'Do We Achieve World Order Through Chaos or Insight?'

At Der Spiegel, "Interview with Henry Kissinger":

Henry Kissinger seems more youthful than his 91 years. He is focused and affable, but also guarded, ready at any time to defend himself or brusquely deflect overly critical questions. That, of course, should come as no surprise. While his intellect is widely respected, his political legacy is controversial. Over the years, repeated attempts have been made to try him for war crimes.

From 1969 to 1977, Kissinger served under President Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, first as national security advisor and then as secretary of state. In those roles, he also carried partial responsibility for the napalm bombings in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos the killed or maimed tens of thousands of civilians. Kissinger also backed the putsch against Salvador Allende in Chile and is accused of having had knowledge of CIA murder plots. Documents declassified just a few weeks ago show that Kissinger had drawn up secret plans to launch air strikes against Cuba. The idea got scrapped after Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976.

Nevertheless, Kissinger remains a man whose presence is often welcome in the White House, where he continues to advise presidents and secretaries of state to this day.

Little in Kissinger's early years hinted at his future meteoric rise in American politics. Born as Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany in 1923, his Jewish family would later flee to the United States in 1938. After World War II, Kissinger went to Germany to assist in finding former members of the Gestapo. He later studied political science and became a professor at Harvard at the age of 40.

Kissinger recently published his 17th book, a work with the not exactly modest title "World Order." When preparing to sit down with us for an interview, he asked that "world order" be the topic. Despite his German roots and the fact that he reads DER SPIEGEL each week on his iPad, Kissinger prefers to speak in English. After 90 minutes together in New York, Kissinger says he's risked his neck with everything he's told us. But of course, a man like Kissinger knows precisely what he does and doesn't want to say...

Keep reading.

And here's the book, World Order.

What the New York Times Won't Tell You About Ferguson

From Heather Mac Donald, at National Review, "Finding Meaning in Ferguson":

The New York Times has now pronounced on the “meaning of the Ferguson riots.” A more perfect example of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down” would be hard to find. The Times’ editorial encapsulates the elite narrative around the fatal police shooting of unarmed Michael Brown last August, and the mayhem that twice followed that shooting. Unfortunately, the editorial is also a harbinger of the poisonous anti-police ideology that will drive law-enforcement policy under the remainder of the Obama administration.

The Times cannot bring itself to say one word of condemnation against the savages who self-indulgently destroyed the livelihoods of struggling Ferguson, Mo., entrepreneurs and their employees last week. The real culprit behind the riots, in the Times’ view, is not the actual arsonists and looters but county prosecutor Robert McCulloch. McCulloch presented the shooting of 18-year-old Brown by Officer Darren Wilson to a St. Louis county grand jury; after hearing three months of testimony, the grand jury decided last Monday not to bring criminal charges against Wilson. The Times trots out the by now de rigueur and entirely ad hoc list of McCulloch’s alleged improprieties, turning the virtues of this grand jury — such as its thoroughness — into flaws. If the jurors had indicted Wilson, none of the riot apologists would have complained about the length of the process or the range of evidence presented.

To be sure, most grand-jury proceedings are pro forma and brief, because the evidence of the defendant’s guilt is so overwhelming, as Andrew McCarthy has explained. Here, however, McCulloch faced a dilemma. His own review of the case would have shown the unlikelihood of a conviction. Physical evidence discredited the initial inflammatory claims about Wilson attacking Brown and shooting him in the back, and Missouri law accords wide deference to police officers who use deadly force against a dangerous suspect. Not initiating any formal criminal inquiry against Wilson was politically impossible, however, especially since the eyewitness accounts that corroborated Wilson’s version of events would have remained unknown. (Not surprisingly, the six black witnesses who supported Wilson’s story did not go to the press or social media, unlike the witnesses who spread the early lies about Wilson’s behavior.) So McCulloch used the grand-jury proceeding as a way to get the entire dossier about the case into the public domain by bringing a broad range of evidence before the grand jury and then releasing it to the public after the proceeding ended — a legal arrangement.

The Times is silent about that evidence, of course. Blood and DNA traces demonstrated that Brown had initiated the altercation by attacking Wilson while Wilson was inside his car. Brown then tried to grab Wilson’s gun, presumably to shoot him. Such an assault on a law-enforcement officer is nearly as corrosive to the rule of law and a stable society as rioting. But to the mainstream media, it is apparently simply normal behavior not worth mentioning when a black teenager attacks a cop, just as it was apparently normal and beneath notice that Brown had strong-armed a box of cigarillos from a shopkeeper moments before Wilson accosted him for walking in the middle of the street. Amazingly, anyone who brought up that earlier videoed felony was accused of besmirching Brown’s character, even though the robbery was highly relevant to the encounter that followed (and showed that Brown did not have much character to besmirch in the first place, something his sealed juvenile records would likely have confirmed).

Even if we ignore the exculpatory evidence, it is absurd to blame the riots, as the Times does, on McCulloch’s management of the grand jury or the way he announced the verdict. There would have been rioting if the grand-jury proceeding had lasted one day, so long as it failed to indict Wilson for murder. It is unlikely that the rioters even listened to, much less carefully parsed, McCulloch’s post-verdict press conference, which the Times finds biased. It is equally absurd to imply that the grand jury’s decision not to indict resulted from unprofessional behavior on McCulloch’s part or from prejudice that somehow infected the proceedings. Not indicting officers for good-faith shootings in the course of their duty is the norm, not the exception. There have been no indictments of Missouri officers for shootings since 1991. Houston grand juries have cleared officers of shootings 288 consecutive times. The Brown verdict was par for the course and not the result of some flawed, partial process.

The Times then goes into blazing hyperbole about the reign of terror inflicted “daily” on blacks by the police in Ferguson and nationally. The Times coyly cites “news accounts” — i.e., its own– claiming that the police in Ferguson “systematically target poor and minority citizens for street and traffic stops — partly to generate fines.” The Times has no evidence of such systematic targeting, proof of which would require determining the rate at which blacks and whites violate traffic and other laws and then comparing those rates to their stop rates. Studies elsewhere have shown that blacks speed at higher rates than whites. Blacks likely also have lower rates of car registration and vehicle upkeep, for economic reasons. Moreover, if authorities are using traffic fines in order to generate revenue, they would presumably “target” the people most likely to be able to pay those fines, not the poorest residents of an area.

Even more fantastically, the Times claims that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast.” A “common feature”? This is pure hysteria, likely penned by Times columnist Charles Blow. The public could perhaps be forgiven for believing that “the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life,” given the media frenzy that follows every such rare police killing, compared to the silence that greets the daily homicides committed by blacks against other blacks. The press, however, should know better. According to published reports, the police kill roughly 200 blacks a year — most of them attacking the officer. In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S. The police could eliminate all fatal shootings without having any significant impact on the black homicide death rate. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other blacks, responsible for a death risk ten times that of whites in urban areas. In 2013, 5,375 blacks were arrested for homicide, which is greater than the number of whites and Hispanics combined (4,396), even though blacks are only 13 percent of the national population.

The Times trots out the misleading statistic published by ProPublica last month that young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than young white males — a calculation that overlooks that young black men commit homicide at nearly ten times the rate of young white and Hispanic males combined. That astronomically higher homicide-commission rate means that police officers are going to be disproportionately in black neighborhoods to fight crime, where they will more likely encounter armed shooting suspects. If the black crime rate were the same as the white crime rate, the victims of police shootings would most certainly also be equal among the races. Asians are minorities, which, according to the Times’ ideology, should make them the target of police brutality. But they barely show up in police-shooting data because their crime rates are so low.

For the years 2005–2009, a significant portion of victims in the ProPublica study — 62 percent — were resisting arrest or assaulting an officer as Michael Brown did. The cop hatred that activists and press organs like the Times do their best to foment significantly increases the chances of such aggressive and dangerous behavior...

Wow.

Keep reading.

Democrats Paved the Way for Their Own Decline

Yeah, Obama built that.

 From Charlie Cook, at National Journal:

Governing is about making choices and facing consequences. Implicitly, to focus on certain things is to de-emphasize other things. The modern Democratic Party was effectively born during President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, reacting and dealing with the Great Depression. While books have been filled with the multitude of things that Roosevelt and his New Dealers did, if you boiled it down to its essence, it was helping people get back on their feet after the great stock-market crash of 1929 and the deep depression that resulted. In 2008, we faced the Great Recession, and like other financial meltdowns, it was deep and painful. At the tail end of the George W. Bush administration and in the early Obama years, financial markets were stabilized (the overwhelming majority of the Troubled Asset Relief Program funds have been repaid, with many of the investments yielding profits for Uncle Sam), and the Obama administration should be applauded for rescuing the automobile industry. But while those actions can be legitimately seen as a good start, we then saw a grand pivot to the environment and health care, with grave consequences for the party. At another time and in different fashion, both are important priorities, but the focus on these issues has effectively decimated the Democratic Party in specific areas and among specific voter blocs. The evidence is the difference in the partisan makeup of the Congress that will be sworn in next month, compared with the one from eight years ago.

RTWT.

It's gotta hurt.

Cyber Week

It's not just Monday.

Keep shopping all week at Amazon, Shop Amazon Cyber Monday Deals Week.

Why Was Miriam Carey Killed?

This is pretty intense, at the Washington Post, "How Miriam Carey's U-turn at a White House checkpoint led to her death."

And from Instapundit, "BECAUSE THEY’RE PROTECTORS OF THE POWERFUL, THE CAPITOL POLICE AND SECRET SERVICE GOT LESS BLOWBACK FOR THIS SHOOTING OF AN UNARMED BLACK WOMAN."

Ferguson Becoming a Revolutionary Tourist Wonderland

At IBD, "Ferguson's Potemkin Protests":

Key Ferguson fact: Nearly all the protesters arrested were from out of town http://t.co/eD4M6OV69O pic.twitter.com/Uk20vs6YCC

— IBDeditorials (@IBDeditorials) December 2, 2014

Revolutionary Tourism: As shattered glass, car fires and protests blight Ferguson, an interesting fact is emerging: Nearly all of the arrestees hollering revolution are from other cities. Obviously, this isn't about Michael Brown.

In the latest batch of radicals busted over the weekend for disturbing the peace in Ferguson, 15 of the 16 didn't even live in Ferguson. They were from places as far away as Chicago and New York.

It's no anomaly, either, but a pattern.

Police said that of the 51 protesters arrested in the protests of Aug. 19 and 20, 50 were from places like New York, Des Moines and Chicago.

They come from groups like the ANSWER Coalition, the New Black Panthers, the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Organization for Black Struggle and the Soros-linked U.S. Human Rights Network.

So any talk about riots and mayhem in Ferguson being a spontaneous uprising or a grass-roots civil society effort by Ferguson's locals is nonsense...

More.

Sisters in India Beat Up Three Men for Harassing Them

Via the BBC:

'Share the Wealth' Failing to Sell

From Michael Barone, at RCP, "Nobody Is Pushing Thomas Piketty's Policies to Combat Economic Inequality":

Last spring, you may remember, the French economist Thomas Piketty was all the rage in certain enlightened circles. His book "Capital" shot up to the No. 1 spot on bestseller lists, and many economists praised his statistics showing increased income and wealth inequality. Piketty argued that, absent a world war, returns to capital will exceed economic growth, inevitably producing growing inequality in the 21st century.

There are problems with Piketty's -- or anyone else's -- statistics. Reliance on U.S. income tax returns overlooks the fact that tax cuts encourage people to realize income and misses non-taxable income such as welfare and Social Security payments.

Still, there has clearly been a boom in the incomes and wealth of the top 1 percent here and worldwide. Piketty sees this as a threat to democracy. Liberal economists and pundits hoped that his revelations would finally get politicians to support policies like Piketty's 80 percent tax rate on high incomes and progressive tax on great wealth -- and get the masses to vote for them.

So far it hasn't happened here or just about anywhere.

You didn't see any campaign ads calling for Piketty taxes this fall. You didn't even see any ads hailing Democrats for having raised taxes on high earners in early 2013. Democratic candidates in seriously contested races didn't come close to advocating such policies.

You may have heard some Democrats bemoaning income inequality. The idea that the rich get richer while everyone else doesn't gets pretty wide agreement in the polls. So does the Democrats' one redistributionist policy -- raising the minimum wage.

As a policy to address inequality, though, it's rather pathetic. About half of minimum wage earners are not in the lowest fifth households in income. Even fewer are their own household's primary earner. Almost all economists agree that when the minimum wage is raised, some employees lose their jobs.

It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that an increased minimum wage is a transfer of income from fast-food customers to fast-food workers minus those who are replaced by kiosks. That's not a very effective way to sock it to the top 1 percent.

Even after the election, some Democrats argue that they didn't hit the issue hard enough. One Democrat's advice to President Obama, according to Politico, "is focus on income inequality, and talk about and propose things, and just be a fierce advocate of addressing the economic divide. That will leave people after two years saying the Democratic Party really stands for something."

"Propose things" -- but what? A recent Congressional Budget Office report shows that when you measure federal taxes paid minus federal transfers received (welfare, food stamps, Social Security, etc.), the top 20 percent of earners pay an average of $46,500. The next 20 percent pay an average of $700. The bottom three-fifths get back more than they pay. Plus, the U.S. already relies more heavily on the income tax for revenues than any other advanced economy nation.

In other words, America already has lots of economic redistribution. American voters evidently sense that more redistribution would sap economic growth. They're willing to throw a little to minimum wage earners, but they don't want to kill the geese laying the golden eggs.

Well, it's all crashing down for the idiot leftists, and it ain't over yet.

More.

Not Working for the Working Class

From Glenn Reynolds, at USA Today:

Working class white people don't like President Obama much. According to the latest Gallup poll, only 27% approve of him. That's 21 percentage points down since he took office in 2009.

A standard talking-point is that these voters don't like Obama because they're racist. But that assumes that the key word in "white working class" is "white." In fact, the key word is "working." After all, Obama isn't any blacker than he was in 2009.

A few Democratic pundits seem to get this. Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum observes: "So who does the WWC take out its anger on? Largely, the answer is the poor. In particular, the undeserving poor. Liberals may hate this distinction, but it doesn't matter if we hate it. Lots of ordinary people make this distinction as a matter of simple common sense, and the WWC makes it more than any. That's because they're closer to it. For them, the poor aren't merely a set of statistics or a cause to be championed. They're the folks next door who don't do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars."

So if Democrats want to win back the white working class — and they kind of need to, if they want to win elections, because it's an enormous demographic — maybe they need to start thinking about honoring and encouraging work, rather than talking about race or class.

I doubt this is going to sink in much with the Democrat race-grievance establishment. But sooner or later someone will come along and say, "Hey, we can't win elections. We need to moderate our message." They did that back in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was elected as a "moderate." He could at least talk the talk. After the midterms the Democrats have doubled down on far left-wing extremism. So it could be awhile, heh.

More.

Emily Ratajkowski Christmas Lingerie

Holy cow!

She's so lovely.

At Egotastic!, "Emily Ratajkowski Officially Opens the Christmas Lingerie Season."

Cyber Monday at Amazon: Camera, Photo, and Video

At Amazon, Shop Amazon - Cyber Monday Deals in Camera, Photo & Video.

Also, at CBS News, "Cyber Monday's potential impact after drop in Thanksgiving weekend sales."

GoFundMe Shuts Down Mad Jewess Woman's Darren Wilson Page

Pathetic.

At the Mad Jewess, "The Mad Jewess Opened @GoFundMe Campaign For #DarrenWilson, @GoFundMe Shut It Down":

This is why I hardly do anything like this on the net. If you are a right-winger or God forbid, a white cop defending his life, you will get nowhere on the net. This is why we should go “Ferguson” on all of the Fed buildings if we all had half a brain.

Also at Fire Andrea Mitchell, "GoFundMe removes conservative blogger’s fundraising page for Darren Wilson."

Penny Mordaunt's Naughty Cock Speech

At Telegraph UK, "Penny Mordaunt's naughty cock speech" (VIDEO):

It has been revealed that Penny Mordaunt, who is a Royal Navy reservist as well as Conservative communities minister, made a spoof speech to the House of Commons.

Ms Mordaunt, 41, used the word "c**k" six times and "lay" or "laid" five times during an address to Parliament on March 26, 2013.

Ostensibly the speech was delivered to highlight issues around the welfare of chickens, however Ms Mordaunt - who was made a minister in the communities department after she delivered the speech - has now disclosed that the real reason for making her address was a forfeit issued during a dinner in the officers' mess.

The MP for Portsmouth North said: "Some of my Marine training officers in Dartmouth thought it would be a good idea to break my ladylike persona by getting me to yell particularly rude words during the most gruelling part of our training.

"They failed but during our mess dinner at the end of the course, I was fined for a misdemeanour. The fine was to say a particular word, an abbreviation of cockerel, several times during a speech on the floor of the Commons, and mention all the names of the officers present."

While she fulfilled the wager, she has been criticised by Labour MPs for making a mockery of the Parliamentary system.

Enough With the Ferguson Pandering

At Blazing Cat Fur:

By embracing the 'need for change' premise promoted by Al Sharpton and company, the media is complicit in spreading the lie that America is racist and blacks are mistreated.

Theo's Monday Mopsies

Check out the babes at Theo Spark's.

Dark Days Ahead for #ObamaCare

From Elise Viebeck, at the Hill:

The Obama administration is facing a slew of healthcare challenges as the winter holidays approach.

While this fall has been a far cry from last year, when HealthCare.gov was melting down, 2014 has brought wholly unexpected problems to the fore for federal health officials and the White House.

Take the conflict surrounding Jonathan Gruber, the ObamaCare consultant whose suggestion that a "lack of transparency" and voters' "stupidity" helped the law pass, went viral.

Though Democrats have sought to distance themselves from Gruber, his remarks have become a new flashpoint in debate over healthcare reform, invigorating GOP critics as the party prepares to take control of the Senate.

Gruber has agreed to testify before the House Oversight Committee on Dec. 9, in a final hearing for outgoing chairman and relentless administration antagonist Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

The gathering, also set to include Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Marilyn Tavenner, is sure to prove a distraction for the White House as officials try once again to keep a lid on opposition to the law.

Here are four additional challenges that the administration faces on healthcare this winter...

Keep reading.

Natasha Barnard

Some video, "Natasha Barnard's Sexy Outtakes for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit."

Also at Sports Illustrated.

Race Relations After Ferguson

Norah O'Donnell, a precious, pampered establishment leftist, sitting in for Bob Schieffer yesterday at "Face the Nation."

Ta-Nehisi Coates is interviewed. His name is pronounced to ryhmye with "Tallahassee."

"We have to get back to foundations" (of racism and theft of Native American land). These idiots will never move into the 21st century.

Here: "Will Ferguson change policing and race relations in America? (VIDEO)."

ANSWER Communists with Che Guevara Signs Lead Protest Against Walmart in Rancho Cordova (VIDEO)

From the Arden Fair Mall in Sacramento.

The Che signs can be seen at 1:35 minutes, exposing the big lie behind these so-called "minimum wage" protests.

These are the Bay Area ANSWER hordes, communist revolutionary protesters pushing for the expropriation of capital --- the "$16 billion in profits" --- from the Walmart corporate oppressors.

Frankly, I'm surprised the Che Guevara signs made it into the newscast. Usually the far-left press enables the idiot revolutionary agitators.



More at the Sacramento Bee, "UPDATE: Protests lead to arrests at a Rancho Cordova Walmart, Arden Fair mall."

CNN Pushed Bald-Face Lies to Keep Ferguson 'Peaceful Protest' Narrative Going

Naomi Schaefer Riley, at the New York Post, "CNN is lying when they say Ferguson protests were ‘peaceful’":

Here’s a quiz for you folks in the media: What happens if you’re out doing “man on the street” interviews but none of the men on the street fit your “narrative”?

If you’re CNN, you stop interviewing them.

It has been remarkable to watch the last few days as America’s self-styled “most trusted news network” has sent out teams of reporters to various areas of Ferguson, Mo., ostensibly to cover the protests there. While their cameramen are watching cars on fire and stores being looted, the reporters ramble on about how “most people here” are “peaceful protesters.”

Where are these peaceful protesters? The reporters can’t seem to find any. Instead, they turn to outside experts and some carefully vetted religious leaders to talk about “the real message” of the protests.

On Tuesday night, CNN correspondent Jason Carroll was reporting, “Most of the protesting we saw in front of the Ferguson Police Department tonight was peaceful.” Then as he started trying to explain the fires burning behind him, he was approached by three of the protesters, who proceeded to get in his face and yell at him because he was promoting a “certain narrative” — the police narrative. “You don’t understand!” one screamed.

Anchor Don Lemon quickly went elsewhere, saying he was worried about Carroll’s safety. When Lemon returned to Carroll later in the broadcast and asked him what the men were saying to him, Carroll refused to say. The reporter was stonewalling because, he explained, these men didn’t “represent” the peaceful protesters who were really the story...

Keep reading.