http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/aurora-fort-hood-a-tale-of-two-massacres/ The murder victims of James Holmes, who slaughtered 12 and wounded 50 at the Dark Knight Rises movie premier in Aurora Colorado, were still sprawled in the theater when ABC News chief investigator Brian Ross on-air tried to link the killer to the Tea Party––without even a modicum of vetting the information, as ABC’s […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The first reaction to the Aurora Massacre was the usual call for making sure that “this never happens again”. Everyone from New York City Mayor Bloomberg to author Salman Rushdie to mystery writer Patricia Cornwell called for imposing gun control to insure “this never happens again”.
And yet if we were to confiscate every privately owned firearm and outlaw the manufacture of new ones in the country, if we were to forcibly institutionalize anyone suspected of being mentally ill, and if we added naked scanners to movie theaters; we still could not insure that this will never happen again.
And yet Colorado has half the murder rate of Illinois, as adjusted for population. Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and New Hampshire, all full of guns, have far lower murder rates than gun control states like New York, California and Illinois. According to Bloomberg, “If we had fewer guns, we would have a lot fewer murders.” But guns are not proportional to murders.
Utah has the second highest gun ownership rate in the country and the eighth lowest homicide rate. Wyoming, the state with the fourth highest gun ownership rate has the fourth lowest homicide rate. Meanwhile New York is 48th in gun ownership, but is the 18th highest in its murder rate.
We escape tragedy by searching for control and this is an obscene gift that we give to liberalism and its counterpart, the police state. Both promise us a better and safer world in exchange for our freedom. After every tragedy they promise us that they can keep it from happening again. They can’t. No one can.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-look-back-at-east-german-writer-erwin-strittmatter-a-845248.html
Erwin Strittmatter was one of the most successful and popular writers in East Germany. Now, on his 100th birthday, several new books dig deep into his past. The result is an unflattering picture of a man who was forced to find his peace with both the Nazis and the communists.
An appealing figure. An unconventional codger who devoted himself to writing and horse-breeding on a remote farm in Brandenburg. A successful author and one of the best known writers in East Germany.
His novels, “Tinko,” “Ole Bienkopp,” “Der Wundertäter” and “Der Laden,” were best-sellers in socialist East Germany, and one was even used in schools. Hundreds of thousands of copies were printed, and his readings attracted large crowds.
When it came to popularity, Erwin Strittmatter could hold his own with fellow East German writer Christa Wolf. He was also inundated with letters from enthusiastic readers seeking consolation.
He received the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic several times, and he was the first secretary of the Association of German Writers for a short while. At the same time, he surrounded himself with the aura of a misfit. And there were indeed confrontations with the leadership the East German communist party, the SED, which sometimes led to printing delays and publishers’ artificially restricting the size of the print runs. This made his books all the more appealing to readers, who read between the lines and felt as if they were reading underground literature.
His success continued after German reunification. In 1996, a respected high school was named after him in Spremberg, a town in the eastern state of Brandenburg. The 1998 TV adaptation of the trilogy of novels “Der Laden” (The Shop) received both the Adolf Grimme Prize and the German Television Award.
But Strittmatter was no longer alive to receive those awards, or to experience the 1996 revelations about his collaboration with the East German secret police, the Stasi, and the doubts voiced in 2008 about his own account of his participation in World War II. Strittmatter was buried in 1994 near his farm.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/mccarthyism-and-mohamed-elibiary/?print=1 McCarthyism and Mohamed Elibiary Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and four other representatives are now being accused of McCarthyism [1] over the letter [2] they sent to defense, diplomatic, intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies asking them to investigate Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in the U.S. government. The implication is that Bachmann, like McCarthy (at least according to […]
Bulletin July 23, 2012 Israel is monster that eats Palestinian children, in Palestinian art on PA TV http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=7174 by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik A Palestinian Authority TV host asked an artist to discuss one of his paintings “dealing with the Palestinian nation’s problems such as the Gaza massacres.” This is the painting: The […]
http://www.jidaily.com/54cb1?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider&utm_campaign=f1bf018c19-Insider&utm_medium=email If the international community wants to do something useful in Syria, it could assist an orderly population separation into ethnic nation states. A massive population separation is already underway; Kurds are fencing off their northeastern corner of the (erstwhile?) Syrian state, Alawites are fleeing to their historic coastal province, Armenians are fleeing to Armenia, […]
The Queen’s Jewry In the history of the British monarchy, there have been only two Diamond Jubilees. Last month, Elizabeth II celebrated sixty years on the throne. In 1897 Queen Victoria marked the same milestone. To mark Victoria’s Jubilee the communal leader and scholar Lucien Wolf published an article entitled “The Queen’s Jewry” that set […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/picture-worth-1000-words-billions-of-barrels-of-oil-and-thousands-of-jobs
What do you do as president when faced with record-high gas prices, unemployment above eight percent and the Middle East sitting on a powder keg that could go off at any time?
Shut down oil drilling along about 85 percent of the U.S. coastline, of course.
You might have already heard about Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s five-year leasing plan for offshore drilling. Maybe you didn’t hear about it, since it was released the same day as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision to be able to fly under the media radar as stealthily as possible.
Every five years, the Department of the Interior must create a drilling and permitting plan for the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), which has to go through 60 days of congressional review before approval.
Here is what the plan looked like under the Bush Administration:
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/aurora-colorado-politicizing-a-tragedy The horrific attack by (alleged) gunman James Holmes at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater last week was naturally big news – and naturally, media outlets rushed to cover the tragedy as it unfolded. As of this writing, 12 people are dead, including several children, and 59 were wounded, many in critical condition. Most Americans […]
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2189/Forty-Five-Percent.aspx From YouGov polling: Polling conducted last week suggests that whatever remaining effect of the release of the birth certificate that persisted through January is completely gone today. From June 30-July 2, 2012, YouGov surveyed 1000 Americans and asked whether “Barack Obama was born in the United States of America.” In the table below, I […]
