Zone of Reality: Castro Notes

By Rich Kozlovich

I find it fascinating how much everyone "knows" about Castro that simply isn't true. What is worse....how little everyone knows about his fellow travelers, like Ernest Hemingway. I know there are those who excuse him due to his mental problems, and there is a great deal of information claiming that he was merely a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, but the reality was a bit different.

In his book "Hoodwinked, How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, Jack Cahill states on page 57 that ; "By 1936, at the height of the Popular Front honeymoon, the Comintern enjoyed a near monopoly on world media. With just a little prodding the best and brightest of the international left rushed to Spain as war correspondents. The New Statesman sent George Orwell. The North American Newspaper alliance send Ernest Hemmingway. Colliers sent Martha Gellhorn. The Times of London sent Kim Philby.

(Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby (1 January 1912 – 11 May 1988 was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union. A communist, he served as an NKVD and KGB operative. In 1963, Philby was revealed to be a member of the spy ring now known as the Cambridge Five, the other members of which were Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and John Cairncross. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been most successful in providing secret information to the Soviet Union. His activities were moderated only by Joseph Stalin's fears that he was secretly on Britain's side.  Philby was an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) from 1946 to 1965.)

The London News Chronically sent Arthur Koestler, The Nations send Louis Fischer…… Koestler was working undercover for the Comintern. Philby was of course a Soviet agent spying on the Nationalists, Gellhorn was a fellow traveler….[and] Hemingway….was drilling the International Brigades. And the young Orwell actually joined a Republican -often called “Loyalist” -fighting force. So much for objectivity."

As the war progressed the Soviet NKVD became very active in Spain eliminating those communists in the “Republican” forces that weren’t Stalinists. Even Orwell was able to see this. Are we to assume the Hemingway didn’t? Well....Mr. Macho did and didn't care.

One of the people killed by the NKVD was a Republican leader, Jose Robles. He had disappeared and not even his wife knew where he was. Hemingway had already been “chastised by Phillip Knightley for his “total failure to report the communists persecution, imprisonment, and summary execution of ‘untrustworthy’ elements in the Republican side, when he knew this was happening and when disclosing it might well have prevented further horrors like this.”

So when he found out about what actually happened to Robles he took “sadistic pleasure” in publically informing Robles friend, Dos Passos, that Robles had been executed as a fascist spy. Nothing ever happened to Hemingway by the NKVD. Why? Because he was part and parcel of that package.

Communism had thoroughly infested the Hollywood literati. We know that from the VENONA intercepts. We know that Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett and that whole literary crowd were not only communists they were Stalinists. Are we to believe that Hemingway wasn't? His life and his actions indicate otherwise.

My purpose for discussing all of this history is to lay a logical foundation for what you are about to read. Please enjoy this latest piece of profound provocation leading to enlightenment.


Castro Regime Opens Nightclub in Washington D.C.
By Humberto Fontova

Castro's embassy (euphemized as "Interest Section") in Washington D.C. will soon open and in-house "invitation-only" nightclub named "Hemingway's Bar." The news comes courtesy of The Atlantic Magazine -- the same Atlantic that a year ago smugly predicted Communism's immediate end in Cuba. Fidel Castro himself had vouchsafed the scoop to a smug Atlantic editor visiting his fiefdom at the time. "I plan to go and will want a Hemingway Daiquiri," smirks the Atlantic magazine's senior editor Steve Clemons regarding the upcoming Hemingway's Bar, "double the rum, and no sugar." (All drinks will be on the house, actually. Buying from Castro's regime remains illegal in the U.S.) That Cuba's Stalinist regime names a bar after a KGB agent who accompanied a beaming Che Guevara while watching his beloved firing squads murder hundreds of men and boys seems fitting. That the Atlantic magazine's senior editor should smugly anticipate an invitation to the Stalinist regime's exclusive bar also seems fitting. That he plans to order its namesake "Hemingway Daiquiri," must fill Atlantic readers....

Steve Milloy on Pesticide Issues This Year

Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality. 

Report: California mosquito fogging in jeopardy after new environmental regulations
Disease bearing mosquitoes are no doubt cheering an anti-insecticide federal court ruling.

Atrazine: The Frog of War
Mother Jones profiles Berkeley junk scientist Tyrone Hayes.

Junk Science Profile on Tyrone Hayes
Summary. Tyrone Hayes is a researcher at the University of California-Berkeley who claims his research shows that the herbicide atrazine harms frogs.

Faulty Science

• Hayes has a history of:

o Sub-standard procedures. Not following Good Laboratory Practices;
o Secret methods. Not sharing his methods with other scientists; and
o Secret data. Refusing to provide his original data to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Storms may have killed off many stink bugs
It certainly wasn’t any EPA-approved insecticide.

Protecting disease vectors from humans
Mosquito fogging in jeopardy after new environmental regulations

Overreach: U.S. detains Brazil, Canada orange juice for fungicide
The FDA confiscates safe orange juice.

New Effort to Ban Three Chemicals Used on Long Island
Pesticide detection does not equal health risk or toxicity.

Ag College President: Pesticides help modern farming
“Atrazine and other pesticides add more than $2.4 billion of crop production in Georgia. They control weeds and help the environment. Atrazine is vitally important to our economic health.”

Fungus Fears Push Orange Juice Up
Pesticide residue hysteria takes hold of the markets.

FDA: Orange juice recall isn’t warranted
Yet Center for Science in the Public Interest can’t pass up the opportunity to fearmonger.

Indoor pesticides cause cancer in dogs?
The enviro war against pesticides targets pet owners.

Felsot: Pesticide residues on food are safe
Great report and just a small nit to pick with a stray (perhaps misreported) Felsot comment.

FDA roils orange juice markets for no reason
The detected fungicide residues are safe and the FDA knows it.

Colony Collapse Disorder: Cause – All Natural!
The bottom line is: we won’t starve; pesticides are our friend; the bees will return; the cause is most assuredly ‘all natural’ and the scaremongers will look for another reason to condemn humanity.

Stinkbugs rule as government, pesticide industry dither
Stink bugs have spread to 36 states — so where are the insecticides?


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Zone of Reality: Castro Notes

By Rich Kozlovich

This article by Humberto Fontova has made me realize how important it is to speed up the process of linking his articles. I will link at least one a day until I run out of links. There are a number of disturbing issues here.

Fontova asks an important question when he says; "I don’t claim expertise in ecclesiastical matters. But before granting absolution the Catholic Church, I’m fairly sure, still requires contrition—sincere contrition." Perhaps we should take a at look what contrition really is.

Does anyone really believe this monster capable of contrition? Contrition is part and parcel of repentance. The original root word for repentance means to "turn about". How has this man "turned about"? Does he acknowledge his guilt, i.e. sin, for the murder of untold thousands of innocents? Has he acknowledged that he has spread death and violence all over the world, and acknowledge that these actions were "sins"? Has he returned all the wealth he stole from all the people he took it from? Tell me; how has he "turned about"? At this point Fidel Castro remains an accredited socialist monster of the 20th century. How has he 'turned about'?

I think the most disturbing part of this article is the statement that; “Pope John Paul II remarked that he was “reserving judgment on Che Guevara who had served the poor.”So John Paul II was going to reserve judgement on another 'accredited socialist monster' of the 20th century, who was even more sadistic than Castro?

I am sorry, but these people are at the center of information. They are not beguiled by the media like the general public is, because the Vatican has information resources that are typical of a government that wishes to know what is really going on in the world. It is impossible for that Pope, or today’s Pope, to not know what a monster Che really was.

One can make the argument that Castro kind of has him in a bind; because if he goes there and Castro asks to be forgiven and taken back in the fold; it is his job to take the Christian high road regarding forgiveness and do so. Baloney! He doesn’t have to go there at all!

Will the Pope Absolve Fidel Castro?

Pope Benedict XVI will visit Cuba in March. Two of Italy’s top newspapers are reporting that Fidel Castro will avail himself of the visit to confess his sins and be accepted back into the Catholic Church, which excommunicated him in 1962.

“During this last period, Fidel has come closer to religion,” says Castro’s estranged daughter Alina who lives in Miami. “He has rediscovered Jesus" at the end of his life. It doesn’t surprise me because dad was raised by Jesuits.”

A baptized and confirmed Catholic, but lifelong layman, I don’t claim expertise in ecclesiastical matters. But before granting absolution the Catholic Church, I’m fairly sure, still requires contrition—sincere contrition.

On his 1998 visit to Cuba, Pope John Paul II remarked that he was “reserving judgment on Che Guevara who had served the poor.” Upon greeting the Cuban ambassador to the Holy See in 2005, this same pontiff hailed Cuba’s “gains in health care and education.” The above makes patently obvious that, on matters Cuban, the Vatican references the same media and academic sources gleefully bestowed Havana bureaus and visas by the Castro regime. Heaven knows the Vatican is not alone on this.

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Africa Fighting Malaria: World Malaria Day

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World Malaria Day - Just another PR swat at malaria? 17 Apr 2008
April 25 has this year been declared World Malaria Day. Since 2001, April 25 has been observed as Africa Malaria Day, commemorating the signing of the historic Abuja Declaration by 44 African malaria-endemic countries at the African Malaria Summit held in 2000….. Despite all efforts, malaria continues to be a serious public health concern throughout the world. It affects over 100 countries and approximately 40 per cent of the world's population. It causes between 300 and 500 million infections and approximately 1 million deaths each year, most of which occur in the poorest region of the world, sub-Saharan Africa. It is estimated that malaria claims a child's life every thirty seconds and the ones who survive an episode of severe malaria are likely to suffer from learning impairment or brain damage. Pregnant women and their unborn children are also particularly vulnerable to malaria, which is a major cause of stillbirths, low birth weight and maternal anaemia.

My Take - The reality is that there isn’t a family in these regions who haven’t lost a family member to malaria. We need to get this. If this was happening in America the EPA would be defunded, disbanded and there would be demands that the first director, who made the decision to ban DDT, along with his lackeys who made it happen, be tried for murder.

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The News: Children Behaving Badly

By Rich Kozlovich

Some months back I read a commentary about the official lies promoted by the Soviet government that was a complete reversal of historical fact. The commentator bemoaned the fact that this has continued into current times and that so many of the youth had been so indoctrinated by these lies they were incapable of understanding the truth.

He went on to say: 

“At the same time we continually hear official lies in Russian daily life, reminiscent of the lies in the Soviet Union during Stalinism and in the post-Stalin period,”….“The truth can hardly stand up to the total impact of so many lies. A young man once said to me of the Prague Spring: ‘That was when the Czechs attacked us.’ …“Brought up on lies, a society cannot mature or take on responsibility. It is an adolescent society, with all the characteristics of adolescence—needing a leader and his imitators, being aggressive and quick to take offence, simultaneously lying and trusting.”

Forth years ago I had an acquaintance who had been in the Czech army when the Soviet Union sent its tanks in to crush the Prague Spring. The only reason he wasn’t there at the time was because he was on leave and had traveled to visit relatives in the U.S.A. So when the Soviets came into Czechoslovakia he never went back. He knew “everything” including the “fact” that Hitler and Stalin never signed a non-aggression pact. He confidently and smugly laughed saying, “you don’t really believe such a thing do you?” As if Stalin could ever commit such a heinous act.  Here was a guy defending the very oppressors he was fleeing. Why? Because he had been indoctrinated since the end of WWII into believing Stalin was a great man. Indoctrination from a very young age can make someone as foolish as ideology can make smart people stupid.

Does this sound insane? Remember, even today there are revisionists who claim that Stalin didn’t really kill all those people; and if he did kill them; he did it to stop the really insane communists from killing more. And this is after all the monstrous facts have been made public. Why do people continue to believe things that actually defy all factual history and the evidence of their own eyes? Ideology! It is true that ideology makes smart people dumb!

As I watch the world, read the news and watch as little of it as I can on TV, I have concluded that the lefties may be right about IQ. Lefties are always trying to publish studies that show that leftists have a higher IQ than conservatives. Well…..I’m not so sure they aren’t right. Why? Because in order to bring reality into line with what they believe requires an enormous level of mental ability and logical gymnastics that must be mentally and emotionally exhausting in order to make the insane things they say and do seem right.

Conservatives only have to concern themselves with what is right and what is wrong based on what they see; as in one and one is two. Try making it three or four or fifty without sounding insane. At this kind of mental gymnastics, which only the left can excel, making insanity seem rational to the casual observer.

I watched O’Reilly this week - I can’t take too much of O’Reilly because I think he’s a phony - and he had Monica Crowley and Alan Colmes on.  Colmes did the five things that are common among the leftists. He wouldn’t stop talking, he interrupted, he talked over everyone, he subtly changed the subject and spewed out logical fallacies by the minute.

Changing the subject is a red herring fallacy they use constantly in order to prevent a response to their already insane views. If you doubt me watch Geraldo when he is on and Bob Beckel on The Five. They won’t shut up and they won’t let others have their say without zings that have nothing to do with the subject at hand, and they use personal insults, and smugly at that as if through their personal attacks they've made so intellectually substantive point.  At least Geraldo is charming....Beckel is.....well.....Beckel. This is a common problem. They’re talking when they should be listening. They remind me of unruly children, and like all unruly children a good slap would do them a world of good.

It really is true….…

“Brought up on lies, a society cannot mature or take on responsibility. It is an adolescent society, with all the characteristics of adolescence—needing a leader and his imitators, being aggressive and quick to take offense, simultaneously lying and trusting.”

That is the left. That is what we see on the news. Children behaving badly! That must be why the Main Stream Media identify so readily with the youthful losers in the Occupy Wall Street movement versus the rest of the country that readily identifies with the adults in the Tea Party Movement.

Zone of Reality: Castro Notes

By Rich Kozlovich

Humberto Fontova(Link to his official website)was born in 1954 in Cuba. He is an author, blogger, conservative political commentator and an ardent anti-communist; which demonstrates a high level of sanity and intelligence. Castro's press agency, Cubadebate, has this to say about him. "Fontova's books shamelessly libel our Revolution's founders! The terms "scoundrel" and "traitor" should precede every mention of Humberto Fontova!" Another good reason to read his works.

Fontova’s works strive to correct all the misinformation about Castro and the Cuba he destroyed. He especially shows his contempt for Che, who was a sadistic murderer and adored by the young left and the left media.

In 1961 when Fontova was seven his family managed to leave Cuba for New Orleans. His father had been held captive for three months after the Revolution and a cousin died while in a Cuban state prison from a “heart attack”. In Cuban prisons “heart attack” is most likely a euphemism for murder.

This is the second in a weekly series that I will be linking. Please enjoy Fontova’s special brand of writing. He is exciting, but most importantly he is bringing out that which has been hidden by the Main Stream Media for over 50 years.

I am making one change. I have my own archive of his works, but as I searched through the internet I just didn’t realize how many articles he has written on this subject that I missed. I will be linking more than one article a week as a result.

Please enjoy the enlightenment.

Today’s post deals with Don Hewitt right after his death. As the rest of the world was praising him Fontova has this to say;

CBS's Don Hewitt — Fidel Castro Enabler

Half a century after his media advance-work helping install a Stalinist regime in Cuba the legendary Don Hewitt of CBS still seemed proud of his work as a Castro media auxiliary. During that interim, over 20,000 Cubans were murdered by firing squad and beaten or starved to death in forced labor camps. Another 70—80 thousand were ripped apart by sharks or drowned in the Florida straits (attempting to flee a nation that previously took in more immigrants per-capita than the U.S.)

If Mr. Hewitt had uttered a single word of remorse regarding this bloodbath, I'd find him easier to praise than to bury.

Shortly after Herbert Matthews of the New York Times made Fidel Castro an international pop star on the front page of the (at the time) world's most important newspaper, CBS horned in on the act. The February 1957 NYT's headline article proclaimed that, "Fidel Castro has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore Cuba's Constitution....this amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist."

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Logical Fallacy of the Week, Week 23: Begging the Question

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Begging the question  (or petitio principii, "assuming the initial point") is a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proven is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise.

The first known definition in the West is by Aristotle around 350 BC, in his book Prior Analytics, where he classified it as a material fallacy. Begging the question is related to the circular argument, circulus in probando (Latin, "circle in proving") or circular reasoning, though these are considered absolutely different by Aristotle.

Please go to the original link because this one has beocme so complicated over the centuries that; “Academic linguist Mark Liberman recommends avoiding the phrase entirely, noting that because of shifts in usage in both Latin and English over the centuries, the relationship of the literal expression to its intended meaning is unintelligible and therefore it is now "such a confusing way to say it that only a few pedants understand the phrase.”

At this point I am going to jump ahead to “(shifting the) Burden of proof (see – onus probandi) – I need not prove my claim, you must prove it is false.”
This will take you to a number of explanations, but this is the one most of us will deal with. Philosophic Burden of Proof.


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Africa Fighting Malaria: Support For DDT

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SA's Leading Malaria Researchers Doctors Support the use of DDT to Control Malaria
Published April 25th 2004

South Africa's leading malaria control experts, researchers and doctors support and endorse the use of the insecticide DDT to control malaria. Their statement is released in light of recent claims that DDT is harmful to human health and should be removed from South Africa's malaria control programme. In a media statement, researchers from, among others, South Africa's Medical Research Council, National Health Laboratory Services and the World Health Organisation assert that since its introduction to disease control, DDT has been associated with improved human health and population growth, not the reverse.

Zone of Reality: CRA Meltdown

By Rich Kozlovich

While reading this please keep in mind that these two agencies were merely the structural framework that made the meltdown happen. The real culprit was the Community Reinvestment Act. Without that there wouldn’t have been such a huge drive to finance so many people who were completely incapable of paying the mortgage. I would also like to point out that the CRA made speculators huge amounts of money because it kept forcing the price of housing farther up than it ever would have gotten otherwise. All of this greed was a natural reaction to a system devoid of common sense imposed by legislation that was insane. I would also like to point out that both Clinton and Bush raised the percentage of these CRA (bad) loans until the banks were required to put out bad loans to the tune of over 50%.

I have a question. Can anyone name one government employee; one government economist or one government agency that predicted that Microsoft would become a soft ware giant that would make the owner one of the richest people in the world? Government doesn't do business well.

Financing Fannie and Freddie’s Failures
Back in August 2008 then-Treasury Secretary Paulson pulled a team together to work on resolving the deeply insolvent Fannie and Freddie. As recounted in the Andrew Ross Sorkin book, "Too Big to Fail", Robert Scully of Morgan Stanley laid out a blunt question: “Do you want to kick the can down the road?” Secretary Paulson was emphatic: “No. I want to address the issue. I don’t want to leave the problem unsolved.” Although it took guts for Paulson in combination with the Federal Housing Finance Agency to take control of Fannie and Freddie and place them in conservatorship, the problem of the two mortgage behemoths is by no means ‘solved.’ In taking control, Paulson highlighted the “flawed business model” underlying the pair............So have Fannie and Freddie begun to downsize or unwind from their flawed business model? The SEC Form 10-K and 10-Q that they must file indicate that the answer is an unequivocal no. Fannie’s filing reveals its mortgage credit and guaranty book of business are both up since 2008 standing at over $3 trillion. Freddie’s filing reveals a mortgage portfolio that has hovered in the neighborhood of $2.2 trillion.

Fannie, Freddie, and the Aftermath of the Financial Crisis
What should be done? Some policymakers have called for fiddling with Fannie’s and Freddie’s governance and operations, but a much better alternative would be to put them into receivership and wind them down. The FHFA has had the authority to do this since 2008. Moreover, there is a historical basis for believing that this could be done effectively: in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Resolution Trust Corporation succeeded in placing hundreds of insolvent savings and loans into receivership and transitioning them to private ownership. Putting Fannie and Freddie into receivership would allow them to be broken up into smaller companies and transferred back to private hands. Critics argue that doing this would jeopardize the recovery of the housing market, but as McKinley notes, these are the same critics who mistakenly claimed that placing Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship would devastate the housing market. “Given its track record, we have to stop listening to that discredited crowd,” McKinley concludes.

FINANCING FAILURE: A Century of Bailouts
The nation’s federal financial regulators and the politicians claim to have saved the American economy. In truth they have done everything within their power to expand their own influence—often far out of view from the public and media. Instead of openly explaining their actions, the bailout agencies have attempted to prevent the public from reviewing their decision-making, often at tremendous cost to taxpayers. McKinley’s painstakingly researched and clear-headed analysis of bailouts and government intervention shows that the American public has accepted too many official pronouncements at face value, and that reining in the federal regulators is a necessary step toward truly promoting the safety and soundness of the financial system.

Africa Fighting Malaria

By Rich Kozlovich

Over the years I have had the opportunity to talk to some who have been involved in this organization via e-mail. I also had the pleasure of meeting Richard Tren, who is a director of AFM and a real gentleman, at the showing of Dr. Rutledge Taylor’s film 3Billion and Counting. They are maligned by the greenies and their fellow travelers regularly; but the beauty of truth is that it will “very patiently wait for us”. Time is on their side, unfortunately time is a killer for so many in the world as a result of greenie influence.

There are some things that we really do need to get. One of them is that everything everyone “knows” about DDT is a lie. The vast majority of the information in articles discussing DDT directly, or as a side bar to another topics, are lies. DDT was the greatest chemical discovery for the benefit of mankind in all of mankind’s history. Chemistry is not the enemy; however, modern environmentalism, along with its adherents and promoters are! Secondly, malaria has killed more people over the centuries than all the other diseases combined. Thirdly, when you consider that hundreds of millions are afflicted by this plague every year, and the effect on them long term is so detrimental, one has to wonder why so much money is spent on other afflictions per ration to the impact each makes on humanity.

I intend to highlight articles from the AFM site for some days.  I hope as they appear  everyone will take advantage of this. 

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Deep dishonor in America's Leftist academe

By Jon Ray

I would like to thank Dr. Ray for allowing me to republish his works. RK

The Humanities faculty at Durham's Duke University have demonstrated bigoted anti-white attitudes that are perfectly mainstream among such faculty at American universities. An amazing total of 88 of them signed the now notorious condemnation of the innocent Duke lacrosse players before the players had even appeared in court, let alone been convicted. Their hatred of American society immediately blasted away the centuries of wisdom which said "innocent until proven guilty". And the wisdom of that maxim was shown when the players were found NOT guilty.

So what is still going on at Duke can reasonably be extrapolated to at least the Humanities departments of America's universities and colleges. And that is not pretty.

One of the Lacrosse players who was NOT accused by the pathetic Crystal Gail Mangum was nonetheless caught up in the blast and suspended by the university at roughly the same time as the other players. He is now suing. As you can read here, Ryan McFadyen is arguably the person who behaved with greatest honor in the whole affair. He certainly behaved with greater honor than prosecutor Nifong or Durham police -- who tried to suborn him into giving false evidence. There is another glimpse of his character here.

And when McFadyen refused to be intimidated into giving false evidence, Nifong and the police must have realized that he had put them into a dangerous position. Fabricating evidence is a crime with severe penalties. So they immediately went all-out to blacken his name. And that blackening still shows up today in that he has become something of a hate figure to many.

So he is now suing over that defamation and the illegal and improper behaviour of all concerned in the matter.

The trial has however produced some document disclosures that reveal the full depth of the moral depravity of senior Duke U officials. The documents contain bombshell emails from Duke President Brodhead and others suggesting that Duke's primary concern was to protect its PR, even if that meant sacrificing innocent students.

In documents submitted February 3 by Plaintiffs' lawyers, President Brodhead is quoted in an email sent very early in the case to other Duke staff:

“Friends: a difficult question is, how can we support our lacrosse players at a devastatingly hard time without seeming to lend aid and comfort to their version of the story? We can’t do anything to side with them, or even, if they are exonerated, to imply that they behaved with honor. The central admin can't, nor can Athletics.”

And Joe Alleva, then of the Duke Athletic Dept., also testified during his deposition on January 20, 2012, that he made positive and truthful statements about Plaintiffs and their teammates’ character at the University’s press conference on March 28, 2006.

Mr. Alleva testified that he was “crucified” immediately afterwards for making those statements by President Brodhead himself and in front of the Crisis Management Team, all of whom knew how “off-message” Mr. Alleva’s truthful, positive statements about plaintiffs were.

Alleva was the one who later told Duke lacrosse coach Pressler that "it's not about the truth" any longer; that the case was about the interest groups and the integrity (reputation) of the university. (Hence the title of coach Pressler's book, "It's not about the truth").

Or as Robert K. Steel (then chairman of Duke's Board of Trustees) said in explaining why Duke would not be defending its falsely-accused students: "Sometimes people have to suffer for the good of the organization". More details here.

You would think that all the exposure of their moral depravity might have created some caution among Duke faculty about race-related matters. It does not appear to have done so. Just a few days ago I ran a large excerpt (scroll down) from an article which summarized the Arcidiacono affair. I will simply refer readers to there for a treatment of that little explosion of rage and hate. See HERE for the full article. Having their warped view of America threatened is intolerable to Duke's Leftist Mafia.

No Leftist will admit it of course but I cannot see why Duke should be regarded as atypical. I don't think there is anything especially poisonous in the air at North Carolina. I think we have seen coming to the surface at Duke what is smouldering away beneath the surface at most of America's universities and colleges. They are true heirs of Stalin and the ghastly Soviet Union. They are a nest of vipers.


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How green zealots are destroying the planet: The provocative claim from a writer vilified for denying global warming

By James Delingpole

This appeared here! I would like to than Mr. Delingpole for allowing me to republish his works. RK

Just imagine a world where you never had to worry about global warming, where the ice caps, the ‘drowning’ Maldives and the polar bears were all doing just fine.

Imagine a world where CO2 was our friend, fossil fuels were a miracle we should cherish, and economic growth made the planet cleaner, healthier, happier and with more open spaces.

Actually, there’s no need to imagine: it already exists. So why do so many people still believe otherwise?

How come, against so much evidence, everyone from the BBC to your kids’ teachers to the Coalition government (though that may change somewhat now Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has resigned), to the President of the Royal Society to the Prince of Wales continues to pump out the message that man-made ‘climate change’ is a major threat?

Why, when the records show that there has been no global warming since 1997, are we still squandering billions of pounds trying to avert it?

These are some of the questions I set out to answer in my new book — which I can guarantee will not make me popular with environmentalists.

Almost every day, on Twitter or by email, I get violent messages of hate directed not just at me, but even my children. Separately, I’ve been criticised by websites such as the Campaign Against Climate Change (Honorary President: the environmental activist and writer George Monbiot). I’ve had a green activist set up a false website in my name to misdirect my internet traffic. I’ve been vilified everywhere from the Guardian to a BBC Horizon documentary as a wicked ‘denier’ who knows nothing about science.

Not that I’m complaining. Margaret Thatcher once famously said: ‘I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.’

That’s just how I feel about my critics’ ad hominem assaults. They’re born not of strength but out of sheer desperation.

The turning point towards some semblance of sanity in the great climate war came in November 2009 with the leak of the notorious Climategate emails from the University of East Anglia.

What these showed is that the so-called ‘consensus’ science behind Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) — ie the theory that man-made CO2 is causing our planet to heat up in a dangerous, unprecedented fashion — simply cannot be trusted.

The experts had, for years, been twisting the evidence, abusing the scientific process, breaching Freedom of Information requests (by illegally hiding or deleting emails and taxpayer-funded research) and silencing dissent in a way which removes all credibility from the scaremongering reports they write for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

(The IPCC is the heavily politicised but supposedly neutral UN advisory body which has been described by President Obama as the ‘gold standard’ of international climate science.)

Since Climategate, the scientific case against AGW theory has hardened still further. Experiments at the CERN laboratory in Geneva have supported the theory of Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark that the sun — not man-made CO2 — is the biggest driver of climate change.

The latest data released by the Met Office, based on readings from 30,000 measuring stations, confirms there has been no global warming for 15 years.

You’re not going to give money to the charity’s Project Thin Ice if you think the polar bear is good for another 10,000 years, but you might if you’re told it’s seriously endangered.

Politicians were attracted because it was a good way of being seen to be addressing an issue of popular concern, and a handy excuse to put up taxes.

Big corporations joined in the scam as a) it enabled them to ‘greenwash’ their image through campaigns like BP’s ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and b) it meant all that extra environmental regulation would be a handy way of pricing their smaller competitors out of the market place.

But money isn’t the only reason. If you read the private emails of the Climategate scientists, what you discover is that most of them genuinely believe in the climate change peril.

That’s why they lied about the evidence and why they tried to destroy the careers of those scientists who disagreed with them: because they wanted to scare politicians into action before time ran out. This was not science, in other words, but political activism.

A similar ‘end justifies the means’ mentality seems to prevail among all those environmental lobby groups. They don’t exaggerate or misrepresent because they’re bad people. They do it, as a former head of Greenpeace once charmingly put it when accused of having overstated the decline in Arctic sea ice, to ‘emotionalise the issue’; because they want to make the rest of the world care about these issues as much as they do.

Powerful feelings, though, are hardly the most sensible basis for global policy. Especially not when, as it turns out, they are based on a misreading of the facts.

One of the grimmest ironies of the modern environmental movement is just how much damage it has done to the planet in the name of ‘saving’ it. Green biofuels (crops such as palm oil grown for fuel) have not only led to the destruction of millions of acres of rainforest in Asia, Africa and South America, but are now known to produce four times more CO2 pollution than fossil fuels.

Wind farms, besides blighting views, destroying topsoil and causing massive noise pollution, kill around 400,000 birds a year in the U.S. alone.

Environmentalists, in fact, have a disastrous track record when it comes to predictions and policy recommendations. Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller Silent Spring — which promised a cancer epidemic from pesticides — led to a near worldwide ban on the malarial pesticide DDT, thus condemning millions in the Third World to die from malaria.

Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, meanwhile, rehearsed another of the green movement’s favourite themes: overpopulation. By the Seventies and Eighties, he warned, hundreds of millions of us would be dying like flies because there wouldn’t be enough food.

Why did Ehrlich’s prediction never come to pass? Because, like most of the greenies’ doomsday scenarios, it overlooked one vital factor: progress.

Because the green movement has for years been ideologically wedded to the notion that mankind is an ecological curse (‘The Earth has a cancer. The cancer is man’, as a global think tank called The Club of Rome, which includes several current and former heads of state, puts it), it fails to understand the role which technology, human ingenuity and adaption play in our species’ survival.

Ehrlich’s population disaster was averted thanks to a brilliant American scientist called Norman Borlaug who devised new mutant strains of wheat which managed to treble cereal production on the starving Indian subcontinent.

Of course, there is still widespread concern over the use of genetically modified crops, but scientists argue that with proper safeguards in place they can actually be more environmentally friendly than conventional crops, using less water and fewer pesticides.

Similar technological advances in the field of energy make a nonsense of environmentalists’ claims that we are running out of fuel: long before coal ran out came the petroleum revolution; and, though we still have plenty of oil left, we now have the miracle of shale gas which lies in abundance everywhere from Blackpool to the North Sea, and is released using blasts of high-pressure liquid to open pockets of gas in rock.

When, many decades hence, that runs out we will start to harvest clathrates (solid methane deposits) buried on the ocean floor.

Economic progress is not our enemy but our friend. It is an historical fact that the richer nations are, the more money they have to spare on ensuring a cleaner environment: compare the relatively clean air in London to the choking smog that envelops Beijing and Delhi; look at where the worst ecological disasters happened in the last century — under impoverished Communist regimes, from the Aral Sea to Chernobyl.

But the greens refuse to accept this because, according to their quasi-religious doctrine, industrial civilisation is a curse and economic growth a disease which can only be cured by rationing and self-sacrifice, higher taxes and greater state control.

That’s why I call my new book Watermelons — because it’s about zealots who are green on the outside, but in political terms, red on the inside. If only their views weren’t so influential, in schools, universities, in the media, in the corridors of power, the global economy wouldn’t be nearly in the mess it’s in today.

As someone who loves long walks in unspoilt countryside and who wants a brighter future for his children, I’m sickened by the way environmental activists tar anyone who disagrees with them as a selfish, polluting, anti-science ‘denier’.

The real deniers are those ideological greens who refuse to look at hard evidence (not just pie-in-the-sky computer models which are no more accurate than the suspect data fed into them) and won’t accept that their well-intentioned schemes to make our world a better place are in fact making it uglier, poorer and less free.

James Delingpole’s Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing The Planet, Destroying The Economy And Stealing Your Children’s Future is published by Biteback (£14.99).

DDT: UN Coverup?

By Rich Kozlovich

Steve Milloy recently posted this article, "Appalling: UN severely underestimates malaria deaths, says study" on February 2, 2012. Steve goes on to say; "Has the World Health Organization been covering up genocide? According to a new study in The Lancet, the WHO has underestimated malaria deaths in children (aged 5 and under) by 475% and total deaths by 89%."

As bemoaned in The Lancet‘s editorial:

This week we publish surprising and, on the face of it, disturbing findings. According to Christopher Murray and colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, there were 1•24 million deaths (95% uncertainty interval 0•93–1•69 million) from malaria worldwide in 2010—around twice the figure of 655000 estimated by WHO for the same year. How should the malaria community interpret this finding? Before we answer that question, we need to look beneath the surface of this striking overall mortality figure.......(go to the original for further links RK)

Should we think that the most corrupt organization the world has ever known; an organization that is filled with influential green NGO's; would lie? I certainly do. For the last few years we keep hearing the greenie fellow travelers declaring that bed nets are doing the job. Everything is OK. We don't need DDT to save people. Especially since DDT kills birds and it causes________! Well, just keep filling in that blank until your fingers get numb, because according to the green misanthropes there is no end to the dangers DDT represents, while failing to tell the world the truth about the very real danger malaria represents.

Malaria has killed more people over the centuries than all other diseases combined. Why is that so hard to get? I can answer that! Because those who should be telling the world the truth, such as the U.N., the media, those activists who claim to be concerned about people’s health and all the leaders of every institution in the world are simply not doing so. It happened because as Viv Forbes says:

“The public has been misled by an unholy alliance of environmental scaremongers, funds-seeking academics, sensation-seeking media, vote-seeking politicians and profit-seeking vested interests.”

Why? 

The answer is that the green movement is so rich and so influential that no trade organization or politician can stand against them.

How did that happen?

Their success came in the banning of DDT in the United States. This gave them money and influence that they never had before.

The ban is foundational to everything they stand for and everything they have. The death of millions and the suffering and misery of billions is meaningless to them. Lies about malaria sufferers and the very real value that DDT represents in alleviating their suffering are repeated unendingly.  No matter how many times the truth is told it is impossible to overcome the daily drumbeat from people who pound out greenie propaganda from so many public sources.

We know that malaria is still a major disaster in many parts of the world. We know that DDT plays a major role in reducing the impact of that human disaster. We know the greenies will do everything in their power to stop DDT from being used. We know from their own statements they are irrational and misanthropic.

• We know one of their goals is to seriously reduce the world's population.
• We know they don't really care about the children because the children of the world suffer most from their policies. When the greenies say that we need to adopt their programs because "it's for the children" we need to stop and look very closely because most of what they have done has been "to the children".
• Now we know there is more to this story than has been told, and the UN has once again been found wanting in integrity.

That's history, and that history is incontestable!

So why do we listen to them?

Logical Fallacy of the Week; Week 22. Argumentum Verbosium

.

Argumentum verbosium – Also know as proof by verbosity.

Proof by intimidation (or Argumentum Verbosium) is a jocular term used mainly in mathematics to refer to a style of presenting a purported mathematical proof by giving an argument loaded with jargon and appeal to obscure results, so that the audience is simply obliged to accept it, lest they have to admit their ignorance and lack of understanding. 

The term is also used when the author is an authority in his field presenting his proof to people who respect a priori his insistence that the proof is valid or when the author claims that his statement is true because it is trivial or because he simply says so. Usage of this term is for the most part in good humour, though it also appears in serious criticism. 

More generally, "proof by intimidation" has also been used by critics of junk science to describe cases in which scientific evidence is thrown aside in favour of a litany of tragic individual cases presented to the public by articulate advocates who pose as experts in their field.

XXX

Black and White TV

By Rich Kozlovich

What you will be viewing below has been sent to me an number of times, and strange as it may seem, I enjoy reading it each time. This was an amazing time to grow up. It was an amazing time to live!

After this many times of receiving it, I've decided to post it.

Some of the pictures sent in the e-mail aren't posted because I have some copyright concerns. I have no doubt that the Walt Disney Company would not be happy if I posted a picture of Annette Funicello as a Mouseketeer, but I have posted those that I think will pass muster.

I have no idea who originated all of this, but it does clearly depict the stability of a by-gone time. It also generates strong feelings of nostalgia in those of us who are growing old far faster than we like, and seeing a world that would have seemed like an alien planet sixty or even fifty years ago.

From this point on this is the product of someone else's work.. Please enjoy!

Black and White TV (Under age 40; you won't understand.) You could hardly see for all the snow; spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Pull a chair up to the TV set: ‘Good night, David; Good night, Chet.'

My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning. My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter and I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can’t remember getting E. coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then. The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE...and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym. Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.  I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.  Oh yeah... and where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either; because if we did we got our butt spanked there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home. I recall Donny Reynolds from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned our house! Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood run amuck.

To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that? We needed to get into group therapy and anger management classes. We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!

How did we ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA. TO ALL WHO DIDN'T; SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED! I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!



“ Good night and may God bless."

Zone of Reality: Castro Notes

By Rich Kozlovich

I subscribe to a number of web sites who will alert me to their postings. One such site is called FrontPage.com. It's free it you are interested.

Today I received my morning alert with the article linked below. At my age I have been reading about Fidel Castro and his minions for over 50 years. I started reading Humberto Fontova's commentaries on Castro, Che and Cuba about 5 years ago. I learned more about Castro, Che and the Cuba they destroyed in the first year reading Fontova than I did my entire previous life.  I am old enough that I remember the revolution and I remember the executions that appeared on the nightly news. What happened? In those days people understood the horror of what communism really is. Things have changed. I guess this article put me over the edge because this should be headlines. Why isn't it?

I intend to go back into his archives and post a link to an article each week about the atrocities of the Castro regime. In the course of time you will find that a corrupt media and officials will also be exposed for who and what they are. I consider his work to be provocative and profound.

History is a voyage and an adventure for those willing to be explorers to find what the media and leftist educators have labeled as elusive, hard to understand and difficult to determine.....that which is known as truth! However, truth is not for the faint of heart; it is not for the cowardly; it is not for the weak!

Please enjoy the adventure!

Che Guevara’s Regime Still Murdering the Young and the Defenseless

By Humberto Fontova

Last week the regime co-founded by Che Guevara (worldwide icon of youthful rebellion) murdered a young defenseless political prisoner named Wilman Villar for the crime of “disrespect to authorities.”

So 53 years into Cuban Stalinism we’re at about 100,000 Cuban deaths at the hands of the regime and counting. (All of this 90 miles from U.S. shores, while Havana swarms with mainstream media press bureaus and Hollywood producers, by the way.)

“The Cuban regime is a callous band of murderers that once again has blood on its hands,” said Senator Marco Rubio in a bi-partisan Senate Resolution passed on Jan. 26 in Villar’s honor. “Once again, we are reminded of the unintended but negative consequences of this administration’s loosened travel and remittance policies [to Cuba]. They help deliver more hard currency to the Castro regime, making it easier for them to brutalize and even murder the Cuban people.” .......

Zone of Reality: CRA Meltdown

By Rich Kozlovich

Over the last two years I keep being amazed at how this story is being twisted. No matter how hard you try you just can't get people to openly exclaim that this economic crisis is a direct result of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The sub-prime mortgage crisis is a direct result of the Community Reinvestment Act. In a article I wrote some time back I noted the following about this Sub-Prime Mortgage Crisis!

In 1977 the media discovered the word “redlining” and they used it like a whip. Redlining was supposed to be a racist action by the banks who wanted to prevent poor people and minorities, primarily black, from owning houses. Sounds insane doesn’t it? It is! Especially when a study came out showing that there was no redlining, that in fact these people were denied these loans because they were bad credit risks.

Yet redlining is what they had everyone believing, so in 1977 Congress, under the Carter administration, demanded that lending institutions pay attention to the “credit need” of the community and not on their ability to repay the loan and passing the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Under this act the banks would be graded on how many of these bad loans they gave out. If they did business in this manner they received a high score. The score was directly proportionate to how easy it was to do a merger or an acquisition or even open a new branch and as I understand it…their ability to borrow money from the government. All of which the government controlled! Under this act if some community activists, like the group ACORN, didn’t like the way you did business could cause all sorts of problems.

Stan J. Liebowitz, economics professor at the University of Texas at Dallas writes; "Home mortgages have been a political piñata for many decades. Greedy lenders aren’t the real reason for this mess. “In a nutshell, Liebowitz contends that the federal government over the last 20 years pushed the mortgage industry so hard to get minority homeownership up, that it undermined the country's financial foundation to achieve its goal."

Everyone was happy; everyone basked in the blaze of self congratulations. All of these bad loans were now declared to be “innovation lending” and they were praised by the regulators, academics and activists and because so much pressure was put on the lending institutions in the 90’s by the Clinton administration homeownership among minorities surged. The media called this “one of the hidden success stories” of that administration. At one point the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is supposed to have “produced a manual in the early '90s that warned mortgage lenders were to no longer deny urban and lower-income minority applicants on such "outdated" criteria as credit history, down payment or employment income.”

Jack Cashill wrote; "Now, they could pat themselves on the head for helping make the home-owning class "look more like America" and still get a smart return on their investment. With housing prices on the rise, private investment groups actively began to buy and bundle non-traditional loans and sell them to investors on the private market. As the demand surged in key areas, and fresh capital flooded the market, lenders came up with innovative new ways to attract sub-prime borrowers, most notably the interest-only, adjustable-rate mortgage (IO ARM)." 

It was a real catch-22. If they continued giving out these bad loans, they would go out of business. If they didn’t comply there were real financial penalties and if they raised interested rates they were accused of “predatory lending”.

Unfortunately this was undermining an entire economic system and the inevitable happened.

Jeff Jacoby notes;“Trapped in a no-win situation entirely of the government's making, lenders could only hope that home prices would continue to rise, staving off the inevitable collapse. But once the housing bubble burst, there was no escape. Mortgage lenders have been bankrupted, thousands of subprime homeowners have been foreclosed on, and countless would-be borrowers can no longer get credit. The financial fallout has hurt investors around the world. And all of it thanks to the government, which was sure it understood the credit industry better than the free market did, and confidently created the conditions that made disaster unavoidable.”

I expanded on this subject in an article entitled, Methodologies! What are they? noting that;

These loans would move from a “mortgage originator” to a “mortgage investor”. “Smaller mortgage originators will often sell their mortgages to large scale originators or aggregators, which pool mortgages together and securitize them into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or as private-label securities.” The idea was to make sure that you could create a Triple A rating for that bundle of mortgages. Once they got a Triple A rating they would then sell them all over the world; usually to investors with large amounts of capital but very little understanding of what they were buying. However, this lack of understanding wasn’t exclusive to unsophisticated buyers. Alan Greenspan himself stated in the show that he didn’t understand the complexities of the CDO mortgage market either, and that he just didn’t understand the numbers. (follow the link to the article to follow what a CDO is)

The greed involved permeated all levels of the financial world. Although many knew that this couldn’t go on and some made an effort to make this clear to some of the biggest players in the field they continued to cling to the idea that the mortgage market would appreciate six to eight percentage points every year to infinity. Clearly that was insane.

Alan Greenspan was asked; why didn’t they just get out? He claimed that they knew the dangers but thought they were smart enough to get out when it was the right time. Baloney! Greenspan, the moderator and all the people interviewed left out the reason they didn’t get out. They couldn’t. Once they bought into the Community Reinvestment Act it became a Catch 22 situation; in for a dime in for a dollar, and in forever.

Since they were in so deep and in forever they refused to see anything else except the potential profits for today. The government forced them into this situation and the government was going to back them through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so they went after the short term rewards without any concern for the long term consequences; after all, they were making tons of money and they had no choice. When you dance with the Devil you won’t call the tune, you won’t choose the dance, you won’t lead, you can’t change partners and you may not be allowed to leave the dance.

An article entitled, Analysis: Reckless Mortgages Brought Financial Market to Its Knees the author says; Surprisingly, research done by economists a decade ago in 1998, particularly by Professors Ted Day and Stan Liebowitz at the University of Texas at Dallas, predicted the current problems and tried to warn people of a different cause. Starting during the early 1990s, mortgage-underwriting standards have been consistently weakened. Many of the names involved in the forefront of those changes, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae as well as Countrywide and Bear Stearns, have been the most prominent financial entities to become insolvent."

So why couldn't anyone change? The Community Reinvestment Act was imposed by the government and those who attempted to step in to fix it were rebuffed. By whom? Below is part of that answer!

Observations From the Back Row

By Rich Kozlovich

The purpose of “Observations From the Back Row” is to explore issues that are not typically seen in the media. These issues will deal with more than JUST the big headline stuff. It is my intention to feature articles that will aid in seeing farther, deeper and wider. I wish to explore the issues that are seemingly small, but may in reality be very foundational. I have found that this is where you see the trend that leads to end conclusions. This is where the history of any issue is being written. Tell me the history and I will give you the answer.

Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality. That has been the foundation logic for my views and conclusions for some time. Expanding on that we must honestly say that everything we are told should have some foundation in past history. Everything that exists, and everything that is an issue, has some historical foundation with an historical context. We have to know that before we can make judgments on anything. Otherwise we are like waves crashing against the rocks; washed back and forth with every new philosophical flavor of the day.

Another one of my favorite sayings is that 'everything really is a conspiracy'. Of course everyone rolls their eyes and snickers when I say that. But I keep wondering if they have ever read a history book, and if they did; did they understand it? Other than natural disasters, things involving people just don't happen in a vacuum. Events don't take place without participants. Are we to assume that these people just walked up to one another one day and decided to do_____(fill in the blank) worldwide without any conversation, discussion, promotion or encouragement? As for these spontaneous eruptions by masses of people; if you look carefully at the history you will find that this spontaneity was fed by events and activists for some time.

Is that being paranoid? Does recognizing that people really can be against you make you paranoid? In my world I am surrounded by those who would destroy my industry and my business. Worse yet, they have “Stockholm Syndrome’ allies within the industry that can hardly be called anything except “Fifth Columnists”. Is it really any different in any other industry? We have regulators, bureaucrats and political leaders that openly state that they intend to eliminate some industries. Coal fired power plants is Obama’s personal choice. Are we to believe that he isn’t surrounded by even more radical anti-industry anti-capitalists? Has anyone recently checked out who his Czars are?

The destructive behavior of the Left is based on the fact that they have no values. They will adopt or reject any policy or philosophy that will put them in power. Here is a historical fact. Dystopia is the final result of socialism. That is a fact. Does that make it paranoia?


OCCUPY WALLSTREET

Will Occupiers Get Their Violent Chicago Riot?
The anti-American activists of the Occupy Wall Street movement announced they plan to violently disrupt the G8/NATO summit in Chicago on May 19. Adbusters, the Noam Chomsky-friendly magazine that spearheaded the Occupy movement, claims the movement will conduct a massive occupation of Chicago “in the tradition of the Chicago 8.” Of course the radicals of the Chicago 8 organized riots at the Democratic Party’s national convention in that city in 1968. Hundreds of police officers were injured. Adbusters vows that this time the rioters won’t give an inch to the police. A massive occupation of Chicago involving “50,000 people from all over the world” will begin on May 1: …..Occupy Wall Street, and the satellite protests it spawned in cities across the U.S. and around the world have been spectacularly violent. Radical activists are responsible for hundreds crimes, including assault, gang rape, arson, rioting, robbery, and a host of others……In anticipation of the May protests Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, himself a radical Saul Alinsky-inspired thug, has increased fines for resisting a police officer.

Exposing the Alinsky Party“
Of no other occupant of the White House can it be said that he owed his understanding of the political process to a man and a philosophy so outside the American mainstream, or so explicitly dedicated to opposing it.”

“Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model” by David Horowitz

When Newt won the battle of South Carolina, he also laid out the stakes for the larger conflict beyond the primaries and even beyond the election. It is the battle for the soul of America. In the 2004 election, John Edwards borrowed James P. Cannon’s Two Americas metaphor to showcase his vision of a divided nation.

MEDIA

Reporters Without Credibility
Founded in 1985, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), also known as Reporters Without Borders, professes to be motivated by a profound devotion to freedom of expression. The organization has apparently done good work on behalf of journalists in countries like Cuba and China, where press freedom simply doesn’t exist. But RSF also issues an annual Press Freedom Index – the latest was released just the other day – in which it purports to rank countries according to the degree of freedom their journalists enjoy. Let’s just say that the list doesn’t represent RSF at its finest

Liberal Bias Detected in Science Media
Incredible as it sounds, the science news media seem to have a liberal bias. This is astonishing, considering the vast majority of science professors in academia are Democrats. The following examples illustrate this trend that came to light around 1859.

RELIGION

‘God Is an Imaginary Friend’: Atheist Billboard Ignites Controversy in Colorado
Atheists have a way with billboards. In fact, it’s one of the primary methods many non-believers use to communicate with the public at large. This is exactly the method a Denver, Colorado-based group, called Boulder Atheists, is using to spread its message. Reaction to the group’s newest billboard, which targets those who hold a belief in God, has ranged from giggles to anger. Boulder Atheists has erected three billboards that each read, “God is an imaginary friend. Choose reality, it will be better for all of us.” This statement, which will clearly offend the religious, is not intended to start problems, the group says.

New Bible Yanks ‘Father,” Jesus as ‘Son of God’In the world of questionable and sometimes downright silly Bible translations, one would think that it couldn’t get any worse. After all, we’ve seen the “In da beginnin’ Big Daddy created da heaven an’ da earth” Ebonics Bible, as well as the “Apostle’s Log” Star Trek English paraphrase Bible. In a more serious effort, the New Oxford Annotated Bible was created in part by pro-”gay” and feminist scholars in order to set forth a more “gay” revisionist interpretation of Scripture.

But now there is a major controversy developing as the latest altered Bibles are being created by organizations that most would think of as being more conservative and reasonable. At the forefront of the controversy are the Wycliffe Bible Translators, the Summer Institute of Linguistics and Frontiers, all of which are producing Bible translations that remove or modify terms which they have deemed offensive to Muslims.

That’s right: Muslim-friendly Bibles.

True Religious Freedom Means Freedom for All
A recent development in Obamacare’s reach raises an important point about religious liberty. The health care law requires hospitals to provide contraceptives to patients. Churches have protested and have won an exemption to this regulation as it concerns their own health services. This is all well and good: Religious institutions shouldn’t be forced to support practices they find morally objectionable. For related reasons, various tax exemptions on religious institutions are also consistent with the principles of a free society.

My Take - This is one of those articles that everyone should read because it takes a reasonable person out of their comfort zone. Religion has always been a blessing and a thorn in humanities side,.  That is why the founding fathers insisted on making sure that this new country was never going to be caught up in the same quagmire that Europe was in for hundreds of years.  They fought wars within wars; because as they conducted wars against other nations because of faith; they also conducted wars against their own citizenry because of faith. If you take the time to read about the religious wars of Europe you will find that it isn’t a simple case of Catholic against Protestant.

As you read this article please remember that the founding fathers were believers .  And in spite of what you may read my modern critics they believed that Judaic/Christian values and practices were far superior to all other religious beliefs. As a result all of the stuff going on today would have never occurred to them. They just didn’t realize that people would get so weird! They also never believed that a secular authority should have the right to become an atheistic semi-religion entity imposing it’s litany on believers.

Bishop: Obama Administration Is Telling Catholics ‘To Hell With You’
“The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To Hell with you!’” the bishop said in a column posted on his diocesan website. “There is no other way to put it.”

Obama Sandbags the Archbishop
In forcing the Catholic Church to violate its own principles, Obama has committed an act of federal aggression, crossing the line between church and state to appease his ACLU and feminist allies, while humiliating the Catholic bishops. At the end of Sunday mass at the church this writer attends in Washington, D.C., the pastor asked the congregation to remain for a few minutes. Then, on the instructions of Cardinal Archbishop Donald Wuerl, the pastor proceeded to read a letter. In the letter, the Church denounced the Obama administration for ordering all Catholic schools, hospitals and social services to provide, in their health insurance coverage for employees, free contraceptives, free sterilizations and free "morning-after" pills.

My Take - This is a “famous statement attributed to pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group. The text of the quotation is usually;

First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I was Protestant.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Asked About Plight of Syrian Christians, State Dept. Erroneously Blames Regime
Christians are under threat in Syria, but the Obama administration appears unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the source of the danger facing the minority. Asked several times during a press briefing Monday about violence and threats facing Syrian Christians, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland appeared to blame the government – although Christians reportedly are at risk from elements among the anti-regime forces……“Now they are afraid of the future. Will they have to flee their country like Iraqi Christians have done over the last several years?... Of those who said they wanted Assad to stay in power, the most common reason given – by 46 percent of that cohort of respondents – was:……. “We do not want to see Syria become another Iraq.  (I think these are two worthwhile follow-up articles.  RK)  U.S. Military Archbishop: Far Fewer Christians in Iraq Since U.S. 2003  (and )‘We Stand With You,’ Clinton Tells Syrian People Ahead of Security Council Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a message to Syrian protesters --

VOTER FRAUD

Left Demands James O’Keefe’s Head Over Voter Fraud Exposé
The Left is in a horrible huff. Once again James O’Keefe, the conservative film-maker who exposed ACORN, has demonstrated the duplicity of the Left. This time he proved why strict voter ID laws, opposed strongly by the Left, are necessary.  In more than 10 minutes of video footage, which has gone viral on the Internet, O’Keefe demonstrated how easy it was in New Hampshire for an individual to pose as a deceased voter and still receive a ballot to vote in an election.  New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien, (R-Mont Vernon) called the video “a shocking exclamation point on the need for immediate reform to New Hampshire’s election laws to ensure that voter fraud does not taint the rights of our citizens to have their votes counted in an honest, responsible way and impact our state.”  New Hampshire Governor John Lynch vetoed legislation passed in 2011 requiring photo ID at the polls. Governor Lynch had stated in his veto message that there was “no voter fraud problem in New Hampshire.”

MIDDLE EAST

How to get Russia on board in Syria? Hint: Think of the sea
Russian foot-dragging is now a key barrier between the Syrian demonstrators and their prospective liberation from Bashar al-Assad’s rule. Even the timid Arab League has called for al-Assad to leave, and Syria’s powerful neighbor, Turkey, has declared that it’s ready for internationally sanctioned action. The question is, can a U.N. Security Council resolution, including Russia’s vote, be secured, paving the way for an end to al-Assad’s rule?

Selfish politicking  (Wow!  Politicking that is selfish...imagine that!  RK)
Over the weekend we witnessed a dangerous intensifying of events in Syria: the freezing of the Arab League observer mission with team leaders citing safety reasons and a high number of casualties, accompanied by the regime’s indiscriminate use of heavy artillery. With over 200 dead since Thursday, we now have a clear idea that the regime of President Bashar Assad is going flat out with its idea of a “security solution,” designed to smash the uprising……But as Russia continues to supply Syria with arms and fuel, mere words have become futile. The Arab states must now collectively approach Russia, warning Syria’s ally that any influence they still retain in the Middle East is in jeopardy. This is the language that countries understand. They are not charities, but pragmatic machines, with markets and interests at stake.

My Take – Two different writers; two different approaches; two different solutions; both wanting the same outcome. Nothing is ever as it seems. However, everything is as history defines it. If we don’t know history we can’t define anything. If we can’t define it, we can’t explain it; if we can’t explain it, it is an illusion! But nothing is ever as it seems. RK

EUROPE

What kind of people have we become?
Churchill would be dismayed by modern Britain’s capitulation to jackboot egalitarians, says Jeff Randall. Between Christmas and New Year, the 70th anniversary of an event, which in no small way helped change the course of history, passed almost unnoticed. On December 26, 1941, less than three weeks after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill addressed both branches of Congress in the United States. The prime minister, who was in Washington to agree military strategy with President Roosevelt, used the invitation from Senators and Representatives to excoriate the Axis powers and pose a simple question: “What kind of people do they think we are?” ……According to a recent government report, some 3,775 former foreign prisoners, who were in line for deportation by the UK Border Agency, have been released from custody and are living here, most thanks to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a family and private life. A Nigerian rapist was due to be sent home after losing a series of appeals in British courts over his jailing for an attack on a 13-year-old girl. But Strasbourg’s worthies insisted that they must protect the culprit’s “social ties” with Britain, which had blossomed while he defied expulsion.

Mary Ann Sieghart: The dreamers who gave us the eurozone stand condemned
This was a policy blunder born of arrogance and insouciance at the highest levels. And it can't easily be reversed. An elderly man in France was arrested last week for supplying faulty breast implants to 30,000 women. Yet an elderly man in Germany is still free to enjoy his retirement despite having wrecked the lives of more than 500 million Europeans, with repercussions for billions more around the world. Not only that, but Helmut Kohl has been feted by an American President as "the greatest European leader of the second half of the 20th century". He should instead be found guilty of the greatest policy blunder of the second half of the 20th century. The formation of the euro has more than a little in common with the PIP implants scandal. In both cases, rules were deliberately broken, dreadful consequences were easily foreseen, and a culture of willful blindness and moral negligence prevailed. In both cases, untold human pain has been caused, with little chance of redress for the victims. But at least in the case of PIP, someone is being held responsible. In the case of the euro, not a single politician has suffered for his negligence.

Europeans See Poor Job Market
In most countries, pluralities say it is a bad time to find a job. Few Europeans in 2011 said it was a good time to find a job in the city or area where they live. A median of 12% of residents across the 27 countries Gallup surveyed were positive about the local job outlook, while a median of 80% said it was a bad time. Greeks were the least optimistic, with 2% saying it was a good time to find a job, and Germans were the most optimistic, with 50% saying it was a good time.

Will German Politicians Wreck Europe To Save Their Own Skins?
Readers of Via Meadia know that there’s little love or respect here for the lazy, lying demagogic politicians whose corrupt patronage politics have ruined Greece. Nor do we hold in particularly high esteem the cultural qualities that led the Greeks to support such rotten politicians year after year. Greek politics is in the school of Huey Long who famously told supporters that “If you’re not getting something for nothing, you’re not getting your fair share.” It takes some truly talented screw ups to come up with a worse plan for Greece than the one the Greeks have developed for themselves, but the Germans have risen to occasion in fine form. The latest German plan to “fix” Greece: the country should surrender control over its tax and budget policy to a European commissioner in exchange for the next €130 billion that Greece needs to pay off the rapacious and stupid European banks who, encouraged by fatheaded German banking regulators among others, paid top dollar for its worthless bonds.

Can the Germans stop being German?
For all Angela Merkel’s tough talk, she will eventually be forced to accept the inevitable on the euro crisis. One of Davos’s more amusing characteristics is that it can be used as a quite reliable contrary indicator. I’ve been coming to this annual gathering of the world elite of finance, business and public policy for some years now, and you can set your watch by it. If the mood is buoyant, you know that disaster is just around the corner, and if it is intensely gloomy, that things will soon be picking up. En masse, bankers, economists and business leaders tend to be a very poor form of economic indicator. Sometimes they are so wrong that one wonders how they manage to stay in business.

Conciliating the Armenians
I go to France quite often, but after this article is published, I may be liable to arrest if I set foot in the country. The French parliament has just passed a bill, proposed by President Nicolas Sarkozy's party, that will make it a crime to question whether the Armenian massacres in eastern Turkey in 1915 qualified as a genocide. Sarkozy will doubtless sign it into law next month, just in time for the presidential elections. It won't be just a crime to deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians, perhaps as many as a million, were killed in eastern Anatolia in 1915, and that it was the responsibility of the Turkish state. That is a historical fact, and only fools, knaves and Turkish ultranationalists deny it. It will also be a crime, punishable by one year in prison and a fine of up to 45,000 even to question the use of the word "genocide."

Mary Dejevsky: Could France show Europe how to move left
Across Europe, a widespread assumption has been that the combination of the cold economic climate, harsh austerity measures, and general disillusionment with politicians boosts the electoral chances of the populist right. The French presidential race, where Marine Le Pen offers a soft-ish version of the far-right option for the National Front, will be one of the first tests of this hypothesis.

My Take - I would love to be able to say “The French; what do you expect?”, except that this is playing out everywhere else also! Socialism is a failure. Socialist policies got the world into the mess it is in. So why are socialists considered for any leadership position? It is all so destructively insane that it seems Satanic. RK

MILITARY

German Angst as U.S. troops bid "Auf Wiedersehen"Walter Brunner, a lively 82-year old whose blue baseball cap matches the color of his eyes, leans across a red leather booth at the American-style diner in this southern German town and tries to make light of the looming pullout of U.S. troops. "We Germans fought for the Russians to go, now we are fighting for the Americans to stay," jokes Brunner, chairman of the German-American contact club in Grafenwoehr, whose lifeblood is its U.S. military base. He watched a young Elvis Presley arrive here for training in 1958 and still goes tenpin bowling with his American friends every Monday night. News that the 172nd infantry brigade, with its 3,500 soldiers and 8,000 family members, is being pulled from Grafenwoehr to return to the United States has hit this town hard.

RACE

Obama's Racial Politics
Many Americans thought that with Obama's presidency, we were moving to a "post-racial society." Nothing could be further from the truth.

A Black Man Can by Mike Adams
There is a bumper sticker I have often seen displaying these four simple words: “A Black Man Can.” The words could be taken in either of two ways. One interpretation is liberal - calling for whites to stop discriminating and give black men a chance. Another interpretation is conservative - suggesting black men can achieve without the help of government programs......

EDUCATION

Universities Abandon Western Civilization
Most students no longer are taught their nation’s triumphs that would equip them to be knowledgeable citizens. Major universities have turned from instruction in the significance of Western Civilization to the “profound” influence of Lady Gaga, (real name: Stephanie Germanotta), the bizarre recording artist whose commercial success has somehow topped charts around the world. In some colleges today even history majors don’t have to delve into our nation’s influences and beginings. The national Association of Scholars, in a new analysis, “The Vanishing West: 1964-2010,” describes the tragic near disappearance of the study of Western Civilization from the American undergraduate curriculum. (My Take – It would be interesting to see what would happen if the federal government stopped funding student loans. If there was less money being thrown at the universities then perhaps professors would really teach and students would really learn. In a world where no one has to compete those in that world will stop excelling. Welcome to higher education!)

WELCOME TO ISLAM

Christmas Under Islam
Earlier I discussed how mosques, some of which breed radicalization and serve as terrorist bases, flourish in America, while churches are increasingly targeted and destroyed in the Muslim world, especially the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity.

The Most Dangerous Place to be an Atheist
Alexander Aan was just another bureaucrat holding down a desk at the Department of Planning until his Facebook Atheism page came to the notice of Indonesian authorities in Obama’s old stomping grounds. Now Aan is facing a five year jail sentence for using social media to spread the message that Allah does not exist. Alexander is being charged with “defiling” Islam by using passages from the Koran to challenge the Islamic religion. And while the State Department and the media routinely go on the attack against any manifestation of what they call “Islamophobia,” it isn’t likely that they will be rushing to Aan’s defense. This isn’t exactly the first time that atheists have run afoul of the Islamic codes under which the Muslim world operates.

Violent Jihadist Video Riles Norway
It was, shall we say, an interesting week in Norway. On Tuesday, January 17, a video was posted on YouTube that called for Norwegian soldiers to be withdrawn from Afghanistan. Over images of Norwegian soldiers and of Norway’s prime minister, foreign minister, and crown prince, a text calling for Allah to “destroy them and let it be painful” was read aloud in Arabic, with subtitles in Norwegian. The video, which concluded with an image of Norway’s flag in flames, urged Muslims to show up for a protest rally on Friday outside the parliament building in Oslo. (My Take - And this is in a country that has bent over backwards to accommodate the Islamists within their midst believing they would eventually become part of Norway's community. To remain in Islam and to become one with the Norwegians is impossible. I wonder if the Norwegian leaders have ever read a history book of European history? RK)

Muslim Hate Groups
Muslim Hate Groups On Campus by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, exposes the radical origins and violent objectives of the purportedly mainstream Muslim student organizations that have set up shop on our nation’s campuses.

HOMOSEXUALITY

Blurring the Lines Between An Agenda and Human Rights
On December 6, President Barack Obama’s support for the demands of the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender” agenda rose to the next level when he issued a memorandum directing federal agencies abroad to “improve protections for LGBT asylum seekers and to strengthen opposition to criminalization of LGBT status or conduct.” The key phrase in the directive was Obama’s claim that so doing is but another part of the “United States’ commitment to promoting human rights.” This shift in characterizing the sexual and political demands of those who engage in homosexual behavior as a “human right” is as purposeful as it is dangerous to liberty, marriage, and the family. And if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech last week in Geneva was any indicator, the appeal to “human rights” is the new moniker for silencing and punishing any person, organization, or state that will not support the homosexual agenda.


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