On February 12, 2015,
in Uncategorized,
by magoo1310
It’s Wednesday, February 11th, 2015…but before we get started, (a) we don’t give a rat’s behind where Jon Stewart goes or what he does, and; (b) let’s begin with a little splash of Socialism, courtesy of The Daily Caller and America’s unelected Nutrition Czarina:
“In a hard-hitting interview for the March issue of Cooking Light magazine, first lady Michelle Obama promised that the deeply unpopular Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act she has long championed is a “generational” effort that America will eventually see as an historic dietary triumph.
“I’m confident that the school lunch changes will eventually be embraced by kids,” the first lady told Cooking Light. “Because we’re really thinking about the kids who are kindergartners today. If all they know are whole grains and vegetables, by the time they’re graduating from high school, this will be their norm; they won’t know anything different.”
Obama’s strategy is to start food indoctrination at a very young age. “These kids are starting from nursery school, getting whole grains and fish and brown rice,” she declared.
“We’re looking at that kid going through high school and then entering college with a whole new set of habits and taste buds,” the first lady also proclaimed. “These kids will be acclimated to different tastes, and then they’ll go into college with that set of information and those skills and those norms. And hopefully they’ll become the voices of their generation for how to eat and live and build a quality life…”
All of which is simple, unadulterated…
All the evidence (aka, for the politically-impaired, “facts“) clearly indicates whatever Moochie’s sellin’, kids of every age, ethnicity and socio-economic status ain’t buyin’ it…
…perhaps because children recognize rank hypocrisy when they hear and see it. Case in point: submitted for your perusal, the luncheon bill of fare enjoyed by Sasha and Malia at the exclusive Sidwell Friends School:
December 9, 2014
MS/US
Potato Sausage Soup
Firecracker Slaw
California Chef’s Salad
All Natural Jamaican Jerk Chicken Wings
Sweet Potato Black Bean Bake
Sautéed Local Greens
Gemelli Alfredo
Sliced Pineapple
Yes…whole grains, fish and brown rice for thee, not for…
…mine or ME! Which at least explains the extended-cab dimensions of Moochie’s daunting derriere!
And which furthermore proves certain animals, particularly pigs…
…are more equal than others.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
We lead of the mid-week edition with the WSJ‘s Jason Riley, who observes how the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is…
“Will liberals ever forgive Daniel Patrick Moynihan for being right?
Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the future senator’s report on the black family, the controversial document issued while he served as an assistant secretary in President Lyndon Johnson’s Labor Department. Moynihan highlighted troubling cultural trends among inner-city blacks, with a special focus on the increasing number of fatherless homes.
“The fundamental problem is that of family structure,” wrote Moynihan, who had a doctorate in sociology. “The evidence—not final but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling.”
For his troubles, Moynihan was denounced as a victim-blaming racist bent on undermining the civil-rights movement. Even worse, writes Harvard’s Paul Peterson in the current issue of the journal Education Next, Moynihan’s “findings were totally ignored by those who designed public policies at the time.” The Great Society architects would go on to expand old programs or formulate new ones that exacerbated the problems Moynihan identified. Marriage was penalized and single parenting was subsidized. In effect, the government paid mothers to keep fathers out of the home—and paid them well.
“Economists and policy analysts of the day worried about the negative incentives that had been created,” writes Mr. Peterson. “Analysts estimated that in 1975 a household head would have to earn $20,000”—or an inflation-adjusted $88,000 today—“to have more resources than what could be obtained from Great Society programs.”
History has proved that Moynihan was onto something. When the report was released, about 25% of black children and 5% of white children lived in a household headed by a single mother. During the next 20 years the black percentage would double and the racial gap would widen. Today more than 70% of all black births are to unmarried women, twicethe white percentage…”
Which is itself far higher than it would be absent the manifestly misguided ministrations of modern Progressives.
The Left also remains in steadfast denial of yet another irrefutable truth Moynihan recognized: entitlement to one’s opinion does not constitute license to manufacture one’s own facts!
By the way, these weren’t mistaken recollections resulting from fatigue, age or any other innocent origin; they were bald-faced, calculated, self-serving lies in which these two charlatans were caught.
And don’t look for Brian to return to his anchor seat in six months:
The man is damaged goods; irreparably damaged goods. The sad part is, Williams is being thrown under the bus not because of his lies, but because his deliberate deceptions are symptomatic of a greater problem endemic to anything remotely connected to Liberalism in general and the Dimocratic Party specifically.
“…In the United States, Obama is operating in a political environment where the public — based on longstanding prudential American policy — believes we should not negotiate with terrorists because that encourages and legitimizes their savage methods. Similarly, the public strongly believes international terrorists are enemies who must be defeated, not defendants who must be indicted. Obama knows he is negotiating with, intends to settle with, and eventually will leave Afghanistan to the tender mercies of, the Taliban. Therefore, the administration is desperate that you not look at the Taliban as terrorists.
…But they are terrorists.“
And no amount of obfuscation, disinformation or misrepresentation will ever alter the fact; or the public’s perception, for that matter. A significant number of Americans may be slow…
…but the majority aren’t stupid.
In two related items, both brought to us again by NRO, the great Victor Davis Hanson explores…
“…The architect of appeasement — for example, Neville Chamberlain, former prime minister of Great Britain — was predictably a narcissist. Chamberlain believed that his own powers of oratory, his insights into reason, and his undeniably superior morality would sway even a thug like Adolf Hitler.
President Obama currently is convinced that his singular charisma and rare insight into human nature will convince the Taliban to peacefully participate in Afghan politics. Obama will supposedly also win over the Iranian theocracy and show it how nonproliferation is really to everyone’s advantage.“Reset” diplomacy with Putin was supposed to lessen tensions — if, after the 2012 election, Putin just had more exposure to a flexible statesman of Obama’s wisdom.
Throughout history, without the vanity of the conceder, there would never have been appeasement.
Appeasement also always subordinates the interests of vulnerable third parties to the appeaser’s own inflated sense of self.When Chamberlain and the French prime minister Edouard Daladier signed the 1938 Munich Pact, they worried little about the fate of millions of Czechs who lost their country — and less about millions of Poles who were next in line for Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.
Reset diplomacy with Russia in 2009 was not much concerned about the ensuing danger to Crimeans or Ukrainians. When the Taliban takes over, hundreds of thousands of reformist Afghans will die.
Obama sees a deal with Iran as a way to cement his legacy as a breakthrough statesman. In comparison, the long-term consequences of a nuclear Iran on the security of tiny Israel or on the stability of the largely Sunni Arab Middle East are future and more abstract concerns for others…”
“…Slavery was outlawed in the U.S. in 1865. Jim Crow ended officially a half-century ago. Indentured servitude, however, continues, almost exclusively among some Islamic groups in the Middle East and Africa. The caste system and ethnic and religious tribalism that institutionalized discrimination and second-class status, quite akin to Jim Crow, persist in places in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. I doubt today whether a Jew of any nationality would be allowed to immigrate and buy real estate in too many corners of the Islamic Middle East. Outside of the West, women and homosexuals are often treated no differently than in the Seventh Century.
…Areas of Central and Latin America are as poor as the Middle East, but Christian liberation theologists, unlike the Islamic State, are not beheading and burning prisoners alive to advance their redistributionist cause…”
This “man”…and we use the term very loosely…is sowing the wind; unfortunately, it will be the rest of us who reap the resultant whirlwind.
In a similar vein, courtesy of PJMedia‘s Roger Simon…
“…Nevertheless, Obama can blacken Christians and name them in a speech, but not Muslims.
The reason is not complicated. Obama is not a religious person. He rarely appears in church, except for political purposes. He is titularly a Christian, but identifies emotionally, from his youth in Indonesian madrassas and from his ideological predisposition, with Third World Muslims. But now he is confronted with those same Muslims behaving like barbarians across Africa and the Middle East and sometimes into Europe and America.
What would be his reaction to that? Pretty much what it is for most throughout the Islamic world — shame. As many have noted, Islam is a shame culture (the kind of society that will go berserk over cartoons) and, like it or not, our president is part of it culturally. That does not mean he is stoning adulterers or cutting off the hands of thieves or treating women like chattel, but it does mean he is genuinely and quite deeply ashamed of the religion he, in part, came from. He cannot adjust to or accept the calamities it is causing. Unlike the president of Egypt, he cannot name it.
This also explains Obama’s determination to whitewash the behavior of Iran and make a deal with the Islamic Republic that will jeopardize the entire world. It also helps make more clear his ambivalent (at best) relationship to the state of Israel and its leaders.
It grieves me much to write this, because it is a horrible situation. Obama is not a Manchurian candidate and never was. He never had to be.He is just absolutely the wrong human being to be leading the West at this point in history. Heaven help us.“
With all due respect to Mr. Simon, Barry would be the wrong human being to lead the West…or any other organization…outside of ACORN…at ANY point in history!
Which brings us to an item from the Washington Examiner‘s Sean Higgins, who reports how an Administration supposedly dedicated to the plight of the working class is, quite literally,…
Single mother Tameka Stigers figured that she could use her skill at braiding hair to support her family. She soon discovered it wasn’t that easy: Missouri required that she get a cosmetology license before she could do it professionally.
That required getting a degree from a cosmetology school, which would cost Stigers at least $5,000 in tuition and require 1,500 hours of classes. The schools don’t even teach hair braiding, she adds.
Alternately, she could be apprenticed under an accredited professional, but she would have to rack up 3,000 hours working there — a year and a half’s worth of 40-hour work weeks.By comparison, Missouri requires 23 days of training to be licensed as an emergency medical technician.
“An EMT comes to your home and maybe saves your life. … Why in the world do I need 1,500 hours [of training] to cut and style someone’s hair?” said Stigers, who is involved in an ongoing court challenge against the license requirements. It’s not like Missouri is worried about how people’s hairdos look, Stigers added. “You can cut and style someone’s hair for free, no problem.It’s only [an issue] when you charge a fee.”
No worries, Tameka; while the Obamaos continue to dine at exclusive restaurants on fare declared unhealthy for the unwashed masses, and enjoy taxpayer-funded luxury vacations beyond the means of anyone but the uber-rich, rest assured they’re always focused on your best interests.
Though how inviting untold millions of illegal immigrants willing to undercut whatever price your services demand helps working stiffs like you remains a mystery!
Since we’re on the subject of the inevitable consequences of government overregulation of the free market, courtesy of Best of the Web, James Taranto reveals how…
Expensive Labor Yields Cheap Shelves
“San Francisco’s outstanding, world-beating science fiction bookstore, Borderlands, will shut no later than March 31,” reports BoingBoing.net’s Cory Doctorow:
In an open letter, the owners Alan Beatts and Jude Feldman explain that they can’t pay San Francisco’s new $15 minimum wage (a minimum wage that they support).That increase will raise their payroll costs by 39% and their overall costs by 18%—and since they can’t raise the cost of their books (because they’re pre-priced, and retail priced books are already a tough sell in the age of Amazon), the only way they could cover the increase would be to stop paying themselves, or fire almost everyone and work insane hours. The cafe attached [to] the store will stay open for the foreseeable [future], since those prices are flexible and can be raised to account for their increased overheads.
It sounds like a hopeless situation, and it’s certainly bad news for bookstores as a category.
It reminds us of Glenn Reynolds’s favorite Heinlein quote:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
But bad luck for Beatts, Feldman and their soon-to-be-erstwhile employees is good luck for you, if you need shelves: “We’re also going to be selling all our shelves and other fixtures. It would make us very happy to know that our hand-built shelves were going to sit in the living room of someone who was a customer of ours and who appreciates their history.”
If ignorance is bliss, these knucklenoses are experiencing Nirvana.
And in the Environmental Moment, The Telegraph‘s Christopher Booker offers more proof (as if any were really needed) the Environazis aren’t playing with a straight deck:
“When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.
Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record…”
Unless of course, you’re a truth-denying, anthropogenic-global-warming-disciple like Slate’s Phil Plait, who lamely attempts to explain…
“This is nonsense. The claim is wrong. The scientists didn’t manipulate the data, they processed it.”
Yeah…
On the Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another useless exercise in expert assessment:
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