barack Obama uttered not a word in protest.

Obama’s close relationship with his brother has continued to this day; completely concealed from the American public. He was raised in the Muslim faith by his father and attended a Madrass in Indonesia.

Now, we should be prepared to give this bloke the benefit of the doubt when it comes to such serious charges as treason and sedition but fair dinkum the evidence is stark.

In six short years Barack Hussein Obama has extended America’s debt from $8 trillion to $19 trillion (soon to be $21 trillion) has crippled American exports and has opened America’s borders to all comers with promises of fat welfare cheques and citizenship.

SOURCE

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The KKK



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A dubious Pledge

"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all".

Many of us will recognize these words as the “Pledge of Allegiance.” As a child in elementary and middle school, I remember saying the Pledge—every single day—mumbling the words, hand over my heart, facing the flag placed at the front of the classroom. As a twelve year old, there was no greater honor than being the student allowed to read the Pledge over the school intercom.

I am not alone in this experience. The Pledge is a hallmark of the American educational system. Every day across the country students state their loyalty and dedication to the flag and the U.S. government. As of 2003, the majority of states actually require the pledge to be said in schools. A few states make the pledge optional, and a few have no laws.

Although the pledge contains the words, “with liberty and justice for all,” the pledge is anything but freedom preserving. For those of us who value individual liberties, the recitation of the Pledge should induce immediate feelings of duress and an uncomfortable tightening in our stomachs.

In fact, the origins of the pledge date back to 1892. The original version was written by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and fervent socialist. Bellamy published the Pledge in The Youth’s Companion in September of that year. He hoped the Pledge would promote egalitarianism and undermine the “capitalistic greed” of the country. By reciting the words daily, it was hoped that the Pledge would unite school children in loyalty to the state and a collective society.

The Pledge was altered several times from Bellamy’s original words. The words “under God” were added in 1954 in an attempt to emphasize the distinctions between the U.S. and the atheistic Soviet Union.

The Pledge has been the center of controversy over the years. For the most part, those opposed to Pledge have done so on religious grounds. In 1943, the Supreme Court ruled that requiring a person to say the Pledge violates the First and Fourteenth amendments.

Issues of religion aside, the Pledge of Allegiance is disturbing.

Schools are supposed to be a place of learning, a place where students learn to think critically. Schooling is supposed to prepare students to function in society. It is supposed to make them responsible citizens.

The cultivation of devotion to the flag and the U.S. government creates anything but responsible citizens. In fact, the Pledge is a complete slap in the face to the principles it supposedly espouses. It encourages, not a love of liberty and justice, but blind obedience to an “indivisible” government.

If you’re skeptical of this, consider what happens to those who disagree with the Pledge and ask that their children be “opted out.” Not only do they see their children socially ostracized as “that kid,” but they are often viewed as “unpatriotic” or “un-American.” Heaven forbid we question authority!

It’s time to rethink the Pledge of Allegiance. As opposed to teaching our children to blindly follow a piece of cloth and the government behind it, let’s teach them to think critically, value liberty, and truly appreciate the need to protect personal freedoms.

SOURCE

I am rather pleased to reflect that I refused to say the Australian equivalent when I was in High School many years ago.  The pledge is clearly outdated.  Many Southerners must find that the "indivisible" rankles and "justice" is something of a joke in America today.

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Michelle Obama's Self-Serving 'Cheese Dust' Disdain

Before the nation's Food Nanny guilt-trips you into ditching boxed dinners on a frazzled night, know this: The first lady profited from cheese dust before she was against it.

In the new issue of Cooking Light magazine, Michelle Obama takes another sanctimonious stand against processed foods. The occasion of this latest hectoring is a month-long celebration of the fifth anniversary of her Let's Move initiative. This time, she spins a slickly crafted tale of how her former personal chef challenged daughter Malia several years ago to turn a block of cheese into powder. "She sat there for 30 minutes trying to pulverize a block of cheese into dust," Mrs. Obama claims.

"She was really focused on it, and it just didn't work, so she had to give up. And from then on, we stopped eating macaroni and cheese out of a box because cheese dust is not food," snob momma Obama pontificated.

Hey, Michelle Antoinette: Shunning convenience foods is easy when you've got a taxpayer-subsidized cooking staff whipping up four-course feasts every night. Those boxed meals you spit upon are affordable and easy to store, and last a long time. For someone who pretends to be sympathetic to working-class and middle-class families, Her Royal Highness sure has a funny way of showing it.

But the faux populist narrative must be spoon-fed to the masses. Cooking Light's editor marveled at how "real" Mrs. Obama is and how genuinely "personal" her government health crusade is. Yahoo News similarly gushed over the nation's enlightened "family meal champion" and touted the five-year anniversary of her "pivotal" Let's Move initiative.

Message from sycophantic foodie and women's magazines: Michelle Obama is just like you and me! She's an ordinary mom who cares! Except she's not.

Before she was wielding the power of public office to dictate school lunches and castigate junk-meal makers, Mrs. Obama profited from the very same processed food industry she now demonizes. What none of the fan-girling mainstream journalists who've covered her Let's Move anniversary campaign has bothered to mention in their glowing profiles is that "cheese dust" was gold dust for the Obamas.

The first lady may not think it's food now, but powdered edibles provided hefty financial sustenance for her family 10 years ago.
It's just one of the many tasty perks of political influence Mrs. Barack Obama has enjoyed in her adult lifetime.

Let's move? How about let's remember, shall we? In June 2005, a few months after her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate, Mrs. Obama snagged a seat on the corporate board of directors of TreeHouse Foods Inc. Currying favor, the food-processing company put her on its audit and nominating and corporate governance committees despite her complete lack of experience or expertise. For her on-the-job training and the privilege of putting her name and face on their literature, the company forked over $45,000 in 2005 and $51,200 in 2006 to Mrs. Obama — as well as 7,500 TreeHouse stock options worth more than $72,000 for each year.

Mrs. Obama raked in that easy money thanks to the worldwide conglomerate's popular product line of powdered non-dairy creamers and sweeteners, hot and cold cereals, evil macaroni and cheese, skillet dinners, powdered gravy and sauce mixes, powdered drink mixes, powdered soup, and puddings.

She certainly didn't look down her nose at milk dust, cheese dust, juice dust, oatmeal dust or broth dust when it came mixed with a healthy paycheck.

I wouldn't begrudge Mrs. Obama's enterprises, except for the fact that she's using taxpayer money and public office to shove her highbrow tastes and control-freak ideology down our throats. More offensive: Constant posturing from the White House about the need for jobs, while Mrs. Obama now sneers at the food-processing industry that put money in her designer pocket. Kraft Foods alone employs 103,000 people, with manufacturing and processing facilities worldwide, and reported annual net revenues topping $40 billion.

When you look past the phony concerned-mom costumery, Mrs. Obama's healthy living campaigns are all about control and cash flow. While she food-shames the rest of us, her Partnership for a Healthier America charity is a conduit for corporations and lobbyists to buy access. Her Fed Foods racket is pulling in millions of dollars from secret donors and nonprofits.

Mrs. Obama's self-aggrandizing food elitism is hard for ordinary Americans to swallow, no matter how much truffle oil her personal chef drizzles on top.

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. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog

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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Who won the Battle of Britain?

The bit of history I want to challenge below may seem to be of no interest to people today but, as we shall see, its central lesson is in fact highly relevant to America's current war on Daesh in Syria.

Finding the truth amid a fog of lies is always hard but if we are to deal with reality constructively, we need to find the truth. One of the great obstacles is propaganda -- and wartime propaganda is surprisingly persistent.  The propaganda of the victor in a war tends to become the history of that war. I don't think anyone now believes the WWI Allied propaganda that it was "The great war for civilization" but that is probably only because so much has happened since then.

One bit of propaganda that always amuses me is the Hollywood portrayal of German troops in WWII as stupid and hopeless bunglers while Allied troops were savvy and clever.  That is of course the exact opposite of the truth.  One only has to reflect on the mere 6 weeks that it took Hitler's troops to overrun France to suspect that portrayal.  It took Germany just 6 weeks to conquer French forces that were more numerous and in some ways better equipped than they were. The Wehrmacht was in fact by far the most militarily efficient force deployed in WWII.

And I am afraid that the British victory in the Battle of Britain is a myth too.  The story is that poorly trained Allied airmen got into their Spitfires and turned back the Luftwaffe.  They didn't.  The Heinkel and Dornier bombers mostly got through and unloaded onto their target areas.  The extensive damage they did to places like Coventry is testimony to that.

So what have we not been told?  The fact is that the trained pilots of the Luftwaffe in their excellent Messerschmitt 109s made mincemeat out of the British fighters.  The German bombers got through because their escorting Messerschmitts shot the Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires down before they could get to the bombers.  The British counted as an air "Ace" a pilot who shot down a dozen or more German planes while Germany had lots of pilots with 100 or more "kills".  Adolf Galland is the best known example of that but other Luftwaffe pilots had even more "kills". There is a list of WWII air aces somewhere and about the first 100 pilots on that list were German.

So how come the Royal Airforce did so poorly?  The British aircraft were pretty good but the Battle of Britain was fought mainly by the older Hawker Hurricanes.  Spitfire production had not ramped up at that stage.  But all British fighters at that time mounted machine guns only, whereas the Messerschmitt had cannon as well. So a hit from a Messerschmitt could be much more deadly.

But some RAF pilots did relatively well so it was not mainly their machines that were wanting. It was their training.  Like the French, the British had simply not trained nearly enough pilots -- whereas Germany had been training pilots since the Spanish civil war.  Britain's large motor vehicle industry was readily converted from making motor cars to making aircraft and it did pour out lots of them.  But where were the pilots to fly them?  Men were sent up to face the Luftwaffe with as little as ten hours of air training.  They were lucky to get their machine pointed in the right direction at that stage and were hence sitting ducks.  Very few allied pilots lasted long.  It was common for them to fly only a few sorties at most before being shot down.

So why did the Luftwaffe eventually go away?  Because the German High Command  learnt at that stage a lesson the Allies also learnt later on when it was their turn to bomb Germany:  Aircraft are expensive and bombing is not very effective at achieving war aims. You need boots on the ground.  America is facing that fact right now in its attempts to suppress Daesh in Syria.  Fortunately, Daesh do not have an air arm

What Germany found was that bombing affected production of war materiel only marginally and that it did not corrode enemy morale to any significant extent.  So the Luftwaffe went away and concentrated on easy targets in Russia instead.

So nobody won the battle of Britain.  The Royal Airforce did not  stop the bombing and the Luftwaffe failed to achieve their basic objectives of stopping British war production and intimidating the British population.

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The Left-dominated Israeli Press are keeping silent on a huge story

Kalman Liebeskind, writing from Israel, points to the U.S. financed V15 group as pouring money into Leftist Israeli political parties.  It appears that Obama is attempting to hijack Israel's elections and get rid of conservative PM Netanyahu

If one of the ways to judge if a state is democratic is by whether its press is worthy of the name, the last few weeks have shown that we have nothing in common with a democratic state. That is because what has been done here by a long roster of journalists and media sources, who cannot abide the thought that Binyamin Netanyahu might win the elections again, is a travesty against democracy. Hysteria, frenzy, there is no other way to define what is happening on screen, on the radio waves, on the Facebook and Twitter pages of just about every leading mainstream Israeli journalist.

In their eyes, Netanyahu has become a demon and the ultimate symbol of evil, so that those who intend to grant him those 20 or so Knesset seats are viewed as the ignorant masses. Likud spokesmen are rudely attacked on mainstream media, while senior journalists ignore any facts that don't fit the master plan. There are no rules, no laws, everything we ever learned in the School of Journalism will just have to wait for the day after the elections. Shush, there is a war going on.

But we are in the midst of an election campaign, and the election campaign story is very simple. Here it is in one short sentence: An organization whose goal is switching our Prime Minster has as its organizational, legal and bureaucratic base another organization to which the American Embassy belongs and to which John Kerry channels funds. Read that sentence slowly and aloud and tell me if that doesn't sound insane. Tell me if that story did not have to be the most explosive one of this entire election campaign.

Do you realize what is happening here? The Israeli media is lacing mercilessly into Netanyahu because of the "finger he is poking into America's eye", because the planned speech he intends to give in the US Congress may insult Obama – and absolutely refuses to notice that at the same exact time, an organization funded by Obama is cooperating with the group that has as its goal pushing Netanyahu out of office.

This is the story that should have been splashed all over the news by the Israeli media. The State Department's spokesman should have been forced to explain what is going on. The American ambassador should have been seen perspiring in TV studios. None of this happened, of course, because this story doesn't interest our media in the slightest. We have no press during this period. The Israeli press and its democratic flak jacket are on vacation, on its office door hangs a sign saying "out due to elections" and we are completely vulnerable.

Let's forget that the fact that we journalists didn't discover what V15 was doing is a colossal failure on our part. The problem is that once the Likud did expose the entire scandal, the only thing the media did, instead of taking up a cudgel and forging on by itself, was to try to bury the story. On Army Radio – whose budget should be cut by the amount that really belongs on Herzog and Livni's campaign fund disbursements– I heard, too many times to count, both before the Likud press conference and after it, that the whole V15 story was concocted to deflect the public's attention from the story of Sara Netanyahu's deposit bottles. That the story is only a diversion. The station's political correspondent repeated that statement so many times that he practically lost his voice.

While the media took on the story of the returnable bottles and demanded explanations, responses and a criminal investigation, no less, we were witness to a totally different press when it came to the V15 story.  Here we had a press that has no desire to investigate, a press uninterested in anything, a press that delivers only an unembellished report. The "Likud says", the "Likud claims", the "Likud will hold a press conference" as all they said. The Likud members' most difficult mission this past week was to convince the press that there was a story at all. One after another the party's spokemen were attacked by interviewers, who not only didn't do their jobs, but demanded that the Likud bring them a full dossier of proofs – or they would decide forthwith that there is nothing to the story.

Did the Likud claimed that one of Obama's past campaign managers is helping V15? Army Radio rushed to announce a "scoop" – they, too, have an advisor for New Media who once worked with the Republicans. Did the Likud claim that OneVoice  is interfering in a sovereign nations' elections? Army Radio responded by attacking Likud MK Yuval Steinitz for once appearing before OneVoice, as if one speech neutralizes the fact that the organization is now working to defeat Netanyahu.

The media kept grinding away at the idiotic story of Sara Netanyahu's returnable bottles and exactly when she gave the blasted 4000 IS she received for them to the state's coffers – but the connection between the US State Department and an organization working to defeat Netanyahu didn't interest a soul among them.

Let's take a look at Yoel Hasson, a member of the (self-titled) "Zionist Camp" of Herzog and Livni. After Ar'el Segal revealed that the honorable Hasson himself is on the board of governors of OneVoice, Hasson rushed to deny it and claim that "I was never a member of the board there". A short time later – when the Hebrew language Rotternet site revealed that not only his name, but also his photograph and bio appears on the list of board members on OneVoice's site - an unusual coincidence occurred and they were removed. Hasson explained that he had no idea who had put his name there. Of course, we know about that – which of us hasn't had some organization choose to post his name and photo as a member of their board by mistake?

Seriously, doesn't this merit some discussion? Doesn't this seem a bit suspicious? Wouldn't a fair press force the "Zionist Camp" to deal with the issue and furnish explanations for it?

If we go back 15 years, we will soon see that this is a repeat of the same corrupt press of 1999. That was when the Likud found out about Herzog and Barak's illegal NPO's. Then, like now, only the then fledgling and small "Makor Chadash" Hebrew newspaper featured the issue.  No one else showed any interest in their story. Then, as well, the Likud party's leaders (Livni was one of them then) were forced to call a press conference to publicize what they had discovered. Then, as now, by the next morning the entire story had been buried, because there were almost no journalists who found it worth taking up.

Almost, but not quite. There was one rare, intrepid journalist, Shelly Yehimovich, whose political leanings were with the left, but whose integrity forced her to bring up the story on the radio again and again, even if it didn't serve her side. This week, too, there was one – Keren Neubach – who, I am willing to bet will not vote Likud, just as Shelly Yehimovich didn't – but whose pointed questions and demand for answers facing the V15 representative preserved a small part of the honor of her chosen profession.

The time has come to put a stop to pretensions of objectivity. A month and a half before Election Day, everything is political, everything is tainted, everything has been bought.

More HERE

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Obama To Scrap Warplane The Islamic State Fears



The venerable A-10 Warthog, designed to stop Soviet tanks, and the perfect weapon to "degrade and destroy" the Islamic State, as President Obama promised, faces a budgetary chopping block.

We have noted the irony of how Obama was going to war against the Islamic State with weapons systems he had scrapped, ending the production runs of the F-22 Raptor and Tomahawk cruise missiles. They were dismissed by the administration as relics of the Cold War even as Russia was rearming and trying to reassemble the old Soviet Union.

We've also mentioned the phasing out of the A-10 Thunderbolt, a close-support aircraft that entered service in 1972 and was designed to combat Soviet tank formations on a European battlefield.

Dubbed the "Warthog" because of its decidedly un-sleek profile, the A-10 has been found to be useful in another capacity in Iraq — attacking IS forces that don't want to be on the business end of the Warthog's 30 mm cannon as it flies low and slow over the battlefield.

As Iraqi News reported last week after an A-10 sortie against IS forces near Mosul: "The aircraft sparked panic in the ranks of ISIS and bombing its elements in spaces close to the ground." Such strikes also prove the value of such a low-maintenance aircraft built to take the punishment expected in close air support.

"Elements of the terrorist organization targeted the aircraft with 4 Strella missiles, but that did not cause it any damage, prompting the remaining elements of the organization to leave the bodies of the dead and carry the wounded to escape," according to the Iraqi report.

This is not surprising, since the A-10 can almost hover over a battlefield as it picks out targets for its 20-foot-long, 2.5 ton, seven-barrel Gatling gun that can fire 1,100 of those 30 mm shells. The titanium shell that wraps around the bottom of its cockpit makes it difficult to shoot down.

The U.S. sent the aircraft to the region in late November with the 163rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, a unit with the Indiana Air National Guard. The unit also provided close air support for air operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

On Jan. 15, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James pointed out that the A-10 had conducted 11% of all sorties against IS since August, despite the fact it was not deployed to the battlefield until November.

But it may be shot down soon by the budget-cutters. The Pentagon figures it can save $4.2 billion in operation and maintenance costs over five years by retiring all 283 of the Air Force's A-10s. It also believes the F-35, despite its unit cost and troubled development, can fill the need for close air-support need. Whether it can take the punishment the A-10 can is open to question.

SOURCE

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Poetic Social Justice: Minimum Wage Laws Hits San Francisco  business

In this iteration, the Daily Caller notes that a beloved San Francisco bookstore will have to close because minimum wage laws.

Back in November, residents of the city voted to increase the minimum wage gradually to $15 an hour over the course of three years. Though the wage hike was designed to help address income inequality, several businesses have already had to close. …

When it came time to break the news to his six employees, [Borderlands Books owner Alan] Beatts decided it was best to talk with each of them individually. He knew it would be tough because his employees love books, love the written word and to them, it was more than just a job.

“I spoke to each of my employees individually,” Beatts notes. “The typical reaction was shock and sadness.”

Michael Saltsman, the research director at the Employment Policies Institute, fears that more is to come as a result of the wage increase.

“We’re probably just seeing the beginning of this,” Saltsman told TheDCNF. “In a relatively short period of time it’s concerning we have a couple stories like these popup.”

“What we do know is San Francisco is an expensive place to do business,” Saltsman also noted. “It’s pretty clear that if this minimum wage didn’t go up, this business would still be open.”

Advocates of minimum wage laws argue that it is more humanitarian to force wage increases, but how humanitarian is it to cost someone their business or their job?  We should note that Borderlands closure is but one of several in San Francisco since the wage increase law passed.

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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Gallup: United States ‘More Liberal in Recent Years’

Buried below its rankings of the most conservative and liberal states, Gallup declared that “Americans have become slightly less conservative and more liberal in recent years.”

The polling group did hedge the judgment by also stating that state-by-state, the ideological bends have “generally remained quite stable.”

The declaration of America’s leftward lean has been a consistent theme in Gallup’s annual state-by-state surveys. In 2014, Gallup said the nation’s “Conservative advantage down from last year.”

Their 2013 judgment was nearly identical to this year’s:

“America has become a slightly more liberal and a slightly less conservative nation than it was in 2011 -- based on residents' self-reports of their ideology…”

Beyond the state-by-state trends, this survey seems to indicate that while President Obama might have fallen short of “fundamentally transforming” America, he has tilted the nation leftward, at the very least.

Gallup’s 2015 “State of the States” series revealed the list of the most conservative and liberal states in the country. Mississippi was named the most conservative, while Massachusetts was deemed the most liberal.

Gallup also determined the most “moderate” state in the U.S. was Delaware, due to the state’s high percentage of self-described moderates.

The comprehensive survey polled 177,034 adults in all 50 states and Washington, DC.

SOURCE

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Obama's Morally Confused Prayer Breakfast Lecture

By David Limbaugh

I find it very odd that a president notably lacking in humility and frequently riding his own high horse would lecture American Christians about those subjects -- because they presumably condemn acts of barbarism by Islamists.

Talk about a string of disconnects. While we're at it, let's note one more. Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast, also exhorted us to "uphold the distinction between our faith and our governments — between church and between state." Last time I checked, it was not Christians, unless you believe that Obama is a Christian, who were using government power to restrict religious liberties of others.

Obama, however, has conspicuously infringed on the conscience rights of Christians in supporting mandates that require religious organizations to pay for contraception and abortifacients.

Indeed, Obama was too busy lecturing Christians about "theocracies that restrict people's choice of faith" — though there are no Christian theocracies in the world — to note that many Muslim nations in the world are theocratic and under Shariah.

Is Obama's moral compass so skewed that he is utterly blind to the rampant theocratic oppression that routinely occurs in Muslim nations in the world? This takes moral equivalency to new levels.

But that wasn't even his worst moral distortion of the morning. On the heels of the Islamic State group's burning alive a captured Jordanian pilot, Obama's instinct was not to decry ISIS' depraved murder but to caution us not to judge the religion of Islam. Was anyone doing that, by the way?

As usual, Obama's first impulse to another atrocity committed in the name of Islam was to defend Islam — and attack Christianity and Christians, who Obama apparently believes are holding their noses in the air thinking they don't engage in such behavior in the name of their religion.

Foremost on his mind was to correct the record on Islam, kind of a pre-emptive defense of the religion he holds dear from his childhood, against any attempts to tar it based on thousands of "isolated" incidents. Here's where his moral equivalence reared its ugly head again.

He said, "We ... see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon." That was his predicate for chronicling the recent despicable actions of ISIS — an acronym, by the way, that, in his moral bewilderment, he refuses to utter — and then glibly transitioning into certain regrettable actions committed by or with the support of Christians in history.

Of course, he was compelled to invoke the Crusades, which in his view were unprovoked acts of aggression by Christians against Muslims but which in reality were far more complex than that. And of course, he had to mention the Inquisition, as if that is somehow relevant, even microscopically, to what's going on today.

But no blanket condemnation would be complete without Obama's obligatory and habitual denunciation of slavery and Jim Crow, only this time he cited them as examples not of America's evil past but of evils committed in the name of Christianity.

As long as we're talking about "wedges" and "weapons," it sure seems to me as if that's precisely how Obama continues to use slavery and Jim Crow. He just will not let these go. It obviously never occurs to him that Christianity was one of the main driving forces in eradicating slavery in this country. But we can hardly expect him to give us a fair reading of Christianity's role when he is on a mission to demonize it.

Obama is the one who needs to demonstrate a little humility and dismount his own elevated steed. He needs to put aside the pride that contributes to clouding his judgment about acts of terror committed by Islamists. He needs to recognize that it is nothing short of an act of moral cowardice to suggest that the multitudinous atrocities committed in the name of Islam today, whether or not they are representative of the true religion of Islam, bear any comparison to acts of Christians — today or in the past.

He needs to reset his own bias-riddled perception and open his willfully closed eyes to the fact that we have real enemies today who are killing us in the name of their religion and that, regardless of how representative they are of the faith that fuels their war cry, they see themselves as faith-driven and they are not going to be deterred or pacified by craven denunciations of Christianity or fervent defenses of Islam proper.

This is not about the Islamists' grievances over poverty or injustice or any of the other pet causes with which Obama can identify but about conquering the world for a global caliphate and subjugating or killing everyone who will not submit. There is no appeasing this mindset.

Americans are in greater danger now than we have been in decades because we have a leader who simply will not recognize that our allies and we are under attack around the world by untold numbers of people acting under the banner of Islam. No matter how many peaceful Muslims there are in the world, it doesn't change the fact that we're threatened by many who aren't.

If Obama spent one-tenth of the time focusing on these radical enemies as he does apologizing for the religion they claim to represent, Americans would be much safer.

SOURCE

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Lessons From an Unenduring Majority

A 2002 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” posited, as the title suggests, an “enduring Democratic majority” in the wake of “permanent changes” to America’s demography. Co-authored by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, the book’s central idea – the heart of the Emerging Democratic Majority (“EDM”) theory – was that the Democrat Party had amassed such a solid coalition of voters over the decades that the party could endure occasional bad election cycles and still retain control of the levers of government over the long haul. Recently revisiting his book, Judis noted it is, well, wrong. How times change.

Sadly for EDM – and every other Democrat-ideology theory forced into sustained contact with reality – the theory was flawed. It turns out – to paraphrase Mark Twain – news of the Republican Party’s death was greatly exaggerated. What hasn’t been exaggerated is the magnitude of just how far the authors' theory missed the mark. The theory wasn’t just wrong: It was exactly wrong – a feat extremely difficult even for Democrats to pull off. As Noah Rothman notes at Hot Air, the fatal flaw in EDM is, “Voters expected results from the party in which they had vested new authority.” After the better part of a decade getting none – or should we say the wrong results – voters learned to vote with their feet, walking out on Democrats at the polls.

The results of that reality check have been telling. Americans do not believe Democrats can provide economic security, let alone national security. The Democrat Party has become the party of racial, social and economic division, promoting class warfare as a primary means to gain political power, at the expense of all. It has accelerated national spending to a point of unfathomable debt, reincarnated the permanent welfare state, and turned public education into a 12-year babysitting service in which children simply bide time until they are turned out onto the streets of reality, lacking critical skills to become productive members of society.

In broad brushstrokes, in the wake of the contentious Barack Obama Era, Democrats have lost both the House and the Senate, lost control of 69 of 99 state-level legislative chambers, and lost countless officeholder seats. In short, the Democrat Party is in its worst position in 90 years. Americans no longer believe Democrats can deliver on any of their Pollyanna visions of the future.

Lest Republicans succumb to the same ruinous party-in-majority arrogance that (at least for the time being) wiped out the Democrats, we should warn that there’s a lesson here for every politician. The lesson is this: Ignoring or mistaking the will of the people can be hazardous to one’s political health.

Surveying the Democrat debris in the wake of the 2014 midterm Republican wave, the Chosen One commented, “To everyone that voted, I want you to know that I heard you.” The problem is that in his arrogance he didn’t hear. Immediately following his seemingly conciliatory statement, he punchlined, “To two-thirds of voters that chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too.” Sure, Barry: It wasn’t popular will, it was just all those eeevil Republicans holding “the people” back from the polls. Any wonder why Democrats went 0-for-2 in Obama’s midterm cycles?

Summarizing the myriad lessons-learned littering the landscape of Democrats' political destruction, we offer the same advice to Democrats as we do to Republicans: Take time to do the hard thinking to connect the dots between our nation’s core founding principles and today’s voters. The notion that a party can have an enduring majority without understanding the fundamental principles upon which America was founded is mistaken. The same is true for a party that ignores or misunderstands the will of America’s voters. Listen to the Founders. Then listen to the voters. That’s how to create an “enduring majority.” Anything else is just another political theory on the ash heap of history.

SOURCE

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There Is a Simple Formula for Unleashing Economic Prosperity

The age old question in economics is this: how does a nation or state create economic growth and rising living standards for its citizens? Once upon a time superstitious economists believed that growth was a function of the constellation of the stars.

That kind of belief in astrology as a predictor of growth was no more misguided than many of the fad economic theories that are peddled today by charlatan economists who preach more government interventionism.

President Obama takes a victory lap for the economic recovery of the last five years despite in being the slowest since the Great Depression. Median household incomes have collapsed by $1,500 in real terms during the Obama recovery. That’s some rebound. Obama’s stimulus plans have created fewer jobs than would have been created by doing nothing – and that is according to his own analysis.

In sum, confusion reigns on how to regenerate growth.

But there is a simple and time-tested formula for unleashing economic prosperity – here at home and abroad. This formula is not complicated. The Heritage Foundation’s 2015 Index of Economic Freedom – which ranks 186 nations – shows conclusively that growth is a byproduct of free enterprise policies and limited government interference.

Adjusted for purchasing power, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is more than 6 times higher in “free” vs. “repressed” economies. So for example, the per capita income is over $50,000 in a free nation like the United States. It is $11,610 in a repressed nation like Cuba. Israel has a per capita income of $34,770 versus $14,845 in Lebanon. Israel is far more economically free than Lebanon.

Take two nations that start at the same place economically. After two decades, the citizens in the nations with economic freedom will enjoy a standard of living one third greater than their counterparts in the less free zone. Poverty rates will also fall in the free nations much faster than the command and control economies. Health, education and environmental improvement are also closely tied to economic freedom. Free markets are the path to fairness. That’s a lesson even Pope Francis, a recent critic of capitalism, needs to learn.

Economic freedom isn’t hard to achieve: it means low taxes, free trade, limited government spending, a sound currency, the rule of law, and a light hand of regulation. Cronyism, which is too often regarded as a partner of capitalism, is exposed as a deterrent to growth. Russia is a nation not of free market capitalists, but of cronyism – and its economy has floundered. In other words, countries that grow reward citizens for how hard they work and what they know, not who they know.

The United States is ranked by Heritage as only the 12th economically freest nation in the world today, behind places like Hong Kong, Switzerland and even Canada. Only a decade ago, the U.S. consistently ranked in the top ten or higher of most free nations – but that all predated stimulus plans, bailouts, tax hikes on the rich, and Obamacare.

While many nations in the rest of the world tragically flirt with proven failed big government strategies and cheap money, the U.S. has an opportunity to win the global competition for jobs, businesses and capital investment. The low hanging fruit in Washington is to chop our highest in the world corporate income tax, reform our welfare system to reward work over handouts, approve free trade deals and drill for our domestic energy resources. That would be a good start to raising worker incomes and it may even move America, the Land of the Free, back into the economic freedom top 10 – where we belong.

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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