Indeed.

More recently Will has become a champion of libertarianism, both in print and on the air. "America is moving in the libertariansÂ’ direction," Will wrote in a 2011 review of The Declaration of Independents, "not because they have won an argument but because government and the sectors it dominates have made themselves ludicrous."

At about 21:00 in the video, he brings up a point, briefly, that I talked about at length in the last podcast: The enervating nature of Government Control. He notes America doesn't seem to have "energy" anymore.

Well, yes. A wild dog will be spirited. A kept dog will be docile.

The government is training us to be docile and dependent.

So that's where the American Spirit went. We elected a government to put it down.

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Posted by: Ace at 08:49 AM | Comments (432)
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This is what I'd feared for some time now.

...He [Zawahiri] goes on to emphasize the importance of so-called "lone-wolf", or small-scale attacks as part of al-Qaeda's strategy.

Such attacks, he argues, will have an economic impact above all.

"We must bleed America economically by provoking it, so that it continues its massive expenditures on security. America's weak spot is its economy, which began to totter from the drain of its military and security expenditure," he says...

We all know how effective the Mohamed/Malvo shooting spree was at inducing regional paralysis, and those turds were amateurs, practically begging to get caught. Had they taken their show on the road, moved around a bit more, stretched the hit interval somewhat, they could still be doing it today.

Small dedicated independent one or two man teams are essentially immune to being compromised from the inside. You're not gonna get an undercover inside their "organization", and you're not going to be able to use all the usual network discovery tricks on them.

OTOH, if they're doing operations that are hardware/gear intensive, then they've got to risk (somewhat) more exposure in their acquisitions since a couple of dozen items can't be parceled out over a number of individuals to make them seem more innocuous.

If one guy walks into Home Depot and checks out with plastic sheeting, some shovels, rope, duct tape, a cordless sawzall, a machete, some bags of lime, and a bunch of hefty bags, it might raise some eyebrows. If those kill kit components are spread out over 6 buyers, no flags would ever be raised.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:23 AM | Comments (466)
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Oh crap, it's Friday the 13th! Whatever. Why people think Friday the 13th is unlucky. Meh. I love me some Friday's.

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Posted by: CDR M at 05:59 PM | Comments (647)
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• The Long, Withdrawing Roar
  
• Why The Media Will Never Be Fair To Conservatives
  
• Kerry's Syria 'Expert' Vouched For Anti-American Jihadists
  
• The Collapse Of The Obama Presidency
  
• Twitter Has Filed For An IPO
  
• VDH: The Myth Of A California Renaissance
  
• Biden Continues GOP Outreach
  
• Scott Walker's Throne Of Skulls Grows Ever Larger
  
• Taranto: Rules For Russians
  
• Illuminating Observations On The Financial Crisis
  
• This Is One Of The Reasons I Only Give To One Or Two Charities
  
• Don't Worry Christie, I'm Sure Obama Will Come To Your Aid Again
  
• Is There Anything More Worthless Than The Modern Know-It-All College Student
  
• Liberals Love Them Some 9/11 Trutherism
  
• Senate Panel OKs Measure Defining A Journalist
  
• Google's Quest To End The Language Barrier
  
• Rocket Frog Photoshop Contest
  
• Self-Driving Mercedes Should Be Available In Seven Years
  
• Herpes-Infected Monkeys Terrorize Florida
  
• Every Sh*tty Thing That Has Happened To The Pittsburgh Pirates In Their 20 Year Losing Streak Which Ended This Year
  
• The Fox, Music Video (autoplay)
  

Thanks to Krak/t for the Fox video.

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:40 AM | Comments (344)
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The Most Surprising Things About America, According To An Indian International Student

In our day to day lives there are assumptions and expectations so deeply embedded in American society that we don't even recognize them as such - the cultural waters that we swim in without any awareness. So it's always interesting to hear the observations of a foreigner who's lived here long enough to get past the easy superficial observations but not so long that they've stopped noticing the water.

And Aniruddh Chaturvedi who came from Mumbai to study computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and interned last summer in Silicon Valley is that guy.

And in his view these are some of the most surprising things about the US:

• Nobody talks about grades here.
  


• US Flag displayed everywhere: I was surprised to see that the US flag is displayed in schools, on rooftops of houses, etc. India has very strict rules governing the display and use of the national flag. Also, something that struck out to me was how it was completely normal to wear the US flag or a US flag-like pattern as a bikini.
  


• Strong ethics - everyone has a lot of integrity. If someone cannot submit their completed assignment in time, they will turn in the assignment incomplete rather than asking for answers at the last minute. People take pride in their hard work and usually do not cheat. This is different from students from India and China as well as back home in India, where everyone collaborates to the extent that it can be categorized as cheating.
  
  
• Rich people are thin/ well maintained, poor people are fat. This stems from the fact that cheap food is fatty, rich people don't eat cheap food - they tend to eat either home-cooked food which is expensive or eat at expensive / healthy places. Unfortunately, it is expensive to be healthy in America.
  
  
• An almost-classless society: I've noticed that most Americans roughly have the same standard of living.  Everybody has access to ample food, everybody shops at the same supermarkets, malls, stores, etc. I've seen plumbers, construction workers and janitors driving their own sedans, which was quite difficult for me to digest at first since I came from a country where construction workers and plumbers lived hand to mouth.

and worst of all:

• Girls are not very promiscuous, contrary to most Hollywood films

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:28 PM | Comments (676)
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Jets and the Pats.

Girdeth thou thy loins and preparest thyself to do battle.

-- John Madden

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:25 PM | Comments (298)
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This Giron woman sure seems miffed.

If you're in a bad mood, do yourself a solid and watch the video, and let her sweet sweet tears of FAILrage run over your body and heal your ills.

Hot Air has a post with much more detail, including a dismissal of her claims and an explanation why she lost. (Hint: It's the arrogance.)

The video here is amusing. Serious flooding caused a "Swamp Thing"-like Shambling Mound to rise from the street of downtown Manitou Springs, Colorado. (I think.)

Okay, now look at the weather map that leads that post.

Are you kidding me with this? Is this a joke?

You have one township named Manitou Springs. "Manitou" is an Indian word for a spirit or demon. Then you have a place called "The Garden of the Gods."

Yes, The Garden of the Gods.

What did you think was going to happen here, guys? You're like the land developer in Poltergeist who's all like, "Ohhhh, you mean I shouldn't have built a development on the Old Cursed Indian Graveyard...! That's an interesting take! You should've written a memo!"

Hey I'm going to start my own town. I'm going to call it Satan's Asshole. We'll see how things go. We'll have a community pool so we're starting off ahead of the game right there. We'll deal with the Poop Demon problem as it arises.

Piers Morgan's ratings must be bad, because he's upping his game in the Failing Media's favorite promotional gimmick, Stupidity Trolling:

Great article from Duh, Ya Think?! Magazine, published by A-Derrr A-Doyyiee Communications.

Cory Booker has a new imaginary friend. Well, the friend apparently existed. But he didn't die in Cory Booker's arms.

Now, you may get the idea that the Left is dumb, dishonest, and borderline insane due to my selective cherry-picking of quotes that make them look bad.

Well let me correct that bias in my reportage. Via @matthops82, here's the left, in fullest flower, firing on all cylinders:

#SmartTake, as the kids say with their twitmachine.

Kaboom Cereal just called me up and said, "I've been slandered. Where do I go to get my reputation back?"

I tried my "random YouTube search terms" thing again and tried "bother a cow." I got some hits, but they're not good. I link just to prove that the concept works.

On the other hand, a video named "Funny Animal Attacks" must be good.

Early night. I'm bushed.

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Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (305)
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Wow.

Read Noah C. Rothman's post. One suggestion: Don't watch the videos in the order he presents them. Watch them in reverse order. Watch the Greg Gutfeld clip first -- where Gutfeld and Levy talk on Red Eye -- and only then watch the preceding video, of what Stephen Colbert's show did with the clips.

Oh, and whatever, what a shock, another liberal reporter who swears Serious You Guys I'm Objective will be joining Obama's War Machine.

Richard Stengel, the top editor of Time magazine for the past seven years, is planning to step down as managing editor for a new job at the U.S. Department of State, sources familiar with the situation tell POLITICO and Capital New York.

If confirmed, Stengel will serve as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, the role responsible for leading “America’s public diplomacy outreach, which includes communications with international audiences, cultural programming, academic grants, educational exchanges, international visitor programs, and U.S. Government efforts to confront ideological support for terrorism,” according to the State Department’s website.

Posted by: Ace at 01:18 PM | Comments (283)
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She's still getting paid, of course.

People who are still getting paid and have been told there is no threat of prosecution tend to keep their secrets.

So it's no accident that she's getting paid to not work. She's now being paid to shut up, which is what I expect she'll keep doing, as there's now a career in withholding evidence for her.

It appears she targeted the Tea Party in order to create the grounds for a lawsuit to get the Citizens United case reexamined.

“Tea Party Matter very dangerous,” Ms. Lerner said in the 2011 email, saying that those applications could end up being the “vehicle to go to court” to get more clarity on a 2010 Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance rules.

In another email, from 2012, Ms. Lerner acknowledges that the agencyÂ’s handling of the tax-exempt applications had been bungled at the beginning, though she said they had taken steps to correct it.

“It is what it is,” she said in the email, released Thursday by the Ways and Means Committee. “Although the original story isn’t as pretty as we’d like, once we learned this [sic.] were off track, we have done what we can to change the process, better educate our staff and move the cases. So, we will get dinged, but we took steps before the ‘dinging’ to make things better and we have written procedures.”

That email suggests agency employees knew they had gone overboard in their scrutiny — despite top IRS officials telling Congress that there wasn’t any special scrutiny of conservative groups.

Posted by: Ace at 01:02 PM | Comments (82)
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Remember when I asked "Why would Putin and Assad pull Obama's fat out of the fire when they're winning?"

Yeah, they're not pulling his fat out of the fire.

This is embarrassing. This the part where, after having scoffed at the idea that Obama's weakness becomes a problem for America vis a vis the world, one starts to go, "Oh yeah, that's right. It does."

Here's the world's most awkward weakling, Bassar al-Assad, openly taunting the US:

“When we see the United States really wants stability in our region and stops threatening, striving to attack, and also ceases arms deliveries to terrorists, then we will believe that the necessary processes can be finalized,” he was quoted as saying in an interview with Russian state television.

Which follows Putin taunting Obama in the pages of the NYT. For example, he uses Obama's 2007-era rhetoric against Obama, 2013 Model:

It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”

Yes, reminding him of what he used to say. Very cute.

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

I'm not sure if Obama has explicitly knocked Bitter Clinger American exceptionalism, but this does sound like he's reminding Obama, again, of his previous beliefs.

Ah well. And it gets a little worse.

“I spent some time with the Tawhid Brigade in Aleppo city at the height of the fighting there,” Spyer said. ” I interviewed one of the leaders of the brigade. I’ve been in the Middle East for a long time and have worked on these issues for a long time. This was an Islamist fighting force, adhering to an Islamist ideology. So even those forces nominally aligned with western supported bodies are themselves overwhelmingly Islamist in outlook (there may be a very small and marginal number of forces who are ostensibly secular, but these are of no military significance). It’s my contention that the real power in the rebellion lies not in the external structures, but among the commanders of the major fighting groups. These men are Islamists.”

I had really hoped that the stories about Islamist domination were wrong, because I actually would like, in my heart of hearts, to hit Bassar al-Assad (a longtime sponsor of terrorism, financier and logistics officer for Hezb'allah, and useful Iranian client/minion state).

But rumors of the rebellion's "moderate democratic" orientation seem to have been greatly exaggerated. Or at least misinterpreted by someone not even fully out of grad school.

I wish I could support this action. I can't. Wars make for strange allies. Countries which despise each other will align to defeat a greater common foe.

But we have no greater foe than Al Qaeda and the Islamists.

Who could be so bad that we would align with Al Qaeda to defeat him?

Obama speaks of "sending a message to tyrants who use chemical weapons."

But there's another message which is even far more important:

"Do not ally with Al Qaeda, or their hateful tyrannical religious cultist allies the Islamists, and if you do, do not expect help from the United States."

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (291)
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