http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/north-korea-today-iran-tomorrow?f=puball “…obviously the North Koreans have tested nuclear weapons and have developed some missile technology. What they have not done is demonstrate…a capability to deploy a nuclear-armed missile–attach a warhead to a missile and fire it.” ~ White House Spokesman Jay Carney, April 12, 2013 Prudence 1957 After the Soviet Union successfully tested a nuclear […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/margaret-thatcher-took-ruined-dishonored-bankrupt-britain-left-it-prosperous-confident-free
Margaret Thatcher Took Ruined, Dishonored & Bankrupt Britain & Left It prosperous, Confident & Free
I’m not sure you can appreciate the magnitude of Margaret Thatcher’s achievement without some knowledge of the calamity that immediately preceded it. Most British people can no longer remember the Seventies. I am just fractionally above the national median age – born September 1971 – and my recollections are hazy. What I do recall, though, was the sense of despair. Again and again, I would hear adults casually say “Britain is finished.” Having spent my early years in Peru, where Britain was still looked up to as a serious country, I was shocked.
In fact, such sentiments were understandable. These were the years of the three-day week, of prices and incomes policies, of double-digit inflation, of constant strikes, of power cuts. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the United Kingdom had been outperformed by every European economy. “Britain is a tragedy – it has sunk to borrowing, begging, stealing until North Sea oil comes in,” said Henry Kissinger. The Wall Street Journal was blunter: “Goodbye, Great Britain: it was nice knowing you.”
Margaret Thatcher, almost alone, refused to accept the inevitability of decline. She was determined to turn the country around, and she succeeded. Inflation fell, strikes stopped, the latent enterprise of a free people was awakened. Having lagged behind for a generation, we outgrew every European country in the 1980s except Spain (which was bouncing back from an even lower place). As revenues flowed in, taxes were cut and debt was repaid, while public spending – contrary to almost universal belief – rose.
In the Falklands, Margaret Thatcher showed the world that a great country doesn’t retreat forever. And, by ending the wretched policy of one-sided détente that had allowed the Soviets to march into Europe, Korea and Afghanistan, she set in train the events that would free hundreds of millions of people from what, in crude mathematical terms, must be reckoned the most murderous ideology humanity has known.
Like everyone else, I remember where I was when she resigned. It was the equivalent, for my generation of John F Kennedy being shot – an event which, curiously, also took place on 22 November. After three election victories, the Iron Lady was brought down by a collection of Euro-fanatical MPs – the “November Criminals” as one of my local party chairmen darkly calls them. It’s true that there were several factors in her unpopularity, above all the poll tax. Still, it can’t be repeated too often: the immediate cause of Margaret Thatcher’s toppling was that she opposed Britain’s membership of the euro. Who called that one right?
On any normal measure, she was a supremely successful politician. I’d go further and call her our most successful prime minister ever. Yet she drove many to a hatred so intense that, even on the day she died, a frail grandmother, the Internet was filled with venomous joy. (Have a look, if you have a strong stomach, at my favorited comments on Twitter, or at the #dingdongthewickedwitchisdead hashtag.)
Where does it come from, this inchoate loathing? Anti-Thatcherites tell you that it’s because she closed down the old industries. (She didn’t, of course: she simply stopped obliging everyone else to support them.) Yet it must surely be obvious by now that nothing would have kept the dockyards and coalmines and steel mills open. A similar process of de-industrialization has unfolded in every other Western European country, and the only parties that still talk of “reviving our manufacturing base” are Respect, the Scottish Socialists and the BNP.
No, what Lefties (with honorable exceptions) find so hard to forgive is the lady’s very success: the fact that she rescued a country that they had dishonored and impoverished; that she inherited a Britain that was sclerotic, indebted and declining and left it proud, wealthy and free; that she never lost an election to them. Their rage, in truth, can never be assuaged; for it is the rage of Caliban.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/the-cultural-intifada-and-temple-denial-on-the-glazov-gang/
This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Lela Gilbert, author of Saturday People, Sunday People, actor Dwight Schultz (DwightSchultzFansite.tv) and Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv.
The Gang members gathered to discuss Lela Gilbert’s book, Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner. A special discussion occurred in Part II, during which the panel focused on the dire lessons of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005. The segmented also shed light on the trauma that Israeli citizens, including children, have suffered from Palestinian terror, Jimmy Carter’s Jew-Hate, and the world’s blind spot: the forgotten exodus of 900,000 Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim countries.
In Part I, the Gang also focused on Saturday People, Sunday People. Ms. Gilbert shared what brought her to Israel, the Israelis’ warm reception of her, and why, as Dr. Gabriel Barkay imparted to her, “Temple Denial is more dangerous and serious than Holocaust Denial.” The Gang therefore reflected on The Cultural Intifada and Temple Denial, a dialogue which dealt with Islamists’ gambit to de-Judaize the Jewish state.
To watch both parts of the two-part series, see below:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
“We did not come to ask for mercy from nature,” Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, the Lysenko of Soviet agriculture, once declared. “We must wrest it from her.”
Communist science was guided not by the journey from hypothesis to fact but by the dusty
proclamations of Marxist theorists. Soviet scientists were expected to reject capitalist science and formulate a science that matched the Communist worldview.
The Communist worldview insisted that every living creature could be completely transformed into anything. It rejected natural selection as having a competitive capitalist bent that suspiciously resembled a biological version of free market competition. And pseudo-scientists like Lysenko and Michurin matched bad science to bad ideology laying out an official dogma in which transforming the environment could transform any creature and in which intraspecies struggle did not lead to evolution.
The USSR’s politicization of biology crippled its agriculture. Its leaders rejected free market competition on the human level and in the plant and animal kingdoms. They insisted that nature had to follow Marxist dialectical materialism and locked up and murdered the scientists who disagreed. By the time the USSR fell, a land which had once exported wheat to the world had gone deep into debt to buy wheat from the United States.
But bad ideology driving bad science didn’t die with Lysenko and Michurin. The new Lysenkos are Warmunists like Michael Mann and James Hansen. The environmentalists, like the Communists, believe that human beings have total control over the environment and that the environment determines all. Where they differ is the perceived effect of that influence. Warmunism, like Communism, originates not from science, but from ideology. The Communists divided industry into two types by ideological classification; the good cooperative Socialist industry and the bad competitive Capitalist industry. The Warmunists similarly ideologically classify two types of industry; environmentally conscious green technology and dirty non-socially conscious brown technology.
The Warmunists, like the Communists, classify science and industry not by outcome, but by ideology, and then paper over that classification with bad science. Green technology is often dirtier and less efficient than the so-called brown technology, but like the collective farms and the idiotic ramblings of Michurin and Lysenko, it’s better because it more closely fits the Socialist vision of how things ought to work.
Scientists debate, but ideologues delegitimize. The Communists did not debate science. They declared dogma and locked up anyone who disagreed. The Warmunists don’t have the power to sentence their critics to prison, though some among them have broached the notion, instead they plot campaigns of character assassination against those who question the theories that they try to pass off as final facts.
The Warmunists, like the Communists, are not interested in learning how the world works, but in using their notions of how the world ought to work to develop a model of how human beings ought to behave.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/345598/understanding-gosnell-kathryn-jean-lopez ‘They were filled with expectation . . . the expectation that there was Something More than the atrocious evil that had befallen them . . . Something More than the darkness . . . Something More than despair.” So said Father Peter John Cameron, a Dominican priest and editor of Magnificat, a daily devotional, to the families of Newtown, Conn., gathered at St. Rose of Lima […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/345662/i1984i-29-victor-davis-hanson
Imagine if, during the campaign of 2008, someone had written the following: “If Barack Obama is elected president, then each year from now on the federal budget will be a trillion dollars in the red. He will pile up in two terms more debt than all previous presidents combined. Interest rates will stay at near zero; 7.6 percent unemployment will be proof of progress in creating jobs. Record use of food stamps, unemployment, and disability insurance will be hallmarks of recovery. The government will take over health care, and the costs will skyrocket. During Obama’s second term, ammunition will vanish from America’s store shelves in panic buying. Gay marriage will become uncontroversial. Women will be eligible for infantry combat. The only question about amnesty for illegal aliens will be when, not if, it is enacted. States will begin legalizing marijuana.” Obviously, such a conspiracist would have been dismissed as an unhinged nut.
You may object that Obama himself has hardly been responsible for all these radical transformations. True, but he helped to create, in brilliant fashion, a “hope and change,” quasi-revolutionary climate — the political cover, if you will, for the media, the universities, federal judges, state legislatures, and Congress to reinvent American popular culture and tradition in a manner rarely if ever seen in the past.
How, then, did the Obama team do that?
LANGUAGE
First were the necessary changes in language. In the Obama age, as in Orwell’s 1984, the natural meanings of words had to change. See the third book of Thucydides’ history for the details.
Running up serial trillion-dollar deficits was not profligacy, but rather making “investments” for “the children.” Irresponsible borrowing became “stimulus.” Indeed, “trillion” — not a frequently used part of most people’s vocabulary before 2009 — suddenly replaced “billion” as a familiar fiscal numerical adjective. A takeover of health care that would spike premiums and ration services, devices, and procedures was aptly named the “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”
“Assault weapons” superseded “semi-automatic rifles,” even as “semi-automatic” and “automatic” were no longer distinct adjectives. The obvious purpose of rapid-fire weapons was to kill innocent children, not to protect your household from intruders, to shoot fast-moving game, or to practice a sport at a shooting range, much less to remind the government, in Second Amendment fashion, that the populace was autonomous and vigilant.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/04/did_jay-z_hear_about_the_cubans_who_risked_their_lives_rather_than_watch_his_little_walk_in_havana.html
Another side of Cuba that Jay-Z did not see is that of a dozen Cubans found in the ocean escaping the island.
Two different cruise ships picked up Cubans in make shift rafts trying to escape Cuba. These Cubans chose to risk their lives rather than greet Jay-Z and spouse in the streets of Havana.
My guess is that Jay-Z and spouse do not have a clue that some Cubans would rather risk death than watch their little walk in Havana. Yes, a few Cubans wanted nothing to do with that “educational” trip after all. I think that Cubans can smell a propaganda charade miles away. They’ve had their share of charlatans who smoke cigars for 50 years.
Mr & Mrs Carter also showed incredible hypocrisy when they said nothing about Roberto Zurbano, a black Cuban who lost his job for writing about racism in Cuba.
Zubrano wrote the truth, i.e. there is great dissatisfaction in the Cuban black population about the revolution’s priorities and choices. He touched on a topic that the “revolution” avoids. The Castro PR machine, with the assistance of too many clowns in the US, has pushed the idea that “white rich Cubans” left for Miami and that “blacks” finally got their due. Not really. Not really at all.
Zubrano confirmed what Brian Lloyd French, a Canadian writer, said to me a few weeks ago. Brian confirmed that blacks are excluded from positions of responsibility in the government as well as those joint ventures that international companies do with the Castro family.
Zubrano focused on black Cubans. However, the Cuban “revolution” has failed all Cubans, unless you are part of the party elite, the privileged class that gets to watch US baseball games on cable TV and go on the internet.
Overall, a bad week for Jay-Z and the Cubans that he left behind. Maybe the next guy who gets to go on an “educational” trip will actually educate himself about Cuba.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/04/happy_birthday_israel.html If countries were people and Israel was an American, it would begin to collect Social Security in nine months. It would be eligible for a reverse mortgage and only a few years from mandatory withdrawals from its 401k. We’d be talking retirement and watching the grass and the grandchildren grow. In national terms, Israel […]
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/04/15/under-pressure-hagel-replaces-dronefare-medal-with-distinguishing-device/
WHO IS DUMB AND DUMBEST? HAGEL OR SENATOR JOE MANCHIN (D W.VA)?????
After pushback from Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has decided to roll back plans for the dronefare medal.
On Feb. 13, the Pentagon established of the Distinguished Warfare Medal to recognize the achievements of “a small number of service men and women who have an especially direct and immediate impact on combat operations through the use of remotely piloted aircraft and cyber operations.”
Lawmakers were concerned about the proposed precedence of the new medal over combat medals including the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Production on the DWM was stopped after Hagel agreed to review the medal.
“While the review confirmed the need to ensure such recognition, it found that misconceptions regarding the precedence of the award were distracting from its original purpose,” Hagel said in a statement today.
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the concurrence of the service secretaries, have recommended the creation of a new distinguishing device that can be affixed to existing medals to recognize the extraordinary actions of this small number of men and women,” he continued. “I agree with the Joint Chiefs’ findings, and have directed the creation of a distinguishing device instead of a separate medal.”
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Hagel’s statement confirmed why he voted for his confirmation: “Simply put, he does the right thing.”
“Secretary Hagel’s commonsense approach to reviewing this important issue proves to our combat veterans that their sacrifices are valued,” Manchin gushed. “I truly am grateful for his leadership and for his willingness to listen to all who care so deeply about this issue.
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/04/15/the-men-responsible-for-starving-egyptian-families/?singlepage=true Egypt’s pound has fallen by 40% since last December, from 6 to the dollar to 8.25 to the dollar on the black market. The prices of basic food items like beans and milk have risen by more than that, pricing all forms of protein out of the range of the half of Egyptians who […]
