Rough Night

October 31, 2012 – 11:12 pm

Here’s a grim item: a time-lapse film of Sandy ravaging New York, shot from a camera above the East river.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

My Fifteen Minutes

October 31, 2012 – 11:26 am

Got picked up on Michelle Malkin’s popular Twitter-aggregator site today. Not quite ready to quit the day job just yet, though.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

October 31, 2012 – 10:47 am

Here’s a video that’s making the rounds, from Steven Crowder (the fellow who gave us that Lena Dunham parody a few days ago).

In this one Mr. Crowder “redistributes” Hallowe’en candy to reduce inequality. Needless to say, the kids he’s taking the candy from don’t like it.

It’s a funny video, sort of, and yes, we get the point — but let’s keep in mind that these are children, and perhaps are not exactly who we should be consulting to fine-tune our tax policy.

Instead, given how things have been going lately, I’d say start ’em off on foreign policy first, and see how that goes.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (30)

Welcome Back!

October 30, 2012 – 1:20 pm

Mangan’s is back up, after a long hiatus. Pop over for this item on the effects of high diversity.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (7)

Worlds In Collision

October 29, 2012 – 9:27 pm

From NOAA, here’s the Water Vapor Loop for the eastern US.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (13)

Uh-Oh

October 29, 2012 – 8:39 pm

Here’s the big Con Ed plant at 14th Street. Blowing up.

Here’s Long Island City and the East River. Jesus.

Three feet of water on the floor of the NYSE (maybe; there are conflicting reports).

This is getting biblical, folks.

Worst of all, now: NYU medical center reported to be without power and no backup power.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

It’s That Bad

October 29, 2012 – 7:08 pm

Tweeted just now by @tonywoodlief:

Hurricane Sandy forces closure of UN, causing intolerable delays in the global spread of moral equivalence.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey there are sharks in the streets.

Update: that last one’s a fake.

Here’s Atlantic City.

And Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Stuyvesant Town. Holy crap.

Dennis Miller (@DennisDMZ) tweets:

I’m in NY. Bloomberg just warned people if storm does drive them to cannibalism they should not use salt on their fellow citizens. #sandy

First Avenue.

(High tide still a little while off, BTW.)

14th Street.

And now, power failing in Manhattan. I can’t believe it’s still on here in Wellfleet…

Battery Tunnel now filling with water.

Manhattan now cut off – no way in or out.

OK, you get the idea. Watch the news.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Comic Relief

October 29, 2012 – 4:36 pm

Rickles at Reagan’s second inaugural. Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (0)

I Feel Better Now

October 29, 2012 – 12:57 pm

Cheers!

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Waiting

October 29, 2012 – 1:03 am

It’s 2 a.m., and getting mighty windy here in Wellfleet as Sandy moves north. Everybody knows the power’s going out sooner or later.

I know that the worst of this storm is going to be felt south and west of here, but my, that wind sure is howling, and at times like this it’s awfully hard to forget that the Outer Cape is only a little wisp of sand flung far out into a cold and angry sea.

By Malcolm | Posted in Cape Cod | Comments (10)

Feel-Good Story Of The Day

October 28, 2012 – 3:40 pm

This warms my heart in so many ways.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (1)

The Council Of One

October 28, 2012 – 2:49 pm

With a hat tip to Bill Keezer, here’s a look at the Obama administration’s increasingly routine use of kill lists and drone strikes to prosecute foreign policy.

I excerpt two notable quotes from this post. The first is by its author:

Benghazi illustrates the problem of the President having the authority for everything and the responsibility for nothing.

The second is from the great war historian B.H. Lidell Hart:

In peace we concentrate so much on tactics that we are apt to forget that it is merely the handmaiden of strategy.

As disturbing as this new tactic is, frankly I think we will need to get used to it. Even under historical, traditional conditions of war, where antagonistic nations pit uniformed armies against each other on the battlefield, and navies upon the sea, the transparency and diffusion of power inherent to representative democracy has always been a hindrance to the cohesion of strategic and tactical will, as well as to stealth and surprise. But in this not-so-brave new world, where the enemy arrayed against us is a shape-shifting army of shadows, and in which we good people of the compassionate West bind our military’s hands with rules of engagement better suited to a suburban paintball club than to mortal combat against implacable, pitiless foes, this sort of thing is about all we’ve got. I expect it will continue, no matter who wins the election.

By Malcolm | Posted in Military, Society and Culture, Politics, Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (0)

Circle Of Life

October 28, 2012 – 12:08 pm

Kevin Kim gives us a memorable visual recap of the recent execution by mortar round of a tippling Nork military bigwig.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (3)

The Panopticon Is Here

October 27, 2012 – 10:39 pm

With a hat tip to the indefatigable JK, here’s the latest on micro-drones.

When I was at Singularity University this past April, a recurring theme was that the coming ubiquity of tiny, cheap and efficient sensors will soon have a seismic effect on the technological, and therefore the human, landscape.

We like to think that we are much freer, in the modern liberal West, than our forebears were under the monarchies, autocracies, and dictatorships of the past. But the truth is that even under the most capricious and unenlightened despots, the lives of ordinary subjects long ago were rarely if ever affected directly by the sovereign, who lived in some far-off keep and was entirely unable to monitor or control the day-to-day activities of his people. But the advent of modern communication and transportation in the twentieth century, followed by electronic-record-keeping of financial transactions and other interactions, has made possible a far greater degree of interference by the government in the minutiae of everyday life — and the development in the twenty-first century of small, ubiquitous sensors, connected in real time to intelligent and adaptive monitoring systems, will carry this trend to its logical endpoint: enabling the continuous monitoring of everything any of us does, anywhere, anytime.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Technology | Comments (0)

Auxetic Material

October 27, 2012 – 10:38 pm

Never heard of it? Neither had I. It has a negative Poisson ratio.

Here. See also here and here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

Magnitude 7.7

October 27, 2012 – 10:28 pm

Breaking: big quake in the Queen Charlotte islands, off British Columbia.

Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Methinks They’re Going To Need A Bigger Rug

October 27, 2012 – 10:25 pm

Here’s a story that’s making the rounds today. I have no way of assessing its veracity.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (0)

Movie Night

October 27, 2012 – 8:26 pm

By now you’ve probably seen the Obama campaign’s video featuring Girls star Lena Dunham. It’s a pitch to female first-time voters, and the conceit of the video is to liken a girl’s first voting experience to her first sexual experience. “Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody,” the tattooed Ms. Dunham explains. “You want to do it with a great guy.”

Conservatives think this is just unspeakably creepy, for all the obvious reasons (and there are many, including that this is actually an imitation of a campaign video by Vladimir Putin), but liberals think it’s just funny and clever, in a worldly, sophisticated way.

If you haven’t seen it, here it is:

 

Today I found an amusing parody:

 

Both of these are trumped, however — and not by a little — by this horrifying, cult-like ad:

 

Ten days to go.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (7)

Wild Kingdom

October 26, 2012 – 10:31 pm

It being a lovely day yesterday, I stopped by the harbor to take in the view. Here’s the vista from Mayo Beach:

After a minute or so I noticed that there was some sort of large animal in distress just offshore. All I could see was a single dark flipper lifting out of the water and flapping about. I thought it must be another of the small cetaceans that beach themselves so often in the harbor at low tide (see here). I used my phone to take a low-res video:

(This is a really terrible video, but it’s that black blob popping in and out of the water in the middle of the picture. It looks much father away than it actually was.)

A fellow sitting on his porch nearby noticed this thing in the water too, and waded out in his shorts to get a better look. It turned out not to be a mammal at all, but a mola — a strange critter, also known as the ocean sunfish, that looks like a huge swimming head with one long fin on top pointing up, and another on the bottom pointing down. Here’s a picture of one:


Mola mola

 
As you can imagine, shallow water is a problem for these guys, and it turns out that the large swift tides in shallow Wellfleet Harbor often catch them unawares. (Regular readers may recall I found a dead one on the same beach about a year ago, as documented here.) This hapless mola was in a similar pickle — caught in about eighteen inches of water, it was unable to get vertical enough to swim properly, and so was just floundering along sideways, making very little headway.

I hope it got out of there eventually.

Meanwhile, as I was standing on the beach I noticed something else flopping about, this time on the mud-flat just a few feet away. I went over for a look, and saw that it was a razor clam on the move. For the benefit of those of you who have never seen a razor clam in full flight, I shot a video of that, too.

Here it is:

There you have it, readers: nature red in tooth and claw.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler, Cape Cod | Comments (5)

The Apology Tour

October 24, 2012 – 3:58 pm

Mitt Romney drew scorn from Obama supporters, and warm approval from the rest of us, when he referred to Barack Obama’s “apology tour” during Monday’s debate. Obama apologizing for America? Never happened, says the Left. (Indeed, they even said it here.)

Pah! Mere pettifogging and hairsplitting. Blogger Jeryl Bier explains, deftly and succinctly, here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (13)

Aid And Comfort

October 24, 2012 – 11:52 am

As we all know by now, the “Arab Spring” has led not to a flowering of pro-Western secular democracy, but instead has brought about a profound shift toward Islamist government throughout the region. Barry Rubin examines the President’s influence on this process, here.

Hat tip: VFR.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (0)

Currency Wars

October 23, 2012 – 5:49 pm

Do forgive me for all that doom & gloom in our previous thread.

Here, this’ll cheer you up. From Jim Rickards.

By Malcolm | Posted in The Economy | Comments (5)

All Done!

October 22, 2012 – 10:47 pm

Well, there you have it, America. We don’t have to watch any more debates until the next presidential campaign gets underway, which won’t be for several months yet.

Romney held his own well enough, and landed a few good blows (best of all: the apology tour). He looked steady and calm, and plausibly Presidential. That said, he seriously blew, in my opinion, the answer to “What is the greatest threat to America’s national security?” His answer was Iran’s nuclear program, but that was off by two. Closer would have been Pakistan (excuse me: “Pock-ee-stahn”), which is disintegrating into Islamizing chaos and owns at least a hundred nuclear weapons. The best answer, though, would have been to say that the biggest threat to America’s security is its unsustainable debt and deficit spending.

Romney also has his head in the clouds regarding the Muslim world generally; he seriously seems to believe that America actually has some chance of noodging the Ummah world into rejecting Islamic “extremism”, and that pinning our hopes on this constitutes a realistic policy. But I have long since given up on any mainstream politician, or pundit, or pretty much anybody with a career in public affairs to worry about, ever saying anything sensible or realistic on that score.

I think that Mr. Obama made a serious mistake with all that snark about horses and bayonets, and how we have “these things called aircraft carriers — planes land on them.” It was snotty and unpresidential, and it ignored, sarcastically, a legitimate point about naval strength. It seemed he often answered serious criticisms with petty personal retorts.

The snap polls are giving this one to Obama, and overall he probably gave as good as he got tonight, I think; he more than held his own in several exchanges. He needed more than that, though, and I don’t think he reversed Mr. Romney’s momentum. He also made one startling remark: that sequestration is “not going to happen”. Whut? Front page news, if true.

Bob Schieffer was by far the best of the moderators (save for jumping in to debate the Republican once or twice). I thought he did a good job.

So! Just some last-minute chess-playing on the hustings, and then off to the only poll that matters. I’ll be glad when it’s over. Keep in mind: no matter who wins, we’re completely screwed.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (36)

Final Round

October 22, 2012 – 5:55 pm

Readers, today we have come to the last debate of this historic election cycle. The stakes couldn’t be higher: upon this election hinges the very survival of this great Republic, and the security of our children, and our children’s children.

So here’s tonight’s drinking game.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

An Old Hand

October 21, 2012 – 11:05 pm

From about 1580, in fact. Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Shameless Filler | Comments (2)

Losing Our Lease!

October 20, 2012 – 9:06 pm

Just got this in the mail from the Obama campaign:

 

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (11)

The New Navy

October 20, 2012 – 8:25 pm

I’ve been hearing a lot lately about defense-spending cuts. All I can say is they’d better not cut this.

By Malcolm | Posted in Military | Comments (0)

Strengthen That Brand !!!

October 20, 2012 – 12:30 pm

With just over two weeks to go until the election, I know many of you are still in the critical “undecided” column. If so, then perhaps this rousing exhortation, sent to me this morning by African Americans for Obama, will help you make up your mind:

The American people and President Obama know how to create jobs right here in America to produce innovative quality products that strengthen the American brand, brings our needy people out of poverty, strengthens American small businesses, the middle class and strongly grows our national economy !!!

Do we want America fall behind the other nations of the world? Do we want to have regrets because we did not vote? Do we want to regret because we voted for someone, we do not know the agenda, we do not know the truth, we do not know the values, believes and commitment to our democracy and the American People?

NO, NO, NO !!!

The choice is yours, America !!! Get out there and vote.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (4)

“What Makes Your Big Head So Hard?”

October 20, 2012 – 11:23 am

Here’s a gloomy piece about my genetic homeland.

It contains this priceless quote from P. G. Wodehouse:

“It is never difficult to distinguish between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance.’

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (0)

Too Bad ‘Chartwell’ Was Already Taken

October 19, 2012 – 8:20 pm

Here’s an odd little story — a million maps found in a 948-square-foot cottage about to be torn down.

By Malcolm | Posted in Marginalia | Comments (0)

Forward!

October 19, 2012 – 8:14 pm

Want more of this? It’s up to you. Sixteen days and counting.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

And What A Scene It Is

October 19, 2012 – 8:09 pm

Some “random thoughts on the passing scene” from Thomas Sowell:

Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.

Yes, so much so that it doesn’t even seem audacious or remarkable any more. Eric Hoffer marked this as well:

The change that matters is the change of a society’s axioms. The 1960s saw a slaughter of axioms. It would be interesting to identify the new axioms. I can think of a couple: (1) The object of life is fun. (2) The world owes everyone a living.

Sowell again:

How are children supposed to learn to act like adults, when so much of what they see on television shows adults acting like children?

How, indeed? I call what he’s referring to “cultural neoteny“.

Sowell:

Whenever you hear people talking about “a living Constitution,” almost invariably they are people who are in the process of slowly killing it by “interpreting” its restrictions on government out of existence.

Not much I can add to that. The Commerce Clause and the General Welfare Clause have holed our Republic below the waterline.

One more:

I have never known a word to become absolute dogma, without a speck of evidence, the way “diversity” has.

Quite so. God help us all.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

Comic Relief

October 18, 2012 – 10:04 pm

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama did a little standup comedy at the Alfred E. Smith Dinner tonight. Have a look.

I’ve seen the President cracking wise before, but never Mr. Romney. I have to say, he was downright Carsonesque.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (2)

Jay Mark Johnson

October 18, 2012 – 7:44 pm

Amazing slit-camera photography. See here and here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Art | Comments (0)

Be Very Afraid

October 18, 2012 – 7:16 pm

I haven’t posted anything about martial arts in quite a while, so I thought I’d share this clip of some truly remarkable practitioners.

Hat tip: Matt Blazon.

By Malcolm | Posted in Martial Arts | Comments (0)

Romney, Syria

October 18, 2012 – 3:29 pm

I wouldn’t want anyone reading the previous post to think I’m particularly stoked about Mitt Romney; he’s a total squish on many issues of importance to conservatives, and just another democracy-exporting dreamer when it comes to foreign affairs.

Speaking of which: in this weeks Radio Derb, John Derbyshire zeroed in on the same comment from Mr. Romney’s VMI speech that I had singled out earlier:

In Syria I’ll work with our partners to identify and organize those members of the opposition who share our values and then ensure they obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks helicopters and fighter jets.

Here’s Derb:

Quote from the Governor, quote: “In Syria I’ll work with our partners to identify and organize those members of the opposition who share our values and then ensure they obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets ”¦ It’s essential that we develop influence with those forces in Syria that will one day lead a country that sits at the heart of the Middle East.” End quote.

In other words, Syria is Libya Two. Isn’t that what Romney’s saying? “Work with our partners ”¦” I guess that means NATO ”” you know, that military alliance set up to prevent Soviet forces from surging through the Fulda Gap into West Germany. So we and NATO are going to do what? “Organize those members of the opposition who share our values.”

Let’s see: Who have we got in the Syrian opposition? Some middle-aged clerks and schoolteachers who kinda like the idea of representative government, separation of powers, free press, et cetera, and who would like nothing better than to sit around in dusty rooms talking about those things all day long. Well, nothing except perhaps a U.S. refugee visa ”¦ None of these people could tell you how to strip a light machine-gun, but never mind: They share our values!

Who else have we got in the Syrian opposition? Tens of thousands of cold-eyed young fanatics, armed to the teeth by Iran, led by fighters hardened in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, ready to die for their faith, or to keep fighting for twenty years if necessary. Do they share our values? No, they spit on our values.

So tell me again, Governor, who are we going to help here? Who are we going to arm?

Who, indeed?

Meanwhile, somebody‘s been arming some of the Syrian rebels with MANPADS — portable surface-to-air missiles. This means that Syrian planes have to attack ground positions from higher altitudes, which in turn means less-effective air assaults with higher collateral damage. (Among other things, the latter makes the world humanitarian crisis that much more unbearable.)

I suspect the stuff is from Libya. After all, who benefits? If the international interest (shared by, among others, Turkey, Iran, and the U.S.) is converging on a truce, on getting Assad out without the pain of de-Baathification — in other words maintaining an Alawite regime, or at least strong Alawite influence in a new coalition — that seems to me at odds with the interests of the sort of folks who would be at the other end of a supply line in Libya. I’ll presume also that Egypt would have some role too, because the factions in Libya who would be involved in this are also well-represented there. It seems to me that the question of regional stability around Syria means a lot less to the Islamists in the Maghreb than it does to, say, Turkey (who will face a terrible refugee problem in the event of an all-out civil war in Syria) or Iran (who wants to maintain its influence in Syria, and a Mediterranean corridor, by way of its Alawite allegiances).

All this this is idle speculation on my part, of course. There are so many competing and overlapping interests at play in this conflict that it would be very difficult for someone like me to keep on top of it all, even if I spent all my time doing nothing else. Just following all the open-source material would be a more-than-full-time job.

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (1)

Galluping To The Finish

October 18, 2012 – 2:45 pm

Mitt Romney’s “steady erosion in the polls” continues: as of this afternoon’s Gallup survey, Romney now leads fifty-two percent to forty-five percent among likely voters.

Not that I put a lot of stock in polls, mind you — after all, only about nine percent of the people pollsters call actually respond. Nice to see this anyway, though.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

Not Politics!

October 17, 2012 – 3:03 pm

From Edge.org, here’s a fascinating article about human athleticism, and how it compares to that of other mammals.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science | Comments (2)

Whack-A-Mole

October 16, 2012 – 3:39 pm

Tim Carney brings the mallet down on a load of tendentious hogwash from Politico. Here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Let’s Get Ready To Rumble!

October 16, 2012 – 3:03 pm

Here we go again, folks. Tonight’s debate is now considered to be a must-win for the incumbent, thanks to what one of our commenters referred to not long ago as Mr. Romney’s “steady erosion in the polls”.

So what’s tonight’s drinking game? Well, this time, readers, you get to take your pick.

Sadly, I won’t be joining you; I’ll likely be somewhere on Route 95 as the bout gets underway, listening on the radio (a poor substitute for watching on TV while following along on Twitter, but it can’t be helped).

Bottoms up! And may the worst man lose.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (11)

1000 Words

October 16, 2012 – 2:30 pm

Possible debate strategy for Mr. Romney tonight: just stand there holding this chart.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Génération Identitaire

October 15, 2012 – 8:30 pm

Here. Hat tips to Bill Keezer and GoV.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (2)

This And That

October 15, 2012 – 2:15 pm

I must apologize for the thin content here over the past few days — from time to time the demands and obligations of personal life leave me no time for blogging. (I realize that for waka waka waka to go dark for a day or two deprives no one of oxygen, but a lot of people do pass though here each day looking for something new, and I hate to disappoint them.) So distracted have I been this past week that I’m rather badly out of touch with just about everything. My inbox is filled with personal correspondence, notes from readers, and digests of the latest scientific, political, and strategic-security news, and it will be several days yet before I can wade through it all.

Here’s a link, at least: reader Bill Keezer directs our attention to Victor Davis Hanson’s latest look at the Obama campaign. It would be naive to imagine that it will sway anyone’s vote at this point, but even if it serves only to encourage the Right and to vex the Left, that’s still a job well done, I think.

Here’s another: a new look for some old utensils.

And this: riots in the wake of an Obama victory? See here and here.

Kevin Kim comments on Sam Harris’s latest.

Muslims assemble at Google’s London offices to demand compliance with Islamic blasphemy laws. Money quote:

One of the speakers, Sheikh Faiz Al-Aqtab Siddiqui, told The Daily Telegraph: “Terrorism is not just people who kill human bodies, but who kill human feelings as well. The makers of this film have terrorised 1.6 billion people.

Riiight.

Blue-state blues.

Finally: aircraft carriers in space.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Narcissist-In-Chief

October 12, 2012 – 10:48 pm

For weeks now the Obama campaign has been offering a chance at dinner with The One to those who chip in a few bucks. (We commented here on one such solicitation.)

That dinner has now taken place, it appears. I know this because Mr. Obama just tweeted a picture with the heading:

Table for four: Kimberly, Mario, Joe, and Barack, at dinner in D.C. tonight.

“Okay,” I say to myself, “let’s have a look at the lucky, lucky winners.”

Here’s the picture:

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (2)

It Ain’t Necessarily So

October 12, 2012 – 10:30 pm

Some house-guests arrived sometime after midnight Thursday night  —  the night of the bizarre VP debate  —  and of course before anyone could go to bed we had to spend an hour or so arguing about politics. (They’re liberal sorts.)

Healthcare came up. So did the alleged “fact” that the healthcare system of the  U.S.A. is ranked 37th in the world.

You hear this often. It’s based on a notorious report by the World Health Organization, and it’s utter rubbish. Fully two-thirds of the score used in the rankings has nothing to do with actual health, but with how each nation rates on purely ideological metrics, such as whether the system is funded according to a sufficiently progressive policy of income redistribution. The rest is made up of manipulative jiggery-pokery. For example, the U.S.A. is ranked a lowly 19th in life expectancy. Take away death from fatal injuries, however, and we’re number 1. (How my driving my car off a cliff, or being shot, is any reflection on our healthcare system is not explained.) Our low ranking in infant mortality turns out to be due to the fact that we actually try to save a great many babies that would simply be recorded as “stillborn” elsewhere. If they persist for a few days and die, into the infant mortality stats they go. And so on.

Writing at Commentary, Scott W. Atlas, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of radiology and chief of neuroradiology at the Stanford University Medical Center, explains just how bad this oft-cited “study” really is.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Society and Culture | Comments (0)

In Cold Blood

October 11, 2012 – 10:40 am

From Danger Room, here’s a damning summary of the runup to the assault in Libya (thanks to Lokilinkster for the link).

An excerpt (emphasis added):

The security situation in Benghazi was “a struggle and remained a struggle throughout my time there,’ (.pdf) said Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, the State Department’s Site Security Team commander in Libya from February to August 2012. Wood, who is to testify to the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, added that “targeted attacks against westerners were on the increase.’

By July, the three diplomatic security teams on the ground in Libya were whittled down to one team “restricted from performing security work and limited to only training local guard force members,’ according to Wood. That team was eventually withdrawn too. [State Department security officer Eric]Nordstrom asked for an extension of the SST teams, but said he was turned down because there “would be too much political cost.’

“There was a complete and total lack of planning for what was going to happen next,’ he added. “There was no plan, there was just hope that everything would get better.’

As Danger Room first reported, security was then largely left in the hands of British security firm Blue Mountain, which employed unarmed Libyan guards and paid them $4 per hour.

Our enlightened Mideast policy: hope for change, but mind the “political cost”. Our ambassador and three others murdered on American soil in an act of war  —  and our President, who had ample warning of their peril but chose to do nothing about it, swans off to Vegas and the Letterman show, meanwhile deploying his sock-puppets to lie to the American press about what he knew and when. Just a “bump in the road”, after all, and there’s an election to win.

Are you angry yet, readers?

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (2)

You’ve Got Mail!

October 10, 2012 – 11:44 pm

OK, enough grim reality. Let’s all lighten up and take a break. Here, for example.

By Malcolm | Posted in Tomfoolery | Comments (0)

The Truth, For Once

October 10, 2012 – 10:41 pm

You’ve probably heard people mentioning Lara Logan’s blunt talk about Afghanistan last week, but you should take twenty minutes and actually watch it. It’s here.

If you are informed enough, and wise enough, not to be taken in by the steady diet of lies and self-serving propaganda this administration feeds us about our Mideast adventures (the latest being the transparent fairy tale we were told about Benghazi), you’ll find it refreshing to see a mainstream journalist like Ms. Logan (who was stripped naked and sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square by the “Facebook revolutionaries” our useful idiots were cheering for at home) pushing back.

 

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (22)

Bump In The Road

October 10, 2012 – 11:16 am

From the Heritage Foundation, here’s a sharp video on the Obama administration’s deceitful, ass-covering response to the Benghazi attack.

But hey, look  —  Big Bird!

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Foreign Affairs, Jihad | Comments (0)

Time Out

October 9, 2012 – 9:33 pm

I haven’t said much about politics for the past few days; that’s because I haven’t had much to say. It’s been delightful to watch the discomfiture of  Mr. Obama’s media catchfarts as they’ve watched the momentum shifting sharply in Mr. Romney’s direction, though.

A couple of things worth mentioning:

First, Mr. Romney’s foreign-policy speech certainly did little to make me excited about the man. He clearly harbors the same hopeful delusions about the Middle East that most American politicians seem to, whether on the Left or the Right. An excerpt:

In Syria I’ll work with our partners to identify and organize those members of the opposition who share our values and then ensure they obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks helicopters and fighter jets.

Yeah, that’s bound to go well.

Second, I hope you’ve all noticed Ms. Clinton’s efforts to distance her State Department from the Obama administration’s lies about the nature of the Benghazi attack. Obviously the chummy façade those two have presented since the inauguration is starting to crack; perhaps Ms. Clinton is beginning to see this campaign taking on water, and is thinking about 2016.

I’m looking forward to the VP debate. Don’t be surprised if Joe Biden acquits himself rather well.

 

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (1)