Does it bother anyone that the techniques ISIS is using come straight out of Joshua and the Israelites playbook?

I confess to having quite a bit of cognitive dissonance regarding the Islamic state in Iraq and the Levant. On the one hand I am appalled at the primitive violence and cruelty. On the other hand I feel a strong sense of recognition. I've read this story before. In the Old Testament. The story of ISIS is in fact quite similar to the Israelite invasion and conquest of Canaan. I'm serious so before you dismiss me as a Judeo Christian hating crank please consider the following:

Both conquests occur in the middle east and were effected by very patriarchal, tribal peoples who speak similar semetic languages and have many commonalities of dress, culture and tabu.

Both Israel and ISIS launched their genocidal invasions after sojourns in the dominant foreign culture of the era.  A culture that was far more powerful and cosmopolitan and they believed did not respect them.  After trying to fit in, they concluded that the foreigner's ways were not compatible with their faith which is why the Habiru of Egypt became Israelites and fled and why the many western educated leaders of ISIS came back home.

The Israelite invasion was directed and sponsored by YHWH.
ISIS claims that their invasion is sponsored by Allah who is otherwise called YHWH.

Israel was a theocracy led by politico military leaders who were also spiritual ones.
ISIS is a theocracy led by a Caliph who is both its spiritual and temporal leader.

The Israelites invaded Canaan to eliminate false religion and behavior abominated by God. 

ISIS claims it is doing likewise.

The Israelites were exhorted by God to slay every unbeliever, heretic and opponent. 

ISIS slays unbelievers heretics and those who oppose it in much the same way.

The Israelites imposed a complex and rigorous Levitical legal system designed by God.

Sharia is just such a system.

Both ISIS and Israel imposed very similar dietary, ablution, and sartorial restrictions on their subjects. Both repressed women in similar ways.

Both invasions actively sought to desecrate and destroy what they considered to be idolatrous monuments to false Gods.

At the end of the conquest of Canaan Israel had completely displaced the previous cultures and faiths with a new common culture and faith. This is also the typical expansion process of Islam: conquer, slaughter, make non Muslims subordinate and wait until they die out.

So what? you say. It's a bit different behaving like an ancient tribal culture 3000 years ago versus doing it today. And we can't really judge yesterday's actions by today's standards because we weren't there.  But God was there. He sits outside of space and time (he'd have to since he made them) and is not particular to any era or geography so when he chooses a method for settling his people on a piece of real estate I must presume that was exactly what he wanted to do.

And that is precisely what ISIS is doing. Which is unsurprising when you remember that Mohammed lifted much of the Koran from the Old Testament.  Which is why Jihad looks so much like the Israelite invasion of Canaan. But coincidence and 3000 years don't really get us off the hook because the Church routinely presents Moses and Joshua in heroic terms.  If it turns out that "doing God's will God's way" is indistinguishable from the practices of the latest crazed sack of Jihadi Joes then it really calls into question just who this God that we spend so much time worshiping really is - is he "love" or not?  Because say what you will, there was NO mercy in the conquest of Canaan.  Scholars now estimate up to a million people lost their lives (this at a time when world population couldn't have been more than 150 to 200 million) due to the Israelite invasion and whole cultures were obliterated.  Much like the Yazidis or Assyrian Christians in Iraq and Syria today.

This reminds me of another related question that I have:  Given that God sits outside of time and space and has access to literally all the various modes and eras of governance and jurisprudence why does Our Lord's approach to salvation and judgement mirror that of primitive pastoral tribesmen from 1000BC Palestine?  For example, instead of sponsoring genocide which is now being imitated slavishly by ISIS couldn't God have simply persuaded the Canaanites to move on or perhaps swap places with the Israelites in Egypt? Why the need for a million murders? Or why didn't he phase the move in over fifty or a hundred years - no more than a blink of the eye in his timescale?  Why the rush and all the blood?  Perhaps God needed to do it that way so that the ultra violent people of that era would sit up and take notice.  Perhaps.  

Democrats risk their career if they contradict "The One"

The One is called The One for One reason and One reason only:  he's the only One that matters, the only One who gets to call the shots.  The One is less a chief magistrate than a Sun King.  Yeah, that's the one this One is.  And for a member of his party to question The One's judgement in one helluva dangerous thing to do one-wise.

As this Congresswoman from Hawaii is finding out.

Chicago begins circling the drsin.

Still pretty far away - to the unaware I just feels like a slight tidal tug but the windy city is going nowhere fast. Except closer and closer to an almost inevitable date with bankruptcy. Of course the same could be said for Illinois. And New York and California and New Jersey and Massachusetts and Maryland and Rhode Island. And all the moderate emergency Republican governors alive can't change that.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Chicago drew closer to a fiscal free fall on Friday with a rating downgrade from Moody's Investors Service that could trigger the immediate termination of four interest-rate swap agreements, costing the city about $58 million and raising the prospect of more broken swaps contracts.

The downgrade to Baa2, just two steps above junk, and a warning the rating could fall further still, means the third-biggest U.S. city could face even higher costs in the future if banks choose to terminate other interest-rate hedges against fluctuations in interest rates. All told, Chicago holds swaps contracts covering $2.67 billion in debt, according to a disclosure late last year.

"This is an unfortunate wake-up call for anyone still asleep over the fiscal cliff facing the city of Chicago," said Laurence Msall, president of the Chicago-based government finance watchdog, The Civic Federation.

Chicago's finances are already sagging under an unfunded pension liability Moody's has pegged at $32 billion and that is equal to eight times the city's operating revenue. The city has a $300 million structural deficit in its $3.53 billion operating budget and is required by an Illinois law to boost the 2016 contribution to its police and fire pension funds by $550 million.

Cost-saving reforms for the city's other two pension funds, which face insolvency in a matter of years, are being challenged in court by labor unions and retirees.

State funding due Chicago would drop by $210 million between July 1 and the end of 2016 under a plan proposed by Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner

I guess blue is the new color if bankruptcy.

If a clearly non English speaking unarmed man walks towards you and several other armed policeman and fails to stop, what do you do?

If you're a brave Grapevine, TX policeman you shoot him down in cold blood.  There was no scenario where the policemen were in any danger from this otherwise law abiding illegal immigrant.  It was simply an act of cowardice and cold blooded murder.  Police do this too oftenin this country and then try to tell us how hard and dangerous their jobs are.  Not nearly as hard as being a hard working man with no record who is scared of the cops and did not understand your command to stop.....why wouldn't he be scared of the cops.  I'm scared of them.  They can kill anyone and get away with it by calling it 'self defense'.  They can steal your car and all the valuables on you and call it "asset forfeiture".  They can charge you with any one of hundreds of crimes, some you may not realize existed. We have stacked the deck in law enforcement's favor way too much and it's leading them to get lazy and arrogant. 60 million Americans have been felonized and these people are out of control.

Following the lead of our President Democrats increasingly applaud our enemies and boycott are allies

Alan Dershowitz Quote: From his WSJ article “The Appalling Talk of Boycotting Netanyahu“:

One should walk out on tyrants, bigots and radical extremists, as the United States did when Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied the Holocaust and called for Israel’s destruction at the United Nations. To use such an extreme tactic against our closest ally, and the Middle East’s only vibrant democracy, is not only to insult Israel’s prime minister but to put Israel in a category in which it does not belong

I'm not sure I am with you always (Mt 28:29) means what everyone thinks it does.

For example, according to theologian RC Sproul the damned will writhe in agony because they will be in the neverending presence of the righteous God. It goes without saying that God is self centered but imagine the solopsism required to sit and watch the eternal howls of anguish of billions when just getting up and going into the next room would stop it all.

If this is the "perfect, merciful Jesus" then don't ask Him to help you lest he slaughter your sons, rape your daughters and flay your wife.

So once again: why did the infinite God who sits outside of time and space select the morality of the ancient equivalent of ISIS to build his kingdom on?

I mean if he's love and all.

Imagine a road network where bikes, semis and Porsches all pay the same price to go the same speed. Now you understand Net Neutrality.

Only it's worse: Mr. Porsche would gladly pay more to go 80 as he does on some Texas tollways but Ms. Bike's top speed is 20 so that's the top speed. And Mr. Semi would happily restrict his driving to low traffic times for a lower road use fee but that w
ould be showing him favoritism.

Net neutrality pretends that all Internet traffic has the same value and urgency. The reality is that there is an ever expanding range of uses for the net each with its own unique value, timeliness and quality profile. Barack Obama has just announced that creepy lawyers like him will decide which uses are more valuable or timely or need more quality.

Pure stupidity paired with left fascist greed.  More discussion here.

Check out how Hillary Clinton Arab funders live: plush 747-8

It's good to be the rich and morally unassailable consort of Bill Clinton. Imagine how the mainstream press will grovel for a ride in this baby. Shill boys shill!

Obamacare, Keystone, Net Neutrality this President routinely defies people to reward his financial backers

Fully 61 percent of voters polled opposed the president's regulation of the internet. More than twice as many as supported it. Being Barack Obama means not needing to give a damn about what the people think.

Quite progressive and technocratic don't you think?

Fortunately witch hunts by fascist thugs in the minority don't get anywhere.

But this truly unAmerican Grijalva character could be in the majority some day.  A copy of his vicious letter to he President of MIT.

"Are you or have you ever been a climate denier?"

Hillary Clinton does too have something to say: My turn! 'Cause I'm a girl!

As she beats her spoon on her luxury high chair. The good Atlantic reports here.

La Clinton's Achilles heel(s): lack of concrete achievements and foreign payola

Carly Fiorina hits her hard here.

What has Hillary Clinton actually accomplished? She’s held many titles — first lady, senator, secretary of state — but what has she actually accomplished in any of those roles?

That’s what former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, a prospective 2016 presidential candidate, wants to know.
“Mrs. Clinton, name an accomplishment,” Fiorina said while addressing attendees at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

Fiorina, who is considered a long-shot for the Republican nomination, has tried to break out from pack in early speeches by projecting the image of a strong and accomplished woman who can take the fight to Hillary Clinton.

“And in the meantime, please explain why we should accept that the millions and millions of dollars that have flowed into the Clinton Global Initiative from foreign governments doesn’t represent a conflict of interest,” she added.

Fiorina was referring to the recent revelations that the Clinton Foundation accepted millions in donations from foreign governments, including while Hillary was the secretary of state.
Fiorina then turned her attention toward Clinton’s own role in the supposed war on women.

“She tweets about women’s rights in this country and takes money from governments that deny women the most basic human rights,” Fiorina said. “She tweets about equal pay for women but won’t answer basic questions about her own offices’ pay standards — and neither will our president.”

Earlier this week, a report in the Washington Free Beacon revealed that while Clinton was a senator, the median earnings for women in her office was 72 cents to the dollar for men’s median earnings.

How can Hillary be President when Bill shills for foreign potentates?

How can slick Willie take tens of millions  from foreign potentates and then advise  Hillary in the White House? My God what a joke Democrats are making themselves if they nominate Nannie Hoo Hoo.

Obama banning AR 15 Ammo

This is what is called accentuating the differences.  In essence, the Obami are banning pro gun Democrats. Period.  Full stop.  End of statement.

As promised, President Obama is using executive actions to impose gun control on the nation, targeting the top-selling rifle in the country, the AR-15 style semi-automatic, with a ban on one of the most-used AR bullets by sportsmen and target shooters.

They've almost banned Democrat men. At least the heterosexual ones.  Which will be very, very cool.

The problem with Islam isn't just with Islamists, it's with Islam's technique for expansion.

Islam has always expanded through the one two punch of conquest and dhimmitude using radicalized religious revivalists like ISIS as its shock troops. All three are now unacceptable.

What happened to the rare earth crisis?

The same thing that happened to peak oil. Next question. Boffin confusion detailed here.

The shape of Republican campaign coverage to come?

If our "brilliant ivy league" press has anything to say about it.

seasoned Washington reporter — distinct in his fashionable black jacket, pressed jeans and once shiny dress shoes now caked with New Hampshire mud — approaches a woman who clutches a Sharpie and a copy of Rubio’s last book.

“Excuse me, do you mind if I ask what you thought of the senator’s speech?”

Woman: “I thought it was great. I liked how he related to average people, you know? I don’t hear a lot of candidates talking about how to make it easier for low-income families to succeed in America.”

Reporter: “It didn’t bother you that his second cousin once removed said Tom Brady wears ladies underwear?

Woman: “Who said that?”

Reporter: “Rubio’s second cousin once removed. He said it at a Miami fund-raiser three weeks ago. Thus far, Rubio has failed to disown his cousin, denounce the comment, or apologize to Tom Brady for it.

For the record: Tom Brady does wear ladies underwear.

If all Barack Obama proposals are made law it will add $5.06 an hour in mandated costs to employment which is a disaster if you make $7.25

If you make $50 an hour - not so much. The "here's some cake, don't worry somebody else is picking up the tab" is no longer working. It would be nice if the administration understood labor economics. But the real fear is they do  but don't care. Dependent and frightened is Dem's best voter profile.

We see the same factors at work today in the left’s repeated attempt to offer government largesse or regulatory requirements to pay for the things American workers now view as out of reach. Rather than wrestling with the question of child care in the era of the two-income household and the importance of upbringing, we see demands for national child-care and pre-kindergarten programs to fill the gap. Rather than questioning whether everyone really needs a four-year college education, progressives want to embark on a massive debt-forgiveness program, pouring taxpayer dollars into the heavily insulated halls of higher ed. Concerned about your birth control? Don’t worry, we’ll make your employer cover it. Here is a cake for you to have, and to eat, and someone you don’t know somewhere else will pay for it, eventually.

But there is no “someone else.” The progressive approach—to which everyone has effectively assented—merely disguises the problems of wage stagnation, redirecting those funds toward health care, housing, energy, education, and more, to the detriment of take-home pay. And all the while, liberals have ignored and continue to ignore the possibility that the increase of regulations, incentives, and mandates would have any trade-offs.

That includes the president. In his State of the Union, he proudly announced that “Since 2010, America has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan, and all advanced economies combined.” But in the next breath, Obama insisted on more mandated benefits. “Today, we’re the only advanced country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers,” he said. “Send me a bill that gives every worker in America the opportunity to earn seven days of paid sick leave. It’s the right thing to do.” It also costs money. Investors Business Daily’s Jed Graham calculates that seven days of mandated paid leave would add 30 cents per hour in compensation costs, bringing Obama’s six-year total to $5.06 had all his proposals been made law. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry has observed, the reason America has done better over the past five years might have more than a little to do with the fact that our private sector is far less encumbered by mandates and regulations than those of all other advanced economies. If we adopt their policies to a greater degree than we already have, we can add their economic stagnation to our income stagnation.

Perhaps the best statement of ISIS' confidence ever enunciated

The ISIS chaps know that they could never beat Texas in a war to the death much less a united West. They are counting on our leaders' sustained self delusion to carry them to victory. In that they assume that the United States will always be led by a Barack Obama or at worst a George W Bush who always, always shrink from the hard blows. But they should peruse photographs of  Germany or Japan circa 1945 before they go much farther. The Islamic state does not pose an existential threat to the Anglosphere. Should it at some point do so by say getting a few nukes and setting one off somewhere then I think the panoramic view of Hiroshima ca October 1945 would be an accurate rendering of any town harboring ISIS gunmen. Here's a quote from the Atlantic article: What ISIS really wants.

But the most interesting comments concerned my story’s popularity among ISIS supporters (referred to below with the shorthand "Muslims"). I was unsurprised to see it shared online by Islamic State fans, at least somewhat positively, but of course I was still uncomfortable about being praised by avowed génocidaires. One ISIS supporter wrote to me to note the peculiarity in all this. The piece, he said,

is grounded in realism, and argues that not understanding what is happening is very dangerous, especially if fighting a war, one must fight the war that is real, not the invented one that one wishes to fight. Perhaps ironically, your [writings] ... are most dangerous to the Muslims (not that it is necessarily meant to be so on your behalf), yet they are celebrated by Muslims who see them as pieces that speak the truth that so many try to deny, but also because [Muslims] know that deep down the idealists of the world will still ignore them.

What stands out to me that others don't seem to discuss much, is how the Islamic State, Osama [bin Laden] and others are operating as if they are reading from a script that was written 1,400 years ago. They not only follow these prophecies, but plan ahead based upon them. One would therefore assume that the enemies of Islam would note this and prepare adequately, but [it’s] almost as if they feel that playing along would mean that they believe in the prophecies too, and so they ignore them and go about things their own way. ... [The] enemies of the Muslims may be aware of what the Muslims are planning, but it won't benefit them at all as they prefer to either keep their heads in the sand, or to fight their imaginary war based upon rational freedom-loving democrats vs. irrational evil terrorist madmen. With this in mind, maybe you can understand to some degree one of the reasons why many Muslims will share your piece. It’s not because we don't understand what it is saying in terms of how to defeat the Muslims, rather it’s because we know that those in charge will ignore it and screw things up anyway.

Obama pays off his cronies and vetos Canada's Keystone for good

Most of the world cheered the One when he came to office not realizing that one characterized as The One would only have one priority and that one priority would of course be: pleasing The One.

Which turns out to be a lot more golf for him and a lot less prosperity and security for the rest of us. 

And they say modern left liberalism is a "mature" political philosophy. Mature as in an 82 year old ratchet jawed NIMBY with a fat investment portfolio and a 32 handicap....

Modern moral arbiters: Please help me here lest I sin

What am I supposed to think?

WAIT, I THOUGHT IT WASN’T A CHOICE: ‘I’m gay. And I want my kid to be gay too’: Lesbian CNN pundit admits she does not want her daughter, 6, to be straight and is ‘disappointed’ that she is already ‘boy crazy.’

Imagine if she wants to be a conservative...

Welcome to one party America.

Chicago is where the Obami learned how to trample the constitution. Thank God the nation's press are on the job.....oh wait: this is from an English paper.

POLICING IN OBAMA’S AMERICA, AND OBAMA’S HOMETOWN: The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site.’ This kind of thing is what happens under unaccountable one-party regimes.

HAT TIP Instapundit.com

If Barack Obama loves America then why so many close America hating friends?

Would you describe a man who shouted "God damn America" to his 1000 person congregation in a sermon as your "spiritual mentor"? If you had political aspirations? Well you would if you were Barack Obama and were campaigning for liberal votes.

If I called for God to damn negroes would anyone doubt that I hated them? And would any of you call me your mentor if I did? If I asked God to damn Africa?

Anyone who simply looks at the factual evidence as to whether Obama loves America, or does not, will find remarkably little to suggest love and a large amount of evidence, over a long period of years, showing his constant close association with people fiercely hostile to this country. Jeremiah Wright was just one in a long series of such people.

Liberals can pretend that their contempt for America "as is" is "patriotic" but do you really love anyone if you only are proud of them when they do what you want? That smacks of the love for a mule, not a person or a nation. Of course the left is wont to look at people merely as racial subcategories or means of production so perhaps it makes sense to their reductionist view of humanity. For if people have no souls what is there left to love?

Our drug laws have turned the police from our best friend into our worst enemies

I could post one of these every day and still miss most of them. When did we vote to allow police to become home invading thieves? Evil creeps like Bill Bennett defend this official government behavior. And people wonder why more and more conservatives just hate the government full stop.

Thomas Williams, a 72-year-old, retired carpenter and cancer patient who is disabled and carries a medical marijuana card, was alone that November morning in 2013 when police raided his rural Michigan home, wearing black masks, camouflage and holding guns at their sides. They broke down his front door with a battering ram, handcuffed him and left him on the living room floor as they ransacked his home, emptying drawers, rummaging through closets and surveying his grow room, where he was nourishing his 12 personal marijuana plants as allowed by law.

They did not charge Williams with a crime, though. Instead, they took his Dodge Journey, $11,000 in cash from his home, his television, his cell phone, his shotgun and are attempting to take his home. And they plan to keep the proceeds, auctioning off the property and putting the cash in police coffers.
According to his lawyer: “Mr. Williams is disabled and lives alone. They took the man’s cell phone and his car, and left him out there alone. He doesn’t have a landline. He was stranded out there for three days until somebody stopped by."

I would be embarrassed to wear a badge. That most police aren't is frightening.

If you want to read a justification for one of the most profound instances of political corruption in our history then this Goolsbee and Kreuger article is for you.

As an alumnus of the U of C it pains me that such a political shill as Goolsbee is on the faculty.  View the whole shameful act of prostitution here. The filthy things some will do for the praise of autocrats.

In its shredding of bankruptcy law, its overt threatening of secured creditors until they relinquished their legal rights and in the diversion of almost the entire bailout to its union cronies this criminal act will go down as the largest single instance of extralegal political corruption in history.

Of course that excludes the wholesale bailout of bank investors and managements and the massive in kind bribes that Dodd-Frank, Obamacare and the pending reregulation of telecoms represent.

And that excludes the entire criminal enterprise called "higher education". But who's counting?

"A sad example of unreasoned decision making"

There was a time when Democrats freed markets from crony rigging leading to rapidly falling prices and improved service. But Barack Obama is no Jimmy Carter.

No, Barack Obama in his reregulation of telecom (for all telecoms are the internet) is imitating his "hero" FDR. An imitation that in its massive and inept manipulations of the finance, healthcare, education and now telecom sectors has stunted economic growth and crushed innovation almost as much as the "Great Depressionater" did.

But happy days are certainly here again. If you're a member of the DC Bar, that is. But as Tallyrand might have said had he watched such thimblerigging: "it's not just a crime, it's a blunder".

America's parasite class has apparently forgotten the first rule of good ticking: never suck so much blood that you weaken the host. Of course it's the rest of us who will pay. Obama, our new Jesus, is on his way to at least a $200 million fortune if the Clintons' grasping greed is any indication. But Democrats with lots of political power almost always end up plutocrats. After all, they have no moral objection to using government to better people's lives. And they're people aren't they? Well? Aren't they?

If you strike me down I shall return stronger

The sheer hysteria of entitled government apparatchiks and favored racial groupings towards measures that most people consider common sense drives middle America rightward. Which is Scott Walker's genius.  I think it's a great strategy for a right populist: instead of giving stuff to middle America, take away entitlements and privileges given to state favored groips. Watch as they go hysterical and drive normal, reasonable America deeper into your corner. The left, government employees and minorities have become so self righteous about their ridiculous privileges they would almost be guaranteed to overreact.

I'd like to see him go after Amnesty and open immigration. If he did, the left and immigrant groups would respond with rioting and violence and middle America (including the kids and grand kids of immigrants) would respond by closing ranks and immigration would be restricted for a generation. Which ironically would go a long way towards achieving left wing goals. The 1960s - the great period of  income equality and expansion of minority rights came after a generation of very limited  immigration - people at the bottom faced far less wage competition and felt less threatened so the minority poor could agitate with less blowback from an unthreatened working majority.

But of course we all know that the the left isn't interested in the "little brown babies" - if it did it would oppose the clearly genocidal abortion regime. It simply wants as many automatic victims as possible. And for that any poor minority immigrant will do.

The DC Bar's takeover of the Internet is deeply and profoundly discouraging.

Turning our most dynamic sector into a public utility rigged by legal fixers is sadly characteristic of this administration. They leave no national crown jewel unsullied.

The Supreme Court has ruled that if the FCC applies Title II to the Internet, all uses of telecommunications will have to pass the “just and reasonable” test. Bureaucrats can review the fairness of Google ’s search results, Facebook ’s news feeds and news sites’ links to one another and to advertisers. BlackBerry is already lobbying the FCC to force Apple and Netflix to offer apps for BlackBerry’s unpopular phones. Bureaucrats will oversee peering, content-delivery networks and other parts of the interconnected network that enables everything from Netflix and YouTube to security drones and online surgery.

Supporters of Obamanet describe it as a counter to the broadband duopoly of cable and telecom companies. In reality, it gives duopolists another tool to block competition. Utility regulations let dominant companies complain that innovations from upstarts fail the “just and reasonable” test—as truly disruptive innovations often do.

AT&T has decades of experience leveraging FCC regulations to stop competition. Last week AT&T announced a high-speed broadband plan that charges an extra $29 a month to people who don’t want to be tracked for online advertising. New competitor Google Fiber can offer low-cost broadband only because it also earns revenues from online advertising. In other words, AT&T has already built a case against Google Fiber that Google’s cross-subsidization from advertising is not “just and reasonable.”

Utility regulation was designed to maintain the status quo, and it succeeds. This is why the railroads, Ma Bell and the local water monopoly were never known for innovation. The Internet was different because its technologies, business models and creativity were permissionless.

My God my God why have you forsaken us?

Paralyzed by Ukraine, dumbfounded by Russia.

Our foreign policy establishment has been unmanned by Islamic Extremism and a resurgent Russia. Of course history is full of Islamist extremism and expansionist Russians. The new normal is the old normal. It's a pity our over educated establishment can't adapt. I think we need a new establishment.

The student debt crisis is first and foremost a consumer protection issue

According to the New York Fed college debt and delinquencies are reaching crisis levels.

Commenters uniformly opine on the "student debt crisis" but the crisis really isn't caused by students taking on too much debt as it is by colleges conning too many barely of age kids into buying more years of "education" that won't pay off and then quadrupling the real cost of that education while delivering the same product.

We have a consumer protection issue: so called "not for profits" have misled students and profiteered off of their naive desire to better themselves. And because they are NFPs they are getting a pass from the press and the government. They even have ginned up their own economic theory "Baumol's Cost Disease" to justify why college (along with K-12) - alone among all information services - is experiencing  rapid inflation while all other information services experience rapid deflation.

We need to break the college cartel's back by reversing the current administration's policy of ever greater subsidies promoting more and more useless college attendance. Before they rape everyone's kids.

The only way Angela Merkel can be the leader of the 'free world' is if the American President abdicates that role

Germany has one fourth the population, one fifth the economy and a maximum of one tenth of the military power.  For Macleans to assert this and get a respectful hearing means Barack Obama either through incompetence or willful intent has abdicated one of the two key roles that he was elected to fulfill:  leading the United States requires that you lead the free world.  Everyone understands that. 

His failure to do so while playing more rounds of golf than any President in history may explain why many people consider him to be unpatriotic or un-American.

The one way tabu - lefties can call righties unpatriotic but not the converse

Mostly because everyone knows that conservatives aren't while no one is quite sure whose side the lefties are on (other than their own of course). Which is why they shriek so loudly: they fear it could be true.

“Democrats are free to impugn their opponents’ decency and patriotism while Republicans never are allowed to do so. . . . The reason why the taboo against criticizing the love of country applies only to Democrats is because the question cuts too close to home for them, and they control the media enforcers of the taboo.”

How lawyers are turning nursing homes into prisons.

The state and its credentialed henchmen poison everything they touch. Even retirement homes where you are imprisoned and regimented for your own good by the edict of state lawyers and the threats of trial lawyers.

The Eden Alternative's CEO, Christopher Perna, told me in a phone interview, "It's almost militaristic, the way many nursing homes are run, where the administration is the top dog. They make all the decisions and the staff basically do as they're told." He adds, "it's very easy to settle into a series of institutional practices that keep you within boundaries that are defined by the government. It can lead to a very sterile, very lifeless environment."

This hierarchal approach to elder care developed out of nursing home operators' fears that their businesses could be vulnerable to government sanctions for failing to comply with broadly written regulations. Everything from requirements to confine certain residents to wheelchairs in order to mitigate the risk of a fall, to strict rules on food content and preparation are covered in the Medicare and Medicaid Program Conditions of Participation, which run almost a thousand pages. But as Marshall Kapp noted in a 2012 article in The Atlantic, "sometimes...the biggest barrier to culture change in nursing homes is not the actual wording of the regulations but rather the often inconsistent, incoherent, and uninformed way that the regulations are interpreted and enforced by government employees who regularly survey facilities and cite them for perceived noncompliance."

Kapp adds, "requirements that beds must be placed only within certain spaces in a resident's room make it impossible for residents to rearrange their furniture as they wish. Regulatory prohibitions on open kitchens prevent residents from fixing snacks whenever they wish. If we are serious about making nursing homes more comfortable and homelike, a review of existing regulations and amendment or removal of those regulations that impede culture change must be put into place."

Here's hoping all my smug leftist friends get sent to a retirement home that is an HHS award winner. Naw. I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy.  Of course my lefty friends would do it to me and would even insist that they were doing me a favor. Such is the advanced state of dementia among the baby boom left.

Clarence Thomas is a gosh darn racist...

..for wanting a society that refuses to consider race. Clearly a dangerous man to any right thinking corporatist. After all we all know that "group rights are the only rights". Everyone knows that. Right?

Americans hate the news media, because they correctly see it as biased, corrupt and lazy. So Republicans shouldn’t be afraid to fight back aggressively.

Oh yes indeedy. Here are some great ways to punch back twice as hard.

I sure hope they all have tenure....

Steven Hayward notices a major study in a top journal debunking the "dying oceans" hysteria sweeping the planet. To say that this is a risky thing for academic scientists to do is an understatement. The Gaians are not mocked with the truth. So how do you know what you know?

But to my amazement, there’s a broad study out in the latest issue of BioScience, a premier journal in the Oxford University family, written by eight scientists from universities on several continents, that bravely takes issue with the conventional wisdom. “Reconsidering Ocean Calamities” argues that there is an “absence of robust evidence” for many of the most common claims about ocean perils. Even though the article is written in the usual dry and technical language of scientific journal articles, it is not hard to make out that the authors think a lot of the popular claims, such as ocean acidification, are exaggerated or badly overestimated. It takes direct aim at some of the leading catastrophist journal articles:

However, an analysis of some of the calamities reported in doom and gloom media accounts (e.g., table 1) shows some—at times, severe—disconnect with actual observations. For instance, there is no evidence that ocean acidification has killed jellyfish predators, nor that jellyfish are taking over the ocean, and predictions that the killer algae, Caulerpa taxifolia, was going to devastate the Mediterranean ecosystem have not been realized, despite claims to the contrary from the media (table 1). It may be, therefore, that some of the calamities composing the syndrome of collapse of coastal ecosystems may not be as severe as is portrayed in some accounts. . .

[W]e contend that the marine research community may not have remained sufficiently skeptical in sending and receiving information on the problems caused by human pressures in the ocean and that there is a need to revisit the process by which potential or isolated problems escalate to the status of ocean calamities. . .

The authors walk through a number of purported ocean calamities, debunking or qualifying them one by one. Of special note is their argument about ocean acidification from CO2:

[T]here have been a few claims for already realized impacts of ocean acidification on calcifiers, such as a decline in the number of oysters on the West Coast of North America (Barton et al. 2012) and in Chesapeake Bay (Waldbusser et al. 2011). However, the link between these declines and ocean acidification through anthropogenic CO2 is unclear. Corrosive waters affecting oysters in hatcheries along the Oregon coast were associated with upwelling (Barton et al. 2012), not anthropogenic CO2. The decline in pH affecting oysters in Chesapeake Bay (Waldbusser et al. 2011) was not attributable to anthropogenic CO2 but was likely attributable to excess respiration associated with eutrophication. Therefore, there is, as yet, no robust evidence for realized severe disruptions of marine socioecological links from ocean acidification to anthropogenic CO2, and there are significant uncertainties regarding the level of pH change that would prompt such impacts.

Ditto for coral bleaching:

[D]espite the strong mechanistic or physiological basis for a role of warming in coral bleaching and coral growth, a robust demonstration of a direct causal link between global warming and global coral bleaching over decadal time scales has not yet been produced.

They don’t hold back with their closing arguments:

[O]nce hypothetical problems have risen to the status of calamities in the literature, they seem to become self-perpetuating. Indeed, the marine research community seems much better endowed with the capacity to add new calamities to the list than they are to remove them following critical scrutiny. As an example, the newest calamity extends the problem of the expansion of coastal hypoxia to a concept of global ocean deoxygenation (Keeling et al. 2010). The possible explanation that the list of calamities only experiences growth because all calamities are real is inconsistent with the examples provided above that some of them may not withstand close scrutiny. The alternative explanation is that there are flaws in the processes in place to sanction scientific evidence, such as organized skepticism, that need to be addressed to help weed out robust from weak cases for ocean calamities. . .

The rise of ocean calamities has generated a worldview in which a host of ecological syndromes resulting from human-driven pressures is leading to the collapse of the ocean. The addition of new problems, such as new invasive species, ocean acidification and deoxygenation, or the perils from plastic pollution, to the litany validates and strengthens this worldview, forming a more compelling case for action to reduce human pressures. Although reducing human pressures on the marine environment is a positive outcome, this may provide a motivation to inadvertently—or, in worst cases, deliberately—fall into the white hat bias, defined as “bias leading to distortion of information in the service of what may be perceived to be righteous ends” (Cope and Allison 2009, p. 84). Clearly, no righteous end justifies the perpetuation of scientific bias. . .

Most important, we should remain skeptical and, in exerting organized skepticism, will ensure a depiction of global ocean problems devoid of unsupported claims and statements, which will help organize management and policy options targeting the most pressing problems to limit the deterioration and to provide effective stewardship of the oceans

Whores for Hillary.

The shilling, in the tank establishment press who never saw a smear of a Republican it didn't magnify is wetting it's dainties over Rudy Guliani's accurate  characterization of our First Anti-American.

He’s now back to using schoolyard epithets against one possible GOP successor in the White House. Or as Mark Steyn writes in “O Beautiful, For Specious Guys…”

The US media have had a fit of the vapors over Rudy Giuliani’s suggestion that Barack Obama does not love America. As the Instapundit says, their reaction suggests that Giuliani hit a nerve. For my own part, I am way beyond that. By the way, I’m growing rather weary of the cheap comparisons of Obama with Neville Chamberlain. The British Prime Minister got the biggest issue of the day wrong. But no one ever doubted that he loved his country. That’s why, after his eviction from Downing Street, Churchill kept him on in his ministry as Lord President of the Council, and indeed made Chamberlain part of the five-man war cabinet and had him chair it during his frequent absences. When he died of cancer in October 1940, Churchill wept over his coffin.

So please don’t insult Neville Chamberlain by comparing him to Obama. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracies are generally a comforting illusion: the real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current “leader of the free world” is this: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?

That’s a question that everyone in the MSM should be asked.

After watching the brain of Dana Milbank of the Washington Post similarly explode like a character in Scanners, Jazz Shaw of Hot Air writes, “Milbank should at least be honest enough to wear a ‘Ready for Hillary’ t-shirt when he goes to work every day if this is how the upcoming election analysis is going to be handled.”

I for one admire the Great Obaminator. When I am President I hope I have in me the courage to smear the things that I despise.

Great Lakes likely to have the most ice coverage since records began

Of course records don't go back very far. Which is a problem for predicting climate change.  More here.

One of the reasons you should almost never cooperate with the police is because they might force you to testify against someone who has committed a victimless or deminimis crime.

Which could put you in the position of aiding in the unjust punishment of someone. Legal penalties today are so disproportionate that unless there is real physical violence involved people who "cooperate" are at risk of doing much greater harm than they prevent.

So save yourself some grief. Just don't talk to them.

Charles Grassley is a Republican senator who lacks decency and mercy

He's a hard core drug warrior. One of the people who created the vicious and iniquitous Federal reign of terror called the drug war. In today's installment of "Dr. Evil Goes to Washington" he's fighting  some very modest sentencing reform sponsired by Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

It's a pity we can't lock this hateful old man up for life. He certainly doesn't make Iowa voters look good at all.

Innocent men are being imprisoned for failure to.pay child support for children they didn't sire.

Another example of how our legal system has been perverted to support leftist ideologies. In this case it's the notion that "all men are rapists and guilty" so making any of them pay regardless of paternity is "cosmic justice". But men who have money and connections don't experience this. It's usually poor men of color. The same people who are always crushed by our objectively evil criminal "justice" system.

Conservatives have a blind spot here. And it's a doozy.

All I can say is that I am Shocked, shocked that restrictions on competitive entry into an industry don't result in lower prices or higher quality - didn't see that coming.

The foundation of Progressivism is the assertion that up is down and left is right because we care so much.  The left's inability to coerce better performance and behavior is well established.  The question is when will the people wake up ?

SHOCKER: Study: Occupational Licensing Raises Prices, But Not Service Quality. “A new study claims that occupational licensing laws contribute to unemployment and raise prices for consumers without measurably enhancing quality of service.”

Hattip Instapundit.com

Cherchez la femme

I like women, I confess I do

And women like me - well at least two

Other than mother and my daughter, that is

although neither one knows it just yet

But the problem with women (or the problem with me)

Is that women and I seem to disagree

About life and sex and money too, 

not to mention all the things that I do.

But I can't stay away from them oh no!

They attract and beguile me so.

Luring me with their dulcet voices 

into remarkably stupid choices

So if you see me standing in the rain

looking more than a bit insane.

Just know that there's a woman at bottom,

an unwitting temptress that doesn't know I got 'em.

Cherchez la femme, cherchez la femme I think I'm going mad

Consider the woman, consider her close because I've got it bad

I can't stand to be with 'em and and I cannot do without

Consider the woman and the wallop she packs upon a tender heart.

The French understand women oh yes they do

because the French are so wise wait:  is that true?

Well anyway they understand that I cannot resist

that strange and terrifying deformation that the female form inflicts

Cherchez la femme, cherchez la femme I think I'm going mad,

consider the woman, consider her close because I've got it bad

I can't bear to be with 'em and and certainly can't do withoutk

consider the woman and the wallop she packs upon my tender heart.

I try to warn my daughter about her secret power

but when I do she just laughs at me and says I'm being dour.

For my daughter is a foremost member of the fearsome breed

that considers men tasty morsels upon which they can feed.

What is it with women that makes them act so cruel?

Why do they so enjoy making me to play the fool?

I do not know, I cannot say

all I know is that I can't keep away.

Cherchez la femme, cherchez la femme I think I'm going mad,

consider the woman, consider her close because I've got it bad.

I can't bear to be with 'em and and certainly can't do without,

consider the woman and the wallop she packs upon my broken heart.

I would call the FBI a "Monumental Constitutional Threat".

Heck, given what I've learned about our fearsome public 'servants',  I'd call Federal Law Enforcement in general a monumental constitutional threat full stop. Hattip Instapundit.

SPYING: Google Calls FBI’s Plan to Expand Hacking Power a ‘Monumental’ Constitutional Threat: Any change in accessing computer data should go through Congress, the search giant said. Yeah, well, so should changes in immigration law. . . .

Left fascists routinely use violence and intimidation to stop speech that they disagree with. Right wingers? Hardly ever.

Face it: the primary venue for suppression of free speech among adults today is at our colleges and universities. We even have prestigious law professors like Eric Posner arguing that colleges have a "duty" to suppress speech in the interests of young adult development (but not sex, drugs or rock 'n roll presumably because those activities don't threaten faculty power). Left fascists violate social norms and perpetrate violence secure in the knowledge that the administration won't punish them. Right groups are often not even allowed on campus much less allowed to misbehave. Here's another example from Asche Schow:

Johnson, who co-wrote the book about the false rape allegation against the Duke lacrosse team, has been trying to bring sanity back to the debate over how college campuses handle sexual assault accusations by explaining repeatedly that accused students should not be convicted based on an allegation, without the ability to defend themselves.
And that’s where the activists disagree.
Protesters showed up to his lecture with homemade signs and t-shirts that said “rape is real” (no one is saying it isn’t) and “sex without consent is always rape” (no one is saying otherwise). They stood up when he was about to speak and blocked the audience’s view of Johnson.

Shut up, they explained.

It's ironic that the other example of administration enabled abuse of the law on college campuses comes from 1930s Germany where the Nazi party became dominant on campus long before they won political power. Like today, sympathetic college administrators back then looked the other way when Jews or leftists were harassed. But this parallel to the Nazis shouldn't surprise anyone because colleges have been the most thuggish, authoritarian and venal institutions in the nation for quite some time.

In what world do "greater economic opportunities for women" quell radical Islamic violence?

The President and his shallow enablers are working overtime to make our country a geopolitical laughingstock. Witness the Harvard genius' latest salvo to overcome the massive explosion of radical Islamic terror and insurgency that began about 20 minutes into his presidency. As Mona Charen notes:

This week, the White House is hosting an international conference on “countering violent extremism.” The administration promises that the conference will “work to address the underlying conditions that can help foster violent extremism such as poverty, inequality, and repression. This means supporting alternatives to extremist messaging and greater economic opportunities for women and disaffected youth.” What “extremist messaging” would that be? The Christian Science Monitor?

This is gibberish. The administration uses language to impede thought rather than to elucidate it —

In what bizarre fantasy world do "greater economic opportunities for women" quell radical Islamic violence? The inability of the Obami to recognize the problem is leading to efforts that exacerbate the problems with our allies. This ideologically driven ignorance must stop before progress can be made.

To call what the President is doing "Carteresque" is to insult Jimmy Carter  who compared to sweet little OBambambi was a Bismarckian giant of Realpolitic.

Don't the Dems  have ANY ADULTS left? Beuhler? Buehler? Buehler? Anyone?

Obama may be an amateur but that's not his or our problem.

To one degree or another all American Presidents begin their Presidencies as foreign policy amateurs. But when a President is into his seventh year and is still wandering around in confusion it's not amateurishness that's the problem.

So Richard Epstein  is wrong to call him that. What Barack Obama is is an ideologue whose ideology  (anti American and universalist)  comports poorly with reality. Much like Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson before him it's what he knows that ain't so that is the problem, starting with his assumption that American self interest is illegitimate and ending with the assumption that our enemies hate us because of their poverty and our past behavior.

Barack Obama constantly ascribes the basest motives to his countrymen while imputing the most honorable motives to our enemies. Which in the case of the Iranians is a catastrophic miscalculation But it will definitely get Barack Obama the prominent place in the history books that he so desperately wants. Although the copy is likely to be rather negative.  Except in the leftist histories that are the only ones he and his smug, benighted academic friends ever read. So he's cool.

Isn't that grand?

Working the Obama care refs.

The left and their fellow travelling subsidy whores in the insurance business are pulling out all the stops to manipulate one man: John Roberts has shown that when it comes to Obama care he can be manipulated into making extra legal decisions if he gets enough people pressuring him. It will be interesting to see if this oh so typical ivy league lawyer is man enough to do his duty this time or if he'll cravenly tie himself into the logical pretzel that his erstwhile leftist masters dictate.

I'm not holding my breath.

This is how dying communists get treated: as victims fighting for "truth, justice and the American way". Dying fascists or even just principled conservatives? Not so much.

I particularly liked the story about "liberating the pool" when it wouldn't let his black friends in. Only I doubt it happened. That sort of civil disobedience was not done by children back then. Sneaking in? Yes but defiantly handing it to the New Deal man your daddy was busily Popular Fronting with? No way Jose. And the anti racism tales were touching given communist stalwarts were forsquare behind Joseph Stalin who was busily murdering millions of Jews, Tartars, and Ukrainians and replacing them with more "reliable" Great Russians. Which was how Crimea - the Tartar homeland - came to be inhabited principally by Great Russians so that Putin could liberate them.

This dude was just a commie. Which means he was an ugly, perverted thug.

Chris Matthews is channeling Jesus

"The poor will always be with us." was Jesus' response to Judas' cynical proposal to "help" the poor. The modern equivalent is made to avoid dealing with existential evil by focusing on their "poverty". Even Chris Matthews sees through that (at least when there's a liberal Community Coordinator.... I mean Commander in Chief).

The truth is ISIS and AL Qaeda have arisen because the average Muslim has never been better off. These are ideological revolts fueled by people who are flying into the fight from other countries using their Visa (née Bank Americard). They aren't bread riots.

And that's the reason we should avoid getting too deeply involved: this is a war for the hearts and minds of Islam-dom. We can never kill all the radicals so long as the West is perceived to be orchestrating  the "persecution" of the umma. The West spent the 90s "saving" Muslims from Serbs, Croats, Saddamites you name it and the result was 9/11.

We need to quarantine the middle east and let them duke it out. By all means arm and train our friends but don't do their fighting for them. Make sure no nukes get into the fray but otherwise only intervene directly if the world's oil supply is directly threatened.  Then exterminate every roach within 200km and go back to quarantine patrol.  Nobody respects a boy whose momma does his fighting for him. We're momma and we need to stay in the kitchen no matter how painful it looks.

As an aside one could argue that this is what Obama is (ever so ineptly) doing but that misses one key point: you can only practice a Fabian strategy from a resolutely pro American position. Romans did not doubt Fabius' patriotism so he could ignore the cries of cowardice and appeasement cascading down on him. But Barack Obama's courage and loyslties are suspected by most Americans and our allies who rightly question his commitment to any even vaguely pro American or pro ally strategy. And his shallow and vaccilating speechifying has just magnified the mistrust we feel towards him.

Incompetent and anti American is no way to go through life, Mr. President.

Ridding is Funda-mental

Union thugs target Scott Walker's house for protests go to his parent's house instead.

The incredible ignorance of stupid people is a wonder to behold. But they're the future, baby.

Chris Wallace is first and foremost a member of the permanent ruling class.

As was his daddy an doubt so will his son. Republicans threaten to upset his cozy nepotism in world so he frames his questions and spins his stories in.ways that serve the ruling class interest. Of course Republicans should declare war on him and the rest of his fraudulent, shilling "profession".

Why Fan boy Christie stands no chance of winning a Republican nomination

Aside from his rather pathetic obsession with Jerry Jones' Cowboys he also (apparently proudly) presides over an increasingly poor authoritarian dystupidia (stupid dystopia). The principled libertarian right won't vote for a man whose acievements consist of making the handiwork of the thuggish left work better.

CHRISTIE’S NEW JERSEY, Where A Flintlock Pistol Can Get You A 10-Year Jail Sentence. “VanGilder is a retired teacher whose career spanned 34 years. He’s an admirer of 18th century artifacts and historical memorabilia and bought the pistol to go with his collection. The pistol featured in Simone’s report is approaching its 300-year anniversary.”

Draconian laws that terrorize compliance with unconstitutional provisions are unAmerican. Let him go play with his cheerleaders.

Frum: Obama anti terror policy is an update of the romanticization of thugs chronicled in Tom Wolfe's "Mau Mauing the Flack Catchers"

Leave it to the progeny of 60s radicals to recycle their patchouli and gullibility approach to the Evi of communist totalitarianism as a "Sure fire" cure for even more obscurantist Death Cult Islam. If a sin can't be blamed on America Barack Obama and the Democrats refuse to acknowledge it's perpetrators.

I thought the Dems had gitt2en over this blame America first delusion. But now it is back in all its contemptible, America Hating force. I have never seen the Dems so isolated from Middle America. So contemptuous of our history, traditions and values. It really is a party with a death wish: either for America, itself or both.

God help us every one.

http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/02/why-obama-wont-talk-about-islamic-terrorism/385539/

The more Islamic a society gets the less free it is period.

Not to mention less creative, tolerant , innovative and compassionate. Someday we will be forced to deal with this foreign ideology undermining our civilization.

The more Islamic a society gets, the less free speech it has - the less intellectual inquiry, artistic achievement, contrarian spirit. Most western Muslims are not willing themselves to open fire on synagogues or Lars Vilks, but they help maintain the shriveled definition of acceptable expression that helps license the fanatics of Copenhagen and Paris. Muslims in Europe, North America and Australia will pay lip service to "free speech", and then promptly re-define it as excluding speech that "blasphemes" or "insults" their faith - which is to say them. Which is to say the great vulgar, brawling, free-for-all of free societies does not apply to them. So, when, say, France's Muslim population reaches 20 per cent, you will need to have the support of three-quarters of the remaining 80 per cent to maintain even a bare popular majority in favor of free speech

America's new aristocracy of merit was caused by the success of America's egalitarianism

One of the most surprising conclusions of genetics is that the more access to nutrition, schooling, common culture and other basic resources is equalized the more heritable traits dominate status. Traits like physical beauty, height, intelligence, persistence and disposition become the sole differentiators even if the proportion of these attributes that is inherited is much smaller than it apparently is.

Thus the paradox of egalitarianism is that it produces a perfectly unequal society. One in which no one can legitimately believe that they really would have done better had they had a "fair shake".

I wonder if that state of knowing will be good or bad for social cohesion? Is a little social inequality useful in maintaining the fiction that "anyone can grow up to be President"? The Economist magazine chronicles the increasing effects of America's egalitarianism here.

Ironically the greatest source of meritocratic inequality is assortative mating where high capability people marry others with elite talent. And of course the institutions most responsible for what scientists believe is fully one quarter of all income inequality are none other than the oh so "egalitarian" elite left wing colleges who ferociously screen their applicants for the right stuff and then provide the winners a (relatively safe) platform for socializing and sexual experimentation with their cognitively elite peers.

The left is reluctant to paint ISIS beyond the pale because the Left's goals are transforming America

And ISIS is looked upon by these "citizens of the world" as less of an enemy than a catalyst or stick to drive their bigoted countrymen towards the new socialist dawn. The reason Barack Obama defends ISIS atrocities by citing centuries old Christian history is because in his addlepated left mind America is the big sinner and the head hacking Arabs are victims.

Bill Moyer - a man who has absorbed this bizarre inversion so much that he's become a walking punchline responded in an even more America and Christian hating manner than the President.

Bill Moyers, the White House press secretary under LBJ and now one of the key fist-clenching, head-tilting spokespeople for American liberalism, said he couldn’t sleep after he heard that IS had burned to death the Jordanian pilot. No, not because his mind was swirling with thoughts of how wicked IS is, silly, but because he kept thinking to himselfloo: America did the same shit. He said his mind filled with images of the ‘charred corpses’ of black men lynched in America’s South decades ago, ‘tied to a blistered tree in the heart of the Texas Bible Belt’. He even got up in the middle of the night to Google images of these lynchings. Now there’s some hardcore commitment to self-loathing: interrupting your night’s sleep to search for gruesome old images that might confirm that America’s historical heart is as black as the Islamic State’s.

Moyers says that when he reads about IS’s execution-by-burning, he thinks of America’s own historic burners, ‘our own barbarians’: ‘Homegrown. Godly. Our neighbours, friends and kin. People like us.’ I’m sorry, but if you look into the Islamic State’s flames and see yourself, if your first thought upon watching one of IS’s medieval snuff movies is to think of your neighbours and friends and how they allegedly once committed equally demented acts, then there’s something wrong with you. Your moral compass is bust. Here, American history is not something to study and understand but instead becomes a hairshirt of self-loathing we wrap around ourselves in order to hide from the apparently pesky task of passing moral judgement against a fiery pseudo-state in Syria. Hateful episodes from Western history are dredged up to the cynical end of avoiding making moral distinctions and decisions in the present.

Only the liberal isn't really wearing the hairshirt - he's running behind normal America trying to persuade us to stop long enough so he can bury us in the hair burka he has so hatefully knitted ere these long years. Regardless of what happens or who does it the answer for the Obama and Moyers of the world is "America sucks and it's América that needs to change".

I still don't understand how man with such contempt for his countrymen got elected. I really dont.

In or out?

In-out, up-down, yes-no
3 simple pairs that scare us so:
Out-in, down-up, no-yes.
We're frightened by the choosing, I guess.

For with choosing always comes loss,
for deciding always has costs.
In paths not taken, in dreams forestalled, 

in futures unsampled and hopes appalled. 

I'm afraid to be the yes man in a No Man's Land,
caught out with an In Crowd I cannot stand.
Can't afford to be up when it's all Going Down,
dreaming of a future that can't be found.

Because not choosing is choosing too
and choosing nothing just makes you a fool.
Sometimes the brightest lines are hardest to see

and it's the thickest ones we can't perceive.
In this life so tempest torn and long,
we are doomed to choose and in choosing, choose wrong.

Don't be a yes man in a No Man's Land,
or be caught out with an In Crowd you cannot stand.
Can't bear to be up when it's all Going Down,
dreaming of perfection that's not around.

Because you've probably already made the worst choice of your life,
the one that will fill it with pain and great strife.
So go ahead and make another mistake,
drinking as deeply of it as you can take.
For it's in the choosing, hoping and trying,
that we find our reason for living not dying.

Don't need to be a yes man in a No Man's Land,
caught out with an In Crowd you cannot stand.
You can't bear to be up when it's all Going Down,
dreaming of a life that can't be found.
Dreaming of your life that can't be found.
It wasn't really yours if it can't be found.

In-out, up-down, yes-no

3 simple pairs that scare us so:
Out-in, down-up, no-yes.
We're frightened by the choosing, I guess.

"The killer clown car of Obama's final years in office continues"

With his proposal for an Authorization for Use of Force constituting an actual DeAuthorization. Like Lincoln, Nixon and Clinton before him Obama is a lawyer. But with his lawyerly evasions and pedantry it  appears that Barack Obama is nothing but an academic lawyer with a vague contempt for the America that is and a grandiose hallucination of what he (supposedly) is transforming it into. 

Mediocre, bigoted, ignorant and lazy....what's not to like?

Hey what's the big deal? Ayers hates America, Obama hates America - see: no problem

Ayers famously was recorded in a NYT interview published on 9/11/2001 bragging of and unrepentant for his past anti-American terrorism while Barack Obama just fielded two of the biggest lies and slurs on America ever said by a President: that 1 in 5 women had been victims of sexual assault and one in four victims of domestic violence.

While the fact that Obama was literally partying with former advocates of violent struggle against the U.S. government will no doubt be taken by his critics as further evidence that he hates America, the most interesting thing about the wedding is the shocking proof it offers that—at long last!—Obama truly no longer gives a fuck about keeping up political appearances.

Of course Gawker describes Ayers and his Hot Hater wife Dohrn as 'advocates' of 'violent' struggle rather than what they were:  active terrorists who in Ayers words were "guilty as hell"* but what do you expect from journalists who have been indoctrinated in an American education system where there are no left crimes? 

Nevertheless Ayers and Obama are unhinged America haters both sitting in their comfortable state funded sinecures. What creeps. Details here.

*Incidentally 'guilty as hell' Billy Ayers got away with terrorism and conspiracy in large part because of his influential father who was Chairman of Commonwealth Edison - the big Chicago utility at the time.  Barack Obama got away with years of heavy marijuana and occasional cocaine use (and no doubt under today's vicious laws what would be considered 'trafficking') because of his privileged status as well.  Laws are for the little people, you see. Ayers and Obama answer to a "Higher Power"

If you want third world diseases and segregated schools San Francisco is for you

What's next? The return of Pellagra and Ricketts? Gee progressives are making such progress these days. On to the cross burning!

The problem is too much law.

Megan McCardle reminds us that a big part of the Ferguson explosion was driven by the constant fining that towns engage in to fund themselves. But she misses half of the story: the school solution for towns like Ferguson that are in decline due to demographic transition is broken windows policing - enforce every picayune regulation, bust everyone with a whiff of Marijuana on them and otherwise impose white, European social norms by force as a replacement for the norms that existed when it was a European American community.

And that's the rub: broken windows policing "works" insofar as police enforcement, fines, arrests and prison stays go through the roof. Trying to impose your values on a community that does not share them requires brutal coercion which is what broken windows policing looks like to the young minority men who it targets.

I don't have any trite answers but the tendency to impose Euro American standards and see all variance from them  as pathological has poisoned relationships between police and poor communities. The cops have too much law to enforce: they are expected to deal with serous crime, enforce an unenforceable drug war and be values enforcers for hundreds of community regs. Too much law means any cop can probably cite any resident for a dozen violations any time they want. The result is that the police become feared and hated as only a particularly brutal and self righteous nanny can.

A good first step to sanity would be legalization of Marijuana and decriminalization of other illegal drugs. Doing so would take a big enforcement load off of the police and give them a chance to be on the residents' side for once.

A good second step would be to consider the cultural compatibility of immigrant groups we let in and exclude those who will have trouble adapting to a modern pluralistic republic like ours. This probably means most muslims and probably quite a few people from very primitive Latin American cultures.

A good third step that is likely unachievable without the abolition of the public education system is a return to an assimilationist  norm in everything we do from schooling to employment.  Demand that everyone live up to traditional (and yes they are European and Judeo Christian) behavioral standards and be quick to deport those immigrants who fail to do so.*

Pipe dreams all.  So long as the left get's electoral benefit from isolated racial and cultural minorities there will be isolated racial and cultural minorities. So in the meantime, enjoy all of the violence and police oppression.


*There is a reason why Finland has very little law, few people in jail and virtually no disorder while Sweden is swinging towards American levels of disorder:  Only four percent of Finns are foreign born while seventeen percent of Swedes are. And the large majority of Swedes who are foreign born hail from less developed, mostly muslim nations.  And a (very foolish) nation of nine million is admitting another 100,000 problem immigrants every year.  Who says the Swedes are 'good government' types?

Who benefits from sexual assault hysteria borne of the Obama administrations lies?

I mean other than Democratic party politicians, of course?  Heavily Democrat plaintiff's lawyers.  Once again Barack is taking care of his own. Here's an ad running in Nashville.

After 6 no 14 no 22 years of out of control Federal meddling the states are revolting

The Feds are well and truly out of control.  Here's to the states restoring some sanity to American governance.

State legislators around the country have introduced more than 200 bills aiming to nullify regulations and laws coming out of Washington, D.C., as they look to rein in the federal government.
The legislative onslaught, which includes bills targeting federal restrictions on firearms, experimental treatments and hemp, reflects growing discord between the states and Washington, state officials say.
“You have a choice,” said Kentucky state Rep. Diane St. Onge (R). “To sit back and not do anything or say anything and let overregulation continue — or you have the alternative choice to speak up about it and say, ‘We know what you are doing or intend to do and we do not think that it is constitutional and we as a state are not going to stand for it.’ ” . . .
Friction between the states and the federal government dates back to the nation’s earliest days. But there has been an explosion of bills in the last year, according to the Los Angeles-based Tenth Amendment Center, which advocates for the state use of nullification to tamp down on overzealous regulation.

http://thehill.com/regulation/legislation/232255-states-rising-up-against-washington

If our President believes that America is a living hell for women then why wasn't stopping the brutalization his first task

If as the President said in his Grammy video that 1 in 5 women has been the victim of sexual assault or attempted sexual assault and 1 in 4 women has been a victim of domestic violence then why focus on Healthcare reform? After all Asche Schow points out:

...... then he just broadcast to everyone watching the Grammy’s that they should be afraid to leave their house for fear of rape, and afraid to stay in it for fear of domestic violence.

Let's assume that there is a one third overlap between the rape victims and the domestic violence victims. If that's the case then fully 59 million women in America have been violently assaulted by men. Yet for six long years the President focused on healthcare and global warming and finance regulation. He took more vacation days and played more golf than any President in history. What an incredible and cynical response to what must be the greatest injustice in America by far. If he's telling the truth. But of course he's not.

These numbers are wildly out of line with national crime statistics, which don’t show anywhere near that number of rapes in the past two decades. Those statistics show fewer than 2 million rapes being reported in that time frame. Even accounting for the fact that many rapes go unreported, the number Obama gave Sunday night is staggering. It would mean that just 6.3 percent of rapes and attempted rapes are reportedp

By his presentation of obvious falsehoods the President signals that he despises this country and believes its citizens are both irredeemably violent and so stupid that they will believe anything he says. How did such a hateful, contemptible man get elected to the Presidency? Telling the lies he told about all of us on national TV is the equivalent of him urinating in our collective face secure in the knowledge that he can get away with just about anything so long as it supports the liberal bigots' conception of the country.

Let's hyphenate all Americans: I for example am a Redneck-Coon Ass-American and I want my subsidies

And we are extremely underrepresented in University professorships at Ivy league colleges. I want some liberal's job dammit.

Our left friends stupidity will be the (professional) death of them yet.

"Amazon Prime Is One of the Most Bizarre Good Business Ideas Ever"

Indeed. Only a capitalist society where people are free to do as they please with their money, time and businesses could such intuitively wrong headed innovation emerge. "Public policy makers" would never countenance it.

Could this be a great country again with no Obami or what?

A new International Brigade?

American and Canadian veterans joining the Kurdish Peshmerga in droves. Perhaps this is a reprise of the Brigade raised to fight in the Spanish Civil war. Only this time the volunteers won't be pathetic Stalinist dupes.

One thing about our pals in ISIS: they sure know how to make people hate them.

Kill baby kill!

Obama is following the Clinton scandal play book: stall until you're out of office.

A supine establishment press makes it work for Democrats. Sigh.

Obama Administration Still Stonewalling On IRS Scandal. “The Obama administration is refusing to publicly release more than 500 documents on the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups. Twenty months after the IRS scandal broke, there are still many unanswered questions about who was spearheading the agency’s scrutiny of conservative-leaning organizations. The Hill sought access to government documents that might provide a glimpse of the decision-making through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The Hill asked for 2013 emails and other correspondence between the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The request specifically sought emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner and Treasury officials, including Secretary Jack Lew, while the inspector general was working on its explosive May 2013 report that the IRS used ‘inappropriate criteria’ to review the political activities of tax-exempt groups. TIGTA opted not to release any of the 512 documents covered by the request, citing various exemptions in the law

ISIS' Invasion of Iraq and its very public atrocities are both indicators of failure, not success.

One year ago ISIS was ISIL and it was contesting for control of a Syria that looked like it was about to fall.  It did not.  An Islamist group like ISIL/ISIS' most important objective is to get control of a functioning state because the record of non-state actors conquering functioning states in the modern era is dismal.  Without a modern state to control ISIS is forced to rely on extortion, illegal drug trades and alms from the faithful to fund its Jihad.  Wars are expensive and winners don't get there by imitating  Don Corleone or the Salvation Army.  This is why ISIS' invasion of Iraq's Anbar province was it's first admission of defeat.  You can't dislodge one shoddy tottering Arab state beset by enemies all 'round so you invade another shoddy tottering Arab state beset by enemies all around?  So starting a two front war because you couldn't win a one front war and declaring war on the United States is ISIS' war winning strategy? Really?  Only ISIS has gone even further by engaging in one of the most remarkable anti PR campaigns in history by promoting their atrocities on Youtube. So why would someone whose primary goal is to get control of a functioning state and be recognized as a state actor promote their atrocities?  After all if you want to get control of either Syria or Iraq you will need to either conquer a whole bunch of minorities or persuade them that you're the best alternative for them to live under which suggests that you shouldn't be slaughtering them. And whatever hacking off heads and setting fire to people on TV does for you it doesn't promote your suitability as a negotiating partner in international confabs.

Just what are the motives behind ISIS' atrocities?  There are two types:  the first is the Youtube Hackemoff (or Burnemup) - focused on western audiences and very theatrical.  The second atrocity type is the "non Sunni village murder, rape and/or kidnap them all" routine.  So why is ISIS doing the Youtube promos?  After all, these vile atrocities guarantee global revulsion and horror. But they also generate donations, protection payments and volunteers - things that a group that does not control a functioning state desperately needs. And the village chaos is simply another indicator that ISIS is not a state actor and has given up becoming one.  The likely reason there is so much chaos is because the volunteers their video promos are getting them are more depraved than pious and even more importantly because they aren't getting paid.  So like every underpaid army in history these pious butchers are sacking every enemy town they get their hands on and liquidating every asset available {including the young women} to generate cash to feed and arm themselves against everyone else who now have very good reasons to oppose them. (Incidentally, the abolition of slavery is the reason that only young women are spared because they can be brothelized to generate cash and anyway the soldiers can get a non-financial benefit out of their presence.  In the past the entire population would have been auctioned off to the slave merchants that followed every conquering army.)

So to summarize:  the moment ISIL invaded Anbar and became ISIS it admitted defeat in its most necessary goal of getting control of a functioning state.  It has now set out to become a 'bigger, stronger' Al Qaeda which is why the telegenic atrocities are so important:  building share of mind among Islam's bloodthirsty remnant, intimidating Gulf governments into paying protection money and generating alms and suicidal recruits.  And like Al Qaeda, it will get its leaders glory, its followers killed and not change the balance of power appreciably.

The real question isn't why the Islamists do what they do, but why the West, particularly conservatives like me in the United States are so panicked by ISIS.  This panic appears to be genuine and not simply a tactical maneuver designed to score points against Barack Obama. But there is no basis for it. As I point out above. ISIS' behavior is playing right into the global war against terror playbook.  After all, they've given up on conquering Syria, the one thing they could have done to truly destabilize the Middle East. It's as if American conservatives have internalized Barack Obama's critique of the West:  that we're really no better, no more capable than your run of the mill less developed Arab state and therefore we should be panicked when an insurgency gets control of a desert inhabited largely by their sympathetic Sunni clansmen half a world away.  And the argument that this will become a 'base for terror' is equally silly.  There are dozens of places in this world so disorganized that terrorists could use them to base their operations - any place with major drug production operations for starters. Indeed if the ISIS wasteland does become a concentration point for Islamic terror training and deployment all the better:  concentrate the thugs in one place for efficient killing.  If there is one thing that the last decade and a half has shown us it's that Islamic terror is protean and does not require sophisticated training and logistics to unsettle the west.

The real problem with ISIS panic among conservatives is that it diverts attention away from Iran's quest to become an atomic power and Barack Obama's supine acceptance of that outcome.  Nukes are the real game changer in the middle east and if I were of a more conspiratorial bent I would propose that ISIS and it's boffo Youtube channel are actually a diversion being funded by the Mullahs in Tehran to divert western attention away from the real threat.

A century ago today's conservative beliefs were dominant in the west as they had been in one form or another for several hundred years.  Back then confidence in Western culture, Judeo-Christian ethics and classical liberal economics enabled the west to conquer and/or dominate the entire globe. The replacement of this 'classical' liberalism with 'socialist' liberalism after two world wars led to the complete collapse of Western political dominance.  The West didn't suddenly become too weak to dominate the world, we simply lost our conservative, Christian, liberal faith in ourselves.  It is ironic that today's panicked conservatives are channeling the profound pessimism about us that informs Barack Obama and our increasingly 'socialist' liberal geopolitics rather than the robust confidence of our forefathers.

It's time for conservatives to have the confidence of our convictions and believe in the society that our forbears built.  Quit panicking.

The drug war strangled promising research on psychedelics for 40 yesrs

Evidently they have applications for anxiety, substance abuse and other maladies. Another vile dividend of Dick Nixon's catastrophically liberal authoritarian domestic policies.

Then America should divest itself of University of California students.

If they don't want us then we can save a lot of money on tuition subsidies and tax exemptions for the foreign and anti American University of California system.

In California, the college students are hatin’ on America, and The College Fix has the story:

The University of California Student Association board – which represents all 233,000 students enrolled in the UC system’s 10 campuses – approved a resolution on Sunday that calls on the system’s leaders to financially divest from the United States.

And here I thought the U of California system constituted an intelligent "elite". Elite ain't what it used to be I guess.