/>
SOUTH OF HELL
Even as the mourning for Mandela goes on, one child is raped every three minutes in South Africa and three children are murdered every day.
If there is anything that the world ought to mourn, not only today, but every day, it is a horrifying reality in which a South African woman is more likely to be raped than to learn to read, a quarter of the men admit to having raped and men with AIDS believe that they can find a cure by raping a baby.
Troubling facts like these defy the easy inspiration of the happy ending. They remind us that history does not stop the way that a film script does. There is no moment when the crowd cheers, the camera pans up and the audience is free to leave the theater and look no further because the story has ended.
South Africa in the Shadows
SOVIET IMITATION OF CAPITALIST WEBSITE FAILS MISERABLY
Khrushchev bought seed corn from the United States and unveiled a massive corn planting campaign. But the Soviet agricultural system treated corn the way that it had wheat with disastrous results. Corn planting techniques weren’t a great mystery; but the Soviet system was a rigid bureaucracy incapable of learning anything new or adapting its methods to the task. Instead, like all bureaucracies, it tried to adapt the task to its usual methods and its ideological armor made its ignorance into a virtue.
The same thing happened with Healthcare.gov. Instead of trying to adapt the methods to the task, the system treated the construction of a website like any other policy; with rigid guidelines emerging out of constant meetings setting up an inflexible process for getting it done without actually understanding what it was that was being done.
Obama, like Khrushchev, was humiliated and caught by surprise when he realized that his grand project had fallen apart. Both Socialist leaders had thought that it was enough to order their subordinates to imitate a successful free market product without understanding that it’s the production process that makes the product. Trying to imitate the product without the production process is a recipe for disaster.
Only Capitalism Can Fix Obama’s Socialist Website
...from the comments
Tina Trent
So what we have is a Lysenkoist website that promises to transform my weak bourgeois private-sector health insurance into sturdy winter collectivist health insurance through the magic of Marxist/Leninist agronomy.
Now everything makes sense.
Habbgun
Are you sure ? I was discussing it with my artist friend and he agrees that it is an example of post-modern art. The website challenges our culturally conditioned ideas of what is and what isn't a website. It places the programmer in the same position as the artist. If the artist expresses himself and is satisfied with the work who are you to say he is not an artist? Similarly if the programmer feels he has truly expressed how he feels about the process and the data who are you say he is not a programmer?
Who indeed?
TWEETS FROM THE MURDERED AMERICAN TEACHER IN BENGHAZI
"Why kill the sheep yourself for Eid? This is Benghazi. Leave it at an embassy for a couple days and let the Beards blow it up."
"Someone asked "how could we make benghazi better?" My first thought: fewer Libyans."
American Who Was “Libya’s Best Friend” Killed in Benghazi
ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER FINDS GOD -"President Mandela's life is the closest thing we have to proof of God. I will never be able to thank him enough for his inspiration."
THE MADNESS OF MULTICULTURALISTS
The Somali Muslim settler was caught raping a dead woman. In his defense, he claimed that it was consensual. And it wasn’t his first rape. But the Swedish prosecutor’s reason for not deporting him sums up everything that is wrong with the West.
“I do not understand why a Somali woman in that case would be less valuable than a Swedish woman in this context. He might commit crimes down there if he were to be deported, “said Jonsson.
Somali Muslim Who Raped Dead Swedish Woman Won’t Be Deported
Hillary Clinton Partied While Benghazi Mission Begged for Help
UNCLE SAM IN A CHINA SHOP
In Obama’s world, events abroad are a reflection of policies in Washington. China, Russia and Iran react to his moves rather than having motives and agendas of their own. This follows the left’s misreading of every major international event as a response to American foreign policy. Good events reflect a good foreign policy. Bad events reflect a bad foreign policy. This masochistic solipsism is at times indistinguishable from isolationism.
As are its consequences.
If America is responsible for everything; then it’s safest for it do nothing. Instead of viewing world politics as a dynamic system; the world becomes a purely reactive place. American power is treated as omnipotent and destructive. America can do everything, but should avoid doing anything except reassuring everyone that it has the best of intentions which it will prove it by doing nothing.
Obama’s Post-American World
New York Democrat Blames Knock-Out Game on “Jews With Bags of Money”
IN AMERICA, YOU RIP OFF GOVERNMENT
Of the 63 babies born to Russian diplomats and their spouses in New York City between 2004 and 2013, 58 births — 92 percent — were in families that received Medicaid benefits, the complaint says.
In their defense all the diplomats and their families voted for Obama… twice.
Russian Diplomats and their Wives Illegally Defrauded Medicaid
Judge Declares Illiterate Muslim Deserves Citizenship Because He is Schizophrenic - "He is incapable of advanced schooling and his career prospects are limited.”
NEWS WITH ATTITUDE
Jeff Zucker cut his teeth on the Today Show and considering his time at NBC this is the least surprising news ever. It’s obvious that CNN has no future as a news network.
So there’s going to be more attitude. And a lot more gotcha “documentaries” and some reality shows.
Zucker came in promising to “broaden the definition of news”. Considering that news today already consists of so many cat videos, celebrity scandals and web morality mobs that it’s indistinguishable from Buzzfeed most of the time… that isn’t good news for news.
CNN Pres Wants Network to Stop Doing News
Kerry Knew Russians Were Cheating on Arms Control Treaty He Supported
THERE'S ALWAYS MONEY FOR JIHAD
Creepy Nazi manchild Max Blumenthal is getting a new forum to promote his deranged screed about the Jewish State.
The NAF received $1 million from the State Department, the Ford Foundation, Bill Gates and Google’s CEO. Other donors include the McArthur Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Bank of Palestine, the Rockerfeller Foundation, the Tides Foundation and various Soros franchises.
Should the State Department be in the business of dropping 1 million on a liberal think tank where Soros Jr sits on the board when it couldn’t afford to provide security for the diplomatic mission in Benghazi?
Obama and Soros Funded Liberal Think Tank Promotes Destruction of Israel
California Considers Giving Away Free Electric Cars to the Poor
INTERESTING PLACES
It’s easy to slam all the nonsense about Islamic extremism as willful denial and the notion that Islamism is something separate from Islam, rather than the political implementation of Islam through Islamization, as delusional.
But this is potentially a quite important step. For the first time, a major Western country is moving to criminalize a variant of Islam. And that’s an interesting precedent.
The UK is separating a part of Islam (based on specific characteristics, e.g. a worldwide Islamic state, approval of violence) that the religion shares as a whole. And it’s doing this by classifying it as a political ideology… rather than a religion.
UK Moves to Criminalize Islam(ism)
HILLARY REFUSES TO LET KERRY TAKE CREDIT FOR HER APPEASEMENT
And who was the first high American official to suggest the U.S. might accept an Iranian uranium enrichment program? None other than Clinton, all the way back in 2010. In an interview with BBC that year, the then-secretary of state said of Iran: “They can enrich uranium at some future date once they have demonstrated that they can do so in a responsible manner in accordance with international obligations.”
She made similar statements to other journalists that year, including Time’s Michael Crowley. It was obviously a carefully constructed trial balloon. Clinton tethered the balloon with conditions—“responsible manner,” “international obligations”—but there it was, fluttering beguilingly. “No, absolutely” had just been amended to “Yes, possibly.”
Hillary Clinton was for the Iranian Nuke, Before She was Keeping Quiet About It
Student Paper Editor Claims Mustaches are Racist - “How are people who do not have a prostate supposed to partake in this cause?”
CONSCIENCE OF A "PALESTINIAN"
Samarin Asrar murdered Tzvi Klein, an Israeli village match teacher, in 1991. Klein had been born in Czechoslovakia right after the Holocaust and taught elementary school at the local village. He enjoyed watching basketball and was involved in education. While driving in the car with his daughter, he was shot in the head. His daughter called for help, but he died shortly thereafter leaving behind his wife and three children.
He was 44 years old.
Murderer of Israel Math Teacher Released Due to Pressure from Obama Regrets Nothing
Illegal Alien Charged with Hate Crime for Mistaken Race Slashing - There are a million multicultural stories in the naked city.
FREEDOM, ACADEMIC FREEDOM
Now, after an extended debate, the American Studies Association’s National Council has rammed through a resolution calling for the boycott of Israeli academia… for academic freedom.
EI is critical of Israel, on dubious grounds, but still lists it as Category Two, no restrictions, alongside Italy, the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Palestine on the other hand is Category Three, Academic Freedom Restricted, alongside Zimbabwe, Egypt, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
American Studies Association Calls for Boycotting Israel Academia for Academic Freedom
ARC OF JUSTICE
When it comes to violent crimes, anti-white hate crimes tend to be more violent than anti-black hate crimes. For example, the FBI lists an anti-white murder in 2012, but no anti-black murder. An anti-white rape, but no anti-black rapes.
African-Americans Commit Disproportionate Share of Hate Crimes
THEY WERE OUTRAGED BEFORE IT WAS COOL
Occupy Wall Street isn’t dead. Its spirit lives on in Bushwick where angry liberal hipsters are occupying other angry liberal hipsters.
Craft beers are being thrown through windows and copies of Pitchfork Magazine are being used as clubs. There’s even talk of constructing some artisinal Fair Trade IEDs.
Liberal Hipsters Declare Occupation of Wealthier Liberal Hipsters
THE ROUNDUP
We learn that Peggy Noonan is at her heartfelt best, noting as she does — clearly, and not for the first time (though probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 or 5 times by now) — that this Obama fellow, despite his manufactured polish, his practiced speech, and his inflated credentials, may just prove ill-equipped to really lead effectively and handle the challenges facing the nation.
...
Or, to put it another way, one of the women who helped guilt the American people into electing a transformative Marxist with a dubious background and no governing experience, a man who, after his drug-addled youth hung out with domestic terrorists, academic (and activist) anti-Semites, and got his religious counsel from a man steeped in hatred of Whites and Jews, as head of the free world — while simultaneously turning down her nose at figures like Sarah Palin, who has proven over the course of time to be every bit as prescient as Ms Noonan was bamboozed, hoodwinked, and gloriously conned — is now writing to tell us the President is not who he promised he’d be.
Jeff at Protein Wisdom. What Peggy Noonan is really saying, what David Brooks was saying, was what Harry Reid said, "He was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a "light-skinned" African American "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one," as he said privately."
There are no doubt private quotes like that from the Republican elite as well. Noonan and Brooks aren't insane enough to say something like that in print. But unpack David Brooks' trouser pant moment.
“I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”
That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”
“Obama sees himself as a Burkean,” Brooks says. “He sees his view of the world as a view that understands complexity and the organic nature of change.” Moreover, after the Bush years, Brooks seems relieved to have an intellectual in the White House again. “I divide people into people who talk like us and who don’t talk like us,” he explains. “Of recent presidents, Clinton could sort of talk like us, but Obama is definitely–you could see him as a New Republic writer. He can do the jurisprudence, he can do the political philosophy, and he can do the politics.
All that talk is a fancy version of what Reid just said. Obama is "like us". He's a black candidate we can get behind because his trousers are perfectly pressed and he cares about the same things that "we" care about.
AND FURTHERMORE...
...from J.E. Dyer at The Optimistic Conservative...
Another answer to the “What if?” question is this one: it means human government can, in fact, be hijacked and perverted – even when we’re the ones who cast the votes on it, and even when the chief executive is brought to power by the means specified in the U.S. Constitution. Yes, we can be deceived. The most highly credentialed among us can be the most deceived of all. This is as good a time as any to take that to heart.
There’s no mechanism that can guarantee government never gets out of control or oversteps its bounds. But all that means is that we’ve had to learn something our Founders already knew. You keep government limited because Obamas happen, and they do the most damage if you’ve carelessly let government’s control over your life grow too much.
...
If it’s all true, it means the common sense of too many of us has been severely compromised. Obama isn’t a normal politician; Chuck Schumer and Lindsay Graham are normal politicians. They annoy us because they’re so transparently from the same planet as us. We and they have the same touchstones for fact, meaning, mendacity, excess. Frankly, I suspected back in 2007 that this wasn’t the case with Obama – and then he went to Berlin for his Riefenstahl moment, and set up Grecian columns to frame himself in Denver, and I was sure of it. Common sense enables us to recognize that Obama is an outlier. We don’t have to rethink our comfortably cynical ideas about politics and politicians because of Obama. But quite a few of us probably need to rethink Obama.
In some ways the focus on Obama the man blocked people's perception of what he truly was, and I don't mean whether he was born in Kenya or whether his real father was Vladimir Lenin. Those are important things in their own way, but they're not the biggest point.
The big point about Obama is that he is the incarnation of the left. A very pure incarnation. The rest follows from that. The left doesn't follow laws. It doesn't compromise. It has no regard for any external ethics other than its own. Its goal is absolute power.
But there's only so many ways to convey that to people.
Once you understand what the left is, the variable details of Obama's biography are entirely possible and matter less. It's like knowing that Stalin used to rob banks. It's a point, but it's not really the point. It's one of the details of what the left is.
HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE...
You have to ignore a long and grisly list of atrocities and lies to honor the man and the ANC , a vile terrorist army that invaded and murdered many Africans who did not agree with their communist politics. They employed sharp shooters to murder innocent Zulu people on the streets.
All that is forgotten in the blur of revisionist history today. Mandela and his wife, a woman who put car tires around her enemies necks and lit them on fire to murder them, are no heroes.
Apartheid was no great shakes but neither was Mandela. Winning does not make you right or a good person.
at Lemon Lime Moon
IDOLATRY
Mandela must be the hero-martyr who bought black freedom from white oppression with his own long incarceration; who set an example of forgiveness; who remained peaceable despite intense provocation to resort to violence. He must be a model of patient virtue under racist oppression; the perfect unvengeful victim who rose to be the gentle leader of a new democratic South Africa.
That picture is false, like the one of Gandhi as a good and simple man. And Gandhi no more liberated India from the British Raj with his passive resistance movement than Mandela overthrew apartheid with his revolutionary leadership exercised from a prison cell.
But the truth about Mandela and Gandhi will not matter. It will not make any difference to what they must stand for in order to satisfy a human need. Mandela the Idol is bigger far than the real man, and so is the Idol named Gandhi. In each case the myth has already replaced the man.
Jillian Becker on the idolatry of Mandela
THE DEAD LEFT RIDES ON
A little musical accompaniment for my article, The Liberal God Dies Again
When that rough god goes riding
And then that rough god goes gliding
They'll be nobody hiding
When that rough god goes riding on in
Riding on in
There'll be no more heroes
They'll be reduced to zero
When that rough god goes riding
Riding on in
Riding on in
Riding on in
Comments
Thank you for the Mandela & political friends pictures which I used, to bring all those that blindly venerate the departed back to earth.
ReplyDeleteThe only comment or question is WHY does Israel listen to a crazed, demagog, Communist, Muslim as Obama. Why does Israel still maintain a relationship with this government. I would close my Embassy in the United States and add Kiss my A
ReplyDeleteI come here to get my daily dose of truth. Today I think I've overdosed. You could have at least posted a disclaimer or warning or something.
ReplyDeleteDaniel, with deepest (sincere) appreciation for your ability to precisely locate the indiffinitiveness of much conceptivity, I'd like to posit an alternative aspect to the Mandela story, and maybe you might find value in this viewpoint.
ReplyDeleteMandela is a chap who in his youth, in intent, was a bomber: he was a true believer. Then he went to jail for a long time and emerged a uniter, and for this very valuable and rare attribute he is accorded accolades, undoubtedly deserved. My contention here, Daniel, is that contemporary politicians should not aspire to similar hero status: most politicians percolate up through the ranks, and when they reach the stardom Mandela reached, it is because of mastery of talents in the political arena of which Mandela was never required to show mastery (he was on Robben Island). Most politicians are narcissists of the first degree. Mandela merely ('merely') sat in jail, and was of a character that, bombing accusations aside (he probably was co-opted in that effort, I wouldn't be surprised), would probably not have had the necessary psychological pathology to be a modern national leader. Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had the qualities to devolve the powers they acquired back to the people, and Mandela might have been of that ilk. As a South African (military experience 1977-78), I am of the opinion that although Mandela's cosying up to the Arafat's of the world was extremely dubious, he was merely naive or completely bamboozled, but not innately evil. We'll never know, but my point is that current politicians follow a different route to stardom, are a self-selected group who got there by pathological narcissism and severe personality disorder rather than going to jail for 23 years, and should expect no such appreciation.
Re: mustaches are sexist.??? Just ask any woman over 65 how hard she works to keep mustaches/whiskers at bay. I speak from experience. The necessary maneuvers are increasingly time-consuming as the years advance. If it were not
ReplyDeletefor vanity, I could prove this ignoramus wrong in just one year with lovely white facial hair.!!!
I also used the pictures, posting them on a public university discussion forum where they will be exposed to anywhere from 20 to 2,000 individuals, depending on the attention the thread itself (which was not my own) gets.
ReplyDeleteThey can not claim ignorance.
Actually, it looks like Idris Elba (perhaps best known as Stringer Bell in The Wire) will be the next actor to portray Mandela in a boi-pic.
ReplyDeletelogprof
Post a Comment