http://www.nationalreview.com/node/355270/print The Affordable Care Act — a.k.a. Obamacare — is off to a very rocky start, and according to the law’s biggest defenders, the blame falls squarely at the feet of Republicans. It’s an odd claim. Republicans did not write the law. They did not support the law. And they are not in charge of […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/355291/print It happened again. Sensitive intelligence has been leaked to the news media to boost President Obama politically and to distract from the various scandals plaguing his administration. The New York Times and McClatchy reported earlier this week that the Obama administration’s decision to close 22 embassies was occasioned by intelligence gathered from intercepted electronic […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/politically-incorrect-posters-and-islam?f=puball On July 9, 2013, Munich police confiscated a poster used at a city demonstration opposing the proposed Center for Islam in Europe-Munich (Zentrum für Islam in Europa-München, or ZIE-M) due to preliminary hate speech suspicions. The Munich confiscation raises questions about the ability to state unvarnished facts about Islam, however displeasing. The conservative German […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/cbo-underestimates-real-costs-of-delay-of-obamacare The Congressional Budget Office last week released its calculation of the impact of the Obama administration’s decision to delay ObamaCare’s employer mandate for one year. Intentionally or not, the CBO’s $12 billion estimate is flawed, understating by a wide margin the cost to taxpayers. On July 3, the Obama administration said that it will […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/perhaps-its-not-her-man-huma-stands-by Huma Abedin — wife of candidate for New York City mayor and disgraced former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y. — is confounding political analysts. Why, after her husband recently admitted on the campaign trail he had continued his sexting exploits subsequent to resigning from office in 2011, would she continue to stand by her […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/obama-tells-marines-al-qaeda-is-near-defeat-decimated/?print=1 Just days after issuing a sweeping terror alert that broadly warned Americans against global travel and temporarily closing embassies across the Middle East, President Obama returned to pressing his longtime narrative that al-Qaeda is on the run. Obama told Marines at Camp Pendleton this afternoon that he was there to mark the war in […]
http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/the-uns-millennium-development-flop/?singlepage=true At the United Nations, America’s new ambassador, Samantha Power, reported for duty on Monday. In remarks [1] just before presenting her credentials, Power listed some of the top items on her UN to-do list, including working together “to alleviate global poverty.” Let’s hope Power takes a look at a new study of UN development […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/climate_realism_and_socialist_realism.html
Louis Fischer, born in 1896 in Philadelphia, was a journalist who became a supporter and believer in the Soviet Union and world communism. He lived in Moscow for many years. In an essay in The God That Failed Fischer describes how in the middle 1930’s the Soviets ordered all writers to “treat the present as though it did not exist and the future as if it had already arrived.” That became known as Socialist Realism. Russian workers who lived in poverty and shared a single room with other families were depicted as well fed, smiling and happy. That was the communist depiction of the future, a future that never arrived.
Socialist Realism was promotion of fantasy for political reasons. The present did not live up to the enthusiastic promises and predictions that accompanied the founding of the communist state. Rather than admit error, the supporters constructed a mental fantasy world. The promises would still come true, but they would be delayed for understandable reasons. In the meantime they pretended the promises had already come true.
The U.S. Department of Energy has a plan to reduce the cost of solar power by a factor of 4 by 2020 with the hope that solar would increase from .05% of our power to 14% by 2030. The motivation is, of course, to reduce emissions of CO2. This is Climate Realism, very similar to Socialist Realism. Not only does solar power, at the plant gate, cost 4-8 times as much as conventional power, but it is erratic and seasonal to say nothing of not working at night. It also needs to be placed in the southwest where there is a lot of sunshine. This leads to needing storage of electricity, or perhaps storage of heat for certain types of solar. The only practical and efficient way of storing electricity is pumped storage, or two lakes at very different altitudes with a reversible hydroelectric plant connecting them. Then you need extra long, very high voltage power lines to bring the electricity from the southwest deserts to the cloudy cities of the Midwest and East. The Department of Energy is spinning a fantasy. Most of the cost of solar power is in pedestrian things like steel and concrete. Even if the cost of photovoltaic panels were zero, solar would not be remotely competitive. If complete solar plants cost zero, it would still not be practicable due to the cost of backup plants, electricity storage and long power lines.
In one fell swoop, the FDR administration classified a group of citizens as dangerous solely based on their national origin. What do West Coast Japanese and New England Chechens have in common? Everything, in the eyes of critics of the nation’s wars. In the aftermath of April’s Boston Marathon bombing, police forces killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324653004578651952240608788.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop The U.S. regarded the terrorist group’s affiliates as local problems—instead of fighting their potent Islamist ideology. Al Qaeda is a group that prizes symmetry and symbolism. When I interrogated Osama bin Laden‘s personal propagandist and secretary, Ali al Bahlul, at Guantanamo Bay in 2002, he confessed that they take great care with timing to […]
