Going where Obama has not

French jets took off a week ago for Raqqa,

the Islamic State group's de-facto capital in Syria on Sunday night, destroying a jihadi training camp and a munitions dump in the city of Raqqa. (Nov. 15)

From AP

Have you received your new "chip" credit cards?

Dave Taylor writes at Lifezette about the new "chip" credit cards. They are a big improvement in fraud protection for in-store or in-gas-station purchases. Taylor writes,

What you should have received when you got that new “chip and PIN” credit card from your bank was also a 4-digit PIN. It’s the combination of the secret code and the chip that make the transaction much more secure. Also, the data on these chips is actually encrypted, making it a lot more secure than the simplistic mag-stripe, which is easily swiped, read and duplicated.

However, Taylor warns,

Don’t get too complacent, however, because none of these technologies offer much protection against online fraud. When you buy something at Amazon.com, Target.com or BestBuy.com, you’re simply typing in your credit card number, expiration date, and CCV, all of which are easily duplicated.

And that’s a problem. American consumers only account for about 25 percent of all credit-card purchases worldwide, but are the victims of more than 50 percent of the world’s credit-card fraud. Indeed, not a month goes by without reports of another huge data breach from an online merchant.

Not enough to worry about? Turns out you can also have your credit-card data stolen by simply having someone too close. Criminals can use RFID scanners to reap your digital bounty in a practice known as “skimming.” You can protect your cards by wrapping them in foil when not being used, or, if you don’t want to look like a crazy person, by purchasing a special foil-lined wallet.

Read more here: http://www.lifezette.com/popzette/beware-new-credit-cards/

It's Trump night on You Tube

Well, this is a "yuge" night for ABC and Donald Trump. ABC has posted three videos. The first one is Barbara Walters with Trump the candidate. The second one is with Barbara Walters, Trump, and Trump's wife Melania. The third one is excerpts repeated from the first two videos, plus Barbara Walters interviewing Trump's children.

Traveling to the welfare state

Anjem Choudary (center), a prominent British Islamist, has urged his followers to quit their jobs and claim unemployment benefits so they could have time to plot holy war. "We [Muslims] take the Jizya, which is ours anyway. The normal situation is to take money from the kuffar [non-Muslim]. They give us the money. You work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar. We take the money."

George Igler makes some interesting points at Gatestone Institute:

The United Nations, in 2000, advocated the "replacement" of Europe's population by Muslim migrants.

...Even in a country with an established Islamic population such as Britain, Muslim unemployment languishes at 50% for men, and 75% for women.

Furthermore, Muslims in Britain represent the demographic with the highest birth rates. Coupled with their levels of unemployment, these imagined saviors of a moribund European social welfare model are, as a group, the recipients of the state's revenue, rather than contributors to it.

...The "blind eye" turned towards polygamy in Britain, France, Belgium and Germany has ensured that some Muslim men have upwards of 20 children by multiple wives, almost always at state expense. This suggests that families with fundamentalist views are outbreeding their more moderate coreligionists.

A recent study in Denmark pinpointed that, of the full range of backgrounds of migrants who had settled there, Syrians had the lowest levels of employment of all (22.8%). A separate longitudinal study from Denmark also showed that, of those Muslim migrants who had come to Denmark claiming to be refugees: only one in four had actually succeeded in finding a job after a decade.

...Those using an economic rationale to implement Europe's demographic transformation, fail to recognize the complexities of Islam: they ignore the fundamentalist revival that has been ongoing for over a century. One feature of this growing embrace of literalism is a belief -- validated by scripture -- that Muslims are entitled to idly profit from the productivity of infidels. This view puts the entitled conduct of a great many migrants into an unexpected, but much needed, context.

Read more here: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6915/europe-muslim-enrichment

If you’re not determined to win at any cost, you’ll lose.

Ralph Peters writes in the New York Post,

The Obama administration has tried to spin its timidity and ineptitude in the face of Islamist terrorism as a clever policy of “strategic patience.” With eyes closed and fingers crossed, the president hoped that, miraculously, the mortal threat from ISIS would wither away.

You might as well hope that malignant tumors will cure themselves.

...Obama wouldn’t go to Raqqa. So the jihadis went to Paris.

Friday’s thoroughly planned and boldly executed attacks not only brought darkness to the City of Light, but scored an enormous propaganda victory for ISIS. With almost 500 Western casualties, a quarter of them dead, the carnage will prove electrifying to potential jihadi recruits around the world.

Just as important, our dithering also gave ISIS time to refine its techniques and strategies. Less than a year ago in Paris, a struggling al Qaeda staged a shocking, if crude, attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine. That incident now seems bush league compared to the latest attack, with its near-simultaneous strikes on six symbolic “lifestyle” targets packed with infidel victims.

The first attack was savage. Friday’s attack was savage and sophisticated.

Last week’s attack was planned in Syria. Three strike teams then infiltrated back into France or were activated in place. A support network supplied them with weapons and cars.

Limiting their communications to the bare minimum (and encrypting them), they relied largely on the techniques terrorists used a century ago: small cells, minimal contact, low profiles and deep planning (real strategic patience).

The result? A handful of men with small arms and home-brew explosives stunned the world.

Technically, the Paris attacks were the result of intelligence failure. But that label’s just too easy. The French are quite good at surveillance. But they’re restricted by law (as are we) in what they can do domestically; they’re overwhelmed by the number of potential threats; and they face an adaptive, elusive enemy.

The ugly truth is that ISIS and its affiliates have been allowed to put down such deep roots that more attacks are inevitable. Here, too.

What can be done? The answer is easy to mouth — and unwelcome to those who conduct foreign policy by platitudes (such as “there’s no military solution”). The base line is that you can’t win by playing defense. You must take the war to the enemy — without restraint. If you’re not determined to win at any cost, you’ll lose.

Our military has the resources to shatter ISIS, but political correctness has penetrated so deep into the Pentagon that, even should a president issue the one-word order, “Win!,” our initial actions would be cautious and halting. We’ve bred a generation of military leaders afraid of being prosecuted by their own government for the kind of errors inevitable in wartime. Instead of “leaning forward in the foxhole,” our leaders lean on lawyers.

If lawyers had had to approve our World War II target lists, we couldn’t have won. War is never clean or easy, and the strictures imposed on our military today just protect our enemies. Collateral damage and civilian casualties are part of combat and always will be. The most humane approach is to pile on fast and win decisively — which results in far less suffering than the sort of protracted agony we see in Syria.

The generals who won World War II would start by leveling Raqqa, the ISIS caliphate’s capital. Civilians would die, but those remaining in Raqqa have embraced ISIS, as Germans did Hitler. The jihadis must be crushed. Start with their “Berlin.”

Kill ten thousand, save a million.

Unthinkable? Fine. We lose.

Read more at http://nypost.com/2015/11/16/obamas-patience-merely-gave-isis-time-to-grow/

What is the world's most dangerous ideology in 2015?

Demanding special privileges

What is the role of Affirmative Action in the current protests by black students at our universities? Could I.Q. be a significant factor? Michael Kennedy writes at Chicago Boyz,

Why does this movement insist that its members’ mental health is in jeopardy? The fact that someone, somewhere on a sprawling campus used the “N” word seems like an insufficient explanation. The fact that these students are competing with students who have a built-in advantage seems like a better one.

Why has “white privilege” become such a catch-phrase? It’s minority students who have the privilege of attending a college that, but for their race, they would not be admitted to. For that matter, it’s minority students who apparently have the privilege of verbally abusing white students in explicitly racial terms without, from all that appears so far, facing disciplinary consequences.

...To be sure, the typical white student had more advantages growing up than the typical black student, and these advantages in some cases are for life. But as I understand it, the “white privilege” mantra claims that the privilege adheres in “whiteness” itself, regardless of economic or family circumstances.

I feel sorry for these students because, due to white leftist orthodoxy, they have been placed in a situation where they cannot succeed. They know it and demand special privileges. All this does is to degrade the accomplishments of black students who are far enough to the right in the curve to succeed in math or engineering or medicine.

Biology can be merciless at times but it does rule.

So much for executive experience

David Drucker writes in the Washington Examiner,

So much for executive experience.

The first three Republicans to exit the presidential race were governors. Among them, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a conservative hero for taking on the public employee unions and originally predicted to be a finalist for the 2016 nomination; Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a one-time rising GOP star who led his state's recovery from Hurricane Katrina; and Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who presided over the best economy in America amid the Great Recession.

Pacing the field are a celebrity businessman, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon, and two 44-year-old first-term senators whose resumes are about equal to that of President Obama when the then-first term senator launched his 2008 White House bid at the age of 45. That runs counter to what Republican voters thought they would want after eight years of a president they deride as an amateur whose lack of having ever run anything is painfully evident.

According to Pew Research polling, Republicans favored experience and track record over "new ideas" and "new approach" in March by a margin of 57 percent to 36 percent. By late September, just after Walker become the second Republican to drop out, those numbers were reversed, with 65 percent preferring a change candidate, and only 29 percent wanting know-how. It's an unusual dynamic for the GOP.

Since World War II, the five Republicans elected president had previous executive experience. They were drawn from the ranks of governors (George W. Bush of Texas and Ronald Reagan of California) and vice presidents (George H.W. Bush, who served under Reagan, and Richard Nixon, who reported to Dwight D. Eisenhower.) Eisenhower, though not previously elected to public office, was a five-star U.S. Army general and the supreme Allied Commander during WWII.

... maybe the problem is that some of them have placed too much value on their resume, and not focused enough on a "compelling" agenda. Republican pollster David Winston said many candidates make the mistake of leading with their resume as validation that they are qualified to serve, rather than emphasizing ideas to make voters' lives better, and then pointing to their professional experience as proof that they have the skills to implement them.

"Candidates who have records need to understand that a record is something that can show that they have the ability to implement ideas," Winston said. "But if they don't have compelling ideas, what is the point of discussing your record?"

Read more here.

The Trump wall needs to be just as solid along the Canadian border as the one on the Mexican border

That wall? Don't forget the northern border! Daniel Chaitin reports in the Washington Examiner that Canada is going to be taking in over 6000 Syrian refugees a week starting December 1!

The refugees will fly out of Jordan as early as Dec. 1, and will land in Toronto and Montreal, after which they will be relocated to sites across the country.

The United Nations will identify the Syrians to be transferred, and they will be subject to a screening process by Canadian officials upon landing. Syrians who pass security and health checks will immediately become permanent citizens.

A government document leaked to local media last week revealed the details about "Operation Syrian Refugees."

...Last week more than 30 governors challenged President Obama's plan to take in refugees. On Thursday the House passed a bill that would install strict background checks on all Syrian refugees entering the country, which could make it more difficult for many to qualify.

The State Department said in September it would accept 10,000 Syrian refugees next year.

Read more here.

A welcoming address

Fred Reid writes about an aging professor welcoming new college students:

In all likelihood you will waste these four years of your time and mine in this institution, which once was a university—during which you will take absurd courses of your own devising, courses having nothing to do with the purposes of education, of which you know nothing. You may already have discovered English 205, Batman and the Legacy of Patriarchy, and Sociology 202, Subliminal Oppression and the Frontiers of Resistance. You will study such nonsense in a spirit of tiresome self-adulation. I will have to babysit you during this sorry process. I do not know who is getting the worse of the deal.

This state of affairs is not entirely your fault. Here is something else you need to know: This university is interested only in collecting your tuition and, having no spine, will accede to whatever your little hearts may desire. You will find that nothing is too silly, imbecilic, or pointless to engage your attention, and nothing too absurd for the faculty to permit. You will make fools of yourselves protesting about the rights of transgendered endangered hermaphrodites of color with AIDS and, like three-year-olds, you will throw fits over imaginary racism, rape, microaggressions, and all the other embarrassing gewgaws, glass beads, and shiny objects of the undeveloped mind.

Your time here will be wasted because you do not know what you need to learn to enjoy a cultivated existence. In the past professors acted in loco parentis. They would have guided your progress toward civilized maturity. This goal has been forgotten. Today the younger faculty do not themselves know why they or you are here. You are the leading edge of a dark age. You will not notice because you will be pecking at smart phones.

You have been sold a bill of goods. In exchange for going into lifelong debt, or draining your father’s bank account, you will pass time in a university-shaped place. It is not a university. You have been had.

When you graduate, a terrible shock awaits you. You will find that employers have no interest in your wearisome righteousness. They will not pay you for Victims’ Studies or contemplation of grievances. They will not care about the high GPAs you got through grade inflation or sleeping with the professor. They will expect you to do your job, if there is a job for you to do.

Which is by no means certain. You are going to debouch from this institution onto a world that is already grim and becoming more so. Jobs are scarce and the scarcity intensifies. The qualified struggle. You are unlikely to be among them. It is a sorry age to be setting out into life, to be half-schooled and unaccustomed to the shocks the flesh is heir to.

The world will not treat well your fragilities and sensitivities. In real life you don’t have “safe spaces” in which a subservient institution does everything possible to protect your alert sensitivities from the slightest offense. I wonder whether you have any idea how risible your safe spaces are, how comic are the boiling little concerns that will occupy you? In the world that awaits, you will not be able to run to mount a protest march every time someone says a word that you do not like.

A few of you—a very few—will perhaps discover the pleasures of knowledge and even of the attempt to understand life and the world to the extent that they can be understood. These unusual students will concern themselves with literature, the sciences, the arts, music, history, and languages ancient and modern. The university will not encourage you. It will instead tell you that such studies are elitist, that they deal too much with Dead White Men. Except for a few aging professors such as I, your instructors are no better than you. Those who do remember the purpose of a university will not subject themselves to attack to try to rescue you from the zeitgeist. They will quietly despise you.

Any interest you might show in, say, philosophy or classical antiquity will be ferociously condemned as elitism. So will almost anything of substance outside of the school of engineering. If you want an education, you will have to acquire it on your own.

Read more here.

Bill Clinton a biter?

Roger Stone claims here Bill Clinton is a biter.

How one family is addressing complex, societal issues

Manhattan Infidel shows how one family is coping with all the changes going on in the world.

Get your ticket now

This blog post is being written now in order for you to hitch a ride on a satellite between now and January 16, 2016. You see, Al Gore predicted in 2006 that the end of the Earth from global warming would arrive on January 16, 2016. Whom do we have to thank for this warning? Rush Limbaugh, who started a countdown clock on January 7, 2006.

Is Charlie Sheen the latest hero/victim?

You may have heard the news about Charlie Sheen being diagnosed HIV-Positive.


Jamie Wilson writes at PJ Media,

''We're talking about shakedowns," Sheen said about hush-money paid thus far. "I've paid people, not that many, but enough to bring it into the millions and what people forget is that's money you've taken from my kids." Yep, it's always all about the children, isn't it? Of course, money's more important than parenting or setting a good example, anyway.

So that's the story, or what we've been told of it. But the unsavory and insipid Sheen will be held up as a hero-victim, just like Bruce Jenner, just like Lamar Odom. This convenient sentimental fiction will recreate Sheen as a liberal media hero. He'll star in a movie extolling the evils of war -- sort of an anti-Platoon -- and talk about his support for Hillary Clinton. Thus he will be redeemed and become a media-anointed hero. His medical status, his bankrupt personal morality, his self-destructive behavior will all be swept away in the cleansing fire of a newfound Progressivism. All the women he may have harmed, all their subsequent sex partners and their family, his terrible life choices and the impact they've had on the people who love him, they will be forgotten.

...Promoting restraint, of course, won't be part of Sheen's rehabilitation. He's already made that clear by talking about having doctor-approved HIV-positive sex without a condom. Because we all know that will work out well in the end.

Read more here.

Meanwhile, satirical blogger Manhattan Infidel also posts about this here.

ISIS planning attacks Sunday?

David Gilbert reports at International Business Times that a hactivist group calling themselves Anonymous released information to the FBI and CIA, as well as foreign intelligence agencies, that the Islamic State is planning attacks Sunday at a WWE event in Atlanta, three events in Paris, one in Indonesia, one in Rome, one in Milan, and one in Lebanon. Anonymous later backed off the claims, perhaps because they are worried about being attacked themselves by the Islamic State.

Anonymous declared war on the Islamic State group last week, vowing to track it down online as part of its Operation Paris (or OpParis). It has since released a guide for all those looking to take part in the operation, which already has identified tens of thousands of Twitter accounts it said are associated with the militant group while also taking some websites offline. The Islamic State group has responded to the threat by Anonymous, warning of a retaliatory attack on the activist group.

Read more here.

Odell's catch

This is the play my two high school football-playing sons practice emulating as they fall into the bales of hay that mark the end zone.

Self-Driving Google car gets pulled over

You think you've had a frustrating day? How about this cop in California, who pulled over a car that was driving too slowly, causing traffic backups?

It turns out that the car was a Self-Driving Google car. No ticket was issued.
Read more here.

Conceptual Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys.

Jonah Goldberg continues to be amazed at the many ways the Left deceives itself and those who fall for their lies. He writes at National Review,

...This is why so many liberals are far, far, far more comfortable calling tea-partiers “terrorists” than they are talking about actual, you know, terrorists. This is why in the wake of the Paris attacks we hear so much about “Christian terrorism” and why so many lefties have raced to arguments about gun control. That is why the supposedly smartest argument among the supposedly smart set these days is to build a time machine and stop Bush from invading Iraq.

Barack Obama is so eager to respond to the Paris attacks with a rhetorical fusillade against Republican bigotry. It is a ploy as brilliant as it is disgustingly cynical. Obama is a co-author of this refugee crisis. As Walter Russell Mead writes, “No one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama.” Somewhere deep inside Obama’s supposedly Niebuhrian conscience even he must suspect there is some truth to this. And even if his denial is total, he must understand that a great many historians will side with Mead in this appraisal.

Rather than face this unthinkable truth, Obama seeks to change the story line so that he is the noble and besieged martyr fighting the forces of reaction at home, rather than the hapless and bumbling nutty professor who let the world go to Hell on his watch. “Sanctimony over refugees is Obama’s way of restoring his own moral superiority over people who’ve been complaining for years, entirely correctly, that his Syria policy is FUBAR and has contributed to the disaster,” as Allahpundit writes.

But it goes further than that. Obama never tires of telling us that he was elected to end wars, not start them (how’s that going?). His real ambition was transformation at home, and that was only possible if foreign policy stayed out of the headlines. His entire foreign policy has been geared towards that goal -- not safety, and certainly not what he considered to be the risible concepts of “American leadership” and “American strength.” That’s why he announced a withdrawal date the same day he announced the Afghan surge. That’s why whenever there’s a terror attack, the White House works assiduously to deny it was a terror attack for as long as possible. That’s why were are drenched in the Orwellian sludge of terrorism euphemisms -- “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disasters,” “workplace violence,” etc.

When Obama does talk about terrorism, he’s only comfortable when he frames the issue in a way that puts the blame on America. That’s why we are constantly hearing that ISIS is inspired by Gitmo. I wonder: Is there a jihadist anywhere in the world who will pause in his desire to behead an infidel, never mind drop his scimitar mid-swing, upon the glorious news that a prison in Cuba has been closed? When John Ashcroft warned Americans that conjuring false fears of lost liberties helped the enemy, the entire New York Times editorial board got its dress over its head. But when Obama and his fans routinely say that “Republican rhetoric” is a recruiting tool for ISIS, they all nod like a crate of bobbleheads in an earthquake.

Acknowledging that the threat is still real only empowers those bitter-clingers who don’t want to transform our country. (They don’t want to transform our country, by the way, because they actually like our country the way it is -- or was. And it is now a given among most of the Left that this is a racist and bigoted desire.) Obama subscribes to the mainstream liberal view that there’s nothing wrong with America that making us more like Europe won’t fix. That’s why terror attacks in Europe are so cruelly inconvenient.

I should say that I am perfectly willing to concede that Obama has some good points on his side in the debate over Syrian refugees. Tourism rules, visa waivers, and homegrown radicalism will likely deliver more terror attacks to our shores than the refugees currently in the pipeline. But that doesn’t make the concerns about refugees unserious, illegitimate, or bigoted. Obama has complete confidence in the screening procedures. Well, okay. He also had complete confidence in the IRS, the VA, and the team building Healthcare.gov. When Obama declares complete confidence in a government agency, that’s a good time to buy gold.

But his remarks this week should remove all doubt that he’s not interested in persuading anybody. He’s interested instead in propping up the walls of his comfortable ideological bunker, where he’s a hero beset by irrational, cowardly, and evil men. I for one am sick of seeing this country go down the tubes just to salve the ego of this vain and cynical man.

What are the costs of forgiving? What are the costs of not forgiving?

Leslie Leyland Fields writes,

...I found the yoke of forgiveness, then, lighter than the yoke of hurt and hate. I found the yoke of caring for him easier than the burden of abandoning him.

And love came back. Yes, in small doses. He called me “amazing,” one day. He phoned on my birthday. When I came to visit, he didn’t want me to leave. All of this was new. All of this broke my new-found heart.

Forgiving my father has changed me. The broken and bitter parts of me are healing.

One forgiveness has led to others and to my own apologies from those I know I have hurt. I am moving toward the person I hope to be.

My father was touched as well. In the last two years of his life, my “worthless” father was surrounded and blessed by the very ones he had harmed.

I believe he felt loved, perhaps for the first time. We cannot heal all the broken families of the world, but we can begin here: with ourselves and our own families. With God’s forgiveness and love, anything is possible.

Read more here.

Do homeschooling parents have only the Left to fear?

Apparently not. No less a man of the right than Antonin Scalia recently expressed his view that

there is no U.S. constitutional right of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children.

The nation's charter document is "not a perfect Constitution," and many "important rights are not contained there," Scalia told an auditorium of first-year law students at Georgetown University Law Center here.

"For example, my right to raise my children the way I want," he said. "To teach them what I want them taught, not what Big Brother says. That is not there."

..."The notion that everything you care a lot about has to be in the Constitution is a very dangerous notion," Scalia continued. "Because it begins with stuff we all agree upon. 'Oh, sure, we ought to be able to educate our children the way we want.'

Read more here.