The Long-Delayed Trial of the Fort Hood Terrorist http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/05/the-long-delayed-trial-of-the-fort-hood-terrorist/print/ It’s around 5,000 miles from El-Bireh, a dirty little administrative center for the Palestinian Authority bureaucracy, to Kileen, Texas. A year after Nidal Hasan opened fire in Fort Hood, killing 13 and wounding 29, a public square in El-Bireh was dedicated to Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/301788/battle-bulge-alexander-kazam
First they came for the trans fat. Now New York City is going after Big Soda — bureaucratic guns blazing. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to ban the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces at restaurants, delis, sports stadiums, movie theaters, and food carts would fine businesses as much as $200 for each plus-size drink they sell.
Gulp. Big gulp. Speaking of which, since the rule won’t apply to supermarkets and convenience stores, you should still be able to buy 7/11’s enormous 32-ounce Big Gulp, a giant container of sugary fizz dwarfed only by the 44-ounce Super Gulp and the 64-ounce Double Big Gulp, which is twice the size of the average human stomach.
Nor will the ban extend to fruit juice, dairy-based beverages such as the 580-calorie Chocolate Frosty from Wendy’s, or alcoholic drinks. A ten-ounce margarita packs about 600 calories, around 10 percent more than a McDonald’s Big Mac.
All of that will be permitted, and yet you will no longer be able to grab a standard 20-ounce Coke bottle from a street cart in Central Park. Ditto for the 20-ounce Snapple and Gatorade bottles at your local sandwich shop.
“I think it’s absurd,” said Paul Previti, owner of a Delmonico’s deli in midtown Manhattan. “I’m totally against it.” Delmonico’s sells several items larger than 16 ounces, and it would have to take these off the shelves to avoid a penalty. And, Previti adds, it’s silly to force people of different shapes, sizes, and needs to conform to the same arbitrary number. “First off, if you take a 16-ounce soda and throw some of it into a cup of ice, what are you left with? Ten ounces of soda? A guy who pulls over in a truck and has to go up on the Thruway, he might want to have the soda there for a couple of hours.”
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/06/04/supranational-government-in-europe/?singlepage=true Great swathes of southern Europe operated as a fiscal scam within the European Monetary Union, we know now. Greece lied about its economy to get into EMU and then ran its national debt up to 130% of GDP to feed a kleptocratic patronage machine. Spain’s banks fed a real estate bubble that, in relative […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/06/the_battle_of_midway_at_70.html
After the famous air raid on Japan on April 18, 1942 led by then Colonel James Doolittle and his squadron of B-25 bomber, launched from the USS Hornet, a series of events were set into motion. One being from our newly found war foe Japan and her military leadership and the other from one very keen and history enriched Admiral Chester Nimitz. In what was to be the largest ever sea battle in size and scope known to man, the results would yield the writing of world history for 70 years to come. However, how much longer will that battle be relevant to world history?
It has always surprised me how this nation’s media has always weighed far more heavily the D-Day invasion that took place two years after Midway. Had we blundered or had the wrong Admiral been in place at the time to make use of the slight but tested intelligence, we could have fallen for the elaborate feint in the Aleutian Islands or held back to protect a suspected threat against Hawaii or the West Coast. We might have been caught in those traps with an inferior force and history may have been flowed in just the opposite direction, where we would have lost both Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States. Without a dramatic and concise victory and the use of intelligence before it aged beyond usefulness, there would have been no saving Europe, and the United States would have found itself looking quite different from today, as it no doubt would have been controlled by an axis power.
Another matter, which has slipped the minds of some of the greatest historians, is the fact that Mexico had reversed its stance on the Embargo to the Axis powers in 1940 and was making deals with Germany, Japan, and Russia for its oil supply. Mexico was lining up to be on the side of the Axis Powers. Had Japan bested us at Midway, the Mexican Government could have easily been emboldened to allow Axis powers to move up from their positions in South America and in from Japan to squeeze the United States into a war here on our own soil. We would have been fighting Yamamoto from behind blades of grass as he once quipped in regard to Americans’ rights to own guns.
The irony of the end of World War 2 is that it was not the end of centralized governance and tyranny. To every American who sacrificed their lives or gave of themselves completely and unselfishly I offer my thanks for what you did. To those of you who are veterans that are still with us today from World War 2, I want you to know you are not forgotten by all us. There are many of us who do know our history and are preparing to save our nation based on that history you helped to write, 70 years ago.
A toast to “Point Luck” and the heroes of the United States Navy!
United States Japan
Casualties 307 2,500
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/what_is_obama_hiding.html
There has been plenty of conjecture regarding Obama’s biography. Clearly, he has a penchant for fiction and does not care to fact-check his own life. Nor does he care for others to fact-check or scrutinize what he has been doing as president. Has this been why he has been decimating the taxpayers’ best friends in Washington: the inspectors general?
Inspectors general are investigative officials charged with monitoring government programs for waste, fraud, incompetency, corruption, and the like. They are the taxpayers’ first line of defense against a rampaging, out-of-control, and corrupt government. Unlike many if not most government programs, inspector general programs have a sterling return on investment. For example, Daniel Levinson, inspector general of the Health and Human Services Department, has been an unheralded hero for taxpayers. Since he took his job a few years ago, his investigations have led to more charges for health care fraud than ever before, and his office has returned about $11 billion to the Medicare Trust Fund (see this glowing profile in Business Week). Even in Obama’s Washington, that is serious money: those billions that will be available to care for our nation’s seniors. Levinson certainly is as deserving of the Presidential Medal of Freedom as Bob Dylan.
Inspectors general are a natural enemy of, let’s say, a politician who hails from Cook County and who likes to spend with abandon. This is particularly true when the beneficiaries of the spending are donors and supporters who can be paid back for their support with other people’s money. Didn’t Barack Obama define politics as a way to punish enemies and reward friends? Such is politics done the Chicago Way.
Looking at the past three years of Barack Obama’s presidency, there appears to have been a plan all along to blunt the effectiveness of inspectors general. This has been done by a variety of ways: by trying to force through Congress new and richly funded programs akin to “slush funds” without providing for the oversight that comes from the inspector general program; by stonewalling and attacking Darrell Issa, who as chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee (the two words “reform” and “oversight” are anathema to Barack Obama) has called for expanding the power of inspectors general; brutal public personal attacks on various inspectors general that are meant to drive them from office and chill the investigative efforts of others; and by deliberately failing to fill vacancies in the ranks of inspectors general — a dereliction of duty on the part of Barack Obama that earned the president a stinging rebuke in a recent Washington Post editorial (“Where are the inspectors general?”).
When Democrats were in control of Congress, President Obama was on a rampage: pushing through various programs that have gone down the memory hole because they have been judged failures and have become unpopular. Foremost among these have been the stimulus boondoggle and ObamaCare.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ It’s easy to dismiss New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s latest nanny state hiccup as the control-freak antics of a powerful man –but that would be missing the point. Bloomberg did not come up with the idea of banning sodas during a spa session on his private island. His implementation of it may be more […]
http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2012/06/05/washington-times-printing-nazi-propaganda/?print=1 Well we knew it wouldn’t be long. If nationalists win a Serbian election, it follows that there will be an article in the Washington Times by Croatian-supremacist Jeffrey Kuhner, as usual angling for a new war against Serbia — by making the argument that Serbia wants it. As a typical rapist would. Below is […]
http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2012/06/04/of-ounces-pounds-and-individual-rights/ The reaction to Mayor Bloomberg’s demand that sugary soft drinks be limited to 16 oz cup size has been surprising. Some of the same people who support measures restricting individual rights in favor of group safety or health (banning smoking in public places) were outspokenly opposed to this rather innocuous suggestion. First, let’s establish […]
http://www.businessinsider.com/george-soros-speech-goes-viral-2012-6
THIS SPEECH CAUSED SUCH A RUCKUS THAT IT WAS TAKEN DOWN FROM HIS WEBSITE….
One of our favorite China bloggers, the pseudonymous Also Sprach Analyst called it “The best thing ever written on the euro crisis.” The bottom line is that the speech is getting praised and passed around and going viral in a way that most speeches about the Eurozone don’t.So you have to ask: Why is this speech going nuts?
Well there’s a lot in it for people to like. He gives a nice roundhouse kick to the Germans, which is usually pretty popular. And he says that the Eurozone has 3 months to fix the crisis, which provides a perfect hook for headline-writers.
But what’s special about the speech is his characterization of the Euro as being itself being a “bubble.”
Now the word “bubble” gets abused a lot. Every little boom is called a bubble these days. And things that have nothing to do with market valuations (like the big pile of student loan debt being taken on) get called bubbles improperly.
But Soros is onto something here.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/george-soros-speech-goes-viral-2012-6#ixzz1wuaY3gt2
Trento, Italy
Ever since the Crash of 2008 there has been a widespread recognition, both among economists and the general public, that economic theory has failed. But there is no consensus on the causes and the extent of that failure.
I believe that the failure is more profound than generally recognized. It goes back to the foundations of economic theory. Economics tried to model itself on Newtonian physics. It sought to establish universally and timelessly valid laws governing reality. But economics is a social science and there is a fundamental difference between the natural and social sciences. Social phenomena have thinking participants who base their decisions on imperfect knowledge. That is what economic theory has tried to ignore.
Scientific method needs an independent criterion, by which the truth or validity of its theories can be judged. Natural phenomena constitute such a criterion; social phenomena do not. That is because natural phenomena consist of facts that unfold independently of any statements that relate to them. The facts then serve as objective evidence by which the validity of scientific theories can be judged. That has enabled natural science to produce amazing results.
Social events, by contrast, have thinking participants who have a will of their own. They are not detached observers but engaged decision makers whose decisions greatly influence the course of events. Therefore the events do not constitute an independent criterion by which participants can decide whether their views are valid. In the absence of an independent criterion people have to base their decisions not on knowledge but on an inherently biased and to greater or lesser extent distorted interpretation of reality. Their lack of perfect knowledge or fallibility introduces an element of indeterminacy into the course of events that is absent when the events relate to the behavior of inanimate objects. The resulting uncertainty hinders the social sciences in producing laws similar to Newton’s physics.
Economics, which became the most influential of the social sciences, sought to remove this handicap by taking an axiomatic approach similar to Euclid’s geometry. But Euclid’s axioms closely resembled reality while the theory of rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis became far removed from it. Up to a point the axiomatic approach worked. For instance, the theory of perfect competition postulated perfect knowledge. But the postulate worked only as long as it was applied to the exchange of physical goods. When it came to production, as distinct from exchange, or to the use of money and credit, the postulate became untenable because the participants’ decisions involved the future and the future cannot be known until it has actually occurred.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/israel-has-deployed-nuclear-weapons-on-its-new-german-built-submarines-2012-6#ixzz1wuYGRWXS For decades the world has accepted that Israel sits upon a mountain of nuclear weapons that it says simply don’t exist, and without any proof to show otherwise, that’s the way it has stood. Until now. Der Spiegel reports that after extensive research they’ve unearthed proof not only of Israel’s nuclear weapons, […]
