It’s Wednesday, December 7th, 2016…and 75 years ago at 0755 Hawaii time began the “day which shall live in infamy”, as a Japanese air armada of some 353 aircraft launched from the carriers…

…Akagi (Red Castle), Hiryū (Flying Dragon), Kaga (Increased Joy), Shōkaku (Crane Flying in Heaven), Sōryū (Blue Dragon) and Zuikaku (Auspicious Crane) filled the skies over the azure waters of the Pacific Fleet’s home port on the island of Oahu in a surprise attack primarily targeting…

…the battleships Arizona (BB-39), California (BB-44), Maryland (BB-46), Nevada (BB-36), Oklahoma (BB-37), Pennsylvania (BB-38), Tennessee (BB-43), and West Virginia (BB-48).

So please take a moment to remember not only those who died in the second-most deadly attack by a foreign power on American soil…

…but the hundreds of thousands who laid down their lives in the conflict which followed so we could write, and you can read, these words today.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Speaking of the Japanese sneak attack of December 7th, 1941, as Yahoo News informs us via Bill Meisen, when he visits the scene of the crime later this month…

Japan PM Abe won’t apologise at Pearl Harbor

 

As Mr. Meisen noted, this won’t present a problem, as B. Hussein plans to beat Abe to it by apologizing to Japan first…

“I’m sincerely sorry those round-eyed Navy bast*rds forced you to swim back to your carrier!”

…for U.S. forces downing a number of their attacking aircraft.

Talk about tone-deaf.

And if you’ve ever wondered how a moment of silence could possibly be tone-deaf…

Not The Onion: The UN’s Human Rights Council Just Held A Moment of Silence For…Fidel Castro

 

If The Donald ever needed another reason to cut off any and all U.S. funding to this idiotic Liberal experiment in fraud, waste and self-abuse, this is it.

Meanwhile, back on that imprisoned island, Fidel’s brother Raúl continues to employ the Castro version of momento de silencio…

…in honor of the dead dictator!

In a related item, following up on a comment we made last week…

“Cubans don’t live, they exist; and that solely at the whim of the Castros.  More importantly, does anyone really believe, were they able to pursue their goals unencumbered by the Constitution and an armed citizenry, American Progressives would act differently?!?“

…NRO‘s Andrew Cline observes how right here at home we have…

In America, a Thousand Little Castros

For many social-justice warriors, systematic oppression of dissent is a feature, not a bug.

 

“…As a general rule, the Left refrains from denouncing its own. Movement solidarity is a hallmark of leftism. But this does not fully explain why so many self-proclaimed champions of justice and human rights have ignored, dismissed, or explained away the corruption and murderous oppression of Fidel Castro and other socialist dictators. Something darker is at work.

For many romantic leftists, socialism is a glorious utopia that one day will magically separate itself from the strong men who somehow always manage to clamber to the top of the People’s Ladder. If only the enlightened thinkers on the Harvard Bookstore’s e-mail list could be put in charge!

Others are not so naïve. They understand that socialism is systematic oppression — but they see this as a feature, not a bug. To them, as it was for Castro, who wandered his way to Marxism, socialism offers a system in which the social and political orders are overturned and the leftists at long last can be on top. With the levers of power finally in their grasp, the redistribution — and the retribution — can begin.

If this seems a little far-fetched, grab a Donald Trump sign and go loiter in the quad of your nearest lefty college campus for an hour. Or play “Sweet Home Alabama” in a Brooklyn supermarket. Castro forced every Cuban to face this daily choice: comply or be punished. This is precisely the choice America’s would-be totalitarian leftists dream of imposing upon as many Americans as possible.

…The way the totalitarian Left in America handles political opponents is disturbingly similar, in spirit, to the the way the Castro regime handles them. The primary difference is that the American Left lacks the dictatorship’s tools. (But not for lack of trying!) Were it to have full access to the tools of the state, it almost certainly would use them. Note that every single Democrat in the House voted in 2014 to suppress political speech and, in large measure, repeal the First Amendment.

We can only guess how far the Left’s aspiring dictators would go to reshape society. But we can take clues based on how they have handled the power they have accumulated and how they have responded to reports of brutality from the people they emulate.

The totalitarian Left has spent decades cultivating a thousand little Castros throughout the United States. They have attained significant authority on college campuses, which they have labored to convert into their own little island prisons. God help us if their angry, busy hands ever grasp control of the machinery of state.“

The brilliant Christian writer Oswald Chambers was “appalled at the possibility of evil and wrong” in his own heart, correctly observing, “If I have never been a blackguard, the reason is a mixture of cowardice and the protection of civilized life.”

By “cowardice” and “the protection of civilized life”, Chambers was referencing his own God-given sense of right and wrong and good fortune to live in a nation subject to the rule of law.

We shudder to think of what the Dimocratic disciples of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Castro, Pol Pot and George Soros have in mind for unapologetic American patriots should they ever come to power unbound by the constraints of moral and legal principles.

Next up, also courtesy of NRO, two classic commentaries from David French.  First, a must-read analysis detailing the irrefutable truth why…

Anti-Gun Hysteria Is Hazardous to Your Health

The data prove it.

 

Despite their avowed faith in science and data, all too many progressives view a gun as a kind of magical, evil object. It’s a metallic voodoo doll that is best not touched, handled, or brought into polite conversation, even when it can save lives.

I remember one of the last briefings I received in my Army career. A military police major stood in front of roughly 100 soldiers and clicked through PowerPoint slides describing how service members and their families could protect themselves from terrorist violence. Slides described suggestion after suggestion as to how to conceal your identity as an American soldier and render your movements unpredictable. It was good advice, but something was missing.

At the conclusion of the briefing, I raised my hand and asked why the Pentagon wasn’t recommending that its soldiers — as a group the most highly trained warriors in the country — legally carry a personal weapon off-post. The response was instant: “Because the data indicate you’re more likely to hurt yourself than harm a criminal.” A murmur went through the room. I followed up. “Do you carry a weapon off-post?” He looked sheepish, but confessed. “Yes I do. At all times.”

I thought of that moment while reading David Montgomery’s lengthy essay in the most recent Washington Post Magazine. Montgomery’s piece is a powerful meditation on life in an era where more people and institutions than ever before must ponder how to respond to mass shootings. It walks through the emerging consensus that “run, hide, and fight” is best policy — that first you should try to escape an attacker, and, if that doesn’t work, your best and only option is to fight back.

Montgomery details what this means: “As a last resort, we must convert our fear into anger. We must swarm the attacker, swinging laptops, coffee mugs, scissors.” Laptops? Coffee mugs? It all seems so hopeless. Montgomery continues:

Given that most of us will never face an active shooter, his rise to prominence is more about us than him. He’s the perfect nightmare, an avatar of the minute-to-minute possibility of terrorism ripping the facade off the familiar.

Can we do what it takes to be ready without letting him haunt our lives? (Holy General George Casey, Batman!!!)

I feel like raising my hand again. Yes, yes there is something you can do. You can arm yourself. When you do, you no longer feel helpless because you’re not. You don’t have to rely on your laptop or a pair of scissors to save your life and the lives of those around you. You can walk into a restaurant, a mall, or any other place where firearms are permitted with confidence, not as a vigilante, but as an armed citizen capable of defending yourself and others.

Yet anti-gun hysteria too often triumphs over common sense. Bring up expanded concealed-carry rights, and some on the Left seem to panic as if law-abiding men and women will somehow turn our shops and schools into free-fire zones. But the evidence is overwhelming: Concealed-carry permit holders are not a public-safety risk.

In July, the Crime Prevention Research Center published a comprehensive report on those Americans who hold concealed-carry permits. Among the findings, the Center notes that while the police are dramatically more law-abiding than the population as a whole (37 times more law-abiding), permit holders in Texas and Florida — two states that keep comprehensive records — were even more law-abiding than cops. Police officers committed crimes at a rate of 103 crimes per 100,000 officers. Permit holders in Texas and Florida committed crimes at a rate of 22.3 per 100,000.

But don’t tell the New York Times. Last week it editorialized against legislation that would require states to recognize lawful concealed carry permits issued in other states. In “support” of its argument, it tried to make the case that permit holders are a threat to public safety. Using research from the anti-gun Violence Policy Center, it ominously claims that “since 2007, concealed-carry permit holders have been responsible for at least 898 deaths not involving self-defense.” Follow the link to the study, called “Concealed Carry Killers,” and you’ll find that almost 300 of those 898 deaths were suicides.

Where does that number fit within the context of all gun deaths in the United States? During the same ten-year span when 898 deaths occurred, there were more than 100,000 homicides and more than 300,000 total gun deaths. Given that approximately 6 percent of the adult population has a concealed-carry permit, legally concealed weapons are involved in remarkably few deaths.

Simply put, if you’re standing at a bus stop, and you know the person to your left is an armed concealed-carry permit holder, and the person to your right does not have a carry permit, the person to your right is statistically a far, far greater threat to your life than the permit holder. That’s just a fact. Indeed, that person’s hands and feet are more dangerous to you than the permit holder’s gun. Applying the New York Times’s own preferred data set, more people were murdered by fists and kicks in 2015 alone than were murdered by firearm-wielding concealed-carry permit holders in the last ten years.

This means that those opposed to concealed carry on campuses and those supporting so-called gun-free zones in other public spaces are behaving irrationally. Those who are training law-abiding citizens to respond to mass shootings without also counseling them to purchase a firearm and learn how to use it aren’t empowering their clients as much as they could. (I don’t want to cast too much blame; often the clients don’t want to be empowered.)

America has a crime problem. It doesn’t have a gun problem. The gun is a tool, not a terror. In the right hands, it’s an instrument of peace and justice. It protects life and stops attacks. It’s an antidote to fear and helplessness. We cannot allow hysteria to prevent us from exercising our inherent right of self-defense.

As the brilliant Thomas Sowell wrote in a recent column, gun control is a prime example of Progressives gambling with the lives of others while not subject to the stakes of their wagers:

“…One of the most zealous crusades of the left has been to prevent law-abiding citizens from having guns, even though gun control laws have little or no effect on criminals who violate laws in general. You can read through reams of rhetoric from gun control advocates without encountering a single hard fact showing gun control laws reducing crime in general or murder in particular. Such hard evidence as exists points in the opposite direction.

But the gun control gamble with other people’s lives is undeterred. And the left still pays no price when they are wrong.“

One is left to conclude Liberals simply don’t believe…

…Black Guns Matter!

Second, French accurately assesses…

It’s Time for Honest Talk about Muslim Immigration

Some immigrants from jihad zones will be involved in murdering Americans. Is this an acceptable price for compassion?

 

“…When we survey the American experience since 9/11, two undeniable truths emerge, and it’s past time that we grapple head-on with them. First, the vast majority of Muslim immigrants — no matter their country of origin — are not terrorists. They won’t attack anyone, they won’t participate in terrorist plots, and they abhor terrorism. Some even provide invaluable information in the fight against jihad. That’s the good news.

The bad news is the second truth: Some Muslim immigrants (or their children) will either attempt to commit mass murder or will actually succeed in killing and wounding Americans by the dozens. All groups of immigrants contain some number of criminals. But not all groups of immigrants contain meaningful numbers of terrorists. This one does. It’s simply a fact.

Moreover, there isn’t an even geographic distribution of terrorists. We don’t have as many terrorist immigrants from Indonesia, India, or Malaysia as we do from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, or from the conflict zones in the Middle East. It’s much less risky to bring into the country a cardiologist from Jakarta than a refugee from Kandahar.

If the Democrats wish to maintain immigration from jihadist conflict zones, they need to rid their rhetoric of the language of “Islamophobia” and tell the truth. If they want to continue admitting refugees from jihad zones, they need to make the case that meeting the humanitarian needs of an an extremely small fraction of the world’s Muslim refugees is worth the cost of importing a small number of mass murderers. They must make the case that the human toll in America is the price we must pay for national compassion. Of course no Democrat wants a terror attack to occur, but Democrats must understand and acknowledge that under present policies, such attacks will occur — despite our best efforts to stop them.

But I’d submit that America can show compassion without opening its borders to an uncertain number of jihadist killers. We can maintain and expand existing safe zones in the Middle East. We can project power to continue to roll back ISIS and provide space for people to return to their homes. We can implement new tests for immigrants and restrict immigration from volatile regions. At the same time, we can avoid paranoia and appreciate the peacefulness and patriotism of the vast majority of our existing Muslim population.

The Trump administration has an opportunity to implement a rational policy — one that rewards friends, preserves Muslim homes in the Middle East, and protects our borders far more effectively than did the Obama administration. In the 15 years of American engagement since 9/11, we have worked with a host of interpreters, allied soldiers, and sympathetic officials — many of whom have endured enormous risks to fight jihad. We should welcome these people with open arms. Muslim immigrants from outside jihadist conflict zones should be welcome as well, provided that they do not profess allegiance to the ideology of our enemies.

During the Cold War, American law denied entry to the United States to any alien who wrote, published, or advocated “the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism or the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship.” We continue to maintain an escalating series of ideological litmus tests for visa recipients and green-card holders. We can and should expand those tests to deny entry to any visitor or immigrant who advocates the doctrines or ideas of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, and any other recognized terrorist organization — including by expressing support on social media for the goals, theology, politics, or leadership of those organizations. Indeed, the list should expand beyond known terrorists so that we’d exclude those who support the doctrines or ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Iranian Revolution.

Beyond this basic test, it is simply not in America’s national interest to admit refugees, visitors, or other immigrants from zones of jihadist activity unless they have a demonstrable record of loyalty to or cooperation with the United States or its allies. When we know that our enemy is seeking to infiltrate and indoctrinate these specific populations (and has greatest access to these populations), the burden of proof for immigration or entry should be squarely placed on the immigrant. If refugees need our aid, we should aid them in the Middle East…”

Please note: French never even intimates America shouldn’t help the innocent victims of war and Islamic violence; simply that sufficient aid can and should be rendered to them in their native countries and regions.

Moving on, writing at the Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty recommends we…

Get Ready for a Week of ‘Fake News’ Hysteria   FYI: Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and the rest of the MSM INVENTED “Fake News”!!! Brace yourselves. In the coming days, we’re going to hear a lot about how “fake news” is now a mortal threat to all Americans. A North Carolina man who sent customers and employees scrambling when he fired a gun inside a northwest Washington pizzeria Sunday told police he went there to investigate a fictitious online conspiracy theory involving the restaurant and high-ranking Democrats. After his arrest, Welch told police he was there to investigate a fake news conspiracy theory known as “pizza gate” involving the pizzeria in the 5000 block of Connecticut Avenue NW. Posts to Facebook and Reddit claim Comet was the home base of a child sex abuse ring run by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign chair, John Podesta. “What happened today demonstrates that promoting false and reckless conspiracy theories does come with consequences,” Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis said. No two ways about it, a guy who goes into a restaurant and starts firing his gun all willy-nilly is a bad dude, and he ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But now there’s going to be an eager effort to shift responsibility from him to whoever wrote about this restaurant. This guy sounds like he graduated from the Yosemite Sam School of Forensic Investigation, and if he hadn’t shown up at the doorstep of this restaurant, he would have shown up at the gate of Edwards Air Force Base asking about the aliens at Area 51 or stomped around the Pacific Northwest hunting Bigfoot. Blaming “fake news” implies a warning to everyone, “don’t write or say something that could set off some nut-job.” That argument assumes that there’s a rationality to the nut-job, and it’s our responsibility to not offer anything that could cause an irrational mind to lash out. Unless, of course, you think the Southern Poverty Law Center is responsible for the guy who tried to shoot up the Family Research Center in Washington D.C. in 2012. That would-be-gunman “had stopped by Chick-fil-A to pick up 15 sandwiches, which he planned to smear in the dying faces of staffers.” He said he chose the FRC as a target because the Southern Poverty Law Center called the organization “a hate group.” Rumors and false news reports can lead to violence, huh? You mean like the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative that came out of Ferguson, Missouri? What DOJ found made me ill. [Officer Darren] Wilson knew about the theft of the cigarillos from the convenience store and had a description of the suspects. [The late Michael] Brown fought with the officer and tried to take his gun. And the popular hands-up storyline, which isn’t corroborated by ballistic and DNA evidence and multiple witness statements, was perpetuated by Witness 101. In fact, just about everything said to the media by Witness 101, whom we all know as Dorian Johnson, the friend with Brown that day, was not supported by the evidence and other witness statements.

Geraghty goes on to describe in gory detail how the propaganda arm of the Progressive movement (aka, the MSM) quite literally wrote the book on “fake news“: Just ask Dan Rather about those memos. Or ask Brian Williams about his war stories. Or ask Rolling Stone about those ritualistic gang rapes on the University of Virginia’s campus. We haven’t seen anything like this “fake news” on social media since…Katie Couric’s blatantly misleading editing in her documentary, Under the Gun. Or Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke’s fictional 8-year-old heroin addict. Or the tall tales of Jayson Blair at the New York Times. Or USA Today’s Jack Kelley’s wild tales from abroad. Or Stephen Glass’s New Republic reporting on the hacking of “Jukt Microtics.” Or Jonah Lehrer’s made-up quotes from Bob Dylan. Or those Research 2000 polls that may or may not have been conducted. Or the trucks rigged to explode on NBC’s Dateline. The false accusations against the pizzeria are abominable but not unprecedented: just ask the Duke lacrosse team, Richard Jewell, Ted Stevens, and the Central Park Five. Our Kevin Williamson points out that as much as the media fumes that Aunt Edna believes what she read on Facebook that President Obama sold the state of Nebraska to the Chinese, plenty of other false beliefs permeate the comfortable class in the blue states: Chevron is up to no good in Ecuador, that vaccines cause autism, and so on.

Proof positive, as if any were needed, why you can’t spell “LIBERAL” without an “L”, “I” and an “E”!

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s this sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter:

Pedophile trumpeter beaten to death with own instrument by angry parents

 

“A trumpet-playing pedophile was beaten to death – in part with his own instrument – when he was attacked during a concert by parents from a preschool where he was alleged (not “alleged”; convicted!) to have molested kids, AFP reported.

Marcelo Fabian Pecollo, 42, was attacked on Oct. 30 in a cathedral near Buenos Aires, Argentina, when a group of parents tracked down the Moron City Orchestra trumpeter and music teacher. The attack left Pecollo in a coma and he died Friday as a result of his injuries. He had been sentenced in 2010 to 30 years in prison for molesting five preschoolers; however, Pecollo served only four years before he was released.

“There is a pedophile and a rapist in the church and he is playing in this orchestra,” the parents allegedly yelled as they charged forward. Pecollo tried to escape, but the parents caught up with him and one man used Pecollo’s own trumpet as a weapon, AFP reported.

“When I arrived, those people were leaving,” priest Jorge Oesterheld told local media. “He was in a very, very bad way, until the police and ambulance arrived.” The priest added: “They say they took justice into their own hands, but it was revenge. It was murder.”

We prefer the term “just desserts”.

Finally, since we’re on the subject of just desserts, in the Sports Section, three memes which demonstrate why NFL viewership is in the tank:

First, a heartfelt “Ooh-rah!!!”  Second, without fear of losing a single reader, we politely suggest anyone who still has a question regarding the relative reality of the counterfeit claims of Colin Kaepernick and the entire Black Lives Matter movement should find another blog!

Magoo