The Razor

TownHall writes about CBS news bosses trying to undermine their own reporter’s efforts to uncover the truth in the murder of four Americans including the US Ambassador to Libya at Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. Sharyl Attkisson is finding life difficult at her job after reporting on the story, with her bosses cutting back her stories and underutilizing her after she has doggedly pursued a story that all mainstream media outlets have studiously ignored. Over the past few months I have been surprised to see such work coming out of CBS News having long given up on the outlet after Dan Rather and his bosses accused Bush two months before the 2004 election of benefiting from favoritism during the Vietnam War in a series of letters that were quickly exposed as fakes. So I was somewhat surprised to see CBS News leading the investigation into the incident. But I guess it’s no surprise to discover such reporting is an aberration, as CBS News cuts the legs out from under their own reporter in order to preserve their left wing bias.

As a child while other kids played outside or watched cartoons, I watched the Watergate hearings. Those hearings brought about by the reporting of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein left me with a deep appreciation for the role of the media as antagonistic to whomever is in power, Republican or Democrat. As a political realist I recognize the truth of Lord Acton’s adage that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely regardless of which political faction is in power, so the role of the media in a free society should be to act as a watchdog and expose corruption in order to benefit the People and protect the Republic. So I am deeply saddened to watch the media doggedly pursue any and every story against any centerist, conservative or libertarian politician while allowing leftist politicians to go unmolested.

Thankfully we have the rise of non-mainstream media such as Drudge Report, talk radio, and Fox News, but as AllahPundit notes, in response the leftist mainstream media has attempted to “ghettoize” these news sources by portraying them as biased advocates while portraying leftist mainstream media as unbiased. The sinking ratings and circulations of these mainstream outlets brings to mind Gandhi’s quote “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The left must feel extremely threatened by these non-leftist sources as it has ignored, laughed at, and fought them every step of the way.

But the Truth has a way of coming out regardless of whether it is convenient for the Left or not. Lefties may choose to believe that the non-Left is focusing on Benghazi as part of a continuation of the “vast right wing conspiracy” against the Clintons, but doing so forces the left to employ cognitive dissonance by suppressing the fact that the story hit during the 2012 election when Obama was running for re-election. The left may also swallow the administration line that at the time the administration blamed the Nakoula video based on initial intelligence reports, but those reports did not suggest the video had anything to do with the attack and the video excuse was added by administration officials. So you can’t blame the intelligence community for something it did not report and that was only fabricated later by the administration.

This story will continue, and Clinton’s run the White House will guarantee it does. The leftist media can ignore, laugh at, and stamp its feet all it wants, but the fact remains its darling in the White House lied to the American people and attempted to cover it up. I’m sure somewhere in Hell Nixon is laughing.

So the LA Times reports a Pew Study finds gun crime has plunged even while American perceptions of it assumes it has risen. Setting aside the obvious issue of what is driving Americans to one conclusion while the facts lead to another, the study raises some other, less obvious issues.

If guns are to blame for violent gun crimes, one would have to assume by the study that the number of guns in American hands have fallen. Yet the opposite appears to be the case, with the highest per capita gun ownership in the US, with roughly one gun for every American man, woman, and child. Over the past four years guns have flown off the shelves, and it is likely there are more guns in private hands today than there were four years ago, although the exact number is difficult to know since such records are not kept. But gun manufacturers are working overtime to fill order backlogs, and the most popular weapons such as AR-15 “assault rifles” are hard to come by. Gun prices have risen as demand has outstripped supply, yet fewer of these weapons are being put to criminal use.

Why?

Because as gun rights supporters have been saying for years, guns don’t kill people, people do. If the opposite was the case American streets should be awash in blood, but they aren’t as writer Barry Snell notes. As as the Pew Study shows, American streets are safer today than they were a generation ago.

So while the Pew Study punctures the liberal myth that guns cause violence, it also pokes a hole in the conservative myth that the breakdown of the traditional family is the root of violent crime. During the same period of the study, the number of out-of-wedlock births has risen. Non-traditional marriages such as those between homosexuals have become more accepted. There are record numbers of people cohabitating. If the breakdown of the family was supposed to lead to a more violent society, it hasn’t.

More likely it’s demographics. Crime spiked in the 1960-80 period as the Baby Boomer generation reached their teens and twenties, the peak time for criminality. As people age they become less impulsive and their criminal behavior is either held in check or condoned in jobs like Federal Reserve Chairman or Goldman Sachs executive. Of course the demographic news isn’t entirely good. While the Baby Boomer generation is less criminal, it is older and requires the smaller cohorts of younger generations to support it in its old age. So younger people might have less chance of being mugged in New York City than their grandparents did, but they’ll be mugged by the taxman. This could explain why suicide rates are spiking among middle aged Americans – proving that guns don’t kill people, aging hippies do.

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: Joshuapundit –Days After Boston, Obama Pressures Israel To Release Terrorists As A ‘Goodwill Gesture’

Noncouncil:  MarkSteyn-The Collapsing of the American Skull

Full voting here.

I’ll admit I’ve been a bit mystified why the Left supports the misogynistic and homophobic religion of Islam, attacking Libertarians and Conservatives who question the religion as being “extremists” and “Islamophobes”. Benjamin Wiker, writing for Human Events, explains that modern liberalism has its roots in and defines itself against Christianity. As a result…

Liberals therefore tended to approve of anything but Christianity. Deism was fine, or even pantheism. The eminent liberal Rousseau praised Islam and declared Christianity incompatible with good government. Hinduism and Buddhism were exotic and tantalizing among the edge-cutting intelligentsia of the 19th century. Christianity, by contrast, was the religion against which actual liberal progress had to be made.

So, other religions were whitewashed even while Christianity was continually tarred. The tarring was part of the liberal strategy aimed at unseating Christianity from its privileged cultural-legal-moral position in the West. The whitewashing of other religions was part of the strategy too, since elevating them helped deflate the privileged status of Christianity.

The problem is that Christians aren’t the threat to that Muslims are today, and so the Leftist view of the world has a huge blind spot that prevents it from seeing the threat Islam itself poses to the liberal ideals of women’s equality and the rights of homosexuals. As a former liberal myself it took the al Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to force me to question my beliefs, and the 9-11 attacks and the celebrations that erupted throughout the Muslim world to forever change them, but neither these attacks nor the many that have followed seem to have drawn many away from the self-defeating ideology at the heart of modern liberalism. So liberals will continue being blind to treatment of women and homosexuals, and the intolerance that lies at the heart of Islam.

This: Police say liberal student activist threatened herself with rape in Facebook hoax, framed conservatives

Reminds me of this:

Mel Brooks is a genius. Meg Lanker-Simons is not.

Arm both sides.

The optimal goal is stalemate, to create a quagmire that bogs down both sides, sucking up resources and destroying men and material for however long this state can be maintained. The idea is to encourage both sides to use up what they have against each other so that neither can threaten you after the conflict is resolved.

In a conflict where there are no good guys, where the civilians have been brainwashed through their religion to hate us and suspect us as being the cause of their suffering, there is nothing to be lost by actually making it so. In Syria we have an Iranian-backed Shiite regime fighting a Saudi funded, al Qaeda manned Sunni insurgency. None of the players in the conflict are freedom fighters believing in the establishment of a secular based, peaceful regime in Syria, and nothing will be gained by the United States committing itself to one side or the other.

Obama’s indecisiveness is actually accomplishing this goal. Iraq, a country whose government the US established, is allowing overflights of weapons and munitions from Iran to resupply the Assad regime in Syria. At the same time the US encourages the Saudis and Gulf states to provide arms and material to the insurgents attempting to overthrow the Assad regime.

To put it bluntly, every dead insurgent or Syrian regime soldier is one less insurgent or soldier dedicated to fighting the United States and its allies. The suicide bombers that attack Assad’s regime will not kill American soldiers at checkpoints in Afghanistan, just as the Iranian special forces captured and executed by jihadis will not kill Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.

While this may strike some Westerners as morally repugnant at first, consider the alternatives. If the Assad regime emerges from the civil war victorious, the hand of Iran will be much stronger throughout the region. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Syria would be in a much better position to threaten America’s only true ally in the region, Israel. A positive conclusion to the conflict would embolden Iran and provide an end to the drain of resources the current conflict draws from the regime, allowing it to refocus on its nuclear program which not only threatens Israel but Europe and in the long term, the United States. On the other hand, if the Alawite Assad regime is overthrown in Syria, what follows will make the Libyan Afterparty in north Africa look like a juice party at a geek fraternity by comparison. The victorious rebels would make Syria into a terrorist training camp, exporting instability and violent attacks throughout the Middle East, but particularly against Israel and Europe. Syria would become the new Afghanistan, run by Wahhabi fanatics dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the assimilation of the West. When viewed from a purely utilitarian American perspective, a successful overthrow of the regime may in fact be worse, forcing the US to intervene militarily with boots on the ground and repeating the errors of the Iraqi occupation.

Neither situation is palatable from the American perspective, so the only option is to support both sides indirectly until they are thoroughly weakened to the point where they cannot threaten the United States or its allies. Turning Syria into a Vietnam-like quagmire for both Iran and al Qaeda is an opportunity that has fallen into Obama’s lap, which when combined with his terrible leadership skills, may be the best luck America has had in its foreign affairs since Mikhail Gorbachev became the premier of the Soviet Union.

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: The Right Planet –Rush for Judgement: The All-Star ‘’Calumnists’’ of the MSM

Noncouncil:  Michael Totten- The Beginning of the End for Hezbollah

Full voting here.

Six years ago I wrote about how conspiracy theories were alluring, thereby attracting attention of some conspiracy theory believers in the comments section of the post. In the days since the bombing attacks in Boston I have watched the conspiracy theories blossom into full flower, something that two of my friends noted.

D starts off the conversation (WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT AT LINK BELOW):

I can’t help myself. The whole thing seemed off from the beginning. Tell me I’m losing it?
http://buelahman.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/are-you-just-a-believer-or-do-you-think/

My response:

We have an administration that lies to the people and tells them their lives have never been better. You have a media that repeats these lies over and over. Yet people look around them and ask themselves whether or not this is true and realize that their lives aren’t better and that they are being fed a constant stream of lies. This is made worse by the administration’s trumpeting of itself as the most transparent in History when the opposite is the case.

Is it any wonder that conspiracy theorists are going crazy over this event?

I founded my blog to counter the conspiracy that thrived after 9-11. Today we are witnessing a similar blossoming of such theories made more potent by the toxic political environment Obama and the Democrats have created during his tenure.

People such as the poster of the article aren’t crazy, D, not with this administration in place. I still believe Occam’s Razor and even Carl Sagan’s statement that “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof” proves his/her argument is wrong, but he or she isn’t crazy and neither are you for considering such things in our poisonous political atmosphere.

My friend J chimes in:

The conspiracy theory is the perfect example of confirmation bias because if you’re looking for it you’ll find it. That being said, something still stinks about this whole thing. Did these guys shoot the MIT police or didn’t they? Did they rob that 7-11? If you just committed a terrorist attack why would you do either of those things, let alone stay in Boston? And what about the Saudi national that was in the hospital under armed guard that is suddenly being deported, especially since there are pictures of agents carrying a spool of det cord out of his apartment?

And another thing…Chechens? Since when do they give a shit about the US, they terrorize their own people (Beslan, opera house)..and its not like we’re Putin’s BFF.

These guys are some of the best analysts and managers I’ve worked with in the banking industry, and neither one of them is stupid by any stretch of the imagination. The three of us also read Zerohedge, and the comments over there remind me of the intellectual free-for-all that followed 9-11 when the attack became a giant Rorschach test. Anti-government libertarians and anarchists see the attack as a “false flag” operation with the Tsarnaev brothers puppets pulled by strings controlled by Obama (if you’re a Republican), the Koch Brothers (if you are a liberal), and the Jews (if you are an old-school asshat.) Some of these people are clearly nuts, but the vast majority of them don’t trust their government or the media.

It’s difficult to trust an administration that conducts “Operation Fast and Furious,” a program by which the federal government provides guns to Mexican drug cartels in exchange for dead border patrol agents and gun control in the USA. Or an administration that refuses to investigate the death of its own ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi Libya or even allow the survivors of the attack to speak to Congress. Or an administration that demands more gun control laws while refusing to to prosecute gun crimes in Chicago, one of the country’s most violent American cities. Or the billionaire mayor of New York City who states after the Boston attacks, “(Y)ou’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.” As one commenter put it,

“We’re going to suspend your rights to protest, bear arms, privacy, and trial by jury.”
“Why?”
“To protect you from terrorists.”
“Why do we need to be protected from terrorists?”
“They hate you for your freedom.”

Evidently Bloomberg forgot Franklin’s quote “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” Perhaps since liberals long ago stopped teaching about “dead white men” like Franklin, Bloomberg never learned that.

Are people being paranoid when they question the official narrative when the administration is full of people who use terms like “narrative” to describe factual events? As if there was no Truth, just a made up story that everyone agrees upon. How very relativist.

Henry Kissinger is credited for the saying “Even paranoids can have enemies,” and while I still personally believe the facts will prove the Tsarnaev brothers are guilty of the attacks in Boston, the behavior of this administration, its media handlers, and the Wall Street kleptocrats that keep it in power makes me at least somewhat sympathetic to the conspiracy theorists’ seemingly outrageous plots and cherry picked evidence. The Tsarnaev brothers may have committed this terrorist attack, but there are other crimes that are being committed today in the halls of power that are going unpunished and ignored, and that behavior becomes the fertile soil in which conspiracy theories will continue to germinate and thrive.

Update: Questions about the attack linger. For example, it turns out the surviving Tsarnaev was unarmed while he was hiding in the boat. If so, then how did he shoot himself in the neck? And how could there have been a firefight? He hid in a fiberglass boat, one that was shot to pieces by authorities using .223 caliber ammunition. I own a .223 rifle, and its round can perforate tree stumps 2 feet thick. The boat offered as much protection as a newspaper. Either the authorities can’t shoot worth a damn or the Truth has yet to be exposed. As my friend J says, something still stinks about this whole thing.

Here is a classic example of how stealth inflation works.

The product is salsa for sale at Walmart. The old jar at the top is 16 oz while the new jar is 15.2 oz, a difference of roughly 5%.
Note how Walmart is advertising it as “new” in a different section away a few feet down from where it sells the old product for the exact same price. Normally Walmart doesn’t waste the effort moving the new size away from the older, larger size, but it has provided a section for the producer containing other of their products.

5% less salsa for the same price won’t kill anyone, but it is an example of how producers are hiding inflation from consumers, and how consumers pay more for products without realizing it. The company passes along increased prices to the consumer while maintaining market share that could be lost to brands that do not raise their prices. A buyer might notice a $.10 jump in the $2 price of salsa, but he may not notice when he receives $.10 less product. Hence the stealth designation.

Pretty clever, huh?

Congratulations to this week’s winners.

Council: Joshuapundit –Unmourned, Unloved and Politically Inconvenient

Noncouncil:  Caroline Glick-Moral Relativism and Jihad

Full voting here.

So contrary to the hopes of some on the Left, the bombers of the Boston Marathon are not white tea party types like myself but Muslims from Chechnya. Dzhokar A. Tsarnaev, 19, and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had been in the country for several years. One of the assumptions made by liberals about Islamists is that they misunderstand us, that if they only got to know us better (and if we stopped blowing them up in their homeland and supporting the evil Jews) they’d like us and wouldn’t want to harm us. Attacks like 9-11, the thwarted Time Square bombing, and the Fort Hood Shooting are in the eyes of liberals based on ignorance just as much as they are on misguided foreign policy.

This thinking has its roots in the writings of Erasmus, something that I covered here a few years back.

From the Machiavellian perspective, the struggle between Islamic terrorists and the Free World is a zero-sum game of winners and losers whereas Erasmus’s humanists view it as a game where everyone can win. Once the Islamic terrorists are educated to understand that America isn’t anti-Islamic, they won’t seek to destroy it. Terrorists and Americans can coexist in peace – all that’s necessary is a few apologies and a worldwide media campaign showing the terrorists how much we love Muslims.

Cases like the Tsarnaev brothers undermine the “they don’t understand us” argument originally put forward by Erasmus 500 years ago, as do the inconvenient facts that all of the 9-11 hijackers as well as the plotters including Osama bin Laden himself spent years studying in the United States and the West. These men are not ignorant, and to imply that they are shows an elitist and racist arrogance that liberals would abhor if they could see themselves from a perspective other than their own. A photo narrative by Johannes Hirn notes,

Tamerlan says he doesn’t drink or smoke anymore: “God said no alcohol.” A muslim, he says: “There are no values anymore,” and worries that “people can’t control themselves.”

Let’s consider that a moment. I don’t believe I am stuffing a straw man when I write that to a greater degree an American liberal believes the following:

1. Atheism is the sign of an enlightened mind.
2. All religions are the same, based on ignorance, and the enemies of knowledge.
3. Women are the equal of men and should be treated as such in all spheres both public and private.
4. Western culture is inferior to other cultures, or at best, equivalent.
5. Sexual freedom is the only expression of freedom that must be protected at all costs.

In the US there are no doubt several protestant denominations of Christianity that would agree with at least some of these propositions. The most liberal sect of Islam I know of is the Ismaili sect, and even that sect would disagree with all of the propositions. Do you think Tamarlan Tsarnaev believed in any of those propositions with the possible exception of western inferiority (or rather did, evidently blowing himself up before capture)?

My abhorrence of Islam isn’t based on fear or ignorance. I’ve read the Koran and more importantly, the Hadith, or interpretations of the Koran in the centuries following Muhammad’s death. I’ve lived in a Muslim country, eaten halal food and have celebrated Muslim holidays. I have studied Islam and its history and although do not consider myself an expert on either I know my way around the religion well enough so that I can confidently say that I know what I don’t know. How many liberals have done the same? A liberal looks at the Muslim community and blames American conservatives for Islamic extremism. I look at the Umma and wonder why, based on the teachings of Muhammad and the interpretations found in the Hadith, all Muslims aren’t Islamic extremists. Muslims have a pretty good idea of what American life and life in general in the West is like, and the truth is that a sizeable minority of them don’t like it.

These Muslims find the idea of a government without G-d just as abhorrent as liberals find a government with G-d. Islam makes it clear that all law derives ultimately from Allah through his prophet Muhammad, which is why the Hadith sprung up to handle legal questions that Muhammad himself didn’t address while alive. By this logic Western society and the Shi’a heretics who accept a limited separation between religion and state is heretical by its very existence, and lacking Allah’s support, weak and Evil. In Islam there is no freedom in the Western sense of the word; instead there is a freedom that comes through submission, a type which any pre-Enlightenment European, fundamentalist Christian married woman or perhaps any dedicated servant or slave could relate to, but a concept which would be completely alien to most raised in the post-Enlightenment West. What liberals refuse to understand is that the message of Islam, of complete submission to Allah, can be appealing on its own. The idea that a man like Osama bin Laden, born of wealth, educated in the finest schools in the West would choose a philosophy where women have few rights, homosexuality does not exist, and unbelievers are allowed to live only as future converts to Islam over the Leftist paradise of sexual and economic equality must rankle the liberal, if she would only allow herself to be rankled. I suppose it is possible. After all, Charles Krauthammer, David Horowitz and are ex-liberals as am I.

Charles Krauthammer once wrote Conservatives think Liberals are stupid, whereas Liberals think Conservatives are Evil. What’s ironic is that libertarians and their conservative allies feel towards Liberals the same way Liberals feel about Muslims, that they are ignorant and misguided, that if they just understood us better they’d like us. But unfortunately Liberals see us the way we see jihadists, as enemies meant to be crushed. How else to explain the vain hope by the Left that the bombers turned out to be white men from the Right? And how sad?

Because it seems to me the only thing the bombings at the Boston Marathon have provoked is anger.
Maybe we need a new word for such acts, furyism, because I’m not seeing any terror or fear, just pure white-hot anger.

I’m just saying…

The barking drifts into my dream where it’s incorporated into the plot, but as it lasts I know something in real life is wrong and I force myself to awaken. I come out of my sleep grudgingly, and check the time: 3:30am. The barking is louder now, almost frenzied, and I can tell the dogs are excited. I am no Doctor Doolittle, but spend time with your animals and pay enough attention to them and you’ll understand how they communicate. Whatever it is that has them riled up is new, but has them scared. I dress and grab a high-power flashlight and open the gun safe. Bears are known in these parts and one was sighted on the property next to mine, so I grab the .223. I have no intention of shooting a bear if I come upon one, but I choose the tool necessary in case I need to protect myself or the dogs.

The night is clear and moonless, and all the constellations in the sky are the ones I’ll be seeing next season at a more opportune viewing time. I click the flashlight and scan. “Blue” the pack coward, the one I rescued and intended to become the guard of the pack, is at the edge of the clearing leading into the woods barking wildly. She runs back towards me, obviously relieved to see me, then runs forward in a vain attempt to prove she’s fierce. She’s not but I love her anyway. I call to the dogs, and shine the light forward. The beagle appears, her eyes catching the light and glowing somewhat demonically. A demonic beagle. Not exactly the hellhound of ancient mythology, and I’d appreciate the irony if my heart wasn’t throbbing in my ears and I wasn’t scared to the point where each step became like trudging through sand. Hearing my arrival the frenzy of the pack reaches a crescendo. Now the dogs want to show their bravery and I’m worried that they are going to do something stupid and get hurt. A dog is no match for a bear’s claw which can gut it from nose to tail with a single swipe. I push through the underbrush, thorns catching my jeans and cutting my arms as I hold the flashlight in one hand and the rifle in the other. I begin to regret my choice of weapon. A .223 round has too much velocity and will pass through an animal and put me at risk of hitting one of my own dogs. Perhaps the .12 gauge with buckshot would have been the wiser choice. But what do I know about guns; I grew up in the suburbs and even at the age of 12 my mother forbade buying a toy gun from the local Ben Franklin that shot pea sized rubber balls a whole 5 yards for fear I’d hurt myself with it. I’m learning as I go along.

Self doubt mixes with fear as the barking grows louder, but at least the adrenaline dulls the pain from the thorny vines. I push forward and catch in the light the stray shepherd I feed but who will not let us touch. He’s perhaps the toughest dog of the pack, and by far the wiliest given that he freely roams the surrounding area. But he defers to the dog I believe is his sister, a shepherd chow mix I rescued at the nearby bridge, and the pack alpha, a lab/border collie mix who used to be too scared to go into our backyard to pee in the suburbs at night without the Wife or me being with her. They are dancing and barking around the base of a tree, leaping up in a vain attempt to catch what shelters in its limbs above them. I raise the light expecting to see a huge brown mass of fur.

And find a snarling mouth full of sharp teeth in a long grey snout followed by a loud cat-like hiss.

A possum. The dogs treed a possum. All this over a possum? Possums may not look particularly dangerous when they are squished on the side of the road, but when they are up close to your face, those sharp teeth and claws are pretty scary, so scary in fact that hillbillies in these parts are known to get drunk and catch them by hand for fun. I thought this was a myth until a mid-level told the Wife about finding her husband covered in scratches one night with a can of beer in one hand and a possum by the tail in the other, grinning proudly. Different strokes for different folks I suppose.

Well my pack isn’t exactly the smartest and they are still learning the woods, and honestly I’m too relieved and tired to care. I don’t have to shoot anything, and no one, including the possum, is going to get hurt this morning. I call to the dogs and convince them one by one to leave the tree, and follow me back into the house. Eventually there’s just the shepherd, and he’s got better things to do than mess with a possum, so he’s the last to follow me back to the house where he stops at the edge of the driveway.

It’s now 4:00am, and the dogs are still excited, running around inside the house and barking as if they had won a great battle. And perhaps they had in their own little doggie minds; I was too tired to convince them otherwise. I locked the gun back up, undressed and returned to bed, assured that something even as small as a possum would not escape notice by my pack. It’s not the best alarm system in the world, and heaven knows it’s not cheap given the cost of dog food and vet bills, but it works.