Bully for them!!

Occupy Wall Street buys $15 million of Americans' medical debt

(Reuters) - An Occupy Wall Street spin-off group has bought up $14.7 million worth of Americans' personal medical debt and forgiven it over the last year as part of its Rolling Jubilee project, the group announced Monday.

Saint Jerome:

Of gold she would not wear so much as a seal-ring, choosing to store her money in the stomachs of the poor rather than to keep it at her own disposal.

Letter 127

G. K. Chesterton:

Nothing will be done until we have realized that charity is not giving rewards to the deserving, but happiness to the unhappy.

The Illustrated London News, 8 December 1906

The limits of the politics of cool

More "complicated" than going to the polls? It's also an awful lot more expensive! Getting callow youth to think Obama was cooler than Hillary, McCain or Mitt - easy. Getting them to translate that sense of shared cool purpose into a willingness tio stand in line for an hour and vote (twice!) - not so hard. Getting them to translate that into a willingness to spend hundreds of dollars a month on insurance they don't need in order to subsidize the old and sick? Good luck. They may be dumb enough to have voted for Obama, but they aren't that dumb.

Here

Mass murder and how to prevent it

What Mass Killers Want—And How to Stop Them

Rampage shooters crave the spotlight, and we should do everything possible to deprive them of it

How might journalists and police change their practices to discourage mass shootings? First, they need to do more to deprive the killer of an audience:

Never publish a shooter's propaganda. Aside from the act itself, there is no greater aim for the mass killer than to see his own grievances broadcast far and wide. Many shooters directly cite the words of prior killers as inspiration. In 2007, the forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner told "Good Morning America" that the Virginia Tech shooter's self-photos and videotaped ramblings were a "PR tape" that was a "social catastrophe" for NBC News to have aired.

HT: Michael Bane

Related:

The media's vile calculus: If it bleeds, it leads and leads to more blood

When Charles Whitman went up the tower at the University of Texas., he carried more than just guns and ammunition. He also took along a radio. He listened to the news coverage of te carnage he created. That was important to him.

"How many people do I have to kill before I get my name in the paper or some national attention?"

A problem of media ethics

Politico Unashamed to be In Bed with Deep-Pocketed Leftwing Smear Artist

California billionaire Tom Steyer poured $8 million into the Virginia governor’s race and helped propel Terry McAuliffe to victory. His group, NextGen Climate Action, essentially bought Politico off the story of just how dishonest a campaign he was running, by bringing them into their campaign nexus.

This is dead on target:

Progressives don’t really hate big money in politics. They just hate conservatives, period.

An interesting book from Down Under

Australia’s Secret War: How Unions Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II

Hal Colebatch’s new book, Australia’s Secret War, tells the shocking, true, but until now largely suppressed and hidden story of the war waged from 1939 to 1945 by a number of key Australian trade unions against their own society and against the men and women of their own country’s fighting forces at the time of its gravest peril. His conclusions are based on a broad range of sources, from letters and first-person interviews between the author and ex-servicemen to official and unofficial documents from the archives of World War II.

Between 1939 and 1945 virtually every major Australian warship, including at different times its entire force of cruisers, was targeted by strikes, go-slows and sabo­tage. Australian soldiers operating in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands went without food, radio equipment and munitions, and Aus­tralian warships sailed to and from combat zones without ammunition, because of strikes at home. Planned rescue missions for Australian prisoners-of-war in Borneo were abandoned because wharf strikes left rescuers without heavy weapons. Officers had to restrain Australian and American troops from killing striking trade unionists.

Unions exposed as war saboteurs

This is a tale of the worst of Australia amid the best, the valour and courage of our soldiers in New Guinea providing our last line of defence against Japanese, only to be forced onto starvation rations and to "go easy on the ammo" because strikes by the wharfies back home prevented supplies from reaching them.

A planned rescue of Australian PoWs in Borneo late in the war apparently had to be abandoned, writes Colebatch, because a wharf strike in Brisbane meant the ships had no heavy weapons.

Obscene, stupid, obscenely stupid

Offensive Nut Tom Cruise: My Acting Jobs Are As Grueling As Fighting In Afghanistan

Denial is their new business model

In effect, the newspaper industry is now cooking its books by mutual agreement

Using the increasing complexity of the digital world as an excuse for all this is also hogwash, by the way. For big-picture metrics, there are already standbys that work just fine — paid weekday and Sunday circ for a print edition, paid subscribers to a paywall, monthly unique visitors or pageviews for a free website, downloads from an app store for a native mobile app, and so on. It would also work just fine to publish these metrics side-by-side for any given individual organization, recognizing that its several publishing channels each work differently, and then let the advertisers judge for themselves.

The real problem isn’t that these methods are inadequate. It’s just that the publishers don’t like what those measures are telling them right now, so they’re choosing to pave over them instead.

Can they fix Obamacare?

Do they want to?

Thomas Sowell:

Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are all on record as believing in a "single payer" system -- that is, a government monopoly able to impose its own will on everybody. Even the current and future problems of Obamacare can help them to reach that goal.

Forrest McDonald, A Constituional History of the United States, (1984)

Between the late 1950s and the early 1980s government in the United States became so big and so complex that it all but lost the ability to function. A medical term, 'iatrogenic disease,' illness resulting from treatment by a physician, fairly well describes what happened. Starting with the New Deal, government attempted to solve problems of a nature and magnitude beyond the capacities of a limited constitutional system and perhaps of any system. Some remedies worked, others did not. When they did not, the tendency was to create a new program on top of an old one, rather than to scrap the old. By the early 1960s this jerry-built machinery was beginning to produce, or aggravate, social problems of a scale previously unknown in America. Every governmental 'remedy' produced a new governmental-caused sickness; and yet Americans had become so addicted to the habit of believing that government could cure everything that the response of the late sixties was wave after wave of crash programs. These created new problems that, in the seventies, resulted in more programs. By the time considerable numbers of people began to suspect that they were overgoverned, the reality was that, though government interfered in their lives from cradle to grave, it scarcely governed at all, in the original constitutional sense of the term. Government had ceased to be able to protect people in their lives, their liberty, and their property; and it had lost the capacity to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare.

Leadership, hard work, and meetings

Found this over at Photon Courier:

HOW TO BE AN EXECUTIVE WHO LEARNS/DOES NOT LEARN

“Your job as a leader is to be right at the end of the meeting, not at the beginning of the meeting.”

The quote is from David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell.

It is good advice, as far as it goes. But I can’t help asking, why have the meeting at all?

As Gen. George Marshall told Dwight Eisenhower in the early days of World War Two:

Eisenhower, the Department is filled with able men who analyze the problems well but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.

Cote also offers this advice:

the biggest thing I learned was that hard work doesn’t always pay off. If you work on the wrong thing, it really doesn’t matter how hard you work, because it’s not going to make a difference. So make sure you put some thought into what you’re working on.

See previous post:

When hard work doesn't pay

Related:

George Marshall

The Best Strategic Planning Advice Ever

Theodore Dalrymple is not a fan of TV

Television Is an Evil

There is so much to be said against it (and its televisual offshoots) that it is difficult to know where to begin. In my opinion, televisual entertainment is by far the most important cause of boredom in the world, and since the attempt to relieve boredom is a much underestimated cause of social pathology of all kinds, television is ultimately responsible for the squalor in the midst of wealth that is so remarkable a feature of our modern existence.

It may seem paradoxical to claim that entertainment is a serious cause of boredom. But as TV Lobotomie demonstrates, children who grow up with TV as a large part of their mental diet have difficulty concentrating for the rest of their lives, and since the ability to concentrate is essential to finding anything interesting that is not swift-moving and sensational, and since also a large part of life is necessarily not swift-moving and sensational, those brought up on TV are destined for boredom. Degradation relieves their boredom. Better a life of sordid crises than a life like a flat-line encephalograph.

This might explain why the sausage is rotten

I have found those who work for TV broadcasting companies to be the most disagreeable people that I have ever encountered. I far preferred the criminals whom I encountered in my work as a prison doctor, who were more honest and upright than TV people.

In my experience, TV people are as lying, insincere, obsequious, unscrupulous, fickle, exploitative, shallow, cynical, untrustworthy, treacherous, dishonest, mercenary, low, and untruthful a group of people as is to be found on the face of this Earth. They make the average Western politician seem like a moral giant. By comparison with them, Mr. Madoff was a model of probity and Iago was Othello’s best friend. I am prepared to admit that there may be—even are—exceptions, as there are exceptions good or bad in every human group, but there is something about the evil little screen that would sully a saint and sanctify a monster.

Johnah Goldberg defends the Tea Party

Rightly so, in my opinion.

And Now, The Airing of Grievances

In the recent government shutdown fight I found myself in polite (on my part at least!) disagreement with the elements of the right inclined to denounce the “Republican establishment.” No need to rehash all that again. But, I will say that in the wake of the Cuccinelli defeat, I think the critics of the establishment have the better side of the argument....

For all the talk about how the base needs to cooperate with the establishment more, it’s worth remembering that the base almost always does its part on Election Day. Its the establishment that is less reliable in returning the favor.

Ace points to the dog that did not bark

We've known for a long time that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is an extreme, though none too bright, partisan. Her MSNBC interview just confirmed that. OTOH, her blunder does raise questions about how they do things at Comcast/NBC.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, 'We're Not Mizled by the President'

It looked like she had her big conclusion written into the teleprompter and that "at the end of the day" was the signal she was starting to read it.

It's funny; it's kind of dumb, but most importantly, if true, MSNBC is allowing select interviewees to prepare their answers and read them on the air.

The birth of the hive mind

The July/August of Gilbert magazine had a telling piece written by G. K. Chesterton many years ago.

The Worship of the Insect

Mr. Bernard Shaw (who still keeps the world alive more than any other single man) has declared that with the present human animal there is and can be no progress; that he wants a new kind of manpossibly one with two heads. With all my admiration of Mr. Shaw’s eternal vigour and sincerity, I cannot help thinking this rather like the conduct of a mother who, after trying a very cold logical education on her child from six years, should suddenly surprise the street, not by giving up the system, but by flinging the baby out of the window and saying, “Bring me another child.”

Of course, man will not fit Mr. Shaw’s religion of bald candor and the cleansing of life from romanticism, because he is a mammal; the mammals are in the Cosmos the romantic order; the order that has tended to hunting and falling in love; but the curious thing about this new scientific and sociological fancy is that it has tended, more than to anything else, to go outside the mammalian altogether. The new sociologist sees his ideal in another great branch of life; in another great biological civilization. He sees his ideal in a race of creatures whose civilization (for most emphatically, of course, it is a civilization) is marked iron regularity, by the everlasting sacrifice of the individual to the State and the everlasting sacrifice of the present to the future. They are the great rationaliststhe only rationalists; they are the insects. The worship of the insect is the new efficiency. The sociologist of the hour goes forth to conquer like Napoleon, emblazoned with bees.
-------

Mr. H. G. Wells again puts the future, apparently with joy, into the hands of a race of serious, capable scientific experts who are quite obviously insects, except for a slight inferiority in the matter of legs. The sentence of Solomon (written I am sure, during his days of decadence and impiety), “Go to the ant, thou sluggard,” is clearly their motto.

Mr. Sydney Webb, to take another deservedly eminently man, though very far from being a sluggard, may be said to have gone to the ant.

It is worth noting that all of these eminent men would later praise Stalin’s totalitarian state. They had been looking for a New Civilization with New Men and the Soviet Union promised them just that. Is it possible that the regimentation of the Soviet nation/prison was a (good) feature in their eyes, not a bug?

A further point worth noting: Chesterton wrote this in a newspaper column in 1903.

The man was a prophet.

Not all of Chesterton’s targets were socialists. If many socialists loved the vision of a society tightly organized like an anthill, many conservatives and businessmen shared the same vision. They were in thrall of factories full of unmammal-like men and women; worker bees with the emphasis on bee. No wonder Taylorism proved so seductive to the business and managerial class.

Michael Malone tries to rescue Frederick Winslow Taylor’s reputation here.

Why Progressives Always Get Tech Wrong

What Taylor realized, and proved, was that work was a measurable activity that could be systematically made more productive using scientific techniques. But Taylor also argued that workers should be rewarded commensurately with their increased productivity something management didn’t agree with . . .and paid for with labor strife for the next half-century. Industry largely learned its lesson and when it forgot there were forward-thinking entrepreneurs to remind them: like a young David Packard, who told a gathering in the late 1940s of the nation’s biggest corporate executives that if they didn’t trust and empower their employees even more in the years to come, they were doomed. History proved him right. And smart CEOs changed their practices because, in the end, they valued profits over power.

While he may be right about Taylor’s intentions, the implementation of his ideas usually failed to live up to the ideal. For every Dave Packard, corporate America had a dozen Robert McNamaras or Carly Fiorinas.

From Taylorism to Reengineering to ERP the private sector managerial class has fallen for one fad after another that promote command, control, uniformity, and the massacre of the drones.

Insect worship helps explain why hip Apple loves to build their expensive trinkets in the world’s largest Stalinist state.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”…

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States. The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes. Foxconn Technology (http://www.foxconn.com/) has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

“How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”, New York Times, January 21, 2012

This love of the ant is not a by-product of the marketplace. It is a cognitive bias, a mental and moral weakness that convinces bureaucrats (government and private sector both) that the world, country, company or factory would be better off if the people would just stop acting like mammals.

A telling story from GM’s failed partner ship with Toyota illustrates the blind spot:

Jeffrey Liker, author of “The Toyota Way,” (McGraw-Hill, 2003), says that GM couldn’t figure out how to absorb company-wide the positive cultural lessons it was learning in Freemont.

“I remember one of the GM managers was ordered from a very senior level, a vice-president, to make a GM plant look like NUMMI,” says Liker in the radio story. “He said, ‘I want you to go there with cameras, and take a picture of every square inch, and whatever you take a picture of, I want it to look like that in our plant. There should be no excuse for why we’re different than NUMMI, why our quality is lower, why our productivity isn’t as high, because you’re going to copy everything you see.’ Immediately this guy knew that was crazy. We can’t copy and play motivation, we can’t copy good relationships between the union and management. That’s not something you can copy. You can’t take a photograph of it.”

Related:

The Hive mind revisited

The continuing appeal of the hive mind

The short answer is no

The Republican Brain Dissected
Are conservatives more biased than liberals?

RTWT for the long one.

Synchronicity

Until last week, I had never heard of the trolley experiment or “The Cold Equations.” Now I run into them everywhere.

I just read Craig Johnson’s Longmire novella Spirit of Steamboat which offers the hardboiled hero’s answer to the trolley question.

His mouth stiffened. “No way. I’ve been up there and this is pure trolleyism.”

“What?”

“Trolleyism. If you had this little girl on a track with a trolley bearing down on her and you could throw a switch that sent the car onto another track with five other people on itwould you throw that lever?”

“It’s not the same.”

His eyes studied the padded surface of the plane’s interior. “You’re right, because you’re not even going to be able to save the girl. You’re all going to die up there.” His eyes came back to mine. “You’re sacrificing five people’s lives for the possibility of saving one girl…”

“It’s not a question of numbers, it’s a question of what you have to do, what you have to live with if you don’t.” I thought about the book in my pocket, the advice that the Ghost of Christmas Present gives Scrooge on decreasing the surplus population, and mumbled to myself: “Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless… [than] this poor … child…”

I am suspicious of these kind of thought “experiments” for the reason Robert Jervis noted when looking at the utility of game theory in international relations:

It is not a good sign when prisoners confronted by a District Attorney do not behave as the prisoner dilemma model would lead us to expect.

#ad

JFK: Fifty Years Later

JFK Assassination Specials: A Guide to 50th Anniversary Television Programming

In this case, the law most certainly is an ass

Investigation IDs IRS Leaker

A House committee investigating the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of right-leaning groups has identified the IRS agent who leaked the confidential donor list of the National Organization for Marriage, a conservative organization that opposes gay marriage. NOM’s donor list, contained in a Form 990 Schedule B, which it is required by law to file with the IRS, was obtained in March 2012 by its chief political opponent, the Human Rights Campaign, and subsequently became the subject of several national news stories that centered on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s donation to the group.

Though the House Ways and Means Committee, which began investigating the scandal in the wake of revelations that the IRS had inappropriately singled out conservative groups, has identified the individual who divulged the information as an employee in the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division, it can’t divulge his name to the public or to NOM. It can’t even confirm when the leak took place, whether the perpetrator was disciplined, or even whether he is still employed by the IRS or the U.S. government. That’s because of a peculiarity of the Internal Revenue Code’s section 6103, which is intended to protect the confidentiality of taxpayer information. The law makes it a felony to disclose tax returns or related information to the public, but in an odd twist, the results of investigations conducted by congressional committees or by inspectors general are considered the confidential tax information of the alleged perpetrator.

Food for thought

"Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."

The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson

Studies in utilitarian ethics

The view from the moral mountaintop

Shoving a fat man under the trolley: abstraction or fiasco?

Throw the fat man under the trolley

Related:

Variations on a theme

"Basically, a step or two above interns"

Obamacare 'tech surge' experts are White House fellows

Julie Bataille, CMS' spokeswoman, declined to tell journalists during an Oct. 28 conference call how many people are working on the surge.

Doing that, she said, would be "a distraction."

Bill Allison, editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, said, “It’s unbelievable that they haven’t announced who is behind this. You would think they would want to highlight the people to just reassure the country that we’ve got these experts.”

Sunlight is a nonprofit that works to increase transparency and accountability in government.

“You want to know who those turnaround specialists are. I think their silence just speaks volumes,” Allison said.

HT: Instapundit

Related:

CGI Federal executive spent ‘Christmas with the Obamas’

Michelle Obama’s relationship with Princeton classmate Toni McCall Townes-Whitley, whose company earned the no-bid contract to design the disastrous Healthcare.Gov Obamacare website, continued after the Obamas moved into the White House.

Townes-Whitley and her husband even enjoyed “Christmas with the Obamas” at the White House in December 2010, according to a Facebook album created by Townes-Whitley.

Snort!

“Quick, get me a J-school grad with a BS in philosophy to do a quick DCF model with comps for all competitors!” said no finance professional ever

Here.

Who is confused?

Powerline looks at the polls and is left puzzled.

Our Deeply Confused Electorate

Do you agree more politically with President Obama, or with the average member of the Tea Party? A good question, ripped from the daily headlines. The response? Dead even, 42% agree more with Obama, 42% with the Tea Party. But other findings are hard to reconcile: only 30% of voters have a favorable view of the Tea Party, while 50% are unfavorable. How can only 30% of voters view the Tea Party favorably, if 42% say they agree more with the grass roots movement than with the president?

I do not find that particular result so surprising. I believe that Ben Roethlisberger is a better quarterback than Joe Flacco, yet I am deeply dissatisfied with the play of the Steelers’s QB over the last four or five years.

Can a thinking individual (i. e. someone not confused) oppose Obama while disapproving of the Tea Party? Powerline seems to suggest that the answer is no.

I disagree.

A rational conservative in a center-right nation will look at the Tea Party’s demand for ideological purity as self-defeating. Hence, while opposed to Obama’s programs that rational voter may still refuse to endorse the Tea Party.

The post does hit one key point that is often ignored:

So among some 30% to 40% of the electorate, the dominant factor appears to be hatred of Republicans. No matter how incompetent Obama is, no matter how hateful Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi may be, no matter how badly the economy goes into the tank, these voters consistently view Democrats as the lesser of evils. Why? Because they are subjected to a constant barrage of hate, directed toward Republicans.

Even here, however, I think they overstate the confusion and ignore the elephant in the room.

Democratic voters have been on the receiving end of so much hate propaganda against the Republican Party, that all Democrats need to do is be the not-Republicans and their voters will turn outno matter that Obamacare is a disaster, no matter that the economy is going down the drain, no matter that we are $17 trillion in debt, no matter that Obama’s foreign policy is a shambles, no matter that Obama himself has been revealed as an incompetent and a liar. Hatred for Republicans trumps everything else.

It sounds so damning until a fair-minded person asks ‘what about Bush?’

On each count of the indictment, it is possible to argue that BHO has done better than GWB.

All of this is old ground:

January 2013

Let’s not forget the biggest, stickiest Republican/conservative message of all:

We {heart} W.

The 2012 campaign was not just Obama vs. catoon-Romney. It was also Obama vs. the ghost of George Bush.

Leaving ideology aside (as swing and low-information voters do), the Bush legacy is an anchor around the neck of the right. The short version goes something like this:

Tanked the economy (worse than LBJ)

Started two wars he could not win (worse than Carter)

Is that fair? Not entirely, but it is accurate.

October 2011

It is now painfully clear that the Republican candidates have no appetite to deal with the serious problems that still weigh on the economy. They are counting on Obama's unpopularity to carry them to victory in 2012. The programs they offer are little more than warmed over talking points.

February 2009

There is no doubt that a sizable minority of the population is opposed to bigger government. This minority is large enough to boost the ratings of talk radio. It drives readership for rightwing blogs and raises money for some candidates. But is it it enough to win election?

40% is an enormous share in radio ratings. It is also the bad end of a landslide election.

The usual mantra of "No socialism, Free Enterprise!" just seems inadequate in the face of the current economic realities.

Key fact number one. As Obama moves toward "socialism", he does so at the behest of the "capitalists". It is not as if he is sending paramilitary gangs to take over successful, profitable businesses. Obama, like Bush before him, is compelled to act because the capitalists screwed the pooch, crapped the bed, and then muttered "maybe my bad" when their recklessness sent the financial system off a cliff.

The broad public knows this, and that makes it hard to win them over with cheap slogans about socialist bogeymen.

October 2008

The Bush-Cheney administration has worked assiduously to restore the power and prerogatives of the executive branch. They have been curiously loath to wield those powers at critical times. We saw it first in their lackadaisical efforts to win the Iraq War. We saw it again in the present economic mess.

Hmmm, jealous of its prerogatives yet indolent in governing. That sounds more like a decadent monarchy than a vigorous Jacksonian chief executive. I think the Right got Bush wrong. Today, he seems more like G.W. Bush II of Connecticut than he does the forceful W from west Texas.

So, sure, someone is confused. The key question is this: Is it the voters or is it conservative pundits and GOP “professionals”

Truth

Advertising Needs Old People

In a society in which half of consumer spending is done by people over 50; in which 75% of financial assets are controlled by people over 50; in which 62% of all new cars are bought by people over 50; in which 94% of all CPG categories are dominated by people over 50, the fact that the average agency has almost no one of this age is incomprehensible.

It is a testament to narcissism, delusion, prejudice and stupidity.

Annals of the junk science

Nick Brown Smelled Bull

A plucky amateur dared to question a celebrated psychological finding. He wound up blowing the whole theory wide open.

This will ring true for anyone who has worked in a large organization:

Adding insult to injury, when charged with renewing his company’s suppliers list for training and coaching materials, he wound up interacting with “nuts” and “charlatans,” people who listed reiki and crystal healing among their interests, or resorted to “hand-waving” when selling their wares.

A pattern of abuse and incompetence

Michelle Malkin shows us the back story of the Obamacare rollout.

What happened to all of Obama’s technology czars?

In 2010, when President Obama first rolled out a dog-and-pony demonstration of Healthcare.gov, Park basked in the glow of positive media coverage. He bragged to TechCrunch.com about working “24/7 … in a very, very nimble hyper consumer focused way … all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew and all-nighters, and you know, idealism.”

It was, as you all now know, all hype and glory. So who has Obama called in to oversee the HealthCare.gov rescue mission? None other than the administration’s “change agent and entrepreneur-in-residence,” CTO Todd Park, who helped build the broken system in the first place!

I really liked this:

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, waste our money screwing things up and then run back to academia to train the next generation of incompetent technocrats.

Like the man said: Credentialed, not educated.

Related:

How we live now: The rule of the inept experts

Priorities

This White House seems utterly unconcerned with security and counterintelligence (see Khost, Seal Team Six, and Benghazi). When important matters are at stake, however, they are relentless and competent.

Stung by a Twitter renegade, group in Obama administration launched sting of its own

Two quick points. First, unlike Joe Biden's mouth, Jofi Joseph's twitter account did not compromise important operations.

Joseph, who held a high-level security clearance, was ordered to leave the building. The Twitter feed does not appear to have included any disclosures of classified information.

John Fund adds this tidbit:

Obama's Valerie Jarrett: Often Whispered about, But Never Challenged

What apparently intensified the campaign to identify the “snarker” was a comment about Valerie Jarrett, the senior Obama adviser who has her own Secret Service detail and appears to exercise an inordinate amount of power behind the scenes. Joseph tweeted “I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me.”

Second, the WaPo article demonstrates the MSM's acute lack of self-awareness and journalists's instinctive protectiveness of this administration.

When the reporters dig into the twitter account, they give us this:

He also brutally mocked national security adviser Susan E. Rice and U.N. Ambas­sador Samantha Power. “What’s with the dominatrix-like black suit ­Susan Rice is wearing at this ­announcement?” @natsecwonk tweeted when Rice was chosen to replace Donilon on June 5.

I guess they don't read their own newspaper or they forgot that likening a powerful woman to a dominatrix is in no way insulting.

When looking at the image of Rice in Wiesbaden, the mind searches for ways to put it all into context. It turns to fiction, to caricature. To shadowy daydreams. Dominatrix! It is as though sex and power can only co-exist in a fantasy.

Important new book

China Lost 14 Million People in World War II. Why Is This Forgotten?

When looking back at World War II, the victors see their own military contributions the clearest. Hence the United Kingdom spotlights the Battle of Britain and El Alamein, the Russians Stalingrad and Kursk, and the Americans D-Day and Midway. The contribution of China, whose war was the longest and among the bloodiest, tends to be forgotten in the West, and for years was little commemorated even in China.

A new book, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945, by Oxford historian Rana Mitter, aims to sharpen this fuzzy picture by presenting the Middle Kingdom’s eight-year war against an invading Japana war that had been under way more than two years before the Nazis invaded Poland, which is the usual starting point for histories of World War II. “Essentially,” Mitter explained in an interview with Pacific Standard, “the politics of the Cold War covered over that what is coming to be realized, I think, as one of the great missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of World War II.” Now, however, a combination of archives in China opening up and a new political attitude by its leaders has cracked the historical window....

While the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and Communist Mao Zedong are usually depicted as the titans of China’s resistance and its on-again, off-again civil war, Mitter details the rise and eclipse of a third figure, Wang Jingwei, whose stature and influence long equaled Chiang and Mao’suntil he made accommodation with the Japanese.

The scale of China’s involvement in the war was massive. Chiang, for example, fielded four million troops at the Nationalist’s height, while China as a whole lost an estimated 14 million in the war. Had China folded, Japan’s capacity to fight the U.S. or even the Soviets would have been vastly amplified.

China's contribution to the Asia-Pacific war is forgotten in the US because it was politically embarrassing to FDR's legacy and to his political heirs. During the war Communist disinformation fueled anti-Chiang propaganda. After Mao came to power, the Truman administration found it useful to emphasize Chiang's corruption and incompetence in order to escape the blame for "losing China".

The '"progressive" narrative gave the credit for Chinese resistance to Mao and his "agrarian reformers” while blaming Chiang for every short-coming of the Nationalist army and economy.

It is only in this century that a few intrepid historians have presented a more accurate picture.

Heh

I’m just amused at how quickly after the implementation of ObamaCare the whole “death panel” thing was transformed from a paranoid fantasy of that yokel, Sarah Palin, to an obviously good idea that all thinking people support.

More questions for the Benghazi investigators to ask

Benghazi suspects not on State Department's 'Rewards for Justice' list

The State Department's "Rewards for Justice" program -- which offers multimillion-dollar payouts for tips leading to wanted terrorists -- does not include suspects in the Benghazi terror attack.

The State Department has not offered an explanation as to why those individuals are not on the list. Pressed by Fox News and The Associated Press on Thursday, spokeswoman Marie Harf suggested the important thing was that the Obama administration is resolved to find those suspects.

Former Guantanamo detainee was on ground in Benghazi during terror attack, source says

A former Guantanamo Bay detainee with Al Qaeda ties was in Benghazi the night of the Sept. 11 attack, according to a source on the ground in Libya.

The source told Fox News that ex-detainee Sufian bin Qumu, who is suspected of running camps in eastern Libya where some of the assailants trained, is also a "respected member" of Ansar al-Sharia -- one of the Islamist groups identified in State Department email traffic two hours after the attack.

Another skirmish in the war on whistle-blowers

This one is actually pretty frightening.

Exclusive: Feds confiscate investigative reporter’s confidential files during raid

After the search began, Hudson said she was asked by an investigator with the Coast Guard Investigative Service if she was the same Audrey Hudson who had written a series of critical stories about air marshals for The Washington Times over the last decade. The Coast Guard operates under the Department of Homeland Security.

Hudson said that investigator, Miguel Bosch, identified himself as a former air marshal official.

But it wasn’t until a month later, on Sept. 10, that Hudson was informed by Bosch that five files including her handwritten and typed notes from interviews with numerous confidential sources and other documents had been taken during the raid.

“In particular, the files included notes that were used to expose how the Federal Air Marshal Service had lied to Congress about the number of airline flights there were actually protecting against another terrorist attack,” Hudson wrote in a summary about the raid provided to TheDC.

Assuming that Hudson is telling the truth, then this is an outrageous abuse of power by someone. The search warrant covered firearms not documents. Further,

While at the Times, Hudson reported extensively on the air marshal program — specifically about whether Homeland Security officials had lied to Congress and reported protecting more flights than they really were. Using her sources inside the government, Hudson has also reported for years about possible terrorist “dry-runs” on airplanes.

Unlike some other reporters whose sources have been targeted in recent years by the government, Hudson said none of the information she had was classified or given to her by someone who broke the law.

“None of the documents were classified,” she said. “There were no laws broken in me obtaining these files.”

R.S. McCain who worked with Hudson at the Washington Times weighs in here:

Police State: Feds Raid Investigative Reporter @AudreyHudson, Seize Notes

RDBrewer makes a good point:

Feds Use Search for Weapons as Pretext for Confiscation of Reporter's Confidential Files

I know, abuse of authority. Dog bites man. But at some point we have to reconsider the scope of the benefit of the doubt we grant to bureaucrats like these, that they're always acting lawfully. A while back Ace discussed public choice theory which is the the idea that political actors are self-concerned and act to maximize their own position.

New revelations on the war on whistle-blowers

Emails: White House, State Department coordinated with journalist on national security leaks

White House and State Department officials cooperated extensively on background with a New York Times journalist during the period that he broke confidential national security information in a series of leaks that prompted outrage from lawmakers, according to unearthed 2011 and 2012 emails....

The nonprofit organization Freedom Watch, which obtained the internal State Department emails through a Freedom of Information Act request, believes that the Obama administration carried out the leaks to bolster a tough image for itself on Iran.

Then-Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Michael Hammer and other State Department employees arranged background interviews between New York Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger and State Department officials between December 2011 and March 2012 for Sanger’s 2012 book “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.”

Sanger’s book included leaks of confidential national security information, including details of the computer worm Stuxnet that was used in a cyberattack against Iran. Sanger linked the worm to a U.S.-Israeli intelligence operation called “Operation Olympic Games” in a June 2012 New York Times article.

RTWT

This reveals a disturbing pattern by the administration. leaks that embarrass the White House or Hillary Clinton are investigated and punished. At the same time, the WH and State Department will reveal vital secrets in order to burnish the image of the bosses in the full knowledge that they run no risks.

Then there is this:

Report: Obama administration most secretive since Nixon

The Obama White House’s war against leaks, and its penchant for secrecy and noted lack of transparency, are the worst “since the Nixon administration,” according to a major new study that relied on interviews from leading Washington reporters and news organization chiefs.

The report, released Thursday by the Committee to Project Journalists, found that reporters from many major media outlets consider the Obama administration the most closed-off in recent memory, and that there is not “any precedent” for its often hostile relationship toward the press.

I wonder if reporters like Sager ever wonder why they are getting those secrets bits when most of their peers are being stonewalled?

Our corrupt press

Anatomy Of The Hoax

In his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch noticed how the Left had reverted from even a “residual conception of truth” in the Tawana Brawley case in which the black teenager falsely accused six white New York City police officers of raping her.

“When the ‘rape’ of Tawana Brawley, proclaimed by Al Sharpton and Alton Maddox as a typical case of white oppression, was exposed as a hoax, the anthropologist Stanley Diamond argued in the Nation that “it doesn’t matter whether the crime occurred or not,” wrote Lasch.

What happened to Brawley “actually happens to too many black women,” wrote Diamond. Lasch cited William Kuntsler who also wrote that it didn’t matter whether the attack on Brawley actually happened. “[It] doesn’t disguise the fact that a lot of young black women are treated the way she said she was treated.”

A decade after Lasch wrote that we saw the MSM fall for the Duke rape hoax. In defense of his guild Newsweek's Evan Thomas could only say "We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong."

Robert Conquest:

Not even high intelligence and a sensitive spirit are of any help once the facts of a situation are dedeuced from a political theory and not vice versa.

The Great Terror

Accountability and cover-ups

Families suspect SEAL Team 6 crash was inside job on worst day in Afghanistan

Questions haunt the families of Extortion 17, the 2011 helicopter mission in Afghanistan that suffered the most U.S. military deaths in a single day in the war on terrorism.

The investigative file made available to The Washington Times shows that the helicopter's landing zone was not properly vetted for threats nor protected by gunships, while commanders criticized the mission as too rushed and the conventional Chinook chopper as ill-suited for a dangerous troop infiltration.

One might think that a sloppy operation that resulted in the heaviest death toll of the Afghan War deserves a thorough investigation.

One would be wrong.

Not all families believe the fact-finding investigation, conducted by Army Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Colt covered all issues. Gen. Colt, who has since been promoted to major general, told commanders that his job was not to find fault and his report did not criticize any person or decision.

Then there is this:

One paragraph in the Colt report grabbed the families' attention. In it, crash investigators were interviewing the top leadership of the joint special operations task force that put together the mission. One of them was asked about a manifest.

"Yes, sir," a commander answered. "And I'm sure you know by now the manifest was accurate with the exception of the [redacted] personnel that were on. So the [redacted] personnel, they were incorrect all seven names were incorrect. And I cannot talk to the back story of why."

The "seven," family members say, refers to the Afghan soldiers. The open Colt report makes no reference about why the manifest was inaccurate. Military censors redacted any reference to the Afghans. Some families believe the task force at the last moment was forced to remove seven Afghans whose names remained on the manifest and replace them with seven others.

Senior Afghans had been aware of the mission because each operation must be approved by a joint operational coordination group made up of Americans and Afghan national security forces.

A Central Command spokesman declined to discuss the issue.

RTWT. It is a fine piece of analysis and investigative reporting.

Related:

Accountability and its impersonators

Shocking story of the day

Interpol Chief after Kenya Mall attack: Maybe armed citizenry isn’t so crazy after all

Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said today the U.S. and the rest of the democratic world is at a security crossroads in the wake of last month’s deadly al-Shabab attack at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya – and suggested an answer could be in arming civilians.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Noble said there are really only two choices for protecting open societies from attacks like the one on Westgate mall where so-called “soft targets” are hit: either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.

Related:

Lessons and preparations

Lessons from Mumbai

Armed citizens and al Qaeda swarms

Mall Shooting and future terrorism

Alan Greenspan, American Bourbon

"They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing"

Talleyrand on France's House of Bourbon

Alan Greenspan still thinks he’s right

What we find, however, is that Greenspan’s journey of discovery brings him right back to where he began — to an unshakable faith in free markets, an antipathy toward market regulation, and a conviction that progressive taxes and social spending are to blame for slow growth, stagnant wages and exploding deficits.

Those who have followed his career know that it was Greenspan who gave the green light to bank consolidation, Greenspan who pushed financial deregulation, Greenspan who advocated new global rules that would have reduced bank capital reserves and Greenspan who blocked efforts to crack down on abusive subprime lending. But if you are looking for him to accept any responsibility for the crisis that ensued, you will be sorely disappointed.

Journalism: Compounding problems for the Guild

Problem One:

Writing Quote: The Ethical Dilemma of Journalism

There's an ethical dilemma in almost all journalism. In taking someone else's story and making it your own, in describing them on your terms, in ways they may not agree with.

Problem Two:

This strikes me as one more case where intermediaries lose out as information becomes more democratic. The people in Kansas had to talk to Truman Capote in order to tell their story. Now, however, cable news can raise enough interest in certain stories that the insiders are the people who get book deals. The writer/outsider is left behind. The best sources won't talk because they have their own deal; the book-buying public wants new information, which only insiders can provide.

Note how the two problems reinforce each other for professional journalists.

OTOH, for readers, Problem Two is part of the solution to Problem One.

Should we call it a science if the practitioners refuse to play by the rules of science?

Criminal Justice Quote: Is Forensic Science Real Science?

The MSM still hates Dick Cheney

Sanjay Gupta’s Heartless Interview with Dick Cheney

The not so subtle implications of Gupta’s commentary and questions was that Cheney’s judgment, cognition, decision making ability and even his mental health was compromised and because of that we ended up in Afghanistan and Iraq and with enhanced interrogation and terrorist surveillance programs.

Goldstein closes with a hypothetical:

There is no way that Gupta would have taken this tone or asked those sort of questions of a liberal policymaker who had a life threatening medical condition. Gupta, who was President Obama’s original appointee as Surgeon General, certainly did not take such a condescending tone much less question the cognition, judgment, decision making capacity or the mental health of Bill Clinton when he interviewed former Commander-in-Chief about his heart troubles in August 2011.

That is certainly true, but there is a better exampe of media malpractice than Gupta's treatment of Bill Clinton.

Compare Gupta's treatment of Cheney with the media's resolute refusal to examine Joe Biden's health, age and erratic behavior. (Cheney was 68 when he left office; Crazy Joe is already 71)

Brain Surgeon Told Biden He Had Less Than 50% Chance of ‘Being Completely Normal’

We Need to Know More About Biden's Health

Is Joe Biden a psychopath or is this evidence of advancing senility?

Grover Norquist: The Opposite of Principle

Grover Norquist is the problem with Washington DC, not the solution

The evidence shows clearly that Grover Norquist is not the anti-tax, limited government advocate he would have you believe.

Norquist’s record is that he will cheer unfunded government spending increases when it suits his own interests, and will shift his interpretation of the ATR no-tax pledge depending on who is lobbying clients are or what special interests he is protecting. As seen with the Defense of Marriage Act and his lobbying for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he will take both sides of the issue given enough time. The Abramoff scandal showed that he willingly whored out the conservative movement to the highest bidder. And his promoting terror leaders, such as Sami al-Arian and Abdurahman Alamoudi, along with his attempts to scuttle the Operation Greenquest terror finance investigation targeting his lobbying clients and friends, shows he has no reservations putting his own financial interests ahead of those of the country.

Make no mistake: Grover Norquist is the problem with Washington DC, not the solution.

How to make bad leaders

A Way” to Develop a Toxic Leader

Toxic leaders don’t just appear on the scene, they develop over time- and we are the ones that create them. Yep! It’s partly our fault as leaders because we fail to properly counsel them as they move up the ladder.

The problem with Big Data

Two interesting items

Another Overhyped Fad

It is intriguing that most of the more optimistic claims about the possibilities of big data come not from intelligence analysts or their policy customers but from people in information technology. This is self-serving, to be sure, but it does raise concerns about hype. Beyond examples such as the NSA program or link analysis, there have not been many concrete examples of specific applications of big data. Some do exist: the terrorism connections so noted; the details of weapons systems; or economic data. However, no amount of data will get at some of the key questions uppermost on the minds of policy makers: intentions. What North Korea or Iran or any other nation or leader will do next is not very susceptible to data. Moreover, as one senior policy official remarked, “I do not want data, I want knowledge and insight.” This is an extremely important point: our customers want knowledge and insight, not data. And no; data in and of itself will not necessarily produce knowledge and insight, any more than crowds will produce wisdom.

A Longtime Tool of the Community

Let’s stipulate that today’s big-data mantra is overhyped. Too many technology vendors are busily rebranding storage or analytics as “big data systems” under the gun from their marketing departments. That caricature rightly is derided by both information technology cognoscenti and non-techie analysts.

America needs a newspaper like the Daily Mail

A British “scandal” shows us how the Guild works and toward what ends.

So which is the REAL sin: to criticise the Marxist views of Red Ed's father or to help terrorists and put British lives at risk?

PAUL DACRE, Editor of the Mail, answers the paper's critics

Out in the real world, it was a pretty serious week for news.

The U.S. was on the brink of budget default, a British court heard how for two years social workers failed to detect the mummified body of a four-year-old starved to death by his mother, and it was claimed that the then Labour Health Secretary had covered up unnecessary deaths in an NHS hospital six months before the election.

In contrast, the phoney world of Twitter, the London chatterati and Left-wing media was gripped ten days ago by collective hysteria as it became obsessed round-the-clock by one story a five-word headline on page 16 in the Daily Mail.

The screech of axe-grinding was deafening as the paper’s enemies gleefully leapt to settle scores.

Leading the charge, inevitably, was the Mail’s bête noire, the BBC. Fair-minded readers will decide themselves whether the hundreds of hours of airtime it devoted to that headline reveal a disturbing lack of journalistic proportionality and impartiality but certainly the one-sided tone in their reporting allowed Labour to misrepresent Geoffrey Levy’s article on Ralph Miliband.

The editor of the Daily Mail understands how to fight back when the Guild throws a hissy fit.

The controversy reveals how journalists and editors fight the battle for “explanation space”.

Central to that battle is defining what is newsworthy. As we saw in the last election, Mitt Romney’s dog and Ann Romney’s horse were newsworthy. President Obama’s relationship with the Stalinist Frank Marshall and the terrorist Bill Ayers were not.

In Britian today, the Guild has decreed that mentioning that the Leader of the Opposition grew up in a Communist household is beyond the pale.

Surely, we reasoned, the public had the right to know what influence the Labour Leader’s Marxist father, to whom he constantly referred in his speeches, had on his thinking.

One might think so, but the Journalist Elect know that such an examination is wrong.

Why, you might ask? That’s the tricky thing about explanation space. Journalists love explaining the world to their readers; they most emphatically do not like explaining their decisions.

The volume and tone of the excoriation of the Daily Mail surely requires some explanation. After all, as Dacre points out, it seems all out of proportion given the other critical events taking place in the world. Moreover, does the BBC et.al. really believe that mentioning that Ed Miliband’s father loved Stalin and once hated England (to the point of wishing it would lose the war against the Nazis) was the worst thing that a British paper had done this fall?

Actually, they probably do. Other Britons might disagree.

This week, the head of MI5 subsequently backed by the PM, the Deputy PM, the Home Secretary and Labour’s elder statesman Jack Straw effectively accused the Guardian of aiding terrorism by publishing stolen secret security files.

The story which is of huge significance was given scant coverage by a BBC which only a week ago had devoted days of wall-to-wall pejorative coverage to the Mail.

Again, I ask fair readers, what is worse: to criticise the views of a Marxist thinker, whose ideology is anathema to most and who had huge influence on the man who could one day control our security forces …. or to put British lives at risk by helping terrorists?

The over the top reaction is a feature not a bug. To defend the Guild’s monopoly in explanation space, renegades must be ignored if possible, and exiled if the public happens to notice them.

In this country we have watched this happen to individuals like Lou Dobbs, Juan Williams, Glenn Beck, and Don Imus. All of them became “controversial”, were forced out of their jobs, and were deemed unemployable by respectable outlets. In contrast, Keith Olbermann, Amanda Marcotte, Piers Morgan, and Al Sharpton became controversial and were then given lucrative positions in the MSM.

Even after the hive expels the rebel, they continue to enforce the banishment with thumbnail signifiers. Andrew Breitbart must always be linked to Shirley Sherrod and an edited video. It is bad form, though to mention the Jimmy Savile scandal when discussing the CEO of The New York Times.

Renegade organizations like Fox News or The Daily Mail receive similar treatment. They are excoriated by the Guild. The public must be made to understand that these outlets are not respectable.

Policing explanation space is not a matter of debate, logic or facts. The boundaries of acceptable journalism are enforced with hissing outrage and juvenile ridicule.

Epistemic closure is only a problem for the rube outsiders. It is a job requirement for the deciders in the media elite. Dacre provides another reason journalists love twitter:

The hysteria that followed is symptomatic of the post-Leveson age in which any newspaper which dares to take on the Left in the interests of its readers risks being howled down by the Twitter mob whom the BBC absurdly thinks represent the views of real Britain.

Once again, sauce for the goose is decidedly not sauce for the gander.

Shutdown theater and Nixon’s Ghost

Andrew McCarthy:

Funding Jihadists while Denying Military Benefits
We can fund al-Qaeda but we can’t fund the families of our war dead?

Here is where we’re at: The Republican establishment the guys who told us that for a trillion dollars and several thousand American casualties, we could build “Islamic democracies” that would be reliable U.S. allies in the War on Terror say it is Ted Cruz who is “delusional” and the effort to stave off Obamacare that is “unattainable.”

These self-appointed sages are, of course, the same guys who told us the way to “stabilize” and “democratize” Libya was to help jihadists topple and kill the resident dictator who, at the time, was a U.S. ally, providing intelligence about the jihadists using his eastern badlands as a springboard for the anti-American terror insurgency in Iraq. That’s probably worth remembering this week, during which some of our new “allies” abducted Libya’s president while others car-bombed Sweden’s consulate in Benghazi site of the still unavenged terrorist massacre of American ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. officials 13 months ago.

Not to worry, though. So successful do they figure the Libyan escapade was, GOP leaders are backing a reprise in Syria. It is there, we learn from a Human Rights Watch report issued this week, that our new “allies,” the al-Qaeda-rife “rebels,” executed a savage atrocity just two months ago. Sweeping into the coastal village of Latakia, the jihadists slaughtered 190 minority Alawites. As the New York Times details, “at least 67 of the dead appeared to have been shot or stabbed while unarmed or fleeing, including 48 women and 11 children.” More than 200 other civilians were captured and are still being held hostage.

McCarthy raises several key issues that are lost in the MSM’s breathless horse race coverage of the shutdown.

I found this one especially interesting:

And, you’ll be pleased to know, supporting the Syrian “rebels” is a high enough priority that it’s not part of the 17 percent of the federal government affected by the “shutdown.”

And this:

You know, there’s also a 1996 law on the federal books that makes it a felony to provide material support to terrorists. It’s not vague. In fact, it’s clear as a bell, according to the many federal courts that have applied it in sentencing scores of jihadist-abettors to hundreds of years in prison.

Don’t you find it strange, don’t you think the public at large would find it strange, that in a shutdown Obama has instigated in order to enforce the Obamacare law Americans don’t want, he so skews the rest of our law that his administration says we can fund al-Qaeda but we can’t fund the families of our war dead?

In his 1977 interview with David Frost, Richard Nixon offered this defense of his actions:

When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.

That answer has taken on an almost mythic status on the Story of Watergate. On one hand we have the arrogant Imperial President who recognizes no limits on his power. On the other, we have a brave band of reporters and special prosecutors who set out to prove that no man, not even the President, is above the law in America.

The battle is joined, Nixon is toppled, and the Rule of Law is saved in America.

So, if that is true, how is it possible for this Administration to support al Qaeda terrorists in Syria?

In praise of the Victorians

The Victorians were dynamic, hugely inventive and deeply caring

Our image of the Victorians is too often of a repressed, conservative, starchy, uptight and blinkered people. They were allegedly so prudish they even covered their table legs, were harsh to women and children, vicious to those who refused to conform and determined to entrench privilege.

In fact, such an impression could not be more wrong. The Victorians were people of vision, insatiably intellectually curious, wedded to the idea of progress and determined to improve their own lives and those of others.

They were the first meritocrats, opening up opportunities to those with the brains and qualities to exploit them rather than them being awarded simply according to social status.

Harnessed to phenomenal intellectual, physical and moral energy, and often (albeit in an age of profound religious doubt) informed by a deep sense of Christian purpose, their vision helped transform Britain from a fundamentally medieval country when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837 to a startlingly modern one within just four or five decades.