MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ON ORLANDO: An Untraditional War: We can’t stop ISIL-inspired massacres if we deny we’re fighting Islam’s jihadist strain.
Archive for 2016
June 12, 2016
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF NEPOTISM AND CORRUPTION? How one of L.A.’s highest-paying jobs went to the boss’s son. “The firing of the younger Rubino followed a string of recent embarrassments for managers of America’s busiest harbor. The former port police chief was indicted for taking kickbacks from a company doing business with the port and then lying to federal investigators about it. Federal officials dropped the corruption charges, and the former chief pleaded guilty earlier this year to tax evasion and filing a false statement to the FBI.”
Plus: “As with most city employees, recruiting for port pilots is supposed to follow a rigorous, merit-based process under civil service rules, designed to ensure the most qualified applicant is hired.”
PETER HITCHENS: The British people have risen at last – and we’re about to unleash chaos. “I think we are about to have the most serious constitutional crisis since the Abdication of King Edward VIII. I suppose we had better try to enjoy it. If – as I think we will – we vote to leave the EU on June 23, a democratically elected Parliament, which wants to stay, will confront a force as great as itself – a national vote, equally democratic, which wants to quit. Are we about to find out what actually happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? I am genuinely unsure how this will work out. I hope it will only destroy our two dead political parties, stiffened corpses that have long propped each other up with the aid of BBC endorsement and ill-gotten money.”
MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ON ORLANDO: An Untraditional War: We can’t stop ISIL-inspired massacres if we deny we’re fighting Islam’s jihadist strain.
IF YOU’RE IN THE MARKET FOR AMMO, consider my former law students’ company, LuckyGunner.com. I use them, and their service and shipping are excellent.
OUCH:
MATTHEW HENNESSEY: Take Off the Gloves: We’re all on ISIS’s kill list—what are we willing to do about it? Precious little, until at least January of 2017.
MAN WHO COULDN’T CONTROL OWN PENIS WANTS TO CONTROL OTHERS’ GUNS: Gen. Petraeus Starts New Gun Control Group.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Facebook Activates ‘Safety Check’ for First Time in U.S. in Wake of Orlando Mass Shooting.
Despite this being the last year of Obama’s presidency, I still find this admission shocking:
Later, the president would say that he had failed to fully appreciate the fear many Americans were experiencing about the possibility of a Paris-style attack in the U.S. Great distance, a frantic schedule, and the jet-lag haze that envelops a globe-spanning presidential trip were working against him. But he has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to America commensurate with the fear it generates. Even during the period in 2014 when isis was executing its American captives in Syria, his emotions were in check. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s closest adviser, told him people were worried that the group would soon take its beheading campaign to the U.S. “They’re not coming here to chop our heads off,” he reassured her. Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do. Several years ago, he expressed to me his admiration for Israelis’ “resilience” in the face of constant terrorism, and it is clear that he would like to see resilience replace panic in American society. Nevertheless, his advisers are fighting a constant rearguard action to keep Obama from placing terrorism in what he considers its “proper” perspective, out of concern that he will seem insensitive to the fears of the American people.
I wonder if late at night, Obama says something along the lines of, “See Michelle, I told you that Americans can ‘absorb’ another terrorist attack, and Fort Hood, Boston, Garland, Chattanooga, and San Bernardino just keep proving me right.”
And now Orlando.
COOL CIVILIZATIONAL DEATH WISH GOES VIRAL, REVISITED: After the Paris massacre in November, Mark Steyn wrote:
Just in case our enemies needed another reason to despise us, today the inactivist group Somnolent Tilty-Headed Wankers for Peace launched an exciting new graphic: the same old clapped-out hippie peace symbol but incorporating the Eiffel Tower (right)! Isn’t that a cool, stylish way of showing how saddy-saddy-sadcakes you are about all those corpses in the streets of Paris? It’s already gone viral! And that’s all that matters, isn’t it?
Our enemies use social media to distribute snuff videos as a means of recruitment. We use it to confirm to them how passive and enervated we are: What was it the last time blood ran in the streets of Paris? Oh, yeah, a pencil – for all those dead cartoonists. But, given that blood in the streets of Paris looks like becoming a regular event, it helps to have something of general application. What about, ooh, a tricolor with a blue tear at the end? No, better yet: a peace symbol with a croissant in the middle. No, wait…
What’s that? All you are saying is give peace a chance? But what, in fact, are the chances of peace for Paris and France? What are the odds?
Oh, sorry. All they were saying is give peace a chance. And, having said it, they’ve gone back to sleep until the next atrocity requires another stupid hashtag or useless avatar.
Which brings us to today. In order to mourn the Orlando terrorist attack, Google and Google-owned YouTube have added black ribbons to their homepages:
To reiterate Mark’s comments in November, and now they can go back to sleep until the next atrocity requires another stupid hashtag or useless avatar.
NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY: The Frenzy Over ‘Campus Rape Culture’ Is Hurting Real Victims. To be fair, the frenzy isn’t meant to help real victims.
WHAT ARE HER THOUGHTS ON PRESSURE-COOKERS? Hillary After ‘Act of Hate’: ‘Weapons of War Have No Place on Our Streets.’
AT AMAZON, deals on Surveillance Cameras. Keep an eye on your property.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ON ORLANDO: An Untraditional War: We can’t stop ISIL-inspired massacres if we deny we’re fighting Islam’s jihadist strain.
UPDATE: Some cogent thoughts from Alex Pournelle:
I agree with every word you say here, but I think it lacks a key component. And, yes, you are space limited.
This is an information war. The grandparents of these mass murderers had different ideals, at least in embryo. Baghdad used to be so cosmopolitan that SFO was “Baghdad by the bay”. Persia, too, was advanced, and I don’t just mean in historic times.
We, the West, used to be very good at exporting ideas, classical liberal ideals, personal freedom, actual tolerance. We don’t, any longer. (Hollywood had shown it can still export ideas, but not so much ones supporting freedom or classical western values.)
Without actual psywar, without actual belief in the Constitution, this evil will not be destroyed, not at its actual base: the hearts and minds of the world where it spawns.
That of course goes to the Long March through the legacy educational institutions you so eloquently cover, but also to the larger question of why naming our actual enemy is fundamental to victory.
So, too, is the concept of victory, which we have discarded in the last decade.
Indeed.
SHOCKER: Co-worker: Omar Mateen homophobic, ‘unhinged.’
Gilroy, a former Fort Pierce Police officer, said Mateen frequently made homophobic and racial comments. Gilroy said he complained to his employer G4S Security several times but it did nothing because he was Muslim.
Gilroy quit after he said Mateen began stalking him via multiple text messages — 20 or 30 a day. He also sent Gilroy 13 to 15 phone messages a day, he said.
“I quit because everything he said was toxic,” Gilroy said Sunday, “and the company wouldn’t do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people.”
Gilroy said this shooting didn’t come as a surprise to him.
So, like the San Bernardino shooter, he escaped scrutiny because people were afraid of seeming racist or something.
WAPO REPORTS THAT ORLANDO SUSPECT’S FATHER HOSTED AN ISLAMIC CABLE TV SHOW, PRETENDS TO BE AFGHANISTAN’S PRESIDENT, PRAISES THE TALIBAN.
UPDATE: “Seddique Mateen is an effusive poster on social media. The following posts from his Facebook describe a trip to Washington DC in April. He can be seen posing in front of State Department offices & the Democratic Foreign Services Committee offices…These posts from 2015 show Mateen with Reps Charlie Rangel, Dana Rohrabacher and Ed Royce. Royce is the Chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs….In March, Mateen had also been granted a corporate license by the State of Florida to operate his group called The Provisional Government of Afghanistan.”
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Police arrest McComb woman for sex crime against toddler. “McComb Police said they went to an apartment on Gillis Circle on Monday. A witness showed police cell phone video of Labruzza being sexually involved with a child that was about 2 years old, police said.”
WHAT’S THIS “WE” SHIT, KEMOSABE? Obama: ‘We’ are to blame, not Islamic terrorism, for massacre.
WHEN “RAPE CULTURE” IS REAL: Predatory Peacekeepers – UN Soldiers Are Committing Widespread Child Rape. “The Blue Helmets attacked the very people they were sent to protect. Children as young as 7 have been targeted, with a girl forced to perform “oral sex on French soldiers in exchange for a bottle of water and a sachet of cookies. Three girls reported being stripped, tied up, and forced to engage in bestiality with a dog by a French military commander. The brutality of this systematic child sexual abuse is entirely at odds with the humanitarian values the UN claims to uphold. Yet UN troops have a history of exploiting people in communities shattered by war and natural disaster, an institutional failure which is yet to see any meaningful resolution. From the international powers-that-be down to right-on liberals, many a blind eye has been turned.”
FROM GAY GUN-RIGHTS GROUP THE PINK PISTOLS, a comment on the Orlando shooting.
AT AMAZON, deals in Heating, Cooling & Air Quality.
Also, Summer Deals in Jewelry.
AMAZINGLY, IT’S AN ARTICLE ABOUT ENGLAND, NOT CALIFORNIA: The government is pursuing a climate change policy which it knows will cause power cuts.
AFTER ORLANDO TERRORIST ATTACK, USUAL SUSPECTS SPOUT USUAL NARRATIVE:
- Tom Brokaw: ‘In this County,’ ‘Everything Seems to Get Settled by a Gun.’
- ABC Blames Orlando Terror on Election Rhetoric and Guns in America
- AP Calls Orlando Terrorist Massacre ‘Just the Latest Mass Shooting’
- Media Matters: “The NRA made anti-LGBT attacks during their annual meeting just weeks ago.”
- Yahoo: “Bernie Sanders Just Nailed the Real Culprit Behind the Mass Shooting in Orlando…Sanders explained to Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, the real culprit, according to Sanders, is gun control — or more precisely, lack thereof.”
- Kansas City Star Editorial Writer Yael T. Abouhalkah: “Dear God: Today I am so sickened by the evilness of the NRA and gun industry. May their leaders be plunged into ever-lasting hell. Amen.”
- Jeffrey Goldberg: “Obama cautious on motive of shooter because caution is required until the investigation advances.”
UPDATE: Transcript of Obama’s boilerplate speech on the incident.
Related: Trump Blasts Obama For Not Mentioning “Radical Islamic” Terrorism As ISIS Claims Responsibility.
THE LOG CABIN REPUBLICANS on the Orlando shooting:
In the early morning hours of Sunday, June 12, a shooter with suspected ties to radical Islam raided and killed 50 people inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
“Domestic terrorism has struck once again on American soil, in a direct attack on the LGBT community of the United States — during Pride Month, no less,” Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory T. Angelo stated. “It’s no secret that abroad men who are gay — and merely suspected of being gay — are targeted for execution; today, that threat has reached the United States. Log Cabin Republicans extends our deepest sympathy, condolences, and sorrow to the victims and families of those targeted in this morning’s violence. If the shooter’s suspected motivations are indeed confirmed, we call upon President Obama and the presumptive nominees of both parties to condemn the attacker and acknowledge in no uncertain terms the cause of this massacre: Radical Islamic terrorism.”
Yes.