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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Sunday, August 16, 2015

The World As I See It!

“Journalists hold themselves up as being the people who are trying to bring truth to news consumers. And I would say they have an obligation, an ethical obligation, to be better at what they do”…..“They owe their readers a duty to be more vigilant, to ask the right questions, to not fall into these biases of thinking that just because it’s exciting, it’s worth reporting on.” Greg Conko, American Council on Science and Health Scientific Advisor

Libya: ISIS executes 22, hangs them on crosses, burns Medical Center down, “A real massacre is taking place” 200 dead - The human toll and unimaginable fallout from Obama, the wrecking ball, continues. Was this Obama’s plan for Libya when he ousted Gaddafi? Where was the statecraft? What was the objective? The jihadis have wreaked havoc on that nation. Gaddafi not only contained the jihad threat in Libya, but in the region as well. Obama’s “JV” team is taking over Libya.  Tripoli – Islamic State group jihadists have beheaded 12 people and hung them on crosses during a battle for the coastal city of Sirte, the national news agency LANA reported on Saturday. The fighting for control of Sirte, hometown of slain dictator Muammar Gaddafi, has been raging since Tuesday, with one top Libyan diplomat warning of a “massacre”... Also - Muslims on Twitter Cheer Explosions, Massive Fire at Texas Chemical Plant: “May Allah Burn America”

Horrific moment ISIS throw two men off a roof for being gay – before they are stoned by baying mob including children - It is terrifying for gay people to live in a Muslim country that is under the sharia or even respectful of sharia law. What is so egregious is that openly gay men in the West like Anderson Cooper loudly and repeatedly condemn me for my counter jihad work and opposition to sharia. And he is hardly alone: the vast majority of gay organizations stand staunchly with their would-be executioners.

Abortion

Whistleblower Says Aborted Baby Parts Sometimes Taken Without Patient’s Consent – ‘No Way They Would Know’ - In the latest investigative video of Planned Parenthood’s harvesting of aborted baby parts for medical research, a whistleblower claims that Planned Parenthood and biotech company StemExpress apparently did not always obtain proper consent from patients before procuring aborted baby parts for medical research. “If there was a higher gestation, and the technicians needed it, there were times when they would just take what they wanted,” former “procurement technician” Holly O’Donnell says in the video, released by the Center for Medical Progress. “And these mothers don’t know,” she said. “And there’s no way they would know.”

Black Pastor: ‘Black Lives Matter … Begins in the Womb’ - Pastor and author Gerard Henry was so frustrated about the recent revelations documented in undercover videos of Planned Parenthood abortionists harvesting and selling organs of aborted babies and the recent failure of the U.S. Senate to take away federal funding from the organization that he made a video expressing his views on the matter. Henry, former host of the BET gospel music program “Lift Every Voice,” chided senators and even President Barack Obama for not facing the facts about the nation’s largest abortion provider.

EXCLUSIVE: National Portrait Gallery Defends Planned Parenthood Founder Exhibit - The Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery has issued a statement regarding a request by a group of black pastors to have a bust of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger removed from the museum.  CNSNews.com asked the gallery’s press office whether they would honor that request and remove the bust that is part of its “Struggle for Justice” exhibit, or defend its inclusion.  On Tuesday, the art museum issued a statement saying that the bust is in keeping with the museum’s goal to “see the past clearly and objectively” and that while some of Sanger’s beliefs “are now controversial,” her inclusion in the museum’s collection represents the “full spectrum of the American experience.” 

My Take – Whether I despise Sanger as an icon of the left or not, I actually I agree with the Institute on this.  She’s an important part of American history, but aren’t the Confederate flag and Robert E. Lee also important parts of American history?  Where’s the media now?

Congress

Poll: 23% of Americans View Boehner Favorably; 22% View McConnell Favorably - A new Gallup poll on Congress and its leaders shows that only 23% of Americans view House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) favorably, and only 22% view his Senate counterpart, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) favorably. Gallup further reports that Boehner’s ranking is similar to that of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in October 2010, when only 26% of Americans viewed her favorably. Also, for then-Senate Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in October 2014, he was viewed favorably by only 21% of Americans. When looking specifically at Republicans, Gallup found that only 37% had a favorable view of Boehner, and only 34% had a favorable view of McConnell.

Cuba

Kerry heads to Cuba, but challenges remain - John Kerry, the first secretary of state to visit Cuba in 70 years, said on Friday that the Cuban government could not expect the United States to lift its trade embargo unless it moved to improve its record on human rights. “There is no way Congress is going to vote to lift the embargo if they’re not moving with respect to issues of conscience,” Mr. Kerry told reporters near the end of his 12-hour visit here. “It is a two-way street,” he added. To try to make headway on human rights and other thorny issues, the two sides decided Friday to form a new steering committee of Cuban and American officials. Its first meeting will take place in Cuba on Sept. 10 and 11, Mr. Kerry said, with another session in the United States.

My Take – I wonder where people ever got the idea that being a Yale graduate qualified you for anything except arrogance.  Sending Kerry to negotiate with Castro and expecting something positive to come out of it is like Nero sending the Christians to the lions in the Coliseum and expecting the Christians to survive.  But at least they’ll begin their negotiations from the same intellectual and emotional starting point – they both hate America!  See – definition leads to clarity! 

Fidel to Obama: 'Yo quiero dolares' for my birthday - Secretary Kerry is going to Havana this week. The island's chief dissidents will be kept away from the celebration at the new U.S. embassy.  President Obama made his Cuba announcement in mid-December. U.S.-Cuba talks are down to this: Fidel Castro is now asking for money on his birthday:  “Castro wrote: “Cuba is owed compensation equivalent to damages, which total many millions of dollars, as our country has stated with irrefutable arguments and data in all of its speeches at the United Nations.” He did not go into detail on precisely how much money he reckons Washington owes Havana….. This is what happens when you give away everything. In other words, this is what results from “one-way street” negotiations.

Rubio: 'Nothing Is Going to Change in Cuba' - Both Iran and Cuba both have received "significant concessions" from President Obama, who is getting "insufficient promises" in return, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told Fox News Thursday night. "The Cubans have basically pocketed all of these concessions that the president has made, but they have been very frank: Nothing is going to change in Cuba." Rubio spoke the night before Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Havanna to raise the American flag over the newly opened U.S. embassy. It's the first time a U.S. secretary of state has visited the communist nation since 1945.

Economics

Progressives and Free Markets - A look at how technocratic government fails, from an engineering perspective.

Using the FDA as a Club against Competitors - Convoluted regulations can be used by powerful companies as a club against their smaller or less experienced competitors.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey: Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism - John Mackey, co-founder of Whole Foods, tells Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie that aristocrats and intellectuals don't like business and capitalism because they're jealous, side with the ruling class, and just don't understand how markets work. "Intellectuals have always disdained commerce" says Whole Foods Market co-founder John Mackey. They "have always sided...with the aristocrats to maintain a society where the businesspeople were kind of kept down."  More than any other outlet, Whole Foods has reconfigured what and how America eats and the chain's commitment to high-quality meats, produce, cheeses, and wines is legendary. Since opening his first store in Austin, Texas in 1980, Mackey now oversees operations around the globe and continues to set the pace for what's expected in organic and sustainably raised and harvested food.  Because of Whole Foods' trendy customer base and because Mackey is himself a vegan and champions collaboration between management and workers, it's easy to mistake Mackey for a progressive left-winger. Indeed, an early version of Jonah Goldberg's best-selling 2008 book Liberal Fascism even bore the subtitle "The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton and The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods."…

My TakeI really find this interesting.  The very people he denigrates are the very people who promote his clabber about veganism, sustainability and organic agriculture.  His stores are Mecca’s for these people, and I use the word Mecca deliberately because their views – and his – border more on neo pagan nature worshipping religion than reality.  Are we now to assume he thinks they're stupid, strange or crazy?  I think they are, but if he does then we have to ask why would we believe anything they say, or for that matter anything he says.  One more thought.  Does anyone beside me smell a faint odor of hypocrisy? 

Environmentalism

Human Ingenuity, Climate Sensitivity, and the Social Cost of Emissions - The Clean Power Plan and climate change models assume the climate is more sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide than is actually the case Julian Morris August 14, 2015 To great fanfare, the White House recently released its final “Clean Power Plan,” which seeks to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation. The Obama administration also released a 343-page “regulatory impact assessment,” which purports to detail the Clean Power Plan’s costs and benefits. But as I show in a new study for Reason Foundation, one of the key assumptions underlying that assessment, the so-called “social cost of carbon,” is deeply flawed. As a result, the administration has massively exaggerated the benefits from reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Under more realistic assumptions, the plan would fail a basic cost-benefit test.

HHS Secretary Pitches Clean Power Plan to Kids, With Reference to 'Cooties' - "The only thing your kids should be afraid of catching in the backyard is cooties," says Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell. That's one of the reasons why the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan is "good for our children’s health," Burwell blogged last week. She explained that the rule finalized this month by the Environmental Protection Agency will "leave the planet safer and healthier for our children and our grandchildren" by cutting carbon pollution from coal-fired plants. Burwell then listed five reasons why the 1,560-page rule will help future generations:-- Because breathing outdoors shouldn't send kids to the hospital. (A reference to children with asthma.)

Report: Danger of Government-Created Solar Bubble Bursting When Subsidies Expire in 2016 - Federal subsidies have created a massive “green bubble” in the solar industry that is in danger of bursting when they expire next year, leaving taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars, according to a report by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA).  Homeowners and businesses that install a solar energy system are currently entitled to a 30 percent Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which was initially passed by Congress in 2006 and extended for another eight years in 2008…… “The reality is that we will lose 100,000 jobs if we lose the ITC — and these are conservative numbers. Ninety percent of solar companies will go out of business,” Rhone Resch, executive director of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), told participants at PV American 2015 in March…..solar companies are currently “bundling and securitizing” third-party solar leases, similar to the activity that triggered the housing market collapse…."Because Congress has this penchant for bailing out companies, big and small. And I think that if the bubble does burst, you’re going to have a lot of members of Congress who don’t want to accept the failure of green energy and make sure that the people that did get these panels, and that they would actually prop up these companies with taxpayer funds,” he said.

My Take – Hard to believe isn’t it?  This is just another consequence of the unending list of leftist schemes, visions and predictions that end up being abject failures, and as Captain Renault said in Casablanca we’re “shocked, shocked to find there’s gambling is going on here!” just after he got his winnings from the croupier.  Jimmy Carter left the world with a radicalized Iran and the Community Reinvestment Act, all of which exploded thirty years later creating almost every international and domestic issue we face.  At least the public was smart enough to send him back to Georgia, where he continued to meddle into world events that were way over his intellectual and emotional ability to handle.  Now we have a “community organizer”, who has never worked at a job in his life, who is even less intelligent and less stable than Carter, making decisions that will impact the world even more negatively than Carter, and the public kept him in office for another four years of unintelligent incompetence - meaning he will always be incompetent - surrounding himself with ever less intelligent and less competent people than himself.  Unless of course their goal is the destruction of America – in that case they’ve performed brilliantly.  What could possibly go wrong?  One more thing.  Who pays a “community organizer”?

Government Corruption and Incompetence

Maryland Dairy Farmers Take On IRS To Get Their Money Back  - A pair of humble Maryland dairy farmers are taking on the IRS, and now some members of Congress have joined the fight. Members of the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee sent a letter Wednesday to Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew calling on the IRS to give back money the agency wrongly seized from two Maryland dairy farmers.  The IRS forfeited, or took ownership of, Randy and Karen Sowers’ $29,500 based on highly criticized structuring laws. These laws make it a crime to make multiple cash deposits just under $10,000. The laws were originally intended to catch money launderers making small deposits to avoid government detection but have since been abused. Randy said his wife made the deposits under $10,000 because the bank teller told her it would require less paperwork.

Social Security at Eighty - The Social Security Trust Fund is in even worse shape than most eighty-year-olds.

Homosexuality

Colorado Judge Rules Against Christian Couple In Sodomy Dispute  - A Colorado judge ruled Thursday that a Christian couple could not refuse to bake cakes for sodomy-based “weddings.”  The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that refusing to bake a cake for a couple engaged in sodomy was discrimination not protected by their right to religious freedom.  “The fact that an entity charges for its goods and services reduces the likelihood that a reasonable observer will believe that it supports the message expressed in its finished product,” the court ruled. “Nothing in the record supports the conclusion that a reasonable observer would interpret Masterpiece’s providing a wedding cake for a same-sex couple as an endorsement of same-sex marriage, rather than a reflection of its desire to conduct business in accordance with Colorado’s public accommodations law.”

Iran

Royce: Russia and Iran ‘Already Violating’ Nuclear Deal - The U.S. must call both Russia and Iran to account for “already violating” the nuclear agreement, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) said Thursday. He was responding to a reported trip to Moscow by Iran’s Qods force commander, who is subject to U.N. travel sanctions. “[Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani] is the chief commander for Iranian foreign forces outside of Iran who carry out their assassinations and carry out their attacks,”

'Flexible' Obama Ignores Russian Treaty Violations - In light of President Obama’s callous disregard of treaty enforcement and the rising Russian missile threat, why should we believe we can trust him or the Iranians on the nuke deal?


20 of 46 Senate Dems Now Support Iran Deal, Which Administration Is Plugging on Twitter  - The number of Senate Democrats who say they will support the Iran nuclear deal when a resolution of disapproval is voted on next month continues to tick up, with 20 of the 46 now publicly endorsing it. (Update: Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) came out Friday in support of the nuclear agreement, the 21st Democratic senator to do so. Figures in the headline and report below continue to reflect the situation before his announcement.) 

Race


Straight Outta Whitewash - My Instagram and Facebook feeds have been filled with unwitting apologists for racism against Korean-American small-business owners.  Heckuva job, Hollywood!  Here's how the poison is spreading. A savvy marketing team at Universal/Comcast Corp. developed a web toy that allows social media fans to customize the theatrical poster logo for the media giant's new biopic, "Straight Outta Compton." Hundreds of thousands of clueless users have uploaded photos of themselves and substituted "Compton" with the names of their hometowns.  Jennifer Lopez, Serena Williams, LeBron James and Ed Sheeran are among the celebrities who helped make the meme go viral. Youth vote-pandering GOP Florida Sen. Marco Rubio jumped on the cultural bandwagon, too, with two obsequious messages on Twitter featuring the hashtag "#straightouttacompton." It's a publicity coup for rappers-turned-multimedia moguls Dr. Dre (Andre Young) and Ice Cube (O'Shea Jackson) as they pimp the movie — named after their breakthrough 1988 album — glorifying the rise of their band N.W.A. (Niggaz Wit Attitudes) and the hardcore gangsta rap genre….

My Take – If birds of a feather flock together then Rubio ought to be ashamed of himself.   We’ve seen Obama jump on the bandwagon of immaturity involving race issues, but we expected that from him.  He’s a socialist, a racist, never grew up and never had to grow up because he’s been carried by leftist promoters his whole life, along with the media.  The question that needs to be asked is this:  Is Rubio disqualified as a candidate if he has such a lack of insight, vision, understanding and is this immature?

Some black lawmakers supporting disruptions at campaigns by BlackLivesMatter protesters -Is this really how we want to conduct a campaign for the next president of the United States?

 Leftism and American Society

 Michael Moore Darkens the Cineplex Door - It's been six years since a Michael Moore mockumentary struggled at the box office. "Capitalism: A Love Story" grossed a paltry $14.3 million, less than an eighth the take of his hit "Fahrenheit 911." The long wait for the next Moore spectacle is almost over. The day before the next 9/11 anniversary, Moore's new America-bashing film "Where to Invade Next" will debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, where movies about America by an American make their debut.  As usual, the film's "principal cast" is just Michael Moore, egomaniac. Moore boasted he hadn't done a TV interview in a year. (Thank the Lord for small favors.) And he succeeded wildly in keeping this film a secret (ditto). The festival website promises only "his most provocative and hilarious film yet: Moore tells the Pentagon to 'stand down — he will do the invading for America from now on.'"  That sounds positively knee-slapping.
 
Do hippies have the 'right' to live in Venice Beach? -What rights do non-property owners have when gentrification takes place?  Los Angeles is a pit. It's hot. It's crowded. It's noisy. It's illegal alien central for Southern California, with many "no-go" zones for the English language.  But it does have one or two almost liveable areas, out at the very periphery, and one of those is called Venice Beach. Venice Beach is considered desirable because there is a tiny strip of lawn and palm trees literally thirty to forty feet wide by the beach filled with hippies and menacing homeless people, which is also directly downstream from an airport runway. But since this is paradise compared to the rest of LA, everyone wants to live there. The WaPo published an article about evil dot-commers who are raising the price of real estate and displacing the existing hippies. It's an old story in a new place:

The Right Not to Keep and Bear Arms? - The left is busy designing a new and seemingly absurd civil right, which threatens to undermine an actual right under the 2nd Amendment. This new “civil right” is to live in a society free of guns and/or “gun violence.” Bolstered by the success of the gay rights movement, anti-gun activists are already attempting to impose gun control by urging the federal government to force states to impose regulations under federal civil rights and disability statutes, by filing civil suits under the same theories, and by pursuing dubious appeals to public health (as in the anti-tobacco crusade.) They hope activist judges will further manipulate the 14th Amendment and statutes derived from it, to impose countervailing rights to that of keeping and bearing arms. Like the gay rights movement and the campaign against cigarettes, the focus will be on victimization (at the expense of personal choices and responsibility) in the expectation that American political views on guns will “evolve” over time with the helpful analysis of elite experts and unelected judges. Eventually the 2nd Amendment, hopes the left, will become effectively irrelevant through a combination of judicial fiat and the mobilization of suitably brainwashed polity.

Big surprise: 'Yes means yes' policies not quite working out as planned - Courts showing how illogical and ludicrous these policies are.  It's been about a year since California governor Jerry Brown signed into law the ludicrous "yes means yes" policy for sexual consent on college campuses.   And, as opponents predicted, the policy not only isn't working as planned, but is being successfully challenged in court by male students unable to prove they received "consent" from the female – even though that turns on its head the standard of the accused being innocent until proved guilty…….The Examiner goes on to describe an encounter where both parties were drunk and witnesses say the woman initiated sexual contact. But because the woman made the accusation first, the man was truly stuck. He tried to file a counter-claim of the woman not getting consent, but it was dismissed because he had already been accused! There is no more "he said, she said." There is only "she said it, so it's true." How many young men's lives are going to be ruined by vengeful or mentally unstable women who accuse them of something they didn't do while making it impossible for them to defend themselves?

Apparently my new identity box to check is 'non-Hispanic'Full disclosure: I’m a white girl. On certain official documents, I have fallen into the demographic category of “Caucasian.”  But not anymore. Glancing at the discharge paperwork from a recent doctor’s appointment, I noticed I now fall into an entirely new category: “White Non-Latino, Non-Hispanic.”  And there you have it. I am described in the negative with respect to the Hispanic population in America.  Press “1” for crazy.  How long before I start living in the shadows?

 

 

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