At the Los Angeles Times, "California wildfires: Springs fire reaches PCH in Ventura County."
More at KABC-TV Los Angeles, "Camarillo fire at 8K acres, new evacs ordered."
Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education - from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
I think there's a big intellectual divide between "bloggers" and "new media professionals." Bloggers are just hung up on the medium of blogging (a medium that is now more than 15 years old and pretty ancient.) New media professionals are people who make their living by exploring and developing new forms of media. I am a partisan of the latter temperament. Blogging is just a means to an end. It shouldn't be an end in and of itself which it is for the kinds of "independent" bloggers who are complaining now about how nobody wants to work with them and link to them anymore. (Not talking about you with that comment, Donald.) New Media professionals should be more interested in finding and developing the next media formats (right now I'm interested in e-books and apps). Preserving the blogosphere as it was in 2002 in like wanting to preserve the newspaper as a format. Time to move on to the next medium and stop fetishizing blogs and "the blogosphere."I agreed with David for the most post, although I suggested that for all the talk of these "new media professionals" it continues to be bloggers who're among the most well-known alternative media personalities shaping the direction of traditional news reporting. Folks like Michelle Malkin, Ace of Spades HQ, and the Power Line crew are prominent examples. David and I went around a bit more then Michael chimed in:
Listen folks, there are hobbyists - people who run blogs - and there are professionals - people who work for new media organisations. The difference between all too often isn't passion, but strategy, approach, and the time they're taking for it.We all went around for a number of iterations after that. David and Michael pressed further on the "new media professionals" while I continued to hammer the vitality of blogs as watchdogs on the mainstream press.
As for 'blogging' as in blogging, that's - professionally - more or less dead. It's about generating news yourself, offering different kinds of 'news' (sport, culture, political, etc.), in different ways (Internet TV, written, short written, long written, apps, mobile, normal on the Net, podcasts).
If you're making a living off of this - as I do, and David does - it isn't 'blogging' anymore, it's being a member of the new media.
Of course, blogs have evolved – and this one clearly has from its early days. What began as one person being mean to Maureen Dowd around 12.30 am every night is now an organism in which my colleagues and I try to construct both a personal and yet also diverse conversation in real time. But that doesn’t mean the individual blogger – small or large – is disappearing. Our entire model requires, as it did from the get-go, links to other sites and blogs – and we have not detected a shortage.There's more at the link.
One reason we have had to grow and evolve – and this started as far back as 2003 – is that the web conversation has grown exponentially since this blog started (when Bill Clinton was president). Yes, many bloggers now get employed by more general sites, or move on to more complex forms (think of Nate Silver, a lone blogger when the Dish first championed his work and now part of an informational eco-system). But every page on the web is equally accessible as every other page. Blogs will never die – but they might form a smaller part of a much larger online eco-system of discourse.
My own view is that one particular form of journalism is actually dying because of this technological shift – and it’s magazines, not blogs. When every page in a magazine can be detached from the others, when readers rarely absorb a coherent assemblage of writers in a bound paper publication, but pick and choose whom to read online where individual stories and posts overwhelm any single collective form of content, the magazine as we have long known it is effectively over.
Lila Rose gets straight to the heart of why the media didn’t want to cover the Gosnell trial — and why they won’t want to cover what happens in other late-term abortion clinics, either. They don’t want to see the brutality or the inhumanity, and the culture sanitizes the horror of abortion in order to keep public opinion from turning against it. These films, and the Gosnell trial, strip the façade away...
President Obama has preferred disengagement from the Middle East and South Asia to focus on "nation-building at home." One result is Middle East instability and the al Qaeda resurgence. To address these emerging problems, the Administration first needs to acknowledge them. The tide of war, to correct President Obama's other favorite line, isn't receding. It's rising.RTWT.
Liberals will never tire of calling conservatives racist, because it’s always a show-stopper, a way of cutting off further debate on any issue where a liberal is likely to lose. So don’t expect it to go away any time soon. (Though why Republicans aren’t better at “punching back twice as hard,” e.g., by pointing out the permanent racist legacy of the Democratic Party, noting the vote tally for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, etc., is beyond me. Another example of Republican rhetorical incompetence.)
Gerard Alexander began a thorough debunking of this theme in the Claremont Review of Books several years ago (“The Myth of the Racist Republicans“), and Sean Trende continues the job with a fine column today on RealClearPolitics, “Southern Whites’ Shift to GOP Predates the ’60s.” It’s worth reading the whole thing...
A president is in trouble when he’s forced to defend his relevancy, as Bill Clinton did 18 years ago, or to quote Mark Twain, as Barack Obama did Tuesday. “Rumors of my demise,” he said at a news conference, “may be a little exaggerated at this point.”More at that top link.
Not wrong--just “exaggerated.” Not forever--just “at this point.”
Parsing aside, Obama channeled Clinton’s April 18, 1995, news conference by projecting a sense of helplessness--or even haplessness--against forces seemingly out of a president’s control.
For Clinton, it was ascendant House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the GOP's takeover of Congress five months prior, a vote of no-confidence for the first-term Democratic president. “The president is relevant here,” Clinton insisted in the East Room.
For Obama, his nemesis is a far-less charismatic and influential House Speaker John Boehner, as well as the intense weight of structural problems that favor Washington gridlock. These include the Senate filibuster, hyper-partisan House districts, polarized media outlets, and a fast-changing electorate that is sorting itself in political tribes.
“So my question to you,” ABC reporter Jonathan Karl asked Obama, “is do you still have the juice to get the rest of your agenda through Congress?”
Ouch. “Well, if you put it that way, Jonathan,” Obama quipped, “maybe I should just pack up and go home. Golly.” Then he quoted the humorist Twain, who famously denied his death.
Much has been made, since the Boston Marathon bombings, of how social media have transformed policing and counterterror techniques. A less-remarked aspect of social networks is the way they have changed how individuals respond to disasters, whether man-made or natural. In particular, some who think nothing of snapping and instantly posting photos of themselves around the clock also have no compunction about snapping and instantly posting photos of the view outside their office windows or across the street during an attack or disaster. What they’re viewing and enabling others to view may be not only gruesome but also intensely personal—images of people gravely wounded or dying. Do people have the right to endure their suffering in private?Continue reading.
A decade ago, this problem didn’t exist. On September 11, digital cameras were still new, and uploading photos was cumbersome. Today, of course, everybody has a digital camera embedded in his phone, and it takes just seconds to send pictures around the world. Minutes after the Boston bombing, before cable news and newspapers had begun reporting it and before emergency responders had “cleared the scene,” as the euphemism goes, social-media users were already redistributing graphic photos of blood-soaked sidewalks still populated by victims with horrific injuries...
A drop in the global air-cargo business is hastening the decline of the 747 jumbo jet just as Boeing Co. is preparing to launch a new plane that could ultimately replace it.More at that top link.
With its distinctive hump and four big engines, the 747, nicknamed "the queen of the skies," has been a symbol of jet travel for much of the past four decades. But in recent years, as airlines have chosen to fly passengers in more fuel-efficient, two-engine planes, the 747 has increasingly become an aviation packhorse. Most new 747 orders have involved freight carriers, which have been weighed down by two consecutive years of recession in global air cargo.
Earlier this month, Boeing said it would cut production of the 747-8, its newest model, to 1.75 airplanes a month in 2014 from two a month now because of weaker demand for large passenger and freighter airplanes.
Since it launched the 747-8 passenger model in 2006 with a longer body and new engines in hopes of rekindling sales, Boeing has sold just 31 of them to airlines, plus another nine to VIP users. "It's a market that hasn't delivered like we'd anticipated," Randy Tinseth, Boeing's vice president of marketing, says. Meanwhile, the company has sold 70 freighter versions.
Boeing would like to keep producing 747s even as it lays plans for a new model of its twin-engine 777, which could eventually supplant the older plane. As early as this month, the Chicago company is expected to seek permission from its board to formally start selling new stretched models of the 777, dubbed the 777X, with additional lucrative under-cabin cargo space and the 747's 16-hour range.
The new 777X, often dubbed a "mini-jumbo," arriving in 2019 or 2020, will seat around 35 more passengers and fly thousands of miles farther than the first "jumbo" 747 flown by Pan American Airways in 1970.
Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney says he doesn't "see the 777X introduction cannibalizing" the 747-8 significantly because the jets are different sizes. But analysts believe the 777X will be attractive to buyers who want many of the same capabilities with more fuel efficiency.
Launched on commercial service in 1970, the 747 was widely credited with making global travel more accessible. At the time Boeing estimated that the 747 halved the cost to airlines of flying a single passenger, compared with its smaller 707. Sales boomed, with Boeing receiving more than 1,400 orders between the 747's launch in 1966 and 2005.
But economic volatility and swinging oil prices made big bets on big aircraft with four engines seem increasingly risky. Sales surged for big twin-engine jets that could fly just as far. Boeing introduced the twin-engine 777 in 1995 and added subsequent models that stretched the jet's capacity and range, cutting into 747 demand.
PEORIA, Ill. — Using plastic fibers and human cells, doctors have built and implanted a windpipe in a 2 ½-year-old girl — the youngest person ever to receive a bioengineered organ.Continue reading.
The surgery, which took place on April 9 here at Children’s Hospital of Illinois and will be formally announced Tuesday, is only the sixth of its kind and the first to be performed in the United States. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration under rules that allow experimental procedures when otherwise the patient has little hope of survival.
Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, a specialist in the field of regenerative medicine who developed the windpipe and led the complex nine-hour operation, said the treatment of the Korean-Canadian toddler, Hannah Warren, made him realize that this approach to building organs may work best with children, by harnessing their natural ability to grow and heal.
“Hannah’s transplant has completely changed my thinking about regenerative medicine,” said Dr. Macchiarini, a surgeon at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He said he would like to proceed with a clinical trial in the United States, something that critics of his approach have called for.
Hannah was born without a windpipe, or trachea — an extremely rare condition that is eventually fatal in 99 percent of cases — and had lived since birth in a newborn intensive care unit in a Korean hospital, breathing through a tube inserted in her mouth. Because of other developmental problems, she cannot eat normally and cannot speak.
Nearly three weeks after the surgery, the girl is acting playfully with her doctors and nurses, at one point smiling and waving goodbye to a group of visitors. Dr. Mark Holterman, a pediatric surgeon at the hospital, said that Hannah was breathing largely on her own, although through a hole in her neck, not through her mouth yet. “She’s doing well,” he said. “She had some complications from the surgery, but the trachea itself is doing great.”
Dr. Macchiarini described a look of befuddlement on the child’s face when she realized that the mouth tube was gone and she could put her lips together for the first time. “It was beautiful,” he said.
The goal of regenerative medicine, or tissue engineering, is to create or regrow tissues and organs to ease transplant shortages or treat conditions that do not have an effective cure. After years of scant progress, tissue engineers have begun to make advances as they have gained a better understanding of the role that stem cells — basic cells that can become tissue-specific ones — play in signaling the body to grow and repair itself...
To make Hannah’s windpipe, Dr. Macchiarini’s team made a half-inch diameter tube out of plastic fibers, bathed it in a solution containing stem cells taken from the child’s bone marrow and incubated it in a shoebox-size device called a bioreactor.
Doctors are not sure exactly what happens after implantation, but think that the stem cells signal the body to send other cells to the windpipe, which then sort out so the appropriate tissues grow on the inside and outside of the tube. Because the windpipe uses only the child’s own cells, there is no need for drugs to suppress the patient’s immune system to avoid rejection of the implant.
Reciprocal linkage is the essential lubricant that makes the blogosphere purr with contentment. If somebody's throwing you traffic, you should either (a) give them a link-back update, or at a minimum (b) keep them in mind for future linkage. Because you don't want to end up on the wrong end of a kharmic unbalance in the 'sphere, where you're always taking and never giving.As blogging has become almost exclusively professionalized in the last few years, the notion of "The Full Metal Jacket Reach-Around" seems kind of quaint. But don't be fooled. We've still got lots of independent bloggers out there doing what the mainstream press refuses to do. For example, Robert mentions Professor William Jacobson's Legal Insurrection as a model of high-impact professional blogging to which we should all aspire. And of course Glenn Reynolds continues to plug away at Instapundit, resisting the lucrative lure of a huge corporate sponsor (even more lucrative, that is, as Glenn's already got great model of monetization). There are lots more examples --- and apologies to some of the great new blogs, like Rebel Pundit and SOOPER Mexican, for not highlighting their work more often --- although it's clear there are increasing sustainability issues for smaller "mom and pop" blogging outfits. Here's how Robert describes the problem at The Other McCain:
This network/community concept seems to have been lost by (or, more likely, was never known to) newer arrivals in the ‘sphere. The idea that each of us is contributing to a common project is not just some kind of “Stone Soup” idealism, but is in fact the only way to build any genuinely meaningful alternative to that pathetic exercise in groupthink we call the Mainstream Media. Bloggers who don’t help build the alternative can complain about the MSM “borg” all they want; they aren’t really making a difference. There are two ways in which bloggers actually help sabotage the blogosphere:Be sure to read the rest for additional insight.
Turn your blog into a series of lectures...
Never link another blogger. It’s weird that some bloggers would rather link a story in the New York Times or the Washington Post than to link a fellow blogger. Why this is, I don’t know. Sometimes it seems like everybody has the same idea: Grab an MSM headline off Drudge, link it, include a brief blockquote and add some political snark. Not only does this effectively surrender content control to Drudge — so that bloggers are merely replicating the headline selection there — but nobody’s snark ever goes beyond their own readership, because no blogger ever quotes another blogger.
.@rsmccain Planned Parenthood Sex Education Graphics Too Grisly for the New York Times is.gd/HBetXJ @jillstanek @directorblue
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 29, 2013
Ew, gross! @nytimes,@washingtonpost reject THIS @amerlifeleague ad of Planned Parenthood sex ed images jillstanek.com/?p=122100
— Jill Stanek (@JillStanek) April 29, 2013
How was the gig? How the hell do you think it was?
It was the Stones in a little club, and for most in attendance, a dream come true.
That's how it was.
"What difference, at this point, does it make?"No doubt.
That was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's angry response to a question about the State Department's account of the attack on the Benghazi consulate where Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered on Sept. 11, 2012.
Her response was cheered by leftist commentators on MSNBC. Righteous indignation is so attractive.
But of course it makes a difference. Hillary Clinton is leading in polls for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination and general election. It's always legitimate to examine the performance of a front-runner for the presidency. And of the president himself.
You can find such an examination in the Interim Progress Report that five House Republican committee chairmen released last Wednesday.
Democrats complain that this is a partisan effort. Sure, but Democrats are free to present their own view of the facts. My sense is that they would rather squelch critical examination of Benghazi and the Obama administration's response, as they did with the help of most of the press during the 2012 presidential campaign.
At least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers, or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.Continue reading.
Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate intelligence committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistleblowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.
“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”
Toensing declined to name her client. She also refused to say whether the individual was on the ground in Benghazi on the night of September 11, 2012, when terrorist attacks on two U.S. installations in the Libyan city killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.
However, Toensing disclosed that her client has pertinent information on all three time periods investigators consider relevant to the attacks: the months that led up to September 11, when pleas by the ambassador and his staff for enhanced security in Benghazi were mostly rejected by senior officers at the State Department; the eight-hour time frame in which the attacks unfolded; and the eight-day period that followed the attacks, when Obama administration officials falsely described them as the result of a spontaneous protest over a video.
Anzor Tsarnaev was tough, a championship boxer back home, and he wanted his oldest boy to be tough too.Read it all at the link.
Rain or shine, like a scene from "Rocky," the wiry Chechen immigrant would ride his bicycle as his son Tamerlan jogged to a Boston-area boxing gym, pushing him to run faster, to punch harder.
"He was his trainer, basically," said Joe Timko, Anzor's supervisor at Webster Auto Body, a corner repair shop in Somerville. "And he was an old Russian soldier. He'd make him run for miles."
Armed with a good left jab and powerful right, "Tam," as friends called him, climbed the ranks in regional tournaments and dreamed of joining the U.S. Olympic boxing team. At home, a crowded third-floor walk-up, he showed off by doing chin-ups outside. At night, he played the piano and accordion.
But by 2009, Tamerlan's life abruptly changed course. He told his parents that "the Koran prohibits beating people in the face." He grew a beard, began to pray more than five times a day, dropped out of college and gave up stylish leather pants for sweat pants. He argued with friends over politics, picked a fight at a pizza parlor, shouted at speakers at a mosque.
"He gave up drinking and smoking, and he even gave up boxing he loved so much," said his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva. Anzor Tsarnaev said he was brainwashed by religion.
His uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, asked why he didn't get a job.
"I'm doing bigger things," Tamerlan told him that August. "Now I'm with God. Now I'm happy."
Tamerlan, 26, died nine days ago after he and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, were in a shootout with police. Dzhokhar is in custody at a medical facility for prisoners on federal charges that he planted one of the two nail-filled bombs that exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15.
Investigators are convinced both brothers carried out the plot, which killed three people and wounded more than 260. Yet it did not appear meticulously planned. Authorities say they planted homemade bombs in full view of surveillance cameras, and when their pictures emerged three days later, they tried to flee with no cash, no disguises and one firearm. Officials say that they killed an MIT police officer for his pistol but couldn't figure out how to unlock the holster.
Now investigators are struggling to understand: How did a cocky young athlete and his skateboard-riding brother, if authorities are correct, become do-it-yourself Islamist terrorists?
BOSTON — It was a blow the immigrant boxer could not withstand: after capturing his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England in 2010, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, was barred from the national Tournament of Champions because he was not a United States citizen.Hey, no doubt.
The cocksure fighter, a flamboyant dresser partial to white fur and snakeskin, had been looking forward to redeeming the loss he suffered the previous year in the first round, when the judges awarded his opponent the decision, drawing boos from spectators who considered Mr. Tsarnaev dominant.
From one year to the next, though, the tournament rules had changed, disqualifying legal permanent residents — not only Mr. Tsarnaev, who was Soviet-born of Chechen and Dagestani heritage, but several other New England contenders, too. His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of boxing competition entirely, and his life veered in a completely different direction.
Mr. Tsarnaev portrayed his quitting as a reflection of the sport’s incompatibility with his growing devotion to Islam. But as dozens of interviews with friends, acquaintances and relatives from Cambridge, Mass., to Dagestan showed, that devotion, and the suspected radicalization that accompanied it, was a path he followed most avidly only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift.
His trajectory eventually led the frustrated athlete and his loyal younger brother, Dzhokhar, to bomb one of the most famous athletic events in this country, killing three and wounding more than 200 at the Boston Marathon, the authorities say. They say it led Mr. Tsarnaev, his application for citizenship stalled, and his brother, a new citizen and a seemingly well-adjusted college student, to attack their American hometown on Patriots’ Day, April 15.
The LA Weekly first reported news of the Kochs' possible interest in Tribune newspapers last month. But a Sunday front-page New York Times story describing a strategy of using media to promote free-market policy ideas prompted Tribune journalists to speak out, both anonymously and on the record. Clarence Page, a liberal Chicago Tribune columnist who opposes Koch ownership, said the Kochs “seem to be coming in upfront with the idea of using a major news media as a vehicle for their political voice."Because nothing promotes robust debate and deliberation like leftist campaigns to squelch competing views.
This week's outcry is reminiscent of Wall Street Journal staffers’ fears in May 2007 as Rupert Murdoch, the conservative mogul behind Fox News and the New York Post, bid for the august broadsheet parent-company, Dow Jones. While the Journal’s framing of political and policy stories sometimes tilts more to the right, journalists’ worst fears of right-wing tabloidization of the newsroom never came to pass. But the response to Koch ownership is different six years later in that journalists are now pining for Murdoch.
“Murdoch, for all his flaws, is a newspaper man. The Kochs are not,” a Chicago Tribune journalist told media writer Jim Romenesko. “I have no faith in their belief in the importance of a free and robust watchdog press. Frankly, such a press seems antithetical to their goals and harmful to their influence in the political process.”
Steven Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post writer, suggested Thursday that Tribune Co. staffers band together to oppose any sale to the Kochs.
Shot from my @loadedmag spread x twitter.com/_JessicaDavies…
— Jessica Davies (@_JessicaDavies) April 28, 2013
Has Salon learned anything? No. And then there is this: the obsessed troll, Alex Seitz-Wald, ran this headline after the Boston bombings.
It was the moment that brought a $200-million blockbuster to a screeching halt.More at the link.
Robert Downey Jr. stood frozen in pain after leaping onto a platform of an oil tanker on the Wilmington, N.C., soundstage where “Iron Man 3” was shooting its fiery finale last year. The actor had made ambitious wire jumps for stunt scenes before, but this time was different. The impact of the landing left him with an ankle sprain so severe he was unable to walk for seven weeks.
“I was feeling a little bit invincible, I guess,” Downey said last week while making the promotional rounds for “Iron Man 3,” which rockets into theaters on May 3. “I checked it out, and I was like, ‘Oh, we got this.’ And we didn’t have it.”
When it comes to playing Tony Stark, the genius-billionaire-playboy-inventor whom Downey first brought to the screen in 2008’s record-breaking “Iron Man,” the Oscar-nominated actor could be forgiven for overreaching.
If anything proves that you will get up off the ground after being knocked down, it's getting up off the ground after being knocked down ... in an apparent terrorist attack, at the tender age of 78, hell's bells ringing in your ears.More at the link.
If anyone should make us feel good about our better selves, it's Bill Iffrig, a carpenter by trade, but a man who made history with his feet in Boston, the town where America was born.
Fifteen wobbly steps to the finish. Fifteen wobbly steps to moving on.
The FBI is whining now that they didn't get more info from the Russians? Sorry, fellas, do your own surveillance and investigative work. They are obviously getting their whining cues from Obama.
They are not allowed to be lazy when it comes to protecting American lives on American soil. O's priorities.
Just updated my blog :) jodiegasson.com/tour xx twitter.com/Jodie_Gasson/s…
— Jodie Holly Gasson (@Jodie_Gasson) April 25, 2013
BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan—In fictional Gotham City, Batman protects citizens from crime. Here, at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan, another Dark Knight is on a different kind of crusade: making sure soldiers carry their rifles and don't get run over at night.Continue reading.
"Bagram Batman" is the star of a recent series of public-service announcements broadcast to troops deployed in and around Afghanistan. The camouflaged superhero—and his catchphrase, "SWEAR TO ME!"— have become an unlikely hit, winning a cult following among soldiers, and going viral on the Internet.
"He acts just as well as Adam West did," marvels Maj. Crispin Burke, an Army officer and military blogger, referring to the star of the original Batman movie and TV series in the 1960s.
While his do-it-yourself costume—rubber Batman mask, black cape and reflective belt over combat fatigues—may look like a joke, Bagram Batman has a very real mission: reminding the troops about the do's and don'ts of life on a forward operating base like Bagram, a small American town planted in the middle of a war zone.
MELISSA BLOCK: OK. What about the explosives themselves? We've been hearing about pressure cookers today.Message to Hate-Monger Racist Tinfoil Rim-Station Repsac3: You said read the transcript. I did --- indeed, I'm deconstructing it for you and your deranged terror enabling mind. In spite of the fact that these so-called officials told her that "nothing was ruled out" at this point, Temple-Raston willfully blew off the possibility that indeed it was Islamic terrorists cribbing al-Qaeda bomb instructions to assemble a pressure cooker bomb in an evil plot to kill Americans in Boston. The key line is all this about how instructions are "all over the Web." Thus she implies anyone could make one of these, especially the alleged Hitler's birthday-celebrating "right wing individuals" that this lady maliciously pegs as the perpetrators in Boston. Sickening.
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Yes. Well, basically, it's one of those pots that you use often to cook rice, and pressure cooker bombs have traditionally been used by young jihadists to get bomb training in Afghan training comps. An al-Qaida online magazine called Inspire provided instructions on how to build pressure cooker bombs, but that doesn't necessarily mean that this is a foreign plot.
Instructions on the how to make this kind of bomb is all over the Web. In fact, white supremacists, on their website, have linked to the Inspire magazine directions to make this bomb. So officials are telling me that we should be careful not to read too much into that.
BLOCK: And what are officials telling you about how easy it would be to make a pressure cooker bomb like the ones we saw in Boston?
TEMPLE-RASTON: They're pretty easy to make. I mean, basically, you put in explosives like TNT into the pressure cooker.
If the Boston bombers really had been Bible-quoting Christian fanatics, none of that [blame-righty disinformation] would actually have happened at all. Instead, the media feeding frenzy would have been intense. The air waves would have been full of earnest examinations of how the Bible is full of material that constitutes incitement to violence, recommendations of what the churches and Christian leaders must do to make sure that this kind of attack never happens again, and story after story about bright, attractive young people who got mixed up with church groups and ended up with their lives and the lives of everyone around them in ruins.F-k you Racist Tinfoil Rim-Station Freak Walter James Casper III. We've read the idiot Temple-Raston's transcript and find it badly wanting, indeed, evil. As are you. Progressives will do anything but look the cold hard facts in the face. We have a Muslim jihadi problem in the U.S. Americans can't deny it. We must fight it. You are with us or you're not. That is you're American or you're not. And we know the answer to that.
But of course, the bombers weren’t Christians; they were Muslims, acting explicitly in the name of Islam. Media analysts, when they have deigned to take notice of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s statement at all, have scratched their heads in puzzlement over how he and his brother could have gotten the idea that murdering innocent people at a sporting event could possibly constitute any kind of defense of Islam. However, they wouldn’t be so puzzled if they knew that the Qur’an exhorts Muslims to use the “steeds of war” to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (8:60) – and that al-Qaeda has recently recommended bombing sporting events as a nicely effective way to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah.
The mainstream media has no interest in how the Qur’an may incite those who believe it is the word of Allah to commit acts of violence against those who do not so believe. And so it was that the Atlantic Wire’s story was actually about why it scarcely mattered that the bombers were Muslim, and Chris Matthews was declaring that the bombers’ inspirations and motivations made no difference, and Martin Bashir was praising the virtues of the Qur’an, and it was Sean O’Malley, the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston, who cautioned against taking revenge and decried the “perversion” of Islam that led to the bombings.
It is hard to say why Cardinal O’Malley was so confident that the bombers were perverting Islam, despite the Qur’an’s many commands to Muslims to commit acts of violence against unbelievers (2:190-193; 4:89; 9:5; 9:29; 47:4; etc.). It is likely, however, that he simply believes what he has been told about this question: that Islam is a religion of peace, and that those who commit acts of violence in its name are twisting and hijacking the beautiful, peaceful teachings of the religion.
And that’s the problem with this pervasive media denial. The Atlantic Wire asked why it mattered that the bombers were Muslim. It’s a fair question. It matters because the fact that they were Muslims is not incidental to what they did. There’s this thing called “jihad,” you see. It’s an Islamic doctrine involving warfare against unbelievers. The likelihood is that some others might want to wage jihad against Americans as well. And so the more we know about it, the better prepared we can be to defend ourselves.
But the more we lie to ourselves and each other about what this jihad is really all about, the more we enable people like Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. We cannot possibly defeat an enemy whom we refuse to understand, refuse to study, refuse to listen to because he explains why he is our enemy in terms that we can’t bear hearing. That’s why this media obfuscation is nothing short of criminal. And it will bear much more fruit of the kind it bore on the sunny day of the Boston Marathon.
Donald Kagan is engaging in one last argument. For his "farewell lecture" here at Yale on Thursday afternoon, the 80-year-old scholar of ancient Greece—whose four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War inspired comparisons to Edward Gibbon's Roman history—uncorked a biting critique of American higher education.Continue reading.
Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness." Rare are "faculty with atypical views," he charged. "Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values." He counseled schools to adopt "a common core of studies" in the history, literature and philosophy "of our culture." By "our" he means Western.
This might once have been called incitement. In 1990, as dean of Yale College, Mr. Kagan argued for the centrality of the study of Western civilization in an "infamous" (his phrase) address to incoming freshmen. A storm followed. He was called a racist—or as the campus daily more politely editorialized, a peddler of "European cultural arrogance."
Not so now. Mr. Kagan received a long standing ovation from students and alumni in the packed auditorium. Heading into retirement, he has been feted as a beloved and popular teacher and Yale icon. The PC wars of the 1990s feel dated. Maybe, as one undergrad told me after the lecture, "the pendulum has started to swing back" toward traditional values in education.
Mr. Kagan offers another explanation. "You can't have a fight," he says one recent day at his office, "because you don't have two sides. The other side won."
"The hell" is right.“April is a big month for anti-government and right-wing individuals. There’s the Columbine anniversary, there’s Hitler’s birthday, there’s the Oklahoma City bombing, the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco.”Okay. Wow. Let’s take those in reverse order. “…the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco…” was a really horrible episode in our history, in which a house full of religious nutcases were burned alive by federal agents for no good reason. It did indeed horrify all kinds of people, and someone out on the “here be dragons” fringe of the right did indeed retaliate with the Oklahoma City bombing. Which is a desperate embarrassment to the third or so of the country that is in the mainstream right and has been used as a stick to beat us for twenty years. It is not a day for celebration in any way, shape or form.
–NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston, speculating that the Boston Marathon bombers were home grown (before the Tsarnaev brothers started shooting up the place, obviously).
But…wait…dear lord, Hitler’s birthday?!? If you turned America upside down and shook her hard, I bet fewer than a hundred genuine neo-Nazis would fall out. A kind of right wing, I guess, because they always say so. But just…really, NPR?
Whoa, hang on, the Columbine anniversary? The hell? Two punk kids shoot up their high school? That’s not even…there’s nothing…that’s not right, left or anything. That’s just. No.
This all happened last week, obviously, when nobody knew nothing. Which is why I didn’t post about it then. I was in no mood.
Is it too much to ask our publicly-funded media not to accuse me of Hitler worship? And they wonder why we talk about defunding them every time we get a majority.
DHAKA, Bangladesh—Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina ordered arrests over the collapse of a factory complex here this week after tens of thousands of workers staged at-times violent protests and police clashed with victims' families angry over the pace of the search for survivors.More at that top link.
Workers pulled 100 more survivors from the rubble of the Rana Plaza building on Friday, drawing cheers from onlookers with each rescue, as the death toll rose to at least 306. Rescuers estimated the toll could jump by at least one hundred once the search phase ends and bulldozers start removing bodies.
Citing criminal negligence, Ms. Hasina on Friday ordered the arrests of the man who built and owns the complex, Sohel Rana, because of the building's condition, and of the owners of all five garment factories housed there for ordering employees back to work after cracks appeared in the building's exterior on Tuesday, her spokesman said. Arrest orders of factory owners are extremely rare here. One factory owner was arrested in 2005 in a building collapse that killed 68, but wasn't convicted. Factory owners wield huge political clout in a country that employs hundreds of thousands of garment workers making clothes for Western retailers.
It remains to be seen whether authorities will charge and prosecute the owners over the Rana Plaza incident or abandon the case once public anger has died down. Two of the factory owners turned themselves in to authorities early Saturday, Bangladesh media reported.
It was wedged in a narrow, inaccessible space between two buildings, about three blocks from the World Trade Center site. And there it remained, hidden from view, for more than 11 years. Ground zero slowly gave way to a new tower. Protesters gathered nearby, angry over a planned Islamic center.Of course, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had to throw out the possibility that the gear had been lowered into that spot by hand, because no doubt everyone wants to lower a piece of jet machinery into a crevice between some buildings a couple of blocks from a terrorist attack site, or something.
But this week, land surveyors happened upon it — a piece of a plane’s landing gear, apparently belonging to one of the two jets that slammed into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, the police said.
On Wednesday, around 11 a.m., the surveyors called 911 to say they had found a piece of damaged machinery. What the police discovered was a component about 5 feet high, 3 feet wide and about 17 inches in depth. It was lodged in the narrow gap between 50 Murray Street, a residential building, and 51 Park Place, which is empty. There, it had been “out of sight and out of mind for over a decade,” the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said on Friday.
That area is inaccessible from the street, Mr. Browne said, adding that a tiny door opens into the corridor from a neighboring building.
“The odds of it entering that space at exactly that angle that would permit it to squeeze in there,” he said, “it had to come in at almost precisely the right angle.”
Based on the 1947 book of the same name, six men attempt to cross the ocean on a raft to prove Polynesians originated in pre-Inca Peru centuries ago. Thor Heyerdahl was the fearless leader, and this film captures the journey and the man in thrilling detail.
"Feel It Still"
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