In 2009, Canadian economist Ross McKitrick was asked by a journalist for his thoughts on the importance of the annual one-hour event in energy self-flagellation and green nitwitery known as Earth Hour, which takes place today, March 28, at 8:30 p.m. Here is his excellent response (my emphasis)...Keep reading.
Additional evidence emerged Saturday to suggest copilot Andreas Lubitz had health issues that should have prevented him from being allowed anywhere near the controls of the Germanwings A320 Airbus that he apparently deliberately flew into a mountain in the southern Alps on Tuesday, killing all 150 people aboard.More.
As well as medical findings, one of the copilot’s former girlfriends came forward to tell a German newspaper that Lubitz, 27, told her, while they were dating last year, that he planned a spectacular gesture to make sure everyone would “remember” him. She described Lubitz as a “tormented” person who knew how to hide secrets.
The German newspaper Bild spoke to the young woman, identified only as Maria W, 26, and said she dated Lubitz for five months in 2014 during which time he said: “One day I will do something that will change the whole system and then everyone will know my name and remember it.
“I never knew what he meant, but now it makes sense,” the woman was quoted as saying.
She revealed that the pilot had suffered nightmares and that their relationship ended because his behavior scared her.
“At night, he would wake up and scream: 'We’re going down!'”
She said if Lubitz did indeed deliberately bring down the plane, “it is because he understood that because of his health problems, his big dream of a job at Lufthansa as captain and as a long-haul pilot was practically impossible.”
You might think that this incident seven years ago — when Lubitz was 21 and “depression” interrupted his training — would have caused someone to question his fitness to be a commercial pilot. Oh, but that would be discrimination against the mentally ill, which is unacceptable. Misguided ideas about “human rights” thereby result in putting a murderous psychopath in the cockpit so he can kill 149 innocent people by flying into a mountain at 400 miles an hour.Yeah, well, wouldn't want to hurt the feelings of the regressive enablers of death, or anything.
“You only hear the screams in the final seconds.”
No reputable media outlet has reported on any possible motivation for the downing of Germanwings Flight 9525 apart from the claim that copilot Andreas Lubitz was suffering from a significant level of depression -- so elements of the Islam-hating right are now just turning him into a Islamist terrorist, based on evidence that appears to be nothing more than wishful thinking on their part.And who would be the "Islam-hating right" to which No More Mister smears?
Last year, Mexico played more games in the U.S. — eight — than the U.S. national team played domestically. Since February 2010, Mexico has played 30 of its 50 non-tournament games, called friendlies, in this country — many before sellout crowds.The team's owner openly disses Mexican nationals. Not enough lucre. Well, at least he's not a communist. That's the only good takeaway from this story. He's not a scummy, decrepit Marxist-Leninist revolutionary America-basher, like most of the idiot stateside Mexican leftists who're going to the games.
This isn't to say the U.S. team isn't popular here. According to Adidas, the uniform provider for the Mexican national team, the U.S. and Mexico sold nearly an equal number of team jerseys in this country last year. Most second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans rate the U.S. as their second-favorite team.
Mexico is first....
The U.S. has a Mexican American population of more than 35 million, accounting for more than 65% of a U.S. Spanish-speaking marketplace that is increasingly attractive to advertisers. The most popular team is the Mexican national team, which is why SUM has been able to get major corporations such as Wells Fargo, Unilever, Allstate, Castrol, Makita and Home Depot to sponsor U.S. tours.
Not surprisingly, the Mexican team's favorite cities are ones with huge expatriate populations such as Phoenix, Houston, Dallas and Los Angeles, where they regularly pack huge football stadiums.
In Southern California, Mexico drew more than 90,000 to the Rose Bowl for a meaningless midweek exhibition with New Zealand in 2010. A year later an overwhelmingly pro-Mexico crowd of 93,420 was in Pasadena for the Gold Cup final with the U.S. Some of the U.S. players were extremely unsettled at being the visiting team in their own country. The American national team hasn't played Mexico in Southern California since then.
An Illinois National Guardsman sought to fight with Islamic State as his cousin plotted to kill scores at an Illinois National Guard facility. If they had succeeded, would President Obama call it workplace violence?More.
President Obama's "JV" terrorist team has metastasized to the point where its franchisees have spread across continents and oceans, with the FBI investigating ISIS-related activities and plots in all 50 states, including a very dangerous one in the commander in chief's home state of Illinois.
One of those FBI investigations involved the arrest Wednesday of Hasan Edmonds — a supply specialist with the Illinois National Guard, who had trained at the Joliet Armory since 2011 — at Chicago's Midway International Airport as he prepared to board a plane to Detroit and then to Cairo via Amsterdam, with the goal of joining the Islamic State.
Two hours later, authorities picked up his cousin, Jonas Edmonds, who had planned to wear Hasan's uniform and attack the facility in the same manner that Maj. Nidal Hasan did at Fort Hood, Texas.
The cousins had scouted out the armory on Tuesday, with Hasan Edmonds picking up a copy of the facility training schedule. The plan was for Jonas Edmonds to carry out the assault using AK-47s and grenades.
As they cased the National Guard facility on Tuesday, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune, the cousins from Aurora, Ill., discussed where soldiers would be stationed inside, which rooms and areas to avoid, and the firepower required to carry out the assault. The plot was uncovered when an FBI source made connections with Hasan Edmonds on Facebook, inquiring about his plans to travel overseas to join the Islamic State.
We are mindful of the fact that not all IS recruits and sympathizers are so careless in revealing their intentions. It may be a cliche, but we have to be right all the time while terrorists only have to be right once.
If successful, the planned assault on the Joliet Armory might have mirrored the terrorist attack by Nidal Hasan, whose Nov. 5, 2009, rampage at the Army base near Killeen, Texas, killed 13, including a pregnant soldier, and wounded 32, as he shouted "Allahu Akhbar!"
The Obama administration would dismiss the attack as "workplace violence," just as they dismissed the Islamic State as a "JV" terrorist team...
The U.S. exerted new pressure against Israel by leaving open the possibility of letting the United Nations set a deadline for a Palestinian state, in what would be a departure from using American veto power to protect its close Mideast ally.Keep reading.
The prospect of a U.N. Security Council resolution arose Friday when French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Paris would introduce a measure setting a deadline for a negotiated settlement of the conflict and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, possibly within two years.
On dozens of occasions in recent decades, the U.S. has lobbied against approval of such resolutions, using its veto authority as a permanent member of the Security Council as a last resort. In response to past resolutions concerning the Middle East, the White House has echoed Israel’s contention that U.N. action cannot substitute for direct negotiations.
But the White House took a markedly different tack on Friday. Press secretary Josh Earnest said the Obama administration was aware of Mr. Fabius’s comments. “But we have not yet actually seen a text of a resolution so I’d reserve comment on a hypothetical resolution,” he said.
While he didn’t indicate whether the U.S. would actively favor such a resolution, the absence of any dissuasion was telling. White House officials didn’t elaborate on the Obama administration’s position...
Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers did not discriminate against former junior partner Ellen Pao for her gender, nor fire her because she filed a high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against the firm, a jury found on Friday.Keep reading.
A six-man, six-woman San Francisco Superior Court jury sided in favor of Kleiner Perkins on all claims after more than two days of deliberation and more than four weeks of testimony that was closely watched by Silicon Valley and around the country as tensions over the lack of diversity in the technology industry have swelled.
The verdict was a major victory for Kleiner Perkins, for which the trial had revealed an at times unflattering portrait of a firm that had fallen from its glory days as an early investor in companies such as Google and Amazon.
Pao filed suit against Kleiner Perkins in 2012 for $16 million in damages for gender discrimination and retaliation, plus unspecified punitive damages. She alleged that Kleiner Perkins had promoted male partners over equally qualified women at the firm, including herself, and then retaliated against her for raising concerns about the firm’s gender dynamics by failing to promote her and finally firing her. Pao, now interim CEO of the message board site Reddit, was fired after seven years at the firm following her 2012 lawsuit...
Conservative thought on campus these days is rare, though for some it’s still not rare enough. Witness the growing campaign by politicians, unions and environmentalists to intimidate into silence any academic or program that might challenge liberal ideology.You get the picture. And especially notice the sick but shameless leftist hypocrisy.
Congressional Democrats have grabbed most of the attention here, with their recent attempt to cow climate skeptics. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT and a Cato Institute scholar, earlier this month described in these pages how House Rep. Raul Grijalva was targeting seven academics skeptical of President Obama’s climate policies, demanding documents about their funding and connections. A trio of Senate Democrats is working to muzzle more than 100 nonprofits and companies that have questioned the climate agenda, with a fishing expedition into their correspondence.
Largely unnoticed is that the congressional climate crusaders didn’t come up with this idea on their own. For several years a coalition of liberal organizations have been using “disclosure” to sully the names of conservative professors and try to shut down their programs. Their particular targets are academics who benefit from funding from the Koch Foundation, which has for decades funded free-market professors and groups on U.S. campuses.
Giving money to universities, and earmarking it for certain purposes, is common, though the left has largely cornered the market. Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer and his wife several years ago pledged $40 million to Stanford to start the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. The Morningside Foundation, established by the family of the late T.H. Chan, last year gave Harvard $350 million to fund work on, among other things, gun violence and tobacco use. The Helmsley Charitable Trust has given money to several schools to advance Common Core.
Apparently the only kind of thought not allowed is that which might “undermine,” according to UnKochMyCampus, “environmental protection, worker’s rights, health care expansion, and quality public education.” Stopping such research is the mission of this organization, which is spearheaded by Greenpeace, Forecast the Facts (a green outfit focused on climate change), and the American Federation of Teachers.
The group’s website directs student activists to a list of universities to which Koch foundations have given money, and provides a “campus organization guide” with instructions for how to “expose and undermine” any college thought that works against “progressive values.” Students are directed to first recruit “trusted allies and informants” (including liberal faculty, students and alumni) and then are given a step-by-step guide on hounding universities and targeted professors with demands for records disclosure and with Freedom of Information Act requests. The AFT and the National Education Association devoted nearly a full day at a conference this month to training students on the “necessary skills to investigate and expose” any “influence” the Kochs have at universities.
This week Michigan State University released documents to student activists who had targeted political-theory professor Ross Emmett, director of the Michigan Center for Innovation and Economic Prosperity. His crime? Using Koch grant money to fund a reading group, called the Koch Scholars, that brings together students to discuss competing political economy ideas. The first two weeks were devoted to Marx, though the activists apparently couldn’t tolerate an equal discussion of capitalism.
Art Hall, who runs the Center for Applied Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business, was forced last year to file a lawsuit to try to stop a state records request from student activists demanding his private email correspondence for the past 10 years. Mr. Hall’s sins? His center got a seed grant from the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, and he testified against green energy quotas at the state legislature last year.
As for those defenders of academic freedom and integrity, the American Association of University Professors several years ago defended climate scientist Michael Mann against a conservative group’s demands for his records. Now the Kansas chapter of AAUP helped fund the students’ demand for Mr. Hall’s records...
The United States Army intends to charge Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. That was Wednesday’s news, but the bigger story is the extravagant price the U.S. has paid because President Obama wanted to score political points.More at Free Beacon, "Former Sergeant Who Served with Bergdahl: He’s Lucky No One is Talking About the Death Penalty."
Readers will recall that then-Private First Class Bergdahl went missing from his post in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan in June 2009. Fellow soldiers suspected desertion, though the Army conducted a risky manhunt to recover him. The sergeant was quickly captured by the Taliban and held for five years.
The Associated Press has reported that an internal Pentagon investigation in 2010 found “incontrovertible” evidence that he had walked away from his post. Journalists also uncovered an exchange of letters in which the soldier wrote to his father “the title of U.S. soldier is just the lie of fools,” that he was “ashamed to even be american,” and that “the future is too good to waste on lies.” Replied father Robert: “OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!”
All of this would have been known to President Obama and National Security Adviser Susan Rice when the Administration decided to swap Sgt. Bergdahl for five Guantanamo Bay detainees—all top Taliban leaders—in May 2014. Mr. Obama even invited Sgt. Bergdahl’s parents to a Rose Garden ceremony to announce the swap, while Ms. Rice declared on a Sunday talk show that the soldier had served his country with “honor and distinction.”
At the time of the release, Mr. Obama said he had a sacred obligation as Commander in Chief to do everything possible to bring the sergeant home. Maybe so, but the President made his real motives clear when he noted that the transfer was part of “the transition process of ending a war” and that he wanted to “whittle away” the number of Gitmo detainees. That, he told NBC, “is going to involve, on occasion, releasing folks who we may not trust but we can’t convict.”
This is the language of a President more concerned with pursuing his ideological fixations, and fulfilling a misbegotten campaign pledge, than winning a war or securing the country.
The Bergdahl swap unleashed a torrent of criticism at the time, including from Senate Democrats, so it’s not surprising that the charges against the soldier are only being unveiled now, five months after the midterm elections. There was no Rose Garden ceremony, and Ms. Rice issued no statement that we saw.
Meanwhile, the war in Afghanistan shows no sign of ending, while an emboldened Taliban can look forward to getting their old commanders back after their obligatory year in Qatar ends in June. Sgt. Bergdahl will now face a court martial, but we already know that the White House is guilty of deserting its obligations to U.S. security.
