RUTHFULLY YOURS

While Google Chrome has been struggling with market share, Firefox has been in a steady decline down to 17% market share in March from 20% in May of last year.

Firefox fell below 18% this year so that it no longer even claimed a fifth of internet users.

Mozilla Firefox Falls to 3rd Place, Hits Lowest User Level Ever

RAINED OUT

The Noah drop is worse than Russell Crowe’s previously unpopular Robin Hood which only fell 48% on its second weekend. At the rate that Noah is falling, it will likely not make back its production budget domestically, let alone its promotional budget.

Cinemascore still rates Noah at C indicating that audiences hate it more than any other movie in current release.

Noah Falls 61.1% in Second Weekend

With all the publicity that Letterman’s retirement is getting, you would think that anyone was still watching the Late Show with David Letterman.

And you would be wrong.

By 2011, Nightline was beating both Letterman and Leno among young viewers.

America to Not Watch Colbert, Just Like It’s Not Watching Letterman

In one of his essays, Oz wrote, “Israel could have become an exemplary state… a small scale laboratory for democratic socialism.”

“Why didn’t Israel develop as the most egalitarian and creative social democratic society in the world? I would say that one of the major factors was the mass immigration of Holocaust survivors, Middle Eastern Jews and non-socialist and even anti-socialist Zionists.”

“Then there were the masses of Orthodox Jews… to whom socialism meant blasphemy and atheism.”

Brandeis Gives Honorary Degree to Critic of Judaism, Refuses to Give One to Critic of Islam

Last year, Bin Shakaran announced that he had a big new Jihad going down. Ibrahim Bin Shakaran aka Brahim Benchekroune went on a social media Jihad.

Brahim Benchekroune created accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to attract Moroccans to his new jihadist movement, Sham al-Islam. The group also announced a media arm, “the Mashers” Foundation, to oversee its public outreach.

On August 31st, the group outlined its principles, based on al-Qaeda’s takfirist ideology.

“We consider democracy to be kufr against God Almighty and a doctrine that is in contradiction to Allah’s sharia,” Sham al-Islam said. The movement calls for engaging in jihad against apostates from Islam.

Al Qaeda Terrorist Freed from Gitmo Finally Blown Away in Syria

Krone came by his hard edge honestly. He spent more than 15 years in the private sector, where he once lobbied for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and more recently was a top Comcast executive.

During his private-sector career, Krone remained friends with Reid. “We always just kept in touch,” he said. “He just always looked after me.”

Krone also became one of the senator’s biggest donors, giving about $35,000 to Reid’s campaigns and leadership political action committees, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

Harry “Man of the People” Reid’s Comcast Connection

…AND NO

The only reason that Pollard even came up is because Netanyahu tried to stall the endless demands by claiming that he couldn’t keep making concessions without bringing down his government.

But that assumes that Obama doesn’t want to bring down Netanyahu. Instead there’s every reason to believe that he does. So why would Obama give Netanyahu anything?

The answer is he wouldn’t.

Why Pollard Won’t Be Released

Illegal Muslim Alien Plotted Drone Bombing, Was Not Deported After Multiple Arrests

PEACE THROUGH WHATEVER

Neoconservative positions on foreign policy have shifted over the years. Their broad center, a strong military, peace through strength, values export and international alliances against geopolitical enemies don’t have much opposition from either side which is why most of Washington is neo-conservative; whether or not it uses that term.

Neo-conservatism has become a shorthand for a dissatisfaction with a particular strain of Washington politician and foreign policy expert. It remains more of an emotional and cultural critique than a policy critique

David Harsanyi Doesn’t Know What a Neo-Con Is, But He Knows He Hates Them

LIGHTS, CAMERA, SCAM

Gore has been churning out new environmental screeds (or his ghostwriters have) every few years. Even devoted Warmists would have trouble naming a single one.

Our Choice was Gore’s literary sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. Then came The Assault on Reason. Followed by The Future. Then Earth in the Balance.

Every few years reviewers dutifully comment that Al Gore (or his ghostwriter) has written another “passionate”, “informed” plea for everyone to go back to the caves and pay him lots of money for fire carbon credits.

Al Gore Considering “Inconvenient Truth” Sequel No One Wants

Muslims Beat Their Wives, UN Human Rights Commissioner Blames Israel

FENCING

The third organization called HaKilerim (The Killers) was considered the most dangerous and specializes in collecting protection money from Jewish businessmen, Sudanese refugees and Romanian workers, Chinese and Filipinos who settled in the area and opened small businesses, as well as prostitutes and drug addicts. This organization also operates betting parlors, massage parlors, nightclubs, cafes and restaurants. In addition to all those engaged in smartphone robbery, kidnapping cases, pimping, drug dealing in very large quantities, bike theft, running stalls selling ethnic foods and making deals on the street.

Successful foreign criminals wear the best brands, Nike or Adidas, wearing gold watches, necklaces and bracelets, and sunglasses luxury. Many of them resemble the look nicer part of American rappers. While the soldiers are living in apartments and moldy old room south of the city, senior bosses can afford to rent apartments of three and four rooms and frequently travel in taxis.

“Put a Big Fence Around Our Country”: Quoting Sheldon Adelson Out of Context

Wife of Democratic Politician Narrates Holocaust Denier’s Documentary Claiming the Sun Revolves Around the Earth

LIBERALISM IS A MENTAL ILLNESS

Chief Illiniwek was already eliminated by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but the Chief has stuck around despite attempts to ban him.

“I dont need a counselor, I need you to #BanTheChief” and then contradicts herself by saying, “Emotional damage should be more important than the money you get from pro-Chief alums #BanTheChief”

“I was told I was acting like a “personally wounded party, and like a child”

“On March 11, I had the thought that I should commit suicide. I specifically thought “blow your brains out on the quad.” #BanTheChief

Insane Leftist Student: “Ban the Illini Chief or I’ll Shoot Myself”

UH-HUH

“[Studio executives say] ‘We’re going to take your stories but, you know what? You’re going to go starve over here and we’re not going to let you get a job.’ The so-called liberals that are in Hollywood now are not as good as their parents or ancestors. They feel that they’re not racist. They grew up with hip-hop, so [they] can’t be racist. ‘I like Jay Z, but that don’t mean I got to give you a job.’”

Man Who Directed 10 Movies Claims Hollywood “Doesn’t Let Black People Tell Stories”

THE ROUNDUP

REFORM

Islam is a totalitarian ideology. They suffered under it. Yet they do not condemn it. They talk as though Islam can be “reformed” or recast as a tolerant, humane creed. It can’t. It is, root, trunk, and branch as evil an ideology as Nazism and Communism. I don’t think they were afraid to condemn Islam. I think their statements about it reflect a profound ignorance of its ends, or a collective delusion. To a woman, they stress that Islam’s depredations against women are “cultural,” not “political.” They do not see that those crimes – forced marriages of children and adult women, female genital mutilation (FGM, or, what a friend prefers to call it, “female castration”), the role of “honor,” and the ubiquity of “honor killings” in Muslim and Western countries – are intrinsic to the ideology, not aberrations or anomalies.

Two segments of Honor Diaries impressed me, and not positively. One indicated just how accommodating the film is to Islam. This segment featured one of the participants, an American, Raquel Saraswati. She had a pierced nose and a pierced lower lip. Her eyebrows looked painted on. She wore the whole “approved” Muslim garb for women, including an unflattering hijab, most of it outlandishly decorated. The overall impression was that she could’ve been a dancer for the Star Wars villain, Jabba the Hut. At one point, the film showed her preparing to pray and praying. That segment underscored the film’s, and the participants’, acceptance of Islam as a legitimate creed.

From Edward Cline; No Honor at Brandeis University

IF ONLY THE PEOPLE WE WERE FIGHTING ACTUALLY THOUGHT LIKE THIS…

The bottom line is, you don’t beat an idea by beating a person. You beat an idea by beating an idea. Not only is it counter-productive—nobody likes the kid who complains to the teacher even when the kid is right—it replaces a competition of arguments with a competition to delegitimize arguments. And what’s left is the pressure to sand down the corners of your speech while looking for the rough edges in the speech of your adversaries. Everyone is offended. Everyone is offensive. Nothing is close to the line because close to the line is over the line because over the line is better for clicks and retweets and fundraising and ad revenue.

… if this view reflected liberals in general, it might be possible to have a conversation, but it doesn’t.

And there’s no reason why it would. The debate has long since become internal rather than external, an assertion of anger and contempt. The left’s views have become fixed in amber even as they keep “evolving”. Functioning within a bubble, they have become unused to dissent and convinced that since they are on the right side of history, it is their sacred mission to stamp out reactionary views.

A REVERSE ATWATER

Jonathan Chait’s anticipated New Yorker piece on Obama and race has finally come out, to boos from the left, and it’s mostly predictable, depicting conservatives as out of touch racists in denial.

What struck Goldberg was Obama’s juxtaposition of “ideology and small thinking”—terms he has always associated with his Republican opponents—with “prejudice and bigotry.” He was not explicitly calling them the same thing, but he was treating them as tantamount. “That feeds into the MSNBC style of argument about Obama’s opponents,” Goldberg told me, “that there must be a more interesting explanation for their motives.”

It’s unlikely that Obama is deliberately plotting to associate his opponents with white supremacy in a kind of reverse-Atwater maneuver.

And yet that’s what liberals have been doing for a long time now to the extent of labeling any conservative views as covert racism.

That indeed is the purpose of invoking Atwater, to prove that even innocuous views are coded racism. It’s not really a reverse-Atwater, it is Atwater, instead of shouting a racial slur, they’re shouting racist.

Liberals experience the limits of historically determined analysis in other realms, like when the conversation changes to anti-Semitism. Here is an equally charged argument in which conservatives dwell on the deep, pernicious power of anti-Semitism hiding its ugly face beneath the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel. When, during his confirmation hearings last year for Defense secretary, Chuck Hagel came under attack for having once said “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” conservatives were outraged. (The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens: “The word ‘intimidates’ ascribes to the so-called Jewish lobby powers that are at once vast, invisible and malevolent.”) Liberals were outraged by the outrage: The blog Think Progress assembled a list of writers denouncing the accusations as a “neocon smear.” The liberal understanding of anti-­Semitism is an inversion of conservative thinking about race. Liberals recognize the existence of the malady and genuinely abhor it; they also understand it as mostly a distant, theoretical problem, and one defined primarily as a personal animosity rather than something that bleeds into politics. Their interest in the topic consists almost entirely of indignation against its use as slander to circumscribe the policy debate.

And that is an interesting point, since indeed the left considers anti-semitism complaints to be a pretext for a smear.

BLACK, NO SUGAR

It never ceases to amaze me to see what kinds of problems are being blamed on “climate change.” Good or bad, these days it’s just about “de rigueur” for the author(s) of any report to attribute any and all problems on this mysterious catch-all phrase of “climate change.” What is even more vexing is that any scientific proof of such claims is not required. After all, it’s all self-explanatory and based on “settled science.”

Of course, the real cause of the declining coffee production is fungus- and insect-derived problems befalling these large mono-cultures. These problems would be easy to overcome with genetic improvements of the coffee plants as has been done for grains and other fruits. However, some coffee aficionados vehemently resist such intentions. They want their morning double-double beanies grown without the use of any “-icides” or genetically enhanced beans.

I think here is your chance to invest in my up-and-coming enterprise of the Greenland Mountain Coffee Cooperative (GMCC). With the claimed rapid melting of the ice sheet on Greenland it ought to be just a matter of time when your investment in coffee trees on Greenland’s slopes (yet to be planted) will bear a rich harvest. The GMCC is currently taking on new (only well-heeled) members; serious inquiries welcome. We’ll even invite you to a free double-double.

…from Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser