Sunday, December 15, 2013

How the West was lost by the selfie president

By Michael Goodwin in the NY Post
How the West was lost by the selfieĀ president
President Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Denmark
 Prime Minister Helle Thorning Schmidt pose for a selfie as
 Michelle Obama looks on.
 
... "It’s official — the government of the United States of Obama consists of boobs and bores and is led by a narcissist. It is no consolation that Great Britain joins us in racing to the bottom.
"President Obama’s flirting with Denmark’s prime minister would be shameful on any occasion. That it happened at the memorial for Nelson Mandela only adds to the embarrassment.
"But the “selfie” episode also symbolizes the greater global calamity of Western decline. With British prime minister David Cameron playing the role of Obama’s giggling wingman, the “look at me” moment confirms we have unserious leaders in a dangerously serious time. " ...
And how would you answer this?
... "Hitler’s greatest mistake was being born too soon. If he were on the march now, would there be will in Washington and London to stop him? Would there be an arsenal of democracy to save mankind from darkness?"







Obama's Syrian Flip Flop from the Coward-in-Chief  

Saudi Prince Criticizes Obama Administration, Citing Indecision in Mideast
... “ 'We’ve seen several red lines put forward by the president, which went along and became pinkish as time grew, and eventually ended up completely white,” said Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former intelligence chief of Saudi Arabia. “When that kind of assurance comes from a leader of a country like the United States, we expect him to stand by it.” He added, “There is an issue of confidence.' ”
Political Cartoons by Eric Allie

Some historical photos

Disney brothers, wives and mom when                                                           they opened                                                           the studio
Roy O. and Walt Disney on the day they opened Disney Studios.
 
Tank Man Tiananmen square
A different angle taken of "Tank Man," the man who stood against
a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square .
He is standing in the street between the tree trunk and the fleeing man.
You can see the tanks approaching from the right.
 
The London sky following a bombing and dogfight between British and German planes in 1940.
 
Martin Luther king and his son
Martin Luther King, Jr removes a burned cross from his yard in 1960.
 The boy is his son.
 
Nagasaki , 20 minutes after the atomic bombing in 1945.
 
  Disney Cafeteria
Disneyland employee cafeteria in 1961.
 
Disneyland Construction
The construction of Disneyland .

 
 First McDonalds
The first McDonalds. - buy em by the bag ---- on the sign
 
 
Fourteen year-old Osama bin Laden. He's second from the right. -
bell bottom pants - pink car - expensive shops, nice threads,
About 24 people out smiling --- looking hip for the day
and not one woman has their face or head covered.
 Halifax airport plane
Speaking of Osama:  Grounded aircraft on September 11, 2001 await orders.

Photos courtesy of John Paul Curnutt, Madras, OR.
 

MSNBC; High School shooter identified as a 'very opinionated Socialist'

Examiner.com   "While liberals blamed the NRA for the tragic Arapahoe High School shooting, it turns out the alleged shooter was one of their own, according to the Denver Post. An article posted at news.com.au Saturday said that one classmate identified senior Karl Pierson as a "very opinionated Socialist.' "
....
"Update: The Denver Post has mysteriously scrubbed the reference to socialism from the shooter's profile. More here."
 It brings to mind the words of Jackie Kennedy after Lee Harvey Oswald killed her husband;

He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

The last living witnesses; by Wesley Pruden. Includes research links for you.

Jewish World Review   
"BERLIN— (MCT) The shadows deepen and lengthen, memories grow dim, and some of the survivors of the tragedies of World War II scramble to preserve the recollections before the colors fade to gray.
"There's no shortage of ghosts prowling the cities and countryside of Europe. Remembrances of monstrous evil lie all about. None have tried harder than the progeny of the Germans who started it all to learn from the past, and recall without flinching the scourge and stain on history that is still unfathomable three-quarters of a century later." 
....
... "But none work with more dedication and enthusiasm for keeping the dark memories alive than a dwindling group of survivors of Hitler's death camps. Some of them are well into their 90s now, leaning on canes or advancing slowly across a room on a walker, talking to young people to whom World War II is as distant as the Hundred Years War."  Emphasis added, TD
....
... Very few prisoners survived the relentlessly efficient Nazi killing machine. Of 67 who survived at Treblinka, where 850,000 prisoners, nearly all Jews, were slain, only 2 survivors are alive today. Of the 250,000 scheduled for execution at Sobibor, only 50 survived and only 4 remain... 
Berlin Gestapo HQ before Hitler started the war

Memorial of the Holocaust: Topography of Terror  "As the “site of the perpetrators,” the "Topography of Terror" fulfills a special role among the many remembrance sites, monuments and museums in Berlin today that commemorate the era of National Socialism. Located in the center of the capital, it provides information at an authentic site about the headquarters of the National Socialist SS and police state and reveals the European dimensions of the Nazi reign of terror."
Gestapo HQ begins to have some consequences

New Third Reich Monument in Berlin: Revealing the Young Bureaucrats Behind the Nazi Terror     "Who exactly were the men who planned and administered the Nazi crimes? The new "Topography of Terror" documentation center opened on Thursday in Berlin at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters.
"It reveals the faces of the almost unknown perpetrators of the Holocaust."
 Image
1945-46
 
A woman inspects the original remains of the Gestapo
 and SS buildings at the new "Topography Of Terror"
 exhibit in Berlin.
 
... "The area once housed not only Hitler's Gestapo secret police and its prison, but also the leadership of the SS, the Nazi party's paramilitary unit and the Reich Security Main Office. Nazi leaders such as Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann all had offices on the street.
"The museum built in the middle of the remnants "leaves the city's scar visible," said the center's director, Andreas Nachama. The site is a few minutes' walk from the capital's Holocaust memorial, which opened in 2005, and the Jewish Museum."
 
USC Shoah Foundation   "Dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with
survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action."

From the Holocaust Survivors Photo Gallery: "There are four main categories of photographs in this Gallery. There are family photographs which come from the survivors themselves. There are historical photographs which come from archives. There are portrait and location photographs which were taken specially for this project" ...
  
[photo]
"From \"The Auschwitz Album\", the only photographic documentation of the entire extermination process at Auschwitz. An SS has just sent the woman with the infant to join those being sent to the crematoria; her hair is covered in the tradition of the Orthodox Jewish wife."
More on Auschwitz here.

The "Gate of death" (part II)
This view is from inside the rail entrance to Birkenau. The building it passes through is the main SS guardhouse. Notice the windows in the tower. You may recall the scene in the film "Schindler's List", where the women are brought into Auschwitz at night with a large spotlight shining alongside the train. For a view of it from behind the light above the ramp see [link]. The object at the bottom of the frame, near the track is a rail switch.

Below: from Schindler's List; the women's train arriving at Auschwitz.




Scrapbooks from Hell: The Auschwitz Albums ; From National Geographic.

Schindler's List filming locations
 

What Will It Take? Americans still seem willing to give a pass to the disaster in the White House.

If you read nothing else, read this column.
PJ Media  via Lucianne   
"Let me begin with a categorical statement that, given current events and recent political history, can be easily defended: Barack Hussein Obama is a willful, indoctrinated child of the Left with strong Islamic sympathies who is not fit to govern. Indeed, he would not be fit to govern Lower Slobovia, let alone the United States of America. Obama is a historic disaster of the first magnitude and, if not restrained, he will see to the irrevocable decline of the country which foolishly elected him, leaving the world on the brink of a conflict — or in the midst of one — whose repercussions cannot be underestimated*."  (Emphasis added, TD)
* Overestimated?
Political Cartoons by Robert Ariail
"Accompanying the undeniable havoc and damage that Obama is wreaking on his country and equally on its allies — Honduras, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Poland, Czech Republic, Israel, and possibly Taiwan — is the sense of helplessness that overcomes one when writing or speaking about a rogue president and his destructive administration. I feel this personally, having done my utmost in books, articles and lectures, from 2008 to the present, to warn whomever might read or listen that Obama represented a greater threat to the U.S. and the oddly named “free world” than any of our most dedicated and belligerent enemies. Even prior to his nomination as the Democratic candidate for the presidency, my distrust of this man was proprioceptive. And after his Missouri address, I wondered why anyone would want to “fundamentally transform” a country which, for all its flaws, perched atop the pinnacle of success in comparison to any other country.

"Everything Obama has done since then has only served to confirm what was originally a deep suspicion and soon grew to become a complete certainty. Dozens of meticulously researched books have been published to the same effect. And yet very few people seemed to be paying attention. No less disconcerting, those who argue that to criticize Obama is a sign of deep-dyed racism are, of course, relying on slander and misappropriation of language to protect their chosen standard bearer and his Marxist/progressivist/utopian project.

"What will it take to convince the ersatz aristocracy of frivolous intellectuals and brainless celebrities, partisan journalists, editors and academics, and an indifferent or deluded laity that they are heading for a crisis that will change our lives immeasurably for the worse? The evidence is beyond dispute.
"America is drowning in a state of unredeemable debt — $17 trillion in actual debt and, according to economic historian Niall Ferguson, in the vicinity of $200 trillion in unfunded liabilities [2], while one in five households [3] depends on food stamps. At the same time, it is printing money like there’s no tomorrow — and there may not be — while subsidizing green energy fiascos at enormous cost to the taxpayer ($90 billion [4] in wasted stimulus funds, and counting). It finds itself in the throes of a metastasizing race war, caused in no small degree by the president’s rhetoric and behavior and fomented by his attorney general.
Politcal Cartoons
 It is a country increasingly governed by executive fiat and by an administration rocked by a near-endless gyre of political and ideological scandals. It is a country whose federal government opposes voter ID, opening the door to electoral corruption. It is a country that spies [5] on its own citizens, software corporations and web search engines, tries avowed terrorists in civilian courts, allows its ambassador and his entourage to be killed, without reprisal, and suffers its higher echelons to be riddled with Muslim Brotherhood operatives, giving the impression of a College of mujtahids. They are the advance cohort. “Today,” writes Larry Kelley in his sobering book Lessons from Fallen Civilizations [6], “millions of militant Muslims awake every morning plotting the destruction of the US. Many are among us.” And there will be more, if these [7] reports [8] of fast-tracking the citizenship applications of large numbers of Muslim immigrants are reliable, as they appear to be.

"It is a country whose president purges its military — 197 senior officers, including nine commanding generals [9] — as did Turkey’s autocratic leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan to ensure the continuity of his regime. It is a country that refuses to defend its borders, even suing to keep them as porous as possible. It is a country shifting precipitously to the Left, now mired in the exorbitant socialist travesty of Obamacare built on an ascending pyramid of lies and false enrollment numbers [10] — or in the words of L.A. County Deputy District Attorney Patrick Frey at his Patterico blog [11], “they’re not just lying about politics now. They’re lying about data. They’re lying about everything. All the time. Constantly. It’s what you have to do to prop up an unsustainable government. … You lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie.”

"It is a country whose domestic agenda is predicated on the Marxist principle of redistributive economics that amounts to stealing from the productive class to maintain an ever-growing parasitical constituency. It is a country at war with honest science, transmuting NASA into a program for Muslim outreach [12] and buying into the Gore/Hansen/Mann-inflated, IPCC climate scam. It is a country that is retreating on every front and that has lost the Middle East [13] as well as the respect of its adversaries [14].  It is a country that betrays its allies and endangers the world in the process, as in the phony, eagerly sought agreement that allows a self-described genocidal and nuclearizing Iran to keep spinning its centrifuges while profiting from relaxed sanctions.
Politcal Cartoons
"It is a country whose administration has sold its loyal partner, Israel, down the Jordan River.

“ 'The United States is no longer a rational nation,” mourns [15] James Lewis. “Under Obama we are burning our traditional allies, and since weakness brings aggression, Iran is now empowered, China is grabbing ocean territory for shale deposits, and the worst offenders against women’s rights are now elected to the UN Human Rights Commission.” It is hard to contend with his summation.
Politcal Cartoons
"All this proceeds under the direction of a president who has sealed his vital documents so that very little of crucial importance is known about him.  Roger Simon notes [16], as many others have done, “that Obama’s academic records are perpetually unavailable for a reason — and that reason is most likely that they reveal he received financial preferences, scholarships and/or loans, as a foreign student.” I have been arguing this thesis, and more, for several years about a president who is essentially a cipher. Intentional lack of evidence comprises evidence of its own that something is amiss. Further, if Obama was a foreign student, it follows that his presidential legitimacy is in question. But Simon is forgiving here, averring that he “would vote in a heartbeat for a foreign born person if I thought he or she were the best candidate, assuming it was all legal and public.…” Pace Simon, considering Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 [17] of the United States Constitution, how such a process could be legal is distinctly moot.
"Indeed, all other reasons aside, to have conferred immense power on a public figure with so meager a track record and so thin and discontinuous a rĆ©sumĆ© defies even the most rudimentary logic. Who is this man who sits in the Oval Office? (As PJM commenter “cfbleachers” correctly remarks in response to a previous article [18] of mine, “Obama has spent his entire life perfecting the art of the mask.”) And what is his modus operandi? “Obama,” writes Dinesh
D’Souza in Obama’s America: Unmaking the American Dream [19], published just prior to the 2012 election, “is possessed of a certain low cunning that makes him politically formidable. Obama’s skill…is to figure out what the American people want to see and hear, and then give it to them, while doing something entirely different.” By 2012 Obama’s lack of a paper trail, his craftiness and his penchant for deceit should have been blatantly obvious to any sensible and mature American voter, irrespective of class, race or gender.
"TV personality Monica Crowley concurs. In a recent speech [20], she spelled out what should have been plain for all to see: “We have a president who…came out  of the swamps of Chicago machine politics, who learned at the knee of the communist revolutionary Frank Marshall Davis, who studied under Marxist professors…who trained intensively in the revolutionary tactics of Saul Alinsky, who launched his political career in the living room of Marxist revolutionaries and domestic terrorists… who for two decades sat in the pews of the radical anti-American preacher, who tried desperately to bury that past, who spoke about the fundamental transformation of the nation…who waged war on entire news organizations, Fox News, and who spent his first term slamming into place radical wealth redistribution and socialized medicine….What I’m describing here is the classic tin-pot dictatorship. We never thought it could happen here, and yet, here it is….Those of us in this room knew what was going on from the beginning before he was even elected president, but now it’s starting to dawn on more and more people what is really happening here.” She is right. Even for those who were not “in this room,” there should have been little doubt that Obama was a man without a discernible moral core, inspired by an anti-American political philosophy and utterly devoid of presidential heft.
"But American voters were ready to be taken in by a smooth-talking, shape-changing, confidence-man, like the gullible “marks” in Melville’s last novel [21] about the exploits of an adroit charlatan, and to trust the image rather than the substance (or absence of same). This is another way of saying that America elected the results of Obama’s wholly predictable dogmatic fecklessness. America elected not to be America anymore, to fundamentally transform itself from a solvent, powerful, feared and respected nation into a quasi-European basket case. America surrendered to reparation chromatics, as if seeking absolution for a history that no one today is responsible for and that Obama himself never experienced. Admittedly, Obama’s approval ratings have plunged of late, but public opinion is notoriously volatile and will probably rebound at some point. Liberal dogma and white guilt will see to that. One can only hope it will assume the form of a dead cat bounce.

"The question remains. What will it take to awaken the tranquilized sector of the public and shake the elite corps of complacent opinion-makers out of their blind and factional torpor? How long before reality pre-empts fantasy? “The last five years of the Obama administration,” writes [22] Russian Ć©migrĆ© Alexander Markovsky, “have been like living on a volcano.” How long before the lava starts to flow?

"One must hope that America will come to its collective senses before it is too late. But I am afraid that it will take nothing less than a major catastrophe, a fiscal implosion that takes the “food” out of food stamps, coupled with more high-casualty terrorist attacks both abroad and on its own soil, leading to the eruption of civil unrest and the possible impeachment of the most destructive president in the entire pageant of American history — a sorcerer’s apprentice in a house on fire or a Machiavellian schemer following a carefully contrived plan — before America emerges from its devastating slumber. Assuming, of course, that it ever does, or that a path to recovery will still be possible. For nothing is guaranteed in a nation so divided as America is today.
David Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist. He is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity, and is currently working on a sequel, Living in the Valley of Shmoon. His new book on Jewish and Israeli themes, Hear, O Israel!, was released by Mantua Books. His latest book is The Boxthorn Tree, published in December 2012.

Well it looks like the left finally got its wish with this Colorado school shooter, who appears to be a Tea Partier. No! Wait!

alan.com
Ace of Spades HQ   "Ahh, so not a Tea Partier at all. He sounds a lot like the lefty trolls that swing by here from time to time, a fact that I find totally unsurprising."
....
" 'He had very strong beliefs about gun laws and stuff," said junior Abbey Skoda, who was in a class with the alleged shooter her freshman year."
"...I was wondering to all the neoclassicals and neoliberals, why isn't the market correcting itself?" he wrote. "If the invisible hand is so strong, shouldn't it be able to overpower regulations?" 
Pierson also appears to mock Republicans on another Facebook post, writing "you republicans are so cute" and posting an image that reads: "The Republican Party: Health Care: Let 'em Die, Climate Change: Let 'em Die, Gun Violence: Let 'em Die, Women's Rights: Let 'em Die, More War: Let 'em Die. Is this really the side you want to be on?" (emphasis added)
 "Ahh, so not a Tea Partier at all. He sounds a lot like the lefty trolls that swing by here from time to time, a fact that I find totally unsurprising.
"And now that these detail are out there, he'll never be heard of again in the media, which must protect the "dangerous right winger" narrative for the possibility that one day one of these guys actually is.
"(h/t JW, who notes that the lead is pretty clearly written to make you think he was pro-gun)"

Arapahoe High Gunman: Republicans Are the Party of 'Let 'em Die'  He died quoting the words of Alan Grayson.
....
"For an American mainstream media that is always eager to exploit tragedy for political gain, yesterday's horrific shooting will not give them much to work with. The gunman's politics have little in common with the Tea Party, and the state where the shooting took place, Colorado, just passed almost all of the media's gun control wish-list about six months ago.
"More bad news for the media came in the gunman's weapon of choice: a shotgun, which is also Vice President Joe Biden's weapon of choice." 

Megyn Kelly Responds to Santa Claus Critics: Get a Sense of Humor

Newsbusters  "Fox News Channel host Megyn Kelly took on the left-wing hate mob that has come after her following a humorous segment that she featured on her program Wednesday evening in which she and her guests staged a mock debate over the racial identity of Santa Claus.

"To the haters, Kelly had a message tonight: Lighten up and learn to realize what satire is. “Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this show but sometimes that is lost on the humorless,” she said.

"Since the Wednesday segment, an absurd controversy has been swirling around the newly minted primetime host in which Foxophobic television and internet outlets seemed unable (or unwilling) to comprehend that the entire segment, which began with a satirical disclaimer to “kids at home” that Santa was white and did exist, was not to be taken seriously."  Read more:
 

Friday, December 13, 2013

Obama the Oblivious; He doesn’t write code — or bother himself with the tasks of governing.

Charles Krauthammer  "In explaining the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, President Obama told Chris Matthews he had discovered that “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly.”
"An interesting discovery to make after having consigned the vast universe of American medicine, one-sixth of the U.S. economy, to the tender mercies of the agency bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service."
....
"That’s why his reaction to the Obamacare website’s crash-on-takeoff is so telling. His remedy? A cross-country campaign-style speaking tour. As if rhetoric could repeal that reality.

"Managing, governing, negotiating, cajoling, crafting legislation, forging compromise. For these — this stuff of governance — Obama has shown little aptitude and even less interest. Perhaps, as Valerie Jarrett has suggested, he is simply too easily bored to invest his greatness in such mundanity."

The Megyn Kelly/ Santa watch

Megyn Kelly to Return to Fox Amid 'White Santa' Furor  "Fox News host Megyn Kelly – who stayed home sick Thursday night – is set to address the media firestorm ignited by her declaration that both Santa Claus and Jesus were white.

"Kelly made the comments during a panel discussion about a Slate article written by a black woman who described feeling ashamed as a child because "our black Santa wasn’t the real thing."

" 'This is so ridiculous, yet another person claiming it’s racist to have a white Santa," Kelly told her panel Wednesday, adding, as she turned to the camera, "And by the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white, but this person is just arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa.' "

Friday 'toons

THE MEANING OF THE ADVENT WREATH. (Speakers on)

This should have been posted in November, but here it is:
Living Hope
"Most Advent wreaths use three colors – purple, pink, and white. However, some may use blue in place of the purple."
Choral excerpts from Handel's Messiah
....
1st CANDLE – (purple) THE PROPHECY CANDLE or CANDLE OF HOPE  For unto us a child is born
....
2nd CANDLE – (purple) THE BETHLEHEM CANDLE or THE CANDLE OF PREPARATION    Every Valley...- G.F. Handel "Messiah"
....
3rd CANDLE – (pink) THE SHEPHERD CANDLE or THE CANDLE OF JOY
"How Beautiful are the Feet of Them that Bringeth Glad Tidings of Joy."
....
4th CANDLE – (purple) THE ANGEL CANDLE or THE CANDLE OF LOVE Messiah Chorus He shall purify
....
5th CANDLE – (white) “CHRIST CANDLE” – The white candle reminds us that Jesus is the spotless lamb of God, sent to wash away our sins! His birth was for his death, his death was for our birth!  Hallelujah Chorus
....
"When these candles were lit, Scripture and prayer was part of the custom and the family devotion time was a time of instructing the children about Christ’s coming. Later, the custom crossed over different denominational lines and other faith traditions adapted its use. Today, you can find Advent wreathes in many Protestant and Roman Catholic churches."

Why Stand for the Hallelujah Chorus?     "No one knows why King George stood but we do know that people around the world still rise to their feet whenever they hear first notes of the Hallelujah Chorus.
"Originally, Handel wrote The Messiah to be performed at Lent or Easter. Today, however, the Hallelujah Chorus is most popular as a piece of Christmas music."
Then there is this excellent contemporary version of the oratorio, "handel's young Messiah".

J.S. BACH – CHRISTMAS ORATORIO

American Glob  "The video description says this is the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists   in 2009.
"If you like classical Christmas music, you’ll love this."