Observations From the Back Row: 12/31/14

Definition leads to clarity. Clarity leads to understanding. Understanding leads to good decision making. Only then can we have harmony! Rich Kozlovich

Editor's Note: In order for things to make sense of what the left does we need to understand is that everything the left says is a lie. Lies of commission and lies of omission, and everything else is a logical fallacy, with just enough truth to give it credibility – all proclaimed as laudable goals that sound wonderful, but the consequences are always ignoble.

 Whether it involves helping the poor or protecting our health, the track record of the left has been disastrous ever since the French Revolution.  They almost have a monopoly on being wrong.  Unfortunately leftists never have to pay the penalty for being wrong. Everyone else pays it for them, which allows them to jump from one irresponsible leftist crusade to another, often times going in a direction that’s 180 degrees in the opposite direction of positions they’ve taken in decades past.  Constantly changing themselves into angels of light while leaving darkness in their wake.  The second thing we must understand is that leftism has no moral foundation.  Leftism’s foundation is based on moral nihilism, where nothing is right and nothing is wrong, unless it's a moral position that promotes their goal of attaining power.  A moral position they will happily abandon as soon as it's no longer necessary.  Once we understand all of that everything else they do makes sense.

 

All that is left to do then is to develop the intellectual arguments necessary to defeat them, and the courage to state them.  Please enjoy my picks for today!

Obama’s See-No-Islam Policy Forces Military Rethink, “We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not goingto defeat it - As I have said every day for the past decade, you can’t defeat an enemy that you refuse to name or speak of (in accordance with Obama’s sharia-compliant restrictions on jihad). Just this morning I said (yet again) that the political, cultural and media elites still fail to grasp the theological issues that drive this savage movement. Now a General is admitting it. It is good that someone in a position of power and influence finally understands that the rivers of blood will not stop under Obama’s see-no-Islam, hear-no-Islam, speak-no Islam edict. What took so long? “We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it,” said Maj. Gen. Michael Nagata. They do not understand...

 

Can Liberals Really Be this Stupid? Apparently they Can - I have grown accustomed to the fact that liberals believe they can somehow change human nature and create a utopian world or, at least, a world that fits their definition of utopia. Although I still find it disturbing, I no longer find it surprising that liberals base their opinions and actions on emotionalism rather than logic or reason. A steadfast refusal to let facts get in the way of their presuppositions seems to be in the DNA of liberals, yet they think they are brighter than anyone else. For example, recall when Jonathan Gruber, the puffed up academic from MIT, talked condescendingly about the stupidity of the America public. Frankly, if he had limited his denunciation to just liberals, I might have agreed with him….

Obama’s “Peace Partner” Iran Hangs Seven on Christmas - Obama say, “Iran could be a “very successful regional power.” The Iranian regime hanged seven citizens on Christmas morning and at least 12 others in the days before and after the holiday, according to Iranian dissidents monitoring the human rights situation. Seven prisoners being held in Iran’s Abdelebad prison were hanged “at dawn on Christmas day,” according to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an Iranian opposition group. The latest round of state-sanctioned killings—which have hit an all time high in the past year—came just days after President Barack Obama praised Iran in an interview at the...

Wash Post ‘Conservatives’ Slam Ted Cruz Wing of GOP: ‘Too Much Clarity’ - Too much clarity? The staff “conservatives” at the Washington Post are throwing the kitchen sink at the Ted Cruz wing of the Republican Party again on the Post editoral page on Tuesday. In his columm, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson dismisses conservatives (like Cruz) who favor so-called “apocalyptic showdowns” with Obama on his executive-power trips. Gerson concluded by talking 2016: “Those who judge a Bush-Clinton race to be a tired retread or disturbingly dynastic should consider the more novel and dynamic alternatives. A Warren-Cruz race would be less of an electoral choice than a national trauma. It’s been said that too much clarity darkens.”  “Too much clarity darkens”? What kind of baloney is that? (It’s apparently taken from Blaise Pascal’s Pensees.) One can look at Dole, McCain, and Romney, and say “Too much moderation loses.”…..

Obama Will Shut Border Agency To Aid Illegals, Says Aide - Pfeiffer used the Huffington Post’s softball interview to prod the GOP leadership toward backing away from a fight over amnesty. President Barack Obama will block 2015 funding for the Department of Homeland Security if Republicans includes spending curbs on the president’s “executive action,” says a top aide. That amnesty action includes the award of work permits, drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards and tax rebates to at least four million illegal immigrants, despite the wage-cutting surplus of American workers in Obama’s economy. The adviser, Dan Pfeiffer, told a Huffington Post interviewer Dec. 29 that the president would “absolutely not” sign a 2015 spending bill that would include limits on amnesty spending……

Federal grant for jihadist recruit - These outrageous blunders, compounded exponentially by foreign aid to jihad groups and nations, reflect the failure of Western elites to grasp the theological underpinnings of this religious movement….A TOP Sydney school student was praised by Arthur Sinodinos and given $2000 by the federal government shortly before flying out of Australia to join Islamic State’s propaganda unit in Syria. It is unclear whether Samir Atwani, who graduated from Sydney’s Canterbury Boys High last year after receiving a university admissions score of 96.25,...

Will Obama Defy Congress on Gitmo Prisoners?  - President Obama has long advocated closing the U.S. terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He likely would have done it long ago, had Congress not stopped him.  Now, however, Obama is not in the mood to abide by anything Congress says. And he is again talking about closing Guantanamo. The result could be an ugly and protracted fight between the president and lawmakers of both parties. But it's also possible Obama will avoid a conflict and simply use his executive authority to release a prisoner here, a prisoner there, until Guantanamo is very nearly empty -- all done without any meaningful debate. Meanwhile, as he has done with immigration, the environment and Cuba, Obama will essentially dare Congress to do anything about it. It's all part of the new executive-action presidency......

Stunning data on average compensation for municipal employees in California - Forget the old-fashioned term “civil servants”; America’s new ruling class is government employees. Would you like your kids to go to work for an outfit where employees average between two hundred grand and a quarter mill? Forget about investment banks or law firms; tell them to go to work for a fire protection district in California. Transparent California, a project of two free-market think tanks, the California Policy Center and the Nevada Policy Research Institute, has released a database of municipal (cities, towns, and special-purpose districts such as water and fire protection districts) employee salaries that is stunning. The North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area had the highest averages, but other areas of that metropolis and the state as a whole also featured extraordinary averages, not to say individual cases.  Some highlights:.....

New IRS Rules Crack Down on Nonprofit Hospitals

The federal government is cracking down on nonprofit hospitals under ObamaCare in an attempt to prevent harsh collection practices and steep charges for the uninsured.  Newly finalized regulations from the Internal Revenue Service, announced Monday, will require nonprofit hospitals to “take an active role in improving the health of the communities” by making payment methods more fair and making costs more transparent.  For example, nonprofit hospitals are banned from asking for money in patients’ rooms or selling debt to third-party companies unless they make a “reasonable effort” to offer financial assistance. Each hospital must also take steps to improve the health of its community, including a semi-annual evaluation of the area’s “health needs.” “For hospitals to be tax-exempt, they should be held to a higher standard,” Emily McMahon, a deputy assistant secretary for tax policy at the Department of the Treasury, wrote in a blog post Monday announcing the rules…… ​

Hysteria and Its Discontents - Jonah Goldberg should have known he would be painted as a rape apologist when he refuted the oft-repeated “one in five” campus rape statistic. The National Review Online editor was locked in a Twitter debate with Matthew Dowd of ABC News, who posited, “[O]ne out of five college women are either raped or victims of attempted rape. thats [sic] a fact.”Well, no. It isn’t a fact. That statistic has been proven, again and again, to be nothing more than a token of feminist mythology, similar to the claim that wife-beating spikes on Super Bowl Sunday. The Department of Justice’s most recent comprehensive study of rape on college campuses concludes that the number is actually .03-in-five, making Dowd’s claim roughly a thirty-three fold exaggeration. The emotionalism that envelopes the topic of rape makes truth a commodity much less valued than concern for the victims, some of whom are genuine, and some of whom are false accusers. Ron Fournier of National Journal demonstrated this tendency to undervalue truth when he joined in the chiding of Goldberg, tweeting: “Jonah, you’re splitting statistical hairs to undermine an argument against …. rape. Let’s call it a day.” Fournier begins by referring to the exaggeration of the problem by a factor of thirty-three as merely “splitting statistical hairs,” then makes clear that he thinks Goldberg a real heel for “undermining” an argument against rape……. The end result of this kind of endless hyperbole is utter hysteria. Lives are ruined, freedom curtailed, and demagogues empowered when truth-challenged activists try to one-up each other with their alarmist claims. I, for one, am fed up with it. Lying for a good cause doesn’t mean that you care. It means you’re a liar…….

Ferry catastrophe: Muslims beat women and children to save themselves - The media and Western elites will explain this away by saying, It’s a cultural thing. Like honor killing, female genital mutilation, etc. What culture is it? The Islamic culture. So forgive me for not embracing multiculturalism. The West is best. Under Islam, women are chattel, less than men. Their response was not quite what we saw on, say …. the Titanic……

Does Color Make A Difference? -Harvard professor, Charles Ogletree, has finally spoken the truth to the dilemma facing the world of law enforcement. In a well researched study, he found that it makes no difference as to the race or gender of the police, blacks and browns are less law-abiding than whites and commit more crimes than whites. Black, brown and white police were generally more committed to enforcing the law, even when the perpetrators were their own race. Yes, there are dishonest police, but the percentage is extremely low, and the focus on them works to lessen respect for them all. In my estimation, police do an incredible job, given the fractures, dangers and disdain placed upon them by race-baitors, leftists and police-haters that always seem to rise to the top of the pot.  So let’s look to what could be the determining factors that lead to professor Ogletree’s conclusion……

Muslim cleric: Even black men who smell bad get into Paradise - For years, Muslim Brotherhood groups and Islamic supremacists have worked feverishly to co-opt the race narrative from civil rights groups here in America. Seeing the success of “white guilt” pushback, Muslim groups have long mythologized imaginary “islamophobia” as “racist,” despite the fact that Islam is not a race. Further, there is no ideology more racist than Islam. Black in Arabic means slave, and many Muslim countries still traffic in black slavery. In a Friday sermon delivered in Maarat Al-Nu’man, Syria, Saudi fighter Sheik Abdallah bin Muhammad Al-Muhayseni...

Wheat Production Sets New Records Thanks To GlobalWarming -  Global wheat production set new records in 2013 and 2014, contradicting alarmists’ claims that global warming is reducing wheat harvests.  Global warming alarmists and their lapdog media allies decided Christmas Week 2014 should be filled with claims that global warming is crushing wheat production. Grist, Reuters, the UK Guardian, and the Columbus Dispatch are among the many news organizations parroting alarmist assertions that global warming is reducing wheat harvests. The Reuters article, for example, cites a study co-authored by several global warming alarmists to claim, “In recent decades, wheat yields had declined in hotter sites such as India, Africa, Brazil and Australia, more than offsetting yield gains in some cooler places including parts of the United States, Europe and China.”  Reuters did not indicate whether it had fact-checked the straightforward claim that global crop yields have been declining in recent decades. Reuters also failed to provide any countering viewpoint, giving readers the impression that declining global wheat yields are universally recognized. Knowing, however, that global warming alarmists and their ventriloquist dummies in the media often make straightforward factual claims that are proven false by objective, verifiable data, I decided to fact-check their straightforward claim about declining global wheat yields……

Global-warmingtrue believers are in denial - I have a theory as to why Americans don’t worry all that much about global warming: High-profile purveyors of climate change don’t push for reductions in greenhouse gases so much as focus on berating people who do not agree with their opinions. They call themselves champions of “the science” — yet focus on ideology more than tangible results. Their language is downright evangelical. Recently, science guy Bill Nye joined other experts who objected to the media’s use of the term “climate skeptic.” They released a statement that concluded, “Please stop using the word 'skeptic’ to describe deniers.” Deniers? Like Judas?  Why, they even hear voices from science. “Science has spoken,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently proclaimed. Some men think God talks to them; others hear Science…….

Editor’s Note:  Please give this article a good go.  I know this one is bit technical and you may feel your eyes rolling back in your head…but work through that. This one’s worth it!

Will a return of rising temperatures validate the climate models? - The coincidence of the current plateau in global surface temperatures with the continuing rise in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has raised many questions about the climate models and their forecasts of serious anthropogenic global warming. This article presents multiple reasons why any future increase in temperature should not be regarded as a vindication of the current models and their predictions. Indefinite time scales, natural contributions, many adjustable parameters, uncertain response to CO₂, averaging of model outputs, non linearity, chaos and the absence of successful predictions are all reasons to continue to challenge the present models. This essay concludes with some suggestions for useful immediate actions during this time of uncertainty.....

De Omnibus Dubitandum

(Question Everything!)