Brian Williams Suspended from #NBC for Six Months Without Pay

He's washed up.

As Ace of Spades HQ says, "WarCock!"

And, "So Brian Williams Has Been Suspended, Without Pay, for Six Months."

More at the New York Times, "Brian Williams Suspended From NBC for 6 Months Without Pay."

(And at Memorandum.)

Shop Amazon

I'll be on campus teaching all day.

Shop Amazon until later.

Obama: Murdered Paris Jews Were Just Random Victims (VIDEO)

From Pamela Geller, at Atlas Shrugs, "VIDEO Obama: Murdered Paris Jews Were Just Random Victims."

O's moral equivalence gets tiring, and fast.

'Timbuktu'

The most beautiful moment in this film is the wonderful singing scene featuring Fatoumata Diawara.

My God I almost fell out of my seat.

You can hear her at the trailer, "Timbuktu Official Trailer 1 (2014)."

Once she's found out by the jihadists, however, you'll cry as she screams while being whipped. Forty-lashes was her punishment from the sharia court. No music allowed, praise be Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

I visited Laemmle's Royal Theatre last Tuesday to catch the show, the same day that Moaz al-Kasasbeh was burned alive.

Unfortunately, I can't wax ecstatic about the movie, as do so many of the MSM reviewers. The peace and happiness of the residents of Timbuktu is overtaken by the horror of Islamic jihad. The filmmakers try to use satire to make the terrorists look like bumblers, but sheer stupidity doesn't prevent them from wreaking death on the people in the community. It's pretty depressing. The problem is ISLAM. Until Muslims of the world abandon their religion, convert to Christianity or Judaism --- or Buddhism, for goodness sake --- then no amount of lush storytelling will transcend the existential horror.

See Joe Morgenstern, "‘Timbuktu’ Review: Artful Cry Against Thug Theocracy: Jihadists impose Shariah law in a West African village, suppressing joy in the process." And also Betsy Sharkey, at the Los Angeles Times, "'Timbuktu' a compelling exploration of extremism's absurdities," a mistake ridden review, pathetically. (Fatoumata Diawara does not play "La chanteuse ... roaming the streets, singing, laughing, taunting passersby, remnants of a black chador dragging in the dust behind her.")

Thankfully, A.O. Scott takes off the gloss, at the New York Times, "A Fury Arrives. Hypocrisy, Too: ‘Timbuktu,’ an Abderrahmane Sissako Film About Radical Islam."

The Dangerous Lie That 'Bush Lied'

From Judge Laurence Silberman, at the Wall Street Journal, "Some journalists still peddle this canard as if it were fact. This is defamatory and could end up hurting the country":

In recent weeks, I have heard former Associated Press reporter Ron Fournier on Fox News twice asserting, quite offhandedly, that President George W. Bush “lied us into war in Iraq.”

I found this shocking. I took a leave of absence from the bench in 2004-05 to serve as co-chairman of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction—a bipartisan body, sometimes referred to as the Robb-Silberman Commission. It was directed in 2004 to evaluate the intelligence community’s determination that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—I am, therefore, keenly aware of both the intelligence provided to President Bush and his reliance on that intelligence as his primary casus belli. It is astonishing to see the “Bush lied” allegation evolve from antiwar slogan to journalistic fact.

The intelligence community’s 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stated, in a formal presentation to President Bush and to Congress, its view that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction—a belief in which the NIE said it held a 90% level of confidence. That is about as certain as the intelligence community gets on any subject.

Recall that the head of the intelligence community, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet, famously told the president that the proposition that Iraq possessed WMD was “a slam dunk.” Our WMD commission carefully examined the interrelationships between the Bush administration and the intelligence community and found no indication that anyone in the administration sought to pressure the intelligence community into its findings. As our commission reported, presidential daily briefs from the CIA dating back to the Clinton administration were, if anything, more alarmist about Iraq’s WMD than the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate.

Saddam had manifested sharp hostility toward America, including firing at U.S. planes patrolling the no-fly zone set up by the armistice agreement ending the first Iraq war. Saddam had also attempted to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush —a car-bombing plot was foiled—during Mr. Bush’s visit to Kuwait in 1993. But President George W. Bush based his decision to go to war on information about Saddam’s WMD. Accordingly, when Secretary of State Colin Powell formally presented the U.S. case to the United Nations, Mr. Powell relied entirely on that aspect of the threat from Iraq.

Our WMD commission ultimately determined that the intelligence community was “dead wrong” about Saddam’s weapons. But as I recall, no one in Washington political circles offered significant disagreement with the intelligence community before the invasion. The National Intelligence Estimate was persuasive—to the president, to Congress and to the media.

Granted, there were those who disagreed with waging war against Saddam even if he did possess WMD. Some in Congress joined Brent Scowcroft, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and former national security adviser, in publicly doubting the wisdom of invading Iraq. It is worth noting, however, that when Saddam was captured and interrogated, he told his interrogators that he had intended to seek revenge on Kuwait for its cooperation with the U.S. by invading again at a propitious time. This leads me to speculate that if the Bush administration had not gone to war in 2003 and Saddam had remained in power, the U.S. might have felt compelled to do so once Iraq again invaded Kuwait.

In any event, it is one thing to assert, then or now, that the Iraq war was ill-advised. It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam.

I recently wrote to Ron Fournier protesting his accusation. His response, in an email, was to reiterate that “an objective reading of the events leads to only one conclusion: the administration . . . misinterpreted, distorted and in some cases lied about intelligence.” Although Mr. Fournier referred to “evidence” supporting his view, he did not cite any—and I do not believe there is any...

Keep reading.

Greek Prime Minister Rejects Extending Bailout and Seeks Loan to Keep Country Afloat

Hmm...

It's not going too well for the Greek Che Guevara.

At Euronews, "Greece needs a bridge loan not a bailout according to its new prime minister: A defiant Alexis Tspras has laid out his plans to dismantle what he calls Greece's 'cruel' austerity programme."

Is There Any 'Global Warming' We Can Trust?

See NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT, "Dellers on Temperature Adjustments, Cowton & More."

"Dellers" is James Delingpole, on whom brainless harpie Babs O'Brien lets loose an hysterical ad hominem attack: "Joy in Rightieville Over a Faux Climate Change Scandal."

If Babs had one scientific bone in her body I suspect she'd realize it's leftists who're anti-science.

Nothing is "settled" in scientific research. But when your mind is so closed off to the possibility of diversity --- including diversity of opinion --- there's no need to even discuss why surface temperature measurements might in fact be flawed.

Leftist regressivism is a religion. It's not about facts. It's a about faith.

Jim Clifton, Gallup CEO: I Might 'Suddenly Disappear' After Exposing Obama's 'Big Lie' on Unemployment

He'll be lucky if he "makes it home tonight."

At Gateway Pundit, "Gallup CEO: I May “Suddenly Disappear” for Telling Truth About Obama Unemployment Rate (Video)."

Plus, "Gallup CEO: 13 Million Jobs Lost - Only 3 Million Created Under Obama (VIDEO)."

The Roots of Obama's Appeasement

From Victor Davis Hanson, at National Review:

Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as likely caused by returning U.S. combat veterans, according to one report by a federal agency.

What is the point of such linguistic appeasement?

The word “appeasement” long ago became pejorative for giving in to bullies. One side was aggressive and undemocratic; the other consensual and eager to avoid trouble through supposedly reasonable concessions.

But appeasement usually weakened the democratic side and empowered the extremist one.

The architect of appeasement — for example, Neville Chamberlain, former prime minister of Great Britain — was predictably a narcissist. Chamberlain believed that his own powers of oratory, his insights into reason, and his undeniably superior morality would sway even a thug like Adolf Hitler.

President Obama currently is convinced that his singular charisma and rare insight into human nature will convince the Taliban to peacefully participate in Afghan politics. Obama will supposedly also win over the Iranian theocracy and show it how nonproliferation is really to everyone’s advantage.

“Reset” diplomacy with Putin was supposed to lessen tensions — if, after the 2012 election, Putin just had more exposure to a flexible statesman of Obama’s wisdom.

Throughout history, without the vanity of the conceder, there would never have been appeasement.

Appeasement also always subordinates the interests of vulnerable third parties to the appeaser’s own inflated sense of self. When Chamberlain and the French prime minister Edouard Daladier signed the 1938 Munich Pact, they worried little about the fate of millions of Czechs who lost their country — and less about millions of Poles who were next in line for Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.

Reset diplomacy with Russia in 2009 was not much concerned about the ensuing danger to Crimeans or Ukrainians. When the Taliban takes over, hundreds of thousands of reformist Afghans will die.

Obama sees a deal with Iran as a way to cement his legacy as a breakthrough statesman. In comparison, the long-term consequences of a nuclear Iran on the security of tiny Israel or on the stability of the largely Sunni Arab Middle East are future and more abstract concerns for others.

Even major concessions never satisfy aggressive powers. It is a traditional Western liberal delusion — brought on by our wealth, leisure, and the good life — that autocrats appreciate magnanimity rather than see it as timidity to be exploited further...

More.

'Up on Cripple Creek'

Listened to The Band yesterday on satellite radio, while out to visit my mom in the high desert north of Palm Springs.

Holly Williams Reports on Difficulties in Defeating Islamic State

For CBS Face the Nation:

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."




Also at Lonely Conservative, "Saturday Funnies," and Theo Spark's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

More at Randy's Roundtable, "Friday Nite Funnies, " and Reaganite Republican, "Reaganite's Sunday Funnies."

  Cartoon Credit: Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – Target Practice."

Charlotte McKinney Sunday Rule 5

This lady is crazy hot, at Egotastic!, "Charlotte McKinney Is Super Busty In White for Manhattan Shindig."

And at iOTW Report, "2 American sisters arrested for nude photos at Cambodia’s Angkor Temple."

More at the Other McCain, "Rule 5 Sunday: Wax Ecstatic."

See the lovely Rachel Alexander, at Right Wing News, "Leftist With Violent History Threatens to Kill Sheriff Arpaio, is Promptly Arrested."

At Maggie's Farm, "Don't Go There: 'WONG FOOK HING BOOK STORE'."

More from Ms. EBL, "Fifty Shades Dakota Johnson Rule 5."

Randy's Roundtable, "Thursday Nite Tart: Kenda Perez."

And Drunken Stepfather, "Jennifer Lawrence Naked With Snake of the Day," and "KENDALL JENNER AND CARA DELEVINGNE EROTICA FOR LOVE MAGAZINE OF THE DAY."

At WWTDD, "Miley Cyrus Topless With Patrick Schwarzenegger."

See also Odie's, "Wheel of Fortune ~OR~ Rule 5 Woodsterman Style."

Knuckledraggin', "GODDAMN, LOOK AT THEM TITTIES!!!"

GCeleb, "Ashley Benson and Juicy Melons."

Still more at the Last Tradition, "Rule 5 Sunday - Helena Christensen."

Dana Pico, "Rule 5 Blogging: Jordan!"

90 Miles From Tyranny, "Morning Mistress."

Over to Pirate's Cove, "Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup," and "If All You See……is a horrible climate killing refrigerator, you may just be a Warmist."

A View From the Beach, "Shame on the Anti-Vaxxers (Jenny McCarthy Nude)."

Also, at Goodstuff's, "GOODSTUFFs BLOGGING MAGAZINE: TITBITS (176th Issue)."

Now over at Gator Doug's, "WRAPPING UP BROOKE ADAMS APPRECIATION WEEK."

Proof Positive, "Friday Night Babe: Linsey Godfrey!"

Crazy Uncle Bubba has "Saturday Short Shorts!!"

At the Hostages, "Welcome to Monday."

Drop your links in the comments if I've missed your Rule 5.

Until then...

New Data Shows That 'Vanishing' of Polar Ice Caps is Not the Result of Runaway 'Global Warming'

From Christopher Booker, at Telegraph UK, "The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever" (via Gateway Pundit and Memeorandum):

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy.

One of the first examples of these “adjustments” was exposed in 2007 by the statistician Steve McIntyre, when he discovered a paper published in 1987 by James Hansen, the scientist (later turned fanatical climate activist) who for many years ran Giss. Hansen’s original graph showed temperatures in the Arctic as having been much higher around 1940 than at any time since. But as Homewood reveals in his blog post, “Temperature adjustments transform Arctic history”, Giss has turned this upside down. Arctic temperatures from that time have been lowered so much that that they are now dwarfed by those of the past 20 years.

Homewood’s interest in the Arctic is partly because the “vanishing” of its polar ice (and the polar bears) has become such a poster-child for those trying to persuade us that we are threatened by runaway warming. But he chose that particular stretch of the Arctic because it is where ice is affected by warmer water brought in by cyclical shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all...

More.

Plus, "Climategate, the sequel: How we are STILL being tricked with flawed data on global warming."

So Radical Lesbian Rosie O'Donnell Can't Make Her Same-Sex Marriages Work?

I seriously could't care less about Rosie O'Donnell, but the Other McCain has one more hilarious entry in the ongoing follies of radical left's culture wars.

O'Donnell's not doing so great on the homosexual marriage front, as if that were a surprise.

See, "The Tragedy of Lesbian Divorce":

Notice that this is O’Donnell’s second lesbian wife. Her first marriage to longtime girlfriend Kelli Carpenter ended in 2007. Carpenter now has her own second wife, and the four O’Donnell-Carpenter children seem closer to Kelli than to Rosie. Nobody in the world of media is allowed to say a word about the unnatural weirdness of all this — two boys and three girls without fathers, one of them (Kelli’s youngest) conceived by artificial insemination — because equality!

And let me emphasize the "no fathers" point. Homosexual families are inherently anti-child, since the absence of a father in the household provides a built-in disadvantage to childhood development.

'The Years of Persecution 1933-1939'

I picked up Saul Friedlander's, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, back in 1998, or thereabouts.

I was working on my dissertation at the time, so I don't think I read it cover-to-cover. But for some reason, I picked it up again last weekend and started reading, and kept on going. I finished it up early this morning.

I've got a couple of other books in progress, but I'm going to dive back into Volume II as well, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination.

The spring semester starts up next week at my college, however, so I doubt I'm be able to fully rip through this time, cover-to-cover. But we'll see.

It's been a great, long and relaxing winter break. I've done a lot of reading. If feels like an accomplishment.

Massive Data Hack at Anthem Health Insurance Could Expose Millions

Target, Sony, and now Anthem --- of just the most recent examples.

Digital data storage just isn't that safe, frankly.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Anthem hack raises fears about medical data."

Also at CBS This Morning, "Anthem insurance data breach could be one of largest hacks in history," and "Why hackers target health providers like Anthem Insurance."

BONUS: At the New York Times, "Protecting Yourself From the Consequences of Anthem’s Data Breach," and at USA Today, "Anthem data breach: How to protect yourself."

Obama's Meeting with Muslim Leaders Included President of Hamas-Tied ISNA, Other Islamic Supremacists and Subversives

These are the secret meetings. The White House refused to release the names of the Islamists who met with Barack Hussein.

See Pamela Geller, at Atlas Shrugs.

Also, on Megyn Kelly's a few days ago, "White House Won’t Reveal Which Muslim Leaders Attended Obama’s Secret Meeting."

Harvard Bans Sexual Relationships Between Professors and Undergrads

Hmm...

Just how common is sex between professors and undergrads?

At the New York Times, "New Harvard Policy Bans Teacher-Student Relations":

Harvard University has adopted a ban on professors’ having sexual or romantic relationships with undergraduate students, joining a small but growing number of universities prohibiting such relationships. The move comes as the Obama administration investigates the handling of accusations of sexual assault at dozens of colleges, including Harvard.

The ban clarifies an earlier policy that labeled sexual and romantic relationships between professors and the students they teach as inappropriate, but did not explicitly prohibit professors from having relationships with students they did not teach.

Harvard said Thursday that the change had been made after a panel reviewing the institution’s policy on Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, determined that the university’s existing policy language on “relationships of unequal status did not explicitly reflect the faculty’s expectations of what constituted an appropriate relationship between undergraduate students and faculty members.” It said the policy had been revised “to include a clear prohibition to better accord with these expectations.”

The change was recommended by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Committee on Sexual Misconduct Policy and Procedures. It was made public Monday in a document revising the division’s sexual harassment policy.

Besides banning sexual and romantic relationships between professors and all undergraduates, the policy also bans such relationships between teaching staff, such as graduate students, and the students who fall under their supervision or evaluation.

 “Our rule is that if you are supervising, evaluating or grading someone, you should not have a sexual relationship with that person,” said Alison Johnson, a history professor who led the committee...

Still more at that top link.

And at the Harvard Crimson, "Professors Praise New FAS Sexual Harassment Procedures," and "Two College Students Dismissed for Sexual Misconduct."

Again, hmm... It's going to be another tool of feminists to destroy the lives of young men.

Lucy Collett at Zoo Today

Heh, as always, I love the accents, "Lucy Collett returns in naughty underwear for a new shoot!"