More Nonsense From Piers Morgan

Piers Morgan, the tabloid “journalist” who briefly was on CNN before we ran him out of America, is once again ranting about gun control in the US.  His tabloid experience allowed him to come up with a sufficiently lurid title: A Math Question For The US Media: What’s Going to Kill More American Kids This Year? Ebola or Guns?

Answering that directly, there’s no way to tell.  It’s only October 28^th and President Obama’s stunning lack of leadership and incredibly bad choices may yet result in an “Ebola Apocalypse Christmas” here in the US.

But Piers doesn't really care about that, this is just another case of his impassioned fury that in America people are allowed to own guns.  And, like all anti-gun liberals, his favorite argument is “guns are killing children.”  Really?  Let me present some facts supporting my assertion that you don’t actually give a crap about “the children.”  According to the CDC, unintentional injury is the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 1 and 4.  Drilling down further, for children 1 – 4 accidental drowning is the leading cause of death.  So, where are the calls to outlaw private pool ownership?  Nonexistent, despite the fact that nobody “needs” to own a pool.  Where are the calls for mandatory 24-7 lifeguards, paid for by the pool’s owner?  Or even just mandatory fencing? Nary a mention.

For kids 5 – 24 automobile accidents are the leading cause of death.  So, why are people allowed to own (or drive) their own car?  Alternatives do exist- everyone could take the bus, train, bicycle, or just walk.  Think of all the children we could save by outlawing pools and cars!

Of course, I’m certainly not the first to point all this out.  It’s a frequent talking-point among those who support the basic human right to self-defense.  And, of course, it’s a point that anti-gunners like Piers Morgan blithely ignore.

Morgan trots out another assertion:  That following the Dunblane Massacre in 1996, the UK almost completely outlawed guns.  And following this wise, sensible action, they all lived happily ever.  Of course, it’s just not true.  Perhaps he should actually read the very publication that now employs him.  They report that England has seen an unbelievable 89% increase in gun violence since outlawing guns.  Which really shouldn't surprise anyone- now the only people with guns are the criminals.  But, in typical liberal fashion, he tries to spin his away around that unpleasant reality by grandly proclaiming “we haven’t had a single school shooting since guns were outlawed!”  What he fails to mention is that they hadn't had a single school shooting before the Dunblane Massacre, either.  But they did have the Cumbria Shootings just four years ago with 14 shot dead.  Wow, that gun control is sooo effective!

Finally, Piers treats us to the liberal’s standard smug moral superiority line of “permitting gun ownership is so uncivilized.”  Really?  OK, Piers, let me show you what “uncivilized” really looks like:

That’s some innocent person being forced to strip by a criminal at the height of the London Riots.  Would you like another?

One Bad Choice After Another

So, the truth is finally starting to come out about the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.  But before we talk about that, let's take a trip down memory lane to see how this story has been presented all along. I think the LA Times summed it up best on August 12th.

Yet again, the protesters took to the sidewalks and streets, facing a row of police guarding the St. Louis County prosecutor's office. "Hands up!" they chanted, their arms aloft. "Don't shoot."

"This is how the boy died!" Kendrick Strong, 42, hollered at police officers Tuesday morning. "This is how the boy died! With his hands up in the air!"

Later in that same article they summed up the narrative: "Brown was shot and killed by an officer Saturday while...running away with his hands up."  It's Trayvon Martin all over again- an unarmed black teen senselessly killed by an evil, racist, white man.  In both cases we've had the liberal media relentlessly hammering their "message" of racial injustice into our skulls.

Yeah, but the facts came out with Trayvon, too.  Most of them in the "alternative" (conservative) media, but I recently read an article by Massad Ayoob that introduced me to things I had never previously heard.  I strongly encourage you to read the article yourself.  The main take-away is that Trayvon was portrayed as an innocent young boy out purchasing skittles and tea who was senselessly gunned down for no reason.  He was in fact a man-sized criminal who both did and dealt drugs, had a history of violence, and who brutally assaulted (and nearly killed) a man without provocation.  A man who successfully defended himself.

What a strange coincidence.  It appears that's EXACTLY what happened in Ferguson.  Turns out the physical evidence corroborates virtually all of Officer Darren Wilson's testimony:  Michael Brown did not have his hands up.  He was not surrendering, he was charging.  He had already violently assaulted Officer Wilson without provocation, and had tried to grab his gun.  He had just robbed a convenience store, a crime that (despite media reports) Officer Wilson was aware of.  So yet again, we have a violent criminal thug, high on drugs, who brutally assaulted a man who then successfully defended himself.

It's Not Theatre

Minutes after emitting some non-committal bureaucrat BS in response to the beheading of American James Foley US President Barack Obama hit the golf course (again).  Someone took this photo:

Finally, three weeks after this atrocity, Obama went on NBC (his biggest cheerleaders) and had this to say:

"Part of this job is also the theater of it. I should have anticipated the optics of playing golf."

The optics?  No, you inhuman monster, it's not theatrics when people are outraged or saddened by someone's untimely death.  James Foley's friends and parents weren't happily laughing after he was killed. And it's not because they appreciated "the theatrics" of the moment, it's because they were feeling honest grief.

Continuing to speak about "theatrics" Obama said: "Well, it's not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters. And I'm mindful of that."

This just shows how completely disconnected from the human race our President really is.  He just doesn't get that other people aren't acting sad about things like this.  He can't imagine that they genuinely are feeling that emotion.

It's so ironic that the liberals, the people who so prize feeling over thinking, would gift us with this man who is apparently incapable not only of feeling these emotions, but also incapable of believing that anyone else feels them.

The photo above tells us what he really felt about the brutal execution of an American: It was hilarious.

Does Google Target Conservatives?

Should bloggers that challenge the ultra-progressive narrative (especially libertarians and conservatives) strongly consider using Wordpress instead of Blogspot?

On July 3rd, in anticipation of conservative buzz over D'Souza's America movie and July 4th weekend posts by conservative patriots with some extra time on their hands, Google employee activists are back to their old tricks. I came out of the theater looking to blog about the movie, and found I had an email about "suspicious activity" on my account.  Well, if Google didn't want me to think my account was hacked, this was a poor choice of words.  Turns out that I was the suspect, and my blog was guilty until proven innocent. (Note: This also occurred withing hours of me doing something I had never done before: commenting on an LA Times article and linking back to my blog!)  And as such the Blogspot interface would not even let me download or back up the data from my 'jailed' blog.  I was told that my blog had been removed.  As I was trying to find information about blog restoration and the review process, I was sent an email telling me that my blog had been reviewed and was denied reinstatement.  Which could easily have dissuaded a blogger from further pursuing the matter.  From a company that prides itself on user interfaces, is that the point?

Back in 2008 it seems that the 98% liberal Google workforce decided to silence criticism of Barack Obama including (or especially) blogs of pro-Hillary Democrats.

It turns out that there is an interesting pattern where it concerns the blogs that Google's Blogspot team have summarily locked down on their service. They all belong to the Just Say No Deal coalition, a group of blogs that are standing against the Obama campaign. It seems the largest portion of these blogs are Hillary supporting blogs, too.

The blogger GeekLove (a pseudonym) writes about how the timing of her blog removal made her suspicious. 

“I suspect that it was Obama supporters because I think the block was timed to affect blogs prior to the unity event so that we would not ‘rain on the unity parade,’ GeekLove said. “Also, Obama has ads out hiring people with no experience, except the ability to use computers. I presume these are the individuals responsible for silencing any opposition. His campaign has really harnessed the power of the internet and in the process learned to game the system in a way that I find frightening.”

In other words, select people (with a questionnaire) who will do anything to support the campaign, and have them simply do Google searches, find anti-Obama sites that get hits on Google, and flag them for review.   Hard to believe?  Do you not know how this Chicago politician became a state senator in Illinois to begin with???

Is all this bullying activism coming from outside Google?  Or are there people on the inside giving low priority to the resolution of suspected Terms of Service violations?  Well, realize that Obama now has the DOJ, the FBI, and the NSA now, not a team of campaign volunteers with PCs.  He can communicate to any staff members of Google and Facebook through intermediaries (although he has met with Zuckerberg directly), and enjoin them with a national security letter to not speak of anything said, especially their covert "cooperation" with the government.    

But even before Obama administration, the following was written by an alan james in 2008 (emphasis mine):

I recently started a new "conservative" blog on blogspot, and was "under review" for potential splogging within 48 hours. Here's the kicker - I hadn't even put any content on my blog yet. The only content on the blog were 2 gadgets (newsmax video feeds and fox news headlines) provided by blogspot.  

Oddly enough, when I learned I had been placed under review, it wasn't hackers I suspected of foul play, but the political leanings Google/Blogspot themselves. Call me narrow minded, but Occam's Razor seems to work here. It's not hard to imagine the simplicity with which Blogspot could flag conservative blogs from the outset and place them under review. 

Last year a "birther" blog was shut down for TOS violation in concert with a purported malware attack, as with the aforementioned alan james (most of the targeting is under the guise of anti-splogging).

I do know that on Oct. 1, 2013 this blog was severely hacked to the point the template had to be replaced and on the very same day Google AdSense sent notification that it was disabling the ads running for violating TOS listing, targeting an individual or group, as their reason, even though sites like Americans Against The Tea Party [www.aattp.org] can run Google AdSense with no problem.
On one hand I thank Google and on the other I shame them. It is sad that such a great resource would let political ideology take over.

And when Christian Browne was given the anti-splog treatment, he was not directed at all to the forum at all by Google staff, and (naturally) concluded that that there was no appeal process for reinstating his blog.  This is all very similar to the tactics reportedly used by insurance companies.  Except that it makes you wonder what Google has to gain by this abuse in a venture that is no more a charity than Facebook is.

Timothy Carney describes the staff-swapping relationship between Google and the Obama administration as being like what occurs for ideological think tanks (maybe they shouldn't have lost all those people to Google before the Obamacare website was built):

This may surprise you if you believed Obama’s campaign rhetoric about him fighting against big business and wealthy executives. But the Google-Obama alliance is long-lasting and intimate.

A couple of examples:
Remember Obama’s No. 2 tech staffer at the White House was Google’s former top lobbyist — who improperly worked with active Google lobbyists on pushing policy that Google supported.
Obama appointed non-registered Google lobbyist and max-Obama donor Vint Cerf to a science advisory board.
Schmidt reportedly once asked a deputy to make the search engine ignore Schmidt’s political giving (heavy to Dems and Obama).

Has the search engine been tweaked before?  Is it possible that the Google search engine response to "WMDs" was a calculated ad as part of the Democrats' "Bush tricked us into voting for the War" strategy?  A lot of criticism over private company owners' donations (e.g. Chic-Fil-A) but no response to obvious campaigning by a search engine?  Google is also apparently joining Eric Holder in Obama's economic war against the 2nd Amendment through selectivity.  It would seem Google doesn't have much use for libertarians at their company.

These are stories leading up to the latest July 4th campaign.  With all the aforementioned problems, is it any wonder that when "technical difficulties" caused an error in the Google search engine turning up results for D'Souza's new movie America, D'Souza was skeptical about it?

And that brings me to the issue of Don Mashak who was caught in the Google's persecution of sploggers" and was given the run-around by Google staff even more egregiously than Christian Browne was.  The Google staff (volunteer staff?) made it sound to me that the problem is with other blogs (presumably at Blogspot/Blogger) that clone material to get hits.  (My articles haven't reached the level to even justify monetization, let alone are there clone blogs that pop up if I test the 'searchability' of my articles.)  What they told Don Mashak that weekend paints a different picture.  It would seem that these agents ruthlessly "persecute" (yes, they use the words) authors that publish the contents of their posts in other venues.

A prominent Google rep/reviewer (who writes articles explaining/defending Blogspot policy) obviously knows that the articles being compared are written by the same person.  The blogger embeds his name in the names of his blogs.  Don Mashak explains several several times that he is the owner of the content.  The reviewer is deliberately obtuse on this point as he never explains why an author can't reuse his own content.  If you question this, look where he mentions "scraped (i.e. stolen) or syndicated" and follows with "My guess is that 90% - 100% of your content is all scraped."  He could've said "You are not allowed to use your own content" and explain how the Google policy is interpreted that way (which would be very odd and not obvious to me why that would be the case, but ...), but he simply concludes this based on his contrived evidence that Don Mashak is lying about using content from articles written by ... himself!

The most telling part might be where the Google rep tries to put on the most I'm-being-reasonable tone (like the contemptuous tone of some managers use to talk to incensed customers like kindergartners):

If this sort of ranting is part of your blogs, that would explain why the blogs were deleted.

Wow.  Think about this. The sort of political complaining that Mashak is doing there might not score points with IT personnel, but how is it against Google policy?  This rep feels that Mashak is abusive because he is "paranoid" about the fact that they are doing nothing with the information provided, not really answering his questions, and basically stonewalling him.  It's theater in a blog forum.  But Mashak's tiresome reactions wear down the TOS agent into an admission of guilt.  I'm having a difficult time understanding what sorts of ranting are against the Terms of Service.

What also seems implicit is that Google has a text comparison application that is like the WinDiff utility, but deals with hypertext and probably searches hypertext at the site level. (And why wouldn't the Terms of Service reviewers have such a utility?)  Enter the name of a blog, and a list of suspected "plagiarized" sources and all commonly used text is cited.  That common text can then be used to run in the Google search engine and turn up results in many pages.  Lo and behold, sentences "chosen at random" turn up half a dozen articles all by the same author.



http://gawker.com/5961202/how-the-obama-campaigns-data-miners-knew-what-you-were-watching-on-tv
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/04/Google-Hires-Obama-s-Campaign-E-Team

Seeing Socialism From Space

China to the left, Japan to the right, and S. Korea below, make N. Korea look very dark indeed.

From space North Korea is an environmentalist's dream.  There is nothing to halt energy consumption like totalitarian repression and anticapitalist poverty.  (And nothing thumbs one's nose at filthy capitalism like keeping one's people dirt poor and miserable.)  With that level of energy production there is sure to either be starvation, or a smaller population due to past starvation. 

Fascist China, having roughly survived the Mao personality cult,  is doing better than North Korea which is a personality cult.  North Korea does have nuclear capability so even if the energy production per capita is nil.  You'd think that the only industry in North Korea is nuclear weaponry.  

Here is what one thoughtful person wrote about the idea that the picture above says something about "socialism":

North Korea is not a socialist state. It is a dictatorship pretending to be communist. There is nothing remotely related to socialism in such a state and no economic philosophy at play in such a state. Anyone making such a suggestion that it is truly an uneducated moron. England is a socialist state. Most of out [sic] democratic allies are as well. The US is socialist in many areas. We don't use the term, but the economic basis for things like Medicare is socialism. And it was socialism at play when George W. Bush briefly took over much of our banking and auto industry. So learn what the word means and what it doesn't. The lack of electricity and the starvation in North Korea has nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with a crazy dictatorial family in power.

Imperialism in Jerusalem

The City of Jerusalem.

Around 1967 something happened that changed the way the enlightened felt about Israel.  Several Arab nations decided it was time to get rid of them pesky Jews. While the first bully was still cocking his fist, Israel punched first, proceeded to beat 3 bullies at once, and then took their lunch money for good measure.  Israeli Jews were no longer victims to be pitied.

The anti-imperialist/multiculturalist set was all prepared to mourn the destruction of the Jews and send out the 1967 equivalent of hashtags.  Their demise would have meant as little to Europe as the demise of Christians and Kurds does now in the present day Arab nations.  But suddenly Israelis represented strength instead of victimhood, they represented self-determination rather than a pawn for the UN to posture over, they represented a militarily defensible democracy rather than another pitiable medieval theocracy.

Suddenly Europe wasn't so embarrassed about the Holocaust.  No longer content to wait in shtetls for the next progrom, Israelis not only demonstrated that an enterprising people could create wealth in an impoverished land but could defend it.

One of many things that amaze me about the anti-imperialist/multi-culturalist movement in Europe and North America is how sensitive they are to some tokens of conquest and not to others.  If Mount Rushmore had been the most sacred site to the Sioux nation, fundamental to their religious system for centuries, it would be difficult to feel as positive about its nationalism.  Wouldn't there be other places to make it after all?  Surely it would even be more embarrassing to have carved a Pilgrim holding a Bible.  Or if American Christians had carved a cathedral into the mountain?

Yet no one speaks about the message of religious imperialism that the Dome of the Rock communicates.  Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Koran.  It is central in the Jewish scriptures (what Christians call "the Old Testament").  Muslim imperialism built this mosque on the site of the Jerusalem Temple for two reasons: to demonstrate that the Muslims have a greater claim on Father Abraham (and the sites associated with him) than do the Jews, and because claiming the most holy Jewish site was a way of marking the territory of the former Israelite kingdom for political Islam.  As beautiful as the Dome is aesthetically, it is and always will be a deliberate symbol of conquest.  If there was an ancient cathedral built there, I think most Christians would feel (and should feel) a sense of embarrassment about it. (Not out of knee-jerk political correctness, but out of the fact that a 'building' is not the Lord's Church.)  Most evangelicals and fundamentalists in America would want such an edifice torn down.

The most visible landmark in all Jerusalem is a landmark of religious and political imperialism.  Jewish Israelis are much more tolerant of the existence of the Dome on their Temple Mount than most Palestinian Arabs and Muslims are tolerant of the existence of Israel in any part of Palestine.  If Jerusalem were unequivocally Israeli soil, the Dome would remain standing.  If it were entirely Palestinian, synagogues and temples would burn as Muslim crowds cheered and Americans tweeted their hashtags.

Contrasting The Democrat Narrative With Reality

SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by Democrat Billionaire Elon Musk got hit by a pair of class-action lawsuits yesterday.  One suit is over the fact that he fired 400 workers last year in clear violation of labor law.  California's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act unequivocally states that any company with over 400 employees must provide 60-day notice when laying off fifty or more employees.

The other suit alleges that SpaceX failed to provide employees, even those with safety-critical jobs, with state mandated lunch and rest breaks.  Even worse, SpaceX is accused of forcing workers to work off the clock and even falsify timekeeping records.  That last bit is a huge violation of federal law, and managers and executives in aerospace have been marched off in handcuffs for that exact violation. I work in that industry myself, and I can tell you that timekeeping is the one thing taken as seriously (or sometimes more so) than worker safety.

So where's the California Labor Board investigation of SpaceX? There isn't one.  Where's NASA's investigation of the company's timekeeping practices? Also completely absent.  Elon Musk is a major Democrat donor, and California is run by Democrats.  So is NASA in the form of Barack Obama who directed them to end manned American spaceflight and focus on Muslim outreach.

Meanwhile, here's the (incredibly ironic) narrative put forth by the Democrats:

Elon Musk's SpaceX is a prime example of something else the Democrats blame on Republicans:  Receiving unfair tax breaks.  In April of this year, the California Legislature passed and Governor Jerry Brown signed into law AB777 which specifically exempts SpaceX from the same property taxes that every other business in the state has to pay.

Hilariously, Musk promptly burned California and moved his operations to Texas.

Meanwhile, here's what Democrats claim to be reality: