What values will they have?

Oh, great! A scientist, Nell Watson, who is Chief Executive of a body scanning firm says that robots could decide to kill humans, either out of malice or kindness. She urges other scientists to teach human values to robots, before it's too late!

Ms Watson claims computer chips could soon have the same level of brain power as a bumblebee – allowing them to analyze social situations and their environment.

Read more here.

Feds warn police departments about ISIS threat

CBSBoston reports that

Federal authorities sent a bulletin to U.S. law enforcement Friday in light of the threat concerning militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), according to CBS News.

Read more here.

"We're in the most dangerous position we've ever neen in as a nation"

Senator Jim Imhoff warns us that our country is at risk from Islamic attacks.

ISIS sends greetings to Chicago

Watch this chilling video of an WGN investigation in Chicago of an ISIS threat to a landmark building there.

Will Obama alter his most cherished beliefs?

Peter Wehner writes,

Mr. Obama is the most dogmatic person to serve as president that I can name. He seems arrogantly settled in his ways, always alert to invent an excuse for his multiplying failures. So far he’s shown he doesn’t have the cognitive flexibility, the proper regard for empirical data, or the wisdom to change as circumstances do. For Mr. Obama to meet the rising threat of the Islamic state, as well as the disorder sweeping the world, will require him to reverse course, to re-examine his core suppositions, to alter his most cherished beliefs (the most important one being that Obama was right from the start).

We’re asking him to do what I don’t think he is emotionally able to do. He’s wired all the wrong way.

I hope I’m proved wrong. I rather doubt I will be.

Read more here.

Turkey and Qatar prop up Hamas terrorists

Evelyn Gordon points out that

it’s no exaggeration to say that without the support Hamas receives from Turkey and Qatar, it could never have built the war machine that enabled it to start this summer’s war, and thus the death and destruction the world is now decrying in Gaza would never have happened.

Since both America and the European Union have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, one might expect this flagrant support for Hamas to prompt sanctions on Qatar and Turkey as state sponsors of terrorism. But Qatar is the world’s largest natural gas exporter and richest country, as well as home to the main U.S. air force base in the Middle East, while Turkey is a NATO member and major emerging economy. So in fact, far from sanctioning Qatar and Turkey, both America and Europe consider them key partners. In short, it’s simply easier for the West to condemn Israel’s response to Hamas attacks and pressure it to accede to Hamas demands than it would be to condemn and penalize Turkish and Qatari support for Hamas.

Read more here.

Absence of romantic victims

Victor Davis Hanson is writing on a cruise ship in Cypris. He explains how Turky still controls over 40 percent of the best land there. He writes about hypocrisy.

We see such hypocrisy when the West stays silent while Muslims butcher each other by the thousands in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Syria. Only when a Westernized country like Israel inflicts far less injury to Muslims does the West become irate. The same paradox seems to hold true for victims. Apparently, Western Christian Greeks are not the romantic victims that Palestinian Muslims are.

In the 40 years since they lost their land, Greek Cypriots have turned the once impoverished south into a far more prosperous land than the once-affluent but now stagnant Turkish-occupied north — unlike the Palestinians, who have not used their know-how to turn Gaza or Ramallah into a city like Limassol.

The next time anti-Israeli demonstrators shout about divided cities, refugees, walls, settlers and occupied land, let us understand that those are not necessarily the issues in the Middle East. If they were, the Cyprus tragedy would also be center stage. Likewise, crowds would be condemning China for occupying Tibet, or still sympathizing with millions of Germans who fled a now-nonexistent Prussia, or deploring religious castes in India, or harboring anger over the tough Russian responses to Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine, or deploring beheadings in northern Iraq.

Instead, accept that the Middle East is not just about a dispute over land. Israel is inordinately condemned for what it supposedly does because its friends are few, its population is tiny, and its adversaries beyond Gaza numerous, dangerous and often powerful.

And, of course, because it is Jewish.

Read more here.

Ending wars instead of winning them

Seth Mandel writes:

President Obama has long been criticized for wanting to “end” wars instead of win them, painting a picture of a fatigued America on the run. Western Europe has not exactly been a model of resolve in the face of aggression either. But Israelis don’t have the luxury of retreat and can’t treat as quaint the notion of victory. Military victory, in fact, has been the necessary precursor to peace for Israel.

Hamas once again appears to be on the ropes. A ceasefire that truly brings peace and prevents future war and terror is surely desirable. In its absence, the Israeli government shouldn’t be blamed for pursuing victory.

Please read more here.

"From jayvee to juggernaut"

Seth Mandel writes that Obama has

a complete lack of understanding in how individual terrorists operate.

Obama has tended to think of “new” terrorist groups as freshmen starting out at the bottom of the food chain. In fact, not only do they blur lines between groups and switch allegiances, but all terrorist groups benefit from the transnational architecture built over decades by Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and other trailblazers.

Nobody defects to the jayvee team. And it’s been fascinating to watch the Obama administration come to terms with that realization, and adjust its rhetoric accordingly. Every time the administration is confronted with the fact that the global war on terror was not a made-up construct in a fit of warmongering pique but a logical reaction to the fluid, metastasizing threat of global jihadist groups, it struggles to explain its own meaningless distinctions.

The point is not to split hairs. The point is that the administration made a grave and dangerous error in its attitude toward al-Qaeda, claiming the fight could be limited to card-carrying and dues-paying members of that one club. Obama is simply repeating that mistake again with ISIS. Who will be the next jayvee team that turns into a juggernaut? Whoever it is, they will almost certainly take Obama by surprise.

Read more here.

Take Eric Holder's thumb off the scales of justice, Mr. President

So says Pat Buchanan in an excellent analysis of the Wilson/Brown case here.

Picking and choosing

Today we get the news that the General Accounting Office announces that the Obama administration broke the law which requires the White House to give Congress 30 days notice before transferring any prisoners from Gitmo. Read more about that here.

Victor Davis Hanson adds:

And so we get the disreputable Malik Shabazz as a Robespierre-like street arbitrator of calm or violence in Ferguson, various ethnic pressure groups as de facto legislators adjudicating who will be granted access to the United States, and the current administration able to pick and choose which particular existing federal law is deemed fair and useful and which discriminatory and counter-productive — and rendered therefore null and void.

In all these cases, any particular law at any particular moment can be judged obsolete and an impediment to social justice — and so it can be replaced immediately by a sort of revolutionary justice with the full backing of the administrative state.

In that sense, even the old racial warhorses Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have become passé, as we’ve evolved now well beyond the misinformation and racialist politics of the Tawana Brawley carnival, the Duke Lacrosse caper, and the Trayvon Martin controversy. And so what was once written off as street theater has now been elevated to revolutionary jurisprudence — a lasting legacy of the Obama administration in general, and in particular the Holder Justice Department.

Read more here.

Open your eyes, your mind, and your heart

Atheist Richard Dawkins has created a firestorm on Twitter, by saying that parents should abort unborn children with Downs Syndrome, and that it would be immoral to allow them to be born.



Sarah Palin responded on her Facebook page:

Mr. Dawkins, I'd let you meet my son if you promised to open your mind, your eyes, and your heart to a unique kind of absolute beauty. But, in my request for you to be tolerant, I’d have to warn Trig he must be tolerant, too, because he may superficially look at you as kind of awkward. I'll make sure he's polite, though!

Love,

Sarah Palin & family

Read more here.

All-female units deployed on front lines by Kurds fighting ISIS

Weasel Zippers quotes from the WSJ:

Battle-hardened after two years fighting Islamic State and other Islamist rebel groups in the multi-sided Syrian civil war, Kurdish guerrillas linked to the PKK have in recent weeks made a series of military gains that have spotlighted their growing sway.

The Kurdish region of Syria was largely left to its own devices by the army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, drawing accusations the PKK’s Syrian branch was in league with Damascus. PKK officials in Syria have denied those accusations.

Last week, the PKK’s Syrian-based units advanced into Iraq and punctured Islamic State lines to help tens of thousands of Yazidis escape an encircled Mount Sinjar. [...]

Syrian commanders say the security and quality of life is improving as their guerrilla forces expand rapidly, propelled by thousands of young volunteers. Recruitment is boosted by the deployment of women soldiers on the front line, often in all-female units.

“The jihadists don’t like fighting women, because if they’re killed by a female, they think they won’t go to heaven,” said one female fighter.

Read more here.

Funding the bird-killers

Jillian Kay Melchior writes here about how high-speed turbine blades and 1,000-degree solar heat patches are killing hundreds of thousands of birds in California.

The religion of atheism

Ben Carson points out that atheism is a religion:

We must also go back and read the Constitution, including the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of religion. It says nothing about freedom from religion, and in fact, if you consider the context and the lives of those involved in the crafting of our founding documents, it is apparent that they believed in allowing their faith to guide their lives. This has nothing to do with imposing one’s beliefs on someone else.

Liberty and justice for all has worked extremely well for an extended period of time, and there is no reason to upset the equilibrium by endowing the hypersensitive complainers in our society with more power than everyone else.

Read more here.

"Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

So said General Sherman, as his midwestern farmboys defeated the Confederate Army. Victor Davis Hanson analyzes Sherman's war aims:

Sherman accepted southern hatred, but he assumed that after he left the Deep South, civilians would start to see a logic to his devastation: The homes and property of the middle classes and poor were largely spared, the infrastructure of the wealthy and of the state were not. That ruthless selectivity would spawn endless arguments among southerners over who was to blame for such destruction — well beyond Sherman himself. Certainly, for all the popular hatred, Georgians and Carolinians were far more likely to be alive after Sherman left than Virginians were after Grant was finished.

What about the Israeli army in Gaza? Hanson writes:

Sherman accepted southern hatred, but he assumed that after he left the Deep South, civilians would start to see a logic to his devastation: The homes and property of the middle classes and poor were largely spared, the infrastructure of the wealthy and of the state were not. That ruthless selectivity would spawn endless arguments among southerners over who was to blame for such destruction — well beyond Sherman himself. Certainly, for all the popular hatred, Georgians and Carolinians were far more likely to be alive after Sherman left than Virginians were after Grant was finished.

Sherman accepted southern hatred, but he assumed that after he left the Deep South, civilians would start to see a logic to his devastation: The homes and property of the middle classes and poor were largely spared, the infrastructure of the wealthy and of the state were not. That ruthless selectivity would spawn endless arguments among southerners over who was to blame for such destruction — well beyond Sherman himself. Certainly, for all the popular hatred, Georgians and Carolinians were far more likely to be alive after Sherman left than Virginians were after Grant was finished.

The IDF taught the supposedly fearsome Islamic warriors of Hamas, who adopted the loud bells and whistles of primordial killers and who supposedly love death more than life, that nondescript Israeli conscripts, through hard training and with the help of sophisticated technology, were in fact far deadlier than a man in a suicide vest or an RPG-wielding masked bandit. The IDF, then, like Sherman, sought to dispel the romantic notion that a uniformed conscript army cannot fight a warrior culture, or that it becomes so baffled by insurgencies and asymmetrical warfare as to be rendered helpless. The IDF went into the heart of Gaza City and came out largely intact after defeating all those it encountered.

Read more here.

Start treating people as unique individuals

Victor Davis Hanson tells us that:

On average, more than 6,000 African Americans are killed by gun violence each year. That startling figure is nearly equal to all of the U.S. combat fatalities incurred in both Afghanistan and Iraq over some 13 years. African Americans are the victims in about half of the homicides in America each year despite the fact that blacks represent only about 13 percent of the U.S. population.

What will save us are not more elite and self-serving “conversations” about racial difference, but a new classically liberal effort to consider race irrelevant in our shared American culture. Perhaps if we started treating people as unique individuals and not as hyphenated and anonymous groups, we could deal with these tragic shootings as individual tragedies rather than collective conspiracies.

Read more here.

Where the US Senate races stand today

Stephen Green provides us with a map showing where US Senate races stand today.



Read his comments about selected races here, especially the video of Montana's Democrat candidate.

Beauty, love, faith and humanity that make life worth living

Andrew Klaven reviews The Giver:

I know author Lois Lowry identifies herself as a life-long Democrat, but I’m assuming she’s just afraid of the whole towel-on-the-head police raid thing. Clearly, she believes that a perfected world is a dead one and that hunger, war and inequality are directly linked to the beauty, love, faith and humanity that make life worth living. In other words, she’s a modern American conservative! In any case, the movie is the answer to John Lennon’s idiot song “Imagine.” It does imagine, and the picture ain’t pretty.

Is it a good movie? Yeah. Good, not great. %71 is just about right. It’s engrossing, entertaining, thought-provoking and occasionally moving. It’s not a rich emotional experience and doesn’t earn the reactions it wants from us. Plus it’s sort of beat-by-beat predictable. But it tells a good story and has excellent values. In fact, it’s values are so good, one can only hope the people who made it will be arrested, audited and hounded into silence ASAP. This is America, after all!

Read more here.

I saw it with my kids last weekend, and we all liked it very much.

How can you be so angry at someone when you don't believe He exists?

Andrew Klaven reviews a film that has atheist reviewers spitting mad. Read more here.